Para-public space
7 July 2024
[NOTE: This is the eighth in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]
In a previous article I argued that free speech in the West has so far taken three forms. The first two existed in Athens during the fifth century BCE: first politics, and then philosophy. With the execution of Socrates in 399 BCE, free speech came to an end in Athens. For the next 2,300 years there was literally no place for free speech in the West. It was only when Freud invented psychoanalysis that free speech was finally reborn in the West, in the confines of the psychoanalyst’s consulting room, which paradoxically emerged as a new kind of public (i.e. not private) space.
I represented the first form of free speech as a set of concentric circles, with the private sphere enveloping the public sphere (see fig.1). Most human beings throughout most of history, before the rise of mass society in the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth centuries, lived exclusively in the private sphere. Ancient Greece was unusual — perhaps unique — in carving out a public sphere, distinct from the private: the agora (Αγορά), in the centre of the polis. In figure 1, the agora is symbolised by the blue circle in the centre, which is surrounded by the private sphere of the households (οἶκοι), symbolised by the larger green circle (green thus designates the private sphere, while blue designates the public sphere, which is here coextensive with the realm of politics). Only a few privileged individuals (the citizens) were permitted to step into the agora to conduct politics — though at the end of each day even they would have to return to the private realm of the household to eat and sleep. Athenian politics — the first historical form of free speech — could only take place in the agora.
But politics didn’t last long; it was corrupted by the Sophists, who taught the Athenian citizens rhetoric, which is the opposite of dialectic. Rhetoric is not free speech; the rhetorician aims to persuade the listener to adopt a certain predefined point of view. With the triumph of rhetoric over dialectic in the agora, politics died, but Socrates managed to carve out another space in which free speech could continue to flourish by going beyond politics: the space of philosophy. The public sphere was no longer co-extensive with the agora, but had retreated to the area within the agora in which Socrates conversed with his peers. In the earlier article, I represented this by means of figure 2, where the agora is no longer coextensive with the public sphere (as indicated by the intrusion of green into the formerly blue circle of the agora, whose boundaries are now designated by a dotted rather than an unbroken line).
Yet this diagram now strikes me as inadequate, for when rhetoric triumphed over dialectic, it did so in the very heart of the agora, where political discourse was most at home. So we really need something like figure 3, in which the agora in the centre no longer functions as a public space, but has been reduced to the realm of private necessity (and hence is coloured green). The realm of philosophy carved out by Socrates is on the periphery of the agora, in a kind of twilight zone between the οἶκοιo and the agora. Free speech continues to exist, but only in this intermediate zone.
This intermediate space is neither fully public nor fully private. But nor would it be correct to call it semi-public or semi-private. We might call it para-public. The prefix para- derives, appropriately, from Greek, and can mean “next to” or “side by side” — as in words like parallel and paragraph. Also present in the Greek is a sense of “moving or going beyond,” and this is evident in words like paradox. The term para-public thus indicates that the new space that Socrates carves out for free speech — the space of philosophy — comes into existence by taking free speech into a zone that is beyond politics.
To get a clearer grasp of what I mean by para-public, consider the physical locations where Socrates actually does philosophy. The early dialogues take place in the (now only notionally) public buildings in the heart of the polis — the law courts, a prison cell, the palaestra, the lyceum — but as time goes on they increasingly take place on the margins of the polis — outside Athens, by the river Ilissus — or inside someone’s house:
Locations of the Early Dialogues
Apology — Athens, court of law
Crito — Socrates’ prison cell, Athens
Charmides — Athenian palaestra
Laches — House of Lysimachus, Athens
Lysis — Athenian palaestra
Euthyphro — Entrance to the king-archon’s court, AthensMiddle Dialogues
Meno — House of Anytus, Athens
Cratylus — Athens
Euthydemus — Lyceum, Athens
Protagoras — House of Callias, Athens
Gorgias — House of Callicles, Athens
Phaedo — Socrates’ prison cell, Athens
Republic — House of Cephalus, Piraeus
Symposium — House of Agathon, Athens
Phaedrus —Outside Athens, by the river IlissusLate Dialogues
Theaetetus — Athens
Parmenides — House of Pythodorus, Athens
Philebus — Athens
Timaeus — House of Critias, Athens
Critias — House of Critias, Athens
The order in which the dialogues were written does not reflect the order in which they are supposed to have taken place, but I’m using the former because I think Plato was trying to tell us something. All these locations count as fully public in the sense that the conditions for truly free speech are fully present. Yet they lack other dimensions of publicity: people in these locations lack the visibility and audibility of citizens in the agora; nor can any citizen freely wander into a house uninvited (though it doesn’t seem that hard to gatecrash a party, to judge from the ending of the Symposium).
Philosophy had an even shorter life than politics; it did not survive the death of its creator, Socrates. And so for the next 2,300 years, there was no place for free speech in the West — neither a public sphere proper, nor even a para-public space. Freud’s achievement was to recreate, in his consulting room, the first para-public space in the West since Ancient Athens, by inventing a third mode of free speech: psychoanalysis.
The para-public space of the consulting room is not, however, a mere repetition of that in which philosophy briefly flourished in Ancient Athens, as if Freud somehow revived the spirit of Socrates. For the world had changed dramatically in the intervening millennia. Of all those changes, that which is most relevant for our story is the emergence of the social and the intimate, which — as we saw in the previous article — had eroded even the conceptual distinction between public and private and thereby abolished both. In the next article, I will attempt to elucidate some the problems that this sinister historical development posed for any attempt to revive free speech, and how Freud was nevertheless able to overcome them.
