Martyn Hudson - Critical Theory and the Classical World

Martyn Hudson

First published 2019

by Routledge

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2019 Martyn Hudson

The right of Martyn Hudson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Names: Hudson, Martyn, author.

Title: Critical theory and the classical world / Martyn Hudson.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. |

Series: Classical and contemporary social theory | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018008445 | ISBN 9781138586970 (hbk) |

ISBN 9780429996467 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Critical theory. | Civilization, Classical. |

EuropeCivilizationClassical influences.

Classification: LCC HM480.H83 2018 | DDC 938dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008445

ISBN: 978-1-138-58697-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-50429-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by codeMantra

This book radically re-examines Europes imaginaries of its origin in the ancient Greek world. Extracting central concepts of critical theory in its widest sense beyond the Frankfurt School like the human, force, spirit and domination, it allies them to characters, mythologies and motifs in ancient thought. Just as the stories of Achilles, Helen and Odysseus have become central to our modes of self-understanding, so we can also examine the roots and routes of the concepts of social theory out of the ancient earth and its myths. An important book for scholars and students of critical theory, social theory, aesthetic theory and the history of the human sciences, it alerts us to the catastrophe that we are facing in the 21st century a catastrophe of domination and ecological collapse that has its origins in the ancient world and the ways in which it began to define a certain sense of humanness. Considering the artistic production of the ancient world in relation to the thought of Adorno, Critical Theory and the Classical World argues that it is only by understanding the persistence of the haunted motifs of the past into the present that we can begin to re-forge our critical theory of society and re-found our social formations on a new basis.

Martyn Hudson is a Lecturer in Art and Design History at Northumbria University, UK, teaching on the Creative and Cultural Management Masters programme. He is the author of The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity, Species and Machines and Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory.

Cover image: Courtesy of Emily Hesse

Series Editor
Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both classical and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it.

The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts.

Titles in this series

Lost in Perfection

Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche

Edited by Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa

Emotions, Everyday Life and Sociology

Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen

Critical Theory and the Classical World

Martyn Hudson

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/sociology/series/ASHSER1383

I would like to thank my friends and collaborators who have contributed to this work and conversation. These include Liv Carder, Ben Reche, P.A. Morbid, Gavin Parry, Neil Jenkings, David Petts, Gwilym Williams, Quentin Lewis, Isabel Lima, Tina Roberts, Sean Milburn, Sarah Tulloch, Benjamin Jeffries, Nick Stone, Rob Airey, Richard Skelton, Tim Shaw, Sean McCusker, Taryn Edmonds, Jessie Joe Jacobs, Eric Lee, Julie Crawshaw, Frances Rowe, Menelaos Gkartzios, Karen Scott, Pete Cookson, James Bloodworth, Darren ONeil, John Bowers, Emmanuel Tzwern, Yael Reicher, Ian Hughes, Grahame Whitfield, David Butler, Venda Pollock, Paul Richter, Ed Wainwright, Julia Heslop, Ian Hunter, Celia Larner, Michele Allen, Eric Cross, Harry Paterson, Alan Johnson, Sacha Ismail, Elinor Morgan, Mick Garratt, Mike Woolley, Rowena Sommerville, Maggie ONeill and Ruth Barker. No part of this work would be possible if it were not for my first teacher of classics, Phil Balmforth a constant inspiration. Neil Jordan and Alice Salt of Routledge have been hugely supportive readers and developers of this project and others. I would like to note the support of the research group I belong to at Northumbria University Visual and Material Cultures and specifically Ysanne Holt. I would also like to acknowledge the importance of the Shefton Museum of Greek Art and Archaeology and the Shefton library collection at the Great North Museum, Newcastle, where I conducted large parts of this study. Many of the ideas here were first rehearsed in conversation with and in partnership with the arts projects of Emily Hesse. I owe a great debt of thanks to her and her co-thinking.

This book is about translation, reception and repetition. It is far less about the original. It is not about the classics or the classical moment and is certainly not a history of events 3000 years ago that a multitude of texts have described, transmuted and reworked. That multitude of texts is a production of 3000 years. Whatever moment or history it attempted to describe at the beginning has long disappeared. No history can be written of the Trojan War, no biography of Achilles. Of course traces of those moments can be found embedded in texts, embodied in statues, buried in the rock of Mycenae. This search for the world of Odysseus is an uncovering of our obsessions and compulsions rather than a search for ancestors or the very moment that Atreus dragged the sons of Thyestes into the sacred grove. Indeed the search for that grove of oak and ilex in the heart of the dead city will retrieve nothing.