Document Type
Article
Abstract
David Henry Hwang’s postmodernist play M. Butterfly, abounds with alienation devices for deconstructing the notion of a unified subject. This essay, however, seeks to challenge the assumed poststructuralist vantage-point that the self and the metaphysics of presence are illusory by exploring what holds the play's identities together as dynamic matrices that function coherently within their discursive contexts. How tenable is the constructivist claim that our shifting subject positions designated by power relations are self-sustaining, that the self does not in fact extend beyond the material tokens of narrative conventions and discursive fields? Even if performers and audience can shift their interpellative identities, they would only have switched from one constructed position, one prison house of language to another with its own set of ideological constraints. How plausible is the generalizing third-person theoretical implication that our immediate first-person phenomenal experience outside discursive contexts is nothing but a liberal humanist delusion? Drawing upon Eastern thought and the experience of pure consciousness, this paper suggests that in M. Butterfly, Hwang creates a phenomenology of non-identity and theatrical presence between performer and spectator based on a recognition of self that exceeds and underpins our constructed identity.
Repository Citation
Haney, William S.. "The Phenomenology of Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence in M. Butterfly." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 2, 2006, pp. 1–22. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss2/4
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