1 “The power to change form – power over the image – can be seen as the ultimate realisable power in a society dominated by consensual (visual) image,” writes Roy Wagner.(⊛) By “consensual (visual) image” Wagner means what is commonly (and poorly) known as “tradition.” Take, for example, any extra-modern ritual: on the day in…
An Eternally-Recurrent Déjà-Vu (travelling to St. Petersburg)
In The Aleph Borges distinguishes two types of labyrinth: (1) the palace with its madly intertwining corridors and (2) the desert with its not-less disquieting, confusing boundless-ness. But he makes such distinction only to add a third and even-more-perplexing type: (3) the endless book whose first page is mysteriously renewed each time the book itself…
Bodies, Ghosts, Ancestors
It is tempting to view Plato’s tripartite division of the soul in Phaedrus 245c–253e as an instantiation – whose conceptual complexity is easily overlooked when the image it conveys is turned into a myth in the modern sense of the term, i.e. into an object of belief – of what we have called a semiotic…
Diagrams as Figures of Thought (a game)
In a “Klein bottle,” container and content become indiscernible from one another, and so their difference becomes iridescent (i.e. when look from different perspectives, each one seems to change into the other): Diagrams are perfect examples of “Klein bottles,” for they consist in turning conceptual content into visual form, which is also the reason why…
Meaning: From Plato to Kant, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein
Consider the following image: The figures in it represent what language says, i.e. such or such words (“bird,” “snowflake,” “tree,” “mountain”),(⊗) whereas the ground (the white space inside the square) stands for the dimension that makes meaningful what language says. By the “dimension that makes meaningful what language says” we do not mean a word’s…
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…
Hybris’s Reverse: On Heraclitus and Pindar
(N.B. This entry complements the previous one, titled “Hybris over What Is: On Aeschylus.”) Heraclitus (fl. 504–501 BCE), Pindar (c. 518–438), and Parmenides (fl. 475) were roughly contemporary with one another; and with Aeschylus (c. 525–455). Pindar is commonly considered to be a poet, Aeschylus a tragedian, and Heraclitus and Parmenides philosophers. But this is…
Hybris Over What Is: On Aeschylus
(N.B. This entry follows from the conclusion to the previous one, titled “Τhe Last God.”) hybris (“excess”) must be extinguished more than a fire (ὕβριν χρὴ σβεννύναι μᾶλλον ἢ πυρκαῖήν) – Heraclitus, DK B43(⊛) “Prometheus,” προμηθεύς (pro-metheus) means “forethought” (from προ- [pro-, “fore-”] + μανθάνω [manthano, to “think”]). It is paramount to make clear the…