دانلود کتاب در غیر این صورت از باینری – خوانش های فمینیستی جدید در فلسفه و فرهنگ باستان

A now common critique of the Western philosophical tradition is that it harbors an inherent sexism wherein “universal reason” is far from neutral but is, rather, positively masculine, setting itself against the feminine domain of irrationality, madness, magic, and mystery. Theorists like Genevieve Lloyd or feminists like Luce Irigaray have argued that Greek modes of thought, particularly Pythagorean, Platonic, and Aristotelian, insofar as they appear to privilege identity over difference, logos over pathos, the intelligible over the bodily, form over matter, and so on, all harbor a gendered hierarchy that reinforces sexist and racist oppression not only in antiquity but also in the present age. As our title suggests, this volume hopes, to think otherwise than this binary and to examine whether the Greek worldview neatly falls within this exclusionary form of thinking. Overall, we will ask if there are ways of thinking antiquity differently, namely, as possibly expounding and even celebrating philosophies of difference, and we will see if we may discover rare moments when authors of antiquity valorize and uphold the necessity of all that has been coded as feminine, foreign, and/or irrational. This volume does not aim to address every figure or period of antiquity; rather, it proceeds thematically through selected texts that invite interpretation that is otherwise than the binary. As contemporary thinkers are turning toward new ways of reading antiquity, we hope that these selected studies will inspire other readings of ancient texts through this critical lens. When examining the philosophers and notable figures of antiquity alongside their overt patriarchal and masculinist agendas, we will attempt to rethink our current methodologies while also questioning how we receive and read these texts. Is it possible to interrogate particular authors, texts, and social practices of antiquity for ideas, theories, and/or images that are complementary to feminist and intersectional concerns? While not a work of apologetics that dismisses or neglects exclusionary practices and beliefs of classical authors so as to safeguard the value of the “perennial tradition,” the following does hope to respond to the question in the affirmative, analyzing the works of problematic thinkers and texts anew, seeing if we can engage their philosophy and practices in ways that might expose their own deep-seated tensions and contradictions. In other words, insofar as feminists wish to argue that patriarchal logic is inherently problematic, we will expose how there are moments, strains of thinking, in which masculinist authors fail to be fully consistent in their misogyny—fail, despite their agendas, to support their own attempts to delegitimize the feminine/Other—showing how the systems and ideas of antiquity may contain internal struggles and possible whispers of revolution that dismantle and subvert patriarchal thinking. Of course, this anthology of essays in which we reinterpret select authors from antiquity through a feminist perspective would not be possible without the important works of the scholars before us. One of the most influential works to turn a feminist critical lens on Ancient Greek culture and thought is Nicole Loraux’s groundbreaking Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes (1984). In this text, Loraux examines the Athenian idea of autochthony (nativeness) in the Ancient Greek imagination and analyzes the figure of Pandora as the “first woman” created by Hephaestus at Zeus’s command. Loraux approaches these myths as fantasies, arguing that myth—often disregarded in much of the classical tradition of scholarship that preceded her—plays a significant political role in the context of the polis.1 Loraux is working in a genre of scholarship influenced by the ideas of Lévi- Strauss, and often refers to the texts of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, thinkers working in the tradition of structuralist anthropology that attempted to understand Ancient Greek mythical narratives within their cultural, civic, and religious contexts. Children of Athena is a rich and complex work, and cannot be exhaustively summarized here, so we will focus on crucial aspects of Loraux’s treatment of autochthony and the myth of Pandora as emblematic analyses that demonstrate her method and critical feminist orientation toward the texts, especially as she reads them in ways that would support our “otherwise than the binary” reorientation toward classical antiquity.