Steven D. Smith: Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 273.)

mothering. The core of Refusal’s Bacchae is the tragic clash of Agave’s relational identities: mother (to the eventually murdered king), daughter (to Cadmus, founder of Thebes), sister, and polis member. Agreeing with Peter Euben, Honig believes “the breaks necessitated by equality tear us apart, rip apart loved ones, and destroy the conjugal and communal bonds we value even though they make us unequal” (13), though equality is clearly worth this sacrifice per Refusal. Tragedy does not mean a wrong choice has been made; it means that pain attends all choices. As Arendt would say, to act is to suffer. Honig’s reading intimates that Agave’s immense grief for Pentheus would differentiate her from Rousseau’s citizen-mother, who cares only for Sparta’s victory after hearing that she has lost all five sons in battle. Her choice to refuse her son-cum-leader’s orders also differentiates Agave from Homer’s Penelope, who obeys Telemachus’s order to be silent before laboring alone to preserve Ithaca’s paternal monarchy. The bacchants’ partial revolution is an enlightenment-esque attempt to displace Thebes’s ancien régime. Whatever admixture of “giddiness and nausea” mighty sorority induces when it slays sons alongside kings, its goal is res publica: a political community meant to guarantee freedom and equality through rights (11). Now that the United States has officially entered its post-Roe reality, Honig’s clarity about feminism’s normative and civic demands rings all the louder. Only in a world without patriarchs could feminist citizenship be claimed without so much bloody sacrifice.