The Question of Grief: Seneca, Consolation and the Solace of Antiquity
The Researchers
Victoria RimellLink opens in a new window is Professor of Latin in the department of Classics and Ancient History. Her research centres on Latin literature, in dialogue with critical theory and psychoanalysis.
The Challenge
In this forthcoming book, I suggest that the reading practices of classical philology have long thwarted our engagement with the creative, critical and ethico-political possibilities of consolation, and with Seneca鈥檚 consolatory works in particular. Despite their significance as co-ordinates in Western philosophical thinking on what it means to console, Seneca鈥檚 consolatory texts have long been sidelined as inconsistent rhetorical exercises with a simple practical aim - to heal grief through rational argumentation.
Our Approach
But as I argue in the book, Seneca is alive to the idea that consolation - like all writing on grief, and all criticism of writing on grief - is a quandary, a relational realm of ethico-political risk and speculation. His texts invite us to enter into this quandary as an experimental domain of self-disturbance that stirs up thinking now, in critical dialogue both with the political, cultural and philosophical provocations of Senecan Stoicism, in Latin, and with modern theoretical orientations on grief, mourning, reparation, and the therapeutic encounter. A different Seneca emerges, I propose, in the precarious, intersubjective dimension of the consolatory mode, which orients the Roman male subject towards the gendered pressures of vulnerability and dependency in the lag between human weakness and Stoic self-sufficiency.
Our Impact
One of the ideas I want to sustain in the book is that immersion in the speculative, relational dimension of Seneca鈥檚 consolation is suggestive of critical pathways through psychoanalytic thinking not conventionally pursued by humanities scholars. I am interested in why certain theoretical itineraries are privileged over others, and what that tells us about our imagining of antiquity, as well as what might be troubled in our stumbling off-track.
