Self-deception is a part of the human condition. Tragedy is not just terrible luck, but our capacity to knowingly/unknowingly deceive ourselves into doing the very things we wanted to avoid.  This aspect of human agency, our reluctance to sometimes see the things that are right in front of us, is fundamental to understanding Sophocles’ Greek tragedy ‘Oedipus the King’, but also, ultimately, understanding ourselves, writes Simon Critchley.

We usually think of tragedy as a misfortune that simply befalls a person (an accident, a fatal disease) or a polity (a natural disaster, like a tsunami, or a terrorist attack like 9/11) and that is outside their control. But if “tragedy” is understood as misfortune, then this is a significant misunderstanding of tragedy. What the thirty-one extant Greek tragedies enact over and over again is not a misfortune that is outside our control. Rather, they show the way in which we collude, seemingly unknowingly, with the calamity that befalls us.