Tragic lucidity: Discourse of recuperation in Unamuno and Camus

The present study examines the significance and function of the "tragic" in a modern, post-Hegelian context, using a historical, socio-political approach. This approach sees the tragic as a product of specific historical conditions rather than as metaphysically constituent of the human condition. After surveying a post-Hegelian critical (re)interpretation of Greek tragedy and the tragic sense, the study focuses on the work of Miguel de Unamuno and Albert Camus as paradigmatic of this modern conception of the tragic: "tragic lucidity.".;The function of tragic lucidity is to recuperate, overcome or at least defer some kind of loss. Initially, it is the loss of God as divine telos ordering the world. But if this loss is conceived as primary, it is not definitive. Decolonization and the world wars exacerbate this sense of loss, perceived by Unamuno and Camus in terms of an increasing national marginalization and a personal exile, thereby highlighting the historical basis for tragic lucidity. Hence, the unacknowledged goal behind the elaboration of a tragic human condition is the attempt to transcend some historically engendered loss through a metaphysical abstraction of this loss, thereby recuperating it within the tragic. Morever, the effect of this recuperation is the preservation of some historico-political status quo.;Finally, the tension between an increasing sense of loss and the consequent urgency to recuperate it becomes so great that it leads to, in the later work of both Unamuno and Camus, a disintegration into silence of this discourse of tragic lucidity. At this point, when events have overwhelmed the discourse's ability to comprehend and explain them, the metaphysical inclusiveness preached by tragic lucidity ironically results in a political marginalization and a personal exile for both Unamuno and Camus at the end of their lives.