This book is a philosophical reflection on the experience of time from within exile. Its focus on temporality is unique, as most literature on exile focuses on the experience of space, as exile involves dislocation, and moods of nostalgia and utopia. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback proposes that in exile, time is experienced neither as longing back to the lost past nor as wanting a future to come but rather as a present without anchors or supports. She (...) articulates this present as a "gerundive" mode, in which the one who is in exile discovers herself simply being, exposed to the uncanny experience of having lost the past and not having a future. To investigate this, the book establishes a conversation among three authors whose work has exemplified this sense of gerundive time: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot, and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The book does not aim to discuss how these authors understand the relation between time and exile but enters in conversation with them in relation to this question. Attempting to think and express this difficult sense of time from within exile, the book engages with the relation between thought and language, and between philosophy and literature. Departing from concrete existential questions, it opens new philosophical and theoretical modes through which to understand what it means to be present in times of exile. (shrink)

PVS may be a modern form of an ancient punishment, exile from human community.

Pourquoi s'exile-t-on? Pour échapper à l'injustice, reconquérir une liberté menacée, fuir les violences, les persécutions, la mort, la misère ou s'arracher à la résignation. On part quand rien ne fait plus écran au risque d'anéantissement, que l'espérance devient lettre morte, alors même que la vie n'a pas été accomplie. Les épreuves qui conduisent aujourd'hui à l'exil ont leurs origines dans les déchirures du nouvel ordre mondial : la guerre économique sans merci des états de la planète ; l'incapacité à (...) maîtriser la réalité du marché financier ; le chômage de masse ; l'exclusion des citoyens sans abri de toute participation à la vie démocratique des états ; l'aggravation de la dette qui affame et réduit au désespoir une grande part de l'humanité ; les guerres interethniques qui se multiplient, guidées par le fanatisme et les fantasmes de la communauté absolue ; les effets destructeurs des dictatures ; les pathologies de l'identité collective fondées sur l'idéalisation de la haine ; la violence naturalisée réduite à une simple gestion ; la cruauté ; le nettoyage ethnique, etc. Pour ces raisons, il est temps de faire de l'exil une catégorie politique de portée universelle et signifiante pour la modernité. Prendre en compte cette exigence permet de repenser les termes de la politique afin de sortir de la passion identitaire et de poser la seule question qui vaille : est-ce qu'on peut faire quelque chose et sous quelle forme ou est-ce qu'on ne peut rien? L'objectif est d'esquisser une éthicosmopolitique qui se présente comme une politique de la condition humaine, un pari sur la capacité de chacun de répondre sans exception à la vulnérabilité d'autrui, un tout-autre-être-au-monde, une forme de vie qui nous lie les uns aux autres. L'enjeu est considérable. Penser politiquement l'exil, c'est chercher à comprendre ce que veut dire être-ensemble, être au monde, être sujet ; c'est ouvrir le monde à la totalité des possibilités qu'il contient. (shrink)

This volume offers a history of the role of exile in the Greek city-state in the period c. 404-146 BC, from the end of the Peloponnesian War to the Roman conquest of the Greek world.

In the Gorgias, Socrates argues that just punishment, though painful, benefits the unjust person by removing injustice from her soul. This paper argues that Socrates thinks the true judge (i) will never use corporal punishment, because such procedures do not remove injustice from the soul; (ii) will use refutations and rebukes as punishments that reveal and focus attention on psychological disorder (= injustice); and (iii) will use confiscation, exile, and death to remove external goods that facilitate unjust (...) action. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point the frequency with which Ovid refers to his earlier works in his Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Alongside his treatment of the Metamorphoses in the exile poetry, it is suggested that Ovid refers, on a number of occasions, to his Fasti and the progress he is making on it. He does so by using the incipit of his calendar poem, Tempora; this term is sometimes combined with signa (‘stars’), which are also mentioned (...) in the opening couplet of the Fasti. It is proposed that Ovid's attitude toward his Fasti changes over the course of his exile, during which time he is, at various junctures, editing his calendar, and that some of these changes are discernible in the exile poetry; they result in part from his entertaining the possibility of using his Fasti as leverage in securing a mitigation of his punishment. Poems discussed in detail are Tristia 1.1, 1.7, 2.547–52, 5.3; Epistulae ex Ponto 2.1, 4.8. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters,John GoodliffeExile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters, by David Patterson; xii & 204 pp. University Press of Kentucky, 1994, $29.95.From the title of this book one might expect its principal focus to be on geographical and/or political exile, exile as punishment, of which there have been many examples in Russian life and letters, (...) both before and after the 1917 Revolution. But David Patterson prefers to interpret the word “exile” in a wider metaphysical and existential sense, so connecting it with the problem of alienation and the question of human identity. His purpose is to demonstrate that “the fundamental problem of meaning in human life is a problem of homelessness; that the effort to emerge from exile is an effort to return meaning to the word and thus the self to the other; and that the exile of the word is an exile of human being” (p. xi). (Incidentally this quotation anticipates the rather curious style of English which the author will adopt, regrettably typical of many academics.) The neurosis engendered by this problem of homelessness is one to which Russians have always been particularly prone, perhaps because their geographical situation on a vast inhospitable plain, stretching uneasily between Europe and Asia, has always generated a feeling of insecurity. So it is not at all difficult to find abundant examples of it in Russian literature. As Patterson makes clear in his preface, there are many Russian writers other than the ones he has chosen who well demonstrate estrangement and alienation. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that a Russian writer who does not suffer from the neurosis is the exception to the general rule. And, pursuing the idea further, it might be possible to show that any novel, any poem, any piece of writing in any language, contains elements of the problem, since it derives almost inevitably from the very occupation of a creative writer.Thus, from the outset, Patterson runs the risk of making his “exile” definition so wide that the term becomes almost meaningless. It may well be [End Page 514] that his book would have been less diffuse had he kept his definition rather narrower. And since he professes that his aim is “not only to make a point about Russian letters but to draw on these Russian texts in an effort to arrive at a deeper understanding of a much larger, more pervasive problem” (p. xi), Patterson runs the further risk of allowing the texts he uses for his demonstration simply to turn into pretexts for uncontrolled and unstructured digression. It has to be said at once that these risks he proves unable or unwilling to guard against.From the nineteenth century Patterson begins, inevitably, with the well-worn theme of the “superfluous man.” Nothing very original here, as this particular label has been applied so often and so indiscriminately to Russian literature that it has turned into a kind of critical rubber stamp. But at least Patterson does not go over the well-worn ground of the realist novel, preferring to concentrate on Dostoevsky’s non-fictional Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, as embodying its author’s post-Siberian sense of estrangement from Russia and his search for a new identity, brought into focus by his trip to Europe. However, in the case of Tolstoy, Patterson reverts to fiction, concentrating on The Death of Ivan Ilich and Resurrection. In this connection he is perhaps rather less scrupulous than he ought to have been over the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.Noting the comments on Tolstoy, the reader becomes increasingly aware that the book is in many respects a more extended sermon than scholarly analysis. This is confirmed by Patterson’s decision in Part Three to include two early twentieth-century religious thinkers, Florensky and Shestov. Here we are guided through comparatively uncharted territory, but with the uncomfortable feeling that we are plunging into an ever darkening and more oppressive jungle of ideas. The feeling of oppression is not greatly relieved by the author’s somewhat heavy-handed style.The remaining four writers covered are from the “Soviet Period... (shrink)

RESUMEN El presente trabajo busca demostrar cómo el reconocimiento y estudio de las narrativas exiliares de mujeres podrían otorgar nuevos registros analíticos y reflexivos al campo de trabajo filosófico sobre castigo político. Para ello, en principio, se lleva a cabo un recorrido por sus orígenes clásicos, griego y romano, destacando que, si bien el exilio ha variado a lo largo de los siglos, hay ciertos elementos constitutivos que se mantienen en sus aplicaciones contemporáneas. Esto lleva a observar el modo en (...) que estos elementos constitutivos del exilio se hacen presentes de una manera particular en la escritura narrativa exilar de mujeres -especialmente en las de las últimas dictaduras cívico-militares del Cono Sur latinoamericano-. Reconocer e incluir estas narrativas experienciales de mujeres en un corpus textual y analítico altamente masculinizado permitiría nuevos acercamientos y proyecciones reflexivas al campo de estudios filosóficos sobre el exilio. ABSTRACT This paper seeks to demonstrate how the recognition and study of women's exile narratives could bring new analytical and reflexive registers to the field of philosophical work on political punishment. In order to do this, first of all, a review of its classical, Greek and Roman origins is made, pointing out that, although the exile has varied over the centuries, there are certain constituent elements that are maintained in its contemporary applications. This leads us to observe the way that these constitutive elements of exile are present in a particular way in women's exile narrative writing -especially those of the last civil-military dictatorships of the Latin American Southern Cone. To recognise and include these women's experiential narratives in a highly masculinised textual and analytical corpus allows for new approaches and reflexive projections to the field of philosophical studies on exile. (shrink)

Paper presented at a meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, Stony Brook, New York, USA, May 2000. -/- Foucault rejects the idea of intellectuals acting as "prophets": telling others what must be done and what sorts of social and political goals they should pursue. I argue that in outright rejecting such prophecy, Foucault may not be pursuing the most effective means of eventually breaking it down. I locate in Foucauldian genealogical works such as Discipline and Punish a (...) rhetorical strategy through which the intellectual acts as a prophet while also distancing him/herself from this role: the genealogist speaks as a universal intellectual while also encouraging others to question the truths thus provided, as well as the role of the intellectual as prophet itself. I argue that in so doing the genealogist engages in a kind of exile, a term I borrow from Edward Said to denote a movement of distancing without effecting a clean break. This intellectual, rather than rejecting outright the role of the prophet, works within this role while yet distancing him/herself from it -- acting as (what I call) a “prophet in exile.”. (shrink)

This article challenges the use of social deprivation as a punishment, and offers a preliminary examination of the human rights implications of exile and solitary confinement. The article considers whether a human right against coercive social deprivation is conceptually redundant, as there are recognised rights against torture, extremely cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment as well as rights to basic health care, education, and security, which might encompass what this right protects. The article argues that the right is not (...) conceptually redundant, but that, even if it were, there would be significant reasons to articulate it. (shrink)

This essay argues that we should find Crimmigration, which is the collapsing of immigration law with criminal law, morally problematic for three reasons. First, it denies those who are facing criminal penalties important constitutional protections. Second, it doubly punishes those who have already served their criminal sentence with an added punishment that should be considered cruel and unusual (i.e., indefinite imprisonment or exile). Third, when the tactics aimed at protecting and serving local communities get usurped by the federal (...) government for immigration enforcement purposes, they often undermine these original aims or get used in ways that conflict with the U.S. Constitution. These concerns should prompt us therefore either to reject the government’s plenary power over immigration or require the federal government to be more consistent about maintaining the separation between criminal law and immigration law. (shrink)

This article focuses on the role of Christian theodicy in Taras Shevchenko’s works. With a biography marked by trauma and suffering, it is no wonder that Shevchenko orients his poetic worldview in search of understanding the nature of evil and human suffering. Operating through a Christological model, Shevchenko arrives at a poetics based on theodicy, as a means of understanding suffering in the world. He analyses the problem of evil associated with the phenomenology of suffering within the framework of religious (...) ethics. The works of the early period emphasize “truth and revenge,” retribution, and physical punishment over the “malicious” in the spirit of Old Testament dogma. The period of Shevchenko’s exile and subsequent works is characterized by changes in moods. The theodicy of Shevchenko’s works reveals the signs of Christodicy. Shevchenko’s concept of “suffering” is theologically based, as he believes that suffering is the key to conversion to faith. (shrink)

When the Athenian court convicted Socrates for subverting the youth of Athens, he was given the option of proposing an appropriate punishment for his misdeeds. Since Socrates was convinced not merely of his innocence but also of his good worth, he proposed that Athens "punish" him by honoring him as a city benefactor. This proposed punishment did not set well with the Athenian court. Had Socrates proposed exile, he probably would have lived. As it was, his proposal (...) earned him a hemlock milkshake. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Patrician Tribune: P. Clodius PulcherNathan RosensteinW. Jeffrey Tatum. The Patrician Tribune: P. Clodius Pulcher. Studies in the History of Greece and Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xii + 365 pp. Cloth, $49.95.Ancient historians rarely tackle political narrative anymore; institutions and culture and structures social, economic, and political are the staples of academic endeavor these days. Thus the biography of a major political figure (...) of the late Republic comes as a refreshing change and evokes a certain nostalgia, for this reviewer at least. One encounters many of the old topics that so preoccupied scholars a generation ago--the Bona Dea scandal, the exile and recall of Cicero, the conference at Luca--and, to judge by the paucity of recent works on them and their like in Tatum's bibliography, excite little interest now. A pity, really, for Tatum shows how much is still to be learned from their study, even if solutions to puzzles like the Vettius affair seem as elusive as ever. The outlines of the story Tatum has to tell will be familiar to its readers; as one would expect, the interest lies in the changes of emphasis and tone and the new insights he brings to these events.Tatum admits that Clodius' personality is largely beyond recovery but [End Page 592] suggests that "One will probably not err by much in picturing Clodius as a handsome, urbane, and proud (at times, indeed, obnoxious) noble, of violent temper and of somewhat dubious moral fiber--possessed of a fascination with adventure yet capable nonetheless of very traditional pretensions" (43). Tatum describes an early career that was largely conventional: like other young nobles Clodius sought military experience abroad and political involvement at home, prosecuting Catiline (Tatum dismisses contemporary claims of collusion with the defense), and serving as Murena's go-between to the divisores in the consular elections for 62 b.c.e. (something neither "novel or in any way indicative of the direction of his later mastery of the plebs urbana" [58]). With regard to the events of late 63, Tatum accepts Plutarch's statement that Clodius supported Cicero against Catiline, despite Cicero's later claims to the contrary. The sole anomaly here is Clodius' instigation of a mutiny among Lucullus' troops at Nisibis in the winter of 68-67 because the latter failed to accord Clodius the honor he thought his due. Tatum downplays the importance of this episode, however, arguing that it did not compromise Lucullus' position, which had already collapsed at Rome, nor did it reveal an incipient demagogic bent, only arrogance.However, the "dangerous combination of arrogance and immaturity" (86), coupled with curiosity and perhaps the hope of an affair with Caesar's wife led Clodius to profane the rites of the Bona Dea. Tatum has no doubt of Clodius' guilt or that the prosecution for incestum was trumped up by Clodius' enemies, since the patres traditionally left the punishment of religious delicts to the gods themselves. But more than factional politics was involved. The most attractive feature of Tatum's study is that it draws on recent studies of aristocratic culture to explore dimensions of the events he describes that prior treatments overlooked. Linderski, North, and other students of Republican religion have made it impossible any longer to doubt that senators and plebs alike took the civic cult seriously. Hence for Tatum, genuine religious outrage enabled the factio out to get Clodius to press home its attack. Likewise, Tatum follows Brunt and others in recognizing the importance of ideas as well as personal alignments in shaping the political struggles of the era; guided by Millar, he sees sovereignty of the people as no mere slogan and stresses that a principled popularis stance was well within the bounds of aristocratic ideology. Tatum therefore argues that, by attacking the senate's proposal that the praetor should hand-pick the jurors who would hear the case against Clodius, his supporters cast the struggle as one over the limits of senatorial auctoritas in the face of libertas and the iurapopuli. The claim revived the central conflict in Cicero's suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy and once again roused the... (shrink)

Joseph de Maistre is usually portrayed as Edmund Burke’s French counterpart, as they both wrote important treatises against the French Revolution. Although Maistre did share many of Burke’s conservative political views, he was much more than a political thinker. He was above all a religious thinker who interpreted political events through the prism of a particular retributionist theology. According to this theology, God punishes evil deeds, not only in the afterlife, but also in this terrestrial life; and sometimes, he may (...) even use human tyrants as instruments of his wrath. This interpretation especially evident in Maistre’s Considerations sur la France, an early work in his philosophical career. In that book, Maistre interprets the French Revolution as divine punishment, and in that regard, his views bear some similarities to the Deuteronomist historian in the Hebrew Bible, who interpreted the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile, as divine punishment in retribution of Israel’s sins. (shrink)

In a situation of advance and consolidation of the ultra-right in Latin America, in which security claims and government interventions in the name of the “combat against insecurity” have been one of its most dynamic vectors, this work is aimed at exploring the contours of another approach to the question of crimes and punishments. During the seventies, in the heat of dictatorships and exiles, a critical, combative, partisan criminological model was forged in Argentina. This other model is tributary of a (...) strategic assembly between the “Foucault effect” in Argentina and Latin American critical criminology. Specifically, the traces of this process are covered through three strong ideas: 1) the “Foucault effect” in Argentina and critical criminology are the ties of a certain critical attitude; 2) that history is realized in a topological structure: it unfolds in the ups and downs experienced by intellectuals here in the dictatorship and there in forced exile; 3) these imports, readings and uses of Foucault overflow and dislocate Foucauldian analysis itself. (shrink)

Irish legislative engagement with abortion law reform has never been framed by recognition of the rights of pregnant women, girls and other people. Rather, where it has taken place at all, it has always been foetocentric and punitive, exceptionalising abortion and conceptualising law as a means of discouraging it. In important ways, the post-repeal landscape has failed to break decisively with this orientation. While in 2018 there was certainly more discussion of women’s entitlement not to be exiled from the country (...) in order to make decisions about reproduction, the framing that dominated legislative and government discourses of abortion law reform was one in which the ‘problem’ being addressed was such that unsafe medication, exclusion from formal medical systems, and the undeserved punishment of people who had received diagnoses of fatal foetal conditions in the course of their ‘much wanted pregnancies’ were the focus. There was little or no engagement in legislative politics with the right to choose, reproductive agency, reproductive justice or the moral standing of pregnant people as ethical decision makers when it came to their pregnancies. As a result, post-repeal abortion law reform was more about managing risk than maximising agency. I will argue that this underpins and partly explains the shortcomings of the new law: the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 (‘HRTPA 2018’). Within that new legal regime, I argue, pregnant people continue to lack decisional security when it comes to their reproductive lives and are exposed to significant constitutional and dignitary harms as a result. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Everything is Breath":Critical Plant Studies' Metaphysics of MixtureElisabeth Weber (bio)In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin W. Kimmerer contrasts two creation stories that are thoroughly incompatible. One starts with an all-powerful male creator calling the world and its vegetation and animals into existence through words, and forming the first human beings from clay; the other starts with Skywoman tumbling through the (...) air with seeds in her fist from the Tree of Life growing in Skyworld. One ends with the condemnation of woman to give birth in "very severe" pains, with the cursing of the ground ordered to "produce thorns and thistles" as punishment for man who will eat his food only after "painful toil," and the expulsion from the garden; the other ends in gratitude for the collective caring of the animals, with the creation of "a garden for the well-being of all." One includes an original fall from grace whose burden will be passed down from generation to generation; the other acknowledges suffering without a trace of the burden of unearned guilt. One predicts death as a return to the dust from whence mankind was created; the other imagines death as becoming plant and fruit, as becoming gift, a rejoining the spirits of all ancestors, human and others, who surround the living in everything that is. The threat of one is the inexorability of a trajectory "from dust to dust" and the latter's association, with Plato, of something so diffuse that it doesn't merit a concept or idea; the promise of the other is an abiding relationship with all that is, the reciprocity of giving and gratitude, and the gladly assumed responsibility for the "inspirited" land.Kimmerer comments:Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road [...].1 [End Page 117]Cosmologies express collective imaginairies that have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years. The Iroquois story recounted and rendered accessible by Kimmerer is one of countless creation stories that constitute an "important genre in many preliterate traditions" (Zolbrod 5). Kimmerer suggests that even though the Judeo-Christian creation story may have receded into the background of Western collective consciousness, it plays a role in the planet's devastation. What strikes the reader in the story of Skywoman is the centrality of reciprocity, of relation, and, as the woman's name indicates, the significance of the sky. While this might mean, on planet Earth, the atmosphere–the Earth's sky is blue because of the surrounding atmosphere–the implications of the sky's preponderance reach beyond the planetary into the cosmological. The "sky is not what is above. The sky is everywhere: it is the space and the reality of mixture and movement, the definite horizon starting from which everything has to draw itself" (Coccia 218-219) in order to breathe and live.In order to continue to breathe, breathe in the long-term, the long-term, that is, as Barbara Kingsolver put it in one of her poems, "from a tree's / way of thinking" (7), non-human kin's "way of thinking" will need to play a role in humans' self-understanding. Kyle Whyte underlines that it is not enough to respond with urgency to specific ecological crises (fires, flooding, etc.) alone, but, rather, "urgency must be aimed at addressing ecological and relational tipping points together":U.S. settler colonialism, for example, in a short period of time, inflicted displacement, drastic ecological changes, and lost or disrupted relationships with hundreds of species that indigenous peoples depended on through kinship ties for generations. These changes are more extreme than what many nonindigenous persons fear most about moving beyond... (shrink)

_Once Out of Nature_ offers an original interpretation of Augustine’s theory of time and embodiment. Andrea Nightingale draws on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, and social history to analyze Augustine’s conception of temporality, eternity, and the human and transhuman condition. In Nightingale’s view, the notion of embodiment illuminates a set of problems much larger than the body itself: it captures the human experience of being an embodied soul dwelling on earth. In Augustine’s writings, humans live both in and out of nature—exiled (...) from Eden and punished by mortality, they are “resident aliens” on earth. While the human body is subject to earthly time, the human mind is governed by what Nightingale calls psychic time. For the human psyche always stretches away from the present moment—where the physical body persists—into memories and expectations. As Nightingale explains, while the body is present in the here and now, the psyche cannot experience self-presence. Thus, for Augustine, the human being dwells in two distinct time zones, in earthly time and in psychic time. The human self, then, is a moving target. Adam, Eve, and the resurrected saints, by contrast, live outside of time and nature: these transhumans dwell in an everlasting present. Nightingale connects Augustine’s views to contemporary debates about transhumans and suggests that Augustine’s thought reflects our own ambivalent relationship with our bodies and the earth. _Once Out of Nature_ offers a compelling invitation to ponder the boundaries of the human. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Edict of Oedipus (Oedipus Tyrannus 223–51)Edwin CarawanI utter to all Cadmeans this proclamation! Whoever among you knows at whose hands Laius, son of Labdacus, perished, him I command to tell me all! If he is afraid that if he removes upon himself, well and good, he shall suffer nothing else unwelcome, but shall leave the land unharmed. But if someone knows another of you, or a foreigner, to (...) be the killer, let him not be silent; for I can dispense rewards, and gratitude also shall be his. But if you remain silent and someone, fearing for a friend or for himself, rejects this order—what I shall do then you must hear from me! I forbid all belonging to this land, over which I rule and sit upon the throne to receive him or to speak to him, or let him share in prayers and sacrifices to the gods, or to touch holy water; but all must drive him from their homes, since we are polluted as the Pythian oracle of god has just now revealed to me. This is how I shall fight side by side with the god and with the man who died.(223–45)[And I pray that the doer of the deed, whether a single man has gone undetected or he has acted with others, may wear away a miserable life in misery, miserable as he is. And I pray further that if he is by the hearth in my own house with my own knowledge, I may suffer the fate with which I have just cursed others.](246–51)1 [End Page 187]The speech of Oedipus to the assembled Thebans contains this notorious pronouncement of his own doom. It is a troublesome text and has been treated with much ingenuity. I quote above the recent Loeb translation by Lloyd–Jones, not because it has any singular defect, but on the contrary because it is an apt and representative treatment and the translator has fully justified his changes to the text. In the first paragraph he supposes that Oedipus sentences the killer of Laius to exile or excommunication, as almost all other commentators suppose: the penalties described in lines 228–29 and 236–41 must apply to the killer himself. Unfortunately, the text that has come down to us in the manuscripts does not quite say as much. So, as many scholars do, Lloyd– Jones finds a lacuna after line 227 and makes other alterations to suit; the curse against the killer in lines 246–51 now seems superfluous, so he brackets it. These changes are not prompted by any difficulty in the text itself but by the editor's understanding of what the text must mean. One presumes that Oedipus is addressing his every remedy against the perpetrator, the killer who slew Laius by his own hand.2 This essay challenges that presumption and the editorial license that derives from it.In the first section we consider the text that is preserved in the manuscripts, along with the major editorial changes, and find that modern editors, almost without exception, have proceeded on the assumption that the order for exile and excommunication can only apply to the actual killer or "author of the crime." The second section presents the evidence for a different assumption on the part of the ancient audience: that anyone who conceals and consorts with a killer bears a measure of guilt and may be punished accordingly. In the third section I offer a new interpretation of the edict and its implications later in the play, based upon this presumption of guilt by association.§ 1 The speech of Oedipus to the Theban assembly (216–75), as found in the manuscripts, has three sections. There is first a preamble (216–22), lamenting the difficulty of the task. We are then presented with what I shall call "the edict" (223–51), including various measures to assure discovery and punishment of the guilty parties and concluding with [End Page 188] the curse that Oedipus takes upon himself (the passage that Lloyd–Jones bracketed, 246–51). The edict is followed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dostoevsky and Schiller:National Renewal Through Aesthetic EducationSusan McReynoldsDostoevsky's novels pivot upon scenes of spiritual transformation, moments of revelation that resolve dilemmas for which no logical solution can be found. Raskolnikov, for example, analyzes his crime from philosophical and sociological angles until he almost dies; he is saved by his dream of the plague and by the image of Sonia's face. When insight and progress come to Dostoevsky's fictional characters, (...) they come as dream, memory, and rapture before images of beauty and suffering. The choice between spiritual and logical solutions confronting Dostoevsky's characters is also a choice between Russia and the West. The rationalism and corollary doctrine of egoism that drives characters like Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov to madness and death are clearly associated in Dostoevsky's novels with Western philosophy. The ability to surrender to the beneficial power of images is associated with characters like Dmitry Karamazov, who is able to accept the primacy of spiritual truth—the truth of his need for expiation—over the fact of his legal innocence of his father's murder. The breadth of spirit that renders Dmitry receptive to the truth revealed in his dream image of the suffering child is clearly identified in The Brothers Karamazov as a distinctively Russian national trait.The contrast between reason, death, and the West, on the one hand, and receptiveness to imagistic truth, salvation, and Russia, on the other, [End Page 353] drives the plots of Dostoevsky's novels. This familiar feature of Dostoevsky's art is first articulated in texts unfamiliar to most readers; the historical essays of the early 1860s that were among his first published works after his return from exile. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, an association dedicated to disseminating the tenets of Western socialism in Russia. For his participation in the Circle, Dostoevsky was initially condemned to death; the sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in Siberian prison camp, to be followed by an indefinite period of military service in Siberian exile.When Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg and public life in 1860, he and his older brother Mikhail launched the journal Time. Mikhail served as editor. Dostoevsky would publish The Insulted and Injured and Notes from the House of the Dead in its pages, in addition to numerous essays dedicated to contemporary literature and events. The essays on Russia and Europe published in Time were a creative workshop in which some basic features of his later novels—most notably the contrast between Western positivism and Russian spirituality, conceived as the capacity to embrace imagistic revelations of the truth—were first developed. The pressure of Dostoevsky's developing artistic craft is clearly apparent in these non-fictional texts from the early 1860s, which narrate modern Russian and European history as a story structured by a dual plot of death and redemption.Before Dostoevsky wrote novels structured around the contrast between characters like Dmitry and Ivan Karamazov, he wrote essays structured around the contrast between Russia and Western nations like France and England. Before Crime and Punishment portrayed Raskolnikov's resurrection as the surrender to images offering glimpses of something that eludes rational analysis, Dostoevsky's essays in Time predicted national renewal for Russia through her embrace of the truths conveyed by the images of fine art. Some essays in Time compose a plot of national rebirth through the effects of artistic images for Russia, but others admonish readers with what Dostoevsky believed would be the terrible consequences of positivism for the West. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in Time in 1863, casts France and England as mortally ill victims of a materialist worldview that can only grasp the challenges of modernity as scientific and political problems. The spiritual solutions that will be revealed to Russia through images of beauty, Dostoevsky warns, will elude nations ensnared in rational approaches to their problems. [End Page 354]Throughout his post-exile life, Dostoevsky believed that political improvement results from changes in the moral condition of individuals, inner changes that are catalyzed by images, not reached through rational deliberation. In 1861, he writes of the Imperial edict... (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 201-207. “Poetry is experience, linked to a vital approach, to a movement which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful course of life. In order to write a single line, one must have exhausted life.” —Maurice Blanchot (1982, 89) Nikos Karouzos had a communist teacher for a father and an orthodox priest for a grandfather. From his four years up to his high school graduation he was incessantly educated, reading the entire private library of his granddad, comprising mainly (...) the Orthodox Church Fathers and the ancient classics. Later on in his life he sold the library for money, only to buy a little more time before he went broke again: “I carry sorrow like a cage/ I got no birds/ as I come back from her hair/ I see the profit emptied/ cool from terror.” (1993, Ι, 101) Nowadays—and ridiculously recently—we are more than apt to speak of a certain insouciance pertaining to the Greek form of expenditure: expenditure without any type of investment, sometimes not (even) symbolic. In the vaults of the European unconscious, this imprudent stance still conjures a “capital punishment” in the form of de-capitation, reflecting back the fear of excess and the terror of its consequences.1 Thus the Greek way of living is very close to what a stranger could have termed as “the Greek way of dying.” Yet, what is not often understood is that the Greek esprit , the same one that invented the maxim μηδ?ν ?γαν (“nothing in excess”), does not experience death solely as an imminent fear of bankruptcy. For it miraculously combines its unconditional acceptance with the promise of a resurrection that is always there in the scents of Spring, from Dionysus to the orthodox Christ: “Everyone resurrects himself through dying [….] Resurrection is the switching of mortalities.” (2002, 94) Hence, if an entire library was imprudently traded for a plate with seven olives, a sliced tomato and some fresh goat cheese, let us not be fooled: this is not the meal of the pauper, but that of “an aristocrat from God” (1993, II, 491) feeding his eloquent loudmouth, ridiculously cut open in an otherwise rock-solid caput . *** To speak of the Greek experience is to speak about a half-dead language that still utters in life what is seemingly excluded from it and thus forbidden to be talked about: death. Death as anything that is out of this world, as something that will never return . Still, along with an experience of death that recently waned as a worn-out academic fashion, the Greek experience is dead too. Nearly 2300 years of written words separating Homer from the fall of Byzantium equal 500 books on a library traded for money: “I am with the killed. Hence my deepest solitude. I do not feel this tremendous macho society, beyond from the fact that it is a ruthlessly consuming one. It is me who pays all the time .” (2002, 57) Let us do the math and see how much this dealing with the Greek experience is costing the poet and how much dealing with the Greek experience might cost us today. *** “I do not guarantee a single word.” (Karouzos, 1993, II, 454) Through its various dialects and forms, the Greek language speaks through an incessant historical dissemination. Anyone who is aware of this terrifying polymorphy and still calls himself a poet, must stand against a white sheet of paper, pen-in-hand, with a very particular duty: to be as fully inconsistent as possible. In the formally ironic uniqueness of the poem, the poet functions as “a band-aid for lesser and greater antinomies.” (1993, I, 251) Of course these antinomies are not exhausted in language—they are historical, political and, alas, existential. Yet, beyond appearances , it is language that ruthlessly encodes them through history, submitting the poet to the temptation of placing them one next to the other on a single white sheet. The closer their neighboring, the greater the scattering of the writer in the ironic uniqueness of the paper. In a work where poetic license is described as a “freedom-impasse” (2002, 51), this task is undertaken in full conscience of its personal consequences: “what I am interested in is to escape my individuality (envisioning the non-ego) […] Nevertheless, my dissociations never achieve duration.” (2002, 74-75) Hence, though poetry is the “deserted direction of will,” (1998, 62) the stance of the poet is not that of a Nietzschean “great man.”2 Whereas drunkenness provides a thread between the poem and the excess it both presupposes and infuses (“Poetry always enlarges. ‘Drunkenness’ is nothing more than that,” (2002, 85)), whereas language flashes in loudmouth spurts of déraison (“When I am alone I do something else. I utter words. For example, while having my ouzo and listening to music I am most likely capable of randomly shouting ‘Electricity!’” (2002, 138)), the poet never gives in to the double affirmation that would eventually risk the “element of pleasure in discourse.” (2002, 80)” It is exactly because the gap of the antinomies is so vast that poetry is not meant to be written with a hammer. Neither does writing consist in a reevaluation of those elements. In short, poetry is not an affirmation of difference, but the surprising beauty of chiming antinomies. We might never transcend them, but it is up to us to put them together. Yet again, this voisinage is not to be identified with the necessity of chance as an eternal return.4 On the contrary it is a return from that very return : Let us treat Yes as a No to No and No as a Yes […] And let us not forget that this pissed affirmation crumbled down Nietzsche’s intellect in the dark paths of this world. (2002, 88) This return from the “vicious circle” should in no way be taken as a form of artistic prudence. Rather it can be seen as a dribble of demonic inconsistency as Dionysus transforms himself into a Christ that is in turn de-theologized: “Who can forbid that? Every man is capable of his own theology, nothing can stop him.” (2002, 73-74) This is a turn towards an existential vision of the world, historically coinciding with a particular political defeat of the Left, to which the poet devoted all his life: after the defeat of the popular front I raised the question “why do we exist?” while others were asking “why we failed.” (2002, 57)5 But most of all it is a return to poetry that exceeds the existential question itself, going beyond the issue of faith. Poetry comes in as a question of return after a defeat that is confessed in full profanity. Though it accepts the necessity of the defeat, it does not affirm it. Though it negates it, the negation is not in the name of a promise to be delivered in the kingdom of heavens. Following a historical and existential defeat, poetry is born post mortem . It signals a return to Christ as “groundless religiousness in the surprise of the real as such” (2002, 72) which is at once a return to the refuge of childhood. It is not a question of endurance towards an eternal return. Rather it is a question on the possibility of an existential return. Returning in a world as someone who cannot enjoy any returns exactly because he is averse to guarantees. A return without returns. *** PHOTOCOPY OF HAPPINESS When I was young I used to pin down cicadas and step on ant nests. I used to stand there silent for hours. With threads I decapitated bees. Now I am a dead man breathing. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 336.) The return to the “paradise of childhood” (2002, 68) constitutes the devouring refuge of its own memory when defeat becomes the synonym of adulthood. The political struggles of a young communist in a country torn up by a civil war right after World War II fraught with incarcerations and exiles. Historically they resulted in the defeat of the communist movement in Greece and opened up a long turbulent road that would peak in the dictatorship of 1967. Existentially they led to a series of disillusionments: mental breakdown, divorce, abandonment of studies in law school. To the question “why do we exist” the answer was poetry. Still this exposé should not be read as a sweeping chronography of a man. For it actually happens to coincide with the historical fate of a nation that after its modern constitution never stopped dreaming of the glories of its past youth, in a present that was (and is) sweepingly disappointing. But isn’t this return to youth finally a way of compensating for a loss of youth that necessarily results in a losing adulthood? Will Greeks, the eternal children of Plato and Nietzsche, ever learn? How to return without dying, how to remember without wasting time? WE ARE IN THE OPEN MEANING Living the coldest mauve night right across Parthenon I went to take a piss on some foliage and I was enjoying the foliage as it was steaming. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 340) Beyond the historical tragedies of modern Greece and away from any personal disappointments, the relation that this land holds with language and history is mediated through the Greek light—whose omnipresence is the very condition of its transcendence. All historical contradictions from Dionysus to Christ took place under this light; all those disseminated dialects were spoken beneath its warmth. To paraphrase Lévinas,6 light is both the condition of the world and of our withdrawal from it—a withdrawal towards the invisibility of God, of the dead, of meta-physics, resulting from the temptation that all is still here, behind this light the visibility of which they once evaded: “birds, the allurement of God.” (1993, I, 17) Under that luminous sky, if Greeks can do anything at all, it is to envision a return that will never come. All they can do is write poetry—which is doing nothing; other than lending an ear to a disseminated language whispering a unity that cannot be promised, as an adulthood in defeat is ready to recognize. Trying “to trap the invisible in visibility” (1993, II, 483) they forget that they have grown up and one day they die—with the promise of return. Hence an additional meaning must be given to this return to childhood. It does not signal salvation but rather its promise. To the ears of an aged continent it means that the return to/of poetry is a losing game, a return without returns. “Europe, Europe… you are nothing more than the continuation of Barabbas.” (1993, I, 295) *** “Life is not there to verify theories.”7 The records show that Karouzos was finally given a second-class pension from the Greek government, at the time when he was being recognized by the literary press as one of Greece’s major contemporary poets. Being neither a bourgeois nor a nobelist, he proclaimed himself to be an anarcho-communist, unconditionally faithful to the utopia of a classless society. He also drank, heavily. “Capitalism made an animal out of man/ Marxism made an animal out of truth/ Shut up.” (1993, II, 369) Perhaps one of the most scandalous divides of our times has been the one between the living and the dead, the latent prohibition that the living should not be concerned with the dead based on the mere impossibility of the dead to be concerned with the living in the first place. What adds to this scandal is that this divide abuses anything that cannot return to us by subsuming it under the same futility. Hence death is no longer “loss” in the usual sense. It no more refers to the things we lost but to our “loss” (of time, money and well-being) as we insist to dwell on them. Death is a waste —of time. It is this waste that we find in the insouciance of Greek expenditure; the waste in dealing with a language that most of its historical part is no longer spoken (a dead language); the waste in translating a poet who is ex definitio untranslatable; the waste of his vision, his money, his life. The waste of dealing with anything that cannot return and that cannot bring in any returns . But it is also the waste of life that poetry itself presupposes, the waste of dealing with invisibility, with anything that is out of this world and thus invokes the fear of death that is in turn—and surprisingly— nowhere to be found. Instead of death, what is there, beyond the light, is the being without us (to recall the Lévinasian il y a ), the mumble of our own nothingness which constitutes the price to be paid for writing poetry under an evergreek light. To understand this to-and-fro, is to realize that poetry is something out of this world that nevertheless takes place in this world, by virtue of this world. But to ridiculously equate this to-and-fro with death as non-existence, is to exile poetry along with its own possibility from this same old world: I do not believe that poetry will ever disappear from this world. […] But I am also sure that it does not have many chances of playing, as you say, a redemptive role in our vertiginous technological future. Without being endangered as a creative need, it will be placed on the side of history. (2002, 32) It is mainly there that we would like to locate the meaning of Nikos Karouzos’s poetry today. If we are willing to include the Greek original it is because we consider that it will be both a waste of time for us to do so (since most of you cannot read Greek) and because it might induce you to the even larger waste of learning it. We would additionally be glad if this small introduction served as an equally wasteful, academically useless piece of reading, gesturing towards a taboo of investing in anything Greek—that is in anything dead among the living, in anything that will never come back and maybe was never here in the first place. This is the only way to reserve for ourselves the possibility of poetry and preserve the light of its promise. “To return: that is the miracle.” (1993, I, 17) Athens, Greece July 10, 2011 NOTES 1 “ Capitale (a Late Latin word based on caput “head”) emerged in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in the sense of funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money or money carrying interest.[…] The word and the reality it stood for appear in the sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) ‘… quamdam seminalem rationem lucrosi quam communiter capitale vocamus ’, ‘that prolific cause of wealth that we commonly call capital’” (Braudel, 1992, 232-233). 2 “A great man – a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style – what is he? First : there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him, including even the fairest, ‘divinest’ things in the world.” (Nietzsche, 1968, 505, §962) 3 Cf. Deleuze, 1986, 186-9. 4 “Return is the being of becoming, the unity of multiplicity, the necessity of chance: the being of difference as such or the eternal return.” (Deleuze, 189)5 In this 1982 interview Karouzos refers to the defeat of the communist movement in Greece after the civil war of 1946-1949 between the Governmental Army and the Democratic Army of Greece, the military division of the Greek communist party. Karouzos’s father was a member of the communist National Liberation front (EAM) members of which formed the mainl resistance movement (ELAS) in Greece during WWII. The poet was a member of the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), which was a youth division of EAM. After the end of the war, ELAS was called to disarmament in view of the formation of a National Army. The members of EAM resigned from the government of national unity and a series of protests led to a 3 year civil war between ELAS and the Government Army. After the defeat of ELAS the Communist party was outlawed and many communists were exiled in deserted Greek islands. Karouzos, who took action in the Greek resistance and was active during the Greek civil war, was exiled in Icaria on 1947 and in Makronisos on 1953 where he was called two years earlier to do his military service. 6 “Existence in the world qua light, which makes desire possible, is then, in the midst of being, the possibility of detaching oneself from being. To enter into being is to link up with objects; it is in effect a bond that is already tainted with nullity. It is already to escape anonymity. In this world where everything seems to affirm our solidarity with the totality of existence, where we are caught up in the gears of a universal mechanism, our first feeling, our ineradicable illusion, is a feeling or illusion of freedom. To be in the world is this hesitation, this interval in existing, which we have seen in the analyses of fatigue and the present.” (Lévinas, 1988,43-4) 7from a TV interview. THE POETRY OF NIKOS KAROUZOS From Redwriter [ Ερυθρογρ?φος ], in Collected Works, Vol . II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 463-4. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 9-10.] JESUS ANTI-OEDIPUS* Why were we once saving till the fifth day the Paschal lamb? The scriptures say: with this victim’s meat we ought to cleanse all of our senses. To give life to the whitest wave miraculous odors in the extension of the chest. Ideals to death. For us to witness the illustrious dawns of Absinthe and for the soul to be a deeply carved ornament on the fore we named will. Then many deer running amidst the evergreen growth with watery hymns, then, the unintended angels descending with heights spiraling in their momentum offer themselves to the luminous Adventure. Whence the need for speech and our sufferings covered with flags like the glorified dead. An incorporeal finger pointing at the flamboyant and fragrant holocausts within the tired horizons and the exhausted breadths with joys of the mistletoe on fire and shivering all of the green-leaved love. Something would have chirped again had we not driven it away— maybe the ewe’s grass. Something would have called us to the eternal resurrection— maybe the grace of spring. But now our heart is fiercely blinded, withdrawn to the appearances of Hades. Silence and ice incessantly cover the Infant Spirit in thatched times. While the cherry trees are dreaming faintly glowing in absolute darkness there’s nothing the Babylonians can contemplate in labs with automatic colored lights. How to rejoice now in the fifth day of the lamb? We have forked the stars. We’ve gradually become supposedly sublime with plucked chimeras in our hands. Avenged relentlessly by science. *Though the poem appears in a 1990 collection, it was actually written in 1968. Hence the reader must be aware in not associating Karouzos’ Anti-Oedipus with the famous 1972 work of Deleuze and Guattari, given that the former precedes the latter. ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΑΝΤΙ-ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ Γιατ? κρατο?σαμε κ?ποτε ?ς την π?μπτη μ?ρα το πασχαλιν? πρ?βατο; Τα κε?μενα λ?νε: μ’ αυτο? του θ?ματος το κρ?ας ?πρεπε να καθαρ?σουμε ?λες τις αισθ?σεις. Για να δ?σουμε κ?μα στη ζω? λευκ?τατο θαυμ?σιες ευωδι?ς στην ?κταση του στ?θους. Ιδανικ? στο χ?ρο. Για να βλ?πουμε τα λαμπρ? χαρ?ματα του ?ψινθου και να ’ναι η ψυχ? στ?λισμα βαθυχ?ρακτο της πλ?ρης που την ε?παμε θ?ληση. Τ?τε πολλ?ς δορκ?δες τρ?χοντας αν?μεσα στην καταπρ?σινη φ?ση με τους υδ?τινους ?μνους, τ?τε, κατεβα?νοντας οι αθ?λητοι ?γγελοι με κυλινδο?μενο το ?ψος στην ορμ? τους χαρ?ζονται της αστραφτερ?ς Περιπ?τειας. ?θεν η μιλι? γι’ αυτ? χρει?ζεται και τα δειν? σκεπ?ζονται ωσ?ν τους τιμημ?νους νεκρο?ς με σημα?ες. Ασ?ματο δ?χτυλο δε?χνει τα φλογ?δη και μοσχοβ?λα ολοκαυτ?ματα στους κουρασμ?νους ορ?ζοντες στα εξουθενωμ?να πλ?τη καθ?ς αν?βουν οι χαρ?ς του νερα?δ?ξυλου και τρ?μει ολ?κληρη η πρασιν?φυλλη αγ?πη. Κ?τι θα κελαηδο?σε π?λι αν δεν το δι?χναμε— μπορε? της προβατ?νας το χορτ?ρι. Κ?τι θα μας καλο?σε στην απ?ραντη αν?σταση— μπορε? του ?αρος η χ?ρη. Μα η καρδι? μας ?γρια τυφλ?θηκε π?ρασε στα φαιν?μενα του ?δη. Σιγ? και π?γος αδι?κοπα σκεπ?ζει στους αχυρ?νιους καιρο?ς το Ν?πιο Πνε?μα. Την ?ρα που ονειρε?ονται οι βυσσινι?ς και λ?μπουν αμυδρ? μεσ’ στο απλ?τατο σκοτ?δι τ?ποτα δε στοχ?ζονται οι βαβυλ?νιοι στα εργαστ?ρια με τ’ αυτ?ματα χρωματιστ? φ?τα. Π?ς να χαρο?με πια την π?μπτη μ?ρα του προβ?του; Φουρκ?σαμε τ’ αστ?ρια. Γ?ναμε σιγ?-σιγ? δ?θεν υπ?ροχοι με μαδημ?νες χ?μαιρες στα χ?ρια. Μας ν?μεται σκληρ? η επιστ?μη. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], in Collected Works, Vol. II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 472. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18.] DIALECTΙCS OF SPRING Christ the straight angle; Christ the Pythagorean theorem. Christ the infinitesimal calculus from above the blessed Sets Christ. Christ the tessellation of massive particles Christ the zero mass. Hence we spray numbers and fields of lust. We are carabineers of diseased logic plus something— Observed means observer and Hekate The darkness luminous and light in the dark Astarte banqueters demons from today. ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΙΚΗ ΤΟΥ ΕΑΡΟΣ Χριστ?ς η ορθ? γων?α· Χριστ?ς το πυθαγ?ριο θε?ρημα. Χριστ?ς ο απειροστικ?ς λογισμ?ς ?νωθεν ?λβια Χριστ?ς τα Σ?νολα. Χριστ?ς η ψηφιδογραφ?α στα μαζικ? σωμ?τια Χριστ?ς η μ?ζα μηδ?ν. ?ρα ψεκ?ζουμε αριθμο?ς και πεδ?α λαγνε?ας. Ε?μαστε τυφεκιοφ?ροι νοσο?σης λογικ?ς και κ?τι-- παρατηρο?μενο σημα?νει παρατηρητ?ς και Εκ?τη σκ?τος το π?μφωτο και φως εν τ? σκοτ?? η Αστ?ρτη συνδαιτημ?νες δα?μονες απ’ ?ρτι. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18. [1993, II, 472]. CREDO (as we are used to say in Latin) Α I believe in one Poet expelled from heavens / fugitive from the god and vagabond, Empedocles / and here on earth / exile on the earth etc. of Baudelaire /. Β I believe in one Computer inside thunder and through matter. Γ Suffering undefiled / substantive / the Poet uplifts himself slow-burning suicidal implying lengthy sleeps. Δ Cutting down on prospective mistakes. Ε Of all things visible and invisible officiating the onion-peelings. Ζ The Poet has nothing / see the departed /. Η I believe in one Poet that says: madness I enjoy; he ridicules existence; let me light up from my mana. Θ Syntax he doesn’t care about when musicality commands him. Along with still more licenses, and Ts are played according to the concept sound anywhere. E.g. the winters here, he winters there; it will not come—I will not rest, etc. etc. Ι The Poet exercises thought until it’s stripped down. Κ And if he’s Greek he must always study the fineness of Attica, in light, mountains, fields and sea. For this fineness teaches language. Λ And if he’s deeply destined the Poet expresses the unexplainable of the explained; he happens to be a rightful heir to the scientist and his predecessor. Μ On the froth he does not last; the Poet blusters at the bottom of the pot. Ν Flamebred and never redeemed. Ξ The Poet must sometimes say: what a consumption of presence — be a bit lonely for a change! Ο The Poet is twilit. Π He is susceptible of deaths and resurrections. Ρ He looks from the corner of his eye and exists in a glance. Σ He follows behind the mother. Τ Eveningless when it comes to age. Υ I believe in one Poet who says: let the purities coincide. Until the Corinth of the Universe or even further. Φ In a higher despair. Χ In a brighter quintessence. Ψ In one sensation that lifts off. Ω Forgiving everyone. CREDO (ως ε?θισται να λ?με λατινιστ?) Α Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν εκτ?ς ουρανο? / φυγ?ς θε?θεν και αλ?της, Εμπεδοκλ?ς / και επ? της γης / εξ?ριστος π?νω στη γη κ.λπ. του Βωδελα?ρου /. Β Πιστε?ω εις ?να Υπολογιστ?ν εντ?ς κεραυνο? και δια της ?λης. Γ Υποφ?ροντας ?χραντα / ουσιαστικ?ν / ο Ποιητ?ς ανατε?νεται βραδυφλεγ?ς αυτ?χειρας εξυπακο?οντας πολ?ωρους ?πνους. Δ Τα υποψ?φια λ?θη λιγοστε?οντας. Ε Ορατ?ν τε π?ντων και αορ?των ιερουργ?ντας την αποκρομμ?ωση. Ζ Ο Ποιτ?ς ?χει τ?ποτα / βλ?πε τους αναχωρ?σαντες /. Η Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: η τρ?λα μ’ αρ?σει· γελοιοποιε? την ?παρξη· ας αν?ψω απ’ τη μ?να μου. Θ Συνταχτικ? δεν το γνοι?ζεται στην προσταγ? της μουσικ?τητας. Μαζ? και μ’ ?λλες ακ?μη λευτερι?ς, και τα νυ πα?ζονται κατ? την ?ννοια ?χος οπουδ?ποτε. Π.χ. τον χειμ?να εδ?, το χειμ?να εκε?· δε θ? ’ρθει – δεν θα καταλαγι?σουμε, κ. λπ. κ.λπ. Ι Ο Ποιητ?ς γυμν?ζει τη σκ?ψη σε απογ?μνωση. Κ Κι αν ε?ναι ?λληνας οφε?λει να σπουδ?ζει π?ντοτε της Αττικ?ς τη λεπτ?τητα, σε φως, βουν?, χωρ?φια και θ?λασσα. Διδ?σκει γλ?σσα η λεπτ?τητα το?τη. Λ Κι αν ε?ναι βαθι? πεπρωμ?νος ο Ποιητ?ς εκφρ?ζει το ανεξ?γητο του εξηγητο?· τυγχ?νει ν?μιμος δι?δοχος του επιστ?μονα και προκ?τοχ?ς του. Μ Στον αφρ? δεν ?χει δι?ρκεια· στο πατοκ?ζανο μα?νεται ο Ποιητ?ς. Ν Φλογοδ?αιτος και ποτ? ξελυτρωμ?νος. Ξ Ο Ποιητ?ς κ?ποτε πρ?πει να λ?ει: μεγ?λη καταν?λωση παρουσ?ας – γενε?τε και λ?γο μοναξι?ρηδες! Ο Ο Ποιητ?ς ε?ναι αμφ?φλοξ. Π Επιδ?χεται θαν?τους και αναστ?σεις. Ρ Ακροθωρ?ζει και υπ?ρχει σε ξαφνοκο?ταγμα. Σ Ε?ναι ουραγ?ς της μητ?ρας. Τ Αν?σπερος απ? ηλικ?α. Υ Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: να συμπ?σουν οι αγν?τητες. Μ?χρι την Κ?ρινθο του Σ?μπαντος ? μακρ?τερα. Φ Σε αν?τερη απελπισ?α. Χ Σε φαειν?τερη πεμπτουσ?α. Ψ Σε μια α?σθηση που πτηνο?ται. Ω Συγχωρ?ντας τους π?ντες. From Large Sized Logic [ Λογικ? μεγ?λου σχ?ματος ], Athens: Erato, 1989, n.p. [1993, II, 521-3]. (shrink)

The force of [Heinrich von] Kleist's story "On the Marionette Theatre" . . . derives from roots deeply sunk into the soil of the past. It is a novel variation on a theme the first author of which may well be Plato. For according to Plato the human mind has been in the dark ever since it lost its place in the community of Truth, in the realm, that is, of the Ideas, the eternal and eternally perfect forms, those now (...) unattainable models which man in his exile is able to see and recognize only as shadows or imperfect copies. And this Platonic parable of the damage suffered by man's soul and consciousness is not unlike the Fall as it is narrated in Genesis. The Fall was the consequence and punishment of man's free will that for the first time had asserted itself against the universal God and rejoiced in a consciousness and pleasure entirely its own—tragically its own; for man had to forsake the indwelling in the supreme Intelligence and thus the harmony between himself and Being as such. The reward for this betrayal was the embarrassment and shame of self-consciousness, the hard labor of maintaining himself in his state of separation, and, soon to follow, the murderous misdeeds of the self-will named Cain. Better to have no mind than a mind thus deprived and impoverished and cruel. Erich Heller, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, is the author of The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought; The Ironic Gentleman: Thomas Mann; The Artist's Journey into the Interior; and Franz Kafka. These books have also appeared in Germany in the author's own translations, and his Dir Wiederkehr der Unschuld [The return of innocence] was recently published there. See also: "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality" by Murray Krieger in Vol. 1, No. 2; "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" by Margret Schaefer in Vol. 5, No. 1. (shrink)

"L’organisation d’une pénalité d’enfermement n’est pas simplement récente, elle est énigmatique. Qu’est-ce qui pénètre dans la prison? En tout cas, pas la loi. Que fabrique-t-elle? Une communauté d’ennemis intérieurs". C’est en ces termes que Michel Foucault dénonce, dans ce cours prononcé en 1973, et que viendra compléter, en 1975, son ouvrage Surveiller et punir, le "cercle carcéral". La Société punitive étudie ainsi comment les sociétés traitent les individus ou les groupes dont elles souhaitent se débarrasser, c’est-à-dire les tactiques punitives, mais (...) aussi la prise de pouvoir sur le corps et sur le temps et l’instauration du couple pénalité-délinquance. Michel Foucault retrace l'histoire des "tactiques fines de la sanction" dont il distingue quatre modalités : exiler ; imposer un rachat ; marquer ; enfermer. C'est dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle que se développe une "science des prisons" à fonction corrective et que se construit un discours sur le criminel et son traitement possible, donnant naissance à un schéma de société qui vise à l’absolu du contrôle et de la surveillance. L’ajustement entre le système judiciaire et le mécanisme de surveillance (l’organisation d’une police), entre l’émergence de la richesse et la pratique des illégalismes, entre la force corporelle de l’ouvrier et l’appareil de production s’accomplit ensuite au tournant du XIXe siècle. Foucault démontre donc que ce sont les instances de contrôle para-pénal du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle qui ont abouti, in fine, au fonctionnement de la prison, visant à l’élimination du désordre, au contrôle de la distribution spatiale des individus, de leur emplacement par rapport à l’appareil productif. La Société punitive finit par poser la question, cruciale aux yeux du philosophe, de la validité intrinsèque de la loi pénale. A-t-elle vocation universelle ou se limite-t-elle à la douteuse applicabilité d’une somme de décrets? (shrink)

The origins of tattooing are very ancient, and the modern fascination with the practice serves to remind us that it has been an enduring fixture in human history. Its functions are many and often overlap, but the particular focus here is on the tattoo as an aspect of punishment. Comparative evidence, however, is welcomed whenever it proves useful. This article first marshals and examines the late antique literary evidence extending from North Africa in the third century to Constantinople in (...) the ninth. Then that evidence is put in its legal context. From at least the time of Augustus, the penal tattoo, which was generally placed on the face or forehead, had been associated with degradation. Such remained the case in late antiquity, and it also becomes clear that the tattoo accompanied a sentence of exile and hard labor, usually in mines or quarries. The deeper meaning of the tattoo and its placement on the forehead is considered in the light of modern understandings. There follows a discussion of the actual form taken by the tattoo, which normally displayed the name of the crime, the name of the emperor, or the name of the punishment. Based on the available data, the last option appears to have been the most common penal tattoo in this period. Finally, the article hypothesizes that the Christians effected a transformation of the tattoo and subverted its original intent, so that, rather than being a sign of punishment, it became a sign of glory in which one could take pride. Thus the penal function, in some settings at least, was overtaken by a primarily religious one. (shrink)

In the Hebrew Scriptures, there are familiar consequences for disobedience to God—destruction of holy sites, slavery, exile, and death. But there is one consequence that is less familiar and of special interest in this chapter. Disobedience to God sometimes results in stark reversals in God’s very relationship and experiential availability to God’s own people. Such people may even remove God’s very presence. This is a curious form of punishment that threatens the very spiritual identity of the victims of (...) the reversal. This chapter explores divine reversal in the Hebrew Scriptures (and its continuation in the New Testament). Insofar as the self-identified people of God commit positive injustices against others, and even insofar as they are culpable for failing to prevent such injustices from occurring, devotees of the Hebrew Scriptures—so, devout Jews and Christians alike—ought to take seriously the possibility that God will side with those who suffer the injustices and even, in a sense, sanctify their life, practices, and identity. Divine reversals pose problems for Jewish and Christian ethics, which must grapple with the possibility that God might seem to adopt inconsistent moral positions across time—or at least inconsistent moral postures. (shrink)

Nineteenth–century scholars assumed that the Athenians as a community punished citizens with death, exile,atimia, and fines and used imprisonment only to hold those awaiting trial, those awaiting execution, and those unable to pay fines.1As they saw it, brief imprisonment in the stocks occasionally supplemented these penalties, but always as additional penalty–never as a penalty on its own. Barkan saw in the use of imprisonment as an additional penalty the likelihood of general penal imprisonment and used evidence from the oratorical (...) corpus to make an argument therefore.2 His argument seems to have been largely ignored–the nineteenth–century interpretation continuing dominant; and the issue, largely unexplored but for a few glancing references in recent scholarship.3 The issue remains, thus, sufficiently vexed to make worthwhile a restatement of the argument for the use of punitive imprisonment. Also, the evidence provides clues worth setting forth as to why and when punitive imprisonment developed. Indeed, these are sufficient to make an argument about the relevance of the development to Athenian political history. For the introduction of penal imprisonment in Athens proves an extremely important historical moment, marking as it does both the completion of a general will institutionalized (in a punishment of consumption of the wrong–doer within, rather than of expulsion from, the community) and a significant point in the establishment ofisonomia. (shrink)

Ancient philosophers are often contrasted with contemporary philosophers because they view philosophy not as a profession, but a way of life. None did so more uncompromisingly, however, than Diogenes the Cynic, who chided even Socrates for occasionally wearing sandals and maintaining a small household. Diogenes's espousal of extreme poverty combined with a talent for exhibitionism and propensity for offense was taken by some to be merely childish and grounded in a desire for fame, but by others as an ideal form (...) of pure philosophical commitment. Beginning with his life as a banker's son in Sinope, this book traces the origins and effects of his exile and status as a foreigner in Athens and Corinth, his subsequent espousal of a life a poverty, and his development of a style of life that both he and others found comparable to a dog's in terms of its disregard for social norms and conventions. Much of Diogenes' practical philosophy took the form of his own distinctive bodily practices which were meant to reinforce Cynic freedom and self-sufficiency. By calling into question cultural conventions governing the body with respect to sexuality, athletics, clothing, hygiene, punishment, etc., his own dog-style life championed unrestrained free speech (parrhēsia), equality between the sexes, and a cosmopolitan view of the possibilities of a world rid of the evils caused by the pursuit of wealth, fame, and power. Throughout various historical periods, Diogenes has offered a fascinating alternative to conventional lives and served as a brave exemplar of absolute devotion to human freedom and equality. (shrink)

Finley’s conceptualization of Greco-Roman slavery was developing in the late 1930s, between W. L. Westermann’s traditional notions and the revolutionary ideas advanced by his contacts in the Frankfurt School in Exile. Turning points came in 1936, when he reviewed Westermann’s Realencyclopädie article on slavery, and in 1937, when he was hired to assist Otto Kirchheimer in the production of a monograph on penal history and reform. The resulting book, Punishment and Social Structure, became a classic text of modern (...) criminology, but it also shaped Finley’s ideas concerning the nexus of forced labor, punishment, and the demands of a labor economy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Conscription and Combat Violence Corporal Punishment Sexual Assault Circumcision Education Family and Other Relationships Bodily Privacy Life Expectancy Imprisonment and Capital Punishment Conclusion.