Classical Literature and Posthumanism

Giulia Maria Chesi, Francesca Spiegel

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350069510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The subject of the posthuman, of what it means to be or to cease to be human, is emerging as a shared point of debate at large in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This volume asks what classical learning can bring to the table of posthuman studies, assembling chapters that explore how exactly the human self of Greek and Latin literature understands its own relation to animals, monsters, objects, cyborgs and robotic devices. With its widely diverse habitat of heterogeneous bodies, minds, and selves, classical literature again and again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human; not to equate and confound the human with its other, but playfully to highlight difference and hybridity, as an invitation to appraise the animal, monstrous or mechanical/machinic parts lodged within humans. This comprehensive collection unites contributors from across the globe, each delving into a different classical text or narrative and its configuration of human subjectivity-how human selves relate to other entities around them. For students and scholars of classical literature and the posthuman, this book is a first point of reference.

PART I

DE/HUMANIZATION AND ANIMALS

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CHAPTER 1

ODYSSEUS, THE BOAR AND THE ANTHROPOGENIC MACHINE¹

Marianne Hopman

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In his 2015 book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, American writer Roy Scranton stresses the urgency to rethink what it means to be human in the Anthropocene:²

In order for us to adapt to this strange new world, we’re going to need more than scientific reports and military policy. We’re going to need new ideas. We’re going to need new myths and new stories, a new conceptual understanding of reality, and a new relationship to the deep polyglot traditions of human culture … We need a new vision of who ‘we’ are.³

Scranton is quick to question, however, whether the humanities can rise to the task: ‘Admittedly, ocean acidification, social upheaval, and species extinction are problems that humanities scholars, with their taste for fine-grained philological analysis, esoteric debates, and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill-suited to address.’⁴ Thus the rise of the Anthropocene, for all its deeply alarming implications, raises a tremendously exciting challenge – and opportunity – for those of us who identify as ‘humanities scholars’. Can we contribute new ideas, myths, and stories that will help redefine what it is to be human? Can we draw on the tools of our trade – the details of philological analysis and the minutiae of close reading – to illuminate, rather than escape from, the project of defining a new humanism?

And what part, if any, may classicists play in those conversations? Shouldn’t the ambition to create ‘new’ ideas, myths and stories for the contemporary world prompt us to focus on the present – and the future – rather than dig into the distant past? Furthermore, haven’t Plato, Aristotle and ‘the Greeks’ provided the ‘humanist’ tradition with concepts that are among the targets of posthumanist critique, such as human exceptionalism and the great chain of beings? In his book The Open, Giorgio Agamben traces to Aristotle one version of the ‘anthropogenic machine’, by which he means the cultural production of the concept of man through the oppositions man/animal, human/inhuman.⁵ And yet that enmeshment of classical texts into the dominant anthropocentric tradition may be precisely what makes classicists relevant and important to the posthumanism debate. There are, as Jacques Derrida has argued, several ways of questioning humanism, one of which involves ‘attempting the exit and the deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house, that is, equally, in language’.⁶ The texts that we have inherited from ancient Greece are complex, dialogical assemblages welding together a variety of linguistic, stylistic, aesthetic and ideological layers. Might our core disciplinary practices – philology and close reading – be harnessed to read those texts against the grain, highlight contrapuntal worldviews that were obscured through their later reception, and thus offer a useful contribution to contemporary conversations?⁷

With this agenda in mind, I turn to my case study – the story of Odysseus and the boar as told in Odyssey 19.⁸ The context is well known. Penelope has asked the faithful nurse Eurykleia to give a bath to Odysseus disguised as a beggar. As the old servant washes the feet of her master, she recognizes the scar that he received from the white tusk of a boar while hunting on Mount Parnassos with his maternal uncles. Eurykleia’s anagnorisis, or recognition process, triggers a flash-back about the origin of the scar that falls into two parts: first an account of how Odysseus’ grandfather, Autolykos, came to visit his daughter and son-in-law at the time of Odysseus’ birth, gave him a name, and invited him to visit upon the turn of manhood (399–412); and second a narrative of youthful Odysseus’ subsequent visit to his grandfather, which includes an elaborate hospitality scene followed by the boar hunt itself (413–466).⁹

As commentators have stressed, the boar hunt represents a crucial step in the psycho-social fabrication of Odysseus as a descendant of Autolykos and as a unique individual.¹⁰ The encounter with the boar takes place when Odysseus is in the vigour of early manhood (ἡβάω, 19.410). Its juxtaposition to the story of Odysseus’ birth and naming suggests a thematic relevance to questions of identity and fabrication of the self, as does the fact that Odysseus’ name is emphatically combined with two adjectives of praise, ‘blameless’ and ‘god-like’, immediately after the killing and wounding ( Ὀδυσῆος ἀμύμονος ἀντιθέοιο, 19.456).¹¹ Specifics of the boar hunt including the role of maternal uncles and the tripartite sequence of separation, transition and reintegration match the anthropological concept of rite of passage studied by Arnold van Gennep and others.¹² Even more broadly, cultural parallels show that – as an extremely dangerous sport where men’s lives were at stake – boar hunting could be used as a test of manhood and an indication of readiness for warfare in ancient Greece.¹³

There is ample evidence, therefore, that Odysseus fully becomes Odysseus during and through the encounter with the boar. In other words, the narrative may be approached as a specific instance of Agamben’s anthropogenic machine – an Odysseugenesis, so to speak. My goal here is to dissect the specifics of this particular example of the fabrication of the human in relation to the non-human. I propose that the text intricately combines at least three different views of the relation between Odysseus and the boar. Specifically, I argue that the fabrication of Odysseus coincides with the imposition of a violent hierarchy that, in contrast with the analogical perception of boars as paradigms for human warriors in Iliadic similes (I), introduces a concept of Odysseus’ technology-based difference from and superiority over the boar (II) while still recognizing his vulnerability and permeability to the non-human (III).¹⁴

I. Audience expectations and the analogical worldview

The expedition that takes Odysseus and his maternal uncles hunting on Parnassos stands out in the extant Homeric corpus as the most detailed account of a heroic hunt. Warriors do not hunt on the plain of Troy. Odysseus or his crew sometimes hunt for food, but those expeditions target animals – goats, a stag, oxen – that per se do not put the men’s lives directly at risk. As far as plot is concerned, our passage resembles the Calydonian boar hunt narrated by Phoenix in Iliad 9, which similarly involves a boar, a youth and his maternal uncles. Indeed the two stories have been fruitfully analysed together through the anthropological concept of rite of passage.¹⁵ Yet from an aesthetic point of view, the highly compressed account of the Calydonian boar hunt strikingly differs from the leisurely paced narrative of Odyssey 19. Poetically, the closest Homeric parallel for Odysseus’ struggle with the boar comes from Iliadic similes that describe the encounters of villagers, their dogs and large and dangerous mammals.¹⁶

On the morning of the second day of Odysseus’ visit, he and his uncles leave the house of Autolykos to go hunting. The narrative opens with a beautifully detailed description of their itinerary as the men and their dogs walk through hills, mountains and dense woods bathe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Theoretical Introduction: The Subject of the Human
• Introductions to Post/human Theories
• The Question of the Animal and the Aristotelian Human Horse
• Foucault, the Monstrous and Monstrosity
• How to Become a Cyborg
• Anders, Simondon and the Becoming of the Posthuman
• Part I De/humanization and Animals
• 1 Odysseus, the Boar and the Anthropogenic Machine
• 2 What Is It Like to Be a Donkey (With a Human Mind)? Pseudo-Lucian’s
• 3 Quam Soli Vidistis Equi: Focalization and Animal Subjectivity in Valerius Flaccus
• 4 Animality, Illness and Dehumanization: The Phenomenology of Illness in Sophocles’ Philoctetes
• 5 The Imperial Animal: Virgil’s Georgics and the Anthropo-/Theriomorphic Enterprise
• 6 Animals, Governance and Warfare in the Iliad and Aeschylus’
• 7 The Sovereign and the Beast: Images of Ancient Tyranny
• Part II The Monstrous
• 8 Typhoeus or Cosmic Regression (Theogony 821–880)
• 9 Demonic Disease in Greek Tragedy: Illness, Animality and Dehumanization
• 10 The Sphinx and Another Thinking of Life
• 11 When Rome’s Elephants Weep: Humane Monsters from Pompey’s Theatre to Virgil’s Trojan Horse
• 12 The Monstrosity of Cato in Lucan’s Civil War 9
• 13 Why Can’t I Have Wings? Aristophanes’ Birds
• Part III Bodies and Entanglements
• 14 The Seer’s Two Bodies: Some Early Greek Histories of Technology
• 15 Fluid Cypress and Hybrid Bodies as a Cognitively Disturbing Metaphor in Euripides’ Cretans
• 16 Body Politics in the Antiquitates Romanae of Dionysius of Halicarnassus
• 17 The Myth of Io and Female Cyborgic Identity
• 18 Cosmic, Animal and Human Becomings: A Case Study in Ancient Philosophy
• 19 Posthumanism in Seneca’s Happy Life: ‘Animalism’, Personificationand Private Property in Roman Stoicism (Epistulae Morales 113 and De Vita Beata 5–8)
• 20 Hagiography without Humans: Simeon the Stylite
• Part IV Objects, Machines and Robotic Devices
• 21 Assemblages and Objects in Greek Tragedy
• 22 Hybris and Hybridity in Aeschylus’ Persians: A Posthumanist Perspective on Xerxes’ Expedition
• 23 Malfunctions of Embodiment: Man/Weapon Agency and the Greek Ideology of Masculinity
• 24 Aeneid 12: A Cyborg Border War
• 25 The Presence of Presents: Speaking Objects in Martial’s Xenia and Apophoreta
• 26 Automatopoetae Machinae: Laws of Nature and Human Invention (Vitruvius 9.8.4–7)
• 27 Pandora and Robotic Technology Today
• 28 Art, Life and the Creation of Automata: On Pindar, Olympian 7.50–53
• 29 Staying Alive: Plato, Horace and the Written Text
• 30 Beyond the Beautiful Evil? The Ancient/Future History of Sex Robots
• Conclusions
• Notes
• 1
• Bibliography
• Index
• 1
• Copyright