BOOKS
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1. La musique linguistique de la réminiscence : le Ménon de Platon entre réinvention cratyléenne de la langue commune et réappropriation de l’ancienne langue parénétique (avec une préface en anglais d’Egbert Bakker, Yale University), Grenoble, Jérôme Millon (« Horos »), 2018 (à paraître)
The new reading of Plato’s Meno that I propose is based on a double observation. On the one hand there is the often noted fact that the protagonist’s name, Μένων, is identical to the present participle form of the verb μένειν “to be steadfast, to resist.” On the other hand, it turns out that each time Socrates addresses Meno, a curious phenomenon comes into play: "clusters" of sequences such as μεν, μην, μον, μν, μαν are being generated, a process that is seen as drawing on the characteristic diction of Tyrtaeus’ exhortative elegies (although the poet of archaic Sparta is never explicitly mentioned). The detailed study of the dialogue’s overall structure (which is self-reflexive in various ways) in terms of these clusters as “phonico-syllabic” nodes operating below the semantic and syntactic surface of its argumentation makes it possible to show that this sonorous “weaving” is integral part of a process of the perpetual reinvention of speaking oneself and speaking together, as the underlying condition for the “anamnetic” introspection without which knowledge is not possible. This leads me to formulating the hypothesis of a linguistic basis for the anamnesis theory as a genuine initiatory experience in and through language that is re-connected to itself and to its speakers. That is, language regains its natural kinship with itself and the subject (συγγενής), and in doing so finds all its natural communicative and cognitive power. Such language does not presuppose the contemplation of the Ideas.
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2. Alcméon de Crotone. « Traité scientifique » en prose ou λόγος poético-médical ? (Nouvelle édition traduite des fragments, accompagnée du texte et de la traduction des témoignages de l’édition Diels-Kranz)
The book is a unique edition of Alcméon's fragments, for the first time identified as authentically poetic (that is to say, metric-rhythmic), with a French translation, and with the text and the French translation of the Diels-Kranz testimonials.
Thanks to a new sonic and rhythmic reading of the verbatim fragments of this ancient thinker – up to now considered as the first “philosopher-cum-doctor” closely linked to the Pythagorician circle which was flourishing in Crotone in the 6th c. BC – the analysis leads to an enunciative reinterpretation of the incipit (fr. 24 B 1 DK) that makes it possible to show the pragmatic force of his discourse and to suggest an oral performance that must be both political and scientific. By highlighting his authentic poetic expertise it takes up once more the question of the so-called obscurity of the “scientific-philosophical” incipit of the archaic period and challenges the straight dichotomy between two kinds of beginnings related to two kinds of public, one broad and communal, the other elitist and confidential.
Without ever losing sight of the contextual data available to us, it is a hope that the new phonic-pragmatic philology here adopted can show for the first time that Alcmaeon was a real poet-doctor for whom the rhythm of speech mattered as much as its content for the simple reason that it must represent, in his eyes, one of the "constituent powers" (dunameis) of his medical knowledge.
The identification of a quasi-strophic four-verse structure in an incipit that has always been regarded as purely prosaic leads, most naturally, to proposing a new edition of Alcmaeon fragments which clearly demonstrates the coherence of their rhythmic work. Being concerned only with quotations that can legitimately be considered verbatim, this edition has to distinguish them from other fragments that are attributable to him. So it will be found, on the one hand, the rhythmic fragments easily detachable from their context (noted F), on the other hand the paraphrastic fragments which are so closely inserted in the discourse of the source-author that they are not syntactically isolatable (noted Fp).
In order to offer a coherent vision of the Alcmaeonian work, the metric-shaped fragments could not be dissociated from the rich whole that has come down to us and which allows us to measure the polymathic extent of Alcmaeon's bio-physiological knowledge. This is why it has been chosen to give the text and the French translation of the Diels-Kranz testimonials.
Neither a prose "treatise" nor a "poem", Alcmaeon's poetic-medical discourse is ultimately valuable for what he teaches us: sage thinkers of the pre-Platonic period were above all real experts of Greek language in its various aspects – lexical, morpho-semantic, phonic-syllabic and rhythmic – because in the aural-sonic culture that characterizes ancient Greece, the experience of the world and the reality of things necessarily depends on the total experience of language.
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3. Tyrtée et Kallinos. La diction des anciens chants parénétiques (édition, traduction et interprétation), Paris, Classiques Garnier (« Kainon »), 2017
The singularity and the most effective holoparaenetic (all-exhortative) function of Tyrtaeus’ and Kallinos’ fragments, too long neglected by a philological tradition narrowly focused on the Homeric model, imposed themselves for a return to the text of these two wise-poets of the VIIth century B. C. and, to do this, required that we stick to the letter of the manuscripts without first take offense, and that we study for itself, in its depths language, the diction which was theirs and that for the first time, concomitantly with Archilochus, used the elegiac meter. Now, apart from their being dialectically and rhythmically more fluctuating than it looks, their organization inherently “stanzaic”, based on echoes which are more phonic than lexical, as well as the repeated use of the rhythmically marked form of the medio-passive participles in -μένος/-(ό)μενος, are two features that underpin us to believe that it is a "sound" or more precisely "phonic-pragmatic" rhythm which was to be their driving force. For that reason and since it is more and more established that we must trust the linguistics of Plato’s Cratylus, I have been looking through it for a method that tackles such a state of language. The resulting hermeneutic and philological journey, throughout a whole system of phonic-syllabic correspondences turning around the verbal stem of μένω “to stand firm”, helps clear a path into the intra- and infra-linguistic dimension of Tyrtaeus’ and Kallinus’ paraenetic diction in order to understand better the reasons and the nature of an efficiency that inherits obviously non-narrative traditions.
Keywords : archaic elegy; archaic knowledge; paraenetic diction; linguistics; historic grammar; (phonic)-pragmatics; deixis; language efficiency; hermeneutic philology; rhythm; poetic performance; sound and sonority; Tyrtaeus; Kallinos (Callinus); Plato; Cratylus; Laws
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4. Parménide, Fragments, Poème, précédé de Énoncer le verbe être, Paris, Vrin, 2012 (Présenté par M. Michela Sassi à la septième édition d’ELEATICA, Ascea, 15-18 avril 2012)
The book provides the text of Parmenides’ fragments with a unique commentary, from which the new French translation is directly resulting. By anchoring the discourse of this poet-thinker into its own linguistic and poetic underlying layer, the analysis is resolutely linguistic and therefore leaves aside all “metaphysical” considerations, both purely ontological and logico-ontological. As an authentic poet, directly connected to the whole of archaic Greek poetry characterized by ever-oral performances, Parmenides elaborates a very peculiar linguistic unit, the verb to be, whose most eminently representative form is ἐστί, “is”. It is the keystone of the efficacy of Parmenides’ kosmological discourse.