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  • Tragic Pleasure from Homer to Plato by Rana Saadi Liebert
  • Eirene Visvardi
Rana Saadi Liebert. Tragic Pleasure from Homer to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. ix + 218 pp. Cloth, $99.

Why is tragedy pleasurable? An answer to this long-standing paradox is still needed, Liebert posits in her introduction, especially because of the dominance of cognitivist solutions to it. Beginning with Aristotle, such solutions rely inordinately on the circumstances of representation (mimesis). Using the figure of Odysseus among the Phaeacians as a starting point, Liebert suggests that tragic pleasure does not require aesthetic distance, is compelling and potentially addictive, and has a disabling quality. To understand this appeal of painful emotions and their satisfactions, we should look to Plato’s Republic which offers what Liebert calls a “psychosomatic model of poetic engagement” (16). According to this model, it is a sub-rational human appetite for grief—the Platonic “hunger for tears”—which tragedy satisfies and which also poses ethical problems for aesthetic theorists. Liebert’s aim is twofold: to explicate the Platonic model after tracing its roots in the archaic poetic tradition; and to offer a new aesthetic theory. In the process, the capacious definition of “tragedy,” the elimination of the distinction between mimetic and real contexts of engaging with the tragic, and the somatic core of tragic pleasure will raise demanding questions for the readers of this book.

The first chapter examines sweetness in archaic poetics. Passages well-known for attesting to poetry’s compelling yet often ambivalent power are analyzed to show the association of poetic pleasure with the sensations of taste, hunger, and sexual arousal. By establishing this somatic conception of poetic pleasure, the language of honey-like sweetness, Liebert argues, gives poetic experience the structure of an appetitive desire. Interestingly, Liebert does not deny the fundamental role of cognition in poetic creation and experience. Rather she argues that since it is cognitive processes that induce affective sensations, the body itself does not pose the usual restrictions of bodily experience. Because the absence of physiological restrictions “maximiz[es] the pleasures of the body with the power of the mind” (37), such sensations are all the more addictive. Poetic pleasure, in this reading, puts cognition in the service of an appetite for sweetness that profoundly affects the body but cannot be limited by it. Pindar, however, complicates the picture by introducing the very danger of poetic satiety (koros) and disgust. Through what Liebert calls “an apian poetic program,” Pindar points to cognitive means—poetic (“bee-like”) craftsmanship and poikilia—as the guard against satiety. Liebert elaborates extensively on the concrete (visual, artisanal) and abstract (varietal) meanings of poikilia, as the concept will be recast by Plato. Despite this Pindaric [End Page 167] shift, however, Liebert argues, the pleasures to be attained and sustained through poetry remain somatically conceived. It seems that so long as sweetness is the goal, the somatic core of poetic desire and pleasure remains unchallenged.

Painful emotions as a source of pleasure are the focus of the second chapter. The Homeric Achilles provides insights to real emotions, while Gorgias illuminates the similarities between real life and the mimetic context. By looking at Achilles’ “attachment” to anger and grief and the terminology of consumption—how, for instance, the hero abstains from food to indulge in his painful emotions which in turn “feed” on him—Liebert suggests that emotions in the archaic period are conceived as psychosomatic addictions. As parasitical forces, they jeopardize the self because their satisfactions are physical while their limits are not. How are we to understand such addictive satisfactions? Pleasure stems from an intensity that offers the subject a heightened self-perception that would not be accessible outside the affective experience, that is, through reason. Such self-perception, however, does not constitute self-knowledge but “a narrowing as well as a sharpening of focus” (92–3), which can be self-destructive, as in Achilles’ case.

We observe here the capaciousness of Liebert’s definition of tragedy. Not only a dramatic genre, tragedy is “an account that elicits grief and anguish” (9) and also refers to emotional experiences that are self-destructive and, therefore, “tragic.” The risk of...

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