Κι αυτό που παραθέτεις πάλι στον Dover αναφέρεται για τον οποίο έγραψα παραπάνω.Φινγκόλφιν έγραψε: ↑09 Μάιος 2018, 14:00Ας είναι. Ξαναπροσπάθησα, αλλά δεν μπόρεσα να βρω το «Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens», αλλά βρήκα το «Love Among the Ruins: the Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens» της Βικτώρια Ουόλ (Victoria Wohl) το οποίο είναι περισσότερο πολιτικό. Δεν μπορώ να το παραθέσω ολόκληρο, αλλά βάζω ένα απόσπασμα από το πρώτο κεφάλαιο και τις αναφορές του στην παιδεραστία και στις ομοφυλόφιλες πρακτικές.SpoilerShowIDEOLOGICAL DESIRE
THE EROTICS OF DEMOCRACY
Lover of the city, lover of the people: the metaphor of eros is remarkably common in the political discussions of classical Athens. Pericles urges the people to fall in love with Athens and its power, to become its “lovers.” His successor Cleon reconfigures this love as a more intimate bond: he claims to be the people’s “lover” and woos them with political gifts. Alcibiades loves the people and they love him back, even as they sentence him to death. Eros suffuses the political relationship between the demos and its leaders. International relations are also a love affair: Aristophanes tells of a Thracian king so enamored of the city that he went around writing “Athens is beautiful” on the walls, just as one would of a pretty young boy. And Athens is not only love object but also lover: Thucydides speaks of its pursuit of imperial power as a diseased passion and shows imperial politics, like democratic politics, driven by lust.
But what does it mean to be a lover of the people, or a lover of the city, or a lover of empire? Was this just a “dead metaphor,” as we might say today “I love my country” and mean no more by it than an ill-defined sense of attachment? For Aristophanes and Thucydides, at any rate, the metaphor is clearly “alive”: Aristophanes literalizes it to comic effect, imagining Cleon not just as a lover but as a prostitute to the people; Thucydides develops a complex imperial psychology around the notion of eros. If we can assume that the idiom was not meaningless, what did it mean? What was the erotics of Athenian democracy? What desire underpinned patriotism and bound the demos to its politicians and the polis? Conversely, what was the politics of eros in Athens? What political relations were implied by the citizen’s sexual relations and what political fantasies were played out in his sexual fantasies? What desires propelled the thrust of Athenian ideology?
Politics and sexuality were mutually defining in democratic Athens. Because only men were citizens, citizenship was a sexual as well as a political category. To be an Athenian always also entailed to “be a man,” with all the injunctions and prohibitions that implied. Likewise, if sexual relations in Athens were organized by issues of mastery and self-mastery (as many have argued), then every sex act was implicitly a political act: some sexual practices were appropriate for citizens and some were not. Moreover, eros bound individuals together into a political community: eliciting love was a primary goal of anyone who would influence democratic politics. To the extent that democracy is the collective decisions of the citizen body, and those decisions are driven by desires—whether rational or irrational—then democratic politics can be described as the movement of desire. But more than binding citizens to one another and to their leaders and city, desire constituted the citizen as such. It was through a passionate attachment to certain ideals that the citizen was forged: the Athenian citizen subject is coterminous with his political eros. Finally, desire was a suture between the fantasy life of the individual and the political structures of the polis, and this suture—an erotic cathexis with political implications—formed the basis of Athenian ideology.
The erotics of democracy is not merely a figure of speech then, but a dense point of convergence within Athenian social relations and subjectivity; it is what Jacques Lacan calls a “quilting point,” a node that binds together the diverse and often contradictory layers of ideology. The language of political eros may be metaphorical, but the metaphor was more than a rhetorical trope to be manipulated by orators to their own ends. Although much name-calling and political jockeying went on, this is not a study of what sort of things one could accuse one’s enemies of doing, being, or enjoying.¹ Far less is it a study of practice, an effort to recreate the sort of things Athenians actually did, were, and enjoyed. Instead, this study attempts to illuminate the erotic imaginary that underlay—supported and subverted —the Athenian political imaginary.
This attempt requires, on the one hand, taking eros seriously as a complex system in its own right: it is not a simple analogy employed to explain the more important and difficult realm of politics.² The Athenians had a philosophy of eros as sophisticated as their political philosophy, and as they theorized it, eros’s domain was broad, encompassing not just “love” (romantic or otherwise) but also sex and sexuality, gender, desire, and pleasure.³ Thus, although I draw on Foucault, I resist his impulse to reduce sexual relations to a special instance of power relations: power, as we will see, arouses eros but does not fully circumscribe it. On the other hand, this project involves accepting that the political, too, has an unconscious, that day-to-day political relations are only the most overt form of politics, which in its wider sense also includes citizen subjectivity and the citizen psyche. Today we are accustomed to think of sexual desire as the essential stuff of the human soul, and politics as epiphenomenal. For the Athenians perhaps the reverse is true, and man is first and foremost a political animal. But more important, I think, for the Athenians, the two are inseparable: love arises from power relations and implicates lovers in power relations. Politics is a form of ideological desire, a desire both governed by and directed toward ideology. Eros permeates the public life of the city and stokes the intimate political fantasies of the citizen.
At first blush, the political passions of the democratic citizen may seem relatively straightforward: he loved equality and freedom; he hated tyranny and enslavement. Our ancient sources proclaim such sentiments, and we tend to take them at their word: why would they lie? Such a naive view, pleasing though it may be, becomes untenable once we begin to take the erotic metaphor seriously. Although eros and politics do often run in tandem, sometimes they move in opposite directions, contesting rather than corroborating one another: one loves in ways citizens should not; one secretly desires what one professes to hate; one loves and hates at the same time. Eros is notoriously wayward, if not downright perverse, and it leads us into strange territory. Pursuing the metaphor of eros, we find political fantasies that contradict or complicate the simple declarations of love of the good Athenian citizen.Within such fantasies, the despised and repudiated (tyrants, effeminates, whores) become objects of desire. Illicit modes of being (excess, passivity, slavishness) become indistinguishable from legitimate masculinity. The normative and the perverse are intricately enmeshed, bound by confused and inadmissible desires. It is not a question, then, of bad faith—of “lying”—on the part of the ancient text or the modern exegesis. Instead it is a question of reading for a different sort of truth than those neat declaratives, the ambiguous truth of longings the Athenians would not or could not speak aloud, of desires that, as Freud says of the unconscious, they know but do not know they know.
“JUST LOVE”: THE ORIGIN OF DEMOCRATIC EROS
We begin with a foundation myth.⁴ In 510 B.C.E., Athens was ruled by tyrants, the sons of Pisistratus, Hippias and Hipparchus. Hipparchus tried to seduce a young nobleman named Harmodius and, when his advances were rebuffed, insulted him by banning his sister from marching in the Panathenaic procession. Angered by the insult, Harmodius and his lover Aristogiton assassinated the tyrant, an act hailed in the fifth century as the death of tyranny and the birth of democracy.
This tyrannicide not only inaugurated the democracy but also enshrined within democratic discourse a specific mode of male sexuality. Harmodius and Aristogiton were lovers as well as tyrant-slayers, and so from this founding moment the political and the erotic are inseparably entwined. Democratic freedom is sexual freedom, freedom from the sexual, as well as the political, domination of tyrants. The Athenian citizen is characterized by both his political and his erotic autonomy—he lives and loves as he wishes—and by his willingness to risk his life to preserve that autonomy. Democracy and democratic eros are coterminous.
The Harmodius and Aristogiton story gives us a familiar version—one might even say the “authorized version”—of love between well-born Athenian men and inserts that love into the very foundation myth of the democracy. Aristogiton is the adult lover of the noble young Harmodius. Τheir relationship is sexual and pederastic; the tyrannicides are never coevals, never “just friends.” Although homosexual relations between an older man and a younger man had a long tradition in Greece, this myth makes such relations a defining feature of the Athenian character, as Athenian as hating a tyrant.
K. J. Dover in his classic 1978 study, Greek Homosexuality, traced the basic lineaments of this eros: an older gentleman (the or lover) pursues a young boy (the beloved); the boy submits with a show of reluctance to the attentions of his lover and, in return, receives an education in civics, learning all the things a well-bred Athenian man needs to know. This sort of homosexual relationship was seen as beneficial—even essential—to the polis, constituting a form of social education and guaranteeing cultural continuity. “Just Argument” in Aristophanes’ Clouds (961–83) gets rather overheated as he describes the decorous and delightful young boys whose seduction made Athens great. Phaedrus also waxes lyrical on this theme in Plato’s Symposium when he pictures an army of lovers and beloveds, a productive, happy polity composed entirely of erastai anderomenoi (178e3–179b3). Harmodius and Aristogiton are the prototype for this socially productive erotics: Aeschines offers them as an example of eros, “just love” (1.136), and as proof of the boons such love brings the city (1.132–40).
The democratic city in particular reaps the rewards of this eros: the tyrannicidal lovers were honored in cult in the fifth century as the liberators—practically the founders—of the democracy.⁵ Fifth-century drinking songs toasted them for killing the tyrants and making Athens isonomos, egalitarian. Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium even goes so far as to suggest that the pederastic relationship is in essence democratic, which explains why it was not practiced in monarchical Persia: “And our own tyrants here in Athens also learned this by experience,” he says. “It was the love of Aristogiton and the loyal fondness of Harmodius that ended their rule” (182c4–7). The statues of the tyrannicides that stood in the Agora allude to this foundational democratic eros: a young (beardless) Harmodius and older (bearded) Aristogiton stand, weapons in hand, ready to strike down the tyrant; beneath them were probably inscribed the telling words: πατρίδα γεν εθέτεν “they established the fatherland.”⁶ These statues, as Andrew Stewart says, “not only placed the homoerotic bond at the core of Athenian political freedom, but asserted that it and the manly virtues (aretai) of courage, boldness, and self-sacrifice that it generated were the only guarantors of that freedom’s continued existence.”⁷
Now, it has been argued that the pederastic homosexuality enshrined in this myth was in practice largely an elite affair, and the extent to which it describes the sex life of “the average Athenian” is the subject of much debate.⁸ Indeed, the literary sources for this eros are mostly elite and situate it within a leisured lifestyle of athletics schools (palaistrai) and drinking parties (symposia). It seems to have been one component of the Athenian caricature of a comically outdated and implicitly antidemocratic elitism, if we are to judge by Aristophanes’ boy-crazed “Just Argument” or the crusty old general in Aeschines’ speech Against Timarchus.⁹ But, in fact, this latter text shows just how important this brand of eros was to the demos, as well as to the elite: whereas his opponent, the general, lauds Harmodius and Aristogiton’s as a specifically elite sort of love, Aeschines—in a move that he hopes will appeal to his democratic jury—offers the tyrannicides as the paradigm for a democratic eros that is prudent and just (sophron and dikaios, 136–40). Even the blue-blood general extends this eros to the demos when he assumes that the jurors would want the benefits of a pederastic relationship for their own sons (133–34).¹⁰ Similarly, the tyrannicide skolia, drinking songs that were staples of the upper-class symposium, are sung by the distinctly nonaristocratic old men in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata as they try to save the city from the “tyranny” of the women (631–35).
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In this way the tyrannicide narrative, a story about an elite love affair, provides a model for a particularly democratic mode of sexuality: every Athenian was an Aristogiton. The norm of adult male sexuality in Athens (as several recent studies have shown) was active, aggressive, dominant, and phallic; passivity was associated with foreigners, women, slaves, and children—noncitizens.¹⁶ Homosexual relations between two adult men were treated with derision and disgust, as they required one man to play the passive role, and an Athenian citizen who submitted willingly to penetration risked charges of prostitution and the loss of citizen privileges.¹⁷ The pederastic relation, with its distinction between active erastes and passive eromenos, fits logically into this correlation between sexual dominance and democratic citizenship. Pederasty, then, no matter what the social status of its actual practitioners, becomes a neat metaphor for democratic sexuality. Through this homosexual relationship, the whole Athenian demos can be imagined as a polity of erastai: elite, active, and sexually potent, penetrating as they desire a variety of socially inferior eromenoi—boys, women, slaves. The eros of Harmodius and Aristogiton thus not only founds the democracy but also constitutes the democratic citizen as a dominant and active lover, an Aristogiton.
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