Excursus

Abstract

Marking a pause between the cycles of chapters on pharmaceutics / the tragic, and Plato, this chapter tracks Kofman’s readings of two pre-Socratic figures in the work of modern theorists: Heraclitus/Nietzsche and Empedocles/Freud. We see a familiar pattern between these readings, insofar as she rejects the paternalistic appropriation of such thinking by mainstream philosophy. With Empedocles, she investigates Freud’s contention that the life- and death-drives are prefigured by the work of this figure; this moves into discussion of the difficult-to-perceive balance between these two drives or phenomena. With Heraclitus, it is the questions of impermanence, flow, and metaphor that interest Kofman (via Nietzsche).