On repetition and theatricality: Dialogue with Samuel Weber

In this article, I question the notion of theatricality, which points to the ever-problematic encounter of philosophy and theatre. I do this in dialogue with Samuel Weber’s elaboration of this concept in his book Theatricality as Medium from 2004 as well as with his reading of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, An Essay in Experimental Psychology, which can be found in Weber’s discussion with Terry Smith titled Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the Theatre of the Image. I argue that viewing the encounter of philosophy and theatre through the perspective of repetition offers a very productive reading, which can be, in general, also referred to Weber’s notion of theatricality, as far as this notion points to certain hollowness or a gap in the processes of representation. To show this, I delineate the concept of productive repetition through Kierkegaard’s concept of Gjentagelsen and link it to Weber’s general notion of theatricality. However, Weber’s elaboration of the concept of theatricality in Theatricality as Medium proves to be very open and therefore also pretty vague, which makes it harder to explicate its clear function. I further proceed by examining Weber’s thesis about theatre setting the scene of possibility in relation to Kierkegard’s theory of posse and the notion of coincidence. I conclude that, unlike Weber’s notion of theatricality in Theatricality as Medium, his suggestion of understanding theatre as the space of possibility proves to be an exact concept, which connects philosophy and theatre through the mechanism of repetition.