Pindar''s victory odes have suffered from a curious lack of
interest on the part of poststructuralism. Even a first, relatively
superficial reading of the surviving corpus, however, reveals an
intense interest in and exploitation of rhetorical figures and
tropes, and an element of autoreferential self-questioning that
throughout the history of Pindaric scholarship has attracted much
comment. In view of the radical discontinuity within language
postulated by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man
between what is meant and the mode of meaning, we can on this basis
alone ask what effects the rich figurality of the epinicians might
have on what they intend to say. Are expression and intention, in
these poems, always simply co-extensive? Or do the odes, read in
the context of a series of concerns addressed in recent decades by
deconstructive literary theory, reveal instead a level of
reflection on the nature of literary language itself to which the
hermeneutical assumption of such co-extension does not entirely do
justice?
