Célestine Galli-Marié as Carmen (Musée de l’Opéra)
Separation Anxiety
Carmen, Opéra Comique in three acts, music composed by Georges Bizet, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy after Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella Carmen, revival of the 2018 Royal Opera Production, directed by Barrie Kosky, conducted by Julia Jones, Royal Opera, Friday 5th July 2019, reviewed by Leslie Jones
“Don’t leave me Carmen”, implores Don José, as he begs her to follow him and to start a new life together. In director Barrie Kosky’s production of Carmen, the rope (subsequently the dress train) is like an umbilical cord that fatally connects the doomed lovers. They seemingly cannot survive without each other. And Don José embodies the dominant ideology of sexual guilt and subservience to the mother. As Sarah Lenton observes, his character “…is more straightjacketed than naive, and his obsessive tendencies are… hinted at in his fixation with his mother” (‘Out of Character’, Official Programme). Christopher Wintle, in What Opera Means, goes even further, claiming that Carmen chooses Don José because of a death wish.
What constitutes femininity and masculinity? Kosky, throughout, accentuates gender differences. We see men, stage right, ogling factory girls, who are narcissistically cooling themselves and smoking, stage left. Carmen is ultimately doomed because she will not abide by the rules of this bifurcated, patriarchal society. She represents untrammelled female sexuality. “Love’s a gypsy”, she proclaims and so is she. “Free was she born and free she will die”. In Mérimée’s novella, Don José recalls that Carmen “walked, swaying her hips like a filly from a Cordoba stud farm”. And the matador Escamillo (Luca Pisaroni), likewise, represents another sexual stereotype drawn from what Richard Langham Smith calls the “growing hispanomania” of the 1870’s (‘Carmen’s Rocky Road to Success’, Official Programme). Continue reading
The Fukuyama Thesis, Thirty Years On
Francis Fukuyama
The Fukuyama Thesis, Thirty Years On
by Mark Wegierski
Initial drafts of this response to Fukuyama’s article go back to November 1989.
Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest no 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3-1; and Alan Bloom, et al. ‘Responses to Fukuyama’, The National Interest no 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 19-35
Fukuyama’s article caught the attention of those who study political philosophy, and who are interested in the future of the West. His article has been seen as a daring éclat on “the end of history”, but certain aspects of these matters, it could be argued, have been poorly represented in the debate. There is the lack of a perspective rooted in the writings of thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, George Parkin Grant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Ellul. Fukuyama has not entered into a dialogue with these thinkers.
Generally speaking, the thesis of “the end of history” has been received in two main ways: some persons, while embracing the foreseen triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism, have expressed greater or lesser reservations about its completeness and permanence; while others argued that socialism, for example, was still a worthwhile, viable alternative.
Professor Bloom received the thesis very warmly and celebrated the future triumph of liberal democracy, albeit tempered with a curious reference to the “fascist” threat. Considering how opposed Professor Bloom was to many aspects of contemporary American life, as in his coruscating Closing of the American Mind, his embracing of full‑blown liberal democracy seems odd. Continue reading →
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