Lifedeath: The Liminality of Role Enactment in the Theatrum Mundi

For millennia, since Homer to postmodern theatre, the world has been imagined as a stage and life as a play. The truth of this metaphor, however, rests on mere assertions. This essay assesses the validity of this metaphor by examining drama as enactment. To this end, in dialogue with Derrida, this study elaborates on Schechner’s view of the liminality of acting and von Balthasar’s conception of death as ‘the center of acting area.’ It argues that the spectrality of existence constitutes the liminality of life as an enactment as much as it defines the world as a stage. This essay begins with a broad survey of the idea of theatrum mundi across cultures to demonstrate the significance of role enactment. It then traces how Schechner, drawing on Van Gennep and Turner, develops the notion of liminality to articulate the ambiguity of enactment as an indispensable part of acting. Finally, it engages with the interplay of life and death—or lavielamort in Derrida’s terms—as observed in von Balthasar’s dramatic framework, and maintains that the spectrality of existence accounts for the liminality of role enactment in the world as a cosmic theatre.