Derrida | Benjamin: Two Plays for the Stage

Within the work of both Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin there is a buried theatricality, a theatre to-come. And in the last fifteen years there has been a growing awareness of this theatricality. To date, though, there has not been a published stage play about either Derrida or Benjamin

Cue Derrida| Benjamin, a volume that brings together two tragi-comic plays which mirror each other in a host of ways – above all, in the way that the central philosophical figure is displaced, or not quite where or when we would expect to find them. In Derrida’s case, it is Oxford in 1968; in Benjamin’s case, it is somewhere (or nowhere) near London in 1948. These, then, are plays in which the philosopher is exiled, or elsewhere – not quite himself. 

This a volume for anyone with an eye or ear for where theatre or performance meets philosophy – students, scholars, readers, actors.

John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at University of Lancaster, UK. His books include Victorians in Theory (1999), Queer Fish (2004), Someone Called Derrida (2007), The Late Walter Benjamin (2012), and Paris Bride (2020) – plus two retrospectives: Hostage of the Word (2013) and John Schad in Conversation (2015).  

Fred Dalmasso is Lecturer in Drama at Loughborough University, UK. He is a screenwriter, theatre director, and performer. He has worked in the theatre industry in both France and Ireland and is now the artistic director of the performance group collect-ifs. His publications focus on practice-based theatre translation, performance philosophy and include Syncope in Performing and Visual Arts (2017).