Always a basic argument to understand..
(From BMCR 2004.02.47)
Ramona A. Naddaff, Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato's Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp.
xv, 189. ISBN 0-226-56727-3. $27.50.
Reviewed by Bruce Krajewski (bkrajews@georgiasouthern.edu) Word count: 1547 words
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Naddaff sets out to offer an "original interpretation" of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. "The censorship of poetry, I argue, is a foil, a cover, to produce literature, to produce philosophy, and to produce a reciprocal need between the two" (xi).
This surprising thesis converts censorship into something salubrious from Naddaff's perspective, at least for the goals of Platonic/Nietzschean philosophy -- more about that below.
She asserts that Plato does not wish to do away with poetry but to learn from it, in the process strengthening philosophy. The talk about censorship in the Republic calls for rethinking, according to Naddaff, since dialectic, by its nature encourages openness. "This openness to all discourses, however, is unconditional; indeed it is the condition of the possibility of the dialectic itself when it examines a nature alien to its own" (133). At this point, Naddaff sounds downright Gadamerian in her allegiance to the openness of dialogue, and fully philosophical in describing poetic discourse as "alien." That allegiance to openness dissolves rapidly when a few sentences later Naddaff endorses the analytic view of philosophy as an endless agon, a view she inherits from Nietzsche (a strange but telling source of inspiration for Naddaff's book). Naddaff tells the reader that "philosophy risks losing its own individual identity and individuality when it engages with and incorporates the object of its discourse....
