ALT Ritual is the act of separating and ordering the contradictory impulses within man such that they might not tear him apart. First comes abstention, then sacred violence, then recompense – desire and disgust, aggression and remorse, abstinence and license, each is given its sanctioned place in a linear unfolding through time. Ritual attempts to harness the tension, to put it work, to motivate the continued existence of the world as it is. It domesticates the inner turmoil of man, harnessing it to the perpetuum mobile of the world-order. Tragedy, on the other hand, does not separate the contradictory impulses. It stacks them, heightens them, until man, stretched between antimonies, is torn to pieces. Ambiguity is not dissected, but suffered. Tragedy does not harness, it drains. In it, man refuses to renounce his wholeness, and is repaid with sparagmos (torn-apart-ness). The cunning of tragedy, or course, is that viewer participates in dismemberment while remaining intact – the tension i
