Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

Abstract

Who is the “us” of this book's title? A riddle, perhaps, for Oedipus. Tragedy is, in Critchley's most sweeping formulation, “a genealogy of who we are, an account of our origins and how the curse of the past can unknowingly take shape in the present, and we don't see it and we rage when we are told what it is.” The riddle only deepens. Tragedy shows us “who we are,” but who is “we”?Critchley's “we,” it emerges, has some clear coordinates. His views on Greek tragedy reflect, more or less faithfully, what might be called the 1990s Anglo-American consensus (which in turn draws on the formative work of broadly structuralist French thinkers): Greek tragedy is an inherently political art form dedicated to exploring ambiguities of agency and subjectivity. Critchley offers a philosophically inflected version of this account, ostensibly drawing on ancient Greek thought, but more substantively formed by German Idealism. The outlines will be familiar to anyone who grew up within the consensus, which remains broadly compelling as an understanding of tragedy in fifth-century BCE Athens. Critchley is on the whole a thoughtful, well-informed guide to tragedy and the Greeks. His account, however, is ultimately unsatisfying in the way it addresses tragedy and “us”: it is relentlessly focused on individual choice and action, and on the category of the hero. But tragedy in this sense, as Aristotle reminds us, occurs only in a few houses. Despite the “us” in Critchley's title, nothing in the book addresses seriously the “we” of the present, for whom the greatest challenges are not “moral ambiguity” or “transcendental opacity”—two of the core experiences he locates in tragedy—but a burning planet, systemic violence and injustice, and rampant lies and falsehoods (to name a few). These are not just curses of the past, but the results of human action in the present. Greek tragedy offers profound resources for thinking about social change and collective action—for addressing the “us” of the title—but these go largely unexplored.But perhaps I expect too much from Critchley's “us.” Though its jaunty, conversational style seems to invite a wide readership, the book's coverage is somewhat too idiosyncratic to serve as a student's introduction to Greek tragedy or to Greek philosophical writing about tragedy. At the same time, it is too superficial to shed any new light for a specialist, and probably too detailed to make for an effective popularizing treatment. A better title might have been “tragedy, the Greeks, and me,” for the book gives us Simon Critchley's tragedy and Simon Critchley's Greeks. There is nothing wrong with either of these. But “we” need more from tragedy and from the Greeks.