Medea Overlived: The Future of Catastrophe

The final chapter turns to the particular nature of a Medean tragedy—that is, the tragedy of what Isabelle Stengers has called the “challenge” of a mother who kills her children but does not perish and is therefore without issue or, paradoxically, finality. This idea of tragedy in the neoclassical age is taken up through this temporal lens, by considering primarily Racine’s last play Athalie (1690). Through the idea of “lastness,” the chapter considers how tragedy demands a peculiar reading of time, of history, of our place in time, and of our relationship to a temporality out of our control. It considers the changing concept of “catastrophe,” originally a theatrical term that originally meant the final steps of a tragedy’s resolution, but shifted, in the eighteenth century, to designate an unpredictable cataclysm. Both within its verse and in its reception Athalie is the drama of a shift in temporalities, from one in which we lived history as an unfolding of events in the past, present, and future; to one in which the future’s devastations are always a surprise.

Staying Power: Performing the Present Moment of Tragedy

Chapter 3 explores Jean Rotrou’s neglected 1634 Hercule mourant, performed during the same season as Corneille’s Médée. In doing so, it conceptualizes the present moment of spectacle—what it means to attend to the theatrical presence of violence—through post-structuralist performance theories of “presence.” Hercule mourant, a Neo-Stoic play exemplary of a Medean tragedy, exposes the conceptual model of endurance as an experience of tragedy. In this performance of Hercules’s death by his wife’s poisoned gift, Hercules’s slow demise is a major portion of the drama’s action. Drawing on the play’s performance archive confirming its incredible spectacularity, this chapter exposes the tension between the invisibility of burning from within and the audience’s poetic apprehension of such violence through stage and rhetorical effects that slow down the moment of crisis to which an audience attends, and whose effects it hopes to feel. Hercule mourant provides a potential counter-example to common notions of catharsis that purge the immoderation of the spectacular, instead belaboring it. It asks audiences to consider endurance as a model of attending to violence.

The Medean Presence: Violence Unmade and Remade

The Medean presence is neither progressive nor genealogical; this chapter demonstrates this concept by tying Pier Paolo Pasolini to Ovid in a non-chronological consideration of literature as an art of destruction. An analysis of Maria Callas’s performance in the titular role of Pasolini’s 1969 Medea offers structural connections to the Medea of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, connections that upend a traditional understanding of history, influence, and the constitution of character. Medea is an exception in this text generally studied and celebrated for its narratives of transformation, which are also considered as generative or explanatory origin stories. Medea is exceptional because her transformations are really nontransformative: they leave nothing behind but the story of their violence. Through this Medea story, Ovid constructs description as a “monument of destruction.” This chapter suggests a link between literature description and destruction, wherein violence is precisely beyond structural control.

Medea, a Manifesto

With the mythological figure of Medea, this chapter offers a counter-theory to the well-known symbol of ethical opposition to the State. While Antigone challenges certain politics of legacy, family, duty and so origins, Medea underscores the problem of our future by killing offspring and creating replacements. Medea operates at the limits of the moral imperative by virtue of her status as pharmakon: her knowledge can both heal and harm. She is also a Latourian “hybrid”: outside of our traditional categories of knowledge and identification, her actions challenge the integrity of the individual itself. Medea underscores relational attachments: mother to children, wife to husband, descendent to forebearers, even as she undoes these relations. Figuring Medea in our literature, the chapter argues, allows us to rehearse the real problem of the social: the false and fragile divisions that purportedly guard integrated insiders from barbaric outsiders and modernity from its necessary but primitive pasts.

Epilogue: The Cosmopolitics of Literature

The Epilogue offers an application of the Medean principle of violence beyond the premodern, first through a reading of cosmopolitanism as a state of epistemological outsiderness: that which can neither be assimilated nor expiated. It turns to Leïla Slimani’s 2016 Chanson douce as a critical examination of contemporary Medean violence

Introduction: Coming after Violence in Literature

The introduction contextualizes the role of Medea through history of violence in performances today and in the history of French theatre of the seventeenth century. It shows how and why violence was never banished from the stage, contrary to prevailing scholarship. It then outlines the concept of the “Medean principle” of violence as a means to consider how tragedy rehearses questions of violence and suggests why Corneille’s 1634 Médée occupies an exceptional place in theatre history. It offers an overview of how the Medean presence functions as a disruptive but persistent force—by disrupting temporal structures upon which premodern theatre is based.

Surface Selves: Médée, 1634

Chapter 1 serves as the cornerstone of this book, against which all the other chapters can be read. It explores a singular play, Pierre Corneille’s 1634 Médée. Often read as generic precursor or holdover, as failed experiment or primitive attempt, Médée is utterly unique for its era in its subject matter and politics. This chapter shows how its Médée is framed not by excess, passion, or inconstancy, but by moderation, knowledge, and attachment, in both positive and negative forms. Médée’s own “self” is a surface self, existing in counter-distinction to the complex self-possessed individual grounded in an interior, the hallmark of the eighteenth century. The contrast between the Medean surface self and the Medean art of destruction as one of cleaving to and cleaving from compels a meditation on how the self emerges in relation to others and what is sacrificed when we see the self as autonomous. Analogously, instead of seeing Médée as Corneille’s first tragedy, and so a primitive or premature form of what will come after it, this reading positions it at the undisclosed heart of the tragic project, as it reverberates in both its past and its future.

Flying toward Futurity: Spectacularity and Suspension

Corneille’s 1660 prequel to 1634’s Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or is usually dismissed as political propaganda. Instead, this chapter considers the play’s technological innovations as part of its aesthetic and political work. An on-stage Medean presence pits two forms of temporality against each other, each performed by a different stage technology. The chapter explores technological innovations in set design and special effects, which offer contrasting experiences of time: rapid transformation versus narrative suspense. The chapter shows how the play changes the rules of dramatic narrative by challenging audience expectations of what will happen. This play offers, contra such conceptual historians as Reinhart Koselleck, an early example of the collision between pre-modern forms of history and more progressivist senses of temporality. This collision is shown to invoke the metaphor of suspension only to replace it with that of suspense, thus effecting a replacement that positions the threat of violence close at hand.