Archive Feelings

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Do we take pleasure in reading ancient Greek tragedy despite the unsettling content or because of it? Does a safe aesthetic distance protect us from tragic suffering, or does the proximity to death tap into something more primal? Aristotle proposed catharsis, an emotional cleansing-or, in later interpretations, a sense of equilibrium-as tragedy's outcome, and Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, grand theorists of the forces of anti-mastery in human and nonhuman existence, surprisingly agreed. Notwithstanding this deferral to Aristotle, their theorizations of the death drive-together with Jacques Derrida's notion of the archive as a place of conservation that inevitably fails-provide the groundwork for a radically new way of understanding tragic aesthetics. With bold readings of thirteen plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, including the Oedipus cycle, the Oresteia, Medea, and Bacchae, an eclectic synthesis of Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Zizek, Deleuze, and other critical theorists, and an engagement with art, architecture, and film, Mario Telò's Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy locates Greek tragedy's aesthetic allure beyond catharsis in a vertiginous sense of giddy suspension, in a spiral of life and death that resists equilibrium, stabilization, and all forms of normativity. In so doing, Telò forges a new model of tragic aesthetics.