Ordinary oblivion and the self unmoored : reading Plato's by Jennifer R. Rapp

By Jennifer R. Rapp

Rapp starts off with a question posed through poet Theodore Roethke: 'should we are saying that the self, as soon as perceived, turns into a soul?'. via her exam of Plato's Phaedrus and her insights in regards to the position of forgetting in a existence, Rapp solutions Roethke's question with a powerful 'yes'. In so doing, Rapp bargains a re-imagined view onto the Phaedrus, a recast interpretation of Plato's relevance to modern lifestyles, and an Read more...

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Rapp deals a recast interpretation of Plato via a spotlight upon the transformative procedures required by way of his texts during which areas of standard oblivion placed a reader in danger. The decomposing and Read more...

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Additional resources for Ordinary oblivion and the self unmoored : reading Plato's Phaedrus and writing the soul

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The cicadas stand over and haunt a dialogue that can be regarded as Plato’s attempt to incorporate, and respond to, the critique of written form that it explicitly includes. In a compressed way the cicadas evoke the dialogue’s later concern with whether forms of discourse, writing in par ticu lar, engender forgetfulness—rather than memory—in the soul. More specifically, they express, in mythic terms, an entanglement between bodily inhabitation and the inhabitation of forms of language. They are humans who have been moved into nonhuman bodies, transformed into another kind of creature, and can communicate only through a single kind of song.

My angle of response to the query about Plato’s unity is different. In part this is because my engagement with the Phaedrus is set within a more specific aim to open up an understanding of a particular feature of human life, rather than present an overarching account of Plato’s philosophy. More substantively, this is because I am wary of unifying or integrating Plato’s corpus—in keeping with his own highly disruptive somatic images, I advocate a quite undomesticated understanding of a “corpus” of his writing.

This “shown” rather than “told” dimension of the palinode is signaled, as has already been noted, in Socrates’ introduction of the avian-horsecharioteer image, wherein he prefaces the image with the laden comment 40 The Teeming Body that he can’t say directly what the soul is—which would be a godlike task—but he can take the humanly appropriate descriptive angle of saying what it is like. With this analogical shift announced, he uses the firstperson plural form to begin (“Let us speak this way, then”), an inclusion not merely of Phaedrus within the dialogue but also of us as the readers of (and with) the dialogue.

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