This paper explores the roles of remorse and recollection as ethical resources apropos tragedy, particularly in reckoning with what constitutes tragedy and what does not. Firstly, I suggest that tragedy has often been eclipsed in favour of fatalistic or deterministic accounts of catastrophe, with detrimental, 'silencing' effects on ethical reflection. Then, I explore how remorseful recollection might help us to recognize and reflect on tragedy historically—which is to consider tragedy within its authentic, truthful temporal conditions without being trapped in deterministic evasions. To further elucidate this, I explore how 'rememory' in Morrison's Beloved serves as a type of remoresful recollection vis-a-vis tragedy.
Finally, in mournfully recalling the tragic past, I consider how such (re)narrations of shared, tragic loss might also serve as ethical resources for articulating and engaging in an alternative, liberative reality through protest, repentance and repair, and forgiveness.
This paper comparatively considers Judith Butler’s and Paul Ricœur’s respective engagements with Greek tragedy to argue that conversion by tragedy is vital for ethics. Paying particular attention to structural evil, I ask what tragedy teaches about ethical living amid the ruins of racism, sexism, classism, militarism, and speciesism. Reading Sophocles and Aeschylus with Butler and Ricœur, I argue that by bringing attention to the overlooked contradictions that characterize human identity and which inevitably complicate action, and by inviting witness to unbearable suffering wrought by superindividual forces, tragedy engenders a re-theorizing of oneself and one’s world that is necessary to nourish ethical responsibility. It does so by fostering sensitivity to vulnerability – one’s own and others’ – through a narrative-performative mode, which refuses premature resolutions, and instead “undoes” witnesses into wider perspective. I conclude by pointing to tragic theorizing’s potential to productively approach structural evil without proliferating shame, nihilism, or moral absolutism.
How can ethics account for appeals to tragedy in public discourse, particularly when it comes to rivalry between social orders? This essay traces the enduring ethical significance of Greek tragic drama while engaging with its critical reception in German philosophy and theology. It begins by analyzing G.W.F. Hegel’s influential criticism of fate in Greek tragedy, particularly through his treatment of Sophocles’ Antigone. It then engages with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own response to Antigone, situated within his broader criticism of Hegel, which involves his disavowal of tragic self-reference for resistance politics. Although there are significant differences between Hegel’s and Bonhoeffer’s ethical projects, I demonstrate how they each seek reconciling forms of thought and life that overcome an ultimately tragic clash between social orders. In light of their works, I argue that although responsible action may incur guilt, it need not also bear a sense of the tragic.
