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Preface “For those possessing no†q,” says Glaucon, “the measure for listening to such speeches is a whole life” (Rep. 450b).1 We are not told here, at least not directly, what the measure of this life would be, how this whole of life might receive its measure. But the statement does suggest that to give oneself over to these speeches, to be devoted to receiving them and what is at issue in them, is a task that takes over one’s life as a whole. It is already to allow one’s life to receive a certain measure, and to let it be determined thereby as a whole in a certain way. Life, as the proper measure for listening to these strange and difficult speeches, precisely because it is a listening , also comes to receive its measure. In this exchange between life and speech, the measure itself comes to be measured, yet measured only by what it measures. It thus cannot be missed that Glaucon’s remark, precisely by invoking a certain measure, also leaves us to consider that very measure as it opens on to an excess or lack of measure—if, that is, the life that finds itself in this exchange between life and speech does not simply return to itself, does not simply revert back to itself in a reiteration or reflection of identity, but rather also confronts itself outside itself, already ahead of itself. The very propriety of the measure, as life, thus finds itself ruptured by this ecstatic operation that is its own erotic necessity, since it proves to be a movement that cannot contain itself, that never will have been in a position to know itself as such. It is as if Glaucon were to say that the measure for such listening can have no measure at all, except insofar as life itself has a measure, except insofar as a measure comes to be imposed upon us, therefore, in life’s finality. The speeches to which Glaucon refers can speak, then, only as they speak to this ecstatic time of mortal life, because only this mortal xi time, the very limits of such a time, give to these speeches their alleged propriety, their sense of limit. If death, as the limit of speech, remains an ecstatic limit—simply because life as a “whole,” the life that we are, will have eluded us—it is no less true that this mortal necessity as such a limit has also already encroached upon life, as life anticipates its death, lives its death. One thus speaks here of a measure or a limit only by adhering to this twofold character of the limit, this double gesture in which the limit itself is put into relief precisely by the excess it harbors. How is a reading of Plato to unfold, allowing itself to be claimed by this erotic and mortal necessity, by the ecstatic limit announced in this statement ? If this book succeeds in such a reading, the first thing to admit is that it also falls far short of achieving a thorough “interpretation” of the Platonic dialogues. This is the case, if for no other reason than for the simple fact that too many texts have been left unaddressed, and too many questions left unasked and unanswered. I have been far too selective in my approach to claim something like a comprehensive and exhaustive justification for the theses I set forward in this study. I have not managed to make the law of this selection explicit. Nor can it be said that I have responded adequately to the veritable mountain of secondary literature that exists on Plato and Socrates and that continues to be produced. What is presented here is rather only a beginning, and one made, of course, within the measure of a certain time. Nevertheless, I would insist that this book does take a decisive step in furthering a different possible way of reading Plato. This step consists in the insight that the movement of the Socratic-Platonic løgoq must be encountered not simply as it speaks about nature (or f¥siq), not simply as it speaks to us in a way that could then be translated into the form of propositions and assertions. Instead, what is ventured here is a reading that follows this løgoq as if it itself were a manifestation of the nature or life that is at issue in it. Such a step may seem at...

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