Toward a Dramatic World: The Latest Resurgence of Drama and Speculative Materialism

Abstract

This essay has two aims: it tries, first, to demonstrate that there is an unignorable correlative relationship between the current resurgence in the popularity of stage plays and the meteoric rise of Speculative Materialism, a philosophical school led by Quentin Meillassoux, and, second, to elicit a useful insight for contemporary people who live in an era when the postmodern relativism has run into a snag. Concretely, the first part shows that any drama enjoins its audience to assent to the ‘dramatic premise’, which is a set of implicit presuppositions. The second part analyzes the fundamental tenets of Speculative Materialism, and points out that there is a curious similitude between the ‘dramatic premise’ and the perspective which the new philosophy urges us to adopt. The last part concludes the discussion by proposing a possible worldview that can be drawn from the investigation into the similarity between the outwardly irrelevant items.

Keywords

• philosophy
• interdisciplinary studies
• drama