Speaking Truth to ‘Platonism’? Some Thoughts on Alcibiades and Erôs

This article reads Alcibiades’ speech in Plato’s Symposium in terms of the later Foucault’s examination of ‘parrhēsia’, or ‘frank spokenness’. It contends that, in part, Alcibiades’ stress on the sheer particularity and individuality of erotic attraction—in his case, attraction to Socrates himself—acts as a kind of rejoinder to the ‘impersonal’ aspect of erôs highlighted in the famous speech of Socrates/Diotima.