Plato's Nightmare

<p>Steven B. Katz's <em>Plato's Nightmare </em>is a wide-ranging tour de force. This poetic-rhetorical-epic-treatise uses poetry and prose to explore the human desire to escape the material body and world. Beginning with Socrates's stripping of poetry from rhetoric and speech in Platos's <em>Gorgias</em> <em>Plato's Nightmare</em> traces the theme of disembodiment across different historical philosophical and literary concepts and periods from ancient Greek sophism and Hebrew mysticism and Christian spiritualism and scientific revolutions to transcendentalism cybernetics and our even more distant post-Anthropogenic future in deep space. In reunifying rhetorics and poetics in <em>Plato's Nightmare</em> Katz's poems act as types of forensic epideictic deliberative arguments forms of evidence (demonstrative illustrative descriptive) and commentary (contrary irony humorous) as well as literary objects (imitative imaginative aesthetic). This experimental and provocative book thus exhibits in its form and content that Plato's ideals of pure mind were increasingly realized but in technological media (writing) that frightened yet exhilarated him. Plato's dream was physical ambiguous haunting and liberating. </p><p></p>