Reading Plato Otherwise: Socrates, Aesop, and Technologies of Care and Repair

This article, a contribution to a symposium in honour of Christopher Tomlins, seeks to embrace his ‘speculative history’ and apply it to the history of philosophy, and especially Plato. The article attempts to read Plato otherwise, offering an alternative account of his picture of philosophy, not as the mastery of the body by reason, and the domination of the ignorant many by the enlightened few, but instead as a therapeutic response to pain, especially the pain of enslavement, and thereby as a practice of care and repair for oneself and others. The article focuses on reading and then re-reading Plato’s Phaedo – a text replete with the imaginary of slavery, including an appropriation of the slave Aesop for the characterisation of Socrates. The article’s rereading of Plato is based on a reversal of Plato’s own appropriation strategy: it reappropriates Aesop in order to re-characterise Socrates, but this time as a figure embodying care and repair, rather than mastery and domination. The article further suggests that it is possible that this active, irreverent re-reading may well be invited, or at least enabled, by Plato’s pedagogically provocative texts.