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of knowledge. Tinker “kisses Grace very gently” before he leaves. Carl lying next to Grace is then awake, he and Grace look at each other, and Carl screams silently.
Losing himself for losing who he loves, Tinker goes to the peep-show booth desperately. The woman asks Tinker if she can kiss him, and she “opens the partition and comes through to Tinker’s side” (147). They kiss each other, and Tinker
confesses, “I think I— / Misunderstood.” “I know. I love you.” says the woman, and they make love with each other. After he comes, they “hold each other, him inside her, not moving” (149).
Tinker What’s your name?
Woman Grace.
Tinker No, I meant—
Woman I know. It’s Grace.
Tinker (Smiles.) I love you, Grace. (149)
Tinker keeps coming back to her because she always symbolizes Grace, and she falls in love with this man who always calls her Grace. If their love blossoms from this name, then why not to keep it when love does not require the people to project themselves into reason but only into their lovers? The name, Grace, is called rightly here since it is articulated for the sake of love. When Tinker’s knowledge always shows him the ways to use human body cruelly, and he always cannot conduct this
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cruelty totally, by living for love only, he finally finds the refuge from the emotion he always tries to destroy, and the answer he always tries to know is not crucial to his life anymore.
Robin, Carl, Rod, the anonymous woman, and Tinker never free themselves from the threshold between their being and non-being for they do not choose or cannot figure out any other possible ways to achieve their existence. They never give up living for who they love even at the cost of their fragmentation. Grace, however, by putting down her old self sustained by reason and love, comes up with another answer. After the surgery, Carl and Grace sit on the mud under the rain together while the rats eating their wounds. With the body cared not from the perspectives of reason and health, Grace comments on her body with ecstasy, “Body perfect. / Chain-smoked all day but danced like a dream you’d never know. / Have they done it yet? / Died. / Burned. / Lump of charred meat stripped of its clothes. / Back to life” (149-50). The body Grace desired for does profane the sacredness of human being when it
accomplishes nothing reasonable or healthy. But humanity ensures its sacredness by requiring human body to be used as reasonably and healthily as possible, and human body itself would inevitably need to be treated instrumentally as a lifeless tool or even a corpse which can be used without any obstacles. The fire of human knowledge lights up the throne of human sacredness, but it simultaneously burns human body
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into ashes. Grace, therefore, does not want to regain her life as the human who can only live as the living dead, but it is the resurrection of the “meat stripped of its clothes” that Grace wants to achieve, which means what she really desires for is to bring life back to her body treated as lifeless flesh. Grace by becoming her brother through the irrational surgery, and that is, by caring her body with the inoperative reason, detaches her body from any human ways of using it, and makes it naked when it is not defined by anything outside of it except by itself alone. Grace joyfully
murmurs, “Felt it. / Here. Inside. Here” (150) as it is the first time that she feels her body moves. When Grace lays down her life taking part in the human world, her body would no more be used for achieving any other ends apart from itself, but would only move for its own sake. And when body’s movements are no more ignored, body cannot be dead but vibrant as what life should be.
“Here now. / Safe on the other side and here. / Graham. / (A long silence) / Always be here.” says Grace as she is soothing a new-born baby (150). She does not only welcome the new birth of her body, but also the new birth of her love she has never experienced before. After losing herself for losing her lover, Grace desires to be inseparable from love forever, so she lays down her past self who exists only for her lover, and who is lost for her lover’s death. And when Grace does not project herself into someone else, and when her life is no longer completed by relegating the life of
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her body to the margins, the mechanism of concentration camp cannot be sustained because Grace really keeps herself “on the other side” and detached herself from the threshold of being and non-being. Then for being no more divided, Grace can finally be inseparable from her complete existence like her body becomes forever inseparable from her love.
Grace realizes herself by detaching herself from the human world, and Christ’s journey toward redemption is also completed by this detachment. Before his arrest, Christ prays to God for his disciples’ peace, and says, “I have given them thy word;
and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” (John 17:14). Christ knows well if his disciples follow his words, they would not be recognized as part of the world, so they would not be accepted and sometimes would even be hated by other human beings. But at the same time, when they are not recognized as part of the world, they would be freed from the condition of concentration camp which humanity and love sustain, and be no longer fragmented because they no longer stand on the threshold between being and non-being. Christ tells the people, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Christ denies his earthly life which can never stop pursuing humanity and love. He compares his body to the bread everyone can take, and his blood to the wine everyone can drink. He is even willing to lay down his
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life in the human world, and does not hesitate to bleed on the cross. He accepts his being hated and being crucified as a sinner because he knows he is on the right track to bring life back to the world. The redemption Christ achieves is fulfilled by
profaning the ways of life protected carefully by the people on the earth who never stop reasoning and loving, but still cannot approach Eden where their existence can be complete but not fragmented. In the end of Cleansed, the rain stops, and the “sun gets brighter and brighter, the squeaking of the rats louder and louder, until the light is blinding and the sound deafening” (151). The brightness is accompanied by the sign
of plague as Grace receives her redemption by profaning the sacredness of humanity and love. But when Grace becomes the forsaken whose existence is no longer recognized by the present world as Christ shouting “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”
(Matthew 27:46), she becomes tomorrow’s Eve having the paradise redeemed with her complete being which present humanity and love can never achieve.
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Chapter Four Conclusion
You have been a poor observer of life if you have not also seen the hand that, ever so gently－kills.
——Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche 59.
Though in Kane’s Blasted and Cleansed, inhuman violence tortures all the characters, the cruel plots composed by Kane do cut into core of human existence as she does not only try to answer “How do the human become human?” but also attempts to figure out, “What does this humanization cost?” through her words.
Analyzing Blasted with Agamben’s concept of “the state of exception,” the second chapter of the thesis, “Exile and the Kingdom,” points out that peace under the regulation of law is in fact sustained by the mechanism of war. In modern democracy, the law limits the people, but at the same time, frees the people from anarchy prejudicial to people’s lives and property. The people accept the regulation of law, so they can enjoy their human rights, so they can live humanly but not live dangerously as unregulated beasts. But when the law is able to restrict the people’s lives, the power of law cannot be unlimited. The people, therefore, unite themselves as the State, and gives the State the power to work beyond the law in order to keep the law as what it should be. The State is given the sovereign power to work
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beyond the law, and its power, of course, is fundamentally not exercising in
accordance with the law, but by acting without the law being the obstacle. The State can, therefore, declare the state of exception and suspend the law to protect itself against the threat like war which the daily law cannot handle because when the people become the subjects uniting the State, to protect the State becomes no more different from to protect the people. But when the law is suspended, any human rights claim would be rendered invalid, and the people would be exposed to inhuman treatments at any time. And being also the objects governed by the State in order to enjoy the protection of law, the abused people are unable to claim their human rights by themselves but can only suffer from the State’s decision. However, when the law keeps regulating the people’s lives, the State must keep its power to work beyond the law in the name of people. Therefore, even not in war, each individual is still trapped in the state of exception since he can never be freed from the possibility to be regarded as the potential threat of State and to have his human rights violated. And the law defining human rights is always ready to be suspended since it must work in the hands of State which can decide to suspend the law in the name of people. Governed by the State and regulated by the law in order to live humanly, no one can be out of the state of exception, and the regulated peace one enjoys is nothing but the sugarcoated war.
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So in Blasted, the war shows up not only abruptly but also mysteriously. The war crushes the routine peace in the smoothest style, and no characters can tell why this war breaks out, and what this war is about. The obscure rationality of war remains unintelligible for the characters because war is always lurking in the shadow of
peaceful daily life. It comes as no surprise that when war breaks out, it makes its catastrophic appearance suddenly yet naturally. And the State does not take any actions to save the characters from their inhuman sufferings because the State keeps its sovereign power not by enforcing the law to secure the people’s human rights, but by suspending the law and rendering human rights null and void. The State must work beyond the law, so it must practice the mechanism of war. But even in this desperate condition, Kane still makes the character, Ian, die and resurrect like Christ, so he and another character, Cate, can wait and hope together for redemption as hoping for God’s Kingdom after the Last Judgment. In God’s Kingdom, “all rule and all
authority and power” would be “put down” (1 Corinthians 15:24), and that is, the law and State would be made inoperative. After Ian and Cate experience all the inhuman violence inflicted by the State which they protect in order to live humanly, they know the condition as God’s Kingdom is what they should hope for. “[I]f to constituent power there correspond revolutions, revolts, and new constitutes, namely, a violence that puts in place and constitutes a new law, for destituent potential it is necessary to
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think entirely different strategies, whose definition is the task of the coming politics”
(The Uses of Bodies 266). They do not fight to build the new State or to make the new law because they know the violence they suffer from would not stop when their lives are still under the regulation of law and State as before. They choose to wait quietly in ruin for, at that moment, they are closer than ever to the condition in which they are no longer the constituent elements of State, and regain the ability to keep the regulation of law at bay. They see the possibility that the law and State work inoperatively in front of them. And when the law and State work inoperatively, Ian and Cate can no longer be recognized as the human because their human rights are no longer protected and defined. But at the same time, the redemption of their lives arrives for Ian and Cate’s lives are finally freed from the state of exception as they are destituted from the State which tramples on the people’s lives by suspending the law in the name of people.
The second chapter shows how the people become human with human rights promised by the State and law, and also points out how human rights are relegated to the margins and violated without compunction for the same reason. With
incomparable rigor, Kane’s Blasted captures extreme inhuman cruelty lurking in the shadow of daily peace. After the discussion of second chapter focusing on the issue between the State and the people, the third chapter, “‘You Were My Death,’” with its
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analysis of Kane’s Cleansed puts its focus on the human being himself. According to Descartes, human reason should unite itself with human body by directing and using body reasonably and healthily in order to achieve humanity. But what Descartes does not emphasize is that this unification really sustains the unamendable separation between human body and reason because only when two elements are separated, they need to be united. Human reason is, therefore, always kept out of human body. And when one’s simply being alive with body alone cannot satisfy humanity, and body has to be used by reason for one to live humanly, the human being really projects his life into reason, and leaves his body as dead as an instrument. That is why one can accept that his body is opened and analyzed, and his body organs are removed and
transplanted like a machine which can be assembled and disassembled. In order to live healthily and humanly, one needs to treat his body instrumentally, and that is, being human itself dehumanizes one’s own being. “In humanity’s self-abasement to the corpus nature takes its revenge for the debasement of the human being to an object of power, to raw material” (Horkheimer and Adorno 193). When the human being treats other species merciless as they are only senseless “raw material” which can be used for him to exist humanly, his pursuit of humanity also forces himself to treat his body in the same way as something he can use but not something he can treat
humanly. Humanity, therefore, is really a dream that can never be achieved, and
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human existence is doomed to linger on the threshold between being and non-being.
So one would desire to love. When I love you, I exist only for you. By loving you, I feel no more fragmented as what I am when I pursue humanity because my fragmented self is pulled together when you become my life. But are you and I not different individuals with radical distinctions that can never be erased? Therefore, even with love, one still cannot be freed from living on the threshold between being and non-being since love also asks one to project his life into someone outside like humanity asks one to project his life into reason departing from his own body. And that is, I have to love you as I am dead. In Cleansed, by turning the university into a concentration camp, and by making the love relationship not different from a haunting nightmare, Kane keenly reveals the disastrous condition resulting from the characters’
pursuit of humanity, and of their lovers. When the characters devote themselves to their loved ones, but their lovers no longer respond to their love, they are forced to recognize their lives as dead as corpses, and their existence can only be characterized as the irretrievable loss. But there is also no way for them to exist through humanity when in the play, they are lynched, raped and even dismembered, which cruelly portrays the most inhuman ways for their bodies to be used, and exposes how helpless their reason is when it can never save them from their dehumanization. Most of them, however, do not stop loving or give up living humanly since if they stop living for
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their lovers or for humanity, they can only expect nothingness waiting to devour them, except one of the characters, Grace, who takes another direction.
What Grace pursues is to make all these mechanisms for the people to achieve their existence inoperative. She does not desire to realize herself through devoting her life to someone or something outside herself. Instead, she desires to be her lover from outside to inside. And it is not a rational medical treatment she takes to realize her dream. Grace has her breasts removed, and has another character’s male genitals transplanted to her body, but the surgery is far from being successful as her wounds allure rats to gnaw at them. But by laying down her life existing only for her lover always outside of her, or for her humanity always unreachable for her, she finally smiles when seeing the rain stops and the sun comes out as seeing redemption from God’s Kingdom. Talking about love, Christ asks his followers not to devote their lives to the particular individual so they can really feel God’s love which has always
already surrounded them. Talking about body, Christ asks his followers to eat his flesh as the bread and drink his blood as the wine, and tells them that whoever does what he commands would regain his life. That is because when one lays down his life existing only for his lover or for humanity, his life is no longer sacrificed by being devoted to something or someone outside. Therefore, the threshold between being and non-being
already surrounded them. Talking about body, Christ asks his followers to eat his flesh as the bread and drink his blood as the wine, and tells them that whoever does what he commands would regain his life. That is because when one lays down his life existing only for his lover or for humanity, his life is no longer sacrificed by being devoted to something or someone outside. Therefore, the threshold between being and non-being