[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
In the introduction to Niobes: Antiquity, Modernity, Critical Theory, “Critical Encounters with Niobe,” Telò explains that the book aims to offer insights and impressions for engaging and emotionally connecting to the diachronic persistence of Niobe, rather than to provide a comprehensive history of her reception. Niobe, whose many children were killed by Apollo and Artemis, is a marginalized yet enduring figure in Greek mythology, who embodies and problematizes dialectics between life and death, mourning and melancholia, animation and inanimation, and silence and logos. She is a tragic figure who has influenced literature, art and various aspects of modern thought, including aesthetics, ethics, psychoanalysis, and politics. Over the centuries, her mythological figure—characterized by the interplay between liquefaction and petrification—has facilitated reflections on the marginalization and silencing of the maternal and on unconventional and non-agentic agencies for subjectivities that are a priori denied recognition it has also contributed to discussions in contemporary intersectional feminism and critical race theory. The book includes different interpretation of the readings by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin who, in his essay “Towards the Critique of Violence”, incorporates Niobe into an analysis of the issues arising when violence is used to establish and enforce social order, and Jacques Lacan, who, in his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, examines Niobe’s position beyond the limits of humanity in his exploration of the death drive. It also tackles Phillis Wheatley’s poem “Niobe in Distress,” which was written by the first African American woman, and only the third American woman, to publish a book of poems.
The book is divided into four clusters (authors and titles are listed at the end of the review). The first section, “An-Archic Beginnings,” is composed of three chapters. In the first chapter, Adriana Cavarero focuses on the version of Niobe’s story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and asserts that Niobe’s motherhood is presented as a power that evokes excess, but with perfection in its distribution: a number equally distributed between the two genders. Becoming hubris, this hypermaternity is punished and changed into its opposite—the absence of children, the mineralization of the flesh that previously gave birth. In the second chapter, Rebecca Comay elaborates on Niobe’s overdetermined excess emblematized by the stone. From Ovid’s line Nihil est in imagine vivum (Metamorphoses 6.305), she develops the impossibility that the myth proposed: Niobe refuses to perform even in her own drama. In the third chapter, Ben Radcliffe places the first depiction of Niobe in Greek literature, in Book 24 of the Iliad, in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s discussion. He is interested in how each text uses the myth to reflect on the ambivalent efficacy of violence, which can variously buttress, supersede, or suspend the prevailing order of things.
The second section of the book, “Around Ovid,” also focuses on the version developed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the most extensive and nonfragmentary rendition of the myth. In the fourth chapter, Victoria Rimell, in a reading that includes Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Ovid, and contemporary artworks, and which spans philosophy, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory, challenges a solipsistic interpretation of Niobe with what she calls a “nonnarcissistic maternal relationality”. She concludes that Niobe is “impossible to love” because of her refusal of motherhood as self-sacrifice and also because relating to another in endless pain is terrifying. In the fifth chapter, Telò focuses on Niobe’s aesthetic coldness, observing the points of contact between depictions of Niobe in Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Ovid, by staging an encounter between Lacan, Rancière, Deleuze, and Meillassoux. The glacial Niobe encodes an aesthetic freezing without any cathartic thawing. In the sixth chapter, John T. Hamilton analyzes Niobe’s petrification as equivalent to the space of mythos, which she inhabits, finding refuge in, and valorizing, an invisible and subjectless reality beyond mortal experience. In the seventh chapter, Andres Matlock explores the Platonic and Stoic appropriations of Niobe in Cicero and Seneca, focusing on his role as mother and as a friend. He identifies that as an object of philosophical attention, Niobe represents a material polarity that conjoins and separates Platonism and Stoicism, a durable marker in the ontological expression of these modes of thought.
In the third section, “Art and Aesthetics,” Niobe is analyzed from the viewpoint of aesthetics, visual and nonvisual. In the eighth chapter, Barbara Baert engages aspects of Warburg’s work in Atlas Mnemosyne with an image of Niobe, and demonstrates how the assimilation of Niobe to a weeping rock is emblematic of the visual artifact’s alluring insistence: the liquid fertility, animate and inanimate, that generates the work of art; and the brute matter in which art lies locked. In the ninth chapter, Mildred Galland Szymkowiak compares Hegel’s view of Niobe with Schelling’s and suggests that for the latter, Niobe is the emblem of symbolic art as such, of symbolism as artistic expression. Niobe as myth and as sculpture symbolizes the telos of the plastic arts: her passage from infinite life (hypermaternity) to petrifaction shows the general direction of the rational classification of the arts, and the being-petrified of Niobe realizes the essence of sculpture (to make the living appear as dead). In the tenth chapter, Paul A. Kottman mines Kant’s notion of disinterested pleasure alongside Hegel’s notion of “passionless love” as resources for thinking about melancholic apprehensions of beauty, and the possibility of postmelancholic life, allowing him to consider the ethical and psychological implications of the contrast Hegel draws between Niobe’s and Mary’s responses to loss. In the eleventh chapter, Daniel Villegas Vélez explores how the use of the figure of the silent Niobe in Baroque opera illuminates the relationship between auditory aesthetics and sovereignty based on the Greek concept of nomos. He posits that Orpheus, a paradigmatic operatic theme, and Niobe form an odd couple as transgressors of nomos. Against hundreds of Orpheuses, there is only one extant opera on Niobe: Agostino Steffani and Luigi Orlandi’s Niobe, Regina di Tebe (Munich, 1688).
The fourth section, “Philosophy, Poetry, Social Justice,” focuses on justice at the intersections of philosophy and poetry, considered as modes of Niobean writing. In the twelfth chapter, Mathura Umachandran returns to Benjamin and proposes Niobe’s condition as a form of resistance and to rethink it in terms of a politics of refusal. She proposes a corrective to Benjamin’s reduction of Niobe as evidence par excellence of mythic violence, the proof of the gods’ existence and the interminable cycles by which states accredit themselves with power and authority. Niobe might guide us in thinking about resistance to violence as a structuring condition of the world. In the thirteenth chapter, (Andrew) Benjamin reconsiders the narrative of Niobe’s punishment in light of the conceptual nexus of relationality, ethics, and time. He proposes to answer questions concerning the deaths of the Niobids and the nature of Niobe’s survival in the context of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in part by introducing the friendship between Leto and Niobe. In the fourteenth chapter, Jacques Lezra, through Niobe’s grief, proposes a comparison between the ethical positions of Benjamin and Judith Butler on violence. In the fifteenth chapter, drea brown explores the connection between Niobe’s mythical symbolism and the narratives of the Middle Passage, seeing Niobe both as an image of the slave ship and as the archetypal Black mother who lost her children and herself in the ocean.
In my opinion, the book achieves its goal. As a cohesive unit, it presents approaches from an essayistic perspective, focusing on the relationship between philosophy and literature. These approaches are fruitful for specialists in classical philology, even though they do not introduce new philological interpretations of classical sources, because they introduce suggestive linkages between classical texts and further engagements and interpretations. The authors explore classical and contemporary poems, iconographic representations, operas, and philosophical and aesthetic reflections on the mythic figure of Niobe. This exploration, though sometimes touching on lesser-known material, allows readers not only to appreciate the extent of Greek myths’ influence on Western culture, but also to reflect on human vulnerability in the face of divine cruelty.
Authors and Titles
Part 1: An-Archic Beginnings
- Niobe’s Hypermaternity. Adriana Cavarero
- Nihil Est in Imagine Vivum. Rebecca Comay
- Niobe’s People: Ambiguous Violence and Interrupted Labor in Iliad 24. Ben Radcliffe
Part 2: Around Ovid
- Philosophers’ Stone: Enduring Niobe. Victoria Rimell
- Niobe’s Tragic Cryo-Ecology. Mario Telò
- Tears From Stone. John T. Hamilton
- Shadow and Stone: Niobe Between Platonism and Stoicism. Andres Matlock
Part 3: Art and Aesthetics
- The Weeping Rock: Paragone, Pathosformel, and Petrification. Barbara Baert
- Schelling’s Niobe. Mildred Galland-Szymkowiak
- The More Loving One: On Postmelancholic Life. Paul A. Kottman
- Niobe’s Nomoi. Daniel Villegas Vélez
Part 4: Philosophy, Poetry, Social Justice
- Niobe Between Benjamin and Arendt—and Beyond. Mathura Umachandran
- Countering Injury: On the Deaths of the Niobids. Andrew Benjamin
- Lacrimae Rerum: Institution of Grief. Jacques Lezra
- “How Strangely Changed”: Finding Phillis Wheatley in Niobean Myth and Memory, an Essay in Verse. drea brown