Abstract
The dialogue between Plato and Aristotle is important for knowing how to read. It is against this backdrop that we need to understand, for example, sensitivity reading and the debates it provokes, a type of reading that corresponds less to a new phenomenon than to a return to Platonism appropriated by Christianity. In the mid-twentieth century, Simone Weil described the morally dangerous nature of literary works, echoing Socrates' description of the harmful effects of poetry. According to this reading, literarymimesis not only excuses evil , it also trivializes it.
Unlike Plato, Aristotle focused on understanding the works themselves, decoupling poetic and poetico-moral ends. A fruitful move, which placed the notion of pleasure at the heart of the literary problem, opening the way to a different kind of literary and artistic history, and a different kind of reading.
