Detail of a 1st-century Roman copy of one of the statues of Athena sculpted by Myron and housed in the Parthenon. Madrid, Prado Museum. Photograph taken by the author I “I will not turn you into stones with snake-haired terror (schlangenhaarigem Schrecken): with my shield of beauty (Schild ,Schönheit‘) I protect myself.” Thus reads one…
Category: Greece
‘Aγχιβασίην…
In a Buddhist temple (with its elaborate architecture, the internal division of the enclosure into sections, etc.) the sacred is delimited by markedly human categories (Buddha of compassion, Buddha of wisdom, etc.), plus it is planned and organized. Conversely, a Shinto shrine (consisting of a small, red portico at the bend of a forest path,…
Diagrams for AntiGONE
A diagram is not merely a way to illustrate something. It is rather the transformation of “content” into “form.” It therefore involves a recoding, e.g., the recoding of an idea in visual terms. The following diagrams attempt at diagramming Antigone’s rhythm, in particular the confrontation between Antigone and Creon and that between Tiresias and Creon,…
What Dies, and What Lasts: On Rosenzweig’s Indictment against Anaximander
I Franz Rosenzweig, in The Star of Redemption — which is a very interesting book, partly written in the trenches of the Balkan front during World War I —, accuses philosophy — he says: from Ionia to Jena, that is to say, all the history of philosophy, from its inception with the Ionian philosophers (Thales,…
On the Counter-Odyssean Background of Contemporary Philosophy
What follows is the synopsis and chapter one of Carlos’s new book project, which is provisionally titled: Ulysses’s Mast: Prolegomena to a Post-nihilist Philosophy. The book argues that contemporary philosophy has lashed itself to Ulysses’s mast to sail past what Adorno called the coincidence of identity and positivity, being and plenitude. Ulysses’s mast thus symbolises…
“We Fight Because We Die” (III): Extra-Modern War and Its Moral Supplement
(N.B. This entry follows from the previous one, titled: “An Existentialist Approach to Extra-Modern War”) Pierre Clastres states that “primitive societies […] invest themselves totally in their religious and ritual life, which unfolds as a continuously repeated affirmation of the communal Self,” and hence that “[e]ach ceremony is a new opportunity to remember that if…
Mythology’s Oblivion
An epoch – any epoch – can be assessed by both the quantity and the quality of its gods. Christianity has accustomed us to imagine a single god: an all-powerful Father as the hypostasis of human hope; and once that god has been declared dead, the two only gods we still seem capable of evoking…
Enigma and Early Greek Thinking
People say that [Homer] died on the island of Ios when he found himself undone because he could not solve the riddle of the fishing boys. The riddle was: “We left whatever we caught and carry whatever we didn’t”. They were obscuring in riddle the fact they actually had discarded whichever of the lice they…
The Poetics of Aidos: On Pindar, Parmenides, and Bacchylides
(N.B. This entry complements our entry “Aidos Before What Is: On Homer and Parmenides“) Michel Briand has recently noticed a number of poetic parallelisms between Pindar and Parmenides, as regards the images they both employ.(⊙) Yet in our view, their affinity is even deeper. Take, for example, Parmenides’s well-known fragment (our translation): τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ…
Aidos Before What Is: On Homer and Parmenides
(N.B. This entry complements our entries “Hybris Over What Is: On Aeschylus” and “Hybris’s Reverse: On Heraclitus and Pindar”) this gleam (kosmos), the same for all things, neither the gods nor men have made it, but it always was, is, and will be an ever-living fire measuredly kindling and measuredly going out – Heraclitus, DK…