Page - 95 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

95 Lazarus’s necropolitical afterlife ever more clearly in the cleavages between rich and poor, citizens and non-citizens (and those who can be stripped of citizenship); the culturally, morally, economically valu- able and the pathological; queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death. (Haritaworn et al. 2014, 2) As Sunera Thobani points out in her prologue to the ground- breaking 2014 volume on Queer Necropolitics, however, “it is wise to remember that sovereignty is not abstract. It has a par- ticular name, a face, an address, a geographical coordinate. Its face is white, it remains housed in white bodies, it is located in Westernity” (Thobani 2014, xvii). From that perspective, Bowie’s return to Newton in Lazarus can be seen as a concretizing of sovereignty in that the face, address, and location he gave it rubs our noses in the contemporary order of things. Given that the original literary character of Newton presaged the billionaire CEOs of media-tech empires, Newton’s Manhattan apartment on Second Avenue is appropriately in the belly of the financial beast, a heart of darkness 2.0. The entire play is rooted in the apartment, from the initial visit of Newton’s friend Michael to Valentine’s finagling of his way in after he has dispatched with Michael and Ben, precipitating Newton’s end. The apartment is Newton’s lair in every sense of the word, something Valentine calls attention to in getting Newton to commit an act of violence there that horrifies Newton and something the Viennese staging underscores by littering the stage with exotic animals. Newton’s desperate final act of violence stands in stark con- trast to Valentine’s sadistic modus operandi. Not only does Val- entine pick a fight with Michael before offing him, he also “ag- gressively holds ELLY against the wall. It looks like he’s going to strangle her”11 and terrifies Newton when he “suddenly strikes 11 Michael’s fate is left somewhat ambiguous — he is described as “slumped opposite VALENTINE — dead” but once Valentine starts singing “Love is Lost,” he “suddenly gets up — his shirt bloody — and leaves the apartment” (Bowie and Walsh 2017, 20),