On Repetition and Theatricality: A Dialogue with Samuel Weber’s Thought (Through Kierkegaard, Freud, Lacan and Deleuze)

Through Kierkegaard’s concept of Gjentagelse, I will delineate the concept of productive repetition and show its fundamental connection to theatricality. I will do this in dialogue with Samuel Weber’s reading of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, An Essay in Experimental Psychology, which can be found in his discussion with Terry Smith titled Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the Theatre of the Image. In addition to the above, I will also look at the philosophical distinction between recollecting and repeating, which Weber and Smith touch upon in their discussion, and analyze it in view of the difference between anamnesis and mneme and by comparing Kierkegaard’s and Freud’s understanding of the relationship between recollection and repetition. I will conclude by examining Weber’s thesis about theatre setting the scene of possibility in relation to Kierkegard’s theory of theatre and the notion of coincidence.

Bara Kolenc (1978) is a philosopher, performer and choreographer from Slovenia. She has been working as a freelance artist for the past ten years, mainly as the author of her own projects. She recently defended her PhD thesis The Philosophical Problem of Repetition and the Real in 20th-century Theatre at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, under the mentorship of Prof. Mladen Dolar.

The president of the doctoral committee, Bojana Kunst, Professor of Choreography and Performance at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany, and member of the editorial board of Palgrave Macmillan’s Performance Philosophy book series, wrote the following about Bara Kolenc’s thesis: « Bara Kolenc’s PhD thesis is a very committed and exhaustive study written with precise argumentation and theoretical lucidity. Her thesis opens numerous connections between theatre and philosophy and very meticulously analyses the problem of repetition in contemporary philosophy. »