At the diegetic beginning of the Theban cycle, excessive conjunctions and disjunctions (Ramnoux) between two different worlds, and within each of those worlds, take place (Zeus abducts Europa, Cadmos slays the dragon, the children of the dragon kill themselves, Cadmos has an incestuous relationship with Europa, etc.). The goal is then to find some rest or equilibrium. We find the same, mutatis mutandis, in Empedocles: Love, Strife… and the Sphere. However, in Heraclitus, where Polemos reigns, there’s never a moment of rest, there’s never equilibrium, but a permanent dynamic disequilibrium that requires endless adjustments. Life as a series of tensions in which resolving one doesn’t mean resolving them all. And isn’t this too the idea of the Homeric cycle (Achilles counters Agamemnon but then loses Patroclus, he must readjust himself again before Priam, and Odysseus goes here and there adjusting and readjusting himself? The political structures of the two cycles differ, as well: the king in one case, the assembly in the other one. In short, the contrast here is between the politics of SYMMETRY (fig. 1) and the politics of DISSYMMETRY (fig. 2). Just like the contrast between the ancient empires and the Greek commercial circuits, it could be ventured, opposes a PROPORTIONAL geometry (fig. 3) to VARIABLE one (fig. 4).
Key to the figures:
1 2
3 4
These two tendencies often stand towards each other in a relation of formal opposition but material coexistence (inasmuch as any culture combines, or rather results from the superimposition, sometimes conflictual of, different modal orientations) which at times, however, can be undone so that, of both options, one ends by displacing the other one (as with the consolidation of Rabbinic Judaism vs Henochic Judaism). As for their formal opposition, probably one could speak, here too, of two different coefficients of dererritorializartion, evidently lower in the case of symmetry, higher in the case of dissymmetry.
