Por más de una década, la escritura de Kazantzakis ha atraı́do a una serie de comparatistas-comentaristas. La propia declaración del autor acerca de sus influencias -Nietzsche, Bergson, Lenin, Cristo, Buda- ha dado a los crı́ticos el incentivo para verlo principalmente a la luz de cada uno de estos pensadores, a la sombra de cada antecesor, y no como escritor con sombra propia. Es como si estos crı́ticos hubiesen probado un plato único y, sin poder identificarlo por lo que es, (...) lo compararan con los ingredientes individuales que contiene. (shrink)

In his Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche praises Heraclitus, the Greek pre-Socratic, for his “assertion that being is an empty fiction.” 1 The philosophical notion of being, which seems to refer to fixed entities or substances, is eclipsed (at least in the mind of Nietzsche [and perhaps other philosophers—Gilles Deleuze comes to mind]) by the notion of becoming. As a result of our innate nothingness—which I defend linguistically, via the structuralist concept of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign—it (...) would seem that we do, in fact, lack a fixed internal essence. Rather, we are constantly redefining (and free to redefine) our being, which is never fixed. It would seem that “un-fixed” being is becoming. In my paper, I aim to track this notion of becoming, as directly opposed to being, through two literary instances: the biblical Christ, and the philosopher-author Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek. (shrink)