An Encounter in Lille: Epicurus’ Language as a Hermeneutical Problem

In the spring of 1972, Diskin Clay was invited to Lille by Jean Bollack, who had just returned from his stay at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, to join for a term the Centre de Recherche Philologique, a small team made up of some colleagues and a few post-graduate and doctoral students who had just received the official support of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), which meant national recognition and some additional funding. This beginning was largely symbolic. One room looking onto the yard of a company that had been shut down, 10 minutes away from the main building of the Uni-versity of Lille (at that time located in the town center), almost no books, and those that did exist bought in second hand bookshops. These were heroic times. The whole enterprise relied on the incredible energy of Jean Bollack and the help he received, officially, from Philippe Rousseau, at that time Assistant Professor of Greek, unofficially from Heinz Wismann, then lecturer at the Sorbonne for philosophical German, and from a bunch of enthusiastic and dedicated graduate and doctoral students, of whom I was one. Most of us politically were rather far to the left, in the wake of 1968, but our utopia was of a scholarly and intellec-tual nature, inspired by Bollack’s teaching, personality, and deeds. ©The author. ©De Gruyter.