Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine

Abstract

Abstract This book offers a new interpretation of the role of the female and the feminine in Plato’s political dialogues—The Republic, Laws, and Timaeus—informed by Deleuze’s film theory and Irigaray’s psychoanalytic feminism. The book reads Plato against the grain and tries to close the gap between the vitalists and Plato, rather than magnifying their differences. It probes the ambivalence that the vitalist tradition, Irigaray, and Derrida have toward Platonism. The application of Deleuzian and Irigarayan concepts to the ancient texts produce a new reading of Plato: the book focuses on the centrality and importance of motion, change, sensuality, and becoming to Platonic philosophy and, thereby, reinterprets Platonic philosophy in the direction of Heraclitus rather than Parmenides, as feminist rather than masculinist, and as mimetic. That is, it prioritizes Heraclitean principles of movement and flux over Form, the feminine over masculine, and materiality, feeling, or sensation. The book illustrates how, in Plato’s thought, the feminine maps itself onto the plane of phenomena—a plane associated with vitalist themes such as motion, tactility, and change (metabolē). The book aims to recontextualize Platonic metaphysics by illustrating how Being expresses itself through processes of (feminine) becoming. With this reformulation, the author’s account of Platonic Being destabilizes any purported Platonic dualism.