Gabriela Basterra

ABSTRACT Kant's third antinomy introduces freedom as the unconditioned cause that allows reason to form a synthesis of causal linkage. What different thinking conditions, I ask, does this antinomy open up for reason even to entertain any possibility of success? Reason's ability to form a synthesis depends on acknowledging the role in Kant's argument of a subject that does not need to be envisioned as a standpoint—whether intelligible or empirical, as Kant's explicit solution has it—but, rather, as the site of a relationship between the series and its outside. We may call it “unconditioned subjectivity,” clarifying from the outset that subjectivity in this sense names a structural position that plays an exceptional role in the series: it is the element that exceptionally introduces a boundary, a fleeting moment of closure. Unconditioned subjectivity would name the relationship and boundary that anchor the phenomenal series time and again. I argue, moreover, that the synthesis of causality forming here coheres as a dynamic system that is not stable or self-contained but, rather, contingent and “in progress.” Perhaps unexpectedly, the potential of this antinomy to form this dynamic system hinges on the fact that its antithesis denies freedom.

Tragedy arranges events in a narrative which secures the victory of a superior necessity or fate, a victory reaffirmed in the protagonist's death. Lorca's tragedies Bodas de sangre and Yerma, however, manage both to repeat the deadly story and at the same time to disturb it, disrupting the inexorable logic at its core. Since the tragic presupposes the usurpation of human agency by a transcendent force, these dramas open up a space for creative action in the very tragic setting in which such a possibility seems to be most radically denied. ;Is fate accountable for the characters' lack of control over their acts? The protagonists experience their life as predetermined by fate because of the compulsion to repeat a narrative of the past or the future, which they project into the present time of the play. The result is a loss of the capacity to interact and to act creatively. This loss of agency, and the subsequent absence of an agent who can be held responsible for their actions, leads the characters to construct a quasi-divine otherness, fate, to which they attribute the control over their lives. ;Tragic events are not unleashed by impersonal fate, but rather dictated by the characters themselves in their narrative. Since as narrators they restrict the alternatives available to them, the only way they see to exercise some agency is to reenact, time and again, the fixed role-patterns they have fashioned for themselves. In so doing they bring about the fate they have constructed and insert a tragic drama into the plays's present. ;Lorca's characters reenact the tragic events within a framework which suggests the positive vision denied to them. Rather than celebrating necessary death, these tragedies portray the protagonists' illusion of destiny, and poetically lament their inability to envision life. Here, for the spectator, the death of the characters ceases to be inexorable. ;By reconfiguring the tragic as lack of human interaction, Lorca's tragedy redescribes creative action as primarily creating ethical relationships in a space for concern and care which secures, in turn, the voluntary and free dimension of every other act

If the tragic interpretation of experience is still so current, despite its disastrous ethical consequences, it is because it shapes our subjectivity. Instead of contradicting the ideals of autonomy and freedom, a modern subjectivity based on self-victimization in effect enables them. By embracing subjection to an alienating other (the Law, Power) the autonomous subject protects its sameness from the disruption of real people. Seductions of Fate stages a dialogue between this tragic agent of political emancipation and the unconditional ethical demands it seeks to evade.

This article explores the ways in which Nietzsche’s conception of subjectivity, as rehearsed in The Birth of Tragedy, draws close to other modern models of split subjectivity as described by Hegel, Freud, or Althusser. Although the subjectivity depicted by Nietzsche is constituted in the tension between reaffirming and dissolving its boundaries, and this tension may seem to put the possibility of identity at risk, in effect individuation and dissolution function as symmetrical contraries. Rather than disrupting the boundaries of reason, the Dionysian contributes to Apollonian equilibrium by temporarily destroying Apollonian rigidity, so that the polis can periodically overcome limitations, assimilate its others and gather new strength. Identity is thus seemingly reinforced through the controlled illusion of its shattering: it is protected from the irruption of real otherness. Unlike Nietzsche’s dialectical dramaturgy, Greek tragedy depicts an incipient rationality wounded by contradictions, institutionalizing conflict. Because of the ambiguity of the Greek tragic world, the fissures of its organizing powers and the ambivalent agency of tragic subjects, a parallel between Attic tragedy and modern subjectivity may illuminate the latter