Overview

Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle explores the concept of the Freudian death drive to interrogate both the ancient past and the present, highlighting how destruction and its remnants resist erasure and shape historical memory. Using Gaza's rubble as a metaphor for the indestructibility of violence's material traces, the text connects ancient Greco-Roman culture--from Homer and Sophocles to Ovid and Seneca--with modern figures and events, from Elena Ferrante to the war in Israel and Palestine. The volume engages psychoanalytic theory, queer theory, and feminism to challenge the boundaries of classical studies, arguing that only by confronting the discipline's entanglement with the pleasure principle and its repressions can classics contribute to understanding the crises of the present and imagining a future distinct from the past. Contributors: Karen Bassi, Martin Devecka, Micaela Janan, Hagi Kenaan, Vered Lev Kenaan, Sara Lindheim, Paul Allen Miller, Helen Morales, Jay Oliver, Victoria Rimell, Mario Telò

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9780814216156

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Reviews

""Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle questions classics as a discipline wedded to fantasies of origins and reconstructions of pristine urtexts. Contributors unmask the reactionary ideologies that underlie these tropes, making urgent contributions to our despondent and death-driven times."" --Zina Giannopoulou, University of California, Irvine ""Finally, a book on Freud and classics that casts the death drive instead of Oedipus in the starring role. Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle is truly standard setting. Brilliant, moving, and insightful."" --Shane Butler, author of The Passions of John Addington Symonds

Author Information

Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina and Distinguished Guest Professor of English at Ewha Womans University. He is the author of many books, including most recently Truth and Enjoyment in Cicero: Rhetoric and Philosophy Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Mario Telò is Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published several monographs, including Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy.

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