Halpern Democracy and Theater

Theater and Democratic Thought: Arendt to RancièreAuthor(s): Richard HalpernReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2011), pp. 545-572Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659358 .Accessed: 24/04/2012 10:31

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Theater and Democratic Thought: Arendtto Ranciere

Richard Halpern

The Greeks invented both democracy and theater. And having done thismuch, they then invented a third thing—political theory—that allowedthem to conceptualize relations between the other two. Plato’s interlock-ing critiques of democracy and drama formalized a general intuition thattheater played a central role in the political life of the democratic city.Greek tragedy as we know it was coterminous with fifth-century democ-racy, taking shape shortly after the reforms of Cleisethenes and interruptedby the brief imposition of oligarchic rule after the Peloponnesian War. TheTheater of Dionysos, roughly comparable in structure and capacity to theAthenian ekklesia or Assembly, even served on occasion as an alternate sitefor democratic debate.1 Present-day scholars largely concur in the viewthat theater helped to educate the demos in the deliberative reason, criticaljudgment, and civic values that undergirded political life.2

This essay has benefitted immeasurably from readings by Julia Reinhard Lupton, Paul A.Kottman, Amanda Anderson, and also by Richard Neer, who additionally steered me towardseveral important studies I had overlooked.

1. The Theater of Dionysos as we conceive it—permanent, semicircular, made of stone—was not built until around 340 BCE under the directorship of Lycurgus. Prior to that, it was atrapezoidal wooden structure, assembled and disassembled annually for the festival ofDionysos, and unsuited for meetings of the Assembly. See Eric Csapo, “The Men Who Built theTheatres: Theatropolai, Theatronai, and Arkhitektones,” in The Greek Theatre and Festivals:Documentary Studies, ed. Peter Wilson (Oxford, 2007), pp. 87–115.

2. Influential works on the question of Greek theater and politics over the past few decadesinclude Christian Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge,Mass., 1990); Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in AncientGreece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of PoliticalTheory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, N.J., 1990); many of the essays in Nothing to Do with

Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011)

© 2011 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/11/3703-0003$10.00. All rights reserved.

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Plato’s arguments about theater and democracy resound through thehistory of Western political thought and provide a primordial “scene of thecrime” to which democratic thinkers still feel compelled to return. The twoconsidered in this essay—Hannah Arendt and Jacques Ranciere—are bothavowedly anti-Platonist. In formulating their influential—and by nomeans unrelated—inquiries into what democracy is, they also take up thequestion of theater and its place in the Athenian polis. I contend that thisquestion is by no means incidental to their more obviously political con-cerns and that Greek theater is as central to their theoretical formulationsof democracy as it was to the historical polis itself. Central, and also diag-nostic. Reapproaching their work through their respective ideas of theaterwill open up conceptual tensions and fissures that might otherwise remainobscure. In a sense, then, this essay endorses Plato’s belief in the essentialdangerousness of theater, but transposes it into another key. What theaterthreatens is not the coherence of the polis but rather that of its theorization.

I want to see not only whether theater has anything to tell us aboutpolitical philosophy, however, but also whether political philosophy hasanything useful to tell us about theater. In the cases of Arendt and Ran-ciere, this something will necessarily have to be abstract. In their respectivetreatments of Greek drama, these writers rarely mention a specific play-wright or play, much less quote from or analyze one.3 What is at stake israther an idea of theater, derived in large part from contesting Plato’s idea

Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin(Princeton, N.J., 1990); and, for a brilliantly “antipolitical” reading that actually aims toarticulate a different kind of politics, Nicole Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on GreekTragedy, trans. Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002). For another antipoliticalargument, see Jasper Griffin, “The Social Function of Attic Tragedy,” The Classical Quarterly,n.s. 48, no. 1 (1998): 39 – 61.

3. Ranciere does include a very brief, allegorical reading of the ending of Oedipus atColonus in the fifth thesis of his “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001),muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html. In The Human Condition, hermost extended consideration of Greek politics and drama, Arendt mentions Euripides once andSophocles three times, two of which are in footnotes. Aristophanes—for reasons that willbecome clear later in this essay—is never mentioned.

R I C H A R D H A L P E R N is Sir William Osler Professor of English at JohnsHopkins University. He is the author of Norman Rockwell: The Underside ofInnocence (2006), Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets,Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (2002), Shakespeare among the Moderns (1997), and ThePoetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogyof Capital (1990). His email is [email protected]

546 Richard Halpern / Theater and Democratic Thought

of it.4 Nevertheless, dramatic criticism of a high order has been undertakenon Arendtian principles by writers other than Arendt.5 That the same can-not yet be said of Ranciere probably reflects the fact that his writings havehad less time to infiltrate the field of literary criticism. Ranciere himselfcomments at length on works of art, though not—to my knowledge— onGreek plays.

My procedure here will largely be to subject Arendt’s and Ranciere’sgeneral pronouncements on Greek theater and politics to the test of his-torical and literary scholarship. I do not do so in order to undertake awearisome historicist critique of theory as such or to demonstrate oncemore that the concrete historical situation (or concrete literary text) eludesthe grasp of general categories. In the case of Arendt, such an undertakingwould be superfluous. Her habits of historical inaccuracy are already wellknown. Besides, who goes to Arendt for a factually precise account offifth-century Athens or revolutionary France in the first place? Ranciere’shistorical credentials are of a different order, given his extensive work innineteenth-century archives. Yet with respect to ancient Greece, his argu-ment is conducted almost entirely by way of a critique of classical philosophy.

My aim in engaging with both thinkers is not a pedantic hunt afterhistorical inaccuracies for their own sake but rather an attempt to seewhether these fall into patterns that are themselves of theoretical interest.History will serve here as a provocation to theory, not its antagonist. I donot, in any case, make naive claims to possession of fact. There is virtuallynothing about classical Athens that is not subject to ongoing scholarlydebate. Nor am I a historian, much less a classical one. I wish merely toprobe the theories of Arendt and Ranciere by bringing them into contactwith some well-known scholarly interpretations of Greek politics anddrama. In doing so I respect the letter—if not quite the spirit— of Paul A.Kottman’s brilliant recent book on Arendt and theater, in which he depictsArendt as elaborating a “politics of the scene.” This he defines as “a sharedtheoretical orientation that suspends grand ontological claims about thenature of political life in order to attend to the formation of polities on thesingular scenes of their births and rebirths.”6 It seems to me that Ranciere

4. The assumption that Plato is simply hostile to theater, however, has been qualified orcontested by several writers, most recently by Martin Puchner, The Drama of Ideas: PlatonicProvocations in Theater and Philosophy (Oxford, 2010).

5. See Meier, The Athenian Discovery of Politics (despite the author’s more consistentlyavowed reliance on Carl Schmitt), and Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory, which mixes anArendtian perspective with elements drawn from Martha Nussbaum. See also Paul A. Kottman,A Politics of the Scene (Stanford, Calif., 2008), and Julia Reinhard Lupton, Thinking withShakespeare (forthcoming).

6. Kottman, A Politics of the Scene, p. 100.

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2011 547

can be included in this “shared theoretical orientation,” which clearlyraises the stakes surrounding the two theorists’ treatment of specific his-torical scenes. This is especially true of fifth-century Athens, which provesfoundational for both writers. Athens is the first democracy and also aparadigmatic one that sets out the basic conceptual terms for how democ-racy works. What are the theoretical consequences if Arendt’s and Ran-ciere’s shared primal scene of democracy—and of theater—worksotherwise than they claim?

Hannah Arendt’s Antitheatrical PrejudiceThe title of the section may well prove surprising if not downright of-

fensive to partisans of Arendt, and that for several reasons. Arendt clearlyprized Greek tragedy, which she carefully studied in the original language,and she could think of no better way to conclude her book On Revolutionthan with a telling Greek quotation from Sophocles.7 Moreover, her un-derstanding of democratic politics is itself—like Ranciere’s— highly the-atrical.8 Arendt conceives of politics as a stage on which the self of the agentis disclosed through speech and action delivered in the agonistic context ofpublic debate. In addition, her theoretical pronouncements on Greekdrama in The Human Condition are consistently favorable. Indeed, shethere declares theater “the political art par excellence.”9 This is about ashigh a form of praise as Arendt can bestow, and it elevates drama above allother art forms:

The specific content as well as the general meaning of action andspeech may take various forms of reification in art works which glo-rify a deed or an accomplishment and, by transformation and con-densation, show some extraordinary event in its full significance.However, the specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the im-plicit manifestation of the agent and speaker, is so indissolubly tied tothe living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and“reified” only through a kind of repetition, the imitation or mime�sis,

7. For an extended reading of how this quotation works in the context of Arendt’s book,see Euben, “Arendt’s Hellenism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. DanaVilla (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 151– 64.

8. But for a useful warning on the limits of this widely held view, see Jacques Taminiaux,“Athens and Rome,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, pp. 165–77. An oftenacute study of the role of tragic drama in Arendt’s work is Robert C. Pirro, Hannah Arendt andthe Politics of Tragedy (DeKalb, Ill., 2000). On the theatrical dimensions of Ranciere’s politics,see Peter Hallward, “Staging Equality: Ranciere’s Theatocracy and the Limits of AnarchicEquality,” in Jacques Ranciere: History, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts(Durham, N.C., 2009), pp. 140 –57.

9. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), p. 188; hereafter abbreviated HC.


which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appro-priate only to the drama, whose very name (from the Greek verbdran, “to act”) indicates that playacting actually is an imitation ofacting. But the imitative element lies not only in the art of the actor,but, as Aristotle rightly claims, in the making or writing of the play, atleast to the extent that the drama comes fully to life only when it isenacted in the theater. [HC, p. 187]

By reproducing the “living flux of acting and speaking” within which po-litical action can alone assume its full significance, drama provides thesupremely appropriate context for its meaningful representation. Con-versely, drama brings out the potentially tragic dimensions of this “livingflux,” which not only nurtures but also entangles action: “It is because ofthis already existing web of human relationships, with its innumerable,conflicting wills and intentions, that action almost never achieves its pur-pose” (HC, p. 184). The image of the web, whose sticky filaments captureaction and divert it beyond the intentions of its agent, invokes somethinglike tragic Fate and ensures that the agent “is never merely a ‘doer’ butalways and at the same time a sufferer” (HC, p. 190). In another sense,though, dramatic form redeems this web or flux by imposing shape andclosure upon it. While action in the political sphere is susceptible to apotentially endless reworking and reinterpretation, dramatic plot with itsbeginning, middle, and end allows for at least the possibility of a definitiveassessment. Through its “transformation and condensation” of the act,drama imposes coherence on its meaning.10 If drama as Arendt conceives itimitates action in the political sense, then, this is a representation thatsimultaneously supplements or improves on the original. Drama is thepolitical art par excellence because it narrates action more coherently andluminously than the political sphere itself can do. In this sense, as in others,politics is not merely redoubled in theater but in some sense comes todepend upon it.

The question remains, however, of how well Greek drama correspondsto this theoretical picture of it. The first thing to observe is that whenArendt writes “drama,” she really means “tragedy.” Aristophanes’s come-dies hardly “glorify the deeds” of their protagonists, with the possible ex-

10. As Michael Davis observes of Aristotle’s Poetics: “The question, then, is what turns aseries of incidents (pramata) into an action (praxis) that is complete and whole. Sustasis, orputting together, was the fundamental feature of mimesis as Aristotle described it in chapterfour. But if imitation is required to make a whole out of otherwise disunited incidents, onemust wonder whether actions, properly understood, exist other than in poetry” (Michael Davis,The Poetry of Philosophy: A Commentary on Aristotle’s “Poetics” [South Bend, Ind., 1998], pp.49 –50).


ception of insurgent housewives such as Lysistrata and Praxagora—figureswho embody a nightmare for Arendtian thinking, as we shall subsequentlysee. But it is difficult to understand in what sense Greek tragedy glorifiesthe deeds of its protagonists, either. For one thing, the consequences ofthese deeds are almost inevitably disastrous. Tragedy depicts a world inwhich the flux or web of events wrests action entirely out of the hands of itsagents, deforming it in catastrophic and ironic ways. In this sense tragedyis almost a photographic negative of heroism. What it depicts is not thegreatness of action but merely its unpredictability, its tendency to go awry.It presents the dangers that render action heroic, not successful actionitself.

Moreover, the acts of tragedy’s aristocratic heroes differ in fundamentalrespects from those of the Arendtian citizen. Political action, though fu-eled in part by motives of self-expression or self-realization, is alwayscounterbalanced by care for the world, which mitigates its narcissisticdrives.11 The tragic protagonist typically lacks this mitigating element. Inhis famous study of the Sophoclean hero, Bernard Knox defines him as“one who, unsupported by the gods and in the face of human opposition,makes a decision which springs from the deepest layer of his individualnature, his physis, and then blindly, ferociously, heroically maintains thatdecision even to the point of self-destruction.” Such heroes are therefore“��voı, strange, terrifying, because they have no sense of proportion, nocapacity for moderation.”12 A polis constructed of such characters wouldbe, strictly speaking, inconceivable. If anything, Greek tragedy offers itscitizens a cautionary lesson in the dangers of the aristocratic ethos, not amodel for political emulation. In Arendt’s view, the threat to politicalaction comes primarily from the realm of the social and its insistence onbehavior, which domesticates and emasculates action. Tragedy, we mightsay, presents a less noticed threat from the other direction, ramping actionup to a dangerous, destructive excess.

Now, in a certain sense, Arendt already takes these objections intoaccount:

The innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word isindependent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by anyeventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse. Unlikehuman behavior—which the Greeks, like all civilized people, judged

11. See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social(Chicago, 1998), pp. 176, 199.

12. Bernard M. W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley,1964), pp. 5, 24.


according to “moral standards,” taking into account motives and in-tentions on the one hand and aims and consequences on the other—action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is inits nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach intothe extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everydaylife no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and suigeneris. [HC, p. 205]

Political action is beyond good and evil in any moral sense; what matters isits sheer amplitude, its daring, not its motive or outcome. The sense ofArendtian “glory” must therefore be extended to comprehend the treach-ery of a Clytemnestra, the blind hubris of a Pentheus, or (in the historicalworld) the disastrous leadership of a Cleon or Alcibiades.

This criterion of pure greatness certainly applies to the remembrance ofaction, whether by playwrights or historians. And yet Greek politicsworked by rather different rules. Advocates of failed or ruinous policiescould find themselves subject to a variety of sanctions by a disappointed oreven scapegoating public—sanctions ranging from fines to ostracism oreven death. The disclosure of one’s self was therefore by no means thegreatest risk faced by orators in the Athenian assembly. In the sphere ofGreek politics, that is to say, consequences did indeed matter. Tragedy’sexaltation of blind, ignorant, or evil actions is not, pace Arendt, compati-ble with the criteria of Greek political judgment.

All of which suggests that Arendt’s praise of Greek drama may be some-what misconceived; but this is not the same as showing an antitheatricalprejudice. This latter swims into view when we turn to another and moreimportant aspect of drama’s function within the polis, which has to do withwriting. Because readings of The Human Condition tend to focus on Arendt’stheory of political action, it is easy to forget that the book’s opening focus is onthe different—though related—topic of time and immortality:

The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to pro-duce things—works and deeds and words—which would deserve tobe and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so thatthrough them mortals could find their place in the cosmos where ev-erything is immortal except themselves. By their capacity for the im-mortal deed, by their ability to leave nonperishable traces behind,men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortal-ity of their own and prove themselves to be of a “divine” nature. [HC,p. 19]


Human beings are, in Arendt’s view, stretched between a natural, physio-logical being destined to transience and the capacity to produce deeds andwords that survive them. In her division of the vita activa, labor sustainsthe needs of the natural body with products that are themselves consum-able and thus ephemeral. Work shapes an enduring, shared, artifactualworld; yet its products in turn fall prey to the constant slippage betweenmeans and ends that marks a purely utilitarian outlook (HC, p. 154). In thecase of both labor and work, an impulse toward self-perpetuation findsitself frustrated. Only action, in Arendt’s view, creates meaningful storiesthat can truly endure, like those of Achilles’s deeds in Homer or of Peri-cles’s words in Thucydides. Yet here again the drive toward permanence ispotentially frustrated by the ephemerality of deeds and especially of words,which in a sense disappear at the moment of their utterance: “Left tothemselves, they lack not only the tangibility of other things, but are evenless durable and more futile than what we produce for consumption” (HC,p. 95). Words and deeds live on only in the remembrance of those whowitnessed them, and the challenge of the polis is to provide a space for evernew acts while retaining the old in memory. Yet even the polis cannotsustain action indefinitely; hence writing, a form of artificial memory,comes into play:

The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality andits continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who haveseen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transforma-tion of the intangible into the tangibility of things. . . . The material-ization they have to undergo in order to remain in the world at all ispaid for in that always the “dead letter” replaces something whichgrew out of and for a fleeting moment indeed existed in the “livingspirit.” They must pay this price because they themselves are of anentirely otherworldly nature and therefore need the help of an activityof an altogether different nature; they depend for their reality andmaterialization upon the same workmanship that builds the otherthings in the human artifice. [HC, p. 95]

In order to survive, words and deeds must fall back on the durability ofmade things—that is, of the products of work—among which writingstands preeminent. Among made things, Arendt claims, artworks last thelongest (HC, p. 167); and among artworks, as we have seen, drama is themost appropriate by means of its form to capturing and revealing ac-tion. Drama’s recording function thus renders it a kind of internalsupplement to the polis, making good the internal lack that wouldotherwise condemn political action—the very substance of the po-


lis—to oblivion (HC, p. 173).13 By preserving action in memory, or soArendt’s argument implies, drama supplies a spur to greatness thatmakes the formidable risks of public engagement worthwhile.

If anything, then, drama’s stature would seem to have been furtherenhanced, since it is now not merely an aesthetic ornament gracing the citybut a precondition of its continued existence.14 At the same time, drama’srecording function situates it at a delicate juncture in Arendt’s theorizationof the political. On the one hand, political action is threatened with futilityif it cannot outlive its immediate context. But, on the other hand, thatimmediate context—with its living flux or web of contending actions—iswhat renders political action most densely significant. To preserve action isthus also to alienate it from the very condition of its greatness. And whilethis potential contradiction is not directly addressed in The Human Con-dition, it becomes a distinct problem in On Revolution, where Arendt ex-plores the antinomies of political foundation. This, as she defines it, is theact of “constituting a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, [a peo-ple’s] combined power of action.”15 But the need to invest revolutionarygovernment with a lasting, constitutional form also threatens to mummifythe living flux of action in which the very freedom of revolutionary gov-ernment consists: “if foundation was the aim and the end of revolution,then the revolutionary spirit was not merely the spirit of beginning some-thing new but of starting something permanent and enduring; a lastinginstitution, embodying the spirit and encouraging its new achievements,would be self-defeating. From which it unfortunately seems to follow thatnothing threatens the very achievements of revolution more dangerouslyand more acutely than the spirit which has brought them about” (HC, p.224). Thomas Jefferson, Arendt notes, was especially sensitive to the dan-gers posed to liberty by a written constitution (see HC, pp. 224 –25), andArendt herself comes to claim that “the Constitution itself, this greatestachievement of the American people, . . . eventually cheated them of theirproudest possession” (HC, p. 231). This had to do in part with the specific

13. Arendt attempts to claim at one point in The Human Condition that the living memoryof the polis can immortalize acts without the aid of writing: “The words of Pericles, asThucydides reports them, are perhaps unique in their supreme confidence that men can enactand save their greatness at the same time and, as it were, by one and the same gesture, and thatthe performance of such will be enough to generate dynamis and not need the transformingreification of homo faber to keep it in reality” (HC, p. 205). But surely the irony cannot be loston her that she knows of Pericles’s claim only because it has been preserved in the writings ofThucydides.

14. “Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictlyspeaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible” (HC, p. 55).

15. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 1977), p. 166.


content of the Constitution, but also in part with its very written form.Drama’s recording function in fifth-century Athens typologically prefig-ures, as it were, a seemingly irresolvable dilemma in modern political life.It is thus of more than merely antiquarian interest.

At the same time this function poses some problems even in its originalhistorical context. For one thing, by ignoring differences between Homericand fifth-century Athens, Arendt overlooks important shifts in the relationbetween memory and individual glory. Commenting on Pericles’s famousfuneral oration in Thucydides, Simon Goldhill remarks:

For now men were said to fight not for individual kleos, nor for theperpetuation of their names through the retelling of acts of individualprowess. Now fighting was for the city. One might fight to free a land,to protect homes, women, and children, as in Homer, but success wasmeasured in terms of the city’s fortunes, and each individual’s successwas subsumed in the kleos of the city. So in the funeral speech it wasthe city, and a citizen’s role in democracy, that were discussed. Peri-cles’ soldiers were a class, a group, not individuated. Military valueswere separated from individuals and individualism. No names weregiven in a funeral speech—the reverse of Homeric name field of battlenarratives, where there are no anonymous heroes.16

A political counterpart to this military ethic would be the ideal ofhomonoia, or “same-mindedness.” “The term homonoia, as it was used bythe political orators, generally implied a condition in which all citizensthink the same thing, in which their social and political differences aresubmerged in a unified community of interest.”17 Successful orators had todemonstrate their adherence to collectively held values, and individualswho transgressed these norms too blatantly were subject to a range of legalsanctions, including ostracism. It is not as if Athens did not value andcelebrate individual accomplishment; but Arendt’s transposition of Ho-meric values onto the fifth-century polis ignores the strongly collectivistethos that balanced and constrained it, often to the point of suppressingthe remembrance of individual deeds.

In addition, the recording function of drama would have to have beenof a rather abstract and mediated variety, since tragedy’s subject matterwas not the political or historical accomplishments of Athenians but ratherevents that took place in an antediluvian, mythical past. Indeed, Nicole

16. Simon Goldhill, “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” in Nothing to Do withDionysos? p. 110.

17. Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power ofthe People (Princeton, N.J., 1989), p. 297; hereafter abbreviated M.


Loraux has persuasively argued that the choice of mythic subject matterreflected a widespread ban on memory that pervaded Athenian politicalculture.18 Herodotus tells the story of Phrynicus, an early playwright whosetragedy The Fall of Miletus depicted a disastrous military defeat for Athens.In response to the excessive outpouring of public emotion that the stagedplay provoked, Phrynicus was fined a thousand drachmas and a law waspassed prohibiting repeat performances.19 Subsequent tragic playwrightslearned this lesson and wisely avoided depicting political or historicalevents.20 In a sense, then, Athenian tragedy could more accurately bedescribed as an exercise in the avoidance of historical memory, not itsperpetuation.

It is therefore unclear in what way, if any, Greek tragedy could under-take the recording functions attributed to it by Arendt, even aside from thefact, already discussed, that the actions depicted by tragedy are for the mostpart disastrously misguided ones that result in notoriety, not glory. Butwhat interests me is that this recording function, while it seems to elevatedrama by granting it unparalleled importance in the polis, actually servesto demote it and thus finally reveals Arendt’s antitheatrical prejudice.Claiming that Arendt demotes tragedy might well elicit the response: com-pared to what? The answer to which is: compared to the status of Greektragedy in Heidegger, who serves as Arendt’s principal model and inspira-tion here. In An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953, based on lectures deliv-ered in 1935), Heidegger elevates the work of art, and principally tragicdrama, above even pre-Socratic philosophy as the form through which theGreeks effected the pristine disclosure of Being.21 Thus Sophocles’s Oedi-pus serves for Heidegger as “the embodiment of Greek being-there, whomost radically and wildly asserts its fundamental passion, the passion forthe disclosure of being, i.e. the struggle for being itself” (HC, p. 107). WhenArendt converts Heidegger’s “disclosure of being” into a disclosure of the

18. See Loraux, The Mourning Voice, pp. 26 –27, 42– 44.19. See Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (New York, 1996), p. 366. For

a bravura reading of this episode, see Kottman, A Politics of the Scene, pp. 116 –38.20. The one exception, of course, was Aeschylus’s first surviving play, The Persians. There

Aeschylus prudently depicted the foreign victims of an Athenian victory, but neither Aeschylusnor his contemporaries ventured anything further in this vein.

21. “The Greeks called art in the true sense and the work of art techne�, because art is whatmost immediately brings being (i.e. the appearing that stands there in itself) to stand, stabilizesit in something present (the work). The work of art is a work not primarily because it iswrought [gewirkt], made, but because it brings about [er-wirkt] being in an essent; it bringsabout the phenomenon in which the emerging power, physis, comes to shine [scheinen]”(Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim [New Haven, Conn.,1959], p. 159]. On the primacy of tragic drama among art forms as the arena of this disclosure,see pp. 144 – 45.


being of the self that occurs via political action, she maintains tragic dramain a close relation to this process. But that relation is markedly diminished,since tragedy as written work is no longer the agent of disclosure but ratherthe preservative medium for an event that happens essentially elsewhere,in the political sphere. In its recording function, tragedy is the amber andnot the fly.

The logic of this move surely finds its basis in Arendt’s larger strategy ofrelocating disclosure from the realm of poiesis, where Heidegger (espe-cially the later Heidegger) tended to place it, to the realm of praxis oraction.22 But, in doing so, Arendt in The Human Condition erects someunnecessarily categorical and doctrinaire distinctions, specifically in deny-ing made things—including the artwork—any direct capacity for disclo-sure. Insisting that we can reveal our essential selves only through politicalaction, and not through our artifacts, no matter how brilliantly or subtlywrought, Arendt reduces tragedy to what it was for Aristotle: the imitationor mimesis of action, rather than a form of action itself. To put this differ-ently, tragedy models the self-disclosure of its dramatic protagonists butdoes not effect the self-disclosure of its maker.

This conceptual prohibition seems especially odd in the case of Greektragedy, where the conditions of theatrical presentation so obviously re-sembled those of the political sphere. Because the plays chosen for presen-tation at the Greater Dionysia vied for prizes, the same competitive,agonistic context that required courage on the part of potential politicalactors applied to Athenian playwrights, who revealed themselves publiclyin their works, submitted them to judgment, and endured possibilities forglory or disgrace comparable to those of prominent members of the As-sembly.23 But Arendt, hewing perhaps too closely to Aristotelian canons,eschews the categories of expression or creation in favor of imitation.Partly as a result, she unnecessarily resists the idea that things too mightpossess a natality— or at least that things might manifest their creators’natality as powerfully as action can.

What I’ve been calling Arendt’s antitheatrical prejudice has nothing,obviously, to do with any failure on her part to value Greek drama ordrama in general. It is a theoretical stance rather than an aesthetic one, andit results from a kind of straightjacketing by conceptual categories that shemaintains in too rigid a form. The result is an account of drama that doesat least restore a political meaning to Aristotle’s poetics but which tells us

22. See Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, N.J., 1996).23. They did not, however, face the same kinds of legal risk—at least, once the lesson of

Phrynicus had been absorbed.


very little either about how Greek theater works or about its real relation toAthenian democracy.24

The latter of these two tasks is further hampered by Arendt’s account ofGreek politics, which is every bit as tendentious as her account of Greekdrama. Issues of Grecophilia aside, Athens serves Arendt as the paradigmof a properly working participatory democracy. This depends in turn on astrictly maintained separation between private and public spheres. TheGreek oikos or household is a site of production and reproduction thatmaterially supports the polis but is kept strictly sequestered from it. In-deed, the freedom that marks Athenian political life is largely freedom fromthe oikos, a space of labor, biological necessity, and personal inequality.Conversely, the dwindling opportunities for democratic action in themodern world are attributed by Arendt to the rise of the social, whichimproperly injects the interests of the animal laborans and his physicalneeds into the political sphere, turning it into “a gigantic, nation-wideadministration of housekeeping” (HC, p. 28). “Society,” Arendt insists, “isthe form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life andnothing else assumes public significance and where the activities con-nected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public” (HC, p. 46).By contrast, “politics is never for the sake of life” (HC, p. 37). The Greeks,in Arendt’s view, had the good fortune to exist before the rise of the social,when women and slaves were properly “hidden away not only because theywere somebody else’s property but because their life was ‘laborious,’ de-voted to bodily functions” (HC, p. 72). While Arendt certainly does notendorse slavery, Greek or otherwise, she does insist that the concerns ofwomen and slaves, insofar as they have to do with bodily life, were properlyexcluded from the political sphere.

While Arendt’s views on the proper relations between Greek oikos andpolis are derived largely from Aristotle, they also find support in recentdecades from the classical historian Christian Meier.25 But there is hardly aconsensus on these issues. At the opposite pole from Arendt and Meierstands M. I. Finley, who advances a professedly instrumentalist view ofancient politics. For Finley, not freedom or action but “canvassing, per-suasion, exchange of services, rewards and benefits, alliances and deals are

24. For a bracing discussion of Aristotle’s somewhat anomalous avoidance of directlypolitical issues in his Poetics, see Edith Hall, “Is There a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics?” in Tragedyand the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, ed. M. S. Silk (New York, 1996), pp. 295–309.

25. “A precondition for politics of this kind was that everything outside the political spherebe exempt from political control. The economy and society, educational conditions andreligion, were quite simply given; they could not be subject to decision making and so provide afocus for the formation of factions” (Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics, p. 152).


the essential techniques of politics in real life, in every known society.”26

Finley sees Athenian politics as crisscrossed by patronage relations, influ-ence peddling, and subsidies that bought social peace from the demos.With respect to the last of these, while classical Athens can hardly be de-scribed as a welfare state, Max Weber’s term “pensionopolis” seems basi-cally apt.27 The city provided “massive economic support for the poorthrough large-scale employment in the navy . . . [and] in the form of amodest per diem” for a range of political offices, including jury service andattendance at the Council and Assembly (P, p. 34).28 Payments were like-wise made to subsidize attendance at religious festivals, including— even-tually—theatrical performances at the Greater Dionysia, and to supportAthenian refugees, war orphans, injured soldiers, and citizens physicallyunable to work. While income from the silver mines and the empire (whileit lasted) helped pay for this munificence, funds were also levied from therich through war taxes, punitive jury fines, and the liturgy system, whereinwealthy citizens were sometimes persuaded and sometimes assigned tostage plays, outfit warships, and underwrite other civic functions. The citygovernment also undertook the provisioning (trophe) of its citizens byensuring the continued supply of grain, timber, and other essential com-modities. In 348, Demosthenes went further still and proposed “a state-paid national service to prevent citizens from falling into shameful(aischron) conditions because of need (endeia)” (M, p. 144). While thisproposal was not adopted, it was nevertheless publicly presented and de-bated, as were all the other economic provisions mentioned here. So ex-tensive was the city’s investment in providing for the material, bodilywelfare of its citizens that Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias (502e–519d) comparesAthenian politicians—including Pericles and Themistocles—to “pastrycooks stuffing the common people (demos) with material goods” (P, p. 1).Not only does Athenian democracy not police its boundaries to exclude“social” questions, but one could argue with equal if not greater justice thatdemocratic government invests the material needs and interests of thedemos with public visibility for the first time. The social is therefore not theantagonist of democratic politics but its originary product. Another way of

26. Moses I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1983), p. 51; hereafterabbreviated P.

27. Max Weber, “Agrarverhaltnisse in Altertum,” Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Sozial- undWirtschaftsgeschichte (Frankfurt, 1924), p. 147; quoted in HC, p. 37. Arendt manages to suppressthe significance of this fact by linking it to Weber’s description of the Athenian demos as a“proletariat of consumers” for which economic production therefore played little role. But theexclusion of production from Athenian politics is not the same as the exclusion of biological lifeand its needs.

28. See also Finley, The Ancient Economy (1973; Berkeley, 1985), chap. 7.


putting this is that Greek politics is already a primordial form of biopoli-tics, which compromises the chronology not only of Arendt’s historicalnarrative but that of theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, who accepts an Ar-endtian framework and, like her, confuses Aristotle’s representations of Greekpolitics with the real thing. (A subsidiary moral of this essay is that politicalphilosophy is not about politics: it is about other political philosophy.)

For a vivid illustration of the Greeks’ melding of politics and the socialone need look no further than the comedies of Aristophanes, with theirfarcical portrayals of political and civic corruption. Most telling amongthese are the “utopian” comedies such as Lysistrata and the Women inParliment, in which female characters seize political control from men andreform city government by subjecting it to the principles of home econom-ics. While Aristophanes presents these plans in a satirical vein, they alsoproject a seductive social fantasy. Arendt’s nightmare of “a gigantic,nation-wide administration of housekeeping” (HC, p. 28) formed the uto-pian wish fulfillment of Athenian theater, just as it informed the ordinarypractice of Greek democracy.

All of this concerns Arendt’s controversial insistence that matters eco-nomic should be excluded as content or topic from political debate. Farmore interesting, I think, is the way these matters inflected the form ofpolitics and political oratory in classical Athens. To begin with: althoughany male citizen, no matter his social or economic status, was permittedand even encouraged to attend debate at the Assembly and to render hisjudgment on political issues, the speakers and politicians who dominateddebate were generally members of the wealthy elite (see M, p. 116). It wasthese men who could, among other things, afford the extensive rhetoricaltraining that made for persuasive presentations. Wealth played an evenmore interesting role in the system of charis or “gratitude for a materialbenefaction” that informed one’s position as political speaker(M, p. 245).29 As Josiah Ober notes, “the Athenian public seems to haveexpected politicians to perform significant liturgies,” and those politicianswould in turn draw on the gratitude produced by voluntary and generouspublic works to reinforce their standing as speakers (M, p. 232). Indeed,“the hope for gratitude from the demos and especially from jurors was themotive behind many liturgists’ acts of public generosity to the state, andsome of them were not reticent about admitting it” (M, p. 228). Con-versely, it was perfectly acceptable for politicians to benefit materially fromtheir political activities, since this would supposedly cause them to feel a

29. The Greek term charis has a range of meanings beyond the somewhat technical politicalone discussed here.


reciprocal charis toward the people: “The politician who took from thestate had conjoined his personal financial interests with the interests of thedemos. As the state prospered, so did he. He could therefore be expected topropose legislation that would be of benefit to the state as a whole” (M, p.246). Material interests informed not merely the logos or content of polit-ical argument, then, but also the ethos or rhetorically constructed characterof political speakers, granting them a voice worth heeding. Ober’s point indetailing the workings of political charis was not that it fatally compro-mised Athenian democracy, however, but rather that the political systemaccommodated the interests of an elite while still granting ultimate powerto the demos. The political ideal of isonomia or equality was not a merefiction despite the social and economic differences that divided the popu-lace and informed political rhetoric.

That Athenian democracy was not subverted by its own material pre-conditions may allow us, if not to calm, then at least to shift, the anxietiesover modern politics expressed by Arendt. The Athenians themselves rec-ognized a danger inherent to their system of charis, and that was bribery—the threat that material gain might turn the recipient’s loyalties in a privatedirection, away from the public good. Here, I think, we find an ancientparadigm for the real dangers confronting modern democracy, which isnot that social concerns will infiltrate political speech but rather that cap-ital will simply buy the system outright. In some sense this threat is coter-minous with democracy itself, whose founding gesture is to introduceprivate interests into the public sphere. That this did not happen in ancientGreece results less from the wisdom of their political arrangements thanfrom the fact that the power of wealth was still mainly that of wealthyindividuals, and that large-scale economic enterprises, such as corpora-tions, did not yet exist. The power of the people was still sufficient tocounter the interests of the wealthy and thus allow the system of charis towork.

Athenian theater participated directly in the economics of charis, sincethe liturgies that wealthy citizens were expected to perform included serv-ing as a choregos who funded the production of a group of plays or of adithyrambic chorus. The choregos who had staged a brilliantly lavish dra-matic production or funded a winning chorus could subsequently recouphis munificence as political capital to be spent in the Assembly or thecourts (see M, pp. 243– 44). But beyond such instrumental motives, a win-ning performance bathed the victor in pure aristocratic prestige and pro-vided various forms of flattering social visibility. There is even evidencethat in at least some instances the choregos also served as chorephaios orchoral leader in his own production, “leading and controlling his khoros


from a position at the head of the orkhestra.”30 Such were the political andsymbolic rewards to be reaped from their endeavors that competing chore-goi descended to bribery, sabotage, spells, physical assaults, and lawsuits inpursuit of victory.31

Theater was therefore a conspicuous conduit for the mutual infiltrationof the political and the socioeconomic. Sometimes this infiltration wasliteral, since theater’s field of (fictional) action was materially sustained by(real) expenditure. And an analogous though not quite identical processoccurred in the plays themselves. I have already noted how Aristophaniccomedy stages the intersection of polis and oikos at the level of plot. Buttragedy does something similar at the level of form. Loraux argues that“what the tragedians strove to express was the disconcerting complicity ofluminous speech with the alien accent of sung lamentation.” “Luminousspeech” is the Apollonian threnos or song of mourning, but it also, inLoraux’s reading, opens up onto public or political speech. Her analysis of“sung lamentation,” by contrast, focuses on the cry “aiai,” in which “thereis no meaning other than the sound itself.”32 This sound is that of femalemourning, which Athenian legislation restricted to the oikos by forbiddingpublic expression. By mixing with that speech which is the basis of Arend-tian action, the sound of female mourning imbues it with the timbre of theoikos, which is in charge of both nurturing life and enacting the privaterituals for its loss. Just as the system of charis inflects the articulation ofpublic speech with socioeconomic forces that, strictly speaking, lie outsidethe realm of the political, so does the mourning voice of tragedy bring anoutside—that of the oikos, with its tending to life and death—into the veryaccent of public speech.

This outside is, of course, also an inside—an affective interiority that isin some sense unassimilable to public space and hence normally banishedto the architectural interiority of the household. Euben reminds us that

politics relies on passions inarticulate within its realm of discourse.Thus, although there are things inappropriate for or dangerous tosuch discourse, they are nevertheless fundamental to it. In his posi-tion as poet and political educator, the dramatist reminds the citizensof the silent foundations of their speech. By expressing the deepestinstincts and passions within the boundaries of his drama, he articu-

30. Wilson, The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage(Cambridge, 2000), p. 131.

31. See ibid., pp. 148 – 68.32. Loraux, The Mourning Voice, pp. 71, 39.


lates their powerful and essential presence in public, yet at a distancefrom the assembly and agora.33

Euben sees drama’s role as one of bringing the political and nonpoliticalrealms into relation—which is not the same as collapsing the two—so as tooffer a richer and more integrated account of human experience than thepolitical sphere alone can render. As he puts it, “the moment of antipoliticsis a reminder that the polis cannot be all.”34 In a sense, Euben takes theAristotelian notion of plurality—so crucial to Arendt’s understanding ofpolitics—and expands it beyond the political realm itself. Drama offers amore capacious space in which the political must coexist in a sometimestense plurality with other social instances. And the dramatic spectatorlikewise constitutes an internal plurality in which the intellectual and otherresources necessary for political life come into contact with other verydifferent kinds of passions and affects. Drama thus undertakes a crucialwork of cultural articulation—adjusting, testing, and analyzing the rela-tions between political and nonpolitical realms.

I find Euben’s account of Greek drama an elegant and suggestive one—all the more so because of his ongoing interest in Arendt and the obviousinfluence that her understanding of politics has on his. Nevertheless, hisapproach to Greek drama is so helpful precisely because it goes placeswhere Arendt herself would be loath to follow. Certainly, she would agreewith Euben’s assertion that politics “cannot be all.” As she notes in TheHuman Condition:

A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, aswe would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the qualityof rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hid-den if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.The only efficient way to guarantee the darkness of what needs to behidden against a light of publicity is private property, a privatelyowned place to hide in. [HC, p. 71]

For Arendt, a complete life must include both the light of publicity and thedarkness of a private realm. But this latter “must remain hidden if it is notto lose its depth,” and therefore it is a matter of alternating between the tworather than of bringing them into direct contact. Arendt was always firm inher insistence that the interior of the heart, as of the house, has no place inthe public realm, either political or intellectual. Euben’s understanding ofdrama as public space, even one “at a distance from the assembly and the

33. Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory, p. 88.34. Ibid., p. 147.


agora,” which nevertheless airs normally nonpublic passions and affects,produces a mixture that Arendt would likely regard as looking too muchlike the social. For that reason she retreats to a more “purely” politicalconception of tragedy, with all the inconveniences I have already traced.

Yet Greek drama does not imitate, condense, or otherwise sequester thepurity of political speech, as Arendt would have it, but stages the encounterof political speech with its other, just as Athenian politics itself stages thisencounter in its own way. Both theater and polis demonstrate that there isno pristine historical or theoretical “before” for the political with respectto the social, or, at least, classical Athens and its theater do not offer anysuch “before.” Hence the veiling of the social is by no means an enablingprecondition for politics, as Arendt would insist. It is rather the enablingcondition for political philosophy, which often demands an imaginary au-tonomy for its subject matter.

Jacques Ranciere and the Wrong DemosBecause Ranciere engages only infrequently with the work of Arendt,

and when he does so he is generally critical, it is easy to overlook theirsubstantial areas of convergence. Both writers turn to classical Athens informulating their respective conceptions of democratic politics; and bothdevise explicitly anti-Platonic notions of the political. That being said,Ranciere’s understanding of the political does initially look very differentfrom Arendt’s. For Arendt, politics is the exercise of human freedom. Itsdefining condition is plurality, and its end or goal is public disclosure ofthe political actor in such a way as to confer distinction upon him. Hervision of politics is in some sense fundamentally individualistic, even he-roic, although individual freedom and glory can be achieved only in ashared space of political debate that is defined by isonomia or the formalequality of all participants. For Ranciere, by contrast, politics is not whathappens within a shared discursive space; it is, rather, a dispute about whobelongs in that space—who counts as participating in a political commu-nity. “Politics arises from a count of community parts which is always afalse count, a double count, or a miscount.”35 As opposed to Arendt, forwhom political agents are always individuals, for Ranciere political dispu-tants are often groups or classes of persons defined precisely by their exclusionfrom political agency because of their supposed lack of qualification to speakand be heard. This group he calls demos, a Greek term used to denote at once“the poor” and “the people as a whole.” The demos is the “part of those who

35. Ranciere, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, 1999), p.6; hereafter abbreviated D.


have no part,” that is, a part judged by those in power to have no legitimate rolein political debate, yet a part that nevertheless claims for itself to represent thewhole, or the community at large (D, p. 11). “The demos attributes to itselfas its proper lot the equality that belongs to all citizens. In so doing, thisparty that is not one identifies its improper property with the exclusiveprinciple of community and identifies its name—the name of the indis-tinct mass of men of no position—with the name of the community itself”(D, pp. 8 –9).

The dispute that is politics arises in opposition to what Ranciere callsthe police, or a system of organization whereby society is divided intoparts, classes, or groups, each of which has its own function and its legiti-mate say in the distribution of social goods. If politics arises from a mis-count or disputed count, the police is the system in which everyone haspurportedly been counted already and, in turn, “counts.” Ranciere’s conceptof the police bears more than a passing resemblance to Arendt’s category of thesocial, insofar as both are essentially administrative rather than political, de-voted to a consensual apportioning of goods rather than to adjudging a dis-pute or wrong. The difference is that Arendt—and, in Ranciere’s view, thewhole “return to politics” movement that derives its inspiration in part fromher work—tries to sequester the political from the social, whereas for Ran-ciere, political dispute concerns precisely the boundary between the politicaland the social, which it can do because the social is not an objective entity butrather itself a symbolic attribute bestowed by the police—a determination thatsomething falls squarely within its field of distribution.36

Despite these differences, what ties Ranciere’s and Arendt’s thoughttogether most closely is a shared conception of politics as a process ofdisclosure, appearance, or manifestation—as a field in which something isrendered publicly visible. For Arendt, this thing is the self of the individualpolitical actor that is at once exposed and risked in competition with hispeers. For Ranciere, it is the visibility of the excluded demos, which mustbe disputed against a police whose parts have already been counted andfound to add up to a whole. Indeed, for Ranciere the police is nothing buta “distribution of the sensible,” and politics not only entails but essentiallyis a redistribution or repartitioning of the visible or sensible.37 It is for this

36. “The police is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social” (Ranciere,“Ten Theses on Politics”). On politics and the boundaries of the social, see, among other works,Ranciere, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London, 2006), p. 84. On the “return topolitics,” see D, p. 91. See also Slavoj Žižek, afterword to Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: TheDistribution of the Sensible, trans. Rockhill (London, 2004) pp. 75–77.

37. See, for example, thesis seven of Ranciere, “Ten Theses on Politics”: “The police is a‘partition of the sensible’ [le partage du sensible] whose principle is the absence of a void and ofa supplement.”


reason that the aesthetic plays such an important role in Ranciere’s con-ception of politics.38

Ranciere is careful to distinguish the demos as a theoretical conceptfrom its historical origin. For him the demos is not necessarily “the poor,”much less the poor of fifth-century Athens. Indeed, the demos has nopositive qualities at all; it is rather, the “unqualified.” This indeterminacy isimportant because when a given demos wins its dispute it is as likely as notto be absorbed into the social count that is the police, and its place asdisputant then falls to another. Nevertheless, the example of fifth-centuryAthens has an important foundational standing in Ranciere’s thought, notonly because the very word demos denotes at once a part of the politicalclass and the whole of it, thus instituting the notion of a “miscount”; noronly because the enfranchisement of the Athenian demos offers a kind oftemplate for Ranciere’s understanding of politics; nor only because Plato,in founding political philosophy, reveals the ongoing complicity betweenthat discourse and what Ranciere calls the police; but also because Plato’santitheatrical stance first reveals the fundamental connections betweenaesthetics and politics.

For Ranciere, the essence of Platonic thought is the “one artisan, onecraft” principle that crops up in many of Plato’s dialogues: the notion thatfor a craftsman to do his work well, he must concentrate on that one thingand do it all of the time. Shoemakers know how to make shoes, but notboats or beds, and they certainly don’t know the art of statecraft. A Platonicrepublic is therefore composed of well-defined parts or groups, each as-signed its role in an organic whole: in short, the police. A democracy, bycontrast, involves artisans—who should have neither the time nor theexpertise for politics—insisting on making themselves heard. They em-body a dangerous multiplicity not only in their status as crowd—that is,when gathered together— but even individually, since they unwisely try tomaster more things than one. A complementary threat is represented bypoets as imitators, since they parrot all sorts of things and persons—sol-diers, artisans, politicians, and so on—that they do not really know orunderstand. Theater is a fundamentally dangerous institution because itgathers the demos as a crowd, encourages them to judge poetry and music(for which they are not qualified), and presents them with poetic imita-tions that themselves violate the rule of one artisan, one craft. Theaterdisturbs the principle of counting on which the Platonic republic relies byconfusing the one and the multiple. And it does so in a conspicuously

38. See Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics.


visible way. It is a public spectacle that stages the dangerous miscount ofdemocratic politics— converts it, as it were, into aesthetic display.39

Ranciere’s reading of Greek theater involves essentially leaving the Pla-tonic account intact but inverting or transvaluing its values, whereby the-ater emerges as an admirably democratic institution. In The Philosopherand His Poor, a relatively early work, the emphasis falls on the politicalforce of poetic imitation and multiplicity. The Politics of Aesthetics, a morerecent interview, elaborates on this by pointing as well to the status of theplay text as a product of poiesis or making:

Perhaps the correlate to this principle [of mimetic doubling and con-fusion] is the most important thing: the mimetician provides a publicspace for the ‘private’ principle of work. He sets up a stage for what iscommon to the community with what should determine the confine-ment of each person to his or her place. It is this redistribution of thesensible that constitutes his noxiousness, even more than the dangerof simulacra weakening souls. Hence, artistic practice is not the out-side of work but its displaced form of visibility. The democratic distri-bution of the sensible makes the worker into a double being. Itremoves the artisan from ‘his’ place, the domestic space of work, andgives him ‘time’ to occupy the space of public discussions and to takeon the identity of a deliberative citizen. The mimetic act of splitting intwo, which is at work in theatrical space, consecrates this duality andmakes it visible. The exclusion of the mimetician, from the Platonicpoint of view, goes hand in hand with the formation of a communitywhere work is in ‘its’ place.40

By staging a poetic “work” in a public manner, theater moves the activity ofproduction from the private, domestic space of the oikos into the politicalrealm and thereby provides an exact correlate to the movement of theartisans themselves from the invisible purlieus of workshop or householdinto the Assembly. In repartitioning the sensible, theater enables the in-surgent demos to witness their own emergence into political daylight—not through the plot of drama or through dramatic characters whorepresent them but rather through the status of the play itself as artifactgranted a dazzling visibility. What the demos sees on stage is a representa-tion—indeed, an example— of their own productive activity.

Ranciere’s reading of theater both invokes and transforms the romantic

39. See Ranciere, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, andAndrew Parker (Durham, N.C., 2004), pp. 3–53.

40. Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 43.


topos running from Friedrich Schiller through Marx whereby the makerrecognizes his own innermost essence objectified in the made thing. Here,however, the artifact is not the objectification of either Geist or species-being but of social visibility; and it manifests that visibility not to theindividual maker himself (that is, the playwright) but to the whole of thepublic sphere. Needless to say, this way of construing the politics of Greektheater runs directly contrary to Arendt’s, since instead of condensing orsequestering political action as a realm unto itself, theater visibly contam-inates it with precisely the private space of economic production. It thusundoes the paradigmatically “healthy” separation of the two that, in Ar-endt’s view, made the success of Greek democracy possible. In their re-spective constructions of Greek tragedy, then, one can see writ small thedifferences between Arendt’s and Ranciere’s very conceptions ofthe political.

But does Ranciere depict the function of Greek theater any more accu-rately than Arendt? The first thing to note is that he bypasses both formand content in favor of something even more abstract: the play’s status asmade thing. I will bracket the complex question of whether Greek audi-ences would have seen theater as an instance of artisanal labor, as Rancieresuggests, and what they would have made of this had they done so.41 But ifwe turn to the actual content of Greek drama, a more richly complex—anddirect—image of politics emerges. This is especially evident in the case ofcomedy. Jeffrey Henderson posits that the demos established the comiccompetitions in order to control politicians through ridicule. “In returnfor accepting the guidance of the ‘rich, the well-born, and the powerful,’ it[the demos] provided they that be subjected to a yearly unofficial review oftheir conduct in general at the hands of the de�mos’ organic intellectuals,the comic poets.”42 At the same time, comic poets such as Aristophanesmocked the venality and gullibility of the demos itself, as when, in Knights,the character Sausageman wins Demos’s vote by giving him a free pair ofshoes. Plays such as this sought to incite a more critical and politicallyastute form of consciousness on the part of the demos and to wean themfrom unthinking consumption of political rhetoric. Such a consciousnesswas not at all incompatible with a materialist understanding of theater—

41. Useful materials for such a discussion can be gathered from Maurice Balme, “Attitudesto Work and Leisure in Ancient Greece,” Greece and Rome 31 (Oct. 1984): 140 –52; AlisonBurford, Craftsmen in Greek and Roman Society (London, 1972); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy (London, 1988); and ElspethWhitney, “Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the ThirteenthCentury,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 80, no. 1 (1990): 1–169.

42. Jeffrey Henderson, “The De�mos and the Comic Competition,” in Nothing to Do withDionysos? p. 307.


as, for instance, in Frogs, when Aeschylus and Euripides put their verses onthe scales to determine which is weightier. Here Ranciere’s focus on themade status of plays seems pertinent, though it takes on a more concreteforce when situated within the actual content of the plays themselves.More important than the real artifactual status of these plays, I would say,is their own self-consciousness of it and how they decide to employ it.

Tragedy provides a more complex case since, unlike comedy, it does notgenerally represent the demos directly. This may have something to dowith social prejudice—a sense that the demos is out of place in so “high” aform. But it is more likely a result of tragedy’s avoidance of historicalmaterials in favor of a remote heroic past. At the same time, these plays givevoice to groups far more politically marginalized than the demos: specifi-cally, women and slaves. They do, moreover, sometimes focus on madethings. A famous case in point is the scene in Aeschylus’s Agamemnonwhere Clytemnestra lays delicate, exquisitely wrought tapestries on theground and then convinces her newly returned husband to tread uponthem on his way into the palace. After murdering him in the bath byentangling him in robes that are somehow also nets, she compares thecomplex weave of these latter to the plot or stratagem by which she suc-ceeds in vanquishing Agamemnon. Here the combined associations of art,weaving, and plot making clearly connect Clytemnestra’s craft to that ofthe playwright. But in this case drama as poiesis or made thing is associatedwith women’s work, not that of the male demos.43 I wish to take this ex-ample as emblematic of a more general tendency in Greek tragic drama.

Ranciere notes of political philosophy that it always arrives late on thescene because democratic politics commence without waiting for philos-ophy to provide it with an arche or foundational principle (see D, p. 62).But in the case of Plato, this lateness is even more profound because by thetime he pens the Republic, democracy has been solidly established in Ath-ens for a century—and, with it, the political ascendency of the demos. ByPlato’s day, the demos is no longer insurgent but a fully assimilated and insome sense dominant “part” of the political order. Putting this in Ran-ciere’s terms, the demos is no longer the bearer of a political miscount butrather integrated into the police, despite the antidemocratic grousing of

43. I am not suggesting that Clytemnestra herself necessarily wove either the tapestries orthe robe/net. Sitta von Reden insists that “the purple tapestry was certainly not bought withmoney” (Sitta von Reden, Exchange in Ancient Greece [London, 1995], p. 164), a claim contestedby Richard Seaford, “Tragic Money,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 118 (1998): 124 n. 59. Butweaving was in any case always women’s work, and the portrayal of Clytemnestra as an anti-Penelope might lead one to suppose that she wove the means of her husband’s death ratherthan (as in Penelope’s case) a means of putting off the importunate suitors.


intellectuals such as Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and others. Indeed, theantibanausic set pieces one finds in their writings are themselves part ofa fully recognizable genre—just another part of the reigning discursivesystem.

In other words, the “wrong” or “miscount” that initiates politics nolonger attaches in any deeply meaningful sense to the Athenian demos. If itis to be found anywhere, it resides with the women and slaves who remainexcluded from Athenian politics but in whom tragedy takes a profoundinterest. Tragic drama has long surpassed the matter of the demos overwhich Plato is still obsessing and relocated its political vision elsewhere.(The Eumenides is a partial and important exception, however.) What I amsuggesting is that by approaching theater so consistently through Plato’spolemics against it, Ranciere has unwittingly latched onto the “wrong”demos: the one that goes by that name. What tragic drama invests withpolitical visibility are precisely those groups still excluded from participa-tion in the polis. Simply inverting Platonic values then may not produce auseful image of Greek theater.

The real challenge to Ranciere’s theory posed by Greek theater lies notexactly here, however, but rather in the direct connection he posits be-tween politics and visibility. To make oneself seen is, in Ranciere’s view, to“count” politically. But tragedy’s representations of women and slaves arenot the aesthetic vanguard of some insurgency on their part. Neither groupever achieved real political agency in classical Greece, nor was it the ambi-tion of tragic drama to suggest that they should.44 The visibility granted bytheater was rather compensatory: a form of public exposure these groupsreceived in lieu of democratic participation. Clytemnestra gets to air thewrong done to the oikos by Agamemnon’s public, military commitments,and she does so before the collected demos in a way that no real Greekwoman ever could. Perhaps this could be described as politics by othermeans, but then one is still left with the question of why these other meansnever eventuate in actual political participation. The relation between aes-thetic and political visibility needs therefore to be carefully parsed, notasserted as an identity. Perhaps theater does not, as Plato asserted, producesimulacra of persons but rather simulacra of their (political) visibility.

Despite its valuable awareness of the way in which political philosophyconspires with the police, it could be said that Ranciere’s own theoreticalprocedure carries out a kind of policing function. By trying to fit Greektheater so seamlessly into its own political vision, Ranciere’s theory does it

44. The case that women enjoyed at least some kind of political standing in Athens is madeby Edward E. Cohen, The Athenian Nation (Princeton, N.J., 2000), pp. 30 – 48.


a “wrong.” In this context, the politics of Greek theater would then consistof its insistence (or of an insistence on its behalf) that any theoreticalaccount of it is simultaneously a miscount. Like Antigone wrangling withCreon, theater must achieve political visibility on its own terms before itcan do any other kind of work.

Theory’s TheaterThe question that provoked me to write this essay—and which may

have gotten somewhat submerged up to now—is: what does democratictheory want of theater? A corresponding question might be: what might welegitimately want, or expect, democratic theory to contribute to our un-derstanding of theater? I use the term democratic theory in these two ques-tions to designate not a subfield within political philosophy but somethingthat may stand entirely apart from it. Arendt referred to what she did aspolitical theory rather than political philosophy, in part to signal her at-tempt to understand the political on its own terms, without the aid of anymetaphysical or other nonpolitical grounding. Ranciere is even more ex-plicitly insistent that what he does is not political philosophy, a discoursethat in his view attempts to eliminate politics by reducing it to the police.

For both writers the threat represented by political philosophy can betraced back to its founding moment. Arendt is wary of Plato’s efforts toeliminate the contingency of human action from politics—to reduce thepolitical to a form of making or poiesis that can plan and predict its product(see HC, pp. 220 –30). Similarly, Ranciere resists Plato’s grounding of pol-itics in a metaphysical arche or first principle. Both of these objectionsreflect Plato’s attempt to fashion the polis after the realm of ideas, anotherworldly scene of order and perfection. One of Plato’s central objec-tions to drama is precisely that it has no access to this ideal realm, sincepoetic mimesis imitates not divine forms but rather those earthly thingsthat are themselves material imitations of the ideal. But this blockage oftheater from the transcendent is precisely its appeal for democratic theory,which turns to theater as a space of profane illumination or this-worldlydisclosure.

Still, the this-worldly has its own dangers, which mirror those of Plato-nism. For Ranciere, these are exemplified in Marxist metapolitics, whichreduce the political to a theater of illusion whose truth is located elsewhere,in the social. Metapolitics retains the image of the political as stage butempties the disclosure that occurs there of any intrinsic weight or mean-ing. As in Platonism, what occurs in the drama of politics is mere show, asimulacrum, though in this case of something below rather than above.


Arendt too sees the political as threatened by the social, which replacesaction and decision with administration.

What most fundamentally connects Arendt and Ranciere, despite theirmany differences, is their shared insistence on the autonomy and dignity ofthe political—their refusal to subordinate it to either socioeconomic in-frastructures or metaphysical ideals. In Arendt’s view, political debate al-ways concerns worldly ends but manages at the same time to transcendthem and become a space of risk and freedom pursued for its own sake. ForRanciere as well, the mere fact of appearance or visibility is a politicalreality that precedes and in some sense overgoes whatever material wrongmay have triggered a given demos into action. What I am trying to arguehere is that the specificity of the political can be respected without seques-tering it in the different ways that both critics do. I certainly am not claim-ing that the attempt to think through the nature of the political, and oftheater’s relation to it, in broadly theoretical ways should simply be aban-doned for a concrete study of material institutions, though I think that thelatter can serve as a useful constraint and provocation to theory.

In trying to evolve a language that would allow the political to be un-derstood on its own terms, Arendt and Ranciere nevertheless find them-selves describing the political in language that is borrowed from anotherinstitution—that of theater. I am less interested in the possible deficienciesof a theatrical model of politics than I am in the logic that informs this—what? analogy? metaphor? identity? Ranciere comes close to embracing thelast of these in stating flatly that “politics is always about creating astage. . . . Politics always takes the form, more or less, of the establishmentof a theater.”45 Perhaps the physical configuration of Athens, in which theTheater of Dionysos resembles the Assembly but stands at a distance fromit, provides a kind of topographical model for the relation of theater andpolitics in both Ranciere and Arendt.

Peter Hallward has explored various facets of Ranciere’s “theatrocratic”conception of politics: spectacularity, artificiality, multiplicity, disruptive-ness, contingency, improvisation, and liminality. He also points out, ifsomewhat in passing, the crucial influence of Schiller’s aesthetics of pureplay on Ranciere’s thought, particularly the ways in which the aestheticfrees objects from social function and place—that is, from that whichRanciere calls the police.46 What theater offers the political is the concept ofa performance pursued solely for its own sake, released from merely in-

45. Quoted in Hallward, “Staging Equality,” p. 142. Hallward’s essay is a searchingexamination of the promises and limits of Ranciere’s “theatocracy.”

46. See ibid., pp. 146 –51.


strumental aims. Greek theater, which is so strongly embedded in civic andreligious occasion, might seem at first to provide an unpromising model inthis regard, but then there is that famous Athenian proverb that tragedyhas “nothing to do with Dionysos”—that it has abandoned its ritual re-sponsibilities to pursue poetic inventiveness. The genius of Greek theater,though, was that it managed to do both—to serve an array of social, reli-gious, and political functions while maintaining a dramatic integrity thatrefused to be reduced to any of these.

For Arendt, the political always pursues worldly ends but also detachesitself from them to comprise an autonomous field of disclosure. The prob-lem is that she is unable to think these two elements other than through alogic of mutual exclusion, so that the instrumental dimension of politicsmust always be bracketed or veiled in order for the realm of freedom toappear. For Ranciere as well, concerned as he is to fend off a Marxistmetapolitics, questions of material wrong must endure a shift from beingthe trigger of political dissensus to its aftereffect: the limit where the polit-ical begins to cede to the police, with its apportioning of social goods. Whata more detailed study of Greek theater might offer is a model of how anautotelic conception of the political can be placed in relation to a socialcontext without thereby disappearing or succumbing to a rigid determin-ism from outside. What I am imagining is a less anxiously defended visionof the political, one that can coexist with other forms of interest and not bebumped from the stage by them. If the plot of Greek tragedy emphasizeddeadly incompatibilities of motive, the institution of theater itself wasrather more accommodating. Perhaps it can offer a model for the articu-lation not only of the political and the social but even, at a methodologicallevel, of philosophy and a more materially aware form of history.


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Halpern Democracy and Theater