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(All parts in English)

I left you last time, as a kind of relay in our discussion, with the word – to which, at the same time, I told you that I would leave it its full value as a riddle until next time – with the word ἄγαλμα [agalma]. I did not know how right I was to say so. For a great many, the riddle was so complete that people asked: “What? What did he say? Do you know?” In the end, to those who expressed this concern, someone in my household was able to give at least this answer – which proves that, at least in my case, secondary education is good for something – it means: “ornament, adornment.”

In any case, this answer was, indeed, only a first-glance response, what everyone should know: ἄγαλμα [agalma], from ἀγάλλω [agallô], to adorn, to ornament, does in fact mean, at first sight, ornament, adornment. To begin with, the notion of ornament, of adornment, is not so simple, one immediately sees that this can take us far. Why, with what, does one adorn oneself? Or why adorn oneself, and with what? It is quite clear that if we are here at a central point, many avenues must lead us there. But in any case, I have retained, to make it the pivot of my explanation, this word ἄγαλμα [agalma].

See in this no concern for rarity but rather this: that in a text to which we ascribe the utmost rigor – that of the Symposium – something leads us to this crucial point which is formally indicated, at the moment when, as I told you, the scene completely turns and, after the play of praise as it has been set so far by this theme of love, there enters this actor, ALCIBIADES, who is going to change everything. I want no further proof than this: he himself changes the rules of the game by unilaterally assigning himself the presidency. [213e] From this moment on, he tells us, it will no longer be Love [the Other] that will be praised but “the other” and, specifically, each person, his neighbor on the right [214d]. You will see that, for what follows, this is important, that it already says a lot, that – if it is to be a question of love – it is in act, in this relationship of one to the other, that it will have to be manifested here.

I already pointed this out to you last time, it is notable that from the moment things take this turn, with the experienced director whom we suppose to be at the principle of this dialogue, which is confirmed by the incredible mental genealogy stemming from this Symposium, whose penultimate echo I pointed out last time with Kierkegaard’s banquet, and the last I have already named for you: it is Anders Nygren’s Eros and Agape, all of this always hangs on the framework, on the structure of the Symposium, well, this experienced character cannot, as soon as it is a question of bringing the other into play, have there be only one: there are two others, in other words: at a minimum, they are three.

Socrates does not let this escape in his answer to Alcibiades, when, after this extraordinary avowal, this public confession, this thing which is between a declaration of love and, one might almost say, a curse, a defamation of Socrates [222c-d], Socrates answers him: “It is not for me that you have spoken, it is for Agathon.”

All this makes us feel that we are moving to another register. The dual relationship of the one who, in the ascent toward love, proceeds by a path of identification if you will, as well as of the production of what we indicated in the discourse of Diotima, aided there by that marvel of Beauty, and coming to see in this Beauty itself, here identified in the end with the perfection of the work of love, finds in this “Beauty” its very term and identifies it with that perfection.

So something else comes into play here, something other than this univocal relationship which gives the end point of the work of love this goal, this end of identification with what I called into question last year: the theme of the “sovereign Good”, of the “Supreme Good”. Here it is shown that something else is suddenly substituted in the triplicity, in the complexity, which shows us, offers to reveal to us that in which – as you know – I make the essential of the analytic discovery reside: this topology from which, at its core, results the relationship of the subject to the symbolic in so far as it is essentially distinct from the imaginary and its capture.

– This is what is our term.
– This is what we will articulate next time to close what we have to say about the Symposium.
– This is, with its help, that I will bring out old models I have given you of intrasubjective topology, in so far as this is how we must understand the whole second topic of Freud.

So today, what we are highlighting is something essential for joining this topology, insofar as it is on the subject of love that we have to connect to it. It is the nature of love that is at issue. It is a position, an essential articulation too often forgotten, elided, and upon which we analysts, however, have brought the element, the keystone which allows us to bring out its problematic; it is on this that what I have to say to you today about ἄγαλμα [agalma] must concentrate.

It is all the more extraordinary, almost scandalous, that this has not been better emphasized until now, for it is a properly analytic notion, which I hope to make you feel, to make you, in a moment, grasp with your very fingertips.

Ἄγαλμα [agalma], here is how it appears in the text: ALCIBIADES speaks about SOCRATES, he says he is going to unmask him – today we will not go as far as to explain everything that the speech of ALCIBIADES means – you know that ALCIBIADES goes into the greatest detail about his adventure with SOCRATES. What did he try? That SOCRATES – let’s say – would show him his desire, for he knows that SOCRATES has desire for him, what he wanted was a sign. Let us leave this in suspense, it is too soon to ask why. We are only at the beginning of ALCIBIADES’ approach and at first glance this approach does not seem essentially different from what has been said up to now. It was at the beginning, in the speech of PAUSANIAS, about what is sought in love, and it was said that what each seeks in the other – an exchange of good practices – was what it contained of ἐρώμενον [erômenon], of what is desirable. It does seem to be the same thing… it seems to be the same thing now. ALCIBIADES tells us that:

“SOCRATES is someone whose amorous inclinations are directed towards beautiful boys – this is a preamble [216d] – his ignorance is general, he knows nothing ἄγνοεῖ [agnoei], at least in appearance!”

And here, he moves on to the famous comparison with the Silenus, which has a double significance, I mean first of all that this is his appearance, that is to say, anything but beautiful, and on the other hand, that this Silenus is not simply the image designated by this name, but also something that has its usual aspect: it is a wrapping, a container, a way of presenting something. These little instruments of the industry of the time must have existed, they were small Sileni that served as jewelry boxes, as packaging for giving gifts and that is exactly what it is about. This topological indication is essential. What is important is what is inside. Ἄγαλμα [agalma] may well mean facing or adornment, but here it is above all a precious object, a jewel, something that is inside.

And here expressly, ALCIBIADES pulls us out of this dialectic of the “Beautiful” which up to now was the path, the guide, the mode of capture on this path of the desirable. And he disabuses us, concerning SOCRATES himself.

“ἴστε ὅτι [iste hoti], know this – he says [216d] – in appearance SOCRATES is in love with beautiful boys: οὔτε εἴ τις καλός ἐστι [oute ei tis kalos esti], whether one or the other is beautiful μέλει αὐτῷ οὐδέν [melei autô ouden], it means nothing to him, he does not care at all, he in fact despises it, καταϕρονεῖ [kataphroneî] – we are told – beauty, to a degree you cannot imagine τοσοῦτον [216e] ὅσον οὐδ᾽ἂν εἷς οἰηθείη [tosouton hoson oud’an eis oiètheiè], you cannot even imagine, and in truth, the goal he pursues…

I emphasize this because it is indeed in the text, it is expressly articulated at this point that it is not only external goods, wealth for example, about which each until now – we are delicate souls – has said that it was not that which one sought in others, nor any of those other advantages that might seem in any way to provide μακαρία [makaria], happiness, bliss, ὑπὸ πλήθους [hupo plèthous] to anyone. It is completely wrong to interpret it here as if it were a question of despising goods that are “goods for the crowd”: what is rejected is precisely what has been spoken of so far: goods in general.

On the other hand – ALCIBIADES tells us – do not let his strange aspect stop you if, εἰρωνευόμενος [eirôneuomenos] he plays the naïve, he questions, he plays dumb to get what he wants, he really behaves like a child, he spends his time joking. But Σπουδάσαντος δὲ αὐτοῦ [spouda santos de autou] – not, as is translated, “when he gets serious” but rather: – be serious, pay close attention, open up the Silenus, ἀνοιχθέντος [anoichthentos] opened, I do not know if anyone has ever seen the agalmata that are inside, the jewels.

So, right away ALCIBIADES asserts that he strongly doubts that anyone has ever been able to see what it is about. We know that not only is this the discourse of passion, but that it is the discourse of passion at its most trembling point, namely the point which is, in a sense, wholly contained in the origin. Even before it is explained, it is already there, heavy with the impact of everything he has to tell us that is about to be released. It is thus truly the language of passion. Already this unique, personal relationship:

“…no one has ever seen what it is about, as happened to me, and I saw it! I found them, these ἄγαλματα [agalmata] to such an extent already divine, χρυσᾶ [chrusa] [217a] – it is sweet, it is “of gold” [wordplay] – totally beautiful, so extraordinary, incredible, that there remained only one thing to do, ἔμβραχυ [embrakhi], in the shortest time, by the shortest routes, to do everything SOCRATES could command.”

Ποιητέον [poièteon], what is to be done, what becomes duty, is “everything it pleases SOCRATES to command.”

I do not think it useless for us to articulate such a text step by step. This is not something one reads as one reads France-Soir or an article from the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. This is indeed something whose effects are surprising: on the one hand, these ἄγαλματα [agalmata] (in the plural) we are not told for the time being what they are, and on the other hand, this suddenly brings about this subversion, this falling under the sway of the commands of the one who possesses them.

You cannot – really! – not recognize something of the magic that I have already pointed out to you around the “Che vuoi?”, “What do you want?” It is indeed this key, this essential edge of the topology of the subject that begins with: “What do you want?” In other words: “Is there a desire that is truly your will?”

Now, ALCIBIADES continues, as I thought he too was serious when he spoke of ὥρᾳ [hôra], ἐμῇ ὥρᾳ [emè hôra] – translated as “the flower of my beauty” – and the whole scene of seduction begins [217a]. But as I told you, we will not go further today, we will try to make you feel what makes necessary this passage from the first stage to the other, namely why it is absolutely essential that SOCRATES unmasks himself.

We will only stop at these ἄγαλματα [agalmata]. I can tell you that it is not – give me this credit – from this text that the problematic of ἄγαλμα [agalma] originates for me, not that there would be any disadvantage to that, for this text is enough to justify it, but I will tell you the story as it is. I can tell you that, without being able to date it precisely, my first encounter with ἄγαλμα [agalma] was, like all encounters, unexpected.

It was in a verse from Euripides’ Hecuba that it struck me a few years ago, and you will easily understand why. It was still a little before the period when I introduced here the function of the phallus, in the essential articulation that analytic experience and Freud’s doctrine show us, that it has between demand and desire, so that in passing, I could not fail to be struck by the use of this term in the mouth of HECUBA. HECUBA says:

“Where are they going to take me, where are they going to deport me?”

You know, the tragedy of HECUBA takes place at the time of “the taking of Troy,” and among all the places she considers in her speech, there is:

“Will it be to that place that is both sacred and pestilential, Δῆλος [Delos]?”

Since, as you know, one was neither allowed to give birth there nor to die there. And there, in front of the description of Delos, she alludes to a famous object, which was – as the way she speaks of it indicates – “a palm tree” of which she says that this palm tree is ὠδῖνος ἄγαλμα Δίας [ôdinos agalma dias], that is: ôdinos: of pain, agalma dias: the term Δίας refers to Λητώ [Leto], it is a matter of the birth of APOLLO, it is the agalma of the pain of the divine.

We find again the theme of childbirth but still rather transformed, for here this trunk, this tree, this magical thing erected, preserved as a reference object through the ages, is something that cannot fail – for us, at least, as analysts – to awaken the whole register that exists around the theme of the female phallus in so far as its fantasy is there, as we know, on the horizon and situates this childish object as a fetish. The fetish that remains cannot but also be for us the echo of this meaning. But in any case, it is clear that ἄγαλμα [agalma] cannot here in any way be translated as ornament, adornment, nor even, as is often seen in texts: statue, for often θεῶν ἄγαλματα [theôn agalmata], when quickly translated, one thinks it fits, that in the text it is a matter of statues of the gods.

You can see immediately, what I want to draw your attention to, what makes, I believe, that it is a term to be highlighted in this meaning, this hidden accent that presides over what must be done to resist the trend toward banalization which always tends to erase for us the true meaning of texts, is that every time you encounter ἄγαλμα [agalma], pay close attention: even if it seems to be about statues of the gods, if you look closely, you will realize that it is always something else. I am already giving you – we are not playing guessing games here – the key to the question by telling you that it is the “fetish” accent of the object in question that is always emphasized. And in any case, I am not giving a course in ethnology here, nor even in linguistics, I am not, in this regard, going to tie the function of the fetish, nor of those round stones, essentially at the center of a temple: the temple of APOLLO, for example.

You very often see – this is very well known – the god himself represented, a fetish of some people, a tribe from the bend of the Niger, it is something unnameable, formless, on which can sometimes be poured an enormous amount of liquids of various origins, more or less foul and filthy, and whose accumulated superposition, ranging from blood to excrement, constitutes the sign that here is something around which all sorts of effects are concentrated, making the “fetish” itself something quite other than an image, an icon, insofar as it would be a reproduction.

But this occult power of the object remains at the bottom, of the use in which even for us, the accent is still preserved in the term “idol” or “icon.” In the term idol, for example in the way POLYEUCTE uses it, it means “it’s nothing at all, it gets thrown on the ground.” But still, if you say of such and such: “I make him/her my idol,” it still means that you do not simply make him/her into a reproduction of yourself or of him/her, but that you make of him/her something else, around which something happens.

Likewise, it is not for me here to pursue the phenomenology of the “fetish” but to show the function it occupies in its place. And to do this, I can quickly point out to you that I have tried, as much as I could, to go through the passages that remain to us from Greek literature where the word ἄγαλμα [agalma] is used. And it is only to go quickly that I will not read them all to you. Just know for example that it is from the multiplicity of the deployment of meanings that I bring out for you the function, in a way central, that must be seen at the limit of the uses of this word.

For of course, we do not have the idea here, I think, in the line of the teaching I give you, that etymology consists in finding the meaning in the root. The root of ἄγαλμα is not so simple. What I want to tell you is that the authors… inasmuch as they bring it closer to άγαυός [agauos], to that ambiguous word άγαμαι [agamai]: I admire, I am amazed but also I envy, I am jealous of, which gives άγαζω [agazô], which is barely tolerated, goes toward άγαίομαι [agaiomai] which means: to be indignant… that the authors, in search of roots – I mean roots that carry with them a meaning, which is absolutely contrary to the principle of linguistics – derive from it γαλ [gal] or γελ [gel], the γελ of γελάω [gelaô], the γαλ which is the same in γλήνη [glènè] the pupil, and γαλήνη [galènè] – the other day I cited it in passing – it is the sea that shines because it is perfectly calm. In short, it is an idea of brilliance that is hidden there in the root. Likewise, άγλαός [aglaos], Aglaia, the Bright, is there to give us a familiar echo.

As you see, this does not go against what we have to say about it. I put it here only in parentheses, because in any case, it is just an opportunity to show you the ambiguities of this idea that etymology is something that leads us not to a signifier but to a central meaning. For likewise one may be interested not in the γαλ [gal], but in the first part of the phonemic articulation, namely: Αγα [aga], which is precisely what makes ἄγαλμα [agalma] interest us in relation to άγατόν [agathon]. And in this vein, you know that if I do not shy away from the importance of AGATHON’s speech, I prefer to go directly to the grand fantasy of the Cratylus. You will see that the etymology of AGATHON is άγαστός [agasthos] admirable, so God knows why one would look for in άγαστόν [agasthon], the admirable that there is in θεόν [thoon]: swift! Such is, moreover, the way everything is interpreted in the Cratylus, there are some quite charming things: in the etymology of ἄνθρωπος [anthrôpos] there is articulated language. PLATO was really quite remarkable.

Ἄγαλμα [agalma], in truth it is not on that side that we have to turn to give it its value. Ἄγαλμα [agalma], as we see, is always connected to images, provided you clearly see that, as in every context, it is always a very special type of image. I must choose among the references. There are some in EMPEDOCLES, in HERACLITUS, in DEMOCRITUS. I will take the most commonplace, the poetic ones, those that everyone knew by heart in Antiquity. I will look for them in a juxtalinear edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, for example, there are two places where one finds ἄγαλμα [agalma]. It is first in Book III in the Telemachia and it concerns the sacrifices made for the arrival of TELEMACHUS. The suitors, as usual, make a big show and a βοός [boos] is sacrificed to the god, which is translated as a heifer, it is a specimen of the ox species. And it is said that a certain LAERKES, who is a goldsmith, like HEPHAESTUS, is specially summoned and is given the task of making a golden ornament, ἄγαλμα [agalma], for the animal’s horns.

I will skip everything practical regarding the ceremony. But what is important is not what happens afterward: whether it is a sacrifice of the Vodou type, what matters is what they are said to expect from the ἄγαλμα [agalma]: ἄγαλμα, in fact, is involved, we are told so explicitly. The ἄγαλμα is precisely this golden ornament, and it is offered as a gift to the goddess ATHENA, so that, having seen it, she may be κεχάροιτο [kecharoito] gratified, let us use this word since it is one from our own language. In other words, the ἄγαλμα appears clearly as a kind of trap for gods, the gods as real beings, there are things that catch their eye.

Do not think this is the only example I have to give you of the use of ἄγαλμα. For example, in Book VIII of the same Odyssey, when we are told about what happened at the taking of Troy—that is, the famous story of the great horse which contained the enemies in its belly and all the misfortunes. The horse that was pregnant with the ruin of Troy, the Trojans who dragged it into their home wonder, and they ask themselves what they will do with it. They hesitate, and we must believe that this hesitation was fatal for them, for there were two things to do:
– either, the hollow wood, open its belly to see what was inside,
– or, having dragged it to the top of the citadel, leave it there to be—what?—μέλα ἄγαλμα [mega agalma]

It is the same idea, it is the charm. It is something that is as troubling for them as for the Greeks. It is an unusual object, to say the least, it is that famous extraordinary object that is so central to a whole series of concerns still contemporary: I do not need to invoke here the surrealist horizon.

What is certain is that, for the Ancients too, the ἄγαλμα is something around which one can, in short, catch divine attention. There are a thousand examples I could give you. In the story of Hecuba—again in EURIPIDES—elsewhere, the sacrifice to the shades of ACHILLES of his daughter POLYXENA is recounted. And it is very charming, here we have the exception which provides the occasion to evoke in us erotic mirages: it is the moment when the heroine herself offers an admirable breast which is, we are told, like an ἄγαλμα: ὠς ἀγάλματος [hôs agalmatos]. Now it is not certain, nothing indicates that we should simply be satisfied here with what this evokes, namely the perfection of the mammary organs in Greek statuary. I rather believe that what is at stake, given that at the time these were not museum objects, is rather what we see indicated everywhere else in the use made of the word, when it is said that in sanctuaries, in temples, in ceremonies, one hangs ἀνάπτω [anaptô] ἄγαλματα [agalmata].

The magical value of the objects evoked here is much more connected to the evocation of those objects we know well called ex-voto. In short, for people much closer than us to the differentiation of objects at the origin, the breasts of POLYXENA are as beautiful as ex-voto breasts, and indeed ex-voto breasts are always perfect, they are made on the wheel, in a mold. Other examples are not lacking, but we can stop there.

What is at stake is the brilliant sense, the gallant sense, for the word galant comes from gal, brilliance in Old French [wordplay]. This is truly, it must be said, what we analysts have discovered the function of under the name partial object. This is one of the greatest discoveries of analytic investigation, this function of the partial object. The thing that should most surprise us on this occasion, we analysts, is that, having discovered such remarkable things, all our effort is always to erase their originality.

It is said somewhere in PAUSANIAS, also concerning a use of ἄγαλμα [agalma], that the ἄγαλματα [agalmata] which in a certain sanctuary were related to the witches who were there expressly to hold back, to prevent the delivery of ALCMENE, were ἆμυδροτερος [amudroteros], a little bit effaced.

Well, that’s it! We too have erased, as much as we could, what the partial object means, that is to say, our first effort was to interpret what we had discovered, namely this fundamentally partial aspect of the object as it is the pivot, center, key, of human desire: it was worth pausing there for a moment. But no, not at all! We pointed that toward a dialectic of totalization, that is, the only object worthy of us, the flat object, the round object, the total object, the spherical object without feet or legs, the whole of the other, the perfect genital object toward which, as everyone knows, our love irresistibly heads!

We did not say to ourselves about all this:
– that even taking things this way, perhaps as an object of desire, this other is the sum of a heap of partial objects, which is not at all the same as a total object,
– that we ourselves, perhaps, in what we elaborate, what we have to handle from that background we call our “Id,” perhaps it is about a vast trophy of all those partial objects.

On the horizon of our own “asceticism,” of our model of love, we placed the other… in which we are not entirely wrong, but of this other, we made the other to whom is addressed this strange function we call “oblative”: we love the other for himself, at least when one has reached the goal and perfection, at the genital stage that blesses all that! We certainly gained something by opening up a certain topology of the relation to the other, of which, as you know, we have no privilege, since a whole contemporary speculation, variously personalist, revolves around it.

But it is still strange that there is something we have completely left aside in this affair—and it is indeed inevitable to leave it aside when one takes things from this particularly simplified perspective—which presupposes, with the idea of a preestablished harmony, the problem resolved: that, in sum, it is enough to love genitally in order to love the other for himself.

I have not brought here—because I dealt with it elsewhere, and you will soon see it come up—the incredible passage which, on this subject, is developed on the topic of the characterology of the genital in that volume called La Psychanalyse d’aujourd’hui. The kind of sermon delivered around this final ideality is something whose ridiculousness I have long, I think, made you feel. We do not need to linger on it today.

But in any case, it is very clear that by returning to the beginning and to the sources, there is at least one question to ask on this subject. If truly this oblative love is in some sense only the homologue, the development, the blossoming of the genital act itself, which would suffice, I would say, to give the keynote, the tone, the measure, it is clear that ambiguity persists about whether this other, our oblative love, is what we dedicate to him in this “all-love,” all for the other, if what we are seeking is his pleasure, as seems self-evident given that it is a matter of genital union, or rather his perfection.

When one evokes ideas as highly moral as that of oblative love, the least one can say about them, with which one can revive old questions, is still to evoke the duplicity of these terms. Ultimately these terms, in such a worn, simplified form, are supported only by what is underlying, namely the thoroughly modern opposition of subject and object. Likewise, as soon as an author somewhat concerned with writing in a style accessible to the contemporary audience develops these terms, it will be around the notion of subject and object that he will comment on this analytic theme: we take the other as a subject and not purely and simply as our object.

The object being placed here in the context of a value of pleasure, enjoyment, gratification. The object is supposed to reduce this unique function of the other—insofar as he must be for us the subject—to this all-purpose function, if we make of him only an object, to be after all any object, an object like any other, to be an object that can be rejected, changed, in short, to be deeply devalued. Such is the underlying theme of this idea of oblative love, as it is articulated when it is made into a sort of obligatory ethical correlate of access to a true love which would be sufficiently marked as genital.

Note that today I am less criticizing—this is also why I refrain from citing the texts—this analytic foolishness than challenging what it is based on. That is, that there would be some superiority in favor of the beloved, of the partner in love, in that he is thus, in our existential-analytic vocabulary, considered as a subject. For I do not know that, after having so thoroughly given a pejorative connotation to the fact of considering the other as an object, anyone has ever remarked that considering him as a subject is no better.

For if one object is worth another according to its noesis, provided we give the word “object” its initial meaning, that is, objects as we distinguish and can communicate them, if it is therefore deplorable that the beloved ever becomes an object, is it better that he be a subject?

It is enough to answer this by noting that if one object is worth another, for the subject it is even worse, for he is not simply worth another subject. A strict subject is exactly another! The strict subject is someone to whom we can attribute—what?—nothing other than being, like us, that being who ἔναρθρον ἔχειν ἔπος [enarthron echein epos] expresses himself in articulated language, who possesses the combinatory faculty and can, to our combinatory, respond with his own combinations, so that we can include him in our calculations as someone who combines as we do.

I think that those trained in the method we have here introduced, inaugurated, will not contradict me on this; it is the only sound definition of the subject, in any case the only sound one for us, the one that allows us to introduce how necessarily a subject enters into the Spaltung determined by his submission to language. Namely, from these terms we can see how it is strictly necessary that something happens: it is that in the subject there is a part where it speaks by itself, to which the subject nonetheless remains attached.

Likewise, this is exactly what needs to be known—and how can we come to forget it?—what function can be occupied in this very elective, privileged relationship that is the love relation, by the fact that this subject with whom, above all, we have the bond of love, in what precisely does this question have a relation to the fact that he is the object of our desire?

For if we suspend this mooring, this turning point, this center of gravity, this anchoring point of the love relation, if we bring it to light, and if in doing so, we do not distinguish it, it is truly impossible to say anything other than an evasion regarding the love relation. It is precisely to this, to this necessity of emphasizing the correlative object of desire in that it is the object, not the object of equivalence, of the transitivity of goods, of transaction over desires, but that something which is the aim of desire as such, what singles out an object above all others as being without equivalence.

It is with this function of the object, it is to this accentuation of the object, that the introduction in analysis of the function of the partial object corresponds. And likewise, as you know, everything that gives weight, resonance, accent to metaphysical discourse, always rests on some ambiguity. In other words, if all the terms you use when doing metaphysics were strictly defined, each had only a single univocal meaning, if the vocabulary of philosophy ever triumphed—in other words, the eternal goal of professors!—you would have nothing left to do in metaphysics, because you would have nothing left to say. I mean that you would realize that mathematics is much better: there, one can manipulate signs with a univocal meaning because they have none.

In any case, when you speak in a more or less passionate way about the relations of subject and object, it is because you put under the subject something other than that strict subject I spoke of earlier, and under the object, something other than the object I have just defined as something that, at the limit, borders on the strict equivalence of an unequivocal communication of a scientific object.

In short, if this object excites you, it is because hidden in it there is the object of desire: ἄγαλμα [agalma], the weight, the thing for which it is interesting to know where this famous object is, to know its function and to know where it operates, both in intersubjectivity and intrasubjectivity, and insofar as this privileged object of desire is something that, for each person, culminates at this frontier, at this limit point that I have taught you to consider as the metonymy of unconscious discourse, where it plays a role I have tried to formalize—I will return to this next time—in the fantasy [S◊a]. And it is always this object, however you have to speak of it in analytic experience—whether you call it the breast, the phallus, or excrement—it is a partial object. This is what is at stake insofar as analysis is a method, a technique that has advanced in this neglected field, this discredited field, this field excluded by philosophy—because it is not manageable, not accessible to its dialectic, and for the same reasons—which is called desire.

If we do not know how to pinpoint, to locate in a strict topology, the function of what this object means, at once so limited and so elusive in its form, which is called the partial object, if therefore you do not see the interest of what I introduce today under the name of ἄγαλμα, this is the major point of analytic experience, and I cannot believe it for a moment, since, whatever misunderstanding there may be, the force of things is that everything done and said in the most modern analytic dialectic revolves around this fundamental function—Kleinian radical reference of the object as good or bad—which is indeed regarded in this dialectic as a primordial given. This is precisely what I ask you to pause your mind on for a moment.

We make revolve a whole lot of things, a whole lot of identification functions:

– identification with the one from whom we request something in the call of love,
– and if this call is rejected, identification with that very one to whom we were addressing ourselves as the object of our love, this sensitive transition from love to identification,
– and then in a third kind of identification—you must read FREUD a little, his Essays in Psychoanalysis—the third function that this certain characteristic object takes on in that it can be the object of the desire of the other with whom we identify.

In short, our subjectivity, we make it build itself entirely in the plurality, in the pluralism of these levels of identification that we will call “ego ideal,” “ideal ego,” that we will also call “desiring ego.”

But we must nevertheless know where the partial object functions, where it is situated in this articulation. And here you can notice, simply from the current development of analytic discourse, that this object, ἄγαλμα, petit(a), object of desire, when we seek it according to the Kleinian method, is there from the very beginning before any development of the dialectic, it is already there as the object of desire.

The weight, the inter-central core of the good or bad object, in any psychology that tends to develop and explain itself in Freudian terms, it is this “good object” or this “bad object” that Melanie KLEIN situates somewhere in that origin, that beginning of beginnings which is even before the depressive phase.

Is there not something in our experience, which by itself is already sufficiently indicative? I think I have done enough today, in saying that it is around this that, concretely, in analysis or outside analysis, the division can and must be made between:
– a perspective on love which, for its part, in a sense, drowns, diverts, masks, elides, sublimates all the concrete of the experience, that famous ascent toward a “Supreme Good” of which it is astonishing that we can still, in analysis, keep vague echoes worth a few pennies, under the name of oblative love, this sort of “to love in God,” if I may say so, which would be at the bottom of every love relationship,
– or if, as experience shows, everything revolves around this privilege, this unique point and constituted somewhere by what we find only in one being, when we truly love.

But what is that exactly: ἄγαλμα, this object that we have learned to define, to distinguish in analytic experience, and around which, next time, we will try to reconstruct, in its triple topology, of the subject, the little other, and the big Other, at which point it comes into play and how it is only through the Other and for the Other that ALCIBIADES—as everyone—wants to make his love known to SOCRATES.