Abstract

A "figure of reversible exchange" can be discerned in the fragments of Heraclitus. Again and again we encounter this rhetorical pattern: in the first part of a fragment multiplicity is framed and contained within unity, only for this movement subsequently to be inverted. This inversion, a chiasmus, is not merely a discursive tool of emphasis through contrast; its usage in forming watery and unstable contrasts between the Many and the One, and between Becoming and Being, suggests that the figure operates in Heraclitus with metaphysical stakes. An invitation to an analysis of the philosophical stakes of the language of the Heraclitus fragments has long been open: whereas in the Rhetoric Aristotle criticizes...