Theory & Event

Faced with the ever-enlarging incoherence of the present, characterised by war without end, the increasingly frantic shoring up of the imperium the deepening contagion of ethnic, religious and civil conflict, and the fatuous theologization of political life with the categories of good and evil, I would like to turn to 17^th Century neo-classical French drama, in particular the case of Jean Racine’s 1677 tragedy, Phèdre the masterpiece of the human mind’, as Voltaire declared. I must confess at the outset that the reasons for this choice are not entirely clear to me and this essay is not intended as allegory. But I cannot deny that it was written with an eye to the present. I will let the reader make of this what they will and turn in detail to the play and its fascinating philosophical implications.

My focus is on the character of Phaedra and the nature of her malaise. I begin by trying to elicit the dramatic pattern of Phaedra’s confessions of her desire, a desire that produces a guilty subjectivity which I illustrate with reference to Augustine’s Confessions. I go on to describe Phaedra’s existence as defined by the fact that, unlike the conventional tragic hero, she is unable to die, that existence is, for her, without exit. I pursue this thought by turning to Levinas’s brief reading of Phèdre it to what is arguably the enabling motif of his work, namely that existence is not the experience of freedom profiled in rapture, ecstasy or affirmation, but rather it is that which we seek to evade in a movement of flight that simply reveals — paradoxically — how deeply riveted we are to the fact of existence. Counter-intuitively perhaps, I try and show how this Levinasian thought has its home in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, in particular in his treatment of the concept of Befindlichkeit (state-of-mind or attunement) and its relation to thrownness and facticity. This is the ontological meaning of Phaedra’s guilt: one’s fundamental self-relation is to an unmasterable thrownness, the burden of a facticity that weighs me down without my ever being able to pick it up. I try and show how this experience of guilt injects a fearful languor into Phaedra’s limbs, a languor that I trace to the experience of erotic stupefaction: Phaedra is hypnotized by the desire that she loathes and it is here that she languishes. After linking languor to the concept of original sin, I seek to take seriously the possibility of Christian tragedy, that is, an essentially anti-political tragedy that would consist in the rejection of the worldly order and the radical separation of subjectivity and the world. I conclude with a remark as to how Racine’s Phèdre lead us to question some of our critical and theoretical doxai about the nature of tragedy.

I want to die, I hate my life. Such is the malaise of Phaedra. Yet why does Phaedra feel this malaise? Well, adultery, incest and murder of an innocent are not mere moral baubles, even for one descended from the line of the gods. Phaedra was the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë father, the Sungod or Helios, whose light burns Phaedra’s eyes and whose scorching gaze she cannot bear, but from whom she cannot hide. The Sun watches her throughout the play: silent, remote to the point of absence, but of piercing intensity, like the Deus absconditus of Jansenism. Her father was King of Crete and later judge in Hades. She married Theseus, King of Athens, who brought her back to Greece after slaying the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth. Aphrodite, as she is wont, inflamed Pasiphaë with a monstrous passion for a bull. Daedalus, the artificer, made a hollow wooden cow where Pasiphaë could crouch to be fucked by the bull. From this union was born the Minotaur. It is the overwhelming power of her mother’s predestined passion that now flows through Phaedra’s veins.

Venus is in Phaedra’s blood: it flows through her like a virus, the...