Beggs_Writing Sample_Modern Drama_Revisiting _Marat_Sade

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Revisiting Marat/Sade: Philosophy in
the Asylum, Asylum in the Theatre
anne beggs
Peter Weiss’s 1963 work, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul
Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the
Direction of the Marquis de Sade (Marat/Sade), became a staple in the west-
ern dramatic canon almost immediately, with translations and interna-
tional productions within one year of its initial publication and critical
analyses by 1965. For the almost fifty years now since its premiere, the work
has been a standard object of study and production in colleges and univer-
sities; according to Dramatic Publishing, the performance rights holder,
there were approximately sixty-two college productions between 2000 and
2010. As trends in literary and performance studies wax and wane, Weiss’s
Marat/Sade has remained a perennial object of fascination, frustration,
investigation, and affection for critics, artists, and students. This being so, it
is not without some trepidation that I embark on yet another assessment of
the work. In this essay, I suggest that one reason why we revisit this play as
a literary, theatrical, and educational staple is its structure of irresolvable
inquiry: Marat/Sade is a hybrid Artaudian-Socratic dialogue, an assertion
that the practice of philosophy is theatrical and that theatre is, itself, the
practice of philosophy.
Scholarship, such as David Krasner and David Saltz’s collection Staging
Philosophy (2006) and Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians (2010),
has been reassessing the intersections of drama, theatre, and philosophy in
interesting ways in recent years. For the present assessment of the drama’s
continuing relevance to performance and class study, I am particularly
indebted to Martin Puchner’s recent interrogation of the Platonic function
of dialogic drama (and, conversely, of the dramatic purpose of Platonic dia-
logue). In The Drama of Ideas, Puchner claims that two Platonic character-
istics of modern drama are its metatheatricality and its celebration of the
“theater of ideas” (73). (One is reminded of Bernard Shaw’s contention, in
the early twentieth century, that the dialogue of ideas as a spectacle in and
of itself was a key feature of the modern drama; discussion was now the
60 Modern Drama, 56:1 (Spring 2013) doi:10.3138/md.2012-0492

climax of dramatic action; see “Technical Novelty.”) The concreteness of
theatrical bodies and their mimesis of human form and thought was what
Plato chiefly objected to in the theatre, and the Platonic dialogue was the
corrective to such misleading shadows. Puchner offers us an alternative
corrective, one that harnesses the dialogic drama as a careful balancing act
between materialism and idealism, “demonstrat[ing] over and over again
how difficult, rare, and fragile a true philosophical exchange really is” (28).
In this reading, relating idea to human interaction is the true aim of philos-
ophy, which is a way of living and a practice that must necessarily navigate
between the groundless ideas of sophistry (and its modern legacy, extreme
relativism) and the positivisms of Hegelian idealism and phenomenology.
In my analysis of Marat/Sade, I argue that one reason why the play has re-
mained so useful is its being based in dialogue, in the potentiality of politics
in the body but also in an idea that is constantly reinvented with bodies.
The play is constructed as a Platonic dialogue between matter and form,
constantly interrupted by (non-Platonic) spectacle. The effecting of politics
through the body is illustrated, then interrupted and discussed.
As I am primarily interested in the continuing relevance of the play in
English-language university courses and theatre programs, I concentrate, in
this analysis, on the English version originally commissioned for Peter
Brook’s landmark 1964 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company
(RSC), translated by Geoffrey Skelton and adapted into verse by Adrian
Mitchell. This production was part of the RSC’s 1964–65 “Theatre of Cru-
elty” season, inspired by Brook’s workshops with the company that ex-
plored the possibilities of a physical, visceral, phenomenological experience
in the theatre. Thus, the English version was crafted with the aim of putting
into dialogue the Artaudian aesthetics of non-verbal affect and a Brechtian
dialectic of reason and human action inherent in Weiss’s drama. The exten-
sive literature on the work has offered valuable insights into what the play
suggests about embodiment and embodied knowledge. Marvin Carlson, for
instance, notes the important locus of the body as receptacle and symptom
of desire that destabilizes the scientific discourse of social and political
development. According to him, in the original English production, Brook’s
focus on the pure physicality of “cruelty” meant that “materiality and pres-
ence [were so strongly] privileged over referentiality and the symbolic that
the production . . . seemed to toy with the possibility of losing referential
control altogether, and becoming pure presence” (14). Weiss’s drama, how-
ever, is a political interrogation of the legacies of Enlightenment rationality,
a verbal dialectic that is set to work within the Artaudian forces of “pure
presence.” The larger discourse of post-Brechtian drama, as Stanton B. Gar-
ner, Jr. has pointed out, is largely characterized by an “almost obsessive
interest in the body as a political unit, its function within the play of politi-
cal forces, and its role within the contest of subjectivity and subjection”
Revisiting Marat/Sade: Philosophy in the Asylum, Asylum in the Theatre
Modern Drama, 56:1 (Spring 2013) 61

(146). The tension between the two discourses – dialectic and pure pres-
ence, the word and the body – results in a direct engagement between the
political and the aesthetic, so that Marat/Sade, David Roberts argues, is “the
paradigmatic work of the post-avant-garde (which can be assimilated in
neither Adorno’s nor Lukács’ aesthetics) in that it poses the central ques-
tion of the function of art in bourgeois society since the French Revolution
and the possibility of the self-transcendence of art” (117). Despite Adorno’s
and Lukács’s efforts to craft an aesthetics of the self-contained work, the
material exchange of drama, both in the theatre and in print, is inevitably
mediated by its formal means of production and receptive environments.
Thus, the original program of the historical avant-garde – to end the segre-
gation of the cognitive, aesthetic, and political spheres – endures in drama’s
messy productivity. This question of the function of art returns us to the
possibility of drama – embodied dialogue – as a method for practising phi-
losophy as an interrogation of the proper way to live. The Platonic dialogue
functions as a non-theatrical drama: character, action, and idea are de-
signed for a personal, engaged audience. The metatheatricality of Weiss’s
Marat/Sade embeds the Platonic drama of de Sade’s work within the theat-
rical spectacle of a modern drama. The spectator/reader of Weiss’s work
engages with the philosophical as (non-Platonic) spectacle, like the works
in the long history of Socrates plays that Puchner provides (Drama 37–71).
With this duality of dialogue and spectacle, Weiss (through his philoso-
pher–protagonist the Marquis de Sade) “interrupts the different dimensions
of drama in order to dislodge the materiality of the theater, turning that
materiality into something much more detached, removed, mediated, and
unstable” (Puchner, Drama 33). The spectacle of Marat/Sade is mediated
through its multiple frames of script, performer, and audience, ultimately
suggesting that the circulation of ideas is best effected through personal ex-
changes.
Thus, in my analysis of Marat/Sade, I focus on the dialogic properties of
the text rather than the specific history of Brook’s production. Weiss was in-
terviewed by Tulane Drama Review editor Paul Gray for the autumn 1966
issue, and when asked about Artaud’s influence on Marat/Sade, he claimed
that
I didn’t think of Artaud when I wrote Marat/Sade, which grew out of its own
material and had to be played a certain way in the atmosphere which the material
created. However, Peter Brook was thinking of Artaud before he produced Marat/
Sade, and he used Artaudian techniques. This is a director’s method, and for a
writer it’s secondary. (111)
Even without the director’s work, the drama opens up new theatrical possi-
bilities for political engagement through its reiteration both of the perpetual
ANNE BEGGS
62 Modern Drama, 56:1 (Spring 2013)

need to re-evaluate material experience through concept and, equally, of
the elusiveness of ideas as they are made manifest in bodies in the world.
The political impetus of a plague-like Artaudian theatre is itself often lost in
the American critical emphasis on Artaudian sensual practice. The original
project of the Theatre of Cruelty lies, not in physical torture, pain, or blood,
but rather in its visceral impact upon the participant. The aesthetic of cru-
elty is, in this regard, the complete opposite of the Verfremdungseffekt,
although both have underlying functions: the application of live perfor-
mance towards social critique.
In fact, in her recent work, Kimberly Jannarone makes a provoking – and
convincing – argument that Artaud, reconsidered in complete context, was
representative of the reactionary thrust of inter-war politics. Despite Anglo-
American practitioners’ desire to enlist Artaud for a liberal revolutionary
project in the 1960s, his primary rhetoric, focused on abjection, reveals a
position of intolerance and absolutist control (Jannarone 13–15). If we
reconsider the original political implications of Artaud’s hypothetical The-
atre of Cruelty, we have a much more complex dialectic of the body’s vul-
nerability to political manipulation, a dialectic that works in tandem,
moreover, with de Sade’s drama of the ethics of aesthetics.
De Sade’s play within a play, taking place in a Napoleonic asylum for the
mentally ill (and socially unacceptable) and Weiss’s encompassing multiple
narratives also resonate with various historical periods. Una Chaudhuri and
Pamela Cooper have both analysed the dynamics of historiography in the
play. Cooper, for instance, suggests that the fractured time frames, charac-
ter, and narrative result in an unheimlich history (111). The history that is
re-enacted before us, “for your delectation and the patients’ rehabilitation”
(4), as the asylum director Monsieur Coulmier puts it, is the drama of the
French Revolution, specifically the death of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat
at the hand of a young, Girondin-sympathizing girl from the northern city
of Caen, Charlotte Corday. Marat, with Robespierre, was one of the key
leaders of the Jacobins, who masterminded the overthrow of the French
monarchy, engineered the rule of the various successive Assemblies and
the National Convention, and finally, was responsible for the despotic rule
of the Committee for Public Safety from 1793 through 1794. Marat was
murdered in the summer of 1793, becoming a martyr for the Jacobin cause,
which disintegrated as a result of its own violence and financial misman-
agement the following year; Robespierre was guillotined in the summer of
1794. By the year 1808, the time of the theatrical presentation in which we
participate through Weiss’s play, France was once more under the rule of a
monarchy, this time of the Emperor Napoleon, whose empire restored a
dictatorship but also encouraged the rise of the bourgeoisie, which had
taken advantage of the opportunities for trade and investment created by
the wars and upheaval of the Revolution. Thus the agon of the play is not

only the conflict between de Sade’s and Marat’s philosophical approaches
to human nature and ethics but also between the flawed political ideals of
the Revolution and the flawed “perfection” of the contemporaneous
moment described by Coulmier. In this essay, I argue for a reading of de
Sade’s philosophical project (as laid out in Weiss’s work) as akin to a
Nietzschean genealogy and suggest that, in addition to the Sadean themes,
de Sade takes up and stages Nietzsche’s dialogic tendencies as a philoso-
pher. Making the historical context for the philosophical–political debate
even more complex is Weiss’s interpolation of a twentieth-century political
Marxist discourse, which de Sade engages in with his debate partner, the
character “Jean-Paul Marat.” As John McKenzie has demonstrated, Marat/
Sade, in one respect, documents Weiss’s attempt to work out his own
stance towards Marxism, and the Skelton/Mitchell version (originally pro-
duced in London in 1964) represents a “‘third standpoint’ – the stance of a
would-be social reformer who can find no satisfactory political means for
effecting social reform” (304).
This leads us to the political contradictions inherent in the drama’s argu-
ments. The three initial productions of the play, in fact – in West Berlin
(1964), London (1964), and Rostock, GDR (1965) – each settled on a differ-
ent lesson. The West Berlin production, directed by Konrad Swinarski, em-
phasized the game-like nature of the debate between Marat and de Sade,
offering a sad, thoughtful de Sade and a suffering, fanatical Marat, accord-
ing to Darko Suvin, in a comparative study of the three productions. The
East German production the following year, however, was markedly differ-
ent in design, characterization, and even text. Director Hanns Anselm Per-
ten and his designers created an asylum of political prisoners and
emphasized the word over physical performances. The Herald and the Four
Singers were no longer clowns but rather rational proponents of political
resistance. Marat was the passionate representative of a Marxist revolution
and a victim of the bourgeois counter-revolution represented by Coulmier
and de Sade himself, a position effected by extensive cuts and revisions to
sections of the play, as Weiss himself admitted in an interview (see McKen-
zie 310). “Marat therefore turned out to be the moral victor, though at the
price of reducing the dialogue to a series of monologues,” Suvin concludes
(408). Weiss was present during the rehearsal process, and by analysing the
extensive interviews he participated in during all three productions,
McKenzie argues that “[t]he progress of the play through its various pro-
ductions, each stressing different aspects of the work, is paralleled by a
marked development in Weiss’s attitudes, political, dramatic, and aes-
thetic” (302). By 1965, Weiss had decided in favour of a firm commitment
to Marxism as is apparent in his multiple interviews with the East German
press. Yet, as an artist, he demonstrated a sensitivity to the different worlds
in which his drama could survive. In an interview with Michael Roloff
ANNE BEGGS

recorded in March 1964, Weiss specifically contemplated the viability of
Marat/Sade in the west:
For a director in a Western society – in which, on the whole, the concept of class
struggle is viewed as no longer having any bearing on reality, and in which, in all
artistic endeavour, the belief flourishes that our problems are insoluble anyway
and that everything is basically absurd and mad – it will be almost natural to let
the madhouse atmosphere in Marat/Sade predominate. (231)
Likewise, Weiss acknowledged, in interviews with East German publications
Neue Kritik and Sinn und Form, that the only way the drama was produci-
ble in the GDR was if Marat became a positive hero of the revolution: “I
know there has been much discussion about the apparent impossibility of
staging the play and about the presence of too many counter-revolutionary
ideas in the figure of Sade,” he said to interviewers Wilhelm Girnus and
Werner Mittenzwei (qtd. in McKenzie 310). While Weiss’s complex invest-
ment in the political and historical stakes of being a writer–artist is not the
focus of this study, it is important to note the powerful range of possibilities
inherent in the political dialogue of the drama. After its early theatrical suc-
cess, Weiss identified the susceptibility of his drama to a purely spectacular
exegesis: “Perhaps one drawback of the play,” he told Roloff, “is that it con-
tains so many theatrical possibilities, which allow a director to give free
reign to his imagination and, coincidentally, to omit discussion of the
ideas” (231). In the analysis that follows, I chart the structure of the play as
philosophical dialogue with the aim of recuperating the ideas as embodied
rather than privileging the bodies as ideas.
DE SADE’S DIALOGUES: SOVEREIGNTY AND POWER
The audience must always remember that de Sade is the source of both ar-
guments: he is, in fact, engaged in a philosophical debate with himself. In
his series of dialogues with his own creation, the character Jean-Paul Marat,
Weiss’s de Sade analyses the human capacity for violence and mass
thought with what can be interpreted as a Nietzschean genealogy of moral-
ity. The historical personage de Sade was, of course, both a dramatist and a
philosopher in his own right, and his Philosophy in the Boudoir, in turn,
“can be seen as the missing link between his conventional dramas and his
perverse novels” (Puchner, Sade 114). That de Sade’s 1795 closet drama,
written as seven “dialogues” that function essentially as French scenes, fol-
lows the education in debauchery of the young noblewoman Eugénie at the
hands of a trio of experienced perverted libertines: Madame de Saint-Ange;
her brother, the Chevalier de Mirval; and the master libertine, Dolmancé.
The dialogues and dramatic action of Eugénie’s sexual and amoral

education are put on hold for the fifth dialogue, a political manifesto en-
titled “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans,”
delivered by the Chevalier. His declamation, a post-revolutionary political–
philosophical treatise presented as a dramatic monologue, argues for free
will as the basis of a democratic, idealist political structure. Philosophy in
the Bedroom shares the exuberant celebration of human drive and desires
of Nietzsche’s later, nineteenth-century philosophy. The two equally dis-
miss religion as morality, share an interest in pagan gods and ancient Greek
culture, and celebrate “natural” human urges rather than cultural moral
codes. Weiss’s stage character de Sade, however, has written for himself a
debate on human action that is influenced obliquely by the cumulative
political and philosophical developments of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, and his counter-engagement with Marat’s Marxist materialism
reveals an argumentative strategy more aligned to that of Nietzsche’s
human will-to-power than to that of the historical de Sade’s belief in an all-
powerful natural law.
The character de Sade’s position is consistent with Nietzsche’s master
morality, where good and bad correspond with power and contemptibility
(Beyond Good and Evil 394). He repeatedly describes his fascination with
the human potential for sensation: pain, cruelty, lust. “Before deciding
what is wrong and what is right / first we must find out what we are / I / do
not know myself . . . What we do is just a shadow of what we want to do,”
de Sade declaims (31), preferring active force over reactive and denigrating
a moral valuation based on reactive forces. In his descriptions of pain in-
flicted upon the body, de Sade wonders at the enormity of this potential,
describing with exquisite detail the self-willed power that human action
can reflect. His wonder turns to nausea, to disgust, however, when violence
is once again harnessed to the slave morality of judgement. Nietzsche’s
genealogy describes the moral values that develop out of reaction to
oppression as follows: “[I]n order to exist, slave morality always first needs
a hostile external world” (Genealogy of Morals 1:10, 472–73). Importantly, a
moral structure that is a reaction to a hostile world does not preclude vio-
lence in the name of the good. On the contrary, it warrants violence against
what it deems “evil,” the opposite of good in the spectrum of slave morality.
Rather than holding the weak in contempt as “bad,” the morality of civiliza-
tion – of religion, of democracy – reactively judges what it deems “evil.” As
he is whipped by the character Charlotte Corday, de Sade explains his dis-
appointment at the reactive judgement that issued in the violence of the
Revolution: the state-sanctioned tortures, the “official sacking” of convents,
the regulated execution: “It was inhuman it was dull /and curiously techno-
cratic” (48, 49). The Marquis vomits at the grotesquery of butchery in the
service of ideals, rhapsodizing instead about the earlier “festival” of the exe-
cution of the aspiring regicide Damiens: “That / was a festival with which /
ANNE BEGGS

today’s festivals can’t compete / Even our inquisition gives us no pleasure /
nowadays” (25). This idea of the festival is recurrent in Nietzsche’s work,
from the early Birth of Tragedy through the later, developed genealogy
and aphorisms. Seen in this light, violence was the purest avenue to plea-
sure for pre-domesticated man. Thus, de Sade’s equating of violence with
pure power is interpreted in Weiss’s play through the lens of Nietzschean-
Dionysian celebration: the masters’ “indifference to and contempt for secu-
rity, body, life, comfort, their hair-raising cheerfulness and profound joy in
all destruction, in all the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty” (Nietzsche,
Genealogy 478).
The historical de Sade also celebrates destruction, but he privileges
Nature as the mistress that controls all human action: “[T]he man who de-
stroys his fellow is to Nature what are the plague and famine, like them sent
by her hand which employs every possible means more speedily to obtain
of destruction this primary matter [for reconstruction], itself absolutely
essential to her works” declares the Chevalier, his bedroom philosopher (de
Sade 331–32). The Chevalier hypothesizes that the perfect Republican is an
extreme, humanist, vital exemplar of Natural law, but from the point of
view of de Sade the dramatic character, the true failure of the Revolution is
the failure of its extreme “festive” acts to awaken a sense of individual
agency, of action on the part of the individual. The violent acts of the Revo-
lutionaries, like those of the vanquished ancien régime, were committed in
the interests of a collective, were unconcerned with the individual capacity
for pain and action, and therefore, turned a passionate impetus into some-
thing mechanical and technocratic, into “the withering of the individual
man / and a slow merging into uniformity / to the death of choice / to self
denial” (Weiss 49). The moral of de Sade’s story, he tells Marat near the
end, is that “these cells of the inner self / are worse than the deepest stone
dungeon / and as long as they are locked / all your revolution remains /
only a prison mutiny / to be put down / by corrupted fellow-prisoners”
(93). The ideals of freedom, equality, and justice are just symptoms of an
imprisoning slave morality; they are the values of the oppressed. At this
point, after the player–patients are seen to get more and more restless in
the course of their dramatic re-enactment, de Sade’s lesson becomes a reit-
eration Nietzsche’s account of civilization: “The ‘redemption’ of the human
race (from ‘the masters,’ that is) is going forward; everything is visibly
becoming Judaized, Christianized, mob-ized . . . The progress of this poison
through the entire body of mankind seems irresistible” (Geneaology 472).
Mankind continually suppresses its own agency in its attempt to create
a collective history – and this mass thought has the disturbing potential
to become self-denying, mechanical, mass violence that operates under
the labels of “justice,” “good vs. evil,” and “redemption.” Certainly, the ab-
solutist position taken by Dolmancé in the historical de Sade’s Philosophy

in the Bedroom – a position readily accepted by his pupil Eugénie – could
be interpreted through this lens of unequivocal cruelty, in their case
committed in the name of Natural law. The repeated lesson that cruelty
is natural instils in the pupil the perspective that cruelty is mandated, and
the extremity of this law leads them to torture Eugénie’s mother in horrify-
ingly creative ways at the climax of the drama. Interestingly, the Chevalier –
de Sade’s true philosopher – is the only character who exhibits doubts
about the rigidity of the dictum that Nature is cruel and thus cruelty is nat-
ural. The suggestion of uncertainty on the part of de Sade’s philosopher–
hero is an interesting twist to the clear narrative arc of his philosophical
drama.
The metatheatricality of philosopher-cum-dramatic-characters can be-
come frustratingly complex: Weiss has dreamt up a Nietzschean de Sade,
who, in turn, creates his own Zarathustrian alter ego onstage (the dramatic
character “de Sade”). De Sade’s dialogic counterpart (in this drama, he has
written for the Asylum of Charenton) is the character Marat, whose critical
position is that of a twentieth-century Marxist philosopher, whose faith in
the humanistic power of collective democratic action has been shattered by
the corruption of power. For de Sade’s “Marat,” the idea of the Revolution
remains valid, despite the failures of the revolutionaries. Ghost-like, he
laments the events that have followed his death, for “[t]he counter-revolution
has started a new civil war / and what are we doing / The farms we confis-
cated from the churches have so far produced nothing / to feed the dispos-
sessed” (76). The patient playing the role is introduced as “a lucky paranoic”
(6), and thus the posthumous laments of a proto-socialist prophet are doubly
marked with the label of paranoia. These “paranoid” accusations are also the
self-justifications of a political martyr, who insists from his coffin-like tub
that from “the vast indifference I invent a meaning / I don’t watch unmoved
I intervene / and say that this and this are wrong / and I work to alter them
and improve them” (26–27). Is not the violence committed in the name of
the people justified by the people’s own welfare? Is not every argument
against Marat’s Revolution countered by the fact that its true, ideal potential
was extinguished with his death? In his fantasized speech to the National
Assembly, Marat even accuses his revolutionary peers of reifying the prole-
tariat, a key revisionary critique among twentieth-century Marxist theorists:
“You’ll never stop talking of the people / as a rough and formless mass,” cries
Marat (77), echoing Georg Lukács’s intervention in Marxist theory in History
and Class Consciousness, in which he critiques the objectification of social re-
lations through class reification. Marat’s desperation to justify the principles
of the Revolution after proof of its violence (and its ultimate failure) reso-
nates (anachronistically) as a twentieth-century attempt to revise and justify
Marxism in the wake of Stalinism and Cold War hegemonies and recalls
Louis Althusser’s argument for “Marxism and Humanism.”
ANNE BEGGS

The debates are thus a complex negotiation of political theory and eth-
ics: Marxist materialist dialectics and a Nietzschean genealogy are put in
dialogue with each other. In his “Author’s Note on the Historical Back-
ground of the Play,” Weiss writes that “[w]hat interests me in bringing
together Sade and Marat is the conflict between an individualism carried to
extreme lengths and the idea of a political and social upheaval” (106). Both
Weiss’s work as a whole and de Sade’s play within a play present social and
political contradictions, much as Brecht’s Mother Courage does, and the
placing of these dialogues in multiple historical contexts encourages critical
reflection on the way in which philosophy plays out in reality. Characters
tell the audience what they stand for, and, consistent with an “epic” struc-
ture, the actions that follow conform to a rigidly prescribed set of contin-
gencies. Marat’s socialist doctrine, so alarming to the Bonapartist asylum
director, Coulmier, draws the attention of the patients:
The rumour spreads
that the workers can soon expect higher wages
Why
(The Head of a Patient appears from behind the curtain,
which is opened from inside)
Because this raises production and increases demand
to fill the rich man’s gold-chest
Don’t imagine
that you can beat them without using force
(The Patients rise one by one and advance slowly, listening intently) (55)
But de Sade mocks Marat’s vision of the poor overcoming an economic
hierarchy, and setting the Four Singers to mime Marat’s song of the work-
ers, he rejects the belief that men will ever be happy with total equality. In
complete context, however, de Sade is not advocating Coulmier’s bourgeois
civil society so much as he is revelling in the innate human drive to power
and pleasure. His final evidence is the internecine violence that equality
has sparked in the idealists, who “would like to kill each other over trifles.”
“But they aren’t trifles,” Marat insists. “They are matters of principle” (57).
For Marat, the Revolution is an example of a failed but promising attempt
at universal human freedom. Marat repeats the language of idealism, plac-
ing himself on the moral side of the good: “I intervene / and say that this
and this are wrong / and I work to alter them and improve them” (27), he
argues; the failure was that, after his death, the forces of judgement were
overtaken by the evil: “We stand here more oppressed than when we begun /
(points across the auditorium) / and they think that the revolution’s been
won” (35). For de Sade, however (as for Nietzsche), the French Revolution
is the ultimate evidence of the triumph of slave morality (Genealogy 490).

The individual’s drive to desire is rooted in a performance of power (sexual,
economic, political); ideals (religious, socialist, nationalistic) repress this
drive or force it into a collective identity, one based on reaction. Marat’s
idealistic belief in equality is representative of the morality of the oppressed;
it is the reactionary judgement of a slave morality.
A third political position is brought into play in the figures of Charlotte
Corday, Duperret, and Monsieur Coulmier. This is the perspective of the
bourgeoisie, the counter-revolutionaries who sought (successfully) to
replace the ancien régime, not with a socialist democracy, but with a capi-
talist empire. Corday, the anguished, devout moderate who sacrifices her-
self in order to halt the carnage she sees ensuing at the hands of an extreme
revolutionary, is Weiss’s most sympathetic character: a young girl, suffering
from narcolepsy and depression, at the mercy of the sisters and of the ag-
gressively nymphomaniacal patient playing Duperret. Unlike the real Mar-
quis de Sade’s young female subjects, however (e.g., Eugénie), the patient/
actress is not encouraged to explore sexual excess as a celebration of the
natural; rather, her molestation is a visualization of her reactive stasis. The
result is a Charlotte Corday who sleep-walks her way through history, cut-
ting down the agent of mass murder and yet helpless against (and oblivious
to) the tide of capitalism and militarism that follows. De Sade’s script allows
some sympathy for this Corday, who is as commendable in her commit-
ment to idealism as is Marat. “Once both of us spoke a single tongue / of
brotherly love we sweetly sung / but love meant one thing to you I see /
and something quite different to me,” she sings to Marat as her introduc-
tory ballad (14). While Marat, however, is a worthy rational opponent for de
Sade, Corday is merely a vessel for the bourgeois version of the slave moral-
ity that has triumphed with the founding of the empire. Duperret, her
friend from Caen, argues against political heroics, preferring instead to
wait for “a society which will pool its energy / to defend and protect / each
person for the possession of each person” (53), and mocks the “[k]nitting-
women concierges and washer-women . . . [p]ickpockets layabouts para-
sites” of Marat’s revolution (77). While advising Corday, Duperret molests
her repeatedly; this casting of a sex maniac as a political moderate is a
hyperbolic performance of the bourgeoisie’s presence during the Terror.
From this perspective, the protesting words of the upper-middle-class in-
croyable Duperret are, in fact, the words of the future and a provocative jux-
taposition that allies the politics of Duperret and Coulmier with the
idealism of Corday. De Sade, though, the master of the dialogue, suggests
that Marat’s principles of human freedom and the bourgeois right of prop-
erty are rooted in the same principle of order and state – the instruments of
culture that are evidence of the domestication of mankind. “Those fearful
bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the
old instincts of freedom . . . brought about that all those instincts of wild,
ANNE BEGGS

free, prowling man turned backward against man himself,” Nietzsche ar-
gues, rearticulating the inward-directed power of the slave mentality (Gene-
alogy 520–21; capitalization original). De Sade’s disdain for order extends
equally to institutions of morality, religion, revolution, and the idea of the
nation, whether monarchy, republic, or empire. “Once you attacked the
authorities who turned / the law into instruments of oppression. / Do you
want someone to rule you, / to control the words you write / and tell you /
what work you must do / and repeat to you the new laws / over and over,”
he asks Marat in the second act, before the ceremonial assassination (84).
The Marquis intends to prove to his opponent-in-debate that every revolu-
tion is a mechanism of control and subjugation and that Marat’s insistence
on his manifestos, on the ultimate utility of organized idealism, is just
another form of authoritarian regime.
The two stage-philosophers agree, on their respective grounds, that reli-
gion is a detriment to mankind. While Marat’s opposition is, expectedly, a
Marxist critique of the opiate of the masses, de Sade, instead, mocks the
vestments of religion as merely a variant of idealist garb. Marat lambasts
the Church’s celebration of earthly suffering, “so the poor instead of bread
made do with a picture/of the bleeding scourged and nailed-up Christ/and
prayed to that image of their helplessness” (28–29). De Sade recognizes that
the Last Judgement predicted by the priests is but another valuation of re-
ssentiment alike to the judgements of Marat and his revolutionaries. As
demonstration of this correspondence, the “notorious priest” (as the Herald
puts it; 43), Jacques Roux, appears as a character in the play, periodically in-
terrupting the discussion with scenes that failed to pass the Asylum Direc-
tor’s censor. “This scene was cut,” protests Coulmier as Roux rails against
war, an objection that does not impress de Sade. “Bravo Jacques Roux,” the
Marquis commends his actor. “I like your monk’s habit / Nowadays it’s
best / to preach revolution / wearing a robe” (45). As a dramatist, de Sade
takes advantage of the tools of the theatre. All expressions of moral author-
ity indicted through his dramaturgy – revolution, nation, religion – are ad-
dressed as theatrical gestures.
In this regard, the strategies of the character de Sade resemble those of
the historical de Sade: the Philosophy in the Bedroom is structured as exten-
sive discourse punctuated by grotesquely demonstrative action, indicated by
“stage directions” and implied in the dialogue. The scatological, incestuous,
and ultimately brutally violent actions of Eugénie, Madame de Saint-Ange,
the Chevalier, and Dolmancé are, for all their orgiastic absurdity, constantly
analysed and justified through the characters’ carefully crafted rhetoric con-
cerning natural law. Likewise, the physicality of Weiss’s play goes beyond
that of Peter Brook’s specifically Artaudian production. As Garner writes of
post-Brechtian theatre in general, “If we seek to understand the powerful
disruptions which the suffering body poses for the representational modes of

contemporary political drama, we must begin with the body as zero-point of
the phenomenal world” (148). The abject bodies performing this dialogue
are the material evidence for de Sade’s inquiry into the morality of sovereign
powers (see, e.g., Cooper 114). In this manner, the opposing positions – de
Sade’s call for individual power and Marat’s belief in universal order – are
embodied in the incarcerated inmates of an asylum and then interrupted
and studied again as clinical evidence in bodies. Giorgio Agamben’s hypoth-
esis that bare life is the root of sovereign power offers insight into this negoti-
ation between materiality and idea in both de Sade’s play within a play and
Weiss’s larger purview. The “paradox of sovereignty,” Agamben suggests,
“consists in the fact [that] the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and
inside the juridical order” (15). The sovereign (as a discourse of power) con-
trols the state of being, which becomes a way of life. Bare life (existence; the
ability and potential not to live) is determined by sovereign power, and thus
the state (the potentiality of the law) is embedded in the body. This was evi-
dent in the “king’s two bodies” of the ancien régime; while the physical king
might cease to breathe, the sovereign could not die. The sacred life, the homo
sacer, was not available for sacrifice nor could it be killed in the sense of mur-
dered. “This is modern democracy’s strength,” Agamben writes, “and, at the
same time, its inner contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish
sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual
body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict” (124). Every one of
the bodies onstage, representing at once the plebs of the Revolution and the
incarcerated of the Empire, is granted or denied life by spectral surrogates of
the sovereign power, and the simultaneous presence of these bodies and
their invisibility in the populace heightens their status as homos sacers. The
bodies killed in the cause of revolution, Marat argues, were neither murdered
nor sacrificed but rather were deprived of their possible bios so that the
sovereign body of the revolution might persist. In this argument, Weiss’s
dialectic resounds with the aporia of post-Enlightenment political philoso-
phy, the failure of democratic humanism to effect humanist democracy – a
perspective beyond the purview of the historical de Sade.
Always, in the play, the physical mimesis of the political idea is retrans-
lated into language, into dialogue. Even the violent corporeality of de
Sade’s flagellation is but a theatrical accompaniment to the rational argu-
ment he lays out in his soliloquy. The whipping scene is, of course, de
Sade’s own demonstration of how the aesthetics of the body are the root of
all and any rational valuation. De Sade honours only the limits of human
sensation, and his lament concerns a world in which human action, once
cruel and ecstatic, becomes machine-like, lacking sensual cognition; for de
Sade, the ultimate power of moral judgement lies in the individual’s capac-
ity for aesthetic sensation. De Sade’s project of extreme sexual and painful
depravity was, in his estimation, a process of humanism: “In a criminal
ANNE BEGGS

society / I dug the criminal out of myself / so I could understand him and
so understand / the times we live in” (47). De Sade’s insistence upon physi-
cal sensation as a means to comprehension is, in this light, a sardonic cele-
bration of the patients’ inability to escape their own flesh, and this includes
Marat, encased in a bath on account of his infected skin, “yellow as cheese”
(5). Gilles Deleuze, in his exegesis of Nietzsche, explains that what “makes
the body superior to all reactions, particularly that reaction of the ego that
is called consciousness, is the activity of necessarily unconscious forces . . .
Appropriating, possessing, subjugating, dominating – these are the charac-
teristics of active force” (41–42). We might read de Sade’s self-directed vio-
lations as his own appropriating of his body’s power not only for violence
but also for pain. By taking control and relishing in his own corporeality, de
Sade harnesses his body’s active potential in the world rather than seeking
escape through a disembodied life of the mind.
As Elaine Scarry suggests, the inscription of the nation (and, likewise, of
revolution and religion) on the body is made explicit in the phenomenon of
pain. According to Scarry, the body is the material through which we make
and unmake the world, and pain and the imagination are linked as “‘fram-
ing’ events within whose boundaries all other perceptual, somatic, and
emotional events occur” (165). De Sade’s project is a literalization of the
certainty of pain: to feel it is to dominate the material of the body itself, af-
firming one’s presence in the world. Once inflicted on others, however,
pain becomes resistant to objectification, as Scarry points out: “Though
indisputably real to the sufferer, it is, unless accompanied by visible body
damage or a disease label, unreal to others. This profound ontological split
is a doubling of pain’s annihilating power: the lack of acknowledgement
and recognition . . . becomes a second form of negation and rejection” (56).
The tortures and deaths of the Revolution “unmake” the world by denying
the agency of the body in pain: torture and suffering become an idea, a dis-
placed symbol of the slave morality of the oppressed. The hacked buttocks
and rivers of blood described by the Chorus in de Sade’s play are evidence
of a dominated humanity, subsumed under a sovereign power that deter-
mines its claim to bare life. Weiss takes the power of pain a step further
than did Artaud or the historical de Sade, for both of whom pain was evi-
dence of agency, the ultimate proof of human control over nature’s all-
powerful cruelty. In the case of the Marquis de Sade, the sensual duality of
pleasure and pain was considered as an isolated, individual experience;
while Artaud’s program, as Jannarone notes, suggests a totalitarian control
over the suffering body. Weiss’s de Sade and Marat, however, rationally
debate the control and abjections of bodies in the individual and the collec-
tive, and de Sade physicalizes his philosophy with specific theatrical gestures
– Marat confined to his bathtub, de Sade whipped by the beautiful sleep-
walker under his command. The additional characters in de Sade’s scene

play out the story as a general experience, though, and their actions connect
the political hypotheses to the larger material of social history. Corday’s
“arrival in Paris” in Act One enacts the viciousness of the Reign of Terror in
song and mime, and we hear about the street-level anarchy of 1793 from the
young convent girl’s horrified point of view. The patients turn pain, torture,
and assassination into spectacle and bodily fluids into stage properties. The
festival of unchecked pain becomes a carnivalesque history. De Sade’s cast
of outcasts alternates between primal, Nietzschean blond beasts, triumph-
ing in the raw power of the body, and a lumpenproleteriat (violent when
listening to Marat) misdirected by the morality of the oppressed.
In a history play, improvisation within the spectacle suggests a phenom-
enological politics of persuasion and identification, something which
Weiss’s de Sade explores through his own drama. The intensity of de Sade’s
and Marat’s arguments, as well as the interludes with the other characters,
raise the question of conviction as part of philosophical reasoning. The
conundrum of identification is especially difficult in the performance of
“Jacques Roux,” for we don’t really know what the inmate is, so literally
does he identify with the historical personage of the enragé [radical activist]
priest Jacques Roux, who died in prison in 1794. In the original play-text,
the Herald introduces the strait-jacketed man as a former monk, isolated
on account of his “politische Radikalität” [political radicalism], playing the
role of Jacques Roux (Die Verfolgung 15). The English version simply intro-
duces the inmate as “Roux,” “[j]ailed for taking a radical view / of anything
you can name,” but also informs us that “unfortunately the censor’s cut /
most of his rabble-rousing theme” (7). Roux’s persistent outbursts show the
visceral identification of the patient with the message, and the seeming
spontaneity of his declarations also raises the possibility of improvisation, a
phenomenon that haunts the action. Did de Sade simply not inform his
actor that his scenes had been cut? Did the actor decide to continue
“Roux’s” socialist, anti-war diatribes despite the censor? Or is the patient/
inmate not performing in de Sade’s history play, “The Persecution and
Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat,” but rather attempting a political rally in
the bathhouse in 1808, believing himself to be Jacques Roux? In another
curious moment of seeming improvisation, a patient (unidentified as a
character in de Sade’s play) responds to de Sade’s description of a human
sacrifice with the “mad animal” speech: “A mad animal / Man’s a mad ani-
mal / I’m a thousand years old and in my time / I’ve helped commit a mil-
lion murders,” the man rants in Coulmier’s face, describing the rotting
corpses and broken skulls that spread across the earth (32–33). Here we
have the rawest expression yet of the festival of cruelty that lies in the heart
of untamed man; such moments, however, are entirely controlled by
Weiss’s playwright de Sade, who “leads [the patient] gently to the back as he
continues” (33). The raucous carnival of the Terror and the eruption of
ANNE BEGGS

threatening speech are always under the control of de Sade’s, the framer of
the dialogue. The material body in the space of the bathhouse is real, threa-
tening, and vulnerable, but the metatheatrical framework implies that it is
never truly unpredictable. Cooper argues that “the conversations between
Marat and Sade are as vividly extreme – as violent, exhilarated, and anar-
chic – as the bodily enactments of the musical/mimed ‘numbers’” (115).
Rather, we might say, the Ensemble’s numbers in “The Persecution and
Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat” are as vividly extreme as de Sade’s
poetry, but he always controls the terms of their movement. De Sade’s proj-
ect is to philosophize the potentiality of physical sensation and the moral
(and thus political) components of affect, and thus (like Socrates encoura-
ging the drunken Alcibiades) the spectacle is always drawn back to dialogic
argument.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
In Weiss’s original, German text, de Sade’s play ends with a post-assassination
epilogue in which a reanimated Marat, Corday, and Roux reiterate to the
audience their positions before de Sade concludes with his own summa-
tion. The published Skelton/Mitchell English version includes only Coul-
mier’s concluding remarks to the Asylum audience and the subsequent
patient revolt in the epilogue. The English translation as performed in the
original production, however, retained part of the epilogue, in which the
Herald asks the Marquis, “Just what you have achieved with your produc-
tion / Who won? Who lost? We’d like to know / The meaning of your bath-
house show.” De Sade’s curious concluding speech is a Brechtian reassess-
ment that repositions himself as playwright who had created the character
of “de Sade” just as he created “Marat,” “Corday,” and all the rest. No
longer arguing as a Nietzschean Zarathustra against a Marxist dialectic, de
Sade suggests, instead, that philosophical debate is uncontrollable as a tool
for persuasion:
Of course, you’d like to take away a meaning
Or a moral from my play, and so you shall
[. . .]
Some seeds have drifted from our stage
A few may have entered and taken root in you
But what these seeds are
Even though in your darkest places they feed and grow
Whatever these are, you will never know.1
There is a frustrated pessimism running through de Sade’s summation,
a scepticism of the audience that hearkens back to Plato, who “rejected the

rule of the audience, [but] he did not want to do without an audience – that
is, without performance – altogether . . . Plato’s critique of theater contains
a powerful critique of passive audiences. His ideal is closer to what one
might describe as participant observers” (Puchner, Drama 26–27). From
this perspective, only the participants can really benefit from the philoso-
phical debate that has ensued and absorb philosophy into their way of life.
This reading solves the conundrum of patient identification and persuasion
and, moreover, opens up a whole new view on the riot that concludes the
play. The patients, consumed with the festival of physical domination, re-
create a revolution, but this time one without ideals: a pure, Sado-
Nietzschean expression of bodily power and individual sovereignty. De
Sade, his philosophy realized, smiling like Zarathustra, “stands upright on
his chair, laughing triumphantly” (102).
Susan Sontag, an avowed fan of Brook’s production, wrote an influential
critique of the show for Partisan Review, arguing that
there is a moral vision in art like Marat/Sade, though clearly it cannot (and this
has made its audience uncomfortable) be summed up with the slogans of
‘humanism.’ But ‘humanism’ is not identical with morality. Precisely, art like
Marat/Sade entails a rejection of ‘humanism,’ of the task of moralizing the world
and thereby refusing to acknowledge the ‘crimes’ of which Sade speaks. (171)
De Sade’s critique of morality was translated (by Brook, at least) into the
viscerality of Artaud’s visionary theatre. But de Sade’s recognition of the
almost sublime potential for cruelty as a component of ideological revolu-
tion is marked by a reticence bordering on abhorrence, a reaction more in
keeping with the irony of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or even the historical de
Sade’s Chevalier than with the absolutism of Antonin Artaud. The Marxist
political debate between Marat and Sade is a Brechtian performance of
the dialectics of history, an open-ended dialectic that refuses to supply
a finished political resolution. Eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-
century historical/political discourses collapse together into a history of the
present – that is, the Cold War moment of the early 1960s, characterized by
militaristic antagonism between ideologically opposed superpowers. What
Sontag sensed in Brook’s production lies in the connection between the
aesthetic and the ethical, in the condemnation of a humanistic Enlighten-
ment discourse that limits the terms of its own moral judgement by separ-
ating political abstractions from physical experience – the same limitation,
in fact, that inspired Karl Marx’s intervention in political philosophy. When
we reconsider the Platonic dialogue inherent in the meta-play, the bodies
become the material for philosophy. De Sade’s play within a play charts,
through a Nietzschean genealogy, a hypothesis of sovereign power and the
material potential of the body-in-pain, complex content that can be
ANNE BEGGS

probed, compared, and debated further; and this, in turn, ensures Marat/
Sade’s continued importance as a drama ripe with new pedagogical and
artistic potential for the twenty-first century.
NOTE
1 This epilogue is included in the original cast recording of the Broadway Produc-
tion. I have been unable to find an explanation for its omission in the Grove Press
publication of the Skelton/Mitchell version.
WORKS CITED
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998.
Althusser, Louis. “Marxism and Humanism.” For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New
York: Verso, 2006.
Carlson, Marvin. “Body and Sign in Marat/Sade.” Assaph: Studies in the Theatre 15
(1999): 9–17.
Chaudhuri, Una. “Marat/Sade and the Politics of Interpretation.” Reading Plays:
Interpretation and Reception. Ed. Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland. New York:
Cambridge UP, 1991.
Cooper, Pamela. “‘A World of Bodies’: Performing Flesh in Marat/Sade.” Captive
Audiences: Prison and Captivity in Contemporary Theater. Ed. Thomas Fahy and
Kimball King. New York: Routledge, 2003. 109–20.
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006.
de Sade, Donatien Alphonse François. The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the
Bedroom, and Other Writings. Trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse.
New York: Grove, 1965.
Dramatic Publishing. Telephone interview. 1 June 2011.
Garner, Stanton B., Jr. “Post-Brechtian Anatomies: Weiss, Bond and the Politics of
Embodiment.” Theatre Journal 42.2 (May 1990): 145–64. JSTOR. 23 March 2011
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207752>.
Jannarone, Kimberly. Artaud and His Doubles. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.
McKenzie, John R.P. “Peter Weiss and the Politics of ‘Marat-Sade.’” New Theatre
Quarterly 1.3 (1985): 301–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00001688.
Munk, Erika, Peter Weiss, and Paul Gray. “A Living World. An Interview with Peter
Weiss.” Tulane Drama Review 11.1 (1966): 106–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/
1125270.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. and
trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. and
trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Puchner, Martin. Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy.
New York: Oxford UP, 2010.
Puchner, Martin. “Sade’s Theatrical Passions.” Yale Journal of Criticism 18.1 (2005):
111–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/yale.2005.0007.
Roberts, David. “Marat/Sade, or the Birth of Postmodernism from the Spirit of the
Avantgarde Author(s).” New German Critique 38 (Spring-Summer 1986): 112–30.
JSTOR. 18 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/488080>.
Roloff, Gordon, and Peter Weiss. “Interview with Peter Weiss.” Partisan Review 32
(1965): 220–32.
Royal Shakespeare Company. The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat
as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of
the Marquis de Sade. Dir. Peter Brook. New York: Caedmon Records, 1966. LP.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York:
Oxford UP, 1985.
Shaw, G.B. “The Technical Novelty in Ibsen’s Plays.” The Quintessence of Ibsenism.
New York: Brentano’s. 1917: 213–34. OpenLibrary.org. 7 Jan 2013 <http://
openlibrary.org/works/OL15691065W/The_Quintessence_of_Ibsenism>.
Sontag, Susan. “Marat/Sade/Artaud.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New
York: Picador, 1966: 163–74.
Suvin, Darko. “Weiss’s Marat/Sade and its Three Main Performance Versions.”
Modern Drama 31.3 (Sept. 1988): 395–419.
Weiss, Peter. Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die
Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade
[The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat . . .]. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1964.
Weiss, Peter. “Author’s Note on the Historical Background to the Play.” Persecution
105–9.
Weiss, Peter. The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by
the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de
Sade. Trans. Geoffrey Skelton. Verse adaptation Adrian Mitchell. Long Grove, IL:
Waveland, 1965.
ABSTRACT: This article stresses the continuing relevance of Peter Weiss’s 1963 drama
Marat/Sade to both production and study, reconsidering the work in the light of recent reas-
sessments of the relationship between drama and the practice of philosophy. In her analysis
of the play as a philosophical dialogue, the author deprivileges Peter Brook’s directorial
choices, which were based on an Anglo-American reading of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of
Cruelty, and focuses instead on the dialogic and physical potentials inherent in the text itself
as a work of philosophical drama more akin to the works of Nietzsche and the historical de
Sade himself. In the play, the effecting of politics on the body is illustrated, then interrupted
ANNE BEGGS

and discussed, and the resulting performance presents us with the unresolved dialectic of
individual agency and democratic sovereignty.
KEYWORDS: Peter Weiss, Marquis de Sade, Marat/Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom,
theatre and philosophy
ANNE BEGGS has a Ph.D. in Theatre Theory and Aesthetics from Cornell University. She
has taught drama, theatre history and theory, and film studies at West Virginia University
and Colgate University, and her articles and reviews have appeared in Theatre Journal,
Modern Drama, and the collection Violence in American Drama.

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