Australasian Political Studies Association Conference 2003
Hosted by the School of Government
University of Tasmania

Political Theory Stream

Mythic Form and Political Reflection in Athenian Tragedy

Michael Janover
Monash University

Abstract:

The question of the meaning of Athenian tragedy has vexed classicists, historians, psychoanalysts and philosophers over many centuries and in many different ways. A question with too many answers, it can be set aside as vague either in irritation at its diffusion or in reverence of its profundity. I argue that the apparent vagueness and overdetemination of the question of tragedy can be a provocation to thinking through the relations of political forms to cultural norms in ancient Athens. In that thinking we find that there is no singular question or meaning of tragedy but a plurality of interpretations rarely in chorus. In this respect interpreters of Attic tragedy are not unlike spectators in the amphitheatre who see the plays from varying positions and find in them diverse political, religious, mythical, and historical enactments. More particularly, characteristics of community and subjectivity are differently framed and reframed in modern and post-modern interpretations of ancient tragic drama. Athenian tragedy can be viewed as pre-philosophical exploration of the limits that constitute civic and individual identity, or as poetic recognition of the violation of limits at the heart of that identity.

This paper presents classicist-anthropological, Heideggerian ontological, and political-philosophical interpretations as three possible renderings of the character and importance of ancient tragedy, and suggests that what I call here the political-philosophical interpretation best captures the meaning of tragic drama to the classical Athenians and its somewhat different cultural and political resonances in postmodernity.