Editing Thersites (section)

==As social critic==
The role of Thersites as a social critic has been advanced by several philosophers and literary critics, including [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel]], [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], [[Edward Said]], [[Thomas Woods (Irish diplomat)|Thomas Woods]] and [[Kenneth Burke]]. In the passage below from ''[[Language as Symbolic Action]]'',<ref>Pages 110–111</ref> Burke cites Hegel's coinage of the term "Thersitism", and he proceeds to describe a version of it as a process by which an author both privileges protest in a literary work but also disguises or disowns it, so as not to distract from the literary form of the work, which must push on toward other effects than the protest ''per se'':
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:If an audience is likely to feel that it is being crowded into a position, if there is any likelihood that the requirements of dramatic "efficiency" would lead to the blunt ignoring of a possible protest from at least some significant portion of the onlookers, the author must get this objection stated in the work itself. But the objection should be voiced in a way that the same breath disposes of it.
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An example of this stratagem is the role of Thersites in the ''Iliad''. For any Greeks who were likely to resent the stupidity of the Trojan War, the text itself provided a spokesman who voiced their resistance. And he was none other than the abominable Thersites, for whom no "right-minded" member of the Greek audience was likely to feel sympathy. As early as Hegel, however, his standard role was beginning to be questioned. Consider, for instance, these remarks in the introduction to Hegel's ''[[Lectures on the Philosophy of History]]'':
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:The Thersites of Homer who abuses the kings is a standing figure for all times. He does not get in every age . . . the blows that he gets in Homer. But his envy, his egotism, is the thorn which he has to carry in his flesh. And the undying worm that gnaws him is the tormenting consideration that his excellent views and vituperations remain absolutely without result in the world. But our satisfaction at the fate of Thersitism may also have its sinister side.
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Thersites also appears in the writings of [[Karl Marx]],<ref>Marx, quoting Shakespeare and otherwise employing the trope of Thesites: Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality, Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung Nos. 87, October 31, 1847 and No. 94, November 25, 1847. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/10/31.htm</ref> and those of later [[Marxist]] literature in Soviet times much in the spirit of Hegel's construal. [[Heiner Müller]] casts Thersites in the role of Shepherd who also shears his sheep reflecting the contradictions broached by Hegel.<ref>e.g. [[Heiner Müller]], Poem, Stories from Homer (Geschichten von Homer), 1949, Werke 1, Shurkamp, 1998, p16.</ref>
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:... Came the talk in dining, meat and wine, to Thersites
:The reviled, the windbag, Homer stood in the gathering
:Using wisely the great quarrel for the greater prey, spoke:
:See the peoples shepherd who shears his flock and does them in as always does the shepherd,
:showed the soldiers bloody and empty, the bloody, empty hands of soldiers.
:Then asked the pupils: What is it with this Thersites,
:Master? You give him the right words then with your own
:Words you put him in the wrong...
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