This handbook focuses on the relationship between law and tragedy. It shows how tragedy's capacity to stage complex, conflicting forces in human existence offers a rich source of insight into law and politics. Approaching tragedy not merely as a literary genre, but as a mode of understanding conflict, finitude, responsibility, judgment, and political order, the volume demonstrates how tragic thought can deepen our understanding of legal and political concepts, contemporary legal systems, and institutional structures. This book addresses various aspects of tragedy from tragic literature to tragic philosophy, from antiquity to the present, from phenomenology to theory on legal adjudication and democratic decision-making. Scholars of law, philosophy, theater, and literature alike will appreciate the book's conversational ability to explore the knowledge and sense of presence we gain through a cultivated understanding of the tragic.

Provides a comprehensive review of the rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field of law and aesthetics Includes in-depth discussions of law in combination with tragedy Covers a vast array of special topics and applications illustrating the wide use of the tragic in law

Autorentext

Timo Slootweg is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy of Law at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD in 2000 from the Faculty of Philosophy in Rotterdam, with a dissertation entitled History and Ethics: Historical Consciousness in the Tradition of Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. In Rotterdam, he taught philosophy of history for several years; since then, at Leiden, he has taught philosophy of law and ethics. His research focuses on the philosophy and theology of law, with particular reference to Christian existentialism, personalism, dialogical philosophy, phenomenology, and postmodernism. Among his favorite thinkers are Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Berdyaev, Shestov, Buber, Heidegger, and Levinas. Of his many publications, two monographs stand out. In 2016, he published, in Dutch, Uit de schaduw van de wet: Inleiding tot de esthetica van het recht (From Out of the Shadow of the Law: Introduction to the Aesthetics of Law). In 2023, he published, also in Dutch, Langs tragische einders: Verkenningen in de esthetica van moraal en recht, which has recently been translated and published in English as Tragedy in Ethics and Law: Other Voices of Dionysus (Springer, 2025).

Bart Jansen is Associate Professor of Legal Philosophy and is affiliated with the University of Amsterdam, Nyenrode Business University, Leiden University, Airlangga University in Surabaya, Indonesia, and Anton de Kom University in Paramaribo, Suriname. From 2023 to 2025, he was affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at New York University. His research primarily explores the intersections of law, philosophy, and aesthetics. He also investigates questions of political theology, language, semiotics, existentialism, postmodernism, and legal anthropology, especially in relation to Indigenous legal traditions and the rights of nature. In the fields of business ethics and corporate governance, his work examines the politicization and juridification of ethics. On these themes, he has published The Juridification of Business Ethics (Springer, 2023) and The Political Corporation: Carl Schmitt and Business Ethics (Springer, 2026).

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Philosophy, Law, and Tragedy.- Part 1. CLASSIC TRAGEDY AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF LAW.- Chapter 2. Law and Tragedy in Sophocles' Antigone.- Chapter 3. Antigone, Legal Pluralism, and the Postcolony.- Chapter 4. Oedipus and the Family/State-Analogy.- Chapter 5. Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris.- Chapter 6. 'O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!'.- Chapter 7. A Tragic Pas de Deux.- Part 2. SHAKESPEARE, POWER, AND LEGAL ORDER.- Chapter 8. Keep law and form and due proportion.- Chapter 9. The Struggle for the Throne.- Chapter 10. Shakespeare's Violence Paradigm.- Chapter 11. Tragedy Averted.- Part 3. TRAGIC, THE UNCANNY, AND BEING.- Chapter 12. The Divine Tragedy.- Chapter 13. The Other Faces of Dionysus.- Chapter 14. The Tragic as Limit Situation and as Cipher.- Chapter 15. Hegel's Criticism of Kant's Doctrine of Postulates.- Chapter 16. Prometheus and Heracles.- Chapter 17. Law and the Uncanny.- Part 4. TRAGEDY AS LEGAL AND POLITICAL CRITIQUE.- Chapter 18. Tragedy in the Laws of War.- Chapter 19. The Promethean Predicament of Liberalism.- Chapter 20. Judicial Decision as a Tragic Leap.- Chapter 21. Postmodern Jurisprudence and Aesthetics.