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The Journey of Non-Identity and a Space for the Other in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2026, 39(1), pp.61~84
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama
  • Received : March 25, 2026
  • Accepted : April 10, 2026
  • Published : April 30, 2026

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ABSTRACT

This paper argues that Eurydice’s incomplete return in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice should be understood not merely as an instance of subjective recovery, but as an ethical practice of non-identity. Rather than restoring a coherent self, Eurydice’s trajectory resists the homogenizing logic of instrumental reason and, in doing so, preserves a space for alterity that identity-thinking would otherwise efface. To articulate this claim, the paper draws on the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno, particularly his critique of instrumental reason as a mode of thought that subsumes its object under conceptual totality, thereby erasing the irreducible remainder of otherness. Against this logic, Adorno’s notion of non-identity foregrounds the persistence of difference that exceeds conceptual capture. Within this framework, Eurydice’s death marks a decisive departure from the domain of instrumental reason. The relation she subsequently forms with her father in the underworld unfolds as a mode of being that does not seek to appropriate the Other, but remains open to difference as such. Her refusal to return with Orpheus further suspends the teleological movement toward restoration and completion, interrupting the Orphic desire to recover the lost object in its original form. Instead, Eurydice re-enters the space of non-identity—a space that resists forward-driven, goal-oriented temporality and retains what cannot be assimilated. This descent stands in contrast to the Odyssean paradigm of instrumental progression, offering instead a world freed from teleological closure and structured by remainder and discontinuity. Ruhl’s Ovidian dramaturgy, characterized by transformation without final stabilization, gives theatrical form to this condition: identity is never secured but remains in a state of ongoing alteration. Accordingly, this paper reads Ruhl’s Eurydice as staging an ethical imagination that departs from the violence of identity-thinking and sustains a space in which the Other can persist without reduction.

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