Love beyond narcissism (II)

Love in Plato

2. Plato’s Symposium, or Love as Transference

If Lacan’s reading of the poetry of courtly love ends with this pornographic and scatological point, his reading of Plato’s Symposium begins with an equally surprising point: the point of comedy.

There are very few academic commentaries that emphasize anything of the comedy in the Symposium, but Lacan begins by saying precisely that he will not be giving an academic commentary. It is an important warning.

Before carrying out his reading of the Symposium in Seminar VIII: Transference, Lacan visited his friend Alexander Kojève to ask him about Plato’s text. Kojève, of course, is the famous reader of Hegel whose course on The Phenomenology of Spirit Lacan attended in the 1930s, along with many other luminaries of Parisian intellectual life. In this meeting it was Kojève who almost occupied the position of psychoanalyst, and Lacan almost that of analysand. For at the end, on his way out the door, Lacan remarked that after all they had not spoken much about the Symposium. Kojève’s response struck him deeply: “You will never interpret the Symposium if you don’t know why Aristophanes had the hiccups.” When he returned to the text, Lacan began to decipher his friend’s hint. Aristophanes is listening to Pausanias, another character in the Symposium, and as Lacan says: “it is extremely difficult not to see that the reason Aristophanes has the hiccups is that he has been cracking up with laughter throughout Pausanias’s entire speech—and Plato has done the same […] for Plato himself […] Pausanias’s speech is ridiculous.”

This is how Lacan reads the Symposium in Seminar VIII. And he crucially applies this insight of Kojève not only to Pausanias’s speech but also to the speeches of all the characters in Plato’s dialogue—except Socrates himself and Alcibiades, who appears at the very end of the text. In short, nearly all the speeches on love in the Symposium—this document so highly valued by the entire Western philosophical tradition—are ridiculous; but when Socrates speaks, and when he responds to the appearance of Alcibiades, something emerges concerning love that has a different status. As Lacan says: “we are going to take the Symposium […] as a kind of set of psychoanalytic session minutes. In fact, it is something of this order. As the dialogue progresses and the contributions of the different participants in the symposium succeed one another, something occurs, in the form of successive clarifications, each flash illuminated by the next; and then, at the end, what is reported to us as a raw fact, even an annoying one—the irruption of life into the scene, the presence of Alcibiades. And it is up to us to understand the meaning in his discourse.”

All the other speeches in the Symposium on love are essentially encomia or praises, and they are basically—for Lacan, and for Plato himself, Lacan insists—ridiculous; though Lacan also finds many interesting things along the way. With the entrance of Alcibiades and Socrates’s response, however, something changes: we move from the encomia and praises of love to what Lacan calls its “pandemonium” and its “scandal.”

Thus, we can consider first and briefly the encomia and other ideas Lacan emphasizes, and second, and more seriously, the pandemonium, because it is from here that Lacan extracts a fundamental lesson for psychoanalysis.

There are six speeches before the entrance of Alcibiades.

The first is by Phaedrus. He defends a theological conception of love, according to which the eminence of its effects depends on its degree of divine dignity. Lacan dismisses this conception, following Socrates and Plato, but he picks out something very important in Phaedrus’s words. According to this character, love is a metaphor or, as Lacan says, “an algebraic formula”: “The meaning of love is produced to the extent that the function of the erastēs, the lover, as subject of lack, is substituted for the function of the erōmenos, the beloved object—takes its place.” Love emerges when the beloved abandons supposed completeness in order to love as a subject based on his or her own lack. This is why Lacan states, in a famous aphorism, that “to love is to give what one does not have.”

On the basis of this metaphor, Lacan also writes in this Seminar a new myth of love. Let us imagine, he says: “[a] hand that reaches out to grasp the fruit when it is ripe, to draw toward itself the rose that has opened, to stir the log that suddenly catches fire […] when in this movement of reaching, drawing, stirring, the hand has already gone far enough toward the object, if from the fruit, the flower, the log, there then arises a hand that comes to meet your hand—and at this moment, it is your hand fixed in the closed plenitude of the fruit, in the open fullness of the flower, in the explosion of a hand catching fire—then what is produced there is love.”

We see that Lacan was not immune to the temptations of a certain love poetry. Yet we will also see that the whole importance of Socrates’s response to Alcibiades lies in the fact that he rejects this myth, and this metaphor, of love.

The second speech is by Pausanias—the one that gives Aristophanes the hiccups. Lacan dismisses it as what he calls “the psychology of the rich.” Pausanias tries to hoard love the way a miser hoards money.

In the third speech, Eryximachus praises love as a kind of concord, harmony, or medical balance. Lacan is not convinced, even though Eryximachus’s definition of medicine as “the science of the erotics of the body” could happily be applied to psychoanalysis.

The fourth speech elaborates another myth. It is the famous myth by Aristophanes about supposedly spherical and androgynous beings, split into two as punishment by Zeus and condemned thereafter to seek eternally their reunion. “Love is, consequently, the name for the desire and pursuit of this integrity,” says Aristophanes. Lacan’s verdict is very interesting, especially after what we have already seen. He says that: “here we find ourselves exactly at the level we moderns attribute to love—after the sublimation of courtly love […] and after what I could call the romantic misunderstanding of this sublimation, namely the narcissistic overestimation of the subject, of the subject supposed in the beloved object.” Aristophanes’s love is also narcissistic, and its only counterweight is that this comic dramatist is speaking in Plato’s dialogue, as Lacan insists, in tragic terms. Ultimately, this myth perhaps does not provoke as much laughter.

The fifth speech is by Agathon, a tragic poet, but this time its content is comic. With these inversions, according to Lacan, Plato is pulling our leg a bit. Agathon’s speech is sophistic, ironic, macaronic, Lacan says; it speaks of love as unclassifiable, untimely, always out of place. But for Lacan we cannot rest content with this opinion, even if we also encounter what he calls “the profound topology that prevents us from saying anything about love that holds together.”

The sixth speech is by Diotima, a woman. Instead of articulating his own theory of love, Socrates yields the floor to her. Academic commentators have taken her speech very seriously, even those who have been able to see something of the ridiculous in the other speeches. They have taken it as an expression of Plato’s idea: the idea of love as a ladder of being that ascends toward the final rung of the essence of eternal beauty, and toward what Lacan defines as “a final identification with that which is supremely lovable.” But this love, again narcissistic, is not Plato’s last word. Lacan’s reading is so radical that he even says that Plato is laughing, in the field of love, at his own theory of Ideas.

In the Symposium, then, Plato’s last word is the entrance of Alcibiades and Socrates’s response to him. But why does this entrance produce, in Lacan’s words, the “pandemonium,” why is it so “scandalous”?

It is scandalous because Alcibiades arrives late to the banquet, after the other speeches have ended. He bursts drunkenly into the symposium, accompanied by a prostitute. He proceeds directly to declare his love for Socrates: “I think,” he tells him, “that you are the only one worthy of becoming my lover, and it seems to me that you hesitate to mention it to me.”

He compares him to Silenus statues, known in Ancient Greece for being ugly on the outside, like Socrates himself, and of extraordinary beauty on the inside, because of the precious objects they contain: “I don’t know if anyone has seen the images inside them,” he says. “I, however, have seen them once, and it seemed to me that they were so divine and golden, so extremely beautiful and admirable, that I had to do without hesitation whatever Socrates commanded. And believing that he was seriously interested in my beauty, I thought it was a happy encounter and that my fortune was extraordinary, in the idea that if I pleased Socrates, I could hear everything he knew.”

The precious objects found within these statues are called agalmatā, or in the singular, agalma. And this agalma is the indispensable core of Lacan’s reading. Alcibiades’s supposed love for Socrates is directed toward his agalma, what is most precious in him. As the citation I have just read makes clear, however, Socrates’s agalma interests Alcibiades only because it essentially reflects his own beauty. Once again, Alcibiades’s love for Socrates is narcissistic.

But how does Socrates respond to this love?

In Alcibiades’s striking words, as follows: “I laid myself under the old cloak of that old man here present, and putting my arms around this truly divine and marvelous being, I lay there the whole night […] But despite my doing all that, he emerged completely victorious; he disdained me, mocked my beauty, and insulted me. And yet in this matter at least I believed I was something […] Thus […] I got up after having slept with Socrates no differently than if I had slept with my father or my older brother.”

In Lacan’s words, Socrates responds in this way precisely because he knows something about love. That is, if Socrates is famous for having said he knew nothing, it is also true that he made one single exception concerning love: this he did indeed claim to know something about, in the Symposium and elsewhere.

But what did he know? According to Lacan, Socrates knew centrally that there is nothing lovable in the agalma. As Lacan says: “the fact that Socrates refuses to enter into the game of love is closely linked to what is posited at the beginning as the point of departure—that he knows […] precisely because Socrates knows, he refuses to have been in any capacity, justified or unjustifiable, the erōmenos, the desirable one, the one who is worthy of being loved […] Socrates can only refuse [to produce the metaphor of love], because he considers that there is nothing in him that is lovable. His essence is this ouden, this nothing, this void, this hollow.”

Here we find another version of the narcissistic and sublimatory logic that Lacan discerns in courtly love. Alcibiades’s love attempts to elevate, to the dignity of the Thing, at the site of a hollow, a void, an agalmatized object. But this object—Socrates himself—rejects precisely this elevation, just as Lacan, we could say, rejects the logic of courtly love.

Why is this so important for psychoanalysis?

In Seminar VIII, Lacan leaves implicit the importance of his arguments. But three years later, in the last lesson of Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), when he returns to the Symposium to explain exactly what is at stake in the transference between analysand and analyst, Lacan lays his cards on the table: “it can only concern,” he says, “the permanent liquidation of that deception by virtue of which transference tends to operate in the direction of the closure of the unconscious. I explained its mechanism to you by referring it to the narcissistic relation through which the subject makes himself lovable as an object. Starting from his reference to the one who must love him, he tries to induce the Other into a mirage-like relation in which he convinces him that he is lovable.” Or again: “the maneuver and operation of transference must be regulated in such a way that the distance is maintained between the point where the subject sees himself as lovable and that other point where the subject sees himself caused as lack by the object a, and where the object a comes to plug the gap that constitutes the inaugural division of the subject.”

In other words and in summary, the desire of a psychoanalyst must operate against narcissism—both that of courtly love and that of Alcibiades’s agalmatized love.

We now move, then, to the third point:

3. A Love Less Foolish, or a More Worthy Love?

This is a title chosen in relation to the two references of Lacan I mentioned at the beginning, with question marks to indicate that there is an open question here; and after having passed through what Lacan calls, at one moment, the “foolishness” of courtly love and what we have seen as the “unworthiness” of Alcibiades’s love.

Until now, one might think that there is a certain devaluation of love in Lacan’s teaching. And with respect to narcissistic love, this is true. In this sense, Lacan is Freudian. However, as Jacques-Alain Miller —Lacan’s best reader; Lacan himself designated him as the one who “knows how to read me”— has said, there is, in Lacan’s later teaching, a “revaluation” of love, precisely of a non-narcissistic love. In this sense, Lacan goes beyond Freud.

What we find at the basis of this revaluation is another aphorism, another statement of Lacan that you surely will have heard and that still resonates in contemporary culture more than 50 years after he first said it in 1970: “There is no sexual relationship (Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel).” I will not explain this statement. Let me simply warn that it clearly does not mean that there are no sexual relationships. Rather, it means that there is no logical way—“rapport” in French also refers to mathematical ratio—to write the harmonious or balanced relation between two, or potentially more, bodies.

I want to finish quickly, because I want to leave time for conversation. So I will read you two passages from Lacan’s later teaching.

The first appears in the final pages of Seminar XX: Encore (1972–73). Lacan says here: “There is no sexual relationship because the jouissance of the Other considered as body is always inadequate […] Is it not with the confrontation with this impasse, this impossibility, that something real is defined, as love is put to the test? In the couple, love can only realize what I called, using a certain poetry so you would understand me, courage before fatal destiny […] For there is nothing there but encounter—encounter in the couple of symptoms, of affects, of every tale marking in each person the trace of their exile […] their exile from the sexual relationship. Does this not mean that only through the affect that results from this gap does one find something that […] gives the illusion that the sexual relationship ceases not to be written?—the illusion that something not only is articulated but is inscribed, inscribed in each person’s destiny, through which, for a time, a time of suspension, what would be the sexual relationship finds in the speaking being its trace and its mirage-like path.”

The second passage is from Seminar XXIV (1976–77), whose almost untranslatable French title I will not read (if someone wants to know it, I can say it afterward). Lacan says here: “What is proper to poetry, when it fails, is to have only one signification, to be a pure knot of one word with another […] Signification is not what a vain populace believes. It is an empty term. It is what is expressed in the qualifier Dante applied to his poetry, namely, that it be amorous. Love is nothing but a signification, and one can clearly see the way Dante embodies this signification […] Love is empty.”

After having criticized the sublimation of courtly love for having placed the Lady in the position of the void, and after having criticized the love of Alcibiades for having placed the agalma in the void of Socrates, the later Lacan returns to Dante’s poetry—which emerged, of course, from the tradition of courtly love—to discover something else there. What else? Honestly I do not yet know very well; I will continue to investigate it. But I found a hint in the third poem of Dante’s Book of Songs. It is a poem that brings us back to that logic of saying the unsayable and painting the invisible, so I will conclude by reading its opening lines:

“Love, which reasoning goes in my mindof my lady, full of desire,makes me at times feel things of herthat my intellect, with them, grows delirious. So sweetly do his words resoundthat the soul that hears him and feels himsays, ‘Woe is me—for I cannot speakwhat I hear of my lady.’So I must leave aside,if I wish to explain what I hear of her,that which my intellect does not understand,and much of what it does understand,for I could not express it.Therefore if my verse has undertakenher praise with defects,let the blame fall on the weak intellectand on our tongue, which has no powerto recount what Love says.”