ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the limits of dialogue and the challenge posed by tragedy, in which the depiction of disproportionate suffering beggars language. As Lacan says, the always further-reaching of desire is quenched only when the body dies, but our knowledge of this fact does not in itself quench desire. This contest between desire and reason is central also to Unamuno’s “tragic sense of life”. Nietzsche likewise explores the boundaries between reason and desire in his theory of tragedy, in which he concludes that neither the purely Apollonian nor the purely Dionysiac is endurable alone. These points lead to a discussion of two kinds of silence at the limits of language – the silence of transcendence and the silence of abjection. Examples from the Northern Ireland Troubles represent the silence of abjection and from the Perennial Philosophy the silence of transcendence. Each in isolation pre-empts dialogue, and in this context Aristotle, Dr. Johnson, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Jaspers confirm how, as a genre, tragedy protests against the abject silence it depicts. In doing so, it does not foreclose dialogue but neither does it offer the solace of transcendence. An analysis of King Lear shows how this is the case. The chapter concludes by suggesting that van Gogh’s letters tell a tragic story to which the paintings respond dialogically, as the written narrative encounters the vision of the sunflowers.
