Life as an Untotalizable Enigma: The Lame Ontology of Greek Myth

Carlos Alberto Segovia (Universidad Del Salvador), Glenn Wallis

SEMINAR DESCRIPTION
What do you really know about the Greek gods and goddesses?
What if the purpose of the stories told about them was to make us think about ourselves?
What if they were to be, that is, the ever-living forces that make and unmake the worlds we live in?
But what if this were to be understood not only in psychological but, above all, ontological terms?
And what if, at the core of the ancient Greek religion (to use an anachronism, for the Latin word “religion” has no Greek equivalent) lay the idea of a foundational enigma as well as the invitation to decipher it, paradoxically (and to use another anachronism, for the term “reason” is also Latin, not Greek), by rational means while preserving the view that life’s instability can never downplayed, life’s inner contrasts never be dissolved into a harmonious totality.
In short, Greek mythology permanently confronts us with, and challenges us to decipher afresh, life’s ever-shifting enigma, thus enhancing subjective  resingularization beyond despotism and nihilism alike.

CONTENT

To explore these questions, we will examine together and discuss:  several images taken from Ancient Greek architecture, statuary, pottery, and funerary art;  and several excerpts from the Iliad, Hesiod’s Theogony, the Homeric Hymns, the Pre-Socratic philosophers, Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Plutarch.

More specifically, we will focus on, and try to decipher:

• a fragment by Heraclitus according to which gods and humans die each others’ lives and live each others’ deaths, plus a few verses by Pindar…
• Apollo and Dionysus’s single sanctuary at Delphi, from which each one withdraws, however, depending on the time of the year…
• a goddess’s cult at Eleusis on life’s limitlessness and the stress of Apollo’s oracle on life’s limits…
• Gaia’s double joy, when she feels her body through the sound of Dionysus’s flutes and the roar of lions and wolves, and when she feels instead sung by Apollo’s Muses…
• the relation between Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, who can be said to be one and many…
• the difference between Olympians and Titans, world and proto-world…
• several fragments from Hesiod’s Theogony where the Earth and the Night birth their own children as two different series of goddesses and gods that stand in relation of inverse proportionality… and a few lines from Aeschylus…
• the transparency of Athena’s temple, in contrast to the rocky and dusty landscape…
• a painted vase where Death and Sleep remove a corpse while its shadow escapes nowhere…
• a stela in which a dead woman holds in her hands something that, on close inspection, proves to be nothing…
• time’s kaleidoscope and the connection between sailors’ knots, a bull’s horns, and the words of the Sphinx…
  
  Finally, in addition to analyzing visual images and textual excerpts by Homer, Hesiod, Heraclitus, Pindar, Aeschylus, and Euripides we will dive, we will dive  into these issues in dialogue, too, with authors like Plutarch, Hölderlin, Creuzer, Schelling, Walter Otto, Károli Kerényi, Clémence Ramnoux, Maurice Blanchot, Jacqueline de Romilly, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Giorgio Colli, B. C. Dietrich, Edward Edinger, Cornelia Isler-Kerényi, Drew Griffith, Alain Moreau, Daniel Boyarin, Carlin Barton, Kathrin Rosenfield or Aude Wacziard Engel.

SESSIONS
2 sessions of 120 mins. each.

Session I
1. Introduction
2. Mortals, immortals, and their geometry: from the Iliad to Heraclitus and Pindar
3. Apollo and Dionysus; or: life’s two divergent but complementary senses
4. From Eleusis to Delphi and back: the topography of a major disjunctive synthesis
5. Of Gaia’s double joy, wolves and Muses
6. Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus; or: the three stages of any ontogenesis

Session II
7. Olympians and Titans, world and proto-world
8. Earth and Chaos: the original dissymmetry and its aftermath
9. Of clear eyes and temples: Athena as a talisman?
10. Of knots, horns, and sphinxes
11. We, thus, mortals

FORMAT
Both sessions will be interactive: a text or an image will be proposed for discussion, we will analyze it together and then move on to the next image or text, etc.

MATERIALS
Materials will be supplied prior to each session.

FACILITATOR: Carlos A. Segovia is an independent philosopher working on meta-conceptuality, contingency and worlding in a post-nihilist key, at the crossroads of the philosophy of mythology. Among his publications, Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide(with Sofya Shaikut), Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings, Félix Guattari and the Ancients: Theatrical Dialogues in Early Philosophy (with Gary Genosko), and Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought. He has been associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at St Louis University Missouri, visiting professor at the University of Aarhus and the Free University of Brussels, and guest lecturer at the European Research Council, the Collège International de Philosophie, the École Normale Supérieure, University College London, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, the European University at St Petersburg, Waseda University, and Ryukoku University.