L.'s volume is a rare book because of the excellence of his ideas and the quality of research and writing. It masterfully shows how our life is shaped by modernity's appropriation of an ancient Greek heritage.
L.'s point of departure and his Ariadne's thread on the voyage from ancient Greece to Nietzsche's modernity, and then also to our world, is Dionysus – an ancient god of Thraco-Phrygian stock; a god of sexual vitality; a god of rejuvenating madness; but also a god of violent intimacy with taboos. L.'s ingenious approach to this millennia-wide sea of ideas sets aside the linear view of time. Instead, L. holds on to the ecstatic view of temporal unfolding. In L.'s own words, we can think about the ‘disruptive’ temporality of ‘Nietzsche's Greeks as they travel through history in a constant whirlwind of change and becoming’ (p. 203). With L. we are thinking about time holistically, and this means that we must think not only how the past has made us who we are, but also how our interpretation of the past shines a light on some aspects and figures while concealing others. We must think what this play of light and concealment means in terms of the kind of destiny that we lay out for ourselves.
The volume is philosophical for many reasons, but most importantly because L. eschews dogmatic modes of interpretation. L.'s starting point is the thesis that neither Dionysus nor the Greeks of classical antiquity are bygone. Rather, they live through us. Nietzsche's works and, most readily, The Birth of Tragedy, which was dubbed ‘an anti-classicist manifesto’, show the way to a vivid engagement with the Greeks. Accordingly, L. articulates the thesis of the book as ‘the idea that Nietzsche's account of ancient Greece [and] … Dionysus … is an emblem of a temporal relationship, one that is the product of a feeling of modernity … he represents not the ancient god himself but rather the desire to remove antiquity from the constraints of idealism or historicism’ (p. 15). L. examines five moments that represent modernity's engagement with the classical heritage and with Nietzsche's understanding of the Greeks. We can think of these five moments as the five masks of Dionysus.
L. starts out with an examination of Jane Harrison's contributions to Classics. In Chapter 1 L. tells us that Harrison's Dionysus, just as Nietzsche's, stands ‘in direct opposition to the Olympians’ (p. 54). Harrison's Dionysus represents the innermost drives that both sustain, rejuvenate and threaten to uproot and destroy life through the very process of rejuvenation. The Olympians, on the other hand, forestall the final collapse of the human community both by establishing boundaries and by imposing limits upon the Dionysian impulses. In her later years Harrison changed her mind on ‘the primacy of Dionysus’ and even left behind ‘the study of Greece altogether’ (p. 67). However, the power of Harrison's discoveries and ideas about ancient Greek religion lies in the fact that, like Nietzsche, she was ‘interested in why he [Dionysus] was, and in excavating what purpose the chthonic, prehistoric elements of Greek religious belief held in structuring and regulating human behaviour’ (p. 67).
Unlike Harrison, D.H. Lawrence, whose works are the subject of L.'s Chapter 2, was ‘concerned with diagnosing the negative influence that he believed tragedy (as worldview, drama, cultural phenomenon and philosophy) was exerting’ (p. 68). For Lawrence, neither the core ideas of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy nor Dionysian violence, as captured in Euripides’ Bacchae, can serve as the necessary elements in the preservation and flourishing of the human world. Instead, as L. explains, Lawrence ‘was more interested in the … versions of Nietzsche’ (p. 78) reflected in Nietzsche's Gay Science. However, Lawrence's positive view of the human future that excludes tragedy from the core of human life comes from Lawrence's misrepresentation of such authors as Sophocles, Shakespeare and Tolstoy (p. 91). This is one criticism that I have of L.'s book, i.e. that he merely describes Lawrence's ‘unusual intervention … in the Nietzschean tragic tradition’ (p. 97) as an example of ‘utopian desires’ (p. 99) without offering any reflections as to the reasons why Lawrence's vision represents a misunderstanding both of the human condition and of Nietzsche on the tragic drive of the Greeks. The latter, for Nietzsche, comes out of their superabundance, not out of any ‘nihilistic thinking’ (p. 97).
L. presents an alignment between a will to ignorance and spiritual crisis in Chapter 3, where he offers an account of Martin Heidegger's Greeks and discusses Heidegger's noticeable omission of Dionysus. L. sets up Chapter 3 as an investigation of the two ways in which Heidegger uses both Nietzsche and the Presocratic Greeks. The difference between the two ways depends largely on Heidegger's view of the destiny of the German people and his understanding of the role that the National Socialists play in bringing this destiny about. In this account of changes in Heidegger's position, L. sets the ground for further study of Heidegger's own philosophy on the basis of the alternative ways in which Heidegger assesses the thinkers and philosophical traditions that he takes up.
Chapters 4 and 5 play up the dramatic aspect of Dionysus and engage, respectively, with the works of Richard Schechner and Wole Soyinka. In Chapter 4 L.'s focus is Schechner's experimental play – Dionysus in 69, which L. discusses in the light of ideas of such thinkers as Sophocles, Derrida, Vernant, Freud and, of course, Nietzsche. Schechner, L. tells us, ‘focuses on the possibility of a theatrical performance that’ takes us into the ‘realm of the unrepresentable’ (pp. 144–5). This reaching for the not-yet thematised or even conceptualised movements of the soul eventuates in a rejuvenation of the social order. Schechner aimed for a more intimate relationship between the spectators and actors through which a primitive idea of theatre as a place of ritual, rather than fetishised entertainment, could come back onto the scene.
L. discusses a concrete representation of the critique and recasting of Western cultural paradigms in Chapter 5 where the focus is the works of Nobel Prize winning author Wole Soyinka. Soyinka's key insight into drama hinges on the fact that the West had colonised the art and that this injustice must be rectified. Both Nietzsche's thinking and the figure of Dionysus, whom Soyinka brings into the vicinity of the Yoruba god Ogun, represent for Soyinka a possibility of both liberation from Western colonial oppression and a syncretic view of ‘global religions’ (p. 178). Thus, Soyinka calls for a liberation of social and political global relations and cultures from Western colonial views of the world. Soyinka's art also advocates for a reformulation of the roots and meaning of the dramatic art, which Soyinka sees (much like Schechner) as a ubiquitous communal ritualistic practice, rather than as an originally Western form of art.
The breadth of L.'s scope does not take away from his focus. The scholarship is stellar throughout, and often L.'s archival findings and the connections that he offers in the notes are nothing short of revelatory. L.'s scholarly rigour and range of topics puts his work in conversation with authors working on Nietzsche as well as texts on Heidegger's take on Nietzsche and the Greeks. L.'s sustained treatment of ancient Greek classics and philology in their contemporary appropriation is timely. The elucidations of Schechner's and Soyinka's artistic engagement with Dionysus brings the book into the vicinity of the intersection between philosophy and theatre studies as well as post-colonial thought. The book enters as a sharp-sighted contribution into the field of literature on modernity and its relationship to the ancient Greeks.
