Theaterstuk van Romeo Castellucci: « Ethica: Natura e Origine della Mente »
"Uno spettacolo misterioso e bellissimo" [zou de Corriere della Sera hebben gechreven]
Weer wordt het stuk van Romeo Castellucci, Ethica: Natura e origine della mente, opgevoerd, nu tijdens de Triennale van Milaan, die van 22 tot en met 25 juni wordt gehouden. [cf. en cf.]
Eerder dit jaar was de officiële première tijdens Biënnale voor Hedendaagse Kunst, in Lissabon en Porto, die gehouden werd van 17 maart - 30 april.
Zie vanaf 25:00 deze video
Zie het blog van 09-08-2013: "Theater: Aard en oorsprong van de geest" over een eerdere proefuitvoering
en het blog van 09-03-2016: "Inutilis scientia Spinozana [199] Spinoza en een miauwende hond… " over nog een voorpremière?
Hier meer info over nóg een uitvoering en voorgechiedenis.
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Uit Joseph Pearson "Preview" [cf.]
»Natura e origine della mente« (»On the Nature and Origin of the Mind«), at FIND 2016, is not a staging of Spinoza, even though it takes its title from the second essay of the philosopher’s 1676 treatise, the »Ethics«. Castellucci tells me »More than anything, Spinoza is used as a spotlight to illuminate certain aspects of our human condition, through the lens of his philosophy. I am interested in his analysis - the disassociation of the parts which operate in a geometrical fashion – and I tackle the arguments on which he touches. I have the intention, over the course of time, to confront all five books of Spinoza’s ›Ethics‹, and eventually to produce them all in a single evening. In truth, the fifth book is already ready; the project exists, and I am only waiting for the right opportunity to show it«.
Even though Spinoza is but a starting point, knowing a little more about the seventeenth-century treatise is helpful. The second essay of Spinoza’s tome is a challenge to Cartesian dualism: the clear metaphysical separation between mind and body. Spinoza’s treatise has a geometric form of argumentation – of Euclidean propositions, corollaries, commentaries – and in the second essay the proposition is put forward that »thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance«. Spinoza questions Descartes’ assumptions, telling us that we cannot trust more in our mind than our body. If mind and body express the same reality – if through extension our mind extends into the corporal world around it – then this makes for compelling problems for perception: the line between our mind and the nature around it is not clearly delineated, and Spinoza goes on to categorise different forms of knowledge we can possess. Spinoza’s work has received attention and elucidation from Gilles Deleuze (if one can really call Deleuze’s prose ›elucidating‹) and Spinoza’s arguments regarding extended substance are precursors to contemporary debates about embodied cognition and extended mind theory.
Castellucci explains how Spinoza’s ideas are recuperated in the theatre space: »The piece progresses allegorically, in which each figure finds relation to the elements that Spinoza analyses in each book. In this case, the second book talks about mind and body, and so I use two figures as vehicles with an allegorical function. There are very precise reference to mind, body, light, that return as a vocabulary from Spinoza. These disassociated elements are collected into an analysis in a geometric form. There is a body which is suspended, that probably represents the mind, the light of the mind. There is a body that remains on the ground, more related to the corporal or physical element, the causality of the body, played by an animal, a dog. There is a paradoxical dialogue between mind and body, which synthesise into a hole, into a human silhouette that is occupied by the mind, body, or both – they meet in this silhouette. This might seem complicated, but things will become clearer when it functions in action. If you have read Spinoza, well then good, you can make associations and parallels. But if you have never read Spinoza, nor have any idea that he ever existed, this is also not a problem. Spinoza is a pretext, not a thesis«.
[Méér in Joseph Pearson "Preview"]
