Psychodynamic Practice, 2015 Vol. 21, No. 1, 19–35, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753634.2014.989714 Refusal and coercion in the treatment of severe Anorexia Nervosa: The Antigone paradigm John Adlam* Principal Adult Psychotherapist, SW London & St George’s Adult Eating Disorders Service, Springfield University Hospital, London, UK (Received 12 November 2013; accepted 16 September 2014) I examine dynamics of refusal and coercion in the reciprocal relationship between traumatised individuals suffering from severe forms of Anorexia Nervosa and fragmented systems of care engaged in the clinical endeavour of pressing food upon them. Inpatient services treating sufferers using various forms of force-feeding face the clinical challenge of refusal: refusal to eat – refusal to comply with treatment – ‘refusal to get better’. In this dynamic, the ‘irresistible force’ of compulsory treatment under the mental health act meets the ‘immovable object’ of the individual sufferer’s refusal to accept food and treatment on the terms offered. In writing this paper, I have worked alongside a small group of anonymous experts by experience. I take as my main ‘case material’ the story of Creon and Antigone, representing the societal ‘irresistible force’ and the individual ‘immovable object’. I explore some of the shared characteristics of present-day sufferers and I trace the history of the aesthetics of starvation in western culture back to the Antigone myth. I examine the paradigmatic collision between Antigone and Creon in different accounts of the story in order to develop hypotheses about the dynamics of negotiation, in pursuit of a radical reimagining of the terms of the encounter. Keywords: Anorexia Nervosa; refusal; force-feeding; asceticism; starvation Introduction Bartleby, never mind, then, about revealing your history; but let me entreat you, as a friend, to comply as far as may be with the usages of this office … in short, say now, that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable:– say so, Bartleby. At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable … Herman Melville, from Bartleby the Scrivener (1853/2010, p. 36). *Email: john.adlam1@btinternet.com © 2014 Taylor & Francis 20 J. Adlam In this paper, I examine dynamics of coercion and refusal in the reciprocal relationship between traumatised individuals suffering from severe forms of Anorexia Nervosa and fragmented systems of care caught up in the ‘clinical’ endeavour to press food upon them. I offer as my psycho-social case material the legend of Creon and Antigone dramatised in Sophocles’s play Antigone, written in 442–441BC; and retold and reinterpreted from that time to this (Anouilh, 1944/2000; Brecht, 1990; Heaney, 2005; Honig, 2013; Lacan, 1992; Sophocles, 1947). In the account I offer here, Creon, the tyrant of Thebes, represents and embodies the societal/ psychiatric ‘irresistible force’ while Antigone, Creon’s niece and the daughter of Oedipus, represents and embodies the individual/eating disordered ‘immovable object’. I use this ‘case history’ to illustrate an inter-group dynamic or paradigmatic encounter between, on the one hand, generations of ‘Antigones’ who have not felt able to take up their place in the domain of the living and, on the other hand, generations of ‘Creons’ whose moral and ethical authority to govern they have challenged in their different ways of being. I also draw upon anonymous contemporary ‘case material’: a group of sufferers have given informed consent for aspects of their treatment to form the background to this paper and have commented on successive drafts. They have also worked with me on two conference poster presentations arising out of this paper (Adlam et al., 2014a, 2014b). The story of Creon and Antigone stands as a paradigm for the experiences of all these sufferers – and of many others besides – and it allows me to write of the sorts of things that have happened to people in their situation, in childhood and in treatment, without exposing any individual’s particular suffering. I use my own experience as a psychotherapist in eating disorders treatment settings to argue that the refusal of these sufferers needs to be taken seriously – not as a pathological sign (although refusal of food is intrinsic to the disorder) but rather as representing the only place where it is possible for them to stand, in relation to the food that is prescribed for them and to the terms on which it is pressed upon them. I conclude by briefly identifying possible implications of a radical reimagining of this refusal. Refusal, misrecognition and coercion Treatment of Anorexia Nervosa on inpatient units in the UK frequently and perhaps increasingly takes place against the consciously stated wishes of the individual sufferer. ‘Increasingly’, because healthcare economics and politics mean that only the most severe cases attract funding for inpatient care and, anecdotally, because ‘severe’ cases present with greater severity and more complex co-morbidity than in the past. The introduction of the mental capacity act (MCA), alongside changes in the mental health act (MHA) and in the way in which it is used, mean that sufferers are more often treated involuntarily (for evidence of a general trend towards increased use of powers of detention under Psychodynamic Practice 21 the MHA, see House of Commons, 2013). For example, community treatment orders extend medical authority into outpatient treatment, but a patient has to be detained under Section 3 of the MHA until the point of discharge; or patients may be found to lack capacity within the terms of the MCA and then have treatment in their ‘best interest’ imposed upon them under the MHA (see e.g. Giordiano, 2010; Tan, Doll, Fitzpatrick, Stewart, & Hope, 2008). Inpatient treatment can do more harm than good (see e.g. Gowers, Weetman, Shore, Hossain, & Elvins, 2000; Treasure, Crane, McKnight, Buchanan, & Wolfe, 2011) and published testimony from service users concerning their experiences in treatment can be critical (see e.g. Allison, 2009; Sister Marie Thérèse, 2008). It may even be that the very existence of specialist eating disorders inpatient units has iatrogenically generated more extreme syndromes of ‘disordered eating’, by providing tantalising glimpses of a regressive Eden to fuel the out-group’s unconscious search for containment. Inpatient eating disorders units can also be places where institutional abuse, and abusers, can flourish, both in terms of gross sexual enactments and of more subtle but no less insidious dynamics such as voyeurism (see e.g. Connan & Tanner, 2009; NHS London, 2008 (the ‘David Britten report’); Scanlon & Adlam, 2011). The central challenge that faces clinical staff is refusal itself: refusal to eat – refusal to comply with treatment – refusal to accept a medical account of the illness or of what ‘getting better’ might entail. These sufferers, like Melville’s Bartleby, ‘prefer not to’ have any part in the ‘usages’ with which they are expected to comply. Yet their refusal tends to get misrecognised and pathologised in narrow terms, merely as an aspect of the illness itself, or of the perceived problematic personality of the sufferer. Skårderud warns against the emotional ‘overreactions’ and potential aggression and rejection contingent upon the ‘hazardous reductionism’ of addressing severe disorders solely at the level of cognitive dysfunction (Skårderud, 2009, pp. 83–84). In ‘axis I’ terms (DSM-IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994), this ‘reductionism’ can cause the refusal to be seen as a consequence of overvalued ideas associated with the fear of weight gain or ‘fatness’; in ‘axis II’ terms, as a function, pejoratively construed, of the (often) suspected or diagnosed ‘co-morbid’ personality disorder(s) that starvation can obscure. Hinshelwood (1999) proposes that the ‘difficult patient’ is a construct born of our difficulty with the patient. Organisational defences against this uncomfortable insight, however, are strong and persistent. Clinicians in this field often strongly identify with the ‘provider’ role (Scanlon & Adlam, 2012). We may feel we need to know that we have ‘good stuff’ on offer and we want our patients to accept and enjoy our ‘food’. We may feel undermined, in our very sense of personal and professional self, if our ‘good food’ is refused or spoiled or purged, as if it were swill or poison. We prefer not to see ‘the problem’ in terms of the possibly dubious fare we prepare and of the problematic way in which it is offered. The consequent potential for unethical or abusive clinical 22 J. Adlam violence and retaliation (‘primitive human behaviour disguised as treatment’ (Main, 1957, p. 130)) is considerable. The ‘irresistible force paradox’ and the battleground of difference Refusal in Anorexia Nervosa thus becomes a threatening signifier of difference as between ‘us’ and ‘them’. A volatile stand-off develops in which it is as if the ‘irresistible force’ of compulsory treatment, backed by medico-legal and technological power, collides with the ‘immovable object’ of the individual sufferer’s refusal to accept the intervention on the terms offered. This is a ‘paradox’ because, by definition, there is no such thing as an immovable object in the context of an irresistible force, and vice versa: nonetheless, a catastrophic collision between those who force-feed and those who refuse food can feel and seem inevitable. The anthropologist Claude Lévi–Strauss contrasted ‘anthropophagic’ (cannibalistic) and ‘anthropoemic’ forms of hostile response to the dangerous difference of the other (Lévi-Strauss, 1955/2011). Anthropophagic responses involve ‘the absorption of certain individuals possessing dangerous powers’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1955/2011, p. 388). Problematic difference is abolished through being coercively incorporated – cannibalised, in fact: thus, for example, the Graeco–Roman myth of Kronos/Saturn devouring his children. There is no difference left, for now ‘we’ are all the same: and what is more, ‘we’ have taken on ‘their’ powers. A contemporary fictional epitome of this position might be the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Borg is a collective hive-like entity that coercively assimilates all other species it encounters: ‘resistance is futile’. In anthropoemic responses, by contrast, difference is abolished by being vomited out or evacuated. This concept is expressed socio-politically in Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (2006) or Agamben’s analysis of states of exception (Agamben, 2005). Lévi–Strauss described a process of ‘ejecting dangerous individuals from the social body and keeping them … in isolation’ (ibid.). There is no difference left to trouble us: the problematically different other has been expelled from consciousness. Assaults upon difference are inherent in certain eating disordered behaviours, such as the rigid separation of foods, or the spoiling of food by mashing it into one undifferentiated mess (Scanlon & Adlam, 2012; Wood, 2012). If a sufferer ‘beats the system’, they may be anthropoemically expelled, in an uneasy collusion with ‘the illness’ that may have at its core the tacit imperative of not allowing the sufferer to ‘offend’ by dying on the ward. If, on the other hand, the system of care brings force to bear upon the dangerously different refuser of food, the ‘immovable object’ may be overwhelmed and anthropophagically coerced into an (arguably) empty compliance with normative demands. Thus, the in-group and out-group are locked into a reciprocal process of almost parodic mirroring. Psychodynamic Practice 23 George Steiner suggests that the central place of Antigone’s story in the cultural imagination of the West stems from its depiction of the ‘five principal constants of conflict in the condition of man’: between men and women; between age and youth; between society and the individual; between the living and the dead and between men and gods (1986, p. 231). I would add a sixth: the confrontation between included and excluded, between housed and unhoused. Antigone is disembodied: she cannot find ‘housing’ within her own skin. Her collision with Creon implies the question: ‘whose body is it anyway?’ Creon acts for the societal ‘us’ – indeed, he insists that he has all our ‘best interests’ at heart – whilst Antigone refuses on behalf of the excluded ‘them’. The Antigone paradigm marks a battle between in-group and out-group for territorial or ‘colonial’ control of the body itself (see e.g. Berkshire, 2011; Scanlon & Adlam, 2013a): a contest that Creon and Antigone play out to the bitter end. The story of Creon and Antigone Only in death can she find peace; thus her whole life is consecrated to sorrow, and it is as though she had set a limit, a dike against the woe that might perhaps have fatally transmitted itself to a succeeding generation. (Kierkegaard, 1843/1992, p. 161) It is now time to turn to my ‘case material’. In what follows, the reader is invited both to hear the ancient Sophoclean story retold and to imagine an ‘Antigone’, and other members of the ‘cast’, as protagonists in a contemporary psychodrama. Case history Antigone was born into the royal family of the city of Thebes. Her grandfather Laius and his wife Jocasta had a male child, Oedipus, whom they cast out to die of exposure upon the hill-side (as was customary in those times when a child was unwanted). This they did because of and despite a warning from the Gods that if they had a son, that child would eventually kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus’ life is spared by those to whom the task of infanticide is entrusted and he is adopted into another aristocratic family in Corinth. In manhood he hears of the prophecy and, wishing to spare his adoptive parents (believing them to be his biological mother and father), he becomes a homeless wanderer. At a crossroads, he murders a man who will not give way. Unbeknownst to Oedipus, this man is his true father, Laius. Oedipus eventually comes to Thebes, where the city is plagued by a monster (the Sphinx). Oedipus vanquishes the Sphinx and is rewarded with the Kingship and the hand of Jocasta in marriage. Thus, the dreadful prophecy is fulfilled. Antigone is the youngest of the four children of this incestuous union: Oedipus is therefore her (half-) brother as well as her father; Jocasta is both her mother and her grandmother. 24 J. Adlam The citizens of Thebes (the ‘Chorus’) preside passively and collusively over this arrangement. They have benefited from the death of the Sphinx and are disinclined to be curious, for fear of putting two and two together: for they are well aware of the prophecy and of the impudence (and imprudence) of imagining the will of the Gods can be denied by human agency. When the family secret is revealed, not only must Antigone discover the incestuous tangle of her birth, but her mother hangs herself in shame and horror and her father blinds himself. When Oedipus is finally expelled by Creon (Jocasta’s brother), Antigone becomes her father’s eyes, sharing his wanderings in exile. Her sister Ismene waits at home while their brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, fall into bitter conflict as rivals for the status of head of the family. The brothers kill each other in battle outside the city gates and Creon, now sole ruler of Thebes, decrees that Polynices was a traitor and must be denied burial rites, on pain of death. Antigone’s allegiance is to her brother Polynices (and to her brother/father Oedipus?) and to the Divine laws concerning burial, not to Creon’s temporal power. She refuses to recognise Creon’s authority and is caught sprinkling earth upon Polynices’ corpse. Creon has her buried alive in punishment. He is challenged by his son Haemon (Antigone’s fiancé) and by the prophet Teiresias. Creon relents when he realises he is losing authority to govern. He hastens to rescue Antigone from her walled-in tomb, but finds her hanging from a noose. Haemon in turn commits suicide – and shortly afterwards, so too does Eurydice, Creon’s wife. Discussion Clinically, this is a story about the transgenerational transmission of trauma. The Chorus tells Antigone her death is ‘the expiation you must make for the sin of your father’. Antigone knows she is ‘curse-ridden, doomed to this death by the ill-starred marriage that marred my brother’s life’ (Sophocles, lines 866–874). The victim/perpetrator syndrome in Oedipus himself is beyond the scope of this paper; but there is no disputing his traumatisation, beginning from the moment in infancy when his feet are pierced to prepare him for death by exposure: no imagining what torment Jocasta had to undergo. Antigone takes all this upon herself, declaring herself the only true survivor of her line, ‘last daughter of your royal house’ (id., line 927); and she is herself multiply traumatised and bereaved. Like Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1955, p. 236), Antigone ‘can only suffer and die’. Antigone has ‘complex post-traumatic stress’ (see e.g. Garland, 2004): the catastrophe of her brother’s deaths at each others’ hands and the edict to leave Polynices unburied reactivates the earlier trauma around her father’s shame and self-blinding and her mother’s suicide. It is not only that there is ‘abuse’ in her childhood (the incestuous union): her ‘treatment’ in adulthood becomes a replay of that abuse. This then is a first point of reference for our contemporary ‘Antigones’, taken as a group: they may or may not have been abused, Psychodynamic Practice 25 but they have in some way taken upon themselves their parents’ and grandparents’ bereavement and trauma – or had it thrust upon them. Kierkegaard suggests that Antigone’s ‘inherited guilt contains the self-contradiction of being guilt yet not being guilt’ (1843/1992, p. 149). There is a significant clinical literature on the effect upon sufferers of bereavement and trauma in the parents (see e.g. Fonagy, Steele, Moran, Steele, & Higgitt, 1993; Fraiberg, Adelson, & Shapiro, 1975; Huline-Dickens, 2005). Creon would have Antigone answer and endorse the demands of the living but her thoughts are with McNeill’s (2011) ‘beloved dead’. The incestuous knot in Antigone’s family tree is also of central importance. One meaning of the name ‘Antigone’ is ‘anti-generation’ (McNeill, 2011). Antigone’s predicament concerns the terrible confusion, within her family history, of the difference between the generations. In that moment of his triumph and fall, when Oedipus answers the legendary riddle of the Sphinx, he does comprehend this difference; but in that moment the boundaries collapse. As already noted, there are powerful forces in the paradigm of Anorexia Nervosa that seek to eradicate difference. Many influential accounts hold that the illness functions as a defence against pubertal changes and the experiences that a post-pubertal body might be called upon to metabolise (see e.g. Crisp, 1990, 2006; although not all sufferers accept this formulation). Antigone herself renounces received ideas concerning what sort of woman she is expected to become or to perform: ‘no wedding-day; no marriage-music; death will be all my bridal dower’ (lines 805–806). Antigone is a ‘parentified child’: another familiar presentation. She has to grow up too fast: age-appropriate spaces for play in childhood and adolescence were denied to her. Her father blinds himself, so Antigone must hold his hand and lead him through the wilderness. She also protects her siblings. For her brothers in particular, she would sacrifice everything. Antigone’s ‘symptoms’ are expressed on behalf of the family system that disowns the true nature of the ailment (the incestuous tangle), while the Chorus stands for the self-interested bystanders, familial and societal, in so many stories of childhood trauma. Antigone is also ‘high-functioning’ and/or ‘of good family’ (see e.g. Bruch, 2001; Lacey, 1982; McClelland & Crisp, 2001). She is arrogant, as is Creon and as was Oedipus before her (see Steiner, 1993) and her grandfather Laius, for imagining they could outwit the Gods: on one level, arrogance is the downfall of them all. Much is expected of Antigone: it is somehow felt there is nothing she could not achieve, if she set her mind to it. But she is ‘born to resist’ (McNeill, 2011): her energies are not channelled into the pro-social path set up for her. She stands in a particular relationship to the Law, understood both in its external, societal manifestations – the laws of Gods and of men – and as an internal voice – that Law which decrees that the sufferer is undeserving of her place at the table or is forbidden food or enjoyment. Antigone recognises no limit in pursuit of truth, no limit to her desire – but her desire is not for the good(s) that others would have her pursue. It is her desire that takes 26 J. Adlam her to that land ‘between life and death’ or, as Lacan puts it, ‘between two deaths’ (Lacan, 1992; see also Lawrence, 2001). Asceticism and the aesthetics of starvation Anouilh’s Antigone (1944/2000) links the psycho-social dynamics of refusal and autonomy in Sophocles’ play to the aesthetics of thinness and the rejection of societal expectations concerning the uses of a woman’s body. Antigone is introduced as ‘the thin dark girl whose family didn’t take her seriously’ (2000, p. 3). She tells Haemon their imagined future son would have had ‘an unkempt, skinny little mother, but one who was safer than all the real mothers put together’ (p. 18). Creon, trying to talk her out of self-destruction or ‘death by cop’, exclaims: ‘Have you put to death? … you little sparrow! You’re too thin. You want to fatten yourself up a bit and give Haemon a nice sturdy son!’ (pp. 33–34). Anouilh’s adolescent Antigone not only prefers herself slender: she is refusing to enter those twin prisons of desirability and fertility. She allows us to trace an aesthetic thread that winds through the history of western culture. Hamsun’s Hunger (1890/2001) and Kafka’s The Fasting Artist (1996) explore the aesthetic of starvation, playing in different ways with altered states of consciousness and the relationship between subject and audience in starvation. In Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky, 1951), Raskolnikov has experiences of hunger and social exclusion of a similarly dissociative quality. Bruch writes of sufferers who ‘consider self-denial and discipline the highest virtue and condemn satisfying their needs and desires as shameful self-indulgence’ (2001, p. xxii). Hegel, in his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (1993), describes the subject who ‘desires to penetrate into truth … but yet is unable to abandon its isolation and retirement into itself’ (p. 73) and suffers ‘morbid saintliness and yearning’ (ibid.). Lacey (1982) discusses the cult of Saint Wilgefortis (also known as Saint Uncumber), the Christian daughter of a pagan King of Portugal, who refused to accept her role as chattel in a political marriage. She starved herself and grew a beard (hirsutism being a recognised symptom of hormonal disturbance caused by starvation in women): her husband-to-be walked away in disgust and her furious father had her crucified. Bruch and other commentators have explored the links to ascetism in the Judaeo–Christian tradition and to Anorexia Nervosa’s mediaeval counterpart, ‘Anorexia Mirabilis’ (Bell, 1985; Bruch, 2001; Crisp, 1990; Huline-Dickens, 2000; Rampling, 1985; Skårderud, 2008a, 2008b; Vandereyecken & van Deth, 1996). Keats wrote that ‘[M]y heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’ (1819/1986, p. 276). Keats here evokes Socrates’ ‘noble death’ (of hemlock) (Plato, 1993). Like Antigone, Socrates is sentenced to death and takes death into his own hands. Christian ascetism and the aesthetics of sacrifice and martyrdom owe much to Plato’s Psychodynamic Practice 27 account of Socrates’ calm and self-denial and all this was amplified by the Romantic movement and the arrival of mass media (see Adlam, 2014; Alvarez, 1974; Campbell, 2005; Nietzsche, 1968; Russell, 1996, pp. 615–622). The practice of Anorexia Nervosa may also be compared to askesis, the arduous and extended physical and mental training to a life of rigour and self-denial in pursuit of ‘perfection by self-discipline’ (Cutler, 2005) that was embraced by Cynic philosophers such as Diogenes, following Socrates’ example. These aesthetic and philosophical threads that run back to ancient Greece have perhaps been overlooked by other commentators in the field of eating disorder. Antigone is the archetypal figure in this continuous tradition and this aesthetic, I suggest, has become the inheritance of our present-day Antigones. On inpatient eating disorder wards, sentences beginning ‘you look …’ or ‘you look like …’ are virtually taboo, and yet there is undoubtedly a powerful aesthetic to the ailment in its contemporary manifestation. There are modes of visual self-representation here that demand to be understood. Here, finally is ‘Gertrude’ from The Golden Cage (Bruch, 2001): I created a new image for myself and disciplined myself to a new way of life. My body became the visual symbol of pure ascetic and aesthetics, of being sort of untouchable in terms of criticism. (2001, pp. 17–18) Perhaps we can consider Wilgefortis, who ‘uncumbered’ herself of her unwanted obligations by refusing food (or Catherine of Sienna, who also fasted in order to be freed of an arranged marriage (Rampling, 1985; Skårderud, 2008a)), as just one of many Antigones down through the ages who have embodied and performed, through starvation, and in paradoxical pursuit of autonomy, an aesthetic of covert resistance against patriarchal colonisation of the female body. Clinical implications: the collapse of connection in the encounter I have taken some time to establish the figure of Antigone in symbolic, historical and clinical terms. The figure of Creon stands for the power of in-groups and dominant discourses, including the dominance of psychiatry (see e.g. Foucault, 1961/2001, 1963/2003) and, by extension, the power of the multi-disciplinary team on an inpatient ward. Creon also stands, via processes of projective and introjective identification between out-group and in-group, for the internal tyrant in the mind of the sufferer: ‘you make out of your body your very own kingdom where you are the tyrant, the absolute dictator’ (‘Hazel’, from Bruch, 2001, p. 62). If we are to reimagine what happens when Creon’s ‘irresistible force’ encounters Antigone’s ‘immovable object’, we must identify the failures of dialogue and negotiation that lead to collision. 28 J. Adlam Inflexibility, antinomy and desire In Sophocles’ account, Creon and Antigone scarcely negotiate at all. They are ‘without pity or fear’: a collaborative reimagining of their shared predicament is beyond them. They clash, but their attempt to find common ground is limited to one exchange: [Creon: establishing responsibility] ‘Do you admit, or do you deny the deed?’ [Antigone: uninterested, almost distracted] ‘I do admit it. I do not deny it.’ … [Creon: querying reality testing] ‘Did you know the order forbidding such an act?’ [Antigone: not accepting his authority to issue the order] ‘I knew it, naturally. It was plain enough.’ [Creon: assessing capacity] ‘And yet you dared to contravene it?’ [Antigone: the ‘immovable object’] ‘Yes.’ … [Creon: the ‘irresistible force’, anthropoemically] ‘Go then, and share your love among the dead. We’ll have no woman’s law here ….’ [lines 442–448, concluding with lines 523–524; my parentheses] By the time Creon realises his terrible error of judgement, events are already irrevocably in motion; and it is only ‘between [her] two deaths’ that Antigone can be at all regretful about what has been lost (Lacan, 1992). Lacan writes that for Antigone ‘life can only be approached, can only be lived or thought about, from the place of that limit where her life is already lost’ (1992, p. 345). He argues that desire, impeded neither by pity nor fear, drives both Creon and Antigone beyond that limit. Creon is driven to inflict a ‘second death’ upon Polynices. It is not enough that his brother has killed him: his body must be left to the carrion crows; his soul denied its resting-place. Antigone identifies with imperatives of kinship that exclude any other possibility than defiance of Creon’s edict. Lacan (1992) also emphasises the problems of antinomy and of Creon’s inflexible pursuit of ‘the good of all as the law without limits, the sovereign law … the good cannot reign over all without an excess emerging whose fatal consequences are revealed to us in tragedy’ (Lacan, 1992, pp. 318–319). For Creon, the burial of Polynices would constitute an assault upon the body politic, on the principle of the ‘good of all’, that the State could not endure – in the same way that a patient’s refusal to eat would be perceived as destructive of a weight gain regime that her peers on the ward were following. The ‘excess’ is that the Gods must then be affronted by Polynices’ decaying corpse and by his soul being denied entry to the land of the dead (on the ward, the excess is that a patient may be denied, in the name of the good of the group, the possibly crucial intervention that might reengage her). The antinomy is manifest in Ismene’s dilemma – shall she risk the wrath of the Gods or of the State, in considering where her duty lies: to the out-group’s ‘Anorexic Law’, that holds food to be inadmissible, or to the Temporal Law of the in-group, that says she will die if she will not admit it? Psychodynamic Practice 29 An excess of zeal Anouilh (1944/2000) does imagine Creon and Antigone entering into a negotiation. Creon shows his own vulnerability and longing and then uses reasoned argument to deconstruct Antigone’s refusal. Each sees in the other’s eyes some moment of hesitation to see things through to the bitter end. Antigone falters, momentarily retreats from the stand she has taken. The possibility emerges that the ‘irresistible force paradox’ is primarily a state of mind in the inter-group dynamic and the professional/patient encounter and not necessarily a dynamic that must be enacted. However, Creon makes a fateful mistake. He presses his case too hard and the encounter collapse back into lethal confrontation. In renarrating Anouilh’s account here, I deliberately merge the play and the clinical setting. Initially Creon is rough with Antigone. He seeks to overwhelm her resistance: he threatens her with detention and force-feeding. Antigone sneers: ‘All you can do is have me put to death’ (p. 36). Creon bemoans the cares of (psychiatric) office: it’s a dirty job, he implies, but someone has to do it. He doesn’t want to have to tube-feed people, to terrify and traumatise them. Antigone retorts: ‘That’s your look-out. I didn’t say yes! [to the ‘dirty job’] … I can still say ‘no’ to anything I don’t like … I alone am the judge’ (p. 38). Creon is exasperated – can’t Antigone understand the ways of the world? Antigone doesn’t want to understand. ‘I’m here to say no to you, and to die’ (p. 40). She almost forces him to ‘be Creon’: to become the executioner. Creon understands clearly that she despises him for his compromises and fudges. He appeals to reason – does she not know how shallow are the myths and cognitive distortions of the ‘refusenik’ propaganda in whose name she is now preparing to die? ‘Please don’t make me make you “be Antigone” here’, he might almost be saying. Creon then plays his trump card: he isn’t even sure which body he buried and which he left for the vultures (such was the violence of the two brothers’ mutual slaughter). Why ‘draw a line in the sand’, he seems to be saying, if ‘Body Mass Index’ (BMI) is only a very approximate piece of pseudo-science and he isn’t even sure which height measurement to use to calculate it? Must Antigone really perish in the abstract cause of her beloved brother’s dignity in death? Antigone wavers – ‘Why have you told me all this?’ ‘Would it have been better to let you die as part of it?’ asks Creon. Antigone concedes – ‘Perhaps. I believed in it’ (p. 44). She makes to go to her room: she consents to the care plan. Creon has done enough for one ‘keywork session’ but now he urges her to marry Haemon. She has her whole life before her, the received future beckons. Antigone is as if spellbound: perhaps she will go for ‘full recovery’ after all. But Creon has to feel good about what he offers – he is over-identified with the role of feeder – and he wants her to enjoy her food. He is chummy with her: he says he was young once. He says ‘get married quickly, Antigone, and 30 J. Adlam be happy’ (p. 45). He invites her to concede the passing of time and the transience of truth itself. ‘Life is probably nothing other than happiness’, he philosophises (ibid.): and in that moment – he loses her! ‘What kind of a happy woman will Antigone grow into?’, she demands (p. 46). What compromises and betrayals will be necessary? Antigone’s voice here is echoed in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘I know that one can compromise and live in the world while believing in the eternal. That is called accepting. But I loathe this term and want all or nothing’ (1942/2005, p. 84). Negotiation, in the sense of ‘collaborative re-imagining’ that I am intending, has collapsed: Creon and Antigone are newly entrenched in their reciprocal roles of ‘Creon’ and ‘Antigone’ and the anthropophagic/anthropoemic impulses dominate. Creon is now in a fury again. A moment ago, Antigone ‘had capacity’ and he was delighted that she was ‘correctly’ opting for integration and acceptance. Now that she reaffirms her refusal, she is ‘crazy’, a ‘fool’: she ‘doesn’t know what she’s saying’ (pp. 46–47). But Antigone now sees him clearly: ‘you know I’m right, but you’ll never admit it because you’re trying to defend that happiness of yours … you disgust me, all of you, you and your happiness!’ (p. 47). Connection has been lost: the irresistible force and the immovable object collide. Clinical implications: the ‘outermost limit of daring’? CHORUS: … you have gone your way To the outermost limit of daring And have stumbled against Law enthroned. … authority cannot afford to connive at disobedience. You are the victim of your own self-will. ANTIGONE: And must go the way that lies before me. From Antigone, Sophocles, lines 860–879 Antigone, then, would have us be cautious of inflexibility and zeal and be mindful of potential antinomies generated by our attempts to regulate her dissidence. But what happens when she denies the laws of action and consequence and therefore Creon’s conventional ‘behavioural’ incentives of ‘carrot and stick’, of privileges granted or withheld, count for nothing? If it is illegal to eat, in the terms of the internal law in Antigone’s mind, how then can Creon ‘authorise’ or legitimise the taking in of calories? What if the ward ‘boundary for all’ says one cannot have leave until one reaches a ‘relatively safe’ BMI of 13.5; yet a particular sufferer has a discharge plan involving maintenance at a BMI of 13? If Antigone has learned from bitter experience that recovery on Creon’s terms means weight restoration and the ‘normal’ parameters of womanhood, why would she not refuse a treatment that forces her to metabolise dread experiences in her history which no words can process? What Psychodynamic Practice 31 becomes of Antigone and Ismene when two Laws collide, and there’s no telling, amid the chaos, which Law is the Ass? Bruch wrote that sufferers find themselves in ‘a desperate fight against feeling enslaved and exploited … they would rather starve than continue a life of accommodation’ (2001, p. xxii). Camus thought that there was ‘no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn’ (1942/2005, p. 117). Where mutual contempt is the currency of the encounter, mutual destruction is assured. There is more here than mere avoidance of the twin pitfalls of inflexibility and zeal – of ‘lack of conviction’ and of ‘passionate intensity’ (Scanlon & Adlam, 2012). Creon and Antigone, to develop and sustain a negotiation, must be able jointly to reimagine their reciprocal roles: to take each other seriously; to be curious about each other; to remember the equality of their common humanity (Rancière, 1987/ 1991). It is not always easy for the ‘Creons’ of inpatient units to learn from Antigone and Ismene how best we might sit with them in their distress: we pathologise their refusal and thereby hold them incapacitous to teach us. Trapped within the structures of our diagnostic system, we fall back (in bewilderment and resentment, I suggest) upon the dictum that ‘refeeding is the only thing known to work’; it then becomes, de facto, ‘disordered’ to disagree. I suggest, for example, that the Chorus, then and now, is wrong to portray Antigone as the ‘victim of her own self-will’: ‘deliberate self harm’ is a flawed and unhelpful concept (see Scanlon & Adlam, 2013b). However, both Creon and Antigone collapse back, in their minds, into the paradigm of the irresistible force paradox. Creon can become as perversely and self-defeatingly fixated on pushing Antigone’s weight up to, say, 30 kilograms, as Antigone can be on setting a ceiling of 29. My purpose here has been to glimpse and grasp the elusive possibility that both parties are unconsciously locked into – have too strong a valency for – the paradigmatic collision-as-equilibrium in which both Creon and Antigone are doomed. If there is self harm, it is in the system as well as in the individual. Antigone is consistent in her self-representation, but perhaps only in Lacan’s ‘second death’ can her autonomy be realised. Two pressing questions follow from this observation. The first is whether the clinical and legal frameworks currently in place do violence to the individual sufferer in her pursuit of agency and self-realisation. If Antigone’s difficulties are indeed so complex, then is the ‘Axis I’ account of Anorexia Nervosa an adequate description of her predicament? If Antigone and all those of her sisters who suffer with severe Anorexia Nervosa are held to be by definition incapacitous, as many experts argue, then how can we find a frame wherein we can take seriously her refusal as something other than irrational and pathological? The second is whether it is possible to imagine an encounter in which she can take up a more autonomous position without having to surrender her autonomy in the very moment of its realisation, as Butler (2000) holds Antigone to have done. Butler argues that Antigone demands nothing less of us than the radical refiguring of kinship itself: not just a new law to resolve 32 J. Adlam the antinomy – ‘a law that defies conceptualisation’ – but a new idea of family is called for (2000; p. 33). If the familial norms that subliminally inform ‘treatment’ have been so utterly abandoned (or transcended?), then perhaps it is Creon who needs most urgently to follow Antigone to the ‘outermost limit of daring’ and to rethink the terms upon which he engages with that refusal which hitherto has so confounded him. Acknowledgements Professor Wayne Martin of the Essex Autonomy Project very generously shared ideas with me and commented in detail on an early draft of this paper. Professor Finn Skårderud provided much support, encouragement and inspiration. Dr Caroline Pelletier hosted a Lacan Reading Group at the Institute of Education which first helped me to see how the Antigone myth might illuminate something of the clinical challenges on the ward where I work. The patients on that ward, down through the years, gradually taught me to stop interpreting at them and start listening to them more carefully and I thank them for their courage and perseverance. Finally, I am particularly and profoundly grateful to my anonymous colleagues who are working with me on this project: this paper could not have been written without them. Notes on contributors John Adlam is a principal adult psychotherapist with the SW London and St George’s Adult Eating Disorders Service at Springfield University Hospital and also Consultant Adult Forensic Psychotherapist with South London and Maudsley Forensic Services at the Bethlem Hospital. He was formerly principal adult psychotherapist with the Outreach Service of the Henderson Hospital Democratic Therapeutic Community and vicepresident of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. He is a founding member of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and has published widely in the fields of homelessness, eating disorder, personality disorder and social exclusion. He is co-editor of two books: The Therapeutic Milieu Under Fire: Security and Insecurity in Forensic Mental Health and Forensic Music Therapy, both published in 2012 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers (London). References Adlam, J., & An Anonymous Group of Experts by Experience. (2014a, March). Refusal and coercion in the inpatient treatment of Anorexia Nervosa: Antigone and Creon in search of an equilibrium. Poster presentation, Eating Disorders International Conference, London. Adlam, J., & An Anonymous Group of Experts by Experience. (2014b, December). Project antigone: A psychosocial exploration of the dynamics of food refusal and force feeding. Poster presentation Psychosocial Connections: Practice, Policy and Research, APS/UCLan, Preston. Adlam, J. (2014, July). 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Copyright of Psychodynamic Practice is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Untergang und Ubergang: The Tragic Descent of Socrates and Zarathustra MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFF I. Through meticulous scholarship and innovative interpretation, Robert Gooding-Williams argues that we must approach the question of modernism historically, especially in relation to the ancients. As the title alone, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism {ZDM), suggests, we must revisit Dionysus in order to understand Zarathustra. The striking juxtaposition of ancient and modern in the title invites us to ask: How does Zarathustra relate to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Greek tragedy? The young Nietzsche's esteem for the Greeks can hardly be overstated; he refers to the Greeks as "our luminous guides" {BT 23) and writes of his desire to "stimulate among the students an interest in the careful interpretation of Aristotle and Plato."' Above all, Plato's Socrates held a pivotal position for Nietzsche throughout his life. Even in later works such as Z, Nietzsche continues to wrestle with Plato and Socrates, to esteem them and evoke them while simultaneously questioning them. One of the particular strengths of Gooding-Williams's book lies in the way it relates Nietzsche to myriad figures from the history of philosophy as well as to recent trends in analytical philosophy. But if we challenge the book's assumptions on Plato and Platonism, we will discover a more three-dimensional understanding of both Plato and Nietzsche. Nietzscheans today, I maintain, must concern themselves with Plato in order to remain true to the spirit of Nietzsche as well as that of Plato. A return to Plato—^though a different Plato, liberated from commonplace assumptions—thus allows us to appreciate Gooding-Williams's readings of Zeven more: a new reading of Plato (which I will sharply distinguish from Platonism) yields a new reading of Nietzsche. By complicating our readings of Plato and Socrates, I aim to enhance the provocative readings of Gooding-Williams, to carry his analysis one step frirther by applying his perceptive insights on Nietzsche to Plato. I will focus on his reading of Zarathustra's prologue and relate it more extensively to selected passages from the Republic and the Symposium, two classics that Nietzsche both evokes and parodies. Although Gooding-Williams stresses Nietzsche's departure from Plato, I will explore Nietzsche's creative, if ambivalent, inheritance from both Socrates and Plato. JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 34, 2007. Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 61 UNTERGANG UND OBERGANG 62 While I cannot do justice to the complexity of ZDM, I will focus on the leitmotif of Untergang and Obergang that runs throughout the book. In particular, I ask how the opening passages of the Republic and Zarathustra invite us to reconsider the relation between the authors, and the heroes, of both works. On my reading, Plato andNietzsche create quasi-fictional heroes of their dramas who must go under in order to go over: Socrates and Zarathustra must submit to the Untergang in all senses of the term (descent, decline, and destruction) for the sake of the Obergang; that is, they must descend, both literally and figuratively, and risk perishing, in order to teach humanity their lesson on ethics (even if the lesson is that ethics cannot be taught). Following Gooding-Williams's discussions of tragedy, I will suggest that both Socrates and Zarathustra take on the role of tragic heroes: their descent initiates a moment of tragic danger. Throughout, I will follow what we might call a principle of hermeneutic equality: Plato deserves and demands the same level of interpretive sensitivity as Nietzsche. We must take care with our interpretation of Plato, as Nietzsche himself did. As much as I admire Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 1 must take issue with the oversimplified generalizations the book makes about Plato as equivalent to a Christianized version of Platonism. But if we take as our example the precise, nuanced readings that Gooding-Williams develops of Nietzsche and then apply that same care to our readings of Plato, we wil 1 discover a better understanding of both thinkers. II. Nietzsche's thought lives in the tension between old and new, or, as GoodingWilliams writes: "Zarathustra occupies the interregnum between past and future" (ZDM 46). On the one hand, the whole tradition of Western philosophy originated with Plato, as Nietzsche knew, and even consists of "a" series of footnotes to Plato," as Whitehead famously put it. On the other hand, modernism rallies around the cry to "make it new," in Pound's phrase, and demands originality (ZDM 3). Heeding the vast influence of the Greeks and wanting to revive them, yet searching to create new values and a philosophy for the future, Nietzsche's attitude toward modernism (and by the same token "postmodernism") takes shape within this creative tension. Gooding-Williams defines modernism as the practice of "novelty engendering interruptions of received practices and traditions" {ZDM 3). If modernism is defined as the drive for novelty and originality, then one of its anxieties must be that it can never be new enough. As Gooding-Williams shows, any "Dionysian modernism" must be anxious, ironic, and aware of its own paradoxical status. A closely related problem arises in the Genealogy of Morals: "If a temple is to be erected, a temple must first be 63 MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFF destroyed; that is the law" (GMII:24). At first, Nietzsche implies that originality requires a radical break from tradition. But then he questions whether such a clean break is even possible and whether destroying and creating are inseparable: "[A]m I erecting an ideal or knocking one down?" (GMII:24). As Alexander Nehamas observes: "No temple, in short, is so radically new.... The notion of total originality is as 'other-worldly' as any ofthe ideas Nietzsche characterizes by that term."^ In Nietzsche's struggle to establish a Dionysian modernism, GoodingWilliams singles out the particular target of Plato's Socrates: "Zarathustra aims to interrupt the modern, rationalistic culture that he associates with the last man and that the early Nietzsche describes as 'Socratic'" {ZDM45). Our scientific, secular culture has its roots in the spirit of Socratic questioning. Throughout the book, Gooding-Williams operates from the grounding assumption, common among Nietzsche scholars, that Nietzsche opposes Plato and Platonism and inverts Platonic hierarehies. To a certain extent, of course, such opposition is undeniable. But the assumption that Plato can be equated to Platonism has recently—and rightly—come into question from many sides.-' Following this approach, my reading of Socrates and Plato partly complements and partly challenges that of Gooding-Williams: on his account, Nietzsche wants to interrupt and make a clean break from Socratie rationalism and from so-called Platonic/Christian values. But on my reading, Nietzsche faces the additional problem of how to interrupt Socrates and Plato if (as he sometimes realizes) they already interrupt themselves, that is, how to question the self-questioners, how to develop an ironic stance toward those who are themselves ironic. To do justice to Nietzsche's relation to Plato, we must, first, distinguish Socrates from Plato and, second, emphasize Plato's dialogues as dramas of many voices.'' Nietzsche himself does both: "Plato . . . was diverted by Socrates. Attempted characterization of Plato apart from Socrates: tragedy—profound view of love—pure nature—no fanatical renunciation" {PT "Science and Wisdom" 194). Gooding-Williams rightly cautions that we cannot simply equate Zarathustra with Nietzsche, by naively assuming that if the dramatic character says it, then the author must mean it literally. In agreement with this principle, I maintain, along with many others, that we cannot simply equate Socrates and Plato. In both cases, the assumption that either Socrates or Zarathustra functions simply as a "mouthpiece" for his author proves to be simplistic.^ As Nietzsche admits, Plato's Socrates proves far more complex than "Socratic man" or "Socratism." In fact, Plato takes artistic liberties with Socrates, transforms him into "a Socrates made young and beautiful" (Plato's Letter II), and gives us a variety of portraits of Socrates—all of them fundamentally different from the portraits given by his contemporaries Xenophon and Aristophanes.^ Plato's Socrates is indeed an "enigmatic ironist," as Nietzsche puts it (57"SelfCriticism" 1): at times, he demands reasons and logic, at others, he tells myths; UNTERGANG UND OBERGANG 64 paradoxically, he is the great erotic who has no lovers, the teacher who claims not to teach, the sage who knows that he does not know, the gadfly who claims to be the best citizen of the state that puts him to death. Plato indirectly criticizes his mentor and suggests the need to go beyond the limitations of Socrates, anticipating Zarathustra's caution: "One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil" (Z: 1 "Bestowing Virtue" 3). For instance, as I will discuss, in the Symposium, Plato portrays the shortcomings of Socrates as a lover and shows the need for a more earthly, more embodied, and more individual eros than usually assumed. As any sensitive reader of the dialogues quickly realizes, Plato is not an "otherworldly" escapist or dogmatist but a master dramatist who weaves in elements of comedy and tragedy, laughing and suffering, into his dialogues. In fact, Plato might not be a Platonist at all!'' Realizing this irony, Nietzsche conducts his own noble agon with Plato, a contest consisting of both respect and rivalry: Nietzsche admires Plato, even imitates his dramatic genius, while seeking to challenge his authority. And of course, Nietzsche has an ongoing love/hate relationship with Socrates, at times blaming him forthe advent of rationalism and nihilism but at other times praising his boldness, cunning, and irony. Indeed, I would venture to say that Socrates has to count as among the first to engage in a revaluation of values. At stake here lies Nietzsche's attempt at a break with the tradition and his claim to originality, to modernism. Perhaps Plato wrote Dionysian drama long before Nietzsche and cast Socrates into a tragic-comic role that surprisingly anticipates Zarathustra. In this regard, Nietzsche expresses deep respect for both Socrates and Plato, even as he expresses a need to overturn their legacy. Consider the ambivalence in the opening of BGE: "Of course, in order to speak as he did about the spirit and the good, Plato had to set truth on its head and even deny perspectivity, that fundamental condition of all life; indeed, in the role of doctor, we may ask: 'What has caused such a canker on the most beautiful plant of antiquity, on Plato? Did that wicked Socrates corrupt him after all? And deserved his hemlock?'" {BGE P). Stressing the continuity of perspectives {ZDM 26-27) between BGE and Z, Gooding-Williams writes of the passage above: Nietzsche, "in contrast to Socrates, but again like Zarathustra, will foster the beauty of these contemporaries, not corrupt it" {ZDM 305). Yet as soon as we have said that Nietzsche inverts Plato, we must admit that Plato inverts himself: Plato strenuously criticizes himself, his mentors, and all interlocutors, including the reader. His use of irony, drama, and self-questioning makes it difficult to fix any position as "Plato's doctrine." Further, I must stress a point so obvious as to be ofren overlooked: Plato wrote all the voices of the dialogues and communicates through all of them, not only through Socrates; he also wrote those late dialogues in which Socrates fades into the background or disappears altogether. 65 MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFF In the play of various voices and settings, Plato's dramatic, literary dialogues anticipate, even influence, Nietzsche's experimentation with a range of styles and genres. As Gooding-Williams writes, Nietzschean styles and genres are not merely decorative but meant "to confront us with new dilemmas" {ZDM 13). He is of course right to note that Plato's dialogues were in their day significant in the same way, originating a new set of problems in a new vocabulary {ZDM 12). The early Nietzsche recognizes this point as well when he compares Plato's dialogues to the modern novel in the range of voices and styles: "If tragedy had absorbed into itself all the earlier types of art, the same might also be said in an eccentric sense of the Platonic dialogue which, a mixture of all extant styles and forms, hovers midway between narrative, lyric, and drama, between prose and poetry.... Indeed, Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel" {BT 14). Both Plato and Nietzsche are highly innovative in finding new styles for new thoughts. Such styles themselves contribute to the philosophical statement.^ Like Plato, Nietzsche is a thinker always in motion, always challenging his own positions. As Gooding-Williams puts it: "[T]he essence ofNietzsche's rigor is his relentless, if often stressful practice of thinking against himself" {ZDM 83). The same goes for Plato: self-questioning keeps alive the spirit of the Platonic dialogue. It might even be the case that Nietzsche learned the vital tension, the dialectical movement, and the drama of thinking from Plato. III. "I went down [kataben] yesterday to the Piraeus. . . ." {Rep. 327a) "Down you must go [katabateon] to the Cave. ..." {Rep. 520c) "Ich ging hinunter... ." (Schleiermacher's [1828] 1971 translation of Plato's Republic) "Ich muss, gleich dir, untergehen...." (Z:l P 1) "Also began Zarathustra's Untergang." (Z: 1 P 1) "Was geliebt werden kann am Menschen, das ist, dass er ein Obergang und ein Untergang ist" {Z:l P 4) Why does the opening of Z repeat the downward movement of the Republic'? Why does the movement out of a cave, and back down into it, figure so prominently in both texts? The descent ofZarathustra evokes the descent of Socrates while at the same time challenging the authority of Socrates. The first few pages of both works, so rich in connotation and foreshadowing, invite a close reading and comparison. In doing so, I follow Gadamer's claim that it is "a hermeneutical requirement" to pay special attention to the beginnings and endings of books.' Nietzsche refers to Plato, who in turn refers to Homer, in a series of UNTERGANG UND OBERGANG 66 "agonistic allusions," as Gooding-Williams puts it, echoing Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. The style of Z obviously represents a parody of both the Republic and Luther's Bible: as Gooding-Williams puts it, "[T]he opening passages of Zarathustra are no less anti-Platonic than they are anti-Christian ..." {ZDM 51). In both cases, as he writes, "Zarathustra repeats and revives a received group of images and metaphors so as to invest them with a new significance" (ZZ)A/53). One ofthe most compelling and complex of such images is that of Zarathustra's Untergang as a repetition of Socratic katabasis: the openings of both works stress a "downgoing," a descent, a risk of decline and destruction. Zarathustra must go down to preach a lesson that everyone mocks and fails to understand, just as Socrates must go down to the ports and the markets, where he faces hostility, misunderstanding, and eventually the death penalty. The first line ofthe Republic holds a special significance. As Eva Brann tells us, ancient sources report that Plato rewrote this first line over and over.'" Socrates' initial descent to Piraeus, the port of Athens, plays several roles: it begins the dramatic movement of the Republic at a level of eommon understanding. Allan Bloom writes that this setting connotes a place known for "diversity and disorder," the foreign and the novel." But David Roochnik suggests instead that the Piraeus, as "a seaport teeming with people and gods from around the Mediterranean," connotes a positive sense of diversity'^ Historically, the Piraeus was the place of resistance to the Thirty Tyrants who would later rule Athens after her defeat by Sparta. As Bloom writes, "[T]his is the drama ofthe Republic, without which its teachings cannot be understood.. . . The participants discuss the best regime but are to experience the worst."'^ Given the background ofthe Peloponnesian War, which Plato expects his readers to know, the descent to Piraeus evokes all the dangers ofthe philosopher's descent into politics, as well as the decline of Athens after the war. This initial descent also foreshadows the descent of the philosopher to the Cave in Book 7. The down-going movement occurs a third time as well: the descent to Hades in the final Myth of Er {Rep. 614bflf.).Here, Plato alludes to Homer, who has Odysseus say: "I went down [kataben] to Hades" {Od. 23.252-53).''' The motif of down-going belongs to Plato's rivalry with Homer, whom he calls the educator of Greece {Rep. 606e). Of this rivalry, Nietzsche writes that Plato wants "to step into the shoes of the overthrown poet himself and inherit his fame" {HC 97). The Homeric allusion reinforces my suggestion that Plato casts Socrates into a heroic role to rival that of Odysseus: both must descend to Hades, although each brings a different lesson on life and death. Socratic katabasis means descent and decline in the negative sense but suggests as well a noble sacrifice for the sake ofthe liberation of others. Zarathustra's Untergang proves to be just as ambivalent and fraught with meanings as the Socratic descent. The term occurs twice in the first section of 67 MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFF the prologue, first, in one of Zarathustra's own statements to the sun: "Ich muss, gleich dir, untergehen"; and then in the narrator's final comment on the section: "Also began Zarathustra's Untergang." The two function on different levels and create a significant tension of meaning. The first line indicates Zarathustra's perception of himself as a sun, overfull and giving extravagantly. His first use of untergehen suggests the ordinary use of the term Sonnenuntergang, not any tragic sense of decline. But the final line contains a further ambiguity of reference: as Gooding-Williams writes, if we read it as a "parody of Neoplatonism," then it connotes Zarathustra's descent "as a cuplike carrier of Dionysian overfullness who will bring Dionysus to men and inspire them to create new values" {ZDM 55). But if we read it as a parody of St. Paul's letter to the Philippians, on the Christ's descent and crucifixion, then Untergang means destruction: on that reading, Gooding-Williams writes, humanity "incarnates the permanent death of Zarathustra's modernist enterprise and is in essence inadequate to receiving Zarathustra's overflow" {ZDM 57). There results "a certain asymmetry" between the character's understanding of his descent and the reader's: "[W]hat Zarathustra understands simply as his descent may as well result in his ruin and demise" {ZDM58-59). His descent may mean his undoing. In this way, "Zarathustra's failure to recognize the full range of untergehen" {ZDM 60) recollects and intensifies the plurality of meanings of the Socratic descent, which itself occurs three times in the Republic. Both philosophical heroes, on my interpretation, must descend in many senses: literally, they begin their down-going, and figuratively, they initiate their decline for the sake of their message. Viewed optimistically, they bring humanity the gift of an ethical lesson and a new liberation, but viewed tragically, they will meet with hostility and even death as the payback for their offering. Such is the danger of descending with a gift to bear.'^ As Gooding-Williams shows so well, Z functions as a drama of ideas; agreeing with this view, I want to stress that the Republic is one of the original philosophical dramas. Both works have an essential movement up and down or, more precisely, down to the Cave, up to the Sun, and then back down again. This dramatic movement provides a different context for each question and statement; if readers ignore the dramatic context and extract only single quotations, they are bound to oversimplify it or misunderstand them. Moments of drama in both works include discord, laughter, irony, recollection and forgetting, myth telling, and music making. Other characters contribute to the drama and stimulate the protagonists (and thus the readers), even through misunderstanding. Because both Plato and Nietzsche write dramatically, with multiple characters and perspectives, we must pay close attention to the context and the speaker, and we must listen to all the voices in their works, rather than naively equating the author with the protagonist. UNTERGANG UND OBERGANG 68 Notice the paradoxical, self-questioning status of both works: as GoodingWilliams shows, there is a significant tension between Zarathustra (the character) and Zarathustra (the text). But the problem is of course much older: Plato makes his readers ask whether the republic (the conversation between interlocutors and readers on justice and the soul, "the city of words") could even take place within the Republic (the Utopia or dystopia described by the text). As Rosen asks: "[A]re we meant to infer that the Republic, like Zarathustra, is a book for everyone and no one?"'^ Both works challenge readers for more nuanced and layered interpretations. Here we must pause to reconsider the meanings of parody.'^ On my view, parody is still a form of intimacy; references to descent in Z pay homage to Plato even as they turn his structures upside down, just as Plato's parodies of Homer still pay homage to the poet. Specifically, when Gooding-Williams uses the phase "parody of Neoplatonism," I am not sure whether he means strictly Neoplatonism or rather Plato. As I have tried to show, the opening of Z refers the reader quite specifically to the Republic. But as we have seen, even within the Republic the meanings of descent are plural and ambivalent, sometimes optimistic, sometimes tragic, and sometimes serving as a parody of Homer. A further complication lies in self-^axo&y: at times Nietzsche may poke fun at Zarathustra and his shortcomings. Of course, Nietzsche remarks of Zthat the phrase incipit tragoedia implies incipitparodia as well {GS P 1). As GoodingWilliams suggests, the parodies of Neoplatonism and Paul on Untergang combine to give a tragic overtone to the prologue {ZDM 59). Daniel Conway develops another way that Nietzsche evokes Socrates' descent to create a parody ofZarathustra: "Throughout Parts I and II, Zarathustra fails to realize that his criticisms of the Socratic icatabasis apply self-referentially as well. His unintentional self-parody consequently serves to nullify his intentional parody of Socrates Through his use of irony, Nietzsche is able to enlist Zarathustra as both protagonist and foil.... True to its name, Zarathustra's Untergang culminates in the 'demise' of his alternative to the Socratic icatabasis."^^ As Conway suggests, Zarathustra charges out to the public like a Socratic redeemer, without realizing that his message is bound to be misunderstood. How exactly do Untergang and Obergang relate to each other? In section 3 of the prologue, Zarathustra uses the image of the tightrope walker as a metaphor for overcoming and transformation. But as Gooding-Williams notes, the metaphor is ambiguous: humanity is likened first to the tightrope itself, then to the tightrope walker, then to a bridge of transition {Obergang), and finally to a destruction {Untergang). The challenge is that "Zarathustra needs to show how going-over and going-under can be phases of the same movement" {ZDM 67). He attempts to do so through his famous teaching: "Behold, I teach you the Obermensch: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can go under [untergehen]" 69 MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFF (Z: 1 P 3). The play of iiber and unter, lost in translation, reinforces the complex movement of going up and down, under, across, and over. In the next section ofthe prologue, containing the passage quoted above on humans as both a descent and a transition, variations of the word Untergang appear nine times. The repetition makes the point urgently and celebrates descent and decline with the striking phrase that virtue means Wille zum Untergang. Must some decline and perish so that others may make a transition, or does the same person do both the descending and the overcoming? There is indeed an unresolved ambiguity between going-under and going-over, between Untergang und Ubergang {ZDM 66). Zarathustra's Untergang has many layers of meaning: as a going-under to Dionysus, as a call to sacrifice for the future, and as a call to a transition and revaluation of values. But it connotes as well the possibility of the failure to create new values. Thus, as Gooding-Williams writes, we encounter "the flux and instability that essentially characterize the action of Dionysian 'going-under'" {ZDM 15). Yet already Plato's Socrates anticipates the danger of revaluation: his constant questioning, his demand for a logos for every action, his critique of art, instinct, and tradition made him notorious in his day. Such radical ethical questioning can be seen as either liberating or dangerous; what Plato describes as liberation from the Cave, the Athenians famously call "impiety and corrupting the youth." A classic "early" example, foreshadowing the Cave, would be the Meno, "a masterpiece of irony," in M. I. Finley's phrase: while Socrates leads Meno's slave to free thinking through the geometry problem, the arrogant Meno and Anytus become angry when frustrated and end the discussion with a threat that foreshadows the trial.'' Still, Socrates retains faith in questioning itself. Plato portrays Socrates as willing to go under: down to Piraeus, down to the Cave, down to a moment of aporia and the common level ofthe "person in the street," who often proves hostile. Linked to the motif of descent, the cave and the sun are central images shared by both texts, but with different meanings. In Plato's famous Allegory ofthe Cave, the philosopher who has ascended is at first "blinded by the light" ofthe sun, then learns to see a higher level of reality, but finally must return to the cave to try to liberate those imprisoned inside. But recall how they receive their liberator: "[I]f they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn't they kill him?" {Rep. 517a). By contrast, Zarathustra lives happily alone in his cave and descends only after ten years there to give humanity his offering. As Gooding-Williams writes, "Plato's sun hovers above the cave and its dwellers whereas Zarathustra's sun comes up to the cave in which he resides" {ZDM 51). He takes this difference to mean an "emphasis on the sun's temporal trajectory" that implies a challenge to "the Platonist view that the source of all value (for Plato, the world of the forms) transcends the world of time and appearances" {ZDM 5\). Yet the UNTERGANG UND UBERGANG 70 "world of time and appearances" in Plato proves to be more significant than this statement implies. Indeed, I would like to suggest that Plato is not as hostile to the world of appearances and bodies as Gooding-Williams implies. Plato makes it explicit in Parmenides and elsewhere that there cannot be "two worlds"; this would be a misunderstanding of his theory.^" As Gadamer rightly says: "Plato was not a Platonist who taught two worlds."^' Plato's emphasis on the necessity of returning to the cave recognizes our finitude, our imprisonment, our suffering.^^ We cannot simply transcend what we call "this world"; that world, in all its richness, is always the locus of each Socratic dialogue. Despite his reputation for "otherworldliness," Plato actually recognizes our "being-in-the-world" and "situatedness" (to borrow Heideggerian phrases) with the use of the dialogue form, which locates every philosophical debate in a specific time and place, dramatically realized with embodied characters and settings. So when Gooding-Williams writes, "Reminiscent of Plato's Good . . . ZarathustraDionysus at noon appears as a self-contained source of value . . . however, Zarathustra-Dionysus has his home within time" {ZDM98), I am half in agreement. I would add that Plato too recognizes that we have our home in time. Plato urges us to turn the entire soul around {Rep. XII.518c-d) toward the sun, the light of the intellect, but he recognizes that we have our temporal home on earth and even in the cave. As evidence of this claim, consider how Plato appeals to our bodies and imaginations with his vivid use of metaphor and image. Again, GoodingWilliams's comment about " . . . a tradition of Platonist metaphysics that sees temporal appearances as unreal parables (or images) of timeless being and value" {ZDM 196) does not in my opinion apply to Plato per se. For Plato, the images and parables are real as images of something real: they are the necessary translation of the eternal into the temporal. Paradoxically, Plato uses the images of the cave to help us escape from the cave and then to help us go back down again. Further, if Plato had believed that only "the world of the forms" had ultimate value, then he would not have written the dialogues he did, embedded as they are in the debates of the marketplace and the struggles of "flesh and blood" characters. The fact that Plato crafted such unforgettable metaphors and allegories shows that he realized our need to think with tangible images, to live in the sphere of the senses as well as the sphere of the intellect. As Hannah Arendt summarizes the point: "[TJhere are not two worlds because metaphor unites them."^^ One more point on terminology: Gooding-Williams repeats the phrase "Platonic-Christian values" throughout the book. But are those two traditions truly the same? Further, as he admits, neither Plato nor Christ speaks of values but of virtues; the relation between them invites further thought. Assumptions about "the security of traditional, Christian-Platonic values" {ZDM 67) invite 71 MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFF questioning as well. Such values or virtues were not secure or traditional in their own day—one need only consider the fates of both Christ and Socrates to recall the danger that their societies perceived in their teachings.^'' And Plato always stresses the uncertainty, not the security, of believing in something that cannot be proven; he uses phrases such as "noble risk" {Phaedo 114d) and "the whole risk for a human being" {Rep. X.618b-c). Further, we must not equate Plato's dialogues with Christian Neoplatonic appropriations of them. For example, everything we assume under the rubric of "Platonic love" differs dramatically from the more in-depth portraits of eros given in the Symposium and Phaedrus. Christian Neoplatonists removed the strong homosexual or homoerotic element from Plato's portrayal of eros, desexualized it, sublimated it (as Freud might say), and redefined the term. IV Tellingly, the young Nietzsche calls Plato's Symposium his Lieblingsdichtung from the Greek world (ZDM3 84).-^^ This all-night drinking party gives a striking portrait of Socrates as a lover and, as many readers have noted, an implied criticism of him.^* In a brilliant and subtle way, Plato puts his mentor to the dramatic test in the Symposium: Socrates must stand for another apologia with "Dionysus as judge" {Symp. 219c-d). He claims to be a master of the erotic, yet has no lover, no "other half"; he claims to have been taught by the wise priestess Diotima, yet she repeatedly scolds him for his limited understanding {Symp. 201e-202b, 210a); he resembles the portrait of Eros, yet he is several times accused of hubris {Symp. 175e, 215b-c). Throughout the series of speeches in praise of love, a triangle of tensions emerges among the comic poet Aristophanes, the tragic poet Agathon, and the philosopher Socrates. Yet it is an unstable triangle: Aristophanes communicates a tragic sense underlying his comical myth of the circle-people: what we most deeply yearn for, a restoration of a primal wholeness, a reuniting with our "other half," we cannot ever have. Conversely, Agathon's superficial portrayal of love as young and beautiful makes him the laughable victim of the Socratic elenchus. The comic poet conveys a fundamental pessimism about the human condition, while the tragic poet appears a comical fool. Diotima, the wise priestess whose speech forms the famous centerpiece of the dialogue, has been the focus of much recent attention as a woman of unique significance at an otherwise all-male symposium.^^ Another passage on ascent and descent, the so-called ladder of love, occurs toward the end of her speech. Diotima teaches us that as erotic beings, we always exist in the intermediary, the realm of the in-between. We have a foot in both sides: being and becoming, the constant and the changing, the eternal and the temporal. This means that both UNTERGANG UND UBERGANG 72 sides are necessary to human experience and both belong to the same world. To put it differently, after the aseent, the descent is necessary, although dangerous. Diotima's speech movesfromprocreative to contemplative eros—and backdown again. While this last point differs from the standard reading, it does find textual support and agree with the movement back to the Cave in the Republic. Diotima begins with the language of pregnancy, birth, and fertility; she connects human desire to that of all animals. As Rosen notes, "Instead of ascending to the divine, she first descends to the level of what is common to man and beasts."^^ Notice the revealing admission that Socrates does not understand the amorous behavior of animals {Symp. 207b-c), a point that suggests he may not understand eros in humans either. Diotima then seems to depart from that earthly level in the ascent toward the vision of Beauty itself, what she calls the higher mysteries. But then, at the end of her speech, she returns to the language of procreation and birth with whieh she began: "[WJhen [a human being] looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen—only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue . . . but to true virtue The love ofthe gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it..." {Symp. 212a-b). The conclusion of Diotima's teaching strongly implies the need to return to the generation and cultivation of children (whether literal or metaphorical offspring). On this pivotal point, I differ from Gooding-Williams's position that "as distinct from the ascent Socrates promotes, the movement Zarathustra promotes does not proceed from a world of bodies to a world of ideas. Rather Zarathustra envisions an ascent from one form of embodied, human being to another" {ZDM 292). On my reading, Plato does portray an ascent from bodies to ideas, but he also stresses the need to go back down again. Though Plato first distinguishes contemplative eros from procreative eros, ultimately he refuses to make that a dichotomy and instead suggests a circular movement between the two.^^ Finally, Plato goes to great lengths to evoke for the reader the limitations of Socrates as a lover. The drunken confessions of Alcibiades show that he suffers from Socrates "as if from a snakebite" {Symp. 218a), yet Socrates treats him only with ironic disdain and does not love him either in body or in soul. As Plato expects readers to know Alcibiades' subsequent career as a traitor to Athens, the shortcomings of Socrates as lover might have tragic political consequences. Alcibiades represents Athens in decline and demonstrates the ethical, political effects of misguided eros. As Martha Nussbaum writes: "[T]he comic speech of Aristophanes and the tragic (or tragic-comic) speech of Alcibiades contain the most serious objections raised in the Symposium against Socrates' program for the ascent of love."^" Plato thus subtly suggests that Socrates never fully learns Diotima's lessons but remains stuck at the top of her ladder of love, unable to descend. Indeed, it is not too much to say that if Socrates had followed the 73 MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFF teachings of the wise Diotima, or if he had put into practice the Allegory of the Cave, he would have descended to reach the tortured soul of Alcibiades. As I have tried to show, in distinction from common assumptions about Plato as transcendent and "otherworldly," Plato has an earthly side: his dialogues, when read as dialogues—as dramas of characters in movement, searching together— recognize the need for a return downward, toward the cave, toward the realm of the imperfect, the finite, and the transient. To be sure, the moment of transcendence and glimpsing the divine has an irreplaceable significance for Plato, but after that, the descent becomes necessary. As Voegelin writes of Plato: "[T]he truth of human existence can be found both by descent and by ascent."^' Most simply put, for Plato, it is a matter of a movement down, then up, and then down again. V As brief concluding remarks, I will explore how the hero's descent has elements of tragic risk for both Plato and Nietzsche. Zarathustra's attempt to conquer nihilism might prove "tragically futile" {ZDM 46): the attempt to create new values might fail. As we have seen, the many meanings of Untergang could have tragic consequences; the hero's descent could mean his destruction. GoodingWilliams explains: "[A]s in Antigone, tragic irony deploys the vehicle of linguistic equivocacy" {ZDM 60). The tragic hero confronts forces he does not understand, even within his own language. As Gooding-Williams notes {ZDM 59), S r already uses the term Untergang to connote tragedy in this well-known passage: Dionysian art, too, wishes to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them. We are to recognize that all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end [Untergang]; we are forced to look into the terrors of the individual existence—yet we are not to become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the changing figures. We are really for a brief moment primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction [Vernichtung] of phenomena now appear necessary to us .. . in view of the exuberant fertility of tlie universal will itself {BT 17) Here, Nietzsche employs Untergang to connote both the fear and the joy of the destruction of particular things. Decline and destruction are here included in "exuberant fertility"—reminiscent of Diotima's teaching on procreative eros and the universal desire of the mortal to take part in the immortal. Pain becomes subsumed in "the eternal joy of existence." Tragedy (in the Greek sense of the term) in the end yields a deep "metaphysical comfort," according to the early Nietzsche. UNTERGANG UND OBERGANG 74 In later works, Nietzsche shifts his focus to comedy as an alternative to tragedy, as shown in the first section fi-om GS on "the purpose of existence": "For the present, the comedy of existence has not yet 'become conscious' of itself For the present, we still live in the age of tragedy, the age of moralities and religions. . . . [TJhese tragedians . . . too promote the life of the species, by promoting the faith in life" {GS 1). As Gooding-Williams discusses, the meanings of tragedy and of Untergang continue to shift after BT and even within one work. As he writes, by the end of part 3, "Zarathustra, the crucified tragic hero, now seems to incarnate the irrevocable Untergang of his attempt to heal the rift between Dionysus and man—an Untergang that was initially forecast by the Pauline parody of his descent" {ZDM 257). But now Nietzsche rejects his earlier idea of "metaphysical comfort" as a symptom of dualism and turns instead to the hero's self-redemption, followed by part 4 as a comedy or parody {ZDM 257). Gesturing toward the relevance of Aristotle's Poetics, Gooding-Williams briefly discusses the Aristotelian sense of mythos, hamartia, and the specific pleasures of tragedy (ZOM 59). Taking up this suggestion, I would like to ask: What might be the Aristotelian tragic flaw of both Socrates and Zarathustra? For both, it seems to be an inability to love another as an equal, a refiasal of full eros.^^ Nietzsche perceives that eros is a perennial problem for the philosopher and that Plato had a profound grasp of it: "Love is the danger for the most solitary man, love of anything if only it is alive!" (Z:3 "The Wanderer"). On my reading, it is especially significant that both heroes ascend and descend alone: "Zarathustra went down the mountain alone" (Z Prologue 2). Similarly, Socrates in the Symposium has no lover or equal, falls into trances alone, and departs alone (with one doglike follower from whom he keeps his distance). In the Phaedo, Socrates maintains an ironic distance from his wife Xanthippe, children, and friends. Further, the very last lines of Z, repeating the images of the cave and the sun, stress the isolation of the tragic hero: "Thus spoke Zarathustra and left his cave, glowing and strong, like a morning sun emerging from behind dark mountains" (Z:4 "The Sign"). The book opens with a reference to sunset {Sonnenuntergang) but closes with a reference to sunrise. In this movement, it again resembles the Symposium, which concludes with Socrates leaving the all-night drinking party, alone, to greet the dawn. While Nietzsche's imagery of the sun and the cave clearly offers a parody of Plato, it also suggests a strong parallel between the heroes of both works. Yet the symbols are turned upside down: for Plato, the sun symbolizes the highest good, "beyond even being," but for Nietzsche, it symbolizes Zarathustra himself (Would the Greeks have suspected this of hubris?) As Gooding-Williams points out, both Plato and Nietzsche experiment with blending comic and tragic modes into their own thought. The famous line at the end of the Symposium—"the skillful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet" {Symp. 223d)—suggests on my reading one of Plato's humorous moments 75 MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFF of self-reference. Along similar lines, the last book of Z works as a comedy, as a satyr play, or as a parody. As Gooding-Williams writes ofthe parallels between these two works: Socrates takes leave of his companions, after arguing that a tragic poet can also write comedy. Analogously, Zarathustra takes leave of the higher men, having shown that a tragic hero, which he appears to be at the end of Part 3, can also become a comedian who parodies his own tragic heroism. In the Symposium, Socrates puts the spirits of tragedy and comedy behind him, confident that the final telos of his eros is the form of beauty. In "the Sign," Zarathustra puts these spirits behind him, hoping to embody an earthly beauty that, as a sublime tragic hero and as a self-parodying Satyrspieler, remains beyond his ken. (ZDM2921-94,) The connections drawn between these works are strikingly insightful, yet the phrase "Socrates puts the spirits of tragedy and comedy behind him" needs qualification. Even if we agree that Socrates does so, it does not follow that Plato does so. Rather, we may read the entire Symposium as a tragic-comic drama and Plato as the true poet. As Gary Shapiro puts it: "[L]ike the true poet of the Symposium, Nietzsche gives us first a tragic and then a comic poem about desire."^^ Read in this light, Nietzsche appears far closer to Plato's spirit of blending tragedy and comedy. In conclusion, to reevaluate Nietzsche's (post)modernist project, we must revisit the ancient ancestors who laid the foundations, if only to question them. Gooding-Williams's book shows us novel and fertile ways of interpreting Nietzsche; if we read Plato similarly, as I believe Nietzsche himself at his best momerits did, then we will gain a richer understanding of both thinkers as tragiccomic dramatists and literary stylists ofthe first order. The Ariadne's thread of Untergang and Ubergang leads through the labyrinth of texts to discover a new reading of both Plato and Nietzsche. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For helpful readings and discussions of this essay, I gratefully acknowledge Christa Davis Acampora, James E. Berg, and Robert Gooding-Williams. NOTES 1. This striking phrase occurs in Nietzsche's letter of application to the University of Basel, 1871 (KGB II. 1, 174-77), cited in Silk and Stern 1981, 50. I have used Kaufmann's English translations of BrCVintage, 1967), BG£ (Vintage, 1989), and GS (Vintage, 1974); Kaufmann and Hollingdale's translation of GA/(Vintage, 1969); Hollingdale's translation of Z (Penguin, 1984); and Breazeale's translation of selections of Nietzsche's notebooks, published as PT (Humanities Press, 1992). 2. Nehamas 1996, 234-35. 3. To mention only a few recent books on Plato and Socrates, all sympathetic to a Nietzsehean or broadly speaking Continental approach and critical of standard assumptions on Platonism, we UNTERGANG UND UBERGANG 76 have Drew Hyland's Questioning Platonism: Continental Interpretations of Plato (2004), Sarah Kofman's Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher (1998), Alexander Nehamas's The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (1998), David Roochnik's Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato's Republic (2003), Stanley Rosen's Plato's Republic (2005), John Sallis's Platonic Legacies (2004), Peter Wamek's Descent of Socrates: Self-Knowledge and Cryptic Nature in the Platonic Dialogues (2005), and Catherine Zuckert's Postmodern Ptatos (1996). 4. This project clearly goes beyond the confines of this essay, but see my pieee "The MusicMaking Socrates" (2002b). 5. See the first-rate eollection on this topic. Who Speaks for Plato? (Press 2000). 6. The source I have used for Plato's Greek texts is the Loeb Classical Library, ed. G. P Goold (Harvard University Press, 1914). Otherwise, I have used the translations in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Hackett, 1997), with the following exception: Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (1968). 7. As Laurence Lampert suggests, Plato might not have believed his own Platonism, and Nietzsche might have suspected as much: "Plato's fear is Odyssean fear for his friends, fear for a whole civil order threatened by ruin through the death of its gods" (2004, 217). Lampert further explores why Nietzsche appreciated the necessity of Plato's "noble lie" (2004, 206-7). 8. For an excellent collection on this topic generally, sec The Philosophy of Style (Lang 1979). On Nietzsche's range of styles, see my piece "The Cat at Play: Nietzsche's Feline Styles" (2004). 9. Gadamer 1988a, 222-23. 10. "We may infer that some special meaning was to be conveyed by the beginning," Brann (2004, 117) notes. 11. Bloom 1968,440. 12. Roochnik 2003, 86. 13. Bloom 1968,440-41. 14. See Fagles 1996. For this reference, as well as for my overall reading of "going down to Piraeus," I acknowledge Eric Voegelin (1957). As he puts it: "[T]he first word, katahen (I went down), sounds the great theme that runs through [the Republic] to the end" (1957, 52). 15. For more on the significance of the gift in Nietzsche and others, see Alan Schrift's The Logic of the Gift (1997) and Mark Osteen's The Question of the Gift (2002). 16. Rosen 2005, 12. 17. As Kathleen Higgins writes: "Zarathustra parallels the philosopher of Plato's Myth of the Cave, whose descent for the purpose of sharing his insight is parodied by Zarathustra's venture" (1987, 73). Gary Shapiro suggests: "[T]he aim of parody is to renew time; here it does so through the transvaluation of Plato's Symposium and Republic" (1983, 61). 18. Conway 1988,266-67. 19. SeeFinley 1964, 121. 20. See my piece "Plato's Different Device" (2007). 21. Gadamer 1988b, 260. 22. See Roochnik 2003 on the necessity of returning to the cave. 23. Arendt 1978, 110. 24. Just as I have distinguishe...
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