Arts & International Affairs: Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2018 | Page 32

HYPOCRITE, ACTOR, POLITICIAN ...
hypocritical system that purports one thing and practises another? What happens when
politicians are “pretenders” and claim to be the king rather than demonstrate a role, or
occupy a position? The political theorist and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis calls
democracy “a tragic regime” (1997:84–107) 4 stressing that in a democracy there is no
external force or archē. It is a regime of self-limitation, and possibly hence the tendency
toward hubris, as limits�moral/political/aesthetic�almost invariably invite transgression.
For Plato, philosophers are the ideal intellectuals/rulers of his ideal city. Democracy
was problematic because “poets” were its intellectuals and theater was its phantasmic
other. When Shelley pronounced poets to be the “unacknowledged legislators of the
world,” he was articulating a defense of poetry but also of theatricality. Could actors occupy
such a privileged position in a democracy? If democracy is somehow inherently
tragic and theatrical, are not politicians its main actors? And what is at stake when the
performative function of politics is conflated with the performance of politics itself? Perhaps
that is why the most unconvincing and difficult emotion for a politician to portray
is sincerity itself.
If democracy is a tragic regime, then theatre and theatricality more generally could be
its primary aesthetic trope. And I refer to the aesthetic here in its Greek sense (aesthesis),
as located and experienced through the senses, through the body. Just as tragedy
is not political theory or simply an exposition of ideas, perhaps democracy too has an
aesthetic dimension that makes it more open-ended and ambivalent. Perhaps this is one
of the reasons the classical Greeks considered tragedy to be the great school of Athenian
democracy, one that at once celebrated its achievements but also highlighted its exclusions
(women and slaves, for example). Aesthetic education in this sense is also political
education. Interestingly, as Castoriades claims, tragedy was central to both experiences.
As an example, I would like to propose a reading of a scene from Thucydides’ History of
the Peloponnesian War where aesthetic form is integral to its politics and to its modern
readability (Castoriades also reads the History as an example of tragic form). I would
like to focus on the famous Melian Dialogue that has become such a canonical text for
contemporary International Relations. It is significant that it is written as a dialogue,
and follows a theatrical structure. It is as if at this catastrophic moment when Athenian
democracy is at its worst and its limits are tested, Thucydides transforms from a historian
into a poet (as playwrights were called in his time). What more powerful way to voice a
critique of Athenian democracy than through its finest aesthetic form, the tragedy. This
offers Thucydides and us the power of krinein of judgment through distance, through
separation, and not solely through identification and empathy. Or to phrase it differently
by referring to Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy, we experience the catastrophe of
Melos through both pity/eleos (empathy, identification) and fear/phobos (awe, wonder,
distance). Eleos and phobos are fundamental emotions generated by actors/hupocrites,
but they are also formal tropes of reception. Too much empathy can easily dissolve into
narcissism (as in the mythological character who could only identify through sameness)
4 For an insightful meditation on this idea, see Gourgouris (2014:809–818).
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