Early Twentieth-Century: what is the attack against the tragic, what its defense

Abstract

Between the last few years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century the tragic discourse went through a significant revaluation. This, practically embodied in Henrik Ibsen, found expression both in the theoretical work of authors such as György Lukács and Otto Weininger, and in the artistic production of figures such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal or – in Italy – Scipio Slataper and Giovanni Boine. Early twentieth century tragic discourse represents an attempt to react to the epistemological crisis that – differently interpreted by authors such as Henri Bergson, Ernst Mach and clearly Friedrich Nietzsche – is imposing as the hegemonic thought of the first part of the century. Early twentieth century tragic discourse was therefore one of the main actors in the philosophical and artistic confrontation the followed the announcement of the “death of God”. It is actually possible to say that Modernist tragic represented one of the most effective weapons for those intellectuals that did not consider positively the cultural horizons embodied by nihilism and relativism. My article, on the one hand, briefly delineates the clash between tragic and anti-tragic conceptions in early twentieth century, clarifying the theoretical genealogies that underlined the two positions. On the other the article points out the connections between the two positions and structural developments of the time (Taylorism, specialization, atomization, etc.)