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Print Price: $42.00

Format:
Paperback
336 pp.
138 mm x 216 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199640218

Publication date:
November 2019

Imprint: OUP UK

Diotima at the Barricades

French Feminists Read Plato

Paul Allen Miller

Series : Classics in Theory

Diotima at the Barricades argues that the debates that emerged from the burgeoning of feminist intellectual life in post-modern France involved complex, structured, and reciprocal exchanges on the interpretation and position of Plato and other ancient texts in the western philosophical and literary tradition. Paul Allen Miller shows how individual works of Anglo-American figures such as Toril Moi, Judith Butler, and Kaja Silverman, as well as movements such as queer theory, are rooted in feminist theoretical debates that began in the sixties in France and have continued right up to the present day. Miller demonstrates that French philosophy as represented by writers as diverse as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Sarah Kofman, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray have had a profound influence on literary, theoretical, and cultural studies in the Anglo-American world. He reveals that in order to understand the intellectual substructure of much of later Anglo-American critical theory, it is crucial to examine the development of post-modern French feminist thought in relation to its dialogue with antiquity. In modern feminism and post-structuralism, the ancient world, and Plato in particular, truly function as our theoretical unconscious.

Readership : Students and scholars interested in classical reception (particularly in relation to Plato), modern French intellectual history, literary and cultural theory, feminist theory, philosophy, post-structuralism, as well as classical and literary studies, and the ancient world more generally.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Sublime Freedom of the Ancients: de Beauvoir, Cixous, and Duras on Gender, the Erotic, and Transcendence
1. The Dark Continent: Luce Irigaray, the Cave, and the History of Western Metaphysics
2. Revolution in Platonic Language: The Chora in Kristeva
3. Platonic Eros: Kristeva Sends Her Love to Foucault and Lacan
4. Socrates, Freud, and Dionysus: The Double Life and Death of Sarah Kofman
Epilogue
References

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina.

Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
Narratology and Classics - Irene J. F. de Jong
Scribes and Scholars - L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson
Derrida and Antiquity - Edited by Dr. Miriam Leonard
Laughing with Medusa - Edited by Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard

Special Features

Offers a detailed account of the influence of Plato on major thinkers in French feminism from Simone de Beauvoir to Julia Kristeva.
Contributes to debates in French intellectual history, the history of Platonic scholarship, and contemporary literary, theoretical, and cultural studies.
Provides translations and interpretations of all non-English material.
Includes extensive background on each author covered by the text.