Book discussion on Gwenda-lin Grewal’s, Thinking About Death in Plato’s Euthydemus. A Close Reading and New Translation (OUP 2022)
Speakers:
Gwenda-lin Grewal (NSSR)
Cinzia Arruzza (NSSR)
Nicholas Pappas (CUNY)
Thinking of Death places Plato’s Euthydemus among the dialogues that surround the trial and death of Socrates. A premonition of philosophy’s fate arrives in the form of Socrates’ encounter with the two-headed sophist pair, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, who appear as if they are the ghost of the Socrates of Aristophanes’ Thinkery. The pair vacillate between choral ode and rhapsody, as Plato vacillates between referring to them in the dual and plural number in Greek. Gwenda-lin Grewal’s close reading explores how the structure of the dialogue and the pair’s back-and-forth arguments bear a striking resemblance to thinking itself: in its immersive remove from reality, thinking simulates death even as it cannot conceive of its possibility. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take this to an extreme, and so emerge as the philosophical dream and sophistic nightmare of being disembodied from substance. The Euthydemus is haunted by philosophy’s tenuous relationship to political life. This is played out in the narration through Crito’s implied criticism of Socrates-the phantom image of the Athenian laws-and in the drama itself, which appears to take place in Hades. Thinking of death thus brings with it a lurid parody of the death of thinking: the farce of perfect philosophy that bears the gravity of the city’s sophistry. Grewal also provides a new translation of the Euthydemus that pays careful attention to grammatical ambiguities, nuances, and wit in ways that substantially expand the reader’s access to the dialogue’s mysteries.
Serving as a response to Aimé Césaire’s call for a universal filled with particularity from his infamous resignation from the French Communist Party in 1956, I focus on the role of culture for a project of universal emancipation. To do so, I follow Sylvia Wynter’s statement that the Négritude movement is an example of a universal and cultural project. Recalling Césaire’s words in “Return to My Native Land,” culture that serves universal emancipation must be “free of the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the world.” To this end, I develop a conception of culture that is both local and universal, that centers on the importance of what it means to be human, as life, as being, and as experience by reading culture as necessarily local, collective, disenchanted, and related to play.
Bio:
Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her book, titled Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), engages French political theorist Alain Badiou’s discussion of Négritude and the Haitian Revolution to develop a nuanced critique of his theory of emancipation. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the writings of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. She is also the Founder of the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop, which takes place annually during the summer.
Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon began as a multidisciplinary, web-based journal in which an assemblage of contributions focused on a single concept with the express intention of re-situating its meaning in the field of political discourse. By reflecting on what has remained unquestioned or unthought in that concept, this all-around collection of essays seeks to open pathways for another future—one that is not already determined and ill-fated.
From this forum for engaged scholarship, a succession of academic conferences have sprung as a space for conversation and constructive debate, including its Graduate Conference at the New School for Social Research organized by students of the Departments of Anthropology, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, and Sociology. Political Concepts invites graduate students from all fields of study to participate in our upcoming conference in Spring 2024. Held at NSSR over March 29-30, the conference will serve as a workshop of ideas on the multiplicity of powers, structures, problems, and orientations that shape our collective life.
Because Political Concepts does not predetermine what does or does not count as political, the conference welcomes essays that fashion new political concepts or demonstrate how concepts deserve to be taken as politically significant. Papers should be dedicated to a single political concept, like an encyclopedia entry, but the analysis of the concept does not have to abide to traditional approaches. Some of the concepts contended with in previous years’ vibrant conferences included abolition, survival, catastrophe, resentment, money, dependence, trans, imaginary, and solidarity. Other examples can be found in the published papers on the Political Concepts website.
Abstracts should be no longer than 750 words in a pdf format, and prepared for blind review, so please ensure that your abstract is free from any identifying personal details. Please title your abstract with your concept. Abstracts must be submitted through this google form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfyVC0H0LSpcyJ3QpcbAvZjEkcUYoS-TCp0kPc6ObTg4YFSiQ/viewform) by December 7, 2023 EST. Any inquiries can be sent to politicalconceptsNSSR@gmail.com.
Applicants must be advanced graduate students and their concept must be a central part of a longer term project in order to be accepted. Results will be informed in January.