Claire Maria Chambers

Sogang University, English Language and Literature, Retired

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Hello! I’m Claire. I am a writer, a scholar, former drama professor, and psychotherapist. I live in Port Townsend, WA, the ancestral home of the Coast Salish people, including the S’Klallam and the Chimacum. With a background in theatre, drama, and literature, I work with children, teens, and adults to uncover creative potential in our own healing, strengthen bonds in relationships both human and extra-human, and discover the stories that help us lead connected and meaningful lives.

I write about the relationship between therapy, philosophy, and the arts at www.clairemariachambers.com. Please check it out!

My services focus on the wholeness of each unique person and your innate potential for meaningful, creative healing. My approach is existential and phenomenological, which means that I attend to your complex relationships to your world, to the others in your life, and to your embodied experience. I believe that drama, literature, and the arts open access to inner experience and create greater awareness. My own stance is that of constant learning, openness, and cultural humility. I strive to practice in ways that are anti-racist, decolonizing, and respectful of persons as dynamic intersections of identities, experiences, needs, and desires. I am a full time clinician at Discovery Behavioral Healthcare in Port Townsend, WA, and the owner of Brackenfern Psychotherapy (www.brackenfernpsychotherapy.com).

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California Institute of Integral Studies

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University of Genova

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Papers by Claire Maria Chambers

The Playwright as Negative Theologian: James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner and Blues for Mister Charlie

Performance Studies and Negative Epistemology, 2017

In this chapter, reading Baldwin alongside the negative gestures of Soren Kierkegaard and Martin ... more In this chapter, reading Baldwin alongside the negative gestures of Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, Chambers proposes that Baldwin himself can be considered a negative theo-philosopher. Explication of the plays focuses on moments of ‘anti-conversion’, or the recognition of the inability to give oneself over to absolute faith. Like Kierkegaard, Baldwin dramatizes the absurdity of the ‘leap of faith’; his characters struggle to overcome blind spots only to find that such unknowing often grants greater awareness. And like Heidegger, Baldwin is also concerned with the process of recognition itself: how it is that subjects may come to be identified as such, between beings and their ‘Being’? The conclusion engages contemporary Afropessimistic philosophers to suggest that Baldwin’s negative theology troubles the foundations of ontology itself.

Introduction: Performance Apophatics

In the Introduction, Chambers argues that the ancient traditions of negative theology and apophat... more In the Introduction, Chambers argues that the ancient traditions of negative theology and apophatic spirituality are still a vital part of Western cultural discourse, especially in performance theory and theatre studies. Apophaticism is a tradition that performs against itself as it resists its own resisting and denies its own denying. Chambers introduces the invented term ‘apophatics’ to define the restless dynamic of the unknowable that often structures performance itself. Performance apophatics describes not only the way performance may deny, resist, or fail, or the way that performance may depend upon the absent or processes of disappearance, or the creation of the indistinguishable, the contradictory, and the im/possible, but also the way that such performances may end up in a place where the negation itself is no longer enough.

Religion and Performance: in “media” res

“In medias res” is a literary term that, in Latin, means to begin a narration in the midst of the... more “In medias res” is a literary term that, in Latin, means to begin a narration in the midst of the action. The reader or viewer enters a created world as if it had always existed. Opening the door in the middle of the narrative exposes a world with a history heretofor unperceived, but no less active or affective than one’s own. This is the power of the fictive: to introduce something entirely new while at the same time creating the effect that it had been there all along. The two articles in this second issue of Performance, Religion, and Spirituality deal with very different forms of media: contemporary video games and the silent cinema musical accompaniment of the early twentieth century. In this issue, I invite readers to consider the implications of regarding religion as something communicated through various media, but also as a form of media itself. What might the term “religious media” mean, beyond the idea that media can be religiously informed or may attempt to communicate a religious message? Religion and Media is already a robust academic subfield (see Hosseini 2008 for a survey of approaches to media in religious studies), to which I hope our issue can contribute with its specific focus on performing and performance. This editorial will delve into scholarly as well as personal reflection in order to consider media as carriers of meaning on several levels: individual, social, and cosmic.

Busking and the Performance of Generosity: A Political Economy of the Spiritual Gift

Performing Religion in Public, 2013

As Jurgen Habermas imagines it, the public sphere has the potential to be a place for inclusive d... more As Jurgen Habermas imagines it, the public sphere has the potential to be a place for inclusive discussion between equals who are free from the pressures of economy or social status. In this nineteenth-century ideal form of bourgeois public culture, consumption of cultural goods often set the scene for public rational-critical debate. Although cultural goods were marketed and exchanged, the ideas circulated about them remained at the heart of the sphere where private individuals met as ‘human beings’. ‘Put bluntly: you had to pay for books, theatre, concert, and museum, but not for the conversation about what you had read, heard, and seen and what you might completely absorb only through this conversation.’1 Habermas’s lament in the 1962 publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere seems as appropriate today as it did then: ‘Today the conversation itself is administered … the rational debate of private people becomes one of the production numbers of the stars in radio and television, a salable package ready for the box office.’2 Does the commodification of opinion cheapen the cultural product itself? Habermas seems to think so: ‘the laws of the market have already penetrated into the substance of the works themselves.’3 This chapter challenges the assumption that cultural goods’ being made marketable and exchangeable introduces a flaw into the public circulation of such products.

Musical Woyzeck by Georg Büchner

Theatre Journal, 2015

“Holier than Thou:” Religion as Teaching Tool in the Rhetoric of Secularism, and the Case of Osama bin Laden's Burial at Sea

Ecumenica, 2012

Claire Maria Chambers and culturally appropriate decisions in response to what it deemed an unfor... more Claire Maria Chambers and culturally appropriate decisions in response to what it deemed an unfortunate yet necessary corrective action. In response to criticism that the killing of bin Laden may have been illegal, contradicting the American right to a fair trial and violating international law, one US official cited Article 51 of the United Nations charter, which guarantees a nation's right to self-defense (Gienger par. 6). The Obama administration carefully engaged bin Laden first and foremost as a terrorist combatant, not as a religious or cultural leader. In doing so, the administration also offered a teacherly corrective to states whose integration of religious life and law does not reflect a model of neutrality and inclusivity. Part of what makes bin Laden's burial discomfiting, perhaps contributing to the ambivalent reaction of many critics, is that the US sought to sanitize Islam by presenting its rituals in a purportedly "neutral" context. In carefully following "Islamic precepts and practices" (Deshishku par. 8), the burial sought to neutralize the influence of Islam. In a paralipsical manner, the Obama administration succeeded in bracketing and highlighting the very feature of the burial that it attempted to erase. If paralipsis obviates the unsaid, then the most striking feature of this performative event is how it strives to not speak, to not make waves within the world community, and to erase the tracks of its invasion into the territory of the religious and political other. By performing a neutral and secular stance in relationship to the Muslim world and to Islam, the US betrays that the burial of bin Laden in no way concludes the "War on Terror," nor does it escape the fact that this "war" has targeted Islam and Muslim populations both inside and outside the US. What a performative rhetorical analysis of the burial will also illuminate is how secularism itself, as a political posture, also behaves paralipsically. By striving not to emphasize religious difference, whether in public practice or private belief, and by seeking "neutral" ground for all to share, secularity makes contentious that which it purports to have already quelled. Although the US performed itself as secular, its very doing so also reinforced the monotheistic, and specifically Judeo-Christian, theology undergirding its particular approach to secularity. On 3 May 2011, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney read aloud the official Department of Defense narrative of the events at the Osama bin Laden Compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan that transpired on 2 May 2011. The report describes the handling of the deceased and its burial at sea in these few words: Aboard the USS Carl Vinson, the burial of bin Laden was done in conformance with Islamic precepts and practices. The deceased's body was washed and then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag; a military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, and the deceased body eased into the sea. (Deshishku par. 8) This particular aspect of Operation Neptune Spear sparked public outcry from both Muslims and non-Muslims in a way that prompted the Obama administration to defend its actions as "respectful" (Spetalnick par. 1). From the more radical camps came the accusation that the US attempted to humiliate the Muslim world by blatantly disregarding standard Islamic practice of burying the body on land with the head directed toward Mecca, and for failing to find a way to return Osama bin Laden's body to his family ("Islamic Scholars" par. 1, 2). From those who seemed more sympathetic to the difficult

Claire Maria Chambers

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