Tragedy is — Scription Contra-diction

Abstract

I commit this chapter to the proposition that the question of tragedy, the question of what is tragedy — to be or not to be: that is the question — is a question which, because it engages existence, involves meditating (perhaps even mediating) the relationship between literature and philosophy. But this proposal which, in being at once literary and philosophical, explicitly commits us to Hamlet’s question — the tragedy of existence, the existence of tragedy — and directly raises the question of our relationship to the ancient Greeks, to their great literary figures, Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus, Pentheus, and to their great philosophers, above all, Plato and Aristotle and, perhaps, first and last, to Socrates, who is simultaneously the greatest literary and the greatest philosophical figure of the Greeks. Socrates writes nothing and is memorialised by Plato² as the noblest and wisest of Greek heroes; he who, in demonstrating in the Gorgias that all speech, both poetic and political, is mere appearance and thus ignorant of that of which it speaks³ — it is ignorant of its ignorance — equally demonstrates that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil. It is better to suffer evil from others — it is better, than is, to put others into the position of doing evil to you, of killing you — than it is to do evil to others — than, that is, to put yourself in the position of doing evil to others, of killing them. But is Socrates’ revolutionary reversal of Greek heroic values — it is better to be a dead hero whose appearance as victim masks his reality as ultimate victimiser, than a live hero like Achilles, who is victimised by the dead Hector — tragic, or is it comic? Do we cry or do we laugh? Plato’s Socratic revolution involves redrawing, while at the same time maintaining, the line which contradicts, which speaks against, Greek life.

The phrase is taken from the final section of Derrida’s essay Dissemination, which is discussed below (see also note 13).