Onassis Foundation Fellowship

Gwenda-lin Grewal, the Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought and Language, has a joint PhD in Philosophy and Classics from Tulane University. Her recent work includes a translation of Plato’s Phaedo (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018), and two books: Thinking of Death: On Plato’s Euthydemus (with a translation; in review) and Philosophy & Fashion: On Good Looks & Good Looking (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic). The former interprets the Euthydemus as set in a ghost world of sophistry, wherein words are stripped of their referents and Socrates encounters the shade of his reputation in the city’s eyes. The latter traces the antithesis between philosophy and fashion to Greek antiquity, and inverts the cliché that fashion is superficial and philosophy deep by suggesting that fashion points beyond the surface and philosophy is guilty of judging by looks.

In addition to Plato and fashion, Grewal has a broad range of research interests: philosophy and poetry, the reception of ancient Greek philosophy (especially in Lucretius, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Heidegger), and problems of translation and language, particularly as they result from the philosophical nature of Greek grammar. She is currently editing a collection of essays, Poetic (Mis)quotations in Plato (forthcoming from the Center for Hellenic Studies) — which asks about the intention or lack thereof of Plato’s seemingly altered quotations of poets — and working on an interpretation and translation of Plato’s Cratylus, which explores etymology’s relationship to truth seeking and similar intimations in Yâska’s Nirukta. She is also finishing three co-translations: Plato’s Alcibiades I, Menexenus, and Laches.

Before joining The New School for Social Research, Grewal previously held teaching positions at Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, and the University of Dallas in both Italy and Texas. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, the Center for Hellenic Studies, and the American Academy in Rome. She is also the recipient of an H.B. Earhart Doctoral Fellowship (2006-2010), an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Humanities (Yale, 2010-2012), and a Blegen Research Fellowship in Greek and Roman Studies (Vassar, 2019-2020).

I work on memory and forgetting and how the relation between the two appears in the history of philosophy; my curiosity is motivated by their effects on identity and contemporary social and political life. Writing, as a form, is also important to me — it has always been the way in which I relate to others. In a parallel life, I’m an editor at the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal.

The core of my academic work at The New School consists of a critical examination of Nietzsche’s account of forgetting and memory with reference to his philosophical foil — a conception of memory that begins with Plato’s distinction between memory and recollection, which is later critically reevaluated by Aristotle. Memory is afforded tremendous explanatory power in modernity as its driving force. We think of memory as both a personal and collective resource that is our conduit to the past; as such, it is the crux on which our self-understanding turns. Memory’s description in philosophical history is dominated by static, preservationist metaphors (for example, Plato’s wax tablet and aviary, Augustine’s “treasure-hall,” Locke’s “storehouse,” and Hegel’s “pit”) and the tendency to identify its telos as an overcoming of forgetfulness — memory is truth and being, while forgetfulness is death and oblivion.

Nietzschean memory, however, is a “poisoned-cure.” It is necessary for being human — for promising, forgiving, friendship, and love. Yet it is also a burden, preventing the renewal of things long gone stale in experiential repetition or historical storage. Nietzsche shows how forgetting is blotted out by Mnemosyne’s long shadow over our most importunate concerns — morality, history, and death. Forgetting, for Nietzsche, is not inert — a mere lack or absence of memory — but an active force necessary for conceptual thinking, agency, and happiness. As an agonistic counterpoint to memory, what is active, Nietzschean forgetting, and how do we cultivate it? The Onassis Foundation Doctoral Fellowship is ideal for my ongoing research and provides crucial support for the remainder of my PhD work.

Since my first reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, that strange word “psychagogy” (ψυχαγωγία) stood out before my eyes and has been stuck in my mind. Where might Plato have borrowed it from? And why is such a term so outlandish to our cultural repertory, even though kindred terms such as “pedagogy” and “demagogy” made their way and are still widely available in our present-day vocabulary, heavily indebted as it is to the Ancient Greek language? I was led to track down the conceptual history of the term in order to grasp what was Plato up to in the Phaedrus when he defined rhetoric as a certain art of leading the soul by means of words (261a7-9).

As a result, my doctoral research dissertation situates itself in the intersection between philological reconstruction and philosophical reasoning. It offers an interpretation of Plato’s Phaedrus that takes the subject of psychagogy (ψυχαγωγία) — the art of conducting souls — as an interpretative key for understanding the dialogue. The first part of the dissertation undertakes a historical-philological investigation on psychagogia, or what could be apprehended as an “archeology of psychagogy.” It does so by analyzing the emergence, expansion, displacement, and reformulation of the meaning of “psychagogy” in a vast collection of extant texts: from Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Isocrates, and Lysias, among others. In the second part, I delve into Plato’s Phaedrus and examine it from the vantage point afforded by psychagogy. Briefly, whereas the nature of the soul has been established in Socrates’ palinode as incessantly self-moving (cf. 245e-246a), the standpoint of psychagogy will take the soul to be a site of competition and confrontation between distinct eros-charged powers that strive to steer its movement in a certain direction. I have no doubt that the Onassis Foundation Doctoral Fellowship will contribute decisively to my doctoral research's fulfillment at the highest possible level of excellence and distinction by affording ideal conditions for its development.

During my undergraduate studies in law school, the Greeks were a constant but distant presence. I would have classes on Greek philosophers, but only so that they were quickly corrected by our supposedly superior modern notions. Greek philosophy was nothing but a step in a ladder, far from a source of true inspiration and reflection. This radically changed after reading a very anachronistic English translation of Aristotle’s Politics, which ironically awoke in me an interest in Greek philosophy and language. I realized that the contemporary tendency to translate — in the widest sense of the word — their notions into ours constantly erases the fact that, although the Greeks were the origin of many of our major political concepts, the difference between our political ideas and practices and theirs can be vast, for better or worse. This insight had two major implications for my academic formation. First, it sparked my interest in learning Ancient Greek language in order to grasp how political notions were employed in their context, but also to understand the actual history of their translation into our modern concepts. Second, the questioning of our modern understanding of politics drew my attention to how the Greeks had a different vision of how reason and myth, the political and the religious, the natural and the divine, were articulated. This made me realize how our modern self-image is ultimately flawed, and that these supernatural elements are still present in our political lives, appearing in ways we avoid considering. These ideas orient my current research focused on the notion of power and its relation to representation in early modern political thinking, especially in the works of Hobbes and Spinoza—two authors greatly influenced by ancient philosophy. With the support of the Onassis Foundation, I plan to continue my studies of Classical Greek and to dedicate the necessary time for my research.

What is the relation between a community and its individual members? Plotinus (204/5–270 CE), widely regarded as the last of the great Greek philosophers, inherited this age-old problem from his famous predecessors: the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic thinkers. In fact, it can be argued that Plotinus represented a synthesis of the entire ancient Greek tradition. As the founder of Neoplatonism, he has had an equally broad influence on later philosophy, from the medieval period through the late 20th century. Indeed, Plotinian thought can be seen as a bridge connecting the ancient Greek world with our own time. Given this, it is surprising to find Plotinus considerably under-researched. One of the goals of my project is to trace his intellectual impact on modern philosophers — most unexpectedly on another principal thinker, Hegel. But Plotinus is more than a prominent figure in the history of philosophy — he is distinctly relevant today. To show this relevance, my research focuses on two central Plotinian doctrines: first, his interpretation of the ancient problem of the One and the Many through the concept of unity in diversity, and second, his depiction of the First Principle as one that “seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs nothing” (Enneads V.2.1.8) and “is good not for itself but for the others” (Enneads VI.9.6.41), which establishes an ethics of altruism and philanthropy. In Greek, philanthropy means “love of humanity,” and we see its spirit alive in the work of the Onassis Foundation. In these times of global crisis, what can Plotinus teach us about our responsibility toward one another and toward our environment as a whole?

I am committed to the idea that narratives play an important role in our political life. My research is broadly interested in the ways that trauma and sexual assault survivor narratives shift our moral and political imagination. In the wake of a culture after #MeToo and the rise of popular strands of the feminist movement, we can see that individual narratives are undoubtedly powerful for mass political mobilization. I argue this shift in political imagination has much to do with both the content of these narratives, and the form of narrative structures.

At the center of a discussion of narrative is the notion of narrative as identity. I’ve encountered two distinct considerations of narrative identity. The first is a strand of thought advanced by Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, and the second is a conception of authorship advanced by Foucault. I find the two types of narrative identity to be both valuable and problematic. In order to work through these concerns, I turn to ancient Greek thought.

The goal of focusing on ancient Greek thought is to ground my theory of narrative identity in a genealogical account. This step is necessary for getting a clear contemporary concept of narrative in political life. Aristotle’s Poetics helps us understand the role that catharsis and emplotment plays in contemporary political movements. Additionally, part of my work focuses on a study of Greek tragedies. These tragedies were narratives in response to broad historical traumas such as war and political unrest. These originary trauma narratives of Western civilization can help us understand the politics of trauma narratives today. With the help of the Onassis Fellowship, I am working through these steps in my research. The grounding of my own understanding of narrative identity in ancient Greek work is pivotal to getting an account of narrative that we can mobilize for political movements.

Joseph Lemelin’s work centers on the philosophical history of the distinction between the natural and the artificial. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at The New School for Social Research with a dissertation on the emergence of the concepts of nature and artifice in ancient Greek philosophy, and in Aristotle’s physics in particular. Joseph’s current research addresses ways contemporary technologies transform self-understanding and draws from the philosophy of technology, philosophy of mind, and critical theory. During the 2018–2019 academic year, he was a postdoctoral researcher at New York University, studying the development of artificial intelligence technologies. He has also taught philosophy and literary studies at Eugene Lang College and Parsons School of Design and was previously a fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought.

Dissimilar approaches and usages of theater in philosophy caught my attention since my first approach to philosophy when, after dedicating most of my life to theater, I decided to go back to academia with a question in mind, which is as central to the practice of theater as it is usually skillfully avoided — what is theater?

With the image of “world is theater” in mind, I address strands of thought from Plato's ban of the poets till today that trap theater in overly sharp dichotomies — from the paradigm of community to the paradigm of fakeness. This dissimilarity, which comprehends not only philosophy but also theory of theater and performing arts studies, points out that, as Peter Brook says, fragments of theater have been scattered everywhere. As a result, understandings of theater that take the part for the whole have rendered theater an empty container that can be modeled according to the needs of one's arguments. Broadly speaking, my research consists on answering the above-mentioned question by picking up theater's scattered pieces with the aim of making manifest that theater, despite having been declared dead or exhausted, still triggers vivid discussions. It thus becomes a tool for addressing philosophical questions but, most important, it provides the grounds for bringing into philosophical discussion elements that were banned together with the poets — vividness, evanescence, co-presence, and the difficulty of dealing with a discipline that seems to resist definition and classification. Ultimately, it provides the grounds to interdisciplinary approaches to, as Beckett would say, “lifelong questions” that have received “ all-time answers.”

In this context, the Onassis Foundation Fellowship for Ancient Greek Studies has provided not only the means to develop my research but also the tools. In spring 2016, I had the chance to TA for Professor Simon Critchley for the course Reading Greek Tragedy. In addition, in September 2017 I started learning ancient Greek with Professor Mirjam E. Kotwick. Furthermore, the Onassis Foundation has made available its archive in Greek performing arts, which I hope to be able to explore sooner rather than later.

My research concerns the notion of passivity. Passivity has, unlike its antonym, received little attention within Western canonized philosophical thought. Instead of focusing on the wakeful, conscious, active parts of human existence, my research is indebted to considering ways of being that belong to the sleepful, unconscious, and passive parts of our being in the world. One of the main parts of my dissertation aims at developing the ontological grounding of passivity, and here I turn to ancient Greek thought and language, and particularly the writing of Aristotle. Aristotle's notion of potentiality in his Metaphysics book offers access to an ontology that creates space for passivity. Reading Aristotle's notion of potentiality in relation to continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben makes it possible to understand ways of being that are rooted in passivity, such as sleep, as not mere privation of waking, but as being something in itself. Aristotle teaches us that being is not one-dimensional; it is not pure actuality. As Heidegger stresses in his reading of Aristotle, being folds over itself not twice or thrice but four times. It is not until we begin to acknowledge the ancient understanding of the four-foldedness of the being of human beings that we can begin to grasp the passivity inherent to being itself. I argue that allowing this passivity to catch our attention, to take up the space that traditionally has been acquired solely by activity, has important ontological, ethical, and political consequences for how we imagine our being in the world. 

Without the support of the Onassis Foundation, I would not have been able to conduct this research, which is deeply rooted in ancient Greek philosophy but also in ancient Greek language. I am therefore also thrilled to have had the opportunity of being taught ancient Greek by Onassis Lecturer Mirjam E. Kotwick. Learning ancient Greek undoubtedly continues to deepen my understanding of Aristotle's thought as well as the tradition that has nourished it.

Zygmunt Bauman, in his groundbreaking work Liquid Modernity, asserted, “Being always, at any stage and at all times, 'post-something' is also an undetachable feature of modernity.” Following the spirit of this insight, my main research agenda is inspired by the desire to explore whether our current political predicaments — predicaments which routinely reduce us to passive consumers of the never-ending deaths spilling out of ubiquitous headlines — are, at least in part, the result of a self-defeating act of social introspection, which insists on — explicitly or implicitly — pushing us to the verges of a "post-solidarity" era. At the same time, the attempt to approach our current Western political condition in these terms evokes the (central) question: What is solidarity? In the context of my research, answering this question provides not simply a "valid" or appealing account of what solidarity ought to be but rather a meticulous engagement with the ways in which the crafting of solidarity over time has come to potentiate or inhibit the horizon of Western political innovations. Simply stated, my goal is to trace a genealogy of "solidarity," for the sake of exposing the assumptions and discontinuities that accompanied the conception(s) and application(s) of the term throughout time. Yet my genealogy would have a particular "bent," as a crucial assumption of my approach to this topic is that an important absence to be noted in the existing theoretical discussions concerning the nature/role of solidarity involves the neglect of spectacularization and its effects on the ways in which different historical communities have conceived of solidarity.

The ultimate goal of my intervention is a careful analysis of the ethical and epistemological tensions that underpin the difficulties we face in trying to live together. In doing this, it is crucial to take note of the extent to which these tensions are a product of our inability to learn from our past, and it is in this way that turning our gaze towards our Greek ancestors seems an unavoidable step in the quest to understand and address our current predicaments.

As a recipient of the Onassis Fellowship, I have worked as facilitator of the Greek Reading Group since fall 2015. I try to organize the GRG in a way that combines the teaching of Greek grammar (especially in the first two semesters) and the translation of original texts. In the first year, we translated canonical passages from Aristotle's Categories, Politics, and Nichomacean Ethics, along with some fragments from the Stoic and Pyrrhonic traditions. More recently, we've focused on individual texts. In the last two semesters, we read Oedipus Rex and Plato's Crito. Occasionally we also meet during the summer and winter holidays. The tradition of our Philosophy department's GRG is one that I try to keep alive; it is an extremely useful tool for anyone interested in ancient thought or philosophy.

I divide my research activities into three projects. First, I've recently finished the qualifying paper, “Pragmatic Perspectives on the Principle of Non-contradiction and Bivalence.” In this article, I offer a pragmatic reading of three arguments Aristotle presents in Metaphysics IV 4 in defense of the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC), followed by a similar analysis of Aristotle's defense of the limitation of the applicability of the Principle of Bivalence (PB). Second, in my work (in progress) “Decidability, Non-contradiction and Bivalence in Sextus Empiricus,” I explore the problem of the justification of standard logical principles (like PNC and PB) in the Pyrrhonic tradition. Third, my dissertation project addresses a classical problem that can be traced back to Aristotle, namely, the problem of substance. Aristotle's metaphysical project can be summarized (very simply) as the claim that in order to explain processual change, there must be a substrate of change which is not identified with any of the transitory phases of change. In contemporary metaphysics, the problem of permanence takes many forms (e.g.: Are we in a position to discriminate between essential and inessential properties of objects? What is the difference between a thing and an event? Is the world composed of enduring particulars, or is it reduced to a mosaic of discrete events? Do dispositions or propensities constitute an ontological category in its own right?). In my dissertation, I examine the problem of permanence from a phenomenological perspective. Specifically, I am interested in giving an account of how the identity of objects and their properties is justified from the point of view of our ordinary, pre-scientific experience. Within this framework, part of my aim is to discuss whether a notion of substance that retains Aristotelian motives is necessary (or dispensable) to explaining the problem of sameness.

I'm interested in how our material and inner lives are formed, transformed, and performed by the sea as both something and a thing of nothing. How does the mirror of the sea reflect, deflect, and act on us, the world, even philosophy? Working as an Onassis Fellow, I have been encountering problematics such as processes of de-territorialization and the problem of nihilism, the nature of the political and its encounter with the maritime, modes and limits of mimesis, metamorphoses of genres, and interpretive possibilities to historicity, as well as rituals of sacrifice and liminality.

With the generous support of the Onassis Foundation, I'm currently finishing my dissertation, The Sea and the Mirror: Essayings in De-territorialization and Mimesis. It traces the pressing and repressed material and symbolic presence of the ocean (the Mediterranean and the Atlantic) from Plato to Heidegger, employing the maritime as a hermeneutic lens through which to understand the drive of philosophy as both response to and moment within the impetus of Western colonization. It examines how philosophy has again and again constructed itself as a genre in opposition to the movement of de-territorialization and the fluidity of mimesis. It does so via the method (meta, “after” + hodos, “way, journey”) of a series of essayings (in the original sense of trial, measure, attempt) across a geopolitical topography of discourses. These include philosophical texts drawn from a constellation of historical topoi at the critical moments of their encounter with the maritime: fifth-century Athens (Plato/Euripides), late republican and early imperial Rome (Augustus/Plautus), Elizabethan England (Shakespeare), Enlightenment continental Europe (Kant/Rousseau) and inter-war Germany of the 20th century (Husserl/Heidegger). In my next project, I will deepen my dissertation research by considering the role of error and the place of the errant in philosophy and how the maritime has been utilized as a site of errancy, sin, and failed expiation (hamartia and katharsis in the Greek context).

As an Onassis Fellow, I have run the discussion seminar to Simon Critchley's lecture course Tragedy's Philosophy.

I have been fascinated by ancient Greece and ancient Greek philosophy since I was an undergraduate at St. John's College. Since then, I have continued this pursuit, being inspired in my research by both the canonical texts of Hellenic philosophy and also by the wider culture, the art, politics, and history, of Greece in which these writings emerged. My interest in the exchange between these two sides of Greek life comes through clearly in my Liberal Studies MA thesis, which focused on the role of Homer as Plato's bête noire in the Republic and Ion.

My current research project is focused on the study of the emergence of philosophy as a genre in fourth-century-BCE Athens, and especially on Plato's engagement with poetry, both in the Republic and in other dialogues. I plan to examine the seeming contradiction of Plato's criticism of poetry as imitative in book X of the Republic, which itself occurs in a mimetic image of a philosophical dialogue. With this as my motivating question, I am also pursuing the related goal of reconciling the nature of poetry described in the Republic with other accounts of poetry found in such dialogues as the Ion, Phaedrus, and Protagoras. In analyzing Plato's intentions in constructing and intertwining his arguments in this way, I hope to understand both the significance of Plato's quarrel with philosophy and in a broader sense the often porous boundary between philosophy and poetry.