Perspectivism, Proleptic Writing and Generic agón: Three Readings of the Symposium

Abstract

Traditional readings of the Symposium generally reduce Platonic erotics to the Socrates-Diotima discourse, relegating the five prior discourses and the last by Alcibiades to a secondary philosophical role. The devaluation of these discourses runs parallel to the canonization of the Socrates-Diotima discourse as a privileged place through which Plato supposedly reveals his only and true thought as to the nature of love. This primacy given to the Socratic eulogy tends to be supported by the key distinction that Socrates establishes as a criterion, in standing as a guarantor of the truth in relation to the erotic issue before pronouncing his discourse. With this traditional reading of the dialogue in mind, in the present work I am interested in proposing a reading of the Symposium based on three mutually-correlative philosophical-literary currents. As regards the first current, and against the backdrop of dramatic-philosophical polyphony that characterizes the dialogue, I start from the assumption that the erotic issue, as Plato presents it in the Symposium, cannot be grasped unidirectionally, but through seven theoretical perspectives in harmony. The second current is concerned with analyzing the extent to which Plato puts into practice in the Symposium, as in no other dialogue, a kind of proleptic writing, in the sense that each eulogy contains fragmentary foretastes of topics that, through a subtle play of rectification and complementation, will be taken up again in later discourses. This proleptic writing is related to the perspectivist reading, as each discursive position is constituted from its dialogical-philosophical counterpoint with the remaining theoretical perspectives. As for the third current, I am interested in taking the agonal character typical of the Greek mentality in this period, approaching dialogue in the light of an agón between discursive genres, an aspect related to this play of counterpoints that the discourses establish between them.