“The Sun Is New Every Day” (Heraclitus D-K frg. B6): Greek Ephemerality and Biopolitical Modernity

Through an implicit dialogue between Arendt and Derrida, this essay considers the Greek reflection on ephemerality in order to respond to the crisis in what Tim Ingold calls “humanifying,” a crisis that has acquired the unique power to upset the life-sustaining balance of earth and sun. By unpacking the significance of ephemerality in Greek poetic and philosophical sources we gain an insight into the challenge to the future of the species that we have faced with growing urgency since the technological-industrial revolution inaugurated by the invention of the coal-run steam engine. The essay ends with a discussion of Hortense Spillers’s reflections on the Black mother in light of Heraclitus. The conclusion, drawn from a Spillerian reading of Heraclitus, and a Heraclitean reading of Spillers, is that only the powers of natality can “break in upon” the bioengineering imagination of a patriarchal order that has never ceased to hope for a birthday like that of the sun, when a man can spring to life in ever-renewable glory, in “the beautiful homogeneity of the Same.” Death does not have the power to free us from this blinding hope to overcome ephemerality, for death is what drives this hope forward. Only birth can save us.