ABSTRACT
The Platonic-Socratic dialogue is a monological reflection occurring in private space, the dialogical performance of tragedy is public, collective and participatory. Tragedy performance is a technique that aims at interrogating the Polis itself, impelling it to develop a self-reflexive relationship to its own ethics, politics, and history. The Dialogical is often reduced to and conflated with dialogue, as a kind of talk between equals. Antiphonic dialogue was revealed to the author in the field as a social structure for the production of juridical discourse. The concept of ‘juridical truth’, in particular, the identification of the jural functions of the death rituals and lament performances, as components of a tradition of customary law, was a critique of legal realism. The transformation of dialogue into monological spectacle is the antithesis of Greek tragedy, and confirms the extent to which dialogue has been removed from the zoon politikon as the zone of everyday life.
