"Towards a Tragic Theory of Honor: Power, Agency, and the Desire for Heroes"

• In Event: Challenging Gendered Spaces: Super/Heroes and Colonialism

Abstract

What accounts for the enduring appeal of a politics of honor today? Is honor simply a relic of the chivalric past to be cast aside with the rusty suits of armor and restrictive corsets of its era, as emblematic of a time that was marked by radical inequality and oppression and therefore to be happily consigned to the dustbin of history? Or does a fugitive fragment of the concept of honor persist in our present and have something to offer it? If the latter, is honor an anesthetic, a dangerous sedative that dulls the senses and blinds us to the risks and consequences of the heroic quest for glory? In recent years, there has been renewed attention given to the seemingly archaic concept of honor in political life, which either boosts it to the forefront as source of moral revolution (as an in Anthony Appiah’s “The Honor Code”) or softens it into a virtue that can revitalize liberalism and democratic agency (as in Sharon Krause’s “Liberalism with Honor” ). Such concepts of honor hold out hope for redemption, whether from a selfless democratic citizen or a messianic hero, and in doing so disguise and conceal the workings of interpellation and power. This essay attempts to restore, or perhaps, more appropriately, re-wind the tragic thread through the concept of honor in the political and imbue it with the complexity of inter-subjective relations. It argues for the necessity of a tragic theory of honor that takes into account the mythic appeal of heroism as an enduring value but reworks it as a form of agency that is chastened by the recognition of power. I draw on Homer and Nietzsche in order recover a tragic concept of honor that attends to the tragic vulnerability at the core of the concept of honor. In such a reading, honor is fundamentally tied to the tragic heroism of Achilles in the Iliad (and its modern mythic re-workings) and linked closely to the Nietzschean ethos of affirmation to formulate a chastened account of agency that refuses any possibility of redemption. If, as James Martel argues in “The Misinterpellated Subject”, there is indeed no messiah that will save us and no easy promise of redemption, if all we can come up with are shifting networks of resistance, how might we reconfigure this archaic and glossy concept of honor for our bankrupt present? Is such a code or concept even worth saving? Perhaps, we too, are looking for Achilles today, but in all the wrong places. If so, the Achilles we reach for might not be the icon of the masculine revenge fantasy, but the Achilles who mourns his lost love, who glories in bloodlust and revenge, but somehow manages to recover the last shred of his humanity. Indeed, in looking for Achilles, we might even find Wonder Woman.

Author

• Smita A. Rahman, DePauw University