Why the question of the tragic, today? An untimely question, the question of the tragic and its necessity exceed the limits of the world and of time—the very idea of the limit and its exceedance is itself caught up in the tension which the tragic exposes, the question between passage and impasse (póros and aporia). This perennial question is bound up with our very existence, grounding time and world; it arises from our mortality. The tragic relates itself to the fundamental “acts” traditionally associated with being human (both of which are also bound to death and dying), namely thought and language. In other words, mortality and its relation to the tragic are intimately entwined with both philosophy and literature, and the troubled relation between them.