The Eros of Sameness and the Rhetoric of Difference in Plato’s Phaedrus

Abstract

In Intimacies, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips argue that the ego is constitutionally threatened by difference, and they turn to Plato’s Phaedrus to locate a theory of Eros to combat this inherent aggressivity. They see in Plato’s dialogue an articulation of an Eros based in sameness and see this new account of love as a possible alternative way to form non-aggressive human relationships. While their account captures Plato’s revolutionary take on Eros, it does not discuss his equally revolutionary theory of rhetoric, a theory that recuperates difference as an essential feature of discourse. Plato’s relocation of rhetoric in private conversations transforms threat into risk and argues for the role of desire in constituting a subjectivity that is both private and political.

Keywords:

• aggressivity
• difference
• Eros
• persuasion
• sameness

Acknowledgments

I thank my two anonymous external reviewers and the editor of RSQ for their comments, which strengthened this essay substantially.

Notes

¹ As Barnard has noted, even well-intentioned pedagogical practices that seek to expand cultural understanding and further efforts at promoting tolerance by encouraging students to identify with that which is other can have the unfortunate and unintended consequences of devaluing genuine diversity. Barnard argues that behind this commitment to identification is the assumption of a fundamental and recoverable sameness that ultimately negates difference by reducing diversity to a surface phenomenon (see especially 61).

² Bersani argues that the ego’s inherent aggression provides support for an imperialist politics: “Thus the imperialist project of invading and appropriating foreign territories corresponds to what Freud calls nonsexual sadism in the 1915 essay ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,’ which he defines as ‘the exercise of violence or power upon some other person or object,” the attempted mastery over the world” (65–66).

³ Ferrari is helpful in explaining the role of the cicadas’ section as a caution particularly relevant to those who pursue philosophy because they are in love with the play of language (25–36).

⁴ “Socrates emphasizes throughout the Palinode that human beings are always in an erotic state, that is, always in a state of moving toward or away from the ultimate objects of their love (the forms). Human knowledge of the forms and human self-knowledge are never complete” (McCoy 175).

⁵ As Lear comments: “A person is, by his nature, out of touch with his own subjectivity” (4).

⁶ Although Plato has traditionally been read as an opponent of democracy, several recent scholars have challenged that reading and argued for a more nuanced view of Plato as a critic of democracy. See, for example, Allen; Monoson; and Wallach.

⁷ For the argument that Plato was concerned about dangers endemic to a democratic Athens, see Kastely.

⁸ Yunis provides a good discussion of the state of rhetoric in Athens in the fourth century BCE (106–08).