Antiquities Beyond Humanism

Greco-Roman antiquity is often presumed to provide the very paradigm of humanism from the Renaissance to the present. This paradigm has been increasingly challenged by new theoretical currents such as posthumanism and the "new materialisms", which point toward entities, forces, and systems that pass through and beyond the human and dislodge it from its primacy as the measure of things. Antiquities beyond Humanism seeks to explode the presumed dichotomy between the ancient tradition and the twenty-first century "turn" by exploring the myriad ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human. Greek philosophy in particular is filled with metaphysical explanations of the cosmos grounded in observations of the natural world, while other areas of ancient humanistic inquiry - poetry, political theory, medicine - extend into the realms of plant, animal, and even stone life, continually throwing into question the ontological status of living and non-living beings. By casting the ancient non-human or more-than-human in a new light in relation to contemporary questions of gender, ecological networks and non-human communities, voice, eros, and the ethics and the politics of posthumanism, the volume demonstrates that encounters with ancient texts, experienced as both familiar and strange, can help forge new understandings of life, whether understood as physical, psychical, divine, or cosmic.

1 - Introduction
2 - The Human Reconceived: Back to Socrates with Arendt
3 - Hearing Voices: The Sounds in Socrates's Head
4 - Song and Dance Man: Plato and the Limits of the Human
5 - Precarious Life: Tragedy and the Posthuman
6 - Aristotle's Meta-zoology: Shared Life and Human Animality in the Politics
7 - Sounds of Subjectivity or Resonances of Something Other
8 - Shared Life as Chorality in Schiller, Hölderlin, and Hellenistic Poetry
9 - Apples and Poplars, Nuts and Bulls: The Poetic Biosphere of Ovid's Metamorphoses
10 - Hyperobjects, OOO, and the Eruptive Classics - Field Notes of an Accidental Tourist
11 - Nature Trouble: Ancient Phusis and Queer Performativity
12 - On Stoic Sympathy: Cosmobiology and the Life of Nature
13 - Immanent Maternal: Figures of Time in Aristotle, Bergson, and Irigaray
14 - In Light of Eros

Emanuela Bianchi is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She works at the intersection of ancient Greek philosophy and literature, French and German nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, and feminist and queer theory. She is the author of The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (Fordham University Press, 2014), and has published numerous articles in journals including Hypatia , The Yearbook of Comparative Literature , Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal , Philosophy Today , Epochê , and Angelaki . Sara Brill is Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University. She works on the psychology, politics, and zoology of Plato and Aristotle, as well as contemporary feminist and political theory. She is the author of Plato on the Limits of Human Life (Indiana University Press, 2013) and has published numerous articles on Plato, Aristotle, Greek tragedy, and the Hippocratic corpus. Brooke Holmes is Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics at Princeton University. Her research centres on ancient medicine and life science, Greek literature (especially Homer and tragedy), ancient philosophy, reception studies, literary theory, and continental philosophy. She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press, 2010) and Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy (I. B. Tauris and OUP, 2012) and has co-edited four books, including the experimental publication Liquid Antiquity (DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2017), which was accompanied by an exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens.