Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy by Alex Dressler (review)

Abstract

This book is a bit of a wild ride, which makes it enjoyable and intellectually stimulating, in the eyes of this reviewer at least. But there may well be too much going on, with the impressive range of intellectual resources from which Alex Dressler draws. Many of his footnotes could be turned into graduate seminars. The core idea, as the author himself summarizes it (253), is as follows: “it was the aesthetic artifact of the feminine, in the form of the personifications of grammatically feminine abstractions, that the Roman philosopher persistently included in his attempt to understand who and what he was, and it was this that escaped his effort and his unflagging interest in discriminating male and female.” This aesthetic dimension, Dressler argues, opens up the possibility of a “reparative” reading not only of ancient accounts, but also of our own current condition, and therefore of hope, feminist and other. Dressler’s primary method is that of post-modern deconstruction, according to which any attempt at creating binaries is inherently unstable and ends up undermining itself. In his analysis of Roman philosophy he also brings to bear ancient theories of rhetoric and grammar, as well as literary theory, and other strands in the ancient tradition. His use of “ownness,” for instance, allows him to group together philosophical notions such as the Stoic “appropriation” (oikeiôsis) and any number of literary and rhetorical devices that express subjectivity and personhood, and that are sometimes overlooked in current treatments of Roman philosophy. But here, instead of questioning the very binary construct of philosophy versus literature (or rhetoric) itself, the author adopts too much of an apologetic tone, and spends too much effort on a discourse of self-justification arguing against the current dominant mode of philosophy in Anglo-American circles. The distinction between philosophy and literature is an anachronism. If instead we define “philosophy” in terms the ancients themselves used, a much richer picture emerges, and the division between argument and metaphor is no longer tenable. The crucial question becomes not what metaphors do in the midst of a philosophical exposition, but what philosophical contribution is made by them qua metaphors. But perhaps the author needs metaphors to remain on the other side of philosophical discourse to allow for what he has called the “aesthetic feminine” to exert its (salutary) disruptive influence. In accounts of Roman philosophers such as Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca, Dressler sees a subversive feminine at work—of traits usually attributed to women such as passivity, dependence, and embodiment—that undermines the attempts at construing masculinity and relegating women to the status of the excluded and socially inferior (the “subaltern”). This subversion can take place at different levels and through a range of processes.