Description:

Please join the Political Science Department as they host PhD candidate Sam McChesney, for a practice job talk!

The classical Athenian practice of parrhēsia was closely associated with the exercise of courage within the city. Citizens would prove their courage—and their fitness to lead the polis—through bold, critical speech addressed to their compatriots. However, two features of this game of civic courage remain undertheorized in the secondary literature: namely, the corresponding courage of the audience to listen to harsh criticisms, and the exclusion of women, slaves, and foreigners from the Assembly. In this talk, I present Aristophanes’ play "Lysistrata" as a dynamic exploration of the relation of parrhēsia, listening, and courage. The title character is an unconventional parrhēsiast: while her speech to her male compatriots carries all the key markers of parrhēsia, she is not granted leave to speak. She must carve out this right for herself by mobilizing the collective power of her fellow citizen wives. Through this play, Aristophanes critiques the “manly” refusal, among his compatriots, to listen to reasonable criticisms of Athens’ war policy. And yet, I argue that the medium of this message—the mobilization of the collective power of the excluded—strains any reading of "Lysistrata" in terms of mere “ethical instruction,” or the contemporary catchphrase "listening and learning." Rather, the “Lysistratites” create a domain of class struggle, and the courage to listen to criticism thereby becomes a courage to join a collective movement to transform the city. I therefore show that "Lysistrata" can contribute to an account of listening as a political and transformative act.

Sam McChesney is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. His primary areas of research are classical political thought, critical antiquities, ethics, and the work of Hannah Arendt. His dissertation, “Political Courage,” aims to rethink courage — traditionally a military and aristocratic virtue — from a democratic perspective, drawing on both classical Athenian and modern political thought. McChesney also draws extensively on hermeneutics and the philosophy of language, democratic theory, feminist theory, and the works of Thucydides, Plato, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Michel Foucault.