4 Till Human Voices Wake Us and We Drown

The Aporia-fish in the Meno

Thomas Thorp

WE ARE AT Stephanus page 80a, a third of the way into the dialogue, when Meno offers up what is certainly the most famous appearance by a fish in the history of philosophy. Except the fish does not actually appear.

Plato wants us to hear in Socrates’s words—“Then answer me again from the beginning [πάλιν ἐξ ἀρχῆς]”—the insistence of an orchestra leader struggling to encourage his musicians to begin again, but to listen to themselves this time. Once more from the top: “what do both you and your associate [ἑταῖρός] say that virtue is?” (79e). This is followed by the manifest frustration of the young performer, who, despite having mastered the technique, and having been praised by others, has never really learned to listen to himself: “on countless occasions I have made abundant speeches on virtue to various people—and very good speeches they were, so I thought—but now . . .” (80b).

Meno is unable to listen to himself because when he turns to where his own voice and ear should be he finds only the words of his “associate,” Gorgias, neatly packaged and ready to present. And so, now, having run through what he “knows” about virtue, which is what he can remember—namely, that virtue is, first, as Gorgias says, ruling others (73d), and then that it is, as a poet says, “to be able both to delight in and to have honorable things” (77b)—Meno is now empty and, unable to play, insists that Socrates is to blame for his perplexity: “Socrates, I used to hear, before I met you, that yours was a case of being in doubt yourself [ἀπορεῖς] and making others doubt also [ἄλλους ποιεῖς ἀπορεῖν]; and so now I find you are merely bewitching [κατεπᾴδεις] me with your spells and incantations, which have reduced me to utter perplexity [ἀπορίας]. And if I am indeed to have my jest, I consider that both in your appearance [εἴδος] and in other respects you are extremely like the flat narkē of the sea [τῇ πλατείᾳ νάρκῃ τῇ θαλαττίᾳ]” (79e–80a).1

a bit obtuse

Despite this being the most famous fish in the history of philosophy, and having virtually no competition in this regard, the philosophers who study Plato have persistently mistaken our narkē for a fish it is not. It is not a stingray.2 Lamb in the Loeb edition gets it right, as does Jowett. But Guthrie, in Hamilton and Cairnes’s standard edition of Plato, has “the flat sting ray,” a confused or indifferent identification that is more or less standard.3

Stingray is the common name of a family of fish (Mylobatidae) equipped with a stinger in its tail through which it can deliver venom. Our fish is an electric ray (Torpediniae). Its Linnaean name is Torpedo torpedo. Both are flat with the characteristic shape of a ray, but their ability to induce torpor or narcosis differs dramatically in both manner and purpose. The stingray’s venom is delivered through direct contact and is entirely defensive, whereas our torpedo ray electrically infects a conductive medium, usually seawater, in order to stun and then thereby capture its prey. It will turn out that the power of our fish to inform the question of virtue is going to hinge upon this distinction between a venomous touch and action at a distance.

Indeed, for centuries our fish was studied precisely in order to dispel the idea of actio in distans. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, European scientists had simply denied the facts about our fish, insisting that for a shock or effect to be communicated there would have to be direct contact, and so they invented various proximate and material causes to account for the torpedo ray’s power to stun at a distance: microscopic effluvia or corpuscles.4 It is, then, not surprising that in the modern period laboratory investigations of its mysterious powers did not merely overlap with the modern discovery of electricity but constituted one of its essential elements. Experiments by Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, and John Walsh that led to the “discovery” of electricity included a concerted effort to account for the torpedo ray’s power to stun prey without contact, a power that appeared to be a mysterious violation of the law of proximate and material causality.5 The ancients, on the other hand, knew full well that the fish they called narkē was capable of inducing a narcotic effect in what merely “came near.” Here is Aristotle in History of Animals: “And the torpedo by causing numbness [ἥ τε νάρκη ναρκᾶν ποιοῦσα] in whatever small fishes it intends to overcome, catching them by means which it possesses in its body, feeds on them; it hides itself in the sand and mud, and catches all the fishes that swim towards it and become numb as they are carried near.”6 Notice that what is identified by Aristotle is precisely what will be most problematic for the Moderns. Namely, while there is nothing uniquely mysterious or problematic in the notion of a venomous sting, nor in the idea of hiding in order to ambush passing prey, characteristic of the fish called narkē is that it neither stings its prey nor speeds from hiding to capture it. Instead it infects the medium itself, seawater, the presumably neutral, ambient medium in which both hunter and prey are suspended and in which they live and breathe. In short, it is not the power to induce numbing, narcotic, torpor that is mysterious, but the power of that power to introduce its effect through what we may call an inflection of the apparently neutral medium of nautical life, a medium that due to its very ubiquity does not itself appear unless and until it is suddenly inflected with a stunning charge. And, to come full circle, this doubling gesture that focuses not on the power to stun but on the power of that power to alter and thus render manifest an otherwise opaque medium is reflected in the names the ancients gave our fish, names that by one measure fail to name the fish at all, allowing it to disappear into its effect.

When the Greeks referred to our fish as narkē their reference was less to the fish than to its effect; or, strictly speaking, its name, narkē, is the same as the word for its effect, narkē (ἥ τε νάρκη ναρκᾶν ποιοῦσα). And this withdrawal of the thing into its effect is retained in the Roman texts where the narkē is torpedo (later to be Torpedo torpedo), a name in the form of a repetition of a name. What sort of being is this whose defining virtue causes its identity to withdraw into its effect, such that its name is the repetition or doubling of that defining virtue? And what does the fact that this mysterious power acts through the inflection of the very medium of life, of being, have to do with the guiding question of the Meno?

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Well, what is the guiding question of the Meno? “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught, or is it acquired by practice, not teaching?” (70a) Doesn’t Plato have Socrates immediately alter the opening question? “So far am I from knowing whether it can be taught or not, that I actually do not even know what the thing itself, virtue, is at all” (71a). Doesn’t Socrates insist upon replacing Meno’s question (How is virtue acquired?) with its double, the question “What is virtue?” And isn’t this substitution justified by the suggestion that the latter is taken for granted by the former? Rather than acceding too quickly to this interpretation, I propose that we pause and allow the aporia-fish to do its work. We would notice, then, that Socrates goes to some length to resist the ti esti formulation and in fact introduces it only in the negative, contrasting the Thessalians (Meno and Gorgias) who have a ready answer for every question to those living “here” (enthade), in Athens, where “a drought of wisdom has come on.” Here, we not only do not know how human excellence is attained, we go so far as to assert that we do not even know what it is.

Rather than insisting upon a definition—presumably in the form of a “what it is”—Socrates should be read as asserting that it might be a good idea to pause and reflect upon the very medium subtending and sustaining the question of the acquisition of virtue. And yet, in order to reflect upon that subtending and sustaining medium, it would have to be rendered present, and to be rendered present this prerequisite question (What is it?) would have to be articulated. So if we begin our reading by noticing that Socrates has insisted on this “What is it?” question, we must also recall that he has no intention of answering it. And this apparent paradox itself might justify a shift of focus from the much-discussed “what it is” of virtue to what we are calling the sustaining medium of the inquiry. This much at least is clear at the outset: Socrates cannot really resist the force of the logic of the ti esti—he must in fact himself introduce it—but he does so within a clear (one is tempted to say a “transparent”) frame of reservations.

Our hypothesis, then, will be that in the Meno Socrates’s insistence on the ti esti and his simultaneous reservations regarding it—the necessity of the question and the pause that accompanies and interrupts it—is personified by our fish. To test that thesis, we must ourselves be willing to shift our focus from the thing (the answer, the entity, the fish) to its effect, and in particular to the power of that effect to suspend the utter transparency of the medium itself. For is not Socrates about to electrify that medium to stunning and torporific effect?

that is not it, that is not what I meant at all

Plato has Meno invoke the narkē in the form of a common insult at the moment in the dialogue when Meno, embarrassed and having exhausted his crib sheet, is left with nothing more to say. Meno has recourse to an insult and invokes the narkē because he now sees no way out (aporia). Yet like its name and its mysterious power, our fish’s aporetic power too is doubled. In other words, it is not that Meno is now willing and able to admit that he does not know. Having run through a set of stock answers is not the same as being on the verge of a Socratic insight, not the same as being willing to join Socrates in the exercise of the manifestation of previously unacknowledged presuppositions and in the work of rendering present the presuppositions of thought by rendering them questionable. But this is, finally, not really a question about Meno, is it? Allow me to suggest, rather, that the purpose of the initial doubling of the question about virtue (“How is it acquired?” becoming “What is it?”) is that Meno’s impasse (aporia) is now being turned back upon us, upon the readers, the true audience of the dialogue, we who up until this point will have likely satisfied ourselves by occupying our manifestly superior posture relative to the sad and embarrassed Meno. We who have been smugly disparaging the one who seems to believe that knowledge is simply reciting what one can remember are about to learn that all of us are Meno, that all knowing is a remembering and, finally, that remembering is not what we and our associates have presumed it to be.

Rather, the repetition characterizing the name of our fish, along with its attendant withdrawal of the thing (the fish) into its effect (aporetic narcosis), mirrors precisely the problem of the relation of virtue or excellence to knowledge, and of knowledge to repetition or recollection, as they are set forth in the Meno. Only because all knowing is doubled, because all knowing is a form of anamnesis, is it possible for Meno’s particular form of remembering (mere memorization) to occupy, block, and distort his own fundamental capacity for comprehending or acquiring virtue. The alternative to Meno’s recourse to mere recitation is not, as we shall see, the pure presence of the object—nor the presence of the pure form of the object—but, rather, an originary and transcendental repetition, a necessary but impossible re-presentation whose power is not presentation (knowledge) but the withdrawal of the grounding relation of the appearance to its form.

Instead of appearance and form, Socrates’s insistent “What is it?” has the power to inflect the medium sustaining these bonds of knowing and being and to do so by effecting the suspension of beings. Look at it this way: the inevitable force of the question “What is it?” is to predetermine the logic of an answer, which will have to come in the form of a posited “it,” an entity or the reified ground of an entity, its form (eidos). But while this positing of the “it is” is inevitable, it need not be self-satisfied, and so we are justified in suggesting that the purpose of the question and its effect may be a matter of highlighting the inevitability itself and of rendering it, thereby, questionable. This suspension of the presumption can leave one either in Meno’s version of aporia—having simply run out of answers—or in a Socratic aporia: the shocking suspension of the very presumption that is the being-Being or appearance-Form binary. And what Socrates demonstrates in the opening exchanges of the dialogue, leading up to the invocation of the electrifying fish, is that this suspension of the presupposition of appearance takes the form of rendering it present, rendering Being, almost and for just an instant, present.

But just as the one who emerges into the light and, faced with the impossible necessity of suddenly seeing not things but the condition of the visibility of things, is blinded, so too here in our nautical analogy the sudden and shocking appurtenance of the medium or background, the sudden presentation of the condition of life, is inimical to life. The condition of sight is not itself visible, and the condition of life (pneuma, thumos, psychē) cannot support life, or in truth can support life but only so long as it remains withdrawn and presupposed. Were a being to come along with the power to render the medium “present,” then the status of the medium as safely withdrawn would be violated, as would our status as safely suspended within it. If life itself, breathing itself, requires that the horizon or background of beings not appear, then we breathe only so long as we are suspended in a breathless medium of appearances. We cannot breathe Being, cannot breathe, that is to say, the medium itself that is the condition of breathing. And what this might suggest to us, as readers, is that Being is not in fact the condition or ground of beings, though its withdrawal would be. Our life—what Plato never tires of viewing as a sort of dream-life—requires that we are suspended in a home or medium in which we are decidedly not at home. In the shocking momentary presence of Being, in the reversal of its withdrawal, in the presence of the aporia itself, we are thus taken aback, we pause, struggling simply to catch our breath.

In any case, this is certainly the effect I want to investigate, this double effect whereby what appears to be the underlying form withdraws in the very act of being expressed, not because of any failure or weakness of expression but simply as the condition of the expression of any form. Or, plainly put, in order for virtue to be acquired, it will be first of all necessary to pursue the underlying question “What is it?” This is not because the question can be answered but because it cannot be answered, even though, if we are to acquire virtue, it must be asked. The exhaustion of the pursuit of the thing (the fish) will infect, or inflect, the medium of discourse, rendering it electric and stunning our normal ways of knowing, not in order to launch us into a world beyond this one but in order to make this world of appearances and of things withdraw in favor of that effect itself, perplexity. And if this use of the fish seems far-fetched, it is only necessary to recall that this pattern of necessary but impossible expression is already fully at play in the passage from the Meno where the fish first seems to appear but does not even appear insofar as the critical passage could properly be translated without positing the fish. A perfectly solid reading giving us no “thing,” no “it is,” no fish at all, but simply “the flat [πλατείᾳ] narcosis [νάρκῃ] of the sea [θαλαττίᾳ].”7

in patterns on a screen

This is an eccentric reading, and so I mean to test it. If the power of the aporia-fish is its habit of withdrawing into its own effect—if simply reading the name of the fish induces a double reading—then we ought to be able to recognize that power in and through its power (the power of the power) to reconstruct the network of philosophical problems actually raised in Plato’s text.

Here, trusting that they are familiar, I will simply list them by name, as it were. Of the classic Platonic doctrines swimming about in the vicinity of our fish we can identify: First, the unmistakable appearance of the theory of Forms, where, in response to Meno’s initial claim that there are many different kinds of virtue, Socrates insists in response, “And likewise with the virtues, however and many they may be, they all have one common character [εἴδος] whereby they are virtues” (72c). To say what virtue is, is to know its eidos, the Form itself. Second, in response to the second properly formulated definition Meno can remember—virtue is to be able both to delight in and to have honorable things—Plato has Socrates ask: “Do not all men, in your opinion, my dear sir, desire the good?” No one desires evil and so to truly know the good is to desire it. Third and fourth, and apparently in direct response to Meno’s comparison of Socrates to an ugly electric fish, the well-known learner’s paradox—“even supposing you were to hit upon it, how will you know it is the thing you did not know?” (80d)—along with what we are taught is Socrates’s response to it: the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the theory of knowledge as recollection (anamnesis).

This is quite a list, and it is remarkable that these fundamental teachings of Plato are to be found as densely schooling as they are here in the Meno. And yet, if we are able to follow the lead of the fish, with its shocking capacity to induce torpor and aporia, we are quickly going to arrive at a point where each and every one of these fundamental teachings is itself suspended.

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas

“I consider that both in your appearance [εἴδος] and in other respects you are extremely like the flat narkē of the sea” (80a). If it appears that Socrates may have purposely induced Meno to resort to his fish-insult8 by his insistence on the form of the question “What is it?” Socrates’s mysterious response justifies the claim that he presses the form of the question “What is it?” not because he thinks of aporia as the lack of an answer to that question, and not because he considers that we might come to understand the question of human excellence (virtue) by answering such a question, but in order, rather, to push us past a limit (horos) that we cannot in fact pass. We both must and cannot (aporia) pass beyond beings, beyond things and answers. We cannot because we are bound to representation through language and must consequently grasp anything “as” the sort of thing that it is, or fail to grasp it at all. We must pass beyond beings (epekeina tēs ousias) because to grasp anything “as” it is means to transcend the thing. We are limited to thinking through things, but we can think things only if we take them “as” the sort of things they are, and yet the “as-this” that we must posit in grasping the thing is not itself a thing and is, thus, something we cannot grasp.

The dizzying and narcotic effect does not stop there, for Socrates has no intention of allowing the moment of broad marine narcosis to be translated immediately into a word or a concept. He will instead immediately work to mark the moment of the suspension or withdrawal of language (aporia). Socrates is made to mark the moment twice, as is his habit: first and most famously, of course, by insisting that “as for me [ἐγὼ δέ] if the torpedo [ἡ νάρκη] is torpid itself [αὐτὴναρκῶσα] while causing others to be torpid, I am like it, but not otherwise” (80c). But, second, and most notably, Socrates marks the necessarily impossible feature of our capacity for knowing and naming things by himself pausing or stumbling—almost as if he were dizzy, out of breath—just at the moment when the word of wisdom might have been forthcoming.

I am referring, of course, to the moment when, as a response to Socrates’s “I am like it, but not otherwise,” Meno offers the eristikon logon, his famous “captious argument” that all knowing may be impossible since one can never come to know what one does not already know. In response, it seems, Socrates is just on the verge of offering a recollection of his own—“for I have heard from wise men and women who told of things divine that . . .”—only to be suddenly and rudely interrupted by Meno.

MENO: Now does it seem to you to be a good argument, Socrates?

SOCRATES: It does not.

MENO: Can you explain how not?

SOCRATES: I can; for I have heard from wise men and women who told of things divine that—

MENO: What was it they said? (81a)

This moment of Socratic narcosis will serve as the test case for our analysis insofar as it appears to be a moment when Socrates is himself about to offer an answer, an “it is,” only to pause or stumble. If there is a properly Socratic aporia, and if it is brought to light by the work of our narkē, then we should find its effects in that Socratic pause.

How to do justice to that Socratic pause or interruption? Try to think of it not as a withholding of the word, not as a failure or flaw, but as the interruption, or perhaps eruption, of a moment of alogia into logos, a resounding though wordless cry or howl at the very source of logos, a source that while essential to discourse exceeds saying; or perhaps, given our marine theme, why not imagine it to be a momentary pause for the soul to catch its breath, since if in fact Socrates is the narkē he admits to being, then he at least, and perhaps also we, must be breathing underwater.

Given the complexity of this need to grasp for images, we could do worse than to begin with the realization that our fish is an animal, maybe even the animal that we are. If this animal has the power to suspend the traditional readings of the three classic Platonic doctrines outlined above, then we might want to take seriously the fact that this Socratic pause results from the fact that the fish is an alogon. And yet Socrates has just allowed that he too has been infected by this temporary narcosis, this alogoria. So it seems that there are two ways to be deprived of words or speech. One is to be an animal for whom this condition is no deprivation at all, and the other is to be an animal having speech but being momentarily deprived of it.

I do not think they will sing to me

In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida works to provoke a wholesale reorientation of philosophy both with respect to and in the form of different questions about animals. Now to a degree, Derrida is expressing his dissatisfaction with all the well-meaning work of philosophers wanting to rescue animals by showing that we are like them or they like us. Of exceedingly greater importance, both to Derrida and to our reading of the Meno, is the suggestion that under the proper regard our animals can grant to thinking an opportunity that was lost to thinking when it turned to metaphysics. And when I say “when it turned” I mean precisely the moment we are now investigating, the traditional reading of the Platonic doctrines outlined above. But I also mean the moment of interruption of that traditional set of doctrines: the moment of the invocation in the Meno of the aporia-fish and the Socratic pause or gasp it induces.9 It is no coincidence that the origin of the traditional reading would also be the moment of an alternative: the moment when, faced with the fact that language speaks to us of things and in terms of things, Plato appears to have his Socrates entertain another path or way (poros). But there is no other way, only a stumble, gasp, or pause that marks both the necessity and the impossibility of the form of the question. Why even entertain such an aporia, such an “impossible possibility?” We can learn something about Plato’s invocation of the aporia-fish at this point of the breakdown of the question “What is it?” by drawing a few insights from Derrida, who knows our fish quite well.

In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida advances his earlier analyses of the Heideggerian Zusage, the spiraling self-inflecting power of language to greet us in advance. Derrida is now willing to suggest that the power of animals to reorient philosophy hinges less on our willingness to care for them (an imperative certainly) than on our regard for their cries and howls.10 Derrida follows the question of language into the question of the animal (the animal that I follow, or that I am: both translate que je suis) in order to suggest that the moment or the pause that constitutes signification in language—the “moment” of difference between what I say and what is, which difference is constitutive of signification—is not mute. What we have here, I propose, is a shift from the vocabulary of the paths of thought (new paths, new approaches, new answers) to the problem of the medium itself.

The focus of this new question is, however, familiar. It is the problem of the connection and thus the difference between speech and phenomena, except that the new formulation with its focus on the animal that I am/following generates a shift from what remains necessarily unthought to what sustains thought. Here in this late work devoted to animals, Derrida is willing to insist that this silent gap or pause is not mute: not because it has a voice but because it comprises the connection between voice and phenomena. There is, it seems, strong reason to believe that due to their exclusion from language animals may offer us the key to thinking in a new way about what remains unsayable in language. “But if one links the concept of the animal, as they all do from Descartes to Heidegger, from Kant to Levinas and Lacan, to the double im-possibility, the double incapacity of question and response, is it because the ‘moment,’ the instance and possibility of the Zusage belong to an ‘experience’ of language about which one could say, even if it is not in itself ‘animal,’ that it is not something that the ‘animal’ could be deprived of? That would be enough to destabilize the whole tradition, to deprive it of its fundamental argument.”11 We would not be overstepping in the least were we to add here that this impossible possibility for thinking anew about being and language was in fact already present and available at the very beginning, indeed at the precise “moment” that our little fish induces in Socrates a pause.

Evidence for that leap from Derrida’s animals to our fish is offered just at the moment this thesis of “a bestiary at the origin of philosophy” is introduced. For just as Derrida is busy inventing a new word for “the” animal, namely, animot—a name that mimics precisely the relation of narkē to its name—Derrida finds himself recalling a moment from even farther back in his private bestiary: “I tried (in 1968, thirty years ago, therefore) to imagine what the program of a Socratic bestiary on the eve of philosophy might be.” Derrida then proceeds to quote this famous passage from his text “Plato’s Pharmacy”: “Alternately and/or all at once, the Socratic pharmakon petrifies and vivifies, anesthetizes and sensitizes, appeases and anguishes. Socrates is a benumbing torpille (narkē).”12 If the voice of an animal speaks through the same pause that makes language both possible and necessary, then could the cry or howl of an animal speak on behalf of the unsayable? Can the impossible be the condition of the possible in this way? Or isn’t that precisely the gesture that is put into question by the double reading (Plato’s or Derrida’s), namely, that despite all the careful protestations to the contrary, every previous philosophical expression of regard for the animal, even Heidegger’s, amounts to asking the unsayable to speak. This is not because they define the unsayable in the light of speech or saying but because they leave the animal wordless, thus deprived, thus voiceless. And of course every animal is voiceless if by speech (logos) we mean the power to ask, “What is it?” and the tendency to name things.

Like a patient, etherized upon a table

Because we owe it to our fish, and our thesis of the Socratic pause, to show that its influence can produce a set of recognizably contestable claims, we should, by way of concluding, return now to the traditional doctrines from the Plato archive.

Logos: Under the narcotizing influence of the aporia-fish, the doctrine of the theory of Forms turns out to be simply the most profound reflection possible on the fact that in order to grasp anything we have to take it “to be.” To grasp something as a being is to conceptualize it “as” this or that. This posited “as-this” is the eidos.

It is important to insist that this apophantic gesture, this positing of the thing “as” the sort of thing it is, must not be viewed as some sort of subsequent philosophical development coming along after the fact in order to categorize the sensibly given object. It is, rather, the very condition of the possibility of there being things or objects of thought and perception in the first place. What occurs when we partake of appearances is an originary act of repetition, a pause or hiccup, if you will, as the zōion logon echon pauses to take in its world. The pause appears as temporal but is ontological. We must re-present the thing “as” this or that in order even to see it. Because it is itself the condition of any rational grasp or vision, this constitutive pause cannot itself be an object grasped, and so it is necessary to acknowledge it through analogy, through images, stories, or depictions. Hence the much-studied Forms are simply Plato’s various efforts to account for the pause or hesitation that is the medium of the originary representation of any thing “as” the sort of thing it is.

This is the basis of our capacity for truth through logos: a momentary pause or hesitation constitutes givenness itself.

Thumos: Whenever Plato does give in to the temptation to posit Being-beyond-beings, it is in the name of the Good.13 Hence whenever we encounter, in Plato, something that might be taken for a posited Form, it is critical to note that the discourse has shifted from the presentation of beings to the problem of being and becoming. Consequently, the doctrine that no one desires evil turns on this shift, or reorientation, from the possibility of beings to the possibility of becoming, from knowledge to action. But on this new ground, we encounter the aporia-fish as well. The moment of originary repetition recurs. Just when we imagine we have caught him in a flagrant act of metaphysics (positing Being beyond beings), Plato repeats the same fundamental move. Just as perception or sensible knowledge requires an attending supplement that both conditions and escapes the function it makes possible, so too, here, in the case of the Good the condition of being good is the re-presentation of desire (a movement from epithumein to boulesthai).14 In the Meno, that transformation from desiring to willing requires, Socrates suggests, an “addition,” a prosthesis: “Very well; procuring gold and silver is virtue according to Meno, the ancestral friend of the Great King. Tell me, do you add [προστιθεῖς] to such procuring, Meno, that it is to be done justly and piously . . . ?” (78d). And what is the prosthesis that, by being added, would constitute virtue? It is, of course, virtue. Virtue would have to be added to any act that would be virtuous. This “addition” that must accompany “the power to desire and to have noble things” is itself neither a desire nor a noble thing. Nor is it their sum. Virtue is the addition of virtue. Originary repetition.

What constitutes the goodness of an action is not its power to procure the thing-desired, nor the desire itself, but the addition of what is, as we see, the re-presentation of the procuring act “as” virtuous. Just as the re-presentation of anything “as” the sort of thing it is constitutes the very possibility of the givenness of that thing, so too here, in the sphere of action, what looks like an addition is in fact the very condition itself. It is an aporetic moment, a narcotized pause. Simply put—and by now our fish ought to be familiar—the “addition” is the fact that, in order to act, human animals must re-present their desires “as” ends to be pursued. This means not that virtue can be added in the transition from mere epithumein to willful boulsethai but that such a transformation already attends the thumos (thus the epi-) in its originary form. The life of the soul (thumos) is the breath (thumos) of the soul. We are approaching a new medium, and it seems to have something to do with breathing when and where it is impossible to breathe.

This originary and radical supplement displaces the “act” of procuring, displaces it into a radical medium that suspends time (understood “as” causality) and sustains action (understood “as” freedom). In the sphere of what we cannot quite help calling epistemology, this shift to an account of the transcendental medium of originary re-presentation obviates any need to posit transcendent Forms. But here in the sphere of human action the same shift requires precisely that the Good actually be posited “as” such, posited not as a supreme being, of course, but as the most fundamental confirmation of the fact of originary repetition: namely, that the initial givenness of desire is, for humans, always and necessarily the re-presentation of desire. Plato presages Freud. A desire is a desire only when it represents an act or an end “as” worthy of enacting. The metaphysical status traditionally afforded the Good collapses into this originary moment, this pause or fold or fissure, through which desire becomes a desire in this originary moment of self-re-presentation. Ours is a thirsty soul.

This is the basis of our capacity for virtue: a momentary pause or hesitation does not come along after the fact in the form of some addition. Rather, what first appears to be an addition actually is the original condition, which is to say that the addition is itself virtue.

Eros: The addition (prosthesis) turns out to be a possibility only for a being whose soul is breathing, a condition of active repetition. With the help of our aporia-fish, we have the charioteer and one horse: we have recollected logos and now thumos. What would be left to be recollected were we to complete this aporetic account of a Platonic soul?

Given the close identification of re-presentation with originary repetition, we arrive at the third of the traditional Platonic doctrines: the learner’s paradox and the theory of anamnesis, of learning as originary repetition. If Being is the medium rather than the logic or the ground of thought and action, then we are, it seems, suspended not in time but in a dream. The dream-report is the original form of the dream, and yet this only indicates that we are suspended in a medium of signification and action that is itself a repetition or re-presentation. The medium itself is the ether, if you will, of the difference between the event and its re-presentation. We live out our lives in that brief espacement of difference, but we are not really at home there. Like wind-blown whitecaps on a wave, we are suspended above the animal we are and we reassure ourselves only through the constructions that follow from that space of originary re-presentation.

The most trenchant and moving manifestation of the pause that sustains our being attaches neither to logos (reason) nor to thumos (desire) but occurs rather as the erotic medium, as touch. There is no finer and truer expression of the disenabling power of our aporia-fish than the pause that attends touch. If we are to complete our depiction of Plato’s aporetic soul, then we need to account for Eros. We need to account for the aporetic pause in the case of touch.

Pause: In the face of Meno’s rude and impudent insistence (“What was it they said?”), and on the verge of offering what will turn out to have been if not a dream then a poetic reverie, Socrates is forced to pause. When he resumes he repeats what he has heard from those who “told of things divine [περὶ τὰ θεῖα πρὰγματα]”: “They were certain priests and priestesses who have studied so as to be able to give a reasoned account [λόγον . . . διδόναι] of their ministry: and Pindar also and many another poet of heavenly gifts. . . . They say that the soul of man is immortal, and at one time comes to an end, which is called dying, and at another is born again, but never perishes” (81a). Two consequences follow, according to Plato, from this reverential reverie that he is willing to recount. First, that “one ought to live all one’s life in utmost holiness.” Second, that since the soul is immortal, “she has acquired knowledge of all and everything; so that it is no wonder that she should be able to recollect all that she knew before about virtue and other things.”

Now, in the tradition, Socrates’s recourse here to divine and poetic images is taken to be a doctrine. And it is presumed to be an answer to Meno’s challenge that it is impossible to learn anything, the infamous “learner’s paradox.” Taken in this way, the thesis that the soul is immortal could possibly address the challenge, assuming only that Socrates were too dense and Meno too weak a debater to notice that it would amount to saying that the soul can get around the fact that it is incapable of learning by instead simply remembering what it already learned. As if shifting the soul from this life to an earlier “this life” would address the challenge. But of course this is to miss the point entirely.

How is the Socratic repetition of what he has heard any different from what we have criticized in Meno, his obdurate recourse to repeating what he has heard from Gorgias? If our aporia-fish has his way, then we will have to accept that memory is not the recollection of something previously learned; learning is, rather, originally a re-collection.

Touch: How would that work exactly? How could the repetition precede the thing or event? What sort of distortion of space and time would allow for such an impossible possibility?

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

“So now, for my part, I have no idea what virtue is, whilst you, though perhaps you may have known before you came in touch [ἅψασθαι] with me, are now as good as ignorant of it also” (80d). It is perhaps not all that surprising that the readers and translators have so often mistaken the narkē for a stingray, since Plato comes very close to making the mistake himself. From a zoological perspective, there is a critical difference between a numbness induced by coming in touch (haptomenon, from haptō, to fasten to, cling to, undertake, to touch or effect) and numbness induced simply by approaching or coming near. From a philosophical perspective, the difference is exactly the same as the difference between Meno’s and Socrates’s acts of recollection. The former is venomous and defensive and characterizes the stingray. The latter is electrical and employs a medium so that it can be used for hunting. Indeed, where the narkē is discussed in the classical literature writers are occasionally inclined to crib a line from Aristotle, who remarks insightfully that one proof of the power of the narkē to act across a distance is the fact that “they are often caught with grey mullets inside, though they themselves are the slowest of fishes while the grey mullet is the swiftest.”15

The earliest commentaries on narkē were concerned with its therapeutic powers.16 They understood perfectly well that the same power that made our fish able to alter the order of time (it is the slowest fish but captures the swiftest) made it capable of acting across space. And before we decide the matter by giving it a name (electricity) we should at least consider the nature of this sort of contact over distance and its therapeutic effect.

For the soul to know or to learn it must cleave to the true and the Good. But to cleave is both “to cling to” and thus “to divide.” I cannot grasp or touch anything unless I am divided from it. And this holds true for the animal I am as much as for anything I would grasp or touch. To touch is necessarily to cleave. Touch must, at one and the same time, “adhere closely, stick, or cling” to its object and “be divided” from that object. Touching is possible only because actually touching is impossible.

When he touches on this question, Derrida is willing to employ the same apparently hyperbolic rhetorical turn that he employed in his re-presentation of the pharmakon passage in The Animal That Therefore I Am, where he wrote of the pervasive tendency to speak in the general singular of “the” animal: “for the gesture seems to me to constitute philosophy as such.”17 In his book On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida invokes what he calls a “haptic intuitionism” and claims to have thereby touched upon the principle of philosophy itself: “But then, by touching on it by way of a figure, psychē really touches (haptetai) upon truth. It touches on it in giving up touching. Truth is not touched except where it is untouchable. In Plato’s Republic the same ‘haptic’ figure describes the relation of the immortal soul with everything that it touches or attains (hapestai) in its love for truth—‘philosophy’ itself. . . . For, as the Republic spells it out, what is at issue here is philosophy itself and the desire of pure psyche.”18 It is no accident that Derrida is willing and able to identify these two gestures with the an-archē “itself” that constitutes philosophical desire: the desire to put the soul in touch with truth even at the price of touch itself (“it touches on it by giving up touching”) and the desire to certify the soul through the pure transcendence of (animal) desire as posited in the neutralized sexuality, “not to say castrated” concept, of “the” animal.19 The animal is no more an animal than pure touch is touch, and for exactly the same reason.

Though we cannot speak with them, and we are not like them in the critical sense of the question of the Meno, the question of justice and virtue, we touch our animals and are touched by them in turn. Here, (un)like the pause constitutive of logos and of thumos, the “being-touched” manifests its aporia literally on the surface, literally and actually thereby deconstructing the surface with every acknowledged touch. When I speak of a shift to the question of the medium of being, what I am suggesting is something like a field-theory of touch, whereby the linear phenomenon we call electricity is set aside in favor of its therapeutic power, the former having to conform to the latter and thus requiring that time and space be bent or warped in order to account for the truth of the contact that is touch. What passes through the narcotized medium is the animal’s spirit, life, breath (“They say that the soul of a man is immortal”). And just as gravity can compel any object across the vacuum of space, and though we are dealing here only with the analogue of an analogy, so too does touch turn out to be a special case (“and at one time comes to an end”). The entire cosmos cleaves (“which is called dying”). Space and time are warped in order to reassure touch (“and at another is born again”). For our part we are homeless in our logocentric world (“but never perishes”).

I am moved over impossible gaps of space and time by voices I remember. I grow old. A love song plays. In a dream I see you speak. (My organs shutting down). I hear, as if for the first time, your voice. (My lungs filling with fluids). My animal sits up and touches me. I am touched by the animal I am. I am hunting again. I am (je suis) following now. Collapsing into that cosmic pause (not now!), all being cleaves, now, to me. I am awakened by a voice I can no longer recognize, a human voice I suppose, and I drown.

Notes

The chapter title is from T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” All section subheads are also from this poem.

1. Plato, Meno, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924).

2. Stingrays comprise eight distinct families of the suborder Myliobatidae and are characterized by a barbed stinger that can deliver venom, but only on direct contact. Electric rays (Torpediniforms) and stingrays (Myliobatiformes) share class (Chondrichthyes) and subclass (Elasmobranchii) but then differ at the level of superorder. On the history of competing efforts to taxonomize the Torpedinaidea and Narcinaidea (the two electric ray superfamilies) and their subfamilies, the interested reader is invited to consult the taxonomic section included in Leonard J. V. Compagno and Phillip C. Heemstra, “Electolux addisoni, a New Genus and Species of the Electric Ray from the East Coast of South Africa (Rajiformes: Topedinoidei: Narkidae), with a Review of the Torpedinoid Taxonomy,” Smithiana, Bulletin 7 (May 2007): 15–49.

3. W. K. C. Guthrie, “Meno,” in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), 363. Despite his “sting ray,” Guthrie does a very nice job with the thallatia, giving us “that we meet in the sea.” Derrida gets it right. In section 5 of Plato’s Pharmacy, he gives us la torpille in the body of the text and Socrate est la torpille narcotique in the note. But his English translator then turns around and gets it wrong again: “Socrates is a benumbing stingray” (Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972], 135, 136; Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson [Chicago: University of Chicago University Press, 1981], 119). John Sallis makes it “stingray” in his Being and Logos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 64, 78. Gareth Matthews, in a book ostensibly devoted to Socratic perplexity, gives one of his chapters the subtitle: “The Self-Stinging Stingray” (Gareth B. Matthews, Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006]). The conflation of these two fish is so embedded that it creeps out into the general culture. The British military named one of their weapons launched from combat helicopters (technically referred to as an LWT: light-weight torpedo) the “Sting Ray torpedo.”

4. Chau H. Wu, “Electric Fish and the Discovery of Animal Electricity,” American Scientist 72 (1984): 598–607.

5. Ibid., 601.

6. Aristotle, History of Animals, Books VII–X, trans. D. M. Balme (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 620b20.

7. I am indebted to Professor Nickolas Pappas, whose superior understanding of Plato and of Attic Greek occasionally saves me from excessively free translation.

8. “But when we deride, or rail at, stupid and ignorant people we call them ‘fish’” (Plutarch, Moralia XII 413). Nothing rests on it, but that Plutarch just might have our passage in the back of his mind is suggested by the fact that he mentions Socrates a few lines above.

9. Michael Naas has offered—as he does—an invaluable recollection of the occasion, in 2002, when Derrida was asked to comment on an exhibit of photos documenting the history of the legendary conferences held over the years at Cerisy-la-Salle: “And then [Derrida] spoke of the exhibit itself. He said that when you enter the exhibit room and see all those photographs of the past you cannot help but gasp, you cannot help but have your breath taken away, and this feeling of being breathless, he said, this suspension of breath, this gasp before the past, is—and I will never forget these words because they were for me so striking and unexpected—‘the very experience of the future’” (Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On [New York: Fordham University Press, 2008], 95).

10. See Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 73.

11. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 166; L’animal que donc je suis (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006), 62.

12. Take your pick. The passage appears originally in Derrida, La dissemination, 135, and then again in a footnote on the following page, 136n47; Dissemination 118, 119n52. Derrida then cites the passage in L’animal que donc je suis, 64. The English translation in The Animal That Therefore I Am repeats, simply through citation, the error: “Socrates is a benumbing stingray” (40).

13. Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 509a.

14. On this transformation from epithumein to boulesthai, see Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 75.

15. Aristotle, History of Animals, 620b20.

16. Wu, “Electric Fish and the Discovery of Animal Electricity.”

17. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 40; L’animal que donc je suis, 64.

18. Jacques Derrida, On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 120–121.

19. Derrida speaks in The Animal That Therefore I Am of “the general singular of an animal whose sexuality is as a matter of principle left undifferentiated—or neutralized, not to say castrated” (ibid.).