Tragedy is what is created by people who refuse to give up. And by the same token it explores, often by implication, what it might be at any given moment to give up. It makes us wonder what catastrophe is being averted by not giving up. For the tragic hero giving up means a change of heart, or changing one’s mind. It means giving up on an

aliveness in language, things begin to open up, and aliveness becomes a term of art for him.

There is then the language we are possessed by and that possesses us – man is the animal, Lacan writes, with his familiar melodramatic panache, captured and tortured by language

‘From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’ This is one of Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms, written during the war – between 1917 and 1918 – just after he received a diagnosis of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. ‘From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must

The Mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. William James, The Principles of Psychology

that life might get away from him, that it can somehow escape us; that even though we are to all intents and purposes alive, we have to arrange to annex and possess life as though it is something we must colonize, or claim, or appropriate.

Giving up is always sacrificing something in the service of something deemed to be better.

The Crow had lived in a land they understood to be given them by God; when it was taken away there was nothing they could do but give up on their lives. Just as people tend not to be mad but to be driven mad, people tend not to give up but to be forced into giving up.

In her remarkable and orientating book A Life of One’s Own – a book really about how we might sustain our aliveness: the aliveness, the being enlivened, that is the true antidote to giving up – the artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner describes her attempt to ‘decide what [her] aim in life was’: