Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ragland What Is Love-Libre
Ragland What Is Love-Libre
Foreword 723
A. LEIGH DENEEF
Permissions. Requests for permission to republish copyrighted material from this journal should be addressed
to Permissions Editor, Duke University Press, Box 6697
College Station, Durham, NC 27708.
757
ELIZABETH J. BELLAMY
NED LUKACHER
724
A. teiyh DeNeef
literary practice.
It is precisely this kind of negotiation I had in mind by calling the
present essays "rereadings." Each represents a return to a familiar
classical text in order to tease out certain themes that assume both
shape and meaning only belatedly, in the wake of nearly a century of
psychoanalytical inquiry. At the same time, each offers a reinterpretation of the analytical motifs and structures that attempts to remain
sensitive to the idiosyncracies of a particular literary representation.
How successful these rereadings are-how convincing and how provocative-will depend upon a further critical reading-another return to another text through a return to Freud through Lacan.
The other half of the title of the collection adopts the phrase
under which Lacan described his own "return to Freud." Writing
before unique historical turning points in anthropology, sociology,
linguistics, literary theory. and philosophy, Freud was unfortunately
deprived of important theoretical innovations that could have supported his intended models and clarified his methodological choices.
The return to Freud, therefore, was to be a bringing back to his thinking the results of works that postdated him. This new constellation,
a collective gathering of several related disciplines, Lacan called "the
Freudian Field."
As the following essays reveal, the present use of psychoanalysis in
rereading literary texts is by no means a single-dimension endeavor,
for it freely borrows from a wide range of theoretical models-linguistics, narrative and discourse analysis, genre and gender studies,
rhetoric, speech acts, deconstruction, and so on. Amid such diversity it is not possible to subsume the interpretive strategies under
anyone patriarchal-Freud, Lacan-or even matriarchal-lrigaray
-name. Indeed, it is perhaps just this refusal to foreclose interpretive models and a concurrent willingness to interrogate methods and
procedures, to test the limits of psychoanalytic insights, that may
be the best answer to the charges that Kerrigan raises. At the very
least, I trust, the present collection shows that despite the death of
its "father," Lacanian thinking is very much alive and well, and that
it is making important differences in contemporary literary criticism.
If, in the process, it also helps to clarify the difficult ideas of Lacan
himself, that, I think, is a major and necessary contribution to the
scene of criticism today.
Ellie Ragland-Sullivan
0038'2876/89/$1.5.
ns
Wlie Ran/and-Sullivan
What
tow? 729
lophancs in the Symposium, and which deals not only with the
orillin of the sexual instinct but also with the most important of
its variations in relation to its object .... Shall we follow the hint
us by the poet-philosopher [Professor Heinrich Gomperz of
Vicnna], and venture upon the hypothesis that living substance
at the same time of its coming to life was torn apart into small
particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through
the sexual instincts? That these instincts, in which the chemical
affinity of inanimate matter persisted, gradually succeeded ... ?a
Ih'ud continues with a biological speculation on the origin of sexu,lIity.
In the Symposium Plato describes six oratorical addresses given "In
Praise of Love," all directed to Socrates for questions and commentary. The speeches represent various efforts to figure out what love is,
what its origins are, and what it means. The tension in the dialogue
('omes from its larger context, however: the jealous rivalry of Alcihiades directed against Socrates and Agatho. Lacan's interpretation
of Socrates' handling of this triad sets the tone for his own On the
Transference, as well as his departure from Freud regarding the role
of the analyst in transference. But before looking at Lacan's seminar,
let us glance briefly at Derrida's spoof of Lacan's theories on love and
sexuality. Derrida focuses on the problems involved in Plato's writing
about Socrates and the imperfect textual renderings that necessarily
follow from such accounts, not the least of which is, for him, Lacan's
reading of Freud. Derrida demonstrates the obvious. Any repetition
turns Rede (speech) into Gerede (rumor or gossip), an imperfect text.
Lacan's teaching about love, love letters, becomes in the Derridean
skeptic's mill a postcard. Derrida finds Lacanguilty of "full speech,"
a term Lacan dropped in the 1950S, although he never used it to mean
something fully present or whole, but rather a fragment or fiction he
called a piece of "truth." Lacan's greater error, in Derrida's account,
lies in his being such a dupe as to base a seminar on a fragment in the
already written.
Lacan did indeed take up the hypothesis or myth that someone
called Socrates commanded enough interest in a pupil called Plato
to keep him from falling into his favorite trap of philosophical clo-
730
ElJie Ran/and-Sullivan
sure (ideal forms) when Socrates was his subject of focus. Moreover,
Lacan took seriously the idea that the Symposium was not merely
an occasion for discrete discourses of mythical opinion (doXQ). More
like the salons of courtly love, the symposium was a moment when
what was said was "overdetermined" by the mingling of desires and
love that frames Plato's account of the speeches, adding something
(a jouissance effect) to the written frame, something that cannot be
recorded but which "materializes" the word-"words in their flesh,
in their material aspect"-especially when the subject matter con9
cerns Eros. Apollodorus, a new and ardent follower of Socrates, begins the evening by running in to announce the eventual arrival of
his teacher. As host, Agatho eagerly awaits the arrival of Socrates.
At the end of the evening, after the speeches, a drunken AIcibiades arrives and insists on revealing to those present that Socrates is
both the most precious (aBalma) and most treacherous of humans. In
Lacan's account, Socrates' response to AIcibiades and then to Agatho
explains much about the differing natures of desire and love, opening
up many questions about the source of Socrates' wisdom (or indeed
the idea of "wisdom" per se): questions perhaps not adequately reconsidered until Lacan's interpretation of the Symposium.
In 1966 at an international colloquium supported by a grant from
the Ford Foundation and sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center ("The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man"),
Lacan advanced some of his most difficult ideas, ideas we are still
trying to make sense of. For instance, he presented his view of myth
as something which operates from structure. The Symposium is made
of myths. That is, Lacan does not stop his discussion of The
Banquet in Seminar 8, but refers to it throughout his teaching. For example, in the seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis he expressly creates a myth of his own to explain his discovery (in the clinic) that the "truth" of structure is the Real (not
mythical) of effect that speaks to and from the body and whose cause
is desire.IO Derrida's insistence that everything is myth or hypothesis is far from Lacanian. There is no metalanguage, Lacan teaches,
no one discourse or explanation or method. But there is a truth of
the body that speaks a language of the Real, a language of symptoms
(objet a) and love (ideals).
What, Is I.ovcl
731
732
EWe RaaJand-SulJivan
734
Ellie RaaJand-Sullivan
not of the female, but of the male only; whence she is the parent
of friendship-a stranger to brutal lust."14 While Pausanias is speaking, Aristophanes, the comic playwright, goes into fits of hiccoughs
and begins to make jokes. Centuries later in his interpretation of the
Symposium, Lacan says that no one will understand Plato's dialogue
if they do not know why Aristophanes acted in this manner during
Pausanias's speech. Since the hiccoughing Aristophanes is in no shape
to speak next, the medical doctor Eryximachus recommends that he
tickle his throat with a feather in order to sneeze and relieve his
hiccoughs.
Eryximachus speaks next, providing the safety of rhetoric and narrative until we can return to Aristophanes. Indeed, what did Lacan
mean by pointing to jokes and hiccoughs as crucial to understanding the Symposium? If one follows the logic of analysis put forth by
Lacan, there is a "truth" to his interpretation of The Banquet that
validates not only his theory that truth has the structure of fiction,
but pushes our understanding of aesthetics beyond its many formalistic explications by showing that fiction's roots lie in the Real of
the body. Indeed, at the simplest level, Aristophanes' laughter and
hiccoughs show that the body gets in the way of smooth and eloquent rhetoric, that the body can be an obstacle, a stumbling block
to meaning. By contrast, Eryximachus invokes a universal principle
in Nature that attracts harmony and stands behind physical health
and happy love. He argues that love as a passion corrupts and blights.
But both gods and mortals, says he, try together for the riaht love,
one which will cure whatever is wrong. Divination is just that: to
cherish the right in order to cure the wrong. The goal of love, then,
aims at good things such as temperance and justice. In these combined efforts of Heaven and Earth, Eryximachus finds the social good
as welL
Then Aristophanes is ready to speak. In 1960 Lacan wondered why
Plato brought Aristophanes into the Symposium. In historical reality,
not only did Aristophanes mock Socrates in The Clouds, he helped
kill him by introducing the diocism: a punitive rupture of the political unity of the city. Moreover, although he is a comic playwright,
Aristophanes' speech on love is not particularly comic, although it
appears to be at first glance. Aristophanes is in no doubt about the
of love. He says the god of love should be the one most honored
humans, but he is not because the human race has Changed from
wh,11 it originally was when there were three species: males, females,
,IIH\ hermaphrodites. In this time humans were like their animal
('ClllIllnparts; they walked on all fours. But, reminding us of the BibIk,l\ myth of fallen angels in the Judaic tradition, Aristophanes says
t h.1I Jupiter punished humans for trying to invade Heaven by cutting
I h(,111 in half and forcing them to walk upright. The true punishment,
736
lillie l{ayland-SllJlivan
What Is Love?
737
hl'gins in the locus of the Other ... is born in so far as the signifier ('merges in the field of the Other. But by this very fact, this
sllbject-which was previously nothing if not a subject coming
illto heing-solidifies into a signifier. The relation to the Other is
pn'cisely that which. for us. brings out what is represented by the
1,lIlldla-not sexed polarity. the relation between masculine and
f('minine, but the relation between the living subject and that
which he loses by having to pass. for his reproduction. through
the sexual cycle. In this way I explain the essential affinity of
every drive with the zone of death. and reconcile the two sides of
the drive-which. at one and the same time. makes present sexuality in the unconscious and represents. in its essence, deathY
There is no totalized masculine or feminine. There is no ideal love,
ollly the love of ideals in their painful affinity to narcissism and
cleat h. What one loves concerns what one has lost. the mark of loss
I"Onstituting the Real as an excess, a beyond or limit that Lacan
named jouissance. Its forms are the objet a which return from a place
of trauma to create affect. and place jouissance and death (archaic
<lead "letters") in our desires (drives) and discourses. Lacan's point
about the "drives" that emanate from the Other is that they do not
necessarily have the good of the subject in mind. We can, however,
<Juestion the "drives" from the side of jouissance or la chose (the objet
a). Indeed. the subject is a headless robot, spoken by repetitions and
drives that try to reduce differences to some alien sense of the same.
What, then, is funny about Aristophanes' discourse. what is so revealing? In this case funny points to the tragicomic. We give all to
love. die for love, kill for love. In this strange masquerade where we
dance around each other. accommodating ourselves to others through
monumental farces, intense contradictions. outrageous comedies, the
strangest of bedfellows. we keep the Other at arm's length and blame
others instead. Lacan says what we love in an other is what we lack
(desire) in the Other of our own repressed fables. Still. love is our
only hope. Love for an other (transference) tries to reach beyond the
738
Ellie Raoland-Sullivan
What: Is [,ovel
739
S.Ylllptolll (rewritten by Lacan as sin thorne in order to express the parI k"I.lrily specific to this order) of her or his life encounters with love
,1IIe! Ilt'sire, told in the names of the father and mediated by desires of
I he Illot her.
Whell Lacan opines that the most hidden and radical articulation
of loY(' in kinship is between father and son, I wonder if he is hinting
,II Ilw sublimated power of the paternal metaphor where love is the
IIIV(' of a name or a lineage: the love of self reflected in the tautomirror of naming. Love is for a name, Lacan taught. Desire is
.111 organ. If the immortality of a name (soul translated by Lacan
.IS (llller/aimer) comes from the generation of a child as the desired
ohjt('\ by which a family tries to pin down whatever remains unassllIIilated (the Real) in each member, I wonder if each child is not
.111 olJjet a in a family; the all too familiar, yet uncannily different
01 It' (s). It seems to me, then, that all this discourse in the Sympo
on the birth of Love is family talk, a philosophical effort to give
h to a child that would symbolize the forces in play in this group
where philosophy was not a thing apart, but a way of life. I would
.l<ld, further, that classical scholars have described "Greek love" as
llirlation or erotic petting, but not as a love that excluded sexual relations with, or love for, a wife. Lacan called it an amour d'ecoJe that
veiled the problematic of Woman, something we will return to later.
Por now, let's go on to Agatho's speech; the one preceding Socrates'
.lIlswers.
Agatho was a second-rate tragedian, and a Sophist, or master of
rhetoric as well. His discourse is witty, rambling, and beautifully spoken, but apparently superficial. Love is the youngest of the gods, he
says, and the most tender. Love seeks beauty, but must also deal with
I he varied effects it produces on the lover and the beloved. In his
answers, Socrates first gently admonishes all the speakers, reminding them that the point of the symposium is not for each one to say
what is "true," but to frame the best from all the materials (reminding us of the coherence theory of truth). Then he replies to Agatho,
leading him step by step in his famous elentic method of teaching by
questioning and refutation, the remembrance of which (in Lacan's
view) kept Plato from embracing altogether the systematic method
of establishing essential truths he strove for. Having praised Agatho's
elegant words and good diction, Socrates begins what Plato renders
as a magical dance. He asks if love is love of something, or of nothing.
"Every being which feels any desire should desire only that which
it is in want of."21 Lacan will hear in these words a reminiscence of
his idea that we love in an other what we lack in the Other; what is
lost in memory and symbolization returns transformed as variations
of the objet a. In other words, Socrates debunks Agatho's claim that
Love desires Beauty alone.
He will explain what kind of being Love is, Socrates says, and afterward show what effects he produces. "Now I think the easiest way
that I can take, in executing this plan, will be to lay before you the
whole of this doctrine in the very manner and order in which I myself
was examined and lectured on the subject by Diotima." 22 This sibylline woman had done for him what he is doing for Agatho. Certainly
Socrates spares Agatho's "self love" by this indirect method of speaking. But much more is going on. Plato puts in Socrates' mouth words
supposedly bestowed on him by Diotima, who showed him that his
account of love gave the lie to itself. Love was neither beautiful nor
good, she said. Love lies between what is human and ignorant, and
what is wise and divine, and thus transmits and interprets the gods.
We remember that for Lacan the gods are of the field of the Real, that
which has left a trace, an effect, but is not symbolized in knowledge,
and so performs maddeningly just out of one's grasp. And we remember Lacan's idea that myth is what works from structure (a principle
of ordering). Yet Lacan uses myth to shpw how structure works, thus
reversing his theory that myth works f,om structure in the service of
teaching.
Socrates' story of how love was generated, taken from Diotima,
is the following: Love was the son of the gods Poverty and Plenty.
Poverty, the woman, copulated with Plenty, then took her son Love
from Plenty as he lay asleep in a state of drunkenness. Thus, Love
is always poor, rough, hard, dry, barefoot, homeless, groveling, and
in perpetual want. But he is also brave, active, devising traps, and
powerful in magic. The child
then, like the mother. She desires
something the man has. According to Diotima, what is particularly
good in love is its object: that is, the generation of love seeks to link
the mortal and immorta1. 23 Socrates via Diotima tells us that Love
What Is Love?
741
concerns the gods. Lacan stresses that the gods are of the Realsomething more obscured (or repressed) from our knowledge today
I han from Greek knowledge when the gods were plural and powerful
in multiple ways. Yet for Socrates love is not itself a good object. It
is a demon. It is, Lacan will later stress, Socrates' demon. For the
Illoment, I suggest that the love Plato describes through Diotima as
Socrates' mouthpiece is the structure of hysteria delineated by Lacan
(after Freud). When Socrates goes on to discuss the role of Love in
t he sciences and arts, Alcibiades enters the room in a drunken state.
Alcibiades was a nobleman, known then and now for his military
for his debauchery and greed for power, and for his physical
heauty. He insists on interrupting in order to speak the truth about
Socrates whom he calls a Satyr and a Silenus, ugly on the outside
hut beautiful inside. Alcibiades then tells the story that stands at
I he origin of the symposium on love insofar as Lacan calls Alcibiades
Socrates' first love.
The story is roughly this. Alcibiades loved Socrates and thought
Socrates loved him for his beauty. Alcibiades thought of Socrates as a
treasure, a precious and undefinable object. But because he confused
desire with love, says Lacan, Alcibiades thought he could possess
t his treasure by sexual seduction. Since he did not receive a specific
from Socrates as to his romantic feelings for him, Alcibiades
devised ways to make his teacher speak his love as sexual desire.
I it' plotted to be alone with him. That led to nothing. He plotted
to wrestle with him in gymnastics. That led to nothing sexual. He
plotted to sup alone with him, and to keep Socrates by his side during
t he night. But Socrates resisted the relationship of lover and beloved,
.1llowing Alcibiades to hold him in his arms all night "merely as a
her or brother." Alcibiades has returned to Athens to accuse him
hdbre his companions of being a Silenus and a Satyr. Socrates' crime
is that he is haughty because he is best in everything, even military
.1rts. Moreover, he does not tell his feelings. Naming other young
lIIen, Alcibiades says: "He has deceived these, as if he had been their
lover. when at the same time he rather became the beloved object
himself."7.1 Then he turns to Agatho and warns him to watch out.
Socrates gives a surprising answer. He immediately speaks to Agaand warns that Alcibiades is trying to separate them. Alcibiades
742
Ellie Ra8/and-Sullivan
has one goal: to have both Socrates and Agatho love him since he
wants to be made better (be cured) by being a "beauty who surpasses
all others." Socrates hears Alcibiades at the level of desire according
to Lacan's rendering of the scene. Put another way, the only organ
that never closes or locks up is the ear whose answer in the body
responds to the voice. 25 Lacan has called silence the voice's purified
form.26 Lacan says Alcibiades praised Socrates, but the words were
really spoken for/to Agatho. "He has 'undressed' in public, telling of
his failed seduction, telling the slaves to stop up their ears, in order
to make Socrates his slave." Put another way, if Alcibiades cannot
seduce Socrates, he will seduce the new young man who loves him.
But Socrates refuses the position of slave or dupe. He tells Alcibiades
that in his mistaken love for him (Socrates), he wants to exchange
the deception of beauty for the truth, copper for gold.
Lacan's interpretation of the Symposium gives a picture of Socrates as one who pretends to know nothing except that he can recognize what love is: where the lover is located and the beloved. Now
this is a curious twist. We know that Socrates has long been seen
as the master of irony, the one who claims' he knows nothing, the
Greek word eironeia meaning "not knowing." The same device is
used rhetorically-not knowing-to create drama. So the drama of
the Symposium turns around not knowing; or, as Lacan would have
it, around who knows what. Socrates knows something: who loves
and who is beloved, a crucial kind of knowledge if knowledge itself
is empty (as true dogma) and arbitrary,
truth reveals whose
knowledge exercises power based on who II\anipulates desire. In his
exegesis of Freud's various writings on love, Lacan views Freud as
saying we can only think of love by referring to another sort of structure, the "drive" which Freud divided into three levels: the real, the
economic, and the biological. To these three levels three oppositions
correspond: interestlindifference, pleasure/displeasure, biological activity/passivityY Lacan picks up on the active/passive distinction,
but substitutes the terms loving/being loved. Michel Foucault's documentation of the suspicion of homosexuality as a distaste for sexual
passivity (the position of the beloved), seen, for example, in ancient
Athens, as a position lacking authority, is picked up by Leo Bersani
who argues that the hygienics of social power concerns the fear of a
h'H.11
rllil hority.lH
744
Ellie Raaland-Sullivan
described as caught up in a dialectic because it is suspended to a signifying chain which is constitutive ofthe subject, but under the form of
metonymy_ In The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan describes the
reality of the unconscious as sexual reality-an untenable truth. And
why? "We know that sexual division, in so far as it reigns over most
living beings, is that which ensures the survival of a species. Whether,
with Plato, we place the species among the Ideas, or whether we say,
with Aristotle, that it is to be found nowhere but in the individuals
that support it, hardly matters here. Let us say that the species survives in the form of its individuals." 29 And that form evolves from the
objet a, cause of desire. So when Freud's little Anna dreams of tarts,
strawberries, and eggs, she is not merely making present the object
of a need (food/oral drive), but on account of the sexualization of
these objects, she can hallucinate a form that sisnjfjes. "It is from
the point at which the subject desires that the connotation of reality
is given in the hallucination:'3o When Socrates asks Agatho if love
is love of something, or of nothing, he shows that Agatho does not
possess the object of his desire, that he desires what is not there, that
love articulates itself in desire. Put another way, Socrates questions
Agatho about what he lacks, which is something that only seems
nothing. He questions him about his desire by questioning the coherence of the signifier: what signifier represents Agatho (as subject) for
another signifier. In doing this, Socrates gets rid of the idea that love
is transparent to itself, a simple thing.
Neither Agatho who spoke like a song, nor Alcibiades who was
drunk, knew exactly what they were saying:
speaking about
Love, they were covering over something about
But Socrates
knew, if we are to believe Lacan. He knew that it takes three to
love: the lover, the beloved, and the objet a that causes the fantasy
of love. And Socrates saw through love fantasies because he could
not accept being the beloved, that which is worthy of being loved.
This puts him in a different position from Alcibiades whose desire
knew no limits, and whose (ideal) ego fantasy of "self" does not
leave room for contemplating rejection. Put another way, Socrates'
special knowledge is the knowledge the hysteric possesses (whether
she knows it or not). Her desire is to support the degradation of an
"unworthy" father. 31 In this way, she supplements the lack in the
Wlwt is Love?
745
1\('1' into the position of being only for others. Yet she is always
liNk (,1' learning that she does not constitute this sign of the gift (or
Mlv('r) li)r everyone. Since she lives the paradoxical dilemma of being
/11111\<'1 hillg and nothing at the same time, she readily understands the
111111'tilwss of desire. To protect herself, she wants to desire from a
l'uNiI ion of Noli me tansere. In this way she can remain unfulfilled,
Itl lIeurotic pain, but true to the Other by continuing to identify with
wh.lt is lacking in her family novel. The difficulty of sustaining this
pusilion is not that it does not work well. It does. But it plays at
I lit t'dge of loss itself, near the void where Lacan located death as a
1'.lIpable presence.
The dignity Lacan attributes to the neurotic is that (unlike normativt' narcissists who by definition cling closely to social law) he or
sht- wants to know what there is of the Real in the passion of which
hl- or she is the effect of a hidden object, das kern un seres Wesen. 32 But
i II place of knowledge subjects have the Symptom, the response given
to the question of not knowing what she or he is for the Other. Any
subject is the symptom of a loss of das Dins at the level of object.
The objet a Lacan designates as the void represents Socrates' central
identificatory position, as well as that of female hysterics. Socrates'
beauty arises from his position of sustaining himself by nothing. Not
"no-thing" as nUllity, but by the nothins that Lacan defines as pure
desire: la chose as the objet a. Perhaps one begins to see why Socrates could represent a possible model for the Lacanian analyst. The
analyst seeks to imitate lack itself in order to incite an analysand to
work with desire, without the analyst's confusing the transference
that comes back from the analysand with love to which he or she
must respond, or a desire to be satisfied.
If the analyst mimes the hysteric's unsatisfied desire, does this have
any relation to Socrates' giving his discourse on love in the guise of a
woman? Lacan points out that by making a sibyl speak, Plato was not
responsible for all he said as author, but nor was Socrates. Moreover,
,,,,I}t./ (/)
It'
746
lillie RaB/and-Sullivan
What Is tovel
Lacan sees quite clearly that Socrates is making the woman in himself
speak (and Plato is listening). By his recourse to myth, Socrates could
use the elentic method in his own speech, as well as in questioning
others because, says Lacan, myth fills in the gap between desire and
jouissance, between what one seeks and what cannot yet be dialectically constructed, the Real. Still, the Real materializes language by
the gaze, the voice. the heterogeneous movements of the objet a burrowing into the flesh, burying our efforts to neatly delineate inside
from outside.
Socrates, like the Lacanian analyst, destroyed the fantasies (assumed realities) of his followers in order to unveil the truth that
everything is interpretation (desire, if we are to follow Lacan's train
of thought here). If our fantasies embroider our desires overtly or
covertly, then we see that fantasies have the structure of fiction. They
were created, imposed, and in turn cover a jouis-sens (something felt
but not symbolized as knowledge) that returns from the future-past
in imaginary traces that give body to the symptoms supporting our
illusions of being unified. Within this logic, why does Socrates' myth
of Love produce so profound an impact on his listeners? Does this
myth tell us anything about the powers of "wisdom" attributed to
Socrates? Insofar as Socrates' figure of Love possesses the attributes of
her mother (Poverty) -in Diotima's myth-and insofar as her mother
took the active role in conceiving Love, the roles of lover and beloved
(desirable one) are reversed from traditional expectations of male/
female sexuality. Is this because Socrates spoke as a hysteric? As one
who knows what it means to take the active role in desire, lest one
face the terror of being desired? I wonder if Lacan would not have told
Diotima's tale differently later when he had fotulated a concept of
the unconscious in relation to a symbol that is absent in the case of
Woman (who is a signifier, a category, a person, but not the essence
"Imaginarized" around the masculine symbol for sexual difference
as erroneously fantasized).33 In the latter case Socrates would not be
questioning the woman in himself, so much as Woman, symbolized
in early childhood at the level of the Imaginary (the visible) as lacking something erroneously attributed to males. Moreover, the incest
taboo between mother and son gives special value to her body and
being.
747
"I,'hysterique produit du savoir . . . Socrate est celui qui a comIlwl1ce. II n'etait pas hysterique mais bien pire: un maitre subtil. Cela
n'empeche pas qu'il avait des symptomes hysteriques."31 The hysteric
is usually a woman who plays the game of love unawares. But she
plays for a stake: to make the supposed master of knowing produce.
She is also a master, then, for she puts others to work. Socrates knew
what he was doing, Lacan says in 1975. He knew how to play the
heloved in the guise of the lover, without giving anything except the
"truth" that there is nothing to give but giving itself. Love is a consolation, on the side of everyday narcissism; desire a passion, on the
side of jouissance. Socrates knew what was in question in the love
game, and he played without soiling his hands. In The Banquet he
said to Aldbiades: "The eye of thought functions by opening itself,
in the measure that the scope of the Real eye works by lowering its
gaze.-But attention: there where you see something, I am nothing."35 In sharp contrast to Alcibiades, Socrates knew in what his
value lay. Alcibiades sees only Imaginarily. Desire is his "good" and
joins fantasy in love. No knowledge of loss-castration/real privation
-is present for him. Yet when rejected, the Freudo/Lacanian triad of
Real privation, Imaginary frustration, Symbolic aggression rears its
head. Is it surprising that Alcibiades was one of those who played a
748
Ellie RaBland-Sullivan
750
Ellie RaBland-Sullivan
What
Love?
751
752
Ellie Raeland-Sullivan
grab, freeze, depict, and reify what is missing, all the while keeping
it enigmatic.
The meeting of a group of American analysts in southern California in January of 1988 whose topic was "What Is Love?" showed
none of the theoretical rigor of the Symposium, or of Lacan's reading
of it. According to Newsday , some topics discussed by the "shrinks
[who] keep eyeing it" (love) ranged from considerations of how preverbal emotions bring our parents into every adult relationship to
how romantic love has failed the human psyche. In the words of the
reporter, Jamie Talan: "At the turn of the century Sigmund Freud
theorized that people fall in love with their Oedipal parent. Today's
therapists have come to recognize something developmentally earlier
and far more intense: A time before language when parents were
nothing short of God-like, totally committed and nurturing."39 The
general consensus of the various analysts and psychiatrists there was
that people must grow out of looking for a repetition of this love in
order to become healthy; that to be obsessed with love is an infantile state; that people must not fall in love only to meet each other's
needs. In March of 1988 analysts and psychiatrists met again in New
Orleans to discuss fear of intimacy, marriage avoidance, romance,
and why real men should eat quiche. Although one is glad to hear of
American analysts speaking about love, one wonders where they can
go with the notion that love is a pleasure-principle infantilism to be
outgrown? If maturation is the model for health, where does desire fit
in? What new ideal of wholeness is
r?lJresented in a model that
makes love an Eryximachian malady t01)e cured by an Aristophean
bisection?
Lacan knew that love can make us ill, make us
but he did
not jump to the conclusion that in order to be "well" or "whole"
we must (pretend to) give it up. Rather, he taught that love is the
pathway along which we can learn to make fine distinctions between
love and desire that may give us the freedom to take a position in
the Other (our desire), and toward others (our ideals). If we come
to understand what Socrates taught-that love is a powerful potion
laced with desire-perhaps we will agree with Lacan that desire (not
love) is every person's cause. Beyond desire, Lacan placed the objet a.
At the first ParisNew York Psychoanalytic Workshop, Jacques-Alain
Miller explained that the objet a introduces something else into language-something he called "light."40 How, he asked, does this small
a relate to the large A-the Symbolic order? Is it exterior or interior?
He offered us the word "extimacy" to try to transcend this exterior!
interior opposition. Again, I think of Alcibiades' description of Socrates as ugly on the outside and beautiful on the inside, the paradox
being that extimacy-perhaps what Augustine called God-is at the
very center of one's intimacy. Yet it seems lost or unattainable. In
this, it is precious, aBa/ma.
Is it not this strange connection between something in us both
alien and intimate that Plato portrays Socrates as showing his pupils
by confronting them with lack, leaving them both empty-handed,
and yet with their hands full, both perplexed and trapped in their
own fantasies? Lacan taught that the sublime object is not "it," but
only a substitute for das DinB. "The thing"-our truth, the Realis what we seek in an other through love articulated in desire. What
mystifies us, eludes us, or drives us mad, is that "it" remains just out
of grasp. Is "it" in us, or in an other? Where is it? What is it? We are
faced with a Wizard of Oz problem. Behind every figure or persona,
forms fade. When an analysand implicitly, or directly, asks "Who am
11" in order not to know what constitutes "1," Lacan says the analyst
never replies "You are this or that," as long as the analyst knows that
at the level of the Other the question articulated is "What am I?"
One of Lacan's lessons to his pupils was that an analyst can help an
analysand reconstitute an "I" only by getting the analysand to answer
the questions: "What do I want?" "What does the I lack?" "What is
suffering beyond my desire?"
Notes
-I
,.I('(llICS
IIJM,,, 3-12.
754
5 Ibid., 22
6 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago, 1987). 374.
7 Ibid., 370.
8 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete PsychologicalWorks of SigmundFreud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London. 1953-'74), 18:
51-52.
II
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, ed. JacquesAlainMiller. trans. AlanSheridan (NewYork, 1978). 205.
Lacan, "OfStructure," 18788.
Ellie RaglandSullivan, "TheLimitsofDiscourseStructure:TheHystericandthe
Analyst," ProseStudies. forthcoming 1989.
JacquesLacan, Encore. ed.JacquesAlainMiller(Paris, 1975), 16; mytranslation.
Plato, Banquet, 46l.
Lacan, FourFundamentalConcepts, 197.205.
Ibid., 19798.
Ibid., 19899.
Ibid., 17486.
JacquesLacan, "KantavecSade,"inEcrits (Paris, 1966),776; mytranslation.
JacquesLacan,Ecrits:ASelection, ed.andtrans.AlanSheridan(NewYork, 1977),
3 15.
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Ellie Ragland-Sullivan
Plato, Banquet,492.
Ibid., 495.
Ibid.. 507.
Ibid., 529.
SeeJacques Lacan. HLe sinthome:Seminairedu 18 n<Jvembre 1975:' inJoyceavec
Lacan, ed.JacquesAubert (Paris, 1987),42.
......./
SeeJeanGuy Godin, "Dusyrnptorne ason epure: Le sinthome," in Aubert, ed.,
JoyceavecLacan, 167.
Lacan,FourFundamentalConcepts. 190.
Leo Bersani,"IstheRectumaGrave?" October43 (1987): 212.
Lacan, FourFundamentalConcepts, 150.
Ibid.. 155.
See Ellie RaglandSullivan, "Dora and theNameoftheFather: TheStructureof
Hysteria,"inDiscontentedDiscourses:FeminineTextualInterventionPsychoanalysis, ed. MarleenBarrandRichardFeldstein (Urbana, 1989), 20840.
JacquesLacan, Leseminaire,livreIX: L'identification, 14 March 1962, unpublished
text.
38 SigmundFreud."TheProjectforaScientificPsychology,"inStandardEdition, vol.
1.