“Le ressort de l’amour”

Abstract

I don’t think I’m 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

Notes

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 Bérubé and Mike Lewis for their linguistic advice. I have followed R. Waterfield's 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 Claudel's Coûfontaine trilogy, met with a far wider and more committed reception, especially in English (see e.g., Chapter 2 of S. Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder. An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996); A. Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000) 211–33). In France, some authors have – from opposite standpoints – explicitly relied on Lacan's general interpretation of the Symposium for their own reading of this dialogue (see esp. C. Dumoulié, Le désir (Paris: Armand Colin/HER Éditeur, 1999) and J. Le Brun, Le Pur Amour de Platon à Lacan (Paris: Seuil, 2002)). However, to the best of my knowledge, no 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, revelatory” (J. Lacan, Le séminaire, livre VIII. Le 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 Badiou's work (see especially, A. Badiou, “La scène du Deux,” in De l’amour (Paris: Flammarion, 1999) 177–90; A. Badiou, “What is love?” in Jacques Lacan, Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory: Volume IV, ed. S. Žižek (London: 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 Truth (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 a “fausse situation” (Le séminaire, livre VIII, cit. 11).

7. Ibid. 46.

8. Ibid. 31.

9. Lacan reminds us that the Symposium's 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) Léon Robin. For Lacan's bitter attack against Robin's interpretation of the final scene of the Symposium, see Le séminaire, 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 31 (1977) 22). However, this was not definitely yet a reputable belief amongst scholars when Lacan delivered his commentary in the early 1960s.

12. Le séminaire, livre VIII 204.

13. Ibid. 59.

14. Ibid. 58.

15. Ibid. 95 (see also 40 and 71). What about (the Christian) God's 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 does not exist” (J. Lacan, Le séminaire, livre IV. La relation d’objet, 1956–1957 (Paris: Seuil, 1994) 140). Indeed, it is precisely because, for Spinoza, God's 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 Spinoza's 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 well-informed 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.

16. Le séminaire, livre VIII 60.

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 ‘dead-for[-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 à Lacan 35). Even if Diotima's allegations would prove wrong, what is certain is that Achilles’ act does not reach the level of Sygne de Coûfontaine's 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 Zupančič when she claims that sacrifice is the precondition of Sygne's 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 J. Lacan, Le séminaire, livre V. Les formations de l’inconscient (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.).

23. Le séminaire, livre VIII 81.

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 Plato's own beliefs concerning love.

31. Ibid. 108, 116–17.

32. Ibid. 109.

33. Ibid. 117.

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, Freud's 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, see J. Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVII. L’envers de la psychanalyse, 1969–1970 (Paris: Seuil, 1991) 36.

40. Le séminaire, livre VIII 118.

41. Lacan seems to contradict Diotima's 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 Agathon's 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 Agathon's 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, Agathon's words would anticipate Paul's 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 “macaronic discourse” (Le séminaire, livre VIII 134).

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.”

52. Le séminaire, livre VIII 159.

53. Ibid. 145–47.

54. Ibid. 146.

55. Ibid. 159.

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 you’re listening to evidence of Socrates’ high-handed treatment of me.”

66. Le séminaire, livre VIII 183, 193.

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 gods” (a “piège à dieux,” ibid. 175): once again, one should be reminded here of the metaxu role of love, i.e., its location in between gods and humans.

69. The expression “pur désirant” is used by Lacan himself with reference to Socrates and the desire of the analyst in Seminar VIII (ibid. 433).

70. Lacan explicitly equates agalma, part-object, 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, Le séminaire, livre IV 70–71).

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 Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 188–89).

73. Le séminaire, livre VIII 187, 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 Phaedrus's speech by the figure of Orpheus: given that Orpheus “hadn’t 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” (M. Safouan, Lacaniana: Les séminaires de Jacques 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 York: Norton, 1998) 90. In his index, Fink proposes to translate “hainamoration” with hateloving.

83. J. Lacan, “Aggressivity in psychoanalysis,” Écrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977) 24.

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.

85. Le séminaire, livre IV 142.

86. Le séminaire, livre VIII 46. In Seminar IV, Lacan similarly states that “there is no bigger sign of love than donating what one does not have” (Le séminaire, livre IV 140).

87. S. Žižek, 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.

88. See Le séminaire, livre VIII 69; see also 216.

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)!

90. Le séminaire, livre VIII 53.

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).

93. Le séminaire, livre VIII 204, 216.

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 don’t 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.

98. Le séminaire, livre VIII 181.

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.

103. Le séminaire, livre VIII 53; my emphasis.

104. Seminar IX (unpublished), lesson of 21 February 1962.

105. Ibid.

106. Le séminaire, livre IV 190.

107. Ibid. 109–10.

108. S. Žižek, “Prefazione all’edizione italiana,” Il soggetto scabroso: Trattato di ontologia politica, trans. and introduced by D. Cantone and L. Chiesa (Milan: Cortina, 2003) xvii.

109. Le séminaire, livre VIII 135.

110. Ibid. 13.

111. Le séminaire, livre IV 109; my emphasis.

112. Le séminaire, livre VIII 158.

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 she lacks: the phallus” (Le séminaire, livre IV 110). 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. Woman's missing phallus is the pendent of man's “plus” qua castrated being: man is castrated, since he symbolically lacks the “minus” (qua imaginary object).

116. Le séminaire, livre VIII 168.

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 possession of an object (Le séminaire, livre VIII 84–85).

119. Which is what Lacan implicitly does in Seminar IV.

120. Le séminaire, livre VIII 158, 204, 215–16.

121. Ibid. 204. For a similar sceptical approach to Plato's own ideas on love, see H. Neumann, “Diotima's 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 Diotima's teachings which differs profoundly from Lacan's.

122. Le séminaire, livre VIII 204.

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 Plato's Symposium” 169)!

129. Le séminaire, livre VIII 215.

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 Diotima's educator intending to father spiritual children in others” (“Diotima's Concept of Love” 57).

136. Lacan comes to this conclusion by strongly disagreeing with usual translations of Symposium 216e: see Le séminaire, livre VIII 170.

137. Ibid. 104.

138. J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Vintage, 1998) 276; my emphasis.

139. Le séminaire, livre VIII 25.

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. It's 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 Lacan's 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. Freud's Papers on Technique 1953–1954: Book I 142.

144. See The Seminar. Book XX 144.

145. Le séminaire, livre V 333.