Hunting for Justice

Kalliopi Nikolopoulou is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. She is the author of Tragically Speaking: On the Use and Abuse of Theory for Life.

• Acknowledgments1. Cosmos/Phusis, Dikē, Pragmata: An Introduction2. Tragedy and the Seriousness of Culture: Aristotle and Walter Burkert3. Like a Dog, or in Artemis's Night: Dikēin Agamemnon4. Hermes of the Axis Mundi: Gē and Dikē inthe Choephoroi5. Beyond Justice: Apollo's Youth and Athena's Dikēin the EumenidesEpilogue A Lying Shepherd and the Limits of Human DikēNotesWorks CitedIndex

"Nikolopoulou's insightful work shows how we might still read the ancients productively. She looks to Aeschylus not as confirmation or precursor of our strongest commitments and most cherished values but shows how his tragedies can help us understand the limits of our politics, instrumental rationality, and progressive sense of history. That Aeschylus does so precisely through an account of justice that is constantly grounded in cosmological necessity proves instructive for recognizing the remnant of injustice that resides even in our best efforts of righting past wrongs. The scholarship is impressive and wide-ranging, the concerns never more relevant: this book tarries with the inherent violence of justice and the importance of nature's capacity for regeneration in the face of an all-too-human hubris." — Jason Winfree, coeditor of The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication