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Drama
Hegel 1: the exclusion of the real Drama as an essentially dialectical genre is at the same time the exquisite place of the tragic. Theatre after drama, we might thus suspect, would be a theatre without the tragic. This conjecture is fed by Hegel’s placing of tragedy in premodernity. Just as art, according to Hegel, comes to an end when the Spirit is at home with itself in the realm of complete conceptual abstraction and no longer in need of sensuous materialization, there is also a ‘past of the tragic’,24 which Hegel in turn ties to ‘dramatic poetry’. In art, the highest form and the most beautiful form are not the same. The ideal joining of the sensuous and the spiritual reached its height in classical sculpture of the gods, of which Hegel can say (not without pathos but with strict dialectical logic): ‘Nothing can be or become more beautiful.’25 The reason given by Hegel as to why Greek classical sculpture nevertheless remains inadequate and forces a further progress of art and Spirit is its lack of subjective internalization and animation (which can then be found in the ‘Romantic art form’, exemplarily in the image of the Virgin Mary). Hence the well-known remark about ancient sculptures that they were tinged with an air of mourning. For in post-antiquity, the height of beauty, the perfect merger of the sensuous and the spiritual, has to be overcome through the progress of Spirit in favour of a progressive intellectual abstraction. This leads to ever higher but no longer more beautiful creations, until in the ‘absolute Spirit’ a state of being is reached that has, in the last instance, to be thought of as beyond any shape or form. While in classical sculpture, i.e. in visual art, the absolute of beauty has been reached, Hegel regards Sophocles’ Antigone by contrast as the ‘most satifying work of art’26 of both the new and the ancient world – yet only in a certain respect: namely as the ideal representation of the division and reconciliation of the objective form and the subjective form of ethical spirit. Classical tragedy, as a creation of ethical conflict, goes beyond ‘mere’ perfect beauty, even within the realm of the ‘classical art form’! It is more than beautiful, already on the way to pure concept and subjectivity. Menke therefore proposes to bring together Hegel’s representation of the ‘dissolution’ of the ‘classical art form’ with the theorem of the end of art in modernity in such a way that actually only the conception of this ‘dissolution’ makes sense of that theorem. ‘Drama for Hegel is on its way to a “no longer beautiful” art, even in its Greek form. In drama begins the end of art, within art’.27 Thus, according to a sort of ‘unofficial logic’ of Hegel’s teleological discourse – at least since the Phenomenology of Spirit – we arrive at a kind of ‘marginal position’ of drama, in so far as, within the area of the beautiful, it renders beauty itself questionable in its capacity for reconciliation. If Hegel understands artistic beauty as a many-layered reconciliation of opposites, especially of beauty and the ethical order, then one can indeed maintain that within the term ‘drama’ Hegel emphasizes those traits of the aesthetic that let reconciliation fail. Drama is not simply the (unproblematic) appearance but, at the same time, the manifest crisis of beautiful ethicity (Sittlichkeit). In the philosophy of drama we find, at the height of its classical formulation,