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Edited and Translated by
David Ames Curtis

Swnford
Univmity

Pms

Stanford
Californui
2002
ON PLATO'S STATESMAN

Cornelius Castoriadis
Assistance for the translation was provided by the French
Ministry of Culture.

011 P'4to's ~StAttsm4n·wu originally published. in Frcnc.h in

1999 under the tide SMr ·u Polihf/w· J.t P'4ton. 0 Editions du
Scuil, September 1999.

Stanford UniversicyPrcs.s
Stanford, California

English translation e 1001 by the Board ofTrwtees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights ic:scrvcd.

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Castoriadis, Corncliw.
[Sur Le politique de Platon. English]
On Plato's Statesman I by Corncliw Castoriaclis ; edited and
translated by David Ames Cunis.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0--8047-4144-1 (alk. papcr)-ISBN o--80-47-4141-.1.
(pbk. , uk. P'P">
I. Plato. Statesman I. Cunis, David Ames. II. Tide
JC71.P314.C37 1001
,10·.01---de11

Original Printing 1001

last figure below indicates year of this printing:

II 10 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 0-4 ~ ~

Typcw-t by Alan Noyes

tn 10.9/23 Adobe Garamond and Llthos Display
 Contents

&olts by Cornelius Ca.storiadis in English xi

Foreword: Castoriadi.J and th~ Statesman xiii
Pierre Vid41-Naquet
Introduction: "Living Thought at WorW" xix
Pa.seal Vemay
On th~ Translation XXV

SEMINAR OF FEBRUARY 19, 1986

Plato's Statesman
I. Date and Situation of the Stat~sman 11

II. Object and Structure of the Srausma.n 19

Summary ofth, Carving Up ofth, Statc,man 28

SEMINAR OF FEBRUARY 26, 1986 29

Resumption and Anticipation 29

Ill. The Two Definitions 31

First Definition:
Th, S,ar,sman a.s Pa.stor ofHuman Floclts 33
Second Definition:
Th, Stlltmnan, th, Royal Man, a.s W..awr 40

Question 48
Missing page
 Contmts ix

SEMINAR OF APRIL 13, 1986 llj

V. The Three Digressions (Continued) 126

First Dit;"ssion:
Th, Myth ofth, R.tign of Cronus (Continued) 126
Second Digmsion:
Th, Form of R.tgimts (Continued) 117
Third Digmsion:
Scimu Alone DqiMs the Stausman 119

Questions 147

SEMINAR OF APRIL 30, 1986 153

V. The Three Digressions (Continued) 153
Third Dit;"ssion:
Scimct Alone Defin,s th, Statmn4n (Continued) 153
Second Digression:
Th, Form of R,gimts (R.tprist) 161

VI. Conclusion: On the Composition of che Statesman 164

Questions 168

Trans'4tori AfttrWOrd 173

Nous 187
/nd,x 199
 Books by Cornelius Castoriadis in English

CL CrosmNlds in the IAbyrinth, trans. Manin H. Ryle and Kace Soper

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Prcs.s; Brighton, UK: Harvester Press,
1984).

CR The GutoruzdU &adrr, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford, UK, and
Malden, Mass., Blackwell, 1997).
115 The fm4gi,wry Institution ofSo&ty (1975), trans. Kathleen Blarney
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press and Cambridge, UK: Policy Press,
1987; cor. paperback edition, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1997
and Cambridge, Mass., MIT Picss, 1998).
PPA PhiUnophy. Politics, Autonomy, ed. David Ames Curtis (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991).
PSW1 Politic11J and SocuJ Writingr, vol. 1, 1946--1955: From the Critiq~ of
B"""UcrtUJ to tM Positiw Conknt ofSoCUlfum, trans. and ed. David
Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

PSW2 Political and SocUll Writin,rr, vol. 2, 1955-1960: From the Workt'rl
StrUggk Ag11inst Bu~llUcrtUJ to Rrvo/ution in thr Age ofModern Cap-
i'41itm, trans. and ed. David Ames Cunis (Minneapolis: Universiry
ofMinncsora Press, 1988).
PSW3 Politi"t/ t1Ni Socutl Writingr, vol. J, 196I-1979: Rr(ommrncing the
Rrvolurion: From Soci4fum to UN AMto,wmous Society, trans. and ed.
David Ames Cunis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993).
xii Abbrroiations

WIF Worki in Fmfl!lma: Writ;ngi- on Politics, Socirty. Ayt"hoatu1/ysis, tlnd

the lmagiru,tion, ed. and trans. David Ame, Curtis (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997).

N .B.· An extensive bibliography of writings by and about Cascoriad.is in a

dozen languages can be found at the Corndiw Cascoriadis/Agora Inter-
national Website, http://aleph.lib.ohio-sracc.edu/bcasc/castoriadis.
 Foreword
Castoriadis and th, Statesman

PIERRE V!DAL-NAQUET

This small book has a history that makes a lovely story. h started out as
a Ca.noriadis seminar on one of Plato's most difficult dialogues, the Staks-
m4n, recorded on audiotape week after week between February 19 and
April 30, 1986, before an audience of studencs from the t.cole des Hautes
~tudcs en Sciences Sodales.
A first raw draft of the transcription was made by Pase.a.I Vernay, with
the collaboration of three of his friends, in 1991, and submitted to Cor-
nelius, whom we called Corneille. He was at once surprised ("I didn't
know that I had written a nc:w book"), delighted, and severe, as he was to-
ward himself. Since that time, the text has been reworked, filled in, and
clarified on a few poincs of detail. Thw was born, while Corneille was still
alive, a ream whose collaboration continues afccr his death and chat pro-
poses to publish in their entirety, and with the requisite rigor, chc semi-
nars led by Cornelius Cascoriad.is. An encyclopedic task if there ever was
one.
Vernay tells us the basics in his lntroduction. Of his work, I can say what
he could not say: how remarkable it is, and in what way it is so. Plato is an
author who condemned writing, a perverse gift of the Egyptian god Thoth,
in the Phaedrw and also, as a matter of faa, in the Sl4tm714n. The written
law c.annot hold its own vis-a-vis science as embodied in che philosopher
in power. The poets arc co be chased from the city of the Rrpublii:; and
writing is only a deutrros plow, a second best, a lesser ~ii in relation to liv-
ing speech and memory. Between impossible speech and theoretical writ-
ing, Plato chose a sublime compromise: the dialogue. The dialogue is to
>,. speech what myth is to truch. The transcription of Castoriadis's seminar
we owe to Vernay is the result of a similar compromise; it is certainly
xiv Foreword

closer co the spoken word than the Platonic dialogue is, but it is pur-
posely situated between the oral and the written. There have been, for
certain famous seminars, transcribers who, while claiming to be perfectly
faithful, have sown confusion and sometimes ended up looking ridicu-
lous. Such is not the case with the seminar on the Statesman.
When I presented Cornelius Castoriadis's candidacy at the &ole des
Hautes f.tudes en Sciences Sociales twenty years ago, I recalled a dialogue
rhac had taken place at Perney apropos of Voltaire. "It's only in Roman
law that I find him a bit weak," said a famous professor ... of Roman
law. "And as for me," replied d'Alembert, .. that's my opinion, too, con-
cerning mathematics." I was trying co explain to my colleagues that, as a
specia1ist in ancient Greek culture, I did not find Castoriadis at all "a bit
weak" in this sector and that, quite the contrary, I had much to learn
from him. And I have indeed learned much from him. It happens that it
was apropos of Athenian democracy that, during the winter of 1963-64, I
had my first dia1ogue with Castoriadis. Since the time of another winrer,
that of 1956-57, I had been acquainted with Sodalimu ou Barbarit, the
review he ran with Claude Lefort, and by the end of 1958, I had made a
first fleeting contact with the group, but I knew the man only very little
and very superficially.
With Lefort and a few ochers, Corneille panicipared in a circle of
thinkers, with Saint-Just chosen as "patron saint. " 1 Fran~ois Ch.itcler,
Jean-Pierre Vernant, and myself were asked co cake up the cause of Greek
democracy and present it before chis group. In 1961, Vernam had pub-
lished le, OrigintJ d, la prml< gr,cqu, (Th< Origins ofGrt<k Thought), in
which he explained that Greek thought was the daughter of the city and
was modeled upon the political sphere {/,t politiqw]. 2 Chitder had writ-
ten La NaiHana de /'hiJtoir~ (The Birch of History), a book in which he
showed that history, coo-as a discipline founded by Hecaraew,
Herodotw, and Thucydides-was closely connected with the civic struc-
ture. 1 For my part, with Pierre UvCque, I had just finished Clisthfflt
l'Athlnien (Ckisthents the Athenittn), a book on Cleisthenes, the
founder-after Solon, bur in a more radical way than Solon--of rhe
Athenian democracy."
I was young a.nd, to tell the truth, a bit full of myself, proud beyond
reason of my new knowledge. How had democracy been born~ At Chios,
perhaps-although few srill believe that-rhen at Athens. I saw ic as hav-
ing been instituted around two experiences-tyranny, which was ere.a.rive
 Fomuord xv

of forms of equality, and coloniution, a source of polfrical invcntionr-

and on • foundation: slavery. I rapidly came to understand rhar I had be-
fore me not some amatcun but real experts, and that Castoriadis, in par-
ticular, was intensely familiar with all the major texts, those of the
philosophers, the historians, and the tragedians. A, for democracy, far
from being merely .. formal• (as imbeciles were saying), it was the very ex-
ample, at Athens, of the self-institution of society.
I would nor necessarily countersign everything Corneille wrote about
ancient Greece. If it were otherwise, what purpose would a dialogue with
someone's oeuvre serve? Nevertheless, we arc rallcing about a great oeuvre
and a robust way of thinking. The reader has in his hands one of the
finest texts this incredibly fertile mind produced. A dialogue of Plato's,
the Suus,rwn, a dialogue with Plato, and, as Vcrnay says, "a trcmcndow
fragment of philosophical agora, in which Plato and Cutoriadis confronc
each oth<"r at their most resourceful, with an issue at stake: democracy."

There arc many ways of studying Plato. Castoriad.is proceeds, accord-

ing to an image from the Phudnu, like a good butcher: he brings out
what he ca11s the Suuemutn's "quirky structure," wirh its three digressions,
its eight incidental points, and ics two definitions, "neither of which is the
good one from Plaro's point of view." Here, Castoriadis's work could be
contrasted with chat of another cxcgcte who spent a great deal of time on
Y Plato: Leo Strauss. Like Castoriadis, Strauss foUowed the ccxt quite
doscly-ro the point of modeling himself upon it. But the result in
Strauss's case is a constant jwcincation of the most minor details of the ar-
gument. Castoriadis, on the contrary, is very panicular about differing
with the text, showing that what is, in appearance, secondary is in reality
essential-this is che case, for example, with the myth of the reign of
Cronu.s--and that the denunciation of the Sophiscs accommodates itself
quite well ro the use of sophistical procedures. He shows perfectly, coo,
how, with the .. resignation.. Ulrich von Wilamowin-Mocllendorff spoke
of, the SIA"""4n takes us into the heart of what is the mark par excellence
of tbe late Plato: blending, acceptance of the mixed, even of the m,tax,;,
of the intermcdiace; democracy is the worse of the regimes governed by
laws; it is the least bad of anomic regimes.
When I was a student, a book by Kul Popper, Th, Open Society and Its
Enmun, sec out to anack the "spell" of Plaro head-on.' He made of Plato
xvi Fortwor~·

a "reactionary" thinker who hurled such slogans as "Back to the tribal

patriarchy." In that form, the attack completely missed its target. Plato
was not reactionary i.11 the sense that, for example, Charles Maurras was; 6
he did not dream of an impossible regression. A study of the iAws
dcmonsrrates his perfect knowledge of the legal and political mechanisms
of fourth-century Athens, and it was ro a foreigner from Athens that he
entrusted the task of sketching out, on Crete, the very detailed scheme for
a new city, "second in unity" in relation to the city of the &public. le re-
mains the case, however, chat while Plato knew the world surrounding
him and chc one that came before him, he hated that world. And his
hauc-d did not apply only to the democracy whose contemporary he
was-which when he died in 348 8.C.E. was already confronced wich
Philip of Macedon-hue in the 6rst place to the insticucing democracy,
char of Pericles, whom he accacked direcdy or indirectly in the Gorgias,
caricaturing him under the name of Calliclcs.
With the sole exception of the l.Aws, chere is no dialogue of Plato's chat
is not clearly situated before che death of Socrates or at the moment of the
latter's death, in 399. All Plato's characters are therefore men of the fifth
cencury, even chough Plato takes all possible and imaginable liberties wich
the chronology. The example of che Mtnamus, that cruel pastiche of Per-
icles' Funeral Oration in Thucydides-a pastiche put in the mouth of As-
pasia, a woman, a courtesan, and, what is more, Pericles' official mis-
tress-shows chat Plato knows perfectly well where to strike: not at the
"demagogues" of che "decadent" period but at the very hean of the city
chat claimed co be the educator of Greece. 7
From irs 6.rst lines, the Statllmiln tells us that to treat the sophist, the
statesman, and the philosopher as if they were "of equal value" is co make
an "outrageous remark." Ir is the royal man, who alone is ulcimately wor-
thy of governing the city, rhac the Stranger from Elca comes to seek at
Athens, not the citizen capable-as demonstrated by the myth in the f+o.
tagoras, which undoubtedly reflects the great Sophist's view that ~cry
human heing has at his disposal a modicum of political know-how-of
expressing an opinion on the great problems with which the city is con-
fronted, if not on technical questions. Perversely, Plato plays upon the
ambiguity of techni, as if statesmanship [la politUj1u] were some kind of
technical knowledge. But the whole question is precisely whether the
king can rule the city without destroying its foundations.
The "king" in Greece, as Castoriadis rightly remarks, was a marginal
6.gure. Ac Athens, he wa.s an archon, an annual magistrate, chosen by lot.
 Fomuord xvii

Hi.s duties were pwdy rcligiow. Hi.s wife, the "queen," wed Dionysw. At
Sparta, the two "kings" were an archaeological curiosity. Their duties were
basically military. The greatest of the Spanan generals during rhe Pelo-
poonc:sian War, Lysander, belonged to a royal line, but he was never
"king."
The Athenians can be heard to say without any complex, via a charac-
ter from Aristophanes' Wasps (around 422 a.c.E.), that their power "yields
to no kingship" (line 149), and before that, via Pericles and via Cleon,
that they cx.crcisc something like a ..tyranny"' over rhe allied cities-that
is to say, that they are to Mytilene and to Samos whac Oedipw is in ap-
pearance to Thebc:s-ruler not by right of birth but by the fortune (rue/,,)
of history. h for the real kings, they were located on the outer edges of
the Greek world: in Epirw, on Cyprw, and especially in Macedonia.
It remains the case that, beside the King par excellence, who reigned
over the Persian empire, the royal personage w;as an imponant and even
capital figure in fourrh-centuty Greek political thought. Plato was not
alone in this. Even though it pwports to be the story of rhe education of
the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, Xmophon's Cyropa,d;a, which is
nearly contemporary with Plato's Rrp"l,I~. is a treatise on how Greek
cities can make good we of the providential man. The same goes for
Isocratcs' EVAtoras, a eulogy for a Cypriot king. Plaro, Xenophon, and
lsocrates herald a time that became one of kings, after Philip and <Spe-
cially Alexander, who corresponds rather well to the panbasikw evoked
by Aristotle in the third book of hi.s Poutics-, indeed, Ari.stode was the ed-
ucator of Alaander after having been Plato's disciple.
X.nophon, Plato, and lsocratcs became the prophets of the Hdlenis,ic
world. Needless to say, the city did nor disappear. le was Still an c:sscntial
fram~ork for life in the age of che first Roman emperors, but in the
Mcditc-rrancan world and even in the Greek world, ic ceased to be a pre-
ponderant factor. The greatest town of the Hellenistic world, Alexandria,
which was "near Egypt" and not ·in" Egypt, was in fact a tow11 more than
a cicy. The Greeks there were citizens, but they had no pan in the gov-
ernment of their town. It was in vain that Clcomencs, a revolutionary
king cxikd from Sparta, attempted at the end of the third centuty, under
Ptolemy IV, to incite them to frcc-dom. Alexandria was not an au-
tonomous decision-making center. It is in this sense that it can be said of
P~w. as Casroriadi.s docs, chat he played a "considerable role in ... rbe
dc:srruaion of the Greek world." One can go even further than this and
sta.te rhac in the Luer Roman F.mpirt', ~tarting with Diocletian, we find
xviii Foreword

philosopher-kings who claimed to govern according to Placo's principles.

Diocletian himself tacitly did so in an edict (from 301) that set a maxi-
mum price for all merchandise, rhe preamble of which is nourished by
Plaro's philosophy.

For Castoriadis, philosopher and theorc:rician of the political sphere,

society has to tend toward a mode: of explicit sdf-creation, a self-creation
incc:ssancly rc:nc:wc:d by what he: calls-and this is the tide of his most fa-
mous book-"thc: imaginary instimtion of society." For Plato--crc:acor,
after rhe Milc:sians and chc Elc:atics, of philosophy-it is the: "royal race"
alone that can be: defined as "self-directive" (auupitalttilti [Statesman
:z.6oc:}). For Castoriadis, the Athenians' immortal contribution to politi-
cal thought is their integration of historicity. That is how the: Corinthians
depict chem to the Spartans in book I (68-71) ofThucydides; 9 for Plato,
the statesman's whole: effort is aimed at blocking the: historical process.
As for the: imaginary, Plato docs in fact make abundanc we: of it-
whether it is a matter of a mere: image (like che abundanc comparisons
borrowed from the: vocabulary of the variow trades), of a paradigm (like
that of weaving), 10 or of myths (like the one that plays a central role in the
Stawman, which Cascoriadis compc:tencly analyzes). Bue neither the
myth nor the image nor the paradigm gives us access to the "incorporeal
realities that are the mon beautiful and the greatest." For chcsc "most pre-
cious" realities there are, as Pla{O cells us expressly, no "images created in
order co give men a clear intuition of mern" (Statesman 285e---286a).
It remains the case:, however, that Plato plays, with great panache, upon
the very thing he denounces! He uses the paradigm of weaving, for ex·
ample, in order to make of the king a weaver who weds courage and gen-
tleness the way his craftsman model unites the warp and the woof in or-
der ro manufacture a fabric. The: paradigm of weaving is far from taken
ar random. Castoriadis sensed this very well, and works wrinen subse-
quent to his seminar have established this in the greatest detail: weaving
furnishes Greek thought, boch mythical and political, with one of irs
most precious tools of analysis. 11
Cornelius Castoriad.is did indeed come to Paris, coming from Athens,
as rhe Stranger came from Elea (Vdia), in Magna Graecia, to Athens in
order co be there a "teacher of truth," teacher of a truth who wanted not
to ?oliffe but to promote: freedom.
 Introduction
"Living Thought at Work"

PASCAL VERNAY

It was during the winter of 1992. that Corncliw Casroriadis read the
present transcription of these seven seminars hdd at the &olc des Hauccs
~tudes en Sciences Socialcs (EHESS) in 1986. His notes, corrections, and
additions have, of course, been integrated into the text you arc about to
read. The judgment he gave was a bit contra.diaory. Amwcd, at first: "I
didn't know I had written a new book"; then gcncrow: it's ..an excellent
job"; finally, reserved, bee.awe "some of the point.s aren't ripe enough" to
envisage publication. Yee here we have these scminan published, and,
what is more, i.n an unauthorized form. Why, then, have we not respected
his wish not to sec them in print?
First of all, and this is the most circumstantial reason, because in early
1991 Corneille was busy preparing che fourth and fifth volumes of che
Carrefour, du i,J,yrind,, (Cro.ssroads in the Labyrinch) series and above all
preoccupied wich putting togcchcr [a planned multivolume work to be
entitled] Lz Crlation hum4iru (Human Creation). 1 Planned, thought out,
and daborated for almost twenty years, .. La Creation humaine" W3.S to be
found-albeit in raw form-in the transcriptions of the more than 200
seminars held at the EHESS since 1980. The rewriting of a history of phi·
losophy commentary-co speak too quickly, and even chough chis com-
mentary had ics place in the overall publication of his great work--d.id
not figure at that rime among his priorities: he wished to begin with
"heavy" philosophy, ontology, therefore, and co get co Greece and to pol-
itics only si.J: or seven volumes later. Alluding to the relative "greenness" of
this work on Plato was therefore also Castoriadis's way of telling us: I've
got someffiing else co do at the moment.
xx b,troductlo ,-,

The second clement involved in weighing this macrcr relates to the

high degree of excellence Corneille required of himself and of what he
signed. This was not just about elegance, formal perfection-although
rhc pertinence, the virulence, of certain condensed conclusive formulas
garner our support as much as the arguments preceding them do; and al-
though, in addition, Castoriadis, who detested approximations and need-
less repetitions, used footnotes to refer to already solidly established
points, whence the extreme density of most of his writings. It was about
completion: a text is finished when it can stand on its own, when its the-
ses, arguments, and supports have been sufficiently tested beforehand,
polished with criticism in order to resist attacks. From the standpoint of
such completion, of this capacity for sdf-defense, these seven seminars
have quite strong backing; it is not a mere textual commentary you are
about to read, but rather a cremendow fragment of philosophical agora,
in which Plato and Castoriadis confront each ocher at their most re-
sourceful, with an issue at stake: democracy.
Finally, and this is precisdy what might have bothered Corneille, there
is the insufficiently reworked oral nature of the presentation. Yet this is
roday what for us makes this long commentary so preciow: our rediscov-
ery of that ever so trenchant, convincing, energetic, provocative, droll
voice-in a word, a voice chat 6lls us with enchwiasm-which makes up
a hie for chc pain we fed in having lost him. And it is also, for his wual
readers, testimony to a hitheno unknown Casroriadis, who reflects while
he is speaking, collccrs himsdf, corrects himself. and does not hesitate to
harp on whar his listeners absolutely have to take in. And chen chere is the
most precious thing of all: gening a fed for his thinking. which, at rhe
end of a seminar, tries to 6nd itsdf, gropes about a bit confusedly, and
then cakes on its full breadth, all its rectitude, at the beginning of the next
seminar.
This living speech-preserved, rediscovered-has nevenhdess been re-
worked. 2 The recordings of the seminars have, of course, served as the ba-
sis. First, che most scrupulous, faithful, and exhaustive transcription pos-
sible was made, an unpadcag«I transcription, it could be said. Then che
formal errors or fwnblcs of all kinds (grammatical, syntactical, etc.) were
rectified, the citations corrected, but wichout harming the w.ay his speech
unfolds. After chat, in a third stage, attempts were made-as discr«tly as
possible-to improve chc overall readability: rurning two sentences into
 ni

one, or vice versa, transforming some of the acunuscs into notes, setting
back into their place within the ow,rall commcntaty some developments
that, u Castoriadis himself had pointed out, had been forgotten, and, 6-
nally, indicating. surely in a bit too heavy-handed and fottnal a manner,
the articulations of the argument, of the exposition, either because he had
neglected to insist upon them or because they had been drowned out, lost
in the over.all exposition. As. for words and phrases in Greek, we have cho-
sen to tnnslitcratc according to the system Castoriadis himsdf used: a
Latin chasactct (or two) for a Greek letter, wing che wual accents to in-
dicate the length of v..-ls (chw, I !Americanized in this translation to i'}
for eta, 6 (Americanized to iii for omega, t for epsilon, etc.). Nonetheless,
in the case of longer quotations integral to the play of the questions and
answers, we give the Gtcek text-that of Augwtc Di~ (Paris: Les Belles
Lcttrcs, 1960, 1975).
A few rudimentary thematic points, it seems ro us, might be wcful
here in order to place these seven seminars in the context of Casroriadis's
sixteen ynrs of teaching at the EHESS. Herc is a very rough summary.
The years from 1980 to 1986 were basially devoted to Grcccc, to chc cre-
ation of philosophy and democracy-with more precise and spcci6c
analyses here and chctc of Anaximandcr, Heraclitw, che tragedians, Peri-
cles' Funeral Oration, Plato's St,zfnmAn, and so on. Then, from 1987 un-
til 1991, Castoriadis took up anew the great problems of philosophy, con-
fronting his "parent ideas" [idlt, mms] with the analyses of the "four
greats" from the histoty of philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel.
Finally, the ycats 1993, 1994, and 1995 dealt almost cxclwivcly with the
human psyche, swting from, with, and sometimes against Freud.
To situate chis commentaty on the St,zfnmAn within his overall labor
during the 1985---416 school year, here, 6nally, is the summary Castoriadis
himself wrote for EHESS's annual report, under me tide "Institution of
Society and Historical Creation: Democracy and Philosophy in Ancient
Grcccc":
The 198s-86 seminar endeavored ro bring out first the differences and oppo-
sirions bmr,,ccn chc Grttk political imaginary and the modern political imag-
inary.' As opposed 10 direct panicipation in power and sdf-govcmrncm in
the democratic cities and to the absence there of Ule State, of •ideology, .. of
an arnsociaJ basis for the instinnion, and of constitutional iUwions, there
att in modem times rhe imaginary of ..rcprcscnration,• the omnipresence and
xxii lntroductiv•!

the all·powcrfulness of a bureaucratic State dm lies beyond the bounds of the

political game, the cloaking of governmenta.l power as such, and "ideology."
But on the ocher hand, lS opposed co the limicacions placed upon ancient po·
litical activity, there is a lifting of the limits of modern political action: exten·
sion of formal sovereignty co the whole of che population; universality, by
righ1, of che political community (wherein, ic is true, che nation remains a
lump undigested by politica.l philosophy); and a challenging. by right, of all
institutions. Finally, as opposed to the ancient political ethos of brutal frank·
ncss (no justification of slavery existed before Aristotle), there is the instituted
duplicity of modern times (which originates in monotheism, on the one
hand, and imperial Rome, on the ocher). In the background, there was, for
the Greeks, being as chaosllt01mos and che accepu.nce of mortality; for che
Moderns, the subject (God and his successive placeholders, culminating in
the substantive individual) and the illusion of immortality.
Plaro conscicuccs the point of passage between these two worlds. His unitary
ontology and his idenci6cacion of being with the good, which are radically
foreign to the Greek imaginary, later became central co modern thought and
practice. Profound.Jy hating the democratic universe and its arborescenccs
(wsophiscry," rhetoric, political activity, even poetry), he construccs--by
strokes of historic.ti falsi6cacion, rhetoric, sophistry, chcacrical scenes, and
demagogy-a false image ofic chat was lacer co h.ave weighty historic::al effects:
when referring to Plato, one still talks about "Greek political thought,"
whereas he is the total negation cherco( He pulled off a great h.iscorical opcr·
acion, transforming the de facto descrucrion of the democracy into a de jure
downfall. Greek political thought is to be sought, rather. in democratic polit-
ical creation, .;1.nd that creation ends basically in 40-4 (or 399). The very dif-
ference bcrwcen Socrates and Plato symbolizes this: Socrates remained in the
city, whereas Plato withdrew from it; Socrates was a soldier, gave sons to th(
city, and served as a magistrate, wheras nothing of the k.ind is known about
Pl.;1.m.
Ac the same time, though, Plato created philosophy for a second time. He in·
vented imaginary schemata of great potential; he was rhe 6m to articulate
and to instrument his schemata in and through a tremendous deployment of
enscmbliscic·idenciury means, the first to aim at and co achieve a system with
pretensions co exhaustiveness, but also the first to be able to put his own re-
sults back inco question. More than just philosophical reasoning, Plato ere·
ated philosophical Rca.son-Lotos-and that is why, cvcn among his advcr·
sarics, philosophy remains Platonic.
The Statmnan was chosen as an object co be worked upon in derail: more
chan just a difficult transition between the &public and the laws, it is also an
 /ntrot/,,a;on uiii

arn:mdy rich dialogu, in ia own right. But it is above all a dialogu, whose ap-
paRnt and real quirks (!WO definitions, neither or which truly comes off, th ...
major dign:s,ions, and eight less long dign:s,iom ot incidental poinu) make it,
or all Plato's writing>--411d perhaps °""n or all philosophical writing-the
one in which can best be xen living thought at work.
 On che Translation

Once again, the ma.in challenge of the present translation has been co
translate Casroriad.is while endeavoring co be faithful to his own distinc-
tive translations from ancient Greek. 1 As Castoriad.is himself noted in
"The Disc.ovcry of the Imagination": "The translations of passages ... arc
my own. Ohcn they diverge considerably (and sometimes on 'dcmcmary'
points of meaning) from existing translations. I have worried little about
elegance" ( WIF, p. 116). In hi., Suu,muzn seminars, Castor~dis makes use
of Auguste Dies's standard Guillaume Bud~ French uanslation. But he de-
paned therefrom when he felt he himself could better translate Plato's text
and elucidate its meaning. Translations of Plato differ rather substantially,
if not wildly, within any one modem language, let alone between two or
more. There would have been no way of capturing the specificity of the
terminology, phrasing, and Aavor of Casroriadis's renditions through di-
rect use of existing English translations for the Stllta'1Uln. (The same goes
for other Platonic dialogues he quotes and funhcr ancient Greek authors
he cites, remarkably wdl. from memory.) I have therefore again opted ro
render the distinctivcness of these French rranslacions, whether DiCs's,
Castoriadis's own, or a combination thereof, dirccdy in English myself.
This has often required consultation of the Greek original, Dies's French,
and an English translation (Hamilton and Ca.irns's Plato: Th, Co/1,md
Diaiopn), and I have incorporated nuances of all three into the final Eng-
lish version given here.
The French original of these seven Ca.scoriadis seminars prepared by
Pascal Vcrnay and reviewed by the speaker himself offers a good running
guide to the general locations in the Sutmn4n where Castor~dis offers
xxvi ·1.., the Tmnsl:tion

translations of dialogue, Standards for providing citations and references

arc considerably stricter in the English-speaking world. Included, there-
fore, arc specific addiriorlal references in scrolled braces" I} "-also noting
"cf." and a reference in such braces for quotations of nor fully certain ori-
gin or for Castoriadis's more general paraphrases. These added references
should aid the reader who wishes to follow the commentary closely; any
errors in them are my own.
In a number of instances, Castoriadis quotes or makes passing mencion
of other authors. In the past, I checked with Castoriadis directly con-
cerning unreferenced quotations. Since I can no longer do this, I have
now added some references myself, in consultation with the ream of
French editors. In some cases, however, this was not possible.'
As with his polyglot writings, Castoriadis's spoken seminars span sev-
eral languages, as if "no one language, or even three or four, could bear
the weight of his thought."J Interestingly, a significant number of English
words steal inco Castoriadis's lectures. These include: "second best" to
translate deuteroJ pious throughout, "bwybody" as the best uanslation of
polupragmontin (2/r9), and numerous colloquialisms--''Tell that to the
marines!" (2/J9), "jam session" (3/12), "They will laugh him down"
(4'23)-as well as his paraphrase of President Reagan's "political maxim"
(4/30).
AJso wonhy of note arc a few neologisms in French, English, or both
languages. Comitant-Castoriadis's neologism for Aristotle's 1umbt-
biko1-ha.<, again been translated as "comiranr. "4 Note here my own sub-
sequent discovery chat "comitant" does indeed--or at least did--cxist in
English. le thus is not a neologism in our language. The Oxford Engli1h
Dictionary notes that this now "rare" term comes from comit4nt-m1, past
participle of comitari, "to accompany"-preciscly the sense Castoriadis
intended when creating his French neologism! (A search of several French
dictionaries turned up no comparable existing, rare, or even obsolete
term.) lnttrrogativitl appears to be another Casroriadis neologism, this
one improvised on the spot. I have created the English "equivalent," plac-
ing interrogativity in quotation marks at its first appearance. There is a
French word stmorialitl. It is of relatively recent origin-1970, according
to the Grand Larousu dt '4 langru franraiu, where it is defined as "the set
of functions of the scnsorial system, that is to say, of rhe-spc:c.ia.J.iud sen-
soriaJ apparatwes, or organs of the senses, as they arc classlCally distin-
guished." Lacking an English equivalent, I have used (coined?) 1nuorial-
 :avii

ity, it being a short stmch from thc: extant English adjective with Kantian
connotations. ("Sensory makeup" might have given too exclusively pas-
sive an idea of Castoriadis's conception thereof.) The 1951 coinage of an-
other French word Castoriadis uscs---dlmi¥,xi<--is attributed to Andr~
Malraux. This neologism comes from the Greek dnni,uzi,,, meaning cre-
ative activiry, workmanship, handicraft. I have merely rendered the word
into "English"---dnniu,iia-thus availing myself of a minor prerogative
contained in the creative aaiviry of the translator.
Following standard editorial practice, 6m names have been supplied
for all but the most obvious persons mentioned. Herc again. any errors
arc my own. I have consulted the Oxford Clmsic,J Dictionary for spellings
of classical names and places. "Sophist" appears in uppercase when refer-
ring to those spcci6cally undcntood 10 fall into that category, but in low-
ercase when meant (u far as I could tcU) more generally.
Nonsexist language is employed throughout: unspecified persons arc
arbitrarily designated as "she" or "he.• This practice, already employed
previously, was developed in consultation with Castoriadis.
One nuance of the French ,ex, has not been rendered into English.
Plato's S14tesm11n concerns knowledge, in panicular the tpistimi of the
"statcsman." Both 111110ir and conll4issd1"t may be translated as "knowl-
edge"; bu, the former has a more formal connotation, while the latter of-
ten implies rather a familiarity, as in knowing (S4voir) that one knows
(con,wlt). Shott of indicating each specific appearance, it is impossible 10
reflect this disrinaion in the translation.
Finally, we come to the tide itself of Plato's dialogue. In Greek, it is
u
Politiltt,r, in French, Polilifw. The English translation, the Sl4tn,,,.n,
is rather unforrunatc, Castoriadis himself noted. 5 Had these seminars
been delivered by him directly in English, one could imagine him prefac-
ing his remarlu with something like the following:
Now, the English tick, the 5'41U11Nln, is panicularly intolerable. I've said on
many occasions that the Greek term polis is not ro be cranslarcd as cilJ-SIIIU,
for the Greeks didn'r have a sq,ararc scate appantw. To call die person who
was ro be occupied with che running of the polis a ,,.,,,,,,.n is, even in Plato's
perverse construction concerning the so-called royal man, totally unaccept-
able. Yet hert ~ have 1he term enshrined in tradition as the common trans-
lation of Plato's dialogue. W£ an not pmend lhar this reality doesn't exist and
so mun we this wholly unsuitable term; lei us simply k«p in mind its inad-
missibility each. rime we employ it.
xxviii On the Tr-anslation

Likewise, when talking about the art of this "statesman" we refer to his
"'statesmanship," whereas che Greek original speaks of politiki, which in
French is /a politique and in English usually is translated as politics.
I would add to this imaginary aside the fact that, as opposed: to la poli-
tique (politics/statesmanship), k politique can mean not only the states·
man but also "the political" (or "the political sphere"), a relatively rccenc
term derived from Carl Schmitt's das Politische, which Castoriadis did not
eschew.(, I have endeavored each time to choose the correct term in Eng·
lish-statesman or the political, politics or statesmanshi~according to
context. The reader may now judge for herself whether I have successfully
sorted out the nuances and ambiguities, or whether alternative readings
might be called fut.
ON PLATO'S STATESMAN
Seminar of February 19, 1986

I was telling you the last time chat Plato played quire a considerable role
in what can be called the destruction of the Greek world. In the eyes of
history, he transformed a de facto destruccion into an apparently de jurc
destruction. Thar is co say, if chc Athenian democracy collapstd in che
end, it was ultimately in the order of things-not in the sense in which
Herodotus says, "All that is great mwt become small," and vice versa, but
because it was fundamentally rotten, a regime dominated by the ignorant
crowd, the impassioned and passionate crowd, and not by chc wise man
or by wisdom, the jwc man or justice. Thw, rather than being a hiswrical
tragedy, the fall of Athenian democracy becomes a ~ of immanent
philosophical justice.
This he did, in one respect, if I may phrase it thus, "positively'": he ad-
vanced che idea that there can and should be an ,pistbni' of policies [/a
po/itiqu,), a sure and ccnain knowledge enabling one co be guided in the
political domain; that, in chc end, chis 9istimi of statesmanship [/a poli-
tiqw] rdies upon a transcendenc knowledge; and even that i1 relics upon
uanscendencc itself. h is in this sense, ultimardy, that the regime de-
scribed in che Laws can and should be considered-co speak hastily and
facilely-co be much more moderate chan char of che Rrpublic. Plato, as
one says, watered down his wine as he aged. That doesn't happen co every-
one. but it happened to him.
Yee, even though it is more moderate, che regime of the Laws remains
all the same basicalJy a throcratic regime. And it is this regime char, in a
sense, opens the way nor only to the critique of rhe democratic regime but
also co tM quite ambiguous critique of th, law as such. I shouldn't say
ambip,ows. moreover, but wry cle11.r, when this critique is read in the
 Ou Plato', Statesman

Stat~ma.n (294,a--c) and when it allows Plato to jwtify his claims to be go-
ing beyond written_law in the name of a higher form of knowledge.
And it's indeed Plato who completely overturns the Greek conception
of justice as a question that remains constantly open within the city: Who
is to give what, and who is to have what? This question constantly poses
the problem of distribution among the citizens and at the same time thw
opens the way to further questioning (une inte"ogation]. He therefore
overturns this definition and makes of justice what could be called and
has, moreover, been called in modern times a holist, or holistic, property,
a property of the whole. For Plaro--chis is the conception from the Re-
public, this is the conception from rhe law.f-justice is che fact that the
ciry as a whole is well divided, well articulated, and chat, within this
whole of the city, each has his place and doesn't cry to obtain another one.
According to the famow phrase from the &public, juscice consists in to
alltoU npcittEtv ,::a\ µ:fl no>..unpayµovE'iv (Republic 433a), minding your
own business, doing what's yours, what belongs to you, what is your own,
what corresponds to your place, without trying to busy yourself with
everything, co be a busybody-this English word being, moreover, the
best translation of polupragmonein.
But at the same time, it's in Plato that for the first time we have an at-
tempt to ground, in right and in reason, a hierarchy within the city. In
the Greek city, the existence of freemen and slaves or of the rich and the
poor is a fact. W~lat_C:, _c~i~ -~~pposedly becomes a right-that is,
something that rests upon the different natures-Oftlieindividuals of
wh!c~ _!he ~is compose~ To do this, I said, Plato engaged throughout
his workln an immense operation that rums anything to good account
and thac manifests a strange inconsistency, which I have even qualified as
perversity-I stand by chis word. Plato constantly rebukes the rhetori-
cians, yet he himself proceeds rhetorically in an immense number of in-
stances. He tries to garner one's conviction, and he succeeds in doing
so-the proof? we're still talking about him-by playing upon the plau-
sible, the probable, che likely, by playing even upon the wellsprings of
shame, respectability, and modesty.4fe does so by working on the soul of
che listener, and not only on his reason, in order to try to show him chat
there is good and evil, chat a decent man can only be on the side of the
good/rhose who are evil blwh in the dialogues, like Thrasymachw at rhe
end of the first book of the &publir. "Thrasymachus agreed co all
that ... but reluctantly and with great difficulty ... and then I saw some-
thing I had never seen before: Thrasymachw blushing" (350d).
 s,,,,;,,,,, ofFd,"""l 19, 1966

It's the same thing as regard. the Sophists. Plato rebukes them, bur he'
is himself an incomparable sophist. One cannor count the number of in-
r,ntional sophisms and paruogisms that are there in the dialogues. The
&public icsdf is one huge articulated sophism, a multi-leveled and multi-
staged sophism.
The two preceding considerations show that what Plato says against
rhc demagogues can be turned around against him~xccpr char, in his
case, ir isn't an everyday, physically present dhnos that he's stirring up, that
he's churning up, and that he's trying co carry off in a c.cnain direction. It
is the dimos of the lcru:rcd. men and women of history, of the work's read-
ers over the centuries. And for the same reasons, moreover, he, too, is an
~idol.opoios, a manufacrurcr of simulacra-what he accuses the Sophists of
being-in, for example, everything he recounts about the differing na-
tures of human beings, which goes to justify their division into classes in
the &public, or the conscious, impudent lies proffered in the third book-..
of chc Laws conc.crning the history of Athens, and so on.
And at the same cime, chis is someone who, if one goes deeper, is, one:
could say, lacking in modesty. He has, char is, an immodesty of the mind,
the: immodesty of an ugumentative person. To prove this, I need only
cite the accusation lodged in the Go,ritu l515dff.l against the politicians
of Athens and, notably, againsc Pericles, where: ic is sa.id thac if chose peo-
ple were cruly, as rcponed, so jusc, so incdligenc, they would have raised
[auraimt /In,/] their sons in corresponding fashion. And this is said by
someone who was himself a pupil [//n,,) of Socrates, the disciples of
whom included, on the one hand, Alcibiades and, on the other, a dozen
of those who later became the Thiny Tyrants! Thac's the: rcsuh of whac
Socrates taught, according to Plato's logid And, secondly, this is said by
someone who raised no son of his own, nc:ichc:r good nor bad, ncicher in
the direccion of juscic:c nor in chc d.ircccion of injwcicc:. He's got a loc of
check, as is said in common pulance, or, in a more noble language, the
immodesty of someone who is a philosophical arguer.
Comparing Alcibiades and Placo, one could say thac in a scnse-
chough, co suppon the comparison, co pwh ic funhcr, one would have co
read chc Sympo1ium in detail, which we cannoc do hcrc-Placo is a son of
inverted Alcibiades. Considerably younger than Alcibiades, undoubtedly
chiny years his junior, Plato sublimates this passion for power chac Alcib-
iades couldn'r master and that led him to do what he did in the history of
Achcns; Placo cr:rnsposcs ic onto another level, chc level of wricing. of
schooling.. of counsel given to the powerful and to cyrancs. That is what
h~ did. it Sttms. in Sicilv with Dionysim and then with Dion.
 But at the same time, there's a son of indifference on his part to the
city that raised him. Again, this contrasts him with Socrates. For Alcibi-
ades, Athens is p~ly and simply the inscrument of his own might.
When the Athenians recalled him from Sicily, 1 he passed over to the side
of Spana and then came back to Athens. Likewise, Plato is completely
cold toward Athens; he rebukes it, and not just the democracy. He docs
retain a kind of racial pride, so to speak, which is to be found again at the
end of the Laws {969c~}, when the l..accdaemonian and the Cretan agree
among themselves that they could nt'Ver have succeeded in resolving the
problem of the good ciry without the Athenian who accompanies them
during this long philosophical march-a march both literal and figura-
tive. Plato therefore retains this one point of honor; bur as for the content
and substance of Athens, of the Athenian historical creation, he detests it.
In any case, he simply uses his situation as an Athenian citizen to profit
from what he has learned, to profit from Socrates, who is a son of the ciry,
to profit from the paifkja {education} screaming out from Athens, and to
profit from his own position. And he uses it finally co found his own
school in the gardens of Academus, ~rofiting from the liberalism, from
/ the love of liberty, of the Achenians7lwho, once again, allowed someone
to open a public-education establishment that rebukes their city, instead
of putting him to death right away, as the ephors would have done in his
beloved Sparta.
To this dimension would have to be added the concern with the aes-
thetic appearance of one's life, a concern chat, unless I am mistaken, ap-
pears for the first time in antiquity with Alcibiades, thus dissoci.1ted.
Plato himself undoubtedly cultivated-and cultivated until the end-the
aesthetic appearance of his life and made swe chat his followers, his
pupils, the entire Academy, constantly contributed to the fabrication of
cl--is myth of Plato, which passes by way of many things-including,
probably, the fabricuion of letcers, about which I'll say a word in jwc a
moment.
From all these standpoints, we can reAcct upon these two children,
these two pupils, who were by far the two most brilliant Socrates had: A1-
cibiades and Plato. Undoubtedly, too, at chis time (at the end of the fifth
century and the beginning of the fourth; thw, after the tragic poets a.nd
after Thucydides), they were the two most brilliant Athenians in quite
different domains--but both of them were already perverse and did not
love their poUJ.
 Why this influence of Plato's? I shall come back to this question at th('
end. In this inffucncc must be $CC11, on the one hand, what is due to Plato
himself, which we have already seen: a wh.ole series of operations, the
strategy be puts into effect. But there is also what is due to later times.
Hm,, things ar< rdativcly simpl<. I won't talk about Karl Popp<r, who
created a kind of countcrprtjudicc. One cannot call Plato toul.itarian or
make him into the father of totalitarianism. But on account of his hatred
of democracy and on account of what constantly shines through from
,!>im as a desire to 6x the things in the city imo place, co put a halt to the
./ evolution of history, to stop sclf-instirution, co suppress sdf-institucion-
on this account, Plato obviously becomes, in a certain way, the inspirer of
and arsenal for everything in history char will represent this attitude. To
put it simplistically: of everything reactionary and pro-establishment;
everything opposed ro the democratic movement. This is found again
among the Romans, among the first Christians, during the Middle Ages,
and in modern rimes. I won't and I can't-it would be an immense
task-truly go through th, history of all that.
Finally, one mwt, of course, keep in mind the enormous demem of
authentic crcacion that exists in Plaro, creation of an inconccscably uans-
historicaJ value that is attached ro his work, that is also another kernel of
his work, or th< other pole. I don't like to speak too much of a poi,, b,,.
c.ausc ir isn't in opposition; the relations between Place's philosophical and 1
lircrary-anistlC--<rcation and what that creation carries along with it,
,that it bears with.in ir, in the way of a political and, of course, philo-
../sophic.al imaginary arc quire strange. There is this other elemcnc, Plato's 1
creation, his incomparable geniw linking at once philosophic.al depth, i
Jogical-dialcctical power, literary anistry, and a savoir faire in the politics
/ of idcos of which I spok< a moment ago. This has played a big rol< in th<
influence he has had; the result is that, while we arc discussing Plato here
and wh,n w< discuss the S,,,i,sman, th, &public, and th, Laws, w< shall
not be able ro speak of him as if he were simply some ... ideological" au-
chor with regard ro whom it would suffic.c to point out his sophisms. Ar
each seep, one runs up againsr~nc becomes enraptured [on 1txt.t.ru') be-
e.awe one discovcrs--somc philosophical nugget or other; one discovers,
in the end, yet another of the roots of whar we think today, of our modes
of thought.
 On PlatoS J[atbman

Before getting to the positive points, it muse be added that with Plato,
and for the first rime, we have what later on was called~he partisan spirit
in philosophy. It is sumined by his rhetoric and his staging. Before Plato,
and even afterward, the philosophers expound their opinions. Rarely, as
with Heraclitus, do they have some disdainful remark to make regarding
other philosophers. Starting with Plato, they discuss the ideas of their ad-
versaries, as Aristotle also did later o~]Placo, however, is the first and per-
haps the last philosopher to transfo~m this discussion into a,yeritable
combat-and in this sense, he comes close to reminding us of Marx; or,
~er, Marx reminds us of him. Plato really wants to polariz.e his readers,
co summon them to choose between chem and us, between the bad guys
and the good guys. The bad guys are those who are mistaken [se trompmt]
and who want to deceive [trompt'T] the world; and the rest of us are those
who are in the truth and in the good, in jwtice. Or he sometimes, in ex-
treme cases, stops arguing altogether in order simply to heap ridicule on
chem.
Bue Plato doesn't limit himself to that. As Aristotle would also later do,
he doesn't limit himself to these attacks against them and these refuta-
tions. He is also the first one-and here again we see the ambiguity of his
creation-who used the weapon Paul Riccrur later called swpicion, which
x, has indeed loomed so large in modern times, with Marx, Nicasche, and
Freud. He doesn't say: What you are saying is false and I am going to
prove it to you. He asks, r.ather: Why arc you saying what you're saying?
And the Why refers not to logical reasons but to subjective reasons in the
largest sense: You are saying it because it suits you to do so; you are mak-
ing up sophisms because you're a Sophist. And that isn't a tautology. You
are a Sophi.st means: You are a merchant of falsehoods, a trader in fallacies,
a kapilos, and it is your ontological and social position as a Sophist that
makes you say what you are saying. Logical refutation is complemented
~ by, if I may put it thus, O_!!.~O!Qg.ita.l. social, and political assignment: You
are saying what you are saying because you arc an enemy of the proletariat
(Marx). You are saying what you are saying becawe your neurosis leads
you to say it (Freud). You are saying what you arc saying because truth is
a poison for the weak and becawe you cannot bear it (Nietzsche).
· - In Plato, it goes as follows: You arc saying what you are saying because
you make a living off of lies. And you are making a living not only in the
~ense chaf you are gcuing pa.id for your lessons-a point Plato insists
upon a gre.i.c dca.1-but because you make a living in this way ontologi-
 5nn;,.., ofFd,,.,,,,ry 19, 1,S6
o'

cally/2i.c b<ing of the Sopbist is a b<ing that relics upon no1-b<ing. 'This
is because there is no1-b<ing and the possibility of making no1-b<ing pass
for b<ing and b<ing for no1-b<in~which leads 10 the famous ontologi-
cal rr:vision made in the Sophist, to the murder of the father, of Par-
menidcs. It is therefore because one can mix one with the other, being
and not -bdng. And th.at mans, in a ccnain fashion, that being is noc and
that nor-being is. And moreover, chis quali6cation ;,, a cert11in fmhion is
100 much. ~ Plato him,df says in ,he SophiJt {259b}. "Ten thousand
times ten thousand, being is nm ... and not-being is." And it's because
there is this ontological connection that you, the Sophists, can exist.
And ir is. moreover, from this scandpoint that one can ma.kc the dis-
tinction-even if that's nor our principal intcrcst-bcrwccn two groups
of Platonic dialogues. On the one hand, there arc the basically staged and
polemical dialogues, which arc designM to refute one or rwo Sophiscs:
the Eut/,ydnnus, the Mmamus, the Go,xias, with the series Polus, Calli-
clcs, and Gorgias. These dialogues take place before an audience, a pub-
lic, which is like a chorus that prevents the Sophist from persisting in his
sophisms by using a kind of silent disapproval that mobilizes an ultimate
residue of shame. Even a Sophist, even Thrasymachw, h2.s some of that
in his soul.
And then there arc the dialogues involving real research, the zctctic di-
alogues, for which no public is necessary and from which rhc public is in
fact cntirdy absent. Thus, in the Parmnri.drr some very profoundly out-
rageous things arc said there, but there is no public. One is among people
of good faith-Young Socrates, Parmcnidcs-and one has no need for a
chorus, for a silent and reproachful judge.

As for the properly philosophical creation, one muse simply recall acer-
tain numb<r of points. And already, fim of all, there's the fm that Plato
is the crcalOr of the interpretation of the positions taken and not only of
the refutation thereof. It's the fact chat he is constandy rcswning his re-
search. Plato is the first person to have cried to 6.x in place the apotias.
and perhaps the ways out of these aporias, that for us surround the ques-
tion of know!~ and truth. And also the limits of rationality in this
world. This is basically the theme of the limtUW, and i, comes back all
the rime. He's the fim to aruck vigorously rhc problem that still today
remains the po,u .,;non,m of philosophy and logic: on the one hand, the
 On Plato's Statesman

relationship berween the universal and the singular (among other texts,
this is found in che p.,.,,,tnieks)-to what extent we can say that there is
one dog and chat there is one society and that there is one God and chat
there is one French language and that there is one number one. In what
f sense all that is one, and what the relationship of this Form or Idea or
\ eidos of the one is with, on the other hand, the concrete realities (as we
, , shall say as Moderns, as post·Kantians), which we c.an chink only with the
aid of--or more exactly, by means of-this category of the one. Can we
chink by means of this category of the one only, as Kant says, because
such is the structure of our mind? Because we cannor think otherwise,
and char, allegedly, is something that could be demonstrated? Or is it that
we cannot think wirhout the caregory of the one becawc there is rhe one?
There is the one, ifl may say so, but where? And we still haven't exited
from all chat bee.awe, obviously, the form of the one couldn't be imposed
upon the phenomena or upon objccu if something didn't lend itself
'> thereto, if something therein didn't permit the propping up [lttayageJ
1and insrrumencation of our categories. Therefore, we cannot simply
affirm chat the one is a category. But on the other hand, the idea chat the
bne belongs to the things, or chat cawalicy belongs to the things, appears,
indeed, co be completely enigmatic and seems to open a gulf about what
that can really mean. In a sense, we have hardly advanced since these in-
vestigations [interrogations} were laid down and worked out the way they
were in the Parmrnieks, in the Theaetetus, or, in another fashion, in the
PhikbUJ and in certain passages from the Republic. We shall sec some
examples of chis while speaking about the S14tesman.

Plato's Statesman

And so, without further delay, we can now turn to hand-co.hand

wrestling with this dialogue. Bue here again, there'll be some prdiminar·
ies, and this is going to seem complex and disordered to you bccawc I
don't know chc means whereby I could speak of an imponant work or an
important subject in a manner that would be both true and linear, weU·
ordered. I don't know how to speak about it other than by taking it by
one end, coming back, going further, turning the thing over, making di.
gressioru, and so on. There will therefore be a lot of back and forth in this
discussion-as there is, moreover, in the text of the StaNmran itself.
A second poinc: Why chose to begin with the Statesman? For three rca·
sons, basically. And first of all, for a reason that is relatively contingent to
 s,,,,;,.,,, ofFebrwuy 19. 198'

our work this year. Given our object in this seminar, we cannot make an
in-depth and detailed analy,is of all the texts that intcrcsr us. During rhe
put rwo years, we did this work around a phrase from Anaximandcr, a
chorus Ii-om Antigon,. one or rwo spc:,chcs in Thucydides, bur this year
ir's impoosible ro make a genuine analysis of the &public, of the Staus-
man, and of the Ulws, then of Aristotle's Politics and of rhc other texts
that come afterward. And on the other hand, I want w to do some work
rogcthcr thar, though far from cxhawrive, will be an in-depth work upon
a determinate text. Let's grapple with a text to sec what it means ro work
genuinely on a tat. And the only one available from the standpoint of
size is the Statmnan. The Republic is too long. The LAws, like Aristotle's
Politics, is huge.
The second reason is that chc St4trsman belongs to what I shall in a
minute be calling Plato's fourth and lase period. It's a ten in which, in a
sense, and without being roo Hegelian abouc it, the results of his cncirc
prior development arc implicitly found sed.imenrcd. And there's nae
much more to come. From this standpoim, che Siaumwn virtu.ally con-
tains Placo's philosophical trajectory-the problrmacic, the aporias, and
the anrinomies of this trajectory. They can be drawn out of the Siaumum
and out of what appear to be the incoherencies in chis dialogue and its
strange goings-on (lmlngltis]. This impression of incoherency and
/nrangcness [lmr"f&'] comes in a second moment. In the first moment,
one rclls oneself while reading through this dialogue that things arc going
quite wdl, chat ir's just Plato or Plato's idiosyncrasies. In the second place,
things don't go at all. And then, i.n a third place, a sort of struaure is sal-
vaged. And, ac a fourth level, one gets a glimpse thar this scructurc itself
contains some very deep faults and chat these faults arc no accident; these
arc the faults of Placo·s though,, and perhaps of all though,.
A third rason: this fourth period of Plato's is embodied and mani-
fested in the Siaumt1tn via a basic change relating co a point rhac in ap-
peuance is minor but chat goes very far, because, here again, given the
magmatic scrucrure of thought, one can cake off from ic co find nearly
everything. The change thar is ,here in rhe Swnman is the change rela-
tive to chc definition of he who is suitable [proprr] co govern, chat is co
say, the srarcsman [I, politiqu,], the political man, or the royal man. In
rhe Rrp"bli<'s definition, he who is suitable to govern is identified with
the philosopher, once he has undergone adequate cra.ining. In the Siau1-
""'"· no direct mention is made of him, but the royal man-co whom we
shall return lam on-appears not as a shepherd [b,,;gerJ-that's the 6m
,o On Plato's ::>catcsman

definition, which is later abandoned-but as a royal weaver. What he

weaves, as we shall sec later on, isn't very coherent, either. lc's disparate,
not so much because .the things woven together arc disparate but bccawc
rhey are situated at different levels: on rhc one hand, they're the different
individuals of the polis; on the other hand, they're the different pares of
the souls of individuals. And no one-to-one correspondence can be made
from one term to the other.
And then, even this royal weaver turns out not to be the true definition
of the statesman. There is a third, subjaccnt definition of him, which is
not the philosopher and doesn't lead to him either. And this ddi.nirion, in
fact, prepares the way for the type of regime and government Plato de-
scribed lacer on in the LawJ. And in rhe latter dialogue, while the mem-
bers of the much talked-about nocturnal council arc philosophers, cdu-
o.ted as such and endowed with a curriculum vitae that reminds one of
the philosophers of the &public, in a sense they arc not-not formally, at
least-the ones who govern. The true governors in the city of the lawJ
are magistrates, and these magistrates arc elected. And the Stausman is
this passage, this ford, the place where the waters become shallower and
where one can pass from one bank to the other. One can pass from the
regime defined absolutely in the &public as the power of the philosophers
to the regime of the lawJ, where there are elective magistrates whose
strings-to speak coarsely-arc pulled in a sense by the nocturnal coun-
cil. That situates the Statesman at quite an important point in Plato's
overall development.
I would like co say now how I intend to speak about this dialogue.
There arc six points:

1. a few words about the dace and historical situation of the Statesman in
Plaro's oeuvre, then about its general problematic;
2. the StateJmani structure as such and its scrangencs.s, this jumble
[enchroitn'mentJ of definitions, incidental poims, and digressions;
3. the two definitions;
4. the eight incidental points;
5. the three digressions;
6. the problem of composition: Is there or is there not a strucnuc hidden
bc:hind what appears to be an entirely baroque edifice, with two main
cowers, three adjoining cowers, and eight secondary buildings?

And, finally, if we have the time, we shall take the opportunity to make a
 Sn,,;,,,,, •fF,lmuuy ,,. 19'6 ll

sort of critical inventory of everything there is in it-unless we do so

along the way.

I. Date and Historical Siruation of the Statmrllln

Almost all authors an: agreed thar the S..usman is ro be sit11ared bc-
rwccn 367 and 360 B.C.E. Some, including myself, would opr for a larcr
date. Why this dating? This is connected with the whole story of Plaro's
voyages ro Sicily. Born in 418, Plaro was ar lcasr rhiny years old when
Socrarcs was condemned ro death (in 399). Ahcr Socrates' death, Plaro-
likc, moreover, Socrates' other djsciples-perhaps fearing that this scn-
rcnce might have legal consequences for rhe «s< of his disciples, left
Athens. Plato himself withd«w for some rime co Mcgua, where he very
soon founded a school of Mcgaritc.s that continued a certain side of
Socrates' teaching. Then he undoubtedly made a series of voyages, in-
cluding certainly one ro Egypt, bcrwccn 399 and 387. Around 387-386, he
founded the Academy at Athens. Before chat, in 38S-387-and we have
here testimony independent of Plato's ~there was the first voyage
to Sicily. There he met the tytmr Oionysius I and struck up friendships,
which later proved to be imponant, with An:hytas, one of the las, great
Pythagoreans (who were then very active in southern Italy, in Magna
Graccia), and with Dion of Syncusc, son-in-law of Oionysius.
Legend has it that, during his trip home, Plato was akcn prisoner by
pirates and sold either a, A<gina or at Corinth. A more elaborate legend
even reports that a number of philooophcrs were meeting a< that very mo-
ment in Corini:h and that, when they saw Plaro on the slave block, they
chipped in together right away ro buy him back! One may think that this
is too l,n, trolldlO to be uuc. I myself have many doubts.
Following the tradition, both of the Uttm and cha< of the doxogra-
phcrs, there would have been rwo other voyages in Sicily char were tied to
the cwists and turns of Sicilian politia. Dionysius I, a very asrure and very
powerful politician, had died. His son Dionysius II then acceded ro
power. Dion, who was the son-in-law of the two Dionysiuscs--Diony-
sius's family alrairs were very complicated, mixing polygamy, inccsr, and
so fonh-was also a very brillianr young man, probably Plato's mnnmos,
nor necessarily in rhe physical sense but in the form of an amorous
friendship Ii~ the one described in i:hc Symposium. Plaro considered him
the one who might be able to pu1 his philosophe, ideas into political
ll

practice. And according to chis tradition, Plato is said to have returned to

Sicily in 367, in response to an appeal from Dion, in order to transform
the young Dionysiw into a philosopher-king. This he f.iilcd to do.
Dionysius broke with Dion and exiled him buc sought ro retain Placo at
Syracuse. Plato is said to have refused.
Three years later, still according to rhc same tradition of the ltttn'l and
the doxographcrs, Placo made a third voyage co Sicily, Oionysiw having
promised him a number of things, including chc recall of Dion. But
Dionysius failed co keep his promises, held Plato prisoner, and finally re-
leased him only after the imcrvencion of the Pythagorean Archytas ofTar-
enrum. Four years afo:rward, Dion landed in Sicily and expelled Dionysiw
from power. A few years of crud and sordid civil war ensued. And finally
Dion was assa.ssinarecl by another student of the Academy, Callippw.
There would therefore have been, according ro chis tradition and the
lerun, especially the seventh one, three voyages co Sicily. That in 387 is
certain. The two others, in 367 and 362 1 are the subject of polemics. Why
do the "dogged minority" of scholars, as M. I. Finley calls them, refwe co
accept these two other voyages? (I'm noc a "scholar," but I belong to this
minoriry.)2 There are two reasons at lease. First, neither Diodorw Sicu-
lus-who speaks ;,,_ txtmso, however, of Sicilian a.ffa.irs, of the fall of
Dionysius, and of Dion's campaign-nor Aristotle utters a word about
them. And yet Aristotle was at che Academy in 367 as wdl as in 362; and
in the Politin, he talks about Dion. It is unclear why he wouki not have
mentioned Plato's going to Sicily.
The second reason is that, in any case, for him to have undertaken a
third voyage-that is to say, co have believed Dionysiw's promises a sec-
ond rime and returned to Sicily-would show in Plato a sort of radical
and incurable inability co judge human beings that is really too hard to
impure to him. Whatever Plato's desire co influence a king or a tyrant or
a holder of power might have been, it cannot be believed that he could
have been mistaken on this point a srcond time apropos of an individual
like Dionysiw.
This impos.sible gullibility is also, thereby, a contributing factor in re-
jecting the authenticity of the Lrttm. And there arc good reasons that al-
low us co understand why at the Academy, very early on, these Uttrn
would have been fabricated: to reinforce, 6rst off, the legend of a Plato ac-
rempcing by every means to test out, to realize his ideas; and, secondarily,
to try co redeem the behavior of rwo students of the Academy, Dion (the
 Snni,wr oflwmutry 19, 19'6 13

pretend., and rben quasi tyrant; sec FinlcyP and Callippw (the assassin).
Thrrc att so many unpleasant things in the affair that it would be very
convenient to cover them over with the great figure of Plato, who, him-
self, mad, a try, risked his lik for his ideas, and then came back.
However, what stands in the way of the 4tbdisis, as the philologists say,
of the refusal to accept the authenticity of the Uttm, is, however, the
quality of the Snnith Lmn, which is quire beautiful and very profound.
From the outstt, the jusrific.ation for Plato's no longer getting mixed up
in politics after Socrates' conviction is entirely convincing. Then there's
the extraordinary passage about language's relationship with ordinary
knowledge, with the knowledge of the thing., themselves and of the Ideas,
and with the much tallccd-abour r.cAiph,,b. It's here char he says that all
the othrr forms of knowledge are preparatory for true knowledge. One
mwt be cra.incd in those forms, but they aren't what bring uuc knowl-
edge. They arc like the prdiminary "rubbing" that eventually, at an inde-
terminate and unexpected-surprising (euiphnir. suddcn)-momcnt,
m2kcs the ffame shoot up, the ffasne that lights up at once the object and
thC' subject and thac permits one to see. That's what all logic, all d.iscw·
sion, all mathematics, all dialectics serve to foster. h is preparatory. And
this recalls what mystics said later on abouc the fact that myscic.al a.scni·
cism is there to prepare for a moment of clairvoyance that cannot be
forced or wrung out. Knowledge-true knowledge, ultimate knowl-
edge-is described in this Snnith l..rtkr. And this description corre-
sponds well enough to what is said in the Symposi"m, in the Phaedrw,
and in the &p,,J,li, iudf about the soul's relationship with knowledge to
dunk that, if this Sn,n,d, ~ is not authentic in the literal sense-is
not authentic for the facts of the third voyage-it is authentic for the
philosophical treatment ir provides on the question of knowledge's rela·
tionship with its object.
Anyhow, the Sta""""n can be catalogued as having been written only
aher the dare of the alleged second voyage. And if there were second and
third voyages, it would perhaps be between those two, perhaps aher the
third. If you've read the Sutaman, you may recall that it comes in the
wake of the Sophist, which is supposed to come aher the Tlmuutw. And
at the same time, there's the promise of a fourth dialogue, which wasn't
written and which would have been th, Philosopkr.
The rhrcc existing dialogues and the fourth, the promi>cd dialogue, the
~ . are linked by a sort of round of dw-acters, a circular dance of
 On PLuo's Statesman

the protagonists. In the Theaetetus, ir's Socrates who asks the questions
and it's the young Theactetus who answers. In the second dialogue, the
Sophist, it's still Theaetetw who answers, but the questioner is rhe Stranger
from Elea, the xenoJ. A remark: in Greek, xenos doesn't mean only stranger,
foreigner, bur also and especially he who receives the treatment reserved
for foreigners, that is to say, hospitality. There is a Zeus Xenios, protector
of foreigners; and xenia is hospitality. XenoJ ekatis is therefore both the
stranger as well as che guest, the invited visitor from Elca. Nevertheless,
we shall say the Stranger from Eka--<Ven though the Ekatic friend would
be more faithful-since that's how he is known and since the Moderns
adopt it because it's chic: he's a stranger who enters into the game.
In the third dialogue, the StateJman, the Stranger from Elea remains
che questioner. That's the point that remains fixed with regard to the
Sophist. And this is foretold explicirly: the person being questioned is
Young Socrates, a young Athenian at the end of his adolescence, like
Theaetetus, who happens to have the name of Socrates-at one point,
moreover, Socrates plays on this, saying chat Theaeretus looks like him,
that he is ugly like Socrates, and that Young Socrates has his name. One
can assume that the latter, like Theaetetw, is very intclligem. In the
promised but never written fourth dialogue, the PhiloJOpher, the person
questioned would again have been, for reasons of symmetry, Young
Socrates, and the questioner should have been Socrates.
If we belonged co the structuralo-deconscructionisr school, we could
ramble on about the fact that Theaetecus, like Socrates, is very intelligent
and very ugly; that in the end, when it comes to defining the true
philosopher, we'll have the true philosopher questioning Young Socrates;
we'll have a return of logoJ into its identity, including from the scandpoim
of rhe speakers [des inonciateun) and not only from that of their utter·
ances [de1 lnoncb]; and chat, as by chance this fourth dialogue was not
written, it lies within the margin of the Platonic text. Under this form, all
rhat stuff doesn't interest us. What interests us is the content and the de-
velopmental process of Platonic thought.
This tetralogy with a pare missing-the Theaetetus, the Sophist, the
Sta~sman, and the Philosopher (which wasn't written)-is arti6cial, in my
opinion, as a tetralogy. The three existing dialogues really do belong to
what I am calling the fourth period, but the TheaetetuJ is nevertheless
rather different from the other two. Its object is as follows: What is called
knowledge or knowing? h is an essentially aporetic dialogue: it doesn't ar-
 SnniMr •fFtbrwzry 19, 1986 15

rive anywhere [nizboutit p,u), and that, too, is the genius of Plato. The
Th~utmu is an enormow, extraordinarily rich dialogue that asks what
knowledge is and ends up admitting: For the moment, we don't know!_ :'[ ·
~·u sec each other again tomorrow. What daring! The Modems don't do ,·
things lik, that! When they do, it's a bit rotten.
The Th,-,,,, proacd.s dialogically. And as in most of the Platonic di-
alogues, the dialogic form is both false and true. Bue in the end the dia·
loguing form isn't supcrfluow, whereas it is entirely so in the Sophist and
the Suztmnan. There, chc dialogue is a pure artifice, which irritates ado-
laccnts who come across these dialogues in high school and can't help
but ask themselves what these goings on [proddis) arc all about.• Above
all. the logical insrrumcncation of the Sophist and the Statrsman isn't in
the form of a dialogue bur is to be found, rather, in ics diacrctic tool, in
logical division and those interminable divisions the much talked-about
Strang,r from Elca deploys both in the S,pl,i,1---Plato deploys six levels
of division in order to try to capture the sophist, who always escapes,
never letting himself be caught within a division-and in the Statnman,
where there are two consecutive definitions, which, as we shall s«, don't
in fact succeed [ndboutissmt pm] in capturing the statesman.
From th.is standpoint, then, then: is no dear unity bctwccn the Tillar~·
tw, on the one hand, and the Sophist and the Statemum, on the other,
whcrt2S the latter two dialogues an: acrually all in one piece. This is so not
only because of the presence of the Suang,r from Elca but also because of
the devices [procidls] he employs. For, this xmo,, this guest-friend, has in
dramatically quite correct and c.onvincing fashion an identical scyic of dis·
cussion in the cwo dialogues: his mania for diaeresis, his obsession wi,h
division, an obsession successfully handled in both dialogues.
And they arc all in one piece also because of their conccm. For-and
here again, one could amuse oneself by doing some stf~curalo-dccon·
suuctionism-chcre's a link and an opposition in the contcn(; there's a
joinc aniculation. The Sophi.JI talks about falsehood and not·bcing; ir
calk.s about the corruption of the philosopher that che sophist is; it (al.ks
about the fabrication of falsehood; and it doesn't talk, or talks only very
incidentally, about the philosopher, which is understandable since there
should have been a founh dialogue, the Pl,il,,,oph,,-. And the Stat,,man
ralk.s abour the true statesman and talks only incidentally about the false
statesman. Well, suucturalism being basically a mncmotechnicaJ procc·
dun:, this gives us the following diagram,
 16 On Plato$ ~tatcsman

T = true; F = false. One has true knowledge--wdl, one should have

had it; 1ha1's the Philmophtr (cj,). One has false knowledge, too; that's the
Sophi.Jt (a). One ha.s true praxis; chat's the St11utman {Po/itiltos in Greek}
('ff). Bur we're missing something; there's a blank(?). And that's how one
,,-/gees oneself elected to the AcadCmic fran~isc! Why is there a blank here?
Obviously, this blank isn't completely a blank, bccawc in the Staumian
there's a moment when, between the lines, indirectly, one can sec what
the false statesman, the demagogue, is. He's talked about a little at the
end. Bue the subject would have merited a real treatment of its own. And
then the true tctralogy would have been: the Philosopher, the Sutusman,
the Sophist, and the Dmwgogsu. The demagogue was treated, bm always
very indirectly. Whenever he can, Plato cakes potshou at the politicians;
in rhc Stausman, he has some very disparaging words for Thcmismclcs.
Bue there is no dialogue chat accacks chc demagogue head-on and that
would be the Sophist's counterpart.
Yet we still have, in chis whole story, a unity of content-that is ro say,
the conccprs, the great themes char connect together [articulmt] these
two dialogues. But this in face concerns four dialogues, rwo of which arc
not wrincn, even if the end of the Statesman talks a bit about alleged
statesmen, people who pretend co be so without truly being so. And we
should have had:

• The Phiknopher: Socrates would there be questioning Young Socrates;

• che Staumum: the Stranger from Elca questioning Young Socrates;
• the Sophist: the Stranger from Elea questioning Theactcrus;
• the Drmagogue: Socrates would there be questioning Theactccus.

As for the most important philosophical prcsupposicions, it must be

nored chat the Sophist and rhc Statesman belong par excellence to that se-
ries of dialogues where new points of view arc put in place. The~ still arc
aporia..s; bur whereas in the early dialogues, these aporia.s were abovc all
verbal and norional, here they arc entirely real. And these are dialogues
th•u grant and place ar the center of their preoccupations the mixed and
no longer the pure ideas. To speak in more facile terms: no longer the ab-
 17

solu« but the miud, the real, the approximate, chc ,dative. On the po-
litical plane, this is aprcsscd through what in the Sta~1man is called the
s«ond uvig11.tion. dnan-os plow. There's a first navigation, char of the Rr-
publi., wruch yield. the true truth and the good city. Only, WC can't claim
to be realizing this idea; or dsc, such a realization could only be chc result
of chance. We therefore have to be content with a second choice, which is
dcsctibcd later on, in the u,w, (739<), where it is also said that chis city, in
tclation to the city of the Republic, is, according to the tcading of the
manuscripts, either ,,,u, tkuln'Os, second according to the deep-seated in-
ternal unity, or timUI UUUTOs, second in dignity. Timia dnttniJs is Otto
Apclt's correction, I bdi~c, but I am in agreement with Pierre Vid.a.J-Na-
quct in saying that mUI tkuUTos would be the righc reading.~ h is really
much more profound as an expression to say that the city of the Laws is
second in unity, in the intensity of the articulations of its parts, in rela-
tion to the city of the Repubuc.
If, chcrcforc, conuavcni.ng all the most respected conccmporary rules,
we address ourselves to the content of the dialogues and co chc evolution
of Plato's philosophical thought in order to group the dialogucs--this is a
general digression, but an indispensable one if one wants to talk about
Plato--wc sec that, in adopting the right criteria--whlch I am going (0
explain-this grouping pretty much coincides, on the one hand, with rhe
classifications made according to so-called cnernal criteria---darcs, refer-
ences to charaaers present or mentioned in the dialogues-and, on the
other hand, with the much talked-about stylomctric analysis, that is to
say, the chtonological layout of the dialogues according to indices of srylc,
statistics relating to partidcs and expressions Plato wcs. There arc, then,
four groups of dialogues:
t. First, the Socmic dialogues, which ate his youthful dialogues. Wich-
out wanting to enter into the much raikcd-about and insoluble prob-
lcm--Who is the true Socrates? Who is the crue Plato? Where docs
Socrates end and where docs Plaro bcgin?-we have some dialogues chat
quite ccnainly continue, perhaps in giving a more thorough look to it,
the Socratic reaching: th< Apology, Crito, the first Akibiad,,, Eutl,yphro,
ucl,a, Ly,u, Cham,ilk,, the tw0 HippiaJ, and Ion.
1. Then we have a second phase, which hasn'r until now been separated
out as a phase, but I think that ir mwr be .separated out. It is a transi-
tion.al pb.asc and a phase of anadts against th< Sophists. During this pe-
riod, we have some dialogues chat ar(' in a sense purely polemical, con-
18 On Plato's Statesman

trary co chose of the last period, which arc interrogatory without great
polemics. These as well as chose of rhc third period arc among the most
beautiful: chis is Plato's mature phase, when he was in full possession of
his poetic powers. Herc we have che ProtagoraJ, the Euthydnnu.s, the
Mrnrxmw, the GorgiaJ, and the first book of the Republic-which is of-
ten called ThrasymachUJ after rhc Sophist who is Socrates' principal intcr-
locucor there.
It is obvious chat the Protagoras, the Euthydmius (the dialogue that
ridicules the Sophists the most), and the Gorgias thoroughly attack the
Sophists. The "Thrasymachu.s," too. The Mmexmus plays a bit the role of
the piece that could furnish the material for illustrating the empty box
here, because, with its parody of the Athenian funeral oration, it's a kind
of charge lodged against the politicians or the demagogues (in Plato's
sense) who go around celling stories. What they were recounting, as pre-
sented in the Menexenus, is so improbable that, for serious readers, it can
only backfire against the orator.
3. The rhird phase involves the discovery, affirmation, and deployment
of the theory ofldeas. One can begin this phase with the Mmo, and it in-
cludes the four great "idealist" dialogues: the Phaed.o, the Phaednn, the
Sympo,;um, and the bulk of the &public.
4. Finally, there's the fourch phase, which extends from the height of
Plato's maturity to his old age, and which I begin with the Cratylw, a
deeply aporetic dialogue. Ir is absurd to say, as many commentators do,
that Plato upholds the theory that some words are naturally correct
Uusw] and that others arc not so. The Cratylw is absolutely aporetic and
,ows enormous confusion, because it investigates our relationship to lan-
guage and language's relationship to things and poses the question: Since
what we state as truth goes by way oflanguage (to formulate it in modern
,terms), how must language be in order that we might be abll" to state a
truth? It's taken hold of at one end, the correspondl"nce of the terms of
language with things, but that's the problem chat is being taken up.
Therl" arc, then, the Cratylw, the Theutetus, the ParmniilUs, three
highly aporccic dialogues, and the results of this apori11 and aporbis,
which arc given in the Sophist, the Stawm11n, the Ti1n11ew plus the
Critias, and the Phil.ebw-and the laws in quite coherent fashion come
at the end. And it's in these lase dialogues chat the theory of the mixed is
posited and expounded upon ro the furchest extent possible:
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