Agonistic politics, contest, and the Oresteia.

Abstract

Contemporary political theorists, such as William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, and Chantal Mouffe, have adopted the agon from ancient political thought as a critique against liberal theories of pluralism and tolerance. These thinkers view the agon broadly as the institution of contestation and emphasize the beneficial aspects of conflict, strife, and discord for democracy. Despite the adoption of the ancient Greek agon, contemporary agonistic theory exhibits a strange silence towards the ancient roots, experiences, and meanings of the agon. This curious inattention to the ancient understandings and historical contexts of the agon have resulted in a "de-Hellenization" of agonism; contemporary agonistic political theory has stripped the agon of its uniquely Greek-heroic historical characteristics and experiences resulting in an anemic understanding of the place of violence, strife, and contestation in democratic politics. In an effort to re-Hellenize contemporary understandings of agonism I turn to the heroic-epic of Homer's Iliad and the tragic world of Aeschylus' Oresteia. In the Iliad, "The Shield of Achilles" serves as a microcosm of multiple sites of contestation that touch upon all aspects of human life. The shield depicts a world that accepts conflict and discord. Reading the Oresteia as a series of agonistic contests questions the assumptions of agonistic theory that contest leads to a mutual recognition of identities and differences. The Oresteia demonstrates that the challenge of agonistic theory is not to affirm the perpetuity of contests as Honig posits, but to question whether these aggressive tendencies can be controlled and channeled without eradicating differences or limiting the political. By returning to classical conceptions of the agon, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that contemporary agonistic theory displaces the bloody roots of contest and diminishes the propensity for contests to spiral into violence.