In this collection of provocative essays, historians and literary theorists assess the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his History of Sexuality, on the study of classics. Foucault's famous work presents a bold theory of sexuality for both ancient and modern times, and yet until now it has remained under-explored and insufficiently analyzed. By bringing together the historical knowledge, philological skills, and theoretical perspectives of a wide range of scholars, this collection enables the reader to explore Foucault's model of Greek culture (...) and see how well his interpretation accounts for the full range of evidence from Greece and Rome. Not only do the essays bring to light the assumptions, ideas, and practices that constituted the intimate lives of men and women in the ancient Mediterranean world, but they also demonstrate the importance of the History of Sexuality for fields as diverse as Greco-Roman antiquity, women's history, cultural studies, philosophy, and modern sexuality. The essays include "Situating The History of Sexuality" (the editors), "Taking the Sex Out of Sexuality: Foucault's Failed History" (Joel Black), "Incipit Philosophia" (Alain Vizier), "The Subject in Antiquity after Foucault" (Page duBois), "This Myth Which Is Not One: Construction of Discourse in Plato's Symposium" (Jeffrey S. Carnes), "Foucault's History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women?" (Amy Richlin), "Catullan Consciousness, the 'Care of the Self,' and the Force of the Negative in History" (Paul Allen Miller), "Reversals of Platonic Love in Petronius' Satyricon" (Daniel B. McGlathery), and an essay from Dislocating Masculinity (Lin Foxhall). (shrink)

The elegy flared into existence, commanded the cultural stage for several decades, then went extinct. This book accounts for the swift rise and sudden decline of a genre whose life span was incredibly brief relative to its impact. Examining every major poet from Catullus to Ovid, Subjecting Verses presents the first comprehensive history of Latin erotic elegy since Georg Luck's. Paul Allen Miller harmoniously weds close readings of the poetry with insights from theoreticians as diverse as Jameson, Foucault, Lacan, and (...) Zizek. In welcome contrast to previous, thematic studies of elegy--efforts that have become bogged down in determining whether particular themes and poets were pro- or anti-Augustan--Miller offers a new, "symptomatic" history. He asks two obvious but rarely posed questions: what historical conditions were necessary to produce elegy, and what provoked its decline? Ultimately, he argues that elegiac poetry arose from a fundamental split in the nature of subjectivity that occurred in the late first century--a split symptomatic of the historical changes taking place at the time. Subjecting Verses is a major interpretive feat whose influence will reach across classics and literary studies. Linking the rise of elegy with changes in how Romans imagined themselves within a rapidly changing society, it offers a new model of literary theory that neither reduces the poems to a reflection of their context nor examines them in a vacuum. (shrink)

Diotima at the Barricades argues that the debates that emerged from the burgeoning of feminist intellectual life in post-modern France involved complex, structured, and reciprocal exchanges on the interpretation and position of Plato and other ancient texts in the western philosophical and literary tradition. Paul Allen Miller shows how individual works of Anglo-American figures such as Toril Moi, Judith Butler, and Kaja Silverman, as well as movements such as queer theory, are rooted in feminist theoretical debates that began in the (...) sixties in France and have continued right up to the present day. (shrink)

This paper examines Foucault's reading of Plato and ancient philosophy as part of his continuing dialogue and debate with Derrida. It contends that this debate not only in part motivates Foucault's turn to antiquity, but also is directly revelatory of the most basic differences between Foucault's and Derrida's conceptions of philosophy.

Examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.

In 1980, Michel Foucault's work makes two decisive turns. On the one hand, as announced at the start of his course at the Collège de France for that year, Le Gouvernement des vivants, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to truth. On the other hand, the texts on which he will concentrate will no longer be those of the early modern period. Rather, he begins with one by Dio Cassius on the emperor Septimius (...) Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. He will concentrate on works from antiquity for the rest of his life. This book will offer the first detailed account of these lectures, examining both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. This is the period during which Foucault also began work on Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality. Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his course and the last books he published before his death, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. Instead they offer a sustained encounter with the texts of the classical and early Christian era while seeking to trace a genealogy of the western subject as a speaker of truth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural MarxismPaul Allen Miller (bio)Jameson, Fredric. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. 296 pp.Fredric Jameson may well be the greatest intellectual produced by the United States in the last half century. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has made as many, as lasting, and as wide-ranging contributions as Jameson. From his (...) early work on Sartre’s style, passing through the twin opera on dialectical theory (Marxism and Form) and formalism and structuralism (Prisonhouse of Language), and the idiosyncratic appreciation of Wyndham Lewis (Fables of Aggression) to that summa of Marxist hermeneutics, The Political Unconscious, and from his major collection of essays, The Ideologies of Theory, through his books on Adorno (Late Marxism) and film (Signatures of the Visible), to that foundational text on postmodern literature, theory, art, and architecture, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and the late work on world cinema (The Geopolitical Aesthetic), utopianism (The Seeds of Time), Brecht (Brecht and Method), modernity (A Singular Modernity), and science fiction (Archaeologies of the Future), Jameson’s career is unparalleled in the American letters. It is perhaps not coincidental, either, that this larger-than-life figure on the intellectual stage ranging easily from Russian formalism to Deleuzean antihumanism, from Balzac to Frank Gehry, and from Hegel to Derrida, is an intellectual dissident. Contemporary American life’s alternation between uncritical consumerism (Marcuse’s one-dimensional man) and nonothing anti-intellectualism (Christian fundamentalism and corporate-fueled jingoism) could only produce such a body of work as an alien presence: its own systemic negation and thus the fullest expression of its deepest internal contradictions. The present collection of interviews from 1981 to the present, then, stands as a welcome commentary on Jameson’s vast work and an important reflection of the changes in American intellectual life in the period from the last days of the Cold War to the end of the second Bush administration.Naturally, as with any collection of interviews, not every thing is new here. Indeed, to the seasoned reader of Jameson, much of this is familiar territory, and there is a fair amount of repetition from one interview to the next (Goethe’s concept of “world literature,” for example, is a recurring motif). Nonetheless, there are many moments of real insight and bold commentary that remind us why Marxism is far from dead and how Jameson has achieved an iconic status rivaling that of Lukacs, Althusser, or Eagleton, as one of the preeminent Marxist thinkers of the last century. Many of these come in the form of vignettes, little snippets of cultural analysis. One such comes in Jameson’s interview with Columbia University Professor of History Anders Stephanson. Here Stephanson asks Jameson to comment on the recent architectural and cultural phenomenon of creating ersatz public spaces. These come in the form of commercial areas that present themselves in guise of “squares,” “plazas,” or “villages.” They make reference to and pastiche traditional forms of life and then re-represent them in the form of a hypercapitalist consumerism. These simulacra of less alienated, precapitalist forms of [End Page 65] life are then presented as depthless surfaces, parodies of authenticity. The archetype of such ersatz public spaces is Disney’s EPCOT:Stephanson: In other words, you are referring to his compressed version of the world; little toy countries where you can orient yourself in no time at all.Jameson: I suppose you can orient yourself because walking paths are available. But where you actually are is a real problem, for you may in fact be in the Florida Everglades, and in this case you are not only in a swamp but also in a simulacrum of a different geographical complex altogether. Disneyland is, on the whole, supremely prophetic and paradigmatic of these multiple shifting and dissolving spatial levels. (49)This is both an insightful observation and a wonderful example of Jameson’s dialectic at work. One moment we’re walking hand in hand with Goofy round the little, fake Eiffel Tower of EPCOT and the next we sink into the morass that paved the Everglades, acquired control... (shrink)

Plato's account of the famous trial of Socrates in 399 b.c., appeals to historians, philosophers, political scientists, and classicists. It is also essential reading for students of ancient Greek. Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter provide running commentary, glosses of unfamiliar words, introductions that address historical and philosophical issues, and thought-provoking essays on each chapter.

The Timaeus is a muthos that attempts to imagine a logos of the cosmos. Like the demiurge, readers are to be mimetic artists, poets, who move constantly between the intelligible essences and their likenesses in the world of appearance, experience, and becoming, occupying a third register that is neither and both. The cosmology of the Timaeus is both a likely story and an allegory of its own failure. It takes place within the nonspace of the khōra, a realm accessible only (...) through bastard reasoning that we can perceive only as if in a dream. The Timaeus is an unfinalizable logos in which each moment of positing is also a moment of irony and interrogation, of simultaneous acceptance and active separation, of choric space. (shrink)

Reckford has produced a very serviceable introduction to a very difficult poet. Written with genuine verve and passion, this personal look at what many view as a crabbed and uncongenial writer is a welcome addition to an all too small English bibliography on Rome's third great satirist, after Lucilius and Horace. Beginning its life as the Martin lectures delivered at Oberlin a decade ago, this generous, often nostalgic look at the work of a young Stoic under the reign of Nero (...) will surely help him find a wider audience among today's ambitious undergraduates and beginning graduate students. (shrink)

The first full treatment of truth as a core philosophical concept in the late Foucault, this volume examines his work on the ancient world and the early church. Each essay features a deep examination as to how the topics of truth and sexuality intersect with and focus on Foucault's engagement with ancient philosophy and thought. Truth in the Late Foucault offers readings on Plato, Artemidorus, Cicero, Sophocles and the Stoics, and pays close attention to Cassian, Paulinus of Nola, and early (...) Christian practices of confession. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 127.4 (2006) 607-611MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reviewed byPaul Allen Miller University of South Carolina e-mail: [email protected] Habinek. The World of Roman Song: From Ritualized Speech to Social Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. x + 329 pp. Cloth, $52.It has become increasingly evident that the texts we study from ancient Rome are embedded objects, implicated in a rich field of symbolic systems and corporeal (...) practices. The image of the poem as an isolated aesthetic object has become untenable as the field has become dominated by concepts of intertextuality, performativity, social construction, and self-fashioning. The text in books like Tony Corbeill's Controlling Laughter (Princeton 1996) is less an object than an action. Thomas Habinek's The World of Roman Song represents an attempt to make good on the promise of these developments by rethinking the entirety of Roman literature as an embedded social process of "song," of marked speech, that stands at the origins of the Roman social order. Ritual hymns, funereal laudations, convivial play, and comedic performances become so many moments in the constitution of what it means to be Roman, even as conflicts between center and periphery, masculine and feminine, vir and cinaedus are both played out and resisted in the various genres that constitute the world of ritualized speech and its formal derivatives.Any such sweeping endeavor brings with it both a necessary boldness—asking us to rethink the history of Roman culture from a new perspective—and the danger of reductiveness. For the most part, these are dangers that Habinek manages skillfully to skirt through a combination of fine-grained philological analysis and a sophisticated, but never overbearing, theoretical apparatus. The World of Roman Song features close readings of the usage of words such as cano, carmen, dico, ludus, convivia, and sodalis, from their earliest attestations through their appearance in later imperial literature. It also deploys an intellectual armature that draws upon contemporary anthropology, Frankfurt-school Marxism, object-relations psychoanalysis, and the theories of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Bataille. Yet, as we shall see, the very methodology that makes this sweeping [End Page 607] and important survey possible—the examination not of texts but of lemmata to trace the memes of Roman self-constitution through formalized language—leads to certain unavoidable distortions. Complex textual systems become reduced to exemplary moments of embeddedness. This reduction is an enabling gesture that like any mode of analysis, however, ultimately produces its own limit.For this reader, the heart of the book is to be found in chapter 4, "Song and Play." Here Habinek traces the relation between three primary sets of terms: dico, dictum, and implicitly dictator, meaning to make an authoritative statement; cano, canto, and carmen, meaning to perform a song (carmen) of one's own (cano), or to repeat that of another (canto), so as to establish a relation between the singer and the constituted social, and ultimately cosmic, whole, via ritualized speech; and ludo, ludus, and lusus, referring to scripted or formalized movements of the body. Thus a poetic ludus, such as that described in Catullus 50 between the poet and Licinius Calvus, would refer not so much to the acts of song (carmina) to which the game of composition gave rise as to the formalized interchange and embodied practice of writing capping verses in different meters in a convivial setting. The previous chapter, "Song and Speech," had established the difference between loquor and dico, with the former referring to unmarked speech and the latter to the making of statements that the speaker asserts as authoritative and hence true. It is thus possible for the terms cano and dico to overlap and those of ludo and cano as well. Nevertheless, the ultimate dream of aristocratic Roman manhood (and, as any number of feminists would point out, of patriarchy as a whole) is for carmen—the ritualized speech that constitutes the community as a living unity—to assume the status of dictum, authoritative speech freed from the... (shrink)