Abstract
In this essay, I make a bid for the incorporation of the Derridian supplement into aesthetic discourses as a means of understanding and evaluating live performance. I call this move “supplemental aesthetics,” which, in the end, expands the vocabulary of absence and presence. I contend that a method of supplemental aesthetics adapts Derridian vocabulary to account for the intertextual and multisensory experience of live performance, asking practitioners and scholars to account for both the present and absent aspects of staged production. Supplemental aesthetics encourages a dialectic understanding of aesthetics: we make meaning by the simultaneous experience of reading what is present and what is absent on stage.
Recommended Citation
Mapes, Meggie
(2014)
"Supplemental Aesthetics: Techniques in Live Performance,"
Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research: Vol. 13, Article 7.
Available at:
https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/kaleidoscope/vol13/iss1/7