The increasingly arbitrary use of the term ‘post-dramatic’ underlines the need for a more differentiated historical perspective and a closer examination of the theoretical and ethical dimensions of this concept. This is Lehmann's undertaking in his seven-hundred-page magnum opus, in which he argues that tragedy should again be placed at the centre of theatrical discourse. In doing so he starts with two basic assumptions: first, that tragedy should be understood as a mode of aesthetic representation, and not as a part of human experience; second, that it should not be seen as an element of literature, but in relation to the specific aesthetic reality of the performance. With this new study, bringing together many strands of his work, Lehmann sets out to supplement the rich tradition of theories of tragedy, which stretches from Aristotle to George Steiner, with questions of theatrical form – not only in order to preserve the idea of tragedy for the present, but also to develop a critical claim for thinking about theatre in its historical and contemporary dimensions.

In the modern dramatic tradition, as well as in the German idealism of Georg Hegel, among others, tragedy was understood with regard to dramatic conflict or the tragic mistake of a character. This overlooks the fact that tragedy is not based on dramatic action, but rather on phenomena that fundamentally question action and will. At the centre of tragedy, according to Lehmann, is a human desire for transgression and excess, one that seeks to exceed set limits – and is thereby confronted with these limits, becomes self-destructive and causes severe suffering. Lehmann develops this ‘core motif of the tragic’ from readings of Oedipus’ ‘exceeding of the knowable’ (p. 70, my translation). In Lehmann's study, tragic transgression is primarily related, with reference to Jacques Lacan, to conceptions of the subject constituting itself only in the act of dissolution of the ego's imaginary boundaries. On a social level, drawing on Georges Bataille's notion of excess as a fundamental principle of life, tragic transgression is understood as leading to a radical convulsion of the foundational principles of norm and law, whereby it can be considered tragic only when it is not based on rational calculation, and thus not subjected to a moral (or any other kind of) intent.

Evidently, this perspective makes it possible to reflect on dance, performance and other recent post-dramatic forms as tragic experiences. Beyond this, however, the broad historical part of the study sets out to show how tragic transgression, understood as a transhistorical motif, is updated for different historical periods. What was articulated in the pre-dramatic theatre of ancient tragedy as an expression of rage, mania and lament vis-à-vis the superiority of the gods finds expression in modern dramatic tragedy as an excess of power and revenge (William Shakespeare), or as the destructive power of the passions (Jean Racine). With the rise of bourgeois culture in the eighteenth century, tragic transgression becomes increasingly repressed, while excessive affect is transferred to the private emotions of a psychological individual. Tragedy increasingly comes into conflict with the dramatic form, as Lehmann shows in his close readings of texts from Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Hölderlin and Heinrich von Kleist; later, Richard Wagner, Maurice Maeterlinck and Bertolt Brecht would develop practices of tragic drama that already anticipated so-called post-dramatic theatre.

Thus, although Lehmann speaks of a ‘dramatic tragedy’, he develops a critique of dramatic theatre from the perspective of the tragic, since dramatic theatre is not able to realize the specific paradoxical quality of the aesthetic that is at the centre of the study. Lehmann names this paradoxical quality a ‘caesura of the aesthetic’, a break that is more than the reflexive distance of Brecht's epic theatre. The caesura, which is developed in reference to Hölderlin, allows the ‘performance to become porous to what is excluded in it’, and is thereby understood as an ‘intrusion of the real’ – it causes the performance to exceed itself. In contrast, Lehmann understands dramatic theatre, in reference to literary scholar Peter Szondi, as a closed cosmos of fiction in which the means and methods remain hidden. As a consequence, drama is not on the level of tragedy, which puts into play precisely what threatens to be repressed if one simply follows the dramatic course of events: indecision, unreason and impotence to act.

With the final, comparatively short chapter on post-dramatic tragedy it becomes clear that tragedy in this sense cannot be envisioned as a representation of a drama, but rather emerges through a resistance to the institution, apparatus or dispositif of dramatic theatre. The tragic caesura in contemporary theatre is thus primarily concerned with the cutting through of a merely aesthetic experience, for instance through the showing of the vulnerable, mortal body (Jan Fabre, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio); through texts that refer to the performance situation (Sarah Kane); or through the reintroduction of the ancient chorus (Einar Schleef), for which already the entanglement with political, non-aesthetic practices was central.

Given the study's intention to reflect on tragedy as a theatrical practice, the concrete analyses of how excess and caesura are concretely articulated in relation to particular performances and their framing elements are, in comparison with the theoretical parts, scarce. How, for instance, are examined works by Tadeusz Kantor, Heiner Müller and Laurent Chétouane able to prevent the disruptions in the framework of specific styles simply becoming another convention? It would also be desirable for tragic transgression to be more strongly differentiated from the general, non-tragic demand for a transgressive suspension between art and life, and for a striving for a sense of unease as a spectacular attraction. Moreover, the central thesis of dramatic theatre as a radically autonomous aesthetic sphere is so pointed that it can hardly be put into dispute with historiographical arguments. However, through its lucid insights into the philosophical construction of the theme, the study provides convincing arguments for understanding tragedy as an ethical demand addressed to the theatre, one in which the problem of human and theatrical action is addressed, and in which everything that cannot be reduced to the idea of the dramatic, and that surpasses its economy, becomes part of the performance.