On Fire, Light, and Volcanoes: Tracing a 'Forgotten Ethics' in Elytis and Camus (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nobel Prize winning author Albert Camus situates his meditations in both the opening and closing essays in his 1937 collection Noces by referring to the classical Eleusinian mysteries centring around the myths of Dionysus and the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Noces’ closing piece ‘The Desert’ directly evokes the two levels of initiation involved in the classical Eleusinian cult in a way which prompts us to reframe the preceding essays beginning at Tipasa as akin to a single, initiatory trajectory. The kind of ‘love of life’ the opening ‘Nuptials at Tipasa’ had so marvellously celebrated, we are now informed, is not sufficient by itself. The entire round of these four essays, whose framing suggest four seasons (Spring in Tipasa, Summer at Algiers, then Autumn in Florence), seem intended by Camus to enact just what the title, Noces, suggests in the context of the mysteries: namely, that hieros gamos or sacred union of man with nature or the gods at the heart of the ancient cults, not excluding the nocturnal gods and with them, the realities of transience, suffering, and mortality.
A Possible Legacy of Albert Camus. A Critical Reading, in «Cogito», n. 2, 2014, pp. 51-59
Abstract. The critical reception of Camus in Italy, mainly underlines the Mediterranean mark of the Camusian thought. In last years several works on Albert Camus have appeared in Italy, and all of them exhibit a crucial feature: the “Thought at the Meridian”. It is a sign that crosses the entire Work of the Author, since the first works of success, as Le Myhte de Sisyphe and, of course, L’Homme révolté, in which the last chapter is entirely dedicated to this theme. One century after the birth of Camus, I would like to offer a review of these Italian critical interpretations of the French thinker, and to show some very rich points in common with other important authors contemporary to him. Keywords. Albert Camus, Mare Nostrum, Tempus Nostrum, Midì, Abend-land.
Mediterranean Modernisms: The Poetic Metaphysics of Odysseus Elytis
2011
Engaging with the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseus Elytis within the framework of international modernism, Marinos Pourgouris places the poet's work in the context of other modernist and surrealist writers in Europe. At the same time, Pourgouris puts forward a redefinition of European Modernism that makes the Mediterranean, and Greece in particular, the discursive contact zone and incorporates neglected elements such as national identity and geography. Beginning with an examination of Greek Modernism, Pourgouris's study places Elytis in conversation with Albert Camus; analyzes the influence of Charles Baudelaire, Gaston Bachelard, and Sigmund Freud on Elytis's theory of analogies; traces the symbol of the sun in Elytis's poetry by way of the philosophies of Heraclitus and Plotinus; examines the influence of Le Corbusier on Elytis's theory of architectural poetics; and takes up the subject of Elytis's application of his theory of Solar Metaphysics to poetic form in the context of works by Freud, C. G. Jung, and Michel Foucault. Informed by extensive research in the United States and Europe, Pourgouris's study makes a compelling contribution to the comparative study of Greek modernism, the Mediterranean, and the work of Odysseus Elytis. Contents: Introduction: Odysseus Elytis and the specter of nationalism; Modernism: from Paris to Athens; Towards a new Mediterranean culture; The theory of analogies; Solar metaphysics; Architectural poetics; Appendix: Odysseus Elytis: life and works; Works cited; Index. About the Author: Marinos Pourgouris is Assistant Professor in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Cyprus, Cyprus. Reviews: 'Mediterranean Modernisms is the first comparative study of Odysseus Elytis, the important Greek poet and Nobel Laureate. Marinos Pourgouris analyzes individual poems and draws connections between Elytis’s work and wider literary movements. Along the way, he challenges our understanding of national modernism and world literature while also charting his own theory of Mediterranean poetics. Undaunted in his pursuit of a Greek and a European Elytis, Pourgouris provides a kaleidoscopic look at the place of poetry in the Mediterranean imaginary.' Gregory Jusdanis, Distinguished Humanities Professor and Director of the Modern Greek Studies Program at The Ohio State University, USA
PHILOSOPHY AND THE ANCIENT NOVEL, Ancient Narrative Supplementum 20, 2015
Philosophy and the Ancient Novel, ed. by Marília P. Futre Pinheiro and Silvia Montiglio, 2015
The papers assembled in this volume explore a relatively new area in scholarship on the ancient novel: the relationship between an ostensibly non-philosophical genre and philosophy. This approach opens up several original themes for further research and debate. Platonising fiction was popular in the Second Sophistic and it took a variety of forms, ranging from the intertextual to the allegorical, and discussions of the origins of the novel-genre in antiquity have centred on the role of Socratic dialogue in general and Plato's dialogues in particular as important precursors. The papers in this collection cover a variety of genres, ranging from the Greek and Roman novels to utopian narratives and fictional biographies, and seek by diverse methods to detect philosophical resonances in these texts.
The Philosopher and the Volcano
It is well-known that as a term, Nietzsche’s Übermensch derives from Lucian of Samosata’s hyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances by reflecting on the context of that origination from Lucian’s Kataplous — which literally means sailing into port — referring to the soul’s journey, ferried by Charon, guided by Hermes, into the afterlife. The Kataplous he tyrannos, usually translated Downward Journey or The Tyrant, is a Menippean satire telling the tale of the “overman” who is imagined to be superior to others of “lesser” station in this-worldly life and the same tyrant after his (comically unwilling) transport into the underworld. As a reflection on the life and the death of Zarathustra, this essay also explores the politics of kingship for Empedocles as reformer in terms of Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles and Nietzsche’s unpublished drafts on the same topic. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche points to a perspective beyond the here and now, beyond the “values” of our all-too-worldly and all-too-human concerns, no matter whether in terms of perceived political/economic advantage, or indeed in the pursuit of more quotidian satisfactions.
Greco-Roman Ethics and the Naturalistic Fantasy
To modern scholars, the naturalistic fallacy looks out of place in Greco-Roman antiquity owing to the robust associations between nature, especially human nature, and moral norms. Yet nature was understood by ancient authors not only as a norm but also as a form of necessity. The Greco-Roman philosophical schools grappled with how to reconcile the idea that human nature is given with the idea that it is a goal to be reached. This essay looks at the Stoic concept of oikeiôsis as one strategy for effecting such a reconciliation.Drawing on natural history, these Stoic sources used examples of animal behavior to illustrate a process whereby nature “entrusts” all animals, including humans, with the care of their own survival. Nature is thus both what is given to the animal and what the animal achieves in a powerful but also problematic synthesis here called the “naturalistic fantasy.”