Nostalgia del mito: l'impossibilità della mimesis in Euripide

Starting from a renewed comparison between the three Orestes reconnaissance scenes in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, this paper aims to show that what we have in Euripides is not so much rationalist polemics, but rather a new idea of the tragic theatre, carried out through a systematic activity of deconstruction related to myth, characters, and the form of drama. The drama remains formally complete, but there is a destructuration of the tragic form and of the myth, so that the act of mimesis and the object itself of mimesis to a fragment: the fragmented performance mirrors the split between myth, mimesis and reality, and in its turn mirrors the split between man and existence.