Introduction

To rethink tragedy is, of necessity, to acknowledge a history of prior thought. Indeed, the magisterial bulk and sheer weighti- ness of that history still cast a long shadow over the present. The subject of tragedy has preoccupied a formidable range of thinkers, from Aristotle to Hegel, from Schopenhauer to Lacan. Moreover, while the creation of tragic art may have waned in the modern era, interpretations of tragedy multiplied and proliferated. Greek tragedy, in particular, was often hailed as an exemplary source of insight into ethical and philosophical questions; in its very remoteness from the present, it could throw light on the dilemmas of modernity. As Dennis Schmidt has argued, the growing self-doubt of philosophy, the questioning of reason, analytical method, and conceptual knowledge as primary values, has much to do with the turn to tragedy, as the form that most eloquently dramatizes the stubborn persistence of human blindness, vulnerability, and error.¹

Beyond the philosophical engagement with tragedy and the tragic extends a vast corpus of literary interpretation. Widely considered the most prestigious of art forms, tragedy has inspired endless and interminable commentary. Gathered together in their entirety, these definitions of tragedy, along with the detailed exegeses of its Greek, Shakespearean, French classical, and modern exemplars, could easily fill a bookstore. It is only in recent years, as critics have challenged the automatic deference and pre-eminence accorded to works of the canon, that interest in tragedy has waned; even here, such a change of fortune is more evident in English departments than in comparative literature and continental philosophy, where tragedy continues to occupy a prominent place.

To speak of "rethinking tragedy" in the context of such a longue durée of critical reflection is thus to risk charges of hubris. There is a danger of assuming, in a manner all too easily exposed as smug and naive, that our own historical moment is uniquely equipped to transcend the benighted errors and obfuscations of the past. Surely the sedimented weight of so many centuries of sustained thought is not to be casually dismissed. Can we so easily "rethink" an intellectual horizon that forms the invisible backdrop for our own reflections on tragedy as epigones and latecomers? It is, of course, such miscalculated confidence and its consequences that is an abiding subject of tragedy. Rather than breaking free of the past, the tragic protagonist finds himself entangled in its meshes; the weight of what has gone before bears down ineluctably on what is yet to come. You may think you are through with the past, writes Simon Critchley in this issue, but the past is not through with you.

And yet a rethinking of tragedy is undoubtedly beginning to take place, even if hindsight may reveal it to be more indebted to its precursors than it now realizes. This nascent shift in critical sensibility consists, I want to suggest, of three distinct strands. One group of scholars wants to revise—and revive—tragedy by disentangling past tragic art from the recent history of tragic criticism. Thus tragedy has often been conceived as an exalted form that transcends the mundane world of politics and concerns itself only with the loftiest of existential concerns. The most powerful version of this thesis is Steiner's often cited The Death of Tragedy. The incandescent energies of tragedy, Steiner declares, flare up at only a few moments in time, such as fifth-century Athens and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Even here, there are only a handful of works that are authentically tragic (much of Shakespeare, Steiner concludes, is too hopeful). Thus tragedy is synonymous with the bleakest form of metaphysical pessimism. It depicts man as an unwelcome guest in the world and teaches us that it is better never to have been born. Nourished by a sacred and hierarchical cosmology, the tragic flame splutters and dies in the inhospitable air of our secular, democratic times. Tragic terror and exaltation are utterly at odds with modern optimism, our sturdy and unquenchable belief that all problems can ultimately be...