Tragic Modernities by Miriam Leonard

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 227 land, but the entire problem is not explained (653). Not every inscription is translated, although those left untranslated are fairly simple (18, 45–46, 49, 53, 179, 185, 445, 456, 522–523, 615, 619). In general, the standard of accessibility is high. The production values are high as well, but I must mention that the first two copies of this book that came into my hands (the review copy and my library’s) had misordered and missing pages (the book jumped from 282 to 411–442 and then back to 315, thus omitting pages 283–314 entirely). The press replaced both, but do check to make sure any volume you buy is complete. The authors of this volume, along with its editors, should be commended. Not only do they fulfill their major stated aim, that of explaining why inscriptions are important, but they have also produced chapters that are useful, accessible, up-to-date—and, in their own way, exciting. The University of Virginia Elizabeth A. Meyer Tragic Modernities. By Miriam Leonard. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. 2015. Pp. xiii, 204. This important book challenges the assumption in the title of Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy that modernity offers no fertile ground for tragic drama.1 It argues rather that “to be a modern subject . . . is to be a tragic subject” (3). After a discussion of the definition of the tragic as a philosophical stance in German thinkers of the early nineteenth century, the book considers how the legacy of these thinkers (Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin) resurfaces in the philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Schmitt, Arendt, Lacan, Butler, and others. Leonard covers a lot of ground, sometimes somewhat cursorily, but her unifying thread is the reception of Greek tragedy as a structuring concept in modern philosophical thought. This thread follows a thematic rather than a strictly historical path; each of the five chapters addresses a particular configuration of the tragic in modernity, responding to a set of anxieties particular to the modern age. Leonard builds constructively on Williams’s Modern Tragedy, written in response to Steiner, which asserts that “modernity itself was tragic” and thus is fertile ground for the appreciation of a tragic vision in art and thought.2 Leonard is advocating for a return to a philosophical reading of Greek tragedy in the face of a prominent scholarly trend (led by Vernant and others) that approaches it with a historicizing and politicizing agenda opposed to universalizing interpretations. The first chapter, “Tragedy and Revolution,” opens with Arendt’s identification of revolution as a unique feature of modernity. The French and American revolutions and others subsequent to them are characterized by theatricality. This quality, along with the promise of a new narrative for history, introduced an aesthetic framework into the ethical philosophies of Germans like Kant, who watched the violence from a distance. The revolutionary goal of freedom itself (Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty”) introduces a structure common to Greek tragedy in which freedom and constraint are in mutually constitutive tension for the citizens in the polis. For Hegel and Marx, tragedy provides the form for a philosophy of history, even as Marx rejects the poetry of the past as a 1 G. Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London 1961). 2 R. Williams, Modern Tragedy (London 1966). 228 PHOENIX bourgeois distraction from authentic action on the historical stage. Leonard treats the structure of tragedy as common to both the abstract aesthetic art form and at the same time to human lived experience (personal and political) in modernity in general, but particularly as it is marked by the crises of revolution. As such, tragedy is a crucial medium for ethical analysis. The second chapter, “Tragedy and Metaphysics,” on the post-Kantian philosophical reception of the tragic in the post-revolutionary period, argues that a modern “conception of the tragic gave new voice to the metaphysical paradox of freedom and necessity” (42), a paradox foregrounded by the recent revolutionary movements in the political realm, but one that was also a preoccupation for the Greek tragedians. Leonard surveys aestheticizing philosophical texts from the essay “The Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism,” through...