An audience with ... the public, the representative, the sovereign

Abstract

The right of audience, in common law, is the right of a lawyer to represent a client in a court. Royalty, the Pope and some Presidents grant audi-ences. What does the power to grant an audience consist in? And what does it mean to demand an audience (with)? Through a reading of the way in which the vocabulary of theatre, acting and audience is involved in the generation of a theory of state by Hobbes and Rousseau, this paper looks to reopen these questions as a political resource for us to re-imagine and refigure our ways of being together. Through readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, it looks at the ways in which the performance of politics creates the public, the representative and the sovereign and the ways these figures interact. It proposes an alternative role for theatre as places of affective learning and a civic ethics of playfulness, in which the auto-institution of the state as an imagined collectivity is fully assumed.

Pravo na saslušanje (audijenciju), u običajnom pravu, jeste pravo advokata da zastupa klijenta na sudu. Kralj, Papa i neki predsednici primaju u audijenciju. U čemu se sastoji moć primanja u audijenciju (to grant an audience)? I šta znači zahtevati audijenciju? Čitanjem načina na koji je vokabular pozoriša, glume i audi­jencije (publike) uključen u proizvodnju teorije države kod Hobsa i Rusoa ovaj rad propituje pitanje političkih resursa koji nam pomažu da iznova promislimo načine bivanja zajedno. Preko Hobsa i Rusoa, ovaj tekst ispituje na koji način performiranje politike stvara javnost, predstavnika i suverena, te na koji način ove figure interaguju. Predlaže se alternativna uloga za pozorište kao mesto afek-tivnog učenja i građanske etike razigranosti u kojoj se autoinstitucija države kao zamišljenog zajedništva obuhvata u celosti.