Janet Lungstrom and Elizabeth Sauer, eds.
Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Contest
Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. Pp. 359. $20.95

Reviewed by Andrea Gogröf-Voorhees

This rich collection of fifteen essays turns its attention to a "beneficial, essentially creative side of social and written agonistics under the sign of postmodernity" (5), against the backdrop of what are perceived as pessimistic, elitist, politically unconscious, or hopeless cultural and literary theories that are negating the potentially creative role of struggle and strife in the formation of culture. In discussing such major theorists of the postmodern establishment as Jean Baudrillard, J. F. Lyotard, and Michel Foucault, this book proposes to rediscover the creative potentiality of the agon ("human need to fight and play") in and for today, and to rescue it from a conceptual paralysis that, according to the editors, seems to have prevailed since the horrors of both World Wars, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima.

The basis of discussion is Friedrich Nietzsche's posthumously published essay "Homer's Contest" at the beginning of the volume, which provides the classical (and positive) definition of the agon as an ongoing productive activity of contest, struggle, and resistance between opposing forces. For Nietzsche, the Greeks' understanding and practice of contest (rhetorical, physical, and political) is superior to the contemporary "softish notion of modern humanity" because the Greeks recognized that "it is in the nature of the agon neither to render its participants mute nor to attain the conquering finality of telos" (25). For Lungstrom and Sauer, "Nietzsche is the agonal prophet of the postmodern world" (1). Nietzsche's idealizing of the ancient Greeks is less the issue here than his vision of a recurrence of the agon in the future. His text provides a rich matrix for the volume's intended investigation of "the post-Wall paradigm shift of postmodernism's journey from the intertext to the extra-textual cultural and historical world" (5).

Yet only six of the fifteen contributions make more or less direct references to "Homer's Contest" and other texts by Nietzsche. In the first part, Benjamin C. Sax's essay "Cultural Agonistics: Nietzsche, the Greeks, Eternal Recurrence" responds most directly to Nietzsche's text, reading it from a historical perspective in connection with "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks" and The Birth of Tragedy. While many of his insights make sense, Sax's main line of thought--to establish a connection between the concept of eternal recurrence and Nietzsche's understanding of agon--is obscured by the inclusion of too many historical sources. In the second part, which deals with identity formation in terms of psychoanalysis and racism, Sander L. Gilman ("The Jewish Genius: Freud and the Jewishness of the Creative") offers insight into Freud's self-emancipatory gesture to unhinge the notion of creativity from agonal representations of the Jewish Other (as in Otto Weininger and Cesare Lombroso) in fin-de-siècle Vienna. In "Criminality and Poe's Orangutan: The Question of Race in Detection," Nancy A. Harrowitz offers an original approach to the genre of the detective story in which she sees an exemplary postmodern arena for an agonistic struggle between the need for epistemological certainty and the challenging reality of semiotic plurality.

The contributors in the third part wrestle with "the discursive-dialogic agon" during the process of creative writing and reading. Using chaos and complexity theory, John A. McCarthy's essay "A Chain of Utmost Potency" investigates the agonistic relationship between the artistic and scientific worlds in Goethe's Faust and the Nietzschean "quantum-universe" in which human action takes place "beyond human value judgments and outside the pale of traditional binary thinking" (215). Elizabeth Sauer, in "The Partial Song of Satanic Anti-Creation: Milton's Discourse of the Divided Self," takes a close look at the soliloquies in Paradise Lost in which, Sauer argues, a modern form of self-representation expresses a critical stance toward the authority of cultural and literary expression established in the poem. Andrew Schmitz's essay on Joyce's Finnegan's Wake concentrates on the agonistic forces within the extremely codified language of the text, concluding that the Wake hypostatizes effectively the act of writing as transcendental self-subversion. Anxiety over artistic performance and the problematic traces of Henry James's self-reflexivity are at the center of Cecile Mazzucco-Than's contribution, "The Gender of Fiction: Henry James's 'Backward Glance' at the Agon of Composition."

The final part of the work, which centers around gender and body issues, shows most convincingly that agonistic forces are at work within the social structure of postmodernity, and that they are relevant. Lisabeth During (on Breton's Nadja), Cynthia Willett (reading Scorsese's After Hours through the lens of Baudrillard), and George A. Trey (on Hannah Arendt and Ursula le Guin) focus on the (im)possibility of a specifically feminist agon and investigate the interplay of agonistic forces in gender relations. John Hobermann's essay "The Sportive Agon in Ancient and Modern Times" returns to the Nietzschean definition of the agon, putting it into the context of the negative effects of today's high-performance sport.

The articles presented here provide the reader with a vast array of texts and theoretical perspectives. Their arrangement into four groups ("Contest in Cultural Philosophy"; "Psychoanalytic and Racial Conflicts"; "Agonal Aesthetics and Narrative Theories"; and "Agons of Gender and the Body") is a laudable effort to give structure to a collection that in many respects proves to be too ambitious in scope. The "expanding concentric manner" in which each part is supposed to "re-orient" and "extend further" issues presented in the Introduction only reveals that the editors and authors "are struggling with the very notion of struggle" (14-15). If the book is aiming at presenting a variety of responses to the Nietzschean conception of the agon, it would have made sense to limit the choice from that angle. Most individual contributions contrast with the editor's understanding of the agon "as a practice of life and culture, not of the work of art in any rarefied sphere." (14) They are all thoroughly researched, yet their individual focus and argument are too often obscured by excessive use of secondary sources and/or a critical jargon that will weary readers who appreciate clarity and focus.