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Deserting Achilles reflections onintimacy and disinheritanceKalliopi NikolopoulouPublished online: 19 Aug 2006.

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Kalliopi Nikolopoulou

DESERTING ACHILLES

Reflections on Intimacy and

Disinheritance

This essay addresses the intimate yet distant relationship of the ancients to the modernsthrough a reading of The Iliad. In light of the recent transatlantic and intra-Europeantensions and rifts regarding the idea of the ‘West,’ the essay reads this foundational Westerntext for its treatment of desertion and disobedience. In doing so, I engage critically MichaelNaas’s analysis of the epic, which focuses on the ethical figure of persuasion as obedience,thus relegating Achilles almost exclusively to the realm of hubris. To the contrary, I insiston the importance of Achilles’s dissent for current discussions of justice, redress, andcommunal ‘values’ within the continental philosophical tradition. My arguments arelargely based on the close attention I pay to the poeticity of Achilles’s language, which isdisclosive of a distant intimacy, hence, disclosive in a rather opaque manner.

Keywords Homer; Iliad; ancients and moderns; Michael Naas andphilosophical approaches to Homer; desertion; intimacy; US war in Iraq

‘‘I didn’t think it would turn out this way’’ is the secret epitaph of intimacy.1

A lovers’ quarrel: Ancients and moderns

Reflecting on recent U.S. foreign policy, a New York Times article under the telling title‘A Classicist’s Legacy: New Empire Builders’ identifies the architects of the AmericanEmpire as fervent inheritors of a certain academic classicism: the think tank of theBush administration comprises disciples of the Chicago classicist and politicalphilosopher Leo Strauss, such as Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Gary Schmitt,while the plan to enforce Western values as world values is traced to anotherStraussian, Alan Bloom, and his cultural lamentations over the loss of the classics incontemporary America. The article clarifies that, although Strauss was careful todistinguish between a coercive and a persuasive means of disseminating the classicalideals and to side with the latter, this is not the predominant interpretation of hiswork by some of his intellectual heirs. Strauss’s insistence on persuasion

European Journal of English Studies Vol. 9, No. 3 December 2005, pp. 229 – 250

ISSN 1382-5577 print/ISSN 1744-4243 online ª 2005 Taylor & Francis

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notwithstanding, it is rather evident that his assumption of the universality of Westernvalues, coupled with the philosophical difficulty of delimiting and guaranteeing the linebetween persuasion and coercion,2 can furnish a sufficient basis for the currentconservative model of reading antiquity. The proximity and tension inherent in thelogic of any model – for the model has to be repeated but also rethought, authorisingbut also authorised by the present circumstances that recall it – expose the unsettlingconnection between past and present, putting at stake the question of heritage: forStrauss, antiquity; for the Neo-conservatives, Strauss’s thought; and so on.

Heritage, of course, invites the discussion of intimacy and familiarity, as much as itinvolves the thinking of mutation and mutability, distance and mobility. At stake is theplace the classics occupy for the West in general. To put it in terms of the Freudianuncanny, it is perhaps the fate of the classics to rest dusty on the shelves of culturalmemory and then, during the always inopportune moments when the repressed returns,to wake up from their deathly sleep and rise menacingly at the heart of our present. Butjust as every resurrection still reeks of the foulness of death, so the citation of the classicstoo often carries with it all the sinister traces of oblivion, and all the intermittentviolations committed to keep them in sync with our world. Tranquil and forgotten, orrelevant and contested, their ghosts claim our lives. If, indeed, classic works are enduringbecause they remain close to our concerns, and because they can be mobilised to speak toand for our present, it is also in an unfamiliar manner that they pay their re-visitation,through their poignant refusal to be mobilised and become worldviews.3 Insisting ontheir singularity, they manage to touch us, yet remain always slightly tangential to ourconcerns, present yet missed in our very efforts to put them to use.

How the classics speak to us and how we invoke them – namely, this mobileintimacy forged in the passage of time and through the passing down of texts – is theframing question of this essay. In what follows I take one more look at a celebratedclassic, Homer’s Iliad,4 and the ways it invites as well as eludes contemporary politicalappropriations. In so doing, I risk the same difficulties I have just mentioned – thetensions, distortions, and opacities to which the relationship of past to present isconstantly exposed. Invoking ghosts is always a dangerous thing, and Marx – whomDerrida astutely recognises as the first scholar of hauntology (Derrida, 1994: 10) –should not be underestimated when he warns of the infernal powers that cannot becontrolled once summoned (Marx and Engels, 1998: 41). Hence, even though I amengaging a classic text here self-consciously, in an effort to address its ethico-politicalrelevance as well as the politics of its citation, this warning should apply to my essaywith the same, if not more, weight.

My choice of text is at least twofold. Both in its function as the Ur-text ofWestern cultural inheritance and in its thematics of love and war, glory and desertion,the Iliad lends itself to the figurality of intimate transfers with which this volume isconcerned. Yet, its elevation to the status of an Ur-text serves also to conceal thestrangeness to which, I believe, this work owes both its originary nature and itsenduring ethico-political significance: the Iliad as an epic – that is, as a foundationalnarrative of community and as the inaugural language of belonging in common – turnsfirst and foremost on the experience of disinheritance, parting, and desertion. It is theexperience of being disowned and dishonoured that affords Achilles the peculiarintimacy he has with violence, an unbearable intimacy through which he comes todisclose to the Achaians – as he does to us – the nature of war.

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This brings me to my second reason for engaging the Iliad in the currentdiscussion of intimacy and mobility, which has to do with their specific thematisationin this work. That the cause of the Trojan War was the betrayal of a marriage, that thefall of Troy is sung as Achilles’s act of revenge for the loss of his friend, and thatHector’s fatality is nowhere more manifest but in the tears of his kin, are some of themost obvious instances of intimacy in a text chiefly concerned with war and action.More specifically, the tragic eventualities of the Iliad are precipitated by various kindsof intimate exchanges involving both persons and things: from Helen’s elopement, toAgamemnon’s release of Chryseis and his subsequent usurpation of Briseis, to thecirculation of Achilles’s armour, which marks fatally the bodies that wear it, we cantrace a deadly metonymic chain of transactions. While all these manifestations ofintimacy as displacement are relevant to my analysis, I focus primarily on Achilles as afigure of an ever-changing yet peculiarly hermetic ethos.

In reading Achilles’s desertion and return to battle not simply as a betrayal of anda reintegration into community, I maintain that his ethics is dictated by his intenseexperience of a multiple disinheritance: the mortality he inherits from his father, thebetrayal he suffers from the honour code, but most of all his proximity to theontological void – a proximity exemplified by the knowledge of his fate.Furthermore, I argue that Achilles’s proximity to this void stems from his poeticnature, his inclination toward figure and metaphoricity, which is shown repeatedly inhis speech to the embassy, his reaction to Hephaestus’s shield, and his reception ofPriam. In turn, metaphor, and all figuration in general – insofar as it is a metaphoricaloperation – are themselves language’s gesture of intimacy through transport. Indeed,claiming the importance of metaphor outside the Platonic debate of whether it can orcannot yield knowledge, Timothy Cohen (1978: 8) equates metaphor’s evocativepossibilities with this capacity to foster intimacy: ‘I want to suggest a point inmetaphor which is independent of the question of its cognitivity and which hasnothing to do with its aesthetical character. I think of this point as the achievement ofintimacy.’ In other words, the intimate relation between intimacy and metaphorallows a thinking that circumvents conceptual knowledge. Since neither intimacy normobility can be frozen under the fixity of concepts, Achilles’s intimacy to metaphor –that is, his intimacy to intimacy as transport – emerges as a site of their poetisation.

His painful but glorious destiny as the one who will die young is in factaccentuated through his poetic clinamen. ‘Poetically [he] dwells’ in this world, asHeidegger would say,5 and subsequently, it is this poetic dwelling that metaphorisesthe unspeakable of his fate into a stream of words. Achilles’s metaphoricalpredilections account for his being the most sensitive barometer of the forces of war,the most vulnerable and yet most resilient site of the war’s disclosure. Metaphor,then, not only as motion, but emotion, as that which moves between words andthings and which in moving moves us to tears. Metaphor as intimation and intimacyclaims Achilles precisely because of his ontological abandon, granting him the ethosmost proper to intimacy: infinite distance. For, as Elizabeth Arnould-Bloomfield andSuzanne Pucci also write, intimacy may be ‘the least intimate of concepts,’ and ‘[i]nits heart of hearts, one may find neither closeness and identity, nor secret interiorityand the comforting space of the familiar, but alienation, foreignness, longing, andthe breach of the caesura’ (Arnould-Bloomfield and Pucci 2004: 3). In probingthe question of our (Western) heritage and the issues that continue to move us as we

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re-read these classic texts – these texts that also keep moving away from us bothchronologically and ontologically as they withdraw from our frame of understanding –I want to think precisely in the moment of the caesura.

Intimate revolt/intimate disclosures: menis, desertion,and the turning of turning

The caesura, the in-between, in which intimacy happens as transport and suspensebetween lines, meanings, and beings is inscribed in the very first word of the Iliad, anambiguous word that has provoked many a philological discussion: menis, sometimestranslated as anger, other times as wrath. The poet pleads to the Muse to help him singAchilles’s menis, which, when translated as anger, connotes human anger, but whentranslated as wrath signifies the modality of anger proper to the gods. LeonardMuellner’s philological and cultural analysis of the term begins with a summary of thisdebate over the meaning of menis. Muellner points out that, while the Hellenisticcommentator Aristarchus defined menis as synonymous with another epic word (kotos)meaning persisting anger or rancour, the German lexicographer J. H. H. Schmidt(1996: 2) claims that menis as persisting anger is attributed exclusively to the emotionalstates of the gods. It is, thus, from this in-between space of the all-too-familiar humananger and the inscrutable divine wrath that the Iliad unfolds, and it is in the reading ofsuch intervals that it yields the most remote but powerful truths about the nature of itshero and about the function of the epic as a text of communal origin and destiny.

Hence, I also begin my reading with the hero’s menis and withdrawal in Book 1,and the ways in which some of its ethical consequences have been obscured orinsufficiently addressed in the exegetical tradition. Since I am more interested in thephilosophical, rather than socio-cultural or philological, legacy of the text, I will be,for the most part, focusing on Michael Naas’s Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy.Unlike the tragedies, Homer has rarely received due attention from modernphilosophers, and Naas’s book is unique in its attempt to engage continental thoughtin its reading of the Iliad, while also trying to follow the classicist imperative of being‘faithful’ to the Homeric world.

In contrast to a long interpretive history that reads Achilles’s withdrawal as ahubristic act that disregards community, I propose to read the Iliad as the tale of ahero turned deserter in his effort to foreground ethical questions such as justice,redress, and the viability of the heroic code – all of which are made secondary in thefrenzy of war. In our own time of war, when the West’s idea of itself is threatened byan American understanding of dissent as both cowardly and selfish, this ‘first’ Westernepic opens up the possibility of thinking desertion away from these common-senseassociations with egotism and cowardice. In fact, in her introduction to StanleyLombardo’s translation, Sheila Murnaghan (1997: lviii) observes that the story ofMeleager in Book 9 – a warrior who withdrew from battle because he feltdishonoured – has been construed by several scholars as the prototype for Achilles’sown desertion, thus illustrating how far back and how profoundly the notion ofdesertion may inform the heroic myths.

Still, as I stated above, much of the existing commentary interprets Achilles’swithdrawal from battle as erroneous, while condemning its prolongation as an

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unjustifiable overreaction that perverts the heroic code. This characterisation hasbecome a pedagogical commonplace, as the critical introductions to several majortranslations of the epic, with the notable exception of Murnaghan, adopt a normativeperspective on Achilles’s rage and render his fury the primary – if not sole – ethicaldeterminant of his acts. Bernard Knox (1990: 46, 60), for instance, in hisintroduction to the Fagles translation, speaks of ‘self-absorption’ and ‘self-centeredrage,’ and even presents the Hector – Achilles duel in terms of a dialectic of cultureversus barbarism, in which culture is defeated virtually a priori by brutal force:

The husband and father, the beloved protector of his people, the man who standsfor the civilized values of the rich city, its social and religious institutions, will godown in defeat at the hands of this man who has no family, who in a privatequarrel has caused the death of many of his own fellow soldiers, who now in aprivate quarrel thinks only of revenge, though that revenge, as he well knows, isthe immediate prelude to his own death.

(Knox, 1990: 37)

Translator Richmond Lattimore (1961: 48) acknowledges the reasons behindAchilles’s withdrawal, but critiques Achilles for refusing to return to battle at theembassy’s request.

Despite Michael Naas’s many insightful remarks on the Iliad, his book’soverarching argument relies on this characterisation as well: ‘Separation entails atransgression of the proximity upon which the community depends. By withdrawingfrom battle, by becoming a lover of strife Achilles seems to corrupt the heroic ideal:though he is the manliest of warriors, his withdrawal to the limits of the camp putshim in a typically female position’ (Naas, 1995: 97). There are at least threeimmediate objections to this theorisation of Achilles’s withdrawal.

Firstly, that ‘Separation entails a transgression of the proximity upon which thecommunity depends’ is a dense statement whose very terms beg the question ofcommunity rather than delimit its proper space; thus, it does not by itself disqualifyAchilles’s choice of withdrawal. To the contrary, if the Iliad marks the veryinception of a community, it does so not by assuming an a priori relation whereincommunity depends on proximity but is destroyed by separation, but by lettingthese modes of being manifest themselves in all their interrelations and potentialtransformations. In that case, it is fair to say that transgression is as much arequirement for community as proximity may be a communal chimera. Communitydoes not happen only as proximity and as opposed to separation, but rather in theproximity of a certain separation as well, and out of the generative possibilities oftransgression. Secondly, even if we take into account the many deaths thatAchilles’s withdrawal causes to the Achaian camp, it is hardly the case that the onewho refuses to fight merits the description of being a ‘lover of strife’ any more thanthe ones who are still actively participating in war. Finally, the logic behindAchilles’s corruption of the heroic ideal and his subsequent feminisation appearsrather inverted. Achilles adopts this feminine position in response to the breakdownof the heroic code, and furthermore, I would suggest that this feminisation is notantithetical, but germane to his heroic nature. His effeminacy, as I will show in thenext section, is indistinguishable from his poetic nature, and from this singular

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vulnerability that marks his acts as profoundly different from the typically masculinearisteia of an Aias or a Diomedes.

It seems, then, that Naas is invested in this hubristic portrayal of Achilles in partbecause it incites a discussion on persuasion, the central ethical figure through whichhe reads the Iliad. Naas’s argument, which traces the history of persuasion (what hecalls ‘turning’) as ambivalence – namely, as both compromise and coercion (Naas,1995: 3) – is partial to the eagerness to turn toward persuasion (to turn towardturning), regardless of the guise under which persuasion may appear. One should be‘turned’ whether one is convinced or coerced. This is a reading of obedience, and,hence, for Naas, to avert tragedy one must accept not simply beneficent persuasion,but persuasion as ambivalence (1995: 125 – 26): basically, one must accept it ascoercion. Implicit in this assumption is a peculiar tautology, namely, that thepersuaded stands for the process of persuasion. However, persuasion does not appearwhen its object is already turned. To the contrary, it is the reluctant one who letsturning appear, and in this sense, Achilles is the foremost figure of the Iliad who servesturning.

Nevertheless, Naas, in agreement with much of classical scholarship, readsAchilles’s failure to comply with Agamemnon’s unqualified and unqualifiabledemand,6 as a failure to turn that amounts to hubris. However, unlike much of theclassical scholarship, which would not so easily reduce leadership solely to the elicitingof obedience and which would define hubris as the excess of self, Naas polarises in thepair of Agamemnon – Achilles the absolute right to bend another’s will and theother’s unquestioning obligation to obey. Consequently, in dissenting, Achillescommits hubris not by exceeding the limits of his individuality, but by daring tobehave as an individual over and against the kingliest of kings. This is in line withNaas’s notion that hubris is not simply excessive individuality, but the very valuationof individuality in the first place (Naas, 1995: 33). According to Naas’s understandingof the Homeric values, the rise of individuality forms a terrifying aberration thatpromises to destroy the norm, namely, the collective interest in maintainingcollectivity. Naas is not wrong to appeal to the basic proposition that the archaicGreeks did not have an advanced concept of the self, although his own normativevaluation of the collective remains largely unproblematised; what is strange, however,in his argument is that, in his eagerness to give as complete a list of hubristic examplesas possible, Naas unwittingly undermines the viability of his proposition. In citingnumerous examples of hubris qua self-valuation, his analysis suggests that individualitymight as well have been the ancient norm (1995: 113 – 16), which is more likely thecase, at least among the breed of heroes, as Seth Benardete shows.

In ‘Achilles and the Iliad,’ Benardete elaborates on the epic’s sustained distinctionbetween two types of human existence: anthropoi (the crowd, the undifferentiatedhuman beings) and andres (the heroes). Individuality, he maintains, is gendered – anindividual is either an aner or a gune – and heroic individuality takes on the gender ofaner, the masculine; all others are simply anthropoi. In claiming the status of heroes,‘both the Achaeans and the Trojans not only insist on being men as opposed towomen, but also on being andres as distinct from anthropoi’ (Benardete, 2000: 16). Ifself-valuation is a threat to community, as Naas suggests, it is also the very foundationof the epic as communal text, for excessive individuality is the essence of heroeswhose deeds the epic narrates. Forgetting this has little to do with loyalty to Homer

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and his age and a lot to do with our own irrevocable modernity. In the heroictradition of the epic, community founds itself in its imaginary identification with itsheroes, that is, in its ideality, as opposed to our modern experience, where heroes – ifwe can still call them that – represent the ideals of the community. This is perhaps thereason why Achilles, the heroic ideal, outlasts Agamemnon, the representative ofheroic ideals, in the cultural imagination of the West.

Naas’s negativising of self-valuation as hubris, however, produces an interestingmoment of textual appropriation, thus performing itself a kind of turning: it affordshim a Levinasian ethical reading in the name of being faithful to Homer. Let menote parenthetically that, as Naas’s frequent citation of continental thought andcontemporary theory suggests, he understands this faithfulness in an untraditionalway: despite his earnest attempts to stay philologically close to Homer, theproximity is best achieved at a distance, as Homer comes to Homer viapoststructuralism. Every seminal re-reading performs such a turn away from theoriginal and so comes closer to it. The question remains toward which path theturning takes us, and it is at this crossroads that I find myself diverging from Naas’sreading, for he attributes the discontents of war exclusively to the failure ofunderstanding and surrendering to persuasion at its limit – as blind obedience fromthe perspective of the persuaded, and as a near-synonym for force from theperspective of the one who persuades.

To return to his reading of Achilles, then, Naas does not have to account forAchilles’s response as precisely what it is – an answer to an unjust demand – becausefor Naas, turning toward persuasion is prior to the claim’s content or chronology,involving instead an axiomatic relation to alterity. Thinking of the answer only withina particular ethics of responsibility qua answerability (a point of convergence in thethought of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas), Naas uproots Achilles’s wordsfrom the specificity of their occurrence as always-already posterior to Agamemnon’s,since even the most valiant of warriors speaks ‘after’ Agamemnon – that is, inresponse even when in anticipation. A good example of this always-already derivativeplace is Achilles’s initiative to call the Achaian assembly before his wrath settles in, asignificant act that does not receive full attention (Homer, Trans. 1961: 1.53 – 67).Certainly, Achilles’s summons to discuss the disaster that has befallen their campcould be read antithetically as genuine concern for the welfare of the army anddeference to the legitimacy of collective council, but also as his eagerness to usurp theleadership of Agamemnon. Even in the latter case, however, Achilles is still curiouslyresponding to the absence of the commander who, as it turns out, is the very cause ofthis disaster, which he unwittingly or conveniently neglects to address. What drivesAchilles to speak (up) in this assembly is precisely this secondariness to which herefers repeatedly in his complaint,7 yet the nature of his claim seems to singularlyovershadow the place of his speech. Furthermore, Achilles understands all too wellthe need for the army’s obedience to its commander, and prudently warnsAgamemnon that his improper conduct will go a long way from inspiring obedience(Trans. 1961: 1.150). This may be judged a presumptuous statement on Achilles’spart, but it is neither unrealistic nor inconsistent with the ethics of valour, and it doesshow that, at least rhetorically, Achilles is mindful of the question of obedience evenat the height of his rage; after all, Achilles himself will obey Athena’s advice not to killAgamemnon (Trans. 1961: 1.216 – 17).

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However, even if we were to agree with Naas’s privileging of persuasion as thesalient figure of the epic, Agamemnon’s double refusal of turning at the verybeginning of the Iliad (his turning away from Apollo’s command to return Chryseis toher father, and from Achilles’s claim to respect), serves figuratively to turn the readeraway, as well as to turn him/her off, from the very operations of turning. The epicintroduces turning not as ambivalence, but solely as coercion. Coercion occupies bothpoles of the ambivalence – thus cancelling out the ambivalence – and, in duplicatingitself against gods and men, presents us initially with a perverted mode of persuasion.Consequently, as the turning has turned away from Achilles, Achilles cancels andrepeats the turn by turning away from it. In plain terms, the only mode of beingavailable to him is to thoroughly appropriate his displacement: the warrior turnsdeserter. His withdrawal represents not only the physical limits of the camp and of hismasculinity, but it also exposes the internal corruptibility of the heroic code, and, Iwould say, of any code. So why judge Achilles by the code when it is the code that isput on trial? Yet through his menis, he also turns toward a different kind of turning:not toward persuasion, but toward change – most importantly, toward changing thethinking of turning from obedience to existing values to questioning and revolt.8

This is why in shifting some of the terms of the debate, I wish to look at Achilles’sdesertion not merely as a sign of inflexibility, but as disruption of a specific type ofcommunity – a mercenary army, a community constituted and sustained by virtue ofwar. Moreover, in disrupting a military community, Achilles’s withdrawal could bethought beyond the negatively inflected discussions of hubris, as a productive locusfrom where we can problematise issues such as war, the politics of obedience, and thesuspension of justice.

What if, given the late point in the war at which the Iliad begins, we look atAchilles’s rage not as a cause of impending disasters but as a symptom of precedingones? What if his wrath has been gestating throughout these nine years – as a personalresentment against a pompous and incompetent commander, but also againstsomething larger than the particular misdeeds of Agamemnon – and finally found itsoutlet in a moment of injustice that touched him? And what if Achilles’s nihilism inthe Embassy Book – his conclusion that no act matters – is a knowledge that hasplagued him from a point prior to these events, a knowledge stemming from theterrifying intimation of his fate, which the experience of the war has made ever moreconcrete? Then we could understand the bestiality of his return to battle not simply asexcessive vengefulness, but as the natural conclusion of an ethics of indifference, acatastrophe enabled by this intimate disclosure of fate. For Achilles’s ferocity in Books20 – 23 emerges as the other, darker face of the absolute inactivity he advocates to theAchaian embassy in Book 9. It is because for him to choose between inertia andactivity does not matter at all that at the end activity can reach such devastating limits.Action without fear and pity shares the same indifference and impersonalisation thatoccur during his withdrawal.

In this spirit, I suggest that Achilles’s menis is the long-delayed result ofdisenchantment with the endlessness, futility, and arbitrariness of this war. After all,even his own superhuman exploits were not enough to take Troy in these nine years.That the quarrel is simply the tip of the iceberg is made clear by how early in the epicAchilles questions the purpose and logic of his participation in the war: ‘I for my partdid not come here for the sake of the Trojan / spearmen to fight against them, since

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to me they have done nothing. / . . . but for your sake, / o great shamelessness, wefollowed, to do you favour / you with the dog’s eyes, to win your honour andMenelaus’ from the Trojans’ (Trans. 1961: 1.152 – 60). This is Agamemnon’s andMenelaus’s war, not Achilles’s. Or, if Helen’s elopement is elevated to a reason forwar, why is the usurpation of Briseis degraded to being merely one of Achilles’s pettypersonal problems? The only other hero to recognise these asymmetries is Achilles’sgreat counterpart and victim, Hector, who reproaches Paris for letting others die in awar that is his (Trans. 1961: 6.326 – 29). Hector and Achilles expose the self-servingbasis of the war, and the ways in which individual greed and excess violate the verycodes the war supposedly restores or defends: both the restitution of Menelaus’shonour and the defence of Paris’s amorous adventures are familial problems thatresolve themselves only at the cost of Achilles’s dishonour and the destruction ofmany Trojan families, respectively. War, the celebrated instant of communal gloryand national legend, shows its other face – its intimately private but mad andmurderous frivolity. In a sense, the greatest tragedy of the Iliad lies in the fact that thetwo men who came the closest to exposing this fatal intimacy had to be each other’smortal enemies.

This irrationality does not translate only into the horrifying deaths of enemycombatants Homer depicts so abundantly. Rather, its first and most perniciousmanifestation occurs in the arbitrary exercise of force within the same camp. It occursin Agamemnon’s transgression, which the army silently sanctions out of fear, and inthe resignation that follows Nestor’s futile attempt at conciliation: when all else fails,unity is the best policy. Focusing on the circumstances of this quarrel, we see that atstake is less the question of obedience or unity than the question of justice, the veryquestion that war – by nature – must suspend. Achilles’s shield shows the suspensionof justice during war in its tale of two cities: besides its joyful activities, the city inpeace includes a quarrel similar to the one between Achilles and Agamemnon, whichis contained by due process (Trans. 1961: 18.490 – 508). The city in war precludesany such scene. Thus, Achilles’s insistence on justice as much as the impossibility of itsimplementation in the Achaian camp expose a fundamental problem of war – namely,that justice and war are not commensurate, and that the very idea of a ‘rule of war’may be a contradiction in terms.

Achilles’s wrath against the arbitrary expression of authority insists on theimperative that one ought to attend to matters of justice at precisely that momentwhen one may easily be tempted to circumvent justice and to censor dissent: in timesof threat to national security, domestic unrest, or war, when authority is left to exertits power without check. The fact that Achilles protests over an arguably pettydispute, given the scale of the war, shows all the more the significance of his claim –that regardless of the situation, no event is too small or too big to postpone thequestion of justice. This is why I am not satisfied with readings that commit Achilles tooverreaction. That Achilles’s way of action eventually brought about enormoussuffering is not debatable, but his ferocity does not invalidate the motives of hisdisobedience any more than the massacre at the end of Hamlet invalidates the hero’sethical struggle.

Although Simone Weil’s 1940 essay ‘The Iliad, or The Poem of Force’ treatsAchilles rather cursorily, and at times not satisfactorily, its own timeliness of war anddeath gives it a penetrating insight into the most terrifying truth of Homer, a truth

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that is of central concern for my analysis as well: ‘The true hero, the true subject, thecentre of the Iliad is force’ (nd: 3), Weil begins her essay. ‘Perhaps all men, by thevery act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to whichcircumstance shuts men’s eyes’ (13), she continues, pointing out both the intimacy webear to violence and the ways in which force discloses and destroys a world for us.Force discloses by concealing, by shutting our eyes to the fact that no one is eternallyinvincible and that fortune changes, thus ruining strong and weak alike. Whereas Weilpresents Achilles solely as an arrogant victor, I am interested in him as a figure tornasunder by the proximity of this force that pulls him in opposite directions: as a victorwho has been immersed in the depths of defeat, he learns first-hand of the ficklegames of fate, which he so eloquently describes to Priam in the allegory of Zeus’s urnsof evils and blessings (Trans. 1961: 24.527 – 33).

The force of fate, the intimately proximate yet uncannily foreign nature ofone’s own destiny, taunts Achilles to do the impossible: to choose between twofates, as if fate were an option, as if his fate were not one and the same in beinggiven to him as twofold. Thus, the paradox of Achilles’s hard and hermetic yetmobile and mercurial ethos is due to this movement between the outside of theinside of his destiny (the impossible otherwise of fate presented as possibility), andthe inside of his destiny (the impossible always-already of fate, that which is nevera question of option).9 How to die one’s own proper death: in this tortuousprocess of deciding between two impossibilities, something of human mortality isrevealed to Achilles, something of the nefariousness of the heroic values, andeventually, of any values that unthinkingly become entrenched as the truemeasures of the human. It is this unveiling of values that leads him to revolt andabandon all things ‘valuable,’ that is, all cultural inheritance – kingly authority,the honour code, community, and riches – and to return to war only for whatremains valueless and infinitely personal: the loss of all and of oneself in the sightof the beloved’s corpse. Tragically, this emancipating disclosure of necessitypartakes in the suffering and violence it reveals, so that Achilles can no moreignore and condemn this war than Agamemnon can, who had started it on thesame reason of revenging a loved one.10

Intimacy, then, motivates and punctuates the critical phases of this war, but thedistance between Achilles’s devastation at the death of Patroclus and Agamemnon’sinstrumentalisation of his brother’s dishonour for his own purposes reveals anotherkind of transport, one that happens between text and reader and – more appropriatelyfor the epic genre – between the text and its community. In other words, the chasmthat separates these two heroes metaphorises the originary leap the Iliad takes infounding a national (and a readerly) community, since it identifies communalbelonging with the figure of disinheritance and revolt rather than with therepresentative of communal authority. I believe that it is this leap, this inauguralmetaphor, that moves us too in our readings of the Iliad across the ages, and makes usturn to it at the moments of our crises. Let me, however, make clear that the text’sability to move us should not be confused with sentimental affect, or gushing literaryappreciation for the ‘classics’; instead, what I mean by emotion is a kind of innermobility, a displacement caused by a profound stirring, and the opening-up of thepotential for ontological and political transformation. Staying a little longer, then,with this notion of transport as revealing of both intimacy and displacement, the next

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section discusses the importance of metaphor in Achilles’s language and its relation tothe war’s disclosure.

The intimacy of metaphor in the wasteland of fate

Of all the other characters, even the ones who have earned glory more because oftheir words than their deeds such as Odysseus and Nestor, it is Achilles who claimssome of the most poignant and figuratively eloquent passages of the Iliad. What I haveearlier called his poetic inclination is not limited to linguistic usage, but extends to thepoetic symbolism of his bodily gestures. The examples abound, but I will address theones that show how Achilles’s attachment to figuration is bound up with his proximityto death. Furthermore, these examples, both in anticipation and retroaction, shedlight on Achilles’s enigmatic response to the embassy, which constitutes the centralfocus of this section.

This enigmatic quality is germane to all figuration and, according to Cohen,cultivates intimacy by drawing close the interlocutor and inviting him/her to interpretthe hidden references of the speaker. However, as Cohen (1978: 9) acknowledges,‘The sense of close community results not only from the shared awareness that aspecial invitation has been given and accepted, but also from the awareness that noteveryone could make that offer or take it up.’ Intimacy is open to distance, to missingthe point, and to failing the encounter. This is the case of Achilles, whose figurativelanguage is at once disclosive of his intimacy with that great Other – death – and thedistance that such intimacy requires from other human beings. Consequently,Achilles’s language relates to others by also setting him apart from them, and with theexception of Priam at the conclusion of the Iliad, no audience (and this perhapsincludes ourselves as readers) can really bear the full weight of his words.

Let us start, then, with Achilles’s public announcement of his withdrawal, whichis performative in its execution and figurative in its rhetoric. He swears byAgamemnon’s sceptre: ‘in the name of this sceptre, which never again will bear leafnor / branch, now that it has left behind the cut stump in the mountains, / nor shall itever blossom again, since the bronze blade stripped / bark and leafage, and now atlast the sons of the Achaians / carry it in their hands in state when they administer /the justice of Zeus’ (Trans. 1961: 1.234 – 39). Achilles goes on to anticipate theevents of the embassy, namely, that the Achaians in defeat will come to ask for hishelp to no avail, and then proceeds to throw the sceptre to the ground. With a doublegesture, Achilles both invests and divests the sceptre of its emblematic power. As asymbol of sovereignty and justice, it furnishes the perfect object for an oath, yetAchilles must see the irony of the unjust king who holds it. Instead, it is by Achilles’sown holding of the sceptre that he invests it with the power of the oath, thus makingit temporarily his own emblem of sovereignty rather than Agamemnon’s; hence,when he lets go of it, it becomes an object of his disdain, thrown to the ground for itsowner to retrieve.

In addition to the ritualistic derision of Agamemnon, Achilles’s seemingly literaldescription of the manufacturing of the sceptre encodes several figurative possibilities.The description insists on the deadness of the object, since human industrytransformed it permanently from the once-lively wood that was its raw material. This

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impossibility to grow foliage may be metaphorical of the sterile authoritarian rule thissceptre now represents, but also of the steadfastness of Achilles’s own decision. In thelarger context of the epic, however, the almost elegiac description of what will be nomore, with its image of the tree stumps, anticipates the many Homeric similescomparing the young dead warriors to trees that were cut too early, filling thebattlefield with the stumps of their dismembered bodies. Achilles’s departureliteralises in the description of the sceptre the figures of disfiguration that will ensue.

One such description of disfiguration is Achilles’s own in Book 18, upon learningthe news of Patroclus’s death. Once again, we are presented with a ritualistic scene,in which the body and gestures of Achilles become themselves the sites of a figure inHomer’s words:

He spoke, and the black cloud of sorrow closed on Achilleus.In both hands he caught up the grimy dust, and poured itover his head and face, and fouled his handsome countenance,and the black ashes were scattered over his immortal tunic.And he himself, mightily in his might, in the dust lay at length, andtook and tore at his hair with his hands, and defiled it.

(Trans. 1961: 18.22 – 27)

This description verges on ekphrasis11 and, risking the anachronism, I would say thatAchilles’s image jumps out of a classic Attic lekythos for the cult of the dead.12 In hisexcessive and prolonged lamentation about Patroclus, during which he also mournshis own death avant la lettre, Achilles looks more like a Maenad than a devastated man.The scene emphasises his effeminacy, since Briseis mourns Patroclus in a strikinglysimilar manner, shrieking and tearing at her breasts, throat, and face (Trans. 1961:19.282 – 85).

This effeminacy is actually part and parcel of Achilles’s poetic nature. It will takeseveral more centuries for Plato to consolidate and demonise this relationshipbetween femininity and art. Plato, who excised metaphor and art from the realm oftruth, did so precisely on the grounds of another metaphor – the resemblance heperceived between poets, women, magicians, and madmen, all of who share aproneness to irrational emotions and, in particular, to excessive mourning (Plato,Trans. 1961: 3.388a, 10.827d). Thus, in the figure of Homer, he dismissed poeticknowledge. Now Homer’s knowledge as the knowledge of art is itself exemplified inthe Iliad by Achilles’s knowledge, a knowledge driven by and inspiring divine terror.This is shown most manifestly in the hero’s response to Hephaestus’s shield, whichcauses all the Myrmidons to avert their eyes in fear and trembling. Achilles looks at ithead-on, as if he is reading in its intricacies its sublime allegory, recognising it was hisdestiny to fulfil its terrible truth (Trans. 1961: 19.14 – 17). He is transfixed andtransformed at the sight of the shield. Contrast Odysseus’s treatment of the Sirens toAchilles’s captivation, and two models of humanity emerge: a man who survives awork of art, and a man who is consumed by it.

Indeed, it should be noted, as our point of entry to the embassy episode, thatwhen the mission arrives at Achilles’s tent, they find him playing the lyre and singingverses (Trans. 1961: 9.186 – 89). It is Achilles the bard as much as Achilles thewarrior that they have come to meet. If we look at the later iconographic tradition,

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which draws from the tragic rather than epic portrayals of Achilles, we find a visualsign of his feminisation as well, in the mantle that he wears. Achilles’s immobility inBook 9, which removes him from the sphere of heroic action, translates visually into acloak that covers him from public visibility, as opposed to the nudity that marksheroic masculinity. Pantelis Michelakis (2002: 37) maintains that, althoughconcealment is associated with people of inferior status, the shroud of Achilleschallenges the articulation of authority. I also think that Achilles’s hiddenness, whichNaas had disparaged for its effeminacy, reveals something other than impotence: itturns Achilles into a sign, a riddle, the figuration of figure itself, where his shroudliteralises the veil of metaphor that needs to be lifted before we can arrive at meaning.In Cohen’s vocabulary of the metaphor’s invitation to intimacy, the shrouded Achillesextends a ‘concealed invitation’ to whomever wants to accept it and engage in theintimacy of the unveiling (Cohen, 1978: 8). It is not a coincidence that Achilles isportrayed in the Iliad not only as a warlike creature, but also as one who invites, thegatherer of assemblies, the master of ceremonies, and a fine host to both friends andenemies. In Book 9, he offers the embassy a generous banquet, but to its pragmaticconcerns he responds with metaphor’s open-ended requirement: that the listeners bemoved by language, and wish to be transported into its space.

His response to Odysseus’s plea starts with a simile that ought to have struck asorrowful chord if the embassy considered Achilles’s battle with his twofold fate: ‘Foras I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man,’ he says of Agamemnon (Trans.1961: 9.312). This is obviously excessive hate and no single person deserves or isworth such hate, but Agamemnon functions rather symbolically. By dishonouringAchilles, Agamemnon targets Achilles’s symbolic heel, pointing to him a much deepervulnerability and limitation: his finitude. Speaking of his suffering in affectivelanguage, Achilles continues with an extended simile that announces his effeminacyboth as fierceness and privation, by comparing himself to a mother bird, who sacrificesher food for her nestlings the way he sacrificed his happiness for other men’s honour(Trans. 1961: 9.323 – 27). Achilles resorts neither to logic – though his critique ofAgamemnon does not lack in argumentative structure – nor to pragmatic plans, butcontemplation of his experience, which can only be intimated, not dictated, thusremaining always open to not being heard. Seen from this perspective, the Iliad ismuch less about Achilles’s recalcitrance to being persuaded, and much more about acertain lack of receptivity to this invitation of the figure.

Poetry, art, or metaphor are some of the names for this figure through whichAchilles intimates his knowledge of ontological suffering, a knowledge to which notonly Agamemnon and his embassy, but much of contemporary scholarship aswell, remain resistant. For instance, in his commentary on Book 9, Jasper Griffin(1995: 22) speaks of the simultaneous stubbornness and wavering of Achilles, butbypasses altogether Achilles’s reflection on destiny. Donna Wilson (2002: 77)interprets Achilles’s responses as clever appropriations of the embassy’s rhetoric toexpose its complicity with Agamemnon who, in offering gifts as ransom and notrecompense, refuses to acknowledge the harm he has inflicted on Achilles. LikeGriffin, she too overlooks Achilles’s reasoning of his refusal not in terms of theinadequacy of the gifts, but in terms of a profound indecision regarding fate.

In a notable contrast, the one classical scholar to be attuned to Achilles’s languageis Adam Parry. For Parry, Achilles is disillusioned in discovering the gap between

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appearance (the embassy’s pretences) and reality (Agamemnon’s hostility), a gapwhich must have reminded him of the initial quarrel: there Achilles first saw the falsityof an incompetent man appearing in the full apparel of authority. The embassy’srhetoric reiterates the cleavage at the very moment that it purports to heal dissent. Bynow, however, Achilles’s disillusionment is emptied of any specific contents and takeson a tone that I would call existential. Achilles realises the infinitude of this gapbetween being and seeming and the finitude of one’s choice when confronted with it;he also realises that only death closes the chasm. Parry (1989: 6 – 7) observes that thisimpossibility is inscribed within the structure of Achilles’s language: ‘Achilles has nolanguage with which to express his disillusionment. Yet he expresses it, and in aremarkable way. He does it by misusing the language he disposes of. He asks questionsthat cannot be answered and makes demands that cannot be met.’ Misusing andcatachresis are of course linguistic figures, and I would say that Achilles is for Homer ahole in language, the place where language falters, and in faltering, also names.

Despite its emphasis on the impossibility of human agency in the face of mortality,Book 9 is also frequently read as ‘the choice of Achilles.’ Susanne Lindgren Wofford’sbook with the same title acknowledges to a degree Achilles’s critique of the heroiccode, but treats his predicament in terms of choice: ‘Achilles speaks here [in Book 9]as if he still has a choice before him, but the events of the poem and his own responsesto the embassy suggest that he has already chosen the heroic way’ (Wofford, 1992: 4).I disagree with the discourse of choice altogether, let alone the certainty with whichAchilles is portrayed as having already chosen the heroic way. Achilles may end up ahero, and the fact that he does not opt for the alternate choice implies and contributesto this result, but in fact, his remaining near Troy does not signify that he has chosenthe war. To the contrary, at a certain point in the episode Achilles is closer to movingback to Phthia than to re-entering the war, and he explicitly urges all soldiers toreturn home (Trans. 1961: 9.417 – 18). His subsequent rejoining of the war is not amoment of choice qua conscious and rational decision-making; rather, it is a peculiarform of action that, as I suggested earlier, is enabled by Achilles’s ethics ofindifference and inaction laid out right here in Book 9. For Achilles’s war crimes donot follow a reasoned decision, but a terrifying necessity. Out of a sheer impulse ofvengeance, he imparts to others the death that has been imparted to him all along, andthat in Book 9 he recognised to be everyone’s common destiny. Achilles’sdisillusionment in the embassy incident articulates a profound terror, namely, thatchoosing the way to our destiny is just another grand illusion – a ruse mortals createto bear the weight of death. Heroism, then, is the narrative we imagine to justify adeath just as unjustifiable and accidental as any other. War is the exemplary place tounderstand and to exercise this supreme arbitrariness.

That the passivity and indifference of the embassy scene explain his atrocitiestoward the end of the epic is evidenced in his answer to Lykaon’s supplication to sparehim his life. Achilles’s devastating response translates the meditation of Book 9into action, in a fatal interpersonal encounter, in which one’s own and the other’slife – regardless of status and beyond any justification – are reduced to nothingness:‘So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it? / Patroklos also is dead, whowas better by far than you are. / Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, howsplendid / and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal? / Yeteven I have also my death’ (Trans. 1961: 21.106 – 10). How uncannily close this

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sounds to Achilles’s words to the embassy: ‘Fate is the same for the man who holdsback, the same if he fights hard. / We are all held in a single honour, the brave withthe weaklings. / A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much’(Trans. 1961: 9.318 – 20). The model of glory as immortality for the mortals, whichfounds and motivates the epic, is thus deconstructed. Achilles has come up againstthe finitude of choice and decides to remain inactive, suspended, liminal. We are notfree to be born and we are not free to die either. So he refuses to choose. His refusalis matched nearly two millennia later by Mallarme’s Igitur who, passivelycontemplating his suicide by throwing the dice, ultimately refuses even the act ofthrowing itself.

Well before Igitur and Hamlet, Achilles understood that determination andchance are two faces of the same unfreedom, and that the only choice is non-choice.Thus finally, in his answer to Aias, he decides for the undecidable, which is not quitethe same as choosing. He will stay where he is, but he will not enter the war until hiscamp is under threat. Of course, such a decision can be construed as an implicitchoice of the heroic way. The angry and self-indulgent Achilles wants to be thespectator of the Achaian decimation, while leaving the door open to enter the war andwin glory. I take his staying more literally. He stays, because to be stationary is to notcapitulate to either pole of his twofold destiny, to not play into the ‘either-or.’ Heremains in the vicinity of Troy because this is the only place of immobility. Neitherback to Phthia nor in the war, Achilles decides to remain where he is – namely, therewhere he is not, in a place that makes of him both an inactive warrior and a lifelesseveryman. Achilles decides that he cannot choose because he understands the tragedyof being chosen.

The remains of a night: irreconcilability and theintimacy of distance

No matter how unilateral Achilles’s actions may seem, I do not believe that theremedy to his excessive individuality is to be sought unproblematically in a model ofpersuasion such as Naas’s, which valorises turning exclusively as unconditionalyielding to collectivity and command. Turning’s productive possibilities are notexhausted in the turning-toward, but may be extended to the turning-against, theturning-back, the turning-away, and so forth. It is true that Naas’s deconstruction ofthe binary persuasion/coercion, which concludes that at the limit one must acceptpersuasion as coercion, is often articulated in terms of the larger ethical need to avoidtragedy. Despite the fact that I too wish to see a world free of injustice and suffering,the question remains not only of whether this is ontologically and politically possible –for I do agree that ethical vision must start from the impossible – but of whether anon-tragic world would yield another type of tragedy: a world devoid of pain andsuffering may be paradoxically as inhuman as is this world, where injustice and painoften reign supreme.

Since this is not the place to address in-depth the inevitability of tragedy for thehuman, it would suffice to say that reading the Iliad normatively, in order to avoidtragedy, entails a certain forgetting. It forgets that the truth of the Iliad is the truth ofterror, not only of war, but of art as well – emblazoned together on the surface of the

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shield; it tells us that perhaps choice is not up to us alone, since we are not endowedwith that subtle antenna that reasonably distinguishes between the indignities ofcoercion and the ruins of war, helping us endure more readily the former than falleasily into the latter. Following Weil, I think that the nakedness of the war’s force, asit is portrayed in the Iliad, discloses to us that no force is better than another for theone who is forced upon, for the one who feels upon his/her body the weight of itsimpact. Then, no force is less tragic than another, since tragedy cannot be reduced tobody counts or to an objective calculation of the experience of suffering. Surrenderingto coercion as such marks a tragic moment, a false reconciliation carrying within itselfindelible the trace of iniquity. While Naas is correct to expose the force thatcontaminates discursive persuasion, I wonder where his analysis would have led if ithad stayed suspended at this moment of deconstruction instead of reinstatingobedience to coercion as the repressed term of persuasion. After all, it seems to methat obedience has long enjoyed the status of a dominant cultural value, and is in noimmediate need of ethical or political reinstatement, not even as a means to a betterend, such as the avoidance of tragedy. Thus, we have come full circle with theStraussian problematic and the current state of affairs, with which this essay began.

Today the figure of Achilles would be the figure of treason, of the one whotransgressed collective unity and mocked its self-empowering motto of belonging, theubiquitous ‘United We Stand’ – the U.S.’s popular slogan about the war in Iraq.Thinking through Achilles’s intransigence vis-a-vis the question of belonging that theepic by nature raises, I wonder whether it is not precisely this ‘United-We-Stand’ thata narrative of obedience such as Naas’s always risks legitimising, thus falling intoanother form of identity even in its wish to preserve alterity. (We must keep in mindthat Naas comes to Homer through Levinas and an ethics of alterity). Reading withbut also away from Naas, I ask this question concerning alterity: must Achilles’sseparateness be read necessarily as an exclusion of alterity? By way of concluding theseremarks on the relation between belonging and desertion, intimacy and distance in theIliad and in our responses to it, I will look at Achilles’s withdrawal from one lastangle, to show the way his distance allows for the most genuine proximity to theother as it transpires in his hosting of Priam.

First of all, let me stress that sitting alone is the mark of Achilles’s spectralexistence, the otherness that testifies to his quasi-divine nature and that places himconstantly apart from others and himself, since by staying inactive, he is also besidehimself and his essence as a warrior. To ‘lay apart,’ a recurrent Homeric charac-terisation of Achilles, means to belong in not-belonging, to be an individual in thesense of being (in)divisible. The son of a goddess and a mortal, Achilles is infinitelyindivisible, not because of his self-mastery, but because he is also already infinitelydivided from his immediate community of fellow warriors, and more generally, fromhumans and gods alike.

This is exactly the accusation Patroclus mounts against him, scandalised byAchilles’s indifference to the Achaian massacre. Patroclus attempts to move Achillesby calling him an offspring of the rocks, the child of something immobile and inhumanthat does not partake of the agony of birth. In so doing, however, he also alludes toAchilles’s being a kind of orphan, a man disinherited by birth, born of the elements(Thetis is a goddess of the sea) rather than of human labour: ‘May no such anger takeme as this that you cherish! / Cursed courage. What other man born hereafter shall be

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advantaged / unless you beat aside from the Argives this shameful destruction? /Pitiless: the rider Peleus was never your father / nor Thetis was your mother, but itwas the grey sea that bore you / and the towering rocks, so sheer the heart in you isturned from us’ (Trans. 1961: 16.30 – 35). Achilles’s turning away is given elementalbeginnings. With no finite genealogy in place, one can hardly speak of origins when itcomes to the ocean and the rocks. Achilles emerges as the locus of a primevalloneliness and deracination at the same time that he is most firmly rooted in hisunwavering position like a towering rock.

This sense of aloneness is often interpreted as the betrayal of community, whilehis double return – the return to battle and his return of Hector’s body – are read asmoments of gradual reconciliation. It is, of course, easy to see why the first of thesereturns is not entirely recuperable within a discourse of community. Achilles returnsto battle because of his desire to revenge Patroclus, not because of his sympathy forthe Achaians, or his reconciliation with Agamemnon. Naas (1995: 67) correctly statesthat Achilles’s return to war ‘does not mean that he has rejoined the world of oathsand covenants.’

However, even the second return, celebrated as Achilles’s ultimate reinstatementwithin community, is more complicated. In its tone of extremity and ex-centricity,the meeting with Priam repeats key elements from the scene of Achilles’s withdrawal.Without compromising Achilles’s generosity, this scene shows him as the ever-unyielding character that he was: he has covered a great distance somehow withoutever moving from his spot. Consider the following moment: When Priam presses himto return the body as quickly as possible, Achilles admits that he received a divinemandate to return the corpse, but reserves for himself the sovereign right to threatenthe old king if further provoked: ‘you must no further make my spirit move in mysorrows, / for fear, old sir, I might not let you alone in my shelter, / suppliant as youare; and be guilty before the gods’ orders’ (Trans. 1961: 24.568 – 70). Priam is toldto keep his distance, and to heed this peculiar space of immobility from which aloneAchilles yields.

In addition to this explicit threat, the overall atmosphere of Book 24 is inflectedby Achilles’s introspection. Indeed, Priam’s supplication happens under the sign ofAchilles’s personal destiny, because Achilles – much like a later tragic heroine,Antigone – is an expert in turning the political into the private. Achilles’s tears inBook 1 summon Thetis who, for the first time in the Iliad, mentions Achilles’s fate:‘Now it has befallen that your life must be brief and bitter / beyond all men’s. To abad destiny I bore you in my chambers’ (Trans. 1961: 1.417 – 18). In this final scene,bathed again in tears, Achilles speaks of his untimely fate (Trans. 1961: 24.540). Aswe have already discussed, the knowledge of his fate in its tragic proximity motivateshis attitude toward the embassy as well, and is the force that constantly turns himtoward himself, but toward himself not as presence, but as absence and death.

Weil detects the introverted, self-absorbed mood of Achilles, but denounces it asthe haughtiness of the victor vis-a-vis the vanquished (nd: 7).13 She maintains thatalthough Priam moves Achilles to tears, it is his father that Achilles mourns, forgettinghis suppliant as if he were not there at all. But Achilles is not just any victor; he is aman on the verge of death, and in turning to himself he also turns toward thatterrifying alterity. Hence, Achilles’s introspection is not exhausted in his self-motivated sorrow for Peleus. It goes deeper to become a turn toward sorrow per se

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and absence: the sorrow for any father bereft of his sons, including Priam; the sorrowfor the young friend who died, Patroclus, and for any slain youth, Hector too; thesorrow of death, of his own impending death; the sorrow of what is no more: ‘I sithere in Troy, and bring nothing but sorrow to you and your children’ (Trans. 1961:24.542). The truth of this scene lies in the fact that neither Priam nor Achilles ispresent, and this is why they are both fully there. Theirs is a meeting between twoabsences, but the emptying out happens after a delving within. Consequently,Achilles’s magnanimity with Priam is not based on sociality, but on a paradoxical formof sharing – the sharing of an unbearable loneliness, non-belonging, anddisinheritance. Naas astutely remarks that, unlike the embassy’s material gifts, Priamoffers the gift of absence to Achilles and this is why it is he, and not the embassy, thatwins Achilles over: ‘Only the gifts of Priam, which carry within them, in the darknessof the night, the traces of an absence, the giving of giving, honor and excellence, willturn and persuade Achilles’ (Naas, 1995: 152). The reverse, however, is also true.Achilles elicits Priam’s respect, and even his acceptance after the slaughters hecommitted, because Achilles’s gift is not only the literal gift of death – Hector’scorpse – but also a gift of absence and destitution exemplified by the time he devotesto mourn alone together. In this final scene of hospitality, the lone deserter meets thedeserted who dares to come, equally alone, and claim his loss. Priam, the destitutefather, comes to be there where Achilles, the abandoned son, once was.

It is, therefore, my claim that the trajectory of Achilles’s character travels notaway from but toward this initial desertion, because this desertion has deeper rootsthan simply the isolated bellicose encounter with Agamemnon at the beginning of thestory. In other words, Achilles’s is not a desertion from this particular battle, butthe other way around: the battle is only a pretext, a site upon which Achilles performsthe ontological drama of abandonment. The reconciliation with Priam is, then, not areconciliation that opens up to redemption (the war will continue after Hector’sburial), but an interruption of what remains fundamentally irreconcilable andirresolvable: the violence of a war that cannot be sanitised by resorting to corruptiblecodes, temporary treatises, broken oaths, and rituals of despair, but calls us instead toconfront it as it is and bear what it reveals.

As war, war crimes, nationalism, and breaches in the justice system are not goingto disappear any time soon from our experience, and as the Iliad marks for the Westan enduring place where these questions are rehearsed, I wished to read Achilles in away that could point to a thinking of desertion outside the usual connotations ofirresponsibility, egocentricity, and cowardice. Achilles is a hero not despite butbecause of his desertion and disobedience, because of his capacity to transform thequestion of justice in Book 1 into a courageous acceptance of fate in Book 9, and inseeing the impossibility of such a thing as choice, act in accordance with his destinyuntil the end. Furthermore, Achilles’s is a desertion that springs from this particularintimacy he has with the abyssal and from the distance this intimacy imposes – aparadox we have seen imprinted in his figurative language that both invites andalienates its audience. This is why my title should also be read both ways, literally andmetaphorically: as an adjective qualifying the action of Achilles, and as a presentparticiple in which we, readers of the Iliad must commit some act of desertion inorder to approach this text, not simply because of its distant antiquity, but in order tobe able to face – to not turn away from – the brutal honesty of this character; in order

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to let him persuade us that ‘We are all held in a single honour, the brave with theweaklings’ (Homer, Trans. 1961: 9.319).

This is, then, the strange trick the classics play on us: in our wish to mobilisethem as parts of an agenda, ‘raise’ them to cultural values, and claim them as ‘our’inheritance, we also participate in the process of their forgetting. Yet, it is preciselythrough this forgetting that they also return in us, as we imitate gestures from theirworld we would rather dispose of. So it goes too with the Iliad. In making the Iliad atext of (and about) communal belonging – regardless of the specific politics ofwhichever community claims it – we must forgo or forget the leap the epic takes inoriginating community. We forgo this moment of desertion and separation that isconstitutive of community for a more ‘patriotic,’ idealised reading, thus repeatingunwittingly Achilles’s most feared move: a turning away, not from battle anymore,but from the truth of the text itself. Yet, as a deserted text, uncannily, the Iliadcontinues to forge communities of reading that restage, in some way or another, itsdeeply intimate moment of shared disinheritance.

Notes

1 From Lauren Berlant’s (1998: 281) introduction to a special edition on intimacy inCritical Inquiry.

2 The difficulty of delimiting persuasion and coercion also constitutes the centralproblematic of Michael Naas’s reading of The Iliad, particularly in regards toAchilles’s refusal to be persuaded and return to battle.

3 In his Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger (1999: 26) speaks of the emergence ofworldviews as restrictive of both experience and genuine thinking: ‘The worldviewarranges the experience in a certain direction and into its range – always only so farthat the worldview is never put into question.’ In abandoning inceptual, that is,originary thinking for a packaged understanding, worldviews mobilise ideas insteadof sustaining the ‘abground [abyssal] character of what is creative’ (1999: 28). TheHeideggerian inflection of this discussion is intended given the relevance ofHeidegger’s own philosophical concerns about the relation of the ancients to themoderns with respect to the question of Being, and thus, to our history. But evenmore specifically, Heidegger’s critique of this instrumentalising mode of reception,which is in fact devoid of any receptivity, proves crucial for my attempt to read theIliad as an originary text about belonging rather than a kind of a savoir-vivre of a hero.Having just explained the critical context in which I am using the term‘mobilisation,’ let me differentiate it from the term ‘mobility,’ which I useelsewhere, and which does not share the same negative connotations. Whereasmobilisation arbitrarily freezes meaning to yield a finalised and accessible version ofevents, mobility as transfer and transport counteracts the fixity of mobilisation.

4 In consulting the original, I have used the Loeb edition. For its faithfulness to theoriginal and its readability, I chose to cite consistently from Richmond Lattimore’stranslation.

5 Heidegger’s essay ‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .’ itself transports a line byHolderlin.

6 Naas’s definition of command, just as his definition of persuasion, is tautological.Both command and the commander do not need qualification. Once a command is

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qualified, it is no more a command. Similarly, a commander does not need to meetany other criteria for his authority (birth, nobility, property, or proper conduct),other than the ability to elicit blind obedience (cf. Naas, 1995: 38). As Achillesindicates in his speech to Agamemnon, he does not disregard obedience, but at thesame time he sets conditions on what qualifies as proper command (Homer, Trans.1961: 1.150). Naas’s understanding of persuasion as in part coercion, along with hisdefinition of command as the right to exercise unchecked power, forges a tacit anddangerous equation between persuasion and command, which forecloses the ethicalpossibility of disobedience.

7 In deference to Agamemnon’s feeling of dishonour at the loss of Chryseis, Achillespromises that, ‘. . . we Achaians / thrice and four times will repay you’ (Trans.1961: 1.127 – 28). When he lists the injustices he has suffered under Agamemnon,Achilles highlights his being constantly sidelined: ‘yours is far the greater reward,and I with some small thing / yet dear to me go back to my ships when I am wearywith fighting’ (Trans. 1961: 1.167 – 68).

8 Julia Kristeva (2002, fn. 1, Ch. 1, 269) ascribes much of the connotative richness ofthe revolt to its etymological roots in turning. Contrary to Naas’s entrenching of theterm ‘turning’ in a phenomenology of obedience, Kristeva links ‘turning’ to theethics of revolt, which I find more pertinent in my discussion of Achilles’s acts. Thisis why I have also borrowed the title of her book as part of my title for this section.‘Intimate revolt’ encapsulates the privileged position intimacy has in Achilles’sdecisions to leave and return to the war.

9 I am borrowing the vocabulary of interior exteriority from Thomas Dutoit’sdiscussion of Derrida’s rethinking of Husserlian intimacy. Whereas for Husserlintimacy is the state of secret interiority, in which the other has only a sign(indication) of the self’s inner speech (expression), for Derrida any such idealinteriority is already contaminated by the presence of these external signs. Intimacy,then, must be recast ‘as a movement between, thus as an alternation,’ as ‘the model ofthe outside (indication) inside the inside (expression)’ (Dutoit, 2004: 15, originalitalics). Although Dutoit offers this model as an instance of intersubjectivecommunication, its terms apply equally well to Achilles’s relationship to his ownmortality, particularly since Derrida understands indication – our relation to theother – as synonymous for our relation to death: ‘un autre nom du rapport a lamort’ (Derrida qtd. in Dutoit, 2004: 15).

10 Just as Briseis and Helen form a parallel in the thematics of intimacy, so do Patroclusand Menelaus, the younger figures of two brotherly pairs.

11 I use the term in its rhetorical significance, which denotes the poetic representationof visual art. For a systematic theorization of the debates concerning the relationshipbetween word and image, or temporal and spatial representation, see Krieger(1992).

12 Karl Reinhardt makes this argument for Antigone’s kommos. The many similaritiesbetween Achilles and Antigone are beyond the scope of this essay and deserve atreatment of their own.

13 Michael Ferber’s essay ‘Simone Weil’s Iliad’ critiques Weil’s reading of thesupplication scene because it fails to see Achilles’s magnanimity.

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References

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Benardete, Seth. ‘Achilles and the Iliad.’ The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetryand Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 15 – 33.

Berlant, Lauren. ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue.’ Intimacy. Spec. issue of Critical Inquiry 24.2(Winter 1998): 281 – 88.

Cohen, Timothy. ‘Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy.’ Critical Inquiry 5.1 (Autumn1978): 3 – 12.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the NewInternational. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Dutoit, Thomas. ‘From Esthetics of Intimacy to Anesthetics in Extimacy: The Examples ofJacques Derrida.’ L’Esprit Createur 44/1 (Spring 2004): 9 – 26.

Ferber, Michael K. ‘Simone Weil’s Iliad.’ Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life. Ed. GeorgeAbbott White. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. 63 – 85.

Griffin, Jasper. ‘Introduction.’ Iliad IX. By Homer. Trans. D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen.Ed. Jasper Griffin. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. 1 – 46.

Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad andKenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Heidegger, Martin. ‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .’ Poetry, Language, Thought. New York:Perennial Classics, 2001. 211 – 27.

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Homer. The Iliad. The Loeb Classical Library. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1999.

Knox, Bernard. ‘Introduction.’ The Iliad. By Homer. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York:Viking Penguin, 1990. 3 – 64.

Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1992.

Kristeva, Julia. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Vol. 2. Trans. JeanineHerman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Lattimore, Richmond. ‘Introduction.’ The Iliad. By Homer. Trans. Richmond Lattimore.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. 11 – 55.

Mallarme, Stephane. ‘Igitur.’ Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de des. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.43 – 66.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. A Modern Edition. London:Verso, 1998.

Michelakis, Pantelis. Achilles in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002.

Muellner, Leonard. The Anger of Achilles: Menis in Greek Epic. Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1996.

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Naas, Michael. Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy: A Reading of Homer’s Iliad. NewJersey: Humanities Press, 1995.

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91. Rep. Wallingford, PA, nd.Wilson, Donna. Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge

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Kalliopi Nikolopoulou was Mellon Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at

Vanderbilt University and taught literature at the University of Cyprus. She currently

teaches comparative literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She has

written articles on French and German philosophical aesthetics and modern literature

and is now working on a project concerning the relationship of the ancients to

the moderns through tragedy. Address: Department of Comparative Literature, 638

Samuel Clemens Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, NY 14260–4610, USA.

[email: kn34@buffalo.edu].

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