The Cave of Images: Understanding Visual Politics in and Through Plato's Republic

Plato's Republic links seeing to philosophizing and civic order. Socrates denounces images, but the dialogue's inquiries depend on them while revealing and even enacting the mutual constitution of the visual and political fields. Introducing the text through work by the conceptual artist, Thomas Demand, and representative criticisms of Plato by Ernst Gombrich, Hannah Arendt, and Arthur Danto, I explore the key dependencies and performative moments. My reading undercuts prevailing approaches to Plato while presenting the politics of vision and the visuality of politics in ways relevant to the current image environment yet overlooked in much contemporary political science and theory.