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Maia Kotrosits, "After Transformation: Rewriting Time, Christian Late Antiquity, and the Present" (Duke UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Mike Motilla
Extra value meals are back. That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just $8 only at McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery.
- [00:16]
Maya Katrocitz
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo.
- [00:18]
Mike Motilla
There's no Milo here who picked up my son from school. Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand.
- [00:29]
Maya Katrocitz
It was just the five of us. So what are you gonna do?
- [00:34]
Mike Motilla
I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All her fault.
- [00:42]
Maya Katrocitz
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- [00:45]
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- [01:16]
Maya Katrocitz
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:21]
Mike Motilla
Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Mike Motilla, and today we're talking with Maya Katrocitz about After Transformation, a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity. Great histories are great stories. They're made of words and images. Their details and movements can make worlds come alive. They shock us into seeing more. They pop bubbles that form around the common sense of a period. They can create new ways that the past touches the future. Or to say that differently, history is not just the accumulation of facts, and it's not participation in a professional community. Knowing a lot of stuff isn't the goal, and having footnotes isn't proof to do it well, you have to do a lot of that kind of stuff. And history, like so much of human work, it requires precision and knowledge and sometimes a little toughness to get your way. But what matters is the writing. Your favorite historian is probably a great storyteller. For the kind of person who listens to a podcast like this, one of those great storytellers is probably Peter Brown, and he thematized Late antiquity as a time of transformation. The transformation from the classical to the medieval world. The transformation on kind of Social geographies, transformations of smaller communal lives, and even individual lives. But Katrusitz asks what it means 50 something years later to write Transformation, and she doesn't just ask. This book is as much a writing experiment as it is a history. And one day I hope that won't sound like a meaningful distinction, but I think it still is today. Or to say that differently. It's a history that knows that the way to define a period isn't just through fixing dates, but through tones, characters, environments, vivid scenes and new portals that move us between worlds. Late ancient literature, it can transport us to another time. But Late antiquity also kind of slips into the present. We make connections between then and now, whether we want to or not. And part of Maya's work asks, like, what if we took that portaling seriously? Maya's work asks us to think about and she produces too, that kind of time travel experience. The book book moves between the the martyr Perpetua fixing her hair while in the arena about to die, and a teenager today learning the delicate aesthetics of avoiding shame as she tries on a bathing suit. The Nakamati treatise on the origin of the world hums next to a terrible, pre clamptic, untimely birth. Augustine's Confessions moves into a discussion of modern domestic violence. And to think that Katunsitz equates the arena and a fitting room is foolish. She doesn't. But maybe more wrong would be just jettisoning those bits of time travel. I mean, how else do we feel our way back into the past? How else do we live with the reality that we are affected by what we read? But maybe more. Katusets writes a history that is alive to the reality that there are some things we can kind of only know in extreme states, in fragments, in poetry. And if we're not willing to go there in the forms and in the ways that we write, we might remain air free in some kind of lab specific way, but we'll never really know the mysteries of a time or of life. And so this is a book that asks what comes after. Late Antiquity has been defined as this time of transformation. And it's also a book that invites readers to pursue, to get after transformation, to read and maybe write in a way that changes the period and the present and maybe even ourselves. So, Maya, hi, thank you for being here. What a book. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you and how did you come to write this?
- [04:53]
Maya Katrocitz
Hi Link. I was so happy to be here. I'm a scholar of early Christianity and a researcher with the center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard. And I write not only about the history of early Christianity in the ancient Mediterranean, but I also work in cultural studies and theory.
- [05:10]
Mike Motilla
Great. So can you tell us, like the book is called A Lyrical History of Christian Late Antiquity. Like what. What is a lyrical history?
- [05:20]
Maya Katrocitz
Well, lyrical history or lyrical historiography is the phrase I use to describe forms of historical description that are poetic and expressive. And this form of writing is kind of already a Meyer tradition in the study of early Christianity. And it's one that I'm extending, of course, although I end up dialing it up pretty high. I'm thinking of writers, including folks not just like Peter Brown, but Brigitte Wilburis, Shusha Coxmiller, Charlie Sang, and yourself, of course. So it's not just that the writing is beautiful, although it is also bad. It's this kind of mode of historiography that values things like poignancy, imagination or energistic description, the musicality of language, as well as kind of openness to emotion and subjectivity activities, kinds of things. So I think there's a way in which lyrical history can probably sound a bit oxymoronic, mainly because history, you know, especially ancient history, I think, is so regularly presented in ways that are restrained and very informational. It's this kind of narrative of sequential events, as we were thing. You know, it's heavily footnoted, quite dry of some kind. And history tends to be defined by these very kind of rationalist renditions of the past. This past sealed off from anything in the present or its future. History involves a very careful laying of things that we call evidence or data. This kind of sweeping perspective from the expert perspective. That's a position of presumed mastery. And this is kind of what gives historical work its gravitas, right? So this MO is not just predictable. It's colonial. It's racialized. It's a way of knowing the world that. I mean, mastery is the word that I use. And mastery implies colonial, racialized, of course. So, among other things, this pashi suggests a writer who isn't actually living through history that it's not shaping their subjectivity or their own desires. This form of historical discourse, as they say in the book, it knows some things well, but it actually knows a lot of things really badly. So that's all to say that I knew lyricism here, not just as a style of writing, but really as an epistemology, a way of knowing some things that we can't get at with the very kind of clumsy tools of stereotypical history lyricism. You know, is part of the experience of history or it gets at the experience of history of what? You know, the kind of imminence and immersiveness of living in history. Yeah, so.
- [08:18]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's really helpful. And I mean, I think I want to emphasize, and I think you're emphasizing too that like lyrical history is real history. The way you put it is what is history if not an attempt to fish out or pronounce life's strangest, most inscrutable turns? And so lyrical history is often more pleasant to read, but it's a real way of trying to understand the past. And often it's those images or a joke or a slogan or a line that tells you a lot more about culture or a person or a society, whatever it is. Then like the kind of, you know, dry, boring lecture that has everything right, but that doesn't really get to the way it moves you. And I think part of what this book shows is that if we, if we don't get the things that a lyrical history can get at, that we don't really understand the society yet. And so maybe I can ask you, like, you know, as you were kind of developing this style, like what, what kinds of things did, did writing a lyrical history help you understand about this time period?
- [09:22]
Maya Katrocitz
Yeah, I mean, the granular scale. Right. The lived experience on lived experience of people in a more daily way. We tend to think of, you know, as we're saying, like history on a large scale. Social movements, ideas, great heroes, et cetera. And we gravitate and gravitate towards that because they're the easiest to characterize, I think those kinds of things, and they're sort of the most straightforward, our catalog of acceptable methods in the field really reproduce these histories too. So the forms of history that I'm interested in are not just social history, like not just history from below, but really history from below the grid or experiences that don't make the official register in a lot of ways for a variety of reasons that they belong to non dominant people or, or they just are not visible within the kinds of evidence that we're taught to think about. So it's not just the ideas or the wars of major characters. It's also like the restlessness, the aspirations and failures that underlie those things. The damages incurred by colonialism, things like trauma, just human grasping for meaning or disappointment. These are experiences dominant frames crowd out or can obscure. And I think lyrical history can surface those. And lyrical history is also something we can kind of paint with a smaller brush. Right. So you can get at the way history lives in and through us in a different way. Because that's a very femoral thing.
- [11:12]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I'm like asking you to put into prose what is often poetry in the book. But can we. Can we give people, like, a sense of what the book is like? Can I ask you to read a little bit for us? So maybe there's a section kind of towards the beginning of the book that moves between a chronography with Julius Africanus and then a little anecdote about a more contemporary historian. Would you read that little section for us?
- [11:41]
Maya Katrocitz
Yes. Okay, so it's three. There are three pages here. And the first piece is called In Fragments with Julius Africans. I spread it all before me like animal viscera or tarot or puzzle pieces in dim light. The events and other whistlings, the past, that silent oracle. Understand my life made no sense. I began to stitch everything into that fabric. Chemical formulas, Axe of war, hair for my sister's brush. The only poor history, a partial one. The movie spoke cryptically, a slow story of depletion. Lord, let me have one thing whole and Lord, let it be everything. My next piece is a prose poem, and it's called Eusebius Tries to Organize Time. Part one. I'll begin from no other place than God's plan for history. And that's a quote from Osevius, the history of the church. Lost in the soft obscurity of trees, he craved forest. And then, where the forest wasn't enough, he craved the cosmos. And then nothing less than the cosmos in its singularity. The world's episodic fragments crystallized into the hard elegance of a line, the calamity of empires transposed into the cool tranquility of a table. How else to describe the monument of right now, Larry, in the operatic, but with the cumulative weight of everything that came before. Every era, Trojanid and rural, shouldering forward, driving to disclose its final meaning in time. Disparate geographies battled together in time, hostages, synchrony. He imagined himself the master of ceremonies, or better, the conductor, each small gesture pulling strings tied to the arms of musicians, the sound rising like water before a countless crowd. His special power was to exhume one note, vibrating and strange, from the gut of every living thing, to hear the same pain everywhere. It was the only true way to celebrate a God so unrelenting in eternity of arrows. And the third piece is an excerpt from scholarship. Ahm Jones prided himself on using the earliest editions of the sources, sometimes from the 17th or 18th century. And his skill at translating, absorbing and interpreting Greek and Latin texts was honed during more than a decade of rigorous training in the classics. First at Cheltenham and then at New College. He was able to transmit to Bupr his familiarity with the original texts as easily as he was able to bring it to bear in debates with colleagues or in seminars with his students. Jones's mastery of the primary sources and the languages in which they were written, in turn formed the basis of a dogmatic adherence to authentication, which became increasingly obsessive later in life. In short, Jones long experience of studying the Classics imbued him with a reverence for original texts, which he felt should lie at the heart of all historical writing. It seemed to me the only point being posed on the students.
- [15:13]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, I think just from those. Gosh, thank you. It's great. From those different pieces, we get some sense of the range of the material that you're covering and how you're writing through them. One of the ways that you theorize or thematize this is through Dion Brand's idea or writings about how it takes a broken story to reflect a broken world. Do you think you could tell us a little bit about the kind of juxtapositions that you have there? Like, we got three different pieces that are moving kind of, you know, in different ways. But how did you think about kind of those. Those juxtapositions or the broken pieces in writing your own history?
- [15:58]
Maya Katrocitz
Yeah, yeah. So DN Brand's broken story is, as you said, about the ways in which we narrate a world to cover over the sheer violence of the structure of the world and the ways that those narratives suddenly collapse, offering an opening for seeing that balance more fully. So I was thinking about that, and then I also, over time, been thinking about David Maldonado Rivero Rivera's work on colonialism and time and history of Christian antiquity, which argues basically that linear sequential narratives of history aid and abet colonial histories, make them seem inevitable. So rather than producing some kind of overarching narrative of cause and effect, which aims for comprehensiveness, conclusiveness, and also does this colonial work, I wanted to describe resonances in and across time in ways that scramble tide, rise and. And cause and effect in any simple way. Although, like, I have to say that I want to acknowledge the sleight of hand that I'm in the narration of this book, because a lot of it, you know, I was theorizing after having done a lot of the writing. Right. So it emerges that I'm thinking about these things alongside what I've already written and how to arrange it, how to honor what I see in the initial writing. Um. But yeah, in terms of. In 4. In terms of form and the juxtaposition in each section of the book, no matter what the theme I explored, it felt important to try to think outside of either teleology or genealogy and to allow the different sides of any thread in history to kind of illuminate each other. And I think, like, lyrical time is also time in the body. It's time. You know, it's unconscious time. And that's not chronological. So it demands brokenness to be more true.
- [18:01]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I. I mean, I, like, just underline that. That point even that, like, it is probably true that it is helpful to, like, know some of this material before scrambling it. Right. Like that. And. But that doesn't mean that the scrambling is, I don't know, just like a spinoff or that it's not the real thing, that the real thing is there at the beginning. And then kind of everything we do is just playing around. I mean, so much of history writing is really thinking about how do we tell this story and how is it going to live in the minds and bodies of a reader or a listener, whatever it is. And. And like, one of the unspoken, I think, arguments of this book is that, like, we could spend a little more time thinking about how to present this stuff. Like, you do have to, like. Like, you've got to, like, you got to learn the lyric, the lyrics. You got to learn the languages and the words and the stories, and you got to read the books. And then, like, I don't know, you may sit down and actually think about how to write this thing, you know, like, and because they're. They're part of the same process, but they're, you know, reading a lot does not mean that you've then written, like, they're actually, like, you got. You got to do the work of writing. And that's. That's just a big part of kind of how you tell a story.
- [19:27]
Maya Katrocitz
Yeah. And I wrote this as a primer really, too. I wanted it to be, in some ways, introductory and for it to only offer more depth to those who knew more about it. So not requiring a whole lot of, you know, expert knowledge about the time in order to be able to appreciate or enjoy it. I wanted it to have levels. And in that way, I hope that the work it does is bring people to the texts for their own kind of scrambling or new juxtapositions. Or writing history differently in their own capacities. So, yeah, very much so. This is not just a deconstructive project for experts. This is something that seeks to reintroduce in some ways the period.
- [20:21]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I think I.
- [20:24]
Maya Katrocitz
No, no, no, it's not a critique of the question.
- [20:27]
Mike Motilla
No, like, you know, to. I don't know, you can read an Anne Carson book without knowing a ton about kind of Greek mythology or Greek philosophy and just be reading it, I think. But to. I mean, no one's going to be Ann Carson, but to write that book, you do have to know the stories and the languages, and I think you're doing something quite similar there of just like, you got to know a lot in order to write the way a book like this comes out. Yeah, so some of this comes out in the kind of styles or the modes of writing. But this book and your last book kind of argued that Late Antiquity is theoretically interesting. There are theories worth thinking about in late antiquity. So it's not just like we read Foucault or Sylvia Wynter and then apply it to Jerome. It's that there's something actually about this period that will help us understand our world in a more, like, nuanced, attentive way. So can you give us an example of what's theoretically interesting about Late Antiquity?
- [21:27]
Maya Katrocitz
Yeah. So one example is. Well, one section of the book I explore, the history of interiority. I think that's probably the easiest way to capture at the moment. In late antiquity, we see an amplified interest in the interior self. And so Foucault understood this to be a precursor to leader for self regulation. So this already highly theorized in many ways, but in a different way. I'm interested in the history of subjective interiority and how it's tied to the imagination of the female body, specifically this growing tendency in antiquity to imagine women's virginity as untouched inner space. So this has colonial valences. And in the book, I put this in conversation with some other fragments and phenomena in history. So Freud's dark continent on women's sexuality, the racialized history of gynecological medicine, the colonization of Africa as approaching its mysterious interior, and then also the kind of quiet fullness of black interiority that Elizabeth Alexander describes in her work. So I think about the violent aspects of men's privacy there, too. And again, I'm trying to evade chronology through this kind of juxtaposition. But that also means you can theorize differently about certain themes or repetitions across time. You know, Augustine's confessions Looks different when read through the biography of the founder of modern gynecology, J. Marie Sims. But both of these look different when you triangulate them with the story of Salome giving a virginity test to Mary, the mother of Jesus. You know, so, I mean, obedience to linear time limits our ability to theorize more fully, I think, and to produce something richer than any kind of unified abstract mega theory. So in the more possibility and a few more angles and points of entry to it.
- [23:33]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. Can you say a little about kind of how lyrical history relates to theory? Like, you've. You've kind of written like both of those books now, but, like, how do you see them kind of in conversation?
- [23:44]
Maya Katrocitz
Yeah, I mean, I take really seriously Barbara Christian's, you know, critique of the way theory has been understood primarily through, you know, European and North American continental thought, which is very abstract. You know, French post structuralist theory is kind of the epitome of this, you know, creating again, meta narratives. But theory for her is about. And for the cluster of particularly black writers that she's speaking with and from this is also, you know, speculative world making is the heart of theory. So I think, you know, lyrical history is speculative world making, among other things. Or it can be.
- [24:30]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So can I go back to the title? So we did like lyrical history. We used to do like after transformation. So, I mean, transformation is like. It's a buzzword. Like, it is like Peter Brown's word. Right. Like, and like, I know that there are historians kind of working slightly later, like in the 6th, 7th, 8th centuries, who are. Who are going to either embrace that or kind of bicker with the word, you know, is the time of fall or collapse or continuity or whatever it is. But I think that you've got a lot going on with what it means to be after transformation. And part of it, I think, is that the word. In 1971, it was meant to revitalize or to bring alive a kind of dead, dark period. And now it's kind of vague. Transformation as the opposite of fall makes sense. And I mean, you show kind of pulling on others work. That transformation was kind of in the air. It was kind of a word that had all kinds of French Algerian War history to it. But I don't know. Now, saying that it was a time period of transformation is like saying that it was a finite life or something. Okay, sure. But what's the opposite of that? What does it mean? And so you're looking for something that is like describing an experience of time and So, I mean, I don't know. That's a long way to ask. What do you mean by after transformation?
- [26:02]
Maya Katrocitz
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. And I mean, I am always drawn to questioning consensus formation. You know, what is the context of any particular term or analytic becoming, you know, implicitly or explicitly a kind of consensus. And transformation has become one of those things. Yeah, and transformation wasn't just an alternate description, but it was, as you're kind of hinting at, really tied up in legitimizing late antiquity as this period worthy of study that was more than just kind of the nasty scraps of broken down classical culture or something. So transformation really defines the field of late antiquity. And I'm very much reliant on Thomas Hunt's work on this, you know, context and sets of implications for this. But what I'm interested in is the way that transformation as a designation for this period aligns with not only Christian exceptionalism, but she kind of accepts the. As truth these ideas Christians have about themselves and their practices, that ascetic practices will transform you in a sublime way. And so we sort of, among other things, extrapolated this to describe an entire era and the entirety of what, what, you know, Christianity does to the Roman world. So that's where the exceptionalism comes in. Transformation as an epistemology of change too, you know, has this kind of romance to it. You know, change, I think it's just much more confusing, much more uncertain. You know, there's all these hiccups that happen with change. It's much less sublime. I mean, for the most part, I'm sure there's accessions to that, but. So the after and after transformation is this effort to pay attention to the partiality of change, the disappointments of change, and also to pay attention to the space between what Christian practices promised and what they delivered or what they were defending against and the failure of Christian practices to transform things.
- [28:13]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, change is scary. And transformation, you know, like, if you really think about it, it can mean that. But I don't know, it sounds nicer than that. Like, it sounds, I don't know, like be transformed by the renewing of your mind, which is supposed to be a good. I don't know, I think that verse is supposed to be a good thing. But like, but, but like it was a scary time. Maybe one way to get into this is like Peter Brown's Making of Late Antiquity opens with the story of the seven Sleepers. And you talk about that story too. Can you do a compare and contrast with what Brown wants with the story and kind of how you're reading it.
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Maya Katrocitz
Yeah, I sort of open with the seven Sleepers also to highlight that contrast. So in the story, seven Christian young men during the third century are escaping from violence and persecution under the Roman emperor Decius.
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Mike Motilla
Okay.
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Maya Katrocitz
They go on ivy, they fall asleep and they end up getting sealed up in there. So they wake up ages later. And what they wake up into is this changed world. Even though they. They themselves are not changed at all. They're still young and beautiful, so they're not in danger suddenly and there are crosses everywhere and they've woken up into a Christian world. Peter Brown is, you know, using this at the beginning of his book to encourage readers to enter into their surprise as these young men encounter the unlikely scenario of a Christian empire transformed world. So I read this story through contemporary desires to anesthetize ourselves through the tumult of our lives and the political moment. And I read it as a fantasy about wanting to be unaltered by political change, a desire to sweep through witness and through your own kind of collusions with power. So for me, it's a spooky and a haunting tale, and I want that tone to unfold the entirety of the book. That's how it begins. But I want to clarify, though, because I think there's a way in which that sounds like what I'm doing is going back to a narrative of decline and fall. And I'm not suggesting late antiquity or our, you know, moment, our parallels in this book sort of like we're living in the fall of Roman Empire, which is a very kind of popular discourse that I am adamant about kind of avoiding. And I think what bugs me about that is not. It's not the contemporary meaning making aspect of it or the connection between long past or present, or even that it's an expression of grief. None of that bothers me. But it's these assumptions about both time and empire, right? So the notion that we're living in the equivalent of the fall of Rome is usually some kind of moral tale, especially in the US that if we had just kind of done things right, we'd be living in the eternal, like a whole empire. And if it fails, it's because we got something wrong. So that's, you know, implies some kind of worship of the classical as well, you know. So in the book, I get close to this discourse. You know, we're living through the fall of Roman Empire disgrace, but I get close to it in order to turn it, you know, kind of Wrench it. Re. Forcefully. We say that catastrophe is not the end of Empire. Catastrophe is simply Empire in its dailiness. And we actually don't know what time we're in. So, I mean, that's just sort of a defensive note, because I think sometimes when I talk about the kind of spooky, haunting quality of. Of these pieces, that they're sort of like, oh, well, you know, because it's. We're living in the father, you know.
- [32:10]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I. I guess I didn't. Yeah, I didn't read that as. As like a. You know, like, it's like a moral claim, which is usually the way, like, the fall stories go, but it's more like there is an acknowledgement that. I mean, one. If you fell asleep and woke up 150 years later, like, I don't know, like, isn't that what happens? Like Captain America or something? Like, like, like, like, like he's like, you know, like a superhero or whatever, but, like. Like, even he's, like, freaked out about it, and he thinks that he's, like, living in the greatest country in the world. Like, like, like it would be scary. It would be weird. And, like, it. Like. Like change is difficult to bear. Kind of. Even when you're going through time in a pretty linear way. You know, kind of these, like, big transformations, they're going to be scary, even if. Even if things are good and. And they. They aren't always.
- [33:07]
Maya Katrocitz
So.
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Mike Motilla
I hope this isn't doubling down on the fear of the Fall question, but one of the things that I found most moving in the book is that a lot of the people that you mentioned at the beginning, other people who are writing somewhat lyrical history or kind of experimental writing, are usually doing it around beautiful things. It's about contemplation or creation or reading or dwelling in a happy place. And you were writing as a poet and as a historian about a world that is also full of violence and hunger and abuse and imperial ambitions. And when I think about this as a book and not a late ancient history, that's not actually that weird. People write very movingly about the worst things that humans do to each other. And, I don't know, plenty of novels that I. I have really loved, I love because they are so precise about forms of pain that I hadn't ever been able to name. And, I mean, I think that's one of the things that a book like this is doing. It is thinking about how we suffer now and how people suffered then. And yet the book is not like a Complaint. It's not trying to convince people that, look how bad life was back then. It's about connecting the pains of the past with contemporary pains. And it's also written. You say this in the intro. It's written with this piece of writing advice that you got from a teacher many years ago, which was, write what you love. And I don't know, I was pretty moved by this. The way you write is a very psychoanalytically informed love. It's a love that is never totally detached from hate, but it is still love. And so I'm going to ask a kind of stupidly blunt question, which is, like, what. What do you love about this world? And like, what. And what does it mean to write what you love? And I kind of keep coming back to late antiquity.
- [35:04]
Maya Katrocitz
Yeah, yeah. What do I love about this world? This question is so beautiful, so bittersweet. So, yeah, I mean, and the thing is, when I hear this question, what's funny is I hear what you love about this world is the world of late antiquity and also the world we're living in. You know, I hear those at the same time, and that's very much where I live. So it's. It's perfect. So I'll answer for both, actually, since the same answer applies, and it is a pretty psychoanalytically informed answer. But I don't think I really have a choice but to keep returning to these worlds because they made me, they're using me kind of, whether I like it or not. And so the question is how to ethically return. In returning to them, I think I'm obliged to reckon with what is both damaging and what is mysterious about them, what they steal and what they offer, what they make impossible, what they make possible. That advice from my creative writing teacher, Liz Rosenberg, just a tremendous teacher. It really lives on in me. And I feel like it's my job not simply to be. I mean, there's two parts of it, right? From what you love, not from what you eat. Because I feel like it's my job to not just be angry at the violence of worlds, but to metabolize that anger into something, and something with a more subtle force to it, something that breeds more than anger. Right. I instinctively choose beauty. Not to make bad worlds seem better, and beauty can surely do that, be used to kind of sell you a shitty house or whatever. But I choose beauty to make bad worlds livable, to refuse deadness and find capacities in bad worlds that bad worlds would kind of otherwise shut out. I think. Yeah, that's one Answer?
- [37:21]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, it's great. Thank you. Let me change topics a little bit. I think one of the most fun parts of the book are these fictional sources that you have for us. So we get these kind of made up epigraphs and even there's these postcards from the pilgrim Egeria.
- [37:39]
Maya Katrocitz
And.
- [37:41]
Mike Motilla
This is part of a larger process of what you call co authoring, which I think is kind of like the opposite of commentary or chronology. And so we get these kind of autobiographical or semi autobiographical stories that kind of speak next to or with patristic sources. And that's one kind of co authoring, but the other kind that we get is this like middle ground that is these made up sources. And so, I don't know, like postcards might be a giveaway here, like might hear echoes of Derrida in it. But can you tell us about the sources and like this larger process of co authoring in your history?
- [38:16]
Maya Katrocitz
Yeah, yeah. Okay, another great question. So there's nothing particular about what I'm doing actually, because all historical work is co voicing or co authoring. So that's one way to think about the blurs that happen in the writing of history, which is also of course part of the living in history. Right. We speak through ancient figures and texts, they speak through us. But as scholars were trained to very reflexively refuse this, to disaggregate subjects, to separate out strands, to really do justice or whatever that means to individuals, and that means generally assigning agency and particularity to subjects. So we say this is Athanasius story, not Antony himself, or a good translation is getting at the true spirit of Gregory, uncontrollated, contaminated by my interests, or I'm listening for the voice of this specific figure and such. So this is part of the discipline's hysterical whiteness. I think it's obsession with particulate subjects. And that's kind of a riff on Fred Moten, as blur suggests. The point is that we're always co voicing, we're always co authoring. I'm just simply being a little bit more overt and playful with that fact. But as for the made up inscriptions and such, I mean, as you also know, we are always inventing our sources in many ways. So scholarship invents the ground it rests on with regularity all the time. I mean, I argued in my last book that material culture, you know, the very substance and the realness of material culture as a product of psychological work of fantasy, because realities are built out of fantasy. But we might think more concretely about things like the production of an original text through textual critical apparatuses create this abstract ideal out of many versions. The original text does not exist except for in our imagination. So the solidity of everything we've used as evident is produce. So here too, I don't think what I'm doing is really any different than a lot of other scholarly processes to work or produce source material. And just being very overt with the production and playful.
- [40:39]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, honest and playful is a nice way to think about it. I mean, how do I say this right? I feel like you're kind of playing out in exaggerated form what is usually played out in the opposite way in exaggerated form of like, you know, if a student came to me with a made up epigraph and said, like, you know, here's my made up source and it says this, and therefore this happened in the Roman Empire, like I would probably say, like, no, man, that's not the evidence. But that's really different than what you're doing, which is a kind of like, you know, like you spent a lifetime reading this material and now you're kind of thinking with it and saying like, you know, what, what might a source look like? And you know, at first I think readers might have a, like, that's cheating reaction. And then part of what that brings our attention to is to say, like, okay, and so is the lobe that you're reading from. And so take a deep breath. And that's, that's actually not how we're evaluating our evidence. Like, like, like think a little harder about what it means to have evidence from, from this source.
- [41:55]
Maya Katrocitz
And that question is always in the service of what? In the service of what are we, you know, designating something as substantial and real and to what effect? You know, and you know, the idea is not to argue that these, you know, made up inscriptions are to be taken seriously on the level of something you can go visit right now in a museum or archive. I mean, it's maybe a little bit like that, but only 10%. The idea is actually the thing that you go in a museum has lots of psychological work around that too, lots of imagination. It's really unstable. So the project is to destabilize everything, not to kind of arbitrarily assign realness to, you know, whatever I want in the service of making my pretty picture, you know.
- [42:59]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, and I mean, I think that one of the things I really appreciated about the epigraphs especially was that it made really clear your point about kind of theory speaking across time, that it's not just like you go from Foucault to Jerome, but it's that in writing, the kind of made up sources, it is a way for us to understand our time through their kind of evidence. And that's just like a, I don't know, it's like not the way my brain usually works. And it was a helpful exercise to think like, okay, what would an epigraph today look like? And yeah, I mean that kind of theoretical back and play I thought was really fruitful.
- [43:40]
Maya Katrocitz
Yeah, I love working backwards. I mean, it is a real mind fuck for most of us all the time. And it really changes what we get out of the material in lives of objects. I think backwards with Derrida to think about martyrdom and translation in a similar way. And I just think it can really wake things up.
- [44:02]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Okay, let's back up a little bit. I think this book wants us to rethink late antiquity, but it's also, I think, asking people to reimagine some academic life. And this is a kind of crazy time to be in academia. It's a time when a lot of people have to rethink really why are we doing what we're doing. There's a lot of texts and skills and histories and habits that, that like, like, I don't know, like I, I, I really think, like, do I, should I be passing this on to my students? Or like, is what I did just like kind of a thing of the past now? Like, like, and just like sometimes I have to think like pretty hard about, about that of like what, what is important to pass down and what, you know, what was hard for me, but like I can let go. Like, I don't have to pass it down just because I learned it. I, I don't know, like, like how, how has writing a book like this helped you think about what an academic life could be or should be?
- [44:59]
Maya Katrocitz
Yeah, whether.
- [45:01]
Mike Motilla
I know that's a, that's a huge question.
- [45:04]
Maya Katrocitz
It really drag me about this question. It's so important. I mean, I love being out of sync with culture and I think being out of sync with culture is important. You know, I'm like a queer studies person, you know, like being out of sync, being anachronistic, being a little out of time, you know, these are values of mine. So like on the one hand, I don't want to pass everything through the sieve of relevance, you know what I mean? Because I feel relevant to something you sort of invent all the time, but at the same time I think writing this book and thinking hard about what this moment is and how to navigate it has reminded me that the horizon of intellectual work should never be institutions and disciplines. It should never be academia, you know, with a capital A, right. I think intellectual work, like the gift of expertise and the bigger gift of like a community of thinkers, you know, needs to be put to work towards something much more serious and fundamental than just institutions and disciplines or upward mobility when these things or getting security within these things. I mean, institutions are cowardly, disciplines aren't conservative, no place to anchor ourselves. For sure. Academia is a risk averse profession, right? Generally and pretty ironically, the more security and reward you get for your work, the more risk averse you become, you know, but you need to take risk. You know, you take risks to keep intellectual work alive and you know, otherwise you're dead in the water. And I think right now, actually the biggest risk that we face is the loss of our collective integrity as thinkers. So I think we need to decide that's a loss we can't tolerate. And the first step in that struggle for our integrity is to have a horizon of thinking that's beyond academic institutions and academic fields or disciplines or any kind of reward system. So in other words, I think the first step is to want something more than a certain job, a certain kind of life, a certain minor notoriety or whatever, and to ask what is the work for again? What is the work in service of, aside from myself, aside from a conversation that is continually looping back on itself? Is it in the service of instantiating the importance of a field or is it bringing new life to the material and for. And for what then? You know, these are the kinds of questions of integrity that I think I came to in writing this book now that they're not that I'm resolved on any of that or I mean, shouldn't be resolved. Ethics can't be resolved recently.
- [48:24]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it makes me just think back to the, the writing advice of, you know, write what you love, not what you hate. And just, I mean, listening to you, like so much of academic life can be about making sure the bad stuff doesn't get in. And that's, that is like, that is important in some ways. You know, like there are bad histories that float around and they do real damage. Like it's not just like this person got this thing wrong, but. That is part of an academic life. But, but sometimes we get, spend so much time policing the bad things that we forget to like try to do the things that are, that are Fun that are. That are lovely, that are. I don't know. Good, good. And.
- [49:12]
Maya Katrocitz
And.
- [49:12]
Mike Motilla
And that's like. It's. It can be hard to trust that too, because. Because you gotta, you know, you gotta take some risks to do it. Yeah. I. So I don't know. Are there anything do you kind of hope readers take from. From this book?
- [49:26]
Maya Katrocitz
I mean, I hope that they do take that. To have a horizon for me that's better, that's bigger and better than institutions and disciplines, to be willing to break some things in the name of more life, whatever that might mean to you. Aside from that, I know people haven't experienced this book that can't be packaged, you know, like. Like, I don't want the experience of this book to be an argument, even though there's, like, arguments that are, you know, being made, I guess, throughout the book. I don't want new information or. I don't think people would take that. I just hope it entombs people to an experience of history or to experience the history differently. That's what I know. So I know people get a different kind of attunement out of it.
- [50:16]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. No, that's great. And. Yeah. What's the argument of the book? I don't know. And it's not even a call to go and do likewise. I don't think either of us want to see 50 people write more lyrical histories of late antiquity. That's not really the call, but there is a mode of reading and attention that. Yeah. That comes out of a book like this. So. Okay, last question. What. What are you working on next?
- [50:44]
Maya Katrocitz
Oh, how is a dicey question. I often say that I don't know what any of my books are about until after they're finished. So anything I inevitably say right now is going to sound really foolish to myself later or. Or it's going to fail. But I am interested in the co voicing, co authoring element and blur in history. And I've been working on that through prosofo poem. So these instances and, you know, literary rhetorical context where a speaker takes up the voice of another. So I'm thinking about that right now. I don't know where it'll go.
- [51:25]
Mike Motilla
Great. That sounds exciting. Come talk when you've got some stuff on that. Maya, this is really great. Thank you for talking.
- [51:34]
Maya Katrocitz
Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much, Mike.