This essay explores Foucault’s conception of the historical a priori through the lens of an archival ethics of eros. Highlighting the paradoxical nature of the historical a priori as both constitutive and contingent, it harnesses the temporal dynamism of experiences of the untimely as erotic. Drawing on the work of Anne Carson, the essay brings out the strangeness of eros as an ancient Greek word that remains unintelligible to us. That strangeness signals an ethics of dissonant attunement to (...) the untimeliness of the historical a priori. Such an ethics of eros names those experiences of connection and rupture that both bind and unbind us in relation to a biopolitical present that is radically unstable. Reading eros as strange thus ultimately allows us to find resources for an ethics of self-transformation in Foucault’s reflections on the temporal instability that the historical a priori names. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Petrarchan Love and the Pleasures of FrustrationAldo Scaglione—Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto III, st. 7As Byron ironically intimated, there is a behavioral connection between much of the literature of love and sexual frustration. What is known as medieval “courtly love” was an epiphany of idealized love. Whether self-imposed or forced restraint, it infused much (...) of Arthurian lore, the troubadours’ and then Petrarch’s lyric, and later partly merged with the Renaissance phenomenon of Platonic love. 1 But we wonder about possible historical derivation both on the cultural (literary) level and on the level of practical behavior. In other words, if taken case by case, is the similarity among cultural patterns and between literary phenomena and behavioral patterns a consequence of: 1) intertextual connections with courtly love and Petrarchism; 2) ideological circumstances similar to those which produced “courtly love”; or, inversely, 3) a broader human need that also lies in the background of courtly love? Where and how did frustration, denial, or sublimation acquire a deeper and greater value than consummation and satisfaction? Was it through religion, myth, morality, psychology, or a combination of these factors? Is this essentially an anthropological or rather a psycho-moral question? Does it originate in our perennial “nature” or in our time-bound mores?It seems safe to assume a combination of these factors. Ideals of psychologically sublimated, hence physiologically frustrated, love have an anthropological foundation and are inherent in any sophisticated cultural form. At the [End Page 557] same time, in the Western tradition they owe much to the persistence of the specific historical phenomena of courtly love and its Petrarchistic variations.Of course the folklore of love includes both satisfied and unfulfilled sorts. Jean Hagstrum’s Esteem Enlivened by Desire (1992) deals with the conjugal sort, implying consummation. He distinguishes his theme from “long-term relations that remain unconsummated, valorizing delayed or obviated climax, prolonged foreplay, ascetic discipline, traditional Platonic or Petrarchan love, or various forms of sublimation.” 2 Yet “this last... is dialectically and psychologically tied to [Hagstrum’s] main theme: it is one kind of long-term love relationship with often more than a tinge of the erotic.” 3 For Hagstrum these behavioral variations are determined by culture, since purely “natural” behavior would be more uniform and “unhistorically” steady. 4The notion that idealized desire is culture-bound finds support in Denis de Rougemont’s well-known thesis, that chivalry and courtesy are inventions of medieval Europe with no equivalent at other times and places except by direct influence or imitation: the behavior of an ancient Greek lover or a modern Japanese lover does not involve “chivalry” toward the woman. 5 For de Rouge-mont, ideal love came under the spell of what he called eros, defined as infatuation with desire itself rather than love for its natural end. Difficulties and obstacles became more meaningful than success, even to the point that, as in the story of Tristan and, differently and uniquely, in Dante’s poetry, the death of the beloved marked the culmination of eros. This eros postulates self-denial and sublimation for the sake of a higher achievement.Regardless of chivalry’s roots in medieval Europe, frustration can be a powerful ideal in non-Western cultures, too. One signal example might suffice. The Chinese literary classic, The Dream of the Red Chamber by Chan T’sao (ca. 1717–63), is the life story or Bildungsroman of a high prince who, after a [End Page 558] life of indulgence, decides to renounce the world and become an ascetic monk. 6 This problematic main character, Pao Yu, moves in the framework of Taoist and Confucian ideals, with the addition of some Buddhist religious traits. His final withdrawal from the world, however, which appears to family and society as a disappointing betrayal, obeys a psychological need for a frustration that represents a nobler achievement than the satisfaction of worldly ambition.The point of this essay is to sample a few cases of literary representations of idealized love while underlining their ideal and, at times, literal interconnections. I also mean to suggest... (shrink)

In _Plotinus on Love_, Alberto Bertozzi argues that love is the origin, culmination, and regulative force of the double movement that characterizes Plotinus' metaphysics: the derivation of all reality from the One and the return of the soul to it.

The article analyzes the key issues of the theology of the modern Greek theologian Chrysostomos Stumulis. Emphasizing the need for the development of Orthodox thought and a clear definition of its place and role in the modern world, the theologian raises issues that are a definite taboo not only for Orthodoxy, but for Christianity as a whole. The problem of the correlation of Eros love and Agape love acquires a new interpretation from theologian, which reveals new horizons for the (...) creation of the latest Christian anthropology. In this context, the view of the theologian is revealed on the relationship between the key anthropological categories of Christianity - faith, love and freedom. Violation of their interaction generates a distorted embodiment of these qualities, which necessitates degradation both of society and of man. The theologian emphasizes that the inability of the Church for millennia to boldly raise the question of the nature of Eros and give him a worthy place in the nature of incarnation limits both the Church and the understanding of Christ. Modern theological thought must respond to problems that are too acute in society, despite the fact that they can be a challenging task for Orthodoxy. The ability of theology to respond to them, generates a "high risk" theology, which has the determination to speak and show the morbidity of an idealized past, dare to point out that some aspects of universally accepted truths are obsolete. The formation of a culture of embodiment is the basis upon which the theologian develops the Theology of the Word of the Flesh. Spirituality, which denies incarnation, in the opinion of the author, appears as pastoral idolatry and leads to dehumanization of society. Understanding the culture of theology as a manifestation of the culture of the flesh, as an expression of all aspects of human life in the perspective of their transformations through the Person of the Incarnate, appears as a continuation and expansion of creation. Love requires the adoption of matter and the human body. Only in this sense disclosure of a human as a Person, in the full extent of his creative spirit. Holistic understanding and a fair assessment of love - eros describes it as an opportunity for revelation and knowledge of both human personality and divine. Violating questions of love, sexuality, desire and satisfaction, the theologian indicates that they have not only anthropological nature, but are a holistic manifestation of the essence of the church body. Consequently, the accusation of Eros by Orthodox theologians points to an inhuman society, full of objections and accusations in human existential self-consciousness. The theologian draws attention to the need for theological discourse in the 21st century in the context of the formation of modern anthropology, in the aspect of disclosure of its completeness, which was lost in the abolition of theology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 84-88 [Access article in PDF] Response to Yiannis Miralis, "Manos Hadjidakis: The Story of an Anarchic Youth and a 'Magnus Eroticus'" Jason Helfer University of Illinois There are two issues that struck me as essential from my consideration of Miralis'paper and the ideas of Manos Hadjidakis: Eros as a pedagogical idea and learner interactions in the music classroom. These ideas developed from (...) my interpretation of this paper, from my experiences in teacher training, and teaching in the public schools. I will examine each in turn, after a brief recapitulation of Hadjidakis' ideology.Hadjidakis' ideas were shaped through reaction against much of the work that took place within traditional musical conservatories and the larger Greek culture. They were also shaped by "his close friendships and collaborations with other poets, composers, and artists." Hadjidakis articulated his reactionary ideas not only through sound (that is, composition and performances), but also through the larger media. The cultural content of the broadcasting services in Greece leaves much to be desired although, as head of the radio Third Programme... Manos Hadjidakis brought a breath of fresh air to the stuffy studios of the broadcasting [End Page 84] organizations with talks, readings, discussion programmes-and the highly original daily program This is Lilliput.1The intended result of this work clarifies one of Hadjidakis' fundamental assumptions: one should be led to a deeper understanding of the self and others, beauty and goodness through engagement and perpetual reflection within the arts. Miralis asserts that the idea of reflection and the resultant self-knowledge and growth are qualities to which a good educator should aspire. Central to this claim is the idea of Eros.2Eros can be problematic if narrowly defined. "The name Eros has been wrongly restricted in common speech to what is really only one form of this universal desire. Just as the word "making" really means creation of any kind but has been misappropriated to one species... so the name of Eros is misappropriated to one species of passion, but really means 'any and every desire for good things and happiness.'"3 My understanding of Hadjidakis' idea of Eros is best articulated in the exchange between Socrates and Diotima in Plato's Symposium.4 Plato's idea of Eros is that the individual moves through a series of stages with the help of another until one has a "complete" and "clear" understanding of the good or beautiful.5 He makes a distinction between the good and the beautiful when Diotima asks Socrates to substitute the word "good" for the word "beautiful."6 This is not merely a change in semantic. Rather, it is a necessary transformation insofar as it emphasizes that a good thing may not be physically beautiful, but still considered good (such as the historical Socrates). The transcendence of the beautiful leading toward the "pure" good is an essential step in obtaining the Platonic understanding of Eros. "The state of mind of the philosopher who has attained knowledge of the good or of beauty is a desire to make beauty or goodness present wherever possible to a higher degree, it is not a desire to just to look at goodness or beauty. It is rather a desire to take anything that is partially good or partially beautiful and to make it more good or more beautiful."7 For Hadjidakis, the necessary quest for goodness and beauty was evident in the creation, combining, and sharing of poetry and music. This idea was not only apparent in his musical creations, but also in his work in the socio/political arena.Further, the Symposium begins as a series of speeches on the subject of love, but "Plato makes the word eros bear a burden far in excess of anything it had ever been made to bear; and the 'love' which he goes on to portray strains the language of eros almost out of recognition."8 However, love is not forgotten; rather "'Love'... is to mean not only the whole complex of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics and Eros in Aristophanes' Speech:Symposium 191E–192A and the ComediesPaul W. LudwigFor many of Plato's modern readers, Aristophanes' encomium of eros is the most memorablnvincing speech in the Symposium. Yet a key passage in the speech is not well understood. About three–fifths of the way through the speech, Aristophanes asserts that boys who are unashamed to lie with men are the most manly boys by nature. A great proof (...) of this, he says, is the fact that they alone end up in politics, where they become "real men."1 Since the same connection between sex and politics is the object of derision in Aristophanes' comedies, 2 many commentators have seen irony in this assertion.3 More have implicitly favored a straight reading, however, relying on the strength of the speech taken at face value. The type of irony at issue, dramatic or verbal, is also open to competing interpretations. Nor have the implications of either type of irony for the rest of the speech and for the dialogue as a whole been adequately treated. Does Plato make his character Aristophanes speak more wisely than he is aware of, in playful revenge for the comedian's own distorted portrait of Socrates?4 Or does Plato make use of the professional jester to clear the way for Socratic morality, on the assumption that Aristophanes' views about male homosexual eros were sufficiently well known to leave little doubt that his explicit praise of pederasty was tongue–in–cheek? [End Page 537]I. The Passage in ContextSymp. 191e–192aThe safest exegesis would first make sense of what Aristophanes professes to mean, comparing the philosophic content, which ought to stand or fall on its own merits, with the rest of the speech and with the other speeches in the dialogue, especially Socrates'. Irony could then emerge either as an alternative or as a supplement to the face–value reading. Assessment of the dialogue's own internal logic, as well as comparison with other Platonic dialogues, should precede recourse outside the authorship of Plato, viz. to the Aristophanic comedies.Aristophanes not only legitimates male–male desire, he asserts that it is best. He argues for his assertion on the grounds that male–male desire is connected to politics. This argument resonates with two themes sounded earlier in the dialogue, by Phaedrus and by Pausanias. The former praises male–male relations by saying that if by some chance a city or armed camp could come into being made up entirely of lovers and their boyfriends, their desire to refrain from all that is shameful and to seek honor in one another's eyes would result in their city's having the best possible government. If such were to fight side by side, even if their city or army happened to be small, they would well nigh conquer all mankind. For an in love would rather die than be seen in any act of cowardice () by his boyfriend (178d 4–179a 2). In other words, lovers make the best citizen–soldiers because the private aim of impressing the beloved serves the public goal of bravery in battle.Pausanias plays a variation on the same theme. He argues that barbarian tyrants outlaw pederasty because they are afraid of strong attachments arising among their subjects. Since proud thoughts are engendered by love, Pausanias reformulates the unwillingness to tolerate disgrace in battle into an unwillingness to acquiesce in tyranny. He cites the example of Harmodius and his lover Aristogeiton, who, in popular lore, dissolved the tyranny of the Peisistratids at Athens, thus clearing [End Page 538] the way for democracy (182b 6–c 7). Like Phaedrus, he mentions unmanliness as the crucial political defect that breeds tyranny (cf. 178d 4–6 with 182c 7–d 2). Like Phaedrus, he sees manliness as the willingness to take up arms, this time not in battle, but in a tyrannicide. And like Phaedrus, he sees male–male relations as the breeding ground for manliness.Unlike Phaedrus, Pausanias is especially concerned with education. The mature lover is assumed to possess already the civic virtues as well as a modicum of philosophy.5 He can initiate his younger... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of SapphoSarah MaceJane McIntosh Snyder. Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xi 1 261 pp. Cloth, price not stated.Snyder’s aim in Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho is to make Sappho’s poetry “come alive for the modern reader” (ix), which is to say, for the Greekless reader. To this end, the author bases her discussions (...) of Sappho’s poems on her own translations accompanied by transliterations of the Greek text. She also explains the system of inflection in Greek and Sappho’s lyric meters, discusses the meanings of Greek words, and lucidly summarizes some of the principal textual difficulties. The result is a far from unsophisticated introduction to Sappho’s poems and the complex issues of their interpretation. For the non-Greekless reader, Snyder reproduces Voigt’s text (with her own translations in parallel) in an appendix (163–218). Her notes (219–37) are scholarly but not pedantic and refer to most of the important recent and older scholarship on Sappho.Snyder’s translations of Sappho are good: quite literal, simple, and elegant. Although it is possible to take issue with a few renderings here and there, it would be caviling to cite examples here; I should note, however, that she has [End Page 636] a tendency to translate supplements (found, e.g., in Campbell) which do not appear in Voigt’s text, and has been somewhat inconsistent about bracketing supplements in her own translations (particularly, e.g., in 17 V). The transliterations would probably have served their purpose just as effectively if used only for illustrative purposes rather than throughout the text; presumably Greekless readers will not be able to connect sense and sound except where their attention is drawn to a particular phrase or verse. The first appendix, “A Guide to the Transliteration,” could have been improved by a pronunciation guide; nowhere does the author note distinctions between long and short alpha, iota, and upsilon.Snyder’s approach to interpreting Sappho’s lyrics is twofold. The author points out that her method “is inevitably that of the classical philologist” and that she is “heavily influenced by the assumptions of New Criticism and the tradition of close textual analysis” (ix). She intentionally steers clear of the subject of Sappho’s historical and social context (1), believing that “Sappho’s text—even in its battered state—has the power to stand alone, with the benefit of very little ancient social context to help explain the author’s purpose or intention” (79). At the same time Snyder identifies herself as a “feminist scholar” whose approach has been “significantly colored by the questions raised through the influence of women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, and postmodernism” (ix). Thus she wishes “to read what is left of [Sappho’s] songs for what they can say to women (and men who are willing to abandon a masculinist frame of reference) who hear her words today” (1).Chapter 1, “Sappho and Aphrodite,” focuses on the Hymn to Aphrodite (1 V). After a close reading of the poem, with attention to Sappho’s themes and techniques of composition, Snyder advances the view that it “subverts the traditional system of female subordination by creating a female authorial self that is of key importance in this song” (16); the powerful goddess featured here also contrasts with “the helpless, girlish whiner of the Iliad” (10). She concludes that the poem “offers us a clear paradigm for a woman-centered perspective on the universe, one in which the goddess and the relationships between women take center stage” (24). This movement from close, text-based readings to more general assertions sets the pattern for chapters 1–4. In a discussion of 2 V Snyder asserts that the temple and grove are “encoded as female space” (19) but does not demonstrate how the description differs substantively from other passages describing idyllic settings in archaic lyric (e.g., Ibycus 286 PMG). The chapter concludes with a summary treatment of other fragments involving Eros or Aphrodite.Chapter 2, “The Construction of Desire,” focuses on 31 V. Properly dismissing interpretations based on “the disease... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 477-481 [Access article in PDF] Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, eds. The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. viii + 457 pp. Paper, $26. The Sleep of Reason derives from a conference held at the Finnish Institute at Rome in 1997. In their introduction to the volume, the editors, (...) Martha Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, note that the incommensurability between sexual behavior/desire and reason was a perennial concern to ancient philosophers and that the modern discipline of philosophy has avoided this topic because of skittishness about "emotional topics" (3) and a pronounced tendency to consider ancient philosophy in a decontextualized manner. The editors accordingly have assembled a mixture of papers on ancient philosophy and other aspects of ancient culture to bring philosophical rigor and context to discussions of ancient sexual ethics. With only a third of the papers specifically about philosophy, however, the volume is more "context" than philosophy. Of greater concern, however, is their claim that the book covers both Greece and Rome. With the exception of Cantarella's discussion of Roman marriage law, Konstan's of Catullus, and Goldhill's few pages on Tertullian, substantive discussion of Latin sources is lacking. The book treats classical Greece in some detail and then skips through Greek sources to the Second Sophistic. Indeed, the failure to engage imperial Rome substantively leaves Goldhill's essay damagingly decontextualized. The editors' tendentious sketch of modern scholarship on ancient sexual behavior (7-8), which overlooks important contributions of Eva Keuls and Amy Richlin, is likewise regrettable.In the first paper, "Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality," David Halperin prescribes a proper way to investigate ancient sexual activity. Beginning with a discussion of Michel Foucault's famous statement on the progress from sodomy ("a category of forbidden acts") to the homosexual ("a life form... a species"), Halperin persuasively argues that Foucault's statement has been misunderstood as social history when it is better regarded "as a claim about the internal logic and systematic functioning of two different discursive styles of sexual disqualification" (28). Elsewhere, however, Halperin's disciplining zeal is wearisome. Opposing the terms deviant sexual morphology and deviant sexual subjectivity (the former deviance in gender presentation and the latter identity based on sexual activity), Halperin predictably asserts that the cinaedus possessed a deviant sexual morphology whose non-normative sexual behavior sprang from innate effeminacy. According to ideology recoverable from the sources, this is correct. Consideration of the cinaedus latens (from Firmicus [End Page 477] Maternus; see below), to take an example, brings up a question: what are we to make of this cinaedus if "the kinaidos's betrayal of his masculine gender identity was so spectacular as to brand him a deviant type of person and to inscribe his deviant identity all over his face and body" (34)? Caution is called for here; discourse surely produces less schematic results (see, e.g., Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 [1978], 96, or Judith Butler, GenderTrouble [1990], 28).In "Eros and Ethical Norms: Philosophers Respond to a Cultural Dilemma," Nussbaum surveys different approaches to the uneasy coexistence of sexual desire and education in pederastic relationships: if Eros is about loss of control in the face of desire, will the ero \ menos be cared for properly or merely be the means for desire's satisfaction? Nussbaum compares Socrates' explication of a "generous madness," wherein reverence and gratitude inspire kindly care, to the Stoics' valuation of friendship undertaken with consummate self-control. Nussbaum's work here has considerable value in its explication of the Stoic position and in her conclusion on the usefulness of analysis of ancient philosophic responses to ero \ s in current debates about sexuality (86-87).The next two papers, Maarit Kaimio's "Erotic Experience in the Conjugal Bed: Good Wives in Greek Tragedy" and Stephen Halliwell's "Aristophanic Sex: The Erotics of Shamelessness," take us to the Athenian stage. Starting from the observation that words for "bed"... (shrink)

This pioneering translation of Plato's Phaedrus, with detailed summary and full philological and exegetical notes taking into consideration all commentaries since Hermias, followed by a painstaking dialogical analysis of the text that shows what we must think at every moment in order to understand the thinking that brings the Greek text to life. In Kenneth Quandt's treatment, Plato's seminal work is allowed to create its own horizon and a new and profoundly unified interpretation emerges: Socrates's conversation with Phaedrus reaches (...) a vision of eros that explains the paradoxes of human nature, explodes the zero-sum game of master and slave, exposes the crabbed fetishism of the written word, and releases the mind to a life of contemplation fixed in a cloudless noon. (shrink)

Speaking to vital scholarship in ancient philosophy, including contemporary Greek academia, Dimitrios A. Vasilakis examines the notion of Love (Eros) in the key texts of Neoplatonic philosophers; Plotinus, Proclus, and the Church Father, Dionysius the Areopagite. The book outlines the crucial interplay between Plotinus, Proclus, and Dionysius' ideas on love and hierarchy in relation to both the earthly and the divine. Through analysing key texts from each philosopher, this enlightening study traces a clear historical line between pagan Neoplatonism and (...) early Christian philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Manos HadjidakisThe Story of an Anarchic Youth and a "Magnus Eroticus"Yiannis MiralisThe name of Manos Hadjidakis is probably unknown to contemporary musicians and music educators. After all, the Greek composer achieved his international fame back in 1961 when he won an Oscar for his soundtrack of the movie, "Never on Sunday." Numerous other awards followed from England, France, Germany, and of course, Greece. After his six years in (...) New York City (1966-1972), the composer returned to Greece where he produced a wealth of diverse musical work and had a profound impact on every aspect of Greek cultural life.Through his radio lectures, the notes on the covers of his records, and his articles in a variety of magazines and newspapers, he expressed his often radical ideas without any fear, but with honesty and passion. His commentaries covered a wide variety of topics such as music, poetry, and the arts, politics and nationalism in art, music education, tradition and change, and the overall cultural problems and dilemmas of his time. The magnitude of his musical and artistic work is yet to be fully discovered and appreciated.In this paper, I will provide a biography of Manos Hadjidakis with a closer [End Page 43] examination and description of his multifaceted work. Through this attempt, a better understanding of who Hadjidakis was and the impact that he had on the musical and cultural life of modern-day Greece will emerge. I decided to use numerous direct quotes from Hadjidakis' books and interviews not only because he eloquently expresses his thoughts and ideas, but also because through these quotes one can get a clear sense of his humor, intellect, and personality. This paper may also serve as food for thought for music educators in and outside of Greece. I say this because much of his work and thought remains unknown to the general public, as well as to music performers and educators. Unfortunately, to some extent this is true even in his own home country of Greece. Even though Hadjidakis was not a music educator in the specific sense of the term, many of the things that he fought for and achieved in his life had an identifiable educational component in them. For example, before each of the performances of the Orchestra of Colors that he founded and conducted, Hadjidakis always gave elaborate lectures on the composers and on the works to be performed at the amphitheatre of the Medical School of the University of Athens. Overall, if we use the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of "education" as "culture or development of powers, formation of character, as contrasted with the imparting of mere knowledge or skill,"1 Hadjidakis can be regarded as a true educator and many of his ideas have a direct implication for music education and education in general. This is what I will examine in the second part of this paper, focusing especially on his ideas on Eros and the importance of song.Hadjidakis' ChildhoodHadjidakis was born on October 23, 1925 in the city of Xanthi in northern Greece. The city was thriving due to the local cultivation and sale of tobacco. His father was a tobacco merchant and his family was initially well off and able to pay for his piano lessons. After the death of his father in 1931, when Hadjidakis was only six years old, the family moved to Athens where he attended high school at nighttime, while working various jobs during the day.During World War II Hadjidakis became involved in a number of political organizations and simultaneously took lessons in diction in order to realize his dream of becoming an actor. However, because he had difficulty pronouncing the letter "r," he had to turn his attention and creativity away from acting and in a different direction. Additionally he received some formal training in classical music, but according to his own words,[m]y relationships with formal music studies were extremely similar to my relationships with dentists; I always approached them and always left them before the end of the treatment. When I was eighteen years old I gave up [End Page 44] music and I surrendered myself to poetry. When... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 125.1 (2004) 148-152 [Access article in PDF] Paul W. Ludwig. Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiv + 398 pp. Cloth, $65. This is a very ambitious and very important, but also importantly flawed, book. It issues from an excellent stable, the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and admirably maintains that (...) stable's thoroughbred tradition of sophisticated interdisciplinarity and equally sophisticated interfacing between the ancient subject matter and the target contemporary readership. It aims not merely to interpret the ancient world but also to change the modern. It takes for its subject matter rival constructions of eros (unitalicized, since this is mostly not used as a mere transliteration of the Greek word): a sometimes deadly, sometimes fructifying, amalgam of altruistic and selfish passion, emotion, and reasonable calculation. The flaws lie not so much in the conception as in the execution. This is one of those books in which the whole is palpably less than the sum of its parts, some of which are quite exceptionally thoughtful and thought-provoking. It is partial, too, in that it selects its source texts very precisely and deliberately but neglects others that a less partial (in another sense) reader might have expected the author to tackle at comparable length and with comparable assiduity. It suffers, probably, from an overlong period of gestation. It would have benefited, certainly, from a Maxwell Perkins in the editorial cutting room.Eros is currently, if the pun may be permitted, a sexy topic in ancient or classical studies. Ludwig's own generally accurate listing of works cited (381-92—not, he stresses, xiii, a "bibliography") includes nearly a score of articles and books in the titles of which "eros" or "erotic" appears, one of them a translated article by Freud (Ludwig cites in all eight Freudian works, having no truck with feminist or other rejections of any or all versions of Freudian psychodynamic theory). To these could be added (exempli gratia) Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.'s Symposia: Plato, the Erotic and Moral Value(which appeared early enough, in 1999, for Ludwig to have taken it into account) or Thomas F. Scanlon's Eros and Greek Athleticsand Victoria Wohl's Love Among the Ruins. The Erotics of Democracy(which did not—they were also published in 2002). It is odd, however, that Ludwig seems to have overlooked Wohl's 1999 article, "The Eros of Alcibiades," which treats a subject that Ludwig himself could hardly not treat, and unfortunate that he did, in that the article appears in revised form in Wohl's new book, the chief premise of which is that "the erotics of democracy is not merely a trope but a dense point of convergence within Athenian social relations and subjectivity."Both Plato's Symposiumand Greek athletics bulk large in Ludwig's account, the former understandably more so than the latter. Indeed, Ludwig begins with a minutely detailed account of—just one speech from—the Symposium, that attributed to "Aristophanes," to which he counterpoints the views that he thinks he can confidently attribute to the "real" Aristophanes, the author of the extant comedies (on which Ludwig concentrates especially, including Clouds, Wasps, and Birds; he promises to return to Lysistrataand Ecclesiazusae). Besides [End Page 148] Plato and Aristophanes, Ludwig's author of choice is Thucydides, at any rate the Thucydides of the Periclean Funeral Oration and of the account of the Athenians' "erotic" decision to go to war in and over Sicily in 415. As for Wohl's claim (above), Ludwig could not agree more. The devil, however, is in the details.And, this is a very detailed book indeed. Ludwig first defines what he means and understands by eros in a variety of subtle and acute ways. It is a "predicament to be experienced and perhaps ameliorated rather than a problem to be solved once and for all" (18); it "occurs in cases in which the desire, whether sexual or not, becomes obsessional" (13, my emphasis); and it was... (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar a semântica da palavra Eros dentro da tradição cristã. Limita-se a algumas dessas significações. A reflexão mostra a limitação dessa expressão na língua portuguesa. Seu significado é muito mais rico na língua grega. Se a tradição cristã carregou esta palavra de forma negativa, outros Padres leram-na em sintonia com Ágape e com outros significados. A relação mística a interpreta como uma relação “erótica” entre homem e Deus. Esta intimidade procura explicar o aspecto do desejo (...) de Deus e da relação mútua entre aquele que ama e o amado, que tem sua raiz na busca mais íntima da humanidade. Negar por preconceitos palavras carregadas de desejos não divinos e nem dignos da humanidade, como na Antigüidade, é reduzir demais seu campo semântico na história. Esta palavra reflete o amor da alma para com Deus numa perspectiva mística, assume variações significativas, dentre tantas, como o amor de Jesus Cristo, como sinônimas de Ágape, do amor de Deus para com os homens, como amor individual ligado a Deus, o Eros como virtude e como castidade. A compreensão das dimensões do amor se realiza na capacidade de ver que todas elas são positivas e importantes para obtermos o equilíbrio da vida humana, numa harmonia destas dimensões constitutivas e importantes para a vida. Palavras-chave: Eros; Patrística; Amor; Alma; Mística; Virtude; Castidade e Ágape. ABSTRACT This article aims at demonstrating the semantics of the term Eros in Christian tradition, pointing out the limitations of the term in Portuguese. The scope of its meaning is much wider in Greek. If Christian tradition has charged the word with a negative feature, other priests have read it in tune with Agape and other meanings. The mystical perspective interprets it as an ‘erotic’ relationship between man and God. Such intimacy attempts to explain God’s desire and the mutual relation between the one who loves and the beloved, rooted in mankind’s most intimate longing. To deny, on account of prejudice, words charged with non-divine desires unworthy of humanity, as happened in antiquity, is to reduce their semantic field in history. That word reflects the soul’s love for God in a mystical perspective and assumes meaningful variations, among which Christ’s love, ‘Agape’ or God’s love for men, and individual love connected with God: ‘Eros’ as virtue and chastity. The comprehension of the dimensions of love takes place in the capacity to realize that they are all positive and relevant to human life’s balance, in the harmony of those dimensions that constitute life. Key words: Eros; Patristics; Love; Soul; The mystical; Virtue; Chastity; Agape. (shrink)

Le corps mythique du héros.Les dieux et les héros grecs sont refoulés dans les ténèbres comme des chauve-souris, Jésus est la lumière victorieuse : ce sont les mots de Théodoret dans sa Graecarum affectionum curatio, l’un des plus précieux témoignages de l’apologétique chrétienne. Dans cette œuvre, l’évêque de Cyr parle aux païens de leurs héros et en particulier de l’iniquité du culte héroïque : cette représentation ne s’explique pas seulement par les topoi de la rhétorique chrétienne, mais aussi par rapport (...) à la réflexion de Théodoret sur l’endurance des ascètes. Ce sont en effet les corps qui « posent le plan de l’énonciation » : les corps faibles des héros, destinés à être vaincus par la souffrance, incapables de supporter la douleur et la maladie, face aux corps trempés par la karteria des martyrs et des ascètes, qui prennent sur eux la souffrance et en font ainsi la « marque » de la sainteté, en actualisant par leur hyponomè celle du Christ. La représentation que Théodoret donne des corps vaincus des héros « marque » l’éloignement de la vera religio du mythe; l’auteur esquisse des modalités nouvelles de la relation entre l’humain et le divin, et il décrit un scénario, où les corps sont aussi éloquents que le logos.The mythical body of the hero. The Greek heroes and gods are vanished into darkness, like bats; actually, Jesus Christ is the victorious light: these are Theodoret’s words in the Graecarum affectionum curatio, one of the most important texts of Christian apologetics. In his work, Theodoret offers to pagans a picture of their own heroes, in order to demonstrate the iniquity of the heroic cult. Evidences of such a statement is provided through Christian rhetorical topoi. However, an important argument against the heroic cult is the practice of ascetic endurance. According to Theodoret, on the one hand, the bodies of pagan heroes, who are unable to endure suffering and diseases, are doomed to be defeated by pain. On the other hand, martyrs and ascetics are able to endure suffering and to assume it, just through their bodies, hardened by karteria, so that they turn it into the mark of holiness. In this sense, Christ’s hypomone is re-enacted by the ascetic hypomone. Therefore, the heroic bodies, defeated by their own inability to endure suffering, stress the distance between vera religio and myth. So, the Christian author displays a new kind of relationship between humanity and divinity, describing a scene in which bodies are as meaningful and eloquent as logos. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wild LoveCynthia Willett’s Biosocial Eros EthicsAnn V. MurphyI’ll frame my comments in honor of Cynthia Willett’s work in light of two recent anecdotes:Anecdote I: It happened that one evening as I was reading Willett’s most recent monograph Interspecies Ethics—in particular the chapter on animals’ capacity for laughter and humor—my wonderful (if somewhat insubordinate) Airedale terrier, Nora Mae Murphy, heard me laughing, trotted into the living room, jumped on the (...) couch, looked at me with concern, stared down at the book in my hand, then placed her paw on my arm as if to check my pulse, eyes wide and ears slicked back. Nora is used to me reading philosophy at night; but she is not used to me laughing loudly while doing so. Clearly, she was curious. I smiled in recognition of what Nora’s behavior had enabled me to realize: I don’t often laugh when I read philosophy, not like I did that night while reading Willett’s work.Anecdote II: Cindy came out to New Mexico last spring to give the keynote address at our department’s annual graduate student conference. The afternoon she arrived, a few graduate students had arranged to take her on a hike in a nature preserve, a beautiful tract of land alongside the Rio Grande, which winds through Albuquerque. The next day, two of [End Page 50] the graduate students were in my office and I asked how the hike went. The students looked at each other, shuffled a bit, and stared at the floor until one announced, “Well, we kind of got locked in the preserve.” Me: “You got locked in the nature preserve?” “Yep, but it all worked out okay. She was cool with it,” one student reported. The other added: “Yeah, she’s pretty wild.”That conversation happened months before I was asked to speak on and to Willett’s work, but that conversation, that compliment, that word—“wild”—came to mind many times as I was preparing these comments in her honor. And I mean “wild” in the best sense: as rowdy and irreverent and joyful. There is a wildness to Willett’s texts in their performative aspect, one that marks them as singular. Bucking certain philosophical tendencies to overindulge a metaphorics of war and violence, Willett’s own work evinces an entirely different philosophical orientation, one that takes love, and more specifically eros, as its bedrock. The wildness of Willett’s ethical philosophy comes into play in the truly variable scenes in which Willett locates eros and its promise. It’s a wild kind of love that informs Willett’s ethics, one that refuses domestication, refuses to be hemmed in by the borders between species, refuses to be fixed. The scope that Willett assigns eros is broad, countering the tendency to reduce it to the sexualized and sentimental contexts in which it is often placed.1At the heart of Willett’s deliberations across her four monographs and many articles is an abiding concern with, and celebration of, eros as a site of social, political, and ethical promise. A preoccupation with eros is evident in her work from the very beginning. In her first monograph, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (1995), Willett frames her project in reference to Audre Lorde’s claim (in Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”) that European American culture has perpetuated an understanding of power that parses the erotic from the spiritual and political and as a consequence has “suppressed the deepest source of power and knowledge in our lives” (Lorde 1984, 55, cited in Willett 1995, 7). This first book suggests new conceptions of freedom and ethical subjectivity based on social eroticism, a project furthered in her second monograph The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (2001), where hubris is understood with and against the Greeks as an assault on this primary sociality. “In response to the Greeks we might say that the person is born, not of honor, but of love. Sociality, or social eros, and not honor is the origin and the goal of the person and the positive core of freedom... (shrink)

Une étude sur l'opéra wagnérien et ses principaux thèmes, notamment la mort et la rédemption ainsi que leurs liens avec l'antisémitisme et l'hitlérisme. L'auteur explique comment le compositeur a tenté de résoudre à travers ses oeuvres les crises politique et spirituelle que traverse alors l'Allemagne, et établit une comparaison avec les opéras de Mozart. Electre 2018.

Eros and Philia are the two Greek words, which can be translated as love in English. This article focuses on the idea that Plato weaves around the emotion of love. On the one hand, there is the verb philein and its cognates —a word we use all the time when we talk about philanthropy, philosophy, philharmonic, and the like. On the other hand, “to love” is also the proper translation of the verb eran. Eros is the name of (...) this psychological force, erastês designates a lover, and erômenos is the one who is loved. Erôs is characterized here as a desire. That does not mean that whenever someone wants something, he loves it. The relationship goes in the other direction: whenever someone loves, he wants. This thesis says nothing about what kind of desire one has, when one loves. It may be a desire that Plato would locate in the appetitive part of the soul, but it need not be. The word Plato most often uses for desire in the passage examined in this article, as so often, is epithumia. But an epithumia can be any sort of desire—it is not necessarily an “appetitive” desire for food, drink or sex. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jean Wyatt THE CELEBRATION OF EROS: GREEK CONCEPTS OF LOVE AND BEAUTY IN TO THE LIGHTHOUSE A voracious reader all her life, Virginia Woolf stored up patterns and images which she naturally wove into the fabric of her novels.1 Integrating literature of the past into her own works was also an affirmation of her belief that "everything comes over again a little differently," as Eleanor says in The (...) Years. Acutely aware of the prevailing fluidity of human life, Virginia Woolf sought a counterbalance in the principle of eternal recurrence. The whole chain of human history forms a "gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible." It becomes perceptible when elemental forces in human life coincide with the forms of individuals, "making them symbolical, making them representative."3 In Mrs. Ramsay, Virginia Woolf combines a personal portrait of her mother with an evocation of eternal life forces in the "symbolical outline" (p. Ill) of Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and marriage, that Mrs. Ramsay irradiates. Events, too, can be "symbolical, and therefore perhaps permanent," in the words of Bernard in The Waves, when they reflect the continuity of human experience. The dinner party in To the Lighthouse contains ritual elements, reminders that it is one in a series of communal feasts. The search for truth in the midst of human pleasures, by means of human love, recalls one such banquet in particular, the Symposium.'' The central concerns of the Symposium are those of To the Lighthouse: striving for knowledge through love; the desire to create that beauty arouses; the paradox of the eternal in the midst of the transitory. The figures and patterns of Greek literature were part of Virginia Woolf's mental formation. She began learning Greek at King's College in 1897, at the age of fifteen.6 For the next few years, Greek was her chief refuge from a stifling Victorian society. From 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. every day she read Greek: Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, all of Sophocles, Plato. Twice a week she met for Greek lessons, first 160 Jean WyATT161 with Clara Pater, then with Janet Case. Her letters speak of Greek as "the greatest of comforts to me" (April, 1900), "my daily bread, and a keen delight to me" (June, 1900); it "has so much attraction for me... that I don't want to do anything else" (February, 1905).8 A diary entry from 1924 shows how Greek "worked its way" into her life. Upon meeting a herd of cattle, "I waved my stick and stood at bay; and thought of Homer.... some mimic battle. Grizzle grew more and more insolent and excited and skirmished about yapping. Ajax? That Greek, for all my ignorance, has worked its way into me." Seeing Grizzle as Ajax is not different in kind from transforming Mrs. Ramsay into Aphrodite, Mr. Carmichael into Poseidon. Greek was in the forefront of Virginia Woolf's mind in 1924 because she had been reading Greek steadily since 1922 in preparation for the article "On Not Knowing Greek." "The amount of reading... that went into the production of that essay... was remarkable," comments Quentin Bell. She published the essay in 1925, the year she began To the Lighthouse. "On Not Knowing Greek" shows that Virginia Woolf knew the Symposium well: she discusses it for four pages, not with the analytical lens of a literary critic, but with loving familiarity. She first read the Symposium when she was about sixteen, but her intimacy with it suggests that she must have read it more than once. At the center of the Symposium is Diotima's doctrine: man has to work through a series of human loves to arrive at the eternal. Lily pursues a similar quest for knowledge through love. She loves Mrs. Ramsay, but, unable to satisfy her love on a personal level, casts about for a way of reaching "the spirit in her, the essential thing" (p. 76). She finally finds a way of loving that takes her to the essence of things when, ten years after Mrs. Ramsay's death, she sees and loves a Mrs. Ramsay who transcends the individual to become the form of love and beauty. To understand the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Sophocles: AntigoneE. Christian KopffMark Griffith, ed. Sophocles: Antigone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii + 366. Cloth, $64.95; paper, $24.95.Mark Griffith's edition of Sophocles' Antigone is a welcome addition to the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. The best volumes in the series, inaugurated by T. B. L. Webster's Philoctetes (1970), enrich the traditional commentary format with the editor's distinctive scholarly concerns: general editor P. E. Easterling's Trachiniae (...) (1982) displays a sensitive literary taste; R. D. Dawe's Oedipus Rex (1982) provides a lively example of a first-rate mind reading a great text, as does Alan Sommerstein's Eumenides (1989); Sommerstein doubts that his play was originally called "Eumenides," while Griffith's Prometheus (1983) gives reasons to question the Aeschylean authorship of Prometheus Vinctus. Griffith's Antigone is less controversial, but it lives up to the series' high standards.The introduction has almost thirty pages of background information on Sophocles and Athens, the myth, dramatic structure, technique, and style, the production of Greek drama, and the transmission of the text. The forty pages on "The Meaning of the Play" contain short essays with bibliography on aesthetics, lessons, characters, ethics, contradictions (human/divine, polis/oikos, male/female), politics, and fantasies. The section on character is especially clear and forceful, but I found the pages on fantasies less focused and their discussion of Freudian criticism, with the rambling footnote on page 60, distracting. Colleagues will learn much from these pages, but students might well skip them and start reading the play.The text is temperately conservative, with good taste displayed when conjectures and variant readings are chosen. The commentary is careful, scholarly, and yet accessible to students. Difficult passages are translated with close attention to particles. The many notes devoted to explicating the nuances of the word reminded me of the story that Denniston was supposedly overheard telling a student, " can sometimes mean 'and.'"Each chorus is accompanied by a metrical description based on a colometry which is often that of R. D. Dawe's Teubner (1985). Griffith's short essays explaining the metrical patterns are usually successful. An exception is his note on [End Page 274] 1115-16/1126-27, which he prints as one long colon, which "could be classified as a kind of 'dragged enoplian'... or as 'acephalous dactylo-epitrite.'... In either case the affiliation to aeolics remains clear" (316). This is the kind of explanation which convinces people that metrics is mumbo-jumbo. Griffith refers to A. M. Dale, Lyric Metres of Greek Drama (Cambridge 1968, 191 n. 3), but Dale's note does not explain why she prefers this colometry over others. The colometry of Lloyd-Jones and Wilson's Oxford Classical Text (1990) is better than Dale's and Griffith's because it is easier to understand (telesillean with resolved first element/ iambic penthemimer) and fits the meter of the rest of the ode. This is also true of the colometry of manuscript L, Laurentianus 32.9 (telesillean/iambic dimeter/telesillean), which I prefer.Griffith usually ignores L's colometry, although for the third stasimon (781-800), the Eros Ode, he agrees with it, including word break at the end of 789/799, and gives a good discussion of the metrical and verbal traits that make the poem a satisfying unity. In other choruses the colometry of manuscript L is superior to that concocted by modern scholars, for example, the second stasimon (582-625), the Ate Ode. At 604-5/615-16, the beginning of the second strophe and antistrophe, Griffith prints glyconic () followed by hipponactean (). L presents these lines as hipponactean and hagesichorean (), an acephalous hipponactean. With modern editors' colometry, the hipponactean is a pendent clausula to the preceding glyconic. Two points noted by Griffith favor the manuscripts. The modern colometry entails word break in both strophe and antistrophe, so that, as Griffith notes (223) "'dovetailing' makes the distinction between 'glyconic' and 'hipponactean' arbitrary." The modern colometry is clearer on paper than in performance. The ancient colometry begins a pattern of increasingly acephalous verses, as noted by Bruno Snell, in Griechische Metrik (Göttingen 1984, 62).More important, as Griffith notes sagaciously: "The basic motif... (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, (...) autonomy , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 99-118MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Klossowski's AlternativePeter CanningThe sympathy that binds friends together into an extended family (a socius or community of allies), countering the impulse to tear each other apart, stops at the gate where the stranger is received with courtesy or turned away. Is it safe to let the other in, past the frontier of my territory, my extended Self? An ancient Greek proverb (...) says that "a friend is a second self"—which echoes the reversible sense of the word guest in ancient Indo-European languages (*hosti-pets-, "guest-master"), which continues into modern French hôte, "host" or "guest." This reciprocity actualizes the inclusive "or": one is guest or host in a reciprocal relation of hospitality. The friend is another self in that each becomes master of the other's house when received by the other as guest. Nor is the relation of hospitality limited to friendship; for according to an archaic tradition the Other, the "stranger sent from god" (as Homer says) is also to be received as guest-master of one's house.These are mythic and etymological conditions, probably idealized and in any case obsolete—what does the archaic institution of hospitality (supposing it was ever practiced in its ideal form) have to do with the crisis of social relation today?In what follows I propose an extended Klossowskian response to this question. But as a preliminary abbreviation let us turn the question around: is any social relation, today or any other day, even possible without passing through—or holding open—the moment of hospitality, of reception of the other, friend or stranger?When I let the other cross my threshold and penetrate the precinct of my home, my family, my own and proper extension of Self, when I give him my friendship and trust, it is then he becomes dangerous to me.1 Menelaus gave Paris his trust as an honored guest, whereupon his guest-friend abducted his wife, instigating the Trojan War.What is the psychic situation conditioned by receiving the other inside my Self? Taken literally, topologically, it is that the other as stranger becomes a part of me, inside me, that is, outside my control. What is inside and what is out, who is me and who is not-me? What and where is the psyche; what is its topology? Does it have an interior and exterior separated by a border between? "To see in the human soul a place [lieu, locus]—no longer to regard the human person otherwise than cohabited by the powers that can take possession of it: exterior powers, autonomous, those evoked by the Gospel—the ornate house that awaits the visit of demons and which, visited, is the parable [End Page 99] of the soul of each among us; this mental topology... the pathos itself [being] only a topos" [Monnoyer 35].Psyche and home are not only analogous or parabolic but the same situation, the same structure. Hospitality is a practice of that patho-logical identity, and a parable of psyche as locus of the Other.* * *Preliminary to entering further into this topic, it is necessary to raise another Klossowskian problem, of equal urgency (and intersecting that of hospitality): the place of perversion.Rather than take space to justify Klossowski's numerous equivocal apologias for the "singular case" of Sade (or Nietzsche),2 theorist of perversion, rhetorician, metteur en scène anxious to infect others with his unspeakable visions (demonic forms of perversion itself) and provoke them to institute the secret cult and practice of his theories—let us take up directly the matter of a definition: what is perversion? More to the point: what is its logic?Freud derives perversion from narcissism: to take one's own body as the object of the drive (or as object of desire), that is, as the object of eros and thanatos, self-love and self-destruction. But all drive passes by way of this loop from the body to itself—to the point that it becomes a question of how one is ever to get... (shrink)