Sebastian Wogenstein
Poetic Anarchy and Human Rights: Dissensus in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade
In his seminal work Making Sense of Human Rights, James W. Nickel argues that, “human rights, as we know them today, are the rights of the lawyers, not the rights of the philosophers” (Nickel 2007, p. 7). Nickel, a professor of law and philosophy, points to the specificity of the rights found in the declarations, conventions, and other treaties that make up today’s international human rights framework, as opposed to the broad and abstract concepts that dominated the philosophical discourse on human rights in the 18th and 19th centuries. Moreover, our pre -sent-day human rights as legal concepts do not depend on the acceptance of a particular philosophical foundation and are realized through institutions.
This chapter considers the place of literature, and more specifically the theater, in relation to today’s human rights discourse, which is dominated by institutional orientations. One path toward addressing this question would be to discuss literary works that involve specific human rights issues and raise awareness of rights violations. My approach takes a different direction and focuses on what I will describe as the “an-archic” leaning of many literary texts. I will argue that such texts raise questions about the institutional framework itself and the ideas on which institutions are built. Instead of presenting institutional praxis as a solution to the problem of the ideas’ abstraction, such literary texts instead reveal the realities of power that are all too often eclipsed by the institutional focus of much human rights discourse.
The two literary examples provided here, Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, dissect the institutional implementation of human rights ideas in the context and legacy of the French Revolution. Although today’s human rights are different from the Droits de l’homme of 1789 both in scope and applicability, they share an underlying assumption about the equality of humans and the possibility of reform, however these ideas of equality and progress might be framed. It is precisely the plays’ commentary on institution-based realization of equality and progress that speaks to human rights discourse today. At the same time, a look at the authors’ commitments to social justice reveals that the critical perspective of a text does not necessarily imply resigned acquiescence in the face of perceived social injustice. Rather, these literary texts – in the imagination that produced them and the imagination they might spark in the observer or reader – are both more radical and more realistic than the political leanings of their authors. Danton’s Death and Marat/Sade challenge us to critically review our preconceived narratives or ideas and, by opening up a “dispute about what is given,” speak to us in a voice that Jacques Rancière calls “dissensus” (Rancière 2004, p. 304).
The Anarchic Origins of Equality
When Hannah Arendt decried the plight of the stateless refugees during the Second World War as a fundamental rightlessness in a well-known passage of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), it was precisely the absence of effective institutions beyond the state that revealed the idea of human rights to be a grand illusion. Without the protection of a supra-national institution, she argued, the elementary rights that should have applied to everyone proved worthless: “The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them” (Arendt 1966, p. 293??f.). As Étienne Balibar has pointed out, Arendt’s argumentation reflects an “extreme form of institutionalism” (Balibar 2007, p. 729). Stateless people were not only deprived of the one (and, in Arendt’s thinking, only) human right, the “right to have rights” (Arendt 1966, p. 296), but she also makes clear that this condition separated the stateless from the very world that Arendt understands as comprising political life. Cast out of the institution of political life, they were also cast out of the communal world in which one’s voice is heard and counts. Not only were they deprived of particular rights, but their situation was in fact much more severe: they became “worldless.” For the stateless person, no longer belonging to the political sphere amounted to a loss of one’s place in the world: “the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity” (Arendt 1966, p. 297). As Balibar makes clear, Arendt’s “idea of rights is indistinguishable from the construction of the human, which is the immanent result of the historical invention of (political) institutions” (Balibar 2007, p. 733??f.).
Political life is fundamental in Arendt’s thinking because only through the institution of the communal world, the polity, can we become equals. This institution creates fellow humans, and in so doing, the “natural” inequality of the human physis, or “mere givenness” (Arendt 1966, p. 301), is overcome. Whoever is expelled from this communal world is thrown back into pre-political insignificance, bare life, a condition in which being human means nothing other than being “some specimen of an animal species called man” (Arendt 1966, p. 302). Balibar calls this a “tragic contingency” in Arendt’s philosophy – that for her being truly human (as opposed to a mere designation of species) hinges on one’s recognition as a member of the polity (Balibar 2007, p. 734). The same institutions that let human subjects emerge through mutual recognition destroy them when this recognition is withdrawn.
At the heart of Arendt’s ideal institutionalism, however, is also a fundamental an-archic principle in the sense of an ideal nicht-herrschaftliche, or “no-rule,” organization of political life. In her treatise On Revolution, Arendt explains that in the prime example of the polity, the Greek polis, equality and freedom were guaranteed through isonomy: a form of political organization, “in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled” (Arendt 2006, p. 20). It is clear to Arendt that this isonomy depends on a mutual agreement among peers that is observed and enacted and, as such, was not to be confused with democracy, the rule of the many. In isonomy, the “outstanding characteristic among the forms of government, as the ancients had enumerated them, was that the notion of rule (the ‘archy’ from archein in monarchy and oligarchy, or the ‘cracy’ from kratein in democracy) was entirely absent from it” (Arendt 2006, p. 20). To Arendt such isonomy is only possible within the “artificial institution” of the polis.
As Balibar observes, however, this assumption of a “no-rule” condition within the polis is contrary to Aristotle’s and other Greek philosophers’ insistence on an arché, on the principle of rulership. In Aristotle’s opinion, the ideal citizen is “the one who successively knows how to give orders and take orders from others (archein te kai archesthai dunasthai)” (Balibar 2007, p. 735). Arendt, by contrast, takes the notion of isonomy from a story told by Herodotus about the Persian prince Otanes who neither wanted to rule nor be ruled. Arendt’s decision to follow this understanding of an “an-archic” equality instead of Aristotle’s give-and-take orders is indeed remarkable and leads Balibar to suggest that in a very concrete sense, Arendt’s institutionalism is built on the notion of a concerted “civil disobedience.”109 Such disobedience “suppresses the ‘vertical’ form of authority and creates a ‘horizontal’ form of association in order to recreate the conditions of a ‘free consent’ to the law” (Balibar 2007, p. 736). Although Arendt’s concept of the person – or even the human itself, as noted above – is often criticized as being predicated on the condition of having a voice in the political realm, the notion of a concerted collective disobedience, and thereby the creation of a new “place in the world,” seems to suggest at least the possibility of newly emergent spheres of the political within the framework of her thinking.
In responding to Arendt’s institutionalism and what he calls her “archipolitical position,” Jacques Rancière rejects the notion that speaking as a human subject depends on an institutional framework, that reciprocal recognition is a precondition for politics (Rancière 2004, p. 299). For Rancière, politics refers to a process of emancipation in which those who are marginalized within, or excluded from, the polity contest their marginalization or exclusion. This contestation does not necessarily involve formally claiming certain rights, such as one’s human rights. Instead, it may appear when those who are marginalized or excluded speak or act when they are expected to remain silent or unseen. Rather than accepting their exclusion or marginalization, those who are consi dered unqualified to participate in the polity (the “uncounted”) act as if they were qualified to do so (Rancière 2004, p. 305). In contrast to what Rancière calls “police,” i.e. a “way of counting” that makes it commonsensical to distinguish between those who are considered qualified and those who are not, “politics” involves the questioning of this division. Politics for Rancière does not refer to political life in which the citizen engages, in juxtaposition with the private sphere or the “worldless” bare life in which being human amounts to little more than a species designation. Instead, politics is the process in which dissensus is enacted. This dissensus, he makes clear, “is not a conflict of interest, opinions, or values; it is a division put in ‘common sense’: a dispute about what is given, about the frame within which we see something as given” (Rancière 2004, p. 304).
Rather than defining the political subject as the one who is qualified to participate in political life, Rancière insists that the subject emerges in the process of “poli tical subjectivization” (Rancière 2004, p. 304). “Political subjects are not definite collectivities,” Rancière claims, contrary to Arendt’s institutionalism, “they are surplus names, names that set out a question or a dispute (litige) about who is included in their count” (Rancière 2004, p. 303). Political subjects, in Rancière’s understanding, emerge only through dissensus. Dissensus, correspondingly, also involves questioning the common use and applicability of the claims that are the most fundamental to human rights, freedom and equality: “freedom and equality are not predicates belonging to definite subjects. Political predicates are open predicates: they open up a dispute about what they exactly entail and whom they concern in which cases” (Rancière 2004, p. 303). In terms of human rights in specific, Rancière suggests paradoxically that, “the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not” (Rancière 2004, p. 302). This claim entails a number of assumptions. First, rather than rejecting the notion of human rights as mere deception, Rancière sees value in what he calls the “inscription” of these rights, i.e. their dissemination as a written set of rights that portray the community as “free and equal.” The resulting portrayal of an imagined community of free and equal members clashes with the experience of those who are marginalized or excluded. Second, this form of “inscription” is not only a contradiction; it also envisions a community in which these rights are actualized.
For Rancière, political subjects “verify” the extension of those rights by putting this imagined freedom and equality to the test. By “stag[ing] a scene of dissensus,” they erase the distinction between two worlds that allows for the exclusion of groups of people: “They not only confront the inscriptions of rights to situations of denial; they put together the world where those rights are valid and the world where they are not” (304). At the heart of this merger of worlds is a process of thinking, or imagining, the extension of rights to those who are excluded.
French revolutionary and playwright Olympe de Gouges serves Rancière as an example. Rejecting the exclusion of women from political rights, de Gouges proclaimed in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791) that, “if woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum” (Gouges 1979, p. 91). The dissensus she staged did not only involve protest against women’s exclusion from the community of men, who are envisioned by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) as “born free and equal in rights” (“Declaration” 1990, p. 118). She also rejected the division between the political sphere and the private or domestic sphere to which women were relegated. If women could be sent to the scaffold, she argued, this act in itself implied a public, or political, form of equality that contradicted their exclusion from other functions. For Rancière this is a clear example of politics, in the sense of making “the uncounted” visible and disputing their exclusion: “If they could lose their ‘bare life’ out of a public judgment based on political reasons, this meant that even their bare life – their life doomed to death – was political” (Rancière 2004, p. 303). But de Gouges’s protest was also an act of defiance, an enactment of the rights she was denied, even though, as Rancière points out, her “deduction could not be endorsed – it could not even be heard – by the lawmakers” (Rancière 2004, p. 304). She emerged as a political subject not by belonging to a collectivity, but precisely by disputing who could be included in their count and acting accordingly.
Ironically, another powerful example of Rancière’s notion of dissensus is Hannah Arendt herself. Given the centrality of Rancière’s rejection of Arendt’s division between political and private life to his argument – between the citizens who count and the “worldless” stateless refugees whose “bare life” doesn’t – this choice may surprise. When Arendt first expressed her thoughts on the situation of stateless refugees in a 1943 essay titled “We Refugees,” she wrote precisely from her personal experience as a stateless refugee: “If we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews it would mean we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings” (Arendt 1978, 65). As Andrew Schaap points out, Rancière misconstrues Arendt’s tone in her remarks on the calamity of the stateless people as contemptuous. If Arendt mentions in Origins of Totalitarianism that they were thought to be so unimportant that their lives weren’t even considered worth oppressing, she was not expressing contempt for the refugees,110 but rather speaking in a tone of “bitter irony” (Schaap 2011, p. 33).
Arendt’s actions in writing about the exclusion of stateless refugees, and her activism in movements to assist them, involved the enactment of precisely the rights that she lacked. She did not resign herself to the invisibility of private life, to which she may have appeared destined in the eyes of many of her contemporaries in the 1940s, both as a stateless person and as a female academic. Instead, she made her voice heard. Although Rancière criticizes her for what he considers her “archipolitical position,” Arendt is a prime example of a political subject whose act of dissensus, enacted in her writing and her activism, confronts precisely the exclusionary institutionalism about which she wrote.
Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade enact dissensus in a number of different registers. Both reveal dimensions of open or concealed violence in institutions and assumptions that are fundamental constituents of today’s human rights discourse. Written in 1835 and 1963/64 respectively, the plays confront us with ideas of equality and justice as well as convictions and doubts regarding the characters’ plans to reform society. Often, such discussions take place in settings that are traditionally excluded from public speech: the private sphere, the prison, the asylum. They engage the political in precisely the sense that Rancière calls dissensus: as a questioning of fundamental, commonsensical assumptions and the “back-and-forth movement between the first inscription of the right and the dissensual stage on which it is put to test” (Rancière 2004, p. 305). Indeed, by putting what is assumed as “given” to the test on the stage and initiating dispute over it – including “inscriptions” of freedom, equality, and progress – these plays speak anarchically today as they did when they were first performed.
Georg Büchner: Danton’s Death
In March 1834, a little more than half a year after completing two years of study at the University of Strasbourg, Georg Büchner, a twenty-year-old medical student and emerging writer, founded a secret “Gesellschaft der Menschenrechte” (Society of Human Rights) in the university town of Gießen, and just a month later a second chapter of the society in nearby Darmstadt. Modeled on the French “Société des Droits de l’homme,” this was Büchner’s response to the abject social conditions he witnessed in his home state of Hesse, in particular the dire situation of the peasants. Described by his friends as an “idolâtre de la révolution française,” Büchner and his comrades printed an eight-page revolutionary pamphlet, Der Hessische Landbote (Hessian Courier), that declares in its programmatic heading: “Peace to cottages! War to palaces!” Contrasting the lives of the rich with the lives of the peasants, Büchner describes the latter as severe exploitation:
The life of the rich is one long Sunday. They live in fine houses, they wear elegant clothes. They have well-fed faces and speak a language of their own. But the people lie before them like dung on the fields. The peasant walks behind the plough; but the rich man walks behind peasant and plough, driving both him and his oxen, taking the grain and leaving the stubble. The peasant’s life is one long working day. Strangers devour the fruit of his fields before his very eyes. His whole body is a sore; his sweat is the salt on the rich man’s table. (Büchner 2008, p. ix)
Büchner’s revolutionary activities did not remain unnoticed by the authorities. An arrest warrant was issued in 1835, and as late as 1842, five years after Büchner’s untimely death, a probe into illegal political movements conducted by the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt mentions Büchner’s founding of the “Society of Human Rights” in 1834 as an example of high treason and lists his co-conspirators. Whereas several of his comrades were arrested and imprisoned, Büchner himself was able to flee. The 1842 document charges that Büchner, as the head of the conspiracy, saw the “material hardship of the people as a revolutionary lever” and attempted to “influence the people’s lower classes” to participate in a mass uprising that would lead to the establishment of a republic, the “only constitution that would adequately respect human dignity” (“Protokolle” 2013, p. 330). The Hessian Messenger is cited as the pamphlet with which Büchner, “taking as a medium of persuasion the religion of the people, tried to declare the sacred human rights through simple imagery and phrases from the New Testament” (“Protokolle” 2013, p. 330). From the confessions of the arrested co-conspirators, the report purports that the initiation of new members simply consisted of a reading of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, voicing one’s agreement that preventing anyone from actualizing these rights amounted to oppression, and a vow to use all of one’s abilities to remove such oppression.” The report also mentions that the central aim of the Society was the “absolute equality of all” (“Protokolle” 2013, p. 331). The report reflects some of the positions Büchner argues in his extant correspondence. In a letter to his parents from Strasbourg, dated April 5, 1833, he explains the reasons why, at this point, he does not entirely reject violence as a means:
My opinion is this: if something can help in our time, then it is violence. […] Our youth is accused of using violence. But don’t we live in a permanent state of violence? Because we are born and raised in a dungeon, we don’t realize that we’re stuck in a hole with chained hands and feet and a gag in our mouths. What do you call rule of law? A law that turns the great majority of citizens into exploited animals in order to satisfy the unnatural needs of an insignificant and spoiled minority? And this law, upheld by raw military violence and the dimwitted diligence of its agents, this law is an eternal, raw violence against the right and sound reason, and I will fight against it with mouth and deed wherever I can. (Büchner 1993, p. 190??f.)
In a similar vein, he writes to his friend August Stöber on December 9, 1833: “The political conditions could drive me mad. The poor people tamely haul the cart on which the princes and liberals act out their ludicrous comedy. I say a prayer every evening to ropes and street-lights” (Büchner 1993, p. 192). In contrast to his revolutionary attitude and activism, however, Büchner’s influential revolutionary drama Danton’s Death is far from unambiguous. Contrary to what one might expect from an “idolâtre de la révolution française,” it provides a sharply critical perspective on the French Revolution and some of its protagonists. Büchner indeed stages dissensus in two directions. One is aimed at the social conditions that appear intolerable, which he and his comrades aim to overthrow with the goal of radical equality not unlike the isonomy Arendt describes. The other direction of dissensus, however, involves his dissection of the institutional praxis of the French Revolution not simply as a failed application of a “good idea,” but as inherently paradoxical in its trust in rulership, a disposition that in Rancière’s terms could be called archipolitical.
Danton’s Death relates a brief but important episode from the revolution’s Terror phase: the arrest, public trial, and execution of French revolutionary Georges Danton under the rule of the Committee of Public Safety, a committee Danton had initially chaired. Although Büchner relied heavily on historical sources, Danton is portrayed in the final days of his life – contrary to these sources – as a doubtful and decadent moderate while Robespierre, his antagonist, appears as the cold and ascetic demagogue whose obsession is his own virtue, a lustful excess that plays out openly in his elaborate self-stylizations and speeches. Among the play’s many fascinating scenes, two stand out, both night scenes at a window. In the first, Robespierre is shown by himself after a heated conversation with Danton, who demands a halt to the killings and accuses Robespierre of hypocrisy. Talking to himself, Robespierre fiercely tries to justify his position at first but then admits, “Why can’t I be rid of that thought? He keeps pointing a bloody finger at the same place; no matter how much wadding I put round it the blood still seeps through. Some part of me, I don’t know which, contradicts the rest” (I,6, Büchner 2008, p. 23). In a later parallel night scene at a window, Danton is shown with his wife Julie, who rushes to his side when she hears him groan the word “September.” When Julie suggests that he was dreaming, Danton replies:
Dreaming? Yes, I was dreaming, but there was something else. […] I was riding the earth like a wild horse; it was careering breathlessly along and I, with gigantic limbs, clung to its mane and flanks. My head was thrown back and my hair streamed out into the void; thus it dragged me along. Then I screamed out in terror and woke up. I ran to the window – and then I heard it, Julie. – What does the word want? And among all possible words, why that one? What concern is it of mine? Why does it hold out its bloody hands to me? I never hurt it. Help me, Julie, my brain is numb. Wasn’t it in September, Julie? (II,5, Büchner 2008, p. 37)
The reference here is to the September Massacres of 1792, the large-scale murder of prisoners accused of being loyalists, at a time when Danton was Minister of Justice. Although Danton’s exact role in the massacres is unclear, Büchner portrays him as accepting personal responsibility and suffering the pangs of conscience. Both scenes discuss personal responsibility for involvement in institutional violence, a responsibility that is first rejected and then, in these most private situations, admitted. In a sense, the private sphere in these instances becomes the most political, if by political we mean an unsettling of the common-sensical and the counting of those whose “bare lives” seemed expendable in the pursuit of an ostensibly justified violent struggle, whether for equality or the survival of the revolutionary republic.
It is interesting that both scenes show the two dominating revolutionary characters of the play, despite their differences, in parallel situations, both confronted with an uncontrollable “something” they can only describe with images of violence. More than half a century before Freud, this “something” in Danton’s Death is markedly the German word “es.” And what are we to make of the windows at night, when a window-pane with some light in the back can darkly mirror the self? Deconstructing the various meanings and functions of windows in architecture, film, and other arts, Thomas Keenan grapples with the notion of a window as a threshold between the public and the private. Both the window in relation to a subject’s public or private persona and the window’s capacity to function as a membrane speak to the questions at stake in Büchner’s play:
The window implies a theory of the human subject as a theory of politics, and the subject’s variable status as public or private individual is defined by its position relative to this window. Behind it, in the privacy of home or office, the subject observes that public framed for it by the window’s rectangle, looks out and understands prior to passing across the line it marks – the window is this possibility of permeability – into the public. Behind it, the individual is a knowing – that is, seeing, theorizing – subject. In front of it, on the street for instance, the subject assumes public rights and responsibilities, appears, acts, intervenes in the sphere it shares with other subjects. (Keenan 1993, p. 132)
At first glance, Büchner’s scenes may appear removed from today’s human rights questions. Unlike the main characters in most of what is considered human rights literature today, Büchner’s characters are not victims of systemic violence, genocide, discrimination, or military occupation. And yet, whether political actors like Robespierre, who might under other circumstances speak of the rationales of lesser evil or collateral damage, or those who feel guilt for complicity in exploitation or silence in the face of human rights violations, Büchner’s characters show in dramatic fashion not only the tensions and contradictions between a rights-inflected rhetoric and their politics, but also imagine – and, through this imaginative act, dissect – the subjective economies of power that usually remain invisible in abstract political discourse and concealed in historical research. Danton’s Death, as a play, is in itself a window that subjects the observer or reader to questions about her or his own views on rights and violence or the struggle between radical freedom and equality.
Despite Büchner’s admiration for the revolution, to which his own revolutionary activities in Hesse attest, he finds himself compelled to show the revolutionaries “as they were: bloody, messy, aggressive, and cynical,” as he writes in a letter to his parents dated May 5, 1835 (Büchner 1993, p. 199). Yet he also makes clear that his drama is no lesson in ethics, but rather the virtual creation of a (past) world that has no particular purpose. Commenting on Danton’s Death again in a letter to his parents from July 28, 1835, and defending his play against accusations of immoral language, he explains: “The writer is no preacher of morality, he invents and creates characters, he makes past ages live again, and people can then learn just as well from that as from the study of history and from their observation of what happens around them in real life” (Büchner 1993, p. 202). According to Büchner, then, the virtual reality comes to life precisely in the audience’s (or readers’) engagement with the artwork. In other words, Büchner throws the separation of art from history or “real life” radically into question. The creative and transformative power of art lies in its potential to stage a dissensus, but this dissensus is not a command or a moral judgment. Rather, dissensus occurs in the “undoing” of a consensus that would treat an artwork as an object separate from any engagement in the changing political sphere and instead locked in the immediate cultural-historical context of its production.
In a poignant formulation, Theodor Adorno addresses this question in his Aesthetic Theory: “It is from within, in the movement of the immanent form of artworks and the dynamic of their relation to the concept of art, that it ultimately becomes manifest how much art – in spite of, and because of, its monadological essence – is an element in the movement of spirit and social reality.” The artwork is the point where the “movement of spirit” and the “movement of social reality” meet, and it is in this meeting that the relevance of literature for human rights lies. An artwork can do all sorts of things, many of which are contradictory: for example, it can evoke, reinforce, or disseminate hope and indignation – or it can do the opposite. Unlike the law and other social institutions, it is in principle an-archic in its autonomy, but this autonomy does not mean it is separate from the political. To the contrary, its dissensual activity consists in presenting the spectator or reader with the possibility of continuously crossing the divide between its virtual world and social reality (Adorno 1997, p. 194).
Peter Weiss: Marat/Sade
A play that provokes dissensus, in many ways akin to Danton’s Death, is Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, or, in its full title, 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.111 Like Bertolt Brecht’s “epic” or “dialectical theater,” Weiss’s play minimizes plot development on the stage in favor of engaging the audience in social critique: commentary is part of the performance, and irritating moments prevent the audience from identifying with the characters on stage or being drawn into the illusion of drama. The long title of this play, written in 1963/64, already provides a synopsis of its plot. With explicit reference to Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting La mort de Marat, the play-within-the-play, the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, is a kind of tableau vivant, showing Marat in his bathtub immediately before and during his murder. Action on the stage consists mostly of speeches, dialogues, and declamations, but also occasional physical violence among the patient-actors, the playwright and patient-director Marquis de Sade, and the director of the asylum, Coulmier. There are three distinct and yet permeable timeframes in this play: first, portrayed by de Sade’s play, the historical murder of Marat in the context of the French Revolution in 1793, second, the primary timeframe of Marat/Sade with the performance of the play by the asylum’s inmates under the direction of de Sade in the year 1808, and third, the performance of Weiss’s play wherever and whenever it may be staged.
The audience watching the play in the present becomes part of the play; audience members are addressed by the asylum’s director directly as though they were the audience of 1808, for example when Coulmier explains his rationale in permitting the production to take place: “We’re modern enlightened and we don’t agree / with locking up patients We prefer therapy / through education and especially art / so that our hospital may play its part / faithfully following according to our lights / the Declaration of Human Rights” (Weiss 1965, p. 8). Despite this “enlightened” stance, it soon becomes clear that Coulmier tries to silence any voice that doubts social progress or could offend the donors on whose financial support the clinic depends. In a scene titled “Death’s Triumph,” Marat justifies the bloody revolution while some actors enact a beheading, then play ball with the head. Coulmier intervenes: “Monsieur de Sade / we can’t allow this / you really cannot call this education / It isn’t making my patients any better …” Anticipating Coulmier’s intervention, de Sade has the Herald, one of the characters, reply: “We only show these people massacred / because this indisputably occurred / Please calmly watch these barbarous displays / which could not happen nowadays” (Weiss 1965, p. 27).
The bitter irony of the Herald’s remark must be acutely palpable to anyone watching the play since it premiered in 1964. With the 20th-century and contemporary genocides and wars in mind, perhaps the most chilling point in the play is when a patient addresses the clinical director face to face:
A mad animal / Man’s a mad animal / I’m a thousand years old and in my time / I’ve helped commit a million murders / The earth is spread / The earth is spread thick / with squashed human guts / We few survivors / We few survivors / walk over a quaking bog of corpses / always under our feet / every step we take / rotted bones ashes matted hair / under our feet / broken teeth skulls split open / A mad animal / I’m a mad animal / Prisons don’t help / Chains don’t help / I escape / through all the walls / through all the shit and the splintered bones / You’ll see it all one day / I’m not through yet / I have plans. (Weiss 1965, p. 37)
In one of the anachronistic conversations between Marat and de Sade, Marat accuses de Sade of lacking compassion, to which de Sade replies: “Compassion / Now Marat you are talking like an aristocrat / Compassion is the property of the privileged classes … No Marat / no small emotions please / Your feelings were never petty.” In response, Marat, the fierce revolutionary, justifies his actions with what we might call a humanitarian stance: “I don’t watch unmoved I intervene / and say that this and this are wrong / and I work to alter them and improve them.” But then his proclamation trails off: “The important thing / is to pull yourself up by your own hair / to turn yourself inside out / and see the whole world with fresh eyes” (Weiss 1965, p. 31). Like Büchner’s revolutionaries, Marat eventually reaches a point of self-doubt shortly before his murder: “Why is everything so confused now / Everything I wrote or spoke / was considered and true / each argument was sound / And now / doubt / Why does everything sound false?”
When at the end the asylum director inquires about the meaning of the play, de Sade gives an answer that appears to sum up not only the play-within-the-play but also, self-reflexively, Weiss’s drama: “Our play’s chief aim has been – to take to bits / great propositions and their opposites, / see how they work, then let them fight it out / The point? Some light on our eternal doubt / I have twisted and turned them every way / and find no ending to our play … So for me the last word cannot ever be spoken / I am left with a question that’s always open” (Weiss 1965, p. 110)
Yet while de Sade’s comment and a brief reply by the clinic director asking the audience to “close the history books” end the battle of words and ideas, the play itself does not end with words, and in this final way once again brings out the shadows of the Enlightenment as it turns from the utopian word to the physical and corporeal. The play ends with the asylum’s patients singing and dancing themselves into trance to rhythmic shouts of “Charenton Charenton / Napoleon Napoleon / Nation Nation / Revolution Revolution / Copulation Copulation,” prompting Coulmier, who just prior to this incident had declared in a messianic vision “that mankind soon will cease / to fear the storms of war,” to incite his armed male nurses to “extreme violence” (Weiss 1965, p. 112). This incitement to violence comes from the same asylum director who welcomes the audience, in his introductory remarks, with a reference to the “Declaration of Human Rights” – notably a term that is closer to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights than the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
In his study on the aesthetics of violence in the 20th century, Robert Buch reports that Peter Weiss initially considered letting the play end with an attack on the audience (Buch 2010, p. 92). Such a violent breaking down of the fourth wall would certainly have been fitting in the context of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Theatre of Cruelty” season, in which the English-language version of the play premiered in 1964. It could have enacted in a visceral way a dissensual rejection of art as mere entertainment and illusion. It could also have driven home in a physical way not only the inherent violence of institutions as a reaction to deviation, but also the violence of the social order as an “order of rule” itself. Yet even without the attack on the audience, the dissensus enacted in the play belies the asylum director’s introductory remarks that history, in this case the French Revolution, is re-enacted before the audience “for your delectation and for our patients’ rehabilitation” (Weiss 1965, p. 8).
The confrontation between de Sade and Marat, which Weiss describes in his notes on the play as “a conflict, carried to the extreme, between individualism and the idea of a political and social revolution,” resulted in a heated debate when the play was first performed in 1964 and 1965 (“Anmerkungen zum geschichtlichen Hintergrund” 1967, p. 8). It premiered in West Berlin in April 1964 and less than a year later, in February 1965, was put on the stage in the East German town of Rostock. Weiss saw both productions, in addition to the one Peter Brook directed in London in August 1964. After witnessing the performance in Rostock, in which Marat – claimed in the GDR as a precursor of socialism – clearly dominates in the confrontation with de Sade, Weiss publically took sides. In an interview he declared that he saw “the principle of Marat as the right and superior one. A production of my piece which does not in the end show Marat as the moral victor is misguided” (“Gespräch mit Peter Weiss, Frühjahr 1965” 1967, p. 101). Comparing the three interpretations of his play, he described the Berlin performance as primarily interested in the “beauty of form and appearance,” while the one in London brought out the cruelty of the historical events. The performance in Rostock, however, Weiss called an “analytical performance, in which the political message of the piece is in the foreground” (“Gespräch mit Peter Weiss, Frühjahr 1965” 1967, p. 101).112
Eventually, Weiss relativized this one-sided interpretation again and explained that he could accept the “black-and-white picture” of the performance in Rostock as an “alternative to the numerous western performances in which Sade was depicted as superior and Marat as insane and errant” (“Peter Weiss über die Inszenierung” 1967, p. 113). Perhaps it should not surprise that the controversy Weiss sparked, and in which he engaged with seemingly contradictory statements, mirrors the confrontation between his characters de Sade and Marat: as a politically engaged writer in a “divided world,” Weiss accuses the West of fraudulently claiming to represent “humanity and democracy,” yet he also rejects the East’s imperiousness in demanding a clear political allegiance (“10 Arbeitspunkte” 1967, p. 117). In many ways akin to Büchner, Weiss declares on the one hand that “art must have the power to change the life, or else it has missed its mark,” while simultaneously admitting to approaching the act of writing without a preconceived stance: “I write to find out where I stand, and that’s why I must always bring in all my doubts” (“Gespräch mit Peter Weiss, 1965” 1967, p. 98f.)
Conclusion
What then is the place of literature, broadly conceived, in relation to today’s human rights debates? Beyond the hope that literary texts can generate empathy and have an educational function, as perhaps most famously argued by Richard Rorty and Lynn Hunt, literary texts also have the potential to provoke dissensus and disrupt archipolitical practices of exclusion, whether the exclusion of the “un-counted” or the exclusion of violence in orders of “rule.” We live in an era in which human rights have been described as the “last utopia” (Moyn 2007, p. 10), the “central principle of order” (Opitz 2002, p. 11), or “the doxa of our time,” in the sense that they “define the space of the conceivable and utterable” (Hoffmann 2011, p. 1). At the same time, and despite the growth of international treaties, institutions, and organizations whose aim is the protection of human rights, Arendt’s denouncement of human rights as mere deception has not lost its power, considering for example the large parts of the globe’s population whose lives remain largely invisible and whose deaths do not appear to count. In addition to drawing attention to their precarious condition, literary texts can question the premises that underlie the archipolitical institutionalism that decides who counts, and who rules.
Literary texts are neither philosophical treatises nor political programs that try to answer the big questions and provide solutions. Rancière speaks about dissensus as a dispute “about the frame within which we see something as given,” suggesting that it involves questioning the common use and applicability of the claims that are fundamental to human rights, freedom and equality. In this sense, Danton’s Death and Marat/Sade can be said to enact dissensus by creating specific characters in specific scenarios from which, as Büchner says, “people can then learn just as well […] as from the study of history and from their observation of what happens around them in real life” (Büchner 1993, p. 202). Both Danton’s Death and Marat/Sade show the messiness of the struggle over ideas and the violence that may – or, perhaps, must inevitably – accompany their institutional implementation. Literature certainly will not provide us with a path to social or political isonomy, but if we engage with plays like Danton’s Death and Marat/ Sade as facilitators of thinking, they can help us recognize the complex economy of power, the violence, and the threats that lurk within the beliefs we so readily accept.
Bibliography
“10 Arbeitspunkte eines Autors in der geteilten Welt.” (1967). In: Karlheinz Braun (Ed.): Materialien zu Peter Weiss’ ‘Marat/Sade’. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 114–119.
Adorno, Theodor (1997): Aesthetic Theory. London: Bloomsbury.
“Anmerkungen zum geschichtlichen Hintergrund unseres Stückes.” (1967). In: Karlheinz Braun (Ed.): Materialien zu Peter Weiss’ ‘Marat/Sade’. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 7–11.
Arendt, Hannah (1966): The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.
Arendt, Hannah (1978): “We Refugees.” In: Hannah Arendt: The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. Ed. by Ron H. Feldman. New York: Grove Press, pp. 55–66.
Arendt, Hannah (2006): On Revolution. New York: Penguin.
Balibar, Étienne (2007): “(De)Constructing the Human as Human Institution: A Reflection on the Coherence of Hannah Arendt’s Practical Philosophy.” In: Social Research 74.3, pp. 727–738.
Beggs, Anne (2013): “Revisiting Marat/Sade: Philosophy in the Asylum, Asylum in the Theatre.” In: Modern Drama 56:1, pp. 60–79.
Buch, Robert (2010): The Pathos of the Real: On the Aesthetics of Violence in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Büchner, Georg (1993): Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings. Trans. by John Reddick. London: Penguin.
Büchner, Georg (2008): Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck. Trans. by Victor Price. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789)” (1990). In: Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (Eds.): The Human Rights Reader. New York: Meridian.
“Gespräch mit Peter Weiss, 1965.” (1967). In: Karlheinz Braun (Ed.): Materialien zu Peter Weiss’ ‘Marat/Sade’. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 96–100.
“Gespräch mit Peter Weiss, Frühjahr 1965.” (1967). In: Karlheinz Braun (Ed.): Materialien zu Peter Weiss’ ‘Marat/Sade’. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 101–102.
Gouges, Olympe de (1979): “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman.” In: Darline Gay Levy et al. (Eds.): Women in Revolutionary Paris 1798–1795. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 87–96.
Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig (2011): “Genealogies of Human Rights.” In: Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hunt, Lynn (2007). Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W. W. Norton.
Keenan, Thomas (1993): “Windows: of vulnerability.” In: The Phantom of the Public Sphere. Bruce Robbins (Ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 121–141.
Moyn, Samuel (2010). The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
Nickel, James (2007). Making Sense of Human Rights. Malden: Blackwell.
Opitz, Peter J. (2002). Menschenrechte und internationaler Menschenrechtsschutz im 20. Jahrhundert: Geschichte und Dokumente. München: Fink.
“Peter Weiss über die Inszenierung das ‘Marat/Sade’” (1967). In: Karlheinz Braun (Ed.): Materialien zu Peter Weiss’ ‘Marat/Sade’. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 111–114.
“Protokolle der Deutschen Bundesversammlung vom Jahre 1842, 23. Sitzung, 25. August 1842, Beilage 6 zu § 254; Frankfurt a. M. Bericht vom 31. Januar 1842” (2013). In: Georg Büchner: Sämtliche Werke und Schriften. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Marburger Ausgabe). Vol. II.2. Burghard Dedner (Ed.). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell schaft, pp. 328–332.
Rancière, Jacques (2004): “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” In: The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3, pp. 297–310.
Rorty, Richard (1994): “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” In: Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (Eds): On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993. New York: Basic Books, pp. 111–134.
Schaap, Andrew (2011): “Enacting the right to have rights: Jacques Rancière’s critique of Hannah Arendt.” European Journal of Political Theory 10.1, pp. 22–45.
Weiss, Peter (1965): 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. Translated by Geoffrey Skelton, verse adaptation by Adrian Mitchell. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing.