Hands to oars: Aeschylus’ cosmo-phthoric spin on Empedocles’ whirlpool
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First author draft
First author draft
Date
2023-02-17
DOI
Authors
Degener, John
Version
First author draft
OA Version
Citation
J. Degener. 2023. "Hands to Oars: Aeschylus’ Cosmo-Phthoric Spin on Empedocles’ Whirlpool" BU Open Access.
Abstract
As verso to the obverse of the gorgonic gaze of Iphigeneia ‘written’ in the fixed, all-apparent
graphais in the Artemisian sacrifice, this study unfolds in the doxic Aphrodesian register the
dynamics of Helen’s disembodied opsis, her image, that crosses both into Menelaus’ psyche and
out through the hands of the warriors put to oars. Empedocles’ optics are argued to constitute a
visual ray between viewer and object joined in the metaphorical grasping of hands. This
grasping figures simultaneously metaphorical hands within Menelaus’ mind through which the
opsis passes into unconsciousness and the physical hands put to oars. Menelaus’ pothos,
longing, for Helen, drives the Trojan debacle as the vortex of Aeschylus’ cosmo-phthoric,
cosmos-destroying, spin on Empedocles’ cosmogonic whirlpool of Aprhrodite and Ares.
Aeschylus’ pathways, keleuthoi, on which the opsis moves in the register of doxein, contrast
Empedocles’ pathways of the generations of forms in that of idein, and figure finally beneath the
tapestries Agamemnon treads. In Aeschylus’ construction of the novel advent of proto imagination, that is, of the inward experience of the untethered image, the self-reflection of the
auditor-spectator is instantiated as that of a bracketed, suspended [I] and is invoked there in the
theatron to cycle between, on the diegetic level, the all-destroying vortex, on the dramaturgic mimetic level, the discharging of the dionysiac thrall in the dawning awareness of the illusion of
the Gesamtwerk of Tragedy. The suspension of the dionysiac thrall reveals the ungrounded
underpinning of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical as the abyssal [I] whence
the movement of faith would spring up. Subtending then the singularity of Abraham, Knight of
Faith, is the bracketed [I] shaken loose from the dæmonic tyranny of the symbolic order in the
suspension of the unmediated commandment of the pagan gods as divine sanction of the sacrifice
and the ethical universal.
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Degener ©2024