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 Plato’s Political Theology: Michael Naas’s Plato and the Invention of LifeMichael Naas, Plato and the Invention of Life, New York: Fordham University Press, ISBN: 978-0823279678.Plato and the Invention of Life begins with an audacious title: who would dare suggest that Plato invented life? After all, life is not something invented by a philosopher—not even the most hubristic theorist would say that—but is something that appeared on Earth (and perhaps elsewhere) billions of years ago. But the question has always been how one draws the line between the inanimate and the animate, the nonliving and the living, and therefore whether one can say with precision where and when life began, e.g., with microorganisms in thermal vents some 3.54 billion years ago. Hence, we would all have to agree that Plato did not invent life since of course he was already living, already alive and well when he would have invented life and, in this way, he would have invented what he was doing all along. And yet, Naas’s book is convincing that Plato invented a form of life that still hasn’t left us, a life that would be anything but this life and without which neo-Platonic Christianity and much else in the Western philosophical tradition would never have had a beating pulse. Every concept has a genealogy and therefore a beginning or invention in the long lineage of our history—whether it be the prison in Foucault, morality in Nietzsche, or life itself if Naas is correct—such that we can say, ah, this is a life, if not the life we were looking for. This leads us to the second meaning of the title, one that Naas doesn’t to my mind take up directly but is there all along, one that he “uses and doesn’t mention” (a phrase he’ll take up often about the Platonic “real life” beyond this so-called life), namely that Plato gives us life as inventive, even the minimal invention needed to invent life, and therefore as welcoming to the other, to the future, to the becoming-other of life itself. The book itself is a tour de force of Platonic exegesis, offering, undoubtedly, inventive readings of Plato and giving us means for thinking Plato otherwise.Let me summarize the chapters of the book before coming to focus on the “invention of life” in the title. The book centers on Plato’s Statesman, which is not often considered a pivotal Platonic work, though its focus on the various methods of philosophy (dialectics, diairesis or cutting for the sake of categorization, mythos, the uses of analogy and examples [paradeigmai], and so on) make it one of the more important of Plato’s later works. The central question of the Statesman, of course, is who the true statesman (politikos) is, given there are many pretenders to the throne: all those who care (epimileomai) for others, but most ominously for Plato, those priests, heralds, and sophists who think their manner of speaking gives them a right to rule (290a-291c). Thus, the dialogue may appear a strange choice by Naas: the answer to the famous Platonic ti esti… question (what is...X?) of the dialogue does not concern life (ti esti ho bios or ti esti hē zōē). Further it is avowedly concerned less with even the question of what is the statesman than using the example as practice for philosophy and dialectics, as the Stranger (Xenos) reminds the Young Socrates at crucial points (e.g., 285d-e). Nevertheless, The Statesman is essential, Naas argues, for thinking life, life itself, in Plato. In making the distinction between living and the non-living in their diairesis and by making a distinction in the dialogue’s crucial myth of a golden age between this life of becoming in the Age of Zeus and that life elsewhere in the Age of Kronos, the age when one grew from the earth and there was no politics, no scarcity, nor marriage, nor sex for reproduction, nor any manner of technology, even writing, since such is unnecessary given earthly abundance (269a-272c), Naas is right to say that the question of life, of what is the best life, the one whose telos is to provide eudaemonia or blessedness (301a) by the ruler in this or that world, is used all over even if not mentioned. No doubt, too, this is true of all of Plato’s dialogues, from the question of the unexamined life as not worth living (ho ... anexetastos bios ou biotos anthropoi) in the Apology (38a) to Plato’s ordering of political life and the semi-divine life found when taming is matched with education in the Laws (766a), believed to be the last of his works. What drives Plato’s dialogues, automatically it seems, is this thinking of life—and Naas provides, despite his focus on the Statesman—an encyclopedic tour of all the kinds of life Plato explores: the divine life of the universe, the quasi-divine life of the philosopher, the unseemly life of pleasure, and so on. He notes early in the book:I will argue here that almost everything in Plato's dialogues can and should be read through this question [of life, of what gets called life]. From the question of how best to live a uniquely human life to the question of what distinguishes human life from other kinds of life, whether that of plants, other animals, or the gods, almost all of Plato's ethical, political, and even epistemological questions revolve around the theme or question of life. (4)And then as the book turns towards its conclusion, he adds:At issue in dialogues ranging from the Apology to the Gorgias to the Laws is the question of what makes life, bios, most biotos, most livable or most worth living and, by contrast, what makes it least livable and least worthy of being lived. (167)Chapter one focuses on the many lines of division in The Statesman and the Phaedrus, especially the method of diairesis as drawing the line properly of what is in nature. In the Age of Kronos, the Stranger avers, there would be no need for such a cutting, since species would naturally live among their own kind, and so philosophical diaresis is necessary only in the Age of Zeus, this so-called life that we live, since what is separated by nature, automatically in the Age of Kronos, is now all mixed up. The chapter begins, helpfully, with a summary of The Statesman for those who have not turned to it in some time, introducing the two key characters and the major moment, for Naas, of the myth of the Age of Kronos and all that it will mean for his and Plato’s text on the question of life, which will be the focus of chapter two and three. There, Naas takes up Plato’s use of the word automatos as meaning both spontaneity, the both freedom to do something, as when the god takes back up the turning of the world, and the more machinic meaning of “automatic,” a passive automatos when the world goes off on its own free of the God in the Age of Zeus, when only a god can save us. This positive and negative valence suggests an indecidability in this or that world between the movement of the living universe as spontaneous or passive, as either a miracle outside of the chain of cause and effect or the machinic happening of come what may, the indecidability of “miracle and machine” that Naas had explored in his earlier book, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham, 2012). Also key in this chapter is the relation of mimēsis between the age of Zeus and the age of Kronos, that is a relation of mimēsis between what we call life (the Age of Zeus) and real life (the Age of Kronos), mimēsis being perhaps the key relation within any opposition: writing imitating speech, sophists imitating the true logos of the philosophers, technics imitating nature, and eventually the statesman imitating in the Age of Zeus the rule of Kronos. This last relation, however, is undecidable of which way the mimēsis goes: Plato would have us believe that what the true statesman does is imitate the real life of the Age of Kronos, which of course is impossible given all that happens in the latter age, while the imitation could also go the other way, since the Age of Kronos, as myth, is an extrapolation, projection, or metaphor borrowing on this life to posit a life before or beyond this life, a real life beyond this so-called life that leaves its traces in turn on this one.The book wears its previous readings of Plato and the Statesman lightly: except for obvious references to Derrida in each chapter epigraph, this is not the ancient philosophy monograph that has you combing through a thicket of summaries of previous studies of The Statesman. But chapter four directly challenges Foucault’s reading of the myth of the Age of Kronos in his 1977-8 lecture course, Security, Territory, Population. Foucault’s claim is that the model of the shepherd, which gives rise to what he dubs pastoral power and ultimately a certain form of sovereignty in the West, arrives only later with the rise of Christianity. His reading, therefore, of the model of the shepherd, no doubt the example of ruling in the Age of Kronos, is definitively replaced by the example of the weaver once the dialogue commences again after the myth. For Foucault, then, the Greeks, most prominently the Greek named Plato, did not lend credence to the pastoral model. Naas rightly and meticulously shows this to be a misguided reading, one that ignores how Plato never replaces one model with another in the Statesman, but as with the ship captain, the physician, and so forth, each supplements the other in order to articulate different angles on the type of ruling the statesman does, always differing and deferring any final example that could be given for the eidos or genos of the statesman itself: it is all of them and none of them at once, since no example can cross the allegorical, analogical, or mimetic line to the true form (eidos) or class (genos) that is the statesman himself. Moreover, Foucault’s reading ignores the quasi-divine nature of the true statesman, whose science (epistēmē) places him above the polis in such a manner that his science is not practical (practikē) at all (others literally do the handiwork of the political), but wholly intellectual (gnōstikē) (258c-259a). His intellectual weaving is done in the service of shepherding his human flock (275a-b) in imitation of Kronos’s ruling. In such dialogues as the Critias and The Laws, the model of the shepherd returns, a point that Foucault has to ignore, Naas notes, in order to keep a neat distinction between Hellenic and Roman politics and the invention of pastoral power later in the West. Here, as throughout Plato and the Invention of Life, any such neat dividing lines will be called into question. The political stakes, for Naas, are clear:The statesman is indeed sometimes in Plato still a shepherd. Were Fou?cault to have admitted this, he would have been able to acknowledge the enormous exception [my emphasis] Plato is with regard to classical political Greek thought. Such an acknowledgement would have also given him the chance to take into account the genuine danger presented by this political thought, the danger that is to be found in any political discourse that tries to return to an earlier, mythological age, that tries to recollect a more natural political state in the name of saving the state. Without giving an account of pre?cisely how this political thought combines pastoral power with a discourse of salvation, one will never be able to understand why—to reverse the famous words of the poet and of the philosopher who cites him—wherever the saving power is, there grows the danger. (97)Inscribed in Platonism, then, is a “political anamnesis,” as Naas puts it, that recalls the statesman to recall his proper role as a shepherd to his flock, all in reminiscence of a mythological Golden Age that would make his polis great again. He continues:As we will see, it is through a kind of recollection or anamnesis that the individual recovers the divine or immortal part within him, and it is through a kind of political anamnesis that the state and its leaders are able to bring about something of the divine in the polis. The true statesman might thus still be said to be the only true shepherd in the polis, the only one capable in the Age of Zeus of imitating [my emphasis] the divine shepherd in the Age of Kronos, the only one in the Age of Zeus capable of recollecting that lost Age of Kronos, the only one in this life, in what we call life, who is able to imitate that true life that is promised in that earlier, mythical age. (97)Unmentioned here but informing this passage is the discussion—playful or not, though how one plays with such things in the game of life is another matter—of a potential purge (katharmon) of certain societal elements in the name of that real life to be brought about by the statesman here, in the earlier Republic, and in The Laws (141). As always the line between biopolitics and thanato-politics is a porous one.The question is whether Plato is truly, “enormous[ly] exceptional” in regarding politics as an act of shepherding as Naas claims: from the Illiad (2.474) where generals are said to line up their flock to the Odyssey, where Odysseus is called a shepherd of his men (3.196–8) through to Aeschylus, who uses the image repeatedly, such as when he has a character ask the chorus in Persae of the Athenians “what shepherd [poinmanōr] looks over them” (241), then throughout Plato, to Aristotle, who uses the model when he compares a good king to a shepherd (EN, 1161a11–15) this paradigm for ruling seems to rule over much Greek political thinking. What does appear exceptional, though, is that in all of those cases, the anamenesis is citational and looks backward to Homer’s usage (Homeric Greece itself representing for these authors a quasi-Golden Age), not to the Platonic Golden Age of Kronos, not to a life before or beyond this one, and it is this that makes Plato’s place in political theological history exceptional. Chapter four looks to passages in the middle of the Statesman where the Stranger asks after the correct measure of discourses in philosophy and where the Stranger nods at what have often seemed to be long-winded asides and examples, such as that of the weaver (283b-287a). The Stranger ultimately decides that there is, as in Aristotle, a mean between extremes, though there is no extreme as to the measure of how long a discourse should go in hunting down the true statesman. Chapters five and six reread Derrida’s 1968 “Plato’s pharmacy,” especially the myth given by Socrates near the end of the Phaedrus where he describes the invention of writing. Derrida’s reading is well known: Plato needs to at once deny writing as a dead letter, as unworthy of philosophy since it cannot answer the questions of any dialectician, as opposed to the speech of the philosopher, which emanates from his sole. And yet time and again, Plato uses the “metaphor” of a writing in the soul that more than borrows on writing in the everyday sense. Naas writes:Derrida is able to show there how the relationship or op?position between speech and writing in the Phaedrus brings along with it Plato's entire philosophical matrix, from the relationships between unity and multiplicity, being and becoming, presence and absence, and memory and forgetting, to the oppositions between fecundity and sterility, legitimacy and illegitimacy, and life and death. Cut off from the presence of a living speaker, written discourses present only a semblance of life and so threaten the real life that can be found only in living speech. (12-13)What becomes clear in these chapters is that there is an isonomy between Plato’s privileging of living speech and the depiction of the statesman who is to rule without spoken or written laws, and therefore between all that Derrida deconstructs in “Plato’s Pharmacy” concerning speaking and writing and what Plato does in the Statesman, where both compare one life (one not threatened by writing or the laws, by technique in general) by way of metaphor of the fallen or “bad one” (122, see also 144).What, then, is the real life in Plato, or indeed, in Plato and the Invention of Life? This brings Naas onto familiar ground: Giorgio Agamben’s famous claim in Homo Sacer I that the Greeks made a distinction between bios (a civic life worth living) and bare life (zōē) (Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998], 1-2), a claim he borrows without attribution from Arendt’s The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 97). Agamben’s claim is not some philological exercise, but rather seeks to demonstrate that at least since the Greeks, the West has been ruled over by a sovereignty that distinguishes between bios and zōē, the apotheosis of the latter being the life lived in the Lager during the Second World War. Derrida himself contested this bios/zōē distinction in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005, 24), but Naas goes further in highlighting different uses of bios and zōē and their verbal counterparts in Plato’s corpus and hence the differing and deferred meanings of life, of what we call life, in Plato.There is what we “call life, either zōē or bios,” which marks the period of the ensouled body between life and death in the Age of Zeus (185). This zōē or bios is at stake from a this worldly reading of Plato and certainly the “Socratic Plato” who in the Phaedo has his foot planted firmly on the floor, the one who exhorts us to live an examined life, a life of wisdom over pleasure, and certainly a life of philosophy over a life of political or self-tyranny—that is, a life worth living (euzēn). Here we see that Agamben’s ironclad distinction does not hold but this does not mean that there are not different modalities of Plato’s usage of zōē, especially, Naas argues, as Plato advanced into his later, “less Socratic” writings. Nevertheless, there is also zōē as akin to what Agamben calls “bare life,” a life that animalistic or not well lived—and certainly not one that involves political or self-rule. The living, this so-called living (zēn), is the life of pleasure and the life of animals all mixed up and needing diaresis in The Statesman but who, automatically, are among their own kind (genos) in the Age of Kronos.But zōē and zēn, as is known to any Greek reader of Plato, is also reserved for the divine life of the cosmos and God, one that is beyond being (epekeina tēs ousias in The Republic [509b]) but is nevertheless “truly living” (alēthōs zōiē [Rep. 590b]) (178). It is this thinking of life that is “truly unique to Plato,” Naas argues, though from Aristotle’s divine zōē as the thought thinking itself (hē noēsis noēseōs noēsis [Meta. XII.9, 1074b33-4])—like the statesman, having no embodied relation to that which it rules—all the way to the suggestion by Husserl that the phenomenological transcendental ego is immortal, this real life beyond all so-called living reiterates itself wherever one finds a given transcendent or transcendental onto-theology: that which is real and true is beyond this life and both immortal and unchanging, no matter the paradoxes that it throws up both for Plato (how is the universe both a body and mortal and also immortal and eternal? What is the relation between the immortal and the mortal in the ensouled and enlightened human being from the Age of Kronos?) and for the whole of the tradition after him. In the end of Plato and the Invention of Life—and we knew this was coming, since it had to come near the end of Socrates’s so-called life (the living par excellence for Plato, the one whom he would say had lived if any man did) and perhaps near end of the more or less historical Socrates that found his voice written into Plato—the best textual evidence for this “form (eidos) of life” is found not in the Statesman but the Phaedo, the text that makes central a “form of life [zōēs eidos]” (106d), one that is the telos of all of its arguments over the immortality of the soul and is one that has no technicity, is ever self-present, and for whose possibility we owe a cock to Asclepius since beyond this life imprisoned in the body, it is the healthiest of all. Let me cite Naas on what this truly living means:[T]his is truly unique to Plato—what [we called] real life or life itself, a life over and above everything we call life, a life independent of and transcendent to that life, a life that provides the measure or and gives meaning to all other life forms. It is this particular lie form, this Form of life, as we saw, that seems to become detached in Plato, and particularly in later dialogues, from everything called life, even if everything called life seems to get its meaning and, in some sense, even its name, from that real life that would have preceded it. Real life or life itself gives meaning to everything called life: This is, to be sure, a rather Platonist reading or understanding of the dialogues. (185-6)As these chapters unfold, then, Naas allows Plato’s lives to reanimate themselves, as it were, in his own writing, beyond the life and death of its author. This survival in Naas’s book, which relies on so many technics—the codex after the scrolls of ancient Greece and now the worldwide digital transfer of a living if not breathing Plato after his so-called life—makes it possible for us to recall and to resurrect Plato, even as the iteration of a certain notion of “real life” has been so often found in what we call life, especially wherever a politics denounces plurality in the name of the one, denounces death in the name of a shepherded life, and technics in the name of the natural, all of which borrow off of the phantasm of the other, just as the Age of Kronos is unthinkable without its projection, without it leaving traces in and thus a memory to those living in the Age of Zeus, namely those of us reading Plato today.This would seem to go without saying. After all, had not Spinoza, Nietzsche, and generations following them castigated Plato for denying this life, for denying what we call life below the divided line as any life of the sort? Of denying a life, as Deleuze would put it? Before Plato and the Invention of Life, no text to my mind had made this case so thoroughly and shown it to be as central to all the dichotomies that Plato’s oeuvre lived on and through which it survives: the living and the non-living, the human and the animal, the intellectual and the sensible, and so on down the line to the whole matrix of the thought we call Platonism. Naas writes:But the fact that all these different kinds or forms of life are called or named, precisely, life, suggests that another reading is possible, one in which what is derived might be taken or the origin and the origin or what is derived. Instead of reading real life or life itself as that which precedes and gives meaning to what is called life, instead of understanding so-called life as the mere supplement to life itself, the fallen version of it, we might think of life itself as the “invention” of what is called life, the hypostasized version of this life, an empty concept or verbal construct that has nonetheless completely transformed the Western philosophical and theological tradition. On this reading, life itself is the least real and the most untrue lie, a mere fiction or phantasm, an illusion, in short, of what is called life. It is a reading or an interpretation that might be identified as the critique or the reversal of Platonism. (186)However, we cannot simply leave ourselves as if elsewhere from the lives of the Platonic text, taking up a position of opposition and critique, since the dialectic calls forth this opposition, for thinking of the Age of Kronos as the mere phantasm “invented” in the Age of Zeus; it’s there already in the text of Plato (195-6). This anti-Platonism within Plato would leave another thinking of life, a life beyond the form of life in Plato, dead on arrival, since all the oppositions of Platonism would be left in place: a way of reading the text in fear and trembling but one that doesn’t tremble or trouble the text. In the conclusion to the book, Naas supplements Plato to ask us to take up another thinking of life and another life of thinking, namely Derrida and his 1975-6 lecture course La vie la mort. This would be a thinker whose work from beginning to end sought to breathe life into a thinking of life death, one that is neither 1) simply this worldly and vitalistic (recall that for the Spinozism that runs through all modern vitalisms, including that of Nietzsche and Deleuze, wisdom about life can never admit of death [Eth. E4 Pr. 67.]) nor, 2) the always-elsewhere of Plato’s transcendent form of life. This life death would evince the structure of différance that makes any distinctions in Plato (including all those made in the divided line or the divisions of diaresis), possible in the first place—and therefore also impossible. This life death would be “not the opposite of death but that which must be thought together with death from the very beginning” (196). “All of this would be another way of saying,” Naas writes, “that, in Plato, there is at once Platonism, the opposite of Platonism, and that which disrupts—or deconstructs—that Platonism” (196). Hence, while Derrida’s thinking of life as life death is said to be supplemental to the text, it risks, as all supplements do, replacing the text of Plato with another; the reader surely fears that Derrida’s thinking is brought in to snuff out what was most alive in Plato’s work. The question then is whether this thinking of life death is extrinsic to Plato and hence Platonism or, as Naas describes, is to be found within the text of Plato itself. Naas argues that it is:If Plato never makes such a conception of life as life death explicit in any of his dialogues, what he does do, especially in late dialogues such as Sophist, Philebus, Timaeus, and Statesman, is identify a differential structure or a differential web that itself “precedes” all forms and particu?lars (including the form of life and everything that is called life), a differential structure in the form of an alphabet or a web… a community of forms or ideas such as same and other, though also, by analogy or contagion, being and becoming, the one and the many, and life and death. (189-90)In sum, then, it seems, differentiation, the dia (between and across) of diaresis and dialectic, means the deferral, automatically it would appear, to an elsewhere of a full presence, of the form of life beyond différance, on which Platonism survives and all the same disavows. This différance is the process itself of writing out, of drawing the lines of diaresis, of drawing the line at life as opposed to death and all the others of a real life, which is the very stuff of philosophy and especially The Statesman. Philosophy is a preparation for dying, surely, but only finally to get a life, a real life. The immortality of this form of life means that for Socrates, life, as they say, doesn’t simply go on after his so-called death, since by some process, spontaneous or machinic, automatic or not, his so-called life becomes in Plato a real life. If real life, then, is always elsewhere than what we call life, a differencing of the two is at the origin “before” for any such differentiation can be made. The decisive cut, then, is neither here nor there, neither mortal nor immortal, neither life nor death, neither to be nor not to be, and yet it haunts Plato and Platonism from its invention. Which is all to say that by reading between the lines of Plato as he invents a life, one can also begin to delineate, to outline, an invention of life in another sense: life death as inventive, as always relying on its outside, as always other to itself, living on (sur-vivre) its others, as if it breathes new life into it. Thus, this invention of a real life is always open to the surprise that in the revolutions and turns of the cosmos between the Golden Age of Zeus and the Golden Age of Kronos, between what we call life and real life, we may find in Plato something that doesn’t come back to the same, but rather to something other, if not elsewhere, a trembling akin to the earthquakes he describes as happens when one cosmic turn gives in to another: the surprise of the event of life itself when one finds a life death at the margins of Plato and Platonism itself. This is why reading Plato, as in this work by Naas, even after so long and after so many commentaries, can catch us by surprise since the life death of Plato is still to be invented and to come. Having read Naas’s latest, I can’t for the life of me think it otherwise. ................
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