Overview

Ethics of Tragedy is a profound analysis of Greek tragedies, especially refugee tragedies and Sophocles' Oedipus-trilogy, that presents the sense of tragedy in a time of rapacious capitalism and ecocatastrophe. Ari Hirvonen argues that theatre is a public space for tragedies, politics, democracy and justice, bringing together thinking and poeticizing, limits and transgression, fate and freedom. Instead of justifying the existing political order, tragedy disrupts, dissents, and exceeds it. Understood in this way, ethics is revealed as a fundamental part of tragedy Drawing upon Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger and Lacan as well as Butler, Irigaray, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Badiou, among others, this book is both a meditation on the theatricality of tragedy and a critique of tragic judgment. Despite being a philosophical treatise, Hirvonen rejects readings that reduce tragedies to philosophical ideas, moral principles, aesthetic dogmas, or heroic identities. Instead, he argues that tragedy reveals a non-essentialist ethics. In the midst of hegemonic capitalist realism, we have lost the capacity to measure. As a disruption of our ways of sensing and the making sense of the world, tragedy inspires the art of measuring in a world without measures.

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9781910761090

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Reviews

This is a hugely important intervention into our thinking about tragedy and how such thinking holds up a black mirror for our times. Ari Hirvonen is the Jari Litmanen of philosophy. Highly recommended. -- Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy, New School for Social Research The stakes are high: this reading shows the lasting importance of Greek tragedy to see the world in a new way and, more particularly to reintroduce measure and thus (ethical) thinking in a world that no longer accepts bounderies and tragic experience. In doing so Ethics of Tragedy prepares for a new ethics. A must read. -- Phillipe Van Haute, Professor of Philosophical Anthropology, Center for Contemporary European Philosophy, Radboud University

This is a hugely important intervention into our thinking about tragedy and how such thinking holds up a black mirror for our times. Ari Hirvonen is the Jari Litmanen of philosophy. Highly recommended. -- Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy, New School for Social Research The stakes are high: this reading shows the lasting importance of Greek tragedy to see the world in a new way and, more particularly to reintroduce measure and thus (ethical) thinking in a world that no longer accepts bounderies and tragic experience. In doing so Ethics of Tragedy prepares for a new ethics. A must read. -- Philippe Van Haute, Professor of Philosophical Anthropology, Center for Contemporary European Philosophy, Radboud University

Author Information

Ari Hirvonen is Adjunct Professor in Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, and Principal Investigator at the University of Helsinki (UH), Finland. He has acted as Professor in Jurisprudence and as Vice-Dean for Research and Doctoral Education at the Faculty of Law (UH). He has been Senior Researcher in the Finnish Academy's Centre of Excellence in Foundations of European Law and Polity. He has published widely on legal phenomenology, socio-legal studies, political theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and aesthetics. In Law and Evil research project, he was the director and co-editor of Law and Evil: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2010). He is the founding member of the Helsinki Lacan Circle.

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