ABSTRACT
One of the key aspects of tragic ethics, Nussbaum argues, is the expansion of what the people would think of as part of human life. The open-ended temporality of the ethics of responsibility is linked to what the literary critic Frank Kermode famously calls a “sense of an ending.” Tragic knowledge as translation disavows hubris and disabuses the reader of the illusion of mastery. It contains no pretense of sovereign power. Batuman discusses the connection between tragedy and therapy in the context of psychoanalysis. In Rethinking Tragedy, Rita Felski called for literary studies to shift toward a “tragic mode” rather than “tragic genre”. For social science, it would mean an alternative chronotope, an ethico-onto-epistemology of the world as “not a limitless globe, but a small, fragile and finite place, one planet among others with strictly limited resources that are allocated unequally”.
