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'Fisher is meticulous in discussing and describing the categories that
constitute political art in the twentieth century: state, government, revolution,
and power.'
The European Journal of Theatre and Performance
'Starting with a seemingly simple question ‘Can art be political?’, this book opens a Pandora’s box that reveals the paradoxical nature of the relationship between art and life, the impossibility of taxonomy of political theatre, on the one hand, and its potential as a hermeneutical tool, on the other, and when it comes to postdramatic theatre and theory – nothing is anymore as it seemed before … The depth of analysis is impressive, whenever we feel we have reached a conceptual stable ground, Fisher probes further and invites us to question deeper!'
Silvija Jestrovic, University of Warwick
'Fisher is a joy to read! He writes with clarity and urgency but without oversimplification and gratuitous polemic. He draws on the whole toolkit of interdisciplinary thought and covers a vast terrain in contemporary theatre, but he never relies on jargon and avoids any form of superficiality … with cautious optimism, [he] takes the lead of key artists and heads out towards new horizons of possibility, en route, he has revitalized our understanding of both politics and aesthetics.'
Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne
Introduction The horizon of the aesthetic
Part I The aesthetic exception
1 The paradox of the aesthetic exception
2 Crossing the threshold
3 The institution of art: critical and theoretical reflections
Part II Political art after the communicative turn
4 The classical debate revisited: Sartre, Brecht, Adorno
5 Art of the communicative turn: Habermas and the political
6 What is the proper way to display a US flag? – the work of
“dissensual speech” in art
Part III Taxonomy of the political theatre
7 Foundational problems and problems of foundation
8 Displacement effects: Althusser’s “Brecht” and the theatre
of the conjuncture
9 Activist theatre of the conjuncture: the case of Janam and the
street theatre in India
10 The “closure” of the political theatre and the critique
of post-dramatic reason
11 The political theatre redefined
12 The theatre of the planetary conjuncture: Milo Rau’s
Congo Tribunal
13 On taxonomic strategies
Index