Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn aw... more Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn away from institutional critique and a return to Kant. This is no coincidence. Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s ‘‘Anthropology’’ (1961) completely anticipates his approach to ancient subject formations, which reflects Kant’s theory of the liberal, self-enterprising, and enlightened subject as this is outlined in Foucault’s ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ (1984) and elsewhere. Foucault’s final studies surface isolated, private, and autonomous subjects who are at once premodern, proto-Christian, and uncannily modern. Fashioned by ascetic and aesthetic models of self-care, they testify to ‘‘a genealogy of the modern subject.’’
Homer, the great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is revered as a cultural icon of antiquity an... more Homer, the great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is revered as a cultural icon of antiquity and a figure of lasting influence. But his identity is shrouded in questions about who he was, when he lived, and whether he was an actual person, a myth, or merely a shared idea. Rather than attempting to solve the mystery of this character, James I. Porter explores the sources of Homer’s mystique and their impact since the first recorded mentions of Homer in ancient Greece.
Homer: The Very Idea considers Homer not as a man, but as a cultural invention nearly as distinctive and important as the poems attributed to him, following the cultural history of an idea and of the obsession that is reborn every time Homer is imagined. Offering novel readings of texts and objects, the book follows the very idea of Homer from his earliest mentions to his most recent imaginings in literature, criticism, philosophy, visual art, and classical archaeology.
Recipient of the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit, Society of Classical Studies, 2017. Citation:
"... more Recipient of the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit, Society of Classical Studies, 2017. Citation:
"James Porter's The Sublime in Antiquity is a critical tour-de-force and at the same time a rich and open-ended source-book that will delight readers interested in how the Greeks and Romans described and analyzed the experience of being struck, captivated, even overwhelmed by an act of hearing, viewing, or reading – an experience surely familiar to all lovers of Classical literature and art.
The notion of “the sublime” and of a special category of awe-inspiring, transcendent and almost inexpressible greatness, whether encountered in the natural world (mountains, oceans, storms, a divine presence…) or in various forms of artistic production, has been a key element in Western aesthetics at least since the 18th century. Critics such as Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel have been followed by innumerable philosophers and historians of aesthetics, almost all of whom have traced the origin of this notion back to the unknown author (traditionally referred to as “Longinus”) who composed a remarkable rhetorical treatise entitled Peri Hypsous (or in Latin, De Sublimitate), some time between ca. 50 and 300 CE. Longinus’ treatise is thus almost universally regarded as constituting a major break-through in aesthetic thought that really stands alone in Classical antiquity. (M. H. Abrams, for example, in The Mirror and the Lamp, famously zeroed-in on the contrast between “Classical” poetics, as represented by Aristotle and the mainstream, and “Romantic” sensibilities, as adumbrated by Longinus.) James Porter, in his immensely erudite and wide-ranging new book, overturns this standardized history of criticism and offers a new and fascinating account of the multiple ways in which “sublime, wonderful, stupendous” experiences and compositions were recognized and described by a wide range of authors before and after Longinus – from Homer and Pindar, to Empedocles and Lucretius, and even such drily analytical critics as Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Porter’s extensively documented study, exploring numerous poetical and philosophical passages in close detail, makes it clear that Longinus’ treatise in fact comes in the middle, not at the beginning, of such discussions, distinguished more by its style and choice of particular examples than by its conceptual originality. As Porter observes, “The sublime pervades much of antiquity; it has simply been hiding in the light.”
Porter’s book is not simply a negative achievement, however, in its re-positioning of Longinus within literary and aesthetic history. Along with its stimulating and important argument about the “tradition of the sublime” as a concept and an affective experience, the book provides a wonderful assemblage of particular close readings and analyses of individual texts, making new connections both within antiquity itself and between ancient and modern authors. Porter explores such stylistic strategies and dichotomies as simplicity vs variety, the power of the kairos and of ekplêxis, and the “logic of excess,” showing how all of these techniques involve an “art of the emotions” in which, as both rhetoricians and philosophers implicitly agreed, artistic skill and organizational power, whether human or divine, lie at the heart of the sublime effect. This book will immediately become required reading for anyone seriously studying ancient stylistics, rhetorical theory, and the history of aesthetics."
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry,... more Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
All parts of Heraclitus' cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs ("bio... more All parts of Heraclitus' cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs ("biomasses") cycle endlessly through physical changes in sweeping patterns ("biorhythms") that are reflected in the dynamic rhythms of Heraclitus' own thought and language. These natural processes are best examined at a more-than-human level that exceeds individuation, stable identity, rational comprehension, and linguistic capture. B62 ("mortals immortals"), one of Heraclitus' most perplexing fragments, models these processes in a spectacular fashion: it describes the imbrication not only of humans and gods but of cosmic masses more generally, and its language mimics the natural relations that it names, or rather intimates through its grammatical and syntactical indeterminacy. The remaining fragments amplify the uncertainties and the exhilarations of Heraclitus' worldview along the same lines. His approach to nature raises urgent questions about how human beings fit into the cosmos, not least by challenging our intuitive conceptions of life and death, our material makeup, and our entanglements with our natural surroundings. In doing so, he provides vital lessons for contemporary ecological awareness, and proves to be an unexpected ally.
Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn aw... more Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn away from institutional critique and a return to Kant. This is no coincidence. Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s ‘‘Anthropology’’ (1961) completely anticipates his approach to ancient subject formations, which reflects Kant’s theory of the liberal, self-enterprising, and enlightened subject as this is outlined in Foucault’s ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ (1984) and elsewhere. Foucault’s final studies surface isolated, private, and autonomous subjects who are at once premodern, proto-Christian, and uncannily modern. Fashioned by ascetic and aesthetic models of self-care, they testify to ‘‘a genealogy of the modern subject.’’
Homer, the great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is revered as a cultural icon of antiquity an... more Homer, the great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is revered as a cultural icon of antiquity and a figure of lasting influence. But his identity is shrouded in questions about who he was, when he lived, and whether he was an actual person, a myth, or merely a shared idea. Rather than attempting to solve the mystery of this character, James I. Porter explores the sources of Homer’s mystique and their impact since the first recorded mentions of Homer in ancient Greece.
Homer: The Very Idea considers Homer not as a man, but as a cultural invention nearly as distinctive and important as the poems attributed to him, following the cultural history of an idea and of the obsession that is reborn every time Homer is imagined. Offering novel readings of texts and objects, the book follows the very idea of Homer from his earliest mentions to his most recent imaginings in literature, criticism, philosophy, visual art, and classical archaeology.
Recipient of the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit, Society of Classical Studies, 2017. Citation:
"... more Recipient of the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit, Society of Classical Studies, 2017. Citation:
"James Porter's The Sublime in Antiquity is a critical tour-de-force and at the same time a rich and open-ended source-book that will delight readers interested in how the Greeks and Romans described and analyzed the experience of being struck, captivated, even overwhelmed by an act of hearing, viewing, or reading – an experience surely familiar to all lovers of Classical literature and art.
The notion of “the sublime” and of a special category of awe-inspiring, transcendent and almost inexpressible greatness, whether encountered in the natural world (mountains, oceans, storms, a divine presence…) or in various forms of artistic production, has been a key element in Western aesthetics at least since the 18th century. Critics such as Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel have been followed by innumerable philosophers and historians of aesthetics, almost all of whom have traced the origin of this notion back to the unknown author (traditionally referred to as “Longinus”) who composed a remarkable rhetorical treatise entitled Peri Hypsous (or in Latin, De Sublimitate), some time between ca. 50 and 300 CE. Longinus’ treatise is thus almost universally regarded as constituting a major break-through in aesthetic thought that really stands alone in Classical antiquity. (M. H. Abrams, for example, in The Mirror and the Lamp, famously zeroed-in on the contrast between “Classical” poetics, as represented by Aristotle and the mainstream, and “Romantic” sensibilities, as adumbrated by Longinus.) James Porter, in his immensely erudite and wide-ranging new book, overturns this standardized history of criticism and offers a new and fascinating account of the multiple ways in which “sublime, wonderful, stupendous” experiences and compositions were recognized and described by a wide range of authors before and after Longinus – from Homer and Pindar, to Empedocles and Lucretius, and even such drily analytical critics as Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Porter’s extensively documented study, exploring numerous poetical and philosophical passages in close detail, makes it clear that Longinus’ treatise in fact comes in the middle, not at the beginning, of such discussions, distinguished more by its style and choice of particular examples than by its conceptual originality. As Porter observes, “The sublime pervades much of antiquity; it has simply been hiding in the light.”
Porter’s book is not simply a negative achievement, however, in its re-positioning of Longinus within literary and aesthetic history. Along with its stimulating and important argument about the “tradition of the sublime” as a concept and an affective experience, the book provides a wonderful assemblage of particular close readings and analyses of individual texts, making new connections both within antiquity itself and between ancient and modern authors. Porter explores such stylistic strategies and dichotomies as simplicity vs variety, the power of the kairos and of ekplêxis, and the “logic of excess,” showing how all of these techniques involve an “art of the emotions” in which, as both rhetoricians and philosophers implicitly agreed, artistic skill and organizational power, whether human or divine, lie at the heart of the sublime effect. This book will immediately become required reading for anyone seriously studying ancient stylistics, rhetorical theory, and the history of aesthetics."
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry,... more Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
All parts of Heraclitus' cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs ("bio... more All parts of Heraclitus' cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs ("biomasses") cycle endlessly through physical changes in sweeping patterns ("biorhythms") that are reflected in the dynamic rhythms of Heraclitus' own thought and language. These natural processes are best examined at a more-than-human level that exceeds individuation, stable identity, rational comprehension, and linguistic capture. B62 ("mortals immortals"), one of Heraclitus' most perplexing fragments, models these processes in a spectacular fashion: it describes the imbrication not only of humans and gods but of cosmic masses more generally, and its language mimics the natural relations that it names, or rather intimates through its grammatical and syntactical indeterminacy. The remaining fragments amplify the uncertainties and the exhilarations of Heraclitus' worldview along the same lines. His approach to nature raises urgent questions about how human beings fit into the cosmos, not least by challenging our intuitive conceptions of life and death, our material makeup, and our entanglements with our natural surroundings. In doing so, he provides vital lessons for contemporary ecological awareness, and proves to be an unexpected ally.
In the last three years of his life, Michel Foucault made a sudden and unexpected turn to the anc... more In the last three years of his life, Michel Foucault made a sudden and unexpected turn to the ancient Cynics. In lectures from 1982 to 1984, and most notably in his final Collège de France lectures from 1984 (The Courage of the Truth: The Government of Self and Others II), he sought to recover from the Cynics a potential for critique, militant revolution, and a courageous means of speaking truth to power. Foucault's engaged scholarship is inspiring, but in many respects, it is indistinguishable from conventional scholarly approaches to ancient Cynicism. In both cases, the Cynics are thought to comprise a philosophical movement that is founded on a core of principled commitments, for instance to virtuous selfrestraint, ascetic training, the pursuit of freedom from externalities of all kinds, rationalism, self-mastery, selfsufficiency, individualism, and cosmopolitanism. To reassess Foucault's analysis, I first examine the pitfalls of this picture, which rests on a largely Stoic retrojection. I then offer an alternative reading of the early Cynics, Diogenes first and foremost, that shows them in a different light. In the final part of the article, I return to Foucault to see how he fares once a different framework for understanding the Cynics is put in place. Foucault's effort to view Cynicism
On le sait bien: le renvoi à Kant n'a cessé de nous adresser obstinément à ce qu'il y a de plus m... more On le sait bien: le renvoi à Kant n'a cessé de nous adresser obstinément à ce qu'il y a de plus matinal dans la pensée grecque.
Spanish translation of "Time for Foucault," Foucault Studies 22 (2017).
The essay approaches the... more Spanish translation of "Time for Foucault," Foucault Studies 22 (2017).
The essay approaches the idea of the self as this was most often formulated in antiquity from Heraclitus to Augustinenot as the object of self-fashioning and self-care, but as an irresolvable problem that was a productive if disconcerting source of inquiry. The self is less cultivated than it is "unbounded," less wedded to regimes of truth and discovery than it is exposed, precariously, to crises of identity and coherence in the face of a constantly changing and unfathomable world. The self on this view of it does not conform to the accounts that are given by Foucault, Hadot, or Gill. Readings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Augustine are used to support this first attempt at an alternative picture of the self in antiquity.
You have to begin by analyzing the third person. One speaks, one sees, one dies. There are still ... more You have to begin by analyzing the third person. One speaks, one sees, one dies. There are still subjects, of course-but they're specks dancing in the dust of the visible and permutations in an anonymous babble. The subject's always something derivative. It comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says, what one sees.
Roman Stoicism is typically read as a therapeutic philosophy that is centered around the care of ... more Roman Stoicism is typically read as a therapeutic philosophy that is centered around the care of the self and presented in the form of a self-help manual. Closer examination reveals a less reassuring and more challenging side to the school's teachings, one that provokes ethical re ection at the limits of the self's intactness and coherence. The self is less an object of inquiry than the byproduct of a complex set
Ideas and Idealism in Philosophy, ed. J. Simoniti and G. Kroupa, 2022
Heraclitus is typicallyt houghtt oh aveu sheredi nt he concept of the individual self as asubject... more Heraclitus is typicallyt houghtt oh aveu sheredi nt he concept of the individual self as asubject of experience that is endowedwith the coreattributes of singularity,i ntegrity,m ental and psychological coherence, and autonomous agency.Aclose look at his fragments along with some of the best nineteenthcentury readings of him (Schleiermacher,H egel, and Nietzsche, and then the earlyB runoS nell in theirw ake)p rovides evidence thats uch ac onception of the self was alien to Heraclitus, not because he was ap rimitive thinker,but because he had strong ontologicala nd ethical commitments that led him in ad ifferent direction. Heraclitus did not pave the wayf or the modernl iberal individual, which is how he is usuallyu nderstood. Rather,h ei sb est seen as a forerunner of the new posthumanism in contemporary ecology.
Philostratus' Heroicus betrays an obsession with statues that demands explanation. Just as cult s... more Philostratus' Heroicus betrays an obsession with statues that demands explanation. Just as cult statues of epic heroes litter the contemporary second-century CE landscape, so do they litter Philostratus' text. No story of a hero is distinct from an ecphrasis of that hero's statue, and in practice a request for the one is a request for the other. Lifeless heroes (Protesilaus first and foremost) become vividly 'alive' in the imagination of their devotees and, occasionally, their Zoilean adversaries. As the lines between reality and fantasy blur, Philostratus' critique of material cultural practices accompanies and fortifies his better known Homerkritik. καθαίρονται δ' ἀλλῶς.. .. καὶ τοῖς ἀγάλμασι δὲ τουτέοισιν εὔχονται, οἱκοῖον εἴ τις δόμοισι λεσχηνεύοιτο, οὔ τι γινώσκων θεοὺς οὐδ' ἥρωας οἵτινές εἰσι. They [sc. the Greeks] purify themselves in vain. .. They pray to these statues the way one might converse with houses: they have no clue what gods or even heroes are like. Heraclitus, B5 DK MOMUS: That is why you, Apollo, are no longer in favour; at present, oracles are delivered by every stone and every altar that is drenched with oil and has garlands and can provide itself with a charlatan (γόητος ἀνδρός)of whom there are plenty. Already the statue of Polydamas the athlete heals those who have fevers in Olympia, and the statue of Theagenes does likewise in Thasos; they sacrifice to Hector in Troy and to Protesilaus on the opposite shore, in the Chersonese. Lucian, The Parliament of the Gods 12 (tr. Harmon (1936)) † This essay was first presented at a conference on ecphrasis held at Cambridge University in September 2019, and then at the Langford Family Conference sponsored by the Florida State University in October 2021 and the UC Berkeley Ancient Greek and Roman Studies brown bag colloquium in February 2022. My thanks to the organisers and participants on each occasion, to two anonymous referees for comments that helped me sharpen my arguments, to Lucia Prauscello for her deft editorship, and to
Costelloe, Timothy M., ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present.
Cambridge: Cambridge Unive... more Costelloe, Timothy M., ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 13 + 304 pp ISBN 978-0-521-14367-7; Eck, Caroline van, Stijn Bussels,MaartenDelbeke, Ju¨ rgen Pieters, eds. Translations of the Sublime: The EarlyModern Recep- tion and Dissemination of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Leiden: Brill, 2012. xix + 272 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-22955-6
Roman Stoicism is typically read as a therapeutic philosophy that is centered around the care of ... more Roman Stoicism is typically read as a therapeutic philosophy that is centered around the care of the self and presented in the form of a self-help manual. Closer examination reveals a less reassuring and more challenging side to the school's teachings, one that provokes ethical reflection at the limits of the self's intactness and coherence. The self is less an object of inquiry than the by-product of a complex set of experiences in the face of nature and society and across any number of flashpoints, from one's own or others' beliefs, actions, values, and relationships to the difficulty of sizing up one's place in the universe. The pressures of natural and ethical reflection put intuitive conceptions of the self at considerable risk. The Roman Stoic self proves to be vulnerable, contingent, unbounded, relational, and opaque-in short, a rich matrix of problems that point beyond the individual self and anticipate contemporary critiques of the self. You have to begin by analyzing the third person. One speaks, one sees, one dies. There are still subjects, of course-but they're specks dancing in the dust of the visible and permutations in an anonymous babble. The subject's always something derivative. It comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says, what one sees.
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Homer: The Very Idea considers Homer not as a man, but as a cultural invention nearly as distinctive and important as the poems attributed to him, following the cultural history of an idea and of the obsession that is reborn every time Homer is imagined. Offering novel readings of texts and objects, the book follows the very idea of Homer from his earliest mentions to his most recent imaginings in literature, criticism, philosophy, visual art, and classical archaeology.
"James Porter's The Sublime in Antiquity is a critical tour-de-force and at the same time a rich and open-ended source-book that will delight readers interested in how the Greeks and Romans described and analyzed the experience of being struck, captivated, even overwhelmed by an act of hearing, viewing, or reading – an experience surely familiar to all lovers of Classical literature and art.
The notion of “the sublime” and of a special category of awe-inspiring, transcendent and almost inexpressible greatness, whether encountered in the natural world (mountains, oceans, storms, a divine presence…) or in various forms of artistic production, has been a key element in Western aesthetics at least since the 18th century. Critics such as Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel have been followed by innumerable philosophers and historians of aesthetics, almost all of whom have traced the origin of this notion back to the unknown author (traditionally referred to as “Longinus”) who composed a remarkable rhetorical treatise entitled Peri Hypsous (or in Latin, De Sublimitate), some time between ca. 50 and 300 CE. Longinus’ treatise is thus almost universally regarded as constituting a major break-through in aesthetic thought that really stands alone in Classical antiquity. (M. H. Abrams, for example, in The Mirror and the Lamp, famously zeroed-in on the contrast between “Classical” poetics, as represented by Aristotle and the mainstream, and “Romantic” sensibilities, as adumbrated by Longinus.) James Porter, in his immensely erudite and wide-ranging new book, overturns this standardized history of criticism and offers a new and fascinating account of the multiple ways in which “sublime, wonderful, stupendous” experiences and compositions were recognized and described by a wide range of authors before and after Longinus – from Homer and Pindar, to Empedocles and Lucretius, and even such drily analytical critics as Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Porter’s extensively documented study, exploring numerous poetical and philosophical passages in close detail, makes it clear that Longinus’ treatise in fact comes in the middle, not at the beginning, of such discussions, distinguished more by its style and choice of particular examples than by its conceptual originality. As Porter observes, “The sublime pervades much of antiquity; it has simply been hiding in the light.”
Porter’s book is not simply a negative achievement, however, in its re-positioning of Longinus within literary and aesthetic history. Along with its stimulating and important argument about the “tradition of the sublime” as a concept and an affective experience, the book provides a wonderful assemblage of particular close readings and analyses of individual texts, making new connections both within antiquity itself and between ancient and modern authors. Porter explores such stylistic strategies and dichotomies as simplicity vs variety, the power of the kairos and of ekplêxis, and the “logic of excess,” showing how all of these techniques involve an “art of the emotions” in which, as both rhetoricians and philosophers implicitly agreed, artistic skill and organizational power, whether human or divine, lie at the heart of the sublime effect. This book will immediately become required reading for anyone seriously studying ancient stylistics, rhetorical theory, and the history of aesthetics."
Book Series
Papers
Homer: The Very Idea considers Homer not as a man, but as a cultural invention nearly as distinctive and important as the poems attributed to him, following the cultural history of an idea and of the obsession that is reborn every time Homer is imagined. Offering novel readings of texts and objects, the book follows the very idea of Homer from his earliest mentions to his most recent imaginings in literature, criticism, philosophy, visual art, and classical archaeology.
"James Porter's The Sublime in Antiquity is a critical tour-de-force and at the same time a rich and open-ended source-book that will delight readers interested in how the Greeks and Romans described and analyzed the experience of being struck, captivated, even overwhelmed by an act of hearing, viewing, or reading – an experience surely familiar to all lovers of Classical literature and art.
The notion of “the sublime” and of a special category of awe-inspiring, transcendent and almost inexpressible greatness, whether encountered in the natural world (mountains, oceans, storms, a divine presence…) or in various forms of artistic production, has been a key element in Western aesthetics at least since the 18th century. Critics such as Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel have been followed by innumerable philosophers and historians of aesthetics, almost all of whom have traced the origin of this notion back to the unknown author (traditionally referred to as “Longinus”) who composed a remarkable rhetorical treatise entitled Peri Hypsous (or in Latin, De Sublimitate), some time between ca. 50 and 300 CE. Longinus’ treatise is thus almost universally regarded as constituting a major break-through in aesthetic thought that really stands alone in Classical antiquity. (M. H. Abrams, for example, in The Mirror and the Lamp, famously zeroed-in on the contrast between “Classical” poetics, as represented by Aristotle and the mainstream, and “Romantic” sensibilities, as adumbrated by Longinus.) James Porter, in his immensely erudite and wide-ranging new book, overturns this standardized history of criticism and offers a new and fascinating account of the multiple ways in which “sublime, wonderful, stupendous” experiences and compositions were recognized and described by a wide range of authors before and after Longinus – from Homer and Pindar, to Empedocles and Lucretius, and even such drily analytical critics as Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Porter’s extensively documented study, exploring numerous poetical and philosophical passages in close detail, makes it clear that Longinus’ treatise in fact comes in the middle, not at the beginning, of such discussions, distinguished more by its style and choice of particular examples than by its conceptual originality. As Porter observes, “The sublime pervades much of antiquity; it has simply been hiding in the light.”
Porter’s book is not simply a negative achievement, however, in its re-positioning of Longinus within literary and aesthetic history. Along with its stimulating and important argument about the “tradition of the sublime” as a concept and an affective experience, the book provides a wonderful assemblage of particular close readings and analyses of individual texts, making new connections both within antiquity itself and between ancient and modern authors. Porter explores such stylistic strategies and dichotomies as simplicity vs variety, the power of the kairos and of ekplêxis, and the “logic of excess,” showing how all of these techniques involve an “art of the emotions” in which, as both rhetoricians and philosophers implicitly agreed, artistic skill and organizational power, whether human or divine, lie at the heart of the sublime effect. This book will immediately become required reading for anyone seriously studying ancient stylistics, rhetorical theory, and the history of aesthetics."
The essay approaches the idea of the self as this was most often formulated in antiquity from Heraclitus to Augustinenot as the object of self-fashioning and self-care, but as an irresolvable problem that was a productive if disconcerting source of inquiry. The self is less cultivated than it is "unbounded," less wedded to regimes of truth and discovery than it is exposed, precariously, to crises of identity and coherence in the face of a constantly changing and unfathomable world. The self on this view of it does not conform to the accounts that are given by Foucault, Hadot, or Gill. Readings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Augustine are used to support this first attempt at an alternative picture of the self in antiquity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 13 + 304 pp ISBN
978-0-521-14367-7; Eck, Caroline van, Stijn Bussels,MaartenDelbeke,
Ju¨ rgen Pieters, eds. Translations of the Sublime: The EarlyModern Recep-
tion and Dissemination of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual
Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Leiden: Brill, 2012. xix + 272 pp.
ISBN 978-90-04-22955-6