Ordinary Oblivion and the Self Unmoored is an exquisitely crafted example of that genre of writing, influenced by deconstruction and phenomenology, which has been gaining ascendancy steadily since the 1960s: the speculative ‘close textual analysis’ (6), in this case composed under the positive influence of the ‘religious turn’ in recent continental thought. As such, the volume is accompanied by a number of tacit, but crucial, caveats. First, though it attends to Plato's Phaedrus very closely, Ordinary Oblivion – like Jacques Derrida's 1968 essay ‘La pharmacie de Platon’ – is not a general introduction to the dialogue, or to Platonic thought. The author presupposes a familiarity with both Plato and his critics, most of the latter being mentioned only in passing references. Second, this book does not offer a sustained engagement with contemporary philosophers from the same field, for the simple reason that it pioneers a new reading (a phenomenon not untypical of the genre). It does not study the Greek concept of forgetting and anamnēsis (‘recollection’), nor of that ‘oblivion’ which issues from the trauma of history (as in Paul Ricoeur's 2003 book La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli), but the oblivion which belongs to the everyday modality of the soul (x). This last concept introduces the third, and most significant, caveat, which is that Ordinary Oblivion accepts a certain theological inflection of its premise – specifically, of the ‘soul’ – in order to construct an alternative to secular and post-secular accounts of selfhood, yet does not argue positively for a recognizably theological position in its place. In this way Rapp's contribution differs profoundly from the only English-language study of the Phaedrus comparable to Ordinary Oblivion, Catherine Pickstock's After Writing (1998), which reads Plato in continuity with Christian Neoplatonism. ‘Theology’ itself should be used with caution in relation to Ordinary Oblivion, and Rapp prefers, rightly, ‘religiophilosophical’ to describe her own approach. She does not argue from a denominational standpoint, Christian or otherwise, but, as I shall discuss later, employs ‘religion’ as a useful hermeneutic for a new anthropology.

The comprehensive Preface and Introduction present Rapp's anti-post-modern, Platonic premise: the soul (psuchē) is real. Unlike Plato, Rapp does not accept this claim dogmatically, but attempts to arrive at it through what can best be described as ‘poetic phenomenology’. We learn that the soul is not a static substance, but a dynamic fluidity. It is made, fashioned by a poetic process of self-perception (poiēsis is ‘making’). Citing the poet Theodore Roethke, Rapp asks her readers to reflect whether the ‘self, once perceived, becomes the soul?’ (1). This premise questions the primacy of a ‘secure’ and stable self underlying our experience of the world, but questions alike the physicalist reduction of our selves to so many neurological reactions in the brain (x). The self is unmoored and becomes a soul, a movement which Rapp seeks to accomplish not through an analysis of Plato's philosophical arguments for the existence of the soul, but through a creative simulation of Socratic ‘dialectics’, the method which the Phaedrus refers to as that ‘speech’ (logon) which is ‘written down … in the soul (psuchēi) of the listener’ (276a). In Rapp's hands this method, originally a spoken dialogue between the philosopher and his student, is translated into the act of ‘perceiving’ which takes place when a reader engages with a text in a manner sensitive and self-reflexive enough to turn the passive mode of reading into an active mode of ‘writing’, where what is written is not an externalized text but a living soul. Submitting a text of such venerability as the Phaedrus to this treatment is ameliorated by Rapp's recourse to poetry, mainly that of Emily Dickinson, which she uses to demonstrate her approach to close reading, and to ‘evoke’ the questions unearthed in Plato.

The three main chapters which follow the introductory sections focus on themes and stylistic dimensions of the Phaedrus which in different ways contribute to this unmooring of the self. The first chapter, ‘The teeming body: making images of the soul through words’, turns to the famous animal images which riddle the text of the Phaedrus – the cicadas, the typhoon, the oyster, the horse-drawn chariot. One image forms the centrepiece: the allegorical muthos in which an erotic encounter between philosopher and student elicits a philosophical awakening in their respective souls, likened to the painful burgeoning of wings (245c–257c). This myth, which illustrates graphically the agonistic relationship between the material body (gravitational pull) and the immaterial soul (heavenward ascension), Rapp – here in rare agreement with Pickstock – wishes to ‘unmoor’ from ‘the prevalent characterizations’ which interpret it as ‘evincing a strict dualism’ (53). For Rapp, the fact that Plato in this myth does not draw a hard and fast line between the soul and its body (sōma), but recognizes their interdependency, means that the Phaedrus teaches ‘a pliant understanding of the relationship between material and immaterial dimensions of the human person’ (53). Ordinary Oblivion demonstrates this by pointing out that the ‘avian’ muthos invites not a pat comparison between the soul and a bird, but between the soul and ‘the dynamic equipoise’ which the bird's ‘hovering’ signifies, a comparison that is meant to ‘unsettle’ the relationship between psuchē and sōma (56, 39). This in-between or ‘slanted’ reading is important for Rapp, who wants to move away from the either/or of, on the one hand, ‘static, one-dimensional fixity’ and, on the other, ‘unbridled, plurivocal chaos’ (56), to the ‘ordinary’ of the book's title. This ordinariness she finds not in the dialogue's quotidian bantering, but in its most singular parts, the religious sections of the soul's muthos, where Plato betrays his indebtedness to Pythagorean teachings and Orphic mysteries. Here, Socrates explains how the soul is ‘entombed’ in this body ‘like an oyster in its shell’ (250c) because it has forgotten that vision of the Ideas in the place ‘beyond heaven’ (huperouranion) (247c) of which it is reminded when it catches a glimpse of the Ideas' earthly imitations – in this case, the physical beauty of the student-lover. The difference between gods and humans is that the soul of a god has never succumbed to this forgetting, while the soul of a human has. For this reason human souls are reincarnated and sent back to earth, rather than allowed to remain with the gods. Since the philosopher, however, is one who is trying to ‘recollect’ the heavenly vision, he is, as Socrates explains in the Theaetetus, trying to ‘become god-like’ (homoiōsis theōi, 176a).

This is the point at which Rapp introduces what readers familiar with this goal of self-deification and its place in Greek philosophy will find the most contentious (120–126). Instead of reading the myth as depicting a real yearning of the soul for a transcendent self-deification (‘beyond heaven’), Rapp, pushing her hermeneutics of the ‘ordinary’, argues that this goal is entirely immanent, and already realized. If the purpose of the ‘avian’ imagery is not to prescribe our upward ascension, but to describe our present state of suspended hovering, then Socrates does not intend to blame the body for exacerbating this ‘original forgetting’, which we must recant by casting off our bodies, but to show that this forgetting is a necessary grace, ‘precipitating the soul's transformation into an earthly bodily form’ (43). Just as the ‘avian’ imagery is not for Rapp a comparison, so the ‘human–divine comparison’ is not one that shows us, in a literal manner, what our lives should be like, but what they are already like. ‘Plato’, she writes, ‘doesn't want us to become gods’ (48–49). Ordinary Oblivion is a meditation on the idea that ‘[our] non-god souls’ are already superlatively divine (42). The close reading which enabled Rapp to espy the ‘porosity’ of the boundaries between soul and body, avoiding ‘the dangers of a bound fixity’ (56), now allow her to collapse the distinction also between transcendence and immanence, rewriting metaphysics into an anthropology whose allegories ‘show us to ourselves’ (39).

Chapters 2–3 develop this anthropological ‘unmooring of transcendence’ (123) by examining the tension between two additional, contrasting animal images, this time applied to rhetoric and the related art of writing which Socrates will assign to the soul. On the one hand, Socrates explains that ‘every speech should be put together like a living animal with a body of its own … composed in a way fitting to each other and to the whole’ (264c). On the other hand, the method of spoken dialectics – proposed as the true, philosophical, form of rhetoric – is described as the art of cutting up according to ‘the natural joints’, or the art of skilled butchery (265e–266b). Rapp wants to arrive at a reading which sees these two analogies as complementary, rather than contrasting, revealing once again a hermeneutic of suspended ‘hovering’. The ‘composed’ discourse-body is for Rapp not ‘a wholly amorphous jumble of limbs from which no body becomes formed’, nor is it ‘an organic economy in which equilibrium hums along by way of its complementary functions’ (95). To explain her alternative, ‘slanted’ reading, Rapp draws creatively on the Freudian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's theory of ‘displacement’, by means of which the self displaces its desires onto external objects which are then internalized, giving rise both to schizophrenia and, in less dramatic forms, to the ‘ordinary madness’ which characterizes our interaction with the world (76). If the body is like a speech (logos) then its ‘logic’ is thus to be at once ‘torn’ by the butcher's displacing cuts, and made ‘fitting … to the whole’ by means of the circulation and flow of blood, the liquid logos of the body: ‘the dialogue operates somewhere between random, aquatic, shapeless promiscuity and articulable, fluidless, rigid structures’ (95).

Unlike the ‘schizo-analysis’ of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who pioneered the vogue for appropriating Klein's analysis to a philosophy of the everyday, Rapp wants to affirm a logos which is decentralized without being fragmented and dissolved; where, at the heart of the ‘circulating blood’ (95), there is, presumably, a regulating organ, a real ‘heart’. That Rapp has thus moved far beyond the remits of Plato is acknowledged in the chapter-length conclusion, ‘Ghost ribs of discourse beyond the Phaedrus: radical and domesticated forgetting in Euripides, Zhuangsi, and Aristotle’. These extra-Platonic texts are used by Rapp to achieve a ‘reinvigorated interpretive view’ of her conclusions from the Phaedrus (162). Zhuangsi, mythic author of a collection of fourth-century bce Daoist texts, is the most interesting of these, as he offers not the ‘radical’ or the ‘domesticated’ modes of forgetting which Rapp finds in the Bacchae and Nicomachean Ethics, but, it transpires, a metaphysic to describe that form of ordinary oblivion which Rapp unearthed in the Phaedrus. In the pithy stories of Zhuangsi, Rapp is struck by the appearance of so-called ‘goblet language’, a rhetorical device whereby an author's voice is displaced in order to ‘suspend or interrupt any possible reception of a linear or teleological relation between the author and the reader’ (140). The moments of forgetting here become necessary in order to achieve ‘that kind of “active participation” on the part of the reader’ which displaces at the same time as it engenders ‘an engagement with its process’, the process of writing, and being written (140). This is, for Rapp, what Plato means by writing ‘in the soul’: ‘a kind of engagement on the part of the reader that is transformative of that reader’ (141), and it is this ‘art’ which she calls ‘poetics’, and by which she opines for ‘poetics as first philosophy’ (163).

With this ‘poetics’, and her own stylistic poise, Rapp shows us a model of attentive close reading, sensitive to the ambiguities inherent in a text. As Ordinary Oblivion progresses, however, it becomes increasingly unclear what connection this method has to the text which it proffers as its source, and whether the granular texture the close reading reveals is that of language in general rather than of the Phaedrus in particular. Structuralism and post-structuralism have taught us, after all, that language always plays hide-and-seek with itself, multiplying certain meanings and unmooring others; that this playfulness characterizes reality also, to the chagrin of Platonic metaphysics and onto-theology. If this were the confessed Derridean punchline of Ordinary Oblivion there would be little to inveigh against in Rapp's turn from text to language, were it not that Rapp not only sets herself against such a conclusion (it would be an ‘amorphous jumble’) but enlists the aid of both theological and historical-critical readings of the Phaedrus to do so. A brief example will suffice to illustrate what I mean.

Rapp argues that her unsettling of transcendence is still ‘religious in character, because it depends on the recognition of sacred sources within the ordinary’ (123). This is backed up by observing, like other recent commentators, that Plato's depiction of the philosopher gazing at a vision of the heavenly Ideas is a subversion of the cultic practice of gazing at idols of the gods (47). For Rapp, following her schema of the ‘ordinary’, Plato's philosophization of cultic gazing does not elevate the idol beyond this world, but anchors it firmly to this one, naturalizing the gaze to one practised in everyday life. This makes the divine immanent, rather than transcendent. Yet in order to achieve this immanentization of ‘the religious’ Rapp must – with a heavy-handedness that jars with the flawless lyricism of her prose – misread the role of the huperouranion within the body of Platonic myths. This role is not, as Rapp supposes, to show us an economy of the self or of the soul (either as it might be, which she rejects, or as it is, which she affirms), but to show the nature of the extra-psychic ‘really existing essence’, the ousia ontōs ousa (247c), which constitutes the very focal point of the myth of the ‘avian soul’, a focal point Rapp conveniently ignores. The economy of this ‘reality’ does not elevate what is ‘beyond’ (huper) – whether it is the ‘plain of truth’ of the Phaedrus (248b) or ‘the Good’ of the Republic (509b) – in order to cordon off one psychic reality from its somatic counterpart, but in order to relate its two poles, by the ‘giving’ of one to the other, in this way effecting a ‘participation’ (the term translating methexis, koinōnia, and parousia) of immanence in transcendence. Its articulation, in the belief that true philosophy proceeds by divine allotment (that is, from transcendence) is repeated throughout the Platonic corpus: see for instance Meno 99e–100b; Republic 473c–d. But because Rapp has already relinquished this telos of immanence towards the Good (115–120), and advocated in its place an ateleological process of self-transformation, she must also reject Platonic ‘participation’ and its metaphysic of allotment and gift (both of which receive no mention in Ordinary Oblivion), in order to reach, with baffling legerdemain, for their Daoist homonym cited above. Despite its reaction to the valorization of selfhood in western thought, Ordinary Oblivion does not succeed entirely in breaking this trend. Though not self-centring, its reading nonetheless internalizes and psychologizes the soul, skirting as it does so those aspects of Plato's text which might not only ‘show us to ourselves’, but also take us out of ourselves.