16. Expressing Differences* If hermeneutics is critical, it must be historical; its task is to reconstitute a project in its own time. Precision remains forever inscribed in the letter of the text. Distinctive expression has the power to endure. This is the property… Read more
17. The Heraclitean Logos* Historians of Greek thought have tended to begin by trying to read Heraclitus as a systematic thinker; they have tried to decipher a world-system in his work comparable to those of other archaic thinkers, and they have sought to… Read more
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… 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… 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… 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… 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]… 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… 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… 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… Read more
