Spiritual Practices: The Reception of Platonic Philosophy in Postmodern France

FAIN: FA-50312-04

Paul A. Miller
University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)

This book argues that an essential token in the debates that have accompanied postmodernism in France (especially in the works of Lacan, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, and Foucault) has been the understanding of classical antiquity. This fact has been unappreciated. Rare is the philosophy department in the Anglophone world where contemporary French readings of ancient texts are regularly considered. Likewise, few classicists make forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result is that postmodern French thought has largely been the province, neither of the philosophers, nor philologists, but of scholars of modern languages who lack the training necessary to appreciate these thinkers' engagement with antiquity. This project will bridge this gap by offering theoretically informed readings of the above named thinkers, while arguing that they not only knew ancient literature but that their understanding of it was central to their intellectual projects.

Media Coverage

(Review)
Author(s): Frede, Dorothea
Publication: PHRONESIS-A JOURNAL FOR ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
Date: 1/1/2009
Abstract: Volume: 54 Issue: 1

Review (Review)
Author(s): Orrells, Daniel
Publication: CLASSICAL REVIEW
Date: 1/1/2009
Abstract: Volume: 59 Issue: 1 Pages: 59-60

Review (Review)
Author(s): Armstrong, Richard H.
Publication: JOURNAL OF HELLENIC STUDIES
Date: 9/9/2008
Abstract: Volume: 128 Pages: 298-300

Paul Allen Miller, Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 270. ISBN 978-0-814210-70-3. (Review)
Author(s): Benjamin Todd Lee
Publication: Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Date: 6/30/2008
Abstract: It is practically a truism of literary theory that poststructuralism is anti-humanist as well as anti-classical, and that the "swerve into poststructuralism was a turning against humanism, against the traditional values of Western civilization."1 Miller provides a fundamental challenge to this proposition, and in a thoughtful and deeply researched study of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, shows the great extent to which these critical titans all relied on exegesis of Plato and other texts of classical antiquity to articulate their philosophies. In so doing, Miller addresses directly one of the most important questions confronting classical studies as a discipline: namely, the value and relevance of a classical canon in the face of poststructuralism and its off-shoots in deconstruction, gender theory, and postcolonialism. Miller is obviously not the first to address this question, but I believe he has offered a significant argument that inscribes the classics into postmodernism, as opposed
URL: http://://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008-06-30.html

Associated Products

Postmodern Spiritual Practices The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (Book)
Title: Postmodern Spiritual Practices The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault
Author: Paul Allen Miller
Abstract: Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, by Paul Allen Miller, argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the reception of Plato. This fact has gone underappreciated in the Anglophone world due to a fundamental division in culture. Until very recently, the concerns of academic philosophy and philology have had little in common. On the one hand, this is due to analytic philosophy’s self-confinement to questions of epistemology, speech act theory, and philosophy of science. As such, it has had little to say about the relation between antique and contemporary modes of thought. On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology’s own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenschaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages. A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers’ contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism’s chief thinkers’ debts to Plato and the ancient world.
Year: 2007
Primary URL: http://osupress.blogspot.com/2007/11/miller-postmodern-spiritual-practices.html
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8142-107

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