1.1. Contemporary iconoclasm and the politics of comfort

For iconoclastic movements like RMF, public statues depicting individuals responsible for past ills such as slavery and imperialism are not simply artefacts of a violent history, but symbols of an exclusionary political philosophy. Their politics can be seen in the disparate effects that their presence has on different observers. As a white, middle-class student, for example, I never really noticed Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes during my three years at Oxford. My presence was not threatened by his, nor were my ancestors subjected to violence at his hands. For others, however, his presence is a direct affront to their right to exist in the space he adorns. Whether “consciously felt” or not, Rhodes’ statue holds political meaning for its audience; signalling to some that they are welcome and to others that they are not, thereby reinforcing the structural exclusions already present at the University of Oxford.Footnote ⁴

Ahmed compares the discomfort some are made to feel amid violent landscapes such as this to the feeling of “not quite fitting in a chair.”Footnote ⁵ At first, this discomfort changes how we perceive ourselves. While it may be that the chair was not built to accommodate our proportions, it still feels as though it is our fidgeting body that has failed to fit. We implicitly blame ourselves for our discomfort. Eventually, however, this discomfort alters the relationship we bear to the space we occupy. As we seek to locate the source of our discomfort, which “surround[s] us, like a thickness in the air, or an atmosphere,” we begin to perceive our surroundings differently: as signs of our being-out-of-place.Footnote ⁶ In this way, discomfort “gives us a different viewing point” outside of the normal receptive register occupied by comfortable bodies, which “allows things to move by bringing what is in the background, what gets overlooked as furniture, back to life.”Footnote ⁷ There is, in a sense, a paranoia implicit in discomfort, one that first sets our judgement upon ourselves and then upon the spaces we inhabit.

Rao acknowledges this paranoia, arguing that a statue “rel[ies] on viewers to project words, thoughts, and images onto it” for it to have meaning.Footnote ⁸ None of this is meant to discount the discomfort students experience when seeing Rhodes’s statue, but to locate it within a broader discomfort experienced by marginalised students within a university disinterested in accommodating their presence. Indeed, this point is made by the RMF campaign itself: “survivors of imperialism… find their histories excluded, or almost unidentifiable in Oxford’s imperial iconographies of space. Here, people experience the pain of cognitive dissonance because there is no ‘legitimate’ language for their own experience and knowledge, and few curricular resources to invoke to change that.”Footnote ⁹ Rhodes’ statue serves as an icon of a broader exclusionary politics, his presence amplified by the discomfort felt due to this exclusion. To discuss the politics of Rhodes’ continued presence at Oxford is thus always to discuss the politics of the institution he adorns.

For “our projections… to be credible,” however, Rao argues they must be substantiated by appeal to “what the person depicted said or thought in their lifetime.”Footnote ¹⁰ Rhodes’ undeniable connection to the genocidal history of British colonialism justifies the connections drawn by students between his statue and the injustices of the university it adorns. For Rao, it is this constraint of historical credibility that gives statues “a degree of autonomy and agency independent of the viewer’s projections.”Footnote ¹¹ Rhodes’ presence does not just reflect a pre-existing discomfort but amplifies it through the violent political history his statue represents. I would add that this also gives statues an autonomy independent of the agency of those who installed them. Given the centrality of imperial violence to Rhodes’ personal history, his presence articulates an exclusionary politics regardless of whether his installation was intended to explicitly celebrate that facet of his character. To discuss the history of Rhodes’ installation at Oxford is thus always to discuss the politics of his continued presence there.

Mary Garrard advances the argument that the installation of a statue in public space can carry more than its intended meaning. While Garrard cannot point to any historical record explicitly connecting the 1504 installation of Michelangelo’s David in Florence’s central square to its republican government’s desire to assert a more masculinist politics, she still contends that “David’s eroticism is inseparable from the erotics of gender power.”Footnote ¹² “The colossal David’s manifest virility,” invested principally in the statue’s visible phallus, justifies, in and of itself, a historical connection being drawn between his installation and contemporaneous expressions of gendered anxiety over the feminisation, decadence, and instability of Florence’s pre-republican past.Footnote ¹³ Again, when Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus joined David in the piazza, no one explicitly articulated their installation in terms of a desire to evoke a misogynistic politics. Yet, archival evidence of such articulations is not necessary for the historian of political philosophy. Rather, these statues, depicting “images of muscle-flexing, murder, and rape,” articulate such a politics themselves.Footnote ¹⁴ Simply by being present in public space, these statues enact an exclusionary politics, symbolically reflecting a political idealisation of gendered violence and masculine rage.

Turning from the past to the present, the ubiquitous presence of masculinist statues in our public spaces contributes to what Rao, following W. J.T. Mitchell, refers to as their refashioning into a “public sphere” in which all those who do not adhere to a proscriptive gendered politics become “trespassers.”Footnote ¹⁵ Again, it is not that these statues alone are responsible for the discomfort felt by marginalised subjects. Rather, their presence is amplified by the discomfort already caused by the exclusionary political rhetoric that circulates through our political discourse, which the presence of these statues, due to the content of their depictions, amplifies in turn. The presence of certain statues in our public spaces does more than offer an archive of the politics that may have motivated their installation. Rather, through what they depict, these statues translate this politics from a historical discourse into a present reality, legitimising exclusions within our public spaces in the here and now. “[T]alking about statues” is thus always “a way of talking about material imbalances of power in the present that are manifest” in our public spaces.Footnote ¹⁶ Meanwhile, demanding the removal of these statues offers a means for articulating an alternative political philosophy, one that seeks to reclaim public space from the politics these statues reflect and the discomfort they amplify.

1.2. The queer art of statues

In contrast with this iconoclastic concern with the aesthetic’s contribution to the violent politics of our public spaces, queer theory approaches the aesthetic as a resource for its own liberatory political philosophy. Muñoz identifies the ability of certain aesthetic forms to push the imagination of its spectators “beyond the quagmire of the present” and sustain a politics premised upon “an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”Footnote ¹⁷ Though this aesthetic inspires by appealing to “no-longer-conscious” moments from queer history that have been lost to the erasures of the archive, what it inspires is a politics grounded in the hope that such moments of queer vitality may be repeated in the lives of its spectators.Footnote ¹⁸ Muñoz, for example, finds within the self-portraiture of Andy Warhol the “ephemeral traces” of a radical queer communitarianism that is as politically salient today as it was at the height of New York’s AIDS epidemic.Footnote ¹⁹

The political potentiality of a queer aesthetic lies not only in the history it archives, but also in its capacity, as an art form, to elicit what Muñoz, following Martin Heidegger, calls “ecstasy.”Footnote ²⁰ In captivating the audience, certain art forms can lift them out of time, suspending their awareness of the goings on around them. Despite the spatiotemporal distance that may separate them, the artist and audience become, in this moment, connected in the “making-present” of a shared experience.Footnote ²¹ Illustratively, Muñoz recounts the experience of watching Kevin Aviance dance in a New York gay club, their bodies separated by “throngs of shirtless dancers… enjoying the ways in which their gym-sculpted muscles rub up against those of the next clonish dance-floor compatriot” and excluding “those who have not devoted their lives to… this hypermasculine ideal.”Footnote ²² Aviance’s flamboyant gesticulations communicate directly to “[t]hose on the margins of the crowd,” offering them an “extreme pleasure in seeing Aviance rise from the muscled masses, elevated and luminous.”Footnote ²³ At this moment, the crowd and its exclusions disappear from Muñoz’s account; only he and Aviance remain in the description of “an event that disappears in the very act of [its] materialising,” this story capturing only a “trace” of the intimacy they shared.Footnote ²⁴ Even in its trace, however, the ecstasy of Muñoz’s written aesthetic performs a political philosophy that simultaneously reclaims a forgotten past, critiques an oppressive present, and imagines a more hopeful future.

I contend that exactly such a trace can be found in the presence of a statue of Antinous, beloved of Roman Emperor Hadrian, amid the otherwise-austere architecture of UCL’s front portico. This statue is an artefact of a much-elided history: of the queer love of a boy for his emperor, and the valorisation of this love by an entire generation of queer Victorian devotees. It is the trace of this queer vitality that Antinous’ static form preserves for the present. Unfortunately, its aesthetic, and that of the university it adorns, have since been co-opted by a violent, exclusionary politics. Whilst in this statue’s beauty there remains an enigmatic queerness capable of captivating its audience, finding ecstasy in its presence therefore necessitates exceeding the exclusionary politics of its surroundings. In doing so, however, we can begin, as Muñoz does, to reclaim the space of this encounter from the politics that distorts it.

2.1. Amid Victorian London

To first reclaim the queerness of Antinous’ past, the public political philosopher must overcome the colonial rhetoric that has co-opted his legacy. Born in Bithynia on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, by age 18, Antinous had been installed within Hadrian’s court as his beloved, and by age 20 he was dead, drowned at the bottom of the Nile. Beginning with John Addington Symonds’ 1879 essay Antinous, historiographical engagements with this biography have always been politically motivated. While Symonds understood Antinous’ romantic relationship with Hadrian to be authentic, it was Antinous’ death, which Symonds determined to be an act of “voluntary suicide” in service to his imperial master, that Symonds truly cared about.Footnote ²⁵ As remains a dominant theme in homosexual literature today, it was the tragedy of Antinous’ demise and not the joy of his love that occupied Symonds’ narrative.

Beyond this sacrifice, Symonds saw “nothing in the life of Antinous to create a legend or stimulate the sense of awe.”Footnote ²⁶ Rather, what captivated Symonds were the many “immortal, indestructible, victorious” statues bearing Antinous’ likeness that Hadrian had commissioned to commemorate his grief and Antinous’ deification.Footnote ²⁷ As Sarah Waters notes, this concern for the beauty of Antinous’ likeness over the person these statues depicted characterised most of his fame among Victorian homosexuals.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, we can see in this cultural obsession the beginnings of the superficial veneration of an idealised bodily aesthetic that, as Muñoz reminds us, continues to dominate homosexual politics.

Liberated from the specifics of Antinous’ lived experience, writers like Symonds were free to mobilise him as the central character of a new homoerotic political philosophy suitable for Victorian London’s imperialist public. In general, Greek Antiquity held special importance within the Victorian colonial imaginary; the British Empire imagined as the inheritor of Greek philosophy and civilisation.Footnote ²⁹ Modelling their sexual practices on the erotic legacies of Greek male–male love allowed writers like Symonds to present their homosexuality as “an egalitarian and manly pursuit, democratic in nature and worthy of emulation for western democrats,” compatible with the imperial politics of their day.Footnote ³⁰

Reflecting the politics of sexual categorisation popular among their Victorian imperial public, this turn to Greek male–male love also provided writers like Symonds the opportunity to differentiate their sexual practices from the supposed sexual immorality of the colonial periphery.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, Symonds placed Greek male–male love within the sphere of European inheritance by emphasising the Doric (Northern Greek) origin of this ideal, distinguishing it from Phoenician (Asiatic) pederasty.Footnote ³² The former he understood as a “soldierly passion” that “had grown up in the camp” during the Doric colonisation of Southern Greece, uniting comrades in their pursuit of a common imperial goal.Footnote ³³ Meanwhile, the Oriental practice of pederastic desire for younger boys he reduced to a “passion which grovels in the filth of sensual grossness.”Footnote ³⁴ Again, this politics reverberates through contemporary efforts to police homosexual desire into more acceptable frameworks like marriage.

For Orrells, the distinction Symonds draws here reflects the imperial anxieties of his time about the corruption of Victorian society by Britain’s so-called uncivilised colonial subjects. As the Doric race spread southwards, Symonds contends, their masculine ideal of male–male love “mingled with ‘Oriental luxury’, becoming sensual and sensuous.”Footnote ³⁵ However, the story Symonds tells is as much one of purification as it is corruption, Greek love always remaining “in its origin and essence masculine, military and chivalrous.”Footnote ³⁶ Ultimately, Symonds argues that, as Doric colonisation progressed, its ideal of male–male love lost none of its “moral energy,” instead transforming the Phoenician pederasty it mingled with into “a glorious enthusiasm, a winged splendour, capable of rising to the contemplation of eternal verities and reuniting the soul of man to God.”Footnote ³⁷ For Symonds, Greek male–male love served as the cornerstone of a moralising sexual politics capable of sanitising even the most deplorable of public ills, retaining its civilising influence even after Roman adaptations to the practice. Furthermore, the racialised undertones of this narrative serve to enshrine racial exclusions into acceptable homosexual practice; exclusions that continue to structure homosexual politics today.

It is in this politics of imperial purification that Symonds placed Hadrian’s love for Antinous. Born at the eastern edge of the Roman Empire, Antinous, marked by the “orient glow” of his “orbed breasts, smooth as dawn-smitten snow,” symbolised a curious combination of European whiteness and Oriental exoticism in Symonds’ writings.Footnote ³⁸ By contrast, he understood Hadrian’s love for Antinous exclusively as a “Greek ideal,” locating it within a genealogy stretching back to Alexander’s chivalric love for Hephaestion rather than the Oriental tradition to which the relationship’s pederastic nature lent itself.Footnote ³⁹ Implicit within this genealogy is an appeal to European imperialism: whereas Alexander’s love for Hephaestion propelled him to conquer the Orient, through his love for Antinous, Hadrian civilised it. In Symonds’ retelling, Antinous’ purported willingness to die for the sake of his Emperor was the final moment in the story of his redemption, from a “background of doubt, calumny, contention, [and] terrible surmise” to “the dying glory of the classical genius,” the ultimate symbolic victory in the battle of imperial morality and Oriental vice.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this narrative, the effeminacy of Antinous’ form was recoded from a disclosure of his homosexuality to a representation of the emasculated subservience expected of the colonial subjects he exemplified.Footnote ⁴¹ To Symonds, Antinous therefore offered the ideal archetype: a visceral demonstration of the value to Britain’s empire of a political philosophy of male–male comradeship premised upon duty as well as desire.

2.2. At University College London

As well as its exclusionary legacies, challenging Antinous’ assimilation into this colonial narrative is also essential to the public political philosopher’s efforts to reclaim the queerness of his presence at UCL. Though the university’s archives don’t commemorate his installation, the first record of his presence at UCL dates to 1886: “[c]opies in lead of the Discobolus (presented by the late Dr. Fellowes), and of Antinous are placed on piers forming parts of the Portico.”Footnote ⁴² Prior to this, UCL’s records instead indicate the presence of “[c]opies in lead of the (so-called) Fighting Gladiator and the Discobolus, presented by the late Dr. Fellowes” at that location.Footnote ⁴³ Importantly, the archive makes clear that the once-called Fighting Gladiator and Antinous are distinct statues: the latter never being described as the progeny of Dr. Fellowes, records of the Slade School from 1871 listing both statues within its holdings, and a drawing of UCL’s portico produced in 1880 depicting a statue remarkably different in stature to either the Discobolus or Antinous.Footnote ⁴⁴ Dating this installation to 1886 is important as it places it as occurring at the height of the fame to which Symonds’ writings, which received “broad” and “mainstream” exposure during this period, propelled Antinous.Footnote ⁴⁵

This date is also important as it attests to the success of Symonds’ efforts to rescue Antinous from “censorious obscurity” by sanitising his image in his writings.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the eighteenth century, Antinous’ relationship with Hadrian was well known and continued to “dishonour the memory of Hadrian” in the puritanical eyes of Victorian society.Footnote ⁴⁷ So abject was this condemnation that, when Symonds, in preparing materials for his essay on Antinous, enquired as to the British Museum’s holdings on the subject, he was informed that “‘it required great courage’ to ask any questions about him!”Footnote ⁴⁸ Meanwhile, in 1875, casts of Antinous and the Discobolus, similar to those at UCL, had been removed from public view at Montreal’s Museum of Natural History on account of their vulgarity.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is perhaps surprising that Antinous’ installation at UCL was so little remarked upon at the time. The installation of Antinous is not mentioned in the minutes of any of the three committees that were involved in the decision to install the Fighting Gladiator and Discobolus in 1872: the University’s Committee of Management, the Slade Committee (the committee in charge of UCL’s art school), and the UCL Council.Footnote ⁵⁰ Whether indicative of an unwillingness to spur discussion of Antinous’ sexual proclivities or an unawareness of the potential controversy of his presence, the lack of debate surrounding his installation still implies the success of Symonds’ transformation of Antinous from public homosexual idol to palatable symbol of Victorian political morality.

A comparison can be drawn to contemporaneous efforts at the University of Oxford to introduce Plato, a similarly sexually maligned figure from Greek Antiquity, into its more conservative pedagogical landscape. Benjamin Jowett, believing that “reading Plato made the man ready for duty for the British Empire,” sought his introduction into a reformed, imperially oriented Oxford curriculum.Footnote ⁵¹ To do so, though, he first had to elide Plato’s staunch association with homosexuality within the Victorian public consciousness, with words like “Platonist” used at the time to “refer euphemistically to male homosexual practices.”Footnote ⁵² This Jowett achieved through a retranslation of Plato’s dialogues in which references to male–male love were quietly dismissed as “figures of speech” and “transpose[d]… into the merely carnal fecundity of the Victorian marriage.”Footnote ⁵³ The resultant sanitisation of Plato’s dialogues rendered his political philosophy of transcendental rationality, practised exclusively in conversations between men, fit for public purpose within an imperial context, with Socrates fast becoming an idol of the “civili[s]ed, civili[s]ing, white masculinity” that the British empire imagined itself to be exporting globally.Footnote ⁵⁴

Importantly, however, this academic sanitisation of Plato could not prevent Oxford’s many homosexual students from exceeding the bounds of its curriculum and discovering in his dialogues a “Liber Amoris” reflecting their own sexualities.Footnote ⁵⁵ Walter Pater, for example, saw in Plato the opportunity to reconceptualise homosexual desire as “a constitutive element of… the Western tradition” from its inception, rather than a Victorian social aberration.Footnote ⁵⁶ Meanwhile, Symonds resisted Jowett’s efforts to separate the masculine virility and imperial rationality of Plato’s dialogues from the male–male love they depicted: “For [homosexual] students of Plato, there is no question of figures of speech, but of concrete facts, facts in the social experience of Athens, from which men derived courage [and] drew intellectual illumination.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In Plato, Symonds further saw an opportunity to reconceptualise homosexual desire as something natural, rather than a Victorian medical malady: “What you call a figure of speech, is heaven in hell to him—maddening; because it is… wholly out of accord with the world he has to live in; too deeply in accord with his own personal desires.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Similarly, I contend that Antinous’ embeddedness within a Victorian politics of imperial morality need not prevent us from viewing his public presence at UCL only through that lens. As Waters argues, it is “impossible” to depict Antinous “without invoking [the] weighty representational tradition” of homoeroticism that surrounded him.Footnote ⁵⁹ Queer subjects are well versed in excavating the queerness buried beneath the violent politics that mask our public aesthetics. This practice, termed “disidentification” by Muñoz, has been responsible for the assimilation of icons of misogynistic, racist, even queerphobic politics, into a queer politics around which queer subjects can form “minoritarian counterpublic spheres.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In this case, it allows a queer subject, faced with an icon of imperial political morality and surrounded by the otherwise-austere architecture of what is a highly normative pedagogical institution, to feel something ecstatic, aroused by the overt queerness of “the sensuous but sulky air of Antinous.”Footnote ⁶¹ That said, I contend that supplementing Antinous’ inconspicuous presence with a written aesthetic that explicates the queerness of his past can make it easier for queer spectators in the present to reclaim his static form, thereby enhancing the political potentiality of his presence.

Muñoz makes clear that the queer gaze is rarely faithful to the aesthetic it consumes. Rather, it “shuffl[es] back and forth between reception and production.”Footnote ⁶² Queer subjects construct their icons as much by excavating them from the problematic politics that masks their public reception as by projecting new significance upon them. When approaching public statues, however, Rao reminds us that even our projections must appeal to the lives of those depicted to be credible. While a statue of Antinous may be enough to attract this queer gaze, the credibility of its assimilation into a truly queer aesthetic necessitates an appeal to the queerness of the life it depicts. Symonds was able to enlist Antinous into his imperial politics by refashioning his public image around a sanitised narrative of sexual morality. I propose to counter this narrative with an account of the queer vitality of Antinous’ history, so that his presence at UCL may elicit an ecstasy from his spectators. It is thus the political aim of reclaiming his public image and the public space it adorns that “conditions [my] knowledge of the past and [my] hope for the future.”Footnote ⁶³

3.1. Critical fabulation

Some recent efforts at writing a new history of Antinous’ “fraught and hideously conspicuous love affair” with Hadrian have been made.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Pax, for example, Tom Holland attends consciously to the personal dynamics at play in Antinous’ story, in ways reminiscent of Marguerite Yourcenar’s fictional Memoirs of Hadrian. Footnote ⁶⁵ In doing so, Holland lingers on key moments in Antinous’ life, usually ignored in historical studies. He notes, for example, Antinous and Hadrian’s shared participation in the Eleusinian Mysteries, a Greek ritual commemorating the myth of Persephone’s passage into the underworld, in which participants marched, fasted, consumed psychoactive substances, and worshiped in silent awe together, before dancing and singing into the early hours in celebration of the divine revelations they’d experienced.Footnote ⁶⁶ This detail he folds into a comprehensive history of Antinous’ life, culminating in his death, which, again, Holland attends to the personal dynamics of.Footnote ⁶⁷

While Holland’s account certainly breathes life into Antinous’ history, this historical resuscitation comes at a price. As Gayatri Gopinath argues, the only way to “rende[r] intelligible the particularities of same-sex desiring relations,” erased by an archive that has no interest in preserving them, is to “trac[e] the cross-pollinations between various sites of nonnormative desires… deliberately wrench[ing] particular scenes and moments out of context and extend[ing] them further than they would want to go.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Such histories go beyond simple archival excavation in their search for a recoverable past, instead relying on interpretation to make their narratives cohere. To tell a political history of the Roman Empire, as Holland seeks to do in Pax, demands from Antinous a significance to which the quotidian moments of his unfolding life cannot hold up. In contrast to Holland, I do not seek to recover the historical significance of Antinous’ life, but to use it to invest his presence at UCL with political significance. As Hartman argues, however, finding meaning in past lives, whether for the purposes of historical analysis or so that their memory may “be made useful or instructive” in the present, does “violence” to lived experiences of those about whom we write.Footnote ⁶⁹ To limit the scope of the violence of this retelling, I therefore turn to Hartman’s own technique of archival reading: critical fabulation.

Hartman tells us that “to read the archive is to enter a mortuary; it permits one final viewing and allows for a last glimpse of persons about to disappear.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The historian cannot resuscitate those they find there, nor can they excavate more than the superficial facts it preserves. The historian must accept that they will always remain “a stranger” to those “who left behind no traces” of themselves in the archive.Footnote ⁷¹ Constrained by “the rumo[u]rs, scandals, lies… and fantasies that constitute the archive,” one must exceed the limits of historical study.Footnote ⁷² Any attempt to reanimate the past reflects a backward projection that does more to articulate a politics of the present than it does to author a historical account.

In response to these constraints, Hartman searches for “an aesthetic mode… adequate to rendering” stories “beyond what could be thought of within the parameters of history.”Footnote ⁷³ Through a practice she names “critical fabulation,” Hartman proposes approaching historical moments “from contested points of view,” so that she may “imagine what might have happened or might have been said” beyond what the archive records.Footnote ⁷⁴ Writing of the death of an unnamed young girl aboard the slaving ship Recovery, Hartman speculates upon the possibility that this girl was “shunned by the other women” on board, who we know “danced and sang” and “pretended not to notice anything” as “she lay dying” beside them.Footnote ⁷⁵ Nothing in this saves the girl from her fate, but it does imbue her story with an altogether different politics. Without altering the historical record of this nameless girl’s short life, Hartman authors an account that makes it clear that neither her life nor the lives of the 12 million others forced to make the transatlantic voyage into slavery, nor the lives of their descendants may be reduced to misery and death. By exceeding the boundaries of history, Hartman communicates her political and moral conviction that all life, even one committed to death, is significant in its unfolding.

This narrative strains against two limits of historical study. First, Hartman cautions against the historiographical impulse to rescue one’s subjects from the violence of their fate. Writing of this unnamed girl, Hartman speaks of her desire to invent the presence of a friend who “could have beheld her” and “whispered comfort in her ear” as she passed.Footnote ⁷⁶ In reality though, no friendship exists in the archive and inventing one does nothing to improve the life of the young girl as it actually occurred; it merely makes the violence of her death more palatable to a squeamish audience “I was forced to admit that I wanted to console myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of something other than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Second, she speaks of the impossibility of finding in histories of despair “the glimpse of beauty, the instant of possibility.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Whether turning to the archive in search of “a lesson for our future or a hope for history,” Hartman contends that to do so within the bounds of historical analysis “replicates the very order of violence it writes against.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Here, Hartman and I diverge. Following Hartman, I seek to supplement the scant details of the life Antinous led before his death that the archive preserves. I do so by narrating vignettes that exceed the limits of both an archive that reduces Antinous’ life to one of sacrificial death and an aesthetic that reduces him to the superficial icon of a problematic politics. However, my goal here is to give less substance to Antinous’ past than to his presence at UCL. To do so, I willingly emphasise the immense beauty of the quotidian occurrences that constituted his life. By fabulating moments of queer vitality, such as Antinous’ initiation at Eleusis, we can provide readers a written aesthetic that draws out the queerness of his life and of the statues depicting him, so that their audience may be inspired to ecstasy in their presence. This ecstasy holds the potential not only to change those who experience it, but also to transform our relations to those with whom we share this experience and to reclaim the public spaces in which it unfolds.

Straining against the limits of Hartman’s fabulative historiography, I therefore aim to demonstrate that a retelling of the past can do more than remind us of the political and moral sanctity of life. As an articulation of what it is we seek to recover from history, I approach fabulation not as a method of history but as a political philosophy, which tells us as much about what we lack in the present and desire from our future as it does about the past upon which we are speculating.

3.2. The limits of historical invention

To me, it is in the fabulation’s limits that this potentiality lies. While I can offer a glimpse of the intimate beauty and erotic ecstasy of Antinous’ experience at Eleusis, I cannot capture the affective intensities of this moment to their fullest extent. In remaining frustratingly ephemeral, however, the narrative I offer below can produce a sense of what Bersani calls “paranoid fascination.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Speaking particularly in terms of the aesthetic, Bersani discusses the ways in which the archive addresses us, drawing us in with the promise of meaning only to deny us revelation in its enigmatic unreadability.Footnote ⁸¹ For Bersani, this “[e]rotic address is a self-reflexive move” by the artist.Footnote ⁸² I contend it is also self-reflexive for the audience in two ways. First, the desire for queer vitality that draws us into the archive forces us to question why our lives are so lacking that we must turn to history to experience a sense of ecstasy. In this way, the insufficiencies of the past can motivate us to critique the insufficiencies of the present. Second, unsatiated by the deficient vitality of the archive, we are forced to find alternative sources to satisfy our desires, leading us to demand ecstasy in our own lives. In this way, the insufficiencies of the past can motivate us to remedy the insufficiencies of the present. To find queer vitality in the archive and revel ecstatically in it thus allows us to “glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by [that] queerness,” sustaining a queer political philosophy aimed at critiquing and surpassing the “quagmire of the present.”Footnote ⁸³

It is in its limitations that fabulation can also contribute to Antinous’ presence at UCL. These stories can liberate his likeness from the superficial politics that has co-opted him and invigorate it with a newfound queerness, by exciting the imaginations of his spectators. In its affective insufficiency, however, this written aesthetic draws us back to the physical: Antinous’ static form investing his queerness with a materiality that words on a page never could. The point is not to locate in Antinous’ past a queer vitality to rival that of the present, but to ensure that when queer subjects observe in the present, it is this past, rather than a history of misery and death that they recall. In this way, these stories can draw Antinous’ likeness out from the background of UCL’s otherwise-austere architecture and allow the ecstasy that his camp form, supported by the queer life it depicts, evokes to dominate the public space it adorns.

To offer a novel history of Antinous that articulates the queer vitality of his life is therefore to alter the material parameters of the public space he adorns. It is also to reclaim that space from the exclusionary political discourse that circulates within it, which existing figurations of Antinous’ life amplify. This reclamation is inspired first by the ecstatic relationality that a properly contextualised statue of Antinous can elicit, and second by the political philosophy of critique that our need for such experiences and the reluctance of our present to nurture them demand.

3.3. Antinous and the mysteries at Eleusis

Imagine then what Antinous must have experienced when initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries.Footnote ⁸⁴ Night was drawing in on Antinous’ seventh day at the festival at Eleusis, tired from the march from Athens, hungry from days of fasting, high from the ingestion of Kykeon. He and Hadrian were each just another initiate among the thousands gathered at the temple. Their bodies would have begun to sway as torches were extinguished, and the hallucinations brought on by the Kykeon took hold. Were Antinous’ eyes to close, it would have been impossible for his mind not to be drawn to the reason for their presence at Eleusis: a commemoration of Demeter’s mythical anguish at the loss of her daughter, and a celebration of her elation at Persephone’s eventual return. A tear may have rolled from his eyes, overwhelmed by his silent contemplation of Demeter’s maternal grief. As the temple’s great pyre was ignited, basking the room in light, Antinous’ eyes would have opened, his gaze likely settling upon Hadrian, who stood close by. Were their eyes to meet, a comforting smile might have appeared across Hadrian’s face, a knowing look from someone first initiated into the mysteries years prior. He may have wiped the tears from the ridge of Antinous’ cheek, allowing his hand to linger for a moment before extending his fingers into his beloved’s tussled curls. A moment of silent intimacy, reminding both of the many nights of passion shared since they first met, united then as they are now in a perfect solitude.

In contrast to the solemnity of their initiations, the next day’s festivities would have offered the pair some welcome revelry. The repetitive drumming of tympana, the cross-tonal drone of aulos, the chanting of choristers; a dissonant cacophony drawing the worshippers, buoyant from feasting and still feeling the after-effects of the Kykeon, further and further into a collective trance. It is at this moment that Antinous and Hadrian’s love for one another would have likely reached its frenzied peak. Their bodies touching, moving together to the rhythmic drone of the pulsating music; their souls entwined, consumed by a communal euphoria in reverence to the Gods they came to worship. Muñoz tells us that to “take ecstasy” together is to “stand out of time together,” to share in an experience “saturated with… both visceral and emotional” meaning, disconnected from the violences of everyday time.Footnote ⁸⁵ In this moment of blissful relationality, drawn together by the love they have for one another, as well as their euphoric worship of a mournful God, Antinous and Hadrian were ecstatic.