Tragic Drama Research Articles

O “Silêncio Trágico”: Walter Benjamin Entre Franz Rosenzweig e Friedrich Nietzsche

This article seeks to present, in its most general terms, the question of the tragic silence and its function within the analysis concerning the Greek tragedy in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which was written by Walter Benjamin. For this purpose, we turn to two sources related to Benjamin’s analysis: The Star of Redemption, by Franz Rosenzweig, and The Birth of Tragedy, by Nietzsche. However, in addition to the two other thinkers, Benjamin thinks about the issue of the “tragic silence” from the confrontation between “ambiguity” and “paradox”, between “myth” and “history”, in such a way that silence is a means of resistance: while expressing the guilt of the hero, what you see is his/her “silent suffering”, and, instead of being found guilty, the gods themselves are the ones who must recognize their guilt.

Paulus Tragicus: Staging Apostolic Adversity in First Corinthians

In 1 Cor 4:9, Paul writes that God has “displayed” the apostles as condemned to death, “for we have become a theater for the cosmos.” This is followed by three (ironic) antitheses contrasting the apostles, who were foolish, weak, and dishonored with the Corinthians as wise, strong, and honored. Interpretations of this metaphor of the theater have emphasized Roman spectacles of death as background to Paul's depiction of apostolic adversity. Without denying the cultural significance of public displays of combat and execution, this study proposes a fresh perspective on Paul's “theater” in view of tragic drama. As in 1 Cor, a central feature of many tragedies was the surprising downfall of those self-assured in their own wisdom and political power. Like his younger contemporary Epictetus, Paul evoked theatrical reversal to deflate the allure of human prestige, which, in his distinctly apocalyptic mode, would be nullified at the final judgment, deus ex machina.

Philosophy at a Crossroads

We are told that the 'state of emergency' that thought is in is the rule rather than the exception. But the task is to provoke the real state of emergency: the expansion of thought.1The Consolation of PhilosophyAnicius Boethius was in prison, sentenced to death for treason and witchcraft. Noticeably aged, he was lost in sad thought and found his only comfort in the Muses of Poetry. But suddenly he saw a woman whose burning gaze was indescribably penetrating, unlike anyone he had ever met.2 It was Philosophy paying him a visit in his cell and giving him inspiration for The Consolation of Philosophy. In this book Boethius says thather complexion was as fresh and glowing as that of a girl, [though] she was ancient and . . . nobody would mistake her for a creature of our time. It was impossible to estimate her height, for she seemed at first to be of ordinary measure, but then, without seeming to change, she appeared to be extraordinarily tall, so that her head all but touched the heavens. I was certain that if she had a mind to stretch her neck just a little, her face would penetrate the skies, where it would be utterly lost to human view.3Boethius further states that Philosophy at first listened to his grievances, but then declared that this was not the time for complaint, but for treatment. Had she not nourished him with her rich milk and fed him on her diet as he was growing up? Had she not prepared him with such weapons as he could now use in his difficulties if he had not chosen to discard them? Did he even recognize her? Why did he keep his silence; was he ashamed or just dumbstruck? But Philosophy also realized that Boethius was stupefied and unable to answer. She therefore placed her hand on his chest and said comfortingly:He is in no real danger. He merely suffers from a lethargy, a sickness that is common among the depressed. He has forgotten who he really is, but he will recover, for he used to know me, and all I have to do is clear the mist that beclouds his vision.4With these words she gathered the skirt of her dress and gently dried the tears from his eyes.Philosophy Is the Art of InterpretationVery few people nowadays have any idea of what philosophy actually is. As early as a century ago, Walter Benjamin realized this problem, which in his time manifested itself in the neo-Kantian identification of philosophy with epistemology, and lives on today in the form of a widespread predilection for cognitive science. Knowledge is possession, Benjamin wrote in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.5 The acquisition of knowledge is an intentional act carried out by a consciousness that functions as a subject, and for whom the known is an object. The object of knowledge is thus something that consciousness possesses as its property. losophy, on contrary, is not intentional, and does not have an object; instead it is oriented towards ideas that are not intentional objects about which certain and complete knowledge can be achieved. For the same reason philosophy does not strive to know ideas; on the contrary it strives to present them.6 them.6According to Benjamin, this presentation is the 'method' of philosophical thinking, provided that the word is not understood as in the modern sciences where method determines thought from its very beginning.7 The method of philosophical thinking corresponds more to the old Greek methodos-'the road on which'-whose path has not been determined in advance but arises gradually as the object is expounded, and whose direction is only seen in retrospect. philosophical method, which according to Benjamin takes shape as a presentation of ideas, he also called digression.8 Whereas knowledge aims directly at its target, philosophy concentrates upon the phenomenon, even though it is the idea it seeks to present. Philosophy digresses and is characterized by renouncing the uninterrupted purposeful structure.9 Not only does it digress to the phenomenon in order to approach the idea, but it also keeps returning to the phenomenon to start again: This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation. …

Odkręcić stan wyjątkowy. Walter Benjamin i krytyka przemocy prawa

Esej składa się z czterech części. Pierwsza dotyczy serii trików za pomocą których Benjamin próbuje rozprawić się z faszyzmem. Argumentuję, że strategia ta w wielu punktach przypomina burleski Chaplina i należy ją czytać w kontekście pojęcia komizmu ze Źródła dramatu żałobnego w Niemczech. Druga cześć jest próbą nowej interpretacji Przyczynku do krytyki przemocy. Pokazuję w niej, że istnieje ścisła relacja miedzy czystymi środkami i czystą czy też boską przemocą, która przypomina relację między obrazem dialektycznym (mającym charakter czystej przemocy), a wyzwalaną za jego pomocą – i do tej pory stłumioną – historią oporu klas podporządkowanych (toczącą się w sferze czystych środków). W części trzeciej rekonstruuję spór Benjamina z Adorno, pokazując, że jego niewypowiedzianą stawką jest pojęcie natury (anty-esencjonalistyczne u Benjamina i proto-faszystowskie u Adorno). W czwartej, przekonuję, że to anty-esencjonalistyczne pojęcie natury stoi u podstaw Benjaminowskiej krytyki faszyzmu, kulminującej w pojęciu rzeczywistego/karnawałowego stanu wyjątkowego.

The Transnational Reception of Improvised Drama: Tommaso Sgricci in Paris and in the Periodicals

The Italian improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci (1789–1836), known for his ability to improvise tragic dramas on themes requested by audience members, made international tours to Paris in 1824 and 1826. This article examines the impact of his performances in Parisian theatres by way of the reviews that appeared in European periodicals. Differences among national tastes and aesthetic values inform the reception of Sgricci's performances by French, German, and English reviewers, and these differences become further defined as reviewers respond to one another and write for different markets. The transnational reception of Sgricci and other improvvisatori also reveals how nineteenth-century journalists are themselves improvising as they adapt rapidly to new readerships and innovative types of performance.

Beckett's Tragic Pantry: Endgame and the Deflation of the Act

Modern tragedy faces a number of challenges, many of them compiled in George Steiner's classic study The Death of Tragedy. This essay will add one more to Steiner's list: a crisis of action inaugurated by the rise of capitalism and given its first and clearest discursive form in the works of the classical political economists. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith suggests that the prevalence of happiness or its opposite depends less on ethicopolitical actions than it does on economic production. Nations are wealthy or poor, and thus happy or not, according to how efficiently their populations make things, not how wisely or virtuously their members comport themselves. And for the individual, happiness comes to depend more on consumption than on the exercise of virtue, as it had formerly done in Aristotelian ethics. But if tragedy is, as Aristotle claimed, the imitation of an action, then the dethroning of action by production will simultaneously degrade the very substance of tragic drama. What happens to tragedy when the thing that constitutes it is diminished under conditions of capitalist modernity?

Unspeakable resistance

‘Tragedy’ is one of those curiously elastic words reserved for life's saddest spheres and events, irrespective of the forms in which they appear. Even though a vast body of genre studies has emerged, however, only a handful of studies have drawn cross-historical comparisons between tragic forms. This essay demonstrates how Walter Benjamin’s reflections on Attic tragedy may contribute to such a line of thought, focusing both on tragedies’ subversive potential and on the social-historical constellations in which they first emerged. In the first part, Benjamin’s conception of the Attic tragedies is explored by focusing on his The Origin of German Tragic Drama and the theoretical roots of his earlier work. According to Benjamin, Attic tragedies offered a messianic, dialectical critique on the social-historical constellation in which they appeared. The second part of the article discusses the relevance of these reflections for the analysis of contemporary tragic forms, thereby identifying the heirs of Attic tragedy outside the strict boundaries of ‘drama’.

The benefits of contemplating tragic drama on self-regulation and health.

Although drama exposure has been examined in the context of health promotion programs, the underlying mechanisms of reflecting on drama have not been established. The degree to which drama contemplation leads to cognitive changes (increased processing, self-compassion and emotional self-efficacy) and improved well-being was examined in the present research. An experiment was conducted in which young adults (n = 148) were randomly assigned to experience and write reflectively on (i) drama via Hollywood movie clips, (ii) drama via scripts or (iii) to perform a control task. Writing content was analyzed for word use. At baseline and 4-week follow-up measures, participants self-reported self-compassion, emotional self-efficacy, physical symptoms, general health, depressed mood and anxiety. Using structural equation modeling, indirect effects of drama contemplation were found. Tragic drama exposure was associated with word use indicative of increased cognitive processing. The use of greater insight words was related to increased emotional self-efficacy, which in turn was associated with improved psychological and general health, whereas discrepancy word use was associated with increased self-compassion, which was in turn linked to better psychological well-being. Conversely, greater use of causation and certainty words was associated with a marginal decrease in self-compassion and psychological well-being. The persistence of drama has long been related to its capacity to enhance individuals' understanding of the human condition. This study helps explain the connection between reflecting on drama and benefits to self-regulation and health. Implications of drama processing as an inexpensive and accessible adjunct to health promotion interventions are discussed.

'Feminine Virtues Violated': Motherhood, Female Militancy and Revolutionary Violence in Elizabeth Inchbald's 'The Massacre' (1792)

In 1792 actress, playwright, novelist, and later drama critic Elizabeth Inchbald wrote her first and only tragic drama – a violent, bloodthirsty and politically charged composition titled The Massacre. The tragedy was printed in London during the height of revolutionary violence in France, and can be seen to engage heavily with the country's debates regarding female militancy. Between 1791 and 1792, criticisms of the vulnerability imposed upon women as a result of their restricted physical agency were being composed and declared by a number of women in France, eager to grant their sex the right to bear arms. Women including Theroigne de Mericourt, Claire Lacombe, and Pauline Leon, each spoke or wrote in favour of the need for women to be granted military rights, and each made the point that if denied the request, women would be left entirely defenceless against the violent attacks launched by their political, male enemies. Gender-conservative party leaders prohibited women from bearing arms on account of the suggestion that women's involvement in military activism would detract from their familial duties. Yet Inchbald's tragedy contests this notion, by implying that it is not female militancy, but female defencelessness, which is depriving the nation of devoted wives and mothers.

Martyrdom and conflict: the fate of Antigone in tragic drama

Acts of martyrdom occur at points in the history of societies when they are riven by fundamental conflicts – not only between competing political authorities, but between divergent fundamental conceptions of just where authority in a society and culture should lie. For many commentators, Ancient Greece provides us with an example of just such a society, one which was riven by a conflict between sacred and secular visions of foundational authority. This latter found expression in fifth-century BC Athens in the development of tragedy, a dramatic form which although it had its origins in sacred ritual was at the same time preoccupied with a continuing debate between the legitimacy of the claims upon human conduct and ethics of temporal and transcendent powers. Perhaps chief amongst the classical tragedies to address this issue is Sophocles’ Antigone, which presents to its audience the spectacle of the daughter of Oedipus sacrificing herself for the sake of eternal laws in the face of the imperatives of laws more explicitly temporally constrained.

Tragedy and Theatricality in The Island

The article discusses the theoretical and generic problems of defining classical and modern tragedy vis à vis contemporary re-adaptations of Greek tragedy. It argues in favour of combining studies in reception history with the aesthetics of genre, and it does so through a re-examination of Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona’s re-adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone in their famous anti-apartheid play, The Island (1973). Through the analysis of this particular play and its relation to Sophoclean tragedy, the article seeks to explain why the modern aesthetics of theatricality, which has often been invested with a potential to liberate by modern dramatists and theorists, has always been difficult to reconcile with tragic drama; more specifically it thus argues that the conflict of tragedy and play, role and player, action and play, which is crucial to the performance of The Island, has a more general relevance.

4. Stagecraft

First published in 1971, this early second-century papyrus, POxy. 2805, was soon identified as coming from Sophocles’ Niobe. It portrays the killing of Niobe's children by Apollo and Artemis during a tragic drama, the staging of which, as we will see, seems to have been among Sophocles’ most striking dramatic creations. This killing, an unvarying element of the myth, was punishment for Niobe's boast that she had borne many children (fourteen, seven sons and seven daughters, is the number specified in Sophocles’ play: fr. 446), Leto only two. A further papyrus, from a mummy case at El-Hibeh (though quite possibly written at Oxyrhynchus) and dated to between 280 and 240 bc, PGrenf. ii.6(a)+PHib. 11, is from the same drama. Aeschylus wrote a Niobe, set after the killings; Euripides is not known to have written such a play. That leaves Sophocles’ Niobe (whose citation fragments indicate that it included the killings) or a play by a minor tragedian; but it is much more likely that two papyri of a Sophoclean drama should survive, from different times and perhaps places too, than that a work by another tragedian should be so unexpectedly favoured. A decade after Barrett argued this, a hypothesis of Sophocles’ play was published which refers to the event described in POxy. 2805: case closed.

German Modernity: From the Baroque to the Present with Walter Benjamin

German Modernity:From the Baroque to the Present with Walter Benjamin Jessica Nitsche Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation and the Baroque. Jane O. Newman. Ithaca, NewYork: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xx + 237. $35.00 (paper). Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy. Sigrid Weigel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. xxxii + 273. $26.95 (paper). Walter Benjamin is one of the most popular authors of modernity, and his significance for media studies, comparative literary studies, aesthetics and art history is indisputable. Though many books have been written about him and his work over the past decades, Jane O. Newman and Sigrid Weigel have found new perspectives on his thought and writings. Without a doubt, both studies can be seen as essential contributions to current international research about Benjamin, contextualizing him in the baroque, the work of other modern thinkers, and even current political events. Newman’s book, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation and the Baroque, illuminates the interfaces between the available research on Walter Benjamin’s writings and on the baroque. Newman is an internationally recognized scholar in both fields. Accordingly her study, published in 2011, is quite ambitious, detailed and presuppositional. Central to this research project is Benjamin’s The Origin of the German Tragic Drama,1 published in 1928. In a sense, the history and reception of this book is tragic. Garber calls it the most important study of international baroque. Nevertheless it has been neglected in previous research. It has also taken a while for scholars of Benjamin to recognize the Trauerspiel book as an important part of his work. The text was originally supposed to be Benjamin’s post-doctoral thesis, but ultimately, in 1925, it brought his academic career at Frankfurt University to an end. Newman’s study of the German mourning play in its literary and political context illustrates the disastrous attitudes shown [End Page 369] towards new ways of thinking at German universities in the 1920s (Burkhardt Lindner discusses this in the poignantly named article “About an Academic Mourning Play”2). Among other things, Newman demonstrates Benjamin’s strong influence on 1930s and 1940s research on the German baroque. In the conclusion of her book, she writes about the “curious inclusion of Benjamin’s ideas,” “echoes,” and the “ghostly presence of Benjamin’s ‘Baroque book’” in studies of the best-known theorists and scholars of baroque. Andreas Solbach wrote a review subtitled: “Jane Newman shows us how Benjamin got his ideas.”3 This title may well be extended to read: “… and how other authors got their ideas about the baroque from Benjamin.” Newman’s observations of the uncanny “afterlife of Benjamin’s Baroque” (186) are quite interesting, and, to my knowledge, they have gone completely unnoticed in German research. This is not surprising, considering the reception history of Benjamin’s writings in Germany, which was influenced by, among other factors, the student movement at the end of the 1960s. The students were more interested in Benjamin as a revolutionary and Marxist thinker, rather than as an expert on the German mourning play. Furthermore, his reputation as a “martyred German-Jewish intellectual and academic outsider” (xi) arguably fit in well with the ideas and ideologies coursing through the student movement. Benjamin’s early scholars were predominantly interested in his later writings. It was only in 2010 that Bettine Menke published her study “Das Trauerspiel-Buch. Der Souverän – das Trauerspiel – Konstellationen – Ruinen,”4 which addressed the early work in more depth. Thus Newman is one of the few who have extensively explored Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book and its relation to other intellectual projects.5 Newman relates Benjamin research with studies of baroque and modernity in a most fascinating way. She emphasizes the importance of the specific historical moment and setting that bore Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book. With reference to Lutz Koepnick, she points out that Benjamin “simultaneously reads the baroque through the lenses of Weimar and mirrors Weimar in the baroque” (x).6 Furthermore, through Benjamin, Newman views the baroque “as a moment of national cultural rebirth” (28) and “as the origin of a peculiarly German modernity both before and during the Weimar years” (xi). Newman’s aim is “to reconstruct...

MELANCOLÍA Y FLEMA (CONCEPCIONES HUMORALISTAS EN TORNO A LA NOCIÓN DE MELANCOLÍA EN "EL ORIGEN DEL TRAUERSPIEL ALEMÁN" DE WALTER BENJAMIN)

Si algo suele destacarse de El origen del Trauerspiel alemán, texto que escribió Walter Benjamin para postularse como docente en la Universidad, es su riqueza e innovación conceptual. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo dos cosas: por un lado, comprender el sentido de uno de estos conceptos, el de melancolía, que es tan importante para Benjamin tanto en esta obra como a lo largo de su producción filosófica. Por otro lado, se pretende indagar en las fuentes, tanto las implícitas como las explicitadas, que usa el filósofo para hablar del término en cuestión. Esto nos llevará a considerar a autores de la medicina clásica como Hipócrates y Galeno, del ideario astrológico renacentista como Ficino y algunas propuestas freudianas en torno al luto y la melancolía.

La interpretación intelectualista de la tragedia: Una discusión critica

La naturaleza de la tragedia es materia de controversia. La visión intelectualista de la tragedia ha ganado terreno en los últimos años. En este trabajo me propongo discutir una versión heterodoxa y extrema del cognitivismo, defendida recientemente por Pierluigi Donini en La tragedia, senza la catarsi, la cual descarta de manera tajante la función catártica o emocional de los dramas trágicos y afirma que “la función de la tragedia no es la catarsis, sino su coronamiento o último paso: la comprensión”. La revisión de los argumentos esgrimidos por Donini permitirá aclarar algunos puntos oscuros de la teoría aristotélica de la tragedia, en particular, el lugar de la música y el espectáculo en el drama trágico.

Analysis as mourning

In an essay on Freud's notions of mourning and the transformations of libido, Jean Laplanche discusses the image of Persephone from Homer's Odyssey, nocturnally ‘unweaving’ at her loom in order to stave off the suitors, as an aspect of the translations and detranslations of ‘the other’, the unconscious, that give rise to temporality. In himself translating the ancient Greek word analuein, ‘unweaving,’ as ‘ana-lysing’, he suggestively re-casts Freud's project of psycho-analysis as the ‘disentangling, dissolution or resolution of souls’. Restoring the Greek words lysis and lysios back to their originary context as epithets and ritualized descriptors of the god Dionysos, Lysios, the ‘loosener’, ‘releaser’, ‘liberator’, untier of knots and bonds, this paper re-visions both the analytical process, as well as the intrinsic nature and function of the dream and dreaming, as performative enactments, which – like tragic drama – attempt to work through and mourn trauma, absence, separation, loss and our basic human finitude, the terms of our mortality and our no longer being in the world itself.

Theological-Political Ruins: Walter Benjamin, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Skeletal Eschatology

Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, this essay argues—largely against Carl Schmitt—that political theology as a critical analytic should examine the ‘afterlife’ of theological tropes with respect to the sense of time and history that they compel. Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama argues that sovereignty as a political concept gains prominence as a response in the wake of the erosion of the concept of salvation history in the Baroque. The consequence of this rise of sovereignty as a political key concept is a philosophy of history based on the permanently impending catastrophic end of the world. This continuously urgent situation is not only one that leaves little room for political critique and action, but also a perplexing one in its perpetuation, since the end of the world never actually arrives. To answer why political urgency can be perpetuated seemingly infinitely and why sovereigns can fail without eroding the ongoing desire for sovereignty, Benjamin’s work suggests that we must broaden our view of political theology to consider the survival of further theological concepts to include original sin as a master trope of philosophical anthropology.

Orchestral Metaphysics: The Birth of Tragedy between Drama, Opera, and Philosophy

ABSTRACT This article argues that Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is an attempt to forge a mode of discourse that draws equally upon the resources of tragic drama, opera, and philosophy, and thereby attempts to disclose their internal relatedness, in order both to exemplify and to enable the attainment of a nonelitist species of perfectionism—one that has both an individual and a cultural dimension (with the latter finding expression in a willingness to question and reconfigure existing boundaries between the moral, the political, and the aesthetic domains, among others). The article thereby contributes to an interpretative tradition initiated in recent work by James Conant and Stanley Cavell, by extending its range of textual application.

와 역사적 알레고리

2000s Korean cinema was influenced by capital, so it chose the way of Allegory instead of talking directly about sensitive issues. A representative movie director is Park Chan Wook who directed The Vengeance Trilogy. , The final part of Park Chan Wook`s The Vengeance Trilogy, reflected Baroque Aesthetics. I analyzed focusing on Walter Benjamin`s Allegory notion in this paper. Walter Benjamin said Allegory is different from a symbol which is represented by totality. Allegory means to reconstruct the fragment instinctively and to expose something repressed. The German Tragic Drama during the baroque period reflects this well. It is my argument that Park Chan Wook incorporated these underlying themes from German Tragic Drama into . He deconstructed the liberation and the birth myth of a nation, and he restored the socialist and anarchist who were completely excluded from history.

Disappearing Act: The Role of Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra

This essay explores perhaps the most unusual death scene in all of Shakespeare’s plays: that of Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra , in which Enobarbus wills himself to die in the absence of any obvious physical cause. Readers have traditionally viewed this death scene as “Roman” in character, but I argue that Enobarbus’s demise aligns symbolically with Cleopatra’s as an instance of an easy death, and moreover a death that (following Stanley Cavell’s broad argument about Shakespearean tragedy) enables the character to avoid the full weight of the catastrophe that conventionally occurs at the end of a tragic drama. Shakespeare’s treatment of Enobarbus and Cleopatra offers interesting resonances with other late plays that have tragic elements but fit uneasily into any single genre.