Tragic Modernities [Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only] 9780674286924

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Tragic Modernities

Tragic Modernities Miriam Leonard

Cambridge, Massachusetts  2015

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London, England

Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­P ublication Data Leonard, Miriam. Tragic modernities / Miriam Leonard. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-­0 -­674-­74393-­9 1. Tragic, The.  2. Tragedy.  I. Title. BH301.T7L46 2015 809.2'512—​dc23 2014042672

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For my parents 

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Contents

List of Illustrations Preface

ix xi

Introduction: Midway between Oedipus and Marx

1



1. Tragedy and Revolution

13



2. Tragedy and Metaphysics

42



3. Tragedy and History

72



4. Tragedy and Gender

108



5. Tragedy and Subjectivity

131

Epilogue

161

Notes Bibliography Index

169 187 197

Illustrations

Karl Marx as Prometheus, chained to a printing press while the eagle of Prussian censorship rips out his liver  29 Jean-­Auguste-­Dominique Ingres, Oedipe explique l’énigme du sphinx (1808), Louvre  116 Replica of bookplate designed by Freud circa 1910, based on the medallion presented to Freud for his fiftieth birthday  117 Logo of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag  117

Preface

This book has taken shape over many years of reading, thinking, teaching, and writing about tragedy. It was when I first encountered Simon Goldhill’s Reading Greek Tragedy as a teenager that I decided I wanted to become a classicist. As an undergraduate it was Greek tragedy that opened a vista onto the vast array of modern thought that still preoccupies me today. A more immediate context was an invitation from Edith Hall to co-­teach a graduate course on the reception of tragedy. I have learned a huge amount from Edith and from Fiona Macintosh as well as from the students we taught together. I also would like to thank my former and current PhD students, Emma Cole, Adam Lecznar, Hamutal Minkowich, Annette Mitchell, Luke Richardson, and Mike Waters, whose own work on tragedy has shaped my thinking on the topic. The writing of this book was made possible through the immense generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, which first awarded me a research fellowship and then a Philip Leverhulme Prize. I am extremely grateful to my Heads of Departments at UCL, Gesine Manuwald and Maria Wyke, who have allowed me to take research leave. Other colleagues at UCL have helped in many different ways, and I would particularly like to thank Stephen Colvin, Fiachra Mac Góráin, Katherine Ibbett, Avi ­Lifschitz, and Thomas Stern. Parts of the book were delivered as lectures and papers at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Essex, Edinburgh, Maynooth, Nijmegen, Brown,

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Cornell, the University of South Carolina, the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, and the History of Political Thought Seminar in London. I am very grateful for the invitations to speak as well as to the audiences for providing such insightful commentaries on my work. Many friends and colleagues at these institutions and others have been generous with their advice, comments, and criticism. Particular thanks are due to Richard Armstrong, Alexander Beecroft, Andrew ­Benjamin, Sara Brill, Hauke Brunk, Leon Burnett, Douglas Cairns, Maarten de Pourcq, William Desmond, Aude Doody, Jill Frank, Annelise Freisenbruch, Nora Goldschidt, Pelagia Goulimari, Benjamin Gray, Barbara Graziosi, Constanze Güthenke, Johannes Haubold, Brooke Holmes, Stephen Kidd, Charles Martindale, Paul Allen Miller, Glenn Most, Richard Neer, Edmond ­R ichardson, Kenneth Sacks, Anette Schwartz, David Scourfield, Olga Taxidou, Tim Whitmarsh, and Vanda Zajko. I have learned a great deal from Katie Fleming and Daniel Orrells about Freud and German philosophy. I am grateful to them for all our conversations and for their sustaining friendship. Katherine Angel has also been a constant support and numerous times talked me out of writing blocks over tea and cake at the British Library. One of the great pleasures of working on this topic was meeting and subsequently working with Joshua Billings. It was in the process of co-­ organizing our conference and co-­editing our book Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity that I really got to grips with the stakes of the project. Joshua’s own work in this field is a model. He has also been extremely generous in reading the whole manuscript and offering astute and searching criticism. Crucial conversations with Jim Porter at various junctures have left an important mark on the book. Victoria Wohl on numerous occasions helped me orient the project and also offered hugely insightful comments on a late draft. Simon Goldhill, as I have already mentioned, has been pushing me to think harder and better about tragedy for many, many years. It has been an enormous pleasure more recently to share ideas and argue about German idealism with him. His comments on a penultimate draft were absolutely invaluable. No one could have been more involved in formulating and reformulating the argument of this book than Bonnie Honig. Her own work on Antigone was both an inspiration and a spur throughout the project. Two long conversations, one in my living room in

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London, the other in her beautiful loft space in Boston, transformed my thinking on this topic. She also answered a zillion emails and read several complete and intermediate drafts of the manuscript; from beginning to end her brilliant suggestions sharpened the focus and improved the structure of the book. I am grateful to her for her intellectual example and loyal companionship. I owe a special debt to Sharmila Sen at Harvard University Press for accepting the book for publication and for offering encouragement and support at various stages. She is an absolutely exceptional editor, and it has been a real honor and pleasure to work with her. The two anonymous reports from the press were also extremely insightful and greatly improved the final draft. Heather Hughes has been very efficient, helpful, and patient throughout the process. I would like to thank Oxford University Press for allowing me to reprint my article “Freud and Tragedy: Oedipus and the Gender of the Universal,” Classical Receptions Journal 5, no. 1 (2013) as Chapter 4. Phiroze Vasunia was, as ever, my first and last reader and interlocutor. He is my Alpha and Omega. He improved the text and argument in innumerable ways. He has endured my many ups and downs as well as my prose. Words simply cannot express what I owe him. Mark, Gabs, Jakob, and Noa have kept me cheerful and offered love and support as only they can. This book is dedicated to my parents, Dick Leonard and Irène Heidelberger-­Leonard, two unique individuals who have taught me everything I know.

Tragic Modernities

Introduction Midway between Oedipus and Marx

“A ll men are aware of tragedy in life. But tragedy as a form of drama is not universal.”1 So begins George Steiner’s book The Death of Tragedy. Tragedy may be a human universal, but tragic art is culturally specific. Notably, according to Steiner: “Oriental art knows violence, grief, and the stroke of natural or contrived disaster; the Japanese theatre is full of ferocity and ceremonial death. But that representation of personal suffering and heroism which we call tragic drama is a distinctive part of the western tradition.”2 And not just any Western tradition, for Steiner will quickly add, “Tragedy is alien to the Judaic sense of the world.” Instead, “this idea and the vision of man which it implies are Greek. And nearly till the moment of their decline, the tragic forms are Hellenic.”3 It is hard to tell whether Steiner’s affirmation of the exclusively Western tradition of tragic drama, written in 1961 at the height of the era of colonial struggle, is merely a scholarly taxonomy of aesthetic forms or a sign of postcolonial anxiety—​or both. In any case, Steiner’s insistence on a geographically restricted notion of tragedy is accompanied by a series of temporal limitations. Tragedy, Steiner affirms, is not just alien to Judaism and “the Orient;” it is also alien to modernity. More precisely, tragedy flourished in “Periclean Athens, in England during the period 1580– 1640, in seventeenth century Spain, in France between 1630 and 1690. After that the necessary encounter of historical setting and personal genius” has been vanishingly rare.4 As he puts it more succinctly: “From 1

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antiquity until the age of Shakespeare and Racine, such accomplishment seemed within the reach of talent. Since then the tragic voice is blurred or still.”5 Steiner believes that three specific mythologies account for the “crisis of modern tragedy”: classicism, Christianity, and Marxism. The classicism of the eighteenth century driven by the pursuit of reason is incompatible with the dark irrationality of ancient tragedy, while the “optimism” of the Christian and Marxian worldviews insulates them from tragic determinism. “Of the three, there is none that is naturally suitable to a revival of tragic drama. The classic leads to a dead past. The metaphysics of Christianity and Marxism are anti-­tragic. That in essence is the dilemma of modern tragedy.”6 Given the coexistence of Shakespeare, of Racine, and of Calderón with a “Christian metaphysics,” the persuasiveness of Steiner’s contention may have more to do with the patrician authority of its deliverance than with the detail of its argument. One might counter Steiner by suggesting that it is in the vacuum left by the critique of Christianity and the failure of the Enlightenment that modern tragedy has been able to thrive. The persistence of a Christianizing perspective in German idealist readings of tragedy and the recalcitrant humanism of many post-­Enlightenment philosophies of the tragic, however, suggest something more complex. But it is the third figure in Steiner’s trinity that is perhaps the most arresting. Indeed, the disproportionate attention that Steiner pays to Marxism is as striking to the contemporary reader as the Eurocentrism of his opening page. Singled out in the second paragraph, Marxism follows on closely from “Judaism” and the “Orient” as the “other” to tragedy. When Steiner laid the death of tragedy at the hands of Marx, it was no surprise that his Cambridge colleague, the Marxist critic Raymond Williams, felt provoked to react.7 Williams stated in an interview that his 1966 book Modern Tragedy was written as “a response to the shock of returning to Cambridge and encountering the course on tragedy there in a much more ideological form than it had been when [he] was a student.”8 The debate between Steiner and Williams may have its proximate cause in the “intellectual politics very specific to the teaching of English in Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s,”9 but it nevertheless resonates with the broad themes of this book. For while Steiner affirmed the impossibility of tragedy in

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modernity, Williams proclaimed that modernity itself was tragic. Steiner acknowledged that modern man may “be aware of tragedy in life,” but he saw only obstacles to the creation of tragic drama in modern historical consciousness.10 Williams, by contrast, saw the pervasive experience of tragedy in modern life as the impetus for the creation and appreciation of a tragic worldview. In its contention that tragedy and modernity are intimately connected, this book takes its cue from Williams in more ways than one. Williams’s observation that the recognition of tragedy in life might offer particular insight into tragic drama is a characteristically modern aperçu. For it is only in modernity that tragedy becomes connected to life in this specific way, and it is in nineteenth-­century Germany, in particular, that the question of tragedy becomes linked to the self-­definition of modernity. Where the eighteenth century had largely considered Greek tragedy for its timeless aesthetic value, this new tradition sees the modernity of tragedy as an existential question. The reasons for this changing perception are complex. The turn to aesthetics in post-­K antian philosophy, the birth of philology as a historicist discipline, and the role of the French Revolution in the reevaluation of tragedy as a historical and political experience are all contributory factors.11 While each takes a very different approach, it is clear that for Schelling and Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, the vocabulary and the concept of the tragic come to play a crucial role in their accounts of the modern condition. Steiner’s exclusionary rhetoric may be grating, but he is certainly right that an interest in tragedy has shaped a distinctively European intellectual tradition. This book draws on this tradition, which I contend stretches from the late eighteenth century well into the twentieth century, to argue that to be a modern subject, whether in our experience of gender, in our attitude to the past, or in our sense of political agency, is to be a tragic subject. The book studies the formulation of the “philosophy of the tragic” in Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin at the start of the nineteenth century and its impact on the later tragic philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, ­Benjamin, Heidegger, Schmitt, and Arendt. Tragic Modernities purposefully juxtaposes these different historical moments as its aim is to emphasize the continuities in the preoccupation with tragedy across disparate philosophies of European modernity. Modernity is a notoriously capacious

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and intractable concept;12 nevertheless, the modern philosophical engagement with tragedy brings to the fore a series of recurring anxieties that are at the heart of modern life: a concern with freedom and the limits of agency, the paradox of historical rupture and continuity, the promise and betrayal of the political, and the interrelationship between gender and subjectivity. Rather than approaching modern tragedy historically, in chronological or evolutionary terms, the book is structured around a series of thematic chapters, each of which will explore the role of tragedy in formulating these core preoccupations. The first chapter introduces revolution as a central term. The French Revolution provides the historical context for the emergence of the philosophy of the tragic. I argue that the experience of revolution more broadly is the impetus for formulating a series of existential and political questions to which tragedy would provide the answers. Chapter 2 explains the metaphysical underpinnings of this new postrevolutionary understanding of the genre by investigating the merging of aesthetic and ontological categories. In Chapter 3 the question “Is tragedy possible in modernity?” becomes central to understanding the codification of a new philosophy of history. The final two chapters respectively explore gender and subjectivity. In moving from revolution to the subject of psychoanalysis, the book may appear to track a transition from the collective to the individual. And yet what Tragic Modernities highlights is how tragedy repeatedly places the relationship between individuals and collectives at the heart of metaphysical, political, and psychoanalytic thought. By making philosophical approaches to tragedy key to my understanding of modernity, I aim to show how important this tradition has been not just for the development of modern thought, but also for understanding tragedy as a literary genre.13 As Joshua Billings argues, “Tragedy is the most philosophical of art forms.”14 Billings, in part, takes his cue from Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy in his Poetics where he claims that “poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal (ta katholou), history the particular.”15 In associating tragic poetry with both abstraction and universalism, Aristotle facilitated the cooption of tragedy into philosophical discourse. Even in antiquity philosophy seemed to have a need to deal with tragedy. It is because Plato and Aristotle reacted almost immediately to the corpus of fifth-­century BCE drama that tragedy entered the history of thought

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with the supplement of philosophical theorization. The German idealist reading of tragedy, which I argue inaugurates the entry of tragedy into modern thought, is both a continuation of and a rupture with the philosophical theorizations of Plato and Aristotle.16 In both ancient and modern configurations it is difficult to untangle the literary texts from their philosophical commentary. So while ancient tragedies have a rich afterlife in literary reworkings, performance histories, and scholarly interpretation, philosophical readings play an often unacknowledged role in shaping these receptions. Even today, no reading of Antigone, of Oedipus, or of the Bacchae is not also, at least unconsciously, a dialogue with Plato and Aristotle and with Hegel, Freud, and Nietzsche too. Although there is some recognition that the philosophical understanding of tragedy has historically shaped the discussion of ancient drama, classicists remain resistant to returning to its insights to further the study of classical texts. This book aims to redress the situation not only by revealing the persistent traces of the philosophy of the tragic in our modern critical vocabulary, but also by arguing that a renewed interest in this tradition will draw out the distinctive contribution of Greek tragedy to conceptual thought. The relationship between Athenian drama and philosophy that was forged in antiquity also accounts for the specific potency of Greek tragedy in modernity. The development of modern tragedy, the modern tragedy that starts with Shakespeare, Racine, and Calderón but continues, pace Steiner, right the way down to Ibsen, Strindberg, Lorca, Beckett, and Soyinka and beyond, owes its identity at least as much to Aristotle as it is does to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Without the Poetics it is arguable that the revival of tragedy as dramatic form might never have taken place.17 Without Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, moreover, would we be able to make sense of modern concepts such as the Sublime and the Dionysiac? Steiner’s assertion that “tragic forms are Hellenic” has to be understood within a broader context of European philhellenism but it also gestures towards the more specific relationship between literature and philosophy, which was sealed by Greek tragedy and enabled its transport into modernity. Tragic Modernities examines a two-­way process: On the one hand, it investigates how an engagement with tragedy defined some of the central preoccupations of modernity, and on the other, it shows how modernity

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changed the meaning of these texts for us and drew out their philosophical significance.18 The texts I examine help us see again why tragedy is philosophically interesting without instrumentalizing tragedy for philosophy’s purposes. They offer another way of looking at Greek tragedy that moves beyond historicist readings that focus on specific performance practices in Athens or the civic ideology of fifth-­century Greek democracy. So, for instance, when Schelling argues that tragedy illustrates a conflict between freedom and necessity, he gives us the vocabulary to read the Oedipus Tyrannus as a commentary on questions of subjectivity and the limits of agency. Or, to take an alternative example, the Marxist reading of alienation can make us think differently about the failure of politics in the Antigone. The book also takes its inspiration from Williams in a different way. The rejection of the philosophical reading of tragedy within classical studies has gone hand in hand with an ostensibly more politicized approach to Attic drama. In the aftermath of the publication of Jean-­ Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-­Naquet’s groundbreaking Myth and Tragedy, classicists developed historicizing accounts of Greek tragedy that placed increasing emphasis on the civic context of the original performances.19 Written within a few years of Modern Tragedy, the essays by Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet mapped out a new understanding of the emergence of the political in fifth-­century Athens inspired by the methods of “historical psychology” and “historical anthropology.” Tragedy was for Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet the ultimate aesthetic manifestation of the fifth-­century Athenian political revolution. It was in Myth and Tragedy that Vernant formulated one of the most compelling renunciations of the German theorization of tragedy in classical scholarship. His essay “Oedipus without the Complex” launches a full frontal attack on perhaps the single most influential reading of Greek tragedy in the past two hundred years. It is the “universalism” of the Freudian reading that Vernant finds so problematic: In the Freudian interpretation this historical aspect of tragedy remains totally incomprehensible. If tragedy draws its material from a type of dream that has universal significance, if the impact of tragedy depends on stimulating an emotional complex that we all carry within us, then why was tragedy born in the Greek world at

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the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries? Why did other civilizations know nothing of tragedy? And why was the tragic seam so rapidly exhausted in Greece itself and its place taken by a philosophical type of thought that did away with the contradictions upon which tragedy constructed its dramatic universe, by accounting for them rationally?20

One of the most striking elements of Vernant’s analysis here is his identification of Freud’s rather specific reference to Oedipus in the course of a chapter in the Interpretation of Dreams devoted to typical dreams with a general theory of tragedy. Rather than restricting his critique to Freud’s reading of this particular Sophoclean play, Vernant assigns to Freud a theory of the tragic that by a clever sleight of hand places it in continuity with a tradition of German thought that leads back to Schelling and Hegel. I have no doubt that Vernant is right that Freud is indebted to these figures, and I explore this relationship more closely in Chap­ ­ter 4.21 And yet to associate Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex in the Interpretation of Dreams with a full-­blown theory of the tragic à la Hegel or Nietzsche is a different kind of gesture.22 In other words, while criticizing Freud for his universalizing reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus, Vernant himself universalizes Freud’s reading of Oedipus into a full-­ blown philosophy of the tragic. Freud, then, is not so much criticized by Vernant for his psychologization of a fictional character or for his lack of attention to the Greek conceptualization of the self as he is for not comprehending the historical specificity of the emergence of the genre of tragedy. As much as Freud’s interpretation of the content of the myth, Vernant objects to Freud’s starting point. “Oedipus Rex,” Freud claims, “moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one.”23 For Vernant such a statement is nonsensical. “Other civilizations,” according to Vernant, “know nothing of tragedy.” The experience of tragedy is so exclusive to its fifth-­century audience that Vernant can make the claim that in the fourth century “Aristotle can no longer know what the tragic consciousness or tragic man really are.”24 And if Aristotle couldn’t understand tragedy, what chance does Freud have? What chance, one might wonder, does Vernant have?25 From this angle of analysis, Vernant would seem to have more in common with Steiner than he does with Williams. While Vernant is

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more extreme than Steiner in denying the genre of tragedy even to Shakespeare and Racine, the two defenders of tragedy’s authenticity share a belief in the unbreachable chasm that separates us from the Greeks and their conception of tragedy. Although they may have different accounts of the historical impetus that gave rise to Greek tragedy, both insist on the exclusively Hellenic origins of the tragic genre. On closer inspection, however, Vernant and Williams have important connections. Vernant’s historicism was grounded in a Marxism not dissimilar to Williams’s. Despite his interest in tragic theory, the same imperative to historicize underpins Williams’s analysis of Modern Tragedy: Tragic experience, because of its central importance, commonly attracts the fundamental beliefs and tensions of a period, and tragic theory is interesting mainly in this sense, that through it the shape and set of a particular culture is often deeply realized. If, however, we think of it as a theory about a single and permanent kind of fact, we can only end with the metaphysical conclusions that are built into any such assumption. Chief among these is the assumption of a permanent and essentially unchanging human nature (an assumption taken over from one kind of Christianity to “ritual” anthropology and the general theory of psychoanalysis). Given such an assumption, we have to explain tragedy in terms of this unchanging human nature or certain of its faculties. But if we reject this assumption (following a different kind of Christianity, a different psychological theory, or the evidence of comparative anthropology) the problem is necessarily transformed. Tragedy is not a single and permanent kind of fact, but a series of experiences and conventions and institutions.26

Williams and Vernant share an antipathy to psychoanalysis and its perceived universalism. They also make the same gesture toward a different, more historically minded form of psychology and anthropology. But while Williams understands tragedy and the tragic as an evolving form in which the “beliefs and tensions” of different historical periods have expressed themselves, Vernant insists on the absolute singularity of the Greek experience. Indeed, for Vernant, the very concept of “tragic theory” would be anathema as it was precisely the advent of philosophical theorizing that was responsible for the demise of the living art form of tragedy.27 They may have been united in their political outlook and

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their commitment to history, but Vernant and Williams had very different understandings of the contemporary politics of tragedy. Vernant saw it as a political as well as a scholarly imperative to bracket Greek tragedy from its modern reception. The politics of tragedy, for Vernant, could only be the politics of fifth-­century democratic Athens. For Williams, by contrast, both the performance and theorization of tragic drama had an important political role to play in the ideological battles of modernity. Though they shared a concern about philosophy’s hypostatization of the art form, they diverged over tragedy’s (un)timeliness in the present. Robert Pirro has argued that “those who deploy the rhetoric of tragedy in more self-­conscious and theoretically robust ways often labour under a general suspicion about the political significance and value of their engagements with tragedy.”28 Classical scholars in the wake of Vernant have generally shared this suspicion. Politically engaged analyses of Greek drama are deemed incompatible with the abstract theorizations of the modern thinkers I consider in this book. Such a reading, I would argue, underplays the abstraction of Vernant’s analysis. Vernant started his career as a philosopher, and his interpretations are not only inconceivable without Hegel and Marx, they also operate throughout with a certain unified conception of “the tragic” in tension with the historicism he professes. Vernant’s brilliant analysis of the tragic will, for instance, is a deeply philosophical meditation that has as much if not more to say about the role of humanism in structuralism than it does about legislation in fifth-­century Athens. This reading also fails to recognize the multiple political contexts that have given rise to the philosophical readings of tragedy across the centuries. The German idealist reading of tragedy was born out of the French Revolution.29 The discussion of freedom that is central to idealism’s investment in tragedy emerges directly from the revolutionary politics of the period. In the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt were certainly inspired by this long tradition of German philhellenism, but they were also alive to the contemporary political resonance of tragedy. Even thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud whose readings have been associated either with aestheticism or, as we have seen, with unreflective universalism turned to tragedy to explore the very questions of subjectivity that are crucial for

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understanding politics today. The tragic, as recent works by Robert Pirro, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig show, continues to be a site for developing democratic theory.30 One of the arguments of this book is that philosophical approaches to tragedy present an underexploited resource for political readings. Billings has recently suggested that the value of German idealist interpretations lies in their ability to pose “different questions . . . ​to the classics.”31 It is in the context of political analyses that these alternatives are most needed. Inviting us to read tragedy otherwise, the theoretical texts I explore in this book push us to read tragedy otherwise politically. So where Steiner argues that the politics of modernity stand in the way of the appreciation of tragic drama, this book shows not just how tragedy has shaped modern political discourse, but also how the political debates of modernity can offer important insight into tragic theatre. Steiner’s discussion of Marxism is particularly pertinent. The Death of Tragedy, as we have seen, barely makes it past its first page before declaring Marxism’s antipathy to the tragic outlook: “Marxism is characteristically Jewish in its insistence on justice and reason, and Marx repudiated the entire concept of tragedy. ‘Necessity,’ he declared, ‘is blind only in so far as it is not understood.’ Tragic drama arises out of precisely the contrary assertion: necessity is blind and man’s encounter with it shall rob him of his eyes, whether it be in Thebes or in Gaza.”32 In Steiner’s interpretation of Marx, the ultimate object of Marxism is the demystification of necessity. The enlightenment it offers is completely at odds with the determinism of the tragic worldview. Yet a closer look at Marx’s “repudiation of tragedy” reveals something a little more complex. The quotation is actually not from Marx at all but from a work by Engels where he is quoting Hegel: Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the appreciation of necessity (die Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit). “Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood [begriffen].” Freedom does not consist in any dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. . . . ​Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves

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and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.33

Presenting freedom as the “appreciation of necessity” is a far more paradoxical position than Steiner’s interpretation allows. As we shall see, German idealist readings return obsessively to this knot between freedom and necessity that tragic drama puts on the agenda. Oedipus may be robbed of his eyes, but his predicament is so poignant, so tragic, one might say, because he opens Sophocles’s play so passionately convinced of his freedom. Marxism’s understanding of history and human agency continues to track the idealist dialectic between freedom and necessity, and tragedy provides Marx with a powerful model to do so. One of the consequences of Steiner’s misapprehension of Marxism is the difficulty he faces in dealing with the dramas of Bertolt Brecht, which he obviously admires: “It is remarkable that so shrill and naïve a mythol­­ogy should have served the ends of a dramatist of the stature of Brecht.”34 Where Brecht “lacked hope,” Steiner opined, “the Marxist creed is immensely, perhaps naïvely optimistic.” He affirmed, “The Marxist con­­ ception of history is a secular commedia”—​not for Steiner, then, the infamous alternation between tragedy and farce.35 Steiner interprets Brecht’s play Mutter Courage as an “allegory of pure waste.” The death and suffering that Mutter Courage endures do not lead to any great insight; they merely keep her trapped in a cycle of “monstrous” “inhuman” loss. Brecht’s allegory, he suggests, provides an ironic and critical perspective on the utopian aspirations of Marxism. “Brecht stands midway between the world of Oedipus and that of Marx. He agreed with Marx that necessity is not blind, but like all true poets, he knew that she often closes her eyes. And when she has closed them, she lies in ambush for the coming of man along the road from Corinth.”36 Williams shares Steiner’s appreciation of Mutter Courage and, like Steiner, concludes his book with an analysis of Brecht’s contribution to tragedy. Williams also concurs that a response to suffering is at the core of Brecht’s tragic vision. But to Williams the analysis of waste and human loss is an intrinsically Marxian dimension of his drama. For Williams the diagnosis of tragedy in human life and society is a Marxist undertaking. Tragic drama plays a crucial role in uncovering structures of social

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oppression and conditions of alienation. The exposure of the short­ comings of modernity is necessary to the creation of a new modernity. Such is the tragic vision that Williams identifies in Brecht: “   ‘The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary.’ This feeling extends into a general position: the new tragic consciousness of all those who, appalled by the present, are for this reason firmly committed to a different future: to struggle against suffering learned in suffering: a total exposure which is also a total involvement.”37 At this stage Williams turns to Brecht’s poem An die Nachgeborenen: For we know only too well: Even the hatred of squalor Makes the brow grow stern. Even anger against injustice Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness Could ourselves not be kind.

Williams, like Brecht, knows that history is no “secular commedia” and that “anger against injustice makes the voice grow harsh.” The tragedy of modernity is the recognition of the persistence of suffering in the knowledge that the suffering is unnecessary. Even un-­blinded necessity remains necessity. Brecht and Williams’s Marxism is more tragic than comic, but it is not entirely without optimism. “In our own day, in a known complexity, it is the fixed harshness of a revolutionary regime which has turned to arrest the revolution itself, but which finds, facing its men turned to stone, the children of the struggle who because of the struggle live in new ways and with new feelings, and who, including the revolution in their ordinary living, answer death and suffering with a human voice.”38 But tragedy does not just respond to suffering with a human voice; it also questions what it is to be human and alerts us, as Williams, Brecht, and the other tragic philosophers in this book do, to “the possibility of action in conditions of impossibility.”39

c h a p t e r

on e

Tragedy and Revolution

Silenus at Colonus: Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution “Since the time of the French Revolution,” writes Raymond Williams “the idea of tragedy can be seen as in different ways a response to culture in conscious change and movement. The action of tragedy and the action of history have been consciously connected, and in the connection have been seen in new ways. The reaction against this, from the mid-­nineteenth century, has been equally evident: the movement of spirit has been separated from the movement of civilization.”1 If Williams is correct to say that the French Revolution inaugurates a new “structure of feeling,” can one understand the turn to tragedy within modernity as a way of trying to make sense of this new affective structure? Even before the events of the Arab Spring, in recent years tragedy has reemerged as a privileged trope in political discussions. From Terry Eagleton to Slavoj Žižek, from Judith Butler to Cornell West, tragedy has repeatedly provided a common lexicon for arguments between philosophers, literary critics, and political theorists. For many of these thinkers, trained in continental philosophy and intellectually shaped by the emergence of the philosophy of the tragic, such tragic politics seem an unavoidable outcome. This chapter will look at how tragedy and modern political theory have shaped each other’s discourses and have provided mutually reinforcing ways of understanding the predicament of modernity. 13

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As the Williams quotation announces, there is one particular domain of political thought and practice that has an especially ambivalent relationship to tragedy: revolution. Revolution decisively established itself as a mode of the political in the modern period. The American and French revolutions arguably brought modernity into existence, but it is the revolutions of the nineteenth century leading up to 1917 that defined and redefined the political stakes of modernity. This chronology forms the basis of Hannah Arendt’s reflections in her book On Revolution: “Historically, wars are amongst the oldest phenomena of the recorded past while revolutions, properly speaking, did not exist prior to the modern age; they are amongst the most recent of all major political data.”2 Although Arendt would characterize the twentieth century as “the century of revolutions,” it is the dual legacy of the American and French revolutions that remains her preoccupation in the book. These eighteenth-­century political crises reshaped the experience of history. Arendt establishes revolution as an inescapable “metaphor” of the modern condition: The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. Before they were engaged in what then turned out to be a revolution, none of the actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot of the new drama was going to be. However, once the revolutions had begun to run their course, and long before those who were involved in them could know whether their enterprise would end in victory or disaster, the novelty of the story and the innermost meaning of its plot became manifest to actors and spectators alike.3

The establishment of a new calendar by the French Revolutionaries stands in metonymically for the transformation of temporality enacted by these revolutions. The sense of “beginning anew” was intimately related to the quest for a new human narrative. The revolution created the possibility of composing a “new story” that deviated from all preexisting stories. But despite the potential afforded by this new narrative freedom, Arendt encodes their actions within a particular generic

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framework. As the revolutionaries in Arendt’s text assume the role of actors their revolution becomes a drama. The theater of revolution transforms citizens into actors and witnesses into spectators. Arendt’s turn of phrase is not casual. “German writers at the end of the eighteenth century described the French Revolution as a drama for which their front row seats rendered them ideal spectators,” writes Rebecca Comay.4 In particular, Comay sees the French Revolution as the spectacle that enables Kant to transform the discourse of morality into an aesthetic register. Comay continues: “In his third Critique (1790), [Kant] had already formalized the logic whereby terror experienced at a slight distance yields the sublime satisfaction of moral self-­enhancement.”5 The imperative of disinterestedness that Kant assigns to the aesthetic sphere is transferred to the act of political spectatorship. “The logic is ultimately Aristotelian: terror is purged through a vicarious catharsis secured by aesthetic distance.”6 Although she may not share Kant’s particular cooption of political judgment to aesthetic sensibility, by resorting to theatrical metaphors, Arendt places herself in a long line of German writers who experienced the French Revolution as a drama. But Comay shows that such a perspective on the revolution was not only reserved for its German philosophical spectators. As the terror progressed and spectacles of violence became widespread, the citizen participants were incessantly confronted with the visualization of suffering. “At this point, the scene of suffering, formally contained in Aristotelian tragedy, threatened to pervade the totality of the spectacle.”7 For Comay the guillotine perfectly captures the paradox. “At this point . . . ​the radiant transparency of the revolutionary festival gave rise to the perfunctory banal nonspectacle of the guillotine. The democratic collapse of the distinction between actor, role, and spectator (on the scaffold everyone can be a player, but each player performs the same role, and only once) requires the elimination of illusionistic distance and the blockage of spectatorial response. Paradoxically, the guillotine both inspired theatricality (as an instrument of mass edification, it required full visibility and spectatorship) and yet resisted every attempt at visualization.”8 Comay draws on Foucault’s analysis in Discipline and Punish to exemplify how the guillotine enacted the transition from “one scopic scene” to another.

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The guillotine had all the accoutrements of drama but none of its cathartic release. Violence had become so efficient, so mechanized, that is was literally impossible to see the spectacle, let alone be purified by it. The French Revolution, then, not only attracted the vocabulary of theatrical performance, through the reference to Aristotle, the act of spectating also took on an important moral and political dimension. Arendt is acutely sensitive to the political aspect of this dramatic emplotment: As to the plot, it was unmistakably the emergence of freedom: in 1793, four years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, at a time when Robespierre could define his rule as the “despotism of liberty” without fear of being accused of speaking in paradoxes, Condorcet summed up what everybody knew: “The word ‘revolutionary’ can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.”9

For Arendt, the distinctiveness of the revolutionary drama is that it is a drama of freedom. Arendt argues here, as elsewhere, that there is no such thing as a revolution, properly speaking, that is not allied to the pursuit of freedom. But how can “the emergence of freedom” be plotted? Does this not imply some constraint on the participants’ action? Before she even invokes Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty” her own narrative is framed by the poles of freedom and necessity, the same structure that frames the philosophy’s tragic inquiries from Schelling to Nietzsche to critical theory. The plot that characterizes revolution is the same plot that structures tragedy. Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty” anticipates Schelling’s classic formulation of Oedipus’s dilemma, which we will discuss in the next chapter. Although Arendt refrains from explicitly characterizing the drama as a tragedy,10 the invocation of freedom and its paradoxes makes it impossible not to ally her philosophical exploration of revolution to the philosophy of the tragic to which it arguably gave birth.11 It is not surprising, then, that Arendt’s close friend and mentor Karl Jaspers would characterize Arendt’s On Revolution as a tragic book. In a letter he wrote to her praising the book, he states: “In the course of your presentation, the greatness to which you give expression is a source of encouragement. Ultimately, the whole is your vision of a tragedy that does not leave you despairing: an element of the tragedy of mankind.”12 ­Jaspers’s reference to tragedy is not incidental: A little more than a decade earlier

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he had himself written a book titled Tragedy Is Not Enough. In that work ­Jaspers had been preoccupied with the redemptive qualities of tragic knowledge: “If preserved in purity, the original vision of tragedy already contains the essence of philosophy: movement, question, open-­mindedness, emotion, wonder, truthfulness, lack of illusion.”13 As the reference to the “original vision of tragedy” suggests, Jaspers’s engagement with tragedy was predicated on his understanding of Greek culture. It is possible that Jaspers’s characterization of Arendt’s book took its inspiration from the isolated references to tragedy that occur in On Revolution,14 but it is much more likely that he took his cue from the discussion of Oedipus at Colonus that concludes the book. Indeed, that it was specifically the Greek aspect of Arendt’s tragic vision that he highlights is clear from the concluding lines of his letter: “I sometimes think in reading your book that Greece is there for you: without your homeland among the Greeks you would hardly have been able to find the form, without them you could not have found the perspective that allowed you to perceive the marvellous significance of the American Constitution and its origins.”15 In suggesting that it is Arendt’s “homeland among the Greeks” that enables her to give “form” to her thoughts, Jaspers affirms that it is the generic form of tragedy that grounds Arendt’s political analysis of modernity: Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus, the play of his old age, wrote the famous frightening lines: Mὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νικᾷ λόγον: τὸ δ᾽, ἐπεὶ φανῇ, βῆναι κεῖθεν ὅθεν περ ἥκει, πολὺ δεύτερον, ὡς τάχιστα. “Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words; by far the second-­best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly as possible whence it came.” There he also lets us know, through the mouth of Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens and hence her spokesman, what it was that enabled ordinary men, young and old, to bear life’s burden: it was the polis, the space of men’s free deeds and living words, which could endow life with splendor—​τὸν βίον λαμπρὸν ποεῖσθαι.16

So concludes “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure,” the final chapter of On Revolution. How should one make sense of Arendt’s tragic coda? Prefacing her remarks with the “Wisdom of Silenus,” Arendt

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then uses Oedipus at Colonus to articulate the redemptive power of the political. The “famous frightening lines” that Arendt quotes from the O.C. were, of course, also central for Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy, these same lines play a pivotal role in Nietzsche’s understanding of the tragic experience. Nietzsche recounts the story of King Midas who confronted Silenus, the wise companion of Dionysus, in the woods and asked him what he considered to be man’s greatest gift; breaking out in “shrill laughter” he responds: “Wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second-­best thing for you is: to die soon.”17 Nietzsche saw the Greeks’ confrontation with the truth of Silenus as a key to the creation of their Olympian deities: “The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to live at all they had to place in front of these things the resplendent, dream-­figures of the Olympians.”18 It was in order to spare themselves a direct confrontation with the frightening futility of life that the Greeks would create the veil of Olympian art as a conscious self-­deception. In Nietzsche’s analysis of tragedy, the Dionysian represents Silenus’s insight while the Apolline provides the veil of aesthetic enjoyment that shields its spectators from despair. Tragedy is the dialectic between these two drives: “Here, in the highest symbolism of art, we see before us that the Apolline world of beauty and the world on which it rests, that terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we grasp, intuitively, the reciprocal necessity of these two things.”19 For Nietzsche it is the Greeks’ acceptance of Silenus’s affirmation that provided the impetus for the creation of the hybrid genre of tragedy. But at a more general level, the sentiment encapsulated in the choral ode of the O.C. necessitates the turn to aesthetics as an answer to the question of being. “Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.”20 This is Nietzsche’s Greeks’ response to the “famous frightening lines” of Sophocles. Arendt’s Greeks will come up with a different solution. As Peter Euben writes, “For [Nietzsche] drama redeems life against the Wisdom of Silenus. For Arendt politics does.”21 Like Nietzsche, Arendt does not leave Silenus’s pronouncement unanswered. Where Nietzsche looks to tragedy as a whole to find the ­necessary

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c­ ounterpart to the Silenean declaration, Arendt looks to a particular tragedy. For, Arendt reveals how the very same poet in the very same play can simultaneously voice the nihilism of Silenus and the utopianism of Theseus. Arendt parallels Nietzsche’s language of endurance: “he also let us know through the mouth of Theseus . . . ​what it was that enabled ordinary men, young and old, to bear life’s burden.”22 Arendt’s Sophocles understands the necessary dialectic that underpins tragic thought, but for her, a different dialectic sustains the genre. The life-­affirming qualities of Theseus’s polis are the antidote to the self-­annihilating pessimism of Sophocles’s choral ode. Moreover, the polis as “a space of men’s free deeds” contrasts strikingly with the passivity and heavy predestination of Silenus’s worldview.23 Nevertheless, the striking aspect of the Sophoclean version is the foregrounding of the political: Not to be born is best of all: when life is there, the second best to go whence you came, with the best speed you may. For when his youth with its gift of light heart has come and gone, what grievous stroke is spared to man, what agony is he without? Envy, and faction, strife and fighting and murders are his, and yet there is something more that claims him, old age at last, most hated, without power, without comrades, and friends, take up their dwelling with him.24

Silenus’s general maxim is reformulated to describe the position of man within the polis. The afflictions that beset humanity are not abstract; they beset man insofar as he is an active member of the community. Although the ode commences as a lament about the difficulties of old age, the political context of human existence soon makes itself manifest. Oedipus’s fate, as we will see in the next chapter, is always at one level bound up with the fate of humanity writ large. This association is sealed in his exchange with the Sphinx where, in identifying man as the answer to her riddle, Oedipus tied his fate to the fate of humanism. Oedipus’s

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ability to identify the life cycle of man, to recognize his distinctiveness from his birth to his grave—​from his four legs in the morning to his three in the evening—​is also paralleled in this ode that references man’s unfortunate journey from youth to senility. As Pat Easterling writes: “The syntax of the whole ode brings out very clearly the fact that what is true for Oedipus is true not only for him . . . ​but for all humanity.”25 But Oedipus’s human universalism is also tied to the universal of political subjectivity. The trials that Oedipus encounters are political as well as being human. Easterling points out that the list of troubles singled out in this ode “sounds more like Solon or Theognis reflecting on the problems of the polis than like traditional meditations on mortality.”26 Oedipus’s incest and parricide are in a different light political problems: regicide, dysfunctional succession, tyrannical overreach, and resulting exile. Seemingly benign old age, the ode suggests, is a far greater cross to bear than the trials of civil war, political factionalism, and murder. And yet what make old age so difficult to bear are the loss of power and the absence of a community. Old age is now the only thing “that dwells in common” (sunoikein). If to live in common is the definition of polis life, old age stands as its antithesis. The conflation of life with life within the polis that we see performed in this ode recalls Heidegger’s interpretation of the phrase “ὑψίπολις: ἄπολις” from the Ode to Man in the Antigone (370). Removing it from its syntactical context, Heidegger translates this phrase as “rising high over the abode, deprived of abode.” Here Heidegger makes an argument for a reconceptualization of the political, asserting that the polis is not to be understood as a secure social or political order, but rather as a place, as a site of being. The polis does not describe the city or a social construct, but rather “πóλιs means, rather, the site [die Stätte], the there [Da], wherein and as which historical Da-­sein is. The πóλιs is the historical site [Geschichtssätte], the there in which, out of which, and for which history happens [Geschichte geschieht].”27 Later in his discussion of the same line from the Antigone in his Parmenides, Heidegger tries to understand the πóλιs in terms of πέλειν, the archaic verb for εἶναι. As he argues: “It is not by chance that these thoughts about man occur in a Greek tragedy. For it is from the unique source of the conflictual essence of ἀλἡθεια that the possibility and necessity of ‘tragedy’ itself arise.”28 If polis and pelein name

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the same thing, if “being” and “being political” are synonymous, then, he affirms, “it is because the Greeks are an absolutely non-­political people” that they both could and had to found the polis.29 What does Arendt make of Heidegger’s redefinition of the political? In returning to this Sophoclean ode to reaffirm the priority of the political, is Arendt merely restating Heidegger’s repositioning of the polis as the site of being? Both Arendt and the Sophoclean ode itself, I would argue, suggest something else. In defining the polis as a “space,” Arendt may recall Heidegger, but for Arendt, the polis is much more than just a space; it is the “space of men’s free deeds and living words.”30 In On Revolution this definition of the polis emerges not from Sophocles’s Silenus ode but from a speech of Theseus. Perhaps this is not surprising: Easterling’s powerful interpretation of the ode, for instance, is firmly at odds with Arendt’s general conclusion about the life-­enhancing power of the polis. Easterling argues that “the implication is surely that human society for all its civilization is liable to make things worse, not better for those that live long in it.”31 But it would also be possible to argue the reverse: It is precisely because old age no longer enjoys the benefits of polis life that it is so wretched. The loss of community experienced in senility merely brings into perspective the benefits of sunoikein (despite envy, stasis, and murder). What Sophocles seems to be arguing is that even with its trials of wars and factionalism, human society is far preferable to the state that experiences its loss. Even in the Silenus ode, the originary status of the political that Arendt uncovers as the essence of tragedy stands against the apolitical reading of Heidegger. As Barbara Cassin writes: “Tragedy, which is essentially Greek, is for Heidegger, as the Parmenides explicitly avows, the tragedy of aletheia. For Arendt, it is ‘the political art par excellence’ —​not because it necessarily represents the conflict between private and public but because it is the imitation, with a minimal reification, of action, of drama, and of those non-­generalisable individuals who are the ‘acting people’—​the ‘agents’ or ‘actors’ of history.”32 If, in Arendt’s reading, even Silenus reinstates the priority of the political, what should we make of Silenus’s counterpart, Theseus? Paralleling Heidegger’s disregard for syntax, Arendt attributes to him the phrase “τὸν βίον λαμπρὸν ποεῖσθαι.” The context of Theseus’s formulation is significant:

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That you should talk a long time to your children in joy at seeing them—​why that’s no wonder! Or that you should address them before me—​ there’s no offense in that. It is not in words that I should wish to bring luster to my life, but rather in things done. Have I not shown that? I was not a liar in what I swore I’d do for you, old man. I am here; and I have brought them back alive and safe, for all they were threatened with.33

This passage marks the moment that Theseus returns Ismene and Antigone to Oedipus after their capture by Creon. Oedipus apologizes to Theseus for not addressing him in gratitude before addressing his children. Theseus responds that words add no “luster to my life,” deeds do. Drawing on the conventional opposition in Greek thought between words and deeds, logos and ergon, Theseus proclaims that actions speak louder than words. It is only through action that one can bring luster to one’s life. So not only is the polis absent from Theseus’s formulation, his words also break down the intimate connection between words and deeds that is central to Arendt’s conception of the polis. For Arendt action and speech are “closely related”: Without the accompaniment of speech . . . ​action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of the deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words. The action he begins is humanly disclosed by the word, and though the deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do.34

By contrast, Theseus elaborates a typically tragic insight into the disjuncture between words and action—​a disjuncture that has already been central to the action of the play. Creon’s deceptive speech and violent

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actions are contrasted to Theseus’s dogged consistency in word and in deed. In Arendt’s terms, Creon may represent the bad polis (Thebes) where words are cheap and bear no relation to actions while Theseus represents the good polis (Athens) where speech and action operate in concert. Theseus might uphold the aspiration of the polis as “the space of men’s free deeds and living words,” but his warning about the potential deceptions of polis life bring him closer to Silenus than Arendt would suggest. The juxtaposition of the two figures may, thus, have more significance than it might at first appear.35 Arendt’s translation of Silenus, “Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words,” echoes Theseus’s anxieties over the impotence of speech. But there is perhaps an even more important relationship between their two positions. In arguing that it is the polis “that enabled ordinary men . . . ​to bear life’s burden,” Arendt may have had Aristotle’s distinction in the Politics between eu zên (living well) and zên (existing) in mind.36 The city, in other words, is not for “surviving,” but for “living well.” “Living well” (the Theseus position) thus occupies the same structural position as “best not to be born” (the Silenus position): Both are in opposition to “surviving” (i.e., Aristotle’s “zên”). Because the city is not for survival, it is for “living well”/”best not to be born.” Tragedy’s message that life is not worth living would be the foundational statement of political life. If tragedy is the “political art par excellence,” what is the specific relationship to revolution signaled by Arendt’s reference to the O.C. at the conclusion of On Revolution? Oedipus brings an end to the book as a whole, but he also acts as a summation to Arendt’s meditation in the final chapter on “the revolutionary tradition and its lost treasure.” In the last section of the book, Arendt probes the reasons for and consequences of the eclipse of the American Revolution from the European tradition of revolutionary thought. Rather than seeing a continuity between the American and French revolutionary moments, Arendt sees them as being profoundly disjunctive. The French Revolution (and its failure) heralded “the severance of the strong spiritual and political ties between America and Europe” that had persisted into the twentieth century.37 The rift that ensued has had profound consequences for the political lives of both Europe and America. While Europe has been bereft of the positive

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example of the American Revolution and its “foundation of freedom,” America’s disavowal of its revolutionary heritage has resulted in “an intense fear of revolution” that Arendt sees as the “leitmotif of postwar American foreign policy.”38 Arendt’s project in On Revolution is to rescue both Europe and America from this oblivion: For if it is true that all thought begins with remembrance, it is also true that no remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions within which it can further exercise itself. Experiences and even the stories which grow out of what men do and endure, of happenings and events, sink back into the futility inherent in the living word and the living deed unless they are talked about again and again. What saves the affairs of mortal men from their futility is nothing but the incessant talk about them, which in its turn remains futile unless certain concepts, certain guideposts for remembrance, and even for sheer reference arise out of it.39

It is only through active commemoration that the revolutionary spirit that Arendt characterizes as “the principles of public freedom, public happiness, and public spirit” can be sustained. She sees the failure to remember the American Revolution as both political and intellectual. What is needed, as Arendt makes clear, is not mere recollection, but the ability to distill this memory into an enduring legacy of conceptual thought. Because America found itself unable to produce “post-­ revolutionary thought,” it failed to safeguard its revolutionary heritage and allowed the tragic legacy of the French Revolution to dominate both the intellectual and political landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.40 It is under the sign of this loss of the revolutionary spirit that Arendt turns to Greek tragedy. She writes that “there is nothing that can compensate for this failure to prevent it from becoming final, except memory and recollection. And since the storehouse of memory is kept and watched over by poets, whose business it is to find and make the words we live by, it may be wise to turn in conclusion to two of them (one modern, the other ancient) in order to find an approximate articulation of the actual content of our lost treasure.”41 Arendt sees poetry as the repository of the revolutionary hope.42 Where the philosophers may have fallen short in their task of creating “concepts and guideposts for

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remembrance,” the poets are able to conjure the “words we live by.” She first turns to the modern French poet René Char, who joined the Resistance in the Second World War. Char wrote a book of aphorisms in the final year of the war nervously anticipating the liberation, for, as Arendt puts it, “he knew that as far as they were concerned there would not only be the welcome liberation from German occupation but liberation from the ‘burden’ of public business as well.”43 Char, who was greatly admired by Heidegger, chronicles the loss of the sense of purpose that he felt in the aftermath of the second war. “If I survive, I know that I shall have to break with the aroma of these essential years, silently reject (not repress) my treasure.” It is Char’s rejected “treasure” that Arendt appropriates in the title to this final chapter and that becomes the leitmotif of On Revolution. For Arendt the sense of foreboding Char felt in the months preceding liberation was symptomatic of a certain malaise—​what Char names an épaisseur triste—​of modernity. She had previously identified this predicament as “one of the most important negative liberties we have enjoyed since the end of the ancient world, namely, freedom from politics, which was unknown to Rome or Athens and which is potentially perhaps the most relevant part of our Christian heritage.”44 Rather than seeing freedom from politics as one of the gains of modernity, it is perceived by Char as the loss of a treasure. The experience of occupation and the necessity of resistance had enabled Char “to find himself” in his actions. As Arendt phrases it: “These reflections are significant enough as they testify to the involuntary self-­discourse, to the joys of appearing in word and deed without equivocation and without self-­reflection that are inherent in action. And yet they are perhaps too ‘modern,’ too self-­ centered to hit in pure precision the centre of that ‘inheritance which was left to us by no testament.’   ”45 In rejecting Char’s model and turning to Sophocles, Arendt reveals how it is antiquity rather than modernity that understands the true tragedy of the loss of Char’s revolutionary treasure. Char understands its loss as a personal loss. The possibility for meaningful action that arose from the German occupation was a catalyst for his self-­realization. The ancient model, by contrast, embeds its action in a social discourse. In the The Human Condition, Arendt sketches out the unique connection between ancient tragedy and action:

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The specific content as well as the general meaning of action and speech may take various forms of reification in art works which glorify a deed or an accomplishment and, by transformation and condensation, show some extraordinary event in its full significance. However, the specific revelatory quality of action speech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and the speaker, is so indissolubly tied to the living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and “reified” only through the kind of repetition, the imitation or mimesis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate only to the drama, whose very name (from the Greek verb dran, “to act”) indicates that play-­acting is actually an imitation of acting.46

In “reifying” the sphere of action, drama has an intimate relationship to the political. “This is . . . ​why the theater is the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art.”47 Within this context, it is no surprise to find Arendt turning to the ancient poets as a “store house of memory.” But it is the specific dialectic that Arendt uncovers at the heart of the O.C., the coexistence of the ode of Silenus with Theseus’s paean to the political sphere, that encapsulates her thoughts on a lost revolutionary treasure. Revolutionary politics emerge from Arendt’s Sophoclean example as the paradoxical juxtaposition of nihilism and action. There is no revolution without tragedy, Arendt seems to imply, but the revolutionary power of tragedy also lies in its association with action, in its ability to move beyond the nihilism of Silenus. If both Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Nietzsche found in Silenus a spokesman for the Greeks and their tragedy, they did so, I have argued, for starkly contrasting reasons. Where Nietzsche argued that the Greeks turned to tragedy as the aesthetic experience that would make the truth of Silenus bearable, Arendt, on the other hand, saw the Greek polis function as a bedrock against the futility of existence. Indeed, Nietzsche’s self-­ consciously apolitical reading of tragedy can only stand opposed to Arendt’s. In associating himself with Wagner, Nietzsche may have had hopes of instigating a revolution—​but that revolution could only have been an aesthetic revolution. Despite Arendt’s singular focus on political revolution, the question of art is never far removed from her preoccupations in

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On Revolution. What Arendt mourns in this text is the lack of commemoration for the ideals of freedom that are the engine of revolutionary thought. Thought, for Arendt, begins in remembrance, and it is the poets who she elects as the guardians of our collective memory. Moreover, it is in the theatre where art comes closest to preserving through imitation the actions of previous political generations. Drama gives us a privileged access to man’s action. And it is the dramas of Sophocles that reveal how “it was the polis, the space of men’s free deeds and living words, which could endow life with splendor—​τὸν βίον λαμπρὸν ποεῖσθαι.”48 Tragedy and revolution are thus inseparable in Arendt’s thought.

Revolution in Tragic Garb: Marx Karl Marx opens the Eighteenth Brumaire, his masterful analysis of the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, with the much-­quoted statement: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-­historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”49 The identity of the “somewhere” where Hegel is meant to have made this remark remains an open question among scholars, but those like Bruce Mazlish who have attempted to track it down suggest that Marx may have been recollecting with heavy distortion a remark that Hegel makes about the Roman Republic in his Philosophy of History.50 The source of Hegel’s comments about the compulsive repetition of history may remain obscure, but it would certainly not be difficult to uncover the Hegelian genealogy of Marx’s historical tropology here. Marx’s characterization of history as tragedy finds an echo, as we shall see, in many of Hegel’s writings from his youthful theological essays through the Phenomenology to his Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Right.51 The Hegelian dialectic may have been conceived as a reaction to the historical events of the French Revolution, but its movement through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is explicitly connected to Hegel’s analysis of tragedy. As we will explore in much more detail in Chapter 3, Hegel does not so much use a tragedy such as Sophocles’s Antigone to illustrate the dialectical development of the history of spirit; rather, it is the dialectical movement that he uncovers as the essence

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of tragedy that becomes the master trope for understanding historical ­progress. In this passage at least, Marx follows Hegel in transforming tragedy into a philosophy of history. Tragedy has become for Marx and Hegel a metahistorical text, its workings a grand narrative of historical progress.52 It is this background that makes sense of Slavoj Žižek’s decision to title his analysis of the dual historical blows of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis First as Tragedy and then as Farce.53 Žižek is at pains in his book to show how Marx’s styling of the French Revolution as a tragedy in the Eighteenth Brumaire was not an isolated instance but rather the development of a more sustained “rhetorical figure” haunting Marx’s analysis of history. After commenting in “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” that “it is instructive for [modern nations] to see the ancien régime, which in their countries has experienced its tragedy, play its comic role as a German phantom,” Marx develops his analogy with antiquity further: The Greek gods, who already died once of their wounds in Aeschylus’s tragedy Prometheus Bound, were forced to die a second death—​this time a comic one—​in Lucian’s dialogues. Why does history take this course? So that mankind may part happily with its past. We lay claim to this happy historical destiny for the powers of ­Germany.54

Every year, Marx read of all of Aeschylus in Greek, and it was the Oresteia that he would bring as reading matter on his family picnics on Hampstead Heath.55 He developed a particular affinity with Prometheus Bound, which figured prominently in his doctoral dissertation. Marx himself was figured as a modern Prometheus by the press, and when the government closed down the Rheinische Zeitung, a contemporary cartoon depicted Marx as Prometheus bound to a printing press while the royal Prussian eagle ate away at his liver.56 So while the reference to Marx’s famous tragedy in this passage should perhaps not surprise us, the systematic incorporation of tragedy into his model of historical process requires more analysis. Giosue Ghisalberti argues that in the Eighteenth Brumaire “Marx will soon become rhetorically ambivalent in his theory of history, oscillating without resolution between dialectic and tragedy, a mature teleology and

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Karl Marx as Prometheus, chained to a printing press while the eagle of Prussian censorship rips out his liver. (Source: Courtesy AKG Images.)

an infantile repetition. Marx’s oscillation is hardly accidental, for his document shows repeatedly, if in spite of himself, how dialectics and tragedy refer to each other. Does the movement of dialectical logic fulfill itself in tragedy?”57 If we see Marx in his Hegelian genealogy, the relationship between dialectics and tragedy that Ghisalberti maps out is a familiar one. And yet, given Marx’s suspicion of the idealist basis of Hegel’s dialectics, would we not expect Marx to rid his analysis of history of this tragic armature? Does the transition from Hegelian dialectics to historical materialism not imply the abandoning of such idealist trappings? “My dialectic method,” Marx writes in the afterward to volume 1

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of Das Kapital, “is not only different from the Hegelian, but is exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ is the creator (demiurgos) of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of ‘the Idea.’ With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.”58 In using the trope of tragedy to understand the historical dynamics of the 1848 revolution, is he not precisely making the “Idea” the “demiurgos of the real world”? So associated with the project of idealism had tragedy become in nineteenth-­century Germany that Nietzsche’s mission in The Birth of Tragedy can be understood as an effort to liberate the genre from this toxic legacy. The expectation is both that Marx’s analysis of revolution would have scorned tragedy in favor of a more materialist account and that his utopian vision would win out over the tragic outlook. Despite Hegel’s presence in the first sentence, the role of tragedy in the Eighteenth Brumaire goes beyond Marx’s Hegelianism. Marx reveals his own preoccupation with the relationship between tragedy and revolution: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-­honoured disguise and this borrowed language.59

Like Arendt, Marx figures revolution in dramatic terms. His well-­ known discussion of the power and limits of human agency places the question of acting at its heart. If Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition reminds us that “play-­acting is actually an imitation of acting,” Marx seems to reverse the mimetic process. To him, all action is a form of (dramatic) reenactment. When men make their own history in circumstances

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and conditions beyond their control, they do so by appropriating the costumes, props, and scripts from the past performances. The French Revolutionaries who acted out their revolution “in Roman dress and with Roman phrases” understood the relationship—​etched in the language of their Greek predecessors—​between action (dran) and drama. While for Arendt the theatrical is valued because it can give us access to the political spirit that animates it, for Marx spectacle haunts action as a form of inauthenticity.60 In Arendt, drama recalls and reawakens dran; in Marx, by contrast, dran is always in danger of being exposed as mere drama. For Arendt, action opens onto the future; for Marx, it heralds the eternal return of the same. As Ghisalberti phrases it: Marx not only defines the event of repetition here, but also the procedures of the act, complete with the appropriate stage for reenacting another scene and actors who understand their roles only as copies of an original script; these are actors without the courage for invention, innovation, or spontaneity, actors relying on a pre-­w ritten script for their lines and movements, characters without a properly historical self since they have been organized according to a previous identificatory model. These are actors forced to imitate an already prescribed comportment and to mimic an ideological discourse-­what Marx calls “borrowed language”—​confined by a script derived from the past and a stage erected to control their actions.61

Rather than seeing a homology between drama and revolutionary action, Marx sees theatre stand in the way of historical self-­consciousness. But given Marx’s opening appeal to a dual theatrical legacy—​tragedy and farce—​is there a distinction at work between these two genres? Rather than the theatre per se as inadequate, does Marx’s critique of drama restrict itself to the domain of farce? Indeed, the main thrust of Marx’s argument in the Eighteenth Brumaire is that it is in its parodic reenactment of the first French Revolution that the 1848 revolution is exposed as a farce. Louis Bonaparte can be nothing more than a “caricature” of Napoleon I; he is “the adventurer who hides his commonplace repulsive features under the iron death mask of Napoleon.”62 The uncle is the comic buffoon who steals the tragic mask from his nephew. In Marx’s figuration, comedy clearly occupies a lower status than tragedy:

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Unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took the heroism, self-­sacrifice, terror, civil war and battles to bring it into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to maintain their passion on the high plane of great historical tragedy.63

Bourgeois society in its lack of heroism needs to find an “art form” in which to express its passion. Tragedy may act as a “self deception,” but it is the contents of its struggles and not the art form itself that is revealed by Marx to be lacking. The substance of the revolution may be exposed as petty, but the stagecraft of tragedy still has the capacity to elevate it to a “high plane.” Indeed, this is where the contrast to farce is most ­operative. Thus the resurrection of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the task in imagination, not of fleeing from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not of making its ghost walk about again.64

Tragedy may be a mimesis of reality, but farce is a mimesis of mimesis; it is, to use Plato’s language, at three removes from reality. In reaffirming tragedy’s capacity for greatness, in a sense Marx reverses the Hegelian hierarchy of genres and goes back to a more conventional evaluation. For Hegel in his Aesthetics, it is comedy rather than tragedy that achieves the highest level of self-­consciousness.65 Despite Hegel’s extensive writings about tragedy and his evident obsession with the genre, he paradoxically places comedy at a more advanced stage of development. Comedy is associated by Hegel with the advent of subjectivity—​w ith the movement whereby the self elevates itself above objectivity (the passive adherence to social norms) and achieves a higher state of self-­consciousness. Marx, by contrast, sees all theatricality as a “self-­deception,” but it is comedy rather than tragedy that models the dramatic as inauthentic.66 Irrespective of the exact hierarchy between tragedy and comedy, Peter Stallybrass sees Marx’s text as a rejection of the status of classical genres tout court. “To put it another way, the classical hierarchy of genres, in

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which tragedy was considered the most elevated and farce the most debased of genres, can no longer retain its unquestioned status within a bourgeois society that pursues the ‘novel.’ Tragedy must now itself be understood as farce. From this perspective, Louis Bonaparte is the most appropriate of performers upon the stage of bourgeois society, for he unintentionally unmasks the self-­deceptions of the elevated genres through which an earlier bourgeois society imagined itself.”67 Farce would be the limit case of the dramatic that exposes tragedy as yet another bourgeois self-­deception. Despite its revolutionary aura, the idealist investment in tragedy is merely a symptom of the bourgeois complicity of the German philosophical tradition prior to Marx. For all its fervor, the philosophy of the tragic is no more authentic than Louis Bonaparte. Where the French Revolution established a bourgeois republic in Roman dress, the philosophy it inaugurated espoused bourgeois aesthetics in Greek dress. For as Marx argues: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself until it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past.” Despite his rejection of the classical genres, poetry still has a crucial part to play in Marx’s revolution. He also shares Arendt’s belief that the poets can “make the words we live by.” Indeed, by previously analogizing the revolutionaries’ attempt to make their own history to the acquisition of a new language, Marx reveals his understanding of the importance of “words” for revolution. But in crucial distinction to Arendt, Marx has no interest in the poetry of the past. While for Arendt the poetry is valuable to the revolution because it provides a “storehouse of memory,” for Marx it is memory that blocks the progress toward the revolution proprement dit: “The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content—​ here the content goes beyond the phrase.” As Derrida phrases it, “No, no more revolutionary memory, down with the monument, bring down the curtain on the shadow theatre and the funerary eloquence, destroy the mausoleum for popular crowds, shatter the death masks beneath the glass caskets. All of this is the revolution of the past.”68 “The storehouse

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of memory,” rather than animating the revolutionary spirit, ends up smothering it. As Derrida has demonstrated so convincingly, for Marx there is a crucial distinction between Geist and Gespenst, between spirit and ghost. The ghost of the past haunts the spirit of the future. The dead must first bury their dead. In Marx’s phraseology, the past becomes associated with (dead) “form” where the future is the (living) “content.” The revolution will throw off the suffocating mask of tragedy and express itself as pure content beyond any recognizable aesthetic form: But in the future, and already in the social revolution of the nineteenth century still to come in Marx’s view . . . ​, the anachrony or untimeliness will not be erased in some plenitude of the parousia and the presence to itself of the present. Time will still be “out of joint.” But this time the inadequation will stem from the excess of its “own content” with regard to the “phrase.” The “own content” will no longer frighten, it will not hide itself, driven back behind the bereaved rhetoric of antique models and the grimace of the death masks. It will exceed the form, it will break out of its clothes, it will overtake signs, models, eloquence, mourning. Nothing there will be any longer an affected mannerism, giving itself airs: no more credit and no more borrowed figure.69

Marx envisages a future beyond form, beyond figuration. Throwing off the mask, disrobing from comic and tragic garb both, the revolutionary actor of the future will be able to do without the trappings of theatre. Marx imagines dran without drama, acting liberated from play-­ acting. But in associating the past with the dead, Marx also specifically invokes a revolution beyond mourning. He raises the possibility of a revolution where there will be no dead real or figurative to bury. Marx hopes that by ridding revolution of the form of tragedy he will guard against its content of death and suffering. Thus, by a sleight of hand, Marx exiles tragedy—​its content and its form—​from his account of the revolution to come. But is imagining a revolution without tragedy not the highest self­deception of all? Arendt and Marx have very different investments in revolution. Indeed, Arendt’s On Revolution was written in part, at least, as a critique of the Marxist conception of revolution. She argues that Marx transformed the political concept of revolution into a social question. In the wake of Marx,

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writes Arendt, “revolutions had come under the sway of the French Revolution in general and under the predominance of the social question in particular.”70 It was in order to get beyond Marx and to reestablish the true political meaning of revolution as the search for freedom that Arendt prioritizes the American over the French Revolution in her book. Yet, despite these profound differences, both Arendt and Marx turn to tragedy to emplot revolution. Both self-­consciously classicize this most modern of political phenomena. How can we make sense of this tropology? What work is the metaphor of tragedy doing in their respective analyses? What, moreover, should we make of the desire of political thought to metaphorize the experience of revolution? In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt draws explicitly on Marx’s vocabulary of the alternating forces of tragedy and farce to describe a different modern drama, the Dreyfus affair. Her discussion starts with a dramatis personae, progresses through an analysis of a polyphonic chorus of opinion, and concludes with the entrance of a deus ex machina.71 By invoking the language of tragedy, Arendt’s account embeds the Dreyfus affair in tragic legacies of the French Revolution while exposing the deceptions of modernity. Arendt also demonstrates, as Marx had done so forcefully, how invaluable tragedy and farce had become as the analytical tools of the political historian. By the time she wrote On Revolution in the 1960s, the vocabulary of drama had clearly become part of the armature of her political theory, but it was also more than that. Beyond a mere metaphorics, the particular confluence of tragedy and revolution in Arendt’s and Marx’s writings demonstrates the ability of antiquity to transform modernity.

Modern Tragedy Where Marx had exiled tragedy from his discussion of revolution in the name of a more future-­oriented poetry, Raymond Williams by contrast repents tragedy’s exile from the domain of the political. Williams opens Modern Tragedy in confessional mode: In an ordinary life, spanning the middle years of the twentieth century, I have known what I believe to be tragedy, in several forms. It has not been the death of princes; it has been at once more personal and more general. I have been driven to try to understand this

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e­ xperience, and I have drawn back, baffled, at the distance between my own sense of tragedy and the conventions of the time. Thus I have known tragedy in a man driven back to silence, in an unregarded working life. In his ordinary and private death, I saw a terrifying loss of connection between men, and even between father and son: a loss of connection which was, however, a particular social and historical fact: a measurable distance between his desire and his endurance, and between both and the purposes and meanings which the general life offered him.72

As we have seen, Williams’s title acts as a provocative rebuke to George Steiner’s Death of Tragedy. While Steiner argues that we live in a resolutely post-­tragic age where the social hierarchies and religious worldview that gave rise to tragic feeling have been lost forever, Williams insists that tragedy is still part of the experience of modernity. Williams’s tragedy does not concern “the death of princes” but the profound disconnection between a working man and his work—​a man who is so alienated from his livelihood that he has lost his connection with his family and his community. This deeply personal experience of tragedy is also crucially a historical experience. The alienation suffered by Williams’s father is not just a familial trauma but a “social and historical fact”: I have known this tragedy more widely since. I have seen the loss of connection built into a works and a city, and men and women broken by the pressure to accept this as normal, and by the deferment and corrosion of hope and desire. I have known also, as a whole culture has known, a tragic action framing these worlds, yet also paradoxically and bitterly, breaking into them: an action of war and social revolution on so great a scale that it is continually and understandably reduced to the abstractions of political history, yet an action that cannot finally be held at this level and distance, by those who have known it as the history of real men and women, or by those who know, as quite a personal fact, that the action is not yet ended.73

Tragedy is not an abstraction but a product of a concrete social and political situation. Factories, coal mines, cities all had tragic alienation “built into them.” But beyond the material conditions that corroded relationships and aspirations, broader historical movements conspired to

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perpetuate and exacerbate the modern experience of tragedy. Wars and revolutions saw death and suffering rupture the lives of families and communities. The scale of devastation experienced in their wake, ­Williams suggests, could only be understood as a form of abstraction. If the wars and social upheavals of the twentieth century have been characterized as tragic, it is in order to abstract from the suffering of the individuals who bore their consequences. Williams underlines the materialist basis of his analysis by immediately juxtaposing his first section heading “Tragic Ideas” to the subheading “Tragic Experience.” After Plato and Aristotle, after Lessing, Schiller, and German idealism, after Nietzsche and Freud, tragedy, Williams affirms, is not merely an idea, it is an experience. Tragedy and the tragic, in particular, have been defined in such a restrictive way that they exclude vast areas of life. Taking up Williams’s argument, Terry Eagleton states: “All-­out nuclear warfare would not be tragic, but a certain way of representing it in art might be. Behind this apparently lunatic notion, which only the remarkably well-­educated could conceivably have hatched, lie a series of false assumptions: that real life is shapeless, and art alone is orderly; that only in art can the value released by destruction be revealed; that real-­life suffering is passive, ugly and undignified, whereas affliction in art has an heroic splendor of resistance; that art has a gratifying inevitability lacking in life.”74 The seemingly common-­sense division of the literary genre of tragedy from its quotidian lexical usage is exposed by Williams and Eagleton to have a deeply ideological underpinning. Insisting that the tragic is a property of art (or philosophy), rather than life, is a political gesture. As McCallum puts it: “From his perspective, the rigid separation of the socio-­cultural usage of tragedy from the literary genre represents an instance of ideological paralysis that blocks recognition and acknowledgement of the tragic affect circulating in and around human experience in modernity.”75 Yet to see art and life, philosophy and experience, as mutually exclusive would also be a mistake: [The] events which are not seen as tragic are deep in the pattern of our own culture: war, famine, work, traffic, politics. To see no ethical content or human agency in such events, or to say that we

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cannot connect them with general meanings, and especially with permanent and universal meanings, is to admit a strange and particular bankruptcy, which no rhetoric of tragedy can finally hide.76

For it to do its ethical work, for it to function as a vessel of “universal meaning,” tragedy must at some level remain an idea. If Williams opposes the abstractions of German idealism, he does not reject the idea of a collective understanding of tragedy: “We are not looking for a new universal meaning for tragedy. We are looking for the structure of tragedy in our own culture.”77 Although he seemingly opposes his reading to a “universalist” one, his vision of tragedy as a “structure” to some extent relies on the possibility that tragedy gives a coherence and conceptual shape to a diversity of experiences. It is for this reason that it is a useful tool of social critique. What Williams’s materialist analysis enables him to do is not to reject tragedy as mere idealism but to examine the consequences of splitting the domain of art from the domain of existence. As such, Williams warns us not to surrender tragedy to an idealist understanding of “meaning.” Just because it has a relationship to experience, that does not imply that tragedy has no “meaning.” In the past, blinded by its timeless grandeur, critics failed to understand the relationship of the literary genre of tragedy to the historical conditions that produced it; today we fail to recognize the same level of “meaning” we ascribe to tragedy in the historical conditions of existence. As Williams puts it succinctly: “Before we could not recognize tragedy as social crisis; now, commonly, we cannot recognize social crisis as tragedy.”78 In contrast to Marx, who wants to exile tragedy from life in the name of revolution, Williams recognizes tragedy in life and in revolution. For Williams, a real Marxist critique would not wish away tragedy but rather uncover its functioning in a modern world that includes revolution and the oppressive social structures that necessitate it. In Williams’s hands, tragedy becomes another tool in the diagnosis of alienation. While we still live in tragedy we cannot afford to dismiss it from the arsenal of Marxist analysis: “The most influential kinds of explicitly social thinking have often rejected tragedy as in itself defeatist. Against what they have known as the idea of tragedy, they have stressed man’s powers to change his condition and to end a major part of the suffering which the tragic

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ideology seems to ratify. The idea of tragedy, that is to say, has been explicitly opposed by the idea of revolution.” But this opposition between tragedy and revolution is deeply problematic: The idea of tragedy, in its ordinary form, excludes especially that tragic experience which is social, and the idea of revolution, again in its ordinary form, excludes that social experience which is tragic. And if this is so, the contradiction is significant. It is not merely a formal opposition, of two ways of reading experience, between which we can choose. In our time, especially, it is the connections between revolution and tragedy—​connections lived and known but not acknowledged as ideas, which seem most clear and significant.79

Marx’s desire to place revolution beyond the realm of tragedy prevented him from understanding the tragic dimension of revolution. Despite what Arendt at times seems to assert, revolution is not a spontaneous ecstatic condition that emerges ex nihilo; it arises from very real social conditions that are frequently marked by tragedy. The conditions of alienation that necessitate revolution are not fully overcome in the moment of revolution; rather, these conditions are inevitably carried over into the destructive violence of revolutionary action. What the revolution unmasks in its own violence is the violence, and tragedy, that characterized the old social order it has overcome. Revolution has to be understood not just as a singular moment but as a crisis in a much longer history of social action. In other words, revolution represents both the failure and the necessity of action. This is where its structural relation to tragedy ultimately resides: It is here that the relation between revolution and tragedy is inescapable and urgent. . . . ​We can all see the constructive activity of the successful revolutionary societies, and we can take evidence of the simple act of human liberation by the energy of reason. I know nothing I welcome more than this actual construction, but I know also that the revolutionary societies have been tragic societies, at a depth and scale that go beyond any ordinary pity and fear. At the point of this recognition, however, where the received ideology of revolution, its simple quality as liberation, seems most to fail, there is waiting the received ideology of tragedy, in either its common forms: the old tragic lesson, that man cannot change his

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condition, but can only drown his world in blood in the vain attempt; or the contemporary reflex, that the taking of rational control over our social destiny is defeated or at best deeply stained by our inevitable irrationality, and by the violence and cruelty that are so quickly released when habitual forms break down. I do not find, in the end, that either of these interpretations covers enough of the facts, but I also do not see how anyone can still hold to that idea of revolution which simply denied tragedy, as an experience and as an idea.80

It is the received ideologies surrounding both revolution and tragedy that have prevented us from seeing their profound connection in modernity. The same leftists who glorify revolution as an instrument of “human liberation” brought about through the triumph of human reason have vilified tragedy for its quietism and irrationalist nihilism. For Williams there is an alternative leftist reading. As an experience of modernity, tragedy both describes the conditions of alienation that make revolution desirable and critiques the willful blindness of revolutions that fail to acknowledge the persistence of human suffering in their midst. Tragedy, in this sense, becomes the necessary condition for a self-­critical leftist practice. As McCallum argues: “This is the site . . . ​where Williams shifts the discussion of affect in tragedy away from a traditional Aristotlean catharsis towards a more Brechtian subjunctive vision of other possibilities, of potential for different outcomes. He goes on to urge an honest openness to the contradictions in the praxis of social change: revolutions undertaken in the hope of extending freedom, justice, and equality nonetheless are made against other human beings, and often involve compromises of the very ideals inspiring the desires for change. Such tensions cannot be explained away as inevitable: to feel their tragic emotional impact is, according to Williams, necessary to continue the revolutionary project.”81 Despite his avowedly Marxian credentials, Williams’s understanding of tragedy ultimately has more in common with Arendt than it does with Marx. While Marx sees revolution as exorcising the specter of tragedy, Arendt, like Williams, recognizes their profound interconnection. For Marx the wisdom of Silenus encapsulates the double threat of tragedy: quietism and nihilism. By contrast, in juxtaposing the Silenus ode to

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Theseus’s praise of the polis, Arendt shows how action can only become truly meaningful in its confrontation with nihilism. Arendt not only refutes the lazy association between tragedy and resignation and inaction, she also reveals how the actions tragedies produce are more significant because of the recognition of the tragedy that dogs even the most hopeful project of human liberation. Williams exposes Marx’s complicity with idealism in his relegation of tragedy to resignation, but he also uncovers the idealism of Marx’s vision of revolution. In Marx’s analysis, both revolution and tragedy have become abstractions. It is only as lived experiences that we can understand the deep association between the idea of tragedy and the idea of revolution.

c h a p t e r

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Tragedy and Metaphysics

Tr agedy and revolution are linked not just, as Raymond Williams suggests, because the philosophy of the tragic takes shape in the French Revolution, but because the political thought to which it gave rise emerges from a critique of metaphysics for which tragedy would become essential. When Marx and Arendt turn to tragedy to discuss the stakes of revolution, they do so within a broader history of philosophical engagement with the literary genre. Modern Western thought in the wake of the French Revolution insistently turned to a series of ontological questions to which tragedy appeared to hold the answers. For tragedy to enter the realm of philosophy, a conceptual shift in the understanding of the genre had to take place. The present chapter tracks this transformation. It provides important background to the political argument of the book by showing how the conception of the tragic gave new voice to the metaphysical paradox of freedom and necessity and gave this ontological problem a decidedly political inflection. The incorporation of the tragic into the critique of metaphysics, I argue, does not spell the end of the political; it rather creates the possibility for a different politics. To quote Michael Dillon: “the impossibility of metaphysical foundations is now the starting point for political thought. In this sense . . . ​not only is it not nihilistic thought, it is thought designed to overcome the nihilism which is immanent in metaphysics.”1 The aim of the chapter, then, is not just to uncover the metaphysical unconscious of Marx’s and Arendt’s political 42

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writings but also to show how this philosophical reception is crucial for making sense of the continued cultural capital of tragedy. When does tragedy become existential? When Peter Szondi proclaimed, “Since Aristotle, there has been a poetics of tragedy. Only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic,”2 he aimed to highlight a fundamental shift in the history of reading. Where Aristotle’s account of tragedy had its roots in an empirical analysis of the effects of its art, Schelling’s philosophical speculations placed the genre at the heart of a metaphysical programme. But the transition from a poetics to a philosophy, from an aesthetics to a metaphysics, was rather more complex than this narrative implies. The philosophy of the tragic did not represent a departure from aesthetics and a refuge in metaphysics. Instead, its formulation was the consequence of the elevation of aesthetics to a new position within philosophy and a simultaneous questioning of the promise and the limits of metaphysics. This battle for position between aesthetics and metaphysics lies behind one of the most interesting and enigmatic texts to emerge from the last decade of the eighteenth century: “The Earliest System-­Programme of German Idealism.” The grandly named manifesto, in fact, consists of an anonymous double-­sided folio discovered in the early part of the twentieth century. It caught the attention of the German-­Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, who gave it its now widely used name. Graphological analysis of the text established that it was written in the hand of the young Hegel, but the ideas it expresses seem to indicate that he may not have been its (sole) author. In fact, at different points during the course of the twentieth century, the text has variously been attributed to Schelling, to Hölderlin, and to Hegel, and it appears in the collected works of all three authors. That there should be confusion about its provenance is the result of overlapping elements not just in the thought of these three figures but also in their biographies. Known as the “Tübingen Three,” Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin had studied together at a seminary in the south German town and had remained close friends and active correspondents.3 The document appears to have been written in 1796 and thus postdates their association in Tübingen. The ideas it expresses are closest to those of the young Schelling, who had published his Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism one year earlier. Its anonymity,

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its fragmentary status, and its early date have all contributed to the conundrum—​and the appeal—​of this text. For some, it is the inaugural document of a new philosophical system;4 for others, it is “utterly improbable,”5 but it nevertheless provides a crucial insight into the philosophical debates that arose in the aftermath of the publication of Kant’s three critiques. Simon Critchley, for example, gives weight to its philosophical significance, describing it as the “most dramatic statement of the link between critique and emancipation,”6 while Lacoue-­L abarthe and Nancy see the text as hailing the advent of Romanticism: “Given its origin in a unique and momentary constellation of ‘authors’ and given the differentiated stamp with which it is marked, [the System-­Programme] is especially well suited to indicate the direction romanticism will choose to take as it sets out . . . ​from the trivium of possibilities offered by the aftermath of Kant.”7 From its very first sentence the document bears the mark of its genesis in Kantian philosophy: “an ethics. Since the whole of metaphysics falls for the future within moral theory—​something which Kant with both of his practical postulates has given only an example, not exhausted,—​this ethics will be nothing other than a comprehensive system of all Ideas or, and this is really the same, of all practical postulates.” But while Kantian ethics provide the starting point, it is as a call to a philosophical aesthetics that the document is most striking. Although a clear hierarchy is established between metaphysics and moral theory, the text affirms that “at the very end, the idea that unites all the rest is beauty.” Indeed, it continues: I am now convinced that the highest act of reason, the one through which it encompasses all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness only become sisters in beauty. The philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet. Men without aesthetic sense are our literal-­minded philosophers. The philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.8

In this new manifesto aesthetics will become the unifying theme of philosophy. Beauty is the only idea that can transcend the divide between truth and goodness. Since Plato, art and truth had been dramatically sundered; in the System-­Programme we find them reunited. Moreover, it

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is not just the case that they advocate a new harmony between the pursuit of beauty and the pursuit of truth; the philosopher who fails to see the aesthetic as part of his domain is fatally impoverished. As Krell writes: “For the generation that came after Kant and read Kant’s third Critique . . . ​it had become impossible . . . ​to pursue aesthetics and metaphysics along separate routes, impossible to leave the crossroads of ontology and literary criticism behind.”9 Indeed, behind this new valorization of aesthetics lies a critique of a certain conception of reason: One cannot be rich in spirit, even about history one cannot reason spiritedly—​w ithout aesthetic sense. Here it ought to be obvious what it is that men lack who do not understand ideas—​and who confess honestly enough that they find everything obscure as soon as it goes beyond the table of contents and the index.10

The philosophy of the past has been a philosophy of pedants. In its pursuit of knowledge and its neglect of beauty, the philosophy of the pre-­ Kantian age confined itself to “tables and indices” and was unable to raise itself to the level of ideas. The aesthetic sense, moreover, has a particular medium. Instead of the cold pursuit of reason, “poetry” will now become the “teacher of humankind.” “For there is no philosophy, no history left; the poetic art alone will survive all the other arts and sciences.” It is not just that poetry will take over the mantle from philosophy, history, and science; rather, it will itself subsume all these human activities under its purview. Many have seen the hand of Hölderlin, the preeminent philosopher-­ poet, behind this tribute to the poetic arts.11 But the System-­Programme soon moves to a preoccupation that bears the hallmarks of Schelling’s philosophy. Poetry becomes in this philosopher’s hands a conduit to what he calls a “sensuous religion.” Simultaneously rejecting the Enlightenment’s tendency to oppose faith and reason and the Protestant pursuit of a rational theology, the System-­Programme argues that both the masses and the philosophers need an antidote to the “monotheism of reason”: Monotheism of reason and heart, polytheism of the imagination and of art—​this is what we need. First of all I will speak here of an

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idea which, as far as I know, has never occurred to anyone before—​ we must have a new mythology, however, this mythology must be in the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason.12

Although there is a possible echo of Kant’s desire to establish a ‘religion within the limits of reason alone’ in this impassioned called for a “mythology of reason,” the shift in vocabulary is significant. Rather than Kant’s search for a rational faith that would essentially model itself on a reformed Christianity, the System-­Programme calls for a mythology that is animated by a “polytheism of the imagination and of art.” In this post-­ Kantian configuration, monotheism, philosophy, and reason stand opposed to polytheism, poetry, and sensuality. No wonder Lacoue-­L abarthe and Nancy identify this document as the founding manifesto of Romanticism. Daniel Greineder states that “the call for a new mythology remains one of the most bizarre demands of any literary theorist or philosopher of the period.”13 But by figuring this new movement in the language of mythology and polytheism the System-­Programme also announces its debt to classical antiquity. In the wake of the failure of both Christianity and the secular Enlightenment, this new mythology, in fact, founds itself on a very old mythology. The intermingling of the languages of beauty, myth, poetry, and polytheism recasts the philhellenic effusions of Winckelmann. What is more, in the call for a reconciliation of art and philosophy, we can detect the desire for the harmonious totality of classical Greece that was central to Schiller’s philhellenism: Until we express ideas aesthetically, that is, mythologically, they have no interest for the people; and conversely until mythology is rational the philosopher must be ashamed of it. Thus in the end the enlightened and unenlightened must hold hands, mythology must become philosophical and the people rational, and philosophy must become mythological in order to make the philosophers sensible. Then eternal unity will rule between us. No more looks of scorn, no more blind trembling before its wise ones and priests. Only then does the equal development of all powers await us, of the singular as well as of every individual. No power will be suppressed any longer. Then universal freedom and equality of spirits will reign!—​A higher spirit, sent from heaven, must found this new religion among us; it will be the last great work of humankind.14

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This text is both a breathless manifesto for a brave new world and a nostalgic paean to the lost world of classical antiquity. It laments the fragmentation of ideas into art and philosophy, the severing of religion and reason, and the separation of the people from the philosophers. Behind this depiction of an alienated modernity lies the ideal of the “eternal unity” enshrined in the Hellenic world. The populace as well as the philosophers in Athens enjoyed both universal freedom and “equality of spirits.” Moreover, it was their very own mythology of reason and their dedicated pursuit of beauty that gave them both their intellectual and their political equality. In calling for a new mythology, the System-­ Programme combats the dualisms that arise from Kant’s critical system with a plea for a return to antiquity. Where the legacy of Kantian thought had left nature in conflict with reason, philosophy at odds with art, and the populace distanced from the thinkers, the “polytheism of the imagination” prescribes a reconciliation inspired by a Hellenic ideal. The frustration with the state of philosophy goes hand in hand with a critique of the State: “Starting with the idea of humanity, I will show that it provides no idea of the State, because the State is something mechanical, any more than it gives us the idea of a machine. Only what is an object of freedom, is called an idea. We must therefore go beyond the state!—​For every State must treat free men as cogs in a machine; and this it ought not to do; so it must cease.”15 The mechanization of the individual by the State produces the mechanization of his ideas. There is no possibility for free thought in an unfree State. And there is no State conceived as a State in its modern instantiation that can ever be free. The text may anticipate Arendt at this point, but it is Rousseau’s critique that flavors the call for political and intellectual emancipation here. The specific instruments of the State are also identified as the “priesthood which in recent times poses as rational.” The search for a mythology of reason should not be confused with a programme of timid religious or social reform. This is a call for “absolute freedom of all spirits which bear the intellectual world in themselves, and cannot seek either God or immor­­ tality outside themselves.”16 As Simon Critchley writes: “In the wonderfully naïve utopianism of this once forgotten fragment, one sees the inspiration of Kant’s critique of metaphysics blend together with the emancipatory spirit of the 1789 French Revolution into an aesthetic manifesto where

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“   ‘truth and goodness are brothers only in beauty.’   ”17 Kant’s turn to aesthetics and the emancipatory promise of the French Revolution animate the idealism of this text. It is the particular melding of philosophical and political discourse combined with its commentary on the limitations of both philosophical and political solutions to the problem of freedom that makes the System-­Programme such an eloquent vehicle for the preoccupations of its age. Although it remains impossible to attribute its authorship with any certainty, there is no ambiguity about dating this document to the last decade of the eighteenth century.18 But despite its self-­conscious location at a particular juncture of modernity, it nevertheless harks back to a vision of antiquity. It is the classical world that subtends or, perhaps better, becomes the medium of its expression. The last great work of humankind finds its inspiration in the first great works of Western thought. But what does this document replete with idealism and optimism have to do with the question of tragedy? As David Krell puts it, “it would seem strange to find in such a grandiloquent birth certificate hints of tragic demise.”19 Nevertheless, there does seem to be something at least contingently “tragic” about this document. No doubt, the fragmentary nature of the text as it survives has contributed to our sense of its incompletion. Its amputated form seems to be paralleled by its forestalling as a philosophical project. Indeed, one of the reasons why its authorship is still debated today is the difficulty of mapping the realization of the fragment’s ideals onto the reality of the philosophical output of its possi­ ­ble authors. That is why it has been labeled by Critchley as “utterly improbable.”20 But the incompleteness is not just contingent, it is intrinsic to the document’s aesthetic and philosophical meaning. Beyond the circumstances of its transmission, beyond the failure to bring its ideas to fruition, the philosophical content of the document is itself marked by a certain necessary incompletion. The tone may be utopian, but it is also apocalyptic. This is a text that calls not only for the abolition of the state, for the “prosecution” of the priests and the “overturning of all superstition,” but also for the end of metaphysics. In the wake of the French Revolution, utopianism is invariably colored by the language of radical destruction. And yet the agent of this insurrection seems to be strikingly inadequate. The document concludes with a plea for a “higher spirit, sent

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from heaven” to effect this reform that is envisioned as the “last great work of humankind.” Just a few paragraphs earlier “absolute freedom” had been defined by the refusal to submit to the external rule of divinity and the necessity for humans to “bear the intellectual world in themselves, and [not] seek either God or immortality outside themselves.” What a dissonant peroration for a script that proclaims the power of art to effect the final work of human freedom! But the paradox of its ending is in a certain way merely a working through of a more profound ambivalence in the text. The System-­ Programme gives a vivid portrait of the frustrations of modernity. From its opening statement about the exhaustion of metaphysics to its later denunciation of the mechanization of the State, it presents the fate of a subject who has been betrayed by the political and philosophical solutions offered to him. Moreover, it sees the conflicts and oppositions in both the intellectual and social spheres as symptomatic of the alienation experienced by the people. This dystopian vision of the modern condition finds its solution in the text on the one hand, through the turn to poetry “as the teacher of humankind,” and on the other, through the ­creation of a “mythology of reason.” As I argued above, both these prescriptions are imbued with a Winckelmannian nostalgia. Winckelmann’s aesthetic philhellenism gave a particular form to the critique of the contemporary condition. The role of antiquity in the diagnosis of the failures of modern society is central, but there is also a more specific legacy from the classical world that speaks to the concerns of the idealists.21 Dennis Schmidt argues that “the conviction that the work of art owes itself in a fundamental way to freedom and thus provides the most direct route to the task of thinking and preserving freedom defines the origins of German Idealism and will shape its development to come.”22 The dialogue between art and freedom leads the idealists in a particular direction: the analysis of tragedy. Freedom, however, has a complex role to play in tragedy. The promise and limits of human freedom that ancient tragedies explore finds a parallel in the hesitation over the efficacy of human agency that we find at the heart of this document. As David Krell writes: “If the improvement of our portion waits upon an emissary from heaven—​a heaven we have ceased to believe in, unless it light up within ourselves by incandescence—​then what has become of the very distinction between

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mortals and gods? Where shall we turn for lessons in such matters—​if not to the Greek tragedians?”23 The System-­Programme thus represents the fate of modern man as tragic but also offers a solution to his plight in the return to the metaphysical preoccupations of the ancient tragedians. Ancient tragedy, thus, functions simultaneously as diagnostic of the problems of modernity and as prophylactic for the frustrations of the contemporary. It is the poetry that will act as “the teacher of humankind” and the conveyor of a new “mythology of reason.” Like the System-­Programme, tragedy sits precariously between philosophy and poetry, between absolute freedom and absolute necessity, between reason and mythology.

Schelling’s Oedipus When Peter Szondi announced that the start of the modern philosophy of the tragic can be dated to Schelling, it was not to the System-­Programme but to Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism that he referred. The project of extending Kantian philosophy, the search for a mode of expression that would move beyond the contradictions of critical thought, and the desire to locate the quest for freedom in art is already anticipated in Schelling’s philosophical letters of 1795 written when he was a mere twenty years old. Schelling’s preoccupation with tragedy emerges from his wider analysis of the Kantian critique of metaphysics. In Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, Schelling reconfigures the Kantian debate about metaphysics as a problem of freedom. For Kant the metaphysical problem of freedom is insoluble: One cannot prove that freedom is possible, but it is equally difficult to prove that it is impossible and that the rule of necessity is absolute. To do so one would have to have a God’s-­eye view of the world. Schelling believed that Kant’s critique exposed the most basic contradiction in philosophy—​the conflict between the objective (necessity or nature) and the subjective (freedom). For Schelling, the two poles of the debate that Kant identifies are illustrated respectively by ­Spinoza and by Fichte. Fichte’s philosophy represents “criticism” in the elaboration of a philosophy based on the subjective conditions of knowledge. In foregrounding the unconditioned freedom of the subject, Fichte posits the external world merely in relation to the “I” and thus creates an

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“absolute subject.” Spinoza, on the other hand, represents “dogmatism.” He inaugurates a philosophy of the “absolute object” and gives the natural world the status of sole reality, radically underplaying the importance of human subjectivity and freedom. As Schelling writes in a letter to Hegel, “the real difference between critical and dogmatic philosophy appears to be that the former proceeds from the absolute I (which has yet to be conditioned by an object), while the latter proceeds from the absolute object or non-­I.”24 Schelling’s aim in the letters is to find a way of reconciling criticism and dogmatism, freedom and necessity, for Schelling is convinced that “absolute freedom and absolute necessity are identical.” In each of the letters he returns to the enduring difficulty within philosophical thought, but in the final letter, the so-­called “Tenth Letter,” it is to art that Schelling turns to find a resolution: “You are right,” he addresses his fictional addressee. “One thing remains, to know that there is an objective power which threatens our freedom with annihilation, and, with this firm and certain conviction in our heart, to fight against it exerting our whole freedom, and thus to go down. You are doubly right, my friend, because this possibility must be preserved for art even after having vanished in the light of reason; it must be preserved for the highest in art.”25 The “light of reason” has failed to produce a convincing defense of freedom—​a defense that arises not despite but because of the acknowledgement of the threat to freedom posed by the existence of an external “objective power.” The failure of philosophy nevertheless preserves this particular duty for art—​for “the highest in art.” In identifying tragedy as the “highest in art,” Schelling invests his hopes in its ability to move beyond the polarizing tendencies of philosophical thought. As Dennis Schmidt phrases it: “Schelling asks if philosophizing can let itself be changed by a different sort of engagement with tragic art.”26 Many a time the question has been asked how Greek reason could bear the contradictions of Greek tragedy. A mortal, destined by fate to become a malefactor and himself fighting against this fate, is never­ ­theless appallingly punished for a crime, although it was the deed of destiny! The ground for this contradiction, that which made the contradiction bearable, lay deeper than one would seek it. It lay in the contest between human freedom and the power of the objective world in which the mortal must succumb necessarily if that power is

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absolutely superior, if it is fate. And yet, he must be punished for succumbing because he did not succumb without a struggle. That the malefactor who succumbed under the power of fate was punished, this tragic fate was the recognition of human freedom; it was the honour due to freedom. Greek tragedy honoured human freedom, letting its hero fight against the superior power of fate. In order not to go beyond the limits of art, the tragedy had to let him succumb. Nevertheless, in order to make restitution for this humiliation of human freedom exhorted by art, it had to let him atone even for the crime committed by destiny. . . . ​It was a sublime thought, to suffer punishment willingly even for an inevitable crime, and so to prove one’s freedom by the very loss of this freedom, and to go down with a declaration of free will.27

Schelling presents the problem of Greek tragedy as a problem for Greek reason. Where contemporary “reason” has been unable to provide a philosophically coherent defense of human freedom, Greek reason found a way of accommodating the contradictions inherent in its tragic worldview. The Greeks were faced with the very same paradox that has confronted post-­K antian philosophy; they too were exercised by the difficulty of making sense of the competing forces of freedom and necessity. But it was art that would not only make the contradictions of philosophy bearable but also provided a defense of human freedom that reason could not. More specifically, it was in the content of Greek tragedy, in fact, in the content of a specific Greek tragedy, that they found the most eloquent expression of the impossibility and the necessity of free will. Oedipus’s fate becomes paradigmatic for Schelling. His guiltless guilt articulates the hope and the deception of the autonomous subject. Oedipus is objectively guilty but remains subjectively innocent, and yet he chooses nonetheless to suffer for the crime. So although Oedipus ultimately succumbs to the necessity of his fate, it is the fact that he is punished for a crime that he did not willingly commit that reaffirms his autonomy. It is not just that he struggled against a necessity that he would not accept but that he was actively censored for assuming his agency—​that is what constitutes, for Schelling, “the recognition of human freedom.” As Lacoue-­L abarthe comments: “We have here the schema and matrix for dialectical logic itself: the negative (the loss of freedom) is converted into the positive (the realization of freedom) thanks

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to the exacerbation of the negative itself (courting punishment, the will to lose freedom).”28 And, as he goes on to say, “Self-­realization is always possible in the form of the work of the negative, or rather, in the present case, its reduplication. And it is because identity is thought in terms of the Self, ipseity or Selbstheit, that only a metaphysics of the subject can claim to resolve the paradox of the Same. When conversely the paradox remains a paradox, or when extreme difference is preserved, we stray beyond the limits of such a metaphysics.”29 And it is this promise of “straying beyond the limits” that Schelling’s reading represents. Schelling’s Oedipus is a subject whose very subjectivity is constituted as a reduplication of the limits of his subjectivity. “It was a great idea . . . ​,” writes Schelling of Oedipus’s will­­ing acceptance of punishment for an “inevitable crime.” In his closing summation of Oedipus’s fate, Schelling recalls the language of his first letter: “This struggle against the immeasurable is not only the most sublime that man is able to think, but in my opinion the principle of all sublimity.” The insight of tragic poetry is recognized as an instance of the sublime. Its great thought is to lead thought beyond the realm of reason both pure and practical. In one sense the move beyond reason could be understood as a return to Christianity. Oedipus’s sacrifice is a self-­sacrifice for the sake of others; the promise of freedom requires the punishment of Oedipus. In the absence of his sacrifice we are all condemned to live with determinism. But as a human artistic creation Schelling’s Oedipus is also different from Christ. As Shaw writes: “Properly speaking, this knowledge of freedom and necessity is neither theoretical nor practical but sublime, motivating reason to think the identity and conflict of freedom and fate.”30 In its ability to see beyond the schisms of reason, the tragic art is able to comprehend the identity that Schelling seeks. “Aesthetics,” as ­Distaso writes, “can comprehend the exceeding element of subject and object, which is the overcoming of the contrast through their own dis­ solution.”31 As Schelling concludes: “Here too, as in all instances, Greek art is standard. No people has been more faithful than the Greeks to the essence of humanity, even in art.”32 And yet the difficultly remains that this insight is confined to the realm of Greek art: “But such a fight is thinkable only for the purpose of tragic art. It could not become a system of action even for this reason

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alone, that such a system would presuppose a race of titans, and that, without this presupposition, it would turn out to be utterly detrimental to humanity.”33 As Shaw puts it, “though the Greeks are the most faithful to the sublime essence of human freedom, their tragedies cannot provide a system of ethics.”34 No system of action can arise from the promise of Oedipus because his successors would have to be equal to the task. Oedipus and the race of Greek Titans have been succeeded by an age that makes the calculation: “Would it not be easier to tremble at the faintest notion of freedom, cowed by the superior power of that world, instead of going down fighting.”35 The inability to convert the ontological insight of tragedy into an ethics of human freedom has a twofold dimension. On the one hand, Schelling seems to describe an impasse between art and action. In an earlier letter, Schelling had defined art in a difficult passage: True art, or rather, the divine (theion) in art, is an inward principle, that creates its own material from within and all-­powerfully opposes any sheer mechanism [and] aggregation of stuff from the outside lacking inner order. This inward principle we lose simultaneously with the intellectual intuition of the world, an intuition which arises in us, by means of an instantaneous unification of two opposing principles and is lost when neither the struggle nor the unification is any longer possible in us.36

Art in its essence rejects the imposition of the objective world on the subjective “I.” But we lose this intuition the moment that we fail to see that the subject and the object are mutually determinative. As Shaw argues, “the principle of art is grounded in either the unification of, or struggle between, fate and freedom.”37 In the final letter, Schelling gives flesh to this idea by demonstrating that tragic art is both animated by the quest for freedom but is constituted in the irresolvable conflict between freedom and necessity. It may be inconceivable to imagine an Oedipus who is not motivated by a desire to assert his free will, but it is equally inconceivable to imagine his fate without the acknowledgment of the tension or the mutually reinforcing dialectic between agency and determination. The transition from aesthetics to ethics is difficult, Schelling seems to imply, because the identity of art is more essentially bound to the notion

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of freedom than the realm of philosophy. The limits of reason are exemplified by the cowardice of the modern age that would rather give up on the project of freedom altogether than risk “going down fighting.” But the passage from art to life, from aesthetics to ethics, is also vexed because although it instinctively chooses the path of freedom, this conviction cannot ultimately lead beyond the aporia of a necessary conflict with objectivity. Although art has more promising resources than philosophy to choose freedom, in the end it can do nothing more than “go down fighting.” The impasse between aesthetics and ethics, then, prevents Greek tragedy from becoming a model of action, but the tragic is also barred from playing this role by the incommensurability of antiquity and modernity. Oedipus stands as a Titan in relation to the quivering cowardice of modern man. Where ancient existence is characterized by its heroism and its harmony, Schelling describes the “horrors of the present” as a “living hell.” Moreover, Schelling uncovers the appeal of Greek tragedy precisely in the disjunction between “Greek reason” and the “light of reason” in his own age. The tragic insight into the essence of freedom is not so much the supplement as the very vehicle of Greek reason. It is a symptom of the fissure of modernity that art and philosophy are no longer bound together in identity. The tragic understanding of the necessity and the limits of human freedom are separated from us by the chasm of history. And yet it would be wrong to characterize Schelling’s investment in Greek tragedy as a historical one. Although he builds a powerful rhetorical contrast between the classical and the modern worlds, tragedy’s role in this opposition is not determinative. Tragedy does not function as a route to understanding the distinctive character of Greek reason; rather, it is invoked as a path to understanding reason itself. More correctly, its insight is sought to probe a metaphysical question that Schelling sees not only as the greatest preoccupation of his age but of all ages. As Distaso argues: “Tragedy is not simply a genre but the modality through which the opposition is incarnated by the action of the tragic hero, the test of the internal tension of the opposition: it is action that radically engages man in conflict.”38 Tragedy, then, for Schelling, is neither “simply a genre” of literature nor a historical expression of Greek culture or even Greek

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reason; rather, it describes the very condition of being human. When Szondi claims that Schelling was the first to formulate a philosophy of the tragic, this is why. Schelling identifies tragedy as an ontological condition. Although, as we saw, he has difficulty reconciling its unique intuition about freedom and necessity with a system of action in the present, he nevertheless looks to tragedy to understand a fundamental impasse in contemporary metaphysics. In his later works, in The System of Transcendental Idealism and in The Philosophy of Art, Schelling will go some way to finding a reconciliation between aesthetics and ethics, between the work of art and the work of philosophy, but despite the optimistic conclusions of these works, their arguments are constructed around the same analysis of tragedy. The optimism of these later works may have its source in the closing statement of the “Tenth Letter.” Here Schelling exhorts his reader: Let us rejoice in the conviction of having advanced to the last great problem to which philosophy can advance. . . . ​We shall not complain, but be glad finally to have reached the crossroad where a parting of our ways is unavoidable, glad to have penetrated the mystery of our spirit, by virtue of which the just becomes free by himself, while the unjust trembles by himself in fear of a justice which he did not find in himself and had to assign to another world.39

We are to rejoice and not complain about the metaphysical cul de sac that the Letters and that tragedy, in particular, have led us down. In invoking the “crossroads” as our final destination, Schelling ties the fate of philosophy to the fate of Oedipus. Oedipus is both the “secret of our spirit” and the model for the “just” exercise of human freedom. As Schelling’s final sentence of the Letters concludes, without the model of Oedipus, philosophy would remain an “eternal enigma.”

Hegel and the Metaphysics of Tragedy Lacoue-­L abarthe affirms that “the singular honour of reintroducing Oedipus—​and the question of the tragic along with him—​into philosophy falls to Schelling.”40 Nevertheless, it is perhaps Hegel who can best lay claim to having advocated an Oedipal imperative for philosophy, for

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it is Hegel who will make Oedipus a synonym of the philosophical itself. Oedipus comes to define Schelling’s philosophical project without ever actually being named. In Hegel, it is the moment of Oedipus’s self-­ discovery, the moment he names himself as the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx, that will constitute the origin of philosophy. The scene of this encounter takes place in the Philosophy of History: That the Spirit of the Egyptians presented itself to their consciousness in the form of a problem is evident from the celebrated inscription in the sanctuary of the Goddess Neith at Sais: “I am that which is, that which was, and that which will be: no one has lifted my veil.” . . . ​ In the Egyptian Neith, Truth is still a problem. The Greek Apollo is its solution; his utterance is: Man know thyself. In this dictum is not intended a self-­recognition that regards the specialities of one’s own weaknesses and defects: it is not the individual that is admonished to become acquainted with his own idiosyncrasy, but humanity in general is summoned to self-­knowledge. This mandate was given to the Greeks, and in the Greek Spirit humanity exhibits itself in its clear and developed form. Wonderfully, then, must the Greek legend surprise us, which relates, that the Sphinx—​the great Egyptian symbol—appeared in Thebes, uttering the words: what is that which in the morning goes on four legs, at midday on two, and in the evening on three? Oedipus, giving the solution, Man, precipitated the Sphinx from the rock. The solution and liberation of that Oriental Spirit, which in Egypt had advanced so far as to propose the problem, is certainly this: that the Inner Being [the Essence] of Nature is Thought, which has its existence only in the human consciousness.41

In this passage Hegel describes the development of the human spirit in both historical and geographical terms. As always, for Hegel, the progress of history is coterminous with the progress of thought, and the great leap forward occurs at the juncture of Oriental wisdom and Greek reason. The Egyptians had advanced to a point in their thinking where the old solutions to the problem of truth had become inadequate. They had an intimation that looking to some external power to unlock the mystery of being was no longer viable. “To the Egyptian Spirit,” writes Hegel, “it has become impossible—​though it is still involved in infinite embarrassment—​to remain content with that. The rugged African nature disintegrated that

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primitive Unity, and lighted upon the problem whose solution is Free Spirit.”42 But it remained to Oedipus to lift the veil of human self-­ comprehension. In giving the response “man” to the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus recognizes that the “inner essence of nature is thought” and that thought resides in “human consciousness.” In raising himself to the challenge of the Delphic injunction: “Man know thyself,” Oedipus frees not just himself but “humankind in general.” The knowledge he proclaims is universal and not particular. As with Schelling, Hegel’s Oedipus also provides an answer to the question of freedom. The coming into being of consciousness, the birth of philosophy, is identical to the project of human self-­liberation. It is in confronting the despotism of the object that the “I” is born as a philosophical subject. Moreover, Hegel’s historical account of the role of Oedipus, like Schelling’s, is not in the end intended to illustrate a merely historical point. As Lacoue-­L abarthe writes: “The history of Spirit is history tout court; the meaning of history, in other words, is none other than the realization of Spirit and the accomplishment of the metaphysical.”43 Oedipus’s story is universalized because, unlike the Egyptian priests, the truth he is able to unveil transcends both history and geography. But what are the consequences of equating the philosophical quest with the fate of Oedipus? He may have the appearance of a triumphant figure of knowledge, but Hegel does not shrink from acknowledging the limitations of Oedipus: But that time-­honoured antique solution given by Oedipus—​who thus shows himself possessed of knowledge—​is connected with a dire ignorance of the character of his own actions. The rise of spiritual illumination in the old royal house is disparaged by the connection with abominations, the result of ignorance; and that primeval royalty must—​in order to attain true knowledge and moral clearness—​ first be brought into shapely form, and be harmonized with the Spirit of the Beautiful, by civil laws and political freedom.44

The “rise of spiritual illumination” is accompanied by “ignorance” and “abomination.” Oedipus’s insight remains incomplete. His tragic knowledge is not yet philosophy. Or is Hegel rather arguing that philosophy remains tragic? Like in Schelling, Oedipus’s subjectivity in Hegel is accompanied by reflection on the limits of his subjectivity. For Hegel, these limitations are crucially linked to a question of political freedom.

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“Primeval royalty” must give way to civil laws in order to achieve “true knowledge and moral clearness.” Oedipus thus has a metonymic relationship to philosophy in Hegel’s Philosophy of History. But Hegel’s interest in tragedy predates this text by many years. In fact, he first mentions tragedy in his youthful essay “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” written in 1797. This early fragmentary text plays a surprisingly important role in the genesis of Hegel’s mature philosophy, and the thoughts he expresses there about tragedy are no exception. Although the mention of tragedy in this text is fleeting, it is linked to two concepts that will be central to his later thinking: fate and history. Hegel’s search for a new expression of reason in this text, in a sense, mirrors the aspirations of the System-­Programme, which was written almost at the same time. Unlike the System-­Programme, however, Hegel does not seek to ground a new “mythology of reason” but instead calls for a renewed interest in an old mythology: the Christian religion. But Hegel arrives at his analysis of Christianity via a rather circuitous route; it emerges from the contrast that he sets up between two ancient societies: the Greek and the Jewish. Throughout the first section, titled “The Spirit of Judaism,” Hegel systematically contrasts Greek and Jewish attitudes to nature, to the family, to freedom, and to political equality. In each instance, it is the incommensurability of Hellenism and Judaism that is stressed. Subtending his analysis of these irreconcilable opposites is a narrative about the development of history. It is this reflection that leads to his final assessment of the essence of Judaism: The great tragedy of the Jewish people is no Greek tragedy; it can rouse neither terror nor pity, for both of these arise only out of the fate which follows from the inevitable slip of a beautiful character; it can arouse horror alone. The fate of the Jewish people is the fate of Macbeth who stepped out of nature itself, clung to alien Beings, and so in their service had to trample and slay everything holy in human nature, had at last to be forsaken by his gods (since these were objects and he their slave) and be dashed to pieces on his faith itself.45

Hegel turns to the vocabulary of tragedy to express his conception of the historical progress of spirit. Already at this early stage in his thinking, Greek tragedy for Hegel represents a form of “true knowledge” to which

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the Jews cannot aspire. Although he could not be more explicit in his homage to Aristotle here—​“ it can rouse neither terror nor pity, for both of these arise only out of the fate which follows from the inevitable slip of a beautiful character”—​the thinking is distinctively Hegelian. While Hegel appropriates the idiom of Aristotelian catharsis, he is already formulating his own vision of tragedy as a conflict of opposites. The tragedy of the Jewish people cannot be a Greek tragedy because their long history of oppression does not arise from an internal conflict between two “rights” but from a servitude to an “alien being” in the form of a tyrannical God. Moreover, like Schelling, Hegel seems to see a conflict between freedom and necessity as a prerequisite to the tragic fate. Because the Jews know no freedom, because they see their fate as entirely the product of the imposition of divine necessity, they can experience no tragedy. The conflict between Hellenism and Judaism is not properly speaking a conflict either. For a conflict to exist, Judaism would have to be able to internalize the recognition of the limits of its freedom and direct this insight toward tragic heroism. This ambition remains alien to the Jews, but it is what constitutes Greek freedom and, as Hegel will later show, it is the very essence of Christian reconciliation. Connecting his denunciation of Judaism to Hegel’s critical dialogue with post-­K antian philosophy, Joshua Billings argues that “modernity for Hegel is characterized more by the awful punishment of Macbeth than the tragic fate of Oedipus.”46 But Hegel’s analysis of tragedy and metaphysics is not linked to a particular tragic hero. Where Schelling implicitly ties the workings of tragedy to Oedipus’s dilemma, as we have seen in the example above, Hegel does not link his characterization of Greek tragedy to a specific protagonist. Although some might see in this passage an intimation of his later preoccupation with Antigone, within the scope of this text it is perhaps to Jesus’s fate that the tragic is most closely aligned. But Hegel never explicitly makes this connection, and the power of his account of the Jewish people’s misfortune and its inability to attain the status of a tragedy lies in the abstraction of the concept. This generic lens drawn from the history of literature is able, Hegel seems to claim, to make sense of a people’s collective history. Schelling uncovers in the tragic an insight into the paradox of subjectivity. Hegel, on the other hand, figures the tragic as a less individualized experience. To him,

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mechanics of Greek tragedy are called upon to make sense of the “spirit” of an entire people. It is not just that this passage anticipates the tragic structure of Hegel’s later dialectical view of history, which I explore in the next chapter. It is also that in denying tragedy to the Jews, Hegel turns the philosophy of the tragic into an abstract structure of collective experience. In this sense, Hegel’s casual use of tragic vocabulary in “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” is perhaps more radical than his later more explicit discussion in the essay “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right,” which appeared in 1802–3 in a journal published by both Hegel and Schelling: Tragedy consists in this, that ethical nature segregates its inorganic nature (in order not to become embroiled in it), as a fate, and places it outside itself; and by acknowledging this fate in the struggle against it, ethical nature is reconciled with the Divine being as a unity of both.47

This essay’s definition of tragedy closely echoes Schelling’s in its account of the struggle and reconciliation with external necessity. Moreover, in its focus on ethical nature, it seems to be directed toward the identity of the subject. But what is distinctively Hegelian about this passage is the mediation between the individual and the collective, the bringing together of the abstract and the real. As Szondi phrases it: “Hegel seeks to replace the abstract concept of ethics with a real one that presents the universal and the particular in their identity, for their opposition is caused by formalism’s process of abstraction.”48 Hegel seeks to move beyond both Kant who had placed ethics under the purview of a universal law and Fichte who wants to “see every action and the whole existence of the individual as that of an individual who is supervised, known, and regulated by the universal which stands opposed to him, as well as by abstraction.”49 Hegel rather wants to found “the absolute idea of ethical life [Sittlichkeit].” The real, absolute ethical life “is immediately the ethical life of the individual; conversely, the essence of the ethical life of the individual [is] simply the real and therefore universal absolute ethical life.” As we shall explore in more detail in Chapter 5, Hegel sees a necessary relationship between the individual ethical life and the universal

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laws of ethics, just as he sees a correspondence between abstraction and lived experience. As Dennis Schmidt argues, “speculative philosophy does not want to be another metaphysics or philosophy of identity: the unity that is the sign of the speculative is not above or outside or other to the phenomenal world, it is rather the very system of this world itself, and it is as complicated and multiple as the world itself.”50 Nevertheless, where “The Spirit of Christianity” speaks of “Greek tragedy,” in this text “tragedy” seems to have been liberated from the specificity of its cultural referent and has become a universal.51 Unlike Schelling who had identified tragedy as the solution to the contradictions of Greek reason, Hegel gives no contextualization to his pronouncements on the tragic. Hegel’s thought is characterized by an interplay between a historical and a metaphysical understanding of tragedy. The abstraction of idealist philosophy turns tragedy into an ontological concept, but the attention that Hegel pays to the phenomenal world turns this very ontology into a problem. As Dennis Schmidt argues, for Hegel, “the idea of the tragic is not merely one idea amongst others that will appear at various moments in the life of the spirit. It will rather belong, in some manner, to the life of spirit in general as well as to specific moments in which tragedy itself is the form that the life of spirit takes.”52 From Oedipus in his encounter with the Sphinx to the fate of the Jewish people, the tragic has become for Hegel a way of talking about the life of spirit. But this “spirit” represents neither the pure abstraction of ­metaphysics nor a lived historical reality; it is rather suspended between the two. In Hegel, then, the tragic becomes both a synonym for ethics and metaphysics and the ultimate expression of their conflicts and ­contradictions.

Nietzsche and the Opus Metaphysicum Within the history of German philosophy, Nietzsche came late to the problem of tragedy. “By the time that Nietzsche broaches the question of tragedy and its relation to the modern world, the history of this second life of this question is, by and large, for better or worse, owned by Hegel.”53 In his attempt to wrest it away from the grasp of Hegel, ­Nietzsche seems simultaneously to rescue tragedy from the tentacles of philosophy. “We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics,” begins

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­ ietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, “if when we have come to realize, not just N through logical insight but also with the certainty of something directly apprehended (Anschauung), that the continuous evolution of art is bound up with the duality of Apolline and the Dionysiac in much the same way as reproduction depends on there being two sexes which co-­exist in a state of perpetual conflict interrupted only occasionally by periods of reconcilia­ ­tion.”54 Nietzsche represents his treatise as contribution to the “science of aesthetics.” His attention is turned not to the progress of the “life of spirit” but rather to the “evolution of art.” Moreover, Nietzsche prioritizes the “certainty of something directly comprehended” over the fruits of “logical insight.” Hegel, too, as we saw above, had wanted to combine an abstract with a phenomenological approach, but in Nietzsche’s hands the ambivalence of Hegelian philosophy is reduced to a caricature of cold “logic.” Nietzsche’s deconstruction of Hegel continues as he compares the duality of the Apolline and the Dionysiac to the conflict of the sexes. The Hegelian dialectic is thus displaced onto the duality of two irrational forces driven by lust and passion rather than by a conflict of two rights. Nietzsche may obliquely be referring to Hegel’s interest in the confrontation between men and women in his analysis of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but his characterization of the two divinities as drives (Triebe) certainly emphasizes the more corporeal aspect of the struggle between the sexes. In his vocabulary of duality, conflict, and reconciliation, then, Nietzsche takes over the structure of Hegel’s insights into the functioning of tragedy but diverts it toward a new end. Nietzsche’s project in this text is driven by a desire to move beyond the cooption of tragedy by German idealism. Where Schelling and Hegel had, in a sense, identified tragedy as the solution that would ward off the death of philosophy, Nietzsche instead sees the birth of philosophy as coterminous with the demise of tragedy. Far from seeing tragedy, as Schelling does, as providing a resolution to the contradictions of Greek reason, Nietzsche argues that the development of rational thought in Greece was directly responsible for the destruction of the tragic aesthetic. The second half of The Birth of Tragedy is thus devoted to tracing in detail the insidious displacement of art by philosophy: “Art becomes overgrown with philosophical thought which forces it to cling tightly to the trunk of dialectics.”55 Nietzsche uncovers incipient “Socratism” in Euripides as an intimation of the decline of the old tragic art:

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In league with Socrates, Euripides dared to be the herald of a new kind of aesthetic creation. If this caused the older tragedy to perish, then aesthetic Socratism is the murderous principle; but insofar as the fight was directed against the Dionysiac nature of the older art, we may identify Socrates as the opponent of Dionysos, the new Orpheus who rises up against Dionysos and who, although fated to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian court of justice, nevertheless forces the great and mighty god himself to flee.56

As the “archetype of theoretical man,” Socrates embodies the dangers that the pursuit of rationality poses to the flourishing of art. For Nietzsche, the true opponent is the “optimistic element,” which he is convinced is the “essence of dialectics”: One only needs to consider the consequences of these Socratic statements: “Virtue is knowledge; sin is only committed out of ignorance; the virtuous man is a happy man”; in three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy. For the virtuous hero must now be a dialectician; there must now be a visible connection between virtue and knowledge, faith and morality; the solution by transcendental justice in the plays of Aeschylus is now debased to the shallow and impertinent principle of “poetic justice,” with its usual deus ex machina.57

Rationalist optimism, for Nietzsche, is every bit as arbitrary in its imposition of resolution as the old poetic conventions of Aeschylean art. The depths of its “transcendental justice,” devastating as it might have been, are far superior to the “shallow and impertinent principles” offered up by rational thought. It is difficult not to see in Nietzsche’s denunciation of Socratic dialectics a pointed renunciation of the Hegelian dialectical reading of tragedy. Nietzsche may have taken over from Hegel his emphasis on conflict, he may even adopt his vocabulary of reconciliation (Versöhnung), but he nevertheless sees himself inverting the premise of Hegelian reading, for his denunciation of Socratism anticipated his plea for tragedy to liberate itself from philosophy. And yet, despite his ostensible rejection of Hegel’s and Schelling’s investment in tragedy as a key to philosophical understanding, Nietzsche does not altogether move beyond the preoccupations of idealism. Indeed, in his foreword to Richard Wagner, Nietzsche seems to call into

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question the dichotomy between art and thought that he later seems eager to construct: “Yet if this act of self-­collection were to prompt anyone to think of patriotic excitement and aesthetic self-­indulgence, or courageous seriousness and serene (heiter) play, as opposites, they would be wrong; indeed if such people really read the work they might realize, to their astonishment, that the matter with which we are concerned is a grave problem for Germany, a problem which we now place, as a vortex, a turning-­point into the midst of German hopes.”58 As the dedication to Wagner makes clear, Nietzsche’s aesthetic manifesto is connected to a project of national renewal. For Nietzsche, it is through art, and especially through tragic art, that the nation can come to grips with its most serious problems and its most ambitious aspirations. But this dedication to art does not take place at the expense of a “courageous seriousness” but rather acts as its medium. In its blending of aesthetics and an emancipatory politics, Nietzsche’s text recalls the rhetoric of the System-­ Programme. And just like in this earlier text, Nietzsche ties art to the most fundamental existential and metaphysical questions: Perhaps . . . ​these people will take offence at such serious consideration being given to any aesthetic problem at all, particularly if they are incapable of thinking of art as anything more than an amusing sideshow, a readily dispensable jingling of fool’s bells in the face of the “gravity of existence.” Let the serious-­minded people take note: my conviction [is] that art is the highest task and the truest metaphysical activity of this life.59

In a deliberately provocative conjecture, David Krell attributed the authorship of the System-­Programme to Nietzsche. Krell supports his attribution by drawing attention to the undercurrent of pessimism that subtends the overt optimism of the System-­Programme: “If Nietzsche is the thinker of the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music, and also from Greek pessimism, which is a pessimism of strength, is there some sense in which the System-­Programme descries the tragic absolute?”60 But the parallels are more fundamental. Despite the fact that Nietzsche constructs a quasi-­historical narrative where tragedy and philosophy part company, the discussion of aesthetics in The Birth of Tragedy is saturated in the language of metaphysics:

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These two very different drives (Triebe) exist side by side, mostly in open conflict, stimulating and provoking (reizen) one another to give birth to ever-­new, more vigorous offspring in whom they perpetuate the conflict inherent in the opposition between them, an opposition only apparently bridged by the common term “art”—​until eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic “Will,” they appear paired, and in this pairing, finally engender a work of art which is Dionysiac and Apolline in equal measure: Attic tragedy.61

Nietzsche’s description of the perpetual conflict between the Dionysiac and the Apolline demonstrates how the language of “art” is straining beyond its normal referent as it seeks to encompass what he calls “the metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic ‘Will.’   ” Just as Schelling sees Greek tragedy as the solution to the contradictions of Greek reason, Nietzsche sees Attic tragedy as the expression of an existential conflict between two metaphysical principles. As Szondi explains: “Schopenhauer’s concepts ‘will’ and ‘representation’ can be seen as forebears of Nietzsche’s artistic principles ‘Dionysian’ and ‘Apollonian.’ . . . ​Schopenhauer’s metaphysical concepts thus become aesthetic concepts, just as metaphysics as such appears in Nietzsche in the form of aesthetics.”62 Nietzsche may make the move from a Hegelian to a Schopenhaurian notion of metaphysics, but his attempt to understand tragedy very much remains a metaphysical quest. Where Hegel turns to tragedy to understand the formation of the subject, Nietzsche instead uncovers the metaphysical truth of tragedy in the dissolution of subjectivity. Hegel elects Oedipus in his quest for self­knowledge as prototype of philosophical man. As we saw in the previous chapter, Nietzsche, on the other hand, turns for his philosophical insight to the figure of the Satyr: The metaphysical solace which, I wish to suggest, we derive from every true tragedy, the solace that in the ground of things, and despite all changing appearances, life is indestructibly mighty and pleasurable, this solace appears with palpable clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural beings whose life goes on ineradicably behind and beyond all civilization, as it were, and who remain eternally the same despite all the changes of generations in the history of nations. The Hellene, by nature profound and uniquely capable of the most exquisite and the most severe suffering, comforts ­himself

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with this chorus, for he has gazed with keen eye into the midst of the fearful, destructive havoc of so-­called world history, and has seen the cruelty of nature, and is in danger of longing to deny the will as the Buddhist does. Art saves him, and through art, life saves him—​for itself.63

In the chorus of satyrs, Nietzsche seeks to grasp the “joy in the annihilation of the individual.” Where for Hegel tragedy plays a crucial role in the constitution of the subject, for Nietzsche metaphysical healing comes in the form of a Dionysiac extermination of the subject. We shall return to the question of subjectivity in the final chapter; the point I want to highlight here is that both Hegel and Nietzsche see in tragedy a search for a metaphysical unity that exists beyond the apparent discord of opposing forces. While Hegel locates this oneness in the quiescence of reconciliation, Nietzsche sees its vehicle as the destructive power of Dionysos. For Szondi, however, Nietzsche’s tragic dialectics are only apparently negative. Turning his back on a Schopenhauerian reading of tragedy that ends in resignation, Nietzsche’s analysis ultimately has more in common with the affirmative strand of Schelling’s: “For Nietzsche, . . . ​ Dionysus emerges from his dismemberment in the process of individuation as one who is powerful and indestructible, which is precisely the ‘metaphysical consolation’ that tragedy offers. Nietzsche confronts Schopenhauer’s negative dialectic with a positive dialectic that is reminiscent of Schelling’s interpretation in the Letters.”64 Nietzsche’s text thus represents both the culmination of and the ultimate challenge to the idealist reading of tragedy. His critique of Socratism stands in metonymically for the rejection of philosophical discourse both ancient and modern. In his attempt to revive a living performative tradition of tragedy, Nietzsche revolts against the idealists’ subordination of art to the world of ideas. And yet, if anything, Nietzsche’s project in The Birth of Tragedy is the very instantiation of the System-­Programme’s yearning. Nietzsche’s text performs the desire to subsume “all ideas” into an “aesthetic act.” As Dennis Schmidt concludes: “In short, The Birth of Tragedy is the site of Nietzsche’s thoroughly problematic relation to the tradition of post-­K antian philosophy; in it one finds the simultaneous effort to deepen and to repudiate that tradition.”65 For Nietzsche, as (for) the author of the System-­Programme:

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“There is no philosophy, no history left; the poetic art alone will survive all the other sciences and arts.”

The Tragedy of Being Martin Heidegger writes: “The experience of beings in their Being which here comes to language is neither pessimistic nor nihilistic; nor is it optimistic. It is tragic.”66 If Nietzsche described himself as Germany’s first “tragic philosopher,” Heidegger can lay good claim to taking over this mantle. Although Heidegger addressed no single work to the topic of tragedy and never formulated a theory of the tragic, it would not be difficult to characterize his philosophical outlook as tragic. In the passage above, taken from his essay “The Anaximander Fragment,” Heidegger equates the very essence of being to the concept of the tragic. This passage, like many of Heidegger’s other passing comments on tragedy, is as enigmatic as it is suggestive. It appears isolated in one of his broader discussions and leads neither to a sustained engagement nor a particular tragedy nor a fuller discussion of the nature of tragic being. While Heidegger’s oeuvre resonates more broadly with tragic themes, it is in the controversial work Introduction to Metaphysics that he develops his most sustained insight into the genre. Despite its title, Heidegger’s text is very far from an “introduction” to “metaphysics”; it is rather a profound interrogation of the concept of metaphysics itself. Greek tragedy is enlisted to this project as a route to dismantling a Christian and metaphysical outlook. To this extent, his debt to Nietzsche is manifest. And yet Heidegger will include Nietzsche in his role call of metaphysicians when he presents his thought as a break with the whole tradition of “metaphysics” reaching back to Plato. Indeed, Heidegger claims to be the first philosopher who will dare to confront the Greek thought of Being. Heidegger’s radicalism is predicated on his “authentic” return to the Greeks. This reimmersion in Greek thought takes its most elaborate form in the Introduction to Metaphysics in Heidegger’s discussion of the first stasimon of Sophocles’s Antigone—​the so-­called “Ode to Man.” Heidegger’s translation of the first line: “πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει” “Many the wonders but nothing is stranger than man”67 is as famous as it is opaque. As he elaborates:

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The human being is, in one word, to deinotaton, the uncanniest. This saying about humanity grasps the most extreme limits and the most abrupt abysses of its Being. This abruptness and ultimacy can never be seen by eyes that merely describe and ascertain something present at hand, even if a myriad such eyes should want to seek out human characteristics and conditions. Such being opens itself up to poetic-­thoughtful projection.68

“Der Mensch” for Heidegger is “das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichen.” Like Hegel, Heidegger looks to Sophocles to uncover the essence of human identity. When Hegel’s Oedipus confronts the Sphinx he reveals the identity of man in his ability to identify himself. Oedipal man is the man who uses his knowledge in the existential quest for self-­knowledge. Far from being deinon, man is constituted by his powers of self-­ recognition. When Heidegger’s tragic chorus comes to “celebrate” man, on the other hand, they confront him with “the most extreme limits and the most abrupt abysses of Being.” Heidegger makes his rejection of previous “humanistic” readings clear: We have already alluded to the fact that this is not a matter of describing and clarifying the domains and behavior of the human, who is one being among many. . . . ​[W]e have also warded off the other opinion, according to which the ode recounts the development of humanity from a wild huntsman and a traveler by dugout canoe, to a builder of cities and person of culture.69

But Heidegger’s proclamation of the “uncanniness” of man is not just conceived as a refutation of a vision of human progress; it is also directed against a certain Enlightenment conception of reason. For this vista onto to the “abyss” of being “can never be seen by eyes that merely describe and ascertain something present at hand.” The truth of being cannot be ascertained by empirical inquiry. Being remains beyond the grasp of physical and intellectual perception. “Such being opens itself up to poetic-­thoughtful projection.” It is the aesthetic and not the philosophical sense that is called upon to open up the mystery of existence. It is difficult not to recall the old plea: “The philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet. Men without aesthetic sense are our literal-­minded philosophers. The philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic

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philosophy.” Perhaps it is Heidegger and not Nietzsche who is the author of the System-­Programme? Heidegger has often been criticized by classicists and philosophers alike for his highly idiosyncratic reading of tragedy and of Greek texts in general.70 Rather than contextualizing this stasimon in the narrative of the drama, rather than presenting it within the dialectical exchange between Creon and Antigone, Heidegger rather treats the chorus as “an ontological document.”71 There is no doubt that Heidegger’s “coercive” reading of the “Ode to Man” is fully in line with the construction of his broader vatic persona. Heidegger’s analysis is not just incidentally decontextualized; its very power is predicated on its decontextualization. And yet one cannot understand Heidegger’s attempt to read Sophocles’s chorus as a “raw” expression of existential “truth” in isolation. In turning to tragedy to uncover the truth of existence, Heidegger can be seen to complete the quest of German idealism just as he seems to repudiate it. For Schelling and for Hegel just as for Nietzsche and Heidegger, tragedy would need to enter the vocabulary of existence before it could become the vehicle for an exploration and ultimately a critique of metaphysics.

In this chapter we have been exploring how in the wake of Kant tragedy became a medium for the elaboration of a philosophical aesthetics. From the System-­Programme to the Introduction to Metaphysics, German philosophy has turned to antiquity to elaborate its vision of a philosophical Renaissance—​a renaissance that is predicated on the appropriation of aesthetics. But in conjunction with the elevation of tragedy to the highest form of art, the turn to aesthetics is linked to a questioning of metaphysics. The System-­Programme, thus, first suggests the subordination of metaphysics to ethics and then vindicates the subordination of both to the sphere of art. Schelling ostensibly turns to tragedy to understand the contradiction of “Greek reason,” but it is as a solution to a problem in Kantian metaphysics that he actually turns to Oedipus. Hegel’s Oedipus is the universal figure of self-­understanding, but he is also the figure whose fate exposes the limits of human subjectivity. It is this conflict that constitutes the essence of tragic subjectivity. Nietzsche finds metaphysical solace in the tragic worldview, but it is only in the experience of

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the Dionysiac annihilation of the individual that man comes to a reconciliation with his own existence. Heidegger’s identification of being as tragic enables what he characterizes as a break with the project of Western metaphysics—​a break that is understood, in part, as a reanimation of poetic thought. But where the System-­Programme’s plea for an aesthetic revival self-­ consciously placed itself at the service of a revolutionary political programme, both Heidegger’s aesthetics and his characterization of man as deinotaton were enlisted for a very different sort of revolution in which a new socialist form of German nationalism would provide the solution that tragedy could not. The work that elaborates his thoughts about tragedy is also the site of Heidegger’s vindication of Nazi philosophy as a solution to the impasse of Western metaphysics. One wants to ask whether Heidegger’s aestheticization of thought and his refuge from the ills of modernity in the ontological thought of the Greeks are constitutive of his embrace of National Socialism. The aestheticization of philosophy seems to be tied in a complex and uncomfortable way to revolutionary political programmes. It is notable that tragedy becomes the hinge of this conflation in both the aftermath of the French Revolution and Hitler’s rise to power. Tragedy acts as a spoke in a wheel that underpins the metaphysicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of metaphysics. When the philosophy of spirit becomes an aesthetic philosophy, it also heralds a deep reflection on the tragedy of existence.

c h a p t e r

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Tragedy and History

H istory marks a disjunction between the turn to aesthetics in the System-­Programme and Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics. Where the background of the French Revolution gives a particular meaning to the System-­Programme’s lionizing of art, the specter of Nazism hangs over Heidegger’s aestheticizing readings. In entering the vocabulary of metaphysics and existence, the discussion of tragedy becomes increasingly abstracted and universalized, yet history still remains a crucial frame of reference. The philosophy of the tragic is marked by a temporal ­unconscious. As we saw in the introduction, classicists, particularly those influenced by the Marxian analyses of Vernant, have emphasized the unconsciousness of this temporality, insisting that the historical coordinates of tragedy become submerged in philosophically oriented readings of the genre. The blindness to historical specificity is also linked, as we witnessed, to a suspicion of depoliticization. History and politics are seen as profoundly linked. This background is essential for understanding Carl Schmitt, who explores the rift between history and aesthetics as the site of tragedy’s political intervention. For Schmitt’s interlocutor, Walter Benjamin, on the other hand, tragedy becomes the medium for the development of a philosophical history. Benjamin’s “historico-­philosophical” enquiries are given different inflections in Hölderlin’s and Hegel’s tragic explorations. I argue that far from obscuring questions of temporality, 72

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Schmitt, Benjamin, Hölderlin, and Hegel offer competing ways of reconciling the historical and philosophical commitments of tragic theatre. Conversely, through the analysis of these figures, the chapter explores how historicity emerges in modernity by way of tragedy and its (im)possibility in modern times. The question is not just, as Steiner would imply, whether tragedy is possible in modernity, but rather how its (im)possibility shapes what modernity can be.

Hamlet or Hecuba? Carl Schmitt’s Tragic Intrusions Both Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, in their different ways, demonstrate the indelible mark of Heidegger’s complicity with Nazism on his philosophical discussions of art. But it is perhaps Carl Schmitt, writing in a similar context to Heidegger, who gives us the most explicit account of the relationship between history and the aesthetic sphere.1 Schmitt places an exploration of tragedy and the tragic at the heart of his analysis. Building on a reading of Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba, this chapter will investigate not just how history has acted, as it were, as the political unconscious of tragedy, but also how tragedy has functioned as an “intrusion of history” in the continuum of the contemporary. Carl Schmitt is a highly controversial figure. To an even greater extent than with Heidegger’s, his works raise the uncomfortable question of their participation in a philosophy of Nazism. A certified anti-­Semite, Schmitt acquired the sobriquet of the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich.2 Despite the fact that Schmitt fell out decisively with the Nazi hierarchy and ended up being investigated by them, he never renounced his association and resolutely refused de-­nazification in the postwar period. Written in 1956, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time into the Play not only looks back on a tragic period of history but also implicitly represents its reflections on history and aesthetics as a reckoning with the aftermath of Nazism.3 In particular, Schmitt’s engagement with literary hermeneutics can be productively contextualized within the broad postwar German academy. He launches his text with the bold affirmation: The following pages discuss the taboo of a queen and the figure of the avenger. This discussion leads into the question of the true

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origins of the tragic action, the question of the source of the tragic, which I can only locate in historical reality. In this way I have attempted to comprehend Hamlet from out of its concrete situation.4

In stating that he will seek to understand “the source of the tragic” in “historical reality” and in a “concrete situation,” Schmitt polemically stakes out his methodology in relation to the dominant models of contemporary literary analysis. Schmitt does not spell out what the alternative to his historical approach might be, but he strongly suggests that others had located “the origins of tragic action” elsewhere. By foregrounding the concrete historical situation, Schmitt implies that he was turning his back on analyses that had sought to locate the meaning of the text in the text itself. But as David Pan argues, there was a political dimension to this gesture that he disingenuously smooths over: “Schmitt leaves out of his account, however, that the predominant ‘text-­immanent’ criticism was a reaction against the politicization of literature in the Nazi period by a Germanistik profession that had ‘devoted itself in 1933 to National Socialism with more enthusiasm than any other discipline.”5 In self-­consciously locating the meaning of Hamlet in its concrete historical setting, Schmitt was making an appeal for the repoliticization of literary analysis. Where his contemporaries had attempted to avoid the charge of political complicity by seeking refuge in the realm of pure aesthetics, Schmitt controversially calls for a return to the ideologically inflected hermeneutics of the Nazizeit or, at least, something like it. On the one hand, Schmitt’s decision could be seen as a continuation of his conservative political agenda; on the other hand, it could be seen to expose the hypocrisy of former collaborators who were now hiding behind professed beliefs in the autonomy of art. Despite their radically different political outlooks, Schmitt’s insistence on the link between aesthetics and politics shares a great deal with Adorno’s.6 Although Adorno will argue for the necessary resistance of the work of art to its ideological situation, he nevertheless insists on the fact that art always participates in broader social and political structures. Even when he is talking about the radical individuality of the lyric voice, Adorno argues in a text published almost contemporaneously with Hamlet or Hecuba: “that in every lyric poem the historical relationship

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of the subject to objectivity, of the individual to society, must have found its precipitate in the medium of the subjective spirit thrown back on itself.”7 Adorno sees the violence that history inflicts on the subject being reflected in the structure of the work of art. Moreover, he sees this incorporation of the “concrete historical situation” as raising the work of art from the individual to the universal: Immersion in what has taken individual form elevates the lyric poem to the status of something universal by making manifest something not distorted, not grasped, not yet subsumed. It thereby anticipates, spiritually, a situation in which no false universality, that is, nothing profoundly particular, continues to fetter what is other than itself, the human.8

As Pan concludes: “Adorno sets up two universalities against each other: . . . ​the false universality of society creates the pathos and isolation of the lyrical subject, and the genuine universality of a projected humanity creates the resistance to society that defines the autonomy of the work of art.”9 In exploring a dialectic between historical violence and aesthetic autonomy, Adorno’s and Schmitt’s analyses can both be seen to emerge from the debates of postwar criticism. Although they will give very different evaluations to these components, both are reacting to a desire to place literature beyond the realms of history and politics. While Schmitt’s discomfort with postwar literary hermeneutics remains implicit in the text, his distaste for what he calls “the entrenched views of our German cultural tradition” are manifest.10 At several points in the argument, Schmitt seeks to differentiate his reading from a “nineteenth century philosophy of art.”11 In addition to the immediate precedent of the “text-­immanent” criticism of the 1950s represented prominently by Gadamer, Schmitt saw himself overturning a much longer tradition of post-­K antian aesthetics. In arguing for the priority of history and politics, Schmitt had sought to question the Kantian and “romantic” investment in the disinterestedness of the aesthetic sphere: Philosophers of art and teachers of aesthetics tend to understand the work of art as an autonomous creation, self-­contained and unrelated to historical or sociological reality—​something to be understood only on its own terms. To relate the work of art to the actual

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politics of the time in which it was created would presumably obscure its purely aesthetic beauty and debase the intrinsic worth of artistic form. The source of the tragic then lies in the free and sovereign creative power of the poet.12

Schmitt associates this belief in the autonomy of art with the “cult of genius” that “arose during the German Sturm und Drang period of the eighteenth century . . . ​[and] has become a credo of the German philosophy of art. . . . ​The creative freedom of the writer becomes thereby a defense of artistic freedom in general and a stronghold of subjectivity.”13 Schmitt links the impulse to understand art “only on its terms” to the rise of individualism and subjectivism in the Romantic age. His critique, as Victoria Kahn argues, has a much broader dimension: “For Schmitt, this idea of the aesthetic is part and parcel of a liberal notion of culture, according to which individuals form themselves just as they artificially create the state. Historically, according to Schmitt, this liberal notion of cul­­ture has negated the autonomous realm of politics, which does not involve disinterested contemplation or moral self-­fashioning but rather an existential conflict between friend and enemy.”14 For Schmitt, aestheti­ cization is a symptom of romanticism, but it is also a symptom of the wider malaise of modernity. The turn to history constitutes for Schmitt a turning back of the clock on modernity and its particular understanding of the tragic. Schmitt’s critique of aesthetic autonomy is intrinsically linked to his exploration of the “source of the tragic.” Immediately after he asks: “Should historical arguments even be included in the consideration of the work of art?” he continues: “From where does tragedy derive the tragic action upon which it lives? What is, in a general sense—​the source of the tragic?”15 Recalling the language of freedom and constraint that permeates the idealist reading of tragedy, Schmitt first tries to understand the question of the tragic in terms of the “limits” placed on the “invention of the writer.”16 He observes that both the writer and the audience are inhibited by what he calls a common “public sphere.” The “concrete presence” of the audience creates an essential context for the play, a context that provides an intelligibility to its action. If the action of the play is met with incomprehension, it is followed by the dissolution of the public sphere that Schmitt says ends “in a mere theatrical scandal.”17 In

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this way the “public sphere places a strict limit on the creative freedom of the playwright.”18 In Schmitt’s analysis, the limit that is placed on Shakespeare’s creativity is the immediate historical situation of Hamlet’s composition. This constraint makes itself manifest through the very plot of the play. In particular, he is interested in explaining why Shakespeare’s tragedy differs from the usual revenge plot structure that one finds in Greek tragedy and Norse legend: What should a son do if he wants to avenge his murdered father but in the process comes up against his own mother, now the wife of the murderer? The opening situation contains . . . ​an ancient theme of myth, legend, and tragedy. The equally ancient answer allows for only two possibilities. A son who is caught in this way in a conflict between the duty of vengeance and the bond to the mother has, practically speaking only two routes open to him. The first route is that of Orestes in Greek legend and the tragedy of Aeschylus: the son kills the murderer as well as his own mother. The other route is followed by the Amleth of the Nordic legend that Shakespeare knew and used: the son allies himself with his mother, and together they kill the murderer.19

As Schmitt sees it, the strangeness of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is that he refuses both the routes that narrative expectation had prescribed for him. Such opacity arises from Shakespeare’s inability to commit himself to affirming either the guilt or the innocence of the queen. And Shakespeare’s inability has its roots in what Schmitt calls the “taboo of the queen.” “I can name this very concrete taboo,” insists Schmitt, “it concerns Mary Queen of Scots.” The “unseemly and suspicious haste” with which Mary Stuart married the Earl of Bothwell, the murderer of her former husband Henry Lord Darnley, father of James I, created a scandal in Elizabethan England. Writing in a period of anxiety surrounding the succession of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare was sensitive to the conflicting politics surrounding James’s accession to the throne, and the plot of Hamlet is the symptom of this ambivalence. Hamlet is mired in an indecision that mirrors the indecision of Shakespeare. He is blocked from fulfilling his destiny as an avenger by the political sensibilities that preyed on the composition of the play. The very aesthetic fabric of the

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play is marked by the intervention of a historical “reality” from which it could not escape. “A terrible historical reality shimmers through the masks and costumes of the stage play, a reality which remains untouched by any philological, philosophical, or aesthetic interpretation, however subtle it might be.”20 Schmitt’s historical explanation appears surprisingly mechanistic.21 Indeed, he commits himself to a kind of philological referentiality that is every bit as mired in the nineteenth century as the philosophy of art he critiques. There is certainly something flat-­footed about Schmitt’s confident identification of Gertrude with Mary Queen of Scotts and Hamlet with James I. Parallel approaches to Greek tragedy that sought to match fictional characters in the plays to specific political and historical figures in a one-­to-­one relationship are now rightly seen as reductive. As Victoria Kahn and others have noted, however, there is more to Schmitt’s “oddly positivistic” reading than might at first seem to be the case. Schmitt names the “powerful intrusion [Einbruch] of historical reality”22 onto the play “Hamletization.” This word describes “the transformation of the figure of the avenger into a reflective, self-­conscious melancholic.”23 Schmitt seems to suggest that the paralysis of the plot arises from the drama of succession that manifests itself, as it were, as a kind of return of the repressed. The languishing in melancholy rather than the move toward decisive revenge arises from the irruption of the “public sphere” into the realm of aesthetics. In this sense, in direct contrast to Arendt’s reading, tragedy consists in inaction rather than action.24 But while Schmitt initially seems to argue that Hamlet’s transformation comes about through the specific traumatic circumstances of James I’s succession, he later opens his analysis to a broader historical perspective. As Strathausen argues, “ultimately what ‘stands behind’ Hamlet’s melancholy is not just King James I but the monumental dawn of the entire modern era as such.”25 In making the transition from Orestes and the Norse legends to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s protagonist also marks the progress from antiquity to modernity. In other words, when Schmitt asserts that it is the “intrusion of history” that diverts Hamlet from fulfilling his identity as a classical avenger, he could equally be identifying the rupture between the ancient and the modern in Hamlet’s pathology. Schmitt writes of Hamlet that he “stands . . . ​in the middle of the schism

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of Europe.”26 More specifically, as Schmitt elaborates, he stands at the crossroads between the theological debates of the Middle Ages and the rise of the secular nation state. Hamletization in Schmitt’s scheme is a vehicle of modernization. The melancholy paralysis of modernity stands in contrast to the active vengeance of the ancient. But what is so interesting about Schmitt’s analysis is that he insistently maps this discussion of historical change onto a more abstract questioning of the role of historical processes in the creation of literary texts. In so doing he identifies three different degrees of “historical influence”:27 allusion, mirroring, and intrusion. He characterizes allusion as one-­to-­one correspondences between passages in the text and “real” historical events such as the veiled reference to a contemporary battle in a mention of the sand dunes of Ostende in Act Four of Hamlet. “Such allusions have something incidental about them; today they are for the most part only significant from a literary-­historical perspective.”28 Mirroring consists in the strong influence of a living historical character on the portrayal of a protagonist within the text. Schmitt refers to the much discussed argument that Shakespeare modeled his Hamlet on the Earl of Essex: Next to the fleeting allusions and true mirrorings, there is yet a third, highest kind of influence from the historical present. These are structurally determining, genuine intrusions [Einbrüche]. They cannot be common or ordinary, but their consequences are that much stronger and deeper.29

In describing the force of these “genuine intrusions” Schmitt recalls the discussion of the role of history and aesthetics we found in Adorno. “Historical reality is stronger than every aesthetic, stronger also than the most ingenious subject.”30 But although his formulation calls Adorno to mind, it also seems to anticipate Lacan’s conception of the real. Despite explicitly rejecting “psychologizing” readings of tragedy associated with Freud, from the reference to the taboo to his interest in melancholy to his representation of history as a repressed trauma, Schmitt’s text is replete with Freudian vocabulary and thematization. But it is perhaps the Lacanian concept of the “real” that comes closest to capturing the sense of history’s role here. “What is being described here is a limit to invention

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that is invention’s condition of possibility. This limit is the real, understood historically not psychoanalytically—​although the structuring function of the real as a material, thingly painful limit resounds across both registers.”31 What the Lacanian real opens up for Schmitt, despite himself, is a way of talking about history as a form of “facticity” that exists beyond representation and beyond the volition of any author. The psychoanalytic register also helps us make sense of the distinctive quality of Schmitt’s historicism. Schmitt contrasts the historicizing tendencies one finds in a figure like Vernant to a more radical understanding that grants history the power to actually make tragedy. In Jennifer Rust and Julia Reinhard Lupton’s phrase: “Schmitt’s emphasis on the radical intrusion of time in the play powerfully evokes modes of historicity that carry the deforming impact of trauma and taboo, and thus challenge simple contextualization without rejecting history as an appropriate frame for interpreting literature.”32 A psychoanalytic conception of history, then, that does not so much focus on uncovering objective external historical “realities” but rather draws attention to the fantasies, repressions, and distortions that mark the historical record is instructive here. In spite of Schmitt’s opposition to its methods, it is psychoanalysis that enables us to make sense of the competing historical discourses at work in his text. “It seems clear that critics’ interpretative shift from ‘reality’ to the ‘real,’   ” Strathausen writes, “is symptomatic of Schmitt’s own underhanded transition from reading Hamlet in the situational context of two concrete historical events (i.e., Mary Stuart’s marriage and James I’s reign as king) to a metaphysical reading of Hamlet as a timeless tragedy marked by the absent presence of the real.”33 What seems at first to be a rather crude historical reading of Hamlet turns out to have more to offer than it first appears. This reading would fall short of the more differentiated analysis of the interaction between the aesthetic and the historical sphere that Schmitt delineates in the text at large. But the shift in understanding from what Strathausen calls “concrete historical events” to “the absent presence of the real” is, in fact, constitutive of his understanding of tragedy. Indeed, Schmitt’s definition of the tragic and his distinction between tragedy and Trauerspiel are constructed around his understanding of these different historical modes. Schmitt discusses the difficulties he has in approaching this question and, in particular, highlights “the broadly prevailing philosophy of art

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and aesthetics”34 that he later characterizes as the “entrenched views of our German cultural tradition.”35 This (post-­K antian) tradition had celebrated the autonomy of art, in general, and had, in particular, located “the source of the tragic . . . ​in the free and sovereign creative power of the poet.”36 Schmitt starts by making a generic distinction between “lyric” and “drama.” German aesthetics have been ensorcelled by lyric subjectivity and have failed to understand the distinctive qualities of dramatic art: “But the freedom to create, which provides the lyric poet with such free play vis-­à-­v is reality, cannot be conferred upon other types and forms of literary creation.”37 Drama, Schmitt argues, through the important limiting role of the audience, grounds the literary production in a concrete historical situation. This is not to argue that theatre does not have its own freedom: “Theatre itself” after all “is essentially play.”38 But this is where Schmitt introduces a crucial distinction: “It is . . . ​necessary to distinguish between Trauerspiel and tragedy to separate them so that the specific quality of the tragic is not lost and the seriousness of a genuine tragedy does not disappear.”39 Schmitt’s discussion of the Trauerspiel leads into a detailed analysis of the concept of Spiel and its antithetical relationship to tragedy: “The tragic ends where play begins, even when this play is tearful—​a melancholy play for melancholy spectators and a deeply moving Trauerspiel. It is with Shakespeare’s Trauerspiel, whose ‘play’ character also appears in the so-­called ‘tragedies,’ that we can least afford to ignore the unplayablity (Unverspielbarkeit) of the tragic.”40 What does Schmitt mean by “the unplayability of the tragic”? He explains his argument through an analysis of the “play within the play” in Act Three of Hamlet. In this connection he quotes Hamlet’s conversation with the actors in Act Two, a conversation that gives Schmitt the title to his essay: Why these Players here draw water from eyes: For Hecuba! Why what is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? What would he do and if he had my losse? His father murdered, and a Crowne bereft him.41

In answering the question of why Hamlet does not weep for Hecuba, Schmitt uncovers the distinctiveness of tragic action and the true importance of the “the intrusion of time into the play.” Schmitt observes that by realizing that, unlike other actors, he is not able to weep for Hecuba,

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Hamlet is led to recognize the necessity of fulfilling his own vow of vengeance. For Schmitt, Hamlet’s inability to weep for Hecuba is programmatic for our own experience of watching the play: It is inconceivable that Shakespeare intended no more than to make his Hamlet into a Hecuba, that we are meant to weep for Hamlet as the actor wept for the Trojan queen. We would, however, in point of fact, weep for Hamlet as for Hecuba if we wished to divorce the reality of our present existence from the play on the stage. Our tears would become the tears of actors. We would no longer have any purpose or cause and would have sacrificed both to the aesthetic enjoyment of the play.42

To weep for Hamlet would be to sacrifice an understanding of the play’s contemporary resonance to a mere aesthetic experience. Schmitt uncovers in the sentimental reaction to Hamlet’s fate the ideology of aesthetic autonomy. A real historical reality prevents the audience from seeing Hamlet’s predicament as Spiel: Only a strong core of reality could stand up to the double exposure of the stage upon the stage. It is possible to have a play within a play, but not a tragedy within a tragedy. The play within the play in Act Three of Hamlet is thus a consummate test of the hypothesis that a core of historical actuality and presence—​the murder of the father of Hamlet-­James and the marriage of his mother to the murderer—​ has the power to intensify the play as a play without destroying the sense of the tragic.43

The metatheatrical device of the play within the play, rather than collapsing the realms of reality and fiction, actually reinforces the distinction. It is because Hamlet refuses to allow his story to descend into Trauerspiel that he reaffirms its identity as a tragedy. The disjunction between the actor’s reaction to the melodrama of Hecuba and the audience’s response to the tragedy of Hamlet confirms Schmitt’s association of tragedy with a “core of historical reality.” In associating Hecuba with Trauerspiel and Hamlet with tragedy, Schmitt reverses the expected chronology. Hecuba (cited, not performed straight but reperformed in Hamlet) is made to stand in for the debased mourning play of modernity while it is Hamlet who is accorded the antique grandeur of tragedy. This is all the

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more paradoxical because it is precisely by locating Hamlet in its very specific context of post-­Elizabethan England that Schmitt elevates Hamlet’s fate to that of a tragic hero. Rather than eliding the specificity of ancient and modern, fifth-­century Athens and sixteenth-­century England, Schmitt’s definition of tragedy is predicated on a razor-­sharp historical sensibility. Where German idealism had, to some extent, made the modern condition appear tragic by virtue of its continuity with antiquity, Hamlet’s tragic identity results from his distinctively early-­seventeenth-­century dilemma that is distinct from antiquity but not unaware of it, as the Hecuba play shows. Schmitt’s attempt to understand Hamlet’s deviation from the narrative form of the revenge tragedy is predicated on associating the Shakespearean play with a uniquely modern predicament. “Hamletization” is a symptom of modernity. That Hamlet is Hamlet and not Orestes depends on a historical caesura that divides the ancient from the modern. For Schmitt, Hamlet is both indelibly modern and incontrovertibly tragic. And yet Schmitt seems simultaneously to argue for the incompatibility of the tragic and the modern. As Katrin Trüstedt writes: “Schmitt criticizes the lack of seriousness that characterizes the political order of modernity and argues for some type of a re-­constitution of the original framework, he devalues the sphere of pure play, of a merely playful theatre that has lost its sense of the tragic and the real.”44 Here, as elsewhere, Schmitt is mapping a generic distinction onto a political one. “Hamletization” in Schmitt’s lexicon has at least a double meaning. It expresses both the turn to introspective melancholy associated with a certain political impotence and the progression toward a vision of the autonomy of art. In order to understand the nexus of ideas that link tragedy and history, Trauerspiel and modernity, it is necessary to bring Schmitt into dialogue with Walter Benjamin. Schmitt includes an appendix to Hamlet or Hecuba that directly addresses his relationship to Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama. His debt to Benjamin is already evident from the distinction between tragedy and Trauerspiel that he employs throughout the essay. Benjamin had constructed his analysis of Baroque German theatre around a distinction between Trauerspiel and the classical model of Greek tragedy. He opens his discussion in the chapter “Trauerspiel and Tragedy” with the affirmation: “The history of

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modern German drama has known no period in which the themes of the ancient tragedians have been less influential.”45 After discounting the relevance of Aristotle’s Poetics for understanding the preoccupations of the Trauerspiel, Benjamin turns to the very question of history that so preoccupies Schmitt: “Historical life, as it was conceived at that time, is its [Trauerspiel’s] content, its true object. In this it is different from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not history, but myth, and the tragic structure of the dramatis personae does not derive from rank—​the absolute monarchy—​but from the pre-­historic epoch of their existence—​ the past age of heroes.”46 Benjamin’s distinction between tragedy and Trauerspiel, like Schmitt’s, revolves around the question of the historical content of the drama. But where Schmitt sees “historical life” as the distinguishing mark of tragedy, Benjamin identifies it as the defining characteristic only of Trauerspiel and as a mark of its degraded aesthetic status. Despite coming to divergent conclusions about the respective properties of Trauerspiel and tragedy, Schmitt and Benjamin are motivated by a common suspicion of contemporary aesthetics. Like Schmitt, Benjamin frames his discussion through a critical engagement with the nineteenth­century “philosophy of the tragic”: The philosophy of tragedy has been developed as a theory of the moral order of the world, without any reference to historical content, in a system of generalized sentiments, which, it is thought, was logically supported by the concepts “guilt” and “atonement.” For the sake of the naturalist drama, this world-­order was, with astonishing naivety, approximated to the process of natural causation in the theories of the philosophical and literary epigones of the second half of the nineteenth century and the tragic fate thereby became a condition “which is expressed in the interaction of the individual with the naturally ordered environment.”47

For Benjamin the philosophy of tragedy developed within German idealism was a “thoroughly vain attempt to present the tragic as something universally human.”48 Representing tragedy as a fully historicized phenomenon that exceeds the grasp of modernity, Benjamin affirms, “Nothing is in fact more questionable than the competence of the unguided feelings of ‘modern men,’ especially where the judgment of

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tragedy is concerned.” For Benjamin it is a “simple fact that the mod­ ­ern theatre has nothing to show which remotely resembles the tragedy of the Greeks.”49 In this vein Benjamin sees Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as the cul­­mination of a misguided attempt to understand tragedy outside the “philosophy of history.” Benjamin, like Schmitt, links this erasure of history to a championing of aestheticism: “For Nietzsche . . . ​the tragic myth is a purely aesthetic creation, and the interplay of Apollinian and Dionysian energy remains equally confined to the aesthetic sphere. . . . ​Nietzsche’s renunciation of any understanding of the tragic myth in historico-­philosophical terms is a high price to pay for his emancipation from the stereotype of a morality in which the tragic occurrence was usually clothed.”50 Nietzsche may have turned his back on one universalizing reading that had associated tragedy with a transhistorical conception of morality, but his vision of tragedy as a “purely aesthetic creation” opens onto a new abyss: The abyss of aestheticism opens up, and this brilliant intuition was finally to see all its concepts disappear into it, so that the gods and heroes, defiance and suffering, the pillars of the tragic edifice, fall away into nothing. Where art so firmly occupies the centre of existence as to make man one of its manifestations instead of recognizing him above all as its basis, . . . ​then all sane reflection is at an end. . . . ​For what does it matter whether it is the will to life or the will to destroy life which is supposed to inspire every work of art, since the latter, as a product of the absolute will, devalues itself along with the world? The nihilism lodged deep in the depths of the artistic philosophy of Bayreuth nullifies—​it could do no other—​the concept of the hard, historical actuality of Greek tragedy.51

Benjamin holds up the “hard historical actuality of Greek tragedy” as a refutation of Nietzsche’s affirmation in The Birth of Tragedy that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.”52 Nietzsche’s and Wagner’s aesthetic nihilism are contrasted to the “historico-­philosophical” understanding of tragedy we find in ­Benjamin. It is notable that, in his engagement with Nietzsche, Benjamin appears to collapse the distinction between Trauerspiel and tragedy that is ostensibly at the basis of his argument. Benjamin’s dialogue with ­Nietzsche, as we saw, emerges from his broader critique of the “tragic

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theories of the epigones,” which Nietzsche saw himself turning his back on. But as Benjamin reveals, Nietzsche never refutes their approach to tragedy—​his aestheticism is merely the culmination of a tradition that had understood tragedy as an abstract idea and a human universal. Rather than insisting on the earlier distinction between the mythic content of tragedy and the historical content of Trauerspiel, in his repudiation of aestheticism, Benjamin presents both tragedy and Trauerspiel as manifestations of a “hard historical actuality.” Myth plays an interesting role in this politics of tragedy. Benjamin argues that “for Nietzsche, . . . ​the tragic myth is a purely aesthetic creation” and is thus associated by Benjamin with the Nietzschean aesthetic abyss. Schmitt, on the other hand, has a different understanding of the relationship between the mythic and the tragic. So he writes: In spite of Nietzsche’s famous formulation that the birth of tragedy arises out of the spirit of music, it is perfectly clear that music can­ ­not be that which we designate here as the source of tragic action. In another equally famous formulation, Wilamowitz-­Moellendorff defines Attic tragedy as a piece of myth or heroic legend. He insists that the origin of tragedy in myth must be consciously incorporated into the definition of tragedy; myth thus becomes the source of the tragic.53

But while Benjamin sees myth as the antithesis to history, Schmitt has a more complex configuration in mind. Despite his previous claims that it is history rather than myth that is at the core of tragic action, he goes on to exonerate Wilamowitz’s perspective: Nevertheless, the definition remains correct because it perceives myth as part of heroic legend, which is not only a literary source for the writer but living knowledge shared by the writer and his public—​a piece of historical reality to which all participants are bound by their historical existence. Attic tragedy is thus no self-­ contained play. An element of reality flows into the performance from the spectators’ actual knowledge of the myth. Tragic figures like Orestes, Oedipus, and Hercules are not imaginary but actually exist as figures from a living myth that are introduced into tragedy from an eternal present.54

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In Schmitt’s recasting, myth does not stand opposed to history but rather represents a shared knowledge that is comparable to the common experience of historical actuality. In other words, within the context of Greek tragedy, the mythic worlds of Orestes, Oedipus, and Hercules have the same uncompromising reality for the spectators as the predicament of James I has to Shakespeare’s audience. “The core of historical reality,” he writes, is not invented, cannot be invented, and must be respected as given. It enters into tragedy in two ways, and there are thus two sources of tragic action: one is the myth of classical tragedy, which mediates tragic action; the other, as in Hamlet, is the immediately available historical reality that encompasses the playwright, the actors, and the audience. While ancient tragedy is simply faced with myth and creates the tragic action from it, in the case of Hamlet we encounter the rare (but typically modern) case of a playwright who establishes a myth from the historical reality that he immediately faces.55

In his contrast between ancient and modern tragedy, Schmitt sees myth as a form of intensification of history. Shakespeare’s achievement was to give mere history the reality of myth. Both myth and history are opposed by Schmitt to aestheticism; they both resist what he sees as mere play. They are what he calls “the unalterable reality” that he sees as “the mute rock upon which the play founders, sending the foam of genuine tragedy rushing to the surface.”56 Rather than seeing Shakespeare’s historical content as being at odds with the mythic content of Greek tragedy, Schmitt shows us what they have in common. Indeed, it is by understanding the true function of myth within Attic tragedy that Shakespeare was able to make Hamlet into a real tragedy. So Schmitt concludes: His success in grasping the core of a tragedy and achieving myth was the reward for that reserve and respect that honored the taboo and transformed the figure of an avenger into Hamlet. Thus, the myth of Hamlet was born. A Trauerspiel rose to the level of tragedy and was able to convey in this form the living reality of a mythical figure to future ages and generations.57

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Where the ancient tragedians may have translated myth into history, Shakespeare, according to Schmitt, translated history into myth. In posing the question “Hamlet or Hecuba?” Schmitt in the end does not ask us to choose between myth or history, antiquity or modernity; he rather shows us how the one can always be implicated in the other. Despite their divergent understandings of myth, Schmitt and Benjamin are united in their suspicion of aestheticism and their attention to the historical core of both ancient and modern theatrical traditions. Nevertheless, the diametrically opposed characteristics they respectively attribute to tragedy and Trauerspiel reveal a profound difference in outlook. As Trüstedt argues: “Whereas for Benjamin Hamlet is a Trauerspiel, Schmitt claims Hamlet as a modern tragedy that manages to hold fast to the past order represented in and incorporated into this drama. At the foundation of the opposition between Hamlet as Trauerspiel and Hamlet as tragedy, as a play of indecision or as a transposition of tragic action, lie diverging ideas on the nature of the modern turn.”58 This divergence comes to the fore in their respective discussions of the notion of Spiel. As we saw above, Schmitt’s conception of “play” is inextricably linked to his valuation of modernity. It is part and parcel of the turn to aestheticism that he deplores. The realm of pure play that he associates with Hecuba is the negative exemplum that Schmitt holds up in order to highlight the authen­ ­ticity of the tragic. In Benjamin, by contrast, Spiel in its association with modernity is redeemed in its contrast to the mythic austerity of classical tragedy. Spiel may be a characteristic of modernity, but ­Benjamin does not characterize it as pathological. Benjamin rather celebrates the theatricality of the modern condition and opposes it to the “silent” reticence of classical tragedy: “And in the European Trauerspiel as a whole the stage is not strictly fixable, not an actual place, but it too is dialectically split. Bound to the court, it yet remains a travelling theatre; metaphorically its boards represent the earth as the setting created for the enactment of history.”59 The erosion of the boundaries between the court and the stage, the theatre and its historical setting, is the crowning achievement for Benjamin of European Trauerspiel. As Trüstedt phrases it: “For Schmitt, Hamlet demonstrates the way in which the element of ‘pure play’ (reines Spiel) of modern Trauerspiel is interrupted and disturbed by the tragic core of the real: historical time. Whereas for Benjamin modernity is

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exemplified by the form of Trauerspiel, Schmitt insists that Hamlet remains (or renews) tragedy. One must not confuse Trauerspiel and tragedy, as Schmitt explicitly emphasizes, ‘so that the seriousness of a genuine tragedy does not disappear.’   ”60 The question of the relationship of history to tragedy has an important political dimension for both Schmitt and Benjamin. While both reject the turn to aestheticism that we witness in idealism and in Nietszche’s and Heidegger’s readings of tragedy, they do so for opposing ideological reasons. For Schmitt the notion of Spiel encapsulates the inauthenticity of modernity. For Benjamin, on the other hand, the Trauerspiel represents an attempt in modernity to tie the work of art to its historical and material situation. Schmitt yearns to return to an age of the sovereign state while Benjamin celebrates the inauthenticity of the Trauerspiel as a root to understanding contemporary alienation. Benjamin’s book published in 1928 and Schmitt’s essay written in 1956 frame the historical period of the rise and the defeat of Nazism. Benjamin’s proto-­Marxist and Schmitt’s post-­fascistic readings are both testimony to the intensity of the debate about the relationship between the historical and the aesthetic spheres during this period. For very different reasons and with starkly divergent consequences, both place tragedy at the heart of this exploration. It is the contemporary historical situation that led Benjamin and Schmitt to question the possibility and the potential of the existence of tragedy in modernity.

Enigma of the Ownmost: Hölderlin’s “Modern” Tragedy In formulating the question “Hamlet or Hecuba?” Schmitt highlights the difficulty of reconciling tragedy and modernity. Hölderlin had posed a similar question a century earlier. The poet and philosopher had spent many of his most productive years attempting and eventually failing to complete his own tragedy, The Death of Empedocles. Hölderlin explicitly conceptualized this enterprise as an exploration of the possibility of writing a tragedy in modern times. This was a topic that he elaborated not just in his dramatic writing but also in the novel Hyperion, in several theoretical essays on tragedy, and in his translations of Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone. Developed across these different media,

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Hölderlin’s thinking about tragedy is wide-­ranging and complex. Nevertheless, history repeatedly returns as a fundamental concern of Hölderlin’s engagement with the tragic. In particular, like Schmitt and Benjamin, Hölderlin reveals how the form of tragedy and its generic characteristics are inextricably bound up with history: The venerable tragic form has been debased into a means of providing the odd occasion for saying something flashy or tender. But what headway could they expect to make with it if they did not choose the subject-­matter it was intended for and coupled with which alone it maintained its life and sense? It had died, like all other forms when they have lost the living soul for which they served as the organic frame and out of which they were originally bodied forth, like, for example, the republican form in our Free Cities, which is now dead and meaningless, because the people are not such that they need it, to put it mildly.61

The form of tragedy is linked to its historical realization. Like a set of limbs that has lost its animating soul, it has become dead and senseless when deprived of its original historical animation. The analogy that Hölderlin uses is arresting. For the organic body soon becomes a metaphor for the body politic. Hölderlin equates the form of tragedy to the republican form of government. A state that has lost its thirst for republican ideals seems simultaneously to no longer have need for tragedy. Republican ideals, Hölderlin suggests, are intrinsically linked to the aesthetic form of tragedy. It is only in a historical context where republicanism can thrive that tragedy can be raised from its state of lifelessness. Hölderlin seems to assert simultaneously that it was a republican government that gave tragedy its original animating force and that a recreation of a republican polity would be the precondition for the revival of tragedy within modernity. Just as Nazism plays a crucial role in the reevaluation of tragedy for Schmitt, so the French Revolution—​and its shortcomings—​ would shape the tragic thinking of Hölderlin, of Schelling, and of Hegel. Hölderlin asks, “How can tragedy be written in an era in which the prerequisites for tragedy are missing?”62 Behind this question lies a ­preoccupation that is at the heart of modern philhellenism. Lacoue-­ Labarthe argues that Hölderlin’s tragic thought can be seen as a reaction

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to Winckelmann’s earlier aesthetic immersion in the Greeks. In proclaiming “the only way we can become great, and, if this possible, inimitable, is by imitating the Ancients,”63 Winckelmann had made the imitation of Greek art a key aspiration of modernity. And yet, in its paradoxical phrasing, Winckelmann’s proclamation also intimates the necessary frustrations involved in such an enterprise. So David Ferris writes: “Winckelmann, in stating that modernity must imitate if it is to become great, establishes Greece as the future possibility of history. But, what this modernity strives for in the name of Greece is less a return to antiquity than the inimitability through which the relation of antiquity to the modern is defined as a gap that may never be bridged. Modernity, in effect, seeks to affirm the necessity of its existence, and this necessity is discovered in the impossible example of Greece.”64 The “psychosis” that Winckelmann introduces into the German relationship to Greece has its legacy in Hölderlin’s tragic thought. But although Hölderlin’s attempts to produce his own tragedy can be seen as a response to ­Winckelmann’s exhortation to imitate the Greeks, an important political, aesthetic, and metaphysical chasm separates Hölderlin’s vision from that of Winckelmann—​a chasm that reflects a new sense of history. Writing in the wake of Kant, Schiller, and the French Revolution, there was for Hölderlin a greater sense of the singular identity of modernity. This can be paralleled in Hölderlin’s own writing—​while he had been engaged in the project of producing his own tragedy, Empedocles, tragedy appeared to him as a static genre with a universal application. But in Hölderlin’s later writing, the ancient and the modern come to take on ever more distinctive characteristics. The letter that Hölderlin wrote to his friend Böhlendorff in 1801 on the eve of his departure for France is at once one of the most eloquent and one of the most opaque formulations of this growing sense of historical consciousness: Nothing is harder for us to learn than to freely use the national (das Nationelle). And it is our belief that the clarity of exposition is originally as natural to us as heavenly fire is for the Greeks. For precisely that reason the Greeks are more likely to be surpassed in fine passion, which is what you have managed to keep, than in the presence of spirit and faculty for exposition we find in Homer.65

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The letter confounds the historical with the geographical, the aesthetic with the political, the personal with the collective. The notion of the “national” that Hölderlin elaborates in the letter is as enigmatic as it is striking. By choosing to use the term “nationelle,” Hölderlin deliberately eschews the more current term “national,” which had taken on a specific political valence in the wake of the French Revolution. As Schmidt phrases it: “With the word ‘national’ Hölderlin should not be understood as asking about ‘nationhood’ or ‘nationality’ in the common sense of those words, but as speaking . . . ​about nature of belonging and about that to which one rightly belongs.”66 The “nationelle” is therefore not equatable with a political entity or even a geographical space. The fact that Hölderlin would write this letter as he was leaving Germany for France inevitably lends the term a particular significance. In seeking to avoid its association with any specific nation or historical period, the “national” is what Hölderlin will elsewhere obliquely call “Hesperia.” The national is what differentiates “our” identity from that of the Greeks. It names the “clarity of presentation” that stands in opposition to the Greek “fire from heaven.” It sounds paradoxical. But I put it to you again, for you to verify and make use of as you wish: in the process of civilization what we are actually born with, the national (nationelle), will always become less and less of an advantage. For that reason the Greeks are not so much masters of sacred pathos, because it was native to them; on the other hand they are exceptional in their faculty for exposition, from Homer onwards, because this extraordinary man had the feeling necessary to capture the Junonian sobriety of the occident for his Apollonian realm, and so truly appropriate the foreign.67

Hölderlin sees in the over-­privileging of the “national” an impediment to the progress of culture. This is paradoxical because you would expect the best art to emerge from giving full expression to innate ability. The Greeks, in Hölderlin’s account, are “natively mystical.”68 But although they have an innate capacity for “sacred pathos” their excellence comes from their ability to transcend this natural affinity. “Beneath the measure and virtuosity, the skill of Greek art, Hölderlin sees a primitive Greece, prey to the divine and the world of the dead, subject to Dionysian ­effusion

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or the Apollonian fulguration (he does not distinguish between them)—​ a Greece that is enthusiastic and somber, dark, from being too brilliant and solar. An Oriental Greece, if you will.”69 Homer’s presentation of Greece may strike us with its “Junonian sobriety,” but what lies beneath it is altogether darker and more troubling. The skill of Homer was to be able to “appropriate the foreign”—​his brilliance comes from the confrontation in his work between the Hesperian “clarity of presentation” and the “Oriental” content. The Greeks’ greatest gift lies in their ability to achieve a “counter-­natural accomplishment.”70 That is also why it is so dangerous to derive our aesthetic rules from the sole source of Greek excellence. I have laboured at this for a long time and now know that apart from what must be the supreme thing with the Greeks and with us, that is, living craft and proportion, we cannot have anything in common with them. But what is our own has to be learnt just as much as what is foreign. For this reason the Greeks are indispensable to us. Only it is precisely in what is proper to us, in the national, that we shall never match them because, as I said, the free use of what is our own is the hardest. As it seems to me that your good genius has prompted you to give the dramatic form a more epic treatment. Taken as a whole, it is a genuine modern tragedy. For that is tragic with us, to go away from the kingdom of the living in total silence packed up in a container, not to pay for the flames we have been unable to control by being consumed by fire.71

The Greeks provide a problematic model because of their startling ability to domesticate the foreign and foreignize the domestic. Their specific excellence is in this sense inimitable. Where Winckelmann had made the mimetic gesture central to the relationship between antiquity and modernity, Hölderlin highlights the danger of aspiring to imitation. At one level, Hölderlin merely restates and radicalizes Winckelmann’s intuition about the ultimate impossibility of mimesis. For Winckelmann, as we saw above, the gulf that separates us from the ancients exposes the desire for imitation as a vain fantasy. Thus, Hölderlin will also draw attention to the vanity of seeking out “resemblances” with the Greeks. But the reason why Hölderlin’s Greeks remain beyond imitation differs. Hölderlin’s Greeks are inimitable because at one level the essence of

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Greekness is itself fantasmatic. The Greekness of Greek art is predicated on its ability to incorporate the “foreign” into the “national.” The identity of Greek art is an expression of its lack of identity. The problem for modernity is that because it lacks a destiny, because it lacks a sense of the “national,” its imitation of the Greeks has become a shortcut to an understanding of the “ownmost.” In the absence of an authentic sense of the modern, the reference to the Greeks has become “inevitable.” But it is not just that modern artists have attempted in a general way to reproduce the ancient; it is also that the aspiration to reproduce the ancient has flattened out the internal complexity of the Greek sense of destiny. Hölderlin is therefore not merely saying that modern art is impossible if we are unable to liberate ourselves from the ancient; he is making a specific argument about the kind of Greece that modernity has created in order to encourage such mimicry. In the place of Winckelmann’s Greeks, whose very confidence in their own identity made them the source of emulation, Hölderlin’s Greeks confront “the enigma of the impossible approximation of the proper.”72 This is where Hölderlin’s more general comments about Greek art turn more directly to the question of tragedy. He draws attention to the specific predicament of Böhlendorff’s protagonist in his drama Fernando. Unlike Hölderlin’s Empedocles, whose tragic destiny seeks to reproduce the suffering of an ancient tragic counterpart, Böhlendorff places his title character in a more authentically modern predicament. Fernando’s tragedy is to remain quietly imprisoned at the time of his loved one’s death; Empedocles is to be consumed by the flames that he cannot bring under his control. The domesticity, indeed the mundanity of the modern protagonist’s fate could not contrast more strongly with the “sacred pathos” of the ancients. Böhlendorff’s drama exemplifies the very essence of “Junonian sobriety.” It is in this respect that it can come to represent for Hölderlin “im Ganzen, eine ächte moderne Tragödie” (“Taken as a whole, it is a genuine modern tragedy”). The letter thus marks a shift in Hölderlin’s thinking. Where the The Death of Empedocles had been predicated on the ability of “the tragic” to transcend historical distance, the letter sees tragedy as a phenomenon bound by its own temporality. Böhlendorff shows us how there can be a “tragic for us” that remains distinct from the tragic as a transhistorical experience:

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And yet it is true! The former moves the innermost soul as well as the latter. It might not be so imposing, but it is a deeper destiny, and it is a noble soul that guides such a mortal through fear and compassion and that keeps the spirit up in the midst of wrath. The wonderful Jupiter is after all the final thought of a mortal who is dying, whether he dies according to our destiny or according to the destiny of antiquity.73

Modern tragedy may not have the grandeur of its ancient counterpart, but it still has the ability to move its spectators. What it loses in its stature it makes up for in its exposition of a “deeper destiny.” The benefit of discovering the distinctive quality of “modern tragedy” is the possibility of eliciting an unmediated confrontation with the “ownmost.” The encounter with the national may ultimately confront modernity with its own poverty, but this encounter is nevertheless beneficial. It forms an essential part of the process of “freely using the national.” Yet it is striking that Hölderlin does not deny ancient tragedy the ability to move “the innermost soul” of modern man. In final analysis, it is ancient tragedy that still provides the prototype for the modern. In fact, far from demonstrating the irreconcilability between ancient and modern, Hölderlin concludes his analysis of tragedy with a reminder of their commonality: Jupiter remains the final thought of ancient and modern man. For Hölderlin, as much as for Winckelmann, the ancient, for all its singularity, remains the marker of the universal. The ancient God remains the symbol of the destiny that transcends historical consciousness. It is this dialectic between singularity and universality, between the national and the foreign, the ancient and the modern, that comes to characterize Hölderlin’s thinking on tragedy. The search for this dialectic encourages him to put aside the project of producing his own tragedy and to turn his attention to translating Sophocles. As Lacoue-­L abarthe argues: “The point where things will begin to shift—​a new understanding of the Greeks making its appearance, an entirely different thought of ­history emerging—​is the moment when Hölderlin, persisting with his project to write a ‘modern tragedy,’ will conclude from the failure of his Empedocles that it is necessary, or that there remains, to translate Sophocles. The point where things will begin to shift, consequently, is when Hölderlin takes on, with one and the same gesture, the ­problematic

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of the theatre (is tragedy still possible?) and the test of translation (do the Greeks still speak to us, can we make them speak?).”74 It is in the act of translation that Hölderlin’s shifting sense of history is given its most complex and satisfying articulation. The translations are a practical counterpart to the theory of history expounded in this letter. To translate Sophocles is at once to lose oneself in the foreign and to map a route back to the national. As Billings describes, Hölderlin’s translations allow him to discover “the Vaterländische through the other.”75 For Hölderlin, tragedy’s “timeliness resides in its untimeliness.”76 It is because ancient tragedy remains foreign to modernity that it can make one understand something about the distinctiveness of the modern predicament and in so doing inspire modernity to grasp its own destiny. Like Schmitt, Hölderlin sees that the ability of tragedy to talk to modernity is bound up with its historicity. The intrusion of history into Shakespeare’s play is identified by Schmitt as the source of its elevation to true tragedy. In Schmitt’s eyes, it is this essential relationship to the historical that enables Hamlet to rise above melodrama and to achieve tragedy. Although Schmitt considers Shakespeare’s play to have the necessary his­­ torical grounding to produce a genuine tragic effect, he worries that moder­ ­nity is only capable of producing Trauerspiel. The aesthetic and political conditions place authentic tragedy beyond the grasp of modernity. Ironically, though they share an investment in the historicity of tragedy, Hölderlin’s reading of tragedy would be a manifestation of the turn to liberalism and aestheticism that Schmitt would deplore. Hölderlin’s Empedocles no doubt represents the very Romantic sensibility that turned tragedy into Trauerspiel against which Schmitt reacts. It might, however, be possible to detect an anticipation of Schmitt’s position in Hölderlin’s own thoughts about the failure of his Empedocles. Hölderlin appears to worry that he is merely ventriloquizing an ancient protagonist who remains detached from the historical situation that would give his tragedy its grounding. Empedocles, in Schmitt’s terms, would be the Hecuba to ­Fernando’s Hamlet. Neither Schmitt nor Hölderlin in a sense deny the possibility of tragedy in modernity. For Schmitt, Hamlet represents an “authentic modern tragedy,” just as Hölderlin maintains Böhelendorff’s Fernando had done. What Schmitt labels Spiel, Hölderlin might have called inauthentic mimesis, for both the problems lie in divorcing the

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a­ esthetic form from historical and political actuality. Of course, Hölderlin and Schmitt have very different configurations of the political in mind. Where Schmitt is nostalgic for the sovereign state, Hölderlin sees the Republic as the prerequisite for the reanimation of tragedy. Where for Hölderlin the French Revolution represented the opportunity for the revival of tragedy, for Schmitt it sounded its death knell. Nevertheless, neither Schmitt nor Hölderlin sees the possibility of modern tragedy as tied to a simple question of chronology. Neither simply believes, as George Steiner does, that where tragedy thrived in antiquity it remains anathema to the (more) modern era. That is why Hamlet is more tragic for Schmitt than Hecuba is. History, rather, plays a more convoluted role in their arguments. In their respective answers to the question “Hamlet or Hecuba?/Fernando or Empedocles?” both place tragedy at the heart of a complex dialectic between timeliness and untimeliness.

Tragedy and the Movement of History: Hegel Perhaps more than any other modern philosopher, Hegel has put the question of history at the heart of his philosophy. As we saw in the previous chapter, tragedy will play a key role in articulating the mutual implication of his historical and metaphysical preoccupations. In confronting the relationship between history and tragedy, Hegel is not concerned with the possibility of writing tragedy in modernity but rather with understanding how tragedy defined the stakes of the ethical at a significant moment in the development of Spirit. In this way, Hegel differs from Hölderlin in consigning the ethical lesson of tragedy to antiquity. Nevertheless, Hegel’s investment in the historical dimension of tragedy remains in tension with more transhistorical questions. Tragedy does not just feature as the content of history but instead becomes a metaphor for the historical process as such. This dual focus is already present in Hegel’s earliest mention of tragedy in the “The Spirit of Christianity,” which we encountered in the previous chapter: The great tragedy of the Jewish people is no Greek tragedy; it can rouse neither terror nor pity, for both of these arise only out of the

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fate which follows from the inevitable slip of a beautiful character; it can arouse horror alone. The fate of the Jewish people is the fate of Macbeth who stepped out of nature itself, clung to alien Beings, and so in their service had to trample and slay everything holy in human nature, had at last to be forsaken by his gods (since these were objects and he their slave) and be dashed to pieces on his faith itself.77

This passage concludes “The Spirit of Judaism,” the first section of Hegel’s essay. It acts as the summation to the narrative of the history of the Jewish people that had started with Noah and the flood, proceeded through Abraham’s exile, and concluded with the establishment of Mosaic legislation. Hegel turns to tragedy to understand the philosophical lesson that emerges from the historical experience of the Jews. As Hayden White argues, tragedy here functions as metahistory.78 Just as it would later in Marx’s and Arendt’s writings, tragedy’s narrative form provides an emplotment to seemingly discrete historical incidents, weaving them together into a philosophically intelligible story with a normative point. Hegel seems to be suggesting that although the fate of the Jews may resemble the form of a Greek tragedy, any resemblance is only superficial. To react to this account of Jewish history as if it were a tragedy would be to accord it a greater metaphysical significance than it deserves. No spectator of Jewish misfortune has earned his or her catharsis. Real tragedy requires beauty, which is an attribute that Hegel has spent the previous twenty pages emphatically denying the Jews. Because of their aesthetic and moral failings, tragedy provides the wrong generic lens through which to view the history of the Jewish people.79 But while the specific features of Jews make tragedy an inappropriate model for understanding their history, its force as a model for understanding historical processes more generally is not reduced. In “The Spirit of Judaism,” Hegel, for the most part, confined his discussion of the Jews to their historical circumstances. Toward the end of the section, however, he gestures toward more contemporary preoccupations: The subsequent circumstances of the Jewish people up to the mean, abject, wretched circumstances in which they still are today, have all of them been simply consequences and elaborations of their original fate. By this fate—​an infinite power which they set over against

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themselves and could never conquer—​they have been maltreated and will be continually maltreated until they appease it by the spirit of beauty and so annul it by reconciliation.80

Hegel’s essay was written in 1797, not long after the French Revolutionaries he admired had granted full civil rights to Jews. In describing the contemporary conditions of the Jews, Hegel shares in a wider public discussion about an issue of social justice. In contrast to the French Revolutionaries and other contemporary writers such as Lessing, Hegel would emphasize the self-­imposed destitution of the Jews. Like these others he shines a spotlight on to the wretched conditions in which the Jews lived, but Hegel will attribute these conditions not to external factors but to the logic of their own “fate.” Much later in the Philosophy of Right (1821), in the only place where Hegel would explicitly discuss the question of Jewish rights, he would present himself as a (guarded) advocate of Jewish emancipation.81 In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel limits himself to a discussion of contemporary Jews and makes no attempt to link this to his historical analysis of Judaism. Scholars have pondered the gulf that separates Hegel’s denunciation of historical Judaism from his (relatively) liberal position on the question of Jewish emancipation. The arresting element of “The Spirit of Christianity” passage is the awkward transition it marks between religious history and contemporary social commentary. But from our perspective what is most striking about this passage is its vocabulary. Hegel not only anticipates the vocabulary of his concluding remarks in “The Spirit of Judaism” but seems in a much more general way also to anticipate the lexicon of his whole philosophy of the tragic. What Hegel sets forth here is the intimate connection between tragedy and fate, Tragödie and Schicksal. Tragedy becomes the philosophical super­­ structure of “fate.”82 It is the armature that turns mere history into fate. But Hegel intimates here what he later confirms: The Jews’ fate cannot be understood with reference to tragedy. That is, even if fate is part of the apparatus of tragedy, not all fate is tragic. What the Jews lack is the “spirit of beauty” that would negate the horror of their fate and lead it on a path to reconciliation—​Versöhnung. But while it is their lack of beauty that here as elsewhere Hegel emphasizes, it is ultimately their misunderstanding of the concept of fate as such that will result in the denial of

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tragedy to the Jews. As the later reference to Macbeth makes clear, what stands in the way of understanding Jewish history as tragedy is their persistent belief in the externality of “fate”—​what Hegel will call their “positivity.” The Jews have no route to reconciliation because they understand their fate “as an infinite power which they set over against themselves and could never conquer.” There can be no reconciliation without self-­consciousness, and it is self-­consciousness that will remain beyond the grasp of the Jews who worship an external and coercive divinity; and without reconciliation there can ultimately be no tragedy. Even though the word tragedy does not appear by name in this passage, it nevertheless provides a key to understanding the relationship between tragedy and history in Hegel’s writing. Through the intricate connection between fate and reconciliation, Hegel reveals how history and tragedy function as mutually reinforcing structures in his work. Fate and reconciliation are the concepts that give philosophical meaning to history, and tragedy is the narrative that binds fate and reconciliation together. Tragedy, therefore, becomes the mechanism through which the reason of history is revealed. By denying the Jews tragedy Hegel also implicitly denies them a history worth talking about. Hegel’s account of the Jews demonstrates how a history without tragedy is not a philosophically interesting history. By failing to qualify as tragedy, the Jews will be left behind by history; they will fall—​or better, they are pushed—​outside the dynamics of historical progress. It is the intimate connection between history and tragedy that Hegel establishes in “The Spirit of Christianity” that explains why the dynamics of history remain essentially Greek and Christian in the Hegelian programme. By modeling the progress of history on a tragic paradigm, Hegel assures the Greeks a privileged role in shaping the historical process. But by making reconciliation the ultimate outcome of the tragedy, Hegel introduces a Christian teleology to the tragic.83 In the Hegelian system, both the Greek and the early Christian worlds described in “The Spirit of Christianity” will ultimately succumb to their own internal contradictions and be superseded by the inexorable march of history. And yet, by making history tragic, Hegel’s history remains Greco-­Christian while simultaneously showing how the Greek and the Christian are inevitably superseded by history.

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This tension seems to be at the heart of Hegel’s best-­known discussion of tragedy in the Phenomenology of Spirit. As Beistegui argues, tragedy is present in the Phenomenology “whether as the mere form of the representation of Spirit, or as just one moment in the historical unfolding of Spirit. As the tragedy of ethicality, tragedy manifests itself as the primary form in which spirit surges forth in its concrete actuality.”84 Although it is intricately bound up with Hegel’s wider philosophical exploration of the Absolute, tragedy also has a more concrete function in the Phenomenology. Introduced for the first time in the chapter on “spirit” in a section titled “The True Spirit. The Ethical Order,” Hegel turns to tragedy, and to the Antigone in particular, to understand a specific moment in the development of Greek ethics. What Hegel aims to grasp in this section is the progress of ethical self-­consciousness as it becomes mired in a conflict between the individual and the universal. For Hegel, this conflict finds its most paradigmatic articulation in Greek society, which makes the transition from an ethics of the family to an ethics of the state. Paradoxically, Hegel includes neither the word tragedy nor a specific reference to ancient Greece in this crucial chapter.85 Yet, as Hegel speaks of “the human law” “confronting . . . ​another power, the Divine Law”86 the scenario he describes evidently arises from the dilemma articulated in Sophocles’s Antigone: Confronting this clearly manifest ethical power, there is, however, another ethical power, the Divine Law. For the ethical power of the state, being the movement of self-­conscious action, finds its antithesis in the simple immediate essence of the ethical sphere; as actual universality it is a force actively opposed to individual being-­for-­ self; and as actuality in general it finds in that inner essence something other than the ethical power of the state.87

“Entirely assimilating the destiny of Greek ethicality to that exposed in Sophocles’ tragedy,” comments Beistegui, “Hegel does not even bother to refer to it explicitly, thus giving the feeling of a total equation between the conflict inherent in the work and the becoming of historical consciousness.”88 In this sense Hegel’s Antigone reading is thoroughly historical—​it does not use Sophocles’s tragedy to exemplify Greek ethicality; it is Greek ethicality itself. Where historicist readings tend to see

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literary works as imperfect or distorted representations of historical realities, Hegel (perhaps in a more New Historicist mode?) sees the text as history itself. To use Schmitt’s terms, history is not just intruding into the play; it is permeating its entire fabric. Antigone’s predicament stands in metonymically for the predicament of Greek culture as it seeks to manage its own internal contradictions. It is this imbrication of text and history that perhaps accounts for one of the most idiosyncratic aspects of Hegel’s interpretation. While Hegel’s philosophical argument relies on an opposition between the Family and the State, his actual text takes a diversion via a long explanation of the specificity of Antigone’s ethical stance within the structure of the family: “The Divine Law which governs the family has likewise on its side differences within itself whose interrelationships constitute the living process of its actuality.”89 After having described the respective relationships of reciprocity and desire that characterize husband and wife, child and parents, Hegel affirms: “The relationship in its unmixed form is found, however, in that between brother and sister.”90 Because “the feminine, in the form of the sister, has the highest intuitive awareness of what is ethical,”91 “the loss of the brother is therefore irreparable to the sister and her duty towards him is the highest.”92 Beyond Derrida’s illumination in Glas of Hegel’s own relationship to his sister, Sophocles’s text appears to provide an obvious motivation for the spotlight Hegel shines on the brother–sister relationship.93 But in following Sophocles, Hegel will be led to revisit one of the most problematic passages in Sophocles’s Antigone (905–915): Were I a mother, with children or husband dead, I’d let them molder. I should not have chosen in such a case to cross the state’s decree. What is the law that lies behind these words? One husband gone, I might have found another, or a child from a new man in the first child’s place; but with my parents covered up in death, no brother for me, ever, could be born. Such was the law by which I honored you. But Creon thought the doing was a crime, a dreadful daring, brother of my heart.94

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As countless critics have pointed out, Antigone’s differential attitude to her family members puts her association with the family as an ethical entity under considerable strain.95 Moreover, Antigone’s privileging of her brother seems precisely to go against the normative gendered assumptions of Greek society. Rejecting marriage and hypothetical children, Antigone’s attachment to her brother is destructive. Following in the footsteps of her father, Antigone is guilty of what Lévi-­Strauss will euphemistically call the “over-­valuing of kinship relations.” Nevertheless, Antigone’s incestuous outrage is transformed by Hegel into the epitome of an ethical relationship. Hegel thus provides an elaborate philosophical justification for Antigone’s most dubious defense of the law of the family: This relationship is at the same time the limit at which the self-­ contained life of the Family breaks up and goes beyond itself. The brother is the member of the family in whom its Spirit becomes an individuality which turns toward another sphere, and passes over into the consciousness of universality. The brother leaves this immediate, elemental and therefore, strictly speaking negative ethical life of the Family, in order to acquire and produce the ethical life that is conscious of itself and actual. He passes from the divine law, within whose sphere he lived, over to the human law. But the sister becomes, or the wife remains, the head of the household and the guardian of the divine law. In this way, the two sexes overcome their [merely] natural being and appear in their ethical significance as diverse beings who share between them the distinctions belonging to their ethical substance.96

We shall look at the legacy of Hegel’s gendered reading in the next chapter. But what is perhaps equally significant about Hegel’s exegesis is the tension he creates between historical and structural explanations. In arguing that it is the brother–sister relationship that forces both individuality to partake in the universal and the universal to be grounded in the particular, he explains how this conflict will lead to an inevitable tragic impasse. It is by “over-­coming their [merely] natural being” that the protagonists become aware of the internal contradictions in the ethical order. But while, within the context of the Phenomenology and its dialectical logic, these contradictions are historical and the specific property of the Greek State, in Sophocles’s text they are structural and belong to the

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dynamics of the Family. Although Antigone and Creon’s predicament is meant to exemplify the ethical limitations of Greek society, in follow­ ­ing Sophocles’s text, Hegel turns a historical argument into a structural one. As Sophocles becomes history, the text intrudes into the historical. Hegel’s engagement with Antigone thus turns Schmitt’s analysis on its head: It is the tragic text that is determining the tragic movement of history rather than history that is elevating the dramatic text to the status of tragedy. In Hegel’s account of the Greeks, Antigone stands midway between the figures of Oedipus and Socrates. Oedipus is wholly unaware of his own identity until his tragic destiny confronts him with the truth of his being. He thus represents the unreflective state of human consciousness, which is only brought to reflection through the violence of tragic destruction. Antigone, by contrast, weighs up two ethical choices and chooses one in full knowledge of the other. Antigone may be prevented by her gender and her position within the family from assuming a position of full ethical consciousness, but the play as a whole nevertheless represents a further stage in the development of ethical self-­consciousness. Socrates represents the end point of this journey in Greece, for it is Socrates who introduced the “infinitely important element of leading the truth of the objective back to the thought of the subject.”97 Hegel concludes his discussion of the Antigone in the Phenomenology with a satisfying affirmation of the efficacy of the dialectical process: “The ethical shape of Spirit has vanished and another takes its place.”98 For all her exemplarity, Antigone remains a stage to be overcome. The historical situation instantiated in the Sophoclean text is one that contains the seeds of its own destruction; for all its philosophical significance, it is characterized by its contingency. This is why, as Beistegui argues, “it cannot be a question of reading these pages from the Phenomenology as the absolute’s last word on the ethico-­political.”99 Yet, in using Sophocles’s text as the basis of historical actuality, Hegel allows tragedy to play a more complex role within the Hegelian system. It no longer merely provides the content of the historical manifestation of Spirit; rather, it models the historical process in its own image. It is in this way that Hegel’s philosophy, and his philosophy of history in

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­ articular, becomes a tragic philosophy. Indeed, it would not be too far-­ p fetched to characterize the project announced in the famous Preface to the Phenomenology as a manifesto of the tragic: But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—​this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I.” Death, if that is what we want to call this non-­actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.100

Tragedy asks us to confront the “tremendous power of the negative,” tarry with it, and emerge from that confrontation with a higher level of understanding and self-­understanding. As Beistegui puts it: “By elevating itself to the level of death, Spirit fixes the limits of its own drama and realizes itself as a tragic hero.”101 By making not just the content but the form of his thinking tragic, Hegel can be seen to play a role in turning tragedy away from historical contingency to static universality. But for Hegel, as for Schmitt and for Hölderlin, tragedy is powerful precisely because it mediates between the particular and the universal. This is why it provides such a compelling figure for Hegel’s thought. And this is why Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster argue: “If that manner of conceiving experience which Hegel calls dialectics can be understood as thinking in movement, then it is arguable that dialectics has its genesis in tragedy.”102 Tragedy gives thought its “movement”; it turns the static into the dynamic, the universal into the particular, the metaphysical into the historical.

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In opposing history’s concern with ta genomena (facts) to poetry’s preoccupation with ta katholou and to eikos (universal truths and abstract possibilities), Aristotle set up a pernicious framework for the discussion of tragedy: It is also evident from what has been said that is not the poet’s function to relate actual events (ta genomena), the kinds of things that might occur and are possible in terms of probability (to eikos). The difference between a historian and a poet is not that between using verse or prose; Herodotus’ work could be versified and would be just as much a kind of history in verse as in prose. No, the difference is this: that one relates to actual events (ta genomena), the other the kinds of things that might occur. Consequently, poetry is more phil­­ osophical and more elevated than history, since poetry relates more of the universal (ta katholou), while history relates particulars.103

It is Aristotle’s binary that classicists seek to deconstruct when they argue that tragedy is a product of a specific moment in the development of Athenian democracy. The drive to make sense of tragedy within the parameters of the historical conditions of fifth-­century Athens has given scholars unique access to the political, religious, and social preoccupations of the age. But the tendency to see these plays as the products of history has resulted in a certain inattention to their philosophical significance and to the role of the philosophical reception history in shaping the approach of classics to its materials. What I have been trying to explore in this chapter is a different way of conceiving the relationship between the historical and the philosophical. Neither Schmitt nor Hölderlin nor Hegel has seen it as their task to reconstruct the Realien of the Athenian democratic polis. Yet, for all three of them, history will play a crucial role in understanding the distinctive contribution of tragedy to thought, philosophical or otherwise. Walter Benjamin, as we saw, worried that the philosophy of tragedy is a “theory of the moral order of the world, without any reference to historical content, in a system of generalized sentiments.”104 Schmitt, in his critique of romantic aestheticism, shares Benjamin’s worry. For Schmitt, both Hölderlin and Hegel represent the turn to aestheticism that he decries. Benjamin and Schmitt are representative of the more general characterization of German idealist thinking on tragedy as universalistic and ahistorical. Classical scholarship in its current form, an heir not just

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to nineteenth-­century German historical positivism but also (indirectly) to various Marxist historicisms, inherits this prejudice. But Schmitt and Benjamin, as I have argued, share more with Hegel and Hölderlin than this characterization allows. When Hölderlin asks whether tragedy is possible in modernity he anticipates Schmitt’s question “Hamlet or Hecuba?” Hegel and Schmitt both consider the relationship between aesthetic form and the historical processes. Where Schmitt sees history intrude into the play and elevate it to the status of tragedy, Hegel shows how the play, that is, the tragedy, intrudes into history and elevates history to philosophical meaning. Modernity inverts the Aristotelian logic by showing how history and contingency are themselves deeply implicated in abstraction and universality. The philosophy of tragedy does not stand opposed to historical analysis. Rather, the analysis of tragedy has given rise to a new philosophy of history.

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Tragedy and Gender

“W hat would happen if psychoanalysis were to have taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure?”1 In her reformulation of George Steiner’s musing, Judith Butler addresses the question of how and why classical texts have played such an important role in the development of psychoanalysis. This question has been given renewed prominence in recent years, particularly in the wake of Richard Armstrong’s work on Freud.2 Meanwhile, Rachel Bowlby, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig, among others, have explored the consequences of the investment in the Oedipus story for psychoanalysis and its narratives of gender.3 In the post-­Freudian era, the prominence of psychoanalysis and its championing of the Oedipus complex have had the effect of troping gender in tragic terms. The encounter between classics and psychoanalysis, between Freud and Oedipus, has, thus, given rise to a two-­way dynamic: Classical myths contribute to the gender politics of psychoanalysis while at the same time psychoanalysis classicizes the modern subject and creates a tragic emplotment for gender identities in modernity. This chapter pushes forward my previous discussions by probing the universalist tendencies of the philosophical investment in tragedy. In the last chapter, we saw how for Schmitt and Benjamin, Hegel, and Hölderlin a certain universalism had gone hand in hand with an intense focus on questions of history. In this dialectic between history and universalism,

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the timely repeatedly revealed itself through the untimely medium of tragedy. This chapter takes a different focus by exploring the relationship between universalism and humanism in the philosophy of the tragic. In particular, it investigates how an alliance between universalism and humanism has had important consequences for gender and sexuality. By looking at the influence of German idealism on Freud’s writings, I explore the persistence of a preoccupation with the universal in the modern under­ ­standing of tragedy. What role does the philosophy of the tragic play in the construction of Freud’s Oedipus? To what extent is Freud’s insistence on the universality of the Oedipus complex a consequence of the gendered assumptions of German idealism and its theories of tragedy? What is the relationship between Freud’s interest in the universal and the wider question of psychoanalysis’s engagement with humanism? My aim is not to construct an intellectual history that would link Freud’s reading of Oedipus directly to specific arguments within idealist philosophy about tragedy and the tragic. Rather, by exploring their shared but distinctive commitments to the universalism of Oedipus, I am trying to understand the dialogue between humanism and antihumanism that runs through the modern fascination with the tragic. In the second half of the chapter, I explore how this complex intertwining of universalism and humanism has affected the later feminist critiques of Freud. Paradoxically, while feminists have sought to move beyond Oedipus and the narratives of sexuality he inscribes, they have nevertheless carried over Freud’s investment in tragedy and have thus unwittingly reanimated many of his humanist and universalist assumptions. Feminist have for a long time worried about Freud’s assertion of the universality of the Oedipus complex. In electing Oedipus as a universal paradigm, Freud commits himself to a vision of humanity founded on what Luce Irigaray has called “hommosexualité”—​a “one sex” model of sexuality that privileges the masculine. It took Freud more than twenty years after his first extended discussion of Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams to reassess his belief that the Oedipus complex was equally valid for girls and for boys.4 It was only in the mid-­1920s that Freud began to publish his essays “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” and “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between

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the Sexes,” which paved the way to the recognition of the specificity of the girl’s experience in his essay “Female Sexuality.” Freud, moreover, was vocal in his rejection of Carl Jung’s efforts to provide a parallel mythic narrative for girls in the so-­called “Electra Complex.” By the time Freud makes explicit reference to Jung’s rival tragic emplotment in his essay “Female Sexuality,” he was himself committed to affirming the masculine particularity of the Oedipus complex “in the strict sense” and was even led to write that “it would seem as though we must retract the universality of the thesis that the Oedipus complex is the nucleus of the neuroses.”5 In this essay, Freud likens his new understanding of the specificity of female sexuality to an archaeological discovery: “Our insight into this early, pre-­Oedipus, phase comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-­Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece.”6 Female sexuality comes to Freud as a surprise. Just as it was impossible for archaeologists to imagine the Minoan-­Mycenaean civilization lurking beneath its classical successor, so the existence of a pre-­Oedipal or even non-­Oedipal sexuality came as a late and reluctant realization to Freud. But despite this awakening, Freud continued to declare his inability to understand female sexuality, infamously asserting that “the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.”7 Since the early twentieth century, Freud’s captivation with Oedipus was seen to play a fundamental role in the limitations of his understanding of female sexuality. For his contemporaries such as Jung, Freud’s singular fixation on the Sophoclean hero blinded him to the possibility of alternative narratives of female desire. In order to explore the gender politics of psychoanalysis, then, it is necessary to understand the particular role that Oedipus plays in the development of Freud’s thought. Others have linked the masculinist bias of Freud’s Oedipal obsessions either to the specifics of his biography or to wider cultural factors; I argue that the history of reading tragedy in the nineteenth century left its mark on Freud’s representation of the Sophoclean hero. While the question of gender is not immediately foregrounded in Schelling’s and Hegel’s readings of Oedipus, a persistent concern with questions of universalism shapes Freud’s own representation of Oedipus as a universal (masculine) paradigm.

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We Are All Oedipus Since the publication of Peter Rudnytsky’s Freud and Oedipus in 1987 there has been a great deal of interest in the question of what led Freud to choose Oedipus as the figurehead of the new science of psychoanalysis.8 As Richard Armstrong and others have shown more recently, not only did the Oedipus complex come to be considered the core insight of psychoanalytic theory,9 but the figure of Oedipus became an icon of the psychoanalytic movement itself—​an image of Oedipus and the Sphinx even acted as the logo of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, the official press of the psychoanalytic movement from 1919 to 1938. Oedipus is the brand on which the success and failure of psychoanalysis rest. To quote Richard Armstrong: “The figure of Oedipus . . . ​literally becomes the cultural capital for the movement.”10 Despite the fact that “the Oedipus complex,” as such, only enters Freud’s analytic lexicon after 1910, the entire edifice of psychoanalysis is retrospectively founded on Freud’s “discovery” of his infantile Oedipal desires. The first mention that Freud makes of Oedipus precedes the well-­known elaboration in The Interpretation of Dreams by several years. It appears in a letter he wrote to Fliess in 1897—​here the play is mentioned in the context of Freud’s revelation of his own feelings toward his mother and father. The letter provides the evidence for the autobiographical foundation of Freud’s preoccupation with the myth. But for most critics, Freud’s fascination with the Sophoclean play can be traced back further beyond the Fliess letter to his school days and to the performances of the tragedy he witnessed in Paris and Vienna at a formative moment in his training. As Armstrong summarizes: “Freud’s fascination with Oedipus grows out of a personal experience with the text . . . ​coupled with the personal and professional crisis of the late 1890s that lead to the development of psychoanalysis as we know it.”11 The question that has insistently confronted critics is how to reconcile the idiosyncrasy of Freud’s infantile desires with his statement of the universal validity of the Oedipus complex. This problem of universalization is already at the core of his letter to Fliess: “I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in childhood, even

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if not so early as in children who have been made hysterical.”12 In The Interpretation of Dreams, on the other hand, it is his own experience which is sidelined in favor of an appeal to Sophocles as evidence for the generalizable quality of certain dreams and their relation to childhood psychology: “The discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity: a legend whose profound and universal power (allgemeingültige Wirksamkeit) to move can only be understood if the hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psychology of children has an equally universal validity. What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’ drama which bears his name.”13 A great deal has been written about the vicious circularity of Freud’s argument in this well-­known passage. Oedipus’s fate is assumed through its antiquity and continuing appeal to a modern audience to have a paradigmatic quality that in turn acts as evidence for the universal truth of Freud’s insights into childhood psychology. Because Oedipus has an Oedipus complex and Oedipus’s story comes down to us from an ancient legend that still has the power to affect us today, it must be the case that we are all afflicted by the same complex. As Jean-­Pierre Vernant famously argued: “The text can only provide this confirmation provided that it is itself interpreted by reference to the framework of the modern spectator’s dream—​as conceived at least by the theory in question.”14 Given Freud’s unambiguously totalizing formulations, it is not surprising that the complex became the so-­called “nuclear core” of psychoanalysis. Freud’s later hypothesis in Totem and Taboo that the Oedipus myth has its basis in an actual historical event is merely an extension of his earliest arguments about the universality of the complex. Those critics who have been keen to establish the biographical basis for his Oedipus have highlighted the subjectiveness of Freud’s childhood fantasies, the contingency of his education, and the coincidence of his theatrical experiences in Paris and Vienna.15 And yet this emphasis on the specificity of Freud’s journey toward Oedipus could not be more at odds with Freud’s proclamations, from the very outset, about the universality of the complex. The background of German philhellenism, the so-­ called tyranny of Greece over the German imagination, has repeatedly been drawn upon to reconcile Freud’s seemingly unique biographical predispositions to the wider cultural currents of his age. Indeed, a dual

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focus on biography and broader intellectual history is the stated aim of Rudnytsky’s, Armstrong’s, and Le Rider’s studies of Freud and his relationship to antiquity.16 In broad terms, each argues that the wider cultural investment in Greece at this time became the vehicle of Oedipus’s universalization. Freud’s acculturation in a Gymnasium, his immersion in a classically inspired Bildung, and his transposition of the philological techniques of Altertumswissenschaft to the theory of psychoanalysis all played a role in his choice of Oedipus as a paradigmatic figure. Classical antiquity is the hinge that connects the particularities of Freud’s self-­ analysis to his grand ambition to create a universally applicable theory of humanity. But there is a specificity to Freud’s insistence on the universality of Oedipus that I think gets lost in this broader picture. Beyond the wider role of German philhellenism in providing a crucial context for understanding the cultural inflections of Freud’s theories, a specific history of reading tragedy within this tradition offers a different way of understanding the resonance of Freud’s universalism. At a general level, the classics may well be the medium through which Freud elevates his personal experiences to the analysis of humanity writ large. But it is a nineteenth-­century philosophical reading of tragedy that provides the conceptual apparatus for the reconciliation between subjectivity and universalism that is at the heart of Freud’s deployment of Oedipus. For Freud, the starting point of any analysis of Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus has to be an attempt to understand why the modern playgoer can receive this play in the same way as his ancient predecessor: “If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified.”17 The whole project of classical scholarship on tragedy in the second half of the twentieth century could be seen to have been devoted to precisely the opposite pursuit—​its aim has been to show how the modern playgoer could not have been more radically distanced from the political, cultural, and religious expectations of his fifth-­century Athenian counterpart.18 Nor, as we have seen, has it just been classical scholars who have been dedicated to debunking Freud’s perceived assertions about the universalism of tragedy. For Steiner, we are living in the

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age of the death of tragedy—​there is, he claims, an insurmountable chasm that separates us from the tragic age of the Greeks.19 But Freud’s peroration: “[Oedipus’s] destiny moves us only because it might have been ours” does not emerge from nowhere. He was building on a much longer tradition that had linked the self-­identity of the modern subject to the fate of the tragic protagonist. As we have seen, with the emergence of the so-­called philosophy of the tragic, the question of tragedy had moved from the aesthetic to the metaphysical realm. “Since the 1790s,” writes Vassilis Lambropoulos of “the tragic,” “this quality has been attributed to every domain, feature and function known to mankind, from life to cosmos, and from culture to society. The term has entered the vocabulary of existence and experience, description and evaluation, high reflection and common argument. It has been broadly present in the major systems of thought, art and scholarship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”20 In Chapter 2, we saw how the figure of Oedipus played a crucial role in this development. By the time Freud came to his own analysis of tragedy, philosophers had been proclaiming that we were all Oedipus for well over a century.21 Although he may not have been responding directly to this philosophical tradition, in his choice of Oedipus he was undoubtedly affected by it and Freud finds himself in dialogue with many of its preoccupations. Ever since Schelling made Oedipus the central plank of his discussion of the tension between freedom and necessity in his Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795),22 Oedipus had become what Lacoue-­L abarthe has called a “figure in philosophy, and the figure of philosophy.”23 Where Schelling founds his reaction to Kantian metaphysics on the conflict between fate and free will in Oedipus, it is Hegel, as we saw, who most clearly ties Oedipus’s quest to the project of philosophy as a whole. It is worth returning to the passage from The Philosophy of History to tease out its Freudian resonances: In the Egyptian Neith, Truth is still a problem. The Greek Apollo is its solution; his utterance is: Man know thyself. In this dictum is not intended a self-­recognition that regards the specialities of one’s own weaknesses and defects: it is not the individual that is admonished to become acquainted with his own idiosyncrasy, but humanity in

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general is summoned to self-­knowledge. This mandate was given to the Greeks, and in the Greek Spirit humanity exhibits itself in its clear and developed form. Wonderfully, then, must the Greek legend surprise us, which relates, that the Sphinx—​the great Egyptian symbol-­ appeared in Thebes, uttering the words: what is that which in the morning goes on four legs, at midday on two, and in the evening on three? Oedipus, giving the solution, Man, precipitated the Sphinx from the rock. The solution and liberation of that Oriental Spirit, which in Egypt had advanced so far as to propose the problem, is certainly this: that the Inner Being [the Essence] of Nature is Thought, which has its existence only in the human consciousness.24

The quest for self-­knowledge so familiar from the Freudian reading is already intimated in the Hegelian scenario. And yet it is almost as if Hegel is anticipating the Freudian reading when he warns: “In this dictum is not intended a self-­recognition that regards the specialities of one’s own weaknesses and defects: it is not the individual that is admonished to become acquainted with his own idiosyncrasy, but humanity in general is summoned to self-­knowledge.” Freud, in an important way, particularizes the general human imperative toward self-­consciousness that Hegel exhorts. Nevertheless, when Hegel makes Oedipus synonymous with human identity—​a human identity predicated on self-­ knowledge—​he turns him into a figure ripe for appropriation by Freud. Oedipus’s identity in Hegel rests on his universality—​that is, he is constituted by his ability to identify mankind in general. In Hegel’s reading of Oedipus we witness the perfect coincidence of the discourse of universalism and the ideology of humanism. Oedipus’s status as an archetype of humanity is predicated on his understanding of his fate as a universal condition. It is interesting that it is this image of Oedipus, the Oedipus in his encounter with the Sphinx, whose iconography surrounded Freud and the institution of psychoanalysis more generally. Freud owned many images of Oedipus and the Sphinx such as the well-­known ancient Athenian red-­figure hydria, but the greatest prominence was given to the neoclassical image of Oedipus painted by Jean-­Auguste-­Dominique Ingres, which was hanging over his couch in his consulting room.25

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Jean-­Auguste-­Dominique Ingres, Oedipe explique l’énigme du sphinx (1808), Louvre. (Source: Courtesy AKG Images.)

As Armstrong suggests: “Ingres’ painting is evocative of many things that one can readily associate with the ambitions of psychoanalysis”26 and the overt sexualization of the encounter, together with his depiction of female monstrosity, would certainly be among them. But what interests me is that in his choice of this neoclassical depiction, Freud upholds the association between Oedipus and the quest for human enlightenment that we see in Hegel’s description. Ingres gives a visual identity to Hegel’s Oedipus in his moment of liberation from the Oriental Spirit. Far from the victim of irrational incestuous and parricidal desires, Oedipus in this image emerges as the figure in and of philosophy. It is

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Logo of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. (Source: Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu, 3rd ed., 1922. Leipzig, Wein, Zürich: Internationaler Pyschoanalytischer Verlag.)

Replica of bookplate designed by Freud circa 1910, based on the medallion presented to Freud for his fiftieth birthday. (Source: Courtesy Freud Museum London.)

this depiction of Oedipus that Freud’s students decided to present him with on a medallion as a fiftieth birthday present, this image that Freud used as a bookplate for his collection, and this image that became the logo of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. If Oedipus becomes the icon of psychoanalysis, the icon that psychoanalysis chooses to associate him with has very little to do with the complex that bears his name. And yet it is a conflict between Oedipus the philosopher and Oedipus as parrincest that seems to structure Freud’s discussion of Sophocles’s play in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s demonstration of the universality of Oedipus hinges precisely on a debate around his conflicting

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identity. Freud introduces his own reading of the play by undermining the validity of previous readings: Oedipus Rex is what is known as a tragedy of destiny (Schicksalstragödie). Its tragic effect is said to lie in the contrast between the supreme will of the gods and the vain attempts of mankind to escape the evil that threatens them. The lesson which, it is said, the deeply moved spectator should learn from the tragedy is submission to divine will and realization of his own impotence. Modern dramatists have accordingly tried to achieve a similar tragic effect by weaving the same contrast into a plot invented by themselves. But the spectators have looked on unmoved while a cure or an oracle was fulfilled in spite of all the efforts of some innocent man: later tragedies of destiny have failed in their effect.27

When Freud characterizes Oedipus as a tragedy of destiny he is drawing on the philosophical tradition that we have been exploring. For both Schelling and Hegel, Oedipus’s tragic fate arises from a confrontation between freedom and necessity. Schelling’s ingenuous reading turns on his ability to make of Oedipus’s impotence in the face of fate a triumph of the human will over destiny. Despite Hegel’s strong emphasis on the ability of Oedipus to overcome his fate through the assertion of his human command of reason, he nevertheless acknowledges the limitations of Oedipus’s triumph and locates his tragedy precisely in the confrontation of these two realities.28 Neither Schelling nor Hegel subscribed in any simple way to the “lesson” that Freud claims the tragedy of destiny is supposed to convey—​but it was the philosophy of the tragic developed in German idealism that turned Oedipus into the tragedy of ­destiny par excellence, and it is this reading that Freud sees himself ­overturning: If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny (Schicksal) and human will (Menschenwillen), but it is to be looked for in the peculiar nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified. There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognise the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus, while we can dismiss as merely arbitrary such dispositions as are laid down in [Grillparzer’s]

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Die Ahnfrau or other modern tragedies of destiny. And a factor of this kind is in fact involved in the story of King Oedipus. His destiny (Schicksal) moves us only because it might have been ours—​ because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our births as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse toward our mothers, and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father.29

As Armstrong has argued, Freud’s rhetoric in this passage is based on his ability to discredit former allegorical or, I would say, philosophical readings of this play: “Part of Freud’s intransigent argument for the Oedipus complex is simply to affirm the literal nature of the myth’s meaning: it really is a tale of incest and patricide, nothing more, nothing less.”30 Freud in this passage founds an alternative humanism to the one that lies behind Schelling’s and Hegel’s readings. For Schelling and Hegel, Oedipus represents man in general because he uses his reason, his all-­too-­human reason, to confront a destiny that he cannot escape. The humanism of Freud’s Oedipus is located in his irrational desires: “We were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers.” Freud rejects the contents of the philosophical reading of Oedipus but maintains its form. He casts off the Oedipus of reason, but he reinscribes the universalism of his fate. The universalizing of Oedipus in Freud’s narrative is the trace of an earlier philosophy of the tragic that he ostensibly strives to displace. This is all the more striking given that the practice and theory of psychoanalysis are so obviously concerned with the idiosyncrasies and specificities of an individual’s life’s story—​the very idiosyncrasies that Hegel rejects in his characterization of Oedipal self-­knowledge. Moreover, even though he rejects the idea of a “tragedy of destiny” (Schicksalstragödie), Freud’s whole analysis is nevertheless dependent on the idea of a human being subject to a destiny beyond his control: “His destiny moves us only because it might have be ours—​because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.” Despite his protestations, Freud escapes neither the vocabulary nor the ideology of “destiny,” of Schicksal, that lie behind the philosophy of the tragic. “Freud appropriates the generic message of tragedy even as he dismisses it,” argues Sarah Winter,

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“while he claims that the transhistorical effect of the play is due to its specific story of Oedipus, and not to its demonstration of the power of fate over mortals, he still endows Oedipal desires and relations with the inevitability of tragic destiny.”31 Freud’s universal irrational parrincestic Oedipus could be characterized as the ironic mirror image of the universal Oedipus of philosophy. But Freud’s persistent heroization of Oedipus as a figure of science should not be forgotten. The medallion that was offered to Freud on his fiftieth birthday by his students was inscribed with a quotation from Sophocles’s OT. 1525: “ὃς τὰ κλείν᾽ αἰνίγματ᾽ ᾔδει καὶ κράτιστος ἦν ἀνήρ” “Who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful.”32 Ernest Jones in his biography recounts how Freud “became pale and agitated . . . ​ as if he had encountered a revenant” when he received the medallion.33 “As a young student at the university of Vienna [Freud] used to stroll around the great arcaded court inspecting the busts of former famous professors of the institution. He then had a phantasy, not merely of seeing his own bust there in the future, which would not have been anything remarkable in an ambitious student, but of it being inscribed with the identical words he now saw on the medallion.”34 Although almost certainly apocryphal, the story abounds with ironies. By presenting him with the medallion the students place Freud not in the position of Oedipus but that of Laius. This Oedipal dynamic is further emphasized by the temporality of the quotation from Sophocles. Sophocles speaks of Oedipus’s great intellectual powers in the past tense (ᾔδει, he knew, ἦν, he was). This is not surprising as the quotation comes from the very last chorus of the play—​a chorus that looks back in hindsight and thus also exposes the limitations and ironies of Oedipus’s knowledge and power. By claiming that he had anticipated this moment of Oedipal transfer, Freud reasserts his authority over his students.35 “This anecdote serves as a psychoanalytic parable, which immerses us in the problem of Freud’s identification with Oedipus,”36 writes Rudnytsky. But it is the double nature of Freud’s identification that is so interesting. The Oedipus that Freud appropriates is simultaneously the continuation and the inversion of the Oedipus of the philosophical tradition that emerged in the wake of the enlightenment. Freud’s Oedipus in his multiple guises is testimony to the persistence of a humanism and a universalism that have their origins in the philosophy of the tragic.

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As I argued in the previous chapter, it would be wrong to characterize the modern philosophical investment in Greek tragedy as a project that was in any straightforward way committed to revealing the universalism of the tragic experience. A dialectic between sameness and difference, an interplay between antiquity and modernity, had been inscribed in this philosophy of the tragic from the start. From Hegel’s engagement with the Antigone as an exemplification of the historical development of Spirit to Hölderlin’s assertion that “Greek art is foreign to us”—​the German word he uses is fremd—​the so-­called idealists looked to tragedy to understand the distance as much as the proximity of antiquity.37 Nietzsche may have advocated an aesthetic revival of tragedy, but that didn’t prevent him from affirming: “One does not learn from the Greeks, their manner is too foreign”—​that same word fremd.38 If the philosophy of modernity from Hegel to Freud has been bound up with the idea of the tragic, this relationship has not been constructed on a simple model of identity or identification. Indeed, even Freud’s claim that Sophocles compels “us to recognize our own inner minds in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found,”39 still insists that the discovery of our inner Oedipus involves an uncomfortable confrontation with the fremd-­ness, the strangeness within ourselves—​that is presumably why we have repressed it. Hegel may have proclaimed: “Among the Greeks we find ourselves immediately at home,”40 but it was to tragedy that modernity has turned to come face to face with the unheimliche as much as the heimische. It is the uncanny Oedipus who stands behind Freud’s assertion that “the ego is not master in its own house.”41 In Freud’s Oedipus, we see how both of these aspects of tragedy come together. We find the universalism of human reason depicted in Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx rubbing shoulders with the dark alienation of our unconscious murderous and incestuous desires. These two aspects of Freud’s Oedipus are never fully reconciled in his writings. It is in Nietzsche rather than in Freud that we get a more explicit account of how the two facets of Oedipus’s symbolism might be understood together. Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy: Oedipus, murderer of his father, husband of his mother, Oedipus the solver of the Sphinx’s riddle! What does this trinity of fateful deeds tell us? There is an ancient popular belief, particularly in Persia, that a wise magician can only be born out of incest; the

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riddle-­solving Oedipus who woos his mother immediately leads us to interpret this as meaning that some enormous offence against nature . . . ​must first have occurred to supply the cause. . . . ​How else could nature be forced to reveal its secrets, other than by victorious resistance to her . . . ​? I see this insight expressed in the terrible trinity of Oedipus’ fates: the same man who solves the riddle of nature—​that of the double-­natured sphinx—​must also destroy the most sacred orders of nature by murdering his father and becoming his mother’s husband. Wisdom, the myth seems to whisper to us, and Dionysiac wisdom in particular, is an unnatural abomination: whoever plunges nature into the abyss of destruction by what he knows must in turn experience the dissolution of nature in his own person.42

“Wisdom is an offence against nature,” Nietzsche affirms. The different aspects of Oedipus’s trifold fate are intimately connected. His incest and his murder are both the cause and effect of the power of his reason. His destruction, then, is a self-­destruction brought about by the very faculty that had made him a savior both to himself and to mankind in general. But for Nietzsche, tragic poetry has the force to reconcile us to the experience of our own dissolution. “Sophoclean melodies,” as he calls them, make tragedy’s glimpse on to the destruction of the self seem bearable. “It becomes plain,” Nietzsche writes, “that the poet’s whole interpretation of the story is nothing other than one of those images of light held out to us by healing nature after we have gazed into the abyss.”43 Like Freud who shines a redemptive light onto the hell of the unconscious, Sophocles shines “a shaft of sunlight” onto the abyss of tragic destiny. Both Freud and Nietzsche present us with an antihumanist Oedipus, but both nevertheless resist a nihilistic interpretation of tragedy. Oedipus may have become an antihumanist paradigm, but for both Nietzsche and Freud, he is humanized by his tragedy.

The Tragedy of Gender There are many ways of understanding the concern with universalism and its limits in the modern philosophical investment in tragedy from Schelling to Freud. The particular configuration of universalism and humanism that infuses Freud’s analysis of Oedipus has perhaps had its

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most significant impact on the gender politics of psychoanalysis. It should be clear from my argument so far that the universalism of Freud’s Oedipus is striking precisely because it seems to emerge from a reading that calls into question many of the premises of humanism. Oedipus is a paradigmatic figure for Hegel because his self-­recognition as man becomes a motto for “humanity in general.” Freud subverts the Hegelian message by showing how the unconscious makes a mockery of Oedipus’s self-­knowledge and that it is rather the limitations of his self-­ knowledge that are at the basis of shared fate of humanity. But one of the most controversial aspects of Freud’s Oedipus is his upholding of the gendering that is elided in the Hegelian parable. As we shall see, Hegel’s broader approach to tragedy, and in particular his reading of Antigone, inscribes humanism with an indelible masculinist bias. In the passage from the Philosophy of History, however, Hegel consistently uses the gender-­neutral term Mensch in his exhortation: Man know thyself. While Hegel’s Oedipus may appear to transcend gender, the Freudian project of Oedipal self-­knowledge has its telos in Oedipus’s self-­recognition as a man. One need only recall the quotation from Sophocles inscribed on Freud’s medallion: “ὃς τὰ κλείν᾽ αἰνίγματ᾽ ᾔδει καὶ κράτιστος ἦν ἀνήρ” “Who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful.”44 Oedipus comes to self-­knowledge not as an anthropos (human being) but decidedly as an aner (man). As we have already seen, Freud’s problematic insistence that the Oedipal narrative was equally valid for both sexes came under attack during his own lifetime. When more recently Steiner questioned the primacy of Oedipus and offered up Antigone as an alternative he was, in a sense, merely following Jung’s lead in returning to the archive of antiquity to found a different understanding of the human drama. Jung and Steiner, however, merely anticipated a much more sustained question­ ­ing of the centrality of Oedipus by feminist critics. Rachel Bowlby, for instance, describes the project of her book Freudian Mythologies as a search for an alternative to the ur-­story of the Oedipus complex through, on the one hand, the recognition of a multiplicity of other potential ur-­ stories and, on the other, an impetus to retell the myth of Oedipus in a different light: “Myths also alter their possible or likely meanings according to the changing cultural contexts in which they are retold. In

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the light of present-­day Western experience of the undoing or mutation of the family forms, the stories of some ancient Greek tragedies can seem strangely contemporary: step-­parents, single parents, step-­siblings, half­siblings, second families, and adoption are everywhere to be found—​the last three in Oedipus the King alone. Yet despite his interest elsewhere in what he takes to be the universal children’s fantasy of being adopted, Freud never mentions that this is in fact Oedipus’ reality.”45 Bowlby espouses two distinct methods in her attempts in the book to found “modern identities” on “Greek tragedy.” In several chapters, she creates original narratives of female sexuality from her provocative readings of alternative tragedies such as Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women and Euripides’s Ion. In others, her focus is on opening up Freud’s analysis of the Chronos myth and, in particular, the Oedipus story to new destabilizing interpretations. Bowlby’s emphasis on the concept of Freudian “mythology” plays an important role in her recuperation of these Greek tragic stories. She does so by highlighting her debt to Barthes’s Mythologies—​a book that played an important role in demystifying Greek narratives by supplanting them with powerful contemporary icons of human identity.46 In the process Barthes exposed the ideological underpinning of all stories ancient and modern. As Bowlby explains: “Often, but not always, the words ‘ideology’ or ‘theory’ are interchangeable with ‘mythology’ in this sense. . . . ​ But I like ‘mythologies’ because, unlike ‘ideology’ or ‘theory,’ the word implies a narrative movement of telling and retelling that at once sustains and changes the likely fabulous ideas and stories in circulation. Conversely, a myth that makes sense to no one will fade away. . . . ​Many such myths in the fields of sexuality and kinship are now newly open to question in this way—​beginning with the two-­parent theory.”47 Bowlby may contrast the open-­ended multivalence of mythology here to the fixity of the concepts of “ideology” and “theory,” but as her argument develops, another by-­now-­familiar antithesis takes center stage: myth and tragedy. The lexicon of myth liberates these stories from the narrative framework of tragedy. It is the aesthetic form of tragedy as much as the straightjacket of “ideology” that traps these tales in the vicious circularity of Freudian theory. Bowlby concludes her book with a final return to Oedipus: “The story of the Oedipus complex, unlike the

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story of Oedipus, is not, in the end, a tragedy. Where there is recapitulation something else follows—​a different conclusion, another version of an old story, a possible new beginning. And one in which women, too, may get a life.”48 It is by removing Oedipus from the inexorable cycle of a tragic destiny that Bowlby imagines the possibility of a new beginning. Interestingly, despite what she seems to argue elsewhere in the book, it is the Oedipus of tragedy and not the Oedipus of Freud that she finally rejects. The Oedipus complex can survive a “different conclusion” in a way that the Oedipus’s tragedy could never do. Freud in this version would be more compatible with the promise of “women getting a life” than Greek tragedy is. Perhaps a similar impulse to Bowlby’s lies behind Heiner Müller’s provocative claim that “in the century of Orestes and Electra which is unfolding, Oedipus will be a comedy.” Dethroning Oedipus for Müller both entails finding an alternative to his narrative as Jung and Bowlby attest and also involves reconfiguring his story as a comedy.49 In many ways Judith Butler’s rereading of both Freud and Greek tragedy in Antigone’s Claim appears to parallel Bowlby’s quest in Freudian Mythologies. Like Bowlby, Butler highlights how contemporary configurations of familial structures make the Oedipal triangle of “mummy, daddy, me” appear ever more problematic. Where Bowlby puts emphasis on the complexity of Oedipus’s own family—​his adoption, his multiple parents and half siblings—​Butler reexamines these same realities from the vantage point of Antigone. Butler explicitly takes up Steiner’s invitation to reimagine a history of kinship that elects Antigone rather than Oedipus as its starting point. Adopting Antigone’s “postoedipal” subjecthood, Butler asks: “If the incest taboo is reconceived so that it does not mandate heterosexuality as its solution, what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be acknowledged as a result?”50 But while Bowlby’s interrogation of normative conceptions of kinship involves rescuing Oedipus from his tragic narrative, Butler’s provocative rereading of Antigone keeps tragedy at the forefront of her analysis. In turning to Antigone, Butler attempts to sidestep the gendered assumptions of both philosophy’s and psychoanalysis’s investment in Oedipus. But by foregrounding another tragic heroine, a heroine, moreover, whose narrative had become deeply implicated in Hegel’s philosophy of tragedy,

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she returns to the very problematic nexus of ideas we find in Freud. Indeed, it is the very relationship between tragedy and humanism that provides the backdrop to Butler’s engagement with Sophocles. As Bonnie Honig has argued, Butler’s attempts to move beyond Freud in her reading of Antigone both in this book and her later work Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence appear to involve a return to a new kind of humanism.51 Honig tracks a shift in Butler’s text(s) from politics to ethics. Where she starts out by celebrating an Antigone who claims sovereignty from Creon, she ends up hailing her as a figure who dares to grieve the ungrievable. For Honig, Butler’s journey with Antigone represents a broader trend: “Humanism is making a comeback; not the rationalist, universalist variety discredited by poststructuralism and the horrific events of the twentieth century, but a newer variant, one that reprises an earlier humanism in which what is common to humans is not rationality but the ontological fact of mortality, not the capacity to reason but the vulnerability to suffering.”52 In her desire to move beyond Oedipus, Butler appears to follow Lacan, whose own Ethics of Psychoanalysis had turned to Antigone to challenge the conventional humanist reading of Sophocles: Some people have said . . . ​that Sophocles is a humanist. He is found to be human since he gives the idea of a properly human measure between a rootedness in archaic ideals represented by Aeschylus and a move toward bathos, sentimentality, criticism and sophistry that Aristotle had already reproached Euripides with. I don’t disagree with the notion that Sophocles is in that median position, but as far as finding in him some relationship to humanism is concerned, that would be to give a wholly new meaning to the word. As for us we consider ourselves to be at the end of the vein of humanist thought. From our point of view man is in the process of splitting apart, as if as a result of a spectral analysis, an example of which I have engaged in here in moving along the joint between the imaginary and the symbolic in which we seek out the relationship of man to the signifier, and the “splitting” it gives rise to in him.53

In a gesture that repeats Heidegger, Lacan sees himself at “the end of the vein of humanist thought.” For Lacan, “man” has been in the process of “splitting apart,” assaulted, one imagines, by the dual force of Freudian

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psychoanalysis and structuralist linguistics. Butler continues Lacan’s project of “splitting” but turns many of his gendered assumptions on their head. Lacan’s interest in the end of “man,” Butler demonstrates, still leaves the heteronormative masculinist subject intact. Despite Lacan’s claims in his seminar to question the very process of signification, Antigone’s desire remains trapped in a symbolic order governed by the universalizing Law of Oedipus. For Butler, however, Antigone challenges the Oedipal structure in her embodiment of kinship gone awry. Moreover, in her “masculine” defiance of the state, she confuses the categories of gender. By infiltrating the political sphere, Butler’s Antigone demonstrates that “the family is not outside of or antithetical to politics.”54 But despite Butler’s overt challenge to the universalism of Lacan’s Oedipus, her Antigone, according to Honig, revives an alternative universalism.55 Antigone’s “masculine” defiance of the state is grounded in “a post-­Enlightenment humanism of lament and finitude.” Antigone’s revolt may be categorized as a politics by Butler, but it is nonetheless rooted in an appeal to an imperative that seems to transcend the sphere of politics. Her decision to bury Polyneices may enact a certain form of politics, but it originates in an appeal to an ethical communality beyond the divisive categorizations of the political. Antigone’s act is based on a recognition of the universal of mortality, on the nonnegotiable right to mourn one’s kin. The feminist politics Antigone validates run the risk of reinscribing the role of women whose defiance of the state takes the form of their demand to mourn the unmournable: “Antigone is trying to grieve, to grieve openly, publicly under conditions in which grief is explicitly prohibited by an edict, an edict that assumes the criminality of grieving Polyneices and names as criminal anyone who calls the authority of that edict into question.”56 It is no surprise that it is in Antigone’s name that many contemporary mourning mothers caught up in wars and revolutions have expressed their resistance to authority.57 Here again we see tragedy co-­opted into a politics of revolution. But this particular co-­option, as Honig argues, may well be counterproductive: “Classicizing the mourning mother naturalizes the maternal and the human, and creates a new universalism: we humans are and always have been, or had, mothers who mourn our mortality. And this universalism, into which tragedy is said to interpellate us, grounds the mortalist-­humanist

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turn to ethics, displacing the conflicts and divisions that are fundamental to both tragedy and politics.”58 Beyond Honig’s more general observations about Butler’s involuntary return to humanism, it is the connection to Antigone’s tragic destiny that concerns me most. Ultimately what Butler emphasizes when she lionizes the mourning Antigone is the tragic as a universal condition. Where Bowlby attempts to reclaim Oedipus as a figure for feminist politics by extracting him from his tragic narrative, Butler constructs Antigone’s heroic resistance around her tragic fate. Honig identifies the process of “classicizing” in general as the bar to Antigone’s feminist political potential, but I see a more specific narrative of “classicization” as the problem. At one level, one could argue that in her attempt to sidestep one particular form of classicization that has taken the name of Oedipus, Butler ends up implicating herself in another equally pernicious one. Attempting to sidestep Freud, Butler ends up reanimating Hegel. Steiner’s postulate that psychoanalysis would have assumed a different sexual politics if it had taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its starting point underplays a history of reading in which Antigone had herself been subject to the most recalcitrant of gendered readings.59 Of course, neither Steiner nor Butler is blind to this. Indeed, much of Butler’s argument in Antigone’s Claim is constructed around a dialogue with Hegel. It is against Hegel’s firm delimitation of familial and public spheres that Butler aims her central argument about the mutual implication of kinship and the political. Nevertheless, Butler takes over Hegel’s core insight into Antigone’s fate—​that she is constituted in and by her obligation to mourn her brother. In Hegel, because of the unconscious nature of her attachment to her brother, Antigone’s resistance can never be a fully ethical act, let alone a political one. Butler, on the contrary, demonstrates that by entering into a public debate with Creon, by becoming a self-­conscious criminal, Antigone cannot help but become a political actor. But for both Butler and Hegel, Antigone’s attachment to her brother is, as it were, pre-­political. I am not suggesting that for Butler it is pre-­political because the laws of the family exist outside the realm of the political; it is rather pre-­political because mourning and mortality belong to the category of human universals.

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Once again we find the form of the philosophy of the tragic reasserting itself just as its content is called into question. Where Freud inverts the content of Hegel’s humanism by making the parrincestic Oedipus the paradigm of the modern subject, Butler inverts Hegel’s unconscious Antigone by turning her into the figure of the criminal. And yet, even in her opposition to Hegel, by concentrating on Antigone’s tragic destiny, she embraces a universalism and a humanism antithetical to her feminist message. Butler is enmeshed in a history of reading that she cannot ultimately escape. She is caught between a philosophical tradition that tethers Antigone to a gendered universal and a literary genre that can narrate gender only as a tragedy. Sarah Winter has written of Freud’s Oedipus: “Since Freud’s tragic stories of cultural beginnings trace a ‘heroic,’ patriarchal genealogy for masculinity, and then secondarily postulate a particularly feminine biological necessity, the psychoanalytic production of the Oedipal subject also stages a tragedy of gender.”60 For Winter and many others, it is Freud in his particular narrative of the Oedipus complex who is responsible for creating the tragedy of gender in modernity. Freud’s Oedipus is simultaneously unambiguous in his masculinity and constituted from the outset by his universalism. Moreover, by appropriating the apparatus of tragedy, Freud endows Oedipus’s story with an inexorability that turns any resistance into nothing more than bad faith. In The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud writes: “In asserting that a child’s first choice of an object is, to use the technical term, an incestuous one, analysis no doubt once more hurt the most sacred feelings of human­ ­ity, and might well be prepared for a corresponding amount of disbelief, contradiction and attack. And these it has received in abundance. Nothing has damaged it more in the good opinion of its contemporaries than its hypothesis of the Oedipus complex as a structure universally bound to human destiny.”61 In Freud’s own retrospective account, Oedipus both inflicts a fatal wound to the project of humanism and elevates his fate to a “structure universally bound to human destiny.” Even at the moment that it dislodges the most cherished ideals of the humanist reading of tragedy, psychoanalysis reveals how tenacious the philosophical concepts of fate and universalism are to the subsequent readings of

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the genre. Both Hegel’s Oedipus and his Antigone stand behind Freud’s complex. Oedipus’s universality and Antigone’s inability to enter the universal equally haunt Freud’s tragic protagonist. And what is more, they persist even in feminist attempts to move beyond Freud. Turning to Electra or Antigone or other myths from the ancient archive has become a preferred tactic of those who have sought to move beyond the patriarchal precepts of psychoanalysis. For Bonnie Honig, it is the classicization of contemporary political activism that reintroduces an unwelcome humanism to feminist readings of Antigone. Rather than classicization more generally, I have argued that it is the particular configuration of tragedy, humanism, and universalism that has proved insurmountable in the post-­Freudian feminist readings—​a configuration that Freud inherits from the nineteenth-­century philosophy of the tragic and perpetuates into modernity’s tragedies of gender.

c h a p t e r

f i v e

Tragedy and Subjectivity

This book tr aced the emergence of the tragic as a distinctive mode of reading Greek tragedy in the modern period. The philosophy of the tragic, as we have seen, encompassed a new understanding of the genre where aesthetic qualities merged with metaphysical considerations. One dimension of this existential turn was the increasing emphasis on the role of the individual subject. Looking back on the legacy of German idealism and its vision of tragedy, Carl Schmitt identifies a romantic festishization of individual subjectivity beyond the forces of history and politics. From the opposite end of the political spectrum, for Raymond Williams, modern tragedy is the experience of alienation. The conditions of isolation and fragmentation we experience in late capitalism are key to understanding the renewed significance of tragedy in modernity. For Schmitt and Williams, for very different reasons, the philosophy of the tragic inaugurates a discourse of tragic individualism. One symptom of this encroaching individualism, Simon Goldhill points out, is an obsessive focus in modern writings on the tragic protagonist at the expense of the chorus. Neither Peter Szondi’s classic discussion of German idealism nor Terry Eagleton’s more recent theorization of tragedy makes a single reference to the chorus in its book-­length study.1 As Goldhill mocks, Eagleton remains deaf to the “collective voice” in Greek tragedy despite his much-­vaunted identification with “the huddled masses.” But Eagleton hardly stands alone, even in the Marxian 131

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reading of tragedy: The chorus plays no significant role in Marx and is barely referenced by Georg Lukács or Raymond Williams in their respective treatments of the genre.2 It was the heroes of tragedy from Aeschylus’s Prometheus to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that Marx returned to repeatedly. For Marx, despite their collectivist goals, the historical actors of the French Revolution adorned themselves in the garb of the tragic protagonist rather than reaching for a choral mask. Similarly, neither Carl Schmitt’s nor Hannah Arendt’s deeply politicized readings of tragedy place much emphasis on the chorus. In Schmitt’s case, the focus on Shakespeare makes this less surprising, but it is notable that the chorus does not feature at all in his discussion of tragedy and its relationship to myth and history. Hamletization may be a byword for introspective hyper-­individualism, but it is never contrasted to an externalized choral collectivity. The prominent quotation from Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus with which Arendt concludes On Revolution does come from a choral ode. In some ways the Silenus ode represents a classic instance of choral wisdom. It voices a universalist perspective divorced from the contingencies of individual experience. But in Arendt’s text, paradoxically, it is Theseus and not the chorus who is associated with the community. Theseus glorifies the redemptive quality of communal life in the polis while the chorus sings nihilistically of the despair and isolation of old age.3 The individual protagonist speaks for the collective while the collective voices the myopic self-­absorption of the individual. For Goldhill, what Eagleton and Szondi, Hegel and Marx, Arendt and Schmitt all have in common is their modernity. To be a modern critic of tragedy is to have a problem with the chorus: “No one doubts that the chorus is integral to the classical tragedies, and since Aristotle, the marginalization of the chorus has been taken as a sign of a falling away from the ideals of classicism—​into a degenerate modernity or even modernism.”4 The reference to Aristotle in Goldhill’s quotation somewhat undermines his claims about this uniquely modern take on the chorus. By insisting that “the chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors,”5 Aristotle played down the collective identity of the choral voice. Aristotle turns the chorus into just another protagonist and effaces the difference between the individual and the collective. What many see as one of the

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central dynamics of Greek tragic poetry, the confrontation between heroic individualism and collective commentary, is absent from Aristotle’s account. But beyond Aristotle’s specific remarks about the chorus, which are in any case few and far between, critics such as Page duBois see ­Aristotle as inaugurating a new individualistic reading of tragedy: While tragedy is a collective, poetic, ritual, and eminently democratic form, concerned with the social whole, with the dynamic interaction that is the city, the polis, Aristotle concerns himself with the management of individuals. His emphasis on katharsis is an individualizing restriction of the scope of tragic performances. He takes the social, political, ritual, literary phenomenon that is the ancient drama and focuses not on its social meanings but on its effect on individual persons. This is a psychologizing, a turn away from the collective, toward internalization.6

In dramatic terms, Aristotle reduces the tragic action to the “management of individuals.” Despite his desire to see the chorus play a full part in the drama of tragedy, he can only do this by making the chorus just another discrete actor. There is no drama for Aristotle in a collective. But what duBois also highlights is how Aristotle shifts the emphasis away from the communal action on the stage toward the response of the individual audience member. Aristotle both particularizes and internalizes the effects of tragic drama. Rather than understanding its efficacy in terms of social meaning, Aristotle shines his spotlight on a personalized psychic reaction. In Aristotle, then, both the content of the drama and its reception are understood in relation to the individual. This is why, for Goldhill, Aristotle is the source of the modern denial of choral collectivity. The problem with Aristotle is not just that he reduces the significance of the choral voice within the tragedies themselves but that, through the concept of catharsis, he posits the individual psyche as the natural receptacle of tragic angst. German idealism, in this respect at least, needed Aristotle to make tragedy existential. On this account, if marginalization of the choral voice has its roots in Aristotle’s Poetics, then it reaches its culmination in the texts of German idealism. For Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin, to a greater extent than in Aristotle, the effacing of the chorus is the corollary to the privileging of

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the tragic protagonists.7 The conflicts in ethical and political subjectivity explored in their philosophies were mirrored in the singular trials of the tragic hero. As Goldhill argues: The power of the response of German Idealism to Kant, then, is that “tragedy and the tragic” becomes a way of exploring central questions of human freedom, political autonomy, self-­consciousness and ethical action, which repeatedly integrates the tragic into a philosophical regime. . . . ​Inherent in this construction of the tragic is a heightened focus on the individual subject as a locus of tragedy—​ the heroic individual (a notion which can always find a genealogy in Aristotle or Aristotelianism)—​or, as I have just expressed it, the internal conflicts of the ethical agent in historical context.8

In electing Oedipus as the paradigm of tragic heroism, Schelling found an analogue on the stage for the ethical and political subject he explored in his philosophical writings. If both Aristotle and Schelling focus on the exemplarity of Oedipus, it is because they share an investment in tragedy as a key to understanding individual identity. Significantly, in addition to focusing on the individual on the stage, German idealists paralleled Aristotle in turning their attention to the singular spectator. Thus, Schelling writes of the chorus: The chorus acquired the function of anticipating what went on in the spectator, the emotional movement, the participation, the reflection, and thus in this respect, too, did not allow the spectator to be free, but rather arrested him entirely through his art. To a large extent the chorus represents objectivised reflection accompanying the action.9

Schelling, like Aristotle, averts his gaze from the collective action on the stage toward the internal reflection of the spectator. Although he does not use the term, it is difficult not to see the “emotional movement” he describes as the analogue of Aristotelian catharsis. What is distinctive about Schelling is that he uses the chorus as the medium of this focalization. In Aristotle, the chorus becomes just another actor on the stage. In Schelling, it is through the chorus that the spectator’s predicament comes to parallel that of the tragic protagonist. The chorus places the spectator in the same position as Oedipus, negotiating the poles of freedom and

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necessity. Just as the tragic hero finds his subjective freedom coming into conflict with objective necessity, so Schelling’s spectator has his freedom curtailed by the “objectivised reflection” of the chorus. A. W. Schlegel’s much-­quoted affirmation “the chorus is an ideal spectator” takes on a new meaning in the light of Schelling’s characterization. The “idealism” of the chorus, for Schelling, consists in its ability to transfer to the audience the same experience of constrained freedom that is suffered by the tragic protagonists. In dramatic terms, the chorus in its multiplicity has often been understood to provide the essential counterpoint to the excessive singularity of the tragic hero. For a critic such as Jean-­Pierre Vernant, the chorus represents on stage the democratic political community that watches the performance in the civic arena. The interplay between chorus and protagonist mirrors the conflicts between aristocratic virtue and democratic ideology that were played out in the Athenian assembly and law courts.10 What, in their different ways, both Aristotle and Schelling suggest is that choral multiplicity does not necessarily equate with a politicized sense of collectivity. When Aristotle and Schelling shift their perspective from the stage to the amphitheatre, their focus rests on the individual spectator rather than the collective body of the audience. Schelling goes further than Aristotle in claiming that it is through the chorus that the spectator learns to experience the heroic isolation of the tragic protagonist. Rather than promoting an experience of collectivity among the audience members, the chorus instead submerges each discrete audience member into trials of subjectivity. For Goldhill, duBois, or Vernant, this inability to see beyond the individual is part and parcel of a broader depoliticization of tragedy in idealist philosophy. The myopic view of the chorus is symptomatic of a failure to understand Greek tragedy as a civic spectacle. Goldhill, in particular, highlights the irony of German idealist philosophers, all, as we have seen, ardent supporters of the French Revolution, shying away from the chorus as a site of collectivity: “Through these political upheavals, there is a changing sense of what community, the crowd, the collective, the voice of the people, can mean, and this dynamic inevitably affects the conceptualization of the chorus, not just by virtue of a potential politicization of its group dynamics, but also, and perhaps more stridently by

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virtue of the insistent impact of ideals of the freedom of the individual on the understanding of tragedy in relation to the chorus.”11 Surely in the age of revolutions, the communal voice on the tragic stage should speak to the call to collective action on the political stage? Yet even Marx, when he writes explicitly about tragedy and revolution, fails to make the connection between the chorus and the voice of the people. Nevertheless, it may be too hasty to associate the lack of interest in the chorus with a depoliticization of the genre. Schelling and his contemporaries may have focused their energies on the tragic protagonist, but this does not mean that they were unconcerned with politics or even that they were blind to the interplay between individual and collective at the heart of tragedy. To be sure, the emphasis on freedom and the quest for ethical self-­consciousness appear to bring their analyses of tragedy into line with their wider role in providing the philosophical basis of liberal individualism. Yet a different conceptualization would see their engagement with tragedy as a site of hesitation in this construction of the individual. This hesitation does not manifest itself in an interest in the chorus as the negation of the individual but rather concentrates on the paradoxes of individualism within the protagonists themselves. The threat to Oedipus’s freedom, to his status as an autonomous individual, does not come from outside in the form of the collective chorus. Rather, what the German idealist reading shows is that the limits of individualism are a constitutive part of the experience of subjectivity. So when Schelling writes of tragedy that the “only genuinely tragic element in tragedy”12 is located in the inner struggle of the hero, it is as important to pause on the struggle as much as on the hypostatization of the individual: The hero of tragedy, one who nonetheless calmly bears all the severity and capriciousness of fate heaped upon his head, represents for just that reason that particular essential nature or unconditioned and absolute in his person . . . ​It is essential that the hero be victorious only through that which is not an effect of nature or chance, and hence only through inner character or disposition, as is always the case with Sophocles.13

The fact that compulsion and the force of necessity do not come from outside, do not reside in nature or chance, does not make the threat to

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the individual less potent. What tragedy reveals to Schelling is the strength of the “inner character” of the protagonist precisely in its weakness. One reading of Schelling would emphasize the power of the subject to constitute itself despite the struggle; another would emphasize the emergence of individuality precisely in and through struggle. The threats to the individual are not a contingent factor; they express the very experience of individualism as such. In its failure to name the specific controls on the individual, Schelling’s tragedy could be read as depoliticized. An alternative reading, however, would argue that what Schelling shows is that the conception of individual who exists in relation to an outside collective was always a fiction. The individual and the collective are always already inter-­articulated. In naming freedom as the central dilemma of tragedy, Schelling may be seen to place an excessive weight on the individual. But Schelling insists: “Freedom cannot exist as mere particularity. This is possible only insofar as it elevates itself to universality.”14 Schelling sees art as the place where this negotiation between universality and particularity takes place: Necessity and freedom, in as much as they are universal concepts, must in art necessarily appear symbolically. Since only human nature is subjected to necessity on the one hand, yet capable of freedom on the other, both concepts must be symbolized in and through human nature, which itself must be represented by individuals who—​as just such natures in which freedom and necessity are bound to one another—​are called persons.15

The tragic protagonist in Schelling’s scheme becomes the symbolic representation of a more universal philosophical proposition. The hero symbolically represents human nature (as a person), but human nature itself is merely a symbolic representation of a universal concept that transcends individuals. In one sense, then, tragedy becomes depoliticized because Schelling subordinates an understanding of its particular internal dynamics to his philosophical universalism. In another way, we could see philosophical universalism itself become politicized. Not only is Schelling’s universal marked by the explicitly political tropology of freedom, through its association with tragedy, it also inevitably takes on some of its specific dynamics:

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The possibility of freedom being overcome by necessity is a thoroughly repugnant thought; just as little, however, can we desire that necessity be overcome by freedom, since this offers to us a vision of the highest anarchy. There thus remains quite naturally no other alternative in this contradiction than that both, necessity and freedom emerge from this struggle simultaneously as victorious and vanquished, and accordingly equal in every respect. But precisely this is doubtlessly the highest manifestation in art, namely, that freedom elevate itself to a position of equity with necessity and that necessity appear as the equal of freedom without the latter losing significance in the process.16

Schelling’s dialectic between individualism and its other, subjectivity and its negation, does not take place in the interaction between the protagonist and the chorus but is rather suffused into the fabric of trag­ ­edy. As Shaw argues: “Tragedy is the highest symbol of the absolute indifference of freedom and necessity. Tragedy in its performance, literally enacts (produces or presents: darstellen) the identity of freedom and necessity.”17

Hegel’s Tragedy in/of the Ethical For Schelling, the seat of tragedy resides in a conflict between freedom and necessity. The internal conflict within the individual is merely a reflection of a more abstract philosophical truth. Schelling’s tragic philosophy may appear individualistic, but Schelling’s tragic individual is never more than a figure of his broader tragic philosophy. Schelling’s individualism is thus mitigated, but he still differs from Hegel, whose youthful tragic philosophy locates the question of tragedy precisely in the conflict between the individual and the collective. In his early essay on Natural Law (1802–3), Hegel enters the debate about the origins of human organization. The concept of “natural law” was opposed to the idea of “positive law.” Where natural law identifies the rational principles of human interaction, “positive law” refers to the codification of particular laws. During the eighteenth century “natural law” became translated into the doctrine of natural rights and formed the basis of, among others, the critiques of monarchical rule. The doctrine of natural rights

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would thus play a crucial role in the American and French revolutions. Hegel’s essay emerges from this context but focuses on two specific strands within “natural law” theory. He makes a distinction between “empiricism” and “formalism.” “Empiricism” is associated with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and differentiates the state of nature and the emergence of civil societies through the establishment of social contracts. Hegel argues that these theorists derived “natural” characteristics from contingent, constructed ones, retrojecting back onto the “state of nature” characteristics that arose in specific civil societies. For Hegel this conception suffers from being “content without form.” “Formalism,” by contrast, described the German philosophical individualism of Kant and Fichte and the political individualism of the French Revolution.18 In this theory the “natural rights” of the person preexist any civil laws, and these laws should derive their basis from these inalienable rights. It is only coexistence that should impact on the freedom of individuals. In contrast to “empiricism,” the “formalist” conception suffers from being “form with­out content.” It cannot show what the specific relationship between legal rights and natural rights should be. In addition, Hegel was sharply critical of the individualism of this approach and argued instead that the ethical community had to form the basis of any analysis of natural law. Moreover, rather than being a product of the “state of nature,” Hegel sees “natural law” emerging at a specific historical stage of human ­development. Hegel’s own theory of natural law, then, both avoids the pitfalls of the “empirical” and the “formal” and also replaces a focus on the individual with an emphasis on intersubjectivity. In particular, as Peter Szondi demonstrates, it is Fichte’s individualism against which Hegel takes particular aim. In a formulation that closely echoes Schelling’s tragic vision, Hegel argues that “Fichte wants to see every action and the whole existence of the individual as an individual supervised, known, and regulated by the universal and the abstractions which are set up in opposition to him.”19 Hegel counters Fichte’s vision with his own account of ethical life that contains within it “that majesty and divinity of the whole state of law which is alien to individuals.”20 Hegel initially models his account of the ethical life on an analysis of the Greek polis. As Axel Honneth argues: “In the essay on natural law,

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whenever Hegel speaks, in a normative sense, of the ethical totality of a society, he has in mind the relations within the city-­states of antiquity. What he admires about them is the romantically transfigured circumstance that, in publicly practised customs, members of the community could also witness the intersubjective expression of their own partic­u­ larity.”21 Taking his cue from Aristotle, Hegel conceives of the ancient city as an exemplar of an organized community. In order to defend itself from outside dangers and to maintain the needs of the city, it formed itself into two classes. “The task that Aristotle assigns to this class is what the Greeks called politeuein, which means living in and with and for one’s people, leading a general life wholly devoted to public interest.”22 This is the class of the free citizens. “The other class consists of those who are not free; it exists in the difference of need and work, and in the law and justice of possession and property; its work concerns the individual and thus does not include the danger of death.”23 This is the class of slaves. The free citizens had freedom, but they also had the responsibility to defend the life of the community through war. The slaves had no freedom, but it was their labor that sustained the political life of the community. This equilibrium in “the absolute ethical life” is undone at some point in the Roman Empire: “With the loss of absolute ethical life and the degradation of the class of nobility, the two formerly separate classes became equals; and, with the loss of freedom, slavery ceased of necessity.”24 Hegel sees in this transition the incipient birth of the modern bourgeois subject. In the absence of the mutual support provided by the two classes, a system of laws has to be put in place to limit the resulting clash of individualisms. The stability of the state is established through the sacrifice of individual freedom that the system of law puts in place. This sacrifice “of the absolute ethical life” is therefore essential to the creation of the modern bourgeois state. As Billings phrases it: “The dialectic of freedom and compulsion that determines ethical life has changed its form: where it used to involve an individual relation to death, it now takes the form of a collective subjection to the law. Hegel understands existence as a constant process of sacrifice, in which the ethical takes on a tragic character.”25 It is at this point that Hegel introduces the language of tragedy into his analysis. It appears at first without explicitly being named in the description of the submission of the ethical life to the “inorganic”:

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This reconciliation lies precisely in the knowledge of necessity, and in the right which ethical life concedes to inorganic nature, and to the subterranean powers by making over and sacrificing to them one part of itself. For the force of the sacrifice lies in facing and objectifying the involvement with the inorganic. This involvement is dissolved by being faced; the inorganic is separated and, recognized for what it is, is itself taken up into indifference while the living, by placing into the inorganic what it knows to be a part of itself and surrendering it to death, has all at once recognized the right of the inorganic and cleansed (gereinigt) itself of it.26

Idealist and Aristotelian terminologies meld in a passage that references “reconciliation,” “recognition,” and “purification.” Collective existence is essentially tragic as it is the “reconciliation” that arises when the loss of freedom resulting from submission to “inorganic” laws is confronted. But Hegel turns away from describing the particular predicament of the community to the “tragedy of the ethical” itself: This is nothing else than the performance of the tragedy in the ethical, which the absolute always plays with itself, that it brings itself forth always in objectivity, in this form thus gives itself over to suffering and death, and raises itself out of its ashes into glory.27

Hegel names the metaphysical process of self-­annihilation a “performance.” The ethical always involves a “sacrifice de soi,” as Bourgeois phrases it, but the “soi” is essentially defined by the sacrifice.28 Despite what seems like an overt reference to Christian martyrdom, the dialectical structure tracks the tragic performance. As Billings phrases it: “Tragedy is an appropriate metaphor for such sacrifice not only because it depicts the death of the individual, but because it arouses the proper cathartic effect. In tragedy, as in Hegel’s history of social life, the viewer understands individual destruction as necessary, acknowledging and transcending the relation to death.”29 Hegel juxtaposes this abstract description of “tragedy in the ethical” to his discussion of the Oresteia: “The picture of this tragedy, defined more particularly for the ethical realm, is the issue of that litigation between the Eumenides (as powers of law in the sphere of difference) and Apollo (the god of indifferenced light) over Orestes, conducted before the organized ethical order, the people of Athens.”30 Hegel sketches a three-­way

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conflict between the Eumenides, Apollo, and the people of Athens. The Eumenides are representative of an archaic divine law; Apollo, the “new Olympian,” stands on the side of the individual Orestes; and the people of Athens are incipient representatives of the laws of the State. Natural law consists in the reconciliation of these competing forces. The establishment of these laws is figured by Hegel as the vote that takes place to determine whether to grant Orestes his acquittal: In the human mode, Athens, as the Areopagus, puts equal votes in the urn of each litigant and recognizes their co-­existence; though it does not thereby compose the conflict or settle the relation between the powers of their bearing on one another. But in the divine mode, as Athene, Athens wholly restores to the people the man [Orestes] who had been involved in difference by the god [Apollo] himself; and through the separation of the powers both of which had their interest in the criminal, it brings about a reconciliation in such a way that the Eumenides would be revered by this people as Divine powers, and would now have their place in the city, so that their savage nature would enjoy (from the altar erected to them in the city below) the sight of Athene enthroned on high on the Acropolis, and thereby pacified.31

Human society in this configuration recognizes the necessary coexistence of human and divine law, individual and collective, but cannot itself bring about the necessary resolution between the different spheres: “The justice of the real and actual State thus admits the incapacity of the (human) law to resolve the fundamental political problem, that is the ethical (or divine) relationship between the political and its other.”32 The human collective is here merely seen as an assemblage of individuals with individual human demands rather than existing as a true ethical community. For this to happen, human society must itself be subject to a higher plane. It is only in the form of Athena that Athens can finally achieve this degree of ethical self-­consciousness. Natural-­familial law and the laws of the State can only be brought together under the sign of Athena, who represents the city’s ethical consciousness beyond mortal divisions. As Miller argues: “Natural law brings together human beings in both their natural and spiritual stage as ethical—​that is intersubjective beings—​rather than either expressing their original state in a

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mythical state of nature prior to conventional law or referring to a higher, intelligible noumenal self that can never be fully captured by conventional law.”33 So Hegel writes: Tragedy consists in this, that ethical nature segregates its inorganic nature (in order not to become embroiled in it), as a fate, and places it outside itself; and by acknowledging this fate in the struggle against it, ethical nature is reconciled with the Divine being as a unity of both.34

Tragedy is defined by Hegel as the “self-­division and the self-­reconciliation of ethical nature.”35 The people are thus only constituted as a people—​ that is, as a true ethical community—​when they separate themselves from the Eumenides in order to be finally reconciled with them by acknowledging their mutual self-­implication: “The opposition between inorganic law and living individuality, between universal and particular, is thus neither excluded nor dismissed; rather it is sublated into the heart of the concept of identity as dynamic opposition.”36 Through its focus on the concept of identity and its necessary internal conflict, Hegel’s discussion of the Oresteia strongly echoes Schelling’s conception of the tragic. Moreover, like Schelling, Hegel locates the real “performance” of tragedy not in the action on the stage but in the abstract interaction of metaphysical forces. Nevertheless, where Schelling’s discussion of identity emerges from his analysis of the tragic fate of the protagonist Oedipus, Hegel’s arises from the dynamic interplay between two collectivities—​the Eumenides and the people of Athens. Although Orestes, Apollo, and Athena all take up their presence on Hegel’s tragic stage, Hegel firmly identifies the life of the community as the proper subject of tragedy. Ultimately it is the fate of the Eumenides—​the figures who make up the chorus in Aeschylus’s final play of the Oresteia—​ around which Hegel’s analysis circles. Well beyond the dramatis personae of his tragic exegesis, it is clear that Hegel turns to tragedy not to understand the ethical consciousness of the single individual but rather to comprehend how the individual as an ethical subject is born through his or her intersubjectivity. Hegel’s essay on Natural Law is founded on the rejection of the atomistic theories of his predecessors. While they understood man in his “natural” state as an

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individual for whom ethical relations are imposed from the outside, Hegel posited a human subject constituted ab origine by his membership in an ethical community.37 Greek tragedy, and Aeschylus’s Oresteia in particular, does not represent an individual protagonist whose individuality is curtailed by the external demands of an ethical collectivity; rather, it depicts the emergence of the tragic subject in and through his or her interaction within a community. Greek tragedy does not so much function in Hegel’s argument as a historical testament to the development of human communities but rather as the aesthetic manifestation of the metaphysics of the subject. There is no individual whose interaction with a collective is experienced as a tragedy. There is only the shared tragedy of subjectivity itself.

Nietzsche’s Principium Individuationis “In reality” writes Nietzsche, “something flows on underneath individ­ uals.”38 Apollo, the figure who looms in Hegel’s analysis of the Oresteia as the shady representative of failed (human/divine) individualism, returns in a new role in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy: Thus in an eccentric sense, one could apply to Apollo what Schopenhauer says about human beings trapped in the veil of maya: “Just as the boatsman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits supported by and trusting the principium individuationis.” (World as Will and Representation) Indeed one could say that Apollo is the most sublime expression of the imperturbable trust in this principle and of the calm sitting-​there of the person trapped within it; one might even describe Apollo as the magnificent divine image (Götterbild) of the principium individuationis, whose gestures and gaze speak to us of all the intense pleasure, wisdom and beauty of “semblance.”39

Nietzsche, like Hegel, sees Apollo as the ultimate representative of the Olympian gods. He is the figurehead of the very Olympians whom, as we saw in a previous chapter, Nietzsche’s Greeks created in order to shield themselves from the futility of being: “The Greeks knew and felt the

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t­ errors and horrors of existence; in order to live at all they had to place in front of these things the resplendent, dream-­figures of the Olympians.”40 In sketching the distinction between the Apolline and the Dionysian, Nietzsche promotes Apollo as the god of illusion: “The Greeks expressed the joyous necessity of dream-­experience in their Apollo: as the god of all image-­making energies, Apollo is also the god of prophecy. According to the etymological root of his name, he is ‘the luminous one’ (der Scheinende), the god of light; as such, he also governs the lovely semblance produced by the inner world of fantasy.”41 Although Apollo represents the fantastical for Nietzsche, Apollonian fantasy remains a bounded fantasy: “But the image of Apollo must also contain that delicate line which the dream-­image may not overstep if its effect is not to become pathological, so that, in the worst case, the semblance would deceive us as if it were crude reality; his image (Bild) must include that measured limitation (maßvolle Begrenzung), that freedom from wilder impulses, that wise calm of the image-­making god.”42 In his capacity as an “image maker” and an “illusionist,” Apollo creates “the row boat” of aesthetic enjoyment that allowed the Greeks to suffer the “furious torments” of their world. Apollo’s identity is thus tied on the one hand to the realm of “appearance” and on the other to the process of “individuation.” Apollo represents “semblance” in its opposition to reality and the “principium individuationis” in its opposition to the “essence of the Dionysiac,” for the Apolline must be contrasted to: The blissful ecstasy which arises from the innermost ground of man, indeed nature itself, whenever this breakdown of the principium individuationis occurs, we catch a glimpse of the essence of the Dionysiac, which is best conveyed by the analogy of intoxification. These Dionysiac stirrings, which, as they grow in intensity, cause subjectivity to vanish to the point of complete self-­forgetting, awaken either under the influence of narcotic drink, which all human beings and peoples who are close to the origins speak in their hymns, or at the approach of spring when the whole of nature is pervaded by the lust for life.43

The Dionysiac is experienced as the loss of individuality to the point of self-­annihilation. The intoxification of the Dionysiac is the antitype to the dream-­state of the Apolline. Like Hegel and Schelling before him,

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Nietzsche turns to tragedy to figure the paradoxes of subjectivity. Where for Schelling and Hegel tragedy acts as a metaphor for the always already circumscribed individual, for Nietzsche the interplay between Apollo and Dionysus enacts the dissolution and reconstitution of the subject. But where for Hegel the loss of individuation is associated with the Christological logic of “sacrifice,” for Nietzsche it resembles blissful ecstasy and the irrepressible life force of spring. In Hegel, it is the human community that provides the inescapable context for the “individual’s” undoing; in Nietzsche, it is the irrepressible pulsations of the natural world. Bounteous nature nourishes the vine that is the source of Dionysiac intoxification, while its “lust for life” is modeled on the arrival of spring. The pervasive naturalism of Nietzsche’s Dionysiac could be contrasted to Hegel’s decidedly polis-­oriented tragic analyses. There is, nevertheless, a certain collectivist dimension to Nietzsche’s Dionysiac yearnings: “In the German Middle Ages, too, ever-­growing throngs roamed from place to place, impelled by the same Dionysiac power, singing and dancing as they went; in these St John’s and St Vitus’ dancers we recognize the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their pre-­history in Asia Minor, extending to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.”44 While nature may set the beat, Nietzsche conjures a decidedly human choreography. Every age, it seems, finds a form in which to express the Dionysiac, but its expression is always collective rather than individual. Indeed, Nietzsche even adds an explicitly political dimension to this description: “There are those who, whether from lack of experience or from dullness of spirit, turn away in scorn and pity from such phenomena, regarding them as ‘popular diseases’ while believing in their own good health.”45 The threat to individuation represented by the Dionysiac comes from below in the form of a populist mob. This interlacing of nature and politics underpins Nietzsche’s most lyrical account of the power of Dionysus: Not only is the bond between human beings renewed by the magic of the Dionysiac, but nature, alienated, inimical, or subjugated, celebrates once more her festival of reconciliation with her lost son, humankind. Freely the earth offers up her gifts, and the beasts of

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prey from mountain and desert approach peace. . . . ​Now the slave is freeman, now all the rigid, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or “impudent fashion” have established between human beings, break asunder. Now, hearing this gospel of universal harmony, each person feels himself to be not simply united, reconciled or merged with his neighbor, but quite literally one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn apart, so that mere shreds of it flutter before the mysterious primordial unity (das Ur-­Eine).46

The Dionysiac reaches beyond romantic alienation to envisage a reconciliation between the human and the natural worlds. But the coming together of nature and human society emerges from a profound reordering of social organization. Slavery and class boundaries must first be dissolved before this harmony can be achieved. Nietzsche weaves an eclectic mix of classical, biblical, and romantic references into his own “Ode to Dionysus.”47 But the tragic intertext is unmistakable. Beyond explicit quotation (“Just as animals now talk and the earth gives milk and honey”48), Nietzsche’s description clearly recasts the first parados of Euripides’s Bacchae: He is sweet upon the mountains. He drops to the earth from the running packs. He wears the holy fawn-­skin. He hunts wild goat and kills it. He delights in the raw flesh. He runs to the mountains of Phrygia, to the mountains of Lydia he runs! He is Bromius who leads us! Evohé! With milk the earth flows! It flows with wine! It runs with nectar of bees! Like frankincense in its fragrance is the blaze of the torch he bears. Flames float out from his trailing wand as he runs, as he dances, kindling the stragglers, spurring with cries, and his long curls stream to the wind!

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And he cries, as they cry, Evohé! On Bacchae! On Bacchae! Follow, glory of golden Tmolus, hymning god with a rumble of drums, with a cry, Evohé! to the Evian god, with a cry of Phrygian cries, when the holy flute like honey plays the sacred song of those who go to the mountain! to the mountain! Then, in ecstasy, like a colt by its grazing mother, the Bacchante runs with flying feet, she leaps!49

If Nietzsche models his vision of the Dionysiac on the Greek tragic chorus, he carries over some of its ambiguity. While, as we have seen in his critique of the modern philosophical approaches, Goldhill assimilates the chorus to a civic collective, in his earlier writings on Greek tragedy the ambivalent positioning of the chorus was given greater prominence.50 Indeed, it was the chorus’s complex negotiation between “collectivity” and “otherness” that he and other critics had repeatedly highlighted.51 The chorus of Euripides’s Bacchae poses a specific challenge to equating choral polyphony to civic or even democratic collectivity. The Bacchic maenads who make up Euripides’s chorus are positioned at the margins of the polis. One could, in a sense, consider them the analogues of the Eumenides, whose integration into the city assures the stability of the incipient democratic state. But the reconciliation that Nietzsche envisages has little in common with Hegel’s. While both see a form of “primordial unity” subtending the apparent contradictions of identity, the political dimensions of their respective “unities” remain starkly divergent. If one compares Nietzsche’s Dionysus ode to Euripides’s, it is true that it is Nietzsche who endows the Dionysiac with political power. Nowhere in Euripides’s text does Bacchic frenzy put the social divisions between freemen and slave under strain. But Nietzsche’s Ur-­Eine is a post-­political utopia. Where Hegel discovers in tragedy an intimation of the political in the necessary intersubjectivity of individuals, Nietzsche

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describes tragic dissolution as the overcoming of the political. Becoming one’s neighbor is not the basis of a politics. Choral collectivity, individuation, and ethical and political consciousness form a complex web in modern philosophical writings on tragedy. While Goldhill and duBois equate an evasion of the chorus with an evasion of politics, Nietzsche’s professedly choral investment in tragedy seems to pose a challenge to this scheme. Embracing the chorus too much or in in the wrong way also seems to have its dangers. Moreover, while the chorus, and the Bacchic chorus in particular, seems to provide the basis of his elaboration of the Dionysiac, elsewhere in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche calls this association into question: It is a matter of indisputable historical record that the only subject-­ matter of Greek tragedy, in its earliest form, was the sufferings of Dionysos, and that for a long time the only hero present on the stage was, accordingly, Dionysos. But one may also say with equal certainty that, right down, to Euripides, Dionysos never ceased to be the tragic hero, and that all famous figures of the Greek stage, ­Prometheus, Oedipus etc., are merely masks of that original hero, Dionysos.52

What does it mean to see Dionysos hiding behind the mask of Oedipus? In his quest for self-­knowledge, Oedipus could be seen as the ultimate representative of the rationalist individualism of the enlightenment. His struggle against the forces of determinism is a struggle both for intellectual freedom and ethical self-­consciousness. In transforming Oedipus’s tragedy into the tragedy of Dionysos, how does Nietzsche reconfigure Oedipus’s individualism? Not only does his fate seem to be interchangeable with that of all other tragic protagonists from Aeschylus’s Prometheus to Euripides’s Pentheus, but he also appears indistinguishable from all the other actors who inhabit the tragic stage. The choral overtones of the Dionysiac had been so strongly emphasized by Nietzsche prior to this passage that it seemed difficult to imagine the tragic protagonists coming under its sway. But here Nietzsche deliberately conflates the chorus and the heroes of tragedy: “Someone or other (I do not know who) once remarked that all individuals, as individuals are comic, and therefore untragic; from which one could conclude that

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the Greeks were quite incapable of tolerating any individuals on the tragic stage.”53 No longer individual and collective, the chorus and the tragic protagonist alike suffer from the same lack of individuation. The very essence of tragedy, Nietzsche seems to suggest, lies in the annihilation of individualism. The comparison between tragedy and comedy that Nietzsche invokes recalls Hegel’s own discussion of comedy, which, as we have seen, he considered to be at a higher stage of development from tragedy. When Hegel argues in his Aesthetics that the comedic actor achieves a greater self-­consciousness than his tragic counterpart, it is comedy’s privileged relationship to subjectivity that he highlights. For Hegel, while tragedy remains mired in “objectivity,” comedy prepares the way for the modern subject. Nietzsche, of course, has no interest in this developmental argument. In naming the Greek incapacity for individualism on the tragic stage, his aim is to uncover the deceptive appearance of the tragic protagonist: Using Plato’s terminology, one would have to say something like this about the tragic figures of the Hellenic stage: the one, truly real Dionysus manifests himself in a multiplicity of figures, in the mask of a fighting hero and, as it were, entangled in the net of the individual will. In the way that he now speaks and acts, the god who appears resembles an erring, striving, suffering individual; and the fact that he appears at all with such epic definiteness and clarity is the effect of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, who interprets to the chorus its Dionysiac condition by means of this symbolic appearance. In truth, however, this hero is the suffering Dionysos of the Mysteries, the god who experiences the suffering of individuation in his own person, of whom wonderful myths recount that he was torn to pieces by the Titans when he was a boy and is now venerated in this condition as Zagreus.54

Nietzsche ironically appropriates the language of Plato’s forms to indicate how the singular Dionysos can manifest himself in the many particular heroes of Greek tragedy. The form of Dionysos becomes caught “in the net of the individual will” of a specific epic figure. But it is only through the illusion of Apollo and the veil he casts over the tragic action that we mistakenly identify individuals on the tragic stage. If Dionysos is singular in Nietzsche’s narrative, that does make him an individual. Dionysos is the unity who is characterized by his disunity. He is the God who

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“experiences the suffering of individuation in his own person.” Dionysos’s identity is constituted in the very sparagmos he incites at the close of Euripides’s Bacchae. The sparagmos, like the Dionysiac itself, is a double figure in Nietzsche. At one level it represents the greatest fear, the greatest suffering imaginable. This image of dispersal, of the complete loss of the self, is the counterpart to the wisdom of Silenus. It is the truth of existence that must be covered over by the veil of Olympian art. At the same time, it is indicated that his being torn to pieces, the genuinely Dionysiac suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth and fire, so that we are to regard the state of individuation as the source and primal cause of all suffering, as something inherently to be rejected. From the smile of Dionysos the Olympian gods were born, from his tears human beings. In this existence as a dismembered god, Dionysos has a double nature; he is both cruel savage demon and mild gentle ruler. But what the epopts hoped for was the rebirth of Dionysos, which we must now understand, by premonition, as the end of individuation. . . . ​Only in the hope of this is there a gleam of the joy on the countenance of a world torn apart and shattered into individuals.55

The only suffering that is greater than the loss of self, then, is maintenance of the boundaries of the self. It is not dismemberment but individuation that is considered the greater calamity. The undoing of individuality may be a source of fear, but it is also, ultimately, a source of joy. Rather than focusing on the shattering of the individual, Nietzsche concentrates on the shattering of the world into individuals. The divided self is a far lesser evil for Nietzsche than the divided world. This, ultimately, is the wisdom of Silenus, the wisdom of Greek tragedy: In the views described here we already have all the constituent elements of a profound and pessimistic way of looking at the world and thus, at the same time, of the doctrine of the Mysteries taught by tragedy: the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is unity; the view that individuation is the primal source of all evil; and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation can be broken, a premonition of unity restored.56

Nietzsche, Schelling, and Hegel, then, all see in tragedy some sort of variation on a Heraclitean unity in difference. For all three, tragedy looks

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beyond identity, beyond the individual subject, and opens onto a self constituted in and through its conflict with the world.

Precarious Life It is not difficult to see why critics have detected a precursor to Freud’s death drive (Todestrieb) in Nietzsche’s Dionysiac with its Silenic celebration of self-­annihilation:57 Their two deities of art, Apollo and Dionysos, provide the starting-­ point for our recognition that there exists in the world of the Greeks an enormous opposition, both in origin and goals, between the Apolline image-­maker or sculptor and the imageless art of music, which is that of Dionysos. These two very different drives (Triebe) exist side by side, mostly in open conflict, stimulating and provoking (reizen) one another to give birth to ever-­new, more vigorous offspring in whom they perpetuate the conflict inherent in the opposition between them, an opposition only apparently bridged by the common term “art”—​until eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic “Will,” they appear paired and, in this pairing, finally engender a work of art which is Dionysiac and Apolline in equal measure: Attic tragedy.58

In designating the Apollonian and the Dionysian as Triebe, Nietzsche lays the groundwork for Beyond the Pleasure Principle.59 The image of Apollo calmly navigating the seas and preserving the individual from the onslaughts of the external world has a strong echo in Freud’s discussion of “elementary organisms”: The instincts which watch over the destinies of these elementary organisms that survive the whole individual, which provide them with a safe shelter while they are defenceless against the stimuli of the external world, which bring about their meeting with other germ-­cells, and so on—​these constitute the sexual instincts. They are conservative in the same sense as the other instincts in that they bring back earlier states of living substance; but they are conservative to a higher degree in that they are particularly resistant to external influence; and they are conservative too in another sense in that they preserve life itself for a comparatively long period. They

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are the true life instincts. They operate against the purpose of the other instincts, which leads, by reason of their function, to death.60

In Freud’s hands, the principium individuationis that Nietzsche identified with Apollo becomes the pleasure principle. It is the life instinct that preserves the individual by providing a safe shelter from the onslaughts of an outside world. But these life instincts also conserve the individ­ ­ual against its internal destruction through death. Nietzsche’s Olympian duel between Apollo and Dionysos is transformed by Freud into a contest between Eros and Thanatos: “Our speculations have suggested that Eros operates from the beginning of life and appears as a ‘life instinct’ in opposition to the ‘death instinct’ which was brought into being by the coming to life of inorganic substance. These speculations seek to solve the riddle of life by supposing that these two instincts were struggling with each other from the very first.”61 In this conflict between different drives (Triebe), Freud envisions a bounded self in conflict not only with an external world but also with itself. Hegel, as we saw, envisioned “the tragedy in the ethical” as the sacrifice of the one part of the self to the inorganic: “The living, by placing into the inorganic what it knows to be a part of itself and surrendering it to death, has all at once recognized the right of the inorganic and cleansed (gereinigt) itself of it.”62 Hegel’s self overcomes death by recognizing its right to coexist with life. Freud appears to come to a similar conclusion: “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything dies for internal reasons—​becomes inorganic once again—​then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death.’   ”63 By locating tragedy within the ethical, Hegel explicitly directs his analysis to human life in a community. Freud, by contrast, self-­consciously parades the nonhuman basis of his investigations. While Hegel populates his essay with Greeks, Freud’s text teems with primitive organisms. And yet Freud would soon give a social context to the discussion of the death drive. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud projects the struggle between Eros and Thanatos onto the screen of culture. Its core thesis about the origins of civilization in the sublimation of aggression restages at the societal level the conflict we previously witnessed at the micro­biological level. Art, literature, music, and even political organization emerge as the

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by-­products of the clash between Eros and Thanatos. If “art” is the term that bridges the conflict between Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysos, civilization is the remainder of the struggle between Freud’s life and death instincts. But there is one cultural by-­product that retains a special place in his narrative: The analogy between the process of civilisation and the path of the individual development may be extended in an important respect. . . . ​The super-­ego of an epoch of civilisation has an origin similar to that of an individual. It is based on the impression left behind by personalities of great leaders—​men of overwhelming force of mind or men in whom one of the human impulsion has found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-­ sided, expression. In many instances the analogy goes still further, in that during their lifetime these figures were—​often enough, even if not always—​mocked and maltreated by others even despatched in cruel fashion. In the same way, indeed, that the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he had met his death by violence. The most arresting example of this fateful conjunction is to be seen in the figure of Jesus Christ—​if, indeed, that figure is not a part of mythology, which called it into being from an obscure memory of that primal event.64

Tragedy is the art form that best expresses the “epoch’s superego.” In the constant va et vient of destructive aggression and instinctual renunciation, civilizations restage the drama of the primal horde. Although it is Jesus Christ who is named here, it is Oedipus who stands behind the mythology of the “primal event.” The great leader and his inevitable fall model the dynamics of civilization. Oedipus is the figure in whom Eros and Thanatos conjoin in the most dramatic fashion. But while Civilisation and Its Discontents tracks the tragic dynamic of culture modeled on Oedipus, it is Freud’s self-­appointed successor, Lacan, who will seal the relationship between Oedipus and the death drive.65 For Lacan it is Oedipus’s fate that illustrates how: “The human being himself is in part outside life, he partakes of the death instinct.”66 While Freud had focused his discussion of Oedipus on Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, Lacan argues that “Oedipus’ analysis is only completed at Colonus.”67 In his return to Freud, Lacan reminds us: “Don’t forget that Oedipus’ unconscious is in fact that fundamental discourse which accounts for the fact that Oedipus’s history has for a long time, forever,

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been written, accounts for the fact that we know it, and for the fact that Oedipus is totally ignorant of it, despite his having been its plaything from the start.”68 As we saw in the previous chapter, Oedipus’s unconscious forms the central plank of Freud’s decentering of the human subject. By showing how the ego is not master in his own home, Freud reveals the fragility of individual consciousness and upends the enlightenment vision of Oedipus. As Shoshana Felman has shown, Freud’s Oedipus demonstrates to Lacan “that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” As he goes on to argue, “the unconscious is the subject unknown to the self, misapprehended, misrecognized by the ego.”69 Lacan, however, reveals the centrality of death to Oedipus’s unconscious: “When we come to talk of death again, I will perhaps try and explain to you the end of Oedipus’ tragedy, as the great dramatists have portrayed it. You should read Oedipus at Colonus. . . . ​There you will discover that the final word of the relation of man to this discourse of which he is ignorant, is death.”70 Lacan turns to a particular passage in Sophocles’s play to elucidate this declaration: In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus says the following: Am I made man in the moment when I cease to be? That is the end of psychoanalysis—​the psychoanalysis of Oedipus is only completed at Colonus, when he tears his face apart. That is the essential moment, which gives the story its meaning.71

Oedipus’s question to Ismene “ὅτ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ εἰμί, τηνικαῦτ᾽ ἄρ᾽ εἴμ᾽ ἀνήρ;” (O.C. 393) (When I no longer exist, then I am a man?) unlocks the drama for Lacan.72 In locating his identity as a man in the moment of his death, Oedipus reveals the identity of the subject in its own negation. Oedipus becomes in Lacan’s terms “the subject beyond a subject.”73 The story of Oedipus’s death at Colonus is exemplary for Lacan because it illustrates the entry of Oedipus into collective discourse through his death. Oedipus: ​You have some hope then that they are concerned with my deliverance? Ismene: ​I have father. The latest sentences of the oracle. Oedipus: ​How are they worded? What do they prophesy? Ismene: ​That you should be much solicited by our people before your death—​and after—​for their welfare. Oedipus: ​And what could anyone hope from such as I?

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Ismene: ​The oracle declares their strength’s in you. Oedipus: ​When I no longer exist, then I am a man? Ismene: ​For the gods who threw you down sustain you now.74

Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus recounts Oedipus’s transition from transgressive individual and social pariah to symbol of collective safety. This transition crucially takes place at the moment of his death. By narrating Oedipus’s metamorphosis from man to myth, Sophocles also narrates Oedipus’s entry into language. Lacan’s aim in turning to Oedipus is to understand the relationship of the ego to discourse. The ego, he argues, “is caught in a chain of symbols. It is an element indispensable to the insertion of the symbolic reality into the reality of the subject, it is tied to the primitive gap of the subject. On account of that, in its original sense, within the psychological life of the human subject it is what appears as closest to, as most intimate with, as on closest terms with death.”75 For Lacan, the ego is close to death because it exists as a nodal point between “the common discourse, in which the subject finds himself caught, alienated, and his psychological reality.”76 Lacan describes the splitting of the self that occurs when one learns to use (an)other’s language. The entry into language is experienced by the subject as a form of death. Oedipus’s death is thus crucial to understanding the nature of his fractured identity. The famous description of the fort-­da game that sets the scene for Beyond the Pleasure Principle is analogized by Freud to the creation of tragedy: Finally, a reminder may be added that the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable. This is convincing proof that, even under the dominance of the pleasure principle, there are ways and means enough of mak­ ­ing what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind. The consideration of these cases and situations, which have a yield of pleasure as their final outcome, should be undertaken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject matter. They are of no use for our purposes, since they presuppose the existence and dominance of the

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pleasure principle; they give no evidence of the operation of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it.77

The “motive for play” that Freud identifies in his young grandson is paralleled by the urge for artistic imitation that persists into adulthood. Tragic poetry would in this sense be a form of repetition compulsion that allowed the spectators to recuperate the “unpleasurable” content of the play in an act of pleasurable spectatorship. Tragedy on this analysis has nothing to do with the death drive because the painful experiences that the spectators witness are filtered through an Apollonian veil of aesthetic enjoyment. But as Lacan argues: “The significance of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that that isn’t enough.” What Freud’s primary masochism teaches us is that, when life has been dispossessed of its speech, its final word can only be the final malediction expressed at the end of Oedipus at Colonus. Life doesn’t want to be healed. The negative therapeutic reaction is fundamental to it. Anyway, what is healing? The realisation of the subject through a speech which comes from elsewhere. This life we’re captive of, this essentially alienated life, ex-­sisting, this life in the other, is as such joined to death, it always returns to death.78

In turning to Oedipus at Colonus, Lacan questions Freud’s understanding of tragedy. Analyzing Oedipus through his end at Colonus reveals how tragedy cannot be contained by the pleasure principle. The real outcome of tragedy is not the life but the death instinct. As Shoshana Felman phrases it: “Beyond the Pleasure Principle stands to The Interpretation of Dreams (the work in which Freud narrates for the first time his discovery of the significance of Oedipus the King) in precisely the same relation in which Oedipus at Colonus stands to Oedipus the King.”79 Lacan replaces the Oedipus of Eros with the Oedipus of Thanatos. In aligning the divided subject of psychoanalysis to the death drive, does Lacan not run the risk of promoting the very mortalist humanism we explored in the previous chapter? In defining us by our finitude and not by our desires, could Lacan be seen to advocate a rather conventional account of common humanity. He will insist otherwise:

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That is what life is—​a detour, a dogged detour, in itself transitory and precarious, and deprived of any significance. Why, in that of its manifestations called man, does something happen, which insists throughout this life, which is called meaning? We call it human, but are we so sure? Is this meaning as human as all that? A meaning is an order, that is to say, a sudden emergence. A meaning is an order which suddenly emerges. A life insists on entering into it, but it expresses something which is perhaps completely beyond this life, since when we get to the root of this life, behind the drama of the passage into existence, we find nothing beyond life conjoined to death.80

The precarious life that Lacan describes is a life without significance. It is not a life given meaning by virtue of its precarity, but a life whose potential for meaning is negated by its telos in death. “The drama of the passage into existence” is completely overshadowed by the tragedy of death. Moreover, where mortalist humanism emphasizes communality as an essential component of human loss, the relationship of Lacan’s divided self to a community is much more circumspect. Nevertheless, both Judith Butler and Lacan predicate their precarious lives on a life lived in common with others. For Lacan, as we saw, it is a subject’s entry into collective language that constitutes both her identity as a subject and her orientation toward death. Butler’s human vulnerability is a recognition of the necessity of intersubjectivity: There is a more general conception of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others: this conception means that we are vulnerable to those we are too young to know and to judge and hence, vulnerable to violence; but also vulnerable to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support of our lives at the other.81

Where Lacan emphasizes discourse as the site of primordial interdependence, Butler pays attention to the bodily needs that open us to others. Bonnie Honig has criticized Butler for failing to recognize a third possibility for human communality between “eradication” and “support.” Draw­ ­ing on Arendt’s concept of natality, she posits action in concert as an

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alternative to the violence of sovereignty that both Lacan and Butler reject for difference reasons. “Action, which expresses what Arendt calls the ‘ontological fact of natality’ is a non-­sovereign performance that works to reconstitute communities and inaugurates new realities. Arendtian action exposes us to mortality, we may die in action, after all; but it is not about grievability.”82 By failing to recognize action, Butler, just like Lacan, subsumes “the drama of the passage into existence” to the tragedy of mourning. Yet if both Lacan and Butler emphasize a life that “does not want to heal,” Lacan nevertheless acknowledges some agency—​one might even say some action in concert—​involved in living such a life: “Anyway, what is healing? The realisation of the subject through a speech which comes from elsewhere.”83

In this chapter I have argued that tragedy is this “speech which comes from elsewhere.” Far from investing in tragedy as a celebration of individualism, modern thinkers have turned to ancient drama to explore the problems of individuation. Rather than finding a prototype for liberal individualism, modernity uncovered in tragedy a model of radical intersubjectivity.84 This intersubjectivity does not just manifest itself through the presence of protagonists in dialogue with a chorus. The recognition of a life and death lived in common is at the core of tragedy whether it is viewed from the perspective of the individual tragic hero(es) or the collective chorus. Even, especially, Oedipus is a subject whose “speech comes from elsewhere” (just as he himself does). Yet, despite this recognition, tragedy could still be seen as lamenting the demise of the individual and mourning the impossibility of collective action. When Hegel figures existence as a form of sacrifice, when Nietzsche talks of the dissolution of the subject as a sparagmos and Freud depicts a life oriented toward death, are they not conceptualizing tragedy as a site of loss? Moreover, when Lacan and Butler, Nietzsche and Freud present the tragic self as a divided self, do they not do so at the expense of the political self? As Honig argues, is action not the price modernity pays for its critique of sovereignty? Or to put it another way, does a politics rooted in the insights of tragedy inevitably give rise to a tragic politics? Despite what Goldhill sees as a disturbing inattention to choral collectivity, from the System-­Programme

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through Marx to Arendt, tragedy has been linked in an essential way to collective action in the form of revolution. The revolutions of modernity may have been animated by the desire of individuals to assert their individuality through the pursuit of freedom. But they have also, undeniably, provided the impetus for action in concert. At the same time it is in revolutions that individuals and communities experience the limits of freedom and the failure of collectivity. Tragedy is the stage on which these paradoxes of the political are repeatedly reenacted.

Epilogue

I n the words of Alan Badiou, “The possible modernity of the tragic is a political question—​as a question for the theory of the subject.”1 One of the central claims of this book is that modernity forges a link between tragedy and revolution. The link is historical: the most influential modern theories of tragedy emerged from the period of the French Revolution. But it is also political and metaphysical because tragedy becomes the modality through which to understand the subject in the wake of the experience of revolution. What can this connection mean for us today? More than half a century after George Steiner signed its death certificate, tragedy remains a preoccupation for literary and cultural critics, for political theorists, and for classicists. I have argued that, if this is the case, it is not just because of the enduring power and value of the Greek tragic texts but because the modern philosophical theorization of tragedy puts a series of questions on the table that we are still confronting. For many classicists this tradition of thought can only represent an extraneous outgrowth from the ancient texts themselves. Turning their back on modernity, classical scholars have looked to the specific contexts of fifth-­century Athens to uncover more “authentic” tragic preoccupations. For those scholars most influenced by Jean-­Pierre Vernant, the rejection of the modern had a pressing ideological motivation. Returning to the raw political arguments of Athenian democracy represented a challenge to the universalizing metaphysical abstractions of German 161

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philosophy. For more than a generation, it has been impossible as a classical scholar to approach these ancient plays politically without rejecting such philosophical readings. My argument throughout this book is that this perspective fundamentally misapprehends the mutual dependency of politics and philosophy. By characterizing the philosophy of the tragic as apolitical, Classicists have insisted on reading the politics of tragedy without turning to a tradition of political thought for which tragedy has been central. The German idealists certainly shifted tragedy’s center of gravity, but this shift was toward rather than away from political concerns. Hegel and Schelling relocate the tragic, moving from pity and fear toward action and conflict. Whether one thinks of tragedy as the clash between freedom and necessity or the conflict between two rights, it is in the wake of German idealism that tragedy becomes truly political in modernity. While Marx, Benjamin, Schmitt, Freud, and Arendt all call the idealist reading into question, their explorations take place within the framework established by postrevolutionary German thought. The tenacity of this framework explains why theorists of the left are still asking about the dangers and possibilities of thinking about “politics in a tragic key.”2 Writing about the connections between capitalism and Christianity in contemporary America, the political theorist William Connolly calls for the adoption of a certain tragic vision: “A tragic drama by Sophocles concentrates a tragic result into a play. A tragic vision builds such a set of possibilities into its fundamental conception of being. You approach a tragic vision if you doubt the providential image of time, reject the compensatory idea that humans can master all the forces that impinge upon life, strive to cultivate wisdom about a world that is neither designed for your benefit nor plastic enough to be putty in your hands, and cultivate temporal sensitivity to how this or that concatenation of events could issue in the worst.” Connolly’s tragic vision resonates both with Nietzsche’s post-­providential philosophy and with Marx’s fundamental insight that “we do not make history in conditions of our choosing.”3 This insight emerges from Marx’s analysis of revolution, an analysis, conducted as we have seen, in a tragic key. But as Raymond Williams shows and as Connolly also suggests, thinking about revolution and tragedy together does not necessarily result in resignation or quiescence. For Alberto Toscano, such an equation is a result of a misunderstanding of the modern t­ radition

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of tragic thought: “There is a tendency . . . ​to present [tragedy] as a condition: a condition of mature and disenchanted engagement, rather than a way of giving shape to the contradictions between intention and consequence, individuality and system, freedom and necessity.”4 We should no longer think of the tragic as a condition but rather as an explanatory structure that makes sense of the paradoxes inherent in action. In Lukács’s words: “The miracle of tragedy is a form-­creating one.”5 As we saw in Chapter 1, for Arendt the Oedipus at Colonus is invoked to explain how action, revolutionary action in this case, becomes meaningful rather than to describe a position of frustrated inaction. Even for Nietzsche, the tragic is not reduced to the Silenean position of self-­annihilation but is rather a dialectic force that gives justification for existence. Although Freud likens the Oedipus complex to a curse “[laid] upon us before our birth,” psychoanalysis in both its Freudian and Lacanian guises turns to tragedy to model its own heuristic practices.6 Rejecting the idea of tragedy as a condition also enables a shift from individual to collective experience. Classicists who have been critical of the philosophy of the tragic have contrasted a modern preoccupation with heroic individualism to an ancient concern with the civic sphere. Such an understanding relies on the assumption that modernity transformed a dynamic ancient art form into an inert and abstract mode of being. It is certainly the case, as we saw in Chapter 2, that when tragedy entered the vocabulary of existence, its texts were caught up in a wider questioning of subjectivity. But as I have been exploring, the subject in question is interrogated in his or her intersubjectivity. Whether one thinks of Schelling agonizing about the limits of Oedipus’s freedom, Schmitt analyzing the source of Hamlet’s melancholy, or Hegel weighing Orestes’s crimes on the Aereopagus, the fate of the tragic hero analyzed by modern philosophy is the fate of a subject immersed in collectivity. Rather than an ancient preoccupation with community and a contemporary fascination with the individual, what emerges is the continuing power of tragedy to communicate the shared predicament of living and dying with others. Beyond these temporal continuities, however, it is also through trag­ ­edy that modernity has confronted the demise of collective experience in a world ever more aware of its own fragmentation. If tragedy and

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r­ evolution emerge as two modern experiences, they do so because both express the anxieties that individuals and collectives face in periods of rapid change and the suffering and confusion that may result from them. It is not surprising that tragedy was the explanatory framework that thinkers have had recourse to in times of emergency. The French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that came in its wake, the two World Wars, the long aftermath of the Shoah, decolonization—​all these events have given rise to profound reflections on tragedy and the tragic. Toscano writes, “It is precisely at the level of a collective historical experience of a crisis—​a crisis that can throw up both the immiserating experience of arrested history or the disorienting one of the collision and stratification of different times and subjectivities—​that a properly modern tragedy can be thought.”7 These reflections on modern tragedy bring us back to George Steiner and Raymond Williams. I have already suggested that decolonization, which marked an intense and perhaps even terminal moment of crisis for the West, may be one of the contexts for the confrontation between these two critics. The death of the West and the death of tragedy seem somehow to be linked. The Cold War is certainly part of the background here too. Although much of my material predates this period, the 1960s produced not only Steiner’s and Williams’s works but also Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic, many of Jean-­ Pierre Vernant’s finest articles as well as Sartre’s Trojan Women and the first tragic plays of Wole Soyinka. Steiner would see these tragic after-­ effects as confirmation of his thesis: It is in the absence of true tragedy that philosophies of the tragic arise in its stead. In Eagleton’s formulation: “Philosophical speculation on tragedy . . . ​flourishes at a point when the form itself seems temporarily exhausted. Those who can, create; those who can’t, philosophize.”8 In this account, Sartre and Soyinka, like Beckett and Ibsen before them, would not qualify as tragedy for Steiner. They may reach for tragic masks, but their plays lack tragedy’s organizing worldview. One is reminded of Hölderlin wrestling with the persistence of tragedy in a world no longer able to comprehend its meaning: “The venerable tragic form has been debased into a means of providing the odd occasion for saying something flashy or tender. But what headway

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could they expect to make with it if they did not choose the subject-­ matter it was intended for and coupled with which alone it maintained its life and sense? It had died, like all other forms when they have lost the living soul for which they served as the organic frame and out of which they were originally bodied forth.”9 Yet I am also reminded of Williams’s ironic retort to Steiner: “War, revolution, poverty, hunger; men reduced to objects and killed from lists; persecution and torture; the many kinds of contemporary martyrdom; however close and insistent the facts, we are not to be moved, in a context of tragedy. Tragedy, we know, is about something else.”10 What, Williams asks, should tragedy be about if not these devastations suffered by individuals and communities? Williams is not arguing here for a kind of universal experience of tragedy. What he has in mind is not the mortalist humanism that Bonnie Honig has so astutely diagnosed and criticized in the modern preoccupation with tragedy. Tragedy, for Williams, speaks to the situation of modernity not because it is timeless but because it is untimely. The catastrophes Williams enumerates are specifically modern catastrophes, the products of iniquitous economic and social organization. Modern Tragedy tracks the tragedy of (late) capitalism. Williams is conscious of the anachrony that results from the juxtaposition of the two words in his title. In returning to antiquity for his explanatory framework, he deliberately reaches beyond the resources of modernity to formulate its critique. But Williams does not just see in tragedy a return to an inert past. For him, the concept of tragedy is already embedded in a rich reception history: “Tragedy is not a single and permanent kind of fact, but a series of experiences and conventions and institutions.”11 Tragedy, for Williams, is always already (also) the philosophy of the tragic. He invests in tragedy as a continuing tradition of anachrony, a timeless residue of untimeliness. That Williams titled his book Modern Tragedy while also being attentive to evolving ideas about the tragic is instructive. The aim of Tragic Modernities has not been to pit Raymond Williams against Jean-­Pierre Vernant or to champion the tragic at the expense of tragedy. Rather, each term can act to draw out the limitations of the other. The philosophy of the tragic took shape, as we have been exploring, at a distinct historical

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and political moment when aesthetic forms took on a metaphysical character. By entering the philosophical idiom, tragedy became part of the armature of modern subjectivity. The idea of the tragic helped the modern subject make sense of her historical situation, her gendered identity, and her political agency. But as Nietzsche, Marx, Vernant, and Honig all highlight in different ways, the tragic can become an obstacle that blocks access to important modes of thinking and acting. The tragic has at times ossified certain conceptions of gender, of revolution, and of the individual, the very conceptions that tragedy has at other times been positioned to unsettle. Vernant and the classical scholars he has inspired have shown us one way in which tragedy can be mobilized to challenge the tragic. But tragedy thus historicized may lose some of its potent political powers. Thus, it is important that the tragic conversely put tragedy into question. The philosophical understanding of tragedy encapsulated in the notion of the tragic constantly asks us to look below the surface of the dramas to the ideas and universals that lie beneath them. The tragic asks us to think of aesthetic forms collaborating in the task of making sense of the world. This is not to say that the tragic itself is universal. It is, as Williams reminds us, a historical concept of universality, itself time-­bound and etched into an ongoing history of tragedy and the tragic. “If tragedy matters to modernity,” Eagleton contends, “it is as much as a theodicy, a metaphysical humanism, a critique of Enlightenment, a displaced form of religion or political nostalgia as it is a question of the slaying at the crossroads, the stench of the Furies or the monster rising from the sea.”12 Moving between Williams and Eagleton, we can see that modernity acts on tragedy just as tragedy acts on modernity. Thus, as Williams suggests, tragedy can also now mean the Oedipus complex, the clash between freedom and necessity, the conflict between two rights and the opposition between Apollo and Dionysus. All of these ideas deepen and extend our understanding of the Greek tragic texts. It is also the case that tragedy has at each of these junctures done something to modernity. The pairing of tragedy and revolution helps explain the alternating sense of advancing forward and lurching backward experienced in the past two centuries. Tragedy maps these revolving temporalities in which we make history but not in circumstances of our own choosing.

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Although today we are not in the French nor the Industrial Revolution, we are in some kind of unspecified global revolution, a revolution that dares not speak its name.13 Perhaps it is because our present revolution does not claim its revolutionariness that we find ourselves turning repeatedly to tragedy and the philosophy of the tragic?

Notes

Introduction

1. Steiner (1961), 3. 2. Steiner (1961), 3. 3. Steiner (1961), 3–4. 4. Steiner (1961), 107. 5. Steiner (1961), 10. 6. Steiner (1961), 324. 7. In naming Raymond Williams “the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals born before the end of the age of Europe (1492– 1945),” Cornel West (1993), 171, indicates how Williams’s Marxism was not incompatible with a certain Eurocentric outlook. His determination to rescue tragedy from bourgeois ideology could be seen as an expression of this Eurocentrism. West nevertheless calls Modern Tragedy an “overlooked gem,” 173. 8. Williams (1979), 211. 9. Surin (1995), 145. 10. For a more recent response to Steiner see Menke (2009). 11. For the best account of this history see Billings (2014b). Szondi (2002), Schmidt (2001), Krell (2005), Lambropoulos (2006), and Goldhill (2012) all provide important context. 12. For one account of modernity’s self-­definition vis-­à-­v is antiquity see Morley (2008). 13. For some other explorations of the relationship between philosophy and tragedy see Stern (2013), Young (2013), Puchner (2010), Bohrer (2009), Rokem (2009), Felski (2008), Sparks and Beistegui (1999), Silk (1996), and Georgopoulos (1993).

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Notes to Pages 4–12

14. Billings (2014b), 1. 15. Poetics 1451b. 16. I explore some of the paradoxes of this relationship in Leonard (2012a). See also Most (2000) and Goldhill (2008), Seidensticker (1996), and Halliwell (1996). 17. Cave (1990) gives a fascinating account of the legacy of the term anagorisis from the Poetics. Halliwell (2002) discusses the reception of Aristotle’s discussion of mimesis. 18. Judet de la Combe (2010) makes a similar argument for the value of this tradition for understanding the (philosophical) “meaning” of these plays. 19. Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet (1988). The book was first published in French in 1972, but many of the individual essays date to the mid-­to late 1960s. Winkler and Zeitlin (1990) is the classic statement of this new orthodoxy. 20. Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet (1988), 89–90. 21. See also Rudnytsky (1987), Armstrong (2005), and Bowlby (2007). 22. I am not suggesting that Freud was merely interested in the myth of Oedipus and had no broader interest in tragedy as such. Indeed, as I discuss in Chapter 4, the introduction of the discussion of Oedipus in the Interpretation of Dreams where Freud explores Sophocles’s relationship to what he calls the “tragedy of destiny” (Schicksalstragödie) demonstrates his broader interest in tragedy and the tragic. Freud does not, however, formulate a theory of tragedy in the manner of the German idealists or Nietzsche after them. On Freud, Aristotle, and tragedy see Ramazani (1991). 23. Freud SE 4, 262. 24. Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet (1988), 89. Despite Vernant’s attention to historical specificity, it is interesting that he seems to inherit a notion of “the tragic” in his claim that Aristotle could not understand “the tragic consciousness.” 25. I explore these themes in greater length in Leonard (2012a). 26. Williams (1966), 45–6. 27. The echoes of Nietzsche’s provocative exploration of the birth and death of tragedy in Vernant’s historicizing analysis are striking. For Vernant, like Nietzsche, the essence of tragedy gives way to a new order of philosophical inquiry governed by the principles of reason. 28. Pirro (2011), 15. 29. On the revolution as a broader context to German intellectual thought in this period see Beiser (1992) and Nauen (1971). 30. Pirro (2011), Butler (2000) and (2004), Honig (2013). 31. Billings (2014b), 4. 32. Steiner (1961), 4. 33. Engels (1954), 158 34. Steiner (1961), 344. 35. Steiner (1961), 343. 36. Steiner (1961), 349. 37. Williams (1966), 203. 38. Williams (1966), 204. 39. Honig (2013), 9.

Notes to Pages 13–18 

ch apter one :

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171

Tragedy and Revolution

1. Williams (1966), 62 2. Arendt (2006), 2. 3. Arendt (2006), 19. 4. Comay (2011), 26. 5. Comay (2011), 26. 6. Comay (2011), 50. 7. Comay (2011), 50. 8. Comay (2011), 51. 9. Arendt (2006), 19. 10. In an earlier essay, Arendt (1958), 7 had characterized the 1956 Hungarian revolution as a “stark and sometimes sublime tragedy.” 11. The French Revolution may have the archetypal “tragic plot” in juxtaposing the pursuit of freedom to the terror, but the terror represents the ultimate man-­ made hubris that no invocation to the gods can hold in check. 12. Karl Jaspers to Hannah Arendt, May 16, 1963—​quoted in Pirro (2001), 28. 13. Jaspers (1969), 103. 14. See Arendt (2006), “The tragedy is that law is made for men, and neither for angels nor for devils,” 74; “We know what happened in France in the form of great tragedy,” 123; “Lewis Mumford recently pointed out how the political importance of the township was never grasped by the founders, and that the failure to incorporate it into either the federal or the state constitution was one of ‘the tragic oversights of post-­revolutionary political development.’ Only ­Jefferson among the founders had a clear premonition of this tragedy,” 227. 15. See above, quoted in Pirro (2001), 31. In speaking of Arendt’s “homeland among the Greeks,” Jaspers reinforces the sense of Arendt’s diasporic identity. This identity may be typically Jewish in its identification with a text rather than a territorial homeland, but it could equally be seen as German in its yearning for Greece. 16. Arendt (2006), 273; Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1225–9, 1143–4. 17. Nietzsche (1999), 23. 18. Nietzsche (1999), 23. 19. Nietzsche (1999), 26. 20. Nietzsche (1999), 33. 21. Euben (2003), 45. For a different perspective on the relationship between theatre and Arendtian politics see Halpern (2011). Halpern’s insightful account reveals the theatrical dimension of Arendt’s conception of politics while also highlighting its paradoxically “antitheatrical” grounding: “Insisting that we can reveal our essential selves only through political action, and not through our artifacts, no matter how brilliantly or subtly wrought, Arendt reduces tragedy to what it was for Aristotle: the imitation or mimesis of action, rather than a form of action itself. To put this differently, tragedy models the self-­disclosure of its dramatic protagonists but does not effect the self-­disclosure of its maker,” 556.

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Notes to Pages 19–22

22. Arendt (2006), 273. On the reference to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in this passage see also Gottlieb (2011), 46–7. 23. Arendt thus contrasts Silenus’s “antinatalist” philosophy to her own philosophy of natality; see Arendt (1998), 247: “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born.” 24. μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νικᾷ λόγον: τὸ δ᾽, ἐπεὶ φανῇ, βῆναι κεῖθεν ὅθεν περ ἥκει, πολὺ δεύτερον, ὡς τάχιστα. ὡς εὖτ᾽ ἂν τὸ νέον παρῇ κούφας ἀφροσύνας φέρον, τίς πλαγὰ πολύμοχθος ἔξω; τίς οὐ καμάτων ἔνι; φθόνος, στάσεις, ἔρις, μάχαι καὶ φόνοι: τό τε κατάμεμπτον ἐπιλέλογχε πύματον ἀκρατὲς ἀπροσόμιλον γῆρας ἄφιλον, ἵνα πρόπαντα κακὰ κακῶν ξυνοικεῖ. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1225–1239. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Sophocles I. 2nd ed. Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 25. Easterling (2009), 165. 26. Easterling (2009), 167. 27. Heidegger (2000), 162. This redefinition of the political is also behind Arendt and Heidegger’s frustration with Seneca’s and Aquinas’s translation of Aristotle’s phrase zôon politikon with the Latin phrase animal sociale: “More than any elaborate theory, this unconscious substitution of the social for the political betrays the extent to which the original Greek understanding of politics had been lost.” Arendt (1998), 23. 28. Heidegger (1992), 90. 29. Heidegger (1992), 96. 30. Arendt (2006), 273. 31. Easterling (2009), 167. 32. Cassin (1990), 49. 33. Θησεύς: οὔτ᾽ εἴ τι μῆκος τῶν λόγων ἔθου πλέον, τέκνοισι τερφθεὶς τοῖσδε, θαυμάσας ἔχω, οὔτ᾽ εἰ πρὸ τοὐμοῦ προύλαβες τὰ τῶνδ᾽ ἔπη. βάρος γὰρ ἡμᾶς οὐδὲν ἐκ τούτων ἔχει. οὐ γὰρ λόγοισι τὸν βίον σπουδάζομεν λαμπρὸν ποεῖσθαι μᾶλλον ἢ τοῖς δρωμένοις. δείκνυμι δ᾽: ὧν γὰρ ὤμοσ᾽ οὐκ ἐψευσάμην οὐδέν σε, πρέσβυ: τάσδε γὰρ πάρειμ᾽ ἄγων ζώσας, ἀκραιφνεῖς τῶν κατηπειλημένων.

Notes to Pages 22–30 

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173

Sophocles, O.C., 1139–1147. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald (adapted). Sophocles I. 3rd ed. Edited and translated by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 34. Arendt (1998), 179. 35. I owe this insight and the argument and formulation of the following paragraph to Stephen Kidd. 36. Aristotle Politics 1252b. 37. Arendt (2006), 207. 38. Arendt (2006), 208, 209. 39. Arendt (2006), 212. 40. Arendt has been criticized on a number of accounts for her championing of the American Revolution. Her failure to see the maintenance of slavery as fatally compromising its “pursuit of freedom” is perhaps her argument’s most significant flaw. Arendt’s silence on the Haitian Revolution is also significant here; see Scott (2004). If, as Arendt suggests, revolution and modernity are co-­constitutive, why should she limit herself to the French and American examples? This choice clearly has important implications for her account of both revolution and modernity. 41. Arendt (2006), 272. 42. Arendt’s discussion in On Revolution extends her analysis of poetry in The Human Condition. There she highlights the role of poetry in creating the “permanence of the world” and explores poetry’s intermediate position between “work” and “action.” 43. Arendt (2006), 272. 44. Arendt (2006), 272. 45. Arendt (2006), 272–3. 46. Arendt (1998), 187. 47. Arendt (1998), 188. For the Hegelian context for Arendt’s discussion of tragedy and action see Speight (2002). 48. Arendt (2006), 273. 49. Marx (1984), 10. 50. See Mazlish (1972). 51. See Paolucci and Paolucci (1962). 52. See White (1973), who identifies “tragedy” as one of the dominant “emplotments” of historical writing in the nineteenth century. 53. Žižek (2009). 54. Marx (1975), 247–8; quoted in Žižek (2009), 2. On this passage see also Prawer (1976), 64–65. 55. See McLellan (1975), xiii, and Kamber (1996). 56. On the wider resonance of Prometheus in German philosophy see Lecznar (2012). 57. Ghisalberti (1997), 413. 58. Marx (1976), 102. 59. Marx (1984), 9.

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Notes to Pages 31–44

60. For a counterargument that insists on the “antitheatricality” of Arendt’s thought see Halpern (2011). For Halpern, it is precisely this emphasis on mimesis that renders Arendt’s thought antitheatrical. See above, note 20. 61. Ghisalberti (1997), 415. 62. Marx (1984), 12. See Richardson (forthcoming) for a fascinating account of the publication of Napoleon III’s History of Julius Caesar, which provides a crucial context for Marx’s analysis. 63. Marx (1984), 11. 64. Marx (1984), 12. 65. Hegel (1975b). 66. In his article “Comments on the North American Events,” Marx offers a fascinating portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his successful revolution, which he characterizes in dramatic terms: “Nowadays, when the insignificant struts about melodramatically on this side of the Atlantic, is it of no significance at all that the significant is clothed in everyday dress in the new world? [ . . . ​] The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world! Hegel once observed that comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning. Although Lincoln does not possess the grandiloquence of historical action, as an average man of the people he has its humour,” Marx and Engels (1984), 250–1. I thank Hauke Brunk for bringing this passage to my attention. 67. Stallybrass (1998), 6. 68. Derrida (2006), 142. 69. Derrida (2006), 144. 70. Arendt (2006), 61. 71. Arendt (1973). 72. Williams (1966), 13. 73. Williams (1966), 13. 74. Eagleton (2003), 15. 75. McCallum (2007), 232. 76. Williams (1966), 49. 77. Williams (1966), 49. 78. Williams (1966), 63. 79. Williams (1966), 64. 80. Williams (1966), 74. 81. McCallum (2007), 239. ch apter t wo :



Tragedy and Metaphysics

1. Dillon (1996), 129. 2. Szondi (2002), 1. For a counter-­narrative that maps continuity see Lurje (2004). 3. For the context of the Tübingen Stift see Jacobs (1989). 4. Lacoue-­L abarthe and Nancy (1988), 40.

Notes to Pages 44–59 

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5. Critchley (2001), 67. 6. Critchley (2001), 64. 7. Lacoue-­L abarthe and Nancy (1988), 32. 8. Schmidt (2001), 84–5. 9. Krell (2005), 2. 10. Schmidt (2001), 85. 11. The influence of Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters is also key; see Gethmann-­Siefert (1984). 12. Schmidt (2001), 85 13. Greineder (2007), 9. Greineder also explores the importance of Winckelmann in the changing philosophical understanding of mythology in the late eighteenth century. 14. Schmidt (2001), 85. 15. Schmidt (2001), 84 16. Schmidt (2001), 84. 17. Critchley (2001), 67. 18. Although Krell (2005), 17–18 and 42–4, puts forward a knowingly provocative argument for seeing Nietzsche as the author of this text. 19. Krell (2005), 17. 20. Critchley (2001), 67. 21. On this diagnosis see Morley (2008). 22. Schmidt (2001), 82. 23. Krell (2005), 43. 24. Quoted in Szondi (2002), 8. 25. Schelling (1980), 192. 26. Schmidt (2001), 73. 27. Schelling (1980), 192–3. 28. Lacoue-­L abarthe (2003), 12. 29. Lacoue-­L abarthe (2003), 12. 30. Shaw (2010), 36. See also Loock (2007). 31. Distaso (2004), 110. 32. Schelling (1980), 193. 33. Schelling (1980), 194. 34. Shaw (2010), 36. 35. Schelling (1980), 194. 36. Schelling (1980), 157. 37. Shaw (2010), 35. 38. Distaso (2004), 109. 39. Schelling (1980), 195–6. 40. Lacoue-­L abarthe (2003), 11. 41. Hegel (1902), 298. 42. Hegel (1902), 296–7. 43. Lacoue-­L abarthe (2003), 12. 44. Hegel (1902), 297–8. 45. Hegel (1948), 204–5.

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Notes to Pages 60–73

46. Billings (2011), 207. 47. Hegel (1975b), 105. 48. Szondi (2002), 15. 49. Hegel (1975b), 124. 50. Schmidt (2001), 89. 51. Hegel does, however, juxtapose this very abstract description of the tragic to a(n equally abstract) reading of the Eumenides; see Chapter 5. 52. Schmidt (2001), 90. 53. Schmidt (2001), 191. 54. Nietzsche (1999), 14. 55. Nietzsche (1999), 69. 56. Nietzsche (1999), 64. 57. Nietzsche (1999), 70. 58. Nietzsche (1999), 13. 59. Nietzsche (1999), 14. 60. Krell (2005), 43. 61. Nietzsche (1999), 14. 62. Szondi (2002), 41–2. 63. Nietzsche (1999), 39–40. 64. Szondi (2002), 42–3. 65. Schmidt (2001), 194. 66. Heidegger (1975), 44. 67. Sophocles, Antigone 332. Translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff. Sophocles I. 3rd ed. Edited by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 68. Heidegger (2000), 159. 69. Heidegger (2000), 165. 70. See Most (2002), Schmidt (2001), and Fleming (forthcoming). 71. Schmidt (2001), 245. ch apter thr ee :

Tragedy and History

1. For a discussion of this debate from the perspective of classical reception see Goldhill (2010) and Martindale (2010). 2. See Gross (2007). 3. Hamlet or Hecuba was first published in German in 1956, but because of Schmitt’s compromised position within Germany it received relatively little attention. During the 1980s as Schmitt began to achieve a new centrality in political theory, his Hamlet text started to attract the attention of scholars from different disciplines. It was translated into Italian in 1983 and into French in 1992 and received its first full translation into English only in 2009. On the circumstances of the first Italian translation and the broader reception of this text see Sitze (2012). Since the English translation the text has produced many fine readings; see Santner (2012), Hammill and Lupton (2012), Critchley and Webster (2013), and the essays in the special volume of Telos (2010).

Notes to Pages 74–81 

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177

4. Schmitt (2009), 4. 5. Pan (2009), 70. 6. Pan (2009). 7. Adorno (1991), 42. 8. Adorno (1991), 38. 9. Pan (2009), 74. 10. Schmitt (2009), 33. 11. Schmitt (2009), 9. 12. Schmitt (2009), 32–3. 13. Schmitt (2009), 33. 14. Kahn (2003), 69. 15. Schmitt (2009), 32. 16. Schmitt (2009), 35. 17. Schmitt (2009), 35. 18. Schmitt (2009), 35. 19. Schmitt (2009), 12. 20. Schmitt (2009), 18. 21. Schmitt appears to base his historical analysis on two works of Shakespearean scholarship: F. G. Fleay, A Chronicle of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare, Player, Poet, and Playmaker (London, 1886), and Lilian Winstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession (London, 1921; translated into German in 1952). See Schmitt (2009), 26 n.15. 22. Schmitt (2009), 19. 23. Schmitt (2009), 19. 24. See Galli (2012), 72. 25. Strathausen (2010), 19. 26. Schmitt (2009), 52. 27. Schmitt (2009), 22. 28. Schmitt (2009), 23. 29. Schmitt (2009), 25. 30. Schmitt (2009), 30. 31. Critchley and Webster (2013), 61. 32. Rust and Lupton (2009), xxvi–xxvii. 33. Strathausen (2010), 20. 34. Schmitt (2009), 32. 35. Schmitt (2009), 33. 36. Schmitt (2009), 33. 37. Schmitt (2009), 34. 38. Schmitt (2009), 37. 39. Schmitt (2009), 38. 40. Schmitt (2009), 40. 41. Shakespeare, Hamlet 2.2; Schmitt chooses to quote from the text of the First Quarto [1603] because it originated before James I’s accession to the throne. He argues that after his accession to the throne the reference to being “bereft” of the “Crown” had to be omitted. See Schmitt (2009), 43 n.31.

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Notes to Pages 82–99

42. Schmitt (2009), 43. 43. Schmitt (2009), 44. 44. Trüstedt (2010), 102–3. 45. Benjamin (1977), 60. 46. Benjamin (1977), 62. 47. Benjamin (1977), 101. 48. Benjamin (1977), 101. 49. Benjamin (1977), 101. For a more nuanced and fully developed discussion of Benjamin’s “historicism,” see Billings (forthcoming). 50. Benjamin (1977), 102. 51. Benjamin (1977), 102. 52. Nietzsche (1999), 33. See Taxidou (2004), 76. 53. Schmitt (2009), 45–6. 54. Schmitt (2009), 46. 55. Schmitt (2009), 48. 56. Schmitt (2009), 45. 57. Schmitt (2009), 49. 58. Trüstedt (2010), 102–3. 59. Benjamin (1977), 119. 60. Trüstedt (2010), 103. 61. Hölderlin (2009), 146. 62. Schmidt (2001), 137. 63. Winckelmann (1756), 3. 64. Ferris (2000), 32. 65. Hölderlin (2009), 207 (translation slightly adapted). For a classic reading of this letter see Szondi (1978). 66. Schmidt (2001), 139. 67. Hölderlin (2009), 207. 68. Lacoue-­L abarthe (1989), 243. 69. Lacoue-­L abarthe (1989), 243–4. 70. Foti (2006), 80. 71. Hölderlin (2009), 207–8. 72. Lacoue-­L abarthe (1989), 245. 73. Quoted in Schmidt (2001), 166. 74. Lacoue-­L abarthe (1989), 242. 75. Billings (2011), 273. 76. Billings (2011), 273. 77. Hegel (1948), 204–5. 78. White (1973). 79. See Janicaud (1975), Cohen (2005), and Leonard (2012b). 80. Hegel (1948), 199–200. 81. Hegel (1942). See Leonard (2012b), Doull (1973), Avineri (1963), and Yovel (1998). 82. There are parallels here with Steiner’s (1961) discussion of the impossibility of a Jewish tragedy.

Notes to Pages 100–106 

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83. See Leonard (2012b) and Cohen (2005), 76. On the essentially Christianizing dimension of Hegel’s tragic vision see also Goldhill (forthcoming) and Billings (2014b). 84. Beistegui (2000), 20. 85. Hegel (1977), 261 does end the previous chapter on “Reason” with an exact quotation from Antigone (l. 456–7), which locates the discussion of the subsequent chapter on “spirit.” 86. Hegel (1977), 268. 87. Hegel (1977), 268. 88. Beistegui (2000), 21. 89. Hegel (1977), 273. 90. Hegel (1977), 274. 91. Hegel (1977), 274. 92. Hegel (1977), 275. 93. See Derrida (1986), 170ff. 94. οὐ γάρ ποτ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἄν, εἰ τέκνων μήτηρ ἔφυν, οὔτ᾽ εἰ πόσις μοι κατθανὼν ἐτήκετο, βίᾳ πολιτῶν τόνδ᾽ ἂν ᾐρόμην πόνον. τίνος νόμου δὴ ταῦτα πρὸς χάριν λέγω; πόσις μὲν ἄν μοι κατθανόντος ἄλλος ἦν, καὶ παῖς ἀπ᾽ ἄλλου φωτός, εἰ τοῦδ᾽ ἤμπλακον, μητρὸς δ᾽ ἐν ῞Αιδου καὶ πατρὸς κεκευθότοιν οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἀδελφὸς ὅστις ἂν βλάστοι ποτέ. τοιῷδε μέντοι σ᾽ ἐκπροτιμήσασ᾽ ἐγὼ νόμῳ Κρέοντι ταῦτ᾽ ἔδοξ᾽ ἁμαρτάνειν καὶ δεινὰ τολμᾶν, ὦ κασίγνητον κάρα. Sophocles, Antigone 905-­15. Translated by Elizabeth Wykoff. Sophocles I. 3rd ed. Edited by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 95. See Gellrich (1988), 56–7. Honig (2013) provides a counterargument to this tradition of viewing the speech as “offensive” and emphasizes, instead, its citational “reason(s).” 96. Hegel (1977), 275. 97. Hegel (1974), 386. 98. Hegel (1977), 289. 99. Beistegui and Sparks (2000), 21. 100. Hegel (1977), 19. 101. Beistegui (2000), 29. 102. Critchley and Webster (2013), 83. 103. φανερὸν δὲ ἐκ τῶν εἰρημένων καὶ ὅτι οὐ τὸ τὰ γενόμενα λέγειν, τοῦτο ποιητοῦ ἔργον ἐστίν, ἀλλ᾽ οἷα ἂν γένοιτο καὶ τὰ δυνατὰ κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς ἢ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον. ὁ γὰρ ἱστορικὸς καὶ ὁ ποιητὴς οὐ τῷ ἢ ἔμμετρα λέγειν ἢ ἄμετρα διαφέρουσιν. εἴη γὰρ ἂν τὰ ῾Ηροδότου εἰς μέτρα τεθῆναι καὶ οὐδὲν ἧττον ἂν εἴη ἱστορία τις μετὰ μέτρου ἢ ἄνευ μέτρων: ἀλλὰ τούτῳ διαφέρει, τῷ τὸν μὲν τὰ γενόμενα λέγειν, τὸν δὲ οἷα ἂν γένοιτο. διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις

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Notes to Pages 106–115

ἱστορίας ἐστίν: ἡ μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον λέγει. Aristotle, Poetics 1451b. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 104. Benjamin (1977), 101. ch apter four :

Tragedy and Gender

1. Butler (2000), 57, based on the discussion of Steiner (1984), 18. See Seery (2006) for a critical discussion of Butler’s relationship to Steiner. 2. Armstrong (2005). 3. Bowlby (2007), Butler (2000), Honig (2010) and (2013). 4. For a classic feminist discussion of the Oedipus complex see Mitchell (2000), 61–73. 5. Freud SE xxi, 229, 226. 6. Freud SE xxi, 226. 7. Freud SE xx, 212. 8. Rudnytsky (1987). 9. See Armstrong (2005), 47–2, and Forrester (1980), 84–96. 10. Armstrong (2005), 52. 11. Armstrong (2005), 47. 12. Masson (1985), 272. 13. Freud SE iv, 261. 14. Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet (1988), 87. 15. For the influence of these theatrical productions on Freud see Armstrong (1999) and Macintosh (2009). 16. Rudnytsky (1987), Armstrong (2005), Le Rider (2002). 17. Freud SE iv, 262. 18. See paradigmatically Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet (1988) and the articles collected in Winkler and Zeitlin (1990). 19. Steiner (1961). 20. Lambropoulos (2006), 7. 21. The influence of this philosophical tradition on Freud’s Oedipus is sketched by Rudnytsky (1987). Freud’s wider relationship to German idealism and Germany philosophy is discussed in Ffytche (2011) and Nicholls and Liebscher (2010). Although Freud’s direct engagement with specific texts is difficult to establish, it is clear that he had read some Schelling and that he was familiar, at the very least secondhand, with many of Hegel’s writings. 22. Schelling (1980). 23. Lacoue-­L abarthe (2003), 8. For Oedipus as philosopher see also Goux (1993). 24. Hegel (1902), 298. 25. I am concentrating here on the iconography of Oedipus that surrounded Freud, but it would also be possible to explore the performance history that influenced his particular understanding of the tragedy. In particular, one could investigate how, through the intermediary of Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and

Notes to Pages 116–127 

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­Literature (1809), idealism left its mark on performances of Greek tragedy through­ ­out the nineteenth century. Armstrong (1999) and Macintosh (2009) have written extensively about the importance of these theatrical representations for Freud, though Armstrong (2012) is more skeptical about the possibility of tying Freud’s reading to particular performances. Hugo Von Hofmannsthal’s play Oedipus and the Sphinx (1906), which itself displays the influence of idealism, may also have played a role in Freud’s choice of iconography. 26. Armstrong (2005), 54. For an interesting discussion of Freud’s identification with the Ingres portrait and its relation to questions of female sexuality see Renger (2013), 47–59. 27. Freud SE iv, 262. 28. There are, of course, important differences between Schelling’s and Hegel’s readings of Oedipus that I explore elsewhere in this book. See also Szondi (2002) and Lacoue-­L abarthe (2003) for a more detailed analysis. What I am emphasizing here is the important overlap in their understanding of Oedipus whose freedom is linked in a distinctive way to his capacity to reason. 29. Freud SE iv, 262. 30. Armstrong (2005), 51. 31. Winter (1999), 29. 32. Translated by David Grene. Sophocles 1. 3rd ed. Edited by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 33. Jones (1953–57), 2:14. 34. Jones (1953–57), 2:14. 35. My thanks to Bonnie Honig for urging me to think harder about this anecdote. 36. Rudnytsky (1987), 5. 37. Hölderlin (1988), 152. 38. Nietzsche (1968), 106. 39. Freud SE iv, 263. 40. Hegel (1902), 300. 41. Freud SE xxvii, 143. 42. Nietzsche (1999), 47–8. 43. Nietzsche (1999), 47. 44. Translated by David Grene. Sophocles 1. 3rd ed. Edited by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 45. Bowlby (2007), 9. 46. Barthes (1994). 47. Bowlby (2007), 8. 48. Bowlby (2007), 234. 49. Honig (2013) suggests a parallel generic move in her reconfiguration of Antigone as Trauerspiel/melodrama. 50. Butler (2000), cover copy. 51. Butler (2004). 52. Honig (2010), 1. 53. Lacan (1997), 273. 54. Holmes (2013), 169.

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Notes to Pages 127–135

55. In her perceptive review of Antigone’s Claim, Rachel Bowlby (2003) also draws attention to a number of places where Butler’s reading reinforces rather than calls into question Antigone’s universalism. 56. Butler (2000), 79. 57. The essays in Mee and Foley (2011) illustrate the potency of Antigone as a political symbol on the global stage. Honig (2013) investigates Antigone’s continuing role in political theory and activism. 58. Honig (2010), 2. 59. For Hegel’s reading of Antigone see Paolucci and Paolucci (1962), Burian (2010), Leonard (2005), 96–147, and Wilmer and Zukauskaite (2010). 60. Winter (1999), 55. 61. Freud SE xx, 213. ch apter fiv e :

Tragedy and Subjectivity

1. Szondi (2002), Eagleton (2003). 2. Williams (1966), 18, does contain a very brief discussion in which he argues that Greek tragedy is distinctive as “choral tragedy,” but this focus on the chorus does not carry through to his broader discussion of tragedy in the work. Nevertheless, Williams himself was critical of the focus on the tragic hero and the “liberal individual”: “This identification of the ‘world historical individual’ with the ‘tragic hero’ is doubtfully Marxist. It shifts attention from the objective conflict, which is present in the whole action, to the single heroic personality, whom it does not seem necessary to regard as tragic if he in fact embodies ‘the will of the world-­spirit’ or of history,” 35. 3. This distribution of labor between the chorus and the heroes is carried over into Arendt’s discussion of tragedy in the human condition: “In terms of Greek tragedy, this would mean that the story’s direct as well as its universal meaning is revealed by the chorus, which does not imitate and whose comments are pure poetry, whereas the intangible identities of the agents in the story, since they escape all generalization and therefore all reification, can be conveyed only through an imitation of their acting,” Arendt (1998), 187–8. 4. Goldhill (2012), 166. 5. Aristotle, Poetics 1456a, 304. 6. duBois 2014. 7. Billings (2014a), 133–4, pits itself squarely against this narrative: “Around 1800 . . . ​changing intellectual currents . . . ​had begun to produce an interest in the non-­integrationist potential of the Greek chorus which was articulated most influentially in the writings of the German Idealist thinkers. Theories of the Chorus move away from the neo-­A ristotelian account by emphasizing the chorus’s difference from rather than similarity to the protagonists.” 8. Goldhill (forthcoming). 9. Schelling (1989), 259. 10. For a classic debate about “the role of the chorus” inspired by Vernant, see Gould (1996) and Goldhill (1996).

Notes to Pages 136–146 

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11. Goldhill (2012), 168. 12. Schelling (1989), 254. 13. Schelling (1989), 89. 14. Schelling (1989), 254. 15. Schelling (1989), 249. 16. Schelling (1989), 249. 17. Shaw (2010), 106. Shaw sees a difference here between the discussion of tragedy in the Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism and the later Philosophy of Art (1989): “Schelling himself reminds us that this [the indifference between freedom and necessity] was the account given already in the Letters, but this elides a crucial difference. There, the measure of tragedy is practical philosophy and the demand is that freedom be the highest principle of praxis. Because the hero eventually succumbs to fate, tragedy cannot provide a system of ethics. . . . ​Thus, in conclusion, Schelling states that Greek tragedy could not reconcile freedom and necessity. In the Philosophy of Art, however, tragedy is the highest symbol of the indifference of freedom and necessity.” Shaw (2010), 106. 18. Miller (2009), 152. 19. Hegel (1975b), 124. 20. Hegel (1975b), 66. 21. Honneth (1995), 13. 22. Hegel (1975b), 100. 23. Hegel (1975b), 100. 24. Hegel (1975b), 101. 25. Billings (2014b), 154. On the broader Hegelian context of the “tragedy in the ethical” see also Schulte (1992) and Menke (1996). 26. Hegel (1975b), 104. 27. Hegel (1975b), 104. 28. Bourgeois (1986). On this passage see also Lypp (1972). 29. Billings (2011), 208. 30. Hegel (1975b), 105. 31. Hegel (1975b), 105. 32. Bourgeois (1986), 475; my translation. 33. Miller (2009), 156. 34. Hegel (1975b), 105. 35. Szondi (2002), 16. 36. Szondi (2002), 16. 37. Honneth (1995). 38. Nietzsche (1967), 359. 39. Nietzsche (1999), 16–17. 40. Nietzsche (1999), 23. 41. Nietzsche (1999), 16. 42. Nietzsche (1999), 16. 43. Nietzsche (1999), 17. 44. Nietzsche (1999), 17. 45. Nietzsche (1999), 17–18.

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Notes to Pages 147–152

46. Nietzsche (1999), 18. 47. Schiller, Beethoven, and Exodus are directly quoted in this passage. 48. Nietzsche (1999), 18. 49. Χορός ἡδὺς ἐν ὄρεσιν, ὅταν ἐκ θιάσων δρομαί-­ ων πέσῃ πεδόσε, νε-­ βρίδος ἔχων ἱερὸν ἐνδυτόν, ἀγρεύων αἷμα τραγοκτόνον, ὠμοφάγον χάριν, ἱέμε-­ νος ἐς ὄρεα Φρύγια, Λύδι᾽, ὁ δ᾽ ἔξαρχος Βρόμιος, εὐοἷ. ῥεῖ δὲ γάλακτι πέδον, ῥεῖ δ᾽ οἴνῳ, ῥεῖ δὲ μελισσᾶν νέκταρι. Συρίας δ᾽ ὡς λιβάνου κα-­ πνὸν ὁ Βακχεὺς ἀνέχων πυρσώδη φλόγα πεύκας ἐκ νάρθηκος ἀίσσει δρόμῳ καὶ χοροῖσιν πλανάτας ἐρεθίζων ἰαχαῖς τ᾽ ἀναπάλλων, τρυφερόν τε πλόκαμον εἰς αἰθέρα ῥίπτων. ἅμα δ᾽ εὐάσμασι τοιάδ᾽ ἐπιβρέμει: ῏Ω ἴτε βάκχαι, ὦ ἴτε βάκχαι, Τμώλου χρυσορόου χλιδᾷ μέλπετε τὸν Διόνυσον βαρυβρόμων ὑπὸ τυμπάνων, εὔια τὸν εὔιον ἀγαλλόμεναι θεὸν ἐν Φρυγίαισι βοαῖς ἐνοπαῖσί τε, λωτὸς ὅταν εὐκέλαδος ἱερὸς ἱερὰ παίγματα βρέμῃ, σύνοχα φοιτάσιν εἰς ὄρος εἰς ὄρος: ἡδομέ-­ να δ᾽ ἄρα, πῶλος ὅπως ἅμα ματέρι φορβάδι, κῶλον ἄγει ταχύπουν σκιρτήμασι βάκχα. Euripides, Bacchae, 135–167. Translated by William Arrowsmith. Euripides V, edited by David Grene and Richard Latimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. 50. Contrast Goldhill (2012) to Goldhill (1996). 51. Gould (1996). 52. Nietzsche (1999), 51. 53. Nietzsche (1999), 51. 54. Nietzsche (1999), 52. 55. Nietzsche (1999), 52. 56. Nietzsche (1999), 52–3. 57. See, in particular, Gordon (2001), 55–71. 58. Nietzsche (1999), 14.

Notes to Pages 152–158 

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59. Freud notoriously denied the influence of Nietzsche on his thought. Both were influenced by Schopenhauer, whose tragic thought pervades both Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. On the relationship to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the wider context of Freud’s “reluctant philosophy” see Tauber (2010). 60. Freud SE xviii, 40. 61. Freud SE xviii, 61. 62. Hegel (1975b), 104. 63. Freud SE xviii, 38. Elsewhere in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (SE xviii, 45) Freud writes suggestively: “It may be, however, that this belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those illusions which we have created ‘um die Schwere des Daseins zu ertragen’   ”. The quotation comes from Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina, 1.8. 64. Freud SE xxi, 141–2. 65. See Razinsky (2013), 215. 66. Lacan (1988), 90. 67. Lacan (1988), 214. 68. Lacan (1988), 209. 69. Lacan (1978), 59, in Shoshana Felman’s translation (1987), 129. 70. Lacan (1988), 209. 71. Lacan (1988), 214. 72. As Simon Goldhill points out to me, Lacan misses the irony, or even the sarcasm, of Sophocles’s locution “ἄρα”—​“So when I’m dead, I finally get to be a mensch . . .” 73. Lacan (1988), 210. 74. Οἰδίπους: ​ἤδη γὰρ ἔσχες ἐλπίδ᾽ ὡς ἐμοῦ θεοὺς ὤραν τιν᾽ ἕξειν, ὥστε σωθῆναί ποτε; ᾽Ισμήνη: ​ἔγωγε τοῖς νὺν γ᾽, ὦ πάτερ, μαντεύμασιν. Οἰδίπους: ​ποίοισι τούτοις; τί δὲ τεθέσπισται, τέκνον; ᾽Ισμήνη: ​σὲ τοῖς ἐκεῖ ζητητὸν ἀνθρώποις ποτὲ θανόντ᾽ ἔσεσθαι ζῶντά τ᾽ εὐσοίας χάριν. Οἰδίπους: ​τίς δ᾽ ἂν τοιοῦδ᾽ ὑπ᾽ ἀνδρὸς εὖ πράξειεν ἄν; ᾽Ισμήνη: ​ἐν σοὶ τὰ κείνων φασὶ γίγνεσθαι κράτη. Οἰδίπους: ​ὅτ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ εἰμί, τηνικαῦτ᾽ ἄρ᾽ εἴμ᾽ ἀνήρ; ᾽Ισμήνη: ​νῦν γὰρ θεοί σ᾽ ὀρθοῦσι, πρόσθε δ᾽ ὤλλυσαν. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 385–94. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald (slightly adapted). Sophocles I. 3rd ed. Edited by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. ­Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 75. Lacan (1988), 210. 76. Lacan (1988), 210. 77. Freud SE xviii, 17. 78. Lacan (1988), 232–3. 79. Felman (1987), 138. 80. Lacan (1988), 232. 81. Butler (2004), 31.

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Notes to Pages 159–167

82. Honig (2013), 43–4. Honig also configures this debate in terms of a conflict between ethics and politics (17–35). See also Leonard (2005). 83. Lacan (1988), 23. 84. See also Benjamin (2010) for a similar argument about the role of ancient tragedy and philosophy in continental philosophy. Epilogue

1. Badiou (2009), 163. 2. I take the phrase from Toscano (2013). 3. Connolly (2008), 121. 4. Toscano (2013), 28. 5. Lukács (2010), 183. 6. Freud SE iv, 262. 7. Toscano (2013), 29. 8. Eagleton (2003), 17. Eagleton is paraphrasing Roland Galle, but he could have been ventriloquizing Nietzsche. 9. Hölderlin (2009), 146. 10. Williams (1966), 62. 11. Williams (1966), 46. 12. Eagleton (2003), 21. 13. Žižek’s First as Tragedy, then as Farce (2009) names the aftermath of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash as two such unacknowledged revolutions that call, he argues, for a communist response.

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Index

Action, 12, 13, 21–23, 25–27, 30, 31, 36, 41, 53–56, 74, 76, 78, 136, 158–159, 160, 162, 163 Adorno, Theodor, 73, 74–75 Aeschylus, 5; Oresteia by, 28, 141, 143, 163; Prometheus Bound by, 28; Suppliant Women by, 124 Aesthetic autonomy, 74–76, 81, 82, 83 Aesthetics: metaphysics and, 4, 43–44; Freud and, 9; Nietzsche and, 9, 62–63, 65, 85–86, 121; Kant and, 47–48, 75–76; ethics and, 55, 56; Heidegger and, 69–70; System-Programme and, 71; politics and, 74–75; Schmitt and, 74–75, 78, 80–81, 106; Benjamin and, 84, 85, 106; Winckelmann and, 90–91; Hegel and, 106; Hölderlin and, 106 Aesthetics (Hegel), 27, 32, 150 Agency, 3–4, 6, 11, 30, 54 Alienation, 6, 12, 36–40, 49, 131, 147 Altertumswissenschaft, 113 American Constitution, 17 American Revolution, 23–24, 139 “The Anaximander Fragment” ­(Heidegger), 68

An die Nachgeborenen (Brecht), 12 Antigone (Sophocles), 5, 20, 89; Marxism and, 6; Hegel and, 27, 63, 101–104, 121, 123 Antigone’s Claim (Butler), 125–128 Apollo, 92; Hegel and, 57, 114; Nietzsche and, 66, 144–145, 150, 152–153, 154; Dionysus and, 166 Arendt, Hannah, 3, 9, 162; revolu­­ tion and, 13–27; On Revolution by, 13–27, 34, 35, 132, 164; French Revolution and, 16, 23, 35; Nietzsche and, 18–19, 26; Sophocles and, 18–25; Heidegger and, 21; Aristotle and, 23; Oedipus at Colonus and, 17–18, 19, 21–27, 132; American Revolution and, 23–24; The Human Condition by, 25–26, 30; polis and, 26; Marx and, 30–31, 33, 34–35; The Origins of Totalitarianism by, 35; chorus and, 132; natality and, 158–159 Aristotle, 43, 106, 132–135; Poetics by, 4, 5, 84, 133; French Revolution and, 16; Arendt and, 23; Politics by, 23; Hegel and, 60, 140 Armstrong, Richard, 108, 111, 113, 116, 119

197

198 

D 

Art, 54–55; truth and, 44–45; objectivity and, 54; subjectivity and, 54, 76; Nietzsche and, 64–66; Adorno and, 75; Schmitt and, 75–76, 80–81

Bacchae (Euripides), 5, 147–148, 151 Badiou, Alan, 161 Barthes, Roland, 124 Beauty: truth and, 44–45, 48; Hegel and, 98–99 Beckett, Samuel, 5, 164 Beistegui, Miguel de, 101, 105 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 73, 162; history and, 72, 83–90; Schmitt and, 83–90; The Origin of German Tragic Drama by, 83–84; aesthetics and, 84, 85, 106; The Birth of Tragedy and, 85–86 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 152, 156–157 Bildung, 113 Billings, Joshua, 4, 10, 60, 96, 140, 141 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), 18, 30, 63, 65–66, 67, 85–86, 121–122, 144, 149 Böhlendorff, Julius Freiherr, 91, 94–95, 96 Bonaparte, Louis, 31, 33 Bothwell, Earl of, 77 Bourgeois, 32, 33, 140 Bowlby, Rachel, 108, 123–125 Brecht, Bertolt, 11–12 Butler, Judith, 10, 13, 108, 125–128, 158–159

Calderón, 2, 5 Capitalism, 162, 165 Cassin, Barbara, 21 Catharsis, 5, 15, 40, 60, 98, 133, 134 Char, René, 25 Chorus, 131–136; Heidegger and, 69, 70; Sophocles and, 70; individualism and, 136; Nietzsche and, 149–150; System-Programme and, 159–160 Christianity, 2, 46, 53, 59, 100, 162 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 153–154 Class, 140, 147

Index Cold War, 164 Comay, Rebecca, 15 Comedy, 11, 31–32, 150 Connolly, William, 162 Critchley, Simon, 44, 47–48, 105–106

Darnley, Henry Lord, 77 Death: Spirit and, 105; Freud and, 152–154; Oedipus at Colonus and, 155; of Oedipus, 156 Death drive (Todestrieb), 152, 153–154, 157 The Death of Empedocles (Hölderlin), 89, 91, 94 The Death of Tragedy (Steiner), 1, 10, 36 Decolonization, 1, 164 Demiurgos (creator), 30 Democracy, 6, 106, 161–162 Derrida, Jacques, 33–34, 102 Despotism of liberty, 16 Destiny (Schicksal), 99, 118, 119 Determinism, 2, 53, 149 Deus ex machina, 35 Dialectic: of Hegel, 63; Nietzsche and, 64, 67; of Schopenhauer, 67; Hölderlin and, 95–96; Phenomenology of Spirit and, 103; of Schelling, 138; of freedom, 140 Dillon, Michael, 42 Dionysus, 5, 18; Nietzsche and, 67, 146–151, 153, 154; self-annihilation and, 145, 152; Apollo and, 166 Discipline and Punishment (Foucault), 15–16 “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (Freud), 109 Distaso, Leonardo V., 53, 55 Divine Law, 101, 102, 142 Doctrine of natural rights, 138–139 Dran (action), 26, 31, 34 Dreyfus affair, 35 Drives (Triebe), 63, 66, 152, 153 DuBois, Page, 133

Eagleton, Terry, 13, 37, 131–132, 166 “The Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism,” 33, 43–44; Enlightenment and, 45–46;

Index  ­ onotheism of reason and, 45–46; m Christianity and, 46; Kant and, 47; Hegel and, 59; Nietzsche and, 65, 67–68; ethics and, 70; Heidegger and, 70; aesthetics and, 71; chorus and, 159–160 Easterling, Pat, 20 Eighteenth Brumaire (Marx), 27, 28, 30, 31 Electra Complex, 110 Elementary organisms, 152–153 Empiricism, 139 Engels, Friederich, 10–11 Enlightenment, 2, 45–46, 166 Épaisseur triste, 25 Ergon (deed), 22 Eros, 153–154, 157 Ethics: of Kant, 44; of freedom, 54; aesthetics and, 55, 56; Hegel and, 61–62, 138–144, 153–154; metaphysics and, 70; System-Programme and, 70; absolute ethical life, 140; natural law and, 142–143 Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 126 Euben, Peter, 18–19 Euripides, 5, 124, 147–148, 151 Eu zên (living well), 23 Existentialism, 43 Existing (zên), 23

Farce, 31–33 Fate, 54, 99–100, 114–115, 122, 129 Felman, Shoshana, 155, 157 “Female Sexuality” (Freud), 110 Feminism, 109–110, 127, 130 Fernando (Böhlendorff), 94–95, 96 Ferris, David, 91 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 50–51, 61, 139 First as Tragedy and then as Farce (Žižek), 28 Formalism, 139 Fort-da, 156–157 Foucault, Michel, 15–16 Freedom: absolute, 49, 51; Kant and, 50; ethics of, 54; fate and, 54; art and, 54–55; Hegel and, 58, 60; Oedipus

 

199

and, 58, 114–115; necessity and, 60, 137, 166; idealism and, 76; chorus and, 134–135; heroism and, 135; Schelling and, 137; dialectic of, 140 Fremd, 121 French Revolution, 3, 4, 71, 161, 164; German idealism and, 9, 135; ­Williams and, 13; guillotine in, 15–16; Arendt and, 16, 23, 35; ­A ristotle and, 16; Hegel and, 27; Greek tragedy and, 31, 33; Dreyfus affair and, 35; Kant and, 47–48; utopianism and, 48; Hölderlin and, 90, 97; Judaism and, 99; Marx and, 132; doctrine of natural rights and, 139 Freud, Sigmund, 5; Greek tragedy and, 6–7; universalism and, 6–7, 113; The Interpretation of Dreams by, 7, 109, 111–112, 117–118, 157; Armstrong on, 108; “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” by, 109; German idealism and, 109; feminism and, 109–110, 130; “Some Physical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” by, 109–110; “Female Sexuality” by, 110; Oedipus and, 110, 111–122; Totem and Taboo by, 112; Oedipus Tyrannus and, 113–114, 118, 154–155; self-knowledge and, 115; Hegel and, 123, 129, 130; myth and, 123–125; The Question of Lay Analysis by, 129; Winter and, 129; Beyond the Pleasure Principle by, 152, 156– 157; Nietzsche and, 152; elementary organisms and, 152–153; death and, 153; principium individuationis and, 153; Civilization and Its Discontents by, 153–154; Oedipus complex and, 163 Freudian Mythologies (Bowlby), 123–125

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 75 Gender, 108–129; subjectivity and, 4; Oedipus and, 108, 129; humanism and, 109; universalism and, 109, 122–123

200  German idealism, 5; French Revolution and, 9, 135; politics and, 10; Williams and, 38; Nietzsche and, 63; universalism and, 106; Freud and, 109; Schmitt and, 131; Szondi and, 131; Aristotle and, 133; Goldhill and, 134, 135; individualism and, 136; democracy and, 161–162. See also “The Earliest System-Programme of German ­Idealism” Ghisalberti, Giosue, 28–29, 31 Glas (Derrida), 102 Goldhill, Simon, 131, 132–133, 134, 135, 159–160 Goodness, 44, 48 Greineder, Daniel, 46 Guillotine, 15–16

Hamlet (Shakespeare), 77–89, 96, 163 Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time onto the Play (Schmitt), 73–89 Hecuba, 81–83 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 5, 7, 162; Vernant and, 9; Engels and, 10–11; Aesthetics by, 27, 32, 150; ­Antigone and, 27, 63, 101–104, 121, 123; French Revolution and, 27; Phenomenology of Spirit by, 27, 63, 101, 103, 105; The Philosophy of History by, 27, 59, 114–115, 123; Philosophy of Right by, 27, 99; Marx and, 27–32; “The Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism” and, 43, 59; Schelling and, 51, 143; metaphysics and, 56–62, 141; Oedipus and, 56–62, 69, 70, 115, 116, 118, 119; Apollo and, 57, 114; freedom and, 58, 60; Christianity and, 59, 100; “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” by, 59, 61, 62, 97–99, 100; Judaism and, 59–61, 97–100; Aristotle and, 60, 140; heroism and, 60; necessity and, 60; Kant and, 61; Natural Law by, 61, 138, 143–144; ethics and, 61–62, 138–144, 153–154; Nietzsche and, 62–63, 145–146; dialectic of, 63; ­subjectivity and, 66–67, 138–144;

D 

Index history and, 72, 73, 97–106; beauty and, 98–99; Lessing and, 99; Absolute and, 101; Spirit and, 101; aesthetics and, 106; Freud and, 123, 129, 130; philosophy of the tragic and, 125; Butler and, 128; humanism and, 129; chorus and, 133–134; polis and, 139– 140, 146; Oresteia and, 141, 143, 163; self-­annihilation and, 141 Heidegger, Martin, 20–21, 68–70; Ode to Man in the Antigone on, 20, 70; Introduction to ­Metaphysics by, 20, 68, 70; ­Parmenides by, 20–21; Arendt and, 21; Char and, 25; “The Anaximander Fragment” by, 68; Nazis and, 71, 73; Lacan and, 126–127 Heroism, 55, 132; Hegel and, 60; of Hamlet, 82; of Oedipus, 134; freedom and, 135; necessity and, 135; subjectivity and, 135; Schelling on, 136; individualism and, 163; philosophy of the tragic and, 163 Historical anthropology, 6 Historical psychology, 6 Historicism, 8, 9, 101–102 History, 72–107; politics and, 72; Schmitt and, 73–89; Benjamin and, 83–90; Hölderlin and, 89–97; Steiner and, 97; Hegel and, 97–106 Hitler, Adolf, 71 Hobbes, Thomas, 139 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 3, 72, 89–97, 164–165; “The Earli­ ­est ­System-Programme of German Ideal­­ism” and, 43; The Death of Empedocles by, 89, 91, 94; Hyperion by, 89; Böhlendorff and, 91, 94–95, 96; aesthetics and, 106; chorus and, 133–134 Homer, 91, 92, 93 Hommosexualité, 109 Honig, Bonnie, 10, 108, 126–128, 130, 166 Honneth, Axel, 139–140 The Human Condition (Arendt), 25–26, 30 Humanism, 129, 157–158; gender and, 109; Honig and, 126, 130 Hyperion (Hölderlin), 89

Index  Ibsen, Henrik, 5, 164 Idealism, 5, 30, 62, 76. See also German idealism Individualism: philosophy of the tragic and, 131; Aristotle and, 132–133; chorus and, 136; German idealism and, 136; Schelling and, 136–137, 138; of Fichte, 139; of Kant, 139; class and, 140; Greek tragedy and, 144; of Oedipus, 149; Nietzsche and, 150; heroism and, 163 Industrial Revolution, 164 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 115–117 Inorganic, 140–141, 143 International Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 111, 117 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 7, 109, 111–112, 117–118, 157 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger), 68 Ion (Euripides), 124 Irigaray, Luce, 109

James I (king), 77, 78, 80 Jaspers, Karl, 16–17 Jesus Christ, 154 Jones, Ernest, 120 Judaism, 1; Hegel and, 59–61, 97–100; Greek tragedy and, 59–62, 97–98 Jung, Carl, 110

Kahn, Victoria, 76, 78 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 44–45, 47–48, 75– 76; Critique of Judgment by, 15, 44, 45, “The Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism” and, 44; ethics of, 44; Schelling and, 50–56; Hegel and, 61; individualism of, 139 Das Kapital (Marx), 30 Krell, David, 45, 48, 49–50

Lacan, Jacques: Oedipus and, 126–127, 154–156; humanism and, 157–158; subjectivity and, 158–159 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 46, 52–53, 58, 90–91, 95; “The Earliest SystemProgramme of German Idealism” and, 44; Oedipus and, 56, 114

 

201

Lambropoulos, Vassilis, 114 Le Rider, Jacques, 113 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 99 Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (Schelling), 43–44, 50, 51, 56, 67, 114 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 103 Living well (eu zên), 23 Locke, John, 139 Logos, 22 Lorca, Federico García, 5 Lukács, György, 132, 163 Lyric, 81

Marx, Karl, 166; Eighteenth Brumaire by, 27, 28, 30, 31; Hegel and, 27–32; revolution and, 27–35; Aeschylus and, 28; Ghisalberti and, 28–29, 31; Prometheus and, 28, 29, 132; Das Kapital by, 30; Arendt and, 30–31, 33, 34–35; comedy and, 31–32; farce and, 31–33; Stallybrass and, 32–33; Williams and, 38–41; metaphysics and, 42–71; chorus and, 132, 136; French Revolution and, 132; tragic vision of, 162 Marxism, 10–12, 132; optimism of, 2; Antigone and, 6; Vernant and, 8, 9 Mary Queen of Scots, 77 Mazlish, Bruce, 27 McCallum, Pamela, 37, 39 Metaphysics, 42–71; of Christianity, 2; aesthetics and, 4, 43–44; ontological questions and, 42; Williams and, 42; moral theory and, 44; Kant and, 44–45, 47–48; Schelling and, 50–56; Hegel and, 56–62, 141; Nietzsche and, 62–67, 70–71; Schopenhauer and, 66; Heidegger and, 68–70; ethics and, 70 Miller, Elaine P., 142–143 Mimesis, 32, 97 Modern Tragedy (Williams), 2, 8, 35–42, 165 Monotheism of reason, 45–46 Moral theory, 44 Mutter Courage (Brecht), 11–12 Myth: Schmitt and, 87, 88; Shakespeare and, 87–88; Benjamin and, 88; Freud and, 123–125

202 

D 

Myth and Tragedy (Vernant and ­Vidal-Naquet), 6 Mythologies (Barthes), 124 Mythology of reason, 46, 49, 50

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 44, 46 Napoleon I, 31 Natality, 158–159 Das nationelle, 91, 92 Natural law, 138–139, 142–143 Natural Law (Hegel), 61, 138, 143–144 Nazism, 71, 73, 74, 89 Necessity, 134–135; Marxism and, 10–11; Kant and, 50; freedom and, 60, 137, 166; Hegel and, 60; of slavery, 140 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 5, 7, 26, 166; aesthetics and, 9, 62–63, 65, 85–86, 121; The Birth of Tragedy by, 18, 30, 63, 65–66, 67, 85–86, 121–122, 144, 149; Arendt and, 18–19, 26; idealism and, 30; Hegel and, 62–63, 145–146; metaphysics and, 62–67, 70–71; German idealism and, 63; Schelling and, 63, 145–146; Socratism and, 63–64, 67; dialectic and, 64, 67; Wagner and, 64–65; art and, 64–66; “The Earliest System-Programme of German Ideal­ ­ism” and, 65, 67–68; Apollo and, 66, 144–145, 150, 152–153, 154; Oedipus and, 66–67, 121–122; subjectivity and, 66–67, 144–152; Dionysus and, 67, 146–151, 153, 154; Benjamin and, 85–86; Bacchae and, 147–148, 151; politics and, 148–149; chorus and, 149–150; individualism and, 150; Plato and, 150; suffering and, 151; Freud and, 152; self-­annihilation and, 163

Oedipus: Schelling and, 52–56, 57, 114, 118, 119; Christianity and, 53; Lacoue-Labarthe and, 56, 114; Hegel and, 56–62, 69, 70, 115, 116, 118, 119; Sphinx and, 57–58, 62, 69, 111, 115; freedom and, 58, 114–115;

Index ­ hilosophy of History (Hegel) and, P 59; Nietzsche and, 66–67, 121–122; gender and, 108, 129; psychoanalysis and, 108, 111; feminism and, 109; universalism of, 109, 110, 111–122, 119, 123, 129; Freud and, 110, 111– 122; fate and, 114–115, 122; Butler and, 125–128; Lacan and, 126–127, 154–156; heroism of, 134; determinism of, 149; individualism of, 149; unconscious of, 154–155; death of, 156 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), 17–27, 132, 155, 157 Oedipus complex, 7, 109, 111, 163, 166 Oedipus Tyrannus (Sophocles), 5, 6, 7, 11, 89, 113–114, 118, 124, 154–155, 157 “Oedipus without the Complex” ­(Vernant), 6–7 On Revolution (Arendt), 13–27, 34, 35, 132, 164 Oresteia (Aeschylus), 28, 141, 143, 163 The Origin of German Tragic Drama ­(Benjamin), 83–84 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 35

Pan, David, 74, 75 Parmenides (Heidegger), 20–21 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 27, 63, 101, 103, 105 Philhellenism, 9, 46, 49, 112, 113 The Philosophy of Art (Schelling), 56, 57 The Philosophy of History (Hegel), 27, 59, 114–115, 123 Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 27, 99 Pirro, Robert, 9–10 Plato, 4–5, 150 Pleasure principle, 152, 156–157 Poetics (Aristotle), 4, 5, 84, 133 Polis, 17, 19–23, 106, 132; Arendt and, 26; Hegel and, 139–140, 146; Eumenides and, 148 Politics (Aristotle), 23 Polytheism, 45–46

Index  Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Butler), 126 Primordial unity (das Ur-Eine), 147, 148 Principium individuationis, 144, 145, 153 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), 28 Psychoanalysis, 8–9, 123, 129, 157; Schmitt and, 80; Oedipus and, 108, 111; Steiner and, 128

The Question of Lay Analysis (Freud), 129

Racine, 2, 5, 8 Reconciliation (Versöhnung), 64, 99 Reinhard, Julia, 80 Revolution, 13–41, 161; Arendt and, 13–27; of nineteenth century, 14; ­Williams and, 35–41, 162, 165. See also American Revolution; French Revolution Rheinische Zeitung, 28 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 16 Rosenzweig, Franz, 43 Rudnytsky, Peter, 111, 112, 113, 120 Rust, Jennifer, 80

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 164 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 3, 7, 16, 162; “The Earliest SystemProgramme of German Idealism” and, 43–44; Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism by, 43–44, 50, 51, 56, 67, 114; poetry of, 45; Hegel and, 51, 143; “Tenth Letter” by, 51, 56; Greek tragedy and, 52–56; Oedipus and, 52–56, 57, 114, 118, 119; The Philosophy of Art by, 56, 57; The System of Transcendental Idealism by, 56; subjectivity and, 60–61; Nietzsche and, 63, 145–146; chorus and, 133–135; on heroism, 136; individualism and, 136–137, 138; freedom and, 137 Schicksal (destiny), 99, 118, 119 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 37, 46, 91 Schmidt, Dennis, 49, 51–52, 62, 67

 

203

Schmitt, Carl, 3, 9, 162; Nazism and, 73, 74, 89; Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time into the Play by, 73–89; history and, 73–89; aesthetics and, 74–75, 78, 80–81, 106; politics and, 74–75; art and, 75–76, 80–81; Shakespeare and, 77, 132; psychoanalysis and, 80; Benjamin and, 83–90; myth and, 87, 88; Hölderlin and, 96–97; German idealism and, 131; chorus and, 132 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 66, 67 Self-annihilation, 141, 145–146, 152, 163 Shakespeare, William, 2, 5, 132; Greek tragedy and, 77, 87; Hamlet by, 77–89, 96, 163 Shaw, Devin Zane, 53, 54 Silenus, 17–19, 21, 23, 26, 40, 132, 151 Slavery, 140, 147 Socratism, 63–64, 67 “Some Physical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (Freud), 109–110 Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus by, 5, 11, 6, 7, 89, 113–114, 118, 124, 154–155, 157; Oedipus at Colonus by, 17–27, 132, 155, 157; Arendt and, 18–25; Heidegger and, 69, 70; chorus and, 70; Hölderlin and, 89. See also ­Antigone (Sophocles) Soyinka, Wole, 164 Sparagmos, 151, 159 Sphinx, 57–58, 62, 69, 111, 115 Spiel, 81, 82, 88, 96 Spinoza, 50, 51 “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” (Hegel), 59, 61, 62, 97–99, 100 Stallybrass, Peter, 32–33 Steiner, George, 1–3, 108, 161, 164; The Death of Tragedy by, 1, 10, 36; Vernant and, 7–8; on politics, 10; Marxism and, 10–11; history and, 97; Greek tragedy and, 113–114; Butler and, 125; psychoanalysis and, 128; ­Williams and, 165 Strindberg, August, 5 Stuart, Mary, 77, 80

204  Sturm und Drang, 76 Subjectivity, 131–160; gender and, 4; universalism and, 9–10; Kant and, 50; art and, 54, 76; Schelling and, 60–61; Hegel and, 66–67, 138–144; Nietzsche and, 66–67, 144–152; hero­­­ism and, 135; comedy and, 150; Butler and, 158–159; Lacan and, 158–159. See also Individualism Sublime, the, 5, 15, 52, 53, 54, 144 Suffering, 37, 40, 66, 85, 94; Nietzsche and, 151 Sunoikein, 20, 21 Suppliant Women (Aeschylus), 124 The System of Transcendental Idealism (Schelling), 56 Szondi, Peter, 43, 56, 131, 139, 164; Schelling and, 50; on Hegel, 61; on Nietzsche, 66

D 

Index Universalism: Freud and, 6–7, 113; of psychoanalysis, 8–9; subjectivity and, 9–10; German idealism and, 106; gender and, 109, 122–123; of Oedipus, 109, 110, 111–122, 123, 129 Utopianism, 19, 30, 47, 48, 148

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 6–9, 161, 164, 166; Schmitt and, 80; on Oedipus, 112; chorus and, 135 Versöhnung (reconciliation), 64, 99 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 6

Thanatos, 153–154, 157 Todestrieb (death drive), 152, 153–154 Toscano, Alberto, 162–163 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 112 Tragedy Is Not Enough (Jaspers), 17 Trauerspiel, 80, 81, 82, 83–84, 86, 88–89, 96 Trojan Women (Sartre), 164 Trüstedt, Katrin, 83 Tübingen, 43

Wagner, Richard, 26, 64–65 Webster, Jamieson, 105–106 West, Cornell, 13 Williams, Raymond, 2–3, 6, 164; Modern Tragedy by, 2, 8, 35–42, 165; Steiner and, 2, 3, 7, 165; Vernant and, 7–8; psychoanalysis and, 8–9; Marxism and, 11–12, 132; Mutter Courage and, 11–12; French Revolution and, 13; revolution and, 35–41, 162, 165; Eagleton and, 37; German idealism and, 38; Marx and, 38–41; metaphysics and, 42; alienation and, 131; chorus and, 132 Winckelmann, J. J., 46, 49, 90–91, 93 Winter, Sarah, 119–120, 129

Unconscious, 42–43, 72, 73, 123; of Oedipus, 154–155

Zên (existing), 23 Žižek, Slavoj, 13, 28