On Making-Up the Mind: A Political Theory of Plato's Forms.

In the very beginning of Plato's Republic, Polemarchus and a few associates emerge to interdict the passage of Socrates and Glaucon as the two are returning home to Athens. When Socrates asks if he might persuade his interlocutors to let the two Athenians pass, Polemarchus says that his group simply will not listen, and that Socrates and Glaucon "better make up [their] mind to that (ο?τω διανο∊?σ&thetas;∊)." The present paper seizes upon this highly enigmatic phrase as a point of departure for interrogating the relationship between free thought and political power at the founding of political theory. The paper draws on the history of ancient Greek religious practices and a particular psychoanalytic topology put forward by Jacques Lacan, in order to demonstrate that this enigmatic and overtly politicized opening of the Republic memorializes a dialectical relationship, always present but repressed, between political forces and the "pure thought" of philosophical theory. Along these lines it is shown how Plato situates even the very philosophical high point of the Republic, the theory of forms, in a political topology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]