The Experience of Tragic Judgement

Book excerpt: Adjudication between conflicting normative universes is always in a sense tragic. And what is called for is not to be found in an impersonal set of procedures. Rather, what is needed, Julen Etxabe argues, is a heightened awareness of the difficulty of judgment. The Experience of Tragic Judgment draws upon Antigone in order to consider this difficulty. Based on the transformative experience that the audience undergoes in engaging with this play, what is proposed is a reconceptualization of judgment: not as it is generally thought to occur in a single isolated moment, like the falling of an axe, but rather as an experience that develops in and through space and time.