ABSTRACT
This chapter situates democratic political tragedy and the character of radical democratic politics that it entails within a Left-Hegelian reading of Hegel’s account of tragedy that is understood as having implications for his reading of the state as an ethical moment. It locates the theory of democratic political tragedy beyond the limiting, deterministic accounts of Hegel’s reading of tragedy that restrict it, and by extension his political philosophy to the theme of resolution. I argue for a more open-ended reading of the dialectical movement that underlines Hegel’s theory of tragedy and his account of the emergence of the nation-state in his political philosophy. The chapter makes the case at the same time for the kind of political experience that concerns us with democratic political tragedy to be seen as tragedy in a real, concrete sense. Drawing upon David Scott’s recent attempts in Conscripts of Modernity and Omens of Adversity to engage with Caribbean revolution as tragedy, I argue in the spirit of Fanon that the radical undertakings, through the democratic process in Jamaica and South Africa, represented similarly disruptive upsurges from the zone of non-being. In their own way they ultimately did violence to the prevailing order of things in contexts marked by oppression and systemic inequality. The political enterprises that provide our case studies are presented in this sense as no less tragic than the instances of revolution that are often theorized as such.
