18. Reading a Reference?* Freud was preoccupied by the role he had had to attribute—or so he thought—to the death principle, a role for which Empedocles’ cosmogony provided a distant model. I later reconstituted that cosmology in very different terms, which were not understood in the same way in Freud’s day. [1] Freud was undoubtedly led astray by… Read more
19. The Scientistic Model: Freud and Empedocles* Preliminary remark A dichotomy is introduced into the analysis of any object of study. The phenomenon studied is situated along a line of evolution. Given the goal of assigning meaning, this dichotomy produces a division between anticipation (or “intuition”) and primitivism, between “going beyond” and “falling short.” In fact, it is only a matter of… Read more
20. Benjamin Reading Kafka* Kafka Then and now Kafka’s unique work—unique in more than one sense—never brings to light anything but its own making, in progress; its status is not that of the already “made,” however carefully composed it may seem (even though the texts were often written in great haste). The strongest linguistic concentration tolerates the maintenance of a certain distance,… Read more
21. Reading the Codes* The hermeneutics of texts decodes what has always been coded, in some sense; this is the rule, and it is the underlying principle of univocity, which integrates ambivalence and polysemy. Its practice has not seemed to me to be limited to a particular literature. I have needed to know the language of the literature in question, along with relevant… Read more
22. A Sonnet, a Poetics—Mallarmé: “Le vierge, le vivace …”* A poem by Mallarmé, the second of the tetrad titled “Plusieurs sonnets” in the 1899 Deman edition, “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” (Mallarmé 1998:36 [1] ) has generated abundant commentary; it has been understood in contradictory ways. It could serve as a model, and lead… Read more
23. Between Hölderlin and Celan* A thunderbolt The occasion was the meeting of the Hölderlin Society in Tübingen on May 22, 1986, on the topic “Hölderlin, the View from France.” [1] André du Bouchet, in the notes and reflections associated with the talk he gave on that occasion, referred at the start to another talk on Hölderlin… Read more
2. Horses, Heroes, and Sacrifice The prominent position of the formula ὠκέες ἵπποι and related expressions attests the special role played in Greek epic by horses and the physical abilities that distinguish them. The similarity of formulas in both Indian and Iranian oral poetries makes it clear that the phrase indicates a common poetic inheritance. It is a sensible assumption that a formula about horses that is… Read more
3. Lyric Horses I believe that it is clear that the PIE horse sacrifice ritual and the depiction of the hero in Greek epic reveal an inherited Indo-European tendency toward the hippomorphizing of humans and the anthropomorphizing of horses which continued to exert influence into the Greek Archaic period. The examples of this phenomenon that have been considered so far have focused generally, although not exclusively, on… Read more
4. Chariots and the Ἵππιος Νόμος The metapoetic charioteer introduced at the end of the last chapter is but one example of the sort of similarity in the treatment of chariots and charioteers that one is likely to find among the IE cultures. When faced with such correspondences the reader may find it difficult to accept the archaeological conclusion that chariots are not themselves a common inheritance. Read more
Conclusion To appreciate any literary subject it is best to know what came before. The scholar of Hellenistic poetry, for example, brings to bear on the subject a knowledge of Classical Greek literature and culture. Yet in the case of the earliest phases of Greek poetry we rarely have access to comparable information, so we are forced to approach the subject in a very different way. The… Read more
