Theodrama

Theodrama, as coined in this passage from Rollins, names a mode of communal religious practice that stages faith as perpetual self-subversion rather than doctrinal consolidation. It designates gatherings—termed "transformance art"—in which the received distinctions constitutive of institutional Christianity (sacred/secular, priest/prophet, Christian/non-Christian, doubt/certainty) are deliberately suspended or scrambled, not as a provisional exercise but as the ongoing structural form of authentic engagement with what Rollins calls the originary Event. The "drama" in theodrama is not theatrical in the decorative sense; it enacts a dialectical overcoming wherein the religious system produced by an Event must continuously betray its own settled forms in order to remain faithful to what inaugurated it. Identity—individual, communal, doctrinal—is refused as a resting point; the gathering is organized precisely to prevent any stable subject-position from crystallizing around priest, believer, or institution.

The concept carries an anarchic valence that is constitutive rather than merely oppositional. The "anarchic" qualifier signals that there is no arché—no foundational authority, no pastoral hierarchy—capable of grounding or authorizing the practice from outside. The Happening to which theodrama points is explicitly characterized as "unspeakable" and resistant to objectification, which in Lacanian terms marks it as belonging to the register of the Real: something that cannot be symbolized without remainder, that resists the closure any Master Signifier would impose. Theodrama is therefore the ritual-aesthetic name for the attempt to sustain a relation to that unspeakable Real without domesticating it into a new discourse of mastery.

In the corpus, theodrama appears in rollins-peter-the-fidelity-of-betrayal-towards-a-church-beyond-belief-paraclete as the practical, artistic instantiation of what Rollins theorizes as "faithful betrayal." Its deepest cross-referential tension is with the Discourse of the Master: institutional Christianity functions as a paradigm case of that discourse, where a Master Signifier (God, Church, Scripture) commands knowledge and produces surplus-enjoyment while concealing its own divided foundations. Theodrama is the attempt to prevent any new S1 from crystallizing—to perform, through "anarchic experiments," the permanent dislocation of the agent position. This aligns with Lacan's observation that revolutionary gestures risk reinstating the Discourse of the Master in a new form; theodrama tries to short-circuit that gravitational pull by making subversion constitutive rather than occasional.

The concept also resonates with the cross-referenced notion of the Real and with Derrida's "Religion Without Religion" (itself cross-referenced here), insofar as theodrama orients practice toward an Event or Happening that exceeds all positive religious content—a faith that cannot be sutured to any identity. The cross-referenced concept of Sublation is equally operative: each inherited religious distinction (sacred/secular, priest/prophet) is not simply abolished but dialectically worked through and overturned, preserving the tension rather than resolving it. The Kierkegaardian register of Moment is also at stake: the originary Event functions as a singular collision of the eternal and temporal that no institutional Moment-in-the-Hegelian-sense (a stable, subsumable phase) can absorb. Theodrama names the communal practice of repeatedly returning to that singularity, refusing its domestication into identity, hierarchy, or settled jouissance.

The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond BeliefPeter Rollins · 2008 (page unknown)

anarchic experiments in theodrama that re-imagine the distinction between Christian and non-Christian, priest and prophet, doubt and certainty, the sacred and the secular

The phrase is theoretically loaded because "anarchic" and "re-imagine the distinction" work in precise tandem: "anarchic" refuses any grounding arché or Master Signifier, while "re-imagine the distinction" does not erase the paired oppositions (Christian/non-Christian, sacred/secular) but holds them in suspension—a move structurally homologous to Lacanian sublation, preserving tension rather than collapsing it into a new identity.