Travelling through the emotions: staging the erotic

Abstract

This article discusses translation for performance as a humanist endeavour driven by the desire for connection with otherness. Drawing on the ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Georges Bataille and Slavoj Žižek, among others, it describes stage translation in terms of a nostalgia for the absent human, as a mode concerned with restoring lost connectedness, a continuance of being that goes beyond the confines and constraints of the rational. In that sense, it argues that there is something that is common to the promise held out by translation and erotic experience alike. In the final analysis it maybe that what ignites that promise is the contrast to self-possession, the antidote to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals.