Deterritorializing Classics

In the opening paragraphs of this introduction, I borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari to make the claim that classical antiquity, rather being understood as a fossilized object, is far better understood in relation to its perpetual instability, as ‘a world created in the process of its tendency, its coming undone, its deterritorialization’. As such, I included a number of expressions derived from this early mention of ‘deterritorialization’, a term that Deleuze and Guattari first employ in Anti-Oedipus.Footnote ³⁰ Their earliest collaboration is nothing short of a whirlwind anthropology of the human psyche, and this work above all else concerns itself with sociological repression in its numerous forms (clinical, economic, sociohistorical, political, etc.).Footnote ³¹ In it, Deleuze and Guattari outline the innately productive quality of the human drives (termed ‘desiring-production’). They argue that, contrary to the formulations of Freud and Lacan, neuroses (especially in paranoid forms) only arise in response to social dynamics, where the forces of ‘anti-production’ within the psyche prevail over those of ‘desiring-production’.Footnote ³²

Deleuze and Guattari then explain how these sociohistorical regimes (or forces of ‘social production’) have evolved over several millennia from ‘savage’, to ‘despotic’, and finally to ‘capitalist’—with their accompanying shifts from close-knit communities with fixed, well-inscribed social codes of exchange to a world where all symbolic value was appropriated by the ruler or ruling family; and finally to a world with isolated nuclear families unconsciously reproducing unfixed axioms of meaning.Footnote ³³ Following Marx, they also posit that the emergence of the Oedipus complex (and its repressive association of desire with lack) was a unique historical phenomenon that was the direct result of capitalism. Namely the worker, receiving only a small fraction of what his labor produces, returns home and unconsciously represses his sequestered family, especially by limiting the desiring-production of his children. This repression is further aggravated by capitalism's endless cycle of surplus production (and all of its associated unstable ideologies) coupled with the paranoia induced by a society trapped in infinite debt.Footnote ³⁴ For Deleuze and Guattari, the next imagined phase in both desiring-production and social production could be accomplished, ‘schizoanalytically’, by liberating multiplicitous, productive, unconscious desires from the repressive power elements that endure amidst the unfettered, yet highly unstable axioms of capitalist social regimes.Footnote ³⁵

Thus, one way of ‘deterritorializing classics’ might be to remove our classical sources—with their own potentially limitless surplus value of axiomatic meanings (which we might historically associate with the emergence of reader-response theory and reception studies)—from any fixed state of philological repression. This includes finding new ways to break from the imagined ‘infinite debt’ that is somehow owed to the idealized Urtext, to the classical canon, and to the privileging of the ancient world ‘as it actually’ or ‘essentially happened’ (‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’).Footnote ³⁶ For if the hindsight gleaned from historical analyses of classical scholarship is any indication, many encounters with classical antiquity have proven themselves to be deeply ideological. The unconscious, being continuously shaped by sociohistorical, political, and economic forces, leads even the most empirically minded of classicists down the rabbit hole into their own Mediterranean wonderlands. As such, we find that many seminal studies of Greco-Roman antiquity often reveal far more about the shifting historical contexts in which their authors wrote their magna opera than they could ever tell us about antiquity itself.Footnote ³⁷

In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical formulations and conceptual frameworks offer the more open-minded classicist a double set of hermeneutic opportunities (and the contributors to this volume make use of both approaches). First, they allow for stable reexaminations of classical texts with newfound understandings of both antiquity and the Deleuze-Guattari philosophical nexus, which can include potential criticisms of both. Second, they open up the far more mutually transformative, speculative process that results when both are brought together into an unstable assemblage—‘a becoming-classical of Deleuze and Guattari, a becoming-schizo of the classical, as well as a becoming-critical of the text and a becoming-textual of the critic’.Footnote ³⁸

As such, a central premise underlying this collection of essays revolves around the crux that arises when one juxtaposes the innate entropy of ancient sources (or ‘deterritorialization’) with its centuries-long history of postclassical reorganization by the individuals who have come into contact with them (‘reterritorialization’). For Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialization and the unrepressed desires that enable it are a primary quality inherent to all things. They exist prior to all reterritorializations, which are always the secondary result of various forms of repression induced by social, economic, political, and historical forces acting upon the human unconscious from without.Footnote ³⁹ Guattari offers a brief elaboration on the term in his ‘Glossary of Schizo-Analysis’:

Many of us, as scholars of antiquity, ‘feel at home’ inhabiting the territory we have delineated as classical studies, viewing it as a system with many conventions, both spoken and unspoken. As such, we operate in that hermeneutic circle of ‘subjectification closed in on itself’, appropriating what we will when it suits our scholarship and lesson plans.

Nevertheless, our desires can enable us to break the boundaries of that classical territoriality—to deterritorialize it—thereby ‘opening it up’ to further permutations of reinterpretation, reperformance, and even field-wise redefinition. Reception studies in classics serves as the best recent example of the latter, whose opposing reterritorialization remains the persistent compulsion to privilege the classical in any reception-based pairing. Thus, at any given moment, both types of forces act on the subject in question, leading Deleuze and Guattari to seek a means of giving greater priority to the forces of deterritorialization in order to liberate the subject from the secondary institutional forces and neuroses that prevent it from actualizing its full, unhindered, manifold drives.Footnote ⁴¹

Therefore, the primary aim of this volume is to explore how the radical philosophies and practices of these two thinkers might aid us in inaugurating further waves of deterritorialization within classical studies—to reopen antiquity to additional lines of desire by unraveling its entrenched structures, hermeneutics, systems, and habits.Footnote ⁴² Guattari offers a broad, inclusive vision:

From a classical studies perspective, we might begin by interrogating further the despotic notion that we as empirically minded classicists are somehow in a unique and privileged position to reconstruct the ancient world, whether through innate reason, scientific models, or an idealized understanding that is bone-deep.Footnote ⁴⁴ With the exception of papyri, inscriptions, material artifacts, and a few late antique manuscripts—many of these being extremely fragmentary in nature—a significant quantity of literary evidence from antiquity circulates within a fundamentally closed, much later hermeneutic circle,Footnote ⁴⁵ one which certain classicists continue to imagine as a transparent window on the ancient world.

Yet this historical dynamic also leads to a second reason for the hypotheses in my opening paragraph: many classical scholars no longer consider it a radical notion to view antiquity as an inherently discontinuous, complex, and diverse assemblage—of peoples, narratives, belief systems, trade networks, and so on. Gone are the days where the ‘Great Man theory’ prevailed (although we still find numerous biographies dedicated to iconic names like Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, and Constantine, wherein the market and lay readership play their indispensable roles). Moreover, we no longer inhabit a discipline where the explicit inclusion of postclassical theory within philological analysis is dismissed as irrelevant at best, or heretical at worst.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although many classicists will still be heard saying that the ‘primary text’ must come first (that perennial reterritorialization—although Page duBois's essay in this volume offers an excellent counterexample), this will surely not be a requirement for the diverse and theoretically minded readership of Ramus.

In fact, we seem to be arriving at a time of further deterritorialization in our studies of classical antiquity. We are pushing to affirm the truly diverse, deeply intersectional, and extraordinarily pluralistic nature of classics in its very essence. In so doing, we are laying bare the history of highly problematic reterritorializations of our discipline—such as the use of classics in the promotion of colonial exploitation and conquest (in Africa, Asia, and the Americas); in Italian fascism, Nazi propaganda and genocide; and, most recently, in alt-right misogyny, white supremacy, and xenophobia.Footnote ⁴⁷ Nor should we as classicists ever seek to ignore, to rewrite, or, worse, to support such authoritarian, exclusionary, and historically warped readings of antiquity.Footnote ⁴⁸

Here, Deleuze and Guattari serve as particularly admirable models. All criticism of their male-centered philosophical framings notwithstanding (a feature Nancy Worman rightly highlights in her essay on ‘Euripidean Assemblages’), there is every reason to believe that both individuals would have supported such reclamations of the classics as a diverse assemblage with deep revolutionary potential.Footnote ⁴⁹ The biographical history of their sociopolitical practices—from their involvement in various left-wing movements and protests (culminating in those of May 1968, a year before Deleuze and Guattari first met);Footnote ⁵⁰ to their non-traditional psychiatric work with patients at La Borde (an experimental clinic where patients were given a central role in the organization of their hospital);Footnote ⁵¹ to their lectures and seminars at Vincennes in smoke-filled rooms often packed to standing room (which were not only open to public attendance, but also actively encouraged public participation and debate, and were plagued with internal conflicts by different faculty and student factions)Footnote ⁵²—illustrates a profound commitment to anti-authoritarian and democratic ideals.

However, in pushing to reveal these many uncomfortable legacies of antiquity and its afterlives, we also run the risk of allowing our own dogmatic ‘microfascisms’ to shut down whatever interpretation of the classics strikes us as problematic. Indeed, the current classical Ekklēsia, and its increasingly fervent silencing of individual scholarly parrhesia in the name of a ‘New Athena Unicode’ of censorial decorum, is very much alive and thriving in the field of classical studies (albeit rightly aggravated by the discipline's ongoing lack of diversity and historical failures to address this problem, and to recognize minority scholarship and its practitioners). To make matters worse, a fair number of those enforcing the silencing of unpalatable views are speaking from positions of significant prestige in the academy, perhaps dreaming themselves to be the next basileis in line for what today could only be called Dark Age scholastic kingships (indeed, Guattari reminds us that ‘Everyone Wants to Be a Fascist’, including the academic).Footnote ⁵³ Granted, it may not be popular to implore such individuals to recognize their own privilege even when asserting what at face value seem to be calls for inclusion and dialogue (but are frequently coated with authoritarian instincts). Nevertheless, it is something that all of us, as participants in that rich diversity of materials we call antiquities, must remain committed to doing, lest we become the censorship-driven fundamentalists we are supposedly striving to expunge.

Here again, we can look to Deleuze and Guattari as models. They caution us to be cognizant of our own unconscious despotisms, which are always ready to reterritorialize our otherwise open, rhizomatic aims and emancipatory aspirations:

In this respect, it remains arrogant, misguided, and even triflingly totalitarian—at least from our hermeneutically limited, postclassical territory of ‘subjectification closed in on itself’—to imagine ourselves as somehow serving as the guardians of the classical tradition. That tradition is inherently open and accessible, yet also unstable, perennially shifting, and occasionally deeply problematic. However, were it not for these innately difficult qualities determined to resist simplification and easy resolution, nearly everyone in classical studies would be unemployed (many without timely book contracts), in an academic field with little ongoing relevance. Whether we like it or not, antiquity will continue to be shared by all whose manifold desires drive them to partake in its many contingencies. For it is always already seeking additional lines of flight through which in can develop newfound identities, interpretations, emancipations, and, in some instances, even problematizations.

Classical Territorializations

When we look to what has been passed down from classical antiquity, our source materials and their receptions offer countless glimpses of an innate deterritorialization accompanied by secondary acts of reterritorialization. In fact, the Homeric question, coming at the very outset of the chronological period which we traditionally (and problematically) refer to as the ‘classical world’, already illustrates these historical processes. Here, our most canonical of ancient authors, once thought to be a blind poet from every corner of the Aegean, has, since the days of Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord, exploded into a multiplicity of oral tales and fragmented formulae.Footnote ⁵⁵ In his account of the scholarly objections to Homeric multiplicity, Lord reveals much about the reterritorialized nature of classical hermeneutics (in this case, its repressive tendency to delimit and restrict texts to a singular, molar, idealized form—the fantasy of an original Urtext).

In this respect, the Homeric question, now a centuries old dilemma facing classicists, contains within its hermeneutic quandaries the very essence of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

On the side of deterritorialization, we witness the multiplicity and fluidity of the Homeric oral formulae as part of a circulating series of Archaic performances and reperformances, by a number of different bards who traveled the Aegean (and possibly the greater Mediterranean) and recreated, in each instance, a unique adaptation of the same underlying mythos. Thus, when Lord articulates, ‘[f]rom one point of view each performance is an original’, he is anticipating by nearly a decade a central formulation at the outset of Deleuze's seminal philosophical text, Difference and Repetition.Footnote ⁵⁷ Therein Deleuze, using the idea of the recurring festival, posits a repeating multiplicity of the non-identical that underlies identity and is unique to each ongoing iteration:

In pairing Deleuze with Lord, we see further broken down the notion of a single, ontologically stable text or poetic work as the original from which all other repeated similarities, or compulsive static repetitions (to borrow from Freud), ought to derive. Rather, each new performance can instead be viewed as the product of a dynamic and protean aggregate of rhizomatically assembled formulae—what we might refer to as ‘schizoformulae’/‘schizoformularity’, or ‘rhizoformulae’/‘rhizoformularity’—so long as the bard can be understood as giving free rein to his mythopoiēsis and its resulting desire-conjunctions.

This series of actions, we might say, is that ‘more secret vibration which animates’ the classics, ‘a more profound, internal repetition within the singular’ that allows for the very existence of the Homeric question and other classical hermeneutic quandaries. It is what Deleuze would call the ‘dark precursor’, which Zina Giannopoulou lays out in her discussion of the Deleuzian simulacrum and how it remakes its Platonic antecedent:

In many respects, this Deleuzian form of the simulacrum is the only manner by which classical antiquity remains available to us, haunted though it remains by its Platonic forms. And while we are tempted to chase a perfect original of the classics—imagining that so many copies have been reproduced from it that all we are left with is ‘an endlessly degraded icon, an infinitely slackened resemblance’—we would do far better to understand the ancient world as a positive, indeterminate force of difference in itself, ‘circumventing the identity of the original within and between its repetitions’, that makes a mockery of our continual attempts to chase a non-existent archetype.

Furthermore, with respect to Homeric multiplicities, the idea of a multiform Homer persists even in antiquity, wherein we can trace further deterritorialization through acts of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘becoming’ (or devenir).Footnote ⁶⁰ Beyond the already discussed biographical tradition of the wandering poet, Homer's transformations included appearing in a reverie of Ennius, in which the bard told the dreamer, ‘I remember myself becoming a peacock’ (memini me fiere pauom, Enn. Ann. 11 Skutsch), and that his soul eventually found its way into the early Roman poet (Schol. ad Pers. Prol. 2f.). They also involve an additional Homeric ‘apotheosis’ in the ancient literary criticism of Quintilian (Inst. 10.1.50). Furthermore, if we turn to the essay by Michiel van Veldhuizen which focuses on Circe's island and its animal becomings, we see that the larger Homeric world and the many simulacra it generates find continual transformation over a range of different classical and postclassical authors, artists, filmmakers, and thinkers.

Such metamorphoses are a mainstay of our ancient texts. Consider their most explicit formulations in the well-known works of Ovid and Apuleius which bear the title of their subject matter in flux. Inspired by these transformations, Assaf Krebs provocatively and playfully deconstructs Apuleius’ textual ontology in his paper on the topic, drawing extensively on Deleuze and Guattari's second collaborative venture, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.Footnote ⁶¹ In so doing, Krebs employs their concept of ‘minor language’—or ‘the deterritorialization of language’—which they refer to as the point at which ‘Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits’, bringing with it also political and revolutionary potentials within a major or dominant language.Footnote ⁶²

Indeed, many classical works celebrate dialects and ‘creolizations’ as forms of literary engagement with the sociopolitical worlds in which they find their genesis.Footnote ⁶³ One particular historical moment in which such minor language becomes acutely evident is early Latin literature, with its many Hellenic, Italic, and even Punic influences resulting from Rome's growing cultural contacts with and conquests of central and southern Italy, as well as the impact of the Punic Wars. Notable examples include Livius Andronicus’ hybridized rendition of the Odyssey into Latin, the reliance by Roman authors such as Varro on translations of Mago the Carthaginian's treatises on farming,Footnote ⁶⁴ or Plautus’ avowed ‘Sicilizing’ in the prologue to his Menaechmi (atque adeo hoc argumentum graecissat, tamen / non atticissat, uerum sicilicissitat, ‘And to the extent that this subject matter adopts a Greek style, nevertheless it does not adopt an Attic one, but instead adopts a Sicilian one’, 11f.). Yet minor language might also be said to include less overt politicizations, such as the varied usages of Greek dialect in the epinician odes of Pindar (say, references to the Dorian lyre and the Aeolian ‘horse strain’ at Olympian 1.17f. and 1.100–3), or the hyperawareness of Attic norms and their Ionic counterparts in Imperial authors such as Lucian of Samosata (above all, his Consonants at Law, the potentially spurious status of the text notwithstanding).

In the case of Ovid's Metamorphoses, we witness how the political forces of becoming take on an even more corporeal, and therefore affective, quality. Therein, the poet begins his cosmic transformation by way of the deeply generative, motion-based verb fero.Footnote ⁶⁵

From the Augustan poet's productive animus emerges a series of forms changed into new bodies, a mutable ontology (mutatas…formas) founded upon corporeal becomings (in noua…corpora). These extend from the human to the non-human, creating rhizomatic bridges among the anthropological, the botanical, the animal, the monstrous, and even the celestial, whose essential forms Ovid views as participating in the fluid dynamics of the cosmos from the beginning of time to the contemporary world in which he is composing his poem. Throughout Ovid's Metamorphoses, the forces of desire and their many extreme problematizations frequently take center stage.

Yet true free-form desire—as a fundamentally emancipatory power—finds its fullest expression in another problematic text by Ovid, the Ars Amatoria. The most striking statement in this respect is Ovid's open rupture (the strongest of any Augustan elegist) with a key element in the emperor's marriage and anti-adultery legislation: the refusal to accept the accompanying psychic impact of an Oedipal, monogynous repression.

Not only does Rome contain every desirable feminine object, but she produces them in abundance. This idea of amatory surplus marks a huge change from earlier elegy, in which poets such as Tibullus and Propertius found themselves regularly repressed in the presence of their mistresses.Footnote ⁶⁶

Even more striking, Ovid goes so far as to show how little power the imperial household has over Rome's affairs with Cupid. Ovid turns every civic monument remotely reterritorialized by the Augustan restorations into a site of amatory deterritorialization, a place redefined by its historically dormant desire-potential for picking up women, and thus transforms Augustan ideology itself: the Portico of Livia, the Forum Iulium, the Palatine, the Theater of Pompey, the Circus Maximus, the Forum Boarum, and so on. From a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, Ovid's act was truly revolutionary, bringing all of elegy's liberating forces to bear on Augustan social and civic structures:

Thus, instead of being viewed as the author whose excesses destroyed elegy, we might instead say that Ovid made the genre into the unfettered ‘schizoanalytic’ act of desiring-production that it had always endeavored to become, ever since Propertius’ migrant god Vertumnus declared, ‘My nature is suitable for all types. Turn me into whatever you want: I will suit those desires’ (opportuna mea est cunctis natura figuris: / in quamcumque uoles uerte, decorus ero, 4.2.21f.). This was Ovid's greatest intervention deep in the midst of the Augustan ‘nuclear winter’: activating and putting into unstoppable motion the Amor/Roma axiom.Footnote ⁶⁸

Elsewhere in our classical sources, we find innumerable fragments and lines of flight that embody other forms of deterritorialization. Among the fragmentary we might include the meaning-deprived, often inarticulate, and differentially repeating distillations of pure Deleuzian ‘sense’ in the ‘nonsensical’ cries of Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (e.g. ὀτοτοτοτοῖ ποποῖ δᾶ, 1072, 1076; and ἒ ἒ παπαῖ παπαῖ, 1114).Footnote ⁶⁹ Also among the fragmentary are the tattered margins and reconstructions of ancient texts, ranging from the openings of poetic works such as Callimachus’ Aetia Footnote ⁷⁰ to the ends of innumerable canonical histories cut short, including those of Polybius, Livy, and Tacitus.Footnote ⁷¹

And how can we forget the nomadic qualities of numerous ancient philosophers. Heraclitus, a key influence on Deleuze, offers his own notions of difference and variance, most famously embodied in his lemmata, one of which states, ‘Other waters and still other waters flow around those who step into the same rivers’ (ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμβαίνουσιν ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ, D65b Laks and Most).Footnote ⁷² So too does Lucretius, another major Deleuzian model, whose entire Weltanschauung is premised upon atomic multiplicities underlying imagined stable identities and unities. Not surprisingly, Richard Ellis and Richard Hutchins delve further into the Deleuzian connections with these two philosophers in their respective essays in this collection. Moreover, although Ellis enters within the human unconscious to understand Heraclitean ideas of the durational and spatial force of connectivity, materiality, and difference, whereas Hutchins seeks to understand the central role of animal agency as an external force of anti-human resistance as part of Lucretius’ concept of the turba and clinamen, both scholars find in Deleuze, Guattari, and their ancient forerunners an immense affinity concerning the posthuman condition—a feature that runs through most, if not all, of the papers in this volume.

Philosophy, like a number of other classical genres, also finds embodiment as an itinerant act. Most famously, we find such rhizomatic tendencies in the Peripatetic School of Aristotle, whose nomadic genesis Diogenes Laertius recounts in a quote by Hermippus:

Nor is this nomadism limited to philosophy. It plays a prominent role in satire, the genre of the ‘walking muse’ (musa pedestris, Hor. Sat. 2.6.17),Footnote ⁷³ whether in Horace's journey to Brundisium (Sat. 1.5), or in his wayward attempts to dodge the parasite as he wanders through Rome on the Via Sacra (Sat. 1.9). Above all, we see rhizomatic itinerancy in the poetry of Pindar, whose far-traveling epinician narratives—both in the temporal gulfs they bridge and the geographical divides they span—produce frequent states of Panhellenic movement and choral intermezzo.Footnote ⁷⁴

Finally, we might even look to the material world of archaeology to see deterritorialization underlying its many excavations and reconstructions. A well-cited axiom asserts that the archaeological process cannot take place without accompanying destruction and fragmentation. We must dig through and demolish later strata if we are to have any understanding of what came before and awaits circulation beneath. In some cases, the historical changes to the ancient sites, much like the emendations made to earlier manuscripts by later scribes and editors, were at least partly the byproduct of unconscious desires. These include financially induced drives, namely a recurring inclination to loot sculptures and inscriptions from their original sites; private reimaginings, such as the vision of Arthur Evans that led to the repainting of the Minoan palace complex at Knossos; and nationalist ideologies, including those which led to the purification of the Athenian Acropolis of its Ottoman buildings during the Greek War of Independence.Footnote ⁷⁵

Previously, in describing the history of Propertian studies, and the relation between unconscious desire in its textual criticism and the schizoid voices of its elegiac poems, I concluded,

Such a statement—finding its model in Deleuze and Guattari's very first description of the book as ‘assemblage’ (as something ‘unattributable’, ‘a multiplicity’ with ‘neither object nor subject’, ‘made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds’)Footnote ⁷⁷—need not limit itself to Latin elegiac desiring-production. This innate multiplicity is everywhere in the larger field of classics, as has been highlighted in the recent work of scholars such as duBois and Denis Feeney.Footnote ⁷⁸ In fact, because this classical diversity is further layered in numerous unstable receptions over several millennia, it would not be a stretch to say that Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage model aptly encapsulates our entire field of study: on the one hand, the iterative force of our source materials and objects of inquiry; on the other hand, the classical discipline that, like the Danaids in the Underworld, only temporarily captures all the ebbs, flows, and circulations within its defective, permeable pithos of ideas.Footnote ⁷⁹

Deleuze and Guattari Read the Classics

After centuries of both pre- and post-Enlightenment endeavors to organize antiquity (although this reterritorializing tendency can actually be traced back through the Alexandrian grammarians and librarians all the way to the Peisistratid recensions of the Homeric poems),Footnote ⁸⁰ several major shifts in the mid- to late twentieth century finally opened classical hermeneutics to a number of non-positivist, non-reductionist, and non-essentialist modes of interpretation. Thanks in no small part to the work of French classical scholars belonging to the ‘Paris School’ and their followers, structuralism, together with its anthropological and semiotic frameworks, inaugurated a series of new theoretical waves in the field of classics beginning in the 1950s to 1970s.Footnote ⁸¹ These include the many applications of feminist theory to classics in the 1970s to 1990s;Footnote ⁸² the intertextual studies of the 1980s and 1990s;Footnote ⁸³ the representational push against purely biographical reading which took off in the mid-to-late 1980s;Footnote ⁸⁴ the extremely influential wave of reception studies beginning in the 1990s, which, besides opening classics to interpretations by later authors, has since led to the important realization that the field of classics is inherently one of reception;Footnote ⁸⁵ and explorations in narratology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and various other theory-driven hermeneutics, whose practitioners have been at the forefront of the push for more speculative approaches.Footnote ⁸⁶ Without this vital work in classical studies over the last half-century, it would not be possible to assemble this volume of Ramus on Deleuze, Guattari, and antiquity.

However, when it comes to larger collaborations on the continental philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, preference has usually been given to individuals whose work is thought to reflect a clearer engagement with antiquity. Among these, Nietzsche stands out, both as a trained classical philologist and as an avid appropriator of Greek tragedy for his philosophical writings.Footnote ⁸⁷ So too does Freud, whose employment of Oedipus in his early theories of the unconscious has found plenty of interest among scholars of antiquity.Footnote ⁸⁸ Other postwar French theorists have also attracted considerable attention from classicists, especially Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, largely as a result of their readings of Sophocles’ Antigone (Lacan); Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica, and other texts by Galen and Plutarch (Foucault); and Plato's Phaedrus (Derrida). Thus, entire monographs, special issues of classics journals, and edited volumes have been dedicated to the work of these individuals.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, although Deleuze and Guattari were their contemporaries, not a single edited volume or special issue of a journal in classics has been devoted to Deleuzo-Guattarian classical receptions.Footnote ⁹⁰ This absence is in many ways surprising given the recent shift within the humanities to posthuman and non-logocentric epistemologies, which themselves have played a major role in our discipline's ‘postclassical’ turn.

Even more striking, if we can return to an earlier thread in this introduction, is the fact that classical antiquity, beginning with the Homeric world, serves as a key influence on Deleuze's philosophical ideas of innate internal difference and nomadology. In the first chapter of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze begins from a logos versus nomos dichotomy, only to delve deeper into the meaning of the latter term's Greek linguistic origins:

Citing the Indo-European linguist Emmanuel Laroche's 1949 doctoral thesis, Histoire de la racine NEM- en grec ancien, Deleuze argues that the word nomós (with the accent falling on the ultima), meaning a ‘place assigned for grazing’, derives from the primary, deterritorialized sense of the verb nemo meaning ‘to pasture’, and thus reflects an implicit nomadism over a not yet ‘allocated’ or ‘distributed’ land. For Deleuze, such ‘distribution’ and ‘allotment’ according to the hierarchies of an externally imposed ‘law’—ideas that are all found in the more familiar, penult-accented form nómos—derive from a secondary sense of nemo that only emerged in the Classical Era.Footnote ⁹² The significance of Deleuze's reading of Laroche should not be overlooked (all reimaginings about unclaimed Archaic land and unbounded Homeric territorialities aside). The French philosopher's foray into Greek morphology and Indo-European linguistics would help inaugurate a number of key formulations in his writings—most notably, his break from the primacy of fixed being and ontology, from traditional hierarchies and identity politics, and from static cartographies, and his subsequent foray into nomadic phenomenologies.

Deleuze's admiration for antiquity even encompasses genres as unlikely as Roman elegy. In fact, during his filmed L'Abécédaire interviews with Claire Parnet dating from 1988–89, he admits to having been an avid reader of Latin poetry in his younger days. In his account of the letter J for Joie (‘Joy’), he describes how he often read the Roman elegists, even conflating two of them in his passionate account of the genre:

The conflation of Tibullus and Propertius (or better still, ‘Tibullus-becoming-Propertius’), not to mention the omission of several other important Latin genres, certainly merits further explanation. Yet such a claim, when coupled with the extensive citations of numerous ancient philosophers in his written works, suggests that Deleuze was as much an avid reader of the classics as he was a voracious consumer of all manner of texts. In fact, merely a cursory glance at some of Deleuze's shorter essays and interviews uncovers a number of classical readings: of the islands of Circe and Calypso (Aeaea and Ogygia) as unique feminine spaces in his essay ‘Desert Islands’;Footnote ⁹⁴ of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, as read by his friend Kostas Axelos, for their modeling of difference as a devouring, errant force that ‘emerges from and re-enters a fissure that swallows up all things and beings’;Footnote ⁹⁵ of Plato and the Neoplatonists, read through the prism of his Doktorvater Maurice de Gandillac's work on the subject;Footnote ⁹⁶ and of Greek tragedy as the space that instituted the tribunal of justice in his essay, ‘To Have Done with Judgment’, with references therein to Aeschylus, Ajax, Oedipus, and even Anaximander.Footnote ⁹⁷

References to antiquity are even more extensive in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza,Footnote ⁹⁸ another early work that forms a part of Deleuze's biographical treatises on other philosophers (Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Kant, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Foucault),Footnote ⁹⁹ as well as What Is Philosophy?, the last work co-authored by Deleuze and Guattari.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The former study includes a chapter ‘Immanence and the Historical Components of Expression’, in which Deleuze—having previously illustrated how Spinoza's philosophy consists of one of immanence, which he terms ‘the theory of unitary Being, equal Being, common and univocal Being’ (as opposed to a Cartesian mode of ordered or taxonomical ‘Being’, with man at the top due to his intellectual reasoning)Footnote ¹⁰¹—sketches the historical development of this philosophical idea through Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the work of Spinoza.Footnote ¹⁰² Beginning with Plato's Parmenides, and the idea of participation as a form of initiation, Deleuze traces through the Neoplatonists (especially Proclus and Plotinus), Augustine, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Erigena, Meister Eckhardt, Avicenna, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and Nicholas of Cusa the development of the ‘expressive immanence of being’ as coequal to ‘the emanative transcendence of the One’ (i.e. ‘God expresses himself in the world; the world is the expression, the explication, of a God-Being’).Footnote ¹⁰³ He starts from the originally subordinate status of immanence (in the Neoplatonists), before situating its eventual conjunction with transcendence in Augustine and his successors (especially Erigena), and finally Spinoza. It is only here, at last, in the work of Spinoza, that immanence attains its full substantive force (what we might refer to as a ‘Neoepicurean materialism’): ‘Substance first of all expresses itself in itself…Substance expresses itself to itself’, all divine, all coequal, entirely free of hierarchy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In What is Philosophy?, by contrast, Deleuze and Guattari shift to a more sociohistorically determinate analysis of Greek philosophy in order to bring it into its clearest formulation as an act of territorialization, which they term ‘geophilosophy’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Therein, they argue that thought is less a matter of subject and object: ‘Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth…deterritorialization (from territory to earth) and reterritorialization (from earth to territory).’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In this respect, the cities of Ancient Greece, being far enough from eastern empires to remain autonomous (in their democratic political models), yet close enough to profit from their abundance of trade routes, ‘develop a particular mode of deterritorialization that proceeds by immanence; they form a milieu of immanence’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Expanding on a comment by Nietzsche in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks to illustrate how philosophy emerged from this geopolitical structure, Deleuze and Guattari map out an elaborate vision of the Archaic and Classical Greek rhizopolitics:

To be sure, Deleuze and Guattari offer a highly romanticized view (although certainly neither the first nor last) of the supposed ‘Greek miracle’. They imagine the Greek poleis and Athens in particular as a kind of open, wholly porous xenia-space where democracy allowed philosophy to flourish without opposition (as opposed to a space where certain forms of parrhēsia were often severely punished by fascistic majority decisions,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ where tyrannies emerged in a majority of its cities, and where Socrates himself was sentenced to death for what was essentially ‘philosophizing’). Similarly, they conceptualize the Delian League as a deterritorialized ‘fractalization’ (as opposed to a brutal form of imperialism of which we catch many glimpses in the history of Thucydides).Footnote ¹¹⁰ And they envision the Athenian empire (‘reterritorialized on the sea’) as an endeavor taken upon ‘a wider bath of immanence’ that created deep bonds of colonization with the rest of the Mediterranean (when in fact Athens itself only partook in the founding of a single colony, Thurii, in present-day Calabria). Yet, for all the historical idealizing, Deleuze and Guattari's reading offers a striking illustration of how our own desiring-productions, which in turn reshape the classical tradition, are ‘marked by detours and contingency’, thereby transforming our own reimaginings of antiquity and its wine-dark precursors into genuine philosophical ‘planes of immanence’.Footnote ¹¹¹

Finally, the French theorists’ mélange of antiquities becomes more schizoid still in their second-to-last co-authored assemblage, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.Footnote ¹¹² Notable in this regard is their extended discussion of ‘becoming’ as Archimedean Science (as opposed to Euclidean Science), through an analysis that moves from Plato's Timaeus to Lucretius’ concepts of the clinamen (a very slight ‘swerve’), turba (‘upheaval’), and turbo (‘to act violently, revolt, throw into disarray’)—central to Hutchins's essay in this volume—and in turn to its pioneer Democritus.Footnote ¹¹³ Elsewhere in the same chapter, ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine’, Deleuze and Guattari employ Georges Dumézil's two-pole theory of political sovereignty to distinguish between Rome's mythical kings Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, and Tarquinius Superbus, which is then extended to include the Greek basileis Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax, and Achilles, and even the German chieftain Arminius.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Likewise, we hear mention of Titus as an agent in the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE;Footnote ¹¹⁵ use of Heliogabalus (via Antonin Artaud) in discussions of their concept of the ‘body without organs’;Footnote ¹¹⁶ and explication of Achilles’ ‘becoming-woman’ and Penthesilea's ‘becoming-dog’ (via Heinrich von Kleist).Footnote ¹¹⁷ Moreover, throughout their later chapter, ‘7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture’, Deleuze and Guattari return to Dumézil's formulation to discuss such classical topics as Horatius Cocles, Mucius Scaevola, the myth of Tantalus, Homer's Iliad, the Dorian invasions, and even broader ancient Mediterranean peoples and polities including the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Pelasgians, the Greeks, the Roman Empire, Byzantium, and cities such as Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Corinth.Footnote ¹¹⁸ If that were somehow insufficient, scattered through the work's plateaus we find a number of French and Francophone classical scholars (many from the Paris School), including not only Dumézil, Laroche, Vernant, and Detienne, but also Claire Préaux, Pierre Noailles, Édouard Will, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Charles Parain, Jacques Harmand, Gérard Boulvert, Gabriel Ardant, Paul Veyne, André Chastagnol, Claude Nicolet, Henri van Effenterre, and François Châtelet,Footnote ¹¹⁹ all of whom Deleuze and Guattari marshal in support of their various extensions of the deterritorialization/reterritorialization cycle.Footnote ¹²⁰

In light of all these classical interconnections, Fredric Jameson's articulation of what exemplifies Deleuzian thought in a chapter entitled ‘Dualism and Deleuze’ seems particularly apt:

We see this ravenous appetite, at least where it involves antiquity, not only in the number of different works by Deleuze and Guattari that cite classical materials, but also in the sheer variety of those classical references that range from all over antiquity (which I have only minimally laid out).Footnote ¹²² If anything, such extensive engagements with antiquity highlight the abundant potential for new studies of postwar classical receptions. We therefore hope that the present volume of Ramus can serve as a further catalyst for such scholarly explorations.

Reading Antiquity's Thousand Plateaus

Work on Deleuze and Guattari, like other theoretical interventions, need not justify itself through unidirectional classical receptions. To date, a number of classicists have begun to explore how the works of these two scholars, like those of other modern and contemporary theorists, can help us to reread antiquity and to question with greater rigor the hermeneutics, methodologies, and boundaries of our supposedly ‘Greco-Roman’ discipline. Some of the more notable case studies of Deleuzian and Guattarian interventions thus far include Michael Shanks's usage of their concept of the ‘rhizome’ to rethink the overly positivist tendency of archaeology to see one-to-one signification in its findings (that are often deeply rooted in unconscious subjectivity);Footnote ¹²³ Shanks's reading of Archaic Corinthian visual culture (particularly the assemblages of mythical creatures and soldiers) through Deleuze and Guattari's models of becoming-animal, becoming-pack, and the war machine;Footnote ¹²⁴ Victoria Wohl's anti-Oedipal remapping of Pentheus’ gender-fluid, libidinal desire for the effeminate Dionysus and the numerous becomings generated by Euripides’ Bacchae;Footnote ¹²⁵ Brooke Holmes's essay on Lucretius, which, in addition to analyzing the philosopher's impact on Deleuzian philosophy (and that of other leading postwar French theorists), also offers a more dynamic model of multidirectional reception theory;Footnote ¹²⁶ and a number of duBois's monographs which draw heavily on the Deleuzian and Guattarian frameworks of deterritorialization, the rhizome, the movement-image, and the critique of Oedipus.Footnote ¹²⁷

In her highly intersectional engagement with antiquity, Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks, duBois highlights how the Deleuzo-Guattarian idea of deterritorialization can help lead us to a more diverse global classics, unbounded by the monadic Eurocentrism and veneration-by-filiation that for centuries defined the classical tradition.Footnote ¹²⁸

More recently, this model has been taken up by Osman Umurhan, who has examined Juvenal's Satires from the perspective of globalization in the Roman empire using Deleuze and Guattari's theories of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as a guiding principle.Footnote ¹³⁰ Likewise, Cavan Concannon has made excellent use of the assemblage to describe early Christian ‘ecclesiastic’ connectivities as rhizomatic networks, and also of Deleuze's notion of difference in itself (what Concannon calls ‘creative difference’ and ‘positive difference’) as a less agonistic way of conceptualizing ‘the various socialities of early Christians’.Footnote ¹³¹ Meanwhile, on the philosophical side of things, Ryan Johnson has expanded the work of Holmes and devoted an entire monograph to demonstrating how ‘Lucretian atomism produced many essential features of Deleuzian philosophy due to the force of that formative encounter’.Footnote ¹³²

Finally, in a lengthy study of French classical scholarship and postwar theory's engagement with the myth of Oedipus, Miriam Leonard has analyzed how Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus was a crucial influence on certain works by Michel Foucault. She also shows how these writings, in turn, shaped the scholarship of Vernant, Claude Lévi-Strauss (via Vernant), as well as the political formulations of Vidal-Naquet.Footnote ¹³³ Leonard's Parisian genealogy is quite striking. For it suggests that the supposedly structuralist scholars, whom we credit with inaugurating a series of theoretical turns in the field of classical studies, were themselves already drawing from the formulations of Deleuze and Guattari. If this is true, then a more systematic study of the relationship between antiquity and these two thinkers—whom a fair number of other classicists have already begun to incorporate into their working methodologies—is long overdue.Footnote ¹³⁴

Furthermore, the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari have for several decades played an influential role in other humanistic disciplines. These include feminist philosophy, LGBTQ studies, postcolonial theory, film and media studies, political science, affect and posthuman studies, art history, architectural studies, historical theory, border and migration studies, and even postmodern textual criticism. Thus, before concluding this introduction with an overview of the papers in this volume, I ought first to discuss a few prominent examples of such disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) incorporations of Deleuze and Guattari. All of these works offer additional models for more creative, open-ended, and experimental engagements with antiquity, and many of them can already be found in the articles featured in this volume.

Although certain continental philosophers, namely Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, have sought to critique the ideas of Deleuze (and Guattari),Footnote ¹³⁵ a number of influential feminist philosophers have built many of their central ideas around the Deleuzian conceptual apparatus. Most notable among them are Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, both of whom have deftly navigated the strong criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari by Luce Irigaray, Alice Jardine, and Gayatri Spivak.Footnote ¹³⁶ Moreover, Braidotti and Grosz have played an influential role in the posthuman turn: Braidotti's work has bridged feminist figurations with zoological metamorphoses, virtual studies, and speculative fiction,Footnote ¹³⁷ while Grosz has experimented extensively with the affective consequences of duration, force, and becoming not only on the female body, but also on prosthesis, artistic territoriality, architectural space, phenomenology, and temporality more generally, and even human evolution.Footnote ¹³⁸

This places both of them in the company of a number of interdisciplinary scholars whose work intersects with these conceptual fields: Isabelle Stengers and her far-reaching studies at the crossroads of the natural sciences, philosophy, and political theory; Manuel DeLanda and his similarly expansive work in macrohistorical theory, the virtual (including the relation between military history and computer technology), materialist philosophy, and assemblage theory; Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Jane Bennett, all four of whom have written extensively on affect theory (with Massumi and Berlant exploring its relation to media-based virtuality, and Massumi further examining the political force of affect in ‘preemption’); Patricia Pisters, Tom Conley, Ronald Bogue, and Réda Bensmaïa in film and media studies; and Eyal Weizman, Keller Easterling, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Rosalind Krauss in the fields of architecture and art history.Footnote ¹³⁹ In fact, the formulations of Deleuze and Guattari have influenced all of these thinkers, in many cases serving as the driving force behind their theoretical and creative formulations.

Deleuze and Guattari have also played a vital role in political theory and political studies, which is not exactly surprising given the influence of Marxist thought on many of their joint endeavors. This legacy is most apparent in the collaborative works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (the most well-known being their book Empire), as well as the solo work of Antonio Negri and Fredric Jameson.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Deleuzian and Guattarian political valences even extend to the recent work of Judith Butler,Footnote ¹⁴¹ as well as the darker undercurrents of Achille Mbembe and Eyal Weizman, who offer an important series of reflections on the dystopian consequences of their theories (a quality touched upon by many of the papers in this volume, especially those of Chidwick, Hutchins, Worman, and van Veldhuizen). These include Mbembe's figurations of the ‘necropolitical’ potential contained within Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the ‘war machine’,Footnote ¹⁴² as well as Weizman's study of the real-life military application of the theories found in A Thousand Plateaus by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in occupied Palestine (perhaps the bleakest reterritorialization of Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy to date).Footnote ¹⁴³

The political legacy of Deleuze and Guattari has also shaped postcolonial theory. In this vein, Mbembe, Bensmaïa, and Weizman have played an important role alongside scholars such as Édouard Glissant; their various applications of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts have helped to (re)articulate phenomena ranging from creolizations in the Caribbean to minor language in the Maghrebian writings of Kateb Yacine.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The same holds true for border studies and migration theory, in which scholars such as Keith Woodward and John Paul Jones III, Iain Chambers, and Thomas Nail have employed Deleuze and Guattari to highlight the fluid, permeable, and nomadic qualities of border spaces.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Furthermore, the destabilizing force of Deleuzian and Guattarian thought has likewise found its way into LGBTQ studies, as is especially evident in the writings of Jasbir Puar, who stresses the affinity of queerness with the Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage. For Puar, the assemblage constitutes ‘a series of dispersed but mutually implicated networks’, as opposed to traditional intersectionality which ‘demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, generating narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative of identification’—an openness, somewhat akin to the Deleuze-inspired theorizing of Sara Ahmed, from which classics could greatly benefit.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Finally, in our eternal return to all things philological, we can note the opportunities for an assemblage-based textual criticism (or rhizomatic history of the book) following the speculative explorations by Henry Sussman, David Greetham, Stuart Moulthrop, Sebastiano Timpanaro, and Sean Gurd.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

In line with this scholarship, many additional concepts have emerged at the intersections generated by the conceptual apparatus of Deleuze, Guattari, and these numerous academic disciplines. Terms such as ‘affect’, ‘posthuman’, ‘cosmopolitics’, ‘exform’, ‘relational aesthetics’, ‘political unconscious’, ‘ontopower’, ‘forensic architecture’, ‘poetics of relation’, ‘necropolitics’, ‘postcolony’, and ‘homonationalism’ all owe either their formation or dissemination, at least in part, to the legacy of these two French philosophers. For this reason, we think it apropos to consider their implications for the field of classical studies, which, when it comes to concepts, is often characterized by both a skeptical reticence and a belatedness of incorporation, an irony that is hard to miss owing to the fact that classics is only ever a conceptual discipline.

Therefore, judging from such a vantage point of ‘conceptual classics’ (or the ‘classics concept’), which includes its numerous ‘postclassicisms’ (a useful recent coinage), our objects of inquiry have ample room for further reconceptualizations: the ‘schizotextual criticism’ suggested in the work of scholars such as Sean Gurd, who, in a particularly Deleuzian manner, highlights the extensive multiplicity underlying our numerous ‘classical assemblages’ masquerading as authorial names (what he terms ‘radical philology’);Footnote ¹⁴⁸ the gloomy underbelly of our ‘necroclassics’, with its longue durée histories of enslavement, imperial subjugation, and patriarchal rule, leading to a shadow ‘form of death-in-life’ for countless peoples who inhabited the Greco-Roman world (slaves, foreigners, women, children—the ancient subaltern appears unfathomable);Footnote ¹⁴⁹ and the ‘devenir-classique’ by which we might characterize every encounter with antiquity, loaded as each of these events is with countless processes by which we reanimate its otherwise necrotic and mute remains (philological, hermeneutic, exegetic, creative, ideological). Or, as Hannah-Marie Chidwick so fittingly describes it:

As such, there really isn't a classical, at least not in any fixed sense of the term, where ontological primacy is concerned: no classical antiquity, no classical philology, no classical world. There is only a ‘becoming-classical’.

The essays in this volume take up this diverse mantle of engagement with Deleuze and Guattari. The volume opens with Richard Ellis’ study of the relation between the Presocratics (especially Heraclitus) and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy (often through another crucial Deleuzian influence, Henri Bergson). Ellis begins by sketching out how Heraclitus’ critiques of other archaic thinkers for overly deductive polymathiē (‘specialized learning’) reflect his own view of the natural universe as a phenomenological continuum that can only be properly understood through one's innate noos (‘intuition’). Ellis then illustrates how Deleuze, inspired by Bergson, believes that durational, virtual thinking allows us ‘to go beyond the human condition’ to connect with the differences not just between, but within things. He uses this framework to reconsider how a number of Heraclitean fragments, namely those involving durational play, temporality, and finitude among children, ‘model Heraclitus’ intuitive method of philosophical practice as νόος, born from their material embeddedness in the world’, whereby children become the exemplars who best expose the ‘more profound grasp of the insights lurking between word and world’.

Like Ellis, Zina Giannopoulou devotes a significant portion of her essay to explicating central tenets of Deleuze's philosophy—not only his ‘simulacra’-related work in Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, and his essay ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’, but also his Bergson-inspired durational studies in Cinema 2: The Time Image.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Framed around Plato's Allegory of the Cave (Pl. Rep. 7.514a–18d), Giannopoulou illustrates how this philosophical concept is reimagined with both political and epistemic possibilities through Deleuzian critique. Building on Deleuze's reworking of Plato, her essay extends to the cinematic receptions of the cave in Bernardo Bertolucci's film, The Conformist (Il conformista, 1970), which centers on fascist Italy and the various simulacra that haunt and reshape the memories of the collaborator Marcello Clerici. In her analysis, Giannopoulou takes a number of the Deleuzian themes examined by Ellis and considers their political consequences in Bertolucci's recreation of fascist Italy through the lens of the Platonic gaze: questions of virtuality in Marcello's coming face to face with the falsehood of his childhood memories; of false external resemblance that masks internal difference (discussed alongside the Platonic ideas of eikasia and pistis); and of the relation between childhood play, openness to experience, and its traumatic finitude, which extends to further iterations of unconscious repression and reterritorialization in adulthood (embodied in Marcello's alternating political conformity, cowardice, and refusal to fully engage in state-sanctioned murder while simultaneously remaining an active participant in its unfolding events).

Ben Radcliffe, too, bridges seemingly disparate poles in his paper on the domestic in Hesiod's Works and Days. Therein, he connects the Archaic Greek oikos with modern visual culture by Paul Klee and Francis Bacon, and the theoretical formulations these inspired in Deleuzian and Guattarian texts such as The Logic of Sense, A Thousand Plateaus, and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.Footnote ¹⁵² Radcliffe employs their idea of the home that does not preexist, but rather, ‘comprises only a “center in the heart of chaos”’—a temporary territorialization that is linked to ideas about nomadology that underlie all spaces (and also tie into Ellis’ discussions of bridging the human and the natural). In so doing, Radcliffe shows how Hesiod's depictions of winter, and the enigmatic figure of the anosteos (‘boneless one’), serve as an affectual expression of unrestrained desires turned inwards, and, although already domesticated, of the Hesiodic Golden Age's ‘workless self-sufficiency’.

The next four papers develop the Deleuzian and Guattarian tenet of becoming, and reexamine a variety of classical works according to its related concepts of multiplicity, the assemblage, the line of flight, and the animal pack. Hannah-Marie Chidwick employs these (especially as they are presented in A Thousand Plateaus) to read the proliferation of multiplicity, already nascent in the Roman concept of the miles (‘soldier’/‘soldierly assemblage’), in Lucan's constructions of military violence, destruction, and collapse in the Bellum Ciuile. Chidwick examines the ‘plus quam ideology that suffuses Lucan's text’, and illustrates how the poet brings to life the Caesarian ‘war machine’ and the violence against the state that it inaugurates by way of its pack-driven intensities.

Subsequently, Richard Hutchins makes use of the same Deleuzo-Guattarian treatise to explore Lucretius’ deeply posthuman depiction of ‘animal politics’ in Book 5 of the De rerum natura. Bringing their concept of the ‘line of flight’ to bear on Lucretius’ deterritorialized atomism, Hutchins details in careful sequence how Lucretius shapes the animal revolt against the all-too-human, reterritorialized, and exteriorly imposed concept of empire. In turn, we are shown how Lucretius offers ‘the first sustained account of animal resistance in the classical world’—a particular form of posthuman thought that has emerged over the past decade in response to concerns about environmentalism, species-extinction, and the so-called era of the Anthropocene, and has finally begun to find expression in the field of classical studies.Footnote ¹⁵³

Continuing further into the territory of the decidedly political (like Giannopoulou, Chidwick, and Hutchins), Page duBois takes the reader across a broad expanse of literary, film, and cultural history. Much like Deleuze and Guattari themselves, she traces human conceptions of the insect swarm in highly comparative, deeply resonant terms, from Plato to the Paris Commune, from Achilles’ Myrmidons to Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Nevertheless, her underlying objective remains the deterritorializing assemblages created by Aristophanes’ anonymous chorus of Wasps. duBois shows how their collective, yet heterogeneous actions in ‘becoming-insect’ transform them into ‘exemplars in the political and ideological conflicts of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE’, whose actions—reformulated in a Deleuzian and Guattarian vein—can finally wrest Greek comedy away from the post-Aristotelian agency of the comic hero and illuminate the enduring capacity of the dēmos to find collective solutions among individual differences.

Like duBois, Nancy Worman explores the intersection of Greek drama and Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage. In so doing, she interrogates the role played by affect and transcorporeality on female bodies in Euripidean tragedy. Worman delves further than any of the others into the problematics of Deleuzo-Guattarian theory, in particular the philosophers’ fetishizing of the non-male as a reflection of the male-centered position on which they base their ideas of becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and becoming-the other. In so doing, she uses this space of critique to frame her reading of Euripides’ gendered tactile embodiments of violence as fundamental features in his ‘tragic aesthetics and its brutal politics’—which seem to align themselves quite frequently with representations of women in both the ancient and contemporary male imaginary.

The last two papers, by Assaf Krebs and Michiel van Veldhuizen, focus especially on questions of transfiguration. Krebs uses Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘minor literature’ as well as ‘sense’ to deterritorialize the Metamorphoses of Apuleius from the inside out, showing the manner in which the text presents itself as an open, highly permeable, and deeply rhizomatic assemblage that affords its readers numerous entry and exit points, thereby ‘subverting the major order governed by structures of language, fixed and steady position’, genre, and style. He examines a number of the work's schizophrenic manifestations of this phenomenon, including Lucius’ loss of uox humana and its dissolution into ‘pure sound’ (like that of other characters in the novel), the transformation of the novel itself into a text to be unbridled and grazed by its audience, and the formations of numerous packs of speed and intensity in the story of Psyche.

Finally, van Veldhuizen closes the volume with a return to Homer and the island of Circe. He explores the long history of allegorizing that has been used to explain Aeaea's hedonism over the course of the island's numerous receptions that extend from antiquity into the twenty-first century. Reading backwards from these later reconfigurations—which range from ancient lycanthropic visual culture to H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau—van Veldhuizen illustrates the subtle nuances in the transformations of Odysseus’ men (and Odysseus’ own actions in relation to that pack). Furthermore, he argues that such metamorphoses, when combined with the unique territorialities of Aeaea, should be understood not merely as analogical representations, but rather as true demonic becomings. And like Hutchins and duBois, he emphasizes how ideas about becoming-animal can offer us ‘a new perspective on the ubiquitous expressions of human-animal interaction in antiquity and beyond’.

Many of the contributions to this volume originated as papers for an organizer-refereed panel at the 149th Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS, Boston 2018), entitled ‘Deterritorializing Classics: Deleuze, Guattari, and their Philological Discontents’. In addition, several other contributors submitted stimulating abstracts during the call for papers, which certainly would have been accepted for presentation were it not for the limitations of the SCS panel structure; a few of these scholars kindly agreed to submit papers based on those abstracts as part of this volume. Moreover, we are extremely grateful to the SCS Program Committees under the leadership of Michele Salzman who were open to the idea of affording Deleuze and Guattari a place at the conference, and to Charles Platter and Mario Telò who took the time to read and evaluate the large number of abstracts that were received. Thanks are also owed to Alex Purves, who generously agreed to serve as a respondent and offered a number of insightful comments regarding both individual papers and the major themes generated by the panel as a whole; and to the audience members, who asked a number of astute questions and helped to generate a lively discussion.

Finally, we wish to express our immense gratitude to the editors at Ramus, Helen Morales and Tony Boyle, for allowing us the opportunity, per duBois's pronounced desire in this volume,

While it is in all likelihood an Anti-Oedipal fantasy to hope to usher into the field of classical studies Foucault's often cited pronouncement, that ‘perhaps one day, this century will be a Deleuzian one’,Footnote ¹⁵⁶ we can still use Deleuze and Guattari to help us resist the reterritorializing pull of a privileged Cartesian rationalism. In so doing, we can not only quietly endure, but also openly celebrate antiquity's numerous ambiguities—much like Socrates pushing back against the limits of what we think we know so well—and thereby take Badiou's epitaph for Deleuze as our model: ‘resist the ineluctable temptation of transcendence, endure the proximity of chaos, victoriously traverse the Acheron’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷