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Transcript of Interview With Simon Critchley _ the Tragic and Its Limits | the White Review
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7/30/2019 Interview With Simon Critchley _ the Tragic and Its Limits | the White Review
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CURRENT ISSUE INTERVIEWS FICTION ART FEATURES POETRY PRIZE
[ONLINE ONLY]
INTERVIEW WITH SIMON CRITCHLEY : THE TRAGIC AND ITS LIMITSJohn Douglas Millar
OVER THE LAST TWENTY YEARS SIMON CRITCHLEY HAS PRODUCED A SERIES OF ELEGANT WORKS OFPOLITICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY. FROM THE ETHICS OF DECONSTRUCTION(1992), WHICH SOUGHT
TO LOCATE AN ETHICAL SOURCE WITHIN DECONSTRUCTION BY READING DERRIDA WITH LEVINAS,
THROUGH TO VERY LITTLE . . . ALMOST NOTHING (1998) AND HIS MORE RECENT STUDY OF POLITICAL
THEOLOGY FAITH OF THE FAITHLESS (2012), CRITCHLEYS WORK HAS HAD A DRAMATIC IMPACT
OUTSIDE THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT. HE HAS BECOME A PROMINENT PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL
WHOSE WORK IS ATTRACTIVE FOR ITS PASSIONATE POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, HUMANITY, BROAD
CULTURAL SCOPE AND GRACE OF STYLE.
Critchley has said in the past that he tends to work obsessively on one topic at a time to the exclusion of all others.
Recently, that topic has been ancient tragedy, which he has been teaching at the New School with Judith Butler in a courseentitled THE TRAGICAND ITS LIMITS. Yet the result of this research has been unexpected, as one obsession has yielded another;
Critchelys new book, co-authored with his wife, the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, is THE HAMLETDOCTRINE(forthcoming
2013), and seems borne of both the possibilities of tragedy and its restrictions.
To Critchley, one attraction of tragedy lies in its savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to
philosophy, and its massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation. Since
the beginning of his career he has been concerned with the antagonism between literature and philosophy, telling me
earlier this year that Literature was always my passion. It was what philosophy was meant to serve in a sense . . .
Literature was served by philosophy rather than the other way around. His work on tragedy may be read in this light, and
can also be seen as a model for reading the present state of permanent war in which we find ourselves. In the followinginterview we discussed the significance of tragedy for him, his use of collaboration as a working method, and how his
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QTHE WHITE REVIEW Going to the theatre was an
important part of public life in classical Athens and Im
interested in what going to the theatre meant for an
Athenian citizen, what the experience of tragedy was
about, what the festival of Dionysus entailed. For someone
like Nietzsche tragedy is born directly out of the cult of
Dionysus and it is a kind of trance experience of
communion with the Dionystic. But for others, like Jean
Pierre Vernant for example, and I think for yourself, it is
perhaps a more complicated phenomenon.
ASIMON CRITCHLEY Bernard Williams begins his
account of Greek tragedy SHAME AND NECESSITY with the
sentence: Were accustomed to thinking of the ancient
Greeks as exotic people. In the work of early Nietzsche
we do find the view that the Greeks were not like us, the
Greeks werent moderns, they werent Christians, and
what they engaged in in going to the theatre had its
origins in a mystery cult surrounding the god Dionysus.
Nietzsches claim is that every tragic hero is a mask for
Dionysus, the god of intoxication, and that in the
experience of tragedy the lines between myself and the
Other disappear and we engage in some kind of
communal fusion. That view is very seductive because it
seems to offer something that is not available in the
individualistic atomised world of modernity, you can see
how it gets a certain traction.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW With Jim Morrison, for
example.
ASIMON CRITCHLEY Yes, its this kind of orgy. Now
it strikes me there are people like Williams and, more
importantly, Vernant who have shown the implausibility
of that view it just doesnt add up. Dionysus appears
only in one tragic drama Euripides BACCHAE, which itself
is problematic as a drama, and it says much more about
the rich fantasy life of northern Europeans than it does
about the ancient Greeks. So what were the Greeks goingto when they went to the theatre? Well here we confront a
really difficult question. We dont know. I spent some time
last year trying to read as much of the classical scholarship
on these questions as I could and the conclusion really is
that we just dont know, we dont even know who was
there. There are estimations that a huge percentage of the
population of Athens went to the theatre, maybe twelve to
fifteen thousand people. We dont know for sure whether
women were allowed to attend. There are views both
ways but no evidence that allows us to clinch it. This is
what I like about dealing with antiquity, we dont know
and so we can breathe our own imaginings into it, which
is what Nietzsche did.
However, I think there is a more plausible view of what
the theatre was. It was a spectacle, its somewhere you
went to look at things that werent real, they were legends
and stories that had some connection to history like the
Trojan war, those spectacles were collective, the writing of
tragedies was a competitive activity and it took placewithin the framework of an annual festival, beyond that
latest obsession has lead to the new book.
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we are into speculation. If theres one thing that I take
from ancient tragedy and this is one way for preparing
for the claim that whats going on in tragedy is more
interesting than what is going on in philosophy its that
tragedy is the staging of a series of ambiguities, a series of
constitutive moral ambiguities that we cannot easily
resolve and we dont know how to judge. What seems to
be going on is a sort of staging of dialectical thinking, a
staging of a complex relationship between positions that
doesnt result in some kind of fusion with primal being as
Nietzsche called it. Its a medium that is able to articulate
the ambiguities that constitute our life in thepolis, our life
in the city.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW And what about the staging of
the female in Attic tragedy?
ASIMON CRITCHLEY Well, thats one of the many
things we do not know. We dont know if women went to
the theatre, its probable that they did. We know that therewere no female actors and that the female parts were
played by men, or maybe young boys, its not clear. It
would have been in full costume, we know that much.
Now, its a really difficult question. The more that I learn
about classical Greek society the more patriarchal it seems.
You can get a certain picture from books but when I spent
time in museums and looking at bits and pieces, for
example the museum of the Agora in Athens, you can find
fragments of friezes with veiled women. Women were
veiled in public. This raises an interesting paradox in sofar as we like to think of Greece as being the birth of
western values. Women were veiled in the public realm.
So it was a patriarchal society with a very clear division
between the sexes and an accompanying hierarchy. The
question then is, if that is the case, whats going on in
theatre where those hierarchies appear to be inverted?
Women are often these unruly, ungovernable characters,
often foreign like Phaedra, or Medea, often exotic, often
savage, who throw into crisis the patriarchal order of thecity. One way of reading that is to say that tragedy should
be read as a kind of symptom of social order. The
repression of women finds its expression and
compensation in these female characters. The other view is
that theres a kind of revolutionary potential in theatre,
theatre is not just the return of the repressed but rather the
glorification of female characters. Another view says that
women are being played by men, men always want to
dress up as women, and it achieves nothing, its just a
kind of spectacle intended to titillate male citizens throughthe depiction of an order that is not their order. We dont
know, we dont know what the spectators saw or were
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meant to see when they saw Antigone or Medea, these
insurrectionary female figures. Was this a kind of
transgressive moment or was it an experience that
confirmed the order through its inversion, a bit like
medieval carnival did according to someone like Bakhtin?
We just dont know. Well then the next move is to say it
doesnt really matter, our relationship to the ancient
Greeks has to be one where they are like vampires, they
need our blood in order to live and when we infuse them
with our blood they become reflections of who we are, or
who we might be. For us at this point in history, or over
the last century, ancient Greek tragedy has presented
characters that have accompanied and deepened womens
emancipation. We make of the ancients what we need in
each new generation and thats the key thing and well
never ultimately know the truth one way or the other,
thank god.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW That idea of ambiguity is really
interesting and it begs the question: what are we left with
at the end of a staged tragedy? Are we left with the
moment of becoming through the violent act whereby a
character brings together their inner divisions by means of
that action? Or are we left with a problem to consider?
ASIMON CRITCHLEY Yes, theres the most famous
view, Aristotles, which is that tragedy is the imitation of
action, mimesis praxeos, which produces extreme emotions
as Socrates said, pity and fear, and has mechanisms of
reversal, reversal of fortunes and the recognition of error
which leads to an experience of catharsis. We dont know
what catharsis means; it only appears twice in Aristotle. It
could have a biological meaning, a kind of relief, or it
could have a more religious function, a kind ofpurification, we dont know. So theres a persuasive view
that we go to the theatre to, in a sense, detox; its like an
aesthetic detox where we are cleansed of our impurities
and ambiguities and we walk away refreshed. Thats not
wrong but theres an awful lot more to say about it. Is
whats going on a detox, or is it perhaps a staging of a
greater complexity, an intractable moral dilemma. We
need to look at the plays. What tends to happen in
discussions of tragedy and again, this goes back to
Aristotle is that we begin with an example, usuallyOedipus Tyrannus, and then people derive all sorts of
conclusions from that, whereas there are thirty one
tragedies, most of them by Euripides, and we should at
least read them and see if we can find patterns in all of
them. Thats where things get more complicated and
interesting.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW Is part of what is going on with
your work on tragedy a defence of sophism?
ASIMON CRITCHLEY Its a literal defence in one
sense. Theres this remark by Gorgias, who is known as asophist, and what is a sophist? Well, its someone that is
called a sophist by a philosopher, whos not a sophist. So,
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a sophist is someone that claims wisdom, a philosopher is
someone who much more humbly is a lover of
wisdom, thats the standard narrative. So philosophy
begins by expelling tragedy but also by expelling
sophistry and we buy that, sophistry is bad, you can see
this repeated in people like Alain Badiou. Now, we know
pretty much nothing about ancient tragedy besides what
we find in Plato and Aristotle, we have Aristophanes play
THE FROGS, which is an interesting dramatisation of how
tragedy was seen, and we have this fragment from
Gorgias, the so called sophist. He says: Tragedy by means
of legends and emotions creates a deception where the
deceived is wiser than the non-deceived. So, tragedy is a
deception that produces greater wisdom. For Plato the
deception of tragedy is a strike against it, for Gorgias that
deception is its virtue, its an enabling fiction if you like.
Then also, if you look at the tragedies themselves
particularly Euripides, but you find this all over there
was a sophistical technique that argues both sides of an
argument, both for and against, being able to make a
strong case for something weak and a weak case for
something strong. This is what philosophers dismiss as
rhetoric.
In Euripides tragedies you find a lot of situations where
two positions seem to be contrasted with each other very
directly and were not told how those positions are
resolved. Look at Aeschylus THE SUPPLIANTMAIDENS, at the
end of that play the chorus is divided and one side of the
chorus says these people are right and the other side says
no, these people are right and its left like that. Or theres
a wonderful play by Euripides, THE TROJAN WOMEN in
which the women are gathered together, the city has been
burned, the men have been put to death and the women
are about to be sold into slavery, its a pretty bad moment.
Cassandra, who can see the future although no one
believes her, engages in this amazing argument where she
says that in our defeat and humiliation is our glory finally
because people will realise what bastards the Greeks are
and that by raping the city and then raping us and
committing violence and murder they will be undone.
Thats a wonderful example of someone finding the
weaker argument a basis for the stronger. The point being
that unlike Nietzsche and a whole series of others for
whom tragedy is a kind of pre-rational fusion with being,
what you actually see in tragedy is rational argumentation
moving between two positions. However, reason is not
triumphant. Cassandra is going to be sold into slavery to
Agamemnon and shes going to die. So we see that reason
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can produce incredibly strong arguments but in the end it
bumps up against the facts of history or the reality of
violence, which it cannot overcome. The founding
delusion of philosophy is that reason can ultimately find
an underlying pattern in reality or history and can,
through the force of the better argument, transform things.
Tragedy does not believe in such a view. Tragedy is more
pessimistic.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW Reading about sophistry and
tragedy in Simon Goldhills bookREADING GREEK TRAGEDY,
there is the idea that sophistry reveals that language itself
is unstable which is a threat to Socrates or Plato. You cant
rely on first principles, which is what philosophy is all
about, if the language you express them in is unstable.
ASIMON CRITCHLEY Yes, you need language to be
able to define stable concepts. Its not that people dont
believe in language in tragedy, people are talking all the
time. Theres both a faith in language and a recognition of
its instability. One thing, one word, can mean exactly the
opposite of what we think it means. This is something that
Goldhill takes from Vernant. Its the idea that tragedies
like the Antigone and the Orestia turn around thesemantic ambiguity of one word, the word nomos in the
Antigone, law or custom, or the word justice in the
Orestia, dike. What tragedy will often explore is that
ambiguity. I also think thats what a good bunch of
Shakespeare is about. Philosophy is, for much of its
history, at war with ambiguity. Ambiguity is a symptom
of a crisis that it has to solve. A great example of that is
Thomas Hobbes. The great horror of the English
Revolution for Hobbes was that it unleashed ambiguity,
and once youve unleashed ambiguity you cant put thegenie back in the bottle other than through authority and
force, which is part of the argument for the Leviathan.
Meaning has to be authorised by the sovereign. Theatre is
an exploration of constitutive linguistic ambiguity.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW You have commented that
philosophy at its moment of crisis returns to tragedy,
could expand on that statement?
ASIMON CRITCHLEY This is a long argument, but to
be brutal about it, there is the recognition after Kant (its
more complex than that but lets just say after Kant) that
the completion of philosophy requires an aesthetic act. So
what Kant left us is what Hegel will call an amphibious
world, we have one foot in the world of nature
determined by science and another in the world of
freedom defined by autonomy and rationality. How can
those two realms be unified? The work of art becomes the
best bet to be a vehicle for unifying those two domains,
and thats what happens in Romanticism, in Schiller and
in the early German idealists and you can trace that on
through Nietzsche, Heidegger and elsewhere. So in a
sense the crisis, the division in modern philosophyrequires some kind of aesthetic moment of healing and the
exemplary experience of the aesthetic is tragedy. Tragedy
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is the highest form of art for all these people. It offers the
possibility of a reconciliation of that which was divided.
Hegel has for me the great distinction of recognising the
force of what tragedy can do in his early work, but also of
not being convinced by the idea of a purely aesthetic
reconciliation. So for Hegel, ultimately, tragedy has to be
overcome in an experience of comedy and thats then
overcome in an experience of philosophy and that is
where the reconciliation might take place.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW So ancient tragedy is, as youve
said elsewhere, defined by the context of war.
ASIMON CRITCHLEY Yes, the frame of war as Judith
Butler would say.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW We are as we speak in what
seems to be a state of permanent war. Can we still access
the tragic? If so, what is it that tragedy gives us that is
useful or can help us to better contemplate the current
order of things?
ASIMON CRITCHLEY Those are very good questions.
The answer to the first, can we access tragedy, is yes. The
answer to the second is that it does illuminate the situation
were in. Those are the short answers. This is where I turn
to and lean on someone like Raymond Williams. Theres a
view we can associate with someone like George Steiner
that tragedy is dead, thats the classical, reactionary,
formalist aesthetic position, the glory that was Greece is
gone and we live in a decaying modernity. The first thing
to say is that makes very little sense of the extraordinary
theatrical creativity of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, from people like Ibsen and Chekov through to
Brecht and Beckett and beyond into people like Sarah
Kane and Heiner Muller. Theatre is still fecund it seems to
me, the theatrical is still fecund. Im not a death of tragedy
person at all and that means looking in different places,
we could look at different media, film, T.V as places to
access tragedy. People have written very well about series
like THE WIREas a modern American tragedy, I wont go
into that now, it can be a bit boyish and obsessional but it
is fascinating. What it can show us, and this is where I
want to bring in Williams, who in his book Modern
Tragedy makes a link between tragedy and revolution and
its a kind of melancholic link. He says, for example,
something like: We need to understand revolution
tragically.
If we see revolution as a throwing off of repression and
the experience of liberation thats all very nice but we see
just half of the picture. Revolution is always a dialectical
process where revolution undergoes inversion in counter-
revolution. So a tragic understanding of revolution would
show the experience of liberation as always risking
flipping over into a new experience of oppression and
terror and the two things are intrinsically linked.
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Liberation and terror are intricated, are dialectically
interdependent and thats what a properly tragic
understanding would lead us to. If we want to maintain
something like revolution or rebellion then we have to see
it tragically in terms of the inversions to which it is subject.
If that sounds a bit abstract then if we think about, say,
Egypt, well we have the experience of Tahrir Square and
thats one side of it but whats happened in Egypt is what
Gramsci would have called a passive revolution, one
where everything seems to have changed but the
institutions of society have remained the same in Egypts
case with the military and the rest and because of that
theres a risk of inversion, a new form of oppression
emerging, maybe not immediately but in perhaps ten,
fifteen years down the road.
We have this progressivist liberal understanding of events
like revolutions as being once and for all events whereoppression is thrown off, whereas a properly tragical,
dialectical understanding would see the situation as a
much more complex question. And also, and this is the
other crucial point about why tragedy is so important
and this goes back to a theme in the FAITHOFTHE FAITHLESS
on violence that violence is a phenomenon with a history
and violence is never one thing. Violence is always a part
of a sequence of violence and counter-violence, each of
which comes with its claim to justification. Williams says,
and its a lovely phrase, to say peace when there is nopeace is to say nothing. So we have to understand the
possibility of peace in relationship to the history of
violence, which is our history wherever we may be. This
violence has a tragic character, its about cycles of violence
and counter-violence that unfold historically, and to
imagine that can just be arrested, that it could be stopped
in an experience of freedom is to risk disavowing that
history and to understand nothing. So for example if we
think about the situation in South Africa post apartheid, or
indeed, whats been happening in Ireland. To understandthe Irish situation we have to grasp the history of violence
that that emerges out of and the pattern of violence and
counter-violence with their accompanying chains of
justification which unfold.
So, yes tragedy is accessible, the world needs to be
understood in tragic terms in the name of realism. Lastly,
once we do that, we throw off a certain nave, optimistic,
progressivist view of history in the name of something
much more bracing and much more pessimistic. Buttheres still a glimmer of hope. For me, the intellectual
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discipline of the left has to be to take the long historical
view and to see events of oppression in the context of
liberation and to see events of liberation in the context of
their reversal and to see the long view and the big picture.
Which means we can still hope but theres no point in
hoping blindly.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW Youve been a vocal admirer of
Anne Carson, who has translated some of Euripides work
and who is a professional classicist as well as a poet.
Youve drawn on her work before the tragedy project also
her book of poems, essays and opera dealing with
Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil,DECREATION,
played a significant role in one section of FAITH OF THE
FAITHLESS.
ASIMON CRITCHLEY There are two reasons I find her
so interesting. Firstly, shes a classicist insider and her
translations are at the antipodes of the kind of Oxonian,
mannered translations of tragedies that I was reading as a
student, my dear chap and all of that. She takes real
liberties with the brutalities of the language, which I find
incredibly powerful, and she can do that because her
Greek is good. Secondly, her central preoccupation is
really the question of love and in particular love as its
experienced in relation to female characters. What I cameaway with from the DECREATION book was her
preoccupation Porete, and Sapho and Simone Weil as
three women who have tried to engage in the act of love
as an act not of satisfaction or happiness but an act of
impoverishment, as Marguerite Porete says to hack and
hew away at oneself to make a space thats large enough
for love to enter in. The idea of love as a kind of pain is
extreme in Carsons work and she brings that to bear on
the female characters in Greek tragedy.
Also, shes a great supporter of Euripides over and against
Sophocles and Aeschylus. The usual philosophical view is
the Aeschylus is beautiful and ritualised and stately,
Euripides is psychological and decedent and Sophocles is
the perfect mien between the two and we should read
him. Thats confounded by the idea that you find in
Nietzsche that Socrates helped Euripides write his plays
which is just rubbish. Euripides is a kind of meta-theatre.
He takes the stories that are put to work in Aeschylus and
Sophocles and then engages in a kind of reflexive critiqueof them, and those characters that looked like sacrificial
victims or noble individuals are shown to be their
opposite. In Orestes we see that, hes shown as a nut job. I
find her concerns incredibly amenable.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW So do you feel ready to dive in
with the classicists yourself?
ASIMON CRITCHLEY I wanted to do a taxonomy of all
of Euripides plays, but its just ludicrous.
Q
THE WHITE REVIEW If not ancient tragedy, thenwhat is the focus of your new book?
A
SIMON CRITCHLEY I was going to write a book onancient tragedy and I had a contract to do that, but then
my wife, Jamieson Webster, whos a psychoanalyst, had a
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different idea. Ive been teaching a course on ancient
tragedy with Judith Butler and Judith wrote this beautiful
little book on Antigone, ANTIGONES CLAIM. Its three
lectures and its very economical. She looks at the play
through a series of interpretations, Hegal, Lacan and
others, and Jamieson thought this would be a neat way of
approaching Hamlet. Wed both been thinking about the
play for much of the previous year through a reading of
Lacans interpretation. So then we were going to do this
little book, it would have been four or five months work,
and then I was going to go on and do the book on ancient
tragedy. Things didnt work out that way and the Hamlet
project sucked us both in.
What I found was that I can talk to you about ancient
tragedy, but Im not sure Im really up to writing about it
in ways Im happy with. Partly because of problems with
ancient Greek, Ive tried to work on it and improve it. Itsso hard. I think I have to leave it to the Simon Goldhills of
this world. Hamlet is written in English and so it became a
vehicle for these larger concerns. So all the stuff I was
talking about, sophistry and philosophy and Plato, that
keeps coming up in the book and its the frame, but at its
heart its an obsessive interpretation and elaboration of the
play. There arent many references to Shakespeare, I mean
we talk about The Merchant of Venice and other bits and
pieces, but really its on Hamlet and we take a series of
outsider interpretations as privileged interlocutors, and
they are in order: Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamins 1928
book on German Tragic Drama, Freud and Lacan and
Nietzsche. We tracked the place of Shakespeare in
Nietzsche, which is really quite interesting. Then we
ended up looking at Joyce and Melville and Heiner Muller
and people like that. Its a kind of assault on the
Shakespeare industry; you know that view that
Shakespeare, like Guinness, is good for you. Its an attack
on the view that Hamlet might be a confused indecisive
wretch but ultimately ends up as a redeemed individual
who might be a model for what it means to be human or
perhaps even invents the human condition. We take some
swipes at that.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW The Harold Blooms of this
world take a kicking?
ASIMON CRITCHLEY Yes. We give a nihilistic reading
of it. Hamlet is the consummate nihilist. Theres a long
discussion of the word nothing in Hamlet. Its pretty
weird. To my amazement we showed it to my editor, who
was going to do the ancient tragedy book, he made abrilliant series of suggestions for restructuring it and said
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well do it, well put it out. So I dropped the ancient
tragedy book, I might pick it up again in a few years. Its
more fun to teach and think about, theres too much
material.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW With the new book, Im
interested in how the collaboration with your wifeworked?
ASIMON CRITCHLEY Well, she came up with the idea
and the structure and then when I had some time off lastyear I began to write it and wrote the parts on Schmitt and
Benjamin and she had written parts on Lacan and Freud.
Then there was a psychotic period of several weeks over
Christmas last year where we were sitting in the same
room banging sentences back and forth and writing
separately but having a very clear idea of what the other
was doing. At the end of that process it was clear that
something had taken shape which then needed to be
tidied up and really thought through. Its a real
collaboration. Its the most intense Ive worked on. Ivedone collaborations before with Tom McCarthy which
have been terrific fun but, you know, we werent living
together. There are similarities though; Tom thinks in
terms of lateral associations while I tend to think in terms
of argument structures so theres a kind of mismatch in
the way we think. Jamieson thinks more laterally and
associatively than I tend to do. Then youve got the fact
that the drama of Hamlet is, for us, the drama of sexual
difference, the drama of the relationships between male
and female characters, so thats being played out in thewriting as well.
It goes back to another side of the interest in tragedy that I
have, and that is that if you think about philosophy from a
psychoanalytic point of view, particularly from a Lacanian
point of view, you can see philosophy as an obsessional
activity. Its a subsuming of data under concepts, which is
what obsessionals do when theyre organising their desks
or whatever it might be, and as an obsessional Im eager
not to be one. What tragedy offers in someone like AnneCarsons translations is a kind of hystericisation of
philosophical discourse. Which also means trying to take
philosophical discourse to a point of vulnerability and
weakness and openness, which sounds noble but its
really not. Where we are with philosophy right now
theres a neoplatonism out there in people like Badiou and
theres that boyish, obsessional Marxism which is trying to
order things under neat concepts, youve also got a sort of
pop-philosophy about how philosophy can help you lead
a better life and I just hate all that shit. What I find intragedy, or theatre more generally is something much
more philosophically interesting and challenging, that
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experience of ambiguity, and rending and openness. It can
allow someone like me to imagine a different way of
writing. Writing with someone else is to imagine another
way of being your self. So for me the collaboration is
about writing a different way and Ive been pushing at
that for a number of years with mixed success.
[ONLINE ONLY]
INTERVIEW WITH DAVID GRAE...Ellen Evans and Jon Moses
[EXTRACT]
INTERVIEW WITH TOM MCCART...Fred Fernandez Armesto
[EXTRACT]
INTERVIEW WITH HANS ULRIC...Benjamin Eastham
[ONLINE ONLY]
INTERVIEW WITH DAVID HARV...Matt Mahon
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