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FACED WITH THE EVER-ENLARGING incoherence of the present, characterised by war without end, the increasingly frantic shoring up of the imperium, the deepening contagion of ethnic, religious, and civil conflict, and the fatuous theologization of political life with the categories of good and evil, I would like to turn to seventeenth-century neoclassical French drama, in particular the case of Jean Racine's 1677 tragedy, Phedre, "the masterpiece of the human mind," as Voltaire declared. I must confess at the outset that the reasons for this choice are not entirely clear to me and this essay is not intended as allegory. But I cannot deny that it was written with an eye to the present. I will let the reader make of this what he or she will and turn in detail to the play and its fascinating philosophical implications.
My focus is on the character of Phaedra and the nature of her malaise. I begin by trying to elicit the dramatic pattern of Phaedra's confessions of her desire, a desire that produces a guilty subjectivity that I illustrate with reference to Augustine's Confessions. I go on to describe Phaedra's existence as defined by the fact that, unlike the conventional tragic hero, she is unable to die, that existence is, for her, without exit. I pursue this thought by turning to Emmanuel Levinas's brief reading of Phedre and linking it to what is arguably the enabling motif of his work, namely that existence is not the experience of freedom profiled in rapture, ecstasy, or affirmation, but rather it is that which we seek to evade in a movement of flight that simply reveals-paradoxically-how deeply riveted we are to the fact of existence. Counterintuitively perhaps, I try to show how this Levinasian thought has its home in Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, in particular in his treatment of the concept of Befindlichkeit (state-of-mind or attunement) and its relation to thrownness and facticity. This is the ontological meaning of Phaedra's guilt: one's fundamental self-relation is to an unmasterable thrownness, the burden of a facticity that weighs one down without one's ever being able to pick it up. I try to show how this experience of guilt injects a fearful languor into Phaedra's limbs, a languor that I trace to...