Squaring the dark-suited, professorial librarian of Paris with the first-person narrator of Story of the Eye or, for that matter, the philosopher of Erotism or The Accursed Share is an instructive affair. The wild imaginings of these writers are hard to find in the demeanor of the interviewee. It points to a paradox of ecstasy and reserve in the most radicalized of writers. If one aspires to explore the farther reaches of imagination, it seems to suggest, one is well-advised to keep one’s nose clean: to avoid offense in appearance or manner, in order to clear the way for the private imaginings conducted behind closed doors. But this is not all, for in the world of the casual week, never mind the casual Friday, this care in appearance and behavior, this leaning towards formality even in friendships, seems almost ostentatious. And so it is. However, there is ostentation too in the self-conscious self-presentation of the apparent democratic populist, the friend of the working man and the oppressed: one sees it in Brecht especially, though Brecht, at least, retained some of that cultural radicalism and ambivalence. The same can’t be said for the blue-jeaned, running-shoed individual of our day, iPod clicking in his ears and tweets running over his iPhone or Blackberry. Inevitably, this behavior and costume betray a philistinism of which its subjects are proud: it is moral and aesthetic authoritarianism clad in a t-shirt, but authoritarianism nonetheless, partaking gladly of the offerings of the Culture Industry (whose products include styles of fashion and demeanor), subsuming a blind self in mad consumption. And thirsting for the power, influence and money to messianically change the world, always in his own image, and kill the autonomous individual human being through ignorance and distance. This is, today, the status quo, especially of theatre.

The pursuit of tragic experience, which takes us to the outer reaches of imagination, paradoxically flourishes in this formal milieu, which in the twenty-first century is subversive all on its own. The ladies and gentlemen of tragedy, then: even as their behavior, manner and mien seem to partake of high-bourgeois culture, it is a high-bourgeois culture of almost a hundred years ago, and so radical in our time. It denies the desire for power and influence, seeing through its transparency and smilingly shrugging at its vanity. (Money it wants too — so do we all — but earned rather than as its due merely for existing.) It partakes of glamour and style, even in behavior: moderation and a good-natured personability, a tendency towards self-control and restraint (an absence from projects which create new forms of individualized white noise, like virtual social networking within arenas owned by corporations; besides, we need the time and silence for the work) rather than an excess of personality; we keep our counsel; an eye towards how we are seen. And not seen — we are gathered at cocktail parties on the side. We are comfortable even in our uncomfortable though carefully chosen clothes, our costumes which hint at the elegant bodies beneath; our recognition of each other makes us community; our imaginations soar in the tragic theatres we make. An elite, if self-elected for all that: but there are enough of us.

Schopenhauer’s radicalism did not lie in the metaphysics laid out in the first book of The World as Will and Representation — it is a distilled and corrected Kantianism that can be found there, and Schopenhauer paid his debt to it. Apart from his personal example as explored by Nietzsche in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” it lay instead in three things: first, his identification of the will as the thing-in-itself (as dark and pessimistic as this was, it is not for that reason invalid or untrue); second, his placing of aesthetic experience above that of science or abstract philosophy as the means to experience of the noumenal; and third, his integration of Eastern philosophies into his own Western tradition. But it is the ironic fate of visionary radicals like Schopenhauer that history has its joke: for it is necessarily incomplete at the time of its writing. Schopenhauer had completed the first volume of his magnum opus in 1818/19, a time during which the bloody recognitions of the French Revolution were fresh in the European mind, and the Industrial Revolution was just beginning. As newly industrialized cities experienced their explosive growth in the following two decades, Modernism itself emerged as a peculiarly democratic and urban response in the work of Baudelaire and Büchner, both of whom were likely directly influenced by Schopenhauer’s philosophy (see, for example, Shehira Doss-Davezac’s essay “Schopenhauer according to the Symbolists: the philosophical roots of late nineteenth-century French aesthetic theory,” in this volume). The poet and the playwright set out to accomplish in art what Schopenhauer had accomplished in philosophy: an event which Schopenhauer, with his favoring of art over science, would certainly have approved.

But this urbanization and industrialization also called for new economics and new psychology which emerged with the formal theory of communism and class struggle of Karl Marx and the exhilarating psychological findings of Sigmund Freud. The years 1818-1914 were a time of relative peace in Europe; Marx’s surplus value (which Bataille would then reconfigure as excess or plethora) was absorbed by the growth of the cities and capital itself. But, as Bataille would suggest, this excess energy created by industrialism and capitalism would burst from their limits: too large for the cities and the banks, it would then emerge as war or in some other manner. Ultimately, in 1945, its energy would literally explode, laying waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Asia; its administrative energy in the system of the concentration and death camps scattered through central Europe.

These were phenomenal manifestations of the Schopenhauerian thing-in-itself as well, and in their wake the place of art and community needed to be wholly reconceived (the sociological, psychological and aesthetic project of the Frankfurt School under Horkheimer and Adorno). But this reconception would take place in a culture in which Schopenhauer’s visions had come to obvious fruition. It was Adorno’s project to suggest how to philosophize and make art in the shadow of these manifestations; Bataille’s to reconceive art and community. In both, Eros, not Thanatos, provides the guiding spirit of any possible redemption, in the dark shadows of the drive to death that Freud described. This is the historical and philosophical situation in which tragedy’s necessity became more and more acute, as both Adorno and Bataille well recognized. It was an urgent call for music and drama, the two greatest art forms, to be reconceived under these new shadows. Married to Schopenhauer’s radical thought, it suggests a new tragedy for the 21st century.

In comedy the anxiety of the self is dissipated in laughter; in melodrama, in tears; in agitprop, in anger. In tragedy it finds a silence in which the self is forced to turn inward, its anxiety pure and complete; it is faced full, without escape.

The earliest we have of the tragedies of Sophocles, Antigone, was written when he was about 55 years old — a play which seems to limn the idealism of youth was the product of a man at least twice the age of his main protagonist. A quality of tragedy is that of a recognition of human time and mortality, and therefore something of age, if not chronological age, then certainly meditative age, an age which can decoct and encompass decades of experience within the 75 minutes of a single play. The Culture Industry’s emphasis on youth and comedy necessarily denies this dimension of tragedy, an emphasis which quickly devolves into a neurotic, narcissistic celebration of the ego and an assumption of innocence, not so much afraid of death as refusing to be troubled by its presence all around us, and especially afraid of being, in that old high-school sense, unpopular (or, in the lovely parlance of Victorian and Edwardian England, unclubbable). It is perhaps likely that those who embrace the products of the Industry are no longer capable of recognizing tragedy, certainly no longer capable of valuing it as more of a necessity than comedy, which it most certainly is. (One need only consider the most common responses to the presentation of contemporary tragedy in New York: a superficial respect [or disrespect] for the ancients and for Shakespeare; silence, dismissal or childish mockery for the rest.) Because of tragedy’s peculiarly elitist dimension, its experience is open even to these. But it must be sought and will not be given freely; there must be that exchange of gifts inherent in theatrical production.

Anyone who has visited a geriatic psychiatry unit will recognize the remnants and rediscovery of childhood in some of its patients. An old man babbles baby babbles; a woman counts “1, 2, 3″ as if to hold on to consciousness in its most abstract form. What is profound about this recidivism of childhood is that it is a childhood without a future: it is a childhood poised on the edge of nothingness, trapped in the decayed body near death. And it gives the lie to the politically and culturally progressive mindset, for the culture’s individual subjects wind up here. As will all of them, eventually: and for those who deny the knowledge provided by tragedy, who avoid it and instead search for it in bastard forms like dark comedy or melodrama, without a recompense for the spirit.

Over the years I watched our children grow
took them to a dusty playground
where they ran and played among
metal and plastic spiders
my legs crossed, one over the other
leather-clad legs brushing
I saw them smile and laugh
stumble and fall
bloody cuts and bruises that I would clean
I licked my thumb and drew my wet spit
over their wounds
HOW QUICKLY SKIN HEALS
SO EARLY IN ITS DYING

What She Knew

The active contemplation for which the art of tragedy aims rehearses a contest between the noumenal and phenomenal. All of theatre’s tools are phenomenal — the body, the word, the scene; time, space and causality — but it is only with these that the noumenal can be suggested, hinted at. The metaphysical union of subject and object in the ecstatic moment of recognition is impossible in the phenomenal world. But this tension presents to the spectator an opportunity for the contemplation of other worldly and phenomenal possibilities. It is a contemplation from within this attempted union, not outside of it, and for all its impossibility it nonetheless limns the thing-in-itself of the body and the word.

All the more reason for the spectator to resist losing herself in the story, a blindness: this is the Culture Industry’s desire. Instead the spectator is engaged in a project to find herself, in an attempt to unite with the performer, in its lyrical duration …