{"id":443,"date":"2019-04-23T01:14:40","date_gmt":"2019-04-23T01:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/?p=443"},"modified":"2019-04-23T01:14:40","modified_gmt":"2019-04-23T01:14:40","slug":"notes-the-homoerotics-of-the-phaedrus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/2019\/04\/23\/notes-the-homoerotics-of-the-phaedrus\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes &#8211; The homoerotics of the Phaedrus"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1>The homoerotics of the Phaedrus<\/h1>\n<h2>Page duBois<\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cPlato\u2019s Phaedrus, as a text of high seduction, aimed at drawing the reader toward erotic life and therefore toward philosophy, plays with the edges of the Greek definitions of male and female to liberate the reader to a paradoxical sense of the fluidity of boundaries,\u201d (p 9)<\/li>\n<li>Calls Plato\u2019s work logocentric<\/li>\n<li>Derrida sees Plato in his emphasis on truth, presence and speaking, as aware of yet caught in the same contradiction as all thinkers who follow him.<\/li>\n<li>\u201cHe insists on truth of the living voice, yet writes, insists on the living presence of Socrates, yet writes only after Socrates\u2019 death.\u201d (p 9)<\/li>\n<li>\u201cFurthermore and wrongly, I think, Derrida describes what he sees as an exclusively masculine lineage of philosophy, a phallocentric model of philosophical discourse, where the inheritance of dialectic passes patrilineally, from father to son\u201d (9)<\/li>\n<li>Female in Phaedrus as another pharmakon, a supplemental whom Plato delicately controls and appropriates in order to center on the male and thus a homoerotic model for philosophy<\/li>\n<li>Plato\u2019s text plays erotically with boundaries, with edges of space<\/li>\n<li>\u201cPlato uses the tension between the sexes in Greek culture, perhaps to assert the authority of the male at the scene of philosophy, but that his own desire to reconcile male and female makes that resolution a very provisional one,\u201d (p 10).<\/li>\n<li>The Phaedrus is a text of seduction<\/li>\n<li>Socrates \u2013 two discourses \u2013 designed to seduce his companion Phaedrus<\/li>\n<li>Logical method Socrates advocates \u2013 polymorphously erotic dimension<\/li>\n<li>Logical-<\/li>\n<li>Possibility of connection between reader-writer<\/li>\n<li>Erotic play Phaedrus \u2013 relations between men<\/li>\n<li>Excludes women<\/li>\n<li>The<strong><em>Phaedrus<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Help:IPA\/English\">\/\u02c8fi\u02d0dr\u0259s\/<\/a>;\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ancient_Greek_language\">Ancient Greek<\/a>:\u00a0\u03a6\u03b1\u1fd6\u03b4\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2,\u00a0\u00a0&#8216;Phaidros&#8217;), written by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Plato\">Plato<\/a>, is a dialogue between Plato&#8217;s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Protagonist\">protagonist<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Socrates\">Socrates<\/a>, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Phaedrus_(Athenian)\">Phaedrus<\/a>, an interlocutor in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Plato#Unity_and_diversity_of_the_dialogues\">several dialogues<\/a>. The\u00a0<em>Phaedrus<\/em>\u00a0was presumably composed around 370 BC, about the same time as Plato&#8217;s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Republic_(Plato)\"><em>Republic<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Symposium_(Plato_dialogue)\"><em>Symposium<\/em><\/a>.<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#cite_note-1\"><sup>[1]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Although ostensibly about the topic of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Love\">love<\/a>, the discussion in the dialogue revolves around the art of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rhetoric\">rhetoric<\/a>\u00a0and how it should be practiced, and dwells on subjects as diverse as\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Metempsychosis\">metempsychosis<\/a>\u00a0(the Greek tradition of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reincarnation\">reincarnation<\/a>) and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Erotic_love\">erotic love<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Misogyny in Plato \u2013 consistent with his class<\/li>\n<li>According to Timaeus, women are only created after the first generation of men \u201cprove themselves cowardly and \u201cunjust\u201d and are \u201cborn again\u201d as women<\/li>\n<li>Male as A female as not A<\/li>\n<li>Attempt to establish boundaries<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>opposite, to enantion (262b) is put into question as<\/p>\n<p>suspect in the dialogue. But Plato&#8217;s text provisionally unites man and man,<\/p>\n<p>and man and woman, in an erotic gesture which teases the reader, which uses<\/p>\n<p>the repressed impulses of Greek male sexual identity, the desire to be the<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>female,apparently in order to cleanse the masculine soul of such impulses.<\/li>\n<li>Socrates plays with erection and growth of wings, \u201cand as the nourishment, streams upon<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>he, the quills of the feathers swell and begin to grow from the roots over all the form of the soul&#8221; (251 a-b).<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Androgyny<\/li>\n<li>Mother\u2019s milk \u2013 ejaculatory stream \u2013 causes buds to sprout<\/li>\n<li>Image of the chariot \u2013 Parmedies<\/li>\n<li>Greek culture \u2013 repressive to women \u2013<\/li>\n<li>Socrates \u2013 in line of poets from Homer \u2013<\/li>\n<li>\u201cSocrates\u2019 delicate, literate gesture towards transvestism \u2013 belongs to a pattern of the Greek male\u2019s fascination with and imitation of the socially suppressed female other,\u201d (13)<\/li>\n<li>\u201cThe mimesis of the female in the Phaedrus is perhaps a way of implicitly suggesting again the theme of intercourse between Socrates and Phaedrus by establishing a difference between them, one displaced from the erastes\/eromenos difference, since both presumably are erasti\u201d (13)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Erastes_(Ancient_Greece)\">Erastes (Ancient Greece)<\/a>, an adult male in a relationship with an adolescent boy, also known as the\u00a0<em>philetor<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Eromenos &#8211; (<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/Appendix:Glossary#historical\"><em>historical<\/em><\/a>)\u00a0An\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/adolescent\">adolescent<\/a>\u00a0boy in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/Ancient_Greece\">Ancient Greece<\/a>\u00a0who was\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/court\">courted<\/a>\u00a0by an older man, or was in an\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/erotic\">erotic<\/a>\u00a0relationship with him.<\/li>\n<li>Erasti &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/lover\">lover<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Garden metaphors<\/li>\n<li>Imagery Demeter, goddess of grain, of cereals, of fruitful human increase<\/li>\n<li>Women\u2019s sexual organs to be plowed by her husband, a metaphor, a metaphor from Oedipus Rex. The imagery of fruitful field characteristically used only of women, crosses the sexes once again (14)<\/li>\n<li>Contains sperma, seed<\/li>\n<li>Philosopher erotically implants his seed, his words, in the soul of the beloved,<\/li>\n<li>Plato seductively uses the boundary between male and female, between homoerotic relationship among men and heterosexual intercourse. (p14)<\/li>\n<li>Imagery \u2013 homosexual and heterosexual is an aphrodisiac motion<\/li>\n<li>\u201cPlato uses Socrates as a lure for the reader, who will conceive a desire for the older philosopher at his loveliest, carried off to the heavens in his vision of the good.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cPlato is the pander for philosophy, making all readers Socrates\u2019 erastai\u201d (p 14)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The Greek title<strong>Erastai<\/strong>\u00a0is the plural form of the term erast\u0113s, which refers to the older partner in a pederastic relationship.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Plato plays with mimesis, distance, motherhood and the hypocrisy of absence.<\/li>\n<li>He uses pharmakon and pharmakos<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The homoerotics of the Phaedrus Page duBois &nbsp; \u201cPlato\u2019s Phaedrus, as a text of high seduction, aimed at drawing the reader toward erotic life and therefore toward philosophy, plays with the edges of the Greek definitions of male and female to liberate the reader to a paradoxical sense of the fluidity of boundaries,\u201d (p 9)&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,56,3],"tags":[60,62,5,63,61],"class_list":["post-443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-summary","category-notes","category-ph-d-digital-portfolio","tag-page-dubois","tag-phaedrus","tag-plato","tag-socrates","tag-the-homoerotics-of-the-phaedrus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":444,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions\/444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stacycacciatore.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}