ABSTRACT:
The essay deals with the idea of formative Eros present in Plato's Banquet, based on the interpretation made by Michel Foucault in the second volume of his History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasures. First, we seek to reconstruct the architecture of Foucauldian research on aphrodisia, which unfolds into dietetics, economics, and erotics, locating the dialectics of love within erotics. In the sequel, the formative aspect of the Banquet is discussed, highlighting especially the reciprocity between erasta (the lover) and eromenon (the beloved), and assuming that the ontological turn of the dialectic of love points directly to the ethical-formative dimension of Eros, according to the argument of the dialogue. Eros related to individual and particular beauty (i.e., as contingent and empirical) can only be overcome by the universal perspective of love when the one (the erasta) is allowed to assume the position of the other (the eromenon) and vice versa.
Keywords:
formative Eros; aphrodisia; dialectic; erasta; eromenon