Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library

Appendix: It Was to Be/It Is to Be

I Quomodo auctor finem inire debeat. In conclusion . . . Thus we can see . . . Concludere: to bring it all together by closing it all up in a confined space. Claustrophilia. Appendere: to cause to be suspended, to hang. Appendix: something supplementary tacked on to a larger whole, an appendage. Hence I conclude with an appended supplement , a testimony to a species of archival claustrophobia. Some will say it is the coda that wags the dog, an open confession of a variety of illdisguised depravities. Others will say that a long-suspended debt is finally paid out by weight and closed off. Here concludere would converge with appendere.1 II Quod δόγμα σαυτοῦ πεποίησαι furti indicum sit. This book is already too long. And yet at this point I ought to insert into it James Porter’s Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future.2 The whole is likely needed. Perhaps parts would do. In any case, I would not name Porter; he would be Gellius (on Pomponius) to my Macrobius. That is how much I adore his book: I would steal it. I would“assent”to it. To provide more context /contextus for this homespun fantasy of (ill-)gotten philology, I would probably also weave into the weaving together of “my” stolen work/works a few additional threads pilfered from elsewhere. Thus, given my interest in 288 appendix 7 Futurum erat / Futurum est 1. “The terms closed and open, in other words, are complicit with each other” (Martindale 1993:38). 2. Foucault 1973:342 offers but a glimpse of the promise of Nietzsche, philology, and the future. Porter at last makes good on (Foucault’s) Nietzsche’s promise. the revenant, I would need to add my opinion as well and to cast a vote along with Pierre Kossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.3 III Fauorinus deterrere uolens ac depellere adulescentes a genethliacis et quibusdam aliis id genus, qui prodigiosis artibus futura omnia dicturos pollicentur, nullo pacto adeundos eos esse consulendosque huiuscemodi argumentis concludebat: “Aut aduersa” inquit “euentura dicunt aut prospera.” A philological Nietzsche who is perhaps less familiar to contemporary philologists can be found in Foucault. I would like to explore some of Foucault’s questions and the manner in which Foucault’s (re)writing of (himself as) Nietzsche affects the way we might ourselves think through the problems of the antiquarian and the archive. Foucault (re)formulates Nietzsche’s rules of reading and offers them as a guide to exploring the power of discourse. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault paints a portrait of the genealogist.4 The genealogist’s work is“grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary .”5 Genealogy discovers a scandalous origin: disparity.6 Genealogy discovers, then, what Gellius himself shamelessly discloses from the outset. After such a proclamation Gellius remains hard to read only to the extent that reading as a genealogist is something we cannot bring ourselves to do. This situation yields the labor of thinking through a proposition such as “emergence designates a place of confrontation,” especially when this place turns out to be a “‘nonplace,’ a pure distance.”7 We see endless confrontation in the nonplace of the Noctes, but we do not want to imagine that anything is emerging there.“Gellius” might emerge there, but only as a Gellius who was always already there: the text merely reflects the image of a nowdeparted Gellius. For us the text is not the nonplace where the real Gellius is really happening. For us the text is not the anachronistic atopic archive where Gellius/Gellius can be seen emerging in the here and now. “But if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different Futurum erat / Futurum est 289 3. Klossowski 1997. 4. Compare also the definition of genealogy at Foucault 1997e:118. 5. Foucault 1997b:369. 6. Foucault 1997b:372. 7. Foucault 1997b:377. game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations.”8 We are reluctant to play genealogists and to record the stories of these “interpretations” that the Noctes (re)produces by way of (re)staging the emergence of knowledge itself. Crisis , criticism, confrontation: they are everywhere within the Noctes; they also clearly lie “behind” the Noctes, and...