https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/414 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1637 In response to ongoing debates about Plato’s view of women, this paper focuses on the source of ambiguities that lead different readers to opposite conclusions. Dealing with the Republic and several passages from the Critias and the Laws, it emphasizes that all the passages that imply some sort of women’s inferiority assume one and only reason, namely that women are weaker than men. I argue that, pace other interpretations, this claim repeatedly points to physical weakness, although some passages, especially in the Laws, moralize this weakness precisely in order to reaffirm male superiority. To disentangle the resulting contradictions in Plato’s position, we must consider Plato’s use of two interconnected kinds of argumentation: the analogy between human procreation and animal breeding; and the craft model of human virtue. At the same time, if these argumentative tools co-determine Plato’s conclusions, a strictly theoretical analysis cannot fully explain those passages that describe the situation of women in both the real and imagined cities from a strikingly male perspective. Besides the narrower interpretation of female “weakness”, the paper also offers a more speculative suggestion that Plato sometimes sees this weakness as a specific reflection of what he describes, more generally, as “weakness of human nature”. mer., 12 nov. 2025 15:43:52 +0100 jeu., 25 juin 2026 12:10:12 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1637 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1573 This paper explores the language of birth in Plato’s dialogues via the conceptual framework of natality, with a focus on Plato’s interest in the question: to what are humans committed on the basis of their status as born? I argue that natality provides a powerful conceptual tool for understanding Plato’s ethical theorizing, as vividly demonstrated in the instructions to the about-to-be-born provided in a passage from the Timaeus (41d4-42e4), and conclude with some broader considerations about the relationship between alienated mortality (the denial of the unavoidability of death), alienated natality (the denial of the contingency of birth), and the potentially liberatory aspects of untethering birth-giving and identity. lun., 18 nov. 2024 12:16:52 +0100 jeu., 19 déc. 2024 18:11:47 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1573 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/413 In this paper, I am interested by Plato’s three waves in Republic Book V, in which Socrates makes three daring proposals for his ideal city: first, inclusion of women in the guardian class and their education (Pl. Resp. 453e-454e); second, abolition of private property and family (Pl. Resp. 457b-c); lastly, that philosophers should be kings and kings, philosophers (Pl. Resp. 472c-e). I explore the unexploited potential and probe the significance of the liquid imagery by applying Deleuzian paradigms to Book V of Plato’s Republic, in order to shed new light on the ancient text, and, thereby, understand these waves to be truly sensuous and material. I intervene in a scholarly debate known as “Plato’s feminism” and identify the feminine principle of becoming and flux, exemplified by the fluid and cathartic presence of the waves. I argue that the presence of the sea, which opens up into feminine space and attracts bodies to itself, mediates the “utopian experience” and sets into motion what I identity to be a cinematic movement, a gendered movement. The sea creates the utopian aesthetic, which is also a cinematic one, because this medium, both fluid and sensuous, invites the reader into its landscape and links up a series of images into the narrative. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:49:27 +0200 ven., 10 mars 2023 14:51:16 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/413 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1093 This article contends that there is a debate in postwar France about the nature of freedom. It argues that an important nexus of that debate can be seen by comparing Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien with the work of her contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir. It makes the supplementary argument that one can shine a more focused light on this dialogue by observing the way in which Yourcenar’s position anticipates the later arguments of Michel Foucault, Both Yourcenar and Foucault turn to antiquity as a way of strengthening their argument and relativizing the construction of the modern normative subject. jeu., 16 juin 2022 10:21:09 +0200 jeu., 09 mars 2023 16:02:48 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1093