Neal Curtis

Tragedy and politics

Abstract This article considers the war against terror in relation to classical
tragedy. It uses Heideggers analysis of Sophocless play Antigone to argue
that human beings are essentially homeless and yet our destiny lies in the
continual attempt to overcome this homelessness by establishing foundational principles that might bring our journeying to an end. The tragedy
of this situation is that the search for foundations and a search for a home
invariably bring differing worlds in conflict with each other as their paths
to truth collide. Lucien Goldmanns analysis of the tragedy of refusal is also
considered in relation to a non-foundational politics that may permit us not
only to endure, but actually to affirm our homelessness as an attempt to
resist the terror and anabolic militarism that marks the current age.
Key words fundamentalism Lucien Goldmann Martin Heidegger
homelessness Sophocles tragedy war

Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued in The Birth of Tragedy that with

the advent of Euripidean comedy tragedy effectively committed suicide,
but if the works of Shakespeare and Racine, Beckett and Miller challenge
the idea that tragedy died, it can certainly be argued that the centrality
of tragic consciousness within the Hellenic mind is incomparable to its
impoverished popular usage today. Rather than having committed
suicide, then, tragedy has been incrementally disabled and marginalized.
In the age of classical tragedy as represented by Sophocles plays tragedy
presented the drama of human limitations and our hubris in the face of
those limitations. Tragedy told profound epistemological and ontological truths about the world and our place in it, presenting the nature of
the human condition and its destiny. The only relation that the popular
use of the word tragedy today has with the Greek art form is its
continued connection to death, but here death is rarely understood in
terms of limits. The poverty of this popular usage is exemplified in the
rhetoric of the war against terror, where the deaths on 11 September
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 33 no 7 pp. 860879
Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and David Rasmussen
www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453707081683

PSC

861
Curtis: Tragedy and politics
2001, 9 March 2004 and 7 July 2005, for example, were tragic because
they were deaths of the innocent. Unlike classical tragedy, in this contemporary telling of the tragic as innocent death we learn nothing about
ourselves and our world; we do, however, learn all we need to know
about the enemy who are quite simply evil. In the performance of
tragedy today, in which the media play the role of a jejune chorus, the
tragic narrative simply reinforces the certainty of our self-knowledge
and the righteousness of our actions.
The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by British police on a
London tube train in July 2005 reveals another feature of the contemporary use of the tragic. This killing was deemed a tragedy because being
shot in the head seven times while being held down by other officers was
reported to have been a regrettable accident. These two motifs of the use
of tragedy today, innocence and accident, show how far we have departed
from the lessons of Greek tragedy where our implication in events was
presented in an unfolding drama concerning the destiny of humankind.
Where Greek tragedy recounted a universal and disquieting truth about
the frailty of the human condition, tragedy today individualizes that
frailty as occasional chance encounters with death. In truth, however,
these chance encounters with death do contain some element of fate
even if it only traces the forgetting of destiny. Many commuters on the
London Underground stoically responded to the bombings with the logic
that you go when your times up, but again this hardly touches on the
lessons of destiny presented in Greek drama. Only when we understand
how the events that unfolded on and after 11 September 2001 might
educate us, beyond the vacuous deployment of good and evil, can we
really begin to think of them as tragic.
To think of 11 September 2001 in terms of tragedy it is therefore
important to reconsider the issue of destiny, which in turn demands a
meditation on our conception of history, but before that a few qualifications. First, all the acts of violence on both sides in the so-called war
against terror could be used for the purpose of discussing the relation
between tragedy and destiny, but the backdrop for this article will be
the events of 11 September 2001 because they are exemplary with
regards to the clash of fundamentalisms that, I will argue, is the recurring manifestation of tragic destiny (in this instance it was the symbol
of a fundamentalist market logic destroyed by disciples of the final and
fully revealed word of God). Secondly, considering acts of mass murder
in relation to destiny is not to suggest that America deserved this
violence. Even if one was to subscribe to the view that since 1945 the
USA has embarked upon numerous murderous ventures of its own, this
does not mean that America deserves to be the subject of such violent
retribution. Such a conception of justice is profoundly unethical. Thirdly,
this also thinks history in a way that is not helpful for thinking destiny

862
Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (7)
and tragedy. To use Martin Heideggers distinction it is an ontical conception of history when what is required is an ontological conception
understood as the assignment hidden within our historically transforming conception of truth. History, for our purposes, is not reducible to
the events that happen, but must be thought of as directed by the principle that in a given age orders our conception of truth and determines
our relation to Being. This is how Heidegger understands both history
and destiny as something sent. Finally, this is not to suggest that the
events that happen are therefore borne of necessity. To speak of destiny
is not to forget the realm of freedom. In fact the opposite is the case.
To think destiny in this way is to think how our freedom posits these
world-forming principles and how the resulting sense of worldhood
frames, delimits and even prescribes the actions and events we ordinarily call history. As Georg Lukcs argued in his early essay on tragedy,
to speak of tragic destiny is not to speak of the inescapable workings
of causality (1974: 157), but to speak of something essential, a term
we will have to define in due course.
The main reason tragedy disappeared from philosophical view is in
part due to the very privileging of human freedom and in particular the
autonomous rational agent that is crucial to the evolution of the
complex and convoluted age we refer to as modernity; and as Terry
Eagleton has recently noted (2003), it is even more out of step with the
postmodern ideology of life as freedom of choice. The notion that
human action was somehow destined was anathema to our understanding of the human faculty to which Kant gave the name spontaneity. In
the light of this, when Lucien Goldmann published his theory of the
tragic vision in 1955 the question of destiny was refigured in line with
a Marxist conception of human action as praxis and the meaningful
progression of history. Consistent with the modern German treatments
that began with Schelling, Goldmanns turn to tragedy is also a response
to crisis, only here it is the crisis of the alienated and reified soul under
capitalism.1 While Marxs analysis of capitalism and the inherent
contradictions that will lead to its demise would seem to lend itself to
an analysis of tragic destiny Goldmann rejects what he calls the tragedy
of fate in favour of a tragedy of refusal, something he finds encapsulated in the work of Pascal.
What Goldmann calls the tragic vision, as set out in Pascals Penses,
forms part of a world-view that responds to and challenges the worldviews of both rationalism, represented by Descartes, and empiricism,
represented by Hume. In keeping with all other modern philosophical
treatments of tragedy Goldmanns analysis also presents tragedy as the
experience of a profound tension between the singular and the universal,
between the individual and the community, between man and God.
For Goldmann the tragic vision reappeared in the 17th century precisely

863
Curtis: Tragedy and politics
because the rationalist conception only heightened the tension when, by
seeking to eradicate it in favour of the authority of reason, it drove an
even bigger wedge between man and God. As he notes, rationalism was
prepared to accept God, but it was only on the condition that this God
did not interfere with the way men behaved, and, above all, that he
refrained from casting doubt upon the absolute validity of human reason
in the realms of both ethics and epistemology (1964: 32). Man is therefore alone in a silent cosmos, but the tragic vision becomes acutely aware
of the inadequacy of this world-view, and refusing to accept human
reason as the only measure and guide, it recommences and reinvigorates
the search for transcendent truth.
Where the God of rationalism is simply the guarantee of mans
autonomy and freedom from external authority, the God of the tragic
vision questions this self-certainty and calls man out of his rational
isolation. Tragic man is directed towards the wholeness and authenticity (1964: 38) that cannot be found in the relativity and contingency
of scientific proofs because everything which is possible when we follow
the rules of this world ceases to exist when the eye of God lights upon
it (1964: 49). However, while rationalism supposedly counters the
tragic by making everything reducible to concepts and the free play of
human reason, tragic man does not simply flee the world and seek sanctuary in the divine; it is a tragic vision because while [Gods] presence
takes all value and reality from the world, his equally absolute and
permanent absence makes the world into the only reality which man can
confront, the only sphere in and against which he can and must apply
his demand for substantial and absolute values (1964: 50). Goldmann
thus conceives the tragic vision as it is worked out in Pascals thoughts
as the tension of a simultaneous Yes and No to a world that is at
once both everything and nothing. Refusal is neither retreat nor flight.
Tragic man cannot ignore the world because it is knowledge of the
world that gives validity to his refusal, but he is also unable to speak
of Gods existence as something fully established and known because
in God, absence and presence are indissolubly linked together (1964:
67). However, as Goldmann notes, what is essential to man is the
inability to tolerate this antagonism and his nature impels him to strive
after a synthesis (1964: 219), even if a synthesis cannot be achieved
with absolute and dogmatic certainty, and can only be achieved on the
basis of what Pascal refers to as a wager that there are the absolute
values of a transcendent being.
From this brief consideration of Goldmanns reading of Pascal it is
important to note that on the basis of both the refusal of the world and
the wager on the existence of transcendent values tragic man might be
understood as homeless, and yet to think this issue in relation to tragedy
proper it is necessary to consider this homelessness and the quest to

864
Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (7)
overcome it in terms of destiny, that is, to think the tragic destiny of
human being as the continual striving of the homeless one for a home
and the perils that such a search brings with it. This sense of homelessness is wonderfully conjured by Pascal, who writes:
We sail over a vast expanse, for ever drifting and uncertain, and driven
from one extreme to the other. If we find a point at which to tie up and
stay awhile, it shifts and fails us; if we try to follow it, it slips from our
grasp and is lost to us for ever. There is nothing fixed and constant for us.
This is our natural state and yet the one we find most contrary to our taste
and inclination. We long to find a firm footing and a sure foundation on
which to build a tower that would reach infinity, but our whole foundations crack and shudder and an abyss opens up before our feet. (Goldmann,
1964: 206)

While there will be recourse to return to Goldmanns analysis of the

tragedy of refusal in relation to a form or style of politics that might
respond to the current clash of fundamentalisms on display in the war
against terror, to explore the specific condition of homelessness and its
relation to tragic destiny I would like to turn to Heideggers interpretation of Sophocless Antigone, primarily as it is set out in the 1934 set
of lectures entitled Hlderlins Hymn The Ister. In particular I will
follow Heideggers treatment of the decisive word (1996: 61) d

as it appears in the first line of the first stationary choral ode. For the
purposes of the analysis offered here I am not concerned with the
accuracy of Heideggers interpretation he himself asserts that it is
literally incorrect although poetically more truthful it is rather a case
of deploying Heideggers insights with regard to an understanding of
homelessness and what Greek tragedy can teach us about the fundamentalism that is our perennial response to this condition.
Central to Heideggers analysis of Antigone are four lines taken
from the choral ode: the first two lines of the first strophe, which
Heidegger translates as Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing more
uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being; the middle line of the
second strophe, which is translated as Everywhere venturing forth
underway, experienceless without any way out he comes to nothing;
the middle line of the second antistrophe, translated as Towering high
above the site, forfeiting the site is he for whom non-beings always are
for the sake of risk; and the closing lines of the second antistrophe,
translated as Such shall not be entrusted to my hearth, nor share their
delusion with my knowing, who put such a thing to work. The first
line is of heightened importance for Heidegger who argues that it
contains the essential ground of this tragedy, and even of Sophocless
poetic work as a whole (1996: 60) As we have noted the decisive word
is d
 and it is the translation of this word that receives extended
treatment in Heideggers various considerations of the play in the period

865
Curtis: Tragedy and politics
193346. The strained translation of the word is justified by Heidegger
because even though translation is an aid to understanding, translation
also means awakening our understanding to the fact that the blind
obstinacy of habitual opinion must be shattered and abandoned if the
truth of a work is to unveil itself (1996: 63).
The dictionary definition of the word d
 is, according to
Heidegger, that which is fearful, but already there is an ambiguity here
for the fearful is not simply that which produces flight in human beings,
but also reverence and awe. The fearful is thus also something worthy
of honour. This ambiguity is the first evidence of what Heidegger calls
a counter-turning in the word, a counter-turning that is essential to both
Being and human beings. That the d
 is both frightening and
awesome means that it might also be translated as immense or powerful,
looming over us, perhaps sublime, but also actively violent (1996: 63).
It is for these reasons that Hlderlin first translated the word d
 as
monstrous (ungeheuer); an interpretation retained by Nietzsche who
used the same word to refer to the total image of the world (1999: 87)
that the dragon-slayers (1999: 88) of a rejuvenated tragic culture might
fearlessly gaze upon. Further to this, that which is powerful, in the sense
of being frightening and awesome, can also be said to be in excess of
our habitual powers and thus might also be conceived of as something
inhabitual (1996: 63). This third aspect of the translation is not to
suggest that this excess is something outside the habitual, instead the
inhabitual remains an essential part of it.2 Therefore, in the light of
this threefold meaning Heidegger chooses to translate d
 as das
Unheimliche, the uncanny. He writes:
This word is not meant to indicate some further meaning in addition to
those previously mentioned; rather, it is meant to name all of them together,
and indeed not by bundling them together in an extrinsic manner, which
is linguistically impossible and nonsensical. Rather, it is meant to name
them in such a way that the term das Unheimliche, the uncanny, . . .
grasps the concealed ground of the unity of the manifold meanings of
d
, thus grasping the d
 itself in its concealed essence. (1996: 64)

This meaning of the concealed essence is then further elaborated when

Heidegger pays attention to the last word of the opening two lines of
the first strophe: 

. The word 

 can be translated as being,
and Heidegger notes that even Hlderlin uses the bland word is in his
translations. Heidegger, however, translates the word 

 as to stir,
to come forth, to find and abide in ones own locale and site (1996: 71),
a translation inspired by the Greek word for sea, 
: that which
stirs itself of its own accord and thus does not flow away but remains
and abides within itself in its surging (1996: 72). Uncanniness, Heidegger
therefore argues, is not a consequence of being human, but arises from

866
Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (7)
Being itself. Thus humankind emerges from a primordial ontological
uncanniness that will need some qualification as we go along. For now,
in terms of establishing the reasons for Heideggers translation, it need
only be said that this very particular reading of the word 

 also
allows him to argue that this surging, this flowing and journeying,
demands that we also view the uncanny as the un-homely, das Unheimishe: Sophocless word, which speaks of the human being as the
most uncanny being, says that human beings are, in a singular sense,
not homely, and that their care is to become homely (1996: 71).3 To
qualify the use of the term essence, then, we might say that human
beings are essentially the unhomely in search of a home; and as William
McNeill has argued, Sophocles drama is not simply a telling of a story
but the very accomplishment of this condition. In Heideggers interpretation of action, to accomplish, vollbringen, means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to bring to its full unfolding
(McNeill, 2000: 170).
This notion that humans are essentially concerned with being homely
also captures something of Pascals observations regarding the incessant
journeying of human beings, as well as Nietzsches argument that tragedy
was created out of a feeling for the dissonance of human experience.4
And while this very sophisticated (some might say torturous) translation
of d
 as homelessness might be argued to have emerged only with
some significant etymological licence on Heideggers part, I believe the
translation is supported by the fourth section Heidegger focuses on; the
closing lines of the second antistrophe in which the chorus declares that
human beings shall not be entrusted to my hearth. Here, the hearth is
to be understood as the heart of being, and it would make sense for the
chorus to declare the hearth not to be entrusted to human beings only
if human beings were in search of a home. Without being homeless and
journeying in their essence the question of humans being entrusted with
the hearth would not arise.
Further justification for translating d
 as the uncanny and the
unhomely is found in the second and third lines that Heidegger singles
out for attention. In those two lines it is the ambiguous or counterturning word-forms 

 

 and tw
 
 that
provide Heidegger with the most revealing sense of the homelessness of
human beings. In the phrase 

 

, 
 is translated
as power by Heidegger, but should be read as having the means or
capacity to achieve something. The word 
 also importantly means
path, passage or way through. Human beings have the capacity to
achieve and find a passage, especially as the ode points out, in relation
to their ingenuity and technical knowledge, and yet in spite of this they
remain 

, without power and come to nothing. Quite specifically,
they come to nothing by the fact that they die, but they also come to

867
Curtis: Tragedy and politics
nothing because amid these capacities and these paths humans still have
no access to the hearth, to that centre, origin and foundation in which
they might achieve completion. Human beings are 

 in the sense
that they have failed to learn anything about their essence amid all the
paths they have taken. Driven to busy themselves with all beings in every
way, human beings are simultaneously (as though) driven out from being
(1996: 76). Human beings thus forget, or become oblivious to Being.
For this reason, beings even refuse to human beings that which humans
hope from them, namely that with and among them they may come to
something. . . . In those beings they come to, and in which they think
themselves at home, they come to nothing (ibid.). In the age we currently
refer to as late capitalism, or consumer capitalism, it is the insatiable use
of and ever-recurring demand for commodities as well as the idealized
life-styles they promise that signpost our myriad roads to nowhere.
This condition of homelessness is further clarified in the phrase
describing human beings as tw
 
, which, as has been
noted, Heidegger translates as: Towering high above the site, forfeiting
the site. Here,  is translated in relation to 

 and 
.
Heidegger argues that the Greek understanding of  is fundamentally not a political concept as we understand it in relation to the institutions of a state or city-state; rather, it is for Heidegger the pole around
which Being swirls and issues forth. In the lecture course entitled
Parmenides Heidegger explicitly defines the  as the site concerned
with the withdrawal and disclosure of Being, or what he terms the
abode, gathered into itself, of the unconcealedness of beings (Heidegger,
1992: 90). Significantly, as was mentioned in relation to the word 
,
the paths human beings carve out for themselves, the paths through
which they pursue the disclosure of beings, are also paths in which the
concealed ground of Being falls into oblivion. Thus despite having the
ability to tower above the site, to control, order, manipulate and transform nature, we still forfeit the site through the reduction of thought
and action, for example, to the endless optimalization of the cost/benefit
(input/output) ratio (Lyotard, 1993: 25) encapsulated in the neo-liberal
orthodoxy of marketization that is currently dominant. This foreclosure
and forfeiture is the basic premise of the ontological difference central
to everything Heidegger thought.
In this conception the  is also inextricably tied to the conflictual conception of truth as the concealment and unconcealment of Being
to which Heidegger gave the name 
. From this Heidegger is able
to conclude:
If . . . 
 possesses a conflictual essence . . . , then in the  as the
essential abode of man there has to hold sway all the most extreme counteressences, and therein all excesses, to the unconcealed and to beings, i.e.

868
Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (7)
counter-beings in the multiplicity of their counter-essence. Here lies
concealed the primordial ground of . . . that frightfulness, the horribleness,
the atrociousness of the Greek . Such is the rise and the fall of man
in his historical abode of essence tw
 
 far exceeding
abodes, homeless . . . It is not by chance that man is spoken of in this way
by Greek tragedy. For the possibility, and the necessity of tragedy itself
has its single source in the conflictual essence of 
. (1992: 90)

The conflictual essence of both truth and the  as the site in which
the unconcealment of beings takes place means that human beings
have the capacity to master their site and simultaneously lose their way;
or rather they lose their way as part of their capacity for mastery; and
to begin to understand the relationship between destiny, history and
politics we need to say a few more words about the nature of this
mastery that loses its way and the  as the site where this takes
place.5
Let us repeat, for Heidegger the  is revealed when we understand it not in terms of the institutions and procedures of a state, but
as the realm in which beings are unconcealed. As such the  is and
remains what is properly worthy of question [and] with which meditation proper, the highest and most extensive, is concerned (1992: 85).
That this is no longer the case, that the nature of the  has been
decided once and for all, and that history has supposedly come to an
end, leads on to the second aspect of the  that we must consider.
For Heidegger, the  as the realm of the unconcealed is governed
historically by differing founding principles that hold sway and determine the manner in which beings are revealed. For Heidegger these
founding principles are indicative of epochs, and can be represented
successively as the all-powerful, creative God that orders beings according to a divine plan; as the promotion of reason as the measure of all
things; which evolved into the principle of certainty that governs all
science; which in turn made way for the epoch of technology in which
all beings are determined as an exploitable standing reserve. While this
synopsis is a little reductive and not a comprehensive picture of an ontological history, it is simply intended to illustrate the ways in which foundational principles are world-forming, that is, can be said to have
dominion over what is disclosed and the manner of that disclosure.6 In
place of the latest epoch I would substitute the technological for the
technocratic, an age of unsurpassed administration, in particular
economic administration, in which beings only come into being if they
perform in accordance with the rules of the free market. In this
scenario the  is absolutely not in question and only remains a task
in the sense that it still needs to be rolled out across the globe.
The history of the , then, is the history of these epochal principles which govern and determine the way in which beings come to

869
Curtis: Tragedy and politics
presence, or indeed, do not presence at all (the academically rigorous and
intellectually valuable book that a publisher cannot market is a simple,
yet effective, example of the way in which things presence or not in the
age of late capitalism). The end of history ideology also demonstrates
that these founding principles are different and successive ways in which
human beings seek to become homely. The end of history ideology
announces nothing if it does not announce the final answer to the
question set by the , if it does not announce the arrival home of
human beings. The political as we commonly understand it thereby
becomes the complete failure to maintain the  as a question. Of
course, this history is not linear, as Goldmanns analysis of the tragic
vision clearly illustrated. The perceived failure of one principle may see
the recovery of an earlier conception of truth. Heideggers analysis
would need some rethinking here, as each epoch is in fact fractured by
competing paths and minor languages that all make claim to some
conception of the homely. And yet each epoch is nevertheless defined by
the major language that comes to dominate the age, as the language of
performativity and the biopolitics of the commodity now dominates (or
seeks to dominate) all planetary life.
For Heidegger history is destiny in the sense that, understood ontologically, history is the sending, or assignment of Being. This means that
if man is that being to whom Being itself reveals itself, then the essential trans-mittal and the essence of sending is the unveiling of Being
(1992: 55), but as pointed out above this unveiling is determined by the
founding principles that hold sway and order beings within an epoch.
This also permits Heidegger to argue that the essence of truth . . . has
in every case its own wealth, from which an age in history may only
draw a small amount as its own portion (1992: 11). What this means
is that while the principles that determine our portion of truth are principles produced by and are the very expression of human freedom, they
nevertheless destine us to a conception of truth that determines in
advance the manner in which things come to presence. In other words,
the events that take place, and which historiography records as the course
of human freedom, are in fact delimited in a very important way by the
epochal principle governing the age. Leibnizs principle of sufficient
reason is an expression of human freedom and yet it would also become
a world-view that profoundly delimited the disclosive speech and action
of the age. And it is in this way that I would like to use the term destiny,
not as the absolute necessity of a course of action driven by either the
gods or nature, but as the framing of thought and action within a
specific conception of truth.
As with almost everything discussed in this article, history in relation
to these foundational epochs is ambiguous and counter-turning. If truth
is the alloy of both the withdrawal of Being and also the disclosure of

870
Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (7)
beings according to the epochal principle holding sway at any given
time and in any given culture, this historical conception also permits
Heidegger to argue that truth is historically transformed, and further to
this, the historical transformation of truth is actually a falling away
(1992: 54). In other words the historical transformation of the essence
of truth is an incremental forgetting of the fact that truth is conflictual,
in the sense of being both concealment and unconcealment, both absence
and presence, both hidden and manifest. For us truth as reason, certainty
or performance is what is beyond conflict, beyond doubt and beyond
question.
Thus the tragic nature of this conception of destiny must be understood in a dual way. First, the admixture of spontaneity and constraint
is of a part with the conflictual essence of truth as both the withdrawal
and disclosure of Being, which, as the decisive word of Sophoclean
tragedy reminds us, leads to the conception of the essence of human being
as the unhomely one in search of a home. Secondly, this conception is
tragic because in searching for a home human beings continually forget
the conflictual essence of truth and violently posit a founding principle
as the final, universal and fully revealed expression of non-conflictual
truth. In effect, with this forgetting of the conflictual essence of truth
the tragic fate of human beings becomes the attempt to put an end to
our journeying and secure foundations where there are none. What is
tragic, then, is the fact that this search and consequent positing of a foundation as the answer to the uncanny places human beings in a condition
of violent confrontation as competing foundational principles and the
worlds they determine vie for supremacy. On this point, and with regard
to the consideration of tragedy in relation to the war against terror,
Heidegger argued that the conflictual essence of mans abode or dwelling
is also in part responsible for the violent conflicts into which man
descends. In undertaking to become homely human beings must place
everything at stake [and encounter] the fact that the homely refuses itself
to them (1996: 90). The quest to become homely is a risk, in Pascals
words it is a wager, a wager that is revealed in all its frailty when
contending paths to truth collide. This risk and the encounter of conflictual wagers are what throw humans into periods of the active violence
Heidegger refers to as predatory uncanniness: Such predatory uncanniness of human beings as historical, however, is an extreme derivative and
essential consequence of a concealed uncanniness that is grounded in
unhomeliness, an unhomeliness that in turn has its concealed ground
in the counterturning relation of beings to human beings (ibid.). This
conception of the counter-turning essence of 
 and  as
conflict, however, is not a defeatist acceptance that we are destined to
descend into a never-ending cycle of warfare, far from it. Instead it is the
attempt to understand how predatory uncanniness can actually unfold

871
Curtis: Tragedy and politics
from the manifold paths through which human beings seek to secure
their home.
In the present condition, the leading agents in the confrontation the
West has dubbed the war against terror are the civic religion of America,
an alloy of Christian and free market fundamentalism (Northcott, 2004),
and Islamism, an especially violent and intolerant reading of the Koran
that has developed out of the Muslim creed Wahabism.7 On the one
hand we have a nation that sees itself as the epitome of freedom and
truth that is also the leading agent in the cult of economic positivism,
and on the other a community that takes an extreme and perverse
reading of Islam as the sole and absolute set of values. Aside from the
conflict between global economic positivism and local ways of life, we
also have a war between two parties both offering different versions of
the end of history narrative. In a political sense America sees itself as the
closure and completion of history, the fully revealed destination of all
human journeying, while on the side of the Islamist we are presented
with an ahistorical narrative that in turn treats a particular manifestation of the word of God as the already disclosed and final path to truth.
Tragically, then, it is at the point where truth is understood as beyond
conflict that human beings are most at risk of falling prey to the active
violence of predatory uncanniness. What is tragic in the human condition
is the search for a home and a foundation when there is none, a search
that invariably demands a conception of truth on which the community
can be founded, but this happens only at the expense of a forgetting of
the groundlessness of Being. It is, then, only by remembering that humankinds essence is to be unhomely, that is, always on the way to becoming
homely, but due to the conflictual essence of Being never arriving, that
we can hope to prevent the eternal return of bloodshed and barbarity.
Only when we remember that Being in its essential ground is an-archic,
that is, without origin or founding principle, will we begin to develop
a critique of the metaphysics of war. This does not mean that we can
hope for an era of peace because the concealed uncanniness of being
will always maintain us in our journeying and our struggle to come to
terms with our conflictual essence.8 In effect the wager needs to change;
rather than risk all in the search for closure and communion, perhaps
we should risk all on the wager that human beings can live in the face
of concealed uncanniness, that they can not only resign themselves to
their homelessness, but can actually affirm it, for what is freedom if it
is not the capacity to choose a path on which to journey, and what is
freedom if we already know our destination? And as Heidegger has
argued, journeying in this sense demands a relationship with the foreign,
in particular it is an engagement with what is foreign to ones own, that
is, an engagement with what we have forgotten; the abyssal ground of
Being. The foreign, which is the presence of the unhomely in the

872
Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (7)
homely, is to be taken in as a guest, because the appropriation of ones
own is only as the encounter and guest-like dialogue with the foreign
(1996: 142).
At this point it is useful to return to Goldmanns notion of the
tragedy of refusal to introduce the possibility of a politics in keeping
with the task of addressing our essential homelessness and taking on
this encounter with the foreign. For Goldmann himself it was the dialectical thought of Hegel, Marx and Lukcs that offered a resolution for
the tragic vision. As he argued:
Hegel and Marx both accept and integrate into the very substance of their
ideas all the problems posed by the tragic attitude which preceded them.
For example, they share its critique of rationalist and empirical philosophy,
of both hedonistic and utilitarian dogmatic morality, of the present
condition of society, of any form of dogmatic theology, and so on. Where
they differ from it, however, is in replacing the tragic wager on eternity and
a transcendent divinity by an immanent wager on mans future in this world
(1964: 478)

A wager, as he noted later, that the Proletariat exists and will triumph
(1964: 301). It is, of course, easy to be cynical and note that only a year
after the publication of Goldmanns book, the full dogmatic and totalitarian force of Soviet Marxism would be displayed in all its oppressive
violence on the streets of Budapest, but it is important to register how
Stalins appropriation of Marxism would have been anathema to
Goldmanns own reading of dialectical philosophy as both reconciliation and refusal at the same time. While dialectical philosophy unites
man and world, part and whole, it does so in a manner that remains
open. In the striking methodological chapter that begins The Hidden
God, Goldmann presents the strength of dialectical philosophy as the
affirmation
. . . that there are never any absolutely valid starting-points, no problems
which are finally and definitively solved, and that thought never moves
forward in a straight line, since each individual fact or idea assumes its
significance only when it takes its place in the whole, in the same way as
the whole can be understood only by our increased knowledge of the partial
and incomplete facts which constitute it. (1964: 5)

According to dialectical philosophy, thought is a living endeavour

(1964: 6), without end or completion because its subject is the infinite
mutiplicity (1964: 9) and extreme complexity (ibid.) of the relations
between the part and the whole. This non-linear, perhaps even vitalist,
reading of the dialectic presages the interest in notions of difference and
deferral, which in Britain and America would be conflated under the title
of poststructuralist philosophy, and very much lends itself to the kind of
anti-foundational thinking that is required for a politics that addresses

873
Curtis: Tragedy and politics
our becoming homely. Indeed, while Goldmann is keen to promote the
dialectical thought of Hegel and Marx as an answer to Pascal, whom
Goldmann also considers to be a dialectician, he is also keen to retain
the idea that life and knowledge, living knowledge, remains a journey
without an instant of repose (1964: 68).
For Goldmann, then, the tragic vision was encapsulated by a radical
scepticism as well as a wager on the existence of transcendent, absolute
values, and I would like to propose that the philosophies of Jean-Franois
Lyotard and Jacques Derrida comply with this logic of the wager, except
that where Pascal recovered a sense of identity through a wager on a
Christian God, the wager for both Lyotard and Derrida is born out of a
relation to alterity that permits no identity at all. The wager is therefore
more radical. Where Pascal wagered on the existence of transcendent
values that confirmed the righteousness of a certain practice, Lyotard
and Derrida wager that practice is still possible in the absence of any
absolute, founding value whatsoever. For both philosophers their
commitment to the primacy of alterity is taken from their respective
encounters with the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas who spoke of the
absolute priority of the Other, and it is this relation to alterity that lies
at the heart of a politics that can both affirm our homelessness and
counter the indiscriminate terror and anabolic militarism that characterizes the manifestation of predatory uncanniness today.9
In Lyotards thought the relation to alterity takes on a form for which
the notion of a hidden God is highly apposite. While the moral law, at
least since Kant, has been understood in terms of autonomy, Lyotard
considers the law in terms of a radical heteronomy. For him the priority
of the Other situates us in a practical condition in which we are first
and foremost addressed, that is, situated in the position of an addressee.
The law obliges us and holds us responsible but it does not announce
what is to be done. Deploying Wittgensteins analysis of language games,
the law holds us in a prescriptive position, but does not describe the right
course of action. For Lyotard there is a radical incommensurability
between a prescription and a description, and the prescription cannot
be translated into a description, an operation requiring the assumption
of the position of addresser, without completely erasing the specificity of
the prescription, i.e. of being held as an addressee. This heterogeneity
between prescription and description suggests to Lyotard that it is
preferable to think of the constitutive withdrawal of the law (1988a:
12) rather than the laws convergence with any theory. The law is a
summons, but we cannot know what it commands for the law is only
prescription as such (1988a: 10). In political terms this means that our
inability to reduce the law to the model of theoretical discourse results
in politics becoming a critical practice (1988a: 62) in which every
model that sets itself up as adequate to the law and thus able to judge

874
Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (7)
the heterogeneity of social life is to be resisted. While for Heidegger our
homelessness is derived from the counter-turning essence of Being, for
Lyotard our homelessness is the result of a law that affects us and holds
us responsible, but withdraws by not signifying the right course of action.
Politics is therefore the dual activity that seeks a passage10 between
incommensurable realms without recourse to predetermined criteria,
and the permanent critique of any and every tribunal (the Church, the
Nation, the Party, the Market) that claims to have determined this
passage once and for all.
While Derridas philosophy speaks of the mutual constitution of self
and other rather than the Others absolute priority, he agrees with Levinas
that the history of western philosophy is a progressive erasure of alterity;
a phenomenon he referred to as the metaphysics of presence. Against a
metaphysics that privileges identity, Derrida consistently argued that
identity is produced through difference, and that presence, meaning and
truth are subject to a chain of possible substitutions that prevented the
securing of any finality, foundation or fundamental category. As Rodophe
Gasch noted, identity is in fact a heterogeneity whose movement cannot
be bounded within a definitive setting (1986: 194). It is therefore constituted as the perpetual journeying between self and other and one might
also say between good and evil, civilization and barbarism, freedom and
tyranny, reason and fanaticism, legitimate force and terror. The philosophy articulating this (quasi-)law of differance (difference and deferral)
is given the name deconstruction, and in Derridas letter to his Japanese
translator the homelessness of this thought is explicitly set out. Of the
translation of deconstruction from (German to) French to Japanese
Derrida writes: The chance . . . would be that another word (the same
word and an other) can be found in Japanese to say the same thing (the
same and an other), to speak of deconstruction, and to lead elsewhere
to its being written and transcribed, in a word which will also be more
beautiful (1991: 276). Deconstruction, then, is not at home in the
French language. As a concept it is as substitutable as any other. In fact,
in its journey into the Japanese language it may be able to articulate
differance more elegantly. This proposal, even request, that the Japanese
language may lead deconstruction elsewhere is also indicative of the
guest-like dialogue with the foreign that is implicit in this philosophy.
The slippage that deconstruction traces and the wager it places on
a future to come is (for our purposes here, which is to think the wager
in relation to the war against terror) most succinctly set out in Derridas
deconstruction of the end of history ideology as expounded by Francis
Fukuyama. For Derrida, Fukuyamas thought is caught in a double-bind
that renders it incoherent. On the one hand he speaks of the good news
that empirical evidence confirms the movement of the world towards
free market democracies, and yet because empiricity must also account

875
Curtis: Tragedy and politics
for the inequalities, forms of violence, terror and exploitation that still
exist, the good news must also function at the level of ideality where
free market democracy is assumed to be the best form of socio-political
organization and its arrival is only something promised. What is important for Derrida, however, is not only to challenge the messianism in the
end of history ideology but to show that the gap between fact and ideality
characterizes, a priori and by definition, all democracies, including the
oldest and most stable of the so-called Western democracies. . . . That
is why we always propose to speak of a democracy to come (1994: 64).
Democracy to come, Derrida continues, is not a future democracy, one
that will have a future present, but one that is always promised, a
commitment that politics will never be done, that it will never be finalized and find repose in, for example, the fully revealed, neo-conservative
Word. Democracy is undeconstructable, for Derrida, because it operates
according to the promise. It is hospitality; an openness to the arrival of
what is yet to come, in other words, the stranger. In keeping with the
tragic vision of the hidden God, its structure is that of a messianism
without content, of the messianic without messianism (1994: 65).
Justice cannot therefore be achieved through the retributive acts of the
techno-military machine, but remains the sign of our incompleteness
and of our debt.
When New York and Washington were attacked on 11 September
2001, Judith Butler also used the language of alterity to argue that the
ensuing grief and mourning offered the chance for a reorientation of
politics in America and, in turn, in the world as a whole. Grief and
mourning, Butler argued, rather than being a private and depoliticizing
affair, as is commonly understood, furnishes instead a sense of political
community of a complex order . . . by bringing to the fore the relational
ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and
ethical responsibility (2004: 22). Furthermore, she asks if something
might be gained from grief by maintaining it as part of the political
framework for thinking international relations. Is grief merely an
expression of powerlessness, or does it return us to a feeling for human
vulnerability and collectivity? Could the experience of a dislocation of
First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable
ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally? (2004: 30). In
other words, grief and mourning open us to the ties that bind us to
others, to our relationality and dependency, to the fact that we are constituted heteronomously rather than autonomously, that we are not sovereign. Human beings, she argues, are laid bare from the start (2004: 31),
and it is this primordial exposure to alterity that is expressed in grief.
The response of the Bush administration, of course, was in stark contrast
to the ethical and political insights that, according to Butler, are revealed
in the practice of mourning. In the place of vulnerability, she writes:

876
Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (7)
. . . a subject has been instated at the national level, a sovereign and extralegal subject, a violent and self-centred subject; its actions constitute the
building of a subject that seeks to restore and maintain its mastery through
the systematic destruction of its multilateral relations, its ties to the international community. It shores itself up, seeks to reconstitute its imagined
wholeness, but only at the price of denying its own vulnerability, its dependency, its exposure, where it exploits those very features in others, thereby
making those features other to itself. (2004: 41)

In short, America set itself up as the foundation of truth and righteousness against an opposing force that had done the same. With each party
presenting itself as the embodiment of good and the other as the embodiment of evil, further violence has been perpetuated and tens if not
hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in a war to validate
the particular path leading to the true home of human beings. But it must
also be noted that this response has split America in two; and significantly, the people who reside in New York, that great city of refuge,
remain critical of this political autism.
To tell the story of the tragedy that unfolded in the events on and
after 11 September 2001 would be to tell of how the violence that took
place was integral to our search for the foundational categories and
fundamental values that might bring our journeying to a close and secure
a home for us. That we consider such closure a possibility is an error
of judgement of the sort Aristotle called  , and was for him the
primary source of suffering expressed in tragic art. In The Poetics Aristotle argues that the compelling power of tragedy arises from the representation of an error by someone who is neither eminently virtuous nor
especially villainous. As Dennis J. Schmidt has argued: the reversal of
fortune that is most pitiable and fearful, and which we do well to understand as the greatest suffering, is one that is owing to hamartia, to some
sort of mistake in praxis that is intelligible . . . and yet that is not simply
a matter of bad character (2001: 60). The events of 9 March 2004 and
7 July 2005 may be considered to be the reversal of fortune that tragedy
would speak of, as might the autoimmune response (Derrida, 1997) of
western democracies that proceed at a pace to undermine their own
traditions of political and civil responsibilities in the quest for security;
but the error of judgement is ours collectively and it is this error that
the tragic plot must unveil. To narrate the story of 11 September 2001
as a tragedy we would need to speak of the impossible desire that is
represented in the ideology of the end of history, or the fully revealed
word of God. It would need to tell of how it is essential for humans to
journey, and that the counter-turning essence of Being as well as the
counter-turning essence of human freedom means that the question
posed by the  must be forever held open. The narration of the
tragedy would therefore also need to tell of the wager that we can not

877
Curtis: Tragedy and politics
only endure such an uncanny existence, but actually affirm it. Of course,
to tell ourselves the story of this tragedy it would have to be presented
through the screens and monitors of our digitally networked society. As
mentioned earlier, the media would have to function as the chorus, but
this is impossible given that the media have neither the distance from the
drama, nor the separation of the spectator to be an effective third party.
Currently the western media do little but mimic the empty platitudes of
the protagonists. This means that the tragedy is unlikely to be told and
we will remain destined to the cycle of violence brought on by our quest
to put politics beyond question.
Nottingham University, UK

PSC

Notes
1 One further qualification with regard to history should be noted here. The
tragic as a modern philosophical question has primarily been addressed at
times of crisis. Schelling, Hlderlin and Hegel considered tragedy against
the backdrop of revolutionary violence, while Nietzsche and Heidegger
meditated upon its lessons amid the turbulence of war in an attempt to
ward off the threat of nihilism. To say that we once again live in a time of
crisis is not to be overly dramatic, but rather than reproduce the rhetoric
of George W. Bush and Tony Blair and consider the crisis in terms of the
permanent state of emergency enacted in an infinite war against a ubiquitous enemy, the nihilism of our time is encapsulated by the reduction of
human freedom to the discourse and processes of the free market. It is
therefore at a time when the word freedom has never been so abused that
a consideration of tragic destiny is important.
2 A similar argument is made by Sigmund Freud in the essay entitled The
Uncanny (1985).
3 This use of the word care takes us back to Heideggers earlier existential
work in which the conception of human being as Dasein the only being
that questions its being also helps us understand why human beings are
the most uncanny.
4 In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche argues that the pleasure we take in
watching a tragic play comes from the same homeland as the pleasure we
derive from dissonance in music: Could it not be that, with the assistance
of musical dissonance, we have eased significantly the difficult problem of
the effect of tragedy? After all, we do now understand the meaning of our
desire to look, and yet to long to go beyond looking when we are watching
tragedy; when applied to our response to the artistic use of dissonance, this
state of mind would have to be described in similar terms: we want to
listen, but at the same time we want to go beyond listening (1999: 114).
This striving is in keeping with Heideggers conception of the surging and

878
Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (7)

6
7

10

journeying of human being, although Heidegger has moved beyond the

subjectivism of the Nietzschean will by the time he delivers his lecture course
on The Ister.
While it is implicit in the lectures on Hlderlin that Heidegger is analysing
the work of a German poet, and that this is very much in keeping with the
nationalist (National Socialist) ideology of the time, there remains an interesting ambiguity here in that Heidegger is also implying that the task of
securing a home is a vain one. Two years later this implicit vanity of an
identity with a state as the home of Being is repeated in this lecture course
on Parmenides where he argues that no conception of the polis understood
as a set of political and administrative institutions is adequate to the task
set by Being. As such these provide interesting reading in relation to the
possibility of Heidegger assessing his decision to join the National Socialist
Party in 1933.
Also, for an interesting discussion of how Heideggers affiliation to
National Socialism might be attributed to the moments in which he himself
succumbed to the lure of the importance of place, see Jean-Franois
Lyotard (1990).
As Reiner Schrmann (1987) has argued, the positing of a founding principle
is indicative of human beings desire to secure the first cause without which
the coherence and stability of our myriad worlds would be threatened.
Many commentators on the left who have allied themselves with George
W. Bush see, for example, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman also
use the expression Islamo-fascism. While this term is workable, in the sense
that liberalism is regarded as the enemy, as it was for the fascists in Germany
and Italy, it is one that I am uncomfortable with given that the majority of
people who follow this particular version of Islam are anything but fascists
and are responding to deep-rooted political, social and economic inequalities rather than an ideology as such.
For an excellent study of Heideggers conception of Being as polemos, see
Gregory Fried (2000). Elsewhere I have been indebted to Frieds translation
of Heideggers use of polemos as interpretive confrontation, a phrase that
is highly appropriate for considering the nature of the war against terror.
For a discussion of Levinas own controversial approach to the political
as documented in relation to the famous radio interview in 1982 with
Schlomo Malka and Alain Finkielkraut see Howard Caygills review of
his political papers (2000).
Lyotard adapts this notion of a passage from the work of Wittgenstein
(Lyotard, 1988b: 5985).

PSC

Bibliography
Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London:
Verso.

879
Curtis: Tragedy and politics
Caygill, H. (2000) Levinass Political Judgement: The Esprit articles, 19431983,
Radical Philosophy 104 (NovemberDecember): 615.
Derrida, J. (1991) Letter to a Japanese Friend, in A Derrida Reader: Between
the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Harvester.
Derrida, J. (1994) Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning
and the New International. London: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1997) Politics of Friendship. London: Verso.
Eagleton, T. (2003) Sacred Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: Blackwell.
Freud, S. (1985) The Uncanny, in Art and Literature, the Penguin Freud Library,
vol. 14. Harmondworth, Mx: Penguin.
Fried, G. (2000) Heideggers Polemos: from Being to Politics. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Gasch, R. (1986) The Tain of the Mirror. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Goldmann, L. (1964[1955]) The Hidden God: A Study of the Tragic Vision in
the Penses of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Heidegger, M. (1992) Parmenides. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1996) Hlderlins Hymn The Ister. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Lukcs, G. (1974) Soul and Form. London: Merlin Press.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1988a) Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1988b) The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1990) Heidegger and the Jews. Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1993) Political Writings. London: UCL Press.
McNeill, W. (2000) A Scarcely Pondered Word: the Place of Tragedy:
Heidegger, Aristotle, Sophocles, in Philosophy and Tragedy, ed. Miguel de
Beistegui and Simon Sparks. London: Routledge.
Nietzsche, F. (1999) The Birth of Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Northcott, M. (2004) An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and
American Empire. London: I. B. Tauris.
Schmidt, D. J. (2001) On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical
Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schrmann, Reiner (1987) Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to
Anarchy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.