Seductress, Storyteller, and Subject: Helen of Argos and the “Feminine” Complex of Dialectic of Enlightenment Katherine C. Bermingham A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? —William Butler Yeats, “Leda and the Swan” New German Critique 133, Vol. 45, No. 1, February 2018 DOI 10.1215/0094033X-4269886 © 2018 by New German Critique, Inc. 155 Many thanks to the graduate program in political theory at the University of Notre Dame. My gratitude extends especially to Ruth Abbey, Cameron O’Bannon, Sidney Simpson, Ernesto Verdeja, Dana Villa, and Catherine Zuckert for their comments and encouragement. The epigraph is excerpted from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats by William Butler Yeats. Copyright © 1989 by William Butler Yeats. Published by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted with permission. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article-pdf/45/1 (133)/155/524168/0450155.pdf by UNIV OF NOTRE DAME user on 22 March 2018