The present thesis aims to trace and detect the Agambenian state of exception in various layers of The Crucible. On an adaptational, performative and testimonial level, this thesis argues, thresholds and zones of indeterminacy are...
moreThe present thesis aims to trace and detect the Agambenian state of exception in various layers of The Crucible. On an adaptational, performative and testimonial level, this thesis argues, thresholds and zones of indeterminacy are originated in the play. As law is suspended in the state of emergency, the source text is held in abeyance and rendered inoperative in the act of adaptation. This process is instigated when a zone of indistinction is molded between the source text and its performance on the stage. Focusing on the zones of indeterminacy, the present study treats Yaël Farber’s stage production of The Crucible as a work of adaptation, and not solely a production to be examined based on Arthur Miller’s text. Firstly, the state of exception is traced in the zone of indistinction between the stage and the text in the second chapter. Based on this approach, Farber’s stage production and Miller’s text are analyzed in the context of their divergent points. By examining the source text and the adapted work in the binary of potentiality/actuality, a methodology will emerge that highlights the process of adaptation as a dynamic river running through different historical eras that brings the contingent.
Turning to the gestural and performative aspects of The Crucible, the thesis brings the trope of hysteria in the performance of the play and the body of the actors into focus. Specifically, it is the oscillation between the intentionality of the human and the automatism of the feral that guides the analysis of the hysterical performance of homo sacer and its bare life as a life that is neither human nor animal in Salem, Massachusetts. Against the backdrop of The Crucible, the last chapter of the body meets the act of adaptation that commenced the body of the thesis. This chapter proposes to expose the links between the act of adaptation and the hysterical performance of homo sacer as they are both haunted by the againness inherent in testimony. Here, the repetitive cycles that experience change in the hysterical performance are linked to the act of adaptation as a type of repetition with variation. On that account, this pattern leads to the term hysteriadaptation to explain the againness of the act of adaptation in the light of contingency. The lack of closure in both testimony and the contingency of adaptation are consequently detected in the hysterical performance of homo sacer with a life that is stripped to its biological foundations in The Crucible. In this last chapter of the body of the thesis, the performance of testimony is claimed to be a resistance to the split between the living and speaking being occurring in bare life. Overall, it is the paradigm of the state of exception which finds its spatialization in the camp that drives the thesis forward in its ring-shaped and circular movement as it analyzes the performance of homo sacer and bare life in Miller’s play and Farber’s staged performance.
Keywords: State of Exception, Adaptation, Hysteria, Homo Sacer, Bare Life, Yaël Farber, Giorgio Agamben, Arthur Miller, The Crucible