Socrates, Make Music!Or

The Work of Socrates Hands, Before the Raising of the CupAnd

More Poetry, Less Prose: Originary Thinking and the Writing of the Self

“Socrate Celui qui N’ecrit Pas.”

Nietzsche

Professor Eduardo Duarte, PhDHofstra University

‘King’ Socrates, the author, in dialogue with his Muse, the dream. Unknown origin. Shared by Sam Rocha, May, 2012

Jacques Luis-David , “The Death of Socrates” (1787)

From the cover of Derrida’s The Post Card. This is a reprint of the postcard Derrida ‘discovered’ and

purchased at the Bodleian library gift shop

Self portrait of Matthew Paris from the original manuscript of his Historia Anglorum (London, British Library, MS Royal 14.C.VII, folio 6r) Retrieved from the Bodleian online catalogue.

Image from Bodlieian library Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts.Listed by the library as: MS. Ashmole 304. English illumination: fortune-telling tracts, (The drawing is by Matthew Paris, but

catalogued under Bernardus Silvertris. Retrieved from the Bodleian online catalog, July 2, 2012.

Photograph from Duke Humphrey Room, Bodleian Library, from Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida. Derrida writes of visiting this reading room and examining Paris’ book on 19 July 1979 in The Post Card.

Bernard Silvester, “Self-Potrait”

Introducing the third tract 'Praenostica Socratis Basilei'. Coloured drawing. Plato and Socrates. Plato points upwards, as Socrates (left-handed) dips his pen in the inkpot while securing the vellum with a knife. MS. Digby 46. Fortune-telling tracts (Bernardus, Silvestris, Experimentarius,) Bodleian Libraray, Oxford. [from the Liber Fortunae, also known as Experimentarius by Bernadus Silvester, third quarter of the 14th century. Bodleian Library, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, MS. Digby 46. Retrieved June 27, 2012] 

Raffaello Sanzio, Plato and Aristotle detail from “The School of Athens,” (1510-1511) Room of the Segnatura, Vatican Museum.

Pythagoras writing. Coloured drawing. MS. Digby 46. Fortune-telling tracts (Bernardus Silbestris Experimentarius, etc., with illustrations. Retrieved from Bodleian online library, July, 2012

A sample of Linear B script, the earliest Greek writing, 1450 BC, and an adaptation of the earlier Minoan Linear A script. This piece contains

information on the distribution of bovine, pig and deer hides to shoe and saddle-makers. It is a script made up of 90 syllabic signs, ideograms and numbers, a form earlier than that used for the Homeric poems. These clay tablets were fortuitously preserved when they were baked in the Mycenaean palace of Pylos fire 250 years later. Retrieved from Wikipedia June 29,

2012

Unidentified origin. It is a frieze, presumably of antiquity, most likely Roman. The frieze captures

Socrates in conversation with his muse, his dream figure, his daimon.

“The story is that in the region of Naucratis in Egypt there dwelt one of the old gods of the country, the god to who the bird Ibis is sacred, his own name being Theuth. He it was that invented numbers and calculations, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing. Now the king of the whole country at that time was Thamus, who dwelt in the great “(Socrates, Phaedrus, 274de-275ab)