(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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DOMINIK FINKELDE
order still lives on. In tragedy the human being becomes conscious that
he is morally superior to his gods, but this knowledge cuts his voice. In
combination with this thought the death of the hero is interpreted as a
“sacrifice” that is given in favor of a coming community. While the tragic
hero is still obliged to live under the demonic ambiguity of the myth, a
new promise reverberates in his perdition, a promise to a coming community
that might, one day, be freed from living exposed to mythic violence.
What the tragic hero at the same time asserts against the mythical world
is therefore the principle of individuation that he embodies, “a principle
that challenges the multiplicity and ambiguity of the existing, mythical
order.” 21 Benjamin writes that “das alte Recht der Olympischen” (GS
I.1:285; “the ancient rights of the Olympians,” Origin, 107) is shattered
through this half-sacrificial, half-tragic death, and that the coming of the
“unbekannten Gott” (GS I.1:286; “the unknown god,” Origin, 107) as
the first fruit of a still-unborn harvest of humanity is proclaimed.
Benjamin puts tragedy and mourning play in relation before the background
of his conceptualization of messianic time. “Tragedy has something
to do with messianic time, not so the Trauerspiel.” 22 He first offers
this distinction in “Trauerspiel und Tragödie,” which he had written in
1916. The structure of time in tragedy is “messianic,” not in a religious
or biblical sense but in the sense of a kind of “fulfillment” that lies bare
in the “speechlessness” and the failing of the tragic hero. The mourning
play, by contrast, cannot commit itself to the belief in a fulfillmentthrough-perdition.
23 When the silent hero in Greek tragedy does not
find words to articulate, his muteness “speaks” a fatal judgment over the
“old order” of the mythical world: he does not understand it any more.
“Die Schroffheit des heroischen Selbst” (GS I.1:289, “The forthrightness
of the heroic self,” Origin, 110) that shines through the silence is not a
character trait “sondern geschichtsphilosophische Signatur des Helden”
(GS I.1:289; “but the historical-philosophical signature of the hero,” Origin,
110). The muteness becomes a speaking dismissal of the old order
and a triumph of the self: the hero who dares to dare stands first of all as
individual and as a principle of individuation in opposition to a polymorphous
cosmos of gods. At the same time he stands also for the multiplicity
of individuals in a future community that will be free from myth one day.
That he is an almost modern individual, a forerunner of this community,
can be seen from the fact that his fight for the community takes place in
the arena of the theatre. When Benjamin compares the performance of
the tragedy with a court procedure and a lawsuit, it is for him no longer
the tragic hero who stands at the bar; now it is the Olympians themselves
who are confronted with a judging audience that fills the rows of the
amphitheatre. The silence of the hero reflects like a speaking force the
judgment that the community enunciates over the myth. 24 In this sense
the “speechlessness” is performative, “an act of defiance, even if it is not