The Hidden Host: Irigaray and Diotima at Plato's Symposium

Like the goddess Demeter, Diotima from Mantineia, the prophetess who teaches Socrates about eros and the "rites of love" in Pluto's Symposium, was a mystagogue who initiated individuals into her mysteries, mediating to humans esoteric knowledge of the divine. The dialogue, including Diotima's speech, contains religious and mystical language, some of which specifically evokes the female-centered yearly celebrations of Demeter at Eleusis. In this essay, I contextualize the worship of Demeter within the larger system of classical Athenian practices, and propose that Plato borrowed Eleusinian language because it criticized conventional notions of the divine, thereby allowing him to reimagine the possibilities for the philosophical process among humans. All this flows from the arguments of Plato-laughter and movement; people getting up and going out; the hour changing; tempers being lost; jokes cracked; the dawn rising. Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking through the long winter's night? -Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf's Plato did not stop his ears or refrain from wine, and Socrates in Plato's Symposium did indeed talk through the long winter's night. The scene Hypatia vol. 21, no. 2 (Spring 2006) 0 by Nancy Evans 2 Hypatia is a damp, cold January night in perhaps 416 BCE, and the poet Agathon has just won his tirst tragic victory. He holds a party at his house, attended by group of young and handsome aristocratic Athenian men. Some of them are lovers and some are would-be lovers. Socrates, neither the youngest nor the most handsome, is also present. Instead of drinking the night away into oblivion, the group of friends agrees to drink moderately while honoring Eros, the god of desire, with a series of speeches praising love. In the course of this evening, Socrates gives a speech in praise of Eros that suggests a redefinition of love. In fact, Socrates' praise of Eros becomes a philosophical discussion of Being' that redefines the relationship not simply between human erotic partners, male-female as well as male-male, but even the relationship between human and divine. Interestingly, Socrates claims from the outset that the speech he gives is not his own, but rather one he heard from a woman. It is the prophet Diotima from Mantineia, Socrates says, who taught him about love, about Eros, and about eros and the divine.Diotima is in fact more than an ordinary prophet; like the goddess Demeter, Diotima is a sort of mystagogue, one who initiates individuals into her Mysteries and who mediates to humans information about the divine. This essay will explore Diotima's speech as recalled by Socrates in Plato's Symposium, looking to the language and images that specifically evoke the yearly celebration of Demeter and Kore (the Maiden, also known as Persephone) at Eleusis. Drawi...

Section: The Drama Of the Mother And Daughtermentioning

confidence: 99%

Diotima and Demeter as Mystagogues in Plato'sSymposium

Evans¹

2006

“…The poetic, impassioned, mystical, and even erotic manner in which Socrates and Diotima characterize the Forms and the Good in the Symposium , the Phaedrus , and the Republic constitutes a part of Bacon's case that Plato was subverting an ultracompetitive, masculinist, and rationalistic conception of philosophical practice (Bacon 1994, 158–73. But see also Nye 1994, 200–201; Nye claims that the lover's relation to beauty in Diotima's speech is distinctly un‐Platonic).…”

Section: The Socratic Dialectic Revealed In Irigaray's Reading Of Diomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this essay, I develop a critical interpretation of Luce Irigaray's readings of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman and in “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium ,‘Diotima's Speech’” (Irigaray 1985a, 1993a). Irigaray's analysis of Diotima's philosophy in An Ethics of Sexual Difference has attracted both interest and criticism from other feminist philosophers (see, for example, Nye 1994; Chanter 1995). However, I shall not really be discussing Diotima's thought here.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Unacknowledged Socrates in the Works of Luce Irigaray

O’Dwyer¹

2006

In Luce Irigaray's thought, Socrates is a marginal figure compared to Plato or Hegel. However, she does identify the Socratic dialectical position as that of a ‘phallocrat’ and she does conflate Socratic and Platonic philosophy in her psychoanalytic reading of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman. In this essay, I critically interpret both Irigaray's own texts and the Platonic dialogues in order to argue that: (1) the Socratic dialectical position is not ‘phallocratic’ by Irigaray's own understanding of the term; (2) that Socratic (early Platonic) philosophy should not be conflated with the mature Platonic metaphysics Irigaray criticizes; and (3) that Socratic dialectical method is similar in some respects with the dialectical method of Diotima, Socrates’ instructress in love and the subject of Irigaray's “Sorcerer Love” essay in An Ethics of Sexual Difference.

“…Numerous articles have treated “Sorcerer Love.” Here, I focus on Andrea Nye's critique of Irigaray because Nye also offers an alternative method for reclaiming Diotima (Nye ). I argue that Nye's approach cannot overcome Diotima's absence from the dialogue and, thereby, helps us to see the importance and power of Irigaray's use of Diotima's absence as the basis for engaging the words ascribed to her.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reclamation from Absence? Luce Irigaray and Women in the History of Philosophy

Tyson¹

2013

Luce Irigaray's work does not present an obvious resource for projects seeking to reclaim women in the history of philosophy. Indeed, many authors introduce their reclamation project with an argument against conceptions, attributed to Irigaray or “French feminists” more generally, that the feminine is the excluded other of discourse. These authors claim that if the feminine is the excluded other of discourse, then we must conclude that even if women have written philosophy they have not given voice to feminine subjectivity; therefore, reclamation is a futile project. In this essay, I argue against such conclusions. Rather, I argue, Irigaray's work requires that philosophy be transformed through the reclamation of women's writing. She gives us a method of reclamation for the most difficult cases: those in which we have no record of women's writing. Irigaray offers this method through an engagement with the character of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. The method Irigaray demonstrates is reclamation as love.