Saturday, November 12, 2011

Theater of Cruelty


"I am more interested in theater as metaphor than as medium. All of the arts should aspire to the qualities of theater: its capacity to simultaneously transfix the imagination and expose the apparatus of representation; the mixture of intimidation and seduction by which it induces in the spectator a visceral feeling of intensity, of the reality of their physical co-presence with real bodies and real objects in a real space in real time; the threatening nature of this corporeality; the simmering sense of potential possessed by the living act."

To which the young clerk said, "But Justice Scalia, how do you reconcile such...
decadent aesthetics with the textual literalism of your jurisprudential philosophy?"

To which the Justice replied, "Open your mouth, boy, and I shall show you."

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