Márgenes del Protágoras: pelo, escritura, phármakon

Abstract

The Protagoras seems to entangle a contradiction. On the one hand, everyone considers it to be a literary masterpiece, on a par with the Symposium —due to its diversity of styles and the livelihood of its scenes. On the other hand, there’s less of an agreement concerning its philosophical value. This discrepancy consists in the focus on a specific thread in the abstract as an example of the entire positive content of the dialogue, namely the one in which the akrasía is rejected, that is, it is refused that reason could be vanquished by the passions and it is stated in its turn that virtue, enkráteia, should consist in a metric science of pleasure and pain. This ambiguity concerning the assessment of the Protagoras is grounded in the distinction between the form and the content of the platonic dialogue. By means of an approach towards the margins of the dialogue, that is, towards what is considered to be its form —what remains as marginal to the dialogical content—, it will be shown how the latter seeks to account for the dialogue itself and not for its mere content. In this sense, attention will be drawn to the lover-­‐‑beloved structure —among other threads or, better said, among other acts of unstitching (the Homeric quote, the Derridean phármakon and the “first beard”)— in order to show how it results in a role reversal. This approach, however, doesn’t seek to make out of the form the real content of the dialogue but wishes on the contrary to bracket any dialogical content by means of the acknowledgment of an undeclared akrasía that distances itself from any enkráteia.