SOURCE: "The Circulation of Bodies in the Iliad," in New Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 339-61.

In the following essay, Staten examines the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon in the Iliad and explores the socioeconomic importance of war booty, vengeance, and mourning in the poem.

"Appropriations tantamount to theft and rape": that is how Luce Irigaray characterizes the economy of capitalism [in This Sex Which is Not One, 1985], and especially its sexual economy, whose hidden essence is the essence of the whole. Women are commodities, exchange objects whose value is defined by the relationship between men, the subjects of exchange. Thus "economic organization is homosexual," and "woman exists only as an occasion for mediation, transaction, transition, transference, between man and his fellow man, indeed between man and himself."

The first part of Irigaray's thesis, that the appropriation of women is "tantamount to theft and rape," rips no...