Big Love: Relationality, Ethics and the Art of Letting Go

This article considers the performance of non-violent relationality. Focusing on a production of Big Love, it explores how performance might enlighten an ethic of non-violent being with others, and non-violent being in the world. While many theoretical models of identity emphasize the unavoidable aggressivity of intersubjective relations, this article focuses on scenes in which the subject is let go from violence and retribution. ʹLettinggoʹ is the strategically utilitarian term deployed here to think about a performative act that loosens the point of attachment between the subject and symbolic law, while paving the way for relatively non-aggressive conditions of being to emerge