Description
Book SynopsisFrequenting circuses in Paris and Berlin, Frank Wedekind, best known for
Spring Awakening and the Lulu plays, learned that trapeze artists and tightrope walkers rely on different artificial reference points in space, in order to maintain their balance and orient themselves and to create their own sensorial and phenomenal worlds. This lesson in radical perspectivism and constructivism is a key to Wedekind's practice as a playwright, and it links the Munich dramatist's work to the thought of Schopenhauer, who first used the term
Elastizität in a philosophical sense; Darwin, who considered adaptability to be a primordial characteristic of life; Nietzsche, whose commentary on acrobats in
Also sprach Zarathustra announces the Overman; and Freud, who used the term to describe the reactive, conservative nature of the instincts. Taking
Elastizität and the modern notion of adaptability as its point of departure, this book explores Wedekind's construction of space, mo
