Tragedy in the Crosshairs of the Present

Brooke Holmes

Abstrakt: A number of developments in the study of Greek literature over the past few decades have bro-
ken down boundaries of canon and genre, opening up a wide range of texts once deemed degenerate or
unavailable to literary analysis, expanding the networks within which literary texts are interpreted, Und
bringing renewed attention to the reception of ancient texts in later periods up to the present. The rise of
reception studies, insbesondere, raises new questions about how our own position within specific present
moments not only imposes constraints on the interpretation of ancient texts but also enables it. In this es-
sagen, I survey these developments using Greek tragedy, the most canonical of genres, as a case study. I argue
that we need to develop strategies of interpretation more attuned to resonances between contemporary
quandaries and our extant tragedies while remaining committed to forms of social and historical differ-
enz. I pay particular attention to the problems of agency that tragedy raises at the juncture of the human
and the nonhuman worlds.

The category of “Greek literature” has been noth-

ing if not contestable for some decades now. Der
challenges have come largely from a cluster of ap-
proaches usually referred to as “cultural poetics”
or “cultural history,” whose driving assumption is
that determining the meaning of any ancient text
requires that we embed it within a larger network
of power and a broader field of signs (Athenian de-
mocracy, Zum Beispiel, or archaic song culture, oder
pan-Hellenic politics). The impact of cultural poet-
ics has been enormous. As canonical “literary” texts
have been released into a wider cultural stream,
once-marginal texts have become newly privileged
objects of attention. The study of texts produced
after the fall of classical Athens in Ptole maic Al-
exandria and under the Roman Empire, texts long
dismissed as imitative and degenerate, has been
booming since the mid-1990s. Decades of ground-
breaking work on gender and sexuality have also
helped to broaden the corpus of texts, encouraging
a shift of attention toward medical and other tech-

BROOKE HOLMES is Professor of
Classics in the Department of Clas-
sics at Princeton University. Sie
is the author of The Symptom and
the Subject: The Emergence of the Phys-
ical Body in Ancient Greece (2010)
and Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy
(2012). She is currently at work on
her next book, The Tissue of the
Welt: Sympathy and the Nature of
Nature in Greco-Roman Antiquity.

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nical texts, insbesondere. Alongside these
developments we have witnessed the rap-
id ascent of a subfield usually called “re-
ception studies,” roughly the study of clas-
sical antiquity in post-antique societies and
the history of classical scholarship. Der
field of Greek literature, in short, has been
blown open. Its boundaries–generic, geo-
graphical, chronological–are no longer
easily locatable.

Yet if these trends have worked togeth-
er to transform what gets studied under
the heading of Greek literature, they also
pull in different directions. The potential
for tension is most evident in the relation-
ship between approaches that locate texts
in their social and cultural contexts and
those that look to their many and varied
afterlives. One strategy tries to figure out
what the texts meant in their immediate
contexts; the other looks to a series of en-
counters in a range of places and times,
including some close to home. Reception
studies is often practiced with a primarily
historicist outlook. But reception studies
by nature, tracking as it does antiquity’s
long tail, raises questions about the trans-
historical value of ancient texts and the
meaning of these texts today. These kinds
of questions can be tough for classicists.
In der Tat, anxieties about presentism are
virtually constitutive of modern classical
scholarship, founded as the model science
in the nineteenth century on techniques
for accessing the historical truth of the past
and reconstituting its texts.1 In the twen-
tieth century, fascist appropriations of an
idealized antiquity came to haunt uses of
the classical past for present-day ends. Tri-
umphalist classicism has been turned on
its head by a political tide that has been in
ascendancy since the late 1960s, and out of
which the best strands of cultural poetics
have emerged. Yet while the conservative
attempt to turn back that tide is undoubt-
edly misguided, forms of anticlassicism al-
ways risk being constrained by what they

oppose. Historicism has its limits. For bet-
ter or for worse, “the Greeks” still haunt
the Western imagination, as they have for
millennia. Though we did not need recep-
tion studies to tell us that, a flood of recent
work has driven the point home. And like
the humanities more generally, classics is
always facing challenges to its relevance.

It is easy enough to let the sheer impact
of “the Greeks” or “the ancients” on West-
ern civilization legitimate by default the
study of whatever fits under the big tent
of Greek literature. The strategy is at some
level unavoidable under current condi-
tionen. But I do worry that it feeds off a cer-
tain defensiveness about the field in an age
of budget cuts and stem-envy, and I wor-
ry even more that it falls back uncritically
on standard classicizing presumptions of
value. The harder task is a serious reckon-
ing with the legacies of classicism and anti-
classicism as the conditions under which
anyone comes to the Greeks as if they do
and should matter. This reckoning would
start by taking up the inherited category of
“Greek literature” and its canon not only
as a historical construct but also as the dy-
namic terrain for the staging of arguments
about the value of ancient Greek texts and
demands that we attend to them. In the rest
of this essay, I flesh out these more general
arguments by looking at the specific case
of that most canonical of genres, Greek
tragedy.

There may be no other genre in which

the tensions I have just sketched are so evi-
dent, precisely because of tragedy’s tena-
cious prestige value. Tragedy already ex-
uded power and status during its efflores-
cence in fifth-century bce Athens. But from
our vantage point, the genre’s power is un-
thinkable without its reimagination as the
philosophy of the tragic most closely as-
sociated with the German idealists in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
tury. Reborn in a philosophical mode and

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145 (2) Spring 2016Brooke Holmes

buoyed by highly influential readings of a
handful of plays (Antigone, The Bacchae, Oe-
dipus Tyrannus) by Hegel, Nietzsche, Und
Freud, tragedy has remained central to
twentieth- and twenty-first-century conti-
nental philosophy, political theory, psycho-
Analyse, feminism, and literary theory,
while also enjoying a robust performance
tradition. There is arguably no tragedy in
modernity without a philosophy of the
tragic.

Unsurprisingly, in light of my remarks
above about historicist trends in the field,
the modern legacy of the tragic has been
a problem for scholars of Greek tragedy
over the past four decades. Much effort
has gone into making sense of what trag-
edy meant not as an idea but as a genre in
the context of fifth-century Athenian pol-
itics, Kultur, and performance traditions.
Most scholars would in fact deny that
anything like a “tragic” outlook on life or
worldview is embodied by tragedy in its
prime, cordoning off Aristotle as well as
Hegel from the phenomenon of lived per-
Form. The commitment to a histori-
cist program can be explained not only by
the discipline’s own formation as a “sci-
ence of antiquity” (Altertumswissenschaft),
which I mentioned above, but also by the
wide-ranging influence of the French Hel-
lenist Jean-Pierre Vernant, who critiqued
the universalizing claims of psychoanal-
ysis and structuralism in order to situate
Greek tragedy more firmly within the co-
ordinates of democratic Athens. In this
critical climate, the pressures of moderni-
ty’s impassioned appropriation of tragedy
have been seen as amplifying the pressures
of the present more broadly construed. Wenn
we are going to rescue Greek tragedy from
the tragic, the thinking goes, we need to
cut through the interference.

But pendulums swing. Approaches that
were once dynamic ossify. The turn away
from the democratic context of our extant
tragedies understood as the key to their

meaning has produced a renewed interest
in the plays’ formal elements, without jet-
tisoning the hope of observing tragedy as
a thoroughly political genre in its original
habitat.2 Even more energy has been chan-
neled into approaching tragedy via recep-
tion studies. Greek tragedy has given rise to
a substantial and thriving subfield devoted
to the study of reperformance and adapta-
tion not only in all corners of the modern
world but in antiquity as well. Obwohl
less attention has been paid, at least under
the auspices of reception studies, to phil-
osophical constructions of the tragic, Die
past couple years have welcomed a trio of
smart new books published by classicists
on the history of tragedy and the tragic in
continental philosophy, psychoanalysis,
and political theory.3 The idealist tradition
is fast becoming less of a threat and more
an object of study in its own right within
the disciplinary parameters of classics, pa-
rameters already expanded by reception’s
generous outlook on the temporal and geo-
graphical scope of Greek tragedy itself.

It will not escape readers that reception
studies thus described looks like histori-
cism by other means. They will not be mis-
genommen. Rather than being trained on the
fifth century, the historian’s gaze is now fo-
cused on key moments in the nineteenth
or the twentieth. The twist is that, taken to
its logical outcome, the work of historiciz-
ing interpretation–indeed, of historiciz-
ing the very dominance of historicism in
recent waves of scholarship on tragedy–
poses with renewed urgency the question
of what it means to read, stage, or watch
Greek tragedy now. The methodological
implications of reception studies can be
spun out in at least two ways.

Einerseits, we can frame histor-
ical self-consciousness as a necessary at-
tempt to know thyself. Als solche, it entails
becoming aware of the spectral presence of
past readings, judgments, and critical tools
that inform your own interpretations. Der

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesTragedy in the Crosshairs of the Present

process is necessarily aporetic or, to put it
more constructively, recursive. You have to
stop historicizing at some point and trust
whatever tools you have (philology, sagen,
or critical theory) to interpret what a text
means. Trotzdem, by trying to under-
stand why we ask the questions we do of a
text and perhaps why we find the answers
we do, we free ourselves up to ask differ-
ent questions and arrive at unexpected an-
swers. Such an outcome, anyways, ist der
hope of any method that aspires to what
Michel Foucault called “genealogy.”

Andererseits, the work of engag-
ing the rich tradition of modern and con-
temporary readings of tragedy can be seen
as license and inspiration for strategies of
interpretation that invest tragedy with the
power to shed light on the human condi-
tion, or some historically inflected version
davon (modern, postmodern, post-postmod-
ern). An approach of this kind hardly pre-
cludes critical self-awareness of one’s place
in an interpretive tradition. It may actually
be a precondition of enabling Greek trag-
edy to tell us something we do not already
know. But this second approach frames the
payoff of historical self-consciousness dif-
ferently. The reader’s larger commitments
and interests within the present function
not so much as a distorting lens to be some-
how corrected; eher, they are now seen
as the very condition of saying something
meaningful about ancient tragedy, präzise-
ly because they shape a conviction that an-
tiquity matters to us at all.

The shift marked by the second perspec-
tive may seem minor. But it has significant
implications for how classicists negoti-
ate their relationship to the present more
generally. For it asks them to reflect more
openly on–and thereby take responsi-
bility for–the values that motivate their
readings and the worlds that they hope
these readings will sustain or help to cre-
aß. Taking responsibility in this sense
means refusing the default mode that the

value of “the classical” is at once obvious
and guaranteed by centuries of prior val-
idation.

But this reflective mode also means not
rejecting out of hand the logic of classici-
zation in order to insist on the otherness of
the Greeks and the particularity of their
Welt. Although the latter approach may
seem to sidestep questions of value or to
locate value in cultural difference alone,
the situation is more complex. For an at-
tachment to the strangeness and the dis-
tance of the Greeks shapes the contours of
classical antiquity in the modern period as
much as figures of intimacy and continuity
do. The case of tragedy is exemplary here
insofar as one of the fundamental ques-
tions posed by philosophies of the tragic is
whether ancient tragedy is even still possi-
ble in the modern world. We can speculate,
Dann, that classicists are attached to his-
toricizing antiquity not just because they
objectively recognize a rupture between
past and present. The recognition of rup-
tur, eher, is a precondition of the opera-
tion to heal rupture by making the ancients
available to the present in their difference, A
desire often motivated by the implicit be-
lief that antiquity is no ordinary anthropo-
logical other, but occupies a privileged po-
sition as a distant parent or lost model. In
its reparative mode, historicism comes full
circle to meet forms of universalism that
see ancient tragedy as valuable because it
taps into timeless truths–in other words,
the ancients are available to the present in
their sameness–without always being ex-
plicit about its own logic of value.

I am suggesting, Dann, that classical val-
ue is still too often assumed as an inher-
itance easily mistaken for an elite birth-
Rechts. In challenges to conventional classi-
Cismus, value is either suppressed or defined
via an ethics of alterity broadly under-
stood. Neither option feels adequate to
the complexity of contemporary encoun-
ters with tragedy. What if instead Greek

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145 (2) Spring 2016Brooke Holmes

tragedy were actively imagined as an ob-
ject of what we might call, after the Sto-
ics, elective sympathy? The aim of chang-
ing our terms would be to force a greater
recognition of the ways in which tragedy
provokes a sense, at once historically con-
ditioned and deeply embodied, of the ten-
sions involved in being human (Sein
mortal, being assigned a gender, being in
a family, being in a city, being embedded
in a field of nonhuman powers) while, In
its impossible strangeness, resisting ap-
propriation. The language of elective sym-
pathy invites us to think harder about how
sameness and difference work together in
specific ratios to make Greek tragedy mat-
ter to us now, where both “us” and “now”
refer to diverse communities living out
temporalities irreducible to the present
allein. It offers a way of seeing modernity’s
philosophies of the tragic as constitutive of
the vocabularies we use to locate ourselves
in relationship to Greek tragedy without
determining the sense that we make of
the texts.

With the term elective sympathy, Dann,
I am trying to foreground our agency in
establishing the terms of our investment
in tragedy alongside the power that these
texts still exercise over us. Agentur, on this
account, is not radical freedom, whatev-
er that means. Es ist, eher, the thoughtful
and creative negotiation of legacies an-
cient and modern, in the interest of living
more fully in this world by not being ful-
ly of this world. Under these conditions,
what might be the claims of Greek trage-
dy on our attention now?

In Greek tragedy, not being fully of the

world in which one finds oneself most
commonly leads to living it more fully
through pain. The majority of surviving
plays are about the suffering of outsized
human beings: trauma, violence, carnage,
grief. Fragments from others suggest that
the texts we have are not unusual in this

respect. The extant plays’ speeds and
rhythms are structured by the eruption
and modulation of pain. This highly for-
mal and complex scripting of tragic suffer-
ing is largely unfamiliar to contemporary
American and Western European culture,
making it one of the least assimilable as-
pects of the genre for audiences and readers
(and a perennial challenge for performers).
This is not to say that performances of
Greek tragedy cannot be raw and intense.
But its very unrelenting intensity, together
with the absence of contemporary reference
points for its form, can obscure the fine-
grained workings of the law that Aeschylus
calls “the learning through suffering.”

Pain in Greek tragedy always demands
the work of making sense. This is true de-
spite the fact that sense-making always
falls short, leaving a remainder of senseless
harm that, depending on your theories or
your experience of the genre’s therapeu-
tic effects, may or may not be metabolized
through spectatorship itself. Like other re-
mainders, the kernel of senseless harm tes-
tifies to the failure of a peculiarly human
capacity to understand and, through un-
derstanding, to master the unknown. Es
testifies, zu, to the very doggedness of the
drive toward epistemic mastery. The fa-
mous “Ode to Man” in Sophocles’s Antigone
names this kernel “death.” Many of the sur-
viving tragedies suggest there are even
worse things that can happen to you.

There are a range of different ways that
characters in a given play come to knowl-
edge or the limits of knowledge in the face
of pain, their own and that of others.
These manifold ways of knowing explain
a good deal of the formal complexity of
tragedy (variations of meter and syntax;
changes from solo speech to choral song to
variants of dialogue, including the rapid-
fire back-and-forth called “stichomythia”;
matched odes; and the combative quasi-
legal speeches of the contest or “agon”).
We sometimes see characters in the grip

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesTragedy in the Crosshairs of the Present

of intense pain: consider Heracles writh-
ing under a cloak doused with flesh-eat-
ing poison at the end of the Trachiniae or
Philoctetes being seized by spasms of ag-
ony when his festering snakebite flares
up in Sophocles’s Philoctetes. Manchmal
we see them coming to know the terri-
ble things they have done in a state of
madness (Heracles and Ajax in the epon-
ymous plays by Euripides and Sophocles,
jeweils, or Agave at the end of The
Bacchae). We see other characters trying
to figure out why someone is suffering
or else situating a fresh trauma within an
intergenerational narrative of misfortune
(Euripides’s Hippolytus and Orestes in Or-
estes; Prometheus in the Prometheus Bound,
probably written by Aeschylus). Die Rolle
of explaining suffering is often taken up by
the chorus, who spend a lot of time cycling
through myths like a lawyer “searching
for a precedent,” as Anne Carson’s chor-
us puts it in Antigonick.4 Sometimes gods
show up ex machina to give an explanation
whose very neatness magnifies the gulf
between the arid logic of immortals and
the lived experience of mortals (that gulf
is one of the great challenges of staging the
Medea for modern audiences).

The intimate relationship between trag-
ic suffering and the work of making sense
can be clarified by thinking about the sort
of violence tragedy shows. It is a generic
convention that direct, human-on-human
violence happens offstage and gets report-
ed in speech, typically by messengers. Was
we see onstage is god-on-human violence:
characters struck by diseases, especially
madness, that manifest themselves via
symptoms, or running into disaster (atē)
with a recklessness that provokes more
sober observers to diagnose the interfer-
ence of daemonic agents. But who can be
Sicher? What distinguishes god-on-human
violence is the open-ended status of a
symptom when compared, sagen, to a corpse
whose murderer accompanies it onstage.

A symptom requires an interpretation of
what is happening, what will happen, Und
who or what is causing it. Those who wit-
ness or experience it usually want to know,
insbesondere, which god is responsible.

The recourse to the gods as explanatory
principles, Jedoch, is never clear-cut. Sogar
if you know which god is behind the suffer-
ing, you need to know why he or she is an-
gry. At times in Euripides, characters won-
der in desperation what kind of creatures
would dream up such horrors. Darüber hinaus,
the very fact that gods wreak havoc in and
through human beings always implicates
the vehicles of divine and daemonic pow-
er in the harm that they and others suf-
fer. Even the case of the red-handed killer
turns out to be murky. When Clytemnes-
tra stands at last over the bodies of Agam-
emnon and Cassandra, after many scenes
of subterfuge, she boldly claims the mur-
ders as her own acts. But she also claims to
be an avenging daemon. A corpse, zu, can
thus be a tragic symptom. Es, zu, marks in-
controvertible evidence of damage to hu-
man life together with an impetus to make
sense that always overshoots the mark (zu
many agents: god, menschlich, ancestral) Und
always falls short (no account can translate
pain completely into meaning).

Tragedy is about suffering, Dann, but it
is also, over and again, about the mysteries
and the fallout of agency, understood as
the ambiguous power to act in the world
as well as the ambiguous openness to the
world that under extraordinary circum-
stances impels one to act in ways that are
difficult to own. The standard definition
of hamartia as “fatal flaw” fails to get at the
force and the complexity of what is going
on here. It is too complacent about the
boundaries of the individual to whom the
flaw is thought to belong. It is too caught
up in Christian notions of original sin,
with its attendant certainty about guilt. Es
is just too blunt an instrument. It can be
downright maddening to watch scholars

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145 (2) Spring 2016Brooke Holmes

argue about whether Oedipus in Soph-
ocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus is guilty or in-
nocent of killing his father and sleeping
with his mother. But there is also a risk
of discounting the problem of agency as
a belated philosophical imposition, Bei der
hands of either Aristotle or the German
idealists. The problem of agency matters
a lot in the tragedies themselves.

It is of course the case that the conver-
gence of philosophy and politics makes
the question of agency newly urgent in
Germany at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury. But it is precisely by recognizing the
creative force of the idealists’ urgency that
we can be more strategic about drawing
out the resonances of tragic agency in the
early twenty-first century. For once again
philosophy and politics are converging on
the conundrum of agency, and in many
spaces at once. The examples can be mul-
tiplied: thinking about and through the
scope, limits, and uneven distribution of
human agency on scales both cosmic and
local in the era of the Anthropocene; Die
implications of research in cognitive sci-
ence and medicine for taxonomies of
Geist, intention, and responsibility; con-
cerns about the capacity of courts to do the
political and emotional work of defining
harm and blame and assigning damag-
es; the rapid growth of technological ex-
pansions of agency that magnify the pow-
er to harm and the power to help, Dort-
by shifting our thinking about mortality
and our control over life; the tenacity of
forces of oppression that continue to work
through individuals and communities and
institutions with devastating consequenc-
es; the ever-fuzzier boundary between hu-
man and nonhuman actants in the various
new materialisms and the causal traffic be-
tween human and nonhuman communi-
ties and networks; wars that inflict vio-
lence by drone but still send home soldiers
damaged by the awful intimacy of com-
bat. The list goes on. Suffice to say that we

are not done with tragic agency. Not even
close.

What tragedy does not do is provide easy
answers to the darkest puzzles of agency.
But its refusal to do so does not mean it
necessarily yields what Bonnie Honig has
recently diagnosed as “mortalist human-
ism,” that is, a quiescent politics bred out
of the indulgence of lament and the posit-
ing of a universal community stitched to-
gether by finitude.5 Rather, Greek tragedy
carves out spaces for dwelling with vulner-
ability and damage via a rich spectrum of
epistemic and emotional modalities. Wir
need aesthetic and communal spaces to
work through the suffering we undergo
and witness that cannot be made sense of
by the poles of guilt and innocence alone–
the moral, ethisch, politisch, and emotional
complexity that surrounds damage to hu-
man life. Rather than inducing paralysis,
the experience of tragedy may condition
more discerning, nimble, and compas-
sionate forms of thought and action in the
world beyond its boundaries. The possibil-
ity that it might do so does not exhaust its
value. But nor can such potenial be written
off as instrumentalization.

In contemporary American culture, Wir
have a deep and desperate need not to see
suffering: to fix it with technology or laws,
to ignore it or blame it on someone else.
Tragedy does not replace medicine or law
or politics. But it does have the capacity to
flesh out the human sciences by transpos-
ing them into worlds where their mech-
anisms get jammed. Its provocation is to
ask whether and how suffering itself can
be creative. If tragedy seen in these terms
bears the residues of the idealist tradition,
idealism’s traces bear witness to the urgen-
cy and power of its readings of the texts
selbst. We court narcissism in believ-
ing that sophisticated problems of subjects
and objects, of necessity and what is “up
to us,” of the human and nonhuman are
uniquely modern. I want to close by look-

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesTragedy in the Crosshairs of the Present

ing very briefly at three versions of these
problems, loosely allied with law, medi-
cine, and politics, as endemic to the histor-
ical moment of tragedy. My aim in doing
Also, in an essay ostensibly about the “now,”
is to enlarge the autonomy of tragedy as
the condition of its viability in this present.

Sophocles’s Oedipus is a cipher from the

start. In the Oedipus at Colonus (durchgeführt
approximately two decades after the Oedi-
pus Tyrannus), Sophocles scripts two modes
of making sense of what has happened to
Oedipus that meet but do not merge. Wann
Oedipus, blind and nearing the end of his
life, first has his infamous name pried out
of him by the chorus of elderly Colonians,
he slips into a rhetorically polished speech
of self-defense. I am a man, he says, whose
deeds were suffered more than acted, WHO
went unknowingly along the path he trav-
eled.6 Midway through the play, he revisits
this language of ignorance and blameless-
ness in a blistering rebuke to Creon, WHO
has stirred up old slurs to goad Oedipus’s
newfound protectors into expelling him
from their city.7

Oedipus here is very much the master
of the legal vocabularies that had been re-
fined over the course of the fifth century.
The appropriation of legal vocabulary by
the tragedians is the main reason why Ver-
nant put so much emphasis on the evolu-
tion of legal thought as a condition for the
historical development of Athenian trag-
edy, which he located at the juncture of
older religious paradigms of blame and
punishment and fifth-century legal insti-
tutions.8 But the mode of the law-court in-
teracts with others. Once the chorus has
agreed to let Oedipus wait for their king
Theseus, they return to the story of his life,
now told through song and punctuated by
lament. Oedipus does not give up the lan-
guage of blindness and innocence here.
But as another kind of sense-making surg-
es up around it, suffering becomes the con-

dition of Oedipus’s life, what defines it as
his own even as he disclaims ownership
of the actions that create it. His hands are
not stained and yet without the stain (mi-
asma)–and the ongoing work of making
sense of the stain–he does not exist. Der
law is little help here.

What about medicine? A number of
scholars have noticed a spike in “medical”
vocabulary and depictions of disease in
tragedy toward the end of the fifth century.
These developments are usually chalked
up to a vague “realism” and sometimes
secularization, particularly in Euripides.
I have elsewhere argued that they can be
more productively understood as part of
the larger story about tragic agency. More
speziell, they stand at the heart of new
ways of thinking about human nature, vul-
nerability, and agency stimulated by the
emergence of a concept of the physical
body under the aegis of naturalizing medi-
cine and the larger “inquiry into nature.”9
What makes these developments so pow-
erful for tragedy is the fact that the open-
ended structure of the symptom allows
the eruption of pain and violence to sus-
tain different kinds of narratives of cause,
some attached to gods, others to generic
or named diseases. In the last decades of
the fifth century, Greek tragedy is working
out the implications of different kinds of
stories that can be attached to the symp-
tom. By emphasizing gods, tragedy fig-
ures the human being as a vehicle of dae-
monic power, as we saw above. This figu-
ration is always problematic. But the spike
in the language of disease, together with
an increased use of medical language and
Bilder, radically expands the space ac-
corded to the human as an incubator of
harm to self and others in accordance with
the contemporary conceptualization of the
corporeal interior as the space of disease
and the origin of the symptom. The body
on this model comes to figure the strange-
ness of what is both not self–for what is

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145 (2) Spring 2016Brooke Holmes

new about the physical body and its na-
ture is its status as an object–and con-
stitutive of self. It thereby enlarges and
sharpens tragedy’s conceptual resources
for problematizing agency. Euripides’s Or-
estes maps a very different world by turn-
ing the Furies, who appear onstage in the
final play of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, in die
unseen hallucinations of an Orestes now
described with the language of disease as
a man capable of murder without divine
sanction. The disease motifs of the same
playwright’s Hippolytus magnify the ethi-
cal conundrum of Phaedra’s desire. Der
stakes of disease-language often go unrec-
ognized by scholars of tragedy. But as we
wade deeper and deeper into the complex-
ities of subjectivities formed through bio-
politics and biotechnology, perhaps we
are ourselves at a historical moment to ap-
preciate more fully the shock of the phys-
ical body as a concept, one that upends
what it means to be a subject and an agent
in ways as powerful as the democratic insti-
tutionalization of the law. From this van-
tage point, the drama of the symptom and
the medicalization of tragic agency acquire
new depths.

The trust we place in medicine and law
to deal with questions of harm and blame
can make tragic agency especially power-
ful and disturbing. Our own attachment
to the idea of the individual, Jedoch, Ist
sometimes said to distort the way we in-
terpret ancient tragedy. The chorus, An
this line, is the perennial problem of mo-
dernity. There is a risk here of overcor-
recting a fixation on the isolated hero and
losing sight of the shifting coordinates–
legal and medical but also political–for
imagining the tragic subject in the fifth
Jahrhundert. But if we remember that part of
the problem of tragic agency has to do with
boundaries, then it becomes clear that
tragedy is also a site for thinking about the
distribution of agency within networks
that extend widely over space and time and

encompass a broad range of relations be-
tween people: kin, armies, slaves, and oth-
er subject populations (who are favored
members of the chorus).

The web of kin relations, in particular,
is notoriously sticky in Greek tragedy. Der
legacy of the family can be seen to enable
forms of agency. Antigone, in Sophocles’s
eponymous play, demands that Ismene
prove that she is the offspring of noble par-
ents by assisting in the illicit burial of their
renegade brother Polyneices. Öfters,
obwohl, what is transmitted from one gen-
eration is the curse (as Antigone herself
suggests at other moments in the play),
which ensnares later generations in an-
cestral crimes and misfortunes. In Aeschy-
lus’s Oresteia, the city and its law-courts
appear to arrest the potentially intermina-
ble chain of harm. But by the time we get
to the Orestes, Euripides’s wildly perverse
sequel staged in the last decade of the fifth
Jahrhundert, the city no longer appears as a
ready savior.

The curse binds one generation to anoth-
er, but it also entangles humans in a world
of nonhuman judges and avengers. Nicht-
human agents sometimes resolve into clear
Formen, such as the Erinyes of the Orest-
es myth or Olympian gods. But deified
force also spreads more diffusely in our
extant tragedies to animate and disrupt
what we would call the natural world,
perhaps most memorably in the Bacchae,
with its flows of milk, its uncannily tame
Tiere, the eerie quiet of the forest be-
fore Pentheus is destroyed. In so doing,
intensities of power seem to become un-
moored from the gods’ intentions and
the narratives they support. The circula-
tion of power through the natural world
can also give rise to heterodox forms of
human and nonhuman community (as in
the Philoctetes). The fluid movement of pow-
er thus works against the arrest of cause re-
quired for responsibility and explanation
at the level of not only humans but also

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesTragedy in the Crosshairs of the Present

nonhumans. The inscrutability of a cos-
mos unpredictably implicated in what
we do and suffer and marked by ancestral
damage signals another facet of Greek
tragedy newly visible in light of our pres-
ent ecological predicament. Tragedy does

not offer to fix a broken world. Instead it
demands that we attend to the complexity
of embodied and earthbound life through
attempts to make sense of suffering and
its causes. In an age of quick fixes, this is
a lot.

Endnoten
1 On philology as a model science, see Lorraine Daston and Glenn W. Most, “History of Sci-

ence and History of Philologies,” Isis 106 (2) (2015): 378–390.

2 Sehen, Zum Beispiel, Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (New York: Oxford
Universitätsverlag, 2012); and Victoria Wohl, Euripides and the Politics of Form (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2015).

3 Joshua Billings, The Genealogy of the Tragic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014);
Miriam Leonard, Tragic Modernities (Cambridge, Masse.: Harvard University Press, 2015); Und
Joshua Billings and Miriam Leonard, Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2015). This is not entirely new ground for classicists; Zum Beispiel, see M. S. Silk
and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); M. S. Silk,
Hrsg., Tragedy and the Tragic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and James I. Porter, The Invention
of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).

4 Anne Carson, Antigonick (Sophokles) (New York: New Directions, 2012).
5 Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
6 Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus 258–291.
7 Ebenda. 960–1013.
8 See Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York:

Zone Books, 1988), 25–28.

9 Brooke Holmes, “Euripides’ Heracles in the Flesh,” Classical Antiquity 28 (2) (2008): 231–281;
and Brooke Holmes, The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 228–274.

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145 (2) Spring 2016Brooke Holmes
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