“Finally, a book on Freud and classics that casts the death drive instead of Oedipus in the starring role. Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle is truly standard setting. Brilliant, moving, and insightful.” —Shane Butler, author of The Passions of John Addington Symonds
“Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle questions classics as a discipline wedded to fantasies of origins and reconstructions of pristine urtexts. Contributors unmask the reactionary ideologies that underlie these tropes, making urgent contributions to our despondent and death-driven times.” —Zina Giannopoulou, University of California, Irvine
Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle explores the concept of the Freudian death drive to interrogate both the ancient past and the present, highlighting how destruction and its remnants resist erasure and shape historical memory. Using Gaza’s rubble as a metaphor for the indestructibility of violence’s material traces, the text connects ancient Greco-Roman culture—from Homer and Sophocles to Ovid and Seneca—with modern figures and events, from Elena Ferrante to the war in Israel and Palestine. The volume engages psychoanalytic theory, queer theory, and feminism to challenge the boundaries of classical studies, arguing that only by confronting the discipline’s entanglement with the pleasure principle and its repressions can classics contribute to understanding the crises of the present and imagining a future distinct from the past.
Contributors:
Karen Bassi, Martin Devecka, Micaela Janan, Hagi Kenaan, Vered Lev Kenaan, Sara Lindheim, Paul Allen Miller, Helen Morales, Jay Oliver, Victoria Rimell, Mario Telò
Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina and Distinguished Guest Professor of English at Ewha Womans University. He is the author of many books, including most recently Truth and Enjoyment in Cicero: Rhetoric and Philosophy Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Mario Telò is Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published several monographs, including Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction “Open Wide”: Receiving the Death Drive
Paul Allen Miller and Mario Telò
Chapter 1 Thoughts on War and Death: Exercises in Survival and Ethics with Freud and Homer
Vered Lev Kenaan and Hagi Kenaan
Chapter 2 History, Aitiology, and the Death Drive
Karen Bassi
Chapter 3 Infinity, Death, and Enjoyment: Purity at the Limit
Paul Allen Miller
Chapter 4 Boar Life: The Culinary Death Drive in Roman Culture
Martin Devecka
Chapter 5 The End of the Line(s)
Micaela Janan
Chapter 6 Metamorphoses Book 9 and the Possibility of Opting Out
Sara Lindheim
Chapter 7 Sadomasochism, Mythomania, and the Death Drive in Petronius’s Circe Episode
Jay Oliver
Chapter 8 Seneca’s Lifedeath
Victoria Rimell
Chapter 9 Leda’s Frantumaglia: Elena Ferrante and the Maternal Death Drive
Mario Telò and Helen Morales
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
List of Contributors
Index
