The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece by Brooke Holmes (review)

An interval between will and act, a silent cavity traversed by daemonic impulses and unpredictable processes—by life instinct and death drive—an otherness inside us that troubles the definitions of both “inside” and “us”: this is a description not of the unconscious, as a post-Freudian reader might suppose, but of the physical body as it first emerged in classical Greece. The Symptom and the Subject traces the genealogy of this body: how the alien force of the gods is rediscovered inside us; how that hidden internal world becomes visible, an object of medical knowledge and ethical care; how this new body, in turn, generates the mind, the psyche, the self. The symptoms that Holmes reads as emissaries from this strange inner world are also messengers from the prehistory of the modern body and the (post-Freudian, post-Foucauldian) subject. Alive to the “sense of mysteriousness in living things,” this rich and fascinating book explores the “daemonic recesses of the ethical subject,” that unconscious domain that the Greeks called sôma.