The Empire of the Self: Self-Command and Political Speech in Seneca and Petronius
In "The Empire of the Self", Christopher Star studies the question of how political reality affects the concepts of body, soul, and self. Star argues that during the early Roman Empire the establishment of autocracy and the development of a universal ideal of individual autonomy were mutually enhancing phenomena. The Stoic ideal of individual empire or complete self-command is a major theme of Seneca's philosophical works. The problematic consequences of this ideal are explored in Seneca's dramatic and satirical works, as well as in the novel of his contemporary, Petronius. Star examines the rhetorical links between these diverse texts. He also demonstrates a significant point of contact between two writers generally thought to be antagonists - the idea that imperial speech structures reveal the self.
Seneca: the world according to nature
The dissertation examines the treatment of nature in the tragic and philosophical works of Seneca the Younger. “Live according to nature” was the Stoic injunction, but for Seneca it was impossible to think about the natural world without also considering the limitations of the philosopher’s own mind. Through literary critical study of various complexes of imagery spanning the Senecan corpus, I argue that Seneca regarded the split between the flawed mind of the philosopher and the perfect nature which is the object of his study as a central problem within Stoicism.
Officium in Catullus and Propertius: A Foucauldian Reading
T HIS PAPER APPLIES A CONCEPT taken from Foucault's History of Sexuality to the ambivalent political stance of Roman poetry of the first century B.C.E. Poets clearly circulate among the elite of society, yet appear to represent themselves as being alienated from Roman political life. 1 As a chronicler of the pervasive intrusion of power into every aspect of human life, Foucault analyzes the process by which power not only exerts its influence over an object but engenders in it a paradoxical desire to be viewed, controlled, and described. In volume one of his History of Sexuality Foucault describes this reciprocal process as "a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure."2 By "sensualization of power" he means that power becomes infected with the qualities of its object. This process has a darker side, however. "A gain of pleasure" describes the experience that occurs when the surveillance of an object becomes a part of the erotic experience and proceeds to heighten it. This complicity on the part of the object limits its potential subversiveness. For it prevents the object from ever separating fully from the power that affects it. Foucault comments: "Pleasure spreads to the power that harried it.... These attractions [were] . . . not boundaries to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure."3 Foucault's imagistic presentation of the interrelationship of power and pleasure runs counter to more traditional teleological models (linear or cyclical) with clearly defined subjects and objects. His image of the spiral reinforces this idea; its oblique motion is iconic for a nonteleological theory of power and history. Likewise, the perpetual alternation-but final separateness-of the strands denies the reducibility of power to pleasure, or vice versa. Foucault is writing about the discourse of what he calls "sexuality," and the institutional incentives that caused it to come into being in the eighteenth century. His analysis, accordingly, can not be applied uncritically to