Did Eos live within a system that reduced her world? – Claudia La Rocco
In Cicero’s reworking on the Myth of Er in Plato’s Republic, he presents the fictional dream of Scipio Aemilianus, in which his illustrious (adoptive) grandfather Scipio Africanus explains how the soul escapes the prison of the body to live the true life after death. The clearest expression of this idea occurs at the moment that Africanus tells Aemilianus of his (birth) father Paulus, who, like other souls, is more alive than the living:
quaesivi tamen, viveretne ipse et Paulus pater et alii, quos nos exstinctos arbitraremur. ‘Immo vero’, inquit, ‘hi vivunt, qui e corporum vinculis tamquam e carcere evolaverunt, vestra vero, quae dicitur, vita mors est. Quin tu aspicis ad te venientem Paulum patrem?’ Quem ut vidi, equidem vim lacrimarum profudi, ille autem me complexus atque osculans flere prohibebat.
(“I ask if he was himself alive and my father Paulus and others, whom we regarded as dead. “Yes indeed they are alive,” he said, “who have soared away from the bonds of the body, as from a prison-house; but your life, as it is called, is really death. Indeed, look at Paulus, your father, coming towards you!” On seeing him I shed a flood of tears, but he folded me in his embrace and by kisses endeavoured to stop me weeping.)
As well as the philosophical point made by this dream sequence, Cicero compounds the patriarchal foundation of ancient Roman society in the moving scene between son and deceased father as a well-ordered system of values.
Jackie Wang in her new book Carceral Capitalism, acknowledges that her proximity to the topic under analysis is partially a result of her own familial situation (her brother’s incarceration). In a lyrical section at the heart of the book, Wang develops this theme in terms of time:
The phenomenology of waiting.
The agony of juridicial limbo.
The carceral ripple effect when any life is taken by the state, how it warps the temporalities of everyone in the orbit of the disappeared person.
I don’t know how time is experienced on the inside of prison; I only know how prison mangles time from the perspective of a family member on the outside looking in.
Nine years we sat waiting for my brother’s hearing, while his appeal sat unread on some courthouse clerk’s desk.
Time moved on the outside while my brother’s situation remained static
Elsewhere, Wang recognizes that although her conception of ‘carceral capitalism’ is grounded in expropriation of ‘black racialization in contemporary contexts’ of mass incarceration, she acknowledges that:
expropriation reproduces multiple categories of difference – including the man-woman gender binary.
In accounting for this expropriation, Wang refers to how women are not only bound by formal and informal duties (e.g. washing dishes at the office, mentoring students, thankless administrative tasks and extensive forms of care labor) that are excused for their male colleagues (who get the “dysfunctional genius” pass), but also how this whole system:
is propped up by gender socialization, which compels women to psychologically internalize a feeling of responsibility for others.
To return to ancient Roman literature, working within the patriarchal system, the North African philosopher and novelist Apuleius of Madauros offers a twist on both Wang’s analysis of gendered incarceration by expropriation and Cicero’s idea of the body as prison for the soul. By telling the myth of Psyche (the soul) in his novel The Golden Ass, Apuleius shows that, even though her lover is none other than the god Cupid, she misses human interaction (especially that of her sisters), as she is locked up in his magical palace which she describes as a ‘blessed prison’ (beatus carcer).
The same phrase is used by Apuleius’ Roman predecessor, Statius, to describe the empty cage on the death of a pet parrot (Silvae 2. 4). Here gendered domesticated isolation and the imprisoned soul are mobilized to critically upend the Platonic values of the free, immortal soul at (bodily) death. Apuleius, as a Platonist, may of course be using this image as a way to show the truth path that Psyche abandons when she gives up this ‘prison’ for the slavish pleasures of her jealous sisters and the human world. Yet, at the same time, the idea of the soul out of the world as a form of prison, no matter how ‘blessed’, also points to philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s feminist rewriting of Plato in her book In Spite of Plato.
Cavarero suggests an alternative way of looking at this impasse between the male philosopher’s image of the body as prison and the female soul’s longing for the bodily attachments of her sisters by invoking the figure of Penelope weaving and unweaving the burial shroud for Odysseus’ father Laertes, as a cunning mechanism to stake off the suitors until Odysseus returns. Of course, as Cavarero acknowledges, Penelope is a myth of domesticity and a cornerstone of the patriarchal system. At the same time, when Plato appropriates her as a reversal of the way the soul unweaves itself from the body at death, she can offer an alternative tradition of embodied psychology that challenges that of Plato.
From Cicero to Apuleius, Cavarero to Wang, what concerns us here is how the body/soul dualism becomes terrain over which sexual difference and misogynistic oppression is played out. As such, perhaps a somewhat naive question would be: if we can stop the expropriation of women’s lives, would the soul then be at home in the body? Conversely, could a way to counter the patriarchal system be to demonstrate that the idealized soul without the body is in fact a kind of prison?
Looking back over the posts from our assigned two week period from last year (March 25-April 4), we can see such a counter-argument feeling its way out, not only of our series of 12 posts that ‘automatically illustrate’ Apuleius’ novel, but also in the build up to them. (Note how we had to expand our time-limit by a few days to encompass the whole of Apuleius’ winding tale). We started by mapping freedom and constraint between the work Locus by Trisha Brown and the story of Socrates dancing early in the morning. Did he dance in prison? Did his soul dance after the death of the prison of his body? (March 20). We then moved past the exhibitions of Suzanne Pagé, an art director and former Classicist, called Migrateurs and the restricted bodies of Trump’s travel ban (March 21) to the soaring Phoenix and the myth of rebirth for the MINT Collective in the fire after ghost ship (March 22) and the soulful song and dance of the weaver Aboubakar Fofana (March 23). Tying and untying the soul from the body, we settled into the groove of Apuleius’ tale of Lucius the donkey, a human soul in an animal’s body, who hears the myth of the Soul (Psyche) and her love for Love (Cupid) (March 24). All other stories are suspended, as we follow this thread of eleven books of back and forth, in and out of mind. We start on the road, traveling with Haim Steinbach (March 25), past the myth of Actaeon and Leon Golub’s dogs (March 26) to the excessive laughter festival of Barbara Cleveland (March 27), only then did we enter the robbers’ cave where lurked Jeff Koons (March 28). There we were told the tale of Psyche’s prison, through a video of Hito Steyerl( March 29), her trials, performed by Pope. L (March 30) and the continuation of the donkey’s tale with Sophie Calle (March 31). As Lucius the ass nearly loses his hide (Courtesy Seth Price April 1 – happy April Fool’s Day!), Pierre Huyghe (April 2) and Martine Syms (April 3) articulate the difference between labor and spectacle. Only then do we get what we were searching for, the redemption of Martha Rosler’s deconstruction of the ‘pose of glamor’ in her rereading of Vogue (April 4).
This journey has moved from the free soul and the imprisoned body of Lock Her Up to being released from the blessed prison to the liberated body of I’m With Her, as we all join in, by jumping out of carefully constructed systems!
