Non-Buddhism

or: As You Never Imagined It… with and beyond Derrida

an 8-session seminar with Carlos A. Segovia

🗓 8 SATURDAYS, from October 18 to December 13.
⏰ 11 AM-1 PM Eastern US Time. See time zone converter.
🔗 A Zoom link will be provided on registration.
💰Three options (registration at bottom of this page.):
(i) $150 for non-members (become a member).
(ii) $120 for members.
(iii) Solidarity. We are happy to make our offerings available at reduced cost if you can not otherwise join. To request this option, please email us at inciteseminarsphila@gmail.com with the following information: (1) your current country of residence; (2) reason for requesting this option; (3) amount you can pay: $40, $60, $90 (we will send you the payment link); (4) if you are requesting reduced-cost, are you reasonably certain that you will attend the entire session(s)?

S e m i n a r   d e s c r i p t i o n

Hypercomplex: there is probably no better adjective to describe Plato’s thought; and this explains, too, why it is so very easy to lose sight of what it invites us to reflect on and ponder, which is nothing different from thought’s endless beginning, meandering itineraries, and inner paradoxes. But then, how can one speak of essentialism in Plato? There is none. There never was. Plato – his thought as much as his textuality – can be rightly compared to a fathomless detour. The critical nature of the later dialogues reflects that of the early dialogues, and the middle ones are no exception to this. Borrowing from Derrida – or should one look at it the other way round? – Plato’s noetics, ontology, and psychology can be said to outline a radical philosophy of difference that deconstructs philosophy’s three historical beginnings (with Thales, Heraclitus, and Parmenides) and whose sole purpose is to facilitate an approximate focusing of what remains always out of focus, by inquiring into what can be provisionally focused on each time.

On a close reading that cannot but disprove the pretensions of Platonism as well as Aristotle’s misleading assumptions on Plato’s alleged essentialism, Plato’s genuine thought-image (to put it in Guattarian terms) emerges afresh through numberless ellipses, out-of-fields and other dramatic strategies, through mythical narratives that highlight, if anything, philosophy’s inherent fragility, and through uncanny questions that fractalize themselves relentlessly and challenge thought’s limits from within. Plato’s thought-image surfaces, thereby, as a kaleidoscope or a prism about which nothing should be taken for granted save, perhaps, the way in which the light is diffracted on its many faces: obliquely.

Briefly: ideas are at once situated and abstract, thought oscillates permanently between two iridescent poles, the soul dissolves while it attempts to take shape, being proves to be pure interference, and if there is something secure behind all this it is merely, on the one hand, a disposition towards the thinkable that may be qualified as erotic and, on the other hand, thought’s own unrepresentable and thus paradoxical space. And what can one affirm about Plato’s political philosophy? Here, too, one has the impression of entering quicksand. In the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian democracy failed to live up to its ideals and Socrates’s trial appeared to Plato to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. But Plato’s critique of the Athenian democracy does not amount to its authoritarian dismissal. The Republic is not only a complex thought experiment that ought to be put into historical and theoretical perspective without this implying that its problematic nature should be dispensed with; it displays an inquiry whose scope is not clear beforehand and that demands interpretative caution. And it is in the Laws, anyway, that one finds Plato’s full-fledged (read: duly nuanced) political philosophy.

The seminar aims at exploring these and other related questions through a symptomatic analysis of the Lysis, the Meno, the Phaedo, the Symposium, the Phaedrus, the Republic, the Theaetetus, the Parmenides, the Sophist, the Philebus, and the Laws, considering their historical and meta-conceptual settings and in conversation, moreover, with Derrida’s notion of “la différance,” in which the ideas of divergence and deferral overlap; with Aristotle’s, Hegel’s, Nietzsche’s, Heidegger’s, Deleuze’s, and Badiou’s – but also Irigaray’s, Kristeva’s, and Butler’s – at times direct and at times indirect engagement with Plato’s philosophy; and with a number of recent contributions, such as those of Monique Dixsaut, Francisco Lisi, Sean Kirkland, or Lucia Saudelli, that are helping help us today – as did formerly those, for instance, of Alexandre Koyré, Leo Strauss, Hans Joachim Krämer, Giovanni Reale, Mario Vegetti, or Luc Brisson – to decipher the originality of Plato’s undeniably inspiring, but often elusive, thinking.

C o n t e n t s

I — 1. On the margins of philosophy: deconstructing philosophy’s three historical beginnings (with Thales, Heraclitus, and Parmenides)
— 2. What is to think? Irony and the aporetic nature of the Socratic dialogues (and what Hegel got wrong): the Lysis as an example.
— Excursus A. Early or first-level dialogues?

II — 3. Once more, what is to think? Cross-reading the Theaetetus, the Sophist and the Philebus.
— 4. The soul as différance (either with Derrida’s permission or without it).
— Excursus B. Philosophy, Platonism, and anti-Platonism (nuancing Whitehead).
— Excursus C. Of myth, wordplays, rhetorical complexity, and the status of the likely (with a note on the poets and the historians)

III — 5. On thought’s precondition: Anamnesis as another name for Eros and the question on what is philosophy.
— Excursus D. Eros, humanness, citizenship, and community in the Phaedrus and the Symposium (with a flashback to the Meno).
— 6. Ideas or ghosts? Ousia, eidos, idea

IV — 7. Who says all ideas are non-situated (with a reference to the Phaedo and a note on Aristotle, Heidegger, and Deleuze)?
— 8. Ideas, meta-ideas, and reflective concepts (with a note on Kant).
— Excursus E. Being as interference in the Sophist (with a note on Empedocles, Aristotle, Heidegger, and Guattari).

V — 9. From meta-ideas to archai: One and Not-One in the Philebus and the unwritten doctrines.
— Excursus F. Plato’s divided line in the Republic and Aristotle’s idealist misreading of Plato.
— 10. Back to the dialogues: One and Many in the Parmenides.
— Excursus G. Back to Heraclitus?
— Excursus H. Two, Three… Four and Five in the Timaeus and beyond (with a note on Irigaray, Kristeva, Butler, Derrida, and new materialism)

VI — 11. To agathon, philosophy’s supreme gesture, and Glaucon’s laugh in the Republic (with a note on Wittgenstein and, here too, Guattari).
— 12. The quest for transparency and its harmonics: a transversal cut across Ancient-Greek culture.

VII — 13. Athenian democracy after the Peloponnesian War and the Republic as a thought experiment (with a    note on Strauss and Badiou) — 14. What changes, and what does not, from the Republic to the Laws?

VIII — 15. Questions, perspectives, conclusions

F o r m a t

Each session will last 120 mins. It will consist of a 15-min. introductory exposition, followed by a 60-min. reading session, and a 45-min. discussion. In the last session, all participants will be invited to share their own final reflections on two topics of their choice.

M a t e r i a l s

All materials (= readings, diagrams, and/or images) will be supplied prior to each session.

S o u r c e s   &   S e c o n d a r y   B i b l i o g r a p h y

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated, with Additional Notes, by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Plato. Complete Works. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by John M. Cooper. Associate Editor D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.

The Dialogues of Plato. A New Translation by David Horan. Foundation for Platonic Studies; available online at: https://www.platonicfoundation.org/translation/.

We will be using David Horan’s translation, which is pretty good and easily accessible.

The original Greek text of Plato’s works (dialogues and letters) can be consulted at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?q=Plato.

Further bibliography on each relevant topic will be provided during and after each session.

F a c i l i t a t o r

Carlos A. Segovia (PhD) is an independent philosopher working on meta-conceptuality, contingency and worlding in a post-nihilist key, at the crossroads of the philosophy of mythology. Among his publications, Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide (with Sofya Shaikut; Brill, 2023), Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Félix Guattari and the Ancients: Theatrical Dialogues in Early Philosophy (with Gary Genosko; Bloomsbury, 2025), and Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought (Peter Lang, 2025). He has been associate professor of philosophy at St Louis University Missouri, visiting professor at the University of Aarhus, and the Free University of Brussels, and guest lecturer, amid other institutions, at the European Research Council, the Collège International de Philosophie, the École Normale Supérieure, University College London, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Parrhesia School of Philosophy, the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, the European University at St Petersburg, Waseda University, and Ryukoku University. He has facilitated the following Incite Seminars: Chaosmic Landscapes in Guattari’s Latest Works; and (with Hannes Schumacher) Anarchia and Archai: Reimagining the Pre-Socratics.

REGISTRATION

Non-members (become a member)