Drafts by Émilie Carrière-Bouchard
It may seem with proverbs that we are facing what is most familiar, homely, and commonplace even.... more It may seem with proverbs that we are facing what is most familiar, homely, and commonplace even. Perhaps it is then one of the tasks of criticism to refuse to leave it at that; and a critical philology would then be tasked with estrangement — to dispel the given. Assuming it were so, we would have to take the proverb as something problematic, something not to be taken for granted. We start from this assumption in order to ask another question: given that proverbs exist, and that they can exist, does it entail that they can always exist? Which we can reword like this: “What are the conditions of possibility of a proverb?” This is a question that’s being tracked here through the threefold problem of experience, translation, and community. Following insights by Walter Benjamin on proverbs and their relation to experience, what was encountered was the issue of translation, something that is then examined through Hölderlin’s work on Sophocles. This was not an innocent choice; by a contact with what seems like the most foreign form of translation we could find, we sought to question the most essential assumptions underlying our own understanding of translation.
From there, this realization emerges, that community is the condition of an experience that could be translated into a proverb, while translatability is the condition of such a community. This might seem somewhat tautological, but as Plato says, the most beautiful things are circular. Set against Agamben’s work, the proverb then seemed to be created by a community of experience, and to hold the power, in its performative utterance, to create an experience of community.
And so, if what follows concerns itself with the conditions of possibility of the proverb, these are not explored exclusively through a theoretical reflection, but also through a comparison with Hölderlin’s philosophy of tragedy. That is to say, Hölderlin’s work on Sophocles serves as an exploration both of the limits of translation, and of the problematic relations between experience, language, and community. This, at last, will allow us to ask ourselves whether new proverbs can exist today.
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Hiero I of Syracuse was a Sicilian monarch of the classical period, who reigned in Syracuse betwe... more Hiero I of Syracuse was a Sicilian monarch of the classical period, who reigned in Syracuse between 478 and 466. If royalty may have become rarefied in the political universe of Late-Archaic and Classical Greece, I contend that the reign of Hiero saw the creation, around his person, of a royal ideology: that is to say, that he represented himself and was perceived as king. Frisone's article "Experimenting Basileia: Princely Models and the Tyrants of Sicily", distinguishes two approaches to Greek kingship, one formalist and one pragmatist, where the former deals with royalties bearing established royal institutions, and the latter with royalties which, although lacking specific royal institutions, expressly assert themselves as royalties and are recognized as such. Adopting this second approach, this research works mainly in the field of representation, and therefore, focuses on discourses organized by Hiero on royal power. According to Hekster and Fowler (2005), royal ideology is constructed "by the transmission and reception of messages, between king and subject, and king and rival." And thus this research compares contemporary Greek royalties to Hiero's and attempts to show that at the turn of the Archaic and Classical periods, royalty as a factual, mythical, and religious referent, is sufficiently present in the Greek mental universe for Hiero to make a convincing interpretation of his reign as a royalty.
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Papers by Émilie Carrière-Bouchard
The Classical Review, 2021
As evinced in its title, this book, a collection of articles published by H. from 1979 to 2020, p... more As evinced in its title, this book, a collection of articles published by H. from 1979 to 2020, presents itself as a reflection on the workings of Pindar’s epinician poetry. The book is divided into two parts, the first comprising five studies on the construction of individual poems, the second two studies on transversal themes in Pindar’s epinician corpus. H. centres his first essay on the tenth Pythian and the fourteenth Olympian and analyses their connection with a local, Boeotian culture. His analysis of Pythian 10 educes a ternary structure from the poem, while his treatment of the fourteenth Olympian delineates a different textual coherence, binary rather than ternary in nature. From such observations on the framework of the two odes H. shows how an overarching structure does not preclude free poetic ‘inspiration’. This allows H. to respond to anti-unitarian scholarship as well as to formalist approaches that attempt to salvage Pindar’s unity at the cost of grounding it in pur...
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Drafts by Émilie Carrière-Bouchard
From there, this realization emerges, that community is the condition of an experience that could be translated into a proverb, while translatability is the condition of such a community. This might seem somewhat tautological, but as Plato says, the most beautiful things are circular. Set against Agamben’s work, the proverb then seemed to be created by a community of experience, and to hold the power, in its performative utterance, to create an experience of community.
And so, if what follows concerns itself with the conditions of possibility of the proverb, these are not explored exclusively through a theoretical reflection, but also through a comparison with Hölderlin’s philosophy of tragedy. That is to say, Hölderlin’s work on Sophocles serves as an exploration both of the limits of translation, and of the problematic relations between experience, language, and community. This, at last, will allow us to ask ourselves whether new proverbs can exist today.
Papers by Émilie Carrière-Bouchard
From there, this realization emerges, that community is the condition of an experience that could be translated into a proverb, while translatability is the condition of such a community. This might seem somewhat tautological, but as Plato says, the most beautiful things are circular. Set against Agamben’s work, the proverb then seemed to be created by a community of experience, and to hold the power, in its performative utterance, to create an experience of community.
And so, if what follows concerns itself with the conditions of possibility of the proverb, these are not explored exclusively through a theoretical reflection, but also through a comparison with Hölderlin’s philosophy of tragedy. That is to say, Hölderlin’s work on Sophocles serves as an exploration both of the limits of translation, and of the problematic relations between experience, language, and community. This, at last, will allow us to ask ourselves whether new proverbs can exist today.