Tissue of the World: In Conversation with Brooke Holmes
Professor Brooke Holmes is a scholar, theorist, and writer. She is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where she is also Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism, a 2026-27 Old Dominion Research Professor, and previously directed the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. She studies the turbulent histories of concepts related to nature, the physical body, affect, and life, especially in the ancient Greco-Roman world, from a contemporary perspective. Her work has focused in particular on how conceptual fields form through experiences of otherness in the self (symptoms) and community with others, including non-human others (sympathy). She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press 2010) and Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy (I.B. Tauris 2012), as well as numerous co-edited volumes.
In the spirit of spanning the divide between theory and practice, Professor Holmes’s collaborations with scholars, artists, and curators have taken her to Athens (DESTE Foundation of Contemporary Art), Berlin (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), Brisbane (The Queensland Art Gallery), Dubai (Alserkal Arts Foundation), Munich (Haus der Kunst), and Porto (Fórum do Futuro), among other venues. Her research has been variously supported by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts.
This interview focuses on Professor Holmes’s intellectual geography, one that has given her a range of expertise stretching from the earliest Greek literature to twentieth-century continental philosophy, and how her disciplinary history has enabled the production of Tissue of the World: The Nature of Ancient Sympathy (The University of Chicago Press 2027), her forthcoming monograph. Tissue of the World takes shape as an in-depth and groundbreaking study of sympathy (sumpatheia) in antiquity, where it functions as a mode of affective relation and affective community distributed throughout the world and becomes of interest to those working in the natural sciences, learned medicine, historiography, and philosophy.
This interview was conducted on 6 January 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity. The views and opinions expressed by Brooke Holmes in this interview are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the interviewer or CJLPA. The interviewer assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the interviewee’s statements.
CJLPA: All your degrees, from undergraduate to doctoral level, are in Comparative Literature. So, calling you a comparatist would seem apt. You have only ever been hired, however, in Departments of Classics. How do you make sense of that for yourself? When did you come to antiquity? What has kept you there?
Brooke Holmes: One of the things that I’ve struggled with in my work and in my career is the question of how to identify: ‘classicist’, ‘comparatist’, ‘philosopher’, ‘historian’, ‘critic’, ‘curator’, ‘writer’. In the last few years, I’ve found myself asking, ‘What is the more capacious category?’ All of these are practices of work, whether scholarly, more curatorial, or more oriented towards community-building. But we still look for an identity. ‘Comparatist’ has felt like it made a lot of sense to me, looking back on my formation. But, as you say, my professional life has largely been in Classics.
Looking back, I think it’s always an interesting combination of contingency and forces that you spend the rest of your life trying to diagnose.
I did my undergraduate work at Columbia. Probably because I did debate in high school, I thought I was going to study Russian and work for the State Department. But my love of literature and literary theory pretty quickly led me to Comparative Literature as this capacious, interdisciplinary, theoretical field.
The thing was, I needed two years of another language. So that’s why I ended up in intensive Greek: it was a means to an end. That said, over the years, I’ve come to see that my interest in ‘the Greeks’ must have also been shaped by Columbia’s Core Curriculum and the outsized role of Greek philosophy in poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze. In any case, once I started doing a PhD in Comparative Literature, it became clear to me that the work I wanted to do in the ancient world would mean training in Classics. Still, I stayed in Comp Lit because that’s where the conceptual questions that I was interested in felt like they were most at home.
I’m fundamentally interested in sameness and difference, not as Platonic Forms but as spaces of negotiation. A similarity is never just given, but it’s also never completely made up. Instead, it’s the result of someone making an active connection conceptually and imaginatively. It can be generous or coercive—or both. To affirm difference, too, is an act of creativity. It can also be driven by politics, by fear, by defensiveness. Questions of sameness and difference have been central to my work on both symptoms and sympathy. They’re also crucial to how I think about what it means to work on antiquity, and especially the mythic past of a ‘classicised’ antiquity or classicism, today. It’s not enough to say the ancient past is the Same or Other. It’s always both.
CJLPA: Indeed, your background and your training come to mind as ‘synthetic’, insofar as they enable you to ask questions that those trained purposively as comparatists or classicists might not ‘naturally’ think to ask.
In that spirit, what then happened during your sojourn at the Sorbonne, where you earned a Diplôme d’études approfondies (DEA) in Études grecques? Was that an ‘official’ turn to classical material, since the French have a known affinity for classical philology? Or was that an attempt to stay more concretely within Comparative Literature? It appears to be somewhat bidirectional.
BH: I went to France partly because I had some French from high school and I had this opportunity to immerse myself in another culture for a year. And part of it was that I’d been influenced by French traditions in both Comparative Literature and Classics. At Columbia, and again in grad school, I studied poststructuralist theory with Gayatri Spivak. At Princeton, I worked with Froma Zeitlin, who was a really important interlocutor with the ‘French School’—Jean-Pierre Vernant, the équipe at the Centre Louis Gernet, and especially Nicole Loraux.
I ended up in Paris through an academic exchange that Princeton had with the École normale supérieure (ENS). But with the help of the Head of Classics at the ENS, Monique Trédé, I was able to connect with Paul Demont, who generously agreed to take me on as a student at the Sorbonne. That gave me the chance to deepen my work on Aelius Aristides, which I’d first taken up in Princeton, in a traditional Classics setting. With the support of Heinrich von Staden at the Institute for Advanced Study, I’d become more interested in ancient medicine, and Paris was a centre of scholarship in that field. So, in the end, what I did in Paris was more classical philology than theory. But that work set me up to really dive into the medical writers once I got back and started my dissertation.
CJLPA: We see in your work that you are drawn towards big and deeply entrenched concepts in intellectual history, ones that we sometimes do not think have actual histories—for example, the body, gender, and sympathy. Has your training informed how you ask these questions? Or vice versa?
BH: All the forms of training that I’ve engaged in—whether as a comparatist or in poststructuralist theory or in Greek or in the history of medicine—those skills are really valuable. But one of the advantages of not settling into a discipline is that you’re always a bit of an anthropologist. So, the ways in which that disciplinary formation works—the history of what kind of problem founds a community; the language you have to use in order to be recognised as a member of the discipline—those things surface.
If you’re moving between different disciplines, you’re always aware, ‘Oh, now I have to do a handout. Now I have to use slides. Now I have to talk about getting clear about things’. Then people will engage with me differently, and I can get a little bit deeper into the community.
But, ultimately, you hit that sense that the techniques themselves aren’t the boundaries of the world. They have their limits, and they have to be tested against the problem. I think that’s where the training over the years has helped me. I try to never reduce anything to one discipline or one genre or one question, because the things I’m interested in often span texts and periods and genres.
These epistemic technologies that I’m talking about in terms of disciplines are also in play if we’re talking about Aristotelian biology, Hippocratic medicine, or Euripidean tragedy. Those are themselves disciplines of knowledge, ways of making sense of the world. So, I’m interested in where those strategies for making sense are converging on different objects in the ancient world. Where are they testing the boundaries of their world? Where are they making a common world? They’re always experimenting with what the world is. How do we use our techniques to get out of our world-making practices, in the ways they’ve hardened, and get back into those world-making practices, in their contingency? In their generosity, or their movement, or their expansiveness?
I often talk about a problem topologically. I think spatially, in terms of a field, what I’ve started to call a conceptual field or, sometimes, a perceptual-conceptual field. We often reduce things to binaries, or we’ll try to come up with a clear set of premises to argue that ‘Aristotle definitely thought this’. I’m much more interested in how problems form space around them and how this space enables new forms of thinking.
CJLPA: You have given us a wonderful overview of your early education, and I want to bring us closer to your dissertation and, thereafter, your first monograph, The Symptom and the Subject. As is well known, dissertations and the resulting monographs are often quite distinct from one another. Was this the case for you, too?
BH: The dissertation was about different ways of reading the symptom. And it was only late in the dissertation that I was like, ‘no, no, what they’re seeing behind the symptom is the body’.
The emergence of the concept of the body felt like it was re-shifting the way that people were telling stories about disease, health, and harm. When people get hurt, people want someone to blame. They want a story. I’d go so far as to say it might be something shared universally among humans.
So, if the body is what they’re starting to see behind the symptom, or if the stories they’re starting to tell in relation to harm now activate this agent called the sôma [‘body’ in ancient Greek]—that, in itself, is a problem for the work of making sense of why people get hurt. That’s because the body is not a real ethical agent; it’s not like a god. It’s impersonal. It doesn’t absorb blame. At the same time, in place of a single event, there are all these micro-changes that snowball into the symptom. And this new way of thinking about causality, alongside the impersonality of nature and the body, means that it’s very hard to pinpoint something to blame.
So, you start to shift blame to the person whose body it is, or you might shift blame to the person to whom the body has been entrusted, namely, the physician. A Hippocratic text like On the Technē [‘Craft’ in ancient Greek] is saying, ‘oh, they’re blaming physicians when people die, but actually it’s the patient’s fault’. So, ancient authors are trying to account for harm by looking at the people involved: physicians and patients.
I felt that there were two things in the book that shifted from the dissertation. One was the focus on the body, and the other was to say that the body creates a new ethical, political subject. Nobody just discovered the body as a scientific thing, and then that was it: now we understand reality. Nor was it just another name for power. It changed the way people thought about what it meant to suffer, to be responsible for oneself. This is happening in democratic Athens, where there’s an obsession with autarky, the hyper-masculine mastery of the self. And this is the space in which the new ethical and political questions emerge.
CJLPA: I am intrigued to hear more about how your work on the ethical subject has developed since then. From 2014-17, you held a ‘New Directions Fellowship’ from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. Was that ‘ethical turn’ the new direction you were taking?
BH: When I started thinking about applying for the New Directions, I knew I needed other skills that I hadn’t yet learned. Even though I had worked a lot in the history of medicine, I needed to do more in the history of science. So, I started going to the History of Science Seminar at Princeton. Once I had the New Directions, I took the graduate methods seminar for the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies on Science at the University of Chicago, where I was also a visiting professor in Classics giving the lectures that became the book on sympathy.
But there’s a longstanding sense that there is no ancient science or that science is an invention of modernity. And whatever you think philosophically about the Scientific Revolution, the sociological turn in the history of science—where there’s more emphasis on institutions—made it almost even harder to study the ancient world, where the modern structure of, say, the laboratory doesn’t exist. On the one hand, the focus in the history of science always casts the pre-modern period as ‘Other’ and probably not science. On the other hand, you have a shift towards the contemporary, which estranges the ancient material even more. So, it became clear that I couldn’t just study the history of science as a New Directions Fellow.
I was also interested in these ethical, philosophical questions. So that led me to a bioethics program that was, at the time, housed in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at NYU. It’s since moved to the School of Public Health, but, at the time, it was affiliated, somewhat unusually, with Philosophy. But I felt I still wasn’t getting at the core question: ‘we’re bodies, and we’re people, and what do we do about that conflict?’ I realised the kinds of questions I was asking just fell between the cracks. Bioethics seemed to be primarily either a legal domain or analytic philosophy.
Then I had an opportunity, through a project on pain run by the wonderful Old Testament scholar Jack Levison at Southern Methodist University, to meet Joseph Fins, who is the Chief Bioethicist at Weill Cornell, and we really hit it off. We’ve since co-taught together. Joe invited me to the Ethics Committee meetings at Weill Cornell. There’d be 40-50 people in the room: internists, chaplains, doctors, psychologists, surgeons, bioethicists—the same kind of interdisciplinary community that, in my academic work, I really valued. It was really moving to me to see people work through real cases with real lives at stake to try to figure out the best way to honour the basic principle of ‘Do No Harm’, or to support flourishing. They would ask, ‘in light of what’s happened, are there policy changes that have happened? How would we do it differently? What did we learn? What did we do right?’
The level of complexity that you can achieve in the case study was really meaningful to me. In analytic philosophy, I learned a lot. But there’s also an aspect of ‘let’s take the variables out to do a very precise analysis’. The answers felt so far away from the complexity of what it means to be in a body as a person or to treat the bodies of other people in political systems that don’t treat all people equally. Those problems felt like they couldn’t be addressed by doing thought experiments.
At the same time, as I got more into bioethics and medical humanities, I realised everybody knows Hippocrates and the Hippocratic Oath. There’s a strong sense in popular culture of the Hippocratic or Greek origins of medicine. I started to worry about just showing up to these conversations and saying, ‘right, the Greeks are the beginning of everything’. That claim, and whatever work that claim had done historically, was complicated and problematic. Even if I wasn’t saying the Greeks discovered reason, what was the story I was telling?
Alongside the New Directions, I was doing Postclassicisms and Liquid Antiquity. These were both projects that made me think, ‘I can’t use the historical work I’m doing to address contemporary questions without interrogating the problem of the Greeks’. So, the work I was doing in reception studies also started to shape how I was thinking about the history of the body.
It was always this question of complexity. What are the mechanisms by which we can honour the complexity of this ethical, political problem—we’re bodies, and we’re people—and its historical dimension, which is now going to be on a massive scale, a much larger timescale than the history of science as a discipline really can handle? I didn’t want to invoke mythic Greek origins. Yet, I also don’t think we can cut the Greeks out of the picture and say, ‘everything started with modernity’, or ‘everything started with Pasteur’, or ‘everything started last week’, or ‘everything else was just not science or didn’t matter’. The Greeks are integral to the ethical and the political problem of the body with which we’re still living.
CJLPA: Bioethics at the threshold of life opens out, finally, onto your latest and eagerly awaited study. Would you be able to give us a brief account of what sympathy, or sumpatheia in ancient Greek, is? On its face, the subject appears to be quite a departure from your previous monographs.
BH: The problem of sympathy starts to appear in the fourth century BCE in writers who are working in the inquiry into nature that interested me so much in my first book. In fact, one of the earliest contexts where we see the language of sumpatheia being used is to talk about sharing affects, pathē, between the body and the soul. One of the reasons I got interested in sympathy was because of its role in the relationship between the body and the soul after they’ve been identified as the two basic parts of a human being.
You can immediately see that the idea of ancient sympathy is much broader than the modern concept, which we usually use to talk about identifying with someone else’s suffering. That’s in part because pathos is an expansive concept. It doesn’t have to be felt. The things that share it don’t have to be living. Instead, they’re just natural bodies or parts of these bodies. A pathos means something has been acted on. A shared pathos—sumpaskhein, to share a pathos—just means that my pathos has now been shared with you.
From the beginning, people have been observing something they call ‘sympathy’ in different domains and at different scales. I’ve already mentioned sympathy between the body and the soul. We also see sympathy used when an affect is shared between parts of the body. This kind of sympathy becomes important for later medical writers, especially Galen of Pergamum in the second century CE.
Some of the earliest cases of the language of sympathy pick out phenomena that look more like what we think of as sympathy between people. What’s probably the first surviving case of the verb sumpaskhein is in Plato’s Charmides, where Socrates is talking about contagious yawning. Contagious yawning comes back as a problēma [‘problem’ in ancient Greek] of sympathy in the ‘physical problems’ tradition that gets especially associated with Aristotle and the Peripatetics. The other early example of the verb is in Republic 10 to talk about how, in tragedy, we sympathise with those on stage. That’s why, Socrates argues, tragedy has to be evicted from the ideal city: it feeds our appetitive soul and corrupts our affective life and destroys the life of reason both in the individual and in the city.
In the Hellenistic period, sympathy increasingly acquires cosmic dimensions. It often names the sharing of affect between the celestial and the terrestrial realms. But it can also point to the total connection of everything to everything else, as in the Stoics.
So, there are these three scales of shared affect, where people who are affirming a commitment to making sense of the world in terms of nature start to notice phenomena that they call sympathy. And, in noticing something—for example, I’m afraid, and I start to tremble—they start to say that what’s happening is ‘the body is sympathising with the affect of the soul’. People start to accept that this is a visible case of ‘sympathy’. Now they have to theorise what has to be in place, given the terms of the inquiry into nature, for an affect to be shared. Those terms often boil down to two things.
First, what’s the material connection? So, the Stoics are going to come in and critique Aristotle for saying a pathos can be common to body and soul without also recognising that the soul must be corporeal. Because the Stoics argue that only a body can act on a body. Or there has to be an effluence that travels from my eye to yours, right?
But there’s another claim. It’s not enough just for a body to touch another body. If we’re talking about the body and the soul, we want to ask: how did these two bodies make a life together? Or: how did these two bodies share a yawn or share a lament in the theatre? There has to be a koinōnia, a community. It might be necessary for there to be a corporeal transfer because a pathos is tied to bodies acting on bodies, but it’s not sufficient. We start to see the language of koinōnia, community, used as the underlying condition of relation that makes sympathy possible.
So, what you see happening is that sympathy becomes a site of speculation in the inquiry into nature about the forms of community that exist in a body, between bodies, and in the entire cosmos. Often, a koinōnia isn’t seen as sufficient. There has to be a unity, or there has to be a whole. If all the parts sympathise, the Stoics will argue, that must be because there’s something unifying them. Plato is already talking about this unity as a living unity in the Republic. He says the city, which has been eugenically engineered, should be like if one of us is in pain, we all feel the pain, just like in an ensouled organism, the pain of the finger, of a part, is felt by the whole. So that sympathy, now, the transfer of an affect to either another part or to a whole, is an index not just of community, but also of wholeness or unity. So, sympathy becomes a privileged site for speculating about unity or wholeness and then furthering discussion about what the cause of that unity must be.
This is why I argue that sympathy is a crucial site within the inquiry into nature for thinking about relations between natures. The nature of ‘X’ may say how it’s going to interact with different natures, but it doesn’t actually account for how I’m going to be a member of a community. You need something larger. This something, I argue in the book, is what I call ‘capital-N’ Nature. So, the history of sympathy also helps us better understand the history of the concept of Nature.
CJLPA: I want to bring us more closely into the fold of modernity. While we ought to affirm ancient sympathy as the discursive, technical concept par excellence of an educated elite, you have also made us aware of its troubled historiography and reception, in which sympathy has been uncharitably and superficially glossed as an occult and folk ‘power’ at work in nature—symptomatic of incursions by pedestrian and non-Western epistemologies into the purported ‘purity’ and orthodoxy of an episteme assigned as both Greek and classical. This seems distinctly racialised. How, if at all, do you address these problems in the book?
BH: The Cartesian moment is key. René Descartes famously says in the Principia Philosophiae that the new mechanical philosophy has gotten rid of ‘occult causes’. So, these hidden causes, these sympathies and antipathies, get read as archaic, or habits of thought that are not in line with proper, scientific thinking.
For moderns, there’s another layer to that movement away from sympathy and antipathy, which is the introduction of sympathy as the way to describe all magical thinking, as in James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Here, you start to see sympathy taken as a way of making sense of the world that is supposed to define non-Western, primitivised, racialised ways of thinking and ‘folk’ ways of thinking. So, sympathy becomes a hallmark of the way people who are not modern, rational European thinkers think. That and the Cartesian moment have, in turn, governed the way that people have looked at the language of sympathy and antipathy in the ancient material when it does appear. In other words, the problematic modern history of sympathy influences how we view its early history.
Part of the complication here is that sympathy emerges in the reception of the inquiry into nature. The inquiry into nature as a world-making practice is developed in the fourth century BCE in Athens and Greece, but it starts to move with the rise of Macedonian power, which imbues Hellenism with new cultural and symbolic capital. The process continues under Rome, so that Roman imperial power is married to the elevation of Greek cultural hegemony.
What we’re starting to see is what I call a ‘cosmo-anthropology of Nature’ being privileged as a culturally hegemonic way of making sense of the world. People who seem to identify as non-Greek are practicing natural philosophy across the imperial metropoles. They’re writing and speaking Greek the way, today, many people would be speaking English, because that’s the language of cosmo-anthropology—what we call ‘science’—married to geopolitical power.
What happens, as I’ve tried to show in the book, is that we start to see two of the most important strands of sympathy—one is astrological sympathy, and the other is sympathy-antipathy—emerge through the encounter between cosmo-anthropological traditions, under this cultural hegemony. So, Bolus of Mendes, who must be the person behind this new discourse of sympathies and antipathies, is writing in Greek but is identified by other ancient authors as Egyptian and says he gained his knowledge from Ostanes, a Persian mage. The Magi are important in Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, our best source for the discourse of sympathy-antipathy, as sources of knowledge about sympathy-antipathy, even though they’re racialised as corrupt and untrustworthy by Pliny. Pliny is taking over a lot from the Bolus tradition and then embedding it in Roman racecraft, to borrow the language of Barbara Fields and Karen Fields.
So, sympathy and antipathy, even in antiquity, are emerging at the site of the inquiry into nature’s reception in communities where a discourse of Nature is, on the one hand, culturally hegemonic but, on the other hand, it’s also a portal onto other cosmo-anthropological traditions. In astrology, you see something similar. Late Babylonian celestial science, where horoscopy is emerging in the late fifth century and early fourth century BCE, is now being taken up in Greek. Sympathy becomes a site where the astrological relations between constellations or stars and their effects on Earth are being translated into Greek physics and assimilated to other forms of sympathy. The field of sympathy by the third century CE had been completely transformed by the encounter between the Greek-aligned inquiry into nature and other cosmo-anthropological traditions. It’s integrated Babylonian celestial science, probably Egyptian pharmacological knowledge, and, at a certain point, alchemical knowledge.
All this defies the notion that the Greeks, as some ethnic or racial group, had a revelation à la Martin Heidegger, and saw nature as the truth of the world and being, and that was it. And now, ‘we good Germans’ or ‘we French’ or whatever are going to take over this as our heritage. No.
The whole cosmo-anthropology of Nature, as it develops in relation to sympathy, is itself indexing the cosmological experimentation that happens under conditions of empire and genuine cultural complexity. When we think about ‘Greek Nature’, what we’re actually naming is that. Then Descartes comes in with a mechanical philosophy and polemically denounces that tradition as obsolete. But the tradition had always been changing through a triangulated relationship between reading authoritative ancient texts, experimentation with the non-human world, and textual, intellectual communities in the present. It was a live strategy for making sense of affective relations. And it didn’t go away.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is important at the end of the book because he is, on the one hand, a good Cartesian. He believes in Cartesian physics and denounces Newtonian gravity as a return to occult forces. But gravity was hard to account for, as was magnetism, in Cartesian physics. There was something that mechanical physics didn’t get at that continued to be associated with sympathy. The other side of it was life and vitalism. Leibniz’s view of the monad, where every being perceives every other being but without touching in a way that seems to draw on Aristotelian and Neoplatonic metaphysics, helps bring sympathy over the Cartesian divide. In a nutshell, I’d say that ‘life’ becomes the name of the sympathy that is not quashed by Cartesian physics or, rather, the sympathy that becomes the point of resistance to Cartesian physics.
Life, in other words, gets allied to the Greeks as a form of classicised magic. ‘Life’ is the thing that can’t be controlled, captured, or mechanised, and the Greeks had access to it. With the rise of scientific racism, ‘bad’ sympathy becomes magic—as what J Kameron Carter, who’s thinking with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, has called ‘Blackened religion’. So, we see this split in the reception of sympathy, where vitalism, in its repudiation of the mechanical, is classicised and validated through the Greeks, who carry value as ‘our’ ancestral past, and the parts of sympathy that seem folk, outdated, and ‘primitive’ are racialised as magic.
CJLPA: ‘Life’, in its modern guise, has been an increasingly rich area of study over the past 15-20 years, what with the increasing mechanisation of life through biotechnologies such as gene editing, ‘designer babies’, and changing views of life, living beings, and what it means to be alive. What are your thoughts on this in relation to your own work, thinking about life as a historico-philosophical concept?
BH: You’re putting your finger on something so important. Stefan Helmreich has this really great article called ‘What Was Life?’. This was pre-AI. But he was already suggesting that new technologies are making the idea of life obsolescent. I taught this class with Spyros Papapetros that we called ‘What Was Vitalism?’: if life is in the past, is vitalism also in the past?
But, of course, a technology is parasitic on life as a norm, right? The whole point is we want to use technology to make life ‘better’. So, of course, it’s going to be embedded in deeply problematic eugenic philosophies. Those philosophies have, historically, over the last 100 years, been enmeshed with the Greeks, who have provided a norm as both ‘natural’ and ‘classical’. So, there are some very complicated dynamics in the contemporary mobilisation of life as a natural norm in relation to a classicised past that have become very present in my thinking.
I am really committed to genealogical work. I felt that I needed to do this genealogy of the body, and then a genealogy of Nature, because the whole tradition that we were given didn’t interrogate the conditions of possibility for its most basic terms: the body, Nature, matter, life. We weren’t going to be able to think differently if we didn’t do a genealogy of those terms. I was very influenced by Foucault in his work on modernity. But when Foucault went to antiquity, he started with the body as a given. I thought about Symptom and the Subject as trying to do that genealogical work about the physical body. The sympathy book is, in some ways, a sequel to that first project.
Tissue of the World looks at how living unity becomes one influential way of thinking about the relation between natures and helps produce the notion of ‘big-N’ Nature. I suggest that the history of sympathy invites us to read the history of natures and Nature differently because it helps us attend to the ways the ancient ‘physicists’ are theorising relation and the ways that accounts of relation become sites for other cosmo-anthropological traditions to come in.
Yet sympathy is also often read through a kind of proto-vitalism or eugenics, where, ultimately, in Plotinus, the One is the most important: we want to be completely rational beings; we don’t want to be affected. There’s anxiety about affect in this tradition, a pathophobia that sees affect in terms of femininity and enslavement. So, when Denise Ferreira da Silva talks about affectability as a mark of race in modernity, I suggest that’s part of the reception of the body in the pathophobic Greco-Roman tradition.
So, I needed to do a genealogy that didn’t take the body, Nature, or life as given. I had concerns, as I discussed earlier, about assuming seamless continuity between the past and the present. But I also didn’t want to tell a story that, like in Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, said, ‘things were totally different in the past, and now it’s exactly the opposite’. Reception has taught us that that’s a false position. For example, I didn’t want to say, ‘everything was really bad back then, and that’s why things are bad now’. I didn’t want to tell a story like ‘in the past, people lived in harmony with nature. The Greeks can restore us to a way of thinking ecologically’.
For me, genealogy can’t fall into any of those narratives. If it does, it won’t do the work of what Friedrich Nietzsche called the untimely in the present. It has to be able to grapple with the emergence of forms of the given and watch how they become ways that people make sense of their world. But those ways are never as fixed as we think they are; namely, in how the past has been canonised and mythologised in modernity. We have to think about this work in relation to our own investments in the Greeks and in an ancient past—whoever ‘we’ are—and all of the complexity in between.
CJLPA: Building on your commitment to disciplinary cross-pollination, you have come to fruitful collaborations with artists, curators, and dancers. This, in its own way, has established an ecosystem of scholars and practitioners. How have their knowledge technologies informed your own academic practice? Did you always want to realise these relationships? Was the project on sympathy, rendered as ‘fellow-feeling’ in translation, the ideal vehicle for doing so? Or did they grow serendipitously?
BH: That’s a really important part of the work that I’ve been doing after Symptom and the Subject and Gender. I was focused on the Postclassicisms project and Liquid Antiquity, a curatorial project that I collaborated on with Polina Kosmadaki and Yorgos Tzirtzilakis and that allowed me to work with artists. Liquid Antiquity came out of some fortuitous meetings, where I was really thinking about how you formally engage the complexity of problems in ways that can affect how people think about antiquity in its mythic dimensions. How can you disrupt the givenness of the classical in public spaces?
The museum, and more generally, art, at least since Johann Joachim Winckelmann, is a major site for the myth of classical antiquity. I learned a lot working with curators to think about the form of the exhibition. I went on to work with the curator Nida Ghouse on the discourse program for the amazing exhibition she did called A Slightly Curving Place that responds to the work of Umashankar Manthravadi, a self-described ‘acoustic archaeologist’ in South Asia. The book we did together, Coming to Know, was really interrogating these questions of, ‘how do you manage complexity? How do you manage the mythic qualities of the past?’. ‘How do you not’, as Nida sometimes says, ‘cede the past to the right?’ In ways that are not just factual, like, ‘oh, but actually it was really like this’. What other counter-stories can we tell?
Exhibitions are really important spaces. Artists—particularly when we think about contemporary art and classical reception studies—are doing such incredible, important work in redefining the terms in which the ‘we’, the ‘us’, and the ancient past are not being cashed out in the ways that they have been historically inscribed in racialised, national ways of thinking: ‘We’re the proper heirs of the Greeks’.
There’s also a challenge to the idea that ‘only people who really understand this material can engage it’. Artists have been just exploding that idea of what it means to form new communities around a relation to the ancient or classicised past in the present and reimagine its value. They’re operating in spaces that engage the public. This is very different from what scholars are often doing, including when they try to do ‘public’ Classics. Art, I think, is a much more capacious space for trying to intervene in public conversation without being prescriptive, policy-oriented, or just having to be legible in a certain common-sense idiom. It can test the terms of what we think we know. So, curators and artists have completely changed the ways I think about the forms that my own work can take. I’ve also learned so much about collaboration.
We started off talking about the problem of what to do if you’re somebody who doesn’t fit into an ‘ist’: a classicist or comparatist. An artist is a capacious category. The artists I’ve worked with have trained in specific fields and developed complex and precise techniques. For example, Isabel Lewis was trained as a choreographer. Martha Friedman has incredible techniques with glass or rubber. But those techniques are there in the service of some other set of problems and experiments. It’s been really inspiring to me to think about working on a problem through a series of formal experiments and not getting locked down by the techniques themselves. It’s about staying focused on what really matters.
CJLPA: And it’s refreshing to work with people for whom the material is not canonical.
BH: Their fidelity might lie elsewhere, right?
I think, for me, one of the challenges is operating in contemporary art and museum spaces as an academic and scholar. I feel I’m thinking creatively, but I also come in as a scholar. I’m increasingly mindful of asking, ‘am I drawing on classicism for added value?’. That’s part of my baggage. What is my authority? I’ve thought, I would say, in the last couple of years, much more about that. So, I come in and try to use what I know to disrupt the assumptions and the myths and find another form of mythmaking. What is the work I can do that is in the service of what I am most committed to?
This interview was conducted by Alex-Jaden Peart. Alex-Jaden completed his undergraduate work at the University of Pittsburgh and his master’s degree at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he was the Society for Classical Studies’ 2024-25 Lionel Pearson Fellow. He is a PhD Student and PE More Fellow in Classics at Princeton University, where he works at the generous intersections of Classics and the history of medicine, philosophy, and the human sciences in medieval and Early Modern Europe.
