This is an elegant and highly original, even idiosyncratic, study of Plato's Phaedrus, a sustained meditation on Theodore Roethke's query, ‘Should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?’ Drawing eclectically upon poetry, psychoanalysis and philosophy R. contends that the self, when properly viewed, is understood, religiously, as a soul: ‘soul is the self rightly understood’ (p. 2). To understand the self rightly is to heed human failures and insufficiencies because human beings are constituted by ‘the ordinary oblivions of their lives’. The self becomes a soul when these pregnant lacunae and absences receive notice and expression through logos. The title echoes Emily Dickinson and points to two conditions that enable the self to become a soul: the ordinary oblivion of the self, the ways in which oblivion in quotidian life distances us from ourselves; and the unmooring of the self, the dislodging of ossified notions about the self that breed fantasies of self-mastery. The elusiveness of the self invites indirect modes of viewing or talking about it: the truth must be told ‘slant and in circuit’ because of the self's opacity and the kind of writing necessary for turning the self into a soul; we ‘become the soul [we are] seeking to see, rather than view the soul [we] already have’ (p. 12). Seeing and telling become practically co-extensive in so far as images and figurative speech emerge as indirect modes of viewing that allow the self to become a soul. A person is transformed into a soul by relinquishing herself to some extent, forgetting certain things about herself that she takes to be constitutive of her self. In order to be authentically human, she must oscillate between memory and forgetfulness, the twin illusions of perfect wholeness and complete dissolution.

R. foregrounds two images which occur in the second half of Phaedrus. The first image depicts speech as an integrated creature, a living animal that has a body of its own, is neither headless nor footless, and has a middle and limbs that are composed in a way fitting to each other and to the whole (264c); the second image portrays the dialectician as a carving butcher who cuts things up by class along their natural joints (265e). These images map onto two different ways of seeing the body: as a ‘teeming’ and as a ‘dissected’ or ‘dissolved’ entity. In Chapter 1, R. examines speech as a teeming body. In the palinode, the soul is rendered somatically (Typhon, the cicadas, molluscs and the avian image of the horse-charioteer), and body and speech emerge as ‘interrelated modes … of embodiment through which the soul becomes present in the world’ (p. 54). Subverting the dominant paradigm of godlikeness, R. contends that the ‘intermeshing’ of body and soul is the latter's telos, not the bodiless existence of the gods. The avian image positions the soul between the heavens and the earth, expressing both its aspiration for divine truth and its grounding in the earth. Less plausibly, in my view, R. takes Socrates to exemplify this ideal by ‘departing’ from his speech (via images and myth) and by ‘staying connected’ to it (via philosophical prose); soul and logos operate on parallel realms, hovering between fixed positions of being. Chapter 2 explores speech as a dissolved entity by focusing on the ways in which the written word qua repository of truth can become ‘a dead shell’ and impede the soul's growth. Applying Richard Wollheim's notions of depersonalisation and derealisation, as well as Melanie Klein's concept of projective identification, R. reads the Lysianic non-lover as a fictitious self, the product of a deceptive speech that never becomes a soul. In the palinode, by contrast, the self gradually unfolds into a soul: Socrates ascribes his words to a seer, then uses first-person forms for this seer, and finally identifies the seer with the soul. In Chapter 3, R. examines oblivion as it manifests itself in textual lacunae and the fragility of earthly creatures. She claims that recollection can never replace oblivion, and so the growth of the soul depends on the proper use of the gaps and fissures in it. The text of Phaedrus deploys these gaps as a ‘philosophic source’ (oblivion leads to embodiment, and writing risks bringing oblivion into the soul) and as a ‘structural feature’ (for example irony, which destabilises the meaning of the text, and Socrates' use of different discursive approaches in the first half of the dialogue). Finally, in Chapter 4, R. offers a brief comparative study of oblivion in Phaedrus and in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics with side glances at Euripides' Bacchae and Zhuangzi's writings (especially his concept of zuowang, ‘sitting in forgetfulness’). She concludes that unlike Plato Aristotle has no special place for oblivion in his examination of phronesis but assimilates it into the process of deliberation, whereas Euripides and Zhuangzi appreciate better than Plato the value of oblivion in written discourse. Although this coda is rather weak and perfunctory, it gives ample evidence of R.'s creativity and imagination.

R. makes her case through evocation and suggestion rather than rigorous argumentation, an approach that will doubtless delight some and disappoint others. She is sensitive to imagery, well versed in contemporary poetry, and capable of drawing rich and insightful connections among seemingly disparate texts. She sees godlikeness as acquiescing to the physicality of human beings and pays attention to the literary and dramatic aspects of the dialogue. Instead of psychic harmony demanding that reason be always sovereign, she proposes ‘displacement in which different emphases are required at different times’ (p. 67), a pliant model that prizes ‘a messily organic entanglement of different elements’ (p. 37) over static fixity. Far more radically and controversially than any study I know, the book rejects Plato's metaphysical dualism and insists on the soul's being ‘written’ or constructed by ‘engagement [with] particular written forms’ (p. xi). Although I remain unconvinced by these claims, I appreciate R.'s emphasis on materiality (the fleshy, the textual) and the ways in which it enhances and complicates our understanding of the human. Her study would have benefited from a clearer definition of the key terms of self and soul than those on offer, and a precise description of the nature of the ‘movement’ from one to the other. How does erotic mania, for example, contribute to this ‘movement’? One also wonders about the religious nature of the shift from the self to the soul: why appeal to religion here? Drawing upon William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience R. says, rather cryptically, that a religious interpretation of the self ‘involves an elemental remaking in which its constitution has become different’ (p. 24), and finds in written form the means for this ‘remaking’. This seems reductive, giving short shrift to the difficult topic of psychic reconfiguration through religious experience. But perhaps this is a calculated move on R.'s part, an attempt to affirm and focus on the fragility of human life instead of discussing means of overcoming it. We have to be taken down, it seems, before we may begin to ascend. Her study of our imperfect humanity and its intimate and manifold relationship with language will appeal to those eager to take a fresh and bold look at one of Plato's most famous dialogues.