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(All parts in English)

We have last time reached the point where SOCRATES, speaking about love, has DIOTIMA speak in his place.

I have marked with the accent of the question mark this astonishing substitution at the acme, at the maximum point of interest in the dialogue, namely when SOCRATES, after having brought the decisive turning point by introducing lack at the heart of the question on love – love can only be articulated around this lack because what it desires it can only have as lack – and after having brought this turning point in the always triumphant, masterful style of this inquiry inasmuch as he brings it to bear on the coherence of the signifier – I have shown you that this is the essence of Socratic dialectic – the point where he distinguishes from any other kind of knowledge the ἐπιστήμη [epistèmè], science, at this point, singularly, he is going to ambiguously give the floor to her who, in his place, is going to express herself by what we properly call ‘the myth’, ‘the myth’ about which, on this occasion, I pointed out to you that the term is not as specified as it can be in our language, with the distance we have taken from what distinguishes myth from science: μύθους λέγειν [muthous legein] is at once a precise story and the discourse, what is said. That is what SOCRATES is going to leave himself to, by letting DIOTIMA speak.

And I have underlined, accented with a line, the kinship there is between this substitution and the dioecism whose form and essence ARISTOPHANES had already indicated as being at the heart of the problem of love. By a singular division, it is the woman – perhaps ‘the woman who is in him’, as I have said – whom SOCRATES from a certain moment lets speak.

You all understand that this whole, this succession of forms, this series of transformations – use it as you wish, in the sense that the term takes in combinatorics – are expressed in a geometric demonstration. This transformation of figures as the dialogue advances, this is where we try to recover those structural reference points which, for us and for PLATO who guides us there, will give us the coordinates of what is called the object of the dialogue: love.

That is why, entering into DIOTIMA’s discourse, we see that something develops which, in a certain way, will make us slip further and further away from that original feature that SOCRATES introduced into his dialectic by positing the term of lack, upon which DIOTIMA is going to question us. What she is going to lead us toward already begins around a question, about what is targeted at the point where she picks up SOCRATES’ discourse: ‘What is it that the one who loves lacks?’

And there, we immediately find ourselves brought to this dialectic of the ‘goods’ [204c] for which I ask you to refer to our discourse from last year on The Ethics.

‘Why does the one who loves love these goods?’ [205a] and she continues: ‘It is to enjoy them (Κτήσει [ktèsei])’.

And here is where the halt, the return, occurs:

‘Is it then from all goods that this dimension of love will arise?’

And here DIOTIMA, making a reference as worthy of note as what we have emphasized as the original function of creation as such, of ποιεσις [poiesis], will take her reference [205b] from this to say:

‘When we speak of ποιεσις [poiesis], we are speaking of creation, but do you not see that the use we make of it is nevertheless more limited, [205c] when it is a matter of those creators we call poets, that kind of creation that makes it so that it is to poetry and music that we refer. Just as in all goods there is something that specifies itself so that we speak of love…’ [205d]

Thus she introduces the theme of ‘the love of the Beautiful’, of the ‘Beautiful’ as specifying the direction in which this call, this attraction to possession, to the enjoyment of possessing [206a], to the constitution of a κτήμα [ktèma] which is the point to which she leads us to define love. This fact is evident in the rest of the discourse, something is sufficiently emphasized there as a surprise and as a leap: this ‘Good’, how does it relate to what is called and is specifically distinguished as the ‘Beautiful’?

Surely, at this turn in the discourse, we must emphasize this element of surprise which is that it is at this very passage that SOCRATES gives one of those replies of astonishment, of that same stupefaction that has been evoked for the sophistic discourse, and of which he tells us that here DIOTIMA demonstrates the same inimitable authority with which the sophists exercise their fascination, and PLATO warns us that at this level DIOTIMA expresses herself entirely like the sophist and with the same authority. [206b-208b]

What she introduces is this: that this ‘Beautiful’ has to do not with having, not with anything that can be possessed, but with ‘being’, and being properly speaking as it is that of ‘the mortal being’. What is proper to what is of the mortal being is that it perpetuates itself by generation. Generation and destruction, such is the alternation that governs the realm of the perishable, such is also the mark that makes it an inferior order of reality, at least this is how it is ordered in the whole perspective that unfolds in the Socratic line, both in SOCRATES and in PLATO. This alternation, generation and corruption, is what strikes in the very realm of the human; it is what makes it find its eminent rule elsewhere, higher up, there where precisely neither generation nor corruption strikes the essences, in the eternal forms to which only participation assures what exists in its foundation of being.

The ‘Beautiful’ then, says DIOTIMA, is what, in sum, in this movement of generation as such, she says: that it is the mode under which the mortal reproduces itself, that it is only by this that it approaches the permanent, the eternal, that it is its fragile mode of participation in the eternal; the ‘Beautiful’ is properly speaking that which in this passage, in this distant participation, is what helps it, if one may say so, to cross difficult capes. The ‘Beautiful’ is the mode of a kind of childbirth, not without pain but with as little pain as possible, this painful leading of all that is mortal toward what it aspires to, that is, immortality.

All of DIOTIMA’s discourse properly articulates this function of Beauty as being first – this is precisely how she introduces it – an illusion, a fundamental mirage by which the perishable, fragile being is sustained in its relation, in its quest for that permanence which is its essential aspiration.

Of course, in all this, almost without modesty, there is the opportunity for a whole series of slippages which are just as many evasions. And on this point, she introduces as of the same order this constancy by which the subject recognizes itself as being, in its life, its short life as an individual, always the same, despite – she emphasizes this point – the fact that there is not a point nor a detail of its carnal reality, from its hair to its bones, that is not the site of a perpetual renewal.

‘Nothing is ever the same, everything flows, everything changes’ – the discourse of HERACLITUS is present beneath the surface – ‘nothing is ever the same’ and yet something recognizes itself, affirms itself, declares itself to be always itself. And it is to this that she refers significantly to tell us that it is analogous, that it is ultimately of the same nature as what happens in the renewal of beings by way of generation: the fact that one after the other these beings succeed one another reproducing the same type. The mystery of morphogenesis is the same as that which sustains the individual form in its constancy.

In this primary reference to the problem of death, in this function that is charged with this ‘mirage of the Beautiful’ as that which guides the subject in its relation to death, as it is at once distanced and directed by the immortal, it is not possible not to make the connection with what last year I tried to define, to approach, concerning this function of the ‘Beautiful’ in that defensive effect in which it intervenes, as a barrier at the extreme of that zone I defined as that of the between-two-deaths.

What the ‘Beautiful’ in sum appears to us – in DIOTIMA’s very discourse – destined to cover, is that if there are two desires, in man, that capture him in this relation to eternity…
– with generation on the one hand,
– corruption and destruction on the other,
…it is the desire for death as unapproachable that the Beautiful is destined to veil. This is clear in the beginning of DIOTIMA’s discourse.

We find this phenomenon which we have brought out in connection with tragedy inasmuch as tragedy is at once the evocation, the approach, which of the desire for death as such, hides itself behind the evocation of Ἄτη [Atè, with a wordplay: ‘ruin, calamity’], of the fundamental calamity around which turns the destiny of the tragic hero and of this, that for us, inasmuch as we are called to participate in it, it is at this maximum moment that the mirage of tragic beauty appears.

– ‘Desire for the Beautiful’, it is this ambiguity around which, last time, I told you the slippage of all of DIOTIMA’s discourse was going to take place. I leave it to you there to follow it yourselves in the development of this discourse.

– ‘Desire for the Beautiful’, desire insofar as it is attached, as it is caught in this mirage, this is what answers to what we have articulated as corresponding to the hidden presence of the desire for death.

– ‘Desire for the Beautiful’, it is that which, in a certain way, reversing the function, makes the subject choose the traces, the calls of what his objects offer him, certain among his objects.

It is here that we see in DIOTIMA’s discourse this slippage take place: that this ‘Beautiful’ which was there, not a medium, but a transition, but a mode of passage, becomes – this ‘Beautiful’ – the very goal that is going to be sought.

By dint, so to speak, of remaining the guide, it is the guide who becomes the object, or rather who substitutes itself for the objects that can be its support, and not without the transition itself being extremely marked in the discourse itself. The transition is falsified.

We see DIOTIMA, after having gone as far as possible in the development of the functional Beautiful, of the Beautiful in this relation to the end of immortality, having gone even to the paradox since she goes – evoking precisely the tragic reality to which we referred last year – so far as to make this statement, which is not without provoking a certain derisive smile:

‘Do you believe that even those who have shown themselves capable of the most beautiful actions, ALCESTIS – whom I spoke about last year regarding the between-two-deaths of tragedy – in so far as she accepted to die in the place of ADMETUS, did not do so in order to be spoken of, so that speech might make her immortal forever?’

It is at this point that DIOTIMA brings her discourse and stops, saying:

‘If you have been able to come this far, I do not know if you will be able to attain up to ἐποπτικά [epoptika] contemplation.’

Evoking precisely the dimension of the mysteries, at this point, she resumes her discourse on this other register – what was only transition becomes goal – where, developing the theme of what we might call a kind of Platonic Don Juanism, she shows us the ladder that presents itself at this new phase, which develops as initiatory, which makes the objects dissolve into a progressive ascent towards what is ‘the pure beautiful, the beautiful in itself, the unmixed beautiful’.

And she passes abruptly to something that seems no longer to have anything to do with the theme of generation, namely: what goes from love – not only of one beautiful young man, but of that beauty that is in all beautiful young people – to the essence of beauty and from the essence of beauty to eternal beauty, and, to take things from the highest, to grasp the play – in the order of the world – of that reality which turns on the fixed plane of the stars, which – as we have already indicated – is that by which knowledge, in the Platonic perspective, truly joins that of the Immortals.

I think I have made you sufficiently sense this kind of sleight of hand by which the ‘Beautiful’, in so far as it is first defined, encountered as a premium on the path of being, becomes the goal of the pilgrimage, and how the object, which was first presented to us as the support of the Beautiful, becomes the transition towards the ‘Beautiful’, how truly – to bring us back to our own terms – one can say that this dialectical definition of love, as it is developed by DIOTIMA, meets what we have tried to define as the metonymic function in desire.

It is something that is beyond all those objects, that is in this passage of a certain aim, of a certain relation, that of desire through all objects towards a limitless perspective, it is this that is at stake in DIOTIMA’s discourse. One might think, from the many clues, that this, in the end, is the reality of the discourse. And indeed, it is what we are always accustomed to consider as the perspective of ἔρως [erôs], in the Platonic doctrine.

The ἐραστής [erastès], the ἔρων [erôn], the lover, in search of a distant ἐρώμενος [erômenos], is led by all the ἐρώμενον [erômenon], by all that is lovable, worthy of being loved, a distant ἐρώμενος [erômenos] or ἐρώμενον [erômenon] (it is just as much a neutral goal). And the problem is what it means, what it can continue to mean, beyond this crossing, this marked leap, what at the start of the dialectic was presented as κτῆμα [ktèma], as the goal of possession.

No doubt the step we have taken marks clearly enough that it is no longer at the level of having as the aim that we are, but at that of being, and that likewise in this progress, in this ascent, it is a transformation, a becoming of the subject that is at stake, that it is a final identification with this supreme lovable that is at stake: the ἐραστής [erastès] becomes the ἐρώμενος [erômenos]. In short, the farther the subject carries his aim, the more he is entitled to love himself in his ideal self, as we would say, the more he desires, the more he himself becomes desirable. And it is, again, there that the theological articulation points the finger, to tell us that the Platonic ἔρως [erôs] is irreducible to what Christian ἀγάπη [agapè] has revealed to us. Namely, that in Platonic ἔρως [erôs], the lover, love aims only at its own perfection.

Yet the commentary we are making on the Symposium seems to me precisely of a nature to show that this is not the case. That is to say, this is not where PLATO leaves it, provided that we are willing to see, after this relief, what it means that first he made – precisely in the place of SOCRATES – DIOTIMA speak, and then to see what happens as a result of the arrival of ALCIBIADES into the affair.

Let us not forget that DIOTIMA first introduced love as being not of the nature of the gods, but of that of demons inasmuch as it [the nature of demons] is – between immortals and mortals – intermediary. Let us not forget that to illustrate, to make us feel what it is about, it is nothing less than the comparison with this ‘intermediary’ between ἐπιστήμη [epistèmè], science in the Socratic sense, and ἀμαθία [amathia], ignorance, that she used this intermediary which, in Platonic discourse, is called δοξα [doxa], true opinion, inasmuch as it is indeed true, but such that the subject is incapable of accounting for it, that he does not know in what way it is true.

And I have emphasized these two striking formulas, that of:

– ‘ἄνευ τοῦ ἔχειν λόγον δοῦναι’ [aneu tou echein logon dounai], which characterizes δόξα [doxa], of ‘giving the formula, the logos, without having it’, of the echo that this formula produces with what we are giving here for that of love which is precisely ‘giving what one does not have’ [wordplay],

– and the other formula, the one that faces the first, no less worthy of being underlined, on the opposite side, so to speak, that is, looking toward ἀμαθία [amathia], namely that this δόξα [doxa] is not ignorance either, οὔτε ἀμαθία [oute amathia], because what by chance reaches the real: ‘τὸ γὰρ τοῦ ὄντος τυγχάνειν’ [to gar tou ontos tugchanein], what meets what is, how could that also be absolute ignorance?

It is indeed this that we must feel, in what I could call the Platonic ‘staging’ of the dialogue. That SOCRATES, even if he has posited the only thing in which he claims to be capable – that is, concerning matters of love – even if from the beginning it is posited that he knows about it, precisely he can only speak of it by remaining in the zone of ‘he did not know’. Even knowing, he does not speak, and, being unable to speak – he himself who knows – he must have someone else speak, in sum, who speaks without knowing.

And it is this that allows us to restore to its place the inviolability of AGATHON’s answer when he escapes SOCRATES’s dialectic, simply by telling him: ‘Let’s say I did not know what I meant’ [201b]. But it is precisely for this reason, it is precisely there, that which gives the emphasis – which I have developed in this extraordinarily derisive mode that we have emphasized – which gives the weight of AGATHON’s discourse, and its special weight of having been placed in the mouth of the tragic poet. The tragic poet – as I have shown you – can only speak of it in a buffoonish mode. Likewise, it was given to ARISTOPHANES, the comic poet, to accentuate those passionate traits that we confuse with tragic relief. ‘He did not know…’

Let us not forget that here takes its meaning the myth introduced by DIOTIMA of the birth of Love, that this Love is born from Ἀπορία [aporia] and from Πόρος [Poros]. He is conceived during the sleep of Πόρος [Poros]: ‘the all-knowing’, son of Μῆτις [Metis], invention par excellence, ‘all-knowing and all-powerful’, resource par excellence.

It is while he is sleeping, at the moment when he no longer knows anything, that the encounter from which Love will be engendered is going to occur. And the one who at that moment insinuates herself by her desire to produce this birth, Ἀπορία [aporia], the feminine Ἀπορία [aporia], here the ἐραστής [erastès]: the original desiring one in her truly feminine position that I have emphasized several times, she is well defined in her essence, in her nature still prior to the birth of Love, and very precisely in this which is lacking, it is that she has nothing of the ἐρώμενον [erômenon]. Ἀπορία [aporia], absolute Poverty, is posed in the myth as being in no way recognized by the banquet held at that moment, that of the gods on the day of the birth of APHRODITE, she is at the door, she is in no way recognized, she has within herself – absolute Poverty – no good that gives her a right to the table of beings. It is truly in this that she is prior to love.

It is that the metaphor – where I told you that we would always recognize that it is love that is at stake, even if in shadow – the metaphor that substitutes the ἔρων [erôn], the ἐραστής [erastès], for the ἐρώμενον [erômenon], here is lacking through the absence of the ἐρώμενον [erômenon] at the outset. The step, the stage, the logical time before the birth of love is thus described. On the other side, the ‘he did not know’ is absolutely essential to the other step.

And here let me mention what came to my mind while I was trying last night to point out, to scan for you this articulatory time of the structure. It is nothing less than the echo of that poetry, of that admirable poem, in which you will not be surprised – for I have chosen the example with intention – in which I tried to demonstrate the fundamental nature of metaphor, this poem which alone would suffice, despite all the objections that our snobbery may have against it, to make Victor HUGO a poet worthy of HOMER: ‘Booz asleep’ and the echo that suddenly came to me, having always carried it, of those two lines:

‘BOOZ did not know that a woman was there,
And RUTH did not know what God wanted of her’

Reread this whole poem to realize that all the data of the fundamental drama, that everything that gives Oedipus his meaning and his eternal weight, that none of these data is missing, and even up to the between-two-deaths evoked a few stanzas earlier concerning the age and the widowhood of BOOZ:

‘For a long time the one with whom I slept,
– O Lord! – has left my bed for yours.
And we are still all mingled with one another,
She, half alive and I half dead.’

The relation of this between-two-deaths with the tragic dimension that is indeed evoked here as constitutive of all paternal transmission, nothing is missing. Nothing is missing, and this is why it is the very place of the presence of the metaphorical function, this poem in which you find it continually. Everything, even – if one can say so – in the aberrations of the poet, is pushed here to the extreme, to the point of saying what he has to say by forcing the terms he uses:

‘As Jacob slept, as Judith slept’

JUDITH never slept, it was HOLOFERNES, no matter! Still, it is he who is right because what appears at the end of this poem is what is expressed by the formidable image with which it ends:

‘…and RUTH was wondering,
Motionless, half-opening her eye under her veils,
Which God, which reaper of the eternal summer
Had, as he left, carelessly thrown
That golden sickle into the field of stars.’

The sickle with which CHRONOS was castrated could not fail to be evoked at the end of this complete constellation composing the complex of paternity.

I ask your pardon for this digression on the ‘He did not know…’, but it seems to me essential to make understood what is at stake in the position of DIOTIMA’s discourse insofar as SOCRATES here can only situate himself in his knowledge by showing that, about love, there is no discourse except from the point where ‘He did not know’, which here seems to me function, spring, origin, of what this choice by SOCRATES of his mode of teaching at that moment signifies. What he proves at the same time: this is not what allows us to grasp what happens concerning what the relation of love is.

But it is precisely what is going to follow, namely the entrance of ALCIBIADES. You know, this entrance is after – without SOCRATES in sum having shown any sign of resisting it – this marvelous, splendid, oceanic development of DIOTIMA’s discourse and, significantly, after ARISTOPHANES has nevertheless raised his finger to say: ‘Still, let me have a word’ [212c]. For in this discourse, reference has just been made to a certain theory, and indeed it is his own, which good DIOTIMA has carelessly pushed aside with her foot [205d-e], in a quite significant anachronism, notice: for SOCRATES says that DIOTIMA told him this long ago, but that does not prevent him from having DIOTIMA speak about the discourse held by ARISTOPHANES.

ARISTOPHANES, and with good reason, has his word to say and it is there that PLATO raises a finger, shows that there is someone who is not happy. So the method, which is to stick to the text, will let us see if precisely what will develop afterwards is not somehow related to this finger, even if this raised finger – that says it all – he was cut off, by what? – by the entrance of ALCIBIADES.

Here, a scene change, for which the setting must be laid: into what world, all of a sudden, after this great fascinating mirage, does he plunge us back? I say ‘plunge back’ because this world is not the ultra-world, precisely, it is the world, simply, where after all, we know how love is lived, and that all these beautiful stories, however fascinating they may seem, it takes only a tumult, a shout, a hiccup, an entrance of a drunk man, to bring us back to it as to the real.

This transcendence where we have seen the substitution of the Other for the other [from love (A), to desire (a)] play out like a ghost, we will now see incarnated. And if, as I teach you, it takes three, and not just two, to love, well, we are about to see it.

ALCIBIADES enters [212d-e], and it is good that you see him appear in the guise in which he shows up, that is, with the formidable mug that is given to him not only by his officially drunken state, but the heap of garlands he is wearing and which obviously has an eminently exhibitory significance – in the divine state in which he stands – of a human chief.

Never forget what we have lost by no longer having wigs! Just imagine what the learned and equally frivolous agitations of conversation in the seventeenth century could be like, when each of those characters would shake at each of his words this kind of leonine getup which was also a receptacle for filth and vermin; just imagine the wig of the Grand Siècle, from the point of view of its mantic effect!

If this is lacking for us, it is not lacking for ALCIBIADES, who heads straight for the only character whose identity he is able – in his state – to discern, namely – thank God, it’s the master of the house! – AGATHON. [212e-213a] He goes to lie down next to him without knowing where this puts him, that is to say, in the position μεταξύ [metaxu], between the two, between SOCRATES and AGATHON, that is precisely at the point where we are, at the point where the debate hangs, between the play of:

– he who knows and, knowing, shows that he must speak without knowing,

– and he who, not knowing, has doubtless spoken like a starling, but who has nonetheless spoken very well [198b] as SOCRATES pointed out: ‘You have said very beautiful things’. καλὸν οὕτω καὶ παντοδαπὸν λόγον [kalon … logon].

It is there that ALCIBIADES comes to be situated, not without jumping back in surprise to see that that damned SOCRATES is still there.

It is not for personal reasons that today I will not push you all the way to the end of the analysis, to the end of what this whole scene brings, namely the one that unfolds from the entrance of ALCIBIADES. Nevertheless, I must announce to you the first features of what this presence of ALCIBIADES introduces: well, let’s say an atmosphere of ‘scene’. Naturally, I will not emphasize the caricatural side of things.

Incidentally, I have spoken about this Symposium as an assembly of old aunts, given that they are not all in their first bloom, but even so, they are not without a certain standing. ALCIBIADES is still somebody! And when SOCRATES asks to be protected against this character who will not let him look at anyone else, it is not because the commentary on this Symposium has been conducted over the centuries in respectable chairs, at the university level with all that this entails of both nobility and universal obfuscation, it is not for this reason that we are not going to realize that what is happening here is, properly speaking – as I have already emphasized – of the scandalous kind.

The dimension of love is showing us before our eyes something in which we must recognize that one of its characteristics is beginning to be drawn, and first of all that it does not tend, where it manifests: in the real, toward harmony. This ‘Beautiful’, toward which the procession of desiring souls seemed to ascend, does not, after all, seem to be something that structures everything in this form of convergence.

A singular thing, it does not happen in the modes, in the manifestations of love, that everyone is called upon to love what you love, what one loves, and to merge with you in the ascent toward the ἐρώμενον [erômenon]. SOCRATES, this eminently lovable man, since he is presented to us from the first words as a divine figure, after all, the first thing at stake is that ALCIBIADES wants to keep him for himself. You will say that you do not believe it and that all sorts of things show the contrary, the question is not there, we are following the text and that is what it is about. Not only is that what it is about, but it is properly speaking this dimension that is introduced here.

If the word ‘competition’ is to be taken in the sense and function I have given it, in the articulation of those transitivisms where the object is constituted as it establishes communication between subjects, something of another order is indeed introduced here. At the heart of the action of love, the object is introduced, if one may say so, of unique covetousness, which constitutes itself as such: an object that one wants to keep away from competition, an object that even resists being displayed. And remember that it is in this way that I introduced it to you three years ago in my discourse, remember that to define the object (a) of fantasy I took the example, in Renoir’s ‘La Grande Illusion’, of Dalio showing his little automaton and of that woman’s blush with which he withdraws after having displayed his phenomenon.

It is the same dimension in which this public confession takes place, marked with I know not what awkwardness of which he himself, ALCIBIADES, is aware as he develops it in speaking. Doubtless we are in ‘the truth of wine’… and this is articulated: In vino veritas, which KIERKEGAARD would reprise when he too remade his own symposium… surely, we are in ‘the truth of wine’, but one really has to have crossed every boundary of modesty to speak truly of love as ALCIBIADES does when he displays what happened to him with SOCRATES.

What is there behind it as an object that introduces this vacillation into the subject himself? Here it is, it is to the function of the object, as it is properly indicated in this whole text that I leave to you today to introduce yourself into for the next time, it is around a word that is in the text. I believe I have rediscovered the history and function of this object in what we can glimpse of its usage in Greek around a word: ἄγαλμα [agalma], which we are told there is what SOCRATES, that kind of shaggy silenus, conceals. It is around the word ἄγαλμα [agalma], whose enigma I leave closed for you today – in the very discourse – that I will focus what I will tell you next time.