original interview for LIFO (in Greek)

Georgia Papastamou (GP): Could you tell me a few things on what is it that you do and what your talk in Athens is gonna be about?

Denis Maksimov (DM): The talk will be an introduction into a vast area of potentiality contained in mythologies to shape our futures. I will speak about critical and creative mechanisms of turning the objects of textual, material and visual culture into living things and narrative machines. I will focus on analysis of Hesiod’s Theogony, to which I refer to as a ‘Rosetta stone’ of ancient mythographies. From presenting alternative ways of reading the characters such as Athena and Dionysos, I will then turn to the pertaining conversation about actuality of “narratives for Europe” and ideological interconnection between these subjects.
I will also present the agenda of the critical reading group “Queering Theogony”, which will take place the following week - starting from queering tour in The National Archeological Museum on Sunday, February 4, and following with reading sessions and screening programme in Athens Museum of Queer Arts (AMOQA) on February 5-10.

GP: Am I right saying that you are trying to explore and read myths of the past in a way different than the one we are used to and have been taught? And also that the way we understand myths is not disconnected to patriarchy and capitalism?

DM: Yes, and even more - the polytheistic mythology is presented in the education and contemporary culture as something that is meant to entertain and aesthetically please, sometimes causing nostalgia. For example political theology, that looks at the religion as an organised way to redistribute power and connected with it agony, departs in its analysis from monotheisms such as Judaism and Christianity. My point that mythological sources are powerful tools for thinking critically about ourselves, the societies we inhabit and the images of the desirable futures. The major concepts of ‘justice’, ‘good governance’ and ‘social peace’ were presented in a form deified beings that over the time became ‘ideographs’ - the high-level abstractions that represent commitment to a particular purpose. They sometimes radically metamorphosed over thousands of years and the way we interpret it now, which is often called ‘normal’, is very recent. Ideology makes it seem eternal, omnipresent and timeless. The inquiry into instability and temporality of these norms has paramount importance for decolonising our imagination towards thinking about alternatives to capitalism and patriarchy among other things.

GP: Why is it important to explore these alternative readings now?

DM: I will avoid repeating already becoming usual banalities about amount of crises that the world is going through - but you don’t need to be Cassandra to see that politics, economy and societies at large are in the complex state of turmoil. To give practical example of this crises juxtaposition - look at the state of the European idea, which is under violent siege of nationalisms and lost most of its revolutionary potency. While we talk about specific challenges like dysfunctional democracies, the core issues are tend to escape from our sight. I am convinced that critical and creative reading of the fundamental sources of our socio-political lexicon is one of the possible gateways to address this sort of powerlessness and hopelessness, this feeling that change is not possible and you can only drag on your existence under control of invisible and eternal matrix. But if we can’t yet make the alternatives visible, we can start from making them sensible. We need to aim for ‘livable life’, to quote the philosopher Judith Butler, as opposed to more and more ‘effective existence’ within the dehumanising matrix.

GP: What do you think of the role myths play in current societies? Which are the myths of our times?

DM: Myths have been always a backbone of communities, then and now. I think the main difference between myths in the past and today is that we lost the critical sight of the nature of myth. For instance, the myth-concepts of ‘social contract’ on which the basis of our democratic regime is laid down or of a ‘sovereign’ and ‘nation state’ is as mythological as the stories of creation of humans by the gods. Man is a political and theological animal - if you radically withdraw from the myth of, lets say, creation of the world, you choose believe in its replacement, which in our strictly epistemological culture is usurped by what we refer to as ‘science’, ‘theory’, whatever. And we are ought to critically decipher all of it with the same rigour.  

GP: Could you give me an example of “queering Theogony”?

DM: ‘Queering’, in a way how I use the term, is about exposing the alternative, suppressed narratives within something that appears to be ‘straight’ and ‘normal’. Take the character of Athena for example, one of the dearest to me personally. Instead of focusing on her being a loyal daughter, ‘an extension of her father and his power’, queering her in Theogony is focusing on her otherness. She is female, masculine, asexual, goddess of both war and arts, as powerful as her father Zeus - combines seemingly unresolvable contradictions, you can even say that by standards of today she is sort of a freak (aka “queer”) in Olympus. But those queer traits of her contain massive potentiality to write her story differently than we learn it in schools and mass culture - for example, if she is as powerful as patriarch-Zeus, she possesses potentiality to overthrow him. I approach queerness from inclusive perspective: when we are looking at it as a resistance to normalisation and standardisation of the social, political and individual. For example, should we aim for universal ‘gay marriage’, normalising gayness, or rather diversity the ‘straight’ concept of marriage itself? It is a question of what absorbs what in a way.

Athena born from the head of Zeus, with two Eileithyiai, Hermes and Hephaistos in attendance. Amphora from Vulci, currently in the British Museum. 

GP: You have written an interesting analysis on the myth of the birth of Athena. Would you like to tell me a few things on that?

DM: The myth of Athena’s birth is one of the most potent stories of Theogony from my point of view. You can write books about it, I will make here just a little example with potent major consequences. Her birth was parthenogenetic - Zeus technically is both Athena’s father and the mother, as she leaped out of his head. But her ‘Other mother’ is Metis, the primordial figure symbolising cunning and wisdom, was the first wife of Zeus, whom he swallowed as she was prophesied to bore him a child that will be more powerful than Zeus himself and will dethrone him and his patriarchal order. Technically speaking, Athena is this child. But somewhat misogynistic commentators over the thousands of years excluded possibility of that - because what madmen would even think that woman can change something radically? In my analysis, Athena has potential to free from the biased limitations of her character.