Abstract

Drawing on the art historical criticism of Georges Didi-Huberman and Aby Warburg, Brecht is here reconsidered as a montage artist who not only produces on-stage juxtapositions, but one whose dramaturgy fractures and divides the body against itself in its fleeting response to pain-what Warburg called the "pathos formula" By keeping constituents within a state of suspended tension, Didi-Huberman argues such iconographic formulations communicate not only "knowledge-visible, legible, or invisible-but... the intertwinings, even the imbroglio, of transmitted and dismantled knowledges" and "notknowledges." The perpetual sufferings of history elude full visibility, emerging "like a flash" within a dramaturgy of dialectical montage. This gives such a dramaturgy its ethical character.