The Egyptian sphinx, a crouched wildcat’s body with a royal face, sometimes holds between its hands—hence human hands—as though in offering, a sort of table or box on which a ram’s head rests: an animal back and a human face doubled with a muffle with a packaged body. You can see elsewhere and in great numbers criocephalic sphinxes, devouring lion and devoured ovine incorporated. Have the wolf and lamb or the man and the bull ever been seen sewn together in the same fabulous flesh? Here the statue is broken down and rhythmed as though it were unfolding: the animal muffle with the box body precedes a monster with a leonine rump and a human head; this latter seems to be sacrificing an animal head. If the wildcat killed the ram, what is the man doing in the middle of them? What is in the black box? One might think that Pharaoh is concealed behind the bestial face. The man and the box intertwine mysteriously between two animal parts from different species. What is a fetish? How do you make one?
Herodotus says that Heracles-Shu wanted at all costs to gaze on Zeus-Ammon and that this latter refused to let himself be seen. As the former was very insistent, the latter took it into his head to skin a ram and then cut off its head. He held it in front of himself, wrapped in the fleece, and showed himself thus. Do we see, one hidden by the other, a god, an animal or a man? The face of God or the muffle and coat of fur?
Moses said to Him, “Let me, I pray thee, see thy glory.” He said, “I will make all my beauty pass before you, and I will pronounce the name ‘Yahweh’ before you, but you shall not see my face: for no man shall see me and live.” And Yahweh continued, “Behold, there is a place by me; you shall stand upon a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I’ll cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take my hand away, and you will see my back. But my face shall not be seen by anyone” (Exod. 33.18–23).
Descending beneath the ground, after a thunderstorm or an earthquake had opened and cracked it, the Lydian shepherd Gyges found a tomb there and a naked corpse that was larger than human size in a bronze horse, as though the man were hiding in the animal, skin protected by leather and hair, as though the animal had gone to ground in the sepulcher. The sphinx who holds the box with the ram’s head in his hands shows the king in the middle of two animals, guarded from the front and guarded from the rear. From what pressing danger? The pharaoh Mykerinos, having lost his daughter, whom he loved dearly, put the mummy of the dead girl in a cow of gilded wood; incense was burned in front of them and lit lamps watched over them during the night. Elsewhere a Nubian head emerges between a bull’s horns whose tips end in worshipping hands: a bicephalic animal in which the god mixes with he who prays to the god.1 The animal, in all these examples, is mixed with the human, with the corpse, with the royal person. How many gods after all are there with an ibis or jackal head, and human limbs?
Can these mixed bodies be separated or a logic to these chimeras be found?
It would be necessary to introduce into philosophy the elementary operator of substitution, an operator so well known and marked out in logic or mathematics.
Isaac lies under his father Abraham’s knife, and suddenly the ram replaces him. As he, the sacrificer, obedient to God, is raising his arm, his son is lying on the altar or stone. “Here lies” the victim. When the fist is holding the blade in the palpitating flesh of the dying, it’s cutting the throat of an animal. Let’s observe Abraham’s arm continuously as it violently falls upon the neck of this lying being and this latter at the same time: on the offertory table, the son withdraws while the animal enters. In the middle of this process, when the hand holding the dagger reaches the midpoint of its trajectory, who is lying on the stone when the motion stops if not this half-animal half-human monster depicted by ancient Egypt? The Biblical narrative effaces it. Substitution, elementary and discontinuous, puts an animal in place of the son; we see the ram, we see Isaac, exclusive of one another, like two tokens that can’t fit together into the same place in accordance with the principle of the excluded middle: it’s impossible, we say, for the man and the animal to be in the same place at the same time. Either one or the other. Granted. However we notice a middle moment, precisely the one during which the replacement is in the process of happening: the duration of the operation causes the mixed body to appear. Time effaces all contradiction.
Now the word “victim” signifies substitution, precisely. Of the same origin as “vice versa,” “vice-admiral,” “vicar,” or “vicarious” as we have seen, it indicates lieutenancy: who or what is the place-holder; he who or what represents. The ram represents Isaac; it lies there in his place. But, once again, in a moment of indecision that no one sees because the motion goes fast and which, mysterious, therefore remains in the black box, on the stone of the altar man is mixed with animal. During the process, the victim, by definition, links the representative to the represented. Here is the origin of tragedy, of all theater in general, of all representation: the Greek word tragos signifies the “goat” or the animal that’s sacrificed in a substitutional way. Who is going to die as a replacement for whom on the altar’s marble or the boards of the stage? Nothing has ever been seen at the theater except characters mixed with actors, in other words substitutes.
Now the word “substitution,” just like the word “substance,” literally says what stands below the statue, what is hiding in its hollow void or beneath its accidental appearances. The sphinx in the museum of Cairo therefore holds between its hands, below the ram’s head, a box that expounds the problem to which it contains the solution.
Every statue is in effect such a black box whose secret walls envelop someone or something that they hide and protect. The way a tent or a tabernacle does.
Like a priest, the sculptor shows this raw concrete chest or on the contrary, opens it and exhibits the mystery that that ark contained, or lastly, lets be seen, at the same time, the box and its secret at the moment of its opening.
Likewise: the corpse and the mummy lie in the tomb or their statue rises, outside. Or lastly, the spectator, stunned, arrives at the middle moment of the resurrection.
In other words, the travelers get into rows, quietly seated in the car or plane, the rocket Challenger, and they come out of it, or not, on arrival. You can put anyone whatsoever in any seat whatsoever, by substitution. We’ve made the moment when the doors gape open commonplace.
The sphinx itself, the jackal- or ibis-headed god, the king’s corpse located in the horse’s body or his daughter’s corpse in the golden heifer, these chimeras or metamorphoses open the black boxes halfway, the way Abraham’s hand was stopped in mid-path just now, just as God let himself be seen a little. The priest and the sculptor show the raw or animal box and the human head that comes out of it in the middle moment, as though midday were ringing.2 At that instant, a person plunges mid-body into another species.
These mixed fetishes anciently commemorate the inaugural moment of history in which animal sacrifice was substituted for human sacrifice. The man hides in the lion, the first foundation: the animal, then, protects the leader; God save the king. Then the ram itself hides in the box, the second foundation. The living subject and death are enveloped in the object. Our entire history is collected there: black beast, king, box or animal, man, thing; and the sphinx silently unfolds it.
Time lifts the contradictions: we were living young yesterday, and tomorrow we die hoary; if childhood and white old age contradict each other like the colors, black or silvery, of the hair this in no way matters to the time that gathers, connects, and units them. If conversely a monster defies nature or logic by mixing the lion and the lamb light is often shed on this mystery by duration. And if man is placed here between the animal and the thing this makes a rhythm of history completely explicit. Might Egypt have invented these dialectical fetishes, statues or stations, about which it may be said that they seemingly cause the march of time?
Petrified duration in the motionless group.
For more than thirty years they carried billions of stones over the absent or dead body of their father or king. Herodotus tells us that they hated him. Cheops behaved like an appalling tyrant, to the point of putting his daughter Hantsen in some brothel so that every client would bring him a stone in payment for her affections.
The Pyramids are lapidations; it’s a tautology to say so: piles of stones that rose from the most distant times over the tombs of the leaders. The pharaohs of the Old Kingdom lie under such heaps: lapidations spread out over the duration of their reigns, deferred, rationalized, administrated. Objectivized. Instead of dying suddenly from a volley of stones like Tarpeia, Saint Stephen, Turnus, and so many others from every culture, they forced those very people who were to put them to death to prepare their death by working to death and, as a result, invented the state and organized it on the very pattern of the pyramid (or of the labyrinth if several command together). The lynching moment swelled over thirty years. The victim, always hated by his victims, becomes king. Herodotus recounts that the pharaoh Cheops, closing the sanctuaries, prevented other sacrifices; let’s not be in too much of a hurry to doubt what he says because the measure directed the sacrificial and collective fury thereby transformed into work onto a single point, his own body or the place he was to occupy, and intensified the one–multiple schema along which violence and desire channel their effects. Hatred over the king’s corpse or cenotaph, love over the king’s daughter’s body, a crushing tax of sweat, money or stone, an immense pile of assembled men, the body social is built here on an invariant diagram, assassins, masons, lovers, a multiplicity weighing over a single point, victim or whore, king or woman, father and daughter, abhorrence, desire, payment, labor, a crowd in clusters around a center, a star or pyramid schema. The first great human termite hills over an individual’s belly. Here’s the father under the stones, and the point raised toward the sky behind the mute Sphinx who, offering his wildcat body to animal sacrifice, protected the king during all the time that he wasn’t being stoned while being stoned. During the time the primitive object, the black box in which the king lay, was being erected.
Egypt’s immense scene, at Giza, the Sphinx’s enigmatic smile signify this lightning-fast moment, at the same time brief and long by several millennia, in which hominization came to be because a group stopped killing its king so as to kill beasts of prey. A statue of substitution, a wonder of the world, and the beginning of history: stones before us, a hard, colossal, and invariant thing.
The Egyptians said that the gods, being only in small number long ago and fearing finding themselves overwhelmed by the multitude of impious and wicked men, concealed themselves beneath the form of diverse animals to elude their pursuit and fury. But these same gods, having finally made themselves masters of the world, had felt grateful to the animals whose resemblance had saved them: they consecrated them so that men had to feed and bury them with honors. Plutarch was indignant before Diodorus’s narrative, which is also cited by de Brosses,3 who was even more indignant that anyone should dare say that the frightened gods concealed themselves in the bodies of dogs or storks, a monstrous lie. But how did these gods or kings conquer the world if not by diverting the sound and fury of the multiple toward another body than their own? And by hardening all of it into worked objects?
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The sphinx—What animal stands on four feet at dawn, Oedipus, man who is passing by and who will die if he doesn’t reply or find the answer to the riddle? Oedipus—Doubtless man, who before walking or standing crawls, a small child, on four legs like an animal. A childish answer. But before man, the animal itself, quadruped like you. Although you lie down in the avenues or before the temples, showing your king’s face or your young woman’s chest or even spreading your bird’s wings, your four legs are obvious to see, oh wildcat. Man and brute mixed can remain quadruped. The sphinx—What animal stands on two feet at noon, beneath the shadowless sun? Oedipus—Man, of course, a biped like me, adult, standing, a walker, wandering, with a mobile niche, or like you, with a king’s face and queen’s breasts, or the animal whose feathered creature’s wingspan you display, man therefore and animal too, but this latter flies away, leaving behind he who finally dominates the animals, the intelligent talker, expressing himself because standing straight. The sphinx—What animal stands on three feet when night falls? Oedipus—The man, again and always, who leans on a staff of old age when fatigue and age arise. Every animal that walks, to the best of my knowledge, does so on an even number of legs, therefore no beast, no monster, oh sphinx, could live on three feet. The non-living, the dead, the inert are necessary for that. Only the object, the thing in equilibrium can stand in front of or after the animal and the man, static tripods, pyramids or tetrahedrons with triangular sides, the results of human labor. They can be called statues since they stay up all by themselves: your shadowless questions only bear on statues or equilibria. On the tripod, between us, the incense for the next sacrifice is smoking, and Pythia sometimes comes and sits on it. Three or four feet provide a good seat, not two:4 man wanders, at Giza, from the Sphinx to the Pyramids; these latter will remain, the former will be effaced. But not the staff. The support manufactured by the indefatigable talker, now standing and old, the tool, appeared during the final hours of the formation of this animal who remains a riddle. Oh, Sphinxe, did you know that work has three feet?5
The sphinx—Oh, Oedipus, do you know why you’re risking death? Oedipus—Yes, I’ve known for a little while now; the decipherers of riddles, my fathers, believed themselves to have gotten out of the difficulty for having heard me answer “man” to your questions. They didn’t even consider the fact that we were risking our lives, the both of us. If I don’t answer or am mistaken you’ll kill me; if I say the truth you’ll die. We’re having a dialog on pain of death. What are we gambling, as though at the dawn of history? Our lives. If I die you’ll sacrifice a man; if you die I’ll sacrifice a mixed body of man and animal: here’s the first progress. The sphinx—New and unexpected Oedipus among the diviners of riddles of ordinary mothers and fathers, why don’t we take up the question again?6 Oedipus—It consists precisely in mixing animal and man. Your riddle resembles your body. It’s always necessary to guess the man concealed behind the animal. The sphinx—Give me some time, Oedipus, before my death. Oedipus—Forget that man that crawls as a quadruped during his childhood, soon to be standing, senile so quickly. Why not say he’s still on four feet when the embalmers lay him out on the alabaster table shaped like a stretched-out lion to empty him of his entrails and organs? What can he be compared to in his mummy wraps? What dull foolishness! The sphinx—Recount again and take your time; save me. Oedipus—Here’s the time: this day in which the sun rises, like a godsend, running to its zenith and falling to the western horizon, which everyone takes to be a short life, mysteriously measures our entire history and gives the laws of hominization.
The sphinx—Say the first law. Oedipus—The death we risk face to face both of us and which makes us talk or write so long makes us think, drives us to decipher its riddle. Death in general and intraspecific murder: animals know little of them. We find ourselves at risk of death, facing the world and the other, in front of the crowd and before speech. We must give death an answer. The sphinx—Give me an answer. Oedipus—Give you an answer. The sphinx—Give you an answer. Oedipus—Give me an answer. Here we are before the altar and the mystery, a riddle completely different from the children’s guessing game of a moment ago. At this risk and to save its life, humanity at the dawn of time fell upon animals. The great hunts drawn at Lascaux conceal the hunt for man. The latter slowly becomes human by first becoming animal. It transforms into a kind of sphinx.
The sphinx—So who am I? Oedipus—Crouched all along your wildcat body, you’re the first moment of history, when human sacrifice was hesitating before the first law—thou shalt not kill—and when animal sacrifice began to be practiced as a substitute for intraspecific murder. If the sphinxes aren’t killed they’ll ravage the land right up to the extinction of men and their group. When Semitic Noah wanted to save himself and his family from the great destruction that would be caused by the waters of the Flood, he built the animal ark so as to hide in their midst, and as a result kept them. Animals must therefore be killed, must therefore be raised or domesticated; wild animals must be eliminated; Hercules labored, a wooden club over his shoulder, and traversed the world, slaughtering birds, lion, hydra, hinds, boar; see him also change into an animal, the lion’s fleece on his body and his face hidden at the bottom of its throat, protecting himself under this beginning of clothing.7 The Egyptians went around nude, above all the women, except for the priests dressed in skins. I recognize you as being a woman beneath that bestial mane, sphinxe tightly bound or hidden beneath your riddles and appearances. The sphinx—My body, my name. Oedipus—Your name, Greek, says at the same time embrace and strangulation, oh monster who brings death but also covering and implication, the condensed, hidden, tightly bound secret. You’re named like your paws: talons.8 The sphinx—And you’re named like your feet. Oedipus—Our two names anticipate the riddle. The sphinx—I designate talons, but you know feet; by your knowledge and the words of language, you become man but I remain beast. Oedipus—Your body reads like a living hieroglyphic, just as jackal-headed Anubis or ibis-beaked Thoth do, like Heracles beneath his lion skin or Noah hidden in his menagerie. Remember Osiris whose dismembered corpse was scattered, piece by piece, on the Egyptian plain where, at each sacred place, an animal guarded it. And metempsychosis! It’s told that the soul migrates into an animal’s body according to its merits. Everything became clear from then on, yet everything became reversed, for all at once, men were going to stop sacrificing animals through fear of killing the man bound in them. The sphinx—They had discovered the secret; they had uncovered the hiding-place! Oedipus—Yes. From that moment on, the delivered man could emerge from his golden animal skins so as to stand upright and naked in the Greek light, in the temples and the public squares, statues on two legs, simply human.9 The lawful noon rang, the Hellenic zenith of the great abstract discoveries.
The gods were no longer hiding themselves—nor men.
The Greek legend of Thebes reports that the sphinx or the sphinxe of undecided gender, nature, and sex—human, animal, male and female mixed—was punishing the city for a homosexual crime committed by Laius, Oedipus’s father, and for that reason would sit in session at the top of a mountain to the west of the capital from which he or she would ravage the country, where she or he would propose impossible riddles to the passers-by, seeking to devour them. When Oedipus guessed, that threw itself to the bottom of its rock.
The questioner and the questioned now stand on both sides of this summit, in equilibrium: which of the two is going to die from the riddle? In Latin the word “examination” signifies the needle of a balance and the act of weighing [peser], that verb from which the verb “to think” [penser] is derived. The sphinxe examines Oedipus who examines the sphinx in return. In which direction is the beam going to strike down so as to kill? In which sense of the word hidden beneath the question or problem? The word is equivalent to decision or the saying to death. Everything flows back into language. Now at the beginning of the drama everything was presented as undecided: male or female, human, bestial, dead or living, in the things themselves and in the said riddle: animal or man, this multipede? The upright beast stumbles; the risen animal doesn’t know how to stand.
A primitive scene of justice. The balance swings, an examiner. And the decision rests on the clarification of words.
Once again, the riddle.
What animal stands on four feet? The quadrupedal animal.
What animal is supported by two feet? The bipedal human.
What is the tripod called now? Work? Not yet.
The riddle becomes more profound in questioning its own staging. It was transiting from animal to man on the question of equilibrium, then from equilibrium to man’s institutions, a term that repeats equilibrium.
On the rock overlooking the city, Oedipus and the sphinx are face to face, to the death. Who will decide who is going to die? Nobody. But a disequilibrium precedes the equilibrium or follows it: the needle of the examination or the balance stumbles and swings, undecided like the body and sex of the monster or like the riddle itself.
The sphinx—Oh, Oedipus, guess and say a three-footed word. Oedipus—The tribunal. The very one before which we’re both appearing today, at the article of death. Or the one that we’re forming, you, death, and me. The sphinx—Now say or guess a two-footed word. Oedipus—The scales or balance, which is what the tribunal amounts to. On both sides of the rock, our two bodies move in disequilibrium on this seesaw. The sphinx—The last word, with one foot? Oedipus—The beam—the rod—which is what the balance amounts to, therefore the tribunal; the authority that immediately decides which of the two of us will die. You’ve only posed riddles of equilibrium, stations or statues, institutions, and now we’re reaching this unique needle together, without seat, deprived of statics, unstable, which wanders in space like our two bodies and our two lives, which moves, which doesn’t stand, which suddenly falls in the midst of us, like the time of death, the first or final authority. The sphinx—Three, two, one. Oedipus—Your life comes to an end at the zero instant.
Here is our first tribunal, set up on the counsel rock to the west of Thebes, on a tarpeian rock. A certain crime required a punishment; some passer-by arrived in order to suspend it. For the first prescription in history. A monster undecided in nature or sex sits in session in that high place and judges who knows or doesn’t know the word.10 Oedipus, with the same word, judges it and sentences it. This duel has laid down force and arms so as to submit to language, exterior or superior to the two legendary beings, animal and man. Justice passes through the precise solution. Does the notion of truth begin there by means of an accuracy obtained in the debate of a legal authority and paid for by the life of a man?11
Here is our first tribunal and its first decision, bringing a cessation to the ravages exercised by the undecided animal. Men will no longer die here because the tribunal amasses social violence and freezes it. The set of the murders around Thebes is summarized in the judicial death of the animal, said responsible for the murders, punished by a final word. Peace arises.
The tribunal brings off the miracle of checking the scattered and unobstructed violence by means of a language trick. The envelopment of meaning in a linguistic black box and its exit out of secrecy into the light of day seems to appease, at least for a time, the murderous fury.
They are three: the man, the real mixed body of man and animal, sphinx, and the animal–man of the questions who’s enveloped in language. Hence this new riddle: how did the debate by questions and answers or detective riddles and solutions suddenly replace the deadly tragedy that was devastating Thebes? In the last act of Horace, Corneille likewise left the deadly tragedy that was devastating Rome and Alba in order to stage in its stead the tribunal in which the king judged the hero in a contradictory manner, causing the judicial authority to be born on the dangerous remains of a fratricide. The old man of law rediscovered with a sovereignly profound gesture the anthropological foundations buried by its practice. The judicial staged a real tragedy in which language didn’t represent but was performatively equivalent to death. But the battle itself didn’t go without staging, in which Horace represented Rome and the triple Curiatii substituted for the city of Alba. It was likewise necessary therefore to clarify the enigma of the staging in the representation of Oedipus.12
A moment ago animal sacrifice substituted for human sacrifice; the search for meaning now substitutes for the victims’ blood. As though the time or the sun of this enigmatic day was advancing by a play, unforeseen or regular, of substitutions.13 If combinatorial algebra cannot produce time, the operation that makes this algebra possible and puts such and such in place of such and such seems to be able to do so. Language in the end holds therefore as the substitute for all possible substitutions and effaces its effectiveness as soon as it establishes its global law. For after everything had distributively been god, leader or sun, stone or father, each in its turn, the religions of the book or speech appeared, whose sayings and writings cast every thing or non-speaking animal into an undecipherable enigma. We will no longer know what the idols were nor what lies under the statues—the things in themselves. The final substitute for substance, the substantive effaces it and makes it unknowable.
Such a transubstantiation takes place at the tribunal, whose scene was already represented in the tragic space of collective murder in which the victim already represents the multiple in its unity, in which Horatius and Curiatius were substituted for their respective cities, whose scene borders on the tripods on which holocausts are smoking: the inaugural place where the word is equivalent to the thing, entirely, without excess or lack, and where first and foremost the verdict is equivalent to the body. If you don’t know the answer you die, your life being answerable. The colossal sphinx’s body, lying, crouched on four legs, wildcat, human-headed, an animal raised on two feet, its body that is going to die already forms almost the entire secret of its riddle: it is already becoming word or letter, hieroglyph.
The birth of the performative, in this place: the word is equivalent to the thing. What thing?
At a tribunal, a case is debated.14 The term “accusation” repeats this “case” in its way. Never has observation followed so subtly the invisible line that separates or unites the domain of words and the world of things. The case here is equivalent to the death of the body, a real stake: is said, debated, and developed in arguments, secrets to be discovered and hidden responsibilities. Every trial or pending case more or less envelops an enigma to be deciphered. Research, even now, often adopts the detective or judicial method. Cause [case], again, is a word whose history we can follow in our language and others more foreign. There the miracle and solution of the final riddle is awaiting us. The word cause designates the root or origin of the word chose [thing]: causa, cosa; likewise, “thing” or Ding in English or German refer to the same origin and root in their respective languages, designating the judicial authority that decides in an assembly. The tribunal stages the identity of the case and the thing, of the word and the object or the substitutive passage of the ones and the others. A thing emerges there.
And for example the box, mysterious and black, that the statufied conversation of the man with the wildcat projects before it, or that the sphinx holds between its hands, a reduced model of the statue and the riddle.
The sphinx—The real evening is falling for me: what animal goes on three feet? Oedipus—The old man leaning on his cane when age wears him out: the answer to the examination of old presupposed that the day governed by the rhythm of the sun indicated the duration of a life. But that day indexes the sequence of history, as I have said. The aging, experienced generations shape, cut or carve branches or marble, adapt the tool to he who uses or desires it, beat, hit, shoot, hunt, dig, kill, or aid a hesitant gait by means of the new object or even, by digging and beating, decorate. This twilight animal adds together a man and a thing the way the morning animal mixed man with animal. The sphinx—Animals have feet, not hands. In the mixed body, the box is put forward held by human hands. Oedipus—Of the three, one foot matters more, leaving the two others to their living parity and to the upright posture that causes hands to be born: the foot that could be said to be orthopedic or false, the prosthesis serving as a support but that can be detached, marking the final and decisive advance of this living being delivered from death by the animal and from the animal by death, risen at noon, soon talking and measuring—at the price of his life—language by things, and bringing death again before the object-box. This living being suddenly recognizes the world. The sphinx—Farewell. Oedipus—Stay. Consider, before you, that, and forget, behind you, the old cases. Look, in silence, for a long time at these boxes and these stable pyramids, at this peaceful objective world. What good is it to die, for what archaic causes?
The metaphor or homothetic projection of the solar day onto a human life is not easily justified, although familiar: child of the dawn, adult at noon, old man in the evening. A similar projection of ontogenetic life onto phylogenetic evolution, also ordinary, is no more justified, although the new solutions to one of our oldest riddles just used it. Why would the body follow the regular course of the sun? Why would a group or species grow old like an individual? These images identify the time of life and that of history with the astronomical model. The odds that history, life and inert trajectory would beat with the same duration can be estimated to be low. For that, it would be necessary for the rhythm to remain everywhere the same as the unit of the day, in two, three or four feet as it’s said in poetry, in four, double, or triple time as it’s measured in music, and nothing assures us of this. Everything leads us to think the opposite, for example the unforeseeability that increases when one goes from sunset to death and from this latter to the end of history, at times that are respectively certain, uncertain, unthinkable. There is often newness under the sun.
And thus pockets of haste border on lakes of frost; an advance adjoins a delay, both contingent; the units or the times mix all the more confusedly because you pass from the sky to living matter and from this latter to collective adventures, day, existence, epochs. The primitive can still be found here and the contemporary in the past.
Does the riddle only have one solution? Then, time would flow in a single direction. But the riddle delivers several, the one at least that Oedipus found, millions of years ago, plus those that have just come to light. Therefore time percolates in several directions, multiple speeds and numerous rhythms, multivalent like tolerance, rich like a peaceful thought.
Behind the plume of smoke left by the rocket, whose name issues a challenge to the stars—does it lift off? does it explode?—past time is unfurled across stations whose ages mix dates, eras, and references. The situation is, in reality, the same as in this book.
Therefore the riddle returns, the same and different: humanity in its sum today is facing its own death the way a unique Oedipus in the past confronted a questioning animal.
What word is this humanity going to answer? What object must be produced? What man should we educate and raise, still buried to mid-body in animals and things?