The title of the book under review refers to an essay by the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943), published in the Cahiers du Sud in December 1940 and January 1941, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”. Although the magazine was published in Marseille, in what was then the “free zone” in France, not yet occupied by the Germans, publications were subject to the censorship of the anti-Semitic Vichy regime and Weil signed her article with the pseudonym Émile Novis. It was published again in the Cahiers du Sud in 1947 under her real name, but as early as 1945 a translation of it had been published by Mary McCarthy in the New York journal Politics, before appearing again as a pamphlet in 1956 (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill). Today the standard English edition is by James P. Holoka (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).
Weil’s paper begins with a twofold thesis: First, “the true hero, the true subject-matter, the center of the Iliad is force.” Second, force is “at the center of all human history, today and in the past”, and the Iliad is “the most beautiful and flawless of [its] mirrors.” In short, the exploits of mythical heroes in an immemorial war are not the core subject of the Iliad, but only the shell. What is to be discovered inside this shell is a lesson about how force governs the fate of humans, individuals as well as societies, a lesson that is valid throughout human history. In the world at war where this thesis was advanced, it was bound to win support.
Eighty years later, C.H. Stocking’s question is what “force” does mean in the Iliad. For Weil, force, “that which makes the human being a thing”, is uniform in character, a universal and transhistorical process. Philologists and social scientists, Stocking observes in his Introduction, take a different view. As early as 1946, in Die Entdeckung des Geistes, Bruno Snell drew attention to the fact that Homeric poetry uses eight different words to designate force: menos, sthenos, biē, kikus, is, kratos, alkē, dynamis; the group, apart from menos, was also retained by Émile Benveniste in his 1969 Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. For Snell, the multiplicity of terms for force suggests a deficiency of awareness of the self in the Homeric man. For Benveniste, on the contrary, it reveals the specificity of the Homeric subject.
According to Stocking, the word that best fits the Weilian definition of force cited above is one that does not appear in Snell/Benveniste’s list, namely the verb damazō, “subjugate”. Indeed, in the passages from the Iliad cited by Weil in her article, the verb damazō appears only once, but in a decisive instance: the bard’s evocation of the moment when ‘gray-eyed Athena beat (damase) <Hector> down [that is, killed him] through Achilles’ arm’ (22.446). In Weil’s translation of this line, the agency is reversed: it is not Athena who subjugates Hector but Achilles, “because of Athena”. At first glance, this confirms Stocking’s thesis that Simone Weil failed to see that in the Iliad men are not the masters but the instruments of a force that is in divine hands. To Weil, he writes, the enactment of force generates the subject-object status of humans, depending on whether one wins or is beaten, whether one has, dead or alive, his self acknowledged or denied. According to Stocking, Weil and Snell share the same psychological conception of the self as an autonomous subject, unlike Benveniste, whose approach is more sociological and who is more interested in the social construction of the self as revealed by the language.
The book’s purpose is to update, so to speak, Weil’s analysis in light of the deconstruction of the subject, one of the long-term effects of structuralism in French thought in the second half of the twentieth century. To this end, the author takes into consideration three of the thinkers who marked this period, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. The reason for the choice is that each of them, on at least one occasion, used a passage from the Iliad to illustrate his own deconstructive vision of the subject: Bourdieu, the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in Il. Book I (Ce que parler veut dire, 1982, Engl. transl. Language and Symbolic Power, 1991); Derrida, Odysseus’ speech in Book II on the need for the Greeks to have only one leader (Voyous, 2003, Engl. transl. Rogues, 2005); Foucault, the chariot race in honor of Patroclus in Book XXIII (Mal faire, dire vrai, course delivered in 1981, published in 2012, Engl. transl. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, 2014). After the Introduction, which gives a broad outline of the problem summarized above, the book is comprised of four chapters, each devoted to one of the four authors taken into consideration: the first to Bourdieu, the second to Derrida, the third to Foucault, and the last to Weil.
It could be argued that in none of the passages considered by the first three a man has died. As Simone Weil explains, killing is not the only way in which force “makes a man a thing.” The force referred to in these chapters is that exerted or manifested in discourse. Taking up the well-known analyses of J.-L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words), chapter 1 shows that in the Iliad the assertion by a speaker (whether human or divine) of his own strength is a performative strategy. As can be seen in the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon, this strategy – here Bourdieu comes in – is not necessarily successful. While the two sides try to play the same card, Agamemnon’s statements reflect the institutional position that he took before the debate began: his status as a king, symbolized by the scepter he holds. But Stocking doesn’t stop there: in turn putting in context Bourdieu’s thesis, he shows that the progression of the Homeric narrative reveals the contingency and instability of power relations, among belligerents as well as on Olympus, where Zeus himself sees the affirmation of his supremacy as continually subject to the approval of other divine figures.
The following two chapters, built on the same diagram, develop, and refine this thesis. Chapter 2 takes as its starting point Derrida’s use of Odysseus’ “rule of the stronger” speech to analyze the relationship between force and politics. In this episode, Odysseus is representative of what the French philosopher called “ipsocentrism,” a self-referential assignment of political power to force that is ideologically justified by the myth of Zeus grabbing power via a coup. Derrida points out that the link between political power and force in the Iliad is intrinsically linked to relations between mortals and immortals. However, Stocking argues, if, instead of stopping at the sole speech of Odysseus in Book II, we broaden the focus to the whole of the Homeric poem and even beyond, to the Theogony of Hesiod, it appears that the political theology which serves as a backdrop for them, far from being reduced to the ipsocentrism diagnosed by Derrida in Odysseus’ speech, consists rather in the continual différance of the Olympian power, over and over again deferred from Zeus to its peers and vice versa. Power thus emerges as a force that belongs no more to its contingent holder than to the one he subjugates.
The demonstration continues in Chapter 3, this time based on a comment by Foucault that Menelaus, although he was defeated by Antilochus in the chariot race in honor of Patroclus (Il. 23), obtains satisfaction, not by virtue of an arbitration rendered by an impartial judge, but by Antiochus’ admission, despite his supremacy in the race, that Menelaus is in all respects superior to him and therefore is entitled to the prize that they are contesting. What is at stake is not the performative force of the discourse, as in Bourdieu’s Achilles-Agamemnon quarrel, but the physical force deployed in an athletic competition. Yet it too is powerless to produce its effects in the face of the network of verbal performances crystallized in a superiority of status recognized by all. “In the Iliad,” Stocking says, “there is no force without speech.” (166).
Each of the three structuralists, or those labeled as such, examined in these three chapters selects an isolated episode in the poem. Hence the criticism that Stocking levels at them: the relevance of their analyses is contained within the limits of the passages that they study. Whatever the outcome of any single episode, sooner or later it is called into question as the narrative unfolds. Stocking cannot make the same complaint of Weil, who is the subject of chapter 4. Her essay covers the entire poem, concluding that, in the Iliad, the distinction between victors and vanquished is inoperative: “every human being may at any moment be compelled to submit to force,” which is consistent with Stocking’s observation.
The latter’s reproach of Weil is that she considers only the humans in the Iliad, even though the gods were so central to it. It is understandable why: what made the Iliad so relevant in 1941 was not its mythology. In a 1937 article that Stocking alludes to (170), entitled “Let’s Not Start the Trojan War Again,” Weil wrote that the gods of Greek mythology are being replaced in the minds of today’s people by the ideologies for which they are fighting: nationalism, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, security, and so on – all abstractions as elusive as the ancient gods. A philological and poetic analysis of the Iliad, Stocking writes, requires taking seriously the role that gods play in the perpetuation of force. That’s true. But Weil is neither a classicist nor a literary critic. For her, the Iliad is a matter for political/anthropological reflection.
Throughout his book, Stocking demonstrates that “throughout the Iliad, the contingencies of force… are directly tied to issues of speech performance” (214). Weil is not far from saying the same thing. Her 1937 paper was an illustration of the “power of words,” the title of the column where it appeared. Later, in The Need for Roots, she extended this reflection by noting that, although force leads the world rather than ideas, it is powerless until it is accompanied by ideas, “of as low quality as one may wish.”
Unfortunately, this discussion does not do justice to the richness and finesse of the detailed analyses of the passages of the Iliad examined in the book nor to the overall vision of the poem that is proposed there. The structuralism that the author invokes confirms in his writing its very high heuristic value. The Homeric poem comes out of this reading as happily updated as it did in that of Simone Weil.
The philological interest of the book is reinforced by a very useful and informative appendix, entitled “Force in Early Greek Hexameter” (224–249). It explains in more detail than any other dictionary the meaning of the various “force” terms listed by Snell and Benveniste plus the word added to that list by the author, damazō/damnēmi. An exhaustive list of occurrences of these terms in early Greek hexameter poetry (Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, Works and Days, and Homeric Hymns) is also included, with translations. Twenty pages of bibliography and an Index locorum follow.