A Comparative Study on Diderot's and Zeami's Acting Theory from a Deconstructionist Perspective

Abstract

A Comparative Study on Diderot's and Zeami's Acting Theory from a Deconstructionist Perspective This paper examines the paradoxes and contradictions underlying Denis Diderot's following discourse on acting: no inherent sensibility is sufficient to result in a great actor who can create emotionally sublime moments. As a defender of sensibility in creating art, Diderot's discourse on acting is seemingly paradoxical, reflecting his mechanist thought in the Enlightenment. His fundamental aesthetics aim to capture an ideal in its purest form that eliminates all that is inconclusive or ambiguous. In Diderot's discourse on acting, actor's reason and emotion are binary oppositions in which one has to be devalued in order to justify the dominance of the other. Following Jacques Derrida's deconstructionist perspective, I reread Diderot's paradoxes and contradictions not through "either A or B" but through "neither A nor B" or "A and B" of the binary oppositions. Zeami Motokiyo's nô acting theory influenced by the basic premise of Zen Buddhism accordingly reflects, in my opinion, the way of the deconstructionist reading that understand the binary oppositions not as incompatible contradictions but as complementary elements. Investigating the discourses of the two great acting theorists from the perspectives of Derrida's deconstruction and Zen Buddihism, I assert that Diderot's emphasis on mechanical value on his acting theory suggests an expressive harmony of reason and emotion or thought and language, even though his text fails to grasp a vital mode of perception. Zeami's theory, on the other hand, can illuminate the gap and disruption between words and meanings as how Zen Buddihism perceives the relationship between language and thought.