Editorial La parade MARIKA TAKANISHI KNOWLES AND CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD I. The parade is the apparition of the actor before the façade of the theater, in the street, in the narrow zone between stage and world. The actor solicits the attention of passersby with skits, with acrobatics, with music, calling out the attractions on offer inside the theater. Without scenic appurtenances, the sideshow performer engineers a compelling figural appearance with body alone. The parade is the manifestation of a figure outside the scene of representation. Beyond the scenic frame, the actor hovers between the vulnerability of exposure and the vitality that propels his promotional appeal. The parade allegorizes life itself as the repetition of this appeal. This issue of Res, “La Parade,” looks to instances of the parade in visual art and in the arts—not necessarily to literal representations of the parade, but to the figure that performs the movement of the parade by throwing itself forth, by a self-animation apart from environmental context. What are the principles of figural anima that compel a viewer to perceive a figure as such, prior to perceiving a relation of figure to ground? If the parade models a modality of art, its countermodel is the aesthetic text. An aesthetic text is a tight weave of signifiers, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, which in generating effects or meanings does not permit itself to draw on any resources beyond the internal relations of those parts, one to another. The aesthetic text can be recognized by the axiom that secures its borders and its stability: no part may be moved or substituted without creating a new whole. This project identifies figures ungoverned by the laws of the aesthetic text. These figures are sometimes found thrown into a work of art, sometimes thrown from a work back into life. “Thrown” suggests the figure’s frequent surplus of energy, the gyrations that invoke contexts beyond the one in which it finds itself, including social contexts. If the figure is animated, its animation does not arise in response to other figures. Instead, the figure self-animates, borrowing too from nonvolitional movement, like fluttering clothes and hair or shimmering armor. Yet thrown figures, cast figures, cast-out figures, figures in transit may also respond by drawing back into themselves, performances of unsociability or inability to engage in relations that would tether them within a picture-world. Whether antisocial or excessively social, the thrown figure is indifferent to the fictional relationships offered up by depiction. La parade is the apparition of the human figure in a state of hysterical or depressive recognition of its own unresolved relation to a prestigious scene of representation. The project seeks to establish the preliminaries of a history and theory of the figure that resists the sociable bonds of the picture-world. This figure only passes through tectonic frames on its way to other settings. Composition—the practical principle of aesthetic textuality—has been an object of study at the expense of other modalities of art, for example, the setting forth or Darstellung (literally, “putting there”) of figures. Many works of art do not depict but simply place figures before us, without implicating them in a scenario or a fiction. Many works are internally discontinuous, open, capable of hosting—not binding—the figure thrown. Art not only proposes second worlds but also populates our world with artful figures. Only a new approach can account for the figure that passes through different art forms, including theater, dance, literature, and other arts de corps. We recognize figural repertoires: viewers, readers, artists, and authors collect and reassemble thrown figures in other places. They draw on works of art to cast their own figural repertoires. In turn, artists create figures knowing they will be recast by others. Such figures perform thrown-ness as an appeal to be picked up, reused, and revived. The parade is an audition for a continued but alternatively social life in the figural repertoires. This was the prompt our authors were asked to respond to. II. The parade is tied to the articulation of difference between what is animate and what is not; one of its functions is to express liveliness as a movement of