Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression?
The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic experimentation with language invites a radically “oversensitive” hyperformalism, a formalistic overanalysis that disrupts, disables, or even abolishes a range of normativities (government, labor, reproduction,...