Carmelo Bene and the gap in the actor’s gesture

Carmelo Bene and Lorenzino De’ Medici

Italian director, actor, and writer Carmelo Bene wrote and performed Lorenzaccio in 1986. Lorenzaccio is a two-part work that includes both a staged performance and a philosophical essay (or a “tale,” as Bene defines it, emphasizing the literary quality of the content and its narrative structure). In both versions, Lorenzaccio is a sophisticated and provocative reflection on the question: what is the act of performing? As the performance and the essay are created in the form of an experimental historical tale that offers a singular portrayal of Lorenzino De’ Medici and his deeds, through Lorenzaccio Bene also asks: how can the act of performing challenge the humanist ideas of historical action and historiographical representation? Lorenzaccio is a twofold work that offers a reflection on the relationship between history and performance. Both history and performance tell events—whether real or fictional—and aim to reconstruct the chain of causes and effects leading to their final accomplishments. Bene questions historical and narrative recounting as primary instruments of reconstruction—both of what happened in the past, and what happens to the actor when performing. Ultimately, with Lorenzaccio, Bene aims to critique the epistemological logic of humanist models of history and subject.

In addressing the concepts of history and performance, Bene engages the relationship between time, actor, and gesture in paradoxical yet illuminating ways. The essay and the performance follow a similar exploration of the relationship between performance and history through the concept of gesture, but find very distinct forms to accomplish it. In both works, Lorenzino becomes the vehicle of Bene’s voice: while in the essay Bene narrates the tale of Lorenzino De’ Medici in the third person, in the performance Bene himself plays Lorenzino. Where the essay is extremely rich in its language and digressions, the performance grants limited space to spoken language and focuses on the relationship between the three characters: Lorenzino, a white man dressed in drag; Duke Alessandro De’ Medici, a half-naked man of color, performed by Isaac George; and Contini the rumorista, a white sound effects technician, dressed in noisy Renaissance armor performed by Mauro Contini. ¹ Throughout the performance, Contini mirrors and interprets Lorenzino’s actions through amplified sounds, performing each noise just before Lorenzino makes the action that appears to cause it. Lorenzino engaging in a blind race of impromptu gestures with Contini constitutes the heart of the performance. For example, we hear the sound of dishes crashing to the floor an instant before Lorenzino can reach them—as he throws the dishes a moment later, they fall silently on the carpet. In turn, Duke Alessandro responds to these noises with a soundless, erotic, and animalistic excitement—once more, only Contini is permitted to make these actions audible and amplified. ² Because the three characters share different spaces on the stage, they cannot see each other. In this way, close listening is crucial to the success of their performances.

Grounded in the idea of listening, Lorenzaccio examines acting in the very process of performing the actor’s gesture, promoting it as the milieu for an embodied thought. Where the essay does so by posing a philosophical question regarding the difference between act and action, the performance shows Lorenzino’s frustration in enacting such a difference, which implies the suspension of the principle of cause and effect. When performing Lorenzino, Bene attempts in vain to catch up with the sonic effects of his actions, as if his gestures are out of sync with his intention. In this paradoxical conception, the gesture cannot pursue the end originally planned because the effect comes first. Even if Bene recounts a historical event and its context, Lorenzaccio’s very theme is the subject’s experience in the enactment of such historical gesture before it is deemed historical. As Bene points to the inconsistency between intention, gesture, and result within the action time frame, he questions the interpretation of the Aristotelian idea of drama as narrative and chronological action. Ultimately, Lorenzaccio is a critique of the representational frame through which theatre history and the dramatic repertoire are often written and staged.

The strict link between critical thought and artistic practice on which Lorenzaccio is built is still relevant today, some 30 years after its creation. The two works reveal a vision of theatre that is inherently a forma mentis, an enacted philosophy deriving from the theatre as a philosophical mode of operating. Through a critical language reshaped for the theatre field that draws on history and philosophy, Lorenzaccio contributes to the field of performance philosophy. Bene is an actor who thinks deeply about theatre, and his perspective is crucial for those studies that derive from theories elaborated upon by actors. In particular, Lorenzaccio adds performatic and theoretical insights about the actor’s perception of her gesture. To reject representation and destabilize it as the method to analyze action and narration, Bene conceives of the actor’s act of performing as a temporal gap. Such a gap acts as a suspension of consciousness, capable of nullifying pre-intentionality. Accordingly, in Lorenzaccio, this type of gap informs the actor’s gesture. Through his performatic concept of the gap, Bene defines the actor’s experience of the gesture as ineffable in nature and provides a way to talk about it solely via negativa. In affecting the relation between act and action, such a gap also impacts the relation between gesture and narrative text, actor and spectator, and, ultimately, performance and history.

Although sometimes returning to the performance of Lorenzaccio to illuminate Bene’s project, this article focuses primarily on Lorenzaccio in essay form, to reveal Bene’s ability—as a performer himself—to speak in crucial ways about the performer’s practice. His double work demonstrates that their reciprocal autonomy is gained through theoretical meditation on practice. The specific theoretical and critical language in Bene’s essay guides this analysis of his vision of performance beyond his refined experimental stage and actor language. Choosing to focus on the essay by no means attributes less importance to the performance, which finds autonomous language and style to address the themes posed in the essay, and would merit close analysis elsewhere. Rather, the analysis of this article aims to emphasize Bene as a writer, an artist, and a philosopher of theatre.

A tale of history and performance

With its subtitle al di là di De Musset e Benedetto Varchi (beyond De Musset and Benedetto Varchi), Lorenzaccio the performance provides some details about the frame of its critical project, which is clarified in the essay. This title announces how Bene’s Lorenzaccio avoids the Romantic vein of De Musset’s play and supersedes Varchi’s critique of Lorenzino De’ Medici’s inability to concretize his proclaimed republican faith. A fine reader of Medici’s history, Bene draws upon the inability of historiographers—from Varchi (1503–1565) to the present day—to explain the motives behind Lorenzino’s murder of his cousin, the Duke of Florence, Alessandro De’ Medici. ³ Even in his time, Lorenzino was believed to have no political or personal motivation for murdering the Duke. Though he depicted himself to the Florence tribunal as a defender of the founding republican values and a supporter of the political fringes who fought for them, the court judged this defense as inadequate. As Manfredi Piccolomini (1991) reports in The Brutus Revival, historians have focused on the “inconclusiveness of Alessandro’s murder, an act without finality enacted simply for the act itself” (Piccolomini, 1991: 86). Apparently, Lorenzino planned and carried out the assassination with no known motive: he sought neither inheritance, nor power, nor the ideal of the restoration of the Florentine Republic. ⁴

This enigma in the person of Lorenzino specifically attracts Bene. He reads the gesture of the actor through Lorenzino’s anti-historical gestures. Through such an overlap, Bene establishes a parallel between history and theatre. As Bene elaborates upon Lorenzino’s presumed lack of intentionality, he depicts intentionality as an inconclusive component in the actor’s work and denounces the principle of cause-effect as an insufficient guide for historiography. ⁵ In Lorenzaccio, Bene criticizes history and theatre as vehicles of representation that rely on intentionality and causality to recount a chronology of events based on the reconstruction of actions. To Bene, the idea of a reconstructed and planned action (both in history and in the theatre) fails because it finds no correspondence in the experience of the subject accomplishing the action. With a narrative trick, Bene demonstrates such a theory as he reverses the position of cause and effect in describing the performer’s experience of her gesture. This way, he creates an impasse regarding the subject’s intention. Yet, as the performatic gesture becomes an opportunity to dismantle representation alongside intentionality and causality, it also provides the subject with a chance to de-think. To Bene, the idea of de-thinking constitutes an attempt to walk away from the type of representational logic upon which most western philosophical systems are based. Lorenzaccio is a step towards this plan.

The following passage exemplifies the narrative trickery Bene (1995) uses in Lorenzaccio the tale. Specifically, it reveals how he envisions the actor’s gesture as performed out of chronological time and in the absence of consciousness. In the passage, while seated behind the Duke Alessandro on the same horse, Lorenzino De’ Medici attempts to stab the Duke from behind. The attack fails, because the blade of his dagger breaks upon the Duke’s coat of mail. Bene describes the historical episode in a long passage; the excerpt below recounts Lorenzino’s memory of the event:

On his side, Lorenzino remembered the splendid harshness of that assault. Even from within the market’s despicable uproar in the background, he heard the amplified rustling in between the folds of his bodice; the shrill shriek and the hiss of that dagger extracted from its sheath; the blow the iron inflicted against the ducal steel; the bending of the weapon; the loud cracking. He remembered until this point: then, he had acted. (Bene, 1995: 34; translation mine) ⁶

The actor’s gesture becomes, for Bene, the occasion to speculate, via negativa, about the most inner experience the actor undergoes in her work. In point of fact, since there is no possibility for the actor to perceive herself during the accomplishment of her gesture, entangled as she is in her lack of consciousness and memory, no spectacle exists in the gratuitousness of the actor’s gesture. Such a speculation on the actor’s gesture offers an occasion for a vision of performance informed by the knowledge the actor derives from the act of performing. Where previous artists, such as Barba and Grotowski, have demonstrated the actor’s central role in understanding the intellectual foundation of performance, Bene emphasizes the philosophical side of such intellectual reach. More specifically, he seeks an alternative system of critical thought which opposes western aesthetics and its concepts of representation and subject. His intellectual attempt has its roots in Antonin Artaud’s anti-metaphysical argument and embraces Gilles Deleuze’s theories of difference and time. Bene locates in the actor’s gesture a unique opportunity to bypass the representation of performance and its chronology and to gain a state of difference in the instant of the event. He opposes the staged action—usually reconstructed from the text, planned with the director, and composed of a set of actions during rehearsals—with the instant in which the gesture happens. Writing about Bene and his legacy in “Attore del deserto” (“Actor of the desert”), Italian theatre historian Antonio Attisani (2014) states:

The most relevant question that he poses—one of the most compelling for the present and the future of theatre—is that of the actor as a herald of difference: “author” and performer of difference, passeur, yet not on behalf of any third party. (Attisani, 2014: 2; translation mine)

A tale of paradox

In Lorenzaccio, Bene describes a paradox in the performer’s gesture through the historical figure of Lorenzino De’ Medici. Lorenzino De’ Medici gained the derogatory suffix -accio, to form Lorenzaccio, because he vandalized ancient monuments in Rome, which Bene interprets as the deeds of an anti-humanist and a history felon. In the essay, Bene uses the word Lorenzaccio not only as a nickname for Lorenzino but also as an attribute: Lorenzaccio, when used as an attribute meaning “Lorenzaccian,” defines the quality of the actor’s gesture in Bene’s post-theatre. Before narrating the murder of Duke Alessandro, which occurs at the end of the essay, Bene pauses on one historical fact and speculates upon its meaning throughout the work, focusing on its Lorenzaccian quality. He narrates Lorenzino’s damage to the statues on the Arch of Constantine in Rome, explaining how Lorenzino’s vandalism was undertaken as if in preparation for the murder of the Duke. Damaging a central symbol of the prestige of the Roman and Christian political power from the past connects to attacking his contemporary Renaissance political power, the aesthetic of which takes inspiration from the Classics.

Bene’s reinterpretation of Lorenzino’s story as an actor’s story fully unfolds in its paradox when Lorenzino cannot perform his plan. At each attempt, the object that he is about to destroy makes a sound as if shattering only seconds before he strikes them:

Under the Roman moon of that night, armed with a random tool, he [Lorenzino] started at those petrified heads: his gesture was anticipated by the noise produced; the tuff crushed down before it was hit. Lorenzino, bewildered, struck a second and a third time, and again the statues crumbled into ruins in the form of an amplified sound before being hit by his barbaric intent. The sonic happening preceded the gestural dynamic. (Bene, 1995: 11)

By speculating upon Lorenzino De Medici’s perception, with an explicit leap, Bene expands the territory of history into that of phenomenology and performance theory. With a narrative trick that shifts the linear principle of cause and effect, Bene removes the moment of performing from chronology and history, emphasizing its phenomenological foundations instead. Unrepresentable and unattainable, the actor’s gesture lives in the very instant of its processual development; the sense of its act is not to be found in the representation derived from the sequence of the actor’s juxtaposed actions. In other words, for Bene, performing lives in the event, not in the action. The difference between event-act-gesture and representation-action-narrative is perceptible by detecting the process of the actor’s Lorenzaccian gesture, which defines Bene’s vision of performing as a critical phenomenon.

Such theory on the gesture as missed action is concretized in the performance. In enacting Lorenzino, Bene must act in time before the sound produced by Contini occurs. However, Bene’s attempts are all in vain, and he becomes increasingly lost in the asynchronous happening of his gestures. Creating real-time asynchrony within a limited time frame is not a simple task. To enact Lorenzino’s asynchronous gestures and consequent bewildered oblivion, Bene never took part in the rehearsals. Although he conceived and directed the entire performance, he wanted to perform in a bodymind state that was not prepared to respond to the reverse of the cause-effect principle. Therefore, a body double attended the rehearsals for Bene, and prepared with the two actors performing Duke Alessandro and Contini. For his role, then, Bene chose a specific actor training consisting of the absence of rehearsals. Recalling his performance on a popular Italian talk show, the “Maurizio Costanzo Show,” Bene recounted:

I had to be after him [Contini]. Staying after him without coinciding for large intervals of time prevented me from thinking about where I was, about my embodiment, who I was. There was no time because I was forced to grab any object! I heard so, and I would do that, but casually [I heard a sound, and I would make a gesture connected to this sound, but I would pick the gesture casually—author’s note] … casually, like in life. (YouTube, 2015)

In Bene’s view, this type of un-acting becomes instrumental in criticizing history and theatre through de-thinking the western coordinates of logical thought. He attempts to find a way to dismantle the representational systems in which history and theatre maintain the Hegelian subject: Bene’s actor finds a different agency that eliminates intentionality by counter-acting chronology and narration, and also by disrupting consciousness and identity. In representation, the consequentiality of cause and effect composes the subject’s action. By displacing such consequentiality, Bene exhibits the performer’s experience as a negation of the subject. ⁷ In describing the actor’s bewilderment at the asynchrony and oblivion of her gesture, Bene negates the possibility of accounting for the experience of the actor’s gesture. As the actor builds an experience that cannot be recounted, what she brings forth in performing as a herald of difference (to once more use Attisani’s words) emerges precisely in losing consciousness of herself: the difference is the emptiness the actor finds in such an experience.

With Lorenzaccio, Bene envisions a post-theatre that attempts to rethink performance. This vision includes getting rid not only of representation as the foundation of modern western theatre but also of the post-modern offshoots of western theatre. Being post-, the category of the postmodern still depends, albeit in critical contrast, upon the values of modern tradition, whereas Bene designs a post-theatre that attempts to de-conceptualize modernity and its derivatives. In other words, a theatre that is done with theatre altogether, as informed by the modern tradition. By investigating the act of performing instead of the performed action and by doing so through the actor’s gesture in place of her psychology and identity, Bene displays a theatre that un-does representation. De-thinking actions, he creates a post-theatre of the void, made of gratuitous acts. Bene identifies in the actor’s gesture the potentiality of envisioning a non-representational model for the theatre. The actor is the repository of this embodied philosophy. As theatre becomes an instrument of critique derived from enacted thinking, the de-thinking quality of such a critique ends, we will see, with the actor’s bewilderment.

From history to the phenomenology of performing

In spite of his argument for a post-theatre which witnesses the impossibility of describing the performer’s act, Bene allows us to dig into the actor’s experience of performing and its gratuitousness. The gestural phenomenon in which the effect precedes the action constantly repeats throughout Bene’s Lorenzaccio, serving his conceptualization of performing. The actor catches her gesture inside a gap where the logic of chronology and intentionality cracks, allowing us to indulge in her missed experience. “Lorenzaccio is that gesture that disapproves of itself in its happening. He disapproves of taking action,” writes Bene (1995: 9), aiming to theorize a total disconnect between intention, gesture, and effect. Lorenzino’s failure in experiencing his actions gives Bene a via negativa to create a language that philosophically engages the actor’s very moment of performing. By interpreting the concept of acting as oblivion and absence instead of identification and embodiment, Bene pursues a theatre of emptiness.

Reflecting upon Bene’s work as an ambitious project that addresses performing as pointlessness—as if in a constructive aesthetic of the vain—Maurizio Grande (1986) asks in “La grandiosità del vano” (“The grandeur of the vain”):

Can that which is vain be grandiose? Does greatness exist in not striking, in failing the target, in missing the strike? Moreover: does greatness exist in the clamorous gesture of which we miss the consequences? Does it exist in an action that doesn’t reach its end? Can we call action the gesture that affirms its pointlessness [vanità]? Not only its insufficiency, its crisis, its negation, but its pointlessness; that is, its gratuitousness, the renunciation to subscribe any project, and, above all, the renunciation to be responsible for the modification of the situation, maintaining ourselves responsible exclusively for the moment of the act? (Grande, 1986: 87; translation mine)

Bene speculates on the experience of the gesture from an actor’s perspective. His actor does not seize the representation of the action by going after the integrity of the gesture necessary to accomplish the action. She endeavors to find the experience of the gesture by catching its performatic process. However, as a result, she misses it, becoming lost within a fuzzy temporality. As Bene talks of gesture and act, he captures the experience of the actor as lack of being, lack of memory; non-act, non-place, utopia—events that are not. He writes:

Removed from the statute of the action, the actor is the one who removes herself from a project, from the reproduction of sense … All the rest is theatre. It is a spectacle of memory, without the gratuitousness of the unavailable act, which is inappropriate to action and its concept. (Bene, 1995: 35)

Defining agere as the actor’s gesture, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Agamben (1999: 78) observes: “Gesture is always the gesture of being at a loss in language”. Through gestures, the actor experiences a linguistic loss that takes her beyond language and makes her enter the domain of experience. ⁸ For both Agamben and Bene, the actor’s gesture becomes the milieu of experience in place of language. It is interesting to read Agamben’s concept of experience alongside Bene’s idea of onnipotenza bambina, “child omnipotence”. Talking of his Pinocchio during an interview held on November 22, 1998, Bene (2010, p. 15) stated: “It is a speech on child omnipotence. In Pinocchio, there is nostalgia for what never was”. The phrasing “what never was” can be associated with Agamben’s theory of the lack of language in infancy—a forgotten experience for the adult. In Infanzia e Storia: Distruzione dell’Esperienza e Origine della Storia (Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience), Agamben (1993 [1978]: 57) observes: “In terms of human infancy, experience is the simple difference between the human and the linguistic. The individual as not already speaking, as having been and still being an infant—this is experience”. By linking the two passages from Agamben, we can identify in the gesture a trace of the experience of infancy—when the child is precluded from the ability to speak—whereas Bene uses a Lorenzaccian gesture to resist the rhetoric of the discourse. They both find in the gesture the potentiality to detect a quality of experience precluded from experiences depending on representational languages and chronological narratives.

Lorenzino De’ Medici’s case provides Bene with the occasion to speculate on the nature of the gesture accomplishing the act—two words that complete the larger concept of action. To Bene, the act seizes the action in its process; specifically, the act occurs through a performatic gesture detecting a moment in which the subject is outside of her consciousness and left without memory or language ability. The action is the intent-and-result of that act. The action is what is left: the linguistic part that gets represented and historicized. Thus, the act (intended as the performatic gesture in the action, its crucial moment) and the action (intended as pre-intention carried to its completion) are part of the same project including two different principles. They are the principle of existence, or, we could say, existence in vain, and the principle of representation. They are opposite systems because, to Bene, the act happens as soon as the project embedded in the action falls short of its intentionality: following the aesthetic of the vain, it is de-projected. ⁹ The actor deploys the event of her gesture in vain.

In place of historicized representations, Bene’s Lorenzino enacts events performed without memory and beyond the analysis of the subject’s identity; events of which there is no experience left for the performer to recount the (hi)story of. The very moment of performing, as an act, overcomes the attempt of recounting it, thus revealing history as a receptacle of actions emptied of the subject’s experience. Defining the event, in Logique du Sens (The Logic of Sense), Deleuze (1990 [1969]) emphasizes the process instead of the result of an action. He writes: “The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed” (Deleuze, 1990 [1969]: 149). ¹⁰ Such processual temporality applies to the experiential quality of Bene’s type of gesture. The event, and with it the gesture, stresses the transformational experience that performance initiates in place of discourse.

In Bene’s interpretation of Lorenzino De’ Medici’s deeds, Lorenzino acts in a temporality that, rather than being sequential, infinitely splits itself into past and future, thus negating the subject’s consciousness of the present moment. Talking of Lorenzino’s assassination of Alessandro De’ Medici, Bene (1995: 10) writes: “Infinite future past perfect; never present. There is no criminal. To commit a crime is to miss. A crime is the emptiness of the project-crime. The reality of the project is its vertigo, ultimately unthinkable and empty.” This paradoxical perception of time in performing shares the Stoic concept of the aion, which Deleuze draws from to describe the temporality of the actor’s act (a time perceived as an expanded present). Deleuze locates the extended present of the aion in the instant of the event: “It is no longer the future and the past which subvert the existing present; it is the instant which perverts the present into inhering future and past” (Deleuze, 1990 [1969]: 165). Deleuze opposes aion to chronos, offering us a way to detect the instant that Lorenzino attempts to grab.

The now-then that Bene is after can be identified with the temporality of the aion: “This present of the Aion representing the instant is not at all like the vast and deep present of Chronos: it is the present without thickness, the present of the actor, dancer, or mime—of the pure perverse ‘moment’” (Deleuze, 1990 [1969]: 168). Deleuze describes the time of the actor’s act as counter-action, which well expresses Lorenzino’s intent to counter-act representation and historicism: “It is not the present of subversion or actualization, but that of the counter-actualization” (Deleuze, 1990 [1969]: 168). In Lorenzaccio, Lorenzino counter-acts the Hegelian subject as the main actor of a capitalized history, its narrative of power. In the asynchrony of the instant-aion lies a resistance, in which both Deleuze and Bene see the actor’s agency, her ability to enact the very essence of performing: its gratuitous gesture. Since “the Aion endlessly subdivides the event and pushes away past as well as future, without ever rendering them less urgent,” writes Deleuze (1990 [1969]: 150), “the actor belongs to the Aion … It is in this sense that there is an actor’s paradox; the actor maintains himself in the instant to act out something perpetually anticipated and delayed, hoped for and recalled”. Where the actions of Deleuze’s actor develop through acts that deploy a non-linear time—the compositional time of poetry and, potentially, performance—the time of Bene’s actor is an anti-time that passes through emptiness. Accordingly, although existing in the present, the actor cannot recount that event-like experience, for the event of performing her gesture escapes her consciousness. In this way, Bene demonstrates to be far from bestowing ontological principles on performance: unable to be grasped in its essence, performing escapes further definition. The gesture is the phenomenon of an experience that is chronologically and ontologically impossible to account for, blocked forever within a temporal gap, where the performer indulges in the experience of a lack of consciousness and intention.

And back: From the phenomenology of performing to history

Since the experience of the act leaves no trace for the performer herself, Bene, in describing Lorenzino’s impressions and thoughts, writes as an omniscient narrator for the performer. Yet he is implying that no one should talk about such a gesture but the performer who experiences it.

Taking Lorenzaccian actions means to disregard intention, not, beware, to hinder the result, but to support it [secondarlo]—second, in any case. The act is neither first nor second, for it has no place in the world of the actor. The actor is out of place in her effort. (Bene, 1995: 33)

At such an impasse, the gesture serves to reveal the complexity behind the action. Because Lorenzino’s actions involve historical facts and monuments, and because the concept of the action itself is ultimately history’s primary material, in Lorenzaccio such gratuitousness in the actor’s gesture also applies to actions that form the construct of history. Thus, writing from the perspective of failure, loss, and emptiness inherent in the aesthetic of the vain, Bene negates the utility of historiographical reconstruction. Bene’s Lorenzino, a performer on the stage and in history, cannot but find history to be meaningless: history is but a container for actions that have lost any trace of their experience in the moment they were accomplished. History emerges as a representation of actions that force a linking-together of empty gaps in which the experience of each action had once resided: “What is left is the ‘misdeed,’ of which all historicism is proud: the misrecognition of each fact, delivered from the void to the heresy of the unreal history of being” (Bene, 1995: 10). A deluded and deceiving project, history loses the experience of the facts it narrates. Monuments exemplify such a loss: though attempting to recall the past, they often represent a partisan vision and make a rhetorical report that is empty of the witnessing value experience grants. Thus, in destroying monuments, Bene’s Lorenzino acts against the cult of historicism. ¹¹

Such a leap from history to phenomenology—and vice versa—ends with a provocation. Since we cannot be present in our actions, the chronological line of facts history traces turns out to be a chain of aborted intentions: “Every action, albeit comprehensible, is unthinkable, and History is a hypothesis of the antecedent, or the dictionary of the never happened” (Bene, 1995: 10). To Bene, history as temporal and cultural reconstruction is inherently a fake project, and a project conducted in vain because it relies on gaps in the consciousness of its subjects. Bene’s provocative statement has the role of destabilizing at its root the humanist conception of history as a rational progression of causes and effects, as an explication given from an external position, and ultimately as an analysis made from a dominant point of view—who writes history? Bene’s pessimistic perspective on history, historicism, and historiography promotes a philosophy of present and presence: “Numeration and nomination are what history is; historiography of the dead, which excludes me. Alive, I am incomprehensible to history, in the same way that history does not concern me” (Bene, 1995: 10). Lorenzino cannot ever be aware of what he is doing, thinking, or feeling in the very moment of his acts. His intention dazes him and leaves him alone in his gesture, as much as being in the act confounds his intentionality. Bewildered at the clash between intention and gesture, effect and movement, and sound and thought, Lorenzino cannot be aware of the process of his action in its entirety: he executes his acts in full oblivion. Thus, if the past is impossible to reconstruct, the present is also impossible to detect. This latter impossibility causes the former.

Although both conceptually and perceptually there is no way for Lorenzino to avoid such an impasse, Bene theorizes a possibility by further speculating upon Lorenzino’s deeds. Obsessed with history’s failure in reporting the experience of his actions, Lorenzino discovers a provisional way out of the impasse. He finds a solution in carefully studying the asynchrony of his gestures while performing them, precisely as he tries to catch up with such asynchrony:

As if he were playing for the Florentine copies [paintings], he damned himself to run after his steps, his movements, his gestures hesitating at their own resonance, trying in vain to diminish the interval of his already unsustainable delay … If, for example, he heard, the amplified crushing of a plate on marbles, he would grab the closest object and hurl it onto a deaf carpet: he deluded himself of decreasing that delay … He yielded to the already done, the already happened (in his mind, elsewhere), to resist on the stage at all costs. What an incredible movie, if the shooting followed the already dubbed. (Bene, 1995: 28)

Valuing such asynchrony as the very core of the act of performing, Bene (1995: 27) is “interested, about the Lorenzaccio case, in what of the fact was not, the never happened, instead of the fact sheet of its redacted misconstructions.” Performance becomes a zero point, a tabula rasa that, to overcome the modern tradition of intentionality and its (impossible) representation, should remain as such—gratuitous and unplanned. To Bene, this reconstruction of the process of the gesture is possible only through performance. Such reconstruction is not a domain of history.

Act as gap

In recounting a paradoxical version of Lorenzino De’ Medici’s life, Bene offers a reflection on the gap existing between the present tense of the act and the attempt history makes of reconstructing it as an action. Bene looks at history as an external construction, as a representation that misses both its object and the subject of its object. His intervention, however, is not limited to merely offering a critique. His critique of history focuses elsewhere: on the domain of performance. Bouncing back and forth from history to performance, Bene speculates upon the phenomenological process of the gesture inherent in each act. He analyzes the performer’s bodymind state in which the gesture is created—its sound, form, rhythm, and the real-time thoughts that belong to that event. For Bene, there is no barrier between thought and act, or between sound and gesture. What occurs is their failed timing: as Lorenzino goes after his gesture and attempts in vain to catch it before its sound effect, he finds himself in a syncopated rhythm. Here the sound starts in levare, and the gesture always strikes the beat too late, albeit immediately afterward. This time-lag syncopation separates intention from the action, dismantling in the act stable distinction of the Subject and the Other. In La Syncope: Philosophie du Ravissement (Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture), Catherine Clément (1994 [1990]) observes that the term syncope identifies an interruption of natural time. ¹² To her, syncope is linked to the idea of breaking, leaving, and yielding. Such interruption also carries the idea of renouncing the subject, letting go of the coherence of one’s identity. Syncope can only be hinted at; it can never be described except in negative terms. Likewise, although the gesture of Bene’s actor is ineffable for lack of memory of its experience, its syncopated asynchrony contains the key to approaching its essence.

The syncopation that Bene describes in Lorenzaccio serves to reach a forma mentis inviting to transhumanize—Lorenzino aspires to exist in his ecstatic perceptions and aesthetic reasoning, beyond being coherent to his identity and social role. As Attisani writes in Un dio assente: Monologo a due voci sul teatro (An absent god: A two voices monologue about theatre), “Above all, [Bene] talks of theatre as an occasion to transhumanize: the passing beyond the human condition, which is considered … as an inescapable starting point to reach elsewhere” (Attisani et al., 2006: 12; translation mine). ¹³ Lorenzino’s attempt to dwell consciously in the act of performing aims to transhumanize. However, the syncopated gestural process becomes increasingly mechanized and less conscious in the race against time, as Lorenzino exhausts his energy and ability to repeat and vary his gestures. Intentionality is weakened and will be finally lost. Ultimately, the slight asynchrony detected in the gesture that Lorenzino desperately attempts to fill up is revealed to be insolvable, increasingly expanding the difference in time into a relative absolute, as we find in Zeno’s paradox of the tortoise and Achilles.

After countless spasmodic attempts, Lorenzino can find a way out of the syncopated mechanism of missing his gesture only in fainting. Again, unconsciousness clashes with history’s pretense of detecting the logic of facts and the intentions of its main characters. Through syncopated gestures that help him transhumanize, Lorenzino ends up fainting. As Dante repeatedly faints in front of the divine manifestation, so Lorenzino-Bene cannot but faint in front of the incommensurability of his gesture. Passing over the arc of time that goes from pre-modern performance to contemporary attempts of going “post,” the tradition of fainting speaks to the ineffability of present and presence via transhumanizing gestures—over and over again.

Conclusion, with a coda

In the end, the assassination of Duke Alessandro seems to take place. This time, instead of indulging in describing the gap between the memory and consciousness of Lorenzino’s actions, Bene narrates with very few words how Lorenzino murdered the Duke in his bedroom. Once more, Lorenzino loses consciousness while perpetrating his action. The reader has by then gained the (a)logic of the process. Unexpectedly, an abrupt ending to the essay complicates the conclusion. In a postmodern coda to the tale, Bene places Lorenzino inside a museum, standing in front of a work of art. While staring at the portrait of Duke Alessandro De’ Medici by Bronzino, with a pair of scissors in his hands a Lorenzino-performer living in 1986 realizes that the Duke is dead—yet his memory survives safe and untouched behind a window in the Uffizi Gallery. ¹⁴ Thus, in the structural time leap which seals the metatheatrical goal underlying the entire piece, the grand finale of the murder is announced at first but finally suspended. Such a suspension this time occurs not because of the asynchrony inherent in the action, but because of the role that the system of representation performs in Lorenzaccio. Representation subtly transverses Bene’s philosophical tale, from a monument to be destroyed to the undefeated subject of a painting; in disenchanted reflections on the legacy of humanism and theatre history; and through the Medici history until the economy of museums. Likewise, performing withdraws in a mirror maze that confounds the plans of subject and history, act and representation, and (de-)thinking and intentionality.

In spite of much syncopation and fainting, at the end of Lorenzaccio, the representational apparatus supporting history is ultimately restored. Still, the restoration occurs after such a dense critique that the power of the system diminishes. Written during the rise of postmodernism, Bene’s Lorenzaccio looks at historicism with a critical approach. It ridicules evolutionary and universalistic claims, emphasizing what historicism leaves buried: the subject who experiences the actions constituting history in favor of the subject who writes history. Alongside historicism, Bene—as an actor, director, writer, and intellectual—criticizes the superimposing roles of plot and character that modern theatre and theatre historiography cultivate in place of the actor’s experience of performing. Lorenzaccio is the tale of an actor caught in his philosophical speculation about the meaning of the performatic gesture.

Yet with his idea of post-theatre, Bene’s Lorenzaccio ultimately aims to go even beyond the postmodern emphasis on the process. Although in describing Lorenzino’s dismay Bene shifts the substance of performing from the outcome of the action to its process, his attempt to describe the experience lived during such process is destined to fail. In doing so, Bene brings the attention to the act. Its mechanism is first studied in the enactment of each gesture, then forgotten in the oblivious repetition of such gesture, and finally reported on, exclusively via negativa. Lorenzaccio offers an anti-humanist memorandum: the impossibility of recalling experience. Bene’s post-theatre is a theatre of the immemoriale (that which cannot be remembered). ¹⁵ Through the immemore (without memory) quality of his gesture, an illuminating idea of performatic act finds existence: the empty act, the act without a subject. Performance is a philosophical praxis that unfolds in the act rather than the subject. The actor stands in place of the subject. There is only the actor, who acts without memory and consciousness. This type of actor constitutes the performance sine qua non. Playwright and director yield to her.

Proposing the actor as the filter for understanding the action’s phenomenology in a world where information is shaped by media and where knowledge is structured by-and-as power, to follow Foucault, has its implications. Where media and power manipulate the telling of an event, the actor possesses the “secret” way of acting it out. Thus, as Bene denounces historiographical practices of reconstructing, interpreting, and narrating the events to be vain and misleading endeavors, he invites concentration upon the making as failure and dismay and encourages analysis of the qualitative difference brought in by such making. With Lorenzaccio, Bene reclaims for the actor her essential contribution to the understanding of performing as philosophical and critical praxis. He not only promotes a singular philosophy of performance but also builds a philosophy in performance, that is, a philosophical vision which unfolds from and while performing—through performing. It is a vision nonexistent without its praxis.

Bene’s critical construct mines the reading of Aristotelian drama as the representation of the subject’s action, upon which western modern drama and theatre are built. It is worth clarifying how Bene’s theatre of the gesture does not embrace avant-garde theories of a theatre of experience. For the Lorenzaccian actor, no memory exists of her performatic act—whether discourse or experience. Only an abyssal vertigo remains to be interrogated. This is the only part of the performance that can be represented. This way, performance is the milieu of an ineffable experience. Only failing the repetitious attempts of catching it, as it forces the performer to deconstruct her process, gets her closer to its description. The actor becomes a new type of subject: a powerless one, isolated within the confines of her act. Such isolation makes of her a thinker. The gap in the consciousness that her gesture provokes works as a tabula rasa from which the actor-thinker can start to formulate questions. The subject of the empty act is performatic: the passage goes from being and remembering to doing and interrogating.

Bene’s post-theatre is post: post subject and post memory. In this vision, the ancient Greek word drama means action solely to the extent of a verb deprived of subject, complement, and contextualizing adverb: an act. This act eradicates the spectator’s judgment on the actor and the action, as well as the actor’s subjugation to her viewer and the obligation to represent. It enables a type of autopoietic thinking, of which the actor becomes the first witness—that is, the first spectator and theorist. In a time where landmark works—such as The Show Must Go On (2001) by Jérôme Bel or Electric Party (2009) by the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards—have marked performance through pedestrian actions ironically emptying them of any commentaries, or have used performance as a vehicle for what Grotowski and Richards called “a transformation of energy,” the critical thinking deriving from Bene’s syncopated gesture is eloquent (Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, n.d.). After all, the post-theatre which Bene envisioned might have finally begun its transhumanizing agenda.