My Heart Went Boom

Drawing on passages of Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus —and telling an autobiographical story like the one Nehamas tells in On Friendship about his friend Tom—this chapter develops an account of erôs as a powerful form of attraction to the sensible beauty of some particular person as such, attraction constituted by desire for sensory interaction with that very particular. The author asks whether—in order for a desire to count as “erotic”—the desired forms of sensory interaction, must be “sexually charged.” But the chapter is focused primarily on Plato's conception of erôs as “ekstatic”—that is, on the power of erotic attraction to take the lover outside of ( ek ) her usual condition ( stasis ) in ways that may liberate her from problematic nomima (or customs) into which she has been habituated by the communities in which she has been raised (for example nomima involving racialized and ethnic biases).