I. RELACIÓN DE PROFESORES QUE INTEGRAN EL DEPARTAMENTO
4. EVALUACIÓN
4.4. P ROCEDIMIENTO SUSTITUTIVO DE LA EVALUACIÓN CONTINUA
The sky bull is not the only astral image of Zeus in Le nozze. An ‘absolute’35 reading of this text reveals that Calasso plays the Zeus of mythical and literary tradition off against different astral images, sometimes simultaneously. This play with the different astral sediments of the figure of Zeus is evident in the pages on Phidias’s chrysolephantine statue of Zeus in the temple of Olympia. This description’s importance to the symbolic order of the book is stressed by Calasso’s statement that, according to Quintilianus, this statue had added something new to human religion.36 The representation of the Olympian Zeus contains reminders of two further astral incarnations of this god, both crucial to the interpretation of the book, and both lending themselves to a poststructuralist reading.
35 In the sense discussed in Chapter III.ii, from p. 118.
36 Id., Le nozze, p. 196.
Made of gold and ivory, shining against the dark floor of the temple of Olympia,37 the statue suggests the colours of a star against the night sky. Explaining the reason why modern commentators are perplexed by the surviving descriptions of this work, Calasso supports this interpretation of Zeus as an astral object. He remarks that it is an error on the part of the moderns to analyse Phidias’ Zeus with the same terms of reference applied to Praxiteles’s Hermes:
L’errore dei moderni sta nel considerare lo Zeus di Fidia una statua, nel senso in cui è una statua lo Hermes di Prassitele. E invece era altro. Chiuso e corrusco nella cella del tempio, lo Zeus di Fidia era forse più vicino a un dolmen, a un betilo, a una pietra caduta dal cielo, su cui si fossero aggrappati, per vivere, gli altri dei e gli eroi.38
This new astral ‘analogy,’ in which we may see an astrological/astronomical reminder of Zeus as the planet Jupiter, results in a questioning of the patriarchal Zeus as Heideggerean ‘presence’. As a planet, as a rock from the sky, Zeus does not seem to have a life of his own, other than as a ‘supporto’, which the other gods and heroes will live upon. While the body of the god, pullulating with heroes, is described, all we know about the god’s head is that it was wearing ‘una corona d’ulivo.’39 Making Zeus a faceless ‘immobile guardiano seduto su un trono’ is in my view a further deconstructive strategy towards Zeus pāter. One of the traditional meanings of the Greek and Latin pāter was that of ‘head’ of the family, and, as Onians notes, 40 the distinctive gesture of
37 Ibid., pp. 196-197.
38 Ibid., p. 197.
39 Ibid., p. 196.
40 In The Origins of European Thought, a text published by Adelphi. See Richard Broxton Onians, Le origini del pensiero europeo, Adelphi, Milan, 1998, p. 125. For the original English see Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, Cambridge University Press, Cambdridge, 1951.
the Homeric Zeus was a nod (‘cenno’) of the head. The still and faceless Zeus of Calasso appears deliberately different from this traditional image.
The representative choices around the Olympia Zeus are also remarkable if we consider that Calasso repeats that Zeus is the god of apparire. Yet he may purely be picking a very accurate term from his philosophical vocabulary. The father of the gods in the twentieth century can no longer be the god of ‘being,’ of full presence, but purely of appearance; an illusion of being. We could argue that this faceless ‘gigante seduto e incrostato di creature’41 is a Nietzschean figure, marked by the undoing of the ‘I’. Being Zeus the totality of the Olympian system, this appears in him as simultaneously fragmented, into all the heroes and gods sculpted on his body, and yet held together by the support of the god’s body:
Ma Zeus non era soltanto quell’immobile guardiano seduto sul trono: Zeus era tutte quelle scene, quei gesti, confusi e rimescolati, che increspavano il suo corpo ed il suo seggio in minuscoli brividi. Fidia aveva dimostrato, senza volerlo, che Zeus non può vivere da solo:
aveva mostrato, senza volerlo, l’essenza del politeismo.42
Here Calasso makes explicit what he may have been hinting at in the tales of Europa and Io, through the references to the god’s metamorphic power; his ‘planetary’ Zeus is not a unique or unifying presence in the traditional philosophical sense, unless we are willing to see his presence as mere ‘support’. Through the keyword apparire, as through his choice to represent him as Phidias’ statue, Calasso drives the reader to question whether Zeus is rather an ‘absence’ than a ‘presence’. ‘Appearance,’ or ‘origin of appearance’ are also two of the meanings of pāter discussed by Derrida whilst
41 Calasso, Le nozze, pp. 197-198..
42 Ibid., pp. 197-198.
analyzing the Egyptian counterpart of Zeus, Ammon, in Dissémination. But of all the meanings of the Greek pāter, discussed by Derrida, Calasso’s Zeus only appears to incarnate this one, the one allowing the deconstruction of pāter as ‘presence.’
If we are willing to see in the Olympian Zeus a display of Phidias, Zeus and Calasso’s artistic language, the ‘giant encrusted with creatures’ appears less and less like the patriarchal founder of Western metaphysics, and more like its hidden enemy, corroding it from within, in line with what Foucault sees as ‘a fundamental structure of contemporary thought’: ‘L’effondrement de la subjectivité philosophique, sa dispersion à l’intérieur d’un langage qui la dépossède, mais la multiplie dans l’éspace de sa lacune, est probablement une des structures fondamentales de la pensée contemporaine.’43