Papagiannopoulos Helias, Beyond Absence: An Essay on the Human Person in the footsteps of Oedipus Tyrrannus by Sophocles, Indiktos Publ. Athens, 2005, pages 587.
Having as point of reference the hermeneutic reading of the fundamental ancient tragedy Oedipus Tyrrannus by Sophocles, this essay describes a journey that runs through the psychical landscapes of the most traumatized hero of the ancient literature: Oedipus.
From the moment that the central spiritual drama of man breaks out, the drama of identity through the exit from the undifferentiated totality, until the time it gets its unexpected solution through the look of the other, there is a series of extensions, like equitant circles or like a spiral manoeuvre, which will open the ancient text to the destiny of modern mentality. From the canals of Venice to the hinterland of Kantian and Freudian thinking, we recognise the dark parts of an existence that eludes itself and the other, reaching, thus, the post-modern encomium of the absent self. Tracing the footsteps of Oedipus, however, we can also open up to the vital loss, the one that Adam inaugurated, to our shadow or the voice of the Other, Nekyia, the petrified look of Medusa and the crushing of vision, the fall of the facades, in all these motifs from Oedipus, the Scripture, Odyssey, and a series of other texts from Shakespeare to Levinas. The path of trust to the same darkness leads us to a charismatic end: the unexpected emergence of a home in exile–in reality, of a radically shared existence and a self, which exists as self-offer or as conversation. Then, generosity and closeness emerge as an ontological field of the subject.
Through the crucifying denial of the idols of the omnipotence of individuality emerges the person as a resurrectional ecstatic relation, which responds to the constitutive call on behalf of the uncreated. The human existence is a gift on the part of a transcendental externality and the self gains an ontological place only through resurrection. Thus, subjectivity is eschatological. We always tend towards it and never start from it.