Part II. Chapter 7. Remembering Nicole Loraux Remembering Athens [1]

I wish this morning to offer a few remarks on method and memory, topics that this anthology asks us to recall and rethink. In the course of these remarks I wish as well to recall explicitly the work of our co-editor Nicole Loraux, whose astonishing series of books and essays—along with those of her colleagues J.-P. Vernant, P. Vidal-Naquet, and M. Detienne—enjoin us to reflect on the inescapable politics of memory as well as on the rigors and nuances of method.

An early favorable, if somewhat arch, review of Loraux described her as “one of the best, most prolific, and most solidly ‘historical’ of the Paris ‘structuralists.’” [2] With scare quotes around both “historical” and “structuralist,” the reviewer alluded to a methodological opposition that one might hope is now old news. It is by now a familiar criticism of structuralism, and the so-called structuralist “method,” that it elides history, suppresses conflict, and hypostatizes process. This criticism is relevant, it seems, only to those works—largely Anglo-American, it must be admitted—that have seized upon structuralism as a kind of reification, a readymade toolkit built for breaking down a cultural system or classical text into its smallest constituent units. It is certainly true that structuralism—as manifested, for example, in the magisterial and highly influential work of Lévi-Strauss—has come in for its share of salutary criticism: one may think of contemporary critiques like Sartre’s, or of Derrida’s famous analysis of the illusory mechanics of structuralism in his “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966). Yet the Anglo-American resistance to structuralism was {214|215} more importantly, as we know, a resistance to things French, or—and perhaps this is the same—to things Parisian, and theoretical. What we see in the work of these French classicists in Antiquities is an imaginative dialogue with, never a vulgar appropriation or a reification of, structuralism. Leaving aside the question of defining “structuralism”—for this I refer you both to the anthology’s introduction and to the vast literature surrounding the structuralist problematic—let us concede that those French classicists associated with newer “schools of thought” (anthropological, psychoanalytic, hermeneutic) have often been tarred with the structuralist label. What we see, however, when we turn to the work of these classicists, is their unflagging commitment to history, to politics, and, in the broadest sense, to committed reading.

It has been especially productive for those of us trained in the Anglo-American tradition to encounter the work of what was called, as early as 1982, “the Paris School” of classicists. [3] If we have felt simultaneously thrilled and puzzled by their work, this indicates the success of their collective venture, which seems nothing less than a wholesale defamiliarization of both antiquity and the study of antiquity. Not defamiliarization for its own sake, but for the sake rather of rigor and revelation, always undertaken under the sign of engaged reading. Consider David Schaps on this productive bewilderment: imagining the reception of Loraux’s work by succeeding generations of scholars, he writes, “None of them [the next generation] will get from this book what it offers to mature scholars of our generation, the exhilarating experience of having the views they had learned from their teachers or from their own reading so penetratingly challenged.” [4] We might say that, in her commitment to discovering and reconstructing (not, it must be emphasized, merely retrieving) antiquity, Nicole Loraux offered classicists a productive response to Sartre’s famous and always urgent question: why write? For as she explained in her introduction to The Invention of Athens, “when confronted with democracy, with the word as well as the thing, and when confronted with antiquity, too, I feel that I am in a strange world, and thus entitled to attempt a new reading.” [5]

The hostility that this work has sometimes encountered, particularly from British and German classicists, must be attributed, not only to national styles of scholarship or even to national chauvinism, but also to the profound challenge such brilliantly eclectic yet remorselessly argued books and essays {215|216} present to our received notions of democracy, rationality, the political: I think here of Vernant’s “The Spiritual Universe of the Polis” and Loraux’s Invention of Athens.

The crude rift between, say, classical philology and modern “schools of thought” is revealed to be precisely that, crude, in such works as The Invention of Athens, Children of Athena, The Experiences of Tiresias, and Mothers in Mourning, which ingeniously, imaginatively, and thrillingly illuminate the politics, myths, state genres, gendered discourses, and institutions of antiquity. As her work on gender and the body shows, Loraux pointedly rejected any reduction of “difference” into binaries—for example male/female—which could then be “subsumed under a ‘law of symmetrical inversion.’” As she remarked, following Froma Zeitlin’s work on transvestism in Greek drama, [6] this “overly mechanical process” must be resisted; it is our task rather to identify the complex layers, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, of representations and institutions of difference. For indeed to invoke, as Loraux does, the vocabulary of the Prague school, if “male” emerges as unmarked and “female” as marked in the classical city, this marking bears always an ideological weight and a political meaning; however “structural” this opposition, it works in historical, political ways. So we see that, even as she found in structuralism, or in later work in exchange-theory, workable tools for approaching and describing systems, her sense of history and her alertness to the mobility of ideological formations always informed, we might even say governed, her use of these tools.

Confounding those who defensively police the boundaries of their disciplines, Loraux unapologetically ranged among history, philology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary studies, and studies of myth and ritual. She acknowledged the “risk that anyone working on the edges of a discipline must incur” [7] —namely, the risk of antagonizing other scholars who feel their discipline is not getting its due (she mentions historians and psychoanalysts who might take umbrage at Tiresias). Perhaps we might take Loraux’s situating of herself as a model: “working of the edges of a discipline,” as she put it, she forced us to reflect on the polyvalence of boundaries, on the ambiguous work that boundaries are meant to do, whether for the classical city or in our scholarly disciplines.

That mainstream classicists considered what we might call the structuralist turn in classics to be strange and alienating was not only surprising, {216|217} it was diagnostic. For the self-announced task of thinkers like Loraux was to defamiliarize what classicists had long conceived—dare we say, unconsciously?—to be their task: to curate the past, to display it honorifically, worshipfully, albeit philologically. Whether culturally triumphalist or culturally defensive, the curatorial function of classical scholarship is one Loraux and her colleagues have always regarded with skepticism, as she wrote in her Introduction to The Invention of Athens: “we no longer believe naively that we are the posterity whom the orators exhorted to remember Athens.” [8]

And yet remembering Athens, and remembering antiquity more broadly, is, as Loraux suggested, the task undertaken not only by orators but also, of course, by ourselves. Focusing from the outset on the vicissitudes of scholarly remembering, Loraux launched her magisterial volume, The Invention of Athens, with a pointed “examination of three readings [of epitaphios] in which three Athenses emerge.” “French Athens,” as represented by G. Glotz, unsurprisingly emerges as a polis in which “fraternity” is a central democratic value alongside democracy and liberty; “[i]t is a short step from this,” Loraux observes, the funeral oration in mind, “to seeing the epitaphios as the ancestor of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” [9] Hegel offers us a German Athens, “a democracy reduced to its spirit and excessively concerned with a love of the beautiful: a strange example [Loraux wryly remarks] of political life in which the political life is absent.” And then there is the English Athens, in which the epitaphios is far more scrupulously read (her example is the work of Grote) but nevertheless becomes, in Loraux’s words, “a hymn to the individual, positive, action-oriented liberty, and to classical Athens—a hard-working, expanding, imperialist Athens, like the British Commonwealth.”

If the text of Athens inevitably becomes something of a culturally narcissistic reflecting pool, nevertheless Loraux does not invoke these readings simply to dismiss them. She recalls them, instead (we might say, anticipating her discussion of amnesty), in order to recall against them. These readings thus emerge as diagnostic of the predicament of reading, and more broadly of the historical project: “there is no such thing as an innocent reading,” Loraux says in her first book, and all her work attests to her commitment to rigorously knowing readings.

From her first book, The Invention of Athens, to her final work, Nicole Loraux ceaselessly, remorselessly, and imaginatively explored Greek—and more particularly Athenian—self-representations. Positing a dynamic relationship {217|218} between what she persuasively reconstructed as a model institution and genre, the funeral oration, and its various exemplary instances in epitaphioi, Loraux observed that “a certain idea that the city wishes to have of itself emerges, beyond the needs of the present: within the orthodoxy of an official speech, there is a certain gap between Athens and Athens.” [10]

There is a certain gap between Athens and Athens, between representations and the array of practices, institutions, and beliefs we call “the real”; the task of the classicist is to identify—to reconstruct, in fact—that critical, political gap. Loraux makes explicit the vocabulary of her method: “I have preferred to use the notion of the imaginary to designate the process by which, in the oration, an ideal of the polis, both opaque and dominant, is constituted.” [11] Insisting that “the imaginary/imaginaire” is a constitutive element of the real, Loraux taught us to see not only the complexity and contradictions encoded within, for example, the funeral oration, or in the representation of the mourning mother, or in Greek discourse on gender: she shows us again and again how the field of representation, particularly as it emerges in a democratic terrain, is the field of contest. If the funeral oration worked to secure for the state the glorious deaths of its warriors, the oration, a double form—both a genre and an institution, as Loraux taught us—also accomplishes other cultural work. Announcing the dead warrior’s embodiment of aretê and securing this virtue for the city, the funeral oration also enacts a conspicuous silencing: the silencing of alternate genres (lament), emotions (anger), genders (women), roles (mothers), and histories. She pointedly remarks on “the silence observed by the funeral oration on the subject of slaves.” [12] Such silences are paradigmatic, ultimately marking out the system of the city itself: “silence brings us back to a much more general omission: the oration ignores whatever does not belong to the sphere of war or politics, that is, everything related to the physical subsistence of the city.” [13]

How the city represents itself, how it constitutes itself, how it remembers and members itself: these are among Loraux’s central preoccupations. At the end of The Experiences of Tiresias, she turns from her anatomization of male appropriation of the feminine in Greek culture to the space of the city itself: {218|219} Under the sign of the tellingly ambiguous seer Tiresias, Loraux excavates what official parlance buries; she ceaselessly uncovers its constitutive denials and procedures of denial, not to restore or to replace or to solace, but rather to remember and recall, to speak—insofar as it is possible—the whole text of Athens, as it were, even those lines “official parlance” refused to sanction.

And indeed it is no accident that Loraux zeroes in on that topos in which the boundaries and affiliations (all affiliations involving a recognition of difference) within the city are most violently contended: namely, the condition of stasis, of seditious dissent, culminating in civil war. “Stasis” emerges as a keyword in Loraux’s corpus: stasis, this strife, this chaos, this rejectamenta within the political, the refusal of which guarantees the city’s apparently seamless self-representations and foundational oppositions.

Consider her meditation on civil war and the “anthropological question of the world turned upside down”: among the questions Greek discourse prompts us to ask, Loraux observes, is whether stasis should be understood—as Greek self-representations would have it—as an anomaly, a threat to civil society, as the essence in fact of the anti-civic, or whether stasis is better considered as constitutive of Greek civic life. Does stasis represent a “return to savagery,” she wonders, with Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux’s work in mind. [15] Or is stasis possible only within the heart of political life:

Does stasis refer to man as anthrôpos or man as anêr, man as anthropological being or as political being? These questions revolve around discursive axes, as Loraux makes plain. The links between stasis and cannibalism would suggest that stasis marks a return to bestial existence. Stasis thus appears as an anthropological crisis, a disordering of the separation of men from beasts. Civil war would then appear, as Loraux puts it, “entirely within the realm of Greek anthropological discourse, of which it would be merely one figure. It would then be appropriate to situate stasis within the cultural realm of civilization rather than in the political realm, where citizens are not so much ‘disciplined’ (as the humanity of the anthrôpoi is in opposition to the animal kingdom) as politicized, as virile men (andres) are supposed to be.” [17]

At the close of her essay, Loraux restates her central question: “Anthrôpoi or andres, anthrôpoi and andres: we will not attempt to choose between the two models, any more than the Greeks did.” [18] It is characteristic of Loraux not only to raise these questions but to suspend them over the course of an essay, to rephrase, refine, and rediscover them over the course of an argument, to refuse prematurely to resolve them; her interest is, indeed, not to resolve but rather to identify the constitutive “dilemmas,” to use her word, running through Greek thought. Hidden within her “or”s (e.g., anthrôpoi or andres) are always deeper recognitions of “and”s (anthrôpoi and andres), soon to be turned by “but”s or modified by “perhaps”es. Her style enacts what her methodological commitments enjoin, that is, a combination of rigorous hovering and surgical penetration. Let no one think this hovering bespeaks indecision: as numerous critics have remarked, Loraux’s style is characterized by its authoritative tone as well as a syntactic precision and complexity that have dazzled and challenged many a translator and reader. In the words of a reviewer, “To summarize [Loraux’s chapters] is to distort them, for Loraux’s every paragraph qualifies, colors, or even contradicts the previous one, and nothing is more alien to her than simplification.” [19] It is as if, through her pauses, her divagations, her sharp turns, her subjunctives, conditionals, “detours,” and negations, she were performing—not theatrically but exem- {220|221} plarily—the texture of her thought: nuanced of course, but also interested in displaying the exact force of resistance that a trope, a concept, or a discourse might present to us.

A rigorous embrace of resistance, a refusal to dodge; considering the connections between civil war and polemos and dikê, Loraux observes, “These are disturbing connections, to be sure, but we must do justice to this straddling of boundaries that the Greeks were bold enough to imagine despite their preference for clear-cut distinctions. Otherwise, we risk depoliticizing the city through a ‘mental dodge’: by manipulating the horror that rivets the texts, thought prevents itself from thinking.” [20]

Thought preventing itself from thinking: here is one pithy formulation of Loraux’s recurring topic. The reduction of stasis to savagery and cannibalism—whether by Greeks or by us—is a “mental dodge” designed to keep us from thinking of the horror within the political, the horrors humans as political beings perpetuate and yet disown, or at least distance, through a discourse of “bestiality.”

It is clear from this vantage that Loraux’s work was always concerned with the politics of memory. What shall be remembered? How? By whom? For whom? These were some of the questions implicitly posed by The Invention of Athens, focusing as it did on the destination of the oration as much as on the topics central to it. Coordinating past, present, and future generations, the oration emerges in Loraux’s account as a state genre and institution through which official memory is performed, cultivated, and transmitted. Throughout her oeuvre she returned to the problematic of memory and its institutions, perhaps most stunningly in her essay “Of Amnesty and its Opposite.”

That the Greeks were expert technicians of memory—of owning and disowning—is clear; Loraux revivified some aspects of Athenian mnemotechnics, notably in her work on mourning mothers and on the concept and practice of “amnesty.”

Consider, from the opening paragraphs of her essay, “Of Amnesty and its Opposite”:

Such a passage condenses the operations of Loraux’s style, a style always inseparable from the argument, the “steps” always sure, whether taken forward or back. Having posed her central question, “What does an amnesty want?” Loraux offers a proliferation of possible answers, or rather a series of ramifying questions, responses over which she, and we, must hover: does an amnesty want erasure? A healed scar? A planning of a time for mourning? These alternatives, yoked by their “or”s—this, or that, or that—mark the paths we might take; but as always with Loraux, our next movement is a surprising one, a “detour,” as she says, a “step back.” Observe the detours of thought, the perpetual questioning, the surgical opening of the question of amnesty, which will involve us, as Loraux indicated, in matters of erasing, mourning, and history.

Let us stay with the question of amnesty; for, in its thinking through and around amnesty, the city offers us a history and an allegory of what Loraux calls “the uses of oblivion.” In tragedy and in epic, in the funeral oration and in myth, the Greeks contemplate the pleasures and dangers of forgetting and equally those of its opposite, undying remembrance. Mourning is, as Loraux has shown us, a profound form of perpetual remembrance, vengeance another; and mourning modulates terrifyingly easily into wrath—a modulation Achilles perhaps best illuminates. Excessive mourning and excessive wrath threaten the polis, challenge cosmogonic order, and yet the polis ceaselessly meditates on such obsessive remembrance—to exorcise it? Or to remind the citizenry of another order?

Consider Loraux’s account of the negations and operations encoded in “amnesty.” The first amnesty she discusses was enjoined on tragedians after Phrynicus, in his drama about the capture of Ionian Miletus in 494, had reminded the Athenians of their own misfortunes. Herodotus tells us that the theater, viewing The Capture of Miletus, burst into tears, after which the Assembly forbade future productions of the play. [22] Loraux reads the Assembly’s decree as the paradigmatic initial check, the initial prohibition, which tragedians thereafter observed—never to represent Athenians’ own misfortunes to Athenians, never to traffic, that is, in “too current events.” [23] {222|223} And then she considers another instance in her elaboration of amnesty, that is, the ban “on recalling the misfortunes” that seals the democratic reconciliation in 403.

I will not be able to recount in full the incredibly complex and deft arguments and sub-arguments Loraux then undertakes; suffice it to say—the risk of simplification all too present!—that in the problematic of “amnesty” Loraux identifies a predicament of ongoing political relevance, perhaps the politically relevant predicament. The amnesty of 403 is, in Loraux’s words, “a double utterance [that] adjoins a prescription (ban on recalling misfortunes) to the taking of an oath (I shall not recall misfortunes).” [24] The political solution to civil war thus simultaneously inscribes a collective identity (those who have suffered misfortunes) onto each of the citizens, who assent to this inscription in the performance of the oath: I shall not recall misfortunes. What is clear is that such an amnesty is precisely not an amnesia, not a forgetting, a slipping away, a Lethean relief, a charm, a drug; the verbal structure of the amnesty reveals that amnesty must announce and enforce oblivion, that citizens as citizens must consent to bind themselves to this active forgetting, a politically constitutive forgetting. The civil war is too near for it to be forgotten; it must be promised to be forgotten, promised not to be recalled.

The negative construction underlying the amnesty—encoded linguistically in the privative ‘a-mnesty’, and in such semantically-related terms as ‘a-lastor’—reveals that amnesty is, as Loraux suggests, a promise to refuse not only to recall misfortunes but indeed to refuse to “recall [misfortunes] against” an as-yet-unspecified object. As Loraux argues, to recall misfortunes would be, in this case, to recall them against the city; to promise not to recall misfortunes is to consent to the new, fragile self-representation the city offers itself in 403. When wounds are too near, forgetting is impossible. Amnesty is one solution—not the suppressing of memory but the performance of a suppression which in itself inevitably speaks the live presence of the suppressed matter. If it is dangerous to remember, it is also impossible to forget, and thus one announces, citizen by citizen, one’s public commitment to forget. In the structure of amnesty, the Athenians illuminate for us the terror of a past not yet past enough, a past that, if acknowledged, would have to re-inaugurate the cycle of stasis and vengeance.

If we open ourselves to this terror, to a past not sufficiently interred to be decorously lamented or politely, silently forgotten, we see with Loraux how the problematic of amnesty speaks to our own use and abuse of the past. {223|224} Loraux herself reflected on Vichy France and the Dreyfus affair, both of which spectacularly raise the question of the politics of memory and the suppression of vengeance. Indeed the work of amnesty should make us ask, to paraphrase Loraux’s reading of Charles Péguy: [25] when is it politically and ethically incumbent on us to be good haters; when should citizens risk disorder in the name of truth? At what price order? At what price justice? And what are the protocols for securing our consent to pay these prices?

Again, the trajectory of Loraux’s analysis of amnesty and its opposites—amnesty always alluding to, if suppressing, its opposites—offers a decidedly non-curatorial reading of “the past.” Making us feel the edges of every question the Greeks posed and surgically opening the body of Greek thought to discover endlessly new contours and edges, Loraux offered us not images of ourselves, but problems to think with, figures to think through. {224|}