Near the end of the third volume of Capital, Marx deploys a telling image to describe the fantasy-world building of commodification, whereby productive powers and social relations are transferred from labor to capital, “and seem to issue from the womb of capital itself.” This trope, in which the womb is figured as both productive and destructive, both natal and mortal, both natural and unnatural, was available already to Aristotle, who used it to examine critically the nature of business expertise and the accrual of interest through the figure of the tokos, both ‘child’ and ‘interest.’ Their shared concern about the nature of money and the psycho-political effects of limitless acquisition and exchange invites a genealogical approach in assessing the possibilities of Marxist critique for a variety of contemporary critical theories. In this paper, I take up the invitation and explore the subterranean conceptual formations connecting an alienated approach to the material conditions of human birth with the dictates of neoliberal global capitalism.

“I’m here!” “I’m here!” The philosophical promise of the ancient myth of “Echo and Narcissus” is inexhaustible, and critical philosophers of the last two centuries have explored some of its most fruitful implications. Perhaps the most famous of these voices is Jacques Derrida, whose early essay, Voice and Phenomenon, can be read as an extended meditation on the myth itself. However, Derrida is not the first philosopher to see a problem in the fact that, to myself, I am hearable from the place that I speak, visible from the place that I see, and touchable from the place that I touch.  There is an echo of Derrida in Merleau-Ponty, who also perceptively explores the delay, hiatus, or spacing between these different vantage-points on necessarily connected experiences.  Echo and Narcissus reveal that, perversely, I myself can never inhabit the double of my speaking and being heard, or my seeing and being seen, at one and the same moment, even though all the promise and risk of meaning and desire emerges from this incapacity to be absolutely present to myself.  My talk explores the critical philosophical implications of the ancient Echo and Narcissus problem in its contemporary rethinking by Merleau-Ponty, whose work is animated by the reversibility of visibility and seeing, and tangibility and touching, no less than the dangerous capacity of his speech to be transformed by its own overhearing. I am particularly interested, however, in the way that these reversibilities always come to be broken and shattered, so that philosophy takes and loses new shape in the breakdown of such reversibility.

In his "On the Concept of History," Walter Benjamin argues that engaging with the past had a radical effect on the present. This was because each time period had a specific material reality of its own and each could disrupt the certainties and oppressions of the other, those systems of power that Benjamin calls "mythic violence" and what I like to call archism. In this talk, I will engage with that framework to consider the claim by the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui that communism lies, not only in the future, but also in the distant past in the form of what he calls "Inca communism." Inca communism was (and remains) a form of societal organization that defied the Incan empire itself—and actually preceded it. It has survived to the present day in the form of the ayllu, deeply organized kinship networks that helped the Indigenous communities of the Andean Highlands to survive the Spanish conquest, genocide, the rise of liberal nation states and now neoliberalism. In some sense the ongoing existence of the ayllu form could be seen as a concrete example of how different historical eras can coexist and disrupt each other. At the same time, the ayllu has not remained static since its inception. The ayllu is as contemporary as archism and it remains as a challenge and also a political and social model that Western leftists might look to to better understand how to resist and even overthrow archist power.

The aim of this talk is to identify and discuss the many things that are happening not only in the dissertation Marx submitted to the University of Jena but also in the extant notes he developed both in preparation for, and in reflection on, this project from around 1839 to 1841.  The basic theme pursued in the dissertation is the distinction between the original form of Greek atomism, represented by Democritus, and its derivative—or, alternatively, completed—form, which is seen to take shape in Epicurus’ writings.  Marx seems to have been drawn to this theme from two primary impulses: an interest in materialism, which would obviously represent a challenge to German idealism in general, and an interest in the predicament of those who are forced to live in the shadow of a totalizing philosopher—after Aristotle in the case of Epicurus, after Hegel in Marx’s own case.  The dissertation and its surrounding notes are, moreover, concerned with many more things, some of which return in Marx’s work in surprising ways.

Plato famously defends the rule of knowledge. Knowledge, for him, is of the good. But what is rule? In this study, Melissa Lane reveals how political office and rule were woven together in Greek vocabulary and practices that both connected and distinguished between rule in general and office as a constitutionally limited kind of rule in particular. In doing so, Lane shows Plato to have been deeply concerned with the roles and relationships between rulers and ruled. Adopting a longstanding Greek expectation that a ruler should serve the good of the ruled, Plato’s major political dialogues—the Republic, the Statesman, and Laws—explore how different kinds of rule might best serve that good. With this book, Lane offers the first account of the clearly marked vocabulary of offices at the heart of all three of these dialogues, explaining how such offices fit within the broader organization and theorizing of rule. Lane argues that taking Plato’s interest in rule and office seriously reveals tyranny as ultimately a kind of anarchy, lacking the order as well as the purpose of rule. When we think of tyranny in this way, we see how Plato invokes rule and office as underpinning freedom and friendship as political values, and how Greek slavery shaped Plato’s account of freedom. Reading Plato both in the Greek context and in dialogue with contemporary thinkers, Lane argues that rule and office belong at the center of Platonic, Greek, and contemporary political thought.

A marginalized but persistent figure of Greek tragedy, Niobe, whose many children were killed by Apollo and Artemis, embodies yet problematizes the philosophically charged dialectics between life and death, mourning and melancholy, animation and inanimation, silence and logos. The essays in Niobes present her as a set of complex figurations, an elusive mythical character but also an overdetermined figure who has long exerted a profound influence on various modes of modern thought, especially in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, psychoanalysis, and politics. As a symbol of both exclusion and resistance, Niobe calls for critical attention at a time of global crisis. 
Reconstructing the dialogues of Phillis Wheatley, G. W. F. Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and others with Niobe as she appears in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Ovid, and the visual arts, a collective of major thinkers—classicists, art historians, and critical theorists—reflect on the space that she can occupy in the humanities today. Inspiring new ways of connecting the classical tradition and ancient tragic discourse with crises and political questions relating to gender, race, and social justice, Niobe insists on living on.

In the final book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pythagoras is provided with a speech that can be read as both the defence of and argument for vegetarianism. There are, however, a number of important delimitations built into the speech that add to its significance. For Pythagoras, eating animals is ‘impious’ (‘nefas’). The position is unequivocal: ‘Refrain from polluting your bodies with such an impious feast’ (Parcite, mortales, dapibus temerare nefandis/corpora!’) The inclusive use of the second person plural imperative ‘parcite’ (refrain from) reenforcing both the coverage as well the urgency of the claim. While the act of killing may be justified if animals menace human life—Ovid even argues that such killings occur without ‘impiety’—it remains the case that animals ‘should not be eaten’ (non epulanda fuerunt). For Ovid, and the claim is a specific one, they should not be killed to be eaten. In order to justify his position he refers to ‘former time’ (vetus .. aetas) in which it was possible to live in ‘peace’ with animals. To the extent that this argument can be sustained, rights-based arguments no longer pertain since human/animal relations can be redescribed in terms of war and therefore the Ovidian legacy is the question of the possibility of living in peace with animals. The aim of the talk therefore is to investigate the extent to which Ovid's Metamorphoses can be used to develop an argument for a relationship with animals structured in terms of peace rather than in terms of rights. While it falls beyond the remit of the talk, what this does is connect the question of the animal to more general philosophical concerns with peace, as for example occurs in Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795).

What has the social, political, and economic organization of human groups been like over the last 5 – 7 million years (i.e., the amount of time since we last shared a common ancestor with our closet great-ape relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos)? In this talk, I explain the types of evidence that are standardly brought to bear in attempting to answer these questions, and give my take on what our current state of knowledge is. I also explain why the answers we provide to these questions are of such fundamental importance to the project of understanding the broader evolution of our species (e.g., our cognitive uniqueness). In particular, I will pay special attention to: (i) the evolution of forager egalitarianism (which contrasts strongly with the dominance hierarchies that govern the lifeways of other primates); and (ii) the evolution of “open” societies amongst forager peoples, that is, groups with (somewhat) fluid social boundaries (which, again, makes for another super salient contrast with lifeways of other primates). Finally, I will explain how these developments transformed the face of human cooperation and cultural evolution.

This paper presents an overview of the interactions between the two arts (technai) which in the ancient world set themselves the task of disciplining the voice, that is, of taking what Plato called the “infinite” material of vocal expression and imposing limits and form upon it. These arts were music (techne mousike) and philology or grammar (techne grammatike). I argue that our view of music is unavoidably clouded by the fact that so much of the evidence about music comes through us through a grammatical filter, and I attempt to identify some of the ways in which philology’s disciplinary biases and self-defining procedures can be seen to inform, and even warp, written evidence for musical practice. As a case study, I treat the history of the debate over the relationship between the pitch accent and melodic contour, a debate which, I argue, is decisively conditioned not by any musical constraint or rule, but by the internal procedures and ideological consequences of the system of grammatical knowledge, above all as these are reflected in the techne grammatike attributed to Dionysius of Thrace and the commentaries which accrued around it.

Nothing seems to be so alien to scholarly activity than nomadic life, i.e. a non-sedentary existence, in constant motion and with an unstable identity, an identity that is not strictly connected to a specific place. Moreover, nomadic culture almost sounds like an oxymoron from a certain perspective: culture is always connected with fixed places and their possible transformations through the ages. But what if classicists adopt a nomadic perspective in order to read ancient Greek and Latin texts? Is there a textuality that can be defined as nomadic? Philosopher Rosi Braidotti discussed and identified a “nomadic theory” that resists dominant neo-liberal concepts of culture by emphasizing alterity, post-human otherness and the relevance of the environment.  In this talk, bearing the title of a book that British writer Bruce Chatwin wanted to write but was not able to accomplish, I launch the hypothesis of a nomadic approach to ancient texts, with the purpose of offering a new perspective on current debates proliferating around the discipline of Classics, its role in contemporary culture, and its uncertain future.

The paradigmatic form of hybris in the Greek sources (consistently with how the concept is conceptualised in modern psychology and business studies) had to do with the self-assertion of the rich and powerful, which resulted in their disrespecting their subordinates in arrogating to themselves claims to respect they were not entitled to. This paper looks at the flipside of this scenario, because hybris, as the arrogating of timē to which one has no right, can also proceed in Greek thought in the opposite direction: from the bottom up. The concept of timē, that is, can accommodate also instances of individuals of subordinate status overstepping the remit of their position in the social hierarchy and arrogating to themselves prerogatives that are reserved for those higher up in the social ladder. While denouncing the hybris of the powerful has egalitarian implications – it defends the right to equal respect (or at least to some respect) of those who are disrespected – denouncing the hybris of the downtrodden towards their superiors is a tool for maintaining and reproducing a social hierarchy by grounding it on an allegedly shared (yet heavily asymmetrical) recognition order.

Wolves once triggered a crucial anxiety in early domesticated human life. It is perhaps no surprise that many pre-modern myths problematize wolves as a fundamental danger, both to flocks, and to the human communities that rely on them. As herds of sheep and goats proved crucial resources for meat, milk, cheese, clothing, and tools, shepherding communities sought protection from such an existential threat. Security, it seems, was once synonymous with protection from wolves. This essay maps some of the origins of that desire for security by tracing the beginning of the concept of police. As I hope to show, the “wolf” is such a crucial character in the dialectic origin story of the police because it provides an exterior force to counteract and develop against. Ancient iterations of police – always included in the security forces of the state – had the maintenance of the boundary of the state as a crucial function. This boundary was both the perimeter of the civil order, and the perimeter of the human world (the human world safe from wolves). I argue that, as police power transforms, so too does the problem of the wolf. From religious figurations of the wolf as evil to bourgeois lessons in moral psychology and the growth of civil administration, the figure of the wolf continues to occupy a significant place in the psychic space of civil society. And, as police develop from a segment of security forces to civil administration and then an independent political institution, the contrast to wolves remains constant. I offer a portrait of a world before police, and the ways that “before” has found itself continuing in justifications of both the constitution of the police as a security force, as well as the continuation and expansion of the powers of that force. Read this way, fear of specific manifestations of disorder (“wolves”) can help explain the beginning of a developmental logic of policing.