1.The Christian and Modern Abolition/Suppression of Tragedy

When George Steiner in The Death of Tragedy argues that the age oftragedy lies behind us, he not only means the vanishing of the dramatic art form that found its classical expression in the 5th century BC in the work of such poets as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and which was once again restored to great heights in the 16th and 17th century by Shakespeare and Racine. He also refers to the disappearance of the tragic sense of life expressed in these tragedies.The tragic art form conveys that suffering is indissolubly bound up with human life and so inevitable.“Any realistic notion of tragic must start from the fact of the catastrophe, The tragic personage is broken by forces which can neither be fully understood nor overcome by rational prudence.This again is crucial.Where the causes of disaster are temporal, where the conflict can be resolved through technical or social means, we may have serious drama, but not tragedy”.[111]（Steiner，1961，8）.According to Steiner this tragic world view has in fact been lying in a coma ever since the arrival of Christianity.The Christian tradition is based on the belief that man will in the end be relieved of his suffering.The Bible still has its tragic moments—think of Job, whose faith is severely tested by Satan, or of Jesus on the Cross, who fears his Father has abandoned him—but since compensation and justice are meted out in the end, the tragic is no longer heard.In Steiner's view the tragedy as art form then disappears as well.It briefly awakens from its coma in the early modern period, when Christianity loses its unquestioned authority without a“reasonable alternative”having arrived on the scene.

This crisis turns out to be a fertile breeding ground for a renewed sense of the tragic which compared to the tragic era of the Greeks is more interiorized due to the intervening Christian era. But when the new, modern faith in the scientific explicability and technical manipulability of the world fills the emptiness created by the death of the Christian God, the definitive death of tragedy becomes inevitable.Where modernity's rational optimism continues the Christian“faith in a happy ending”（and in this respect belongs to the genreof comedy rather than tragedy），it is not so much a radical break with Christianity as a continuation of it by other, secular means.In modern culture both the dominant scientific-technological world view（in the diverging forms of positivism and scientism）and the ruling political ideologies（Marxism, fascism, liberalism）promise humanity future happiness.

Steiner's thesis about the end of tragedy has found broad support, but it is contestable for several reasons. Steiner's critics—we find a nice collection of them in the 2004 theme issue of New Literary History on tragedy—accuse him of regarding traditional Greek tragedy as an invariable given.In reality this classical model is merely one of the historical manifestations of a genre that has continually reinvented itself over the course of history.The argument against Steiner is partly politically inspired.He is said to have wrongly identified the tragic, on the basis of an elitist, conservative-liberal world view, with the individual struggle of highly placed white male heroes in a world still inhabited by gods.In his own contribution to the special issue Steiner still likes to point out that tragedy in his view is all about the“aristocracy of suffering”which is locked in a heroic battle with“the supernatural”.[112]Evidently, this is historically incorrect, since in many classical tragedies women, strangers and above all the community play crucial parts.Moreover, in the later stages of Greek tragedy, with Sophocles and certainly Euripides, attention increasingly shifts from divine intervention to the still tragic, but increasingly anthropocentric conflict between people, between mutually exclusive desires within a person, or between a person and his circumstances.[113]Furthermore the modern age has witnessed a fundamental democratization and secularization of the tragic.In a society full of risks the tragic becomes an everyday event.Raymond Williams begins his book Modern Tragedy by pointing out that all people in the course of their lives are inevitably confronted with tragicoccurrences.[114]In Sweet Violence.The Idea of the Tragic Terry Eagleton points to the increased freedom of ever larger groups of people to explain the democratization of the tragic.This growth in freedom does not automatically lead to greater happiness, but it does make tragedies more likely to occur, since they manifest themselves precisely where fate collides head-on, and blends, with human freedom.[115]

As Felski puts it in her introduction to the New Literary History theme issue, what has happened is not at all the death of the tragic, but rather the opposite：a universalization of the tragic.[116]The contributions to the theme issue, many of which deal with the influence of the tragic in popular（youth）culture, emphasize furthermore that tragedy in the course of its effective history has found ever new forms of expression.

Although this thesis of universalization has its merits, it does seem to take too lightly Steiner's argument for why the modern world view has no room for tragedy. Even if Eagleton is right and the breeding ground for the occurrence of tragic events has become wider in modern culture, and if we acknowledge that the likelihood that tragedies will happen has risen explosively in risk society, that still does not mean that these are also experienced as such.The fact that modern culture—like any culture in any age—is witness to tragic events does not necessarily imply that a tragic sense of life is developing, let alone that this is expressed by a priviliged art form.As long as human suffering is viewed from a modern, technical perspective, its tragic character—the confluence of freedom and fate—will not be perceived as it is, but rather give rise to further technological and political action.

The tragedy of modern culture may well be rooted in the fact that it fails to see the tragic nature of its own fantasies of manipulability. Miscalculation, blindness to the tragic reality in which they become entangled, and hubris are characteristic of the protagonists of tragedies.Ages too can be called tragic in this sense：not because the actions that define them are inspired by an understanding or a sense of the tragedy of life, but on the contrary because this understanding is lacking.In that sense the American invasion of Iraq, which was aimed at bringing instant democracy to the country in a huge display of technological superiority, is a typical example of modern tragedy.Although many European observers of this tragedy saw the disaster coming from the very start, the protagonists themselves—as is usual in tragedies—only reached this understanding after the catastrophe had become a fact.In that sense modern, technological culture is tragic, but not characterized by tragic sense.We could define postmodernity as a rebirth of the tragic sense in modern culture.I intentionally use the term rebirth because it calls to mind the view of technology that we find in classical tragedy.