Semiotics of Theatrical Performance

Extract

According to Jorge Luis Borges, Abulgualid Mohammed Ibn Ahmed Ibn Mohammahd Ibn Rushd, better known as Averroes, was thinking—something like one thousand years ago, more or less—about a difficult question concerning Aristotle's Poetics. As you probably know, Averroes was a specialist on Aristotle, mainly on the Poetics. As a matter of fact, Western civilization had lost this book and had rediscovered it only through the mediation of Arab philosophers. Averroes did not know about theatre. Because of the Muslim taboo on representation, he had never seen a theatrical performance. At least, Borges, in his short story The Quest of Averroes, imagines our philosopher wondering about two incomprehensible words he had found in Aristotle, namely “tragedy” and “comedy.” A nice problem, since Aristotle's Poetics is nothing else but a complex definition of those two words, or at least of the first of them.