Animal Republics: Plato, Representation, and the Politics of Nature

Abstract

It is something of a truism among contemporary French theorists that Plato’s vision of politics is elitist, and that it legitimates authoritarian schemas of (non)democratic representation. This view is held by anti-authoritarians like Bruno Latour and Jacques Ranciere who deploy Plato as a foil, as well as by communists like Alain Badiou who cite Plato’s authoritarian view instead as precedent. I challenge this version of Plato the anti-democrat by considering his aesthetics and politics in light of the representation of nonhuman animals in the Republic and Timaeus. In these texts we see a very different Plato, one who solicits the voices of nonhuman animals in order to elicit cacophonous conversations on knowledge, art, and politics. While conventional views of Platonic animals emphasize their role as representatives of wildness in need of taming (imagery of the dogs in the Republic, and of the horses of the Phaedrus, may come to mind), I use the work of Christina Tarnopolsky and Peter Euben to argue that a closer reading of Plato reveals these texts as incitements to listen to the voices of nonhuman animals in the reformation of both philosophy and politics. These voices are not included by Plato merely to constitute the order of Ranciere’s “police logic,” but instead set up a “zoopolis” where human and nonhuman come together in strange, incomplete, but often productive encounters. The irony is that these moments of human/nonhuman community in Plato can fruitfully engage with these French democratic theorists on the very terrain they believe Plato is most hostile to. Ranciere’s conception of politics, as the site of the clash between police and egalitarian logics, can be expanded and deepened by reframing his exclusion of nonhuman voices through Plato’s inclusion of these voices. Latour’s “politics of nature” can be seen as the furthering of Plato’s solicitation of nonhuman entities, via the creation of representative institutions, while Plato’s critique of representation may indicate lacunae in Latour’s new vision of the separation of powers. Bringing Plato, Ranciere and Latour into a dialogue on the topic of nonhuman representation challenges conventional notions of “Platonism,” but more importantly it produces a more nuanced (dare I say more “representative”?) vision of the contemporary ecological polis.

Keywords: Plato, Critical Animal Studies, Rancière, Latour, Democratic Theory, Posthumanism