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Utilizes Greek tragedy to investigate the fundamentally arbitrary and violent nature of justice.A purely political understanding of justice does not convey the cosmological origins of the ancient conception of justice, Dikē, in Aeschylus's
Oresteia. Drawing from Walter Burkert's anthropology of the hunt in
Homo Necans, which articulates an ancient cosmology and implies a theory of (tragic) seriousness that parallels Aristotle's naturalist interpretation of tragedy,
Hunting for Justice argues that justice is rooted in predation as exemplified by the Furies. Although the
Oresteia has been read as the passage from the violence of nature to civic justice, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou offers an original interpretation of the trilogy: the ending of the feud is less an instance of political deliberation (as Hegel maintained), and more an instance of nature's necessary halting of its own destructiven'ess for life to resume. Extending to contemporary contexts, she argues that nature's arbitrariness continues to underpin our notions of justice, albeit in a distorted form. In this sense,
Hunting for Justice offers a critique of the political infinitization and idealization of justice that permeates our current discourses of activism and social justice.
About the author
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. She is the author of
Tragically Speaking: On the Use and Abuse of Theory for Life.
