“A Kind of Theater Where Freedom Could Appear”:¹ Arendt, Sophocles, and Tragic Agonism

In this article I argue that Hannah Arendt’s agonistic reading of the Greek experience of the political can be complicated and enriched by looking at tragic agonism. I use this concept in a broader sense to identify the agonistic aesthetic of tragic theatricality, encompassing all the linguistic, stylistic, and dramaturgical strategies through which each play presents a plurality of viewpoints. Its agonistic character manifests as a tension that never resolves into a dialectical process of sense-making, but instead sustains a polyphonic configuration of relating and competing voices. In order to explore tragic agonism, this article reads Arendt’s work along with Sophocles’s Women of Trachis. In this play, the multiperspectival narrative of the series of events leading to the death of an epic hero—Heracles—unfolds entirely through the affairs of his oikos. My reading of the play focuses on two scenes: the prologue, pronounced by Deianeira, Heracles’s wife (lines 1–47), and another scene where she secretly discusses with the female chorus after discovering her husband’s erotic desire for another woman (lines 531–549).