SOURCE: Critchley, Simon. “I Want to Die, I Hate My Life—Phaedra's Malaise.”¹New Literary History 34 (2003): 17-40.

In the following essay, Critchley discusses the title character of Phèdre, considers the nature of her melancholy, and characterizes the play as an antipolitical Christian tragedy.

Faced with the ever-enlarging incoherence of the present, characterised by war without end, the increasingly frantic shoring up of the imperium, the deepening contagion of ethnic, religious, and civil conflict, and the fatuous theologization of political life with the categories of good and evil, I would like to turn to seventeenth-century neoclassical French drama, in particular the case of Jean Racine's 1677 tragedy, Phèdre, “the masterpiece of the human mind,” as Voltaire declared. I must confess at the outset that the reasons for this choice are not entirely clear to me and this essay is not intended as allegory. But I cannot deny that...