/lit/ - Literature

>Religion, speech, politics, invention—each is but an effect of the de-fault of origin. The essential is the accident, the absence of quality. The political question, the question of the community, only makes sense if one starts from the community of a de-fault or of the imminent de-fault of community. Religion, sacrifice, the altar only make sense with this political question, which originates in Prometheus's stamp. Speech will only make sense in terms of the meaning that this sacrifice saves.

>Man invents, discovers, finds (eurisko), imagines (mê khane),and realizes what he imagines: prostheses, expedients. A pros-thesis is what is placed in front, that is, what is outside, outside what it is placed in front of. However, if what is outside constitutes the very being of what it lies outside of, then this being is outside itself The being of humankind is to be outside itself. In order to make up for the fault of Epimetheus, Prometheus gives humans the present of putting them outside themselves.

>Humankind, we might say, puts into effect what it imagines because itis endowed with reason, with logos—that is, also with language. Or should we rather say that it is because it realizes what it imagines—as we said a moment ago, because it lies outside itself—that humanity is endowed with reason, that is, with language? Is it tekhne that arises from logos, or the reverse? Or rather, is it not that logos and tekhne are modalities of the same being-outside-oneself?

>Prometheus robs Hephaestus and Athena. By pursuing Athena, Hephaestus becomes the father of the Athenians. Here arms, tools, and instruments of war play a large role: Athena rose from the head of Zeus clad in arms, delivered by the patron god of handicraft with an axe. Athena is in turn pursued by Hephaestus when she orders arms from him: in this manner the craftsman's sperm is spilt on the earth, constituting the myth of Athenian autochthony, a myth that will be important to us later. Origin, war, politics: with each it is a matter of instruments. From these gods who handle instruments is stolen the "creative genius of the arts" (which translates ten entekhnen sophian: it is, again, a matter of sophia and tekhne).

>Sophia and tekhne are nothing without fire, with all that this connotes of duplicity, given that it concerns the fire stolen by Prometheus. Fire, in the hands of mortals, is a power of divine origin through whose mediation, in sacrifice, the mortals put themselves in the place of the gods. Fire is not, however, the power of mortals, it is not their property; it is much more a domestic power that, when escaping the technical mastery of this domesticity, reveals its wild violence, disclosing the powerlessness of mortals, only appearing in their hands, yet again, through disappearing.

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