The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens

by Corinne Pache (Translator), Jeff Fort (Translator)

Athens, 403 B.C.E. The bloody oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty is over, and the democrats have returned to the city victorious. Renouncing vengeance, in an act of willful amnesia, citizens call for -- -if not invent -- -amnesty. They agree to forget the unforgettable, the -past misfortunes, - of civil strife or stasis. More precisely, what they agree to deny is that stasis -- -simultaneously partisanship, faction, and sedition -- -is at the heart of their politics.Continuing a criticism of Athenian ideology begun in her pathbreaking study The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux argues that this crucial moment of Athenian political history must be interpreted as constitutive of politics and political life and not as a threat to it. Divided from within, the city is formed by that which it refuses. Conflict, the calamity of civil war, is the other, dark side of the beautiful unitary city of Athens. In a brilliant analysis of the Greek word for voting, diaphora, Loraux underscores the conflictual and dynamic motion of democratic life. Voting appears as the process of dividing up, of disagreement -- -in short, of agreeing to divide and choose. Not only does Loraux reconceptualize the definition of ancient Greek democracy, she also allows the contemporary reader to rethink the functioning of modern democracy in its critical moments of internal stasis.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Greece

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up based almost wholly on the fact that it's one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen. The red of the jacket almost glows, the dust-flaps are intriguingly extra-long, set off from the book proper by endpapers of austere ashy-gray; the text itself boasts margins just on the proper side of being too ample, printed on thick, handsome paper. I am shallow, and could not resist the wiles on offer; even if this didn't turn out to be the kind of book one brings home to mother, I couldn't resist the idea of possessing it, and, more, being seen to possess it.

So, that's part one of the review: if you suffer from a lustful bibliophilia-of-the-flesh, run don't walk to your nearest academic bookshop, etc.

Part two, engaging with the actual content, is sadly a bit more equivocal. You see, this is a series of papers/lectures by a French scholar of ancient Athens (in translation, of course) who takes poststructuralism or postmodernism or Theory or whatever it is we're calling it this week as her point of departure and her literary model. The core scenario she's investigating -- how Athens reconstituted itself after the civil strife that ousted the Thirty Tyrants imposed by Sparta at the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War by having recourse to formal renunciation of memory and practical amnesty -- is an interesting one. Loraux has some interesting sources to bring to bear on the problem, from recently-discovered memorial inscriptions in cities facing similar problems of reconstitution, to how Athenian dramatists treated the supernatural representations of memory and vengeance.

But the problem is, the prose is written -- or rather, overwritten -- in an overbearing, Derridean language that's a headache to read. Abstractions predominate, of subjects and texts, the double and the singular; Lordy, is there a lot of effacing. More, in any given essay, around half the wordcount is devoted to alternately bemoaning the impossibility of methodological purity and chest-puffing about the bravery of the antihegemonic analysis being attempted. The fact that the book also larded up with completely unnecessary discursions upon the entirely inappropriate fetish-objects of Theory -- good Christ, why bring Freud into this? -- doesn't exactly help matters.

With that said, the core analysis is interesting, when it can be glimpsed under the verbiage. And there are occasional intimations that Loraux's interest in the question of reconstituting society after devastating war was at least somewhat engendered by more contemporary European events, and where she tentatively expands on these parallels, it's easy to see the importance of this kind of work. But there's an awful lot of wading-through to get to that point.

So: got the looks, got the brains, but still not a keeper. Nice fling while it lasted, though.

[I-kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Argues that the Greek understanding of "the political" involves the paradoxical collective operation of remembering what the city swears to forget. More simply: disagreement is more foundational than harmony in political society. A bit underwhelmed.

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapter Ten "The judgment decides, but in a certain way also gives the fight its completed form by consecrating the result of the agon, to which 'the city remains in a sense foreign.'"