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The destiny suffered by Renaissance and Golden Age erotic works is an excellent example that shows the ways in which written thought has managed to survive the attempts directed at its destruction. The different forms of evasion in order to hide the delicate erotic contents can be compared to a form of exile, from where erotic literature has only recently come back. But the return from oblivion was a slow and not linear one. The attitude of society and investigation has been variable and has played a considerable role in the recovery of writings that had been sent away to exile ages ago by censorship.

If the dialogue is a key genre of philosophical discourse since Plato, it was also, since its very beginning, doubled and undermined by its contrary - the erotic dialogue. Plato's Symposion can thus be read on the one hand as a trial to conceptualize Eros, and on the other hand as the ontological fact that Eros withstands logos; Xenophon's Symposion stresses even more the ambiguity of this unstable relationship between logos and Eros, especially in its theatrical conclusion. As a matter of fact, there is a mutual dependence between the dialogic tradition of philosophical dialogues about eros and the tendency of erotical dialogues to decontruct subversivly the philosophical discourse. Although Plato's and Xenopho's Symposia can be considered as prototypes, there is a long lasting tradition of dialogues about erotic topics, inextricably intertwined from antiquity to the end of the 18th Century. This paper suggests outlooks from an historical and methodological angle for the treatment of this "erotological" tradition from Plato to Sade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]