Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Realm of Mimesis in Plato: Orality, Writing, and the Ontology of the Image by Mariangela EspositoDoug Al-MainiESPOSITO, Mariangela. The Realm of Mimesis in Plato: Orality, Writing, and the Ontology of the Image. Boston: Brill, 2023. xiv + 173 pp. Cloth, $143.00This manuscript grew out of the author’s original interest in Platonic aesthetics, itself developing into a more particularized examination of Plato’s account of beauty. Plato’s interest in the arts is famously bound up in a broad criticism of their imitative nature; the relation between the original and the imitation, or the eidos and the eidolon, is the core topic of this book. When this binary nature of mimesis is emphasized, it is difficult not to see the two poles as opposed to each other, and indeed there are several passages in the Platonic corpus that tell us directly to value the eidos over the eidolon. “The critique of the arts, in general terms, is based on the assumption that they produce multiple, false, sensorial images (eidola ) that are far removed from the truth, while the truth is a process through which multiplicities are gathered together into an intellectual unity (eidos).” While this duality shows up in the dialogues in numerous ways, Esposito seeks to show a method that transcends it, a method that depends on the experience of [End Page 347] beauty. Beauty is the entity that allows for a transition from the sensual to the intellectual, a point Plato makes in both the Symposium and the Phaedrus, and thereby supports the view that the binary pair of image and original are not so discrete as we might originally believe.Esposito’s analysis of the relation between image and original is made concrete through its application to writing and speech. The book is divided into an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion that track the progress of our ascent to the eidos, with the first chapter devoted to Plato’s critique of writing, the second to the critique of speech, and the third to an analysis of how beauty facilitates going beyond their opposition. The main sources for the critique of writing are the Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter; Socrates in the Phaedrus explicitly declares writing to be an imitation of speech and the Seventh Letter supports this position. Esposito follows Derrida’s famous essay, Plato’s Pharmacy, stating, “In Derrida’s account of the Phaedrus, this is the main charge against the written word: first, it imitates the original, and then—its second crime—substitutes itself for the original.” The ability of the copy to substitute itself for the original shows a sensitivity on Derrida’s part to the kind of project that Esposito wants to engage in, and indeed a major theme of Derrida’s work was his use of the concept of the pharmakon as something that transgressed a boundary between seemingly discrete opposites; the term pharmakon could refer to either a poison or a cure. But Esposito claims that focusing on the opposition between speech and writing ensures that it will never be overcome, and so this criticism of writing (as an imitation) must be demoted in importance. Esposito therefore ultimately distances herself from Derrida and also spends time taking on the importance of the so-called Unwritten Doctrines, especially as outlined by the Tübingen School. The Tübingen School straightforwardly accepts the criticism of writing in comparison to speech and so develops a theory of unwritten doctrines that Plato would only transfer orally. Given her project of synthesizing the tension between writing and speech, it is unsurprising that Esposito would be hostile to the project of the Tübingen School, “which this work does not consider sustainable.”In the second chapter Esposito moves on to the critique of speech. Here the core of her analysis is given to the Sophist, which provides us with “the best ontological expression of the criticism of image making.” The wider criticism of the Sophist is centered on the observation that appearances are bound up with nonbeing itself; “the biggest challenge posed by the sophist and the main danger of the mimetic mechanism is revealed: both allow the pseudos...