a tragic worldview has to be the starting point

 

“Why does tragedy exist?,” writes Anne Carson. “Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” 

Tragedy might be defined as a grief-stricken rage that flows from war. We live in a world whose frame is war.

 

Often, we simply want violence and war to go away because it is an inconvenience to our lovely lives. As such we do not only fail to see own own implication in such violence and war, we completely disavow it.

The virtue of Greek tragedy is that it makes such disavowal more difficult by confronting us with a situation of grief-stricken rage and disorder. The virtue of seeing the bloody events of the contemporary world in tragic light is that it exposes us to a disorder that is not just their disorder. To see political events tragically is always to accept our complicity in the disaster that is unfolding. We are the audience in the theater of war, and we too are responsible. As such, tragedy can enable us to comprehend a situation of war, violence, and grief, without simply condemning it or mouthing empty words of peace. More difficult still is imaging the resolution of such a situation, but a tragic worldview has to be the starting point for any such aspiration. 

 

Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us,  p. 19-20. 

image -BBC: - Oresteia