Ethics of Tragedy: Dwelling Thinking Measuring

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 tragedyDrawing 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.