2024 Louisville Conference

The Harold Pinter Society sponsored three panels at the 2024 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture. Two of the three panels examined the performative nature of Hélène Cixous’s theory and the theoretical nature of her drama. Included in this issue, Ann C. Hall’s paper, “Going Overboard: Hélène Cixous’s ‘Aller à la Mer,’ a Feminist Theoretical Performance,” presents Cixous’s perspective on the theatrical world. Much like Laura Mulvey’s work on traditional Hollywood narrative cinema, Cixous argues that the spectacular power structures at work in the illusory and spectacular world of theater imprison women, casting them, in both senses of the word, as supporting characters or corpses created to facilitate male performance. Cixous’s manifesto challenges women to resist patriarchy and create a new theater. But the text has been largely forgotten and relegated to that “hysterical period” in feminist theater theory and, consequently, locked up, ignored, and ridiculed. Countering this history, Hall explores the essay’s theatricality, performativity, and hysteria to show how the work invites us to leave terra firma and explore oceans of possibility in theater, feminism, and theory.The final panel examined the relationship between Harold Pinter and Sarah Kane since the week of the conference marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death. Kane’s suicide often colors how scholars and critics interpret her plays. And during her life, it was her death that dominated the press’s account of her work as a theater artist. But situating Kane and Pinter in relation to one another might shed new light on their work and begin a conversation about Kane that is rather nascent. For while the two seem to be unlikely companions, history would suggest otherwise. And the speakers who contributed to this panel—Basil Chiasson and Judith Roof—explored how Pinter and Kane corresponded with each other, whether in letters or on the stage.But the panel, as intimated, also marked an occasion for mourning, or rather, melancholia. In his numerous eulogies to intellectual friends, most notably to Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida distinguishes melancholia from the more narcissistic work of mourning. Whereas mourning names the appropriation of a subject’s libidinal energy from a now deceased loved one, melancholia, as Derrida depathologizes it, does not seek a return on its investment in another, but preserves their alterity. The loss is not a loss that I recuperate for myself, rather, it, as Derrida will go on to say when reading Paul Celan’s “Grösse, Glühende Wölbung,” ends the world, “Die Welt ist fort[.]” (140). And the world ends, over and over again—recall Rebecca in Ashes to Ashes—with the death of the other who made it. Celan answers this end of the world by ending the poem with a command, “ich muß dich tragen” (140). But how do I, or perhaps we, carry those whose lives made the world and whose deaths, over and over, end it? It is such a question that I believe both Pinter and Kane give us to think.