Rhapsody of Philosophy

Plato is usually cast as the philosopher who put poetry in its place, the source of a long tradition that ranks argument above verse. Max Statkiewicz reads the dialogues against that grain, finding in them a rhapsodic mode that splits any single meaning and lets philosophy and poetry, seriousness and play, answer one another. Plato emerges, paradoxically, as an ally in what Deleuze called the overturning of Platonism.

Statkiewicz follows this mode through Plato's modern European readers, among them Nietzsche, Heidegger, Irigaray, Derrida and Nancy. He sets it apart from both the dogmatic and the dramatic readings common in recent scholarship, each of which takes the modern idea of the subject for granted. Demanding and original, it rewards anyone drawn to continental philosophy, literary theory or the old quarrel between the philosopher and the poet.