Irigaray reads The Cave as the a metaphor for “the inner space,” that is, “the womb or hystera.” ”Ground, dwelling, cave, and even, in a different way, form—all these terms can be read more or less as equivalents of the hystera” (243).
The sun that lights the cave is a topographic mime, “a fire ‘in the image of’ a sun” (246).
Socrates’ allegory makes us all “Understuddies in a mime that you yourselves confirm” (248).
The simulacrum, the fake—the shadow of a man cast on the wall—is a “lasting morphological impress” (250).
The performers are “Hidden from the eyes they charm but equally kept away from seeing their own show, the effects of their own sorcery” (250-51).
“Brilliance of silver-backing in suspension” (256).
The Socratic dialectic: “nothing can be named as ‘beings’ except those same things which all the same men see in the same way in a setup that does not allow them to see other things and which they will designate by the same names, on the basis of the conversation between them. Whichever way up you turn these premises, you always come back to sameness” (263).
The sun as an “autarchy” “of fire,” “Immutable periodicity of sameness.” It is “caught in an eternal pendular isolation as it described the orb of the representable, the visible world, and distinguishes ideas from copies, from fakes” (267-68).
“The man will be brought out by a path he could never have got in by, out of somewhere be never lived” (281).
“This superior condition [philosophical enlightenment] is the lot of the sex which, subsequently, will be called masculine. It still remains for him to disengage himself from his human double, his female understudy, launching himself into the sky in a philosophical flight, raising his head toward what alone has a real existence. Ideas. Careless of things here below, or earthly realities, since an appetite for sensations leads to irrationality and injustice, and risks making him fall back down to another sex, which is much further from the divine love” (322).
"”the lover is his mirror in whom he is be holding himself”.” (323).
“Forgetting that we have forgotten is sealed over at the dawning of the phonological metaphor-system of the West” (345).