Sign-In
Cart
Need/Emergency: Political Theater in Exigent Times
Hardcover
Literary CriticismTheater History
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9781503646018
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: Aug 4 2026
Pages: 308
Weight: 1.27
Height: 0.97 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Modern politics is preoccupied with states of emergency. Yet emergency politics obscures underlying socioeconomic, infrastructural, and ecological conditions of need. Prompted by Hannah Arendt's claim that theater is the political art par excellence, Benjamin Lewis Robinson treats this political perplexity as a theatrical problem. In the company of political thinkers including Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School, Rosa Luxemburg and Martin Heidegger, Robinson revisits the entwined histories of politics and theater, analyzing plays that stage the political scene as an always asymmetrical coupling of need and emergency.
In Arendt's view, the defining tendency in modern politics is for need to emerge where it has no right to appear, posing a threat to politics as such. In contrast, the works of theater addressed in Need/Emergency concern moments when, whether it ought to or not, need does appear--demanding justice. Writing in exigent times, Elfriede Jelinek, Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, and Friedrich Hölderlin produced formally innovative political theater. Not reducible to the drama of emergency, these plays bring into focus the very need for politics. Moving fluently between theory and theater, Robinson offers a critical study of biopolitics and emergency politics in times of poverty, plague, infrastructural predation, and forced displacement, from the French Revolution to the climate crisis.
Also from
Robinson, Benjamin Lewis
Bureaucratic Fanatics: Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization
Robinson, Benjamin Lewis
Paperback
Bureaucratic Fanatics: Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization
Robinson, Benjamin Lewis
Hardcover
Also in
Theater History
History Hiding Around Broadway: Backstage Lore, Secrets & Surprises from New York's Famed Theater District
Dvornik, Teale
Hardcover
The Dream Factory: London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare
Swift, Daniel
Hardcover
Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen
O'Malley, Charles
Stern, Scott W.
Hardcover
Houdini's Library: Inside the Spellbinding Collections of the Great Illusionist
Colleary, Eric
Hardcover
The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition
Landau, Tina
Bogart, Anne
Paperback
Champions for the Arts: Lessons and Successful Strategies for Engaging Diverse Audiences
Walker-Kuhne, Donna
Paperback
Shakespeare's World: Seeing the Plays Through Elizabethan Eyes
Krausnick, Dennis
Lubarr, Josh
Goodheart, Rebecca
Paperback
Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919
Thompson, Cheryl
Paperback
Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George
Lapine, James
Paperback
The Bird Cage Theater: The Curtain Rises on Tombstone, Arizona's National Treasure
Mihaljevich, Michael Paul
Hardcover
Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive
Bainbridge, Danielle
Paperback
Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Gefter, Philip
Paperback
The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War
Shapiro, James
Hardcover
Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Every Told
Papp, Joseph
Turan, Kenneth
Paperback
Playhouse to Powerhouse: Locating Black Power Women and their Movement in the Black Theatre
Goldmann, Kerry
Paperback
Playing to the Gods: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and the Rivalry That Changed Acting Forever
Rader, Peter
Paperback
Playhouse to Powerhouse: Locating Black Power Women and their Movement in the Black Theatre
Goldmann, Kerry
Hardcover
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Nineteenth-Century America: Discourse and Criticism
Rowland, Herbert
Hardcover
Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women's Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation
Barber, Tiffany E.
Paperback
Moment Work: Tectonic Theater Project's Process of Devising Theater
Kaufman, Moises
Pitts McAdams, Barbara
Paperback
Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater
Vollmann, William T.
Paperback
Mediatic Shakespeare: The Dynamics of Orality, Script and Print in the Plays and Poems
Cavell, Richard
Hardcover
Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Gefter, Philip
Hardcover
Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel
Gerould, Daniel
Paperback
Listening for America: Inside the Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim
Kapilow, Rob
Hardcover
Collaboration in Theatre: A Practical Guide for Designers and Directors
Roznowski, Rob
Domer, K.
Paperback
The Second City: The Essentially Accurate History
Kozak, Liz
City, The Second
Patinkin, Sheldon
Hardcover
Something Wonderful Right Away: The Birth of Second City--America's Greatest Comedy Theater
Sweet, Jeffrey
Paperback
Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England
Kuhn, John
Hardcover
Les Misérables: The Story So Far of the World's Longest Running Musical
Nightingale, Benedict
Wolf, Matt
Palmer, Martyn
Hardcover
Beyond the Sewol: Activist Theatre and Performance in South Korea and the Diaspora
Jeong, Areum
Paperback
The Untold Stories of Broadway: Tales from the World's Most Famous Theaters
Tepper, Jennifer Ashley
Paperback
Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950
Hollander, Katherine
Hardcover
Shakespeare's Compassion: Emotion and the Classics on the Early Modern Stage
Refskou, Anne Sophie
Hardcover
Harold Pinter, Fascism, and Outrage: Aesthetic and Moral Implications
Russell, Dennis Eugene
Hardcover
The Long Revolution: Sixty Years on the Frontlines of a New American Theater
Fichandler, Zelda
Paperback
Japanese No Masks: With 300 Illustrations of Authentic Historical Examples
Perzynski, Friedrich
Paperback
Pioneering Theatre-in-the-Round: The Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent, 1962-1986
Walker, Rachel
Hardcover
Sistren Theatre Collective and the Politics of Space in Jamaica: Woman Talawa
Smith, Karina
Hardcover
Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive
Bainbridge, Danielle
Hardcover
¡A Teatro Camaradas!: Dramaturgia militante y política de masas en Colombia (1965-1975)
Parra Salazar, Mayra Natalia
Paperback
A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge
Hajdu, David
Carey, John
Paperback
A History of Leadville Theater: Opera Houses, Variety Acts and Burlesque Shows
Scanlon, Gretchen
Hardcover
Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era
Na, Na
Paperback
New York Theatre Walks: Seven Historical Tours from Times Square to Greenwich Village and Beyond
Kissel, Howard
Paperback
Boom Chicago Presents the 30 Most Important Years in Dutch History
Rosenfeld, Pep
Moskos, Andrew
Hardcover
An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Hughes, Amy E.
Paperback
Theatre Work: Reimagining the Labor of Theatrical Production
Clements Cotton, Brídín
Robin, Natalie
Paperback
F*ck the Army!: How Soldiers and Civilians Staged the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War
Goss, Lindsay
Paperback
100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater
Ruhl, Sarah
Paperback
New Directions in Tarot: Decoding the Tarot Illustrations of Pamela Colman Smith
Martin, Scott
Hardcover
Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts
Horowitz, Joseph
Paperback