STATEMENT OF WORK

“How could Ovid claim that a being that has changed form—a human who has become a stone, or a god who has turned into a bird—is still the same thing and must therefore be called by the same name? The time someone spent living as a flower and the time that same someone spent living as a woman are part of the same fate, and make sense within the horizon of that fate. That, apparently, is exactly the meaning of the principle or the concept of the narrative in general: building a relation, and indeed a relation that can even take the form of identity, between two completely different things.

The stone and the woman are the same. It is tempting to assume that there is an eternal soul here, a spiritual object that exists beyond all objects and survives all forms. Yet we may also say that narrative is the name of a mode of continuity that permits the building of interconnections between dissimilar things, to the point where they are translated into, and identified with, each other. The entity in the narrative is composed of the narrated relations and is nothing outside these interconnections. And the latter survive even the translation, at which point two relations coincide. Not a single molecule remains when a woman is turned to stone, but her relation to her lover, her enemy, and the jealous goddess to whom she owes her metamorphosis persist through transformation. The relation survives thingness and personhood; it transposes both into the same world of possibilities.”

-Diedrich Diederichsen on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 2012