/lit/ - Literature

>It is immediately by deviating from the equilibrium of animals, from tranquillity—a departure engendered by the fault of Epimetheus—that mortals occur. Before the deviation, there is nothing. Then the accidental event happens, the fault of Epimetheus: to have forgotten humans. Humans are the forgotten ones. Humans only occur through their being forgotten; they only appear in disappearing.

>Fruit of a double fault—an act of forgetting, then of theft—they are naked like small, premature animals, without fur and means of defense, in advance of themselves, as advance, and also as delay (no qualities are left, everything has already been distributed). They do not yet possess the art of the political, which will be made necessary by their prematureness, directly ensuing from the technical. But this "not yet" does not imply that there will be two steps to their emergence, a time of a full origin, followed by a fall: there will have been nothing at the origin but the fault, a fault that is nothing but the de-fault of origin or the origin as de-fault. There will have been no appearance except through disappearance. Everything will have taken place at the same time, in the same step.

>If the myth in the Theogony evokes a golden age in which humans banqueted next to the gods, this means that humans had not yet occurred, since nothing had yet occurred, the golden age lying prior to the time in which something could occur. {The golden age} does not oppose a state of nature to a civilized state; it erases all differences between them, presenting civilized foods as the spontaneous product of nature bestowed upon men without their having to lift a finger, the food already cultivated, harvested, stored, cooked, and ready to be consumed.

>Thus the deviation, if there is one, is not in relation to nature but in relation to the divine. Again this means that the real issue here concerns the relation of mortals to immortality, that this anthropogony is in the first instance a thanatology. Anthropogony only acquires meaning in theogony, the conflict between the Olympians and the Titans, which continues, in an underhanded way, with the struggle between Zeus and Prometheus.It is in this sense that humans participate in the divine, on the basis of the double fault, particularly that of the theft of fire, erecting altars to the gods qua those who are immortal. It is a religion entirely made up of trepidation at the condition of technicity (its power, implying equally the powerlessness of mortals). Before the fault, nothing had happened. The fault takes place, and everything disappears: humans, in their condition of mortality, issue from a deceitful lot given by Prometheus, to the detriment of Zeus and to the apparent benefit of humanity, whose sacrificial practices in the Greek city recall the consequences. Mortals come to be through their very disappearance, a disappearance inherent to their condition, that of dying.