Subjects, Selves, and Survivors

Abstract

The Subject of Time Classicists can legitimately argue that their right to be stakeholders new economies of academy is based on philosophical idea, first fully developed Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (Sein und Zeit [1927]), that key constitutive element of subjectivity is temporality. With slightest degree of modification, notion of temporality subjectivity intensely illuminates reasons why ancient Greek and Roman texts and artifacts have proved so culturally long-lived and versatile. In his interpretation of Heidegger, Albert Shalom (1993) emphasizes that subjectivity known universe only arose after long time when there was no subjectivity at all; each one of us, subjectivity only arose at some unknown point after our father's spermatozoon fertilized our mother's egg. Temporality, which currently remains entirely beyond our control either as individuals or as species, thus constitutes very source of our subjectivity (Shalom 1993, 189). There are, of course, one or two other philosophical concepts that can certainly stake nearly equivalent claims to importance makeup of self, especially spatiality and corporeality. There has also been great deal of recent literature produced by psychologists on what they call self. (1) They often assume that dominant explanatory metaphor for sense of continuous self, which unites our diverse constituent selves, is no longer linear story or plotline, but something more like computer that processes information, central processing unit (CPU) (Knowles and Sibicky 1990). Yet even scholars who have produced these studies would undoubtedly agree that CPU needs loci by which to sort that information, and that dominant loci by which we, as subjects, experience world are always primarily temporal. From this point of view, ancient world from which we trace our origins, and against backdrop of which we constitute our identity, has always represented--and will probably always represent--a key locus by which we experience temporality. It is black American thought that arguments from temporality have been developed more than any other arena, reaction to appalling fact that slaves were until so very recently not only denied collective history, but even individual dates of birth. Here there is much to be learned from remarkable black American Frederick Douglass, born into slavery Maryland during second decade of nineteenth century, who became obsessed with discovering his date of birth. This need continued to nag at him throughout his life; he called it a serious trouble even as free man his sixties (Gates 1987, 98-102). Henry Louis Gates has written that We mark human being's existence by his or her birth and death dates, engraved granite on every tombstone. Our idea of self ... is as inextricably interwoven with our ideas of time as it is with uses of language. In antebellum America, it was deprivation of time life of slave that first signaled his or her status as piece of property. Slavery's time was delineated by memory and memory alone. (Gates 1987, 100) To classicist, therefore, it is distressing to find Phillis Wheatley, late eighteenth-century Boston slave, and first African ever to publish book of poems English, express her reflections on memory, race, and lacunose nature of her own cultural inheritance poem that is classically infused. In On Recollection (an abstract she names by abbreviating Mnemosyne to Mneme), Wheatley muses on way that this female personification of Recollection enables her new vent'rous Afric poet to range in due order of long departed years, and to paint the actions done / By ev'ry tribe beneath rolling (Wheatley 2001, 34-5). Wheatley could have had little access to any data about long departed acts of her own ancestors beneath sun that shone on continent from which she came. …