This book pays homage to French feminist theory. It is an energetic exploration of gender, philosophy and the erotic as they pertain to the reception of Plato by six postmodern feminists. The introduction gives brief treatment to Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous and Marguerite Duras, and the epilogue issues an inspiring call to the future of Classics in relation to reception studies. Sandwiched between them are four chapters devoted to Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Sarah Kofman. Male philosophers and theorists also make an appearance: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Bakhtin, Heidegger, Sartre, Lacan, Derrida and Foucault. The recent ‘translation’ of Plato's Republic by A. Badiou (2012) highlights the centrality of Plato in French critical theory, and M.’s erudite study charts important but largely unexplored stages of the trajectory of this reception. The main preoccupation of all these feminist thinkers, as M. conceives it, is the transcendence of the binary opposition of subject and object by the Other, a tertium quid that is both inside the subject and external to and in excess of it (p. 5). This transcendence also delimits the authors’ engagement with Plato.
In the introduction, M. shows the relevance of antiquity for early feminist readings. In La deuxième sexe (1949), S. de Beauvoir's philosophical encounter with the Symposium and the classical world reinforces binary oppositions between subject and object, masculine and feminine, and at the same time informs her narrative of struggle and transcendence through woman's assimilation to the Other. De Beauvoir treats the past both as a lost origin to be reclaimed and as a source of absolute beauty that must be left behind. Cixous’ poetic écriture feminine, as evinced in theoretical texts like ‘Le rire de la Méduse’ (1975), her play La ville parjure, ou le réveil des Erinyes (1994) and Illa (1980), uses Ovid, Virgil, Aeschylus and Sophocles as fodder for reflection on the women of the present, a ‘complex multiperspectival conjuring of all that patriarchal metaphysics must repress’ (p. 50). Duras’ feminist aesthetic is traced all the way to Plato. Works such as Moderato Cantabile (1958) and Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) are written in a fragmentary style that refuses closure and views the erotic as a moment of lack at odds with the totalising gesture of the masculinist discourse.
Chapter 1 offers a nuanced discussion of Irigaray's Speculum (1974) and The Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984) as they relate not only to Plato but also to Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida and Lacan. Classicists will find here insights that deepen their appreciation of Plato, even if, as M. judiciously cautions, Irigaray's forays into the Platonic texts fail to do them full justice. Her reading of the cave in Republic 5 and 6 foregrounds the distinction between seeming and being, and at the same time forces us to interrogate it by pointing at the intervening gap as a guarantor of the possibility of reference. The walls of the cave are the place where images of material objects are projected. This place is as invisible as the maternal body (and as alêtheia itself). Thus woman as such eludes masculinist reason and remains unassimilated. Irigaray's reading of the Symposium complements her thoughts in Speculum by inviting reflection on how this absolute Other must constitute itself as a ‘same’ in order to love itself through an ‘other’. An ethics of sexual difference requires love and admiration for the other as Other, whereby the Other is received by the Same without losing its essential difference from it.
Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to Kristeva. In Chapter 2, M. explores the notion of semiotic chora in La révolution du langage poétique (1974/1985) with sensitivity to Kristeva's background, feminist politics and intellectual affiliations. He situates the chora in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction and Marxist critique, and argues that Kristeva's main objective is to produce a theory of the logical, political and psychoanalytic subject. In its rich associations with the feminine and the maternal, the chora, like the walls of the cave in Irigaray's reading of Republic, is the ground on which Kristeva's subject is written, the invisible substance necessary for the subject's integration into the Symbolic. This ground, M. argues, recalls in many ways Timaeus’ chora, the necessary but invisible receptacle of the metaphysical edifice. Chapter 3 focuses on Kristeva's project on love in Histoires d'amour (1983), a psychoanalytically inflected genealogy of love from Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium to Baudelaire, Stendhal and Bataille. M. brings the essay into fruitful dialogue with Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité (1976–1984), Freud's concept of transference and its development by Lacan. Occasional glances at Irigaray and Derrida add texture and enhance the book's cohesion. For Kristeva, Phaedrus manifests ‘the erotics of domination’ (p. 193), an extreme duality between erastês and erômenos that lacks a mediator. Diotima and Eros in Symposium are the requisite mediators, an avatar of the figure of the feminine and the maternal. Lacan, by contrast, posits a freely circulating desire between subject and object, an erotic intersubstitutability as manifested by Socrates in Symposium, where he is both the erastês and the erômenos of Alcibiades. Ultimately, for Kristeva, love presupposes the recognition of sexual difference, whereby the subject is both intentional and always in process.
Chapter 4 deals with the lesser-known S. Kofman, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi and a student of Derrida, who committed suicide at the age of sixty. Her autobiography, Rue Ordenet, Rue Labat (1994), articulates her belief in the doubleness of all texts, their participation in the economy of argument and the economy of desire. A text is both a set of logical statements and a construction designed to produce effects that may elude authorial control. The task of philosophy is neither to adjudicate the truth-value of each set nor to collapse the sets into one another but to tolerate this ‘double reflection, to let the mirror reveal its other side’ (p. 219). M. focuses on three cases of Kofman's reception of Plato: her reading of the myth of the cave in relation to Marx's concept of ideology; her reading of Republic 9 as a precursor to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams; and her reading of Symposium as influenced by Lacan.
M. has written a useful and arguably much-needed book that will appeal both to the connoisseur of theory and to the open-minded and adventurous Classicist. His impressive knowledge of theory in all its stripes, deep familiarity with history, politics, literature, cultural and feminist studies, ability to make interesting connections among disparate texts, judicious avoidance of facile similarities among thinkers of diverse personal and intellectual histories, and lucid writing on difficult topics make this book an impressive feat. Even if some of M.’s readings seem tenuous or partially unconvincing, they are sure to provoke further thinking and stimulate exciting critical debates.
