Chiesa, L. - Lacan's Theory of Love in His Reading of Plato's 'Symposium'

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Angelaki
Journal of Theoretical Humanities
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"Le ressort de l'amour"
Lorenzo Chiesa a a School of European Culture and Languages University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NF, UK Online Publication Date: 01 January 2006 To cite this Article: Chiesa, Lorenzo (2006) '"Le ressort de l'amour"', Angelaki, 11:3, 61 - 81 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/09697250601048515 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250601048515
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ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities volume 11 number 3 december 2006
I dont think Im exaggerating if I say that that [ . . . ] which we concluded [ . . . ] had thus far been neglected by all the commentators of the Symposium and that, for this reason, our commentary is a date in the continuation of the history of the development of the virtualities which are concealed by this dialogue. Lacan, Seminar VIII, lesson of 1 March 1961
lorenzo chiesa
I introduction
The relationship between psychoanalysis and the classical worlds philosophical and literary production dates back to Freud who made of the Oedipus complex one of the conceptual cornerstones of his revolutionary practice. If, on the one hand, Jacques Lacans reading of Sophocles Antigone in his Seminar VII (19591960) has been repeatedly investigated by many commentators, on the other, few have ventured to explore his close and extensive more than two hundred pages long examination of Platos Symposium in Seminar VIII (19601961).1 According to Lacan, this dialogue depicts an ante-litteram but nevertheless paradigmatic transferential relationship whose protagonists are Socrates (qua proto-analyst) and Alcibiades (qua protoanalysand); Seminar VIII is indeed entitled Le transfert.2 Lacan also cautiously specifies that his reading of Plato does not primarily focus on the question of the nature of love,3 on the abstract, philosophical notion of love as such which is an event, strictly speaking, miraculous in itself4 but on the question of loves relationship with the empirical experience of transference in psychoanalysis. We could define the latter with Laplanche-Pontalis as a process of actualisation of unconscious desires [whose] context par
LE RESSORT DE LAMOUR lacans theory of love in his reading of platos symposium

excellence is the analytic situation.5 It is no doubt one of the great achievements of psychoanalysis to have shown how love could artificially be provoked; according to Lacan, this fact is not necessarily to the detriment of love itself: loves artificiality as it emerges in the analytical setting6 might suggest that love as such is closely linked to some sort of psychical fiction, one which is however essential for the subject.7 Given these premises, it is not surprising that, when approaching Plato, Lacan is mainly interested in articulating a connection between the Symposiums philosophical speeches on love all revolving around a Socratic ti esti?/what is it? and Alcibiades sudden irruption followed by his public declaration of love to Socrates: as Lacan points out, Alcibiades vehement and profoundly intimate speech in the first person
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/06/030061^21 2006 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250601048515
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goes beyond the limit of the banquet.8 Therefore, in commenting on Platos dialogue, Lacans principal assumption is that its final part is far from constituting an apocryphal and tangential addendum,9 an unimportant divertissement or a mere apology of Socrates directed at those who had accused him of being the cause of Alcibiades notorious hybris:10 these have all been popular readings of the Symposiums conclusion throughout the centuries. On the contrary, for Lacan, there is no reason why we should not believe that this bit has an [important] function.11 It is now my intention to proceed as follows: (a) To provide a short summary of the speeches that precede Alcibiades entrance together with an account of the most original and often convoluted interpretations that Lacan himself formulates of each of them. In Seminar VIII, Lacan surely demonstrates himself to be a careful and innovative reader of Plato: his admittedly retroactive explanation of the virtualities12 of this dialogue is, to say the least, ingenious. (b) To provide a description of the dialogues final scene involving Alcibiades, Socrates, and Agathon, and to explain why, according to Lacan, it is so determining for both an appropriate understanding of the Symposiums overall economy and, more importantly, a general grasp of how transferential love functions. (c) To provide an introduction to Lacans notion of love as such as it is expressed at this stage in the development of his psychoanalytic theory. Despite having often recourse to mythical imagery, in Seminar VIII, Lacan undoubtedly also sketches an epistemic explanation of the miracle of love: I am particularly interested in these theoretical attempts. However, the impossibility of dealing in this article with subsequent developments, the complexity of the concepts involved and the necessity of using an intricate algebraic jargon to discuss them in an adequate manner prevent me from delivering an exhaustive explanation within the boundaries of what primarily presents
itself as a reading of Lacans reading of Platos Symposium.
II lacan as a reader of plato

The first speaker of the Symposium is Phaedrus (178a180b). He declares that Eros is one of the most ancient of all gods. Love has donated the greatest benefits to men as demonstrated by the fact that when the lover (erastes) is in love, he wants to distinguish himself before his beloved (eromenos). Love instils courage and the ability to sacrifice oneself for ones beloved, as the examples of Alcestis and Achilles clearly show. Thus, love contributes to the well-being of the polis. Lacans most important observations regarding this short speech which he defines as being theological13 in principle could be summarized by the two following points: (a) Phaedrus is incorrect in believing that Eros is a god. Diotima will in fact show Socrates how Love is instead a daimon, i.e., how he is in an intermediate (metaxu) position between human beings and gods. Furthermore, for Lacan, gods belong to the Real.14 As a consequence, he lets us deduce that love does not belong to the Real but functions as an intermediary between the Real and what in Lacanian theory is opposed to it, that is, everyday reality (in its symbolic and imaginary connotations). Lacan also concludes that gods cannot understand anything concerning love.15 (b) Phaedrus is correct when he suggests that Love can bring about divine effects16 in human beings: when one is in love, one is entheos, i.e., literally possessed by a god. This is clear in the case of Alcestis and Achilles who each sacrificed their lives for their beloved: in so doing, they both substituted themselves for their beloved. This substitution allows us to affirm that: Love is a metaphor, given that we have learnt to articulate a metaphor in terms of substitution.17 However, the modalities of Alcestis and Achilles substitution differ from one another: Alcestis is an erastes when she loves her husband in place of whom she
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decides to die; in her case we can talk of a substitution and consequently of a metaphor sensu stricto. Achilles position is not the same: as opposed to most commentators,18 Lacan takes Phaedruss speech at face value and claims that Achilles is an eromenos; and what is more, he sacrifices his life for his lover in spite of the fact that Patroclus is already dead. Strictly speaking, he cannot be his substitute. In order to sacrifice himself for love he needs to become an erastes: this becoming erastes of the eromenos, the fact that the beloved behaves like a lover, is defined by Lacan as a miraculous transformation.19 Lacan thus underlines Phaedruss remark on how this change together with the sacrifice it entails is what gods deem sublime:20 in other words, Achilles love is more admirable than Alcestis since, we might add, it entails a form of disinterestedness that, strictly speaking, goes beyond the residual pathological utility of sacrifice qua sacrifice-for.21 The second to speak is Pausanias (180c 185c). According to him, there are two distinct kinds of Love: there is a celestial Love and a vulgar one. Human deeds are never good or bad in themselves: actions can be praised only if they are carried out with honest intentions. Love is now discredited for the vulgar use that many people make of it by aiming only at the body of the beloved. Pausanias then moves on to a description of homosexual relationships and the way in which they are differently considered in different parts of Greece. Athenian customs are ambiguous; the erastes is both encouraged and hindered in his attempts to conquer his eromenos: the latter is blamed if he surrenders too quickly or for the wrong reasons to the erastes. Pausanias thinks that this ambiguity is due to the necessity of distinguishing between the lover who desires only the body of the beloved and the lover who, on the contrary, aims at improving the knowledge of the beloved. Homosexuality is permissible only when the intention of both the erastes and the eromenos is honest.22
In Lacans opinion, Pausanias speech is important only insofar as it is derisory:23 Aristophanes has hiccups and is not able to speak when his turn comes since he has been laughing throughout its entire duration. Plato is having fun as well; he shows it with an interminable series of homophonies which follows Pausanias speech and deals with Aristophanes hiccups: Having paused Pausanias . . . (Pausaniou [. . .] pausamenou . . .), etc. (185c).24 According to Lacan, Platos message regarding this speech can be said to anticipate the Christian motto according to which the rich person will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven (qua Kingdom of Love, we should emphasize). Why is Pausanias thought to epitomize the position of the rich man? Why can he not really love? Lacans answer is the following: for Pausanias, love is all about an exchange:25 on the one hand, the erastes shows himself able to give a contribution whose object is intelligence (phronesis), and the whole ); on the other hand, the field of merit (arete eromenos needs to gain something in education (paideia) and, generally, in knowledge (sophia).26 The topic of the entire speech is a quote of values.27 The relation of the rich man to the other is entirely a matter of value, of the external signs of value.28 Pausanias notion of honesty utterly equates to a regulated possession of the beloved.29 Lacan believes that all those commentators who have overlapped Pausanias deceptive ethics of pedagogic love ultimately based on an acquisition (ktasthai) either with Platos own personal beliefs or with so-called Platonic love, are profoundly mistaken.30 Finally, if Pausanias cannot enter the Kingdom of Love, it is because true love is not measurable and cannot be acquired/possessed. This is something which Alcestis and, above all, Achilles had already demonstrated; as a matter of fact, we might add, it is not a mere coincidence if the latters act was awarded a special compensation by the gods: as Phaedrus reminds us, Achilles was immediately allowed to enter the Isles of the Blessed, i.e., the Heaven of the ancient world. I will omit Eryximachuss speech, since Lacans comments about it are only indirectly related to the question of love.
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The fourth speech is delivered by Aristophanes. He tells us an imaginative myth regarding the birth of man. Initially, human beings were spherical; they had four hands, four legs, and two sets of genitals; and there were three different sexes (masculine, feminine, and androgynous). These beings were ambitious and attempted to storm Olympus and attack the gods. For this reason, Zeus decided to divide each of them in two, making them similar to soles. From that moment, humans began desperately to search for their other half: love is nothing but this search for the whole. Lacan makes a series of important observations regarding Aristophanes speech which we could summarize as follows: (a) Why did Plato decide to make Aristophanes a famous comedian and one of Socrates most persistent detractors speak if he did not believe that the question of love should be approached in comical terms? (Lacan states that precisely because Aristophanes is a clown, he is the only one who is worthy enough to speak of love.31) Moreover: why did Plato, with a further ironical move, decide to make him utter what apparently is the most tragic of the Symposiums speeches if he did not think that, with what concerns love, comedy and tragedy have something in common? How can we otherwise explain the fact that, immediately after Aristophanes, Agathon somebody who has just won a prize for his tragic poetry will utter what Lacan deems to be the most openly comic speech of the dialogue? (b) Aristophanes speech is both seemingly tragic love consists of an incessant search for our lost half: in this sense, scholars tend to consider him the first one who talks about love as we, moderns, do . . .32 and, less manifestly for us (post-romantic commentators) but not for the ancients, comic. This speech is comic insofar as here Plato makes fun of himself: according to Lacan, Aristophanes speech is nothing but the derision of the Platonic sphairos as it is articulated in the Timaeus.33 Why is a sphere funny? First of all, because, for
Aristophanes, our spherical ancestors when it came to running, supported themselves on all eight of their limbs and moved rapidly round and round, just like when acrobats perform their circular manoeuvre and wheel over and over (190a) while, as Lacan points out, Platos sphairos actually had all that it needed inside itself.34 Second, and most importantly, I suggest that Aristophanes spheres are, for Lacan, amusing because they cannot love one another; spheres are irremediably separated from each other. We are reminded that, in the classical world (and in fact until Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo), the sphere was considered to be the best form and its movement the most perfect. A sphere can enjoy itself in the perfection of its selfcontainment but it cannot love another sphere: consequently, (human, non spherical) love must be imperfect, it must presuppose some sort of inadequacy. The derision of the sphere aims at ridiculing all notions of love based on an (impossible) idea of perfect adaequatio. Love is somehow related to the search for the whole, but love itself can never be whole: indeed, gods cannot love. But why, in the first place, would self-enjoying spheres need to love each other and thus become ridiculous through their vain attempts to do so? (c) Aristophanes myth is far more subtle than it may initially appear.35 Lacan is very careful in interpreting it: his reading tacitly concedes that, for Aristophanes, there is a transitional state of evolution between our spherical ancestors and present human beings. At a certain point, humans were half spheres which could not (sexually) love each other since their genitals were left on the outside there where they had been, in sets of two, before the Spaltung took place even though their faces had already been twisted towards the inside. They could not copulate but desperately and, above all, comically tried to do so. It is only when they started to die out that Zeus took pity on them [. . .] changed the position of their genitals round to the front and thus
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introduced intercourse between two human beings (191b). This passage is fundamental for Lacan: it hints at the fact that in order to have (object) love something which relates to an operation on the genitals must occur.36 In other words, love is inextricable from symbolic castration and its assumption, that is, from the mythical renunciation of the spherical/divine genitals and their absolute enjoyment note that the latter is only supposed/fantasized: Aristophanes clearly indicates how, at this stage, spheres are already reduced to impotent half-spheres. Castration is necessary in order to establish both a sexual and a love relationship between two human beings. Aristophanes myth could help us here to shed some light on a basic point of Lacans theory of sexuation, one which is generally misunderstood. Commentators usually underline how, according to Lacan, the symbolic order is responsible for the fact that there is no sexual relationship; as Evans succinctly puts it, this means that: There is no reciprocity or symmetry between the male and the female positions because the symbolic order is fundamentally asymmetrical.37 What is, on the contrary, almost unanimously overlooked is the fact that the assumption of castration, that is the subjects active entrance in the Symbolic, constitutes the structural condition of possibility for some sort of (reproductive) sexual relationship to occur.38 The natural helplessness of man qua dis-adapted animal is logically prior to the emergence of the symbolic order. Lacan believes that, already at the imaginary level, there is no sexual relationship: propagation of the species is impossible (as Aristophanes has it, human beings would start to die out); because of prematurity of birth and the ensuing alienating identification in the others body image, unlike animal Gestalten, mans disordered imagination39 is unable to fulfil the basic sexual/ reproductive requirements of the species. What happens after the subject undergoes castration? Aristophanes vivid imagery is extremely useful to explain this difficult point; we might suggest that current human beings are still half-spheres, even after their genitals were
moved: two half-spheres can copulate through their internal middle point but could never fuse and become a sphere again, not even for an instant. There is no sexual relationship if we intend it in terms of a transitory fusion, of a harmonious, pacifying encounter between the two sexes; but there is a sexual relationship if we intend it as an asymmetrical superimposition40 or intersection which makes one thanks to the illusory veil/sublimation of imaginary love. Love thus proposes itself as a fictional, unifying palliative that compensates for the absence of the sexual relationship. This kind of love clearly differs from that described by Phaedrus. The fifth speaker is Agathon (194d197e): according to him, Love is the most sensitive, most beautiful, and youngest of all gods. Since the moment he was born, all discord among gods has ceased. Love is rightful, temperate, courageous, and wise, and he produces in men similar virtues. According to most critics, the main characteristic of Agathons speech is its style which is marked by an agglutinative language and seems to follow Gorgias rhetoric. Socrates starts his speech by forcing Agathon to admit that he did not understand anything of what he has just said. This confutation is carried out, according to the Socratic method, in the guise of an ironic elenchos. After that, Socrates reports what Diotima, a priestess, taught him about love (201d212c). According to her, Love is not beautiful or ugly, good or bad, immortal or mortal, but he is intermediate (metaxu) between these two. He is the son of Poverty (Penia) and Resource (Poros), poor but also resourceful. Those who love what is beautiful also desire that what is beautiful may belong to them forever. All human beings are prolific, and all seek to reproduce. Beauty stimulates generation, whilst ugliness inhibits it. It is precisely through generation that mortals acquire a form of immortality: Love is an aspiration after immortality and consequently after reproduction.41 Generation is not achieved only in the domain of bodies: it also interests souls, where thoughts and knowledge are continuously renovated. Human beings who are fertile in their body generate children in the flesh, while those who are fertile in the soul generate knowledge, arts,
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and laws. Diotima also delineates an ascending trajectory that the lover should pursue: he is asked to move from the love of the beauty of one body to the love of the beauty which manifests itself in all bodies, and then, progressively, to that for laws and institutions, science, until he reaches the contemplation of beauty itself, which is immutable and imperishable. This speech is usually attributed to Plato himself given that it seems to presuppose his theory of forms; the ultimate kalon, which is reached by the lover after a gradual process of abstraction, eludes any concrete determination and overlaps with the form of forms: goodness-in-itself. Lacan is firmly convinced that Agathons and Socrates speeches should be read together. They are perfectly complementary. Why? (a) Agathon is not just a cheap sophist; he knows very well what he is doing.42 By analysing the language of his intervention and strongly disagreeing with usual translations on different points, Lacan shows us how Platos main intention here is to deliberately create contradictions (aporia) such as when there is love there is no more love.43 Agathon, the tragic poet, is presented as the real ironist, if by irony we mean deliberately provoked dis-orientation. Agathons message (probably directed against Pausanias, his real-life lover) is clear: love is unclassifiable [. . .] it never stays in its own place;44 love is atopos.45 (b) Agathon is far from being convinced by Socrates dialectic confutation: he simply admits that they are talking about love at two different levels, given that he has spoken in riddles (201c).46 Socrates himself acknowledges that Agathon delivered a kalon logon (198b), i.e., a fine speech: with a laboured pun, he also admits that he has been gorgonized that is, turned into stone (198c) by its Gorgianic style. (c) Socrates confutation qua philosophical speech on love hurriedly47 replaces love with desire as the object of its enquiry and then reveals the interconnection between desire and lack: one desires what one lacks in essence (200e).48 This is an important
philosophical conclusion, but philosophy is not able to go beyond this point: Socratic episteme qua self-consistent, completely transparent knowledge49 cannot attain Eros per se. By making Diotima speak on his behalf and by reporting her myth, by having to switch from episteme to mythos, Socrates would surreptitiously acknowledge that Agathons speech has got him into trouble.50 (d) Socrates knows that episteme cannot attain Eros. Socrates is generally the one who knows not to know; however, in this dialogue as well as in the Lysis he more specifically presents himself as the one who does not know anything but the ways of love.51 Precisely because he knows what love is, he also knows that his dialectic method cannot fully disclose what it is. Even if Socrates knows, he cannot speak himself about what he knows and has to make speak somebody else who speaks without knowing:52 a priestess, somebody through whom the Other (gods) speaks. With an ingenious but nevertheless rather precipitous comparison, Lacan associates Diotimas non-transparent knowledge with unconscious knowledge. Therefore, Socrates passage from episteme to mythos entails the implicit admission of the existence of the unconscious: Diotimas mythical speech is nothing but the speech of Socrates unconscious.53 The direct consequence of ` men the dioekisthe described by Aristophanes myth that is, of the Spaltung, the division of the perfectly round primitive being54 is the formation of a kind of knowledge which first and foremost concerns love that eludes Socratic episteme and can only be expressed by dwelling in the zone of the he didnt know. 55 (e) According to Lacan, mythos has to be interpreted in this context according to its original signification: mythos legein,56 which means what we generally say, what we generally say about truth without being able to prove why that is true. In such a way, one could argue that Lacan implicitly
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makes mythos and doxa overlap insofar as they are both forms of non-ignorance that partake of the unconscious function of the he didnt know. On top of his comments concerning Diotimas capacity to talk about love in a mythical way, Lacan in fact also argues that love belongs to a zone [. . .] which is at the same level and has the same qualities of doxa; i.e., [. . .] there are discourses, behaviours, opinions [. . .] which are true even though the subject does not know it.57 Socrates and Agathons speeches on love are thus proved to be very close to one another: Socrates knows but has to talk without knowing, i.e., in mythical terms; Agathons doxa does not know but, as Lacan says, na pas moins fort bien .58 parle (f) Finally, we might suggest that all this leads Lacan to draw two fundamental conclusions from Socrates-Diotimas words: 1) in philosophical terms, love qua real desire ro s-de sir) corresponds to the continuous (e postponement of what ones object of desire is a body, bodies in general, laws, etc. until desire reaches a final identification with kalon in itself; 2) in mythical terms, ro s-amour) is the son of love qua love (e Poros and Penia. Penia is precisely what Poros is not. Penia is literally A-poria, i.e., that which, by being resource-less, constitutes an impasse, a contradiction.59 Love is thus the product of Poros and Aporia. Love is a certain, secondary adaequatio which follows a structural inadaequatio Agathons doxatic speech was therefore at least partially correct. This inadaequatio is a precondition of love, it factually is his mother; when Aporia lays with Poros-theresourceful who does not know he is conceiving Love since he is drunk and asleep, Aporia does not have anything to give him but her very own lack.60
III in plato more than himself

Shortly after the end of Socrates speech, Alcibiades tumultuously enters the house in which the symposium is held. He is
clearly drunk. After a humorous squabble with Socrates and Agathon, he declares he does not want to praise Eros but the person of Socrates. When one meets him for the first time, Alcibiades says, he may seem to look like a Silenus or a satyr:61 however, his words produce a prodigious, spell-binding effect. When Alcibiades was young, he attempted to seduce Socrates but failed: Socrates resisted all his advances, even though he admittedly was in love with him. According to Alcibiades, nobody is like Socrates: after having been unable to sleep with Socrates, he would have obeyed all his orders without hesitation, like a slave (219e).62 Socrates answer to Alcibiades eulogy (epainos) is unexpected: The whole point of your speech was [. . .] that I ought to love you and nobody else, and Agathon ought to be loved by you and nobody else (222d). Alcibiades accepts Socrates interpretation. Why, according to Lacan, is this epilogue so important for the overall economy of the dialogue? First, because Plato portrays here love as we live it,63 love in action.64 The main question now is not what is love? but how does it work? Second, and more importantly, as we shall see later in more detail, because Plato is implicitly suggesting that Alcibiades final position concretely provides us with a notion of love which is alternative to Diotimas ascent to beauty/ goodness in itself. So why is Alcibiades final position, after his true intentions have been unmasked and above all acknowledged by him, so important? Because after Alcibiades eulogy of Socrates i.e., the confession of his transferential love to the tribunal of the Other65 and after Socrates own interpretation of the transference Lacan notes that Socrates is, properly speaking, a [psychoanalytic] interpretation66 Alcibiades can finally desire for real. Alcibiades becomes what Socrates already was, lhomme du sir, which means he stops fearing castration.67 de The end of the dialogue coincides with the end of Alcibiades proto-psychoanalysis. It is for the same reason that this epilogue is so significant for Lacans own notion of transferential love. In Platos dialogue, Alcibiades compares Socrates to one of those Sileni you find sitting
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in sculptors shops [. . .] which when opened up are found to contain a precious object (agalma) inside (215b).68 The metaphor of the Silenus and the term agalma are central for Lacans reading of this scene; the analysand behaves exactly like Alcibiades with Socrates: he attributes a hidden precious object (agalma), i.e., his object of desire, to the analyst. How is this desire initiated? How is it transvalued into real desire beyond transference? What is the link between desire and love in this context? In order to provide an introductory answer to these fundamental questions, I shall reconstruct the phenomenology of the transferential relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades in four different stages: (a) Socrates desires Alcibiades. Socrates qua erastes desires him but he does not desire only him. Indeed, he says after I have fallen in love with him, he does not even let me look at other boys (214d). Socrates is already a pure desirer.69 On the contrary, Alcibiades wants to be the exclusive object of his love: this is to say, he does not realize that Socrates qua pure desirer is looking for the agalma, i.e., the object of desire which psychoanalysis names part-object and Lacan re-defines as objet petit a,70 something which is not, strictly speaking, in Alcibiades (or in anybody else), something which is in Alcibiades more than himself. Precisely because of his indifference towards the individual specificity of physical beauty, Lacans real-life Socrates might apparently be associated with Diotimas abstract teachings: however, I shall later attempt to show how this comparison is, for Lacan himself, highly problematic. (b) Alcibiades starts desiring Socrates as an eromenos. Alcibiades qua eromenos is desired by Socrates. But he is also avoided by Socrates. Alcibiades thus starts desiring Socrates precisely when he realizes that Socrates desires him whilst not really desiring him (i.e., in Lacanese, after Socrates has frustrated Alcibiades unconditional demand to be loved)71. As Lacan points out, this is an awkward position to be in for an eromenos.72 Alcibiades thus asks
Socrates: Che vuoi?, What do you want from me? Why do you seem to want from me something which is not in myself? Alcibiades desire is thus initially elicited. However, at this stage, his miraculous transformation into an erastes has not occurred yet. Unlike Achilles, he is not here a pure desirer. His love remains imaginary. He desires Socrates just to make sure that Socrates desires him in return (only him); his desire is aimed at confirming his disputed role of beloved.73 In other words, like Pausanias, Alcibiades is still proposing an exchange of values which does not contemplate any lack or excess. Nevertheless, differently from Pausanias, he has already sensed the lack which characterizes Socrates desire: he now needs to identify with it. This is the only way in which Alcibiades can emulate Achilles: indeed, the latter is a pure desirer precisely because, besides the fact that he desires Patroclus in spite of Patrocluss lack, he also accepts that he must face his own lack, i.e., his death, by deciding to revenge Patroclus. (c) Socrates denies that he is the real object of Alcibiades desire, i.e., he refuses to desire him in return as an eromenos. Socrates remains a pure erastes. Lacan believes that he cannot be an eromenos precisely because he knows what love is:74 in other words, Socrates knows that, per se, he is void/ nothing (ouden), that he is only an imaginary substitutive object of Alcibiades (emerging) real desire. Differently put, he knows that agalma is in him more than himself, that love relies on what the other lacks, and not on what he has. In this sense, one might suggest that Socrates enacts a sort of practical confutation of Pausanias pedagogic love insofar as this is based on a quote of values, on an exchange of what the lover and the beloved respectively, have. As Lacan claims by closely commenting Symposium 218e219a, Socrates reply to Alcibiades unashamed advances goes as follows: You want to exchange that which, from the Socratic perspective of science, is the illusion [. . .] of beauty [i.e.,
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Alcibiades beautiful body] for truth [i.e., Socrates agalma]; on the one hand, that would not be fair; on the other: Be careful, examine things with more circumspection (ameinon skopei) so that you wont make any mistake; this self is, properly speaking, n). [. . .] There where you nothing (ouden o see something, I am nothing.75 (d) Helped by Socrates interpretation of the facts he is now reliving by recounting them publicly, Alcibiades retroactively realizes that Socrates is/was not the real object of his desire; his desire is now contingently aimed at Agathon. More importantly, he also grasps that his desire actually aims at what is in Agathon more than himself, i.e., his agalma. According to Lacan, Socrates ironically anticipates this realization when, at the beginning of the Symposium, he compares Agathon with a full cup (175e).76 This is obviously an antiphrasis: like Socrates, Alcibiades is in fact, by now, able to concede that Agathon does not own any agalma. Alcibiades knows that Agathon is only a contingent object of his desire. He has thus assumed the truth of his desire beyond transference. Alcibiades has become a pure desirer/erastes; at the same time, the miracle of love is realized in him.77 Moving beyond Lacans overt reading of the Symposium, we may also draw the following general conclusions: (a) In order to really desire, Alcibiades needs to assume lack. One does not merely desire what one lacks: essentially, one desires the lack that desire is; real desire is, in the end, an unconscious desire for death. This is to say: by desiring agalma, or, in Lacanese, the objet petit a, one actually desires the (lacking) object which causes desire to desire all other objects (at the imaginary level). This is why, for Lacan, the objet petit a is defined as the object-cause of desire. This is also why the objet petit a is, for Lacan, an object-nothing which creates something. (b) Precisely because Alcibiades really desires, he is also potentially ready to really love.
For the Lacan of Seminar VIII, real love somehow sublimates real desire for death without erasing it: real love has to come to terms with real lack. In this sense, love is a messenger of the Real, a metaxu between the order of the Real (qua lack) and reality (in which the structural lack is necessarily veiled). (c) Socrates qua analyst has a priori decided not to love; he does not enter into the game of love78 even though he could. More specifically, he refuses to be loved. This does not prevent him from desiring: there is a specific desire of the analyst. If the analyst realizes the popular image [. . .] of apathy, this is only insofar as he is possessed by a desire which is more powerful than [. . .] getting down to facts with his patient.79 (d) The Symposium has an open ending: we ignore what happens next. We do not know if Alcibiades and Agathon will start a true love relationship (given Agathons coquettish and self-complacent final remarks at 222e, this seems highly improbable). What we know for certain is that Alcibiades could now love: he only needs to meet another pure desirer who consents to be loved. At this stage, we can finally ask ourselves: what is real, true love for Lacan (of which he directly speaks very little in Seminar VIII and elsewhere)? How does he distinguish it from false, imaginary love? A distinction between true and false love is, in different ways, tacitly present throughout Lacans uvre. Simply put, false love is imaginary, i.e., narcissistic in essence.80 It must occur during psychoanalysis in the guise of transferential love.81 Above all, imaginary love entirely determines our everyday life: it shapes and gives consistency to our own imaginary identity, our ego. The latter is nothing but the product of an alienating redoubling of the subject caused by his capacity to identify himself with his mirror-image (or with the imaginary other understood as mirror-image). Such an identification relies on the fact that the subject is captivated by the image of the human body
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which functions as a gestalt. The ego thus attempts to realize an impossible coincidence with the ideal image reflected in the mirror: given such an impossibility, this relationship ends up in a permanent rivalry of the subject with himself, with the narcissistic image of himself that the lure of the mirror creates. Such a rivalry is already evident at the level of the dialectics between the childs early perception of his fragmented body and his parallel vision of the completeness of the specular body: it continues after the constitution of the Ur-Ich and successively consolidates itself in concomitance with the progressive reinforcement of the egos alienating identifications. In other words, since the beginning of his psychic life, the subject both eroticizes and vies with his own image because this constitutes the ideal perfection which the subject does not have. Narcissism and aggressivity are thus one and the same thing; in later years, Lacan indeed creates a neologism in which being in love/enamoured ) and hate (haine) are fused in a (enamoure single term: he speaks of hainamoration.82 Narcissism can generally be defined as the (self-loving) relationship between the subject and his own ideal image; aggressivity differs from sheer aggression understood as violent acting (the latter is just one of its possible outcomes): on the contrary, it is a prerequisite of the subjects imaginary dimension and can never be completely eliminated.83 As a consequence, the augmentation of aggressivity will be proportional to the narcissistic intensity of the subjects relationship with his own ideal image. The subject who, when considered qua ego, is nothing but the consequence of an alienating identification with the imaginary other, wants to be there where the other is: he loves the other only insofar as he wants to aggressively be in its place. The subject claims the others place as the (unattainable) place of his own perfection. It goes without saying that, for the same reason, this ambivalent relationship is also selfdestructive.84 When it comes to real love, Lacans aphoristic definitions are the following: What one loves in a being is beyond what he is, i.e., in the end, what he lacks85 and, in parallel, love is
giving what one does not have.86 The first formula refers to the lover, the second to the iz beloved. A quotation from Z ek can help us to explain them:
When in love, I love somebody because of the objet a in him/her, because of what is in him more than himself in short, the object of love cannot give me what I demand of him since he doesnt possess it, since it is an excess in its very heart [. . .] the only thing left to the beloved is thus to proceed to a kind of exchange of places, to change from the object into the subject of love, in short: to return love. Therein consists, according to Lacan, loves most sublime moment: in this inversion when the beloved object endeavours to deliver himself from the impasse of his position [. . .] by answering the lovers lack/desire with his own lack. Love is based upon the illusion that this encounter of the two lacks can succeed.87
In Seminar VIII, Lacan uses a mythical image to exemplify all this: I want to pluck a ripe fruit. My hand stretches out, it gets closer to the object but it still cannot reach it. At that precise moment, it is reached by another stretching hand. When the two hands meet, it is as if they were grabbing the fruit which attracted and still attracts them.88 The least we could say is that we are here confronted with a notion of love which, despite remaining confined to the field iz of illusion, as Z ek has it, also appears not to impede the appearance of (the subjects) pure desire (in the form of the Others desire qua object a). In other words, in this context, love bears the sign of a real encounter with lack; it bears the scar of castration, says Lacan.89 More specifically, for Lacan, real love is the product of a metaphoric substitution in which the function of the erastes, i.e., the lover qua subject of lack, comes in the place, substitutes itself for the function of the eromenos, i.e., the loved [imaginary] object.90 The erastes becomes eromenos by substituting his narcissistic love object with his own lack. The emergence of a structural inadaequatio91 between real desire and its imaginary object together with its assumption on the side of the subject/lover is a precondition of love: this inadaequatio also coincides with the field of tragicomedy.92 Whilst this occurs, the
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eromenos transforms himself into an erastes, that is to say, he starts really to desire by offering the other what he does not have: this cannot but be, by definition, the eromenos own lack, his own desire or, which is the same, what is in him more than himself, the agalma/objet petit a that the lover is looking for. In such a way, an illusory adaequatio of lacks is achieved. In the end, the erastes looks for the desire of the beloved; what the erastes desires is the Others desire. The sir de lAutre] qua agalma is Others desire [le de the spring of love [le ressort de lamour].93 Returning to the Symposium: the miraculous character of the eromenos transformation is what Lacan had emphasised in Phaedruss praise of Achilles sacrifice; the emergence of a structural inadaequatio (i.e., an impasse, an aporia) in the erastes from which only an adaequatio can successively arise is exactly what the myth of Penias conception of Eros with Poros was all about. It should be clear by now that both partners involved in a love relation must be, at the same time, both erastes and eromenos: this is why the relation between Socrates and Alcibiades could never be a love relation.94 However, it is important to note how, according to Lacan, this overlapping of lacks is far from creating any sort of symmetry: my hand meets the others hand whilst stretching towards a third object; a nage a ` trois real love relationship is a me between a couple of lacking subjects and agalma/objet petit a.95 On the contrary, two is the number which activates the aggressively narcissistic mirage of completeness. For this same reason, real love is, as I have already remarked, less illusory than imaginary love. Thanks to the metaphor of love, both partners somehow realise that what they desire in the other is not a subject but an object which is in each subject more than the subject himself. Given that they both take up the position that was of the other, what they both desire through the other is ultimately something which is in them more than themselves: an object-nothing which provides the extimate kernel of their own being. In this way, they are not apparently desiring in the other their own ideal image.96
IV in lacan more than himself

Does such an account of love actually mark the definitive end of its dependence on narcissism? We should doubt it: for Lacan, the ego will always remain a prerequisite of the subjects own individuation. As he states in one of his early essays: The ego is a vital dehiscence that is constitutive of man;97 I take this assumption to be valid throughout his entire oeuvre. As a consequence, the neat division of two perspectives on love98 one which derivates, masks, annuls, sublimates all that is concrete in experience and another which revolves around this privilege, this unique point [. . .] agalma [. . .] which we only find in a being when we really love99 enacted in certain passages of Seminar VIII could rightly be considered as all too hurried. Imaginary love and real love cannot easily be separated: if on the one hand, agalma is also constantly operative in narcissistic love despite the fact that we ignore/veil it, on the other as Lacan somehow contradictorily admits in the same seminar every temporary emergence of agalma in real love must necessarily be more or less [imaginarily] dissimulated; in case this does not happen, falling in love soon degenerates into unbearable anxiety.100 In a lesson from Seminar IX, Lacan briefly returns to the interpretation of the conclusion of the Symposium he had provided in Seminar VIII and the reason why the scene between Socrates and Alcibiades should not be understood as an example of (the metaphor of) real love. Socrates qua pure desirer does not accept his being loved by Alcibiades: therefore, Socrates does not occupy the place of the beloved, i.e., no metaphoric substitution takes place. Lacan maintains that he is here specifically focusing on the frontier that separates desire from love:101 if there is a substitution, one accesses the realm of love; if no substitution occurs, one remains in the field of desire. More importantly, in Seminar IX, Lacan challenges the plausibility of (the metaphor of) real love tout-court: It is a matter of establishing whether it is not structurally impossible, whether it does not represent an ideal point.102 In other words, all pure desirers like Socrates would as such, by definition, always
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persist in their refusal to take up the position of the beloved: being aware of the fact that there is nothing in them which is lovable, or, better, that they are desired for the void, for the ouden, which is in them more than themselves, pure desirers could not but subscribe to a programmatic noli me amare. If according to Seminar VIII, as we have seen, the signification of real love surfaces when the function of the erastes, i.e., the lover qua subject of lack comes in the place of [. . .] the function of the eromenos,103 in Seminar IX, Lacan realizes that the lover either fully recognizes himself as a subject of lack (i.e., as a pure desirer) or accepts his being loved for something he does not have. What is it then that radically changed in the course of just one year? In Seminar VIII, real/ non-narcissistic love relied on one main (inconsistent) assumption: its compatibility with pure desire. Now, Lacan thinks that such a conjunction, as he names it, between pure desire and the (more or less illusory) function of the One which love necessarily supports is simply impossible. Desire and love are structurally incompatible. Desire is the desire of lack, or, more precisely: That which desire looks for in the Other is less that which is desirable [le sirable] than that which desires [le de sirant], de i.e., that which the Other lacks.104 Differently put, the pure desirer desires the desire of the Other, to be understood as that which in sirant dans lAutre], the Other desires [le de i.e., the Others lack. As Lacan notices, for this very reason, as a pure desirer, I cannot desire the Other desiring me, I cannot desire to be loved: if this happens, I abandon desire. To express this with Lacans own convoluted words: Its me who desires and, given that I desire [the Others] desire, this desire could only be sir de moi] if [. . .] I love desire for myself [de myself in the other, that is if it is me that I love.105 In Seminar IV, Lacan had already come to the conclusion that the biggest desire is lack,106 and that, consequently, what one loves in a being is what the beloved lacks. He had also underlined how this is particularly evident in two specific forms of love: Platonic and courtly love.107 In Seminar IX, the same trans-historical/cultural
association is openly resumed under the motto of noli me amare. At this stage, we should naively ask the following basic question: what does Diotimas ascent and final identification concretely share with the troubadours and ngers love for an inaccessible Lady? Minnesa iz Z ek seems to propose that their common denominator should be identified in tragedy; both Platonic and courtly love culminate in Liebestod, in a climactic self-obliteration in which all distinctions disappear:108 both should therefore be condemned as two fundamentally false visions of love. I completely agree with these conclusions, but I believe some further elucidations are necessary. In Seminar VIII, Lacan explicitly claims that the notion of tragic (and not tragicomic) love was alien to the classical world,109 and proposes that Platos fundamental fantasy (in the Symposium and beyond) consists in having projected the idea of Supreme Good on [. . .] the impenetrable void.110 Platonic love, like courtly love, leads to the void: in this sense, what they both equally share with tragedy is, on one level, an undeniable rmerei, an exaltation. However, not only Schwa do they do without satisfactions but, above all, unlike tragedy, they point towards the institution of lack.111 We could thus affirm that, for Lacan, Platonic (and courtly) love: (a) Elides the Other. By reducing the beloved to the void, it mortifies the Other. In Platonic Eros, the lover, love, only aims at his own perfection.112 (b) Converts, at last, the quest for the void which, meanwhile, has enhanced desire into an absolute, final identification with that which is supremely lovable,113 beauty in itself, i.e., the Supreme Good qua capitalized Void. In the higher mysteries of love described by Diotima, Lack is thus positively instituted as the ultimate ktema (which Lacan adequately renders as but de possession, aim of possession114). Psychoanalysis can only define this transvaluation which indeed perfectly corresponds with the utter obliteration of the Other as superlatively narcissistic.115 If, for Lacan, three is the minimum number of love,116
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Diotima remains on the contrary at the level of a dual relation.117 (c) Ultimately differs from tragedy insofar as the latter does not operate this final reversal: in tragedy, pure desire embraces the void without paradoxically elevating it to the dignity of the Supreme Good. Moreover, radical/tragic desire also goes beyond the experience of beauty. As Lacan writes in Seminar VII: On the scale that separates us from the central field of desire, if the good constitutes the first stopping place, the beautiful forms the second and gets closer.118 We have thus far tacitly associated Platonic love with Diotimas ascent.119 Does Lacan, in Seminar VIII, actually think that Platos own notion of love in the Symposium is unreservedly expressed by the priestess? There are at least three instances in which he overtly denies this.120 If, on the one hand, in presenting that which one may call his thought [on love], Plato deliberately reserved for himself the place of enigma,121 on the other, Lacan believes that we should definitely be looking for the last word of what Plato wants to tell us about the nature of love122 in the scene between Socrates and Alcibiades. Lacans reading of the Symposium remains as open as Platos own ending of the dialogue: however, a close cross-scrutiny of lessons X, XI and XII of Seminar VIII enables us to draw some provisional conclusions. Concerning Alcibiades, one can infer that Lacan thinks that, after he has been analysed by Socrates, his desire is both irreducible to Diotimas ascent to beauty in itself/the Supreme Good and strangely contiguous to it. Indeed, Lacan states that it is not beauty, nor the ascent, nor an identification with God that Alcibiades desires, but this unique object, this something he has seen in Socrates;123 he is able to support this view by showing how, through the simile of the ugly Silenus and of agalma as something precious which is hidden inside, Plato makes Alcibiades eradicate us from the dialectic of the beautiful which had thus far been [. . .] the guide [. . .] on the road to what is desirable.124 Moreover, Lacan reminds us how Plato writes
that Alcibiades is literally spellbound by Socratess agalma, beyond good an evil: Alcibiades is saying I want it because I want it, be it my good or my evil. 125 But, at the same time, Lacan also puzzlingly affirms that: Without knowing it, Alcibiades provides the true representation of what the Socratic ascent implies.126 Are we facing an insurmountable contradiction in the psychoanalysts impromptu statements? A possible way out of this deadlock would consist in referring Alcibiades true representation of Diotimas ascent to a notion of tragic desire which profoundly interests Lacan and which, in this period of his production, he deems compatible with nothing less than the ethics of psychoanalysis. If this hypothesis is correct, the truth of Alcibiades desire should precisely be equated with the fact that its quest for agalma (qua void) was never reversed into the appropriation of a Supreme Good. Undoubtedly, Alcibiades is one of the most tragic figures of Ancient Greek history: he was rapidly downgraded from the status of political leader and military hero to that of enemy of the state par excellence (and possibly, as Lacan remarks, of scapegoat); however, even when he was obliged to flee Athens, he did not cede on his desire (for instance, to assure a throne to his descendants) and he found nothing better to do [. . .] than conceiving a child with the queen [of Sparta] in the open;127 he died a violent death. (In order to have an updated idea of the sort of man he was, Lacan suggests, one should imagine a Kennedy who would have been at the same time James Dean!)128 Furthermore, the similarities between Alcibiades existence and that of the fictional character of Oedipus (e.g., profanation of the Gods; subversion of the laws of the polis; imposed exile; conceiving a child with a foreign queen, etc.) are dazzling; Lacan repeatedly analysed the figure of Oedipus throughout his seminars: one may suppose that he did not fail to notice them. This reference to the real-life Alcibiades leads us to our second concluding point concerning the notion of transferential love that, according to Lacan, Plato would make him impersonate in the Symposium. Lacan insinuates that (Plato is well aware of the fact that) Socrates does not
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really know what he is doing when he interprets Alcibiades desire.129 He thinks he has displaced agalma from him to Agathon: as we have just seen, what history actually teaches us is that Socrates has allow me the expression uncorked Alcibiades devastating hybris. On an initial level Lacan seems to suggest Plato shows us how, by wanting to praise Agathon, Socrates is actually indicating to Alcibiades where his desire lies130 given that Alcibiades desire equates with the Others/Socrates (contingent object of) desire. In this sense, it would appear that Socrates interpretation achieves a narcissistic re-corking of Alcibiades desire through Agathon after having awakened it. But, on a second level, Alcibiades real/tragic desire is not re-corked by Socrates retroactive interpretation (You do not love me, you love him!). As Lacan himself specifies: Alcibiades keeps on desiring the same thing. That which he looks for in Agathon do not doubt it is this same supreme point where the subject abolishes himself in his fantasy, i.e., his agalmata.131 This is probably the reason why, in an early passage of Seminar VIII, Lacan also notes that Socrates had been a master of love against everybodys good and that, consequently, he was (rightly) put to death for everybodys good;132 against any superficial apologetic reading of the overall economy of the dialogue such as Socrates is not guilty for Alcibiades hybris, he even refused to sleep with him Plato would instead be the first to admit his teachers responsibility. I believe that, for Lacan, these two interpretations are equally valid and, what is more attaching importance to the mythical stratifications of the Symposium as a whole should not be held as mutually exclusive. As he remarks, the conclusion of the conversation between Alcibiades and Socrates is enigmatic:133 Plato purposely disrupts the banquet with the arrival of a new group of drunken tards. I suggest that this second interruption fe should be read together with the abrupt Good night! with which Socrates answers to Alcibiades advances and which Lacan seems to associate with his notorious interruption de la ance.134 se
The diffuse ambiguity that permeates the finale of the dialogue equally prevents us from establishing what Socrates role is with regard to the enunciation of a true notion of love, both for Plato and, more importantly, for Lacan. To what extent is Socrates (and not Plato) a faithful pupil of Diotima who, in his turn, converts new adepts to the cause of the Void qua Supreme Good? Undoubtedly, the more he is, the less he can convincingly be presented as a proto-analyst given that Lacan unequivocally distances his notion of true love from the ascent to beauty in itself condemning the latter as a radical form of narcissism. But even if one unconditionally assumes that there is no connection whatsoever between Diotimas theory of love and Socratic Eros135 this is what Lacan seems to imply when he insists on the passage (217e) in which Plato makes Alcibiades speak of Socrates indifference before beauty and the Good as such136 many problems still remain unsolved. First and foremost: Lacan admits that Socrates was driven by a desire for death; if, on the one hand, reading the Apology he says it is difficult to believe, hearing [Socrates] defence, that he didnt want to die, on the other hand, this desire is itself contradictory (it is not just a matter of committing suicide) given that it took him seventy years to satisfy it.137 This complex proximity between the desire of the (proto)analyst and the desire for death directly introduces us again to the delicate issue of psychoanalysis overlapping with tragedy. Justifying or criticizing the reasons and the consistency of Lacans temporary superimposition of the aim of psychoanalysis and therefore of the formation of the analyst with real desire qua tragic desire lies beyond the scope of this article. Let us only recall that, some years later, in Seminar XI, the analysts desire is not [any longer seen as] a pure desire.138 As for Seminar VIII, what noticeably emerges from one of its opening lessons and is later explored by Lacans dissection of the scene between Socrates and Alcibiades is that the psychoanalyst should be somebody who: a) is not there for [the analysands] good but so that he may love; b) makes the analysand love that which he lacks [i.e., the analysands real desire] through the medium of the transference.139
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V conclusion
Lacan is well aware of the fact that the final scene of the Symposium does not provide him with an exemplification of what, in Seminar VIII, he understands as (the metaphor of) real love. Alcibiades is, at best, initiated by Socrates into the tragic mysteries of pure desire. No hand stretches back to meet his hand: not Socrates, who refuses to be loved; not even Agathons, for the simple reason that he is not a pure desirer. However, Lacan supposes that Alcibiades qua pure desirer could have established a real love relationship if only, in his quest for the void, the Other would have answered him as a to use one of the most effective definitions of real love from Seminar VIII last presence.140 (And, in case such an answer ever occurred, if he himself consented to answer to it.) As we have seen, for the Lacan who ingeniously re-reads the Symposium through the filter of the psychoanalytic setting, pure desire and real love are deemed compatible: the emergence of pure desire is a conditio sine qua non of real love (contrary to all Lacanian doxa, this is, for example, clearly implied by Lacan when he states that Penia qua erastes original desirer represents the logical time that precedes the birth of Love)141; conversely, unlike narcissistic love, which, all things considered, also includes courtly and Platonic love, real love does not hinder pure desire. The problem is that this compatibility remains largely unexplained and, in the end, inconsistent with regard to Lacans own general theory of desire. Lacan acknowledges this in Seminar IX, where the subject of desire is neatly distinguished from the subject of love.142 The latter is now regarded exclusively as a narcissistic subject. Despite the fact that pure desire is apparently the only option one might choose that would not amount to narcissism, we should stress one last time that this same admission is precisely what marks Lacanian theory in the early 1960s with the antinomy of tragedy: if on the one hand, the shattering manifestation of pure desire is rightly invoked to re-engrave on the subject the scar of castration, on the other hand, Lacan is not yet able to explain in a convincing way how we
prevent the inflicted wound being lethal, how analysis manages to re-cicatrize an old wound after having turned the knife in it. Such an antinomy is not without consequences for the extremely variable status of real love in these years. On this regard, one might well argue that, if Seminar VIII is overoptimistic, Seminar IX is, almost by way of compensation, overpessimistic. For this reason, both fail to consider (the metaphor of) real love as something momentarily possible: real love emerges for an instant when, having pursued agalma, the subject of pure desire abandons his (ultimately nihilistic) search for purification and, by answering to the Others answer qua last presence, substitutes himself for the beloved. He will not take the place of the latter qua pure subject of lack as Lacan contradictorily suggests in Seminar VIII but as somebody who, despite his progress towards the void, finally opts to be loved regardless of his residual impurity. In other words, the subject of pure desire who has experienced lack finds himself in a position where he can decide either to enact the metaphor of love, thus necessarily falling back into narcissism qua structural vital dehiscence, or to consume himself in tragedy by refusing to be loved. In Seminar I, Lacan had already pointed out how love, by provoking a perturbation of the symbolic order,143 entails the exposure of ones own narcissism to the influence of the beloved: however, at this level, we are still passive victims of love. The space of discussion opened by Seminars VIII and IX invites us to think a way in which we could also actively decide to be loved after having undone our stagnant narcissistic identifications by temporarily following our pure/real desire (for the void). Strange as it may sound, I firmly believe that such a decisionism should be thought in accordance with and not to detriment of the logical mode of contingency that undoubtedly permeates Lacans later speculation on love. Being unable to develop this argument any further in this article, I limit myself to pointing in the direction of the element of courage in love, as obliquely treated by Lacan in Seminar XX:144 we could suggest that, after subtraction, in order to love, one must have the courage and
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thus somehow decide to be faithful to the event of love, despite obligatory re-narcissisisation. As for this imaginary re-inscription, it is imperative to make a distinction between new imaginary identifications that are the consequence of mere frustration in everyday life there are as many [narcissistic] masks as there are forms of insatisfaction, Lacan says 145 and those which follow the (reciprocal) experience of falling in love, the fleeting moment in which the Real qua void pierces the imaginary-symbolic veil of reality and appears in self-consciousness. Ultimately, this is precisely the difference between relating to the Others demand, demanding something of him, being frustrated in our demand and consequently identifying with him, and temporarily relating to the pure desire of the Other and thus purely desiring.
detailed analysis of the first part of Seminar VIII has thus far been produced. 2 Such a relationship is not a presentiment of sychanalisse, Lacan admits, but an encounter, the apparition of certain traits which are, for us, minaire, livre VIII. Le revelatory ( J. Lacan, Le se transfert, 1960^1961 (Paris: Seuil, 2001) 85^ 86; for an alternative critical edition of Seminar VIII, see also www.ecole-lacanienne.net/documents/ transfert.doc). (All translations from French source materials for which no English translation is currently available are mine.) 3 Ibid. 37 . 4 Ibid. 71; my emphasis.For a Lacan-inspired treatment of love qua event and the importance of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis in relation to it one should refer to Alain Badious work (see especially, A. Badiou,La sce in De lamour (Paris: ' ne du Deux, Flammarion, 1999) 177^90; A. Badiou, What is love? in Jacques Lacan, Critical Evaluations in iz ek (London: Cultural Theory: Volume IV, ed. S. Z Routledge, 2003) 51^ 67; A. Badiou, On Beckett, eds. N. Power and A. Toscano (Manchester: Clinamen, 2003) 22^36, 64 ^ 67 . See also P. Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to T ruth (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2003) 185^91). 5 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac,1988) 455 (translation slightly modified). 6 Lacan reminds us how psychoanalysis itself is minaire, livre VIII, cit.11). a fausse situation (Le se 7 Ibid. 46. 8 Ibid. 31. 9 Lacan reminds us that the Symposiums first translator into French, the sixteenth-century humanist Louis Le Roy (Ludovicus Rejus), considered the last part of the dialogue apocryphal and did not translate it. 10 As claimed amongst others by the respected twentieth-century classicist (and himself a translator of the Symposium into French) Le on Robin. For Lacans bitter attack against Robins interpretation miof the final scene of the Symposium, see Le se naire, livre VIII 36 ^37 . 11 Ibid. 37 . As Gagarin observes (in 1977),there is now general agreement that Alcibiades speech is a vital element of the Symposium (M. Gagarin, Socrates hybris and Alcibiades failure, in Phoenix
notes
A first draft of this paper was originally presented at the Ancient and Continental workshop organized by John Sellars (University of Warwick, 27 February 2003). A second, enlarged draft was delivered as a lecture at the Jan van Eyck Academie (31 March 2004) on invitation by Marc De Kesel and Dominiek Hoens. I want to thank Myriam Be rube and Mike Lewis for their linguistic advice. I have followed R. Waterfields English translation of the Symposium (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994) except in the places where Lacan proposes an interpretation that is incompatible with it. 1 The third part of Seminar VIII, centred on a commentary of Claudels Cou fontaine trilogy, met with a far wider and more committed reception, especially in English (see e.g., Chapter 2 of S. iz Z ek, The Indivisible Remainder. An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996); A. Zupanc ic , Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000) 211^33). In France, some authors have ^ from opposite standpoints ^ explicitly relied on Lacans general interpretation of the Symposium for their own reading of this sir (Paris: dialogue (see esp. C. Dumoulie , Le de diteur, 1999) and J. Le Brun, Armand Colin/HER E ' Lacan (Paris: Seuil, 2002)). Le Pur Amour de Platon a However, to the best of my knowledge, no
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31 (1977) 22). However, this was not definitely yet a reputable belief amongst scholars when Lacan delivered his commentary in the early 1960s. minaire, livre VIII 204. 12 Le se 13 Ibid. 59. 14 Ibid. 58. 15 Ibid. 95 (see also 40 and 71). What about (the Christian) Gods love for us? We can believe that God qua supreme Being loves us only insofar as we ultimately doubt about his existence. As is well known, Lacan was a fervent admirer of Spinoza: Beneath all belief in a god that would be perfectly and totally generous, there is the idea of a certain je ne sais quoi that he anyway lacks and that makes it always possible to suppose that he minaire, livre IV. La does not exist ( J. Lacan, Le se relation dobjet, 1956^1957 (Paris: Seuil, 1994) 140). Indeed, it is precisely because, for Spinoza, Gods essence and existence are one and the same that he famously loves no one (see the fundamental corollary to Ethics, V, Prop. 17). Miller provides a succinct Lacanian explanation of Spinozas God incapacity to love: Spinoza [. . .] cannot imagine that God loves us since he cannot imagine a God as Barred Other ( J.-A. Miller, Logiche della vita amorosa (Rome: Astrolabio, 1997) 19). For a wellinformed comparative discussion of Lacan and Spinoza, see C. Guarino, A. Labate and G. Galvano, Il desiderio di fronte alla causa, in La Psicoanalisi 24 (1998): 257^ 64. minaire, livre VIII 60. 16 Le se 17 Ibid. 53. 18 Noticeably, M. Meunier (see ibid. 62, 71). 19 Ibid. 63, 71. 20 Ibid. 63 (see Symposium 180a ^ b). 21 Interestingly enough, Diotima will denounce Achilles act as ultimately self-interested (208d). Diotima in fact claims that those who are deadfor[-somebody], or have followed another in death [uper [. . .] apothanein, epapothanein, proapothanein [. . .] uper ] only thought about assuring for themselves an immortal memory: men do everything in order to achieve the immortality of glory (see J. Le Brun, Le Pur Amour de Platon ' Lacan 35). Even if Diotimas allegations would a prove wrong, what is certain is that Achilles act does not reach the level of Sygne de Cou fontaines act (also analysed by Lacan in
Seminar VIII). Simply put, at best, Achilles sacrifice is beyond all pathological sacrifice but, as it were, does not sacrifice the non-pathological sacrifice itself ^ which should therefore be considered as a final pathological remainder. On the contrary, Sygne sacrifices sacrifice, says No! to it. (However, I fully agree with Zupanc ic when she claims that sacrifice is the precondition of Sygnes final No!) 22 Why is the idealized erastes/eromenos relationship in ancient Greece generally homosexual? Putting together different suggestions made by Lacan in Seminar VIII, we might be able to sketch an answer: a) The real object of love is always neuter (in general, not only in ancient Greece) (ibid. 64); b) As the scene between Socrates and Alcibiades will show, the neuter object of love emerges only when demand is frustrated; c) In Greece,woman demanded what was due to her, she attacked man, i.e., simply put, she used to take the initiative (ibid. 44; on this point, see also minaire, livreV.Les formations delinconsJ.Lacan, Le se cient (Paris: Seuil, 1998) 135); d) Consequently, the neuter object could not generally emerge in heterosexual relations. On the contrary, homosexual courting was socially coded in a way that allowed the neuter object to emerge (i.e., recalling Pausanias speech, the erastes was both encouraged and hindered; the eromenos could not surrender too quickly, etc.). minaire, livre VIII 81. 23 Le se 24 We find seven repetitions of paus in [sixteen] lines (ibid. 80). 25 Ibid. 73. 26 Ibid. 73. 27 Ibid. 73. 28 Ibid. 77 . 29 Ibid. 74, 77 . 30 Ibid. 77 . As we shall later see in this article, according to Lacan, Platonic love (the love of beauty-in-itself qua Supreme Good) should in its turn be distinguished from Platos own beliefs concerning love. 31 Ibid.108,116 ^17 . 32 Ibid.109. 33 Ibid.117 .
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34 Ibid.116. 35 A general lack of sufficient attention on the side of commentators may be indeed inferred from the fact that we still call it the myth of the androgynous, whereas the androgynous is just one of the three original spherical species. 36 Ibid.118. 37 D. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996) 181. Briefly put, this lack of symmetry is due to the fact that the phallus is the only signifier which governs the relations between the sexes: woman has to take the image of the other sex as the basis of her [symbolic] identification ( J. Lacan, The Psychoses 1955^1956 ^ Book III (London: Routledge, 1993) 176). 38 Lacan is particularly explicit on this point:The symbolic order has to be conceived as something superimposed, without which no animal life [. . . nor] the most natural of relations, that between male and female [. . .] would be possible for [. . .] man (Ibid. 96). 39 J. Lacan, Freuds Papers on Technique 1953^1954: Book I (New York: Norton, 1988) 138. On the incompatibility between nature in general and the spherical perfection of harmonious copulation, minaire, livre XVII. Lenvers de la see J. Lacan, Le se psychanalyse, 1969^1970 (Paris: Seuil,1991) 36. minaire, livre VIII 1 40 Le se 18. 41 Lacan seems to contradict Diotimas assumption that all those who sacrifice themselves for love do so in order to become immortal, or, better, he renders it much more complex (see above n. 21). Indeed, on the one hand, he claims that ^ like Antigone ^ both Alcestis and Achilles have entered the tragic space in between two deaths, i.e., the space of symbolic death (ibid. 61). On the other hand, he maintains that Socrates himself was led by a peculiar desire for death (suffice it to read the Apology) whilst he also clearly aspired after some sort of immortality: Lacan names the latter the desire of infinite discourse and rather surprisingly locates it again in the space in between two deaths (ibid. 126 ^29). Here, it is clearly impossible to fully unfold the multiple resonance of these observations. I limit myself to underlining how the space in between two deaths is intended in Seminar VIII as the limit where full symbolisation (Socrates infinite discourse) and its
exact opposite, i.e., the mythical achievement of symbolic death through tragic desire, ultimately coincide. 42 Ibid.132. 43 Ibid. 132. The list of qualities attributed by Agathon to Eros is considered by Lacan to be far more ambiguous than translators generally consider it to be. Most of the terms used by the poet would have a double, pejorative meaning: for example, Lacan claims that it is too simplistic to translate truphe as well-being given that it also presupposes a certain hybris qua pretentiousness (ibid. 134). Waterfield also notes that there are some obvious absurdities in Agathons speech, such as love is self-controlled, but he does not make much out of it (see, Plato, Symposium 84). If, on the one hand, most commentators find Agathons contribution a sophistic nullity (see Lacan on Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, ibid. 138 ^39), on the other hand, some take it very seriously indeed: for instance, according to Hamilton, Agathons words would anticipate Pauls praise of love in the First Letter to the Corinthians (see Plato, The Collected Dialogues (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961) 526). Lacan does not subscribe to either of these readings: he believes this speech should be taken seriously precisely because it is a minaire, livre VIII 134). macaronic discourse (Le se 44 Ibid.134. 45 Ibid.134. 46 Ibid.139^ 40. 47 Ibid.143. 48 Ibid.141^ 42. 49 Ibid. 145. Lacan believes that the purpose of Socratic episteme is to warrant knowledge, to bring truth back to discourse: this attempt to assure truth through a certainty that is internal to discourse makes him a super-sophist (ibid. 102). 50 Ibid.143. 51 See, for example, 177d: The ways of love are all I understand. minaire, livre VIII 159. 52 Le se 53 Ibid.145^ 47 . 54 Ibid.146. 55 Ibid.159.
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56 Ibid.147 ,153. 57 Ibid.150. 58 Ibid.163. 59 Ibid. 149; see Symposium 203b where Penia is in fact described as aporia. 60 Lacan says he derived this expression from Symposium 202a (ibid.150). 61 Indeed, Socrates was snub-nosed and had protuberant eyes. 62 Ibid.171. 63 Ibid.162. 64 Ibid.168. 65 Ibid. 213. See also Symposium 219c; Alcibiades states: I might as well call you gentlemen of the jury, because youre listening to evidence of Socrates high-handed treatment of me. minaire, livre VIII 183,193. 66 Le se 67 Ibid.192. 68 As for the question of how to translate agalma, Lacan provides a detailed explanation of its signification which analyses many examples of its use in various classical texts and which we could summarize with the following points: a) it is something precious; b) the topological indication, the fact that it is inside, is very important (ibid. 170); c) it can be considered both as a special image and as an unusual object (ibid. 174 ^75); d) unlike most translators who refer to agalma as hidden statues of gods, Lacan invites us to think of it as a trap for ' ge a ' dieux, gods (a pie ibid. 175): once again, one should be reminded here of the metaxu role of love, i.e., its location in between gods and humans. sirant is used by Lacan 69 The expression pur de himself with reference to Socrates and the desire of the analyst in Seminar VIII (ibid. 433). 70 Lacan explicitly equates agalma, partobject, object of desire and objet petit a (see ibid.179,181). 71 There is here a parallelism with what happens in the so-called dialectic of frustration between the child and the mother: the demand of the subject is initiated by primordial frustration and successively sustained by the fact that the mother
desires the child for what literally is in him more than himself: the phallic gestalt (see, for example, minaire, livre IV 70 ^71). Le se 72 See M. Nussbaum on this issue (The speech of Alcibiades: a reading of the Symposium, in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek T ragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 188 ^ 89). minaire, livre VIII 187 73 Le se , 213. 74 Ibid.188. 75 Ibid.189. Elsewhere in Seminar VIII, Lacan reads Socrates ouden in topological term: his being is nulle part, he is atopos. Equally, the analyst should be atopos. (ibid.103). 76 Ibid.189. 77 Ibid.192. 78 Ibid.188. 79 Ibid. 225. 80 According to Lacan, imaginary love is exemplified in Phaedruss speech by the figure of Orpheus: given that Orpheus hadnt been brave enough to die for his love, the gods showed him only a phantom of his wife (Symposium 179d). 81 In Seminar VIII, Lacan notices that the transference is something which is similar to love (cit. 84; my emphasis). However, the narcissistic love relation established during the transference is meant to undo narcissistic identifications: in this sense, as Safouan clearly points out with reference to Alcibiades confession, the transference becomes related to a search for truth minaires de Jacques (M. Safouan, Lacaniana: Les se Lacan,1953^1963 (Paris: Fayard, 2001) 164). 82 See, for example, J. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality , The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Book XX, trans. with notes by B. Fink (New Y ork: Norton, 1998) 90. In his index, Fink proposes to translate hainamoration with hateloving. 83 J. Lacan, Aggressivity in psychoanalysis, crits: A Selection (London: Tavistock,1977) 24. E 84 For an in-depth analysis of these issues, see L. Chiesa, The Subject of the Imaginary Other, Journal for Lacanian Studies 3.1 (2005): 1^34. minaire, livre IV 142. 85 Le se
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minaire, livre VIII 46. In Seminar IV, Lacan 86 Le se similarly states that there is no bigger sign of love than donating what one does not have (Le minaire, livre IV 140). se iz 87 S. Z ek, Enjoy your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out, revised edition (London: Routledge, 2001) 57^58. One should specify though, that, in real love, the beloved returns love qua erastes, i.e., qua pure desirer. minaire, livre VIII 69; see also 216. 88 See Le se 89 Ibid.130. Lacan could have found further corroboration for this expression in the fact that, in his speech, Aristophanes claims that the navel should be regarded as a reminder of the cut inflicted by Zeus (see Symposium 190e ^191a)! minaire, livre VIII 53. 90 Le se 91 In Seminar VIII, Lacan writes that this signification called love must raise from the conjunction of desire with its object insofar as the latter is inadequate (ibid. 47; my emphasis). 92 This would explain the conclusion of the Symposium which continues to puzzle commentators: in the early hours of the morning only Agathon [the tragic poet], Aristophanes [the comedian], and Socrates were still awake (223c); Socrates was trying to get them to agree that knowing how to compose comedies and knowing how to compose tragedies must combine in a single person (223d). minaire, livre VIII 204, 216. 93 Le se 94 The fact that love necessarily entails a (metaphoric) becoming eromenos of the erastes is clearly stated by Lacan in Seminar VIII with reference to Socrates refusal to become eromenos (This would be the metaphor of love insofar as Socrates would acknowledge himself as a beloved, ibid.189). 95 On the lack of symmetry in love, see ibid. 53, 70. On the number 3 qua number of love, see ibid.162,168,182. 96 Objectifying the Other (whose being is an object; see ibid. 68) is thus the best one can do in order to distance oneself from sheer narcissism. As Lacan writes in Seminar VIII: I dont know if, after having given such a pejorative connotation to the fact of considering the other as an object, anybody has ever remarked how considering him as a subject is not better. [. . .] If it is true that an
object is worth the other, for a subject things get even worse. Indeed, a subject is not actually worth an other subject: in this case, one subject is the other subject (ibid.178 ^79; my emphasis). 97 J. Lacan,Aggressivity in psychoanalysis 21; my emphasis. minaire, livre VIII 181. 98 Le se 99 Ibid. 181^ 82; my emphasis. The same dichotomy is also expressed in Seminar VIII by the distinction between phantasmatic love and the love which aims at the being of the Other (ibid. 61). 100 Ibid. 214. 101 Seminar IX (unpublished), lesson of 21 February 1962. 102 Ibid. minaire, livre VIII 53; my emphasis. 103 Le se 104 Seminar IX (unpublished), lesson of 21 February 1962. 105 Ibid. minaire, livre IV 190. 106 Le se 107 Ibid.109^10. iz 108 S. Z ek, Prefazione alledizione italiana, Il soggetto scabroso: T rattato di ontologia politica, trans. and introduced by D. Cantone and L. Chiesa (Milan: Cortina, 2003) xvii. minaire, livre VIII 135. 109 Le se 110 Ibid.13. minaire, livre IV 109; my emphasis. 111 Le se minaire, livre VIII 158. 112 Le se 113 Ibid.158. 114 Ibid.158. 115 In Seminar IV, talking indiscriminately about courtly and Platonic love, Lacan states that: At the height of love, in the most idealised form of love, what is looked for in woman is what minaire, livre IV 1 she lacks: the phallus (Le se 10). Even in this case, one should not overlook the fact that such a love of what woman as such lacks paradoxically coincides in the end with the most radical quest for the whole. Womans missing phallus is the pendent of mans plus qua castrated being: man is castrated, since he
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symbolically lacks the minus (qua imaginary object). minaire, livre VIII 168. 116 Le se 117 Ibid.168. 118 J. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959^1960: Book VII (London: Routledge, 1992) 217 . The fact that, for Lacan, the aim of psychoanalysis is, in these years, close to such a tragic notion of desire is clearly reinstated in Seminar VIII. Through psychoanalysis, we find our desire qua lack: the latter is incompatible with any good and any pos minaire, livre VIII 84 ^ 85). session of an object (Le se 119 Which is what Lacan implicitly does in Seminar IV. minaire, livre VIII 158, 204, 215^16. 120 Le se 121 Ibid. 204. For a similar sceptical approach to Platos own ideas on love, see H. Neumann, Diotimas Concept of Love, American Journal of Philology 86 (1965): 33^59 (esp. 34 ^37). Neumann convincingly disputes the fact that Socrates speech in the Symposium holds the key to the Platonic evaluation of the other speeches (ibid. 33). However, such a conclusion is drawn after an analysis of Diotimas teachings which differs profoundly from Lacans. minaire, livre VIII 204. 122 Le se 123 Ibid.194. 124 Ibid.170. 125 Ibid.191. 126 Ibid.197 . 127 Ibid. 33. Lacan mentions again the same anecdote (taken from Plutarch) in Seminar IX (lesson of 21 February 1962). 128 Ibid. 35. Interestingly enough, Nussbaum herself, who never mentions Lacan in her seminal 1979 article on Alcibiades speech, compares Alcibiades to Kennedy (see The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Platos Symposium 169)! minaire, livre VIII 215. 129 Le se 130 Ibid. 215. 131 Ibid.194. 132 Ibid.16 ^19.
133 Ibid. 215. 134 Ibid.191. 135 From a different standpoint, Neumann similarly concludes that: It is [. . .] wrong to ascribe to him [Socrates] the role of Diotimas educator intending to father spiritual children in others (Diotimas Concept of Love 57). 136 Lacan comes to this conclusion by strongly disagreeing with usual translations of Symposium minaire, livre VIII 170. 216e: see Le se 137 Ibid.104. 138 J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Vintage, 1998) 276; my emphasis. minaire, livre VIII 25. 139 Le se 140 Love as such is related to the question one poses to the Other concerning what he can give us and what he can answer us. Its not that love is identical to all demands with which we assail the Other; it situates itself in the beyond of this demand, insofar as the Other can answer us or fail to answer us as a last presence. (ibid. 207) 141 Ibid. 160. One should, however, specify that pure desire is, as such, an ideal asymptotic point. Pure desire designates here the commencement of a process of purification of desire, the fact that, as is clear from Lacans mythical example, before meeting the hand of the Other, my hand has already reduced its distance from the fruit. 142 Seminar IX (unpublished), lesson of 21 February 1962. 143 Freuds Papers on Technique 1953^1954: Book I 142. 144 See The Seminar. Book XX 144. minaire, livre V 333. 145 Le se
Lorenzo Chiesa School of European Culture and Languages University of Kent Canterbury CT2 7NF UK E-mail: l.chiesa@kent.ac.uk

Chiesa, L. - Lacan's Theory of Love in His Reading of Plato's 'Symposium'

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"Le ressort de l'amour"

LE RESSORT DE LAMOUR lacans theory of love in his reading of platos symposium

itself as a reading of Lacans reading of Platos Symposium.

II lacan as a reader of plato

III in plato more than himself

IV in lacan more than himself

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Chiesa, L. - Lacan&#39;s Theory of Love in His Reading of Plato&#39;s &#39;Symposium&#39;

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This article was downloaded by:[ANKOS 2007 ORDER Consortium] On: 31 October 2007 Access Details: [subscription number

"Le ressort de l'amour"

LE RESSORT DE LAMOUR lacans theory of love in his reading of platos symposium

itself as a reading of Lacans reading of Platos Symposium.

II lacan as a reader of plato

III in plato more than himself

IV in lacan more than himself

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Chiesa, L. - Lacan's Theory of Love in His Reading of Plato's 'Symposium'

Chiesa, L. - Lacan's Theory of Love in His Reading of Plato's 'Symposium'