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(All parts in English)

A brief pause before letting you enter the great enigma of transference love. A pause—I have my reasons for occasionally marking a pause—since what is at stake is our mutual understanding, not losing our orientation.

Since the beginning of this year, then, I feel the need to remind you that in everything I have taught you, I have merely pointed out that FREUD’s doctrine involves desire in a dialectic, and here already I must stop to make you note that the junction has already been taken, and already with this, I have said that desire is not a vital function, in the sense in which positivism has given its status to life, thus it is taken up in a dialectic—desire—because it is suspended… open the parenthesis, I have said in what form: suspended in the form of metonymy [wordplay: métonymie/metonymy/metonymic displacement] …suspended from a signifying chain, which as such is constitutive of the subject, whereby the subject is distinct from individuality simply taken hic et nunc, for do not forget that this hic et nunc is what defines it.

Let us make the effort to penetrate what individuation would be, the instinct of individuality then, insofar as individuation would have to be reconquered by each individuality, as psychology explains to us, through experience or by teaching, the whole real structure, which is nonetheless no small matter. And also, what one cannot manage to conceive without the assumption that it would at least already be prepared for by an adaptation, an adaptive cumulation. Already the human individual, in terms of knowledge, would be the flower of consciousness at the end of an evolution, as you know, of thought. Which I deeply doubt.

Not that I consider, after all, that this is a direction without fruitfulness, nor without an outcome, but only insofar as the idea of evolution mentally accustoms us to all sorts of elisions which are in any case very degrading for our reflection, and I would say—especially for us analysts—for our ethics. In any case, to return to these elisions, to show the gaps that the entire theory of evolution leaves open, inasmuch as it always tends to cover up, to facilitate the conceivability of our experience, to reopen them—these gaps—is something which seems to me essential. If evolution is true, in any case one thing is certain, it is that it is not—as VOLTAIRE said of something else—so natural as all that.

As far as desire is concerned, in any case, it is essential that we refer back to its conditions, which are those given to us by our experience. Our experience disrupts the whole problem of the data, which consists in the fact that the subject preserves an articulated chain outside of consciousness, inaccessible to consciousness, a demand and not an urge, a malaise, an imprint or whatever you try to characterize in that order of primitively, tendentially definable things. But on the contrary, there is marked there a trace, so to speak, outlined by a stroke, isolated as such, brought to a power that could be called “ideographic,” provided that this term “ideographic” is well emphasized as in no way being a portable index on anything isolated, but always linked to the concatenation of the ideogram on a line with other ideograms themselves outlined by this function that makes them signifiers.

This demand constitutes a claim eternalized within the subject, though latent and inaccessible to him, a status, a set of specifications, not the modulation that would result from some phonetic inscription of the negative inscribed on a film, a tape, a trace, but one that is dated forever: a recording, yes, but if you place the accent on the term register, with filing in the dossier, a memory, yes, but in the sense that this term has in an electronic machine.

Well, it is FREUD’s genius to have designated the support of this chain, I believe I have shown you this sufficiently and I will show it again, especially in an article which is the one I thought I should redo around the Royaumont congress and which is about to be published, FREUD designated its support when he speaks of the Id in the “death drive” itself, in that he designated the mortiform character of the automatism of repetition.

Death, what FREUD articulates there as a tendency toward death, as desire in which an unthinkable subject presents itself in the living being in whom it speaks, is precisely responsible for what is at stake, namely this eccentric position of desire in man which has always been the paradox of ethics, a paradox, it seems to me, completely insoluble from the perspective of evolutionism. In what one may call their “transcendental permanence,” that is, the transgressive character fundamental to them, why and how could desires not be the effect nor the source of what they constitute: that is, after all, a permanent disorder in a body supposed to be subject to the status of adaptation, under whatever aspect one admits the effects of that adaptation?

Here, as in the history of physics, all that has been done so far is to “save the appearances” [wordplay: sauver les apparences/save appearances, as in Ptolemaic epicycles], and I believe I have made you feel, have given you the opportunity to complete the emphasis of what it means to “save the appearances” when it comes to the epicycles of the Ptolemaic system.

Do not go imagining that the people who taught this system for centuries, with the proliferation of epicycles it required, from around thirty to seventy-five depending on the demands for accuracy that were made, truly believed in these epicycles! They did not believe that the sky was made like little armillary spheres. You see them, in fact, they made them with their epicycles. I recently saw in a Vatican corridor a lovely collection of these epicycles regulating the movements of Mars, Venus, Mercury. That makes quite a few that need to be put around the little ball for it to fit the movement! No one ever seriously believed in these epicycles.

And “saving the appearances” [wordplay: sauver les apparences/save appearances, as in Ptolemaic epicycles], simply meant accounting for what was seen according to a requirement of principle, the prejudice of the perfection of that circular form. Well, it is much the same when one explains desires by the system of needs, whether individual or collective—and I maintain that no one believes in it anymore in psychology, I mean a psychology that goes back through the entire moralist tradition—no one ever really believed, even in the time when people cared about it, in epicycles. “Saving the appearances,” in either case, means nothing other than wishing to reduce to supposed perfect forms, forms supposed to be required at the foundation of deduction, what can in no way, in any reasonable sense, be made to fit.

So, it is from this desire, from its interpretation, and, in short, from a rational ethics, that I am trying with you to found the topology, the basic topology. In this topology, you have seen emerge during the past year the relation called between-two-deaths which is, if I may say so, still not in itself a Herculean task, because it means nothing other than this: that for man, there is no coincidence of the two boundaries relating to this death.

I mean the first boundary, whether it is linked to a fundamental due date called old age, aging, degradation, or to an accident that breaks the thread of life, the first boundary, the one where life indeed ends and comes undone—well, man’s situation is inscribed in the fact that this boundary—it is obvious and has always been so, that is why I say it is not a Herculean task—does not coincide with the one that can be defined in its most general formula by saying: man aspires to be annihilated there in order to be inscribed in the terms of being. If man aspires—that is obviously the hidden contradiction, the small drop to swallow—if man aspires to destroy himself, it is in this very fact that he makes himself eternal. You will find this everywhere inscribed in this discourse as well as in others. In the Symposium you will find traces of it. Ultimately, I took care last year to illustrate this space for you by showing you the four corners where the space in which the tragedy is played out is inscribed.

I think there is not a tragedy that does not come out clarified by it. Something of the “tragic space,” to use the term, was historically taken away from the poets in seventeenth-century tragedy, for example in the tragedy of RACINE, and take any one of his tragedies, you will see it, for there to be the semblance of tragedy, it is necessary that, in some way, this space between-two-deaths be inscribed.

Andromaque, Iphigenia, Bajazet—do I need to remind you of the plot—if you show that something remains there that resembles a tragedy, it is indeed because, however they may be symbolized, these two deaths are always there. Andromaque is situated between the death of HECTOR and that suspended over the head of ASTYANAX, which is of course only the sign of another duplicity. In short, that always the hero’s death lies between this imminent threat to his life and the fact that he faces it in order to “pass into posterity,” is nothing but a derisory form of the problem. That is what the two terms always found in this duplicity of the death drive mean.

Yes, but it is clear—although this is necessary to maintain the frame of tragic space—that the point is to know how this space is inhabited. And I want, in passing, to do only this operation of tearing away the cobwebs that separate us from a direct vision to urge you, as rich in poetic resonances as they may remain for you through all their lyrical vibrations, to refer to the peaks of Christian tragedy, to the tragedy of RACINE, to see for yourself—take Iphigenia for example—everything that takes place: everything that happens there is irresistibly comic. Put it to the test:

– AGAMEMNON there is fundamentally characterized by his terror of the conjugal scene: “There, there are the cries I feared to hear.”

– ACHILLES appears in an incredibly superficial position regarding everything that happens there. And why?

I will try to point this out to you in a moment: precisely in relation to his relationship with death, this traditional relationship for which he is always brought back, cited in the foreground, by one of the moralists in the closest circle around SOCRATES. This story of ACHILLES—who deliberately prefers the death that will make him immortal to the refusal to fight that will leave him alive—is there recalled everywhere.

In the Apology of Socrates itself, SOCRATES refers to it to define what is to be his own conduct before his judges. And we find the echo of it even in the text of Racine’s tragedy—I will cite it for you in a moment—under another much more important light. But that is part of the commonplaces, which throughout the centuries keep resounding, rebounding, always growing in this ever deeper and more inflated resonance.

What, then, is lacking in tragedy, when it extends beyond the field of its limits, limits that gave it its place in the rhythm of the ancient community? The entire difference rests on a few shadows, obscurities, occultations that concern the commandments of “the second death.” In RACINE, these commandments no longer have any shadow for the reason that we are no longer in the text where the Delphic oracle can even make itself heard. It is only cruelty, vain contradiction, absurdity. The characters argue, dialogue, monologue to say that there surely must be some mistake in the end.

It is not so in ancient tragedy. The commandment of “the second death,” though present in a veiled form, can be formulated there and received as pertaining to that debt which accumulates without a culprit and is discharged upon a victim, without that victim having deserved the punishment.

This “he did not know,” in short, which I inscribed for you at the top of the graph on the so-called “fundamental enunciation” line of the topology of the unconscious, that is what is already attained, prefigured I would say, if it were not an anachronistic word for ancient tragedy, prefigured in relation to FREUD, who immediately recognizes it as pertaining to the raison d’être he has just discovered in the unconscious. He recognizes his discovery and its domain in the tragedy of OEDIPUS, not because OEDIPUS “killed his father,” nor because he wants to “sleep with his mother.”

A rather amusing mythologist, I mean one who made a vast collection, a vast gathering of myths that is quite useful, a work with no renown but of good practical use, who gathered in two small volumes published by Penguin Books all of ancient mythology, believes he can be clever regarding the myth of Oedipus in FREUD.

He says: why does FREUD not seek his myth in Egyptian mythology, where the hippopotamus is reputed to “sleep with his mother” and “crush his father”? And he says: “Why didn’t he call it the hippopotamus complex?” And there, he believes he has landed a fine blow in the belly [wordplay: bedouille/belly] of Freudian mythology. But that is not why he chose it! There are many other heroes than OEDIPUS who are the site of this fundamental conjunction. The important thing, and the reason why FREUD finds his fundamental figure in the tragedy of Oedipus, is the “he did not know…” that he had killed his father and that he was sleeping with his mother.

So here are recalled these fundamental terms of our topology because it is necessary for us to continue the analysis of the Symposium, that is, for you to perceive the interest there is, in the fact that it is now AGATHON, the tragic poet, who is to give his speech on love.

I must still extend this brief pause to clarify my point, regarding what, little by little, I am putting before you, through this Symposium, on the mystery of SOCRATES, a mystery about which I told you the other day that, for a moment, I had the feeling of killing myself in it. It does not seem to me impossible to locate. Not only does it not seem impossible to locate, but it is because I believe that we can perfectly well locate it that it is justified for us to begin with him for our research this year.

So I recall this, in the same annotated terms that are those I have just rearticulated before you, I recall it so that you may confront it with the texts of PLATO, of which—as long as they are our firsthand document for some time now—I note that it is no longer in vain that I refer you to readings. I will not hesitate to tell you that you must double your reading of the Symposium, which almost all of you have done, with that of the Phaedo, which will give you a good example of what the Socratic method is and why it interests us.

So let us say that the mystery of SOCRATES—and one must go to this firsthand document to make it shine again in its originality—is the installation of what he himself calls science, ἐπιστήμη [epistēmē], and which you can check in the text for what it means. It is quite obvious that it does not have the same sound, the same emphasis as for us. It is quite obvious that there was not even the smallest beginning of what has been articulated for us under the rubric of science.

The best formula you can give for this installation of science—in what?—in consciousness, in a position, in a dignity of the absolute, or more exactly in a position of absolute dignity, is that it is nothing other than what we can, in our vocabulary, express as the promotion, to this position of absolute dignity, of the signifier as such. What SOCRATES calls science is what necessarily imposes itself on any interlocution through a certain manipulation, a certain internal coherence linked—or which he believes is linked—to the sole pure and simple reference to the signifier.

In the Phaedo you will see him pushed to his final limit by the disbelief of his interlocutors who, however compelling his arguments may be, do not manage—any more than anyone else—to entirely yield to SOCRATES’s affirmation of the immortality of the soul. What SOCRATES refers to in the final analysis—and of course, in a way that is, for everyone, at least for us, less and less convincing—is properties such as that of even and odd. It is from the fact that the number “three” can in no way receive the qualification of oddness, it is on such points that the demonstration rests that the soul, by virtue of what it is at the very principle of life, cannot receive the qualification of the destructible. You can see to what extent what I call this privileged reference, promoted as a kind of cult, an essential rite, the reference to the signifier, is all there is to what is new, original, incisive, fascinating, seductive: we have historical evidence of it, the emergence of SOCRATES in the midst of the sophists.

The second term to be drawn from what we have in this testimony is the following: it is that through SOCRATES, and through the total presence this time of SOCRATES, through his destiny, through his death and what he affirms before dying, it appears that this promotion is consistent with that effect I showed you in a man, of abolishing in him—apparently in a total way—what I will call, using a Kierkegaardian term: fear and trembling—before what?—precisely not before the first, but before the second death. On this, SOCRATES has no hesitation. He affirms to us that this second death, incarnated in his dialectic, in the fact that he brings to absolute power, to the power of “sole foundation of certainty,” this coherence of the signifier, is where he, SOCRATES, will find—without any kind of doubt—his eternal life. I would permit myself, almost in passing, to sketch as a sort of parody, provided of course you give it no more significance than what I am going to say, the figure of the “Cotard syndrome”: this tireless questioner seems unaware that his mouth is made of flesh. And it is in this that this affirmation is coherent; one cannot call it a certainty.

We are here almost faced with a kind of apparition that is foreign to us, when SOCRATES—make no mistake, in a very exceptional way, in a way that, to use our language, and to make myself understood, and to go quickly, I will call of the order of the psychotic core—unfolds implacably his arguments, which are not really arguments, but also this affirmation, more affirming than perhaps any ever heard, to his disciples on the very day of his death, concerning the fact that he, SOCRATES, serenely leaves this life for a truer life, for an immortal life. He does not doubt that he will join those who, let us not forget, still exist for him: the Immortals. For the notion of the Immortals is not, for his thought, eliminable or reducible: it is on the basis of the antinomy—the Immortals and the mortals—absolutely fundamental in ancient thought, and no less, believe me, for our own, that his living, lived testimony takes its value.

So I sum up. This tireless questioner, who is not a “talker,” who rejects rhetoric, metrics, poetics, who reduces metaphor, who lives entirely in the game, not of the forced card, but of the forced question and who sees in this his entire subsistence, generates before you, develops throughout the time of his life what I will call a formidable metonymy, whose result, equally attested—we start from the historical attestation—is this desire which is incarnated in this affirmation of immortality, I would say, frozen, sad, “black and laureled immortality” writes VALÉRY somewhere, this desire for infinite discourse.

For in the beyond, if he is sure of joining the Immortals, he is also—he says—almost sure of being able to continue for eternity, with interlocutors worthy of him—those who preceded him and all the others who will join him—his little exercises. Which, admit it, is a conception that, as satisfying as it may be for people who like allegory or allegorical paintings, is still an imagination that distinctly reeks of delirium.

To discuss “even and odd,” “just and unjust,” “mortal and Immortal,” “hot and cold,” and the fact that “the hot cannot admit the cold within it without weakening itself, without withdrawing in its essence as hot to the side,” as we are at length explained in the Phaedo, as a principle of the reasons for “the immortality of the soul,” to discuss this for eternity is truly a very singular conception of happiness!

One must bring these things into relief: a man lived the question of the immortality of the soul in this way. I will say more: “the soul” as we still manipulate it, and I will say: as we are still encumbered by it, the notion of “the soul,” the figure of “the soul” that we have, which is not the one that was concocted through all the waves of traditional heritage, I said “the soul” with which we are concerned in the Christian tradition, “the soul” has as apparatus, as framework, as metallic rod in its interior, the by-product of this delirium of immortality of SOCRATES. We are still living it.

And what I simply want to present here before you is the relief, the energy of this Socratic affirmation concerning the soul as immortal. Why? It is obviously not for the significance that we can usually give it. For if we refer to this significance, it is quite clear that after a few centuries of exercises—and even spiritual exercises!—the rate—if I may say so—of what is called “the level of belief in the immortality of the soul,” among all those I have before me, I dare say: believers or non-believers, is among the most tempered, as one says the scale is tempered.

That is not the point, that is not what is interesting: to return you to the energy, to the affirmation, to the relief, to the promotion of this affirmation of “the immortality of the soul,” at a given date and on certain grounds, by a man who, in his wake, in short, astounds his contemporaries with his speech. It is so that you might question yourselves, that you might refer yourselves to this which has all its importance: for this phenomenon to have been able to occur, for a man to have been able, as one says: “Thus spoke…” (this character has, over ZARATHUSTRA, the advantage of having existed), what must SOCRATES’s desire have been?

This is the crucial point that I believe I can highlight for you, and all the more easily, clarifying its sense all the more, as I have at length described before you the topology that gives this question its sense. If SOCRATES introduces this position, about which I ask you to open, after all, any passage, any one of the dialogues of PLATO that refers directly to the person of SOCRATES, to verify its legitimacy.

Namely, the sharp, paradoxical position of his affirmation of immortality, and that on which is founded this idea—his—of science, inasmuch as I deduce it as this pure and simple promotion to the absolute value of the function of the signifier in consciousness, to what does this respond, to what atopia, I would say—the word, you know, is not mine concerning SOCRATES—to what ἀτοπία [atopia] of desire? The term ἀτοπία, ἄτοπος [atopos], to designate him, ἄτοπος: an unclassifiable, unlocatable case, ἀτοπία: you can’t put the guy anywhere!

That is what is at issue, that is what the speech of his contemporaries buzzed with, regarding SOCRATES. For me, for us, this “atopia of desire,” on which I place the question mark, does it not, in a certain way, coincide with what I could call a certain topical purity, precisely in that it designates the central point, where in our topology, this space of “between-two-deaths” is as such, in the pure and empty state, the place of desire, desire being there nothing more than “its place,” in that for SOCRATES it is nothing more than “desire for discourse,” for revealed discourse, revealing, forever? From which, of course, results the ἀτοπία of the Socratic subject himself, if ever before him this “place of desire” has been occupied by any man, in so purified a way.

I am not answering it, this question, I pose it because it is plausible, because at the very least it gives us a first reference point to locate what is our question, which is a question that we cannot eliminate from the moment we have introduced it even once. And it is not I after all who introduced it. It is, already, introduced from the moment we realized that the complexity of the question of transference was in no way limitable to what happens in the subject called the “patient,” that is, the analysand.

And consequently the question arises, to articulate, in a way a little more advanced than has been done until now, what the “desire of the analyst” must be. It is no longer enough now to speak of the καθαρσις [catharsis], of the didactic purification, if I may say so, of the bulk of the unconscious in the analyst, all of this remains very vague. It must be acknowledged of analysts, that for some time they have not contented themselves with this, one must also realize—not to criticize them, but to understand what obstacle we are dealing with—that we are not even at the smallest beginning of what could so easily be articulated, in the form of questions concerning what must be obtained in someone, so that he can be an analyst: does he now know a little more about the dialectic of his unconscious? What does he know, in the end, exactly? And above all, how far did what he knows have to go concerning the effects of knowledge?
– And simply I put this question to you: what must remain of his fantasies? You know that I am capable of going further,
– of saying “his fantasy,” if there is such a thing as a fundamental fantasy. If castration is what must be accepted at the last term
– of analysis, what should be the role of its scar from castration in the EROS of the analyst?

These are questions that I would say are easier to ask than to resolve. That is precisely why they are not asked! And believe me, I would not ask them into the void, just to tickle your imagination, if I did not think that there must be a method, a method by indirection, even oblique, even by detour, to shed some light on these questions to which it is obviously impossible for us at the moment to respond directly. All I can tell you is that it does not seem to me that what is called “the doctor-patient relationship,” with all its assumptions, prejudices, its swarming molasses, its cheese-worm aspect, is something that allows us to advance very far in this direction.

It is therefore a matter of trying to articulate, according to markers which are, which can be designated for us based on a topology already sketched out, like the coordinates of desire, what the desire of the analyst must be, what it is fundamentally. And if it is a matter of locating it, I believe that it is neither by referring to the articulations of the situation for the therapist or observer, nor to any of the notions of situation as phenomenology elaborates them around us, that we can find our proper bearings.

The desire of the analyst is not such that it can be satisfied, suffice, with a dyadic reference. It is not the relation with his patient through a series of eliminations, of exclusives, that can give us the key to it. It is something more intrapersonal. And of course, it is also not to tell you that “the analyst must be a SOCRATES,” nor “a pure one,” nor “a saint.” No doubt these explorers, SOCRATES or the pure ones or the saints, can give us some indications concerning the field in question. And not just some indications, but precisely for this reason, on reflection, we refer to them, we, all our science—I mean experimental—on the field in question.

But it is precisely from this that, since the exploration is done by them, we can perhaps articulate, define in terms of longitude and latitude the coordinates that the analyst must be able to attain simply to occupy the place that is his, which is defined as: the place he must offer vacant to the desire of the patient so that it may realize itself as the desire of the Other. This is what makes the Symposium interesting for us, in that, by this very privileged place it occupies regarding the testimonies about SOCRATES, insofar as it is supposed to put before us SOCRATES grappling with the problem of love, the Symposium is for us a text worth exploring.

I think I have said enough to justify that we tackle the problem of transference, starting with the commentary on the Symposium. I also think it was necessary for me to recall these coordinates at the moment when we are going to enter what occupies the central or quasi-central place in these famous dialogues, namely the speech of AGATHON.

Is it ARISTOPHANES, is it AGATHON who occupies the central place? It does not matter to decide. Both of them, in any case, surely occupy the central place, since everything before, apparently demonstrated, is by them considered as already pushed aside, devalued, since what is to follow will be nothing other than the speech of SOCRATES. About this speech of AGATHON, that is, of the tragic poet, there would be a world of things to say, not only erudite, but which would draw us into detail, even into a history of tragedy, of which you saw I gave you earlier a certain relief. That is not the important thing. The important thing is to make you perceive the place of AGATHON’s speech in the economy of the Symposium. You have read it, there are five or six pages in the French translation by Guillaume BUDÉ by ROBIN. I will take it toward its acme, you will see why: I am less here to give you a more or less elegant commentary on the Symposium than to lead you to what it can or must serve us for.

After having given a speech whose least one can say is that it has struck all readers from the beginning by its extraordinary “sophistry” [wordplay: sophistique/sophistic], in the most modern, most common, pejorative sense of the word. The typical example of what can be called this sophistry is to say [196b] that:

– “Love neither commits injustice nor suffers it,
– neither from a god nor toward a god,
– neither from a man nor toward a man…”.
Why?
“Because there is no violence from which it suffers, if it suffers in any way, for—as everyone knows—violence does not lay hands on love—so—no violence either in what it does and that comes from it, for it is willingly—we are told—that all, in everything, submit to the commands of love…” [196c].
Now:
“those things on which goodwill agrees with goodwill, these are what the Laws, queens of the City, proclaim just.”

Moral: Love is therefore what is at the principle of the laws of the city, and so on, since love is the strongest of all desires, the irresistible pleasure, it will be confused with temperance, since temperance is what rightly regulates desires and pleasures, love must therefore be identified with this position of temperance [196c].

Clearly, there is amusement going on. Who is amused? Is it only us, the readers? I think we would be quite wrong to believe that we are the only ones. AGATHON is here in a position that is certainly not secondary, if only because—at least in principle, in terms, in the position of the situation—he is the beloved of SOCRATES.

I believe that PLATO, let us give him this credit, is also amused by what I would already call—and you will see that I will justify it even more—the “macaronic speech of the tragedian about love” [wordplay: macaronique/macaronic, referring to a jumble of Greek and Latin, or mixed styles]. But I believe—I am sure—and you will be sure of it yourselves as soon as you have read it, that we would be quite wrong not to understand that it is not only us, nor only PLATO, who are amused here by this speech. It is absolutely clear, contrary to what commentators have said, it is completely out of the question that the one who is speaking, namely AGATHON, does not know very well what he is doing. Things go so far, things go so strongly, that you are simply going to see that at the height of this speech AGATHON is going to tell us [197c]: “And besides, I am going to improvise for you two little verses of my own,” and he says:

“εἰρήνην μὲν ἐν ἀνθρώποις, πελάγει δὲ γαλήνην νηνεμίαν, ἀνέμων κοίτην ὕπνον τ᾽ ἐνὶ κήδει.”

“εἰρήνην μὲν ἐν ἀνθρώποις” [eirènèn men en anthrôpois]: “Peace among humans,” says Mr. Léon ROBIN, which means: love is the end of the brawl. Strange conception, it must be said, because up until this idyllic modulation, one had hardly suspected it. But to dot the i’s, he adds: “πελάγει δὲ γαλήνην” [pelagei de galènèn], which absolutely means: everything is at a standstill, dead calm at sea. In other words, we must remember what “dead calm at sea” means for the ancients—it means: nothing works anymore, the ships are stuck at Aulis, and when that happens to you in the open sea, you are extremely annoyed, just as annoyed as when it happens to you in bed.

So that, when talking about love, to evoke: “πελάγει δὲ γαλήνην” [pelagei de galènèn], it is quite clear that there is some joking going on: love is what puts you “out of commission,” it is what makes you have a “fiasco.” And that is not all. Then he says: “There is no more wind among the winds”… He keeps going, love: there is no more love:

“νηνεμίαν ἀνέμων” [nènemian anemôn] [“calm of the winds” or “dead calm of the winds”]

This also sounds like verses forever comic from a certain tradition. It resembles two lines by Paul-Jean TOULET:

“Under the double ornament of a name soft or sonorous, No, there is nothing but Nanine and Nonore.”

We are in that register. And “κοίτην” [koitèn] as well, which means: in bed, lying down, nothing in bed, no more wind in the winds, all the winds are lying down. And then “ὕπνον τ᾽ἐνὶ κήδει” [hupnon t’eni kèdei]. Strange thing: love brings us “sleep in the midst of cares”—which one might translate at first glance.

But if you look at the meaning of occurrences of this κήδος [kèdos], the Greek term always so rich in undertones that would allow us to singularly revalorize what one day, with no doubt great benevolence for us, but perhaps still lacking by not following FREUD in something essential, Mr. BENVENISTE, for our first issue, articulated about the ambivalences of signifiers, you will realize that κήδος [kèdos] is not simply care, it is also kinship. The ὕπνον τ᾽ἐνὶ κήδει [hupnon t’eni kèdei] gives us a sketch of it, the κήδος [kèdos] as “in-law relative of an elephant’s thigh” somewhere in LÉVI-STRAUSS, and this ὕπνος [hypnos], the peaceful sleep, τ᾽ἐνὶ κήδει [t’eni kèdei] in relationships with the in-laws, seems to me something worthy of crowning verses which are incontestably made to jolt us, if we have not yet understood that AGATHON is making fun.

Moreover, from that moment on, he literally lets loose and tells us that love is what literally frees us, rids us of the belief that we are strangers to one another [197d]. “Naturally, when one is possessed by love, one realizes that we are all part of one big family, it is truly from that moment on that one is warm and at home.” And so on, it continues for several lines. I leave it to your evenings’ pleasure to savor them.

In any case, if you agree that love is indeed “the craftsman of good humor,” that “it banishes all bad mood,” that “it is generous,” that “it is incapable of being ill-intentioned,” there is an enumeration on which I would like to dwell at length with you: it is said to be the father [πατήρ]—of what?—the father of Τρυϕῆς [Truphès], of Ἁβρότητος [Habrotos], of Χλιδῆς [Chlidès], of Χαρίτων [Chariton], of Ἱμέρου [Himeron], and of Πόθου [Pothon].

We would need more time than we have here to make a parallel of these terms that at first glance can be translated as Well-being, Delicacy, Languor, Graces, Ardor, Passion, and to do the double work that would consist in confronting them with the register of benefits, of honesty in courtly love as I recalled to you last year. It would then be easy for you to see the distance, and that it is quite impossible to be satisfied with the comparison made in a note by Mr. Léon ROBIN with the Carte du Tendre, or with the virtues of the knight in La Minne—he does not mention that, by the way, he only talks about the Carte du Tendre.

For what I would show you, text in hand, is that there is not one of these terms, Τρυϕῆς [Truphès] for example, which one is content to connote as “Well-being,” that has not, among most authors—not just comic authors—been used with the most unpleasant connotations.

Τρυϕῆς [Truphès], for example, in ARISTOPHANES, designates what, in a woman, in a wife, suddenly enters a man’s life, in the peace of his life, in her unbearable pretensions. The woman who is called τρυϕερός [Truphéros], or τρυϕερα [Truphéra] in the feminine, is an unbearable snob: she is the one who never ceases for a single moment to make her husband feel the superiority of her rank and the quality of her family, and so on. There is not a single one of these terms that is not usually and for the most part, by the authors—whether it be the tragedians, or even poets like HESIOD—paired, juxtaposed, Χλιδῆς [Chlidès], languor for example, with the use of αὐθαδία [authadia], this time meaning one of the most unbearable forms of ὕβρις [hubris] and conceit.

I only want to point these things out to you in passing. It continues [197d]:

love is attentive to the good, on the other hand, it never happens to take care of the wicked, in lassitude and in anxiety, in the fire of passion ἐν πόθῳ [en pothô] and in the play of expression…”

These are translations that mean absolutely nothing, for in Greek you have: ἐν πόνῳ [en ponô], ἐν ϕόβῳ [en phobô], ἐν λόγῳ [en logô]:
– ἐν πόνῳ [en ponô] means “in trouble,” ἐν ϕόβῳ [en phobô], “in fear,” ἐν λόγῳ [en logô], “in discourse.”

“…κυβερνήτης, ἐπιβάτης…” [kubernètès, epibatès] [197e] [“…helmsman, passenger…”]

He is “the one who holds the helm.” He is also “the one always ready to steer.” In other words, there is a lot of joking going on. πόνῳ [ponô], ϕόβῳ [phobô], λόγῳ [logô] are in the greatest disorder. The aim is always to produce the same effect of irony, even of disorientation, which for a tragic poet really has no other meaning than to underline that love is truly: that which is unclassifiable, that which comes to get in the way of every significant situation, that which is never in its place, that which is always out of season.

Whether this position is something that can be defended or not, strictly speaking, is obviously not the high point of the discourse, concerning love in this dialogue. That is not the point. The important thing is that it is from the perspective of the tragic poet that the only discourse on love is given to us that is openly, completely derisive. And moreover, to highlight what I am telling you, to seal the legitimacy of this interpretation, it suffices to read when AGATHON concludes:

“Let this discourse, my work, be—he says—O PHAEDRUS, my offering to the god: a blend as perfectly measured as I am able—more simply he says: composing, as best as I can, the play and the seriousness” [197e].

The discourse itself, one could say, is affected by its own connotation: amusing discourse, discourse of an entertainer. And it is nothing other than AGATHON as such—that is, as the one whose triumph in the tragic competition is being celebrated, let us not forget, we are on the day after his success—who has the right to speak of love.

It is quite certain that there is nothing here that should in any way cause disorientation. In any tragedy set in its full context, in the ancient context, love always appears as a marginal incident, and if one can say, as dragging behind. Love, far from being the one who leads and rushes forward, only drags behind, to use the very words you will find in AGATHON’s speech, dragging behind the one to whom, quite curiously in one passage [195d], he compares it, that is, the term which I put forward to you last year as the function of Ἄτη [Atè], in tragedy.

Ἄτη [Atè], misfortune, the thing that has been crucified and can never be exhausted, “the calamity” that lies behind all tragic adventure, and which—as the poet tells us, for it is to HOMER that one refers on such occasions—

“moves only by running, with feet too tender to rest on the ground, upon the heads of men.”

Thus passes Ἄτη, swift, indifferent, striking and forever dominating and bowing heads, driving them mad: such is Ἄτη. It is a peculiar thing that in this speech it is under the reference that, like Ἄτη, Love must have the soles of its feet very delicate in order to be able, it too, only to move upon the heads of men! And on this point, once again, to confirm [195e] the fanciful character of the speech, a few jokes are made about the fact that after all, skulls may not be so tender!

Let us return once again to the confirmation of the style of this speech. All our experience of tragedy—and you will see, especially as, due to the Christian context, the emptiness produced in ancient fundamental fatality, in the closed, the incomprehensible of the fatal oracle, the inexpressible commandment at the level of the second death, can no longer be sustained, since we find ourselves before a god who could not give senseless or cruel orders. You will see that love comes to fill this void.

Iphigenia by RACINE is the finest illustration of this, in a sense incarnate. It was necessary for us to have arrived at the Christian context for IPHIGENIA to no longer suffice as tragedy: she must be doubled with ÉRIPHILE, and rightly so, not simply so that ÉRIPHILE may be sacrificed in her place, but because ÉRIPHILE is the only true lover.

A lover, with a love that is shown to us as terrible, horrible, evil, tragic, in order to restore a certain depth to the tragic space and of which we also clearly see that it is because love, which otherwise occupies the play enough, mainly with ACHILLES, each time it appears as pure and simple love—and not as dark love, love of jealousy—is irresistibly comic.

In short, here we are at the crossroads where—as will be recalled at the end in the final conclusions of the Symposium—it is not enough, in order to speak of love, to be a tragic poet, one must also be a comic poet. It is at this very point that SOCRATES receives AGATHON’s speech, and to appreciate how he welcomes it, it was necessary, I believe—you will see this later—to articulate it with as much emphasis as I thought necessary today.