Tragedy and Law in Castellucci
Tragedy belongs to everybody and it is a contemporary object. It’s even connected to such concepts as community and intimacy. “Intimacy is the keyword that opens the possibility of tragedy for the future.” Tragedy is something that concerns all of us, but sadly enough we cannot understand it very well. That’s the vague side. On the other hand, Castellucci is very precise as to what is the essence of classical tragedy for him. He even defines tragedy: “Tragedy is the exhibition of the hero’s corpse. The hero’s corpse is exhibited to the city and to the citizen. ‘Look, this is the corpse.’ For the city, this moment is critical. The corpse breaks the rules, it breaks the law. However, this does not constitute a transgression from the outside. The transgression rises from the heart of the law. (La transgression sort du milieu de la loi.) It is the law that is breaking the law, by means of the law. And the corpse is the final point of the law.” Now how are we to make sense of this? To clarify this, I will make use of Klaas Tindemans’ reflections on the political nature of Greek tragedy.
In each of these scenes, the stress is not on the person being tortured or the persons executing the action. It is on the ways these acts are being watched. In theatre and film history, there are two methods of representing violence. In most cases, the violent scene is framed by a narrative. This narrative makes it easy for us to digest what we see.
Tragedy belongs to everybody and it is a contemporary object. It’s even connected to such concepts as community and intimacy. “Intimacy is the keyword that opens the possibility of tragedy for the future.” Tragedy is something that concerns all of us, but sadly enough we cannot understand it very well. That’s the vague side. On the other hand, Castellucci is very precise as to what is the essence of classical tragedy for him. He even defines tragedy: “Tragedy is the exhibition of the hero’s corpse. The hero’s corpse is exhibited to the city and to the citizen. ‘Look, this is the corpse.’ For the city, this moment is critical. The corpse breaks the rules, it breaks the law. However, this does not constitute a transgression from the outside. The transgression rises from the heart of the law. (La transgression sort du milieu de la loi.) It is the law that is breaking the law, by means of the law. And the corpse is the final point of the law.” Now how are we to make sense of this? To clarify this, I will make use of Klaas Tindemans’ reflections on the political nature of Greek tragedy.
In each of these scenes, the stress is not on the person being tortured or the persons executing the action. It is on the ways these acts are being watched. In theatre and film history, there are two methods of representing violence. In most cases, the violent scene is framed by a narrative. This narrative makes it easy for us to digest what we see.