ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4, together with Sophocles and his Antigone (5th century BC), I go into ancient Greece, before Plato and Aristotle, and from there arises that great vision of the deinon as an expression not only of the human but also of the dancing and drunken god himself, that is, of Dionysus: it is an initial way of calling the Real. And with this we can understand, from our time, that what was expressed in the Dionysian vision of the world was a queer vision of the Greek world, which Euripides then radicalises in his Bacchae. And this has not been seen by scholars of Greek antiquity: philologists, philosophers, historians, aesthetes, etc. For the Greeks both the real and the human are not trapped by the essentialist signifier of gender, least of all by masculine gender: the gods were not masculine, but merely feminine, that is, as open in themselves. The gods as the Real express that Dionysian life-death tension which is the very differential of the human in the midst of the world, that is the deinon and that is how the Real is understood. And there we can see that it is Aristotle himself who, unable to understand this movement of things, of the vegetative, of the animal, of the human, of the gods, calls what is not what it should be a monster. The “monster” is the Aristotelian negative name for what is positively queer today, namely, that very movement of all things that makes them pass through and in this happens their life-death.
