Ordinary Oblivion and the Self Unmoored

Jennifer Rapp begins with a question posed by poet Theodore Roethke: "Should we say that the self, once perceived, becomes a soul?" Through her examination of Plato's Phaedrus and her insights about the place of forgetting in a life, Rapp answers Roethke's query with a resounding "yes." In so doing, Rapp offers a re-imagined view onto the Phaedrus, a recast interpretation of Plato's relevance to contemporary life, and an innovative account of forgetting as a fertile fragility constitutive of humanity. The crux of Rapp's account of forgetting and her re-reading of Plato is the idea that ordinary forms of oblivion in a life are essential for change, knowledge, and truer seeing beyond the self. Ordinary moments of oblivion both saturate and fissure a life, as well as make possible the decomposing and generative processes of reading required - and risked - by Plato's texts. It is through these processes that the soul becomes forged, such that, argues Rapp, the religious dimension of Plato's philosophy rests not in metaphysics but arises from the texts themselves. Building upon Socrates' suggested method of "forming an image of the soul through words" Rapp documents the vibrant, boundary-blurring images of the soul in the Phaedrus to illustrate how Plato's conception of the soul is not narrowly dualistic, but pliantly construed in a way befitting our porous nature. Rather than being hopelessly incongruous with the modern concern for the subject, Plato stands as a potent resource for engaging impasses in the contemporary discourse of selfhood. Drawing upon poetry and comparisons with other ancient Greek and Daoist texts, Rapp brings to light overlooked features of the Phaedrus, disrupts long-standing interpretations of Plato as the facile champion of memory, and offers new lines of sight onto (and from) his corpus. Her attention to the Phaedrus and her meditative apprehension of the permeable character of human life leave our understanding of both Plato and forgetting inescapably altered, if not resolved. Unsettle everything you think you know about Plato, suspend the 20th century entreaty to "Never forget," and behold a new mode of critical reflection in which textual study and humanistic inquiry commingle to expansive effect.