Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Paul Allen Miller, Mario Telò

• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9780814216156
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814284957
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle explores the concept of the Freudian death drive to interrogate both the ancient past and the present, highlighting how destruction and its remnants resist erasure and shape historical memory. Using Gaza's rubble as a metaphor for the indestructibility of violence's material traces, the text connects ancient Greco-Roman culture—from Homer and Sophocles to Ovid and Seneca—with modern figures and events, from Elena Ferrante to the war in Israel and Palestine. The volume engages psychoanalytic theory, queer theory, and feminism to challenge the boundaries of classical studies, arguing that only by confronting the discipline's entanglement with the pleasure principle and its repressions can classics contribute to understanding the crises of the present and imagining a future distinct from the past.

Contributors:
Karen Bassi, Martin Devecka, Micaela Janan, Hagi Kenaan, Vered Lev Kenaan, Sara Lindheim, Paul Allen Miller, Helen Morales, Jay Oliver, Victoria Rimell, Mario Telò

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction “Open Wide”: Receiving the Death Drive
• Chapter 1 Thoughts on War and Death: Exercises in Survival and Ethics with Freud and Homer
• Chapter 2 History, Aitiology, and the Death Drive
• Chapter 3 Infinity, Death, and Enjoyment Purity at the Limit
• Chapter 4 Boar Life: The Culinary Death Drive in Roman Culture
• Chapter 5 The End of the Line(s)
• Chapter 6 Reading the Death Drive in Ovid Metamorphoses Book 9
• Chapter 7 Sadomasochism, Mythomania, and the Death Drive in Petronius’s Circe Episode
• Chapter 8 Seneca’s Lifedeath
• Chapter 9 Leda’s Frantumaglia: Elena Ferrante and the Maternal Death Drive
• Acknowledgments
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index