Introduction: Self-Denying Creativity

Abstract

In our present world we often resort to the tragic mode of arranging experience in order to give sublime sense to traumatic events. When we interpret a particular event (genocide, a terrorist attack) as tragic, however, we ultimately justify it by reference to a transcendent agency. By extricating that traumatic irruption in our lives from its historical context, by declaring it ineluctably imposed on us, what we ultimately do is occlude our own involvement in the decision-making process that led to so much suffering, as well as our own responsibility for its outcome.