Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

The Demonic in the Self 73Particular theories incorporate readings of particular tragedies, dependingon the manner of their relation to questions of (tragic) conflict andidentification. Stephen Diamond, a psychotherapist, and Jean-Pierre Vernant,a scholar of literature and history, prefer different tragedies (theOresteia and Seven Against Thebes, respectively) because they have differenttheoretical and practical interests invested in tragedy, and these plays sustainthese differing interpretations. As Gearhart argues, tragedy and its interpretationsare ambiguous in nature; living at the borderlines of identificationand conflict, they do not properly fit inside any single identity or discipline.82 According to her, tragedy is “less an entity that can be studied fromdiffering theoretical perspectives – be they psychoanalytical, literary-critical,philosophical, or social – than a space in which these different perspectivesmeet and clash.” 83The interpretation of the daimonic as an element of the self, that canand should be integrated into a larger conception of the human subjectivity,is at odds with the view that holds conflicting elements as fundamentally irresolvable.Following Gearhart’s analysis, the basic attitudes behind theseconflicting readings can be seen operating already in the discord apparent inHegel’s reaction to Kant. The status of subjectivity as a representation basedon the categories of the mind is the problematical question this discussionaddresses; in the chapter titled “On Applying the Categories to Objects ofthe Senses As Such” in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant speaks aboutthe “paradoxical” quality of the subject as an observer of itself – “how [theinner] sense exhibits to consciousness even ourselves only as we appear toourselves, not as we are in ourselves.” 84 Gearhart follows Gilles Deleuze ininterpreting this as a “split within the Kantian subject,” an alienation of theacting self from the “I” that is an object of representation for the consciousness.85Hegel’s readings of tragedy privilege Sophocles’ Antigone; he thoughtthat art in general effects reconciliation of the various oppositions of Kant’sthought – “between subjective thinking and objective things, between theabstract universality and the sensuous individuality of the will,” and between“the practical side of the spirit” as contrasted with “the theoretical” 86 – andAntigone was for Hegel the most successful work of art in this. The conflictbetween Creon and Antigone embodies for Hegel the conflict between thefamily and the state, woman and man, and, finally, between nature and reason.The third party in the conflict is represented by the chorus, which is theembodiment of the “ethical community” in the play. Hegel conceives thechorus as “the scene of the spirit”; it makes acceptable the tragic conflictsand even the destruction of individuals, because the chorus illustrates the82 Gearhart 1992, 16.83 Ibid., 37.84Kant 1781/1996, 192 [B 152-153].85 Gearhart 1992, 49.86Hegel 1835/1988, 56.