4 - The Politics of Tragedy, Recognition, and Acknowledgment

Summary

This chaper takes the account of democracy developed in chapter three and considers it in the context of his critique of American democracy in the 1960s through a reading of King Lear. Cavell’s distinctive contribution to aesthetics is his claim that tragedy is a site that works through the implications of skepticism as it relates to the other. Cavell’s interpretation of tragedy contributes to three important debates in contemporary political theory. First, King Lear’s tragic abdication exposes the crisis in authority that results from post-sovereign politics. Second, Cavell’s claim that acknowledgement rather than knowledge is the appropriate response to tragedy makes an important intervention into recent debates in political theory over the politics of recognition. Third Cavell’s analysis of tragic downfall underscores important shifts in consciousness that a society must undergo in order to realize justice. Under this reading, the political import of tragedy is as a pedagogy for a politically repressed culture that spurns necessary changes in cultural self-understanding.