Sovereignty and Immanence in The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Abstract

In this article, the author offers a reading on Walter Benjamin’s The origin of German Tragic Drama focusing on issues such as sovereignty and immanence. For this, the author proposes three topic centers. First, the article deals with the distances that Benjamin traces and that separate Tragedy from the German mourning play, giving special emphasis to the link that both, the tragedy and the Trauerspiel, have with transcendence. Secondly, the author presents an excursus which focuses on the theory of sovereignty developed by Carl Schmitt. Third and last, the text addresses the theory of sovereignty present in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel with the aim to show that the sovereign is responsible for the immanence of the mourning play in terms of “integrating the catastrophe”. Thereby, the third section connects to the first, highlighting the creatural condition of the sovereign.