The choice of beginning this dialogue of the entwined history of philosophy and literature concerning the tragic and mortality with Aristotle bears upon a question of staging, of a scène (denoting both “scene” and “stage”). This mise-en-scène for a dialogue with the dead has been decided upon for several reasons. First, there is the difficulty demanded by this project of maintaining something of the literary, of not giving everything over to philosophy; hence the language and (mythical) figures employed in this framing (otherwise so foreign to a philosophical “thesis”). What is more, and perhaps the most difficult to understand initially, this framing figuration is set up to displace and bring into question the positing and positioning of the primary, of the origin. As I shall unfold throughout these chapters, there already appears to be a displacement of the “primal scene,” bound to an originary secondarity (the first being always already second, displaced, coming after something abyssally anterior).