Crisis and Passio. The Encyclopaedists and the Creation of an Encyclopaedic Work

Abstract

In the article I point out that in encyclopaedic works, from the Roman beginnings of encyclopaedic discourse, there are noticeable textual traces that refer to the experiences and affective conditions of their empirical authors, and that the zoe of the empirical encyclopaedist sometimes shines through from behind the bios theoretikos of the encyclopaedic self. Moreover, the author’s decision to create an encyclopaedic work is sometimes caused by a real or discursively assumed catastrophe as its justification.

Keywords

• encyclopaedism
• encyclopaedia
• empirical author
• zoe
• catastrophe
• crisis