Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 13:45:52 -0700 From: ithomson-AT-ucsd.edu (Iain Thomson) Subject: Oedipal issues Michael wrote: >The >hidden meaning of the Theban plague (patricide) is the truth of Oedipus' >existence, the root cause of his fate as heralded by the Delphic oracle. His >swollen foot is his fateful im-pedi-ment [nice pun.] To which Bob replied: >Rather marks him for chthonic. Complaisance (hubris) with his reason, >ability to solve riddles, science, is his fateful flaw...his forgetting >of the essence, chthonic, (dust thou art...), of his being. >>And would not that ["openness of Beyng"], then, be precisely the meaning >>of the apotheosis at >Collonus? ...and the empty tomb? etc. > Very interesting! Perhaps you fellas wouldn't mind if we explore these issues--the 'etc.'--a bit further? Can Aristotle's 'fatal/ed flaw' analysis (hubris --> nemesis) really explain the meaning(s) of Oedipus? Doesn't Oedipus come to fully (even hyperbolically) embody his Apollonian 'essence' (as a riddler with perhaps too keen an in-sight, "an eye too many perhaps" -Hoelderlin) rather than "forget" it? We cannot know that the tomb of Oedipus is empty (I would sttress this point), rather "the secret tomb" [ieron tumbon] is *hidden* for all perpetuity from everyone but the King--and only this pact of eternal secrecy between kings will secure a Kingdom [see Oedipus at Colonus, 1546, 1520ff]. Oedipus tells Theseus that precisely this gift (the hidden site of his tomb which shelters one city and, by its absence, "curses" another) is the redemptive offering the gods have promised him for enduring his life of suffering. [The curse Oedipus sets in motion by denying his body to his native Thebes sets the stage for _Antigone_. Many other connections between 'Oed-AT-Colonus' and 'Antigone' should ideally be pursued: The daughter's suicide also begins here, denied access to the site of her father's corpse, unable to view him in death--mourning made impossible without her father's dead body, sign of her father/brother the once-king's death (the later reaction to Polynices' unburied corpse cannot be unrelated to this).] As to the meaning(s) of Oedipus's death--is this not to ask for the secret meaning of the secret event/death? We know only a few things, such as can be gathered from the messenger's report of what the chorus saw: "the man [Oedipus] was no longer there, and the king [Theseus] was holding his hand before his face to shade his *eyes*, as though some terrifying sight [phobon phanentos, 1652], which he could not bear to look on, had been presented. But then, after a moment, with no word spoken, we saw [Theseus] salute the earth and the sky (home of the gods) at the same moment [horomen auton gen te proskunounth hama kai ton theon Olympon hen tauto chrono]." The coming-together of sky [as home of gods, Olympus] and Earth in the same moment; how to look at this so as to see what is deliberately kept >from our sight (for our own good?)? This fusion of the horizons of the fixed and the possible, earth and sky, mysterious source and holy height, a fused thanking/commemoration which occurs on the far side of a blinding event and only for a chosen witness (another King); is it an entrance into death, or into the ecstatic realm of Dionysus (perhaps Oedipus crossed-paths with the nomadic and epiphantic presence(s) of Bacchus during the long course of his blind wanderings)--and would this be an antidote to Oedipus's fatal Appolonian discovery of his own patricide? Or just another herald of the final tragic consumption in which O's familial lineage is sacrificed, that Others who come later might achieve redemption from their/our own tragedies [i.e., Athens]: Sacrificing his family, Oedipus tells the 'dearest stranger' or 'most beloved foreigner' [philtate xenon, 1553] "in prosperity remember me when I am dead for your success for ever! [memnesthe moy thanontos eutukeis aie]." Oed-AT-Colonus takes place in the no man's land (of the lawless Furies), where Kings call across to each other as 'stranger' [xenos], it asks the questions of homecoming and becoming-at-home--in a foreign land, in death (in death in and as a foreign land). Sophocles's lessons concern 'dwelling' in the death which is always imminent for mortals (Sophocles's final masterpiece, written in 406 BC, a year before Sophocles own death at age 90), the death of the King, the father--and succession (and perhaps even about the way in which, as Epicurus later taught, the 'invisibility' of death confers us with a tragic kind of immortality). Oedipus passes on--"teaches" [didaxo]--to Theseus, and only to Theseus (who in turn is to teach these "cursed secretes" only to his 'eldest and dearest son, and only when the term of Theseus's own life has expired') "great mysteries," "things that are tabboo and which speach must not disturb," literally 'a discourse which should not itself even be put into motion.' [1518-1538]. (Always already) too late... "In all ways these things stand fast" [pantos gar ekei tade kuros, 1776-9, the final line of the play]. Let us return, finally, to the question of 'patricide' Michael raises. It could be argued that Heidegger's destruktion of the ontological tradition is itself, in the end (e.g. in 1973's Zaringen Seminar), an anamnetic attempt to clear away the impediments blocking our recall of the philosophical parricide of the ontological progenitor; Heidegger's work facilitates a recovery of the "parricide" [patraloian hypolabes] of "father Parmenides" [patros Parmenidou], as the "Xenos from Elea" in Plato's Sophist puts it [241d]? (I'd say that this recovery of the parricide is less a reinarnation than the reconnection of a broken lineage, the reassertion of a certain succession, perhaps of the 'right' to interpret the meaning(s) of the event.) And, appropriately, isn't Oedipus somehow present here, at the moment when Plato stages the primal scene of the ontological parricide (in this text from which Heidegger launches B&T)? "Yes, it is plain even to *a blind man,* as they say" [241d]. Iain --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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