Alain badiou who is nietzsche

If you belong to such an institution, please login or read more about How to Order. Back to Book Go to Page. Go Pages Front matter unlocked item List of Abbreviations. Chapter 1. Nietzsche, Genealogy and Justice. Chapter 2. Nietzsche on Truth, Honesty and Responsibility in Politics.

Chapter 3. Nietzsche, Naturalism and Law. So that we return to insistent question: if the Philosophical Act seeks recognition, any question contact him? If it is a declarative Eventality eventually the market of 4 seasons can recognize without knowing it, that she knows the name because there is no name, which is the question addressed in this Act? It is here, in its preliminary title, that we will look at works by Heidegger and Deleuze on Nietzsche. We see at which point this is embarrassing, at which point Nietzsche is not an author who asks a question, because he asks for recognition.

It is quite complex. I simply wish to establish my own method, by difference and by confrontation. Heideggerian Interpretation Heidegger's view is actually the Event, and this is the point where it is true to Nietzsche.

Anyway, at first, Heidegger actually discusses Nietzsche as an Event, and he agreed to consider it as such. The movement of Heidegger will be to examine Nietzsche I, Seminar How far is this Event really an Event for thought, i. Heidegger is going to question the Nietzschean Event through its innovative power and exceptional singularity.

The method will be immanent for Nietzsche, because it does not at all deal with anything outside his philosophy as a body of doctrine, but will treat Nietzsche as he wants to be treated, i.

In other words, if Eventality of this Event measures left to what it claims, i. Heidegger looks under that name and that name as may be appropriate to act Nietzschean reversal of all values. Clarifying the conditions of The Act of thought, i. This question will be raised: what is actually the relation of thought to Being in Nietzsche, that the fundamental act on behalf of which he asks to be recognized can be called the transvaluation of all values?

The bafflement is as follows: we will take action, the conditions of this Act, and examine the conditions in thought of the name of The Act; a consideration will revolve around two concepts, that of the will to power, and that of the Eternal Return of the Same. And, as we know, this movement will conclude that the novel Event of Nietzsche novelty Nietzsche I, Seminar But it will be, nonetheless, by memorization of the Eventality of the Event that the Nietzschean act will be said to remain internal to what he claims to be in ruins, namely Western metaphysics and Platonism.

Heidegger will at best condescend in stating that Nietzsche is the edge of the completion of metaphysics. However, in the second statement, a review of its basic features allows us to say that one is situated in the era of the completion of metaphysics.

I present here the principle of its course. In a completely primary approach, we can say that the evaluation of the Nietzschean Event by Heidegger is the assessment of the form of an endpoint as what is at the extreme edge, i.

At bottom, this Nietzscheanism will be the protocol of what Western metaphysics draws as its endpoint, the point which is not beyond, but in interiority recapitulative at the same time as it is an extreme effect. Note that this is nearly the opposite of the representation Nietzsche has of himself.

I'm not saying that this invalidates Heidegger's interpretation, but the fact is that if there is one thing Nietzsche says, it is although it is not an endpoint, a summary, or a completion. The representation that Nietzsche has of his act, and which will be the phenomenological question in the next session, is first of all a rupture, a break, a break in half, and not at all something that comes from a topological board in a species of the effect of closure, which would at the same time be the ultimate disposition of all that it closes.

This figure would honor Nietzsche in terms of the representation of its act, even though strictly speaking there are all sorts of Nietzsche I, Seminar But in my opinion the essential point is when Nietzsche speaks of his own act, and he conceives it as primarily a political act.

This Philosophical Act conceived as a policy instrument is held in the face of breaking in the entire history in two, and not at all like arrival to the transgression of its limit. Among the numerous texts on this topic, perhaps the most striking is a draft letter to Georg Brandes, the Danish scholar of Nietzsche, dated December , and so a few days before what would be called the collapse or start of his breakdown: "We have just entered high politics, even the most high.

We must begin again the question of Year 1. In short, the Philosophical Act is designed by Nietzsche as a revolutionary political, radical and foundational act. This is a key point for me because, from there, I have an opportunity to argue that Nietzsche is perhaps the thinker who tried to bring philosophy to the tune of a revolution. It is in the age of revolutions, but it is in thought.

Nietzsche hates the French Revolution, hates socialists, but in thought, Nietzsche is anything but a counter-revolutionary. In his ideological hatred of figures of the revolution, what he reproaches in them is the being of aborted and petty revolutions, packed into Christianity, and of missed revolutions.

And what he proposes is veritably the first year, i. Thus Nietzsche at not at all the Nietzsche I, Seminar I believe that the representation that Nietzsche has given himself is actually the thought of a break.

The fact that Nietzsche says that the Philosophical Act by which he is about to break in two world histories is the transvaluation of all values, which Heidegger relates to the eternal problem of values, is finally a problem of unconditioned subjectivity, which he states very strongly from the point of the name, as if, in this area, it were the name of the Philosophical Act according to which Nietzsche could bear or endure the entire interpretation of this Act.

I do not believe this. I think that in the Nietzschean configuration of The Act, there is something rebellious in the name he gave it, i. We will try to make this point work, because the question of Nietzsche's philosophy must start from the extraordinary representation that Nietzsche gives to The Act. For Heidegger, the appropriation of the name Nietzsche, since it is always by him, is available in the metaphysical category in the precise sense that thinking like Nietzsche's philosophy text will be related or placed in the subsuming of metaphysics.

However, the metaphysics appropriated by Heidegger in the case of "Nietzsche", it is metaphysics taken up in the form of its completion, which itself has the name of nihilism, and one can say in an all-too-summational fashion, but which tries to point the open way, in Nietzsche, nihilism is completed in overcoming it, once again properly metaphysics, of nihilism even of nihilism, which for Heidegger Nietzsche I, Seminar This is the nihilism completed in the separation from its own essence, as Nietzsche claims to have the means to overcome nihilism from within, which, for Heidegger, makes Nietzsche the emblem of completed nihilism, as defined where it is ultimately blind to its own essence.

In the undertaking of thought represented by the two volumes of Nietzsche by Heidegger, the passage that is perhaps most synthetic is found precisely in the 6th part of Volume II: The Metaphysics of Nietzsche , which is descriptively the most representative of the operation of Heidegger's thought on Nietzsche.

And, in light of the specification as Nietzsche as the enterprise which achieves it from the inside of nihilism that ends up blind to its own essence, the most striking passage is found on page of Volume II, which is in the seventh section of the book entitled: The ontological-historical determination of nihilism : "When the metaphysics of Nietzsche not only interprets Being from the being in the sense of the direction of the will to power as one value, but until Nietzsche will think the will to power is the principle of an establishing of new values and he attempts and wills this, it as what is supposed to overcome nihilism, and thus the extreme embarrassment of metaphysics in the inauthentic nihilism comes to rule by the same desire to overcome it, so that this embarrassment is hiding from its own essence, and so, as a reduction of nihilism it simply transposes it into the efficacy of its originating essence which is unleashed.

He says that overcoming nihilism, which in Heidegger's eyes, is the program of Nietzschean thought, i. One could almost say that this is his definition, in some respects. But when nihilism, i. Nietzschean metaphysics, is Nietzsche I, Seminar In this sense, for Heidegger, Nietzsche is the one with the program of nihilism, the destructive agenda of the reversal of all values, but also the program of the establishing new values in the form of the great afternoon of affirmation.

And as with Nietzsche has endowed the nihilism of such a program, and has delivered it from the prescription of the visibility of its own essence, and unleashed efficiency, if one means by revolution a programmatic vision of historical rupture, namely the program combined from destruction from what is an Event of a radical innovation.

This is where essence comes to be darkened to the point of hiding from its essence, when liberated, under the form of pure efficiency, or the arrest of Being, the sheer power of nihilism itself. In passing, I would like to make the following remark: when Heidegger grasps and thinks like Nietzsche concerning the programmatic dimension of the revolutionary element of thought, what is interesting is that this is truly what he criticizes, i.

Heidegger argues, instead, that nihilism provides a program of exiting from nihilism, and essentially accomplishes the principle of releasing one from nihilism. This is the way of a consistent power in the appropriation of the text of Nietzsche.

The question is whether it is relevant, i. Deleuzian Interpretation In contrast, what Deleuze places at the center of his perception of Nietzsche, his main qualification, is not the subjective exposition in the first plan. This is not the starting point of Deleuze, which is no longer the revolutionary dimension of The Nietzsche I, Seminar Deleuze addresses in Nietzsche the following question: what is a tragic philosophy in the sense that Nietzsche himself understands it?

The context of Deleuze's assessment, which will be employed in an extraordinarily orderly manner - Deleuze's book is constructed quite systematically and stringently compared to the Nietzschean corpus — has as an emblem the designation of a type of exemplary philosophy, which is of the tragic kind, where Nietzsche himself claims the naming. So we share intra-Nietzschean words. Ecce Homo: "I am entitled to consider myself as the first tragic philosopher, i. What is meant by tragedy in the Nietzschean sense, but ultimately, too, in an almost universal sense?

Tragedy seems to have two essential references: The first is that there is tragedy when an inevaluable depth is found, a bottomless bottom or something reduced to the standards he founded, inaccessible from departing from what depth grounds. In Nietzsche, the inevaluable depth is from one end to the other of his thought called life. And in a first sense, Nietzsche's philosophy will be tragic because life, which is the principle of any assessment, is itself inevaluable.

Twilight of the Idols: "The value of life cannot be assessed. The second reference which characterizes tragedy is that chance is irreducible. The occurrence that happens in the face of the terrible does not let itself be subsided by anything. And even as Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo: "I'm always left to chance. If you wish, the tragedy is the correlation of the depth and excess of chance, which constitutes the tragic as fate, as destiny in its Greek sense.

We must not take any of destiny as a form of necessity, the fate of the Greek tragedy is the exposed correlation between the lack of assessment of the foundation, and what establishes, and the incalculable excess of chance.

Such is the fate that works in Greek tragedy, and not at all formal requirement which precedes, or a determinism. The tragic hero is one who in a double binding is at once exposed to the hiding of the assessment in the depth at the same time that he will strike a supplementary chance at the heights which he desperately tries to reach.

The tragic philosopher is also the one whose declaration of thought is that the value of life cannot be evaluated, but that it is required to try to be worthy of life. Nietzsche will say, "One is a fragment of fatality.

But although he does not say so, it is "I" who has to reconstruct, it is the center of gravity in Deleuze, who concerning Nietzsche, deploys the layout of the tragic philosophy: How, once this is said, does the philosophy arrive at an establishment in Nietzsche?

Deleuze discusses this point on two levels: On the first level: He immediately explains why all tragic philosophy replaces the question of meaning with that of truth. This will be his first essential interpretation. The opening sentence of his book goes: "The more general project of Nietzsche is this: introducing in philosophy the concepts of meaning and value. So tragic philosophy contains a problem of meaning.

On the second: Tragic philosophy will examine the multiplicity of meaning, because from the moment we leave the singularity of truth, we are in the plurality of meaning. Thus the questions that Deleuze will address to Nietzsche will be essentially typological questions, i. This will be the axial matter traversed by a logic, i. If you wish to specify the types from which meaning is given, one must use a logic of forces which distributes The Active forces and reactive forces as the first binary logic of forces.

So if you had to summarize in one word the question that Deleuze asks Nietzsche, the usage that Deleuze makes of it, it could be said this way: Nietzsche is tragic philosophy as a logic of the typological multiple. So it is the name Nietzsche designates philosophy in its tragic type, since Deleuze assumes the typological principle of Nietzschean thought. And thus Nietzsche, in an exemplary way, names philosophy in its tragic type.

However, as much as tragedy is the correlation of a depth that is hidden, i. In this last maxim, Nietzsche says of himself but this itself is a category of his philosophy : "I'm always left to the height of chance. From this point of view, tragedy is the correlate of a lack and excess, and the point where something missing is given in excess, an excess which never fills this gap.

From the determination of philosophy as a tragic type, Nietzsche is engaged in an interpretation that provides a coherent theory of multiples in addition to the theory of the multiple of what gives meaning, namely of types. The Deleuzian interpretation consists, then, of a typological path of Nietzsche that is settled by the non-dialectical correlation between active forces and reactive forces.

Instead, in Heidegger, the entire focus is on the program of thinking attributed to Nietzsche by Heidegger, i.

Deleuze's vision will be attached to the essential descriptive style in Deleuze, in the description of a path related to the typological multiplicity in the work of Nietzsche. Deleuze touches upon a significant and real point, not only in stating that there is a great Nietzschean typology of homes, of principles or intensities of meaning, which is obvious, but because this leads to a question that is fundamental, in my view: which is, in Nietzsche, the question of proper names.

What is the function of proper names in Nietzsche, given that we have already met with a principal name that is Nietzsche, but it is not the only one? Well, it is in light of all this that I will try to draw out my own way in contraposition and review these points during the next session.

This was a way to enter Nietzsche's singularity, i. I told you that the central difficulty converges towards the fact that Nietzsche does not ask his textual proposition to be a submission to an assessment or a commentary, nor does he demand, strictly speaking, rallying. What the nature of Nietzschean text requires is a form of recognition, i. It is necessary and sufficient to note that taking action is the true relationship that Nietzschean text requires and this is the form of what I might call his singular authority.

Nietzsche calls for this existence to be acknowledged, but one notices quite soon that what Nietzsche requests to be acknowledged is the very existence of Nietzsche. It must be mentioned that this is what Sarah Kofman suggests in her recent book on Ecce Homo, titled Explosion I — that we must distinguish "Nietzsche" and Nietzsche. Thus there is a Nietzsche who is, in fact, the circulating proper name to which we are accustomed, and then there was the "Nietzsche" that could, in fact, punctuate or emphasize something, and that is where Nietzsche's text asks to be acknowledged.

Or we can say that Nietzsche himself is presented, i. Nietzsche presents "Nietzsche" as the name of an infinite power of thought and that this name as such should be recognized. Let's indicate in this passage that this demand for recognition is not actually a narcissistic demand, but a categorical demand, i.

One can also say that the main argument that Nietzsche displays in favor of his text, is the validation of what this proper name recovers: "Nietzsche" as immanent category of the textual device. We can also say: the proper name "Nietzsche" is what is immanent evidence for Nietzsche's text. It is an even greater difficulty, which of Nietzsche I, Seminar If we wish, we can say that "Nietzsche" is explicit in Nietzsche, and it is not underlying quality of the author which is abolished- an author who is dead where his text is most vibrant.

Finally, I had indicated that this recognition Nietzsche requires, i. It is not intended, nor addressed. It is arbitrary in the sense that Nietzsche can and should be recognized by anyone as "Nietzsche," and the rest of it is in part independent of the text, despite independence in relation to the text no longer being the recognition of a person or of a psychological subject.

Let's say that in everything he does, including, of course, his writings, Nietzsche bears the emblems of "Nietzsche". This is expressed in the text that I have read you: "What has flattered me so far the most, is the old market of four seasons have never ceased to choose, in my opinion, the ripest clusters of grapes. And Nietzsche adds, "This is how one must be a philosopher," saying that being a philosopher is not about being the author of a doctrinal test, but about wearing convincing emblems of life itself, where the text is the text.

Since there is a portrait of the philosopher Nietzsche, I would say that the philosopher is this princely anonymity which is generically known and called "Nietzsche," which Nietzsche himself deems "Nietzsche".

Obviously, this form of the philosopher and of his relation to his text, and, for example, "Nietzsche" is an immanent category of Nietzsche's text, meaning that the relation to Nietzsche as a work, as writing, as disposition to thought, seems to exclude the commentary. In any case, Nietzsche's text as it stands and such as it is related to this exposition is not a proposition for commentary. The text is in check and it is not there for us to clarify or interpret.

Besides, if you look closely, Nietzsche himself keeps for its own account to verify that the very thing he writes is "Nietzsche", i. What is a book?

We were just saying that the use of a book of Nietzsche serves the best use type checking. But more generally, Nietzsche states in in Ecce Homo that "no one can take from things, including books, more than he already knows. And we can no longer force the book to confess latent knowledge that is not already explicit in its reader. In referring to Nietzsche, one must really expect that we cannot draw upon anything other than what has already been known.

But what should we already know? What is this prior knowledge that makes the ownership of the book possible? It is a basic mastery or control of the proper name, "Nietzsche," as an opening category of the book.

From this point of view, Nietzsche's thesis is extraordinarily opposed to the posterior theses which are attested to in the text either by the erasure or the death of the proper name of the author, something that the text induces, i. In Nietzsche things work in reverse: it is the minimal control of the proper name "Nietzsche" which depends on what can verify the writing of the Nietzschean book, and thus explain in existence.

Let's add that what makes available the name "Nietzsche" is not of the structure of discourse, Nietzsche I, Seminar It is from the way of style that the minimal recognition of the word "Nietzsche" as an opening capacity of the book operates.

Nietzsche says, "Communicating through signs, including the tempo of these signs, a state, or the internal tension of a passion, this is the meaning of any style. And if we consider that the diversity of inner states is exceptional in me, so there is in me many possibilities of style.

One must then understand style as communication by the tempo of signs of internal tension. A comment I already made: Let's try to understand, once and for all, the 2nd sentence of this quote as the sentences pronounced in Nietzsche's most rigorous modesty.

If you hear the outset as emphatic or delusional statements, I think believe that we lack the effective interiority of Nietzsche. When he says that there are in him "a variety of exceptional inner states," we must credit him with the greatest integrity. I will have the opportunity to say that there is an inner holiness that is indisputable in Nietzsche, and that this element of exceptional integrity is what one must understand from the declarations of what Nietzsche thinks, which are so obviously paranoid that they may seem to us immediately so from the outset.

But to return to the meaning of "Nietzsche" as the working principle of the book, the instruction that you may have stuck it in style, which is itself an immediate striking of the book, i. It is very important to remember that for Nietzsche, style is the tempo of the signs. There is a metaphorical element but also a rhythmic element, which is that entering understanding of the word "Nietzsche" is first of all letting oneself fall into the rhythm of the tempo of signs, and therefore in an image very central to Nietzsche, the potential reader is first a dancer: it is necessary that something of thought enters the dance of the tempo of signs so that the style is existing, and when the style exists, then we can grasp the uniqueness of the uniqueness of the word "Nietzsche," grasped from the singularity which is the operation by which the book opens itself to be verified.

Here we have it. Evidently, all this makes a philosophizing Nietzsche I, Seminar The Function of Proper Names In reality, understanding Nietzsche involves, for a good part, if not all, understanding the function of proper names.

To take up the Deleuzian lexicon again, it is a thought that exemplarily proves a philosophy of conceptual characters that hinge and concentrate upon the crucial points of the Nietzschean device. There is a first reason that this is quite clear, namely that in the eyes of Nietzsche, a proper name has the immense advantage of initially lacking an underlying idealism, i.

And he'll have to state what he names, and that the name, proper, does not only name in its proper name. In Nietzsche there is a real hatred of the common names of philosophy: truth, the good, the beautiful, the just, the unjust, and the entire network of common names of philosophy. Nietzsche proposes to destroy the gesture the reversal of all values, which is largely a reversal of the common names of philosophy.

And there is on Nietzsche's part, an attempt to substitute these common names with new proper names. And where we have the true, the good, the beautiful, we will have Dionysus and Ariadne, or "Nietzsche," more than anything else.

I would say that there is a Nietzschean movement, which is that the reversal of common names results in the profit of the proper name. The common name is not affected at all. In Nietzsche's view, the common name organizes nihilism, i. Only the proper name will thus be able to designate the intensity of a sense, for all the common names are definitely worn out, and their usage is precisely the annihilating aggregation which Nietzsche I, Seminar One cannot hope to recode, or rename the new intensities arriving in the form of the proper name.

From this moment, one is always tempted to question the Nietzschean text from the question of who is it as such? Who is Dionysus? It is striking that he himself is established in this logic of who: Who is Ariadne, who is Socrates, who is Wagner. And then, of course: Who is Nietzsche? Only I ask at this point whether this is really the question relevant to the proper name of Nietzsche. Under each of these names, is the right question: who is? And I would even say, are these proper names really the names of a type?

Do they designate through themselves the likelihood or intensity of a unique form in the granting of meaning? This question is very important and, in my opinion, quite difficult. The first thing to note is that proper names don't have insular operations. Paradoxically, names do not work on their own, but form a network, and it is rather the disjunctive correlation of proper names which is the location of meaning. I'm not sure we can respond in an operational input text from Nietzsche, for example, from the question: Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?

Or, more generally, from the question: Who is it? To put it in another register of image, one can say that proper names are the algebraic dimension of Nietzsche, i. There is in the proper name a recapitulation, an element of the point of capture and also, between names, and quite complex operations-- it is for this reason that the idea of algebra, i.

I would like to give a few simple examples, which we will find hidden, and much more complicated. You know Ecce Homo ends with the famous words: "Do you understand me? Dionysus against the Crucified Notice: "Dionysus Against the Crucified" could have been the title of the book by Nietzsche, or all the books by Nietzsche. Or, if you like, "Dionysus against the Crucified" is Nietzsche himself. So if we understand, this is what we understood, i. That's what we understand, because this question of the correlation of names is an ultimate instance of the Nietzschean text.

But obviously, "Dionysus against the Crucified" is not the question, but rather: Who is Dionysus? This entry has no external links. Add one. Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server Configure custom proxy use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy.

Configure custom resolver. Michael A. Peters - - Educational Philosophy and Theory 52 7 Fabio Gironi - unknown. Conditional Notes on a New Republic. Materialism, Dialectics, and Theology in Alain Badiou. Nietzsche Humanist. Daniel T. It should moreover be understood that the theatre makes fun of everything, and comedy makes fun of all authorities, from princes to pedants and from philosophers to salesmen and coquettes.

Comedy does not set itself any restrictions. So we ought not whine about the fact that the philosopher is seen as a pedant, that merely proves that he is part of real life. The best examples of people spouting abstract jargon are to be found in philosophy. Indeed, Plato would say that in that example it is not really philosophy that is being mocked but sophism, since the typical pedant speaking nonsense is in fact a sophist.

The other comical aspect of the philosopher is the fact that for various reasons he is ill-adapted to the world. Indeed, I think that it was Plato who first pointed to this aspect of the philosopher in his references to Thales falling into the well. Plato knew that this was comedic, and there are many amusing passages, particularly in his dialogues regarding Thales, where he tells of how he fell into the well while he was gazing at the stars.

A lowly slave laughed seeing his boss falling into the well. So here we are in comedy — the popular audience sees the philosopher falling into a well and has a good chuckle. We can think of Aristophanes — for the relations between Plato and Aristophanes were outlandish. Aristophanes wrote a play that made an unprecedented, vehement attack on Socrates, who he brazenly mistook for a sophist spouting jargon.

Each made a little theatre of the other, it was a quarrel that took place via the intermediary of theatre. You could even say that he would be ready to make important concessions — or, to put it another way, it raises the question of the relationship between philosophy and love, passion, affection, and perhaps even femininity. It must be recognised that the theatre makes the philosopher a somewhat sombre figure of fun, in the case of the Misanthrope but also in Marivaux.

Indeed, it is a problem of the relation between philosophy and the philosopher and amorous passion, sexual desires. The theatre has made a comedy out of it because it makes all contradictions into comedy, and in this case it picked up on the contradiction between the pedant and love, which it finds most amusing. Philosophy also knows that love and everything that goes with it greatly encumbers philosophy and puts it in a difficult position.

I think that the most striking texts in this regard can be found in Stoic philosophy, in Pascal, and laid bare in Kierkegaard. There is a whole philosophical tradition that has studied the particular difficulty of being in love, of passions, of impulses. Or rather, it concerns the problem that the feminine poses philosophy in general. He knows perfectly well that if he is going to talk about love then he inevitably has to talk about sexuality, and perhaps even have a woman talking, as he does.

Women had no voice in Greek philosopher, but here, yes, Socrates gets her to speak. In reality there is always a tennis match between philosophy and theatre: the ball may now be on one side of the court but it will soon be knocked back over the net. There is a bizarre kind of knot entangling this pair, and I believe that this was the case ever since the beginning, in the image of Plato who wrote the dialogues.

Philosophy poses as problems the very things out of which the theatre makes comedy and tragedy. What is the origin of the negative image of the comedian in philosophy? It is an entirely moral judgement, and as a consequence this piece should be understood as a polemical manner of expounding the constitutive traits of his morality. Lest we forget that he wrote plays for the stage, he wrote a kind of operetta, he was absolutely fascinated by the theatrical milieu.

All his Confessions were written in this vein, and we know that the moralist Rousseau frequented prostitutes in Venice. This consists of making the category of imitation appear as a sort of fraud, a swindle carried out before the court of morality, literally identified with Alceste. For Rousseau, the theatre that derides Alceste is an immoral imposture.

However it is not evident that this should be the case, since many times the Misanthrope has been played as the very incarnation of conscience. Rousseau made the theatre appear before the court of morality, and evidently when you do so at that level of generality — when it is imitation itself that is corrupt, detestable — then you can only consider theatre as a whole as a corruption.

So this theatre that is no longer theatrical goes under the banner of pure presence. Today, many theatre companies seek to deconstruct representation. At root, this means bringing the actor back very close to the real of his body, and making a critique of imitation by going beyond representation.