ABSTRACT

For the ‘ancients’, authority lay in the corpus of tradition, an external source for their present writings; for the ‘modems’, it lay instead in the subject herself or himself, in the present body and its intimate ‘experience’ [...] For the ancients, true authenticating and authorising nature lay, like a palimpsest under the writings of the past; for the modems, it lay under the consciousness of the present body writing.1