Plato and the invention of life

265 Pages·2018·1.751 MB·English

by  Naas, Michael;Plato

Plato and the I nvention of L ife

Plato and the
Invention of Life
Michael Naas
Fordham University Press
New York 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
available online at https:// catalog . loc . gov.
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
for DFK

Contents
Introduction: Philosophy’s Gigantomachia
over Life and Being 1
1. The Lifelines of the Statesman 17
2. Life and Spontaneity 42
3. The Shepherd and the Weaver: A Foucauldian Fable 73
4. The Mea sure of Life and Log os 98
5. Fruits of the Poisonous Tree: Plato and Alcidamas
on the Evils of Writing 115
6. The Life of Law and the Law of Life 136
7. Plato and the Invention of Life Itself 164
Conclusion: Life on the Line 185
Acknowl edgments 201
Notes 203
Index 249

Introduction
Philosophy’s Gigantomachia
over Life and Being
In a word, zōē is a word for being . . .
— david farrell krell1
“Being”—we have no idea of it apart from the idea of “living.”— How
can anything dead “be”?
— friedrich nietz sche2
In his 1997 book devoted to the work of his long- time friend Hélène Cixous,
a book whose title, H. C. for Life, at once names its theme and pronounces
its dedication, Jacques Derrida writes the following about the question
of life in the Western philosophical tradition:
in the philosophical gigantomachia [that runs] from Plato to Descartes,
from Nietz sche to Husserl, Bergson, and Heidegger, among others,
the only big question whose stakes remain undecided would be to
know w hether it is necessary to think being [l’être] before life [la vie],
beings [l’étant] before the living [le vivant], or the reverse.3
It is a rather sweeping, ambitious claim, to be sure. Derrida is asserting h ere
that in the long philosophical tradition that runs from Plato to Heidegger,
the only big question, la seule grande question, he says, that has yet to be
settled, the only question whose stakes remain undecided, is the question of
the relationship between being and life. Derrida will go on in this book,
using especially the literary works of Cixous, interestingly, to provide a
1