Suchergebnisse

AbstractDoes theRepublicdepict a conspiracy? The ostensible impetus for discussing profound political change behind closed doors is a desire to discuss the meaning of justice, not to replace a political order with a new one. But the dialogue takes place during the Peloponnesian War, when fears of plots sporadically consumed an eroding Athenian democracy. Arguments about political instability and instances of plotting reverberate throughout dialogue that takes shape in this suspicious climate. Whether Socrates makes us privy to a conversation about a political world that does not exist or presents us with a strategy for talking about revolution undetected remains unresolved. I argue that Athenian fears of secret power and revolution express themselves in the style and arguments of theRepublicand suggest that already at the origins of democratic practice, critics like Plato were concerned with theorizing the subtleties of democratic erosion.

AbstractThis essay reads Euripides'sMedea, the tragedy of filicide, as a critical investigation into the making of a refugee. Alongside the common claim that the drama depicting a wife murdering her children to punish an unfaithful husband is about gender inequity, I draw out another dimension: that the text's exploration of women's subordination doubles as a rendering of refuge seeking. Euripides introduces Medea as aphugas, the term for a person exiled, on the run, displaced, vulnerable, and in need of refuge. I adopt thephugasas a lens for interpreting the tragedy and generating enduring insights into dynamics of "forced" migration. Taking this political predicament as the organizing question of the text enables us to understand how dislocation from the gender-structured family can produce physical displacement and a need for asylum while casting the political meaning of Medea's kin violence in a new light.

Classical Athens assimilated and disenfranchised a large, free immigrant population of "metics" on the basis of blood, generation after generation. Yet immigration politics remain a curiously displaced context for interpreting ancient Greek political thought and its instructive criticisms of democratic citizenship. Accordingly, Euripides's Ion—the only classical text devoted to exploring the founding myth Athens used to naturalize metics' exclusion from citizenship–is underexamined by political theorists. Attending to the play's metic figurations and historical-poetic contexts, this essay argues that the Ion is a hitherto unappreciated immigration fable about the paradoxes of blood-based citizenship. Drawing ultimately on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, it shows that the tragedy is a still-relevant political critique of the practices of concealment and disclosure—so dominant in today's U.S. immigration rights debate—that make political status look prior to and generative of citizenship practice.