Hunting Plato's Agalmata: On Philosophy in the Form of LIterature

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Deakin Universit y Library] On: 27 Novem ber 2013, At : 20: 52 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ cele20 Hunting Plato's Agalmata Mat t hew Sharpe a a Deakin Universit y, School of Int ernat ional and Polit ical St udies, Melbourne School of Cont inent al Philosophy , Deakin Waurn Ponds Campus, Waurn Ponds, Vict oria, Aust ralia, 3217 Published online: 24 Sep 2009. 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Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions The European Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 535–547, 2009 Hunting Plato’s Agalmata Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 MATTHEW SHARPE ABSTRACT In this essay I argue that to understand Plato’s philosophy, we must understand why Plato presented this philosophy as dialogues: namely, works of literature. Plato’s writing of philosophy corresponds to his understanding of philosophy as a transformative way of life, which must nevertheless present itself politically, to different types of people. As a model, I examine Lacan’s famous reading of Plato’s Symposium in his seminar of transference love in psychoanalysis. Unlike many other readings, Lacan focuses on Alcibiades’ famous description of what caused his desire for Socrates: the supposition that beneath Socrates’ Silenus-like language and appearance, there were agalmata, treasures, hidden in his belly. I argue that this image of Socrates can also stand as an image for how we ought to read and to teach Plato’s philosophy: as harbouring different levels of insight, couched in Plato’s philosophy as literature. ‘‘You must not blame me if I do not give you the last word on Plato because Plato was quite determined not to tell us this last word.’’ —Jacques Lacan, Seminar VIII: On Transference ‘‘For Aristophanes I have this suggestion: old, soft, beloved . . . Beloved of whom? In Phaedrus’ case, for example, we know by whom—Eryximachus; Agathon, by Pausanias. Aristophanes, I suggest, and this is a mere suggestion, by Plato. There is an old story that when Plato died he had Aristophanes’ comedies under his pillow.’’ —Leo Strauss, On Plato’s ‘Symposium’ ON THE LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ARISTOPHANES’ HICCUPS Two facts concerning controversial psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s eighth seminar on transference, wherein Plato’s Symposium occupies half the year,1 might excite hagiographers of twentieth-century ideas. The first is that the seminar was given at nearly exactly the same time as the equally controversial classicist Leo Strauss’s famous seminar (Autumn term of 1959) on the dialogue at the University of Chicago. The second is that, Deakin University, School of International and Political Studies, Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, Deakin Waurn Ponds Campus, Waurn Ponds, Victoria, Australia, 3217. Email: [email protected] ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/09/050535–13 ß 2009 International Society for the Study of European Ideas DOI: 10.1080/10848770903128422 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 536 MATTHEW SHARPE at a decisive point, Lacan tells us that—out of his Eros for his audience—he has solicited interpretive advice from Strauss’s long-time correspondent (and Lacan’s teacher) Alexandre Kojeve. Kojeve is an unreformable snob, Lacan comments wryly. And he had not recently revisited the Symposium. But Kojeve did deign to tell his younger acolyte this higher exegetical mystery: that you can get nowhere near the true teaching of the Symposium if you do not understand why Aristophanes, just as he is about to speak, gets the hiccups (Lacan, IV 11). Kojeve’s sage intervention here concerning Plato’s Symposium puts on stage directly the literary nature of the Platonic dialogues. Why did Plato, the philosopher whom students everywhere are taught wanted to ‘‘expel the poets’’ from his ideal city, nevertheless present his work in dramatic dialogues, including the kind of sub-philosophical, ‘‘literary’’ interruption which Aristophanes’ intergestion in the Symposium surely typifies? Why indeed, in these dialogues, did Plato himself violate nearly every proscription he has his Socrates try to put on the imitative poets in the Republic, not least the prohibition against speaking indirectly, through characters or mouthpieces? (Rep. 392b–398a). In recent European thought, led by the later work of Michel Foucault (and behind him, Pierre Hadot), there has been growing recognition that classical philosophy—as opposed to its modern successors, analytic and Continental—represented a bios or way of life. Far from an impersonal mathesis, the learnings and teachings of the philosophers were meant to engender what Plato calls in the Politeia a periagoge tes psuches, or turning around of the soul, of the initiate (Rep. 518c–d). However, certainly in Foucault’s published work in the area, what could be called the ‘‘literary question’’ concerning why Plato for one, and Aristotle, might have written dialogues, is not taken up.2 At least, it is not robustly linked to this recovery of the sense of classical philosophy as bios theoretikos. This essay aims by contrast to address this lack in what is otherwise a welcome return to classical thinking. Its horizon is the hypothesis that Plato’s way of writing was deeply connected to his sense of philosophy as a bios animated by a particular species of Eros. This love or desire for transformative truth singles out would-be philosophers from those who pursue the worldly goods of wealth (the bios tou pollou) and/or the political goods of fame (he bios politikos). However, Plato’s awareness of the different types of human desire legislates a mode of writing which would somehow address all of these different addressees. More than this, the relative openness of the literary, dialoguic form allows Plato to write in different styles (and in different settings) when he addresses the different goods people pursue: so that, for instance, his two great dialogues on Eros (Phaedrus and Symposium) are also his two most rhetorical and poetically compelling compositions. It would follow that when we approach the dialogues unerotically, looking solely for their literal or ‘‘purely reasonable’’ contents, we miss the multiple political, psychological and rhetorical registers that Plato’s presentation of his philosophy as literature always involves. In the modern intellectual division of labour, the one disciplinary field that takes as its object the ‘‘Platonic’’ link between desire or Eros and truth is of course psychoanalysis. (This is one reason why it remains so awkwardly situated between the humanities and sciences to this day.) Intriguingly, psychoanalysis is also arguably the modern discipline which has made moderns attentive again to the entire rhetorical field we hypothesise to be in play in Plato’s literary presentation of his ideas: namely, the ways in which the truth and peoples’ desire can be said or ‘‘half said’’ in language, through contradictions, Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 Hunting Plato’s Agalmata 537 witticisms, puns, metaphors and metonymies, ‘‘slips’’ in the speakers’ speeches, and other non-verbal behaviours. In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that Lacan was unfazed by his teacher Kojeve’s gnomic comment pointing to the literary and philosophical significance of Aristophanes’ hiccups in the Symposium. Indeed, Lacan takes it in his stride. Lacan goes on to suggest two reasons for this kind of Aristophanic conversion symptom which Plato has seen fit to write into the dramatic fabric of the dialogue. The first is that Aristophanes gets the hiccups during the second speech in the Symposium, that of the wealthy pederast Pausanias. People often take this speech to give the ‘‘Platonic’’ account of love between an older teacher and beautiful boys. Yet, Lacan notes, when we read the text in the Greek, we notice that Apollodorus’ account ends with this ridiculous, isological (perhaps Isocratic?) punning: Pausaniou . . . pausomenou: roughly, ‘‘Pausanias paused upon this clause.’’ Then there are sixteen lines on how to stop (pausesthai) Aristophanes’ hiccups, in which the stem paus- is repeated no less than seven times (Pausaniou . . . pausomenou, pausomai, pausn, pausethai, pausetai). There is no other instance of such stylised punning elsewhere in Plato. What can it mean, Lacan asks us, if not that ‘‘if Aristophanes gets the hiccups it is because during the whole discourse of Pausanius he is convulsed with laughter—and so is Plato!’’ (IV 12). In Lacan’s reading, Plato’s derision towards Pausanias is there to show what a later tradition formulated with the thought that it is nearly impossible for the rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven: namely, that Pausanias’ idea of love as a tidy economic exchange between goods of the body and of the soul misses love’s definitively uneconomic preconditions (IV 6–11).3 The second reason Lacan highlights to explain Aristophanes’ hiccups is that it gives Plato an elegant alibi to shift his speaking position from third, after Pausanias, to fourth out of seven, after the doctor, Eryximachus, has reached his Empedoclean heights. For the question of what an author positions as the central part of his text is a decisive consideration for reading an esoteric text, Lacan notes (VII 10). And, like Leo Strauss and others throughout Western history, Lacan suggests that one component of Plato’s philosophical literature is such esotericism, guided by his philosophical sense of the different types and capabilities of his different potential readers: Plato in the presentation of . . . his thought had deliberately made a place for enigma, in other words that his thought is not entirely open. [I]n the opinion of all the commentators on Plato, ancient and especially modern . . . an attentive examination of the dialogues shows very evidently that in [them] there is an exoteric and esoteric element, a closed-off element . . . so that those who are not supposed to understand do not understand. This is really structuring, fundamental to everything that has remained to us from Plato’s texts. (XII 2)4 The ‘‘merely literary’’ matter of the comic poet Aristophanes’ hiccups in this way can stand at the outer portico of our attempt here to read Lacan’s interpretation of the Symposium. In particular, for Lacan it points towards the literally central importance in Plato of Aristophanes’ famous account of love or Eros as the search for each of our lost ‘‘other halves,’’ which Socrates’ speech however explicitly rebuts (Symp. 205e). Aristophanes’ account of love is the only one of the first six, considered speeches on Eros which speaks to the disconcerting urgency or what it is like to be in love, Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 538 MATTHEW SHARPE Lacan notes.5 Moreover, these hiccups, which alert us that he is now to take the central spot, anticipate a second major ‘‘interruption’’ in the orderly speaking arrangements of the banqueters in Plato’s Symposium. This moment also involves Aristophanes. It occurs when the drunken Athenian general and tyrant Alcibiades incongruously bursts in, thereby literally interrupting Aristophanes as he is beginning to object to Socrates’ famous encomium to the ladder of Eros (Symp. 212c). Again, any approach inclined to reject such merely literary ‘‘curios’’ is left in the hermeneutically difficult situation of having to ignore, or perhaps even excise,6 all that follows: namely, Alcibiades’ famous epainos to Socrates, and account of their torrid, ultimately physically and philosophically unconsummated affair. By contrast, if Aristophanes’ attempt to rebut Socrates is interrupted by the drunken entry of Alcibiades, Lacan’s reading of Platonic philosophy as literature suggests that this is because Alcibiades is about to show, in actu, the abiding force of the comedian’s earlier account of love and its passion. Indeed, in what Lacan immodestly suggests might represent ‘‘an epoch’’ in interpreting the Symposium, he argues that ‘‘the very scenario of what happens between Alcibiades and Socrates [involves] the last word of what Plato has to tell us concerning the nature of Eros’’ (XII 2), hidden behind the scandalous appearance of this encounter. The central pivot of Lacan’s reading, famously, is Alcibiades’ description of Socrates as like a satyr whose ugly exterior conceals treasures or agalmata which pique Alcibiades’ desire, and turn him into Socrates’ lover (erastes). For Lacan’s purposes in the seminars—of trying to put psychoanalytic practice on an adequate theoretical footing—this image of the agalmata comes to form the basis for his decisive later notion of the objet petit a, cause of desire. For our purposes, by reading Lacan’s reading of the Symposium, I am going to argue here that Alcibiades’ account of what erotically drew him to Socrates can also stand as a guide for how we should interpret classical philosophy in general, and the Platonic dialogues in particular. DIOTIMA’S ASCENT, SOCRATES’ IRONY So what further evidence does Lacan provide for this ironic Plato? If Aristophanes’ speech gives us the element of Penia or lack in Eros, are not the two succeeding speeches of Agathon and Socrates or Diotima there to fill this lack, and restore to love its other, Poros half (203b–e)? And doesn’t this element of Poros find its most perfect description at the height of Socrates’ speech, wherein Diotima evokes the ‘‘ocean of Beauty (kalos)’’ upon which the philosophical lover can come finally to gaze, and which by rigid designation, can lack nothing (211a–b)? Lacan’s wager is that if we read the text closely, we will see that both Agathon’s and Socrates’ speech have a ‘‘derisory’’ register which calls into question the dialogue’s exoteric surface. Agathon’s speech, the fifth, is for a tragedian the most extraordinarily rococo performance.7 Love for Agathon is, remarkably, the source and reconciliation of all the virtues, ranging from justice (‘‘for violence never touches love’’ [196b–c], nor apparently, the police) through to moderation, since we all can agree on how truly moderate lovers are, even in times of disagreement. Eros is also most gentle, Agathon sophisticates. Hunting Plato’s Agalmata 539 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 Why? Comparing him to ate in Homer, namely the tragic misfortune that befalls people like Oedipus or Antigone, we learn that he only ever walks upon the skulls of men (195d)!8 Next to this ‘‘lovely proof’’ (195e), we should not be surprised when Agathon’s speech climaxes by saying that love brings ‘‘eirenen pen en anthrophois . . . pereagai de gelanen.’’ The idea that love brings ‘‘peace (eirenen) among men’’ might strike us as odd coming from a Greek poet in the Homeric line beginning with the Illiad. But, Lacan notes, peleagei de galanin: means absolutely ‘nothing is working, dead calm on the deep.’ In other words, you have to remember what dead calm on the sea meant for the ancients. That meant: nothing is working any more, the vessels remain blocked at Aulis and, when that happens to you in mid-ocean, it is very embarrassing, just as embarrassing as when that happens to you in bed. So that when one evokes [this] peleagei de galanin in connection with love, it is quite clear that you are having a little giggle. (VII 11–12) So much for Agathon. Our remaining questions to Lacan concern Socrates. Does not Socrates, by gracefully positioning his young self as the proponent of the same position as Agathon’s, not proceed to ruthlessly (if a little sophistically9) demolish Agathon’s position? It turns out that Diotima teaches that Eros is neither beautiful nor a God, but our desire to possess some good we lack, supposing only—as the young Socrates lovingly grants his Priestess—‘‘that someone changes the question . . . and puts ‘good’ (agathos) in place of beautiful (kalos)’’ (204e [sic.]). Eros is a daimon or spirit that mediates between (metaxu) mortals and Gods. Moreover, since we desire to possess what we love for as long as possible, Socrates’ or Diotima’s conclusion is that Eros is the one desire in mortal creatures that naturally aims at what is immortal. This is evident even in the physical Eros of beasts and non-philosophers, whose couplings give birth to offspring who outlive their progenitors. So Eros immortally becomes under Diotima’s guidance the desire to give birth, in beauty, to the most lasting Goods (206b–d). In this manner, as Lacan notes, Socrates’ great speech slides from treating beauty as what we might call the handmaiden or midwife of Eros towards being its highest object: so it finally becomes ‘‘the reason for all [the lover’s earlier labours]’’ (211a). The slide occurs upon the famous ‘‘ladder of love’’ wherein the acolyte passes from loving the beauty of one body, to the beauty in all bodies, then to the beauty in souls, laws and works of culture, before arriving at the idea of Beauty herself (207c–208b; 211b–c) (Lacan, IX 4). There are at least four reasons why Lacan thinks Aristophanes is right when, at the end of this ascent, he tries to interrupt the group’s applause saying, ‘‘all the same . . .,’’ except that Alcibiades’ comic entrance stops him short (212c). The first reason is simply Socrates’ refusal to avow the doctrine of love as his own, by putting it in the mouth of the Priestess Diotima. This disavowal seems all the more remarkable since Socrates has just restated that Eros is the one thing about which he can speak from wisdom (198d). As Lacan put it ironically to his own audience in Seminar VIII: Suppose that I had to develop all my teachings concerning psychoanalysis . . . and that—verbally or in writing—in doing it, at a certain moment, I hand over to Francoise Dalto.You would say: ‘all the same, why? Why is he doing that?’ (VIII 8) Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 540 MATTHEW SHARPE Well, Lacan secondly notes that Diotima herself tells us that the status of her discourse is not something that will match the logical rigour to which Socrates aspires in the elenchus, whose paradigm for Plato remained mathematics. Appropriately enough, given her teaching of Eros as metaxu between mortals and gods, she rather specifies that what she will say is neither episteme (knowledge) nor amathia (ignorance), but something between (metaxu) the two: ‘‘It’s judging things correctly without being able to give a logos . . . correct doxa has this character: it is between understanding and ignorance’’ (202a) (Lacan, VIII 8–9).10 Socrates’ handing over to Diotima, Lacan can thus correctly emphasise, corresponds to his beginning an approach to the topic of love which transcends what can be achieved through the purely philosophical methods of elenchus and diaeresis. ‘‘In the absence of experimental conquests,’’ Lacan comments, ‘‘it is clear that in many domains . . . there will be a pressure to let myth speak’’: What is remarkable is precisely . . . that Plato always knows perfectly well what he is doing or what he makes Socrates do . . . in the realm of myth . . . and throughout the whole Platonic work we see in the Phaedo, in the Timaeus, in the Politeia, myths emerging, when they are required, [namely] to supply for the gap in what can be assured dialectically. (VIII 9) Thirdly, Lacan draws our attention to the way Diotima’s progressively hortatory discourse on the ascent of Eros is riddled with inconsistencies only covered by the young Socrates’ loving eagerness to agree with everything she has to teach. ‘‘What is more,’’ Lacan observes: Socrates punctuates these gaps [in Diotima’s account] by a whole series of replies which . . . — it is tangible . . . —are more and more bemused. I mean that there are first of all respectful replies of the style: ‘do you really think that?’, then afterwards: ‘very well, let us go as far as you are leading me’ and then, at the end, that becomes clearly: ‘have fun, my girl, I’m listening, talk away!’ (VIII 9)11 It is remarkable, given this very bold Lacanian reversal of the accepted reading of the Symposium on Diotima, that even his best expositors have not highlighted this decisive prequel to the importance he assigns to Plato’s Alcibiades.12 ALICIBIADES AND SOCRATES’ AGALMATA Lacan argues we should listen when Socrates comments at Symposium 208c that really Diotima was speaking ‘‘in the manner of a perfect sophist.’’ The culminating reason Lacan gives for such a scepticism towards the apparent ‘‘Platonic’’ teaching on Eros in Socrates’ speech is the episode that follows it. Alcibiades’ performance in his famous epainos about Socrates, Lacan comments, has something of the scandalous force that in the older poets characterised the interventions of Gods, when they are moved by Eros to cavort with mortals (XI 11–12). Yet our enjoyment of the comedy should not conceal the seriousness of what Alcibiades has to say concerning Eros, by recounting his real love for the particular individual, Socrates. We should take note, Lacan argues, that Plato has Hunting Plato’s Agalmata 541 Alcibiades seat himself exactly metaxu Socrates and Agathon. It is as if Alcibiades is about to embody the metaxu status of Eros we have just theoretically encountered: namely, . . . precisely . . . the point we are at, . . . in which the debate is in the balance between . . . the one who knows, and knowing, shows that he must speak without knowing [Socrates] and the one who, not knowing [Agathon], spoke of course like a bird-brain but who nevertheless . . . ‘said some very beautiful things’ [as Socrates complements Agathon]. (IX 9) Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 However that may be, Martha Nussbaum concurs that Alcibiades’ intervention introduces (in Lacan’s words): a change of perspective and we must carefully set up the world into which, all of a sudden, after this fascinating mirage, all of a sudden [Alcibiades] replunges us. I say ‘replunges’ because this world is not the world beyond, . . . it is the world as it is where, after all, we know how love is lived out and that, however fascinating all these beautiful stories appear, an uproar, a shout, a hiccup, the entry of a drunken man is enough to bring us back to [Eros] as it really is. (IX 9)13 All the comic aspects of love—comic when it is not we who are involved—are evoked in Alcibiades’ account: down to cooked-up attempts to invite Socrates over to dinner and then keep him talking so late that he has no option but to stay over at Alcibiades’ for the night (217a–d). Things culminate—after Alcibiades has told the uninitiated to block our ears (218b) (XI 4)—with this momentous exchange beneath the covers on Alcibiades’ couch: ‘‘You asleep, Socrates?’’ ‘‘No, not at all!’’ (218c). Lacan’s reading of Alcibiades’ confession singles out something other readings generally pass over. It is the central image Alcibiades returns to three times, ‘‘in a quasirepetitive insistence,’’ as he strives to articulate what he immortally dubs Socrates’ incomparable atopia (XI 3). Alcibiades envisions Socrates as the statuettes ‘‘that it seems really existed at the time,’’ whose exteriors were shaped in the likeness of the satyr Silenus (III 2). But this ugly exterior concealed in their insides what Alcibiades calls agalmata theiwn (‘‘images of the gods,’’ 215b), agalmata theia kai thaumasta (‘‘images divine and wondrous,’’ 216e), and finally agalmata arêtes (literally ‘‘images of virtue,’’ 222a): in Lacan’s gloss, ‘‘the marvel of marvels’’ (XI 3). Lacan’s interest in this striking image of the agalmata Alcibiades discerns in Socrates reflects the import which Alcibiades himself assigns to it in his epainos. He tells us directly that it was only when he had ‘‘opened’’ Socrates and caught a glimpse of these agalmata that his passion was born: It was all so golden and all beautiful that there was only one thing to do, en brachei, as soon as possible, by the quickest means, to do whatever Socrates commands. (217a) So ‘‘it is not beauty, nor ascesis, nor the identification to God that Alcibiades desires, but this unique object which he saw in Socrates,’’ Lacan observes (XI 10). Indeed, in this privileged object, Lacan is going to argue that Plato has laid out very precisely the coordinates for understanding the key stake in the transferential love psychoanalysts encounter on a daily basis in the clinic (I 11). How is this so? The word agalma in the Greek means roughly ‘‘ornament’’ or ‘‘adornment.’’14 Nevertheless, as Lacan shows, in the poetry of the Greeks, the signifier agalma Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 542 MATTHEW SHARPE (nom. pl. agalmata) had accrued a set of religious significations which would have been known to Plato’s audience as they read the Symposium. Perhaps most tellingly, the Trojans’ fatal hesitation about what to do with the wooden horse the Greeks had gifted them, recounted in Odyssey VIII, concerned whether or not, rather than opening its belly straight away, they should not transport it to the citadel’s heights to present it as a mega agalma: namely, as a kind of wondrous image to win the Eros of the gods.15 Just so, Lacan argues, on one side, Alcibiades is very explicit that his eros for Socrates is caused because Socrates scorns all the goods of bodily beauty or riches which ‘‘the many’’ are always chasing about, believing that they will deliver makaria (happiness) (219d–e). The agalmata Alcibiades sees are sacred. These things can not be compared, or circulated amongst other, more profane goods. So there is this truth in Alcibiades’ imperative episthesthe (bar or close!) ‘‘pulas panu megalas’’ (‘‘the heaviest gates’’) so the uninitiated may not hear what he has to say at 218b, complete with the evocation of the Egyptian mysteries (‘‘tois wsin’’).16 Yet, at the same time, the transcendent agalmata Alcibiades espies in Socrates are clearly tied to the dimension of what Lacan calls a ‘‘unique covetousness’’ proper to Eros, completely abstracted from in Diotima’s ‘‘fascinating mirage’’ of Eros (IX 4).17 Agalma is also etymologically related to agamai, which means ‘‘to admire,’’ but shades off towards ‘‘to envy’’ or ‘‘to be jealous of’’ (X 6). Thus, when Alcibiades tells the assembled of the marvels he has glimpsed in Socrates, it is to stress Socrates’ unique, irreplaceable singularity: the very type of irreplaceability which would forestall any Diotimian ascent towards higher, but also more general, truths.18 Lacan notes how Alcibiades goes to some pains, having invoked Socrates’ hidden treasures, to boast that he ‘‘doubts whether anyone else has ever been able to see what he is talking about . . . ’no one has ever seen what is in question, as I once happened to see; and I saw it!’’’ (X 4, paraphrasing Sym. 217a). We are dealing, in short, with what Lacan calls ‘‘the discourse of passion at its most quaking point’’ (X 4). In this way, Plato shows himself wide awake to how: ‘‘in the action of love, there is introduced this object, precisely from which one [always] wants to ward off competition, an object that one does not even wish to show’’ to any others (IX 10).19 So we have seen two dimensions of the object-cause of Alcibiades’ desire, which Lacan highlights. These are: (1) its transcendence vis-à-vis all mundane goods, which situates it in the orbit of sacred Things; and (2) the covetousness its splendour invokes in the erastes. There is however a third, epistemic dimension which for Lacan allows us to say that Plato has put ‘‘every possible key’’ before us, in order to understand the nature of Eros as it manifests itself in life and in the clinic (I 11). Near the end of the encomium, Alcibiades comments that it is not only Socrates’ body that is ugly and Silenus-like but that his words too at first sight seem ridiculous. As other dialogues confirm, Socrates is always banging on about the technites—doctors, craftspeople, physical trainers and ship’s captains (221e)—and concerns far beneath the aristocratic concerns of the assembled host. Yet Alcibiades likens the effect Socrates’ words have on him, despite this rough exterior, to the ecstasy of Cybeline revellers. It is something completely beyond what any other orator—even Pericles—can produce (215d–216b). In a way which again invokes the dimension of the mysteries, Alcibiades confesses that Socrates alone is the one person that can make him feel aidos or shame: ‘‘you didn’t think I had it in me, did you gentleman?’’ (216a–b). Socrates’ discourse even Hunting Plato’s Agalmata 543 Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 makes him ask whether his life—‘‘my life,’’ as Alcibiades underscores—‘‘was no better than a miserable slave’s’’ (215e). So he is torn between love and wanting to flee Socrates, wishing him dead (216c). The point is that Alcibiades’ desire is caused not simply because Socrates has, for him, beautiful agalmata in his belly. He testifies that the splendour of these images intimate to him some body of knowledge which he imagines speaks to his most intimate concerns. In so far as he loves Socrates, Socrates is for him the subjet suppose savoir: he who has this transformative knowledge at his disposal, if only he can elicit it from him: What I thought at that time was that what he really wanted was me and that seemed to me the luckiest coincidence: all I had to do was to let him have my way with me and he would teach me everything he knew—believe me, I had a lot of confidence in my sex appeal (hora). (217a)20 This brings us, to conclude, to what Lacan sees in Socrates’ response to this proposition, so shamelessly confessed to the banqueters. Here Lacan’s reading notably parts company with Nussbaum’ interpretation in The Fragility of Goodness. For Nussbaum, Socrates neither knows nor cares to know anything of Alcibiades’ truths and way of loving.21 By contrast, for Lacan, we need to take Socrates’ avowal of knowledge concerning Eros at Symposium 198d seriously. For ‘‘it is because he knows’’ about Eros, Lacan contends, that Socrates’ response to Alcibiades’ transferential crush speaks so directly to the task of the psychoanalyst, confronted with the demands of the analysand (XI 6). What is Lacan’s analysis here? Well, after crudely establishing that Socrates was wide awake beside him as they lay together on Alcibiades’ couch, Alcibiades seizes his moment. He confesses that of all his many admirers, Socrates alone seems worthy of his love (218c). This, in short, is the moment when what Lacan calls the ‘‘miraculous’’ dimension of love could have been achieved. This ‘‘miraculous’’ dimension involves the phenomenon which Phaedrus’ opening speech in the Symposium told us is most beloved of the gods. It occurs when a beloved (eronomos), like Achilles in the Illiad, returns the love of his or her lover (erastes), in this case the older Patroclus (IV 4). It is at this moment that love, in its reciprocal, substitutive dimension, supplants desire, which we all know can remain a one-way street.22 Plato dramatises for us in Alcibiades Major a fact widely attested: that Socrates was Alcibiades’ first lover or desirer. Alcibiades’ speech in the Symposium however amply attests that since then Alcibiades has become the erastes of Socrates: and this in typical Alkibiadean disregard of the scandal which attended a young man actively pursuing an elder.23 Socrates, however, famously refuses Alcibiades. Lacan’s translates Socrates’ wonderful reply to Alcibiades’ ‘‘proposition’’ at Symposium 219a–b in these terms: Really, my dearest Alcibiades, you are really and truly no bad hand at a bargain, if what you say is really true and you see in me some power which can make you better; you must see some inconceivable beauty in me. If then you spy it there and if you are trying to do a deal of beauty for beauty, so instead of the physical appearance of beauty you want to exchange the truth, that would mean nothing other than exchanging bronze for gold. But! Don’t be deceiving yourself, examine things more carefully 544 MATTHEW SHARPE (ameinon skopei) so as not to deceive yourself, and you will see that I properly speaking am nothing (kenosis). For the eye of the mind begins to see more sharply when the sight of the eye is losing its keenness, and you are far from that still. (219a–b) (XI 5)24 In Lacan’s view, it is this austerity in the face of the transferential love of Alcibiades, this attitude of noli me tangere (XI 8) that makes of Socrates the ancient prototype of the modern psychoanalyst. The analyst must also enact such an erotic refusal if the transference is not to abort the analysis: Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 It is precisely because Socrates knows that he sets his face against having been in any justified or justifiable way whatsoever eromenos, the desirable, what is worthy of being loved. (XI 6) Socrates’ very refusal to acknowledge what Alcibiades’ Eros imagines in Socrates is instead there to turn Alcibiades’ erotic gaze around, if the young erastes is willing and able to achieve such reflexivity. By not ceding to Alcibiades’ transferential supposition, that is, Socrates prompts his erastes to consider a type of thing that has clearly never occurred to Alcibiades before: namely, that if he is so able to ‘‘see’’ such wondrous things in Socrates and others, what must that say concerning the state of his own Eros and psyche? In other words, it is the refusal of the Socratic physician of the soul that ‘‘implicates’’ Alcibiades on the path towards his own good, ho agathos, which for Socrates can only pass by way of gnothi seauton (knowledge of the self) (XI 8). What Socrates gives to Alcibiades, in exchange for his profession of love in the story Alcibiades recounts, is merely the promise that, tomorrow, they should consider what seems best for them both (219b). This is hardly the type of good Alcibiades was after. And in response to Alcibiades’ feminine confession to the assembled banqueters in which these mysteries are unclothed, Socrates once again confounds Alcibiades by giving to his words what Lacan calls an ‘‘interpretation.’’ The entire, hysterical ‘‘satyr play’’ of unrequited love for Socrates, which Alcibiades has put on stage before us, Socrates interprets, was not so artless as it seemed.25 It was all produced with an eye to pleasing the most beautiful individual present, to wit, the host so ‘‘Platonically’’ named Agathon: 26 You’re perfectly sober after all Alcibiades. Otherwise you could never have concealed your motive so gracefully . . .. As if the real point of all this has not been simply to make trouble between Agathon and I. You think that I should be in love with you and no one else while you, and no one else, should be in love with Agathon. (222c–d) CONCLUDING REMARKS: FROM SOCRATES’ TO PLATO’S AGALMATA We have now presented what I take to be the key interpretive observations in Lacan’s remarkable reading of Plato’s Symposium. In doing so, we have been newly attentive to several moments of this interpretation passed over, even in the best of the literature on Lacan’s impassioned encounter with Plato’s Symposium.27 This erotic encounter has a key place in the history of Lacan’s own development. Lacan also boasts the controversial novelty of his reading of Plato’s Symposium in the much longer history of the ongoing reception of Plato, and what he calls the Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 Hunting Plato’s Agalmata 545 ‘‘longest transference the history of thought has known’’ (I 4): readers’ continuing Alcibiadean attempts to comprehend Socrates’ atopia. However, it is pre-eminently as an exemplar of a way of reading the Platonic dialogues that Lacan’s reading of the Symposium has been proffered here. This way of reading the dialogues starts from an openness to the founding parameters of Plato’s thought, lost with the modern, post-Cartesian refiguring of philosophy. It accepts the dimension of philosophy as an erotic pursuit and way of life, whose highest end is the (re-)education of the desire of the philosopher. Our argument is that the formal correlative of this erotic substance of philosophy is, in Plato’s case, the dialogic or literary form. We have seen how Lacan’s reading, because it is attuned to the textual elements of setting, action, and interruption in the Symposium, presents an interpretation of ‘‘Platonic love’’ strikingly different from the way the Symposium is usually understood. The hyperporos or over-full speeches of Agathon and Socrates, Lacan suggests, are intended ironically by Plato. If we want to understand Plato’s more comprehensive teaching concerning Eros, Lacan highlights the fractious encounter that occurs in place of what Aristophanes was clearly about to say in criticism of Socrates’ elevated account, when Alcibiades crashes into the room. That Alcibiades appears like a maddened ‘‘satyr’’ and that his comical acting out is compared by Socrates to a satyr-play—all this, if Lacan is right, is as the fascinating exterior there to capture readers. The scandal conceals the more subtle importance of what Alcibiades’ testimony teaches concerning Eros. This teaching concerns the place of the erotic—sublime, unattainable objects, agalmata—that Alcibiades sees in Socrates’ belly. Lacan’s argument is that these agalmata give poetic figure to the illusory, ‘‘transferential’’ cause of desire analysts must still train themselves to recognise in the desire of their analysands—so they can Socratically renounce it there, thus urging their analysands towards self-knowledge. The bolder point of this essay though is to make a different extrapolation. This involves saying that Alcibiades’ picturing of Socrates as a satyr concealing agalmata within, which Lacan highlights, can also stand as a powerful image for how we should read the Platonic corpus itself. If classical philosophy is not to continue to decline—even as both the modern, analytic and Continental streams seemingly approach differing aporiai— reviving such an ‘‘Alcibidean,’’ or more truly ‘‘Socratic,’’ sense of the classical texts in students will be an important part of our philosophic pedagogy. As I hope also to have indicated, Plato’s dialogues amply reward this erotic supposition by, ultimately, prompting us to examine ourselves. NOTES 1. The key text I refer to in this paper is Jacques Lacan, Seminar VIII: On Transference, trans. Cornac Gallagher (London: Karnac Books, 1998). References, including parenthetical references in the text, are to the session (in capitalised Roman numerals), and then the page number. Some translations have been amended by the author. 2. The central work is Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume II, The Use of Pleasure (London: Penguin, 1992). Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 546 MATTHEW SHARPE 3. See Dominic Chiesa, ‘‘Le Ressort de L’Amour: Lacan’s Theory of Love in His Reading of Plato’s Symposium,’’ Angelaki 2.3 (December 2006): 63. The author is much indebted to this article. Note that a second reason why it seems to me that Aristophanes gets the hiccups, which last throughout the speech of the doctor, Eryximachus, is to highlight the partiality of this technician’s proto-scientific account of Eros as a physical force of attraction which applies to everything in nature, and which aims to harmonise opposites. Medicine, in this unlikely perspective, becomes the erotic art: in Eryximachus’ definition, episteme tou ton somatos erotikwn (the science of the body’s loves) pros pklesmonen kai kenosis (for filling and emptying), and restoring the body’s physical harmonia. But while the good doctor is dryly holding forth thus in justification of his techne, Aristophanes is there in the background sneezing unharmoniously, holding his breath, before finally using a feather to tickle his nose! 4. See Lacan, VI 7. 5. See also Lacan, VII 13–15. As such, Aristophanes is the first to say something which we moderns recognise about the phenomenon, conditioned as we are culturally by modern romantic notions of love. By contrast, as Lacan had addressed three years prior, for the ancients love was an essentially comic phenomenon. The play of masks, misidentifications, and metamorphoses in Ovid is as much witness to this as Aristophanes’ plays. Equally, it is no mistake that Plato makes his Aristophanes alone the one to make the true point that, if we are to talk comprehensively of Eros, the delicate matter of the gods’ artful placement and shaping of our genitals should be raised (Lacan, VI 16). See Jacques Lacan, Seminar V: The Formations of the Unconscious trans. Cormac Gallagher (London: Karnac Books, 1998), VII, 13–17. 6. Lacan cites the example of the medieval Louis le Roy, who did excise this part of Symposium from his translation (II 6). 7. Things get so bad that Agathon invokes the image of this youngest of the gods (for love loves the young, 195a–b) prancing around with flowers in his hands, in a way which might evoke for today’s readers a commercial for a toilet deodorant: ‘‘His place is wherever it is flowery and fragrant; there he settles, there he stays’’ (196b). 8. For Lacan on Ate, a notion to which he devoted some time in the year preceding his work on the Symposium, see Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 262–70. 9. And then sophistically eliding the difference between desire and love in the Greek word Eros, at 200a–b and 202d. 10. Lacan, IX 6; see Chiesa, ‘‘Le Ressort de L’Amour,’’ 66. 11. See also IX 3 and IX 8 for Lacan’s further supporting claims. 12. For instance Chiesa, ‘‘Le Ressort de L’Amour,’’ 66–67; but see also the excellent critical reading of Lacan’s Symposium in Paul Allen Miller, ‘‘Lacan, the Symposium, and Transference,’’ in Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 121–30. 13. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 14. Notably enough in our context, Lacan notes the semantic proximity of agalma to agastos, ‘‘the admirable,’’ from which Plato himself derives agathon in the etymological follies in Cratylus (Lacan, X 7). 15. See Lacan, X 7–8. Lacan cites several other cases. The golden ornaments crafted to adorn the horns of the heifers Telemachus sacrifices to Athena in the Odyssey III, for instance, are agalmata. We are told that they pleased the eye or gratified (kecharoizen) the goddess (X 7). In Euripides’ Hecuba, the tree at the sacred site of Delos under which Leta is supposed to have given birth to Apollo is odinos agalma dias: a standing agalma of the birth-pains of the goddess (X 5). 16. See also Symp. 220c on Socrates’ character. 17. NB: Every bit as much as it was lost in the technical discourse of Eryximachus before Aristophanes’ speech. Prompted by Lacan’s analysis, it is tempting to see the Symposium’s ordered speeches as divided into two halves of three speeches. At the end of both halves, Hunting Plato’s Agalmata 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 20:52 27 November 2013 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 547 we have ascended out from the pressing bodily dimension of eros, to which Aristophanes the comedian is there to return us. See Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 185–87. See Symp. 214d. This is exactly the type of erotic-economic exchange that Plato has introduced in the speech of Pausanias, which Lacan argues Plato has artfully shown his criticism of. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 165, 189–90. This is what is in play for Nussbaum when Alcibiades asks Socrates rhetorically whether Socrates will ‘‘let him’’ tell the truth. When love happens, Lacan concurs with Phaedrus in his own ‘‘Platonic’’ mythos of sorts, it is as if you had reached out to grasp a flower on a branch, and that—because of your reaching— it suddenly burst into bloom. And then, miracle of miracles, a hand reaches back from the bloom to clasp yours (IV 3). See Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 188 on this point; see also Miller, ‘‘Lacan, the Symposium, and Transference,’’ 125–27. On Socrates’ ‘‘nothingness’’ or kenosis, see Lacan, XI 5–6, and Symp. 175d. In the Greek theatre, the comedy and tragedy were followed by a satyr play. Aristophanes has given us our comedy and Agathon has spoken as a tragedian. So we might be tempted to read the banquet here, as a ‘‘real’’ Dionysian festival wherein the truly highest artist, Socrates, can be awarded the prize. On the Platonic play in this name, see, amongst others, Miller, ‘‘Lacan, the Symposium, and Transference,’’ 124–25. Neither Chiesa nor Miller, for instance, stresses the decisive importance of Aristophanes’ hiccups for Lacan, in placing Aristophanes as the central speaker, although they both make many other fine interpretations. No previous reader, as far as this author is aware, has located how ironic Lacan takes Socrates’ Diotimian account of love to be. However, this seems decisive if his reading of Alcibiades’ importance is to be plausible.