CAN invites people to take up and use Critical Antiquities (CA) as an approach to help create a collective vision. Provided here are a few publications that articulate and evince CA approaches. The hope is that these publications are generative and enabling above all else, so that more energies will be directed towards the development of frameworks for CA.
This list is not intended to be exclusive or exhaustive. Closer and wider engagement with articulations of the CA agenda are a way of stimulating a field, not capturing it. Additional publications will be added as is appropriate and necessary.
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ForthcomingRead
Tristan Bradshaw, “Human Utility and Refuge: Oedipus’ Politics and Critical Antiquities,” Classical Antiquity.
In this article, Bradshaw offers a careful reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays though a broadly Nietzschean interpretive strategy in the name of Critical Antiquities. In doing so, he conceptualizes two forms of political authority that emerge from the problem of human utility in political community: “Theban utility,” and the “Athenian politics of human utility.” He then seeks to clarify the significance of these modes of utility for political and social actors situated in late modernity. Two strategies are employed to this end. First, he seeks conceptual clarity on each mode of authority displayed in Sophocles’ plays by turning to philosophy. Second, he seeks to identify manifestations of these modes of authority in the modern era by examining some of the recent history of immigration, refugees, and Indigenous politics. He thereby reconceives utility as a resource for the dispossessed to move themselves across boundaries of exclusion.
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ForthcomingRead
Tristan Bradshaw and Ben Brown, “Critical Antiquities and Radical Readings: Ancient Greek Political Thought with and against Marx," in C. Atack (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Political Thought.
As equal co-authors of this handbook chapter, Bradshaw and Brown articulate the Critical Antiquities agenda by asking, "Can, how, and should ancient Greek political thought be used in the present?" To answer this, they consider the way that ancient Greek political thought was taken up by Karl Marx. Contrary to those who, in the twentieth century, took up ancient Greek political thought to critique Marx and especially Marxism, we consider Marx's own use of Aristotle in the 1859 Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy and in Capital, Volume 1. In the end, we attempt to identify and recover promising uses of antiquities in the name of Critical Antiquities. The point is not to produce a hagiography of Marx, but to learn some tools from Marx that render antiquities potent for critiques of the present.
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2025Read
Tom Geue. 2025. "Introduction." Major Corrections: An Intellectual Biography of Sebastiano Timpanaro. Verso.
Sebastiano Timpanaro (1923-2000) was one of the great thinkers of the 20th century left. He combined a lifelong commitment to big-picture transformation with an eye for detail honed in the workshop of classical philology. This book reads Timpanaro's thought in its entirety, showing how the eccentric combination of socialism and philology generated a host of original contributions in many fields, from the philosophy of materialism to the critique of Freud. An implicit argument for critical antiquities runs throughout, tracking the application of Timpanaro's philological thinking beyond itself and towards socialism.