1. Peter Weiss (1916-1982) Marat/Sade (1963)
Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats
dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes
zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul
Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of
Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

2. ‘Sade: Before deciding what is wrong and what is right
first we must find out what we are
I
do not know myself
No sooner have I discovered something
than I begin to doubt it
and I have to destroy it again
What we do is just a shadow of what we want
to do.’
•Is it possible ever to be free from a feeling of subjugation
and violence?
•What role might violence have in the creation and
maintenance of psychic identity?
•What is our psychic attachment to structures of power?

3. Theorisation of power?
1933-39, Kojève, Hegel, Sorbonne.
Self =power = negation = struggle with other.
Dialectic.
Master/Slave, sovereign/bondsman.
In the Hegelian picture, the self is formed in a struggle with
the other, a struggle which it internalises but which is also
ceaselessly replayed.
The self is a perpetual drama of domination and submission.
Hegel calls this the ‘unhappy consciousness.’

4. ‘All human desire is, finally, ‘a function of the desire
for “recognition”. And the risk of life by which the
human reality “comes to light” is a risk for the sake
of such a Desire. Therefore to speak of the “origin”
of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a
fight to the death for “recognition”.’
Kojève,Alexander, Introduction to the Reading of
Hegel, lectures on the phenomenology of spirit, trans.
by James H. Nichols, Jr., (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1980), p.7

5. ‘In order that the human reality come into being as “recognized”
reality, both adversaries must remain alive after the fight. Now, this is
possible only on the condition that they behave differently in this
fight. By irreducible, or better, by unforeseeable or “undeducible”
acts of liberty, they must constitute themselves as unequals in and by
this very fight. Without being predestined to it in any way, the one
must fear the other, must give in to the other, must refuse to risk his
life for the satisfaction of his desire for “recognition”. He must give
up his desire and satisfy the desire of the other: he must “recognize”
the other without being “recognized” by him. Now, “to recognize”
him thus is “to recognize” him as his Master and to recognize himself
and to be recognized as his Master’s Slave.’
Kojève, Alexander, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, lectures on
the phenomenology of spirit, p.8

6. Ressentiment

7. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) - part 1, §14
‘There is a guarded, malicious little rumour-mongering and
whispering from every nook and cranny. I think people are telling
lies; a sugary mildness clings to every sound. Lies are turning
weakness into an accomplishment, no doubt about it – it’s just as
you said.’ -
- Go on!
‘and impotence which doesn’t retaliate is being turned into
“goodness”; timid baseness is being turned into “humility”;
submission to people one hates is being turned into “obedience”
(actually towards someone who, they say, orders this submission -
they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weakling, the very
cowardice with which he is richly endowed, his standing-by-the-
door, his inevitable position of having to wait, are all given good
names such as “patience”, which is also called the virtue; […]’

8. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) - part 1, §14
[…] not-being-able-to-take-revenge is called not-wanting-to-take-
revenge, it might even be forgiveness (“for they know not what
they do - but we know what they are doing!”). They are also
talking about “loving your enemy” - and sweating while they do
it.’
- Go on!
- ‘They are miserable, without a doubt, all these rumour-mongers
and clandestine forgers, even if they do crouch close together for
warmth - but they tell me that their misery means they are God’s
chosen and select, after all, people beat the dogs they love best;
perhaps this misery is just a preparation, a test, a training, it might
be even more than that - something which will one day be
balanced up and paid back with enormous interest in gold, no! in
happiness.’

9. What do the actors in Marat/Sade do?
They exist outside of the regimen of desire/work.
What is the mood of Revolutionary Paris in
Marat/Sade? Reason.
What is the mood of Charenton in Marat/Sade?
Inertia, hysteria, lust, violence, anxiety - all responses
to the articulation of desire/work.
Violence, instrumental action, work, boredom, leisure
and desire – psychic regimen of modernity.

10. ‘Sovereignty is the power to rise, indifferent to death, above the laws
which ensure the maintenance of life.’
‘the quest for sovereignty by the man alienated by civilisation is a
fundamental cause of historical agitation […] Sovereignty […] is the
object which eludes us all, which nobody has seized and which
nobody can seize for this reason: we cannot possess it, like an object,
but we are doomed to seek it.’
‘the creation of a sovereign […] depends on the negation of some
interdict […] This means that sovereignty, in that humanity tends
towards it, requires us to situate ourselves ‘above the essence’ which
constitutes it. It also means that major communication can only take
place on one condition – that we resort to Evil, that is to say to
violation of the law.’
Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans, by Alastair Hamilton,
(London: Marion Boyars, 1985), pp.182, 193, 202

11. Evil ‘is essentially relative to unproductive consumption, that is
to say, to destruction […] Submission and obedience, on the
other hand, are on the side of Good. Liberty is always open to
revolt, while Good is closed as a rule.’
Bataille, Literature & Evil, p.197
‘These despotic pleasure-seekers engage in a continual
subversive-anarchistic discourse about [the destruction of
power] (a discourse against law, property, religion, procreation,
and marriage, and in favour of crime, incest, adultery, theft, and
the like). The text takes responsibility for this contradiction all
the more easily because it continuously indexes its own
excesses on those of its characters; hence, right at the heart of
the verisimilitude that it assumes, the radical nonrealism
through which it unfurls.’
Marcel Hénaff, Sade, p.184

12. Abjection - Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror.
Operation of the psyche by which the subject creates and
maintains identity by repelling or rejecting anything that
threatens its boundaries. Mary Douglas' famous statement that
"dirt is matter out of place.”
Abjection can be understood as a psychic operation that
maintains the division between the clean/proper and the
unclean/abject.
Filth and defilement become inconceivable without a process
and boundary that separates them from what is clean.
Weiss’s play concerns abjection in several ways: because it
represents what is filthy, debased and sordid; because it reverses
the hierarchy of values, making desirable what is filthy; and
because it begins to undermine the boundary between abjection
and desire.