(P.) DUBOIS Democratic Swarms: Ancient Comedy and the Politics of the People. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. xv + 261. £36/$45. 9780226815749.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: This book marks a new era in the scholarship on Aristophanic comedy.It boldly touches upon the relationship between humanistic scholarship and activism and the place that antiquity occupies in the conceptualizations of this relationship.In a political context in which antiquity is often used to enforce the most pernicious ideologies, how can we look to ancient comedy, a profoundly political genre steeped in misogyny, transphobia and racism, to articulate forms of emancipatory thinking?At a time when, in many states in the US, critical theory is in danger of being silenced, Classics is self-servingly presented by some institutions as a code for the safe and apolitical.This is the reason why, as Page duBois suggests in the introduction of her brilliant book, a renewed discussion of the relationship between Classics and critical theory is urgently needed.Comedy is a very complex discursive machine, in which the funny is always implicated with the unfunny, pleasure with pain, release with discomfort.The very dynamic of the joke presupposes an opposition between those who are in the know and those who are not, those who get it and those who do not.There is an in-built structure of exclusion that should inform our presuppositions.While the debate on Aristophanes has long centred the dichotomies of irony and seriousness, escapism and political engagement, the question now seems to be this: given that this is a deeply political corpus, how can we make a case for continuing to read it when we find it disturbing and often not funny at all?An important starting point, for duBois, is a re-evaluation of the anarchic energy located in the swarming, buoyant energy of unruly chorality.In his theorization of the political aesthetics of Blackness, of refusal as a sensory break, an agential cut, Fred Moten coins the word 'choreophonographics', a term that nicely dovetails with duBois' spot-on focus on Deleuzian becoming, on Aristophanic drama's exuberant mobility.I could not agree more (and I hope that many other classicists will, too) on the necessity, in her words, of 'break [ing] Greek comedy out of the scholarly insularity of its study ' and 'challeng[ing] the complacencies of Western liberalism based on ancient models' (x, 186).To do so, duBois calls for a shift of attention from personhood (that is, from the never fully abandoned notion of Aristophanic authoriality) to impersonality, the singular plurality of the Chorus.duBois makes a powerful case for shifting critical emphasis from mockery to laughter as an insurrectionary vibration.In Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (New York (1967), translated form the French 1952 edition), laughter is an act of emancipatory intemperance, of bodily dissolution as escape from the control of the colonial oppressor.The phenomenology of laughter, the choreographics or choreophonographics of laughter, encompasses laughter's vibrations and its indecent gaping at the purely representational.It constitutes the political not as the carnivalesque, or liberal inclusion-as-containment, but as an infinite, unforeseeable force of de-actualization.There is a kind of choreographic swarming even in the languaging of comic language, a rendition of the affective contradictions of laughter.I am particularly taken by duBois' compelling observation that 'we can see, in such contemporary movements as the Yellow Umbrellas, the Sunrise Movement, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter, resistance to defined leadership, to named figures who stand for the
Source: The Journal of Hellenic Studies
Author: Mario Telò
Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4403952247