A Recreation of Plato’s Symposium

Hey all, Shival’s providing the topic for the next meeting. Here’s the write up:

A Recreation of Plato’s Symposium

The Symposium is one of the most universally beloved of the Platonic dialogues not just for its stirring, strange, and sublime descriptions of love but also for its festive, warm, and almost cinematic atmosphere. A group of guests gather at the dramatist Agathon’s house for a banquet to celebrate his winning first prize at a drama festival. After dinner, and while drinking lots of wine, they have a friendly competition to see who can give the best encomium, i.e., speech in praise of, love.

If the dialogue were a film, it’d have all the elements of one of those wonderfully atmospheric movies that mostly consists of conversation: friendly ribbing, interconnected dialogue, a hilarious set piece by the comic-relief character (Aristophanes), and even an unexpected party crasher!

Sounds like a good time to me! In this Negative Space event, let’s recreate the Symposium and give speeches about love. In the original, the speeches are in praise of eros specifically, but people should feel free to give speeches about any form of love they want, or just take the role of spectators, if they like. Additionally, since this is a Negative Space, I don’t think we have to limit our speeches to just praise. If you want to deconstruct the very notion of love, have at it. I’ll kick us off with a brief summary of the original Symposium before we have our very own and see what wisdom (or nonsense) we come up with about love.