HyperCultura (Apr 2020)
Constructing Philippe Rousseau’s Self through Text and Musical Theatre
Abstract
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Philippe Rousseau began writing and creating. His text Je me souviens mon père was published in 2003. A few months later Rousseau turned his text into a theatre play, including music and acting; he represented himself on stage. Soon afterwards, more texts were produced: Passeport pour une Russie (which was also rewritten as a theatre play) talks about his wanderings in the north of Russia, while Feintes attentes (a poetico-erotic dialogue) and La personne qui te har take into discussion an experience of harassment in addition to a self-representation. This paper proposes a dialogue between the literary critic-researcher, on the one hand, and the author-artist, on the other, a conversation between theory and practice, in short, two ways through which the intellectual and emotional Self can be inserted into the narrative. The theories of autofiction in the literary text, in Rousseau’s visual and theatrical art, as well as in music echo the author-artist’s lived and integrated practice (Leroux, 2004). According to Doubrovsky (2007), and from what Judith Butler problematizes about in Le Récit de soi, not only at the level of an actor, but also at that of the human being in general, the truthfulness and authenticity of the “I” or “me” reside in the subject defining itself/being defined through the possibility of saying, speaking, telling the Self. In addition, the paper reflects on the ethical conditions related to the fictionalised showing of the Self.
