Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.2 (2001) 151-176 [Access article in PDF] Beyond the Comedy and Tragedy of Authority: The Invisible Father in Plato's Republic Claudia Baracchi They say that, when asked who the noble are, Simonides answered: those with ancestral wealth. --Aristotle, fr. 92 Rose When the victor of the mule-race offered him only a small recompense, Simonides would not compose a poem, for he could not endure poetizing in honor of half-asses; but on being offered an adequate amount he wrote, "Greetings, daughters of storm-footed horses!" Yet, they were daughters of the asses also. --Aristotle, Rhet. 1405b Socrates was driving them to agree that the same man could know how to compose both comedy and tragedy and that a skillful tragic poet could also be a comic poet. They were thus driven, though hardly following and getting drowsy; Aristophanes fell asleep first and, as day was breaking, Agathon also. --Plato, Symp. 223d Introductory remarks What follows is a reading of Plato's Republic in the light of Aristophanes' Clouds. More precisely, what is here offered is the bare outline of such a reading--a set of preliminary notes that, by illuminating the inceptive stages of the Republic (especially book 1), constitutes a propaedeutic to the interpretation of the Platonic dialogue as a whole. Questions that one would typically be expected to raise in this context, questions regarding the relation of philosophy to poetry, the nexus between the Aristophanean and the Platonic Socrates, or Aristophanes' comedy in connection with the fate of the historical Socrates, will here remain unaddressed or will be touched upon only marginally (and obliquely). Far from accidental, this qualified [End Page 151] silence reflects a certain reluctance simply to take up these issues in their time-honored formulations and to speak under the force of their dictation. In this way, perhaps (and only perhaps), motifs of the Platonic discourse that would otherwise remain almost imperceptible if not altogether inaccessible--despite their pervasiveness--may come to show themselves.Leo Strauss wrote that Plato's Socrates may be seen, at least in part, as "a reaction or response to the Aristophanean Socrates" (1966, 316 n 20). The present study articulates the suggestion that the dialogue on the Republic may be understood as a response to Aristophanes' Clouds. Indeed, we shall see how the dialogue makes its own the problems delineated in the comedy, how it rewrites them, and how it unfolds in an attempt to address them. In spite of its remoteness from the tone and mode of the comedy, the Platonic text offers a meticulously punctual, even contrapuntal transcription of the main thematic features of the Clouds--as if an infinitely compelling provocation were to be found there, calling for thinking. The philosophical venture seems to be called forth and stem from such ground--as if comedy were the matter (indeed, the subject matter) of philosophy.Emerging from this interpretive approach to the Republic is the centrality of the figure of paternity, namely, of authority and instituted power. The Clouds depicts fatherhood in its dejection and loss of credibility. What this caricatured remnant of paternity signals is the simultaneous collapse of the orders of the divine, of ancestral authority, and of legality. This is the plexus of problems taken up in the Platonic dialogue.But the question of decay and the dying of the city mark the opening of the dialogue in a rather inconspicuous, even unapparent way. In the Republic, all terms are reversed. Indeed, the rendition of paternity one finds in the Republic is virtually opposite to the risible father of the comedy. Here, a dignified old man commanding respect seems to safeguard the integrity of the family, and hence the stability of the polis, both in its intrapolitical-juridical structures (regulating communal interaction) and in its relation to the gods, to its beyond. Yet, in spite of this inversion, it will become apparent that paternal authority has become an empty simulacrum. Simultaneously, the relation to the gods has become mere commerce, ancestral authority is invoked as a...