In light of eros

This essay gives a reading of eros at the intersection of Plato and Aristotle in its anthropological and cosmic implications, using archaic and modern sources. The discussion is articulated in four sections: the first is devoted to Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha and Lambda, where quotations from Parmenides and Hesiod prepare the elaboration of nous, the unmoved mover, as eromenos, the beloved. The second section takes up eros in its cosmic/physical dimensions, as developed by the physician Eryximachus in Plato’s Symposium. The third and central section delves into the specifically human experience of eros, by reference to Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus as well as lyric poets such as Sappho and Ibycus. The fourth and final section analyzes the myth of the androgyne as a figure (1) of the desire for literal, biological fusion with the beloved and (2) of psychic/spiritual completeness. A brief consideration of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando concludes the essay.

On Stoic sympathy

This chapter analyses the Stoic concept of cosmic sympathy. The Stoics contribute to the conceptualization of a web of interconnected natures in antiquity by making sympathy visible as a feature of the world, encompassing both humans and non-humans. Holmes argues that the Stoic conceptualization of sympathy offers an experiment in thinking through the contradictions of cosmic organicism or “cosmobiology” insofar as it affirms both the integrity of individual natures and the rigorous unity of the cosmos as a whole, to which its parts are subordinated. By taking cosmobiology to an extreme, the Stoics have to deal with how to affirm the integrity of individual natures within a cosmos organized by Nature as a totally determined life, to which each part must be subordinated. Revisiting Deleuze’s reading of the Stoics in the Logic of Sense, she argues that sympathy is not only the expression of a totalized Nature but must also be seen as the surface effect par excellence in the Stoic cosmos, namely, the paradoxical reality of god’s becoming.

Sounds of subjectivity or resonances of something other

This chapter explores how the voice carries different meanings in early Greek conceptions of corporeality, contrasting Homer with later writers such as Plato. Sampson argues that both the notion of an autonomous subjectivity and an autophonous voice expressing this self are absent from the Homeric texts. Sampson shows how in Homer voices are said to flow through the speakers like rivers of breath, and reveals a heterophony of voices in the Iliad and the Odyssey: those of mortals and immortals, humans, animals, and even natural forces. The chapter uses such a detour into a distant past to complicate modern notions of subjectivity, and to open up alternative conceptions of corporeality and life within contemporary post-human thinking.

Precarious life

In …Pleasure Principle, Freud juxtaposes his discussion of the life and death instincts in “elementary organisms” to the tragic drama he sees enacted in his grandson’s fort-da game. Freud’s insights into the death drive are given an added tragic dimension in Lacan’s reading of Oedipus at Colonus. Here Lacan establishes the anti- or even post-humanist credentials of tragedy by insisting that it is the death of the subject which is Sophocles’ ultimate preoccupation. By placing Greek tragedy’s confrontation with the death drive in dialogue with the instincts of the “germ-cell”, the chapter demonstrates how psychoanalysis offers a perfect model for understanding antiquity’s contribution to posthumanism.

Nature trouble

This chapter interrogates the search for origin in classical antiquity alongside the search for an underlying reality in contemporary physics. Drawing on Butler’s notion of gender performativity as well as a phenomenological approach to the natural world that brings to bear the thinking of John Sallis, Alphonso Lingis, and Luce Irigaray upon early Greek texts, Bianchi develops a phenomenological and elemental account of nature as itself thoroughly performative, a theater of display, effect, and response that may never succumb to full epistemic illumination. In so doing, she at once radicalizes the Heideggerian account of ancient physis, while mounting an intervention into what she sees as the reductionism and scientism of contemporary theorists of the posthuman such as Karen Barad.

Apples and poplars, nuts and bulls

This chapter attends to Pythagoras’ great speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and its eccentric poetic metaphysics. Sissa shows how, for Ovid, the change that forms and permeates the cosmos follows a certain logic and operates as a very particular kind of becoming, one that produces stabilities that endure for a time and then flow away. Out of this form of becoming emerges not only a taxonomy of human, non-human animals, and plants, but also an ethics of eating. Whereas any non-human animal may derive from a human being, comestible plants are metamorphosis-free. This ethics is born not out of respect for non-human life but out of the fear of anthropophagy, and in this, the poem remains an anthropocentric text. But, as Sissa demonstrates, its metamorphic fluidity undermines any sense of human exceptionalism, and thus presents us with the paradoxical formation of an anthropocentrism that is also posthuman.

The human reconceived

The chapter shows how Socrates becomes the crucial figure that Hannah Arendt turns to, against Plato, for thinking the human as rooted in plurality and attesting to both action and thought. As a positive split image of Plato’s negativity, Socrates is singled out in the context of interrogations that cross Arendt’s entire work about radical evil and, later, about the banality of evil. Socrates works as an antidote to both: radical evil because his practice of dialogue is a political practice that calls on politics as a shared space of plural interaction; and the banality of evil because, by assuming thinking as an activity consisting in the internal questioning of oneself, Socrates discovers conscience as the source of ethical judgment.

Hyperobjects, OOO, and the eruptive classics—field notes of an accidental tourist

This chapter considers the relevance of speculative realism and object-oriented ontologies to Greek and Roman thinking, focusing on the phenomena known as hyperobjects. Are these theories of the posthuman entirely postclassical, or do they have ancient counterparts? Porter responds in the affirmative, showing that, beyond the inspirations occasionally cited in support of the new materialisms (most frequently, Aristotle’s theory of substance and ancient atomism), there are solid grounds to support this claim in numerous thinkers, including Empedocles, Lucretius, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. He investigates three trajectories: views of nature in which we encounter some conception of a hyperobject; a collection of materialist and sensualist perspectives on nature in which matter is conceived as operating independently of a human phenomenology; and object-oriented philosophies of nature that treat human phenomena as one object among others.

Hearing voices

The interpretation of Socrates’ daimonion, his “divine sign” or “supernatural force,” has troubled scholars for centuries. Naddaff argues that Socrates’ daimonion is central to understanding the exceptionality of this “atopos” philosopher. Insofar as he hears a voice that is “alogos,” without or beyond logos, Socrates chooses to live life differently, to transform his being as that which is beyond the human. As such, Socrates ontologically disrupts the very category of the “human,” and proposes a new style of living that radically redefines his relation not only to the divine but also to the animal.

Immanent maternal

Hill’s chapter takes up Aristotle’s claim that time is always other and other (aei allo kai allo) and the same (hama pas chronos ho autos) as a figuring of time that exceeds his definition of time as the measurement of motion. Hill reads Aristotle’s claim that time is always other and other and the same in relation to Henri Bergson’s theory of duration as heterogeneous and continuous change. Bergson conceives of the Whole Universe in terms of virtual fluxes of duration. The final section of this chapter refigures the Bergsonian virtual Whole with reference to Luce Irigaray’s essay “Volume without Contour” from Speculum of the Other Woman. Hill proposes, strategically, a figuration of the maternal as immanent time in which there is no more self and disavowed other, and no more inside and outside, but only virtual rhythms of the immanent maternal, always other and other.