Plato Inside Out

Carlos A. Segovia

Plato Inside Out

or: As You Never Imagined It… with and beyond Derrida

an 8-session seminar with Carlos A. Segovia | starting October 18

SEMINAR DESCRIPTION

Hypercomplex: there is probably no better adjective to describe Plato’s thought; and this explains, too, why it is so very easy to lose sight of what it invites us to reflect on and ponder, which is nothing different from thought’s endless beginning, meandering itineraries, and inner paradoxes. But then, how can one speak of essentialism in Plato? There is none. There never was. Plato – his thought as much as his textuality – can be rightly compared to a fathomless detour. The critical nature of the later dialogues reflects that of the early dialogues, and the middle ones are no exception to this. Borrowing from Derrida – or should one look at it the other way round? – Plato’s noetics, ontology, and psychology can be said to outline a radical philosophy of difference that deconstructs philosophy’s three historical beginnings (with Thales, Heraclitus, and Parmenides) and whose sole purpose is to facilitate an approximate focusing of what remains always out of focus, by inquiring into what can be provisionally focused on each time.

On a close reading that cannot but disprove the pretensions of Platonism as well as Aristotle’s misleading assumptions on Plato’s alleged essentialism, Plato’s genuine thought-image (to put it in Guattarian terms) emerges afresh through numberless ellipses, out-of-fields and other dramatic strategies, through mythical narratives that highlight, if anything, philosophy’s inherent fragility, and through uncanny questions that fractalize themselves relentlessly and challenge thought’s limits from within. Plato’s thought-image surfaces, thereby, as a kaleidoscope or a prism about which nothing should be taken for granted save, perhaps, the way in which the light is diffracted on its many faces: obliquely.

Briefly: ideas are at once situated and abstract, thought oscillates permanently between two iridescent poles, the soul dissolves while it attempts to take shape, being proves to be pure interference, and if there is something secure behind all this it is merely, on the one hand, a disposition towards the thinkable that may be qualified as erotic and, on the other hand, thought’s own unrepresentable and thus paradoxical space. And what can one affirm about Plato’s political philosophy? Here, too, one has the impression of entering quicksand. In the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian democracy failed to live up to its ideals and Socrates’s trial appeared to Plato to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. But Plato’s critique of the Athenian democracy does not amount to its authoritarian dismissal. The Republic is not only a complex thought experiment that ought to be put into historical and theoretical perspective without this implying that its problematic nature should be dispensed with; it displays an inquiry whose scope is not clear beforehand and that demands interpretative caution. And it is in the Laws, anyway, that one finds Plato’s full-fledged (read: duly nuanced) political philosophy.

The seminar aims at exploring these and other related questions through a symptomatic analysis of the Lysis, the Meno, the Phaedo, the Symposium, the Phaedrus, the Republic, the Theaetetus, the Parmenides, the Sophist, the Philebus, and the Laws, considering their historical and meta-conceptual settings and in conversation, moreover, with Derrida’s notion of “la différance,” in which the ideas of divergence and deferral overlap; with Aristotle’s, Hegel’s, Nietzsche’s, Heidegger’s, Deleuze’s, and Badiou’s – but also Irigaray’s, Kristeva’s, and Butler’s – at times direct and at times indirect engagement with Plato’s philosophy; and with a number of recent contributions, such as those of Monique Dixsaut, Francisco Lisi, Sean Kirkland, or Lucia Saudelli, that are helping help us today – as did formerly those, for instance, of Alexandre Koyré, Leo Strauss, Hans Joachim Krämer, Giovanni Reale, Mario Vegetti, or Luc Brisson – to decipher the originality of Plato’s undeniably inspiring, but often elusive, thinking.

FACILITATOR

Carlos A. Segovia (PhD) is an independent philosopher working on meta-conceptuality, contingency and worlding in a post-nihilist key, at the crossroads of the philosophy of mythology. Among his publications, Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide (with Sofya Shaikut; Brill, 2023), Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Félix Guattari and the Ancients: Theatrical Dialogues in Early Philosophy (with Gary Genosko; Bloomsbury, 2025), and Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought (Peter Lang, 2025). He has been associate professor of philosophy at St Louis University Missouri, visiting professor at the University of Aarhus, and the Free University of Brussels, and guest lecturer, amid other institutions, at the European Research Council, the Collège International de Philosophie, the École Normale Supérieure, University College London, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Parrhesia School of Philosophy, the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, the European University at St Petersburg, Waseda University, and Ryukoku University.

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