Plato’s Nightmare

Steven B. Katz’s Plato’s Nightmare is a wide-ranging tour de force. This poetic-rhetorical-epic-treatise uses poetry and prose to explore the human desire to escape the material body and world. Beginning with Socrates’s stripping of poetry from rhetoric and speech in Platos’s Gorgias, Plato’s Nightmare traces the theme of disembodiment across different historical, philosophical, and literary concepts and periods, from ancient Greek sophism and Hebrew mysticism, and Christian spiritualism and scientific revolutions to transcendentalism, cybernetics, and our even more distant post-Anthropogenic future in deep space. In reunifying rhetorics and poetics in Plato’s Nightmare Katz’s poems act as types of forensic, epideictic, deliberative arguments, forms of evidence (demonstrative, illustrative, descriptive), and commentary (contrary, irony, humorous), as well as literary objects (imitative, imaginative, aesthetic). This experimental and provocative book thus exhibits in its form and content that Plato’s ideals of pure mind were increasingly realized, but in technological media (writing) that frightened yet exhilarated him. Plato’s dream was physical, ambiguous, haunting, and liberating.