Articles

Postdramatic Katharsis and Milo Rau's Global Realism

---

Abstract

In his recent book Re-claiming the Future: An Essay,1 Milo Rau argues for a Global Realism that can contest the nihilism of contemporary capitalism through the establishment of strategic global alliances.2 What interests me in this article is how his artworks seek to represent the subject of Global Realism as an ideological construct that enables katharsis to occur between this subject and the imagined, utopian global polity they would belong to. Such a katharsis is anti-mimetic (and therefore also anti-Aristotelian) in the sense that Rau evokes the potential existence of this global polity outside of the bounds of the theater by evoking the democratic, socio-political processes that would be able to realize such a polity. Therefore, Rau’s blending of documentary-style narrative with mythical tropes falls within the postdramatic tradition of katharsis because it plays with the representation of pain as well as the pain itself, disallowing the audience from identifying with a traditionally distant tragic hero and yet suggesting that katharsis would still be possible from a globally realist standpoint. By focusing on two of Rau’s major works – The New Gospel (2020) and Antigone in the Amazon (2023) – and reading them against theories of democracy from Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero, I try to uncover the universality behind Rau’s combined aesthetic-political project, which he alludes to in Reclaiming the Future but does not fully explain. Finally, through a reading of the play The Trojan Women by Euripides in combination with the recent book Letters from Gaza: By the People, From the Year That Has Been (2025) written by various poets in a city under siege, I propose a speculative case study to advance the anti-mimetic, globally realist katharsis outlined in this article. By focusing on the universality of the pity and fear evoked in The Trojan Women as a blurring of the identification between victor and victim –or, in postdramatic terms, between audience and actor or spectator and hero – I suggest that a speculative, globally realist katharsis would also be possible in this conflict. In this sense, this article is inspired by Rau’s claim that “perhaps (this) is the basis of every poetics: that somebody suffers something, and that somebody else can witness it: to be with this person, so that they are not alone” (2023, 117). 

Keywords: katharsis, democracy, Global Realism

How to Cite:

Parkhowell, L., (2025) “Postdramatic Katharsis and Milo Rau's Global Realism”, Documenta 43(1): 4, 109–139. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/documenta.94048