(Mis)counting Catastrophe in Aeschylus’ Persae

IF 0.9 2区 历史学 0 CLASSICS CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Pub Date : 2022-04-01 DOI:10.1525/ca.2022.41.1.91
Ben Radcliffe
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Abstract

This article considers how mourning is configured as a site of political and aesthetic conflict in Aeschylus’ Persae. Aeschylus represents the Persian defeat at Salamis as a catastrophe that unsettles the Persians’ habitual modes of visualizing and quantifying the empire’s population as an ordered whole. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, I show how characters in Persae construct novel representations of the war dead as social collectivities that do not fit into the hierarchical structures of dynastic rule. I focus on two passages that stage this work in granular detail: the Messenger’s list of dead commanders recited soon after he reports the defeat (302–330) and a second list of the dead sung by the Chorus in dialogue with Xerxes (955–1001). Each passage advances a polemical recount of the dead, at once reevaluating the scale of the disaster and reframing how individuals and collectivities destroyed in the war should be mourned and memorialized. The Messenger and Chorus thereby contest the efforts of the royal family to count the losses at Salamis according to the circumscribed terms of imperial administration. By tracing how the memorialization of the dead galvanizes conflicting efforts to count (or miscount) the community as a whole, Persae raises larger questions about the political affordances of aesthetic form.
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埃斯库罗斯笔下的灾难计数
本文探讨了在埃斯库罗斯的《佩尔塞》中,哀悼是如何被配置为一个政治和美学冲突的场所的。埃斯库罗斯将波斯在萨拉米斯的战败描述为一场灾难,这场灾难扰乱了波斯人将帝国人口作为一个有序整体进行可视化和量化的习惯模式。根据雅克·兰齐埃和阿兰·巴迪乌的作品,我展示了佩尔塞笔下的人物是如何将战争亡灵塑造成不符合王朝统治等级结构的社会集体的。我专注于两段详细介绍这部作品的段落:信使在报告失败后不久背诵的死亡指挥官名单(302–330),以及合唱团在与薛西斯的对话中演唱的第二份死亡名单(955–1001)。每一段都对死者进行了激烈的叙述,同时重新评估了灾难的规模,并重新定义了在战争中被摧毁的个人和集体应该如何哀悼和纪念。信使和合唱团因此对王室根据帝国管理的限制条款计算萨拉米斯损失的努力提出质疑。通过追踪对死者的纪念如何激发对整个社区进行计数(或错误计数)的相互冲突的努力,佩尔塞提出了关于美学形式的政治可供性的更大问题。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
1.10
自引率
20.00%
发文量
6
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