Circulating Authority: On Jill Frank's Poetic Justice

In recent decades, scholars such as Peter Euben, John Wallach, Arlene Saxonhouse, Sara Monoson, Christopher Rowe, and Elizabeth Markovits have read Plato's Republic for democracy by challenging the canonical view of it as an anti-democratic treatise that champions authoritarian rule by philosopher kings. This new democratic reading of the Republic has been made possible by employing one of two methods. The first takes the dialogical and dialectical structure of the Republic seriously in order to distinguish between the substantive teaching about the kallipolis (or city in speech), which is explicitly anti-democratic, and the collaborative and democratic construction of this kallipolis that occurs between Socrates and the other interlocutors. The second involves showing how Plato uses important elements of the Athenian democratic imaginary even in his critiques of democracy. In other words, it involves treating Plato as an immanent critic of a corrupt imperial democracy that falls below the standards actually held by Athenian democrats. Jill Frank's brilliant and startlingly original book, Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato's Republic, contributes to this project of reading Plato's Republic for democracy by introducing a third method that involves reading it in a register of negation. Unlike the scholars mentioned above, Frank argues that the interactions between Socrates and the other interlocutors of the dialogue, and even the figure of Socrates, are presented in problematic ways to prompt the reader to disidentify with them, and to imagine what is left out by these interactions and figures so as to achieve their own form of justice and self-authorization.

What also sets Frank's book apart from the scholarship mentioned above is that it offers the most systematic attempt to rebut ALL of the accusations that have been leveled against Plato's Republic, showing how his style of philosophic writing in fact embraces rather than rejects 1) mimēsis and poetry, 2) persuasion and imagination, 3) erōs, and 4) aisthēsis (sense perception) in order to instill a practice of democratic, self-limiting authority and judgment in its readers. In doing so it offers the most comprehensive understanding of the affective and aesthetic elements of Plato's philosophy now available in ancient political theory scholarship, and at the same time it offers a model of democratic judgment and authority that contributes to recent attempts to understand their aesthetic and affective dimensions.

In the first three chapters of the book, Frank offers a radically new interpretation of Plato's treatment of mimetic poetry and poetic knowledge that can be fruitfully compared with two of the most important books on the topic of mimēsis in the Republic: Ruby Blondell's The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues and Stephen Halliwell's The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Like Blondell and Halliwell, Frank pays careful attention to the dramatic structure, the playful nuances, and the performative contradictions of Plato's text in order to challenge the canonical view of the Republic as opposed to mimetic poetry and pedagogy. However, Frank's treatment of Platonic mimēsis is much more attentive to the ways in which this mimetic pedagogy instills and provokes forms of democratic ethical and political self-knowledge, judgment, and self-authorization.

Unlike Blondell, who takes Book 3's notion of mimēsis as imitation or self-likening to be the model for Plato's own mimetic pedagogy, Frank offers one of the most extensive and nuanced interpretations of Plato's views on mimēsis in Republic 10. She does so in order to show that it actually offers a critique of mimēsis as imitation or self-likening, and instead offers a notion of mimēsis as representation, which is the form of mimēsis that is necessary for poetic knowledge and a self-limiting form of democratic authority on the part of the reader. Mimetic pedagogy as self-likening (Blondell's view) presumes that Plato wants his readers to simply take...