This article analyzes the role of pain and torture in the construction and destruction of subjectivity by way of a comparison of the depictions of torture in the theatre of Sarah Kane and Elaine’s Scarry’s highly influential The Body in Pain: On the Making and Unmaking of the World. The essay uses Kane in conjunction with the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, as well as relevant work on the history and sociology of privacy and private speech. Its purpose is to develop an account of what is here called pain’s bi-directional character, or its capacity to represent both the presence and the absence of the victim’s subjectivity, possibly at the same time. Using Kane to expand upon Scarry’s account of the role of subjectivity in torture, we can see how the logic of torture structures numerous relationships in Kane’s work, including Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, and Crave. The essay establishes Kane as not only a major playwright, but also a subtle and perceptive theorist of suffering for whom the question of intersubjectivity is a major site of dramatic struggle. Jeremy Colangelo is the author of Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and the editor of Joyce Writing Disability (University Press of Florida, 2022). His work has appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, Textual Practice, and Modern Drama. He currently teaches at King’s University College, University of Western Ontario.

This essay examines Samuel Hirsch’s Religious Philosophy of the Jews as a forerunner of twentieth-century works of ethical monotheism in modern Jewish thought. In particular, it explores Hirsch’s use of the dichotomy between monotheism and idolatry as a way to resist Hegel’s attempts to incorporate Judaism into his developmental history of religion. Hirsch frames his opposition to the Hegelian account of religion by means of providing a rival interpretation of Genesis 3 to that offered by Hegel in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. After juxtaposing Hegel’s and Hirsch’s respective interpretations of Genesis 3, I explore Hirsch’s account of religion, which, unlike Hegel’s, is presented in terms of the dichotomy of true and false religion. Finally, I will briefly highlight how Hirsch’s basic strategy for understanding Judaism vis-à-vis other religions—namely, casting the dichotomy between monotheism and idolatry in starkly ethical terms—is taken up and utilized by Hermann Cohen and Emmanuel Levinas in the twentieth century.

If space explorers discover a biosphere supporting life on an off-Earth body, should they treat that life as possessing intrinsic value? This is an ethical quandary leading to a further question: how do we ground a universal moral norm to which the astroethicist can appeal? This article closely analyses various forms of responsibility ethics and finds them weak because they commit the naturalistic fallacy – that is, they ask nature to define the good. The good, however, is self-defining and not derivable from nature. Even so, a revised responsibility ethic could ground its universal norms on the fact that life and only life can experience and appreciate the good. Conclusion: living creatures possess intrinsic value both on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe.

Relational leadership invokes an ethics involving a leader’s affective engagement and genuine concern with the interests of others. This ethics faces practical difficulties given it implies a seemingly limitless responsibility to a set of incommensurable ethical demands. This article contributes to addressing the impasse this creates in three ways. First, it clarifies the nature of the tensions involved by theorising relational leadership as caught in an irreconcilable bind between an infinitely demanding ethics and the finite possibilities of a response to those demands. Second, it examines this ethical challenge in acknowledgement of the hierarchical discourses and power dynamics in which leadership relationships are constrained and enacted. Third, it proposes “ethical irony” as a way leaders can respond to the demand for ethics without resulting in either an escape from ethics, or being crushed by its burden. Three dimensions of ethical irony are examined: ironic perspective, ironic performance, and ironic predilection.

In this article Mireia Aragay and Clara Escoda examine James Macdonald's Royal Court Theatre production of Martin Crimp's triptych Fewer Emergencies (2005) in the wake of recent critical assessments of Crimp's work in relation to Hans-Thies Lehmann's postdramatic paradigm. By focusing on light design, the authors suggest that Macdonald's staging of the play productively enhanced the tension inherent in Crimp's text between dramatic and postdramatic elements. Light was conceived in postdramatic terms as a major component of the mise-en-scène, synaesthetically interacting with the linguistic material in a way that necessitated the spectators’ active processing of all onstage signs and, ultimately, their critical examination of their own ethical and political positioning with respect to the late-capitalist social and cultural order. Mireia Aragay is a Senior Lecturer in English drama and theatre at the University of Barcelona. She is co-editor of British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics, and Academics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Clara Escoda has recently completed a PhD thesis on Martin Crimp's theatre at the University of Barcelona, where she lectures in English literature.