Category: Tragedy

On the 16th July 1942, Rabbi Bereck Kofman was picked up from his family home by the French police; he was taken first to Drancy and then deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed. His daughter writes:

When I first encountered in a Greek tragedy the lament ‘o popoi, popoi, popoi’, I couldn’t keep myself from thinking of that scene from my childhood where six children, their father gone, could only sob breathlessly, knowing they would never see him again, ‘oh papa, papa, papa’.

How is one to understand the echo of the lament in the sobbing of the children?

Plato’s objections to tragic art are ethical; it is said to bear upon a crisis which only the individual can suffer – upon, that is to say, the sphere of the private which Plato always distrusts insofar as it is set again what for him are the interests of the common. Why else does he advocate the distribution of children among members of the polis?

The danger, for Plato, is always that of the attachment to particulars rather than to the whole; the individual soul is always too protean, too unstable; loss of one to whom one is attached threatens instability; if it is to attain harmony this is only by relating itself to the common, to no one and to everyone, to attain that ideal distance which Alcibiades discerns when Socrates refuses his embrace.

Grief, then, is the danger. A danger which pushes forward in tragic art where, and Antigone is the most obvious example, grief is born of ties of kinship. ‘The law presumably says that it is finest to keep as quiet as possible in misfortunes and not be irritated….’ And the law of Plato’s ideal community will be such that it forces apart ties and attachment in order to eliminate the relations which, as Freud knew, were at the seat of tragic drama.

Tragic art calls forth that part of the soul which is ‘far from prudence [phroneseos], and is not a companion and friend for any healthy or true purpose’. And with the child who gre up to write Smothered Words? What becomes of the companion, the friend revealed in Kofman’s mourning? One might say: hers is not a private mourning; she mourns not only for her father, but for all those who died.

Yet the ones who died, she reminds us, are emblematised by the figure of the Jew, the one who over and again will have been excluded from our community. ‘Auschwitz’, this ‘senseless breaking of the human race in two’ was, Kofman writes, ‘desired by the anti-Semites and the Nazis so that the Jew would signify repulsion, the Other in all his horror, the abject who must be kept at a distance, expelled, exiled, exterminated’. A distance beyond that which Plato advocates but which permits a different reflection on the polis, on the common.

Kofman, after commenting on Antelme’s The Human Race, will allow herself to write of a new humanism, a new ethics, of a ‘”we”’ that is ‘always and already undone, destabilised’. Plato sought to expel the tragic poets, more dangerous even than the figure of the tyrant, from the city. Kofman will discern a community who are always so exiled and which reveals itself even amidst grief. The childrens’ ‘oh papa, papa, papa’ lament their father. What kind of friend or companion is born in this lament?

Bereck Kofman was beaten to death when he refused to work on the Sabbath. ‘My father, according to the story, said that he had been doing no harm, only beseeching God for all of them, victims and murderers alike. For that, my father along with so many others suffered this infinite violence: death at Auschwitz, the place where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted’.

Infinite violence: it is this dying without measure and without recompense that keeps the child awake in Kofman. A child she would awaken in each of us, insofar as her book never contents itself with a private act of mourning.

Blanchot:

We must not doubt that suffering weighs more heavily on us to the extent that our estrangement from religious consolations, the disappearance of the other world, and the breaking up of traditional social frameworks deprive the one who suffers of all distance and more clearly expose him to the truth of suffering: a truth that consists in withdrawing from him the space that suffering requires, the little time that would make his suffering possible.

The truth of suffering? But we are protected, some of us at least, by a horizon of values which, if hypocritical, keep us from the truth in question. And when it does not? When death takes place, as Levinas writes of the war, in the absence of a shared horizon? ‘at least the victims know whither to lift their dying gaze’, writes Levinas of post-war racism, imperialism and exploitation, ‘their devastated areas belong to a world[….] What was unique between 1940 and 1945 was the abandonment’.

Abandoment. Recall that the word ‘abandon’ was Levinas’s suggestion for a translation of Heidegger’s Geworfenheit, thrownness. Abandon: isn’t this also the state of the family of Bereck Kofman when their father is taken from them? And of Bereck Kofman when he prays on the Sabbath at Auschwitz?

Abandonment. As he reminds the readers of Existence and Existents, Levinas spent the war in captivity in Germany. He does this, he claims, only to account for the absence of any discussion of the famous works of French philosophy published over those years, but he also reminds us that it was in the stalag he continued the work he began in his earlier study, On Evasion.

Who can resist the conclusion that the analyses of Existence and Existents reflect the conditions of his captivity? There is the emphasis on physical pain: ‘physical suffering in all its degrees entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. It is the very irremissibility of being’. ‘In suffering there is an absence of all refuge. It is the fact of being directly exposed to being. It is made up of the impossibility of fleeing or retreating’. Exposure to being? What does this mean?

Abandonment: the tragic heroine is thrown against necessity; she is abandoned to what she cannot know and cannot determine. Freedom, necessity: the former breaks against the latter. The grandeur of tragedy lies in her rebellion. She is dashed to pieces – but for a time, she brought herself into a splendid freedom. She laments, but to lament, one has to detach oneself from the instant of existence; being is not irremissible; she finds a refuge.

For Levinas, however, it seems no such rebellion is possible; the sufferer is overwhelmed by necessity. She comes up against a limit, against which she runs up inexhaustibly. It is because he thinks of necessity as the very relationship to being that Levinas invokes what he calls the ‘tragedy of tragedy’ in Existence and Existents.

But what does he mean? Hamlet, for Levinas, is exemplary. Why this play? Hamlet is a mutation of the violent revenge tragedy, a play focused on dilemma and not revenge. Its protagonist does not have the reassurance of the mastery of thought or of action; Hamlet vacillates – not because he is planning perfect actions; when he acts, he does so rashly and his actions miscarry. Nor is it to give him time to think for he allows thinking to fall back to that region where decision is impossible, to a madness of indecision, a yes-no without resolve.

‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd. Elinsor is the hell where phantoms wander – not just his father, but Hamlet, too: phantom of resoluteness, phantom of action. And it is the same hell he would want to enclose the others. This, indeed, is why he will not murder the praying Claudio. Hamlet’s Denmark is rotten, all are damned, the royal family must be drawn into hell’s circle if the country is to be purged. And so they are. Then Fortinbras comes; hell recedes; the world retrieves itself in Elsinore. 

In his famous soliloquy, according to Levinas, Hamlet ‘understands that the “not to be” is perhaps impossible and he can no longer master the absurd, even by suicide’. ‘Hamlet is precisely a lengthy testimony to this impossibility of assuming death’; ‘To be or not to be’ is a sudden awareness of this impossibility of annihilating oneself’. Hamlet cannot escape; to exist, not to exist are each as impossible as one another. In the third act of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet cries ‘I keep the power to die’; Hamlet does not have this power. Freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.

A., one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, writes in the first part of Either/Or

Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way, that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.

The locus of the modern tragedy has changed; it no longer concerns the torsion between family and state but the plight of an individual. An individual who, moreover, is responsible for herself, for her existence – who had taken on the burden of creating herself.

What specifically characterises ancient tragedy is that the action does not proceed only from character, that the action itself has a relative admixture of suffering. Ancient tragedy, therefore, did not develop dialogue to the point of exhaustive reflection with everything merged in it; the distinct components of dialogue are actually in the monologue and chorus.

But Levinas’s Hamlet is not a tragedy of subjectivity; he does not speak as a subject and Shakespeare’s tragedies do not differ from those of Sophocles simply because he presents an interior monologue. ‘To be or not to be’: who speaks? Hamlet? Perhaps Levinas would say it is being that speaks. Being? Blanchot would prefer to write the neuter, designating by this word what is neither being nor nothingness (ne uter: neither one nor the other). Who speaks? What speaks? Vacillation; abandonment without refuge.

The uncanny is many-sided; nothing, however, / looms larger than the human in strangeness. / He travels on the effervescent tides / driven by the southern winds of winter, / crossing peaks of ravaging waves. / The gods, even the most sublime ones, / he wears down, and / the earth – indestructible and tireless – too / overturning her from year to year, / plowing back and forth with stallions.

– Sophocles, Choral Ode from Antigone

What can be retrieved of Greek tragedy today? Schelling and Hölderlin understood each in his own way the fatedness of the tragic for our age.

‘Our age’: but what does this mean? Schmidt, to whose excellent On Germans and Other Greeks I am indebted here, gives a clue: Kant argues that limits do not merely belong to human experience but are its condition; then it is possible to write what might be called a ‘tragedy of reason’. See the opening sentence of the first Critique with the reference to the ‘peculiar fate of reason’.

Schmidt provides three indications as to why this fate leads Kant’s successors to retrieve the question of tragedy. There is, first of all, the antimony of reason itself (with special reference to the third antimony between freedom and nature). Secondly, there is the dignity accorded to aesthetics in reflection on ethical life. Thirdly, there is the renewal of the notion of the sublime. True, for various reasons, Kant did not take up the question of the tragic himself; it was left to Schelling to indicate in his Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795) how tragedy, as a literature of crisis, of agony and incommensurability, might be retrieved to mark the experience of the limit in post-Kantian philosophy.

Szondi: ‘After Aristotle, there is a poetics of tragedy, only after Schelling is there a philosophy of the tragic’. For Schelling, tragedy indicates the way in which the contradiction between freedom and necessity might be thought; the lesson for post-Kantian philosophy lies in the way aesthetic experience, specifically the artwork (no longer, like Kant, does Schelling place emphasis on nature) can think, endure, the contradiction in question.

To deinon is the word Heidegger isolates from Sophocles’s Antigone. How might it be translated? Gewaltige, powerful, that was Hölderlin’s first translation of this word in 1801; in 1804, he translates it as ungeheuer, monstrous. Heidegger will translate it Nicht-geheuren, the non-familiar. What does it designate? The power of the human being to transform the world confronts the overwhelming power of death; freedom shatters itself against necessity.

Freedom, necessity: for Hölderlin, writing to the philhellene Böhlendorff in 1801, the Germans have fallen too far from the experience of fate, from the ‘highest’; they must be brought into confrontation with the Greeks. This is the task of art, perhaps a renewed tragic art, but it is, he writes, dangerous for German art to imitate the art of the Greeks.

Why then labour so hard over his translations of Greek tragedy? The task: to attune the German language to what he calls Greek sorrow and thereby to bring it into the conflicted space which exceeds the power of philosophical cognition. ‘We learn nothing with greater difficult than to freely use the national’, he writes to Böhlendorff. If it is ‘the clarity of presentation’ which is natural for the Germans, it is the ‘fire from heaven’ that is natural to the Greeks. Yet for Hölderlin, to use the national is not play to the strengths of one’s nature. It is, rather, to test oneself against the foreign – and what is more foreign for Germany than Greece?

The Greeks are less masters of sacred pathos, because it is innate to them, whereas they excel in the gift of presentation from Homer onward, because this extraordinary man was sufficiently soulful to conquer the Western Junoian sobriety for his Apollinian empire, and thereby to truly appropriate the foreign.

Hölderlin’s task? To surprass the Greeks in ‘beautiful suffering’, in ‘sacred grief’. But it this possible? Greece names for Hölderlin a fated experience of overwhelming power and strangeness; the German confronts in fate and destiny what exceeds its power. It is the task of the poet to reawaken that torsion, to affirm the shining forth of the disclosure to which the human being belongs. The poet thus watches over both freedom (‘the free use of the national’) and necessity (the fateful encounter with the Greeks). This was the mission which emerges for Hölderlin.

Heidegger, too, is drawn to this strange reciprocity between Greece and Germany; once again, for him, it is a question of poetry, Dichtung, of the inaugurating poetic act this time to be accomplished by Hölderlin the poet, in dialogue with the thinker (Heidegger) and perhaps, at least in the early 1930s, the statesman (Hitler).

What is the fate of tragedy in those years and after? Perhaps it collapses in the sorrow beyond sorrow of those same years such that the tragic life of the ones the Germans called the Greeks no longer rises to exemplarity with respect to the experience of the limit. It was the Greeks’ relationship to pain which was his central concern in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote. But what happens when the pain is closer, more immediate – when it can no longer be a question of attending to what Heidegger calls the katastrophe, the turning around of the human being which is still understood in terms of the heliotropism to Greece, but to what might be called the disaster?

On 16th July 1942, Rabbi Bereck Kofman was picked up by the French police; he would die at Auschwitz. His daughter writes:

When I first encountered in a Greek tragedy the lament ‘o popoi, popoi, popoi’, I couldn’t keep myself from thinking of that scene from my childhood where six children, their father gone, could only sob breathlessly, knowing they would never see him again, ‘oh papa, papa, papa’.

Kofman’s father was beaten to death when he refused to work on the Sabbath. Sarah Kofman writes:

My father, according to the story, said that he had been doing no harm, only beseeching God for all of them, victims and murderers alike. For that, my father along with so many others suffered this infinite violence: death at Auschwitz, the place where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted.

Infinite violence: but what does this mean? A reinvention of tragedy – its transformation, just as it was transformed after Kant? The quest for a new dispensation of freedom and necessity? ‘Auschwitz belongs to a sphere beyond tragedy’ – Lacoue-Labarthe.