Bertolt Brecht – Mother Courage and Her Children

• Theme: Epic theatre and anti-war critique.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children is not merely a play—it is a disruption. It unravels the illusionism of classical theatre in favor of a rupture, a defamiliarization. This radical dramaturgy, when seen through Michel Foucault’s lens, becomes a theatre of counter-discursive resistance, where spectators are invited not to identify, but to awaken; not to believe, but to question; not to follow, but to reflect.

Mother Courage, a war profiteer who paradoxically loses all her children to the very war from which she makes her living, embodies Foucault’s concept of subjectivity under the conditions of biopolitical war. She is not merely an individual; she is a node in the apparatus of conflict—what Foucault would call a dispositif—where economic, military, and social systems converge to constitute the subject as a tactical field of survival and loss.

Throughout the play, Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt” (alienation effect) actively breaks the illusion of mimesis, reflecting Foucault’s critique of representational knowledge. For Foucault, truth is not something unveiled through recognition (as in Aristotelian catharsis), but constructed through discourse. Brecht refuses identification; he installs interruptions, exposing the mechanisms of power behind war, economy, and moral complicity. He forces the viewer to see the theatre as an apparatus of perception, much like Foucault sees society as an apparatus of discipline.

Furthermore, Mother Courage’s pragmatic ethos—her will to survive in an absurd system—evokes Foucault’s notion of the ethics of care of the self, albeit in an ironic, inverted form. She adapts, negotiates, performs. But this performance is not liberation—it is entrapment in a system that punishes her autonomy. In this way, she becomes a paradoxical subject: one who refuses to become a hero or a martyr, but also cannot escape the economy of violence that shapes her reality.

Foucault’s genealogy of power relations, especially in The History of Sexuality, reveals how power is not simply repressive, but productive. War, in Brecht’s world, is not a deviation of politics—it is its continuation by other means. Mother Courage profits from war but is also devoured by it. Her body, like that of her children, is inscribed by the truth regime of conflict, profit, and disposability.

Thus, Brecht’s work stages not simply a critique of war, but a philosophical enactment of how subjects are governed and govern themselves in times of crisis—exactly what Foucault explored in his late works.