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(All parts in English)

We have thus arrived, in the Symposium, at the moment when SOCRATES is about to speak in the ἔπαινος [epainos] or the ἐγκώμιον [enkômion]. As I mentioned in passing [Cf. 07-12-1961], these two terms are not quite equivalent. I did not wish to dwell on their difference, which would have led us into a somewhat eccentric discussion.

In the praise of love, we are told—affirmed by himself, and SOCRATES’ word cannot, in PLATO, be contested—that SOCRATES, if he knows anything, if there is anything in which he is not ignorant, it is in matters of love [198d]. We must not lose sight of this perspective in everything that is about to happen.

I emphasized to you, I think in a sufficiently convincing way last time, the strangely derisive character of AGATHON’s speech: AGATHON the tragedian speaks of love in a way that gives the impression he is clowning, the impression of a macaronic speech [wordplay: “macaronic” refers to a deliberately mixed or burlesque style]. At every moment, it seems the expression he suggests to us is that he is “pulling our leg” a bit. I pointed out, even in the content, in the substance of the arguments, in the style, in the details of the elocution itself, the excessively provocative character of the little verses in which he at one point expresses himself.

It is disconcerting to see the theme of the Symposium reach its climax in such a speech. This is not new; it is the function, the role we assign it in the development of the Symposium that may be new, for this derisive character of AGATHON’s speech has always stopped those who have read and commented on it.

To the point that, for example, to take what a figure of German scholarship from the beginning of this century, whose name, the day I mentioned it to you, made you laugh, I don’t know why, Wilamowitz MOELLENDORFF, following the tradition of almost all his predecessors, says that AGATHON’s speech is characterized by its Nichtigkeit, its nullity. It is very strange that PLATO should have put this speech in the mouth of the one who is immediately to precede SOCRATES’ speech, in the mouth of the one who, let us not forget, is SOCRATES’ beloved at present and on this occasion, at the moment of the Symposium.

Moreover, what SOCRATES uses to introduce his intervention consists of two points. First, even before AGATHON speaks, there is a sort of interlude where SOCRATES himself says something like [194a]:

“After having heard everything that has just been heard and, if now AGATHON adds his speech to the others, how am I, myself, to speak?”

AGATHON, for his part, excuses himself. He too announces a certain hesitation, a certain fear, a certain intimidation at speaking before an audience, let us say, so enlightened, so intelligent, ἔμϕρονες [emphrones] [194b]. And a kind of beginning of a discussion, of a debate, takes place with SOCRATES, who at that point begins to question him a bit about the remark that was made, that if AGATHON the tragic poet has just triumphed on the tragic stage, it is because on the tragic stage he addresses the crowd, and here, it is something else. And we begin to set out on a slope that ought to be precarious. We do not know where it will lead us at the moment when SOCRATES begins to question him. It is something like this:

“Would you blush over something in which you might appear inferior, only before us? Before others, before the mob, before the crowd, would you feel calm in putting forward themes that would be less assured…” [194c]

And there, my God, we do not know very well what we are getting into: whether it is a kind of aristocratism, if one can say, of dialogue, or whether, on the contrary, SOCRATES’ aim is to show, as seems more likely and as all his practice attests, that even a slave, that even an ignorant person, can, when properly questioned, reveal in himself the seeds of truth, the seeds of a sound judgment.

But on this slope someone intervenes: PHAEDRUS, who, interrupting AGATHON, does not allow SOCRATES to draw him in on this point. He knows very well that SOCRATES has no other pleasure—it is said expressly—than to speak with the one he loves, and if we were to engage in this dialogue, it would never end [194d]. So AGATHON then takes the floor, and SOCRATES finds himself in the position of having to respond to him. He does respond!

To do so, he has, so to speak, the easiest part, and the method immediately reveals itself as brilliant in its superiority, in the ease with which he makes what explodes dialectically in the midst of AGATHON’s speech appear. And the process is such that it can only be a refutation, a complete annihilation of AGATHON’s speech, properly speaking, in order to expose its ineptitude, its Nichtigkeit, its nullity. So much so that the commentators—and specifically the one I just mentioned—think that SOCRATES himself hesitates to push the humiliation of his interlocutor too far, and that here lies the mechanism of what we are about to see.

It is that SOCRATES, at a certain moment, stops and makes someone else speak in his place, adopts the voice of the one who will later become in history a prestigious figure: DIOTIMA, the foreigner from Mantinea. If he has DIOTIMA speak and has himself instructed by DIOTIMA, it is so as not to remain any longer, in front of the one to whom he has delivered the decisive blow, in the posture of a magister. He has himself instructed, he lets himself be relayed by this imaginary character, in order to spare the confusion he has imposed on AGATHON.

It is against this position that I take exception. For if we look more closely at the text, I believe we could not say that this is entirely its meaning. I would say that, precisely where we are meant to see, in AGATHON’s speech, a kind of confession of his going astray [201b]:

“I truly fear, SOCRATES, that I have known absolutely nothing about the things I was in the process of saying…”

The impression that remains to us, hearing him, is rather that of someone who would reply:

“We are not on the same level, I spoke in a way that had a meaning, in a way that had an undertone, I spoke, let us say, even to the limit, in riddles.”

Let us not forget that ἆινος [ainos] with ἆίνίττομαι [ainittomai] leads us directly to the very etymology of the enigma:

“What I said, I said in a certain tone.”

And as we read, in SOCRATES’ response speech, that there is a certain way of conceiving praise—which, for a moment, SOCRATES devalues—namely, to place, to wrap, around the object of praise everything that can be said that is best. But is that truly what AGATHON did? On the contrary, it seems, in the very excess of this speech, that there was something that seemed only to ask to be heard.

In short, for a moment, we can, by hearing AGATHON’s reply in a certain way—and in a way that I believe is the correct one—we have the impression, at the limit, that by introducing his critique, his dialectic, his mode of questioning, SOCRATES finds himself in the pedantic position. I mean that it is clear that AGATHON responds in veiled words, which partakes of a kind of irony, and it is SOCRATES who, arriving there with his big boots, simply changes the rules of the game. And in truth, when AGATHON responds [201c]:

“Ἐγώ, ϕάναι, ὦ Σώκρατες, σοὶ οὐκ ἂν δυναίμην ἀντιλέγειν” [ego, phanai, o Socrates, soi ouk an dunaimèn anti-legein] “I will not set myself to argue, to contest with you, but I agree, go ahead in your way, according to your manner of proceeding.”

There is here someone who steps back and says to the other: “Now let us move on to the other register, to the other way of dealing with speech!” But it cannot be said, as the commentators do, even the one whose text I have before me: Léon ROBIN, that this is a sign of impatience from AGATHON. In short, if truly AGATHON’s speech can be put in quotation marks as this truly paradoxical play, this kind of sophistic feat, all we have to do is take seriously—this is the correct way—what SOCRATES himself says [201c] of this speech which, to use the French term that best corresponds to it, stuns him, “petrifies” him, as it is expressly said, since SOCRATES makes a pun on the name GORGIAS and the figure of the GORGON [wordplay: “Gorgias”/“Gorgon”]. Such a speech closes the door to dialectical play, petrifies SOCRATES, and, he says, turns him to stone.

But this is not an effect to be disregarded. SOCRATES brought things to the level of his method, his interrogative method, his way of questioning, his way also—as presented to us by PLATO—of articulating, of dividing the object, of operating according to this διαίρεσις [diairesis], by virtue of which the object is presented, on examination, to be situated, articulated in a certain way, of which we can identify the register with the progress that has been made by a development of knowledge, originally suggested by the Socratic method.

But the scope of the agathonic speech is not for that reason annihilated. It belongs to another register, but it remains exemplary. It plays, in short, an essential function in the progress of what is demonstrated to us through the succession of encomia concerning love.

No doubt it is for us significant, rich in lessons, that it is the tragedian who, about love or from love, has made, if one can say so, the comic romance, and that it is the comic ARISTOPHANES who has spoken of love with an almost modern accent, in the sense of passion. This is eminently rich in suggestions and questions for us.

But SOCRATES’ intervention comes as a rupture, not as something that devalues or reduces to nothing what has just been stated in AGATHON’s speech. And after all, can we consider as nothing and as a mere antiphrasis the fact that SOCRATES places all the emphasis on the fact that it was—as he puts it, strictly speaking [198b]—καλὸν λόγον [kalon logon], a beautiful speech, that he spoke very beautifully?

Often the evocation of the ridiculous, of what can provoke laughter, has been made in the preceding text. But SOCRATES does not seem to tell us that it is in any way ridicule that is at issue at the moment of this change of register, and at the moment when he brings in the wedge that his dialectic has driven into the subject, in order to bring what is expected of the Socratic light. It is a discord that we sense, not a balancing act entirely meant to annul what, in AGATHON’s speech, has been formulated.

Here we cannot fail to notice that, in SOCRATES’ speech, with what is articulated as properly his method, his interrogative method—which means that, if you allow me this Greek wordplay, the ἐρώμενος [erômenos], the beloved, will become the έρωτώμενος [erôtomenos], the questioned one—with this properly Socratic questioning, SOCRATES brings out only a theme that, since the beginning of my commentary, I have repeatedly announced, namely: the function of lack.

Everything that AGATHON says more specifically about love, that beauty for example belongs to it, is one of its attributes, all this collapses [199d-e] before the interrogation, this remark of SOCRATES:

This Love you speak of, is it or is it not love of something?
“To love and to desire something, is it to have it or not to have it? Can one desire what one already has?”

I will pass over the details of the articulation of this particular question. He turns it, returns it, with an acuity that, as usual, turns his interlocutor into someone he handles, maneuvers. This is indeed the ambiguity of SOCRATES’ questioning, that he is always the master, even where—for us who read—in many cases it might appear to be an escape.

No matter, moreover, to know what, on this occasion, should or could be developed in all rigor. What matters to us here is the testimony that constitutes the essence of Socratic interrogation, and also what SOCRATES introduces, wishes expressly to produce, that about which, conventionally, he speaks to us. It is attested to us that the adversary cannot refuse the conclusion, namely, as he expresses explicitly [200e]:

“In this case, as in every other,” he concludes, “where the object of desire for the one who feels this desire is something, τοῦ μὴ ἑτοίμου [tou mè hetoimou], which is not at his disposal: καὶ τοῦ μὴ παρόντος [kai tou mè parontos] and which is not present: καὶ ὃ μὴ ἔχει [kai ho mè echei] in short, something καὶ ὃ μὴ ἔστιν [kai ho mè estin] which he does not possess, αὐτὸς: something he is not himself—as translated—καὶ οὗ ἐνδεής ἐστι [kai hou endeès esti]: something of which he is deprived.” “τοιαῦτ᾽ ἄττα ἐστὶν ὧν ἡ ἐπιθυμία τε καὶ ὁ ἔρως ἐστίν” [toiaut’ atta estin ôn hè epithumia te kai ho erôs estin] “it is this sort of object for which there is desire as well as love.”

[Καὶ οὗτος ἄρα καὶ ἄλλος πᾶς ὁ ἐπιθυμῶν τοῦ μὴ ἑτοίμου ἐπιθυμεῖ καὶ τοῦ μὴ παρόντος, καὶ ὃ μὴ ἔχει καὶ ὃ μὴ ἔστιν αὐτὸς καὶ οὗ ἐνδεής ἐστι, τοιαῦτ᾽ ἄττα ἐστὶν ὧν ἡ ἐπιθυμία τε καὶ ὁ ἔρως ἐστίν (200e)]

The text is assuredly translated weakly:

ἐπιθυμία [epithumei] he desires, τοῦ μὴ ἑτοίμου [tou mè hetoimou], which is strictly speaking: what is not ready-to-wear, τοῦ μὴ παρόντος [tou mè parontos]: what is not there, what he does not have, ὃ μὴ ἔχει καὶ ὃ μὴ ἔστιν αὐτὸς [ho mè echei kai ho mè estin autos] “what he is not himself, what he is lacking, what he lacks essentially” οὗ ἐνδεής [hou endeès] in the superlative.

[200e, Trans. Luc Brisson: “Under these conditions, to love that which one is not yet endowed with and does not possess, is it not to wish that, in the future, those things be kept for us and remain present?”]

This is what is articulated by SOCRATES in what he introduces to this new speech, that something of which he has said that it is not placed on the level of verbal play, whereby we would say that the subject is captured, captivated, is fixed, fascinated [199b]. That in which it differs from the sophistic method is that he makes the progress of a speech reside, as he tells us, in what he pursues without seeking elegance, with the words of all, in this exchange, this dialogue, this consent obtained from the one he addresses, and in this consent presented as the emergence, the necessary evocation, in the one to whom he speaks, of the knowledge he already possesses. This, as you know, is the essential point of articulation on which all Platonic theory, both of the soul and of its nature, of its consistency, of its origin, rests.

In the soul already are all these knowledges which it is enough for just questions to reawaken, to reveal. These knowledges have been there forever and attest in a certain way to the precedence, the anteriority of knowledge, to the fact that it is not only from always, but that because of it we can suppose that the soul participates in an infinite anteriority, it is not only immortal, it has always existed.

And it is this which provides the ground, and lends itself to the myth of metempsychosis, of reincarnation, which undoubtedly on the mythical level… on a level other than that of dialectic… is nevertheless what accompanies on the margin the development of Platonic thought.

But one thing is there to strike us: having introduced what I earlier called this wedge of the notion, of the function of lack as essential, constitutive of the love relation, SOCRATES, speaking in his own name, stops there! And it is no doubt asking a just question to wonder why he substitutes the authority of DIOTIMA. But it also seems to us that it is, this question, to solve it too cheaply, to say that it is to spare AGATHON’s pride.

Things are as we are told, namely that PLATO only needs to make a very elementary move of judo or jiu-jitsu:

“I beg you, I did not even know what I was telling you, my speech is elsewhere”

as he expressly says. [201b] It is not so much AGATHON who is in difficulty as SOCRATES himself. And as we cannot suppose, in any way, that this is what PLATO meant, to show us SOCRATES as a pedant with a rather heavy step, after the assuredly airy speech—even if only in its amusing style—which is AGATHON’s, we must really think that if SOCRATES passes the baton in his speech, it is for another reason than the fact that he could not himself continue. And this reason we can immediately locate: it is because of the nature of the matter, of the thing, of the τὸ πρᾶγμα [to pragma] in question.

We may suspect—and you will see that what follows confirms it—that it is because they are speaking of love, that one must go through this, that he is led to proceed in this way. Let us note in fact the point to which his question was directed: the efficacy he has promoted, produced, as being the function of lack, and in a very obvious way, the return to the desiring function of love: the substitution of ἐπιθυμία [epithumei], he desires, for ἔρα [era], he loves.

And in the text [199d-e], we see the moment when, questioning AGATHON about whether “he thinks or not that love is love of something,” the term is substituted: love or desire of something.

It is quite obvious, in so far as love is articulated in desire, is articulated in a way that here is not properly speaking articulated as substitution, that the substitution is not—as can legitimately be objected—the very function of the method which is that of Socratic knowledge, it is precisely because the substitution is there, a little hasty, that we have the right to point it out, to notice it. This does not mean that there is a fault for all that, since it is indeed around the articulation of Erôs: Love, and of erôs: desire, that all the dialectic, as it develops in the whole dialogue, will turn. Still, it is fitting that the thing be pointed out in passing.

There, let us also note that what is properly the Socratic intervention, it is not for nothing that we find it thus isolated. SOCRATES goes exactly as far as the point where, what I called last time “his method”—which is to make the effect of his questioning bear on what I called the coherence of the signifier—is properly manifest, visible in the very delivery, in the way he introduces his question to AGATHON [199d]:

“εἶναί τινος ὁ Ἔρως ἔρως, ἢ οὐδενός ?” [einai tinos ho Erôs erôs, è oudenos] “Yes or no, is Love love of something or of nothing?”
[199d, Trans. Luc Brisson: “Is it in the nature of Love to be the love of someone or of something, or of no one or of nothing?”]

And here he specifies, for the Greek genitive τινος [tinos] “of something” like the French genitive has its ambiguities, “of something” can have two meanings, and these meanings are in some sense accentuated in a nearly massive, caricatural way, in the distinction SOCRATES makes: τινος [tinos] can mean [199d] being of someone, being the descendant of someone:

“what I am asking you is not whether it is with respect to—he says—such a father or such a mother…”

But what is behind this, this is precisely the whole theogony that was mentioned at the beginning of the dialogue. It is not a matter of knowing from whom love descends, of who it is, as one says “My kingdom is not of this world,” of which god is love, to say it all. It is a matter of knowing, on the level of the interrogation of the signifier, of what—as signifier—love is the correlate.

And that is why we find marked, we cannot, it seems to me, fail to notice:

– that what SOCRATES opposes to this way of posing the question, “whose love is this?”
– that what is at stake is the same thing, he says, as this “Name of the Father.”

We find it here again because what we find is the same “Father.” It is the same thing to ask: when you say “Father,” what does it imply, not the real father, that is, what child he has, but when one speaks of a father one necessarily speaks of a son. The Father is the father of the son by definition, as father

“You would no doubt tell me, if you wished to give a good answer”—translates Léon ROBIN—“that it is precisely of a son, or of a daughter, that the father is father.” [199d].

We are here, strictly speaking, on the ground that is properly where the Socratic dialectic develops, interrogating the signifier on its coherence as a signifier. There he is strong, there he is sure, and even if what allows for this somewhat quick substitution I spoke of between erôs and desire is that, it is nonetheless a process, a progress that is marked, he says, by his method.

If he passes the word to DIOTIMA, why should it not be that, concerning love, things could not, with the properly Socratic method, go any further? I think everything will demonstrate this, and DIOTIMA’s speech itself. Why should we be surprised by this, I would say already? If there is a step that constitutes, compared to the contemporaneity of the sophists, the initium of the Socratic approach, it is that a knowledge—the only certain one, SOCRATES tells us in the Phaedo—can be affirmed by the sole coherence of this discourse, which is dialogue, which is pursued around the necessary apprehension—of apprehension as necessary—of the law of the signifier.

When one speaks of the even and the odd, about which—do I need to remind you in my teaching here—I think I have taken enough trouble, have exercised you long enough to show you

– that this is the domain entirely closed in its own register [of the signifier],
– that the even and the odd owe nothing to any other experience than that of the play of the signifiers themselves,
– that there is even and odd, in other words countable, only what is already brought to the function of element of the signifier, of the grain of the signifying chain: one can count words or syllables, but one can count things only from the point where words and syllables are already counted.

We are at this level, when SOCRATES speaks, outside the confused world of discussion, of debate, of the “physicists” who precede him, as of the sophists who, at various levels, for various reasons, organize what we would call in short—you know I do so only with all reservations—“the magical power of words.”

SOCRATES affirms this knowledge internal to the play of the signifier. He posits at the same time that—this knowledge entirely transparent to itself—that it is this which constitutes its truth. Now is it not on this point that we have taken the step by which we are in discord with SOCRATES? In this passage, no doubt essential, which secures the autonomy of the law of the signifier, SOCRATES—for us—prepares this field of the verb properly speaking, which, for him, will have enabled all the critique of human knowledge as such.

But the novelty—if what I am teaching you concerning the Freudian revolution is correct—is precisely this: that something can be sustained in the law of the signifier, not only without this involving knowledge, but by expressly excluding it, that is, by constituting itself as unconscious, that is, by necessitating at its level the eclipse of the subject in order to subsist as an unconscious chain, as constituting what is irreducible in its core in the relation of the subject to the signifier.

This is to say that it is for this reason that we are the first, if not the only ones, not necessarily to be surprised that the properly Socratic discourse, the discourse of episteme: of knowledge transparent to itself, cannot continue beyond a certain limit concerning such an object, when that object—if it is indeed the one on which Freudian thought has shed new light—this object is love.

In any case—whether you follow me here or not—concerning a dialogue whose effect through the ages has been maintained with the force and constancy, the interrogative power and the perplexity that develop around it: Plato’s Symposium, it is clear that we cannot content ourselves with such paltry reasons as to say that if SOCRATES has DIOTIMA speak, it is simply to avoid excessively pricking AGATHON’s pride.

If you allow a comparison which keeps all its ironic value, suppose I were to develop for you the entirety of my doctrine on analysis, verbally, and—that verbally or in writing, no matter—while doing so, at a certain point I hand the word to Françoise DOLTO, you would say: “Still, there is something, why, why is he doing this?” This, of course, supposing that if I were to hand the word to Françoise DOLTO it would not be to have her say stupid things! That would not be my method, and besides, I would have trouble putting any in her mouth.

It troubles SOCRATES much less as you will see, for DIOTIMA’s speech is precisely characterized by something which, at every moment, leaves us before gaps for which we certainly understand why it is not SOCRATES who takes responsibility for them.

Much more, SOCRATES punctuates these gaps with a whole series of replies which are in a way—it’s evident, you only have to read the text—more and more amused. I mean that at first these are very respectful replies, then increasingly in the style of: “You think so?” then: “Alright, let’s go as far as you lead me,” and then, in the end, it clearly becomes: “Have your fun, my girl, I’m listening, go on talking!”

You have to read this speech to realize that this is what is at issue. Here I cannot fail to make a remark which, it seems, has not struck the commentators: ARISTOPHANES, in connection with Love [193a], introduced a term which is simply transcribed in French under the name “dioecism.” It is nothing other than this Spaltung [wordplay: German “split” or “division”], this splitting of the original all-round being, this sort of derisory sphere of the Aristophanic image whose value I explained to you.

And this “dioecism,” he calls it so by comparison with a practice which, in the context of communal relations, of relations in the city, was the mechanism on which all politics in Greek society played. This practice consisted in the following: when one wanted to put an end to an enemy city—which is still done nowadays—to scatter the inhabitants and put them in what are called “resettlement camps.”

This had happened not long before the time when the Symposium appeared, and it is even one of the markers around which the date we can attribute to the Symposium revolves. There is apparently some anachronism here, the event to which PLATO would be alluding—namely, an initiative by Sparta—having taken place after the text, after the presumed meeting of the Symposium and its unfolding around “the praise of love.”

This “dioecism” is very evocative for us, it’s not for nothing that I earlier used the term Spaltung, a term evocative of subjective splitting, and that, at the very moment when—what I am expounding before you, to the extent that it is a matter of the discourse of love—something escapes SOCRATES’ knowledge, SOCRATES withdraws, splits himself and has, in his place, a woman speak. Why not “the woman who is in him”?

In any case, no one disputes it, and some, Wilamowitz MOELLENDORFF in particular, have emphasized, pointed out, that there is in any case a difference of nature, of register, between what SOCRATES develops on the level of his dialectical method and what he presents to us in the form of myth, through all that is transmitted to us, restored to us by the Platonic testimony.

We must always—and in the text it is always very clearly separated—when we reach—and in many other fields than that of love—a certain point of what can be obtained on the level of episteme, of knowledge, to go further… it is entirely conceivable that there is a limit, if the field of knowledge is only what is accessible by simply and purely bringing into play the law of the signifier, in the absence of well-advanced experimental conquests, it is clear that in many domains, and in domains on which we, for our part, can do without… it will be urgent to hand over to myth, to let myth speak.

What is remarkable is precisely this rigor that means when one shifts, one shifts onto the level of myth, PLATO always knows perfectly what he is doing or what he makes SOCRATES do, and it is clear that we are in myth… by myth, I do not mean in its common use, μύθους λέγειν [muthous legein] to tell tales, it does not mean that… μύθους λέγειν [muthous legein] is common discourse: what is said, that’s it.

And throughout the Platonic work we see in the Phaedo, in the Timaeus, in the Republic, myths emerge, at the moment they are needed, to make up for the gap of what cannot be secured dialectically.

From there, we will better see what constitutes what can be called the progress of DIOTIMA’s speech. Someone here, one day, wrote an article called, if I remember correctly: “A child’s desire.” This article was entirely constructed on the ambiguity of this term:
– desire of a child, in the sense that it is the child who desires,
– desire for a child, in the sense of wanting to have a child.
This is not a simple accident of the signifier if things are thus. And the proof is that you have been able to notice that it is around this ambiguity that SOCRATES’ oblique attack on the problem pivots.

What was AGATHON telling us in the end? That EROS was the erôs of the Beautiful, the desire for the Beautiful, I would say in the sense that: the god Beauty desires. And what SOCRATES retorted was that a desire for the Beautiful implies that the Beautiful is not possessed.

These verbal subtleties do not have the character of vanity, of needle-point, of confusion, from which one might be tempted to turn away. The proof is that it is around these two terms that DIOTIMA’s entire discourse will develop.

And first, to clearly indicate continuity, SOCRATES will say that it is on the same level [201e], that it is with the same arguments he used with AGATHON, that DIOTIMA introduces her dialogue with him. The foreigner from Mantinea, who is presented to us as a figure of priestess, of sorceress—let us not forget that at this turning point in the Symposium, we are told much about these arts of divination, about the ways to act, to obtain the favor of the gods in order to shift the natural forces—she is knowledgeable in these matters of sorcery, of mantic, as Count DE CABANIS would say, of all goetia. The term is Greek: γοητεία [goèteia] and is in the text.

Moreover, we are told something about her that I am surprised is not given more importance when reading this text: that she supposedly succeeded by her arts in postponing the plague by ten years, and in Athens to boot [201d]! We must admit that this familiarity with the powers of the plague is certainly something that makes us reflect, that makes us situate the stature and approach of the figure of a person who is going to speak to you about love.

It is on this level that things are introduced and it is on this level that she continues concerning what SOCRATES, who at this moment acts naïve or pretends to lose his Greek, asks her [201e]: “So if Love is not beautiful, does that mean it is ugly?” Here indeed is where the logic of the method of “more or less,” of “yes or no,” of “presence or absence,” the very logic of the law of the signifier, leads: what is not beautiful is ugly, that is at least what a strict pursuit of SOCRATES’ usual mode of questioning would imply.

To which the priestess is in a position to reply: “My son—I would say—do not blaspheme! And why should everything that is not beautiful be ugly?” [201e]

To explain, she introduces us to the myth of “the birth of Love,” which is well worth our attention. Let me point out to you that this myth exists only in PLATO. That among the countless myths, I mean the countless mythical accounts of “the birth of Love” in ancient literature—I have taken the trouble to go through a number of them—there is no trace of what is about to be stated here. Yet it is the myth that has remained, if I may say, the most popular. It therefore appears, it seems, absolutely clear that a character who owes nothing to tradition in this regard, in short, a writer from the age of the Enlightenment, like PLATO, is quite capable of forging a myth, and a myth that carries through the centuries in a very vivid way, functioning as a myth, for who does not know that since PLATO told us:

“Love is the son of Πόρος [Poros] and Πενία [Penia].”

Πόρος [Poros], the author whose translation I have before me—simply because it is the translation that faces the Greek text—translates it, in a way that is not entirely irrelevant, as expedient [203b]. If expedient means resource, it is certainly a valid translation, cleverness also, if you like, since Πόρος [Poros] is the son of Μῆτις [Mètis], who is even more invention than wisdom.

Opposite him we have the feminine figure in this matter, the one who is to be the mother of Love, who is Πενία [Penia], that is, Poverty, or even destitution, and—in a way articulated in the text—who is characterized by what she knows very well about herself: it is ἀπορία [aporia], that she is without resources, this is what she knows about herself, it is that as for resources she has none! And the word ἀπορία [aporia], you recognize, is the same word we use regarding the philosophical process: it is an impasse, it is something before which we give up, we run out of resources.

So here is the female ἀπορία [aporia] facing the male Πόρος [Poros], the Expedient, which seems quite enlightening. But there is something very charming in this myth, which is that for ἀπορία [aporia] to conceive Love with Πόρος [Poros], a condition is required, which the myth expresses: at the moment it happened, it was ἀπορία [aporia] who was awake, who had her eyes wide open and, we are told, had come to the festivities for the birth of APHRODITE and, like any self-respecting ἀπορία [aporia] in this hierarchical era, she stayed on the steps, near the door, she did not enter, of course—to be ἀπορία [aporia] is to have nothing to offer—she did not enter the banquet hall.

But the joy of festivities is precisely that things happen there which overturn the ordinary order, and Πόρος [Poros] falls asleep. He falls asleep because he is drunk, which allows ἀπορία [aporia] to be impregnated by him, that is, to have this offspring called Love, whose date of conception will coincide with the date of APHRODITE’s birth.

That is precisely why, it is explained to us, Love will always have some obscure connection with beauty [203c]—which will be the subject of DIOTIMA’s whole development—and it is because APHRODITE is a beautiful goddess.

So here things are stated clearly. It is, on the one hand, the masculine that is desirable, and the feminine that is active. At least, that is how things happen at the moment of Love’s birth.

And when one formulates that “love is giving what one does not have,” believe me, it is not, concerning this text, just one of my “hobbies” [wordplay: French “dada” means both hobby and hobby-horse]: it is perfectly clear that this is exactly the issue, since the poor Πενία [Penia], by definition, by structure, strictly speaking has nothing to give except her constitutive lack—άπορία [aporia].

And what allows me to say that I am not forcing anything here is that the expression “to give what one does not have,” if you refer to passage 202a of the Symposium, you will find it written out in full in the form of the development that, from that point, DIOTIMA gives to the function of love, namely: “ἄνευ τοῦ ἔχειν λόγον δοῦναι.”

This is exactly modeled, in relation to discourse, on the formula “to give what one does not have”: here it is a matter of “giving a speech, a valid explanation, without having it.” This is the moment in her development where DIOTIMA is led to say to whom love belongs. Well, love belongs to a zone, to a kind of affair, of thing, of πρᾶγμα [pragma], of ἀρᾶξις [praxis] which is of the same level, of the same quality as δοξα [doxa], that is, this which exists, that there are discourses, behaviors, opinions—it is the translation we give of the term δοξα [doxa]—which are true without the subject being able to know it.

The δοξα [doxa] insofar as it is true but not ἐπιστήμη [episteme], it is one of the main points of Platonic doctrine to distinguish its field. Love as such is something that belongs to this field. It is “between ἐπιστήμη [episteme] and ἄμαθία [amathia] ignorance,” just as it is “between the beautiful and the true.” It is neither one nor the other. To remind SOCRATES that his objection, an objection that is no doubt feigned, naïve, that “if love lacks beauty then it must be ugly.” But it is not ugly, there is a whole domain that is, for example, exemplified by δοξα [doxa] to which we continually refer in Platonic discourse, which can show that love, according to the Platonic term, is μεταξύ [metaxu]: between the two.

That is not all! We cannot be satisfied with such an abstract, even negative, definition of the intermediary. It is here that our speaker, DIOTIMA, introduces the notion of the daimonic [202e]. The notion of the daimonic as an intermediary between immortals and mortals, between gods and men, is essential here to evoke, in that it confirms what I told you we should think of what gods are, namely that they belong to the field of the Real. We are told: these gods exist! Their existence is not here contested and the daimonic, the daimon, τὸ δαιμόνιον [to daimonion]—and there are many others besides Love—is that through which the gods make their message heard to mortals, whether they are asleep or awake [203a].

A strange thing, which also does not seem to have attracted much attention, is that “whether they are asleep or awake,” if you have heard my sentence, to whom does this refer, to the gods or to men? Well, I assure you that in the Greek text one can doubt it. Everyone translates, according to common sense, that it refers to men, but it is in the dative, which is precisely the case in which the θεοῖς [theois] appear in the sentence, so it is one more little enigma at which we will not linger. Simply, let us say that the myth situates the order of the daimonic at the point where our psychology speaks of the world of animism. This is quite well constructed in a sense to urge us to correct how simplistic the idea is that the primitive would have a world of the animist.

What is said to us here, in passing, is that it is the world of messages that we would call “enigmatic,” which only means, for us, messages in which the subject does not recognize his own. The discovery of the unconscious is essential in that it has allowed us to extend the field of messages that we can authenticate—the only ones we can authenticate as messages, in the proper sense of this term insofar as it is grounded in the domain of the Symbolic—namely that many of those we believed to be opaque messages of the Real are only our own, it is this which is won from the world of the gods, and this also which, at the point where we are, is not yet conquered.

It is around this that what will be developed in DIOTIMA’s myth… We will continue it from start to finish next time and, having gone all the way around, we will see why it is doomed to leave opaque what is the object of the praises which constitute the rest of the Symposium, doomed to leave it opaque, and to leave as the only field where its truth can be elucidated, only what will follow from the entry of ALCIBIADES.

Far from being an add-on, a superfluous or even rejectable part, this entrance of ALCIBIADES is essential! For it is from it, it is in the action that develops from ALCIBIADES’ entrance, between ALCIBIADES, AGATHON and SOCRATES, that alone the structural relationship can be effectively given. It is precisely there that we can recognize what the discovery of the unconscious and the experience of psychoanalysis, namely the experience of transference, finally allow us to express in a dialectical way.