The Erotics of (Re)reading

Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, his master and erastēs (older male lover).

SOCRATES: Dear Phaedrus, wither away, and where do you come from?

PHAEDRUS: From Lysias, Socrates … and I am going for a walk outside the wall [of Athens].

Earlier that day, Phaedrus says, Lysias had given him a speech in which he described the erotic relationship that a master can have with a young disciple whom he does not love, with whom he is not in love.

PHAEDRUS: Lysias has represented one of the beauties being tempted, but not by a lover; this is just the clever thing about it; for he says that favors should be granted rather to the one who is not in love than to the lover.

This report does not satisfy Socrates. Dying to know more, he is determined not to let Phaedrus out of his sight; he will follow him everywhere, hound him until he agrees to read Lysias’s speech to him. At the very threshold of the reading scene there thus emerges a close and complex connection between loving and reading, two verbs, two gerunds, between which, for reasons that will soon become apparent, it makes sense to leave open all the possible punctuation marks, including the possibility that there be none (as though one wrote them in scriptio continua, with no space between them, which was a common scriptural practice in Plato’s day). Loving()reading could then be read (or connected) at least in two different ways:

1. Lovingreading or loving-reading (a double verb, conjugated as transitive, where what one loves-reads is someone or something, Lysias or the book).

2. Loving reading (in which case, it is reading that one loves).

For Phaedrus, loving()reading is, above all, loving and reading, in a single verb, someone. Loving and reading are intertwined in this reader who loves the voice to which he listens in the text to which he lends his own body. And it is thus under the sign of this hyphen (trait d’union), the hyphenated loving-reading, that Plato’s Phaedrus opens. It is as though this feature, the line contracting the space between the two verbs, some sort of silent bond where a contractual relationship between them takes place, has brought them together or joined them together in order to express the union of love and reading in the act of uniting with the one who speaks in the text.

One can indeed suppose that Phaedrus, Lysias’s disciple, had already granted his master favors and is now prepared to love-read him again, for Socrates. He would have thus offered himself to Lysias without being loved in return since such seems to be the “clever” nature of the pederastic and pedagogical contract suggested in the speech that we, the readers of this dialogue, are about to hear in turn. And Socrates cannot wait to witness a sort of second playing out, a reproduction of this free union, with neither jealousy nor possession. He is burning with the desire to hear Phaedrus let himself be penetrated again by Lysias’s speech or voice, by Lysias’s logos.

Yet the actual act of reading, that act that many Greek and Latin inscriptions describe in openly sexual terms, is long in coming. Phaedrus first doubts his own ability to “tell from memory” Lysias’s speech, whereas Socrates insists that he do so in a few remarkable lines, lines in which, in some sense, he splits his reticent interlocutor:

SOCRATES: O Phaedrus! If I don’t know Phaedrus, I have forgotten myself. But since neither of these things is true, I know very well that when listening to Lysias he did not hear once only, but often urged him to repeat; and he gladly obeyed.

It seems, then, that Lysias read his speech to Phaedrus several times; it was not a hapax. And in the space of this singular rejoinder, Phaedrus, who will soon read and reread it for Socrates (and thus also for we who read him), moves from the second person singular—the place of interlocution or address in a dialogue—to the third. For a moment, through these sentences addressed to him, rather than you, he appears to be absent from the scene, as though he were already taking leave or disappearing in order to read, that is, to lend his voice, his body, to the words of another. Before he really starts to read, before giving himself over body and soul to the one who will speak through him, Phaedrus is already no longer quite himself, is already partly another. Socrates continues, still speaking of Phaedrus to Phaedrus as though the latter were not really there: “Yet even that was not enough for Phaedrus, but at last he borrowed the book [the scroll, to biblion] and read what he especially wished.” In a sort of hyperbolic repetition, Phaedrus, one Phaedrus or the other, has thus taken hold of Lysias’s writing to carry it off, to read and reread it elsewhere, outside the city walls.

What a strange manner Socrates has! What a strange way of addressing Phaedrus by splitting him in two! For when Socrates has to insist that Phaedrus actually get on with reading (Phaedrus needs to be begged), he goes literally as far as asking Phaedrus to ask Phaedrus to do it: “So, Phaedrus, ask him [Phaedrus] now to do what he will presently do anyway.” Why this insistence on addressing Phaedrus both as you and as him? It is as though Socrates already perceived, already heralded, the division that the imminent scene of reading would set up in Phaedrus, splitting him between his reading voice and the voice of the text that speaks through him.

While Phaedrus thus divides himself, as though in preparation for reading, what excites Socrates’s curiosity is the biblion: that’s what he wants to see, the hidden object of desire that is “in your left hand, under your cloak.” “Come now, show it”—there is undeniable eroticism in Socrates’s request, as though after having split his interlocutor, he now wanted to undress him. The attraction of the roll that carries the text of the speech, a sort of metonymy for Lysias that Phaedrus hugs, might evoke a magnificent later epigram (second century C.E.), one attributed to Strato:

Fortunate little book, I am not jealous of you [meaning “would not be, even if you deserved it”]. Reading you, a boy will touch you, hold you close to his cheek or press you to his lips, or perhaps he will unfold you upon his tender thighs, O most fortunate of books! Often you will be carried within his shirt or, flung down upon a chair, you will dare to touch those particular things without fear. You will speak much with him, alone with him.

Once the biblion has thus been seen or glimpsed as an object of erotic substitution, Phaedrus and Socrates set out in search of a place where they can sit together or lie down together to read it. Plato describes the place they ultimately find, in the shade of a plane tree, as a charming place, covered in gently sloping grass. When they arrive there, Socrates and Phaedrus take up their positions or poses. Paraphrasing the stage directions of another great text on reading and love (Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom), we might say that the disposition is effected, the posture is assumed, in a way that prepares for loving-reading Lysias:

SOCRATES: So now that I have come here, I intend to lie down and do you choose the position in which you think you can read most easily, and read.

PHAEDRUS: Hear then.

Lying down, Socrates lets himself be penetrated by Phaedrus’s reading as Phaedrus offers himself vocally to his master, Lysias. The two of them loving-reading under the plane tree is, of course, actually a threesome.

In the middle of this triangulation, it is hard to concentrate on Lysias’s rather boring and poorly constructed speech, which, through Phaedrus, talks about their pedagogical and pederastic (pederastagogic) contract based on free love, that is to say, love without love. The long argument aims to show the erōmenos (the younger male, the “loved one”), who is himself reading it to a prone Socrates, that a disciple has everything to gain by giving himself over to a master who does not love him.

However, we, who, like Socrates, no doubt, are more interested in Phaedrus as he reads than in what he is reading, are tempted to turn away from this arduous demonstration and toward the fascinating underlying paradox, namely, that when Phaedrus reads, when Phaedrus is in the middle of loving-reading his master, for those of us who read him reading, he is not reading anymore. I mean that in the text, when Phaedrus gets to the point of reading, there is no longer any representation of him reading. In other words, the structure of the reading point is such that it appears only as it disappears, that it manifests only intermittently, where it is interrupted, where it is being prepared or set up, where reading is going to begin or begin again.

Indeed, it is when Phaedrus has finished reading that we again see him reading, that we go back to reading him as he was when he was reading (since we cannot read him reading), through the words and gaze of Socrates, who listens:

PHAEDRUS: What do you think of the discourse [logos], Socrates? Is it not wonderful, especially in diction?

SOCRATES: … I am quite overcome by it. And this is due to you, Phaedrus, because as I looked at you, I saw that you were delighted by the speech as you read.

As he is reading, Phaedrus does not only radiate Lysias’s logos, the logos that penetrates him and passes through him. He also radiates the pleasure he gets from reading. As Socrates had sensed in the dialogue before the reading scene, Phaedrus splits or duplicates his reading, draws attention to it through the pleasure he takes in it, a pleasure that we can read. But for us, as we read what he reads, these marks or traces of his reading—of the activity of his reading rather than of what he reads—can be discerned only after the fact, with Socrates’ retrospective comments (“while you were reading, you seemed …”).

***

The rest of the Phaedrus has been glossed so many times that I will only summarize it, pausing on what matters to us here, namely, as we will see, rereading.

Having taken it upon himself to critique Lysias’s speech, which he has just heard, and responding to Phaedrus’s insistent request, Socrates gives a better, more inspired version of the speech under the spell of an enthusiasm that, he explains, possesses him (enthousiasō). Then, full of remorse when he hears his daimon’s voice, Socrates launches into improvising a second speech, one that will be the exact opposite of the first, in order to correct what he now sees as sacrilegious or impious with respect to the god of Love (Erōs): “I am afraid of Love himself,” he explains to Phaedrus, and so he “wish[es] to wash out the brine from [his] ears with the water of a sweet discourse.”

Through this speech-washing (one logos wiping out another), Socrates inaugurates a general movement of inversion in the dialogue that will become a hymn to the mania of love and all its positive effects on the soul. Phaedrus, the erōmenos, finds himself in a novel role facing his erastēs, Lysias. As Sade would say, the posture is dissolved, the attitudes are dissolved, and, in the ensuing permutation, Phaedrus is given an unexpected place in the loving-reading scene: “When you have spoken the praise of the lover, Lysias must of course be compelled by me to write another discourse on the same subject.”

Everything gets turned around here, as though Phaedrus, who now promises to dictate his future speeches to Lysias, had become the latter’s erastēs while becoming henceforth erōmenos to Socrates, his erastēs. There is a circulating revolution in this threesome that carries them to loving-reading each other backward or upside down.

Socrates once again addresses Phaedrus in the third person, but this time as a love object, the object of a love contract that Phaedrus seems to countersign similarly through an oblique pronouncement, speaking of himself as of another:

SOCRATES: Where is the youth to whom I was speaking? He must hear this also, lest if he do not hear it, he accept a non-lover. …

PHAEDRUS: Here he is, always close at hand, whenever you want him.

But why, on the threshold of the big speech Socrates is about to improvise to celebrate the delirium brought on by love—this mania that, as he will put it, is the anamnesis of true beauty, when souls recover memories of contemplating essence and truth (ousia and alētheia), glimpsed as they reach the end of their journey on the outer surface of the heavens—why does Socrates again make use of this strange way of addressing his interlocutor as though he were both present and absent, both here and elsewhere, both himself and another?

You may have guessed that my hypothesis is that Phaedrus, both as a reader and then as the auditor of another’s speech (Lysias’s and now Socrates’s), is indeed double, divided: as he prepares to read or to listen, Phaedrus splits into the erōmenos (the passive Phaedrus who makes himself into a pure transparent vehicle for the voice that speaks through him) and the erastēs (the Phaedrus who reads or listens to that voice, in the most active senses of those verbs). And it is precisely because there are two Phaedruses, so to speak, because one Phaedrus hides another, that the permutation, the cycling revolution of loving-reading can take place, one Phaedrus taking over from the other.

I would like to take this one step further: the doubling that Plato stages as though it were the precondition of any reading (as I read, I split into my reading voice and the voice that I read), this division is intrinsically—albeit subterraneously—connected to what is perhaps the most quietly remarkable event of this dialogue, namely, that Socrates soon asks Phaedrus to reread Lysias’s speech. He actually suggests rereading several times only to observe in the end, together, that they do not like this logos, the dry, rather weak speech that advocates not loving.

Both of these rereadings take place after Socrates holds forth for the second time, when the dialogue is moving toward a debate no longer about beauty in general, or beauty in love, but about the beauty of speeches, a beauty that also supposes knowledge of truth. Lysias’s speech is first evaluated according to this criterion:

SOCRATES: Then, my friend, he who knows not the truth, but pursues opinions, will, it seems, attain an art of speech, which is ridiculous, and not an art at all.

PHAEDRUS: Probably.

SOCRATES: Shall we look in the speech of Lysias, which you have with you, and in what I said, for something which we think shows art and the lack of art? … Read me the beginning of Lysias’s discourse.

Phaedrus obliges, rereading the lines we have already read with him. However, as though once were not enough, as though it were necessary that a rereading, like a reading, not remain a hapax (to use the term that you will remember Socrates uses at the very beginning of the dialogue), Phaedrus will have to reread again, reread a second time: “Socrates: Read, that I may hear Lysias himself.”

Rereading here is not at all passive. The passivity of reading flips into an active rereading, given that, as it is reread, Lysias’s speech is judged, analyzed, criticized, that is it is also disassembled, decomposed, dismembered into its constituent parts:

SOCRATES: [Lysias] certainly does not at all seem to do what we demand, for he does not even begin at the beginning, but undertakes to swim on his back up the current of his discourse from its end.

Indeed, contrary to Socrates, Lysias did not proceed in an orderly fashion, defining love at the beginning. That is why, being upside down, his speech does not follow the rule that would take the beauty or the harmony of the body as a model:

SOCRATES: Every discourse must be organized, like a living being, with a body of its own, as it were, so as not to be headless nor footless.

Diagnosing what now seems to them to be a clumsy inversion of the organic parts of the speech, Socrates and Phaedrus turn around, or upside down, the erotics of power in loving-reading. In other words, as their critical judgment spins the speech around, the corporal postures of the reading scene are also rearranging themselves. Lysias, whom Phaedrus could already imagine—as Socrates was about to begin his second speech— being forced to write under his dictation, now is clearly in the position of the one suffering the reading. In other words, and to put it crudely (that is, in the terms of many Greek and Latin inscription or epigrams, such as the one attributed to Strato), whereas during the first reading, Lysias was penetrating Phaedrus, who was penetrating Socrates, this time Socrates penetrates Phaedrus, who penetrates Lysias.

Rereading thus foreshadows the possibility of reshuffling the roles: not only the members of the discursive organism, the parts and articulations of the corpus of the text that is read, but also, above all, the bodies of those who read and the relationships of domination in which they are caught are rearranged. This is the chance for a change, an exchange of positions or a swapping of partners in the pederastic psychagogy of reading.

It is, of course, an open question what remains of the Phaedrus/Socrates/Lysias threesome, what happens to their switching triangle, when reading goes silent. Might it be that they resurface in us every time we read? Might it be that we carry them in us, throughout the subvocalizing mumbling that is tacitly active in our inner selves as readers?

An adapted excerpt of Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks, translated from the French by Olivia Custer, to be published by Zone Books in March.

Peter Szendy is the David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His four books include For an Ecology of Images; The Supermarket of the Visible: Towards a General Economy of Images; Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience; and All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage.

Olivia Custer is a scholar and the author of L’Exemple de Kant.

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