This lecture will explore Marx’s revisionary appropriation of Hegel’s dialectic in the Eighteenth Brumaire as he searches (in vain?) for a new revolutionary subject amidst the “farce” of the post-1848 counterrevolution. Is there a connection between tragedy, revolution, and dialectic? We will be thinking about what is tragic about revolution and the revolutionary kernel of the tragic: the explosive power of its collisions; its catastrophic reversals; its belated recognitions and blinding insights; its rituals of purification; its temporal and spatial condensations; its intractable contradictions–freedom and necessity, singular and universal, individual and collective, subjective agency and objective process. Does the “end of tragedy” imply the end of revolution, and does this also mean the end of dialectic?