Introduction

Ancient Greece achieves a contemporary presence in four of the essays in Theory & Event 11: 1. In “From the Empire of the Gaze to Noisy Bodies: Foucault, Audition and Medical Power,” Lauri Siisiainen focuses on Foucault’s departure from the inhibitions embedded in Aristotelian science to illuminate a medical subject who appears at the intersection of the discourses on medical knowledge. Treating especially the “the issue of auditory perception and the practice of listening, with an emphasis on their political significance,” Siisiainen proposes “new possibilities for using Foucault’s concepts as political-analytic tools.” The essay takes its departure from the familiar types of Foucault criticism, which focus on “the gaze” and explores the emphasis on auditory perception one finds in Foucault’s well-known investigations of medical knowledge in his The Birth of the Clinic and in his neglected Message or Noise? Noting Foucault’s historical analysis of the changes in the “forms, functions, capacities, powers, and limitations” of auditory perception,” Siisiainen finds a Foucauldian power-knowledge circuit within a different genealogy of the senses from what has been emphasized in Foucault studies thus far. Deriving new implications from Foucault’s two investigations of medical knowledge, Siisiainen suggests that “we shouldn’t just assume that the ear, audition, listening, or music are just ‘innocent’ when it come to the functioning of the apparatuses of power.”

Ancient Greece meets Hurricane Katrina in Simon Stow’s “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? George Bush, the Jazz Funeral, and the Politics of Memory.” Stow evokes Pericles’ funeral and treats two types of memory and mourning in Greek thought and practice in order to frame the political implications of President Bush’s “jazz funeral” speech. Although he states that he is not suggesting a historical continuity between the two funeral orations, Stow sees a decidedly Greek suggestion that “Nature not politics was the cause of the problems in the Gulf Coast” in the Bush speech. At the same time, Stow finds “rather simple linear models of mourning” in Bush’s rhetoric, in contrast with the way African American thinkers from W. E. B. Du Bois through James Baldwin have figured the play of memory and mourning in African American music – for example in “sorrow songs.” Ultimately, Stow suggests that “the models drawn from the Greeks provide a lens through which to view American politics,” especially when used to conceptualize the Bush administrations strategy of memory and mourning. In the American case, he argues, the strategy of memory and mourning served as a distraction from injustices rather than, as in the Greek case, providing a mode of mourning “conducive to the health of a democratic polity.”

Ancient Greece’s Odysseus, as articulated through Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklarung, makes an appearance in Claudia Leeb’s “Desired and Feared: The Working-Class Woman and Adorno,” a feminist rejoinder to Theodor Adorno’s “problematic depictions of the feminine.” Arguing that “there is so far no scholarship that shows how the feminine interacts with class in Adorno’s figuration of the working-class woman,” Leeb draws on the theoretical idioms of Jacques Lacan to treat the fantasy objects in Adorno works – the phallic woman, the castrating woman, and the castrated woman. To counter what she refers to as Adorno’s “false wholes,” Leeb celebrates instead of demonizing the appearance of the working-class woman in the “moment of the real,” arguing that she reveals “the blind spots of identity thinking.” Ultimately, she suggests, a focus on the real working-class woman allows us to envision working-class women and men as not castrated, but as non-identical to Adorno’s identity thinking — as those women and men that are able to resist their gender and class domination.

In her “Ancient Ideologies, Postmodern Echoes: American Politics after 9/11 and the Greek Rhetoric of Identity,” Sulochana Asirvatham contrasts the ancient Greek dichotomy of the civilized vs. the barbarian with the Bush administration’s post 9/11 articulated dichotomy between the civilized nations of the West and the Taliban and Al Qaeda. However, as she notes, while there is little evidence in the classic texts of...