Book Review: Tragic democracy and political theory

In circles of critical social and political thought the trope of tragedy has been much invoked of late. J. Peter Euben, Judith Butler, Frederic Jameson, George Steiner, Martha Nussbaum, Charles Segal, Joan Copjec and Terry Eagleton, to name but a few, have all recently published texts devoted to the subject. The truth, however, is that tragedy has made for a perennial theme of consideration for those interested in political and philosophical questions since time immemorial. From Aristotle’s Poetics to Hegel’s Aesthetics, and from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy to Derrida’s reading of Hamlet’s ghost, tragedy has served a veritable station of insight for scores of canonized thinkers. So much so, in fact, that one might compellingly argue that at the core of political philosophical thought there resides some fundamental fascination with the literary-aesthetic genre. 

Derek W. M. Barker would certainly agree with such a finding. His book, Tragedy and Citizenship: Conflict, Reconciliation, and Democracy from Haemon to Hegel, recently printed by SUNY Press, begins with the very premise that ‘tragedy surrounds us’. In furnishing proof for such a nominally hyperbolic pronouncement, Barker recounts the familiar litany of contemporary atrocities: ‘Newspaper headlines repeat stories of suffering engendered by ethnic rivalry, class conflict, religious strife, and war.’ Such were indeed the quintessential themes adjured in 5th-century Athenian tragic literature. In the public festivals of the ancient polis, tragic theater was performed as a collective meditation on such themes. To take part in these performances, either as player or spectator, was to participate in something sacred to the political culture. As Euben aptly reminded us in The Tragedy of Political Theory, tragedy served as something more than an aesthetic form to the Athenians, it was indeed a ‘political institution’. ¹ Such is Barker’s point of departure.

Barker’s aim in appropriating a discussion of political tragedy is to suggest something about the nature of active citizenship for a robust democratic theory. Doing so, Barker tells us, means discriminating between two contrasting visions of tragedy and the tragic: the one which conceives of political conflict as something ultimately reconcilable, the other which takes intractable conflict to be endemic to political life. In the case of the former – what Barker refers to as the ‘Hegelian paradigm’ – the resolution, or sublation, of social discord is considered immanent to the underlying structure of the conflict itself. Thus, on this view, tragedy is reckoned to be self-dissolving. In the case of the latter, conflict is considered restlessly ongoing, irresolvable and aporetic. Admittedly, Barker is more interested in this second vision, especially insofar as it can be allocated for ‘citizen-centered democratic politics’. As he eloquently puts it,

Active citizenship requires a paradoxical sense that the reconciliation of conflict is an indeterminate and even impossible task, and yet among the highest and most meaningful of human activities. Engagement in public-building politics requires both a yearning to mediate and cope with conflict and an understanding that conflict is omnipresent and ineliminable. ²

This is a conception of politics consistent with the tragic view of conflict that departs from the ‘extremely optimistic’ aspect of the Hegelian paradigm. Conflict is not an automatically self-canceling condition of politics, rather it can be negotiated only through the conscious actions set in motion by active citizens. More specifically, for Barker, this means engaging with the ‘speech-centered expressive form’ of tragedy. Tragic drama has an instructive and even pedagogical upshot – it can help teach us both how to take part in effective public speech and also how to participate in collective listening.     

In exploring this possibility, Barker turns to an obvious exemplar, the Antigone, albeit in a highly inventive manner. Rather than focus on the play’s main characters, say Antigone or Creon, Barker turns to Haemon, Creon’s son, Antigone’s fiancé.  For Barker, Haemon, though ‘secondary in terms of dramatic action’, is central to the ‘political implications of the play’ (19). Haemon confronts his father mid-way through the play, and initially concedes to Creon’s will: ‘Father, I am yours [sos eimi]; with your excellent judgment you lay right before me, and I shall follow it’ (in Barker, 33). And yet later, more triumphantly, Haemon reproaches Creon:

A man who thinks that he alone is right [monos dokei], or what he says, or what he is himself, unique, such men, when opened up, are seen to be quite empty. For a man, though he be wise [sophos], it is no shame to learn [manthanein] – learn many things, and not maintain his views too rigidly. You notice how by streams in the wintertime the trees that yield [hypekei] preserve their branches safely, but those that fight the tempest perish utterly. … Yield [eike] something of your anger, give way a little. If a much younger man, like me, may have a judgment, I would say it were far better to be one altogether wise by nature, but, as things incline not to be so, then it is good [kalon] also to learn [manthanein] from those who advise well. ³

This passage marks an important moment, for Barker,  in revealing the tragedy’s instructive capacity for deliberative democratic thinking. For Haemon, practical wisdom consists in yielding to others (there is, after all, ‘no city possessed by one man solely’). Creon’s inability to listen to the counsel of his neighbors betokens his failure to learn how to participate in ethical deliberation and political membership, which makes of him a veritable tyrant. As Haemon puts it to his father, ‘You want to talk [legein] but never to listen [kluein]’ (36). For Barker, it is Haemon who learns this lesson most thoroughly, and it is thus to him that we who endeavor to think democratically should turn: ‘Haemon, more than any of the other characters, has learned the distinctions between passive yielding, tyrannical rule, and active citizenship. Above all, Haemon has learned what it means to be a member of a genuine polis.’ ⁴

In the end, Barker reads a range of contemporary political thinkers – Rorty, Rawls and Butler, most conspicuously – and faults them for appropriating the Hegelian paradigm in their own tragic view of politics. In failing to read Haemon as a pivotal archetype of democratic praxis, each thinker fails to realize tragedy’s most provocative political promise. Tragic democracy ought to  consummate not in the harmonious resolution of conflict, but rather the sustained deferral of reconciliation. ‘Rather than ethical closure’, writes Barker, tragic democracy requires ‘open ended discussion and deliberation’. ⁵ This is something Haemon knew well, something contemporary theories of democratic citizenship need to heed. 

Some of what Barker argues is quite convincing. Indeed, politics should be conceived less as a means of foreclosing the conflicts which arise out of difference and disagreement than as an ethos through which they might be refracted, elaborated and honed. Tragic literature expresses this premise in eloquent and forceful terms. Considering the total lack of attention paid to his character in the secondary literature, the focus on Haemon makes for an interesting choice, one that marks an important intervention. And in terms of his reading of democracy, Barker is at his best when he argues its meaningful expression is ‘rooted in a human condition of mortal limitation and imperfection’. ⁶

Barker’s text is, however, not without its limitations. Perhaps most significant among these is his outmoded reading of Hegel. On Barker’s view, Hegel reads philosophy as the art of immanent critique; which is to say, its task is to ‘show that what appears to be irrationality and conflict is a temporary, inherently unstable condition’. ⁷ As time progresses, the Absolute Spirit that underpins the world of appearances eventually reveals the divergence between thesis and antithesis to be dialectically resolved. Such a reading of Hegel was standard for the contemporary philosophers Barker takes as his intellectual forebears (Judith Shklar and Charles Taylor, most prominently, both of whom appropriate an understanding derived, however obliquely, from the legendary lectures of the Marxist scholar Alexandre Kojève). And yet, this understanding fails to appreciate a crucial dimension of Hegel’s thought, more recently emphasized by the poststructuralist literature, namely ‘the restlessness of the negative’. As Jean-Luc Nancy has put it, in his vision of Absolute Spirit, Hegel espouses ‘a world of movement, of transformation, of displacement, and of restlessness … this world moves toward no end or result other than itself, nor toward a resorption or sublimation of its own exteriority’. ⁸ Dialectical sublation does not, for Hegel, resolve in the ultimate reconciliation of opposites, as Barker suggests, but is rather an infinite project, as never-ending and aporetic as the vision of democratic conflict Barker himself champions. As Hegel himself writes:

Spirit is not an inert being, but on the contrary, absolutely restless [unruhig] being, pure activity, the negating or ideality of every fixed category of the abstractive intellect; not abstractly simple but, in its simplicity, at the same time a distinguishing of itself from itself; not an essence that is already finished and complete before its manifestation, hiding itself behind appearances, but an essence which is truly actual only through the determinate forms of its necessary self-manifestation. ⁹

This important facet of Hegel’s thought goes missing in Tragedy and Citizenship. There are of course many ‘Hegels’, and for good reason. So complex a thinker deserved to be multiply interpreted. But by restricting his interpretation to the Hegel of resolved opposites, Barker ultimately reduces the vast complexity too of the ‘neo-Hegelians’ who are his object of critique.

Though he is also concerned with the appropriation of Sophoclean tragedy for political theory, Peter Ahrensdorf is less interested in the question of citizenship and action than he is motivated by the question of what epistemic categories ought to guide democratic political society. Specifically Ahrensdorf, in his new book Greek Tragedy and Political Philosophy, suggests Sophocles can help us to negotiate the question of whether the dictates of human reason, as opposed to religious faith, can govern the polis. In exploring this possibility, Ahrensdorf takes Nietzsche – who in The Birth of Tragedy famously argues against Socratic rationalism – to be his chief rival. Nietzsche calls for the rejuvenation not merely of a tragic aesthetic, but more radically for a tragic mode of living. In Ahrensdorf’s terms, such a call amounts to ‘the re-establishment of a tragic, warlike culture that is based on a rejection of political rationalism, an affirmation of passing away and destroying … and a saying Yes to opposition and war’. ¹⁰ On Ahrensdorf’s view, Sophocles promises none of this; quite the contrary, he endorses the very Socratic principles of reason Nietzsche otherwise disparages.  

Qualifying his argument, Ahrensdorf turns beyond the Antigone, addressing in turn each of Sophcles’ Theban masterpieces – including Oedipus the Tyrant and Oedipus at Colonus. Departing from the Nietzschean take, he insists that Sophocles does not endorse the views procured by some of his own most sage characters, such as Teiresias’ denunciations of reason. The downfall of Oedipus in Oedipus the Tyrant is ultimately the consequence not of his dedication to reason, but rather of his ‘turn to piety’. Similarly, ‘it is not the religious, anti-rationalist Oedipus who is the hero of Oedipus at Colonus,’ Ahrensdorf contends, ‘but rather the humane and enlightened Theseus’, whose rational statesmanship constitutes a prudent rejection of theological precepts. Finally, in the Antigone, the protagonist

… ultimately demonstrates her superiority to Creon, not through her heroic piety but through her heroic willingness to question her most cherished convictions about justice and about the possibility of an immortal happiness. The Antigone, I suggest, invites one to ascend from the pious heroism of Antigone to the humane wisdom of Sophocles. The true model of rationalism to be found in the Theban plays … is Sophocles himself, who presents the problem of politics, reason, and piety with a genuinely philosophic clarity, calm, and depth. ¹¹

Sophocles, for Ahrensdorf, is the true hero of his own tragic vision. Pioneering a brand of rationality whose ‘somber reserve’ he champions, Sophocles registers at once the necessity of piety to political life while also revealing its radical limitations. The cultivation of human wisdom and compassion, the very principles upon which a just civic order ultimately relies for Ahrensdorf, depends for its realization on the virtues of deliberate logic. ‘However mindful Sophocles may be of the limits of political rationalism, of the prudence of accommodating pious longings within the political arena, and of the dignity of piety,’ writes Ahrensdorf, ‘he quietly but clearly affirms the superior wisdom and the humanity of the individual life guided by reason.’ ¹²  

Though Ahrensdorf, in the pursuit of his argument, spends quite a lot of time rebutting Nietzsche, a more formidable, if not more interesting, opponent would surely have been the Frankfurt critical theorist Theodor Adorno. The very tenets of Ahrensdorf’s position are challenged, if not altogether torn asunder, in Adorno’s brilliant critique of instrumental reason, articulated perhaps most lucidly in his and Horkheimer’s influential Dialectics of Enlightenment. There, following the Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács, they argue that the Enlightenment faith in rationality underscores the very mythological and pious thinking it otherwise claims to reject: ‘Just as myths already entail enlightenment,’ they write, ‘with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology.’ ¹³ Reason can just as easily be a vehicle of domination, Adorno teaches us, as it can one of wisdom and compassion, insofar as it tends to reduce objects in the field of knowledge to mere use value. Rather than stress the inherent worth and importance of a person, for instance, instrumental rationality reifies the subject by reducing her or him to some exchange rate. Especially in the contemporary social circumstance of bourgeois consumerism, where the culture industry ubiquitously pervades the life-world of late capitalism, Adorno tells us we should be wary of the means by which reason can be mobilized toward dehumanizing ends. Where Ahrensdorf unabashedly defends the fostering of reason as the bedrock of civil society, Adorno demonstrates reason’s complicity in some of the 20th century’s most brutal excesses. This is not to say that Ahrensdorf’s argument about Sophoclean rationality should be seen as altogether dubious, rather it is to cast into relief his uncritical endorsement of rationality as the a priori foundation of democratic political society as such. Engaging with Adorno would have had a favorable effect on Ahrensdorf’s case, especially because Adorno argued so forcefully toward the end of his life (particularly in Aesthetic Theory) for the political import of tragic art arrayed against instrumental reason. ¹⁴

Though I maintain that both books would ultimately have been well served in broadening the scope of their thinking, each is certainly on to something important in reading tragedy politically. If, as Simon Critchley writes, we are today ‘faced with the ever-enlarging incoherence of the present, characterized by war without end, the increasingly frantic shoring up of the imperium, [and] the deepening contagion of ethnic, religious, and civil conflict’, the malaise and melancholia of a tragic sensibility may prove particularly germane to the present political conjuncture. ¹⁵ These are indeed tragic times. Still, as  Terry Eagleton has put it, some trouble may problematize the easy translation of tragedy into a viable politics:

As an aristocrat among art forms, its tone is too solemn and portentous for a streetwise, skeptical culture. … For some feminists, tragic art is far too enamoured of sacrifice, false heroics and a very male nobility of spirit, a kind of highbrow version of ripping yarns for boys. For leftists in general, it has an unsavoury aura of gods, myths and blood cults, metaphysical guilt and inexorable destiny. ¹⁶

Despite these potential problems, both Barker’s and Ahrensdorf’s texts successfully gesture towards a means of connecting tragedy to politics vis-à-vis its affiliation with democratic culture. Democracy resolves in the refusal of some final redemptive purpose. It affirms the possibility and practice of a mortal politics, an openly human politics, realist’ all the way down. In these senses democracy is indeed alloyed with tragedy. 

Though Barker and Ahrensdorf do not go far enough to suggest it, there is another sense in which tragedy and democracy are aligned. Tragedy is not merely about a site of struggle given to a conflictual topos, urging onward and upward the agon of democratic spirit. Tragic form may help construct the collective dream of the democratic polis, but also and crucially, it also undermines it by conjuring to the fore the very exclusions and modes of violence upon which the project of democracy is always already founded. Tragedy reveals to the democratic sensibility its own radical limitations even as it provides it its vital impetus. Barker and Ahrensdorf may fall short in exploring this important dimension of their rapport, but both books come a long way in setting the stage, as it were, for the expression of tragedy and democracy as the twin tropes of our time.