Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Classical Memories/Modern Identities
Editat de Paul Allen Miller, Mario Telòen Limba Engleză Hardback – 8 iun 2026
Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle explores the concept of the Freudian death drive to interrogate both the ancient past and the present, highlighting how destruction and its remnants resist erasure and shape historical memory. Using Gaza’s rubble as a metaphor for the indestructibility of violence’s material traces, the text connects ancient Greco-Roman culture—from Homer and Sophocles to Ovid and Seneca—with modern figures and events, from Elena Ferrante to the war in Israel and Palestine. The volume engages psychoanalytic theory, queer theory, and feminism to challenge the boundaries of classical studies, arguing that only by confronting the discipline’s entanglement with the pleasure principle and its repressions can classics contribute to understanding the crises of the present and imagining a future distinct from the past.
Contributors:
Karen Bassi, Martin Devecka, Micaela Janan, Hagi Kenaan, Vered Lev Kenaan, Sara Lindheim, Paul Allen Miller, Helen Morales, Jay Oliver, Victoria Rimell, Mario Telò
Contributors:
Karen Bassi, Martin Devecka, Micaela Janan, Hagi Kenaan, Vered Lev Kenaan, Sara Lindheim, Paul Allen Miller, Helen Morales, Jay Oliver, Victoria Rimell, Mario Telò
Preț: 565.36 lei
Preț vechi: 697.97 lei
-19% Precomandă
Puncte Express: 848
Preț estimativ în valută:
100.04€ • 117.31$ • 87.86£
100.04€ • 117.31$ • 87.86£
Carte nepublicată încă
Doresc să fiu notificat când acest titlu va fi disponibil:
Se trimite...
Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76
Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814216156
ISBN-10: 0814216153
Pagini: 232
Ilustrații: 6 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Classical Memories/Modern Identities
ISBN-10: 0814216153
Pagini: 232
Ilustrații: 6 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Classical Memories/Modern Identities
Recenzii
“Finally, a book on Freud and classics that casts the death drive instead of Oedipus in the starring role. Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle is truly standard setting. Brilliant, moving, and insightful.” —Shane Butler, author of The Passions of John Addington Symonds
“Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle questions classics as a discipline wedded to fantasies of origins and reconstructions of pristine urtexts. Contributors unmask the reactionary ideologies that underlie these tropes, making urgent contributions to our despondent and death-driven times.” —Zina Giannopoulou, University of California, Irvine
Notă biografică
Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina and Distinguished Guest Professor of English at Ewha Womans University. He is the author of many books, including most recently Truth and Enjoyment in Cicero: Rhetoric and Philosophy Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Mario Telò is Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published several monographs, including Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy.
Extras
In 1920, Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Inspired by his work with veterans of the First World War, he asked, Why do we continuously repeat traumatic experiences in our dreams? Why do we resist letting go of our most painful shattering moments? Why do the formerly abused reenact the scenes of their abuse on a new generation of victims? Why do the currently abused often return to their abusers, even when offered the possibility of escape? In the world of poetry, as Micaela Janan in her essay in the present volume writes, why does the lover circle the object of their desire “such that the cycling itself, however painfully disappointing, becomes its own obsessional reward?” If, as psychoanalysis had assumed before Freud’s revolutionary intervention, the psyche was governed by the pleasure principle, and in both our conscious lives and our unconscious desires we sought to maximize pleasure (Lust) and to minimize pain (Unlust), then clinical work should be aimed at bringing the pleasure-seeking ego into conformity with its mirror image, the reality principle, which inhibits and limits our desires. In short, according to classical psychoanalysis, the strong, well-adapted psyche is one that both recognizes its desires and acknowledges the material and social limitations that bring pain. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, asks an uncomfortable question: Is this all? Can this really explain the totality of our existence? Is there not another side, a beyond (jenseits) of this incessant calculation?
On one level, Freud had uncovered a fundamental logical problem. If all our behavior is motivated by pleasure, then pleasure in fact explains nothing. The thesis of pleasure as the regulative principle of the psyche is a tautology. To have meaning, the criterion of pleasure requires the possibility of acting according to another, alternative standard, and the reality principle cannot provide that, since its psychic function is to actualize pleasure by making it possible to avoid pain. The grounding assumptions of early psychoanalysis are, in fact, eminently Epicurean.
But on another, far more disturbing level, the positing of a beyond of the pleasure principle, is the supposition that the entire project of ego psychology, of replacing a dark instinctual realm with scientific rationality, is fundamentally impossible or at least radically incomplete. The Great War had destroyed more than the bourgeois dream of a self-confident European civilization, more than the old world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; for Freud it had destroyed the rationalist paradigm that had undergirded the psychoanalytic project up to this point. The various forms of repetition compulsions and negative therapeutic reactions Freud encounters in his work with war veterans and those who survived the devastations of the Spanish flu revealed forms of resistance that in his clinical experience could not be subjected to the ego and its discursive resources. For this reason, though the death drive would be a central part of Freud’s thought till his death in 1939, it was widely rejected by the larger psychoanalytic movement, including by his own daughter, Anna Freud, and such central figures as Ernst Jones. The libidinous impulses of the classical Freudian unconscious might be unsettling to the respectable burgers of prewar Europe, but there remained a fundamental enlightenment optimism at its heart, one that the death drive refused to recognize. For this reason, it had to be rejected as the late excess of a dying old man, suffering from cancer, increasingly prone to wild speculations. As psychoanalytic thought was institutionalized in the Anglo-Saxon world of Great Britain and the United States in the years after the Second World War, it was largely in the sanitized form of a rationalistic clinical practice that could be harmonized with general psychology and psychiatry, one easily brought into conformity with the assumptions of a liberal consumerist society that saw the horrors of fascism, genocide, and totalitarianism as deviations from the norm, anomalies to be corrected, errors in the application of reason, as opposed to revealing fundamental structures of enjoyment, forms of a pleasure beyond pleasure, that could not be simply contrasted with pain, forms of pleasure that could not even recognize themselves as objects of desire but were, as Freud said, “drives.”
On one level, Freud had uncovered a fundamental logical problem. If all our behavior is motivated by pleasure, then pleasure in fact explains nothing. The thesis of pleasure as the regulative principle of the psyche is a tautology. To have meaning, the criterion of pleasure requires the possibility of acting according to another, alternative standard, and the reality principle cannot provide that, since its psychic function is to actualize pleasure by making it possible to avoid pain. The grounding assumptions of early psychoanalysis are, in fact, eminently Epicurean.
But on another, far more disturbing level, the positing of a beyond of the pleasure principle, is the supposition that the entire project of ego psychology, of replacing a dark instinctual realm with scientific rationality, is fundamentally impossible or at least radically incomplete. The Great War had destroyed more than the bourgeois dream of a self-confident European civilization, more than the old world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; for Freud it had destroyed the rationalist paradigm that had undergirded the psychoanalytic project up to this point. The various forms of repetition compulsions and negative therapeutic reactions Freud encounters in his work with war veterans and those who survived the devastations of the Spanish flu revealed forms of resistance that in his clinical experience could not be subjected to the ego and its discursive resources. For this reason, though the death drive would be a central part of Freud’s thought till his death in 1939, it was widely rejected by the larger psychoanalytic movement, including by his own daughter, Anna Freud, and such central figures as Ernst Jones. The libidinous impulses of the classical Freudian unconscious might be unsettling to the respectable burgers of prewar Europe, but there remained a fundamental enlightenment optimism at its heart, one that the death drive refused to recognize. For this reason, it had to be rejected as the late excess of a dying old man, suffering from cancer, increasingly prone to wild speculations. As psychoanalytic thought was institutionalized in the Anglo-Saxon world of Great Britain and the United States in the years after the Second World War, it was largely in the sanitized form of a rationalistic clinical practice that could be harmonized with general psychology and psychiatry, one easily brought into conformity with the assumptions of a liberal consumerist society that saw the horrors of fascism, genocide, and totalitarianism as deviations from the norm, anomalies to be corrected, errors in the application of reason, as opposed to revealing fundamental structures of enjoyment, forms of a pleasure beyond pleasure, that could not be simply contrasted with pain, forms of pleasure that could not even recognize themselves as objects of desire but were, as Freud said, “drives.”
Cuprins
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction “Open Wide”: Receiving the Death Drive
Chapter 1 Thoughts on War and Death: Exercises in Survival and Ethics with Freud and Homer
Chapter 2 History, Aitiology, and the Death Drive
Chapter 3 Infinity, Death, and Enjoyment: Purity at the Limit
Chapter 4 Boar Life: The Culinary Death Drive in Roman Culture
Chapter 5 The End of the Line(s)
Chapter 6 Metamorphoses Book 9 and the Possibility of Opting Out[EZ1]
Chapter 7 Sadomasochism, Mythomania, and the Death Drive in Petronius’s Circe Episode
Chapter 8 Seneca’s Lifedeath
Chapter 9 Leda’s Frantumaglia: Elena Ferrante and the Maternal Death Drive
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
List of Contributors
Index
List of Illustrations
Introduction “Open Wide”: Receiving the Death Drive
Chapter 1 Thoughts on War and Death: Exercises in Survival and Ethics with Freud and Homer
Chapter 2 History, Aitiology, and the Death Drive
Chapter 3 Infinity, Death, and Enjoyment: Purity at the Limit
Chapter 4 Boar Life: The Culinary Death Drive in Roman Culture
Chapter 5 The End of the Line(s)
Chapter 6 Metamorphoses Book 9 and the Possibility of Opting Out[EZ1]
Chapter 7 Sadomasochism, Mythomania, and the Death Drive in Petronius’s Circe Episode
Chapter 8 Seneca’s Lifedeath
Chapter 9 Leda’s Frantumaglia: Elena Ferrante and the Maternal Death Drive
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
List of Contributors
Index
Descriere
Radically rethinking classics, contributors link ancient texts to modern crises and highlight how destruction and its remnants resist erasure and shape historical memory.