Medea, a Manifesto

With the mythological figure of Medea, this chapter offers a counter-theory to the well-known symbol of ethical opposition to the State. While Antigone challenges certain politics of legacy, family, duty and so origins, Medea underscores the problem of our future by killing offspring and creating replacements. Medea operates at the limits of the moral imperative by virtue of her status as pharmakon: her knowledge can both heal and harm. She is also a Latourian “hybrid”: outside of our traditional categories of knowledge and identification, her actions challenge the integrity of the individual itself. Medea underscores relational attachments: mother to children, wife to husband, descendent to forebearers, even as she undoes these relations. Figuring Medea in our literature, the chapter argues, allows us to rehearse the real problem of the social: the false and fragile divisions that purportedly guard integrated insiders from barbaric outsiders and modernity from its necessary but primitive pasts.