On the Tragic Today – from the Perspective of the Subject and the Situation

Abstract

The article challenges the presumption of the death of tragedy from a philosophical perspective and illustrates the survival of the contemporary form of tragedy. – In a brief preamble, the argument traces the influence exerted by the Aristotelian tenets of tragedy, emphasizing the issue of the paradigmatization of Poetics. The article demonstrates the manner in which the history of tragedy in the West has emerged in the light of this foundational treatise. In addition to Aristotle, additional key elements such as myth and its perception further complicated the conception of subsequent tragedies. Later, the development of Western society resulted in a major shift in the comprehension of ourselves: the inception of the Cartesian thinking subject that became the key to both philosophical reflections on human subjectivity and considerations about the possibility of representing tragic subjects in drama. This intertwining of philosophy and artistic representation is particularly pronounced in German Idealist thought, which developed a philosophy of tragedy, and established the subject as the essence of the genre. After Hegel’s demise, a criticism of the idealist perspective was mounted by authors such as Hebbe which led the way to ever-widening discrepancies between the theory and practice of tragedy that culminated in Steiner’s claim of the genre’s death. At the same time, modernism and, most obviously, post-modernism denied the subject’s entirety and, consequently, lay the foundation for its eradication. The existence of tragedy appeared thus to be doubly in doubt. – The following development of the article’s argument is therefore twofold. First, it goes on to prove that with the critique of post-structuralism new perspectives on the subject emerged. Despite the institutionalization of the subject’s disappearance in post-structuralist hypotheses, theoreticians such as Lévinas found a new basis for the self-constitution of the subject. This article shows how Lévinas’s ethical theory lays the groundwork for a post-deconstructive subject that can be found in contemporary tragedies. Secondly, the article returns to the question of tragedy. The argument endorses the current view on tragedy with its »deviation« from the Aristotelian high-brow genre. Thus, it is difficult to claim that tragedy per se exists. Rather, it is a dramatic, conflictual situation that has to fulfil two additional conditions: it has to be at once unavoidable and irresolvable. – Hence, only after re-establishing the subject and after taking into account the state of modern society can one claim that tragedy in its contemporary form as a tragic situation has survived.