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Argues that the underlining of erotic matters in Plato's dialogues marks the most significant moment in his career.

The Greeks are on trial. They have been for generations, if not millennia, from Rome in the first century, to Romanticism in the nineteenth. We debate the place of the Greeks in the university curriculum, in New World culture--we even debate the place of the Greeks in the European Union. This book notices the lingering and half-hidden presence of the Greeks in some strange places--everywhere from the US Supreme Court to the Modern Olympic Games--and in so doing makes an important (...) new contribution to a very old debate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Economy, Society, Tragedy: Moral Reflections in an Age of Crisis and Austerity LOUIS A. RUPRECHT JR. Precisely their tragedies prove that the Greeks were not pessimists... In this sense, I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher—that is to say, the most extreme antithesis and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher. —Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “The Birth of Tragedy” Orgiastic religion leads most readily to song (...) and music; ritualistic religion inclines toward the pictorial arts; religions enjoining love favor the development of poetry and music. In all of this, the one important fact for us is the significance of the marked rejection of all distinctively aesthetic devices by those religions which are rational, in our special sense. —Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion tragedy and society The title of this review essay is taken from Max Weber’s posthumous magnum opus, Economy and Society,1 an ambitious and wide-ranging comparative sociological analysis of economic orders, social orders and the normative structures that both emerge from and lend meaning to the intersecting economic, political and religious spheres in which complex human arion 28.2 fall 2020 Kathryn A. Kozaitis, Indebted: An Ethnography of Despair and Resilience in Greece’s Second City (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021), 248 pages. This book is the fifteenth in Oxford’s important series, “Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology,” edited by Carla Freeman and Li Zhang. 138 economy, society, tragedy societies take shape. To Weber’s grand and capacious sociological categories, economy and society, I have added a third literary and philosophical term: tragedy. Now, to be sure, Weber thought a great deal about tragedy,2 and was drawn to tragic themes in many of his most salient and influential sociological studies. One need think only of his account of the bureaucratic “routinization” of prophetic charisma in The Sociology of Religion,3 or his depiction of modern humanity’s self-imposed “iron cage” in the rousing final pages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,4 a text to which I will return at the end of this essay.5 But tragedy entails far more than systemic collapse or self-inflicted disaster. In this essay, I want to explore some of the implications of combining close attention to the lived experience of concrete individuals to the highly theoretical, systems-level analysis inspired by such Weberian categories. Put another way, how may Cultural Anthropology, and more specifically Ethnography, deepen such a globally-oriented Sociology? Here, I intend to supplement Weber’s sociological dyad, economy and society, with a conception of tragedy drawn from the cognate social sciences of Comparative Religion and Cultural Anthropology; I will be using Attic Greek tragedy as a benchmark. More specifically, I wish to highlight some of the ways in which the first book-length ethnographic study of the Greek economic crisis may add vital nuance to Weber’s more theoretical, world-systems approach. That book is Kathryn Kozaitis’s Indebted: An Ethnography of Despair and Resilience in Greece’s Second City, an ethnographic study of the lived reality of Greeks experiencing the double -whammy of a sovereign debt crisis and externally imposed austerity regimes in the Greek city of Thessaloniki; the book is the fifteenth to appear inOxford’s “Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology” series, edited by Carla Freeman and Li Zhang. As Kozaitis demonstrates with sensitivity and eloquence, by zeroing in on the people, rather than the economic policies or the social and administrative structures, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. 139 certain normative categories and ethical stances become more relevant, many of them implicated in ancient Greek tragedy, and drama more broadly. tragic crises appropriately to a work of cultural ethnography, Kozaitis links the personal to her profession; further still, she weaves her own personal story into the story of the people to whom she is attempting to give voice. This, she notes, constitutes “the auto-ethnography in this ethnography” (4–6). How, then, did this professor of Cultural Anthropology, based in the United States, find her way to Greece’s “second city”? The path was circuitous, and its destination unclear for quite some time. That Kozaitis’s personal... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reach Without Grasping: A Retrospective Appreciation of Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet LOUIS A. RUPRECHT JR. Everything I know about love and its necessities I learned in that one moment when I found myself thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon at a man who no longer cherished me. There was no area of my mind not appalled by this action, no part of my body (...) that could have done otherwise. But to talk of mind and body begs the question. Soul is the place, stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, where such necessity grinds itself out. Soul is what I kept watch on all that night. —Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay” (1995) It is always tricky, the question of whether to read an author’s work in light of his life or not. —Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout, no. 56 (2014) anne carson (b. June 21, 1950, in Toronto, Canada) is one of the most versatile of contemporary writers in the English language who have drawn deeply from the Classical well. She has achieved a unique place in the realm of North American letters, and much deserved recognition in the past twenty years: she was awarded the Lannan Literary Award in 1996; the Pushcart Prize in 1997; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998; the MacArthur Foundation arion 27.2 fall 2019 “genius grant” in 2000; the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 (the first woman to be so recognized); the T. S. Eliot Prize also in 2001; the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2010; and a second Griffin Poetry Prize in 2014 (the only person ever to receive this award twice). in 2018, she was an Inga Maren Otto Fellow at the Watermill Center in Watermill, New York, on leave from a Creative Writing position at New York University. Trained as a classicist—she received her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Toronto in 1981, and an Honorary Degree in 2012—but better known as an accomplished poet and translator, Carson burst on the scene in 1986 with the publication of her first and most philosophical work, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay.1 What this book announced most clearly, in addition to Carson’s complex identity as a poet-and-classicist-and-philosopher-in-one, was her unique ability to work against the expectations and across the loose boundaries which define a genre, and thus to create new genres along the way. In this essay, I would like to offer a retrospective appreciation of Carson’s first book, published (it is scarcely believable to note) more than thirty years ago. There are historical precedents to her achievement in this text, as I hope to show, but her authorial voice is altogether unique, and the reach of her influence has been long. ❖ on rare occasion, a first book may give us a telling glimpse into everything that will follow. Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet is such a first book. What the book does best is to announce itself, and its author, as the bearer of unconventional news, reported in an unconventional manner, all of it expressed in uncommonly luminous prose. It is a book that refuses to be categorized, a book that refuses genre— strangely enough, virtually by creating one. And along the way of creating—that is, of poeticizing—in its singular way, this book generates new desires all its own. There is a history to such literary and generic non-conformity. 138 reach without grasping When Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was invited to take up a professorship at the astonishing age of 24, without even having produced his dissertation yet, the expectations surrounding his first book were elevated, to say the least. Well aware of this, aware too of having been described by his mentor as “the future of Classics in Germany,” Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music in 1872.2 He was still just 26 years old, and very few classicists knew what to make of it; even his mentor regretted the rashness of the thing. Meaner spirits mockingly called it a work of “future-philology!” suggesting that... (shrink)

Reading both philosophical and theological texts, this book presents an argument against nostalgia: against the myth of a Golden Age, against the posture that sees "modernity" as a problem to be solved.

`From Aristotle to Us', the conference held at La Trobe University in May 2007, names a powerful and highly influential Romantic trajectory, one which posits a particular conception of the ancients, a particular conception of the moderns, and a complex conception of the relationship between the two. Using the modern Olympic Revival as a case study and a case in point, this article argues that such `exercises' in Greek appropriation always operate with largely unstated assumptions about the nature of the (...) present's relation to the past, and the enormously complex quality of the Greek past. In becoming self-critical about such appropriations of the Classical legacy, contemporary critics are forced to contend with the spectre of religion, a topic that `Greek exercises' almost inevitably carve in high relief. The article concludes with an historiographic meditation on varying images of `paganism' in contemporary culture, images that link the Greeks to athletics to such modern and post-modern `revivals'. (shrink)

The fundamental argument of this book is that the evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy—from Emerson to Rorty—results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism in which the meaning of America is put forward by intellectuals in response to distinct social and cultural crises. In this sense, American Pragmatism is less a philosophical tradition putting forward solutions to perennial problems in the Western philosophical conversation initiated by Plato and more a continuous cultural commentary or set of interpretations that (...) attempt to explain America to itself at a particular historical moment.The goal of a sophisticated neopragmatism is to think genealogically about specific practices in... (shrink)

Much has been made of the ‘Southern difference’ in cultural and sociological images of the North American landscape. Everything isdifferent there: the cuisine, the music, the religion, and the politics. Moreover, the South was the crucible in which two of the definitive North American experiences were formed: the Civil War (1861–5) and the Civil Rights Movement a century later. This article poses another important category, in addition to ‘race and space’ – namely, the concept of tragedy, and the correlative rendering (...) of the South as ‘America's tragic landscape’. (shrink)

In this essay I begin with Aristotle’s perplexing observation that a tragic drama is a “whole,” one identified by a clear beginning, middle and ending. I pause to wonder how Aristotle imagines such ends, given his contention that a play concludes in such a way that “nothing can follow from it.” On the face of it, it is very difficult to imagine what Aristotle has in mind here. I suggest that one clue may be found in his title, Poetics, with (...) its clear suggestion that a dramatic event is in fact a making, a poiesis. I develop this idea to suggest that the end of a story, any story, tends to be something the reader imposes, often in the interest of generating a specific moral. I then display these readerly dynamics by providing a close reading of the famous story from Genesis, concerning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. I explore a number of different ways in which this story may be thought to “end,” as well as the implications of each such ending. (shrink)

There are three “scandals” that appear in most discussions of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the so-called father of modern Art History: his allegedly careerist conversion to Catholicism in 1754; his semi-secret homoerotic discourse while under Vatican employ in the early-to-mid 1760s; and his shocking murder in Trieste in 1768. Of the three, Winckelmann's sexuality has garnered the most attention in recent scholarship. A little-known story reported by Casanova during his second visit to Rome in 1761 has something to do with (...) that. In this essay, I argue that we make too much of sexuality these days and, in so doing, fail to register the far more radical religious activities in which Winckelmann was involved, most notably the creation and curation of the Vatican Museums, with their almost casual display of naked statues of pagan divinities. Winckelmann's “profanity,” not his sexuality, constitutes the revolutionary core of his life's work and enduring influence. The statues he discussed so passionately were not simply naked; they were pagan. (shrink)

Traditionally there has been a great divide between those practitioners of comparative religion who work on discrete and identifiably religious traditions (such as Confucianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, etc.) and those who work on identifying aspects of ‘religious’ life that often go unnoticed because they are less traditional and therefore less recognizable as religion. There has also long been a predisposition not to view Greek materials as religious, and thus to secularize one form of thriving polytheism about which we know (...) a great deal. Combining those two methodological insights in a study of contemporary North American religious life, Gary Laderman offers a fresh look at what I will call the ‘practical polytheism’ of modern US society, one that examines cultural arenas as diverse as sport, music, celebrity, sexuality and death in a riveting analysis of current spiritual trends in a more multicultural North America. (shrink)

There is fierce controversy in the United States over whether parents should be able to choose their children's schools and/or curriculum. To discuss the pedagogical arguments inherent in this question, Todd Alan Price and Ruprecht Mattig begin with the classical concept of Bildung as developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt around 1800. Next, they compare Humboldt's ideas with the ideas of John Stuart Mill and Milton Friedman, who stand in the tradition of liberal thought, as Mill was strongly influenced by (...) Humboldt and Friedman, in turn, by Mill. Finally, they consider Friedman's role as a central figure in the school choice movement, and are thus able to trace a line of thought from Humboldt to actual controversies. Price and Mattig's analysis here shows that the liberalism of Humboldt, Mill, and Friedman revolves around diversity and choice in education. Moreover, it traces that in the process of translating, translocating, and transcontextualizing Humboldt's original thought through Mill to Friedman, the complexity of arguments about education and the role of parents and the state in a liberal society has been unduly reduced. The authors conclude the paper by proposing a principle for thinking about the relationship between different educational institutions in democracies. (shrink)

While freedom has traditionally been discussed in philosophy and political theory, this paper proposes an anthropological approach to the study of freedom. The focus is on the Japanese word amae, which Takeo Doi calls the ‘key’ to Japanese culture and contrasts with the ‘Western’ concept of freedom. After discussing Doi’s influential work, meanings are reconstructed from interviews and group discussions with Japanese people about amae. The interviewees define amae literally in terms of social ‘non-independence’ and, unlike Doi, understand it in (...) a complex intertwining with freedom on the one hand and autonomy on the other. Overall, the paper argues that amae can hardly serve as a ‘key’ to understanding the Japanese, but can stimulate fruitful anthropological reflections not only on Japanese culture, but also on the concept of freedom. (shrink)

Malek Chebel talks to Nicole Albert and Lydia Ruprecht about gender questions in Islam: androgyny, homosexuality, and relations between the sexes in traditional and changing Muslim societies. 198.