About

Giulia Sissa was trained in Italy and France, graduating with a Laurea in Classics from the University of Pavia in 1977 and completing her PhD in 1983 at the Centre de Recherches Comparées sur les Sociétés Anciennes in Paris. She has held research positions at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (LAS), and the Laboratoire d’Études de Genre et de Sexualité (LEGS) in Paris. In the United States, she served as Professor of Classics and head of department at Johns Hopkins University before becoming a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Classics and Political Science at UCLA. Her research focuses on societies and cultures of the Greek and Roman worlds, connecting the study of the past to modern issues such as feminism, sexuality, addiction, democratic theory, utopian thinking, political emotions, and eco-criticism. Her work explores themes like the embodied, sensorial experience of eroticism, gendered embodiments, metamorphic thinking, and the political pursuit of pleasure, with a particular interest in how classical studies intersect with contemporary societal challenges.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Aesthetics
• Law
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Literature
• Art
• Botany
• Social psychology
• Epistemology
• Psychoanalysis
• Biology
• Linguistics
• History

Selected publications

• Phenomenal Eros: For a History of Sensuality

  Philosophy Politics and Critique · 2024-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Forty years of scholarship in the history of sexuality and gender studies have delivered a considerable amount of knowledge, framed by an encompassing premise: power is paramount. A preferred object of this kind of attention are the erotic cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. The focus on power leads contemporary scholars to adopt binary thinking, namely the attribution to ancient writers and thinkers of dichotomies such as domination versus subjection, or activity versus passivity. This is a fixist view that obliterates the dialectic of desire and, therefore, its fundamental mobility. Desire aims at the other person’s desire; roles are exchanged; age and social status can play in surprising ways; hyperactivity can become subjugation. It is time for a change. It is time to look at what mattered for the Ancients themselves: the subjective experience of sensations, bodies and situations; the felicitous, ironic, or tragic reversals of intersubjective games. More importantly: the quest for pleasure, rather than the use of pleasures. The Greeks thought the sexual experience as sensuality. And sensuality inflects what they thought about gender. In poetry, narrations and philosophy, concrete details draw our attention to the felt phenomena of lived bodies – in the plural. When we look for the logic of gender, we discover that bodies can be compared, not as totalities, but as bundles of multiple discreet qualities, ready to be combined and recombined, allotted and exchanged. Qualities can be bits and pieces of anatomy, manners and garments; but also fragments of experience, moments of sensory awareness. The logic of the concrete meets the phenomenal body. For the body is a challenge, to be taken up – as a cinematic life, frame after frame. Sensations can be shared across the boundaries of female and male, which are adjectives, not substances. A granular, corpuscular, pointilliste redistribution of traits, distinctive – or not. Sensuality is queer. Like Plato’s pharmacy, erotic materialism can deliver us, beautifully, cathartically, refreshingly from the modern strictures of binary thinking. This is what the Greeks have to tell us. Let us listen!

  PublisherDOI

• Κιναίδων βίος: Ethics, Lifestyle, and Sensuality in Greek Erotic Culture

  2023-08-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The figure of the κίναιδος, and his κιναιδία, offer a puzzling object of inquiry both in terms of sexual practices and of gender expression. Whether recent scholarship has problematized the relevance of gender rather than sexuality to capture the Greek definition of this kind of person, I attach the utmost importance to Plato’s emphasis on the life of these men, κιναίδων βίος, in the Gorgias. Taking the cue from Plato, I focus on character, dispositional states and lifestyles as the truly important notions that pertain to the erotic experience in ancient Greece. After a discussion of the epistemological obstacles created by the modern binaries active/passive and penetrating/penetrated, I argue that our dilemma is not between framing the κίναιδος in terms of either sexual acts or manners of living a gendered body. We must rather reconstruct the semantic ramifications of the Greek discourses themselves. Thinkers and writers such as Aristophanes, Plato, Aeschines, and Aristotle connect matters, textures, sensations, habits, dispositions, pleasures and desires. They convey a phenomenological ethics in the form of praise or blame. The paradox of the κίναιδος is that he lives a life of sensuality, both soft and hyperactive, therefore impossible to praise.

  PublisherDOI

• The Rest was not Perfected: Platonic Endings and their Modern Echoes

  2023-10-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Plato's Critias, whose Latin title is Atlanticus, is famously a labor imperfectus. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1626) ends, or fails to end, or even refuses to end with the equally famous, maddening, bracketed sentence: "[the rest was not perfected]". I argue that, if we want to understand the significance of this double textual "imperfection" - ancient (in the Critias) and modern (in the New Atlantis) -, we must concentrate on three moments in Bacon's "worke unfinished": the identification of Plato's Atlantis as Great Atlantis, namely America; the replacement of an earthquake with a deluge, so that New Atlantis is not engulfed in an ocean of mud; and the experimental re-writing of Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic. Deceptive grottos are relevant in Bacon's reception/elaboration of the Platonic cave in the Novum Organum. But cavernous spaces and subterranean holes play a startlingly novel role in the New Atlantis. A truly epoch-making question is at stake. What do these modern variations mean? In this paper, I try to answer this question.

  PublisherDOI

• Une soirée chez les précieux ridicules

  Ausonius Éditions eBooks · 2022-05-03

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Il y a une fête ce soir, chez un jeune poète qui célèbre la première de sa première tragédie. Un franc succès, paraît-il ! Il a invité des amis, mais des amis d’amis vont sans doute se joindre à cette joyeuse compagnie. Tous des hommes, cela va sans dire.

  PublisherDOI

• Elle sait. Elle dit. Elle rit. L’éloge paradoxal d’éros par Diotime de Mantinée

  2022-10-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In Plato's Symposium, Diotima is credited with teaching Socrates that Ἔρως is a quest for immortality, through the generation of λόγοι. Diotima concludes her praise of Ἔρως with a famous metaphor: the steps that take a lover, from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls, to the form of Beauty. This ascent of desire from the embodied beauty of boys to its paradigmatic and unalloyed version, has attracted considerable scholarly attention. I argue that Ἔρως is not a mystical energy. It is an experience that occurs in a particular erotic culture, that of Athens and its sophisticated practice of παιδεραστεῖν. Athenian young men live in that culture and share that experience. They know about love, and how they live it through language. These amorously inclined youth, ἐρωτικοί, are the potential philosophers Socrates is interested in. For having grown used to that kind of Ἔρως ‒ talkative and libertine, flattering and unfaithful ‒ an Athenian ἐρωτικὸς is the best candidate for philosophical improvement. Socrates will take him from there. But it takes a woman to articulate this profoundly ironic understanding of Ἔρως: the more promiscuous, the more promising.

  PublisherDOI

• Mille facesse iocos!

  Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Aesthetics
  • Literature

  A vivid metaphor is pervasive in erotic poetry. The “playful” dimension of love is linked to an “art” of love, that is to say a regulated, tactical and strategic way of enjoying an affair. This is a know-how that one can learn, cultivate and transmit to others. The poets who think the amorous experience in the language of ludere, however, cannot agree on its value. The elegiac lover admits to a chronic failure. Worse, the purpose of a ludus is to deceive others. To all the enemies of love, Ovid will answer with a theoretical rebuttal. “But love”, he says, “is only a child!”. The art of love is the art of ruling a toddler. As soon as Ovid infantilizes love everything becomes possible. Here is an ars, an erotic technique that works. This pleasantly animated climate requires the constant activity of ludus and iocus, from dancing or singing to playing table games, while lovemaking is nothing but ioci. And the poem itself, the Art of Love, is itself a lusus.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What Artemisia Knew: The Political Intelligence of Artemisia of Halicarnassus

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Botany
  PublisherDOI

• The quest for the best. Praise, blame, utopia

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  International audience

  PublisherDOI

• MAIDENHOOD WITHOUT MAIDENHEAD:

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2020-11-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 10 Mighty Mothers: Female Political Theorists in Euripides’ Suppliant Women and Phoenician Women

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Tragedy, Aristotle tells us, is a place for intelligence, διάνοια, and for political discourse.Tragic characters, he points out, speak politically (πολιτικῶς) or rhetorically (ῥητορικῶς). 1 As we know, this is all true.The theatre dramatizes, visually and argumentatively, political theory.Let us look at a sample of this kind of discourse and let us focus on its normative content: what is said, and how it is argued.The reader will kindly forgive me if I ask them to indulge in a moment of scepticism and to suspend their belief on who is speaking, to whom, and why.In a moment, we will discuss the role of mothers in classical theatre, but let us begin with a simple reading.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Marcel Détienne

  6 shared

• Han van Ruler

  Erasmus University Rotterdam

  4 shared

• Tim De Mey

  1 shared

• José Carlos López

  1 shared

• Page duBois

  1 shared

• Janet Lloyd

  University of West Florida

  1 shared

• Herman De Dijn

  1 shared

• 信 片岡

  1 shared

Education

• Other, Classics

  University of Pavia

  1977

• Ph.D., not specified

  not specified

  1983