THE TRAGICAL SUBLIME Simon Critchley I have begun to work seriously in the last six months on a topic that hasobsessedmeformanyyears:thenatureoftragedy,especiallybutnot exclusively Attic tragedy. More properly—in the context of this volume— what interests me is the sublimity of tragedy, and its relation to philoso- phy. Since its beginning in ancient Greece, philosophy has been involved in an extended and often bitter quarrel with the poets. So the argument goes, philosophy is concerned with truth whereas poetry is not true—it simply deals in fictions and storytelling. Plato even wanted to expel the poets from the philosophically well-ordered city described in the Repub- lic. The poets that he had in mind were the Attic tragic poets: Aeschy- lus, Sophocles and Euripides. Philosophy begins, then, with the politi- cal exclusion of the tragic poets. The larger story I want to tell begins with a detailed examination of the complex exclusion of tragedy in Plato and at Aristotle’s decisive philosophical comprehension or, one might say, containment of tragedy, before looking in detail at a number of ancient Greek tragedies—notably the Oresteia, the Theban plays and a number of pieces by Euripides. I am also very concerned with examining the way in which the quarrel between philosophy and poetry and more specif- ically the question of tragedy is taken up and deepened by a number of modern philosophers: Rousseau, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche and Hei- degger, and the way in which the category of the tragic finds its expres- sion in early German idealism. My simple, but far-reaching, question is the following: if philosophy begins by excluding tragedy, then why is it that modern philosophy, in the epoch of its self-acknowledged modern crisis, should turn to tragedy, the tragic and attempt to return to tragic thinking? On my mind here will be the question of the availability of tragedy for us, as an aesthetic genre, a mode of experience and a critique of the present. The examination of this question leads me to a considera- tion of Shakespearean tragedy, especially Hamlet, and the consideration of the responses of Ibsen and Beckett ultimately to the question of the limits of tragedy. This entire problematic will be the topic of my research for the coming couple of years, which I hope will find expression in a book. simon critchley I have an epigraph from Gorgias, a fragment which—along with Aristo- phanes’ parody of Aeschylus and Euripides in The Frogs—gives us our earliest philosophical response to Attic tragedy. Gorgias writes, Tragedy, by means of legends and emotions, creates a deception in which the deceiver is more honest than the non-deceiver, and the deceived is wiser than the non-deceived.1 Tragedy exists, then, within an economy of deception, where the deceived is wiser than the non-deceived. In another fragment by Gorgias, Enco- nium of Helen, a text that was apparently composed as an experiment in persuasion and as ‘an amusement for myself ’,and which appears to have directly influenced the argument of Plato’s Republic,2 Gorgiaswritesthat if it was speech alone that persuaded Helen to abscond to Troy, then her defense is easy, Speech is a great power, which achieves the most divine works by means of the smallest and least visible form; for it can even put a stop to fear, remove grief, create joy and increase pity. This I shall now prove: all poetry can be called speech in meter. Its hearers shudder with terror, shed tears of pity and yearn with sad longing; the soul, affected by the words, feels as its own an emotion aroused by the good and ill fortunes of other people’s actions and lives.3 ThisispreciselywhatSocratesfearsintheRepublic, that the emotional power of speech can lead us to forget ourselves and empathize with the other in a way that is beyond reason or morality.4 This is also true of tragedy, indeed especially true of tragedy. Looking at the above fragment on tragedy, Gorgias is arguing that tragedy is a deception in which the deceiver is more honest than the non-deceiver and the deceived is wider than the non-deceived. Tragedy, Gorgias would appear to be suggesting, is the acquisition of wisdom through an emotionally psychtropic experi- ence, a shuddering with terror, the effect of something like the sublime. What Plato sees as the great danger of tragedy is celebrated by Gorgias as revealing the sublime power of persuasion and the affective effects of imi- tation and deception. For Socrates, tragedy can lead us to have sympathy for morally suspect characters and this is why it has to eliminated from 1 Kathleen Freeman, , p. 2 Plato, , b. 3 Freeman, , p. 4 Plato, , a–d..