Socrates and the Voice that Says No: Listening to Plato's Apology

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Socrates and the Voice that Says No:Listening to Plato's Apology Sarah Nooter (bio) In Plato's Apology, Socrates describes himself as being guided by a voice (phônê) that prevents him from doing the wrong thing. This voice is also a "sign" (sêmeion), whose absence is "proof" (tekmêrion) of correct action. Moreover, it is a "divine" (theion) and "spiritual" (daimonion) phenomenon (see Apology in Fowler, 1966, 31c–d, 40a–b).1 In contrast to scholars who refer to this phenomenon as Socrates's daimonion ("spiritual thing") or as a "sign" that implicitly signifies something else, in this article I suggest that it is not truly a signifier, but is rather better understood as a sign that resists symbolization.2 In other words, I aim to take this "voice" seriously as a voice: one that is irreducible to language (it says nothing), representative of no one (its speaker is not identified), non-dialogic, acousmatic, and unknowable except by the act of negation or the nonperformance of this act. In these features, it resembles the negative capability of Jacques Lacan's object a, and, in a similar way, dwells almost outside of social existence, the symbolic order, a trace of the Real, as defined here: The Real is essentially that which resists symbolization and thus resists the dialectization characteristic of the symbolic order, in which one thing can be substituted for another. Not everything is fungible; certain things are not interchangeable for the simple reason that they cannot be "signiferized." They cannot be found elsewhere, as they have a Thing-like quality, requiring the subject to come back to them over and over again. (Fink, 1995, p. 92) Like the Real, this voice is embodied as unique, its own Thing, repeatedly present to and constitutive of Socrates, heard only as it frees him from the symbolic structures of language, law, [End Page 413] and Athens, despite the attempts of Socrates's many accusers and his still more numerous interpreters (including himself) to assign it a fixed meaning. It is only through its strange (dis) embodiment of (as) voice that we can understand how it is constituted by and in opposition to the other voices in the Apology.3 Socrates's daimonion has been the object of copious studies, not least because it appears frequently—in several dialogues of Plato, works of Xenophon, and again in later but still ancient authors, such as Plutarch and Cicero.4 Thus, we have a protracted chain of overlapping but never quite (quiet) equivalent signifiers (each a "sign," sêmeion), with its meaning always shifting just a touch from one text to the next, with implications ever newly revealed or occluded.5 Many studies of the daimonion attempt to piece together clues from several dialogues (or authors) to construct an interpretation of its meaning or provenance. In this article, I suggest a different approach, namely, to read the daimonion in the Apology alone, not only in accordance with the precise words used there to denote it—first and primarily "voice"—but also in the context of the other voices that populate this dialogue. There are several justifications for this approach. One is that so literary a writer as Plato (however paradoxically) is likely to construct a careful work like the Apology in such a way that the parts bear meaningfully upon each other, whether intentionally or otherwise. Another is to adopt a more broadly structuralist perspective, which also calls for a psychoanalytic one: each piece of the Apology gains its meaning only in relation or opposition to the other pieces. However generally this may apply to language or texts, I try to show here that this form of reading is particularly, even preternaturally, appropriate to the Apology, whose entire raison d'être is to acknowledge, answer, respond to, fend off, diminish, refute, and even invalidate, but ultimately to exist in relation to accusation. Every voice in the Apology accuses, every voice but one. Yet very few voices can be heard, inasmuch as the dialogue poses the courtroom as a space that does not provide time for emphatic listening, the kind of listening that can affect a process of thought and (re) evaluation, such...