🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

For those who somehow fall among us today from the moon, I am giving a brief orientation. After having attempted to present before you, in terms more rigorous than has been done until now, what can be called ‘the theory of love’, this on the basis of Plato’s Symposium, it is within what we have succeeded in situating in this commentary that I begin to articulate, the position of transference in the sense I have announced this year, that is, in what I have above all called ‘its subjective disparity’. By this I mean that the position of the two subjects present is in no way equivalent. And that is why one can speak not of a ‘situation’, but of a pseudo-analytic situation, of a ‘so-called situation’.

Therefore, having approached, since the last two times, the question of transference, I have done so from the side of the analyst. This is not to say that I assign to the term ‘counter-transference’ the meaning in which it is commonly received, as a kind of imperfection in the analyst’s purification in relation to the analysand. Quite the contrary, I mean to say that ‘counter-transference’, that is, the necessary involvement of the analyst in the situation of transference, means that in sum we must beware of this improper term ‘counter-transference’: the existence of ‘counter-transference’ is a necessary consequence, purely and simply, of the phenomenon of transference itself, if it is analyzed correctly.

I introduced this problem by the fact—current in analytic practice—that it is received quite widely that what we might call a certain number of affects—as far as the analyst is touched by them in the analysis—constitute a mode, if not normal, at least normative, of situating the analytic situation. And I would say, not only as information for the analyst in the analytic situation, but even as a possible element of his intervention, through the communication he may eventually make of it to the analysand.

And—I repeat—I have not, on my own authority, assumed the legitimacy of this method, I note that it has been introduced and promoted, that it has been admitted, received in a very wide field of the analytic community, and that this, in itself, is sufficiently indicative on our path for now, which is to analyze how the theorists who thus conceive the use of ‘counter-transference’, legitimate it. They legitimate it to the extent that they link it to moments of misunderstanding on the part of the analyst, as if this ‘misunderstanding’ were in itself the criterion, the dividing point, the aspect, where something is defined that obliges the analyst to move to another mode of communication, to another instrument, in his way of situating himself in what is at stake, that is, the analysis of the subject.

It is therefore around this term ‘understanding’ that what I intend to show you today will revolve, in order to allow us to get closer to what can be called in our terms, the relation of the subject’s demand to his desire, it being understood that what we have put at the principle—that in which we have shown that the return is necessary—is to put at the forefront that what is at stake in analysis is nothing other than the bringing to light of the manifestation of the subject’s desire.

Where is ‘understanding’ when we understand? When we believe we understand, what does that mean? I propose that in its most assured form, I would say in its primary form, the understanding of whatever the subject articulates before us is something we can define at the level of the conscious as follows: it is that, in sum, we know how to respond to what the other demands. It is insofar as we believe we can respond to the demand that we have the feeling of understanding.

About demand, however, we know a bit more than this immediate approach, precisely in that we know that demand is not explicit, that it is even much more than implicit, that it is hidden from the subject, that it is as if it must be interpreted. And it is here that the ambiguity lies, insofar as we, who interpret it, respond to the unconscious demand on the plane of a discourse which, for us, is a conscious discourse. This is exactly where the bias, the trap is, and also why, from the beginning, we have tended to slip into this supposition, this capture, that our response, the subject should in some way be content with what we bring to light by our response, with something that should satisfy him.

We know that it is there that resistance always occurs nonetheless. It is from the situation of this resistance, from the way in which we can qualify the agencies to which we have to relate it, that all the steps, all the stages of the analytic theory of the subject have followed, that is, of the various agencies with which, in him, we are concerned.

Nevertheless, is it not possible to go to a more radical point—without of course denying the part these various agencies of the subject play in resistance—to see, to grasp, that the difficulty in the relations of the subject’s demand to the response given him is situated further on, is situated at a quite original point.

At this point, I have tried to bring you, by showing you what results, for the speaking subject, from the fact—as I expressed it—that his needs must pass through ‘the passes of demand’ [word play: défilés means both ‘narrow passages’ and ‘fashion shows’], that for this very reason, at this quite original point, precisely this results, that something is founded here: that everything which is ‘natural tendency’ in the speaking subject, must be situated in a beyond and in a before demand.

In a beyond, it is the demand for love. In a before, it is what we call desire, with what characterizes it as condition, as what we call its absolute condition in the specificity of the object it concerns: petit(a), that partial object, that something I have tried to show you as included from the very beginning in this fundamental text of the theory of love, this text from the Symposium, as agalma [word play: agalma in Greek means both ‘statue’ and ‘treasure’], insofar as I have also identified it with the partial object of analytic theory.

It is this that today, through a brief revisiting of what is most original in analytic theory: the Triebe, ‘the drives and their fate’, I intend to make you grasp, before we can deduce what follows from it as concerns us, namely the point on which I left you last time concerning the ‘drive’ involved in the position of the analyst.

You recall that it is on this problematic point that I left you, insofar as an author [Money-Kirle], the one who specifically speaks on the subject of ‘counter-transference’, designates in what he called: the ‘parental drive’, this need to be a parent, or the ‘reparative drive’, this need to go against the natural destructiveness supposed in every subject as analysand analysable.

You have immediately grasped the boldness, the audacity, the paradox of putting forward things such as these, since, after all, it is enough to pause for a moment to realize, regarding this ‘parental drive’—if this is truly what must be present in the analytic situation—then how could we even dare to speak of the situation of transference, if it is really a parent that the subject in analysis has before him? What could be more legitimate than that he falls back for his part into the very position he had throughout his development regarding the subjects around whom the fundamental passive situations for him were constituted, which constitute in the signifying chain, the automatisms of repetition.

In other words, how can one not see that here we have a direct contradiction, that we are heading straight for the obstacle that will force us to pose it? Who will contradict us by saying that the situation of transference, as it is established in analysis, is at odds with the reality of that situation which some imprudently express as a situation so simple, that of the situation in analysis, in the hic et nunc of the relationship with the doctor? How can one not see that if the doctor is there armed with the ‘parental drive’, however developed we might suppose it to be on the side of an educational position, there will be absolutely nothing to distance the normal response of the subject to this situation from all that could be formulated as the repetition of a past situation.

It must be said that there is not even any way to articulate the analytic situation without positing, at least somewhere, the contrary requirement. And for example in Chapter III of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, when indeed FREUD, taking up the articulation at stake in analysis, distinguishes between remembering and the reproduction of the automatism of repetition, Wiederholungszwang, inasmuch as he considers it as a partial failure of the mnemonic aim of analysis, as a necessary failure going so far as to assign to the structure of the ego—as he feels at this stage of his elaboration to found the agency as largely unconscious—the attribution and assignment, not of the whole, since surely the entire article is written to show that there is a margin, but of the most important part of this function of repetition, to the account of the ego’s defense against the repressed memory, considered as the true term, the ultimate term—though perhaps at that moment considered impossible—of the analytic operation.

It is thus by following the path of something which is resistance to this ultimate aim, the resistance located in the unconscious function of the ego, that FREUD tells us we must pass through there, that:

“In general, the doctor cannot spare the analysand this phase of the cure, must let him relive a certain piece of his forgotten life and must take care that a certain degree of Überlegenheit, superiority, is maintained thanks to which the apparent reality, die anscheinende Realität, can always again be recognized in a reflection as a mirror effect of a forgotten past.” [In der Regel kann der Arzt dem Analysierten diese Phase der Kur nicht ersparen; er muß ihn ein gewisses Stück seines vergessenen Lebens wiedererleben lassen und hat dafür zu sorgen, daß ein Maß von Überlegenheit erhalten bleibt, kraft dessen die anscheinende Realität doch immer wieder als Spiegelung einer vergessenen Vergangenheit erkannt wird.]

God knows to what abuses of interpretation this highlighting of Überlegenheit has led. It is around this that the entire theory of alliance with what is called ‘the healthy part of the ego’ could be built. Yet in such a passage there is nothing of the kind and I cannot emphasize enough what in passing must have struck you: it is the in a sense neutral, neuter—neither on one side nor the other—character of this Überlegenheit.

Where is this superiority? Is it on the side of the doctor, who, let us hope, retains all his faculties, is it this that is meant on the occasion? Or, is it on the side of the patient? Curiously, in the French translation—which, like the others, is as bad as those done under various other patronages—the thing is translated: “…and must only see that the patient retains a certain degree of serene superiority—there is nothing of the sort in the text—which allows him to note, after all, that the reality of what he relives and reproduces is only apparent.”

Although the question of the situation of this Überlegenheit—which is doubtless required—arises, must we not situate it, in a way that, I believe, can be infinitely more precise than anything elaborated in these so-called comparisons of the current aberration of what repeats itself in treatment, with a situation that would be given as perfectly known. Let us therefore return to the examination of the ‘phases’ and of demand, of the requirements of the subject as we approach them in our interpretations, and let us simply begin, according to this chronology, according to this diachrony which is called that of the ‘phases of the libido’, with the simplest demand, the one to which we refer so frequently, let us say that it is an ‘oral demand’.

What is an ‘oral demand’? It is the demand to be fed which is addressed to whom, to what? It is addressed to that Other who hears and who, at this primary level of the enunciation of the demand, can truly be designated as what we call ‘the locus of the Other’, the Other, one, the Otheron I would say, to make our designations rhyme with familiar designations in physics. There, to this abstract, impersonal Otheron, this demand to be fed is addressed by the subject, more or less without his knowledge.

We have said: every demand, by the fact that it is speech, tends to be structured in this:
– that it calls from the Other a response in its inverted form,
– that it evokes by its structure its own form transposed according to a certain inversion.

To the demand to be fed there responds—by the signifying structure, in the locus of the Other, in a way that one can say is logically contemporary to this demand—at the level of the Otheron, the demand to let oneself be fed. And we know well—in experience this is not the refined elaboration of a fictive dialogue—we know well that this is what is at stake between child and mother each time the slightest conflict erupts in this relationship, in what seems made to meet, to close in a strictly complementary way.

What, in appearance, could better respond to the demand to be fed than the demand to let oneself be fed? Yet we know:
– that it is in this very mode of confrontation of the two demands that lies this minute gap, this breach, this tear where discord, the preformed failure of this encounter, can insinuate itself and does so normally, consisting precisely in this, that it is not a meeting of tendencies but a meeting of demands,
– that it is in this encounter between the demand to be fed and the other demand to let oneself be fed that the fact slips in—manifested at the first outburst of conflict in the feeding relationship—that this demand is exceeded by a desire,
– and that it could not be satisfied without this desire being extinguished in it, that it is so that this desire which exceeds this demand does not go out, that the very subject who is hungry—so that to his demand to be fed, there responds the demand to let oneself be fed—does not let himself be fed, refuses in some sense to disappear as desire, by being satisfied as demand because the extinction or crushing of the demand in satisfaction could not occur without killing the desire.

From this arise these discordances, of which the most pictorial is that of the refusal to let oneself be fed, of what is called, more or less rightly, mental anorexia. Here we find this situation that I cannot better render than by playing on the equivocation of the sounds of French phonematics: it is that one cannot confess to the most primordial Other this: ‘you are the desire’,
– without at the same time saying to him: ‘to kill desire’,
– without conceding to him that he kills desire,
– without abandoning to him desire as such.

And the primary ambivalence, proper to every demand, is that in every demand is also implied that the subject:
– does not want it to be satisfied,
– aims for the safeguarding of desire in itself,
– bears witness to the blind presence of desire, unnamable and blind.

What is this desire? We know it in the most classical and most original way, it is in that:
– the oral demand has another meaning than the satisfaction of hunger,
– it is sexual demand,
– at bottom, Freud tells us since the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, it is cannibalistic, and cannibalism has a sexual meaning.

He reminds us—it is there what is masked in the first Freudian formulation—that for man, feeding himself is bound to the good will of the Other, bound to this fact by a polar relation, this term also exists, that it is not only on the bread of his good will that the primitive subject has to feed, but truly on the body of the one who feeds him.

For things must be called by their name, what we call sexual relation is that by which the relation to the Other leads to a union of bodies. And the most radical union is that of original absorption, where the horizon of cannibalism emerges and is aimed at, and which characterizes the oral phase for what it is in analytic theory. Let us observe carefully what is at stake here. I have taken things from the most difficult end by beginning with the origin, whereas it is always retroactively, backward, that we must find how things are constructed in real development.

There is a theory of the libido against which you know I protest—even though it is the one promoted by one of our friends, Franz Alexander—the theory of libido as the surplus of energy that manifests in the living being, when the satisfaction of needs related to preservation is obtained. It is very convenient but it is false, for sexual libido is not that. Sexual libido is indeed a surplus, but it is this surplus that renders all satisfaction of need vain wherever it appears, and, if necessary—it is just the case—refuses that satisfaction to preserve the function of desire.

And indeed, all of this is only evidence that is confirmed everywhere. As you will see by looking back and starting again from the demand to be fed, as you will grasp immediately in this: that by the mere fact that the tendency of this hungry mouth—by this very mouth—expresses in a signifying chain the possibility of designating the food it desires. What food? The first thing that results from this is that it can say, this mouth: ‘not that one!’ The negation, the gap, the ‘I like this and not something else’ of desire already enters here, there the specificity of the dimension of desire bursts forth.

Hence the extreme caution we must have regarding our interventions, our interpretations, at the level of this oral register. For I have said, this demand is formed at the very point, at the level of the same organ where the tendency is erected. And it is precisely here that the confusion lies, the possibility of producing all sorts of equivocations in responding to it. Of course, from what is answered to it nonetheless results the preservation of this field of speech, and thus the possibility of always finding there the place of desire, but also the possibility of all the subjugations by those who attempt to impose on the subject that, his need being satisfied, he has nothing more to do than to be content with it. Hence, compensated frustration is the outcome of analytic intervention!

I want to go further, and I truly have—you will see it today—my reasons for doing so. I want to move on to the stage called ‘the anal libido’. For it is there that I believe I can meet, reach, and refute a number of confusions that are introduced most commonly in analytic interpretation. In approaching this term by the way of what demand is at this anal stage, you all, I think, have enough experience that I need not further illustrate what I would call the demand to hold back excrement, undoubtedly founding something, which is a desire to expel.

But here it is not so simple, for this expulsion is also required by the parent educator at a certain time. There it is demanded of the subject to give something that satisfies the expectation of the educator, maternal in this case. The elaboration that results from the complexity of this demand deserves that we pause on it, for it is essential. Note that here it is no more a matter of the simple relation of a need with the link to its demanded form than of sexual surplus. It is something else, it is a discipline of need that is at stake, and sexualization occurs only in the movement of return to the need that, if I may say so—this need—legitimates it as a gift to the mother who waits for the child to satisfy the functions that bring out, make appear, something worthy of general approval.

And indeed, this character of gift of excrement is well known from experience and has been noted since the origin of analytic experience. It is so much in this register that here an object is experienced, that the child, in the excess of his occasional overflows, uses it, one may say naturally, as a means of expression. The excremental gift is part of the most ancient themes of analysis.

In this respect, I want to in some way put a final end to this extermination, to which I have always applied myself, of the mythic ‘oblativity’, by showing you here what it really refers to. For from the moment you have seen it once, you will not be able to recognize otherwise this field of anal dialectic, which is the true field of ‘oblativity’.

For a long time, in various forms, I have tried to introduce you to this reference, and specifically by having always pointed out that the very term ‘oblativity’ is an obsessional’s fantasy: ‘All for the Other’, says the obsessional and that is indeed what he does. For the obsessional, being in the perpetual vertigo of the destruction of the Other, never does enough for the other to be maintained in existence. But here we see its root. The anal stage is characterized in that the subject satisfies a need only for the satisfaction of another.

This need, he has been taught to hold back solely so that it may be founded, instituted, as the occasion for the satisfaction of the other who is the educator. The satisfaction of nursing, of which cleaning is part, is first of all that of the other. And it is precisely insofar as something—that the subject has—is demanded of him as a gift, that one may say that oblativity is linked to the sphere of relations of the anal stage. Note its consequence, which is that here the margin of the place that remains to the subject as such, in other words desire, comes in this situation to be symbolized by what is carried away in the operation: desire literally goes down the toilet.

The symbolization of the subject as that which goes into the potty, or into the hole as the case may be, is precisely what we encounter in experience as most deeply linked to the position of anal desire. It is indeed what makes it both the drama and, in many cases, the avoidance. I mean that it is not always to this point that we succeed in bringing the patient’s insight.

Nevertheless, you may tell yourself each time, as far as the anal stage is concerned, that you would be wrong not to be wary of the pertinence of your analysis if you have not encountered this point. In any case, I assure you that from the moment you have touched upon this precise, neuralgic point—which is worth, for the importance it holds in experience, all the remarks about primitive oral objects, good or bad—as long as you do not locate at this point the basic, fundamental relation of the subject as desire with the most unpleasant object, you will not have made much progress in analyzing the conditions of desire. And yet you cannot deny that this reminder is constantly made in the analytic tradition. I think you cannot remain deaf to it for so long except insofar as things are not pinpointed in their fundamental topology as I am trying to do for you here.

But then—you will say to me—what about sexuality here and the famous sadistic drive, which is joined by a hyphen to the term anal, as if it were simply self-evident?

It is quite clear that some effort is needed here, of what we cannot call understanding, except insofar as it is an understanding at the limit. The sexual can only enter here in a violent way. This is indeed what happens, since it is a matter of sadistic violence. Still, this contains more than one enigma and it is worth pausing on it.

It is precisely to the extent that the other as such, in the anal relation, takes full dominance, that the sexual will manifest itself in the register proper to this stage. We can approach it, we can glimpse it, by recalling its antecedent qualified as ‘sadistic-oral’: the reminder that, all in all, life in its depths is devouring assimilation as such. Likewise, this theme of devouring was what was situated, at the preceding stage, in the margin of desire, just as this presence of the open mouth of life is what here appears to you as a sort of reflection, a fantasy, this: that when the other is set up as the second term, he must appear as existence offered to this gaping void.

Shall we go so far as to say that suffering is implied in it? It is a very particular suffering. To evoke a sort of fundamental schema that, I believe, is the one that will best give you the structure of the sadomasochistic fantasy as such, I would say:
– that it is a suffering expected by the other, that it is this suspension of the imaginary other, as such, above the abyss of suffering, which forms the peak, the axis, of sadomasochistic erotization as such,
– that it is in this relation that what is no longer the sexual pole, but what will be the sexual partner, is instituted at the level of the anal stage, and so we can say that it is already a kind of reappearance of the sexual,
– that what is constituted in the anal stage as a sadistic or sadomasochistic structure is, from a point of maximum eclipse of the sexual, from a point of pure anal oblativity, the ascent toward what will be realized at the genital stage,
– that the preparation of the genital, of human eros, of desire expressed in normal fullness—so that it can be situated not as tendency, need, not as pure and simple copulation, but as desire—takes its inception, finds its beginning, has its point of resurgence in the relation to the other as undergoing the expectation of this suspended threat, of this virtual attack that founds, characterizes, and justifies for us what is called the sadistic theory of sexuality, whose primitive character we know in the very great majority of individual cases.

– What is more: that it is in this situational feature that the fact is founded that in the origin of this sexualization of the other in question, he must as such be delivered to a third party in order to be constituted in this first mode of his apprehension as sexual, and it is here that lies the origin of this ambiguity that we know, which makes sexuality as such remain—in the original experience that the most recent theorists of analysis have discovered—undetermined between this third party and this other.

In the first form of libidinal apprehension of the other, at the level of this point of resurgence from a certain punctiform eclipse of the libido as such, the subject does not know what—most of all—he desires from this other or from this intervening third party, and this is essential to every structure of sadomasochistic fantasies. For the one who constitutes this fantasy—let us not forget, if we have here given a correct analysis of the anal stage—this witness subject at this pivotal point of the anal stage is indeed what he is: as I have just said, he is shit! And moreover, he is a demand, he is shit that only asks to be eliminated.

This is the true foundation of a whole structure that you will find to be radical, especially in fantasies, in the fundamental fantasy of the obsessional inasmuch as he devalues himself, inasmuch as he places outside himself the entire play of erotic dialectic, as he feigns, as the other says, to be its organizer. It is on the basis of his own elimination that he founds this entire fantasy. And here things are rooted in something that, once recognized, allows you to clarify quite banal points.

For if things are really fixed at this point of identification of the subject with the excremental petit(a), what are we going to see?

Let us not forget that here it is no longer to the organ itself, involved in the dramatic knot of need to demand, that is entrusted, at least in principle, the care of articulating this demand. In other words—except in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch—one does not speak with one’s behind.

And yet, we have the curious phenomena of breaks, followed by explosions of something that makes us glimpse the symbolic function of the excremental ribbon in the very articulation of speech: stammering. Long ago—a very long time ago, I think there is no one here who remembers it—there was a sort of little character—there have always been little meaningful characters in the mythology of childhood, which is in reality of parental origin—nowadays people talk a lot about Pinocchio, but in a time I am old enough to remember, there was ‘Bout de Zan’.

The phenomenology of the child as a precious excremental object is entirely contained in this designation, where the child is identified with the sweet element of what is called ‘licorice’, glukurrhiza [word play: Greek root means ‘sweet root’], as apparently is its Greek origin. And undoubtedly it is not by chance that it is about this word ‘licorice’ that we can find an example—really, the expression is apt—of the sweetest kind, of the perfect ambiguity of signifying transcriptions.

Allow me this small parenthesis, this pearl that I have found for your use in my reading. It is not new, in fact; I have kept it for you for a long time, but since I encounter it here in connection with ‘Bout de Zan’ I will share it: ‘licorice’, then, we are told that it is originally glukurrhiza. Of course, it does not come directly from Greek, but when the Latins heard this, they made it liquiritia using liquor, whence, in Old French, it became licorice, then ricolice by metathesis. Ricolice met règle, regula, and thus produced rygalisse. Admit that this meeting of licorice with rule is really splendid.

But that is not all, for the conscious etymology to which all this has led, on which recent generations have ultimately relied, is that ‘réglisse’ should be written ‘rai de Galice’, because ‘licorice’ is made with a sweet root found only in Galicia, the rai de galice. Here is where we return after having started—as the expression goes—from the Greek root. I think this little demonstration of signifying ambiguities will have convinced you that we are on solid ground in giving it all its importance.

In the end, as we have seen, we must—more than elsewhere—at the anal level be reserved concerning understanding the other, precisely in that every understanding of his demand implicates him so deeply that we must look twice before going to meet it. And what am I telling you, if not something that coincides with what you all know, at least those who have done a bit of therapeutic work, namely that with the obsessional one must not give him ‘that’ encouragement, absolution, or even interpretative commentary that goes a little too far.

Because then you will have to go much further, and what you will end up succeeding to and conceding, to your great detriment, is precisely this mechanism by which he wants to make you eat, if I may say so, his very being as if it were shit. Experience has well taught you that this is not a process in which you will be doing him a service—quite the contrary.

It is elsewhere that the symbolic introjection must be placed, insofar as it must restore for him the place of desire and also, to anticipate what will be the next stage, what the neurotic most commonly wants to be is the phallus, and it is certainly to short-circuit unduly the satisfactions to be given to him, to offer him this ‘phallic communion’ against which, as you know, in my seminar on Desire and its Interpretation, I have already brought the most precise objections.

I mean that the phallic object as imaginary object could in no way reveal in a complete way the fundamental fantasy. In fact, to the neurotic’s demand, it could only respond with something that we can call, broadly, an obliteration, in other words a path that is opened for him to forget a certain number of the most essential mechanisms that have been at work in the accidents of his access to the field of desire.

To mark a pause in our journey on what we have promoted today, let us say this:
– that if the neurotic is unconscious desire, that is to say repressed, it is above all in so far as his desire suffers the eclipse of a counter-demand,
– that this place of counter-demand is strictly speaking the same as that where everything external may subsequently add a supplement to the construction of the superego.

A certain way of satisfying this counter-demand is that every premature mode of interpretation in that it understands too quickly, in that it does not notice that what is most important to understand in the analysand’s demand is what is beyond that demand, it is the margin of the incomprehensible which is that of desire: it is in this respect that an analysis is closed prematurely and, to put it plainly, is missed.

Of course, the trap is that in interpreting you give the subject something by which [he can] nourish himself: speech, even the book that is behind it, and that speech nonetheless remains the place of desire, even if you give it in such a way that this place is not recognizable, I mean if it remains—for the desire of the subject—uninhabitable. To respond to the demand for food, to the frustrated demand, with a nourishing signifier is something that elides this: that beyond all nourishment from speech, what the subject really needs:

– is what he signifies metonymically,
– is what is in no part of that speech.

And so, every time you introduce the metaphor—no doubt you are obliged to—you remain on the same path that gives consistency to the symptom, surely a more simplified symptom but still a symptom, in any case in relation to the desire that would need to be brought out.

If the subject is in this singular relation to the object of desire, it is because he was first himself an object of desire that became incarnate. Speech as the place of desire is that Poros [word play: Poros in Greek means ‘resource’], where all the resources are. And desire—Socrates originally taught you to articulate it—is above all a lack of resources, aporia [word play: aporia in Greek means ‘without resource’]. This absolute aporia approaches the dormant word and becomes impregnated with its object. What does this mean, except that the object was there and that it is the object that asked to come into the world. The Platonic metaphor of metempsychosis, of the wandering soul that hesitates before knowing where it will come to dwell, finds its support, its truth, and its substance in this object of desire that is there before its birth.

And Socrates, without knowing it, when he praises—epainein—when he praises Agathon, does what he wants to do: brings Alcibiades back to his soul by bringing to light
– this object which is the object of his desire,
– this object, aim and end of each person, limited no doubt because the ‘whole’ is beyond, can only be conceived as beyond this end of each.