Performance e Immagine. Il “performativo” dal Sofista di Platone al Moderno (con Amleto)

Traversing the rift between ancient dramaturgical experience and Hamletian modernity, this paper investigates the ontological and performative status of the Image (phantasma, eidolon) and its structural nexus with processes of embodiment. Moving from the Hamletian short-circuit between the reality effect of performance and the inaction of revenge, the inquiry traces back to classical reflections on mimesis—from Xenophon’s Symposium to Lucian’s De Saltatione—where the mimetic-danced act emerges as thinking in motion, an uninterrupted flux between soma and psyche capable of overturning the primacy of logos. The theoretical core of the paper resides in a re-reading of Plato’s Sophist, retrieved from traditional exegesis to be situated within Performance Studies and contemporary visual culture. In the contest between the propositional logic of the language of Being and the unsubduable force of the Image, the Artist (mimetes-sophist) comes forth as the creator of verbal and bodily simulacra (eidola legomena) that fissure ontology, revealing its manque-à-être. Pushed to its extreme in the limit case of the Lucianic pantomime's madness or in the apparition of the Hamletian ghost ("that within which passes show"), the performative experience un-does representative fiction to become a demonic corpus-opus: an extra-propositional, presencial event in which the living Image bypasses the regime of fiction to directly enact the unconscious of the body.