Federico García Lorca – Blood Wedding

• Theme: Tragedy, fate, and poetic ritual.

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

Lorca’s Blood Wedding is not only a play—it is a ritual wound. A ritual carved from Andalusian soil, gendered silences, and the blood of ancient cycles. Under Michel Foucault’s lens, this tragedy becomes a theatre of desire as structure, fate as discourse, and ritual as the apparatus of social control.

In Foucault’s philosophy, particularly in The Use of Pleasure, sexuality is not a repressed biological instinct but a discursive field, governed by norms, ethics, and technologies of the self. In Blood Wedding, love is not an expression of freedom—it is already captured. Leonardo and the Bride are not autonomous lovers but subjects spoken into being by a web of kinship obligations, honor codes, and community surveillance. Their passion is tragic not because it’s forbidden, but because it is already structured by power.

The play enacts a limit-experience—a Foucaultian threshold where subjectivity meets its boundary. The forest, moon, and death itself become theatrical agents. Here, Foucault’s idea of the dramatization of transgression comes alive: when societal boundaries are crossed (marriage, honor, blood), the system does not collapse; it reinscribes itself with greater force. Lorca's poetic landscape reveals how the individual becomes the site where cultural violence is repeated.

The maternal voice in the play (the Mother) embodies Foucault’s late-care ethic: she is caught in a generational cycle of pain, mourning her husband and son lost to vendetta, yet unable to disrupt the machinery of revenge. Her care is not liberatory—it is encoded in death. Her “self” is shaped through loss, like Foucault’s notion that subjectivity is forged through practices of suffering and remembrance.

Lorca’s poetic metaphors—moon as voyeur, forest as fate, blood as memory—echo Foucault’s idea that power works not only through discipline and institutions but through symbolic structures that make domination appear natural, even beautiful. Blood Wedding becomes a poetic archaeology of gendered, fatalistic subjectivation, where desire is never free—it is ritualized, punished, and finally, consumed.