Archive Feelings

<div>Do we take pleasure in reading ancient Greek tragedy despite the unsettling content or because of it? Does a safe aesthetic distance protect us from tragic suffering or does the proximity to death tap into something more primal? Aristotle proposed <i>catharsis</i> an emotional cleansing-or in later interpretations a sense of equilibrium-as tragedy's outcome and Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan grand theorists of the forces of anti-mastery in human and nonhuman existence surprisingly agreed. Notwithstanding this deferral to Aristotle their theorizations of the death drive-together with Jacques Derrida's notion of the archive as a place of conservation that inevitably fails-provide the groundwork for a radically new way of understanding tragic aesthetics.<br> <br> With bold readings of thirteen plays by Aeschylus Sophocles and Euripides including the Oedipus cycle the <i>Oresteia</i><i>Medea</i> and <i>Bacchae</i>; an eclectic synthesis of Freud Lacan Derrida Žižek Deleuze and other critical theorists; and an engagement with art architecture and film Mario Telò's <i>Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy</i> locates Greek tragedy's aesthetic allure beyond catharsis in a vertiginous sense of giddy suspension in a spiral of life and death that resists equilibrium stabilization and all forms of normativity. In so doing Telò forges a new model of tragic aesthetics.</div>