Athens, between love and anarchy: democratization of pleasures and the contingencies of popular politics

Abstract

<p In Republic, Plato identifies democracy as a political regime that is anarchic, manifold and pleasant (hēdeia), because it distributes the same equality for everyone. This generates an excess of freedom that provokes each one to do what he wishes (ti bouletai), which Plato considers one of the main evils of democracy, and Aristotle in Politics explains it from the fact that is pleasant (hēdion) for the multitude to live in disorder and not in moderation; but if the latter prevails, so pleasure and desire would be restricted, or even canceled. Thus, democratic politics is characterized by the pleasure it produces, while enabling the possibility to materialize in and by the desire of each one. From different perspectives, this is what has been studied as an erotics of politics (e.g. Victoria Wohl, Love among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens; Andrew Scholtz, Concordia Discors: Eros and Dialogue in Classical Athenian Literature), one of whose obvious dimensions is the loving relationship, a paradigmatic symbol of the intersection between pleasure and desire, unless these are controlled or suppressed. These are the alternatives that Thucydides enables in the Funeral Oration attributed to Pericles by him, whose proposal the Athenians to be lovers (erastas) of the polis refers the question to an abstract entity without there being any pleasure in that loving resource. In Knights, Aristophanes reinstates the pleasure-desire principle and inscribes it in the exchanges between the Athenians themselves based on the figure of the erastēs tou dēmou, playing with the active and passive roles in pederastic relationships and turning into prostitution the metaphorical loving relationship between the demagogue and the people. Plato is mounted on this understanding in Gorgias and in the first Alcibiades, where the term dēmerastēs is coined. The intent is to demonstrate that all these expressions seek to dis-invest the people of their power because of their lack of qualification, their mess, their disorder, incapacitated as they are to practice true love, in short, by the anarchy that democracy depicts.p>