Platão e o Corpo

Participam:
Jonathan Lear, University of Chicago: "Ironic Eros: Notes on a Fantastic Pregnancy"
Gretchen Reydams-Schils, University of Notre Dame: "What Does the Body Have to Do with Becoming Like God in Middle-Platonism?"
David O'Connor, University of Notre Dame: "Ice Cold Feet"

Miss Anna O

"Considering that Breuer is the beloved, but it seems that he was also a lover pregnant in soul. It's clear from the case history that he was impressed with Anna O, as well he should have been. Quote: 'She was markedly intelligent with an astonishingly quick grasp of things and penetrating intuition. She possessed a powerful intellect, she had great poetic and imaginative gifts which were under the control of a sharp and critical common sense, one of her essential character traits was a sympathetic kindness.' Unquote. [...] And if we look back at these pair of lovers with the benefit of hindsight, and if we try to cut through the draws of social pretense, and ask what was ethically significant about their interaction, we see that one person was asking another person for help and the other person was trying to offer help. And everything was going along smoothly in the production of a false theory and a false understanding of their relationship until miss O's unconscious interrupted it. And in effect, her pregnancy (her unconscience) was saying, 'I'm pregnant. I'm giving birth. This is your baby!"
Jonathan Lear



"How does wonder provoke us to put together our bodies and our souls? Something transcendent with something mundane? [...] If Wagner can't stir your anxieties about the relationship between the sensuous and the transcendent, you are stone cold dead. [...] King Marke, the legitimate spouse of Isolde, has been unable, ever, to have sex with her because he respects her too much. He sings this in music of great nobility and control. Which contrasts with the ecstatic eroticism of the music that the true lovers Tristan and Isolde tend to express their love in. Marke loved Isolde too much to become her sexual partner. He had a fantasy (I'm tempted to say) of love that would be undisturbed by the turbulence of erotic desire. I think Plato, too, knew all about this fantasy of philosophy without turbulence.  [...] The fantasy of philosophy without erotic turbulence is enacted over and over again by Plato (it seems to me).A fantasy that he indulges but that he also chases. "
David O'Connor