The Inevitability of Rhetorical Violence: Georg Buchner's "Danton's Death"

John B. Lyon

doi:10.2307/3195451

Playing with Death

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190693060.013.13 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 647-660

Author(s):

Steed Vernyl Davidson

Keyword(s):

The State ◽

State Of Exception ◽

Systematic Analysis ◽

The Earth ◽

Book Of Jeremiah ◽

Central Claim ◽

Rhetorical Violence

The task of identifying a single rationale for the violence on display in the book of Jeremiah may end with a coherent answer, but perhaps not a satisfactory one. That violence serves a reforming purpose seems satisfactory to theological readers in search of theodicy, as well trauma analyses that find the violence problematic but understandable. Other interpreters of Jeremiah, such as feminists and postcolonialists, struggle with the gratuitous and seemingly arbitrary nature of the violence. While not an attempt to rationalize the violence, this chapter engages the arbitrariness of the violence through a systematic analysis of four targets of violence in the book of Jeremiah: the prophet, the feminized Israel/Judah as adulterous wife, foreign nations, and the earth. By distinguishing these separate targets, the chapter examines how gender, sexuality, nationality, and speciesism intersect in the enactment of the rhetorical violence in the book. These delineations also set the stage for a central claim of the chapter, that of exceptional violence. Building upon Carl Schmidt’s notion that exceptional violence stems from exceptional vulnerability that requires the state of exception to use unrestrained violence, the chapter considers how the violence as narrated in Jeremiah not only performs this exceptionalism but also has exceptions. By examining who/what dies from the violence in the book, the chapter points out how the politics of death is played out upon different targets.

Download Full-text

Writing Between Cultures

TTR traduction terminologie rédaction ◽

10.7202/037280ar ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 53-99

Author(s):

Barbara Godard

Keyword(s):

Theory Of Language ◽

Literary System ◽

Vertical Translation ◽

Rhetorical Violence

Abstract Writing Between Cultures — This essay examines the traffic in languages or systematic interferences, the tropes of translation whereby the network of the Canadian literary system is produced. It focuses on two moments in that process, one whereby Canadian literatures are produced as Europe's other by vertical translation of Canadian concepts into classical languages and an erasure of horizontal translation among Amerindian languages as manifest in the writing of colonization, especially in the work of Marie de l'Incarnation. The second is the contemporary period where the theatre of cultures of Amerindian playwrights, Daniel David Moses in particular, restages the trope of non-translation to expose therein the rhetorical violence of imperialism and offers in its place a model of horizontal translation between Amerindian languages. Performance as repetition with a difference or rewriting is another mode of translation, characterized by a theory of language as event not as mimesis.

Download Full-text

Danton’s Death

Georg Büchner ◽

10.1007/978-1-349-16737-1_4 ◽

1982 ◽

pp. 58-87

Author(s):

Julian Hilton

Keyword(s):

Danton's Death

Download Full-text

Poetic Anarchy and Human Rights: Dissensus in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade

Imagining Human Rights ◽

10.1515/9783110376616-010 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 139-156

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

Danton's Death

Download Full-text

Patel … and Not Patel

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x00011507 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 13 (52) ◽

pp. 368-370

Author(s):

Shelley King

Keyword(s):

South India ◽

The Third ◽

Danton's Death

My relationship with Tara Arts began in 1989, with the production of Danton's Death. Jatinder had made it very clear that none of the assembled actors would know the roles they were to play until at least the third week of rehearsal. Unsure about this process, I scanned the list of Büchner's characters full of doubt. Then, in the certainty that none of them was called Patel, I decided to put whatever reputation I had amassed during my previous twelve years as an actor in Jatinder's hands. Patel is a fine name, but I had played four characters called Patel in the last twelve months, and was just about to play another. And I was feeling claustrophobic. In the end, Jatinder cast me as Robespierre opposite the splendid Muraly Menon from Trivandrum in South India, who played Danton. Since then I have played various characters of both genders for Jatinder and Tara, and I have visited countries and continents where I have worked with performers whose skill and knowledge have humbled me.

Download Full-text