Agamemnon

Photography, tragedy and Osama bin Laden: looking at the enemy

“…The invitation to look was often accompanied with an appeal to the justice or injustice of the death, or the improbable simplification of the relationship with the dead into friendship or enmity. Thus Clytemnestra shows the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra, clarifying that they are ‘enemies who had seemed to be friends’, and, in the next play in the trilogy ( Libation Bearers ), Orestes shows the bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, displayed with the same net in which Clytemnestra trapped his father . And similarly, at the end of Antigone , Creon brings out the body of Haemon for public mourning, highlighting his close identification with his son: ‘You look at us the killer and the killed/ of the one blood.’ By contrast, while Creon attends eventually to the proper burial of Polyneices, he does not bring his body out on stage or offer it that public act of witnessing and mourning.…”

Representation as indwelling: Contextualizing Michael Psellos’empsychos grapheacross artistic, liturgical, and literary theory

“…(ἤδη τέχναισιν ἐνθέοις ἡιρημένη;). 38 These uses of the term endure well into late-antiquity given that the application of entheos to describe the Psalms, together with both the Old and New Testaments more generally, speaks to the term's associations not only with divinely-inspired texts, but also those that are prophetic in nature. 39 As such, the term in Byzantium is often used to describe sacred texts as well, their material embodiments, and holy figures, such as the Evangelists or Church Fathers.…”

Rhetoric and Drama

“…At the end of the Phaedrus, for instance, he includes, in his overview of the arts of rhetoric that he rejects, the work of one Theodorus on the refutation or elenchos of both accusation and defense (Phaedrus 267A). 6 Aristotle references this same Theodorus in his treatment of the parts of the oration at the end of his own art of rhetoric; and he does so to contrast it with his strong preference for a simpler division of a speech into statement and proof-prothesis and pistis (Rhetoric 3.13.4). 7 Those who insist on introductions, statements, proofs, refutations, conclusions, and so on, are pegged as wrong-headed followers of .…”

“…5 The ars rhetorica is precisely such a device of mediation and facilitation. 6 Conceptualized as a téchne from its onsets in Greek Antiquity, rhetoric is the expedient kat' exochén, a form for potentially any content: Blumenberg pointedly describes the "rhetorical medium" as being "nothing and capable of everything" (Höhlenausgänge 131; trans. dsm).…”