Forgetting the tragic

Notes on Emmanuel Falque’s hors phénomène

Abstract

What Emmanuel Falque seems to achieve in this book is to make the "out of phenomenon" synonymous with the "tragic". Certainly, we see the heuristic interest in creating and cultivating the concept of "out of phenomenon". In Aeschylus' Agamemnon (a reference that runs throughout this book), the atrocious rubs shoulders with the filthy and can only test us, traumatize us, and, therefore, can only "modify" us in some way. If it is also true that the tragic, according to Kierkegaard in particular, can lead to despair, another attitude seems to be dodged and no less sketched by Falque, namely, under the influence of Nietzsche this time, the amor fati: "Learned in the War School of life: what does not kill me strengthens me." Falque does not refer to it explicitly, while the approach that consists in looking the trauma in the face, in having no fear of fixing it, of penetrating it, of inhabiting it, appears to stem from this love of fatum, of destiny "that falls on us", enough in any case for us to be modified in a sense as unexpected as irreparable. But isn't it also the definition and very role of tragic and/or catastrophic feelings?