Beyond Retribution: Re-theorizing Justice Through Greek Tragedy

Abstract

Can retribution be just? Through a close reading of eight Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, this dissertation argues that it is both possible and necessary to theorize justice in other than retributive terms. By attending to the words and actions of female characters and their attendant choruses, I consider how each articulates a harm and makes a claim to justice, and I analyze how the actions they undertake as women in pursuit of justice unsettle the idea that legal retribution is more “impartial” and less harmful than revenge. In doing so, they make legible issues of justice that are of contemporary concern: what a person might want, in taking revenge or in seeking redress of harm from the law; the kinds of subjects that democratic legal justice imagines and makes visible, and the kind of agency those subjects possess; the construction of the criminal type and the use of predictions to reduce crime; the affective role of the community in ensuring justice is done; the justification of the use of punishment; and the logic of commensurability that underlies any system of retribution.

My introductory chapter provides an overview of debates among contemporary philosophers and penal theorists about the merits and limitations of retributivism, and explains how Aeschylus’s Oresteia has been enlisted as a mythical origin for the legal paradigm of retributive justice. The second chapter links the revenge of Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s Oresteia to that of the title character in Euripides’ Hecuba, positing revenge as a kind of meaning-making outside the framework of legal justice, undertaken by women when denied recourse to the law. In the third chapter, I examine the gendered construction of the criminal type in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and Euripides’ Medea, in order to contest an enduring logic of prediction that rests on an identity-based presumption of guilt and cannot accommodate the ways systemic forces affect subjects’ possibilities for action.

Refining the theory of agency in my third chapter, the fourth chapter juxtaposes Euripides’ Ion and Bacchae to explore how two core institutions of legal justice – the adversarial form of the legal trial and the administration of punishment by the courts – are insufficient to secure justice for survivors of harm. Throughout the dissertation I develop a gendered frame of analysis to explore how female figures in Greek tragedy also perform alternatives to the retributive institutions and unequal forms of relation that fail them; from their perspective it becomes possible to see a version of justice that may be more adequate both to the kinds of beings we are and to the redress we seek in turning to the law.

My dissertation engages a tradition of political theory that uses classical materials to pose questions about ethical and political life. I outline a double shift in our understanding of justice, from conceiving justice in negative terms (ameliorating harms) to positive ones (promoting goods) and from conceiving justice as a product that is delivered after a harm, through punishment, to conceiving it as a process that is always ongoing: the pursuit of being in just relations with others. In my conclusion I reflect on the usefulness of Greek tragedies in undergraduate teaching, showing how my own students have engaged with Euripides’ Hecuba and Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound to think critically about current ideas of justice.