"I Know What Has to Happen": Tragedy, Mourning, and Melancholia in Medea
This chapter explores how Medea (1988), von Trier’s version of Euripides’ play, engages with a modern politics of tragedy. In particular, it argues that von Trier uses the tragic script to explore questions of agency and sovereignty. Medea is a television adaptation based on a film script by Carl Theodor Dreyer—somehow retaining its tragic form despite von Trier’s professed disinterest in tragedy. By bringing von Trier into dialogue with Freud, Schmitt, and Kierkegaard, the chapter explores the dialectic between melancholia and responsibility that gives voice to his distinctive tragic politics. As such, von Trier both resists and embraces this tragic script and in the process reveals his insights into sovereignty and subjectivity.