Michael Doliner at Swans Commentary, commentarying on Jean Genet after musing on torture, writes:
Genet experiences love of the classic type, not love that ends in little houses, picket fences and happily ever after, but love that is a calamity. It is love as the Greeks knew it, where the lover becomes the slave of the beloved. Eros, as Socrates, recounting Diotima's teachings, describes him, is the child of Need and Resource. He lacks all beauty, for that is what he needs. When Eros's arrow strikes, Genet is smitten by beauty, and at the same time stricken by his own poverty. It is the beautiful, which Genet convinces us is found only in the gutter, that masters him. After Socrates' speech in the Symposium we get to witness it first hand as Alcibiades, acknowledged by all as the most beautiful man in Athens, barges in and recounts his utterly abject unrequited love of Socrates, a squat, snub-nosed unprepossessing satyr who is beautiful inside. Genet's love for Stilitano, who is a cripple, has something of this.
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