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« ἐπιθυμίαν μὲν διαπλασιασθεῖσαν ἕρωτα εἶναι, ἔρωτα δὲ διαπλασιασθέντα μανίαν γίγνεσθαι » [Desire, once doubled, is love, and love, once doubled, becomes madness.]

Today I am going to try to move forward in the analysis of the Symposium, which is the path I have chosen this year to introduce you to the problem of transference. Remember how far we got last time at the end of the first speech, that of Phaedrus.

I would not want, for each of these speeches as they follow one another—those of Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, who is the host of this Banquet, witnessed by Aristodemus, Aristodemus whose account is reported to us by Apollodorus—to make you go through them step by step. It is thus Apollodorus who speaks from beginning to end, repeating what Aristodemus said. After Agathon comes Socrates—Socrates, and you will see the singular path he takes to express what he, himself, knows as love. You also know that the last episode is the entrance of Alcibiades: this kind of astonishing public confession, bordering on indecency, presented to us at the end of the dialogue and which has remained an enigma for all commentators.

There is something that comes after as well, and we will get to it. I would like to avoid having you go step by step, speech by speech, through this path, at the risk that, in the end, you become lost or weary and lose sight of the goal, the meaning of the point toward which we are heading.

That is why, last time, I introduced my speech with these words about the object, about this being of the object that we can always say—sometimes more legitimately, sometimes less, but always in some respect—we have missed; I mean, that we have failed it.

This encounter, which we ought to seek while there is still time, this being of the other, I will return to it by specifying what is at stake in relation to the two reference points of what is called, in this context, ‘intersubjectivity’. I mean, the emphasis on this: that in the other we must recognize a subject like ourselves, and that it is in this ‘I’, in this direction, that the essential lies, the ‘advent to the being of the other’…

In another direction as well, that is to say, what I mean when I try to articulate the role, the function of desire in this apprehension of the other as it occurs in the couple erastès–erômenos, which has organized all meditation on love from Plato down to Christian meditation.

This ‘being of the other’ in desire—as I think I have already sufficiently indicated—is not a subject. The erômenos is, I would say, erômenon, and just as well ta paidika in the neuter plural: the ‘things of the beloved child’, as one might translate it. The other, properly speaking, insofar as it is targeted in desire—‘is targeted’, I said—as a beloved object. What does that mean?

It means that what we can say we have missed in ‘the one who is already too far away’ for us to make up for our failure is indeed his quality as an object. I mean, essentially, what sets this movement in motion—of which the access to the other, given by love, consists—is this desire for the beloved object, which is something that, if I wanted to use an image, I would compare to the hand reaching out: to grasp the fruit when it is ripe, to draw closer the rose that has opened, to stoke the log that suddenly catches fire. Listen carefully to what I am about to say. In this image, which will stop here, what I am sketching for you is what is called ‘a myth’, as you will soon see in the miraculous nature of the rest of the image.

When I told you last time that the gods from whom we begin—megas theos, ‘a great god’, which is Love, as Phaedrus first says [178a]—the gods are a manifestation of the Real. Any passage from this manifestation to a symbolic order distances us from this revelation of the Real.

Phaedrus tells us that Love, who is the first of the gods imagined by the goddess of the Parmenides—a point I cannot stop at here—and whom Jean Beaufret, in his book on Parmenides, identifies, I think more accurately than with any other function, with truth, truth in its radical structure.

And refer back to the way I spoke about this in The Freudian Thing: the first imagination, invention of truth, is love, and here as well it is presented to us as being “without father or mother” [178b]. There is no genealogy of Love. And yet already the reference is made to Hesiod in the most mythical forms. In the presentation of the gods, something is ordered that is a genealogy: a “system of kinship,” a theogony, a symbolism.

At this halfway point I spoke of, which goes from theogony to atheism, this halfway point that is the Christian god, notice it from the perspective of its internal organization, this “triune” god, this god “one and three”—what is it, if not the radical articulation of kinship as such in what is most irreducibly, mysteriously symbolic about it, the most hidden relationship, and, as Freud says, the least natural, the most purely symbolic: the relationship of the Father to the Son. And the third term remains there, present under the name of love.

That is where we started, from Love as god, that is to say, as a reality that reveals itself in the Real, that manifests itself in the Real, and as such we can speak of it only in myth. That is why I am also authorized to establish before you the term, the orientation of what is at stake when I try to direct you toward the formula metaphor-substitution of erastès for erômenos. It is this metaphor that generates this meaning of love.

I have the right, to introduce this, to materialize it before you, to complete its image, to really make it a myth. And this hand that reaches out, toward the fruit, toward the rose, toward the log that suddenly blazes, I have the right, first, to tell you that its gesture of reaching, drawing, stoking, is closely bound to the ripening of the fruit, the beauty of the flower, the blazing up of the log, but that, when in this movement of reaching, drawing, stoking, the hand has gone far enough toward the object, if from the fruit, the flower, the log, a hand emerges that reaches out to meet your own hand, and at that moment it is your hand that freezes in the closed fullness of the fruit, the open fullness of the flower, in the explosion of a hand that flares up, what happens there then is love!

Still, it is fitting not even to stop there and to say that it is love in return, I mean that it is yours when it is you who were first the erômenos, the beloved object, and suddenly you become the erastès, the one who desires. See what, with this myth, I mean to emphasize: every myth relates to the unexplainable of the Real, it is always unexplainable that anything at all should respond to desire. The structure in question is not this symmetry and return.

Nor is this symmetry truly a symmetry, in that when the hand reaches out, it is toward an object. The hand that appears from the other side is the miracle, but we are not here to organize miracles, we are here for quite the opposite: to know. And what needs to be emphasized is not what happens “from there to beyond,” but what happens “there,” that is to say, the substitution of erastès (lover) for erômenos or for erômenon.

In other words—I stress this—some have believed, I think, in some ambiguity in what I articulated last time: on the one hand, the substitution of erastès for erômenos, a metaphorical substitution, and in some way wanted to see in it some contradiction in the supreme example to which the gods give the crown [179d], before which the gods themselves marvel—agasthentes [note: in Greek, “marvelled”] is the term used—namely that Achilles, the beloved, dies, epapothanein [note: in Greek, “to die in turn”], we will see what that means, let us say, to remain vague: dies for Patroclus.

This is why he is superior to Alcestis, who, for her part, offered herself to death in the place of her husband whom she loves [179b]: …huper tou autès andros apothanein. The terms used by Phaedrus in this respect: huperapothanein opposed to epapothanein [180a], huper… apothanein, as Phaedrus says earlier in the text [179b], she dies in the place of her husband: epapothanein, that is something else.

Patroclus is dead. Alcestis exchanges her place with her husband who is required by death, she crosses that space from earlier which is between the one who is here and the other [the beyond]. She is already doing something which surely is made to elicit from the gods this helpless testimony before the extreme, which will allow her, in the eyes of mortals, to receive this unique prize of having come back “from beyond” the dead.

But there is even greater! This is what Phaedrus articulates. It is greater that Achilles has accepted his tragic fate, his fatal destiny: certain death which is promised to him—instead of returning to his country, to his father, to his fields—if he pursues the vengeance for Patroclus. Now Patroclus was not his beloved. He himself was the beloved.

Rightly or wrongly—it matters little to us—Phaedrus states that Achilles, in the couple, was the beloved, that he could only have that position and that it is by virtue of that position that his act, which is essentially to accept his fate as it is written—if he does not subtract anything from it, if he puts himself—not in the place—but in the wake of Patroclus, if he makes Patroclus’s fate the debt he, himself, must answer for, that he, himself, must face—this is why, in the eyes of the gods, the most necessary, the greatest admiration is imposed, that the level attained in the order of the manifestation of love is—Phaedrus tells us—higher, and as such, Achilles is more honored by the gods.

As it is they who have judged something in which their relationship, let us say in passing, is only a relationship of admiration, I mean of astonishment, I mean that they are overwhelmed by the spectacle of the value brought to them by humans in the manifestation of love, up to a certain point the gods, impassive, immortal, are not made to understand what happens at the level of mortals. They measure from the outside something that is like a distance, a miracle in what takes place in the manifestation of love.

There is therefore indeed, in what the text of Phaedrus means, in the epapothanein, an emphasis on the fact that Achilles, erômenos (beloved), transforms into erastès (lover). The text says and asserts this: it is as erastès that Alcestis sacrifices herself for her husband. This is a less radical, total, and striking manifestation of love than the change of role that happens at the level of Achilles when, from erômenos, he transforms into erastès.

It is therefore not a matter, in this erastès over erômenon, of something whose image—humorous, if I may say so—would be given by the lover over the beloved, the father over the mother, as Jacques Prévert says somewhere. And this is undoubtedly what inspired that kind of strange error of Mario Meunier that I mentioned to you, who says that Achilles kills himself on the tomb of Patroclus. It is not that Achilles as erômenos (beloved) somehow substitutes himself for Patroclus, it is not that, since Patroclus is already beyond any reach, any grasp, it is that Achilles transforms, he who was the beloved, into the lover. This is the event that is truly miraculous in itself. It is through this that, in the dialectic of the Symposium, the phenomenon of love is introduced.

Right after, we enter the speech of Pausanias. “The speech of Pausanias” we must break up. We cannot take it in its detail, line by line, because of time, as I have told you. The speech of Pausanias, you have generally read the Symposium enough for me to say so, is something that begins with a distinction between two orders of love [180c-d]: Love, he says, is not unique, and to know which one we must praise… There is here a nuance between enkômion and épaïnos, I do not know why the last time I made the word epainesis with epainein, the praise of love—that is the meaning of épaïnos—the praise of Love must begin from the fact that Love is not unique. The distinction, he makes from its origin. …There is not, he says, an Aphrodite without Love, but there are two Aphrodites.

The essential distinction between the two Aphrodites is this:

– One partakes in nothing of the woman, she has no mother, she is born from the projection of rain onto the earth engendered by the castration of Ouranos. It is from this primordial castration of Ouranos by Chronos, it is from there that is born the Uranian Venus, who owes nothing to the duplicity of the sexes.

– The other Aphrodite was born soon after from the union of Zeus with Dione [Diana], who is a Titaness. The entire story of the advent of he who governs the present world, of Zeus, is linked—I refer you to Hesiod for this—to his relations with the Titans, who are his enemies. Dione is a Titaness [181c]. I will not insist. This Aphrodite is born from the man and the woman arrenos. This one is an Aphrodite who is not called Uranian, but Pandemian.

The depreciative and contemptuous accent is expressly formulated in the speech of Pausanias: she is the popular Venus. She is entirely of the people: she belongs to those who mingle all loves, who seek them at levels beneath them, who do not make love an element of elevated domination such as that brought by the Uranian Venus, the Uranian Aphrodite.

It is around this theme that the speech of Pausanias will develop which, contrary to the speech of Phaedrus—which is the speech of a mythologist, which is a discourse about a myth—is a speech, one could say—we would not be forcing things—a sociologist’s speech, that would be exaggerated, let us say, the speech of an observer of societies.

Everything, in appearance, is going to be founded on the diversity of positions in the Greek world regarding this “higher love,” this love that happens between those who are at once the strongest and the most spirited, those who are also the most vigorous, those who are also agathoi [181e], those who know how to think, that is to say, between people placed at the same level by their capacities: men.

Custom, Pausanias tells us, differs greatly between what happens in Ionia or among the Persians, where this love—as he himself testifies—would be disapproved of, and what happens elsewhere, in Elis or among the Lacedaemonians, where this love is more than approved, where it seems very wrong for the beloved to refuse his favors kharizesthai to his lover [182b], and what happens among the Athenians, which appears to him to be the highest mode of apprehension of the rite, so to speak, of the social structuring of relations of love.

If we follow what Pausanias says about it, we see that if he approves of the Athenians for imposing obstacles, forms, prohibitions—and at least this is how he presents it to us, in a more or less idealized form—it is for a certain purpose, for a certain end: it is intentionally that this love manifests itself, proves itself, establishes itself, within a certain duration, even more, within a formally expressed duration, comparable to conjugal union.

It is also with this intention that the choice which succeeds the competition of love—agônothetôn, as he says somewhere when speaking about this love [184a]—presides over the struggle, over the competition among the contenders for love, by testing those who present themselves in the position of lover.

Here, ambiguity is singularly sustained over an entire page: where does this virtue, this function of the one who chooses, take place? For just as much, the one who is loved—even if he wants it, a little more than a child, already capable of some discernment—is still the one of the two who knows the least, who is the least able to judge this virtue, of what could be called the profitable relationship between the two; it is something that is left to a kind of ambiguous trial, a trial between the two of them; it is just as much in the lover that this virtue, this function of the one who chooses, is found, namely in the way in which his choice is directed according to what he seeks in the beloved, and what he seeks in the beloved is something to give him.

The conjunction of the two, their meeting at what he somewhere calls the meeting point of the discourse [184e], both of them will meet at this point where the coincidence will take place. What is at stake? It is this exchange which will ensure that “the first”—as Robin translated in the text [184d] from the Budé collection—being thus capable of a contribution whose object is intelligence and the whole field of merit, the second needing to gain in the sense of education and generally knowledge, here will meet, to form, as he says, the couple, and an association which, as you see, is on the highest level:

kai ho men dunamenos eis phronêsin kai tên allên aretên sumballethai, ho de deomenos eis paideusin kai tên allên sophian ktasthai [184d-e] [And the one who is able to contribute to understanding and to other virtue, and the one who is in need of acquiring education and other wisdom.]

It is on the level of ktaomai, of acquisition: ktêsis, of profit, of acquiring, of possession of something, that the encounter will take place between the terms of the couple that will forever articulate this so-called superior love, this love which will remain even when we have changed the partners, which will be called for the centuries to come “Platonic love.”

Now it seems very difficult, when reading this speech, not to sense, not to see what register all this psychology belongs to. The whole speech—if you read it again—is constructed according to a rating, a search for values, I would say, rated values. It is indeed a matter of placing one’s funds of psychic investment. If Pausanias at one point asks that rules, severe rules—let us go a little higher in the speech—should be imposed on the development of Love, in the court to the beloved, these rules are justified by the fact that it is proper that pollè spoudè [181e], too much care—it is indeed this investment I spoke about earlier—not be wasted, spent on young boys who are not worth it.

That is also why we are asked to wait until they are more formed, until we know what we are dealing with. Further on he will say: what are savages, barbarians, those who introduce disorder into this order of the postulancy of merit, that in this respect access to the beloveds should be preserved by the same kinds of prohibitions, laws, reservations, by which we strive to prevent, he says, access to free women as they are those by whom two families of masters unite, as they are in some way in themselves as representing everything you like of the name, of a value, of a firm, of a dowry, as is said today. They are on this account protected by this order. And it is a protection of this order which must forbid access to the desired objects to those who are not worthy of them.

The further you go in this text, the more you see affirmed that something which I indicated to you in my last lecture, inasmuch as it is properly speaking the psychology of the rich. The rich existed before the bourgeois. Even in an agricultural economy still more primitive, the rich exist. They exist and manifest themselves from the origin of time, if only by what we have seen as primordial, by the periodic manifestations, in terms of festivals, of the expenditure of luxury, which is what constitutes the first duty of the rich in primitive societies. It is curious that as societies evolve this duty seems to become, if not secondary, at least clandestine.

But the psychology of the rich rests entirely on this: that what is at stake for himself, in relation to the other, is value, it is what can be evaluated according to open modes of comparison, of scale, between what can be compared in open competition which, strictly speaking, is that of the possession of goods [183e]; what is at stake is the possession of the beloved because it is “a good asset”—the term is there: chrèstoï—and that this asset, a single lifetime will not be enough to make it yield its value.

Likewise, Pausanias, a few years after this Banquet—we know from Aristophanes’ comedies—will go a little further away with Agathon precisely, who here, before the eyes and knowledge of all, is his beloved, even though he already has what I called “a beard on his chin,” a term that is of the utmost importance here.

Agathon is 30 years old and has just won the prize in the tragedy competition. Pausanias will disappear a few years later into what Aristophanes calls “the realm of the blessed.” It is a remote place, not only in the countryside, but in a distant country. It is not Tahiti but it is Macedonia. He will stay there as long as his safety is assured. The ideal of Pausanias in matters of love is—if I may say so—the capitalization kept safe, locked away of what rightfully belongs to him as being what he has been able to discern and is capable of making yield.

I am not saying there are not remnants of this character, as we glimpse him from the Platonic discourse, in that other type I will quickly indicate to you because he is, in a way, at the end of this chain, who is someone I have met—not in analysis, I would not speak to you about it—whom I met enough for him to open to me what served him as a heart. This person was really well-known, and known for having a sharp sense of the limits imposed, precisely in love, by what constitutes the position of the rich. This one was an exceedingly rich man. He had, if I may put it that way, and it is not a metaphor, safes full of diamonds, because one never knows what might happen, it was just after the war, the whole planet could go up in flames. This is nothing.

The way he conceived things, for he was a rich Calvinist—I apologize to anyone here who may belong to this religion, I do not think it is the privilege of Calvinism to produce the rich, but it is nonetheless significant to mention it here. Because in truth, one can still note that Calvinist theology has had the effect of making it appear as one of the elements of moral direction that “God fills with goods those he loves on this earth”—elsewhere too perhaps, but already on this earth—that observing the laws and commandments brings with it earthly success, which has not been without fruit, moreover, in all kinds of undertakings.

Be that as it may, the Calvinist in question treated exactly the order of merits he acquired, already on this earth for the world to come, on the register of an accounting ledger: bought such and such a day, this. And here too all his actions were directed toward acquiring, for the beyond, a well-stocked safe. I do not want, in making this digression, to appear as though I am telling too easy a fable, but nevertheless it is impossible not to complete this picture with the account of what his marital fate was.

One day he ran someone over in the street with the bumper of his large car, even though he always drove with perfect caution. The person who was jostled shook herself off. She was pretty, she was the daughter of a concierge, which is not at all excluded when one is pretty. She received his apologies coldly, his offers of compensation more coldly, and his invitations to dinner even more coldly.

In short, as the difficulty of access to this miraculously encountered object rose higher and higher for him, the notion grew in his mind. He told himself that here was a real value. It is for this reason that all this led him to marriage. What is at stake is, strictly speaking, the same thematic that is presented to us in the speech of Pausanias. That is to say, to explain to us just how much love is a value [182e]—just think—he tells us [183a]:

“To Love, we forgive everything. If someone, to obtain a post, a public office or any other social advantage, behaved with the slightest extravagance that we accept when it comes to relations between a lover and the one he loves, he would be dishonored. He would be guilty of what one may call moral baseness aneleutherias, because [183b] that is what flattery means, kolakeias. He would flatter—which is not worthy of a master—to obtain what he desires.” It is according to something that exceeds the alert threshold that we can judge what love is.

It is indeed the same register of reference at issue here, the one that led my Calvinist accumulator of goods and merits to have, indeed, for a certain time a lovely wife, to cover her, of course, with jewels which each evening were removed from her body to be placed back in the safe, and to arrive at the result that one day she left with an engineer who earned fifty thousand francs a month. I would not want to seem, on this subject, to be pressing the point too far.

And after all, in introducing this speech by Pausanias, which is presented to us in such a singular way as the example of what in ancient love would be, I don’t know what, an exaltation of the moral quest, I do not need to get to the end of this speech to notice that it shows the flaw that exists in all morality, which in any case attaches itself only to what can be called the external signs of value. For he cannot help but end his speech by saying that if everyone accepted the primary and prevailing nature of these fine rules, by which values are granted only to merit, what would happen?

“In that case, even if one had been completely deceived, there is no dishonor […] Suppose indeed that, with a view to wealth, [185a] one has granted one’s favors to a lover believed to be rich, and that, being entirely mistaken, one finds no financial advantage because the lover turns out to be poor… in general opinion, one displays what one truly is, a man capable, for financial gain, of getting involved with anything, at anyone’s orders, and that is not a beautiful thing. Let us pursue this reasoning to the end, suppose the case where, having granted one’s favor to a lover, because one believes him virtuous and hopes to perfect oneself thanks to his friendship, one has been mistaken, and the lover proves to be kakou [185b] fundamentally bad and vicious, lacking merit, possessing no virtue, it is nonetheless a beautiful thing to have been deceived.”

Here we generally see something in which, curiously, one would like to find, to recognize the first manifestation in history of what Kant called the “right intention” [Kantian “good will”]. It seems to me that this really participates in a peculiar error. The peculiar error is not to see rather this: we know by experience that all this ethic of educating love, of pedagogical love in matters of homosexual love and even the other kind, is in itself always something—experience shows us this—of some deception that in the end lets its ears show.

If it has ever happened to you, since we are on the plane of Greek love, that you have had some homosexual brought to you by his protector—it is always assuredly, on the part of the latter, with the best intentions—I doubt that you have seen in this order any very manifest effect of this more or less warm protection on the development of the one presented to you as the object of this love, which would be presented as a love “for the good,” for the acquisition “of the greatest good.”

This is what allows me to tell you that this is far from being Plato’s opinion. For as soon as the speech of Pausanias—rather hastily, I must say [185bc]—is concluded on something that says more or less:

“All the others were Uranian and those ‘who are not,’ well, my God, let them turn to Pandemian Venus, the Big Hanger, to the one who likewise ‘is not.’ Let them go to hell if they wish! On this, he says, I will conclude my speech on Love. For the plebs—in other words, for popular love—we have nothing more to say about it.”

Now, if Plato agreed, if this was really what it was about, do you think we would see what happens right after? Immediately after, Apollodorus resumes speaking and says:

“Pausaniou de pausamenou…” [Pausaniou dé pausamenou…][185c]

Pausanias having paused, it is difficult to translate into French and there is a little note that says: “No French expression corresponds, yet the numerical symmetry of the syllables is important, there is probably an allusion, see the commentary.” I will spare you that… It is not Mr. Léon Robin who first noticed this. Already in the Henri Estienne edition there is a note in the margin. Everyone has noticed this “Pausaniou de pausamenou…” because they saw an intention in it. I believe I am going to show you that the intention has not quite been seen, because in truth, right after this little trick, it is strongly emphasized to us that it is a trick, because in parentheses the text tells us: “I learned from the masters, as you see, to speak:

didaskousi gar me isa legein outôsi oi sophoi

‘the masters have taught me to speak thus by isology’, let us say ‘wordplay’ [first occurrence: isology = play on “equal”], but it is not a play on words, isology is truly a technique. I will spare you all the ingenuity that has been spent in trying to find which master, is it Prodicus, is it not Prodicus? Is it not rather Isocrates, because also in Isocrates there is “iso” and it would be particularly ‘iso’ to “iso-logize” Isocrates. This leads us into problems! You cannot imagine what kind of research this has generated! Were Isocrates and Plato friends? People criticize me for not always citing my sources, and from today I have decided to do so; here it is Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. I mention it because he is a sensational figure. If you come across it, if you know how to read German, get his books—there is a book on Simonides I would love to have—he lived at the beginning of this century and was a German scholar of the era, a major figure whose works on Plato are absolutely illuminating. It is not him I am calling into question regarding: ‘Pausaniou…pausamenou’, he did not especially dwell on this minor witticism.

What I wanted to tell you is this: I do not believe, in this case, in any particularly distant reference to the way Isocrates might handle “isology” when it comes to demonstrating, for example, the merits of a political system. All the development you will find in the preface of this edition of the Symposium as translated and commented on by Léon Robin seems to me certainly interesting, but unrelated to this problem, and here’s why. My conviction was probably already formed regarding the scope of Pausanias’s speech, and I already stated it entirely last time by saying that Pausanias’s speech is truly the image of the evangelical curse: what is truly worthwhile is forever denied to the rich.

Nevertheless, I believe I have found here a confirmation of this, which I submit to your judgment. Last Sunday—I continue to cite my sources—I was with someone whose importance for my own formation I would be sorry not to have already told you, namely Kojève—I think some of you know that it is to Kojève that I owe having been introduced to Hegel—I was with Kojève, with whom, naturally, since I am always thinking of you, I spoke about Plato.

I found in what Kojève told me—who now does something entirely different from philosophy, for he is a distinguished man, though he still from time to time writes two hundred pages on Plato, manuscripts which travel around various places—he shared with me a number of things from his recent discoveries in Plato, but he could not tell me anything about the Symposium since he had not reread it. It did not figure into the economy of his recent discussion.

So I was a little disappointed, although I was greatly encouraged by many of the things he told me about other points of Platonic discourse, and in particular this: that it is very certain—and quite obvious—that Plato essentially hides from us what he thinks as much as he reveals it, and that it is only in proportion to the capacity of each person, that is, up to a certain limit, most certainly “not to be surpassed,” that we can catch a glimpse of it.

Therefore, you must not blame me if I do not give you Plato’s last word, because Plato is very much determined not to tell it to us. It is very important, at the moment when perhaps all that I am telling you about Plato will lead you to open the Phaedo, for example, that you have the idea that perhaps the aim of the Phaedo is not at all to demonstrate, despite appearances, the immortality of the soul. I would even say that its conclusion is very obviously the opposite. But let us leave that aside.

As I was leaving Kojève, I told him that we had not really spoken much about the Symposium, and since Kojève is someone who is very, very refined, that is to say, a “snob” [first occurrence: snob = fashionable/elitist], he replied:

“In any case, you will never interpret the Symposium if you do not know why Aristophanes had the hiccups!”

I have already told you that this is very important. Because it is obvious that it is very important! Why would he have the hiccups if there were not a reason? I had no idea “why he had the hiccups,” but still, encouraged by that little impulse, I said to myself, moreover with great weariness, that I expected nothing less tiresome than to have to go back over again all the speculations about hiccups, sneezing, whatever antique, even psychosomatic, value that might have.

Quite absentmindedly, I reopened my copy and looked at the text at the place “Pausaniou… pausamenou…” because it is immediately after that it will be a question of Aristophanes (when he is to speak), and I notice this: for sixteen lines [185c-d-e] it is only a question of stopping this hiccup: “When this hiccup stops…”, “Will it stop, will it not stop?”, “If it does not stop you will take such and such a thing, and at the end it will stop…”.

So that the words: pausai, pausômai, pausè, pauesthai, if we add: Pausaniou…pausamenou, give 7 repetitions of paus in these lines, that is an average of two and one-seventh lines between these eternally repeated paus… [Pausaniou dé pausamenou – didaskousi gar me isa legein outôsi oi sophoi – ephè ho Aristodemos dein men Aristophanè legein, tuchein de autô tina è hupo plèsmonès è hupo tinos allou lygga epipeptôkuian kai oukh hoion te einai legein, [185d] all’ eipein auton – en tè katô gar autou ton iatron Eryxima- chon katakeisthai – ô Eryximache, dikaios ei è pausai me tès lyngos è legein huper emou, heôs an egô pausômai. kai ton Eryximachon eipein “alla poièsô amphotera tauta; egô men gar erô en tô sò merei, su d’ epeidan pausè, en tô emô. En hôi d’ an egô legô, ean men soi ethelèi apneusti echonti polun chronon pauesthai hè lyngx; ei de mè, hudati [185e] anakonchuliason. Ei d’ ara pany ischura estin, analabôn ti toiouton hoiô kinèsais an tên rhina, ptare; kai ean touto poièsèis hapax è dis, kai ei pany ischura estin, pausetai.”]

[Pausanias having finished – for the wise have taught me to speak equally, said Aristodemus – Aristophanes should speak, but it happened that he had been struck with a hiccup either from having eaten too much or for some other reason and was not able to speak; but he said – for lying beside him below was the doctor Eryximachus – “Eryximachus, it is only right for you either to stop my hiccup or to speak in my place until I have stopped.” And Eryximachus said: “I will do both. I will speak in your turn, and you, when you have stopped, will speak in mine. While I am speaking, if the hiccup lets you go, hold your breath for a good while; if not, gargle with water. And if it is very stubborn, take something to tickle your nose, and sneeze; if you do this once or twice, and if it is very stubborn, it will stop.”]

If you add to this the fact that “this will work, or this will not work” for something, and that in the end “I will do what you said I should do,” that is, the term poièsô is added, repeated with almost equal insistence, which reduces the average to one and a half lines between the homophonies, or even the isologies in question.

It is, all the same, extremely hard not to see that if Aristophanes has the hiccups, it is because throughout Pausanias’s speech he was doubled over with laughter, and that Plato is no less so! In other words, if Plato tells us something like “Pausaniou… pausamenou”: “Toto tried everything,” and then for sixteen lines repeats for us the word “trying” and the word “to try,” he really wants us to prick up our ears, for there is no other example in any Platonic text of a passage so bluntly similar to some bit from the Vermot Almanac. That is also one of the authors in whom, of course, I formed my youth. It is even there that I read for the first time a Platonic dialogue called “Theodore is Looking for Matches” by Courteline, truly a royal piece!

So I think I have sufficiently asserted that for Plato himself, in so far as it is he who speaks here under the name of Apollodorus, Pausanias’s speech is really something derisory.

Well, since we have now reached a late hour, I will not today give you the analysis of the speech of Eryximachus which follows. Eryximachus speaks in place of Aristophanes, who should have spoken at that moment. Next time we will see what the speech of Eryximachus—the doctor—means in relation to the nature of love.

We will also see, because I think it is much more important, the role of Aristophanes, and we will see that in his speech Aristophanes will make us take a step, the first truly enlightening one for us, if not for the ancients to whom Aristophanes’s speech has always remained enigmatic, like a huge joke.

It is about dioecism, about that dioekisthèmen [193a] as he puts it, being split in two, it is about this Spaltung, this splitting which, although not identical to the one I am presenting to you with the graph, surely is not without some kinship for you.

After Aristophanes’s speech, I will look at Agathon’s speech. What I want right now—for you to know where you are going until next time—if you look at this text more closely, there is in any case one certain thing, and here I do not need scholarly preparation to give it more value: at whatever point of analysis you approach this text you will see that there is one and only one thing that Socrates articulates when he speaks in his own name, it is first of all that Agathon’s speech, the speech of the tragic poet, is not worth a penny.

It is said: it is to spare Agathon’s feelings that he is, if I may say so, going to be replaced by Diotima, that he will give us his theory of love through Diotima’s mouth. I see absolutely no way in which the sensitivity of someone who has just been executed could be spared. That is what he did with regard to Agathon.

And already now, just to be able to make an objection if there is reason, I ask you to note what is at stake: it is that what Socrates will articulate after all the fine things Agathon will in turn have said about Love—which is not only all the goods of Love, all the profit that can be drawn from Love, but, let’s say, all its virtues, all its beauties, nothing is too beautiful to be counted among the effects of Love—Socrates with a single stroke undermines all this at its root by bringing things back to their root, which is this: love, love of what?

From love we pass to desire, and the characteristic of desire, if indeed Éros era, if Eros desires [200a], is that that which is at stake, that is, what he is supposed to carry with him: beauty itself, he lacks it, endès, endeia. In these two terms “he lacks it,” he is identical in himself to lack.

And all that Socrates contributes in his own name in this speech of the Symposium is that from that point on something will begin, which is very far from ever becoming something you can hold in your hand. How could that be conceivable?

Right up to the end, on the contrary, we will gradually sink ever deeper into a darkness and will find again here the ever-greater ancient night. And everything there is to say about the thought of love, in the Symposium, begins there.