„Das Zeitalter des Aischylos ist angebrochen, mein Lieber“. Wagner, Bakunin, Słowacki über die griechische Tragödie und die schöpferische Zerstörung

Abstract

The present paper is an endeavor to formulate the tertium comparationis between the “time of Aeschylus”, when the Greek tragedy came into being, and the time of Juliusz Słowacki, in whose poem we find the title comparison, or the identification of the two epochs. The tragic potential lies in the habitus where Słowacki and his contemporaries wrote and acted, i.e. in the way the people interacted in order to negotiate the answers to the events that had happened to them or that they had provoked. The best way to hem the inherent tragic of Słowacki’s habitus in is to recall the epoch’s pre-scenes (Urszenen) and to extract their intrinsic theory, i.e. the logics of praxis that defines the acts of the actors. The most promising seems to be the theory of tragedy: both the one explicitly expressed by the mentioned authors, heroes of the pre-scenes, and the implicit one. The Greek tragedy served our actors as an ideal fulfillment of the then theory’s assumptions: it spanned a realm in which a word actually was an action.

The three heroes of our pre-scenes – their relations intertwine until they create a web with which to catch the tertium comparationis – also emphasized the destructive, rebellious nature of Greek tragedy and its theory. In it, a destructive potential of art is supposed to appear for the first time in history; the very potential will become later a vital part of modern art’s organon and will eventually influence the aesthetics of the new total politics in the 20th Century.

The present paper comprises four major sections: in the first one, the author contemplates the concurrence of the theory and the praxis in the pre-scenes and eventually extracts the most characteristic elements of the scenes, so that he may articulate these extracted terms’ oppositions and identifications that shaped the late romantic theory of tragedy, and of action. In the second part, the author concentrates on a particular identification: that of creation with destruction. In the third part, the author turns to the privileged object of these destructive-creative actions of ancient and future tragedy – the law. In the last part, the planned totality of the new tragedy is demonstrated, as the new tragedy is supposed to create a new form of sociality, a new organic social system.