To view a work knowingly gives understanding but not hope Rorty, "The Necessity of Inspired Reading" I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. Thoreau, Walden.

In this paper I examine the role of tragedy in the ancient emergence of philosophical interiority and in the recent return of exteriority that marks the birth of theory. I argue that tragedy names a kind of epistemic threshold between systems of knowledge predicated on exteriority and interiority. I conclude by arguing that Derrida's late effort to articulate a messianic model of the tragic in Specters of Marx and elsewhere, his effort to “think the ghost,” both confirms and complicates tragedy's (...) place in the history of theory. (shrink)