What's Nietzsche to Euripides? The Aesthetics of Suffering in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Euripides’ Trojan Women

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12903285
AutoresZachary Case (King's College Hospital, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen67
Páginas25-50
Fecha de publicación2021-08-09
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Cambridge Classical Journal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1750-2705 • E-ISSN: 2047-993X
EditorialCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/s1750270521000038
OpenAlexW3189492698
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas66

This article reads Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy in dialogue with Euripides’ Trojan Women , synthesising a Nietzschean reading of Euripides’ tragedy with, as it were, a Euripidean reading of Nietzsche's theorisation of the tragic. It focuses on the way in which both texts confront the threat of nihilism in the face of human suffering and attempt to redeem or transfigure it. This is manifested internally and self- consciously in Euripides’ play through the actions of Hecuba and the chorus, who seem both to exhibit what Nietzsche might call a ‘pessimism of strength ’, and to express Nietzsche's fundamental claim that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified ’. Yet Trojan Women ultimately resists Nietzschean theorising – a form of critical resistance which, as it will turn out, is already anticipated by Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy . More than a close study of two texts, this dialogic reading also has some big implications for thinking through the relationship between philosophy and tragedy in general

Dialogic · Greek tragedy · Nihilism · Pessimism · Tragedy (event · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Social and Cultural Studies