Hegel’s Poetics of History: Tragic Repetition and Comic Recollection

For Hegel, modern selfhood is an implicitly poetic, normative capacity for actions that could not be empirically explained. Thus it eludes the “clarification” offered by classical tragedy, but modernity’s apparent loss of tragedy conceals the dialectical refinement of tragic into comic form that most defines modern selfhood. If Aristotle contrasted poetry and history, Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit derives a modern, comic ethical poetics from the form of historical contingency itself. Focusing on Hegel’s reading of Antigone, I solicit Gillian Rose and Dieter Henrich to defend this account against tragic assessments of modern selfhood by J. M. Bernstein, Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, and Judith Butler.