Desire and Tragedy. The Late Platonic Anthropology, Prologue C.I. Despotopoulos
By the term Desire it is stated the entrance of platonic philosophical discourse in the consequence of the facts of appearance and replenishment of desire, as the final object of the primal concern of the last platonic anthropology, which is – basically – the defense of difference in the intro-subjective area; this entrance is nothing but the core of a new policy concerning the self that opens a very deep rupture from the previous platonic thought and from the up-to-Plato’s-time cultural facts.
By the term Tragedy, there is a reference to the critical consequences of the primal concern of the last platonic anthropology: there is a reference to the concern of defending the difference, i.e. of achieving the reconciliation that takes the form of an attempt to achieve an aesthetic representation of reconciliation in daily life; by this same term, there is a reference to the realization of the paradoxes and problems of philosophical discourse – intrinsically related to the concern of defending difference – and to the attempt of Plato’s thought to transcend them; all those elements constitute the category of tragic, of a tragic art rival to the poets conception of tragedy, a new conception of tragic that is the culmination of the last platonic anthropology.
According to this anthropology, after the revealment of all the discourse about desire, after the unfolding of the will to enter the here-point (ενταύθα), neither the conventional daily life nor the conventional aesthetic are in any position to offer a new possibility of facing human situation; this facing is proposed by Plato’s thought to be achieved through the unconventional entrance of the aesthetic as tragic-inside daily routine. This entrance will of course, first of all declare the expectation that the experience of the opaque of the here-point will be ruptured from the discourse about the here-point; but at the same time this entrance will declare the acceptance that the discourse about the here-point will form its being inside the experience of this opaque.
