The vocabulary of seeing shows three types of “mediation” provided by the chorus between spectacle and spectators. As persona spectans, i. e. internal spectator, the chorus mirrors the figure of the spectator; as persona sentiens, it shows its own emotional response, which operates like instructions for use of tragic spectacle for spectators; as persona monstrans, the chorus focuses public attention on spectacle and involves it in the representation. These three choral modalities act as a catalyst of (...) public emotional response and allow for a definition of ideal posture of tragic spectators. (shrink)

This paper argues that the passages on tragedy in Nietzsche's Daybreak , taken together, articulate a conception of tragic psychology that plays a pivotal role in the overarching argument of the book. I maintain that in Daybreak , Nietzsche construes tragedy as the embodiment of a superior alternative to the (modern, Christian) moral worldview that is the main target of his critique, and that in the curious phenomenon of tragic pleasure, Nietzsche identifies a potent antidote to what he (...) calls the Circean seductions of morality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume's Tragic Emotions Malcolm Budd Hume opens his essay "OfTragedy" with these remarks: It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle... The whole art ofthe poet is employed, in rouzing and supporting the (...) compassion and indignation, the anxiety and resentmentofhis audience. They are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted, and never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, and cries, to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swoln with the tenderest sympathy and compassion.1 The task he sets himself is to explain this seemingly problematic pleasure. Hume'sproblemisnotmerelytoaccountforthepleasurablenature of the experience of a well-written tragedy or even for the pleasure a spectator of a well-written tragedy receives from passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. His conception ofthe problem is more specific than this. The problem, as Hume understands it, is to explain a pleasure which still retains all the features and outward symptoms ofdistress and sorrow, for example, but which lacks any of the unpleasurableness intrinsic to the experience of these emotions when they are aroused by real, rather than artistically represented, tragic incidents. Soit wouldnotbe enough forHume toindicate a source of pleasure in the experience of a well-written tragedy, or a pleasure which stems from the arousal of passions that are in themselves disagreeable and which compensates for the pain or unpleasantness suffered in undergoing such passions. He must attempt to explain how a negative emotion is transformed into a positive emotion, rather than merely add a specified pleasure to the negative emotion. He thus acquiesced in the standard eighteenth century assumption that the experience is purely pleasurable, but correctly rejected the stock eighteenth century solution, provided by Du Bos, for example. However, Hume also intensified the problem, since the experience ofa well-written tragedy is, for Hume, not only one in which there is no unpleasantness, but one that is extraordinarily Volume XVII Number 2 93 MALCOLMBUDD pleasurable—extraordinarily pleasurable at the very moments at which the spectator experiences the negative emotions. He must therefore explain how an experience which involves the arousal of negative emotions can be as supremely pleasurable as he takes it tobe. The problem thatHume setshimselfisthereforethatofaccounting for the intense pleasure, unqualified by pain ("one uniform and strong enjoyment"), ofa spectator ofa well-written tragedy in whom negative emotions have been arousedin response to the tragic nature ofwhatis represented in the play. His solution is in fact perfectly fitted to the problem as he sees it, exploiting each feature ofthe experience that he construes as unqualifiedly pleasurable to explain the absence of unpleasantness and the intensity ofthe pleasure. Since the experience is ofa well-written tragedy, it is the experience of(i) a particular kind of artistic representation, an imitation, in Hume's language; (ii) a well-written representation; and (iii) a tragic representation. The first feature, according to Hume, ensures that the experience is pleasurable (in a certain respect), for "imitation is always of itself agreeable" (Essays, 220). The second feature not only adds to the pleasurable nature of the experience but, according to Hume, insofar as it swells the pleasure, it increases the likelihood that pleasure will be the "predominant" emotion in the experience, thus allowing it to capture the force or impulse of any contrary, subordinate emotion in the experience. And the third feature, according to Hume, ensures that the spectator experiences powerful negative emotions, so that the predominant emotion of pleasure is much greater than it would be in the case ofan equally well-written play with an uninteresting subject which does not engage the spectator's negative emotions. What exactly is Hume's solution? It turns upon assigning a crucial role to the way in which the painful events in a tragedy are represented. First, the manner ofrepresentation ofa painful scene in a well-written tragedy is highly agreeable. Second, the satisfaction derived from the manner of representation—the beauty of language, the selection and arrangement of incidents, and the fact and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 2, November 2004, pp. 213-236 Pleased and Afflicted: Hume on the Paradox of Tragic Pleasure E. M. DADLEZ How fast can you run? As fast as a leopard. How fast are you going to run? A whistle sounds the order that sends Archie Hamilton and his comrades over the top of the trench to certain death. Racing to circumvent that order and arriving (...) seconds too late, Archie's friend Frank screams in rage and despair. Archie is cut down before he has run twenty yards. Peter Weir's film Gallipoli is a chronicle of the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of the first World War, but it is also a film about racing. Archie is trained by his uncle Jack to run "as fast as a leopard." The film begins as it ends, with Archie sprinting in response to a whistle. Frank is first shown racing after a train, along with friends who are on their way to enlist. Archie and Frank meet while competing in a race, they race in Cairo once they have enlisted, and they finally race death. From the beginning, Archie has been faster; even at the end he is the first to die. And from the beginning he has swept Frank along in his wake, encouraging him, pushing him, inspiring him, and helping him to positions for which he is inadequately qualified. In the end, Archie's compassion and kindness prompt a decision which has grim consequences both for himself and for hundreds of others. Knowing that his friend fears death in the trenches, Archie recommends Frank as a substitute for himself, a designated message runner. But Frank is not fast enough, and falls short by mere seconds which Archie would not have lost. This is what leads to the failure of the one real effort to countermand the fatal charge. E. M. Dadlez is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, OK 73034, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 214 E. M. Dadlez I am an emotional wreck by the time the movie is over, though I should admit that most of my tears are the result of sheer rage. Both my dogs exited the room in some haste once I began to shout at the television and the unpardonably dimwitted British officers who sat sipping tea at a comfortable distance as they gave the order for soldiers to commit suicide. But it isn't just the scope of the real human disaster, or the enormity of the blunder, or the pointlessness of the entire enterprise, or even my renewed conviction that stupidity is, in fact, evil, that is so unsettling. The film unnerves with respect to personal as well as global concerns, focusing attention on the chance of vanity's leading one to undertake responsibilities beyond one's competence, the possibility of advancement or security being achievable only at the expense of another, and the realization of how easy it might be to let those things happen. Gallipoli is a sad, disturbing film, and the spectator is grieved and disturbed in the course of watching it. Yet, having said that, I must own to having a copy in my possession, and to having watched it more than once. I recommend it to friends, offering to lend them my videotape. In fact, I press it on them. I say that it is a terrific, rewarding work which they should take the time to see. How is it that I can describe my experience of the film in such glowing terms and at the same time acknowledge the extreme distress I felt in the course of watching it? How can I reconcile the discordant aspects of my experience? David Hume explores some possible answers in his essay "Of Tragedy."1 He begins by calling attention to the paradox of tragic pleasure: It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror... and other passions, which are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle.... The whole art of the poet is employed in rousing and supporting the compassion and... (shrink)

It has long been the habit of philosophers, and is still a common failing of ordinary playgoers, to see tragedy through the coloured spectacles of an acquired philosophical or religious outlook, and to commend or condemn rather from the standpoint of partiality for a certain view about life in general than from that of one assessing the intrinsic merits of a work of art. Because we all, whether laymen or specialists, theorize about the nature and destiny of that mysterious universe (...) which, for a brief span, our minds illumine, and because the working hypothesis so engendered is inevitably tinged by our personal idiosyncrasies of temperament and taste, there have been—and, building on such a foundation, there must be—almost as many different theoretical explanations of the tragic as theoreticians speculating on this high theme. Besides introducing that personal equation which has always been anathema to science, the distorted vision for which philosophical preconceptions are responsible brings with it minor illusions that are scarcely less injurious; the reading into a play or a novel of notions that had never entered the poet's brain, or the interpolation of history with incidents that never really occurred, the discarding of much that is genuinely tragic because it happens not to fit into the mould shaped by our own ideas, and the acceptance of much that is not merely untragic, but actually inartistic—pacifist, or communist, or feminist, or religious propaganda—because it happens to display the native hue of our own convictions. (shrink)

‘In forming our estimate of tragedy, let us first consider its externals—the hideous appalling spectacle that the actor presents. His high boots raise him out of all proportion, his head is hidden under an enormous mask; his huge mouth gapes upon the audience as if he would swallow them; to say nothing of the chest-pads and stomach-pads with which he contrives to give himself an artificial corpulence lest his deficiency in this respect should emphasize his disproportionate height.’.

Sophie de Grouchy, marquise de Condorcet, réinterprète la doctrine de la sympathie propre à la tradition moraliste écossaise dans le sens d’une réévaluation de ses origines physiologiques, ce qui affecte profondément ses dimensions morales et sociales. Dans le cadre d’un rousseauisme compassionnel, elle transforme Adam Smith en un républicain sentimentaliste modéré, précurseur des Idéologues. Elle s’emploie pour cela à montrer que la déférence envers le pouvoir établi, surtout la royauté, érigée par Adam Smith en servilité quasi fétichiste envers les puissants (...) et les rois, doit être réexaminée dans le cadre d’une économie affective post-révolutionnaire. Malgré le risque d’un mimétisme affectif enflammé par une rhétorique démagogique, Sophie de Grouchy mise sur la moralisation de l’identification avec la souffrance humaine, et sur sa régulation par des lois et institutions réformées pour tenir compte d’une nature humaine profondément sympathique. L’institutionnalisation de la sympathie morale est censée porter remède aux tragédies dues à la ségrégation sociale. En revanche, Adam Smith souligne à la fois la corruption morale due à l’adulation des puissants, et l’illusion socialement utile d’un imaginaire collectif cultivé par la tragédie classique et peuplé d’idéalisations du statut social. Adam Smith explore en outre d’une façon originale une dimension quasi psychanalytique de l’idéal social du moi qui anticipe la problématisation du culte du chef, là où la marquise se contente de critiquer le meneur de foule. (shrink)

Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World' examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, theologians, and humanist critics turned to tragedy to understand providence and agencies human and divine in the crucible of the Reformation. Rejecting familiar assumptions about tragedy, vital figures like Philipp Melanchthon, David Pareus, Lodovico Castelvetro, John Rainolds, and Daniel Heinsius developed distinctly philosophical ideas of tragedy,irreducible to drama or performance, inextricable from rhetoric, dialectic, and metaphysics. In its proximity to philosophy, tragedy afforded careful readers crucial insight into (...) causality, probability, necessity, and the terms of human affect and action. With these resources at hand, poets and critics produced aseries of daring and influential theses on tragedy between the 1550s and the 1630s, all directly related to pressing Reformation debates concerning providence, predestination, faith, and devotional practice. Under the influence of Aristotle's Poetics, they presented tragedy as an exacting forensic tool, enabling attentive readers to apprehend totality. And while some poets employed tragedy to render sacred history palpable with new energy and urgency, others marshalled a precise philosophicalnotion of tragedy directly against spectacle and stage-playing, endorsing anti-theatrical theses on tragedy inflected by the antique Poetics. In other words, this work illustrates the degree to which some of the influential poets and critics in the period, emphasized philosophical precision at the0expense of-even to the exclusion of-dramatic presentation. (shrink)

This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are internally related to “Being Singular Plural.” One of the strongest strands in Nancy’s philosophy is his attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of the book is that being (...) is always “being with,” that “I” is not prior to “we,” that existence is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this “being-with” not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the “I” and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a “society of spectacle” nor via some form of authenticity. The five shorter essays impressively translate the philosophical insight of “Being Singular Plural” into sophisticated discussions of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity politics, the Gulf War, and the tragic plight of Sarajevo. The essay “Eulogy for the Mêlée,” in particular, is a brilliant discussion of identity and hybridism that resonates with many contemporary social concerns. As Nancy moves through the exposition of his central concern, being-with, he engages a number of other important issues, including current notions of the “other” and “self” that are relevant to psychoanalytic, political, and multicultural concepts. He also offers astonishingly original reinterpretations of major philosophical positions, such as Nietzsche’s doctrine of “eternal recurrence,” Descartes’s “cogito,” and the nature of language and meaning. (shrink)

The present article has as its purpose to analyze the “spectacle” (ὄψις), from the conceptions developed in the Poetics of Aristotle, as a fundamental part in the tragic conception of Sophocles, in the work Oedipus Tyrannus. The analysis focused on the exodus of the play to demonstrate how aspects of theatrical representation are present in the tragic text.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wild Justice: A Study of Euripides’ HecubaGeorgia Ann MachemerMossman, Judith. Wild Justice: A Study of Euripides’ Hecuba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. xiv 1 283 pp. Cloth, $55. (Oxford Classical Monographs)Judith Mossman’s monograph on Euripides’ Hecuba deserves its accolades. It is well-written, well-argued, and shows a quality sometimes lacking in today’s publish-or-perish world, scholarly integrity. Sceptical of the theses she seeks to refute, Mossman nevertheless adopts no arrogant poses, (...) but carefully weighs the merits of each position before casting it aside. Having found questions in a vast array of comparative and critical material, she meticulously develops answers from the ancient evidence itself, comprehensively drawing into one orbit not just classical Greek poetry and Attic tragedies, but also a variety of prose works, both early and late. In no way arbitrary, her comment avoids easy solutions garnered from contemporary fields of thought and faces even intractable textual problems head-on. With its sights high, the book never wanders wide of the mark, claiming neither too much nor too little. Nor does it pretend to [End Page 134] a fashionable last word on its subject, preferring rather to advance a tradition of interpretation so that those who later raise objections will happily find themselves engaged in a dialogue with its author in the common search for new insights.Dr. Mossman’s obvious admiration for Hecuba is affirmed by the play’s history as a select text in the Byzantine manuscript tradition, and, as she demonstrates in her “Epilogue” (210–43), by the esteem accorded it in subsequent ages, especially the Renaissance, which considered it an ancient type of the then popular revenge tragedy. As I lack the background, however, to judge her winning treatment of Hecuba’s Renaissance heritage, I shall confine my remarks here to her presentation of the play’s internal dramatic excellence. This I found to be well conceived, thorough, and convincing.The opening chapters on antecedent myth, the structural unity of spoken dialogue with conjectured stage spectacle, and the dramatic integration of the chorus serve as a suitable warm-up for the more controversial topics of the later chapters. Of these preliminary exercises I was most taken by Mossman’s reconstruction of the play’s original staging and its possible effect on the contemporary audience (chapter 2). It was a good idea to pay attention to this experiential dimension at the outset. By doing so the author alerts her readers not only to the natural indeterminacy of dramatic texts, but also to the enormous gap between our literary readings of ancient plays and our perusal of them as vehicles for performances, ancient or otherwise. Mossman plays this critical game well. What she says is lucid and enlivening. Nevertheless, the heart of her discussion lies elsewhere, in the chapters on Euripides’ “rhetoric as a characterizing force” (94), Polyxena’s heroic sacrificial death, and the justice of Hecuba’s savage revenge.In these chapters Mossman successfully takes up the cudgel, first against the rhetorical formalists who argue that characters in Greek tragedies are often poorly motivated, inconsistent, generalized types that have been created largely without regard to individualizing details of the plot, a view sometimes wrongly attributed to Aristotle (see especially the excursus on Aristotle, 138–41); she then counters Nicole Loraux’s post-Freudian, feminist belief in the erotic nature of Polyxena’s sacrifice (Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, tr. Anthony Forster [Harvard 1987; orig. publ. Paris 1985] 56–61); and finally she argues against the many who, like Martha Nussbaum (The Fragility of Goodness [Cambridge 1986] 408, 414–16) claim that in the play’s second half Hecuba degenerates into subhuman brutality.As regards character development, Mossman contends that what we see in ancient drama is never a change of ethos, but the interplay of ethos and events and the delineation of “successive emotions which arise in response to successive situations” (102). As in the rhetorical handbooks, speeches must be judged by their appropriateness to type of both speaker and addressee and to the specifics of the individual case. Using these ancient principles, Mossman reviews the speeches of the play and, by means of their opposing and... (shrink)

In Mexico, as in the case of the massacre of 1968 in Tlatelolco, there exists a long tradition of writing history in a tragic or traumatic key by starting from its founding moments of violence, as if the repetitive compulsion could be met only by the compulsion to repeat the trauma. And yet, this essay proposes that perhaps we should not forget that the compulsion to respond to the violence of repression with a sorrow song or a memorial of (...) grievances ends up being very much part and parcel of the effect of displaying the spectacle of sovereign power that was being sought after in the first place. Precisely because it is so terribly awe-inspiring, state violence when it is wielded serves not just as a symptom of vulnerability but also as a way of diverting attention away from the utopian dreams and efforts in resistance and self-government that were unfolding on the ground prior to the punctual onslaught of repression. Drawing important lessons from the experience of the disappeared students of Ayotzinapa, the point is not to let ourselves be blinded by the power of repression but to let ourselves be illuminated by the resistance that comes before it. (shrink)

Résumé — Cet article défend une interprétation de la catharsis qui intègre la psychologie, l’éthique et l’esthétique. Un réexamen attentif de la référence à la catharsis musicopoétique en Politique VIIImontre que, contrairement à l’opinion reçue, la catharsis n’est pas ici séparée de la conception aristotélicienne de l’importance éthique des réactions émotionnelles face aux formes d’art mimétique. Politique VIII donne également une raison de supposer que la catharsis est associée au plaisir, mais pas identifiée à lui. La catharsis tragique se comprend (...) mieux comme un profit retiré de la transformation des émotions pénibles en émotions agréables dans la contemplation de l’art mimétique. Cette lecture permet d’harmoniser catharsis et psychologie morale d’Aristote dans son ensemble : une réactivité émotionnelle intense aux objets esthétiques peut contribuer à l’entraînement approprié de dispositions éthiques. La catharsis n’est pas seulement le résultat final du spectacle de la tragédie ; elle vient couronner une expérience tout entière, à la fois cognitive et morale.— This paper argues for an interpretation of catharsis that integrates psychology, ethics and aesthetics. A careful reexamination of the reference to musico-poetic catharsis in Politics 8 shows that, contrary to received opinion, catharsis is not there divorced from Aristotle’s view of the ethical significance of emotional responses to mimetic art-forms. Politics 8 also supplies reason to suppose that catharsis is closely associated with, but not identical to, pleasure. Tragic catharsis is best understood as the benefit accruing from the transformation of painful into pleasurable emotions within the contemplation of mimetic art. This reading allows catharsis to be harmonised with Aristotle’s moral psychology as a whole : intense emotional responsiveness to « aesthetic » objects can contribute to the appropriate exercise of ethically attuned dispositions. Catharsis is not just the end-result of watching a tragedy ; it supervenes on the entire cognitive-cum-emotional experience. (shrink)

For Bakhtin the “gradual narrowing down” of the carnival’s regenerative power is directly linked to its separation from “folk culture” and its ensuing domestication as “part of the family’s private life.” Nonetheless, Bakhtin’s faith in the inherent indestructibility of “the carnival spirit” compels him to find it preserved, even if in an interiorized and psychological form, in the post-Renaissance literary tradition, and he specifically names Diderot, along with Molière, Voltaire, and Swift, as authors who kept alive the subversive possibilities of (...) a Saturnalian laughter . But, of course, as Bakhtin himself recognizes, much more has changed in both the nature and the effects of that laughter than merely its locus of action. The crucial difference, according to Bakhtin, is a new sense of terror felt at the heart of the post-Renaissance carnival grotesque:The transformation of the principle of laughter which permeates the grotesque, that is the loss of its regenerating power, leads to a series of other essential differences between Romantic grotesque and medieval and Renaissance grotesque…The world of Romantic grotesque is to a certain extent a terrifying word, alien to man…Something frightening is revealed in that which was habitual and secure. [Pp. 38-39]Directly linked to this burden of terror, of laughter as a response to dread, not exuberance, is a change in the literary function of madness:Other specific traits are linked with the disappearance of laughter’s regenerating power…. The theme of madness is inherent to all grotesque forms, because madness makes men look at the world with different eyes, not dimmed by “normal,” that is by commonplace ideas and judgments. In folk grotesque, madness is a gay parody of official reason, of the narrow seriousness of official “truth.” It is a “festive” madness. In Romantic grotesque, on the other hand, madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual isolation. [P. 39]Bakhtin’s typology of laughter, for all its richly textured local insights, is haunted, from its inception, by a wistfully nostalgic longing for a realm of pure and ahistorical spontaneity, a rite of universal participation whose essentially affirmative character is guaranteed by its very universality. The most characteristic feature of such a carnival is, in fact, its abolition of all distinctions between participant and viewer:Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it…. It has a universal spirit: it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part. [P. 7]Yet as soon as the question of representation arises, whether in Rabelais or in his successors, the “footlights” which separate actor and spectator, reader and character, come into being, introducing the very divisions the work’s themes deny. Belatedness, the knowledge of coming after the festival has already been fragmented, is thus not limited to a post-Rabelaisian, bourgeois culture; it is itself a condition of every Saturnalian text, and what has changed is not the inclusiveness of the carnival per se but the literary consequences of acknowledging that belatedness. Michael André Bernstein, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic and Prima della Rivoluzione, a volume of verse. He is currently at work on a book about the Abject Hero and literary genealogy. (shrink)

Bernard Williams articulated his later political philosophy notably in response to Ronald Dworkin, who, striving for coherence or integrity among our political concepts, sought to immunize the concepts of liberty and equality against conflict. Williams, doubtful that we either could or should eliminate the conflict, resisted the pursuit of conceptual integrity. Here, I reconstruct this Dworkin–Williams debate with an eye to drawing out ideas of ongoing philosophical and political importance. The debate not only exemplifies Williams's political realism and its connection (...) to his critique of the morality system. It also illustrates the virtues and hazards of contemporary efforts to ameliorate or engineer our concepts; it indicates what political philosophy might look to in appraising political concepts; it adverts to the different needs these concepts have to meet if they are to sustain a politics of pluralism, deal with polarization, and secure the consent of those who end up on the losing side of political decisions; and it presents us with two starkly contrasting conceptions of politics itself, of the place of political values within it, and of our prospects of reducing the uncomfortably conflictual character of those values through philosophy. (shrink)

In fourth-century Greece, the debate over the nature of philosophy generated a novel claim: that the highest form of wisdom is theoria, the rational 'vision' of metaphysical truths. This 2004 book offers an original analysis of the construction of 'theoretical' philosophy in fourth-century Greece. In the effort to conceptualise and legitimise theoretical philosophy, the philosophers turned to a venerable cultural practice: theoria. In this practice, an individual journeyed abroad as an official witness of sacralized spectacles. This book examines the philosophic (...) appropriation and transformation of theoria, and analyses the competing conceptions of theoretical wisdom in fourth-century philosophy. By tracing the link between traditional and philosophic theoria, this book locates the creation of theoretical philosophy in its historical context, analysing theoria as a cultural and an intellectual practice. It develops a new, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, history and literary studies. (shrink)

The aim of the current article is to analyze the concept of tragic cases and its different implications based on Manuel Atienza, one of the jurists who specially addressed the issue, and on Robert Alexy, whose work is one of the main references in contemporary Legal Philosophy. According to parameters exposed by Alexy (correctness, rationality, legal argumentation, human rights), some of Atienza’s central assertions about tragic cases (lack of correct answer, legal rationality limitation, option for the lesser evil) (...) are herein demonstrated as inadmissible. Based on Alexy’s work, it is possible to justify the opposite conclusion about tragic cases, i.e., cases where there is more than one correct answer and these answers are opposed to each other. (shrink)

Tragedy is a founding theme in disability studies. Critical disability studies have, since their inception, argued that understandings of disability as tragedy obscure the political dimensions of disability and are a barrier facing disabled persons in society. In this paper, we propose an affirmative understanding of tragedy, employing the philosophical works of Nietzsche, Spinoza and Hasana Sharp. Tragedy is not, we argue, something to be opposed by disability politics; we can affirm life within it. To make our case, we look (...) to an ongoing ethnography of two Canadian children’s rehabilitation clinics. Looking to the clinical experience of Canadian boys and young men diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and those of their families, we show how this affirmative understanding of tragedy allows us to pursue the themes of disability politics within tragedy. Contrary to an optimism that would eschew tragedy at all costs or a pessimistic approach that declines to act in the face of tragic circumstance, we argue that a revised understanding of tragedy allows us to situate the occasionally-tragic clinical experience of disability in a philosophy of life. Both disability and tragedy point us to the shared entanglements that make life what it is. (shrink)

There is a concern that the widespread deployment of autonomous machines will open up a number of ‘responsibility gaps’ throughout society. Various articulations of such techno-responsibility gaps have been proposed over the years, along with several potential solutions. Most of these solutions focus on ‘plugging’ or ‘dissolving’ the gaps. This paper offers an alternative perspective. It argues that techno-responsibility gaps are, sometimes, to be welcomed and that one of the advantages of autonomous machines is that they enable us to embrace (...) certain kinds of responsibility gap. The argument is based on the idea that human morality is often tragic. We frequently confront situations in which competing moral considerations pull in different directions and it is impossible to perfectly balance these considerations. This heightens the burden of responsibility associated with our choices. We cope with the tragedy of moral choice in different ways. Sometimes we delude ourselves into thinking the choices we make were not tragic ; sometimes we delegate the tragic choice to others ; sometimes we make the choice ourselves and bear the psychological consequences. Each of these strategies has its benefits and costs. One potential advantage of autonomous machines is that they enable a reduced cost form of delegation. However, we only gain the advantage of this reduced cost if we accept that some techno-responsibility gaps are virtuous. (shrink)

The 2000 U.S. presidential election was one of the most bizarre and fateful in American history. Described in books as a “deadlock,” “thriller,” “the perfect tie,” and even “Grand Theft 2000,” studies of the election have dissected its anomalies and scandals and have attempted to describe and explain what actually happened.1 In this study, I will analyze how the turn toward media politics and spectacle in U.S. political campaigns and the curious and arguably archaic system of proportional voting in (...) the U.S. tilted the campaign toward George W. Bush and were prejudicial to the election of Al Gore. Gore received over 540,000 votes more than Bush, but because of the U.S. system of proportional voting won less electoral votes and lost the crucial state of Florida. In this chapter, I will argue that media representation of the two candidates and the anomalies of the U.S. system of proportional representation in an arguably archaic Election College were major factors in the highly controversial ascent to the presidency of George W. Bush. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court decision directly decided the election results and the story of Election 2000 is highly complex and contested. Yet focus on the media in the election and problems with the system of proportional representation provide revealing lenses on the events of the 2000 election and call attention to major problems in the U.S. system of representational democracy. (shrink)

_Tragic Play_ explores the deep philosophical significance of classic and modern tragedies in order to cast light on the tragic dimensions of contemporary experience. Romanticism, it has often been claimed, brought tragedy to an end, making modernity the age _after_ tragedy. Christoph Menke opposes this modernist prejudice by arguing that tragedy remains alive in the present in the distinctively new form of the playful, ironic, and self-consciously performative. Through close readings of plays by William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, (...) and Botho Strauss, Menke shows how tragedy re-emerges in modernity as "tragedy of play." In _Hamlet_, _Endgame_, _Philoktet_, and _Ithaka_, Menke integrates philosophical theory with critical readings to investigate shifting terms of judgment, curse, reversal, misfortune, and violence. (shrink)

This paper outlines and defends a notion of tragic-remorse. This moral emotion properly accompanies those actions that involve unavoidable moral wrongdoing in general and dirty hands scenarios in particular. Tragic-remorse differs both phenomenologically and conceptually from regret, agent-regret and remorse. By recognising the existence of tragic-remorse, we are better able to account for our complex moral reality which at times makes it necessary for good persons to act in ways that although justified leave the agent with a (...) moral stain and a particular emotional response. (shrink)

The following essay examines visual representations of hurricane Katrina in popular media in order to show how photography continues to be enlisted in the production of the racial spectacle, the transformation of the plight of people of color into entertainment. The essay also analyzes how such a use of the visual serves to solidify the understanding of people of color by way of a black-white binary that does not do justice to current U.S. demographics. The essay provides a glimpse (...) into the intertwining between the visual and racial thinking. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy overcomes the opposition between scientific optimism and Schopenhauerian pessimism with the image of a music-making Socrates, who symbolizes the aesthetic affirmation of life. This article shows how the aesthetic ideal is an illusion whose metaphysical solace undermines itself in being recognized as such, thereby ceasing to be comforting. While I agree with recent commentaries that contest the pervasive Schopenhauerian reading of The Birth, most of these commentaries still support the view that Nietzsche wishes to communicate some (...) fundamental truth about nature or meaning in life. By contrast, I argue that he treats any such truth as a cultural fiction that emerges from the poetic staging of reality, leaving us with a contradiction of appearances deprived of any intelligible ground. (shrink)

Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of very different sorts--pragmatists, metaphysicians, philosophers of language, philosophers of law, moral philosophers--have taken a reflective rather than merely recreational interest in literature. Does this literary turn mean that philosophy is coming to an end or merely down to earth? In this collection of essays, one of the most insightful of contemporary literary theorists investigates the intersection of literature and philosophy, analyzing the emerging preferences for practice over theory, particulars over universals, events over structures, (...) inhabitants over spectators, an ethics of responsibility over a morality of rules, and a desire for intimacy with the world instead of simply a disengaged knowledge of it. (shrink)

This book examines Whitehead’s process aesthetics focusing on two categories, the penumbral beauty of darkness and the tragic beauty of perishability, while establishing parallels with the Japanese sense of evanescent beauty. It clarifies how both traditions develop a religio-aesthetic vision of tragic beauty and its reconciliation in the supreme ecstasy of peace.

Is it possible to preserve national security through ethical policies? Richard Ned Lebow seeks to show that ethics are actually essential to the national interest. Recapturing the wisdom of classical realism through a close reading of the texts of Thucydides, Clausewitz and Hans Morgenthau, Lebow argues that, unlike many modern realists, classic realists saw close links between domestic and international politics, and between interests and ethics. Lebow uses this analysis to offer a powerful critique of post-Cold War American foreign policy. (...) He also develops an ontological foundation for ethics and makes the case for an alternate ontology for social science based on Greek tragedy's understanding of life and politics. This is a topical and accessible book, written by a leading scholar in the field. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the nature of the situationist concept of spectacle, especially by separating it into its philosophical elements, in order to check the effectiveness, from a systematic point of view, of situationism’s radical critique. In doing so, the main focus of our attention will be Debord’s major theoretical work: Society of the Spectacle. In fact, the concept of spectacle, repeatedly evoked in other writings, has its most far-reaching version in that small but great book, (...) whose first edition was published in 1967. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore how the differences between Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze delineate two different interpretations of the politics of found footage cinema. To do so, the notion of cinematic interval is crucial. While Debord's practice of détournement presupposes a Hegelian-inspired notion of interval that allows for self-awareness to be achieved, Deleuze puts forth a Bergsonian concept of interval that functions as a condition of possibility for creating an ‘image of movement in itself’. To explore (...) these two interpretations, this article uses Guy Debord's 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle as a case study. By focusing on this specific object, the two interpretations of the cinematic interval make it possible to compare two alternative ways of dealing with the representability – or unrepresentability – of capital, and hence to sketch two alternative views on the politics of found footage film practices. (shrink)

Considering formative twentieth-century theories in relation to contemporary technosocial developments, this article examines ideas of spectacle and surveillance as ways of approaching visual politics. I argue that the historically important relationship between the visual and political fields is now intensifying and mutating. First discussing Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, I show how his influential approach proves inadequate to the politics of image-saturated societies. I next show how critics of imperial and racial spectacles, from Michael Rogin to (...) Claudia Rankine and Tina Campt, provide better ways of engaging power and political contestation in the visual field. Third, I examine how Michel Foucault deployed notions of spectacle in his own work but argued for leaving the term behind, presenting surveillance as not just a different modality of power but also spectacle’s temporal successor. This account remains essential for both historical understanding and reckoning with contemporary surveillance. Fourth, however, as Simone Browne argues, Foucault’s separation between spectacle and surveillance is too stark, his history too prone to occlude race. Furthermore, recent surveillance technologies and practices have changed in ways that confound his terms, while extending and also altering the racial dynamics explored earlier in the essay. Today, even surveillance based on optical media contributes to a “postvisual” image world in which algorithmic, machine-machine communication abets forms of power neither tied to human perception nor graspable as subject formation. With surprising assistance from Debord, I end by discussing the significant theoretical and political challenges posed by the ironies of postvisual visuality. (shrink)

This volume presents two works by Gabriel Marcel. The first, _Tragic Wisdom and Beyond,_ a collection of his later writings, shows the impact of his encounter with the later writings of Heidegger. The second, _Conversations between Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel, _is a series of six conversations between Marcel and his most famous student.

I. Introduction This paper aims to explain Nietzsche’s understanding of tragedy, and in particular his self-characterization as the “tragic philosopher.” What I shall claim is that, according to Nietzsche, to recognize the self-determining or self-creating character of our agency is to reveal it as tragic. Tragedy accordingly illuminates the most fundamental issue in Nietzsche’s mature philosophy: the possibility of affirmation.

A world awash in little understood chemicals tragically harms adults and children alike. Laws keep health agencies in the dark about toxicants, slow, well motivated research hampers protections, and strenuous vested opposition exacerbates the harm. How science is used in the tort law can facilitate or frustrate redress of harm. This book recommends better approaches.

Twelve scholars in religion and the humanities present Christian interpretations of tragedy in literature, including works by Nietzsche, Kafka, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Milton and others.

The letter sent by the Royal Society to the London optician, John Marshall, in 1694, commending his new method of grinding, has been reprinted, and referred to, in recent years. However, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the method itself, the letter and the circumstances in which it was written, nor the consequences for trade practices. The significance of the approval by the Royal Society of this innovation and the use of that approbation by John Marshall and other practitioners (...) are examined. Gaps in existing accounts of Marshall's method are partly remedied by supplementing surviving written materials with accounts of contemporary, and present-day, trade practices based on his method. The reasons why Marshall and his contemporaries failed to record his method and specify his improvements are discussed. The reactions of the Spectacle Makers' Company and its more prominent members, both to the innovation itself and to the Royal Society's letter, are analysed. The impact of the new technique on contemporary and later opticians is described. (shrink)

This is the masterpiece of Miguel de Unamuno, a member of the group of Spanish intellectuals and philosophers known as the "Generation of '98," and a writer ...

The global COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020 coincided with another incident that made global news, namely the release of the video of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in the United States. While the novelty of the pandemic wore off relatively quickly when things “went back to normal”, the death of George Floyd inspired a radical global movement relating to the treatment of black people (by both police and civilians) worldwide, namely the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement. (...) The force of the 2020 BLM movement arguably resulted in greater social activism relating to the treatment of minorities in the US and UK in a matter of a few weeks than the almost unfathomable number of deaths from COVID-19. The aim of this article is to critically analyse this particular phenomenon through the lens of so-called “memory culture”, and specifically the role of spectacle in digital mnemotechnologies in circulating videos, images and appeals to empathetic engagement with the collective memories of violence against black minorities in the West. This trend supports the argument that will be made, namely that we live in a memory culture which has become obsessed with the fetishisation of the spectacle in order to induce the collective imagination, leading towards empathy for different groups. This provides a perspective on how the notion of the spectacle seems to be more effective in our contemporary memory culture at garnering sociopolitical action than appeals to scientific reason, or even just narratives unaccompanied by shocking videos or images. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The history of spectacle terror lynching remains one of the darkest and least explored political events in American history. In this article, I explore the aesthetic relation of this history to the formation of notions of public action and political assembly. I argue that the history of spectacle terror lynching establishes both a past and present form of public sovereignty. As such, I attempt to examine questions of what public action means with regard to a political context (...) of antiblack violence. I conclude that lynching festivals constitute not only a form of politics but a form of public sovereignty that is still in play in our notion of the public. At heart this notion informs not only antiblack forms of racism but antiblack forms of genocide. (shrink)

Tragic choices arise during the COVID-19 pandemic when the limited resources made available in acute medical settings cannot be accessed by all patients who need them. In these circumstances, healthcare rationing is unavoidable. It is important in any healthcare rationing process that the interests of the community are recognised, and that decision-making upholds these interests through a fair and consistent process of decision-making. Responding to recent calls (1) to safeguard individuals’ legal rights in decision-making in intensive care, and (2) (...) for new authoritative national guidance for decision-making, this paper seeks to clarify what consistency and fairness demand in healthcare rationing during the COVID-19 pandemic, from both a legal and ethical standpoint. The paper begins with a brief review of UK law concerning healthcare resource allocation, considering how community interests and individual rights have been marshalled in judicial deliberation about the use of limited health resources within the National Health Service (NHS). It is then argued that an important distinction needs to be drawn between procedural and outcome consistency, and that a procedurally consistent decision-making process ought to be favoured. Congruent with the position that UK courts have adopted for resource allocation decision-making in the NHS more generally, specific requirements for a procedural framework and substantive triage criteria to be applied within that framework during the COVID-19 pandemic are considered in detail. (shrink)