Abstract

Tragic writing emerges as a representation of a sacrificial crisis that calls into question the human relation to the divine. The process of dramatization that exposes this crisis places the subject and language at risk. The threat which this poses is forestalled with the triumph of metaphysics on the stage of the Western tradition, until Friedrich Nietzsche's appeal for a rebirth of tragedy. This modernist reanimation of sacrificial dramatization is conditioned by the absence of the divine. ;The first chapter begins with an exploration of representations of sacrifice in Greek tragedy. After demonstrating how the tragedians stage an ontological and theological crisis, I turn to the critique of sacrifice and tragedy within the dialogues of Plato. The death of Socrates is represented in Plato as an antidote to the ecstatic consciousness of tragic man. ;The second chapter follows the motif of sacrifice in Nietzsche from its initial use as a literary trope to his understanding of himself as an embodiment of tragic man. With his declaration of the death of God, Nietzsche collapses the significatory order of the ontotheological tradition as an act of sacrifice. Nietzsche eventually turns this mimetic violence inward, and becomes the embodiment of tragic man, as he inaugurates a new mode of tragic writing. ;The third chapter examines Georges Bataille's obsession with sacrifice as an attempt to provoke a manifestation of the sacred in the wake of Nietzsche's declaration of the death of God. Bataille mythologizes Nietzsche's collapse into madness as a tragic event, and places his own subjectivity at risk in states of consciousness represented in writing. ;The fourth chapter explores the mimetic escalation of sacrificial imagery in the texts and performances of Yukio Mishima. Profoundly influenced by Nietzsche and Bataille, Mishima dramatizes sacrifice in literature, photography, film and theatre. Ultimately, Mishima exhausts the tragic as a literary mode, taking the consciousness of tragic man to its limit with the staging of his own death by ritual disembowelment in 1970. ;This dissertation demonstrates the dangers inherent in the mimetic engagement with sacrifice. The sacrificial dramatist writes with blood to experience tragic ecstasy