Paris

The earliest story of judgment comes in the Iliad with the Judgment of Paris and the ensuing Trojan Wars. The chapter suggests we have concealed important insights from this story, so enamoured have we become with an understanding of history configured through substantiated evidence. The Iliad resists the logic of entailment and proof, and instead delights in an ordinary world in which myth, event, character, and things cohere and contrast with little overall coherence. In such a world without much in the way of subjects and objects envisaging strategy as enacting a plan seems futile. Despite understanding ourselves differently now, as subjects in whom knowledge resides, the world of the Iliad still resonates. Perhaps in spite of our knowledge, we seem no closer to a settled condition of control than those immersed in the Trojan War.