LA CITE DIVISEE

by Nicole Loraux

404 avant J.-C. : Athènes fait l'épreuve de la guerre civile. Un an plus tard, en 403, la démocratie est restaurée. Les démocrates font alors le serment que personne ne devra revenir sur le passé, rappeler les morts, les violences de la guerre. Bref, il est demandé à tous les citoyens d'oublier la division de la cité. Faudrait-il donc oublier pour se réconcilier et former une nation unie ? Quel est le bon usage de la mémoire ? Que voulaient réellement oublier les Athéniens ? En quoi le conflit est-il central à la démocratie?

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Greece

352 pages, Pocket Book

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up based almost wholly on the fact that it's one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen. The red of the jacket almost glows, the dust-flaps are intriguingly extra-long, set off from the book proper by endpapers of austere ashy-gray; the text itself boasts margins just on the proper side of being too ample, printed on thick, handsome paper. I am shallow, and could not resist the wiles on offer; even if this didn't turn out to be the kind of book one brings home to mother, I couldn't resist the idea of possessing it, and, more, being seen to possess it.

So, that's part one of the review: if you suffer from a lustful bibliophilia-of-the-flesh, run don't walk to your nearest academic bookshop, etc.

Part two, engaging with the actual content, is sadly a bit more equivocal. You see, this is a series of papers/lectures by a French scholar of ancient Athens (in translation, of course) who takes poststructuralism or postmodernism or Theory or whatever it is we're calling it this week as her point of departure and her literary model. The core scenario she's investigating -- how Athens reconstituted itself after the civil strife that ousted the Thirty Tyrants imposed by Sparta at the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War by having recourse to formal renunciation of memory and practical amnesty -- is an interesting one. Loraux has some interesting sources to bring to bear on the problem, from recently-discovered memorial inscriptions in cities facing similar problems of reconstitution, to how Athenian dramatists treated the supernatural representations of memory and vengeance.

But the problem is, the prose is written -- or rather, overwritten -- in an overbearing, Derridean language that's a headache to read. Abstractions predominate, of subjects and texts, the double and the singular; Lordy, is there a lot of effacing. More, in any given essay, around half the wordcount is devoted to alternately bemoaning the impossibility of methodological purity and chest-puffing about the bravery of the antihegemonic analysis being attempted. The fact that the book also larded up with completely unnecessary discursions upon the entirely inappropriate fetish-objects of Theory -- good Christ, why bring Freud into this? -- doesn't exactly help matters.

With that said, the core analysis is interesting, when it can be glimpsed under the verbiage. And there are occasional intimations that Loraux's interest in the question of reconstituting society after devastating war was at least somewhat engendered by more contemporary European events, and where she tentatively expands on these parallels, it's easy to see the importance of this kind of work. But there's an awful lot of wading-through to get to that point.

So: got the looks, got the brains, but still not a keeper. Nice fling while it lasted, though.

[I-kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Argues that the Greek understanding of "the political" involves the paradoxical collective operation of remembering what the city swears to forget. More simply: disagreement is more foundational than harmony in political society. A bit underwhelmed.

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapter Ten "The judgment decides, but in a certain way also gives the fight its completed form by consecrating the result of the agon, to which 'the city remains in a sense foreign.'"