Antiquitopia

Ô souvenir, Tes arbres sont en fleur devant le ciel, On peut croire qu'il neige, Mais la foudre s'éloigne sur le chemin, Le vent du soir répand son trop de graines. (Yves Bonnefoy, "Une Pierre," Les Planches Courbes ) Memory. It is something that fascinates so many ancient and modern thinkers. It is the basis of epistemology for Socrates/Plato: all knowledge is remembrance. It is the basis of the Self and where one finds God in Book 10 of Augustine's Confessions . The Bible constantly enjoins one to remember: zakhor , as the famous book by that name by Yosef Yerushalmi examines. It is the recollection of God's actions with Israel. Augustine depicts memory as a vast cavern with nooks and crannies in which some memories are easily accessed and others are hidden and only elicited with great difficulty. Bonnefoy's image, however, is not of the space of stone that can be filled, but organic. It is not empty space to be filled, but the spring flowering...

SOCRATES: On the other hand, Polus, my opinion is that the wicked man and the doer of wicked acts is miserable in any case, but more miserable if he does not pay the penalty and suffer punishment for his crimes, and less miserable if he does pay the penalty and suffer punishment in this world and the next. (Plato, Gorgias 472; trans. Walter Hamilton) How did Plato know the premise to Dostoesvky's Crime and Punishment ?

During my insomnia last night, I picked up, as I usually do when I cannot sleep, some ancient philosophy--it works rather well as an antidote. Last night I picked up Plato's Gorgias , mainly because it is short. Socrates interrogates Gorgias and his colleague Polus about who they are and the nature of what they do--they are orators. In the process he begins to discuss the nature of justice (because he sees oratory as a "knack" or irrational component that opposes justice--justice being a great good because it heals the soul, since the soul is responsible for behavior. Its literary or even philosophical quality is not on par with Plato's other works in my humble opinion. The dialogue is often awkward and the arguments occasionally seem forced. But it has some redeeming qualities. One is an objection I have heard from my students concerning Socrates is that Socrates always gets to question in the elenchus process and never submits to similar questioning. But in ...

From Walter Benjamin's "What is Epic Theater?" One can go even further and remember that interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring. It goes far beyond the sphere of art. To give only one example, it is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context. In a way, by quoting this text about quotation, I have interrupted Benjamin's context, his discussion of the "quotable gesture" in epic theater. As my quote stands, you may not even realize that this is about gestures or even theater, except that I have told you so. Yet this violence of extraction allows the quotation to take wing; it reinvigorates it with new life as I place it in a new context. Yet to quote also interrupts the context of placement. When I quote something, it interrupts my own prose, creating a cacophany of voices, or, to put in M. M. Bakhtin's terms, heteroglossia. I often find in reading other people's work that I find ...

With little need of introduction, here's Socrates! My own wisdom is of no account--a shadow in a dream.... (Plato, Symposium 175E)