Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Victoria Wohl is Assistant Professor of Classics at Ohio State University. She is the author of Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy.

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"Wohl's book is an important contribution to a growing body of literature on the psychic experience of Athenian citizens and the fantasies, hopes, and fears that fuel democratic experience in general. She seriously advances the field and also challenges what have become the standard ways of thinking about sexuality in ancient Athens."--Danielle Allen, author ofThe World of Prometheus

"This is a very smart, sophisticated, well-written book that offers some new and convincing readings of important texts. Wohl's reading of Athenian culture is original, exciting, and often brilliant."--Josiah Ober, author ofThe Athenian Revolution and Political Dissent in Democratic Athens

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"Wohl's book is an important contribution to a growing body of literature on the psychic experience of Athenian citizens and the fantasies, hopes, and fears that fuel democratic experience in general. She seriously advances the field and also challenges what have become the standard ways of thinking about sexuality in ancient Athens."--Danielle Allen, author ofThe World of Prometheus

"This is a very smart, sophisticated, well-written book that offers some new and convincing readings of important texts. Wohl's reading of Athenian culture is original, exciting, and often brilliant."--Josiah Ober, author ofThe Athenian Revolution and Political Dissent in Democratic Athens

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Love among the Ruins

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface..........................................................ixIntroduction: Ideological Desire.................................1The Erotics of Democracy.........................................1"Just Love": The Origin of Democratic Eros.......................3Normativity and Its Discontents..................................12Symptomatic Reading..............................................20I. Pericles' Lovers..............................................30The Ideal........................................................32The Lover........................................................41The Love.........................................................55The Beloved......................................................62II. Pornos of the People.........................................73Parodic Pericles.................................................73Politics of the Open Mouth.......................................80Cleon's Turn.....................................................92King Demos.......................................................105III. Perverse Desire: The Eros of Alcibiades.....................124Theories of Perversion...........................................124Paranomia........................................................129Demerastia.......................................................144Socrates' Boyfriend..............................................158IV. The Erotics of Empire........................................171Hard on Empire...................................................174Duseros ton aponton..............................................188Working through the Symptom......................................203V. What Does the Tyrant Want?....................................215Hipparchus's Herms...............................................215Desire of the Other..............................................224Tyrannical Ecstasy...............................................236All or Nothing...................................................249The Tyrant's Lack and Democratic Fantasy.........................260VI. Conclusion...................................................270Bibliography.....................................................285Index Locorum....................................................313General Index....................................................321

Chapter One

In the funeral oration ascribed to him by Thucydides, Pericles urges the people to become lovers of the city (2.43.1). This speech is often taken as the quintessence of Athenian democracy: the city is at its most powerful, the demos at its most noble. In this most canonical of Athenian texts we would expect to find, too, a canonical Athenian eros, a perfect and perfectly democratic love and lover. And Thucydides (or perhaps Pericles) gives us what we desire: a manly pursuer of beauty and wisdom, an erastes willing to die for his beloved, a lover whose sensibilities are aristocratic but whose love object is the democratic city. Here we would seem to find, as iconic as if sculpted on the Parthenon frieze, the ideal eros of the democratic citizen.

While Thucydides' history is resolutely unsexy, eros runs like a subterranean current beneath its description of political affairs: sometimes acknowledged, more often denied, eros binds citizens to their city and the demos to its demagogues. Pleasure, the modality of eros, is a powerful force behind political relations; indeed, in Thucydides' synopsis of Athenian politics at the end of the fifth century, pleasure is the key term. Pericles led the people; he was not led by them and, as an orator, never catered to their pleasure (2.65.8). Later demagogues, however, competing with one another for power, "turned to pleasing the demos and relinquished affairs to it" (2.65.10). The falling away from the Periclean ideal is represented as a different relation between the citizens and their leaders, a different sort of political pleasure.

This chapter examines that pleasure and the politics it engenders. In the Funeral Oration, Pericles constructs an idealized Athenian subject as lover of the city. What is the nature of that lover and his love? What is the role of the demagogue in this patriotic love affair? Thucydides denies pleasure in the relation between Pericles and the demos: what is that denied pleasure and what is the economy of its disavowal? The speech, I argue, inculcates a narcissistic desire for an ideal self and, around that desire, constructs a democratic citizen-subject. But this ideal itself has a politics, as does the love for it: this chapter explores the politics of the speech's ideal, and the sort of political relations-both narcissistic and anaclitic-implied when the people are urged to become "lovers of the city." It is a theorization of, as well as a case study in, the erotics of politics, an attempt to unravel the threads of desire and identification that bind this patriotic passion.

The Funeral Oration offers Thucydides' vision of an ideal Athens and Athenian: the words we read in it are, for all intents and purposes, Thucydides'. They may correspond more or less closely to the oration actually delivered by Pericles in the winter of 431/30 (and scholars can argue over that "more or less"), but the original speech is lost to us, and in the speech we have, Thucydides' voice and Pericles' are effectively inseparable; indeed, as I suggest at the end of the chapter, Thucydides goes to some effort to make the two indistinguishable. When I refer, then, to Pericles and the demos in this chapter, these must be understood as "Pericles" and "the demos," Thucydidean creations. The psychic dynamics here are first and foremost textual dynamics, one text's fantasy of democratic love.

And yet perhaps we are justified in making broader claims for that fantasy and reading this speech as one textual articulation of a larger cultural psyche (a psyche, as I suggested in the introduction, that exists only as the sum of such articulations). The words of this oration may be Thucydides' but they operate within a language that is not uniquely his own. Thucydides has a strong individual voice, often highly critical of the polis; frequently he sets himself in explicit opposition to what he identifies as democratic discourse. But critique, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, always operates within the practical logic of that which it critiques. Thucydides' oppositional stance does not place him outside democratic discourse (of which he is as much a product as a critic), and even as he challenges many of the tenets of contemporary political thought, he simultaneously reinscribes the cultural assumptions and aspirations that inform them. His vision of the citizen-lover is without doubt part of his critique (especially of the post-Periclean democracy); that it also belongs to a broader cultural debate over the erotics of democracy is attested by Cleon's parody in Aristophanes' Knights. As we shall see in chapter 2, Aristophanes' Cleon cites-if only to pervert-the ideal of the citizen-lover depicted by Thucydides' Pericles. Parody here really is the sincerest form of flattery: it indicates the hegemonic status within the contemporary imaginary of the ideal to which Thucydides (through Pericles) gives expression. Thucydides' speech, then, is no mere idiolect but rather a fluent example of...