A Different Approach to the Â•Œtheater of The

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ISBN 978-3-89975-251-9 CULTURA CULTURA INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE CULTURA AND AXIOLOGY Founded in 2004, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy 2011 of Culture and Axiology is a semiannual peer-reviewed jour- 1 2011 Vol VIII No 1 nal devoted to philosophy of culture and the study of value. It aims to promote the exploration of different values and cultural phenomena in regional and international contexts. The editorial board encourages the submission of manuscripts based on original research that are judged to make a novel and important contribution to understanding the values and cultural phenomena in the contemporary world. CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY CULTURE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY INTERNATIONAL

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY

Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology E-ISSN (Online): 2065-5002 (Published online by Versita, Solipska 14A/1, 02-482 Warsaw, Poland) ISSN (Print): 1584-1057

Advisory Board Prof. dr. Mario Perniola, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy Prof. dr. Paul Cruysberghs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Prof. dr. Michael Jennings, Princeton University, USA Prof. Emeritus dr. Horst Baier, University of Konstanz, Germany Prof. dr. José María Paz Gago, University of Coruña, Spain Prof. dr. Maximiliano E. Korstanje, John F. Kennedy University, Buenos Aires, Argentina Prof. dr. Nic Gianan, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines Prof. dr. Alexandru Boboc, Correspondent member of the Romanian Academy, Romania Prof. dr. Teresa Castelao-Lawless, Grand Valley State University, USA Prof. dr. Richard L. Lanigan, Southern Illinois University, USA Prof. dr. Fernando Cipriani, G.d’Annunzio University Chieti-Pescara, Italy Prof. dr. Elif Cirakman, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey Prof. dr. David Cornberg, University Ming Chuan, Taiwan Prof. dr. Carmen Cozma, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania Prof. dr. Nancy Billias, Department of Philosophy, Saint Joseph College, Hartford, USA Prof. dr. Christian Möckel, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany Prof. dr. Leszek S. Pyra, Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland Prof. dr. A. L. Samian, National University of Malaysia Prof. dr. Dimitar Sashev, University of Sofia, Bulgaria Prof. dr. Kiymet Selvi, Anadolu University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. dr. Traian D. Stănciulescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania Prof. dr. Gloria Vergara, University of Colima, Mexico

Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief: Co-Editors: Prof. dr. Nicolae Râmbu Prof. dr. Aldo Marroni Faculty of Philosophy and Social- Facoltà di Scienze Sociali Political Sciences Università degli Studi G. d’Annunzio Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Via dei Vestini, 31, 66100 Chieti B-dul Carol I, nr. 11, 700506 Iasi, Romania Scalo, Italy [email protected] [email protected] Executive Editor: PD Dr. Till Kinzel Dr. Simona Mitroiu Englisches Seminar Human Sciences Research Department Technische Universität Braunschweig, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Bienroder Weg 80, Lascar Catargi, nr. 54, 700107 Iasi, Romania 38106 Braunschweig, Germany [email protected] [email protected]

Editorial Asssitants: Radu Vasile Chialda, Adina Romanescu, Marius Sidoriuc, Daniel Ungureanu Designer: Aritia Poenaru

Editorial Office Address: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, The Seminar of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, Carol I, nr. 11, 700506, Iasi, Romania, Tel.:0040/232/201054; Fax: 0040/232/201154; e-mail: [email protected]

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Cultura

International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology

Vol. 8, No. 1 (2011)

Editor-in-Chief Nicolae Râmbu

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CONTENTS

DEBATES and DIRECTIONS. AFRICAN STUDIES

Anton CARPINSCHI, Bilakani TONYEME Cultural Minorities and Intercultural Dialogue in the Dynamics of Globalization. African Participation 7

Jacob Ale AIGBODIOH Stigmatization in African Communalistic Societies and Habermas’ Theory of Rationality 27

Justina O. EHIAKHAMEN The Practice of Inheritance in Esan: the Place of the Female Child 49

Nicolito A. GIANAN Delving into the Ethical Dimension of Ubuntu Philosophy 63

Uyi-Ekpen OGBEIDE, Lambert Uyi EDIGIN Military Establishments and The Stability Of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic: Toward The Realization Of Vision 2020 83

Elvis IMAFIDON Rethinking the Individual’s Place in an African (Esan) Ontology 93

Francis Xavier GICHURU Creating a New Society, New Nation and New Leadership Quality in Kenya through African Traditional Education Principles 111

Solomon A. LALEYE Democracy in Conflict and Conflicts in Democracy: The Nigerian Experience 127

VIEWS upon ETHICS, TRUTH and LANGUAGE

Jim I. UNAH Self-discovery: Who am I? An Ontologized Ethics of Self-mastery 143

Seungbae PARK Defence of Cultural Relativism 159

Simona MODREANU A Different Approach to the “Theater of the Absurd”. With Special Reference to Eugene Ionesco 171

Mario PERNIOLA Impossible, yet real! 187

Simona MITROIU To collect in order to survive: Benjamin and the necessity of collecting 213

Radu Vasile CHIALDA Weak Barbarism 223

10.3726/975251_171 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 8(1)/2011: 171–186

A Different Approach to the “Theater of the Absurd” With Special Reference to Eugene Ionesco

Simona MODREANU Faculty of Letters, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi, Romania [email protected]

Abstract. The well-known label of “theater of the absurd” is based on the Aristotelian logic of the nonincluded middle, the common interpretation being that of the chaotic and irrational character of the universe, human destiny, and language. However, we propose another view on the subject, relying on the discoveries of quantum physics, the main principles of transdisciplinarity, and the literary theory of the possible worlds. We applied these ideas to some of Eugene Ionesco’s famous plays, concluding that absurd becomes an irrelevant notion if analyzed in this perspective. Keywords: theater of the absurd, quantum physics, transdisciplinarity, possible worlds, included middle

INTRODUCTION

Simple word structures often are too narrow and unable to efficiently transfer the subtleties of complexity. However, the same problem occurs periodically with the use of metaphors, syntagms, and labels. We resort to them to compress information and to render it imaginative and convincing, and we just let them be, ignoring the scientific, philoso- phical, and cognitive evolution that sometimes makes them obsolete and meaningless. In our opinion, it is the case with the already historical name of the “theater of the absurd” and its main representatives, especially Eugene Ionesco. The term was created by Martin Esslin in his 1962 book by that title1, and refers to the work of several dramatists who first emerged during and after World War II. Esslin considered these playwrights as giving artistic expression to Albert Camus’ existential philosophy, illus- trated in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, according to which life is inherently absurd. Not intending to show how reductive and caricatural this global judgment is, we only wish to mention here a few elements

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that argue against the viability of the notion “absurd” in the literature of the 1950s. There is a basis of existential philosophy in the theater of the absurd, but it is combined with dramatic elements to create a style of drama presenting a world that cannot be logically explained. As the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language2 states, the theater of the absurd is a form of drama that emphasizes the absurdity of human existence by using disjointed, repetitious, and meaningless dialogue, purposeless and confusing situations, and plots that lack realistic or logical development. Some common characteristics of absurdist plays include this general existential philosophy coupled with a rejection of narrative continuity, rigidity of logic, and a radical devaluation of language which is seen as a futile attempt to communicate the impossible. The general effect often is a nightmare or dreamlike atmosphere in which the protagonist is over- whelmed by the chaotic or irrational nature of his environment. Most absurdists also doggedly resist the traditional separation of farce and tragedy, intermixing the two at will and creating an unpredictable world that mirrors our own, in which the poignantly tragic may come upon the heels of the absurdly funny, or vice versa. Also, the theater of the absurd seems to have been a reaction to the disappearance of the religious dimension from contemporary life and can be seen as an attempt to re- store the importance of myth and ritual to our age, by making man aware of the ultimate realities of his condition and by instilling in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and primeval anguish. The absurd theater hopes to achieve this by shocking man out of an existence that has become trite, mechanical, and complacent. There is a mystical experience and a deep scientific approach in confronting the limits of human condition, both mystics and scientists attempting to thrust through the mystery. Our hypothesis mainly considers three paradigms that are all derived from the discoveries of the quantum physics which have changed the roots of our thinking and reality picture more than we are ready to admit. This metamorphosis also is visible in some artistic schools of the first decades of the 20th century, such as surrealism or Dadaism, both in painting and poetry. However, the theater’s evolution seems to have been envisaged in totally different parameters. Hence, according to the various but quite convergent definitions of the phenomenon, absurdity is the condition or state in which human beings exist in a senseless, irra-

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tional universe wherein people’s lives have no purpose or meaning. So, whereas the traditional theater attempts to create a photographic representation of life as we see it, the theater of the absurd aims to create a ritual-like, mythological, archetypal, and allegorical vision, closely related to the world of dreams. The essence of this attitude is the fact that most of the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away or discredited, pointing out the imperma- nence of values and the precarity of human existence. However, this is not only due to war and its horrible consequences but also to a change that is so extraordinary in its implications, of which, we often are unaware.

QUANTUM PHYSICS, TRANDISCIPLINARITY, AND POSSIBLE WORLDS THEORY

In an interview with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, for the TWM television3, the quantum physicist Nick Herbert states that reality is fuzzy, is crumbling, and it is ambiguous – that’s a word I like to use. Somehow ther’s a basic ambiguity at the center of the world – the center of the inanimate world, the unconscious world. So that’s the first reason why there are some formal resemblances between quantum theory and what the mind looks like from the inside. (...)We’re learning that the world is put together in such a strange way that it’s almost like reading science fiction. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. And this is certainly a strange way to make a universe. All the patterns are perfectly ordinary; they preserve space and time, and they’re separated at light speed. Yet the bricks that make up these patterns are not that way at all. They don’t know anything about space and time, and they’re connected instantaneously.4

Fuzzy, crumbling, and ambiguous – this is the astonishing description of the theater of the absurd’s universe, especially in Beckett’s and Ionesco’s plays. In his book, Quantum Reality5, Nick Herbert synthesizes the famous Copenhagen Interpretation, naming several types of realities, starting with the one approved by the major part of the scientific community (Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, etc.), according to which, there is no reality in the absence of an observation; therefore, the act of observation creates reality. The second type is the holistic one (with David Bohm and Fritjof Capra as leading members), assuming that reality is an indivisible

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whole and that subject and object are undivided parts of each other. The third reality is about a multiplying number of parallel universes created in each act of observation and is based on the idea of multiverse proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957. As for Schrödinger’s cat, it is a famous illustration of the principle of superposition, serving to demonstrate the apparent conflict between what quantum theory states to be true about the nature and behavior of matter on the microscopic level and what we observe to be true about the nature and behavior of matter on the macroscopic level. This experiment highlights the implications that accepting uncertainty at the microscopic level has on macroscopic objects. If you put a cat in a sealed box, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid, its life or death is dependent on the state of a subatomic radioactive particle. The observer cannot know whether an atom of the substance has decayed and, consequently, whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Because we cannot know, the cat is both dead and alive according to the quantum law, in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive). This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer’s paradox .

As the prefix “trans” indicates, transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines. Its goal is the understanding of the present world , of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.6

Essentially, transdisciplinarity is the study of correspondences between the different fields of knowledge. It is an inquiry method that goes beyond the dualism of opposing binary pairs: subject/object, subjectivity/objectivity, matter/consciousness, nature/divine, simplicity/complexity, reductionism/ holism, and diversity/unity which have marked the history of ideas for millennia. Similar to quantum physics, transdisciplinarity is radical – it goes to the roots of knowledge and questions our way of thinking and our construction and organization of knowledge, integrating the observer in the process of knowing. The three pillars of transdisciplinarity are the levels of Reality, the logic of the included middle, and complexity. Reality means that which resists our knowledge, experiences, representations, descriptions, images, or mathematical formalizations. For Basarab Nicolescu, one of the

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initiators and promoters of transdisciplinarity, the levels of organization exist at a single level of reality. He defines a level of reality as “an ensemble of systems which are invariant under the action of certain general laws.”7 For instance, quantum theory describes a completely different level of reality in that fundamental laws are not the same as those at the macrophysical level. The passage from one level to another can be better understood using Stéphane Lupasco’s logic of contradiction and complementarity. In the 1940s, through contact with quantum physicist Louis de Broglie, Lupasco developed what he called “le principe d’antagonisme” (the antagonism principle), a theory that formalizes the “logic of the included middle” and allows for a complete integration of the different levels of reality. The mainstay of the Western culture is the Aristotelian logic of “the excluded middle,” founded on three axioms: 1. The axiom of identity: A is A. 2. The axiom of noncontradiction: A is not non-A. 3. The axiom of the excluded middle: there exists no third term T which is at the same time A and non-A. Thus, in this view, the “middle” is seen as nonconnective and non- participatory to the logical construct. On the contrary,

(…) the logic of the included middle is a true logic, formalizable and formalized, multivalent (with three values: A, non-A, and T) and noncontradictory. Our understanding of the axiom of the included middle – there exists a third term T which is at the same time A and non-A – is completely clarified once the notion of “levels of reality” is introduced.8

“T,” in the transdisciplinary language, plays the role of a mediating and containing “ether” between the subject and the object, facilitating the interaction across multiple levels of reality, involving the essential notion of “simultaneity.” It is the included middle at a different level of reality. The logic of the included middle goes hand in hand with the theory of relativity and its self-referential space-time continuum, geometrically visualizable by the non-euclidian spherical space convention. Complex nature demands complex thought, and this century has seen the rise of chaos, complexity, and the nonlinear sciences. Edgar Morin has been calling for a new complex thinking for more than thirty years, asking for a radical reformulation in our organization of knowledge.9 For Basarab Nicolescu,

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the logic of the included middle is perhaps the privileged logic of complexity, privileged in the sense that it allows us to cross the different areas of knowledge in a coherent way, by enabling a new kind of simplicity.10

The notion of possible worlds can be traced back to the 17th century and Leibniz, who expressed the belief that our actual world was chosen as the best among an infinity of possible worlds that exist as thoughts in God’s mind. The theory of possible worlds is a modern adaptation of a Leibnizian concept and was originally developed by philosophers of the analytic school (Kripke, Lewis, Rescher) as a means to solve problems in formal semantics. In the 1970s, a group of literary scholars familiar with structuralist methods, such as Umberto Eco, discovered the explanatory potential of the possible worlds model for narrative and literary theory, but it is Marie-Laure Ryan who gave its most inclusive and clear description11. The basis of the theory is the idea that reality – as the sum of the imaginable – is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct elements and hierarchically structured by the opposition of one well- designated element, which functions as the center of the system. This central element is commonly interpreted as ‘the actual world,’ with the satellites as merely possible worlds. Ryan further divides the private worlds of characters into mental worlds (beliefs); static model-worlds, which capture how the actual world should or will be (obligations, desires, predictions); dynamic model-worlds; intention-worlds; and fantasy worlds, which outline new systems of reality, complete with their own actual and possible worlds (dreams, hallucinations, acts of imagination, and fictions within fictions). Although the idea of a centered system of reality is contrary to its ideology, the postmodern imagination has found, in the concepts of possible worlds theory, a productive plaything for its games of subversion and self-reflexivity. Modernists were haunted by questions, such as “What can I know about myself and about the world?” Postmodernists ask more radically: “What is a world?” “What makes a world real?” “Is there a difference in mode of existence between textual worlds and the world(s) I live in, or are all worlds created by language?” These are the interrogations that the theater of the absurd, among other genres of postmodern literature, carries around in its plays. Its ontological inquiry takes a variety of forms: (a) the challenge of the classical ontological model through branching plots that lead to plural

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actual worlds or through the blurring of the distinction between actuality and possibility – no world in the system assuming the role of the ontological center; (b) the blocking of the principle of minimal departure (that presupposes that a fictional world is an ontologically complete entity) through the creation of impossible or innumerable objects, inconsistent geographies, and radically incomplete beings; and (c) the subversion of the hierarchy of accessibility relations through the creation of hybrid worlds situated simultaneously very close and very far from experiential reality (like the dialogue of the Smiths in Ionesco’s Bald Soprano or that between the Teacher and the Pupil in The Lesson). Having Ryan’s claim that absurdist plays “may liberate their universe from the principle of noncontradiction”12 as a starting point, we tried to see the functioning of the above-mentioned distortions to the traditional theatrical laws in Ionesco’s universe. In his plays, the classification of a proposition as either true or false is extended because the system also includes the modal operators of necessity and possibility. For instance, logical contradictions make their appearance quite early in the text, when the protagonist couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, begins to talk about someone called Bobby Watson, who is first discussed as dead. However, immediately after this has been established, Mrs. Smith asks an odd question: “MRS. SMITH: And when do they plan to be married, those two? MR. SMITH: Next spring, at the latest.”13 To the readers’ surprise, the Smiths refer to Bobby Watson as if he were alive and about to get married, as if they had not just talked about their attending his funeral. Even more remarkable is the fact that Mr. Smith replies to his wife most naturally, without pointing out that her question comes in sheer contrast with the previous truth. They are not only building a possible world different from the actual world of the spectator/reader, they are going much further, simultaneously moving from a possible world to another, ignoring all accessibility relations. The fact that a person is discussed as being both dead and alive constitutes a logical impossibility, only in the Aristotelian view of the nonincluded middle. In a quantic picture of life, Bobby Watson is like Schrödinger’s cat: as long as we do not see him, his ontological state is one of the included middle, that is dead and alive. The Smiths are blessed with what James Christian calls “epistemic naivete”14; they have not begun (or maybe they have ceased) to question the origins, nature, and depend- ability of our information. They take everything for granted, as if Ionesco

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really wanted us to understand that in a parallel world, somewhere, somehow, they are right, as all the possibilities are true. Absurd drama subverts logic and relishes the unexpected and the logically impossible. According to Sigmund Freud, there is a feeling of freedom we can enjoy when we are able to abandon the straitjacket of logic. In trying to burst the bounds of common logic and language, the absurd theater tends to shatter the enclosing walls of the human condition itself. Our individual identity is defined by language; having a name is the source of our separateness – the loss of logical language brings us toward a unity with living things. In being illogical, the absurd theater is antirationalist: it negates rationalism because it feels that rationalist thought, like language, only deals with the superficial aspects of things. Nonsense, on the other hand, opens up a glimpse of the infinite, offers intoxicating freedom, brings one into contact with the essence of life, and is a source of marvelous comedy. What happened to old objective reality, the stronghold we all used to trust? Many ingenious scientists continue to investigate its disappearance. Subject/object, actual/virtual, presence/absence – these two slopes are not segregated poles, rather they are in constant interaction. With that out of the way, what we understand from Beckett’s words and his “passing judgment” is (a bit like a quantum-physics paradox) that once you go and define something as “absurd,” you have just passed judgment upon it which precludes you from being able to analyze its content – you just labeled it “absurd,” hence something that has no bearing on life as we know it to be. So far, the possible worlds theory has been applied to absurdist plays to account for the relationship between their fictional world and the actual world of the readers and how this can be linked to the creation of absurdity (for instance, Katerina Vassilopoulou15). However, we think it is time to outgrow certain beliefs that we have been operating with for too long because they are false. We live a remarkable moment in human history, and we need to change and adapt our view of the world, identity, state, causality, and so on. A profound revolution has taken place in our mind during the last couple of decades. Aristotle and Descartes were partly wrong, not even Einstein dared credit god with the liberty to play dice. From this point of view, we assert that there is no such thing as the “theater of the absurd.” Absurdity is the conclusion of the impossibility to accept contradictory facts or statements on a single level of reality.

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However, if we admit that the world does not function like we used to believe, or not only in this determined, linear way, the perspective is totally modified, and the absurd simply loses its content. A big literary and cognitive injustice might be cured if we accepted to free this wonderfully complex theater of its binar logical chains. It is said and repeated that one of the most important aspects of absurd drama was its distrust of language as a means of communication, as language had become a vehicle of conventionalized, stereotyped, and meaningless exchanges. It is true that words failed to express the essence of human experience, but we do not believe that the theater of the absurd constitutes an onslaught on language, showing it as a very unreliable and insufficient tool of communication. On the contrary, as shown in the example above, this theater restores the language’s primordial powers, in its simplest apparel, allowing the words to express a thing and its opposite as a means to avoid the freezing in a single meaning. Absurd dramas use conventionalized speech, clichés, slogans, and technical jargon, which distorts, parodies, and breaks down. By ridiculing these stereotyped speech patterns, the theater of the absurd tries to make people aware of the possibility of going beyond everyday speech conventions and communicating more authentically. Conven- tionalized speech acts as a barrier between ourselves and what the world is really about; to come into direct contact with natural reality, it is necessary to discredit and discard the false crutches of the noncontradictory logic that we use every day. So, words are set free; they play and turn around and upside down, like in children’s speech or like the “glossolalia,” the capacity to speak in languages you ignore and the force to invent and to wonder.

EUGENE IONESCO AND SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT

In a famous conversation, Einstein, anxious and slightly irritated, interpellates Niels Bohr: “You are not going to tell me that the moon doesn’t exist when I am not looking at it?” History has not registered Bohr’s answer, but the lecture of his texts and theories would rather lead to a sum of interrogations of the kind: How can I know it? What does “to exist” mean? All the notions we conveniently grew up with are reconsidered by quantum physics that teaches us, above all, that reality is something much more mysterious than we have ever imagined and that

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the postulate of absolute objectivity and the one of absolute causality are not actual anymore. In other words, reality is partly determined but remains partly undetermined. The study of the microscopic has completely overturned the concepts of classical physics. Newton’s laws, applicable to big dimension objects, are no longer viable in the subatomic world. When you bend over the small infinite, there no longer exists a physical, objective world that evolves independently from you. Haphazard replaces the causality principle. In a synthetic way, quantum physics can be defined as a representation of the world in terms of probabilities. Contradicting the principles of classical physics, opposing discontinuity to continuity, haphazard to causality, and interconnectedness of the atoms to separability and objectivity, quantum physics has played a fundamental role in the emergence of postmodernity and its different forms of art from the first half of the 20th century, even when the creators themselves were not conscious of this influence and this new pattern of thinking. Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, and Gödel, in the physics, surrealism in art, and literature; Stéphane Lupasco in the philosophy of sciences; and Ionesco, Beckett, and Adamov, in the theater, have just started to “see” differently, to feel unease in this Aristotelian logic of the noncom- tradictory, that the discoveries of quantum physics, and also the intuition specific to every real creator, have been decrying for a long time. Eugene Ionesco is one of those who understood very early that the reality, or rather the real, because it is manifested to our senses, commands an immovable frame, a one-way journey, whereas everything we have deep inside requires a liberating opening. Generally speaking, philosophers ask themselves “what is reality?” For Ionesco, the fund interrogation is “where is Reality?” “And what if reality was real indeed, that is, sacred? What if the creation, the feats, and pains of people were sacralizable? What if we all entered the eternity, the living eternity?”16 Ionesco expresses a particular vision of the world, eccentrical as regards both the cultures he represents, as it values a freedom of thought that only the logic of the included middle can carry out. As we already know, this is one of the pillars of transdisciplinarity, besides the “levels of Reality.” If we remain within the classical logic, of the noncom- tradictory and on one pillar of reality, Newtonian and Aristotelian, we are obliged to resort to the term “absurd” to try to define this “quantic” positioning of A and non-A considered simultaneously, although the

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dramatist is obviously claiming for another logic, really ontological, which allows him to suspend his identity on the border of alterity, without crossing the line and having to choose, although he often repeated, especially in Notes and counter notes: “I don’t believe in absurd.” A friend and fascinated reader of Stéphane Lupasco, Ionesco con- ceived his whole work as a denial of the logic of identity, which excludes by definition the fact that two contradictory junctures can coexist at the same time and under the same ratio. Symbolical imaginary thus joins the quantum physics in expressing, in a noncontradictory way, sensations, feelings, and subjective values that Hegelian logic would not accept unless in sequences. Heisenberg’s “coexistence of antagonic potentialities” is a formula close to Lupasco’s logic of the contradictory and to Ionesco’s theater. The contribution of the philosopher, who deeply inspired the physicist and writer, Basarab Nicolescu, mainly involves the reevaluation of the axiom of the nonincluded middle, as he demon- strated that only what he called the included middle can express the complexity of the real. The epistemic revolution proposed by Lupasco involves the renunciation of the reasoning based on duality in favor of another one founded on three terms, therefore acknowledging the dynamic of the included middle of the fertile contradiction. The mental experiment of Erwin Schrödinger, as previously described, is meant to illustrate the paradox of the superposition of the quantic states, the cat remaining dead-and-alive until the box is opened. Consequently, a system ceases to become a superposition of states and becomes one of them when observation occurs. If no external observer interferes, beings and things benefit from this state of unifying grace, bereft of irreconcilable oppositions. We have tried to read a play like Ionesco’s Chairs, for instance, in this quantic view. The absence of the audience for which the message of the old couple is intended might be a brilliant artifice meant to preserve all the incoherences and contradictions of the speech inherent to every human existence; the presence of observers would have probably dashed away, forcing the two speakers to articulate a “disciplined” discourse. Certainly, in the present case, there are second degree observers – the spectators or the readers, like in a sort of ontical mise en abyme, but they can contemplate the magic circle of uncrystallized potentialities, symbolized by the empty chairs and the invisible audience. The absence of the duality-inducing look reveals the hidden unity. Then, why should

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not we listen in a different manner to the slightly dull litany of the Old Woman, who pretends to receive a gift from the invisible Colonel: “The Old Woman: Is it a flower, sir? Or a cradle? Or a pear? Or a raven?/ The Old Man to the Old Woman: Of course not, can’t you see it’s a picture!”17 This is an astounding sample of possible worlds, as the two old people are not only referring to a world different from the actual one in which we – readers or spectators – live, but each of them has built up his own possible world – coherent, normal, different, and comprehensible to them. They are thus breaking the principle of the minimal departure, the reality they are referring to being different for each of them. However, linguistically expressed contradiction might be a solution, a form of knowledge through and in the diversity. In the theater, the contradictory dynamisms actualize and virtualize one another, such as creating only the illusion of a contradiction resorption. The illusion is on the side of the observers, who are the ones who need coherence and stability. However, for the protagonists, contradictions fuse in a muddling essence of life fragments of reality, dreams, wishes, what has been, what has not been, and what might have been:

The Old Woman, to the photogravor: I had a son... he lives, of course... he left... the usual story... rather strange... he abandoned his parents... he had a heart of gold... We who loved him so much... he slammed the door... My husband and I tried to hold him back by force... he was seven years old, the age of reason, I was calling him: my son, my child, my son, my child... he dindn’t even turned his head... The Old Man: Unfortunately, no... no... we didn’t have children... I would have liked a son... So would Semiramis... we did everything we could... my poor Semiramis, she is so maternal. Maybe we weren’t supposed to. I was also an ungrateful son... Wow!... Sorrow, regrets, remorses, this is all we have left (...)18

We are confronted by totally new perspectives, far from modernity. A new paradigm was born when Ionesco wrote, an invitation to a fresh reception of what the classical thinking had locked up in unfruitful oppositions. In reality, there is no irreducible duality. The ancient Egyptians, or the Chinese, or the Vedanta said it long ago. Heraclitus and Anaximander, in their turn, insisted on the nonduality as the essence of the Real, or, closer to us, Nicolas Cusanus put it in its well-known formula, coincidentia oppositorum, that unfortunately remained just a case study. How many steps have we made on this path ever since? Does not our entire picture of life and representation change if we dare, even

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timidly, to believe that we are not just a state, with ideas and feelings in a unit artificially cut out of time, but a complex entity, sheltering its contradictions with serene understanding? One of Ionesco’s most dazing statements that are full of extraordinary hermeneutic suggestions is “Moi aussi, je me suis l’autre”/ “Me too, I am the other one to myself”19... Therefore, Ionesco’s theater (including his autobiographical writings) does not seem to be “absurd,” “strange,” and “puzzling”, and his fronde seems to point out to something much more complex and profound than the bitter and playful breaking of the linguistic and dramatic canons, something as pure as cosmic silence: “I happen to believe that we are all one in the multiple.”20 Iconoclast and vanguardist, Ionesco joins in fact that major displacement of the horizon of expectation that took place in the first half of the 20th century. The turnover of the perspective, the denial, the deny of the denial, the glide, the palinode, and the paradox are the many existential attitudes that shake the foundations of the nonincluded middle logic in which we chose or we accepted to submerge. As a corollary of the traditional Aristotelian view, language has come to answer some very specific requirements: - to disrupt the continuum noticeable in objects, events, properties, and relations; and - to designate these things, status, and others through symbols of univocal correspondence. Consequently, the physical world seems like an ensemble of objects that can be described and classified and of qualitative changes for which some regularities can be identified. This is the background on which Ionesco arrives and challenges the noncontradictory habit, dynamiting the claims of the almighty classical logic. We do not know how the author would have reacted in front of the collocation “quantum theater,” or if he was told that he could be considered as one of its forerunners. The fact is that such a theater really exists, since 1995, when in Granada,Spain, an international association was created around the notion of “quantum aesthetics.” In 1998, Gregorio Morales, a journalist and a writer and one of the cofounders, published an essay entitled Balzac’s Corpse. A quantic view of literature and art.21 He defines the idea of quantum theater starting from a few pre- mises: 1. There is a relationship between cosmogony, quantum particle dynamic interactions, on one side, and the scenic vacuum inhabited by the actors, by the energy they shift away, on the other side.

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2. The quantum theater is based on the modification of the object observed by the observer, be it an actor or a spectator, as the observer is inseparable from the quantic reflection on the world. 3. This type of drama exhibits a chaotic, lacunary space-time, exploiting the existence of parallel universes, of multiple possible universes that spring into the diachronic, linear space-time of the representation. The important thing is not to get satisfied with what one sees and to grant at least a thought to the series of possibilities that might have been actualized. This kind of theater encourages the deliverance from the automatisms of thought, the jump without any protection net or com- promises, neglecting the common benchmarks and heading for the unknown. Is not that what Ionesco does in his plays concerning the dissolution of behavior and daily language? In front of scenes, such as those in The Bald Soprano or The Lesson, for instance, we realize that the sought effect was not just the easily obtained catharsis of the comic induced by the endless incongruities and contradictions but rather the gift – which maybe confusing and ambiguous – of an instrument for a real detachment, through the grotesque magnification of the limits we have forced on ourselves. What is scenic reality? Quantum physics tells us that a measurement has no value besides the moment it is made and only for the person who makes it. Conceptually, this perspective allows the actors of the new theater to perform different things at the same time, developing a particular poetics. Ionesco was probably the first one to do it on the ontic-linguistical level. Ionesco’s “theater of the absurd” is situated at the crossing of arts and sciences, assuming the radical metamorphosis of our relation to the world. The universe, as it appears to us, is in explicit order, manifest, and unfolded, articulated around the space-time but creating a reality which seems separated and independent. According to the physicist David Bohm, the manifest world is part of what he refers to as the “explicate order.” It is secondary, a derivative; it “flows out of the law of the Implicate Order.” Within the implicate order, there is a “totality of forms that have an approximate kind of recurrence (changing), stability and separability.” Summarizing, Bohm uses analogies and suggests that, instead of thinking of distinct particles as the fundamental reality, the focus should be on discrete particle-like quanta in a continuous field.22 The objects and beings that are moving,

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interconnected by fields, appear in the explicate order, but beyond, there is this implicate veiled order. Because we are immersed in space and time, we are not able to reveal the reality, which remains veiled (as the transdisciplinary philosopher Bernard d’Espagnat defined it23), being partly knowable only in some of its structures. This reality is situated beyond phenomena; it is a multidimensional space in which time does not flow any more and all the events are instantaneous – there is no past, present, future, and causality, nothing but perfect synchronicity. Some- times, in a state of grace but not necessarily mystic, our right brain seems to be the receiving channel of our universe’s unity intuition. Ionesco puts it in his unique way:

Shall we be because we are? Maybe nothing is fated to death? I feel mortal, immortal, I feel human, I feel angel, saint, vulnerable, invulnerable, unrottable, rottenness. I know, I think I know the whole truth, the truth of the truth, the truth of the non truth: the truth of the counter-truths, the true counter-truths of the truths. […] I am nothing, I am everything, I am the absolute, I am nothing.24

A prisoner between the Siren and the Minotaur, Ionesco confronts his dilemmas. The linguistic one meets the ontological one, when you no longer have faith in language, but you live through it; lucidity becomes painful, and derision closes down upon you. Still, from these incoherences, from this disequilibrium-generating surprises that are mon- strous and strange, and from somewhere, a twisted smile reaches out for us and then: “Logician [to the Old Gentleman]: Another syllogism. All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore, Socrates is a cat!”25 Yes, maybe a Schrödinger’s cat.

Acknowledgments. This article is the partial result of a more complex research conducted within the project Dynamics of Identity in European Francophone Literature, financed by the State budget through CNCSIS- UEFISCSU.

Notes

1 Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1962. 2 4th Edition, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. 3 THINKING ALLOWED. Conversations On The Leading Edge Of Knowledge and Discovery, 1998. 4 http://twm.co.nz/herbert.htm

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5 Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics. New York: Doubleday, 1985. 6 Basarab Nicolescu, Trandisciplinarité. Manifeste. Paris: Edition du Rocher, 1996. 7 Basarab Nicolescu, “Gödelian Aspects of Nature and Knowledge.” Bulletin Interactif du Centre International de Recherches et Études transdisciplinaires, 1998, http://perso.club-internet.fr/nicol/ciret/ 8 Basarab Nicolescu, Le tiers inclus: De la physique quantique à l’ontologie. In Badescu H., Nicolescu B. (sous la dir.), Stéphane Lupasco, l’homme et l’oeuvre, Paris: Edition du Rocher, 1999: 128-129. 9 Edgar Morin, “From the Concept of System to the Paradigm of Complexity.” Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 1992, 15(4): 371-385, JAI Press. 10 Basarab Nicolescu, “Gödelian Aspects of Nature and Knowledge.” Bulletin Interactif du Centre International de Recherches et Études transdisciplinaires, 1998, nhttp://perso.club-internet.fr/nicol/ciret/ 11 Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, artificial intelligence and narrative theory. Indiana University Press, 1991. 12 Ibidem, 31. 13 Eugene Ionesco, La Cantatrice chauve suivi de La Leçon. Paris: Gallimard, 1954: 17. 14 James L. Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering. Tenth edition, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009: 161. 15 “Possible Worlds in the Theater of the Absurd.” In Papers from the Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics and Language Teaching, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, 2007, vol. I: 120-139. 16 Eugene Ionesco, La Quête intermittente. Paris: Gallimard, 1987: 14-15, 26. 17 Eugene Ionesco, Théâtre. vol. II, Paris: Gallimard, 1958: 28. 18 Ibidem, 29. 19 Eugene Ionesco, La Quete intermittente, 53. 20 Ibidem, 31. 21 Gregorio Morales, El Cadaver de Balzac. Alicante: Epigono, 1998. 22 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980: 147, 149. 23 Bernard d’Espagnat, Veiled Reality: An Analysis of Present-Day Quantum Mechanical Concepts. Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., Advanced Book Program, 1995. 24 Eugene Ionesco, La Quête intermittente, 54-55. 25 Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros and Other Plays. Translated by Derek Prouse, New York: Grove Press Inc., 1960: 19.

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