1In contemporary philosophy, and especially in the continental deconstructive tradition inspired by Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Heidegger or Bataille, Plato has been a target of constant criticism. His thought has been seen as a source of the millennia-old tendency in Western thought towards metaphysical hierarchies and dichotomies, according to which ideal is opposed to empirical, rationality to sensibility, soul to body, man to woman, form to matter, infinite to finite, and so on. In “Platonism”, the umbrella term for these tendencies, the first member of the opposition has always been considered superior to the second in every possible sense – ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic.
- 1 See e.g. J. Derrida, Dissemination; Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Typography”; L. Irigaray, Speculum of th (...)
2However, as deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe or Luce Irigaray have highlighted1, the Platonic dialogues, like any other philosophical discourse, contain features that generally compromise their argumentation, authority, and self-sufficient appearance. It is possible to read these texts as manifesting processes of meaning-making, or a search for meaning that is simultaneously finite and infinite, conscious and unconscious, serious and playful. The certainty these discourses can achieve at a given moment turns out to be conditional and dependent on other points which, in the final analysis, remain conceptually uncontrollable, undecidable and ambiguous.
3In the following reading, I will focus on a few moments in the Platonic dialogues when Socrates asks his interlocutors to imagine something with him. The objects of the Platonic imagination are fabulous, sometimes so fabulous that they are barely imaginable, and yet the philosopher must appeal to them to maintain his argument. What interests me particularly in these Platonic fantasies is their implicit corporeal aspect. The reason I return to them relates to my long-term attempt to understand the logic of imaginative and linguistic processes in scenic performance. The artistic agenda of my operation is explicit, given that Plato was a philosopher who considered theatrical presentations as dangerous for the civil and political order and who, in his dialogue titled The Republic, concluded that tragic poets and actors should have no place or role in an ideally governed city-state. At the same time, the Platonic dialogues also contain elements that constitute a real challenge for contemporary thinking, deconstruction included.
4My demonstration will focus on two Platonic fabulous constructs. The first derives from the lecture of the Republic and the second from the Timaeus. What I am going to do with these two texts is to attempt their scenic deconstruction, that is to unfold their implicit theatricality, and to consider what that operation brings forth.
5The first Platonic fantasy under consideration is the allegoric depiction of the idea of the human “soul” (psychè) in Book IX of the Republic. This demonstration, although rarely commented, plays a key role in Plato’s argument on the subject of the dialogue, which is justice (dikè). By intermediary of the psyche, Plato (or “Socrates” as his alter-ego) succeeds in establishing the idea of an isomorphism (formal similarity) between the three-partite body of the citizen and the three-partite body of the ideal city-state2. The justness or unjustness of an action is to be judged against the background of that isomorphism: a city can be just only insofar as it corresponds to the idea of the soul of the citizen, and a citizen is just only if he acts in accordance with this idea. The principle constitutes the basis for the ideal distribution of work between the three economico-political classes, the “artisans”, the “soldiers” and the “guardians”, respectively in charge of production, maintenance of the civil order and governance. Rhetorically, the presentation is addressed to a hypothetical interlocutor, who claims that for a governor it is more profitable to be unjust than just, if only their action has a just appearance. The counter-argument of Socrates is as follows:
- 3 Ibid.,588b-e, the translation of Raymond Larson has been modified.
[Socrates] “Then since we’ve agreed what power justice and injustice each have, let’s have a discussion with him”.
[Glaucon] “How?”
– “By molding [plasantes, derived from plassô] in words [logos] an image [eikon] of the soul [psychê], so that the one who said that will realize what he was saying”.
– “What kind of image?”
– “Oh, something like those natures [physeis] the myths tell us were born in ancient times – the Chimaera, Scylla, Cerberus, and others in which many different shapes were supposed to have grown into one”.
– “So they tell us”, he said.
– “Then mold [platte] one figure of a colorful, many-headed beast [thêrion] with heads of wild and tame animals [thêriôn] growing in a circle all around it; one that can change [metaballein] and grow all of them out of itself”.
– “That’s a job for a skilled artist [deinos plastos]. Still, words [logos] mold easier [euplastoteron] than wax or clay, so consider it molded [peplasthô]”.
– “And another idea [idea] of a lion, and one of a human being [anthrôpos]. Make the first by far the biggest, the second second largest”.
– “That’s easier, and already molded [peplasthai]”.
– “Now join the three together so that they somehow grow into one”.
– “All right”.
– “Next mold the image [eikon] of one, the human being, around them all [periplason], so that to someone who can’t see what’s inside but looks only at the container it appears [phainesthai] to be a single animal [zôon], human being”.
– “I have done it [peripeplastai]”3.
6Here’s an image of the human soul, drawn by me according to the given instructions (fig. 1).
Fig. 1 — The image of the human soul.
7What is going on here? The first thing to notice is that Plato gives us a detailed depiction of the work of imagination at the service of reason, the first being impersonated by Glaucon, and the second by Socrates himself. In the interiority of the mind, the imagination can evoke all sorts of images and join them regardless of the limitations of reality. The resulting image appears not to the physical but to an inner eye, being simultaneously and indistinctively an imaginary and ideal construct. The ambiguity between these two qualities is striking and enigmatic. What is the internal logic of this demonstration? And what does it say about the power of imagination itself, which performs the operation? And why, despite the imaginary nature of the operation, is the term “imagination” – phantasia – not mentioned in the text? Instead, as we could notice, the text is full of terms related to “plastic” manipulation, “moulding” or “fashioning” (plassô).
8Socrates asks Glaucon, his interlocutor, and us, their readers, to “mold in words” a figure made up of three overlapping but seemingly heterogeneous parts, surrounded by a quasi-transparent anthropomorphic figure. From the outset, Socrates describes this “creature” under construction as something monstrous, comparing it to “mythological” monsters like Chimera, Scylla or Cerberus. The comparison is strange since what we are asked to imagine next is no less monstrous. Glaucon is asked to mould a beast with multiple heads. The creature is situated at the lowest level, the belly area, of the encompassing human figure. What does the monster embody here, and how is it distinguished from the monstrous construct of which it is a part? According to Socrates, the many-headed creature is the symbol of the multiplicity and proliferation of human desires, needs, or drives (epithumiai), which seek “profit” (kerdos)4. Some of these drives are vital and therefore necessary to human existence, whereas others are superfluous and therefore harmful to us. What ultimately makes the creature dangerous is that it cannot by itself make or know a difference between the drives it gives birth and form to. The creature is monstrous, not because of evilness, but because of its uncritical productivity. In political terms, we are dealing here with the economic life, the market, which is guided by a multitude of private and egoistic purposes that are blind by nature and therefore require external guidance.
9So, the monster needs to be governed. But who does it, and how? Plato’s answer is twofold. The first instance of governance consists of the capacity Plato and the whole classical tradition calls thumos. In Plato, the virtue of this faculty, courage, is proper to warriors, soldiers, and police officers, and it is symbolised by a “lion”. Its place in ancient physiology is in the rib cage of the human body.
10But the lion, despite its incomparable physical strength, courage, and sovereign appearance, is also an animal, which implies that it does not know for what purpose it should use its power. There is a risk that it lends its ear to the monster and becomes seduced by the desires of the masses. Since the latter are multiple and contradictory, any military force under their rule drives the city-state into an internal conflict, civil war, stasis. This is why a third party and a second authority are needed to tame the monster, namely “reason” (logos), whose voice convinces the lion to use its courage in a just way: to distinguish the useful desires from the harmful ones, to reject the latter and to harness the former to the service of the common good. This superior part is symbolised by a human form (anthrôpos).
11Lastly, and this is again very interesting, Socrates asks us to join all these parts together and:
mold the image of one, the human being, around them all, so that to someone who can’t see what’s inside but looks only at the container it appears to be a single animal, human being.
12This doubling of the humanoid form, both as the external contour of the soul and its inner principle (supposedly located in the head, and therefore smaller than the lion), is crucial to the persuasiveness of the demonstration. Once imagined, it leads to a process of endless self-reflection – as if the figure imagined itself.
13In the first instance, the doubling sustains the argumentation of the dialogue. It corresponds to the function of the Guardians, the members of the ruling class, who both embody the ideal psychic order and guard the social order through the martial power of the soldiers. The just order is based on the control of the interior human being over the entire human being. A rightful citizen:
- 5 Ibid., 589a-b, the translation has been modified by the author.
should care for the manyheaded beast like a farmer, raising and domesticating its tame heads and preventing the wild ones from growing, making the lion’s nature his partner and ally, and so raise them both to be friends to each other and to him5.
14From the deconstructive perspective opened by the above-mentioned authors, the demonstration establishes a metaphysical order capable of sustaining itself. What is its rhetorical force and intuitive persuasiveness based on?
15As Derrida has argued in Plato’s Pharmacy, the “phallogocentric” ideal Plato sustains in his dialogues is conditioned by the prohibition of writing, and the difference it implies. Lacoue-Labarthe has shown how Plato’s discourse remains in an undecidable double-bind concerning mimèsis as an artistic mode of imitation. Luce Irigaray, in turn, demonstrates that Plato’s basic metaphors and argumentative structures are built on the categorical exclusion of features associable with femininity. In each case, the repressed other makes its return in a modified form: in Derrida with pharmakon, in Lacoue-Labarthe with mimèsis, and in Irigaray with metonymic associations. In the present case, the cause of repression and control, as I will argue, seems to relate to the mimetic aspects of corporality and, thereby, to the scenic imitation exercised by actors.
- 6 E. Kirkkopelto, Le théâtre de l’expérience and “A Phenomenological Actor”.
16As I have argued, the human phenomenon provides us with the only occasion in our perceptual field where mimetic processes of behaving and appearing take place in concomitance with logic or discursive processes6. The former ones are rather corporeal by nature, the latter ones rather linguistic and ideal. Although the processes are mutually dependent, they never overlap completely. Between them resides a constitutive double-bind and difference that I have called “the scene”. Consequently, we perceive ourselves and each other in a double register, always able to distinguish the contents of expression and its style or attuning, for instance. The location of the difference cannot be detected empirically, although it has empirical effects. Being transcendental by nature, it engages our experience of ourselves and our fellow beings and creates thus a ground for meaningful encounters. It also constitutes the prerequisite for the theatrical imitation and its understanding. The scenes in theatre externalize in time and space this basic structure of the human experience and manifest its possibilities.
17If Plato’s demonstration is now considered from the scenic perspective, its logic, prerequisites, and agenda start to unfold in a new way. The first thing to notice is its double bind with the human phenomenon. From now on, two things always happen at once:
18– Firstly, the allegory could not function without appealing to the reader’s perception of how a human being as a speaking and acting animal appears to another human being. The demonstration takes this appearance as granted and builds on its power. Secondly, the allegory articulates and re-organises that appearance by identifying it with an imaginary configuration.
19– As it does that, on the one hand, it leans on the process of idealisation and signification which the phenomenon in question manifests. According to that process, the phenomena belonging to a more mimetic or corporeal level are identified, represented, named, signed and, thereby, governed by instances of the more logical level. On the other hand, the allegory represents that two-directional process as a making of a human instance itself.
20– As the result, firstly, the human phenomenon as an object of wondering and a subject of scenic presentation becomes replaced by a human figure, which is an object of identification. Through that replacement, the process of appearing manifested by the (scenic) mimesis becomes subjugated to a metaphysical order based on a self-imaginative process. Secondly, the process of idealization and signification becomes replaced by the dialectical logic of (self-)appropriation. What the tiny human figure in the head of the human figure contains is nothing but the same tripartite division it belongs to, and so on.
21Through the doubling of the human figure and its repetition, the demonstration both hides and reveals the metaphysical desire, or the desire of metaphysics, which is as endless as it is desperate. Even if the reflective process described can now appear to us as an example of “bad infinity”, from the point of view of the one who identifies with the model, it is a matter of utmost concern. The tripartite metaphysical order constitutes the object of desire of the psyche, which aims at imitating its idea. For the same reason, that order cannot ever be granted or assured, but must be established all over again, i.e. it must be re-imagined. The strive for ideality, the coincidence of eidos and telos, is both conditioned and compromised by the imaginary nature of the operation.
22This conclusion does not imply, however, that that operation is false or fake. It only shows how hard it is for us, even today, to seize the difference when everything is based on its concealment. In this case, the difference is the one between the human phenomenon, which can constitute both the basis and the object of artistic mimèsis, and the human figure, on which the governance of that phenomenon is based, let that governor be the subject citizen or an external sovereign. To hide the gap between the phenomenon and the figure, the desire must first jump or rush over it and then produce an image or representation, which covers the remaining discrepancy without reconciling it. The operation goes most often unnoticed, as it does in the case of Plato’s allegory where the rhetorical power of the philosopher has in advance engaged the metaphysical desire of the interlocutor/reader.
- 7 “The eidos is that which can always be repeated as the same. The ideality and invisibility of the e (...)
- 8 As a matter of fact, Plato does not have a term for imagination in the same sense as we have. The h (...)
23So far, my argumentation has followed Derrida’s initial argument about the dependence of the ideality of eidos on the movement of repetitive and supplementary difference, which in Plato’s discourse has come forth in the ambiguous logic of the pharmakon7. However, in our case the pharmakon is not epitomized by “writing” like in Derrida, but by a process that I have so far called “imagination”. The term is connected to the scenic nature of the deconstruction I am pursuing. But how is scenic imagination different from the one practiced in Plato’s allegory? As already noticed, the quoted text does not contain that term. Instead, the verb that is repeatedly used to characterise the operation is plassô, which refers to the manipulation of some plastic and malleable material. The terminological choice corresponds to Platonic mimetology, according to which the suprasensible ideas inform the sensible matter more directly, as if by being “stamped” or “printed” (typtein) on it. The procedure excludes, or at least minimizes, the mimetic distance between the object and its model and, thereby, constitutes a prerequisite for the Platonic critique of mimèsis. The change from three-dimensional metaphor (moulding) to the two-dimensional one (printing) is also interesting as it highlights the barely imaginable nature of the operation. In Plato, we must do without imagination8. Instead, the mental representation of ideas consists of the fashioning of language (logos) itself which, as Glaucon notes, is a “particularly malleable material” (euplastos) and more malleable than the “cire” (kêros). The Platonic imagination, so to say, is plastic without being mimetic…
24This aspect of Platonic mimetology, which distinguishes it from the modern way of thinking, needs to be respected if we want to understand the internal logic of the demonstration and not just overlook it as something “imaginary” and therefore metaphorical. As I see it, the relevance of Plato’s allegory to contemporary thought depends largely on this point. Among other things, it can help us to better understand the difficult-to-translate sense of logos meaning simultaneously “language” (or “word”) and “reason” (or “thinking”), the aspect of Greek thought that is so difficult for a modern mind to conceive.
- 9 At this point, one might argue in the Kantian way that here the deconstruction only concerns the “e (...)
- 10 In Le théâtre des philosophes, Jacques Taminiaux criticizes the “poietic” or “productive” paradigm (...)
25As my reading proposes, in the footsteps of Derrida, the presentation of the idea of the soul can be read as an analysis of the process of idealisation9. As the psychic system works, it distances mental images or representations repetitively from their sensible counterparts and, thereby, enables the governance of the latter by the former. The ideas do not need to be fashioned at all, since they are eternal and self-identical. But everything else must be. The activity of thinking (logos), having partly access to the ideas and dwelling partly in the material world, is plastic by nature. Idealisation as an act of logos equals to the fashioning according to the ideas, and the idea of the soul equals to the idea of an ideal fashioner, and as distinguished from the material fashioner, the artisan10.
- 11 Jacques Derrida has come to that same point in an interview with Elisabeth Weber: “But as soon as o (...)
- 12 See Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe’s detailed analysis of Plato’s mimetic double-bind in “Typography”.
26This reading has two implications: First, a visualized monster is already a tamed monster to a certain degree11. The symbolisation and identification of the multiple sensible functions in a visual form introduces a critical and controllable distance to them, and the operation is based on a secret collaboration between logos and thumos, even before the latter are discussed. Second, the sensible functions become associated with a plastic material whose incomparable malleability equals the monstruous. The soul integrates its inner monster as a material of its auto-fiction. The observation corresponds to Plato’s characteristic double-bind and undecidability with mimèsis, insofar as sensible fashioning for him is a mimetic operation par excellence. The struggle with the unrestrained mimèsis must be had by mimetic means, and the fashioning of the soul constitutes a means to redress mimèsis so that it serves better the ideal order12.
- 13 The idea of the ideal matter comes close to what Catherine Malabou understands by “plasticity”. See (...)
27Here, unlike in theatre, mimèsis is integrally at the service of the self-imitating logos, so integrally that it does not even need to be named. Since Plato, the problem of the philosophers with mimèsis relates to the distance between the model and the copy it simultaneously introduces and tries to overcome. As Plato’s demonstration now indicates, even when logos works itself as immediately as it can, i.e. as a human being tries to imagine its own idea in the form of the soul, the operation encounters an internal material resistance due to its medial or mediating nature. The resistance implicit to all mimetic operations reappears in the form of an image of the uncontrollable mimèsis, a monster to be kept at distance and tamed. The mimetically superior being, a “marvellous fashioner” (deinos plastês), as Glaucon calls it, encounters an affectively and mimetically charged ideal material, immediately associated with the corporality of the figure under construction13. The allegory does not hide its paradoxical outcome: the attempt to take mimèsis and body under the control of logos leads to its mimetic embodiment.
28Finally, as the physiological correspondences of the allegory are combined with the idea of idealization, the psyche can be understood as the idea of the linguistic or languaged body. In Platonic terms, this means that the body, as a sensible and material entity, imitates the soul as its own idea and thus participates in it. One might even think that the soul is the image of the linguistic body as it imagines itself. Like the body of the linguistic subject in the psychoanalytic theory, the ancient body depicted by Plato is internally divided. Physiologically, the organ in charge of the division between thumos and epithumiai is the diaphragm, the peculiar mediating function of which has attracted the attention of both ancient and modern physiologists. I will come back to its role at the end of this presentation. Before that, let us see how Plato’s demonstration, by virtue of his restricted mimetic paradigm, is forced to lean on a supposition of plasticity that is indistinctly ideal and material.
29It is by no means a coincidence that Book IX, which concludes with the demonstration in question, is followed in Book X by the final argument against the practitioners of the tragic mimèsis. As the actors or poets imitate people at the mercy of their desires, they provide a bad model for citizens who should rather imitate the idea of the soul and thus become just subjects of the just civil order. The equation between artistic mimèsis and monstrosity is thus established.
- 14 See J. Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice.
30True, what happens on stage, or in our scenic imagination, does not respect the internal psychic order Book IX had imposed on our bodily existence. Already Aristotle, in the Poetics, raises the classical question concerning the nature of the pleasure people get from watching the presentations of unpleasurable and base things. For modern Western audiences, theatre provides a place and an occasion to evoke and study the monsters and monstrosities that people must suppress in their civilized personal and social lives. In theatre, the division line between the conscious and the unconscious is momentarily and locally suspended. But does this necessarily make theatre opposed or hostile to the civil order, like the anti-theatrical arguments after Plato have sustained?14 Is not the doubling of the human form in Plato’s paradigm not only accompanied but also conditioned by the doubling of the imaginary monster, both as the representative of drives and as the tripartite creature the external human form both conceals and reveals?
- 15 J. Roach, The Player’s Passion, p. 41-50.
- 16 Cf. my previous note 11 on Derrida.
- 17 See E. Kirkkopelto, Le théâtre de l’expérience and “The Question of the Scene”.
- 18 See E. Kirkkopelto, “The Most Mimetic Animal”.
31In the history of the critique of theatre actors, due to their multiform nature, have sometimes been compared to mythical monsters, notably “Proteus”15. That comparison, as we can now see, has a Platonic legacy. Even in modern Western contexts, where people may imagine themselves as being free from the dominance of metaphysical aesthetic hierarchies, the Platonic principle of the right kind of imitation still prevails, when we consider how a supposedly “normal” or “natural” way of behaving and expressing oneself should look or sound like. In film and theatre, as well as on the street, the deviation from this psycho-realistic norm is immediately recognized and often considered if not as monstrous, at least as awkward, queer or “arty”16. “Psycho-realism” here means: faithful to a supposedly universal psychic behaviour. The immediacy of the observation reveals that there is nothing immediate about the appearance of another human being. On the contrary, as I have argued elsewhere, we encounter each other through the intermediary of a transcendental anthropomorphic trope or figure17, whose basic features are outlined in Plato’s allegory. As in this allegory, we see as if through the outer surface of our neighbour, and we presume that within it prevails the same kind of psychic order as within ourselves in terms of the right way of expressing ourselves. In cognitive psychology, the phenomenon is called “mentalization”. The psyche (mens) we project on each other retains the Platonic tripartite structure. A sensible (logos) person is supposed to master (thumos) their instinctive and affective impulses or reactions (epithumiai), not to let them excessively drive their behaviour, or at the very least not to let them show. The civil order and harmony, even today, is based on a supposition of this relative mutual transparency18.
32The figure of the acting and speaking human being has captivated our experience since our early childhood, and it dominates our perception of human appearance. The performing arts, insofar as they operate with human bodies or their representatives (like in puppet or object theatre), are automatically tied up in a certain dialectic with that figure, either supporting and reinforcing it, or criticizing and deconstructing it. As I see it, the prevalence of the figure is not only due to metaphysics, let alone Plato. It is also because the human phenomenon constitutes the only occasion in our sensorial field where the connection between mimetic corporeal processes and linguistic or logical processes, here: the fashioned and fashioning processes, becomes apparent and detectable to another human being. The symbolic order, the possibility of establishing a meaning, “this means that”, is now based on this same happy coincidence, and it is thanks to it that we learn and get accustomed to mean things. For this same reason, any respective establishment of meaningful relations between us and our physical or social reality, or between us and our psychic reality, is sustained by an imaginary anthropomorphic detour.
33The fact that the symbolic order, and thereby any order whatsoever, is based on the same scenic difference as the theatrical play constitutes the basic problem for Plato, like it does for us today. The difference the metaphysical desire rushes over is scenic. The discrepancy is constitutive, not only due to the lack of power of the logical processes, that can never name and control everything, but also because of the plastic nature of the linguistic process itself, which comprises both processual aspects as well as their constant variation. Consequently, every established meaning can be untied, and the relationship between the processes can be replayed.
34Correspondingly, the scenic deconstruction of a (philosophical) discourse consists of showing how it articulates itself in the tension between the mimetic and logical processes, participating in the language itself as logos. As our reading of Plato has indicated so far, that articulation consists of a self-dividing and self-fashioning process, which, in addition to its idealizing and linguistic aspects, has its implicit material and corporeal aspect. But what of this ideal matter and corporeality that can only be achieved in imagination? Can it ever appear according to its terms? Plato also has an answer to this question.
35Next, I would raise another example of Platonic fabulation, perhaps the most fabulous of them all, namely the Khôra in Plato’s late dialogue devoted to cosmological speculation, the Timaeus.
- 19 Phaedrus, 247c, trans. by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff.
- 20 As it seems to me, Plato’s biggest problem with artistic mimèsis is due to its lack of participatio (...)
- 21 Plato, Timaeus, 50d, trans. by Robin Waterfield.
36Given that the eternal and divine ideas that material and sensible things are supposed to reflect and imitate reside in a transcendent realm, in a “place beyond the sky” (topos hyperuranios)19 as it is called in Phaedrus, the question remains how these ideal forms can be transposed into the sensible world. How are ideas embodied, and not merely reflected, by multiple beings and phenomena, so that their “participation” (methexis) in the ideas is realised?20 In Platonic terms, the question concerns the logic of generation. For the generation of all things to be possible we must, according to Socrates and Timaeus, consider three factors: firstly, the process of generation; secondly, that in which generation takes place; and thirdly the thing that is generated after its idea. Thus, according to Socrates, “[i]t would not be out of place to compare the receptacle to a mother, the source to a father, and what they create between them to a child”21.
37Following on from the previous discussion, I will now focus on the “receptacle” (dekhomenos) mentioned. To make it conceivable within the confines of Platonic mimetology, Socrates postulates an idea of ideal matter, capable of receiving all the singular imprints of all the eternal ideas and, thus, dividing itself into as many singular incorporations. For this kind of cosmic process to continue endlessly, the same material receptacle or matrix must simultaneously renew itself as endlessly to retain its purity and potentiality. Moreover, it should never assume any of the forms to which it gives place. This mysterious “moulding stuff” (ektupôma) named Khôra, literally “Place”, is by essence “without form” (ektos eidon). To describe this barely imaginable thing, Socrates has recourse to the ideally feminine attributes of eternal fertility and eternal virginity:
In speaking of the mother and receptacle (hypodokheion) of every created thing, of all that is visible or otherwise perceptible, we shouldn’t call it earth or air or fire or water, or any of their compounds or constituents. And we won’t go wrong if we think of it as an invisible, formless receptacle of everything, which is in some highly obscure fashion linked with the intelligible realm. It’s almost incomprehensible […]22.
- 23 J. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 40-44.
- 24 In addition to Butler, the sense of the Platonic Khôra has been discussed e.g. by Julia Kristeva, L (...)
38As Judith Butler has pointed out, Plato’s way of endowing Khôra with feminine attributes and defining it as something a priori incomprehensible is a philosophical example of a phallogocentric performative, where the voice of women is silenced from the very start, and the female body is doomed to remain outside rational discourse23. Through Platonic veneration and idealization, the female body is excluded and muted. Philosophically, liberating the female body and expression from their age-old seclusion is all but an easy task24. Our previous reading of the Republic opens one possible way to tackle this question.
- 25 The attempts to master that process lead easily to another kind of metaphysical anthropomorphism, t (...)
- 26 In Changing difference, C. Malabou ends up to a similar conclusion regarding the “ontological diffe (...)
39If the materiality in question were understood as intrinsic to language, characterizing its implicit plasticity, the ideological nature of Plato’s gendered interpretation of Khôra becomes immediately revealed. What this interpretation discards at every turn is not only the woman but also the “child” (ekgones), that is the bodies. If instead of the dialectic between the fashioner (supposedly man) and the fashioned (supposedly woman), the plastic process is considered from the point of view of engendering, i.e. embodiment, it opens up for a variation that the classical gender identifications cannot integrate. All we need to suppose then, is that the process of embodiment is not equal to biological reproduction. But are we ready, as Westerners, to assume this? Aesthetically and artistically, it would imply that embodiment, i.e. becoming a body or assuming a bodily form, is from the very start and genuinely considered to be free of anthropomorphism. As we have seen, this process has both a physical and a psychic side, a conscious and an unconscious side, etc. But these divisions are not uniquely human either. Once the process of idealisation and its replay has been opened scenically the way I proposed above, it invites us to re-imagine its outcomes. The Platonic citizen, or its modern bourgeois heir, is not the only possible or necessary outcome of the human self-fashioning. There is no fixed idea of the human; there is only the self-fashioning process that humans can participate in but that they cannot master entirely25. However, like my analysis has also hopefully indicated, any sustainable change in the registers of appearing requires that it also informs the nature of the difference itself, not only the appearances it produces26. However, in our culture and everyday practice, these conclusions are still far from being evident.
40Based on my reading of the Platonic discourse, it is now possible to re-imagine a performing body which works that discourse from within, both enabling its operations and undermining them. Like a Platonic monster, the performing body can reproduce any kind of affective state and thereby manifest any kind of impulse, no matter if it comes from within or from without (the drives do not respect that division anyway). Furthermore, like Khôra, the body can receive and embody any imaginable mimetic form. The resulting scenic entities are bodies, not metaphorically, but virtually, influencing our actual corporeal existence both mimetically and affectively. The matter with which the performing body works, and through which it imagines itself, is first and foremost linguistic by nature – a matter of potentiality and creation. Strange as it may seem, we must assume its subsistence as an implicit correlate and companion of our linguistic operations.
- 27 See E. Kirkkopelto, “Virtual Bodies in Virtual Spaces”.
- 28 Here, the monster appears in another, more affirmative sense, which Jacques Derrida associates with (...)
41This fabulous matter manifests itself and makes itself sensed in the arts, and here in particular in the body of the scenic performer. When performers perform, they simultaneously create around their transformed embodiments a virtual transformed space, which is no less affective and mimetic than the body that evokes it27. The virtual scenic embodiments distinguish themselves from and against their virtual surroundings like the imaginary monsters from the Khôra-like substance28. The attuned and excited relationship between the two, the monster and Khôra, constitutes the archi-scene of the psychic reality, on which all the other scenes, also those of psycho-realism, are based and which they either reveal or hide, hide by revealing, reveal by hiding.
42We can see now how the Platonic demonstrations not only exploit the potentialities of the embodied imagination, which constitute the basis for the actor’s psychophysical performance. They also lead us to rethink what that imagination consists of, notably its linguistic or logical basis. Imagination is not just a “capacity” or “faculty” at the service of reason or psyche like modern philosophy or psychology has been thinking since Kant. Imagination is not just a mental operation, which produces representations of things in their absence. If the latter were the case, artistic creation would be inconceivable. Instead, as I have proposed, imagination should be understood as an intrinsic aspect of the self-fashioning and self-dividing process of linguistic embodiment. “Language” (logos) is the “reason” (logos) of this process. For the same reason, we should be cautious when using this term, and always be precise about what kind of imagination we are talking about, embodied or representational.
- 29 J. Roach, The Player’s Passion, p. 131-136, 150; E. Kirkkopelto, “The Most Mimetic Animal” p. 127 s (...)
43When performers perform, they do not lose control of themselves for a second. They neither yield to chaos nor become mad. From the point of view of Platonic mimetology, this is incomprehensible. What it cannot understand, and what the long philosophical tradition that followed has barely understood, is the intrinsically critical nature of the performing arts, which sets our bodies apart from themselves and provides them with an internal reflective distance from themselves. This invisible distance that constantly articulates our bodies as something divided is, once again, a scenic difference. Physiologically, this division manifests itself most concretely in the form and function of the diaphragm, which, as we know since Diderot29, is an internal organ of acting. The conscious control of the spontaneously moving diaphragm plays a crucial role in the scenic reproduction of emotions. Plato’s Timaeus also contains a remark on the topic:
Since there are better and worse parts of the mortal soul, they also created a partition (diaphragma) within the thoracic chamber (much as the women’s quarters are separated from the men’s quarters in a house) by setting the diaphragm as a barrier between them. They housed the competitive part of the soul, the part that is characterized by courage (thumos) and passion, closer to the head, between the diaphragm and the neck, so that it would be within hearing of reason (logos) and would share with it the task of forcibly restraining the appetitive part whenever it completely refused to obey the dictates of reason issuing from the acropolis, unless forced to do so30.
44The quote adds to the former analysis of psyche a value hierarchy between men and women. The “better parts” of the soul, thumos and logos, are associated with masculinity and ward off the “worse parts”, epithumiai, associated with femininity. The same psychic structure that constitutes the basis for the social value hierarchy also serves to sustain male supremacy.
- 31 N. Loraux, “La métaphore sans métaphore”.
- 32 The colloquium (“Il Riso di Platone”, Accademia Dimitri, 17-18 Dec. 2021) on which this article is (...)
45As Nicole Loraux has once analysed it, the idea of diaphragm, which comes up recurrently in the imagination of the body in the ancient Greece since Homer, finds ultimate externalization in the division between chorus and protagonist, orkhestra and skènè31. Accordingly, the Platonic idea of the soul constitutes an anthropomorphised idea of theatre, where the many headed crowd of people is forced to follow the undertakings of their governors. Contemporary theatre struggles with the same compositional problems as Plato, including their socio-political implications, but without the given anthropomorphic framing32.
46Finally, as we know, the diaphragm not only separates and mediates, it can also tremble. And sometimes even convulsively. The diaphragm is, not coincidentally, also the organ of laughter. Based on what has been noted above, we may now better understand why. The one who laughs last laughs the best. But who, in this case, would that someone or something be? Deconstruction can be accused of making philosophical discourses sound and look ridiculous. True, there is often lots of humour implied in deconstruction, unlike in phenomenology, for instance. Why is this so? Insofar as I understand it, the laughter always relates to an experience of liberation. In laughter, bodies make their sudden re-entrance into the discursive situation to remind us about their sovereignty. Transcendentally, the one who laughs is our linguistic body which, like Khôra, must every now and then shake off all the images and identifications imprinted on it. Empirically, we burst into laughter for instance as members of the theatre audience watching a comical play. A trembling borderline is still a borderline, which opens the established differences for critique and change.
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