ABSTRACT
The identification of that otherness also offers a possibility for resistance, and allows the possibility of a radical reading of tragic form. It is fitting that deconstruction, the radical questioning of the conditions under which definitions achieve their authority, should come at the end. Throughout this selection it is evident that tragedy is deeply concerned with questions of knowledge, of reality, of the ritual elements in communal life, and of the various ways in which these topics achieve representation. These materialist accounts of tragedy do much to disturb the traditional philosophical foundations upon which the form has been grounded, and the challenges from psychoanalysis and feminism particularly served to problematise this tradition even further. Derrida's reliance upon the structuring mechanism of difference allows him to chart not just the production of order, but also its 'other', which serves as a challenge to its imperatives.
