Incapacity

Spencer Golub builds on a recent trend in theater and performance studies in which scholars bring philosophy to bear on our understanding of performance. In Golub's case, however, he also adds to the mix a meditation on the nature of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, from which he has long suffered. Golub sees Wittgenstein's work as having both descriptive power in relation to OCD and, as such, offering some relief from this condition. Golub analyzes a broad range of dramatists, novelists, and filmmakers, among them Richard Foreman, Mac Wellman, Peter Handke, David Mamet, and Alfred Hitchcock. In their work, Golub finds an overriding interest in the relationship between the linguistic and the visual. Like Wittgenstein, the work of these artists is concerned with the limits of language's representational capacity. For Golub, it is these limits that give Wittgenstein's thought its therapeutic quality with respect to OCD. And it is Wittgenstein's notion of "pain behavior" that for Golub illuminates "performance behavior" - that which gives public expression to private experience. In this highly unconventional book, Golub charts new directions for exploring the relationship between theater and philosophy, and even for scholarly criticism itself.