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Volume 14 Number 2, August 2013

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Badiou, Alain. Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters, with a Prologue and an Epilogue. Trans. Susan Spitzer. Intro. Kenneth Reinhard. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6214-5. Hardback: 25 pounds. Paperback: ?.  (First published as La République de Platon. Paris: Librairie Fayard, 2012.)

 

Reviewed by

John Vignaux Smyth

Portland State University

 

We should be grateful to Alain Badiou for writing, and Susan Spitzer for translating, what he calls “cet incertain livre” (Spitzer: “this unclassifiable book”). Badiou’s adaptation--part translation and conceptual transposition, part wholesale re-writing--of Plato’s Republic is to be welcomed, if only for trying to make readers take Plato seriously now.

 

This is perhaps not best done stylistically speaking (in Spitzer’s American English) by having “a guy named Glaucon” talk of “shoot[ing] the breeze” with his companions, while the only female is characteristically seen “fiddling with her messy hair,” returning “all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after a trip to the bathroom,” and saying things like “Wow!” when impressed by Socrates, who often has “his beady eyes twinkling” (e.g., when talking of philosophers sleeping with or marrying their students). English-speaking youths, I fear, are unlikely to be seduced by some parts of Spitzer’s “colloquial” translation, partly because of its (perhaps intentional) stylistic banality, but partly because it risks seeming philosophically condescending by so transparently attempting to achieve the reverse. (How far Badiou’s original runs a similar “cool” risk, I leave native French speakers to decide.)

 

But such peripheral matters should not distract us from the main issue: how Badiou helps us understand Plato and vice-versa. Kenneth Reinhard’s introduction notes that “[m]any of our commonplaces about Plato and Platonism, according to Badiou, are confections propagated by Aristotle, by the so-called ‘Neo-Platonic’ philosophers, by Christianity, and by […] various modes of modern ‘anti-Platonism’…” (xii). In short, many commonplaces about Plato are likely to be wrong. Moreover, for Badiou, there are apparently “‘only three crucial philosophers’: Descartes, Hegel, and above all, Plato. In a 1994 interview, Badiou describes his privileging of Plato as a kind of  ‘coquetry,’ but he insists it is a serious coquetry” (vii). His aim is thus to show how powerfully this most crucial philosopher’s “pivotal work” (xxxi, l’oeuvre centrale du Maître) speaks to us today (pour en faire briller la puissance contemporaine).

 

To want to make “brilliant” or “shine” (let alone intellectually plausible) again the most crucial philosopher’s most brilliant work—if we may thus summarize Badiou’s goal—betrays an ambition of a magnitude with regard to detailed reinterpretation of the Republic in particular, and political theory in general, that has to my knowledge no match in the history of modern philosophy, with the exception of Leo Strauss’ brilliant treatment of it in The City and Man (1963).  But whereas Strauss’ work conceals its originality behind a literal summary and quasi-academic re-presentation of Plato’s text, Badiou’s creative adaptation is evidently very much his own. (“This, not the aseptic scholarly work, is the mark of a true fidelity to our past,” announces Slavoj Zizek’s “blurb” on the cover.)  Not only is the text advertised as playful and artistic in its own right, but the author frequently and frankly substitutes his own philosophy for what he takes to be Plato’s. “Gods” become (Lacan’s) “the Big Other,” for example; “souls” become “Subjects;” and Badiou tends to show off his modern mathematics in place of the Greek originals.  For anyone familiar with the rest of his work, his motives for thus appropriating Plato will come as no surprise. For like Plato as traditionally understood (here he departs little from orthodox Platonism) Badiou’s own philosophy is well known for proposing a) a basic ontology grounded in mathematics, and b) a “communist” theory of politics.

 

Allied to Badiou via his communism and appeals to Saint Paul, to a certain degree via the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, and having co-authored with Badiou a dialogue titled Philosophy Is Not A Dialogue, it is not surprising that Slavoj Zizek provides a superlative “blurb” for Plato’s Republic: “a resounding triumph: Plato comes fully alive as our contemporary, as someone who directly addresses our issues.” Similarly, Peter Bush’s 2012 translation of Badiou’s earlier dialogue (with Nicolas Truong) titled Eloge de l’amour (2009) sports prominently on its front cover Zizek’s éloge de Badiou: “A figure like Plato walks here among us!” 

 

Even or especially if this were true—and Badiou were a kind of modern Plato whose In Praise of Love stood in relation to his Plato’s Republic something like Plato’s Symposium in relation to his own Republic—we would want to be clear about their differences. Given the ambitions of Plato’s Republic, which is even longer than Plato’s, this brief review can single out only a few features:

 

1) Badiou substitutes “the Idea of the True” for the “Idea of the Good” throughout (emphasizing that the “good” in Plato is in any case not a specifically moral concept).  

 

2) Though there are too many implications entailed in this substitution to treat in detail, we may add that such an axiomatic re-orientation towards truth seems to go along with a tendency to minimize the importance of not only falsehood (notwithstanding Plato’s famous passages about noble or necessary lies, which Badiou of course translates) but of irony—not only Socrates’, but Plato’s.  Thus Spitzer helpfully cites Badiou’s distinction between himself and Lacan, who “thought that the Republic was a fundamentally ironic dialogue” (361).

 

3) The most important stylistic alteration, from Socrates’ first-person to Badiou’s third-person narration (e.g., “but Socrates ignored her sarcasm, which he had by no means failed to pick up on” (239)), also tends to minimize irony. In Badiou we know more or less immediately what Socrates and Plato think, especially when they think alike and agree with Badiou. And when Badiou disagrees with what he thinks Plato thinks—concerning, for example, important parts of Book V that are suppressed altogether in Chapter 8 (“Women and Families”)—he adopts the guileless strategy of making Socrates say: “Taking advantage of the opportunity given me here by Badiou, I solemnly protest your brother Plato’s interpretation of my thinking” (160). Knowing what Plato’s interpretation actually was, in short, is more or less taken for granted (in marked contrast to Lacan’s attitude cited by Badiou, and to the pointed warnings about this matter we find, for example, in Leo Strauss). 

 

4) Badiou justifies his decision to maintain “a true heavily dramatized dialogue at all times” by criticizing Plato’s own art: “What was the point of retaining Socrates’ endless stream of fake questions, to which the young people, for pages on end, only respond with ‘yes,’ ‘of course,’ or ‘naturally’? A better solution would be either to accept for there to be a long, uninterrupted demonstrative speech, or else to give the interlocutors a share of the argument” (xxxiv). Whatever our view of Badiou’s “true” (vrai) dramatized dialogue, we may note that his argument discounts the possibility that Plato’s technique is subtler than supposed, that slight differences as well as repetitions may be more important than Badiou thinks, and indeed that more or less unanimous agreement is sometimes, even comically, arranged by Plato precisely where it seems least “true” (for instance in Book V where Socrates proposes communist reforms that effectively legalize parent-child incest).

 

5) A list of the book’s original features must include Badiou’s substitution not only of the Good by the True, but also of Plato’s brother Adeimantus by his sister Amantha. Her feminist egalitarianism is certainly more akin to Adeimantus than to Glaucon (also Plato’s brother), and a feminist egalitarian voice is certainly relevant to a text in which Socrates at one point argues that the difference between men and women amounts to little more than the difference between their hair length. Nevertheless, or apropos, Amantha reminds me of Baudelaire’s famous quip about Emma Bovary: that for all her “soft, high-pitched voice” and black dresses, and however much she fiddles with her hair, “puts on her aggressive tough-girl act,” is called “a typical girl, fierce and heartless” (by Socrates) and so on, Amantha is evidently a man.

 

6) Badiou attempts to maintain an orthodox (essentially unironic) view of Plato’s seemingly anti-democratic communism while divesting it of its totalitarian or fascist reputation (its eugenics for instance), legitimately insisting on its feminist dimension, and assimilating it as far as possible to Badiou’s own communist theory. Certain things get more or less transformed or even reversed: the principle of one person one art, for example, becomes the principle that everyone should be able to do anything (along the lines of Mao’s Cultural Revolution); and the principle of copulation by (rigged) lottery in Plato may be contrasted to the principle of election to political leadership by (fair) lottery in Badiou.  Badiou also employs Amantha to make a stronger defense of the mimetic arts than anything that appears in Plato’s Book X, and repeats the important platitude that the Republic is itself a work of drama or poetry that concludes with an evidently fictitious myth of the afterlife. Badiou’s version of this myth includes Pavarotti’s foolishly choosing to become a nightingale; a man who chooses to be a corporate executive with a trophy wife (but discovers he likes only girls under seven); Thomas Jefferson choosing to become a runaway slave in expiation of his exploitation of slaves; while Odysseus, even more edifyingly, becomes a single mother of four who works as “an industrious check-out woman” and insists he would choose no other life (352-53).

 

7) The text concludes, in a way surely rather uncharacteristic of Plato’s Socrates, by claiming that the “greatest Evil [is] selfishness.”

 

Above all, however, Badiou departs from (and indeed suppresses) the text of Plato’s Republic most obviously, as he himself stresses, in Chapter 8, concerning women, the family, and eros, where he interestingly uses the Christian cross as a metaphor for his communism’s most important problem:

“…let’s face it, this question of the family and the dialectics of private and public life is the cross that communism’s got to bear, because love, which is truth too, requires withdrawal, requires that a certain amount of invisibility be granted it. […] Let’s bear this cross, young people, and move on. We’ll have to bear it until such time as the real movement has given rise to the idea [of eros and the family] that we’re currently lacking where this issue is concerned.” (161)

 

Not only is Badiou’s Republic thus modestly but explicitly incapable of producing an “idea” of this essential political problem, but nothing in his approach clarifies such basic issues as why, for example, homosexuality is illegal in the Republic (and punishable by death in Plato’s Laws) while apparently praised, even as a model of pedagogy, in the Symposium; or why the same person is said to be incapable of writing both comedy and tragedy in the Republic, while the Symposium famously concludes with Socrates showing the opposite. For these “contradictions” must surely be attributed to Plato’s irony, if we discount the possibility that he is frankly incoherent (or has simply changed his mind between writing the two texts). 

 

As regards comedy and tragedy, Badiou follows the letter of Socrates’ disjunction in the Republic—but can’t resist adding that “In the long run, our generic idea of Humanity and the collective effort required to realize its full potential will do away with these limitations” (86). The solution to the problem is thus postponed to the future (despite the Symposium’s suggestion that Socrates has already solved it).   

 

As regards homosexuality, not only does Badiou drop all mention of its legality or illegality, but his characters fail to discuss the issue significantly at all. Indeed even in In Praise of Love, homosexuality is mentioned cursorily only once: when erotic love is not based on sexual difference, we are told, it “still ensures that two figures, two different interpretive stances are set in opposition.” [i](27-28). For all his enthusiasm for “May ’68 [which] was a great explosion of experiments in new takes on sexuality and love,” Badiou’s reticence about this subject seems —whatever else it may be---significantly unlike Plato, for better or worse.  Though In Praise of Love is, in this respect and others, very little like the Symposium (though it mentions it at some length), we can find elsewhere indication of Badiou’s opinions on the subject: for example, “however it is sexuated, desire is homosexual, whereas love, even if it can be gay, is principally heterosexual.”[ii] But such claims make it make it all the more curious that the issue is almost completely suppressed in Plato’s Republic.

 

It should be added, however, that in Badiou’s mythical conclusion Agamemnon, filled with “a holy horror of the female sex, […chooses] the life of a puny homosexual [d’un homosexuel malingre], unfit for military service.” Is this then, for a moment, Badiou’s comic (?) equivalent of the communist anti-homosexuality of the Republic? (In the Symposium, by contrast, homosexual love is said to increase military valour!)

 

Zizek and Badiou might perhaps regard my singling out this issue as an exercise in “aseptic” scholarly pedantry. Perhaps it is enough to say that nowadays homosexuality, along with some other forms of sexual freedom, is not only tolerated and legal--in Badiou’s & Zizek’s hypothetical communism as well as actual “liberal” capitalism--but often celebrated. But this does not seem to get to the heart of the issue in Plato, since he already celebrates both ordinary and “philosophical” homosexuality, at least to some degree, in the Symposium; hence its re-emergence in the Republic as a political and legal problem is of great importance. Indeed homosexuality arguably epitomizes, alongside incest, the whole “Platonic” dilemma of eros and the family (as well as philosophy and education) in relation to justice—the fundamental problem about which Badiou’s Republic, as we have seen, modestly admits defeat.

 

I nevertheless strongly recommend reading his amusing, erudite, and intelligent book.