Dr. Fred Dalmasso

(School of the Arts, English and Drama, Loughborough University)

2pm WEDNESDAY 15^th FEBRUARY in Martin Hall Boardroom MHL 1.09

Dr Fred Dalmasso is Lecturer in Drama in the School of Arts, English and Drama at Loughborough University (UK). He has published on practice-based theatre-translation and on the interaction between performance, philosophy and politics in particular through the lens of French philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of theatre and philosophy. Among his most recent publications is a chapter on the militant image in Fisher and Katsouraki’s Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance & Radical Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, January 2017).

Fred will talk about syncopolitics, a notion he has coined in response to Catherine Clément’s seminal book, Syncope – The philosophy of Rapture, where she stresses that “syncope is spectacle, it shows off, exposes itself, smashes, breaks, interrupts the daily course of other people’s lives, people at whom the raptus is aimed.” (1994: 251) Fred will look in particular at how the image of syncope and the syncope of the image might radically displace or dissolve the self and thus offer strategies of resistance against norms through renouncement or disappearance; a recess of the image that he considers as a sine qua non condition for thinking politics as what can only happen within a horlieu (an out-place or non-place) of representation: a syncopolitics that resonates with what Badiou calls inexist[a]nce.

Image: Mircea Cantor, The Landscape is Changing, performance video, 2003, 22’7s loop, colour film with sound.