By Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
From German idealism onward, Western thinkers have sought to revalue tragedy, always converging at one cardinal element: tragic paintings hazards aestheticizing actual violence. Tragically talking severely examines this revaluation, supplying a brand new figuring out of the altering which means of tragedy in literary and ethical discourse. It questions universal assumptions concerning the Greeks’ philosophical relation to the tragic culture and concerning the moral and political ramifications of up to date theories of tragedy.Starting with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and carrying on with to the current, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou strains how tragedy used to be translated into an idea (“the tragic”) that used to be then revised additional into the “beyond the tragic” of postmetaphysical modern concept. whereas spotting the various benefits of this revaluation, Tragically conversing concentrates at the losses implicit in the sort of flip. It argues that by way of translating tragedy into an idea, those rereadings effected a complex subordination of politics to ethics: the drama of human clash gave approach to philosophical mirrored image, bracketing the area in want of the belief of the realm. the place modern notion valorizes absence, passivity, the opposite, rhetoric, writing, and textuality, the writer argues that their “deconstructed opposites” (presence, will, the self, fact, speech, and motion, all of that are vital to tragedy) are both worthy for any significant dialogue of ethics and politics.
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Additional info for Tragically Speaking: On the Use and Abuse of Theory for Life (Symploke Studies in Contemporary Theory)
Example text
Whereas both champion the victory of philosophy over poetry, I argue that Plato’s ban issues from a cathartic understanding of tragedy’s powers — thus, being itself a poetic and tragic reaction that grants art rightfully its universal and diachronic xxxiii INtroduction appeal — while Hegel’s pronouncement thinks of art purely in terms of a historical logic, which diminishes art to being a function of timely concerns. In reading Plato tragically, I side with Stephen Halliwell’s thesis that Plato was also the first philosopher of the tragic, contrary to the German idealist legacy, which maintains that the Greeks had to wait for modernity to be granted a proper understanding of their artistic process.
Yet the resort to self-reflexivity as panacea does not necessarily heal, but often worsens, the wound: among other problems, self-reflexivity too often serves less a process of fruitful meditation than it provides a cover for self-referentiality and self-indulgence. That uncertainty and antisystematicity are the favored new theoretical positions and that much contemporary theoretical prose assumes a creative or performative use of language (without for the most part risking the terrible possibility of failure that genuine creation always has in store) do not automatically absolve theory from the charge of weak optimism that inheres in discursive thought.
In other words, Kant’s limits mark an intellectual sacrifice of sorts, not a neutral undertaking; it is because of this tragic dimension of Kant’s philosophy that his German idealist heirs turned to tragedy to rehearse the issues of modernity, as Dennis Schmidt rightly maintains (Schmidt 75). Just as Kant had to forfeit experience to save some claim to it for us, so Hölderlin may have had to sacrifice his Greeks to save them for our future, in the way Szondi intimated, because we may need them more than we think we do.