Tragedy, genealogy and theories of International Relations
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116689131 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116689131
European Journal of
International Relations
2018, Vol. 24(1) 177 –197
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1354066116689131
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
E
JR
I
Tragedy, genealogy and
theories of International
Relations
Alister Wedderburn
King’s College London, UK
Abstract
This article interrogates the role of tragedy within the work of International Relations
theorists including Michael Dillon, Mervyn Frost, Richard Ned Lebow and Hans
Morgenthau. It argues that a tragic sensibility is a constituent part of much thinking
about politics and the international, and asks what the reasons for this preoccupation
might be. Noting that a number of diverse theoretical appeals to tragedy in International
Relations invoke analytically similar understandings of tragic-political subjectivity, the
article problematises these by building on Michel Foucault’s intermittent concern
with the genre in his Collège de France lecture series. It proposes that a genealogical
consideration of tragedy enables an alertness to its political associations and implications
that asks questions of the way in which it is commonly conceived within the discipline.
The article concludes by suggesting that International Relations theorists seeking to
invoke tragedy must think carefully about the ontological, epistemological, ethical and
political claims associated with such a move.
Keywords
Foucault, genealogy, International Relations theory, Morgenthau, raison d’état, tragedy,
tragic vision
Introduction
In Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, the historians Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre
Vidal-Naquet (1990) locate Athenian tragic drama in its immediate social context. They
explore the relationships between the texts themselves, the political institutions and prac-
tices of their day, and the ‘presuppositions that compose as it were the framework of
Corresponding author:
Alister Wedderburn, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: aliwedderburn@gmail.com
689131EJT0010.1177/1354066116689131European Journal of International RelationsWedderburn
research-article2017
Article
178 European Journal of International Relations 24(1)
everyday life in the civilization for which [the plays] are one form of expression’ (Vernant
and Vidal-Naquet, 1990: 10; emphasis in original). Yet to speak of tragedy in its histori-
cal specificity begs another question: given its indissociability from the context in which
it was written, how can one explain the genre’s enduring importance to the contemporary
political imagination — what Bonnie Honig (2013: 69) describes as the ‘uncontested
privileging’ of the tragic in post-Hegelian political theory?1 As Vernant acknowledges:
If it is true that works of art, like any other social products, are connected with a specific
historical context and that their genesis, structures, and meaning can only be understood within
and through that context, how is it that they remain alive and continue to communicate with us
when the forms of that social life have been transformed at every level and the conditions
necessary for their production have disappeared? (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 1990: 237)
Vernant’s answer to this problem rests on the claim that Athenian tragedy ‘lays bare the
network of contradictory forces that assail all human beings … the illogical logic that
governs the order of human activities’ (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 1990: 247). Tragedy
therefore carries within itself a core ‘knowledge or theory’ that, in its trans-historicity,
remains inescapably relevant. If 16th- and 17th-century playwrights like Shakespeare,
Racine and Corneille can be described as tragedians, then, it is because they were able
— for all their circumstantial differences — to tap into this ‘knowledge or theory’, what
Vernant describes as the Athenian ‘tragic vision’ (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 1990: 241).
And if tragedy is of relevance to the contemporary world, it is because we can recognise
the purchase of this ‘vision’ on our own experience (cf. Goldmann, 2013: 15).
For Richard Ned Lebow (2003), a ‘tragic vision’ of precisely this sort has informed
the study of International Relations (IR). Identifying a tradition of classical realist
thought stretching from Thucydides through Carl von Clausewitz to Hans Morgenthau,
Lebow (2003: 40) notes that the three men ‘share remarkably similar understandings of
power and influence, the relationships between interests and justice, agency and struc-
ture, domestic and international politics, and the importance of community’. These simi-
larities, it is argued, cohere around a tragic sensibility defined by a keen attentiveness to
human limitation and finitude (Lebow, 2003: 298–303), and as such, classical realism
can itself be understood as ‘an expression of the tragic understanding of politics, and of
life more generally’ (Lebow, 2003: 63). For both Vernant and Lebow, then, tragedy
expresses a wisdom that transcends its historical specificity. For Lebow, however, this
wisdom is articulated not only in literary texts and dramatic performances, but also in
theories of IR.
Although Lebow focuses exclusively on what he sees as a tradition of classical real-
ism, a range of IR theorists — including but not limited to realists — have mobilised
tragedy in order to explore or explain the ontological, epistemological and/or ethical
conditions under which politics as they variously see it takes place (e.g. Appleman
Williams, 2009; Butterfield, 1950; De Boer, 2007; Dillon, 1996; Erskine and Lebow,
2012; Frost, 2003, 2008; Mearsheimer, 2001; Morgenthau, 1947, 1962, 1969; Niebuhr,
1938, 1964; Thompson, 1972). According to this literature, international relations pre-
sent a tragic aspect to their students and practitioners, and an engagement with the gen-
re’s themes accordingly enables an enriched understanding of some of IR’s basic and
To continue reading
Request your trial