Theatre of the cave

Irigaray's essay "Plato's Hystera" takes a close reading of Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave," and makes the comparison of Plato's cave to a theater. The characters within the cave cannot breach the line between one another, but they can watch one another and assume a storyline. The cave, like the theater, allows for a certain amount of interpretation as well as makes for a certain amount of disproportion. "Here a theater, text, that has yet to reflect upon its perspective. Here the properties of the eye, of mirrors--and indeed of spacing, of spacetime, of time--are dislocated, disarticulated, disjointed, and only later brought back to the perspective-free contemplation of the truth of the idea" (253). Basically the cave is upside down and inside out and turns everything up on it's respective head before anyone has any idea what is going on, but like the theater, it has an origin and (hopefully) a purpose.