THE SECOND NAVIGATION: NOBODY RETURNS HOME
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26565/2226-0994-2026-74-31Keywords:
second navigation, homecoming, immortality, pharmakos, rhetoric, polytropyAbstract
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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