Sophistic Travel: Inheriting the Simulacrum Through Plato's "The Sophist"

Abstract

A single marks our departure, a that, while apparently straightforward, has assumed so many shapes and disguises that it would not be unjust to claim it has infected all of Western history. In its current manifestation, however, we will take our cue from Plato in phrasing it thus: What is a Sophist? When Plato first formulated the in these terms, he well understood that its self-evident simplicity could be deceptive and that its effects might proliferate uncontrollably. As Jacques Derrida comments, of what the Sophists really were is an enormous question (Olson 17). In Plato's case, attempting to hunt down the Sophist led from a disturbing journey through the world of images to an unsettling encounter with the existence of nonbeing. Of course, the issue of Plato's distaste for sophistry is well-covered ground, so well-covered, in fact, that nearly all contemporary rhetorical scholarship that attempts to assert the value of sophistic rhetoric does so by reproducing an antagonism between sophistry and Platonism (see, e.g., Poulokos, Jarratt, Vickers).1 A particularly interesting example, simply because it is so persistently skeptical of most conventional assumptions about sophistry, is G. B. Kerford's The Sophistic Movement. is an excellent and careful treatment of sophistry in which he insists on the importance of approaching the Sophists without prior assumptions as to their relationship to the history of thought or politics something that he shows has been far too prevalent in previous appropriations. Nevertheless, in his treatment of Plato's dialogue the Sophist, he writes, It is clear that [Plato's] character-