James I. Porter

Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology

Reading Erich Auerbach’s lead essay in Mimesis, one might well be struck by the willful perversity of that piece. Its comparison between Greek culture (focused by Homer) and the Bible (focused by the Old Testament) seems rather pointed and polemical, though the reasons for this boldness are anything but self-evident. Look closer and you will notice that the Jews in that chapter are a little too Jewish, while the Greeks are a little too, well, . . . German. How could this be anything but a provocation? Inquire further into the immediate historical and political background of “Odysseus’ Scar,” and it will quickly emerge that Auerbach’s apparent perversity has a good claim to being real, as does his seeming urge to provocation, though oddly neither the Jewishness of the Old Testament as he presents it there nor the politics of his position have attracted anything near the attention they deserve. A comparable provocativeness can, moreover, be detected in Auerbach’s other works from before and after the publication of Mimesis (1946), notably in his vision of time and history, in his view of the Judeo-

Why Nietzsche still? : reflections on drama, culture, and politics

Contributors: David B. Allison Debra B. Bergoffen Wendy Brown Judith Butler Daniel W. Conway John Burt Foster Jr. Duncan Large Alphonso Lingis Jeffrey T. Nealon David Owen Paul Patton Aaron Ridley Alan D. Schrift Gary Shapiro Rebecca Stringer Dana R. Villa

The Materiality of Classical Studies

Three years ago, on February 17, 2000, the New York Times ran an article announcing the discovery of the skeletal remains of Greek soldiers, a funerary monument consisting in communal tombs which it is now suspected (and the suspicion seems valid enough) could be the site of Pericles’s famous Epitaphios, or Funeral Oration from 431, which was immortalized by Thucydides. The find is of interest, not because it establishes the authority of Thucydides as a recorder of history, but quite simply just because it is – or as of three years ago, was – of interest. That it is (or was) says something about the relevance of Classics to our (English-speaking) world and the values this world projects. Still, the event warrants closer inspection.

Disfigurations: Erich Auerbach’s Theory of Figura

Erich Auerbach is a critic of many legacies. The most frequently read of his essays outside of those that together make up Mimesis is without a doubt his landmark study “Figura.” “Figura” was published in 1938, two years into Auerbach’s forced exile in Istanbul after he was dismissed from the University ofMarburg under the Nazi racial laws prohibiting Jews from occupying government-sponsored posts. Formally speaking, the essay is a model of German philology from the time. Running some fifty pages in its

Homer, Skepticism, and the History of Philology

Both archaeological ‘documentation’ and Homeric scholarship were satirized in Samuel Butler’s Authoress of the Odyssey, the work of a writer who devoted his life to subverting the revered institutions and mocking the sacred cows of late Victorian Britain. Butler suggests his own recipe for enlivening modernization—surely a mischievous young female author is preferable to an aged bard?—but quickly turns to making ‘presence’ ridiculous in his photographs of “Cyclopean” walls, and a “Cave of Polyphemus” that looks like any other cave.

Sublime monuments and sublime ruins in ancient aesthetics

The Greeks and Romans produced monuments – monumental buildings, temples, tombs, inscription-bearing slabs and other structures – as a way of projecting themselves into their own present and into the future of others. Monuments are reminders, in enduring material, of the achievement of a collective, even when they appear to commemorate an individual. They are collective expressions with ideological force. This paper explores the interaction between materiality, language and architecture in a Greek tradition of the sublime that exalts monuments and their ruins. The paper begins by proposing an aesthetics of early sepulchral inscriptions; it then looks at selected Hellenistic epigrams. It culminates in Hellenistic poetics, Vitruvian architecture and the Longinian sublime, which looks directly back to earlier developments in the same tradition of verbal architecture. The sublime is generated at the nether ends of the spectrum that monuments can occupy – at their moment of greatest possible expansion (at the limits of the cosmos) and at the moment of their imminent collapse. From Homer to the postclassical eras, the traditions of sublime monuments and their ruins are ways of confronting and expressing the fragilities of time, matter and existence under changing cultural circumstances in a cumulative and self-reflexive fashion.

Plato and the Platonic Tradition: The Image Beyond the Image

Plato’s thought, from his metaphysics to his poetics, is unthinkable apart from his theory of the image. Images occupy the center of Plato’s universe for the same reason that imitation does: Platonic metaphysics rests on the assumption of an image that is copied in successive stages, each suffering a derogation from the original Form or idea (shape, image). The phenomenal world is a (bad) copy of an original image. Art and poetry are necessarily caught up in the same metaphysical process of imitation (mimēsis) and copy, producing images that lie at an even farther remove from the original Forms. There would seem to be no escaping the image in a Platonic world.1 Or is there? The idea of a Form is paradoxical in any number of ways, but the most salient and relevant of these is the question why Forms are called Forms at all. If they are shapes or images, what do they look like? But even to put the question in this way is to open up a Pandora’s box of problems. Surely Forms cannot “look like” something else in the sense of resembling a more perfect image, else we would encounter a vicious regress, with each step leading to another image that prompts the same question: What does it look

Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique

Whenever a reader of Nietzsche confronts the problem of genealogy, it is tempting for her to assume that she is in familiar country. As we read in the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic from 1887, the aim of genealogy is to mount ‘a critique of moral values and the value of those values’ by reconstructing ‘an actual history of morality’, the sources for which are to be found in ‘what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind’.1 Genealogy tracks large expanses of time, millennia that one can actually count. Here we finally come to grips with agents who are driven by urges that at least approximate to passions and instincts, as opposed to those ghostly agencies of the will to power straining to exert themselves against the background of some metaphysical and barely imaginable flux.2 However unsettling it may prove as a cultural diagnosis, genealogy at least provides the solace of a story with a familiar plot, one easily and intuitively followed: it is the well-worn tale of human decline and hoped-for redemption. Indeed, here the familiar becomes almost banal, a repetition of itself, or as Nietzsche would say, ‘grey’. At the extreme, genealogy is Nietzsche’s least original theory, in ways not much different from Homeric and Hesiodic mythology, the Judaeo-Christian story of the fall, or Marxian anthropology.

Is the Sublime an Aesthetic Value

This chapter provokes a few different questions, not just about the immeasurability of the sublime and how immeasurability could possibly serve as a value of anything. Additionally, it examines whether the sublime is a literary value, an aesthetic value, or neither of these in a strict sense. This last possibility is best viewed by considering the historical emergence of the sublime in antiquity prior to Longinus. The chapter concludes that the sublime, strictly speaking, is not an aesthetic value but a measure of thought pressed to its utmost limits, while thought in its various hues enjoys different aesthetic values. Historically, the sublime emerged in an effort to conceive entities that lay at the limits of thought. That is the reason why matter and the immaterial are congenitally linked in the disparate traditions of the ancient sublime— which Longinus culminates but in no way originates. Keywords:aesthetic value; Longinus; sublime

NIETZSCHE, DIE GRIECHEN UND DIE PHILOLOGIE

1. Enrico Müller, Die Griechen im Denken Nietzsches (Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung, Bd. 50), Berlin / New York (Walter de Gruyter) 2005, 292 S., ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018348-1 / ISBN-10: 3-11-018348-X. 2. Christian Benne, Nietzsche und die historisch-kritische Philologie (Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung, Bd. 49), Berlin / New York (Walter de Gruyter) 2005, 428 S., ISBN 3-11-018442-7. 3. Dale Wilkerson, Nietzsche and the Greeks, London / New York (Continuum International Publishing) 2006, 162 S., ISBN 0-8264-8903-6. 4. Riccardo Dri, Nietzsche legge Platone: Platone e Nietzsche: due uomini, due artisti, Torino (Seneca) 2009, 223 S., ISBN 9788861221284.