This chapter revisits reception theory through an exploration of the metaphysics of presence and absence across time. Bringing together the ‘Letter to Horace’ of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and Horace’s own Epistles, it uses the theory of communication developed by John Durham Peters and the philosophy of the afterlife of Samuel Scheffler to elucidate the experience of, on the one hand, communicating with a past where one and so much of what makes one what one is was not present and, on the other, of projecting oneself into a future in which one will no longer exist so as to communicate with those who do not yet exist and whom one will never know. Recent metaphysical thinking has sought to make us sensitive to the existential incompleteness of people and things and the fragility of selves that are distributed across the multitude of ‘attachments’ which Bruno Latour suggests as one ‘mode of existence’ that makes us what we are. Latour suggests that we should not think of ourselves as simple, atomized, points of emission and reception for texts, and appeals to Étienne Souriau’s notion of instauration to suggest how our selves and what and whom we value are sustained.

Plato’s writings play a crucial role in bootstrapping the discourses that came to be called metaphysics, which see their task as exploring distinctions between seeming and being, reality and appearance, and what we can sense and what lies beyond our senses. Central to them is the notion of ‘theory’, which, as Andrea Nightingale has argued, Plato develops out of the social institution of theōria: a representative of the city attends a Panhellenic festival, observes what happens, and reports back on what he has seen. This model structures the story (in Republic) of the prisoner leaving the cave, ascending to the light, and reporting back to those he left behind – a structure that Lucretius reprises in the ‘theoretical’ journey of Epicurus across the universe in DRN 1. Plato’s stories are subject to a process of reception Hans Blumenberg has described as ‘re-occupation’ so as to express metaphysical positions that are at odds with Plato’s. This essay explores Lucretius’ re-occupation of a number of Platonic motifs (the cave, the pitfall of Thales in Theaetetus, the representation of Socrates as a thinking subject) to highlight the role that these motifs have played (and continue to play) in the metaphysical tradition.

The chapter starts with an observation: contemporary élite jurists pursue, vis-à-vis one another, a “hermeneutic of suspicion”, meaning that they work to uncover hidden ideoogical motives behind the “wrong” legal arguments of their opponents, while affirming their own right answers allegedly innocent of ideology. The rise of the hermeneutic of suspicion is a striking manifestation of the contemporary transformation of the relationship between legal élites and political economic élites. This transformation accompanies and corresponds to the progressive juridification, judicialisation and finally constitutionalisation of the contemporary social order.