There is a question of philology. “Where are you going to?” Socrates asks his lover Phaedrus. “I am going for a walk outside the walls”, he answers. While walking, Phaedrus tells Socrates, a “philological man”, about the conversation about love, the logos erotikos, a language of love and love for language that he had with Lysias. “Plato’s ‘philologist’ is a friend and lover of language as that which is the language of love and self-loving language. [...] Language loves. Whoever loves it like the philologist, loves the love in it”, Werner Hamacher suggests in a reading of the scene. is philological text attempts to trace the reins set on this love throughout a certain fragment of philosophy, to tease out the gay science (or as Nietzsche also puts it, “queer reason”) that allows it to proceed. […
