Solon's Ekstatic Strategy: Stasis and the Subject/Citizen

Hegel famously argues that the ancient Greeks did not have a notion of the subject because they lacked a conception of self-consciousness. There is, nonetheless, something enticing in Hegel's notion of the Greek subject as lacking self-consciousness by Hegel. In particular, the lack of a reliance on reflection for the determination of human agency is intimately linked to, even inextricable from, the conception of the citizen. What the ancient Greek "subject" may lack in self-reflexivity, thereby never arriving at the idea of transcendental subjectivity, it compensates for with a decisively political insistence on human action and thought.

The connection between the subject and the citizen is important because, as Étienne Balibar has shown in a series of texts, starting with "Citizen Subject," the two concepts are actually linked in modernity, both in terms of their genealogy and in terms of the political commitments they entail.¹ In the context of trying to answer the question "What comes after the subject?" it may, then, be useful to remember the historical specificity and artificiality, even artifice, of the wrenching apart of the subject and the citizen. It may even lead us to wonder whether the separation between subject and citizen is tenable, especially when we note the ways in which violence is inscribed in affecting this separation. To raise these questions, then, the Greek subject's lack of "self-consciousness" is indeed a fruitful starting point. I propose to do so by organizing some thoughts about the subject departing from the Greeks.

Perhaps the greatest examples of a conjoining of the subject and the citizen in Greek context appear in the tragedies. But I would like here to focus on a different example that is arguably of equal importance and no less dramatic. I am thinking of Solon's law against neutrality, or, as I prefer to call it, the law of stasis. I cite it here in full as it appears in Aristotle's Athenian Constitution:

And as he saw that the state was often in conflict [στασιάζουσαν], while some citizens would let things take their course through idleness [διὰ τὴν ῥᾳθυμίαν], he laid down a special law to deal with them, enacting that whoever did not take a stand in a stasis [στασιαζούσης τῆς πόλεως] was to lose his citizenship and to be expelled from the polis. (8.5, translation modified)²

We should remember that, according to the tradition, Solon's is the first-ever democratic constitution. This peculiar law stands out in the Solonian code as conjoining the way that one is in the world with the conditions for citizenship. If one's being in the world precludes political participation, that is, if a subject refuses to engage in the conflict of stasis that is constitutive of being a citizen, then the subject will be stripped of its formal citizenship and expelled from the polis.

Note that the Solonian conception of the democratic subject/citizen is described almost in the dramatic terms. The democratic polis is like a stage. The conflict or stasis between the parties takes place on this stage. The actors are subject/citizens occupying the polis as a stage of the drama. Simultaneously, there is an actor on the side of the stage, lounging about and refraining from moving to center stage. The law of stasis indicates the imperative for the actor to position him or herself at that part of the stage where the stasis unfolds. There is no drama without the agon that unfolds on the stage.³ In this conception, democracy is the participation by the subject in the agon unfolding on the political stage.

Now, such a drama does not conform to the usual way in which we understand democracy. If an off-the-shelf definition of democracy is required, then one usually refers to the two proper names of the compound word: democracy indicates that the people (demos) hold power or rule (kratos). I do not need to belabor the well-rehearsed difficulties of this "self-evident" definition of democracy. I can mention indicatively questions such as the following: Is the demos in ancient Athens really the same...