en

Mario Telò

2025

OpenAlex

According to Blanchot, “disaster is its imminence…what escapes the very possibility of experience.” This notion of disaster confounds the Derridean a-venir, since it concerns “what one cannot welcome except as the immanence that gratifies.” In this chapter, I use Blanchot’s engagement with Derrida as well as Derrida’s discussion of him in Demeure to reconsider the sense of disaster in Euripides’ Bacchae. Instead of focusing on the Maenads’ vitalistic rage, I linger on an apparently problematic scene: the enactment of Dionysian transgender rituals by two old men, Tiresias and Cadmus. Their jouissance lies in a gratifying passivity before the imminence that, for Blanchot, is dis-aster. In this scene, a prolonged present provoked by a not-yet-materialized catastrophic present evokes the temporality of the “gimmick,” which, for Sianne Ngai, confronts us with “a mode of bad contemporaneity akin to an elongated present.” I dwell on the temporality of hesitation as an alternative that Bacchae offers to the manic claims of decision-making and the future. While waiting is at once an unwelcome intrusion in the Covid era and the perennial condition of the migrants and refugees denied coevalness, in the context of the play the “arrival” (venir) of a “lack” (a-) constituted by the act of waiting and the in-decision of the present’s immobility has the potential to forestall the deceptively liberating future of ecstatic Dionysian time, replacing it with an extended (differently) Dionysian chronicity.

book-chapter

Punctum Books

History | Philosophy