Philosophy & Rhetoric

According to the legend from two ancient Greek texts by Hesiod, Pandora, the first woman, was artificially produced rather than naturally born. Drawing on the philological expertise of some of Hesiod’s best readers, this article explores how Pandora renders the concept of the human unfamiliar and unnatural in ways that surprisingly resonate with contemporary challenges to androcentric models of life and death. As an amalgam of divine, bestial, and duplicitous qualities, Pandora simultaneously represents the category of the human and is excluded from it. Neither mere machine nor static image, Pandora is living machine. After Pandora, the human can no longer be thought in merely human or even humanizing terms: to be human is to bear a primal relation to artifice, imitation, technology, rhetoric, and death.