SOLON’S EKSTATIC STRATEGY STASIS AND THE SUBJECT/CITIZEN H egel famously argues that the ancient Greeks did not have a notion of the subject because they lacked a conception of self- consciousness. There is, nonetheless, something enticing in Hegel’s notion of the Greek subject as lacking self-consciousness by Hegel. In particular, the lack of a reliance on relection for the determination of human agency is intimately linked to, even inextricable from, the conception of the citizen. What the ancient Greek “subject” may lack in self-relexivity, thereby never arriving at the idea of transcendental subjectivity, it compensates for with a decisively political insistence on human action and thought. The connection between the subject and the citizen is important because, as Étienne Balibar has shown in a series of texts, starting with “Citizen Subject,” the two concepts are actually linked in modernity, both in terms of their genealogy and in terms of the political commit- ments they entail. 1 In the context of trying to answer the question “What comes after the subject?” it may, then, be useful to remember the historical speciicity and artiiciality, even artiice, of the wrench- ing apart of the subject and the citizen. It may even lead us to wonder whether the separation between subject and citizen is tenable, espe- cially when we note the ways in which violence is inscribed in affect- ing this separation. To raise these questions, then, the Greek subject’s lack of “self-consciousness” is indeed a fruitful starting point. I pro- pose to do so by organizing some thoughts about the subject depart- ing from the Greeks. Perhaps the greatest examples of a conjoining of the subject and the citizen in Greek context appear in the tragedies. But I would like here to focus on a different example that is arguably of equal importance and no less dramatic. I am thinking of Solon’s law against neutrality, Cultural Critique 96—Spring 2017—Copyright 2017 Regents of the University of Minnesota Dimitris Vardoulakis CC #96.indd 71 15/06/2017 11:33:02 PM