“Odysseus’ Corpses: Necropolitics in Homer’s Odyssey,” by Associate Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner, was recently published as a chapter in Ancient Necropolitics: Maltreating the Living; Abusing the Dead in Greek Antiquity, a new volume from Brill.
In his chapter, Weiner discusses “necropolitics,” an expression of sovereign power over human bodies that “extends beyond death to include control over corpses and their rights to be mourned, interred, etc.”
With this in mind, and “taking Homer as an origin for necropolitics in Greek literature,” Weiner said he “read Odysseus and Telemachus’ purge of the suitors, slave women, and Melanthius in Odyssey 22 as an expression of biopower and their treatment of corpses as a necropolitical claim to sovereignty.”
He said that “in stark contrast to the effort and care Odysseus earlier takes to perform funeral rights for Elpenor, the bodies of the suitors and Odysseus’ maligned slaves receive far less respect.”
Weiner argues, “At play is not only vengeance but also an emphatic political performance as Odysseus reclaims his kingship and his oikos.”
Weiner also presented two talks recently. He discussed “Prometheus, Pandora, and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina” at a virtual conference on Gender & Classics sponsored by EuGeStA, a University of Lille, France, journal dedicated to women’s and gender studies. He also presided over a panel at the conference.
He presented a related paper, “Real, Artificial, and Myth in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina,” at the annual meeting of the Southern Humanities Conference in Greenville, S.C. The paper focused on issues of reality, artificiality, and aesthetics.
Together, these papers form the basis of an article Weiner is preparing for inclusion in a book to be published by EuGeStA. The article will examine the reception (both direct and mediated through Frankenstein) of the Greek and Roman myths of Prometheus, Pandora, and Pygmalion in the sci-fi thriller Ex Machina (2014, dir. Alex Garland), and will address themes of sexuality, gender, race, artificial intelligence, and ecocriticism.
