Singularity and Remainder: Brecht’s Theater of Others

Summary

Bertolt Brecht's relationship to realism has been a hotly contested topos in Brecht research since time immemorial. Some claim links between Brecht and the programmatic bourgeois realists of the nineteenth century, while others claim that Brecht condemned and rejected realism. However, both of these positions at either end of the spectrum fail to recognize that Brecht's interest in realism seems to have had little to do with merely aligning himself with or rejecting realist aesthetics. Instead, in the 1930s and 1940s and in the Messingkauf (Buying Brass) too, he seems to have been rethinking existing concepts of realism and theater in a paleonymic manner (Jacques Derrida). There is one aspect of this conceptual rethinking that has seemingly received little attention, namely Brecht's renegotiation of the idea of the Mensch, the human being, which is carried out in particular in his Messingkauf and other texts written at a similar time during his exile, such as “Die Straßenszene” (“The Street Scene”). In this article, I contend that the concept of the human being negotiated in these texts puts Brecht's thinking in close proximity to discussions of alterity and the Other, revealing a theater that is ultimately nothing less than a theater of Others.

The concept of “egology” derives from Husserlian phenomenology: for Edmund Husserl, as for René Descartes, there is nothing in the world that does not relate back to the perceiving subject; the subject is “the ground for all worldly objects since what defines them as objects in the first place is that they are given in consciousness.” The world is thus egological due to the fact that it is rooted in the ego, the Self. Emmanuel Levinas picks up on the concept of egology and uses it in his critique of ontology to describe an order that violently excludes the Other from the totality of its self-referentiality. In his book Totality and Infinity, Levinas posits against this egological order a radical exteriority, an infinitude that moves toward the Other, welcoming the Other as Other. It does not overcome the ego of the Self; rather, the Self, by overcoming its own interiority and finitude, stays open to the Other by acknowledging that it “escapes [the Self’s] grasp by an essential dimension.”