Housman Lecture 2024

Twenty years after Bruno Latour called for critics to stop ‘adding ruins to ruins’ in the face of global permacrisis, this paper takes as its framing gesture post-millennial debates on why criticism needs renewal, and what ‘post-critique’ might look like, alongside the particular disciplinary reckoning now faced by classical philology as a field. Although the theologies of critical distance and invulnerability laid bare in various modes of ‘post-critique’ also underpin the methods of classical philology, Latour’s invitations to revive rather than to fight empiricism have seemed to sanction philology’s doubling down on its long-standing positivistic sense of responsibility towards antiquity; preservation and reparation recuperate an old agenda. The paper considers what the genre or mode of ancient consolation – developed most fully in extant literature by Seneca the Younger – has to say to classical philology as an archival-reparative project that shores up the subject against loss. While Seneca the consoler is periodically undone by grief, as he relates to and speaks of the bereaved, and explicitly involves his audiences as fellow-learners in the ethical praxis of interpretation, philology has treated the consolations as generalisable artefacts, domains of political, philosophical and literary self-fashioning, or has disappeared them entirely from Seneca ‘as a whole’. They have come to stand, in opposition to tragedy, for the principle of self-regulation, or mourning without melancholia, but at the same time languish - contradictory yet unremarkable – in tragedy’s shadow, unable to hold our attention. The paper approaches the consolations and consolatory letters as critical worlds-in-themselves, both generalising/generalisable and particular, whose uneven movements in response to loss can help us think creatively about the future of critique.

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