Dionysus and Apollo After Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide (Value Inquiry Book, 384) 9004538585, 9789004538580

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Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Editor-​in-​Chief J.D. Mininger

volume 384

Studies in Existentialism, Hermeneutics, and Phenomenology Series Editor Mark Letteri (University of Windsor) Editorial Board Peter Durno Murray (University of Sydney) Janusz A. Polanowski (Nashville State Community College)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​vibs and brill.com/​se

Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism Rethinking the Earth–​World Divide Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Art by Olha Liubokhynets. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at https://​cata​log.loc.gov lc record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/2023002134​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 0929-​8 436 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 3858-​0 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 3859-​7 (e-​book) Copyright 2023 by Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

[I]‌n the intimation […] of the advent […] of the gods that essentially occur as having been and of their concealed transformation […] earth and world meet anew in the simplest strife. heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 324–​5 (=​ ga 65: 409–​1 0)

…

In holding sway, struggle pervades the whole of beings with a double power: as power of generation and power of preservation. […] What Nietzsche characterizes as the Apollonian and the Dionysian are the opposing powers of this struggle. heidegger, Being and Truth, 74 (=​ ga 36/​3 7: 93)

…

It is clear that Lynx and Coyote in North America, and Maire and Opossum in South America, fill complementary but opposite functions. The first separates the positive and negative aspects of reality and puts them in separate categories. The other acts in the opposite direction: it joins the bad and the good. The demiurge has changed animate and inanimate creatures from what they were in mythical times into what they will be thenceforth. The trickster keeps imitating the creatures as they were in mythical times and as they cannot remain afterward. He acts as if privileges, exceptions, or abnormalities could become the rule, while the demiurge’s job is to put an end to singularities and to establish rules that will be universally applicable to all members of each species and category. lévi-​s trauss, The Story of Lynx, 49

…

“Imagine a tree whose top foliage cuts the shape of a human face against the sky,” say the Tolai people of East New Britain, in Papua New Guinea, “and fix the shape of that face in your mind, so that it appears as a real face, and not just a profile. When you have finished, go back to the tree, and visualize it as a free-​standing object without reference to the face. When you have both images firmly fixed in your mind, just hold them in suspension and keep shifting your attention from one to the other: tree/​face, face/​tree, tree/​face, and so on. That is what we call a tabapot. Man is a tabapot. For you

see the human being is encased within the boundaries of their own body, but they want what is outside of their own body. But when they get what is outside of their own body, they want to be encased back in the body again.” wagner, The Logic of Invention, 1

∵

Contents  List of Figures ix 1  Introduction 1 1  The Idea behind This Book 1 2  Mapping the Issues 9 3  Brief Outline of the Book’s Chapters and Their Sources 16 4  A Note on Style, Translations, and Conventions 19 2  Dionysus in Greece 21 1  Untamed Life 22 2  An Olympian God? 25 3  The Unity of the Living 28 4  An Integrative God 32 5  Dionysus and Ontology 34 3  The Greek Apollo 39 1  Apollo’s Gaze 40 2  Apollo’s Distance 42 3  Apollo’s Arrows 49 4  Apollo and the Birth of Philosophy 53 5  Apollo, Dionysus, and the Earth 56 4  The Modern Misadventures of Apollo and Dionysus 59 1  Achilles and Odysseus 60 2  Nietzsche’s Dionysian Philosophy 62 3  Dionysus’s Maelstrom 69 4  Winckelmann’s Apollo 75 5  A Queer Ideal? 80 6  Dionysus’s Bequest 84 5  Thinking with Apollo 88 1  Apollo’s Marble 90 2  Apollo’s Stereogram 93 3  Apollo’s Screen 98 4  Apollo’s Blackout 101 5  Apollo’s Silence 102 6  Worlding(s): the Earth’s Reflexivity 107

viii Contents 6  Dancing with Dionysus 121 1  Our Living Body 123 2  The Purpose of Dancing 127 3  Artaud and Hijikata 131 4  Butō: Animism redux 134 5  Intersections 139 6  A Twofold Legacy 142 7  Back to Structuralism? 151 1  Structuralism as a Philosophy of Difference 152 2  The Post-​structuralist Waterline 157 3  Ontological Pluralism and the Neo-​structuralist Worlding Star 160 8  Conclusion: Post-​metaphysics and Its Doubles 169 1  On Post-​nihilism and the Subject/​Object Divide 169 2  Destiny and the Otherwise 176 3  Dionysus and Apollo, Twins 182 4  À rebours 184  Appendix 1: Development of the Ontological Pentagram 191  Appendix 2: Development of the Modal Pentagram 195  Bibliography 200  Author Index 240  Subject Index 248

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Figures 1  Our un-​world’s two poles 10 2  Cosmopolitics, ontology, and modality 10 3  Two re-​worlding pentagrams 11 4  Sensing and thinking, Dionysus and Apollo 13 5  The post-​nihilist arrow turned spiral 17 6  A post-​nihilist tipi 17 7  Dionysus’s hare (Athenian black-​figure clay vase, De Ridder.222, French National Library) 31 8  Dionysus, by Olha Liubokhynets 57 9  Apollo, by Olha Liubokhynets 57 10  The earth’s semiotic prism 94 11  Mirroring quaternities 116 12  Heidegger’s “Fourfold” reinterpreted 119 13  Cicada metamorphosing (image courtesy of Imre Thormann) 136 14  Structural formula 154 15  Structuralism’s two scalar versions 162 16  Worlding star 167 17  Permutations of the worlding star 168 18  The “Fourfold” as an abstract machine 175

­c hapter 1

Introduction [C]‌oncepts need conceptual personae that play a part in their definition. deleuze and guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 2

…

[A]‌question cannot be properly formulated but retrospectively, by examining the misunderstandings raised among its inevitably heterogeneous responses. maniglier, La Vie énigmatique des signes, 4501

∵

1

The Idea behind This Book

It is urgent to imagine new ways of worlding the un-​world into which we have turned the earth. Yet, this awareness can neither be reduced to the ecstatic assumption of our “being-​there,”2 nor can it be outflanked by the cosmopolitical pragmatics of a recovered “being-​with.”3 A supplementary theoretical gesture is needed: one that, while being supportive of regained situatedness and transversality, proves capable of overcoming today’s logics of contingency. For it is not enough to denounce the “conscription”4 and “liquidation of the real”5 provoked by what Heidegger famously called the modern Ge-​stell –​i.e., the instrumental “framing” and subsequent reduction of everything to its availability6 –​and to oppose to it the view that, delivered from our will to 1 Our translation. Maniglier draws here on Althusser’s approach to knowledge in For Marx and Reading Capital, but the idea is already in Bachelard’s The New Scientific Spirit and The Philosophy of No. 2 Pace Heidegger, especially the early Heidegger of Being and Time (=​ ga 1). 3 Pace Haraway in her otherwise excellent Staying with the Trouble. 4 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 26–​7, 29–​30, 38, 55 (=​ga 79: 27–​8, 30–​31, 45, 63). 5 Polt, “Eidetic Eros and the Liquidation of the Real.” 6 On which see again Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 1–​73 (=​ ga 79: 1–​77).

© Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004538597_002

2

Chapter 1

control it, reality consists in an unpredictable “drift.”7 Recalling reality’s free self-​motion is fundamental in our epoch, or rather counter-​fundamental, and hence necessary against any fundamentalist claim. Does this require, however, that we forget about reality’s free, yet regular, autopoiesis, which stands as the premise of our knowledge of and our care for it?8 The relation between being and thought –​and, with it, the very possibility of an onto-​logy –​is, moreover, affected by all this, insofar as the difference between what things are and how we represent them is in turn. On the eve of modernity (a few years before Descartes’s birth) Montaigne suspected, though, that, by looking too narrowly into our own ontology, we would end up overlooking at once our Greek past and our extramodern outside.9 While philosophy was for Montaigne a privileged tool to access the former, comparative anthropology (which had not yet established itself as a science) was a perfect window to look into the latter. Like Montaigne, we are persuaded that cultivating both might help us to position ourselves otherwise amid reality. Accordingly, this book asks whether merging philosophy and anthropology around issues of differential but translatable ontologies10 may give us an chance to re-​become earthbound dwellers in a re-​worlded earth instead of worldless wanderers over a ruined planet.11 It does so with the help of two “conceptual personae,”12 Dionysus and Apollo, whose original meaning it reassesses and whose modern misadventures it examines. It argues that Dionysus and Apollo are the twin conceptual personae of life’s dual rhythm, as 7 Szerszynski, “Drift as a planetary phenomenon.” 8 Gevorkyan and Segovia, “Post-​Heideggerian Drifts,” 13–​16. 9 Montaigne, Complete Essays, 150–​159. As Pierre Charbonier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish write, “presumption has been taken so far that conceiving peoples as extramodern is taken for their exclusion from the modern, rather than an acknowledgment of their specificity and difference”; yet, they go on to say, “Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro have together altered, perhaps for a long time to come, the situation. You want to think modernity? You had better start from the outside” (Charbonier, Salmon, and Skafish, “Introduction,” 1). We ask the reader to bear this nuance in mind in what follows. 10 Cf. Reddekop, “Thinking Across Worlds.” 11 Since Westerners must think of themselves, to paraphrase Robert Mugerauer, as “homeless wanderers, […] as ‘thinkers’ who only reckon and calculate for use (understood metaphysically as consumption and mastery), but also as those who might at least have the possibility opened to pass beyond drifting and to build a home outside the scaffolding thrown up by a completed metaphysics” (Heidegger and Homecoming, 169). The expression “ruined planet” is intended to evoke Tsing, Swanson, Gan, and Bubandt, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. In turn, the term “earthbound dwellers” is a wink to Latour’s “Terrans,” on which see Latour, Facing Gaia and, more recently, Down to Earth. 12 The expression is Deleuze and Guattari’s in What Is Philosophy? (2, 4–​5, 7, 10, 24, 40, 48, 61–​84, 92, 102, 110, 128, 13, 133, 177, 197, 211, 216, 217).

Introduction

3

well as two polyvalent concepts which must be perceived, felt, and thought13 in their reciprocity in order to find a way out of nihilism, which we are willing to define in turn as the overshadowing of the earth’s unconstrained cum meaningful autopoiesis. These two concepts are polyvalent because they can be rendered variously, e.g., as “elicitation” and “containment” (Wagner),14 “generation” and “preservation” (Heidegger),15 “exposure” and “attunement” (Ingold);16 or, somewhat more superficially albeit not less adroitly, “disorder” and “order” (Guattari);17 or, to evoke yet a few other possible conceptual figures for them, “trickster” and “demiurge,” “Coyote” and “Lynx” (Lévi-​Strauss).18 Hence, this book dares to put a post-​Nietzschean philosophy of mythology –​post-​Nietzschean because it departs from Nietzsche’s own use of the Dionysian and the Apollonian –​at the service of a post-​nihilist “futurability” (to borrow freely from Berardi’s composite neologism).19 It does so in an attempt to redesign the chessboard on which today’s philosophy is played, as it questions the stress commonly (if differently) put on Dionysus at the expense of Apollo in contemporary theory (read: in Post-​Structuralism, New Materialism, and Speculative Realism). For it might be, this book contends, that Apollo and Dionysus are nothing more than two metaphors for our obliterated dialectic ability to disappear into the domain of pure possibilities in order to reappear into that of their vectorised determinations, i.e., two metaphors for the “figure-​ ground reversal” (Roy Wagner) in which life ultimately consists. It may well be, therefore, that, in the end, Dionysus and Apollo are best grasped as tropes for our ability to sense –​or, as we shall later argue, dance –​and think, respectively. Similarly, drawing on the “teachings” of Castaneda’s Don Juan,20 Roy Wagner speaks of a “first” and a “second attention” “locked into a mutual dependency with one another.”21 With the “first attention,” he says, we “pick out” the forms and “figures” (people, places, things) which allow us to “look” at and “think” reality.22 Conversely, with the “second attention” we “feel” their 13

Cf. ibid., 131: “conceptual personae are philosophical sensibilia, […] through them concepts are not only thought but perceived and felt.” 14 On which see, e.g., Wagner, Asiwinarong, passim; An Anthropology of the Subject, 31–​47. 15 Heidegger, Being and Truth, 74 (=​ga 36/​37: 93). 16 Ingold, The Life of Lines, 141. 17 Guattari, Qu’est-​ce que l’écosophie, 105. 18 Lévi-​Strauss, The Story of Lynx, 49. 19 Which results from superimposing the terms “future” and “possibility.” See further Berardi, Futurability. 20 Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan, on whose otherwise irrelevant apocryphal nature see Shelburne, “Carlos Castaneda: If It Didn’t Happen, What Does It Matter?” 21 Wagner, Coyote Anthropology, 10. 22 Ibid., 14.

4

Chapter 1

“background.”23 “Second-​attention,” Wagner adds, “is our ‘dream’ of the world and our bodies use this feeling of the world to move with.”24 While these two “attentions” oppose one another, they also change into one another, so that, “[c]‌aught in a play of light and shadow between one extreme and the other”25 our perception of reality oscillates between two dimensions which shift into each other in a permanent “figure-​ground reversal,”26 that is, in a constant “reciprocity of perspectives.”27 It is in this way, too, that we picture Dionysus and Apollo.

…

Dionysus and Apollo shared one sanctuary: Delphi, located on a ridge of the Parnassus mountains, overlooking the Valley of Phokis and the surrounding hills, near the town of Crissa north of the Gulf of Corinth, in today’s region of Sterea or Central Greece. Dionysus was worshiped there in the winter, whereas Apollo returned to Delphi every spring. Plutarch suggests that the two gods were actually one: a single god with two names, with Dionysus symbolising nature’s becoming and Apollo symbolising being28 –​and both, then, symbolising life’s dual rhythm. For, in Greek, “life” is said in two different but complementary ways: as ζωή and βίος. The former (ζωή) is pre-​individual: it names the anonymous and impersonal “life” that lives in everything, which goes on taking new forms unceasingly; the latter (βίος) is individual instead: it is this particular “life form” as well as that particular “life form” –​hence, it is all possible “life forms” (βίοι). In short, while Dionysus symbolised ζωή,29 Apollo symbolised βίος, i.e., the shining forth of X, Y, and Z as such. Dionysus, the masked god, was a compassionate god who communicated the earth’s delivering truth to those willing to learn it: the truth that life qua ζωή is immortal. This, however, did not imply that life’s finite, concrete forms were deemed unreal by the Ancient Greeks, as the shining forth of something as some-​thing was for them life’s purpose rather than a deceiving illusion. At most, Dionysus could help to moderate excessive pride, which explains his occasionally burlesque features. Falling back into darkness and oblivion 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., x. 26 Ibid., 14. 27 Wagner, The Logic of Invention, esp. 1–​18. 28 Plutarch, Moralia, 388e–​389b, 392e–​393d. 29 Cf. Taunton, Nietzsche, The Antichrist and the Antipolitical, 52.

5

Introduction

after being alive was for the Ancient Greeks a terrible thing for which there was no remedy: one had to cope with it. Yet, at the same time, one should not forget that life continues, that new living forms shine forth from the depth of the earth when others relapse into it, and that the impersonal life that nurtures all living things takes new forms –​like the wind blows through Dionysus’s instrument: the flute, and like the sap runs through the leaves of the vine: Dionysus’s plant. Now, while Dionysus’s mission was to enforce life’s oneness and continuity beneath the spatial and temporal discreteness of all living forms, Apollo’s task was to prevent these from clinging to their being and deprive others from the right to shine forth. In consequence, Apollo’s loftiness symbolises compassion too, but in the form of justice. In fact, Apollo’s name derives, quite possibly, from that of the Dorian assembly, the ἀπέλλα (“boundless” in the sense of “lacking” [ἀ-​] any delimiting “stones” [-​πέλλα] around it),30 in allusion to the empty space at the heart of the Spartan polis where the assembly gathered –​a symbol of political freedom and justice against any concentration of power. By means of his all-​encompassing vision, on the one hand, and his fairness, on the other hand, Apollo –​like the sun –​brings all beings evenly into what Heidegger calls their “unconcealed standing-​there,”31 allowing them to acquire their distinct features, forcing them to assume their limits, and targeting them with his arrows if they do not show mutual esteem. In this sense, it can be argued, Apollo worlds the earth, thereby delimiting ζωή in one way or another –​indeed in multiple ways. In other words, then, Apollo and Dionysus protect life’s rhythm, yet they do so in two different ways. Their dual affirmation is distinctive of Ancient Greek culture, and it is also the distinctive assumption on which the present essay builds. Therefore, earth and world –​to go back to our opening conceptual pair –​can be said to encode, though not to exhaust, the meaning of Dionysus and Apollo. The following thematic hallmarks can be associated with them, as well: Dionysus

Apollo

Chaos Limitlessness Possibility

Cosmos Limitation Compossibility

30 Burkert, “Apellai und Apollon.” 31 Heidegger, Heraclitus, 14 (=​ga 55: 16).

6

Chapter 1

Dionysus

Apollo

Emergence Becoming Transformation Darkness Reality Body Allowance

Shape Being Stability Light Symbolicity Language Care

For their part, One and Multiple, Identity and Difference, Sameness and Otherness, can be seen as intersectional hallmarks variously shared by the two gods.32 Another way to put this is to say that Apollo cuts Dionysus’s continuum, which Dionysus restores despite Apollo’s cuts.33 Were it not for Apollo, nothing definite would begin; were it not for Dionysus, things would not be in position to begin otherwise. Drawing on Nietzsche, Derrida points to it when he states: “The divergence, the difference between Dionysus and Apollo, between ardor and structure, cannot be erased in history, for it is not in history. It too, in an unexpected sense, is an original structure: the opening of history, historicity itself.”34 Dionysus and Apollo function as twins in a way akin, then, to that in which twins correlate in extramodern mythologies, as studied by Lévi-​Strauss in the American continent.35 Put otherwise, theirs is –​against the Western tendency

32

Dionysus symbolises life’s unity, but hence, too, its multiple possibilities before they come to be actualised; once actualised, Apollo confers on each its own differential unity, but at the same time embraces them all. 33 Cf. the notions of “flows” and “cuts” in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus, passim; and those of “territorialisation” and “deterritorialisation” in ibid. and A Thousand Plateaus. Cf. too Plato’s dialectics of the limited and the unlimited as examined in Krämer, Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics. 34 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 34 (emphasis original). Cf. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 108 (“The Birth of Tragedy,” §1): “history itself [is] the development of this idea,” i.e., “the opposition between Dionysian and Apollonian.” See, however, our critique of Derrida in Chapter 7. 35 See Lévi-​Strauss, The Story of Lynx, but also Myth and Meaning, 11–​14. Cf. Wagner’s references (in The Logic of Invention, 64–​5, 84–​7) to Afek and Boben among the Ok People of Papua New Guinea.

Introduction

7

to either over-​stress or downplay the differences between mythical twins36 –​ a “dynamic disequilibrium,”37 to use Lévi-​Strauss’s words, that witnesses to the scattered continuity of an old Indo-​European motif.38 Based on the idea of “a relationship of simultaneous interdependence and contradiction”39 between two terms –​which is the very premise of Structuralism40 –​such “dynamic disequilibrium” can, moreover, be employed to explain the dialectics of “invention” and “convention” in any given culture.41 The idea of a 36

“The Old World favors extreme solutions in response to the problem of twinness: its twins are either antithetical or identical. The New World prefers intermediate forms that were known as well by the Ancient Greeks and Romans: the way Plato tells it ([in the] Protagoras […]), the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus could have been Brazilian! However, it does appear that in the mythology of the Old World this formula yielded, so to speak, a small return, while in the mythology of the New World it constitutes a sort of seminal cell” (Lévi-​Strauss, The Story of Lynx, 227). 37 The expression is Lévi-​Strauss’s (ibid., 83, 256, 258). 38 Consider, e.g., the Proto-​ Indo-​ European creation myth reported by Mallory and Adams: “Although the various Indo-​European groups exhibit different creation myths, there appear to be elements of a Proto-​Indo-​European creation myth preserved either explicitly or as much altered resonances in the traditions of the Celts, Germans, Slavs, Iranians, and Indo-​Aryans. These traditions all indicate a proto-​myth whereby the universe is created from a primeval giant –​either a cow such as the Norse Ymir or a ‘man’ such as the Vedic Puruṣa –​who is sacrificed and dismembered, the various parts of his anatomy serving to provide a different element of nature. The usual associations are that his flesh becomes the earth, his hair grass, his bone yields stone, his blood water, his eyes the sun, his mind the moon, his brain the clouds, his breath the wind, and his head becomes the heavens. This body not only fills out the material world but the dismemberment also provides the social tiers with the head associated with the First (ruling) Function, the arms being equivalent with the warrior function, and the lower torso, with its sexual organs, the fertility function. As to the identity of the sacrificer we have hints in a related sacrifice that serves as the foundation myth for the Indo-​Iranians, Germans, and Romans (with a possible resonance in Celtic). Here we find two beings, twins, one known as ‘Man’ (with a lexical cognate between Germanic Mannus and S[ans]k[ri]t Manu) and his ‘Twin’ (Germanic Twisto, Skt Yama with a possible Latin cognate if Remus, the brother of Romulus, is derived from *Yemonos ‘twin’). In this myth ‘Man’, the ancestor of humankind, sacrifices his ‘Twin.’ The two myths, creation and foundation of a people, find a lexical overlap in the Norse myth where the giant Ymir is cognate with Skt Yama and means ‘Twin’” (The Oxford Introduction to Proto-​Indo-​European and the Proto-​Indo-​European World, 435). Cf. Lévi-​Strauss, The Story of Lynx, 231: “Even though the Indo-​Europeans held an archaic notion of twinness that was close to that of the Amerindians, they gradually discarded it. In contrast to the Indians and as Dumézil would have said, ‘they did not draw an explanation of the world from it.’” Dumézil’s quotation is from Heur et malheur du guerrier, 188. 39 Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 52. 40 See Chapter 7. 41 Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 52.

8

Chapter 1

“dynamic disequilibrium” can be also said to inform the non-​linear thinking of Heraclitus.42 Yet, one finds it too, via Heraclitus (in contrast to the “‘linear’ logic” of Hegelian dialectics),43 in Hölderlin’s Essays towards a Theory of the Tragic;44 just as one finds it via Hölderlin, a few years after the publication of Being and Time, in Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art, where the conceptual pair “earth” and “world” makes its Heideggerian debut.45 “Earth” and “world,” writes Heidegger, do not form “an empty unity [leeren Einheit] of opposites unconcerned with one another;”46 nor is their “strife” (Streit) a “rift” (Riß) of mutually exclusive opposites, he goes on to say, but a relation of belligerent “intimacy” (Innigkeit).47 For, Heidegger adds, “[w]‌orld is grounded [gründet] on earth, and earth rises [ragt] up through world,”48 so that it is “[i]n its resting upon [the] earth [that] the world strives to surmount it.”49 Heidegger’s reasoning proves chiastic at this point: instead of an “empty unity,” the relation between “earth” and “world” is “strife”; instead of a “rift,” it is “intimacy”; and while the earth “raises up through world,” the latter “strives to surmount” the former by simultaneously resting on it. Compare with Heraclitus, dk B51: “οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόμενον ἑωυτῷ ὁμολογέει· παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης” (“they do not understand that what diverges coincides: bent-​back attunement, like that of the bow and the lyre”).50 The formula is patent: convergence ↔︎ divergence.

42 43

Cf. Wagner’s allusion to Heraclitus in Coyote Anthropology, 5. Ibid. A logic that is also that of the modern myth of a transition from “nature” to “culture,” on which see Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 95–​111. Cf. Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture. 44 Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles, 139–​60. 45 See further Heidegger’s references to Hölderlin in Heraclitus, 25 (=​ga 55: 31) and to Heraclitus in Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” 111 (=​ga 39: 123), as well as our own remarks on Heraclitus (and Creuzer) in Chapter 7, n.7. The reciprocity of “earth” and “world” is also a key theme in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (316, 325 [=​ga 65: 410]) in connection to the possibility of overcoming nihilism. 46 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 26 (=​ga 5: 35). 47 Ibid., 38 (51). 48 Ibid., 26 (35). 49 Ibid., 24 (32). 50 Our translation. Cf. the wording in Heraclitus, dk B54: “ἁρμονίη ἁφανὴς” (“unapparent harmony”).

Introduction

2

9

Mapping the Issues

Why is all this relevant to contemporary philosophy? More precisely, which are the specific issues it can help redefine and how do we approach them in this book? Such issues can be grouped into five thematic nodes. 1. Our un-​world’s two poles. –​“Worldlessness” (Weltlosigkeit) and “wonderlessness” (Entzauberung) go hand in hand.51 They form the two poles of today’s un-​world. The nature of such poles can be easily deduced from Heidegger’s critique of modernity and from Guattari’s critique of semiotic capitalism, respectively. On the one hand, a framing pole52 which conscripts all things and places them at the ready to be appropriated, investigated, classified, manipulated, modified, exchanged, destroyed, and replaced when needed. On the other hand, an exchanging pole which puts all things on a single “plane of equivalence”53 to make them exchangeable on behalf of their radical contingency.54 The image below (Figure 1) displays both poles, connected by a line. 2. Cosmopolitics, ontology, and modality. –​Against the self-​complacent view that we should either enjoy our worldless condition55 or resign to it,56 several contemporary authors tend to emphasise the need we have to re-​assess and

51

On the term Weltlosigkeit, see Heidegger’s Introduction to Philosophy (=​ ga 50: 105, 114–​16, 127), where it relates to the “objectivation” (Vergegenständlichung) of reality, as well as Heidegger’s 1967 letter to Medard Boss (reproduced in ga 89: 350–​1), where it describes the nature of that which is merely “present-​at-​hand” (vorhanden). In turn, the term Entzauberung –​which was famously coined by Max Weber in 1917 (after Tolstoy) in a lecture at Munich University titled “Science as Vocation” (Weber, The Vocation Lectures, 13, 30) –​figures in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (=​ ga 65: 107) in connection to the “bewilderment” (Verzauberung) provoked by modern technology, whose “machination” (Machenschaft), according to Heidegger, makes everything stand in a “permanent presence” (bestandige Anwesenheit). 52 Cf. Heidegger’s notion of Ge-​stell in ga 7: 7–​36; ga 79: 5–​77. 53 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 28. 54 “Contingency” is, as a category, gaining rapid relevance in the contemporary philosophical arena (see, e.g., Meillassoux, After Finitude; Mackay [ed.], The Medium of Contingency). In “Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy” we offer an extensive criticism of this phenomenon in conversation with Hilan Bensusan’s claim (in Being Up for Grabs, 16) that the issue is “not to state the sovereignty of contingency […] but rather to spell out the details that make possible its governance,” insofar as contingency “is not the upper hand, but […] a primary component of what there is.” Furthermore, we argue, contemporary natural science, from Haskell’s network biology to Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis and Deacon’s teleo-​dynamics, shows that it is not even its sole primary component. 55 Végsö, Worldlessness after Heidegger. 56 Morton, Dark Ecology.

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­f igure 2  Cosmopolitics, ontology, and modality

­f igure 1  Our un-​world’s two poles

re-​negotiate our role in a reality that refuses from any exclusive and exclusionist centredness.57 It is clear, though, that cosmopolitics (which asks questions about what things, ideas, and practices fit within the same world and which ones do not) is not enough: in order to (variously) re-​world the earth we need to think afresh modality (which asks what modes and thereby models of compatibility may need to be considered in each case) and, first of all, ontology (which asks, in turn, what things are). The image above (Figure 2) adds to the previous one: it displays three horizontal regions, one for each of such “disciplines.” 3. Combining Heidegger with Lévi-​Strauss. –​To undertake such modal and ontological exploration we oppose two figures to the two aforementioned un-​worlding poles. Each figure has the form of a pentagram. A thorough presentation of their contents –​which we renounce to include here so as not to overcharge this Introduction with further tree-​like elaborations –​will be found in the two appendixes included at the end of the book. The first pentagram (Figure 3) unfolds and refolds certain aspects of Heidegger’s late philosophy, a number of whose concepts we propose to place in a broader web of problems and ideas. The second pentagram (Figure 3) unfolds and refolds, in turn, certain aspects of Lévi-​Strauss’s structural anthropology. The number of aspects thus developed is ten: five and five, respectively. This is the reason why we have chosen two pentagrams to symbolise those developments. Given that pentagrams have oftentimes been used as talismans, their imagery is particularly

57

See, e.g., Stengers, Cosmopolitics ii; Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth; Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; Povinelli, Geontologies; as well as Yavena and Zaera-​Polo (eds.), What Is Cosmopolitical Design?; Blok and Farías (eds.), Urban Cosmopolitics; Gevorkyan and Segovia (eds.), From Worlds of Possibles to Possible Worlds.

11

Introduction

­f igure 3  Two re-​worlding pentagrams

apropos here, as, in a manner of speaking, they are the talismans we need to counter the “worldlessness” and “wonderlesness” of today’s un-​world. Briefly put, the first pentagram includes these five ideas: ( ) That, at the heart of the modern Ge-​stell, a twofold blackout occurs, namely, of the earth’s autopoiesis (φύσις) and of the sheltering of its shining forth by the human λόγος, hence an onto-​logical blackout; as a result, the “earth’s song”58 can no longer be heard by us. ( ) That only a renewed sensibility towards the earth’s autopoiesis, plus the acknowledgement of our role as the poetic carers of its unconstrained shining forth –​and, therefore, an ontology and a poetics of dwelling –​can help us to re-​cover our earthboundness. ( ) That for such poetics to be in place we first need to re-​assume our mortal condition, not to make of our finitude an end in itself but to enable ourselves to pay homage to life’s immortal forces and to make of what dies something susceptible of being remembered despite all. ( ) That, accordingly, we are not merely part of the earth’s flesh, but also capable of producing meaning and, thereby, of securing things against their inevitable destruction by means of extracting an intelligible supplement from their sheer materiality. ( ) Lastly, that Heidegger’s “Fourfold” supplies the minimal structure needed for making the “earth’s song” audible again. In turn, the second pentagram includes these five ideas: ( ) That, just as the movement of the universe is not only rotary but alternating, so, too, binary cum chiastic arrangements accompany the emergence of biological life and shape the major reference systems in the elaboration of human material culture, social organisation, and thought. ( ) That, as Lévi-​Strauss contends, although difference has primacy over resemblance in both biology and culture, this does not require to privilege contingency as the basic law of reality, since, here and there, difference is often synonym with coupled, if asymmetrical, identity. ( ) That, likewise, analogy and translatability, which posit resemblance without 58

The expression is Heidegger’s in Heraclitus, 189 (=​ga 55: 247).

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suppressing difference, are essential cognitive tools for the study of any parcel of reality, including the different worlding processes which confer meaning on the earth’s autopoiesis across different human cultures. ( ) That Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” if it is reinterpreted as the reciprocal articulation of the real, the possible, the given, and the giving, supplies an interesting model thereof, i.e., a model for the study of different but translatable ontologies. ( ) Lastly, that to speak of translatable ontologies requires to speak of translatable epistemologies, inasmuch as any ontology reflects a particular modality of semiotising the earth, of turning it meaningful, and of knowing it. 4. Dancing and thinking. Our own biological constitution evinces the iteration of binary patterns. As Camille Paglia writes drawing on Paul MacLean’s “triune” brain model, “[t]‌he quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and [our] older limbic and reptilian brains.”59 The latter two regulate our body’s vital functions and make us feel sensuously and emotionally connected to –​hence in continuity with –​what there is. Conversely, our frontal cortex is responsible for our cognition, which inevitably introduces a distance between ourselves and reality. We are back here into Roy Wagner’s “first” and “second” attentions. “Sensing” and “thinking” could thus work as Dionysus’s and Apollo’s names, respectively. We will later nuance this division by arguing that the body thinks, and that thought itself is sensible. In any event, though, this means that Dionysus and Apollo are part of us. Accordingly, they are also part of our everyday experience –​or, to put it more forcefully: we are them. Assuredly, “Dionysus” is not the earth as such, but a word for it: a name we give to the earth understood as a collection of infinite possibilities. Similarly, “Apollo” is not the world as such, but, again, a word for what any world is, to wit, a distribution of actual determinations. The tension we all experience between what we can do and be, and what we do and are, brings to the fore the interdependency of the two gods in our daily acquaintance with reality –​or, rather, the interdependency of what they symbolise. Hence, potentiality and actuality could well function as alternative names for them. An excellent way of exploring this sensing⎮thinking binary consists in examining two particular practices which are represented in the image below (Figure 4) by two symmetrically opposed triangles: (1) dancing, when it entails the exploration of the body as a collection of sensations, our corporeal imagination, and the unconscious, as it happens in butō dance; and (2) thinking. For, not in vain, whereas Apollo’s chariot runs through the sky shedding light upon 59 Paglia, Sexual Personae, 96. Cf. McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary.

13

Introduction

­f igure 4  Sensing and thinking, Dionysus and Apollo

an otherwise undisclosed earth60 –​the same light of which, born from Zeus’s forehead, Athena is the consciousness –​Dionysus is born (for the second time) from Zeus’s leg. These two practices, we further argue, gain importance against the backdrop of the modern forgetting of both earth and world. 5. Reimagining today’s philosophical chessboard. The problem of our times is twofold: material and immaterial. On the one hand, we inhabit an un-​world nurtured by our own ὕβρις –​made, as Donna Haraway observed in 1997, of transuranic elements, i.e., chemical elements with atomic numbers greater than 92, which is the atomic number of “the naturally occurring earthly element […] where the evolution of the elements that make up the solar system stopped.”61 On the other hand, this material surplus parallels a sort of mental scarcity, as Roy Wagner suggests: Nothing is more symptomatic of the intellectual stagnation of our times than the chains of unicausal implication that dominate everything from cosmology’s “big bang” theory to evolutionary biology’s commitment to individual lines of species descent. There can be no doubt that the culprit, the illusion of linear causality, is part of a general consensual pattern –​perhaps a kind of folklore –​linked to family trees, individual genealogies, chains of command, organizational tree-​diagrams, etc., none of which have any counterpart in reality.62 By definition, “unicausality” carries with it a Subject’s mark, i.e., the footprint, as it were, of a protagonist (a certain One =​1). However, when that Subject is turned inside out, or upside down, 0 substitutes for 1 –​that is to say, “unicausality” becomes negative causality: the Subject is erased and an Abyss is put in its place. “In far too much continental philosophy,” writes, e.g., Ben Woodard, “the Earth is a cold dead place enlivened only by human thought –​either as a thing to be exploited, or as an object of [romantic] nostalgia”63 which can 60 Γαῖα μέλαινα (“black earth”), in Hesiod’s words (Theogony, v. 69). 61 Haraway, Modest−Witness@Second−Millennium.FemaleMan−Meets−OncoMouse, 54. 62 Wagner, The Logic of Invention, 59. 63 Woodard, On an Ungrounded Earth, 2.

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take various forms: “world” (Kant),64 “openness” (Heidegger),65 or even “geosomatism” (Deleuze and Guattari).66 From this subtractive perspective, which celebrates reality’s alleged abyssal qualities, to think about something is what matters, not the way in which thinking itself occurs.67 Yet, Woodard and, more broadly, today’s “Speculative Realists,”68 circumvallate this objection somewhat dismissively: the choice between “exploitative capitalist Cartesianism” and any other imaginable pretension to confer meaning on what, fοr his part, Meillassoux labels and defends as a “glacial” reality,69 is redundant in their view: a “false choice.”70 Considered noumenically, they suggest, the earth is but obscure matter –​pure Object or abyssal Subject.71 Even those philosophies, like New Materialism, that wish to overcome the Subject/​Object divide on behalf of new, extensive horizontal connections –​and of a flat ontology capable of assuring these72 –​tend, willingly or not, to recreate one of such terms. For connectiveness (was not that La Mettrie’s thesis?) is a distinctive trait of the res extensa –​and, therefore, of the Object as such. Subject/​Object. Could this be, we feel inclined to ask, nihilism’s Janus or double-​faced head? For nihilism is not only a suitable word to describe the lack of (moral) values, as per the term’s meaning in 19th-​century Russian literature;73 or the resentment behind ascetic ideals, as Deleuze proposes.74 It is perhaps, above all, a fitting word to name three related things: our lack of awareness before life’s tragic aspect, our lack of awe before what is, and our lack of care for it. For we fancy that things are there at the ready for us,

64 Ibid., 9. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 5–​6. 67 Is dedicating, say, a musical piece like Schumann’s Forest Scenes, Op. 82, no. 3 to the lonely flowers of the forest, the same as deforesting the latter to extract fuel from it? We seem to have reached the point in which, to some contemporary philosophers and cultural critics, both things amount to the same. 68 On which see Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, (eds.), The Speculative Turn, as well as Harman, Speculative Realism. See also our critique of Graham Harman’s “object-​oriented ontology” and Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” in Chapter 8. 69 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 115. 70 Ibid. 71 Thus, e.g., Iain Hamilton Grant’s return to Schelling’s Ungrund in Philosophies of Nature after Schelling. Reza Negarestani’s Lovecraftism in “The Corpse Bride,” “Undercover Softness,” and elsewhere, shares a similar premise. 72 On which see the studies collected in Coole and Frost (eds.), New Materialisms. 73 Where it is synonym with “anarchism”; see Hatab, “Nietzsche, Nihilism and Meaning.” 74 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 34. For a discussion of other contemporary interpretations of nihilism, see Chapter 8.

Introduction

15

that they just pass away, and that we, too, vanish sooner or later. In this, again, we have un-​become extramoderns as much as we have un-​become Ancient Greeks. Conversely, the Warlpiri envisage themselves as “those who care for” (kirda, kurdungurlu) the ecosystem they live in (alongside other beings they do not deem to be inferior to them), to whose immanent but ever-​living principles they pay homage by recreating (singing, painting) their “stories” (tjkurrpa, lit. “dreaming[s]‌”).75 In turn, the Ancient Greeks thought that mortals are driven by θαῦμα (“wonder,” but also “dread”)76 to safeguard things, which otherwise dissolve inside the “circle of becoming,”77 and that to think them amounts to celebrate their being.78 Nihilism proves to be a suitable word, then, for what Heidegger calls, after Heraclitus, the “disempowerment of φύσις”79 –​ and, we dare add, of the λόγος capable of singing back to it. Yet, nihilism also proves to be an appropriate word for what Severino calls, after Parmenides, the forgetting of the “dimensional” difference that there is between being and becoming.80 On this basis, to overcome nihilism –​which is a distinct, albeit distant, possibility –​implies, we argue in this book, to affirm both being and becoming, as well as to recover the aforementioned unity of φύσις and λόγος. Their 75 Glowczewski, Du rêve à la loi chez les aborigènes, 28. See also Poirier, A World of Relations. 76 Severino, “Thaûma.” Cf. Aristotle’s comment in Metaphysics, A 2, 982b on what drives one to study philosophy. 77 Severino, Dike, 22. 78 Parmenides, dk B3. 79 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 91 (=​ga 65: 115; emphasis original). 80 Severino, The Essence of Nihilism, 35–​49, esp. 46: “[T]‌his green color of the plant outside my window is Being, and insofar as it is Being it is immutable, eternal (there is no time when it was-​not or will not-​be),” in the sense that, by being, it manages to make it through the dark screen of non-​being. “But then, this ‘same’ green color was born just now, when the sun began to illuminate the plant; and now, when I have moved my head and see it in a different perspective, it is already vanished. This ‘same’ color (like the countless events that make up our experience) is therefore immutable, insofar as it is Being, and is manifest as coming-​to-​be. This means that the ‘same’ (this color) differentiates itself; i.e., that qua immutable it constitutes itself as and in a different dimension from itself qua coming-​ to-​be” (emphasis original). Cf. Heraclitus dk B16 (with its allusion to “that which never sets”) and B30 (with its straightforward reference to reality’s underlying “ever-​living fire”), and Parmenides dk B4 (with its warning “not to separate” being from its own source, hence “being from being”) and B8 (with its definition of being as that which is “one,” “now,” “complete,” “continuous,” etc.). As we argue elsewhere (Segovia, “Fire in Three Images, from Heraclitus to the Anthropocene,” 501–​6), it is somewhat difficult, though, to understand the “dimensional difference” mentioned by Severino in the absence of a linguistic distinction similar to that which the Ancient Greeks made between χρόνος and αἰών as two diverging, but intertwined, temporalities; a linguistic distinction that runs parallel to that which they made between the past, present, and future tenses of the verb,

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dissociation –​the dissociation of being and becoming and of φύσις and λόγος, which is, ultimately, that of Dionysus and Apollo –​has led us to the dramatic situation in which we are: an un-​worlded earth. What we are asking in this book, therefore, is what would happen if, instead of further developing any of the notions that enrich today’s philosophical lexicon (e.g., “accelerationism,” “ecohorror,” “technoanimalism,” etc.),81 we were to look back into the causes of our loss and then move forward into the Otherwise in a spiral-​wise movement (Figure 5). From the combination of the previous images, a recapitulative image (Figure 6) results. Its tipi-​shape (⩓) evokes the need we have, to quote R. Mugerauer once more, to “build a home outside the scaffolding thrown up by a completed metaphysics,”82 i.e., to lay the foundations of a habitable earth.83 3

Brief Outline of the Book’s Chapters and Their Sources

Accordingly, the argument of the book flows thus: In Chapter 2 (“Dionysus in Greece)” we analyse Dionysus’s figure in Ancient Greek culture, which was shadowed by its Roman adaptation and its Christian and modern distortions. A new Dionysus emerges through its pages, based on a cross-​reading of a number of ancient sources; classics like Walter Otto, Károly Kerényi, and B. C. Dietrich; the recent iconographic studies of Cornelia Isler-​ Kerényi; and Schelling’s philosophy of mythology. In Chapter 3 (“The Greek Apollo”) we analyse Apollo’s figure in Ancient Greek culture, three of whose distinctive features we relate to the birth of philosophy. Furthermore, we study the nature of Apollo’s oracle, Apollo’s statue in the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, and Apollo’s role in Attic tragedy in dialogue with Plutarch and other early sources, but also in conversation with the classic works of Giorgio Colli and Walter Burkert and later studies by Drew Griffith and Judith Barringer. Lastly, we asses Apollo’s relation to Dionysus and the way in which the twin gods connect to the earth.

81 82 83

on the one hand, and the aorist tense (from ἀόριστος, “without limits”) that they used to express an action as if it were occurring in the very moment in which it was being enunciated, exactly as it had occurred in the past and as it would occur again in the future when evoked. For a discussion of Plato’s εἴδη in light of these considerations, and with reference to the Yanomami notion of utupë, see Segovia, “Eἶδος⧹Utupë.” On which see Braidotti and Hlavajova (eds.), Posthuman Glossary. Supra, n.11. Cf. Deleuze’s allegorical drawing of the “Baroque house” in The Fold, 5.

17

Introduction

­f igure 5  The post-​ nihilist arrow turned spiral

­f igure 6  A post-​nihilist tipi

In Chapter 4 (“The Modern Misadventures of Apollo and Dionysus”) we survey Winckelmann’s and Nietzsche’s modern interpretations of the two gods, which, on our reading, prove, both, partial and unsatisfactory. Furthermore, we examine the transformation of Dionysus into the archetype of the modern disenchanted mentality, and that of Apollo into a para-​bourgeois emblem. The final part of the chapter is dedicated to the influence of Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy upon contemporary French thought, from Bataille to Laruelle, with Foucault and Barbara Stiegler representing the only exceptions thereof. In Chapter 5 (“Thinking with Apollo”) we distinguish between (a) the earth’s flesh qua Dionysian continuum of images, sounds, sensations, and communicative interactions and its action-​oriented type of meaning, and (b) the Apollonian domain of stereographic thought with its own type of detached, contemplative meaning, which we identify with being and explore in connection to Merleau-​Ponty’s last writings, Deleuze’s essays on film, Balthus’s paintings, and Pasolini’s cinema of poetry. We ask, too, whether meaning, in the latter sense, might be seen as the earth’s self-​reflecting mirror –​and as our own mirror for that matter, as Roy Wagner contends. Finally, we engage in a new interpretation of Heidegger’s “Fourfold” against the background of contemporary object-​oriented ethnography and in connection with current eco-​ philosophical concerns. In Chapter 6 (“Dancing with Dionysus”) we investigate our Dionysian tissue through the analysis of our living body, which, we state, is the centre of our earthly being. Re-​experiencing it, we argue, amounts to be born not twice but many times, and dance makes possible that renewed experience when it is practiced as the free exploration of movement and its transformative qualities,

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Chapter 1

i.e., as a pure becoming capable of taking us back to the earth’s flesh. Most of this chapter is thus dedicated to the study of butō dance, whose nature, sources, history, and legacy we revisit in some detail. The names of Tatsumi Hijikata, Kazuo Ōno, Yoko Ashikawa, and Min Tanaka, but also those of Jean Genet and Antonin Artaud, surface through its pages, in which we look at butō from the standpoint of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and of today’s performative arts. In Chapter 7 (“Back to Structuralism?”) we introduce Dionysus and Apollo, drawing on Roy Wagner, as the two aspects of a dual force that enables the human capacity to produce meaning and test its limits; additionally, we make of their reciprocity the key to their differential being. This takes us to vindicate Structuralism, with Patrice Maniglier, as a relational ontology of difference, and to praise in this sense Althusser’s aitiological rereading of Spinoza. Yet, it is above all Lévi-​Strauss’s structural anthropology that we propose to recover against the Post-​Structuralist, and more specifically Derridean, critique of Structuralism. Also, we maintain that Lévi-​Strauss’s transformational Structuralism –​which we compare to Michel Serres’s in dialogue with recent works by Christopher Watkin and Lucie Kim-​Chi Mercier –​may help to reinterpret Heidegger’s “Fourfold” in cross-​cultural perspective. Lastly, in Chapter 8 (“Post-​metaphysics and Its Doubles”) we attempt at putting all this together, like different pieces of a single puzzle, in reference to four overlapping theoretical discussions: on the Subject/​Object divide, nihilism, post-​metaphysics, and the Otherwise. This monograph is the result of five years of uninterrupted theoretical work. Over the past two years, we have analysed the figures of Dionysus and Apollo in an essay for Open Philosophy84 which draws on the content originally included in Chapters 2 and 3 of this book. Also, we have examined the dialectics of earth and world in another essay for Open Philosophy85 whose contents we develop in Chapter 5. In turn, the Conclusion echoes a joint essay of ours on possible worlds for the Brazilian journal Das Questões.86 Like the present book, these and other recent essays –​two on the Anthropocene87 and contemporary metaphysics88 for Cosmos and History, one on the alien for Alienocene,89 and one 84 85 86 87 88 89

Segovia, “Rethinking Dionysus and Apollo.” Gevorkyan and Segovia, “Earth and World(s).” Gevorkyan and Segovia, “From Worlds of Possibles to Possible Worlds.” Segovia, “Fire in Three Images, from Heraclitus to the Anthropocene.” Gevorkyan and Segovia, “An Anthropological and Philosophical Critique of Hilan Bensusan’s Indexicalism.” Segovia, “The Alien –​Heraclitus’s Cut.”

Introduction

19

on Guattari and Heidegger for Deleuze and Guattari Studies90 –​revolve around the notion of “post-​nihilism.” This is a notion we first coined in another essay for the journal Das Questões which discusses the premises of “object-​oriented ontology.”91 Yet, overall,92 these essays should be read less as the preparatory materials for this book –​whose draft manuscript predates most of them –​than as its tentative ramifications. 4

A Note on Style, Translations, and Conventions

The nature of this book is twofold. On the one hand, it is a philosophical essay which demands from the reader to think in new ways, and which offers the reader several concepts to do so with the purpose of delimiting and solving a series of theoretical problems. On the other hand, it is an erudite work which demands from the reader appreciation for detail and minutiae, in the conviction that it is not possible to do philosophy today while overlooking the manifold ways in which the convoluted problems that form philosophy’s soil have been approached and nuanced in the past. In terms of style, therefore, the book navigates between two waters. Yet, we hope this will prove stimulating in one way or another. The overviews preceding each chapter should help the reader get a clear picture of the book contents from the start; their style is, in turn, descriptive. As we have mentioned, our book aims at bringing together Heidegger and Lévi-​Strauss. Heidegger’s texts are well known for their conceptual complexity, linguistic difficulty, and, often too, stylistic intricacy. Therefore, whenever we quote an excerpt from them we give, together with its English translation, the reference in brackets to the German original after Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (=​ ga). Heidegger’s ga is also the edition referred by default in the footnotes when a particular Heideggerian passage is mentioned but not quoted. Conversely, of Lévi-​Strauss’s excerpts we give their English translations alone in all cases except for The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage), in whose case we additionally refer the reader to the 2008 Gallimard edition of Lévi-​ Strauss works (=​Œuvres) due to its interest and to the many problems that surrounded the translation of La Pensée sauvage into the English language.93 90 91 92 93

Segovia, “Guattari⧹Heidegger.” Gevorkyan and Segovia, “Post-​Heideggerian Drifts.” With the exception of those cited in nn. 84 and 90. On which see Keck, “Notice sur Le Totémisme aujourd’hui et La Pensée sauvage,” in Lévi-​ Strauss, Œuvres, 1799–​801.

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All other non-​originally English texts are given in their English versions except otherwise indicated, and, as a general rule, save in the case of the Pre-​Socratic fragments, of which we give the Greek original accompanied by our own translation.

­c hapter 2

Dionysus in Greece the mighty Potnia had born a strong son hippolytus, Philosophumena v, 8

∵

Overview

It is customary to approach the Greek Dionysus by paying attention, first and foremost, to the public processions and theatrical representations that took place during the god’s festivals, to the private symposia dedicated to him, and, above all, to the cultic practices of the god’s female followers, the maenads, which included frenetic running, dancing, shouting, flute and drum playing, snake handling, fire handling, fire walking, the offering of sacrifices, and perhaps too the breast-​feeding of other mammals and even omophagy. Examining the role of Dionysus at Eleusis offers a better start, though, to understand the nature of the god and his connection to the earth. In Eleusis, Dionysus manifests himself as both the younger consort and the offspring of the goddess Earth, to whose womb he leads the initiates back so that they may experience their earthboundness and realise that the impersonal life which is alive in all living beings is indestructible and, hence, the source and the end of all individuated life. Thus, Heraclitus’s identification of Dionysus with Hades, the god of the underworld. This, moreover, explains Dionysus’s non-​Olympian identity, as well as his irresistible otherness and his disquieting, yet inescapable, proximity, which his mask and frontal gaze symbolise. Dionysus, however, is also worshiped as a vine, which symbolises, in turn, the ever-​living life that springs from the earth and takes many forms; forms whose differences Dionysus does not acknowledge, for he affirms their unity. Consequently too, Dionysus challenges all social differences, although less with the intent of subverting the political order than with the purpose of inspiring mercy towards the other (any other) and of grounding the primacy of the earth over the polis in case of conflict between the two, as in Sophocles’s Antigone. Nevertheless, Dionysus must not be viewed as a disruptive god, but as an integrative god; hence his role in ritualising transitions (e.g., rites of passage). Yet, it is likewise possible to look

© Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004538597_003

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at Dionysus from the standpoint of the morphogenesis of all things, and to link him, then, not only to Hades, but also to Poseidon and Zeus, who –​as Schelling contends –​represent the three stages through which life, despite its oneness, becomes multiple. It might be intriguing to reread Melissus in this light, since he was the first to flirt with the para-​Dionysian motto (“One is All”) that can be said to haunt the history of philosophy from the Neo-​Platonists to Deleuze. Additionally, it might be interesting to ponder, in dialogue with Schelling, the bearing that a philosophy of mythology could have on today’s thought, in connection to the question of the poetic disclosure of the earth. 1

Untamed Life

Nietzsche’s views in The Dionysian Vision of the World and The Birth of Tragedy –​ which he nuanced afterwards –​do not pay justice to the Greek Dionysus. For while, unlike what Bataille suggests,1 Nietzsche cannot be deemed to portray Dionysus as delivering a mystical, “subtractive”2 experience that would substitute for the ordinary (inauthentic) experience of reality, he envisages Dionysian “suffering,” literally, as the “primal”3 truth “which lies beyond the Apolline”4 –​or, to employ Nietzsche’s own metaphor, as the soil where the latter’s “foundations” lay, as it becomes apparent, he says, when the Apollonian “artful edifice” is “dismantled stone by stone.”5 The problem with this early Nietzschean understanding of Dionysus, to which we shall return later, is that it runs perpendicular to the Greek construal of the god. In fact, despite his claims to revive the “tragic philosophy of the Greeks,” the young Nietzsche inspired himself not only in Schopenhauer’s critique of representation,6 but 1 Bataille, On Nietzsche, 171–​2, 181. 2 The term “subtractive” is Peter Hallward’s, who applies it to Deleuze’s philosophy (Hallward, Out of This World, 81–​2). It can also be applied, more broadly, to Bataille’s “acéphale” reading of Nietzsche, which has considerably influenced contemporary French philosophy from Deleuze to Laruelle. Paraphrasing Morton Smith’s classic study on the politics that shaped the Hebrew Bible (Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament), it would be possible to speak of a Dionysus-​alone party in the French reception of Nietzsche. We shall return to it in Chapter 4. 3 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 114 (§24). 4 Ibid., 115 (§25). “Beyond” but in fruitful “play” with the Apollonian, Nietzsche stresses, rather than against it. See Nietzsche’s further comments on the “union” of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in ibid., 14 (§1), 26 (§4), 33 (§6), and Ecce Homo, 108 (“The Birth of Tragedy,” §1). 5 Ibid., 22 (§3). Cf. ibid., 26 (§4), where the Dionysian is called the “ground” of the Apollonian, and 114 (§24), where it is depicted as its “womb.” 6 While rejecting Schopenhauer’s pessimism, that is. See, e.g., Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 228 (“What I Owe to the Ancients,” §5), Ecce Homo, 107–​8 (“The Birth of Tragedy,” §1).

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also in Dionysus’s Roman re-​instantiation, which, due to its counter-​cultural trimmings,7 served him, unlike the Greek original, to formulate his criticism of what Philip Rieff calls “the banality of liberal culture.”8 How, then, did the original Dionysus look like? It is not in the Dionysia or annual festivals dedicated to the god in Athens, Ionia, and elsewhere,9 but in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were regarded in antiquity as “one of the apices of Greek life,”10 that we would like to begin searching for the original Dionysus and his Mycenaean precedents, on which Dietrich’s classic volume on the sources of Greek religion11 remains fully relevant more than forty years after its publication.12 As it is well known, the mysteries at Eleusis turned around the myth of Demeter and Persephone/​Kore as it is recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter:13 upon discovering that, while gathering flowers, her daughter, Persephone, had been seized by Hades and taken with him to the underworld, Demeter (i.e., the earth viewed through the lens of its fertility) causes a draught seeking with it to coerce Zeus to allow the return of her daughter to the visible world; Zeus agrees on the condition that Persephone does not taste the food of the underworld; yet, tricked by Hades, who gives her a bunch of pomegranate seeds, Persephone eats of what she should have abstained from, and is therefore obliged to spend the winter months of each year in the underworld, but permitted to reunite with her mother during the rest of the year. A child, though, called Plutus (Πλοῦτος, “wealth”), is born from Persephone after her abduction14 by Hades (who was also called Pluton [Πλούτων, i.e., “wealth-​giver”]): 7

Surely, there is no need to recall here that in 186 bce the Roman Senate had the Bacchanalia prohibited under the charge of being a cover for sexual indulgence and political sedition. 8 Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 132. Note Nietzsche’s praise for Roman culture as his spiritual homeland in Twilight of the Idols, 224 (“What I Owe to the Ancients,” §1). Cf. Heidegger, Parmenides, 43 (=​ga 54: 63): “The metaphysics of Nietzsche, whom we like to consider the modern rediscoverer of Ancient Greece, sees the Greek ‘world’ exclusively in a Roman way, i.e., in a way at once modern and un-​Greek.” 9 On which see Taylor-​Perry, The God Who Comes. 10 Colli, La sapienza greca, 1: 28. See further Kerényi, Eleusis; Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries; Cosmopoulos, Bronze Age Eleusis and the Origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries. 11 Dietrich, The Origins of Greek Religion. 12 See now also Bernabé, “Dionysos in the Mycenaean World.” 13 On which see Foley (ed.), The Homeric “Hymn to Demeter.” 14 For, obviously, a living being cannot go into the house of the dead but violently, pace recent attempts to “restore agency” to Persephone by turning her abduction into a “romance” in order to contest “the powerlessness of women in patriarchal, Greco-​Roman society,” on which see Schiano, “The Rape of Persephone in Children’s Media,” esp. 1, 6, 10.

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In two representations of the Eleusinian goddesses intended for the general public, two magnificent vase paintings in late Attic style, we see the child; once as a little boy standing with a cornucopia before the enthroned Demeter, and once in the cornucopia being handed to Demeter by a goddess rising out of the earth –​as though he had been born down there in the realm to which Kore had been carried away.15 In all probability, according to Dietrich, the child’s birth “formed the nucleus of the [Eleusinian] Mysteries from their inception.”16 Like Persephone, the initiates at Eleusis would first descend to the underworld, i.e., to the “invisible” (ἀιδές) domain of Hades (Ἅιδης),17 and then ascend from it –​symbolically speaking. They would do so as new-​born children –​like Plutus or Dionysus, one of whose many names was Διμήτωρ (notice the phonetic affinity with Δημήτηρ), i.e., “twice-​born” –​after having reached a “vision” (ἐποπτεία in Plato’s and Aristotle’s words)18 that opened for them19 the “joyful knowledge of life’s beginning and end,” as Pindar puts it.20 What kind of knowledge did the initiates obtain? The knowledge, as we have already underlined, that “life” qua ζωή is immortal, and that new living forms spring out of the earth when others relapse into it. In this manner, the newcomers at Eleusis were procured the knowledge of that which lacks any visible “aspect” and recognisable “form,” i.e., they were introduced to the ἀ-​ιδές domain of Hades, where, insofar as they do not shine forth into unhiddenness as X, Y, or Z, but remain concealed in a state of mere possibility and mixed with one another (as it corresponds to all things inside the earth’s womb), things lack distinction and determination, and, thereby too, any εἶδος (not yet “idea” but “aspect” or “form,” as per the term’s original meaning). Thus, Heraclitus’s otherwise surprising statement that “Hades and Dionysus are one and the same.”21 15 Kerényi, Eleusis, 31. 16 Dietrich, The Origins of Greek Religion, 18. 17 Cf. Plato’s etymological word play in Cratylus, 403a–b. 18 Colli, La sapienza greca, 3: 106, 108. 19 Possibly by ingesting an entheogenic substance, but see Cosmopoulos, Bronze Age Eleusis and the Origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries, 19–​21. 20 Pindar, Nemean Odes, Isthmian Odes, Fragments, 385, frag. 137. 21 Heraclitus, dk B15: “[…] ὡυτὸς δὲ Ἀίδης καὶ Διόνυσος […]” (our translation). Heraclitus’s identification of Dionysus and Hades is generally interpreted to bring together “life” and “death” as opposites (so Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Pre-​Socratic Philosophers, 212; Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 1: 476). Kahn (The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 264–​5) adds a twist to it: Hades, he suggests, is “the invisible (a-​ides) figure of Death,” and Heraclitus “recognize[s]‌[Dionysian] madness […] as a kind of psychic death, a darkness of soul at maximal distance from the light of sound thinking (sophronein)”; hence, for Heraclitus, he concludes, “what passes for enhanced vitality [under the auspices of

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There are also good reasons to suspect that Plutus, i.e., Hades and Persephone’s child, was no other than Dionysus.22 There is more, though. There are good reasons, too, to suspect that, in addition to being (qua Plutus) the earth’s offspring, Dionysus was also the earth’s consort. This is of fundamental importance for us. For it means, on the one hand, that it is the earth’s voice that speaks through Dionysus (figuratively, as neither the earth nor Dionysus can pronounce any word, given that language is Apollo’s distinctive attribute),23 since it is the earth’s compassion for all living beings that nurtures Dionysus’s seen/​sensed promise of eternity24 (which does not contradict the indisputable mortality of everything that lives on earth). Yet, it also means, on the other hand, that it is the earth’s depths that Dionysus’s mask ultimately hides. We shall consider these two interrelated points successively. 2

An Olympian God?

Like in many other places of the ancient Near East, the sacred union of a Mother Goddess (named 𐀡𐀴𐀛𐀊 [po-​ti-​ni-​ja], “lady,” in the Linear-​B tablets from Pylos)25 with a masculine figure whose birth, life, and death represented the

Dionysus] is a sheer pursuit of death.” This, however, looks to us like a moralising interpretation of Heraclitus’s entire fragment, which reads: “For, if it were not to Dionysus that they make processions, and [if it were not because of him that they] sing hymns to the shameful parts (αἰδοία), they would be performing something shameful (ἀναιδής). Yet, Dionysus, for whom they rave and go mad, and Hades (Ἅιδης), are one and the same” (our translation). Despite the moral undertones of his interpretation (which are not uncommon; see Wildberg, “Dionysos in the Mirror of Philosophy,” 210–​13), Kahn is here on the track of something crucial, namely, the relation between Dionysus and the “invisible” (ἀιδές). Unlike Lacan (in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 299), though, he fails to see the wordplay between Ἅιδης, αἰδοία, and ἀναιδής, which seems to imply not that “what passes for enhanced vitality is a sheer pursuit of death,” but that Dionysus and what does not belong in the realm of light are inherently linked, and hence, too, connected to that which would inevitably provoke shame in the domain of the visible, i.e., to that which cannot be assumed in the latter inasmuch as it constitutes its opposite. Cf. Plato’s qualification (in Laws, 815b-​d) of the Dionysian dances as being οὐ πολιτικὸν (“non-​political”). 22 As their shared tauromorphic features attest (Dietrich, The Origins of Greek Religion, 172–​3). 23 This contrast is especially perceptible in the instruments traditionally associated with the two gods: Dionysus’s flute, which, when played, requests that the player’s face deforms itself; and Apollo’s lyre, which serves to accompany poetic songs made of words. 24 Or “indestructible life,” to use Kerényi’s expression in the subtitle of his classic study on the god: Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. 25 Dietrich, The Origins of Greek Religion, 167.

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annual birth, growth, and death of nature, was a mythical feature not unknown in Ancient Greek culture, where it served the purpose of ensuring both “human fertility and the fruitfulness of the fields.”26 Its presence is attested in the archaeological record of Minoan and Mycenaean Greece, in the form of male figurines playing –​which is most telling of course –​a harp (Apollo’s instrument) or a flute (Dionysus’s).27 “This religious belief,” says Dietrich, “may have travelled to Creta and Greece, but at any rate it was so deeply rooted in popular imagination that even Homer could not ignore it but spoke of the sacred union between Demeter and Jasion […] in Crete.”28 Dionysus’s main festival in Athens, the Anthesteria, is reminiscent of such union, for, in it, the god’s sacred marriage with the wife of the senior magistrate of the city29 was enacted30 in what looks like a reversal of the typical formula for such union, which followed the pattern: goddess +​young monarch. Greek mythology, concludes Dietrich, “remembered several names of […] youthful companions of the nature goddess: to the list belonged a young [mortal]31 Zeus [Cretagenes (=​Cretan-​born), who, interestingly enough, was worshiped at Apollo and Dionysus’s Delphic sanctuary], Hyacinthus [(whose worship Apollo absorbed)],32 […] Plutus, and Dionysus”33 himself. Finally, to all this one should add that the goddess’s consort was sometimes depicted as her offspring.34 As structural anthropology teaches, thematic iridescence is the key to the many variant versions of any myth and it is extensive to its protagonists. In any event, we can draw from this the view that, for the Ancient Greeks, Dionysus operated as the symbolic driver of their earthboundness. For this very reason, Dionysus cannot be properly seen as an Olympian god. In contrast to the Olympian gods, he is intimately and substantially linked to the earth, on whose higher peak the Olympians dwelled. For even if, as Cronus’s 26

Ibid., 11–​12. Cf. the parallel myths of Ishtar and Tammuz, Isis and Osiris, Aphrodite and Adonis, and Cybele and Attis. 27 Ibid., 12. 28 Ibid. 29 Literally, with the wife of the “king ruler” (ἄρχων βασιλεύς) of Athens, and therefore, symbolically, with the queen of the city, insofar as the ἄρχων βασιλεύς was, in classical times, the substitute for the pre-​classical monarch. 30 Dietrich, The Origins of Greek Religion, 12. Reversal, nonetheless, is frequent in mythical thought. Cf. Lévi-​Strauss’s “canonical formula of myth”: Fx(a): Fy(b) ≃ Fx(b): Fa-​1(y), as it is introduced in Structural Anthropology, 206–​31. 31 “[D]‌estined to be born and to die each year” (Dietrich, The Origins of Greek Religion, 14; cf. 17). 32 Ibid., 18. 33 Ibid., 14. 34 Ibid., 13.

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and Rhea’s children35 and grandchildren,36 they were the grandchildren and great-​grandchildren of Gaia (and Uranus),37 the Olympians, with Zeus ahead of them as their father and brother, represented a stage in the earth’s history that was no longer, or not simply anymore, that of Gaia (in whose womb, let us stress it once more, everything remains mixed and potential). Zeus’s victory over Gaia’s and Uranus’s children, the Titans (or, put otherwise, his victory over the all-​too-​basic qualities38 of a chthonic, i.e., not-​yet-​fully-​consistent-​ and-​conscious proto-​world) paved the way for a new phase in the process that goes from Chaos to Cosmos:39 a phase that, while being part of Gaia’s own reality and history,40 opened up something else beyond Gaia’s womb, namely, the world as we know it. For, in the last instance, any world is “a possible way of making identity and difference,”41 of turning an undetermined multiplicity (in which all cows are black) into a determined multiplicity (in which cows are, say, what sheep are not). Therefore, Zeus’s lightning –​which, as Heraclitus says, “steers all things”42 by pulling them out of their chthonic hiddenness43 –​must

35 36

In the case of Hades, Hestia, Poseidon, Demeter, and Hera. In the case of all the other Olympian gods except Aphrodite, who had been born out of Uranos’s emasculation by Cronus; Hephaestus, who had been conceived by Hera on her own; and Ares, who was often depicted as Aphrodite’s counterpart. 37 Who was Gaia’s own creation, anyway. 38 Including, e.g., time (Cronus) and movement (Rhea). 39 We are drawing here on Guattari’s Chaosmosis. 40 Pace Haraway (Staying with the Trouble, 51–​7, 180–​1, n.38, 186, n.58) who, following Gimbutas (The Living Goddess), tends to picture the Olympians as being alien to Gaia (a sort of Indo-​European intrusion in a pre-​Indo-​European milieu characterised by an earthbound spirituality exclusively centred on the figure of an Earth-​Goddess). In rigour, the only gods that are alien to Gaia in Greek mythology are those that precede Gaia’s autopoiesis, i.e., Chaos’s own children: Night and Darkness, who, in turn, gave birth to other obscure figures like Death, Sleep, Misery, Mockery, Discord, Oblivion, Deceit, Sorrow, and Destiny, which thus haunt not only the present world but also any possible world, and against whom the world-​shaping gods (Zeus and the other Olympians included) remain powerless. 41 Maniglier, “Anthropological Meditations,” 127. Cf. Lévi-​Strauss’s fragment reproduced by Frédéric Keck in the expanded edition of La Pensée Sauvage (Lévi-​Strauss, Œuvres, 1834–​5, n.14, our translation): “The speculative ground of all alimentary prohibitions and exogamy rules is no other than the refusal to fuse that which can only be fused by generalisation (every woman is good to ‘copulate’ with, any food is good to ‘eat,’ etc.), in respect to which the mind always posits some sort of condition that allows for resemblance and distinction to be made (the women or the animals of my own clan alone, etc.).” 42 Heraclitus, dk B64: “τὰ δὲ πάντα οἰακίζει κεραυνός”; cf. the reference to Zeus in Heraclitus, dk B32. 43 Cf. Heidegger and Fink, Heraklit, 9–​27.

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be viewed as the ἀρχή or the gleaming “source”44 of what begins within Gaia but, in a certain sense too, after Gaia. Born from Zeus’s leg (unlike Athena, who is born from his forehead), Dionysus leads back to the earth on which our feet stand, which is also where all life begins and ends. How, then, could he be an Olympian god? Indeed, in Ancient Greece Dionysus was not part of the Olympian cohort that intervenes in the human affairs. This can be deduced from his practical absence from the core of the Homeric epic.45 It is likewise perceptible in the way in which Dionysus was represented in the Attic vases. In one of these (the so-​ called François Vase) he is portrayed frontally, with eyes wide open, looking at the viewer, unlike the other gods. Hence, the encounter with Dionysus is different from the encounter with any other god: while the other gods may or may not approach you, he, alone, is inescapable.46 Elsewhere, Dionysus is portrayed wearing a mask, in fact he is the “masked god” par excellence.47 Yet, as Otto remarks, he wears a mask not to underline his distance but to highlight his irresistible otherness and his disquieting proximity;48 and, again, to make clear that he is ἀιδές. 3

The Unity of the Living

The picture drawn so far, however, is incomplete. Dionysus was not only the god that led back to the earth and, thereby, to life’s ultimate source:49 he also symbolised life’s emerging power. Accordingly, the branches and foliage of a vine50 often cover his mask, climbing to it from his feet.51 This does not only explain the widespread worship of Dionysus as a “tree,”52 but also the frenzy that marked the union with the god in the festivals dedicated to him –​a frenzy that, allowing Dionysus’s devotees to come out of themselves, epitomised their 44

Cf. our comments in Chapter 5 on the semantic field of the Proto-​Indo-​European root *h₂erǵ-​, in which the Greek noun ἀρχή belongs in the last instance. 45 The exception is Iliad 14.323–​5. We are grateful to Gilles Courtieu for calling our attention to it. 46 Otto, Dionysus, 90. 47 Ibid., 88. 48 Ibid., 90–​1. 49 Which is the reason for which he was worshiped in the winter season, i.e., when life seemingly withdraws from the earth’s surface. 50 Dionysus’s plant, which the goats and donkeys –​two of Dionysus’s animals –​nibble. In turn, the leopard symbolises Dionysus’s untamed nature. 51 Otto, Dionysus, 86. 52 Ibid., 86–​7.

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union with all the living. Károly Kerényi’s disclaimer apropos the association of the vine with Dionysus remains perfectly valid in this respect: “any account of the Dionysian religion must put the main accent not on intoxication but on the […] powerful, vegetative element which ultimately engulfed even the ancient theaters, as at Cumae.”53 It is in Rome –​as it may be expected perhaps from a society where legal reasoning was preferred over philosophical inquiry –​that Dionysus acquires –​as the counter-​figure of such preference? –​ his famous intoxicating traits.54 It is also important to emphasise, in relation to the life-​giving aspects of Dionysus, that the god’s cult was originally led by women, although it was not exclusively attended by, nor solely addressed to, them. Now, if one puts aside literary elaborations and later cultural prejudices against women’s55 ritual self-​ organisation, the feminine cult of Dionysus took place in what would be called today (it matters little at this point whether too naively) a natural environment. Their cult of Dionysus consisted, mainly, in frenetic shouting, running, dancing, flute and drum playing, a number of practices like snake handling, fire handling, fire walking, the offering of sacrifices of various kinds including, possibly, animal sacrifices, and –​as per the account of some indirect sources whose rhetoric might not be exactly descriptive –​the breast-​feeding of other mammals and the practice of omophagy.56 Rural and urban public processions,

53 Kerényi, Dionysos, xxv. 54 Cf. Colli’s reference in La sapienza greca (1: 17–​18) to the procurement of “knowledge” as the “goal” of the Greek cult of Dionysus. Notice, in this sense, the role of Athena (goddess of clear vision and wisdom) in the recovery of Dionysus’s heart after he is killed by the Titans. 55 Or, rather, upper-​class women who could leave their children with their slaves while gathering in honour of Dionysus (Bremmer, “Greek Maenadism Reconsidered,” 285). On the aristocratic setting of the maenadic cult of Dionysus, see Graf, “Dionysian and Orphic Eschatology”, 256. 56 On maenadism and sex, see Henrichs, “Greek Maenadism from Olympias to Messalina,” 135: “The satyrs of myth and folklore are in a permanent state of sexual arousal: the satyr plays and vase painters leave us no doubt about their […] desires. The maenads use their thyrsi and snakes to ward off the sexual attacks of the satyrs, or become the unwilling victims of satyric lust when caught with their defenses down. Were the maenads of Dionysiac cult similarly, or even more actively, involved with male companions? Pentheus in the Bacchae is convinced that they were, but the first messenger is at pains to defend their honor. We do not know enough about the real maenads […] to decide if their behavior gave cause for complaint. [Yet] [d]‌oubt about the morality of the maenads was presumably not so much a real issue in fifth century Athens […] as an invention of Euripides or Aeschylus as playwrights who exploited it as a dramatic foil for Pentheus’ own prurient curiosity, which precipitated his downfall.” The Roman Bacchic sex orgies denounced by

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theatrical representations, and private symposia in which women did not play any leading role, though, were common, as well. In the private and public rites, Dionysus functioned as the symbol of life’s autopoiesis. Yet, he was also the symbol of the underlying unity of all living things. Plants apart (but notice our former allusion to Hyacinthus, who is both a god and a plant, and our comments on Dionysus and the vine),57 living beings, i.e., animals, mortals (humans), and gods, fell in Ancient Greece into three inversely proportional ontological classes, whose traits echo Lévi-​ Strauss’s distinction between the “raw” and the “cooked” in the first volume of Mythologiques:58 animals hunt and eat their food raw; unlike them, mortals59 do not only cook what they eat:60 like the gods, to whom they sacrifice their food, they share their meals; and yet, unlike the gods, but like all animals, mortals must hunt what they eat.61 Thus, humans stand between the animals and the gods; yet, they do so in a sort of dual disequilibrium, as they come closer to the gods in one way and closer to the animals in another way. In other words, their position is ambivalent, for which reason they must try to find out who they are; hence, the appropriateness of Apollo’s motto: “Know yourself!” Conversely, Dionysus erases all boundaries between mortals, animals, and gods, as, for him, everything is equally alive. Thus, too, the partial abolishment of social privileges and gender divisions during the Dionysia. In short, Dionysus is –​drawing again on Lévi-​Strauss –​the trickster who “acts as if privileges, exceptions, or abnormalities could become the rule.”62 Could this be the reason, we wonder, why he is associated with the hare (Figure 7), whose ambiguity is a well-​known mythological topos elsewhere?63 Be that as it may, the cult of Dionysus in Ancient Greece did not aim at subverting the social order of the polis. If, however, the laws of the polis came for

57

58 59 60 61 62 63

Livy are a different phenomenon. Cf. Porres Caballero, “Maenadic Ecstasy in Greece,” and Alonso Fernández, “Maenadic Ecstasy in Rome.” Cf. the Yawalapiti unstable distinction between “humans,” “animals,” and “spirits,” as reported by Viveiros de Castro in “The Crystal Forest”: the ontology of each class varies depending on the perspective from which each one is observed (we are like spirits to most animals, except the jaguar, which sees us as animals instead, etc.) Lévi-​Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. Or, at least, the Greeks and a number of other peoples, for some “barbarians” apparently did not, or so did the Greeks think. Dionysian omophagia is the exception here, and an additional proof of Dionysus being the symbol of the unity of the living. The exception here, in turn, is Orphic/​Pythagorean vegetarianism, which aimed at turning mortals into immortal gods. Lévi-​Strauss, The Story of Lynx, 49. Lévi-​Strauss, “Myth and Meaning,” 3.

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­f igure 7  Dionysus’s hare (Athenian black-​figure clay vase, De Ridder.222, French National Library)

whatever reason into conflict with life’s prerogatives, Dionysus would remind the citizens that, in axiological terms, nothing stands above the earth. Attic tragedy –​where Dionysus64 played a key role presiding over the choir, which gave voice to a solemn but faceless type of wisdom that seemed to emanate 64

In addition to being the god to whom the dramatic festivals were dedicated.

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from the bowels of the earth –​makes this crystal clear. Thus, for example, Antigone’s defence of her brother Polynices’s right to be buried, which reflects the view that, in the moment of their death –​i.e., when they go back and dissolve into the earth –​all mortals must be treated respectfully by those who shared their lives with them, regardless of whether the dead can be viewed as political enemies of the city. Put differently: earthbound mercy towards the other, whoever that other may be,65 is requested in correspondence with the aforementioned mercy that the earth shows to everyone (through Dionysus). 4

An Integrative God

The fact that Dionysus encouraged, in various ways, the integration66 of life’s indestructible qualities and all-​inclusive features into the everyday lives of the Ancient Greeks, proves how mistaken it is to make of him a disruptive god –​the god of “dissonant dynamics, […] noise […], intoxication, self-​ abandon, oblivion, and revelry.”67 Against this, Cornelia Isler-​Kerényi adroitly recovers, through a careful re-​examination of the extant iconography, the originally integrative aspect of the Greek Dionysus, and emphasises the god’s role in “ritualising transitions that could potentially be traumatic for the individual and risky for the community”68 like, e.g., individual rites of passage: Inherent to the concept of life made of successive phases, each marked by special images and actions, all of them important for the functioning of the social organism, are moments of transition, of individual and social metamorphosis. It is at these moments that Dionysos, the god of metamorphosis, must have been active, as guarantor both of a happy transition from one phase to another and of the temporary but unavoidable sojourn in the intermediate phase.69 This gentle dimension of Dionysus affects, too, the production and consumption of the substance with which the god is most habitually associated. Coming from a plant (the vine) that grows only in rural areas, i.e., neither in the city 65

Cf. the notion of “a life” in Deleuze’s posthumously published essay: “Immanence: A Life” (in Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 25–​34). 66 Cf. Bremmer’s own definition of the Dionysian cult as “integrative” (in “Greek Maenadism Reconsidered,” 286). 67 Mellamphy and Biswas Mellamphy, “Nietzsche and Networks, Nietzschean Networks,” 11–​12. 68 Isler-​Kerényi, Dionysos in Archaic Greece, 215. 69 Ibid., 214–​15.

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nor in the forest, but in between both, and that demands considerable care in order to grow, wine itself reveals other meanings beyond being an intoxicating drink which favours ritual reversion to the wild state.70 It is also a symbol and at the same time a means of civilised interaction in that it makes one happy only if consumed in the correct manner and in the right amount. And finally, it is a way of being moved transitorily to a level above daily life: to see and also reveal reality beyond appearances. The pottery of the symposium also belongs to this dignity of wine: a dignity that explains its often very high techne, out of proportion to the material value of clay and so successful in the market. Ultimately wine is a metaphor of the gradual and troubled make-​up of the real world: like the whole cosmos, and like the citizen who has attained his akmè, it is the result of a long process. To produce grapes the vine must be cultivated and then cut, the grapes themselves must be trodden and closed into vats so that they can be transformed into wine: these preparations of the drink must have made it suitable for its ritual role in individual metamorphoses.71 Needless to say, “[i]‌nherent in every metamorphosis […] is death,” for in order “[t]o become different it is unavoidable to cease being what one was before.”72 Thus, the “efficacy” of the Dionysian mysteries, their “rapid diffusion,” and their “long life” in the ancient world “beyond all cultural borders and all changes of political order.”73 The reshaping of Dionysus as a disruptive god, or even as an anti-​god –​ that is to say, as a character “demonic rather than divine, since it is a peculiarity of demons,” in Deleuze’s words, “to operate in the intervals between the gods’ fields of action”74 –​was mostly a Christian endeavour. Like Jesus, writes Richard Seaford, Dionysus “was the son of the divine ruler of the world and a mortal mother, appeared in human form among mortals, was killed and restored to life,”75 and for this reason early-​Christian writers from Justin Martyr onwards, aware as they were of the similarity between Christianity and the 70

“Wild,” of course, can mean different things. The leopard is both one of Dionysus’s animals (supra, n.50) and a symbol of wildlife. Yet, animals are never wild in the sense that such adjective is applied to humans when they lose control and behave brutally. The wildness of the earth that Dionysus symbolises has nothing to do with this latter meaning of the term. 71 Isler-​Kerényi, Dionysos in Archaic Greece, 215, 233. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 37. 75 Seaford, Dionysos, 126.

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cult of Dionysus,76 “claim[ed] that the latter [was] a diabolical imitation of the former”77 –​diabolical, one may deduce, due to Dionysus’s association with carnal excess in Rome. For centuries, Christianity reinforced this symbolic opposition, and Christian authors went as far as to “ascribe many of the chaotic qualities of […] Dionysus to the new trickster figure of the devil, including the splicing of animal and human in his body.”78 There is little mystery, therefore, in the fact that the proclaimed death of the Christian God entailed a parallel resurgence of the post-​Greek Dionysus, as shown in Nietzsche’s writings.79 5

Dionysus and Ontology

Whereas in Hades all things remain hidden in a state of mere possibility, Zeus’s lightning “steers all things” by pulling them out from their hiddenness, i.e., by showing and making patent what each one is. We should like to argue, then, that in frag. dk B64 Heraclitus thinks Zeus’s light in transcendental terms. Put otherwise, it is the “thinkability”80 of all things by virtue of their rhythmic disclosure81 that concerns Heraclitus82 –​like it concerns Parmenides, who writes about the reciprocal relation of being and thought that allows all things to shine forth in their being and about what their disclosure reveals vis-​à-​vis their passing away;83 and like it concerns, if in a different way, Plato, whose purpose is to clarify the being of that which is disclosed as X, Y, or Z against the backdrop of their common intelligible ground. This, however, means that Heraclitus –​and the same can be said of Parmenides and Plato –​was not concerned with the morphogenesis of things. Not even Anaximander –​ attentive as he was, like Heraclitus, to the rhythmic disclosure and concealment of all things –​was concerned with it. As for Thales and Anaximenes, who are said to have identified the ruling principle in all things with “water” and “air,” respectively, there are serious doubts as to whether they meant any of it

76

The first author to study their similarities in some detail was Charles Guignebert in Le Christianisme antique. 77 Seaford, Dionysos, 126. 78 Rowland, Remembering Dionysus, 81. 79 We shall return to it in Chapter 4. 80 “Denkbarkeit” –​so Heidegger in On the Way to Language, 108 (=​ga 12: 203). 81 Rhythmic as per Heraclitus’s dialectics of opposites. 82 Notice Heidegger’s comments on the aorists ἔδειξε (“sets out”) and ἐποίησε (“lets come forth”) in Heraclitus dk B53 (Heidegger, ga 36/​37: 117–​18). 83 Supra, Chapter 1, n.80.

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to be taken literally.84 Only after Parmenides does such concern take root in the field of Pre-​Socratic philosophy –​with Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists. Yet, these –​Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists –​are all pluralists. Conversely, there is one Eleatic, hence non-​pluralist, post-​Parmenidean philosopher who thinks “being” in substantial terms, who affirms that “being” is “one” and the same for everything, and who claims that everything emerges from its depth but remains within its infiniteness: Melissus of Samos.85 Sadly, Melissus’s role in the history of philosophy is usually downplayed, when not overtly ignored. In all probability, though, when Plato attributes to Parmenides the thesis that being is univocal86 –​an identification that, as Friedrich Solmsen observes, “was to have a very large progeny; for […] it was to become the ancestor of the One in Plotinus’ and in other Neo-​Platonic systems”87 –​he is thinking more on Melissus than Parmenides. Indeed, according to Melissus, “being” is both “one” (ἕν) and “infinite” (ἄπειρον),88 plus it names “all there is.”89 Melissus, then, identifies “being” with what Heidegger calls the “ontic”90 –​furthermore, he makes of all beings One and identifies that One, accordingly, with everything. In a nutshell, Melissus is our earliest source for the renowned proposition: ἕν τὸ πᾶν! (“One is All!”). Hence, one should not underestimate Melissus’s influence throughout the history of philosophy –​ from the Neo-​Platonists (with their One, be it placed above [Plotinus] or alongside being [Porphyry], from which everything emanates) to Spinoza (with his Deus sive Natura sive Substantia that reduces all things to one single substance with many modalities) and Schelling (for whom Nature is visible Spirit and the Spirit invisible Nature), but also to Merleau-​Ponty (for whom the “flesh” of the world forms a perceptual continuum)91 and Deleuze (with his “magic formula we all seek –​pluralism =​ monism”).92

84

Pace Cornford’s widespread view that their philosophy represents a first rudimentary attempt to produce the “perfectly clear conceptual model of reality” which modern physics provides us with and that allows us to “master the world by understanding it” (From Religion to Philosophy, viii). The anachronism of this statement is patent enough to deserve any further comment. 85 Cf. Melissus, dk B2–​8. On Melissus’s ontology, see Solmsen, “The ‘Eleatic One’ in Melissus”; Harriman, Melissus and Eleatic Monism. 86 Plato, Parmenides, 128d. 87 Solmsen, “The ‘Eleatic One’ in Melissus,” 222. 88 Melissus, dk B2–​6. 89 Melissus, dk B7–​8. 90 Cf. Martínez Marzoa, Historia de la filosofía antigua, 60–​1. 91 See Chapter 5. 92 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 23.

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In this context, the question of the morphogenesis of things becomes entirely relevant. If all things are one, then one is compelled to ask: how does that single one diversify and become everything? Now, it is possible to reread the aforementioned Hades/​Zeus dichotomy as pointing to the lower and the upper ends of the coming into being of all things. On this reading, Hades would symbolise their (still) undetermined possibility of being, whereas Zeus would symbolise their (finally) achieved determination. If so, though, a third term –​and a third god –​may well be added to such diptych, transforming it into a triptych instead: Poseidon. For, in between the blind possibility of being (=​ i) and being’s full determination as X, Y, or Z (=​iii), something seems to be missing, namely, an intermediate ontological modulation, that is, an interstitial stage (=​ii) between the two extremes of the ontological spectrum. In other words, if being is both possibility (in its lower end) and determination (in its upper end), it also needs to be something no-​longer-​informal but not-​ yet-​formal either: it must be self-​affirmation to be, i.e., to transit from one end to the other. Schelling sees it very well. Thus, in his Philosophy of Mythology (in which, despite remaining unpublished in his lifetime, he worked unremittingly from 1815 to 1854),93 he makes recourse to the notion of a fundamental ontological “process”94 through which a “primordial being” comes to acquire its different expressive modalities; moreover, he defines such process as the “primordial event”95 accounted for in Greek mythology.96 Furthermore, Schelling takes the figures of Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus to represent the three successive moments of that “process”: (i) the pure possibility of being (which lacks determination) =​Hades; (ii) its self-​determination to be, or self-​affirmation (which lacks, in turn, form and intelligence) =​Poseidon; and (iii) being qua fully achieved and conscious determination (which contains the two previous moments and brings all things to ontological fulfilment) =​Zeus.97 Additionally, 93

The result is a philosophy of mythology proper (vol. xii of Schelling’s Sämtliche Werke, ed. Cotta, pp. 133–​674) preceded by a philosophy of monotheism (ibid., pp. 1–​132) and followed by a philosophy of revelation (ibid., vol. xiii, 356 pp.), plus two introductions: one historical-​critical (ibid., vol xi, pp. 1–​252), the other one philosophical instead (ibid., pp. 253–​590) –​, i.e., more than 1,600 pages in total, of which only 252 (corresponding to Schelling’s historical introduction to the study of mythology) have been translated so far into English. 94 Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, xii: 160. 95 Ibid., 153. 96 Cf. Heidegger’s contention that myth “names” being in its “primordial shining” (Parmenides, 112 [=​ga 54: 165]). 97 Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, xii: 577–​86, 625, 634, 663–​4, 667.

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Schelling labels such moments the three “pure causes” of being.98 Lastly, he identifies Dionysus with ii (hence with Poseidon)99 but also with the whole “process” as such,100 which, consequently, he calls “the triple Dionysus”101 and “Dionysus in an absolute sense.”102 Admittedly, Schelling’s identification of Dionysus with Poseidon is anything but capricious. Consider, for instance, the myth of Glaucus, whose horses “were driven into a homicidal frenzy after eating a special grass at Potniai in Boeotia that had a maddening effect on horses.”103 The reference to the horses’ frenzy (i.e., to the Dionysian-​induced state of Poseidon’s archetypical animals); the fact that Poseidon’s name is partly formed after the Greek vocative for “lord”: πότε (pote);104 and, finally, the fact that such vocative echoes the name of the earth goddess (𐀡𐀴𐀛𐀊 [po-​ti-​ni-​ja, “lady”]) –​all this is extremely eloquent indeed. There is more, though. Unlike his brothers Hades (who got the underworld) and Zeus (who rules over the world we live in), Poseidon “received as his dowry the grey sea, which is the deepest layer of the earth’s surface, and his wild heart protests before Zeus’s will.”105 Now, what could be more characteristically Dionysian that such wild depth? Plainly: if Heraclitus is right to compare Dionysus and Hades, in whose invisible domain everything begins and ends, it is not less legitimate to compare Dionysus to Poseidon, given that Poseidon symbolises life’s source and untamed power.106 As for Zeus and Dionysus, let 98

Ibid., 634. Schelling distinguishes between “–​A” or the pure power to be (=​which he also calls “pure Subject”), a power to be that lacks being until something is affirmed of it (Sämtliche Werke, xi: 282–​94, 331, 335–​6, 565, 570); “+​A” or pure being (which he calls “pure Object”) that lacks, for its part, the power to be different from what it actually is (ibid., 282–​94, 331, 335–​6, 565, 570); “± A,” which results from merging “–​A” and “+​A” (ibid., 282–​4, 331, 335–​6, 565, 570) and thus overcomes their mutual negation (Einleitung in die Philosophie, 98); and “A0,” which stands for the A behind “–​A,” “+​A,” and “± A” alike, or, in other words, for their Quod or real “referent,” without which all the other modalities would only be logical but not real principles (Sämtliche Werke, xi: 365–​7, 560–​1, 565, 570) –​hence, too, his conceptualisation of A0 as the Ursein or “primordial being” (in Einleitung in die Philosophie, 98). 99 Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, xii: 581, 627, 664. 100 Ibid., 634, 642. 101 Ibid., 634. 102 Ibid., 642. 103 Hard, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology, 432. 104 Burckert, Greek Religion, 187. Aside: Ποσειδῶν (Poseidon) is the Homeric name of the god; in Aeolic it is Ποτειδάων (Poteidaon); in Doric, Ποτειδάν (Poteidan), Ποτειδάων (Poteidaon), and Ποτειδᾶς (Poteidas). 105 Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, xii: 585 (our translation). 106 Cf. Volpe’s reference to Poseidon Phytalmios and Dionysus Dendrites –​and to the pine as Poseidon’s and Dionysus’s plant –​in “Plutarch and the Ambiguity of the God Dionysus,” 293.

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us simply recall here that Dionysus is (re)born from Zeus’s leg, and that, as we have seen too, a particular type of Zeus (Zeus Cretagenes) was identified with Dionysus. In a way, then, Dionysus is the whole process,107 but it is also each of its constitutive moments.

107 Of which, born directly from Zeus’s forehead, Athena represents the self-​consciousness (Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, xii: 665).

­c hapter 3

The Greek Apollo he saw what is, what will be, and what had been homer, Iliad, 1.70

∵

Overview

Apollo presents three key features. First, he gathers in his gaze what is, what was, and what will be, thus bringing all things into unhiddenness and allowing them to be thought. Secondly, he rises himself above all things to put down any disrespect they may show one another regarding the equal right to be that all things have. Thirdly, in this way he does not only encourage mutual esteem, but reminds humans of their mortal condition and, if needed, forces them to accept it with his lethal arrows. These features are perceptible in the god’s oracular qualities (which are echoed in Parmenides’s poem), sculptural rendering (e.g., in the Temple of Zeus in Olympia), and diegetic role in Attic tragedy (in particular, in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex). Furthermore, the first two features can be said to form the thematic background of the birth of philosophy and, more exactly, of Anaximander’s, Heraclitus’s, and Parmenides’s thought. Nevertheless, Apollo is not only a god whose epigeal, distant gaze –​at the expense of which he could not be fair to everyone –​contrasts with Dionysus’s hypogeal proximity. Nor is he just a political god who, accordingly, recommends measure against excess, and who, in like manner, allows things to take shape before they step back into the earth’s womb, to which Dionysus leads in turn. Each one in his own manner, Apollo and Dionysus encompass and shelter all things, hence protecting life’s rhythm in two different, proportionally inverted, ways: while Dionysus, out of compassion towards the living, affirms life’s continuity beneath the discreteness of its many forms, Apollo grants all things an equal right to shine forth into unhiddenness; yet he, too, does so –​it can be argued –​out of mercy for the living. Does Apollo’s compassion, though, derive from the fact that Zeus, i.e., his own father, is father to all and brings all things into being? Or is it an expression of the same earthly compassion that is distinctive of Dionysus? This is a crucial question. The fact that the

© Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004538597_004

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basement of Apollo and Dionysus’s shared sanctuary at Delphi opened, under its floor, to the depths of the earth, over which the Pythia stood on her tripod to receive Apollo’s oracle, points to the latter option and underscores Apollo and Dionysus’s twinness. 1

Apollo’s Gaze

As we have mentioned, Dionysus and Apollo shared the sanctuary of Delphi in Central Greece. While Dionysus was worshiped there in the winter, Apollo returned to Delphi every spring –​like forms and colours return to the earth when the winter’s gloominess recedes. Whatever the apparently chthonic origins of the shrine –​which might have been initially dedicated to Gaia1 –​Apollo’s presence in Delphi is attested as early as the 8th century bce.2 As for Dionysus, his connection to Delphi may be even older.3 In any event, two artefacts witness to the simultaneous presence of Dionysus and Apollo at Delphi: a vase of c. 400 bce that depicts the two gods “holding out their hands to one another,”4 and a 4th-​century relief in which “the Proxenos of the Dionysian cortege raises a rhyton, a Dionysian drinking vessel, and pours its content into a cinnamon-​colored phial, a familiar accoutrement of the cult of Apollo.”5 There is, however, a crucial difference between the two gods. While Dionysus retains his wisdom by keeping it enclosed within himself, so that whoever attempts to obtain it must fuse with him by means of an ecstatic experience, Apollo, instead, delivers his in such a way that it can be rendered into the oracular words of his priests or priestesses (at Delphi, Didyma, and Klaros, for instance) and seers (like Calchas and Teiresias).6 Would it be fair to say, then, that Apollo allows an easier access to that which Dionysus demands at a higher price? Not really. For Dionysus shares his wisdom without any restrictions with those who partake in it by means of an ecstatic experience. Conversely, Apollo only speaks through signs or “signifies,” in the sense that he merely “indicates”

1 Dietrich, The Origins of Greek Religion, 155–​6, 308–​9; Larson, Ancient Greek Cults, 93; Graf, Apollo, 47. 2 Dillon, Omens and Oracles, 353. 3 Otto, Dionysus, 203. 4 Ibid. 5 Detienne, Dionysos at Large, 11. 6 Colli, La sapienza greca, 1: 23–​4.

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(σημαίνειν), as Heraclitus suggests.7 Apollo, in other words, is the archer-​god whose wisdom remains at a distance. It can be argued, therefore, that Apollo’s epigeal distance contrasts with Dionysus’s hypogeal immanence. Furthermore, it can be affirmed that it is this distance that philosophy initially revolved around. Thus Plutarch, who was both a philosopher and a priest of Apollo, portrays the latter as the god of truth qua “disclosure” (ἀλήθεια) and “reasoning” (διαλεκτική), and thereby as the god of philosophy.8 First, because the words of Apollo’s priestesses, priests, and seers demand to be interpreted, not believed in,9 which is also philosophy’s game.10 Secondly, because the words thus proffered by the interpreters of the god’s words echo something of a non-​ordinary nature which philosophy, too, aimed at reaching from the start. To find out what that something is, it is paramount to recall, once more, that Apollo’s seers, priests, and priestesses speak for the god.11 Put otherwise, Apollo himself does not: Apollo sees. What does he see, though, what can be said to be his vision which is later turned into words and without which no oracle would be possible in the first place? Homer gives us a clue to it when he introduces Calchas as someone who could “see” (ὃς ᾔδη) “what is, what will be, and what had been” (τά τ᾽ ἐόντα τά τ᾽ ἐσσόμενα πρό τ᾽ ἐόντα).12 Similarly, the underlying oneness of what “was,” what “is,” and what “will be” is, according to Aristotle, that which philosophy originally aimed at elucidating.13 Parmenides, for example, affirms of “what is” (ὡς ἔστιν),14 whose “disclosure” philosophy pursues,15 that it is “not born” 7 Heraclitus, dk B93: “ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει” (“the lord of the oracle which is found in Delphi neither speaks nor hides [his meaning], but gives signs”; our translation). 8 Plutarch, Moralia, 386d–​387c. 9 Consider, e.g., the famous oracle delivered to Croesus, king of Lydia, on his planed military campaign against the Persians, which Croesus erroneously interpreted as a favourable omen (Dillon, Omens and Oracles, 33–​5, 375). 10 Cf. Colli, La sapienza greca, 1: 27, 37–​8. Heraclitus’s enigmatic style is perhaps the best example of this. Yet, enigma is also at play in Anaximander’s saying (dk 12A9) and Parmenides’s poem (esp. dk B2, 2–​5). 11 It is in this sense that Plutarch (Moralia, 404d-​e) compares the Pythia to the moon, which reflects the light of the sun. 12 Homer, Iliad, 1.70. Cf. Hesiod, Theogony, vv. 32, 38. Plutarch says something similar: “The god […] is a prophet, and the prophetic art concerns the future that is to result from things present and past” (Moralia, 387b). Apollo’s oracle bears witness to this, as well. Thus, for instance, among the Delphic oracles catalogued by Fontenrose, those requested by the Spartans in the early 7th century (The Delphic Oracle, 271), and by the Athenians in 421 (ibid., 247), involve the reciprocal articulation of past, present, and future. 13 Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics A 3, 983b. 14 Parmenides, dk B8, 2. 15 Parmenides, dk B1.

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(ἀγένητον) and “imperishable” (ἀνώλεθρον);16 hence, he adds, it can neither be said that “it has been” (οὐδέ ποτ᾽ἦν) or that “it will be” (οὐδ᾽ἔσται),17 as it is “one” (ἕν), “now” (νῦν),18 “altogether” (ὁμοῦ πᾶν).19 For his part, Heraclitus affirms, of “the never-​submerging before which one cannot hide” (τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι),20 that “it was, it is, and will be an ever-​living fire” (πῦρ ἀείζωον) whose “gleaming” (κόσμος) all things display.21 In short, Apollo’s eye procures the thought-​vision (the “thinking,” νοεῖν) of that which “is” (i.e., of “being,” εἶναι), as Parmenides has it;22 and it “gathers” it up as its λόγος (logos), in Heraclitus’s terms.23 Therefore, Apollo’s eye is the very eye of philosophy24 –​in addition to being the eye of divination and the eye of poetry, since, in their own way, the words of the ἀοιδός (the “singer” or “poet”) bring forth all things into the open.25 2

Apollo’s Distance

As Walter Otto stresses, one of Apollo’s salient qualities is his “loftiness of spirit,”26 which is easily perceptible in Apollo’s sculpture in the west pediment of the Temple of Zeus in Olympia. Apollo stands there at the centre of a scene likely depicting the mythological battle between Centaurs and Lapiths.27 He rises soberly over the contenders and extends his right arm horizontally, as if urging them to put an end to their violent fight. The god’s 16 Parmenides, dk B8, 3. 17 Ibid., 4. 18 Ibid., 5. 19 Ibid., 11. 20 Heraclitus, dk B16. 21 Heraclitus, dk B30. On the translation of κόσμος as “gleaming,” see Heidegger, Heraclitus, 123–​4. 22 Parmenides, dk B3. 23 Heraclitus, dk B1, B2, B50. 24 In turn, Athena’s clear vision is needed to determine when it is the time for, and the wise way of dealing with, something (see, e.g., Homer, Iliad, 1.187–​215; 22.268–​71). Hence, if Apollo can be said to be the god of pure reason –​to use an otherwise suggestive anachronism –​Athena, in turn, can be said to be the goddess of practical reason. On Apollo’s and Athena’s political alliance, see Shapiro, “Athena, Apollo, and the Religious Propaganda of the Athenian Empire,” 101–​4; Kennedy, Athena’s Justice, 33. 25 In this respect, philosophy must be viewed not only as the prolongation of Apollo’s mantic, but as the continuation of the Homeric epos by other means. See further Segovia, La cólera de Aquiles, 13, n.9. 26 Otto, The Homeric Gods, 61. 27 See for discussion Spivey, Greek Sculpture, 114.

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gesture is authoritative, yet calmed and noble at the same time, as is his facial expression.28 Seen from today, Ancient Greek statuary can prove unmoving and too rational, as a visitor confessed to Dodds regarding the Parthenon sculptures at the British Museum.29 The truth, however, is that the Ancient Greeks invented an entirely new way of looking at things which their statuary reflects.30 Compare, for example, the vivid traits of 5th-​century Attic sculpture with the hieratic features of Egyptian statuary or with the repetitive nature of the Achaemenid reliefs in Persepolis. Impressed by the realistic nature of Ancient Greek sculpture, art historians tend to speak of a “revolution” which was made possible, in their view, due to the Greeks’ attentive observation of nature.31 While this factor need not be completely dismissed, it is, we think, crucial to inquire about the reason behind the Greek willingness to transpose the observable, with all its visual nuances, onto, say, a piece of marble. A marble statue aims at making something “appear” (φαίνεσθαι). Therefore, a marble statue can be described, literally, as a “phenomenon” (φαινόμενον). Etymologically, writes Barry Sandywell, “‘phenomena’ express that which ‘shines’ or ‘shows’ in appearances, that which comes to appearance and grants visible presence.”32 Thus, for instance, in the statue of a horse –​like the horse head from the east pediment of the Parthenon now in the British Museum,33 which originally belonged to the chariot of Nyx (goddess of the night) or Selene (goddess of the moon) –​a horse’s “horseness”shines forth and becomes manifest.Calling it, as Plato does, the εἶδος (“idea”) of a horse, is certainly possible, provided that one takes the term εἶδος to mean something’s distinctive “form” or “visible aspect,” which is observable when that something comes to light, i.e., when it appears in the realm of being (in the domain of what “is”)

28

See the images and the analysis in Barringer, “The Temple of Zeus at Olympia, Heroes, and Athletes,” 213, 217–​18, 232–​6. 29 Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1. 30 Which leads Spivey to claim that Ancient Greek sculpture is a “statement of Greekness” (Greek Sculpture, 377). 31 Ibid., 92–​4. 32 Sandywell, Presocratic Reflexivity, 70. 33 With reference no. 1816,0610.98. An image of it is available at: https://​www.britis​hmus​ eum.org/​col​lect​ion/​obj​ect/​G_​1​816-​0610-​98. The Harvard-​ Oxford-​ Dubai Institute for Digital Archeology (ida) has recently offered the British Museum the possibility of making a 3D copy of the statue for it to be displayed in the museum in lieu of the original, which could thus be repatriated to Athens –​an initiative that could help to put an end to the debate about the rightful home of the Parthenon statues (see https://​advi​sor.mus​ eums​andh​erit​age.com/​featu​res/​new-​prop​osit​ion-​repat​riat​ion-​parthe​non-​marb​les/​).

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offering itself to be seen.34 The εἶδος of a living horse, therefore, condenses, and transmits to the viewer, the qualities of any living horse, including its strength and vigour, but also, if needed,35 its tiredness.36 This, ultimately, is what the so-​called Ancient Greek observation of nature was all about. For us, a statue describes something, be it in iconic, indexical, or symbolic fashion –​that is to say, it re-​presents it. For the Ancient Greeks, it allowed something to appear as such, to become visible in its “emergence” (φύσις) and by virtue of its “distinctiveness” (again, φύσις). To emerge, therefore, means to become present, to be. Now, taken in absolute terms (i.e., as the opposite of non-​being), being proves interstitial: it is characterised by a certain in-​betweenness. Take, for example, the Hegeso funerary stele at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. It portrays two figures. The figure sitting on the right is a deceased person, an upper-​class woman. Standing next to her, a young maid brings her a coffer, so that she may put back into it the earring she holds in her right hand –​ or is it the other way round, is it that she has taken the earring from the coffer? We cannot know. Yet, one thing we do know: the earring (if it is an earring, for it could also be a ring, a brooch, or a necklace) is no longer there. It is gone, for the woman is dead: her life is gone and thus everything is gone with it. Death is fully accepted here. It is accepted as something inevitable that, while being its reverse and its opposite, is one with life, for life and death succeed one another and, above all, imply one another. Very few Ancient Greeks would have denied this.37 Yet, seen from a different angle, death brings an abrupt end to what is: it destroys the world as we know it, and thereby causes sorrow among the living. This is the reason why, in Hesiod, Death and Sorrow are mentioned among the offspring of Night and Darkness, which are the two main un-​worlding powers that haunt the earth from the beginning of time, since they are Chaos’s children.38 Hence, death must be seen, in relation to all “individual life” (βίος), as 34

See further, for a full reassessment of Plato’s εἴδη, Segovia, “Eἶδος⧹Utupë,” and “On Plato’s Εἴδη, Deleuze’s Simulacra, and Zeno.” 35 Pace Timofeeva, The History of Animals, 38–​42. 36 Cf. Spivey, Greek Sculpture, 81–​2. 37 Among the few who would have, one must count the Pythagoreans (Redfield, “Anthropology and the Fate of the Soul”). 38 The Ancient Greek gods were neither supernatural beings nor persons: they named the brightness and the shadow of everything that is, i.e., the all-​powerful, immanent forces of the earth whether positive –​e.g., love (Aphrodite) and the clear vision of things (Athena) –​or negative –​e.g., darkness (Nyx) and discord (Eris) –​that make and unmake the world, that is, any world. Consequently, they were experienced, not believed in (infra, n.67); cf. Otto, Theophania, 8–​9.

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something at once inevitable and undesirable. In other words, it is something whose domain is, in a certain sense (and only in a certain sense), foreign to that of life, whose negation it represents. Accordingly, nothing can be said to live there where death reigns. The world of the living and the un-​world of the dead oppose each other. Whatever dies, dies forever, it can neither be returned to this life nor can it enjoy a new life in the region of the dead. Therefore, from the standpoint of life’s individual crystallisation, life and death stand against each other as the two opposing sides of a tragic divide.39 This is what Attic funerary art foregrounds. It suggests, moreover, that life must be celebrated while it lasts, as everything is in the domain of light only for a brief period of time, surrounded by two darknesses: the darkness which precedes being and the darkness which follows being. To sum up, then: in Ancient Greek culture, being was understood to be synonymous with the shining forth of things; it is light that breaks through the darkness of non-​being40 and it is therefore, of all things, the most precious one, as Iphigenia says.41 Hence, the early Greek concept of φύσις, which was built upon a noun whose verbal root (φύω, to “spring up”) overlaps, morphologically and semantically speaking, with that of the verb φαίνω (to “shine,” to “appear”).42 Perhaps this was also the reason why Artemis, the goddess of φύσις, was called Φωσφόρος (“Light Bringer”).43 Add to it the morphological 39

Conversely, from the standpoint of life qua ζωή –​whose symbol, as we have seen, is Dionysus –​life and death merely flow into one another. The dual affirmation of these two contrasting perspectives is a proof of the extent to which the Ancient Greek esteemed complexity. 40 Supra, Chapter 1, n.80. 41 Euripides, Plays, 2: 1249–​52. Cf. Hölderlin’s evocation of life’s bountiful light in the first version of his Empedocles (Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles, 50). 42 Frisk’s (Griechisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2: 991) caution regarding φύω and φαίνω is supported by Pokorny (Proto-​Indo-​European Etymological Dictionary, 326–​9, 436), who assigns different Proto-​Indo-​European (pie) roots to them: *bhā-​1, and *bhū-​, respectively; nevertheless, he assigns the same root, *bhā-​, to φημί (to “voice,” to “speak”) and φαίνω, although he distinguishes two variants in it and derives each Greek verb from one of them: φαίνω from *bhā-​1 and φημί from *bhā-​2. It is important to recall here, though, von Humboldt’s view (in Gesammelte Schriften, 7: 90) that languages condense and reflect specific “conceptual perceptions” of reality. The pie consonantal phonemes bhā-​and bhū-​ are close enough to suggest a common conceptual perception underlying them, which we propose to render as bh∅-​(where ∅ can take any auxiliary vocalic sound). Furthermore, if pronounced slowly, bh∅-​ can be heard as what it is: an ideophone expressing the shining forth of things. It is not absurd, therefore, to presume a semantic overlap between the verbs φύω and φαίνω. On how language echoes reality in sensible terms (an idea that goes back to Rousseau, but which the French Symbolists developed to a degree formerly unprecedented), see Maniglier, La Vie énigmatique des signes, 265–​72. 43 Heidegger, ga 55: 16.

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cum semantic relation between φύω, φαίνω, and φημί (to “voice,” to “speak”),44 and Ancient Greek sculpture will become a sort of visual enunciation that brings to light what is, making it susceptible of being contemplated in its distinctively “formal” or “eidetic” features. What, therefore, are the distinctive features of Apollo’s statue in Olympia? In order to respond to this question, allow us, first, to draw the following tripartite opposition, based on what we have just exposed: Life Light Being

Death Darkness Non-​Being

The latter conceptual couple (“being”⎮“non-​being”) points to Parmenides’s poem. In turn, Homer’s epos and Pindar’s odes revolve around the other two conceptual couples, with their mortal heroes (Homer) and athletes (Pindar) pursuing κλέος (“everlasting fame”) and immortality. The problem is that those who compete for κλέος, i.e., those who struggle to remain (present) by being remembered (in the words, and hence in the world, of those who sing their deeds), do so by defeating their rivals. Consequently, an ethics of “excellence” (ἀρετή) can prove cruel, given its agonistic nature. Nevertheless, from Homer to Euripides, and from Anaximander to Plato, Ancient Greek culture supplied the corrective, if not the remedy, to this in the form of a reminder that Heraclitus enunciates thus: “excess (ὕβρις) needs to be put out more than a house on fire.”45 Hence, the positive role assigned to absence in the Iliad,46 where Agamemnon’s ὕβρις (i.e., his desire to overstep Apollo’s εὐνομία [“good order”] by keeping for himself what is under Apollo’s symbolic protection) is contested by Achilles, who withdraws from the battlefield after Agamemnon refuses to consider both Calchas’s (i.e., Apollo’s) wisdom and the reasonable words of his fellow Achaeans in the assembly, where all are equally entitled to speak. Such “equality” (ἰσονομία, to paraphrase Cleisthenes) is symbolised, too, by the open or “de-​occupied” (as the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza labels it)47 space typically found at the heart of any Greek polis: the ἀγορά (“agora”) where the 44 See n. 42 above. 45 Heraclitus, dk B43: “ὕβριν χρὴ σβεννύναι μᾶλλον ἢ πυρκαῖήν.” 46 Martínez Marzoa, El decir griego, 31–​9. 47 Oteiza, Propósito experimental/​An Experimental Proposition, 297–​301.

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citizens gathered and which was kept thus (i.e., empty) as the formal guarantee of their political freedom.48 We have already alluded to the morphological proximity, which now acquires full relevance, that there is between Apollo’s own name (Ἀπόλλων, Ἀπέλλων in Doric dialect) and the Dorian noun for the agora: ἀπέλλα, which is but another proof that early Greek thought turns around a single recurring intuition. In philosophical terms: that which is not present like everything else is present, is the condition of possibility and the limit of any presence, i.e., of that which struggles to be present and tends to cling to its own presentness at the expense of the right of others to be. Apollo incarnates this formidable (both ontological and ethical) intuition. Let us now go back to Apollo’s statue in Olympia. It shows Apollo rising over two groups of warriors (although, on account of the statue’s location, the addressees of its visual message were, in all probability, the participants in the Olympic games). As we have emphasised, Apollo extends his arm horizontally, as if calling on everyone to put an end to the fight, or to moderate their “will to power,” to put it in Nietzschean terms. In other words, the god comes to the fore encouraging αἰδώς (“shame,” “modesty”; Latin: pudor) among the fighters, with whom he does not mix –​he keeps his distance, that is, from those who

48

Compare this with Clastres’s analysis (in Society Against the State) of the mechanisms implemented in extramodern societies to avoid the concentration of power. It would be possible to reread Athenian democracy, which represents the culmination of Greek political freedom, as a harmonic progression, in the musical sense of the expression, of such mechanisms; just as it would be possible to reread modern parliamentary democracy not only as an evolved form of Athenian democracy, but also as a temporal transposition of the spatial emptiness that structured the political life of the Greek citizens, as each four or five years modern parliaments are physically emptied to call for elections. We intend to pursue these analogies in a future book provisionally titled Ulysses’s Mast, whose first chapter is available here: https://​polymo​rph.blog/​reim​agin​ing-​hom​ers-​leg​acy-​i-​on-​the -​coun​ter-​odyss​ean-​bac​kgro​und-​of-​conte​mpor​ary-​phi​loso​phy/​. The political value that we assign to the negative thus differs from that examined by Artemy Magun in Negative Revolution, which focusses on its disruptive qualities. Also, it is antithetical to Ernesto Laclau’s notion of “floating signifier” in On Populist Reason, for Laclau’s notion denotes any ad hoc political label/​banner that, lacking any concrete referent, might, however, serve to foster political struggle –​in the image of the Marxist class struggle but in the absence of a proletariat proper, which is replaced by discontent social groups lacking a common ideology but susceptible of finding a common identity under the umbrella of an opportunistically invented label/​banner –​with the goal of achieving political hegemony when, in the context of modern liberal democracies, ample social sectors happen to mistrust their traditional political representatives (see further Müller, What Is Populism?). Magun draws on Adorno and Badiou; Laclau, on Lacan and Gramsci. Our proposal, however, is neither Marxist nor Post-​Marxist.

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fight under his gaze. For αἰδώς and ἀρετή go together49 –​and, together, they oppose ὕβρις.50 In short, then, Apollo rises over those who fight and demands them to refrain from ὕβρις –​and, thereby, from ἀδικία (“injustice”). He does so on behalf of all things’ equal right to be, for one cannot always win Nike’s (Victory’s) favour, and losers must not be despised, let alone humiliated. Interestingly, one finds the terms δίκη (“justice”) and τύσιν (mutual “esteem”), paired, in contraposition to the term ἀδικία (“injustice”), in Anaximander’s saying, which is the oldest philosophical fragment we have. It reads: “That from which things spring up, is also that into which they relapse when they pass away according to necessity, for they pay justice and show mutual esteem to each other on account of their injustice, as per the assessment of time.”51 Things shine forth and then recede into darkness rhythmically, to let others shine forth in turn, and they do so according to time’s cyclical movement, to which they are all equally subjected. On our reading, the statue of Apollo at the Temple of Zeus in Olympia expresses this very same notion: Apollo rises above the contenders and asks them to put down any disrespect they may show to each other concerning the right they have to enter being’s region. Can this be the reason for one of Apollo’s frequent epithets: Oὔλιος, “Healer?” We cannot know.52 Nonetheless, we would like to supply the reader with an intriguing parallelism: whereas Apollo might have been called Oὔλιος because he countered excess, his sister Artemis, Aἰδώς (“the Pure”), was identified with Athena’s nurse,53 and thus –​as we have suggested –​with the “nurse” of 49 Cairns, Aidōs, 340–​2. 50 Ibid., 53, 131. The semantic field of the noun αἰδώς includes, too, the idea of “purity.” Thus, Artemis’s epithet: Aἰδώς, “Pure” (Otto, Theophania, 72) –​for, in addition to being Apollo’s sister, she is the goddess of the wilderness, i.e., of that which, being untouched by the human hand, is, by definition, set apart from human ambition. We encounter here again a distance –​a distance that, in this case, Artemis protects. See further our remark below (Chapter 5, n.28) on Frédéric Neyrat’s notion of “separation.” The intimate relation between Apollo and Artemis is highlighted, on the other hand, by the fact that “Pure” is also the secondary meaning of Apollo’s main epithet, Ὁ Φοῖβος, “the Bright” (Otto, The Homeric Gods, 62–​3). 51 Anaximander, dk12A9: “ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστί τοῖς οὖσι καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν” (our translation). 52 For oὔλιος means the opposite: “baneful,” “destructive.” Accordingly, Apollo is mentioned in various sources as the bringer of death. It seems that, at some point which is difficult to establish, the word oὔλιος, when applied to the god, fused with ὅλος (“whole,” “complete”), and thus lost its original meaning. See further Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2: 1126–​7. 53 Otto, Theophania, 72.

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practical reason. This, moreover, may explain the connection between αἰδώς and νοῦς (“thought,”54 of which Parmenides says that it is one with “being”).55 In a nutshell: the thought of φύσις, whose goddess is Artemis, must be nurtured by purity, whose goddess is also Artemis, i.e., the sister of he who is called ὁ Φοῖβος, “the Bright,” but also “the Pure” –​Apollo. 3

Apollo’s Arrows

What happens when the contenders disregard Apollo’s call, i.e., when they admit no restrictions to their will to power? The god subdues them. We have the first proof of it in the Iliad. Consider the following passages, which we give in Green’s translation, preceded by a brief summary of their content:

(a) Il. 5.432–​44. Diomedes attacks Aeneas three times, and is three times repelled by Apollo; upon his fourth charge, which he carries out “like a god,” Apollo reminds him that mortals and immortals are of different kinds, thus persuading Diomedes to prudently withdraw, which he does: Diomēdēs of the great war cry sprang at Aineias, well aware that he was protected by Apollo himself: yet not even the great god awed him, he was still urgent to kill Aineias, and strip his splendid armor from him. Three times he lunged at Aineias, mad-​keen to cut him down; three times his gleaming shield was slammed back by Apollo. But when for the fourth time he charged, like some divine being, then in a terrible voice Apollo the archer shouted: “Think well, son of Tydeus! Withdraw, do not presume to think like the gods, since in no manner is the race of immortals akin to that of earthbound men.” Such his words: Tydeus’s son gave ground a little, backwards, to keep clear of the wrath of Apollo the archer […]56

435

440

54 Cairns, Aidōs, 126–​30. 55 Parmenides, dk B3: “τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι” (“for the same is to think and to be”; our translation). 56 Homer, The Iliad, 106.

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(b) Il. 16.702–​11. Like Diomedes, Patroclus charges three times against the walls of Troy, and is three times repelled by Apollo; upon his fourth charge, the god tells him that neither he nor Achilles will conquer Troy, thus inciting Patroclus to prudently withdraw, which he does: Three times Patroklos climbed up the lofty wall’s elbow-​bend, and three times Apollo violently beat him back, thrusting against the bright shield with his immortal hands. But when for the fourth time he came on like a god, in a terrible voice Apollo addressed him with winged words: “Withdraw, Patroklos, scion of Zeus! It’s not fated that the lordly Trojans’ city should be laid waste by your spear, nor by that of Achilles, a far better man than you!” So he spoke, and Patroklos backed off a healthy distance, to avoid the wrath of Apollo, the deadly archer.57



705

710

(c) Il. 16.783–​822. Similar to Ares, the god of war, Patroclus attacks the Trojans three times; yet upon his fourth charge, which he, too, carries out “like a god,” Apollo injures him fatally; a Dardanian warrior first, and Hector next, put an end to Patroclus’s life: […] and Patroklos with deadly intent now went after the Trojans. Three times he charged them, the equal of swift Arēs shouting terribly: three times he slew nine men. 785 But when for the fourth time he came on like a god, then for you, Patroklos, the end of your life showed clear, for Phoibos confronted you in the grind of battle, dread god –​yet Patroklos missed him coming through the turmoil, for he was wrapped in a thick mist when they met. 790 Standing behind him, Apollo slammed his back and broad shoulders with the flat of one hand. His eyes turned in his head, from which now Phoibos Apollo struck off the helmet, and it rolled away, clattering, under the horses’ hoofs crest, visor, and all, its horsehair plumes besmirched 795 with blood and dust. Never till then had the gods allowed that crested helmet to be besmirched with dust,

57

Ibid., 312–​13.

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when it guarded the head and fine brow of a godlike man, Achilles; but now Zeus made a present of it to Hektōr to wear on his head, though his own doom was very near. 800 In Patroklos’s hands the far-​shadowing spear, so huge, so solid, bronze-​tipped, was all broken, and from his shoulders the fringed shield with its baldric fell to the ground, and his corselet the son of Zeus, Lord Apollo, now undid. Delusion clouded his mind, his bright limbs were unstrung, 805 he stood in a daze, and was struck from behind, at close range, midway between the shoulders, with a sharp-​edged spear, by Euphorbos, Pánthoös’s son, a Dardanian, who excelled all those of his age as a spearman and horseman, and at running: twenty men by now he’d dislodged from driving their horses 810 since he first arrived with his chariot, still a novice at warfare. He it was first threw his spear at you, horseman Patroklos, yet did not kill you, but pulled his ash spear from your flesh and ran back into the ranks, did not stay there to face Patroklos, even unarmed, in hand-​to-​hand combat, 815 while Patroklos too, overcome by the god’s blow and the spear, turned back towards the ranks of his comrades, avoiding fate. But Hektōr, when he perceived great-​hearted Patroklos backing off, after taking a hit from the sharp-​edged bronze, came up close to him through the ranks, and with his spear 820 stabbed into his nether belly, driving the bronze clean through: and he fell with a thud, greatly grieving the troops of the Achaians.58 In the three cases, Apollo appears as “he who strikes from afar,” that is, from a distance that mortals cannot reach –​and in order to prevent them from reaching it.59 Put differently: Apollo’s arrows bring an absolute limit to human ὕβρις. Persuasively, Redfield takes the Iliad to be the inaugural text of Ancient Greek tragedy.60 For his part, Griffith links the Apollonian assumption of one’s own limits to the Delphic imperative: “γνῶθι σεαυτόν” (“know yourself”),61 which, he says, Oedipus fails to enact.62 Certainly, there is more at play in 58 Ibid., 314–​15. 59 Cf. Otto, The Homeric Gods, 77–​9. 60 Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad, 220. 61 Griffith, The Theatre of Apollo, 17, 78. Compare this wise recommendation with the Delphic ethical imperative: “μηδὲν ἄγαν” (“nothing in excess”). 62 Ibid., 69, 74.

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Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex than the Dionysian reversal of the given (i.e., the transformation of a king’s son into a pariah).63 What brings about Oedipus’s ἄτη (“misfortune”) is Oedipus’s own arrogance as much as Apollo’s punishment for it. For, after receiving the oracle from the lips of the Pythia, Oedipus could have avoided killing men, and sleeping with women, older than him. Yet, he is sure about who his parents are –​and about his own identity. Acting out of self-​confidence, convinced that he can outwit fate, Oedipus tries to escape it, instead of reflecting on the oracle’s words. When he comes across his father, Laius, he confronts him and his entourage without any sense of proportionality, respect for superiors and elders, and due mercy towards strangers. Oedipus then boasts about his knowledge, which is but ignorance, before the Sphinx.64 Next, he arrogantly despises Teiresias, Apollo’s blind seer, when the clairvoyant warns him about his own blind self-​assuredness. Pretending that, in all this, Oedipus acts out of fear –​which, in a way, he does, since arrogance and fear go hand in hand throughout the play –​is of no excuse to his behaviour; for, when one acts out of fear, one contributes to precipitate what one intends to avoid. Nor is there any reason to surmise that Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is a play on how one is doomed by fate. The Greeks were not interested in the idea of providence, which is of Judaeo-​Christian origin. What do we know? How and why do we think we know it? What good is to know something if we do not get to know it when we need to? What is the difference between the “truth” (in the sense of ἀλήθεια or “disclosure”) and the “dissembling” (ψεῦδος) that endangers it?65 Is knowledge somehow marked by duality?66 It is this that Sophocles invites us to consider by showing how Apollo, the god of knowledge, punishes Oedipus for obviating such questions. How not to see that Oedipus’s reversal is Apollo’s work, the sign of Apollo’s justice against his all-​too-​proud attitude before the riddles he fails to solve? Here again, we encounter Apollo’s limiting arrows, if in a different way. The notion that one should not transgress one’s limits is the bedrock of Ancient Greek tragedy, which is Apollo’s business as much as it is Dionysus’s. Actually, all Greek theatres were physically put under the simultaneous safeguard of three gods: Dionysus, who, in addition to being the god to whom all plays were

63 64

On which see Vernant and Vidal-​Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 113–​40. For he presumes to know much about feet, but ignores the cause of his own damaged foot –​notice that, etymologically, Οἰδίπους derives from: (a) οἶδα πόδας =​“I know about feet,” and (b) οἰδεῖ πούς =​“Your foot is swollen” (Griffith, The Theatre of Apollo, 78–​9). 65 On ψεῦδος as “dissembling,” see Heidegger, Parmenides, 28–​58 (=​ ga 54: 42–​83). 66 Cf. Parmenides’s “two ways” in frag. dk B2, as well as his distinction between the “truthful speech” of the goddess and the “opinions of mortals” in B8, 50.

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dedicated, ruled over the physical space of the ὀρχήστρα (“orchestra”) where the chorus (χορός) stood and danced; Athena, who ruled over the θέατρον (“theatre”) proper, which was the place reserved for the audience; and Apollo, who ruled, in turn, over the σκήνη (“scenario”) where the actors performed.67 4

Apollo and the Birth of Philosophy

By gathering what was, what is, and what will be under his gaze, Apollo brings everything to the fore evenly; that is to say, he prevents X from not respecting Y’s right to be, and vice versa. In this manner, he educates all things in the acceptance of their limits, which, if needed, he imposes on them to counter their ὕβρις. This provides us with three intersecting notional axes along which we would now like to distribute several fragments of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides.68 The three notional axes in question are: (i) Apollo’s gaze, (ii) Apollo’s distance, and (iii) Apollo’s arrows. We shall consider them successively. 67 Griffith, The Theatre of Apollo, 14–​18. 68 Which implies leaving the Pythagoreans aside. Overall, we agree with Miller (“Greek Dualism”, p. 130): “The novelty of Pythagorean philosophy lay in its blend with religion. ‘Every distinction they lay down as to what should be done or not done,’ observed Aristoxenus, ‘aims at communion with the divine.’ Conversely, the novelty of Pythagorean religion lay in its blend with philosophy. Even though the Pythagoreans shared their ultimate goal with the salvation cults, their route to this goal seems to have been quite different. Whereas Eleusis promised immortality to those who had been initiated and had seen the holy objects [sic], and whereas the Bacchics tasted unity with the divine in the midst of their revels, the Pythagoreans –​and perhaps also the Orphics –​favored small congregations whose asceticism was aimed at a purification of thought.” See further Redfield, “Anthropology and the Fate of the Soul.” A note on the term “religion” is in order here. We have already mentioned that the Ancient Greeks did not exactly “believe” in their gods –​ Kerényi’s remark (in “Theos und Mythos”) that, before the arrival of Christianity, the term θεός, which we habitually translate as “god,” was mostly used in Greece as an exclamation, and Feyerabend’s claim (in Three Dialogues on Knowledge, 111) that the Greek gods were “part of the phenomenal world” are precious in this respect. Therefore, the ordinary meaning of the term “religion” (“belief” in “supernatural beings”) does not apply to Ancient Greek culture. Undoubtedly, Ancient Greek εὐσέβεια (or “due [εὐ] awe [σέβας]” vis-​à-​vis the gods) implied putting something apart in the sense of caring for it, and thereby some form of “dedication” (ἱερoῖς) to something perceived as “sacred” (ἱερoῖς), regardless of whether this entailed or not some sort of “ritual observation” (θρησκεία) towards it. But then again, this is not “religion” as we generally conceive of it. In an excellent study titled Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities, Carlin Barton and Daniel Boyarin have convincingly shown that our mainstream notion of “religion” relies on the adaptation of a Latin term (religio) that took its current meaning not before the 5th century ce, whereas in Julius Caesar (1st century bce), in whom we find its earliest occurrence,

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(i) Apollo’s gaze –​by which Apollo gathers what was, what is, and what will be, bringing all things evenly into unhiddenness. The fragments susceptible of being distributed along this first axis are: Anaximander, dk 12A9, 12A10, 12A12; Heraclitus, dk B1, B2, Β50, B30, B32, B41, B64, B72, B89, B90, B94, B108, B114; Parmenides, dk B1, B8. Read together, these fragments convey the following idea: There is “something” that, while being “boundless” (τὸ ἄπειρον),69 and thereby being “no-​particular-​ thing” (πάντων κεχωρισμένος),70 stands as the “ever-​living” (ἀείζωον)71 “primordial disposition” (ἀρχή)72 that brings into the “open” (ἄπειρον) and, therefore, into “disclosure” (ἀλήθεια)73 all things that were, that are, and that will be,74 allowing them to emerge according to their own nature.75 That “something” makes all things come to light, like Zeus’s “lightning” (κεραυνός) does;76 it “guides” (οἰακίζω)77 them by conferring on them their intrinsic “gleam” (κόσμος)78 and by allotting them their respective “portion” (μέτρον)79 according to “justice” (δίκη);80 and it gathers them as their “logos” (λόγος)81 which is “one” (ἕν),82 “wise” (σοφόν),83 and “common” (κοινόν)84 to all things.

it denoted “commitment to a vow,” and Julian (4th century ce) used it as a synonym of Hellenism. It was only in the 5th century ce, that several Christian authors began to use it to denote a system of beliefs and its corresponding practices, institutions, traditions, etc.; in their own interest, since Christianity turns basically around a belief (to wit, the belief that Christ is God’s only Son sent by the Father to redeem humanity from its sins). Now, while Pythagoreanism fits into this category of things, the Olympic “religion” does not. 69 Anaximander, dk 12A9, 12A10, 12A12. 70 Heraclitus, dk B108. 71 Heraclitus, dk B30. 72 Anaximander, dk 12A9, 12A10, 12A12. 73 Parmenides, dk B1. 74 Heraclitus, dk B30; Parmenides, dk B8. 75 Heraclitus, dk B1. 76 Heraclitus, dk B32, B64. 77 Heraclitus, dk B64. 78 Heraclitus, dk B30, B90. 79 Heraclitus, dk B30, B94. 80 Anaximander, dk 12A9; Heraclitus, dk B94; Parmenides, dk B1. 81 Heraclitus, dk B1, B2, Β50, B72. 82 Heraclitus, dk B30, B32, B41; Parmenides, dk B8. 83 Heraclitus, dk B41, Β50, B108. 84 Heraclitus, dk B2, B41, Β50, B72, B89, B114.

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(ii) Apollo’s distance –​due to which Apollo rises above those who fight and steps aside from them. The fragments susceptible of being distributed along this second axis are: Anaximander, dk 12A9, 12A10, 12A12; Heraclitus, dk B1, B16, B29, B32, B73, B89, B108; Parmenides, dk B1, B3, B8. Read together, these fragments convey the following idea: Being, then, what makes all things shine forth into unhiddenness, that “something,” which is different and “apart from everything else” (πάντων κεχωρισμένος),85 is not only divine and immortal,86 but also, for that reason, “never-​submerging” (τὸ μὴ δῦνόν),87 “steadfast” (ἀτρεμές),88 “continuous” (συνεχές),89 “whole” (οὖλον), “complete” (τέλειον),90 “un-​circumscribable” (ἄπειρον),91 and “unique” (μουνογενές);92 and this means that it can only be “thought”93 and, consequently, that it is perceptible to those who are “awaken” (ἐγρήγοροςον)94 and sought by the “best” (ἄριστοι) alone.95 (iii) Apollo’s arrows –​with which Apollo opposes the contenders’ ὕβρις, forcing them to accept, willingly or not, their mortal condition. The fragments susceptible of being distributed along this third axis are: Anaximander, dk 12A9; Heraclitus, dk B29, B30, B43, B53, B62. Read together, these fragments convey the following idea: “Justice” (δίκη) is achieved by the “timely distribution” of all things (τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν)96 in correlation with time’s curved arrow, which limits their “excess” (ὕβρις)97 and 85 Heraclitus, dk B108. 86 Cf. the reference to Zeus in Heraclitus dk B32 and the role of the goddess in Parmenides’s poem. 87 Heraclitus, dk B16. 88 Parmenides, dk B8. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Anaximander, dk 12A9, 12A10, 12A12. 92 Parmenides, dk B8. 93 Parmenides, dk B1, B3, B8. Cf. Severino, Il giogo, 103–​6. 94 Heraclitus, dk B1, B73, B89. 95 Heraclitus, dk B29. 96 Anaximander, dk 12A9. 97 Heraclitus, dk B43.

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mutual “injustice” (ἀδικία)98 by introducing cyclical alternation into the realm of being. In this way, when “mortals” (θνητοί), feeling nurtured and sustained by the “ever-​living”99 or “immortal” (ἀθάνατοι) forces which are expressive through them,100 engage in “agonistic fight” (πόλεμος)101 to achieve “immortal fame” (κλέος ἀέναον θνητῶν),102 they are prevented from overstepping their mortal limits. Apollo’s gaze, distance, and arrows are, therefore, more than simple literary tropes with which to examine retrospectively the dawn of philosophy: they are three conceptual metaphors that prove exceedingly helpful to examine philosophy’s mythological matrix from within.103 Plutarch’s assertion that Apollo was the god of philosophy thus becomes transparent. Ultimately, the different cultural factors ordinarily adduced to explain the birth of philosophy –​e.g., the Greeks’ appreciation for the world as such, the curiosity they put in studying it, the advantages of their alphabet, etc. –​cannot dispute the richness and the depth of this one, which de-​authorises the positivist interpretation of the birth of philosophy as a transition from the superstitious to the logical, from the religious to the scientific. 5

Apollo, Dionysus, and the Earth

If Dionysus embraces all things and leads them back to the earth, Apollo makes sure that they can all shine forth evenly. Is it not then, one may ask, that both gods prove merciful in the sense that they shelter all things, if in two different ways? One may infer from this that Apollo shelters what he shelters because, unlike Zeus’s, his light encompasses all things from above instead of determining them from within. It might be so. Yet, there seems to be something more at stake here. Admittedly, Apollo illuminates evenly all things from above; but that does not exactly amount to shelter them. If, on the one hand, Apollo’s distance contrasts with Dionysus’s proximity,104 Apollo’s care for everything 98 Anaximander, dk 12A9. 99 Heraclitus, dk B30. 100 Heraclitus, dk B62. Cf. Pindar, Nemean 6.1–​7, Pythian 8.95–​7. See, for a new interpretation of Heraclitus dk B62, Segovia, “Rethinking Death’s Sacredness,” 8–​10. 101 Heraclitus, dk B53. 102 Heraclitus, dk B29. 103 On which see overall Colli, La nascita della filosofia. 104 Otto, The Homeric Gods, 78: “Apollo rejects whatever is too near –​entanglement in things, the melting gaze, and, equally, soulful merging, mystical inebriation and its ecstatic vision. […] Apollo’s ideal of distance […] puts him in opposition to Dionysian exuberance.”

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­f igure 8  Dionysus, by Olha Liubokhynets

­f igure 9  Apollo, by Olha Liubokhynets

makes him, on the other hand, a proximate god –​as is Dionysus. Given their dissymmetry, though, it can be ventured that the two gods coincide on their back, for their respective proximities are the reverse of one another –​so, too, are their respective distances, as there is a Dionysian distance by which the masked god, affirming as he does the pre-​individual unity of all things, brushes off their individuality. We seem to have found, then, the spot where the two gods meet. The chiastic logic that we evoked in Chapter 1 is once more discernible here: while Apollo’s nearness is Dionysus’s distance, Dionysus’s nearness is Apollo’s distance, and vice versa. Hence, their twinness (figures 8 and 9).105 A final word about the source of Apollo’s compassion. The key term here may well be the Greek noun ἔλεος, “pity,” which denotes a feeling that was “personified” as a goddess in Ancient Greece. Pausanias tells us that there was an altar dedicated to her in Athens.106 We also know that, in addition to being a daughter of Night and Darkness and a sister to Sorrow, “Pity” (Ἔλεος) opposed ἀναίδεια –​literally, the “lack of αἰδώς.” The fact that ἔλεος and αἰδώς go together puts us again on Apollo’s track. Arguably, then, compassion is not only an essential trait of Apollo –​who has often been portrayed as the epitome

1 05 Nesbitt Oppel (Nietzsche on Gender, 72) refers to them as “half-​brothers.” 106 Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1: 17.1.

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of the Dorian spirit107 –​but a feminine one, as well. Furthermore, this suggests that Zeus need not be seen as the source of Apollo’s mercy. For Eleos, like all other children of Night and Darkness, precedes, chronologically speaking, the generation of the Olympian gods. All in all, then, Apollo’s compassion may have pre-​Olympian roots. Yet if, as we have seen, Dionysus symbolises life’s informal oneness, which, out of mercy towards the living, he reveals to whomever approaches him, Apollo can be said to extend Dionysus’s compassion to each living form by granting it its right to be. Would it be possible, therefore, to deduce from this that it is the earth’s own merciful disposition towards her children –​for Gaia is, above anything else, mother to all the living –​what lies, too, behind Apollo’s compassion? The fact that Hyacinthus/​Apollo was, as we have mentioned, one of the names associated with the Earth’s consort; and the fact that, as we have also underlined, the basement of Apollo and Dionysus’s shared sanctuary at Delphi opened to the depths of the earth, over which the Pythia stood on her tripod to receive Apollo’s oracle –​these important facts militate in favour of this unconventional but plausible assumption.108

107 Transforming Apollo into an essentially masculine god of victory, and victory itself into a totalising worldview (“at the expense of reality,” as Hanna Harendt puts it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 9), was indeed the Nazi temptation. Cf. Lacoue-​Labarthe and Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” 301; Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, 59–​60; Pine, Hitler’s “National Community,” 93–​4. 108 We are grateful to Antonio Piñero for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter; to Richard Polt for drawing our attention to Feyerabend’s Three Dialogues on Knowledge; and to Ukrainian artist Olha Liubokhynets for designing for us figures 8 and 9, which illustrate Dionysus and Apollo’s chiastic relation.

­c hapter 4

The Modern Misadventures of Apollo and Dionysus “disharmony” is simply the way in which transformation appears when projected onto a static schema wagner, An Anthropology of the Subject, 34

∵

Overview

Modern thought tends to overlook the twin nature of Dionysus and Apollo. Undeniably, Nietzsche perceives their complementarity. Yet, he stresses the Dionysian over the Apollonian, making of the former the underlying truth of the latter. In this, Nietzsche’s judgment carries with it echoes of 19th-​century biologism, of Schopenhauer’s opposition between our will and our representations, and –​no matter how painfully Nietzsche himself tried to overcome it –​ of the typically Christian contraposition of truth and falsity. Possibly, it was his reading of Schopenhauer between 1865 and 1867 that tipped the scales in favour of the Dionysian, because Nietzsche’s 1864 Valediktionsarbeit on Theognis of Megara still vindicates Apollo –​eloquently enough, in connection to the earth. Clearly, Nietzsche maintains till the end a certain balance between the Dionysian (i.e., between the “will to power”) and the Apollonian (the formal “representations” to which the artiste cannot renounce). However, Nietzsche’s inclination towards the Dionysian reaches a problematic and commonly overlooked peak in the third section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Dionysus’s “maelstrom” engulfs reality as a black hole would. Distinguishing between Nietzsche’s three successive formulations of the “eternal return” –​in dialogue with Heidegger’s, Deleuze’s, and Löwitz’s interpretations of Nietzsche’s “most difficult thought,” as Nietzsche himself labels it, and with an eye put on Nietzsche’s indebtedness to Richard Wagner –​proves key to round this out. Can one say, though, that Nietzsche’s ongoing fascination with Dionysus points, if obliquely, to the symbolic contraposition of Achilles and Odysseus in relation to the question of human sorrow? And, if so, to what extent can Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy be interpreted as a development of themes which are characteristic of the Homeric epos? As for Winckelmann’s recovery

© Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004538597_005

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of Apollo, which we propose to reread in queer terms, it obviously stands in open contrast to Nietzsche’s Dionysianism. Yet it lacks, in turn, ontological strength. Nevertheless, Winckelmann’s Apollonian thought can be connected to Foucault’s appropriation of Hellenistic ethics and, in particular, to understand what Foucault calls the “care of the self,” which, we argue, must be viewed as Apollo’s latest modern adventure; or rather misadventure, since its implications have gone largely unnoticed, except among Anglo-​American Foucault scholars, or else have been overtly rejected –​blame it on Nietzsche’s French reception, which, from Bataille to Klossowski, Deleuze, and Laruelle, has raised Nietzsche’s Dionysianism to the rank of dogma. 1

Achilles and Odysseus

“Event” and “form” can be described as the two fundamental components of life’s morphogenesis. By “event,” we mean the emergence of possibilities out of the chaotic milieu where they remain mixed and potential; by “form,” we mean the ontological crystallisation of some of those possibilities. Remo Bodei recalls that Paul Valéry applied this very distinction to art, which, according to Valéry, consists in the “constantly broken and restored equilibrium” between form and event.1 For his part, Carlo Diano associates these two components with two distinctive conceptual matrices: one “Mediterranean,” and more broadly “Oriental”; the other one, by contrast, typically “Greek.”2 They coexisted in Ancient Greek culture, says Diano. Odysseus and Achilles are their eponymous heroes; the Odyssey and the Iliad, their eponymous texts. Achilles, he goes on to say, epitomises the realm of “form,” for his “strength” displays “excellence” (ἀρετή) and is linked to the achievement of everlasting “fame” (κλέος).3 The fact, moreover, that form is “absolutely indifferent to the event,” i.e., worthy of being praised as such, is the reason why Homer extols it in the vanquished, and why Pindar demands that the adversary be duly honoured.4 In short, there would be no epic without it.5 Conversely, 1 Bodei, “Cristalli di storia,” 19, n.17. See, e.g., the interplay between “vide,” “événement,” and “forme” in Valéry, Le cimetière marin, 6 (vv. 5.3, 8.3, as per McGrath and Comenetz’s edition), as well as Rey’s parallel distinction between “idée” and “structure” in Paul Valéry, 125. Cf. Lévi-​Strauss’s notion of “dynamic disequilibrium” mentioned in Chapter 1, to which we shall return in due course. 2 Diano, Forma ed evento. 3 Ibid., 58. 4 Ibid. The idea that form is, as Bodei contends, “indifferent to the event,” may be better understood through an example: the occasion of this particular “event” makes me victorious; however, my rival’s “excellence” or outstanding “form” is not less praiseworthy than mine. 5 Ibid., 59.

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Odysseus is alien to form. Accordingly, there is one thing Odysseus, the man of many tricks,6 cannot do, namely, “to sing and accompany himself with a lyre, as Achilles does.”7 When Odysseus hears the Sirens singing the κλέος of the heroes, he asks his men to tie him up to the mast of his ship to avoid falling under the Sirens’ spell; and when he hears of his own κλέος, he cries, “because in his world forms are merely aspects of the event, fame an illusion, and pain the only true reality […] [which] cannot be sung but narrated.”8 For sorrow “takes refuge in the fortress of the soul,”9 in whose depths “one finds the images of the goods previously enjoyed but preserved in one’s memory,”10 i.e., memories and souvenirs which can only be evoked in narrative fashion, whereas poetry is reserved for epic purposes alone. Thus, remarks Diano, the difference in style between the two Homeric poems, between the Iliad’s staccato and the Odyssey’s legato.11 Several additional oppositions are patent, as well: Achilles’s straightforwardness and Odysseus’s twistedness;12 their respective weapons;13 Achilles’s “wrath” and Odysseus’s “patience”;14 Achilles’s youthful death and Odysseus’s longevity;15 the way in which each hero encounters death,16 etc. A triadic structure underlies this dual logic –​a structure to which, furthermore, the figure of Odysseus is the key. If, in Ancient Greece, Dionysus symbolised life’s informal continuity, and Apollo life’s formal discreteness, Odysseus can be said to play a complex role vis-​à-​vis this division: on the one hand, he falls on the Dionysian side, as we have just seen; on the other hand, he falls right between both sides. For, despite countering Achilles’s Apollonian κλέος, Odysseus’s sorrow cannot be equated with Dionysus’s untamed life. Dionysus compensates for Odysseus’s sorrow. A brief comparative note is in order here. In 6

Cf. Dionysus’s apparition as a “multi headed bull or dragon” in Euripides’s Bacchae, vv. 1016–​17. 7 Diano, Forma ed evento, 59 (our translation). 8 Ibid., 60 (our translation). Notice, too, that the diegetic purpose of the Odyssey is to bring the hero’s “life” (ψυχή) to a meaningful “closing loop” (νόστος), to give it a definable –​in both the usual sense and the etymological sense of the term definable: recognisable and concluding –​“form” or “figure” (ψυχή) which cannot be praised before being achieved. Cf. Míguez Barciela, La visión de la Odisea, 13–​14. 9 Notice, in this sense, Achilles’s lack of “interiority,” on which see Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, 75–​85; Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad, 20–​2. 10 Diano, Forma ed evento, 49 (our translation). 11 Ibid., 59. 12 Ibid., 63. 13 Ibid., 62–​3. 14 Ibid., 62. 15 Ibid., 64. 16 Ibid., 64.

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Buddhism, too, the deceiving illusions of individuated life cause suffering. Yet, sorrow is overcome by moving one level downwards –​it can be appeased, that is, through the intuition and experience of something even deeper, of whose unawareness sorrow is but the consequence: life’s ever-​living impersonal flow; hence, should one experience it before dying, one will not really die when death comes. Greece however –​despite Alexander’s persistent dream to bridge both cultures –​is not India, or, more exactly, the Greek thought-​world is not equal to that of Vedanta (in particular, Advaita Vedanta) Hinduism. As we have said, to affirm life’s impersonal dimension did not amount, in Ancient Greece, to reject as illusions the aspirations of individuated life, through which ζωή’s pre-​individual flow achieves its goal and becomes fully expressive. Otherwise, there would be no epic. 2

Nietzsche’s Dionysian Philosophy

Drawing on his own subjective experiences of pleasure and displeasure,17 and influenced by Schopenhauer’s Hindu-​oriented philosophy,18 which he discovered in 1865, the young Nietzsche, too, places suffering at the core of individuated life.19 Yet, in spite of flirting with it in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche ultimately dismisses Schopenhauer’s pessimism,20 i.e., the view that the striving of the will to fulfil its aspirations can never be fully satisfied, and, therefore, that, since life, due to its inevitable ups and downs (i.e., to its permanent becoming), is dissatisfaction, one should renounce to one’s will in order not to suffer. Neither can we put our will aside, thinks Nietzsche, nor can we renounce, as “artistes,”21 to transfigure life’s suffering into beauty and art,22 –​i.e., to create our own self-​affirming masquerades. In other words, we cannot negate the absolute “will” (Wille) that each one’s own “will to power” 17 As per his own confession: Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885–​1887, 115 (§2[110]). 18 On which see Cross, Schopenhauer’s Encounter with Indian Thought; Barua (ed.), Schopenhauer and Indian Philosophy; Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 68–​70, 76–​9. 19 In both The Dionysian Vision of the World (1870) and The Birth of Tragedy (1872). 20 See once more Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 228 (“What I Owe to the Ancients,” §5), Ecce Homo, 107–​8 (“The Birth of Tragedy,” §1); but also the Preface to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche defends a “life-​strengthening pessimism” against Schopenhauer’s “pessimism of weakness” (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 4 [§1], 7–​8 [§§4–​5], 10 [§6], 11 [§7]). 21 Artist in German, rather than the more usual term Künstler, on which see the translator’s comment in Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 5 n. 4. 22 Such, Nietzsche says, is the “highest symbolism of art” (ibid., 26 [§4]).

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(Wille zur Macht)23 fragmentarily reflects, and which moral “representations” (Vorstellungen) hypocritically try to tame; we need to assume the former (i.e., to affirm Dionysus) no matter how much it makes us suffer, and we need to replace such moral representations with other ones capable of enhancing it, Nietzsche suggests.24 Still, while our representations may be valid or not, depending on the extent to which they affirm or negate our “will to power,” the latter is the sole truth –​and in a way, then, the sole true God –​there is. Thus, Nietzsche calls the will “Ur-​Eine,” i.e., “primordial oneness,”25 and, significantly, qualifies its denial as moral “weakness” and as an act of “idolatry.”26 Like Nietzsche’s overall thought, The Birth of Tragedy is, however, rich in nuances. Throughout the 1880s, Nietzsche will go back to it repeatedly, in an “attempt at self-​criticism.”27 He will describe his first published work as an “immature” and “romantic” text which draws, chiefly, on subjective “experiences of aesthetic pleasure and displeasure,” overemphasises “suffering,” and blends together “creative fury” and “destructive wrath.”28 Furthermore, he will declare it to be a “badly written” book, “clumsy, embarrassing, with a rage for imagery and confused in its imagery,” in addition to being too “emotional.”29 23

Which, as Heidegger emphasises, is Nietzsche’s own word for “being” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1: 18–​19 [=​ga 43: 20–​22]). 24 On the union of Dionysus and Apollo in Nietzsche’s thought, see again The Birth of Tragedy, 14 (§1), 26 (§4), 33 (§6), and Ecce Homo, 108 (“The Birth of Tragedy,” §1). Nietzsche himself speaks of “reciprocal necessity” (The Birth of Tragedy, 26 [§4]); Daniels (Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy, 50), of “chemistry and conflict” between the two gods. On the “life-​affirming basis” of Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy, see further Murray, Nietzsche and the Dionysian, esp. 14, 19, 27, 30, n.48, 99. 25 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 18 (§1). We provide Nietzsche’s original German terms after Paolo D’Iorio digital edition (eKGWB) of the German reference edition of Nietzsche’s works, posthumous fragments, and correspondence edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (kgwb). 26 Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 42. In this, Nietzsche is indebted not only to Christian theology (despite all!), but also to 19th-​century “biologism,” on which see Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor; cf. Heidegger’s warning: “[W]‌e may doubt whether the Nietzschean interpretation of the Dionysian […] is not a coarse interpreting back of an uncritical nineteenth century ‘biologism’ into the Greek world” (Heidegger, Parmenides, 122 [=​ ga 54: 182]). Making of the will, and hence of Dionysus, a “primordial One” is, on the other hand, reminiscent of Schelling, whose lessons on the philosophy of mythology Burckhardt followed in Berlin in the 1840s (Vieweg and Danz, “Introduction,” 11). Notice, too, the role of Dionysus as a “god to come” in Schelling’s philosophy of mythology (Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, xi: 149; xii: 254–​5). 27 As per the title of the Preface to its second edition, which dates from 1886 (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 3–​12). 28 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885–​1887, 115 (no. 2[110], from 1885). 29 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 5–​6 (§3).

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More importantly perhaps, he will cast doubt on whether the book really manages to respond to the question: “What is Dionysiac?,” both in its own right and in reference to the Greeks.30 It is indeed the question about the Dionysian, in connection to the “destructive” undertones of The Birth of Tragedy, that we should like to briefly consider here. For even if the Apollonian, says Nietzsche, “soars upward […] borne on the wings” of the Dionysian,31 and thus cannot be discarded on behalf of the Dionysian, “at the same time,” he writes,32 the domain of Apollo is also that of the illusory “appearances” we self-​complacently build to elude “becoming” by “immobilising” it33 –​a domain that “Dionysian joy” therefore aims at “destroying.”34 There is a crucial ambivalence here, though; one that Nietzsche not only acknowledges, but which his thought takes on violently, to the point of splitting in two due to it. For if, on the one hand, Nietzsche writes (in a fragment from 1883): “I will not turn you into stones with snake-​haired terror [schlangenhaarigem Schrecken]:35 with my shield of beauty [Schild ,Schönheit‘] I protect myself,”36 and thus places Athena’s shield (in her quality as Apollo’s ally, one may infer)37 between himself and the terrifying (which is not only the Gorgon’s, but also, in another sense, Dionysus’s domain), on the other hand, as we shall see, Nietzsche, in the third part (1884) of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, seems to advocate for what looks like a complete dissolution of Apollo into (literally) Dionysus’s “maelstrom.”38 Now, while the latter is a minor, if not exactly isolated motif in the context of Nietzsche’s thought, it should not be overlooked, however, for it can help to explain, first, Nietzsche’s final breakdown (from a strict philosophical standpoint, that is); 30 Ibid., 6–​7 (§§3–​4). 31 Ibid., 112 (§24). 32 Ibid., 26 (§4). 33 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885–​1887, 115 (no. 2[110]). 34 Ibid., 116 (§2[110]). The blending of Dionysus’s “intoxication” and Apollo’s “quietness” (and Athena’s “inventiveness”) is mentioned by Friedrich Schlegel (in 1795–​97) apropos Sophocles (Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, 61). For his part, Winckelmann had discriminated (in 1764) between two youth male ideals in Ancient Greece, one “Apollonian” and the other one “Dionysian.” Nietzsche’s Dionysus/​Apollo dichotomy is reminiscent of both Winckelmann’s and Schlegel’s distinctions. 35 In allusion to the Gorgon, but notice that, as Helen Lovatt remarks (basing herself on Nonnus’s analogy in Dionysiaca 18.295–​7), “the head of Medusa is a fruit like the grape,” since “both bring oblivion” (Lovatt, The Epic Gaze, 350). Cf. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 50 (§2), where Dionysus and Medusa are expressly associated. 36 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1882–​1884, 350 (no. 9[17], contra Lou Saomé and Paul Rée?). 37 See Chapter 3, n.24. 38 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 124.

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secondly, it can also shed light on a possible development of Nietzsche’s thought on the “eternal return”; and, thirdly, it can help to make sense of a key aspect of Nietzsche’s reception in France and of his influence upon French Post-​Structuralism, as well. We shall examine all this at a later point in this book. Suffice it to say, for now, that the growing distance between the Dionysian and the Apollonian within Nietzsche’s thought (from shortly before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy to the third part of Zarathustra), brings to a close Nietzsche’s pre-​ Schopenhauerian approach to Apollo, which can be found in his, sadly, still little studied –​especially in the Anglo-​American world39 –​ Valediktionsarbeit on Theognis of Megara (1864), which Nietzsche wrote in Latin and of which, interestingly enough, Anthony Jensen writes that “[i]‌t is a piece that, had Nietzsche never written another word, would have assured his place […] in the history of German philology.”40 In this early booklet, which antedates The Birth of Tragedy by eight years, Nietzsche, after elaborating on the original setting of Theognis’s elegies (the common meals instituted by Megarian nobles, during which, Nietzsche writes, “a libation was made to the gods, and prayers and songs were offered especially to Apollo”),41 notes down Theognis’s anthems thematically; and he observes that, in their majority, they contain supplications to Apollo (as well as to Zeus, Zeus and Apollo, Artemis, the Muses and the Charites, and the Dioscuri, in decreasing order of recurrence).42 Now, one of the “most beautiful” songs of Theognis, underlines Nietzsche, reads thus: Oh lord Phoebus, when divine Leto bore you, Her slender hands clutching an oasis’ palm, To be the most fair of the immortals, Limitless Delos’ entirety was filled with Ambrosia’s scent –​monstrous earth laughed, The grey ocean’s saline depth rejoiced.43

39 Kerr, “Preface,” i. 40 Jensen, “Nietzsche’s Valediction and First Article” 99. 41 Nietzsche, De Theognide Megarensi, 53. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid, in R. M. Kerr’s translation. The Greek original (which corresponds to vv. 5–​10 of Theognis’s extant elegies) reads: “φοῖβε ἄναξ, ὅτε μέν σε θεὰ τέκε πότνια Λητώ, /​φοίνικος ῥαδινῇς χερσὶν ἐφαψαμένη, /​ἀθανάτων κάλλιστον, ἐπὶ τροχοειδέϊ λίμνῃ, /​πᾶσα μὲν ἐπλήσθη Δῆλος ἀπειρεσίη /​ὀδμῆς ἀμβροσίης, ἐγέλασσε δὲ γαῖα πελώρη /​γήθησεν δὲ βαθὺς πόντος ἁλὸς πολιῆς.” The expression γαῖα πελώρη is a wink to Hesiod’s Theogony, vv. 159, 173.

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Not only do we encounter here a reference to Apollo’s “fairness” (v. 3), but also to the god’s connection to the dynamic (“ocean”-​like, “grey,” i.e., Posidonian⧹Dionysian) “depths” of the “earth” (vv. 5–​6), which, Theognis says, “rejoiced” (v. 6) when Apollo was born.44 One cannot but wonder, then, how differently might Nietzsche’s thought have evolved, had he not come across Schopenhauer’s philosophy one year after submitting his Valediktionsarbeit.45 The Birth of Tragedy, where Schopenhauer’s distinction between Wille and Vorstellungen leads Nietzsche to reconfigure his earlier presentation of Apollo, dates instead from 1872 (and “Schopenhauer as Educator,” i.e., Nietzsche’s third “untimely meditation,”46 from 1874). An altogether different Apollo emerges through its pages. Nonetheless, the idea that Apollo’s domain is formed by the deceiving appearances with which we vainly try to frozen life’s becoming –​for “the Apolline appearances in which Dionysos objectifies himself are no longer an ‘eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life,’47 […] [i.e.,] they are no longer those [felt] energies [still lacking an image] […] in which the enthusiastic servant of Dionysos senses the closeness of his god,” writes Nietzsche48 –​this idea is already patent in an opuscule titled The Dionysian Vision of the World49 which predates The Birth of Tragedy by two years. Thus, in The Dionysian Vision of the World (1870), Nietzsche suggests that the “entanglement” of Dionysus and Apollo betrays their mutual “struggle”:50 to Apollo corresponds the “beautiful seaming of the dream world,51 in which every person is [a]‌consummate artist”;52 by contrast, he underlines, Dionysian “intoxication” and “ecstasy” make the subjective “disappear before the erupting force of […]

44

In this, Nietzsche goes beyond the studies of Creuzer and Müller on the difference between the Olympian and the chthonic in Ancient Greek culture, studies which, according to Cornelia Isler-​Kerényi, could have played a key role in Nietzsche’s intellectual formation (Isler-​Kerényi, Dionysos in Archaic Greece, 235–​44). See infra, Chapter 7, n.7. 45 We intend to pursue this line of thought in a future book titled Nietzsche’s Pre-​Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought, in which we claim that the ghost of Nietzsche’s early (and earthly!) Apollo hunts Nietzsche between 1883 and 1889. 46 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 125–​94. 47 Goethe, Faust, I, 505ff. 48 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 46 (§8). 49 Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 4 (§50): “Philosophy in the Schopenhauerian vein,” writes Nietzsche, “teaches us to conceive of what we term ‘feeling’ as a complex of […] representations [Vorstellungen] and states of Will [Willenszustanden].” 50 Ibid., 29 (§1). 51 Cf. the reference to “the world of the Maya” in ibid., 55 (§4). 52 Ibid., 29 (§1).

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the common-​to-​all, the natural,”53 thereby “sundering”54 or “annihilating”55 (Nietzsche explicitly recalls here Dionysus’s “dismemberment”)56 the “principium individuationis,”57 i.e., making it appear as a “persistent weakness of the Will.”58 The fact that Schopenhauer’s philosophy frames Nietzsche’s, implies, of course, that Nietzsche’s thought revolves, if indirectly, around Kant’s. For, in the last instance, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is a misreading of Kant’s.59 That is, Schopenhauer projects his Wille/​Vorstellung dualism onto Kant’s own philosophy –​and does so wrongly, since, strictly speaking, Kant does not formulate an utter opposition between how things are and how we take them to be. Kant had simply reacted against the prevalent mechanicist determinism of his time and opposed to it a radical cum rhizomatic principle of freedom, on three levels. (1) Against the notion that scientific knowledge, as per its concept of causality and its principle of the necessary concatenation of all things, tells us how things are, Kant, in the First Critique, states that things are more

53

Ibid., 31 (§1). This is a perfect illustration of what we have called Nietzsche’s “biologism.” Recent theorising on the problematic character of the nature/​culture divide (see, e.g., Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture) compromises its foundations, though. See Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 134: “If the allegory of man’s ‘becoming human’ is to be realized as an evolutionary sequence, it must have a beginning. Hence the myth of ‘natural man’ is born; an unrefined man, as it were, all ‘instinct’ and impulse. […] Indeed, we are all made to ‘feel’ natural man within us, as the impulsive ‘animal’ that propels wondrous instincts like hunger, sex, and aggression. But for an age that has been taught, by Wynne-​ Edwards and others, to perceive the significantly ‘cultural’ essence of most animal life styles, the genealogical locus, and in fact the very possibility, of such an intuitive ‘animal-​ man’ becomes a matter of greater and greater dubiousness. If we cannot find an uncultured animal, in other words, if wolves treat one another with the tempered gentility of rococo courtiers, and tigers kill for the abandoned young of other carnivores, why single out man’s forebears as the only real beasts in the zoo? Man has always been cultural, just as he has always been natural. It is extremely unlikely that he was ever generally crude, brutish, slovenly, or unsophisticated. Crude, unsophisticated animals do not survive very well. […] The principle of natural selection requires that a strong adaptive pressure must bear upon any given species throughout its evolutionary history; there is no place for the luxury of crudeness or the preservation of an inept race that may one day accomplish great things”; 140: the standard “viewpoint is simply an inversion, like a movie run backward […] We create nature, and tell ourselves stories about how nature creates us!” 54 Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 31 (§1). 55 Ibid., 57 (§3). 56 Ibid., 36 (§1). 57 Ibid., 31 (§1). Cf. Pollard, “Self-​annihilation and Self-​overcoming.” 58 Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 34 (§1). 59 See further Auweele, The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism.

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than what we get to know about them. (2) Against the supposition that all our knowledge is conditioned, Kant acknowledges that, while it is true that our understanding is conditioned –​in the sense that it is determined by the a priori forms of our sensibility and by its own epistemological laws –​our reason, by contrast, is free to produce its own ideas. (3) Against the view that we act heteronomously, Kant, in the Second Critique, contends that we ultimately do not, as the grounding principle of our morality cannot be but the free or autonomous self-​positioning of our practical reason. (4) Lastly, in the Third Critique, Kant bridges these various spheres by showing that, when the issue is looked upon closely and in reflective terms, one is forced to admit that there is as much freedom in the natural world as there is in us. More importantly, there is a good deal of Hölderlin in Nietzsche, as well. For Nietzsche’s Dionysian “erupting force” resembles Hölderlin’s concept of the “aorgic” (Aorgische),60 which designates, in opposition to nature’s “organic” forms, nature’s original unboundness. Yet Hölderlin –​whom Nietzsche read enthusiastically in his youth, but whose thought he would later reject61 –​contraposes the “aorgic” and the “organic” for purposes which are not those of Nietzsche; furthermore, unlike Nietzsche, he avoids placing the “aorgic” above the “organic” in axiological terms. Briefly, Hölderlin distinguishes between (i) the “pure,” “unmeasured” or “excessive,” “sensible” “intimacy” (Innigkeit)62 of the “aorgic” and the “organic,” which defines the primordial unity of everything; (ii) a subsequent conflict between them due to the emergence of “consciousness;”63 and (iii) the possibility of a more “contained” (gehalter) and “clear” (klarer) “intimacy” that would neither erase their difference nor suppress their underlying unity –​which is not very different from our own proposal of affirming earth and world.64 As for Hölderlin’s claim about a regained “intimacy” of the “aorgic” and the “organic,” one must probably seek for its motivation in the poet’s discontent with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution.65 60 Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles, 144–​9. Other terms for it, mentioned there as well, are: “hyper-​ living” (überlebendig), “lacking figure” (Unbildlichere), “indistinct” (Unterscheidbare), “unconscious” (Unbewußtere), and “infinite” (Unendlichere). 61 Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, 11: 257. 62 Krell (in Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles) translates Innigkeit as “intensity,” which is doubtless a feasible option, but a less suitable one in our view, given the context of Hölderlin’s Vereinigungsphilosophie (“philosophy of unification”). 63 Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, 37–​8. 64 Cf. Heraclitus’s play with “sameness” and “difference” in frags. dk B8, dk B10, and dk B51. Note, too, that Hölderlin’s threefold process prefigures Hegel’s dialectics: Thesis –​ Antithesis –​Synthesis. 65 Mykova, The German Idealism Reader, 211.

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Nietzsche’s motivation was altogether different, though: alarmed by the gradual transformation of the philhellenic German educational tradition (which Winckelmann had contributed to establish in the 18th century with his endorsement of Apollonian soberness) into a massive promoter of bourgeoise utilitarianism, state engagement, and moral enthusiasm,66 he wanted to introduce Dionysus/​ζωή as a counter-​cultural force into the impoverished cultural landscape of late-​19th-​century Germany. 3

Dionysus’s Maelstrom

Overall, Nietzsche’s thought is torn between the overcoming of the limitations usually imposed on life’s untamed flow, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the realisation that such limitations are indispensable, lest life be dissolved into an incoherent succession of episodes lacking any synthesis.67 Hence, the tension between what may be called Nietzsche’s death drive68 and his “metaphysics of the artiste.”69

66 67

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On which see Konrad, “Wilhelmn von Humboldt’s Contribution to a Theory of Bildung,” 107–​8; Myers, The Double-​edged Sword; van Bommel, Classical Humanism and the Challenge of Modernity. Cf., e.g., Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 76 (§1): “To be able to look out from the optic of sickness towards healthier concepts and values, and again the other way round, to look down form the fullness and self-​assurance of the rich life into the secret work of the instinct of decadence –​that was my longest training, my genuine experience, if I became the master of anything, it was this. I have a hand for switching perspectives” (emphasis original). This attitude, which Nietzsche projects onto Apollo and Dionysus, is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s (see Pestalozzi, “Nietzsches baudelaire-​rezeption”; Le Rider, “Nietzsche et Baudelaire”) and typically modernist. Thus, the motto that Nietzsche attributes to “Silenus, companion of Dionysos”: “[t]‌he very best thing is […] not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. […] the second best thing […] to die soon” (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 22–​3 [§3]; emphasis original). Cf. Nietzsche’s statement in Twilight of the Idols (210 [§36]): “When you do away with yourself you are doing the most admirable thing there is” (emphasis original). One finds a similar idea in Theognis of Megara: “For those on earth, never being born is best, /​Never to have seen the sun’s burning rays. /​Thus when born, head straight for Hades’ gates: /​Make your earthen grave and then lie in it” (Nietzsche, De Theognide Megarensi, 67); yet it is provoked by the bitterness caused by dispossession and exile. An unpublished note from 1880 reads: “To make ourselves, to shape a form from all the elements –​that is the task! The task of a sculptor! Of a productive human being! It’s not through knowledge but through practice and a model that we become ourselves!” (Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, 9: 213; emphasis original).

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Dionysus’s “maelstrom,” we should like to argue, functions, in the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (composed in 1884, but published in 1887), as a powerful metaphor for the disquieting implications of such death drive –​a metaphor intimately linked to one of the versions of what Nietzsche calls his “most difficult thought” (schwerste Gedanke),70 i.e., his thought on the “eternal return” (Ewige Wiederkunft). The latter surfaces here and there (notably, in The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and several posthumous fragments) in various forms, thus allowing different and contrasting interpretations. Heidegger speaks, apropos Nietzsche’s “eternal return,” of the eternal recurrence of the “same.”71 Deleuze speaks, instead, of the eternal recurrence of “differences.”72 They are both right in a way, but also wrong in another way. Before clarifying this point, though, it is important to stress that Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “eternal return” can be approached from three different angles: (a) in connection to the aforementioned opposition between Dionysian will and Apollonian appearances; (b) in correlation with Nietzsche’s willingness to embrace suffering in order to better disarm it,73 which brings him close to the ethics of Stoicism74 and Schiller;75 and (c) in relation to Nietzsche’s parallel attempt to dissolve being into becoming in the “image” of Heraclitus’s thought.76 In the first case (A), Nietzsche’s “eternal return” is the eternal recurrence of the 70 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 545 (§1059, from 1884). We are ready to assume, therefore, that The Will to Power contains some authentic material, despite the book itself being an editorial forgery, as Colli and Montinari have amply demonstrated. 71 Heidegger, ga 6.1: 225–​423. 72 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 27–​9, 47–​9, 52, 65–​72. 73 Kain, “Nietzsche, Eternal Recurrence, and the Horror of Existence,” 50. 74 On Nietzsche and the amor fati of the Stoics, see Ure, “Stoicism in Nineteenth-​Century German Philosophy,” 296–​7. 75 Cf. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 210 (§36): “You are never destroyed by anyone except yourself […] [Y]‌ou should want death to be different, free, conscious, without chance, without surprises. […] We cannot help having been born: but we can make up for this mistake”; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 125 (“On the Vision and The Riddle,” §1): “courage is the best slayer, courage that attacks; it slays even death, for it says: ‘Was that life? Well then! One More Time!’”; and Schiller, On the Sublime, 193, 195: “This is the position in which man finds himself. Surrounded by countless forces, all of which are superior to his own and wield mastery over him. […] If he is no longer able to oppose physical force by his relatively weaker physical force, then the only thing that remains to him, if he is not to suffer violence, is to eliminate utterly and completely a relationship that is so disadvantageous to him, and to destroy the very concept of a force to which he must in fact succumb. To destroy the very concept of a force means simply to submit to it voluntarily.” See further Bishop and Stephenson, Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism. 76 “Heraclitus,” writes Nietzsche, proclaims: “‘I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your myopia, not of the nature of things, if you believe you see land somewhere in the ocean of coming-​to-​be and passing away. You use names for things

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will affirming itself when it wills –​which means that the “eternal return” is, at once, eternal recurrence of the same, i.e., of the will (as Heidegger contends), and eternal recurrence of the will in its different instantiations (hence, to some extent, an eternal recurrence of “differences,” as Deleuze suggests).77 In the second case (B), Nietzsche’s “eternal return” is, again, eternal recurrence of the will, which affirms whatever comes turning it into something actively willed rather than passively suffered. Assuredly, A and B do not contradict each other, for in the recurrent affirmation of whatever comes, the will recurrently affirms itself; furthermore, they can both be inferred from §341 of The Gay Science,78 which is Nietzsche’s earliest in-​length account (dating from 1882) of his schwerste Gedanke. As for the third case (C), it is far more complex, as it involves a philosophy of time which does not simply postulate time’s circular recurrence; nor does it merely imply the recurrence of the same (Heidegger) as something always-​already different (Deleuze); plus, it goes far beyond the problematic of the will. The locus classicus for C is the section “On the Vision and the Riddle” in Zarathustra’s third part.79 It opens, somewhat enigmatically, with a dedication to “the riddle-​drunk, the twilight-​happy whose souls are lured by flutes

as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before’” (Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 51–​2 [§5]). It is a spurious Heraclitean fragment, though. Heraclitus’s allusions to “flowing waters” (in dk B12, echoed by Plato in Cratylus 402a-​b) and to what “forms and dissolves” (in dk B91) must be put into the overall perspective of his philosophy, on which see the previous chapter. 77 See, however, Nietzsche’s own emphasis on “sameness” in the passage reproduced in the next note. 78 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 194–​5: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence –​ even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are, it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” 79 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 123–​7.

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to every maelstrom.”80 Now, who can the “twilight-​happy” (Zwielicht-​Frohen) be, but those who recognise themselves at the time of sunset,81 i.e., when Apollo is no longer, according to the god’s traditional identification with the sun? Furthermore, who can those “whose souls are lured by flutes to every maelstrom” be, but Dionysus’s followers, given that the flute is Dionysus’s instrument? Notice, too, the closing reference to “every maelstrom,” literally, to every “mad throat” (Irr-​Schlunde). In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche mentions Dionysus’s “flood-​tide” (hohe Fluth) and its “sudden swell” (lit., Dionysus’s “suddenly swelling tide” [plötzlich anschwellende Fluth]).82 As for the expression “riddle-​drunk” (Rätsel-​Trunkenen), must it not be read, lastly, as a Dionysian (“drunkard”) appropriation and overturning of Apollo’s “riddles?” On our interpretation, these indications are enough to suggest Apollo’s replacement by Dionysus in Nietzsche’s major opus. In turn, the following lines make crystal clear the nature of Dionysus’s “maelstrom,” which, on our reading, stands as the metaphor for such replacement (“Zarathustra” speaks): “See this gateway, dwarf!”83 […] “It has two faces. Two paths come together here; no one has yet walked them to the end. This long lane back: it lasts an eternity. And that long lane outward –​ that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they blatantly offend each other –​and here at this gateway is where they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed at the top: ‘Moment.’ But whoever were to walk one of them further –​and ever further and ever on: do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?” –​ 80 81

Ibid., 124 (§1). “To you alone I tell the riddle that I saw –​the vision of the loneliest one,” writes Nietzsche; for “darkly I walked recently through cadaver-​colored twilight –​darkly and hard, biting my lip. [As] [n]‌ot only one sun had set for me” (ibid., 124 [§1]). 82 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 51 (§9): “[…] lest this Apolline tendency should cause form to freeze into Egyptian stiffness and coldness, lest the attempt to prescribe the course and extent of each individual wave should cause the movement of the whole lake to die away, the flood-​tide of the Dionysiac would destroy periodically all the small circles in which the one-​sidedly Apolline will attempted to confine Hellenic life. That sudden swell of the Dionysiac tide then lifts the separate little waves of individuals on to its back […].” 83 The “spirit of gravity,” i.e., Zarathustra’s “devil” and “arch-​enemy” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 124 [“On the Vision and the Riddle,” §1]), whom, nevertheless, Zarathustra accuses of interpreting the the idea of an eternal return too “easily,” i.e., too lightly (see below).

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“All that is straight lies,” murmured the dwarf contemptuously. “All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.” “You spirit of gravity!” I said, angrily. “Do not make it too easy on yourself! Or I shall leave you crouching here where you crouch, lamefoot –​ and I bore you this high! See this moment!” I continued. “From this gateway Moment a long eternal lane stretches backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can already have passed this way before? Must not whatever can happen, already have happened, been done, passed by before? And if everything has already been here before, what do you think of this moment, dwarf? Must this gateway too not already –​have been here? And are not all things firmly knotted together in such a way that this moment draws after it all things to come? Therefore –​itself as well?84 Interestingly, it is not “Zarathustra,” but the “dwarf,” who says that “time is a circle” –​a circle, one may infer, that brings everything back, thus making it recur. “Zarathustra” says something else: he suggests that “now,” i.e., this very “moment,” this very “instant” (Augenblick), recurs “itself as well” (emphasis added). Accordingly, the present “moment” becomes indistinct from any other possible “now,” in the sense that it is preceded and followed by nothing ultimately different from it.85 Put otherwise: past, present, and future collapse, all “moments” turn out to be the same moment, all instants are drained into

84 85

Ibid., 125–​6 (“On the Vision and the Riddle,” §2; emphasis original). Cf. Martínez Marzoa, Historia de la filosofía, 253, whom we follow in the contention that Nietzsche’s “eternal return” affects, above anything else, the ontology of time. Cf. too Ferraris, who writes: “if everything repeats itself there is neither sense […] nor any reason to lament the lack of sense” (Nietzsche y el nihilismo, 68; our translation). Conversely, Deleuze espouses an interpretation of Nietzsche’s “eternal return” that turns it into the law of life’s vitalist affirmation. Yet, despite his own brief reference (in Twilight of the Idols, 228 [§4]) to the “eternal return of life,” Nietzsche himself seems to deauthorise such interpretation. Thus, when Zarathustra’s animals sing: “Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; the same house of being builds itself eternally. Everything parts, everything greets itself again; the ring of being remains loyal to itself eternally. In every Instant being begins; around every Here rolls the ball There. The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity,” Zarathustra protests: “Oh you foolish rascals and barrel organs! […] you have already made a hurdy-​ gurdy song of it?” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 175–​6 [“The Convalescent,” §2]). For his part, Löwith (in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same) sustains that Nietzsche’s thought on the “eternal return” and Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “will

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the “maelstrom” of an “eternal return” that is no longer the eternal recurrence of this or that, but the eternal recurrence of “time” itself. A sort of philosophical zero-​ness, whose most immediate and corrosive effect consists, therefore, in dissolving all being into becoming, announces itself here. Arguably, thus understood, Nietzsche’s “eternal return” looks paradoxically –​to draw freely on Parmenides –​like the spheric non-​being of nothingness.86 Nietzsche himself speaks in this respect –​before being drained into it, i.e., before signing his last letters as “Dionysus”87 –​of his “most abysmal thought” (abgründlichen Gedanken, emphasis added);88 a thought which, needless to say, cannot but vanish right after being conceived: “Where now was the dwarf? And the gateway? And the spider? And all the whispering? Was I dreaming? Was I waking? I stood all of a sudden among wild cliffs, alone, desolate, in the most desolate moonlight.”89 We are tempted to call this Nietzsche’s anti-​Apollonian apotheosis. Yet, upon careful examination, it looks, too, like a Wagnerian apotheosis. We should like to recall at this juncture that, while Wagner inspired himself on Aeschylus’s Prometheus (or, rather, on the fragmentarily preserved third part of Aeschylus’s Promethean trilogy: Prometheus Delivered) to compose the Ring cycle, on which he began to work in the 1850s, Wagner departs from Aeschylus’s play in one crucial point: once the ring/​fire is returned to the gods to whom it belongs, the gods inexplicably perish.90 August Röckel saw it very well. After receiving in 1853 a copy of Wagner’s poem, “The Ring,” Röckel drew Wagner’s attention to what he perceived as an incongruence in the plot: what was, he asked the

to power” –​which Deleuze identifies with the will to puissance (“power” qua “potency”) rather than pouvoir (“power” qua “dominion”), but which Heidegger, more simply, identifies with the will to “power” (Macht) –​do not entirely match. Distinguishing, as we have done, between three different versions of the “eternal return” solves the problem in our view. 86 Cf. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 7 (“Preface,” §5): “here I saw the great danger to mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction –​temptation to what? to nothingness?” (emphasis original). 87 Those of January 1 and 4, 1889, to Catulle Mendès, Hans von Bülow, Jacob Burckhardt, Paul Deussen, Franz Overbeck, Erwin Rohde, Carl Spitteler, and Heinrich Wiener, i.e., letters nos. 1234, 1244–​6, 1249–​52. 88 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 173–​4 (“The Convalescent,” §1–​2): “[‘]Up, abysmal thought, out of my depths! […] I, Zarathustra, […] the advocate of the circle –​you I summon, my most abysmal thought! […] I hear you! My abyss speaks […] Nausea, nausea, nausea –​oh no![’] /​Scarcely had he spoken these words, […] Zarathustra collapsed like a dead man and long remained as if dead.” 89 Ibid., 126 (“On the Vision and the Riddle,” §2). 90 See Reich, “The Rebirth of Tragedy”; Foster, Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle and the Greeks.

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musician, the reason for Wotan to will his own destruction and that of the Walhalla? Wagner’s reading of Feuerbach and, especially, of Schopenhauer, supplies the reason. The so-​called “Schopenhauer Ending” of Wagner’s poem, which dates to 1856, reads: “I depart from the home of desire, I flee forever the home of delusion; the open gates of eternal becoming I close behind me now […] The blessed end of all things eternal, do you know how I attained it? […] [S]‌uffering opened my eyes for me: I saw the world end.”91 Wagner and Nietzsche’s friendship began in 1868, i.e., two years before Nietzsche finished The Dionysian Vision of the World, four before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, and five before Nietzsche gave up writing Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.92 Nietzsche’s gradual break with Wagner after 1874 (due, mainly, to Nietzsche’s personal dislike of Wagner’s Völkisch antisemitism) became public in 1878, i.e., six years before Nietzsche wrote the third part of his Zarathustra.93 Nevertheless, there is a curious parallelism, to say the least, (a) between Wagner’s 1856 “gates of eternal becoming” and Nietzsche/​Zarathustra’s “gate of the eternal return,” and (b) between Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s respective “ends of the world,”94 which, for Nietzsche, became literally that –​the end of a world: his –​in 1889. 4

Winckelmann’s Apollo

While Nietzsche flirts with Dionysus, Winckelmann dreams with Apollo. Undeniably, Winckelmann’s Apollo is no more faithful to the Greek Apollo than Nietzsche’s Dionysus is to the Greek Dionysus. Furthermore, Winckelmann’s Apollo is considerably less complex than Nietzsche’s Dionysus. Lastly, if Nietzsche’s posterity has proven exceptionally rich and long lasting, Winckelmann’s, conversely, has been rather limited notwithstanding his influence upon German culture until, approximately, World War i. Yet, there is something common to both Winckelmann and Nietzsche: they saw themselves

91 92 93 94

Spencer and Millington, “Appendix: Rejected Versions,” in Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung, 3d (emphasis added). On Nietzsche and Wagner, see Hollinrake, Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Philosophy of Pesimism; Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 112–​34. Which is probably too, as Paul Loeb claims in The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the book’s tragic end, followed by a sequel: the fourth part, in the image of Aeschylus’s trilogies (in fact, tetralogies). Supra, nn. 88–​9.

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as educators and they transformed our two Greek gods into two different philhellenic educational ideals.95 Hence, their equal relevance for us. Specifically, Winckelmann’s educational ideal turns around the notions of καλοκαγαθία (which combines those of the “beautiful” and the “good”: καλὸς κἀγαθός, like in classical Attic παιδεία [“education”])96 and σωφροσύνη (“soundness of mind,” which Heraclitus and Plato count among the most important virtues).97 According to Winckelmann, the two best examples of σωφροσύνη in Ancient Greek art are the Laocoön (who, on his interpretation, experiences death with uttermost dignity)98 and the Apollo Belvedere or Pythian Apollo. The latter is described by Winckelmann as “the miracle of art,”99 for no other sculpture, he says, reflects so masterfully the “serene grandeur” (stille Grösße) distinctive of Ancient Greek art.100 “As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface,” Winckelmann remarks, “a great soul lies still beneath the strife of passions in Greek figures,” and in the Pythian Apollo in particular:101 An eternal spring […] clothes with the charms of youth the graceful manliness of ripened years, and plays with softness and tenderness about the proud shape of his limbs. […] [T]‌here is nothing mortal here, nothing which human necessities require. Neither blood-​vessels nor sinews heat and stir this body, but a heavenly essence, diffusing itself like a gentle 95

Nietzsche’s educational concerns are patent already in Schopenhauer as Educator, which, as Daniel Breazeale notes, “remains one of Nietzsche’s most personal and stimulating books, valuable not merely as an essential document for understanding his own spiritual development, but also as an early eloquent exploration of some of his most characteristic themes and ideas” (Breazeale, “Introduction,” xix). As for Winckelmann, his aesthetic ideas became one of the main sources of German education between the 18th and 20th centuries; see further Horlacher, The Educated Subject and the German Concept of Bildung. 96 Jaeger, Paideia, 2: 28, 134, 148, 223. 97 Heraclitus, dk B112; Plato, Charmides. 98 See for discussion, Babich, “From Winckelmann’s Apollo to Nietzsche’s Dionysus.” As Babich stresses, Winckelmann overlooks that, in Sophocles, Laocoön is a priest of Apollo, and that Laocoön’s offence –​thus perhaps, she asks, the red shell-​shaped cape which he is shown wearing in the Vergilius Vaticanus? –​“violated that same divine service […] [by] having sex with his wife in the sanctuary of the god, from which congress his sons were born” (ibid., 175). Hence, perhaps too, the fact that “the boys to either side of the central figure [of the Laocoön Group] draw the gaze back to the father, to focus attention on the struggle of the priest, ‘his eyes seemingly turned in vain to the gods’” (ibid., 171–​2), as Wilhelm Schlegel perspicaciously observed (Sämmtliche Werke, 5: 85). 99 Winckelmann, Writings on Art, 90, 140. 100 Ibid., 72. 101 Ibid., 72 (translation slightly modified).

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stream, seems to fill the whole contour of the figure. He has pursued the python […]. His lofty look, filled with a consciousness of power, seems to rise far above his victory, and to gaze into infinity. Scorn sits upon his lips, and his nostrils are swelling with suppressed anger, which mounts even to the proud forehead; but the peace which floats upon it in blissful calm remains undisturbed, and his eye is full of sweetness as when the Muses gathered around him seeking to embrace him. […] The soft hair plays about the divine head as if agitated by a gentle breeze, like the slender waving tendrils of the noble vine; it seems to be anointed with the oil of the gods, and tied by the Graces with pleasing display on the crown of his head. In the presence of this miracle of art I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking upon it in a worthy manner.102 Frederick Beiser is right to stress, however, that it would be a mistake to take Winckelmann’s praise of composure as a matter of neoclassicist taste.103 Winckelmann’s statement, writes Beiser, was a “reaction against Baroque taste,” which prized the “expression of passion” in compliance with the theology of the Counter-Reformation and had, as such, an “apologetic mission” appointed by the Church.104 Ancient Greek culture knew well that passions cannot be, and should not be, ruled out: they can be rationally assessed and channelled, though. Conversely, Christianity needs them to run free in order to redeem them and/​or to repress them. Were it not for our evil and uncontrolled inclinations, and for the fact that we never succeed in giving them up no matter how hard we try, Christ’s saving role would be superfluous, and so, too, would then be the role of the Church as Christ’s representative on earth. Christ’s own passion, which he himself voluntarily underwent to deliver humankind from its sins, shows that, for Christianity, passions are the “engine” of human history, to paraphrase Marx. Against this assumption, Beiser observes, Winckelmann values “serenity” because he sees it as the “incarnation” of the Greek ideal of σωφροσύνη: “the ideal of self-​control, of moderation in all things, of rational self-​restraint, which allows a person to enjoy […] calm self-​possession amid all the perturbations of passions and vicissitudes of fortune.”105 Σωφροσύνη, nonetheless, differs from asceticism: “the passions,” Winckelmann comments,

1 02 Ibid., 124, 139–​40. 103 Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 173. 104 Ibid., 171, 174. 105 Ibid., 174.

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“are the winds which impel our bark over the sea of life, with which the poet sails, and on which the artist soars.”106 Winckelmann’s vindication of the ideal of σωφροσύνη is reminiscent of one of the two well-​known imperatives of the Delphic Apollo: “μηδὲν ἄγαν” (“nothing in excess”). By recommending moderation, this motto heartens the rational assessment of the passions. The Ancient Greeks, and especially the Athenian citizens of the classical period, thought that what moves us, i.e., what proves “lovable” and “desirable” (ερόμενος) to us, is desired by us because we see in it a certain “good” (ἀγαθόν or καλός, which means both “good” and “beauty”).107 Yet, while we all desire the good, as Diotima tells the attendants of Plato’s Symposium,108 we are also in disposition to learn more and more about it. Needless to say, this thought-​provoking view has not gone unchallenged in the history of Western thought. The earliest and, possibly too, the finest objection to it, comes from Xenophon, who puts forward two interrelated arguments against it: first, one may know what is good, and yet wish something bad instead; secondly, one may know what is good, wish it, and yet do something bad. Winckelmann’s contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, responds to Xenophon’s objection by arguing, as Beiser recalls, that “the efficacy of an incentive is proportionate to the quantity of good, the quantity of our knowledge of it, and the speed with which the knowledge acts”;109 hence, although we might have a clear and distinct knowledge of some good, “it might be the case that we have an obscure or confused knowledge of a greater good […], or that the force of custom and habit works so swiftly that we do not take the time to think over all the options and their consequences.”110 Therefore, says Mendelssohn, when we choose to do something bad rather than good, and when we wish to do some good but happen to do something bad instead, we act out of ignorance, as Socrates puts it.111 In sum, by thinking we become capable of knowing and guiding our emotions, which enables us to live our lives in a way such that we are not unreflectively carried away by our passions. There is no other premise for a truly happy life, thought the Ancient Greeks, for life’s vicissitudes are many and unpredictable; there is no other premise for a true education either, they thought too. Schiller and Rousseau think in

1 06 Winckelmann, Writings on Art, 119. 107 Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 1: 164. 108 Plato, Symposium, 206a: “ἄνθρωποι τἀγαθοῦ ἐρῶσιν” (“all men desire the good”). 109 Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 216. 110 Ibid. 111 “No one does wrong willingly” (οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἁμαρτάνει). Cf. Apology, 37a; Gorgias, 488a; Protagoras, 345d, 358c; Republic, 589c; Timaeus, 86d-​e; Laws, 731c-​d.

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strikingly similar terms: “While reason makes of us what we are, i.e., men, it is sentiment that moves us (si c’est la raison qui fait l’homme, c’est le sentiment qui le conduit).”112 In other words, “sentiment” and “reason” need not be in opposition to one another. This also explains why Plato –​whose erotics of knowledge in the Symposium113 Winckelmann thus makes his –​places σωφροσύνη qua “virtue” (ἀρετή) between the “appetitive” and the “rational” parts of the soul.114 Translated into modern parlance, Plato hints at the need to distinguish between our immediate desires, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the considerations that they may rise in us. Yet, if this is granted, can it not be said, then, that there is something that ought to be placed (figuratively speaking) precisely there where desires and considerations concur to produce a given action? The etymology of the term σωφροσύνη is eloquent in this respect. Σωφροσύνη is connected to φρήν, the “midriff,” but also the “chest,” which the Greeks understood to be the “seat” of all “mental activity,” i.e., of the “mind” and the “spirit.”115 Thus, φρoντίζω means “to consider, reflect, worry, be concerned”; φρονέω, “to think,” as well as “to be minded” and “wise”; φρόνιμος, “to be sensible” and “wise”; and ἄφρων, “to be foolish” or “out of one’s mind.”116 The connection to the chest is most significant. For, in contrast to φρoντίζω, νοέω means “to meditate,” “observe,” “think,” “devise,” and “have in mind”; and νόος/​νοῦς, “purpose,” “aim,” and “mind.”117 In this latter case, therefore, the connection is to sight and, by extension, to the fact of having something present in the mind or to the ability to foresee it. It is not hard to suppose, then, a scenario in which one would, e.g., (i) feel (in the chest) the desire to attack an enemy; (ii) figure out (with the mind) a plan for it; (iii) feel (again in the chest), by realising it and hence by thinking it (with the mind in this case), the suitable moment to launch the attack; and (iv) launch the attack. Put otherwise, desires and considerations, appetites and reasons, coalesce, and practical wisdom –​which is another possible name for σωφροσύνη –​consists in knowing how to combine them successfully. Winckelmann expected art to educate in the pursuit of such wisdom. The Apollo Velvedere was, to his eyes, the paragon of Diotima’s teachings. Hence, even if his aesthetic thought was not as elaborated as, say, Wolff’s, Baumgarten’s,

112 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 30. The phrase is from Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. 113 On which see Scott and Welton, Erotic Wisdom. 114 Plato, Phaedrus, 237c−238e. 115 Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2: 1590. 116 Ibid., 2: 1590–​1. 117 Ibid., 2: 1023.

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or Mendelssohn’s, it contributed to the revival of Plato’s philosophy in 18th-​ century Germany –​a revival that would influence Goethe and Schiller and, via Schiller, Hölderlin. It was against it that Nietzsche, in turn, rebelled.118 5

A Queer Ideal?

In contrast with Christian asceticism and late-​ modern Prometheanism, Winckelmann’s educational ideal can be deemed a queer ideal. For it goes beyond the dialectics of asceticism and excess, or, as Lacan has it, beyond the dialectics of the “law” and its “transgression”119 –​a dialectics to which Nietzsche has contributed his own grain of sand by opposing Dionysus to the Crucified.120 Certainly, Winckelmann’s neoclassicism is narrower than Ancient Greek culture, which cannot be reduced to the καλοκαγαθία ideal of classical Athens and Plato in particular. In this sense, then, Nietzsche was right to react against Winckelmann. Yet, Winckelmann recovered from Greece something that Nietzsche overlooked. Labelling it “queer” is anything but capricious. The problem, as Whitney Davis notes, is that we are adamant to think that the “queer” can, as such, supply a model: The history of modern and contemporary art provides many examples of the “queering” of cultural and social norms. It has been tempting to consider this process of subversion and transgression or “outlaw representation” (as Richard Meyer has called it), as well as related performances of “camp,” or otherwise gay-​inflecting the dominant forms of representation, to be the most creative mode of queer cultural production. Whether or not this view is correct when applied to the history of later nineteenth-​ and twentieth-​century art, we can identify a historical process in modern culture that has worked in the opposite direction –​namely, the constitution of aesthetic ideals, cultural norms that claim validity within an entire society, that have been based on manifestly homoerotic prototypes and significance.121

118 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 226–​8 (“What I Owe to the Ancients,”§3–​4). See further Babich, “From Winckelmann’s Apollo to Nietzsche’s Dionysus,” 176–​7. 119 Lacan, “Kant with Sade.” 120 Nietzsche, Ecce Hommo, 151 (“Why Am I a Destiny,” §9). 121 Davis, Queer Beauty, 23. The reference to Meyer is to his 2002 essay, Outlaw Representation.

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Davis’s allusion to homoeroticism is quite apropos here, as Winckelmann was homosexual and, as Beiser stresses in turn, his homoeroticism played a fundamental role in his aesthetics122 –​like it did in the making of Ancient Greek culture, for that matter. Surely there is no need to recall the reader that Ancient Greek homoeroticism was, above all, a statement (which is how the French Structuralist school has taught us to interpret all Ancient Greek cultural phenomena, from sacrifice to tragedy) according to which eros did not have to be linked to fertility, nor did it have to be subjected to heterosexuality: rather than serving a man’s passions (of posterity in one case, and of lust in the other), it could be stirred by the Apollonian qualities demanded from all Greek (male) citizens alike.123 Due to the division of labour demanded by its war economy, homoeroticism was the only means to achieve this erotic cum educational ideal in Ancient Greece, where women did not take part in the public life of the city. Obviously, we are not endorsing this social division: we are merely trying to explain why the Apollonian and the homoerotic were intimately connected in Ancient Greece, a connection to which Winckelmann was likewise sensitive. Now, Susan Gustafson has drawn an interesting parallel between the Apollonian notion of “the self that emerges in the writings of the German Classicists,” including Winckelmann, and Foucault’s recovery of the Hellenistic notion of ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ (“care of the self”).124 This concept emerges in Foucault’s latest volume: The Care of the Self,125 which was published only a few days before his death in 1984.126 In it, Foucault examines the ethics of the Hellenistic period in relation to the “use of pleasures” in a series of miscellaneous recommendations of austerity regarding sexual practice, extra-​marital sexual relations, and love for boys –​recommendations which echo and expand the Ancient Greek ethics of σωφροσύνη. Such recommendations, Foucault says, have nothing to do with later Christian moral prohibitions, as they are based on the convergence of “nature and reason,” which is put at the service of the “care of the self.” The passage is worthy of being quoted in full:

1 22 Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 191–​5. 123 The expression “Greek (male) citizens” is a pleonasm, since, in Ancient Greece, women were not considered citizens. To understand, however, what this meant and implied, see Míguez Barciela, El llanto y la polis. 124 Gustafson, Men Desiring Men, 28, 31. 125 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3. 126 Together with The Use of Pleasure (originally L’Usage des plaisirs, in the plural), i.e., vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality.

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A whole corpus of moral reflection on sexual activity and its pleasures seems to mark, in the first centuries of our era, a certain strengthening of austerity themes. Physicians worry about the effects of sexual practice, unhesitatingly recommend abstention, and declare a preference for virginity over the use of pleasure. Philosophers condemn any sexual relation that might take place outside marriage and prescribe a strict fidelity between spouses, admitting no exceptions. Furthermore, a certain doctrinal disqualification seems to bear on the love for boys. Does this mean that one must recognize, in the schema thus constituted, the lineaments of a future ethics, the ethics that one will find in Christianity, when the sexual act itself will be considered an evil, when it will no longer be granted legitimacy except within the conjugal relationship, and when the love of boys will be condemned as unnatural? […] In these [recommendations] […] one can [rather] see the development of an art of existence dominated by self-​preoccupation. This art of the self […] gives increasing emphasis to the frailty of the individual faced with the manifold ills that sexual activity can give rise to. It also underscores the need to subject that activity to a universal form by which one is bound, a form grounded in both nature and reason, and valid for all human beings. It likewise emphasizes the importance of developing all the practices and all the exercises by which one can maintain self-​control and eventually arrive at a pure enjoyment of oneself. It is not the accentuation of the forms of prohibition that is behind these modifications in sexual ethics. It is the development of an art of existence that revolves around the question of the self, of its dependence and independence, of its universal form and of the connection it can and should establish with others, of the procedures by which it exerts its control over itself, and of the way in which it can establish a complete supremacy over itself. And it is in this context that a dual phenomenon, characteristic of this ethics of pleasure, occurs. On the one hand, a more active attention to sexual practice is required, an attention to its effects on the organism, to its place and function within marriage, to its value and its difficulties in the relationship with boys. But at the same time as one dwells on it, and as the interest that one brings to bear on it is intensified, it increasingly appears to be dangerous and capable of compromising the relation with oneself that one is trying to establish. […] Thus, as the arts of living and the care of the self are refined, some precepts emerge that seem to be rather similar to those that will be formulated in the later moral systems. But one should not be misled by the analogy. Those moral systems will define other modalities of the relation

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to self: a characterization of the ethical substance based on finitude, the Fall, and evil; a mode of subjection in the form of obedience to a general law that is at the same time the will of a personal god; a type of work on oneself that implies a decipherment of the soul and a purificatory hermeneutics of the desires; and a mode of ethical fulfillment that tends toward self-​renunciation. The code elements that concern the economy of pleasures, conjugal fidelity, and relations between men may well remain analogous, but they will derive from a profoundly altered ethics and from a different way of constituting oneself as the ethical subject of one’s sexual behavior.127 In the last decades of the 20th century, Foucault was thus on the track of something arguably not very different from what had captured Winckelmann’s attention two hundred years earlier. Yet, apparently, the modern dialectics of asceticism and excess have prevented Foucault’s approach to Hellenistic σωφροσύνη from being broadly received, except among a few Anglo-​American authors.128 In his homage essay to Foucault, for instance, Deleuze judges Foucault’s “return to the Greeks […] extremely partial and ambiguous,” since the question of “the body and its pleasures” in Ancient Greece, writes Deleuze, “was related to the […] relations between free men, and hence to a ‘virile society’ that was unisexual and excluded women.”129 This, we think, is a mean reading of the last Foucault. More importantly perhaps, it is a reading that overlooks Foucault’s self-​declared willingness to find a regulatory ideal, whatever its original limitations, “valid for all human beings.”130 Furthermore, Deleuze’s view that “returns” are never possible131 leaves us wandering: was the last Foucault, in his attempt to re-​approach the Hellenistic moralists, doing, according to Deleuze, something objectionable in comparison to Deleuze’s own revitalisation of, say, Hume despite his typical 18th-century classism? That is, are only some returns possible, whereas others are not? This proves how hard it has been, and how hard it still is for Apollo to find a place in the modern imaginary –​safe as a ghost.

1 27 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 3: 235, 238–​9 (emphasis added). 128 See, e.g., Martin, Gutman, and Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self; McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis. 129 Deleuze, Foucault, 148, n.28. 130 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 3: 238. 131 Deleuze, Foucault, 103, 105.

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Dionysus’s Bequest

Apollo’s transformation into an unwanted, ghostly figure in the contemporary philosophical scene has been motivated, above all, by the influential reception of Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy in 20th-​century France. If, in early 20th-​century Germany, Nietzsche’s legacy was widespread among German avant-​garde artists, writers, bohemians, naturalists, unorthodox psychologists, nationalists, and anarchists,132 the association, after World War ii, of Nietzsche’s philosophy with Nazi ideology put the former in an eccentric intellectual position from which it has only managed to escape recently.133 As for the English-​speaking world, Nietzsche’s influence in the 20th century was minimal in it –​apart, that is, from a number of writers including Yeats and Joyce;134 plus, it never reached the philosophical circles, among other things because Nietzsche’s ideas were deemed alien to, and dangerous for, the utilitarian and pragmatist views prevalent in them.135 The case of France, however, is different. It is possible to distinguish three consecutive waves in the French reception of Nietzsche.136 The first wave comprises the early 20th century, up to the 1930s, and like in Germany, avant-​garde artists, writers, nationalists, and anarchists took part in it.137 In contrast, Nietzsche’s thought was not welcomed in the official philosophical milieus: between 1891 and 1918, neither of the two most-​important French philosophical journals, the Revue de metaphysique et de morale and La Revue philosophique, featured reviews of Nietzsche’s writings,138 and even Bergson, whose vitalist philosophy presented clear parallels with Nietzsche’s,139 avoided mentioning Nietzsche too much in public, probably out of caution.140 The second wave extends through the 1930s and the 1940s, and it is marked by Bataille’s interpretation of Nietzsche.141 Nietzsche exemplified, for Bataille, the transgressive possibilities of life’s “nonproductive expenditure” vis-​à-​vis 1 32 See further Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany. 133 See especially Wolfgang Müller-​Lauter’s 1971 volume, Nietzsche: Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie, which is also the only one translated so far into English, as well as his 1999 three-​volume set, Nietzsche-​Interpretationen. 134 On which see Thatcher, Nietzsche in England 1890–​1914. 135 See, e.g., Martin Nick, “‘Fighting a Philosophy.’” 136 Zhou, “Bataille’s Nietzsche,” 35. 137 Forth, “Nietzsche, Decadence, and Regeneration in France.” 138 Forth, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” 855. 139 François and Lapidus, “Life and Will in Nietzsche and Bergson.” 140 Forth, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” 854. 141 On which see Bataille, On Nietzsche.

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capitalist productivity and work ethics, as well as the transgressive possibilities of meaninglessness vis-​à-​vis bourgeois utilitarianism and common sense. As Yue Zhou states, “Bataille’s Nietzsche […] is more a philosopher of evil than one of ‘will to power,’ whose fundamental concern is not ascension to power but transgression.”142 André Masson’s drawing for the cover of Bataille’s review, Acéphale,143 illustrates rather neatly the fundamental intuition behind Bataille’s appropriation of Nietzsche: it consists of a naked man standing on his feet, headless but with his guts fully visible.144 Similarly, Dionysus represents, for Bataille, the emergence of all things commonly deemed “low” against any pretended “upper” values and ideals,145 and hence the vindication of the exuberant and subversive force of materiality as such,146 which, Bataille contends, gives us a chance to recover the “sacred” cum “animal” joy that culture represses but whose memory remains latent in us.147 Finally, the third wave in the French reception of Nietzsche extends from the 1960s onwards. Its two major names are those of Pierre Klossowski and Gilles Deleuze. Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle became a highly influential book after its publication in 1969. As Ashley Woodward notes, Klossowski takes Nietzsche’s thoughts on the “eternal return” to be both (a) “an interpretation of reality which undermines the very notion of a stable and coherent reality” –​and,

1 42 Zhou, “Bataille’s Nietzsche,” 42. 143 Acéphale was the title of Bataille’s 1936–​9 review, but also the name of Bataille’s secret society throughout those years, whose members held nocturnal meetings in the woods, engaged in various sorts of rituals, celebrated the decapitation of Louis xvi, read texts by Sade, Nietzsche, Freud, and Mauss, and went as far as to discuss carrying out a human sacrifice, which they finally refrained from undertaking. See further Marina Galletti and Alastair Brotchie’s edition of the internal papers of the society, all of which are collected in Bataille, The Secret Conspiracy, which includes, too, a reproduction of Masson’s aforementioned drawing. 144 Masson’s Acéphale (who, moreover, holds a dagger in his left hand and a burning heart in his right hand) is partly inspired in Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man (since it is also inspired in a gnostic seal from the 3rd/​4th century which displays a headless god surmounted by two animal heads). It symbolises, therefore, the death of classical reason as celebrated in the Renaissance, in addition to representing “the death of God as proclaimed by Nietzsche,” as Marina Galletti observes (“The Secret Society of Acéphale,” 19). For the gnostic seal, see Bataille, The Sacred Conspiracy, 27. 145 Notice Bataille’s simultaneous defence of sexuality and dejecta in The Accursed Share 2: 61–​6. 146 See in this respect Macherey, “Georges Bataille et le renversement matérialiste.” 147 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 17–​61. On how this bears the mark of the myth of a lost paradise, see Gemerchak, The Sunday of the Negative, 6.

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therefore, “its own status as intelligible and communicable knowledge” –​and (b) “a lived experience which undermines the identity of the experiencer and thus the very coherence of ‘experience’” itself.148 If, with Bataille, Dionysus becomes an evil god, with Klossowski it becomes a delirious god.149 With Bataille and Klossowski, Dionysus takes on a distinctively French dress. For if “perversion” is, from Sade to Genet and Bataille, a common theme in modern French literature, sensitivity towards what Evelyne Grossman calls “de-​figuration” is, in turn, a topos in 20th-​century French literature and thought, from Artaud to Michaux and beyond;150 and it is in connection to the latter category that Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche tacitly acquires its meaning. Deleuze, for his part, does not go as far as Klossowski goes –​even if Deleuze’s notion of a “body without organs,” to which we shall return in Chapter 6, is partly dependent on Klossowski’s subversive interpretation of Nietzsche, which Deleuze greatly appreciated.151 Faithful to Bergson’s philosophy –​on which he began to write in the 1950s –​Deleuze approaches Nietzsche in a vitalist key. For him, Nietzsche’s “eternal return” entails, as we have seen, the recurrent “affirmation” of life against “nihilism,”152 in consonance with Nietzsche’s own brief thought on the “eternal return of life” in Twilight of the Idols.153 Hence, Dionysus becomes in Deleuze the symbol of life’s “multiplicity,”154 which is but another name for the “innocence of plurality”155 that, according to Deleuze, awaits to be affirmed. This explains, says Deleuze, Ariadne’s mirror-​role vis-​ à-​vis Dionysus in the same proportion that it explains Zarathustra’s indirect fiancé-​role vis-​à-​vis Ariadne. For while Ariadne, in Deleuze’s interpretation, unconditionally affirms Dionysus’s affirmation of life’s becoming, i.e., while she says “yes” to Dionysus’s “yes,” the “overman” taught by Zarathustra says “yes” to the unconditional affirmation (Ariadne) of life’s affirmation (Dionysus).156 Furthermore, since saying “yes” to whatever comes in life amounts to affirm its being, Dionysus is, for Deleuze, both “labyrinth” and “bull,” “being” and

1 48 Woodward, “Klossowski’s Nietzsche,” 87. 149 Note the recurrence of the term “delirium” in Klossowski’s presentation of Nietzsche’s thought (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, xv–​vi, 22, 25, 87, 121, 204, 213, 217, 222, 226, 228). 150 Grossman, La Défiguration. 151 See, e.g., Deleuze’s letter to Klossowski of April 21, 1971, cited in Wilson, “Pierre Klossowski,” 15. 152 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 71. 153 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 228 [“What I Owe to the Ancients,” §4]. See n. 85 above. 154 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 201, n.17. 155 Ibid., 22. 156 Ibid., 14, 188, 192.

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“becoming”157 –​a view that falls closer to Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy than Bataille’s and Klossowski’s interpretations of it. Bataille’s, Klossowski’s, and Deleuze’s readings of Nietzsche have contributed to set the tone of French philosophy over the past decades –​in dialogue, very often, with Freud’s and Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Thus, for example, François Laruelle claims that Nietzsche’s “eternal return of the same” and “will to power” have, like no other philosophical notions, paved the way for the “destruction of the fences” that tend to repress human desire.158 According to Laruelle, write Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, “the Dionysian (that is to say, the non-​signifying but active and unmediated forces [of freedom], or what he calls ‘Rebellion’) mediates the Apollonian (that is to say, the signifying forces of ‘Mastery’) […] as the other side of a duplicitous interface.”159 If in Nietzsche, therefore, Apollo recedes before Dionysus not only gradually, but also proportionally to the way in which, in Winckelmann, Dionysus recedes before Apollo, in Bataille, Klossowski, Laruelle and, to a lesser extent, Deleuze (who still speaks of being) Apollo is crossed out by Dionysus.160 Apparently, the only contemporary French philosopher willing to push further Nietzsche’s early Dionysian-​Apollonian dialectic is Barbara Stiegler, who rereads Nietzsche in dual fashion by combining political philosophy and the philosophy of psychology, and who reclaims Apollo as Dionysus’s necessary counterpart. More precisely, Stiegler defends that “flux” (i.e., “Dionysus,” which, she says, is always “excessive”) must be “delimited” through the “representational” mediation of “Apollo,” and that only then can “flux” be properly “listened to” and “incorporated” into our “lives.”161 We feel sympathetic towards Stiegler’s proposal, although our philosophical background is different from hers.

1 57 Ibid., 188. 158 Laruelle, Nietzsche contre Heidegger, 189–​90. See also Nadaud, “Lecture(s) de Nietzsche, théorie et pratique du fragment(s).” 159 Mellamphy and Biswas Mellamphy, “Nietzsche and Networks, Nietzschean Networks,” 21. 160 That is to say, a purely modern (and hence, loosely Apollonian) Apollo is crossed out by a purely modern (and hence, loosely Dionysian) Dionysus. 161 Stiegler, Nietzsche et la critique de la chair. See now also, from the same author, Nietzsche et la vie. Another interesting work in this respect –​and quite recent for that matter –​is Francis Wolff’s Dire le monde.

­c hapter 5

Thinking with Apollo we are the fact or act of picturing facts to ourselves […] Outside of this […], and inside of it as well, there are no human beings, only bodily functions and our apprehensions about them wagner, The Logic of Invention, 22

…

Life […] is a whirling nexus of growing, fusing, and dying beings. It is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction in order to indefinitely forestall the inevitable moment of thermodynamic equilibrium –​death. Life is also a question the universe poses to itself in the form of a human being. margulis and sagan, What Is Life?, 55

…

reality doesn’t do anything else but speak with itself using our experience as a vehicle pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, 247

∵

Overview

The earth is a continuum of moving images, sounds, and sensations. It is also a semiotic prism made of many communicating faces and their manifold intersections, in which humans partake like any other earthly being. At this level, thought remains action-​oriented, and meaning remains, therefore, kinetic and embodied. Such is the domain of what may be called, following Merleau-​Ponty, the earth qua self-​thinking flesh. Yet, there is a supplementary, second-​order type of meaning that entails a perspectival jump over the earth’s flesh. Plato’s contention on how ideas come to us, our own interpretation of a painting by Balthus, and the notion of stereographic vision, prove

© Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004538597_006

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equally helpful when it comes to understand how that second-​order type of meaning is produced by us. On this premise, we explore the relations between Apollo’s lyre, Apollo’s vision, a stereogram, and what Merleau-​Ponty himself calls the non-​objectual “fishing net” that must be kept (while the fishes must be thrown away) in order to transit from the realm of perception to that of meaning. Merleau-​Ponty illustrates this move through Stendahl, but it can be exemplified, too, with recourse, e.g., to Debussy’s music, Oteiza’s sculpture, and Deleuze’s interpretation of Dreyer’s close-​ups, since the transition from perception to meaning is also the transition from the actual to the virtual, or, what amounts to the same, from the mortal to the immortal. We are back again in Apollo’s domain, then, which is also that of Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry.” Pasolini’s cinema is also political, though: it combines nostalgia for bygone meaning and coherence, perceptiveness towards their liminal gleaming in a degraded world, and awareness of that gleaming’s politically disruptive force. What Heidegger calls the modern “positioning” (Ge-​stell) amounts, in turn, to its darkening. But how should our openness to it be construed? Can it be described as a way of listening to a particular type of silence? Is it possible, moreover, to affirm that, by the production of meaning\being, the earth appears in a more clear way to itself –​and that meaning\being is its self-​reflective mirror in approximately the same proportion as it is ours, and as we are its, to paraphrase Roy Wagner? Examining Heidegger’s concept of Lichtung in light of Thomas Sheehan’s novel epistemological interpretation of Heidegger’s “being” provides, we argue, a vantage point from which this issue can be reframed in Apollonian terms. Contra Heidegger, then, we underline the need to think meaning\being as a cognitive disposition rather than a free-​ floating signifier or a new Deus absconditus. This, however, does not mean that we identify meaning with a mere product of human constructivism, even if we do acknowledge its human basis and inventive qualities. With the help of comparative anthropology, which serves us to test various interdependent ways in which the earth can be worlded and in which meaning can be extracted from the earth’s flesh, our thesis on the earth’s self-​reflexivity acquires all its relevance. Our two conceptual allies in this are, on the one hand, the notion of variation as it is elaborated in structural anthropology, i.e., as an analytic category that permits to think what falls right between sameness and otherness, and, on the other hand, Heidegger’s “Fourfold” (Geviert), which, read in conversation with Guattari’s and Roy Wagner’s respective approaches to the notion of multiplicity, provides, we argue, a minimal structure capable of bridging assorted ethnographic data from, among others, the Darkhad of Mongolia, the Pawnee of North America, and the Yanomami of the Amazonian basin as regards the symbolic reciprocity of earth, sky, mortals, and immortals.

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Apollo’s Marble

Commenting on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Merleau-​Ponty writes: What is important is not that Julien Sorel [i.e. the protagonist], after he has learned that he has been betrayed by Madame de Rénal, travels to Verrière and tries to kill her. It is that silence, that dreamlike journey, that thoughtless certainty, and that eternal resolution which follow the news. But there is no passage where these things are said. There is no need for “Julien thought” or “Julien wished.” […] As though in a second life, [Stendhal] makes Julien’s voyage according to the cadence of a cold passion which selects for itself the visible and the invisible, what is to be said and what is to remain unsaid. The desire to kill is nowhere in the words. It is between them, in the hollows of space, time, and the significations they delimit, […] the way the letters in some advertisements are made less by the few black lines than the white pages they vaguely indicate –​blank, but full of meaning, vibrating with lines of force, as dense as marble….1 We find riveting the attribution of meaning –​the meaning, in this case, of an episode in a novel –​to that which is absent: “[t]‌he desire to kill is nowhere in the words […] [but] between them.” Similarly, the final crescendo of the first movement –​“From Dawn to Noon” –​ of Debussy’s symphonic poem, The Sea, reflects the rise of the sun to its zenith, which, of course, is not in the music but confers an aesthetic sense on the piece, making it meaningful as a musical poem, i.e., as something more than a succession of musical notes. Likewise, in Oteiza’s sculpture Empty Edge,2 the absent edge makes sense of what the viewer perceives. Consider, too, Deleuze’s distinction, in Cinema 1, between a “state of things” and a certain something that goes beyond its actualisation. Deleuze provides two examples thereof. They are taken from two early cinematographic works, namely, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929). Deleuze writes on Pabst’s film:

1 Merleau-​Ponty, The Prose of the World, 88–​9. 2 Hosted at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid (mncars) with reference no. as10877. An image of it is available at: https://​www.muse​orei​naso​fia.es/​en/​col​lect​ion/​artw​ork/​ari​ sta-​vacia-​empty-​edge.

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There are Lulu, the lamp, the bread-​knife, Jack the Ripper: people who are assumed to be real with individual characters and social roles, objects with uses, real connections between these objects and these people –​in short, a whole actual state of things. But there are also the brightness of the light on the knife, the blade of the knife under the light, Jack’s terror and resignation, Lulu’s compassionate look. […] [And while these] power-​qualities relate to people and to objects, [i.e.] to [a]‌state of things […] [in rigour] they only refer back to themselves, and constitute the “expressed” of the state of things.3 Therefore, Deleuze distinguishes between what he labels: “states of things,” and that which is “expressed” in them,4 i.e., between the tangible components of any given event and what escapes it: something that he calls, in turn, an “affect” or a “power-​quality,”5 whose conjuring by the camera produces on the screen, he says, a particular type of cinematographic image –​an “affection-​image,”6 like those found in Dreyer’s films: In the affective film par excellence, Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, there is a whole historical state of things, social roles and individual or collective characters, real connections between them –​Joan, the bishop, the Englishman, the judges, the kingdom, the people: in short, the trial. But there is something else, which is not exactly eternal or suprahistorical: it is what Péguy called “internal.” It is like two presents which ceaselessly intersect, one of which is endlessly arriving and the other is already established […] one goes the whole length of the historical event, but […] one ascends inside the other event: the first has long been embodied, but the second continues to express itself and is even still looking for an expression. It is the same event but one part of it is profoundly realised in a state of things, whilst the other is all the more irreducible to all realisation.”7 “To extract the Passion from the trial, to extract from the event this inexhaustible and brilliant part which goes beyond its own actualisation,”8 in short, to extract

3 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 102. 4 “The expressed entity is what the Middle Ages called the ‘signifiable complex’ of a proposition, distinct from the state of things,” adds Deleuze (ibid., 105, emphasis added). 5 Ibid., 105. 6 Ibid., 87–​122. 7 Ibid., 106. 8 Ibid., 106.

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the virtual from the actual –​and meaning from what occurs9 –​is Dreyer’s task, concludes Deleuze. More than one decade after the publication of his widely acclaimed Phenomenology of Perception –​ which aimed at re-​embodying knowledge against the prerogatives of what is commonly known as the Cartesian mind/​ body dualism10 –​Merleau-​Ponty had ventured a kindred distinction between “perception” and “expression.” While “perception opens for us a world already constituted and can only reconstitute it,” he says,11 “expression always goes beyond what it transforms”;12 it goes, that is, “beyond signs toward […] meaning,”13 which “escapes perception at the very moment that it takes shape,”14 thus opening the door to “another world.”15 This “other world,” adds Merleau-​ Ponty, is an “internalized”16 world that is, nevertheless, the very “same world” that perception unceasingly folds, unfolds, and refolds, but “freed” from the “weight” that “holds it back” to “equivocality”17 (read: to indeterminacy). Think, for instance, about a painter’s or a writer’s gesture, Merleau-​Ponty goes on to say: Given that there are organisms, objects, or fragments of objects whose ponderous existence surrounds him, each one in its place, and yet all run through and intertwined on the surface by a network of vectors and a clustering of the lines of force to their roots, the painter throws away the fish and keeps the net. His look appropriates correspondences, questions, and answers which, in the world, are revealed only inaudibly and always smothered in the stupor of objects. He strips them, frees them, and looks for a more agile body for them. Given, moreover, colors and a canvas which belong to the world, he suddenly deprives them of their inherence. The canvas, the very colors, by virtue of being chosen and composed in terms of some secret, to our sight cease to remain where they are; they make a hole in the plenum of the world. Like the fountains 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 164–​73, 176, 178, 188, 193, 197, 229–​30, n.5. Cf. Deleuze’s take on “being” and “becoming” in Nietzsche and Philosophy, 188. On whose problematic attribution to Descartes see Merleau-​Ponty’s own comments in The Prose of the World, 92–​7. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 124. Notice Deleuze’s reference above to the “internal” in Péguy. Ibid., 63.

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or the forests, they become the place where spirits appear. They are no longer there except as the minimum of matter that is needed for meaning to manifest itself. The task of language is similar. Given an experience, which may be banal but for the writer captures a particular savor of life, given, in addition, words, forms, phrasing, syntax, even literary genres, modes of narrative that, through custom, are already endowed with a common meaning –​the writer’s task is to choose, assemble, wield, and torment these instruments in such a way that they induce the same sentiment of life that dwells in the writer at every moment, deployed henceforth in an imaginary world and in the transparent body of language. There is, then, on both sides, the same transmutation, the same migration of a meaning scattered in experience that leaves the flesh in which it did not manage to collect itself, mobilizes already capitalized instruments for its own profit, and employs them so that in the end they become the very body it had needed while in the process of acquiring the dignity of expressed meaning.18 To “throw away the fish and to keep the net”19 is a beautiful metaphor indeed for a “transmutation” that produces a meaningful supplement beyond the “flesh”; plus, it suggests that “meaning” gathers the “given.” Hence, in both Merleau-​Ponty and Deleuze meaning appears as a giving dimension. In order, then, to stress its smoothed-​out nature we are willing to call it Apollo’s marble (i.e., polished limestone) in contraposition to Dionysus’s flesh –​and to speak, then, of a cut on life’s continuum. 2

Apollo’s Stereogram

There is on the one hand –​paraphrasing Merleau-​Ponty20 –​the earth’s self-​ perceiving flesh, i.e., a multiplicity of movements, images, sounds, and sensations by which all earthly beings communicate with one another.21 This 18 19 20 21

Ibid., 47–​8. Cf. the dialectics of “forces” and the “invisible” in Deleuze’s interpretation of Bacon’s paintings (Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 56–​64). Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, esp. 9, 84, 88, 114, 118, 123, 133, 135–​6, 138–​9, 144–​5, 146–​8, 152, 193, 200, 209, 248, 261, 267–​72, 274. See also Dillon, Merleau-​Ponty’s Ontology, 105. We distinguish, therefore, between “matter” and “flesh,” since the category “matter” is extensive to anything physically existent, independently from its being alive or

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­f igure 10  The earth’s semiotic prism

dynamic multiplicity is permanently accompanied by thought –​a “kinetic bodily logos,” as Maxine Sheets-​Johnstone calls it,22 “that comes with the creature’s being the animate form it is.”23 For each creature […] is quintessentially suited, and in multiple ways, to the life it lives. [Yet] [n]‌ot only is there an existential fit with respect to its physical and living body –​what might roughly be described as a fit between its anatomical and animate form […] –​but an existential fit obtains between the organism and its environing world, a fit that is kinetically expressed. Each species of animate form is kinetically suited to the life it lives by way of an intelligence that is of the very nature of the form itself, an intelligence that is plaited into its very tissues and expressed in the sensible ways in which it lives its life.24

not –​biologically or otherwise, since volcanos, rocks, etc. are alive in their own ways insofar as they shape the earth dynamically and, by doing so, they help to distribute and redistribute the earth’s living ecosystems and to preserve the layered memories of the living beings that inhabit these. Cf. François Dagognet’s geophilosophy in Une épistémologie de l’espace concret. 22 Sheets-​Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn, 59. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. “From this perspective,” adds Sheets-​Johnstone, “the designations ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ are clearly inappropriate; each creature is what it is and is not another thing” (ibid.). Two quick remarks: first, the term “logos” is employed here as a synonym for practical intelligence, which is fine but is not the way in which we use it in this book; secondly, the suitability of the term “creature,” with its inevitable Christian undertones, is, we think, debatable.

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To each embodied life-​form corresponds, moreover, a particular existential perspective. Put together, then, all possible existential perspectives form the many sides of what we are willing to call a semiotic prism made of countless communicating faces and their manifold intersections. A first-​order cum embodied type of meaning thus arises within the numberless folds of the earth’s semiotic prism, like when I say: “this wave comes my direction, it is too high for me to jump it, but I can duck dive it,” or like when a jaguar realises that the X-​we-​call-​bird standing before it is edible, whereas the Y-​next-​to-​it-​we-​call-​rock is not. We inspire ourselves here in the works of Terrence Deacon,25 which show that the morphology of any given body depends on the way in which it processes a set of communicative signals. Basing himself on Deacon, Eduardo Kohn,26 for his part, suggests that the Amazonian rainforest is, for the animal and plants not less than for the humans that live in it, a continuum of iconic and indexical signs that affect the shape and the behaviour of all organisms alike.27 Yet, there is also something that, despite being connected (in the last instance) to the earth’s flesh, exceeds the latter –​a supplement to it, as we have seen apropos the “expressed” in Merleau-​Ponty and Deleuze. For there is, in addition to the pragmatic thought that is characteristic of the earth’s flesh, a detached thought that does not exactly follow the latter’s movements and sensations, even if it is, of course, dependent on them –​in the same way that abstract thought can be said to be dependent on, yet different from, the brain’s neuronal connections that make it possible. A second-​order type of meaning, a non-​immediate type of meaning emerges here, like when I say “death” without referring to anyone’s death in particular, or when I say: “this is,” or “this is no longer,” to convey the idea that something either lives or is dead, respectively. A kind of perspectival jump over the kinetic thought of the thinking flesh occurs at this point, as shown in the diagram above (Figure 10).28 25 Deacon, Incomplete Nature. 26 Kohn, How Forests Think. 27 Cf. Donna Haraway’s “knotted and dynamic ecologies” in When Species Meet. 28 Recent research on animal future-​oriented cognition (e.g., Osvath and Martin-​Ordas, “The future of future-​oriented cognition in non-​humans”) and animal dreaming (e.g., Louie and Wilson, “Temporally Structured Replay of Awake Hippocampal Ensemble Activity during Rapid Eye Movement Sleep”) suggests that long-​term future anticipation and the revival of the past beyond immediate remembrance are not exclusively human features. Something similar can be said about self-​awareness, which tiny fishes like the labroides dimidiatus seem to have in one degree or another (see Kohda, Hotta, Takeyama, Awata, Tanaka, Asai, and Jordan, “If a Fish Can Pass the Mark Test, What Are the Implications for Consciousness and Self-awareness Testing in Animals?”). Apparently, though, by

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Identifying this detached thought with Apollo’s lyre, and the earth’s kinetic thought with Dionysus’s aulos, is a possibility based on the discreteness and the continuity of these instruments’ respective sounds.29 The discreteness of the former reflects Apollo’s detached thought, by which he knows in a manner that is no longer the purely immanent way of knowing of Dionysus. In turn, the fact that, regarding its materiality, the lyre results from assembling a turtle-​ shell or wooden body and a varying number of strings, plus a bridge between them and, occasionally too, pegs (one per string), mirrors Apollo’s ability to bring all things together –​what was, what is, and what will be, but also this as this and that as that: X as X and Y as Y. This means that Apollo’s vision is like a stereogram in which a new, three-​dimensional image is produced by merging two bi-​dimensional images into one, without the resulting image being, however, equal to their mere addition. We are tempted to evoke here Plato’s εἴδη. For one day, in our early infancy, the εἶδος, say, of a “circle” –​which, previously, an adult had tried, in vain, to awake in us –​comes to us, as it were,30 after observing attentively several thereinafter “circled” things which, formerly, we did not perceive as being “circled,” since we lacked altogether the idea of a “circle.”31 Apollo’s vision is there at play, as well. A good way perhaps to understand the twofold nature, both sudden and stereographic, of Apollo’s gaze, could be to briefly examine one of Balthus’s paintings: The Street (1933), which was included in the artist’s earliest solo exhibition

29 30 31

giving raise to abstract thought humans have developed these and other similar skills to an unmatched degree. This, of course, is not the same as to speak of a human/​non-​human “split;” it would be better to speak of “separation.” Cf. Frédéric Neyrat’s suggestive distinction in The Unconstructable Earth, 149: “Whereas separation articulates and recognizes differences, a split establishes an identity on a refusal of recognition.” Needless to say, in terms of echolocation it is whales and dolphins that “separate” themselves from all other animals, ourselves included. The lyre, thanks to its intermittently pulsed strings, introduces relief in what would otherwise be a sounding continuum, whereas the cuts and stresses made when playing an aulos are prompt to dissolve into an uninterrupted flow of sound. “Internally,” as Péguy, Merleau-​Ponty, and Deleuze say. As we have written elsewhere (Segovia, “Eἶδος⧹Utupë”), behind the production of any εἶδος there is an analogical flow of meaning that brings to the fore certain analogies and certain differences. Bantu languages offer an admirable example of this, as in them all nouns go, as a rule, preceded by a class prefix, and nominal classes are often built on visual contrasts and analogies; yet, what follows the prefix (i.e., the noun proper) differentiates the thing in question from all others that belong in the same class. Is it, then, possible to reconcile the view that our εἴδη are produced with Plato’s famous notion of ἀνάμνησις (“remembrance”) in Meno, 80e, 81e? We think so, provided, that is, that the latter notion is not taken literally; for any εἶδος is also an event by means of which, all of a sudden, an

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in Paris in 1934 and is now at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).32 What do we see in it? In principle, an old Parisian street (rue Bourbon-​le-​ Château) with people. Yet, if we were just to enumerate and describe the portrayed characters (a worker dressed in white carrying a beam, a blonde girl with a pink coat and a green hat playing with a racket and a ball, etc.), we would solely narrate what is there before us, and then it would matter little whether we stand before one of Balthus’s marvellous paintings or before the random objects (a pile of books, a pencil case, etc.) laying at this very moment on our desk. Furthermore, any information about the painting supplied by an audio-​guide like those which most museums offer nowadays to the visitor,33 would distract us from encountering the painting face to face: our ears would be filled up with noise (when and where did Balthus paint what we see in the painting, which technique he used, how was this painting included in his first solo exhibition, how it was received by the art critics, etc.) that would make impossible for us to apprehend that which necessarily transcends what we perceive with the senses. For, on the other hand, unlike the painters linked to the 1920s Neue Sachlichkeit, Balthus is anything but a painter of the dull objectivity of things –​hence, his closeness to the Surrealists. Balthus “paints not to represent the appearance of the world, but to reach the interior,” to “penetrate” a “secret domain,” writes Lance Esplund;34 and he adds: “his pictures –​like dreams –​are journeys unto themselves.”35 Now, if we watch Balthus’s painting attentively, we will surely discover in it something uncanny. The figures are rendered “frozen mid-​movement,” and this has the effect of making of “a crowded street […] an uncanny site of mental isolation,” as we read in the official museum note. In other words, the street is not experienced by the characters painted by Balthus as any other street (in Paris or elsewhere) would be naturally experienced by the pedestrians walking on it: each character is absorbed in its own world, which produces in the viewer (a) the impression that they are emotionally isolated from one another –​as if image appears (and then reappears) in our mind, leaving no trace of the flow of meaning of which the εἶδος itself is, so to speak, the fruit. 32 With reference no. 1200.1979. An image of it is available at: https://​www.moma.org/​col​lect​ ion/​works/​80582. 33 Cf. Merleau-​Ponty’s dismissal (in The Prose of the World, 72–​6) of the way in which museums transform “efforts” into “works,” which is inspired in turn in Sartre’s dismissal of the way in which libraries transform “gestures” into “messages” (ibid., 73). 34 Esplund, The Art of Looking, 129, 139. Notice, here too, the reference to the “interior” of the world. 35 Ibid., 140. Balthus himself declares: “Painting is [for me] something both embodied and spiritualized. It’s a way of attaining the soul through the body” (cited in ibid., 127).

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the painter wanted to stress the depths of their inner lives and/​or their inter-​ subjective indifference –​or, alternatively, (b) the impression that they belong in the same place but not in the same time –​for the life of a street is made out of numerous asynchronous events that, framed together in a trans-​temporal picture, would repel each other like two equally charged magnets. Be that as it may, it is this uncanniness that gives meaning to the painting, in the sense that, by virtue of it, what is painted on the canvass shines forth and offers itself to be thought. Ultimately, what Balthus paints is this uncanniness.36 Yet, it would be impossible to notice it –​i.e., to realise it and to think on it –​at the expense of Apollo’s stereographic gaze. 3

Apollo’s Screen

Apollo’s gaze, we saw in Chapter 2, is sensitive to the meaningful shining forth of all things into unhiddenness, i.e., to what Heidegger calls their “self-​opening coming-​forth and emerging ‘up’ and upwards into an unconcealed standing-​ there.”37 Now, in addition to conjuring Apollo’s gaze in a diegetic manner,38 the Homeric epos spreads Apollo’s gaze in non-​diegetic terms, for it summons each thing according to what each thing is: the ships in their concavity or as objects that swiftly cross the waters, the sea with its roars similar to those of a lion, the aurora with its characteristic pinkish colour, etc.39 Φύσις (“being”) and meaning coincide: things display their ontological cum aesthetic qualities and thereby become meaningful –​and vice versa. By things we mean anything of course, including human affects. Thus, Pasolini’s originality consists in identifying meaning with the fundamental “affective aspects of being” –​to borrow from Susanne Claxton40 –​on which human lives rely, however differently such aspects may be experienced. It is to this identification that Pasolini anchors his non-​metaphysical poetic essentialism: a sorrowful departure cannot be but a departure whose regretfulness must be perceived on the screen, regardless of the circumstances in which it may be experienced; a beautiful encounter cannot be but an encounter that brings joy

36

The netless racket of the girl can be seen as a cypher thereof –​as though the artist meant to challenge the viewer to find out the missing “net” that brings the depicted characters together in order to win the ball, i.e., the painting’s meaning. 37 Heidegger, Heraclitus, 14 (=​ga 55: 16). 38 Homer, Iliad, 1.70. 39 See Míguez Barciela, Mortal y fúnebre, 29–​39. 40 Claxton, Heidegger’s Gods, 59.

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to the screen, regardless of the circumstances in which it may be experienced, etc. In short, what counts for Pasolini, like for Deleuze, is that of which the concrete is the expression: something that is treasured by the camera because of being precious, and that is precious because it provokes awe; something, in sum, that unites the viewer and the viewed in a vision. Take, for example, Tonino Delli Colli’s close-​ups of Margherita Caruso in Pasolini’s adaptation of Matthew’s Gospel (1964), whose opening shots extract from Caruso’s facial expression the profound sadness of an unjust feeling of rejection in which all similar feelings ever felt by anyone take shape beyond the particular story told in the film; or take Giuseppe Ruzzolini’s close-​ups, in Flowers of the Arabian Nights (1974), of Ines Pellegrini and Franco Merli playing Zumurrud and Nur ed-​Din, whose gazes are not just innocent, but the embodiment of innocence itself (like Nō masks). Furthermore, Pasolini assimilates being’s fundamental “affects” to what he calls the “sacred,” by which, interestingly, he also understands a specific “way of seeing life.”41 Ultimately, Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry,” as he himself calls it,42 can be defined as a “rethinking” or “remembrance” (Andenken)43 of the “sacred” that combines (a) nostalgia for bygone meaning and coherence; (b) sensitivity towards their liminal gleaming in a degraded world in which everything is consumable; and (c) awareness of that gleaming’s politically disruptive force.44 Pasolini believed that the non-​modern peoples of Africa (and elsewhere) and the European peasantry of the mid-​20th century, including the peasants who migrated to the suburbs of the big cities in the 1950s, were more capable of perceiving and expressing the sacred, thus understood, than the modern industrialised classes.45 Accordingly, he recruited among them the protagonists and co-​protagonists of several of his films, including his adaptations of Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, 1967), Euripides (Medea, 1969), and Aeschylus (Notes Towards an African Orestes, 1971). It is their non-​consumerist gaze, still sensitive to the sacred, that Pasolini attempts to capture with the camera, and to reproduce on the screen, by means of what he calls “free indirect subjectivity.”46 41 Pasolini, Uccellacci e Uccellini, 44–​5. On the sacred according to Pasolini, see further Benini, Pasolini, 18–​51; Scheller, “Le Sacré selon Pasolini.” 42 Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, 79–​101. 43 The term is Hölderlin’s, whom Pasolini did not only read, but translated. See in this respect Amaba, “Dioses desconchados.” 44 On Pasolini’s politics of the sacred, see Segovia, “Pasolini’s Counter-​Political Gaze at the Sacred.” 45 Maingois, “Entretien avec Pasolini.” 46 After the notion of “free indirect speech” in literature. See further Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, 79–​101, 167–​86.

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More precisely, Pasolini uses the camera to show the non-​modern gaze, which, he writes, differs from that of an “educated bourgeois” in strict ontological terms: “Not only do the two [gazes] […] see different sets of things, but even a single thing […] appears different through them.”47 In other words, different cultural perspectives do not only differ in epistemological terms, but convey different realities, hence different ontologies.48 Therefore, by showing the non-​ modern gaze, i.e., by conjuring it on the screen before the viewer’s eyes –​whose own gaze is thus provoked to undergo a “perspectival shift”49 –​Pasolini builds a new reality altogether. For, as he suggests, cinema is not evocative –​it is not literature –​but works with and produces reality, i.e., images in movement.50 In other words, Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” can be said to gravitate around the Apollonian idea of αἰδώς –​an idea on which, commenting on v. 1,267 of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus (which reads: “Αἰδώς, together with Zeus,51 holds the throne of essence, raised above all others”),52 Heidegger writes: Αἰδώς –​thought in the Greek manner –​is not a feeling man possesses but the disposition, as the disposing, which determines his essence, i.e., determines the relation of Being to man. Therefore αἰδώς, as the highest, lies in essential proximity to the highest god, Ζεύς. […] Being itself sustains awe, namely the awe over the “to be.” In this way Being at the very beginning is protective of its own essence. Αἰδώς refers to this awe, which thrusts something upon man.53 What is in this way “thrusted upon man” is the thought54 of being (we kindly ask the reader to take the genitive in both its objective sense and its subjective sense). Also, Heidegger’s sentence: “[b]‌eing itself sustains awe,’” does not imply that being is always morally praiseworthy. Being is, first and foremost,

47

Ibid., 177 (translation slightly modified). Cf. Eva Schuermann’s contention (in Seeing as Practice, 8) that to “discover” reality amounts to “constitute” it. 48 See further Holbraad and Pedersen, The Ontological Turn. 49 We borrow here from Viveiros de Castro’s “amerindian perspectivism” in The Relative Native, 195–​228. 50 Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, 133. 51 That is, with being qua determination. Cf. Aeschylus, frag. 70: “Ζεύς ἐστιν αἰθήρ, Ζεὺς δὲ γῆ, Ζεὺς δ᾽οὐρανός, Ζεύς τοι τὰ πάντα χὤτι τῶν δ᾽ὑπερτερον” (“Zeus is the ether, Zeus is the earth, Zeus is the sky, Zeus is everything and more”; our translation). 52 In Heidegger’s own translation (Parmenides, 75 [=​ga 54: 110]). 53 Ibid., 75 (110–​11). 54 Compare with our own comments on Athena, Artemis, and αἰδώς in Chapter 3.

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synonymous with life-​bearing: “whosoever has thought what is deepest,” writes Heidegger after Hölderlin, “loves what is most alive.”55 Now, that which is “deepest” and “most alive” can be either straightforwardly hinted at or else shown a contrario. Put otherwise, it can be a child’s innocent smile, in which life affirms itself spontaneously; it can also be the freedom of Iphigenia’s soul when she confronts death, i.e., her grandeur before the inevitable, through which life affirms itself despite all; or it can be Medea’s understanding that a desecrate world lacks any future, by which life desperately affirms itself in the form of a painful lamentation. 4

Apollo’s Blackout

We have written that Apollo’s gaze is sensitive to, and the catalyst for, the meaningful shining forth of all things into unhiddenness. We ought to have written that it is sensitive to, and again the catalyst for, their unconstrained shining forth. Conversely, what Heidegger calls the modern Ge-​stell constrains all things to become present, and hence to be, according to a predetermined plan. This, we should like to argue, causes Apollo’s blackout. By “ordering,” “requisitioning,” and “conscripting” absolutely everything, says Heidegger, the modern Ge-​stell transforms reality into, and frames it as, a “standing reserve” in which all things are placed “at the ready” to be appropriated and manipulated at will.56 A single example taken from Heidegger’s 1949 Bremen lectures will probably suffice to illustrate it: The hydroelectric plant is placed in the river. It imposes upon it for water pressure, which sets the turbines turning, the turning of which drives the machines, the gearing of which imposes upon the electrical current through which the long-​distance power centers and their electrical grid are positioned for the conducting of electricity. The power station in the Rhine river, the dam, the turbines, the generators, the switchboards, the electrical grid –​all this and more is there only insofar as it stands in place and at the ready, not in order to presence, but to be positioned […]. [Hence it can be said that] [t]‌he hydroelectric plant is not built in the Rhine river, but rather the river is built into the power plant and is what it is there due to the power plant’s essence.57 55 Heidegger, Heraclitus, 160 (=​ga 55: 211). 56 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 23–​43 (=​ ga 79: 24–​45). 57 Ibid., 27–​8 (28–​9). On how modern science supplies the “world picture” necessary for it, see Heidegger, ga 5: 75–​113.

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Heidegger wrote these lines in the 1940s. Today, such instrumental “positioning” of reality has sadly become all the more natural to us. Witnessing the slow opening of a flower does no longer move us –​we prefer to purchase the flower’s branded fragrance instead. We have, that is, become insensitive to being on behalf of our own “will to power.” As a result, we have ended up losing sight of what, after Kant and Hölderlin’s use of the adjective uneigennützig (“disinterested”), Heidegger calls for his part unbewältigt (“that which cannot be mastered”58 but demands to be cared for). The modern Ge-​stell thus represents the completion of what, drawing partly on Heidegger,59 we are willing to call the history of “metaphysics,” through which φύσις has been suppressed. 5

Apollo’s Silence

So far, we have described meaning⧹being as a stereographic vision. We shall now attempt to describe it in two additionally interrelated ways: as a particular type of silence that can be listened to, and as a kind of opening that can only be perceived from within –​which implies that, in the final analysis, meaning can only be described in paradoxical terms.60 In one of his lasts writings, titled “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964), Heidegger writes that there must be an “Opening” (Offenheit)61 prior to the shining forth of all things into unhiddenness, and prior to their relapsing into hiddenness, in which “space,” “time,” and “everything present and absent in them” (e.g., “brightness” and “darkness,” “sound” and “silence”) are both “gathered” and “sheltered.”62 He describes it, too, as a “Clearing” (Lichtung) that stands vis-​à-​vis the multitude of everything that is like a “forest clearing” stands vis-​à-​vis the forest’s arboreal “density” (Dickung).63 In a dialogue from 1944–​5, Heidegger analogously speaks of a “free expanse” (freie

58 Heidegger, ga 65: 10. 59 Heidegger’s own problematic approach to φύσις (on which see the next section) explains our reservations to fully embrace his thought at this juncture. 60 “Stereographic vision,” audible “silence,” “opening” –​these are all metaphors. Yet, more often than not, metaphors prove suitable to “describe” realities “inaccessible to direct description” (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, xl), for which reason they can be said to have “transcendental qualities” (Wagner, Symbols That Stand for Themselves, 5, n.4; cf. Segovia, “Metaphor and the Analytic-​Philosophy Cuisine”). 61 Heidegger, On Time and Being, 66 (=​ga 14: 81). Variant: “freie Offene” (ibid., 65 [81]). 62 Ibid., 65–​6 (81) (translation slightly modified). 63 Ibid., 65 (80). Cf. Fichte’s notion of thought’s self-transparency in his 1812 Wis­senschafts­lehre.

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Weite)64 where all things “abide” and “rest,”65 and of “the Region” (die Gegend) that, “while resting on itself,” gathers them all, i.e., “each to each and each to all into an abiding (Weile).”66 Needless to say, such “Region” is not external to human thought, so there is nothing mystical about it, but we shall return to this point in a moment. Suffice it, for now, to stress its dual nature in Heidegger’s own words: “the region itself is at once an expanse and an abiding […] which, gathering all, opens itself.”67 One might also think of it as a breath –​and feel its all-​encompassing silence.68 Yet there would be nothing mystical in that silence either. For such silence is the “crucial thing” (Ur-​sache),69 to paraphrase Heidegger, on which “thinking” itself stands;70 put differently, it is what makes thought possible in the first place (thus its “expanding” nature) and, at the same time, the “region” where all thoughts are contained (hence, its “abiding” nature). We stand on that “opening” breath and we can perceive its silence whenever we find ourselves inside meaning, i.e., inside the “region” within which we make sense of whatever we come across with and/​or think about: of X as a mountain physically present to us, of Y as a stream of water which is no longer there and yet it is safe in our memory, of Z as the joy we perceive in someone’s smiling face, and so on. We inhabit meaning inasmuch as we inhabit language, and vice versa.71 In fact, it is only because we abide in meaning that we name, whisper, fancy, shout, deduce, dream, and remember. What we perceive and how we perceive thus merge into one another, for things only shine forth before us when we see them as separate things which are meaningful in one way or another: what we call a “bird” stands out from an otherwise undifferentiated stream of reality because we perceive it both physically and meaningfully; in a nutshell: the word “bird,” and the thing it designates, are always embedded in a space of meaningfulness.72

64 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 66 (=​ga 13: 47). 65 Ibid., 65–​6 (45–​7). 66 Ibid., 66 (47). 67 Ibid. Cf. Fichte’s notion of thought’s invisibility in his 1812 Wissenschaftslehre. 68 Cf. Heidegger’s reference (ibid., 66 [47]) to the fact that such region “withdraws” while it comes towards us. Cf. too Torres Gregory, Speaking of Silence in Heidegger. 69 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 65 (=​ga 13: 81). 70 Cf. ibid., 65–​8 (81–​4). 71 Cf. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 10 (=​ga 12: 203): “Saying releases the ‘is’ into lighted freedom [gelichtete Freie] and therewith into the security of its thinkability [Denkbarkeit].” 72 A possible one among others, that is, for there is always more than one for each particular thing. Hence, for example, in contrast to the Europeans, the Yekuana of the Amazonian

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The curious thing, though, is that we are never in possession of meaning –​ rather, meaning possesses us; that is to say, its openness is always-​already present to us, or, better, we are always-​already in it, often without noticing it. It is the imperceptibility of its being always-​already present to us, and of our being always-​already contained in it, that we call its silence.73 Does this authorise to view meaning as a mystical entity? By no means! However, as Wittgenstein notes, a picture cannot “depict” its pictorial form, but “display” it74 –​by “picture,” Wittgenstein means the “logical space”75 in which what he calls “things,” i.e., what we have called X, Y, Z, etc., are transformed into what he, in turn, calls meaningful “facts” for reality to become a “world.”76 Consequently, we propose to understand the “Open” and its silence –​i.e., meaning⧹being and its silence –​ as a strictly cognitive disposition. As Roy Wagner puts it, meaning is not only an “innate property” of humans,77 “[i]‌t is our own mirror image, and we, perhaps, are its.”78 Paraphrasing Kant, one could venture that meaning is the “a priori form” of our thinking, in the same manner that “space” and “time” are the “a priori forms” of our “sensibility.” Also, one would be right to wonder if it is not the a priori nature of meaning, hence its troubling simplicity –​and its Apollonian quality –​what Plato has in mind in Republic 509b-​c when Socrates claims that τὸ ἀγαθόν (approximately: “the good”) is ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας (“beyond being,” in the sense that is neither this nor that), and Glaucon laughs at him saying: “By Apollo [sic.], what a daemonic superiority!”79 For, as Drew Hyland underlines, τὸ ἀγαθόν “dispense[s] unhiddeness (to what emerges) and the ability to

basin take the crimson-​crested woodpecker (Campephilus melanoleucos) to be their hero and first shaman because bright-​coloured beings and dynamic social roles belong for them in the same ontological category (Guss, To Weave and Sing, 118, 145). Therefore, a crimson-​crested woodpecker is susceptible of shining forth differently to different peoples, which means that a thing’s being is indissociable from its meaning. 73 On the relation between “hearing” and “thinking,” see Heidegger, Heraclitus, 188 (ga 55: 245), but also Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 47. 74 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.172. 75 Ibid., 2.11. 76 Ibid., 1.1, 1.13, 2.1. Cf. Wolff (Lire le monde, 43), who defines language as a “transparent cage.” 77 Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 107, 114. 78 Wagner, Symbols That Stand for Themselves, 5. 79 Cf. Deleuze’s comments in The Logic of Sense (69–​70) on “sense,” “nonsense,” and the “intangible nature of sense” (the latter expression is Eugene Young’s in “Sense,” 279), as well as Roy Wagner’s approach to “humour” as that which “takes the person out of their perspective,” allowing the person to “get the point by not getting it,” in Coyote Anthropology xi, 12, and his comments on “humour” and the impossibility of a picture to depict itself in The Logic of Invention, 24.

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perceive (the unhidden).”80 Ultimately, then, we are, as regards the Open, like the characters of any of Plato’s dialogues: whatever we are confronted with and given to think, we find ourselves inevitably looking at the manner in which τὸ ἀγαθόν, refusing any direct thematisation, looks at us –​as though it were “our own mirror image” and “we were its.” The problem with Heidegger, however, is that, instead of pursuing this line of thinking –​which his own thinking hints at –​he avoids to equate “being” and “meaning” and is forced, therefore, to rethink meaning⧹being’s elusiveness as the negative predicate of some-​thing ungraspable which is no-​thing and he thus conceives in the image of a Deus absconditus; an image, moreover –​and this is crucial for us and the reason for which we cannot follow him –​that leads him to oppose being to φύσις qua φύσις. For if, in his “exoteric” writings, Heidegger explicitly identifies Parmenides’s ἀλήθεια with the “Open”,81 in his Black Notebooks he states that one ought to go “above […] φύσις–​ἀλήθεια […] [so as to] ground the domain of the open [offene Stelle] as such.”82 “Never again,” he writes, “should we begin with φύσις, and hence never again with ἀλήθεια!”83 We are willing to label it as Heidegger’s para-​Christian conceptual loop.84 Now, since, for the Greeks, as Heidegger himself concedes, “Apollo [is] the self-​showing [Sichzeigen] of φύσις,”85 to go beyond φύσις implies to go beyond Apollo and, thereby, to go beyond Zeus, who, as we have seen, determines from within what Apollo encompasses from without. The question,

80 Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues, 143. Translating τὸ ἀγαθόν as “the idea of the good,” and as “the idea of all ideas,” is customary, but this translation presents three problems. First, τὸ ἀγαθόν is not the idea of something (namely, the “good”). Secondly, τὸ ἀγαθόν should not be interpreted in moral terms (i.e., as that which “orders” or “commands” and expects “respect” and “obeisance” in exchange) but in ontological terms, for its “goodness” consists in that it allows things to shine forth and be, like meaning does. Thirdly, τὸ ἀγαθόν is the condition of possibility of all other “ideas” because, if it were not to allow things to shine forth and stand as X, Y, or Z, we would simply have no “ideas” of them. On the first two points, see further Heidegger, ga 34: 95–​116. 81 Heidegger, ga 14: 83–4. 82 Heidegger, ga 94: 241 (emphasis original, our translation). 83 Ibid. (emphasis original, our translation). Another reason for this, in our opinion, unjustified move, is Heidegger’s view that the “letting-​come-​forth” of φύσις has been corrupted into θέσις, i.e., into the arrangement or “positioning” (Ge-​stell) of what is “present” (Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 60–1 [= ga 79: 64]). We shall return to this issue in due course. 84 Cf. Sloterdijk (Not Saved, 76), who sustains that “[t]‌he concept (or the model) of grace returns in Heidegger –​transformed into the kinetic schema of releasement [Gelassenheit],” and qualifies the latter as a “crypto-​Catholic” notion (ibid., 254). 85 Heidegger, Heraclitus, 133 (=​ga 55: 177; emphasis added).

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therefore, is: what other god, that is, what other essential and uttermost value can be found beyond Zeus? It can only be, we fear, Eckhart’s (and Cusa’s) Deus absconditus,86 i.e., the hero-​god of the West’s negative theology,87 whose origins must be traced back to the theology of Christian gnosticism.88 It is, we believe, necessary and convenient to follow a different path, though. Among today’s Heidegger scholars, Thomas Sheehan seems to be the only one uncomfortable, if not with Heidegger’s own mystical drift which he discards as inexistent, at least with what he calls Heidegger’s “crypto-​metaphysical” interpretation.89 Thus, commenting on the transcendent(al) character of Heidegger’s “being” (or, rather, “being”),90 he writes: “We transcend things not only in the sense of already understanding their possible meanings and then returning to the things to give them meaning, but also and above all by being already ‘beyond’ things-​and-​their-​meanings and in touch with what makes the meaningfulness of things possible at all […] [W]‌e in fact are […] the thrown-​open clearing […]”91 of which Heidegger speaks. With this, Sheehan tacitly guides Heidegger’s thought back to Parmenides’s frag. dk B3 (“for the same is to think and to be”), which, on our reading, Heidegger’s own mystical drift and his “crypto-​metaphysical” interpretation miss entirely –​so much so that, relying on Severino, it would be possible to accuse the two of “parricide” against Parmenides,92 and hence against the basal axiom on which the philosophical tradition stands from its very inception.93 It is true that meaning and being are not fully identical to one another, that there is no simple equivalence between them. For, while being is an abstraction, meaning is the abstraction of an abstraction: we call being the “presencing” of something into its unconcealed standing-​there, and we call meaning the invisible noetic “frame” wherein such “presencing” takes place. Furthermore, meaning is not only the space of meaningfulness wherein being/​presencing takes

86

Possibly via Novalis? Cf. Moore, Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement, esp. 26, 222, n.11; Moore, “Homesickness, Interdisciplinarity, and the Absolute,” 288. 87 Regardless, that is, of Heidegger’s explicit rejection of the Christian God in the Beiträge (ga 65: 403); and despite his interest in Zen Buddhism, on which see Duval, Heidegger et le zen; Parkes (ed.), Heidegger and Asian Thought; May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources. 88 Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing, 112. 89 See further Sheehan, “What, after all, was Heidegger about?”; Making Sense of Heidegger; and, now too, “Heidegger and Professor Capobianco.” 90 On which see Pineda Saldaña, “La triple escritura del ser en la obra de Heidegger.” 91 Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, 148. 92 Cf. Severino, Il parricidio mancato. 93 On Heidegger and the confusing possibility of another beginning, see Chapter 8.

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place: it is also the “opening” of such space. This said, it is also clear that the latter amounts to the human activity par excellence; as a result, then, meaning must be seen as the human essence. Oddly enough, Heidegger himself seems to be aware of it when he writes: “Presencing needs the open of an illuminated clearing and is thereby transferred into the ownership of the human essence”;94 and: “being essences and endures only in that it concernfully approaches [an-​geht] the human. For it is the human, open for being, who first lets this arrive [ankommen] as presencing.”95 As Roy Wagner puts it in a somewhat different language (after Wittgenstein’s phrase, “We picture facts to ourselves”):96 We are the fact or act of picturing facts to ourselves –​our own picture to others and their own picture to ourselves. We have no other self; self or soul is how I have been pictured by others, and how I have pictured others to myself. Outside of this discourse, and inside of it as well, there are no human beings, only bodily functions and our apprehensions about them.97 6

Worlding(s): the Earth’s Reflexivity

In the previous pages we have repeatedly written on the unconstrained cum meaningful shining forth of all things into unhiddenness. Therefore, it makes no sense to think meaning⧹being at the expense of φύσις; or, otherwise stated, to separate Apollo from his twin sister, Artemis. Consequently, we should now like to propose a definition according to which the unconstrained cum meaningful shining forth of X, Y, and Z into unhiddenness amounts to world the earth. Susan Claxton suggests something similar when she writes that the “earth manifests as worlds.”98 Conversely, if the earth is compelled, that is, forced in any possible way to come forth, it is not worlded but engineered. What we wrote about the “earth’s song” at the outset of this essay acquires all its relevance in this context. For, against the claim that human worlds are only culturally constructed, it is apparent, as Tim Ingold says, that 94 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 114 (=​ga 79: 121; emphasis original). 95 Ibid. 96 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.1. 97 Wagner, The Logic of Invention, 22. 98 Claxton, Heidegger’s Gods, 48. Cf. Aeschylus, Prometheus, v. 210, where the earth is described as “a single form with many names.”

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[because] the human condition [is] that of a being immersed from the start, like other creatures, in an active, practical and perceptual engagement with constituents of [a]‌dwelt-​in world […] apprehending the world is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view in it.99 In other words, it is “through dwelling in a landscape, through the incorporation of its features into a pattern of everyday activities,” that the earth “becomes [a]‌home” to us.100 Accordingly, the “poetics of dwelling” –​to use Ingold’s own expression101 –​ of many Australian indigenous peoples demands that, before they set up a camp, they dance and sing to the sacred earthly “principles” that shape their polycentric natural environment –​“principles” of whose activity or “dreaming” (tjukurrpa, in the Warlpiri language) those populations take everything to be the manifestation, and of which they see themselves as the “custodians” or “caretakers” (kirda, kurdungurlu). Furthermore, they envisage those “principles” as the “guiding sources” of reality’s ongoing morphogenesis, i.e., as the ἀρχαί of its coming into being. For, as we have mentioned elsewhere,102 the meaning of the term ἀρχή is twofold: on the one hand, ἀρχή means “beginning” (in connection to ἀρχαῖος, “original,” “ancient,” “old,” etc.); on the other hand, it means “reign” (in connection this time with ἀρχικός, “to put into power”); however, of these juxtaposed meanings, the former (attested in Homer) is also the oldest one (while ἀρχή as “reign” is first documented in Pindar). Actually, ἀρχή is no more than a verbal noun of ἄρχω, which means “to be the first,” “to begin,” and only derivatively, then, “to rule” or “to guide”;103 yet, additionally, the Proto-​Indo-​European semantic field in which ἀρχή and other morphologically related terms belong, includes, too, the root *h₂erǵ-​, which carries with it the meaning: “to glitter,” whence terms like “silver” in Avestan (𐬀𐬙𐬀𐬰𐬆𐬭𐬆) and Latin (argentum) and “white” in Sanskrit (अर्जुुन � ) and Greek (ἀργός). Hence, one can legitimately render ἀρχή as “gleaming sources,”104 which makes a lot of sense in this case, as the pictorial representations of the tjukurrpa glow due to their colourfulness.

99 Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 42 (emphasis original). 100 Ibid., 57 (emphasis original). 101 Ibid., 11, 26, 102, 110. See also Poirier, A World of Relations, 60. 102 Gevorkyan and Segovia, “Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy,” 647. 103 Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 1: 145. 104 Cf. Heraclitus’s reference to Zeus’s guiding light in dk B64.

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In other words, earth and world intersect in the domain of tjukurrpa. Whereas the sacred principles (the ἀρχαί) themselves which give form to the environment are embedded in the landscape, the tjukurrpa that brings them forth into the domain of the thinkable adds a supplement (as per the meaning we have given to the term “supplement” earlier in this chapter) to the pre-​perceived or merely perceived earth: it worlds it. Thus, Sylvie Poirier qualifies the Warlpiri tjukurrpa in the following terms: “[w]‌hile being [itself] a hierarchically superior value,” she says, “Tjukurrpa is immanent rather than transcendent,” for it is “everywhen,” that is to say, its “manifestations” are “part of daily life.”105 Hence, she concludes, “Tjukurrpa represents a realm of action, a mode of experience, and a state of being that are coeval and consubstantial with the human realm”106 –​that is to say, inexistent without it. For their part, the “solemn wisdom-​speeches” (hereamuu) of the Yanomami of the Amazon basin display ontologically disclosing qualities that, they too, bring forth the earth as a “dwelt-​in world.” Davi Kopenawa describes them thus: Our great men […] usually address the people of their house a little before dawn or shortly after dark. […] They tell about the beginning of time […] and they speak with wisdom. We call this hereamuu. Only the oldest men speak like this. […] […] This is the heart of our talk. When we say things solely with our mouths, during the day, we do not truly understand each other. We do listen to the sound of the words addressed to us, but we easily forget them. But during the night, […] words […] enter deep into our thought. They reveal themselves in all their clarity and can truly be heard. […] To be able to make hereamuu speeches firmly, one must acquire the image of the kãokãoma loud-​voiced falcon we call Kãomari. It gives the words of our exhortation their strength. […] [T]‌he great men whose chest is inhabited by the kãokãoma falcon’s image truly know how to make long and powerful exhortations. They are skillful at convincing young people to follow their words. […] […] [O]‌ften the elders only discourse with wisdom […] so that those who hear them can become wiser. This way when an old man wakes before dawn, at the hour of the dew, he will name in hereamuu the old forest where his fathers and grandfathers lived. […] He will speak about

1 05 Poirier, A World of Relationships, 121. 106 Ibid.

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the place where he was born and those where he grew up. […] He will tell what he observed of the lives of the long-​ago elders during his youth.107 Next, Kopenawa goes on to mention the forest’s yarori ancestors or “primordial beings” (i.e., the principles or, again, the ἀρχαί of the forest’s present biodiversity) which the hereamuu speeches of the elders evoke as well,108 and whose “images” (xapiri, utupë) are arguably the “ideas” (εἴδη) through which the Yanomami see the earth⧹forest in its aliveness.109 From the Central Desert region of Australia to the Amazon rainforest, therefore, a common way of being⧹dwelling shapes the lives of culturally different peoples and the ways in which they variously relate to the earth and world it.110 Admittedly, it is not possible to do anthropology today at the expense of what has come to be known as the discipline’s “ontological turn,” which, as Paul Heywood underlines, “continues [nonetheless] a long tradition in anthropology of aiming to take difference seriously and understand it as best we can on its own terms.”111 Unlike modern relativists, proponents of the ontological turn sustain that there is not one single reality (ontology) and many cultural interpretations of it, but as many realities (ontologies) as cultural views on what, consequently, is better described as a pluriverse.112 For, as Roy Wagner highlighted in 1967 (long before the expression “ontological turn” became current),113 [if] projection […] is the means by which men […] extend the realm of the ‘known’ by applying the range of their symbolization to the data and impressions of the ‘unknown’ […] the practice of extending the realm of

1 07 Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 299, 302, 304–​5. 108 Ibid., 305. 109 Ibid., 256. On the eidetic nature of the xapiri and their connection to reality in its concreteness, see Segovia, “Εἶδος⧹Utupë.” 110 Obviously, if to “world” the earth is the opposite of “un-​worlding” it, it is also something different from living on it in a sustainable way (pace Rentmeester, “Beyond Bestand”); it presupposes sustainability, that is, but it cannot be reduced to it. Similarly, a worlded earth cannot be just described as a politeia (pace Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, 78, who draw on Latour’s Gifford lectures, which draw, in turn, on Serres’s The Natural Contract), since political negotiations are not enough to make of the earth a poetically dwelt-​in world. 111 Heywood, “Ontological Turn,” 9. 112 See, e.g., Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse; de la Cadena and Blaser (eds.), A World of Many Worlds. 113 On Wagner’s decisive influence on today’s “ontological turn,” see Holbraad and Pedersen, The Ontological Turn, 69–​109.

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the ‘known’ by applying one’s symbolizations to the ‘unknown’ can easily become a means of finding what one wants to find.114 In this respect, “[t]‌he so-​called ontological turn,” writes Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “is nothing more than a change in the disciplinary language-​game that forbids, by declaring it an ‘illegal move,’ such an analytical facility from the anthropologist’s part”;115 for the practice of anthropology, and then too anthropology as a practice (which can never be merely descriptive, but is always theoretical for that very reason), implies “sticking one’s neck out through the looking-​glass of ontological difference.”116 Otherwise, by looking at others we would be condemned to only see ourselves. Still, if despite the perils of extended synonymity, which is always a mirage, cultural cross-​examination is possible, it is because there are ways to bridge differences without suppressing them. Comparison has, of course, its limits, since experiences and their corresponding ontologies can be deemed, at most, kindred but never identical. Lévi-​Strauss puts it elegantly when he states: “resemblance has no reality in itself; it is only a particular instance of difference, that in which difference tends toward zero.”117 Comparison and translation, however, are not necessarily a sham. Mario Blaser is therefore right when he says that “[t]‌ranslation as controlled equivocation is premised on the counterintuitive notion that what needs to be kept in the foreground when translating two different terms is, precisely, their difference,”118 and that this is the only way to pay justice to difference without collapsing the possibility of translation, and vice versa. The expression “controlled equivocation” is Viveiros de Castro’s.119 Its method, however, is as old as Leibniz’s philosophy. “Distinct knowledge has degrees, for ordinarily the notions that enter into a definition would themselves be in need of definition and are known only confusedly,” writes Leibniz in his Discourse on Metaphysics.120 In turn, in the 1 14 Wagner, The Curse of Souw, xviii-​xix. 115 Viveiros de Castro, “Who Is Afraid of the Ontological Wolf?,” 16. The expression “language-​ game” is Wittgenstein’s in Philosophical Investigations. 116 Ibid., 18. Cf. Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 1–​16. 117 Lévi-​Strauss, The Naked Man, 38. See, e.g., Lévi-​Strauss’s comparative analysis in The Savage Mind, 64–​5 (=​ Œuvres, 627–​8) of the structural patterns underlying the usage of ritual chromaticism among the Luvale of Rhodesia and some tribes living in the north-​ east of the state of South Australia. 118 Blaser, “Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?,” 565. 119 Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.” 120 Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, 31 (§24) (translation slightly modified).

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Monadology we read that the analysis of whatever notion, and of all the notions implied in its definition, could result in an “endless detail” given nature’s “variety” and “division.”121 On the one hand (on the “division” side), every notion can be infinitely decomposed into smaller notions, e.g., any circle can be said to be a spatial distribution of multiple contiguous points in such a manner that they all remain equidistant from a point that constitutes the circle’s centre. Yet, even the notion of a point, which might look like a “primitive notion” (i.e., like a non-​decomposable one) presupposes, and thereby comprises, other notions: that of space, minimal unity, place, dimensions, and the negation of these, and so on. On the other hand (on the “variety” side), any definable notion presents infinite conceptual ramifications (e.g., a plant is a multicellular [which means…], photosynthetic [that is, …] living being [that is, …] which produces oxygen, which is a chemical element [or, in other words, …] of a certain atomic value [which is the name given to…], etc.). Hence, a double vertigo accompanies any process of knowledge (i.e., what Leibniz calls “analysis,” whose goal is the production of “distinct knowledge”) menacing it to collapse twice: in relation to the infinitely small and in relation to the infinitely vast. Yet, knowledge stands halfway between both poles, or, rather, in any of the infinite points (read: “degrees”) comprised between, say, 0 and 10: 0.73918, 5.24445, 8.00009, etc. Michel Serres sees very well that, with this, Leibniz opposes Descartes’s law of “everything or nothing,” according to which one must doubt of everything that one may not be certain of.122 Clearly, Leibniz also opposes with it the view that one need not doubt of anything, e.g., of extended synonymity. Leibniz anticipates thus the anthropological method, which consists in cross-​examining, comparing, and translating approximately, e.g., “Θ” into “ΤΗ” or (in the case of a Spanish speaker) “Z”, despite reality’s hyper-​complexity but also due to it. Furthermore, commonality cannot be a priory ruled out when it comes to the cross-​cultural study of human phenomena, no matter how different these may seem to be. For a common human nature provides humans with a common perceptual structure, which is then culturally and ecologically nuanced in almost infinite ways, but whose biological unity cannot be denied either.123 Subsequently, several notional parallelisms can also be found here and there. Thus, for example, the Yanomami fancy that all worlds come to an end, and that, whenever a world ends, a new world rises upon the remains of the bygone one. This, to be sure, amounts to a typically modern rationalisation of 1 21 Leibniz, Monadology, 91, 93 (§§36–​7). 122 Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, 127. 123 See Herron and Kirk (eds.), Human/​Nature.

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an extramodern myth whose exactness, then, must be deemed approximative. Yet, it is fully legitimate. The myth itself says that when a given world comes to an end, its sky collapses, and that on the back of its collapsed sky a new earth emerges,124 because the values of any world must necessarily decline for a world to become effectively extinct, and because any new world must be based on new values which can only be located “on the back” (i.e., out of sight) of the old values replaced by them. The equation “sky” =​“values” is only approximative, yet it is anything but spurious. We surely miss many things through it, but it enables us to gain some knowledge –​not all the knowledge, let alone an absolute knowledge, but some knowledge at least –​of what would otherwise remain opaque to us.125 Hence, we disagree with Martin Holbraad and Morten Pedersen when they assert that “if the ontological turn is to be defined by its propensity reflexively to undo ontological presuppositions in the face of ethnographic contingency, then to premise it on a prior set of […] [translatable] presuppositions is at best half-​measured and at worst downright contradictory.”126 First of all, such presuppositions need not be prior to the analysis, but function as apré-​coup terms obtained by means of a reasonable deduction. Secondly, contingency, as we have already seen, cannot be absolute –​in fact, pretending otherwise would be self-​refuting. Hence, the existence and the viability of a category that falls right between sameness and otherness, i.e. between unity and multiplicity, must be acknowledged as a fundamental methodological axiom in the field of cross-​cultural studies. For, if the world were a collection of copies of several paradigmatic identities (i.e., pure sameness), comparison and translation would be superfluous; and if the world were a collection of indiscernible differences (i.e., pure otherness), comparison and translation would be impossible. It is here, we claim, that the notion of variation, as developed by Lévi-​Strauss and Serres, proves crucial to deal with what is simultaneously one and multiple –​without, that is, sacrificing its two differing, yet indissociable, qualities (multiple, one).127

…

1 24 Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 130–​1. 125 On how to deal with what looks at first like trans-​cultural opaqueness, see Wagner’s excellent analysis of non-​linear causality among the Ok peoples of the Star Mountains of Papua New Guinea in The Logic of Invention, 59–​87. 126 Holbraad and Pedersen, The Ontological Turn, 108. See, for a similar critique, Alberti, Fowles, Holbraad, Marshall, and Witmore, “Worlds Otherwise”; Heywood, “Anthropology and What There is”; Laidlaw and Heywood, “One more turn and you’re there”; Ricart, “Field of difference.” See also Geertz’s rejection of Lévi-​Strauss’s thought in The Interpretation of Cultures, 346–​59. 127 We shall return to it in Chapter 7.

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This requires that the question be now put of whether there is a structural figure capable of supplying a transcendental diagrammatic model that may, in turn, help us examine various worlding processes comparatively or in cross-​cultural terms –​a figure by virtue of which different worldings may be inscribed as a set of variations upon a single theme. We are persuaded that this question has an affirmative answer, and we are persuaded, too, that Heidegger’s Geviert is a good candidate thereof. In this we follow Viveiros de Castro’s remark128 that Heidegger’s philosophy, like Kant’s or Wittgenstein’s for that matter, can provide contemporary anthropology with “images” that are good to think with. Roy Wagner’s thorough use of Wittgenstein confirms Viveiros de Castro’s point.129 As for Kant, in a remarkable study in Maori cosmology Gregory Schrempp shows that certain “images” employed in Kant’s First Critique “are found as cosmological idioms throughout the world.”130 Conversely, despite James Weiner’s recourse to it about a decade ago to examine the ways in which humans are in the world “interpretationally” –​i.e., “bring[ing] closure and […] meaning to the[ir] open-​ended traffic […] with other beings”131 –​Heidegger’s philosophy is a sort of terra incognita for most contemporary anthropologists.132 In what follows, therefore, we intend to analyse several human-​made and non-​human-​made things in connection to Heidegger’s “jug” –​the famous artefact which Heidegger first used in 1949 to illustrate his idea of the “Fourfold.”133 An artisanal jug, says Heidegger, brings about134 the nearness of four cardinal components which “shine together” in the “unity” of their “mirror-​play” (Spiegel-​Spiel):135 (A) earth, (B) sky, (C) mortals, and (D) immortals:

(A) “earth” –​i.e., the generous earth on which we, mortals, live, which gives us all we have while we live on it, and to which we shall return at death; (B) “sky” –​i.e., the sky whose events determine the weather cycles that make possible the emergence and the continuity of life on earth;

1 28 Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 92. 129 See, e.g., Wagner, The Logic of Invention, 19–​57. 130 Schrempp, Magical Arrows, 9. 131 Weiner, Tree Leaf Talk, 11. 132 Even if Marco Antonio Valentim’s critique of it in Extramundanidade e sobrenatureza has helped to introduce Heidegger’s thought to a good number of Brazilian and, more generally, Portuguese-​speaking anthropologists. 133 Heidegger, ga 79: 5–​77. On the role of such idea within Heidegger’s thought, see Mitchell, The Fourfold. On its sources, Mattéi, Heidegger et Hölderlin. 134 Thus the phenomenological character of Heidegger’s analysis. 135 Heidegger, ga 79: 18–​20, 46–​8, 74.

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(C) “mortals” –​i.e., ourselves in our quality of earthly dwellers, who are aware that all things perish, and who are thus ready to sing to them and to care for them to avoid that, after relapsing into the earth, they lapse into oblivion; and (D) “immortals” –​i.e., our ways of pointing with awe at, and of rendering respectful homage to, the earth’s ever-​living forces, on which our lives depend.

An artisanal jug brings together these four components –​of which, arguably, the first one (“earth”) supports the other three136 –​because it is made out of earthy clay which contains either water poured from the sky or wine whose preparation requires the rhythms of earth and sky to coalesce; and because it serves either to calm human thirst or to make offerings to the gods. In short, Heidegger’s “Fourfold” is formed by two intersecting binary axes (A⎮B, C⎮D) whose terms stand in inverse proportion to one another; that is to say, their articulation is chiastic.137 This does not only mean that such terms belong together and cannot be isolated from one another; it also means that they do not exactly relate as the two halves of a bigger thing. In other words, Heidegger hints here at something qualitative and dynamic, rather than quantitative and static. Heidegger’s recourse to the expression “mirror-​play” to qualify the type of relation that exists between the components of his “Fourfold” is extremely eloquent thereof, as what one sees in a mirror is, precisely, one’s (laterally) inverted reflection.138 Notice, though, that this is also how we have repeatedly characterised relation between “earth” and “world” in this book. Hence, Heidegger’s “Fourfold” can be seen as a twofold permutation of his 1935–​6 ⎨earth⎮world⎬ binary:139 ⎨earth⎮sky⎬ +​ ⎨mortals⎮immortals⎬. Recent investigations into the “life of things” –​to borrow from Fernando Santos-​Granero140 –​confirm the applicability of Heidegger’s “Fourfold” to the cross-​cultural study of human-​made objects and, thereby, the appropriateness of Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of a jug as a “thing” that brings together “earth,” “sky,” “mortals,” and “immortals” in their “mirror-​play.” Take, for instance, Morten Pedersen’s analysis of the way in which a Darkhad shamanic gown brings together (i) “space” and “time” (i.e., the cosmos in its material and immaterial complexity, of which the shaman’s frame-​drum registers 1 36 137 138 139 140

Cf. Mattéi, Heidegger et Hölderlin, 137–​88. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, Radical Dualism, 19–​21. Cf. Wagner, The Logic of Invention, 4. On which see Heidegger, ga 5: 1–​74. Santos-​Granero (ed.), The Occult Life of Things. See also Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell (eds.), Thinking Through Things.

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the rhythm and the inner voices), and (ii) the episodic “history” of the “community” in which the shaman belongs and of which the shaman is the centre (since the shaman contributes to periodise that history in meaningful terms through his communal and individual healings).141 Is it possible on this premise to interpret a Darkhad shamanic gown in terms of Heidegger’s jug, and vice versa? We think so, for “earth,” “sky,” “mortals,” and “immortals” mirror one another in these two objects in a strikingly similar manner: “earth” and “sky,” that is, provide their materials, whereas, functionally speaking, the two objects mediate between humans and gods⧹spirits, “mortals” and “immortals.” See in this respect the image below (Figure 11), in which each of the components of Heidegger’s “Fourfold” (A, B, C, D) is variously related to the materials of the two objects in question and to their respective functions; we use bold characters to emphasise those components which are more salient in each case. Let us succinctly consider now the way in which someone may relate to a tree as a hierophany through which “earth” and “sky” communicate to bring

­f igure 11  Mirroring quaternities

141 Pedersen, “Talismans of Thought.”

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“mortals” and “immortals” together. In her study on the Daur of inner Mongolia, Caroline Humphrey reports the following story: “[a Khorchin informant told me that] his father moved to live in a new place. This was a sandy, stony region, but there was a single tree growing there with thick green leaves. His father thought, ‘That beautiful tree is worthy to be worshipped,’ and he moved some large stones the size of a man’s head to the foot of the tree and started to worship it.”142 A lonely tree in a “sandy, stony” land is, of course, something quite remarkable –​the very mark of the otherwise. Yet, its exceptionality means something else, as well:143 a lonely tree in a stony land is also a symbol144 of the ever-​living, i.e., “immortal,” fertility (=​D) of the “earth” (=​A) which the tree itself would be unable to host if it were not for the rain that it periodically receives from the “sky” (=​B), without which no “mortal” (=​C) would be able to dwell in that place either. Because of this, the tree functions as an omphalos mundi for those who dwell nearby.145 North America supplies other intriguing examples of the widespread nature of this recurrent worlding structure. Drawing on the work carried out by Alice Fletcher among the Pawnee of the Great Plains,146 Lévi-​Strauss writes: The ceremony of the Hako among the Pawnee is particularly illuminating in this respect.147 […] The invocation which accompanies the crossing of a stream of water is divided in several parts, which correspond, respectively, to the moment when the travellers put their feet in water, the moment when they move them and the moment when the water completely covers their feet. The invocation to the wind separates the moment when only the wet parts of the body feel cool: “Now, we are ready to move 1 42 Humphrey, Shamans and Elders, 59. 143 Even if, in an attempt to stress the spontaneity of the gesture, about which she is correct, Humphrey states that “[t]‌his veneration did not imply anything strange or symbolic about the tree” (ibid.), which, she goes on to say, is shown by the fact that it was only “after” being consecrated that some kind of “spirit” was attributed to it (ibid., 74, n.93). For, as Jung and Lévi-​Strauss variously show, the symbolic is fundamentally unconscious. Furthermore, as Pierre Clastres stresses, it is precisely when extramodern peoples act in a way that seems “obvious” to them, that one is usually “on the path of some particularly interesting piece of information […] that it would be wise to pay attention [to]” (Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, 33). 144 In the etymological sense of the word, which denotes the act of “drawing” (βάλλω) two things “together” (σύν-​). 145 Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 367–​87. 146 Fletcher, “The Hako.” 147 For, in it, the classification and allocation of sacred objects “contributes to the maintenance of order in the universe” (Lévi-​Strauss, The Savage Mind, 10 [=​Œuvres, 569]).

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forward in safety” […] As the informant explains: “We must address with song every object we meet, because Tira’wa (the supreme spirit) is in all things, everything we come to as we travel can give us help.”148 In sum, a given centre (named here Tira’wa) brings all things together: by relating to them with due respect, “mortals” (=​C) aspire to be helped by the “immortals” (=​D) in their crossing of the stream, and both the lower, earthly waters (=​A), and the upper wind (=​B) set the scenario for it. A final example, which is taken this time from Yanomami mythology, hence from South America, will suffice to prove the recurrence of the “Fourfold” in almost any context in which the human worlding of the earth is at stake. While speaking about the aforementioned xapiri’s “songs” to the French anthropologist Bruce Albert, Davi Kopenawa says that the xapiri themselves retrieve them from the “amoa hi song trees [located] at the edges of the forest where the earth comes to an end and the sky’s feet are rooted,”149 and then pass on those songs as such (i.e., as songs) to the shamans (for whom the xapiri dance) and as words to the other Yanomami.150 We have here too, in rather-​explicit terms, the “earth,” the “sky,” the Yanomami (including their shamans) qua “mortals,” and their spirits or “gods”: the xapiri –​and, once more, the earth⧹forest at the centre of their “mirror-​play.” Why is this structural topos so very pervasive, one may ask? Which is its raison d’être? A little notional substitution may hold the answer. It goes like this: any (human) world results from the combination of what there is (=​A), what could be (=​B), humans with their limitations (=​C), and life’s ever-​living forces (=​D). In short, the “Fourfold” is but a conceptual metaphor for the reciprocity of (A) the “real,” (B) the “possible,” (C) the “given,” and (D) the “giving,” as shown in the diagram below (Figure 12). Interestingly, Guattari stresses that “four” is the “minimum” number that any multiplicity must assume as its underlying structure in order not to dissolve into a chaotic assemblage, a closed bidirectional circuit, or a hierarchical set:151 “It is only with 3 +​n entities,” he writes, “that one can establish […] a 1 48 149 150 151

Ibid., 10 (569–​70). Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 58. Ibid., 59: “There are as many amoa hi trees as there are Yanomami ways of speaking.” Note Guattari’s own fourfold meta-​model (“F” [=​flows of desire] +​“Φ” [=​phyla of cultural knowledges] +​“U” [universes of reference or value] +​“T” [existential territories]) in Schizoanalytic Cartographies, which blends the “real,” the “possible,” the “actual,” and the “virtual” into the production of new “subjectivities.” We have examined at some length this parallelism in Segovia, “Guattari⧹Heidegger,” in dialogue with Gary Genosko’s own schizoanalytic interpretation of Heidegger’s Geviert in a yet-​unpublished lecture

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­f igure 12  Heidegger’s “Fourfold” reinterpreted

trans-​entitarian (matricial) generativity without any essential priority of one essence over another.”152 Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” therefore, does not provide a “fundament,” in the traditional philosophical sense, to an otherwise irreducible multiplicity, but rather –​to paraphrase Roy Wagner –​a cognitive device that “depict[s]‌the implications and interrelationships of a set of things” (the functors A, B, C, and D) “which are themselves relations,” and, more exactly, differential relations (A|B, C|D).153 On this account, what is thus diagrammed in terms of two intercrossing axes (A|B +​C|D) is not the “shape” of something, but its “interpretation,”154 i.e., its symbolic thinkability.155 Furthermore, titled “Chaosmic Immanence and the Zen of Schizoanalysis” (we are grateful to him for sharing its draft with us). See also Segovia, “Dionysus’s Mirror/​Mirage,” which analyses Guattari’s rereading of Parmenides and his assimilation of “F,” “Φ,” “U,” and “T” to Ἀνάγκη (“Necessity”), Δίκη (“Justice”), Μοῖρα (“Destiny”), and Ὕβρις (“Excess”), which are furthermore transformed by Guattari into “goddesses.” 152 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 69. By “matricial” Guattari probably means capable of making room for “an other” (cf. Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One, 26, 28, 31), hence for any other, and thus for others. 153 Wagner, Lethal Speech, 48. On the notion of differential relations, see Chapter 7. 154 Wagner, Lethal Speech, 48. 155 On the identity of the symbolic and the theoretical, see Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 171–​3.

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Heidegger himself suggests in his Contributions to Philosophy that, if anything can still “occur” (in lieu of being presumed to exist beforehand) as a “grounding ground,” it is only by assuming an “in-​between” (Zwischen), rather than “a priori,” position in respect to what is.156 Now, interpreted in light of Guattari’s and Wagner’s respective approaches to the multiple qua multiple, Heidegger’s “Fourfold” has precisely the status of being something in the “middle” (Mitte)157 of being’s relational coordinates. Next question: if Artemis is, as we have underlined, another name for φύσις,158 and Apollo is, as Heidegger himself suggests, a possible name for the “self-​showing of φύσις,” whose meaningful shining forth occurs –​as the songs of the Yanomami recall –​at the crossroads of such four coordinates, will not Apollo be, then, a possible name for the crosscultural transcendental gesture that is at stake in any worlding, which consists in bringing together “earth,” “sky,” “mortals,” and “immortals” in their “mirror-​play” on behalf, therefore, of the earth’s own self-​reflexivity? Admittedly, Lévi-​Strauss’s references to the pine wood burnt in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the pine branches used by the Aztecs and the Nivx, and the role assigned to conifers in the myths of the Nez Percé to celebrate the coming of the spring159 –​and, with it, the renewal of a disclosed, worlded earth –​point, if subtly, to it. For what is celebrated in each case is the meaningful display of the earth’s qualities, i.e., its autopoiesis, upon which its subsequent classification relies. Yet, at the same time, just as the Ancient Greeks did, most extramoderns peoples pay cult to Dionysus, i.e., they worship a figure whose existence defies the regularity that any world needs in order to survive: a trickster that “acts as if privileges, exceptions, or abnormalities could become the rule,” in Lévi-​ Strauss’s words.160 In short, they are, more often than not, Apollo’s peoples and Dionysus’s peoples, and thus commit themselves to celebrate the twin gods. Because if there has to be, for the earth to be worlded, an order that says what things are, there must be also a power that makes things capable of becoming more than they are, and hence other than what they are.

1 56 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 174 (=​ga 65: 223). 157 Ibid. Cf. Hanly, Between Heidegger and Novalis. 158 Heidegger, Heraclitus, 14–​15 (=​ ga 55: 16–​17). 159 Lévi-​Strauss, The Story of Lynx, 115–​16. 160 Ibid., 49.

­c hapter 6

Dancing with Dionysus The living body is a source of mystery because it is always a source of potential surpassing, that is, a source where novelty, no matter how seemingly trivial, is a perpetual possibility. sheets-​j ohnstone, The Corporeal Turn, 21

…

since we cannot live in a perpetual mystery, we invented dancing to give the shadows its visible form fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body, 31

…

the balance of the rock and the noise of the water are no less relevant than the murmurs of men guattari, Schyzoanalytic Cartographies, 253

∵

Overview

Our bodies are the very centre of our earthly being. They are essentially alive before being recognised and remain creatively alive while we use them, despite our attempt to control them. Furthermore, in addition to being our bodies –​or so we think –​they are intrinsically connected to the earth: they have a past in which the memories of the earth are sedimented and disseminated, a present in which such memories subsist alongside newly acquired sensations and images, and a future into which that living legacy will be projected and enriched. Re-​experiencing our living body amounts to being born not twice but many times –​hence to a Dionysian experience. Butō dance is an exceptional vehicle for it: as a free exploration of the transformative qualities of movement and its abyssal, Posidonian roots, it allows us to sense our earthly body in its uncanniness and to re-​position ourselves otherwise in our aliveness.

© Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004538597_007

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In this respect, butō differs from ballet or classical dance, which aims instead at subjecting the movements of the body to extrinsic aesthetic purposes. Yet, it also differs from contemporary dance, which, like butō, rejects the virtuosic and narrative features traditionally associated with dance as a spectacle, and lets things flow in improvisation, but which, unlike butō, tends to explore movement as such, without necessarily diving into the inner depths of our “living body.” For, in butō, the dead metamorphose into the living, and the living metamorphose into the dead; sensations change into psychic images, images change into sensations, and both change into forms; anything solid becomes fluid, the ethereal becomes dense, and forms and events exchange their roles. Like Dionysus’s, butō’s is a metamorphic domain that changes all the time in all its dimensions. Butō can also be described as an animist domain in which the question: “How many times can we be reborn to life, or how many times can life itself be reborn in us?” finds a powerful answer: “as many times and in as many ways as the body proves capable of sensing afresh and of undertaking life’s many natures and assuming the reversibility of their corresponding perspectives.” Historically, butō was born in the avant-​garde theatrical scene of post-​World-​War-​i i Japan, at the crossroads of a number of intellectual and artistic influences that can be distributed along six thematic axes. First, the international performative avant-​garde, which had been introduced in Japan by dancers like Ishii, Takaya, and Itō. Second, Mishima’s defiant appropriation of Nietzschean nihilism against the Westernisation of Japanese culture. Third, Bataille’s subversive flirt with outrage, excess, and death-​obsession. Fourth, Genet’s exaltation of suffering and vindication of amorality and violence as a path to sanctification. Fifth, Artaud’s and Genet’s shared understanding of theatre as an inverted mass whose purpose is to exorcise evil by granting the unconscious free expression. Sixth, Artaud’s notion of a “body without organs,” non-​functional and thus capable of connecting itself to the cosmos through all its pores. Butō’s founder, Tatsumi Hijikata, merged these influences and created butō in collaboration with Kazuo Ōno, a second-​generation disciple of Eguchi who defined butō, for his part, as a realm of poetry which gravitates around life’s celebration. Over the years, some butō performers, including Hijikata’s early collaborators Ashikawa and Tanaka, have developed butō in a direction similar to Ōno’s, and hence different from Hijikata’s, by centring their dance on the exploration of the body as a dynamic intersection of nature’s living forces. In a time like ours in which it is imperative to rethink the relationship between life and non-​life against the backdrop of an unprecedented ecological devastation, butō dance proves especially relevant. Drawing freely on Lacan, butō can be seen as an embodied practice that allows us to re-​enter the “Real” beyond the “Symbolic” and the “Imaginary.” In

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addition, butō practice can be described as a centre of conceptual vibrations where key notions of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy (e.g., “pre-​individual,” “molecular,” “rhizome,” “smooth space,” “machinic unconscious,” etc.) find a persistent echo, and where many of the conceptual and aesthetic certainties that contemporary performance works with (including the stress on flux and the exploration of liminality) resonate at a different level. 1

Our Living Body

As Thomas Tweed has it, it all begins –​and ends –​with bodies: birthed bodies and dead bodies; polluted bodies and purified bodies; enslaved and freed bodies; bodies that are tattooed, pierced, flagellated, drugged, masked, and painted; sick bodies and healed bodies; gendered bodies and racialized bodies; initiated and uninitiated bodies; bodies that are starved and fed, though fed only this way; exposed bodies and covered bodies; renounced and aroused bodies, though aroused only that way; kin bodies and strangers’ bodies; possessed bodies and emptied bodies; and, as humans cross the ultimate horizon of human existence –​however that horizon is imagined –​bodies that are transported or transformed.1 Moreover, our bodies are fundamentally alive before any words about them are proffered, i.e., before they are recognised and mapped; plus, they remain creatively alive while being consciously used.2 Yet, we are hardly aware of it.

1 Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 98. 2 Not only do we have a “body schema,” as Gestalt psychologists say, but a “virtual body” that, with the help of our imagination, multiplies our possibilities to move spontaneously beyond our habitual repertoire of movements, to assume varying embodied points of view, and to essay innovative physical responses in our interaction with the environment: “A toddler may discover how to walk while attempting to accomplish something else” (Steeves, Imagining Bodies, 23). The intellectualist view according to which our body, in our everyday life, follows the designs of our will (apart from its internal organic functions and its reflex reactions to external impulses) is thus unwarranted. Interestingly enough, this view is not only endorsed by those who support –​to put it in traditional terms –​the submission of the body to the mind, but also by those who, under the influence of Surrealism and its attempt to break off with the conventional to reach a deeper truth –​which is reminiscent of that of Christianity in that it is not from this world either –​claim that, to recover our bodily aliveness, we ought to free our bodies from their everyday subservience to the will. This is to paint a very poor

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To begin with, the inner workings of our body (the fact that I am now breathing) and its spontaneous movements (be they creative or not: this entirely new position I have adopted while crossing over these rocks, my daily opening the window of my room when I wake up, etc.) are easy to overlook –​ultimately, they elude us. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio observes, We use part of the mind as a screen to prevent another part of it from sensing what goes on elsewhere. The screen is not necessarily intentional –​we are not deliberate obfuscators all of the time –​but deliberate or not, the screen does hide. One of the things the screen hides more effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins of it, its interiors. […] [T]‌he screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.3 Furthermore, over the past forty years or so we have come to control our bodies in a totally unprecedented manner. In fact, there is no exaggeration in affirming –​as Maxine Sheets-​Johnstone wrote in the late 1970s –​that today we are invited to regard or to care for our bodies in the same way we regard or care for our cars, toasters, outboard motor boats, and electric can openers. […] The analogy with cars is no doubt the strongest: our cars are gassed and oiled, washed, dried, and polished, diagnosed from malfunctions by specialists, taken to the shop for repair, put into garages for protection, allowed to cool off and rest after grueling use, and so on.4 Thus, as Peter Pál Pelbart remarks, [t]‌oday everyone voluntarily submits him or herself to an ascesis following the scientific and aesthetic precept in gyms or in cosmetic surgery clinics […] so as to [adequate] the body to the norms of show business, along the celebrity-​type format. […] [So much so that] [b]ioascesis5 [has picture of our bodies, which, day after day, prove to be far more inventive than we tend to think. In this chapter we write on the possibility of an in-​depth Dionysian experience of our body that must be seen, therefore, as adding an additional degree of profundity (indeed several) to our always-​creative embodied condition. 3 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 28; emphasis added. 4 Sheets-​Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn, 18. 5 The term is Francisco Ortega’s in Corporeality, Medical Technologies and Contemporary Culture.

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become] a care of the self, but different from the ancients, whose care was directed at the good life, something which Foucault also called an aesthetics of existence,6 our care aims at the body itself, its longevity, health, beauty, good shape, scientific and aesthetic happiness, or what Deleuze would call fat dominant health. We shall not hesitate in calling it, even under the modulating conditions of contemporary coercion, a fascist body [since] in face of such an unattainable model a large part of the population is thrown into a condition of sub-​human inferiority.7 The production of a “fascist body,” combined with the growing algorithmisation of our subjectivities,8 defines, it could be argued, our gradual transformation into bodily enhanced “cyberzombies [that] graz[e]‌indolently between services and commodities.”9 As a result, we are no longer able to feel our bodies, nor are we in position to ask ourselves about them anymore. Yet, they are there –​or rather here: so close to us that, in a manner of speaking, as we saw apropos Dionysus in Chapter 2, they can only take us by surprise. In other words, the “mysterious possibilities” of our bodies “lie within our immediate grasp.”10 Inasmuch as, from the very moment of our “birth,” our body is the “centre and origin of our being in the world,” it is also our “first world and reality.”11 Our “living body”12 is both a “body-​in-​motion” (a body that moves) and a “body-​of-​motion”13 made of infinitesimal conscious and unconscious movements. It is also a body whose history is made of numberless stories contained even in its “simplest movements.”14 It is body with a past in which the memories of the earth are sedimented and disseminated, it is body with a present in which such memories subsist and express themselves alongside 6 See Chapter 4. 7 Pelbart, Cartography of Exhaustion, 40–​1. For a criticism of the contemporary un-​body against the objection that the body is regaining significance today, or even gaining new significance, in academic discussions, medical research, Science-and-Technology Studies, etc., see Segovia, “Spinoza as Savage Thought,” 4 (§3). 8 On which see Lazzarato, Signs and Machines. 9 Pelbart, Cartography of Exhaustion, 42. See also Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs. 10 Sheets-​Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn, 20. 11 Ibid. Admittedly, the meaning of the term “world” is very broad here: “world” is synonym with “reality.” In the present essay, however, we employ it to designate, more narrowly, a “worlded” or “meaningful reality,” as per the concept of “second-​order meaning” put forward in the previous chapter. 12 Ibid., 21. Damascio uses this very same expression in The Feeling of What Happens, 22, 29. Cf. Sondra Fraleigh’s notion of a “lived body” in Dance and the Lived Body, 12. 13 Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body, 13. 14 Ibid., 34.

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newly acquired sensations, and it is body with a future into which that living legacy will be permanently projected and enriched. Our “living body” is the body of our “lived concreteness,”15 and it is, in that sense, both an “imagining body”16 and a “minded body” accompanied rather than “commanded” by the “mind.”17 If our mind listens to and inquires about it, it is because our body is somehow broader than our mind. Sheets-​Johnstone puts it thus: to re-​enter the world of the living body is to recover a world of mysterious possibilities and to forego, at least for a time, a world of self-​made […] certainties. […] The living body is a source of mystery because it is always a source of potential surpassing, that is, a source where novelty, no matter how seemingly trivial, is a perpetual possibility. Sometimes the novelty might be no more than a fleeting new awareness, as of space between fingers; other times it might be protracted as in discovering and yielding to the flow of air breathing one now inward, now outward. Whatever the new awareness, it is always fully saturating […] It delights or awes, excites or subdues us. It catches us off guard and comes unbidden. Though someone might direct our attention to new modes of awareness […] we must await the moment of insight; we cannot conjure it forth.18 Yet, at the same time, our “living body” is “utterly transparent,” it “hides nothing”19 –​again, like the masked Dionysus who catches us “off guard” but frontally, leading us to experience life in its continued emergence, and hence to re-​enter the earth’s flesh like newborns. To re-​enter the earth’s flesh is thus as simple as to sense, for everything that is alive senses prior to producing meaning. Paradoxically, however, we only put ourselves in position to enter the formless ocean of sensations which the body consists of, by making the question –​which is thus formulated as a thinkable, meaningful interrogation –​about what our bodies are, independently from what we take them to be when we reflect on how we use them to reach our conscious purposes. For, unlike the body we (improperly) call “our” body (whose idea is but a simplification of our body schema), our “living body” (in which we belong) is neither entirely predictable nor controllable. It not only bears the mark of the fortuitous and the spontaneous, but permits us, 15 Ibid., 32. 16 The expression is Steeves’s in Imagining Bodies. 17 Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body, 9 (emphasis original). 18 Sheets-​Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn, 21. 19 Ibid.

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when it is experienced in all its depth, to experience afresh what we may have experienced before, i.e., “to see, hear, smell, feel things anew.”20 In short, by re-​ entering our “living bodies” we are reborn to life –​we become “twice born,” like Dionysus –​and we “spring forth again in the full measure of our aliveness.”21 2

The Purpose of Dancing

Experiencing our “living body” is also the reason why we dance when dancing amounts to the free exploration of our aliveness. “We dance,” writes Sondra Fraleigh, “to assure our bodily lived freedom. […] Dance frees us from the constraints of our practical lives and utilitarian movement. […] [W]‌e experience a sheer freedom in dance as we move free of any practical outcome.”22 This leads us to experience a kind of “immanent transcendence” amid our “average everydayness.”23 For, as Sharon Chaiklin underlines, movement signifies the start of life and precedes language.24 In this way, dance becomes a “lived metaphysics”25 –​an existential adventure, that is, which invites us to explore what it is to be alive at the expense of any conventional frames of reference thereof, and to explore it poetically. Poetry, on the other hand, is always metaphorical, in the sense that it operates with metaphors, and more generally tropes (simile, metonymy, alliteration, anthimeria, merism, etc.) of which, in a certain sense, metaphor provides the archetype. For metaphors break the circle of tautologous meaning and elicit an open relation between words and things,26 and just as they bind us to reality in an “open leap”27 that subverts the narrowness foisted upon it by literal denotation, so, too, “movement […] functions metaphorically (and poetically) in dance.”28 This, though, is not the same as to say that dance is a form of speech, no matter how peculiar; it means that, like speech, it is an essentially human thing. True, “we dance from the moment our feet touch the earth” (if not before, inside 20 Ibid., 22. 21 Ibid., 23 (text slightly modified). 22 Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body, 18–​19. 23 Ibid., 164. 24 Chaiklin, “We Dance from the Moment Our Feet Touch the Earth,” 3. 25 Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body, 167–​74. The term “metaphysics” does not point here beyond φύσις, but hints at the given, whose closeness it questions, thus making room for the constituent within the constituted. 26 Wagner, Habu, 4–​8. 27 Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body, 171. 28 Ibid.

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our mother’s womb)29 like everything else that moves on it, since life is movement and any of its singular expressions must be viewed as a particular way of moving⧹dancing. In another sense, however, dance occurs when, and only when, one explores intentionally the transformative qualities of movement, which is something only we humans, unlike other earthly beings, do. Our physical “non-​adaptation” –​we are “a tortoise when we retire beneath a roof, a crab when we hold out a pair of pliers, a horse when we bestride a mount,” as André Leroi-​Gourhan says30 –​makes us experiment movement freely and prompts us to dance as a means to figure out what it is to be. Fraleigh again: “Dances move. They do not speak as language does. They are not audible expressions. Yet, they stand with other forms of nonverbal […] expression in the open of saying”31 (read: of doubting, inquiring, affirming, etc.). That is to say, dances take us back to the earth to silently sense it, but in the hope of extracting meaning (new meaning) from such experience. When this happens, we became capable of re-​positioning ourselves otherwise in our aliveness: my hand serves to uncork bottles but can also resonate with the movement of a plant. Assuredly, dance can be other things, as well. The spectrum of possibilities of what it can be is quite broad indeed. In the last instance, however, they all fall between two poles. One consists in embracing unreservedly the free exploration of our “living body.” The other one consists instead in subjecting our bodily movements to extrinsic aesthetic purposes. The latter option is what is commonly known as ballet. It assumes that humans express their passions by means of their movements, which must be refined for the expression of their passions to become publicly acceptable and acquire artistic status.32 In this way, measure becomes the norm and the goal –​in consonance with the courtly origins of ballet in 15th-​century Italy and France, where dance was performed in dialogue with, if subordinated to, music. European popular dances are also intrinsically linked to music and measured in their own fashion (in fact ballet initially built its repertoire on them); yet, unlike ballet, they favour spontaneity. As for the former option –​what we have called the free exploration of our “living body” –​its history comprises a larger chronological and geographical span, from the shamanic-​like dances studied by today’s ethnochoreologists, 29

Inasmuch as “[o]‌ur sensory world takes shape even before we are born” (Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 93). 30 Leroi-​Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 246. 31 Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body, 172. 32 Cf. the 16th-​to 17th-​century testimonies gathered in Anderson, Ballet & Modern Dance, 58–​60, and Homans, Apollo’s Angels, 27.

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which Jean Rouch was the first to film in 1948–​9 south of the Niger River,33 to the ecstatic dances of the maenads in Ancient Greece; from the Islamic mystics of medieval Persia and Turkey to the Hasidic Jews of Eastern Europe; from Isadora Duncan’s free dance style to contemporary Gaga improvisation –​and beyond. Spontaneity, then, is anything but an exception throughout the history of dance. Yet, in the past few decades butō dance (Japanese: ぶとう, from the Chinese: 舞踏, “to dance”), which first surfaced in the avant-​garde theatrical arena of post-​World-​War-​ii Japan, has become a powerful way to access and explore the “living body” in experimental ways unmatched by any other type of dance. Since Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, and Martha Graham flooded the theatrical scene of the early 20th century with freedom from tradition, enhanced expressionism, and renewed technical qualities, contemporary dance remains adamant to formal hindrances of any kind. In fact, contemporary dancers search for spontaneity as much as they search for authenticity. Hence, it is possible to define contemporary dance, roughly, as post-​ballet. Nevertheless, it was in the 1960s that the boundaries delimiting what dance is collapsed.34 They did so on behalf of what might be qualified as a Neo-​Dadaist spirit35 that aimed at erasing any distinction between performers and spectators, at intertwining dance with other artistic practices, and at rejecting the virtuosic and narrative features associated with dance as a spectacle. Butō dancers share much of this rebellious spirit, but tend to concentrate instead on the “living body” and its sensations to propitiate one’s creative re-​singularisation –​as per the distinction made by Sartre in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, and then reworked by Guattari in the 1970s, between “inert” subjectivities defined by serialised repetition, and those that, by contrast, undergo a “heterogenesis” that allows them to “reappropriate the meaning of their existence.”36 Hence, “caught up in a larger-​than-​self pursuit,”37 in butō dance the body is simultaneously experienced as “all of self” and as “more than self,”38 i.e., as the “self of the possible,”39 which is bigger than my self because it is more than what I am myself aware of being, but is, at the same time, experienced from within my own “lived concreteness.”40 Thus, too, butō’s healing qualities, which 33 See Jean Rouch’s film, Une Aventure Africaine. 34 See further Banes (ed.), Reinventing Dance in the 1960s. 35 See, e.g., Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 “no Manifesto.” 36 Guattari, Chaosophy, 180. 37 Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body, 23. 38 Ibid., 34. 39 Ibid., 27. 40 Ibid., 32.

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Guattari was the first psychiatrist (or, in rigour, “schizoanalyst”) to write about in the 1980s while describing Min Tanaka’s dance: […] beneath industrial identities beyond narrative programs slownesses in the speed of light animal horizontalities extracting his dance from the cosmos diagrams of intensity at the intersection of all the scenes of the possible […].41 For the “possible,” as Guattari understands it, is “hypersensitive” not only to “language” but also to “touch,”42 and “doesn’t exist as a purely logical matter,” but is “organised in the form of quanta of freedom”43 which, cutting through the “empty redundancies”44 of the predictable, enable our subjectivity to re-​ singularise itself in perceptual, affective, libidinal, and cognitive terms, in relation to our social and natural environments. The healing qualities assignable to butō dance should come as no surprise. Our “living body,” which butō therefore aims at recovering, is, as Damasio says, the “origin […] of what we call self”;45 or, more exactly, it is our “proto-​ self,” i.e., the “nonconscious forerunner for the levels of self which appear in our minds as the conscious protagonists of consciousness,” to wit, our “core self”46 and our “autobiographical self.”47 In turn, writes Bessel van Der Kolk, “agency starts with […] interoception, our awareness of our subtle sensory, body-​based feelings,” and “the greater that awareness [is], the greater our potential to control our lives” becomes, because “[k]‌nowing what we feel

41 Guattari, Machinic Eros, 43, but see also ibid., 45–​53. On Guattari’s interpretation of Tanaka’s dance, see Murasawa, 「『身体のアレンジメント』を読む：田中泯と『分子革 命』」 . 42 Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, 10. 43 Guattari, Lines of Flight, 148. 44 Ibid., 124. 45 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 29. 46 “Which provides [me] with a sense of self about one moment –​now –​and about one place –​here” (ibid., 16) as experienced by me. Cf. Dan Zahavi’s notion (in Self and Other, 88) of the “minimal self” that accompanies any experience deserving such name, as well as Jean Oury’s reference (in Création et schizophrénie, 67) to the minimum of “unity” that makes possible the minimum of “coherence” (rassemblement) necessary for any self-​ conscious experience to be possible in the first place. 47 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 16.

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is the first step to knowing why we feel that way.”48 This is the reason why the “emotional awareness”49 awaken by “mindfulness practice[s]” is a “cornerstone” of “recovery from trauma.”50 What, then, is the difference between butō dance –​ which implies a good amount of bodily meditation –​ and mindfulness practices like, e.g., yoga? The difference is that, on the one hand, yoga, understood in the secular way in which it has spread in the contemporary Western world, is a combination of physical and mental exercises for the improvement of one’s wellbeing, which is far from being butō’s goal. On the other hand, traditional yoga is mostly about discovering and reconnecting one’s “inner essence” (आत्मन्, ātman in Sanskrit) with the “unchanging, universal consciousness” (or ब्रह्मन्], brahman) that underlies all things, in the hope of achieving deliverance from the “cycle of birth, life, death, and reincarnation” (संसार, saṃsāra) to which all living beings are subjected. Conversely, butō is about discovering and experiencing the multiple unconscious sensations, memories, images, and forces that inhabit us, i.e., about knowing ourselves otherwise and expanding what we are by inquiring what we can become in cosmic terms51 (which entails an exchange of Apollo’s and Dionysus’s respective roles). In other words, and notwithstanding their shared emphasis on self-​awareness, bodily meditation, and physical endurance, whereas yoga accentuates univocality and inwardness, butō stresses multivocality, inwardness, and outwardness alike. Butō dance may be legitimately described, therefore, as a “metamorphic dance” and as a “global alchemy,” even if, as we shall now see, the transformation it enhances “seems to come magically from nowhere.”52 3

Artaud and Hijikata

Butō’s transformative potential seems to come from nowhere because, ultimately, the “living body” eludes thematisation. Insofar, then, as dancing butō amounts to re-​experience the “living body” in its depth, it amounts to explore the body’s darkness. Put differently: butō can only begin with, and progress from, a question mark.

48 Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 95. 49 Ibid., 238. 50 Ibid., 95. 51 Cf. Guattari, Machinic Eros, 43, 50–​1. 52 Fraleigh, Butoh, 11.

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Artaud had intuited something similar to this in 1947–​8.53 In his willingness to escape the functional enclosure of the body and to make of the latter a polyvalent surface of sensations in continuity with the earth,54 he writes: “we have not been made to live with a brain /​or with the organs collateral to it. […] Nor have we been made to live with nerves that correspond to a limited sensitivity and a limited vitality, /​as our sensitivity and our life /​have neither end /​ nor background;”55 and elsewhere: “one day /​man /​stopped /​the idea of the world. /​Two paths were offered to him: /​that of an outwardly infinitude /​and that of an inwardly pettiness. /​And he chose the latter.”56 To reverse this choice was Artaud’s quest.57 Yet, contrary to what we have seen apropos Damasio’s “core self” and Zahavi’s “minimal self,” without which no experience is possible, Artaud aimed at overcoming selfhood altogether –​hence, he ended up falling into the quicksand of schizophrenia.58 “For there is nothing as ignoble and useless and superfluous as the organ called the heart, which is the dirtiest means beings have invented to pump life into me,” says Artaud: “its movements are nothing more than the maneuvering of being over me with the purpose of taking from me what I ceaselessly deny it: a reason to subsist.”59 Arguably, then, Deleuze’s expression regarding Artaud’s thought: “crowned anarchy,”60 is somewhat misleading, as there is no-​one left to put the crown on. Nevertheless, Artaud was on the track of something crucial. What type of body could emerge, one may ask, if one were to opt for an “outwardly infinitude” rather than an “inwardly pettiness”? Response: a permanently nescient body, as Artaud describes it: Machine-​force that belches fire, the primordial body knows nothing 53 54

Segovia, “Artaud y la revolución del cuerpo.” See also Murray, Antonin Artaud, 10–​35. Thus, Artaud’s notion of a “body without organs” (corps sans organes), which Deleuze (and Guattari) reworked insistently. Cf. Artaud, Œuvres, 1654; Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 74–​81, 154–​61, 186–​95, 196–​209, 224–​33; Francis Bacon, 44–​55; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 165–​84. See also Bouillon, Gilles Deleuze et Antonin Artaud. 55 Artaud, Œuvres complètes, 28: 61–​2 (our translation). 56 Artaud, Œuvres, 1645–​6 (our translation). 57 Cf. Grossman, La Défiguration, 17–​20. 58 Cf. our reference to Nietzsche’s maelstrom in Chapter 4. In Nietzsche’s case, difference eventually collapses through the abolition of temporal distinctiveness; in Artaud, it collapses through the abolition of identity as such. 59 Artaud, Œuvres, 1582 (our translation). Cf. Oury, Création et schizophrénie, 23: inquired by the therapist, a schizophrenic patient shows that she lacks self-​recognition –​upon looking at herself on a mirror, she sees nobody. 60 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 37, 41, 265, 278, 304.

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neither family nor society, neither father nor mother. […] It knows nothing. It burps. Cuffs. Feet. Language. Teeth. It’s a beat of barbarian skeletons without end or beginning, a fearful fiery brokenness.61 Notice that a nescient “beat” of “barbarian skeletons” without “beginning” and without “end” resembles an endless, purposeless, and unconscious dance. Hence, too, Artaud’s verses: The human body is an electric battery of which we have castrated and repressed the discharges […] but which is made to absorb by their voltaic displacements all errant dispositions of the infinite […] […] We make the body eat we make it drink, to avoid making it dance.62 Like Artaud –​whose influence, together with that of Sade, Lautréamont, Bataille, and Genet he expressly acknowledged –​butō’s main creator, Tatsumi Hijikata, aimed at experiencing the unforeseeable possibilities of that purely nescient body. Thus, Hijikata’s description of butō as a “dance of utter darkness” (Japanese: あんこくぶとう [ankoku butō]) and his aspiration to transform the body into “a bellows that expels each and everyone of its organs.”63

61 62 63

Ibid., 1519. Ibid., 1656. Hijikata, “Wind Daruma,” 75 (translation slightly modified). See further Hornblow, “Bursting Bodies of Thought.”

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Butō: Animism redux

Drawing on Miryam Sas’s interpretation of Artaud,64 Bruce Baird claims that any attempt to access our “primal body” is “impossible,” since “[t]‌he primal body is not available for anyone to access” it.65 However, “pursuing the idea of a primal body by using of the body, while paradoxically repudiating the use of it,” enabled Hijikata to “find a way beyond some conventions,” he says.66 We do not agree. Undeniably, our primordial body lies beyond the limits we prescribe to our body in our daily lives, and no matter how hard we try to re-​enter its foreclosed dimension, what we may experience as a result is compelled to re-​assume those limits –​in other words, a complete “deterritorialisation,” to employ Guattari’s famous term,67 is never possible, because at some point convention will be restored. Yet, this does not mean that our “living body” cannot be accessed. For, regardless of its intensity and duration, any experience of it is precisely that: an experience of it; by experiencing it once and again, our “living body” becomes more and more familiar to us, and diving into it becomes easier in the long run. As a matter of fact, we have seen that butō is an exponential immersion in the depths of our “living body,” whose creativity we experience every day. It all depends here, like elsewhere, on practice and awareness. Pretending otherwise would be like pretending one cannot learn philosophy, whose concepts work against the opinions we have, because we have opinions to begin with. Furthermore, Baird fails to distinguish between two possible uses of the body: in butō dance one does not “use the body while paradoxically repudiating the use of it,” as he contends, but uses it in a way which is not that in which one uses it to, say, walk from one place to another –​actually, one does not “use” the body anymore: one is the body. It is true, nonetheless, that it all begins with a “pursued idea,” as Baird puts it. This is a crucial, if often overlooked, view. For, if it were not for the idea that there is something like a “living body” waiting for us to re-​enter it, it would not be possible to re-​gain access to it; even if that idea can be provoked by, and hence depend on, our punctual and fragmentary experiences of the body we are. The difference between Hijikata and Artaud turns, precisely, around the distinction between that which is thought and that which is sensed: while Artaud wrote on the “living body,” Hijikata made it dance. 64 Sas, “Hands, Lines, Acts,” 40–​1. 65 Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh, 129. 66 Ibid. (translation slightly modified). 67 Its first occurrence is in Guattari’s preparatory notes for Anti-​Oedipus (Guattari, The Anti-​ Oedipus Papers, 31–​2).

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What is experienced in this dance –​what is experienced in butō dance –​is both the joy of being alive68 and of being a life69 immersed in the depths of life’s waters: a Posidonian, Dionysian joy.70 A feeling of wonder and intensity is thus reconquered at the level of our bodily experience of every single instant. Through such an experience, space and time (here and there, up and down, in and out, before and after, then and now, etc.) shift into something entirely new, they become thresholds through which life’s untamed “emergent force” (again: φύσις) can be fully sensed –​which echoes, in turn, T. S. Elliot’s “still point of the turning world […] [where] the dance is.”71 Is this not, though, art’s task, as Deleuze suggests? “In art, and in painting as in music,” he writes, “it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces. For this reason no art is figurative. […] The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible. Likewise, music attempts to render sonorous forces that are not themselves sonorous.”72 In butō dance, too, dance is extracted, therefore, from that which seems to fall outside the category of the danceable: a sensation in the forearm or in the sole, or that of the “space” that one realises exists “between the fingers,” to borrow once more from Sheets-​Johnstone. Forces and intervals, intervals and forces: an interval is always an interstitial dimension between forces, and forces appear, transform, and vanish thus making room for new ones to emerge. Deleuze again: “Force is closely related to sensation: for a sensation to exist, a force must be exerted on a body, on a point of the wave”73 that life is qua continuum. In this way, our “living body” reveals itself an ever-​changing body permanently traversed by life. Those who were once alive, however, form the seabed of all present life. Hence, life rests upon the dead, upon the ancestors whose gone existence beats subtly inside the bones of the living ones. In fact, our dna carries with it a

68

Cf. Kazuo Ōno’s allusion to the “joy of being […] alive on this earth,” cited in Viala and Masson-​Sekine, Butoh, 22 (emphasis added). 69 Cf. the notion of “a life,” “impersonal and yet singular,” in the last Deleuze (on which see Pure Immanence, 25–​33, esp. 28–​9). 70 Cf. Nietzsche’s references to music’s “unified stream of melody” and to Dionysus’s “eternal sea” in The Birth of Tragedy, 21 (§2), 46 (§8). 71 In “Burnt Norton,” the first of his acclaimed Four Quartets. A rare recording by the author is available at: https://​www.brainp​icki​ngs.org/​2015/​11/​18/​t-​s-​eliot-​reads-​burnt-​nor​ton/​. Cf. Guattari’s expression above, concerning Tanaka’s butō dance: “slowness in the speed of light.” 72 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 56. 73 Ibid.

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­f igure 13  Cicada metamorphosing (image courtesy of Imre Thormann)

genetic memory made of many crimped lives.74 According to the Mayan Popol Wuj, “from the ‘death’ of harvested corn, when it’s stripped off its cobs and its leaves, a new life is born of the seed” buried in the earth’s dark womb.75 Hence Thomas Hart’s comment: “In some communities in the Guatemalan highlands today […] cornstalks [are] planted in the earth of recent graves” to stress the intimate connection between “death and rebirth,” and the little moths that emerge from the corncobs are said to be the “souls of the dead.”76 Therefore, even when no external forces press the body, the latter is traversed by the present memories of the dead, which may be paradoxically described as the body’s collection of inner living forces. Just as the “task” of painting is “to render visible forces that are not themselves visible” (Deleuze), the task of butō dance is to render perceptible in the body those forces that affect it from without as much as those that inhabit it and affect it from within, but are not ordinarily perceived to be there –​whence the correlation between butō and darkness. 74

Dias and Ressler, “Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations.” 75 Hart, The Ancient Spirituality of the Modern Maya, 132. 76 Ibid. Cf. Eliade’s take on the relation between the seeds and the dead in pre-​industrial Europe (Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 349–​52).

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How do such forces become perceptible? First, by tuning in to the ever-​ changing sensations of the body and/​or by following the lines that the body draws in the space when it moves (e.g., the diagonal between the left side of my hip and my right shoulder, the curve that my back makes when I go down opening it to the sky while I frontally enfold the earth, etc.). Secondly, by allowing such lines and sensations to transform into new images, although this process may be reversed, since the imagination partakes of the inner vitality of the body and can take the lead in the production of new sensations77 and the drawing of new lines, by means of which one enters the dreamy world of the unknown. Sensations, lines, and images reshape the body and extract new forms from it, although this process can be also reversed, for one can try to adopt a form –​as Hijikata taught his students78 –​and wait for new images, lines, and sensations to leap out of it.79 Now, if exploring in depth the minimal movements of the body, until they become fully eloquent, increases our attention to the body’s lines and layers, extracting poetic images from them helps us to dive into our selves (i.e., into the psychological unity we are); and together both processes allow us to re-​perceive the body’s space and time, as a result of which the body becomes something at once ancient and unexpectedly new. Ultimately, it is the ongoing circulation and exchange of lines, sensations, images, and forms that delimits the always-​variable milieu of butō dance. The production of new affects is the goal of any butō dancer and what might be called butō’s shamanic-​like hook.80 Shamanism, however, is different from mysticism: it is the practice of becoming, the art of transformation, which is also nature’s law (Figure 13).81 As we have explained, the dead metamorphose into the living, and vice versa; sensations change into images, images into sensations, and both into

77 78 79

80 81

Cf. Hornblow’s description of our imagination (in “Special Affects”) as being potentially “generative” of affects. Furthermore, in butō dance the boundary between external sensations, internal sensations, emotions, and images tends to be blurred. As per Yukio Waguri testimony in Michael Blackwood’s film, Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis, 00:15:58. Today, certain butō dancers, like Imre Thormann, focus, above all, on the body’s structure and its transformative potential. Others, like Natalia Zhestovskaya and Grigory Glazunov, work however with images alone. In turn, Sayoko Onishi’s New Butoh® integrates aspects of tai chi and explores side by side bodily energies, primordial pulses, and ancestral images to uncover, as she puts it, the presences that dwell inside the body. Other tendencies and examples could be provided too. They all show that butō can be approached in very different ways. On the shamanic qualities of butō, see Fraleigh, Butoh, 13–​14. Cf. Viveiros de Castro’s “transversal” approach to shamanism in Cannibal Metaphysics, 151–​8.

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forms; plus, forms and events exchange their roles. Like Dionysus’s, butō’s domain is a metamorphic one. Horizontally, it is limitless, as nothing can be said to be exterior to it. Furthermore, the dance itself has no specific point of departure or arrival: each possible point where the dance seems to start is at the crossroads of many dances –​past, present, and future. Vertically, its zenith evokes the lightness of the air, with its intrinsic reluctancy to “fixity,”82 while its nadir evokes the earth’s gravity, by which everything is attracted towards the earth. For, on the one hand, what may be initially perceived to be solid in the body proves to be fluid instead: “We often believe that bones and muscles are strong things. But lay down and give your body a little swaying motion and you will feel your bones floating in a sort of sack”;83 thus, the dense becomes ethereal. Yet, on the other hand, “it is in its dialogue with gravity […] that the body is there, as that which renders the world present” to us;84 and so, the ethereal becomes dense. Like Dionysus’s, butō’s metamorphic domain changes all the time, and it changes all the time in all its dimensions. There is no other principle in it but that of a universal “affectability.” For a body is, before anything else, a collection of affects: “bodies,” writes Deleuze recovering Spinoza’s terminology, “are not substances […] but modes,” and a “mode,” for Spinoza, is “a capacity for affecting or being affected.”85 Now, while sight, speech, and thought present reality to us as a discrete collection of differences, movement, touch, taste, smell, and hearing tend, for their part, to accentuate reality’s continuity, and ours in relation to it. Butō dance begins on that exact threshold, through which our body becomes fully other. To new affects, new percepts, and vice versa. Furthermore, percepts and affects provoke not only physical sensations but also subjective mental states that present distinctive qualities, or qualia;86 and just as bodies can assume other affects than their own, so too anyone’s qualia can metamorphose into someone else’s qualia –​one becomes, say, capable of sensing like a plant. “There is butō in becoming the air, or a single leaf,” says Yoko Ashikawa,87 about whom dance critic Tobi Tobias wrote in 1992: “She seems to have become an element of nature (tree, rock, ocean, wind).”88

82 Waychoff, “Butoh, Bodies, and Being,” 38. 83 Amagatsu, Dialogue avec la gravité, 18 (our translation). 84 Ibid., 43–​4 (our translation). 85 Deleuze, Spinoza, 124. 86 See Wright (ed.), The Case for Qualia. 87 Interviewed in Blackwood, Butoh, 01:15:05. 88 Tobias, “Dance: Mystery Stories,” 81.

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It is possible, therefore, to interpret butō in animist terms.89 Interestingly, Tanaka says that “trying to bring the earth to life again” is his “purpose” when dancing.90 For, as Tim Ingold stresses, “animism is not about restoring agency to objects; it is about bringing things back to life.”91 If Donna Haraway is correct in affirming that animism is a “powerful proposition for rethinking relationality, perspective, process, and reality”92 in our times, then butō can be seen as a powerful practice for re-​experiencing reality, i.e., as a practice that gives us “room to breathe,” to use Ingold’s words.93 In this sense, butō dance becomes the perfect scenario for what Elizabeth Povinelli takes to be one of the major conceptual metaphors of the late-​modern imaginary, to wit, the “Animist” –​ the other two being the “Desert” and the “Virus.” Unlike the “Desert,” which dramatises “the possibility that Life is always at threat from the creeping, desiccating sands of Nonlife” (whence the fear that all places will soon be “nothing more than the setting within a Mad Max movie,” and the subsequent search for “other instances of life in the universe”);94 and unlike the “Virus,” which dramatises, for its part, the “disrupt[ion] [of] the current [political] arrangements of Life and Nonlife”,95 the “Animist” challenges those arrangements in new, creative ways. The question we must then make ourselves is: how many times can we be reborn to life and how many times can life itself be reborn in us? Butō dance amounts to a practical exploration of this question, to which it offers a captivating response: as many times and in as many ways as the body becomes capable of sensing afresh by undertaking life’s many natures and by assuming the reversibility of their corresponding perspectives. 5

Intersections

In the preceding pages we have mentioned Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy regarding the relation between bodies, affects, sensations, and forces, and notions like “body without organs” and “deterritorialisation.” Butō’s transversal quest for impersonal micro-​sensations echoes, too, Deleuze’s notion of the

89 Bensusan, Linhas de animismo futuro, 159. 90 Interviewed in Blackwood, Butoh, 00:36:51. 91 Ingold, “Being Alive to a World Without Objects,” 225. 92 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 165. 93 Ingold, “Being Alive to a World Without Objects,” 225. 94 Povinelli, Geontologies, 16–​17. 95 Ibid., 19.

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“pre-​individual”96 and Guattari’s notion of the “molecular”97 as the domain of life’s “multiple” and “intensive” “singularities.”98 Furthermore, butō’s encouragement of experimental transformation matches Deleuze and Guattari’s view that “difference and becoming are key elements of life.”99 In addition, the non-​ arborescent bifurcations of butō’s dance witness to its “rhizomatic” nature.100 Hence, the butō space, due to the dancers’ full commitment to free “nomadic” action, can be labelled as being “smooth” rather than “striated”101 –​and butō itself can be defined as an art of the “event” understood in Deleuzian terms, i.e., as “a vibration with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples.”102 Many of the conceptual certainties in the aesthetics of contemporary performance resonate in butō practice, as well, including the stress on “flux”103 and the preference for the “fragmentary,”104 the “ephemeral”105 and the “precarious”106 over “linearity,”107 and, in consequence, the exploration of the “liminal”108 and the “paradoxical.”109 As Debra Levine underlines,110 “liminoid” performances are not only distinguished by “hybridization,” “indeterminacy,” 96 97

On which see Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 23, 132–​3, 151–​2, 204, 207, 213, 226, 230. Ibid., 13, 61, 70, 104, 117–​18, 123, 147, 159, 164, 174–​9, 201, 242, 261, 273, 275, 281, 307; Young, Genosko, and Watson, The Deleuze & Guattari Dictionary, 200–​3. 98 Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 133–​5, 181–​2, 254–​6; Young, Genosko, and Watson, The Deleuze & Guattari Dictionary, 166–​9, 210–​213, 286–​8. On the concept of “multiplicity” in Deleuze and its Riemannian roots, see Jedrzejewski, “Deleuze et la géométrie riemannienne.” 99 Stagoll, “Duration,” 82. On difference and becoming in Deleuze and Guattari, see further Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 12–​13, 25–​31, 34–​5, 38–​9, 45, 49, 61, 70, 73, 75, 77–​8, 81, 84–​89, 91, 93, 100, 105–​6, 110, 111, 117, 123, 126–​7, 130, 132–​3, 148, 151–​2, 165, 167–​9, 171, 174–​5, 178, 183–​4, 196–​7, 205, 212–​15, 225, 227, 230, 233, 235, 237–​8, 242, 244, 248, 250, 265, 272, 280, 282, 287, 293–​4, 296, 299, 300, 302–​4, 306–​7, 309–​10. 100 Cf. Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 14, 48, 60, 83–​4, 123, 138, 178, 181, 208, 232–​8, 245–​6; Young, Genosko, and Watson, The Deleuze & Guattari Dictionary, 262–​5. 101 On their difference, see Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 34, 46, 83, 110, 118-​119, 148, 151–​2, 157, 174, 185–​91, 207, 212–​13, 237–​8, 256–​8, 260–​3, 265, 270–​3, 280–​1, 285, 299, 307; Young, Genosko, and Watson, The Deleuze & Guattari Dictionary, 220–​2, 289–​91, 300. 102 Deleuze, The Fold, 87. See further Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 89–​91; Young, Genosko, and Watson, The Deleuze & Guattari Dictionary, 116–​17. Compare with Yumiko Yoshioka notion of “body resonance,” on which see Fraleigh, Butō, 156–​7. 103 Stiles, “Fluxus.” 104 Bay-​Cheng, “Post-​linearity.” 105 Stiles, “Fluxus.” 106 Fabião, “Precariousness.” Cf. Morrison, “Remains.” 107 Bay-​Cheng, “Post-​linearity.” 108 Levine, “Liminality.” 109 Fabião, “Paradox.” 110 Levine, “Liminality,” 28.

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and “a lack of aura,” but also challenge any “normative social order” by “dissolving” any “formal” elements and “polluting” any “boundaries”; therefore, they counter any “aim-​directed existence” and “progress narrative” and allow the performer(s) and the audience –​whenever their distinction is kept, that is111 –​ to “play,” as Susan Broadhurst says, “to the edge of the possible.”112 Butō dance is a perfect laboratory for such liminal (inter)play, which, as a result, goes as far as to defy meaningfulness. Accordingly, Susan Blakeley Klein translates and glosses Osamu Eguchi thus: Butō […] resists the substitutive function in which words are used to express some thing. […] [I]‌n Butō it is the body[’s] […] movement that encloses within itself the extreme point which it must seek, while, at the same time, by twisting, jostling, and touching it opens up a […] space that enfolds both the dancer and the spectator. Needless to say, within that […] space, any explanation which takes the form, “this means so-​and-​so” becomes meaningless. The action on stage is intended to be as resistant to critical interpretation, as multivalent and open as possible […] so as to bypass the symbolic mode, which is seen as tainted by the inevitable intellectualizing process that traps both the viewer and the dancer in conventionalized perceptions[:]‌[…] the body convulses spasmodically, the eyes roll up to show the whites, the tongue spews out, and the face is twisted beyond all recognition […] in an attempt to move beyond the usual forms of expression to a level of grotesquery that would make it impossible to apply verbal explanations.113 “Gestus”114 is thus as crucial as movement in any butō performance, in which not only does the “body in action”115 undergo constant and often “extreme”116

1 11 Cf. Cody, “Proxemics.” 112 Broadhurst, Liminal Acts, 1. Cf. Stiles, “Anti-​art.” 113 Blakeley Klein, Ankoku Butō, 28. “Ironically enough,” however –​she observes –​“in pursuit of the goal of creating a dance that blocks critical interpretation, most practitioners of Butō gradually left their anti-​technique bias behind and from the late 1960’s on began to develop a whole range of specialized techniques,” e.g., the rolling up of the eyes, the spewing out of the tongue, etc. Eguchi’s excerpt is from a 1980 article in Japanese titled “My View of Hoppō Butō-​ha,” published in the journal Butōki. 114 Bial, “Gestus.” 115 Stiles and O’Dell, “Bodies in Action.” 116 Cheng, “Extreme Performance.” Cf. McGinley, “Explicit Body Performance.”

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“modifications,”117 but reality itself is “transmuted” into a series of “corporeal events”118 within a “theatre of images.”119 Lastly, butō’s other-​than-​human sensibility –​recall Yoko Ashikawa’s words above about becoming a leaf –​echo contemporary explorations in “ecodramaturgy”120 and “environmental theatre.”121 6

A Twofold Legacy

From its inception, however, butō dance stands at the crossroads of two intellectual tendencies that we are willing to call the reversal trap and the inventive otherwise. They are not mutually exclusive, though: genealogically speaking, butō owes as much to one as it owes to the other, and the two coexist in it as two intertwining gravitational fields. Yet, they must be carefully distinguished at the outset. Butō was born in the Japanese avant-​garde scene of the late 1950s as a radicalisation of the new sensibility towards the possibilities of the performative arts promoted between the 1920s and the 1940s by Baku Ishii, Eguchi Takaya, and Michio Itō, who had opened Japan to the influence of modern dance and theatre.122 Indeed, Hijikata had studied with Mitsuko Ando, a disciple –​like butō’s co-​founder Kazuo Ōno –​of Takaya. However, Hijikata went far beyond anything then imaginable in the post-​World-​War-​i i artistic scene of Japan, as he was interested –​unlike Ōno before they began to collaborate –​not in exploring new expressive possibilities analogous to those then in vogue in Europe and the US, but in transgressing the very boundaries, and corroding the very nature, of what could be defined as dance. To this end, Hijikata worked under the spell of Nietzsche’s nihilism, which, introduced in Japan by Takayama Chogyū, had its apostle in the figure of Yukio Mishima. Hijikata combined it with Bataille’s provoking equation of violence, eroticism, and ecstasy,123 and with Genet’s subversive legitimation of the socially marginalised (vagrants, prostitutes, gigolos, pimps, convicts, etc.) through the empathic vindication

117 Henkes, “Performing Body Modifications.” Cf. Gržinić and Stojnić (eds.). Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance. 118 Stiles and O’Dell, “Bodies in Action,” 266. 119 Marranca, “Theatre of Images.” 120 Thomas, “Ecodramaturgy.” 121 Alker, “Environmental Theatre.” Cf. Strahler Holzapfel, “Landscape Theatre.” 122 Viala and Masson-​Sekine, Butoh, 16–​17. 123 On which see, e.g., Bataille’s conclusion to his “history of eroticism” in The Tears of Eros, 206–​7.

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and exaltation of their amorality and violence.124 Since we have already talked about Nietzsche at some length,125 it is worth to pay attention now to the influence of Bataille and Genet on Hijikata and on today’s butō world. It was via Mishima –​the title of one of whose writings (Forbidden Colours) Hijikata appropriated for his own inaugural butō performance in 1959 –​that Hijikata discovered Bataille’s flirt, as Stephen Barber says, with “outrage, excess and death-​obsession.”126 By equating violence, eroticism, and ecstasy, Mishima, like Bataille, wanted to challenge the dullness and hypocrisy of the modern bourgeois life. Thus, Hijikata used Bataille’s “revolt of the flesh”127 as a means to protest, culturally and politically, against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming Japanese society which sought to create its own new image in the mirror of contemporary Western, and in particular American, culture. Excess, Hijikata thought, would open the door to freedom and authenticity beyond social constraints; explicit violence would make patent the oft-​silenced violence of a society whose cruelty ought to be denounced; death-​obsession would witness to the reciprocity of death and life and promote ecstasy in communion with the absolute in contrast with bourgeois banality; and unrepressed eroticism would deliver minds and bodies alike from all imaginable taboos. Thus, like Bataille, Hijikata made of transgression his norm. Yet, while Bataille lived in a secret, clandestine way what he liked to write about, Hijikata exposed himself before everyone’s eyes by questioning heterosexuality and allowing for real violence in his performances, which included, too, body convulsions of various kinds around which butō improvisation first, and butō technique afterwards, started to form. Hijikata’s transgressive spirit lives on in Sanae Hiruta, who, for instance, evokes an image (there are actually three) relative to the torture by dismemberment of a convict in early 20th-​ century China which are reproduced in Bataille’s The Tears of Eros.128 Hiruta opposes what she calls the “serene beauty” before the abyss of death in the facial expression of the tortured person (ignoring, it would seem, that such 124 See further Starrs, Deadly Dialectics; Barber, Art, Riot, Terror; Kuniyoshi, “On the Eve of the Birth of Ankoku Butoh”; Eckersall, “Butoh’s Remediation and the Anarchic Transforming Politics of the Body in the 1960s.” Compare with Pasolini’s radically different look at the metropolitan underworld, on which see Segovia, “Pasolini’s Counter-​Political Gaze at the Sacred.” 125 In Chapter 4. 126 Barber, Art, Riot, Terror, 30. Bataille’s key texts here are The Story of the Eye (1928), The Solar Anus (1931), and Madame Edwarda (1941). 127 The expression is Carla Melo’s in “When the ‘Revolt of the Flesh’ Becomes Political Protest.” 128 Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 204–​5.

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“serenity” is the effect of the legally typified administration of opium to all convicts sentenced to be executed by dismemberment in China in that period) to the “fashionable beauty standards of today,” which are dependent upon market directives.129 While acknowledging the importance that the subversion of the given has in any creative process, we call this the reversal trap because its logic is, above all, one of negation. It is a logic that claims loudly and defiantly: are order, tidiness, completeness, and contention socially regarded as virtues? –​well then, let’s put them upside down and have them replaced by what is socially deemed chaotic, dirty, failed, and brutal, no matter how painful this may look to us.130 One could add as well: is institutional violence imposed on us as something unquestionable? –​let’s then side with its victims. This takes us straight to Genet. Hijikata was born Kunio Motofuji, the pseudonym hijikata being a re-​ semanticised Japanese phonetical adaptation of Jean Genet’s surname.131 In his beginnings, Hijikata often performed under the composite name of “Hijikata Genet,” and called Genet “Saint Genet,”132 after Sartre’s 1952 homonymous text.133 Genet, whose mother had been a prostitute, and who, in his early life, had been a vagabond, a petty criminal, and a prostitute himself, vindicated prostitution and the violence linked to it as a nonconformist social choice which could both excite and secure a total if extreme existential experience on the fringe of the tolerable, and as the most straightforward path to sanctification by means of its self-​inflicted pain and of the painful social repudiation it provokes. Genet’s work must be inscribed within the multiform tradition of French malditisme that had, between the 18th and 19th centuries, adumbrated Sade’s Justine (1791), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857), and Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror (1868–​9) –​a tradition in which, in addition to Genet’s, Artaud’s works belong as well. Yet, the Christian, and more specifically

129 Sanae Hiruta interviewed in Blackwood, Butoh, 01:11:58–​01:12:40. Cf. Catherine Curtin’s notion of “paradoxical beauty” in “Recovering the Body and Expanding the Boundaries of Self in Japanese Butoh,” 59. 130 On dirtiness and tidiness, cf., e.g., Bataille, The Accursed Share, 2:61–​78, and Natsu Nakajima’s remarks on “dirtiness,” “madness,” and the origins of butō, quoted in Candelario, “‘Now We Have a Passport,’” 245–​52. 131 Previously transformed into genêt, “broom” (Cytisus), which is, in French, phonetically identical to Genet, but has, unlike Genet, (botanic) meaning. 132 Fraleigh, Butō, 22. 133 Sartre, Saint Genet.

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Catholic, trimmings of Genet’s écriture and worldview are likewise undeniable. They are manifest, for instance, in the title of Genet’s debut, and largely autobiographical, novel, which he wrote in prison: Our Lady of the Flowers (1943) –​notice that the phrase “Our Lady of…” is customary in the Catholic and Anglican churches for the local veneration of the “Virgin Mary” (i.e., Jesus’s mother) in her quality of epiphanic patroness of a given place which is thus put under her advocation (e.g., Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Westminster, Our Lady of the Sea, etc.). In Genet’s novel, the protagonist is Genet’s alter-​ego, a drag queen called Divine, who is canonised after dying of tuberculosis “in a pool of her [own] vomited blood,”134 and whose sexual adventures the narrator tells to amuse himself while he is imprisoned, and to masturbate meanwhile. Despite Genet’s clear-​cut inversion of a number of socially accepted values (e.g., he substitutes robbery for property and onanism and prostitution for chastity), his hero/​heroine’s canonisation through suffering must be seen as crypto-​Catholic remake of Christianity’s core symbol: Christ’s death on the cross. One must also read in this light, furthermore, Genet’s depiction of betrayal as the highest moral value, which amounts, in turn, to a consecration of the Judas archetype.135 This means that, unlike Bataille’s, Genet’s transvaluation of values is not inspired in Nietzsche, for Nietzsche aimed at subverting rather than revalidating –​no matter how eccentrically –​all Christian values. However, the fact that, in Genet, murder is not only an act of virtue but, like in Bataille, an act of sexual appeal, shows how much the two of them value transgression, and why Hijikata regarded their combination feasible. In the expanded version of Forbidden Colours (Forbidden Colours 2, also from 1959), Hijikata adapted the death of Divine as portrayed in Genet’s novel. As Bruce Baird writes in a passage that tacitly corroborates our crypto-​Christian interpretation of Genet, making it extensive to Hijikata himself, Hijikata seems to have taken from Genet’s treatment of Divine a hint for the kind of dance he wanted to create: Genet wanted [his readers] to feel for Divine, so he mobilized [their] sympathies for Divine in order to draw [them] in. [Yet] it was going to take some time for Hijikata to sort completely through the implications of this sympathetic reaction. 1 34 Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, 57. 135 Cf. Borges’s “The Three Versions of Judas” in Ficciones, 151–​58. The fascination of the French intellectual left with Christian themes and figures is quite remarkable; compare in this sense, e.g., Badiou’s Saint Paul and Laruelle’s Future Christ. See for a critique, Gevorkyan and Segovia, “Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy.”

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[…] The inclusion of a quasi-​crucifixion [scene in a new performance of Forbidden Colors in 1968] indicates [however] that he was clearly thinking about it in [the late 1960s].136 To be sure, Buddhist compassion plays some part in this, as well.137 Yet, the affinities between Buddhism and Christianity are well-​known to deserve any further treatment here.138 In sum, the reversal trap displays in Genet differently than in Bataille. However, the logic of negation is also patent in the Genet’s attempt to render acceptable what is ordinarily deemed unacceptable. Hence, Hijikata’s own words: “When, despite having a normal, healthy body, you come to wish that you were disabled, or better yet, had been born disabled, you take your first step in butoh.”139 To this it is essential to add Genet’s understanding of theatre as an “exorcism of evil in which latent prejudices […] are purged in an inverted sort of Mass.”140 Interestingly, Genet’s earliest plays were premiered in the late 1940s (The Maids in 1947 and Deathwatch in 1949), i.e., around the same time in which Artaud came out with his notion of a “body without organs” in his radio broadcast To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947). A decade before, though, Artaud had arrived in The Theatre and Its Double (1938) at a concept of what theatre should transform into which was remarkably close to Genet’s: “The theatre,” writes Artaud in The Theatre and Its Double, will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior.141 For Artaud, like later for Genet, cruelty had the purpose of “exposing” spectators to the “evil” of their own “natures” with the goal of “purging” their “latent drives” and “instincts” in a sort of (modern) catharsis.142 Nevertheless, in this, 1 36 Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh, 131. 137 Fraleigh, Butō, 5, 74. 138 See. Further Carmody and Carmody, Serene Compassion; Leloup, Compassion and Meditation. 139 Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh, 131. 140 Plunka, The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet, 131. 141 Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 92. 142 Plunka, The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet, 132. Such sui generis “catharsis,” though, is not driven by knowledge, hence it has absolutely nothing to do with the Ancient Greek

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too, the shadow of Christianity is manifest: humans are evil by nature –​a nature arbitrarily construed and not-​less arbitrarily turned axiomatic.143 Plus, alongside with it, a particular understanding of the unconscious emerges: neither as a pornographic family theatre (Freud), nor as a space for the interplay of spiritual archetypes (Jung), nor as a symbolic order in the image of language (Lacan), but as a “Theatre of Cruelty” (the expression is Artaud’s own) in which any dominant images, any high ideals of beauty, order, and peace must be metaphorically burnt144 in an “inverted sort of Mass”145 which, as Baird underlines, “finds a counterpart in Hijikata’s dance.”146 Thus, the recurrence of “anti-​” themes in the latter.147 Therefore, two very different senses of darkness must be distinguished in relation to butō dance: the one we have earlier mentioned, in which “darkness” stands for the unknown of the body that is to be explored, and “darkness” as, so to speak, a kind of black hole where social conventions are thrown into. We find here again what we have called the “inventive otherwise” and the “reversal trap.” There is no denying that butō operates at their crossroads. For the exploration of the unknown requires to overstep social conventions. Yet, there is the risk of turning Dionysus’s freedom, which begins beyond Apollo’s domain but does not aim at destroying it, as we have stressed in Chapter 2, into the Devil’s antagonism towards God; that is to say, there is the risk of changing the Eleusinian mysteries into a Black Mass, the exploration of the otherwise into the mere subversion of the given, the former’s silent innocence into an arrogantly assumed sinfulness. Now, in spite of their positive aspects,148 Bataille’s

concept of κάθαρσις, on which see Golden, “The Clarification Theory of Katharsis”; Griffith, Apollo’s Theatre, 45. 143 See Chapter 4, n.53. 144 Cf. Shibusawa, “Hijikata Tatsumi: Burnt Offering Dancer.” 145 Cf. Masakatsu, “Butoh and Taboo.” 146 Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh, 124. 147 Inata, “Rethinking the ‘Indigeneity’ of Hijikata Tatsumi in the 1960s as a Photographic Negative Image of Japanese Dance History,” 67. Basing himself in the Surrealists, Hijikata viewed the unconscious as a domain of total freedom –​in a way, then, similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to the unconscious in Anti-​Oedipus, where, in order to make it play the role of a “productive force” not determined by any “relations of production,” the unconscious no longer bears upon itself the imprint of any law, but amounts to productive positiveness. It is, however, many times difficult to draw a neat line between the unconscious repetition of individually and socially motivated obsessions and the unconscious production of the otherwise. 148 Including the quest for the absolute against any form of renouncement, the courage to face one’s inner drives (which encourages the knowledge of oneself), and empathy towards the socially marginalised, respectively.

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violent spirit of reversal, Artaud’s vindication of cruelty, and Genet’s sublimation of the outcast fall, all three, under the latter attitude; like Hijikata’s project for that matter, inasmuch as it is inspired in them. Yet at the same time, whatever its overtones, Hijikata’s dance revolved around the experience of the body’s own force, whose power and fragility was present for him in the non-​standardised bodies of women, children, and animals, in which he perceived the original unity of desire and gesture to be yet untamed.149 With this, Hijikata propitiated the inventive exploration of the otherwise. Hence, Ashikawa’s personal confession: “The content of my work, its spirit, is not necessarily Hijikata’s spirit [although I have been one of Hijikata’s earliest collaborators]. My butō is like a cry of the body, a body that is silent, yet full of ideas it yearns to express.”150 Ashikawa’s butō performances, in which, as we have formerly said, her body transforms into “nature’s elements,” have, indeed, nothing to do with Hijikata’s neurotic theatre and its sexual violence, which, in Lacanian terms, inquires into the “Symbolic” (“You should submit to the social law and behave accordingly!”) and the “Imaginary” (“I rather dream with being a criminal”) without necessarily accessing the “Real” (“It is no longer about me: I belong in the cosmos”).151 Instead, Ashikawa’s performances prolong Hijikata’s metamorphic practices with his students, as also do Tanaka’s “Body Weather” and Yoshioka’s “Body Resonance,” which attempt to explore, among other things, the body as the intersection of nature’s elements and forces. Similarly, some contemporary butō dancers, like Imre Thormann, commit themselves to investigate “the body in its origin,” i.e., the sources of its movement, whereas others like Sayoko Onishi concentrate on freeing the body’s energies hidden under its external vessel.152 As we have anticipated, a radically different comprehension of the role of the unconscious is at stake here. For there is, on the one hand (like in Freud, if differently) the unconscious as a (neurotic) theatre. Yet, on the other hand, there is a connective, “machinic” unconscious, as Guattari calls it: “work[ing] inside individuals in their manner of perceiving the world and living their body, territory,” etc.153 –​an unconscious, that is, not “congealed in an institutionalized 1 49 Uno, Hijikata Tatsumi, 27–​8. 150 Interviewed in Blackwood, Butoh, 01:25:14. 151 Cf. Deleuze: “Oh, the poverty of the imaginary and the symbolic, the real always being put off until tomorrow” (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 51; emphasis added). For Lacan, the “Real” is inaccessible. Butō dance contests this conviction. 152 See Sousa, “Imre Thormann and the Concept of Authenticity,” available at: https://​butoht​ houg​hts.wordpr​ess.com/​2014/​12/​13/​imret​horm​ann-​authe​ntic​ity/​; Onishi: “What is New Butoh®?” available at: https://www.newbutohschool.com/?lang=en#newbutoh. 153 Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, 10.

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discourse” which would thus gravitate obsessively around the latter’s figures and counter-​figures, “but, on the contrary, an unconscious […] whose screen would be none other than the possible itself, the possible as hypersensitive to language, but also the possible hypersensitive to touch, hypersensitive to the socius, hypersensitive to the cosmos”; in short, a “‘machinic unconscious’ […] populated not only with images and words, but also with all kinds of machinisms” and connections.154 Accordingly, Megan Nicely speaks of butō’s “ability to grow new life,” linking such ability to the Deleuzian-​Guattarian concept of “other becomings.”155 Moreover, drawing on Akira Kasai’s imagery, she chooses “pollen” as a conceptual metaphor to illustrate butō’s transversal cum transformative potential thereof: Pollen moves the past into the future. Its fine powder is the seed of reproduction, generating new life. Transmitted by the wind, insects, or other animals, its multiple pathways are unpredictable, guided by desire, perception, and chance. Interspecies interactions and random acts of nature are openings to the other that also result in pollen’s movement. For instance, insects attracted to the bright colors and scents of flowers temporarily assemble with them in an exchange whereby obtaining nectar’s nutrients also results in pollen dispersal. Wind and weather dislodge, carry, and relocate these small grains as well. Thus a series of temporary relations chart an open map of possibility for new life to grow.156 In a similar vein, Fraleigh suggests that, in butō, the “cosmos” can be found in “every corner,” and cites Atsushi Takenouchi, who usually dances in forests and says that dance is, ultimately, “devotion to life.”157 Hence, too, Ōno’s famous statement that butō dance opens “a realm of poetry that only the body can reach.”158 For, in the end, not only does the body constantly metamorphose itself: through its transformations, our subjectivities become “polysemic.”159 If one were to find a precedent for this, one would have to search for it neither in Bataille’s notion of “excess,” nor in Genet’s obsession with crime, but in the late Artaud –​the Artaud of the “body without organs,” rather than the Artaud of 1 54 Ibid. 155 Nicely, “Growing New Life,” 192. 156 Ibid. 157 Fraleigh, Butoh, 149. 158 Cited in Viala and Masson-​Sekine, Butoh, 176. 159 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 101.

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the “Theatre of Cruelty”; and, above all perhaps, in Fernand Deligny’s notion of “wander lines” (lignes d’erre), as he proposed to name the unintentional tracing and retracing of body movements in the environment which led him to discover, while working with autistic children and in Guattari’s words, that “the balance of the rock and the noise of the water are no less relevant than the murmurs of men.”160

160 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 253 (translation slightly modified). See further Deligny, Cartes et lignes d’erre /​Maps and Wander Lines, as well as Alvarez de Toledo, “Pédagogie poétique de Fernand Deligny.” Deligny aimed at showing, contra Lacan, that the “Real” is accessible for purely embodied and transversal subjectivities –​like those of the autistic children he and his collaborators worked with for many years –​which repel, or rather elude beforehand, any pressure from the “Symbolic” order. Cf. Erin Manning’s approach to autism in Always More Than One and The Minor Gesture, whose title echoes Deligny and Victor Renaud’s homonymous 1962–​71 film: Le Moindre Geste. (Strangely, though, Deligny’s name, which is present throughout Manning’s first book, is absent from her second book.)

­c hapter 7

Back to Structuralism? the essential in a symbol is that which all symbols which can fulfil the same purpose have in common wittgenstein, Tractatus, 3.341

∵

Overview

Dionysus and Apollo are the two sides of a single coin or the two faces of a dual power, in the sense that they are the elicitation and the containment of a single immanent force that enables humans to produce meaning and to test its limits –​a force, therefore, which is both demiurge and trickster, lynx and coyote, form and event. Hence, their “reciprocal subordination” (Lévi-​Strauss) becomes the key to understanding their differential being. Put differently: they form a structure, in the Structuralist sense of the term. For Structuralism is less about tracing invariants that would make of all things copies or deviations of such or such ideal prototypes –​i.e., it is less about extending the logic of identity –​than it is about figuring out an ontology of difference in which being means, for two things, to relate with and to differ from one another. Thus, Althusser’s notion, after Spinoza, of an “immanent” causality according to which a structure is entirely immanent in its terms, i.e., nothing beyond their reciprocal presupposition. Our own approach to “earth” and “world” follows this intuition. Patrice Maniglier is therefore right when he identifies the spirit of Structuralism with that of a philosophy of difference; although he goes too far, we think, in his contention that philosophies of difference like those of Derrida and Deleuze fulfil rather than oppose the Structuralist project. The latter is regaining attention today after the predominance of Post-​Structuralism in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s. It is in tacit dialogue, then, with the contemporary resurfacing of Structuralism –​at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy and anthropology –​that our repositioning of Dionysus and Apollo’s twinness must be read, as we endorse their dual (read: simultaneous and reciprocal, or structural) affirmation against the suppression of Dionysus that has

© Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004538597_008

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characterised the history of Western metaphysics on behalf of the reduction of difference to sameness, and against the suppression of Apollo on behalf of the affirmation of difference alone which is distinctive of most contemporary thought. The Post-​Structuralist project gravitates around Apollo’s suppression on behalf of pure difference and runs parallel to the rejection of Structuralism as such. Yet, Post-Structuralism is inherently flawed, for it is based on a misconstruction of the Structuralist enterprise, as a close examination of Derrida’s polemics against Lévi-​Strauss proves. Furthermore, Derrida uses Heidegger’s anti-​ metaphysical philosophy against Lévi-​ Strauss’s structural anthropology. Reclaiming then, as we have done, the possibility of bringing Heidegger and Lévi-​Strauss together against the backdrop of the ontological pluralism prevalent in today’s anthropological theorising, leads us to question the very foundations of Post-​Structuralism. On the other hand, Structuralism is not only about differences: it is also about their own differences or variations, as the last works of Lévi-​Strauss and the early work of Serres show. Instead of representing a way outside Structuralism, as Jean-​Claude Milner and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro claim, the first Serres and the last Lévi-​Strauss extend it in strict scalar terms: such and such mirroring structures become the terms of a bigger structure that is nothing beyond the reciprocal presupposition of such smaller structures, which means that, once more, there is no underlying prototype that would govern the interplay of differences. Leibniz offers an outstanding model for this, after which it is feasible, first, to reinterpret in comparative ethnographic terms Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” and, secondly, to deduce its formal variations as worlding variants. In this manner, compossibility –​and with it the intertwining of cosmopolitics, ontology, and modality announced in the Introduction to this essay –​regains relevance vis-​à-​vis the falling apart of today’s un-​world. 1

Structuralism as a Philosophy of Difference

There is no Apollo without Dionysus. Yet there is no Dionysus without Apollo either. This, at least, should be clear by now. Dionysus, however, is not only sensed by the body at the crossroads of the earth’s forces. “What we might call ‘culture’ or ‘society,’” writes Roy Wagner, is “the containment by human beings of a spontaneously occurring force or power” that enables them to produce meaning and to “test its limits.”1 Consider, 1 Wagner, Asiwinarong, xiv (translation slightly modified).

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for example, how any human group is capable of conferring meaning not only on the flora and the fauna of its environment, but also on the social relations and roles of its members, and hence on itself, by means of what may be called notional classification.2 Ultimately, the group’s existence relies on the mastery of such capacity, which permeates reality and extends through it as an immanent cum dynamic force.3 It is possible, then, to label such force as an “eliciting” power of which any society represents one possible configuration amid others. Yet, all social configurations are challenged by the transformations they are forced to face over time. Now, what capacity, what power or force will assist those who, due to such transformations, feel compelled to make changes? The very same one at stake in the production of any of its possible configurations, i.e., a force that, being by definition creative, proves also transformative: a force that enables those willing to introduce any changes to substitute for a new one a given state of things or social formula. Therefore, Wagner continues, if “power over something” is not only the ability to master that something, but also the ability to “negate” or “destroy” it, or to replace it by something else, then “social power […] cannot be merely a function of the social order itself,” i.e., “[i]‌t cannot, despite Durkheim’s assertions to the contrary,4 amount to society’s representation of itself”;5 in other words, it cannot be society’s own mirror. Nor can it then be exclusively “represented as ‘order’ or establishment,” for “[i]t may […] be [either] elicited or contained,”6 and when it is elicited it overflows any possible container. In short, its elicitation must be acknowledged to be broader than its containment –​which means, too, that Dionysus is broader than Apollo. Yet, what sense would it make to be in position to elicit such force without simultaneously being in position to contain it? Hence, this essay’s epigraphs: Heidegger’s on Dionysus and Apollo as the two faces of a dual power; Lévi-​Strauss’s on Coyote and Lynx or the trickster and the demiurge; and Wagner’s on the need to constantly re-​perceive what, due to its

2 On which see, e.g., Lévi-​Strauss, Totemism; The Savage Mind, esp. 35–​74 (=​Œuvres, 559–​636). 3 The same one which shapes the land and keeps it together, through which place-​spirits manifest in innumerable forms, which makes everything fructify and promotes new births, and which encourages cultural invention beyond convention, the re-​creation of social relations, etc. On its versatility, see Tomlinson and Kāwika Tengan (eds.), New Mana. 4 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 418-​448. 5 Wagner, Asiwinarong, xiv. 6 Ibid.

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dynamism, cannot be enclosed in any of its exchanging (i.e., provisional) dimensions: ground/​ figure, figure/​ ground, ground/​ figure, and so on.7 Guattari’s simultaneous appeal to “order” and “disorder”8 in connection to his own definition of “being” qua “modulation of consistency”9 moves along similar lines, as also does –​turning now from philosophy to music –​Schumann’s aim, inspired perhaps by Beethoven’s three last piano sonatas, at blending “contrapuntal density” and “structural integrity,” at rendering “the unfathomable in the guise of thrifty affluence, infinity of content in a beautifully rounded form, boundlessness in graceful limitation, […] darkness in luminous clarity.”10 Hence, too, the reciprocity between event and form –​or, to anticipate another chiastic couple to which we shall return in due course, the dual articulation of Harlequin and Pierrot in the Commedia dell’Arte, whence Leibniz takes it.

7

Winckelmann’s and Friedrich Schlegel’s brief references to Dionysus and Apollo aside (supra, Chapter 4, n.34), it can be argued that Kant (with his dialectics of law and freedom, morality and nature, phenomenon and noumenon, etc.), Fichte (with his dialectics of being and thought, reality and concept), Hölderlin (with his distinction between the organic and the “aorgic” in his Essays towards a Theory of the Tragic [1799]) and Creuzer (who, in his Idee und Probe alter Symbolik [1806], speaks of Nature’s “fundamental law of oppositions”), are the first modern authors to play with this dual logic. Inspiring himself in Heraclitus, Hölderlin (on whose Kantian background see Martínez Marzoa, De Kant a Hölderlin) uses it to develop his own tragic thought; Creuzer, who likewise praises Heraclitus, traces in turn its genealogy, via Porphyry’s De Antro Nympharum, back to Homer (cf. the description in Odyssey, 13.96–​112 of a harbour in Ithaca, possibly Vathy’s, with its two rocks and the two spaces that the port itself separates, plus the two doors at the nymphs’ cave). It is known that Nietzsche read Hölderlin, and it is also known that, in addition to being familiar (supra, Chapter 4 n. 26) with Schelling’s philosophy of mythology, which can be viewed as a sui generis commentary on Creuzer’s 1810–​12 Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, Nietzsche owned a copy of Creuzer’s compendium (Bishop, The Dionysian Self, 370) –​one cannot but wonder whether he read Creuzer’s Dionysus (1809) as well (on Nietzsche’s indebtedness to Creuzer’s attempt to unearth Greece’s archaic, i.e., pre-​classical, thought, via the figure of Dionysus, see Duque, “Introducción,” 17–​18). Possibly too, Schopenhauer himself read Creuzer (Porter, The Invention of Dionysus, 193, n.3, 196, n.10). 8 Guattari, Qu’est-​ce que l’écosophie, 105. 9 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 107. 10 Cited in Daverio, Robert Schumann, 94, 212.

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For the moment, though, we should like to stress Dionysus and Apollo’s “reciprocal subordination” –​the expression is Lévi-​Strauss’s. The fact that the two gods are subordinated to each other means that the “priority” that must be assigned to one of them “on one level,” is “lost” to the opposite “on the other.”11 Furthermore, we should like to suggest, putting things thus amounts to recover Structuralism, which is far from being a pseudo-​Eleatism.12 In fact, Structuralism does not equate being and fixity, nor does it make of all things “imitations” or “deviations”13 of such or such ideal prototypes;14 it rather provides a true ontology of difference. What Structuralism sustains is that, given two elements: A and B (e.g., “langue” and “parole,” “consanguinity” and “affinity,” etc.), they are susceptible of being interpreted as forming a structure when and only when A proves to be what it is inasmuch as it differs from B, and vice versa, when and only when B proves to be what it is inasmuch as it differs from A –​their co-​implied difference (d, or⎮) being their structure, i.e., the meaningful relation that determines their individual qua joint being (↔︎).15 A structure in the Structuralist sense, therefore, is not exterior to, and hence does not transcend, its elements or terms, but names their difference, as shown in the image above (Figure 14). Hence, Althusser’s notion (after Spinoza) of an “immanent” causality, according to which a structure is immanent in its terms and solely present in its effects.16 In other words, a structure is no more, but also no less, than a relation of reciprocity between two elements. Our own treatment of earth and world illustrates this idea, which means that Heidegger’s thoughts on the dual articulation of such terms –​and, more broadly, Heidegger’s dialectics of the “hidden” and the “unhidden” –​can be read in Structuralist fashion. We shall come back to it later, to stress the difference between our own reading of Heidegger and what we are willing to call today’s aporeticist and neo-​existentialist interpretations of his philosophy. Patrice Maniglier is totally right, therefore, when he identifies the spirit of Structuralism with that of a philosophy of “difference.”17 Thus, too, his 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Lévi-​Strauss, “Reciprocity and Hierarchy,” 267–​8. Cf. Maniglier, “Des us et des signes,” 91. Cf. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 253–​7; Maniglier, “Des us et des signes,” 105. Which would thus supply a “reductionistic and unnuanced” (Moore, Visions of Culture, 244) method for the study of culture. Cf. Carneiro da Cunha’s formula of the “cannibal cogito” (in Os mortos e os outros, 143): “I am that which I am not is not,” on which see further Segovia, “‘Tupi or Not Tupi.’” Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 187. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics, 1.18. On Spinoza’s plausible sources thereof, see Albiac, “The Empty Synagogue,” 128–​32. Maniglier, “Des us et des signes,” 93. See also, of the same author, La Vie énigmatique des signes, 460.

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contention –​which we deem more problematic, though –​that the philosophies of “difference” of Derrida and Deleuze (who are commonly labelled “Post-​Structuralist” philosophies in the Anglo-​American world) fulfil rather than oppose the Structuralist project; but more on this below. As for the Structuralist project proper, it was with Dumézil (a mythologist), Lévi-​Strauss (an anthropologist), Lacan (a psychoanalyst), Barthes (a literary theorist), and both Althusser and the early Foucault (two philosophers) that it acquired its citizenship card in the French intellectual milieus of the 1960s beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Saussurean linguistics, where its roots must be sought in turn.18 Interestingly, after a more or less prolonged parenthesis following the inception of Post-​Structuralism in the late 1960s, and its diffusion between the 1970s and the 1990s,19 Structuralism is regaining attention in France and elsewhere thanks to philosophers like Pierre Charbonier20 and Patrice Maniglier,21 anthropologists like Albert Doja,22 Frédéric Keck,23 Lucien Scubla,24 Pierre Maranda,25 and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,26 and scholars like Vincent Debaene27 and Robert Doran,28 who are proposing new ways to think afresh its legacy and, in particular, that of Lévi-​Strauss’s structural anthropology. It is, consequently, in tacit dialogue with this resurfacing of Structuralism that our own repositioning of Dionysus and Apollo’s twinness should be placed in relation to contemporary thought. For this book endorses the dual, i.e., reciprocal or structural, affirmation of the twin gods against the suppression of Dionysus that has characterised the history of Western metaphysics on behalf of the reduction of difference to sameness, and against the pretendedly post-​metaphysical suppression of Apollo on behalf of

18

See Milner, Le Périple structural; Maniglier, Le Moment Philosophique des années 60 en France. 19 On which see, e.g., Belsey, Post-​Structuralism. 20 Charbonier, “Breaking the Modern Epistemic Circle.” 21 Maniglier, “Des us et des signes”; “A Lévi-​Straussian Century”; “Signs and Customs.” 22 Doja, “Claude Lévi-​Strauss at his Centennial”; “Claude Lévi-​Strauss.” 23 Keck, Lévi-​Strauss et la pensée sauvage; Claude Lévi-​Strauss, une introduction; “‘La Pensée sauvage’ aujourd’hui.” 24 Scubla, Lire Lévi-​Strauss. 25 Maranda (ed.), The Double Twist. 26 Viveiros de Castro, “Claude Lévi-​Strauss, fundador del pos-​estructuralismo”; “Claude Lévi-​ Strauss, Œuvres”; Cannibal Metaphysics; Radical Dualism. 27 Debaene, “Lévi-​Strauss”; Debaene and Keck, Claude Lévi-​Strauss. 28 Doran (ed.), Rethinking Claude Lévi-​Strauss.

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the affirmation of difference alone that is distinctive of most contemporary thought.29 2

The Post-​structuralist Waterline

It is the Post-​Structuralist rejection of Structuralism that lies at the heart of Apollo’s sacrifice on the altar of pure difference. In turn, the Post-​ Structuralist dismissal of Structuralism derives, genealogically speaking, from Derrida’s claim in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”30 –​which is commonly considered to “embody the advent of Post-​ Structuralism”31 –​that Structuralism, and Lévi-​Strauss’s thought in particular, is all about establishing a “fixed origin” or a “fundamental ground” for the multiple, i.e., about “totalising” the latter around a “center” that may work not only as its “archē,” but also as its “telos,” so that the “anxiety” vis-​à-​vis the multiple can be “mastered.”32 This, however, is an unwarranted claim, for two reasons. First, it results from projecting Freud’s critique of “self-​presence,” “self-​ possession,” “consciousness,” and “identity”33 as symptoms of a troublesome disposition towards the uncontrollable (namely, the libido), onto Lévi-​Strauss’s structural anthropology, which amounts to explain the latter in extrinsic (non-​ theoretical) and subjective (psychiatric) terms.34 Secondly, Derrida’s critique of Lévi-​Strauss is based on Derrida’s misreading of Lévi-​Strauss’s thought. For Lévi-​Strauss repeatedly notes that: 29

Cf. the notion of “pure difference” in Williams, Understanding Post-​Structuralism, 6. See also Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference; Gevorkyan and Segovia, “From Worlds of Possibles to Possible Worlds.” On what can be viewed as truly post-​metaphysical and what cannot, see the next chapter. 30 That is to say, in his famous 1966 lecture at the Johns Hopkins University, which was included the next year (1967) in Writing and Difference, 351–​70, but also compiled in 1972 in Macksey and Donato (eds.), The Structuralist Controversy, 247–​65, followed by Derrida’s discussion with Serge Doubrovsky, Lucien Goldman, Jean Hyppolite, Jan Kott, Richard Macksey, and Charles Morazé. 31 Debaene, “Lévi-​Strauss,” 25. 32 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 352. Cf. Lyotard’s take on Lévi-​Strauss’s in “Les Indiens ne cueillent pas les fleurs,” and Geertz’s critique in The Interpretation of Cultures, 347, 356, of Lévi-​Strauss’s alleged “universal rationalism” and “metaphysical” way of thinking. 33 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 354. 34 Compare with Derrida’s critique of Lévi-​Strauss’s ethnography in Of Grammatology, 101–​ 40, where a question of differential ontology (what do proper names name?), classificatory logic (how may the named be divided?), and linguistics (how may names and verbs

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(i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

structures must not be confused with reality; structures are not institutions; structures do not aim at enclosing reality within a rigid mould; a structure’s extension is always limited, as there is always something that a structure does not account for, both outside its field of application and inside of it; (v) structures undergo variations, which is what one deals with all the time.35 Moreover, Lévi-​Strauss insists that Structuralism is less a theory than a “method” for solving “multiple problems,”36 i.e., problems which are, by definition, multiple. In short, Structuralism is not a “totalising” theory attempting to disarm the multiple from its “poisonous sting.”37 Unlike Derrida, Deleuze sees this very well. Despite his wish to push Structuralism’s plea for difference farther than Structuralism ever did by making of “difference” something “in itself,”38 Deleuze acknowledges that “disequilibrium,” “instability,” and “asymmetry” define Lévi-​Strauss’s thought,39 that Lévi-​Strauss never explains “repetition” by recourse to “identity,”40 and that “difference” is for Lévi-​Strauss the very secret of “resemblance.”41 Furthermore, Deleuze describes the concept of structure as denoting a “virtuality of coexistence” that preserves its inherently plural nature, for which reason, he adds, it can be also called a “multiplicity of virtual coexistence.”42

relate) is wrongly reduced to a question of Western politics (in particular, of censorship and inequality). See further Segovia and Shaikut Segovia, “Derrida’s Mistake.” 35 Lévi-​Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 277–​323; The Story of Lynx, 235. 36 Lévi-​Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 82; The Story of Lynx, 236. 37 Cf. the opening lines of Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, 9: “Philosophy has the audacity to cast off the fear of the earthly, to remove from death its poisonous sting.” On the affinities between Derrida and Rosenzweig, see Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Derrida; Bensussan, “The Last, the Remnant…”; Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness. 38 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 28–​69. 39 Ibid., 19–​20. 40 Ibid., 19. Notice, e.g., Lévi-​Strauss’s “canonical formula of myth”: Fx(a): Fy(b) ≃ Fx(b): Fa-​1(y), which renders the homology between two myths whatsoever as a twofold inversion: (a) of the roles assigned to their terms and functions, and (b) of the terms themselves and their opposites, which shift unevenly from one series to the next in sort of a “double twist.” See further Lévi-​Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 206–​31. See also Scubla, Lire Lévi-​Strauss, 23–​121; Mosko, “The Canonic Formula of Myth and Non-​myth”; Keck, “Notice,” 1868–​9; and the essays collected in Maranda (ed.), The Double Twist. 41 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 318, n.24. Cf. Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 177. 42 Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 179.

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Despite its misleading interpretation of Lévi-​Strauss’s thought, Derrida’s argument is, however, extremely relevant for the purpose of our book, as it additionally draws on Heidegger’s philosophy; in fact, it is Heidegger’s “destruction [Destruktion] of metaphysics,” i.e., the critique of the identification of “being” with fully achieved “presence,”43 that inspires Derrida’s “deconstruction” (déconstruction).44 Conversely, in this essay we are examining the possibility of combining, rather than opposing, Lévi-​Strauss and Heidegger. Re-​semantised as the transcendental mirroring reciprocity of the real, the possible, the given, and the giving –​we have argued –​Heidegger’s “Fourfold” supplies the minimal structure for any worlding process. Lévi-​ Strauss’s notion of structural variation –​we should now like to suggest –​reinforces this intuition. It is then fair to deduce that, if Post-​Structuralism was born with Derrida’s Heideggerian (and Freudian) dismissal of Lévi-​Strauss, bringing Lévi-​Strauss and Heidegger together amounts to target, after several decades of almost-​ uncontested supremacy, the Post-​Structuralist waterline. This does not mean that Structuralism can solve all the problems it addresses, or that it is free of any detectable flaw. There is, among others to be sure, an issue regarding which Structuralism is improvable –​it just has nothing to do with the view that its structures are fixed abstract prototypes. Plainly: Structuralism approaches “cultural and contextual frames” as if they were “ready-​made,”45 thus overlooking their genealogy. In this sense, Bateson’s notion of “schismogenesis,” i.e., Bateson’s notion of the productive conflict through which two antagonistic terms, by simultaneously attracting and repelling each other, generate a structure that makes them indissociable,46 can serve to reintroduce dynamism at the very core of the structuralist picture. Once again, we come here across Wagner’s difference between “elicitation” and “containment,” i.e., between Dionysus and Apollo.47 Influenced by Bateson,48 Wagner has put all his efforts in exploring their dual articulation in terms of cultural “invention” vs. cultural “convention.”49 Unlike Derrida, however, he has never failed to credit Lévi-​Strauss’s Structuralism for its methodological 43 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 354. Cf. Adorno’s criticism of the correlation between “identity” (being) and “positivity” (plenitude) in Negative Dialectics, 141. 44 See Gough, “Destruktion/​Deconstruction.” 45 Wagner, Symbols That Stand for Themselves, 8. 46 On which see Bateson, Naven, 171–​97. Cf. Scubla, Lire Lévi-​Strauss, 11. 47 Notice the phalic (i.e., Dionysian) symbolism ascribed to “elicitation” among the Usen Barok, on which see Wagner, Asiwinarong, 34. 48 Ibid., 52–​54. 49 Wagner, The Invention of Culture.

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refinement.50 Hence, Wagner’s thought represents –​it could be argued –​a line of bifurcation in relation to Structuralism’s “plane of immanence”:51 one that, zigzagging through it, trespasses its limits without erasing them, ideally paving the way, therefore, for a type of “Post-​Structuralism” in which there is still room for Apollo despite Dionysus’s powerful creative role, and in which Dionysus himself is not raised above their twinness.52 3

Ontological Pluralism and the Neo-​structuralist Worlding Star

Structuralism is a philosophy of difference. Accordingly, the notion of “variation” plays, together with that of “structure,” a crucial role in it.53 For, if a structure reveals a difference between two terms, the variations of a given structure reveal, in turn, the differences (or transformations) of that difference –​i.e., they, too, thematise difference, but difference elevated to the second, the third, the fourth power, etc. Lévi-​Strauss makes ample use of such notion in “The Story of Asdiwal,”54 Structural Anthropology,55 Totemism,56 and The Savage Mind.57 Yet, it is in Mythologiques and its three small sequels (The Way of the Masks, The Jealous Potter, and The Story of Lynx) that the notion of structural “variation” becomes truly fundamental in the context of Lévi-​Strauss’s thought. As Frédéric Keck writes, unlike in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1955), which was Lévi-​Strauss’s first major work, from Mythologiques onwards (that is, between 1964 and 1991) Lévi-​Strauss seems to be less concerned with “finding the unconscious structures which underly such or such social practices by classifying the intellectual means displayed to solve such or such problems,” 50 Wagner, Asiwinarong, xiii. 51 Or conceptual “whole.” The expression “plane of immanence” is Deleuze’s in Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 35–​60. 52 The Post-​Structuralist view that an event must prevail over its representation and typological classification loops back into Sartre’s “plane of immanence” instead, as it is one of Sartre’s main arguments in his Critique of Dialectical Reason –​long before reappearing in Badiou’s Being and Event. Interestingly, in The Savage Mind, Lévi-​Strauss questions Sartre’s claim: drawing on Sartre’s own example, the French Revolution, he asks whether an event is anything beyond its (various possible) interpretation(s) (Lévi-​Strauss, The Savage Mind, 245–​70 [=​ Œuvres, 822–​49]). Arguably, then, Lévi-​Strauss explicit critique of Sartre contains in nuce the counter-​critique of Derrida that Lévi-​Strauss never wrote. 53 Lévi-​Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 319, n.62. 54 Lévi-​Strauss, “The Story of Asdiwal,” 33–​43. 55 Lévi-​Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 221, 253, 291–​2, 313–​14. 56 Lévi-​Strauss, Totemism, 86. 57 Lévi-​Strauss, The Savage Mind, 52, 64–​5, 71, 75–​108 (=​Œuvres, 614, 627–​8, 633–​4, 637–​71).

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than with “demonstrating how such intellectual means undergo various transformations.”58 A brief clarification, though, is in order here. Despite its musical and acoustic analogies, which led Lévi-​Strauss to speak of “theme and variations”59 and “frequency modulation,”60 respectively, the concept of structural variation translates not so much a difference with respect to a pre-​existent theme or centre frequency, as a difference that only exists in its manifold cum diverging expressions, each of which expresses a unique perspective –​a Leibnizian infinitesimal view, as it were –​on that which thus lacks any prototype. The numerous myths involving twins and stationary climate changes in North-​, Central-​, and South-​ American cultures, in which twinness and their connection to climate proves an essentially multiple topos, provides a perfect example thereof.61 58 59 60 61

Keck, “Notice,” 1850–​1. Lévi-​Strauss, The Savage Mind, 90 (=​Œuvres, 653). Ibid., 259 (838). Cf. Lévi-​Strauss, Myth and Meaning, 11–​12: “Among the Tupinambas, the ancient coastal Indians of Brazil at the time of the discovery, as also among the Indians of Peru, there was a myth concerning a woman, whom a very poor individual succeeded in seducing in a devious way. The best-​known version, recorded by the French monk André Thevet in the sixteenth century, explained that the seduced woman gave birth to twins, one of them born from the legitimate husband, and the other from the seducer, who is the Trickster. The woman was going to meet the god who would be her husband, and while on her way the Trickster intervenes and makes her believe that he is the god; so, she conceives from the Trickster. When she later finds the legitimate husband-​to-​be, she conceives from him also and later gives birth to twins. And since these false twins had different fathers, they have antithetical features: one is brave, the other a coward; one is the protector of the Indians, the other of the white people; one gives goods to the Indians, while the other one, on the contrary, is responsible for a lot of unfortunate happenings. It so happens that in North America, we find exactly the same myth, especially in the northwest of the United States and Canada. However, in comparison with South American versions, those coming from the Canadian area show two important differences. For instance, among the Kootenay, who live in the Rocky Mountains, there is only one fecundation which has as a consequence the birth of twins, who later on become, one the sun, and the other the moon. And, among some other Indians of British Columbia of the Salish linguistic stock –​the Thompson Indians and the Okanagan –​there are two sisters who are tricked by apparently two distinct individuals, and they give birth, each one to a son; they are not really twins because they were born from different mothers. But since they were born in exactly the same kind of circumstances, at least from a moral and a psychological point of view, they are to that extent similar to twins.” None of these variants has precedence over the others, and if, in order to analyse them comparatively, any of them might be used as the “mythe de référence” –​as Lévi-​Strauss remarks in Le Cru et le Cuit a propos de Bororo myth and its variants examined therein –​that particular myth must be seen as “a transformation, to a greater or a lesser extent, of other myths originating either in the same society or in neighbouring or remote societies,” which means that any myth can

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­f igure 15  Structuralism’s two scalar versions

Variations, of course, imply resemblance. Yet, Lévi-​Strauss is careful to stress, as we have already mentioned, that “resemblance has no reality in itself; [that] it is only a particular instance of difference […] in which difference tends toward zero.”62 Sameness is approached here in πρὸς-​ἕν (“unifying”) terms, i.e., it is taken to be inherently plural and “focal”, like Aristotle’s “being”: P (e.g., “healthy,” when it is said of a hot bath, rosy cheeks, or a person)63 is said “multiply” (πολλαχῶς), but there is no need of a καθ ̓ ἕν (“unified,” “preliminary”) content (e.g., a definition of “health”) to understand what we mean by saying that something is P and what we mean by saying that

serve as the “starting point” for the analysis, that there is no prototype or “typical” myth, that all are in “irregular position within the group” of similar myths (Lévi-​Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 10). 62 Lévi-​Strauss, The Naked Man, 38. 63 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Γ 2, 1003a; the examples are Aristotle’s and Heike Sefrin-​Weis’s, whom we follow in her innovative interpretation of Aristotle’s πρὸς ἕν (Sefrin-​Weis, “Pros Hen and the Foundations of Aristotelian Metaphysics”).

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something else is also P. Hence, too, the constitutive “openness” –​not very different from the sense famously assigned to this term by Umberto Eco64 –​ of the analysis of structural variations in Lévi-​Strauss’s Mythologiques, as well as the playful expression that one encounters once and again in its pages: “Ce n’est pas tout…”65 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro draws from this the idea that the last Lévi-​ Strauss is less “structuralist” than “Post-​Structuralist.”66 We disagree. For the notion of variation crowns Lévi-​Strauss’s structural epistemology –​we should like to argue –​in strict scalar terms. Just as a structure designates, as we have underlined, a differential relation between two terms (A, B), and therefore nothing else than such terms considered in their reciprocal (A ↔︎ B) articula­tion (as A⎪B), so, too, different structures (K, L, M, N) may relate to one another like the terms of a structure relate among themselves (K ↔︎ L, K ↔︎ M, K ↔︎ N, L ↔︎ M, L ↔︎ N, M ↔︎ N).67 Furthermore, the cause of their co-​implication need not be less immanent, to evoke Althusser once more, than the cause of the co-​implication of a structure’s terms. In other words, the same law applies here and there according to a shift in the scale (α, β) of the material in question: (α) two terms (e.g., two twins) are structurally linked (within a particular myth that associates them with two contrasting climatic phenomena), or else (β) several structures (several myths displaying twins in relation to climate phenomena) are linked as the terms of a bigger structure (the relation between twins and stationary climate changes, taken as an extended mythological topos), with each small structure carrying its own terms and operating as a sample of the larger structure, and the larger structure being nothing else than the differential relation (d or⎮) existing between the smaller ones, as shown in the diagram above (Figure 15). Lévi-​ Strauss’s defence of Structuralism as a “relational,” i.e., “non-​reductive,” type of thought,68 acquires all its relevance here. In The Way of the Masks, moreover, Lévi-​Strauss proves that, occasionally, a structural relation may only be perceived on account of its observable 64 In The Open Work (1962), where it is applied to any work of art in which the performer, the viewer, and the reader maintain open in one way or another, and thus prolong and widen with their own creativity, the work initially done by the author, which, consequently, does not close in upon itself. 65 On which see Viveiros de Castro, “Claude Lévi-​Strauss, fundador del pos-​estructuralismo,” 48. 66 Ibid., 48–​50. 67 Compare with the exchangeability between “words” and “sentences” in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (§ 49). 68 Lévi-​Strauss, Myth and Meaning, 3.

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transformations.69 This shows that, in Lévi-​Strauss’s thought, the category of structural variation is by no means subordinated to that of structure. Hence, Lucie Kim-​Chi Mercier’s opportune expression: “transformational” or “translational structuralism,”70 which, she says, is distinctive of the last Lévi-​Strauss, but also of the early work of Michel Serres, i.e., of Serres’s study of Leibniz.71 Accordingly, she rightly disputes Jean-​Claude Milner’s allegation that transformational “formalism” –​or “structurisme,” as Milner himself calls it –​is antithetic to Structuralism. Milner’s reasoning proceeds thus: while for Structuralism a structure is nothing more than its (reciprocally connected) terms, “structurisme” posits a “structure in itself –​in the singular” to grant “systemic simultaneity” to the structures linked to it, i.e., it supplies a prototype in order for these to be reciprocally meaningful.72 We have seen that this is not the case, that there is no need for a structure “in itself” to establish such or such isomorphisms between different structures: it is their “ensemble,” as Lévi-​Strauss says, that forms their otherwise-​inexistent “paradigm.”73 Put differently: they lack a common ground other than their own intertwining, i.e., other than their own meaningful mirror-play. The reader will perhaps recall at this point our observation that Heidegger, too, posits “in-​betweenness” (Zwischen, Mitte) as the only possible “grounding ground” (gründende Grund) that philosophy can still think of in contradistinction to the aprioristic notion of “ground” (Grund) that has been prevalent in the history of metaphysics.74 It would suffice with this parallelism to justify the intuition that guides this book, namely, that the rapprochement between Lévi-​Strauss’s and Heidegger’s ways of thinking can be extremely fruitful indeed. Similarly, Serres disputes Russell’s, Gueroult’s, Baruzi’s, and Olgiati’s interpretations of Leibniz’s philosophy –​on account of their “logicist,”

69

“[A]‌mask does not exist in isolation; it supposes other real or potential masks always by its side, masks that might have been chosen in its stead and substituted for it. […] [A] mask is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, that is to say, what it chooses not to represent. Like a myth, a mask denies as much as it affirms. It is not made solely of what it says or thinks it is saying, but of what it excludes.” (Lévi-​Strauss, The Way of the Masks, 144, emphasis original). 70 See further Kim-​Chi Mercier, “Michel Serres’s Leibnizian Structuralism.” 71 Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques. 72 Milner, “Forme et structure ou le conte des faux jumeaux,” 137–​42. 73 Lévi-​Strauss, The Story of Lynx, 140. 74 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 174 (=​ga 65: 223; emphasis original). See Chapter 5 above. Cf. our additional recourse therein to Guattari’s notion of “trans-​entitarian generativity” in Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 69, and to Roy Wagner’s notion, in Lethal Speech,

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“metaphysical,” “theological,” and “historical” features, respectively75 –​and emphasises that Leibniz’s system is a “carrefour étoilé,” i.e., a “star-​like crossroad.”76 As Christopher Watkin’s says, Serres shows that the latter is “neither a simple unity nor an unrelated diversity, but […] a complex harmony of domains,” none of which “stands over and above the others,” since each one has “its own integrity” and it is possible to establish “local translations from one to the other,” with “different domains [thus] converg[ing] to form star-​like nodes.”77 It would be a mistake, however, to think of Leibniz’s system, adds Watkin, as a “totalising whole,” for it is a “complex web of translations” akin to “a vast multilingual dictionary or encyclopaedia, the entries in which are [not] subordinated to one primary entry” or “umbilical discipline.”78 In this manner, Leibniz, and Serres in his image, put forward “a principle of variation which reduces neither to absolute identity nor to absolute difference,”79 or, two play with two new conceptual personae, a philosophy that blends the figures of “Harlequin” (Dionysus) and “Pierrot” (Apollo).80 Transversal “rules,” writes Serres, “multiply diversity ad infinitum,”81 and with it the possibilities of an “Imaginatio Luxurians”82 that acknowledges no “privileged point of departure”83 for its manifold adventures. What one gets, as a result, is a “reversible”84 “network,” or “labyrinth,”85 where “multivalence,”86 “multilinearity,”87 and “counterpoint”88 allow the “multiple” –​identified as the

48, of a cognitive (i.e., thinkable) device capable of depicting the interrelationships of a set of things which are themselves relations. 75 Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, 26–​7. 76 Ibid., 28. 77 Watkin, “Draft Entry for a Michel Serres Dictionary.” 78 Ibid., but see also Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, 250–​1. 79 Watkin, “Draft Entry for a Michel Serres Dictionary,” yet a similar idea can be found in Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, 59. 80 Notwithstanding Pierrot’s melancholic nature, in which it radically differs from Apollo. See in this respect our remarks on Achilles and Odysseus in Chapter 4. As regards Leibniz, notice his use of the notions of “identity” and “variation” in the Commedia dell’Arte to describe his own philosophy (Leibniz, Correspondenz von Leibniz mit Sophie Charlotte, Königin von Preußen, 244). 81 Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, 41 (our translation hereinafter). 82 Ibid., 39. 83 Ibid., 24. 84 Ibid., 19. 85 Ibid., 14. 86 Ibid., 16. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 18.

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“given”89 –​to endlessly communicate. Yet, this is clearly not the same as to affirm “differences in themselves,” as Deleuze does, because if there is no room here for “absolute identity,” there is no room for “absolute difference” either. Post-​Structuralism may be a philosophy at the crossroads90 and a philosophy for the crossroads,91 yet, unlike scalar or “transformational structuralism,” it substitutes psychedelia for figurativeness92 –​in short, it lacks any “star-​like” junctions. Put differently: Post-​Structuralism is postmodern rather than Neo-​ Baroque. Conversely, Structuralism is a Neo-​Baroque phenomenon,93 as it is evidenced by the fact that Spinoza and Leibniz form its conceptual ground. Hence, too, its alleged “scientism,” which, upon close examination, reveals itself to be fundamentally aesthetic, though. Thus, like in Bach’s Art of the Fugue, with its superimposing mirrors and its inverted mirrors, its rigorous mathematical progressions and its beautiful non-​mathematical tricks, geometry plays in Structuralism an essentially aesthetic role that brings it perhaps closer to Leibniz than Spinoza.94 The key importance that all this has for the present book can be easily deduced from what we have seen apropos the idea of worlding and its cross-​ cultural variations, which –​we have argued in Chapter 5 –​are all dependent on the reciprocal articulation of four functors: the real, the possible, the given, and the giving. The fact that such meta-​model (for it is a meta-​model rather than a model) structures Heidegger’s philosophy not less than various myths and ideas from Amazonia, Australia, or Mongolia (and Ancient Greece!),95 makes cross-​cultural translation plausible regardless of the existence of worlding variants and their respective ontologies. For, as Viveiros de Castro puts it, it is not a question of seeing “the same thing” in “different ways” (as relativism

89 90 91 92 93 94

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Ibid., 45. Cf. the idea of being always “in the middle” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25. Cf. the notion of “rhizome” in ibid., 3–​28. Cf. Deleuze’s “homage to psychedelia” in The Logic of Sense, 161. Pace Buci-​Glucksmann (Baroque Reason), who makes of Post-​Structuralism today’s Neo-​ Baroque phenomenon par excellence. For Spinoza’s geometrical method displays a continuous chain of reasoning despite its complex network of cross-​references, whereas Leibniz takes his inspiration from specular geometry, e.g., from the virtual coexistence in the sections of a cone of the point, the angle, the circle, the parabola, the ellipse, and the hyperbole. Hence, too, Leibniz’s monadology, according to which every substance expresses the world diversely –​and of which Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus is, arguably, the algebraic isomorph. Cf. Porphyry’s own quadrant in De Antro Nympharum, §29: north (mortals)⎮south (immortals) +​east (gods)⎮west (demons).

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teaches), but of seeing “different things” in the “same way.”96 Applied to our meta-​model, this means that earth (X) and world (Y) are always combined in a way such that, while the latter amounts to the disclosure of the former, the former, in turn, amounts to the closure of latter; and this articulation is then repeated twice: as the reciprocal articulation of earth (A) and sky (B), i.e., of the real (the domain of facts) and the possible (the ideals that hint beyond them),97 and as the reciprocal articulation of mortals (C) and immortals (D), i.e., of the given (mortality) and the giving (life’s ever-​living forces). This implies that each variant displays a single “star-​like” structure (Figure 16). Yet, it also implies that, compared to one another, the multiple variants of that basal structure ought to display a “star-​like” analogy (Figure 17) –​notice that the analogy itself demands no “umbilical” prototype: K =​ {A’, B’, C’, D}; L =​ {A’’, B’’, C’’, D’}’; M =​ {A’’’, B’’’, C’’’, D’’’}; N =​ {A’’’’, B’’’’, C’’’’, D’’’’}, but there is no original {A, B, C, D} behind such equivalences:

­f igure 16  Worlding star

Heidegger’s jug and, say, a Darkhad shamanic gown are differently translucent to this “star-​like” figure, whose repetition is never identical to itself –​for repetition stands here as difference. Justice is therefore paid to the requirements of ontological pluralism, which, as we have stressed, cannot be overlooked: a Mongolian shaman’s gown is hardly the same as a medieval cloak, which, unlike the former, belongs in the ontological category that we call “clothing.” Plus, finding out the minimal structure of any worlding process can also help to make patent what states of things may turn out to be compossible (to borrow again from Leibniz) in the making of a possible world, and

96 97

Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, 59–​60, 178, 252, 257. Variant: of (A’) the positive that makes and orders the world and (B’) the negative that unmakes and disorders it (i.e., the possible, in this case, as the opposite to the real) –​thus, Porphyry.

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what states of things may, on the contrary, not be compossible at all –​which is exactly what today’s un-​world, in which everything is brought together no matter how,98 fatally obliterates.99 In other words, it can help to weave together ontology (what are things?), cosmopolitics (what things can fit within the same world?), and modality (what modes, and thereby what models of compatibility, may need to be considered in each case?).

98

99

As per the axiomatics of post-​Fordist capitalism, which can be summarised thus: “the potentially-​limitless combination of whatever with whatever else is only a potential subset of another potentially-​limitless combination of whatever with whatever else, and so on and so forth endlessly,” i.e., {[n × (…+​ …+​ n) ⊂ n × (…+​ …+​ n)] ⊂ n × (…+​ …+​ n)} ⊂ n × (…+​ …+​ n)… This is also the principle of contingency upon which today’s un-​ world rests, on which see Gevorkyan and Segovia, “Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy.” On post-​Fordism, see Amin (ed.), Post-​Fordism. On behalf of the “omnipotency of chaos” (Meillassoux, After Finitude, 71).

­f igure 17  Permutations of the worlding star

­c hapter 8

Conclusion: Post-​metaphysics and Its Doubles If φύσις should prove to be what remains […] to-​be-​thought heidegger, Heraclitus, 15

∵ 1

On Post-​nihilism and the Subject/​Object Divide

The argument put forward in this book points beyond any philosophy of the Subject. For, while worlding must be seen as a recurrent, both trans-​geographic and trans-​temporal, phenomenon, it lacks any point of convergence other than the abstract “star-​like” figure described in the previous chapter, which is less the product of a universal cogito than a noetic instantiation (among others) of the “twinning” principle of which the human species is the effect.1 Conversely, the modern Ge-​stell displays the logic characteristic of a philosophy of the Subject, and represents its culmination, for it lays all things before us in their availability, thus putting them at the ready for us appropriate and use them for our own profit. Yet, we cannot escape the modern Ge-​ stell by depriving things of their constitutive relations, as Speculative Realism pretends, for this amounts to re-​picture reality in purely negative, subtractive terms. Althusser: “It is impossible to leave a closed space simply by taking up a position merely outside it, either in its exterior or its profundity: so long as this outside or profundity remain its outside or profundity, they still belong to that circle, to that closed space, as its ‘repetition’ in its other-​than-​itself.”2 Therefore, if we are in the antipodes of a philosophy of the Subject, we are also in the antipodes of its dialectic negation, which affirms the primacy of the Object over the Subject and takes us back, as it were, to Schelling’s 1795 Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (Letter no. 4): “either no subject but an absolute object, or else no object but an absolute subject.”3 1 Wagner, The Logic of Invention, 2–​3. 2 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 53. Cf. Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 103: “Passive nihilism is the zero of religion, whilst active nihilism is the religion of the zero.” 3 Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, 167 (translation slightly modified).

© Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004538597_009

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Take, for instance, today’s Speculative Realism,4 in particular Graham Harman’s “object-​oriented” philosophy (whose interpretation of Heidegger’s “Fourfold” is otherwise suggestive, though).5 Harman states that the goal of his philosophy is to re-​invigorate the “concealed actuality”6 of all objects, that is to say, their “reality in vacuo,” regardless of their “accidental collision[s]‌with other objects,” and, thereby, independently from their “relational potentiality.”7 Harman’s sui generis recourse to Aristotelian terminology (actuality vs. potentiality) is anything but casual, as he declares Aristotle “the permanent ally of all brands of realism; [for] whatever the flaws of the Aristotelian substance may be,” he writes, “lack of reality outside the human mind is not one of them.”8 Yet, Harman’s Aristotle is conveniently redressed in 21st-​century clothes: “objects are ghostly objects,” stresses Harman, “withdrawing from all human and inhuman access, accessible only by allusion and seducing us by means of allure. Whatever we capture, whatever table we sit at or destroy, is not the real table.”9 Ontological cum relational “opaqueness” and “ghostliness” define all things. Compare with Quentin Meillassoux’s “anti-​correlationism,” which, as Meillassoux himself acknowledges, is based on “the discovery that the world possesses a power of persistence and permanence that is completely unaffected by our existence or inexistence.”10 Perhaps this is normal, though; or at least expectable. For what else but a drive towards worldless-​ness could the un-​worlding of the world brought about by the fulfilment of nihilism provoke? If the modern Ge-​stell can be said to have obscured and usurped11 the ontologically translucent qualities of non-​human-​made things, if it does no longer let them shine forth but as 4 5

On which see Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman (eds.), The Speculative Turn. For, according to Harman, Heidegger’s Geviert epitomises a type of dual reasoning built around the notions of “veiling and unveiling, absence and presence, concealing and unconcealing, sheltering and clearing” (Harman, “Dwelling in the Fourfold,” 295; The Quadruple Object, 175). As we have seen, Heidegger’s “Fourfold” echoes and expands Heidegger’s earlier distinction between “earth” and “world,” which mirrors such dual reasoning. 6 Harman, Tool-​Being, 224. 7 Ibid, 228 (emphasis original). See also Harman, Weird Realism. The expression “in vacuo” is reminiscent of the experiments of modern science, which places Harman’s philosophy within the Ge-​stell paradigm that it tries to depart from. 8 Harman, “On the Undermining of Objects,” 27. 9 Harman, The Third Table, 12. Cf. Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 178, and our discussion of the assumptions and Wirkungsgeschichte of Lacan’s thesis in “Εἶδος⧹Utupë.” 10 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 116. Cf. Pascal: “I look around in every direction and all I see is darkness” (Pensées, 221, §429), and Voltaire’s critique of Pascal’s “desert island[s]‌” (Philosophical Letters, 105). 11 Heidegger, Sojourns, 35.

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commodified materials, objects, and/​or data in the actual and virtual showcases of post-​Fordist capitalism, it can be tempting to turn the light off to see what happens next, to open the door to the experience of the alien –​from feeling a styrofoam carpet with our naked feet to breathing atmospheric sulphur-​ dioxide nearby, say, the Norilsk Nickel plant.12 Why? To better reconcile ourselves, it would seem, with the fact that we must coexist with toxicity without the need to question anymore, let alone to philosophically meditate, on what has brought us here and on whether we may be capable of drifting in an altogether different direction.13 Paraphrasing Proudhon, then, we are tempted to re-​label today’s “object-​oriented” philosophy as today’s new “philosophy of misery.”14 There is, of course, an easy way out of this inferno; one particularly suitable for the times we live in, in which banality is rewarded, and which is repeatedly presented as the way out of the Subject/​Object dichotomy. It consists in restoring the Subject–​Object continuity more technologico. Today’s Posthumanism swims like a fish in such pond, whose waters Speculative Realists do not distaste either, for they, too, end by dissolving the human into what Morton has famously labelled the “mesh.”15 Thus, many contemporary philosophers bounce over pure objectuality into the paradise regained of a generalised connectivity, which is celebrated by them as the true “philosophy of our

12

13 14

15

See, e.g., Morton, “What is Dark ecology?” Notice Heidegger’s correlation in Contributions to Philosophy, 99–​111 (=​ ga 65: 126–​41) of “machination” (Machenshaft), “nihilism” (Nihilismus), and “lived experience” (Erlebnis) qua experimentation. For a criticism of today’s Lovecraftian “object-​oriented” mantra: “the alien is everywhere” (Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 133), see Segovia, “The Alien –​Heraclitus’s Cut.” Cf. Tsing, who, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, makes the point that living in “capitalist ruins” should not preclude that we try to do something different from self-​ satisfying ourselves with what there is, be it at hand or beyond our reach. Even if some of its notions are, we think, assumable. Thus, for example, Morton’s term “hyperobjects” (on which see Morton, Hyperobjects) is a very fine term for new realia that were not here till recently, like the plutonium currently accumulated on the seabed. Paradoxically, certain “hyperobjects” of this kind contribute to the growth of some forms of organic life (e.g., bacterial life), as a result of which distinctively non-​organic materials, like closed-​cell extruded polystyrene foam (i.e., Styrofoam™), might be legitimately incorporated to the catalogue of the earth’s “natural” ecosystems (because of the bacteria capable of transforming it into degradable plastic, that is). Whether we like it or not, we must live with this new realia, i.e., we must live “with the trouble,” as Haraway puts it (in Staying with the Trouble). Yet, at the same time, one should not overlook that the earth can hardly support anymore the production of a number of such new realia (on which see Nelson and Braun, “Autonomia in the Anthropocene”). Morton, “The Mesh.”

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time”16 –​a “philosophy of mediation” that, it is claimed, “discharges any confrontational dualisms and hierarchical legacies”17 and allows us “to experience the relationship between persons and other materialities more horizontally”;18 New Materialism is another name for it.19 Here, Dionysian connectivity20 substitutes for Lovecraftian darkness, but it does so, once more, at the expense of what we identify in this book as the Apollonian. For, while we may need to re-​locate ourselves diversely among the living “to make the Anthropocene as short/​thin as possible,”21 it is reasonable to ask whether doing so necessarily entails giving up worlding and dwelling on behalf of random connectivity.22 Surely there are good reasons –​which André Leroi-​Gourhan,23 Gilbert Simondon,24 Michel Serres,25 and Bernard Stiegler26 have variously highlighted –​to view technology as the exteriorisation of our very being, and to see it, then, in strict continuation with certain pre-​technological ways of being.27 In other words, technological development does not necessarily threaten what we are. It can put at risk, however, our own interface being: our being, that is, at the crossroads of φύσις and λόγος. Furthermore, it is essential to ask if, insofar as it obscures such correlation not less than the modern Ge-​stell does, the flat ontology upon which generalised connectivity builds is what we need to overcome anthropocentrism, or if it promotes its unconditional extension instead. Something similar may be asked about today’s tendency to reduce philosophy to the politics of negotiation, i.e., to envisage the encounter with the other-​than-​human in exclusively political and/​or juridical terms, or as a “contract,” like Latour proposes28 following Serres.29 Full of connections and

16

See, e.g., Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism, 1, and, for a more nuanced approach to the subject, Roden, Posthuman Life. 17 Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism, 22. 18 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 10. 19 See Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” esp. 7–​9. 20 See further Mellamphy and Biswas Mellamphy (eds), The Digital Dionysus. 21 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 100. 22 Cf. Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel’s excellent critique of today’s Realism(s) in Le Lieu de l’universel and her earlier study on reference and self-reference: The Death of Philosophy. 23 Leroi-​Gourhan, Gesture and Speech. 24 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. 25 Serres, Thumbelina. 26 Stiegler, Technics and Time. 27 Szerszynski, Nature, Technology and the Sacred. 28 Latour, Facing Gaia; Down to Earth. 29 Serres, The Natural Contract. On Latour’s indebtedness to Serres, see their cowritten book, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, esp. 100, 115–​16, 143, 151–​2, 161, 165, 168, 176–​7,

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contracts, “yet it is poetically,” to paraphrase Hölderlin, “that humans dwell on this earth.”30 Otherwise, the earth will hardly become more than “that upon which construction, settlement, and installation are possible,” i.e., a “realm of command,”31 whether unilaterally exerted or shared –​to the greater glory of Apollo’s blackout.32 Upon close analysis, therefore, nihilism burgeons behind these alternative configurations: that of a pure Subject, that of a pure Object, and that of their dissolution on behalf of the generalised connectivity of all things –​configurations which have come to delimit the contour of the thinkable today. For, in the three cases, φύσις is darkened: it is either sacrificed on the altar of planned organisation, divested of any witness, or replaced by the politics of negotiation. As we have seen, there is one occasion in which Heidegger defines nihilism not as the forgetting of being, as he usually does, but, more interestingly perhaps,33 as the “disempowerment of φύσις.” In turn, Severino speaks of the forgetting of being’s incandescence. Correspondingly, our approach to nihilism differs from any attempt to reduce it to a claim about life’s meaninglessness,34 or to a metaphysical question largely irrelevant in our daily lives if we are uninterested in philosophy.35 Nor can we view nihilism, therefore, as “a useful tool in an overly judgemental world” that might “help us to imagine a better future”36 thanks to the pragmatic potential of its sceptic-​like nature; or as something that, by becoming the object of its own unlimited denial, “might make us stronger” if it “doesn’t kill us.”37 Heidegger and Severino are right in that only the possibility of thinking nihilism down to its root can pave the way for its genuine overcoming. We are persuaded that only thus can post-​nihilism become a distinct, if distant, possibility.

193–​4. It is also from Serres that Isabelle Stengers (in In Catastrophic Times, 43–​50) draws her notion of the earth as an “intruder” after its anthropocentric devastation. 30 “Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch wohnet /​der Mensch auf dieser Erde” (Hölderlin, “In lieblicher Bläue”). See further Trawny (ed.), “Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch wohnet /​Der Mensch auf dieser Erde.” 31 Heidegger, Parmenides, 60 (=​ga 54: 88–​9; emphasis added). Notice the technological connotations that terms like “installation” and “command” present. 32 Thus Heidegger’s counter-­​­figure –​after Hölderlin –​of a home-​land that need not be interpreted in traditionalist ​or bucolic terms. See further Mugerauer, Heidegger and Homecoming; Bambach, Of an Alien Homecoming. 33 See our discussion of Heidegger’s negative ontotheology in Chapter 5. 34 So Crosby, The Specter of the Absurd, 35; and, more recently, Gertz, Nihilism, 74. 35 So Tartaglia, Philosophy in a Meaningless Life, 38. 36 Tartaglia and Llanera, In Defence of Nihilism, 59. 37 Gertz, Nihilism, 186.

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Post-​nihilism, however, will only get a chance to be something more than a philosophical rubric –​we should like to argue –​if Dionysus and Apollo are kept together as the two inseparable sides of the single yet polymorphous event that we have devised in the preceding pages, first, by reinterpreting Heidegger’s “Fourfold” in light of Heidegger’s own dialectics of “earth” and “world” qua terms of a structural or differential relation; and, secondly, by projecting Lévi-​Strauss’s notion of variation or structural translatability onto Heidegger’s “Fourfold.” One and multiple, the event in question is the variable worlding of the earth out of its sheltering chthonic womb at the recurring intersection of four mirroring functors:





(A) the real –​i.e., what there is, of which we ourselves are merely one component among others that are neither under our jurisdiction nor alien to us, since reality is inherently polyhedric; (B) the possible –​i.e., what we can become, through which our relative freedom is affirmed, but that we betray in equal measure when we pretend that things cannot be different and when we fancy that everything is possible; (C) the given –​i.e., our mortality, which we, mortals, cannot overstep no matter how hard we try to delude ourselves supposing we can; and the awareness of which, together with that of the mortality of all earthly things, leads us to dwell poetically among the living; and (D) the giving –​i.e., life’s ever-​living and life-​bestowing forces, to which we must rend tribute insofar as, being beyond our reach, they elude our attempt to control them.

By classifying, tuning in, and singing to A and D we, mortals (C), world the earth out of which our lives emerge as an amalgam of possibilities (B), and in this way we become capable of dwelling on the earth with awe and care. There is, however, no foundation in all this other than the earth itself on which we stand –​the earth understood, therefore, as neither soil nor landscape but as the “weather-​world” where we live with others.38 If space and time are, as Kant famously argued, the a priori forms of our sensibility, the “mirror-​play” of these four functors can then be said to be the a priori form of any dwelling-​oriented thought. Furthermore, if Heidegger used a jug to decipher its structure, another object-​oriented, if less-​artisanal, metaphor might, in turn, help us to represent, if approximately, the way in which those four 38

The concept of “weather-​world” is Ingold’s in Being Alive, 126–​35. Evidently, “world” has for Ingold a different connotation from the one assumed throughout this book.

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functors display themselves in their togetherness –​namely, the turning tray of a carousel slide projector. For each worlding option is, so to speak, like a new slide projected on a white wall.39 Consequently, we are willing to define our own fourfold as a kind of “abstract machine”40 capable of eventuating different worlds as different, albeit not unrelated, “modes of existence.”41 Of necessity, each particular world will have to turn around a basal intuition (e.g., the Olympians’ triumph over the Titans, Ra’s Mandjet and Mesektet cycles, the cyclical renewal of earths and skies, etc.) which must be identified in turn as both its ἀρχή (α) and its τέλος (τ), i.e., as its opening and defining principle, as shown in the diagram below (Figure 18).42

­f igure 18  The “Fourfold” as an abstract machine 39 40 41 42

Cf. Deleuze’s “white wall” in his lecture on Spinoza of March 10, 1981, available at: https://​dele​uze.cla.pur​due.edu/​semin​ars/​spin​oza-​vel​ocit​ies-​thou​ght/​lect​ure-​12. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “abstract machine”: by “combin[ing] particles-​signs,” an abstract machine “creates continuity for intensities that it extracts from distinct forms and substances” (A Thousand Plateaus, 78). Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 86–​7. The English verb to “open” derives from the Proto-​Germanic verbal root *upana-​, which means, literally, to “set up” something. In turn, to “define” is a verb of Latin origin, formed by a resultative prefix (de-​) followed by the verb finere, which means to draw something’s “limits.”

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Will such ἀρχή “totalise” then –​one may ask –​the world emerged from it? It need not be so. For a world’s ἀρχή seldom encircles it, even if it provides it with a growing impulse that expands to unlatched positions engendering new ἀρχαί (new principles, new values) along the way. Additionally, there will always be many other worlds beyond any given world, which makes any attempt to totalise reality by enclosing it within the limits of a single world, a vain wish. 2

Destiny and the Otherwise

Assuredly, as long as our language, and hence our world,43 keeps turning around terms like “ideas,” “logic,” “phenomena,” etc. –​all of which derive from the Ancient Greek philosophical lexicon –​re-​tuning in to the earth cannot but echo for us, Westerners, the thematisation of φύσις carried on by early Greek thought. Conversely, other extramodern thematisations of that for which φύσις is merely the Ancient Greek word, need not meet this condition that we ourselves, however, cannot escape. What, though, made the Greek difference –​and, therefore, what makes ours? Quite plausibly the fact that, in addition to naming the earth’s shining forth into unhiddenness, φύσις was in Ancient Greece –​and remains for us –​ the object of a purely theoretical intuition. Thus, Barry Sandywell speaks of Greek “theory” (θεωρία) as the fruit of an “intellectual revolution”44 –​one in which, as L. A. Moritz puts it,45 thought was (is) “externalised,” i.e., “detached” from any figurative “content.”46 Deleuze’s distinction between “Figure” and “Concept” is, we think, likewise pertinent here: The Greeks might seem to have confirmed the death of the sage and to have replaced him with philosophers –​the friends of wisdom, those who seek wisdom but do not formally possess it. But the difference between the sage and the philosopher would not be merely one of degree, as on a scale: the old oriental sage thinks, perhaps, in Figures, whereas the philosopher invents and thinks the Concept. […] The philosopher is expert in concepts and in the lack of them. He knows which of them are not viable, which are arbitrary or inconsistent, which ones do not hold up for

43 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 5.6. 44 Sandywell, Presocratic Reflexivity, 2. 45 Moritz, “An Approach to Classical Literature,” 30. 46 Cf. Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, 40–​1; Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 31.

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an instant. On the other hand, he also knows which are well formed and attest to a creation, however disturbing or dangerous it may be.47 “Figures” –​figures of thought, and of pure thought for that matter,48 but figures all the same, rather than “Concepts” –​nurture, too, the extramodern imaginaries of the Darkhad, the Warlpiri, the Yanomami… regardless of the fact that, occasionally, such “Figures” may shift into more-​or-​less-​abstract notions, as Pierre Clastres shows apropos the Ache notion of “bayja.”49 For, in most extramodern worlds, what is thought must be sensed, displayed, and performed in addition to being thought.50 There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. We have examined elsewhere, for example, a Bororo drawing which proves that concepts are, for the Bororo, just as important as their perceptions are.51 Furthermore, our own modern culture, like Ancient Greek culture, abounds in “sensibilia” and concepts in equal measure.52 Yet, we cannot step over the conceptual, as though the conceptual should no longer concern us, in our wish to re-​tune in to the earth.

47 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy, 3. See further ibid., 9, 43, 86–​8, 90–​6. 48 Cf. Lévi-​Strauss, The Savage Mind, 1–​74 (=​ Œuvres, 559–​637). 49 Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, 33–​41. 50 West, Ethnographic Sorcery, 3–​4. Cf. Martin Holbraad’s analysis of Cuban Ifa rituals in “The Power of Powder.” 51 More specifically, a portrait of the German explorer Karl von Steinen (1855–​1929) that is reproduced on p. 26 of Pierre Déléage’s Lettres Mortes. Von den Steinen’s genitalia were not seen by the Bororo, but they drew them despite all, as a man without genitalia would simply not fit within the Bororo concept of a man. Nor is the size of von den Steinen’s pipe what we would call realistic; yet, it serves to stress the uncommonness of such object, and hence a conceptual challenge, by expanding its perceptual dimensions (the same applies to Von den Steinen’s beard). See further Gevorkyan and Segovia, “An Anthropological and Meta-​philosophical Critique of Hilan Bensusan’s Indexicalism,” 37–​9, n.69. 52 The Greek gods are a perfect example of it. As for our modern world, cf. Wagner’s precious insights on the interplay of concepts and images in today’s science: “The process of modeling in science […] makes use of known, familiar relations or orderings as a basis for the analogic comprehension of some heretofore unorganized material. A metaphor is made, and expanded into a perception within the properties of the material to be grasped, so that the idea of a double helix or of floating tectonic plates, for instance, is ‘seen’ to inform the structure of dna, or the motility of the earth’s crust. The ‘seeing’ itself is ‘new’ knowledge, and because a metaphor is self-​significative, the knowledge acquires a galvanizing force from its apparent (and de facto) uniting of knower and known –​hence the certainty that carries scientific-​paradigms. And the consequences of such a confident ‘seeing’ include a restructuring of the model, the heretofore familiar, by the research material: dna becomes a model for the double-​helical, geography for the floating and flowing of solids” (Symbols That Stand for Themselves, 10).

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It is probably in this sense that Heidegger speaks of (our) “destiny” (Schicksal, Geschick) –​a term which, rather than “fate” in the prevalent sense of the word, designates that which awaits us insofar as we (already) belong in it. Nevertheless, our re-​tuning in to φύσις and the Greek tuning in to it cannot be identical to one another. For the erasure of φύσις brought about by the modern Ge-​stell stands behind us, as a risk by now known to us, in exact proportion as it was yet unknown to, and thus stood ahead of, the Greeks. Heidegger elaborates on this fundamental difference as follows: what in the Greeks caused “wonder” (Erstaunen) causes in us “shock” (Erschrecken).”53 Hence, there is something uncanny, as Heidegger says, about our potential rediscovery of φύσις. Andrew Haas tends, nevertheless, to overrate such uncanniness, we think, when he suggests that we will never be able to feel at home thinking “being,” inasmuch as “being” escapes any pretension to grasp it: being, he contends, must remain “indeterminable” and “indecidable,” lest it be “forced into the Ge-​stell of a [cognitive] contract” and its “gift” be turned into “exchange.”54 We have seen, nonetheless, that thinking and grasping are by no menas the same thing, and that being and φύσις cannot be dissociated except at a very high price. Haas, though, is not alone in his appreciation of Heidegger’s uncanniness: contemporary Heidegger scholarship turns preferentially around it, in various ways.55 Thus, for instance, Scott Campbell sustains that the “human being” is short of a “catastrophe” due to its despondency.56 If Haas risks making of being a new deus absconditus (read: a ghostly Object), Campbell, in turn, risks making of the human a fallen creature (read: a wretched Subject); and with it, Heidegger’s own effort to recover what we have lost is obscured. Yet, probably, Heidegger himself is to blame for this. For Heidegger’s own philosophy rests, as it were, on three legs: (a) an inquiry into the essence of what may be called human homelessness, which Heidegger pursued for the first time in Being and Time; (b) a negative theology, pervasive throughout most of his writings and influenced by his early Christian faith, which Heidegger projects onto the problem of being’s transcendence; and, somewhat more promisingly in our view, (c) the rethinking of being qua φύσις, which Heidegger only began to explore after his discovery of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides following the publication of Being and Time, and 53 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 14 (=​ga 65: 15). 54 Haas, “The Ambiguity of Being,” 18. 55 See overall Withy, Heidegger on Being Uncanny. 56 Campbell, “The Catastrophic Essence of the Human Being in Heidegger’s Readings of Antigone,” 85, 96.

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which intersects with a and b –​or, more precisely, which reshapes a and b as much as it is shaped by them. Contemporary Heidegger scholarship gravitates chiefly around the former two points; and it proves, at best, indifferent to the possibilities inaugurated by Heidegger’s rethinking of being qua φύσις. In fact, a good many among Heidegger’s current interpreters view Heidegger’s flirt with the Greeks as a side-​effect of his anti-​modern philo-​Nazi drive,57 as if any other aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy had not been compromised in one way or another by Heidegger’s Nazism between 1933 and 1934;58 and, most importantly, as if Heidegger’s recourse to the Greeks had no philosophical relevance per se in connection to Heidegger’s rethinking of being’s truth. Paradoxically, then, instead of exceeding the “familiar,” as Heidegger hoped those writing after him would do to prepare the “meeting anew” of “earth” and “world” in their recovered “intimacy” –​hence, this book’s main epigraph59 –​Heidegger scholars end, more often than not, falling back into the all too familiar. Put differently: instead of dodging the admixture of Christianity and modernism which is present, malgré tout, in Heidegger’s philosophy, they indulge in it. There is an additional problem with Heidegger’s thought on φύσις and Ge-​stell. We have already alluded to it.60 According to Heidegger, the “letting-​ come-​forth” of φύσις was corrupted into θέσις, i.e., into the arrangement or “positioning” of what is “present,” which the modern Ge-​stell materialises in turn.61 True, Heidegger proves extremely ambiguous concerning this point. On the one hand, he writes: “‘Being’ has since the early days of the Greek world

57

Thus, e.g., Neske and Kettering (writing in the 1980s): Heidegger “lends respectability to the Nazi revolution by placing it in the light of Greek philosophy” (Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, xxxvi); and Knowles (writing in the late 2010s): Heidegger “link[s]‌ the Germany of his day to what he refers to as the ‘Greek inception’” (Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities, 10). 58 On Heidegger and Nazism, on which much has been written, see Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, and Wendland, “Heidegger’s New Beginning,” of whom it is worthy quoting here a few lines: “Heidegger’s early enthusiasm for National Socialism was partially based on his belief that the Nazis represented a radical break from the Western tradition that begins with Greek metaphysics and culminates in the environmental degradation and human dislocation in our modern, technologically driven societies. […] Yet later Heidegger came to realize that, far from a break with Western history, National Socialism represented the apotheosis of modern technology. […] Heidegger’s later critique of technology develops out of his disillusionment with the Nazis, and so amounts to an implicit and occasionally explicit critique of National Socialism” (149). 59 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 325 (=​ga 65: 410). Cf. the parallel reference to the meeting of “earth” and “world” and the role of the “future ones” in ibid., 316 (399). 60 Supra, Chapter 5, n.83. 61 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 60–​1 (=​ ga 79: 64).

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up to the latest days of our century meant being present.”62 On the other hand, however, he acknowledges that, if the Ge-​stell comes from the “letting-​ lie-​before” (Vorliegenlassen) experienced by the Ancient Greeks as a result of their “letting-​come-​forth” (Her-​vor-​ankommen-​lassens) of everything into presence, “[w]hat stands here through θέσις essences otherwise than what is brought forth here by φύσις.”63 It certainly does; for, unlike the modern “positioning,” the Greek “letting-​come-​forth of everything into presence” (which, as we have seen, is symbolised by Apollo) entailed “respectful awe” (αἰδώς) before what is (which is symbolised, in turn, by Apollo’s sister, Artemis). Furthermore, Severino rightly contends that, to dominate things, it is not enough to make them present: one must also erect oneself over them as their producer and their annihilator.64 If all this is considered, then, it is patent that there is no direct transition from φύσις to θέσις. Overall, however, Heidegger’s surmise on the continuity between φύσις and θέσις seems to have won the day, and has paved the way to the view that the undetermined (in Heidegger’s terminology: “beyng”) ought to be privileged over the determined (“being”), which reverses Aristotle’s axiom that “being is preferable to non-​being.”65 All in all, though, Heidegger saw very well that re-​tuning in to φύσις can open for us the possibility of a different “history” (Geschichte) and a different “style” (Stil) of “Da-​sein”66 –​that is to say, of “being-​there,” and being with others, on the earth. As a matter of course, he avers, the hypothetical beginning of that other history will be an “other beginning” (andere Anfang), in respect to the “first beginning” (erste Anfang) opened by the Greeks,67 for it to be able to “build” there where that “first beginning” did not.68 Certainly, it cannot be but “another beginning,” since we are not Greeks anymore and because, as we have highlighted, the modern Ge-​stell lies behind us rather than ahead of us.69 Yet, this is not necessarily the same as to claim, as Heidegger does, that things would have been different, had that “first beginning” built where it did not –​which explains, too, Heidegger’s rejection of any new beginning that would attempt to revitalise the notion of φύσις.70 For the Greeks are by no means responsible 62 Heidegger, The Question of Being /​Über „Die Linie,“ 63/​64 (emphasis added). 63 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 60–​1 (=​ ga 79: 64; emphasis original). 64 Severino, The Essence of Nihilism, 45–​106. 65 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 731b30-​1. 66 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 29 (=​ga 65: 34). 67 Ibid., 7, 11 (5–​6, 10). 68 Heidegger, Pathmarks, 319 (=​ga 9: 423). 69 As Lévi-​Strauss observes, we cannot “regain” something as if we “had never lost it” (Myth and Meaning, 1). 70 We have discussed this point at some length in Chapter 5.

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of what came after them. The arrow that we drew in the Introduction can now be better understood perhaps, in contrast to Heidegger’s rejection of the Greek concept of φύσις: its spiral moves backwards first into early Greek thought, and only then it moves forward into the Otherwise. Obviously, we cannot be extramodern like, say, the Yanomami, the Warlpiri, or the Darkhad do their best to remain, even if, to some extent, we ourselves remain unconsciously extramodern.71 We can only (re)become extramoderns, that is, in our own way. This, of course, means that we are not forced to break off with our modern condition in toto. Thinking and exploring what in us is compossible with the incipiency of the Otherwise might well be the key to what we can become. Pretending anything different would be a sham. Plus, if we were to pretend anything different from that rather modest thinking and from that rather modest exploration, we would have not written a book like this one, i.e., a book that addresses modern questions, makes use of modern concepts, develops modern writing technics, etc. Furthermore, while the gesture thus required from us is one that combines learning from the Greeks what we have not yet learned from them, and learning from those whom our Western civilisation has either ignored or excluded on account of their otherness, it is also blatant that Rome and Jerusalem –​to use a metonym –​are there too, and that they will likely stay with us. There seems to be in us, that is, an impetus for conquest and domination of which today’s accelerationism, be it right-​winged or left-​ winged, can be said to represent the latest offshoot. In this, we still seem to be quite Roman. Simultaneously, the indelible conviction that we move basically forward, if at times obliquely, through history’s yet-​unwritten pages, evinces our indebtedness to the world of the Hebrew Bible, in which, as André Neher puts it, “le peut-​être” (“what can be”) is favoured over “l’être” (“what is”).72 Lastly, is our inclination towards contingency and uncertainty and our flirt with transgression, anything but an emanation of our former Christian soul, in which Rome and Jerusalem meet proportionally? How, then, can we picture the Otherwise? We do not fully know; maybe only tentatively, by rooting ourselves back into the essential with the humbleness Rosenzweig once demanded to “walk” back “into life.”73 For this to be possible, however, another less triumphal, more plural, sensitive, and prudent modernity is urgent. In short, we need an alter-​modernity sensitive, first, to our own Otherwise. Secondly, we need an alter-​modernity sensitive to the fact that we

71 Harvey, “Introduction,” 6. 72 Neher, L’Exil de la parole, 246ff. 73 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 447.

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ourselves are only one human “variant” among others74 –​hence, sensitive to the human Otherwise. Plus, we need, thirdly, an alter-​modernity sensitive to the non-​human Otherwise of which, as butō dance powerfully shows, we are part and parcel too. Finally, we need an alter-​modernity sensitive to, and reconciled with, the twin nature of Dionysus and Apollo. 3

Dionysus and Apollo, Twins

Dionysus is intrinsically connected to the earth, of whom he is the younger consort but also the offspring. As a result, he leads the initiates at Eleusis back to the earth’s womb, so that they may experience their earthboundness and realise that the impersonal life that is alive in all living beings is indestructible, i.e., that it is the source and the end of all individuated life. This explains Heraclitus’s assimilation of Dionysus to Hades, the god of the underworld, as well as Dionysus’s characteristic otherness and disquieting proximity, symbolised by his mask and his frontal gaze, respectively. Yet, Dionysus is also worshiped as a vine which symbolises the ever-​living life that springs from the earth and takes innumerable forms, whose underlying unity the god thus proclaims. For this reason, too, Dionysus challenges all social differences, although less with the intent of subverting the political order than with the purpose of extending mercy to all beings and of stressing the primacy of the earth over the polis. Therefore, Dionysus is less a disruptive than an integrative god, for which reason he is also the god of transitions. Lastly, he is linked to Poseidon and Zeus not less than to Hades: the three gods represent the three stages through which the morphogenesis of all things takes place. In turn, Apollo allows all forms to take shape before things step back into the earth’s depths. He gathers in his gaze what is, what was, and what will be, thus bringing all things into unhiddenness and allowing them to be thought. He rises above all things, thereby putting down any disrespect they may show to one another regarding their right to be. In this way, Apollo does not only encourage mutual esteem among all beings, but reminds humans of their mortal condition and, if needed, forces them to accept it with his arrows, which kill from afar. Apollo’s ontological features are perceptible in the god’s oracular qualities, sculptural rendering, and role in Attic tragedy, where he

74

Maniglier, “Anthropological Meditations,” 127.

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symbolises measure against excess. This makes of him the god of the polis, as well. Additionally, Apollo’s aforementioned features can be said to form the matrix out of which philosophy was born, as shown in the writings of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. Each one in his own manner, therefore, Dionysus and Apollo encompass and shelter all things and thereby protect life’s rhythm in two different, proportionally inverted but indissociable, ways. The fact that the basement of Apollo and Dionysus’s shared sanctuary at Delphi opened, under its floor, to the depths of the earth, over which the Pythia stood on her tripod to receive Apollo’s oracle, underscores Apollo and Dionysus’s fundamental twinness, of which their mutual dependence is the premise; their reciprocity of perspectives, the secret; and their dual affirmation, the corollary. To recover their twinness –​which, despite Nietzsche’s initial insistence on the unity of the two gods, has reached an unassailable vanishing point under the effect of Nietzsche’s own Dionysian philosophy –​we have put forward in this book two muqarnas-​like arguments, to employ an architectural metaphor. We have argued that the earth is a continuum of moving images, sounds, and sensations of which our bodies are part and parcel; that our bodies are the origin and the centre of what is commonly called our being in the world; and that, in addition to being our bodies –​or so we think –​they are intrinsically connected to the earth, for they have a past in which the memories of the earth are sedimented and disseminated, a present in which such memories subsist alongside newly acquired sensations and images, and a future into which that living legacy will be projected and enriched. Hence, we have concluded, re-​ experiencing our living body amounts to being born twice, indeed multiple times, and thereby to a Dionysian experience: one which dance, understood as the free exploration of the transformative qualities of movement, enables. For dance allows us to silently sense the earth’s flesh in which we are embedded and, consequently, to re-​position and re-​singularise ourselves otherwise in our aliveness. Yet, we have also argued, it is through the elaboration of meaning, which supposes a perspectival jump over the earth’s flesh, that the earth appears in a clearer way to itself; plus, we have stressed that meaning is its self-​ reflective mirror in approximately the same proportion as it is ours and as we are its, since, ultimately, human life coincides with the production of meaning. The domain of Apollo in his quality as the god of philosophy begins precisely there. Hence, it would be possible to paraphrase the Viennese Secession motto as follows: to each domain –​Apollo’s and Dionysus’s –​its own art, and to each art its own freedom.

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À rebours

This book’s argument goes against the grain in that it does not aim at establishing, as it is relatively common today, a new metaphysics,75 i.e., a new “theory of everything”76 based on the premise that φύσις is a senseless notion because things are exterior and alien to one another, or based, alternatively, on the premise that φύσις is a misnomer for what must be viewed as a web of engineered connections. By contesting these two premises, we want to challenge today’s philosophical game, which is largely overdetermined by them and which, while proclaiming the virtues of post-​metaphysical thought, succumbs inadvertently to the metaphysical trap it tries to escape. Speculative Realism and New Materialism are not better than scholastic Platonism in this respect, as they, too, obliterate φύσις. Nor are we seduced by the idea of a new “paradoxico-​metaphysics”77 circumscribed to exploring the fragmentary furniture of what, in the lack of any sure correlation between what things are and how we take them to be, appears to be a scrappy un-​world; or by the idea of a “hermeneutic ontology” that would reveal being’s contingency and ambiguity against the rigidness of earlier metaphysical thought yet in intimate dialogue with it, as though the latter, whatever its failures, had, too, been delicately moved by “that which holds sway only as a remnant.”78 A self-​ refuting metaphysics –​paradoxical, hermeneutic, etc. –​is still a metaphysics, and a true post-​metaphysical thought cannot be metaphysical, neither directly nor obliquely. Instead of venturing, therefore, a new kind of metaphysics, in this book we have put forward, within the limits of our possibilities, a critical project not entirely dissimilar to Kant’s: a project that consists in inquiring how is it that thought is possible against any maximalist pretension that would make such inquiry superfluous (as if reality would simply speak to us), and against the minimalist claim that thought is arbitrary and thus flawed (as if the aspects of reality that it cannot grasp were more fundamental than those translucent to it). Put differently: we have attempted at examining how thought and reality mirror, albeit asymmetrically, one another79 –​in ontological terms, but also in 75

“The world is due for a resurgence of original […] metaphysics. […] Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’ from any nation of the world,” reads, for instance, the brochure of an acclaimed present-​day book series in philosophy (http://​www.open​huma​niti​espr​ess.org/​books/​ser​ies/​new-​meta​phys​ ics/​). 76 See the subtitle of Harman’s 2018 book: Object-​Oriented Ontology. 77 The term is Hilan Bensusan’s in Indexicalism, passim. 78 Zabala, The Remains of Being, 101, 103. 79 See further Segovia, “Eἶδος⧹Utupë.”

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dialogue with the philosophy of mythology and with contemporary anthropological theory. There is no denying that minimalism rather than maximalism is the issue at stake in today’s philosophical realm. We are willing to call it the Ulysses syndrome of contemporary thought. For two reasons. First, because when Odysseus/​Ulysses hears the mermaids singing the κλέος of the heroes –​hence singing, indirectly, to Apollo –​he asks his men to tie him up to the mast of his boat to avoid falling under the spell of their song, since, as we have seen, “in [Odysseus’s] world forms are merely aspects of the event, fame an illusion, and pain the only true reality […] [which] cannot be sung but narrated.”80 Inevitably, one recognises here some of contemporary thought’s distinctive traits, such as the preference for the event over being,81 the parallel preference for narrative over both poetry (save when poetry is turned introspective, like in Baudelaire)82 and knowledge (other than negative, on which more below), and the refusal to acknowledge the κλέος of things (as still sung by Hölderlin) under the pretext that the experience of anything is painful at best and, at worst, meaningless.83 The second reason is that, from the plea for “‘ecstasy’ […] under the aegis of Dionysus as ho lysios (the ‘liberator’) who undoes boundaries”84 –​ which runs, in Nietzsche, parallel to the invitation to explore anew the “seas”85 (re-​)opened by the “death of [a]‌God”86 –​to the image of Joyce’s Ulysses, there is, as Sam Slote suggests, a rather straight line.87 In contrast, Odysseus’s original landscape (like that of Nietzsche before his final breakdown, i.e., prior to his falling into Dionysus’s “maelstrom”) is that of an untraced sea explored by someone still capable of orientating himself (which he manages to do by re-​ conducing to their being the many appearances he comes across) –​hence it

80 Diano, Forma ed evento, 60 (our translation). 81 As thematised, e.g., in Deleuze (see, e.g., The Logic of Sense) long before it reappears in Badiou’s Being and Event. 82 Who was the first to vindicate the term “modernity” in connection to the experience of “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” (Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 13). 83 Cf., e.g., Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing; Brassier, Nihil Unbound; Woodward, “Vigour Mortis.” 84 Ulfers, “Introduction,” 6. 85 Cf. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 3 (§1), 161 (§283), 163 (§289), 172 (§302), 199 (§343), 234 (§370), 243 (§377), 258 (“Toward New Seas”). 86 Ibid., 109 (§108), 119–​20 (§125), 199 (§343). 87 Slote, Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics.

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is a landscape very different from that of Joyce’s Ulysses, whose characters are unable to orientate themselves in the overdetermined space of a modern city.88 In short, we take a disoriented Ulysses, willingly tied to the mast of his boat, to be the epitome of our present modern condition, to which two consecutive world wars, the globalisation of social misery, and an unprecedented ecological crisis have contributed their own grains of sand. As a result, philosophy, or what is left of it, has, it would seem, ended up lashing itself to the mast of absolute contingency, as we advanced in the Introduction to this essay. Undeniably, Heidegger has played a crucial part in this. For, as we have seen, Heidegger intimates that early Greek φύσις prepared the summoning of everything into the “assured availability” (Sicherstellung) of the modern Ge-​stell, in a manner similar to Deleuze, then, when the latter contends that identity and representation conscript being’s infinite flow.89 Deleuze’s own role in the darkening of φύσις should not be underestimated either, despite the affirmative nature of his philosophy. For, by claiming that the singularity of what is precludes its representation, and that reality is inherently multiple and unstable,90 Deleuze has influentially reversed Plato’s axiom that there are no things deprived of φύσις and that, for that very same reason, they cannot be known at the expense of their εἴδη91 (whence Deleuze’s own commitment to nonsense).92 In a nutshell, Deleuze, in yet another way of privileging indeterminacy (unpredictability) over determination, is responsible for having promoted to the doxological spotlight –​in the two senses of the term δόξα –​of contemporary philosophy a notion of “difference” that makes of the any true difference something unassimilable and rebellious; and he is responsible for it despite having made of a single power or δύναμις the substance of being’s transitory configurations,93 which supplies ontology a material anchor that is lacking in Heidegger. Perhaps there has been no stronger dismissal of being’s positiveness, though, than Derrida’s, who –​reversing Heidegger like Marx did with Hegel –​makes of a being’s “trace”94 that which awaits to be thought against the intolerable 88

See in this respect Cosgrove, James Joyce’s Negations. It would be possible to describe those two seas as “smooth” and “striated” spaces, respectively (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 474–​500). See further Segovia, “Ulysses’s Mast.” 89 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 28–​69, 168–​221, 262–​304. 90 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus, 362. 91 See further Segovia, “On Plato’s Εἴδη, Deleuze’s Simulacra, and Zeno,” and, on the correlation between φύσις and εἴδη, Segovia, “Εἶδος⧹Utupë.” 92 Particularly in The Logic of Sense, 66–​73. 93 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 35–​42; Spinoza, 91–​2, 97–​104. 94 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 61.

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menace of that being’s presence.95 “Only pure absence –​not the absence of this or that, but the absence of everything in which all presence is announced –​can inspire, in other words, can work, and then make one work,” writes Derrida.96 Linguistic referentiality provides Derrida the model thereof.97 Yet, it is Lévinas, with his view of textuality as that which bears upon it the voice of an absent Other, and of that Other as an instance that cannot be appropriated but incites my responsibility towards its interpeling non-​presence, on whom Derrida relies in the last instance.98 In other words, Lévinas’s replacement of ontology by ethics99 is also at play in Derrida. Hence, Derrida’s perceived need to move beyond ontology altogether, which echoes Lévinas’s embrace of an “infinite” opposed to any “being”100 and any “totality”;101 for, according to Derrida, being⧹determination implies “closure”102 and “violence.”103 And here we are –​lashed to the mast of indeterminacy and negativity. For, in one way or another, today’s philosophical game revolves around what Ihab Hassan hallowed in the 1970s and the 1980s as a new cultural paradigm (“post-​modernist,” “post-​humanist,” etc.)104 characterised by the restatement of freedom and uncertainty. Negativity –​or, what amounts to the same, subtraction –​is thus its main ingredient. Therefore, if the history of metaphysics can be described as a series of more-​or-​less totalitarian deductions from a first principle (God, Man, the State, Class Struggle, etc.), its post-​modern limes can be said to abound in anarchic subtractions that hint at the negative side of any alleged principle (God’s death, the non-​human, the unresolved possibilities of aesthetic playfulness in the absence of any compelling political imperative, etc.). For deductive or demonstrative logics have failed to procure what they aimed at providing, namely, a stable ground on which to build a world that has proven, more often than not, some kind of prison. In turn, the counter-​ demonstrative illuminative logics offered by spiritualities of various sorts (perhaps with the exception of Buddhism, but what we are saying applies entirely 95 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 354. 96 Ibid., 7 (emphasis original). 97 Cf. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 4: “Th[e]‌state of being haunted […] is perhaps the general mode of the presence or absence of the thing itself in pure language.” 98 Ibid., 97–​192. 99 On which see, e.g., Levinas, Otherwise than Being. 100 Levinas, Otherwise than Being. 101 Levinas, Totality and Infinity. 102 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 292–​316. 103 Ibid., 97–​192. As though ontology did not present ethical concerns from the start, as we have stressed apropos Anaximander’s saying in Chapter 3. 104 Hassan, “Prometheus as Performer”; “The Culture of Postmodernism.”

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to its Western reception)105 is adamant to dissolve life into the intractable, but cannot suppress, at the same time, a certain proclivity to coexist with vague deductive principles. The intractable –​this is what it is all about, it seems. Hence, even the surface on which the trace of our shipwreck might be located is condemned to vanish at the beating of a siren’s tail;106 likewise, any imaginable post-​metaphysical attempt to rethink φύσις qua event is apparently condemned to collapse under the pressure of “the unprethinkable sphere of the original ontological Freedom”107 from which φύσις unquestionably stems. If philosophy was, it could be argued, originally shaped by the Mediterranean light –​one needs to live in the Mediterranean to understand it; why, then, is this permanently overlooked in a time in which everyone speaks of “situated knowledge?” –​it is, therefore, the Mediterranean co-​implication of being and thought as initially formulated by Parmenides, that is being questioned today on behalf of something like a global-​nordic mist.108 Hence, just as Plato, in the Sophist, fancied a Stranger who taught that being is ineluctably affected by Sameness and Otherness, contemporary philosophy is only able to fancy reality, as it were, as a different kind of stranger: a Stranger barely perceptible because of being surrounded by fog, about whose being, consequently, nothing can be surmised, let alone known, and before whom one can only ask oneself endlessly, for otherwise the game would be over: “how do I (or what can no longer be called “I,” anyway) relate to it (if it is an “it” after all)?” As courageous as initiatives to find out minimal answers to such question may be in a time in which many seem to be willing to listen to the question itself for the pleasure of hearing it, one wonders whether this is the only game philosophy is entitled to play today. Yet, for another game to be possible, Dionysus’s anarchic tyranny has to be contested once and for all. Not on behalf of Apollo’s own tyranny, though. Again: Apollo is nothing without Dionysus, and Dionysus is nothing without Apollo. What would happen, therefore, if we were to reimagine the 1 05 See, e.g., Boon, Cazdyn, and Morton, Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism. 106 Meillassoux, The Number and the Siren, 17. 107 Corriero, The Absolute and the Event, 139. 108 While the “Amazonian” thought-​world is granted a sort of guest honorary membership in today’s philosophical parliament (see, e.g., Marco Antonio Valentim’s Extramundanidade e sobrenatureza and Graham Harman’s preface to Hilan Bensusan’s Indexicalism), but only after having been carefully filtered through the concepts of Deleuze’s (Valentim) and Derrida’s (Bensusan) philosophies, beyond which important aspects of it that bring it closer to the Ancient Greek thought-​world than to the postmodern subtractive profession of faith, are tellingly silenced. See in this respect Segovia, “Εἶδος⧹Utupë.”

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philosophical game on the chiastic board of dual thinking, on which Apollo cuts Dionysus’s continuum, which Dionysus restores despite Apollo’s cuts? Were it not for Apollo, we have written, nothing definite would begin; were it not for Dionysus, things would not be in position to begin otherwise. Chaos/​ Cosmos, Earth/​World, Limitlessness/​Limitation, Possibility/​Compossibility, Emergence/​Shape, Becoming/​Being, Transformation/​Stability, Allowance/​ Care are among Dionysus and Apollo’s many names, i.e., among the many markers of their twinness. Now, while, as we have seen,109 their combination goes back to Homer and Heraclitus –​from whom Hölderlin first, and then Creuzer, drew the idea of their dynamic disequilibrium, which Nietzsche, for his part, adopted somewhat problematically110 –​the earliest extant list including several of those names and on which it would be worth reflecting goes back to the Pythagoreans,111 whose mistake was to moralise their binary distribution. A more recent list can be found, nonetheless, in Ihab Hassan’s The Dismemberment of Orpheus,112 where the myth of Orpheus is symptomatically recalled to warn the reader about the fatal consequences of forgetting Dionysus: Orpheus died in his willingness to serve Apollo alone, and was, as a result, dismembered by Thracian maenads. Hassan overlooks, though, that Dionysus was also torn to pieces by the Titans,113 that nothing durable comes out of Dionysus even if he sustains everything –​nothing durable and nothing habitable, that is.114 In fact, the twinness of our two gods should be clear by now. Gilbert Durand closed the 20th century, and Marcel Detienne inaugurated our own century, by re-​emphasising it.115 In this book we have simply done our best to draw its implications. To conclude, we would like to restate its most basic premise: we are body and thought, sensation and meaning, openness and completion; not 1 09 Supra, Chapter 7, n.7. 110 See Chapter 4 above, as well as Segovia, Nietzsche’s Pre-​Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought. 111 Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, 238. 112 Shortened: “Hierarchy/​Anarchy; Mastery-​Logos/​Exhaustion-​Silence; Creation-Tota­liza­­ tion/​Decreation-​Deconstruction; Presence/​Absence; Centering/​Dispersal; Selection/​ Com­bina­tion; Root-​Depth/​Rhizome-​Surface; Type/​Mutant; Origin- ​Cause/​Difference-​ Differa­nce-​Trace; Determinacy/​Indeterminacy” (Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus, 268). 113 Detienne, Dionysos Slain. 114 Hassan acknowledges that dichotomies “remain insecure, equivocal” (The Dismemberment of Orpheus, 269), but believes that modern culture promotes the Dionysian traits in the list. 115 Durand, Sciences de l’homme et tradition; Detienne, “Forgetting Delphi between Apollo and Dionysus.”

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one thing or the other, but one thing and the other: both. Tim Ingold puts it beautifully: every life, he writes, is held in the tension between submission and mastery, between imagination and perception, between aspiration and prehension, and between exposure and attunement. In every one of these pairings, the first leads and the second follows. But the former’s lead is not commanding but tentative. It requires of its following not passive obedience but active delivery.116

116 Ingold, The Life of Lines, 141.

Appendix 1

Development of the Ontological Pentagram The major sources for our first pentagram are Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–​6);1 Heidegger’s 1942 seminar on Parmenides2 and 1943–​4 seminars on Heraclitus;3 Heidegger’s 1949 Bremen lectures;4 two of Heidegger’s texts on poetry: “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (1936)5 and “Why Poets?” (1946);6 and Heidegger’s essay “Language” (1950).7 The earth’s song. –​Heidegger identifies Heraclitus’s φύσις (which he describes as “the self-​opening coming-​forth,”8 i.e., as “the emerging and self-​expanding into the open and lightened” of what is)9 with what he himself calls the “earth’s song” (das Lied der Erde); a song which, he says, “remains untouched [despite] the colossal noise that the human is now causing upon earth’s battered surface.”10 The “earth’s song” and its disclosure and/​or “gathering [λέγειν] in the name of Zeus”11 are the two sides of a single coin: (i) the earth in its autopoiesis (φύσις), whose song is audible when the earth is not yet, or no longer, seen as “land of settlement” and “realm of command”;12 and (ii) the song that sings back to it (λόγος). Φύσις, being, and λόγος thus touch one another, for what is appears in its being at the encounter of the earth’s song and its sheltering saying. It is the junction of φύσις and λόγος that the modern Ge-​stell obscures. An ontology and a poetics of dwelling. –​Does the rejection of the modern Ge-​stell –​or in positive terms, does an “ecology of repair”13 –​presage or require the 1 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 1–​56 (=​ ga 5: 1–​74). 2 Heidegger, Parmenides (=​ ga 54). 3 Heidegger, Heraclitus (=​ ga 55). 4 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 1–​73 (=​ ga 79: 1–​77). 5 Heidegger, Elucidations on Hölderlin’s Poetry, 51–​66 (=​ ga 4: 33–​48). 6 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 200–​41; Poetry, Language, Thought, 87–​140 (=​ ga 5: 269–​320). 7 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 185–​208 (=​ ga 12: 7–​30). 8 Heidegger, Heraclitus, 14 (=​ga 55: 16). 9 Ibid., 15 (17). 10 Ibid., 189 (247). The full passage reads thus: “We […] are only able to listen –​[…] to the thunder of the heavens, to the rustling of the woods, to the flowing of a spring, to the tones of the harp, to the clattering of motors, and to the noise of the city –​insofar as we belong, or do not belong, to all of this. We have ears because we can listen in a hearkening way, and through such hearkening are allowed to listen to the song of the earth, its shudders and shakes, a song that nevertheless remains untouched by the colossal noise that the human is now causing upon earth’s battered surface.” 11 Cf. Heraclitus, dk B32: “ἓν τὸ σοφὸν μοῦνον λέγεσθαι […] ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνομα.” The expression “gathering in the name of Zeus” is Heidegger’s own (Heraclitus, 280 [=​ga 55: 376]). 12 Heidegger, Parmenides, 60 (=​ga 54: 89). 13 Blanco-​Wells, “Ecologies of Repair.” © Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004538597_010

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transition from the all-​too-​familiar shores of modern “extractivism,” which is rightly understood to be the corollary of “anthropocentric greed,”14 to the open sea of post-​ humanism?15 A “poetics of dwelling”16 profiles itself as an alternative to such transition, for if, as we have just seen, φύσις, λόγος, and being form a triangle at whose heart the “truth” of being qua “disclosure” (ἀλήθεια) and “sheltering” (Wahrheit)17 ought to be inscribed, such truth is sheltered in no better place than in the words of the poet in its Pindaric, Hölderlinian, and Rilkean sense, since, as Bruno Snell says, “things need someone who chants them, so as not to lapse into oblivion.”18 Heidegger hints at something similar when he writes: “The saying of the [poet/​]singer says the integral [heile] entirety of worldly existence that grants its space invisibly in the world inner space of the heart.”19 The figure of the poet thus contrasts with that of the modern human who, being no longer able to listen to the “earth’s song,” and being incapable of singing back to it, spreads “noise” on its surface: the former shelters what the latter commands, and the latter wanders about where the former dwells. Conversely, replacing the “human” with the “transhuman,”20 with the “inhuman,”21 or with the “post-​human,”22 will not bring the earth’s song back to us, nor will it bring us back to it. Mortals and immortals. –​Much has been written on finitude over the past decades.23 Yet, mostly, to celebrate contingency: “Finitude designates the ‘essential’ multiplicity and the ‘essential’ nonreabsorption of sense or of being,” writes, for example, Jean-​Luc Nancy;24 therefore, he goes on to say, “a finite thinking of finitude is a thinking of the fact that we, as beings, from the moment that we exist, have already ‘understood’ the finitude of being.”25 This means that everything “stems from nothing and no-​one,” that it “comes from nowhere and goes nowhere,” that it “rests on no ground and goes uninterpreted,” that it “exists by the mere fact of existing, by a perfect necessity that equates to an equally perfect contingency.”26 The death of the Christian God 14 Willow, Understanding ExtrACTIVISM, 106. 15 Cielemȩcka and Daigle, “Posthuman Sustainability.” 16 See Chapter 5. 17 Heidegger, ga 5: 348. 18 Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, 78 (translation slightly modified). 19 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 238–​9 (=​ ga 5: 318). 20 Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near; Huberman, Transhumanism. 21 Negarestani, Intelligence and the Spirit. 22 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 23 See, e.g., Stambaugh, The Finitude of Being; Nancy, A Finite Thinking; Meillassoux, After Finitude; Luchte, Mortal Thought; Winkler, Philosophy of Finitude; Bielik-​Robson, Another Finitude. 24 Nancy, Finite Thinking, 9 (emphasis original). 25 Ibid., 10 (emphasis original). 26 Ibid., 317. Cf. Thomas Ligotti: “consciousness is an existential liability” and “our lives are MALIGNANTLY USELESS” (The Conspiracy against the Human Race, 119). Cf. too Brassier: philosophers “would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about

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demands it thus: “our finitude becomes manifest in the shadow of the death of God,” writes James Luchte.27 Interestingly, the Ancient Greeks used the term θνητός (“mortal”), far more often than ἄνθρωπος (“man”), to designate the human, but they did so in an altogether different way and with an altogether different purpose. Mortals, they thought, are those who, while living, are aware that they and everything else dies, and because of it, the Ancient Greeks thought, they are able to dwell and live poetically among the living, since the awareness that all things that live die makes it possible for us to sing to them so as to turn them immortal, that is to say, susceptible of being remembered despite their dying. To assume one’s finitude, therefore, did not mean for the Ancient Greeks to avoid acknowledging that things can become immortal –​let alone to dismiss life’s immortal or ever-​living forces. Thus, Hölderlin’s verse: “what remains is founded by the poets,”28 and his parallel reminder: “this you have all forgotten, that the first-​fruits are not for mortals, that they belong to the gods,”29 for singing to what perishes means to look at it sub specie æternitatis, i.e., from the standpoint of the thinkable immortality present in it.30 Reversing the argument that our finitude becomes manifest through the death of the divine, it would be possible to state, moreover, that our mortality is the vehicle for the gods (the “immortals”) to appear, provided that they are not envisaged in Christian terms. Heraclitus’s dk B62 proves inspiring thereof: “Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, living each other’s death, dying each other’s life.”31 For the gods are the names we give to the earth’s ever-​living forces that bring forth all things into unhidden-​ness, i.e., they are the ways we have of sheltering with our λόγος what shines forth. In this sense, Richard Rojcewicz is right to say that “the gods are, primarily, the looking ones; θεοί are θεάοντες ([…] ‘ones who look’),”32 and that, if they are to “become again […] lookers,” this will only happen as long as we re-​become those who “look after” them.33 Flesh and meaning. –​“World is grounded on earth, and earth rises up through world,” says Heidegger.34 That is to say, earth becomes a world when it is worlded, and

the need to re-​establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life” (Nihil Unbound, xi). 27 Luchte, Mortal Thought, 49. 28 Quoted in Heidegger, Elucidations on Hölderlin’s Poetry, 58 (=​ga 4: 41). Cf. Bachelard’s description of the “poetic image” as “the seed of a world” in The Poetics of Reverie, 1. 29 Heidegger, Elucidations on Hölderlin’s Poetry, 55 (=​ga 4: 37). 30 Cf. Severino, The Essence of Nihilism, 46; Il giogo, 104. 31 “Ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάντατοι, ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες” (our translation). 32 Rojcewicz, The Gods and Technology, 233, n.3 (emphasis original). 33 Ibid., 176. 34 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 26 (=​ga 5: 35).

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it is worlded when purely intelligible, i.e., non-​pragmatic meaning is conferred on its flesh. Language is the locus of this operation. For, “by naming beings for the first time,” says Heidegger, language “first brings beings to word and to appearance,”35 plus “it entrusts world to the things and […] keeps the things in the splendor of world.”36 It would be a mistake, though, to infer from this that linguistic meaning –​which amounts to being –​erects itself on a ground deprived of any communicative facts and of some degree of meaning production.37 Neither is such ground mute, nor is it imageless, as it is composed by images in movement, images in themselves and images of other images, if there is any reason to keep such distinction: the anteater’s snout is both an ongoing icon and a metaphor of the ants’ subterranean galleries, the roar of a jaguar is for the attentive monkey a metonymy of the predator’s presence, my hunting of a peccary is perceived by the peccary as an act of war as per the peccary’s peccary-​centred ontology, etc.38 In short, permanent, multi-​directional, multi-​perspectival, and multi-​ natural communication weaves reality’s tapestry, which is like a cubist semiotic prism painted in fauvist –​if, from the point of view of what we have called second-​order meaning, paradoxically pale –​chromatics.39 The Fourfold. Heidegger’s thought revolves around opposite differential terms like “earth” and “world,” “sheltering” and “clearing,” “veiling” and “unveiling,” etc. It displays, in other words, a dual thinking that multiplies and diversifies its chiasmi. Furthermore, in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Heidegger devised a conceptual metaphor formed by two intersecting axes of opposites: “earth” and “sky,” “mortals” and “immortals,” and emphasised their “mirroring reciprocity” or “mirror-​play” (Spiegel-​ Spiel).40 He named it das Geviert, i.e., “the Fourfold.”41 With this notion, Heidegger aimed at diagramming the world-​wide dimension of any human-​made object and, hence, of what is at the root of any object of such kind, namely, human experience; he did so in contraposition to the un-​worlding “positioning” of the modern Ge-​stell, thus providing with it –​we argue in this book –​the minimal structure for any worlding process. In a way, then, all the previous points of our ontological pentagram converge in this one.

35 Ibid., 46 (61). 36 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 199 (=​ga 12: 21). 37 We follow here Eduardo Kohn’s extension of indexicality and iconicity in How Forests Think. 38 Cf. ibid., 32, 74; Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, 28–​34. 39 Pace Heidegger, who tends to see the earth as being entirely silent and opaque before human language brings voice and light to it. See, e.g., ga 29/​30; 36/​37: 100–​1, 107–​10, 133, 177, 218, as well as Buchanan, Onto-​Ethologies, 65–​113; Tanzer, “Heidegger on Animality and Anthropocentrism”; Engelland, “The Question of Human Animality in Heidegger.” 40 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 15–​20, 44–​6, 70 (=​ga 79: 18–​20, 46–​8, 74). 41 The original and most important text for it is ibid., 1–​76 (5–​77). Nonetheless, see also Heidegger, ga 7: 145–​64, 165–​84; ga 12: 19–​21, 25–​26, 202–​4.

Appendix 2

Development of the Modal Pentagram The major sources of our second pentagram are Lévi-​Strauss’s 1944 brief essay on reciprocity and hierarchy among the Bororo, which was originally published in English in the American Anthropologist;1 Lévi-​Strauss’s structural anthropology as displayed in Totemism (1962),2 The Savage Mind (1962),3 Mythologiques (1964–​71)4 and the latter’s three minor sequels: The Way of the Masks, The Jealous Potter, and The Story of Lynx; and Lévi-​Strauss’s comments on translatability and invariance in his 1977 cbc Massey Lectures, published the following year as Myth and Meaning.5 Chiastic thinking. –​Our experience reports to us numberless dual phenomena –​ or we tend to map them thus: above and below, in and out, in front of and behind, right and left, concave and convex, striated and smooth, absent and present, dark and bright, etc. “The movement of the universe,” writes André Leroi-​Gourhan, “is not only rotary but also alternating and contrasting”: night and day, north and south, winter light and summer light, rainy season and dry season, coast and inland, highlands and lowlands, desert and forest, etc.6 For his part, Lévi-​Strauss remarks that dual thinking is “the least common denominator of all thought, a direct expression of the structure of the mind (and behind the mind, probably, the brain) and not an inert production of the action of the environment on an amorphous consciousness.”7 Roy Wagner goes further to underline the chiastic, i.e., the dynamic character, of most dual structures, beginning with our own physical shape: the reciprocity of perspectives is written into the constitution of the human species as its primal phenomenon –​that is, it is not a purely mental or symbolic artifact, but an evolutionary achievement, like the upright posture or the lowered larynx. This is […] the evolutionary fact that the generic human organism is modeled upon itself in two distinctive ways, each one countervening the other. Gender is twinned outward from the basic human form into two distinctive

1 2 3 4

Lévi-​Strauss, “Reciprocity and Hierarchy.” Lévi-​Strauss, Totemism. Lévi-​Strauss, The Savage Mind (=​ Œuvres, 553–​864). Lévi-​Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (1964), From Honey to Ashes (1966), The Origin of Table Manners (1968), The Naked Man (1971). 5 Lévi-​Strauss, Myth and Meaning (1978). 6 Leroi-​Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 334. 7 Cf. Lévi-​Strauss, Totemism, 90.

© Carlos A. Segovia and Sofya Shaikut Segovia, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004538597_011

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Appendix 2 body types called ‘male’ and ‘female,’ whereas laterality, the ‘sides’ of the body or right/​left coordinates, is twinned inward to meet at the body’s longitudinal centerfold to form the single individual organism.8

In comparison to the recurrence of these dual arrangements, contingency plays a rather limited role in what are conventionally called nature and culture. The view that “there is [in reality] no […] up or down, centre or periphery, nor anything else that might make of it a world designed for humans,”9 is correct in that reality is not teleologically ordained towards the satisfaction of human needs. Yet, this does not mean that contingency is absolute. Far from it, the development of life on Earth often responds to binary choices and patterns: plants and animals (i.e., chemical vs. mechanical food intake), radial and bilateral symmetry among the latter, etc.10 In his introduction to the English edition of Leroi-​Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech, Randall White speaks, in turn, of the “basic binary oppositions” implicit in the “operational sequences”–​which are always, he adds, “more-​or-​less subconscious,” “unverbalized,” and “unrecognized” –​ that guided originally the creation of human “material culture,” “social organization,” and “cosmology.”11 Leroi-​Gourhan talks of “binary complementarity,”12 but Lévi-​Strauss prefers to speak of “reciprocal subordination,”13 as well as of “permanent” or “dynamic disequilibrium,”14 to thus stress the avoidance of “inertia.”15 This is yet another way of introducing a dynamic point of view in the study of dual structures, which Lévi-​Strauss finds to be at play in most forms of social organisation,16 including totemic classifications,17 in funeral and fertility rites,18 and in the vast repertoire of extramodern myths which he began to study systematically in the 1960s. Twin myths like those of “Lynx” and “Coyote” spread among the Nimiipuu and their neighbours of the North-​American Pacific,19 are a perfect example of the recurrence of dual structures –​and of their rhizomatic distribution, in which structural variation plays a key role. It would be wrong

8 Wagner, The Logic of Invention, 2 (emphasis added). “Reciprocity of perspectives” is Wagner’s most frequent expression for it. On its chiastic nature, see Wagner, Coyote Anthropology, 5, 7, 27. 9 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 115. 10 Leroi-​Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 25–​60. 11 White, “Introduction,” xvii–​xviii. 12 Leroi-​Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 396. 13 Lévi-​Strauss, “Reciprocity and Hierarchy,” 267–​8. 14 Lévi-​Strauss, The Story of Lynx, 63, 230–​1, 235, 238–​9. 15 Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, 119. 16 Lévi-​Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 132–​63. 17 Lévi-​Strauss, Totemism, 89–​90. 18 Lévi-​Strauss, The Savage Mind, 64–​5 (=​ Œuvres, 627–​8). 19 On which see Lévi-​Strauss, The Story of Lynx.

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to suppose, though, that, in anthropology, the interest in dual structures begins and ends with Lévi-​Strauss: Gregory Bateson’s study of “schismogenesis,”20 Roy Wagner’s take on the “reciprocity of perspectives” among inter alios the Usen Barok of Papua New Guinea,21 Marilyn Strathern’s approach to gender in Melanesia,22 and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s analysis of consanguinity and affinity in Amazonia23 respond to a concern with dual phenomena. Plus, it would be mistaken to follow here Deleuze and Guattari’s misguiding assimilation of the “dual” to the “dichotomous.”24 Understanding difference otherwise. –​According to Deleuze, there are two ways of approaching difference. One privileges identity over difference, in the sense that it takes the repetition of the identical to be difference’s norm. As per this view, depending on their degree of approximation to, or deviation from, their originals, things are identified as good or bad copies; or, what amounts to the same, as the true “copies” and “simulacra,” or “false pretenders,” of their originals.25 Not only does multiplicity fall to the trap of unity under this all-​too-​symmetric26 logic of “resemblance”;27 ontology, too, falls to the trap of morality, in the sense that what is, is replaced by what should be. The other way of approaching difference consists, according to Deleuze, in “reversing” such logic, i.e., in “mak[ing] the simulacra […] rise and […] affirm their rights among icons and copies.”28 Proclaiming “subversively”29 the “twilight of [all] idols,”30 like Nietzsche did, demands, says Deleuze, to vindicate “difference in itself”31 in order to establish “the Different as primary power.”32 Structuralism, and Lévi-​Strauss’s structural anthropology in particular, offers an approach to difference which does not fit within any of these mutually exclusive outlooks. It also affirms difference in its irreducibility, as that which is: “resemblance has no reality in itself,” writes Lévi-​Strauss, “it is only a particular instance of difference […] in which difference tends toward zero.”33 20 Bateson, Naven. 21 Wagner, Asiwinarong. 22 Strathern, The Gender of the Gift. 23 Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, 97–​138. 24 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 5–​6. 25 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 253–​62. 26 Cf. the critique of “symmetry” in Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 20. 27 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 257–​62. 28 Ibid., 262. 29 “There is no sin other than raising the ground and dissolving the form” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 29). 30 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 262. 31 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 28–​69. 32 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 262. Cf. Difference and Repetition, 30: “is difference really an evil in itself? Must the question […] [be] posed in these moral terms?”; 29: “To rescue difference from its maledictory state seems, therefore, to be the project of the philosophy of difference.” 33 Lévi-​Strauss, The Naked Man, 38.

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Appendix 2

Nevertheless, it posits difference as reciprocity –​and hence not only as bidirectional relatedness, but also as coupled identity –​in several cases (e.g., kinship, myth, and ritual) relevant for the study of human sociality.34 And it makes of analogy or translatable identity an essential resource without which knowledge would be impossible. In other words, instead of endorsing an either/​or approach to difference and identity, structural anthropology commits itself to their dual affirmation, and treats similarity and reciprocity as two particular modalities of the different. Translatability. –​It is not difficult to understand why Structuralism makes of analogy a must in the production of knowledge: unlike literature, which is often concerned, especially in its narrative forms, with exploring the singular, knowledge, says Lévi-​Strauss, amounts to the “quest” for approximate, i.e., relative or non-​totalising, “invariants” which prove capable of making sense of the otherwise unbounded multiplicity of the given.35 Thus, for example, in “geology,” he goes on to say, the “problem” is “to try to understand what is invariant in the tremendous diversity of landscapes, […] to be able to reduce a landscape to a finite number of geological layers and of geological operations.”36 It would be inappropriate, however, to speak of formalism: what is at stake in this –​as Lévi-​Strauss himself adds drawing on a biographical anecdote from his childhood –​is the possibility of what we are willing to call translatability: as an adolescent, I spent a great part of my leisure time drawing costumes and sets for opera. The problem there is exactly the same –​to try to express in one language, that is, the language of graphic arts and painting, something which also exists in music and in the libretto; that is, to try to reach the invariant property of a very complex set of codes (the musical code, the literary code, the artistic code). The problem is to find what is common to all of them. It’s a problem, one might say, of translation, of translating what is expressed in one language –​ or one code, if you prefer, but language is sufficient –​into expression in a different language.37 Pure identity makes translation superfluous, while pure difference makes it impossible; and even though translation is never fully accurate, it is –​as Leibniz dreamt –​always possible to some extent. Reinterpreting Heidegger’s “Fourfold” in modal terms. –​What would happen, then, if one were to apply Lévi-​Strauss’s principle of translatability to Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” and to assess the latter’s functionality with the help of comparative 34 Cf. Bowles and Gintis, A Cooperative Species. 35 Lévi-​Strauss, Myth and Meaning, 2. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.

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anthropology? Can a Darkhad shamanic gown display the “Fourfold” in the same way that Heidegger’s “jug” does? Or would it display it in a different way, but display it nonetheless? In other words, how can ontological difference, and hence ontological pluralism, be bridged without being dumped? Reinterpreting Heidegger’s “Fourfold” in modal terms, as the reciprocal articulation of the real (“earth”), the possible (“sky”), the given (“mortals”), and the giving (“immortals”), supplies the key to it, we hold. Supplementing ontology with epistemology. –​To speak of translatable ontologies requires to speak of translatable epistemologies, for any ontology reflects a particular way of semiotising the earth, of turning it meaningful, and of knowing it. That is to say, considerations about how the earth shines forth and raises up through worlds in the plural38 –​without turning its back on the permanent becoming of its flesh –​should go together with considerations about how different worlds display translatable modes of semiotising the earth, i.e., of turning the latter variously, yet analogously, meaningful and knowable. With this we do not only have our modal talisman complete, but our two talismans connected to each other.

38

Pace Heidegger, who generally speaks of “world” in the singular. Cf. however the intriguing reference in the Beiträge to different “styles” [Stile] of Da-​sein (Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 29 [=​ga 65: 34]).

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Author Index Adams, D. Q. 7n38 Adorno, Theodor W. 47n48, 159n43 Aeschylus 29n56, 74, 75n93, 99, 100n51, 107n98 Albert, Bruce 110n107, 113n124, 118, 118n149 Alberti, Benjamin 113n126 Albiac, Gabriel 155n16 Alker, Gwendolyn 142n121 Alonso Fernández Zoa 30n56 Althusser, Louis 1n1, 18, 151, 155, 155n16, 156, 163, 169, 169n2 Altizer, Thomas J. J. 106n88 Alvarez de Toledo, Sandra 150n160 Amaba, Roberto 99n43 Amagatsu, Ushio 138n83 Amin, Ash 168n98 Anaxagoras of Clazomenae 35 Anaximander of Miletus 34, 39, 41n10, 46, 48, 48n51, 53, 54, 54n69n72n80, 55, 55n91n96, 56n98, 178, 183, 187n103 Anaximenes of Miletus 34 Ando, Mitsuko 142 Arendt, Hannah 58n107 Aristotle 15n76, 24, 41, 41n13, 162, 162n63, 170, 180, 180n65 Aristoxenus of Tarentum 53n68 Asai, Jun-​ya 95n28 Aschheim, Steven E. 84n132 Ashikawa, Yoko 18, 122, 138, 142, 148 Artaud, Antonin 18, 86, 122, 131, 132, 132n5 4n55n56n58n59, 133, 134, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149 Auweele, Dennis Vanden 67n59 Awata, Satoshi 95n28 Babich, Babette 76n98, 80n118 Bach, Johann Sebastian 166 Bachelard, Gaston 1n1, 193n28 Badiou, Alain 47n48, 145n135, 160n52, 185n81 Baird, Bruce 134, 134n65, 145, 146n136n139, 147, 147n46 Balibar, Étienne 155n16, 169n2 Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) 17, 88, 96, 97, 97n35, 98 Bambach, Charles 173n32

Banes, Sally 129n34 Barber, Stephen 143, 143n124n126 Barringer, Judith M. 16, 43n28 Barthes, Roland 156 Barton, Carlin A. 53n68 Barua, Arati 62n18 Baruzi, Jean 164 Bataille, Georges 17, 22, 22n1n2, 60, 84, 84n141, 85, 85n143n144n145n147, 86, 87, 122, 133, 142, 142n123, 143, 143n126n128, 144n130, 145, 146, 147, 149 Bateson, Gregory 159, 159n46, 197, 197n20 Baumgarten, Alexander 79 Bay-​Cheng, Sarah 140n104n107 Beekes, Robert 48n52, 78n107, 79n115, 108n103 Beiser, Frederick C. 77, 77n103, 78, 78n 109, 81, 81n122 Belsey, Catherine 156n19 Benini, Stefania 99n41 Bennett, Jane 172n18 Bensusan, Hilan 9n54, 139n89, 177n51, 184n77, 188n108 Bensussan, Gérard 158n37 Berardi, Franco “Bifo,” 3, 3n19 Bergson, Henri 84, 86 Bernabé, Alberto 23n12 Bial, Henry 141n114 Bielik-​Robson, Agata 192n23 Bishop, Paul 70n75, 154n7 Blackwood, Michael 137n78, 138n87, 139n90, 144n129, 148n150 Blakeley Klein, Susan 141, 141n113 Blanco-​Wells, Gustavo 191n13 Blaser, Mario 110n112, 111, 111n118 Blok, Anders 10n57 Bodei, Remo 60, 60n1 Bogost, Ian 171n12 Borges, Jorge Luis 145n135 Boss, Medard 9n51 Bouillon, Anne 132n54 Bowles, Samuel 198n34 Boyarin, Daniel 53n68 Braidotti, Rosi 16n81 Brassier, Ray 185n83, 192n26

Author Index Braun, Bruce 171n14 Bremmer, Jan 29n55, 32n66 Broadhurst, Susan 141n112 Brotchie, Alastair 85n143 Bryant, Levi 14n68, 170n4 Bubandt, Nils 2n11 Buchanan, Brett 194n39 Buci-​Glucksmann, Christine 166n93 Burkert, Walter 5n30, 16 Cairns, Douglas L. 48n49, 49n54 Campbell, Scott M. 178, 178n56 Candelario, Rosemary 144n130 Carmody, Denise Lardner 146n138 Carmody, John Tully 146n138 Carneiro de Cunha, Manuela 155n15 Castaneda, Carlos 3, 3n20 Chaiklin, Sharon 127, 127n24 Charbonier, Pierre 2, 150 Châtelet, Gilles 125n9 Cheng, Meiling 141n116 Chogyū, Takayama 142 Cielemȩcka, Olga 192n15 Clarke, J. J. 62n18 Clastres, Pierre 47n48, 117n143, 176n46, 177, 177n49 Claxton, Susanne 98, 98n40, 107, 107n98 Cody, Gabrielle H. 141n111 Colli, Giorgio 16, 23n10, 24n18, 29n54, 40n6, 41n10, 56n103, 63n25, 70n70 Comenetz, Michael 60n1 Coole, Diana 14n72, 172n19 Cornford, F. M. 35n84 Corriero, Emilio Carlo 188n107 Cosgrove, Brian 186n88 Cosmopoulos, Michael B. 23n10, 24n19 Courtieu, Gilles 28n45 Creuzer, Georg Friedrich 8n45, 66n44, 154n7, 189 Critchley, Simon 185n83 Crosby, Donald 173n34 Cross, Stephen 62n18 Curtin, Catherine 144n129 Cusa, Nicholas of 106 D’Iorio, Paolo 63n25 Dagognet, François 94n21 Daigle, Christrine 192n15

241 Damasio, Antonio 124, 124n3, 130, 130n45n47, 132 Daniels, Paul Raimond 63n24 Danowski, Déborah 110n110 Danz, Christian 63n26 Davis, Whitney 80, 80n121, 81 de la Cadena, Marisol 110n112 Deacon, Terrence W. 9n54, 95, 95n25 Debaene, Vincent 156, 156n27, 157n31 Debussy, Claude 89, 90 Déléage, Pierre 177n51 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 2n12, 6n33, 14, 14n74, 16n83, 17, 18, 22, 22n2, 32n65, 33, 35, 35n92, 44n34, 59, 60, 70, 70n72, 71, 73n85, 74n85, 83, 83n129n131, 85, 86, 86n151n152n154, 87, 89, 90, 91, 91n3n4, 92, 92n9n16, 93, 93n19, 95, 96n30, 99, 104n79, 119n155, 123, 125, 132, 132n54n60, 135, 135n69n72, 136, 138, 138n85, 139, 140, 140n98n99n102, 147n147, 148n151, 151, 155n13, 156, 158, 158n38n41n42, 160n51, 166, 166n90n92, 175n39n40n41, 176, 177n47, 185n81, 186, 186n88n89n90n93, 188n108, 197, 197n24n25n26n27n29n30n31n32 Deligny, Fernand 150, 150n160 Delli Colli, Tonino 99 Derrida, Jacques 6, 6n34, 151, 152, 156, 157, 157n30n32n33n34, 158, 158n37, 159, 159n43, 160n52, 186, 186n94, 187, 187n95n97n102, 188n108 Descartes, René 2, 92n10, 112 Descola, Philippe 2n9, 8n43, 67n53 Detienne, Marcel 40n5, 189, 189n113n115 Diano, Carlo 60, 60n2, 61, 61n7n10, 185n80 Dias, Brian G. 136n74 Dietrich, B. C. 16, 23, 23n11, 24, 24n16, 25n22n25, 26, 26n30n31, 40n1 Dillon, M. C. 93n20 Dillon, Matthew 40n2, 41n9 Dodds, E. R. 43, 43n29 Doja, Albert 156, 156n22 Donato, Eugenio 157n30 Doran, Robert 156, 156n28 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 89, 90, 91, 92 Dumézil, Georges 7n38, 156 Duque, Félix 154n7 Durand, Gilbert 189, 189n115

242  Durkheim, Émile 153, 153n4 Duval, Jean-​François 106n87 Eckersall, Peter 143n124 Eckhart, Meister 106 Eco, Umberto 163 Eliade, Mircea 117n145, 136n76 Empedocles of Akragas 35 Engelland, Chad 194n39 Escobar, Arturo 110n112 Esplund, Lance 97, 34 Euripides 29n56, 45n41, 46, 61n6, 99 Fabião, Eleonora 140n6n9 Farías, Ignacio 10n57 Ferrando, Francesca 172n16n17 Ferraris, Maurizio 73n85 Feuerbach, Ludwig 75 Feyerabend, Paul 53n68, 58n108 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 102n63, 103n67, 154n7 Fink, Eugen 27n43 Fletcher, Alice Cummings 117, 117n146 Foley, Helene P. 23n13 Fontenrose, Joseph 41n12 Forth, Christopher E. 84n137n138n140 Foster, Daniel H. 74n90 Foucault, Michel 17, 60, 81, 81n125, 83, 83n127n130, 125, 156 Fowles, Severin 113n126 François, Arnaud 84n139 Fraleigh, Sondra 121, 125n12n13, 126n17, 127, 127n22n25n27, 128, 128n31, 129n37, 131n52, 137n80, 140n102, 144n132, 146n137, 149, 149n157 Fränkel, Hermann 61n9 Frisk, Hjalmar 45n42 Frost, Samantha 14n72, 172n19 Galletti, Marina 85n143n144 Gan, Elaine 2n11 Geertz, Clifford 113n126, 157n32 Gemerchak, Christopher M. 85n147 Genet, Jean 18, 86, 122, 133, 142, 143, 144, 144n131, 145, 145n134, 146, 148, 149 Genosko, Gary 118n151, 140n97n98n100n10 1n102 Gertz, Nolen 173n34n37

Author Index Gibbs, Robert 158n37 Gilbert, Scott 9n54 Gimbutas, Marija 27n40 Gintis, Herbert 198n34 Glazunov, Grigory 137n79 Glowczewski, Barbara 15n75 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 66n47, 80 Golden, Leon 147n142 Gough, Tim 159n44 Graf, Fritz 29n55, 40n1 Gramsci, Antonio 47n48 Grant, Iain Hamilton 14n71 Griffith, R. Drew 16, 51, 51n61, 52n64, 53n67, 147n142 Grossman, Evelyne 86, 86n150, 132n57 Gržinić, Marina 142n117 Guattari, Félix 1, 2n12, 3, 3n17, 6n33, 9, 9n53, 14, 18, 19, 27n39, 35n92, 89, 92n9, 118, 118n151, 119n151n152, 120, 121, 123, 129, 129n36, 130, 130n41n42n43, 131n51, 132n54, 134, 134n67, 135n71, 139, 140, 140n99, 147n147, 148, 148n153, 149, 149n159, 150, 150n160, 154, 154n8n9, 160n51, 164n74, 166n90, 175n40n41, 177n47, 186n88n90, 197, 197n24 Gueroult, Martial 164 Guignebert, Charles 34n76 Gustafson, Susan E. 81, 81n124 Guthrie, W. K. C. 24n21 Gutman, Huck 83n128 Haas, Andrew 178, 178n54 Hallward, Peter 22n2 Hanly, Peter 120n157 Haraway, Donna J. 1n3, 10n57, 13, 13n61, 27n40, 95n27, 139, 132n92, 171n14, 172n21 Hard, Robin 37n103 Harman, Graham 14n68, 170, 170n4n5n6n7n 8n9, 184n76, 188n108 Harriman, Benjamin 35n85 Hart, Thomas 136, 136n75 Harvey, Graham 181n71 Haskell, David George 9n54 Hassan, Ihab 187, 187n104, 189, 189n112n114 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 8, 68n64, 186 Heidegger, Martin v, 1, 1n2n4n6, 3, 3n15, 5, 5n31, 8, 8n45n46, 9, 9n51n52, 10,

243

Author Index Heidegger, Martin (cont.) 11, 11n58, 12, 14, 15, 15n79, 17, 18, 19, 23n8, 27n43, 34n80n82, 35, 36n96, 42n21, 45n43, 52n65, 59, 63n23n26, 70, 70n71, 71, 74n85, 87n158, 89, 98, 98n37, 100, 100n52, 101, 101n55n56n57, 102, 102n58n59n61, 103, 103n64n68n71, 104n73, 105, 105n80n81n82n83n8 4n85, 106, 106n87n93, 107, 107n94, 114, 114n132n133n134n135, 115, 115n139, 116, 118n151, 119, 120, 120n156n158, 152, 153, 155, 159, 164, 164n74, 166, 167, 169, 170, 170n5n11, 171n12, 173, 173n31n32n33, 174, 178, 178n53, 179, 179n57n58n59n61, 180, 180n62n63n66n68, 181, 186, 191, 191n1n2n3n4n5n6n7n8n11n12, 192, 192n17n19, 193, 193n28n29n34, 194, 194n36n39n40n41, 198, 199, 199n38 Henare, Amiria 115n140 Henkes, Andrew J. 142n117 Henrichs, Albert 29n56 Heraclitus of Ephesus 5n31, 8, 8n42n45n50, 15, 15n80, 21, 24, 24n21, 25n21, 27, 27n42, 34, 34n81n82, 37, 39, 41, 41n7n10, 42, 42n20n21n23, 46, 46n45, 53, 54, 54n7 0n71n74n75n76n77n78n79n80n81n82 n83n84, 55, 55n85n86n87n94n95n97, 56n99n100n101n102, 68n64, 70, 70n76, 71n76, 76, 76n97, 108n104, 154n7, 178, 182, 183, 189, 191, 191n11, 193 Herron, John P. 112n123 Hesiod 13n60, 41n12, 44, 65n43 Heywood, Paolo 110, 110n111, 113n126 Hijikata, Tatsumi 18, 122, 131, 133, 133n63, 134, 137, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 147n147, 148 Hippolytus of Rome 21 Hiruta, Sanae 143, 144n129 Hlavajova, Maria 16n81 Holbraad, Martin 100n48, 110n113, 113, 113n126, 115n140, 177n50 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich 8, 8n44n45, 45n41, 68, 68n60n62n63n64, 80, 99n43, 101, 102, 154n7, 173, 173n30n32, 185, 189, 191, 192, 193 Hollander, Dana 158n37 Hollinrake, Roger 75n92 Homans, Jennifer 128n32

Homer 23, 26, 28, 37n104, 39, 41, 41n12, 42n24n25, 46, 49n56, 59, 60, 61, 98, 98n38, 108, 154n7, 189 Horlacher, Rebekka 76n95 Hornblow, Michael 133n63, 137n77 Hotta, Takashi 95n28 Huberman, Jenny 192n20 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 45n42 Humphrey, Caroline 117, 117n142n143 Hutton, Patrick H. 83n128 Hyland, Drew H. 104, 105n80 Inata, Naomi 147n147 Ingold, Tim 3, 3n16, 107, 108, 108n99, 139, 176n38, 190, 190n116 Irigaray, Luce 119n152 Ishii, Baku 122, 142 Isler-​Kerényi, Cornelia 16, 32, 32n68, 33n71, 66n44 Itō, Michio 142 Jedrzejewski, Franck 140n98 Jordan, Alex L. 95n28 Joyce, James 84 185, 186 Kahn, Charles H. 24n21, 25n21 Kain, Philip J. 70n73 Kant, Immanuel 14, 67, 68, 102, 104, 104n73, 114, 154n7, 174, 184 Kāwika Tenga, Ty P. 153n3 Keck, Fréderic 19n93, 27n41, 156, 157n23n27, 158n40, 160, 161n58 Kennedy, Rebecca Futo 42n24 Kerényi, Károly (Carl) 16, 23n10, 24n15, 25n24, 29, 29n53, 53n68 Ketterin, Emil 179n57 Kim-​Chi Mercier, Lucie 18, 164, 164n70 Kirk, Andrew G. 112n123 Kirk, Geoffrey Stephen 24n21, 189n111 Klossowski, Pierre 60, 85, 86, 86n149n151, 87 Knowles, Adam 179n57 Kohda, Masanori 95n28 Kohn, Eduardo 95, 95n26, 194n37 Konrad, Franz-​Michael 69n66 Kopenawa, Davi 109, 110n107, 113n124, 118, 118n149 Krämer, Hans J. 6n33 Krell, David Farrell 68n62

244  Kuniyoshi, Kazuko 143n124 Kurzweil, Ray 192n20 Lacan, Jacques 25n21, 47n48, 80, 80n119, 87, 122, 147, 148, 148n151, 150n160, 156, 170n9 Laclau, Ernesto 47n48 Lacoue-​Labarthe, Philippe 58n107 Laidlaw, James 113n126 Land, Nick 169n2 Lapidus, Roxanne 84n139 Larson, Jennifer 40n1 Laruelle, François 17, 22n2, 60, 87, 87n158, 145n135, 157n29 Latour, Bruno 2n11, 110n110, 172, 172n28n29 Lautréamont, Compte de 133, 144 Lazzarato, Maurizio 125n8 Le Rider, Jacques 69n67 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 111, 111n120, 112, 112n121, 152, 154, 161, 164, 165, 165n80, 166, 166n94, 167, 198 Leloup, Jean-​Yves 146n138 Leroi-​Gourhan, André 128, 128n30, 172, 172n23, 195, 195n6, 196, 196n10n12 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude v, 3, 3n18, 6, 6n35, 7, 7n36n37, 10, 11, 18, 19, 26n30, 27n41, 30, 30n58n62n63, 60n1, 111, 111n117, 113, 113n126, 117, 117n143n147, 120, 120n159, 151, 152, 153, 153n2, 155, 155n11, 156, 157, 157n32n34, 158, 158n35n36n40, 159, 160, 160n52n53n54n55n56n57, 161, 161n59n61, 162, 162n61n62, 163, 163n68, 164, 164n69n73, 174, 177n48, 180n69, 195, 195n1n2n3n4n5n7, 196, 196n13n14n16 n17n18n19, 197, 197n33, 198, 198n35 Lévinas, Emmanuele 187, 187n99n100n101 Levine, Debra 136, 140, 140n108n110 Ligotti, Thomas 192n26 Liubokhynets, Olha 58n108 Livy 30n56 Llanera, Tracy 173n36 Loeb, Paul 75n93 Louie, Kenway 95n28 Lovatt, Helen 64n35 Löwith, Karl 73n85 Luchte, James 192n23, 193, 193n27 Lyotard, Jean-​François 157n32 Macherey, Pierre 85n146

Author Index Mackay, Robin 9n54 Macksey, Richard 157n30 Magun, Artemy 47n48 Maingois, Michel 99n45 Mallory, J. P. 7n38 Maniglier, Patrice 1, 1n1, 18, 27n41, 45n42, 151, 155, 155n12n13n17, 156, 156n18n21, 182n74 Manning, Erin 150n160 Maranda, Pierre 156n25, 158n40 Margulis, Lynn 88 Martin, Luther H. 83n128 Martin, Nick 84n135 Martin-​Ordas, Gema 95n28 Martínez Marzoa, Felipe 35n90, 46n46, 73n85, 154n7 Marranca, Bonnie 142n119 Marshall, Yvonne 113n126 Marx, Karl 75, 77, 186 Masakatsu, Gunji 147n145 Masson, André, 85, 85n143n144 Masson-​Sekine, Nourit 142n122, 149n158 Mattéi, Jean-​François 114n133, 115n136 May, Reinhard 106n87 McGilchrist, Iain 12n59 McGinley, Paige 141n116 McGrath, Hugh P. 60n1 McGushin, Edward F. 83n128 Melissus of Samos 22, 35, 35n85n88n89 Meillassoux, Quentin 9n54, 14, 14n69, 168n99, 170, 170n10, 188n106, 192n23, 196n9 Mellamphy, Dan 32n67, 87, 87n159, 172n20 Mellamphy, Nandita Biswas 32n67, 87, 87n159, 172n20 Melo, Carla 143n127 Mendelssohn, Moses 78, 80 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 17, 35, 88, 89, 90, 90n1, 92, 92n10, 93, 93n20, 95, 96n30, 97n33 Meyer, Richard 80, 80n121 Michaud, Eric 58n107 Michaux, Henri 86 Míguez Barciela, Aida 61n8, 81n123, 98n39 Millington, Barry 75n91 Milner, Jean-​Claude 152, 156n18, 164, 164n72 Mishima, Yukio 122, 142, 143 Mitchell, Andrew J. 144n133 Montinari, Mazzino 62, 63n25, 70n70

245

Author Index Moore, Gregory 63n26 Moore, Ian Alexander 106n86 Moore, Jerry D. 155n14 Moritz, L. A. 176, 176n45 Morrison, Elise 140n106 Morton, Timothy 9n56, 14n68, 171, 171n12n14n15, 188n105 Mosko, Mark S. 158n40 Mugerauer, Robert 2n11, 16, 173n32 Müller, Jan-​Werner 47n48 Müller, Karl Otfried 66n44 Müller-​Lauter, Wolfgang 84n133 Murasawa, Mahoro 130n41 Murray, Peter Durno 63n24 Murray, Ros 132n53 Myers, Perry 69n66 Mykova, Marina F. 68n65 Mylonas, George E. 23n10 Nadaud, Stéphane 87n158 Nancy, Jean-​Luc 58n107, 192, 192n23n24 Negarestani, Reza 14n71, 192n21 Neher, André 181, 181n72 Nelson, Sara 171n14 Nesbitt Oppel, Frances 57n105 Neske, Günther 179n57 Neyrat, Frédéric 48n50, 96n28 Nicely, Megan V. 149 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 6, 6n34, 17, 22, 22n2n3n4n6, 23n8, 34, 47, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76n95, 80, 80n118n120, 84, 85, 86, 87, 122, 132n58, 135n70, 142, 143, 145, 154n7, 183, 185, 185n85, 189, 197 Nonnus of Panopolis 64n35 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) 106n86 O’Dell, Kathy 141n115, 142n118 Olgiati, Francesco 164 Onishi, Sayoko 137n79, 148, 148n152 Ōno, Kazuo 18, 122, 135n68, 142, 149 Oteiza, Jorge 46, 46n47, 89, 90 Otto, Walter F. 16, 28, 28n46n51, 40n3, 42, 42n26, 44n38, 48n50n53, 51n59, 56n104 Ortega, Francisco 124n5 Osvath, Matthias 95n28 Oury, Jean 130n46, 132n59

Pabst, G. W. 90 Paglia, Camille 12, 12n59 Parkes, Graham 106n87 Parmenides of Elea 15, 15n78n80, 34, 35, 39, 41, 41n10n14n15, 42, 42n16n22, 46, 49, 49n55, 52n66, 53, 54, 54n73n74n80n82, 55, 55n86n88n92n93, 74, 105, 106, 119n151, 178, 183, 188, 191 Parnet, Claire 148n151 Parr, Adrian 140n96n99n100n101 Pascal, Blaise 170n10 Pausanias 57, 57n106 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 17, 88, 89, 98, 99, 99n41n 42n43n44n45n46, 100, 100n50, 143n124 Pedersen, Morten Axel 100n48, 110n113, 113, 113n126, 115, 116n141 Pelbart, Peter Pál 124, 125n7n9 Pestalozzi, Karl 69n67 Pindar 24, 24n20, 46, 56n100, 60, 108, 192 Pine, Lisa 58n107 Pineda Saldaña, Carlos Alberto 106n90 Piñero, Antonio 58n108 Plato 7n36, 16n80, 24, 24n17, 25n21, 34, 35, 35n86, 43, 44n34, 46, 71n76, 76, 76n97, 78, 78. 108, 79, 79n114, 80, 96, 96n31, 104, 105, 186, 188 Plotinus 35 Plunka, Gene A. 146n140n142 Plutarch of Chaeronea 4, 4n28, 16, 41, 41n8n11n12, 56 Poirier, Sylvie 15n75, 108n101, 109, 109n105 Pokorny, Julius 45n42 Pollard, David 67n57 Polt, Richard 1n5, 58n108 Porphyry 35, 154, 166n95, 167n97 Porres Caballero, Silvia 30n56 Porter, James I. 154n7 Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 10n57, 139, 139n94 Rainer, Yvonne 129n35 Raven, John Earle 24n21, 189n111 Reddekop, Jarrad 2n10 Redfield, James M. 44n37, 51, 51n60, 53n68, 61n9 Rée, Paul 64n36 Reich, John J. 64n90 Rey, Jean-​Michel 60n1 Rentmeester, Casey 110n110

246  Ressler, Kerry J. 136n74 Ricart, Ender 113n126 Ricoeur, Paul 102n60 Rieff, Philip 23, 23n8 Röckel, August 74 Roden, David 172n16 Rojcewicz, Richard 193, 193n32 Rosenzweig, Franz 158n37, 181, 181n73 Rouch, Jean 129, 129n33 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 45n42, 78, 79n112 Rowland, Susan 34n78 Russell, Bertrand 164 Ruzzolini, Giuseppe 99 Sade, Marquis de 85n43, 86, 133, 144 Sagan, Dorion 88 Salmon, Gildas 2n9 Salomé, Lou 64n36 Sandywell, Barry 43, 43n32, 176, 176n44 Santos-​Granero, Fernando 115, 115n140 Sartre, Jean Paul 97n33, 129, 144, 144n133, 160n52 Sas, Miryam 134, 134n64 Scheller, Sophie 99n41 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 14n71, 16, 22, 35, 36, 36n93n94n97, 37, 37n98, 38n107, 63n26, 154n7, 169, 169n3 Schiano, Sierra 23n14 Schiller, Friedrich von 70, 70n75, 78, 79n112, 80 Schlegel, Friedrich 64n34, 76n98, 154n7 Schofield, M. 24n21 Schopenhauer, Arthur 22, 22n6, 59, 62, 62n20, 65, 66, 66n49, 67, 75, 154n7 Schrempp, Gregory 114, 114n30 Schuermann, Eva 100n47 Scott, Gary Alan 79n113 Scubla, Lucien 156, 156n24, 158n40, 159n46 Seaford, Richard 33, 33n75 Sefrin-​Weis, Heike 162n63 Serres, Michel 18, 110n110, 112, 112n122, 113, 152, 164, 164n71, 165, 165n71n78n79n81, 172, 172n25n29, 173n29 Severino, Emanuele 15, 15n76n77n80, 55n93, 106, 106n92, 173, 180, 180n64, 193n30 Shapiro, H. Alan 42n24 Sheehan, Thomas 89, 106, 106n89n91

Author Index Sheets-​Johnstone, Maxine 94, 94n22n24, 122, 124, 124n4, 125n10, 126, 126n18, 135 Shelburne, Walter A. 3n20 Shibusawa, Tatsuhiko 147n144 Simondon, Gilbert 172, 172n24 Skafish, Peter 2n9 Slote, Sam 185, 185n87 Sloterdijk, Peter 105n84 Smith, Morton 22n2 Snell, Bruno 192, 192n18 Solmsen, F. 35, 35n85n87 Sophocles 21, 39, 52, 64n34, 76n98, 99, 100 Spencer, Stewart 75n91 Spinoza, Baruch 18, 35, 138, 151, 155, 155n16, 166, 166n94, 175n39 Spivey, Nigel 42n27, 43n30 Srnicek, Nick 14n68, 170n4 Stagoll, Cliff 140n99 Stambaugh, Joana 192n23 Starrs, Roy 143n124 Steeves, James B 123n2, 126n16 Stendahl (Marie-​Henri Beyle) 89 Stengers, Isabelle 10n57, 173n29 Stephenson, R. H. 70n75 Stiegler, Barbara 17, 87, 87n161 Stiegler, Bernard 172, 172n26 Stiles, Christine 140n103n105, 141n112n115, 142n118 Stojnić, Aneta 142n117 Strahler Holzapfel, Amy 142n121 Strathern, Marilyn 197, 197n22 Swanson, Heather 2n11 Szerszynski, Bronislaw 2n7, 172n27 Takaya, Eguchi 122, 142 Takeyama, Tomohiro 95n28 Tanaka, Hirozaku 95n28 Tanaka, Min 18, 122, 130, 130n41, 135n71, 139, 148 Tanzer, Mark 194n39 Tartaglia, James 173n35 Taunton, Gwendolyn 4n29 Taylor-​Perry, Rosemarie 23n9 Thales of Miletus 34 Theognis of Megara 59, 65, 65n43, 66, 69n68 Thevet, André 161n61 Thomas, Arden 142n120

247

Author Index Thomas-​Fogiel, Isabelle 172n22 Thormann, Imre 136 fig.13, 137n79, 148, 148n52 Timofeeva, Oxana 44n35 Tobias, Tobi 138, 138n88 Tolstoy, Leo 9n51 Tomlinson, Matt 153n3 Torres Gregory, Wanda 103n68 Trawny, Peter 173n30 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 2n11, 171n13 Tuan, Yi-​Fu 10n57 Tweed, Thomas A. 123, 123n1 Ulfers, Friedrich 185n84 Uno, Kuniichi 148n149 Ure, Michael 70n74 Valentim, Marco Antonio 114n132, 188n108 Valéry, Paul 60, 60n1 Van Bommel, Bas 69n66 Van der Kolk, Bessel 128n29, 130, 131n48 Végsö, Roland 9n55 Vernant, Jean-​Pierre 52n63 Viala, Jean 135n68, 142n122, 149n158 Vidal-​Naquet, Pierre 52n63 Vieweg, Klaus 63n26 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 2n9, 30n57, 100n49, 110n110, 111, 111n115n119, 114, 114n128, 115n137, 137n81, 152, 156, 156n26, 163, 166, 167n96, 194n38, 196n15, 197, 197n23 Volpe, Paola 37n106 Voltaire (François-​Marie Arouet) 170n10 Wagner, Richard 74, 75, 75n92 Wagner, Roy vi, 3, 3n14, 4, 4n27, 6n35, 7n39n41, 8n42n43, 12, 13, 13n62, 17, 18, 59, 67n53, 88, 89, 102n60, 104, 104n77n78n79, 107, 107n97, 110, 110n113, 111n114n116, 113n125, 114, 114n129, 115n138, 119, 119n153, 120, 127n26, 152, 152n1, 153, 153n5, 159, 159n45n47n49, 160, 160n50, 164n74, 169n1, 176n46, 177n52, 195, 196n8, 197, 197n21 Waguri, Yukio 137n78

Wastell, Sari 115n140 Watkin, Christopher 18, 165, 165n77n79 Waychoff, Brianne 138n82 Weber, Max 9n51 Weiner, James F. 114, 114n131 Wendland, Aaron James 179n58 Welton, William A. 79n113 West, Harry W. 177n50 White, Randall 196n11 Wildberg, Christian 25n21 Williams, James 157n29 Willow, Anna J. 192n14 Wilson, Matthew A. 95n28 Wilson, Sarah 86n151 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 17, 59, 60, 64n34, 69, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 87, 154n7 Winkler, Rafael 192n23 Withy, Katherine 178n55 Witmore, Christopher 113n126 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 104, 104n74, 107, 107n96, 111n115, 114, 151, 162n67, 176n43 Wolfe, Cary 192n22 Wolff, Christian 79 Wolff, Francis 87n161, 104n76 Woodard, Ben 13, 13n63, 14 Woodward, Ashley 85, 86n148, 185n83 Wright, Edmond 138n86 Xenophon 78 Yeats, W. B. 84 Yoshioka, Yumiko 140n102, 148 Young, Eugene B. 104n79, 140n97n98n100n 101n102 Young, Julian 75n92 Zabala, Santiago 184n78 Zaera-​Polo, Alejandro 10n57 Zahavi, Dan 130n46, 132 Zhestovskaya, Natalia 137n79 Zhou, Yue 84n136, 85, 85n142 Zimmerman, Michael E. 179n58 Zimmerman, Nadya 143

Subject Index absolute 143, 147n148 absolute being 37, 44 absolute contingency 186, 196 absolute identity/​difference 165, 166 absolute knowledge 113 absolute object/​subject 169 absolute will 62 accelerationism 16, 181 Achilles 46, 50, 51, 59, 60, 61, 165n80 actual 6n32, 12, 37n98, 89, 90, 91, 92, 118n151, 170, 171 Adonis 26n26 Advaita Vedanta 62 Aeneas 49 Aeolic 37n104 affects 98, 99, 137, 138, 139 Agamemnon 46 agora 46, 47 Alexander the Great 62 alter-​modernity 181, 182 American culture 143 amorality 122, 143 analogy 11, 167, 198 anarchy 14n73, 84, 132, 187, 188, 189n112 Ancient Greek art 16, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 76, 77 Ancient Greek culture 4, 5, 7n36, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64n34, 66n44, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 120, 129, 146n142, 147n142, 166, 176, 177, 180, 188n108, 193 ancient Near East 25 animism 122, 134, 139 Animist 139 Anthropocene 18, 172 anti-​correlationisn 179 Antigone 32 aorgic 68, 154n7 Aphrodite 26n26, 27n36, 44n38 Apollo among the Dorians 5 Apollo among the extra-​moderns 107, 108, 109, 110, 120 Apollo and Achilles 61

Apollo and Artemis 48n50, 49, 107, 120, 180 Apollo and Athena 42n24, 48, 49, 53, 64, 100n54 Apollo and being 4, 6, 16, 41, 42, 53, 54, 55, 56, 189 Apollo and the birth of philosophy 16, 39, 41, 42, 42n25, 53, 54, 55, 56 Apollo and contemporary philosophy 3, 18, 60, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 152, 153, 156, 157, 159, 160, 165, 172, 173, 174, 182, 188, 189 Apollo and Hyacinthus 26, 58 Apollo and justice 5, 47, 48, 52, 54, 55, 56 Apollo and knowledge 30, 51, 52 Apollo and language 25, 93 Apollo and life’s duality 4, 6n32, 61, 183 Apollo and meaning 17, 18, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 120 Apollo and modern philosophy 64n34, 154n7, 165, 165n80 Apollo and Pierrot 165, 165n80 Apollo and the earth 5, 12, 16, 17, 40, 56, 57, 58, 93, 94, 95, 96, 107, 120, 182 Apollo and the polis 46, 183 Apollo and the sun 5, 12 Apollo and thought 13 fig.4, 17, 41, 42, 42n24, 53, 54, 55, 56, 89 Apollo and tragedy 16, 39, 51, 52, 53 Apollo and Zeus 26, 58, 100, 105 Apollo and αἰδώς 47, 48, 49, 57, 100, 180 Apollo and lόγος 16, 42 Apollo and ὕβρις 39, 42, 46, 48, 51, 53, 55 Apollo and φύσις 16, 49, 98, 105, 107, 120, 180 Apollo as Ἀπέλλων 5 Apollo as a conceptual persona 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 18, 189 Apollo as Dionysus’s twin 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13 fig.4, 16, 18, 22, 22n4n5, 26, 39, 40, 56, 57, 57 fig.9, 58, 58n108, 63n24, 93, 131, 147, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 174, 182, 183 Apollo as Oὔλιος 48 Apollo at Delphi 4, 26, 40, 183 Apollo in Heidegger 105, 120 Apollo in Nietzsche 3, 17, 22n4n5, 59, 63n24, 65, 66, 67, 69n67, 72, 74

Subject Index Apollo in Schlegel 64n34, 165n80 Apollo in the Iliad 46, 49, 50, 51, 98 Apollo in Winckelmann 17, 60, 64n34, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 154n7 Apollo Velvedere 76, 77 Apollo’s lyre/​harp 8, 25n23, 61, 89, 96 Apollo’s motto(s) 30, 51, 78 Apollo’s oracle 16, 40, 41, 41n7n9n12, 52, 58, 183 Apollo’s seers 40, 41, 46 Apollo’s statuary 3, 42, 47, 48 Ares 27n36, 50 Ariadne 86 Artemis 45, 48, 48n50, 49, 65, 100n54, 107, 120, 180 asceticism 14, 53n68, 77, 80, 83 Athena 13, 28, 29n54, 38n107, 42n24, 44n38, 48, 53, 64, 64n34, 100n54 Athens 23, 26, 26n29, 29n56, 43n33, 44, 57, 80 Attic funerary art 45 Attic sculpture 43 Attic style 24 Attic tragedy 16, 31, 39, 51, 81, 182 Attic vases 28 Attic παιδεία 76 Attis 26n26 autopoiesis 2, 3, 11, 12, 30, 120, 191 awe 14, 53, 99, 100, 115, 126, 174, 180 Aztecs 120 becoming 4, 6, 15, 16, 18, 62, 64, 70, 70n76, 74, 75, 86, 87, 92n9, 120, 137, 138, 140, 140n99, 142, 149, 189, 199 being 2, 4, 5, 6, 15, 15n80, 16, 17, 18, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 37n98, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 63n23, 70, 73n85, 74, 86, 87, 89, 92n9, 98, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 120, 125, 129, 132, 135, 151, 154, 155, 159, 162, 172, 173, 178, 179, 180, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 194 being 106 beings v, vi, 5, 7n38, 15, 21, 23n14, 25, 30, 33, 35, 39, 43, 53n68, 69n69, 82, 83, 88, 93, 94, 107, 110, 112, 114, 121, 128, 131, 132, 135, 182, 194 being-​there 1, 125, 183

249 being-​with 1, 114 binary 11, 12, 115, 189, 196 biologism 59, 63n26, 67n53 birth of philosophy 16, 39, 41, 42, 42n25, 53, 54, 55, 56 body vi, 6, 7n38, 12, 17, 34, 83, 92, 94, 95, 97n35, 117, 121, 122, 123, 123n2, 124n2, 125, 125n7n12, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 137n79, 138, 139, 140n102, 141, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 183, 189, 196 body resonance 140n102, 148 Body Weather 148 body without organs 86, 122, 132, 133, 139, 146, 149 Bororo 161n61, 177, 177n51, 195 Buddhism 62, 106n87, 146, 187 butō 12, 18, 121, 122, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 182 Calchas 40, 41, 46 cannibal cogito 155n15 care 2, 6, 11, 14, 15, 56, 102, 108, 115, 174, 189 care of the self 60, 81, 82, 125 Cartesianism 14, 92 Chaos 27, 27n40, 44 chaos 5, 168n99, 189 chaosmosis 27, 27n39 Charites 65 chiastic thinking 8, 11, 57, 115, 154, 189, 195, 196, 196n8, 197 Christian God 34, 54n68, 63, 85n144, 106, 145, 147, 185, 187, 192, 193 Christianity 16, 33, 34, 52, 53n68, 54n68, 59, 63n26, 77, 80, 81, 82, 94n24, 105, 196, 123n2, 144, 145, 146, 147, 178, 179, 181, 192, 193 chthonic 27, 40, 66n44, 174 cinema 90, 91, 100 cinema of poetry 17, 89, 99 compassion 4, 5, 25, 39, 57, 58, 91, 146 compossibility 5, 152, 168, 89 conceptual personae 1, 2, 3, 13, 165 connectivity 171, 172, 173 containment 3, 68, 151, 152, 153, 159 contingency 1, 2, 2n54, 11, 113, 168n98, 181, 184, 186, 192, 196

250  convention 7, 123n2, 127, 134, 141, 147, 153n3, 159, 196 cooked 30 correlationism 2, 179, 184 cosmopolitics 9, 10, 10 fig.2, 152, 168 Counter-​Reformation 77 Coyote v, 3, 151, 153, 196 crime 146, 149 Cronus 26, 27n36 cruelty 143, 146, 147, 148, 150 culture 7, 8n43, 11, 12, 67n53, 85, 152, 155n14, 196 Cybele 26n26 dance 3, 12, 17, 18, 25n21, 53, 108, 118, 121, 22, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 182, 183 Darkhad 89, 115, 116, 116 fig.11, 167, 177, 181, 199 Darkness 27n40, 44n38, 57, 58 darkness 4, 6, 44, 44n38, 45, 46, 48, 102, 131, 133, 136, 147, 154, 170n10, 172 Death 27n40 death 25, 25n21, 27, 32, 33, 44, 45, 46, 48n52, 61, 62, 76, 88, 95, 101, 114, 122, 131, 136, 143, 145, 193 death drive 69, 70 death of God 34, 85n144, 145, 185, 187, 192, 193 defiguration 25n23, 86 Delphi 4, 26, 40, 41n7n12, 51, 51n61, 58, 78, 120, 183 Demeter 23, 24, 26, 27n35 demiurge v, 3, 151 demons 33, 166n95 Desert 139 destiny 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182 determination 3, 12, 24, 27, 36, 42n24, 68, 100n51, 114, 155, 180, 186, 187, 189n112 deterritorialisation 6n33, 134, 139 difference 6, 11, 12, 15, 21, 27, 68, 71, 98n28n31, 110, 111, 113, 132n58, 138, 140, 140n99, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 186, 189n112, 197, 198, 199 Diomedes 49, 50 Dionysus among the extra-​moderns 30, 120 Dionysus and becoming 4, 6, 16, 18, 70, 74, 86, 87, 120, 189 Dionysus and being 22, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38

Subject Index Dionysus and the body 121, 122, 124n2, 125, 126, 127, 152 Dionysus and contemporary philosophy 3, 17, 18, 22n2, 60, 84, 85, 86, 87, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 165, 172, 174, 182, 188, 189 Dionysus and dance 25n21, 121, 135, 138, 147 Dionysus and Demeter 23, 24, 25 Dionysus and Hades 24, 24n21, 25n21, 37, 38 Dionysus and Harlequin 165 Dionysus and knowledge 24, 29n54, 40, 96 Dionysus and liberal culture 23 Dionysus and life’s duality 4, 5, 21, 23, 24, 25, 25n24, 30, 30n60, 39, 45n39, 58, 61, 121, 122, 135, 182 Dionysus and Medusa 64 Dionysus and modern philosophy 64n34, 154n7 Dionysus and Persephone 23, 24, 25 Dionysus and Plutus 23, 24, 26 Dionysus and Poseidon 37, 37n106, 38, 66, 135 Dionysus and Odysseus  Dionysus and the body 17 Dionysus and the Olympians 25, 26, 27, 28 Dionysus and Silenus 69n68 Dionysus and the earth 17, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31, 32, 39, 56, 57, 58, 126 Dionysus and tragedy 21, 31, 52 Dionysus and women 21, 29, 29n55n56 Dionysus and Zeus 13, 37, 38 Dionysus as a conceptual persona 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 18, 189 Dionysus as an integrative god 32, 32n66, 33, 182 Dionysus as Apollo’s twin 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13 fig.4, 16, 18, 22, 22n4n5, 26, 39, 40, 56, 57, 57 fig.8, 58, 58n108, 63n24, 93, 131, 147, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 174, 182, 183 Dionysus as the aorgic 68, 69 Dionysus at Delphi 4, 26, 40, 183 Dionysus at Eleusis 21, 23, 24, 25 Dionysus in Christianity 16, 33, 34 Dionysus in Nietzsche 17, 22, 22n4n5, 34, 59, 60, 62, 63, 63n24n26, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 69n67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 80, 84, 183, 185 Dionysus in Rome 16, 23, 29n56, 30n56 Dionysus in Schelling 36, 37, 38, 63n26

Subject Index Dionysus in Schlegel 64n34, 165n80 Dionysus in Winckelmann 64n34 Dionysus’s animals 31 fig.7, 61n6 Dionysus’s aulos 5, 25n23, 72, 96 Dionysus’s dismemberment 67, 189 Dionysus’s festivals 21, 23, 26, 30 Dionysus’s mask(s) 4, 28, 126 Diosynsus’s plant 5, 29, 30, 33, 37n106 Diosynsus’s tauromorphism 25n22 Dionysian frenzy 21, 24n21, 29, 66 Dioscuri 65 Diotima 78, 79 disclosure 22, 34, 41, 52, 54, 109, 167, 191, 192 Dorians 5, 47, 58 Doric 37n104, 47 dual affirmation 5, 45n39, 151, 152, 156, 157, 183, 198 dwelling 2, 8, 108, 109, 110, 115, 117, 172, 173, 174, 191, 192, 193 dynamic disequilibrium 7, 8, 30, 60n1, 189, 196 earth v, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 8n45, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33n70, 37, 39, 40, 44, 44n38, 56, 57, 58, 59, 65, 66, 68, 69n68, 77, 88, 89, 93, 94 fig.10, 95, 96, 100n51, 107, 108, 107, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 135n68, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 152, 156, 158n37, 167, 170n5, 171n14, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 199 earth’s flesh 7n38, 11, 17, 18, 35, 88, 89, 93, 95, 126, 183, 193, 194, 199 earthboundness 2, 11, 21, 26, 26, 27n40, 32, 49, 182 ecodramaturgy 16 ecohorror 142 Egypt 43, 72n82 eidetic 24, 43, 44, 46, 96, 96n31, 97n31, 110, 110n109, 186 Eleatism 155 Eleos 57, 58 Eleusis 21, 23, 24, 53n68, 147, 182 elicitation 3, 127, 151, 153, 159, 159n47 enigma(s) 41, 41 n7n9n10, 52, 71, 72 Ephaestus 27n36 Epimetheus 7n36

251 epistemology 12, 68, 89, 100, 163, 199 epos 42n25, 46, 59, 60, 61, 62, 98 eroticism 79, 80, 81, 142, 142n123, 143, 146 eternal return 59, 65, 70, 71, 72n83, 73n85, 74, 75, 85, 86, 87 event 36, 60, 60n4, 61, 91, 96n31, 98, 114, 122, 138, 140, 142, 151, 154, 160n52, 174, 175, 188 exorcism 146 extramodern(s) 2, 6, 15, 47n48, 113, 114, 115, 116, 116 fig.11, 117, 117n143n147, 118, 118n150, 120, 176, 177, 181, 196 figure-​ground reversal 3, 4, 154 finitude 11, 83, 132, 192, 193 first attention 3, 4, 12 flat ontology 14, 172 flesh 7, 11, 17, 18, 35, 51, 88, 89, 93, 95, 126, 143, 183, 193, 194, 199 form 3, 4, 5, 21, 24, 36, 39, 40, 43, 46, 58, 60, 60n1n4, 61, 61n8, 68, 71n76, 72n82, 93, 94, 95, 104, 107n98, 109, 121, 122, 129, 135, 137, 138, 141, 151, 154, 182, 185, 196, 197n29 formalism 164 fourfold 11, 12, 17, 18, 89, 114, 115, 116, 116 fig.11, 118, 118n151, 119, 119 fig.12, 120, 152, 159, 170, 174, 175, 194, 198, 199 fundament/​ground 2, 8, 22n5, 34, 36, 68, 105, 119, 120, 157, 164, 187, 192, 193, 194, 197n29 Gaia 27, 27n37n40, 28, 40, 58 geophilosophy 94n21 geosomatism 14 ghostliness 170 Glaucus 37 gnosticism 106 god(de)s(ses) v, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 13 fig.4, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 22n4n5, 23, 24, 25, 26, 26, 27, 28, 29, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63n24n26, 64, 64n34, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 69n68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 84, 93, 98, 100n54, 105, 107, 115, 116, 116 fig.11, 118, 119 fig.12, 119n151, 120, 131, 147, 151, 153, 155, 156, 165n80, 166n95, 174, 177n52, 180, 182, 183, 185, 189, 193

252  Hades 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27n35, 34, 36, 37, 69n68, 182 Hector 50, 51 Hera 27n35n36 Hestia 27n35 heterogenesis 129 Hinduism 62 homoeroticism 81 Hyacinthus 26, 30, 58 Hymn to Demeter 23 hyperobjects 171n14 identity 6, 27, 96n28, 132n58, 151, 157, 158, 159n43, 165, 166, 186, 197, 198 idolatry 63 Iliad 28n45, 39, 42, 42n24, 46, 49, 50, 51, 60, 61 images 17, 61, 88, 93, 96, 100, 110, 114, 121, 122, 131, 137, 142, 147, 149, 177n52, 183, 194 Imaginary 122, 148, 148 n .151 imagination 12, 123n2, 137, 190 immortals 49, 65, 89, 114, 115, 116, 116 fig.11, 117, 118, 119 fig.12, 120, 166n95, 167, 192, 193, 199 indeterminacy 92, 140, 187 informal/​formless 36, 58, 61, 126 injustice 48, 56 invention 7, 153n3, 159 Iphigenia 45, 101 Ishtar 26n26 Isis 26n26 Ithaca 154n7 Japanese culture 122, 143 Jasion 26 Jerusalem 181 justice 5, 48, 52, 54, 55, 56 Khorchin 117 Kootenay/​Kutenai 161n61 Laius 52 language 6, 25, 45n42, 46, 93, 96n31, 103, 104n76, 127, 128, 130, 133, 147, 149, 176, 187n97, 194, 198 Laocoön 76, 76n98 logos 11, 15, 16, 42, 54, 172, 191, 192, 193

Subject Index Lovecraftism/​Lovecraftian 14n71, 171n12, 172 Lynx v, 3, 151, 153, 196 maenads 21, 29n55n56, 129, 189 Maori 114 Mariology 145 Marxism 47n48 matricial 119, 119n152 meaning/​meaningfulness 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 41n7, 61n8, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96n31, 97n31, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 114, 116, 120, 125n11, 126, 127, 128, 129, 141, 151, 152, 153, 155, 183, 189, 193, 193n26, 194, 199 meaninglessness 85, 141, 173, 185 Medea 101 Medusa 64n35 mesh 171 metamorphosis 32, 33, 122, 131, 136 fig.13, 137, 137, 148, 149 metaphor 3, 22, 33, 56, 70, 72, 93, 102n60, 118, 127, 139, 149, 174, 177n52, 183, 194 metaphysics 2n11, 16, 18, 23n8, 98, 102, 106, 127, 152, 156, 157n29n32, 159, 164, 165, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190 metaphysics of the artiste 59, 62, 69 modality 9, 10, 10 fig.2, 152, 168, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199 modernism 69n67, 79 modernity 2, 9, 185n82 monadology 166n94 monism 35 monotheism 36n93, 63 morphogenesis 22, 34, 36, 60, 108, 182 mortals 15, 30, 32, 33, 49, 51, 52n66, 56, 89, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119 fig.12, 20, 166n95, 167, 174, 192, 193, 194, 199 multiple/​multiplicity 2, 6, 22, 27, 86, 93, 94, 112, 113, 118, 119, 120, 131, 140, 149, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165, 167, 174, 183, 186, 194, 197 Muses 65, 77 mysticism 22, 56n104, 103, 104, 106, 137 myth/​mythology v, 3, 6, 7, 7n36n38, 8n43, 16, 22, 23, 26, 27n40, 29n56, 30, 36, 36n93n96, 37, 42, 56, 63n26, 67n63, 85n147, 113, 118, 120, 154n7, 156, 158n40,

Subject Index 161, 161n61, 162n61, 164n69, 166, 185, 189, 196, 198 nature 4, 7n38, 8n43, 15, 26, 35, 43, 44, 67n53, 68, 81, 82, 93, 94, 100n51, 103, 108, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 116, 116 fig.11, 117, 118, 122, 137, 138, 139, 146, 147, 148, 149, 154n7, 196 Nazism 58n107, 84, 179 negative 5, 13, 44n38, 47n48, 105, 106, 159n43, 167n97, 169, 173n33, 178, 185, 187 negative theology 106, 173n33, 178 Neo-​Platonism 22, 35 neoclassicism 77, 80 neurosis 148 New Materialism 3, 14, 172, 184 Nez Percé, 120 nihilism 3, 8n45, 14, 14n74, 15, 17 fig.4 fig.5, 18, 19, 86, 122, 142, 169, 169n2, 170, 171n12, 173, 174 Nike 48 Nivx 120 Nō 99 non-​being 15n80, 44, 45, 46, 74, 180 nonlife 139 noumenon 154n7 Nyx 43, 44n38 object 9n51, 14, 17, 18, 19, 37n98, 66, 89, 91, 92, 97, 115, 116, 117n147, 118, 139, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 177n51, 178, 194 Object-​Oriented Ontology 14n68, 19, 170, 171 Odyssey 60, 61, 154n7 Odysseus 59, 60, 61, 165n80, 185 Oedipus 51, 52 Oedipus at Colonus 100 Oedipus Rex 39 Okanagan/​Syilx 161n61 Olympia 16, 39, 42, 46, 47, 48 Olympians 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 58, 66n44, 175 ontological pluralism 110, 111, 113, 152, 157n34, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 199 ontological turn 110, 111, 113 ontology 2, 9, 10, 10n2, 11, 12, 14, 14n68, 18, 19, 30n57, 34, 25, 36, 37, 38, 73n85, 110, 151, 152, 155, 168, 172, 184, 186, 187, 191, 192, 194, 197, 199 ontology of difference 151, 155

253 ontotheology 173n33 oracle 16, 40, 41, 41n7n9n12, 52, 58, 183 Orpheus 189 Orphism 30n61, 53n68 otherwise 6, 16, 18, 121, 142, 147, 147n147, 148, 176, 177, 178 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 189, 197 Patroclus 50, 51 Pawnee 89, 117 perception 4, 45n42, 89, 92, 177, 177n52, 190 Persephone/​Kore 23, 23n14, 24, 25 Persepolis 43 philosophy of difference 111, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168 philosophy of mythology 3, 16, 20, 34, 36, 61, 63n26, 154n7, 178 physis 11, 15, 16, 44, 45, 49, 98, 102, 109n59, 105, 105n83, 107, 120, 127n25, 135, 169, 172, 173, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184, 186, 186n91, 188, 191, 192 Pierrot 154, 65 Platonism 184 Pluton 23 Plutus 23, 24, 25, 26 poetics of dwelling 11, 108, 191, 192 politics 5, 21, 22n2, 25n21, 30, 46, 47, 99n44, 158n34, 172, 173, 182, 183 Poseidon 22, 27n35, 36, 37, 182 possible 118, 149, 159, 166, 167, 174, 199 Posthumanism 171, 187, 192 Post-​Marxism 47n48 post-​metaphysics 18, 156, 157n29, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190 Postmodernity 166, 187, 188n108 post-​nihilism 3, 17 fig.6, 19, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176 Post-​Structuralism 3, 18, 151, 152, 156, 157, 159, 159, 160, 163, 166, 166n93 Potnia 21, 25, 37 pre-​individual 4, 57, 62, 123, 140 Prometheanism 80 Prometheus 7n36 prostitution 142, 144, 145 Proto-​Indo-​European 7, 7n38, 27n40, 28n44, 45n42, 108

254  psychedelia 166 Pylos 25 Pythagoreans 30n61, 44n37, 53n68, 54n68, 189 Pythia,40, 41n11, 58, 58, 183 qualia 138 queer 60, 80, 81, 82, 83 Ra 175 raw 30 re-​singularisation 129 Real 6, 122 reciprocal subordination 151, 155, 196 reciprocity of perspectives 4, 195, 196n8, 197 religion 53n68, 54n68, 169n2 representation 22, 59, 63, 87, 160n52, 186 Rhea 27, 27n38 Riemannian 148n98 Rome 7n36, 16, 23, 23n7n8, 29n56, 30n56, 34, 181 schismogenesis 159, 197 Science-​and-​Technology Studies 125n7 second attention 3, 4, 12 Selene 43 semiotic prism 88, 94 fig.10, 95, 194 sensations 12, 17, 88, 95, 121, 122, 126, 129, 130, 132, 137, 138, 139, 183 sexuality 23n7, 29n56, 81, 82, 83, 87n145, 143, 145, 148 silence 89, 90, 102, 102n60, 103, 104, 189n112 situatedness 1 sky 12, 89, 100n51, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 18, 120, 137, 167, 194, 199 Socrates 78, 104 Sparta 5, 41n12 Speculative Realism 3, 14, 169, 170, 171, 184 Sphinx 52 spirits 30n57, 93, 116, 118, 153n3 Stoicism 70, 70n74 structural anthropology 10, 18, 26, 89, 152, 156, 157, 195, 197, 198 Structuralism 7, 18, 65, 81, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162 fig.15, 163, 164, 166, 197, 198 subject 13, 14, 18, 37n98, 169, 171, 173, 178

Subject Index subjectivity 99, 118n151, 125, 129, 130, 149, 150n160 subtraction 14, 22, 22n2, 169, 187, 188n108 Surrealism 97, 123n2, 147n147 Syilx/​Okanagan 161n61 Symbolic 6, 122, 147, 148, 148n151, 150n160 symbolic 6, 24, 26, 34, 44, 46, 59, 89, 117n144, 119, 119n155, 141, 195 Tammuz 26n26 technoanimalism 16 technology 9n51, 125n7, 171, 172, 173n31, 179n58 Teiresias 40, 52 Theatre of Cruelty 147, 150 Titans 27, 29n54, 175, 189 Trickster v, 3, 30, 34, 120, 151, 153, 161n61 transgression 80, 84, 85, 142, 143, 145, 181 translatability 2, 11, 12, 174, 195, 198, 199 transversality 1, 137n81, 149, 150n160, 165 truth 41, 52, 54, 105, 192 Tupinamba 161n61 twin(nes)s 2, 6, 7, 7n36, 16, 40, 57, 59, 107, 120, 151, 156, 160, 161, 161n61, 163, 169, 182, 183, 189, 195, 196 Tydeus 49 Ulysses 185, 186 uncanniness 97, 98, 121, 178 unconscious 12, 68n60, 117n143, 122, 123, 131, 133, 147, 148, 149, 160, 181 underworld 21, 23, 24, 45, 182 unicausality 13 un-​world 1, 9, 10, 10 fig.1, 11, 13, 16, 44, 45, 110n110, 152, 168, 170, 184, 194 unpredictability 2, 78, 149, 186 Uranus 27 Usen Barok 159n47, 197 utilitarianism 69, 85, 127 variation 113, 114, 152, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 174, 196 violence 122, 142, 143, 144, 187 virtual 92, 118n151, 123n2, 158, 166n94, 171 Virus 139 Warlpiri 15, 108, 109, 177, 181 weather-​world 174, 174n28

255

Subject Index will to power 47, 47n48, 49, 59, 62, 63, 73n85, 74n85, 85, 87, 102 world v, 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 23, 27, 27n40, 33, 35, 35n84, 37, 44, 44n38, 45, 46, 61, 66, 66n51, 75, 89, 92, 93, 94, 97, 97n34, 99, 101, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 125, 125n11, 132, 148, 151, 152, 155, 159, 160, 166n94, 167, 167n97, 168, 168n98, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 176, 179, 179n59, 185, 187, 189, 192, 193, 193n 28, 194, 196, 199, 199n38 worlding 1, 10, 11 fig.3, 12, 44, 110n110, 114, 117, 118, 120, 152, 159, 160, 166, 167, 167 fig.16, 168 fig.17, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 194 worldlessness 9, 11 Yanomami 16n80, 89, 109, 110, 111, 118, 120, 177, 181 yoga 131 Zeus 13, 16, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55n86, 56, 58, 65, 100, 100n51, 105, 106, 108n104, 182, 191, 191n11 Greek terms Mycenaean Greek 𐀡𐀴𐀛𐀊 25, 37 Ancient Greek ἀγαθόν 78, 78n111, 104, 105, 105n80 ἀγένητον 42 ἀγορά 46 ἀδικία 48, 56 ἀείζωον 42, 54 ἀθάνατοι 56, 193n31 ἀιδές 24, 25n21, 28 Ἅιδης 24, 24n21, 25n21 αἰδοία 25n21 Αἰδώς 48, 48n50, 100 αἰδώς 47, 48, 48n50, 49, 57, 100, 100n54, 180 αἰών 15n80 ἀλήθεια 41, 52, 54, 105, 192 Ἀνάγκη 119n151 ἀναίδεια 57 ἀναιδής 25n21 ἄνθρωπος 193 ἀνώλεθρον 42

ἀοιδός 42 ἄπειρον 35, 54, 55 ἀπέλλα 5, 47 Ἀπέλλων 47 Ἀπόλλων 47 ἀρετή 46, 48, 60, 79 ἄριστοι 55 ἁρμονίη ἁφανὴς 8n50 ἀρχή/​αί 28, 28n44, 54, 108, 109, 110, 175, 176 ἀτρεμές 55 ἄφρων 79 βίος 4, 44 γνῶθι σεαυτόν 51 διαλεκτική 41 Δίκη 119n151 δίκη 48, 54, 55 Δημήτηρ 24 Διμήτωρ 24 δόξα 186 δύναμις 186 ἐγρήγοροςον 55 εἶδος/​εἴδη 24, 43, 44, 96, 96n31, 97n31, 110, 186 εἶναι 41, 42, 49n55 Ἔλεος 57 ἔλεος 57 ἕν 35, 42, 54, 162 ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ, 81 εὐνομία 46 εὐσέβεια 53n68 Ζεύς 100 ζωή 4, 5, 24, 45n39, 62, 69 θαῦμα 15 θεάοντες 193 θέατρον 53 θεός/​θεοί 53n68, 193 θεωρία 176 θνητοί 56, 193n31 θρησκεία 53n68 ἱερoῖς 53n68 ἰσονομία 46

256  καθ᾽ ἕν 162 καλοκαγαθία 76, 80 καλός 78 κεραυνός 27n42, 54 κεχωρισμένος 54, 55 κλέος 46, 56, 60, 61, 185 κοινόν 54 κόσμος 42, 42n21, 54 λέγειν 191 λόγος 11, 15, 16, 42, 54, 172, 191, 192, 193 μέτρον 54 μηδὲν ἄγαν 51n61, 78 Μοῖρα 119n151 μουνογενές 55 νοεῖν 42, 49n55 νόος/​νοῦς 49, 79 νόστος 61n8 νῦν 42 Ὁ Φοῖβος 48n50, 49 οἰακίζω 54 ὅλος 48n52 ὁμοῦ πᾶν 42 ὀρχήστρα 53 οὐ πολιτικὸν 25n21 Oὔλιος 48 oὔλιος 48n52 οὖλον 55 παιδεία 76 Πλοῦτος 23 πόλεμος 56 πρὸς ἕν 162, 162n63 Ποσειδῶν 37n104 πότε 37

Subject Index Ποτειδάν 37n104 Ποτειδᾶς 37n104 Ποτειδάων 37n104 πῦρ ἀείζωον 42 σημαίνειν 41 σοφόν 54 συνεχές 55 σωφροσύνη 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83 τέλειον 55 τέλος 175 τὸ ἀγαθόν 104, 105 τὸ μὴ δῦνόν 42, 55 Ὕβρις 119n151 ὓβρις 13, 46, 48, 51, 53, 55 φαίνεσθαι 43 φαινόμενον 43 φαίνω 45, 45n42, 46 φημί 45, 45n42, 46 φρονέω 79 φρήν 79 φρόνιμος 79 φρoντίζω 79 φύσις 11, 15, 16, 44, 45, 49, 98, 102, 109n59, 105, 105n83, 107, 120, 127n25, 135, 169, 172, 173, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184, 186, 186n91, 188, 191, 192 φύω 45, 45n42, 46 Φωσφόρος 45 χορός 53 χρόνος 15n80, 48n51 ψεῦδος 52, 52n65 ψυχή 61n8