Albert Camus famously referred to the myth of Sisyphus to dramatize the absurdity of the human condition: ‘Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion... is hope.

Hope of another life one must “deserve” or trickery of those who live, not for life itself, but for an idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it meaning, and betray it’ (Camus 2005, 7).

The decision to commit suicide to resolve the absurd, Camus argues, is ‘prepared within the silence of the heart’, and as such, so must the decision to keep living (Camus 2005, 3). The promise of plenitudinous meaning atop the mountain is a myth to mask life’s unspoken absurdity. Sisyphus’ own (decisive) silence is surely, therefore, a myth amid a myth. Human life is but an ‘inhuman show in which absurdity, hope and death carry on their dialogue’ (Camus 2005, 8). How this dialogue goes about in its silence is the fundamental question of myth and the mythographer.

Traditional literature on myths transcends ethnographical, geographi­cal, and historiographical boundaries: here, the concept acts as a stage to a typical cast of tropes and tales, which mythologists analyse and categorise to discover their (mythical) paradigms and archetypes (e.g. Levi-Strauss 1963, 1970; Coupe 2009, 3-5). Other authors have sought to expose the ideological and negative power of myths (e.g.

I will argue that a foundational aporia embedded at the meta-mythical level, the very myth of myths, is the incommensurability between mythos and logos—that which constitutes myth as an object. From this derives a necessary critique of the very limits of metaphysics, in which logos is ‘put on edge’ (Spitzer 2011, xx). The purpose of this chapter is to push myths to their most ‘absurd’ conclusion, to better comprehend myth on its own terms, and to challenge where the modern ‘reclamation of myth is itself logocentric’ (Spitzer 2011, xvii). Following mythos—as the disrup­tive trace of logos—enables a deconstructive reading of philosophy, giving a voice to that which silently haunts logos and logocentric discourse. In a nutshell, it shall be argued that the logocentric limits of mythos and myth analysis are themselves a myth, and that myths have the potential to signify every aspect of knowledge.

This chapter begins by analysing metatheoretical delimitations of previ­ous approaches to myths, especially in the works of Claude Levi-Strauss, Paul Ricixur, and Dvora Yanow. While these authors have in common that they have sought to reclaim myth in their works, I argue that they have failed to reclaim myth on its own terms. To substantiate this argument, the second section draws parallels between Yanow’s ‘incommensurable values’ and the Derridean concept of difference, explicating their implications for our own understanding of mythos and metaphysics. Thirdly, by highlighting parallels between mythos and the pharmakon, I apply the analysis to the illustrative case of Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of myth and enlightenment. The fourth section directs the attention towards the question of mythogra- phy and discusses the value of empirics versus ethics. It argues in favour of a reflexive ethic of suspicion, in contrast to hope, to better accommodate the ambiguity of mythos. The chapter concludes by reviewing the virtues of postmodern myth and mythography in accepting the absurd.