The Paradox of the Self. Beyond Identity

Abstract

In 2023, the invasion of the stage during a performance by the trans woman Keyla Brasil at a theatre venue in Lisbon, as part of a protest that claimed for the visibility of transgender performers, spawned numerous reactions. One of the most common was that such action meant an offense to the principle of theatrical representation and the ‘art of acting’. This idea of theatre as a place of illusion, where the self presents itself as the non-self, is commonly accepted as an interpretation of Diderot’s The Paradox of the Actor, but we are convinced that describing Diderot’s idea of the actor as someone who never seems to be himself is not an accurate interpretation. We will therefore read Diderot’s paradox following two postmodern inter­pretations by Lacoue-Labarthe and Eyal Peretz and adding the contributions of biologists who have been working with recent microbiological knowledge that challenges notions of One and the Individual. Our goal is to describe the action of Keyla Brasil not as an ‘interruption’ of a performance but as a complex intersection of (re)presentations that think with each other, destabilizing epis­temic boundaries between one and the other, actor and character or performer and audience. We are convinced that the descriptions and vocabulary that emerge from this discussion will allow us to cast a new light not only on Diderot’s idea of the actor but also on Keyla Brasil’s action, taking us a step further in Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Peretz’s considerations on the self and the actor.