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This chapter explores the theme of general economy which is evident in many of Lyotard’s diverse writings, and relates it to wider contexts – such as ecology and organology –in which it is operative. Economic terms inspired by Freud’s libidinal economy and related philosophical notions have been influential in economics, environmental ecology, and Systems Theory. Lyotard proposed a Nietzschean reading of the Freudian drives which defies convention by placing a positive value on the disharmonious, deregulating function. In various essays he examined ecology, economy, and Systems Theory explicitly, revaluing the way economic terms are typically understood. The chapter charts the links between these themes in Lyotard’s thought, and develops them especially for a critical comparison with Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of ‘general organology.’

Chapter 2 investigates in some depth Bernard Stiegler’s notion of “tertiary memory” and its implications for the industrial production of temporal objects, such as films and music. Two case studies explore Stiegler’s assertion that cinema and life converge in the temporality of consciousness, whereby the remembrance of past events—involving a process of montage akin to post-production in creating movies—is rendered as a temporal object with the help of music. The first example is Omar Naïm’s The Final Cut (2004), a sci-fi drama and critique of commercial memory that revolves around a brain implant capable of recording every sensory impression in a person’s life. After a person’s death, the complete footage is reviewed by a cutter who eliminates unsavory episodes using music to suture uplifting moments into an uplifting “rememory” video of for friends and family. The second example from Federico Fellini’s semi-documentary Intervista (1987) in which Anita Ekberg and Marcello Marcello Mastroianni watch their younger selves in clips from La dolce vita (1960). Amid the continuous stream of interlocking music from both films, the actors reliving the past in the present amplifies their experience of a paradoxical “future anterior” (Roland Barthes) which both defies and defers to death.

This chapter shows how French thinkers mobilize the reject in their engagements with the concepts of friendship, love, and community, so as to enable other forms of relations to inflect existing understanding and practices of those concepts. It begins with Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié, eliciting the reject in the “friend” who renounces all expectations of the other to respond, leaving the other free in his or her movements and desires. This reject allows Derrida to go beyond a narcissistic friendship that predicates itself on the number of friends and on a similitude between the friend and oneself. That friendship is akin to contemporary network-centric sociality, and this chapter proposes that it is with Derrida’s “friend”-reject that one can posit a critique of the latter. Derrida, though, does not go far enough in his “deconstruction” of conventional friendship. The chapter then turns to Clément’s radical syncopic lover, who harbors no hope of any return to an amorous relation. The radical rejection of friendship and the turn to a nonreciprocal love can also be found in Deleuze, who also, with Guattari in Mille plateaux, tear down any idea of community as a structured organization or insular totality.

This chapter explores the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 and beyond, in a discussion of the relationship between the spectator and the ‘other’. Drawing on two theatrical case studies - Vanishing Point’s (2016) The Destroyed Room and Zinnie Harris’ (2015) How to Hold Your Breath, I suggest ways in which live performance can respond to the erasure of humanity that is often practiced upon the refugee in the circulation of images. One chief strategy is through storytelling, an art-form that relies upon personal interaction and privileges experience over information. This chapter also applies Bernard Stiegler’s theory of ‘spiritual misery’ to performance analysis, and concludes with a discussion of the dangers of building a visual economy on the destruction of the face of the other.

Chapter four appraises both the destruction of the exterior and the ‘empty centre’ that I theorize as hallmarks of emergencies, proposing a survey of some recent theatrical texts in which these ideas have been tackled. The intention here is to illustrate some ways in which theatre, with its partialities, contingencies and failures, can offer spaces of potential identification or resistance to this process. I begin with the concept of a ‘rigged game’. This idea, which underpins Forced Entertainment’s Real Magic, Ontroerend Goed’s £¥€$ (LIES) 2 Magpies’ Last Resort and Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical (all 2017), offers a way of conceptualizing through performance the restrictive limits imposed by emergency protocol. Addressing each in turn, I explore the ways in which they create theatrical languages to challenge the orthodoxies latent within emergencies and, importantly, destabilize the notion that ‘there is no other choice’. My second cluster of productions are Kieran Hurley’s Heads Up (2016), Andy Duffy’s Crash (2015) and Mark Thomas’ The Red Shed (2016), which are shows that borrow conventions from storytelling and dramatize the imperative of retaining a sense of historical context to the present moment, and the consequences of what can happen if this relationship is overwritten.

This chapter bases its discussion on Bernard Stiegler’s analysis in Technics and Time (1998). He argues that every technique externalized in material objects simultaneously exteriorizes memory. Every object produced or used by a technique both houses and relays the memory of the living actions and gestures which produced or used it. Not every technique is a mnemotechnique like writing or mechanical recording; but every technique involves a process of memory insofar as it passes via object mediation. Stiegler calls this process of exteriorizing memory a form of “tertiary retention,” invoking the vocabulary used by Husserl in The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1964).