ABSTRACT
A theory of the tragic may not, for the sake of conceptual 'purity', marginalize what in fact constitutes the tragic for experience by reckoning it simply an indeterminate 'surplus' a mood or feeling and then 'philosophically' abbreviating the tragic into a process of cognition or reflection. Peter Szondi's brilliant interpretation of Oedipus reveals how fixation on dramaturgy fits the tragic to the pattern established by the dramatic-dialectical model of conflict. The essential feature of tragic experience is the violation of norms and laws on the part of a self that ruptures the possibilities/the prison of its own 'cultural intelligibility', even though these very possibilities evidently constitute selfhood itself in the first place. A psychoanalytic approach to the tragic follows from Sigmund Freud's thesis that something in psychic life strives against desire being fully gratified as opposed to only external obstacles existing. According to Szondi's definition, the tragic requires simply the 'menace' of doom; it need not actually occur.
