‘Humanity Doesn’t Exist Yet’: Democracy as a Kind of Prophecy

Extract

This roundtable discussion with Hélène Cixous took place at St John's College, Cambridge, on 20 September 2014 as part of the Cambridge ‘Conference for a Poetics of Critical Political Theatre in Europe’. It was subsequently transcribed and prepared for publication by Joseph Long and Eva Urban to pay homage to the acclaimed critical theorist, novelist, and dramatist Hélène Cixous on her eightieth birthday on 5 June 2017, and to celebrate her important contribution in particular to political European theatre. The conversation centres on the recurring themes of her major plays, many of which were written in creative collaboration with Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, where they were performed. Her epic modern tragedies are deeply concerned with ethics, politics, social criticism, and ideas of utopian social projects and their tragic failures. Here Cixous, with Maria Shevtsova, Joseph Long, Eric Prenowitz, Marta Segarra, and Eva Urban highlight both the passionate political commitment of her plays and their innovative textual and poetic forms within the wider context of Cixous's writings for the theatre.1 The conversation followed a keynote address by NTQ co-editor Maria Shevtsova, attended by Hélène Cixous, prior to the roundtable discussion, and published as ‘Political Theatre in Europe: East to West, 2007–2014’, in New Theatre Quarterly, XXXII, No. 2 (May 2016).