Yet it is pre­cisely the dis­en­chant­ment of beauty in the exper­i­ence of nud­ity, this sub­lime but also miser­able exhib­i­tion of appear­ance bey­ond all mys­tery and all mean­ing, that can some­how defuse the theo­lo­gical appar­atus and allow us to see, bey­ond the prestige of grace and the chi­meras of cor­rupt nature, a simple, inap­par­ent human body. (Agam­ben 2011:90)

The het­aera or cour­tesan, Phryne, who lived in Athens dur­ing the 4^th cen­tury BC, was known for her beauty, wit and intel­li­gence. In clas­sical Greece, cour­tes­ans were women who used to be slaves and who had man­aged to escape their serf­dom. They became women with inde­pend­ent means and were the equals of the men who cour­ted them.

Accord­ing to the comic poets, prior to becom­ing a het­aera, Phryne used to sup­port her­self by col­lect­ing capers (McClure 2006: 357). She was a com­pan­ion to a lot of influ­en­tial men, includ­ing the sculptor Prax­iteles, who is rumoured to have sculp­ted his Cnidean Aph­rod­ite in her image. Phryne became one of the wealth­i­est Greek women of her time.

Around the year 350 BC, Phryne was put on trial. What did the beau­ti­ful Phryne do to find her­self before the judges? It is said that, dur­ing the Eleusin­ian mys­ter­ies, she shed her cloth­ing, let her hair loose and sub­merged her­self in the sea. Had she been found guilty of pro­fan­ing the gods, she would have been executed.

Her defence law­yer was the orator, Hyper­ides, who was appar­ently one of her courtiers. Hyper­ides defen­ded her with all his rhet­or­ical skills, but des­pite his mas­tery, he was los­ing the case. So he moved Phryne to the centre of the court and exposed her breasts to the judges (another ver­sion of the story has Phryne expos­ing her­self to the judges).

The judges were startled by what they saw. Her breasts were said to be so beau­ti­ful that the judges thought they must be divine or, at least, hold within them the seeds of divin­ity. A divine creature could not have pro­faned the gods, there­fore the judges absolved Phryne of the charge. Phryne’s trial has retained the interest of rhet­or­icians who, as Laura McClure tells us, use it to dis­cuss, amongst other things, tropes of good oratory (McClure 2003: 135).

*****

On the even­ing of the 14^th Janu­ary 2012, I found myself at the aban­doned Old Street Magis­trates Court (335 – 337 Old Street EC1V 3UD), which is cur­rently occu­pied by a group that are part of the Occupy Lon­don alli­ance: they call them­selves pre­cisely Occupy Justice. The events to be held at Old Street Magis­trates Court were advert­ised by the Bank of Ideas, another branch of the Occupy Lon­don alli­ance that, some time ago now, took up res­id­ence in a dis­carded UBS Bank build­ing. A friend and I agreed to visit the Court to enjoy the cab­aret and other enter­tain­ment prom­ised on the web­site. I arrived there just after 8 pm (the per­form­ances were to take place between 8 and 11 pm), expect­ing a low-​key event. I was totally taken by sur­prise to see about 50 or more people wait­ing to get in and oth­ers arriv­ing in droves. Old Street Magis­trates Court appeared to be the hot­test thing hap­pen­ing in hipsterland/​Shoredich E1.

When we tried to get in at 8.30 pm, we were told to queue to the left of the entrance. I recall smil­ing as I wondered how an aban­doned court man­aged to main­tain its author­ity. When I con­veyed my thoughts laugh­ingly to my friend, she rightly poin­ted out that at least in this court we wouldn’t be searched, nor would we have our cam­eras and mobile phones con­fis­cated, a com­mon prac­tice at func­tion­ing UK courts.

“I’ve read too much Kafka”, I thought. I see his thoughts inscribed every­where. Here’s to another new year’s res­ol­u­tion: stop read­ing Kafkaesque scen­arios into everything.

Old Street Magis­trates Court is a pala­tial build­ing albeit in a state of decay. Its ceil­ing is dec­or­ated with a col­our­ful glass mural, a beau­ti­ful rem­nant of its once glor­i­ous days. The entrance hall was wel­com­ing: instead of the expec­ted voices of frantic law­yers, clerks, police officers or offend­ers and vic­tims, we were wel­comed by the sound of music. The occu­pi­ers had indeed trans­formed the Court in such a way that, upon entry, the insignia of law, order and fear had been removed and the space infused with a party atmo­sphere. I remem­ber think­ing what a lovely sur­prise this was. What else, I wondered, could we expect from this group?

As we are were look­ing around, enjoy­ing the music and invest­ig­at­ing how the court had been turned from a place of law and justice into a social and hous­ing space, we noticed people sur­ging towards a room on the left-​hand side of the build­ing. We fol­lowed them into an old courtroom, where the occu­pi­ers were about to stage a play in the form of a trial. I didn’t know what to expect and, before I’d had a chance to sur­vey the space and to won­der what was going to be per­formed, the play began.

A tall, impos­ing judge with a wig and sunglasses prom­ised us that we would see justice being done in his courtroom. In the dock, we could see a group of women. They were cour­tes­ans who were charged with expos­ing their bod­ies in the pres­ence of chil­dren. The women were not your typ­ical accused, quiet, timid, and dread­ing the trial that could lead to con­vic­tion. Oh no, they were not at all quiet. They were rowdy, argu­ment­at­ive and strong: they defen­ded without hes­it­a­tion their right to expose their bod­ies, the con­nec­tion between women’s bod­ies and chil­dren, and their profession.

To the right of the dock you could see the pro­sec­u­tion law­yer, but I don’t recall how he looked. I was over­whelmed by the strength of the women. The pro­sec­u­tion law­yer accused them of scan­dal­ising the val­ues of Brit­ish soci­ety. On the left was their defence law­yer. He defen­ded their right to their bodies.

After the defence law­yer fin­ished his speech, the judge turned to us, the audi­ence, and asked whether we thought they were guilty as charged. With one voice we shouted ‘no’. The judged pre­ten­ded to listen and promptly pro­nounced the women guilty.

The women were taken to prison cells behind the courtroom. But the play did not end there. The judge invited us to fol­low the women to the cells, along with a num­ber of politi­cians (act­ors dressed as Tony Blair, Mar­garet Thatcher, George Osborne, to name but a few), to wit­ness how justice was executed by the Eng­lish Crim­inal Justice system.

This play was a par­ody of an Eng­lish trial and a rein­ter­pret­a­tion of the trial of Phryne. The lat­ter read­ing became appar­ent when a cour­tesan asked the judge how he viewed his body. He pre­dict­ably replied that his body was his temple and then asked “Phryne” to “shut up”. The rowdy audi­ence may have missed the ref­er­ence to Phryne, but if it hadn’t, it could be for­given for being puzzled by this decision. The case was meant to rein­ter­pret Phryne, yet here the cour­tes­ans, unlike Phryne, found them­selves guilty of expos­ing their bod­ies in front of children.

The audi­ence may also have been puzzled by the par­al­lels the occu­pi­ers where try­ing to make. How can an accus­a­tion of pro­fan­ing the gods be ana­log­ous to women expos­ing their nude bod­ies to chil­dren? Are both acts the same? Have our con­tem­por­ary cour­tes­ans been ‘undi­vine’? The par­al­lel between Phryne’s profan­a­tion and our con­tem­por­ary cour­tes­ans’ inde­cent expos­ure is not, on second thoughts, that far­fetched. Crit­ical the­or­ists like Lauren Ber­lant (1997) have been remind­ing us for a while of the sac­red pos­i­tion that chil­dren hold in our soci­ety. With this in mind, the act of inde­cently expos­ing your body in front of a minor may indeed be con­sidered a profanation.

But why end it with the con­vic­tion of the cour­tes­ans? As I was walk­ing towards the prison cells, I was try­ing to under­stand why the occu­pi­ers had per­ver­ted the end­ing of Phryne’s trial. I had no imme­di­ate answer, but as it hap­pens, the answer lay only a step away. Once we had passed the prison guard and entered the cell block, we were exposed to tough justice. The politi­cians who had accom­pan­ied the police officers to the cells to see how the Eng­lish Crim­inal Justice sys­tem executed justice found them­selves locked in the cells. They were being pun­ished by and in place of the con­victed courtesans.

In Phryne’s trial, we are told that justice ensues because of the phys­ical beauty the gods had bestowed upon her: justice as divine beauty. In this rein­ter­pret­a­tion — where there are no gods, where god is dead — we have only human justice and the sug­ges­tion thrust upon us that human justice is not beau­ti­ful. Justice is trans­formed into pun­ish­ment or the pun­ish­ment of those who were not even under trial.

The cour­tes­ans are pun­ish­ing the politi­cians, but not only them. On the out­side of cer­tain cell doors, we read in chalk that invest­ment banks like Gold­man Sachs are inhab­it­ing the space, as well as subprime mort­gage com­pan­ies like Fan­nie Mae and Fred­die Mac, sug­gest­ing that even invis­ible cor­por­ate bod­ies are to be pun­ished. Justice is indeed being done. The judge had sen­tenced the cour­tes­ans to impris­on­ment. The audi­ence or the people had asked for them to be set free. In the cells, where justice is sup­posed to be done, we see the judi­cial sen­ten­cing per­ver­ted and the people’s justice prevailing.

The occu­pi­ers have given us a dif­fer­ent play on justice: here justice does not bow to beauty, nor is it seen to be done in the courtroom. Justice and pun­ish­ment are inex­tric­ably linked. This, of course, does not mean that the justice that pre­vails is pure or even jus­ti­fi­able, but rather that it may take on the col­ours of the very meth­ods by which we enter the door of the law, the meth­ods that the left cri­ti­cises: manip­u­la­tion, opaque­ness, force­ful­ness and, yes, even viol­ence. If nud­ity still retains its beauty or if nud­ity still sur­prises, as this satir­ical play on justice sug­gests, it is per­haps because it shows us what justice ‘is’, not what we ima­gine it to be.

As I exit this play on justice, as we exit this aes­thetic exper­i­ence, where I have wit­nessed what justice is, I feel a sense of optim­ism. Not in justice per se, but in our abil­ity to play with justice. As I exit, I hope for more ways of pro­fan­ing our sac­red insti­tu­tions. As I exit, I dream of more. And to be able to dream or to be given the pos­sib­il­ity to do so is quite something.

Dr Elena Loiz­idou is Senior Lec­turer in Law at Birk­beck, Uni­ver­sity of London.

Agam­ben, G (2011) ‘Nud­ity’ in Nud­it­ies (Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity Press: Stan­ford).
McClure, L (2006) in Dit­more, H M (ed) Encyc­lo­pae­dia of Pros­ti­tu­tion and Sex Work. Vo. 2 (Green­wood Press: West­port).
McClure, L (2003) Cour­tes­ans at Table (Rout­ledge, Lon­don, New York).
Ber­lant, L (1997) The Queen of Amer­ica Goes to Wash­ing­ton City (Duke Uni­ver­sity Press: Durham, London).

Many thanks to Gil­bert Leung for his edit­or­ial cor­rec­tions. This text has benefited tre­mend­ously from his input.