Sophocles' Oedipus and the Temporal Constitution of Truth

This paper develops a temporal-ontological reading of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus. Its claim is the one the chorus makes when the house has fallen and the agent of the disclosure has to be named: that the truth of a life is brought to light by time, and by nothing else that could have been asked instead. Not by the god, who spoke too early to be believed; not by the seer, who said the whole of it to a man who could not yet receive it; not by the investigation, whose success was the catastrophe. What discloses is the living of the years, and it arrives against the will of the one disclosed. The corollary is what the drama spends itself on. Anything that offers such a truth in advance offers a fold that cannot be opened, and the receiver who opens it anyway opens it with his own hand and wrongly. Delphi hands Oedipus the whole of his life in a sentence, and his valid reasoning from it carries him down the road it foretold. That offer, rebuilt in fresh materials by the world-history comprehended from its end, the description of nature given from no position within it, the instrument that predicts, is met throughout as an attempt to hold from outside a truth that has no outside. Heraclitus, Herodotus, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger are read alongside the plays, each articulating in fragments what the tragedy enacts whole; Hegel is the one from whom the reading parts, where he converts the completed course into a reconciliation. The last movement returns to time and finds it does not keep what it discloses, so that the disclosure is never a possession, not even for the power that performs it.