Plato's Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters

Badiou (philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris; Being and Event) has provided a lively rendering of Plato's Republic. Gone is the ten-part division in favor of 16 chapters, a prolog, and an epilog. There is now a female character, and the cast is much more active—stealing Socrates's lines or vigorously challenging him. Badiou's Republic is more dialectical than Plato's. Badiou's cast members frequently quote thinkers throughout history as contemporaries or near-contemporaries. His Socrates occasionally contracts Plato. Sometimes Badiou's Platonism is more in evidence than Plato's. Most striking is Badiou's counter to the charge that Plato is a sort of proto-fascist, by characterizing the ideal republic as a communist state and equating the tyrannical with the fascist state. Badiou states that in some cases Spitzer's translation enhanced or even improved upon his French; he calls the English version a "hypertranslation."