The problem of love and distance in Anne Carson

Abstract

This work aims to evaluate the rearticulation of the problem of love in the work of the classicist and poet Anne Carson. In her book Eros, the bittersweet, Carson carries out a reconstruction of the problem of love in the Hellenic tradition. The operation, however, is not restricted to a mere historical reconstruction, since the author’s conceptual elaborations end up placing the problem of love as a type of situation that has its strength precisely in the transcendence of particular conditions. We will analyze, therefore, how Carson conceives the contours of the dynamics of love as a relationship between lover, loved one and the distance between them on the basis of the works of Safo of Lesbos. Then we will discuss in the article how, from this conception of the love relationship, the author elaborates, through a close reading of Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, the unfoldings of the problem of love in the question of composition of subjects (that is, redefining ‘what is a subject’ from the problem of love) and in the experiences of time and space. In the end, we will believe we have shown how Carson’s work gives us a renewed vision of the problem of love.