In his book Sweet Violence, Terry Eagleton examines the discomfort exhibited by the Left when it comes to tragedy as a theatrical genre and worldview. Conventional Aristotelian poetics presents tragedy as an elevated art form that focuses on individual heroism and despair and as such offers little to a view of history as class struggle or to a vision of theatrical art that highlights rational, or in Marxian terms, scientific understandings of the human condition. In keeping with that argument, Patrice Pavis maintains that historical perspective and tragedy are mutually exclusive: “When a historical backdrop is glimpsed behind the destiny of the tragic hero, the play ceases to be a tragedy of the individual and takes on the objectivity of historical analysis.” In other words, conflict, or history, is negotiable, but catastrophe, or tragedy, is not. Brecht is often seen to represent this view of tragedy, advocating a theater of critical distance, disruption, and retrospection. This is certainly what critics have in mind when they consider Epic Theater as the end of tragedy in which the historical parable creates distance, insight, and critique instead of catharsis. However, this misses an important point in Brecht's theater and theoretical approach, because rather than dismissing tragedy, he seeks to reach an unconventional interaction with the genre based on critical distance.

In this way Brecht seems to have anticipated Eagleton's invocation of a tragic component in critical thought. Eagleton observes that tragedy's elements have migrated from literary text into literary theory, where they are used as a “cultural signifier…a fertile source of ultimate value or form of counter-Enlightenment.” Both Nietzsche's and Freud's critiques of Enlightenment, to name just two examples, insist on the presence of carnal drives that determine and disrupt rational projects, drives that they explicitly link to their readings of ancient tragedy. Freud sees the entire project of civilization as tragedy. In George Steiner's words: “More pliant divorce laws could not alter the fate of Agamemnon; social psychiatry is no answer to Oedipus.” Tragedy confronts us with the futility of human attempts to produce progress in accordance with moral principles and rational insights, a position that can be found with equal emphasis in critical theory.