Platonic Eros and Its Discontent

• Main Authors: Hsieh Peiwen, 謝佩妏
• Other Authors: Beatrice Lei
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/asp2t4

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 92 === This thesis is a study of Plato’s erotic dialogues, namely the Symposium and the Phaedrus, the inherent tension of the Platonic eros, and the critical pitfall. Rather than a consistent and unitary theory of love, true love contested in Plato’s erotic dialogues is polyvalent with heterogeneous forces. The setting, the erotic scenario, and the language disrupt the original course of moderation and transcendence. Certain unsettled desire always escapes the knowledge of love and deviates from its original aim of abstinence, leaving the subliminatory motif perplexed, unable to justify itself. Alcibiades in the Symposium exemplifies and embodies this failure of sublimation. More importantly, while the female voice appropriated by Socrates via the priestess Diotima tends to conceal the lethal aspect of female eros incompatible to Platonic love by binding it to reproductive activity, Alcibiades’s violent desire runs parallel with the desire in woman, generally assumed to be excessive and untamable by classical Athenians, especially doctors and philosophers. Nevertheless, numerous critics dismiss the dramatic effects aroused by Alcibiades or assimilated it into the central doctrine of love, not to mention to reveal the striking resemblance between the excessive desire of Alcibiades and female eros. In my thesis, I investigate Platonic eros from a psychoanalytical point of view in the hope of unveiling the crux of the erotic drama, and the curious sway between transcendence and immanence in the erotic dialogues. Insofar Platonic eros anticipates Freud’s theory of sexual drive, the latter in turn illuminates the logic and the immanent tension of the former. Besides, Lacan’s returning route to Freud via Socrates throws light upon a different reading of the erotic dialogues in terms of contemporary theories on love and sexuality and to a certain extent fills the gap left by the traditional readings of Plato’s erotic dialogues as coherent and unified. This thesis is divided into five parts. In the first chapter, I give the background of the study by clarifying the main terminology, reviewing Plato’s dialogues on love, surveying previous criticism, justifying my area of study, and outlining the whole thesis. The second chapter discusses the original social and cultural background of Plato’s theory of love--the practice of homosexuality between a male adult and a teenage boy--and the grounds on which Plato appropriates and modifies the existing social code to support his teaching. Moreover, I justify the special technique of Socrates in mastering desire and love in Platonic corpus in terms of psychoanalytic theory. Chapter 3 discusses the mechanism of the Platonic sublimation and the disturbance embedded in the construction of a purified eros. Chapter 4 explores Socrates’ hermeneutics of desire in the Platonic corpus and investigates where female eros is situated. Lastly, I draw the focus back to the erotic dialogues, and discuss female desire materialized in Alcbiades in view of a new signification of love. In chapter 5, I will restate my arguments and offer my conclusion.