The book in question is part of a series, Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing, which, as the editor Laura Jansen says in the introductory blurb, probes twentieth-century writers’ “tendency to break with tradition [while] continu[ing] to maintain a fluid dialogue with the Greco-Roman past.” In contrast to other writers which the series examines (e.g., Joyce, Foucault, Derek Walcott), Judith Butler straddles the divide between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and Butler’s ideas, intentionally aimed at effecting social change, continue to shape some of today’s most avantgarde movements. Further telescoping the distance between the book’s readers and its subject is the fact that the author, Mario Telò, is a colleague, intellectual disciple, and friend of Butler’s (in the Acknowledgments, Telò recalls a spirits-reviving hug he once received from Butler). More than just a biographic framework, this relationship between subject and author informs the unique voice of the book. Instead of endeavoring to write about Butler or to read Greek tragedy according to Butler, Telò puts one of Butler’s central tenets, “being in non-being,” into practice: embracing deindividuation, Telò co-reads and co-writes with his subject (indeed, the book’s Afterward—a discussion of grievability in the context of the war in Gaza—belongs to Butler). But the book is not simply a duet between author and subject: into the orbit of his Butlerian readings Telò draws a whole constellation of writers, poets, artists, theorists, and psychoanalysts. Thus, in Chapter 1, grounding himself in Derrida’s analysis of auto-thanato-graphy in Freud’s 1925 essay on the mystic writing pad, Telò reads Sophocles’ Antigone in dialogue with “memory traces” in the artwork of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta.
For Telò, Butler’s treatment of Greek tragedy pioneers a new genre which, engaging simultaneously in “literary-criticism and philosophical speculation, scholarship and creative adaptation,” proposes “a theory and praxis of politics” (2). Telò pairs this Butlerian focus on praxis with his own, linguistically virtuosic approach to the Greek text (something that the Greekless Butler endeavors, but struggles, to do). Opposing the conventional, “intentionalist and historicist” philological approach, Telò seeks “to model a kind of formalistic abolition” with “attention to…disruptions of syntax…juxtapositions, unscripted adjacencies, and…serendipitous proximities, improvisational intertwinements, insurrectionary solidarities between words, phonetic units, and quasi- or pseudo-syntactical entities” (147). Although it is debatable whether earlier generations of philologists were in fact ignorant of such elements, the mastery that Telò displays as both scholar of Greek and English stylist is truly impressive: his voice is vibrant, dynamic, exquisitely attuned to the etymological and connotational layers of individual words—as, for example, when he draws a connection between modern studies in neuro-diversity (autism) and the autonomy of Antigone, or conducts a tour de force analysis of the messenger speech in Euripides’ Hippolytus.
Telò begins by observing that, whereas thinkers from Hegel to Cixous have turned to Greek tragedy for inspiration, they did not conduct in-depth analyses of individual plays. By contrast, Butler has focused, in three unconnected works, on three different ancient plays, one by each of the three great tragedians. Onto this Butlerian “trilogy” Telò maps the three chapters of his book.
Chapter 1, “Infinite Heterology,” engages with Sophocles’ Antigone on the basis of Butler’s Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (2000). Rejecting Lacan’s analysis of Sophocles’ heroine as rooted in heteronormativity, Telò/Butler turn from Lacan back to Freud—specifically, to the slide of kinship which Freud effects when he identifies both with his deceased daughter Sophie and with his grandson Ernst. For Telò, Butler’s Freudian Antigone champions “an ungovernable, ever-shifting impulse to deny the self and become other.” Telò reads the porous ego of the Butlerian Antigone against “the imaginary of the Black ‘underlife’” which he interprets as a vertically oriented populist insurrection, “a subterranean undercommons”[1] enabled “to burst into the world” (46). Arguing that no one individual agency is responsible for a populist uprising, Telò embraces Moten’s idea of not just sliding kinship but sliding authorship (“I feel like yeah, that’s their project. That’s my project. I wanna be with them”). Strangely at odds with this commitment to deindividuation is Telò’s choice to ground the final part of his discussion of Butler’s Antigone in Bernard Knox’s vision of the Sophoclean hero as one who, “unsupported by the gods and in the face of human opposition, makes a decision which springs from the deepest layer of his individual nature.”[2] Telò does not seem to be aware of the incompatibility of Knoxian heroism with Butler’s dedication to “modes of agency that don’t reside in human subjects”[3]—a dedication that Telò/Butler take to the extreme of denying birthing authorship to the individual mother in favor of “plural mothering” and “reproductive communism.”
Chapter 2, “Trans-parentality, Abortion, and Social Ecology” engages with Euripides’ Bacchae on the basis of Butler’s 2017 UCL Housman lecture, “Breaks in the Bond: Reflections on Kinship Trouble.” Reading Euripides’ Dionysus as a parable for Butler’s impact on present-day social issues (68), Telò sees Euripides’ play as holding up a critical mirror to our society’s anxieties about the possibility of a “liberal dystopia” of “birthing trans men” and feminist abortion. Central to Telò’s discussion of this mirror are the concepts of transversality (borrowed from the psychiatric theories of Deleuze and Guattari, whose transversal lines, cutting across vertical hierarchies and horizontal groups, merge analyst and analysand); and somatechnics (a key term in transgender studies coined by Nikki Sullivan). Notwithstanding the diversity of innovative approaches that Butler/Telò apply to the Bacchae, their reading of this play is surprisingly undifferentiated from that of the Antigone: in their view, both plays champion the dissolution of kinship ties. Perhaps this is why Telò offers a peculiarly narrow view of one of the Bacchae’s central themes, motherhood. Comparing the shaking of Dionysus’ hair to the delivering of a baby, Telò writes: “The transfer of an internal/external quasi-organ into a new space, the release of such an organ from a bounded container, or the self-unburdening of this container—the bodily transformations encompassed by delivery enable us to look at childbirth as a moment of transness” (83). Missing from this description is any acknowledgement of birth as a coming-to-be (from the child’s point of view), or as creation (from the mother’s), with Telò drawing no distinction between (a mother’s body) pushing out a baby and (any body) pushing out excrement or bodily effluvia such as tears and spit.
Bodily emissions are, in fact, central to Telò’s third chapter, “The Justice of Rage,” which engages with Aeschylus’ Eumenides on the basis of Butler’s article, “Fury and Justice in the Humanities.”[4] Butler/Telò understand Aeschylus’ play to be “…construing justice as fury breaking the violence of the law.” Telò reads Benjaminian Niobe, whose everlasting tears stand in perpetual opposition to the tyranny of the gods, in the theoretical framework of Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of bucca—the mouth as the organ of non-linguistic orality. This reading allows Telò to identify Niobe’s tears with the saliva spat forth by Aeschylus’ Furies: both are forms of bodily emissions, or “buccal exscriptions,” as forms of just outrage. In the Butlerian spirit of joining literary analysis with present-day praxis, Telò discerns the buccal exscriptions of the Furies in J. T. Roane’s 2021 account of a court case involving Donnetta Hill, a Black sex worker, spitting on one of the jurors, an act which Roane interprets as “a claim to rage…as the elementary basis of poor Black women’s rogue articulations of freedom.”[5]
In this chapter the limitations of Telò’s/Butler’s anti-historicist approach are particularly felt. Telò/Butler borrow the concept of anger as opposition to legal violence from twentieth-century Black feminism. At no point, however, do they acknowledge the centuries-old philosophical-literary awareness of the conflict between legal violence and ethics or ask why anger emerges as a distinctive feature in twentieth-century Black thought. A victim of a legal system that replaced his death sentence with forced labor in Siberia only after marching him in front of a firing squad, Dostoyevsky voiced passionate opposition to capital punishment across his oeuvre. But this opposition did not equate with anger in the mind of the Russian writer—nor, some 350 years earlier, in the mind of Sir Thomas More, whose Utopia decries the Crown’s deployment of capital punishment as a means of controlling the impoverished masses and who himself ultimately ascended the scaffold with courageous equanimity. When Butler/Telò draw a historically unexamined connection from Aeschylus to Angela Davis, they deprive Black feminist conceptualization of anger of much-needed context, leaving the reader unconvinced by the reliability of the connection.
My aim thus far has been to summarize Telò’s/Butler’s engagement with Greek tragedy. In the remainder of this review, I consider the underlying logic of this engagement and ponder whether Telò/Butler are successful in achieving this logic’s overall aim.
Each of Telò’s three chapters zeroes in on the cosmic binaries central to a given play: brother-sister, life-death (Antigone); male-female, human-animal, birth-destruction (Bacchae); law-rage, light-darkness (Eumenides)—all of them variants of the foundational binary of self and other. Telò/Butler do not seek to understand why Greek thought in general and tragic playwrights in particular were fascinated with cosmic oppositions. Instead, following the principle of deindividuation, they point to different versions of the self-other dichotomy across the tragic texts, in each case rejecting the self and identifying with the other. In doing so, however, they ignore the basic fact that most human populations past and present have not subscribed to the same categories of self and other as they. Earlier criticism has noted Butler’s anachronistic treatment of the individual-state binary in the Antigone.[6] Similarly, Butler’s discussion in the Afterword of the war in Gaza ignores the fact that Palestinians are a Semitic people and that the Israeli population comprises some 170,000 Ethiopian (Black) Jews: bundling Palestinians together with “people of color,” Butler insists on the simplistic Americentric dichotomy of oppressor (American, Israeli, colonizer, white) and oppressed (non-American, Palestinian, colonized, Black). If we shift focus from the foreign to the domestic sociopolitical sphere, we will see that here too Butler/Telò lock people into rigid polarities, disregarding the complexity of individuals’ beliefs and motivations. “The auto-immunitarian catastrophe of technocapitalism,” writes Telò, “whose death-driven logic engenders the racialized poverty and abjection disturbing the eyes and noses of white privilege, is the open secret, the truth barely concealed behind the self-exculpatory ascription of all responsibility for the current sense of impending collapse of ‘San Francisco values’” (67). Confining whiteness, capitalism, law, and tech industry to one half of the binary and people of color, socialism, police abolition, and rejection of Silicon Valley culture to the other, Telò/Butler have no more to say to a Black policeman or a Latino business owner than to an Ethiopian Zionist.
Thus, for all their talk of transversality, Butler/Telò struggle to reach the other in space or time. They are more interested in having Euripides take their side on present-day sociopolitical issues than in trying to see the world through the eyes of the ancient tragedian. And, instead of exploring the diverse perspectives of present-day societies across the globe and asking whether there might exist pan-human common ground beneath them, Butler/Telò see the very label “human” as synonymous with the privileged self and therefore exclusionary of different kinds of other: animals, trans, queer, BIPOC, women, the disabled, the undocumented. Groping among this post-humanist proliferation of micro-identities, one recalls nostalgically Martin Luther King’s call to brotherhood: “God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men but God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race, the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers.”[7]
Notes
[1] F. Moten, and S. Harney, 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 2013.
[2] B. Knox. The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964, p. 5.
[3] From Butler’s 2010 interview with Vikki Bell, quoted by Telò in an endnote.
[4] J. Butler, “Fury and Justice in the Humanities,” Classical Antiquity 42, 1-18.
[5] J. T. Roane, “Spitting Back at Law and Order: Donnetta Hill’s Rage in an Era of Vengeance.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46 (2021): 858.
[6] S. Elden, 2005. “The Place of The Polis: Political Blindness in Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim” Theory & Event 8.1 (2005).
[7] King, M. L. 1963. Speech given on 12.18.1963 at Western Michigan University.