Tragically Speaking

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Tragically Speaking

On the Use and Abuse of Theory for Life

Kalliopi Nikolopoulou

Symploke Studies in Contemporary Theory Series

376 pages

Paperback

January 2013

978-0-8032-4091-9

$45.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

January 2013

978-0-8032-4487-0

$45.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

From German idealism onward, Western thinkers have sought to revalue tragedy, invariably converging at one cardinal point: tragic art risks aestheticizing real violence. Tragically Speaking critically examines this revaluation, offering a new understanding of the changing meaning of tragedy in literary and moral discourse. It questions common assumptions about the Greeks’ philosophical relation to the tragic tradition and about the ethical and political ramifications of contemporary theories of tragedy.

Starting with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and continuing to the present, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou traces how tragedy was translated into an idea (“the tragic”) that was then revised further into the “beyond the tragic” of postmetaphysical contemporary thought. While recognizing some of the merits of this revaluation, Tragically Speaking concentrates on the losses implicit in such a turn. It argues that by translating tragedy into an idea, these rereadings effected a problematic subordination of politics to ethics: the drama of human conflict gave way to philosophical reflection, bracketing the world in favor of the idea of the world. Where contemporary thought valorizes absence, passivity, the Other, rhetoric, writing, and textuality, the author argues that their “deconstructed opposites” (presence, will, the self, truth, speech, and action, all of which are central to tragedy) are equally necessary for any meaningful discussion of ethics and politics.
 

Author Bio

Kalliopi Nikolopoulou is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Buffalo.


Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Old Quarrels
1: Orient/Occident, Ancients/Moderns: The Tyranny of Theory over Greece
2: An Old Quarrel: Poetry and Philosophy
Part II: For the Love of Truth
3: Habeas Corpus: Foucault's Fearless Speech
4: Plato's Courts: Phaedrus and Apology
5: Euripides' Verdict: The Bacchae
Part III: Passions
6: ??ζα Α?ματ?εσσα: On Antigone
7: Antigone's Children
Appendix
Notes
Work Cited
Index

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