Who’s watching? Me! – Theatrality, the Žižekian Subject and Spectatorship

This chapter outlines a Žižekian analysis of theatre performance that goes be-yond disclosing the ideological workings of the symbolic and imaginary orders at the level of plots, characters, and representation. Linking Žižek’s revision of Hegelian (negative) subjectivity with approaches from German ‘theatrality stud-ies’, I instead focus on the (formal) level of theatral presentation. Discussing Flemish director Guy Cassiers’s intermedial production of Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities (2009-12), I argue that the dynamic force of ‘thea’ cre-ates a reflexive experiential loop of ‘watching ourselves watching’. This induces a parallax split, which dramatizes the negative dialectic force of Hegelian-Žižekian subjectivity.