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Let us also reread that, at Aulis, [Agamemnon’s] function as commander defines and universalizes him, that he inserts it into a world that is meaningful, but that also, at Aulis, the undeniable— yet denied—allegiance to his offspring likewise singularizes him. The other prescription expels him in advance from the world of arms and ships: a world that, in sacrificing his daughter, he plainly exalts as normative. The denied prescription makes non-meaning penetrate into the universal meaning. To think this double prescription for itself is to make tragic knowing one’s own. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, tragedy, which had been of scant interest to philosophers since Plato and Aristotle, began to move to the forefront of German thought. Not only was this tragic turning of philosophy sustained well into the nineteenth century, it also surfaced anew in the first half of the twentieth century in the work of Martin Heidegger. Whereas Plato and Aristotle were concerned with the question of the educational and political impact of tragedy, or with its poetics, the German thinkers focused not so much on tragedy as a dramatic form (although Hölderlin took pains to study it as such, and Hegel does explore it in his Lectures on Aesthetics), but on the very essence and philosophical thought-structure of the tragic, and ultimately on the role of the tragic paradigm in philosophy. Although such a focus is not wholly alien to the therapeutic concern that runs throughout much of the Western philosophical tradition—a concern for the assuaging of human suffering through a discipline of thought (here the interest of German Idealism in Spinoza is relevant, although Spinoza’s thought did not directly motivate 7 ONE The Tragic Turning and Tragic Paradigm in Philosophy Hölderlin’s work on tragedy1 )—the tragic turning of German philosophy is unique and striking enough to provoke a quest for an explanation. Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks offer one that is perceptive and thought-provoking : tragedy, in their interpretation, offered the prospect of bridging the abyss between natural necessity and human freedom, or between pure theoretical and practical reason, that yawned in the wake of Kant’s critical philosophy.2 Enticing though this analysis is—particularly in the way it revisits the Kantian sublime as “the site of the presentation of the unrepresentable”—its preoccupation with the issue of freedom responds primarily to Schelling’s theory of tragedy (which nevertheless is given no place in de Beistegui and Sparks’s edited volume),3 rather than to the tragic thought of Hegel, Hölderlin, Nietzsche , or Heidegger. Most conspicuously, the analysis does not address the prominence of the question of history or historicity in the tragic turning of philosophy from Hölderlin and Hegel to Heidegger, and beyond. It also does not seek to clarify in any way the striking prominence of Sophoclean tragedy in German philosophical discussion; for, notwithstanding Hegel’s interest in Aeschylus’s Oresteia and in Shakespearean tragedy, German Idealism remained almost obsessively preoccupied with two of Sophocles’ three Theban plays: Oedipus Tyrannos and Antigone; and Heidegger sustains this preoccupation . Euripides, cast by Nietzsche as a destroyer of Attic tragedy, is otherwise accorded hardly a mention; and a range of characters familiar to the Greek tragic stage, such as Ajax, Herakles, Medea, Helen, or Hekabe (Hecuba) receive little or no attention.4 One wonders then just why only these very few plays have been selected out of the vaster legacy of Greek tragedy as speaking to and even definining the philosophical question(s) at issue, and, if so, what the implications may be of this restriction concerning the relationship between ancient Greece and modernity. These critical reflections are not meant as a preamble to a fuller explanation of the tragic turning of philosophy. The question of what is philosophically at stake in this turning is one that may still have to be left open, not least because the issues are not the same for Hölderlin, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. This book does not seek to offer a comprehensive explanation, but rather to undertake an in-depth study of the tragic thought of Hölderlin. The task that this first chapter sets itself is to delineate key aspects of the tragic turning and to interrogate the formulation of a tragic paradigm in the interest of situating Hölderlin’s thought in its philosophical context. If Plato, in Republic X, offered the tragic poets a chance to be readmitted to and...

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