If we suffer for love, it’s Plato’s fault:

a critical reading of the Symposium

Abstract

The present text has as its initial objective to weave a critical reading of Plato’s well-known dialogue, The Symposium, reflecting on the conceptions of love, sexuality and affectivity that this text presents and the way in which such conceptions penetrated and developed in the western culture. This critique will be made from a post-modern perspective, based on Michel Onfray’s Théorie du corps amoureux, as well as some fragments from Nietzsche that underlie this author’s thinking, among other references that prove to be opportune. For this, the text will be divided into three distinct parts, the first reconstructing in general terms the arguments of Plato’s text, the second pointing out the weaknesses of these classical conceptions and the third directing the reader to the alternatives available in contemporary times through so many transformations in the forms of living, thinking and loving that we find at the beginning of the 21st century.