In Common

This chapter considers Homer's perspective as he oversees a scenario that comprises both Trojans and Achaeans. Here, there is something that goes beyond the often mentioned “impartiality” of Homer's relation to the two adversaries; something that seems to approach an impersonality in which Weil's notion of “reading” (First and Last Notebooks, 337) loses its subject and adheres to the object, to the point of disappearing into it, of becoming “non-reading”: “It is a question of uprooting our readings of things, of changing them, so as to arrive at non- reading” (Notebooks Vol. I- D, 312). It is only from this point—which does not coincide with any particular perspective and is, rather, an absence of perspective—that the author of the Iliad can frame the scene on the basis of the invisible circle that unites all combatants.