Professor Holmes has provided the following abstract:
"In this seminar, I explore how the formation of the modern classicism at the heart of both the academic study of the ancient Greco-Roman world forged in the nineteenth-century German research university and the various appeals to “classical” antiquity in Europe and the US has interacted with concepts of nature and life after 1800. I suggest that while antiquity is often set in opposition to the biopolitics and naturalism of modern science, we can better understand both the culturally assumed valuation of ancient Greece and Rome and modern naturalism by reading them as entangled logics of what is “given.”
1800 plays a pivotal role in the history of academic classicism and heralds new forms of attachment to a classicized (Greek and/or Roman) past as the anchor of new national and imperial identities. It also occupies a central position in Foucault’s account of the modern episteme, both in Les mots et les choses—where the classical order of sympathy is what must fall to yield a new cosmology—and in his late work on biopower, governmentality, and the care of the self. Foucault recognized that his own turn to Greco-Roman antiquity as a heterotopic prehistory to the modern was itself entangled in nineteenth-century valorizations of a pagan past, filtered through Nietzsche. But he did not dissect the formation of classicism itself in its relationship to concepts of life that have long offered refuge from modernity through radical difference while being thoroughly imbricated in the making of modern forms of biopower. I approach the entanglement of classicism and Romantic concepts of life with an eye to the search for non-modern ground as the site of real value.
Real value can also be read as natural value. It is n/Nature that is the missing term in an analysis of modern classicism and vitalism. If vitalism has a non-incidental relationship to “the ancients,” as Georges Canguilhem declared in his analysis of the “three aspects of vitalism” in 1946, so, too, does nature, whose history always begins with the Greeks. But nature can also be used to drive a wedge between antiquity, with its vitalist or “sympathetic” visions of the cosmos, and modernity, in its organization of the cosmos according to strict natural law; that is, the “mononaturalism” identified by Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in their work on Amazonian cosmologies and the structure of nature and culture. At the same time, the Greeks were being recuperated in the nineteenth century as paragons of reason—founders of philosophy and science—within a sea of superstition, precisely through a classicism defined against racialized postclassical decline and the resurgence of “magic” as the failed science of non-modern, non-white peoples.
Rather than align classicism, vitalism, and naturalism, then, I try to map a topology through which we can better grasp how the relationships between these terms have mutually secured the reality of n/Nature, the value of classical antiquity, and the love of life in formations that persist today, requiring urgent interrogation."
"In this seminar, I explore how the formation of the modern classicism at the heart of both the academic study of the ancient Greco-Roman world forged in the nineteenth-century German research university and the various appeals to “classical” antiquity in Europe and the US has interacted with concepts of nature and life after 1800. I suggest that while antiquity is often set in opposition to the biopolitics and naturalism of modern science, we can better understand both the culturally assumed valuation of ancient Greece and Rome and modern naturalism by reading them as entangled logics of what is “given.”
1800 plays a pivotal role in the history of academic classicism and heralds new forms of attachment to a classicized (Greek and/or Roman) past as the anchor of new national and imperial identities. It also occupies a central position in Foucault’s account of the modern episteme, both in Les mots et les choses—where the classical order of sympathy is what must fall to yield a new cosmology—and in his late work on biopower, governmentality, and the care of the self. Foucault recognized that his own turn to Greco-Roman antiquity as a heterotopic prehistory to the modern was itself entangled in nineteenth-century valorizations of a pagan past, filtered through Nietzsche. But he did not dissect the formation of classicism itself in its relationship to concepts of life that have long offered refuge from modernity through radical difference while being thoroughly imbricated in the making of modern forms of biopower. I approach the entanglement of classicism and Romantic concepts of life with an eye to the search for non-modern ground as the site of real value.
Real value can also be read as natural value. It is n/Nature that is the missing term in an analysis of modern classicism and vitalism. If vitalism has a non-incidental relationship to “the ancients,” as Georges Canguilhem declared in his analysis of the “three aspects of vitalism” in 1946, so, too, does nature, whose history always begins with the Greeks. But nature can also be used to drive a wedge between antiquity, with its vitalist or “sympathetic” visions of the cosmos, and modernity, in its organization of the cosmos according to strict natural law; that is, the “mononaturalism” identified by Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in their work on Amazonian cosmologies and the structure of nature and culture. At the same time, the Greeks were being recuperated in the nineteenth century as paragons of reason—founders of philosophy and science—within a sea of superstition, precisely through a classicism defined against racialized postclassical decline and the resurgence of “magic” as the failed science of non-modern, non-white peoples.
Rather than align classicism, vitalism, and naturalism, then, I try to map a topology through which we can better grasp how the relationships between these terms have mutually secured the reality of n/Nature, the value of classical antiquity, and the love of life in formations that persist today, requiring urgent interrogation."