Page - 99 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

99 Lazarus’s necropolitical afterlife is quite clear in Sade that not only does sadism require an un- willing victim, but the death of that victim does not destroy it” (Holland 1993, 19–20). In refusing to sugar-coat the ending of Lazarus while at the same time retaining the original’s distinc- tion between Newton’s anguished and Valentine’s euphoric ex- pressions of violence, the Viennese production demonstrates its understanding of the conceptual distance between fantasy and reality. Even if one wants to anthropomorphize the human con- dition as being in a contractual relation with a grim reaper, it is a sadistic rather than a masochistic relation in that there is no way for us to control the fantasy after our deaths; on the con- trary, our deaths are necessary for its prolongation. Hence the rage Newton expresses in “Killing a Little Time,” one of the four songs Bowie wrote explicitly for the musical. This gut-wrench- ing song expresses the violence and pain of dying, “the rage in [him]” as he falls, chokes, fades, and experiences himself as “a broken line.” When confronted with having to die, then, it was just like Bowie to stage that confrontation in a way that held up a mir- ror to it that we could look into and reflect on death and the implications of how all it can come about.14 But it was also just like Vienna to stage the musical in a way that paid homage to Bowie’s playful, postmodernist performativity while at the same time showing how Bowie used his final work to flip the ques- tion from “why must we die?” to “why do people kill?” as well as “why doesn’t it bother people to live in such a way that others die?” Recognizing that Bowie’s final work involved a confronta- tion with a death drive he suddenly felt he understood the full extent of, Vienna’s Volks theater produced a Lazarus worthy of the theater’s long tradition of radical politics. Coming away ut- terly moved by a staging of necropolitical power as the sadistic spectacle it is speaks to the ensemble’s range and the enormous talents that made the production a reality. 14 As Brooker reminds us, mirror images are a common motif in Bowie’s work, while “clones, doubles, twins (or triplets) and alter egos” are also recurring features (Brooker 2017, 177).