Plato in Folsom Prison

Introduction

“We shall have our manhood,” Eldridge Cleaver announces in Soul on Ice, “We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.” ¹ Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, founding editor of the Black Panther newspaper, Cleaver deploys dual meanings of manhood in this provocative, not to say hyperbolic, declaration. Political, legal “manhood”: civil rights, access to the vote, equality under the law. Sexual, gendered “manhood”: the free possession and deployment of one’s own sexual agency. Dual, but seemingly incongruous, meanings backed by a threat, near to godlike in its intensity, invoking the mid-century specter of nuclear holocaust—or the Apocalypse recounted in the Book of Revelation. Why this threat behind Cleaver’s two demands for manhood? What is the relation between the two demands? And how does Cleaver’s provocation advance African American liberty and equality within the Euro-American political order, an order long conditioned, as Cleaver understood it, by virulent anti-black, gendered, and sexualized political discourses?

These are thorny questions. Cleaver’s political thought is itself a barbed thicket of intellectual and rhetorical provocations. Is it possible to enter without being cut? Likely not. On its face, Soul on Ice—Cleaver’s bestselling masterwork, which catapulted him onto the national stage as a Panther leader—is wrenchingly masculinist, misogynistic, and homophobic. It has long been critiqued by a variety of activists and scholars from feminist, lesbian, and gay perspectives. Rightly so. Yet we cannot quite be done with Cleaver, just as we cannot quite be done with many other political thinkers who can be similarly faulted, for Soul on Ice epitomizes a particular mode of radical political thought with exceptional clarity. Better yet: in your face, flamboyant Technicolor, every surface heightened into its own spectacle. The form of Cleaver’s political thought in Soul on Ice is inseparable from its content. Race, gender, sexuality, class, nationalism, and the very practice of “doing” political thought, enacting it for and upon a public, all are revealed in a brilliantly lit display. Cleaver’s thought is often bewilderingly transverse, shockingly transgressive, agonizingly perverse—in short, it’s rather queer.

But back to the surface. At first glance, the Black Panthers appear as the quintessence of aesthetic and ideological modernism—in styles of dress and graphic design, for example, and in forms of political writing and speech indebted to the manifesto, that high-impact vehicle for conveying ideas and demands. So it comes as a surprise to discover in the culminating section of Soul on Ice, in which Cleaver gives a mythic account of how sexuality and gender are racialized in the Euro-American political order, that Cleaver transversally deploys ideas, images, and forms of writing which seem clearly to be alluding to classical Greek referents. Most obviously, Cleaver reworks the playwright Aristophanes’s mythic speech on erôs in Plato’s Symposium. I argue Cleaver is also alluding to the Republic, particularly its stark bifurcation of intellect and desire and the consequences of that bifurcation for Plato’s theory and its subsequent impact. The Panther traverses many spheres—personal, political, historical, and theoretical—in queering political theory.

Queer as a verb and a practice, not as an adjective or identity, should hover over every usage of the term. I do not intend to shoehorn Cleaver or his thought into the category “queer.” There is no such category. Rather, Cleaver’s queer modes of political thinking, especially his emphatic focus on racialized sexualities, expand our understanding of what it means to queer theory. In turn, while my focus on racialized sexualities as a mode of queering classicism is unique in LGBTQ studies and theory, I affirm recent trends in these disciplines which over the last two decades have shifted markedly towards interrogation of their “whiteness” and Eurocentrism. ² I analyze three distinctive features of Cleaver’s queer classicism: his esoteric mode of alluding to but not naming his classical sources; his excision of essentialized same-sex elements from Aristophanes’s myth; and the specific Platonic concepts, images, and forms of writing which Cleaver explores and reworks, including the concept of to deinon, the uncanny.

In order to appreciate Cleaver’s theoretical intervention, we need to bring together the study of classical political theory and the study of black political thought (joining the call by Michael Hanchard in the pages of this journal for more sustained engagement with the latter) while also questioning the very demarcations “classical” and “black.” ³ Just whose classics are the Greeks, after all? And what counts as political thought simpliciter? In terms of intellectual architecture, Cleaver’s classicism in Soul on Ice models a richly allusive, postmodernist technique that rearranges classical elements with brio and verve, flagging thereby the unrestricted theoretical fecundity of Black Power while simultaneously subjecting the now disaggregated components of classicism to critical interrogation. ⁴

In addition to studying Cleaver’s multifaceted engagement with Plato, I conclude by arguing that one pathway towards understanding Cleaver’s broader political thought (and, indeed, self-presentation as a political thinker and actor) runs through the queer concept of camp—a ludicrous, wrenching form of exaggeration which succeeds precisely through enacting failure. This approach sheds light on Cleaver’s obsessive interest in masculinity, a concern of many previous interpreters, and a similar interest among neo-Cleaverites set on defending a Left masculinism of black resistance. Such attention broadens the critical study of men and masculinities, still in its infancy in political theory. Let me emphasize now, however, that these are not the only ways to interpret Cleaver—there is much to be done on his deployment of African American vernacular traditions, for example, to say nothing of other sources, like Frantz Fanon, which beg for attention. Yet I offer these explorations as contributions to the study of the Black Panthers and Black Power, twentieth-century radical and anti-colonial thought, and queer theory and classicism. Lastly, I submit that Cleaver can also teach us about Plato. Cleaver reworks Plato in a mode akin to what George Steiner calls a “vitalizing assessment of past presentness.” ⁵ Cleaver thereby shows what in Plato is still alive, what can be pressed into confrontation with modern political problems, and what role the historical legacy of Platonic theories may have had in creating those problems.

Second Glances

Cleaver and Plato? Are you surprised by this pairing? Deepening the challenge of exploring what Cleaver is doing with his Platonic sources in Soul on Ice are his strategies of playing with and playing up to his reader’s expectations. Veiling his pairing with Plato, if indeed it is a pairing, Cleaver masks his sources. As one critic notes of an important chapter we’ll consider, “Although ‘The Primeval Mitosis’ clearly has a substantial intellectual pedigree, relying on works Cleaver probably read in prison—Plato’s Symposium, Hegel’s ‘Master-Servant Dialectic,’ Engels’s ‘The Origin of Private Property,’ Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and many others—Cleaver mentions no sources by name.” ⁶ Cleaver’s silence stupefies some interpreters, but I consider his silence as illustrative of his political and theoretical method. Cleaver leaves it up to the reader to recognize that he is doing anything with Platonic sources before being able to think about what he is doing. This is a form of esotericism, a mode of writing which clearly interested Cleaver. ⁷

Cleaver devotes much of Soul on Ice to unmasking American neuroses about racial miscegenation. These neuroses are analyzed most acutely in two sequential chapters, “The Allegory of the Black Eunuch” and “The Primeval Mitosis,” which begin the culminating section of the book, “White Woman, Black Man.” Platonic references are densely concentrated in these two chapters. If a reader comes to these chapters with some Eurocentric, Aryanized Plato in mind, then he or she may well not want to see this intellectual pairing—or even consider it thinkable. ⁸ In this case, the shock of recognizing that Cleaver is having his way with Plato (and Aristophanes) might well awaken the terror of cultural miscegenation—three-way sodomitical miscegenation at that. And Cleaver wouldn’t be the first Panther to be intimate with Plato: Huey P. Newton, party Minister of Defense, cause célèbre (the nationwide “Free Huey!” campaign), romanticized icon of Panther sovereignty (Cleaver staged the famous photograph of Newton, wielding a spear, seated on a rattan throne atop a zebra skin), was well known for having repeatedly reread, and street-lectured upon, the Republic. ⁹

There are more biographical and textual reasons for thinking that Cleaver engages seriously with Plato, but at this point it is important to recognize that there is still much work to be done on the intellectual architecture of Black Power in political theory. To say Eldridge Cleaver’s political thought has been scorned by scholars would not be accurate. Scorn presupposes attention. Within political theory, the Black Panthers and Black Power itself—to say nothing of Cleaver—are not even deemed worthy of a parenthetical or footnote in, for example, The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, which also makes no mention of precursors like Malcolm X. ¹⁰ These lacunae are mirrored in nearly every leading overview, ¹¹ introduction, ¹² and reader in the field. ¹³ This is true even since the turn to the study of ideologies, less fraught with policing what counts as “theory.” ¹⁴ Standout exceptions at the monograph level include the work of John McCartney and, more recently, Michael Dawson, Judson Jeffries, and Michael Hanchard. ¹⁵ Of course, this is certainly not to deny excellent work on Black Power in other disciplines, particularly history and African American studies, but rather to call attention to the tardiness of political theory. ¹⁶

Given the range of theoretical figures and movements studied (even canonized) in the discipline, not a few of which could be accused of misogyny and masculinism, heterosexism and homophobia, the deeply troubling neglect of Black Power in political theory is likely not due to the scorn Cleaver’s work has received on these scores. It is worth rehearsing Cleaver’s critical and popular reception, however, for it has bearing on the challenge of determining what Cleaver is up to in Soul on Ice. New York Times critic Maxwell Geismar claimed Soul on Ice “represents in American terms the only comparable approach to the writings of Frantz Fanon.” ¹⁷ In his foreword to a later collection of Cleaver’s writings, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who had interviewed the exiled Cleaver in Algeria, reflected that Soul on Ice was one of three classic works of Black Power in his eyes, and those of his contemporaries, at the time; indeed, it was “especially titillating—I know no more appropriate word to use—both because of Cleaver’s bold advocacy of the use of Fanonian armed resistance in the next phase of the civil rights struggle, and in particular his somewhat obsessive fascination with black male and white female sexual encounters.” ¹⁸

On the right, Cleaver provoked much gnashing of teeth. William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the conservative National Review, is representative. Aghast that Berkeley offered Cleaver a teaching position and that the Columbia University newspaper editorial board endorsed him for U.S. President, Buckley took to the pages of the Boston Globe to attack Cleaver in patronizing tones, reducing Cleaver to the following: “early on in his life he elected to defy the law, which he began to do as a boy by hustling marijuana, for which he was sent up to a juvenile reformatory, after graduation from which he turned to the serious business of rape, beginning first with black women but moving on to white women for ideological reasons.” ¹⁹ New Right conservatives confess “Cleaver was huge” in 1968 and that they and other conservatives felt “besieged” and in desperate need of “heartening” when “Bill Buckley came riding into town, all alone and totally unafraid, into the heart of the New Left revolution.” ²⁰ (Note, by the way, the telling imagery of settler colonists surrounded on a savage frontier, waiting for a cowboy savior.)

Cleaver’s stature within Black Power and his national and international renown would soon come to end. From the early 1970s the Black Panthers disintegrated due to a combination of internal disputes—fomented in part, we now know, by the machinations of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s “Counter-Intelligence Program”—and external pressures. ²¹ A particularly acrimonious dispute saw Newton expel Cleaver, in exile in Algeria, from the party. And over the next decade, as feminist, lesbian, and gay perspectives gained ground, Cleaver’s work came under withering assault. Despite Cleaver’s Black Panther declaration in 1969 that “we must purge our ranks and our hearts, and our minds, and our understanding of any chauvinism, chauvinistic behavior or disrespectful behavior toward women,” a later generation applauded Michelle Wallace’s forceful feminist critique of the “black macho” she discerned in the Black Panther party: “A big Afro, a rifle, and a penis in good working order were not enough to lick the white man’s world after all.” ²² Exhibit A in Wallace’s argument: Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.

Nearly two decades later, bell hooks continued this critique, arguing Cleaver invoked the long-dominant “negative stereotypical image of the black male as a predatory and lust-filled rapist” and also “claimed this identity as central to his definition of black male being.” ²³ Even more troubling, hooks argued, were the downstream effects of Cleaver’s work: from the 1960s onwards, “black males, courtesy of Eldridge Cleaver and others, were stoking the fires of white racialized sexist pornographic fantasies by proclaiming that they were indeed the sexual fiends white folks had always claimed them to be.” ²⁴ Cleaver was also out of step with the gay rights movement. Newton, in contrast, declared common cause between the Black Panthers and the gay rights movement in 1970. ²⁵ Later, gay critics like Kobena Mercer would extend feminist critiques to include the heterosexist and homophobic aspects of the “masculinist form” of Cleaver’s “cultural reconstruction of the black subject.” ²⁶

“I suspect that history is not finished with Eldridge Cleaver,” the contrarian Ishmael Reed confided in his 1992 preface to Soul on Ice. Among scholars, the recent revival of interest in Cleaver’s thought is certainly not predicated on denying feminist, lesbian, and gay critiques. Most aim to analyze Cleaver from a queer theoretical perspective, arguing we should revisit Cleaver as a way of exploring miscegenation, shame, abjection, mid-century American masculinities, and social subjectivity. ²⁷ These second glances acknowledge the difficulty and rarity of theoretical considerations of “the sexual politics of race (or the racial politics of sexuality).” ²⁸ Cleaver provides an admittedly preparatory “model of cultural psychology implicated in historical process.” ²⁹ If Cleaver is interesting it is because of “the problematic out of which he works” ³⁰ and the manifold theoretical problems he gets himself, and us, into. Indeed, Cleaver’s thought on the sexual politics of race, and the racial politics of sexuality, may be a failure—may even be designed to be a failure. Here, in the enactment of failure, the queerly camp element of Cleaver’s thought is to be found. ³¹

Queer camp enacts failure. Cleaver may well show up political masculinism for what it is, for example, rather than attempting to shore it up. But another crucial feature of camp is esotericism, an inscrutability to those who fail to see (or choose not to see) its subtle codes of irony, parody, and auto-critique. So there will admittedly be those who don’t take Cleaver’s point. Some political practitioners, engaged artists and public intellectuals, see Cleaver theorizing a Left masculinism of black resistance. This group—quite in contrast to the scholars above—launches a frontal assault on the feminist, lesbian, and gay orthodoxies which shunt Cleaver to the margins. Consider Reed: “The groups that are the subject of so much abuse in Soul on Ice, women and gays . . . have placed their oppression front and center and have even made villains of the former black male machos who fantasized a revolution (while borrowing their strategies).” ³² Reed bemoans a split he perceives in the tradition of Left masculinism, charging white men have attempted to escape critiques of their male chauvinism by shining the spotlight on that of black men, “bonding with the black feminist movement and criticizing the treatment of black women by black men.” ³³ Reed situates Cleaver at the fountainhead of a newly assured Left masculinism of black resistance grounded in the musical and cultural permutations of Hip Hop and encompassing thinkers and activists known as “Hip Hop intellectuals.” ³⁴

To conclude this summary of the critical and popular reception of Cleaver’s thought, we may note that among the Hip Hop Intellectuals a recent, self-consciously Cleaverite, theorization of “radical Black righteous machismo” can be found in A. Shadid Stover’s Hip Hop Intellectual Resistance. ³⁵ Stover, whom I discuss more fully in the conclusion, gestures toward defending his Cleaverite position from charges of misogyny and homophobia but does not (I think) succeed, partly because his position has lost all of the queer transversality of Cleaver’s shifting position, in terms of gender and sexuality, in Soul on Ice. That said, Stover’s work, like that of other intellectual and artistic Cleaverites, is an important marker of Cleaver’s ongoing impact: Cleaver’s Soul on Ice continues to shape the radical Left subject—predominantly though not exclusively in the African diaspora—across the globe and to this day. ³⁶

Zeus’s Stratagem

Eldridge Cleaver knew he’d be persecuted. “It may be that I can harm myself by speaking frankly and directly, but I do not care about that at all” (36). He knew he’d provoke outrage—indeed, he plainly revels in appropriating the right to outrage his fellow citizens. Cleaver later points explicitly to Socrates as his model. Writing “Exile and Death” seven years into his own fugitive exile from the United States, Cleaver begins:

After his outraged fellow Athenians convicted him of corrupting the morals of the youth, Socrates was offered two forms of punishment: a choice between exile and death. That he opted for the hemlock over the lonely road has been an incitement to martyrs and a reproach to fugitives down through the ages. In high school, I remember marveling at Socrates’ choice. It took my breath away[.] ³⁷

Cleaver’s Socrates is the one represented in Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Phaedo, works recounting Socrates’s trial and conviction in the Athenian assembly—on charges of corrupting the citizen youth and introducing new gods—and consequent death by hemlock. Socrates’s distinctive political role in his home city, that of outrage-inducing provocateur, results in his afterlife as a “martyr” in the eyes of many, especially his disciple Plato.

Given Cleaver’s life-long fascination with Socrates as a model for political living (and dying), how surprising would it be if Cleaver sought out other writings on Socrates? One of his biographers reports that Cleaver studied Plato while imprisoned. ³⁸ He tells us himself—in the chapter “The Christ”—of his intensive studies with an impassioned instructor who taught in the prison each day. Cleaver’s studies included “world history, Oriental philosophy, Occidental philosophy, comparative religion, and economics” (52). In “Exile and Death,” Cleaver sees himself as a Socrates who puts himself at risk as he poses sharp questions to his fellow citizens. But political provocations come with a price.

It has rightly been said that Soul on Ice “moves narratively from illness to health.” ³⁹ What is revealed when we map that trajectory? “Primeval Mitosis” turns away from the enraged despair coursing through the book. That enraged despair comes to a head in “The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs” chapter immediately before; that chapter ends in a paean to the shedding of (white) blood. The chapter following Primeval Mitosis is “Convalescence.” The surgery suturing the racialized split in the body politic has been done. Healing can begin. Between these two chapters, the Primeval Mitosis myth does life-saving theoretical surgery; it works by revealing—and thus undoing—the original, politically wounding, split in the body politic.

Cleaver’s classicism is crucial to the overall project of Soul on Ice: of the many theoretical and literary registers in which Cleaver writes (Biblical apocalyptic, Marxist, Fanonian, Beat, Freudian, among others), his engagement with Plato stands out for its role in the Primeval Mitosis myth and the myth’s importance within the work’s trajectory. And there are aspects of Cleaver’s classicism, like his valorization of Socrates as risk-taking political provocateur, beyond his adaptation of Aristophanes’s myth.

Cleaver trumpets his classicism from the first lines of the culminating section of Soul on Ice. The Black Eunuchs allegory begins, “I sat down to eat my beans.” Plato’s Republic begins with Socrates’s statement, “I went down to the Piraeus.” The “I” of the allegory may or may not be Cleaver, but the two “contemporaries” with whom he sits are “young, strong, superlative Black Eunuchs in the prime.” The interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues, excepting Socrates of course, are almost always young men in their prime. Cleaver’s threesome will soon be joined by an old man, in some respects a Socratic figure, who provokes them to enraged despair through relentless questioning prompting the young men to unnerving self-examination. This Socratic form of questioning and these affective responses from interlocutors are among the most distinctive features of Plato’s dialogues. (Thrasymachus’s fate in Republic I is a prominent example.) Furthermore, both Cleaver’s allegory and Plato’s Republic are forms of diegesis, recounted narrative, which distance the narrator (positioned at the extradiegetic level) from the narrative action. Both also contain additional levels of narration (the metadiegetic) embedded within the primary narrative structure as speakers within the dialogue recount narratives of their own.

The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs richly repays detailed exegesis as a vitalizing assessment of the Platonic dialogue form. In addition to the dialogic features noted above, the old man also resembles Cephalus, the old, wealthy arms-dealing metic (resident alien) in Republic I. Each is a second-class citizen. Cephalus has made his peace with the Athenian political and social order and his second-class status within it. As a metic, Cephalus can trade and own property—though only in the port city of Pireaus and not in Athens proper—but he does not have full Athenian political or legal rights. Cleaver’s old man has made his peace with American racialized and sexualized politics and the black man’s role within those politics. Cleaver’s young men hold the old man in contempt. “We had written him down as an Uncle Tom—not that we had ever seen him buck dancing or licking the white man’s boots, but we knew that black rebels his age do not walk the streets in America: they were either dead, in prison, or in exile in another country” (183). Cleaver’s classicism not only adapts Plato to present concerns but also gives us a new language for, and eyes to see, Plato’s original work. Is Cephalus, especially in comparison with Socrates, not a kind of Uncle Tom?

Cleaver has been accused of equating disenfranchisement with emasculation, ⁴⁰ a logic much on display in the Primeval Mitosis myth but which emerges in the Black Eunuchs allegory (castration, in multiple forms, is the allegory’s core subject, as its title emphasizes). It’s helpful to also keep in mind, however, that Cleaver’s target is a white America—he trumpets his role as an “Ofay Watcher” (87)—which equates full political citizenship with a particular masculinist ideal. One component of that (white) masculinist ideal is sexual sovereignty over the bodies of others, especially black bodies: hence, Cleaver’s second demand for “manhood” is opposed to the interdiction of desire in midcentury America, especially the preemptive interception of erotic congress between white women and black men. For several centuries, Cleaver reminds us, such preemptive interception was all-pervasive and ranged from policing the most fleeting glance to the terror of lynching and castration.

Cleaver found himself the object of modern-day carceral surveillance on precisely the point of interracial desire. It’s been argued that modern American prisons operate not like Foucault’s reading of Bentham’s Panopticon but through practices of non-surveillance, non-discipline, a mere warehousing of bodies, the “nonopticon”: “if you control the entrances and exits, you do not have to look.” ⁴¹ This may be true of the American carceral regime today, but not at mid-century. After adorning his cell with a pinup of a white woman, Cleaver returns one day to find the pinup, torn to pieces, floating in the toilet. At that moment, Cleaver is interpellated as a black man who wrongly desires, and displays his desire for, a white woman. The guard who noticed the pinup offers Cleaver a deal: he can have a pinup—it just can’t be of a white woman. Cleaver realizes the terms of the deal reveal much about the American carceral system. Under slavery, Jim Crow, ghettoization, and mass incarceration, the policing of black sexuality is central. ⁴²

In the Primeval Mitosis myth, Cleaver analyzes white America’s obsession with black male sexuality and the political imaginary created to sustain that obsession. This analysis will break the aporia, the impasse and enraged despair, with which the Black Eunuchs allegory closes. Within the myth, Cleaver theorizes white political domination as a machine constructed of social imagery backed by coercion, a machine designed to create docile laboring subjects and to interdict relations with the potential to effect political change. It is here that Cleaver engages with Aristophanes’s mythic theory of erôs. In Cleaver’s Primeval Mitosis, humans were once a combined, hermaphroditic “Man/Woman” entity, a “Unitary Self” split in half into “male and female hemispheres of the Primeval Sphere” (206). In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes theorizes humankind as originally composed of spherical beings—hermaphrodite, female, and male, each sexually self-sufficient—which are later divided into hemispheric halves by Zeus, on behalf of the Olympian gods, in order to weaken humankind and forestall their rebellion against the gods (189c ff.).

Cleaver’s Aristophanic model adapts the theory of a wounding separation meant to shore up established power. The division effected by the contemporary racial order is similar to that effected by Zeus: both are designed to politically weaken the victims by sundering them one from another, distracting them from their reformist political aspirations as they attempt to erotically (re)unite. By dividing black men from white and black women, the possibilities of challenging the dominant racial order are reduced. Hence, in the final chapter of Soul on Ice, Cleaver refers to his black potential bride as “Queen” to indicate the new political status effected by the reunion of black men and women in rebellious contravention of white supremacy.

The lusciously queer irony here is that for all of Cleaver’s much-bemoaned heterosexism, of which the yearning for heterosexual (re)union in the Primeval Mitosis myth is supposedly indicative, the fact remains that within this model Cleaver’s heterosexuals are striving to achieve hermaphroditic wholeness. The genesis and telos of Cleaver’s supposedly arch-heterosexist myth is, literally and logically, a hermaphrodite. This is but one of several examples in Soul on Ice of Cleaver’s queerly transverse theoretical positioning.

To see the further intricacies of Cleaver’s Aristophanic myth, we need to again consider the Black Eunuch chapter. There, the old man explains divisions between black men and women as the result of the “war going on between the black man and the white man.” The white man declared himself the “Omnipotent Administrator” and “established himself in the Front Office,” turned the black man into the “Supermasculine Menial” and “kicked him into the fields.” “The white man wants to be the brain and he wants us to be the muscle, the body” (190–91, original emphasis). As Cleaver’s mix of anachronistic workplace references suggest, this subordination stretches from the early modern plantation to contemporary managerial industry.

Twice in this section Cleaver refers to the “mechanics” of the political imaginary of white supremacy. The white man applauds black male achievement in physical activities but “hates to see a black man achieve excellence with his brain”:

The mechanics of the myth demand that the Brain and Body, like east and west, must never meet—especially in competition on the same level. When it comes to the mechanics of the myth, the Brain and the Body are mutually exclusive. (191)

The “mechanics of the myth” is a revealing phrase. It captures both senses of the mythic American racial order: both the workings of the myth as myth—he’s elaborating its contours—but also the political efficacy of the myth, the political facts on the ground which the myth purports to justify. The myth that white = Brain and black = Body is not simply an attempt to “explain” the world: it is imposed politically by law. Segregation and anti-miscegenation laws are demanded, and justified by, the mythic discourse which imputes radically different ontologies to the two races, the “Brute” Menial and the Administrator “Godhead of society” (209).

In Aristophanes’s myth, Zeus’s stratagem to divide humankind is similarly part of a war designed to achieve two goals. First, make the subjects divided, distracted, and thus too weak to rebel. Second, gain docile subjects who fulfill economic functions for the ruling gods. The machinations of Plato’s Zeus and Cleaver’s white man are both designed to create the unrebellious, laboring subject. Desire must be interdicted because desire forms connections, and even political alliances, among individual bodies. In Aristophanes’s myth desire glomerates, winding together separate human beings into a new whole, a cosmological whole, represented by the sphere. We see here a cosmological conception of erôs more akin to pre-Platonic philosophy than the political and psychological forms advanced elsewhere in Plato’s thinking. ⁴³ Sylvia Wynter has called our attention to “archaeo-astronomy” and the ways cosmological conceptions are used to buttress ethical norms and political power. ⁴⁴ As we shall see, the political significance of Plato’s Aristophanic, cosmological, spherical human beings, bound together by erôs, is their capacity to challenge hierarchies of domination and exploitation. For Cleaver, these intimate spheres are paired with and opposed to the global sphere bounded by white supremacy and neo-colonialism—the globe Cleaver threatens to “level” in the provocative declaration which opens the present article and which closes the first section of Soul on Ice.

Plato’s Machine

Apocalyptic (“the earth will be leveled”) and machinal (“the mechanics of the myth”), Cleaver’s thought appears both biblical and modernist. Cleaver is a postmodern master of deploying various registers. Indeed, he engages in a kind of exemplary disidentification, in that he “disidentifies” with these discourses (i.e., works within and beyond them, neither identifying with nor wholly rejecting them) while also redeploying them with exemplary virtuosity. ⁴⁵

Cleaver envisions that the reunion of the sundered, now heterosexual but originally hermaphroditic, beings in his Primeval Mitosis myth will result in “Apocalyptic Fusion” (207). It is no coincidence that the apocalyptic returns precisely at this point. Cleaver theorizes his way out of the political aporia with which the Black Eunuchs allegory, immediately preceding, closes. There, the two young men declare, “Blood is a lubricant. . . . It smooths the way and enables a people to slip out of the tightest of clutches. You don’t tinker with a logjam, man, you dynamite it! . . . I’m thirsty for blood—white man’s blood. . . . I will march into the Mississippi legislature with a blazing machine gun in my hands and a pocketful of grenades” (203). The old man, who has the last word, recoils, “No. More blood will only add crime upon crime. No! . . . Blood upon blood; crime upon crime; brick of blood upon brick of blood of a new mad Tower of Babel which, too, will fall. . . . There can be no triumph in blood” (204). Instead of dynamite and grenades, Cleaver offers his Apocalyptic Fusion of reunited black men and women.

A black nationalist project of political foundation, especially one in the midst of a white supremacist order, cannot but adopt a supremely ambitious register. The world of white supremacy will be radically changed regardless of which option chosen: either the black man is denied his manhood and the earth is leveled by his attempts to gain it or the black man gains his manhood and the Apocalyptic Fusion results. Either way, the white supremacist world is done for. It must pass away to make room for the black man’s founding establishment, with his black “Queen,” of a “New City” (242).

Few canonical political theories combine Cleaver’s interests in the erotic underpinnings of political resistance, liberation, and nationalist foundation. But Plato’s work does. Two concepts in particular intersect with Cleaver’s apocalyptic and machinal thought. First, the concept of to deinon, the uncanny, awe-inspiring and awful. At three sites in the Symposium this concept surfaces. The sites involve, respectively, rebellion against ruling gods, aspiration to sexual union, and a sovereign act of political foundation. The second concept is mêchanê—later machina in Latin, machine in English—denoting plans and stratagems, machinations, and also the devices which effect those machinations. Plato exploits these dual meanings: Zeus devises a plan to slice humans apart using a cutting device, a mêchanê (190d). Machina ex deo. As we will see, the concept of a mêchanê plays a central role in both Plato’s Aristophanic myth and Socrates’s act of founding a new city in the Republic.

In the Symposium, the primeval human beings, on account of their sexual union, are immensely powerful and undertake to rebel against the gods. As Aristophanes puts it, the original spherical humans were “uncanny (deinon) in their strength and robustness, and they had great and proud thoughts (phronêmata megala), so they made an attempt on the gods” as “they attempted to make an ascent into the sky with a view to assaulting the gods” (190b)—a classical Tower of Babel. ⁴⁶ I suggest we see the uncanny as apocalyptic here. What can be more apocalyptic than the overturning of the cosmological order of hierarchical power in which gods dominate humankind? Martin Heidegger, in his seminal analysis of Sophocles’s Antigone, declares to deinon to be the “fundamental word” of the tragedy, “indeed of Greek tragedy in general, and thereby the fundamental word of Greek antiquity”:

to deinon means, on the one hand, the fearful, but also the powerful, and finally, the inhabitual. Each of these three meanings—which are intrinsically related to one another—at the same time refers, whether explicitly or not, to something counterturning. ⁴⁷

Reflecting on various translations of to deinon, Heidegger prefers “the uncanny,” das Unheimliche. The uncanny is “extraordinary,” outside the ordinary, “the un-homely,” das Un-heimische. ⁴⁸ Uncanny is the displacement of the status quo, the site of what was known before and naturalized as always having been, and its replacement by something radically new.

The uncanny surfaces again later in the Symposium when Socrates narrates to his fellow symposiasts of his tutelage in erôs under Diotima, a priestess from Mantinea (one of only two women, albeit a possibly fictional one, whose views are expressed in the Platonic corpus). ⁴⁹ According to Diotima, humans are uncanny in their pursuit of sexual union and generation. First, she states that all beasts, including humans, are uncanny (deinos) in their “desire to produce offspring” (207a). Similarly, she argues (208c-d), humans are uncanny (deinos) in their pursuit of the immortality of renown, the remembrance of their presence on earth, which can be achieved through bodily offspring, children, or the offspring of one’s “soul” in the form of creative works (like those of Homer, Hesiod, and the poets) or political orders (like those Lycurgus created for Sparta and Solon for Athens). The uncanny in the Symposium is uniquely attached to bold aspirations for sexual union and the generation of offspring biological, creative, and political.

Uncanny sexual, creative, and political aspirations are interlinked in the Symposium and Soul on Ice. Neither Plato nor Cleaver rests content with reflecting upon the rebellious, even violent, potential of these aspirations, however. Each also analyzes the response of the ruling powers—Zeus and his fellow Olympian gods and the white Administrator (the “Godhead of society”) class, respectively. Both Plato and Cleaver utilize the language of machines and machinations, wounding cuts and reactionary stratagems. Cleaver analyzes the “mechanics of the myth,” the political imaginary sustaining the anti-black racial order. In a counterturning move, he creates his own myth to undermine the myth of white supremacy.

Three cuts, three divisions: splitting apart Brain from Body, splitting apart the races, splitting apart the sexes. By this threefold wounding white supremacy is created and sustained. The sequence of this threefold wounding is gradually revealed as Cleaver’s analysis proceeds. Infamously, his starting point is the interdiction of (heterosexual) interracial erotic desire and sexual union. Cleaver takes a step back to analyze the broader status of black men. Cleaver sets out to unmask the “complex, all-pervasive myth” created to justify slavery and segregation, a myth which originated in a conceptualization of “the black man as subhuman beast of burden” (101). Cleaver calls this conceptualization the Supermasculine Menial, a construct for understanding the system of economic, political, and cultural relations first imposed during the plantation period of African enslavement. “Forced to do the backbreaking work,” the black man “was conceived in terms of his ability to do such work,” while the “white man administered the plantation, doing all the thinking, exercising omnipotent power over the slaves.” Blacks and whites were “conceived as mutually exclusive types” and, as Cleaver concludes, these “images were based upon the social function of the two races, the work they performed” (101–2). Cleaver insists that the division of these racialized classes does not rest on innate differences but in the manipulation of the self. The Menials who do not exercise the administrative function of society “have the administrative component in their personalities suppressed, alienated, denied expression.” Meanwhile, the Administrators “repudiate the component of Brute Power in themselves, claim no kinship with it, and project it onto the men in the classes below them” (208–9).

As his language of the “suppression” and “alienation” of components of one’s personality suggests, Cleaver argues that to understand the social imagery which sustains the racialized American political order it is necessary to take another step back. Class society begins by forming laboring subjects through “the fragmentation of the Self”: “the alienation between the function of man’s Mind and the function of his Body” and the differentiation of two categories, the “Administrative Function” and the “Brute Power Function,” which are then “embodied” by the Omnipotent Administrator and the Supermasculine Menial, respectively (208). Cleaver’s Aristophanic myth of a wounding separation of the sexes follows a thorough-going exploration of how the black man is separated from the white man, and how each is separated from a crucial component of the self, Brain and Body, respectively, in the American racial order. On Cleaver’s view, the white American political order is technophilic, obsessed with fantasies of omnipotence imposed by hyper-rationalized economic and technological systems which sunder mind from body and radically devalue the body in contrast to the mind. This devaluation justifies the systematic subjugation of the body and anything associated with the body, including black persons.

Previously, I gave several reasons for thinking that Cleaver is engaging in a vitalizing assessment of the Platonic dialogue form, specifically the Republic, in his Allegory of the Black Eunuchs. And I think it’s probable that Cleaver still has ambitions to comment upon—by radically reworking—the Republic in the chapter we are presently analyzing, the Primeval Mitosis. Here, however, the Republic is less a model for writing (in the Black Eunuchs chapter, the Republic model informs a richly interpersonal, multivocal, and affective dialogue) than a model of political theory. Viewed through Cleaver’s lens, the Republic becomes a model of political hierarchy and (forestalled) rebellion—a model Cleaver subjects to radical critique. Plato’s ideal regime rests on an attribution of certain functions, intellective or bodily, to distinct classes and the denial of those functions to other classes. Cleaver sees a similar hierarchy in modernity as part of the enslavement and exploitation of Africans in Euro-American colonialism. Plato’s classes are constituted by ontology. They fulfill characteristic functions suited to the “nature” (phusis) of their members (374e). In modernity, this ontological functionalization is coded in racial terms. The Administrator class is the “natural” bearer of intellective functions in society—and marked exclusively as white. The Menial class is the “natural” bearer of bodily functions—and marked exclusively as black.

In the next two sections, we will see how Cleaver’s vitalizing assessment of Plato’s Republic sheds light on modern practices of political racialization and sexualization. Again Cleaver gives us new tools for analyzing Plato. The uncanny sexual rebelliousness of the Symposium and the rigid class hierarchies of Republic are conceptually linked. The Symposium reveals the mechanics of human domination effected by the manipulation of sexuality, the wounding cut of Zeus’s mêchanê. And the sexual mechanics of political domination are also crucial to Plato’s Republic. Socrates and his interlocutors announce a scheme to solve the problem of human rebelliousness in their new order: the Noble Lie, described precisely as a mêchanê (414b). The function of the Noble Lie is to prevent the lower classes, the menials, from rebelling against the higher classes, the soldierly Auxiliaries and the Guardians themselves, the Philosopher Kings and Queens. Stanley Rosen describes the Noble Lie as “brainwashing,” emphasizing that such propagandistic devices are necessary precisely where sexuality must be policed and managed in the Republic’s ideal order. ⁵⁰ The Noble Lie is part of a social and political imaginary: individuals in each class are to conceive of themselves as marked by a different “metal” in their being—gold, silver, iron, or brass—which determines the class to which they are suited. Ontology as political destiny.

Cleaver’s Missing Men

While Cleaver’s classicism sharply critiques modern modes of racialization and sexualization, we need to recognize the wounding cuts Cleaver makes upon the Platonic corpus as he excises elements of the political theory of sexuality and gender found in Plato’s work. The Symposium is a hallowed site for lesbian and gay historical identification as Plato’s Aristophanic encomium gives the most striking rendition in antiquity of non-hierarchical same-sex erotic desire and union. (The encomium’s status as a queer text is more problematic, however, given its essentialist account of sexuality. ⁵¹ ) In his heteronormative revision, however, Cleaver cuts out the female-female and male-male unitary pairings, leaving only the female-male hermaphroditic pairing which, when split, results in heterosexual desiring subjects. In making this excision, Cleaver joins a long history of heterosexist bowdlerizers. ⁵² Nor is this Cleaver’s only wounding cut.

As a consequence of expelling any normative same-sex erôs, Cleaver finds himself pushed into excising two crucial elements of Plato’s political thought which might otherwise be appropriated into Cleaver’s masculinist model of political rebellion and liberation. In the Symposium, the most striking models of masculinity and rebellion are both bound up with same-sex erôs. And few features of Cleaver’s thought are more obvious than his valorization of rebellion: “I vibrate sympathetically to any protest against tyranny” (55). His interest in Aristophanes’s rebellious primeval humans is a signature example. But Plato’s Symposium contains not one but two conceptualizations of rebellion. The other occurs in Phaedrus’s earlier speech. The crucial linking concept in both theories of rebellion is moral-psychological: the quality of possessing phronêmata megala, “high and proud thoughts,” lofty ambitions—literally, thinking big. ⁵³ Opposed to self-revulsion, belittlement, dejection, and shame, rebels must have phronênemata megala in order to initiate revolt.

In both their encomiums to erôs, Phaedrus and Aristophanes theorize that rebellious phronêmata megala arise as a result of erotic unions. In Aristophanes’s encomium, these lofty ambitions arise from the three erotic pairings, but in Phaedrus’s encomium they result from pederastic unions. Given Cleaver’s bowdlerizations as he crafts a wholly heterosexual model out of Aristophanes’s original, it may come as no surprise that he ignores Phaedrus’s encomium entirely. Yet Phaedrus’s theory of rebellion is in fact more suitable to Cleaver’s political project than is Aristophanes’s. For Phaedrus envisions (pederastic) erotic unions giving rise to phronêmata megala targeted at political tyranny—as opposed to the cosmological domination of gods over humans which is Aristophanes’s concern.

Given Cleaver’s masculinist politics, yet another irony is found when we turn back to Aristophanes’s myth. Likely in a nod to the pederastic civic pedagogy espoused by Phaedrus—in which one becomes a good citizen by affiliating with a good lover—Aristophanes claims that young men who desire, from youth, other males, are “naturally the manliest (andreiotatoi)” and act out of “boldness (tharsos), manliness (andreia), and masculinity (arrenôpia).” Indeed, one of the best proofs of their naturally manly nature is that, at maturity, “only men of this kind go off to political affairs (ta politika)” (192a). Classicist Christopher Rowe interprets this passage insightfully: “such people are the only ones who as adults turn out to be real men in the political sphere.” ⁵⁴

My point here is that these theoretical sites in the Symposium—Phaedrus’s model of political, anti-tyrannical pederasty and Aristophanes’s various combinations of rebellious same-sex desire and union—open up radical theoretical pathways on the very terms Cleaver is laboring to develop, namely, an erotic model of rebellion and liberation. But Cleaver forecloses these pathways as a result of his staunchly heteronormative stance, one shared by contemporaries in the Black Arts movement like LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), whose poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” Cleaver quotes in “On Becoming” in the context of his rape confession. ⁵⁵ Among the possibilities suggested by the logic of Cleaver’s Platonic model, were those possibilities not foreclosed, are black erotic desires and unions which are not heterosexual.

On independent grounds (he is not considering Cleaver’s classicism), Jared Sexton reaches a similar conclusion in his critical re-reading of Soul on Ice. Sexton wonders what “redemption” there would be for the millions of black men imprisoned today given Cleaver’s investment in the “romance of black heterosexuality” as “salve for the historical rift between black men and women making common cause in the shadow of slavery.” Sexton hints that “perhaps it is in this field of relations between men that Cleaver encounters the frightening possibility of love among black people that he finds elusive.” ⁵⁶ But in Cleaver’s model homosexuality is exclusively an “alienating aberration” resulting from the separation of mind and body and the discursive displacement of the latter upon black persons, the “Body,” as justification for their subordination under white supremacy. As Sexton avers, Cleaver’s “schema simply cannot account for the existence of black male same-sex desire” (nor black lesbian desire, for that matter) which results in Cleaver’s theoretical ambition coming up short: his is only a form of “contradiction” and not a more radical “deconstruction.” ⁵⁷

Cleaver’s vitalizing assessment of Plato’s Symposium may therefore be a failure of political thinking, ⁵⁸ but what if Cleaver constructs a theoretical model which flies apart as a result of its own excessive potential? Thinking through Cleaver’s model suggests queer possibilities for erotic desire and union beyond what he is willing to explicitly allow. Cleaver’s heteronormativity makes his refashioning of Plato’s Symposium less useful as a tool for theorizing a liberatory sexual politics than it could otherwise be. The foreclosures Cleaver builds into his theoretical model are doubly self-destructive: they result in logical dead-ends, as the model proves unconvincing even on its own terms, and they prevent interlinkages with other theoretical and practical political projects invested in challenging hegemonic structures of gender and sexuality.

Black Classicism—and Queer

If Cleaver’s political thinking in Soul on Ice fails to convincingly theorize a radical politics in which racialized structures of gender and sexuality in the United States are reshaped in a genuinely liberatory direction, there is nevertheless another way to look at what Cleaver is doing. Cleaver engages in a complex form of classicism which I suggest is “queer” (this, despite its homophobic treatment of lesbians and gays) as Cleaver adopts various strategies, both in his self-positioning as a theorist and in his theory itself, to subject classicism to radical interrogation and repurposed, even self-destructive, uses.

First, it’s rewarding to think about the ways in which Cleaver may be doing a form of “black classicism” or “classica Africana,” fields now being explored by historians and literary scholars as they trace engagements with the Greek and Roman classics in the African diaspora and Africa itself. Scholars have considered a number of African American engagements with the classics, especially among novelists. ⁵⁹ Others have considered the African diaspora in the Caribbean, particularly the recurrence of Homer’s Odyssey. ⁶⁰ The topographical metaphor of the “Black Aegean,” overlaying but stretching beyond the Black Atlantic, has been proposed: extend one angle of the Triangle Trade further east to encompass classical Greece along with western Europe, capturing thereby the modern traffic of (classical) culture in and since the slave trade. ⁶¹

Such studies of classical reception differ from the project Martin Bernal inaugurated in Black Athena and which only a few scholars undertake in the recent, landmark African Athena. ⁶² Bernal’s work urges us to resituate classical Greece in its ancient Mediterranean context and reconsider the seminal role of Egypt in that cultural world. As Bernal’s terminology makes clear, such a project needs to proceed in the face of “Aryan” models which whitewash Greece and its genesis, erasing influences on Greece from outside Europe. The interest of much recent scholarship in black classicism is different—and here the majority of the contributions to African Athena are representative—focusing primarily on later cultural and intellectual reception of the classics. Only in select cases, like Toni Morrison’s reflections on her own work, are deep affinities between the classical Greeks and African diasporic traditions revealed and the “Greekness” of the classics itself questioned. The “Africanness” of Greece still needs to remain very much a live question for scholarly enquiry. ⁶³ Affinities between black thought and the Greek classics, aside from and beyond reception of the latter, are relevant to Cleaver’s case precisely because he chooses not to name his sources, Platonic or otherwise, however clear they may appear to certain readerships.

Cleaver’s queer classicism thwarts attempts to name and categorize the type of thought he creates. Thereby, Cleaver destabilizes Eurocentric practices of identification and legitimation, constructing a parody both of the practice of classical referentiality and of the cultural legitimation such referentiality so desperately seeks. He thereby troubles categorizations like black classicism. Absent the modifier “black,” the remainder may seem unmarked and thereby universal, but in our culture the unmarked always disguises an implicit whiteness or Eurocentrism. Cleaver’s point, like Morrison’s, is to call into question the very demarcation which separates “black” from “classical.” More promising is classica Africana, which “evokes the role of Africa in the construction of black identities in the New World,” ⁶⁴ a category derived from Reinhold’s prominent study of the classics in the formation of (white) American identity, classica Americana. ⁶⁵ The background premise of classica Americana, however, is anxiety about the collapse of European culture in an indigenous, “barbarous” New World. Legitimacy—of the Eurocentric sort to be sure—is sought by appealing to the cultural capital of the Greek and Roman classics. Cleaver’s esotericism, in contrast, eschews ready Greco-Roman identification and legitimation while holding open the possibility for heretofore unrecognized affinities between African and “classical” thought.

And there is more at stake in Cleaver’s queer refusal of categorization. If Cleaver had been more traditional in his practices of referentiality and citation, one could well judge that he is seeking cultural identity and legitimation in the classica Americana mode. In the Primeval Mitosis, he’d be seeking legitimation for his mythic account of heterosexuality by couching it in Platonic imagery and concepts. His bowdlerization could then be seen as part of a contestation over what—and whose—sexuality gets the Platonic imprimatur. Cleaver would fall into the trap of betraying the “Greek fetish,” a mode of cultural legitimation in Eurocentrism cogently analyzed by Greg Thomas. ⁶⁶ Sadly, (white) lesbian and gay political cultures continuously fall into this trap. Foundational works in the history of same-sex desire betray this “Hellenomaniacal heritage,” as in the editorial introduction to the landmark Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past:

The sexual practices of the classical Greeks, along with the enduring prestige that in modern times has traditionally surrounded their achievements, have long made them a kind of rallying point for lesbians and gay men of the educated classes, to whom they have seemed to offer an ideological weapon in the struggle for dignity and social acceptance. ⁶⁷

The appeal to the Greeks in many lesbian and gay political struggles unmasks their striving for “mere acceptance and dignity within the status quo”; the refusal on the part of lesbians and gays in the West to consider, much less valorize, alternative historiographies of same-sex eroticism demands now a much more thorough-going “counter-struggle,” Thomas argues. Contests about the Greco-Roman classics—about what they say and whose they are—are all too frequently contests about Eurocentric legitimation. Thomas reminds us that, within the cultural bounds of the West, an appeal by lesbians and gays to the “sex of a Black Athena” would not have served the same strategic role. ⁶⁸

That the sex of a Black Athena could not serve to legitimate homosexuality in the West is intimately bound up with the Platonic dichotomy between the intellect and erotic desire which enables the marking of blackness as hyper-erotic and, thereby, less than human. Sylvia Wynter, who Thomas follows as he discusses the “coding of sexuality for empire” in modernity, points to the humanist revivals of the classics in the sixteenth century as crucial to the construction of modern justifications for colonial appropriations of native lands and African bodies. ⁶⁹ We must admit that the Greek classics, including Plato and Aristotle, contained the material which the humanists could exploit. The erotic is displaced upon the lower classes and upon non-Greek others in the East and South. So having a narrative of homosexuality from those regions would serve no legitimating purpose. One can’t legitimate deviant sexualities utilizing cultural references already over-burdened with deviance. And this displacement occurs long before the rise of Bernal’s “Aryan model” of historical scholarship in the eighteenth century or Wynter’s humanist revival of the classics in the sixteenth. This dichotomization and displacement goes back to the origins of Greek political theories of sexuality as different intellective, irascible, and erotic capacities and motivations are assigned to distinct peoples (and denied to others) in both Plato’s Republic (VI.435e-436a) and Aristotle’s Politics (VII.7.1327b19-36).

Cleaver’s retooling of Plato’s theory here contains a sharp edge. It has been said that, for Plato, “the body of the just is genderless.” ⁷⁰ Unlikely. Nor is it is likely that, for Plato, the body of the just is raceless. Whiteness and Eurocentrism in modernity are constructed in conversation with classicism. Why did this occur? I suggest that the denigration of the body superlatively seen in Plato’s Phaedo would not end with Socrates’s taking leave of his flesh. In the history of Platonic theory the body is ontologically suspect—the body does not have a being which endures, and the being it does have is not human being—which opens the way, in later eras, to attaching “the body” to the sexed, gendered, and raced bodies of, for example, women and people of color. Cleaver hits upon a facet of Greek (and Roman) theory with dark implications and histories. This facet can be seen in Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, as I have just indicated, and in the work of Xenophon, Plato’s contemporary and fellow student of Socrates. Xenophon’s influential Education of Cyrus—studied carefully by Roman aristocrats three centuries later and by British and American elites over two millennia later—is “a Socratic reflection on imperialism” which theorizes how to conquer eroticized peoples to the east and south of Greece. ⁷¹ In these forms of Greek and Roman thought, subordinate classes and peoples, including peoples in the East and South, are conceptualized in moral-psychological terms which attribute to them a set of “base”, bodily motivations—erotic motivations, preeminently—which justify (indeed, naturalize) their subjugation. ⁷²

If we choose to see Cleaver’s work as a form of black classicism, then in the vast and rich range of black classicism which scholars are now mapping, Cleaver’s classicism stands near the radical end of the spectrum—here we find how he queers classicism. Considered as an engagement with Plato, Cleaver’s classicism pushes us to consider the complicity of classicism in the sexual politics of race (and class and cultural chauvinism). He does more than appropriate Greek classics despite what Fanon called the Eurocentric “sentinels” policing access to Greco-Roman civilization as the putative bedrock of European culture. ⁷³ He does more than fashion a vitalizing assessment of Plato which makes his thought into a tool for analyzing the contemporary politics of sexualized racial domination. Cleaver pushes us to question the role of classicism in creating and sustaining the very state of affairs he is depicting, analyzing, and (according to him) resisting.

Queering Theory

Cleaver’s breathless admiration of Socrates in “Exile and Death,” analyzed above, is spoken from within the exilic position. Cleaver had by then been a fugitive from the United States for seven years. Hear how his reflections continue:

I recall thinking, some years later, that maybe Socrates was playing to the galleries of future generations, or, perhaps his choice was that of a senile mind seeking an honorable cover for the cravings of his decrepit flesh. ⁷⁴

At this moment, in the mist of a heart-rending, exilic confession of praise for and identification with the Socrates who risked his life engaging in radical political questioning, Cleaver unveils his transgressive, even perverse, classicism. Consummate player or senile pervert? Hard to tell. Is Cleaver speaking of Socrates or himself? Hard to tell. In any event, there are no sacred cows here. So, too, with Cleaver’s Plato.

Cleaver is a tough nut to crack. All queer nuts are. To be queer is to be transverse—outsiders would say transgressive or perverse—and at the heart of queer transversal is a twisting free from categorization and identification. We can be certain that Cleaver does political theory with Plato. And by queerly eschewing self-identification that he is doing it with Plato, he avoids the trap of seeming to secure legitimacy through the Eurocentric canon. After all, what could a Platonic imprimatur do to legitimate a black politics of sexuality (even a heterosexuality) in a white supremacist order which had long since made Plato into a prop for Eurocentrism?

As we have seen, Cleaver is invested in certain Platonic forms and concepts. His usage of those concepts suggests affinities between some features of Plato’s thought and Cleaver’s own political project. But we have also discerned an auto-critical excess: not a deployment of Platonic forms and concepts but a critique of them, their limitations and their potential role in creating the very states of political disenfranchisement and sexual emasculation Cleaver is attacking. I suggested above that Cleaver’s mode of political thinking can be likened to postmodern architectural designs which disaggregate traditions like classicism (taking a classical cornice or capital, for example, from the site of the Greek temple and repositioning it, alone, in the middle of a modernist blank wall). The disaggregated elements are here resituated for double effect. First, to create a new, distinctively postmodern intellectual architecture for Black Power and, second, to subject the now-disaggregated traditions (classical, biblical, Marxist, and Freudian, among others) to critical scrutiny.

Soul on Ice should be seen as a significant attempt to grapple with the racialized mass incarceration state emerging in postwar America. At the leading edge of the most dramatic expansion of incarceration in the Western world, Cleaver infuses the prison memoir with new imaginative vigor, analytical ambition, and contemporary relevance. The work is a memoir but also much more, as I hope to have shown. Cleaver tackles both what he calls the “snarled web my motivations,” especially his anger at the American social and political order, and analyzes the policing of black male sexuality in that order. He both “witnesses and appraises.” ⁷⁵ Throughout, Cleaver is a virtuoso prose stylist with a canny sense for the evocative image. In this respect, Cleaver stands in the tradition of Plato, that master-builder of conceptual models and images impacting political discourse. ⁷⁶ Cleaver’s engagement with Plato’s theory should be seen as a component of the Black Power movement’s “dramatic redefinition of black identity” and “assault on previously held assumptions of the passivity and powerlessness of black men.” ⁷⁷ And we witness in Cleaver’s own redefinition, over the course of Soul on Ice, a striking example of political subjectivity rising to presence in the midst of systematic oppression. Cleaver emerges as self-reflective, creative, and provocative. It appears Plato was his cellmate.

What do Cleaver’s classical affiliations say about his broader theoretical project? Reconsider, for example, all the impasses we confronted when Cleaver’s Aristophanic Primeval Mitosis model for understanding the political formation of sexuality under white supremacy is put into motion. The model self-destructs when pressed to account for various black same-sex positions beyond the maligned type represented by Baldwin. The very “unthinkability of these various positions,” as Sexton puts it, and “the trouble they pose for a vision of compulsive (or cosmic) heterosexuality as the driving force of social justice, is rich in theoretical and political potential.” ⁷⁸ Such potential can be seen, I will argue, in the queerly camp failure of Cleaver’s politics of sexuality, a failure we are invited to recognize precisely because of the extravagant model Cleaver chooses to construct, a model with many moving parts, parts we are tempted to play with and put to work as we pursue its logic to unexpected ends (like unaccounted-for forms of black homosexuality).

As a way of grappling with the fecundity of failure, it’s worth seeing Cleaver’s political thought as queerly “camp,” a form of mockery which exaggerates in order to reveal what we otherwise take for granted. ⁷⁹ Kathryn Bond Stockton closes Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” with reflections on the presence of “dark camp” in a disparate group of writers and directors including Cleaver, Morrison, Quentin Tarantino, and David Fincher. Dark camp “keeps the violent edge of debasement visibly wedded to camp caprice.” ⁸⁰ With respect to Cleaver, Stockton is on to something. Revisiting the relevant Urtext, Susan Sontag’s 1964 “Notes on Camp” note that, in Sontag’s argument, a work cannot be camp if it succeeds. ⁸¹ Camp is about wrenching failure. Camp needs to successfully enact that failure in order to be camp. But sometimes attempted camp fails to be camp because it does not fail enough—or in the right way. This may well be Cleaver’s problem, and this possibility in turn poses a problem for interpreters keen to see subversive potential in Cleaver’s theory.

Seen as deadly serious and without camp caprice, Cleaver’s classicism can be taken to reveal the dark potential of several Platonic political concepts, especially those theorizing the uncanny—fearful and violent—manipulation of sexuality for political ends. Therein, we discern a kind of proto-nationalistic Plato who can be appropriated for modern nationalist projects, real or imagined, white or black. But seen through the queer lens of camp, Cleaver’s outlandish political concepts and models enact failures which reveal and educate by their hyperbolic, auto-critical excess.

Camp is, above all, not serious but rather a “new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’”—never forget that “Camp sees everything in quotation marks.” My interpretation of Cleaver’s political theory in Soul on Ice as queerly camp is constructed out of three elements in Sontag’s definition of camp: its love of exaggeration, its failed seriousness, and its esotericism. Camp, a “good taste of bad taste,” is the “love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.” Camp has an especial penchant for “the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms.” We’ve amply seen this last feature in Cleaver’s Supermasculine Menials, Omnipotent Administrators, and recurrent invocations of the Apocalypse to refer both to sexual frustration and union.

Exaggeration leads to “melodramatic absurdities” and ultimately to a “way to find success in certain passionate failures.” I think Cleaver’s queerly camp political thought succeeds in failure precisely on the point of political masculinism for which he is so often criticized and to which his thought is usually reduced. In Cleaver, political masculinism is pushed to melodramatic absurdity. Thereby, we see something about masculinism as an ideology. Here, I have in mind Sontag’s example of the Art Nouveau lamp meant to re-create “the Orient” with symbolism like a snake coiling around its base. Sontag here makes her point about the naïveté of camp—the maker of the lamp is earnest about his project of re-creation and upon completion declares “Voilà! the Orient!” But I think there is an additional point implicit in Sontag’s argument: the failure to represent the Orient (how could it ever be represented?) reveals Orientalism for what it is. Thus, Cleaver’s failure to theorize a successful form of political masculinism (how could it ever be successful?) reveals through its melodramatic absurdity the ideology of political masculinism as such. Critics who see Cleaver as the archetypical promoter of black hyper-masculinity may well be falling into a trap. To push a metaphor past the point of failure, it’s as if the flamboyant performance of butch masculinities in the Village People’s 1978 YMCA were taken as the real thing.

Ultimately, camp is “esoteric,” its “flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation,” an esotericism we have seen specifically in Cleaver’s queer classicism. Either Cleaver is referencing Plato or he is not. Either Cleaver is re-creating a proto-nationalistic Plato or he is parodying such a Plato and his modern epigones. Hard to tell. As Eve Sedgwick warns us, we neutralize and domesticate queer performativity when we set about “straining eyes to ascertain whether particular performances” of queer culture and politics—and I include here performances of queer political theory—“are really parodic and subversive . . . or just uphold the status quo,” for the “bottom line is generally the same: kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic.” ⁸²

Even among theorists obsessed with masculinity, Cleaver’s thought is too richly queer for white conservatives and black radicals both. Taken on its face as a theorization of black masculinity, Cleaver’s work and the tradition of which it is a part, stretching from Malcolm X to the present, should be considered not solely as an iteration of contemporary African American political thought but also as an important strand in the history of men, and conceptualizations of masculinity, in political theory. Men and masculinity as explicit objects of analysis in political theory—as opposed to assumed referents, normalized and naturalized—is quite new to the field. But two prominent treatments by Terrell Carver and Harvey Mansfield pay no attention to formulations of masculinity by African American thinkers like Cleaver despite his overt, and much discussed, political masculinism. ⁸³

Recognizing Cleaver’s camp masculinism also reveals the limits of Cleaver’s reception among black radicals. In his preface to the 1992 reissue of Soul on Ice, Ishmael Reed elaborates a form of black Left masculinity. Nearly two decades later, A. Shahid Stover similarly claims “the cultural resilience of Soul on Ice should come as no surprise” as he posits Cleaverite “radical black righteous machismo” as “an expression of the human impulse of rebellion as channeled existentially by Black men in response to the inherent and specific racist dehumanization we have been subjected to under western imperialism.” As Stover’s reference to imperialism makes clear, the political context to which Cleaver responded has in crucial respects remained the same for subsequent thinkers and activists. We should see Cleaver as one source of a tradition of global anti-colonialism infused with a particular conception of black masculinity. That said, Cleaver’s epigones among Hip Hop artists and intellectuals still remain open to charges of homophobia, if not misogyny, when they fail to enact the queer transversality we have seen in Cleaver’s thought and self-presentation. ⁸⁴

Recognizing how Cleaver reworks classical Greek political theory enables us to better understand intellectuals and activists who applaud Cleaver for effecting a “Promethean rebellion,” “taking fire” from the gods and bearing it back to “our cold humanity.” ⁸⁵ Plato’s Aristophanes recounts a similarly Promethean challenge on behalf of humanity. Cleaver’s vitalizing assessment of Plato turns one of the weapons of Eurocentrism back upon itself. Fanon famously called for the destruction of the sentinels guarding the Greco-Roman idols, ⁸⁶ and if Plato remains an idol for Cleaver he is an idol separated from his guardians. In the hands of Cleaver—the Black Power and, I submit, queer theorist of political freedom, resistance, and anti-colonialism—Plato becomes again, and yet more, a global touchstone standing apart from any canon of Eurocentrism.