Sphinx

Every so often, the tireless labour of the Thucydides Bot – someone recently referred to it as Sisyphean, and in the midst of the current spate of misattributions being tweeted out by accounts with apparently Islamic and/or Indian sub-continental identities, that doesn’t feel too far off – throws up something valuable. Generally this means a new misattribution with an interesting back story, but very occasionally there’s something even more useful. I’m still waiting to find time to investigate Cornelius Castoriadis’ book on Thucydides, force and law (or might and right), partly because it looks like the source of a misattribution that’s recently become quite prominent – “either war or equanimity, you have to choose”, or variants thereof – but also because I wasn’t aware of its existence until I started tracking down the misquote. This morning brought a reference that will be very useful if I ever get round to writing a half-planned piece on Thucydides read through the lens of exile literature:

To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home.

Don’t bother looking for it in Thucydides – nor on Twitter, where the couple of tweets this morning have now disappeared, perhaps as a result of my correction. It’s actually from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951), a collection of aphorisms (rather lengthy aphorisms, it must be said) dating from the previous decade or so. This is the clsing paragraph of number 51, from 1945:

Authors settle into their texts like home-dwellers. Just as one creates disorder by lugging papers, books, pencils and documents from one room to another, so too does one comport oneself with thoughts. They become pieces of furniture, on which one sits down, feeling at ease or annoyed. One strokes them tenderly, scuffs them up, jumbles them up, moves them around, trashes them. To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home. And therein one unavoidably generates, just like the family, all manner of household litter and junk. But one no longer has a shed, and it is not at all easy to separate oneself from cast-offs. So one pushes them to and fro, and in the end runs the risk of filling up the page with them. The necessity to harden oneself against pity for oneself includes the technical necessity, to counter the diminution of intellectual tension with the most extreme watchfulness, and to eliminate anything which forms on the work like a crust or runs on mechanically, which perhaps at an earlier stage produced, like gossip, the warm atmosphere which enabled it to grow, but which now remains fusty and stale. In the end, authors are not even allowed to be home in their writing.

Lots to unpack here. Any hint of a Thucydides connection? I’ll have to consult someone who’s more familiar with this material, but my initial reaction is: nope. Except that the line was used as a section heading in an article by Panos Christodoulou on ‘Thucydides Philosophistoricus (Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, no 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 151-167. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.07 – for some reason WordPress won’t let me link to the online pdf), which notes that exile enabled Thucydides to gather material and also offers the hypothesis “that in 5.26 Thucydides makes an indirect allusion to the fact that a life of quietude, which liberates the eminent thinker from engagement in political life, is the path leading to intellectual production.” The argument seems to me on first reading to be somewhat speculative (especially the attempt at linking Thucydides to the Socratic gang), but it’s certainly interesting, and worth another read at some point – even if it is, quite inadvertently, responsible for someone thinking that Adorno quote is actually from Thucydides…