Notes
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Page references appear in the text.
2. I would dissociate myself from some of what Roth says about Greek tragedy, but that is not really the point.
3. The novel’s view of race is consistently provocative, even or especially when it remains ambivalent. Far less can be saidfor its view of gender, which is clearer andmore problematic.
4. The mirror image is Toni Morrison’s claim in the New Yorker that Clinton was coded black by the Christian right:
African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heardthe first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when . . . the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seizedand body-searched, who couldgainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: No matter how smart you are, hard you work . . . we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. . . . Unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once) your expletives belong to us.
5. The first part of the definition of the human stain comes from Faunia, Coleman’s lover, who has been molested and brutalized for much of her life. The second and third aspects are presented by the narrator.
6. Again, the narrator is somewhat distant from what is said, and given the crudity of the conversation we, though not Roth, may be further from it still.
7. Richard Posner, An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
8. In Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece, quoted in Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 19.
9. In The Greek City from Homer to Alexander, ed. Oswyn Murray and Simon Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1–24.
10. Ibid., 3.
11. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Cosmopolitanism and the Circle of Reason,” Political Theory 28, no. 5 (October 2000): 631.
12. Murray and Price, The Greek City, 4–5.
13. Ibid.
14. See Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Verso, 1989).
15. Quotedby Gabriel Josipovici, “The SecondAd ams,” Times Literary Supplement, April 13, 2001, 27.
16. “Rorty on Gadamer,” London Review of Books, March 16, 2000, 25.
17. Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 50–51.
18. I take some of the language from Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
19. Assertions about “origins” and “The West” can no longer be made unproblematically.
20. I take this story from Mel Gordon, “Noise Sound Creation in the Nineteenth Century,” in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and Avant Garde, ed . Douglas Kaplan and Gregory Whitehead (Cambrid ge: MIT Press, 1992).
21. The December 21, 1997, front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, in a story opposite one about organ transplants, quoted the complaint by astronomers that a sky full of noise was jamming their radio telescopes. The booming use of cellular phones, radios, pagers, communication satellites, and wireless links to the World Wide Web was flooding the atmosphere, making it more and more difficult to study “galaxy-gobbling black holes, hellfire-spewing stars and perhaps intelligent beings.”
22. Michael Valdez Moses, “Lust Removed from Nature,” in New Essays on White Noise, ed. Frank Lentricchia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 64.
CHAPTER TWO
ON THE USES AND DISADVANTAGES OF HELLENIC STUDIES
FOR POLITICAL AND THEORETICAL LIFE
1. I have used the Hollingdale translation by Daniel Breazeale in Untimely Meditations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); page references appear in the text. In those few instances when I have not, I have usedthe Walter de Gruyter edition of Vom Nutzen und Machtheil der Historie fur das Leben (Berlin, 1972).
2. I am not using Nietzsche’s work as a whole to do this, which means that I am avoiding the challenging question of Nietzsche’s view of “The Greeks” as a whole and the way he comes to differentiate among them, e.g., in his critique of Socratism, his admiration for the Sophists and Thucydides, his assessment of Homer and Hesiod, his analysis of pre-Socratic philosophy, and his judgments about Greek drama, Athenian democracy, and the role of the Dionysian. Who the Greeks were for him and the role they come to play (or not play) in his thought changes substantially from this essay, The Birth of Tragedy, and The Genealogy of Morals through Twilight of the Idols to Zarathustra. In part it is the “un-Nietzschean” things he says in this essay that attracted me to it. One couldsay that in terms of many contemporary uses of Nietzsche, my reading is untimely. Cf. Foucault’s “use” of Nietzsche in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64, esp. 95–97.
3. Joel Whitebrook argues that “utopia has been exhaustedas a project and discredited as a body of thought.” Perversion and Utopia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 76.
4. On the meaning of betrachtungen as well as unzeitgemasse, see Breazeale, Untimely Meditations, xliv.
5. Something like this is going on when Martin Luther King, Jr. (in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”) “uses” subordinate aspects of the Western philosophical religious traditions and the American political tradition to recast the dominant interpretations of them, and when Adam Michnik interprets the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a form of Polish resistance to foreign invasion. When Machiavelli attempts to insert Florence and Italy into a Roman past he is partly inventing, he is acting out Nietzsche’s advice about the need to choose a past when our own offers no examples of great action.
6. Thus I will have little to say about the way “On the Uses and Disad vantages of History for Life” is related to contemporary events, intellectual currents, or figures (such as Grillparzer, Hartmann, Wagner, Strauss, and Hegel).
7. It has the same explosive potential Machiavelli’s opposition between success andmorality had for those enamored of the Mirror of Princes literature.
8. As I will argue in chapter 4, Machiavelli laments the fact that his contemporaries are in thrall to a literary, aesthetic, and philosophical past but ignore its political uses. Indeed, their veneration of its culture becomes the excuse for ignoring its political potential. Of course he, unlike Nietzsche, is referring to Rome, or rather Livy’s Rome.
9. Here is Marx’s famous characterization of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations . . . are swept away, all new-formedones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, andman is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
10. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Knopf, 1980), 91.
11. See Joan Wallach Scott, “After History?” Common Knowledge 5, no. 3 (Winter 1996): 9–26.
12. In Wir Philologen, Nietzsche complains that classical education almost always reflects a “bloodless recollection of the past” and represents a “nauseating erudition” that fosters a “sluggish timid indifference to life.” (I quote from William Arrowsmith’s translation in Arion 2, nos. 1 and 2 [1963].)
13. The significance of historical contextualization, the way it generates shifting perspectives and precludes moralistic condemnations, is suggested by Dan Fowler in a review of a recent book on classical scholarship. “It is an irony,” he writes, that “one of the reasons that Classical philology made this attempt at objectivity was to free itself from Victorian and Edwardian moralizing, so as to be able to examine ‘coolly’ and ‘historically’ phenomena such as same-sex relationships in Sappho without Christian prejudice.” He adds that the professionalization of classics now under attack was driven by younger scholars who were tired of raptures about “The Greek Spirit.” See “Expertise and Experience,” Times Literary Supplement, October 24, 1997, 33.
14. See the discussion in Scott, “After History?”
15. Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment (London: Verso, 1995), chap. 1.
16. Wolin develops the idea in Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1970).
17. I do not mean to single out any particular school, since what Weber called (in a different context) the routinization of charisma is a frequent occurrence when theoretical provocations become methods of analysis.
18. “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed . H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1958). Page references appear in the text.
19. Where the structure of society produces a war, people with a “manly and controlled attitude” would tell the enemy, “We lost the war. You have won it. That is now all over. Now let us discuss what conclusions must be drawn according to the objective interests that come into play and what is the main thing in view of the responsibility towards the future which above all burdens the victor. Anything else is undignified and will become a boomerang.” Weber contrasts this “manly” attitude with that of an “old woman” who searches for the guilty one (118).
20. Weber distinguishes this from measuring up to the world as it is. But it is not entirely clear how he can do this without an unacknowledged idealizing moment: a “real” world exists distinct from the one we actually live in.
21. This project, though hardly the nature of the specific conditions, is analogous to that of Hannah Arendt (see The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958]) and Sheld on Wolin. Here is Wolin (in “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996]):
I shall take the political to be an expression of the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the well-being of the collectivity. Politics refers to the legitimized and public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social power, overaccess to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity. Politics is continuous and ceaseless and end less. In contrast, the political is episodic and rare (171).
In many respects Arendt and Wolin developed their idea of the political as a critique of Weber.
22. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1983), 196.
CHAPTER THREE
HANNAH ARENDT AT COLONUS
1. William Connolly asks the right questions and provides a generally persuasive answer. Why, he asks, “do so many contemporary intellectuals draw selective sustenance from this untimely aristocrat in rethinking democracy? . . . How does this protean thinker contribute distinctive elements to the nobility of democracy while he himself, after Human All Too Human, disparages it?” The paradox is that the distinctive sensibility through which Nietzsche opens the door “to an ennobling of democracy is also one that inhibits him from walking through it.”
See his “The Nobility of Democracy” in Vocations of Political Theory, ed. Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 305–25. (The quotations are on 305–6.)
2. Hanna Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Public and Private,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (August 1981): 327–52.
3. See Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
4. The essay is in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), 165.
5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 187 (HC). On this andon Arendt as a tragic thinker, see Robert C.
Pirro, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001).
6. Simon Goldhill, “Refracting Classical Vision: Changing Cultures of Viewing,” in Visions in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), l9.
7. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace andWorld, 1968), 104 (MDT). There are some striking similarities between this play about exile and Arend t’s own life.
8. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, One Thinking (London:
Secker andW arburg, 1978), 164 (LOM).
9. With a few exceptions I rely on the David Grene translation (with a few minor emendations): The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 1, Sophocles, ed. David Grene and Richard Latimore, 2ded . (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Here I am using the translation by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, The Oedipus Cycle: An English Version (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949).
10. See, for instance, Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 3–19.
11. See The Jew as Pariah, edited and with an introduction by Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978).
12. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking), 1963, 285 (OR). Nietzsche’s version of Silenus’s wisdom and his remarks about Olympian gods can be found in “The Birth of Tragedy,” in The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 42 and 41, respectively.
13. There is the further bondof their both being exiles. Perhaps this explains why, as P. E. Easterling suggests, they “talk the same language.” Only “brief exchanges are needed between them so secure is their understanding of one another.” The quotations are from her “Plain Words in Sophocles,” in Sophocles Revisited: Essays Presented to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed. Jasper Griffin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 105.
14. See Easterling’s reading of line 618 (ibid., 103).
15. See Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger, trans. and ed. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 155.
16. The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), 155.
17. See the discussion of Sophie Mills, Theseus, Tragedy and the Athenian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 168.
18. R. P. Winnington-Ingram has a goodd iscussion of this scene. But in an effort to correct the argument that Oedipus is the definitive spokesman of the play, he goes too far by underestimating the degree to which Polyneices is being manipulative andthe fact that the son never answers, let alone refutes, the charges Oedipus levels at him. (See Sophocles: An Interpretation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], chap. 2.)
19. Ibid., 263.
20. We might read this scene in terms of Arendt. For one thing, Oedipus’s explosive reactions against his powerlessness echo Arendt’s fears (in her analysis of the French Revolution) of the “masses” taking revenge for their poverty. For another, Oedipus’s new power and confidence are connected with his newly acquired citizenship and so illustrate Arendt’s ideas of collective power. Of course the problem with any such analogy is that Arendt is relentlessly secular in her reading of Greek literature. One could say that for her the role Nietzsche assigned the Olympian gods is played by a myth of politics.
21. Arendt also speaks about the dangers of the old dictating to the young and the past to the future. See “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future:
Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin), 1968, 173–96.
22. C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), 349.
23. See Peter Burian, “Suppliant and Saviour: Oedipus at Colonus,” Phoenix 28, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 408–29.
24. The quotation and argument are from Deborah Roberts, “The Frustrated Mourner: Strategies of Closure in Greek Tragedy,” in Nomodeiktes, ed. Ralph M. Rosen and Joseph Farrell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 573– 89.
25. Felman, Jacques Lacan, 142.
26. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 158–59.
27. Jasper Griffin’s impatience with political readings of tragedy (the polis “makes its way into the discussion because of an a priori conviction that tragedy must be political in something like our sense”) is a useful warning. But “politics” in “our” sense has, for better or worse, expanded to include issues of culture, religion, sexuality, etc. He is also right to warn about the great difficulty of determining just what the political content of a play or passage should be taken to be, but apparently thinks it easy to say what the political content is not. And his question “[W]ere the audience on the lookout for subtly disguised or obliquely presented political meanings or were they absorbed in the primary meaning of the words and events?” may rest on a false dichotomy and begs the question. See his “Sophocles andthe Democratic City” in Sophocles Revisited, l89–90.
28. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, The Oedipus Cycle (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 174.
29. On the degree to which the valorization of Theseus’s Athens is a critique of Periclean Athens, see Mary Whitlock Blundell. “The Ideal of Athens in Oedipus at Colonus,” in Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis, ed. Alan Sommerstein et al. (Bari: Levante Editori, 1990), 287–306. On 290 ff. she has a fine discussion of the significance of the Chorus’s honoring both Poseidon Hippios (the horse god patron of the elite class of knights) andthe sea god associated with the demos.
30. See her “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama,” in Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, ed. J. Peter Euben (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 121–22, 126. But in this play Thebes is as plural as Athens. Thus Theseus distinguishes Creon from Theban citizenry as a whole, as the play does between the mythical and the contemporary. Thus there are four, not two, terms involvedin the contrasts in the play.
31. On exclusivist Athenians’ self-understanding, see Carol Dougherty, “Democratic Contradictions and the Synoptic Illusion of Euripedes’ Ion,” in Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Cf. Barry Strauss, “The Melting Pot, the Mosaic and the Agora,” in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. J. Peter Euben et al. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), and Laura Slatkin, “Oedipus at Colonus: Exile andIntegration,” in Euben, Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, 210–21. I do not want to exaggerate about the “openness” of even mythical Athens or the sense in which it can serve as an ideal for “us.” We are talking about relative exclusiveness, since it, like perhaps all structures of power, establishes exclusions merely by defining even the most capacious notion of inside. Indeed, one could argue that the more a society captures honorific terms such as “democratic,” “open,” and “inclusive,” the more its exclusions are erased.
32. For a discussion of what these are and how they function, see Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
33. Arendt’s translation takes considerable liberties with the Greek. For instance, it is not clear that when Theseus talks about endowing life with splendor, he is talking about the city or polis in general rather than his life, or what he shares with Oedipus (to whom the lines are directed). Nor is it clear that Theseus is the spokesman for the city as a whole or how exactly the line about endowing life with splendor relates to theWisdom of Silenus, which comes some eighty lines later. In sum, Arendt’s claim that the play proclaims the redemptive nature of politics is a stretch at best.
34. Blundell, “The Ideal of Athens,” 298.
35. “Democratic Contradictions,” 262.
36. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
37. The phrases are from Jonathan Lear’s Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 50.
38. This is a paraphrase of Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s characterization of Arendt’s project in The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1 andpassim.
39. Ibid., 88 40. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt, Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 149.
40. See The Discourses 1:xi.
41. Easterling, “Plain Words in Sophocles,” 98–99, 101–2.
CHAPTER FOUR
ARISTOPHANES IN AMERICA
1. I chose TV comedy because, as David Marc has put it, “Television is America’s jester. It has assumed the guise of an idiot while actually accruing the advantages of power andauthority behind the smoke screen of its self-degradation.” See his Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 7.
2. As anyone who has heardJerry Lewis expoundon the subject can attest.
White’s argument is in the preface to the Modern Library edition of A Subtreasury of American Humor (New York: Random House, 1948), xvii.
3. Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theater (London: Routledge, 1992), vii, 3–5. See Oddone Longo, “The Theater of the Polis,” and John J. Winkler, “The Ephebes Song: Tragoida and Polis,” in Nothing To Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990), 12–19 and 20–61, respectively.
4. See the introduction to Three Plays by Aristophanes: StagingWomen, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Henderson (New York: Routledge, 1996), 5–7.
5. See his “Drama and Community: Aristophanes and Some of His Rivals,” in Winkler and Zeitlin, Nothing to Do with Dionysos?, 237–70.
6. Thucydides 1.142, and Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens:
Intellectual Critics of Popular Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, University Press, 1998), 135–40.
7. David Konstan, Greek Comedy and Ideology (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1995), 8, 165–67.
8. As Anthony Grafton has argued, humor is “the most delicate of subjects in scholarship and everyday life.” The phrase “we are not amused” is one of the most fearful we can hear, and the disapproving comment “I don’t think that’s funny” makes most intellectuals neurotic. No social task is harder “than explaining a joke to someone who does not get it and no intellectual task is harder than trying to understand what makes jokes funny in another society or in the earlier history of one’s own.” See his “Beyond the Joke,” Times Literary Supplement, April 10, 1998, 4–5.
9. Malcolm Heath (in Political Comedy in Aristophanes, [Go¨ ttingen: Vandenhoeck and Reprecht, 1987]) argues that Plato is not blaming Aristophanes here but ridiculing Meletus for constructing a travesty of Socrates no different from the purposeful caricatures of comedy.
10. See Stephen Halliwell, “Comic Satire and Freed om of Speech in Classical Athens,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 111 (1991): 48–70.
11. Jeffrey Henderson, “The Demos and the Comic Competition,” in Winkler and Zeitlin, Nothing To Do with Dionysos? 293–97.
12. See Daphne ElizabethO’Regan, Rhetoric, Comedy, and the Violence of Language in Aristophanes’ Clouds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 132.
13. There is a certain affinity between comedy and Socrates’ project as he describes and exemplifies it in Plato’s Apology, insofar as both are engaged in political education without normative blueprints and practical solutions. Elsewhere (Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], chap. 5) I have argued that comedy helped constitute a tradition of democratic self-critique upon which Socrates built even as he criticized democracy’s shortcomings. Without denying the obvious ways in which comedy and philosophy are very different things, or that philosophers have frequently rejected with disgust the idea that irreverence, ridicule, parody, scatology, and vulgarity couldever be a ground for “serious” ethical and political critique, there are, nonetheless, continuities between Socratic political theory and comedic political education as I describe it here. (My discussion of ancient comedy draws on that chapter.)
14. My Corrupting Youth offers an extended analysis of the question, using The Clouds as an example.
15. I take the idea of a “democratic ethos” and some of its substance from William Connolly, “Democracy and Territoriality,” in The Rhetorical Republic: Governing Representations in American Politics, ed. Thomas Dumm and Frederick Dolan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 249–74.
16. Henderson, Three Plays, introduction, 13. Christopher Carey argues that comedy required radical democracy. Given the “scale, rigor and tone of comic attacks on powerful figures,” there must have been a “patron” more powerful than any of the targets. That patron “was the demos.” See “Comic Ridicule and Democracy,” in Democratic Accounts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 69.
17. Henderson, Three Plays, introduction, 12.
18. Halliwell, “Comic Satire,” 66. Simon Goldhill, “Comic Inversion and Inverted Commas: Aristophanes and Parody,” in The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature, ed. Simon Goldhill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 167–222.
19. Henderson, “The Demos and Dramatic Competition,” 307.
20. Anthony T. Edwards, “Aristophanes’ Comic Poetics: TRUX, Scatology, Skomma,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 121 (1991): 179.
21. Robert Wallace, “Poet, Public, and Theatrocracy: Audience Performance in Classical Athens,” in Poets, Public and Performance in Ancient Greece, ed . Lowell Edmunds and Robert W. Wallace (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Cf. Ober, Political Dissent.
22. See George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
23. Ibid., chap. 1.
24. Ibid., 7–11.
25. Ibid., 19. But see the provocative argument by Robert Meister in “Beyond Satisfaction: Desire, Consumption and the Future of Socialism,” Topoi 15 (1996): 189–210.
26. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1986), 92.
27. Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).
28. See Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Current, June 1995, 3–14.
29. Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Making of American Television, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 300. Caren Kaplan argues that television “contributedto the rise of a consumer culture by flattening or homogenizing U.S. national identity; increasingly by eliminating or subduing the vaudeville-inspiredethnic comics and through the representation of middle-class, white, WASP suburban families in situation comedies” (“The Good Neighbor Policy Meets the ‘Feminine Mystique’: The Geopolitics of the Domestic Sitcom” [lecture delivered at the University of Southern California, April 1993]). Robert Bork criticizes the same phenomenon for very different reasons when he laments how American popular culture has become a threat to democracy because it “trashes our values.” See his comments in the New York Times, June 14, 1992, sec. 1, 24. On the “balkanization” of TV audiences, see chap. 6 of Marc, Democratic Vistas.
30. See the discussion in Anne Norton’s Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chap. 2.
31. See Lipsitz, Time Passages, 4–5, 18.
32. Ibid. Without ignoring the omnivorous appetite of commodification, Melissa Orlie has suggested that “the practices of commodity consumption reveal a persistent desire for freedom and a capacity for the deliberate exercise of power in conditions that otherwise would appear to extinguish them.” What she is doing with commodification I am trying to do with television: opening up possibilities for thought and action by disaggregating a monolithic pessimism which (in her case) insists that commodity consumption “is at best distracting, and therefore politically and ethically bankrupt.” See her “Political Capitalism and the Consumption of Democracy,” in Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William E. Connolly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). The quotations are on 139.
33. Norton, Republic of Signs, 116, and Mark Danner, “The Shame of the Political TV,” New York Review of Books, September 21, 2000, 101.
34. On television’s role in levitating John F. Kennedy and his presidency into “an historiographic mythosphere,” see Marc, Demographic Vistas, 133–34.
35. Jim Cullen, The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996), 278–79.
36. Pierre Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” in Rethinking Popular Culture:
Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 357–73.
37. Why look at anything for longer than the duration of its allure, when dozens more imagi mundi—all of them bouncing and shifting through endless permutations—seductively tickle the fingertips? David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 204.
38. In Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), Roderick P. Hart warns of the peril to democracy “when its people do not know what they think they know and when they do not care about what they do not know. Television miseducates the citizenry, but worse, it makes that miseducation attractive” (13). Postman makes a similar argument about how television changes the structure of discourse “by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase by creating new forms of truth telling,” (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 27).
39. Michael Ignatieff, “Is Nothing Sacred? The Ethics of Television,” Daedalus 4 (1985): 70–71.
40. Ibid.
41. Sheldon W. Wolin, “Democracy without the Citizen,” in The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 180–91.
42. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
43. Lipsitz, Time Passages, 18.
44. See Dana R. Villa, “Theatricality in the Public Realm of Hannah Arendt,” in Public Space and Democracy, ed. Marcel Henaff and Tracy B. Strong (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 144–71.
45. See Todd Gitlin’s discussion in the introduction to his edited book, Watching Television (New York: Pantheon, 1986), and Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989).
46. See the discussion in John Corner, Television Form and Public Address (London: Edward Arnold, 1995).
47. See Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular, ’ ” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1981), and “Encoding and Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980).
48. As Gitlin argues, while television may not have invented the superficiality or triviality of American political or public expression and there may be precedent for a “shriveled politics” of slogans, deceit, and pageantry, “precedent is nothing to be complacent about when ignorance is the product.” See his “Blips, Bites and Savvy Talk: Television’s Impact on American Politics,” Dissent 37, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 26.
49. For an example, see Roger Sanjek, The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge : MIT Press, 1995); and, for the importance of hip-hop culture and music in these negotiations, George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (New York: Verso, 1994). For Arendt’s discussion of the polis, see The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. 192–99.
50. Goldhill, “Comic Inversions and Inverted Commas,” and Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 302–11.
51. Marc, Demographic Vistas, chap. 6, “What Was Broadcasting?” 65–66.
52. Karen Hudes, “It’s the Sitcom Cartoons That Have Character,” New York Times, March 8, 1998, sec. 4, 36–37. The quotation is on 37.
53. Konstan, Greek Comedy, 5.
54. See Blaine Harden, “Ralph Had Dreams. Archie Had Opinions. Jerry Had Neuroses. But They All Tolda Story about Life and Times in the Big Apple,” Washington Post, May 14, 1998, sec. C, 1, 8.
55. Marc, Demographic Vistas, 112; Marc has an excellent discussion of The Honeymooners.
56. I take these points from Paul A. Cantor, “The Simpsons: Atomistic Politics and the Nuclear Family,” Political Theory 27, no. 6 (December 1999): 734–49.
57. See Jeff MacGregor, “More Than Sight Gags and Subversive Satire,” New York Times, June 20, 1999, sec. 2, 97.
58. See Paul A. Cantor, “In Praise of Television: The Greatest TV Show Ever (‘The Simpsons’),” American Enterprise 8, no. 5 (September–October 1997): 34– 37.
59. Cantor (in “The Simpsons: Atomistic Politics and the Nuclear Family”) makes much of the fact and of what he sees as the Simpsons’ postmodern traditionalism.
60. See “The New Political Theater,” Mother Jones, November–December 2000, 30–33.
61. Ober, Political Dissent, chap. 2.
62. See Charles McGrath, “No Kidding: Does Irony Illuminate or Corrupt?”New York Times, August 5, 2000, A15.
63. C.L.R. James, American Civilization, ed. and introduced by Anna Grim shaw and Keith Hart, with an afterword by Robert A. Hill (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 123.
64. Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” in Themes Out of School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
65. Alexander Nehamas, “Plato and the Mass Media,” in The Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). For Nehamas, Plato accuses poetry of perverting its audience because it is essentially suited to the representation of inferior characters and vulgar subjects, both of which are easy to imitate and are what the already corrupt crowd wants to see and hear . In these terms, reactions to poetry are transferred directly to the rest of life because we regardit as being as real as the world “outsid e” it. Only when we come to recognize it as an art form requiring interpretation does this duplicating function come to be seen as naive.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA AND THEORIES OF LOSS
1. C.D.B. Bryan, Friendly Fire (New York: Putnam, 1976), 139–40.
2. This does not mean that all theories can be read as (or as part of) a narrative of loss, or that any theorist can be wholly read that way. Nor would I deny that the very act of writing about loss is often an act of compensation and red emption, no matter what the explicit argument.
3. Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, translated from the French by Co-rinne Pache (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 83–84.
4. See Jackson Lears, “Looking Backward: In Defense of Nostalgia,” Lingua Franca, December–January 1998, 59–66.
5. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age (New York: Scribner, 1965), 5. Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), 12.
6. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 139.
7. In Homer, he¯ro¯ s is related to ho¯ re¯, meaning season, especially the season of spring, so that a hero is seasonal “in that he comes into his prime, like flowers in the spring, only to be cut down once and for all.” See Seth Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 69. In my view Schein’s book is far and away the best introduction to the Iliad available in English.
8. Hesiodis, wrongly I believe, sometimes considered an exception to this statement.
9. Simon Goldhill, “Intimations of Immortality: Fame and Tradition from Homer to Pindar,” in The Poet’s Voice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 76.
10. Schein, The Mortal Hero, 72. The wrath of Achilles is also the wrath of his mother, Thetis, who is forced to marry a mortal man who is about to die. In Loraux’s words: “Homer has displaced the wrath from a mother to her son and because the maternal me-nis ‘becomes absorbed in the actual wrath of her son’ we credit the hero with a Great Mother’s wrath without seeing that mourning and wrath are undivided between the mother and son,” 49. (She is quoting Laura Slatkin’s “The Wrath of Thetis,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 116 [1986]: 22.)
11. Goldhill, “Intimations of Immortality,” 86.
12. See Margaret Anne Doody, “Finales, Apocalypses, Trailings-off,” Raritan 15, no. 3 (Winter 1996): 24–46.
13. See the discussion of this in Goldhill, “Intimations of Immortality,” 93–94.
14. Doody, “Finales,” 28–29.
15. The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 1, Sophocles, ed. David Grene and Richard Latimore, trans. with an introduction by David Grene, 2ded(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991).
16. Blanco translation of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, ed. Walter Blanco and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
17. Michael Janover, “Nostalgias,” in Critical Horizons 1, no. 1 (February 2000): 113–33.
18. I have discussed this at length in The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), chaps. 1 and 2.
19. Sheldon Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1970), 4–5.
20. Though there are serious questions about the authenticity of The Seventh Letter, I think the same conclusions about The Republic and Syracuse can be made more circuitously on the basis of other sources.
21. 325 b–c. I have reliedon the Morrow translation (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1962).
22. 325 d–e. Cf. The Republic, 473d, 487e, 499b, 501e.
23. The phrase is Sheldon Wolin’s from Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), chap. 2.
24. At the end of Book 1 (354b–c), Socrates berates himself and warns his readers/interlocutors about their impatience in arriving at conclusions. By itself this is simply advice to be more cautious in discussing issues of such complexity. But when the beginning of Book 5 (449–451b) dramatically as well as substantively recapitulates the opening of the entire dialogue—as if we need to begin the entire discussion again—the caution becomes a general wariness about beginnings and endings. That warning becomes even more significant if we read the Myth of Eras violating the conditions of the dialogue as they were stipulated at the beginning of Book 2 (357a–367e, esp. 366e), where Socrates accepts the challenge to defend justice without recourse to rewards and punishments. Here, at “the end,” he does exactly what he has promised not to do.
25. Doody, “Finales,” 42–43.
26. J. H. Plumb, Renaissance Italy (New York: American Heritage, 1961).
27. The Portable Machiavelli, trans. and ed. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1980), 159. Hereafter, page references appear in the text.
28. See the perceptive analysis of Machiavelli’s realism in Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
29. If I am right in following Hariman on this point, Machiavelli changes from a successful realist into an unsuccessful republican in the sense that his means (The Prince) to an end( The Discourses) become the end. While we take Machiavelli’s realism as his final word and reject politics because it relies on deceit, power, and appearances, he saw this as a spur to political engagement. Thus he has contributed to a political cynicism he was trying to combat. Since it is The Prince, not The Discourses, that is honored as a “great book,” few people aside from political theorists know anything about Machiavelli’s views of civic virtue, the dignity of citizenship, public spiritedness (which he defends), confrontational politics, the people as the appropriate repository of liberty, or civic religion.
30. The most powerful modern restatement of Machiavelli’s views on this subject remains the concluding section of Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation.
31. See The Discourses, esp. 297–99.
32. See Claude Lefort, “Machiavelli: History, Politics, Discourse,” in The States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. with an introduction by David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 113–24.
33. Lefort, “Machiavelli,” 138.
34. Machiavelli’s critique of religion parallels Marx’s argument about God. We project our powers onto an alien being and need to recover them for ourselves. Capitalism’s corrosive effect on religious belief and affiliation is “progressive” in this respect.
35. In a discussion of “high minded nostalgia” Mary Beard argues that ever “since the Romans it has been an underlying tenet of most classical scholarship that the present generation is strikingly less capable than its predecessors at the job of preserving and passing on the great traditions, that ‘we’ unlike our illustrious forebears are simply not up to it” (“Not You,” London Review of Books, January 23, 1997, 10–11). If Beardis right, then Machiavelli learned about the problem of nostalgia from the Romans.
36. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Freud Reader, ed . Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 584–89. Freud has a quite different analysis in The Ego and the Id. On the significance of the differences, see Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 132–41.
37. Machiavelli implies that the dual perspective essential for political knowledge and power was institutionalized in the Roman mixed constitution. Because that constitution was composedof (at least) two classes, each of which stood for different principles (the Senate for tradition, authority, order, property, and continuity; the people for innovation and liberty) and interpreted events in those terms, Rome was able to change with the times. In other words, a healthy society like Rome has no need of the theorist’s special qualifications as they are presented in the image of the landscape painter.
38. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 120–21.
39. Ibid., 120–21. No doubt Machiavelli also chose fratricide to contest Augustine’s version, which he would have seen as a further instance of Christianity’s political nai¨vete´.
40. See The Discourses 1:xi.
41. Of course if I am right that Machiavelli finds prudential reasons why the prince must modify his immoral impulses, then this is far less of a blanket endorsement than it seems.
42. Lefort, "Machiavelli,” 124.
43. Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Richard Tucker, 2ded . (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 475–76.
44. Ibid., 595–96. With this description Marx “transformed, by a sort of reverse rhetorical alchemy, the golden exempla of humanist favor into the leaden burdens of a dead past” (Kirstie McClure, “Affect in Action: Figurae, the ‘Community Sense, ’ and Political Prose” [paper delivered at the American Political Science Association Meetings, September 1998]). For Machiavelli this was often a result of invoking Rome, but it need not be one.
45. See Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998).
46. I do not mean to exaggerate. Religion for Marx was delusional only in the sense that the objective conditions that brought it into being and made it an opiate would be transformed. Moreover, many criticisms of Marx come from Marx himself, which is why he denied that he was a Marxist.
47. Victor Nee, “A Theory of Market Transition: From Redistribution to Markets in State Socialism,” American Sociological Review 54 (October 1989): 663– 81.
48. See the introduction to Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order, by Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
49. “Newsreel History,” London Review of Books, November 12, 1998, 8.
50. See Elaine Showalter, “Foucault in America,” Times Literary Supplement, November 28, 1997, 28.
51. See the discussions in Simon Critchley, Very Little-Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2–3, 24.
CHAPTER SIX
THE POLIS, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE CITIZENSHIP OF PLACE
1. Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), xxi. Green is ambivalent or perhaps coy about fulfilling the promise present in the quotation, for he goes on: “I have . . . steadfastly tried to avoid drawing such factitious parallels in my text, or coloring ancient phenomena with modern associations. . . . What this parallelism signifies I do not pretend to know, and think it wiser not to speculate; but it does suggest, forcibly, that there may indeed be something more in the Hellenistic age for concerned modern readers than mere antiquarian interest.”
2. Ralf Dahrendorf, Betrachtunger über die Revolution in Europa (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1990). Quoted by Pietr Sztompka, “Mistrusting Civility:
Predicament of a Post-Communist Society,” in Real Civil Societies: Dilemmas of Institutionalization, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 191.
3. William Connolly, “Democracy and Territoriality,” in The Rhetorical Re-public: Governing Representations in American Politics, ed. Thomas Dumm and Frederick Dolan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); and Richard Falk, “The Making of Global Citizenship,” in Global Visions: Beyond the NewWorld Order, ed. Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler (Boston: South End Press, 1993).
4. See the introduction to Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order, ed. Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); and see Mike Featherstone, “Global Culture: An Introduction,” in his edited volume, Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990).
5. John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social History of the Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 236.
6. Mary Beard, “An Open Forum? New Emphasis on the Place of the Citizen in the Roman Polity,” Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 1999, 3–4. Beardis making her arguments against those who denigrate Rome by romanticizing Athens. Kenneth Minogue calls “the legend” of Athenian participatory democracy a “will-o-the-wisp,” since “the reality of governing must always be a top-down activity, in which the rulers, despite their democratic parades of humility, must be remote from the people” (“Creed for Democrats,” Times Literary Supplement, June 18, 1999, 8).
7. W. G. Runciman, “Doomed to Extinction: The Polis as an Evolutionary Dead-End,” in The Greek State: From Homer to Alexander, ed. Oswyn Murray and Simon Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 364.
8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 2ded ., 198.
9. Here and in general I owe a great deal to Ronnie Lipschutz’s “Members Only? Citizenship and Civic Virtue in a Time of Globalization,” International Politics 36 (June 1999): 203–33.
10. I take the idea and much of the content of this ethos from Connolly’s “Democracy and Territoriality.”
11. The previous paragraphs paraphrase Jean-Pierre Vernant’s The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 47–48, 51–52.
12. I have argued this in detail in “The Battle of Salamis and the Origins of Political Theory,” in my Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 64– 90, as has Josiah Ober in many of his essays. For a very different view, see Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1982).
13. Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 35.
14. See Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 6–7, 40–41, 368– 69; and J. Peter Euben, “Political Equality and the Greek Polis,” in Liberalism and the Modern Polity: Essays in Contemporary Political Theory, ed. Michael J. Gargas McGrath (New York: Bael Marcel Dekker, 1978).
15. On how citizenship functioned to limit forms of economic exploitation, see Ellen Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy (London: Verso, 1988).
16. Ober, Athenian Revolution, 63.
17. Ibid., 150.
18. Ibid., 4.
19. On the ancient economy and Aristotle’s views of it, see M. I. Finley, “Aristotle and Economic Analysis,” Past and Present 47 (1970): 3–25, and The Ancient Economy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973); Karl Polanyi, “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics, ed. G. Dalton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968); M. M. Austin and P . Vidal-Naquet, Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977); Paul A. Rahe, “The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece,” American Historical Review 89, no. 2 (1989): 265-93; Thomas J. Lewis, “Acquisition and Anxiety: Aristotle’s Case against the Market,” Canadian Journal of Economics 2 (1978): 70; and Trade and Market in Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, ed. Karl Polanyi, C. Arensberg, and H. W. Pearson (Chicago: Free Press, 1957), 255; as well as Book 2 of the Politics and Books 5 and 6 of the Ethics.
20. Ober, Political Dissent, 303–4. None of this is to suggest that Aristotle was a democrat, though he is much less antidemocratic than is usually supposed.
21. For example, when we place an adto sell a car, we are likely to ask the maximum price and exaggerate the quality of the car’s condition while remaining silent about unobvious malfunctions. But if a friend becomes interested, everything changes; we may well lower the car’s price and tell our friend exactly what is wrong with it, while he or she may insist on paying the original price so we do not lose money. What intervenes is a concern about the other with whom we have had a history and with whom we expect to have a future. We think now not only of our profit but of their needs and the importance of maintaining the friendship. I take the example from Lewis, “Acquisition and Anxiety,” 72–73.
22. Ober, Athenian Revolution, 11.
23. See Erich S. Gruen, “The Polis in the Hellenistic World,” in Nomodeiktes: Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald, ed. Ralph M. Rosen and Joseph Farrell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). The quotation in the next paragraph is on 340. In general, Gruen argues against the position taken here. He insists that the very existence of treaties between city-states, with the pledges of their citizenry and external witnesses, is proof of “the continued vitality of the polis, its political and territorial integrity, and its autonomous nature” (342–43). Similarly, Mogens Herman Hansen argues that since a polis did not lose its identity as a polis by being subjected to another political entity, such as the king of Persia or Macedon or Hellenistic monarchies, one should not talk about the loss of autonomy. (See his “The Polis as a Citizen State,” in his edited book The Ancient Greek CityState [Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 1993], 19–22.) For him the culprit is Aristotle. But Hansen makes unintelligible the reasons why poleis would fight at such risk for the autonomy he says is not that important and the terms in which Athenians (in Thucydides) celebrate their victory over Persia.
24. See Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), chap. 3, “The Age of Empire: Space and Community”; and T. A. Sinclair, A History of Greek Political Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), chap. 12.
25. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 83.
26. Ober, Political Dissent, 343, makes a very different claim. He thinks Aristotle not only took account of the conditions of his time but thought they presented an opportunity to create new political constitutions.
27. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 70.
28. See the introduction by Andre´ Laks and Malcolm Schofield to their edited book, Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–17; and J. L. Moles, “The Cynics and Politics,” in the same volume, 129–60.
29. See Fragment 17M and the gloss on it by Sinclair, History of Greek Political Thought, 246 ff.
30. Moles, “The Cynics and Politics,” 143–44.
31. Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 24.
32. The transition from man as citizen of a polis to man as a moral being meant removing all contingencies, such as physical proximity or mutual acquaintance, from the idea of citizenship. Thus citizens were simply those who were in obedience to the law of nature. No political dimension of citizenship is necessary or indeed desirable in this formulation. See ibid., chap. 4, esp. 102–3.
33. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.
34. See Schofield’s discussion of instrumental and substantive reason, The Stoic Idea, 93.
35. In de otio 4 (Schofield translation).
36. Epistulae Morales 1.
37. Of the Nature of Things 2.
38. A. A. Long, “Hellenistic Ethics and Political Power,” in Hellenistic History and Culture, ed. Peter Green (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 143.
39. Schofield, The Stoic Idea, epilogue.
40. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 78–80.
41. In addition to chap. 2 of Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), see chaps. 9 and 10 in Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) and For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 2–20.
42. For Love of Country, 13.
43. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 60.
44. Ibid., 58.
45. Ibid., 57–58.
46. Ibid., 61.
47. Ibid., 58-61, and The Therapy of Desire, 343.
48. Cultivating Humanity, 59, 60, 62, and For Love of Country, 7–9.
49. Cosmopolitanism has a fascinating political history. For Spengler cosmopolitanism was a code for Jews whose lack of belonging made them dangerous outsiders to European society. Stalin traded on the same association when he condemned Jews as “intellectuals” and cosmopolitans. But cosmopolitanism also played a conservative role in this country when used as a basis for anti-Stalinism. On this, see Bruce Robbins’s “Introduction, Part I,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1998.
50. Cultivating Humanity, 59. Nussbaum italicizes “no” while I have italicized “mere.”
51. Michael Walzer, “Spheres of Affection,” in For Love of Country, 125.
52. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 82.
53. Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 6.
54. For Love of Country, 11.
55. See Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Cosmopolitanism and the Circle of Reason” Political Theory 28, no. 5 (October 2000): 631.
56. Nussbaum argues that if we believe we owe more respect to a nation because it is democratic, then we do so because we regard democracy as a universal value. (See her argument in For Love of Country.) But this seems misleading because arguments for democracy need not be universalistic, or, if they are, it is in a way different from those Nussbaum defends. For instance, Connolly and I see democracy as interrogating its own claims to superiority. For the distinction between cosmopolitanism and universalism, see Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism and the Divided Legacies of Modernity,” in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 265–89.
57. See Featherstone, “Global Culture,” 12. Thus an “Indian scientist or intellectual in New Delhi who wishes to develop contacts or exchange information with his Japanese opposite numbers, must do so in English.”
58. See Kwame Anthony Appiah’s discussion of “rooted cosmopolitanism” in “Cosmopolitan Roots,” in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 91–114; Christopher Lasch’s argument as to how traditional cultures within and outside imperialist states have managed to resist industrial capitalism despite all predictions to the contrary, The World of Nations: Reflections on American History, Politics, and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1973); and Veit Bader on how commitments to cosmopolitanism are rootedin bonds of language, culture, and history, in “For Love of Country,” a review essay in Political Theory 27, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 379–97.
59. Cultivating Humanity, 59.
60. Jürgen Habermas, “Remarks on Legitimation,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 24, nos. 2–3 (1998): 162, quoted in Mehta, “Cosmopolitanism,” 8.
61. Mehta, “Cosmopolitanism,” 9–11. Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), and the essays in pt. 3 of Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics.
62. Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 1.
63. See, for instance, her “Aristotelian Social Democracy,” in Liberalism and the Good, ed. R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 203–52; “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism,” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (May 1992): 202-46; “Nature, Function and Capability: Aristotle on Political Distribution,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, supplemental volume (1988): 145–84.
64. See Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism,” 268.
65. Falk, “The Making of Global Citizenship,” 40. Hereafter page references to Falk are in the text.
66. “Democracy and Territoriality.” Page references are in the text.
67. See Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: The New Press, 1998), xxxii. Hereafter page references will be in the text.
68. See Roger Sanjek, The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
69. On the “parallel polis,” see Václav Benda et al., “Parallel Polis or an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe: An Inquiry,” Social Research 1–2 (1988): 211–46; Jeffrey C. Isaac, “The Meaning of 1989,” Social Research 63, no. 2 (1996); H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1981); Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985); and Jonathan Schell’s introduction to Adam Michnik’s Letters from Prison (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), xvii-xliii, and Michnik’s essay in that volume “Maggots and Angels,” 169–98.
70. Sheldon S. Wolin, “Democracy without the Citizen,” in The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 180–91.
71. Ibid.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PLATONIC NOISE
1. See John E. Seery, Political Theory for Mortals: Shades of Justice, Mirages of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Though I disagree with some of Seery’s interpretations and formulations, I have learnedmuch from his book.
2. Quotedby Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968), 105.
3. Ibid., 8.
4. Ibid., 105–6.
5. The Human Condition, 2d. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
6. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York:
Harcourt Brace and World, 1968), 95.
7. Here is the full quotation: “I don’t have a political theory or doctrine that I’m espousing. I follow characters where they take me and I don’t know what I can say beyond that.” Quotedby Louis Men and, “Market Report: Review of Mao II,” New Yorker, June 24, 1991, 81.
8. John Leonard, “The Hunger Artist,” New York Review of Books, February 22, 2001, 4. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1984). All page references will be given in the text.
9. Ibid. and A. O. Scott, “The Page Floats,” New York Times, June 16, 2000, E1–4.
10. Leonard, “The Hunger Artist.”
11. Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” sec. 9, and William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 25–29.
12. The phrase is Terry Eagleton’s in “For the Hell of It,” London Review of Books, February 22, 2001, 30.
13. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking, 1964), 287.
14. The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (London: Socker and Warburg, 1978), 5.
15. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Cosmopolitanism and the Circle of Reason,” Political Theory 28, no. 5 (October 2000): 626. As Mehta points out, appropriation of Eastern religions seldom includes the broader premise and practices that give those religions meaning.
16. Given the Orphic and Pythagorean influences on the dialogue, this is hardly surprising.
17. I take this discussion from Ian Donaldson, “The Importance of Dying Well,” Times Literary Supplement, February 13, 1998, 13–14.
18. Robert A. Harrison, “Foodand Graves” (manuscript). Portions of that paper appear in “Hic Jacet,” Critical Inquiry 27 (Spring 2001): 393–407.
19. Thomas Lynch, “Why Buy More Time?” New York Times, March 14, 1999, sec. 4, p. 15.
20. Herbert Marcuse, “The Ideology of Death,” in The Meaning of Death, ed . H. Feifel (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959), 64–76; and the discussion in Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 220–27. It was Dollimore’s book that brought the Marcuse essay to my attention.
21. Slavoj ŽižekLondon Review of Books, March 18, 1999, 3.
22. The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, introduction by Karl Barth and foreword by H. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Harper, 1953), 152–53.
23. See George Shulman, “Hope and American Politics” manuscript.
24. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 102.
25. See Glenn W. Most, “A Cock for Aesclepius,” Classical Quarterly 43, no. 1 (January-June 1993):1–16.
26. Ibid., 15.
27. “The Problem of Socrates,” in Twilight of the Idols, in Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1968), 473–79.
28. The Gay Science, 340. Foucault found something quite different in the dialogue and its final words. Treating the Apology, Crito, and the Phaedo as a cycle, he finds them an ethic of care for the self confirmed by the other two dialogues. See Thomas Flynn, “Foucault as Paresiast: His Last Course at the College de France,” in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). A more direct source is the lecture Foucault gave at UCSC. Alexander Nehamas thinks Foucault is wrong to link the Phaedo with these much earlier works and insists that Plato’s animosity toward the body is “so intense, so passionate” that one cannot look past it. Yet he agrees with Foucault that Plato was developing a discourse that is primarily concerned with the care of the self. See his The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 6.
29. Arlene Saxon house makes a parallel argument about Xanthippe. She suggests that “Xanthippe’s presence [in The Phaedo] emphasizes the aporetic quality of the Platonic dialogue by questioning the adequacy of Socrates’ apparent, but often ineffective, efforts to pursue dichotomies, in particular the dichotomy between body and soul, between life and death, between waking and sleeping.” See her “Xanthippe and Philosophy: Who Really Wins?” Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy 14 (1998):111–29.
30. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, trans. Lynn Solotar off (New York: Bantam, 1981), and Tobin Siebers, Morals and Stories (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 161–63.
31. See Mary Margaret McCabe, “Listening to Plato’s Niece,” Times Literary Supplement, July 7, 2000, 10.
32. Harrison, “Food and Graves,” 4.
33. James Booth, “Communities of Memory: On Identity, Memory and Debt,” American Political Science Review 93 (June 1999):249–62.
34. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
35. See Anthony DeCurtis, “ ‘An Outside in the Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89, no. 2 (1990): 301, and Paul A. Cantor, “Adolph, We Hardly Knew You,” in New Essays on While Noise, ed. Frank Lentricchia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 39–62.
36. Frank Lentricchia, “Tales of the Electronic Tribe,” in Lentricchia, New Essays, 87–113.
37. See Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (New York: Pantheon, 2001).
38. “The Storyteller,” 34–5.
39. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 174–75.
40. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 101–2.
41. See Michael Gorra, “Voices Off,” Times Literary Supplement, February 16, 2001, 21.