Despite Plato: A Question of "Rewriting"

“Despite” - a reading of Plato by Adriana Cavarero, notably In Spite of Plato: A Feminist rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, Polity Press, 1995 (1990). I am perhaps not the first to notice, but interestingly the Italian original title does not inform anything of the “rewriting” ascribed in the English translation. The original reads Nonostante Platone: Figure femminili nella filosofia antica, which, as I understand it, simply promises to treat “feminine figures in antique philosophy” – those eventually “despite” (nonostante) Plato. The emphasis of the English transliteration on “rewriting” almost suggests a project similar to and intolerable as the Stalinist rewriting of history. (Cf. Amy Knight, ‘Beria and the Cult of Stalin: Rewriting Transcaucasian Party History’, Soviet Studies, Vol. 43, No. 4, 1991, pp. 749-763.) As Derrida writes, Western philosophy is phallogocentric (Cf. Derrida, La dissemination). The Socratic dilemma of philosophy’s written or spoken for example in the Pheadrus 274a-276b implies, in my view, that “rewriting”, feminist or any other, is still a phallogocentric activity. "Rewriting" reassures the writing it opposes since any writing is phallogocentric. I doubt however that the nonostante of Cavarero entangles any “rewriting” but certainly a feminist reading of ancient philosophy. 

On the Writer

The written as a source of  thinking is mistaken to represent the writer who is known only as a figure of a writer. Do we really know Plato or Derrida, indeed any writer? With all the footnotes and (anti)theses philosophers engage in “dialogue“ with the writer, the person of the writer becomes repressed by the text – there is no-one outside the text, we may say with Derrida (il n’y a pas de hors-texte, “there is nothing outside text”; Cf. Derrida, On Grammatology) Simultaneously, the writer is represented as a spirit or a spectre, or psychoanalytically speaking as an imago of the real person. Albeit the real person of the writer is there, outside the text, but as the writer the person of the writer is repressed by the metonymy of language which structures (and dictates) the text; repressed in the literal sense of being reissued and repressed in psychoanalytical sense of being “forgotten”. Hence the writer whom we suppose to know as we read the text basically underlies the text as a writing subject who is supposed to know. As we are now embarking on Lacan’s concept of the “subject supposed to know” (sujet supposé savoir), that is, the unconscious subject, we may perhaps consider the real person of the writer as the unconscious subject of the text –– a real person who as any other is unconscious and writes his or her desire. (On reading/writing and desire cf. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against Historicists) Unnoticed in the writing of the other the writer is also an unconscious sub-text of that other, drifting metonymically aloft the meaning. Unceasingly, or to say with Lacan: it will never stop being written. Perhaps as there is nothing outside the text it needs to be filled with the text, which often outlives the writer. Therefore the writer is a tool of writing.