The abstract and the presentation: the theft of Zeno's writing in Plato's Parmenides

Abstract

How to provide a summary of a text that questions the very idea of an «abstract»? First of all, attention is drawn to the problematic character of the abstract, understood as the pretense of bringing the presentation into presence and at the same time of postponing it. Secondly, it is shown how this problematic character of the presence (eîdos) takes place throughout the platonic dialogue in the continuing failure to define the entity’s being, that is, in its ongoing postponement. Furthermore, it is claimed that the metadialogical pretense of the platonic dialogue, its accounting for what takes place in the dialogue itself, is given in the form of a taking distance from its own written nature. Thirdly, this meta-dialogical character is displayed through a scene of the Parmenides, in which this taking distance is provided in the form of the story about the steal of Zenon’s writing, which points to the fact that the eîdos only takes place in its own absencing. Indeed, this will only have been a summary if we refer to the Latin resumere, that is, to the reassuming, in its turn a reassumption of the Greek analambánein. And it is precisely this analambánein that which Plato links to the anámnesis, that is, to the reminiscence, which in its turn refers to a constituting absence.