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(All parts in English)

Today, we are to begin our examination of the Symposium. At least, that is what I promised you last time. What I said to you last time seems to have reached you with various outcomes. The tasters taste. They ask themselves: will the year be a good one? I would simply like us not to linger too much on what might seem approximate in some of the strokes with which I try to illuminate our path.

Last time, I tried to show you the supports of the stage on which what we have to say about transference will take place. It is quite certain that the reference to the body, and namely to what can affect it from the order of beauty, was not simply an opportunity to make witty remarks around the reference to transference.

I am occasionally objected that, in the cinema—which I took as an example of the apprehension concerning the aspect of the psychoanalyst—it sometimes happens that the psychoanalyst is a handsome man, and not only in the exceptional case I mentioned. One should see that it is precisely when, in cinema, analysis is taken as a pretext for comedy. In short, you will see that the main references to which I alluded last time find their justification in the direction we will take today.

Reporting what the Symposium is about is not easy, given the style and the limits imposed upon us by our position, our particular object which—let us not forget—is particularly that of the analytic experience. To undertake a proper commentary on this extraordinary text might force us to take quite a long detour that would then leave us without enough time for other parts of the field, given that we are choosing the Symposium insofar as it seemed to us to be a particularly illuminating introduction to our study.

Thus, we will have to proceed in a form that is obviously not that of a—let’s say, academic—commentary on the Symposium. On the other hand, of course, I am forced to suppose that at least some of you are not really initiated into the Platonic dialectic. I am not telling you that I consider myself absolutely equipped in this regard. Nevertheless, I have enough experience, enough ideas to believe I can allow myself to isolate, to concentrate the spotlight on the Symposium while respecting the whole background.

I also ask those who are in a position to do so, on occasion, to check me, to make me notice what could be, not arbitrary—for this illumination is necessarily arbitrary—but, within its arbitrariness, what might be forced and off-center. On the other hand, I do not dislike—and I even think it is necessary—to bring out something raw, something new, in approaching a text like the Symposium. That is why you will excuse me for presenting it to you at first in a somewhat paradoxical form, or one that may seem so to you.

It seems to me that someone reading the Symposium for the first time, if they are not absolutely blinded by the fact that it is a text of a respectable tradition, cannot fail to experience this feeling that one must call something like: “to be blown away” [note: play on words, as in being astonished]. I would go further: if they have a bit of historical imagination, it seems to me they must wonder how such a thing could have been preserved for us through what I would readily call generations of hacks, of monks, of people who do not seem to have been destined to transmit something to us, something that cannot fail to strike us—at least by one of its parts: by its ending—that it rather belongs, why not say it, to what is nowadays called “special literature,” a literature that can be the object of, that can fall under, police searches.

In truth, if you simply know how to read… it seems to me it can be said all the more readily since I believe, that for once, quite a few of you, following my announcement last time, acquired this work and therefore must have put your nose in it… you cannot fail to be struck by what happens at least in the second part of that speech between ALCIBIADES and SOCRATES.

Beyond the limits of what the banquet itself is, insofar as we will see in a moment that it is a ceremony with rules, a sort of rite, an intimate contest among elite people, a social game, this social game, this Symposion [note: Greek word for symposium], we see that it is not a pretext for PLATO’s dialogue, it refers to mores, to customs, regulated differently depending on the localities of Greece, the level of culture, we might say, and it is not something exceptional that the rule imposed there [194d]: that each brings his share in the form of a small contribution, a regulated speech on a subject. Nevertheless, there is something that is not foreseen. There is, one might say, a disorder.

The rules were even set at the beginning of the Symposium that there would not be too much drinking. No doubt the pretext is that most of the people present already have quite a headache from having drunk a little too much the previous evening. One also becomes aware of the importance of the serious character of the elite group that the fellow drinkers form for that evening.

This does not prevent that at a certain point—which is a point where everything is far from over—one of the guests, who is ARISTOPHANES, has something to point out, in the order of a correction to the agenda, or a request for explanation. At that moment, a group of people enters—they are completely drunk—namely ALCIBIADES and his companions.

And ALCIBIADES—rather “up in the air” [note: wordplay, also meaning excited or tipsy]—usurps the presidency and begins to make remarks that are exactly those whose scandalous character I wish to make you appreciate. Obviously, this supposes that we have a certain idea of who ALCIBIADES is, of what SOCRATES is, and this leads us far. All the same, I would like you to realize what ALCIBIADES is.

For common use, read in the Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans what PLUTARCH writes about him, so that you may realize the scale of the character. I know very well, once again, that you will have to make an effort. This life is described to us by PLUTARCH in what I would call the Alexandrian atmosphere, that is, a strange moment in history when all the characters seem to pass into a kind of shadow. I am speaking of the moral accent of what comes to us from this period, which participates in a kind of coming forth from the shadows, a kind of nekyia [note: from the Odyssey, descent to the underworld].

PLUTARCH’s construction of men, with what they included as models, as paradigms for a whole moralist tradition that followed, have that something which makes us think of the being of zombies: it is difficult to make real blood flow in them again.

But try to imagine, from this singular career that PLUTARCH traces for us, what this man could have been, this man coming there, before SOCRATES… SOCRATES who elsewhere declares that he was prôtos erastès [note: Greek for “first lover”], the first who loved him, ALCIBIADES… this ALCIBIADES who, on the other hand, is a kind of pre-ALEXANDER, a character whose political adventures are all unmistakably marked by the sign of challenge, of extraordinary exploits, of the inability to situate himself or to stop anywhere, and everywhere he goes, overturning the situation and transferring victory from one camp to the other everywhere he goes, but everywhere pursued, exiled, and—it must be said—because of his misdeeds.

It seems that if Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, it is insofar as it felt the need to recall ALCIBIADES in the midst of hostilities to have him answer for an obscure story, the so-called “mutilation of the Herms,” which seems to us as inexplicable as it is absurd with the distance of time, but which certainly at its core had a character of profanation, strictly speaking of insult to the gods.

Nor can we entirely absolve the memory of ALCIBIADES and his companions. I mean that it is probably not without reason that the people of Athens called him to account. In this kind of practice, evocative by analogy of I don’t know what black mass, we cannot fail to see against what background of insurrection, of subversion with regard to the laws of the city, a character like ALCIBIADES emerges.

A background of rupture, of contempt for forms and traditions, for laws, no doubt for religion itself. That is indeed what a character drags behind him as disturbing. He nonetheless drags a very singular seduction everywhere he goes. And after this request of the Athenian people, he passes no less to the enemy, to Sparta, to that Sparta, moreover, of which he is not for nothing that it is the enemy of Athens, since beforehand, he did everything to thwart, in short, the peace negotiations.

So he goes to Sparta and immediately finds nothing better, more worthy of his memory, than to make a child with the queen, in full view of all. It so happens that it is well known that King AGIS has not slept with his wife for ten months for reasons I will spare you. She has a child, and indeed ALCIBIADES will say: “Besides, it is not for pleasure that I did it, it is because it seemed worthy of me to ensure a throne for my lineage, to honor in this way the throne of Sparta with someone of my race.” These kinds of things, one understands, can captivate for a time, they are not easily forgiven. And of course, you know that ALCIBIADES, after offering this present and some ingenious ideas for the conduct of hostilities, goes to take up his quarters elsewhere.

He does not fail to do so in the third camp, in the camp of the Persians, in that which represents the power of the king of Persia in Asia Minor, namely TISSAPHERNES, who—PLUTARCH tells us—does not much like the Greeks. He positively detests them, but he is seduced by ALCIBIADES. It is from there that ALCIBIADES will strive to recover the fortune of Athens.

He does this under conditions whose history, of course, is also quite surprising since it really seems to be in the midst of a kind of network of double agents, of permanent betrayal: everything he gives as warnings to the Athenians is immediately, through a circuit, reported to Sparta and to the Persians themselves, who then let the person in the Athenian fleet who passed on the information know, so that at the same time he himself comes to know, is informed, that it is perfectly well known in high places that he has betrayed. These characters each manage as best they can.

It is certain that in the midst of all this, ALCIBIADES restores the fortune of Athens. Following this, without our being absolutely certain of the details, according to the way ancient historians report it, it should not be surprising if ALCIBIADES returns to Athens with what we could call the marks of a triumph beyond all conventions, which—despite the joy of the Athenian people—is going to be the beginning of a reversal in public opinion. We find ourselves faced with someone who cannot fail at every moment to provoke what may be called public opinion.

His death is a very strange thing as well. There are many obscurities as to who was responsible for it. What is certain is that it seems, after a series of reversals of fortune, of changes, each more astonishing than the last—but it seems that in any case, whatever difficulties he got himself into, he could never be brought down—a kind of immense contest of hatreds would end up finishing ALCIBIADES by means that, according to legend, myth, are those used with a scorpion: one surrounds it with a circle of fire from which it escapes and then from afar with javelins and arrows it must be struck down.

Such is the singular career of ALCIBIADES. If I have made you see the level of a very active, exceptional power and penetration of spirit, I would say that the most striking feature is still the reflection added by what is said of the beauty not only precocious in the child ALCIBIADES—which we know is entirely linked to the history of the manner of love then prevailing in Greece, that is, the love of boys—but this beauty long maintained which means that, even at an advanced age, it makes him someone who seduces as much by his form as by his exceptional intelligence. Such is the character.

And we see him in a contest that brings together, all in all, learned, serious men—although in this context of Greek love on which we will place emphasis shortly, which already brings a background of permanent eroticism on which these speeches about love stand out—we thus see him come to tell everyone something that we can roughly sum up as follows: namely, the vain efforts he made in his youth—at the time when SOCRATES loved him—to get SOCRATES to have sex with him.

This is developed at length, with details, and with, all in all, a very great crudeness of terms. There is no doubt that he led SOCRATES to lose his composure, to display his trouble, to yield to bodily and direct invitations, to a physical approach. And this is what is publicly reported, by a drunk man no doubt, but a drunk man whose remarks PLATO does not disdain to report to us in their entirety. I do not know if I am making myself clear: imagine a book appearing—not in our own days, for this appears about fifty years after the scene reported, PLATO publishes it at that distance—suppose that at a certain time—to be cautious—a character who would be, say, Mr. KENNEDY—in a book written for the elite—KENNEDY who at the same time would have been James DEAN, comes to tell how he did everything in his university days to be made love to by—let us say some kind of professor—I leave it to you to choose a character.

He should not be taken absolutely from among the teaching staff, since SOCRATES was not quite a professor. Still, he was a kind of special one. Imagine it is someone like Mr. MASSIGNON who is also Henry MILLER. That would make a certain impression. That would bring the publisher Jean-Jacques PAUVERT some trouble for publishing this work.

Let us recall this at the moment when we note that this astonishing work has been transmitted to us through the centuries by the hands of those whom we must, for various reasons, call Brothers of varying degrees of ignorance, which is why we have, without a doubt, the complete text. Well, that is what I thought, not without a certain admiration, leafing through this admirable edition given to us by Henri ESTIENNE with a Latin translation. And this edition is something quite definitive, so much so that even now, in all the variously scholarly, critical editions, it is already—this one—perfectly critical for us to be given its pagination.

For those who are new to this, know that the little [272a] and so on, by which you see the pages to which you should refer noted, it is only the pagination of Henri ESTIENNE (1578). Henri ESTIENNE was certainly not an ignoramus, but it is hard to believe that someone capable—he did not only do this—of devoting himself to establishing such monumental editions could have had such an openness to life as to fully grasp the content of what is in this text, I mean inasmuch as it is eminently a text about love.

At the same period—that of Henri ESTIENNE—other people were interested in love, and I may as well tell you everything: when I spoke to you at length last year about sublimation around the love of women, the hand I held invisibly was not that of PLATO, nor of someone scholarly, but that of Marguerite DE NAVARRE.

I alluded to it without insisting. Know that for this kind of banquet, this Συμπόσιον [symposion] that is also her Heptaméron, she carefully excluded those sorts of black-nailed characters who were, at the time—while renewing the content—emerging from libraries. She wants only knights, lords, figures who, when they speak of love, speak of something they have had the time to experience. And also, in all the commentaries that have been given on the Symposium, it is indeed this dimension, which so often seems lacking, that we thirst for. No matter. Among those people who never doubt that their understanding—as JASPERS says—reaches the limits of the concrete sensible, understandable, the story of ALCIBIADES and SOCRATES has always been hard to swallow. I offer only this as witness:

[1] It is that Louis LE ROY [1559], Ludovicus REJUS, who is the first translator into French of these texts that had just emerged from the East for Western culture, simply stopped there: at the entrance of ALCIBIADES. He did not translate after that. It seemed to him that sufficiently fine speeches had been made before ALCIBIADES entered. Which is, indeed, the case. ALCIBIADES seemed to him something added on, apocryphal, and he is not the only one to behave thus. I will spare you the details.

[2] But RACINE one day received from a lady, who had undertaken a translation of the Symposium, a manuscript to review. RACINE, who was a sensitive man, considered this untranslatable, and not only the story of ALCIBIADES, but the whole Symposium. We have his notes that prove he examined closely the manuscript sent to him—but as for redoing it, for it was a question of nothing less than redoing it—it would have taken someone like RACINE to translate the Greek, he refused. It was not for him…

[3] Third reference. I was lucky to pick up long ago, in a corner, the handwritten notes of a lecture by BROCHARD on PLATO. It is quite remarkable, these notes are remarkably well taken, the handwriting is exquisite. Regarding the theory of love, BROCHARD naturally refers to everything appropriate: the Lysis, the Phaedrus, the Symposium. It is above all the Symposium. There is a very pretty play of substitution when one comes to the matter of ALCIBIADES: he shifts, he steers things toward the Phaedrus, which at that point takes over. The story of ALCIBIADES, he does not deal with. This reserve, after all, deserves our respect. I mean that at least there is a sense here that something is questionable. And we prefer that to seeing it resolved by singular hypotheses that are not rare in appearing.

The most striking of them, I leave you to guess, M. Léon ROBIN even accepts—which is astonishing—is that PLATO wanted here to do justice to his master. Scholars have discovered that a man named POLYCRATES published a pamphlet a few years after the death of SOCRATES. You know that he succumbed to various accusations, three people carrying them, one named ANYTUS. A certain POLYCRATES apparently put in the mouth of ANYTUS an indictment whose main body was that SOCRATES was responsible precisely for what I spoke to you about earlier, namely what could be called the scandal, the wake of corruption: that he had dragged ALCIBIADES after him all his life, with the train of troubles if not catastrophes that he brought with him.

It must be admitted that the idea that PLATO exonerated SOCRATES, his morals, if not his influence, by having him act out a public confession of this kind, is really the bear’s favor [note: French idiom “le pavé de l’ours”—a misguided or clumsy attempt at help]. One really must wonder what people who put forth such hypotheses are dreaming about. That SOCRATES resisted the advances of ALCIBIADES, that this alone could justify this part of the Symposium as something meant to enhance the meaning of his mission in the eyes of public opinion, is something that, for my part, cannot fail to leave me speechless. One must recognize that:
– either we are faced with a sequel of reasons about which PLATO scarcely informs us,
– or this piece indeed has its function.
I mean this irruption of the character, who indeed can be joined to the character—from a more distant horizon, no doubt—of SOCRATES, but also who is most indissolubly linked to him, so that this character arriving in flesh and blood has something with the closest relation to what is at issue: the question of love.

So to see what it is, and it is precisely because what it is, is exactly the point around which everything at issue in the Symposium turns, the point around which will be most deeply illuminated not so much the question of the nature of love as the question that interests us here, namely its relationship with transference. That is why I focus the question on this articulation between the text that is reported to us of the speeches delivered in the Συμπόσιον [symposion] and the irruption of ALCIBIADES.

Here, I must first sketch for you something concerning the sense of these speeches, first the text transmitted to us, the narrative. What is this text, after all? What is PLATO telling us? One may well ask. Is it a fiction, a fabrication, as clearly many of his dialogues are, which are compositions obeying certain laws, and God knows there would be much to say about this, why this genre, why this law of dialogue? We must leave certain things aside. I only point out that there is a whole realm of things to know about this. But it still has another character, a character which moreover is not altogether foreign to the way in which certain of these dialogues are shown to us.

To make myself understood, I will say this: if we can take the Symposium as we are about to take it, let us say as a kind of report of psychoanalytic sessions, for in fact it is something like that, since as the contributions of the different participants in this Συμπόσιον [symposion] progress, one after the other, something happens which is the successive illumination of each of these flashes by the one that follows, and then at the end something that is really reported to us as this sort of raw, even troubling fact, the irruption of life into it: the presence of ALCIBIADES.

And it is up to us to understand what meaning there is precisely in this speech of ALCIBIADES. So then, if this is what it is about, according to PLATO we have a kind of recording. Since there was no tape recorder, let us say it is a “recording on the brain.” “Recording on the brain” is an exceedingly ancient practice, which, I would even say, supported the mode of listening for many centuries among people participating in serious matters, as long as writing had not taken on this function of dominant factor in culture which it has nowadays.

Since things can be written down, the things we are to retain are, as I have called them, “the kilos of language,” that is, piles of books and stacks of papers. But when paper was rarer, and books much harder to produce and circulate, it was an exceedingly important thing to have a good memory, and, if I may say so, to live everything that was heard in the register of the memory that keeps it. And it is not simply at the beginning of the Symposium, but in all the traditions we know that we can see the evidence that oral transmission of sciences and wisdoms is absolutely essential. It is because of this, moreover, that we still know something of it, it is to the extent that writing does not exist that oral tradition serves as support.

And it is precisely to this that PLATO referred in the way in which he presents to us, in which the text of the Symposium comes to us. He has it recounted by someone called APOLLODORUS. We know the existence of this character. He exists historically and he is supposed—this APOLLODORUS whom PLATO makes speak, for APOLLODORUS does speak—to come in a time dated about a little more than thirty years before the publication of the Symposium if we take the date of about -370 for the publication of the Symposium. It is before the death of SOCRATES [-399] that PLATO tells us is the moment when this account is gathered by APOLLODORUS, received from ARISTODEMUS, of what happened fifteen years before the moment he is supposed to receive it, since we have reasons to know that it was in 416 that this alleged Συμπόσιον to which he [Aristodemus] attended would have taken place.

It is therefore sixteen years later that a character draws from his memory the literal text of what would have been said. So, the least one can say is that PLATO uses all the necessary procedures to make us believe, at least, in what was commonly practiced and what was always practiced in those phases of culture, namely what I have called: “recording on the brain.” He emphasizes [178a] that the same character, ARISTODEMUS, “had not kept a complete memory,” that there are damaged parts of the tape, that in some places there may be gaps. All this obviously does not settle absolutely the question of historical truth but nevertheless has a great verisimilitude. If it is a lie, it is a beautiful lie. [“si non e vero, e bello”]

As on the other hand it is obviously a work of love, and perhaps we may come to glimpse the notion that after all: “only liars can answer love worthily,” in this very case, the Symposium would certainly respond to something which is, as this on the other hand is passed on to us unambiguously, the elective reference of SOCRATES’ action with respect to love. That is precisely why the Symposium is such an important testimony. We know that SOCRATES himself testifies, asserts, that he really knows something about nothing else. Certainly the Theages, where he says so, is not a dialogue of PLATO but it is a dialogue nonetheless, by someone who wrote about what was known of SOCRATES and what remained of SOCRATES, and SOCRATES in the Theages is attested to have expressly said that he knows in fact nothing except that little thing σμικροῦ τινος [smikrou tinos] of knowledge μαθήματος [mathematos] which is that of τῶν ἐροτικῶν [tôn erôtikôn], the things of love. He repeats it in his own terms, in terms that are exactly the same at a certain point in the Symposium.

So the subject of the Symposium is this, the subject was proposed, brought forward by the character of PHAEDRUS, nothing more nor less. PHAEDRUS is also the one who gave his name to another dialogue, the one to which I referred last year in relation to beauty and which is also about love—the two are connected in Platonic thought—PHAEDRUS is called πατὴρ τοῦ λόγου [patèr tou logou]: the father of the subject, concerning what will be dealt with in the Symposium, the subject is this: in short, “what use is it to be wise in love?” And we know that SOCRATES claims to be wise in nothing else. It is all the more striking to make this remark, which you can appreciate at its true value when you refer to the text: you will notice that SOCRATES says almost nothing in his own name. This “almost nothing” I will tell you if we have time today, it is important. I believe we are arriving at just the moment when I will be able to tell you: “almost nothing,” no doubt it is essential. And it is around this “almost nothing” that the scene really turns, namely that we really begin to talk about the subject as was to be expected.

Let us say right away that in the kind of adjustment, of setting the level at which to take things, you will see that in the end SOCRATES does not set it so high compared to what the others say; rather, it consists in framing things, in adjusting the lights so that one sees precisely this height, which is average. If SOCRATES tells us something, it is certainly that love is not a divine thing. He does not set it very high, but that is what he loves, in fact, that is all he loves. That said, the moment he speaks is certainly worth emphasizing, it is precisely after AGATHON.

I am, in fact, forced to bring them in one after another, as my speech progresses, instead of introducing them all at once from the start, namely: PHAEDRUS, PAUSANIAS, ARISTODEMUS who came there, I must say, as a “toothpick” [note: French idiom, here meaning as an afterthought or by chance], that is, he met AGATHON, SOCRATES, and SOCRATES brought him. There is also ERYXIMACHUS who, for most of you, is a colleague, a doctor. There is AGATHON who is the host.

SOCRATES, who brought ARISTODEMUS, arrives very late because on the way he had what we might call “a crisis.” The crises of SOCRATES consist in stopping dead, in standing on one foot in a corner. He stops in the neighboring house where he has nothing to do, he stands planted in the vestibule between the umbrella stand and the coat rack and there is no way to wake him up.

It is necessary to create a little atmosphere around these things. These are not at all the kind of stories—as you will see—as boring as those you heard about in school. One day I would like to give you a talk where I would take my examples precisely from the Phaedrus, or again from some play by ARISTOPHANES, about something absolutely essential, without which there is really no way to understand how, in all that Antiquity offers us, what I would call the illuminated circle of Greece is situated.

We, we live all the time in the midst of light, night is, after all, carried on a stream of neon. But imagine all the same that until a time not so far in the past, not even needing to go back to PLATO’s time, night was really night. When they come knocking, at the beginning of the Phaedrus, to wake SOCRATES, because one must get up a little before dawn—I hope it is in the Phaedrus but it does not matter, it is at the beginning of a PLATO dialogue—it is a whole affair. He gets up and he is really in the dark, that is, he knocks things over if he takes three steps.

At the beginning of a play by ARISTOPHANES, to which I was also alluding, when it is dark, it is really dark, it is there that you do not recognize the person who touches your hand. To take what still happens in the time of Marguerite de NAVARRE, the stories of the Heptameron are full of stories of this sort.

Their possibility is based on the fact that at that time, when one slips into a lady’s bed at night, it is considered one of the most possible things there is, provided one keeps quiet, gets mistaken for her husband or her lover. And it seems, indeed, that this is commonly practiced. This changes completely the dimension of relationships between human beings. And obviously what I would call in quite another sense “the spread of lights” changes many things. The fact that night is not for us a substantial reality, cannot be ladled out, does not make a thickness of black, deprives us of certain things, many things.

All this to return to our subject, which is the one to which we must now come, namely what this “illuminated circle” in which we are means, and what is at stake when one talks about love in Greece. When one talks about it, well—as Monsieur de LA PALICE would say—it is about Greek love. Greek love—you must get used to this idea—is “the love of beautiful boys,” and then dash, nothing more. It is very clear that when they speak of love, they are not speaking of anything else. All the efforts we make to put this in its place are doomed to failure in advance. I mean that in trying to see exactly what it is, we are obliged to push the furniture around in a certain way, to reestablish certain perspectives, to put ourselves in a somewhat oblique position, to say: “surely there was not just that, obviously, of course…”

Nevertheless, as far as love was concerned, that was all there was. But then, on the other hand, if one says that, you will tell me:

– “the love of boys is something universally accepted, it has long been regretted by some of our contemporaries: if only they could have been born earlier!…”

And no! Even when one says that, it remains the case
– that in a whole part of Greece it was very badly regarded,
– that in quite another part of Greece—it is PAUSANIAS who emphasizes this in the Symposium—it was very well regarded.

And since it was the “totalitarian” part of Greece, the Boeotians, the Spartans who were among the “totalitarians”—everything not forbidden is obligatory—not only was it highly approved, it was required service. There was no question of evading it. And PAUSANIAS says:

– “there are people who are much better. Among us Athenians, it is well regarded but still forbidden, and naturally that increases its value.”

That is more or less what PAUSANIAS tells us. All this, of course, ultimately does not teach us much, except that it was more plausible on only one condition: that we have some idea of what it corresponds to. To get an idea of it, one must refer to what I said last year about courtly love. Of course, it is not the same thing, but it occupies a similar function in society. I mean that it is obviously of the order and the function of sublimation, in the sense in which I tried last year to offer a slight correction in your minds about what the function of sublimation really is, let us say there is nothing here that we could not classify as a kind of regression on a collective scale.

I mean that this something which analytic doctrine tells us is the support of the social bond as such, of fraternity among men, homosexuality ties it to this neutralization of the bond. That is not what this is about. It is not a dissolution of this social bond, a return to the innate form; it is clearly something else. It is a fact of culture and it is also clear that it is in the circles of the masters of Greece—among people of a certain class, at the level where culture reigns and is developed—that this love is practiced. It is obviously the great center for the development of interhuman relations.

Let me remind you in another form of something I had already pointed out at the end of a previous seminar, the schema of the relation of perversion with culture in so far as it is distinguished from society.

If society brings about by its effect of censorship a form of disintegration called neurosis, it is in an opposite sense of elaboration, construction, “sublimation”—let us use the word—that perversion can be conceived when it is a product of culture. And if you wish, the circle is closed: perversion brings elements that work upon society, neurosis favors the creation of new elements of culture. This does not prevent—however much sublimation it may be—that Greek love remains a perversion. No culturalist point of view has any standing here. There is no reason to say that because it was an accepted, approved, even celebrated perversion, it was not a perversion. Homosexuality was nonetheless what it was: a perversion.

To want to tell us—in order to smooth things over—that if we treat homosexuality today, it is because in our time homosexuality is something quite different, it is no longer fashionable, and that in the time of the Greeks, on the contrary, it played its cultural function and as such deserves all our respect, is truly to evade what is properly the problem. The only thing that differentiates contemporary homosexuality, with which we deal, from Greek perversion—my God—I believe one can hardly find it in anything but the quality of the objects. Here, high school students are acne-ridden and stultified by the education they receive.

Among the Greeks these conditions are more favorable for them to be the object of homage, without needing to seek objects in lateral corners, the gutter, that is the whole difference. But the structure itself is in no way to be distinguished. Of course this causes scandal, given the eminent dignity with which we have clothed the Greek message.

And so there are good words used for this purpose, namely that we are told:

– “After all, do not think for all that that women did not receive the honors due to them.”

Thus SOCRATES, do not forget, precisely in the Symposium, where as I have told you, he says very little in his own name, but it is enormous how much he speaks, only he makes a woman speak in his place: DIOTIMA.

– “Do you not see here the evidence that the supreme honor goes, even in the mouth of SOCRATES, to woman?”

At least that is what good souls never fail to make sure to point out at this turn. And to add this:

“You know, from time to time he would go to visit LAÏS, ASPASIA—all the gossip one can collect from the historians!—THEODOTA, who was ALCIBIADES’s mistress.” And about XANTHIPPE—the famous one I mentioned to you the other day—she was there the day of his death you know, and even screamed so loudly it could deafen the world.

There is only one misfortune—this is attested to us in the Phaedo in any case—SOCRATES insists that she be laid down quickly, that she be taken out as soon as possible so that they may speak in peace, for there are only a few hours left. Apart from this, the function of the dignity of women would be preserved. I do not doubt the importance of women in ancient Greek society, indeed I would even say more, it is a very serious matter whose significance you will see later on. They had what I would call their true place. Not only did they have their true place, but this means they had a quite eminent weight in love relations, as we have all kinds of evidence.

It turns out—as long as one knows how to read: one should not read ancient authors with barred spectacles—it turns out that they had this role, which for us is veiled but still very eminently their own in love: simply, the active role, namely that the difference between the ancient woman and the modern woman is that she demanded her due, she attacked the man. That is what you will, I think, be able to see quite clearly in many cases. In any case, when you become awake to this point of view on the question, you will notice many things that would otherwise seem strange in ancient history.

In any case, ARISTOPHANES—who was a very good music-hall director—never hid from us how the women of his time behaved. There has never been anything more characteristic or more blunt concerning the initiatives, if I may say, of women. And it is precisely for this reason that learned love, if I may say so, sought refuge elsewhere. In any case, here we have one of the keys to the question and one that is not at all surprising to psychoanalysts.

All this may seem a very long detour to excuse that in our undertaking, which is to analyze a text whose object is to know what it is to be learned in love, we take something, obviously, we take what we know: that it belongs to the time of Greek love, this love, if I may say, of the school, I mean of schoolboys.

Well, it is for technical reasons of simplification, of example, of model that allows us to see an articulation otherwise always elided in what is too complicated in “love with women,” it is because of this that this “love of the school” may indeed serve us, may legitimately serve everyone—for our object—as a “school of love.” That does not mean, of course, that it should be repeated. I wish to avoid all misunderstandings, because soon they will say that I am here becoming a propagator of Platonic love.

There are many reasons why it can no longer serve as a school of love. If I were to tell you which, it would still be like making great sword thrusts at curtains [cf. Hamlet] whose contents behind them one cannot control, believe me: I generally avoid it. There is one reason why there is no reason to start again, why it is even impossible to start again, and one of the reasons which may perhaps surprise you if I put it forward to you is that for us, at the point where we are now, even if you have not yet noticed it, you will notice it if you think a little, love and its phenomenon, and its culture, and its dimension, for some time now have been disengaged from beauty. That may surprise you, but that is how it is. Check it from both sides: on the side of the beautiful works of art on the one hand, on the side of love as well, and you will see that it is true.

In any case, it is a condition that makes it difficult—and that is precisely why I make this whole detour to prepare you for what is at stake—for us to return to the function of beauty, to the tragic function of beauty, since it is this that I highlighted last year, the dimension of beauty, and it is this that gives its true meaning to what PLATO will tell us about love.

On the other hand, it is entirely clear that today love is no longer at all on the level of tragedy, nor on another level which I will speak of later, but on the level which in the Symposium, in the speech of AGATHON, is called the level of POLYMNIA.

It is at the level of lyricism, and in the realm of artistic creations, at the level of what is clearly the liveliest materialization of fiction as essential, namely what we call cinema. PLATO would have been delighted by this invention. There is no better illustration for the arts of what PLATO places at the threshold of his vision of the world than that something expressed in “the myth of the cave,” which we see illustrated every day by those dancing beams that come on the screen to manifest all our feelings as shadows. It is indeed at this dimension that, in the art of our time, the defense and illustration of love most eminently belongs.

That is precisely why one of the things I have told you—which will in fact be that around which we will center our progress—one of the things I have told you and which does not fail to awaken your reticence, because I said it very incidentally: love is a comic feeling, even that demands an effort for us to return to the right point of accommodation that gives it its scope. There are two things that I have noted in my past discourse concerning love and I will recall them.

The first is that love is a comic feeling, and you will see what in our investigation will illustrate this. We will, in this regard, close the loop that will allow us to bring back what is essential: the true nature of comedy. And it is so essential and indispensable that this is why there is in the Symposium, what for ages commentators have never succeeded in explaining, namely: the presence of ARISTOPHANES. He was, historically speaking, the sworn enemy of SOCRATES. Yet he is there.

The second thing I wanted to say—and you will see: we will encounter it at every moment, it will serve as our guide—is that: “love is about giving what one does not have.” You will also see this appear as one of the essential pivots of what we will encounter in our commentary.

In any case, to enter into this subject, into this analysis by which SOCRATES’ discourse about Greek love will be enlightening for us, let us say that if Greek love allows us to isolate in the relation of love the two partners in the neutral, I mean in that pure something which is naturally expressed in the masculine gender, it is first of all to allow us to articulate what happens in love at the level of that couple who are respectively the lover and the beloved: the ἐραστής [erastès: the lover] and the ἐρώμενος [erômenos: the beloved].

What I will tell you next time consists in showing you how, around these two functions: the lover [ἐραστής], and the beloved [ἐρώμενος], the process of what unfolds in the Symposium is such that we can rigorously attribute, with all the precision that analytic experience is capable of, what is at stake. In other words, we will see clearly articulated there, in a time when analytic experience as such is lacking, where the unconscious in its proper function in relation to the subject is certainly the least suspected dimension, and thus with the limitations this entails, you will see most clearly articulated this something that comes to meet the summit of our experience, what I have tried over all these years to unfold before you under the double heading:
– the first year, Object Relation,
– the following year, Desire and its Interpretation.

You will see appear clearly, and in the formulas that are precisely those to which we have arrived:
– the lover [ἐραστής] as the subject of desire, and taking into account what that means in all its weight for us, desire;
– the ἐρώμενος [erômenos], the beloved, as the one who in this couple is the only one who has something.

The question is whether “what he has”—for it is the beloved who has it—has a relation, I would even say: any relation, with what the other—the subject of desire—lacks. I will say this: the question of the relation between desire and that before which desire is fixed—as you know—has already led us around the notion “of desire as desire for something else.” We arrived there by the paths of the analysis of the effects of language on the subject.

It is strange that a dialectic of love, that of SOCRATES, which was made precisely, entirely by means of dialectic, by a testing of the imperative effects of interrogation as such, does not bring us back to the same crossroads. You will see that much more than bringing us back to the same crossroads, it will allow us to go beyond, that is, to grasp the moment of tipping, the moment of reversal, where from the conjunction of desire with its object as inadequate, there must arise this meaning called love.

It is impossible, without having grasped in this articulation—what it involves as conditions in the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real—to grasp what is at stake. Namely, in that effect so strange in its automatism that is called transference, to measure, to compare, what is—between this transference and love—the share, the dose, of what must be attributed to each and reciprocally, of illusion or truth.

In this, the path and the investigation into which I have introduced you today will prove to be of inaugural importance for us.