In Defence of the Terror. Sophie Wahnich

and contempt for ordinary people that one can easily see why, after the German defeat in 1945, the Allied occupation powers prohibited its performance. Consequently, the play seems to offer a rather narrow interpretive choice: what are the alternatives to staging the play the way it is, i.e. to surrendering to its militaristic anti-democratic lure? We can try to subtly ‘extraneate’ this lure by way of its excessive aestheticization; we can do what Brecht did in his rewriting of the play, shifting the focus from the display of emotions (Coriolanus’ rage, etc.) to the underlying conflict of political and economic interests (in Brecht’s version, the crowd and the tribunes are not lead by fear and envy, but act rationally in view of their situation); or, perhaps the worst choice, we can overplay pseudo-Freudian stuff about Coriolanus’ maternal fixation and the homosexual intensity of his relationship with Aufidius. However, in the recent cinema version of the play, Ralph Fiennes (with his scenario writer John Logan) did the impossible, thereby perhaps confirming T. S. Eliot’s famous claim that Coriolanus is superior to Hamlet: Fiennes broke out of this closed circle of interpretive options, which all introduce a critical distance towards the figure of Coriolanus, and fully asserted Coriolanus – not as a fanatical anti-democrat, but as a figure of radical Left.

      Fiennes’s first move was to change the geopolitical coordinates of Coriolanus: ‘Rome’ is now a contemporary colonial city-state in crisis and decay, and the ‘Volscians’ Leftist guerrilla rebels organized in what we call today a ‘rogue state’. (Think of Colombia and the FARC, the ‘revolutionary armed forces of Colombia’ holding a vast territory in the south of the country – if only the FARC had not been corrupted by drug-dealing.) This first move echoes in many perspicuous details, like the decision to present the border between the territory held by the Roman army and the rebel territory, the place of contact between the two sides, as a lone access ramp on a highway, a kind of guerrilla checkpoint.6

      One should fully exploit here the lucky choice of Gerard Butler for the role of Aufidius, the Volscian leader and Caius Martius’s (i.e., Coriolanus’s) opponent: since Butler’s greatest hit was Zack Snyder’s 300, where he played Leonidas, one should not be afraid to venture the hypothesis that, in both films, he basically plays the same role of a warrior-leader of a rogue state fighting a mighty empire. 300, the saga of the troop of Spartan soldiers who sacrificed themselves at Thermopylae to halt the invasion of Xerxes’s Persian army, was attacked as the worst kind of patriotic militarism with clear allusions to the recent tensions with Iran and events in Iraq. Are things really so clear, however? The film should rather be thoroughly defended against these accusations: it is the story of a small, poor country (Sparta) invaded by the vast armies of a much larger state (Persia). At the time Persia was much more developed than the Peloponnese, and wielded much more impressive military technology – are not the Persians’ elephants, giants and flaming arrows the ancient versions of today’s high-tech weaponry? A programmatic statement towards the end of the film defines the Spartans’ agenda as standing ‘against the reign of mystique and tyranny, towards the bright future’, which is further specified as the rule of freedom and reason. It sounds like an elementary Enlightenment programme, and with a communist twist! Also recall that, at the film’s beginning, Leonidas rejects outright the message of the corrupt ‘oracles’ according to whom gods forbid the military expedition to stop the Persians. As we later learn, these ‘oracles’ who were allegedly receiving the divine message in an ecstatic trance were actually paid off by the Persians, like the Tibetan ‘oracle’ who, in 1959, delivered to the Dalai Lama the message to leave Tibet and who was – as we learn today – on the CIA payroll.

      But what about the apparent absurdity of the Spartan idea of dignity, freedom and reason being sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding the weakest children? This ‘absurdity’ is simply the price of freedom – freedom is not free, as they put it in the film. Freedom is not something given; it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. The Spartans’ ruthless military discipline is not simply the external opposite of Athenian ‘liberal democracy’: such discipline is democracy’s inherent condition, and lays the foundations for it. The free subject of reason can only emerge through ruthless self-discipline. True freedom is not ‘freedom of choice’ made from a safe distance – a consumer’s choice. True freedom overlaps with necessity; one makes a truly free decision when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence – one does it because one simply ‘cannot do otherwise’. When one’s country is undergoing a foreign occupation and one is called on by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not ‘you are free to choose’, but: ‘Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?’ No wonder that all the early modern egalitarian radicals – from Rousseau to the Jacobins – admired Sparta and imagined republican France as a new Sparta: there is an emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline which survives even when we subtract all the historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule, ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves, etc. Even Trotsky called the Soviet Union in the difficult years of ‘war communism’ a ‘proletarian Sparta’.

      So it is not that soldiers are the problem per se – the real menace is soldiers with poets, soldiers mobilized by nationalist poetry. There is no ethnic cleansing without poetry – why? Because we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes no longer have the force to mobilize people for mass violence, a larger sacred Cause is needed, a Cause which makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial. Religion or ethnic belonging fit this role perfectly. And this brings us back to Coriolanus – who is the poet there? Before Caius Martius (aka Coriolanus) enters the stage, it is Menenius Agrippa who pacifies the furious crowd which is demanding grain. Like Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, Menenius is the ideologist par excellence, offering a poetic metaphor to justify social hierarchy (in this case, the rule of the senate); and, in the best corporatist tradition, the metaphor is that of a human body. Here is how Plutarch, in his Life of Coriolanus, retells this story first reported by Livy:

      It once happened . . . that all the other members of a man mutinied against the stomach, which they accused as the only idle, uncontributing part in the whole body, while the rest [of the members] were put to hardships and the expense of much labour to supply and minister to its appetites. The stomach, however, merely ridiculed the silliness of the members, who appeared not to be aware that the stomach certainly does receive the general nourishment, but only to return it again, and redistribute it amongst the rest. Such is the case . . . ye citizens, between you and the senate. The counsels and plans that are there duly digested, convey and secure to all of you your proper benefit and support.7

      How does Coriolanus relate to this metaphor of body and its organs, of the rebellion of organs against their body? It is clear that, whatever Coriolanus is, he does not stand for the body, but is an organ which not only rebels against the body (the body politic of Rome), but abandons its body by way of going into exile – a true organ without a body. Is then Coriolanus really against the people? But which people? The ‘plebeians’ represented by the two tribunes, Brutus and Sicinius, are not any kind of exploited workers, but rather a lumpenproletarian mob, the rabble fed by the state; and the two tribunes are proto-Fascist manipulators of the mob – to quote Kane (the citizen from Welles’s film), they speak for the poor ordinary people so that the poor ordinary people will not speak for themselves. If one looks for ‘the people’, then, they are rather to be found among the Volscians. One should watch closely how Fiennes depicts their capital: a modest popular city in a liberated territory, with Aufidius and his comrades in the uniforms of guerrilla fighters (not the regular army) mixing freely with commoners in an atmosphere of relaxed conviviality, with people drinking in open-air cafeterias, etc. – in clear contrast to the stiff formality of Rome.

      So yes, Coriolanus is a killing machine, a ‘perfect soldier’, but precisely as such, as an ‘organ without a body’, he has no fixed class allegiance and can easily put himself in the service of the oppressed. As was made clear by Che Guevara, a revolutionary also has to be a ‘killing machine’:

      Hatred [is] an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must