If we trace the history of feminism through changing responses to Plato’s thought on women, this thought-provoking study brings that story up to the present day. The active civic role Plato gave to women in the Republic’s Kallipolis spoke to the nineteenth-century reformers of feminism’s first wave. It ensured the Republic’s prime place on the syllabus of expanding systems of higher education across the Anglophone world, as with Benjamin Jowett’s establishment of the Oxford paper on the Republic which continues to this day.[1] Second-wave feminists, on the other hand, were divided; while some continued to find much to value in Plato’s claims for the role of women, others were more critical, rightly suspicious of his imagery around reproduction as a form of change, and apparent exclusion of women as agents of Becoming from what was asserted to be the higher order of Being.
Feminist philosophers in 1980s France used psychoanalytic theory to identify key structures in Plato’s cosmology and political thought as parallels to the womb—the receptacle (chora) of the Timaeus and the Republic’s Cave.[2] Julia Kristeva identified the maternal space of the receptacle (chora) from the Timaeus as a non-semiotic space whose chaos preceded the imposition of the Demiurge’s masculine ordering. Luce Irigaray identified and critiqued Plato’s use of female-coded imagery to describe processes and events from which women appeared to be excluded, most notably identifying the Republic’s Cave (‘antre’) as a womb (‘ventre’) in her ‘Plato’s Hystera’.[3] Irigaray was more explicit, perhaps, on the way that Plato’s powerful use of imagery served to exclude women from discourse and power by identifying them with ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’.
Irene Han’s monograph offers a new stage or perhaps a further wave in this long history, in which more recent ideas of fluidity erode firm binaries and what Irigaray saw as a hierarchical and exclusionary model can be reidentified as an opposition in which the feminine plays an essential rather than subservient part in Plato’s metaphysics. In identifying Plato’s association between fluidity and the feminine, she engages with the earlier thought of Kristeva and Irigaray, and synthesises a critical response to their analysis with the help of further theory, notably Gilles Deleuze’s critique of Plato and account of cinema. She sustains this (arguably revisionist) project through the close reading of arguments from the Timaeus and Critias, Republic (books 5 and 8) and Laws 3; even readers who did not come for the French theory will find much of interest in her fresh readings of key passages. Han’s own playful ‘French touch’ is to assert movement and change through references to the cinema; each chapter is named after a film, as is her subtitle. There is real value to the invocation of Deleuze’s analysis of cinema, and his concept of assemblage, although also a worry that there is some circularity in turning the thought of a modern thinker building on ancient thought back on to that ancient thought.
Han’s aim is to reassert the importance of women or at least of a feminine principle in Plato’s metaphysics; her book fits into a contemporary revaluation of processes of change and liquidity, from the philosophical to the art-historical, and also fits into new frameworks of gender fluidity in which the work of earlier feminists itself becomes identified as essentialising and thus problematic. Focused on Plato’s distinction between the states of being and becoming, Han argues that processes of generation and change play a significant role in Plato’s metaphysics, are always coded as female or feminine, and that, rather than seeing Plato’s philosophy as a rejection of movement and change, of Heraclitean flux, it embodies and embraces it.
Han’s introduction sets the context of her study well, and provides a good orientation for those less familiar with interpretations of Plato beyond the analytical tradition, introducing some key elements from the ‘continental’ tradition and particularly the second-wave feminist thought associated with it. Identifying movement as a significant tool in Plato’s writing, she turns to Deleuze’s theory of cinema to draw out the value and meaning of change, drawing on Alain Badiou’s lectures and his identification of a ‘vitalist’ tradition which valued Becoming as well as Being.[4] Playfully, Han’s chapters and sections bear the names of films—Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language for the chapter on the Timaeus, for example—but the commitment to interpreting the dialogues as cinematic works has more than novelty value, as the centrality of movement and change within Plato’s work itself becomes a mark of a feminine presence, and Plato’s authorial skill in depicting it comes into focus.
The playful wrappings frame substantive analysis. Han is sensitive, sometimes acutely so, to the way in which Plato’s language and imagery often helps along his argument, but at times she prioritises a more contemporary understanding of an image over a more historicist or contextual interpretation of what it might have conveyed to Plato’s earlier readers. The Republic’s recurrent imagery of the moving water of the sea, for example, must surely be meant to evoke the suffering of Odysseus, with whom Socrates identifies himself (Rep. 458d), and also to tap into the broader cultural fear of travel by sea evident from documentary sources such as the Dodona oracle enquiries.[5] Han instead argues for a more positive understanding of changeability and liquidity as part of the ‘metaphysical feminine’ which, she argues, has a necessary place in Plato’s cosmic thought and does not denote the deprecation of women. She leans on Andrew J. Mason’s Flow and Flux in Plato’s Philosophy to distinguish between two kinds of change, ordered and chaotic, and from that develops an account of the significant value Plato places on organic processes of development.[6]
Chapter 1 turns to the chora as a feminine presence in the Timaeus, which for Han ‘makes the explicit association between the feminine and the ontological sphere of becoming’ (p. 29). The gendering of the chora is not in doubt, but Han aims to show that its generative capacity makes it more akin to an active rather than passive force. Here she parts company with earlier feminists, drawing on a range of theorists (notably Deleuze) and bringing their accounts of cinematic change to bear on both the chora’s role in generation and Timaeus’ structure of his account of it; she pictures the Demiurge as a father who ‘watches the movie that is his creation’ (p. 43, summarising Timaeus 37c6-d7). Han takes on a challenging task in asserting the importance of the feminine within Plato’s model, in which the primacy of the masculine as originator over the feminine as copy is firmly stated (p. 50). Yet the feminine is a necessary part of the overall structure—without the feminine, the Demiurge’s project would be ‘unfinished’ and ‘fragmentary’ (p. 55). Han draws on Kathryn Morgan’s analysis of the Timaeus as a revision of the Republic first to return to the Cave and read Plato’s analogy more positively, and then to consider the account of the development of Atlantis in the Critias, framing the polis as a ‘political womb’.[7]
The Republic is the focus of two central chapters where Han offers subtle and detailed analysis. Socrates’ three waves sit well within the liquid imagery she has already explored. The role of women in Kallipolis, which Plato sets out perhaps rather sketchily in Republic 5, has provided the foundation for claims that he is a proto-feminist of some sort. But Han concurs with Arlene Saxonhouse that the guardian women are curiously desexed—the minimisation of their reproductive role destroys them as women (p. 75). Returning to Deleuze, Han identifies the women of Kallipolis as ‘simulacra’, whose mimesis of the male guardians is necessarily incomplete, but who are combined within the city which in turn becomes a Deleuzian assemblage. Nonetheless, she concludes that Plato ‘builds his philosophical project with feminine blocks of becoming’, which keep him ‘embedded in the phenomenological domain’ (p.86).
Chapter 3 considers the fluidity of constitutional decline described in the later books of the Republic as a reorganisation of the senses, with political metabole analysed as a Deleuzian time-image in which change is driven by gendered bodies, starting with the failure of eugenic reproduction that leads to the initial decline of Kallipolis (Rep. 8, 546b). Han argues that Socrates’ appeal to the Muses is an acknowledgement of feminine insight, and treats the movement between discussions of city and soul as cinematic jump-cuts, further embedding feminine processes of change which will operate at the level of both community and individual. That is especially true of the chaotic soul of the democratic man, while the disorder instantiated and experienced by the tyrannical man restricts him to his interior and so feminises him (597b7-c1, p. 123).
In Chapter 4, Han’s addition of the narrative of the development of human society after a great cataclysm (Laws 3) takes a psychoanalytic and theorised reading to a part of Plato’s corpus often overlooked, but which intersects with the cosmology of the Timaeus and the political thought of the Republic. The narrative of Laws 3 recounts the redevelopment of human society after a destructive flood which has wiped out existing culture, clearly a major instance of flowing liquid as agent of transformation. That initial cataclysm ties in with the earlier argument, but when Han treats the changing form of society, and political change within society, as part of the same process, her argument is less convincing. While the sea operates as an agent of cataclysmic change, the societal development Plato outlines in Laws 3 depends on the withdrawal of that agent, not its continuing presence.
Debate between different instances of second-wave feminism often focused on the problem of essentialism, the assertion that bodies and the minds they contain necessarily behave and think in certain ways because of sexed difference. Plato clearly is an essentialist, and many have argued that his French feminist critics are also prone to essentialism. Han makes no explicit exploration of this issue, and underplays some of the tensions between the accounts she connects and develops. Irigaray’s key claim was that Plato’s hierarchy of being and becoming was inherently gendered in a way that underpinned and reified an inequality which was to the disadvantage of women; for all the insight which Han brings to this interesting study, her reframing of the discussion does not entirely dispose of this concern. However, it is a valuable case study in the productive use of modern theory to gain new insight into ancient thought, and anyone with an interest in Plato’s thought and method will find much of interest within it.
Notes
[1] Myles F. Burnyeat, ‘The Past in the Present: Plato as Educator of Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Philosophers on Education: Historical Perspectives, ed. Amélie Rorty (London, 1998), pp. 353-73.
[2] Paul Allen Miller, Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato (Oxford, 2016); Miriam Leonard, Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (Oxford, 2005).
[3] Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York, 1984); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY, 1985).
[4] Han cites notes of the lecture series available online, but they are also now published as Alain Badiou, Pour Aujourd’hui, Platon! 2007-2010, ed. Isabelle Vodoz (Paris, 2019).
[5] See for example Eidinow, E., Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks (Oxford, 2007).
[6] Mason, A.J., Flow and Flux in Plato’s Philosophy (London / New York, 2016).
[7] Morgan, K.A., ‘Narrative Orders in the Timaeus and Critias’, in R. D. Mohr and B. M. Sattler (eds.), One Book, the Whole Universe: Plato’s Timaeus Today (Las Vegas, NV, 2010), 267-85.