HENT DE VRIEStion—central to Schmitt’s work—between friend and foe. Detienne starts out from the
observation of concrete practices that, in the geographical, linguistic, historical, and ethnic
diversity of ancient Greece and its legacy constitute what he calls the ‘‘political domain.’’
He distinguishes, for example, the phenomenon of the assembly or, rather, ‘‘the practices
of people deliberately assembling in order to debate affairs of common interest’’ (p. 92)
as one such constituent, whose basic features have been either ignored or shunned by
modern reflection on the question of politics. Analyzing the political domain within such
a ‘‘framework’’ or ‘‘notional field’’—for example, by taking the Greek conception or ‘‘mi-
croconfigurations’’ of discursive deliberation of the common good as one’s point of de-
parture or reference—would allow one, Detienne claims, to adopt a view of the political
that is somewhat less ‘‘heavy-handed’’ than, say, the insistence on the ‘‘paradigm of civic
humanism’’ introduced by John Pocock in his studies of the ‘‘Machiavellian Moment.’’
The latter characterization, Detienne acknowledges, might indeed fit the basic tenets of a
‘‘post-sixteenth-century Anglo-Saxon world,’’ but, like the concept of ‘‘empire,’’ it does
not adequately describe the actual constitution of the political, not just in the smaller
Greek cities, but also in Buddhist communities in Japan, or African, Amerindian, and
Cossack societies, to mention just a few of the historical instances in which assemblies
have taken on their singular forms (p. 93).
Other points of entry into the comparative experiment might be such notions as
‘‘public matters,’’ ‘‘citizen-citizenship,’’ ‘‘sameness-equality’’—all of which, Detienne as-
serts, would likewise allow one to take a certain distance from facile associations of the
political with the ‘‘religious’’ or ‘‘religion,’’ whose semantic link to the Latinreligio-relig-
ere, as well as its ‘‘ritualistic scruples,’’ tends to block the historical and comparative
importance of ‘‘cults’’ (and hence of ‘‘gods’’). It was partly through the Roman legacy,
Detienne claims, that in the academic study of religion ‘‘there was pressure, already in the
Christian Augustine, to consider polytheisms as vastterrae incognitaethat were destined
eventually to receive True Religion, whether from Christianity or from Islam.’’ The favor,
Detienne muses with irony, is promptly returned: ‘‘Polytheistic societies revel in their
ignorance of churches and episcopal authorities, whether pastoral or papal. They mock
these upstart monotheists for their insistence on ‘having to believe’ and their proselytizing
efforts.’’ Yet this ‘‘vast continent,’’ he continues, represents a whole ‘‘world of the possible
relations that link divine powers.’’ As the gods are virtually everywhere, they also inhabit
the places for politics and do so in multifarious ways, since in the polytheistic system ‘‘a
god is always plural, constituted by the intersection of a variety of attributes. In this sense,
a god is conjectural, a figure with many angles and many facets’’ (pp. 94–95).
Gods, or at least their altars, Detienne illustrates with reference to theIliad, make
their appearance in theagora, a term referring to a space that the Achaeans created on
the way to their siege of Troy as they gathered among the ships on the beach. It connotes
at once the ‘‘physical place of the assembly, the men who came there to deliberate, and
the words that they exchanged there’’ (p. 96). The beginning of the consultation and
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