Which Iphigenia is Sacrificeable? Jean Racine and the Gendered Politics of Desire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While it has become both legitimate and commonplace for political theorists to examine plays as texts of political theory, as texts that offer theoretical reflections on political concepts and ideological frameworks in narrative and dramatic form, neoclassical French drama has received scant attention from political theorists. As the dominant and orthodox artistic genre in seventeenth-century France, many central political and theoretical concepts are shaped and refracted through neoclassical drama, and as such, merits close attention. In this essay I turn to one of the most successful plays in seventeen-century France, namely dramatist Jean Racine’s Iphigénie, to explore the relevance of desire to politics and political life. Racine dramatizes that the desire to die, or attachment to one’s own death, is a politically salient form of desire. Furthermore, I show that such desire is fundamentally gendered. I argue that in Racine’s narrative, desire marks sacrificeability, which is a particular kind of abjection that differs from disposability and killability. Sacrificeability is conferred by one’s passionate attachment to one’s own subjection to the extent that one consents to one’s own death. This is what I call a fantasy of consent, wherein consent is not a normative feminist ideal but a critical analytic that we can take up to dissect and discern the logic of subjection. By expounding and ultimately foreclosing the disruptive power of desire, Racine’s Iphigénie enriches our understanding of desire as salient to political life, and clarifies the relation between desire and sovereign-patriarchal power.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".