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Peter Szondi famously claimed that after Aristotle there was a “poetics of tragedy,” but after Schelling there was a “philosophy of the tragic.” Lacoue-Labarthe argues that this is only half correct, in that this philosophy of the tragic is still and also a poetics of tragedy, insofar as this philosophy is based on Aristotle and on the question of the tragic effect. In a commentary on letter 10 of Schelling’s Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (written in 1795), Lacoue-Labarthe shows that Schelling articulates in its most pointed form the historical dialectic played out in the struggles of Greek tragedy, a struggle in which mimesis reaches into a kind of sublime terror, an unsublatable mimesis that links catharsis with death. The chapter ends with a reminder that a thinking of dialectics and death is at the core of Hegel’s thought and with a quotation from Georges Bataille, who exclaimed, in “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” that the deathly scene of sacrifice “is a comedy!”