Alexandra Lianeri, "Dēmokratia’s Dissociative Historical Futurity in Nineteenth-Century Britain"

Talk Description: This talk focuses dēmokratia’s reception in historiographical works published in Britain after the late eighteenth- and over the nineteenth century, from John Gillies and William Mitford to George Grote and Edward Freeman, in order to discuss an enigma or paradox: that differences in articulations of democracy’s history as ancient and modern entailed not a separation, but instead a fractured trajectory or wormhole, an agonistic confrontation between processual temporal movement and a certain syncopation of time linking past, present, and future. Why didn’t such differences give democracy’s story the form of an ‘either/or’ structure, but led, instead to some type of Heideggerian rift that unites, a timeline that was constantly blurred and displaced from within, and yet entailed conceptual and historical connection? I explore this temporality as a form of dissociative historical futurity that elucidates key theoretical and historiographical questions about conceptual change, the transformation and becoming other of the Greek democratic legacy, as well as the concepts of the ‘concept’ in dēmokratia’s long-term history. Moreover, I argue that dēmokratia’s nineteenth-century futurity provides a compelling alternative to modern notions of linear and progressive time, and bears further relevance on configurations of historical outsides to democracy in our present day. 

Short Bio: Alexandra Lianeri is assistant professor at the classics department of the University of Thessaloniki. Her research focuses on historical temporalities of classical reception, the translation of Greek historical and political thought, and the dissociative role of classical works in modern and contemporary Western thought. Her publications include The Western Time of Ancient History (2011); Knowing Future Time in and through Greek Historiography (2016); and forthcoming Translating Dēmokratia, Entiming Democracy: Conceptual Translation and Historical Futurity in 19th-Century Britain (Oxford UP); and (with R. Armstrong) Classical Translation Studies (Oxford UP).

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.