Ari Hirvonen
Adjunct Professor in Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory at the University of Helsinki
B & W 229 x 152 mm | Perfect Bound on White w/Matte Laminate | 344 pages | Paperback ISBN 978-1-910761-09-0 | E-book (PDF) ISBN N/A | 30 January 2020
Ethics of Tragedy is available from Blackwell’s (UK) and major online bookshops internationally at a recommended retail price of 18.00 GBP.
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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.
Readership: Philosophers, psychoanalysts, legal scholars, literature and theatre scholars, and those who practice theatre.
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
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
Introduction: Our Dwelling Place
Angels and Capitalist Discourse
Paranoia
No Ethics?
Ch. 1 / Measuring Poetically
Sacred Names
Faith
Wink
Ch. 2 / Where Now Is Athens?
Death of Tragedy?
Interability of Tragedies
Measuring of Justice
Ch. 3 / Being in Exile
Refugee Tragedies
Children of Heracles .
Suppliants
Oedipus, the Refugee
Sanctuaries for Refugees
Ch. 4 / Tragic Catharsis
Fear and Pity in Tragedy
Cathartic Purification
Phenomenologial Catharsis
Desire and Catharsis
Ch. 5 / Tragic Conflict and Beyond
Sovereignty
Freedom Fighter
Ethical Life
Absolute Justice
Ch. 6/ Heroine: The Supplement
Sexual Difference
Eternal Irony
Human Vulnerability
Agonistic Humanism
Ch. 7 / Law and Dust
Antigone—The Eternal Refugee
Valid Law
Certain Legality
Unwritten Laws
Ch. 8/ Uncanny Stranger
Dasein as Deinon
Heart
Ethics of Being
Ch. 9 / Unconditional Desire
The Real
Antigone’s Desire
Glimmering Crime
Infidel Criminal Fidelity
Ch. 10 / Caesura
Deconstructing Figures
Interruptive Silence
Antitheos
Law of Tragedy
Thinking/Measuring
Ch. 11 / Scene
Reading Tragedy
Tragic Transport
Material Tragedy
Rhythm and Tragedy
Scene as Assembly
Ch. 12 / Theatre Truths
Concrete Tragic Situations
Courage
Justice
Care
Ethical Catharsis
Conclusion: Capitalism and Tragedy
Bibliography
Notes
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. He was the director of a ‘Law and Evil’ research project and co-editor of Law and Evil: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2010). He is the founding member of the Helsinki Lacan Circle.
Footnote/Endnote:
Ari Hirvonen, Ethics of Tragedy: Dwelling, Thinking, Measuring (Oxford: Counterpress, 2020)
Bibliography:
Hirovenon, Ari. Ethics of Tragedy: Dwelling, Thinking, Measuring. Oxford: Counterpress, 2020.