Presence without Possession: Perceptual Misalignment and the Field of Access in Archaic Greek Poetics

This work develops a theory of perceptual misalignment and the field of access in archaic Greek poetics. Its central claim is that presence is not simply possessed by a subject, source, body, object, place, or occasion, but becomes accessible through mediated fields of voice, gesture, body, performance, inscription, memory, and reception. The work argues that archaic Greek poetics should not be understood through a simple opposition between presence and absence, or between exteriority and interiority. Instead, it proposes the concept of presence without possession: a mode of mediated presence in which an index makes something present without fully coinciding with what appears to guarantee it. Through readings of Homeric epic, Sappho 31, Alcaeus, Pindaric praise, Nestor’s Cup, the Midas epigram, Phrasikleia, and other inscriptional and epigrammatic forms, the essay shows how archaic Greek texts organize presence through non-coincident indices: bodies that register what the subject cannot master, voices that exceed speakers, objects that speak, places that are displaced, and monuments that make memory durable. The work substantially revises and expands earlier stages of the author’s field-of-access project. It does not replace the earlier comparative essay on modernist narrative and archaic Greek poetics, but reorganizes the argument around a Greek-focused account of mediated presence, perceptual misalignment, and pre-subjective poetics.