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Notes on An Invitation to Participate in a Performance of Silence: This invitation was presented in a leaflet at the beginning of the conference ‘What is Performance Philosophy: Staging a New Field’. A copy was anonymously left on each chair in the lecture theatre.  These are notes made in diary form throughout the conference, followed by reflections on reactions to the invitation. At the end is the extended proposal further contextualising the performance.  1. Initial attempts to be silent – distracted by things crossing my mind that I try not to express. (Such physical discomfort of sitting in lecture theatre).…

“On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: ‘Dear guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200.’ The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refusing to fully enjoy your stay … The superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant’s “Du kannst, denn du sollst” (You can, because you must!); it relies on a “You must, because you can!” That is to say, the superego aspect of…

I was so happy to get Laura’s email asking for the participants’ feedback mostly because the truth is that I wanted to share my thoughts on others’ thoughts. But why? What is it that makes us wanting, perhaps needing or even feeling obliged to response? Otherness. In a sense, all performance can perhaps be perceived as a response. What’s love got to do with it? Perhaps that all life performance is generated through acts of love. In practice and literally through making love (much much fewer times rape). Philosophy and performance as a-contextual in the sense that they respond to…

Jonathan Clark kindly invited me to give a talk on PP at Trinity Laban yesterday evening - a really welcome opportunity, for me at least, to think through my sense of where Performance Philosophy is at thus far and where it might go in future. In particular though it was great to meet so many researchers from across the disciplines, though particularly Music and Dance, who are concerned with a lot of the same issues that have been bugging me for years. We talked a lot, for instance, about some of the remaining issues around PaR - the continuing resistance…

This paper will focus on the body and its relation to subjectivity and practices, taking on Foucault's and Deleuze's philosophies, and through the presentation this newly created concept, the syngram, one that helped me rethink actor's/performer's conscience and how a technique may lead into a mode of subjectivation. So, I shall begin with some statements before addressing the main issue in this paper. The human body is one of many effectuation and counter-effectuation of the Event that is Life, it's a complex of forces enclosed in multiple layers of surfaces, a palimpsest; it's an exhibitor – a surface of inscription…

Dear friends,  As some of you know, I have been working with Esther Neff on an independent conference to gather people from various disciplines to theorize together prompted by --and through-- specific acts of performance. "Theorems, Proofs, Rebuttals, and Propositions: A Conference of Theoretical Theater" will happen in September 2013, in New York. (For more info: http://theatreastheory.wordpress.com/home/)I am really excited to announce that we will have a preview benefit event on March 23rd, with a lecture by Dr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on imaginative training forepistemological performance. Also performances by Varispeed and Doug Barrett, and others. The event will be at Glasshouse in…

I have had the pleasure to spend much of the last couple of weeks reading through the great quality and quantity of proposals that we received for the Performance Philosophy conference in April. (NB. Decisions will be out by Jan 15th once the organizing committee have had a chance to meet and confer). What was fantastic and thought-provoking was the number of papers that really dealt with the questions of the CFP head on - particularly perhaps the question of what the future of this area of performance philosophy might be. Do we automatically restrict our thinking if we submit…

Hello. I have recently returned to, spruced up and tagged my blog "Unattended Articles". Have a sift. There's a post here that perhaps serves as an introduction - Reality: A User's Guide. Thanks. http://slepkane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/reality-users-guide.html

A new journal hass been founded: Sublin/mes. philosophieren von unten. a queer reviewed journal. The first issue will be published soon.http://sublinesblog.wordpress.com/ A liquid Manifesto What is philosophizing from below and why do we affirm it unconditionally? Philosophizing from below is affective, bodily, precarious, rhizomatic, cynic, wild, feminine, full of pleasure, poetic, prosaic, horizontal, performative, fierce, tender, abyssal, underlying, sublime, dangerous, erotizing, sexy, magnetic, repellent, sensitive, brute and rough, rhythmic, expanded, disadvantageous, powerful. And still much more. Philosophizing from below means not to relinquish philosophy to the heads and chairs of “academia” alone but to let it happen and occur everywhere it…

' To stay still and to step aside, both pertain in the end to a method of performance, to play. So it is not surprising that on the impossible horizon of the anarchy of language, at that point where language tries to escape the power inherent in it, to escape its own servility, one finds something that relates to theatre. To indicate the impossible limit of language I have cited two authors : Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Both of them write , nevertheless. But what was at sake for both of them was the very inverse of identity; it was the…