Tragedy and the arts
30
Jan
I am not speaking here of tragedy in the ordinary
sense, but as an artistic category that is not only important for understanding the arts and beautiful Greek, but is claimed as a new idea of tragedy “as proposed by Hölderlin, Hegel or Nietzsche.” (Ranciére, 2009, p. 25).
Just as Byung Chul Han in “The Salvation of the Beautiful” will problematize the dualism between contemplation and action, typical of modern philosophy that separates subject from object, Rancière penetrates further by proposing his “aesthetic revolution”, stating that what is there is “The abolition of an ordered set of relations between the visible and the sayable, knowledge and action, activity and passivity” (Ranciére, 2009, p. 25).
I said this when analyzing the Oedipus of the “psychoanalytic revolution” that invalidates “those of Corneille and Voltaire and who intends to resume – beyond the French tragedy, as well as the Aristotelian rationalization of tragic action – as the tragic thought of Sophocles” (idem , p. 25).
Ranciére will discuss in the following pages of his chapter on the “aesthetic revolution” on psychoanalysis saying that it is “invented at that point in which philosophy and medicine are mutually questioned to make thinking a question of disease and disease a question of thinking ” (Ranciére, 2009, p. 25), in paint above Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927),.
A large part of modern neo-therapies (I call exoteric psychoanalysis) go around, as if the problem of idealistic thinking was “disease” and a large part of human suffering could be solved as “thought” transforming it into disease.
This happens due to a bad relation with the thinking of tradition, late modernity is nothing but the bad reading of rationalism and idealism, or the delayed reading of empiricism, the thinking of Hanna Arendt’s “active” action, expressed in Byung Chul Han , is also part of the thinking of tradition that Ranciére will identify in the “representative regime as an absolute power of making” (Ranciére, 2009, p. 27).
It clearly identifies this regime in Baumgarten’s discourse on “confused clarity”: “in the aesthetic regime, this identity of knowledge and non-knowledge, of acting and suffering, which… constitutes the very way of being of art ”(Idem, p. 27), of course this is the art of tradition. And so it says, that the aesthetic revolution had already started with Vico, in his New Science, who against Aristotle and the representative tradition, although Rancière knows that his problem was not the theory of art, but the theological-poetic problem of “ wisdom of the Egyptians ” about hieroglyphs.
