The ancient fragment, as a seemingly crucial part of its ontology, registers loss. This is what distinguishes it from the non-finito works of sculptors such as Auguste Rodin. Take, for example, Rodin’s moving Danaïd. The female figure seems to emerge from the rough-hewn rock, or rather, she collapses in her exhaustion back into the inchoate marble from which she came. The suppleness of her flesh stands in stark contrast to the rugged, unkempt contours of the unpolished stone. The figure is not fully realized in all its dimensions, imbuing the sculpture with a poetic aura of incompleteness.
She is a thought in motion; her emergence from or disappearance into untouched, unformed, irrational matter serves as a physical manifestation of our relation to the fleeting, ephemeral nature of thought and of the ideal, or better, of reason’s attempts to grapple with the ideal. The ideal, incapable of being realized in this imperfect world of Becoming (insofar as the ideal is meant to be pure Being; immutable, incorruptible, eternal), can only be glimpsed obliquely by its devotees. Any attempt to arrest its fugitive passing before our mind’s eye forces its collapse.