Being Undone, Becoming Responsible: Judith Butler, Paul Ricœur, and the Necessity of Tragic Theory for Ethics

This paper comparatively considers Judith Butler’s and Paul Ricœur’s respective engagements with Greek tragedy to argue that conversion by tragedy is vital for ethics. Paying particular attention to structural evil, I ask what tragedy teaches about ethical living amid the ruins of racism, sexism, classism, militarism, and speciesism. Reading Sophocles and Aeschylus with Butler and Ricœur, I argue that by bringing attention to the overlooked contradictions that characterize human identity and which inevitably complicate action, and by inviting witness to unbearable suffering wrought by superindividual forces, tragedy engenders a re-theorizing of oneself and one’s world that is necessary to nourish ethical responsibility. It does so by fostering sensitivity to vulnerability – one’s own and others’ – through a narrative-performative mode, which refuses premature resolutions, and instead “undoes” witnesses into wider perspective. I conclude by pointing to tragic theorizing’s potential to productively approach structural evil without proliferating shame, nihilism, or moral absolutism.