What drives bodies together? What inclines them towards one another? What keeps these bodies inclined towards each other as the world around them continues to fall apart? In this article, I argue that the circulation of grief and anger produces a choral inclination, a relationality forged through our emotional responses to loss. Coming together through this choral inclination allows us to acknowledge loss, confront its conditions, and enact a collective response to it. I engage with feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s concept (...) of inclination and its further development by political theorist Bonnie Honig to theorize the posture and politics of togetherness. Both thinkers turn to prefabricated relationships – between mother and child or sisters – and in proposing an alternative, I offer choral inclination to help theorize the dynamics that bring people together when neither these prefigured relationships nor access to care is readily available. I turn to grief and anger as emotions that circulate in the context of loss, and pluralize the affective responses through which our bodies incline and thus politicize one another. I develop these claims through a novel reading of Euripides’ Hecuba. In the final section, I briefly explore the motivations and leadership structure found within the Movement for Black Lives to link develop the implications for choral inclination for feminist and democratic politics. In contrast to commonplace frameworks that consider tragedy in primarily its historical context, I mobilize ancient tragedy to help theorize and enact feminist responses to the contemporary context. (shrink)

This essay challenges dominant interpretations of Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia as affirming an ethical, non-political conception of truth-telling. I read the lectures instead as depicting truth-telling as an always political predicament: of having to appear distant from power, while also having to partake in some sense of political power. Read in this way, Foucault’s lectures help us to understand and address the disputed politicality of truth-telling – over who counts as a truth-teller, and what counts as the truth – that (...) his ethical interpreters tend to neglect. Yet the essay also shows that Foucault’s depiction of the predicament of truth-tellers is problematically gendered: focused on the masculine problem of moving in and out of the public sphere, rather than on the experience of the dispossessed, who are excluded from political power altogether. The essay mobilizes an alternative reading of one of Foucault’s key texts – Euripides’ Ion – to draw out an alternative, more democratic model of the predicament of truth-telling: of having to constitute power that can lend significant to truth-telling, while speaking from a position of powerlessness. (shrink)

Intertwined with the celebration of Athenian democratic institutions, we find in the "Oresteia" another chain of interactions, in which the elite families of Argos, Phokis, Athens, and even Mount Olympos employ the traditional aristocratic relationships of xenia and hetaireia to renegotiate their own status within-and at the pinnacle of-the civic order, and thereby guarantee the renewed prosperity of their respective communities. The capture of Troy is the result of a joint venture by the Atreidai and the Olympian "family" . Although (...) Agamemnon falls victim to his own mishandling of aristocratic privilege, his son is raised by doryxenoi in Phokis , a relationship which is mirrored by that with the Olympian "allies," Hermes and Apollo. Orestes' recovery of his father's position is thus shown to depend upon a network of "guest-friends" and "sworn-comrades," reinforced by the traditional language of oaths and reciprocal loyalty. In the Eumenides, the alliance between the Olympian and Argive royal families is re-invoked as the basis both for Athena's protection of Orestes, and finally for Zeus' concern for his daughter's Athenian dependents. In contrast to this successful "networking," and the resultant benefits that trickle down to the citizens of Argos and Athens, stand the seditious oaths and perverted "comradeship" of Aigisthos and Klytaimestra; likewise, the Erinyes are unable to draw on equivalent claims of pedigree or xenia to those enjoyed by Orestes and Apollo. Like all Greek tragedies, the "Oresteia" presents the action through constantly shifting viewpoints, those of aristocrats and commoners, leaders and led, while the propriety of this hierarchy itself is never questioned. And although the action moves from monarchical Argos to an incipiently democratic Athens, paradoxically we hear less and less about "ordinary," lower-class citizens as the trilogy progresses. Thus, at the same time that the trilogy reinforces the sense of collective survival and civic values , it also suggests that these can be maintained only through the proper interventions of their traditional leaders. Aeschylus' plays were composed during a time when the Athenian democracy was still developing, and elite leadership and patronage were still taken for granted. Attic tragedy and the City Dionysia may be seen as a site of negotiation between rival ideologies within the polis, wherein a kind of "solidarity without consensus" is achieved. Written and staged by the elite under license from the demos, the dramas play out dangerous stories of royal risk-taking, crime, glory, and suffering, in such a way as to reassure the citizen audience simultaneously of their own collective invulnerability, and of the unique value of their leading families. (shrink)

The uneasy relation between violence and sanctity, between oppression and culture, underlies the dramatic action of Euripides' "Ion." Ion's monody ends with his threatening to shoot the birds who would soil the temple, or in other words, to protect purity through violence and death. The earlier part of his song also shows how the forces of exclusion and domination create sacredness. Ritual silence , restricted access to the aduton, ritual chastity, even the irreversible transformation of natural gardens into laurel brooms (...) and jugs of water all suggest how violence and domination create culture out of nature. The rape of Creusa epitomizes the relation between culture and violence. Her meeting with Ion reveals the psychological cost of social oppression and portrays the imperfect interdependence between moral feelings and legal institutions. Various dramatic devices portray the divisions in Creusa's mind that the injustice has created, devices including self-address, riddling speech, self-restraint, and silence. Her reluctance to pose her bold question to the oracle, and her displacement of the story onto the person of a raped "friend," show her resentful awareness that social institutions collaborate in the oppression. Ion's disillusionment echoes her resentment more theoretically. Together their comments show how moral rules and legal institutions, though fundamentally based on personal feelings such as shame and indignation, enact these feelings only imperfectly; the resulting dissonance in turn leads to further indignation and moral reflection. Finally, the allusions to fifth-century politics in Ion's speech on Athenian politics and elsewhere suggest that democracy itself depends on political domination and imperialism. (shrink)

Among the most characteristic motifs in Greek mythology is the sexual union of a god with a mortal woman and the resultant birth of a hero. The existence of hexameter poetry listing the women thus favoured – the famous women in the underworld in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, and above all theEoiai– is evidence of an interest in the women involved, not only in their heroic sons, and suggests that already at an early date the theme was the (...) object not merely of passive reception but of an active consciousness. TheEoiai, indeed, saw such unions as an integral part of an earlier and better age, when mortals and immortals were closer:ξυναὶ γὰρ τότε δαῖτες ἔσαν, ξυνοὶ δὲ θόωκοιἀθανάτων τε θεῶν καταθνητοῖς τ' ἀνθρώπων(fr. 1 Μ–W)But it was not to be supposed that such a potentially rich theme would receive a unitary treatment. Already in their first appearances – at least, the first appearances for us – many individual stories are clearly distinguished by their different circumstances. A common variable is the existence, the kind and the degree of difficulty experienced by the woman as a result of the encounter. Polymele, for instance, mother of Eudorus by Hermes atIliad16.179–92, has seemingly no difficulty in leaving her child to be brought up by her father while she goes on to marry a mortal husband. But suffering of some sort is perhaps more usual, and famous sufferers include Cassandra, punished for spurning Apollo's advances; Danae, first imprisoned by her father in a brazen tower to prevent her pregnancy, and then locked in a chest with her baby and set afloat on the waves; and Semele, destroyed when her lover Zeus appeared to her in his true form. Such different experiences could suggest further multiple versions of the same general theme, diverging especially in the consequences of the union (or attempted union) for the mortal partner. Even the same characters could potentially undergo quite different variants of the story; the chief constant is the unfailing popularity of the mythical motif. (shrink)

This paper explores how gender can operate as a disguise for class in an examination of the self-sacrifice of the Maiden in Euripides' Children of Herakles. In Part I, I discuss the role of human sacrifice in terms of its radical potential to transform society and the role of class struggle in Athens. In Part II, I argue that the representation of women was intimately connected with the social and political life of the polis. In a discussion of iconography, the (...) theater industry and audience I argue that female characters became one of the means by which different groups promoted partisan interests based on class and social status. In Part III, I show how the Maiden solicits the competing interests of the theater audience. After discussing the centrality and marginality of the Maiden's character, I draw upon the funeral oration as a comparative model with which to understand the quite different role of self-sacrifice in tragedy. In addition to representing and mystifying the interests of elite, lower class and marginal groups, the play glorifies a subordinate character whose contradictory social status embodies the social position of other “marginal” members of Athenian society. The play stages a model for taking political action to transform the social system and for commemorating the tragic costs of such undertakings. (shrink)

In modern times a gap has appeared between the arts of history and literature, and the sciences of historicism and criticism. Many modern critics, historians, and teachers of literature and history (and even many so‐called authors of literature) have welcomed, or at least complied with, the “scientification” of their arts, resulting in widespread illiteracy with regard to literature and history. The solution to this problem lies in a (re‐)investigation of how the art of literature teaches us the truth. I maintain (...) that the lifeblood of literature is the set of common joys and griefs, the common blessings and sufferings, of mankind. Without a communication of these passions as passions with the result of a transformation or shaping of the soul – without a mimesis, as the Greeks would say –across the boundaries of tribe, race, gender and era, there is no literature; and no literacy. Using a scene from Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, I argue that these passions are part of the truth (or falsity) of any story involving human beings. So literature and history would both be restored if the writers, readers, and teachers of each developed a deeper concern for the whole truth. (shrink)