Dialectical What?

More like Dialectical Standstill.

I am an incorrigible critic - a troll. This would explain to some extent the irregularity of these outtakes. With a few exceptions my friends also write irregularly, presumably out of fear, conscious or unconscious, of critics like me who would assault their work. And I share that fear, reflect it right back at them. Thus we find ourselves in this irresolvable deadlock of mutually assured humiliation, projecting our own dispositions onto each other in a dialectical cold war where ideas pile up on either side, always on the verge of deployment but never taking off.

And then we have Socrates, who wrote nothing. And what was he if not a first-rate critic?

Every apt pupil of Socrates is wrought with vacillation. Plato's genius lay in the way he offset the burden of his thought onto the shoulders of his predecessor. And he was fortunate to have had such a predecessor as Socrates: without him he would have left a barren legacy, fearful of critics laying waste to what would otherwise have been construed as philosophical misappropriations. Employing Socrates as a mouthpiece is above all not a way of honoring him, but a way for Plato to inhabit a zone of indistinction between reader and writer, and thereby elude any assault whatsoever.