The Future of the Past: Pericles, History, and Athenian Democracy

This paper considers the temporality and ethics of democracy, specifically within the context of Pericles’ funeral oration in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Drawing on J. Derrida’s notions of the future-to-come and democracy, reading the oration through the work of Gomm, opposing conservative Anglo-American readings and invoking the political thought of J. Rancière as well as insights from E. Schrödinger, K. Barad and the sciences, the paper argues that democracy, and indeed Pericles’ Athenian democracy is a practice that is the unity of the “one too many” and “the ‘more, always more’ of unsatisfied desire”, a regime that, as Rancière puts it, is “governed by the judicious use of its own un-governability.”