SCHOLARLY ARTICLE MADISON JONES Plato’s Apocalyptic Rhetoric: Interpreting Bioregionalism in the Critias-Timaeus Dialogs How shall I establish my words, and what part of it can be truly called a remnant of the land that then was? —Critias The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering. —Hegel Plato’s Critias-Timaeus dialogs offer a regionalist critique of Athenian capitalist and imperialist practices using apocalyptic rheto- ric. 1 These dialogs undermine the global capitalist forces which de- manded the enslavement of nations to extract natural resources, such as the silver mines at Larium (less than 40 miles south of Athens). Plato’s myth of Atlantis offers a subtle warning of coming destruction for Athens, a purge ordered by Zeus for the state’s pleonexia (literally “reaching for more”) and hubris. By reading the Timaeus and the Critias side by side, it becomes evident that Critias’ argument problematizes Timaeus’ despotic worldview. In the Critias, Plato looks to the natural world—to place—for his evidence, rendering ecological degradation as a text to interpret, and he unearths a crisis of the ontology discussed in the Timaeus, asking “How shall I establish my words, and what part of it can be truly called a remnant of the land that then was?” (Critias 110e-111a, 113). What Plato sees in the land is what Derrida called trace, evidence of degradation and destruction. As Spivak asserts in the introduction to Of Grammatology “Derrida’s trace [ ... ] is the mark ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2016) doi:10.1093/isle/isw049 V C The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com by guest on August 26, 2016 http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from