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as he had desperately wanted a knighthood.) The crown that decorates the Companion of Honour motto punctuates its imperialist connotations. This is a British subject’s prerogative––the geopolitical context of the Companion of Honour is clear, but elsewhere one must ask what does “British” mean?9 No doubt Sir Vidia could readily tell us––and that is another reason he is such a cultural irritant. Thus, we can see that attempting to frame the discussion of identity and character is fraught with connotational peril. Leaving aside this consideration of the literary persona, let us turn directly to the performing body of work. In their way performers, playwrights, theatre critics, and the material culture of performance offer us another way of departing from “static” phenomenology and approaching history in Derrida‘s “uncommon sense.”
The performing body of work can be viewed through the prism of material culture and the idea of performance, both of which are things theatricality and performance accrue. In this context, the high-relief commemorative medal of a performer that can be grasped and even caressed is a figure of performance, as is the printed review of a performance that may be held between the fingers and drooled over or spat upon. The expansive idea of the performing body of work, while shying from postmodern epistemic insouciance, nevertheless must recognize that it is the product of the early twenty-first century and eagerly obsolesces the certainty of nineteenth-century concepts such as Coleridge’s “fancy and imagination” and the critical taxonomies they engendered. Conversely, recent, vehement antinomianism would make “genus envy” little more than the “toy of thought” that Derrideans delight in, but the system of nomenclature derived from the eighteenth-century sage Carolus Linnaeus abides (hence “genus”). Linnaeus was one of the wonders of his age, diverse giants such as Goethe and Rousseau10 hailed