Antiquities Beyond Humanism
Emanuela Bianchi, Sara Brill, and Brooke Holmes
Abstract
Countering an unflagging modernist infatuation with the new, Antiquities beyond Humanism maps out the ground for a richer and more sustained encounter with Greco-Roman antiquity, excavating an ante-humanism that nonetheless does not seek any kind of return to a pre-humanist arcadia. The volume arises from a commitment to actively engage the ancient philosophical tradition as a powerful field through which to tackle some of the most urgent questions addressed by the new materialisms and forms of post- and non-humanism. The papers gathered here take up ancient Greek philosophical and literary te ... More
Countering an unflagging modernist infatuation with the new, Antiquities beyond Humanism maps out the ground for a richer and more sustained encounter with Greco-Roman antiquity, excavating an ante-humanism that nonetheless does not seek any kind of return to a pre-humanist arcadia. The volume arises from a commitment to actively engage the ancient philosophical tradition as a powerful field through which to tackle some of the most urgent questions addressed by the new materialisms and forms of post- and non-humanism. The papers gathered here take up ancient Greek philosophical and literary texts as at once live with possibilities for the present and uncannily distant. Collectively, they approach antiquity as neither origin nor telos but as asynchronous or untimely in Nietzsche’s sense. By bringing together a range of international scholars actively working at the intersections of ancient philosophy, literature, continental philosophy, feminist theory, and political theory, the volume opens up new vectors for thinking beyond the human that are informed by and responsive to the contemporary world while proposing a complex set of relationships to the longue durée of Western history, to deep time, and to the profound strangeness and unsettling familiarity of the Greco-Roman world. In this way, the volume resists and displaces the seductions of presentism, scientism, and technological determinism that often limit the horizons of new materialist thinking.
Keywords:
Posthumanism,
humanism,
non-human,
New Materialism,
ancient Greek philosophy,
ancient Greek literature,
critical theory,
biopolitics,
Hellenistic philosophy,
Hellenistic poetry
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198805670 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2019 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805670.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Emanuela Bianchi, editor
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University
Sara Brill, editor
Professor of Philosophy, Fairfield University
Brooke Holmes, editor
Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics, Princeton University
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