ABSTRACT
Terry Eagleton has observed that tragedy “deals in blasted hopes and broken lives” (Eagleton (2003), p. 25) and that “it needs meaning and value if only to violate them. Tragedy is heavily implicated in the processes of ‘law’ and ‘justice;’ it violently violates some aspect of law, or pits one aspect against another, and to the extent that it does so, it is also involved in the process of what Walter Benjamin called “power making,” and “justice.” Tragedy offers the possibility of limited emancipation by advancing through what Theodor Adorno, in a much larger context, calls “a determinate negation”, new possibilities that force a reassessment of human purpose, and establish rules that point towards an escape from impasse. Girard’s complicated reading of ancient Greek tragedy identifies a structure some of the elements of which are clearly trans-historical, and his ethnographical explanation of the role of violence contains an element of flexibility that permits different applications.
