Political displacement at the point of reception

Abstract

This essay considers the implications for political theory when the historical mediations highlighted by classical reception studies move to the centre of the analysis. Through critical engagements with work by two political theorists — Bonnie Honig’s Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge, 2013) and Jeanne Morefield’s Empires without Imperialism (Oxford, 2014) — I probe a politics of reception in which contestation over the meanings of Ancient Greece becomes a site for contemporary political (self-) understanding. Empires without Imperialism explores how early twentieth- and twenty-first-century liberal imperialists deployed ‘strategies of antiquity’ that displaced illiberal political practices onto Athens, and rhetorically enacted a tortured (and torturing) liberal state as tragic hero on the world stage. Antigone, Interrupted intervenes in current debates concerning sovereignty, in addition to questioning current preoccupations with human finitude, vulnerability, and suffering, by critically engaging Sophocles’ Antigone and its modern reception. In each case, the author’s attention to a dialogue between past and present proves politically and theoretically productive, not by exposing implausible readings of ancient texts but by showing how a ‘universe of political meaning’ is configured through classical (re)appropriations, and likewise, how dilemmas of contemporary politics (sovereignty, empire) are made intelligible through ongoing dialogue with the past.