Resumen de Ariel Dorfman's Quest for Responsibility
Mieke Bal comments on Ariel Dorfman's play Picasso's Closet. The thrust of Picasso's Closet is to ethically unsettle the audience via the “out-of the closet” revelations about Picasso's cowardice against and complicity with the Nazi regime. The multiplication of story lines, of identities, and of actors underlines different ethical stances, staged, exposed, but not judged. This does not reflect a refusal to commit or a free-floating indifference, but a direct rejection of moralistic judgment and its resulting moral superiority. Instead, and along with the refusal of facile identification, this multiplication, when added to the singular case, seeks to use affect as a medium rather than and a means to manipulate emotions. Picasso's Closet resituates the political in art in the self-conscious artifice of the theatrical.
