For Today Plato: The Republic - [excerpt]

translated by Susan Spitzer

INTRODUCTION
Plato will be our guide. It is him whom we need first and foremost today, for one reason in particular: he was the one who first introduced the idea that conducting our lives in the world implies that some access to the absolute is available to us, not because a veridical God is hovering over us (Descartes) nor because we ourselves are the agents of the becoming-subject of such an Absolute (Hegel as well as Heidegger), but because the materiality of which we are composed participates—above and beyond individual corporeality and collective rhetoric—in the construction of eternal truths.

THE REPUBLIC: PROLOGUE - CONVERSATION IN THE HOUSE ON THE HARBOR
The day this whole huge affair began, Socrates was returning from the harbor area, accompanied by Plato’s youngest brother, a guy by the name of Glauco. They’d greeted the goddess of the People of the North, those drunken sailors, with a kiss on either cheek and had taken in the whole scene at the festival in her honor, which was the first one ever! The parade of the harbor residents, incidentally, was awesome. And the People of the North’s floats, overloaded with half-naked ladies, were pretty cool, too.[...]

THE REPUBLIC: EPILOGUE - THE VARIABLE ETERNITY OF SUBJECTS
Beyond the colonnade, the sky, visible in patches, was bleached white. The heat was making everything sticky. In her black summer dress, sitting up)—straight in her chair with her eyes closed, Amantha looked like an armchair oracle. Glaucon had stretched out on a carpet and was lying with his hands clasped behind his head. Socrates, looking exhausted, was pacing back and forth. Thrasymachus had disappeared, as if by magic.[...]

Art: Ryan Trecartin
Re’Search Wait’S (Edit One: Re’Search Missing Corruption, Budget) - video still, 2009
courtesy The New Museum, New York City.