He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Need/Emergency: Political Theater in Exigent Times, with the following results:
Serendipitously, page 99 opens on a discussion of the famous – or infamous – chapter “The Social Question” in Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963), which is central to the argument of my book. Arendt claims that the liberatory promise of French Revolution was undone when “the poor, driven by the need of their bodies burst on to the scene.” For Arendt, need and politics are incompatible. When need in the form of mass poverty appears on the political scene, “freedom is sacrificed to necessity.”Learn more about Need/Emergency at the Stanford University Press website.
I take up Arendt’s claim, not on theoretical or political grounds, but rather theatrical ones: I am interested in her dramatic conception of politics, the staging of “the scene,” and the ways in which, in her own account, “need” unsettles it. Arendt acknowledges the force of need—it “drives” bodies that then “burst” into view. But at the same time – in a gesture that has perplexed many of her readers – Arendt dismisses the political relevance of need. This is because she identifies its social manifestation with the intimate bodily experience. Arendt writes: “The most powerful necessity of which we are aware in self-introspection, is the life process which permeates our bodies and keeps them in a constant state of a change whose movements are automatic, independent of our own activities, and irresistible—i.e., of an overwhelming urgency.” Poverty, she argues, is the experience of subjection to this urgent “life process,” which she describes as “the absolute dictate” of the body. For Arendt, when the compulsions of bodily need enter the political scene, politics succumbs to the same necessity.
I see this differently. Need/Emergency shows how the appearance of need in modernity transforms the political theater. This is, as I argue in the remainder of the chapter, what Georg Büchner does in Danton’s Death (1835) and Woyzeck (1837). Rather than modelling politics on the drama of speaking actors, Büchner’s “theater of exigency” presents figures in need – from sex workers to single mothers to exploited soldiers – who do not count as recognized political actors and so turn to other and ambiguous modes of corporeal expression to agitate politically.
Does page 99 give a good impression of the book as a whole?
The Page 99 Test provides a surprisingly good entry into my book. It introduces my disagreement with Hannah Arendt which is political theatrical in the first instance. In The Human Condition, Arendt says that theater is “the political art par excellence.” But she means a very particular kind of theater: drama, understood as the imitation of action among actors. Need/Emergency asks: What would be the consequence for Arendt’s political thought had she actually gone to the theater? And so I go to the theater with Arendt and other political thinkers to see how works of theater, from the French Revolution to the present day, disrupt the assumptions that inform their theoretical views on the political scene. This is what I mean by “political theater.” Our political imaginary, theory, and institutions rely on the metaphors, devices, conceits, and machinery of the theater. Works of theater that challenge these conventions in response to social upheavals are illuminating therefore for understanding politics.
Page 99 also happens to reference a key term in my book, the German word Not, which comes up in Arendt’s own translation of On Revolution. The German word she uses to translate “needs” is Not. But Not means not only dire need, but also emergency. I took this ambiguity for the title of the book. I argue – and one only need think back to the Covid-19 pandemic or indeed to the wildfires and heatwaves of this summer – that modern politics is preoccupied with the critical temporality of emergency, which obscures chronic social, infrastructural, and ecological dimensions of need. Our current politics of emergency measures will continue to be stopgap, presentist, parochial, and anthropocentric until this ambiguity is acknowledged.
This requires a fundamental change in the prevailing conception of politics. For this, I argue, one can look to the theater, which has long experimented with bringing about such change. Along with Büchner’s theater of exigency, I consider Heinrich von Kleist’s theater of sovereignty and the plague, Bertolt Brecht’s theater of unrestrained consumption in the Great Acceleration, Friedrich Hölderlin’s tragedy of the Anthropocene, and Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek’s infrastructural theater. Each addresses an exigent and habitually overlooked dimension of our current political theater – and in so doing brings into focus the need for politics in the first place.
--Marshal Zeringue
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