Gathered here, in defence of the site of Plato’s Academy, whose garden is endangered by governmental recklessness, we understand that far more is at stake in this struggle, namely thought itself. I would like to explore this issue by delving into Plato’s Politeia, a work whose projected ideal society would seem no more than a static and dead monument to aristocratic desires.
But the idea of the Politeia, of a novel and radical form of politics, tells us something about the idea in Plato in general. The point here will not be to excavate an original Plato that has simply been overwritten too many times. If the Idea in Plato has been forgotten, it can only be rediscovered through an encounter with modern political inventions. This is the paradox: only by rewriting it in the light of political attempts at societal transformation, can the Idea in Plato can be grasped anew for what it is.
Throughout the 20th century, Plato’s Politeia was caught between leftist denunciation (for being idealist) and rightist (and really idealist) moralizing appropriation. I will take the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s “hypertranslation” of Plato’s Politeia as my inspiration to suggest a rewriting of its stakes: not so much the vision of an ideal city, as an understanding of politics as the creation of a new form. The Idea in Plato can be seen, with a little twist, as precisely that: the set of processes that support a conviction that what is presented as necessary and ineluctable is no more than a bundle of contingent arrangements (e.g. of capitalism and forms of power). Ultimately, we will not only how radical political thought makes the stakes of Plato’s thinking accessible, but also how, thus schooled in the real of emancipation, philosophy can again be renewed so that it cuts along latent points of societal transformation.
Steven Corcoran is a philosopher, educationalist and translator living in Berlin who considers that philosophy orients us toward the good life, helping us to gather truth in its multiple, scattered forms and sites. Corcoran’s work of writing, editing, and translating philosophy has chiefly involved a discernment of artistic and political truth. He is the editor of The Badiou Dictionary and has edited/translated over 20 works of philosophy by, among others, Alain Badiou (Conditions, Polemics and The Idea of Communism), Jacques Rancière (Dissensus, Hatred of Democracy, The Edges of Fiction, and What Times Are We Living In?), Frantz Fanon (Alienation and Freedom), and Achille Mbembe (Necropolitics, The Earthly Community and Brutalism). His current projects include a book on egalitarian political organization and imagination, and a special issue on the thought of Jacques Rancière for Continental Thought & Theory. Corcoran is the founder of Parrhesia: School of Philosophy, Berlin e.V., a non-profit teaching and research organization devoted to the public practice of philosophy.