Destripando una metáfora transcendental: Melville y Camões a la luz de Marc Richir

Abstract

Marc Richir’s remarkable essay on Hermann Melville’s work critically relies on the idea of the world’s foundations (“les assises du monde”). Rather than before an architectonically elaborated concept, we stand before a metaphor full of nuances and with far-‐‑reaching ramifications. It is precisely the great deal of subtlety this metaphor entails that the present paper seeks to illustrate and account for, by simultaneously resorting to what we may call a structural analysis or metaphorological critique and to a diachronic review of the different modulations which some of its building blocks have gone through in the course of time. The analysis of Camões’s Os Lusíadas, more specifically, of the poetic invention labeled “the Machine of the World” (“A Mâquina do Mundo”), a complex and rich synthesis of the two main approaches to the relation between Mathematics and Physical Reality in the Ancient World, turns out to be particularly relevant for our goal. A brief history of the conceptions lying at the basis of Camões’s invention is sketched.