The History of the Impossible: Ancient Utopia

his essay was inspired by the memory of George Walsh, who contributed so much to the flourishing of the discipline of classics in the twenty-first century, in admiration for his readings, attuned as they are to the unexpected that has become naturalized, domesticated, and familiar. 1 This is a kind of listening I associate with psychoanalysis, with its attention to a surface troubled by unmanageable forces. 2 In this essay I have tried to be attentive to silenced events, voices, and acts of resistance to monarchy, domination, hierarchy, and empire, and to remember gestures of defiance that barely survive. I attend to vestiges, the almost invisible traces of resistance, the other utopias of Greek antiquity, those that we barely glimpse, that never achieved the textual monumentality of Plato’s Republic , possibly utopian events that emerge in the rips and crevices of history, that in retrospect express the impossibility of certain kinds of transformation. These are wild, eccentric events, unassimilable in the smooth narration of universal history. The great German Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin, who killed himself in flight from the Nazis, wrote: “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.” 3 These words, cited so often, may be difficult to read anew because of their frequent repetition—but I cite them again here because they are so uncannily appropriate to my subject. Fredric Jameson, an heir of Benjamin and other Frankfurt School writers, reads utopia as unexpected symptom, as a figurative practice in narrative, a textual figuring that emerges out of seamlessness. This emergence is almost like an unconscious letting itself speak in history, revealing impossible desires, in ruptures that persist and disrupt sameness. 4 I want to identify the snags, the acts of resistance, barely visible in the historical record, and call them utopic,