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Chapter 2 - Tragedy, Cult and Ritual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2024

Claude Calame
Affiliation:
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Vanessa Casato
Affiliation:
Universita Ca'Foscari, Venezia
Simon Goldhill
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

In the wake of German Romantic aesthetic thought, Greek tragedy was appropriated by idealist philosophy as a basis for theories of the Tragic. This resulted on the one hand in a positive ontology that led, by way of tragic reversal, to man’s absolute conscience and freedom, and on the other hand in a negative ontology in which human nature’s fundamental indeterminateness eludes language. In this perspective, Greek drama acts as a salutary reminder that human reality eludes Enlightenment reason. A historicized version of these idealist theories of the Tragic, greatly influenced by Christian theology around divine Incarnation and Redemption, finds expression in recent work by various scholars; by staging divine men who suffer and gods who are all too human, Attic tragedy as a genre is held to refer to a ‘minimal theology’ based on the effects of time and animated by a ‘theoretical need’ that is instrumental rather than final; it presents on stage a series of paradoxical individualities. By relying on a template, it enables singular dramatic situations to ‘make sense’.

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Chapter
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Choral Tragedy
Greek Poetics and Musical Ritual
, pp. 21 - 63
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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