The Seba library treats Palimpsest in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Derrida, Jacques, Auerbach, Erich, Jung, C. G.).
restore the palimpsest… he undertakes an etymological or philological work which is to reawaken all the sleeping figures.
Derrida presents the palimpsest as the object of a philological operation that reactivates buried figurative strata within philosophical language, treating the text as a site of layered and recoverable meanings.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
the layered structure of a consciousness engaged in recollection… the whole work is written in accordance with the technique which our passage makes apparent without comment or analysis.
Auerbach’s analysis of Proust articulates the palimpsestic logic of consciousness, wherein multiple temporal strata coexist and interpenetrate within a single recollective moment.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
the Biblical palimpsest again… instead of lamentation and bitter weeping in Ramah, she thinks that she ‘may sing aloud, even in the dark’.
The explicit invocation of the ‘Biblical palimpsest’ here designates a prior sacred text that persists beneath and structures the affective meaning of a contemporary secular narrative.
, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997supporting
All the great motifs of the cultural history of Europe are contained in it, although its point of departure is very specific individuals and a clearly established present.
Auerbach’s reading of Joyce’s Ulysses identifies the palimpsestic technique by which the entire archive of European cultural motifs is superimposed upon a rigorously localized present.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
overlapping, complementing, and contradiction yield something that we might call a synthesized cosmic view or at least a challenge to the reader’s will to interpretive synthesis.
Auerbach describes his own interpretive method in terms that mirror the palimpsest’s structure: plural, overlapping inscriptions that no single reading can fully resolve into transparency.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Other times and places are in question; it is an excursus of the same type as the story of the origin of Odysseus’ scar… Even from that, however, it is different in structure.
Auerbach distinguishes between different modes of temporal layering in narrative, tracing how earlier strata interrupt and complicate the surface of the present scene.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
the figural import of the allusions to Scripture… the abundance of Bible texts, the way they are pieced together… give this personal letter a highly literary appearance.
Auerbach’s analysis of Bernardian figural citation illustrates how prior scriptural inscriptions remain operative beneath the surface of a later text, constituting a theological palimpsest.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
the large number of inconsistencies in the poem, some in very close proximity… the second line was added by a later poet who in his auditory trance was not even visualizing what he was saying.
Jaynes identifies the Iliad as a compositional palimpsest in which successive layers of authorship from different psychic regimes are superimposed, making earlier and later mentalities simultaneously readable.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside