Odysseys of Recognition

Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist

Ellwood Wiggins

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781684480395
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literary recognition is a technical term for a climactic plot device. Odysseys of Recognition claims that interpersonal recognition is constituted by performance, and brings performance theory into dialogue with poetics, politics, and philosophy. By observing Odysseus figures from Homer to Kleist, Ellwood Wiggins offers an alternative to conventional intellectual histories that situate the invention of the interior self in modernity. Through strategic readings of Aristotle, this elegantly written, innovative study recovers an understanding of interpersonal recognition that has become strange and counterintuitive. Penelope in Homer's Odyssey offers a model for agency in ethical knowledge that has a lot to teach us today. Early modern and eighteenth-century characters, meanwhile, discover themselves not deep within an impenetrable self, but in the interpersonal space between people in the world. Recognition, Wiggins contends, is the moment in which epistemology and ethics coincide: in which what we know becomes manifest in what we do.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

Part I

Marking the Limits of Recognition

Between Aristotle and the Odyssey

ἀναγνώρισις δέ, ὥσπερ καὶ τοὔνομα σημαίνει, ἐξ ἀγνοίας εἰς γνῶσιν μεταβολή, ἢ εἰς φιλίαν ἢ εἰς ἔχθραν, τῶν πρὸς εὐτυχίαν ἢ δυστυχίαν ὡρισμένων (P, 11, 1452a, 29–31)

(Recognition, just as the name itself signifies, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, into either friendship or enmity, among those bound for good or bad fortune.)

Aristotle’s definition of anagnorisis makes a promise it doesn’t keep. The first clause claims that the name should signify itself: anagnorisis and recognition both imply “knowing again.” Yet the ensuing definition has nothing to do with the recurrence signaled by the word’s construction. A “change from ignorance to knowledge” does not require repetition and in fact suggests that recognition is a matter of learning something new rather than revisiting something old. It is as if the logical formulation of the definition quickly hides away the recursive “again” suggested by the word itself. Though tucked away and ignored, however, the introductory clause intimates and foreshadows the repetitions that will arise again at incongruent moments in Aristotle’s analysis.

There is no requirement for any modern theory of recognition—whether in political, theatrical, or philosophical discourses—to look to Aristotle’s Poetics as a source of authority. But over and over again in contemporary accounts of this hot-button topic in current academia, the same pattern staged in Aristotle’s definition repeats itself. Theorists attempt to contain and define the phenomenon of recognition, only to discover that it has gotten away from them and appeared in a different guise in another venue.1 This stubborn recurrence of recognition is not the only fortuitous kinship between Aristotle’s formulation and recent studies of recognition. Aristotle’s definition entails three disjunctive pairs that modify the course of recognition along binary nodal points. These dyads correspond precisely to problematic areas in contemporary recognition studies: the move from ignorance to knowledge points to questions of epistemology and cognition, the binary friendship or enmity pertains to the entire ethical dimension of recognition in politics, and the determination of good or bad fortune implicates the ineluctable aspects of identity in society. Chapters 3 through 5 are devoted to each of these dichotomies in succession. It turns out that the unkept promise concerning the name’s self-signification also involves a series of opposing binaries, and I trace their emergence and complication in chapter 1. The central element of Aristotle’s formula, however, is the single word that makes up the defining predicate: change. Chapter 2 shows how change also encompasses a dual structure, though instead of an opposing relation, as in the other binaries, the performative change of recognition works through the complementarity of potency and actuality.

Though these five chapters open up discourses implicit in the key parts of Aristotle’s definition of anagnorisis, the primary text for part I is the ultimate poem of recognition, the Odyssey. This epic provides a rich font of important recognition scenarios, in its language and narratives as well as in the performative practices through which it evolved as a poetic work. Aristotle himself noticed this feature of the Homeric poem: “The Odyssey is recognition through and through” (P, 24, 1459b). How seriously should one take this claim, which almost appears as an aside in a late chapter of the Poetics? Scholars have long analyzed the second half of the epic (books 13–24), which narrates Odysseus’s arrival home in Ithaca, as of a series of formulaic recognition sequences between Odysseus and the various members of his household. The most technical of these studies confidently concludes that “recognition scenes are confined to the second half of the Odyssey.”2 Yet the first half also abounds in recognition. In the first part, the so-called Telemachy (books 1–4), Odysseus’s son leaves Ithaca with an unrecognized, mentoring goddess to seek out news of his father among other returnees from the Trojan War. Each of his encounters with his father’s old friends and their retinues involves episodes where Telemachus is not only identified as the son of Odysseus but then recognized to be like his father in some important way. In the second part (books 5–8), Odysseus lands naked on a foreign shore and must present himself to the natives in such a way that they reward him with lavish gifts and conveyance home. This self-presentation includes the third part (books 9–12), in which Odysseus narrates an account of his journeys since leaving Troy. All the first-contact scenarios with strange creatures and cultures during his travels can figure as recognition scenes, in which characters must assess each other as friends or enemies. The entire narration, meanwhile, is part of his endeavor to be recognized as a hero worthy of honor and booty by his Phaeacian audience.

The recognition scenes in the two halves of the Odyssey are different in kind. In the second half, the confrontations between Odysseus and his servants and family members on Ithaca are reunions that reestablish a broken oikos (household). In the first half, in contrast, Telemachus and his father were previously unacquainted with the people they encounter. Interestingly, most classical scholars who write about recognition in Greek literature concentrate almost exclusively on the scenes in the second half. They assume that recognition implies reunion between estranged members of a family or household.3 Philosophers and comparatists, on the other hand, want the term to apply more broadly to a wide range of human interactions.4 Their definitions of recognition encompass the variety of encounters in the first half of the book as well as those on Ithaca.

The readings below show how neither of these seemingly incompatible scholarly treatments are wrong. Recognition is both a ubiquitous experience of human intersubjectivity and a phenomenon limited to the restoration of familial bonds. The underlying desire of recognition, which haunts Aristotle’s definition in the fleeting nod toward the word’s self-signification, injects into all interactions a longing to return home. Anagnorisis is always already a process of elusive nostos.

This nostalgia of recognition is the subject of the first chapter. As each chapter takes off from a clause of Aristotle’s definition, key episodes of the Odyssey offer confirmations, complications, and challenges. First, attention to the composition of the word anagnorisis itself reveals the illusory desire that is the motivating engine for recognition stories such as the Odyssey and for fundamental oppositions in genre studies, ontology, and semiotics. The hidden recognitions between Menelaus and Helen are emblematic of this self-signifying desire (chapter 1). Second, since recognition is a kind of change for Aristotle, it makes sense to examine how change functions in his system. This analysis allows me, with the help of recent Homeric scholarship, to gloss Aristotle’s definition of recognition as performance. Two instances of Odysseus’s performative weeping serve as examples of the dynamics of this articulation of recognition (chapter 2). This explanation then enables a profitable exploration of three opposing pairs in Aristotle’s formulation. The change “from ignorance to knowledge” demands an inquiry into the epistemology of recognition, which, it turns out, is contingent entirely on a propensity to forget. Penelope’s interview with Odysseus in book 19 of the Odyssey serves as a perfect exemplum of the indeterminacy of recognition (chapter 3). The exclusive disjunction, “friendship or enmity,” then forces the problem of recognition into the fields of ethics and, per Schmitt and Derrida, politics. The famous reunion of Odysseus with his dog provides a limit case to understand the dissimulation at the heart of human friendship (chapter 4). Finally, the nodal horizon for good or bad fortune, which closes off Aristotle’s definition, offers a vantage from which to view the frailty of recognition. Odysseus’s encounters with three women (Circe, Nausicaa, and Athena) reveal a spectrum of the inescapable checks that identity holds over human agency (chapter 5).

It will become clear that both classicists and philosophers are justified in their opposing efforts to limit and expand, respectively, recognition’s reach in the Odyssey. The universalizing tendencies of the former require the constructivist assumptions of the latter—and vice versa—to make the distinctions either insists on. Recognition is a matter of hermeneutics writ both large and small. Any attempt to grasp the essential action of recognition will find that that it eludes conceptual stability. It constantly escapes onto different stages (andere Schauplätze, to borrow Freud’s phrase). This means both that recognition will appear with strangely familiar features in unexpected places and that many sightings of it will prove errant. Even when observed closely, this protean activity, so central to human agency, is devilishly difficult to hold still.

Chapter One

“Just as the Name Itself Signifies”

Under the Sign of Nostalgia

What’s in a name? If the construction of a word reveals its own meaning, a definition should be superfluous. Aristotle prefaces his own definition of recognition by claiming that the word is self-explanatory: “Anagnorisis, just as the name itself signifies.”1 He then goes on to provide an explanation of the term that is by no means obvious from its component parts. Though Aristotle never explicitly addresses the etymological roots or compound structure of the word—presumably its signification is too self-evident to warrant explication—these questions launch this chapter, leading to four important claims about recognition. First, the word itself invites reflection on the iterative nature of recognition, revealing a deep connection between recognition and nostalgia. The specific illustration of this link in the Odyssey with the homecomings of Agamemnon and Menelaus then leads to the identification of a distinct Atreidian mode of recognition in anticipatory contrast to that of Odysseus and Penelope. Next, the consequences of nostalgic recognition offer insight into the theory of epic poetry. Tragedy and epic both sport their own paradoxes of recognition that simultaneously contradict and complement the other. What’s more, the dual logic of recognition echoes and amplifies a series of fraught dualities: surprisingly, the relationships Same/Other, simple/complex, and natural/conventional all share features of the seemingly generic divide between epic and tragedy. Finally, the temporality of epic forces a return and reevaluation of the very nature of signing and signification itself. Semiotics, it turns out, is predicated on the nostalgic paradox of recognition: the artificial arbitrariness of mediating signs necessary for the functioning of language makes possible the idea of and longing for natural signs and immediate communication.

Nostalgia and Recognition

An obvious place to begin investigating what “the name itself signifies” would be the elements that make up the noun: ana (again) + gnōrisis (acquaintance, knowledge) = knowing again. The term is most often translated as “recognition.” This English word fortuitously indicates its own meaning as well: re (again) + cognition (mental action, acquisition of knowledge) = knowing again. Of course, this kind of explanation simply passes the buck. Saying that recognition means to know something or someone again gets us no closer to an understanding of knowledge. What does it mean to know something or someone in the first place? What concept of time is implied by the adverb again? By directing attention to the elements of the term, Aristotle’s parenthetical aside is an answer that begs more questions. It does, however, serve to emphasize two fields of meaning implicit in every instance of recognition: epistemology and time. What is the temporality of knowledge assumed behind dramatic anagnorisis?

Before returning to the assumptions behind these two complex notions, however, some alternative explanations of the word anagnōrisis merit mention. Several translations of the Poetics render the term as “discovery.”2 This name signifies itself in a way quite appropriate to many instances of tragic recognition cited by Aristotle, but the elements of the word discovery are very different from those that make up recognition and anagnorisis. Discovery entails an uncovering or disconcealment. It involves the revelation of a preexistent but hidden truth. In fact, discovery is rather suggestive of Martin Heidegger’s creative etymology for the Greek word for truth. He derives alētheia from lanthanein (to escape notice) via an older form (lēthein) that is connected to lēthē (forgetting) by adding a negating alpha primitive. Hence one should understand truth as a kind of not-forgetting—or, as Heidegger puts it, Unverborgenheit (unconcealedness).3 Heidegger uses this etymological strategy to reveal his notion of truth as disclosure, which he opposes to the prevalent but distorting correspondence conceptions of truth. The connections between disclosure and discovery may ring true to a poetic ear, and thinking through interpersonal recognition in terms of Heideggerian ontology could be a thrilling enterprise.4 Yet the suggestive self-disclosure of the word discovery clearly signifies itself in a lexical field very different from that of anagnorisis. For one thing, recognition and unconcealedness require radically different notions of agency. Heideggerian disclosure is a feature of the world in which humans are situated; Aristotelian recognition is an action that subjects engage in. Certainly the Odyssey could yield very enlightening readings that illustrate and challenge Heidegger’s phenomenology in terms of recognition as disclosure: for seven years, Od...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Overview of Contents
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Translations and Orthography
• Introduction: Performing Recognition
• Part I
• Part II
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author