Europe Anti-Power: Ressentiment and Exceptionalism in Eu Debate by Michael Loriaux

Author:Michael Loriaux [Loriaux, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317215783
Google: 2bBTDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30536654
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

“More settled” translates bebaioteron ōkoun, “resided more stably.” Thucydides makes frequent use of bebaios, firm, steady, steadfast, sure, or certain – “otiose” (Chapter 5). Bebaios is, with hēsychia, rest, the agonistic other of kinēsis, relentless moving and shifting. As agonistic others, however, neither bebaios nor hēsychia durably prevails. The contest is never “settled.” As cities build walls to dam kinēsis, the construction of walls becomes itself a manifestation of kinēsis. Themistocles builds Athens’ walls in haste, demolishing public buildings for their stone. Pericles dislodges the population of Attica, removing it to protection behind the city walls. While Pericles deploys his strategy, protean forces shift beneath him. Plague strikes “Ethiopia, … [w]‌hence it descends into Egypt and Libya and most of the King’s country,” moving by sea to “the neighborhood of Lemnos and elsewhere.” At Athens “it first attacked the population in the Piraeus,” Athens’ port, walled and fortified by Themistocles, and home to Athens’ formidable armada (2.47–8; emphasis added). In other words, plague invades Athens from the “King’s country,” that is, the Persian Empire, by crossing that same sea that, Pericles boasts, “we have forced … to be the highway of our daring” (2.41). It quickly spreads to all of Athens. The infected population “cannot rest [hēsychazein] or sleep” (2.49), causing Thucydides to indulge in a rare Homeric gloss: “All the birds and beasts that prey upon human bodies either abstained from touching them … or died after tasting them” (2.50).12 The plague convulses the precinct of regulated to-and-fro conduct like an earthquake. “Men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything whether sacred or profane.” Burial rites are “entirely upset” (2.52).13 “Men now did just what they pleased, coolly venturing on what they had formerly done only in a corner … regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. Perseverance in what men called honor was popular with none … fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them” (2.53). Reason, writes Robert Connor, “is overpowered” (Connor 1984, 100).

But, say the Corinthians, there is another plague: Athens, itself. “To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.” They are “addicted to innovation [neōteropoioi, “revolutionary,” as conveyed by the Latin res nova: Chapter 5],” swift in plan and action, “adventurous beyond their power [dynamis], and daring beyond their judgment [gnōmē].” They are “swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from reverse”; “they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got.” They excel, not by their hard-nosed realism – they are, after all, “adventurous beyond their power” – but by making minds spin (Chapter 4). And like the plague, they show no regard for the norms of the common life but treat them with sophistic arrogance. They place themselves outside and above the precinct of the common life. They “are never at home” (1.

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