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Bruce Rosenstock

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 28, Number 2, October 2004, pp.

243-258 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/phl.2004.0035

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Bruce Rosenstock

243

Bruce Rosenstock

MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA:

READING THE SYMPOSIUM

he narrator of the Symposium, a certain Apollodorus, is characterized in the opening frame of the dialogue as a sort of melancholic. One of Apollodoruss interlocutors complains that youre
always the same, Apollodorus; . . . you seem to think that virtually
everyone is miserable (athlios) except for Socrates, counting yourself
rst ahead of the rest (Symp. 173d47).1 This same Apollodorus is
mentioned in the Phaedo. Phaedo, the dialogues narrator, explains that
those who were present with Socrates on the day of his death experienced a mixture of sadness and pleasure, but there was one man in
particular, Apollodorus, whose mood swung between extremes of tears
and laughter (Phd. 59a9b1). Plato holds Apollodorus up as a wellknown case of emotional imbalance, and it is through him that the
Symposiums treatment of the interlocking themes of ers and mourning/
melancholia may best be approached.
At the opening of the Symposium, Apollodorus describes to unnamed
companions how the day before one of his acquaintances had asked
him about the speeches concerning love that were made in Agathons
house. The companions to whom he is speaking had apparently just
requested that he narrate those speeches to them, too. In the line that
opens the Symposium, Apollodorus says, I believe I am not out of
practice (amelettos) in what you are asking me about (172a12). As
David Halperin shows, the word amelettos, out of practice, suggests
one of the major themes of the Symposium.2 Halperin points out that the
term melet (practice) is used in the speech of Diotima to describe how
the spiritual offspring, knowledge, which is engendered in the human
Philosophy and Literature, 2004, 28: 243258

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soul through the power of ers is preserved (szetai ) into maturity

(208a37). According to Halperin, we might be tempted to view
Apollodorus as someone who has been preserving the speeches of the
evening, and in particular the speech of Socrates, because he has been
caught up by ers. The Symposium is not only about ers, then: rather, its
complex narrative structure is itself designed to manifest and dramatize
the workings of ers (PEN, p. 103). Halperin argues that, quite the
contrary, Apollodoruss memorization of the speeches does not dramatize the power of ers as Diotima describes it. Apollodorus, Halperin
says, is more like an ofcial transcriber of the speeches than someone
inspired by love because of them. He is, as Halperin puts it, like a
grammaphone record (PEN, p. 112). I would say, to carry the admittedly anachronistic grammaphone simile one step further, that Apollodorus is like a record with a scratch: he is caught in a repetitive cycle of
re-narration (he had just recited the speeches day before by his own
admission). The melet, the practice, which Apollodorus engages in by
memorizing and repeating the speeches is hardly erotic; it seems, in
fact, neurotic. As I have already mentioned, Plato represents Apollodorus
in the Phaedo as suffering from an abnormally excitable disposition.
Being present [with Socrates in prison] I felt something quite remarkable. For I was not moved to pity as I might have been in the presence of
a good man about to die, since, from his manner and his words,
Echekrates, the fellow seemed happy and he faced his death with
fearlessness and nobility. . . . And everyone who was there felt nearly the
same; now they were laughing and now they were crying, but one of us
was especially moved this wayApollodorus. You know the man and his
character, I think. (Phd. 58e159b1)

Apollodorus was driven from excessive laughter to excessive weeping,

feeling an unusual mixture of pleasure and pain. In the Phaedo, the
mixture of pleasure and pain is the subject of the very rst words which
Socrates addresses to his companions. Socrates describes the strange
(atopon) condition which Phaedo refers to later in the dialogue as the
general feeling of all those present, namely, the admixture of pleasure
and pain. Socrates also calls it strange, but he identies it as
constitutive of the human condition:
How strange (atopon) it seems, gentlemen, he [Socrates] said, this thing
men call pleasure, and how remarkably it is constituted in relation to
what is held to be its opposite, pain. Though the two are unwilling to be

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found together at the same time within a single human being, just let
someone try to pursue the one and hold it fast, and he will nd that he
is forced to seize the other, too, as if they were two beings, but with one
neck. I think if Aesop had taken note of this, he would have composed a
fable about how god wanted to put an end to their ghting and, when he
couldnt, he fastened them together at their necks. Because of this,
whenever one is found, the other is sure to follow. Just such was my own
experience; the pain which I felt in my legs because of the shackles is
now, it seems, followed by the arrival of pleasure. (Phd. 60b3c7)

This Aesopian fable, the very reverse of the Aristophanic fable in the
Symposium about the origin of ers from the severing of a single creature,
is nothing less than a description of the condition of embodied life as
the Phaedo conceives it. Each pleasure and pain, Socrates says later in
that dialogue, is like a nail which fastens and stitches the soul to the
body (Phd. 83d5). As Socrates explains, the most intense pleasures are
those which are preceded by the most intense pain. To pursue such
pleasures is to submit to a life of violent oscillations of pain and
pleasure, to swing from laughter to tears and back without any hope of
escape.
Apollodorus in particular suffers from acute sensitivity to the condition of embodiment. His pains and his pleasures are heightened, and
so also is the violence of his swings from laughter to grief. This man
whose name suggests that he has been given a special dispensation from
Apollo, is more truly seen as the victim of Dionysus. Apollodorus is
drawn to Socrates and to philosophy because it seems to him to be a
cure for his condition, which he has himself rightly diagnosed as
nothing more or less than the human condition itself. In his opening
remarks, he explains his attraction for Socrates: I have made it my
concern every day to know whatever it may be that he says or does . . . .
Before this I used to run around aimlessly, thinking I was accomplishing
something, but I was more wretched than any man you might name,
but no less wretched than you are right now, believing that anything you
might be doing is more pressing than philosophy (Symp. 173a13). For
Apollodorus, life is full of aimless activity yielding neither joy nor
satisfaction, and as one of his interlocutors points out, in whatever you
say you are always the same, raging at yourself and everyone else, except
Socrates (Symp. 173d610). From the perspective of his contemporaries, Apollodoruss temperament reveals a severe mental imbalance.
A Freudian interpretation of the symptoms Apollodorus is presenting can help us understand his role in the dialogue better.3 As I said at

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the outset of this essay, Apollodurus is perhaps most aptly described as

melancholic. In his essay Mourning and Melancholia, Freuds
governing insight is that melancholia shares with mourning an origin in
the loss of a love object, but that in the case of melancholia the
attachment to the lost object was ambivalent, linked with aggression
and hatred.4 Freud terms mourning the normal process by which we
accept the reality of loss, whereas melancholia is the morbid pathological sign of the selfs denial of loss and its incorporation of and
identication with the fantasmic image of the lost object within itself.
The self, haunted by loss and directing the aggression once felt toward
the object against itself, collapses in upon itself: the loss of the object
became transformed into a loss in the ego (MM, pp. 153, 159).
In Freuds analysis, the distinguishing mental features of melancholia
are dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the
capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of selfregarding feelings to a degree that nds utterance in self-reproaches
and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment (MM, p. 153). Freuds interest centers on the self-reproaches
and self-revilings of the melancholic which, he points out, are not
typical of individuals who are self-reproachful: Shame before others,
which would characterize this condition above everything, is lacking in
him [viz., the melancholic], or at least there is little sign of it. One
could almost say that the opposite trait of insistent talking about
himself and pleasure in the consequent exposure of himself predominates in the melancholiac (MM, p. 157). Certainly, Apollodorus ts
this description.
Reading Apollodorus as a melancholic, we may say that he is
suffering from the loss of a love object, although, as Freud states, it may
be that the patient . . . cannot consciously perceive what it is he has
lost (MM, p. 155). Identifying Socrates as the love object whose loss
has precipitated Apollodoruss melancholia requires no very great
analytic skill (whether literary or clinical). To be sure, Socrates is not
lost to Apollodorus because of his death, but he is certainly as
unapproachable as a love object for Apollodorus as he is for Alcibiades.
Frustrated in his longing for Socrates, Apollodorus has narcissistically
identied with him. Apollodorus is a limit case of what Plato declares to
be the inadequacy of any mortal object of desire to satisfy human
longing. Since loss is constitutive of the (embodied) human, we are all
potential melancholics. Jonathan Lear explains in his account of the
coming into being of the self (an I) that

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a necessary condition of there being a world for me is that I love it, or

invest it with libidinal energy. Because my love affair is with a distinctly
existing world, I must be disappointed with it. A distinctly existing world
cannot possibly satisfy all my wishes. Out of the ensuing frustration and
disappointment, I am born. Melancholia, or some more archaic precursor, must lie at the heart of every I. (LPN, p. 160)

The melancholic I seeks to cure itself by incorporating the fantasmic

image of a lost love object. Plato (like Freud) is not concerned with the
details of the loss. Rather, he is holding out an example of what may be
at stake in our failure to transcend our own case of melancholia.
We can round out the parallels between Freuds Mourning and
Melancholia and the Symposium if we consider the case of Alcibiades.
In total contrast with Apollodorus who delights in the words of
philosophy by which he castigates himself and others as miserable
creatures hardly deserving to be alive, Alcibiades painfully senses the
bite of Socratess words. His problem, of course, is that he also runs
from these words. Alcibiades functions in some ways as a foil for
Apollodorus. Unlike the shameless self-exposure of Apollodorus, typical of the melancholic according to Freud, Alicibiades experiences
shame because of Socratess words. Alcibiades is frustrated by Socrates,
but this is countered by a rejection of the real Socrates and the
incorporation of the fantasized Socrates who, in yielding to Alcibiadess
advances, would provide proof of his narcissistic vision of himself as the
pinnacle of beauty and virtue.
Plato wants us to see Apollodorus and Alcibiades as responding in
contrasting ways to Socrates, with each displaying a marked emotional
excess in this response. However different their symptomology, Freuds
argument in Mourning and Melancholia allows us to understand how
Apollodorus and Alicibiades are really two sides of a single case.
Freud points to an important difference between mourning and
melancholia, namely, the fact that the cessation of mourning restores
the individual to his original condition, but melancholia is often
followed by another extreme state, mania. Freud suggests that what
causes the manic state is the triumph of narcissistic libido over the
raging superego by a mechanism Freud does not hazard to guess at in
Mourning and Melancholia, but which he later describes as the
temporary absorption of the superego or ego ideal into the ego.5
Alcibiades is, in Freudian terms, a manic personality. Plato leaves no
doubt that Alcibiades, so long as Socrates is not near, believes himself to

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be nearly perfect: beautiful, brilliant, and a leader capable of glorious

achievements. In other words, he sees no difference between his ego
and his ego-ideal. He runs from Socrates because it is Socrates who
exposes the gap between reality and ideal. He is, however, also drawn to
Socrates because he imagines that Socrates conceals within himself the
images of the gods that would, if he could possess them, remedy that
gap. Socrates wounds Alcibiadess narcissism, and it is with the futile
yearning of a Narcissus for his own projection that Alcibiades is
attracted to Socrates.6
Apollodorus, unlike Alcibiades, is not consciously ambivalent about
Socrates. He uses Socrates to punish himself, and this is the only
pleasure left in his life. But, more signicantly, he appropriates the very
speech of Socrates and internalizes it as his own though a practice of
memorization. This practice is an imitative identication with Socrates,
the fusion of his punishing superego with the image of Socrates.7 For
Alicibiades, quite the opposite is the case: Socrates stands between his
ego and his narcissistically enlarged superego (ego ideal).
In the different but matched responses of Apollodorus and Alcibiades
to the words of Socrates, Plato offers us, his readers, a cautionary tale
about how to respond to his own text.8 Plato suggests that if we turn to
his text either as a mantra to recite in order to escape from our
disillusionment with the seemingly aimless life of the city, or as
something concealing elusive secrets, we may fall prey to the very forces
from which we ee. The text in itself is no antidote to the ceaseless
oscillation of pleasure and pain, possession and loss, melancholia and
mania. The text does not offer the fullness of presence, an object which
can ll the lack we sense within ourselves.9 What, then, does the
Platonic text offer? To answer this, we must explore in greater detail the
representation of Socrates in the Symposium, and the signicance of
Socratess speech (actually, Diotimas) about ers.

II
Socrates, as he is portrayed both in the Phaedo and the Symposium, is
someone who in his strangeness (atopia) stands apart from the human
condition as subject to the body and its sensitivities. In the Phaedo he is
portrayed as serene on the day of his death and in the Symposium he
drinks, but he never becomes inebriated. It is only in the light of
Socratess strangeness that life rst takes on the quality of strangeness;

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Socrates disturbs lifes everydayness. Who but Socrates would nd it

strange, as he says in the opening of the Phaedo, that pleasure follows
pain? Socrates seems like a visitor from another planet; he is a stranger
even to his body. The strangeness of Socrates is his out-of-placeness,
the literal meaning of the Greek work atopia. The drama which
precedes the speeches of the evening described in the Symposium is a
drama of Socratic out-of-placeness.
Invited for dinner to celebrate the victory of the tragic poet Agathon,
Socrates arrives late. Socrates causes a disturbance not by his presence,
but by his absence. He disturbs by the peculiar combination of absence
and presence which constitutes his out-of-placeness. Where is the
fellow? Agathon asks Aristodemus, who had accompanied Socrates to
Agathons house until told by Socrates to go ahead without him.
Aristodemus, confessing that he nds the situation ridiculous (geloion),
replies, I am wondering the same thing (174e12175a2). After Aristodemus nds his seat, a slave enters and reports that he has found
Socrates standing on a neighbors porch, unresponsive to his calls.
Agathon remarks upon the news: What you say is strange (atopon).
Socrates eventually arrives when the dinner is half-nished. The
action of the Symposium begins, then, with the comic arrival of an
uninvited guest (Aristodemus) and the strange absence of Socrates.
The comedy results from Socratess strangeness, his out-of-placeness.
Socratess strangeness causes others to nd themselves to be out of
place and this, according to the worlds proprieties, makes them seem
comic. Something very similar occurs at the end the Symposium when
Alcibiades, who was not invited to the party, breaks in upon the diners
with a band of revelers. Somewhat drunk, Alcibiades fails to see that
Socrates is present, and he sits in Socratess place next to Agathon after
Socrates has moved aside for him. Agathon calls for his slaves to
prepare another place for Alcibiades, so that the three men can sit
together. Alcibiades wonders who this third man might be, and
turning around he saw Socrates (213b78). Alcibiadess surprise at
discovering Socrates beside him is as great as Aristodemuss was at
nding him missing. Present or absent, Socrates is just not where one
expects him to be, and this leads to ones own displacement. You
have a habit of suddenly appearing where I least expect you to be,
Alcibiades declares (213c12). When Alcibiades is nally persuaded to
offer a speech in praise of Socrates as a condition of his participation in
any further drinking, Alcibiades asks Socrates not to be surprised if I

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talk about one thing and another as my memory prompts me, for it isnt
easy for someone in my condition to have at his ngertips a checklist of
your strangeness (atopian, 215a13).
Just as Aristodemus is made comic (geloion) by the strangeness of
Socrates, so Alcibiades turns himself into a comic gure as he describes
the strangeness of Socrates, which rst and foremost consists, according
to Alcibiades, in Socratess power to reverse the established positions of
older and younger man as lover (erasts) and beloved (ermenos)
respectively.10 After Alcibiades had nished his speech, Aristodemus
reports (221c13), laughter broke out at his frankness, because it
seemed that he still desired Socrates as a lover does. The comedy
which Socrates in his strangeness stages is one that places the
individual in an unexpected and improper position: Aristodemus
arrives at a party as an uninvited guest; Alcibiades pursues the older and
physically unattractive Socrates as a lover would pursue a beautiful
youth. The individual becomes, in a word, atopos, out-of-place. But the
comedy can be, for the victim, salutory. It can lift the individual
beyond the cycle of pleasure and pain, desire and disgust, which
governs embodied life.
The irony is that neither Aristodemus nor Alcibiades do in fact
transcend this cycle; each simply embraces one half of the cycle and
seeks thereby to bring the movement to a standstill. Aristodemus, like
Apollodorus, chooses to reject pleasure; Alcibiades chooses rather to
live altogether for pleasure. Aristodemus, again like Apollodorus,
transforms himself into a comic imitation of Socrates; Alcibiades
transforms himself into a tragic gure whose alleged actions, desecrating the Herms and profaning the Mysteries, on the eve of Athenss
expedition to Syracuse bring disaster on himself and his city.
If as I argued in the previous section we have two gurations of failed
responses to the power of Socratess strangeness with Aristodemus and
Alcibiades, it is fair to ask what a successful response would look like. To
answer this, we must consider what it is that makes Socrates strange,
because this may hold a clue to the strangeness he causes others to feel.
An understanding of Socratess strangeness depends upon an examination of the round of speeches made in praise of the god ers. Alcibiades
tells us that the reversal of erotic roles is at the heart of Socratess
strangeness, and this reversal is the analog of the relationship between
the speeches of all the other symposiasts and that of Socrates/Diotima.
The other symposiasts draw their picture of ers from the object of love,
beauty joined with youth; Socrates/Diotima focus upon the lover. Only

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the focus upon the lover permits a recognition of the real strangeness
of ers, which is nothing less than the strangeness of our selfhood.
When Socrates nally arrives at the dinner, Agathon invites him to sit
beside him so that if I touch you I might also get a share of the wisdom
that came to you out there (175c8d1). Socratess rst words at the
symposium will announce an important motif in the upcoming speeches,
that of emptiness and fullness and the attraction of one for the other.11
Socrates sat down and says: It would be nice, Agathon, if wisdom were
like that, and it owed from the one of us that was full to the one that
was empty . . . .
The notion that touching can provide a conduit of wisdom from a
full vessel to an empty one nds an echo later in the dialogue. In her
speech Diotima informs Socrates that love can only be consummated
when a soul that is overfull from its spiritual pregnancy touches what is
true and gives birth to genuine excellence (212a56). The difference between this and the earlier reference to touching is that for
Diotima the source of the movement lies not in the attractive power of
the empty vessel but in the condition of the full, indeed overfull, one.
If Socrates is full of wisdom, as Agathon suggests, it is not by virtue of his
emptiness that Agathon will receive that wisdom, but by virtue of his
own overfullness (pregnancy) that he may hope to give birth to wisdom.
Each speech of the Symposium prior to that of Socrates plays in different
ways with the theme of emptiness and fullness, since ers, when it is
misidentied as longing for what is not the (ideal) self, is construed as
an emptiness within the self. In fact it is an excessive fullness of the self.
Space does not permit a complete exploration of the thematics of
fullness and emptiness in the round of speeches of the Symposium, but
some brief remarks are in order.

III
When it is Aristophaness turn to speak, he must yield to Erixymachus
because of his serious case of hiccoughs. Now there is, of course, some
poetic justice in Aristophaness being made the center of this comic
interruption. But Plato has not merely added a clever literary highlight
with Aristophaness hiccoughs. The hiccoughs are a parodic commentary on Eryximachuss entire speech. Aristophanes suffers from an
overfullness (plsmon) of air, and in order to cure it, Eryximachus tells
him to induce certain physiological counter-reactions. The nal and
most effective such counter-reaction is the sneeze, which is a violent

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emptying process. The hiccoughs and the sneezes are also a parody of
the pregnancy and delivery theme which is the center of Diotimas
speech.
For Eryximachus, there is a love which brings about health in the
body, and it exists between those elements in the body which are
dissimilar to one another. When one predominates over another, the
doctor must restore the balance through techniques of emptying and
lling.
Except for its heavily mathematical bent, the Philebuss description of
the role of intelligence in rendering order and harmony in place of
disharmony and conict, strongly reminds one of Eryximachuss medical theory. In fact, the Philebus offers a signicant elaboration of themes
adumbrated in Erixymachuss speech and in the rest of the Symposium,
especially that of emptiness and fullness. A brief examination of how
this theme plays out in the Philebus will, I believe, prove illuminating. In
the Philebus, Socrates suggests that if a living organism remembers its
prior state of equilibrium while it is in a condition of dissolution, it will
desire a return to that prior state. Since all dissolution is, Socrates says,
a result of emptying, the desire for restoration is a desire for lling.
The one who is emptied desires the opposite of what he is experiencing, for one who is emptied desires (er) to be lled (Phil. 35a34).
Earlier in the dialogue, Philebus had advanced the claim that pleasure
was the human good. Socrates argues that a life devoted to pleasure
would be a life spent in becoming lled and becoming empty and in
all that has to do with the preservation (stria) and dissolution
(phthora) of living things, and when one is at one end of the spectrum
he will feel pain, but then, as he moves to the other end, he will feel
pleasure (35e25). Besides being caught in an endless cycle of lling
and emptying, one who pursued this form of life will soon become a
slave to ever more extreme swings in the alternation of fullness and
emptiness. He will judge those pleasures to be greatest which release
him from the greatest pain, and he will eventually come to cherish
especially the exquisite agonies of sexual need. Socrates compares the
pain/pleasure mixture of sex with the lesser one of itching and tickling
(46d747b7). After discussing the mixture of extreme pleasure and
pain in such physical experiences as tickling, itching, and orgasm,
Socrates goes on to discuss the mixture of pleasure and pain in psychic
experience, and most particularly in the experience of both tragic and
comic performances. Socrates says in conclusion: Our discussion
reveals to us that pain is mixed together with pleasure in a thousand

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different ways, in poetic dirges, in tragedies and comedies, and not only
those in the dramatic theater, but in the whole tragedy and comedy of
life (Phil. 50b14). This passage offers us a remarkable metaphor for
life lived under the sign of Dionysus, the god of the tragic and comic
theatre: the whole tragedy and comedy of life. As we now see, it is a
life of lling and emptying. It is a life governed by the manicmelancholic cycle.

IV
Socrates relates to the other symposiasts the education in love which
he received from Diotima. Diotima explained that ers is a daimn
because he is in between both [gods and men], brings fullness
(sympltoi ) to both, so that the whole becomes bound up with itself
(202e67). The great daimn ers is the child of Poros (resource)
and Penia (poverty). As a child of Penia, ers is homeless (aoikos) and
always needy; as a child of Poros, he is a clever schemer, a trickster
(gos), a sophist, and a philosopher all his life (203d7). Given this
description, we cannot fail to see Socrates himself as, somehow, ers
incarnate. It is no wonder that Socrates seems out-of-place (atopos):
like ers, he is truly homeless, never rmly rooted to one place.
All human action, Diotima gets Socrates to agree, is directed to some
end judged by the agent to contribute to his ultimate good, happiness
(eudaimonia). Diotima goes on to explain that love is not a function of
any lack, but rather of an over fullness: all humans are pregnant, both in
body and soul. But with what are humans pregnant, and how does their
pregnancy relate to their love for the eternal possession of the good?
These questions are answered by Diotima in her lesser and greater
mysteries (209e6210a2). The two levels of the mysteries of love are
paralleled by the two levels of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The Greater
Mysteries reveal to the initiate the teaching of the goddess Demeter
about the path to blessedness after death. Similarly, Diotimas greater
mysteries will explain how the soul can nally achieve the eternal
possession of the good. In what precedes these greater mysteries,
Diotima tells Socrates that every living creature is continually regenerating itself in every part of its body. The life of an organism is a perpetual
race against dissolution. In this race, there is only one way an organism
can win: produce new life. In each generation life triumphs over
death and gains the share it has in immortality. In many respects,
Diotimas lesser mysteries resemble the picture of the continuous

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alternation of lling and emptying which dominates the life of the body
according to the Philebus. But Diotima teaches that each new generation is pregnant with the next. Without this exorbitance of resource,
life would be swallowed by death. From the perspective of the single
organism struggling for its survival, however, the exorbitance of pregnancy is ignored and all that is felt is an endless cycle of pleasure and
pain, re-lling and emptying. And, if the creature we are talking about
is human, then it cannot but perceive death to be the consummation of
this existence.
Diotima, who teaches us to recognize our exorbitant resource, shows
the way to our defeat of death. We learn that our love for what is
beautiful is never sterile, but always leads towards birth and reproduction. It is only in the beautiful that we are able to give birth, and our
love for the beautiful guides us to the object which will relieve our
birth pangs. It seems difcult to imagine that Plato intends us fully to
comprehend what kind of thing this eternal beauty is. In the Symposium,
Diotimas greater mystery remains, for all practical purposes,
unrevealed. The beautiful itself is not so much an object to be tted
within an ontological system as it is the ultimate lure of a love which
seeks nothing less than an eternal triumph over death. Whatever else
the beautiful itself is, it is the guarantor of the unceasing presence of
beauty within the realm of birth and death, and, as such, it holds the
promise that our pregnancy, if we only recognize it, will never be
stillborn. Our rst task, then, is to see our love as the mechanism by
which life continually overcomes death. Within our souls, the future
awaits its birth. Socrates, as Plato understands him, is supremely
qualied to serve as the midwife for our spiritual birth because he must
elude us if we pursue him as the object of our desire (he is, as we have
seen, always out-of-place), and therefore he sends us back to discover
the exorbitant but unrecognized resources within ourselves. He reveals
nothing of himself, but he allows our own out-of-placeness to be
revealed as we sense, as Alcibiades so ably describes it, our lack (of
knowledge, of beauty, of excellence) where we had imagined a fullness,
and a fullness (our pregnancy) where we had imagined a lack.

V
What does all this mean in practical terms? To answer this we must
return to the questions about the text of the Symposium itself that we
touched on in the introductory section of the paper. We may begin by

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attending to the name of Phoenix, an individual mentioned only in

passing in the dialogues opening. Apollodorus told his companions
that Phoenix had misled them about the date of the gathering at
Agathons house. He also said that Phoenix and he had both heard
about the gathering from Aristodemus himself. Plato thus contrasts the
power which these speeches have upon Apollodorus, who delights in
retelling them, and upon Phoenix, who has forgotten even the date of
Agathons party. Is it possible that Plato is thus also suggesting the irony
of Phoenixs name? The phoenix, of course, is the mythic bird that has
the power to rise again from its own ashes. This capacity for selfrejuvenation is, according to Diotima, to be found in all living things
and is evidence of their participation in immortality through selfreproduction into something new. This need for self-reproduction is
felt, too, she says, in spiritual things: knowledge requires practice for it
to be preserved; without practice, forgetfulness will destroy all that one
knows (208a37). Phoenix, then, whose name suggests the animal
which embodies Diotimas teaching, has failed to preserve the memory
of that teaching and, unlike the mythic creature for which he was
named, has lost his share in immortality.
If this is true, then we already have a valuable clue for deciphering
the message of the extraordinary tale of the speeches transmission: the
speeches are reborn with each retelling and thereby embody the
truth of that speech which links love with birth and the transcendence
of death. What is more, the speeches, born now in one soul, create the
desire for re-telling them and giving them birth in another soul and
hence they incite one to step upon the ladder of beauty. The narrative
frame of the Symposium, therefore, represents the life-giving power of
philosophic speech. We who read this text are challenged either to
become partners with Plato in nurturing the discourse of philosophy or
carelessly to permit its memory to fade. But we must also remember the
cautionary tale of Apollodorus, the one who seeks to transcend the
cycle of weeping and laughingthe whole tragedy and comedy of life
in the remarkable phrase of the Philebus. Apollodorus uses the speeches
as if they were a mantra that might permit him to assume the identity of
Socrates. His extreme mood swings as Plato depicts them perfectly t
within the description Plato offers of the tragedy and comedy of life.
Plato knows that one possible result of the experience of this intense
oscillation between pain and pleasure is the rejection of life itself. The
melancholic position is a threat especially to those who have been
exposed to Socrates, since his atopia frustrates and disappoints those

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who love him and his strange distance from the cycle of pleasure and
pain can lead one to view life itself as strange, and to withdraw from
it, as Freud would say, all libidinal attachment.
I would like to conclude with some remarks about the relation
between the Phaedo and the Symposium, a topic I broached at the
opening of the essay in discussing the gure of Aristodemus.12 The
Symposium shows us a Socrates immersed in life, speaking of love as the
force that preserves life, and being himself the focus of the symposiasts
love (cf. Symp. 218a7b4). The Phaedo gives us a Socrates who has
prepared himself for death and who speaks of his commitment to
philosophy as having been nothing else than a preparation for death.
The Symposiums Socrates is out of place (atopos) in the midst of a world
of comedy and tragedy (represented by Aristophanes and Agathon)
ruled over by Dionysus. The Phaedos Socrates, represented as preparing
to remove himself from this world and return to his home, sings the
Apollonine music of prophecy, like swans before their death (cf. Phd.
84e385a7). Although the Symposium is full of comic action, Socrates
himself is never described as either smiling or laughing; in the Phaedo,
on the other hand, he is twice said to have laughed (84d8, 115c5), and
once to have smiled (86d6). In the Symposium, when the speeches are
completed, the symposiasts who remain are compelled to drink, giving
themselves over to Dionysus (cf. Symp. 223b6) until, at sunrise, the last
have nally been overpowered by wine and fatigue, and Socrates,
unaffected by either, goes to the shrine of Apollo to bathe. In the
Phaedo, the action begins just before sunrise and ends precisely at
sunset, when Socrates, having bathed (lousamenos, 115a7), drinks the
cup of poison which offers him an Apollonine liberation. In the
Symposium and the Phaedo, then, we have a full representation of the
day of Socrates, from sunset to sunset, a day in which we see
embodied the triumph of Apollos music, philosophy (cf. Phd. 61a3),
over Dionysuss comedy and tragedy. The Phaedo and the Symposium,
then, seek to involve us in the continuing life of the philosophical logos
whose source is a fullness, an exorbitance, without end. Philosophy
alone can cure the melancholic self.
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana

Bruce Rosenstock

257

1. Translations throughout are my own.

2. David M. Halperin, Plato and the Erotics of Narrativity, in James C. Klagge and
Nicholas D. Smith, eds., Methods of Interpreting Plato and his Dialogues, Oxford Studies in
Ancient Philosophy Suppl. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 93130. Hereafter
abbreviated PEN.
3. My use of Freud in this essay is indebted to John Brenkman, The Other and the
One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, The Symposium, in Shoshana Felman, ed., Literature and
Psychoanalysis; The Question of Reading: Otherwise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1982), hereafter abbreviated OO; Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature: A
Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux,
1990), hereafter abbreviated LPN; and Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: From Homer to
Lacan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
4. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia in Collected Papers, Vol. 4 (New York:
Basic Books, 1959), pp. 15270. Hereafter abbreviated MM.
5. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: W. W. Norton,
1959), p. 64.
6. I disagree with Martha Nussbaums characterization of Alcibiades as embodying
Platos portrait of what the love of one human for another, in his or her singularity,
would look like. I am not sure if we ever get this portrayed in Plato or any other ancient
Greek text, but I am convinced that Alcibiades yearning to open Socrates, both
sexually and epistemically, is seen as a part of his overall narcissism. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 19295.
7. As Andrea Nightingale says, By reproaching himself, Apollodorus succeeds in
imitating Socratess self-deprecating style; but when he reviles his companions, he fails to
emulate the philosophers ironic handling of others. Andrea Wilson Nightengale,
Genres in Conflict: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), p. 118.
8. The subject of Platos textuality has been much discussed. See, for a balanced
discussion and full bibliography, William A. Johnson, Dramatic Frame and Philosophic
Idea in Plato, American Journal of Philology 119 (1998): 57798.
9. It is at this point that I may register my disagreement with one of the most
interesting efforts at connecting psychoanalytic theory with the Symposium, John
Brenkmans OO. Brenkman is right to insist that Plato wants to deny that lack is truly
constitutive of human desire, but he does not offer either Socrates or Socratic discourse
as the fullness which could overcome the lack. Nor does Plato consider the lack theory
to be mistaken simpliciter; rather, he takes it to be, as we might say, phenomenologically
valid as a description of what embodied existence appears to be.
10. For a detailed exposition of the role-reversing power of Socrates, see R. G.
Edmonds III, Socrates the Beautiful: Role Reversal and Midwifery in Platos Symposium,
Transactions of the American Philological Association 130 (2000), pp. 26185.
11. For a full discussion of the theme, see Steven Lowenstam, Paradoxes in Platos
Symposium, Ramus 14 (1985): 85104.

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12. For a more detailed discussion, see John A. Brentlinger, The Cycle of Becoming in
the Symposium in The Symposium of Plato, Suzy Q. Grodin, ed. (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1970), p. 2; and Charles Kahn, Drama and Dialectic in Platos
Gorgias, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 (1983): 57798.