Hyperion's symposium: an erotics of reception

Abstract

Hölderlin’s Hyperion is both a reception of Plato’s Symposium and a reflection on the process of reception. Fundamental to Hölderlin’s reading is Socrates’s description of Eros: the god exists in a state of constant oscillation between lack and fulfilment. This dialectical nature makes erotic desire unstable and forces it to turn away from the pursuit of transient possession to the production of lasting beauty. Hyperion shows the erotic dialectic in relation both to physical desire and to desire for the ideal of ancient Athens. The title character turns from his initial romance with Diotima to the civic goal of reviving the culture of ancient Greece in the modern world. Themes and verbal echoes of the Symposium structure the first book of Hyperion and suggest that desire for the presence of the past is conditioned by the Symposium’s dialectic of poverty and resource. Recognizing this structure leads to an understanding of the process of classical reception as essentially dialectical, characterized both by absence and presence; this calls for an increased attention to the ‘erotics of reception’. Beauty is momentary in the mind – The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. (Wallace Stevens, Peter Quince at the Clavier )

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