Staging Political Virtue: Plato’s Republic and the Drama of Desire

PEDAGOGIES FOR LIFE

Speaker: Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston

Discussant: Martin Puchner, Harvard University

Plato's Republic has shaped how we think about politics, ethics, and justice for more than two millennia. In On Political Virtue: Plato’s Republic and the Politics of Desire, the Italian philosopher Carlo Sini reinterprets this foundational dialogue in a strikingly original way. Rather than treating it as a straightforward defense of reason or ideal governance, Sini reads Plato’s work as a theatrical piece : a carefully staged philosophical performance that hides its message even as it delivers it. Through this lens, politics appears not as a purely rational enterprise, but as something animated by desire, exclusion, and spectacle.

In this conversation, Alessandro Carrera, the book’s editor and translator, will guide us through Sini’s provocative re-reading of Plato. He will explore what it reveals about the origins of Western political thought, and how it challenges us to reconsider what “political virtue” might mean today.

About the speaker

Alessandro Carrera is John & Rebecca Moores Professor, Chair of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, and Director of Italian Studies at the University of Houston. Born in Lodi, Italy, he holds a Laurea in Philosophy from the University of Milan and a Ph.D. by Publications in Music, Humanities, and Media from the University of Huddersfield (UK). He has taught Italian literature, philosophy, and comparative literature at a number of institutions, including NYU, Columbia, Rutgers, and the University of Houston. Carrera has published widely in both Italian and English, edited key volumes in Italian philosophy and critical theory, and translated works by Graham Greene and Bob Dylan. He has also won multiple awards for his contributions to poetry, literary criticism, and translation.