Body and Event in Howard Barker's Drama : From Catastrophe to Anastrophe in The Castle and Other Plays

This book explores questions of gender, desire, embodiment, and language in Barker's oeuvre. With The Castle as a focal point, the scope extends considerably beyond this play to incorporate analysis and exploration of the Theatre of Catastrophe; questions of gender, subjectivity and desire; God/religion; aesthetics of the self; autonomy-heteronomy; ethics; and the relation between political and libidinal economy, at stake in 20 other plays by Barker (including Rome, The Power of the Dog, The Bite of the Night, Judith, Possibilities, I Saw Myself, Fence in Its Thousandth Year, The Gaoler's Ache for the Nearly Dead, The Brilliance of the Servant, Golgo , among others). CHAPTER ONE: New Cartographies of Catastrophe and the Ethics of the Non-Human: Howard Barker's Aesthetics since 1980s.- CHAPTER TWO: The Castle and Other Plays.- CHAPTER THREE: Relationality, Desire, and Language.- CHAPTER FOUR: Aporias of Religion in Barker: God, Deconstruction and the Re-Writing of the Bible.- CHAPTER FIVE: Disciplinary Apparatus, Paining the Transgressive Bodies and.- CHAPTER SIX: The Moment of Con-tactile Aesthethics.