Po-ethics of war in the dramatics works of Matei Vişniec, Laurent Gaudé and Wajdi Mouawad: The theatre as a battlefield

Abstract

To raise the question of war is to raise the question of narrative. What is offered here is a reflection on the “narration” of war(s) in the dramatics works of Matei Vişniec, Laurent Gaudé and Wajdi Mouawad, in an attempt to highlight the characteristics and singularities of anti-heroic “narratives” that develop from a double perspective, from an oscillatory movement between actualisation and “essentialization”, history and myth, fragmentation and linkage, synchrony and diachrony, plurality and unity. The texts seem to elaborate a sort of po-ethics of war that subsumes oppositions and paradoxes in an effort to apprehend History in its catastrophic dimension, privileging the sense of the human and affirming the superiority of the word.