FRANKENSTEIN

THE NEW PANDORA:
DESIRE, MONSTER, THEATRE

Boyan Manchev

Who is the new Pandora talking about?

What does the new Pandora want?

When panic grips you in the noon of life’s journey, don’t ask what Pandora wants: Pandora wants you.

Inhuman Theatre

Frankenstein is a creature of summer, a creature of the frenzy of life.

The Sahara of Humans, that’s you, Frankenstein, i.e., not their devastation, but their enormity, their frenzy. Humans’ inhumanity does not precede them, nor does it come after them. It surpasses them –in every organ, in every cell.

What would a theatre be without humans? A scene of the inhuman? Theatre has its origins in this very question, which opened up a space for the monster called human to become itself, to unfold the hell of its forms.

Theatre of Desire

Inhuman theatre is a theatre of boundless desire – the desire that exceeds the human being. In boundless desire there is no hope for an exit, for an exodus. Desire is a Monster.

A theatre of desire, not a theatre of frustrated desire. End of the family romance. The sub-ject as pro-ject: pro-metheus, pan-dora, methe-or.

We begin anew, there where desire has no limits – it is this space that theatre ravishes, the scene opened in it becomes obscene, an obscene placenta in which grow new organs for experimenting the human.

Mary Shelley’s mistake was that she mixed the frenetic excess of desire with the workings of conflict. Having created a monster, she used the toolkit of banal conflict to lock it in the cage of Enlightenment didactic rhetoric. But the images of the inhuman haunted her and broke through the bars: ice, a frozen world, darkness, limit.

The desire to create a new body is driven by the unlimited economy of desire. A theatre of desire is a theatre without conflict. A theatre without conflict is a theatre of splitting, a theatre of rupture. How is theatre possible without conflict? How is desire possible without conflict?

Frankenstein’s logic is Pygmalionian. Frankenstein created his creature as his double, as his extension. An auto-erotic act triggered not so much by narcissism as by the impossibility of restraining one’sdesire within oneself, the inevitable outlet of desire that “gifts” an object to itself in an attempt to return to itself, i.e., to confront the real; but this object is always elusive. The only antagonist of desire is its impossible object.

Frankenstein’s tragedy is a tragedy of desire, the double bind it is caught in: on the one hand, the impossibility of not creating the paradoxical object of desire, on the other the impossibility of possessing this object. On the one hand, the impossibility of retaining the object, of exceeding the body; on the other hand, the impossibility of appropriating the object. In order to attain the object, one must eliminate desire as a mediator, but it is desire that produces the object. Hence desire must burn itself out, hide itself as a mediator so that the object can be absolutely attained, but then it is no longer an object, it is no longer other, it is the same.

That is why the splitting in two, the cutting axis of the limit, is the divided centre of this theatre. Subject and object appear as doubles – Frank and Stein, Pan and Dora – doubles yearning to fill all their holes. But the more holes desire opens up in its object, the more monstrous the object’s body becomes; the more perfect, complete and completed it becomes, the greater the impossibility of seducing it; it cannot be mastered because the desire that creates a monstrous object, that creates a new body, cannot satisfy that body. That body, as the body of Mary Shelley’s Monster shows, defieslaw and order because it is a body of desire that exceeds this law and this order: it strives towards the boundary, towards the limit. It is a body at the limit.

If the logic of conflict is a logic of openness, the logic of desire is a logic without an exit, without an opening at the end, without catharsis. There is no possibility of a final turn, no possibility of returning to oneself: an endless progression which, being endless, is absolute closedness.

That is why the monster will continue its journey towards the limit of the end.

A monster is what carries the limit. It will not reach itself, therefore the limit will always be pushed further away. The movement towards the pole, towards the polar cap frozen in ice, the movement of the pursuit of the monster, is analogous to the endless movement of a perversion that seeks ever-greater sensual pleasure, but the more complex its dispositive is, the more complex the technique it invents is, the more the possibility of an end, of attainment of the object, of a climax, is pushed further away; any logic of orgasm, of catharsis and sublimation, of purification or elevation, is pushed away. There is no dialectic in the logic of desire. Despite or precisely because it is a logic of radical negativity. The work of desire is the incessant work of subverting any possibility of a shore or haven. Bodies driven by desire devise monstrous techniques in which they recreate themselves as unattainable new bodies, exceeding themselves to attain this impossible pushing away.

“‘My work is nearly complete. (…) I shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. (…)’ He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.”

(Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus)

The logic of desire is not a logic of death; Eros and Thanatos no longer play their dramatic game. The logic of desire is a logic of immortality: immortality as closedness, as the impossibility of an exit, as the impossibility of a breakthrough, the breakthrough of death. The frenetic puncturing, the panic of puncturing the body is the panic of the impossibility of collapsing, of crashing down to the bottom, of ever reaching the bottom as the bottom is knocked off: this is an endless fall further and further down, there is no cone, there is no point at which the cone breaks, there is no exit on the other side. When you slide down the hairs on the thighs of the frozen Lucifer, you will find yourself in another hole. Hell is like a black hole, a puncture in another surface.

It doesn’t lead to the grave, it doesn’t lead to the stone. The stone comes out of there all the time. Stones don’t enter, they aren’t the immanence that swallows the wolf and is sewn into its belly, remaining there; they come out all the time. They don’t knock the bottom off, they come out of the bottom, those stones. Desire is the very bottom that springs forth: it is the river of negativity. That is why Mary Shelley was hit by the stone. She wanted to resurrect the dead, to bring the dead back to life, to bring back the child as a cavity. But in reality there is no cavity, there is no dead, desire is a persistent life that constantly propels itself forward, trans-gressing, thrashing about, pro-metheus, in this endless perversion of creation.

If Frankenstein is a tragedy, it is an inverted tragedy. The drama of desire can also be called poetry (or oratorio: not a theatre that recites, but a theatre that chants), because poetry is the excess of language driven by desire, the excess that doesn’t reach the limit, that returns to itself without hitting itself.

That is why the desire-chanting theatre splits: it doesn’t go beyond the limit, but discovers the limit within the limit. It deepens the boundary in-between, the boundary from which desire draws its power.

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause.”

(Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or)