Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (review)

This is a thorough study, perhaps more intended for a readership of classical scholars, of the reception of Greek thought and literature in post-war French thought, which takes account of the uses and possible abuses of Greek references in the works of, chiefly, Vernant, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Irigaray. On the one hand, it presents itself as a scholarly examination of French thinkers' encounters with Greek texts, while on the other emphasizing the important figuration of the political in these encounters, convincingly arguing that 'the very definition of what constitutes political philosophy is at the heart of the post-war investment in antiquity'. In her introduction Leonard ambitiously states that her book 'aims to make a contribution not just to intellectual history but also to the methodological issues of writing intellectual history' and in this ambition she succeeds. Organized in three chapters on 'Oedipus and the Political Subject', 'Antigone between Ethics and Politics' and 'Socrates and the Analytic City', the book certainly manages to shed some light onto the intellectual history of the manifold debates around political agency, the notion of the democratic subject, as well as the complex interrelation between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and politics as they were informed by readings of the Greek figures she concentrates on, and one of the book's many merits is its constant and consistent opening up of its complex arguments to the vast field of writing devoted to the major figures Leonard deals with by way of excellent referencing. The scope, therefore of the intellectual history covered in this book is immense, attempting as it is to place the reception of Greek thought in the context not only of the French post-war intellectual and political constellation but also of the French reception of the major nineteenth-century appropriations of the same Greek texts, which inevitably takes in the very complex, and already widely studied, question of the fate of figures such as Hegel and Nietzsche in the hands of post-war theory. It is perhaps this wide scope that disallows Leonard from engaging in sufficient depth and detail with writers such as Hegel or Lacan whose texts will perhaps always defy attempts at summary, and results in readings that either appear disputable, say from a Hegelian or Lacanian perspective, or seem to smooth out the edges of often forbiddingly complex thinking. This may also be why, at precisely these moments of overdetermined reception she seeks to disentangle, Leonard often has recourse to such an abundance of critical material that several pages read like little more than collations of citations. Nevertheless, despite such specific problems, in her concluding overview of the field which deftly uses Sartre's own dramatic forays into Greek myth, Leonard concisely and successfully presents the reception of Greek texts as being at the core of the political debates in post-war French thought.