Abstract

To present an spectrum is, in itself, a patent difficulty: to see in the invisible the visible that isn’t shown in the immediate, to resort to the nothingness in order to, with it, obtain something, to become one more of the mediations that constitute the character, implies to make of oneself an observer. This spectrum, the one that I’m referring to in Soren Kierkegaard’s words, is no other but the one approached in multiple occasions along the history of philosophy: the phenomenon Socrates.This character, as I will show throughout the text, is constantly enunciated as an attractive figure, in spite its notorious physical defects; the seduction hidden behind the veils, the one which Plato would name Socratic dialectic or what Xenofonte replaced with Sophistic and that Kierkegaard finally will track down as irony, will be, along the writing, the guide that will allow the glimpse of the irony that, in each game and in each smile, parts from itself to return again to her in a seductive game. I will focus my attention on showing, parting from the Socratic dialogues, the characteristic features of the ironic seduction which Socrates undertakes; in order to, parting from each of these features, be able to understand the negative potential that is expressed in every ironic move.