the stage is taken only after the act has been committed: "thus always unto tyrants" as hermeneutics, pt 1

always already, Aeschylus, the birth of tragedy, the death of RFK

Dramaturgy as Hermeneutic (Shakespearian staging of Marxian dramaturgy)

There are two common associations with the phrase sic semper tyrannis assassination. It is what Brutus said as he killed Caesar and it is the state motto of Virginia.

These converge at the moment that John Wilkes Booth and shouts the phrase after shooting Abraham Lincoln. Once he jumps onto the stage and shouts the words. The converge the moment the actor¹ shoots the president of the United States, jumps onto the stage (the stage is only taken after the act has been committed), shouts sic semper tyrannis and escapes to Virginia, whose motto is the same phrase, newly emblazoned on a seal officially adopted at the start of the civil war.

This is the point of historical convergence where Thus Always Unto Tyrants lives.

This play is not about Booth. Earlier drafts had him as a character and had scenes of him and co-conspirators plotting, with allusions to Julius Caesar. This was too on the nose. It wasn’t what the play is about. It is not about Booth, who wanted his actions to be mythologized. This isn’t about mythologizing him but rather finding in the layers and allusions already present in his act the material for a play. Right now, the focus has been shifted entirely onto Boston Corbett, known in his time as “Lincoln’s avenger”. Booth is only present towards the end, after his act of assassination has been committed.

There a lot of threads in this project, and returning to the phrase, “thus always unto tyrants”, helps me keep from getting too tangled. It’s not so much about a celebration of a phrase, which is in common usage is right-libertarian leaning, but a historicization of it. By the time it reaches Booth’s lips it is already loaded with historical and theatrical references I think by untangling that web I will find the material for this project. Dramaturgy as history.²

I want to to explain it all at once, but if I do that I’ll trip over myself. So I’ll explain it in the way that it comes and hopefully it will begin to make itself clear.

Always Already

Thus always unto tyrants is not the usual translation of the phrase sic semper tyrannis, and I don’t remember where I first came upon it. There is a strangeness to the formulation. It asserts itself in its strangeness. That “unto”. It, “unto”, and “thus” as well, might, in their slight archaicness, come across as flowery, pretentious even. But that is not how they sound to me. That is not how it feels to say them. It feels like a grunt. They are guttural, the sound of Brutus thrusting and stabbing— brutish. Brutish in the way of old Anglo-Saxon words.³ I like “thus always unto tyrants” because it lacks the pretensions of the Latin. Booth spoke the Latin to mythologize his actions. Virginia writes its motto in Latin to dress up its decision to break from the Union over the issue of slavery. “Unto” lays it bare as the grunt it is.

The repetition of that guttural sound, “thus” and “unto”, broken up by “always”- by “unto” it is already “always”. Reminiscent of that “always already” of 20th century philosophy, that Heidegerian immer schon— action with no identifiable beginning. Already existing in the action. Tragedy in media res.

The stage isn’t taken until after the act is committed.

We are always already unto tyrants- a cycle of retributive violence without a beginning. (Foucault’s assessment that “there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.”⁴ [History of Sexuality Volume I])

Derrida on Marx and Hamlet

Violence of the law before the law and before meaning, violence that interrupts time, disarticulates it, dislodges it, displaces it out of its natural lodging: “out of joint”

-Specters of Marx, 31⁵

Thus always unto, already. Always already, tilting forward, born into momentum. The phrase is thrusting, but it is a little off balance. Unto is already: the step proceeds itself. It is tilting forward, standing like Trump does, you’ve seen the way he stands, like he has lifts in his shoes, like the weight of his body or its momentum is pulling him toward the ground. (“Trump”: that same guttural sound as “unto”, a primal grunt, an insurgent thrust, a visceral expression of populist disgust coming from the stomach of the body politic.)

The Oresteia

But ancient Violence longs to breed,/ new violence comes/ when its fatal hour comes, the demon comes/ to take her toll- no war, no force, no prayer/ can hinder the the midnight Fury stamped/ with parent Fury moving through the house

Chorus, Agamemnon, Aeschylus, lines 755-760

Cycle of vengeance and violence: the curse of the house of Atreus and the pacification of the Furies.

In his post The Real Source Behind “Sic Semper Tyrannis”, Cornell University Classics professor Mike Fontaine argues that the phrase’s origin’s are older⁶ than Brutus. Fontaine traces it back to the opening lines of the Odyssey, spoken by Athena as appraises Orestes’ murder of Aegisthus, revenge for the slaying of his own father, Agamemnon.

She says of the killing, “Bring death to all who act like him! (1:47).

The murder of of Agamemnon by Aegisthus is also what opens up Aeschylus’ Oresteia a play cycle whose explorations of the moral questions of vengeance is instructive to my project. The plays are a tangled web of retribution.

Agamemnon:

The play opens with the warlord Agamemnon being stabbed to death by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus, cousin of Agamemnon.⁷

After the murder, Aegisthus takes the throne— an illegitimate ruler, the original meaning of tyrant.

The Libation Bearers

Orestes, son of Agamemnon, avenges his father and kills Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. The act of matricide arouses the anger of the Furies, who hunt him down. ⁸

Eumindes

And now/ if you would hear my law, you men of Greece, you who will judge the first trial of bloodshed./ Now and forever more, for for Aegeus’ people this will be the court where the judge reigns […] Neither anarchy for tyranny, my people./ Worship the Mean, I urge you, shore it up with reverence.”

-Athena, Eumenides 695-710

Orestes is hunted by the furies. He is able to escape, with the aid of Apollo and Hermes, to Athens. The furies find him in Athens; he prays to Athena for help.

Athena sets up for him a trial, supervised by 12 athenian citizens, a jury, who vote on his fate.

Athena rules that all trials must be settled in court rather than be be carried out in the form of personal vendettas.

The Orestia, thus ends with the development of the judicial system of Athenian democracy.

The cycle of the Oresteia is the journey the fury of the gods to the formation of democratic judicial system.⁹. After all of that, all the gods and Furies and bloodshed, it is about the invention of organized litigation. The invention of the jury. The triumph of reason over superstition in classical Greece.

Propaganda for the then very, very, new concept of “democracy”, the invention of which is by many accounts dated to 507 BC.

The oldest surviving tragedy, written by Aeschylus, is dated to 472 BC. The birth of democracy and the birth of tragedy happened within 50 years of each other.

Trace the birth of democracy in the Orestia to the death of the Republic with the killing of Julius Caesar. ¹⁰

Trace the killing of Julius Caesar to Shakespeare’s play to the actor jumping on staging after killing Abraham Lincoln.

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RFK and Aeschylus

Robert Kennedy gave a speech the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated. He was in Indianapolis when it happened. The speech was not planned¹¹. While there were riots in most major cities in the US after King’s murder, there weren’t in Indianapolis. Many attribute this to RFK.

Upon hearing news of the murder of Martin Luther King, Kennedy quotes Agamemnon, naming Aeschylus as his. favorite poet: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God ( Agamemnon 179-185)."¹²

RFK had first turned to Aeschylus at the recommendation of Jackie Kennedy after his brother, her wife, was assassinated.

Kennedy recognizes that the assassination of King is a pivotal point for America. He makes a call for peace and a rejection of vengeance. He appeals to the crowd by reminding, them, his brother, John Kennedy¹³, was also assassinated by a white man, and when that happened he felt in his heart the same desire for revenge.

He sees the violence and makes a plea for peace.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

A plea for peace, to turn away vengeance.

Less than two months after he gave this speech, he himself was assassinated.

pt 2

this is already too long so I’m breaking it into two parts.

pt 2 will contain:

Virginia, its seal, and the succession from the Union

Thomas Jefferson

Federalists and anti federalists

land reform

Gracchus

Julius Caesar

1. Whose father, Junius, was named after Marcus Junius Brutus, the speaker of those words.

2. Specifically a Shakespearian staging of Marxist dramaturgy.

The experience of the specter, that is how Marx, along with Engels will have also thought, described, or diagnosed a certain dramaturgy of modern Europe, notably that of its great unifying projects. One would even have to say that he represented it or staged it. In the shadow of filial memory, Shakespeare will have often inspired this Marxian theatricalization.

Derrida, Specters of Marx - 5

3. “The rumbling sound of ghosts chained to ghosts” (5) of the above staging.

4. Deeply pessimistic. True, maybe, but deeply pessimistic.

The issue with conceiving tyranny as always already is that it forecloses imagining its end. How can you imagine the end of something if you can’t imagine the beginning? Fascism began in 1920s Italy, (coined by the poet FT Marinetti- my first ever substack post) It is not helpful to cast back to the tyrants and Caesars of the past and project this ideology onto them. Il Dulce wanted to project himself as the eternal emperor of Rome. While assist him in that by backdating fascism further and further?

5. Derrida on Heidegger’s opposition to the trace of the tragic and the logic of vengeance in Hamlet

What is the justice beyond right? Does it come along to simply compensate a wrong, restitute something due, to do right or do do justice? Does it come along simply to render justice or, on the contrary, to give beyond the due, the debt, the crime, or the fault? Does it come simply to repair injustice or more precisely to rearticulate as must be the disjointure of the present time (“to set it right” as Hamlet said)?

-Specters of Marx, 25

6. you can always keep digging back into the past

7. (Clyetemnestra kills Agamemnon as revenge for sacrificing her daughter, Iphigeneia, to appease Artemis, who he had angered by killing her sacred deer and was keeping Greek troops from reaching Troy unless the sacrifice was made. Aegisthus kills Agamemnon because Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, had tricked Aegisthus’s father into eating his children.)

8. In this play the chorus of old men is replaced by one foreign slave women. This chorus is not passive but influences Orestes’ actions.

9. The furies do not react well; by establishing the court of justice, Athena has trampled on the power they see themselves as entitled to. They promise the most violent of violent vengeances, all mankind destroyed.

you, you younger gods!- you have ridden down/ the ancient laws, wrenched them from my grasp- / and I, robbed of my birthright, suffering, great with wrath, I loose my poison on the soil aieeee!- / poison to match my grief comes pouring out my heart/ cursing the land to burn it sterile and now/ rising up from its a roots a cancer blasting leaf and child/ now for Justice, Justice- cross the face of the earth, the bloody tide comes hurling, all mankind destroyed

-Furies Eumenidies 791-800

The vengeance of the chthonic Furies against the mankind who has attempted to replace them with Law. Revenge of the Furies against the Gods.. (One thing I find fascinating about greek mythology is the gods are not always already, like the Abrahamic god. They were born to fathers and they killed those fathers, like their father, Cronos, had killed his father Ornonos. Thus unto tyrants even among the gods.

you can always keep digging into the past and you will not find an origin

10. Compare with Derrida writing of the history of politics, theater, vengeance, and repression that opens between Oedipus Rex and Hamlet

How to distinguish between two disadjustments, between the disjunction of the unjust and the one that opens up the infinite asymmetry of the relation to the other, that is to say, the place for justice? Not for calculable and redistributive justice. Not for law, for the calculation of restitution, the economy of vengeance or punishment ([…] one must still think possibility of a step beyond repression: there is a beyond the economy of repression whose whose law impels it it to exceed itself, of itself in the course of history, be it the history of theater or of politics between Oedipus Rex and Hamlet.)

-Specters of Marx 23

Speech in Full:

I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.

In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love--a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

-Robert Kennedy, “Statement on Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Indianapolis, Indiana, April 4, 1968”

11.

12. (The lines, spoken by the chorus, come in the context of the story of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter to appease Artemis. They are followed closely by

and I can still hear the older warlord saying/ ‘Obey, obey, or a heavy doom will crush me!-/ Oh but a doom will crush me/ once I rend my child,/ the glory of my house,/ a father’s hands are stained,/ blood of a young girl streaks the altar./ Pain both ways and what is worse?/ Desert the fleets, fail the alliance?/ No but stop the winds with a virgin’s blood,/ feed their lust, their fury?— feed their fury!—/ law is law/ let all go well” (205-216)

Agamemnon choosing fealty to the law, obedience, over the life of his daughter. It is a strange context for Kennedy to invoke upon hearing of King’s death.

13. The Kennedy curse as the curse of the house of Atreus.