PLATO AND POSTMODERNISM

Mi iir ( P. A. ) Postmodern Spiritual Practices. The Construction of

the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida and Foucault.
Pp. x + 270. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007. Cased,
US$59.95. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1070-3.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X08001832
One eective way to sum up the intellectual motivations behind this book on the
appropriation of Plato in the work of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel
Foucault, is expressed on p. 5: The problem in a nutshell is that theory per se does not
exist. It is a disciplinary ction. That is to say, it exists within (a) history. The radical
insights of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault are all too often extracted from their
respective contexts and repeated and applied ad innitum and sometimes ad absurdum.
(And the list could easily include other cardinal twentieth-century francophone
intellectuals whose work is plundered willy-nilly: Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille,
Maurice Blanchot, Aim Csaire, Hlne Cixous, Franz Fanon, Luce Irigaray, Sarah
Kofman, Julia Kristeva, Paul de Man, Jean-Luc Nancy, to name but a few.) Derrida
once famously said that all this applying Derrida to whatever analytic endeavour
made him feel as if he were already dead! He was of course making a wry comment
about the always present possibility of ones language being appropriated against
ones intentions as if one were not alive; ones own proper name signies ones
impending death, since the very possibility of being named is conditional on being
named and known as such after ones death. Attaching a real and absolute meaning
to postmodern theory will always be a dicult exercise, then, since these thinkers were
acutely aware that their words and ideas were not superglued to, and completely
dependent upon, the historical context in which they were said and written. If they
were happy to appropriate the words of Plato to make Platos work mean and think
otherwise, then they were certainly self-aware enough to realise that their own works
could be re-used and applied in intellectual contexts that would never have occurred
to them. This is an important point that Miriam Leonard makes in her recent Athens
in Paris, a superb critique of conventional intellectual history that is very wary of
uncovering the meaning behind the work of, say, Derrida, by situating him within the
canvas of his historical and political contexts: one way not to read Derrida is to
suggest that Platos Pharmacy unproblematically reects Derridas thoughts about
May 1968. Historicising French literary theory, then, requires careful consideration.
So what makes M.s book important for both classicists and literary theorists in
general is his sophisticated and nuanced comparison between modernist and
postmodernist engagements with antiquity. M., heeding Leonards warning (p. 1, n.
2), concerns himself with questioning why French modernism was so interested in
Greek tragedy, whereas postmodern thinkers became more preoccupied with the
Platonic uvre. Even when the postmoderns do turn to Greek drama, as Lacan does
with Antigone, M. notes they no not present a modernized recreation of the dramatic
experience [as, say, Anouilh did], but a careful and methodical reading of the text
from a dened perspective (p. 22). M.s opening and fascinating chapter looks at
Sartres, Camus and Anouilhs stagings of Greek tragedy and Roman history under
the Nazi occupation of France. M. explores a dynamic set of appropriations that
meditates deeply upon the meaning of freedom and responsibility. These plays are
read as allegories for the choices and constraints imposed upon the populations of
Nazi-occupied territory. Anouilhs Antigone, in particular, presages the diculty of
The Classical Review vol. 59 no. 1 The Classical Association 2009; all rights reserved
1nr ci:ssi c:i rvi rv 59
separating the earlier fascist pursuit of an absolute beyond the bounds of bourgeois
subjectivity from the later postmodernist pursuit of a pense du dehors (p. 23).
This pense du dehors is [t]he postmodern turn to a thought from outside, to a
refusal to accept the categories of the given even in the guise of the antique (p. 21).
Just as Plato once reacted to the dangerous messages broadcast at Athenian dramatic
festivals, so postmodern thinkers have responded to the French modernist re-staging
of antiquity. Moving from Anouilhs Antigone to Lacans reading of Sophocles
version of the tale, we interrogate the possibility of an ethical theory of pure desire.
Lacans ethical re-reading of Antigone that seems to occlude a political understanding
of the play is an issue that is addressed by M. when he turns to discuss Lacans reading
of Platos Symposium. Lacans Plato, as M. shows, has a great deal to teach us about
the seductive and alluring relationship between psychoanalyst and patient. In his next
chapter M. discusses the place of Plato in the uvre of Jacques Derrida with especial
attention drawn to Platos Pharmacy and The Post Card. M. re-presents the now
classic arguments of the rst essay and then discusses the importance of the Philebus
in the latter for thinking through the intellectual relationships between Plato and
Freud, Freud and Lacan, and Lacan and Derrida himself. The nal chapter considers
Foucaults care of the self. As well as considering Foucaults relationships to Deleuze,
Derrida and Lacan, this chapter, as the Appendix claries, examines how the political
signicances of Foucaults discussions of Plato and his ancient heirs have been
underplayed and mystied. Postmodern theory is often accused of being all about
discourse, detached from the real world and all its urgent concerns. M.s book
powerfully shows that postmoderns like Lacan, Derrida and Foucault were
profoundly preoccupied with making sense of the legacy of world events between
1939 and 1945 (to periodise crudely) in the post-1945 period. And it was Plato (inter
alios) that oered a way of thinking through the ancient and modern tragedies
inicted during the rst half of the twentieth century.
University of Warwick DANIEL ORRELLS
d.orrells@warwick.ac.uk
THE MENO
IoNrsci ( C. ) Platos Meno. An Interpretation. Pp. xx + 194.
Lanham, MD and Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007. Cased, US$65.
ISBN: 978-0-7391-2025-5.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X08001844
I. has presented an intelligent, thoughtful and thorough consideration of this
fascinating Platonic dialogue. She argues that its unifying theme is that virtue is
knowledge or wisdom, but that this theme is occluded by Socrates need to address
rather shallow interlocutors (p. xiii), whose notions of virtue, teaching and learning
reect the non-philosophical views of the many. The dialogue, she argues, proceeds on
two levels: (1) a supercial level at which Socrates accommodates the views of Meno
and, later, Anytus and (2) a deeper level at which Plato engages the reader.
The book contains a brief introductory chapter followed by three chapters that
track the Meno sequentially. It concludes with two appendices that deal, respectively,
with the lines that go through the centre of the rst square drawn by Socrates in his
exchange with the slave, and with the initial hypothesis in the argument concerning
The Classical Review vol. 59 no. 1 The Classical Association 2009; all rights reserved
60 1nr ci:ssi c:i rvi rv