🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

I hope that what I am saying today, before the celestial conjuncture, is about to reach its winter solstice. I mean that, carried along by the orbit it entails, it may have seemed to you that we were moving further and further away from our subject of transference.

So be reassured! Today we are reaching the lowest point of this ellipse, and I believe that from the moment when we glimpsed – if this is to be proven valid – something to learn from the Symposium, it was necessary to go as far as we are going today in analyzing the important parts of the text that may seem not to have a direct connection with what we have to say.

Anyway, what does it matter! Here we are now in this undertaking, and when one has begun on a certain path in discourse, it is precisely a kind of non-physical necessity that is felt, when we want to carry it through to its end. Here we are following the guide of a discourse, the discourse of PLATO in the Symposium, the discourse that has, around it, the entire charge of meanings – like a musical instrument or even a music box [first occurrence: “boite à musique” means both a literal music box and a box full of meanings], all the meanings that, through the centuries, it has made resonate. A certain aspect of our effort is to return as closely as possible to the meaning of this discourse. I believe that to understand this text by PLATO, to judge it, one cannot avoid evoking the “context of the discourse” it is in, in the sense of universal concrete discourse.

And again, let me make myself clear: this is not, strictly speaking, about putting it back in history! You know well that this is not our method of commentary, and that it is always for what it makes us hear, that a discourse – even pronounced in a very distant time when the things we have to hear were not in view – that we question it.

But it is not possible, concerning the Symposium, not to refer to something that is the relationship between discourse and history, namely: not how discourse is situated in history, but how history itself emerges from a certain way in which discourse enters into reality. And as well, I must remind you here, at the moment of the Symposium where we are, in the second century of the birth of concrete discourse on the universe, I mean that we must not forget that philosophical efflorescence of the sixth century, so strange, so singular moreover for the echoes or the other forms of a kind of earthly chorus that are heard at the same time in other civilizations, without any apparent connection. But let us set that aside.

It is not the history of the philosophers of the sixth century, from THALES to PYTHAGORAS or to HERACLITUS, and so many others whom I cannot even sketch here. What I want you to feel is that this is the first time that, in this Western tradition, the one to which RUSSELL’s book that I recommended to you refers, this discourse is formed as expressly aiming at the universe, for the first time as aiming to make the universe discursive. That is to say, at the origin of this first step of science as wisdom, the universe appears as a universe of discourse.

And in one sense, there will never be any universe but one of discourse. Everything we find in that era, up to the definition of the elements [earth, water, air, fire], whether there are four or more [cf. The Purloined Letter: alpha, beta, gamma, delta], bears something that marks, stamps, imprints it with this requirement, this postulate, that the universe must submit itself to the order of the signifier. Of course, it is not about finding elements of discourse in the universe but elements arranged in the manner of discourse. And every step taken at that time, among the holders, the inventors of this vast interrogative movement, shows that if, concerning one of these universes that are being forged, one cannot speak coherently according to the laws of discourse, the objection is radical.

Remember the mode of operation of ZENO the dialectician, when to defend his master PARMENIDES, he proposes the sophistic arguments that must throw the adversary into an inextricable embarrassment. So, in the background of this Symposium, of this discourse of PLATO, and in the rest of his work, we have this attempt, grand in its innocence, this hope that inhabits the first philosophers called “physicists” of finding, under the guarantee of discourse – which, all in all, is their entire experimental instrumentation – the ultimate hold on the real.

I ask your pardon if I avoid it. Here, I cannot hold forth before you a discourse on Greek philosophy. I propose to you, in order to interpret a particular text, the minimal thematic that you must keep in mind to judge this text well. And so I must remind you that this real, this grasp on the real, does not have to be conceived at that time as the correlate of a subject, even a universal one, but as the term I am borrowing from Plato’s Seventh Letter [324a-352a], where, in a short digression, it is said what is sought by the entire operation of dialectics: it is simply the same thing I had to mention last year in our discussion of Ethics and which I called the Thing, here το πρᾶγμα [to pragma], understand it precisely in the sense that it is not die Sache [first occurrence: German “die Sache” meaning “thing” as affair or matter]: a matter, understand if you wish the great matter, the ultimate reality, that on which even the thought that confronts it, that discusses it, and which is, if I may say, only one of the ways of practicing it, depends. It is το πρᾶγμα [to pragma], the Thing, the essential πρᾶξις [praxis].

Be well aware that the theôria, whose term was born in the same era—however contemplative it may assert itself to be, and it is not only contemplative, as the orphic praxis, the practice from which it emerges, amply shows—is not, as our usage of the word “theory” implies, the abstraction of this praxis, nor its general reference, nor the model, however one might imagine, of what would be its application; at its emergence, it is this praxis itself: the theôria is itself the exercise of the power of to pragma, the great affair.

One of the masters of this era whom I choose, the only one, to cite: EMPEDOCLES, because thanks to FREUD he is one of the patrons of speculation, EMPEDOCLES in his certainly legendary figure, since, after all, what matters is this: that it is this figure that has been passed down to us, EMPEDOCLES is an all-powerful being. He advances as “master of the elements,” capable of resurrecting the dead, magician, “lord of the royal secret,” on the very same lands where charlatans would later present themselves in a parallel manner. Miracles are asked of him, and he produces them. Like OEDIPUS, he does not die: he returns to the heart of the world in the fire of the volcano and the abyss.

All this, you will see, remains very close to PLATO, and it is not by chance that, taken from him, in a much more rationalist era, we quite naturally borrow the reference of to pragma. But SOCRATES? It would be quite peculiar if all of historical tradition were mistaken in saying that he brings to this background something original, a rupture, an opposition. SOCRATES explains himself—so far as we can rely on PLATO where he presents him to us, more manifestly in the context of a historical testimony aimed at him—it is a movement of withdrawal, of weariness, of disgust, in relation to the contradictions manifested by these first attempts such as I have just characterized for you.

From SOCRATES originates this new, essential idea: first, knowledge must be guaranteed, and the way to show everyone that they know nothing is itself a revelatory way, revealing a virtue, which in its privileged successes, does not always succeed. And what SOCRATES calls, for his part, epistèmè, science, what he discovers in sum, what he brings out, what he isolates, is that discourse generates the dimension of truth. The discourse which ensures “certainty internal to its very action,” ensures, where it can, truth as such. It is nothing other than this practice of discourse.

When SOCRATES says that it is the truth, and not himself, that refutes his interlocutor, he shows something whose most solid aspect is its reference to a primitive combinatory that is always the same at the foundation of our discourse. Whence it results, for example, that the father is not the mother, and that it is on the same basis, and on this basis alone, that one can declare that the mortal must be distinguished from the immortal. SOCRATES, in sum, consigns all the ambition of discourse to the realm of pure discourse.

He is not—as is believed, as is said—especially the one who brings man back to man, nor even all things back to man; it is PROTAGORAS who gave this slogan: “man is the measure of all things,” SOCRATES brings truth back to discourse. He is, in sum, so to speak, the “supersophist” [first occurrence: supersophist as play on “sophist”], and therein lies his mystery, for if he were only the supersophist, he would have engendered nothing more than the sophists, namely, what remains of them, that is to say, a dubious reputation. It was precisely something other than a temporal subject that inspired his action.

And here we come to atopia, to that unplaceable aspect of SOCRATES, which is precisely the question that interests us when we sense in it something that can enlighten us about the atopia that is required of us [analysts]. It is from this atopia, from this “nowhere” of his being that he certainly provoked—as history attests—a lineage of inquiries whose fate is linked, in a very ambiguous way, to an entire history that can be fragmented: the history of consciousness, and as it is said in modern terms: the history of religion, morality, politics, at the limit certainly, and to a lesser extent art.

All this ambiguous line, I say, disseminated and alive, to designate it I would only have to point it out to you by the question most recently renewed by the latest fool: “Why philosophers” [first occurrence: French “Pourquoi des philosophes” as a philosophical provocation], if we did not feel, this lineage, bound in solidarity with a flame that is, in fact, foreign to all that it illuminates, even if it be “the good,” “the beautiful,” “the true,” “the same,” of which it boasts to be concerned.

If one tries to read, through the nearby testimonies as through the distant effects—“nearby,” I mean: in history—as through its effects still present: the Socratic descent, there may indeed come to us the formula of “a kind of perversion without object.” And, in truth, when one tries to accommodate, to approach, to imagine, to settle on what this character could actually have been, believe me, it is exhausting, and the effect of this exhaustion, I believe I could not better formulate it than in the words that came to me one of those Sunday evenings: “this Socrates is killing me!”

Curious thing, I woke up the next morning feeling infinitely more lively.

It nevertheless seems—for the sake of trying to say something about it—impossible not to start by taking literally what is attested to us by the people around SOCRATES, even on the eve of his death, that he is the one who said that, all in all: we should fear nothing from a death about which we know nothing.

And specifically, he adds, we do not know if it is not a good thing. Obviously, when one reads that… We are so accustomed to reading nothing but “good words” in classical texts that we no longer pay attention to them. But it is striking when we let this resonate in the context of SOCRATES’s last days, surrounded by his last faithful followers, to whom he throws this final “look a little from below” that PLATO documents in a snapshot—he was not there!—and which he calls “that bull’s gaze.” And his whole attitude at his trial… If the Apology of SOCRATES reproduces exactly what he said before his judges, it is hard to believe, hearing his defense, that he did not expressly want to die. In any case, he explicitly repudiated, and as such, all pathos of the situation, thus provoking his judges, who were used to the ritual, classical pleas of the accused.

So what I am pointing to here in the initial approach to the enigmatic nature of a desire for death, which undoubtedly can be held as ambiguous, is a man who, all in all, spent seventy years achieving the satisfaction of this desire; it is certain that it cannot be taken in the sense of a tendency toward suicide, nor failure, nor any kind of moral or other masochism. But it is hard not to formulate this minimum of tragedy tied to the maintenance of a man in a no man’s land, a kind of gratuitous between-two-deaths.

SOCRATES, as you know, when NIETZSCHE discovered him, it went to his head: “The Birth of Tragedy,” and NIETZSCHE’s entire subsequent work, came out of that. The tone with which I speak to you about it must surely mark a certain personal impatience. One cannot help but see, undeniably—NIETZSCHE put his finger right on it, it was enough to open almost any dialogue of PLATO at random—the deep incompetence of SOCRATES every time he touches on the subject of tragedy is something tangible. Read the Gorgias. Tragedy passes there, dismissed in three lines, among the arts of flattery, a rhetoric like any other, nothing more to say about it.

No tragic, no “tragic feeling”—as it is said nowadays—sustains this atopia of SOCRATES. Only a “demon,” the daimôn—let us not forget, for he talks to us about it constantly—that hallucinates him, it seems, to allow him to survive in this space, warns him of the holes he could fall into: “Don’t do that…”

And then, in addition, a message from a god—about which he himself testifies to the role it played in what one might call a vocation—the god of Delphi: APOLLO, whom one of his disciples had the rather ludicrous idea, it must be said, to go consult. And the god replied:

“There are some wise men. There is one who is not bad: EURIPIDES, but the wisest of the wise, the crème de la crème, the sacred one, is SOCRATES.”

And since that day, SOCRATES said:

“I must fulfill the oracle of the god, I did not know that I was the wisest, but since he said it, I must be.”

It is exactly in these terms that SOCRATES presents to us the turning point of what one might call his “entry into public life.”

All in all, he is a madman who believes himself to be in the conscripted service of a god, a messiah, and in a society of chatterboxes on top of it. No other guarantor of the word of the Other (with a capital O) than that very word itself, there is no other source of tragedy than this destiny which, from a certain angle, may well appear to us to be nothingness. With all that, he is led to give back the ground I spoke to you about the other day, the ground of the reconquest of the real, of the philosophical, that is, scientific, conquest, to give a good part of the ground back to the gods.

It is not to be paradoxical, as some have confided to me:

“You had fun surprising us when you asked: what are the gods?”

Well, as I told you, the gods are real! Everyone expected me to say: the symbolic. Not at all!

“You played a good joke, you said: it is real.”

Well, not at all!

Believe me, it was not I who invented it. For SOCRATES, they are clearly nothing but real.

And this real, having had its share, is absolutely nothing as regards the principle of SOCRATES’s conduct, who aims only at truth. He gets away with the gods by obeying them when necessary, provided that he himself defines this obedience. Is it really obedience to them, or rather fulfilling an obligation ironically toward beings who also have their own necessity? And, in fact, we feel no necessity that does not recognize the supremacy of the necessity internal to the deployment of the true, that is, to science. Such a severe discourse may surprise us by the seduction it exerts. In any case, this seduction is attested to us in one or another of the dialogues.

We know that the discourse of SOCRATES, even when repeated by children, by women, exerts a charm, if one may say so, a staggering fascination. It is indeed fitting to say: “Thus spoke Socrates.” A force is transmitted from it “which lifts up those who approach it,” as the Platonic texts always say, in short, at the mere murmur of his speech, some say “at his touch.”

Notice also, he does not have disciples, but rather familiars, the curious too, and then the delighted, struck by I don’t know what secret, the santons as they say in Provençal tales, and then, the disciples of others also come, who knock at the door. PLATO is none of those, he is a latecomer, much too young to have seen anything but the end of the phenomenon. He is not among the intimates who were there at the last moment, and this is indeed the ultimate reason—I must say this in passing very quickly—for that obsessive cascade of testimonies to which he clings each time he wants to speak of his strange hero:

“Such-and-such picked it up from so-and-so who was there, from such or such a visit where they had such or such a debate.” “The recording on brain, here I have it first-hand, here in a second edition.”

PLATO is a very particular witness. One could say “he lies” and on the other hand “he is truthful even if he lies,” because, in questioning SOCRATES, it is his own question, PLATO’s, that finds its way. PLATO is something else entirely. He is not a “beggar,” he is not a wanderer. No god speaks to him or has called him, and in truth, I believe that to him, the gods mean very little.

PLATO is a master, a true one, a master witness of the time when the city is decomposing, swept away by the democratic storm, prelude to the time of the great imperial confluences. He is a kind of SADE, but funnier. Naturally, as a person, one can never imagine the nature of the powers that the future holds: the great showmen of the global tribe, ALEXANDER, SELEUCID, PTOLEMY, all that is still, properly speaking, unimaginable. The mystical soldiers, those are still unimaginable!

What PLATO sees on the horizon is a communal city, utterly revolting to his eyes as to ours. The stud farm in order, that is what he promises us in a pamphlet which has always been the nightmare of all those who cannot get over the ever greater discord between “the order of the city” and “their sense of good.” In other words, that is called The Republic and everyone took it seriously: people think that is really what PLATO wanted!

Let us pass over a few other misunderstandings and a few other mythical concoctions. If I told you that the myth of Atlantis seems to me rather to be the echo of the failure of PLATO’s political dreams—it is not unrelated to the adventure of the Academy—you might find my paradox needs more substance, which is why I move on.

What he wants in any case is still the thing, to pragma. He took over from the magi of the previous century at a literary level. The Academy is a kind of “reserved city,” a “refuge of the best.” And it is in the context of this enterprise, whose horizon certainly extended very far, that we know what he dreamed during his journey to Sicily—curiously, in the same places where his adventure somehow echoes the dream of ALCIBIADES who, for his part, clearly dreamed of a “Mediterranean empire with a Sicilian center”—bore a sign of higher sublimation: it is like a kind of utopia that he thought he could direct.

From the height of ALCIBIADES, obviously all this is reduced to a certainly lower level. Perhaps it would not rise higher than a summit of masculine elegance. But it would still be to depreciate this “metaphysical dandyism” not to see what kind of scope it was capable of. I think it is right to read PLATO’s text from the angle of what I call dandyism: these are writings for the outside, I would even say he throws to the dogs that we are the scraps, “good or bad bits,” debris of an often quite infernal humor, but the fact remains: he has been heard differently.

It is that the Christian desire, which has so little to do with all these adventures, this Christian desire whose bone, whose essence is in the resurrection of bodies (one must read Saint AUGUSTINE to realize the place this holds), that this Christian desire has recognized itself in PLATO, for whom the body must dissolve into a supraterrestrial beauty reduced to a form—which we shall speak of in a moment—extraordinarily decorporealized, this is obviously a sign that we are in the midst of a complete misunderstanding.

But it is precisely this that brings us back to the question of transference and to the delirious character of such a resumption of discourse in another context, which is, strictly speaking, contradictory to it. What is there in this, if not that the Platonic fantasy—which we are going to approach as closely as possible: do not believe these are merely general considerations—already asserts itself as a phenomenon of transference.

How is it that Christians, to whom a God reduced to the symbol of the Son had given his life as a sign of love, allowed themselves to be fascinated by the inaneness—you recall my term from earlier—speculative, offered up for consumption by the most disinterested of men: SOCRATES? Must we not recognize here the effect of the only tangible convergence between the two themes, which is “the Word” presented as the object of adoration?

That is why it is so important—in the face of Christian mysticism, in which one cannot deny that love has produced quite extraordinary fruits and follies, according to the Christian tradition itself—to delineate what is the scope of love in the transference that occurs around this other: SOCRATES, who is nothing more than a man who claims to know something about love, but who leaves behind only the most simply natural proof of it, namely that his disciples teased him for losing his head now and then over a handsome young man, and as XENOPHON tells us, for one day—not going very far!—touching with his shoulder the bare shoulder of the young CRITOBULUS. XENOPHON, for his part, tells us the result: it left him with a sore shoulder, nothing more. But nothing less either: it is not nothing, in so seasoned a cynic!

For already in SOCRATES there are all the figures of the cynic. In any case, this proves a certain violence of desire, but, it must be said, it leaves love in a somewhat momentary position. This explains to us, makes us understand, allows us to situate, that in any case for PLATO, these stories of love are simply farcical, that the mode of final union with to pragma, the thing, is certainly not to be sought in the sense of an effusion of love in the Christian sense of the term.

And it is nowhere else that we must look for the reason why in the Symposium, the only one who speaks appropriately about love is “a buffoon”—you will see what I mean by this term—for ARISTOPHANES is nothing else for PLATO: a comic poet for him is “a buffoon.” And we can clearly see how this man, who is very distant, believe me, from the crowd, this man, this obscene ARISTOPHANES, of whom I do not need to remind you what you can find by opening even the slightest of his comedies. The very least that can appear on stage is, for example, the scene where the relative of EURIPIDES, who is going to disguise himself as a woman to be exposed to the fate of ORPHEUS, that is, to be torn apart by the assembly of women instead of EURIPIDES in this disguise… we are made to witness on stage the burning of ass hair because women, as even today in the East, depilate. And I will spare you all the other details.

All I can tell you is that this goes beyond anything that nowadays can only be seen on the stage of a London music hall, which is not saying little! The words are simply better, but for all that, they are no more refined. The term “gaping ass” is the one repeated ten times in a row to designate those among whom it is appropriate to choose those whom we would today call, in our language, the candidates most apt for all the progressive roles, for it is those that ARISTOPHANES especially targets. So, that it should be a character of this kind—and moreover, as I have already said, who played the role you know in the defamation of SOCRATES—that PLATO chooses to have say the best things about love, that must, at any rate, awaken our understanding a little!

To make clear what I mean when I say that it is to him that he has the best things said about love, I will illustrate it for you right away. Besides, even someone as reserved, measured in his judgments, cautious, as the scholarly editor whose edition I have here before me, Mr. Léon ROBIN, even he cannot help but be struck by it: it brings tears to his eyes. He is the first to speak of love, my God, as we speak of it, that is, he says things that grab you by the throat and which are the following. First, this rather subtle remark—it can be said that this is not what one expects from a buffoon, but it is precisely for this reason that it is in the mouth of the buffoon—it is he who makes the remark:

“No one,” he says, “can believe that it is hè tôn aphrodisiôn sunousia” [first occurrence: hè tôn aphrodisiôn sunousia = the union of sexual pleasure][192c]. It is translated as “the community of amorous enjoyment”… I must say this translation seems to me detestable, and I believe that Mr. Léon ROBIN made another, much better, for La Pléiade.

[Ὅταν μὲν οὖν καὶ αὐτῷἐκείνῳἐντύχῃ τῷ αὑτοῦἡμίσει καὶὁ παιδεραστὴς καὶἄλλος πᾶς, τότε καὶ θαυμαστὰἐκπλήττονται φιλίᾳ τε καὶ[192c] οἰκειότητι καὶἔρωτι, οὐκ ἐθέλοντες ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν χωρίζεσθαι ἀλλήλων οὐδὲ σμικρὸν χρόνον. Καὶ οἱ διατελοῦντες μετ᾽ἀλλήλων διὰ βίου οὗτοί εἰσιν, οἳ οὐδ᾽ἂν ἔχοιεν εἰπεῖν ὅτι βούλονται σφίσι παρ᾽ἀλλήλων γίγνεσθαι. Οὐδενὶ γὰρ ἂν δόξειεν τοῦτ᾽ εἶναι ἡ τῶν ἀφροδισίων συνουσία, ὡς ἄρα τούτου ἕνεκα ἕτερος ἑτέρῳ χαίρει συνὼν οὕτως ἐπὶ μεγάλης σπουδῆς· ἀλλ᾽ἄλλο τι βουλομένη ἑκατέρου ἡ ψυχὴ[192d] δήλη ἐστίν, ὃ οὐ δύναται εἰπεῖν, ἀλλὰ μαντεύεται ὃ βούλεται, καὶ αἰνίττεται.]

[Whenever either a lover or anyone else happens to meet with his own half, then indeed they are struck with amazement by friendship and intimacy and love, and are unwilling, so to speak, to be separated from one another even for a brief moment. And those who spend their lives together in this way are just such people, who would not even be able to say what it is that they desire to gain from each other. For it would not seem to anyone that this is the union of sexual pleasure, as if, for this reason, one rejoices with the other with such great earnestness; rather, it is evident that each soul wants something else, which it is unable to express, but only senses what it wants, and hints at it in riddles.]

For in truth, it means: It is not the pleasure of being together in bed that is ultimately the object in view for which each delights in living in common with the other and with a solicitude so overwhelming in thought…[192c]

In Greek, outôs epi megalès spoudès, it is this same spoudès that you found last year in the Aristotelian definition of tragedy. Of course, spoudès means solicitude, care, eagerness, it also means seriousness: “they have, in short, these people who love each other, a peculiar air of seriousness.” And let us pass over this psychological note to nevertheless show, to indicate, where the mystery lies. This is what ARISTOPHANES tells us[192d]:

“it is rather something entirely different that their soul manifestly desires, something it is incapable of expressing. Yet it senses it and proposes it in the mode of the enigma. Suppose even that, while they are lying on the same couch, Hephaestus (that is, Vulcan, the character with the anvil and the hammer) stands before them equipped with his tools, and proceeds thus… ‘Is it not this (the object of your wishes) that you desire: to become as completely one with each other as possible, so that neither night nor day do you ever abandon each other? If this is truly what you desire, I can well[192e] fuse you together, unite you in the breath of my forge, so that, from two as you are, you become one, and that, as long as your life lasts, you live together in community as one; and that after your death, there, in Hades, instead of being two, you are one, taken by a common death… Well then! see if that is what you long for…’ On hearing these words, there would not be a single one, as we know very well, to say no, nor obviously to wish for anything else; but each of them would think, on the contrary, that he has just heard, quite simply, the formulation of what, for a long time, he had basically coveted: that, by his union, by his fusion with the beloved, their two beings might finally make only one!”

This is what PLATO has ARISTOPHANES say. ARISTOPHANES does not only say that. ARISTOPHANES tells things that make one laugh, things moreover that he himself announced as destined to play precisely between the laughable and the ridiculous, if indeed between these two terms falls the fact that laughter lands either on what the comic targets, or on the comedian himself.

But what does ARISTOPHANES make people laugh at? For it is clear he makes people laugh and that he crosses the line into the ridiculous. Does PLATO make him make us laugh about love? It is quite obvious that already this shows you the opposite. We can even say that nowhere, at no moment in these speeches, is love taken so seriously, nor so tragically. We are exactly at the level that we attribute to this love—we, moderns—after courtly sublimation and after what I might call the romantic misunderstanding of that sublimation, namely the narcissistic overestimation of the subject, I mean the subject supposed in the beloved object. For that is the romantic misunderstanding with respect to what I taught you last year about courtly sublimation.

Thank God, in PLATO’s time, we are not yet there, except for that strange ARISTOPHANES, but he is a buffoon, we are rather still at an observation that is in some way zoological of imaginary beings, whose value comes from what they evoke of what can certainly be taken in a derisory sense in real beings. For that is what is at stake with these beings split in two like a hard-boiled egg[190e], one of those strange beings such as we find on the sandy bottoms[191d], a plaice, a sole, a flounder evoked here, which look as though they have everything they need: two eyes, all the paired organs, but are flattened in such a way that they seem to be half a complete being.

It is clear that in the first behavior following the birth of these beings born from such a bipartition, what ARISTOPHANES first shows us, and what is the basis of what suddenly appears there in a light that is for us so “romantic,” is this kind of panicky fatality, which makes each of these beings seek first and above all their half, and there, attaching to it with a tenacity, so to speak without exit, to the point of wasting away side by side through their inability to be reunited. This is what he describes to us in his long development, which is given with every detail, which is extremely vivid, which is naturally projected onto the plane of myth, but which is the way in which, by the sculptor that the poet is here, his image of the love relationship is forged.

But is this where lies what we must suppose, what we are touching with our finger, that there is here something laughable? Clearly not! This is inserted into something that irresistibly evokes for us what we could still see nowadays on the ring of a circus if clowns were to enter, as they sometimes do, embraced or attached together in some way, coupled belly to belly, and, in a great whirling of four arms, four legs and their two heads, make one or more circuits of the ring by tumbling.

In itself, it is something we can easily associate with the method of creating this type of chorus which, in another genre, gave us The Wasps, The Birds, or again The Clouds, for which we will never know under what disguise these plays appeared on the ancient stage.

But here, what kind of ridicule is it? Is it simply the character of the image itself, which is rather amusing? This is where I will undertake a little development, for which I ask your pardon if it makes us take quite a long detour, for it is essential. If you read this text, you will see to what extent—even to the point that it strikes Mr. Léon ROBIN as well. It’s always the same thing, I am not the only one who knows how to read a text—extraordinarily, he insists on the spherical character of this figure. It is hard not to see it, because this spherical, this circular, this sphaira is repeated with such insistence, we are told:

“the flanks, the back, pleuras kuklô echon, all that continues in a perfectly round way.”[189e]

[ἔπειτα ὅλον ἦν ἑκάστου τοῦ ἀνθρώπου τὸ εἶδος στρογγύλον, νῶτον καὶ πλευρὰς κύκλῳ ἔχον, χεῖρας δὲ τέτταρας εἶχε, καὶ σκέλη τὰ ἴσα ταῖς χερσίν, καὶ πρόσωπα [190a] δύ᾽ ἐπ᾽ αὐχένι κυκλοτερεῖ, ὅμοια πάντῃ· κεφαλὴν δ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἀμϕοτέροις τοῖς προσώποις ἐναντίοις κειμένοις μίαν, καὶ ὦτα τέτταρα, καὶ αἰδοῖα δύο, καὶ τἆλλα πάντα ὡς ἀπὸ τούτων ἄν τις εἰκάσειεν. Ἐπορεύετο δὲ καὶ ὀρθὸν ὥσπερ νῦν, ὁποτέρωσε βουληθείη· καὶ ὁπότε ταχὺ ὁρμήσειεν θεῖν, ὥσπερ οἱ κυβιστῶντες καὶ εἰς ὀρθὸν τὰ σκέλη περιφερόμενοι κυβιστῶσι κύκλῳ, ὀκτὼ τότε οὖσι τοῖς μέλεσιν ἀπερειδόμενοι ταχὺ ἐφέροντο κύκλῳ.]

[Then the shape of each human being was completely round, with back and sides forming a circle; they had four arms, and legs equal in number to the arms, and on their neck, two faces perfectly alike in every way; and on both faces, set opposite each other, one head, with four ears, and two genitals, and everything else as you might imagine from these features. They could move upright as we do now, in whichever direction they wished; and whenever they wanted to run quickly, just like acrobats who turn themselves around and move their legs straight out in a circle, so too, pressing themselves against all eight limbs, they would roll swiftly around in a circle.]

And we must see this, as I told you earlier, as two wheels attached to one another and still flat, whereas here it is round. And this bothers Mr. Léon ROBIN, who changes a comma that no one has ever changed, saying, “I do it like this because I do not want so much insistence on the sphere, it’s the cut that is more important.” And it is not I who will diminish for you the importance of this cut, we will come back to it in a moment.

But it is still difficult not to see that we are dealing with something very singular, and I will tell you right away the term, the punchline, it is that the derision in question, what is presented under this ridiculous form, is precisely the sphere. Naturally, this does not make you laugh, because “the sphere,” it leaves you cold! Only, be well aware that for centuries it was not so.

You only know it in the form of this fact of “psychological inertia” that is called the “good form.” A number of people—M. EHRENFELS and others—noted that there was a certain tendency of forms toward perfection, a tendency to rejoin, in the dubious state, the sphere, and that, after all, this was what pleased the optic nerve.

This, of course, is very interesting and only begins the problem, for I point out in passing that these Gestalt notions, so blithely used, only revive the problem of perception. For if there are such good forms, it is because perception must consist, so to speak, in rectifying them in the direction of the bad ones, which are the true ones. But let us leave aside the dialectic of this “good form” on this occasion. This “form” has a meaning altogether different from that objectification, of limited, strictly psychological interest.

In the time and at the level of PLATO, and not only at the level of PLATO but well before him, this form, sphairos as EMPEDOCLES still says, whose verses I do not have time to read you:

“ἀλλ᾽ ὄ γε πάντοθεν ίσος έὼν καὶ πάμπαν ἀπεἰρων Σϕαῖρος κυκλοτερὴς μονιη περιηγἒὶ χαίρων” “But he, everywhere equal to himself and without any limit, Sphairos with the perfect orb, joyful in the solitude that surrounds him.”

Sphairos, masculine, is: a being who, on all sides similar to himself, is on all sides without limits.

“Sphairos who has the form of a ball, this Sphairos reigns in his royal solitude, filled with his own contentment, his own sufficiency.”

This sphairos haunts ancient thought. It is the form taken, at the center of the world of EMPEDOCLES, by the phase of gathering of what he, in his metaphysics, calls Philie or Philotès, Love. This Philotès, which he elsewhere calls Schedunè, Love that gathers, that agglomerates, that assimilates, that agglutinates—exactly: agglutinated—it is krèsis, it is the krèsis of love.

It is very peculiar that we have seen reemerge, under the pen of FREUD, this idea of love as a purely and simply unifying power, and, if one can say so, with limitless attraction, to be set in opposition to THANATOS, while we have at the same time—and you can feel it clearly: in a discordant way—a notion so different and so much more fruitful in the “ambivalence of love-hate.” We find this sphere everywhere. I was speaking to you the other day about PHILOLAUS: he accepts the same sphere at the center of a world in which the earth has an eccentric position. Already in the time of PYTHAGORAS, it had long been suspected that the earth was eccentric, but it is not the sun that occupies the center, it is a central, spherical fire, to which we, the inhabited face of the earth, always turn our backs. We are in relation to this fire as the moon is in relation to our earth, and that is why we do not feel it. And it seems that it was so that we would not, despite everything, be burned by the central radiation, that the so-called PHILOLAUS invented—this concoction which already gave headaches to the people of Antiquity, even to ARISTOTLE himself—anti-chthôn, the anti-earth.

What could possibly have been, besides this, the necessity for inventing this strictly invisible body, which was supposed to contain all the powers opposed to those of the earth, which at the same time seemed to play the role of firewall, this is something, as they say, “that should be analyzed.” But this is only to introduce you to this dimension, to which you know I attach very great importance, of what can be called “the astronomical revolution,” and even “Copernican.” And to finally put the “dot on the i” here, namely—what I indicated to you—that it is not the so-called geocentrism dismantled by the so-called “Canon KOPPERNIGK” [Copernicus] that is most important, and that, indeed, it is rather false, quite pointless, to call it a “Copernican revolution.”

Because, if in his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres he shows us a diagram of the solar system that looks like ours, like the one in the schoolbooks in sixth grade, where you see the sun in the middle and all the stars revolving around it in the orbit, it must be said that this was not at all a new diagram, in that everyone knew in the time of COPERNICUS—it was not us who discovered it—that, in Antiquity, there was a man HERACLIDES, then ARISTARCHUS of Samos, who, quite certainly and attested, had made the same diagram.

The only thing that could have made COPERNICUS something other than a historical fantasy—for it was nothing else—would have been if his system had been, not closer to the image we have of the real solar system, but truer. And truer would mean less cluttered with imaginary elements that have nothing to do with the modern symbolization of the stars, less cluttered than the system of PTOLEMY. But that is not the case. His system is just as stuffed with epicycles. And what are epicycles? They are something invented, and besides, no one could have believed in the reality of epicycles!

Do not imagine that they were foolish enough to think they would see, as you see when you open your watch: a series of little wheels. But there was this idea that the only perfect movement that could be imagined as conceivable was circular motion. Everything seen in the sky was extremely hard to interpret, because as you know, these little wandering planets performed all sorts of irregular tricks among themselves, the zigzags of which had to be explained. They were satisfied only when each of the elements of their circuit could be reduced to circular motion.

The peculiar thing is that they did not succeed better, for by combining rotations on top of rotations one could in principle think that everything could be explained. In reality, it was quite impossible, for as they observed them better, it became apparent there were even more things to explain, if only, when the telescope appeared, their variation in size [elliptical orbits]. But no matter! COPERNICUS’s system was just as loaded with this kind of imaginary superstructure, which cluttered and weighed it down, as PTOLEMY’s system.

What you should read during these holidays—and you will see it is possible, for your pleasure—is to see how KEPLER manages to give the first grasp that has ever been had of something that is truly the date of birth of modern physics. He does so by starting from the elements in PLATO’s same Timaeus of which I am going to speak to you, that is, from a purely imaginary conception, with the emphasis that this term has in the vocabulary I use with you, of the universe entirely regulated by the properties of the sphere articulated as such: as the form that essentially carries within itself the virtues of self-sufficiency that allow it to combine in itself the eternity of the same place with eternal movement.

It is around speculations, moreover refined, of this kind that he gets there, since, to our astonishment, he brings in the five solids—as you know, there are only five—perfect solids that can be inscribed in the sphere. By starting from this old Platonic speculation, already reinterpreted thirty times, but which was already coming back to light at this turn of the Renaissance and the reintegration into the Western tradition of Platonic manuscripts, which literally goes to the head of this character, whose personal life, believe me, in this context of the peasant revolution and then the Thirty Years’ War, is something remarkable and to which, you will see, I will give you the means to refer: said KEPLER, in search of those celestial harmonies, and by a prodigy of tenacity—you can really see the hide-and-seek game of unconscious formation—manages to give the first grasp that has ever been had of something that is truly the date of birth of modern physical science.

In seeking “a harmonic ratio,” he arrives at this ratio of the speed of the planet on its orbit to the area of the surface swept out by the line joining the planet to the sun. That is to say, he simultaneously realizes that planetary orbits are ellipses.

And believe me—since it is talked about everywhere—there is KOESTLER, who wrote a very beautiful book called The Sleepwalkers, published under the title The Sleepwalkers at Johns Hopkins University Press, which has recently been translated. And I asked myself what Arthur KOESTLER, who is not always considered an author of the surest inspiration, could have made of it. I assure you, it is his best book! It is phenomenal, marvelous! You do not even need to know elementary mathematics, you will understand everything through the biography of COPERNICUS [1473–1543], of KEPLER [1571–1630], and of GALILEO [1564–1642], with a bit of bias toward GALILEO, it must be said that GALILEO is a communist, he admits it himself. All this to tell you that, communist or not, it is absolutely true that GALILEO never paid the slightest attention to what KEPLER had discovered. As brilliant as GALILEO was, in his invention of what can truly be called modern dynamics, namely having found the exact law of the fall of bodies, which was an essential step, and of course, despite the fact that it was over this matter of geocentrism that he had all his troubles, it remains the case that GALILEO was, here as well, just as backward, as reactionary, as attached to the idea of perfect circular motion—therefore the only possible one for celestial bodies—as the others. In short, GALILEO had not even crossed what we call the Copernican revolution, which we know is not COPERNICUS’s. You can see, then, how long it takes for truths to make their way in the presence of a prejudice as solid as the perfection of circular motion.

I could talk to you for hours about this, because it is really very amusing to consider why this is so, namely: what are really the properties of circular motion, and why the Greeks made it the symbol of the limit, peirar as opposed to apeirôn. Curious thing, it is precisely because it is one of the things best suited to tip over into the apeirôn, it is for that reason that I would need to show you, a little, to magnify, diminish, reduce to a point, infinitize this sphere. You know, moreover, that it has served as a common symbol for that famous infinitude. There is much to say. Why does this form have privileged virtues? Of course, this would plunge us into the heart of the problems concerning the value and function of intuition in mathematical construction.

I simply want to tell you that before all those exercises which have made us de-exorcize the sphere, for its charm to have continued to be exercised on dupes, it was nonetheless something to which, if I may say so, the philia of the spirit also clung—and clung badly!—like a strange adhesive. And in any case for PLATO, this is where I would like to refer you to the Timaeus, and to the long development on the sphere, this sphere which he describes for us in every detail, curiously responds like an alternate stanza to all that ARISTOPHANES says about these spherical beings in the Symposium.

ARISTOPHANES tells us that they have legs, little limbs that stick out, that twirl. But there is such a connection that, on the other hand, in the Timaeus, what PLATO, with a kind of emphasis that is very striking as to the geometric development, feels the need to point out to us in passing, is that this sphere has everything it needs inside: it is round, it is full, it is content, it loves itself, and above all it has no need for eye or ear since by definition it is the envelope of all that can be living.

But by this very fact it is “the living thing” par excellence. And what is “the living thing,” all this is absolutely essential to know in order to give us the mental dimension in which biology could develop. The notion of the spherical form as being essentially what constituted “the living thing” was something we must take in an extremely strict imaginary spelling. So it has neither eyes nor ears, it has no feet, no arms, and it has been left with only one movement, the perfect movement, that on itself. There are six: up, down, left, right, forward and backward.

What I mean is that from the comparison of these texts, it results that—by this sort of double-action mechanism, making a buffoon of a character who, for him, is the only one worthy of speaking of something like love—what we arrive at is that PLATO seems to amuse himself in ARISTOPHANES’s discourse by making a farce, a comic exercise, about his own conception of the world and the soul of the world. The discourse of ARISTOPHANES is the derision of the Platonic sphairos, of the proper Sphairos articulated in the Timaeus.

Time limits me and, of course, there would be many other things to say about it. To make sure the astronomical reference is certain and definite, I will still give you the proof—because it may seem as if I am amusing myself[sic]. ARISTOPHANES says that these three types of spheres he has imagined[190a]: the all-male one, the all-female one, the male and female one—they each nevertheless have a pair of genitals—the androgynes as he calls them[190b], have origins, and that these origins are stellar: some—the males—come from the sun, others—the all-female—come from the earth, and the androgynes from the moon. Thus the lunar origin is confirmed, says ARISTOPHANES—for it is nothing other than having a composite origin—for those who have a tendency toward adultery.

Isn’t something pointing here, and in a way I think sufficiently clear, in this relationship: this fascination illustrated by this contrast of the spherical form as being the form that one must not even touch, not even contest? It kept the human mind for centuries in this error: that people refused to think that, outside any action, any foreign impulse, the body is either at rest or in uniform rectilinear motion. The body at rest was supposed to be able to have, apart from rest, only circular motion. All of “dynamics” was blocked by this.

Don’t we see—in this sort of incidental illustration given to us from the pen of someone whom we can also call a poet: PLATO—what is at stake in these forms: where nothing sticks out, where nothing can be grasped, nothing but undoubtedly something that has its foundations in imaginary structure—and as I told you earlier, one could comment on it—but to which adhesion, in its affective aspect, clings—to what?—to nothing else except the Verwerfung of castration.

And it is so true that we also find it within ARISTOPHANES’s discourse. For these beings split in two like hemipoires[191ab], who will, for a time—which is not specified, and that is just as well, since it is a mythical time—die in a vain embrace trying to join together, doomed to futile efforts[191c] of procreation in the earth. I will also skip over all this mythology of procreation of the earth, of beings born from the earth, which would take us too far.

How is the question resolved? ARISTOPHANES speaks to us here exactly like little Hans: they will unscrew the genitals that are in the wrong place—because, of course, they were in the place where they were when they were round, on the outside—and they will screw them back on the belly, exactly as for the faucet in the dream you know, from the observation to which I am alluding.

The possibility of amorous appeasement[191cd] is referred to—which is unique and astonishing from the pen of PLATO—to something that relates to, at the very least, an operation on the subject of the genitals. Whether we put this or not under the heading of the castration complex, it is clear that what the detour of the text insists on here is the passage of the genitals to the anterior face. Which does not simply mean that they are there as a possibility for copulation, as a junction with the beloved object, but that literally they come with it: the passage of the genitals to the front comes with the beloved object in this kind of superimposed, almost overlayed relationship.

It is the only point where it is betrayed, where it is translated… how can one not be struck, in a character like PLATO, whose apprehensions, as is clearly shown by a thousand proofs concerning tragedy, did not go much further than those of SOCRATES, how can one not be struck by the fact that here, for the first time, for the only time, he brings into play in a discourse—and a discourse concerning a matter which is a serious matter, that of love—the genital organ as such.

And this confirms what I told you is the essential mechanism of the comic, which is always, at its core, this reference to the phallus: it is not by chance if it is ARISTOPHANES who says it: only ARISTOPHANES can speak of this. And PLATO does not realize that by having him speak of this, he has him speak of what here brings us the tipping point, the hinge, the something that will make all the rest of the discourse shift to the other side.

This is the point where we will pick things up next time.