Fury and Justice in the Humanities¹

It is always awkward for humanities scholars untrained in the classics to engage classical works, even though they do precisely that with apparent enthusiasm and regularity. We usually start by asking to be forgiven for our ignorance, and then we tend to barge ahead and say whatever we please. On the one hand, it is a good thing that the classics do not belong only to the classicists, that they have wide appeal across the humanities, law, and the social sciences. On the other hand, there is always a sense that the engagement stands in need of correction either because we do not have the classical languages well enough or because we do not know the existing scholarship and go about reinventing the wheel. So here I stand, as it were, between this Scylla and Charybdis, not knowing whether to flagellate myself for my lack of expertise or to cheer myself on as I trespass on hallowed terrain. You have made things all the more difficult since you asked for a nonspecialist, a humanist, to appear before you and make my views known. My predicament is obvious, I suppose. Psychoanalytically, we might say that the oscillation between self-flagellation and bravado mirrors the swing between super-egoic disdain and unbridled mania. The way around that polarity requires, I believe, a sense of irony, humility, and not only a willingness to make mistakes, but a sense that one will survive the mistakes one makes.

I plan to find my way today through the final section of the Eumenides to a broader discussion of legal violence, depending mainly on the Lattimore translation. I do that not only because we are living in a time in which anti-carceral politics has become increasingly important, but also because it seems to me that too often Greek tragedy in particular is approached with the expectation that the great ideals of Western civilization will become manifest in these texts as long as we know how best to read them. We all now know these debates, I presume. My sense is that the Eumenides gives us something different, namely, a way to reconsider the relationship between law and violence and, specifically, the emergence of legal violence as the alternative to extra-legal vengeance. I join a number of critics who have waded through these particular waters, so I don’t pretend to be offering something radically new. But I do think the play offers a set of critical insights into how law, rather than overcoming violence, often absorbs violence into its own operation. That view implies rethinking the narrative sequence that leads from vengeance to legal justice, one that correlates with a non-ironic transformation of the Erinyes, the Furies, into the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones.

I conduct this review and reading in order to glean some insights into contemporary skepticism about legal processes like trials and legal institutions like the prison. Our public debates have included the #MeToo skepticism of due process and the widespread conviction that trials concerned with police violence tend to favor the version of events proffered by the police, especially when the victims are Black or brown. It matters that some social justice movements are skeptical about whether justice can be achieved through law, and whether it ought to be, sometimes seeking recourse to the Twittersphere to conduct its tribunals and call for punishment, and at other times, in a contrary motion, seeking to set up transformative justice practices that not only refuse to engage the prison system but call for its abolition. My point is not to debunk law, or to say that it is only and always another version of violence, but to observe, as many have, that there are good grounds to object to legal violence and that those who point out its operation are often acting in the name of justice that cannot be captured by contemporary law, especially when law conducts injustice in systematic ways. For those who argue that justice is served by abolition, justice is defined against legal violence, which includes the violence of the prison system. Such views have been persuasively argued by Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Beth Richie, and Ruth Ann Gilmore in recent years. Although their approaches differ, they are all Black feminists who believe that prison abolition is a theory of change, one that, through its negation of the cruelty and vengeance embodied by prisons, asks us all to imagine a form of justice beyond institutionalized cruelty.

One reason I wanted to revisit the final part of Aeschylus’ Eumenides is that I did not trust the account that I was given when I was first taught the text in high school, even though I was surely excited by the story of that transition from violence to law. As you know, the rudimentary trial protocols that Athena establishes to determine whether Orestes should be punished for killing his mother, Clytemnestra, tend to be read as a transition from darkness to light, from cycles of revenge to a form of justice that puts an end to such cycles. I was also taught that with this trial structure, Athena brings about a rule of law, one that puts an end to violence, and for some time I stood in awe of that transition. The Furies were cast in a bad light, nearly defined as bad light, for they were the ones who wanted to avenge the killing of Clytemnestra, and they came to stand for unchecked destructive powers as well as mad feminine passions that needed to be constrained by a patriarchal law. I read H. D. F. Kitto as a high school student who was very clear that by the time we get to the final play of the Oresteian trilogy, we have left behind the violence of revenge waged by one clan against another and arrived at trial by jury, the sign of a deliberate approach to law and justice. The negative becomes positive, and violence becomes justice, and all this becomes possible through the trial. The war between a patriarchal power, represented by Zeus and Apollo and voiced by Athena, and the mad feminine Furies was supposed to be overcome at the end, and the two gendered forces were to be understood as now working together.

Several years later, I read Froma Zeitlin’s incisive interpretation and saw both the hilarity and horror of the play’s gender politics.² What scholars had to labor to show was in some sense there all along, but unreadable given the great investment in the transition at hand. You will remember that one of Apollo’s bad arguments is that matricide is not as serious a crime as patricide since only the father is the parent. Indeed, it is not clear that it is a crime at all, since technically there is no mother, there are no mothers. What we call “the mother” is only she who nurses the seed—or so Apollo makes clear to the Furies. The parent is he who mounts (Aesch. Eum. 660)—who knew that parenting could be established by sexual position and posture, and that mounting is an exclusively masculine prerogative! It was then with some interest that I discovered Simon Goldhill’s impressive readings of the Eumenides in which he argues that the polarity between masculine and feminine in the play is nowhere nearly as stable as is generally assumed, and that the play does not end with an unequivocal resolution of an ongoing gender conflict but with a continuing set of tensions, open-ended and disturbing, even undermining the gender binary.³ Gender trouble, indeed.

On a first reading, it seems that revenge and hatred are replaced by a rule or law, where the law is understood to hold the members of a community together, to bind them to legal resolution rather than violent exchange. But given how quickly the Furies give way, is it plausible to think that all hatred and revenge disappear when law is instated? The Furies are placated, overtly seduced by reputational repair. Athena’s persuasive powers are amplified by a set of promises she makes—a life free of grief and pain (sounds good, even a provisional definition of euphoria!), a set of powers on which every household relies, a way to be held in honor by the community without ever forfeiting this newly won unifying and sustaining power. The point is that the Furies acquiesce not only to the law as such, but to the trial as a legal procedure, modeled awkwardly by the one that Athena herself has just established, where, you will remember, each side basically gets to make one presentation without recourse to evidence before the jurors take a vote. The Furies acquiesce, and as they do, they agree to live under that version of law where trials establish guilt and innocence and a judge—in this case Athena—metes out punishment to the guilty or exonerates the unfairly accused. Is it that they have given up their passion for a more dispassionate consideration of evidence, or is it rather that their passion takes a new form once it comes under the sway of the law and once they are tasked with making sure that law has a binding force on the community?

In 1987, Paul Gewirtz, a legal scholar at Yale, argued that although the Furies “consent to participate in the trial, the very establishment of the court seems to displace their method of revenge.”⁴ His remarkable essay continues, however: “After the Furies lose the case against Orestes, they announce that they will ‘let loose on the land . . . vindictive poison.’ Athena, however, pleads with them to take an honored place within the community” along with new powers, and they give way. Their hate starts to vanish, and they take their place alongside Athena.⁵

Gewirtz points out that the Furies are “complex forces of passion, linked at various points in the plays with vengeance, fear, anger, violence, conscience, instinct, the sense of hurt, memories of grief, the primitive, the emotional and nonrational.”⁶ I would add: grievance. And though Gewirtz notes that the Furies are persuaded by Athena to relinquish their poisonous ways after some time, I find myself surprised by how quickly they give up their hatred and revenge. It is difficult to understand why they would surrender it all so quickly, given its intensity and their vow to pursue vengeance eternally. Was the politics of respectability so attractive that they could simply give up their boundless fury? Did they fall for the offer of a politics of inclusion? Or were they simply given a different job that let them keep their wrath alive by putting it to use in the service of the community?

Gewirtz suggests that the Furies did not have to relinquish those driving passions because they saw that the law required that very passion to bind the community together. Gewirtz continues: “What the Furies most clearly represent—call it fear, conscience, vengeance—is not a ‘threat’ to law in the Oresteia’s scheme. Rather, Fury is law’s partner. It reinforces a respect for legal rights. It promotes ‘reverence for the just,’ which in turn is a source of society’s prosperity.”⁷

It is of course one thing to claim that fury comes to be law’s partner, but quite another to claim that law preserves and transmutes fury, understood as vengeance and hatred. This last position allies perhaps more closely with Walter Benjamin’s view that law cannot stand as an alternative to violence, since for the most part it depends on legal violence—a system of police and courts with the power to restrain and take away life.⁸ The death penalty is only the most extreme form of legal violence, argued Robert Cover, Gewirtz’s colleague at Yale at the time, in his influential essay “Violence and the Word” (1986). Gewirtz insisted on legal violence in Aeschylus at about the same time that Cover elaborated his own views on legal violence. Gewirtz remarks at one point that it was “Cover [who] taught us that law is a story” through his narrative theory of constitutionalism.⁹ Cover started to highlight the narrative dimensions of legal violence in “Nomos and Narrative” (1983) and in Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (1984). We should not be surprised that there is resonance with Walter Benjamin’s views on legal violence given Cover’s engagement with Jewish theological and legal traditions, including Scholem and Benjamin, on issues such as violence and redemption. In the 1986 essay mentioned above, Cover makes the following remark about how pervasive violence is in the law:

If we expect Cover to follow Benjamin, however, in calling for a general strike against legal violence, we are mistaken. Cover concludes, “I think it is unquestionably the case in the United States that most prisoners walk into prison because they know they will be dragged or beaten into prison if they do not walk. They do not organize force against being dragged because they know that if they wage this kind of battle they will lose—very possibly lose their lives. If I have exhibited some sense of sympathy for the victims of this violence it is misleading. Very often the balance of terror in this regard is just as I would want it.”¹¹

Cover here affirms that a measure of legal terror is important, and we start to see that he is in some ways a partisan of the very legal violence he diagnoses. Cover does not seek to cloak the fact of legal violence through a narrative that claims that legal processes vanquish violence in favor of justice. He knows law is violence, and in the United States of 1986, he wants it to stay that way. The conclusion is chilling. But is his conclusion much like Athena’s at the end of Aeschylus’ Eumenides?

Gewirtz, Cover’s colleague and interlocutor, maintained as much in relation to the Eumenides at about the same time in the mid-1980s. The two legal scholars are in many ways quite different, but there is some interesting resonance between their work as they both engage the humanities and the law. Gewirtz writes, “Through the Furies, law is strengthened by terror; legal judgment is ripened by pain.”¹² In turn, this resonates with Nietzsche’s well-known claim in The Genealogy of Morals that the turn to law generally does not overcome or replace violence with a non-violent alternative, but rather assimilates and instrumentalizes violence for its own purposes. Benjamin made this claim quite explicit in his essay “Toward the Critique of Violence.”¹³ These kinds of arguments seek to debunk a progressive narrative in which violent conflicts are overcome in time through submission to law, a narrative that sometimes assumes that vengeful passions are replaced with dispassionate deliberations that follow established rules and laws. If, however, the violence that is said to be overcome by law is actually preserved and redeployed by law, then a tautology emerges along with a fairly consequential question: Is living according to laws any less violent than living without them? One can see how an anarchist view could emerge from such an analysis of the tautology of law. One can also see how a nihilist view could emerge. But one could also well become angry that the very legal institutions that promise to overcome violence actually embody violence—often a greater violence than the one they claim to overcome. How do we understand this kind of anger? Is this not also a legitimate fury, one that can be neither contained nor seduced by the law? Shall we call it a critical fury that forms in relation to an institution that says one thing and does the opposite, and that claims that only the vengeful and destructive fail to grasp and honor the legitimacy of this institution?

Of course, one could argue against this formulation by claiming that law continues the violence it claims to overcome, just in another form; that law assumes that the violence it seeks to overcome and the violence it deploys are the same violence. Even if we were to accept the argument that it is only legal violence that supplants prelegal violence, we would have to ask whether that “supplanting” or “absorbing” does not alter the initial violence, making the second instance of violence less violent than the first—the price, Gewirtz might say, we pay for social order. For one can claim without contradiction that law is violent and that law overcomes violence only if one is referring to two different sorts of violence that can be specified and differentiated as such. And if one further argues that the kind of violence that belongs to law alters the kind of violence it is said to overcome, it might also be possible to conclude that this alteration is significant and beneficial. What may seem like a trivial distinction turns out to matter as one tries to understand the violence conducted by carceral systems in relation to the violence enacted by those designated as violent criminals.

As we know, one of the first skeptical reactions to prison abolition is to say, “But what about the violent criminals? What do we do with them?” The assumption is that prison checks the violence of individuals rather than tending to put those individuals in violent cultures, cultures reactive to violent institutional practices, especially when understood to be regenerating systemic racism. In turn, this raises the question of whether prisons produce more violence than they check, whether what counts as a form of “checking” violence is itself a further iteration of violence, and how best to distinguish among these two sorts of violence. The proposition that one sort of violence can and should be checked by an arguably greater violence—the violence of the prison system—is itself angering, and justly so. Fury again. The prison system is a complex of legal violence, or a violence that is supported by a complex set of legalities, perhaps now better understood under the rubric of “administrative violence,”¹⁴ opened up by the law but exceeding its terrain. In arguing that one sort of violence is best overcome through subjecting those criminalized to a violent institution, violence is not only continued but legitimated. Does this sort of situation then lead us back to the Eumenides?

I join a great many readers in wondering why the Furies accept so quickly the deal that Athena gives them. They describe their anger as infinite, and they have vowed to poison the earth irreversibly. Why should they give up their violent ways, their eternal vows of vengeance and destruction? Is it plausible that violence can be given up so easily in light of a matricide, that the crime was not so serious, or that the trial that exonerates Orestes was really that persuasive? One problem with the swift vanishing of vengeance and hatred from the Furies is that we do not know exactly where it goes. And we do not know why they are so easily assuaged by Athena’s offerings, in effect joining her staff and working for the polity. Have they accepted her reasons as just, or were they simply very susceptible to her seduction? We can speculate that they were bought off with promises of reputation, honor, and inclusion, but does that make psychological sense, and does it not advance the plot with an implausibly accelerated speed? Endless grief and insatiable revenge seem a bit harder to resolve than that! Could it be that the deal was a good one precisely because they did not have to give up their violence, that the altered form on offer allowed them both inclusion in the community as guardians of the household and even a police function that gave their threatening powers acceptable social and legal form?

Let us consider, then, that their hatred and vengeance, their ability to strike fear in those they threaten, is preserved and transformed in the emergent legal order. Thus, it is not a matter of relinquishing an overwhelming passion, but of settling on a form that allows for its indefinite continuation. Only if being held in disrepute were insufferable would it make sense to take the bait of gaining a good reputation. But do those Furies really hate their bad reputation so deeply that any respite is welcome? And what if you can gain access to that good reputation and still exercise vengeance and hatred? Then a compromise formation has been achieved. Gewirtz’s suggestion is that the law as figured in the Eumenides is, as Athena maintains, based on fear, and that the Furies may well take on the job of making sure that the law remains feared. His view seems right to the extent that they are charged with keeping the various households in order, that is, in compliance with the law, and that compliance depends on fear. Helen Bacon has made this argument: “The song they sing just before the trial dwells not on their desire for blood but on their function as enforcers of the unwritten laws and on the crucial importance of fear in maintaining the social order (Eum. 517-19). Athena . . . reaffirms this positive aspect of fear. . . . ‘From these fearful faces, I see great gain for these citizens’ (Eum. 990–95).”¹⁵ The term for fearful here is phoberos, that is, fear-inducing. Athena thus confirms the continuity of their threatening powers before and after the trial, suggesting that their submission to Athena’s judgement does not imply the relinquishment of their power to command fear, to issue a threat to exercise destructive powers.

We can infer that the fear of the law follows only where the law exercises a threat, the threat of punishment; and so perhaps the Furies now support the community by embodying or enacting the threat of legal punishment. We have been told that in order for the law to exercise a binding power on the community, citizens must fear the law. Athena cautions against casting fear from the community later when she asks, “What man who fears nothing at all is ever righteous?” (Eum. 699). Apollo then backs her up, addressing the chorus: “I command you to fear” (714). Athena makes clear that righteousness can only be expected on the part of those who have something to fear, and then Apollo issues his command: you must fear. The command to fear is an odd sort of command, for no one can suddenly produce the feeling of fear in response to such a speech act unless that command comes from a fearsome authority, unless the command is simultaneously a threat. And though Apollo does not tell us what the punishment would be were the chorus to fail to fear, we are given to understand that a significant wrath awaits them. The command, in other words, is the announcement of a forthcoming wrath and destruction, but maybe not the wrath and destruction itself. It is a threat. It may come from him, but maybe from her, Athena, who claims to be his mouthpiece. She is also standing in for another divine figure with power waiting in the wings: “I have Zeus behind me,” she claims. “Do we need to speak of that? I am the only god who know[s] the keys to where his thunderbolts are locked. We do not need such, do we?” (826–29). It would seem that the Furies thus succumb to Athena’s proposition from fear, but there is also something exciting going on: they are asking to become fearsome, phoberos, for the community. They are threatened: they must fear. But they are also tasked with producing fear wherever they go. They have transposable skills for that new gig, as Athena has suggested, and it comes with lifelong security. Surely honor, reputation, and new powers were important, as well as the promise to live a life “free of all grief and pain”—but this last seems linked to the position they are asked to take up: inducing fear in others. The others fear loss and pain: the Furies only threaten them with such loss, but are safeguarded from ever feeling it again.

When Apollo commands the chorus of Furies to fear, that command is not only backed up by a threat or punishment, but models the very task that Athena asks the Furies to take up. It is a transitive action: they are made to fear the command to fear, and that fear is what they are commanded to produce in others. The specter of violence moves through this chain of command. Apollo wields the power of destruction, and Athena, as we know, is backed by some seriously destructive thunderbolts she can unlock as she wishes. In this way, violence is already in the scene as an injunction to follow the law and to accept its binding power. But how, then, does it come about that the Erinyes turn into the Eumenides, once they have agreed to be bound by the law, take over this very task, binding the community to the law? Some circularity is happening here. Perhaps we should say that they agree to take over this task of binding the community to the law in exchange for abiding by the law. The reason I put it this way is that they were, you will remember, reiterating the same threat a few times in the earlier part of the play. Obsessional, they repeat the same words in response to various appeals by Apollo and Athena. Speaking as a single voice, they state their intentions at line 780 and then again at lines 810–14: “I, disinherited, suffering, heavy with anger, shall let loose upon the land the vindictive poison dripping deadly from my heart upon the ground.” By the time the second iteration comes around, they also make plain that they are intending to spread a cancer, a mortal infection. So, Athena is up against quite a threat by the self-proclaimed afflicted ones, but she counters not by sapping them of power, but by offering them new powers that will preserve the earth, fertility, prosperity, and peace and relieve them of grief and pain.

The Furies’ threat to spread their vindictive poison is countered by the joint threats of Athena and Apollo, at which point the encounter consists in an exchange of threats of destruction: poison in one direction, thunderbolts in another. Thus, the turn to law as a turn away from violence rests still upon a primary or originary threat of violence that inaugurates the law (narratively considered) or the foundation of law (philosophically considered). This is precisely the role of what Walter Benjamin in “Toward the Critique of Violence” calls mythic power, or law-instating violence.¹⁶ When Athena counsels the chorus not to cast fear from the city because no one will be righteous without fear, she is setting the stage for Apollo’s command to fear that comes just a few lines later. The law requires, she says, “just terrors” (Eum. 700). Can we then conclude that she is effectively saying to the Furies: Listen, you will have a new job under this legal system of mine: it will be your task to use your power to deliver threats in the service of the law, to instill those “just terrors” in the various households to make sure that they are compliant? This will not require retraining, for they already have those skills.

Gewirtz, too, underscores the parallel between Athena’s strategies and those of the Furies in claiming that Athena echoes the Furies themselves, who warn: “There are times when fear is good. It must keep its watchful place at the heart’s controls.”¹⁷ Can we then conclude that the Furies will now occupy this “watchful place” within the community now bound by laws; or, rather, that they will be responsible for binding those subjects to law through inducing fear, surveilling, threatening, binding each and every citizen to the law through the inculcation of fear, presenting, as it were, the fearsome face of the law? Although Athena claims that the Furies will “do good, receive good, and be good as the good are honored” (Eum. 868), are we to conclude that those who are regarded as good are filled with fear and fill others with fear, issuing in some way the threat of a dire punishment that keeps the citizens in line? Of course, they are led to a subterranean hold at the end of the play, not sent off to patrol the streets. But there is no reason to think that the terror they instill continues to work on the people, and the example of imprisonment they peaceably accept is surely one rather dramatic example of the domestication of fury in the service of the law.

Of course, Aeschylus’s play is about a trial, and so not about every aspect of a legal order. The possibilities for generalization are therefore limited. But what is distinctive about this trial, as so many feminists have noted, is that Orestes has killed his mother for killing his father and, accordingly, the relative seriousness of the crimes of matricide and patricide are under consideration. You will remember that Apollo makes an argument that is so terrible it broaches hilarity and has induced incredulity throughout the centuries. As I mentioned earlier, Orestes cannot be found guilty for the crime of matricide because, alas, mothers don’t really exist (Eum. 660) and, if they do, they are not parents. There is only one real parent, and he is the one with the seed. The idea that the legitimation of matricide founds this version of law championed by both Athena and Apollo has been persuasively discussed throughout the scholarship, as far as I can tell. But it is not only that the mother has been killed, but that, once killed, her status as a mother and parent is denied ex post facto. There are many ways of killing a woman, argued Nicole Loraux, and every matricide is, in this logic, also a femicide; this killing and its denial form the basis of the new legal order of the state.

I have been following two legal scholars who have exposed the violence of the law and who also link that violence to redemption: Cover in relation to the Bible; Gewirtz in relation to the classics. Another paper, another time. The pervasive violence in the law is not finally for Gewirtz a cause for outrage, but a necessity we can live with. Like Athena, we might say, he prefers one sort of violence, legal violence, to the violence it is meant to counter, despite the debilitating and even fatal consequences for those subjected to law.

“The Furies bring more to the legal system than fear,” Gewirtz writes. “Along with fear, which contributes to order, they bring pain, which contributes to wisdom—that most essential attribute of those who judge. In pressing their claims, the Furies not only counsel that ‘there are times when fear is good’ but also speak of the ‘advantage in the wisdom won from pain.’”¹⁸ That wisdom is the redemptive power of pain. If one were to bring Benjamin’s divine violence to bear on this discussion, we would see that it constitutes a break with the mythic violence that Gewirtz identifies as inevitable in law. For Benjamin, divine violence puts an end to all legal violence; for Gewirtz—and for Cover as well—the violence in the law is but the nascent form of the redemption it is said to bring. The prisoner will be redeemed (the wisdom redeemed from pain), and the law’s violence will be justified accordingly.

The Furies thereby here echo the vision of tragic understanding in the Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteian trilogy, found in what are arguably the most famous lines in the Oresteia: “[W]isdom comes alone through suffering. Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God” (Ag. 176–83). Here is the very different way Anne Carson renders the lines:¹⁹

The Furies are promised a life free of grief and pain, but what kind of promise is that? There is a wager here, and not certain knowledge. If they are delivering pain and grief, will they be immune from pain and grief? For Carson, though, the pain that gives rise to wisdom is “griefremembering,” suggesting that if the Furies, now the Kindly Ones, are to be bearers of wisdom, they will keep the memory of grief, or remember in ways that are bound up with grief. But that is not what they do. As they take the deal on offer, they think they are turning away from grief for good. Indeed, one reason some critics shy away from the Eumenides is that one cannot find the same role for lamentation as one finds in other tragedies. Sara Nooter, my host, has argued that Athena seeks to replace the bestial cries of the chorus with her own version of the Logos.²⁰ Loraux in fact remarks that Aeschylus becomes less interesting “when he reduces the chorus, [making] discourse the true protagonist,” for what then is lost is “the voice of tragedy” (citing Charles Segal) including the presence of song as “an active lament,” “powerful enough to pervade the plot.”²¹ She points to the cry that cannot be resolved into words, the sounds of the voice that defy communicable language. The cry “Aieee” is no proper word, but a sounding of grief that pervades all the other words. And she notes that in the Oresteia, mournful songs intrude thematically into the iambic, that is, the spoken passages, indicating those sounds of grief that cannot find their way into words. This is, we might say, the sonorous version of “griefremembering pain” (mnêsipêmôn ponos). Ponos is also a kind of laboring or exertion, and so we might read it as well as a working through, the painful work of mourning, oddly connected, I believe, with the agonies of childbirth. Can we read in the obsessional repetitions of the Furies a struggle to accept the reality of a violent loss when that loss remains unacceptable? Can we find in that first-person voice both the abyss of language and its performative power, as my host, Sarah Nooter, has spoken of “the mortal voice”? Here is where the non-specialist has to yield, for what are those sounds at the end of The Eumenides, that succumbing of sound to a new choral voice? This I cannot know, but I can be taught.

But the Furies are taking a bargain that precludes grief at the same time that they identify with the law’s violence and agree to do its dirty work. As Desmond Manderson puts it, they were always “dogs of law,” and “as the diokousi or ‘pursuers’ in Orestes’ case—the word for prosecutor also means a ‘hunter’—they are depicted as bloodhounds . . . who have picked up the trace of a guilty scent.”²² Even before taking on their new job, they are described by Manderson as “the most legalistic of all the figures in the play”: even their prelegal pursuit of vengeance is prosecutorial, suggesting that the violent legal economy is there from the start.²³ Similarly, at the end of the play, rage is subsumed but not negated, in the image of the “torch devoured by fire” (Eum. 1041–1042, trans. Sommerstein) or “the flamesprung torchlight” (trans. Lattimore). Has the rage become part of the law, its fiery light, its violent illumination? Can we read the rageful torch of the Furies reinstated now within the very terms of law? As the Furies are enclosed within the earth, so their burning light now fuels the law that put them there.

Legal violence makes the head hurt because all along one has been taught that the law will resolve violence, and that if the law deploys violence, it is of another order, a necessary one, a justifiable one. And yet, the Eumenides can, and must, be read against this narrative: much within the text constitutes a counter-trend to the manifest plot of progress. Can the Eumenides help us with some of the head-splitting debates of our time? People are angry, even furious, when considering, for instance, the violence of prisons and police institutions, even the kinds of violence that trials can inflict, and one is left, as it were, outside the law, in a position that—at least from the point of view of legal violence—is nearly criminal. One cannot oppose violence without opposing the law, and yet the law is said to deliver us from violence. If one is angered by this operative contradiction, this formulation that exposes its own lie, then perhaps that fury is justified, even tied to an alternative view of justice. This is a fury that exceeds any fury that the Furies may have had; it is the one that emerges in the aftermath of the text, filled with the grief that was foreclosed, critical of that legal violence that claims to be a necessary part of justice. I have posed the question, Where did that fury go when the Erinyes became the Eumenides? And now, what follows from taking a position informed by the fantasy of overcoming all grief and pain? And finally, how do we read this play in light of the present debates on legal culture and legal violence, that is, in light of the fury that accompanies these debates in and out of the classroom?

So far, I have conducted this investigation as a semiliterate fan of Greek tragedy, but surely not as a specialist. I am assisted by friends who know ancient Greek and can tell me which translations are better than others. I suppose I seek to speak for the nonspecialist who does not want Classics defunded or eliminated. I understand the arguments that seek to position Classics in the service of white supremacy, and few challenges are worthier of a response from those directly in the field. I suppose my wayward readings, the few I have been willing to publish, engage Greek tragedy through a contemporary lens, seeking to understand how these compressed and anguished dramas might illuminate central dilemmas in our lives. I do not go there to find ideals of civilization that are now lost, nor do I think that we should find protagonists in Greek tragedy who can serve as models for moral action. I accept the difference between fiction and reality with enthusiasm at the same time that I wonder how ancient dramas might quite inadvertently refract for us some pressing and difficult questions about legal violence. Perhaps I should have said this at the outset of my remarks, but I am trusting that you understand how I am proceeding, and I certainly do not mean to be obscure.

For instance, I am struck by the fact that Angela Davis has said that once institutions start talking about equity, diversity, and inclusion, revolutionary ideals have surely been lost. As important as those efforts are, diversity will never be the name for a radical ideal. The Furies oddly, perhaps inexplicably, agree to join in Athena’s polis project, and we can surely ask: What is the lure of inclusion? Davis remarks that we cannot simply prize inclusion without first asking, In what kind of institution do we want to be included? If the institution is a violent one, then we oppose the institution rather than join its ranks. Have the Furies become “dogs of the law” or were they always “dogs of the law”? Similarly, feminist theorist Sara Ahmed has spoken of the “non-performative” character of the discourse of inclusion.²⁴ Administrators, she writes, can be seen to be nodding and using the word “inclusion” as a discursive effort to placate a demand for a more thorough restructuring of institutions to eliminate all forms of racism and sexism, all forms of discrimination. The nodding and the display of the term “inclusion” are nonperformative, because they substitute for the action that they refuse to take. They guarantee non-action. Of course, this does not happen in every instance, but the fact that we recognize what she is talking about suggest that it happens all too often.

In the course of the #MeToo movement, some feminists have argued that legal trials are a sham for women who have been subjected to sexual harassment or, indeed, for anyone of any gender who has been subjected to sexual harassment. The problem, as we know, is that those harassed are very often the only ones who can bear witness to the scene, and the trial founders on the he said/she said impasse. Some have argued that trials have to take place in public, on social media, precisely because due process imposes a burden on those who have been subjected to sexual harassment to supply evidence that can be corroborated. The public sphere, now identified with various forms of media—a situation intensified under pandemic conditions—becomes the site of the trial, but there are no procedural rules, no rules of evidence, and in some sense no trial. Of course, this situation, which, on the one hand, feels like the only option for many who find that courts of law fail to furnish justice on such matters, feels like injustice to those who have counted on due process to check discrimination and unfounded allegations against sexual, gender, and racial minorities. Thus, many have turned to Title IX to develop extralegal protocols within institutions to adjudicate grievances. Sometimes this works well to address and redress the scourge of harassment, exploitation, and discrimination. But sometimes a new dilemma appears—the intensification of administrative powers, which includes surveillance, reporting, and the proliferation of grievances that produce a series of individual cases seeking reparation rather than systemic institutional change that would constitute more radical transformation.

In my mind, this painful dilemma demands to be understood more carefully and patiently in order to find a way through. I do not have a way to resolve it, for I am very convinced that within educational institutions and a wide range of workplaces harassment is rampant, debilitating, and appalling. I could easily yell about this, and have stories of my own. I could get really furious, become a non-domesticated fury, but is there a reason to slow my fury down and try to find the right words? The right words, if they come, do not deny my fury, but carry them—that is, if the words are working in the way they should. But there are some strong and compelling claims on both sides which deserve a richer and slower amplification, and a more careful form of public thinking in concert to find our way. What seems clear to me is that an allegation should not be the same as a trial or a judgment, and that only in Kafka’s world does the allegation initiate the process of punishment prior to any trial.

What is confusing, but important to consider closely, is that those who distrust trials and feel that due process is an instrument used to exonerate sexual harassers and other perpetrators of violent crime, sexual or not, sometimes call for greater legal punishments, allying with the carceral state. The term “carceral feminism” describes precisely those positions that call for enhanced punishments against those who commit gender-based or race-based violence. Some who call for greater punishment, which means filling the prisons with more people, also question due process, whereas others feel that a just incarceration requires due process. This too is an important debate that we should, in my mind, take the time to consider carefully. At the same time, abolitionist feminism opposes carceral feminism, arguing that the answer to acts of violence directed against gender, sexual, and racial minorities, including the disabled, is not to turn to the courts, for the courts are a pipeline to prison, two dimensions of the carceral state. The carceral state intensified racial inequalities and is itself a violent institution. The argument is then that it will not do to respond to violent acts with violent institutions. That way leads to a more violent world and intensifies systemic racism, for the prison system systematically and disproportionately disenfranchises and subjects to violent subjugation Black and brown people. And yet, refusing the carceral state involves imagining, and working for, another future. For many, the educational programs in prisons, the prison universities, are not just a good idea but a model for what prisons should become. Those buildings should be transformed into institutions organized by the principles of transformative justice.

Within feminism, the tension between carceral and anti-carceral trends is significant, and it is no accident that white feminism tends to embrace carceral solutions while prison abolition has emerged as a dominant form of Black feminism in this country and abroad—distinct from intersectionality, though internally related. Some hear “prison abolition” and think that it means freeing a bunch of violent criminals to roam the streets and commit fresh crimes. But what is being called for is the end to legal violence, the institutional violence of the prison, a violence that is too often an intensified form of institutional racism. It is a violence that takes place in the name of the law. Thus, to call for transformative justice is to call for the dismantling of violent institutions that are justified and reproduced by virtue of their legality. Thus, it is only through the turn to the extralegal that a nonviolent world looks possible. That does not mean getting rid of law, but only not looking to law to address all political issues, all forms of injury and repair. Abolition, on the other hand, asks for a new imagination, asking what other ways of organizing social life are possible in response to violent acts that would not reproduce violence in the proposed solution.

I am guessing that many of you know something about fury, about grievance, and about not letting the issue go. I am not sure you should let your issues go, and sometimes grievances are precisely the way to call attention to systemic issues like harassment, like discrimination. The question of what to do with unending fury is a real one, that is, one that grips our lives, and seems to pervade our public discourse. Where there is fury, even grievance, there seems to be grief as well, if not a “griefremembering pain.” My sense is that the projects of both reparative and transformative justice start with the claim that no person can be fully summarized by the injury that they have caused another; that injurious actions, or a set of actions, compose part of a life, and the life of the person is larger than any of those acts. I sometimes feel that this is hard to accept. Is not Orestes defined by the act of matricide, a clear and total murderer? Well, yes, he is, but was he not also doing something violent with his grief? Had he not suffered the loss of his father through a violent crime committed by his mother? Where, if anywhere, do the relations among grief, rage, and violence come under examination? Certainly not in the trial, where the Furies think they will be freed of a life of grief and pain and trot happily down to that grotto at the end, maintaining, I wager, a terrifying grimace still in the service of the law. Certainly not in the trial, where Orestes is exonerated because he is a man privileging the loss of a father over the loss of a mother who, by the way, never really existed as a mother, and so could not have been lost. Somewhere in this trial, this tragedy that sacrifices its own form in the course of elevating the value of the trial, grief is lost and rage is subdued. What fades is the lamentation that echoes, or should echo, through the legal language. And yet, is it not the story of grief and rage that lets us understand how violence is reproduced, and why the most powerful antidote to violence is the acknowledgment of loss, the working through of what seems like endless grief? And though we have not used the word “forgiveness” in this discussion, it hovers there unnamed if not unnamable within the lexicon of legal violence.

Perhaps one reason the Eumenides speaks to us now is that it reckons with a rage over an unacceptable and violent loss, or losses. If we dismiss the rage as uncivil and applaud its domestication, we may well miss what the rage articulates about how unbearable it is to be asked to live with the radical injustice of certain losses, especially those that are the result of police killing and legal violence. including the death penalty. Rage will continue to emerge about a legal system that not only fails to do justice but amplifies racial violence. This is not rage as irrational, but rage as an illuminated response to an unacceptable loss—a loss that did not have to happen, a taking of life and a letting die that is repeatedly conducted by legal institutions themselves. This is a life and death issue, and the rage carries with it an argument, a luminosity, that should not be too quickly shut down in the name of civility, certainly not before it is heard and understood. It speaks to justice beyond the unjust law; it speaks to the demand to live, opposing that life-negating deployment of law.

The Eumenides calls attention to the desire for law, the legal form that fury can take, the role of fury and fear in binding a people to the laws by which they are to be governed. And yet the anger against a legal system that deals violence as it claims to transcend violence is a sound of fury that we are hearing all the time. It is perhaps why the demonstrations mobilized by the movement for Black lives were at once acts of mourning and protest, exposing racial violence, acting nonviolently to demand to make a less violent world, but also calling for a justice by which the legal system itself can be judged.

As we know, our classrooms have become imbued with legal culture; they are possible sites of grievance, of challenge, indictment, censorship, calling out or sometimes calling in. I have been suggesting that the humanities and its classrooms can furnish the sites for examining grief, fury, and justice as they appear in relation to legal and extralegal violence. This fury is already there in the texts we read, so we surely have many of the materials we need to think about the grievances that emerge in the fields of power in which we work. In my mind, it is not a matter of substituting civility for rage, but of understanding what histories and demands are carried by fury. To foreclose rage is to perpetuate it, to repeat the violence against which it rails—even though the Eumenides gives us a finally implausible account of its domestication. But we can, and must, read texts against and beyond themselves, so that they can continue to speak to us during times when the burning sense of what is true demands to be heard and known. As Lauren Berlant has taught us, “Getting the story right as an act of love allows for a higher justice in the face of the law’s inadequacy.” And when the story is too much, and we reach for the trigger warning, or the trigger itself, we might do well to remember these wiser words of theirs: “When I say a book breaks me this is what I mean: I am changed by it, startled and thrilled that something has become unbound in me. I become the loosened object, in proximity to an uncomfortable enigma but not a fate.”²⁵ Staying with the unbearable, Berlant reminds us, opens up the space of heterotopia, new paths for experimentation beyond the limit of the unbearable. The disturbance that is life bears the possibility of new forms at the edge of the unbearable. All the more reason not to shut down our debates too soon, and to remain together at the site of what is disturbing to see what potentials open precisely from there. Thank you, Lauren.