In The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben makes a few but poignant references to Plato’s understanding of art. Because art’s impact was powerful, Plato deemed art dangerous and subordinated it to politics. In contrast, Agamben argues, modern art enjoys the privilege of formal autonomy at the cost of losing political significance. This essay develops the Platonic dimension in Agamben’s thought: whereas Platonic censorship recognizes art’s power by way of prohibition, the modern culturalist tolerance of art is symptomatic of art’s reduction (...) into commodity and of the public indifference toward it. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relationship of ancients to moderns by focusing on the “quarrel” between art and philosophy that has led to two articulations of the endof art—one in antiquity, another in modernity: Plato, who expelled the poets from his city on account of art’s irrationality, and Hegel, for whom art was no more the necessary vehicle for truth. Following Giorgio Agamben’s cue in The Man Without Content, I opt for a symptomatic reading of Plato’s condemnation of art, by foregrounding (...) his ambivalence toward poetry. I conclude that, whereas Hegel found poetry wanting, Plato understood poetry’s truth to be tragically excessive. (shrink)

This paper considers Foucault’s remarks on Euripides and parrhesia in order to reflect on the deeper relation between tragic speech and truth-telling. It argues that: a) tragedy is a privileged mode of truth-telling, since the tragic fall always involves the hero’s passion for truth; and b) parrhesia is inherently tragic, insofar as it endangers its agent. By focusing on the Bacchae, which Foucault sidesteps, I maintain that this play exemplifies the tragic structure of parrhesiastic conduct, while staging the passage of (...) parrhesia from the temple to the city, and thus also from religion to politics and philosophy. (shrink)