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(All parts in English)

There are therefore agalmata [agalmata] in SOCRATES, and this is what caused the love of ALCIBIADES. We will now return to the scene as it precisely stages ALCIBIADES in his speech addressed to SOCRATES, to which SOCRATES, as you know, will respond by actually giving an interpretation of it. We will see how this assessment might be revised, but it can be said that structurally, at first glance, SOCRATES’s intervention will have all the features of an interpretation, namely:

“Everything you have just said that is so extraordinary, huge, in its shamelessness, everything you have just revealed while talking about me, you said it for AGATHON.” [222c-d]

To understand the meaning of the scene that unfolds from one to the other of these terms, from the praise ALCIBIADES makes of SOCRATES to this interpretation by SOCRATES and to what follows, it is appropriate that we take things up again from a little further back and in detail, that is, that we look at the meaning of what happens starting from the entry of ALCIBIADES, between ALCIBIADES and SOCRATES. As I have told you, from this moment on, there has been this change: it is no longer love but another, designated in the order, that will be the subject of the praise. And what is important is precisely this: it is going to be a matter of praising the other, ἐπαίνος [épaïnos]. And it is precisely in this, as regards the dialogue, that the passage of the metaphor lies: the praise of the other replaces not the praise of love but love itself, and this from the very entry [213c].

That is to say, SOCRATES, addressing AGATHON, says to him:

“The love of that man (Alcibiades) is no small matter for me – Everyone knows that ALCIBIADES has been the great love of SOCRATES – ever since I fell in love with him, – we shall see the meaning it is appropriate to give to these terms: he was the ἐραστής [erastès] of him – I am no longer allowed to set eyes on a single handsome boy, nor to converse with any, without his becoming jealous and envious, giving way to incredible excesses and insulting me, scarcely stopping short of throwing himself at me in the most violent way! So beware and protect me – he says to AGATHON – for as for this one, the mania and the rage to love, ϕιλεραστίαν [philerastian], are what frighten me!”

It is after this that the dialogue with ERYXIMACHUS takes place, from which the new order of things will result. It is to be noted that it is agreed that praise will be given in turn to the next person, to the right in the order. This is established in the course of a dialogue between ALCIBIADES and ERYXIMACHUS.

The ἔπαινος [épaïnos], the praise that is now the topic has – as I have said – this metaphorical, symbolic function, of expressing something that, from one to the other – the one being spoken of – has a certain function as a metaphor for love, ἐπαινεῖν [epainein], to praise, here has a ritual function which is something that can be rendered in these terms: to speak well of someone. [214d] And even if this text cannot be brought up at the time of the Symposium, since it is indeed much later, ARISTOTLE in his Rhetoric, Book 1, Chapter 9, distinguishes the ἔπαινος [épaïnos] from the ἐνκώμιον [enkômion]. I have told you that I did not wish until now to go into this difference between ἔπαινος [épaïnos] and ἐνκώμιον [enkômion], but we will come to it nonetheless, led by the force of things. The difference of ἔπαινος [épaïnos] lies very precisely in the way AGATHON introduced his speech. He speaks of the object starting from its nature, from its essence, and then develops its qualities; it is, so to speak, an unfolding of the object in its essence.

Whereas the ἐνκώμιον [enkômion] which, it seems, is hard for us to translate – and the term κῶμος [kômos] implied in it no doubt plays a role – the ἐνκώμιον, if it is to be translated by something equivalent in our language, is something like a panegyric, and if we follow ARISTOTLE, it will then be a matter of weaving the garland of the deeds, the high achievements of the object, a point of view that overflows, that is eccentric in relation to the aim at its essence, which is that of ἔπαινος [épaïnos]. But ἔπαινος [épaïnos] is not something that, at first, appears without ambiguity. First, it is when it is decided that it is of ἔπαινος [épaïnos] that it will be a question, that ALCIBIADES begins to retort that the remark SOCRATES made concerning his jealousy, let us say fierce, does not have a word of truth in it:

“It’s quite the opposite! It is he, the old man, who, if I happen to praise someone in his presence, whether a god or a man, as soon as it is someone other than himself, is going to fall upon me – and he takes up the same metaphor as earlier – τω χεῖρε [tô kheire], with fists swinging!” [214d]

There is here a tone, a style, a kind of uneasiness, of confusion, a sort of embarrassed response, a nearly panicked “be quiet!” from SOCRATES: “Be quiet: won’t you hold your tongue?” is a fairly accurate translation. “By Poseidon,” replies ALCIBIADES (which is no small thing), “you may not protest, I forbid you! You know very well that I would not praise anyone else in your presence!” “Well then,” says ERYXIMACHUS, “go ahead, pronounce the praise of SOCRATES.” And what happens then is that—to SOCRATES [in fact: to Eryximachus]: “as I praise him, should I in front of you inflict upon him the public punishment I promised him, as I praise him, should I unmask him?” [214e]

This is then how his development will proceed. And indeed it is not without anxiety either—as if it were at once a necessity of the situation and also an implication of the genre—that the praise, in its terms, could go so far as to make one laugh at the person concerned. Thus, ALCIBIADES proposes a “gentleman’s agreement”: “Should I tell the truth?” To which SOCRATES does not object: “I invite you to tell it.” “Well then,” says ALCIBIADES [215a], “I leave you free, if I go beyond the limits of truth in my words, to say, ‘You’re lying!’ Certainly, if I happen to stray, to go astray in my speech, you should not be surprised […] considering the character—we find here again the term ἀτοπία [atopia], unclassifiable—so disconcerting are you […] how could one not get confused, when it comes to putting things in order καταριθμειν [katarithmein], to make the enumeration and the count.”

And here begins the praise. The last time, I indicated to you its structure and its theme. Indeed, ALCIBIADES says that no doubt he will enter into the γέλως [gelôs], more exactly γελοίος [geloios], the laughable, and he indeed enters into it by starting to present things through the comparison that—as I note for you—will recur essentially three times in his speech, each time with a nearly repetitive insistence, where SOCRATES is compared to this rough and ridiculous shell that is the satyr: one must in a sense open it to see inside what he calls the first time ἄγαλματα θεὸν [agalmata theon], the statues of the gods [215b]. And then, afterwards, he resumes in the terms I mentioned to you last time, again calling them ἄγαλματα θεία [agalmata theia], divine, θαυμαστά [thaumasta] admirable. The third time, we will see him use further on the term ἀρετῆς [aretès], ἄγαλματα ἀρετῆς [agalmata aretès], the marvel of virtue, the “wonder of wonders” [216e].

Along the way, what we see is this comparison, which, at the moment it is introduced, is pushed quite far, where he is compared with the satyr MARSYAS, and despite the protest: “Well, he certainly isn’t a flutist!” ALCIBIADES comes back, presses, and compares SOCRATES here to a “satyr,” not simply as the shape of a box, of an object more or less ridiculous, but specifically to the satyr MARSYAS, in that when he takes action, everyone knows by legend that the charm of his song emerges. The charm is such that he incurred the jealousy of APOLLO, this MARSYAS. APOLLO has him flayed for having dared to compete with supreme music, with divine music.

The only difference, he says, between SOCRATES and him, is that in fact SOCRATES is not a flutist: it is not through music that he operates and yet the result is exactly of the same order. And here we should refer to what PLATO explains in the Phaedrus regarding the states, if one may say so, “higher” states of inspiration as they are produced beyond the crossing of beauty. Among the various forms of this crossing—which I will not go into here—there are those by which men are revealed who are δεομένους [deomenous] who have received from the gods initiations [215c]. For them, the process, the path, consists of means among which is the drunkenness produced by a certain music, producing in them that state called “possession.”

It is to this very state that ALCIBIADES refers when he says that this is what SOCRATES produces, himself, through words, through words that are themselves without accompaniment, without instruments: he produces exactly the same effect through his words.

“When it happens that we hear an orator,” he says, “speak of such subjects, even an orator of the first rank, it produces little effect on us. On the contrary, when it is you we hear, or your words reported by another, whoever reports them, even if he is πάνυ ϕαῦλος [panu phaulos] a thoroughly insignificant man, whether the listener is a woman, a man or an adolescent, the blow he receives, the disturbance, and properly speaking κατεχόμεθα [katechometha] we are possessed by it!”

This is the determination of the point of experience for which ALCIBIADES considers that in SOCRATES there is this treasure, this utterly indefinable and precious object, which is the one that will, so to speak, fix its determination after having unleashed his desire.

It is at the principle of everything that will then be developed in his terms, his resolution, then his efforts with SOCRATES. And it is on this point that we must pause. Indeed, here is what he is going to describe to us. He had with SOCRATES an adventure that is not an ordinary one. Having made this determination, knowing that he was walking on somewhat secure ground… he knows the attention that for a long time SOCRATES has paid to what he calls his ὥρα [hora], which one translates as best one can, finally his sex appeal [217a], it seems to him that it would be enough for SOCRATES to declare himself to obtain from him exactly everything at stake, that is, what he himself defines as: everything he knows πάντ᾽ἀκοῦσαι ὅσαπερ οὗτος ᾔδει [pan t’akousai hosaper hou tos èdei].

And then comes the account of the steps. But after all, can we not already stop here? Since ALCIBIADES already knows that he has desire from SOCRATES, why does he not presume better and more easily upon his willingness? What does it mean that, in a way, based on what ALCIBIADES already knows—that for SOCRATES he is a beloved, an ἐρώμενος [erômenos]—why does he need on this subject to get from SOCRATES the sign of a desire? Since this desire is in some way recognized—SOCRATES has never made a secret of it in the past moments—recognized and thereby known, and so, one might think, already admitted, what is the meaning of these seduction maneuvers developed with such detail, such art, and at the same time with an impudence, a challenge to the listeners? A challenge so clearly perceived as something that exceeds the limits, that what introduces it is nothing less than the phrase that serves as the origin of the “mysteries” [218b]:

“You others who are here, block your ears!”

It is about those who do not have the right to hear, even less to repeat: the servants, the non-initiated, those who cannot hear what is going to be said as it will be said: it is better for them not to hear anything. And in fact, to the mystery of this requirement of ALCIBIADES, to this mystery after all corresponds the conduct of SOCRATES, because if SOCRATES has always shown himself as the ἐραστής [erastès] of ALCIBIADES, no doubt it will appear to us—in a post-Socratic perspective we would say: in another register—that it is a great virtue that he demonstrates, and that the translator of the Symposium points out in the margin, under the term “his temperance.”

But this temperance is also not, in context, something indicated as necessary. That SOCRATES shows his virtue there, perhaps! But what connection does it have with the subject at hand, if it is true that what we are shown at this level is something concerning the mystery of love. In other words, you see what I am trying to cover: this situation, this game, what is developing before us in the actuality of the Symposium, to grasp its structure, properly speaking. Let us say at once that everything in the conduct of SOCRATES indicates that the fact that SOCRATES, in short, refuses to enter himself into the game of love is closely linked to this, which is set up at the beginning as the starting point: it is that he knows. It is even, he says, “the only thing he knows”: he knows what is at stake in matters of love. And we shall say: it is because SOCRATES knows, that he does not love.

And also, with this key, let us give their full meaning to the words with which, in ALCIBIADES’s account, he welcomes him, after three or four scenes in which the rise of ALCIBIADES’s attacks is presented to us with a rising rhythm. The ambiguity of the situation always borders on what is, properly speaking, the γελοίος [geloios], the laughable, the comic. Indeed, it is a comic scene, these dinner invitations [218c] that end with a gentleman who leaves very early, very politely, after having kept people waiting, who comes back a second time and escapes again, and with whom, under the sheets, the dialogue takes place: “SOCRATES, are you asleep? – Not at all!” There is something here which, to reach its final terms, makes us pass through courses quite designed to place us at a certain level. When SOCRATES finally responds to him, after ALCIBIADES has truly explained himself [218d], has gone so far as to say to him: “Here is what I desire, and I would certainly be ashamed of it before people who would not understand, but I explain to you what I want” [218e]

SOCRATES answers him:

“In short, you are not the last of the little fools, if it is indeed true that all that you say of me I do possess, and if in me there is this power by which you would become, you, better! Yes, that is it, you must have glimpsed in me an unbelievable beauty that is different from all the others—a beauty of another kind, something else—and having discovered it, you then put yourself in a position to share it with me, or more precisely to make an exchange, beauty for beauty, and at the same time—here in the Socratic perspective of science against illusion—in place of an opinion of beauty—the doxa which does not know its function, the deception of beauty—you want to exchange the truth. And in fact, my God, that means nothing other than exchanging copper for gold. But—says SOCRATES, and here it is appropriate to take things as they are said [219a]—disabuse yourself, examine things more carefully, ἄμεινον σκόπει [ameinon skopei], so as not to be mistaken: this “I” οὐδὲν ὤν [ouden ôn] being, properly speaking, nothing. For obviously—he says—the eye of the mind opens as the range of the vision of the real eye goes down. You are certainly not at that point! But be careful, where you see something, I am nothing.”

What SOCRATES refuses—at this moment, if it can be defined in the terms I have given you concerning the metaphor of love—what SOCRATES refuses… in order to show himself as what he has already shown himself to be, I would say, almost officially in all the appearances of ALCIBIADES, so that everyone knows that ALCIBIADES, in other words, has been his first love …what SOCRATES refuses to show to ALCIBIADES is something that takes on another meaning, which would properly be the metaphor of love inasmuch as SOCRATES would admit himself as beloved and, I would add more, would admit himself as beloved unconsciously.

It is precisely because SOCRATES knows, that he refuses to have been—in any sense, justified or justifiable—ἐρώμενος [erômenos], the desirable, the one worthy of being loved. What makes it so that he does not love, that the metaphor of love cannot take place, is that the substitution of the ἐραστής [erastès: lover] for the ἐρώμενος [erômenos: beloved], the fact that he manifests himself as ἐραστής [erastès] in the place where there was the ἐρώμενος [erômenos: beloved], is what he can only refuse. Because for him, there is nothing in him that is lovable, because his essence is this οὐδὲν [ouden], this emptiness, this hollow, to use a term that was later employed in Neoplatonic and Augustinian meditation, this κένωσις [kénosis] which represents the central position of SOCRATES.

This is so true that this term κένωσις [kénosis], emptiness—as opposed to fullness—of whom?—but of AGATHON precisely—is entirely at the origin of the dialogue when SOCRATES, after his long meditation in the vestibule of the neighboring house, finally arrives at the banquet and sits next to AGATHON. He begins to speak, it seems he is joking, that he is jesting, but in a dialogue as rigorous and as austere in its progression, can we believe that anything is there as mere filler? He says:

“AGATHON, you, you are full, and just as one transfers from a full vessel to an empty vessel something, a liquid, with the help of a wick along which the liquid flows, so too I will fill myself with beautiful knowledge!” [175d]

Irony, no doubt, but which aims at something, which wants to express something, which is precisely also what SOCRATES—I have repeated to you many times, and it is in the mouth of ALCIBIADES—presents as constitutive of his position, which is this: the essential thing is that he knows nothing, except concerning “the things of love”, άμαθία [amathia], inscientia, as CICERO translated, stretching a little the Latin language. Inscitia is brute ignorance, while inscientia is this not-knowing constituted as such, as emptiness, as the call of emptiness at the center of knowledge.

So you can clearly grasp, I think, what I mean here: it is that the structure constituted by the substitution, the realized metaphor constituting what I called the miracle of the appearance of the ἐραστής [erastès: lover] in the very place where was the ἐρώμενος [erômenos: beloved], it is here the lack of this which means that SOCRATES can only refuse to give, so to speak, the simulacrum. That is to say, he presents himself to ALCIBIADES as unable then to show him the signs of his desire insofar as he rejects having been himself, in any way, an object worthy of the desire of ALCIBIADES, nor indeed of the desire of anyone.

Also note that the Socratic message, if it contains something that refers to love, is certainly not in itself fundamentally something that proceeds, so to speak, from a center of love. SOCRATES is represented to us as an ἐραστής [erastès: lover], as one who desires, but nothing is farther from the image of SOCRATES than the radiation of love that comes, for example, from the Christian message. Neither effusion, nor gift, nor mysticism, nor ecstasy, nor even commandment result from it. Nothing is farther from the message of SOCRATES than “you shall love your neighbor as yourself”, a formula which is remarkably absent in the dimension of what SOCRATES says. And this is indeed what has always struck exegetes, who ultimately, in their objections to the asceticism properly of the ἔρως [erôs], say that what is commanded is: “you will love above all in your soul what is most essential to you.”

Of course, this is only an appearance. I mean that the Socratic message as it is transmitted to us by PLATO does not make a mistake here since the structure, as you will see, is preserved. And it is even because it is preserved that it also allows us to glimpse in a more accurate way the hidden mystery beneath the Christian commandment. And likewise, if it is possible to give a general theory of love under any manifestation that is a manifestation of love, even if this may at first seem surprising to you, understand well that once you have the key—I speak of what I call “the metaphor of love”—you find it absolutely everywhere. I have spoken to you about it through Victor HUGO. There is also the original book of the story of RUTH and BOAZ. If this story stands before us in a way that inspires us differently—except for a bad spirit making this story a story of a lustful old man and a maid—it is also because we suppose there this inscience: “BOAZ did not know that a woman was there.”

…and that already unconsciously RUTH is for BOAZ the object he loves. And we also suppose—and here in a formal way:

“And RUTH did not know what God wanted of her”

…that this third, this divine place of the Other, insofar as it is there that the fatality of RUTH’s desire is inscribed, is what gives her nocturnal vigilance at the feet of BOAZ its sacred character.

The underlying presence of this inscience, where already—within a veiled anteriority as such—the dignity of the ἐρώμενος [erômenos: beloved] for each of the partners is situated, is what constitutes the whole mystery of the meaning of love in the proper sense that the revelation of their desire takes on. So here is how things happen: ALCIBIADES does not understand! [219a] After hearing SOCRATES he says to him:

“Listen to me, I have said all I had to say, now it is up to you to know what you should do.”

He puts him, as they say, face to face with his responsibilities. To which SOCRATES says to him:

“We will talk about all that. Until tomorrow, we still have many things to say about it!”

In short, he puts things in the continuation of a dialogue, he engages him on his own paths. It is insofar as SOCRATES makes himself absent at the point where ALCIBIADES’s covetousness is marked… and this covetousness, can we not say that it is precisely the covetousness of the “best”? But it is precisely because it is expressed in these terms of object, namely that ALCIBIADES does not say:

“It is as my good or my bad that I want this, which is incomparable, and which is in you: ἄγαλμα [agalma]”
but:
“I want it because I want it, whether it is my good or my bad.”

It is precisely in this that ALCIBIADES reveals the central function of the object in the articulation of the relation of love, and it is precisely in this also that SOCRATES refuses to answer him on that level himself. I mean that by his attitude of refusal, by his severity, by his austerity, by his “noli me tangere,” he involves ALCIBIADES in the path of his own good.

The commandment of SOCRATES is:

“Take care of your soul, seek your perfection.”

But is it even certain that we should not, concerning this “his good,” leave some ambiguity? For after all, what has been called into question ever since this dialogue of PLATO has resonated, is the identity of this object of desire with “his good.” Should we not translate “his good” as “the good” such as SOCRATES conceives it, draws the path for those who follow him, he who brings a new discourse into the world? Let us observe that in the attitude of ALCIBIADES there is something, I was about to say sublime, in any case absolute and passionate that borders on an altogether other nature, of another message, the one where in the Gospel it is told to us that for the one who knows there is a treasure in a field—it is not said what this treasure is—he is capable of selling everything he has to buy this field and to enjoy this treasure.

It is there that the gap is located between SOCRATES’s position and that of ALCIBIADES: ALCIBIADES is the man of desire. But then you will say to me: “why does he want to be loved?” In truth, he is—himself—already, and he knows it. The miracle of love in him is realized as he becomes the desiring one, and when ALCIBIADES manifests himself as in love, as one might say, “this is no trifling matter” [French wordplay: gnognote].

It is precisely that, because he is ALCIBIADES, the one whose desires know no limits, this preferential field in which he commits himself, which is properly speaking for him the field of love, is something in which he demonstrates what I would call a very remarkable case of absence of the fear of castration, in other words a total lack of that famous Ablehnung der Weiblichkeit.

Everyone knows that the most extreme types of virility in the ancient models are always accompanied by a perfect disdain for the possible risk of being treated—even by their soldiers—as “woman,” as happened, you know, to CAESAR. ALCIBIADES here makes a feminine scene for SOCRATES. He nonetheless remains ALCIBIADES at his level. That is why we must attach all its importance to the supplement he gave to the praise of SOCRATES, namely this astonishing portrait destined to complete the impassive figure of SOCRATES. And impassivity means that he cannot even bear to be taken passively, loved, ἐρώμενος [erômenos]. The attitude of SOCRATES, or what is displayed before us as his courage in war, consists of a profound indifference to everything happening, no matter how dramatic, around him.

Thus, once the whole end of this development has been crossed, where in sum the demonstration of SOCRATES as a being without equal culminates, here is how SOCRATES comes to respond to ALCIBIADES: “You seem to me to be quite in your right mind!” [222c]

And indeed, it is under the cover of “I do not know what I am saying” that ALCIBIADES has expressed himself. SOCRATES—who knows—says to him:

“You seem to me to be quite in your right mind!” “Νήϕειν μοι δοκεῖς” [nèphein moi dokeis]

That is to say, even while being drunk I read something in you, and what is it? It is SOCRATES who knows, not ALCIBIADES. SOCRATES points out what is at stake: he is going to speak of AGATHON. At the end of ALCIBIADES’s speech, indeed, ALCIBIADES turned toward AGATHON to say to him:

“You see, don’t let yourself be taken in by that one. You see how he was able to treat me. Don’t go for it!” [222b]

“And it is incidentally…”

says SOCRATES, for in truth SOCRATES’s intervention would have no meaning if it were not precisely on this “incidentally” that the intervention, as I have called it interpretation, is based.

“…that you gave him a place at the end of your speech.”

What he tells us is that the aim toward AGATHON was present in all the circumlocutions of the speech, that it was around him that his whole speech wound itself:

“as if your whole speech—it must be translated as speech and not language—had only this aim—what aim?—to declare that I am obliged to love you and no one else, and that on his side AGATHON is obliged to let himself be loved by you, and by no one else! And this,” he says, “is completely transparent, κατάδηλον [katadèlon], in your speech.” [222d]

SOCRATES makes it clear that he reads it through the apparent speech. And very precisely it is this affair, this “drama of your invention” as he calls it, “this metaphor,” it is there that it is completely transparent: “τὸ σατυρικόν σου δρᾶμα τοῦτο καὶ σιληνικὸν” [to saturikon sou drama touto kai silènikon] “this story of satyr and silenus,” that is where you see things.

Well, let us indeed try to recognize its structure. SOCRATES says to ALCIBIADES:

“If what you ultimately want is: for you to be loved by me, and for AGATHON to be your object—for otherwise there is no other meaning to give to this speech except the most superficial psychological senses, the vague awakening of a jealousy in the other—it is out of the question!” [222d]

For indeed, that is what is at stake. ALCIBIADES—SOCRATES admits it—manifesting his desire to AGATHON and asking of AGATHON, in sum, what first ALCIBIADES had asked of him, SOCRATES. The proof is that if we consider all these parts of the dialogue as a long epithalamium, and if what all this dialectic leads to has a meaning, it is what happens at the end: that SOCRATES praises AGATHON.

That SOCRATES praises AGATHON is the answer to the demand, not past but present, of ALCIBIADES. When SOCRATES is about to praise AGATHON, he gives satisfaction to ALCIBIADES. He gives him satisfaction for his present act of public declaration, of placing on the level of the Universal Other what happened between them behind the veils of modesty. SOCRATES’s response is:

“You can love the one I am going to praise because, in praising him, I, SOCRATES, will know how to convey the image of you loving, inasmuch as the image of you loving, it is thereby that you will enter the path of the higher identifications traced by the way of beauty.”

But it is important not to overlook that here SOCRATES, precisely because he knows, substitutes something for something else. For it is not “beauty,” nor asceticism, nor identification with God that ALCIBIADES desires, but this unique object, this something he saw in SOCRATES and from which SOCRATES diverts him because SOCRATES knows he does not have it.

But ALCIBIADES, for his part, always desires the same thing, and what ALCIBIADES seeks in AGATHON—do not doubt it—is this same supreme point where the subject is abolished in the fantasy: his ἄγαλματα [agalmata]. Here SOCRATES, by substituting his lure for what I would call “the lure of the gods,” does so in all authenticity insofar as “he knows what love is,” and it is precisely because he knows it that he is destined to be mistaken about it, namely to misunderstand the essential function of the object of aim constituted by the ἄγαλμα [agalma].

Last night we heard about model, and theoretical model. I would say that it is impossible not to evoke here, if only as a support for our thought, the intrasubjective dialectic of the ideal ego, the ego ideal, and precisely the partial object.

I remind you of the little diagram I once gave you of the spherical mirror, insofar as it is in front of it that this key fantasy is created: “the real image of the vase” as it emerges, hidden in the apparatus, and that this illusory image can be supported by the eye, perceived as real, insofar as the eye adjusts itself in relation to that around which it comes to be realized, namely the flower that we have placed. I taught you to note in these three terms, the ideal ego [I(a)], the ego ideal [i(a)], and petit(a): the ἄγαλμα [agalma] of the partial object, the something denoting the supports, the reciprocal relations of the three terms that are involved each time what is constituted? Precisely what is at stake at the end of the Socratic dialectic: something destined to give substance to what FREUD—and it is in this context that I introduced this diagram—has stated as being the essence of infatuation: Verliebtheit, that is, the recognition of the foundation of the narcissistic image inasmuch as it is what makes the substance of the ego ideal. The imaginary incarnation of the subject, that is what is at stake in this triple reference.

And you will allow me finally to come to what I want to say: the demon of SOCRATES is ALCIBIADES. It is ALCIBIADES, exactly as we are told in the speech of DIOTIMA that love is not a god, but a demon, that is to say, the one who delivers to the mortal the message that the gods have to give him, and that is why we could not fail, with regard to this dialogue, to evoke the nature of the gods.

I am going to leave you for fifteen days and I am going to give you a reading: De natura deorum by CICERO. It is a reading that once did me a lot of harm, a long time ago, with a famous pedant who, seeing me absorbed in this, judged very poorly regarding the focus of my professional preoccupations. This De natura deorum, read it, just to get your bearings. You will see first all sorts of excessively funny things, and you will see that this CICERO—who is not the blockhead people try to depict for you when they say the Romans were simply followers—is a guy who articulates things that go straight to your heart.

You will also see amusing things there. That is to say, in his time, people went to Athens, as it were, in search of the shadows of the great pin-ups of SOCRATES’s time. People went there thinking: I will meet Charmides on every street corner. The Charmides, you will see that our Brigitte BARDOT, compared to the effects of the Charmides, she can keep up! Even the little street kids had eyes wide as saucers! And in CICERO one sees some funny things. Notably a passage I cannot give you, along these lines:

“To be honest, the handsome guys, those whom after all the philosophers have taught us it is very good to love, you can look for them! There is just one here or there, a handsome one.”

What does that mean? Does the loss of political independence have the irreparable effect of some racial decadence, or simply the disappearance of that mysterious sparkle, that ἵμερος ἐναρής [himeros enargès], that brilliance of desire that PLATO speaks of in the Phaedrus? We will never know. But you will learn many other things there. You will learn that it is a serious question to know where the gods are localized. And it is a question that has not lost, believe me, its importance for us.

If what I say here may one day—when, by a subtle slipping of certainties, you find yourself between two chairs—if it can serve you for something, one of these things will have been to remind you of the real existence of the gods. So then, why should we not, too, pause at this object of scandal that were the gods of ancient mythology, and, without seeking to reduce them to bundles of index cards or to groupings of themes, but by asking ourselves what it could well have meant that after all these gods behaved in the way you know, and whose theft, swindling, adultery—I am not speaking of impiety, that was their own business—were all the same their most characteristic mode. In other words, the question of what a “love of god” is, is something that is frankly brought up to date by the scandalous character of ancient mythology.

And I must say that all the same the pinnacle is there, at the origin, at the level of HOMER. There is no way of behaving more arbitrarily, more unjustifiably, more incoherently, more ridiculously, than these gods! And still read the Iliad, they are there all the time, mixed in, intervening constantly in the affairs of men. And after all, we cannot think that the stories that in the end could, from a certain perspective—but we do not take that perspective, no one can, not even the most blockheaded HOMAIS—say that these are cock-and-bull stories…

No, they are there and very much so! What could it mean that the gods, after all, only manifest themselves to humans in this way? We must still look at what happens when they get it into their heads to love a mortal, for example: nothing will stop them until the mortal, out of despair, is transformed into a laurel tree or a frog. There is no way to stop them.

There is, after all, nothing further from these sorts of tremors of being before love than a desire of a god, or of a goddess for that matter—I do not see why I should not include them as well. It took GIRAUDOUX to restore for us the dimensions, the resonance, of that prodigious myth of AMPHITRYON. It could not be that this great poet would fail to make even JUPITER himself radiate with something that might resemble a kind of respect for the feelings of ALCMENE, but that is just to make the thing plausible for us. It is quite clear that for one who knows how to hear, this myth remains in a way the height of blasphemy, one might say, and yet that is not how the Ancients understood it. For here things go further than anywhere else. It is divine debauchery disguised as human virtue.

In other words, when I say that nothing stops them, they go so far as to deceive even in what is best, and this is indeed the key to the whole affair. The best of the real gods push impassivity to that point I mentioned earlier, of not even being able to bear the passive qualification. To be loved is necessarily to enter into that scale of the desirable, and we know how hard Christian theologians have struggled to get out of it. For if God is desirable, he can be more or less so. There is, then, a whole scale of desire, and what do we desire in God if not the desirable, but not God. So that it is at the moment when people tried to give God his most absolute value that they found themselves caught in a vertigo from which it was hard to emerge with the dignity of the supreme object intact.

The gods of Antiquity did not beat about the bush: they knew they could only reveal themselves to humans in “the stone of scandal,” in the ἄγαλμα [agalma] of something that violates all the rules as pure manifestation of an essence that itself remained completely hidden, whose enigma was entirely behind, whence the demonic incarnation of their scandalous exploits. And it is in this sense that I say that ALCIBIADES is the demon of SOCRATES. ALCIBIADES gives the true representation, without knowing it, of what is implicated in Socratic asceticism. He shows what is there—which is not absent, believe it—that comes from the dialectic of love as it was later elaborated in Christianity. It is indeed around this point that the crisis arises, which, in the sixteenth century, overturned the long synthesis that had been maintained—and, I would say, the long ambiguity—regarding the nature of love that made it unfold, develop throughout the Middle Ages in so post-Socratic a perspective. I mean that, for example, the God of SCOTUS ERIGENA does not differ from the God of ARISTOTLE, in that he dies as ἐρώμενον [erômenon], they are consistent: it is by his beauty that God makes the world turn.

What a distance between this perspective and the one opposed to it! But it is not really opposed to it—that is the meaning of what I am trying to articulate—we articulate this one in opposition, like ἀγάπη [agapè] inasmuch as ἀγάπη [agapè] teaches us expressly that God loves us as sinners: he loves us as much for our evil as for our good. This is the meaning of the reversal that took place in the history of the feelings of love, and curiously at the very moment when the Platonic message reappears for us in its authentic texts, the divine ἀγάπη as addressed to the sinner as such, here is the center, the heart of the Lutheran position.

But do not think that this was something reserved for a heresy, a local insurrection in Catholicism, for it is enough to cast even a superficial glance at what followed the Counter-Reformation, namely the irruption of what was called “the art of the baroque,” to see that it means nothing other than the bringing to light, the erection as such, of the power of the image in what is properly seductive about it.

And after the long misunderstanding that maintained the Trinitarian relation in the divinity: from the knower to the known, and returning from the known to the knower through knowledge, we see here the approach of that revelation which is ours, which is that things go:
– from the unconscious toward the subject who constitutes himself in his dependence,
– and ascend to that core object we here call ἄγαλμα [agalma].
Such is the structure that regulates the dance between ALCIBIADES and SOCRATES. ALCIBIADES shows the presence of love but only shows it insofar as SOCRATES, who knows, can be mistaken about it and only accompanies him by being mistaken: the lure is reciprocal. It is as true for SOCRATES—if it is a lure and if he is truly mistaken—as it is for ALCIBIADES, who is caught in the lure. But who is the most authentic one deceived if not the one who follows, steadfastly and without letting himself drift, what is traced for him by a love I would call terrifying.

Do not think that she who is placed at the origin of this discourse, APHRODITE, is a goddess who smiles. A presocratic, who I believe is DEMOCRITUS, says that she was there all alone at the origin, and it is even in this connection that for the first time in Greek texts the term ἄγαλμα [agalma] appears.

VENUS, to call her by her name, is born every day, every day is the birth of APHRODITE, and to borrow from PLATO himself an ambiguity which, I believe, is a true etymology, I will conclude this discourse with these words:

καλιμέρα [kalimera]: good morning, καλιμέρος [kalimeros]: good morning and beautiful desire!

From the reflection on what I have brought to you here about the relation of love to something that has always been called “eternal love,” may it not be too heavy for you to think on, if you remember that this term “eternal love” is placed by DANTE expressly at the gates of Hell.