| Description |
x, 322 pages ; 21 cm |
| Contents |
Part I : Introduction. Feeding the ancients with our blood -- Philosophy's tragedy and the dangerous perhaps -- Knowing and nor knowing: How Oedipus brings down fate -- Rage, grief, and war -- Gorgias: tragedy is a deception that leaves the deceived wiser than the nondeceived -- Justice as conflict (for polytheism) -- Tragedy as a dialectical mode of experience -- Part II : Tragedy. Tragedy as invention, or the invention of tragedy: Twelve theses -- A critique of the exotic Greeks -- Discussion of Vernant and Vidal-Naquet's Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece -- Moral ambiguity in Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes and The Suppliant Maidens -- Tragedy, travesty, and queerness -- Polyphony -- The gods! Tragedy and the limitation of the claims to autonomy and self-sufficiency -- A critique of moral psychology and the project of psychical integration -- The problem with generalizing about the tragic -- Good Hegel, bad Hegel -- From philosophy back to theater -- Part III : Sophistry. Against a certain style of philosophy -- An introduction to the Sophists -- Gorgiasm -- The not-being -- I have nothing to say and I am saying it -- Helen is innocent -- Tragedy and sophistry -- The case of Euripides' The Trojan Women -- Rationality and force -- Plato's Sophist -- Phaedrus, a philosophical success -- Gorgias, a philosophical failure -- Part IV : Plato. Indirection -- A city in speech -- Being dead is not a terrible thing -- The moral economy of Mimesis -- Political forms and demonic excess -- What is mimesis? -- Philosophy as affect regulation -- The Inoculation against out inborn love of poetry -- The rewards of virtue, or what happens when we die -- Part V : Aristotle. What is catharsis in Aristotle? -- More devastating -- Reenactment -- Mimesis Apraxeos -- The birth of tragedy (and comedy) -- Happiness and unhappiness consist in action -- Single or double? -- Most tragic Euripides -- Monstrosity -- Or Aristotle and his highlighter pen -- The anomaly of slaves and women -- Mechanical prebuttal -- The god finds a way to bring about what we do not imagine -- Misrecognition in Euripides -- Smeared makeup -- Sophocles' Theater of discomfort -- Vulgar acting and epic inferiority -- Is Aristotle really more generous to tragedy than Plato? -- Poetics II -- Aristotle on comedy -- Tormented incomprehensibly -- Against homeopathic catharsis -- Aristophanes falls asleep -- Make Athens great again -- Part VI : Conclusion. Transgenerational curse -- Aliveness |
| Summary |
Tragedy presents a world of conflicts and troubling emotion, a world where private and public lives collide and collapse. A world where morality is ambiguous and the powerful humiliate and destroy the powerless. A world where justice always seems to be on both sides of conflict and sugarcoated words serve as cover for clandestine operations of violence. A world rather like our own. The ancient Greeks hold a mirror up to us in which we see all the desolation and delusion of our lives but also the terrifying beauty and intensity of existence. This is not a time for consolation prizes and the fatuous banalities of the self-help industry and pop philosophy. Tragedy allows us to glimpse, in its harsh and unforgiving glare, the burning core of our aliveness. If we give ourselves the chance to look at tragedy, we might see further and more clearly--back cover |
| Notes |
Originally published in hardcover in 2019--title page verso |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Subject |
Tragic, The
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Tragedy -- Greek influence
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Greek drama (Tragedy) -- History and criticism
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Literature -- Philosophy
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Philosophy, Ancient
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| ISBN |
0525564640 paperback |
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9780525564645 paperback |
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