Page - 96 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

96 siting futurity BEN in the stomach hard with the knife,” after which he “grabs BEN by the hair and drags him ‘outside’” (Bowie and Walsh 2017, 52). While Vienna’s Valentine, played by Christoph Rothen- buchner, was not as aggressively violent as his counterpart in Leipzig, played by Dirk Lange, whose Village People costume was a match for the bravado with which he played the role, or as elegantly evil as André Kaczmarczyk’s raven-winged demon in Düsseldorf, the Vienna production nonetheless made clear the character’s brutality, something by no means to be taken for granted. In Göttingen, Daniel Mühe played Valentine as sweetly angelic, and the audience could be forgiven for not recognizing he was supposed to be a serial killer. In rejecting the spectacle of sadistic, necropolitical power that Bowie and Walsh’s text con- fronts us with in the character of Valentine, Göttingen turned the play into a liberal fable with a focus on dying and not killing. What the original play-text insists on, however, and what in contrast to Göttingen the Vienna production does not deny, is that there are characters who derive pleasure from achieving mastery over others. As the song “Valentine’s Day” puts it, they enjoy having “all the world […] under [their] heels.” Much has been made over the years of Bowie’s flirtation with fascism in the 1970s. Yet, as Brooker underscores in the patient reading he performs in Forever Stardust of Bowie’s whiteness, it was not the case that Bowie was being racist in adopting the character of the Thin White Duke. Rather, by performing an exaggerated whiteness, he was drawing attention to racializing tendencies, not ascribing to them himself (Brooker 2017, 101–3). The vio- lence staged in Lazarus can be read in a similar fashion. The play refigures death as a deliberate killing of life and, in case we are not paying attention, it underscores this shift by making one of the protagonists a serial killer who not only deliberately kills life, and clearly takes pleasure in doing so, but also brings Newton to the point he is able to commit such an act, albeit without the pleasure. The difference between the quality of the stabbings that Val- entine and Newton commit points to the need for caution in theorizing sadism in works in which Bowie was involved. While