Tragedy—the word conjures up a multitude of associations, some clichéd. By calling something a tragedy, whether a literary work or an event in a person's or a society's experience, one may suggest suffering and trauma but also grandeur and endurance and nobility. A tragedy is something horrible and yet, paradoxically, edifying. For those who are morally inclined, it demonstrates the punishment that befalls the proud or the flawed; for those more fatalistic, it suggests humanity's unmerited but inevitable suffering in an indifferent universe. To some people, certainly, tragedy as a literary genre is old and boring, loved by the Greeks but of little relevance now.

This article compares and contrasts how the texts of Greek tragedy thematize ending and how German idealism, especially Hegel and Schelling, constructed a theory of ending in relation to Greek tragedy. In particular, through Hegel's and Schelling's paradigmatic readings of Oedipus, the article demonstrates a deep-seated commitment to a Protestant Christian teleology that continues, unrecognized, to influence modern readings of Greek tragedy.

Accompanying Keith Thomas's account of its defeat by scientific rationality, supernatural magic, which I designate magic1, receives scholarly attention denied the stigmatized magic2—stage magic and the “gulling” practices popularized by Tondon's con artists and pickpockets, who exploited distraction through sleights of hand, body, language, and thought. As Othello's paratheatrical “entertainment unconscious,” competing and collaborating with theater, magic2 informs the play's sensationalism, gull's gallery, source-tale revisions, and transformation of much traditional tragedy into a genre less about epistemology than about perception. Practicing early modern magicians' fundamentals—conveyance (legerdemain, misdirection) and confederacy—and exposing his own tricks, the entertainer-villain Iago's tactics and handkerchief prop illuminate phenomena such as “inattentional blindness,” important for cognitive psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and performance. His “helpmeet” wife and apprentice Emilia emulates his misdirecting visual and conversational skills, until their team, echoing a celebrity magician-and-animal partnership, finally implodes. Situated between Montaigne's and Adorno's views on distraction, Othello transforms wonder from tragic affect into the capitalist distraction pleasure of a discursive entertainment revolution. Its hero-dupe himself adopts magic2 technology for a spectacular suicide—arguably the suicide of tragedy's tradition.

Milton's one venture into the genre of tragedy, Samson Agonistes, has prompted a notoriously divided reception among modern critics, not least because it revives the topos of exemplary violence, which the poet had conspicuously rejected in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. I propose we consider the underlying Samson plot not simply as the triumph or tragedy of a chosen nation and its representative hero but as the tragic collision between a universalizing faith and a nation's claims to exceptionality. Even after the devastating collapse of England's republican experiment, Milton never wavered in his commitment to the communal as well as the private manifestations of faith. The nation, or a nation equivalent, was an indispensable vehicle for continuing Reform, but the conceptual parameters of that nation, its relation to geographic place, and its rights in relation to other nations and to faiths other than its own posed a foundational dilemma for Milton's dramatic poem.

Scholars have been quick to dismiss Georgian tragedy as mere rant and have thus failed to examine why tragic plays were regularly staged in the eighteenth century. This essay explores the “unaccountable pleasure,” in David Hume's words, that spectators of the genre experienced. Hume compared the feeling of witnessing a tragedy to the sweet misery of watching high-stakes gamblers risk their fortunes. Part of the attraction derived from star actresses who performed the mixed genre of tragedy topped off with a comic epilogue in plays such as Edward Moore's The Gamester, George Lillo's The London Merchant, and David Garrick's The Fatal Marriage. This essay argues that eighteenth-century tragedies portray the struggles of a genre caught between a world ruled by poetic justice and one flung about by uncontrollable economic powers. Further, in its democratization of grievable subjects and its metatheatrical relation to the tragic, Georgian tragedy anticipates modern developments of the genre.

Tragedy is a recurrent subject in recent constitutional law scholarship. But this scholarship theorizes tragedy through a single narrow model, generally applies it to a limited conception of the domain of constitutional law, and ultimately conceives tragedy only as a liability rather than as a positive potentiality of constitutional practice. This essay critiques one theoretical understanding of tragedy and introduces three more, to argue for an open-ended praxis of pluralist tragic engagement with the United States Constitution that is necessary for the sober, mature, demystified, and deliberative functionality of the constitutional system. Each of these four models of tragedy is paired with a domain of constitutional law: Aristotle's model with interpretation, Hegel's with structure and institutions, the radical Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal's with performance and public effects, and Nietzsche's with cultural and educational accessibility.

The epilogue of Tony Kushner's Angels in America is often criticized as modeling a political capitulation, allowing vague spiritual promise to eclipse real political difference. This article reads Kushner's epilogue in dialogue with Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus as a negotiation with the tragic condition that intertwines the political and the spiritual, set in a ritual space of utopian transformation. The plays' tragic subjects, persisting past their expected demise and defined by their continued exclusion from the polis, demand citizenship as an act of reincorporation and an amelioration of suffering, offering transformative benefits to the state in turn. For Kushner, following Sophocles, the demand for citizenship is a demand for personal and political subjecthood, a precondition to all other politics and always a spiritual transfiguration.

Modern tragedy faces a number of challenges, many of them compiled in George Steiner's classic study The Death of Tragedy. This essay will add one more to Steiner's list: a crisis of action inaugurated by the rise of capitalism and given its first and clearest discursive form in the works of the classical political economists. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith suggests that the prevalence of happiness or its opposite depends less on ethicopolitical actions than it does on economic production. Nations are wealthy or poor, and thus happy or not, according to how efficiently their populations make things, not how wisely or virtuously their members comport themselves. And for the individual, happiness comes to depend more on consumption than on the exercise of virtue, as it had formerly done in Aristotelian ethics. But if tragedy is, as Aristotle claimed, the imitation of an action, then the dethroning of action by production will simultaneously degrade the very substance of tragic drama. What happens to tragedy when the thing that constitutes it is diminished under conditions of capitalist modernity?

It would seem impossible to wrench dramatic tragedy away from humanism. In their encounters with fate, capricious gods, or a corrupt polis, tragedy's protagonists confront the injustice and futility of existence, and in their suffering and defeat they affirm the “indomitability of the human spirit,” the preeminent value of human life. Certainly this is George Steiner's view in The Death of Tragedy (1961), although his conservative hierarchies (no gods, no tragedy) have been refuted by critics who argue that there is profound tragedy in ordinary life (Williams; Eagleton; Poole) and that tragedy “continually adapts itself to the conditions of experience” (States 199). However, even Steiner's debunkers embrace his notion of tragedy as extremity, as an encounter with extrahuman forces and suffering far exceeding human guilt. So, I argue here, does the British playwright Caryl Churchill, who in 1994 produced a diptych of contemporary tragedy: The Skriker, first mounted in January 1994, and her translation of Seneca's Thyestes, staged just four months later. Taken together these plays absorb the “conditions of experience” of the mid-1990s in the West. Along with the horrors of the Bosnian War and continuing environmental and economic crises, such conditions might well include the widely touted mapping of the human genome, begun in 1990 and concluded in 2003, and, concurrently, a popular and scholarly fascination with affects, intensities, and “the lively immanence of matter” (Coole and Frost 9). What happens to the humanist foundations of tragedy when understandings of the human are subjected to these “new materialisms”? Churchill's The Skriker, along with her translation of Thyestes, invites us to imagine a seeming oxymoron, a posthuman tragedy.

Debates about how to stage, film, narrate (or record in any available media) real-life catastrophe, such as mass human-rights violations or war, tend to center on the simultaneous necessity and inadequacy of any representational form to capture the real event: evidence is needed for political, legal, cultural, and historical purposes, but its framing is always conditioned by whatever a given regime of visibility leaves in or leaves out. All too familiar ethical, political, and representational challenges lurk behind the deployment of media to make visible the experience of real-life survivors—in the case I treat here, women survivors of imprisonment and torture during Uruguay's 1973-85 dictatorship. Consider the risks of revictimizing the protagonists, overwhelming or numbing spectators with images of extreme vulnerability, or, even worse, of inciting voyeuristic or sadistic pleasures in an audience passively “regarding the pain of others”—to recall Susan Sontag's famous last title (2003). Some have argued that testimonial or documentary accounts cannot represent the effects of destruction without courting these perils.

In a famous essay, the agnostic bertrand russell hailed tragedy as the highest instantiation of human freedom. tragedy results from human beings' persistence in the conscious, imaginative representation of the plight of humanity in the inhumane universe. Tragedy “builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; … within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty” (53-54). Russell's “servile captains of tyrant Fate” are the instruments by which metaphysical compulsion tortures humans—Death and Pain and Despair. Man, instead of allowing himself to be terrorized as “the slave of Fate,” creates tragedy “to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life” (57). By transforming the human condition into tragic art, humans create their own world of resistance, in which they can be the truly free “burghers” of a dauntless new city-state of the mind.

For many commentators on tragic temporality, tragic time is the “now,” binding the characters—the actors of the catastrophe—in the anxiety and horror of a blinding present moment. As Northrop Frye observed in his Fools of Time, “The basis of the tragic vision is being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation” (3). In performance, in particular, that presentness feels relentless: as Stanley Cavell writes, tragic performance “demands a continuous attention to what is happening at each here and now, as if everything of significance is happening at this moment, while each thing that happens turns a leaf of time” (93). This sense of the present mimics our everyday sense of how we live in this world: in David Kastan's words, “Tragic time is, then, the experiential time of human life—a time, that like life itself to which it is inextricably tied, is directional, irreversible, and finite” (80).

Since the shift from modernist, formalist, and old historicist methodologies of mid-twentieth-century criticism, tragedy has been a problematic term. In the earlier age of the American New Critics and their British analog F. R. Leavis, it was one of the classic instances of a “timeless” literary category that embodied the “news that stays news” that Ezra Pound thought epitomized the literary. Tragedy was an example par excellence of a genre tied to a permanent human condition—death. As such, however, it was also largely taken for granted in the practice of the New Critics, American and British—one of the large-scale literary categories that could be safely ignored in favor of the strategies of close reading and detecting complex ironies. At times the whole project of defining a larger genre was simply ruled out of order. Kenneth Muir spoke for many in this critical generation when he wrote, “There is no such thing as Shakespearean tragedy. There are only Shakespearean tragedies” (12).

I have been arguing, over some years, that thinking about the postcolonial condition in relation to tragedy or, rather, through a critical perspective informed by the idea of the tragic is especially useful in a historical conjuncture in which the triumphalist narratives of national liberation, anti-imperialism, and socialism have become exhausted, if not extinct (Scott, Conscripts and Omens). Romance, it seems to me, is the predominant mode of emplotment of the anticolonial and radical postcolonial imaginarles. This is because the salient questions animating the critique of the colonial past have turned, understandably enough, on the identification of the disabling repressive harms of colonial power and the construction of the justificatory narrative of resistance that, at length, overcomes the perceived obstacles to a postcolonial state without these sources of (moral, political, cultural, economic) dissatisfaction. These are narratives of longing and vindication that link past, present, and future in a steady rhythm of progressive (sometimes righteously exultant) redemption. But what if the futures anticipated in this story form come to be fundamentally thrown into doubt so that they lose the self-evidence that so long sustained them as an effective horizon of political desire and political action? What if the futures anticipated by the past are now themselves a part of the past? I have been arguing that, as a consequence of the collapse of the great social and political hopes that went into the anticolonial imagining and postcolonial making of national sovereignties, we do indeed inhabit a postcolonial present marked by such an irreversible transformation. I have been arguing that the problem about the former colonial worlds for the present is not the superficial one of finding better answers to existing questions but the more fundamental one of altering the questions concerning the relation between past and present that have organized our expectations of possible futures.

In this brief meditation i am less concerned with how tragedy as a theatrical form relates to democracy than with how democracy entails a tragic politics, in its ancient and contemporary manifestations. My broader argument follows from three presuppositions:

Philosophically speaking, democracy is a historical manifestation of self-organized politics that rests on no foundation other than self-authorization, which, being occasional and provisional, has no antecedent and is therefore abyssal.

Politically speaking, democracy requires an imaginary of rule without archē or telos—an an-archic imaginary that disengages itself from traditional parameters of the command-obedience structure. This isn't to say that democracy entails no rule. On the contrary, it engages in the paradoxical practice of anarchic rule, or rule shared by all (even those in opposition), so that the traditional division of power between rulers and ruled is destabilized.

Ethically speaking, there is nothing good or bad about democracy; all moral imperatives are foreign, perhaps even contrary, to democracy. Hence, democratic politics operates in an ethical realm without categorical imperatives, a priori principles, or transcendental guarantees and is thereby constitutively perilous and precarious. Democracy involves a tragic imaginary, enacting a politics of tragic life that includes folly without heroic salvation and demands lucidity in conditions of total uncertainty.

What does it mean to saythat we live in tragic times? the 9-11 attack was certainly a tragedy, but whose tragedy was it? What constitutes a national tragedy in the first place? Ned Blackhawk points out that a nation unable to confront its past will surely compromise its civic future (293). What are the consequences of sacralizing one national calamity (the 9-11 attack) as a world-historic tragedy while ghosting the other foundational violences of United States history, which have returned to haunt the post-9-11 era as unspeakable premonitions and accusatory revenants? “Mark me,” said the ghost.

Irony and tragedy have always been uneasy bedfellows. thus, it is no surprise that in cynical eras such as ours, in which there are no moral absolutes, no clear beliefs, no accepted authority, and no commonly shared values or ethical norms, the act of producing a Greek tragedy requires a different lens. Even so, my recent experience shows that the plays continue to exert a peculiar hold on contemporary imaginations and can find startling resonances for modern audiences.