THE SECOND NAVIGATION: NOBODY RETURNS HOME
Abstract
This article is devoted to a philosophical reflection on the "second navigation" (δεύτερος πλοῦς) as a borderline regime of the subject's existential movement under conditions of a total loss of metaphysical and institutional guarantees. In a situation where homecoming is no longer synonymous with restoration, and "home" has ceased to be a space of harmonious coincidence, navigation is transformed from a technique of achieving a goal into a strategy of enduring the rupture. In contrast to classical teleological readings of the Odyssey, where Ithaca appears as a triumphant finale, this study conceptualizes homecoming as an aporia: a situation of fundamental non-recognition, radical vulnerability, and the disintegration of biographical integrity.
The central analytical figure of the article is Calypso and her island, Ogygia, interpreted not as a topos of external coercion or deficit, but as the ultimate temptation of "ontological desertion". Calypso's offer is an invitation to abolish the very need for return through a radical replacement of identity. The immortality she grants appears as a form of "high amnesia": a peace without loss and an existence without the burden of biography. It is a perfect space of incorporeal presence where the subject is relieved of the necessity to testify to who they once were. In this light, Odysseus’s refusal is seen not as a moral act, but as a fundamental choice of mortality as the sole condition for preserving the "Self". An immortal body is a body without scars, and thus an empty archive; gods possess an immutable status, while mortals possess a living, wounded biography.
The metaphor of the hand-built raft is revealed as a symbol of "manual", non-delegated agency: a movement through the void, deprived of the fair wind of institutional support or guarantees of social recognition. The second navigation is an ethics in spite of circumstances – the ability to hold a course when the horizon promises neither acceptance nor salvation.
The final part of the research deconstructs the act of returning to Ithaca as a series of ontological thresholds of non-recognition. The transformation of the king into a beggar is interpreted not as a clever disguise, but as the attainment of the status of "Nobody" (Οὖτις) – the only possible form of presence in a home that has become foreign. The slaughter of the suitors, in this context, appears not as an act of restoring justice, but as a sacrificial mechanism of the pharmakos: a bloody procedure that does not restore the lost order but creates a fleeting moment of intense, tragic coincidence of the subject with their own fate.
The article argues that the second navigation is an endurance between two impossibilities: a sterile paradise without a path (Calypso) and a sacrificial path without the hope of paradise (Ithaca). Home, in this perspective, is not a period at the end of a sentence, but merely a momentary flash of recognition that cannot be sustained. No one returns home in the literal sense, but within this knowledge, a new polytropic subjectivity is born, capable of rowing even through a total fog.
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References
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Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Viking Press.
Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural memory and early civilization: Writing, remembrance, and political imagination. Cambridge University Press.
Benardete, S. (1992). Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic. University of Chicago Press.
Blanchot, M. (1995). The writing of the disaster (A. Smock, Trans.). University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1980)
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.
Derrida, J. (1995). Archive fever: A Freudian impression (E. Prenowitz, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Detienne, M., & Vernant, J.-P. (1978). Cunning intelligence in Greek culture and society (J. Lloyd, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Ferber, R. (2020). Second sailing towards immortality and God: On Plato’s Phaedo, 99e4-100a3, with an outlook on Descartes’ Meditations, AT VII, 67. Mnemosyne, 74(3), 371 – 400. https://doi.org/10.1163/1568525X-12342732
Frame, D. (1978/2009). The myth of return in early Greek epic. Center for Hellenic Studies. (Original work published 1978 by Yale University Press; online edition 2009).
Girard, R. (1986). The scapegoat (Y. Freccero, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1995). The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: World, finitude, solitude (W. McNeill & N. Walker, Trans.). Indiana University Press. (Original lectures delivered 1929-1930).
Nails, D., & Tarrant, H. (Eds.). (2015). Second sailing: Alternative perspectives on Plato. Societas Scientiarum Fennica.
Norris, P. (2023). Cancel culture: Myth or reality? Political Studies, 71(1), 145-174.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2001). The fragility of goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy (Rev. ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1986).
Plato. (1995). Phaedo (D. Gallop, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Ricœur, P. (2004). Memory, history, forgetting (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Vernant, J.-P., & Vidal-Naquet, P. (1988). Myth and tragedy in ancient Greece (J. Lloyd, Trans.). Zone Books.
Virilio, P. (2006). Speed and politics: An essay on dromology. Semiotext(e).
Žižek, S. (2008). Violence: Six sideways reflections. Picador.
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