Love among the Ruins
Love among the Ruins

Author: Victoria Wohl

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-02-09

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1400825296

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Classical Athenian literature often speaks of democratic politics in sexual terms. Citizens are urged to become lovers of the polis, and politicians claim to be lovers of the people. Victoria Wohl argues that this was no dead metaphor. Exploring the intersection between eros and politics in democratic Athens, Wohl traces the private desires aroused by public ideology and the political consequences of citizens' most intimate longings. Love among the Ruins analyzes the civic fantasies that lay beneath (but not necessarily parallel to) Athens's political ideology. It shows how desire can disrupt politics and provides a deeper--at times disturbing--insight into the democratic unconscious of ancient Athens. The Athenians imagined the perfect citizen as a noble and manly lover. But this icon conceals a multitude of other possible figures: sexy tyrants, potent pathics, and seductive perverts. Through critical re-readings of canonical texts, Wohl investigates these fantasies, which seem so antithetical to Athens's manifest ideals. She examines the interrelation of patriotism and narcissism, the trope of politics as prostitution, the elite suspicion of political pleasure, and the status of perversion within Athens's sexual and political norms. She also discusses the morbid drive that propelled Athenian imperialism, as well as democratic Athens's paradoxical fascination with the joys of tyranny. Drawing on contemporary critical theory in original ways, Wohl sketches the relationship between citizen psyche and political life to illuminate the complex, frequently contradictory passions that structure democracy, ancient and modern.

The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece
The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece

Author: David Le Roy

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9780892366699

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The striking engravings of Julien-David Le Roy's The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece (1758) first revealed the architectural wonders of ancient Athens to the West. Part architectural theory, part archaeological report, part travelogue, the greatly expanded edition of 1770 -- here translated into English -- is entirely original in its understanding of the spirit of classical Greek architecture and in its influence on the direction of contemporary architectural creation. Book jacket.

China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome
China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome

Author: Chris Murray

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-07-16

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0198767013

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Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers have turned to classics to provide interpretative paradigms and narrative shape to inform their understanding. This volume reveals key insights into British cosmopolitanism, which sought its bearings in the ancient past in encounters with Qing Dynasty China.

Athens, Still Remains
Athens, Still Remains

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 73

ISBN-13: 0823232050

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Athens, Still Remains is an extended commentary on a series of photographs of contemporary Athens by the French photographer Jean-François Bonhomme. But in Derrida's hands commentary always has a way of unfolding or, better, developing in several unexpected and mutually illuminating directions. First published in French and Greek in 1996, Athens, Still Remains is Derrida's most sustained analysis of the photographic medium in relationship to the history of philosophy and his most personal reflection on that medium. At once photographic analysis, philosophical essay, and autobiographical narrative, Athens, Still Remains presents an original theory of photography and throws a fascinating light on Derrida's life and work. The book begins with a sort of verbal snapshot or aphorism that haunts the entire book: "we owe ourselves to death." Reading this phrase through Bonhomme's photographs of both the ruins of ancient Athens and contemporary scenes of a still-living Athens that is also on its way to ruin and death, Derrida interrogates a philosophical tradition that runs from Socrates to Heidegger in which the human--and especially the philosopher--is thought to owe himself to death, to a certain thought of death or comportment with regard to death. Combining philosophical speculations on mourning and death, event and repetition, and time and difference with incisive commentary on Bonhomme's photographs and a narrative of Derrida's 1995 trip to Greece, Athens, Still Remains is one of Derrida's most accessible, personal, and moving works without being, for all that, any less philosophical. As Derrida reminds us, the word photography--an eminently Greek word--means "the writing of light," and it brings together today into a single frame contemporary questions about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and much older questions about the relationship between light, revelation, and truth--in other words, an entire philosophical tradition that first came to light in the shadow of the Acropolis.

Athens Riviera
Athens Riviera

Author: Assouline

Publisher:

Published: 2020-05-28

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9781614289463

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Overlooking the Aegean Sea, a charming string of coastal neighborhoods form the Athens Riviera, a serene escape from the constant activity in the city's center. A selection of high-end hotels lines the pristine stretch of beaches down to the southernmost point of the Attica Peninsula. The revamped Four Seasons Astir Palace, with a history of housing foreign dignitaries and film stars of the 1960s, is the most luxurious hotel in Athens, perhaps even in all of Greece. The night club, Island, is bringing back the glamour and excitement of the twentieth century bouzouki clubs reminiscent of names such as Melina Mercouri and Stavros Niarchos. Athens is experiencing a revival--in art, night life and design. For a metropolis constantly associated with the past, the modern strides in development and culture are sometimes overlooked in favor of the ruins and artifacts from antiquity. When in fact, the juxtaposition only enhances the beauty of both. Athens Riviera puts the old-world beside the new-world and a deeper understanding of this ancient capital emerges. With one foot in the past and one foot in the future; access to both the electricity of city life and the tranquility of a beach side resort, Athens cannot be defined in simple terms. One just has to experience it for themselves.

Christo-Fiction
Christo-Fiction

Author:

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-05-05

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0231538960

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François Laruelle's lifelong project of "nonphilosophy," or "nonstandard philosophy," thinks past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations between religion, science, politics, and art. In Christo-Fiction Laruelle targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and the radical potential of Christ, whose "crossing" disrupts their circular discourse. Laruelle's Christ is not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the Apostles, or the Catholic Church. He is the embodiment of generic man, founder of a science of humans, and the herald of a gnostic messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. Explicitly inserting quantum science into religion, Laruelle recasts the temporality of the cross, the entombment, and the resurrection, arguing that it is God who is sacrificed on the cross so equals in faith may be born. Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism alike, Christo-Fiction is a daring, heretical experiment that ties religion to the human experience and the lived world.

Thucydides, Pericles, and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides, Pericles, and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War

Author: Martha Taylor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-10-26

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1139482793

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Thucydides, Pericles, and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War is the first comprehensive study of Thucydides' presentation of Pericles' radical redefinition of the city of Athens during the Peloponnesian War. Martha Taylor argues that Thucydides subtly critiques Pericles' vision of Athens as a city divorced from the territory of Attica and focused, instead, on the sea and the empire. Thucydides shows that Pericles' reconceputalization of the city led the Athenians both to Melos and to Sicily. Toward the end of his work, Thucydides demonstrates that flexible thinking about the city exacerbated the Athenians' civil war. Providing a thorough critique and analysis of Thucydides' neglected book 8, Taylor shows that Thucydides praises political compromise centered around the traditional city in Attica. In doing so, he implicitly censures both Pericles and the Athenian imperial project itself.

Phoenix
Phoenix

Author: David Stuttard

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0674988272

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A vivid, novelistic history of the rise of Athens from relative obscurity to the edge of its golden age, told through the lives of Miltiades and Cimon, the father and son whose defiance of Persia vaulted Athens to a leading place in the Greek world. When we think of ancient Greece we think first of Athens: its power, prestige, and revolutionary impact on art, philosophy, and politics. But on the verge of the fifth century BCE, only fifty years before its zenith, Athens was just another Greek city-state in the shadow of Sparta. It would take a catastrophe, the Persian invasions, to push Athens to the fore. In Phoenix, David Stuttard traces Athens’s rise through the lives of two men who spearheaded resistance to Persia: Miltiades, hero of the Battle of Marathon, and his son Cimon, Athens’s dominant leader before Pericles. Miltiades’s career was checkered. An Athenian provincial overlord forced into Persian vassalage, he joined a rebellion against the Persians then fled Great King Darius’s retaliation. Miltiades would later die in prison. But before that, he led Athens to victory over the invading Persians at Marathon. Cimon entered history when the Persians returned; he responded by encouraging a tactical evacuation of Athens as a prelude to decisive victory at sea. Over the next decades, while Greek city-states squabbled, Athens revitalized under Cimon’s inspired leadership. The city vaulted to the head of a powerful empire and the threshold of a golden age. Cimon proved not only an able strategist and administrator but also a peacemaker, whose policies stabilized Athens’s relationship with Sparta. The period preceding Athens’s golden age is rarely described in detail. Stuttard tells the tale with narrative power and historical acumen, recreating vividly the turbulent world of the Eastern Mediterranean in one of its most decisive periods.