Socrates: Let me put the matter thus: When will there be more chance of deception – when the difference is large or small?
Phaedrus: When the difference is small.
Socrates: And you will be less likely to be discovered in passing by degrees into the other extreme than when you go all at once?
Phaedrus: Of course.
Socrates: He, then, who would deceive others, and not be deceived, must exactly know the real likenesses and differences of things?
Phaedrus: He must.
Socrates: And if he is ignorant of the true nature of any subject, how can he detect the greater or less degree of likeness in other things to that of which by the hypothesis he is ignorant?
Phaedrus: He cannot.
Socrates: And when men are deceived and their notions are at variance with realities, it is clear that the error slips in through resemblances?
Phaedrus: Yes, that is the way.
Socrates: He then, who being ignorant of the truth aims at appearances, will only attain an art of rhetoric which is ridiculous and is not an art at all?
Phaedrus: That may be expected.
In Symposium, and then in Phaedrus, it is said that amorous delirium is what grants access to wisdom. And it is, of course, very important and quite striking, not to say shocking, to see Plato – who is constantly pleading for rationality, reserve, metron, and against excess, passion, lies – here appealing to delirium and excess (which is the flip side of the défaut, and we must develop this point further by reading Symposium)
“Nobody accuses a cis femme of not being a woman,” you add, crossly. The gap between them and you is, I know, a sensitive subject. I think before I speak, but I want to press you a little further. “This is what is different about the figure of the transsexual woman in this Platonist universe. It is not a femininity deceiving about something else. It is deceptive about femininity. In cis metaphysics, you and I are a special kind of deceiver.”
“So … we’re not women who as women are deceivers, we are deceivers about being women at all. Sort of like double deceivers? Super-femmes!” You crack us both up.
“Precisely. You see, previously there was what’s true, which is Plato’s ‘idea’; and two fallen states, short of what’s true, which are the thing; and then even more fallen–the representation. The idea embodies truth for the Platonist. God and communism do it for Christians and Marxists, respectively. What is true is identical to itself. It allows no gap between itself and any aspect of itself. It is incapable of making a mere sign of itself. It is pure–and unrepresentable.”
I launch another move: “Okay, so this is also how a certain brand of feminism thinks about the figure of woman. She just is. There’s hand-waving about biological chromosomes, but those are things that are outside the everyday realm of human perception. Woman is a Platonic ideal that ‘real’ women just embody by default as variations upon perfection. They then inevitably join misogynists in their distrust of femme signs as deception, and the trap as the lowest deceiver of all.”
“As it stands, to be a transsexual woman is to be the scapegoat of an order of representation in which someone has to be held accountable for the failure of signs to be adequate to things. In the cis world, we’re comprehensible only as the lowest kind of deceivers. To the cis, we are choosing to be female. But who would choose that? So we must be traps, deceivers. We are even-worse things in the world.”
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/122/429125/trap-metaphysics/
Phaedrus, the ur-text of media studies. Exaggeration? Possibly
Maybe of interest is to note that earlier in the text, Socrates and Phaedrus were discussing whether it was better to be with the lover or non-lover (and all the questions this incurs)
Sometime after this passage, they discuss the famed pharmakon.
Is the body a text? What would this do?
Is it legible or readable (as various systems of knowledge may claim)? How is the body made legible?
If the body is a text, is there an Author (as sole originator of the text, and gaurdian of Interpretation)? What happens if we assume there’s one Author, or multiple Authors, or many authors?
What is the “real likenesses and differences of” the body? of bodies? How do we know “real likenesses and differences”?
What memory supports are involved in the production of the body?
Other texts. Other media.
What is ‘deception’ when it comes to a body?
Who is the deceiver? Who is the deceived? Are the deceived truly deceived? What role do the deceived play in the deception? To whom’s (or what) benefit is it, to claim to be deceived? Who has to be protected from deception? What is at stake?
What are the conditions that allow us to make these questions? What are the conditions that make these questions valid, admissible for judgement?
Who is the (non-)lover of a given body? What processes produce these (non-)lovers?
“He then, who being ignorant of the truth aims at appearances, will only attain an art of [the body] which is ridiculous and is not an art at all?”