Pierre Michon

Pierre Michon's "Agéladas d'Argos (Contre Thèbes)" (Flammarion, 2025) reinterprets Aeschylus' Theban myth through the lens of art. The narrative shifts between the modern museum in Reggio Calabria, home to the discovered Riace Bronzes, and the ancient sites, intermingling the voices of the author Michon, the playwright Aeschylus, and the sculptor Agéladas II. Michon obsessively focuses his reflections on the materiality of bronze, which he sees as the only enduring form capable of capturing "raw, bloody history." At the center is the warrior Tydeus (Bronze Figure A), whom Michon elevates to "the most beautiful murderer in art history," his archaic savagery becoming the inescapable definition of beauty itself—a poetic premise that also defined his Homeric book, "J'écris l'Iliad." As in the Iliad, where archaic violence and desire become the ecstatic experience of storytelling, Michon, in Agéladas d'Argos, transforms raw, bloody history into the material, imperishable form of bronze. – This review focuses on Michon's radical political theories, which trace a shocking, unbroken line of violence through civilization. Michon establishes a direct analogy between the Seven Chiefs of the Theban campaign and the Once (in Michon's novel of the same name) of the French Revolution—the "killers of the king." He interprets this historical flow as a consequence of the "decisive coup of the Logos" in the 6th century BC, thereby exposing democracy as a cynical "massacre with a clear conscience." In this interpretation, Tydeus embodies the ambivalence of political power: he is simultaneously "the legitimate violence of the Logos" and "the no less legitimate violence that the world exercises in return." The work concludes with the assertion of the eternal efficacy of archaic violence, which defies the commercial and intellectual conventions of modernity.