“Tragedy under Siege,” by Alberto Toscano, is a Communis original feature. It was first presented as a lecture of the same title delivered on 28 November 2025 at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, followed by the author’s intervention on 26 March 2026 at the panel discussion “Tragedy, apocalyptic imagination, and beyond” featured in the program of the conference “Utopias, Dystopias, and the Politics of Imagination” (25-27 March 2026), held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

“Tragedy has often been rejected by those engaged with radical social transformation, as an ultimately conservative genre that sublimates the engineered fact of social powerlessness into figures of fate. Against those who would see an age of revolutions as an anti-tragic age, one whose belief in the possibility of progress makes it inhospitable to the irreparable, one could instead follow Raymond Williams’s argument in his Modern Tragedy, according to which he ‘[saw] revolution, that is to say, in a tragic perspective.’”

— Alberto Toscano

This essay inhabits the intersection between two of my current preoccupations: the relationship between philosophy and anti-fascism, on the one hand, and the rethinking of politics in a tragic key, on the other. I want to explore how, in the context of the Spanish Civil War and in polemic against the limits of the popular front, namely of the confluence of democratic and Soviet (or Stalinist) anti-fascism, the French thinker Georges Bataille, in some texts for the short-lived journal Acéphale, tried to find in the experiences of communal life under fascist siege the resources to think a tragic anti-fascism. Though I am conscious that this may risk retreading the vexed question of Bataille’s supposed “fascination” for and even complicity with fascism, I am concerned with Bataille’s writing more as a symptomatic document of how the tragic came to be politically inscribed in the epoch of fascism and anti-fascism.

Tragedy has often been rejected by those engaged with radical social transformation, as an ultimately conservative genre that sublimates the engineered fact of social powerlessness into figures of fate. As Roland Barthes’s quipped: “Tragedy is only a way of assembling human misfortune, of subsuming it, and thus of justifying it by putting it into the form of a necessity, of a kind of wisdom, or of a purification.” But where an orientation to revolution could counsel abandoning the tragic, it can also lie behind the effort to recover and repeat it in a contemporary frame. Following Franco Moretti, we can justifiably view tragic poetry as “synonymous with the organic crisis of a political and cultural order.” In that respect, it as a “genre of transition,” and we can see how the organic crises that birthed forth communist revolutions and decolonizing movements could serve as ferment for powerful re-imaginings of tragic theory and practice. Against those who would see an age of revolutions as an anti-tragic age, one whose belief in the possibility of progress makes it inhospitable to the irreparable, one could instead follow Raymond Williams’s argument in his Modern Tragedy, according to which, “the revolution is an inevitable working through of a deep and tragic disorder, to which we can respond in varying ways but which will in any case, in one way or another, work its way through our world, as a consequence of any of our actions. I see revolution, that is to say, in a tragic perspective.”

How does a Nietzschean figure of tragedy break with its dialectical articulation, be it idealist or revolutionary, as a “working through”? We can turn here to the courses on tragedy Nietzsche delivered in Basel prior to the publication of the Birth of Tragedy. His lessons on Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus would stress the “irreducibility of the tragic to the moral scheme guilt-punishment” and polemicize against the moralist-rationalist interpretation of tragedy as a display of immanent poetic justice, anticipating his later assault on Christianity and its juridical imagination. For Nietzsche too, like critics of the tragic that followed him, it was pathos, or more precisely the “transfiguration of suffering,” which grants singularity to tragedy’s form, with catharsis here understood, in a musical vein, as “a necessary consonance in the world of dissonances.” Perhaps more unique, also with regard to Nietzsche’s anti-democratic animus (some of which has been traced to the cultural trauma of the Paris Commune), is the manner in which his Basel courses do not just chastise the moralist-rationalist figure of tragedy, but repeatedly stress the collective, mass mysticism that lies at the heart of Greek tragedy. The widely disputed idea of an emergence of tragedy from the cult of Dionysus, in the dissolution of individuation within a cosmic order, the initiation to transcendence through extreme fright, is here bound to the fusional and popular character of the Dionysian games, which Nietzsche calls “a great festival of freedom and equality in which the servile classes recovered their original right.” Tragedy draws on “popular mass poetry” which the dithyramb masters. As the young Nietzsche declared: “The dithyramb is a popular chant, even one principally issuing from the lower classes. Tragedy has always conserved a democratic character; just as it was born from the people.” Modern tragedy is instead modelled after the law court and was never able to recover its popular base, which is a precondition of the truly tragic. While ancient tragedy is a “dramatized hymn,” modern tragedy is a “dramatized novel.” (It is noteworthy that Nietzsche’s excavation of a tragedy beyond the moral-rationalist vision could serve as a resource for thinking the tragic outside of a Eurocentric ambit, from Suzanne and Aimé Césaire’s wartime writings in Tropiques to the dramaturgical theory of Wole Soyinka.)

How and why does Bataille turn politically — or, following Roberto Esposito’s problematization, impolitically — to the Nietzschean tragic in the context of the politics of fascism and anti-fascism? I was prodded toward thinking the nexus of tragedy and (anti-)fascism by an art-historical intervention, namely Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on the genesis and ambivalence of Picasso’s Guernica. Having gestured towards the familiar motif of Bataille’s “ambiguous” stance towards fascism and its violence, Ginzburg elaborates on how a theme from Bataille’s “private mythology,” the “rotten sun,” had entered into Picasso’s iconography. He tracks its appearance through the various stages of the painting as photographed by Dora Maar [Fig.1], a former lover and political comrade of Bataille’s in the far-left groupuscule Masses. As he observes, “Through a sequence of destructions [which also elided a far less ambiguous raised fist], Picasso transformed the sun of production into the sun of decay, the rotten sun described by Bataille.” Ginzburg concludes his essay, “The Sword and the Lightbulb,” by noting that Guernica was first displayed in July 1937, the same year as the publication of a double issue of the journal Acéphale, which included Bataille’s excoriation of the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche, as well as his own “Nietzschean Chronicles.” In this latter piece, Bataille responds combatively and rhapsodically to a then-recent production, by Jean-Louis Barrault with the collaboration of the painter André Masson, of Miguel de Cervantes’ play on the Roman siege and extermination in 133BC of the town of Numancia [Figs. 2-5]. The intransigent resistance of the besieged town against imperialist assault had already been turned into a contemporary political myth by Spanish Republicans and their international allies resisting Franco’s troops and their Nazi-Fascist backers. But for Ginzburg, Bataille took this political myth to a metaphysical extreme, juxtaposing a “Caesarism” shared by Fascist and Stalinists alike to a radical tragic alternative embodied in an acephalic, which is to say leaderless, “community of death.” For the French philosopher, hegemonic anti-fascism, whether Soviet or “democratic,” could not really pose a challenge to “Fascist misery” because it was reduced to an “empty assembling, a vast decomposition of human beings connected only by negation.” For Ginzburg, “Bataille’s ambiguous critique of the limits of anti-Fascism may throw light on the paradox of Guernica — a quintessential anti-Fascist painting from which the Fascist enemy is absent, replaced by a community of humans and animals connected by tragedy and death.” Is tragedy both the limit and the critique of anti-fascism? And is the price for shifting from the conflictual-transitional or Hegelian model of tragedy to the Dionysian one the abandonment of a strategic politics of rational if intransigent opposition?

At the dawn of a Cold War confronting two blocs and their respective state ideologies, Bataille would incorporate that dialectical or Hegelian model of tragedy, writing of “the capacity humanity has to oppose itself, to find within itself the fundamental opposition between two irreconcilable possibilities. As in tragedy, the antagonism comes to a high point of intensity; as in tragedy, we find an exposition of that moment. The present time seems, in fact, to share the tragic author’s concern not to rush to the dénouement but first express the irreconcilable violence of the colliding forces.” In 1937, though, the contrast between Caesarism did not rise to the level of tragedy, which was to be sought at an entirely other level. In these texts from Acéphale, Bataille tells a story of civilization as synonymous with sickness, crisis and decomposition, and with the rise of both the encompassing state and the possessive individual. This is a world marked by the waning of “tragic appearance” — of “puerile” and “terrible” expenditure, which grounds “the strong and painful feeling of communal unity.” This tragic but ecstatic feeling comes to the replaced by the “awareness of being a dupe before administrative impudence (and also before terrifying displays of individual satisfaction and stupidity.” The growth of states bound up with imperial conquest and plunder degrades into the picture of “a failed and disappointing world, flattened by interminable crises.” Bataille’s metapolitical and metahistorical propositions advance a juxtaposition between the key ingredients of fascist organization, nation and army, understood as profoundly anti-tragic realities, which “try to deny death by reducing it to a component of a glory without dread,” separating human beings and their societies from expenditure and excess. The latter returns but is quickly contained and sublimated in the “brute appearance” of revolution, and specifically of revolutionary time. As Bataille observes:

“authority no longer belongs to God, but to time, whose free exuberance puts kings to death, to time incarnated today in the explosive tumult of peoples. Even in fascism itself authority has been reduced to founding itself on a so-called revolution — a hypocritical and forced homage to the only imposing authority, that of catastrophic change.”

Here “democracy” comes up short when it comes to providing a living form for the tragic, which is also to say conflictual character of human collective life (we may note, parenthetically, that Bataille here seems to bring together the Hegelian and Nietzschean modalities of the tragic, albeit in an anomalous headless hybrid). Democracy is based on warding off all “explosive condensation” — it is, we may add, constitutively based on foreclosing stasis, civil war, to the point that, it “rests on a neutralization of relatively free and weak antagonisms.” This leads to Bataille’s suggestive but truncated reduction on a tragic political form beyond democracy and opposed “Caesarisms,” when he writes that “[t]he only society full of life and force, the only free society, is the bi- or poly-cephalic society that gives the fundamental antagonisms of life a constant explosive outlet, but one limited to the richest forms.” Fascism is instead a swindle of tragic fulfilment, to paraphrase Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Time. While fascism feeds on the nostalgia for a lost community unified in tragic play, festivity and the public experience and organization of suffering, it “has as its outcome nothing other than military discipline and a limited calm, produced by a brutality that destroys with rage everything it lacks the power to captivate.” The “true, wild, and avid demand” for such a community — which is certainly Bataille’s own, cannot be deceived he says by “brief bursts of fascism, set off by fear” which bind the “constitution of communal forces” to “a narrow tradition-parental or racial” and its monocephalic counterfeits of absolute authority.

It is here that Numantia becomes for Bataille the political (or impolitical) myth of a tragic community which is the non-dialectical negation of fascist, Soviet or democratic imperialisms. Though the dramaturgical spectacle of a community that slaughters itself rather than fall into the hands of its enemy should inspire mere horror, in Bataille’s eyes Barrault and Masson’s production of Cervantes recovers “the world of truth and immediate passion for which nostalgia has always been felt.” The opposition to Rome, which here stands in for both Moscow and Berlin (or indeed fascist Rome) is beyond reconciliation. As Bataille writes, “Just as the Romans, commanded by the implacable authority of a leader, are associated with the glory of the sun, in the same way the Numantines, WITHOUT A LEADER, WITHOUT A HEAD, are located in the region of the Night and the Earth, in the region haunted by the Tragedy-Mother.” Paradoxically, Bataille will drastically juxtapose this revelation of “death as the fundamental object of the communal activity of men, death and not food or the production of the means of production” against the mass production of death that governs the foreclosure or pantomime of the tragic that defines state politics, and the very notion of a “fatherland.” Modern martial nationalism is in fact grounded, according to Bataille, “on a brutal negation of any profound meaning of death and, if it uses cadavers, it is only to make the living march in a straighter line”; “incapable of basing communal life on the tragedy of dread,” “it subordinates everything to a particular utility.”

Bataille notes that the audience for this rediscover of Cervantes’s play was animated by the political passions unleashed by the Spanish Civil War. He even tells of how Numantia was also being performed in Spain itself “in burned-out churches, without any other décor than traces of the fire, and without any other actors than red militiamen.” And yet, in a turn that Ginzburg foregrounds in his critical reflection, he asks a difficult question, which ultimately touches on the communication between and compatibility of tragedy and politics: “The fundamental themes of a remote existence, the cruel and unalterable mythological themes developed in the tragedy — are they not, however, as foreign to the political spirit as they are to the military spirit?” This is where Bataille reminds us that the politician’s vocation abhors the deeper realities of tragic and communal suffering for the sake of power’s machinations and compromises, that the struggle between German and Soviet Caesarism is a corrupt “comedy.” Bataille’s conclusion is unsparing but worth meditating, not least to give greater dimensionality to Ginzburg’s intimations about Bataille’s “ambiguity” regarding fascism:

“There is only illusion and comfort in admiring Numantia because one sees in it an expression of the current struggle. But tragedy confronts the world of politics with an evident truth: the battle joined will only take on a meaning and will only be effective to the extent that fascist wretchedness comes face to face with something other than troubled negation – namely the heartfelt community of which Numantia is the image.”

These are the terms of the radically asymmetrical warfare between tragedy and Caesarian unity, between the “HEADLESS COMMUNITY, BOUND TOGETHER BY THE OBSESSIVE IMAGE OF TRAGEDY” and the devastating mediocrity of the Führerprinzip, of leadership.

It is not irrelevant that the conditions for this tragic appearance of a community beyond the terms of political order should arise in sieges real and dramatized. As the art historian Joseph Leo Koerner has observed in his remarkable book on Hieronymus Bosch, Max Beckmann and William Kentridge, Art in a State of Siege, the “experience of siege,” with its long sedimentation in foundational texts from the Bible to the Odyssey, is that of the “collective extreme.” Its tragic compression, suppression and extermination of the body politic is also coterminous with “civilization” and “politics,” the history of cities (civitas, polis) is inseparable from that of walls, fortifications and war, with their material and symbolic technologies. Collapsing historical time and shattering political space, siege “is the extreme state of collective political experience.” While not exploring the siege as a potential catalyst for a community of death — a theme he would likely find as unappetizing as Ginzburg — Koerner foregrounds the conditions for the kind of experience that Bataille sought to recover in his effort to capture the contemporary meaning of Numantia as symbol of an escape from an anti-fascism that was only the troubled negation of fascism. As Koerner observes:

“Sieges mark history suddenly and irreversibly, and as they unfold, they suspend the ordinary pace of time. Sieges are states of temporal exception, with delay as the essential strategy of the besieged. Beginning suddenly, siege intensifies the days, weeks, and sometimes years of its duration, dependent as endurance is on the strength of walls, the availability of food and water, the unity of the besieged, and the might, exposure, and determination of the besiegers.”

Sieges, which punctuated the history of ancient and modern European warfare, often accelerating its genocidal potentials, as we can already read in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, are also present as the material and referent for visions of hell. As Koerner writes about the right panel of Bosch’s Hay Wain, displayed in the Prado [Figs. 6-7]:

“The damned share the fate of a besieged citizenry whose walls have failed them and who now are gruesomely tortured for their disobedience. Bosch secularizes the scheme of his Last Judgment triptychs. He places the world in its everyday unfolding between the beginning in Eden and the end in hell. Doomsday has not yet come, but world history has been encapsulated in a tableau vivant of imminent damnation. Damnation takes the form of urbicide.”

(One is reminded of the observation by Simone Weil, who briefly fought with the Durruti column in the Spanish civil war that “The whole of the Iliad lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience-the destruction of a city”). A few years after Bosch painted the Hay Wain, Machiavelli would write in The Prince about urbicide, with specific reference to the Roman siege of Numantia:

“Anyone who becomes master of a city accustomed to living in liberty and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it, because such a city always has as a refuge in any rebellion the name of liberty and its ancient institutions, neither of which is ever forgotten either because of the passing of time or because of the bestowal of benefits. And it matters very little what one does or foresees, since if one does not separate or scatter the inhabitants, they will not forget that name or those institutions. Immediately, and in every instance, they will return to them … in republics, greater vitality, greater hatred, and greater desire for revenge exist.”

Gaza is nowhere named in the pages of Art in a State of Siege, though it cannot but haunt them. But Gaza is not Bataille’s Numantia nor indeed Masada, whose Roman siege and mass suicide two centuries later was forged into a powerful Zionist myth. There are certainly many ways in which we may think of its plight and its resistance in a tragic key, but it is anything but a “community of death.” As the Palestinian critical theorist Nasser Abourahme articulated in his essay “In Tune with Their Time,” published in Radical Philosophy, that lends remarkable conceptual and political acumen to the poet Mahmoud Darwish’s idea of “besieging the siege,” it is imperative not to inhabit the perspective of the besieger or to view the besieged in a logic of victimhood, sacrifice or even martyrdom. As he writes, “it would be a mistake to read the conjuncture only from the vantage point of a settler order that feels be sieged and senses a way out [through the deployment of genocidal violence]. A deeper reading has to recognise that at some level this siege — the siege of the fort, the siege of the siege — is real and not just a figment of settler society’s narcissistic attachments to fears of injury and reversal.”

Despite a seemingly insurmountable asymmetry in military and infrastructural power, Abourahme contends, Palestinian resistance has repeatedly countered the collapse of temporality and shattering of space that marks the siege. Following in long anti-colonial traditions, Palestinian resistance “sought to make and open time, to set its rhythms and tempos” in a “time of initiative” that is neither ecstatic self-immolation nor mere delay. This has allowed, however imperfectly and episodically, reversals of “the logic of the siege.” But the refusal of the eliminatory terms of settler-colonial domination, what, following Fanon, Abourahme dubs “the order of colonial non-reciprocity,” cannot be reduced to the figure of a community of sacrifice. The “siege of the siege” is not a product of an obsessive, ecstatic, tragic image but of “the insistence on habitable life and its ordinary rhythms” which resists being folded into an “image of sacrificial heroism.” Abourahme’s proposal opens up the possibility of a different nexus of tragedy and anti-fascist — which is also to say anti-colonial — politics, one that makes room for grief, suffering and lament, for living politically with death, while eschewing a sacrificial framing that transfigures politics into an aestheticized unanimity, as the symbolism of the communal hecatomb comes to cover the possibility of political freedom which is also to say of political difference.

Featured image: Alberto Giacometti, Five Heads of Men, One Face and One Woman Face on, One Woman in Profile, 1965. Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris © Estate of Alberto Giacometti / Bildupphovsrätt 2020. Image courtesy of Moderna Museet. The images for figures 1 to 7 have been provided by the author.

Alberto Toscano