Voices of Love. Reinvention of Plato's Erotology in Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Widely known as one of the most significant authors in the field of theory of myth and literary theory, Roland Barthes pointed to new ways of thinking about love with his late work A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris, 1977). A literary acheivement of dazzling disharmony, this book proved to be one of the cornerstones of contemporary erotology. Both by its philosophical argument and by its unconventional form, it is firmly rooted in Plato’s dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus, sometimes competing them in conceptual creativity with Plato’s legacy. The paper tries to determine the basic axes of analogy between the two erotological legacies that belong to two very different cultures. Among their multiple intellectual affinities, special attention is paid to the diffraction of the erotic vision and to the transformation of the erotic phenomenon.