symploke

Iphigenias at Aulis is quite simply one of the most exciting books I have read in some time. In a field (classics) that is still known for its allergy to all modes of theoretical reflection, and in a discipline (textual criticism) that is still considered the most conservative redoubt in an otherwise conservative field, Sean Alexander Gurd has produced a work of astonishing audacity. Drawing on the resources of Derrida, Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, with stops along the way for Iser, Jauss, Barthes, Foucault, Saul Kripke, and Paul de Man, Gurd asks us to rethink the nature and production of our most cherished cultural monuments from antiquity. The texts of Homer, Plato, and Sophocles, or of Horace, Vergil, and Cicero, according to Gurd, come down to us not through an unbroken chain of transmission, in which the humble textual critic is but the amanuensis of immortality, but they are produced instead in a kind of differential flux by strange Cyclopean "cyborgs" laboring in the mines of tradition.

The dossier of manuscripts, archetypes, witnesses, autographs, readings, and critical editions that lies behind the received text of any work from antiquity, does not constitute the set of sources from which a pristine original has been drawn. These artifacts are not various approximations of an ideal embodiment of authorial intent, which it is the critic's task to produce through patient collation and reasoned deduction. Rather they are the structures of iteration and dissemination that constitute the text as textuality. As in Lévi-Strauss's theory of myth, there is no Ur-text from which all other versions can be seen as [End Page 344] derivations, deviations, and corruptions. Rather the text of the work exists precisely in the differential body of competing versions that constitutes its concrete and evolving totality.

The textual critic as cyborg is at once an image of the latter's enslavement, of the chains it which he/she/it toils, and of the critic's simultaneous ascendance to the ranks of the Nietzschean posthuman. The production of the critical text is never simply the result of the free invention of the critic. It is always a strange hybrid of submission to the dictates of the mechanics of information transmission and the free (almost Sartrean) consciousness of the critic. That consciousness can never be separated from the mechanism of transmission. It is not simply the ghost in the machine. It is at once immanent to the mechanism and its transgression. It is at once the fabric and materialization of tradition and historicity, and its radical negation. "In the cyborg operations of textual criticism consciousness reasserts itself, throwing a wrench into the works and instituting in place of the monstrous automaton of tradition a new vision of its origin and destiny. The textual critic is not the agent of tradition but its saboteur" (43). Each new critical iteration is always already a moment of dissemination in a tradition that necessarily deconstructs itself in the moment of its constitution.

Of course, Gurd in fact is not the first classicist to have discovered poststructuralist theory, nor is he even the sole philologist to have pondered theory's relation to that most hidebound of disciplines, textual criticism. Yet until very recently most theoretical work in classics has been in the form of "applying" theory. A given theoretical apparatus is chosen—Lacanian, Derridian, Foucauldian, Iserian—and is then used as the lens through which the works of antiquity are read. Few and far between are the truly original theoretical syntheses on the order of what Gurd has achieved here. At the same time, the theoretical work that has been done in textual criticism primarily consists of the occasional isolated article. No one to my knowledge has attempted a sustained and systematic rethinking of the textual enterprise in light of poststructural theory in the manner of Gurd.

The reasons for the relative lack of theoretical reflection among classical philologists are not hard to discover. Beyond the innate conservatism embodied in the...