Abstract

Aristote’s meson according to the Hölderlin’s Remarks on Sophocles The first two parts of the Remarks on Oedipus and later on Antigone (1804) form what Hölderlin calls a “point of contact” with an author : 1) Hegel ; 2) Aristote. The Naturphilosophie revisited by Hölderlin leads to elucidate very concretely the structure of the Sophocles tragedies : the “middle” — concept issued from the Poetics — is a “point of indifference” — concept issued from Schelling and Hegel’s “speculative physics”— between the beginning and the end. The “caesura” (word of Tirésias), major discovery of Hölderlin, is structurally necessary as heterogeneous representation in Sophocles’ texts to bring to light the said middle, otherwise imperceptible. The Remarks, as analysed in the present article, disassemble the Poetics piece by piece to rebuild an extraordinary thought of the tragedy. Aristote would have sought to exceed, to really raise the moment of the “middle”, thus prefiguring the Hegelian dialectics. Yet Hölderlin will strongly oppose this suppression of meson.