Mateo Duque (Binghamton) will visit and present his research on Oct. 11, 11AM-12:30PM, USyd Philosophy Seminar Room (Quad N494).
Title and abstract:
The Return of the Repressed: Family Drama of Republic in Books 8 and 9
Republic Book 5’s “second wave” neutralizes the private family of the Guardians in the kallipolis, collectivizing kinship terms so that private attachment dissolves into civic unity. Yet in Books 8–9 individual family figures return with unexpected force, driving the corruption of each declining regime. I argue that this reappearance constitutes a “return of the repressed”: the very attachments Socrates suppressed resurface as the engine of devolution. I treat Books 8–9’s political and psychological narratives as inseparable, with the family mediating between city and soul. A case study of the timocratic man—pulled between his restrained father and status-anxious mother—shows why the family returns: catastrophic regime rupture, privatized miseducation, and a retreat from publicity into secrecy. The upshot is not Plato’s endorsement of the family’s abolition but its recuperation, a claim the Republic itself enacts by staging its own dialogue as a drama among Plato’s brothers.
