DOCSLIB.ORG

Being-Up-For-Grabs.Pdf

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Being-Up-For-Grabs.Pdf UCC Library and UCC researchers have made this item openly available. Please let us know how this has helped you. Thanks! Title Being up for grabs: On speculative anarcheology Author(s) Bensusan, Hilan Publication date 2017 Original citation Bensusan, H. (2016). Being Up for Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology. London: Open Humanities Press. Type of publication Book Link to publisher's https://openhumanitiespress.org/ version Access to the full text of the published version may require a subscription. Rights © 2016, Hilan Bensusan. This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/5669 from Downloaded on 2021-10-05T06:32:10Z Being Up For Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology Hilan Bensusan Being Up for Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology New Metaphysics Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphys- ics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic- continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intel- lectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’ from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main inter- est is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Hilan Bensusan Being Up for Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London, 2016 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2016 Copyright © 2016 Hilan Bensusan Freely available at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/being-up-for-grabs/ This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Design by Katherine Gillieson Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu The cover illustration is copyright Tammy Lu 2016, used under a Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC-BY). Interior images copyright Gisel Carriconde Azevedo used with permission. PRINT ISBN 978-1-78542-028-3 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-029-0 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org Contents Acknowledgements 11 1. Being up for grabs – the preliminaries 15 2. Anarcheologies 61 3. Fragments 95 4. Doubts 137 5. Rhythms 163 6. Contingency and its galaxies 195 Notes 209 References 223 To Denise Paiva Agustinho and Devrim Acknowledgements The gestation of this book took pretty close to nine months. Its conception, to be sure, took much longer. Both processes were collective and I’m grateful to a large number of people, places and institutions for ideas, inspiration and support. The idea came up in a bus ride with Fabiane Borges somewhere close to Arba Minch, Ethiopia, in January 2012. It was first sketched in a talk at the American University of Beirut, organized by Ray Brassier in June 2012. Parts of the book have nonetheless had previous lives. Anarcheology is an older endeavor I have been pursuing with Leonel Antunes and Luciana Ferreira since 2009. The chapter on fragments is much indebted to the course I taught at Paris 8 in 2011, and I’m thankful to many students and colleagues there, especially Eric Lecerf, Stéphane Douailler, Zouzi Chebbi, Marie Bardet, Andres Vahos, Jean-Sébastien Laberge, Romain Flizot and Julie Alfonsi. While in Paris I also had important conversations with Lise Lacoste and Quentin Meillassoux. The chapter on doubts was developed in parallel with my interactions with the Neo-Pyrrhonism work group in Brazil and its meetings around 2012 and 2013 where the argument of the chapter took form. It benefited from discussions particularly with Oswaldo Porchat, Eros Carvalho, Alexandre Noronha, Michael Williams, Luiz Eva and Plinio Junqueira Smith. The chapter on rhythms was bred in my courses in Brasilia in 2012 and 2013, the conference on Performance Philosophy at Guilford, the one on Diverse Bodies in Rio, both in 2013 and in exchanges I had in events about ontology and speculation around this time. I’m thankful to 12 Hilan Bensusan André Arnaut, Barbara de Barros, Tomás Ribeiro, Guilherme Moura, Lucas Kaeté, Jéssica Franco, Rômulo Fontinelle, Gena Pulino, Juliana Bramatti, Marcos Chagas, Gabriela Lafetá, Bernardo Tavares, Otavio Maciel, Gerson Brea, Herivelto Souza, Ana Miriam Altmayer Wünsch, Wanderson Flor, Loraine Oliveira, Agatha Bacelar, Agnaldo Portugal, Cecília Almeida, Laura Cull, Ana Cristina Chiara, Johnny Kemp, Marcus Gabriel, Graham Harman, Cesar dos Santos, Rodrigo Nunes, Steven Shaviro, John Protevi, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Déborah Danowski, Alexandre Nodari, Erick Felinto, Erick Lima, Paulo Abrantes, Julio Cabrera and Eclair Filho. Work on galaxies has been carried out together with Alexandre Costa-Leite (and more recently with Edelcio Souza and Rodrigo Freire). Furthermore, I’ve rehearsed some of the ideas in the book on my blog (No Borders Metaphysics) and I’m grateful to comments and suggestions I received. The writing season started early in 2014 in Xalapa where Juliana Merçon and her house in Zoncloantla, close to the Pixquiac river, provided the right environment for the embryonic book. Its birth also owes much to her. From Veracruz, I moved to Vienna, Graz, Innsbruck, Granada, Paris, Brighton, Berlin, Lisbon and back to Brasilia. During these nine months I was helped in many ways by my sister Nurit and my nephew Ariê, Alfonso de Pablos, Flor Rothschild, the Coatepec organic market, Grego Queiroz, Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (for hosting my course on ontographies and modes of existence and the invitation to talk in Tajin), Helio Garcia, Eckhart Boege, Irlanda Villegas, Luisa Paré, Adriana Menassé and our great conversations at Parochia and Chiquito, the Universidad Veracruzana (where I ultra-sounded parts of the book), the Biblioteca Carlos Fuentes and the adjacent street Ursulo Galván, Carol Sobreiro, Edla Eggert, Gerardo Alatorre, Shantal Mesenguer, Crisanto Bautista, Roberto Penedo, Ignacio Marcué, Barbara Hardcore,Witek Jacorzinsky who helped me with the Sahagún Colloquia and invited me to talk at CIESAS, Daniel Paiva, the Österreiches Nationalbibliothek, Cristina Borgoni, Marian David, Guido Melchior, the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (where I talked on the ontology of doubts), Manuel de Pinedo and his friends and colleagues at the Universidad de Granada (where I talked about logical galaxies), Mar Muriana, the Genil river, Filipe Chipe, Monica Udler, Aurèle Crasson, the Paris 8 library, the Buttes Chaumont park, Aharon Amir, Olga Shaumyan, Acknowledgements 13 the North Laines Library in Brighton, Katie Bailey, Oli Sharpe, Tom Beament, Benjamim Noys, Dariush Sokolov, Claudia Freire, Guida Chambel, Caroline Marin, Nuno Oliveira, Aia Hipácia, Joana Barata, Filipe Ceppas, Kelly Heitor, Laura Ovidio, Poncho and everyone from the community where I live: Gisel Carriconde Azevedo, Phil Jones, Laura Virginia, Judith Zuquim, Hannah Prado, Tina Nunes and Treps. During these (roughly) forty weeks Denise Paiva Agustinho was very much by my side, gestating Devrim. The book is dedicated to them both. The text was much improved by conversations with Jadson Alves, especially concerning monadologies in general. I also thank Stephanie Mitchell and Kaio Rabelo for their careful help in preparing the final manuscript. To conclude, I would like to thank my Department at the University of Brasilia, which made it possible for me to go on leave to write this book, the two grants that supported the investigation: one from CNPq, Brazil (CNPq/486635/2013-9) and one from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2010-19455), as well as the two anonymous reviewers for Open Humanities Press. I’m happy that this book is appearing in the New Metaphysics Series – reading its mission statement was a key factor in my decision to write this book. Wrapped-up Gisel Carriconde Azevedo, Digital photography, 2011 Chapter 1 Being up for grabs – the preliminaries Up for grabs This is a book about what ain’t necessarily so. It is about how we can grasp, assimilate or come to terms with what could have been otherwise – or might not be at all. Aristotle claims that we cannot know the impermanent.1 It can be argued, from that perspective, that thought itself requires a measure of fixity. After all, if thought has a format akin to predication, it requires a subject for that predication. Indeed, metaphysics has classically been associated with necessities of some sort. It has typically resorted to substances (which endure modifications and provide reality to what is perceived), to substrata (hypokeimena underneath different qualities and predications) and to fixed principles and necessary connections: in a word, to one kind of arché or another.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Polemos and Agon
    Edinburgh Research Explorer Polemos and Agon Citation for published version: Thomson, A 2009, Polemos and Agon. in A Schaap (ed.), Law and Agonistic Politics. Edinburgh/Glasgow Law and Society Series, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, pp. 105-118. Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Peer reviewed version Published In: Law and Agonistic Politics Publisher Rights Statement: © Thomson, A. (2009). Polemos and Agon. In A. Schaap (Ed.), Law and Agonistic Politics. (pp. 105-118). (Edinburgh/Glasgow Law and Society Series). Farnham: Ashgate Press. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 This is the Author’s Original Version of © Thomson, A. (2009). Polemos and Agon. In A. Schaap (Ed.), Law and Agonistic Politics. (pp. 105-118). (Edinburgh/Glasgow Law and Society Series). Farnham: Ashgate Press. Please refer to the published volume for citation purposes. CHAPTER 6 Polemos and Agon Alex Thomson Agonist political theorists stress not only the irreducibility but the centrality of conflict to democratic politics. This sets them apart from pluralist or deliberative democrats who may acknowledge the impossibility of eliminating disputes, but whose efforts are directed towards institutions and processes which would foster co-operation and reconciliation rather than sustain antagonism.
    [Show full text]
  • Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles
    SEMIOTEXTIEJ l'OREIGN AGENTS SERIES BOLO 'BOLO JIM fuMING & SnvERE LO'fRINGER, EDI1'ORSG P.M. SPEEDAND POUTICS IN TIlE SHAOOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES Paul Viri/io Jean BaudrWard ONTHEUNE NOMADOLOGY; THE WAR MACHINE Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Gilles Deleuze & FelixGuattari SADNESS AT LEAVING DRIFTWORKS ErjeAyden Jean-Franf0is Lyotard REMARKS ON MARX POPULAR DEFENSE AND ECOLOGICAL STRUGGLES Michel Foucault Paul Virilio 69 WAYS TO SINGTHE BLUES SIMULATIONS Jiirg Laederach Jean Baudrillard INTERVENTIONS THE SOCIAL FACTORY Michel Foucault Toni Negri & Mario Tronti ASSASSINATION RHAPSODY PURE WAR Derek Pel! Paul Virilio & Sylv�re £otringer GERMANlA LOOKING BACK ON TIlE END OF THEWORLD Heiner Mueller Jean Baudrillard Gunter Gebauer Dietmar Kamper DieterLenzen NATIVI<:AGENTS SERIES Edgar Morin CIlRIS KRAUS & Sn.vEIUl LoTRINGER, EDITORS Gerburg Treusch-Dieter Paul Virilio Christoph WUlf IF YOU'RE A GIRL Ann Rower FOUCAULT UVE Michel Foucault WALKING THROUGHCLEAR WATER INA POOL PAINTEDBLACK FORGET FOUCAULT Cookie Mueller Jean Baudrillard ORIGIN OF TIlE SPECIES BEHOLD METATRON, TIlE RECORDING ANGEL Barbara Barg Sol Yurick SEMIOTEXTIEJ l'OREIGN AGENTS SERIES BOLO 'BOLO JIM fuMING & SnvERE LO'fRINGER, EDI1'ORSG P.M. SPEEDAND POUTICS IN TIlE SHAOOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES Paul Viri/io Jean BaudrWard ONTHEUNE NOMADOLOGY; THE WAR MACHINE Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Gilles Deleuze & FelixGuattari SADNESS AT LEAVING DRIFTWORKS ErjeAyden Jean-Franf0is Lyotard REMARKS ON MARX POPULAR DEFENSE AND ECOLOGICAL STRUGGLES Michel Foucault Paul Virilio
    [Show full text]
  • Pantes Theoi, Polemos and Ares on the Battlefield. the Greek Concept of the War Deity
    SYMBOLAE PHILOLOGORUM POSNANIENSIUM GRAECAE ET LATINAE XXI/1 • 2011 pp. 41–48. ISBN 978-83-7654-160-0. ISSN 0302-7384 Lucyna Kostuch Instytut Historii Uniwersytetu Humanistyczno-Przyrodniczego Jana Kochanowskiego ul. Żeromskiego 5, 25-369 Kielce Polska – Poland Pantes theoi, Polemos and Ares on the Battlefield. The Greek Concept of the War Deity AbstrAct. Kostuch Lucyna, Pantes theoi, Polemos and Ares on the Battlefield. The Greek Concept of the War deity. The Hellenes created a concept of potential military engagement by all the gods. In martial contexts, Greek authors often included the concepts of “all the gods” (pantes theoi), “the gods” (theoi), “god” (theos), divine being (daimonion) and holy power (hieros), which signify interference by unidentified divine forces. The relationship between war and gods may thus be defined ex definitione. The question arises as to the basis of this way of thinking. It seems that the answer should be sought in the basic definition of war – polemos. War is only occasionally personified. The answer to the question of why Polemos never became a clearly defined divine figure and mythological hero can be found in Homer. In the Iliad many deities, although not all, have military might (polemos) at their disposal and participate in directing martial activities. It is for this very reason that this force never became an independent one – war arises as a result of what can be termed a divine “chain reaction”. The existence of war is thus dependent on the gods who make it active as the result of a stimulus. It is significant that Ares, just like Polemos, is not fully autonomous.
    [Show full text]
  • Demoting and Restoring the Underground Goddesses Judy Schavrien Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
    International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Volume 29 | Issue 2 Article 14 7-1-2010 War and Nature in Classical Athens and Today: Demoting and Restoring the Underground Goddesses Judy Schavrien Institute of Transpersonal Psychology Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/ijts-transpersonalstudies Part of the Philosophy Commons, Psychology Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Schavrien, J. (2010). Schavrien, J. (2010). War and nature in classical Athens and today: Demoting and restoring the underground goddesses. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 29(2), 153–179.. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 29 (2). http://dx.doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2010.29.2.153 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. This Special Topic Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals and Newsletters at Digital Commons @ CIIS. It has been accepted for inclusion in International Journal of Transpersonal Studies by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ CIIS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. War and Nature in Classical Athens and Today: Demoting and Restoring the Underground Goddesses Judy Schavrien Institute of Transpersonal Psychology Palo Alto, CA, USA A gendered analysis of social and religious values in 5th century BCE illuminates the Athenian decline from democracy to bully empire, through pursuit of a faux virility. Using a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion, the study contrasts two playwrights bookending the empire: Aeschylus, who elevated the sky pantheon Olympians and demoted both actual Athenian women and the Furies—deities linked to maternal ties and nature, and Sophocles, who granted Oedipus, his maternal incest purified, an apotheosis in the Furies’ grove.
    [Show full text]
  • Considerations on Modern War
    PAOLO CEOLA LABYRINTTHE H Considerations on Modern War New edition renewed (2016) Società Italiana di Storia Militare © 2016 - Collana SISM Tutti i diritti riservati all’Autore ISBN: 978-88-941325-1-9 Nadir Media - Roma [email protected] On the cover: olive tree on the ruins of Sparta, Greece. (shot by Author. 2010) Stampa: Nadir Media - Roma Discant viventes sorte mortuorum1* A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are star- ing, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris be- fore him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.2** * [May the living people learn from the fate of the dead]: inscription placed at the entran- ce of the concentration camp of Mauthausen. ** W. Benjamin, Schriften, Frankfurt a. M., Suhkamp, 1955. 5 INTRODUCTION his book represents the greatly revised and corrected fusion of two former books written in Italian.1 T The title is easy to explain: when I am thinking about war, it calls me to mind the last sequences of The Shining, a horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick, with the father running after his son through a labyrinth made-up of snow-covered hedges in order to kill him.
    [Show full text]
  • Mimesis, Eros, and Mania on Platonic Originals
    1 Mimesis, Eros, and Mania On Platonic Originals PHILOSOPHICAL IMAGINATION AND THE MIDDLE Vico’s inspiring work reminds us of the importance of what he called the imaginative universal. An imaginative universal, of course, would strike many rationalistic philosophers as very odd. It will not so strike the person with even minimum exposure to the revelatory power of art. Vico not only gives our imagination wings, as Joyce said; he also had more wings than not a few philosophers. Think, for instance, of his opposite in spirit, Descartes. Or per- haps Hegel, whose version of speculative reason, one fears, betrays this inti- mate strangeness of being. One might say: a properly winged philosophical imagination knows this intimacy and this strangeness.1 Can the name “Plato” stand for that philosophical imagination? This too will seem odd, since Plato is taken as the implacable foe of the poets. But who has endowed the philo- sophical tradition more richly with its philosophical images, such as the Cave, the Sun, the winged soul, and so on? Do not these images present some of the imaginative universals of philosophy itself, to which thinkers return again and again, and not because they are deficient in speculative reason but 1. The admirable work of Donald Verene helped open my eyes to the importance of the imaginative universal in Vico. Verene has also awakened us to the philosophical importance of images in Hegel, and especially his Phenomenology, in Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).
    [Show full text]
  • Blessed Is He Who Has Seen
    HELIOS Volume 40 Spring/Fall 2013 Numbers 1–2 Vision and Viewing in Ancient Greece Sue Blundell, Douglas Cairns, and Nancy Rabinowitz, Guest Editors Preface 1 Introduction 3 Sue Blundell, Douglas Cairns, Elizabeth Craik, and Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz I. Art and Text Swallow This: A Pelike within Late Archaic Song and Visual Culture 41 Deborah Steiner Framing a View of the Unviewable: Architecture, Aphrodite, and Erotic Looking in the Lucianic Erôtes 71 Melissa Haynes Apparitions Apparent: Ekphrasis and the Parameters of Vision in the Elder Philostratus’s Imagines 97 Michael Squire II. Narrative Hesiod and the Divine Gaze 143 Helen Lovatt ‘Empire of the Gaze’: Despotism and Seraglio Fantasies à la grecque in Chariton’s Callirhoe 167 Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones III. Performance Women as Subject and Object of the Gaze in Tragedy 195 Nancy Rabinowitz Vision and Knowledge in Greek Tragedy 223 Chiara Thumiger Humiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy 247 Ian Ruffell IV. Enlightenment Dynamics of Vision in Plato’s Thought 281 Fritz-Gregor Herrmann ‘Blessed Is He, Who Has Seen’: The Power of Ritual Viewing and Ritual Framing in Eleusis 309 Georgia Petridou Notes on Contributors 343 HELIOS EDITOR Steven M. Oberhelman EDITORIAL BOARD Helene Foley Mary-Kay Gamel Barbara K. Gold Barnard California, Santa Cruz Hamilton S. C. Humphreys W. R. Johnson Richard P. Martin Michigan Chicago Stanford Sheila Murnaghan Martha Nussbaum C. Robert Phillips III Pennsylvania Chicago Lehigh Brent Shaw Marilyn Skinner Victoria Wohl Princeton Arizona Toronto H ELIOS publishes articles that explore innovative approaches to the study of classical culture, lit- erature, and society.
    [Show full text]
  • Greek Mythology / Apollodorus; Translated by Robin Hard
    Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Robin Hard 1997 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1997 Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Apollodorus. [Bibliotheca. English] The library of Greek mythology / Apollodorus; translated by Robin Hard.
    [Show full text]
  • Polemos, Pathemata, and Plague: Thucydides' Narrative and the Tradition of Upheaval
    Polemos, Pathemata, and Plague: Thucydides’ Narrative and the Tradition of Upheaval Rachel Bruzzone For Tony Woodman HUCYDIDES’ ANALYSIS of the pathemata of the Pel- oponnesian War (1.23) is often ignored or treated as suspect,1 with relatively few scholars arguing for its T 2 significance to his work as a whole. All indications from the 1 E.g. P. J. Rhodes, Thucydides: History I (Oxford 2014) 207: “By the end of his catalogue Thucydides has departed from the rationalism which we tend to associate with him.” Gomme, HCT I 151, expresses some doubt about “whether Thucydides himself thought there might be some connexion be- tween such natural events and human actions” and attributes this belief to “popular opinion” rather than the historian. H. D. F. Kitto, Poiesis: Structure and Thought (Berkeley 1966) 274, observes how awkwardly the pathemata passage is often skirted by those who prefer not to engage with it. S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides I (Oxford 1991) 63, notes that the association between natural and political crises in this passage has been “an embarrassment to his commentators,” some of whom simply ignore it. L. Kallet, “Thucydides, Apollo, the Plague, and the War,” AJP 134 (2013) 355–382, at 360–361, argues rightly, however, that “it does no service to his—and, therefore, our—understanding of the war to sweep under the rug, make improbable excuses, or awkward explanations, for what does not conform to our preconceptions, as if the historian has ‘slipped’ a bit from the program.” 2 N. Marinatos, Thucydides and Religion (Königstein 1981) 17–28, takes this passage as significant, as does Kallet, AJP 134 (2013), esp.
    [Show full text]
  • Hesiod As Precursor to the Presocratic Philosophers: a Voeglinian View
    Hesiod as Precursor to the Presocratic Philosophers: A Voeglinian View Copyright 2001 Richard F. Moorton, Jr. Early in the Metaphysics Aristotle remarks that myth like philosophy begins in a sense of wonder (982b18f). For Voegelin mythology is that compact symbolization of the wondering psyche in testimony to its experience of the tension of existence in the world at the dawn of a people. A thinker like Herodotus, participating in the early stages of differentiation of the compact poesis of Greek mythology, still had a sense of the freshness of the achievements of the two fountainheads of Greek mythos, Homer and Hesiod: But it was only�if I may so put it�the day before yesterday�that the Greeks came to know the origin and form of the various Gods, and whether or not all of them had always existed; for Homer and Hesiod, the poets who composed our theogonies and described the gods for us, giving them their appropriate titles, offices, and powers, lived, as I believe, not more than four hundred years ago. But Voegelin correctly discerns in both Homer and Hesiod the seminal impulses of protophilosophers of order. Homer is the great diagnostician of nosos, sickness, in the social order of what he took to be Achaean society and in the human conception of the divine order. Though prephilosophical, he is nonetheless a great poet of the movement of the psyche towards truth and its possible derailment in disorder, a philosopher�s concern. Hesiod disentangles this poisesis from the specific "true story" of the Trojan conflict and universalizes it in his Theogony, a theological cosmology, and the Works and Days, a theosensitive anthropology.
    [Show full text]
  • War and the Warrior: Functions of Ares in Literature and Cult1
    War and the Warrior: Functions of Ares in Literature and Cult Alexander T. Millington UCL Dissertation submitted for the degree of PhD in History 2013 1 I, Alexander Millington, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract This dissertation presents a new interpretative synthesis of the sources relating to the cults, identities, and functions of the god Ares, focusing on the Archaic and Classic periods. An apparent dichotomy is identified: in many respects, the evidence suggests that Ares must have been a very important god throughout much of the Greek world throughout the Archaic and Classic periods (and beyond), but in other respects the evidence suggests that he was not. I argue that this dichotomy does not derive from changes in the popularity, relevance, or nature of the god, as has been proposed. Instead, I argue that the elements of Ares’ cults and representations which suggest that Ares was unpopular or unimportant derive from those which made him important and continually relevant. I argue that because Ares was identified with war, attitudes towards the god directly reflect Greek attitudes towards war. War’s importance as an element of Greek life, and the god’s power as a causal force with it, led to deep respect for Ares, reflected by widespread cult, and a place among the great Olympians. But the wild, destructive, and unpredictable nature of war, which Ares represented, meant that he was not a regular recipient of large-scale celebratory cult.
    [Show full text]
  • Gender and Violence in the Odyssey
    Colby Quarterly Volume 29 Issue 3 September Article 7 September 1993 Penelope's Male Hand: Gender and Violence in the Odyssey Michael N. Nagler Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq Recommended Citation Colby Quarterly, Volume 29, no.3, September 1993, p.241-257 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. Nagler: Penelope's Male Hand: Gender and Violence in the Odyssey Penelope's Male Hand: Gender and Violence in the Odyssey by MICHAEL N. NAGLER N AN EARLIER study I argued that the innocent-sounding line at the beginning I ofthe Slaughter ofthe Suitors when Odysseus says the contest is over and he will now try a shot "which no one has ever made before" (Od. 22.6) is actually a signal that the event we are about to witness is an aition for a leader's use of violence againstmembers ofhis own community-thecentral ethical topic ofthe Odyssey. 1 It seemed to many a weak point in this argument that such an off-hand and rather obscure remark could be expected to carry such programmatic weight and direct the hearer's attention to the aetiological character of the whole episode. At the time of writing I could only support my intuition with the ex silentio argument that in oral epic we would not expect the poet to stress the aitiological character ofhis story any more overtly. The return ofOdysseus is­ at least on the surface-a good stretch down the road ofprogressive rationaliza­ tion from its origins in aitiological myth.
    [Show full text]