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Christel Stalpaert

The Reconfigurative Power of Desire. Jan Fabre’s As Long as the World Needs a Warrior’s Soul

Jan Fabre is a Belgian artist who is fond of dismantling the traditional representational codes of theater. His theater work can be ‘labeled’ as post-representative throughout; it moves beyond traditional representation and Aristotelian dramatic aesthetics. Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetics of intensities provides an alternative theoretical framework to analyze Fabre’s As Long as the World Needs a Warrior’s Soul (2000). Since performances like these move away from a cognitively based methodology, traditional semiotics are inadequate to get a grip on them. Deleuze’s theoretical framework proves to be fruitful, for it provides terminological tools such as the Body-without-Organs, rhizomatic bodyscapes, etc. Together with Foucault’s discourse theory this terminology gives insight into the biopolitics that are at stake in Fabre’s Warrior’s. In a most fascinating way, the performance foregrounds the regulating processes of sexual discourses and their suffocating effect on disciplined and normalized bodies – bodies that are molded and fixed to ‘fit’ into a class, a genus, or a species.

Arcadia International Journal for Literary Studies, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0003-7982
Volume: 40, 07/2005
Pages: 177 - 193

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