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How to tell the sophist from the Sophist? Plato scholars acknowledge that there is no formal way to distinguish the two cases: neither capitalization nor italics are available in Greek manuscript, and there are no other formal marks that would allow us to tell the difference between the man and the text. Nevertheless , they would assure us, it is possible to determine whether Plato is talking about the man or about his own dialogue whenever he writes ho sophistes (the Sophist/the sophist). In fact he never has his own dialogue in mind in the Sophist: if he did, the certainties of Plato scholarship might suffer, and in the end, philosophy would be hardly distinguishable from sophistic tricks. We should not sin against modern logic and allow self-referential statements to be taken seriously. A Sophist condemning sophists for lying should puzzle us no more than a Cretan who says that all Cretans are liars. Don’t we have Bertrand Russell’s set theory to protect us against such riddles? Thus, Plato, the writer, or his character—characters especially can know nothing about the dialogue they are in—never has his own dialogue in mind. One passage, however, in the Statesman, seems to disturb this assurance and to question the identity of the writer and of the speaker. Indeed, to whom or what does the Elean Stranger refer when in the Statesman, he compares his and his interlocutor’s, the young 3 The Notion of (Re)Semblance in the Sophist (Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy) Good strategy: seem to pretend to resemble that which one truly resembles. —jean-luc nancy Perhaps Socrates would deny the possibility of distinguishing between icons and fantasms. —stanley rosen The first epigraph to this chapter comes from Nancy’s “Le ventriloque (ou de l’authenticité du Sophiste de Platon, et, donc, du Philosophe),” in Sylviane Agacinski et al., Mimésis des()articulations (Paris: AubierFlammarion , 1975), 296; my translation (French: “Bonne stratégie: sembler faire semblant de ressembler à ce à quoi on ressemble vraiment”). The second is drawn from Rosen’s Plato’s “Sophist”: The Drama of Original and Image (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 65. The Notion of (Re)Semblance in the Sophist 103 Socrates’ present conundrum with the one en toi sophistei (in the Sophist/with the sophist [Statesman 284b])? It is impossible to deny with certainty a reference to the dialogue here. C. J. Rowe, for example, translates the phrase “just as with the sophist” but immediately appends a note: “i.e., in the Sophist,” which completes his translation.1 What if we suspected the same reference to the dialogue behind any of the multiple occurrences of the word sophistes in the Sophist itself? asks Jean-Luc Nancy. Such a procedure, drawing Plato’s text into the uncertainties of the mimetic play of the sophist, would undermine the authority of Plato the author, which neither doctrinal nor “dramatic” interpreters are willing to question. It would also undermine the authority of the philosopher, whom traditional readings radically oppose to the sophist, and of the philosophical interpreter, who ultimately derives his or her own authority from that of the author. He or she would no longer be able to keep a distance from “his” or “her” text. In the terms of the Sophist (the sophist), a legitimate image of a thing would hardly be distinguishable from an illicit simulacrum, of which the sophist, the actor, and the rhapsode are the foremost examples. Plato’s Sophist is traditionally taken as a dramatic challenge to the ontology that underlies the representational system of the Republic and that constitutes the basis of both ancient—Aristotelian and Neoplatonic—and modern interpretations of Platonism. The dialogue questions the basic distinction between the two modes of representation, philosophy on the one side, and poetry/ mimesis on the other, which is supposed to govern Plato’s theory of being as idea and his politics of partition. But the challenge of the Sophist seems so radical that many contemporary thinkers turn to this dialogue in their desire to “overturn Platonism.” One knows the impact of Heidegger’s reading of this dialogue, in his lecture course of 1924–25, on his own thought of being and nonbeing, of truth as aletheia, of Dasein, and of logos as language.2 It is no accident that Being and Time begins with a lengthy quotation from the Sophist; the forgetfulness of being is measured against the bafflement of Theaetetus and the Elean Stranger exhibited in...

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