Tragic Modernities

Do the Greek tragic plays represent universal themes, forms, and experiences that transcend the veils of antiquity, language, and time? Or are their particular, historically specific meanings to the ancient Greeks irrelevant to a modern, secular, society? Miriam Leonard's valuable and timely Tragic Modernities addresses this familiar impasse in an innovative way by analyzing how modern ideas of tragic universality (and particularity) first emerged within the texts of the German idealist philosophers who analyzed tragedy, particularly Hegel, and from there shaped the work of later political theorists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts, including such figures as Marx, Arendt, Freud, Benjamin, Schmidt, Heidegger, Lacan, and Butler. By tracing out a complex interplay between ancient plays and their modern readers, Leonard shows that not only the idea of the tragic, but also the actual plays themselves, were formative for modern philosophical and political thought.The book joins a recent wave of reconsiderations of tragedy that includes work by Terry Eagleton, Rita Felski, and Olga Taxidou, as well as a recent PMLA issue edited by Jean Howard and Elaine Foley.1 Like these critics, Leonard explores the vitality and importance of tragedy to modern and contemporary life. She challenges the view that it is an elite Western genre unconcerned with politics, which dominated literary criticism in the 1980s and 1990s.2 Leonard's particular contribution to this scholarly and critical trend is to examine the reception of tragedy within modern intellectual history. The book provides fresh accounts of Schelling's, Hölderlin's, and Hegel's interpretations of particular tragic plays and heroes, while showing that an unacknowledged universalism in the writings of later philosophers makes their work less of a departure from idealism than might appear. One of the strengths of Tragic Modernities is the way it reveals the curious power and persistence of Hegel's reformulation of history, metaphysics, and modernity in terms of the tragic. Freud's Oedipus, for instance, owes a very particular debt to Hegel's, as a figure who reconciles particularity and universality. And what to make of the strange fact that Marx—despite his view of tragedy as farce in the modern world—reread the Oresteia every year in Greek and frequently took it along to read on family picnics?The book is primarily addressed to classicists and literary critics who have argued for a return to the particularities of tragedy's historical context, asserting its alienness to modernity, and protesting modern misreadings. George Steiner's 1961 The Death of Tragedy, discussed in the Introduction and Epilogue, is perhaps the most influential example. Steiner argues that tragedy is a distinct achievement of the West and alien to secular modernity (as well as to Judaism and “the Orient”). Leonard, following Steiner's colleague Raymond Williams and recent critics noted above, challenges this view, showing how the philosophy of the tragic infuses modern critical vocabularies. The book examines concepts of revolution in Chapter 1 (Arendt, Marx, Heidegger), metaphysics in Chapter 2 (Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger), history in Chapter 3 (Schmitt, Benjamin, Hölderlin, Hegel), gender in Chapter 4 (Butler, Freud), and subjectivity in Chapter 5 (Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan). It shows that in the very act of describing ourselves as modern subjects, we become tragic subjects.A renewed interest in the philosophical tradition of reading tragedy, Leonard believes, will allow us to draw out “the distinctive contribution of Greek tragedy to conceptual thought” (5). Throughout her chapters, she successfully pursues this goal by delving into the particularities of different thinkers' readings of tragic texts, and by offering her own readings. For instance, in Chapter 1 (“Tragedy and Revolution”) she describes how Arendt articulated the redemptive power of the political through a reading of Oedipus at Colonus, and offers her own reading of the place of the political in the play's final choral ode. In the process she puts herself and Arendt in dialogue with other contemporary interpretations of the ode, and with Heidegger's account of the polis in Antigone, which, she shows, exhibits a different understanding of the political than Arendt and Sophocles (by implication, Arendt is the better reader).Likewise, in her discussion of Hegel's gendered reading of Antigone, in Chapter 3, “Tragedy and History,” Leonard argues that Antigone's love for her brother is a structural, not a historical, contradiction within the text. Anchored by this observation, she is able to show what relying on Antigone does to Hegel's argument in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The argument here is dense, but her point seems to be that Antigone draws Hegel toward a philosophy in which it is the tragic text that “models the historical process in its own image” (104), rather than the Spirit. This point bears further fruit in Chapter 4, “Tragedy and Gender,” in which the author critiques Butler's reading of kinship in and as politics in Antigone. Because of her dialogue with Hegel, Leonard argues, Butler partakes of the same tendency as Hegel to see Antigone's plight as a universal, and thus ends up describing kinship and suffering as prepolitical—the opposite of her intent. Leonard concludes that the contradictions in Butler's account point to her being “enmeshed in a history of reading that she cannot ultimately escape” (129).Can anyone escape it? Leonard largely focuses on tragedy's reception, providing an important and much-needed reevaluation of its tremendous, even astonishing, influence over modern political and philosophical thought in the Continental tradition. But this reception-focused approach largely brackets the question of misreading raised by many classical scholars. Does Hegel get it wrong? Does Butler? Tragic Modernities raises a larger question as well. To declare that modern tragedy is impossible in the wake of Christianity and Marxism, as George Steiner does, has something of a tragic ring to it. So does Lacan's idea that the subject is realized “through a speech which comes from elsewhere,” not least because this idea emerges from Lacan's reading of Freud's reading of Oedipus at Colonus. Lacan's “elsewhere,” as Leonard claims in her discussion of tragedy and subjectivity, is tragedy (159). Is it at all possible to read classical dramatic texts accurately, given the massive armature of concepts almost immediately brought to bear on them by Plato and Aristotle, and shaping our perception of them ever since? Further, if the very terms of the conceptual analysis of tragedy come from tragedy, then what of Leonard's own methodology? Her approach often consists of resolving differences between seemingly opposed philosophical concepts, or uncovering the ways in which one philosopher's concepts invert, but do not escape, another's. Insofar as the tragic plot also proceeds by inversion and synthesis, then is intellectual history itself tragic?That the book only implicitly raises such questions does not undermine its value. Leonard's impressive ability to bring together the work of so many different thinkers via readings of tragic texts is what makes tragedy's influence, and perhaps its agency, so evident and striking. Because her readings across philosophy and literature allow for new insights into the literary and dramatic origins of contemporary critical thought, they open up exciting avenues for scholarship at the intersection of drama, theater, philosophy, and criticism. As a result, Tragic Modernities is certain to occupy an important place in these fields for many years to come

German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Philosophy and Historical Thought · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies