Ari Hirvonen belongs to what I call for myself ‘my archipelago of support’ in my life of Nordic exile. Thus, it is not easy to live with and from the cut of interruption that exile necessary implies. Exile – either voluntary or involuntary exile, either chosen or compulsory – is an experience of suffering, even when it might be the only possible ‘salvation’.

‘My archipelago of support’- is an attempt to say in another language what in my Portuguese Brazilian mother tongue I would say with ‘meu arquipélago de amparo’ – amparo, a much better word than support. This archipelago is indeed friendship – maybe friendship is in human shape what an archipelago is in the element of seawater – a being together crossed by streams of coming and going, a crossed togetherness. This image points toward the secret of friendship which is the secrecy of having no opportunistic grounds for becoming a friend, for receiving someone as friend when each one exists archipelargically, we could say, that is, sharing a certain sensibility for the world and its multifaceted lives. To find such an archipelago of support when one lives in exile is more than a gift: it is a grace. And strangely, at least for me as Brazilian, I discovered such an archipelago in Finland. Indeed, I have never been in the Finnish archipelago; but since I found an archipelago of Finnish friends, I do not even miss this never happened visit. Among these rare islands of friendship, I met Ari Hirvonen, and became a friend since a common stream of sensibility brought us together. I keep his smiling eyes in glasses in front of me, discussing football: the Brazilian he disliked, and the English he admired - and despite this, we got along so well, I that really dislike the English football and have Garrincha with his Elza as house-gods? To have this difference between us and become nonetheless friends, this is only possible in archipelargic reciprocity!

But all this is about a shared sensibility towards life. In fact, it would be more precise to speak about a shared sensibility from and towards being alive, and the experience - which is a hard knowledge – of being alive. It is not a mere coincidence, I would say, that ‘live’ and ‘evil’ are anagrams. Evil was the topic that Ari and I most discussed together. Thus, this rigorous anagrammatic relation of evil and live – is - whatever sense the ‘is’ may have – freedom. Evil – live – freedom: what an ana-grammar shapes human existence! I heard and learned a lot with Ari about this ana-grammar, an ana-grammar that shapes the tragic condition of existence.

From Law and Evil, the anthology edited by Ari Hirvonen and Janne Porttikivi in 2010 to his book Ethics of Tragedy from 2020, we can follow an extraordinary thinking trajectory; we can follow the trajectory of thinking this ana-grammar of freedom.

There are many important things to discuss from a reading of the Ethics of Tragedy, which is a book to be read and reread, again and again. But I would like to focus on what for me seems to be the central question: the question of measure as the heart of the ethics of tragedy. Ari’s book is not a book about tragedy, nor a book about his own reading of Antigone, the most philosophically discussed among the Greek tragedies, but rather a book that responds, a ‘response-able’ book, to use his own accented term, to our times, the times of ‘capitalist immanency of dwelling’ (Hirvonen 2020, p.12), a time which barely has time to set limits, to face the tragedy of measure. Thus, the central question that the times ask us, and to which Ari’s book listens and responds is the one about the urgency, I quote him, to ‘rethink the limits which seem to have disappeared, without returning to divine beings or fixed moral norms’ (Ibid., p.14). It is about a thought of ‘ethos as forms of a measure that exists on earth’ (Ibid., p.15). The question Ari urges us to ask is about how to find a measure today, the measure of finitude in our world, a world in which the words ‘hubris’ and ‘tragedy’ sound rather like innocent games. His own task, as he himself phrases it, is to ‘think the present’ (Ibid., p.31) ; to think the present, there is a need – ‘il faut’ – ‘think tragedy in the present’; not to reiterate the past, the Greek past, the Western past, but to discover, in the impossibility of tragedy in the present, the tragedy of the present. ‘There is no sense in attempting to restore the language of ancient tragedy. Instead, we have to listen to tragedy…’ (Ibid., p.31). The whole book is about how to listen to abandonments, to the leaving behind, indeed to the exilic structure of tragedy, to how tragedy is the language of exile: the language of no longer having the language, the language of having the no longer having, the language of being the no longer being. Tragedy is not only a language of refugees, but it is about the fact, that ‘we are all refugees in language, but language is our home here and now and the only possibility to be in touch with the unhomely past/present/future’ (Ibid., p.30). Ari presents an imposing reading of ancient tragedies, in which he listens to the various listenings, echoings, vibrations, resoundings, taking place in them. He performs an ‘inframince’-reading, to use a term by Marcel Duchamp he himself proposes (Ibid., p.40), which is a reading of the almost imperceptible murmurs of language in language and through which tragedy emerges as the language of the experience of exile. When I read his book now I get sad for many reasons but also because, due to the pandemic, he did not get the opportunity to know of my own book, Time in exile: in conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot and Clarice Lispector (Cavalcante Schuback 2020), that also came out 2020, as much as I did not know of his, missing the unique opportunity to discuss the exilic nature of tragedy. Ari’s readings of what he calls the Refugee Tragedies, the tragedy of being in exile, his readings of the refugee as suppliant are highly illuminating and they themselves deserve a reading. But what shall be kept in mind in this brief account is how his readings listen to listening and turn our attention to how tragedy, which is always the performative utterance of radical loss and wound, is about the loss of sense and language, hence about the loss of belonging, of being-with, which is the core of exilic experience.

The question about the loss of measure, the question of tragedy and its ethics – is about the loss of the measure of being-with, about the loss of the measure of the with. Showing how old tragedy is indeed the tragedy of exile and how this is discovered through listening to the listenings to the voicings of the world ‘without melody or note’ (59), to murmuring, almost noiseless voices in tragedy, Ari’s book renders it necessary to ask the question about the measure of being rather without, the measure of the being-without. Calling attention with outstanding sensibility to how listening and seeing the inframince, the almost imperceptible movements of abandonment performed in the old tragedies - thus a sounding sound is nothing but abandonment –, Ari connects the ethical urgency of measure to exilic measure of being-without a with and with a without and this through a listening to tragical listening. Here, the voiceless existence of refugees discovers a voice, far distant from any reduction to humanist and humanitarian ethics of lamentation (Hirvonen 2020, p.72).

Another central aspect of Ari’s impressive book has to do with his whole life’s readings of Antigone, of course: he rereads canonic readings of this tragedy, which became in tradition the most philosophical among Greek tragedies. But he does not only reread these canonic readings: he proposes new paths to understand the sense of Antigone’s listening to the unwritten laws of nature. Ari listens to the language of nature in Antigone: indeed, to how dust, storm, and bird ‘are the essences of Antigone’s ethical way of being in the polis as an illegal defender of the law that cannot be laid down. What we have here is not merely voiceless and unuttered suffering but a materiality of unheard, unnoticed, and unrecorded law’ (Ibid., p.136). Ari turns our attention to the cosmological dimension of Antigone, of the tragedy of human existence, opening a path to leaving behind the issueless dialectic of universality and individuality, of written laws of the state and unwritten laws of kinship, thus the non-human dimension of humanity is heard. As Ari writes so insightfully, ‘Perhaps we can understand the unwritten law as a gesture of wind and as the trajectory of the bird that gestures, shows, and points’ (Ibid., p.201). Antigone’s tragedy is not only about the tragedy of being-in-the-world, but also of being-in-the earth.

Ari’s book is about the ‘Ethics of Tragedy’. It departs from the tragedy of ethics, from the urgency to respond to our world and not merely to account for a tradition and for the already spoken of ‘tragedy’. It aims to respond to the urgency of a measure, a measure that within the book is discussed in terms of perhaps and their rhythms, a measure that emerges as nothing but measuring itself (Ibid., p.203). The ethics of tragedy shows how measuring, and not a system or set of measures, is the only human condition. But why go back to ancient Greek tragedies today? Ari’s answer is because ‘Tragedy measures without defining the measure, through mimesis, catharsis, and caesura immanent to the tragic transport’ (Ibid., 207); because it is performed before our eyes, in a scene, tragedy stages, performs in a scene, before the eyes, not established measures but the act of measuring, ‘Perhaps, there is one measure that tragedy presents, ‘the measure of that which humanity is capable of’ (Ibid., p.256). Ari brings the question of tragedy back to the theatre, back to the scene, back to the before the eyes because theatre operates in the realm of truth (Ibid., p.229), if truth is understood as the bringing back of things to their world, to a vulnerable sphere of intertwinings, where their radical precariousness and contingency can be restored. Back to the scene, tragedy brings truth back to the realm of showing, courage back to action, indeed the action of refusal and interruption, an act of infidelity to the dominating law, and thereby to an act of justice (Ibid., p.244). This theatricality of tragedy exposes a home, far beyond the dialectics of private and public, a hestia, which is rather a ‘shared heart’ (Ibid., p.247) of the political community, which enables the transformation of the materiality of bodies into responsibility, refugees into visible signs of voices, suppliants into ethical acts affirming the being-with of existence. (Ibid.)

David Kapenawa, the leader of the Yanomami people in Brazil, said once that language is an arrow. Ari Hirvonen’s book is an arrow of thinking, a gesture, a bird, in times of disastrous dust and storm.