In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

ACTION = IMPOTENCE (TRAGEDY) 355
a cockfight gets under way, it is impossible to stop it before one of the
two animals has died. Thus, cockfights are seen as incarnating a new
experience of war, and it is this new experience of war which shows that
the biological component in the contemporary concept of Tragedy stands
for facticity, and for whatever concrete conditions of Action exceed the
control of the human will. For this reason, the young literary critic Erich
Auerbach accuses Jean Racine's Tragedies of failing to represent the
"sphere of everyday life" as it existed in their historical moment (Auerbach,
386), whereas he praises the relatively obscure French author
Jean-Paul Courier, an eyewitness to the Napoleonic Wars, for the "tragic
meaning" in the historical details and circumstances he so meticulously
evokes (520). In Courier's books, "the world of facts, the overwhelming
accumulation of pragmatic events, strangles all possible theory" (Auerbach,
514; also Gumbrecht, 104ff.).
The concept of Tragedy has become popular enough to revive the old
question of how readers and theatergoers can take pleasure in unpleasant,
"tragic" things. The historically specific answer to this question is
obvious. On the one hand, the concept of "Tragedy" emphasizes those
conditions of human existence which exceed the control of human Actions;
but on the other, Tragedy offers a perspective from which human
Actions can be praised even if they fail to accomplish their explicit goals.
This type of aestheticization, however, which is a depragmatization of
Actions that extends to their everyday contexts, is different from the
traditional association between aestheticization and fictionality, which is
more strictly confined to literature and its reception. Since literary texts
and theatrical representations are expected to be nonreferential, readers
and spectators can set aside any unpleasant aspect of their content. This
is how scholars still analyze the problem: "Where the truly great work
of art begins, one no longer thinks about real-world plots and persons,
and on this absolute level of concentration, where artist and audience
must meet, we quite naturally enjoy the tragic" (Wolff, 397). The new
concept of Tragedy, in contrast, brings Action and its potential ineffectiveness
together, along with a basic ambiguity in the emotional reaction
to the success or failure of Actions: "We are incapable of structuring our
affects in any meaningful way on the basis of simple binarisms such as
'joy/pain'" (Dieck, 148). Thus, the modality of aesthetic experience that
corresponds to the new concept of Tragedy depends on acknowledging
the limitations that facticity and fate impose on the human will. Only by