Tragedy in modernity

Abstract

A barbarian, primitive, bloodthirsty, in short, non-rational unknown currently fouls our air. Its presence leads us to reflect upon the fact that a thing may be true, without being, however, good, beautiful or fair. As a perverse compensation for the "intimate terror" of a city that has bowed down to the ghost of social asepsis, and also as a perverse compensation for the lethal boredom in which that same city agonises, a latent insurrection takes place in it: terrorism, all kinds of tribal wars, archaic beliefs, and fundamentalisms of many sources and loyalties. I believe that civic absenteeism, everyday sedition and terrorist escalade are all part of the same disastrous eroticism, a kind of allergic reaction of an impoverished and uprooted social body, given over to the abyss of total bartering in a flat, immaterial world.