Being and Enjoyment in Plato’s Philebus: A Lacanian Perspective

[DRAFT]

Aaron Schuster

Outline
1. Philosophy contra Enjoyment
2. Does Pleasure Speak?
3. Plato’s Hedontology
4. Plato’s Apeiron and Lacan’s Jouissance
5. What is True Pleasure?
6. A Speculative History of Pleasure
7. The Theory of Pleasure and the Pleasure of Theory

Philosophy contra Enjoyment

Jacques Lacan’s fourteenth seminar The Logic of Fantasy (1966-1967) contains one
of those passages where the psychoanalyst throws down the gauntlet to philosophy.
Lacan comments briefly on a section in the Philebus where Plato writes that the gods
feel neither pleasure nor pain, for “these states would be quite unseemly in their case”
(33b).1 Pleasure is beneath the dignity of the gods, since, according to Plato’s
definition, it involves the movement from a degraded to a more perfect state, and thus
presupposes a lack or deficiency. A perfect existence would be one without pain or
pleasure. This dismissal of pleasure as unworthy of the gods is deplored by Lacan,
who sees in it a sign of philosophy’s constitutive misrecognition of enjoyment. He
claims that the Philebus constitutes “the weak point at the beginning of philosophical
discourse: to have radically misrecognized the status of enjoyment in the order of
beings.”2 This assessment alludes to the conclusion of the dialogue, where pleasure is
relegated to the lowly fifth and sixth spots in the ranking of goods. Taking Plato as a
stand-in for philosophy tout court, Lacan effectively condemns philosophical
discourse for its forgetting of enjoyment, to echo the famous Heideggerian forgetting
of Being—not a Seinsvergessenheit but a Lustvergessenheit.

Lacan favors mythology over philosophy. Against Plato’s anhedonic gods, he

declares that “the goddess is enjoyment” (la déesse est jouissance), and to illustrate
this he reaches beyond the Greeks to one of the great legends of Egyptian mythology:
the mourning of Isis who dutifully collected the dismembered parts of her murdered
husband’s (and brother’s) body in order to resurrect him; locating all of Osiris’ organs
except his penis, she fashioned a golden phallus as a substitute. Here we have, in a
nutshell, the theme of symbolic castration (the missing genital), and the ersatz surplus
object (the golden rod) that comes in its place—it is this coincidence of lack and
surplus, something missing and something extra, that constitutes the “divine”
structure of jouissance. “Divine” should here be read as a synonym for the real, in
accordance with Lacan’s thesis in Seminar VIII that the gods belong to real (“The

1
All references to Plato’s dialogues are to Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1997).
2
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIV, La logique du fantasme 1966-1967, session of June 7, 1967
(unpublished). I am using the Staferla version: http://staferla.free.fr/S14/S14%20LOGIQUE.pdf,
accessed November 2017; my translation.

1
gods are a mode by which the real is revealed”).3 Plato’s evacuation of pleasure from
the realm of the gods thus amounts to a covering up of this structure, which is
elsewhere obliquely revealed by the agalma, the flashy figurine meant to attract the
gods’ attention, invoked by a drunken Alcibiades as the precious object inside
Socrates, in the penultimate scene of the Symposium. In fact the question of the
pleasure’s divinity is one that runs throughout the Philebus. At the beginning of the
dialogue, Philebus delegates the defense of pleasure to his friend Protarchus, invoking
the “goddess herself to witness this” (12b). Socrates, however, soon after refers to this
goddess not as Hēdonē but as Aphrodite, but adds that he will address her by
“whatever title is pleasing to her” (12c). Is the goddess jouissance? Socrates hesitates
over the correct name to use for her. “When faced with the names of deities,
Protarchus, my fear knows no bounds: I always get more afraid than you would think
humanly possible” (12c). If Socrates is unsure of whether pleasure is a divine name, it
is because it is unclear exactly what it designates. Are all pleasures the same? Does
pleasure have a generic essence which would unify its multiple appearances? What
should truly be called pleasure, and who are the impostors? While in classical
literature pleasure is indeed often referred to as one of the gods, Plato is much less
straightforward about the matter of pleasure’s divinity.4 One of the most interesting
responses to this problem is recorded in Neoplatonist philosopher Damascius’s
commentary on the Philebus. If Hēdonē is not the name of a goddess it is because of
pleasure’s ambiguous nature: “Why did the ancients not give the name of Pleasure to
any deity? Proclus’s answer is: because it is neither a primary good nor bad in itself
nor intermediate and therefore indifferent; for how can its magic be indifferent?”5
Neither good nor evil nor simply neutral, pleasure might be described as necessary yet
dangerous: there is no human life without pleasure, yet pleasure threatens to corrupt
and destroy the very life that it supports. Right afterwards, Damascius confirms that
pleasure is indeed a goddess, and her name is Euphrosyne, one of the Graces.

Lacan’s passing remarks on the Philebus were a missed opportunity, or to use his own
phrase, between Plato and Lacan there is a “missed encounter.” Especially
considering his original and subversive reading of the Symposium, it is somewhat
surprising to see Lacan offer such a flat assessment of the Philebus, Plato’s most
sophisticated treatment of the question of pleasure and the good life, which is
definitely not without its ironies and tricks. Lacan’s comments stand in sharp contrast
to those of Jacques Derrida, who saw in the Philebus nothing less than the
philosophical prefiguration of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As Derrida
writes, Freud “translates or transfers its entire program.”6 “Beyond… belongs to the
tradition of the Philebus. The inheritance is assured. Plato is behind Freud.”7 Like
Plato, Freud was concerned with the question of the being of pleasure—what it is,

3
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII Transference, 1960-1961, trans. Bruce Fink, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), p. 44.
4
Apuleius recounts in The Golden Ass that Voluptas was born from the union of Cupid and Psyche.
Lacan refers to the tale of Cupid and Psyche in Seminar VIII, in his interpretation of the painting
Amore e Psiche by Jacopo Zucchi, which presents the same structure of lack-and-surplus found in the
myth of Isis and Osiris: in Zucchi’s painting Cupid’s missing penis is (mostly) covered by a
strategically placed bouquet of flowers. Fittingly enough, Apuleius’s novel ends with an ode to Isis.
5
Damascius, Lectures on the Philebus, transl. L. G. Westerink (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing
Co., 1959), ¶19, p. 12.
6
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1987), p. 53.
7
Ibid., p. 398.

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how to define it—a problem that chased him throughout his career and which he
never satisfactorily resolved. Derrida argues that Plato’s definition of pleasure as a
genetic process or transitional movement (the filling of a lack, the restoration of
equilibrium), as well as his metaphysical scheme of the limit and the unlimited,
profoundly inform Freud’s model of the pleasure principle and its beyond. What I
propose in this essay is an alternate Lacanian interpretation of the Philebus, a kind of
exercise in thinking with Lacan against Lacan (in all fairness, Lacan recommended to
his auditors to read the Philebus for themselves). My aim is twofold: on the one hand,
to provide a deeper appreciation of some of the complexities of the dialogue, and, on
the other, to clarify the meaning of Lacan’s concepts of pleasure (plaisir) and
enjoyment (jouissance), in their connection with and distance from Plato. Derrida
envisioned that the Philebus and Beyond the Pleasure Principle “address each other
in a fabulous correspondence.”8 In the same spirit but following a different path, my
interpretation will open onto the wider questions of how to write a history of pleasure,
and the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis within such a history.

Does Pleasure Speak?

Scholars agree that the Philebus is one of Plato’s late dialogues, arguably one of the
last; it also marks the return of Socrates after the Eleatic Stranger’s main role in the
Sophist and the Statesman. The first thing that calls for comment is the title, which
already poses an interesting problem: the dialogue is named after the character who
refuses to take part in it. Philebus himself—the name literally means “love boy”—
remains largely silent throughout the proceedings, having delegated the defense of
pleasure to Protarchus; unlike many of Plato’s characters, he is not known outside his
appearance in Plato’s text, and may be a fictional invention. The dialogue starts
abruptly, with the “fair” (kalos) Philebus handing off the defense of pleasure to
Protarchus, who subsequently conducts the inquiry into pleasure and the good life
with Socrates. Why does Plato begin with this act of substitution? Ironically, the
dialogue on pleasure begins with the dropping out of pleasure: pleasure does not
speak for itself but has to be lent another voice, ventriloquized. There is at the outset
an antinomy between pleasure and dialectics, an antinomy that will finally be
overcome when “love of argument” (67b) carries the day over love of pleasure, when
philosophy proves itself to be not only superior to pleasure but also the superior
pleasure. Philebus’s strategy is essentially to shut up and be beautiful, sois belle et
tais-toi, as the song goes. (Reading the text, one can almost forget about Philebus’s
presence, but it is funny to picture him watching over the proceedings, his silence the
sign of self-satisfaction). If Socrates is to prevail, he must not only win the
argument—and in a sense, he has already won as soon as the discussion has begun,
that is, as soon as the participants have agreed to settle the dispute between pleasure
and reason by rational means—but he must also defeat love boy’s (silent) charms. In
addition to conducting a theoretical examination into pleasure and the good life, the
Philebus is therefore also the scene of a seduction, and the return of Socrates can be
seen as a return to the method of seduction (the “corruption of the youth”), which
certainly fits a dialogue about pleasure. Socrates will seduce Protarchus by luring him
not with his person (Socrates is notoriously ugly) but with his desire, his love of truth,
getting Protarchus hooked onto philosophy and philosophical pleasure.

8
Ibid.

3
In fact, we soon discover that the real threat to the dialectic lies not so much in the
silence of hedonists like Philebus, but rather in the excessive, “unlimited” pleasure of
discourse itself. By not speaking, Philebus ironically deprives himself of this exquisite
pleasure, a delight that is available only through logos. Socrates explains:

It is through discourse that the same thing flits around, becoming one and
many in all sorts of ways, in whatever it may be that is said at any time, both
long ago and now. And this will never come to an end, nor has it just begun,
but it seems to me that this is an “immortal and ageless” condition that
comes to us with discourse. Whoever among the young first gets a taste of it
is as pleased as if he had found a treasure of wisdom. He is quite beside
himself with pleasure and revels in moving every statement, now turning it to
one side and rolling it all up into one, then again unrolling it and dividing it
up. He thereby involves first and foremost himself in confusion, but then also
whatever others happen to be nearby, be they younger or older or of the same
age, sparing neither his father nor his mother nor anyone else who might
listen to him. He would almost try it on other creatures, not only on human
beings, since he would certainly not spare any foreigner if only he could find
an interpreter somewhere. (15d-16a)

Apart from the thinly veiled description of sexual eros that appears later in the
dialogue, this passage contains the Philebus’s most passionate, and detailed, portrayal
of pleasure: the young person getting his first taste of speaking and arguing, and
discovering the magical autonomy of language wherein the same thing “flits around,”
becoming one and many, the same and other. This discursive drive is described as
irresistible; the youngster is “beside himself with pleasure” and “revels” in playing
with words and statements and manipulating them in various ways (rolling and
unrolling, dividing, turning around, etc.—what operations do these refer to?).
Moreover, this is a most generous and egalitarian (democratic) pleasure which is
happy to share itself with anyone who will listen, including foreigners and animals.
This last is a funny detail: it is as if there were a utopian community of discourse in
which everyone, and even every beast, was equally welcome. Plato clearly intends
this in a negative light, akin to the perverse democracy described in the Republic,
where foreigners, slaves, women, and animals all become equal to male citizens, and
authority and mastery are completely denigrated (562e-563e). The utopian (or for
Plato, dystopian) community of discourse is a particular case of this, where truth is
drowned in a din of words and the only master is confusion itself. If for the speaker
possessed by the fake “treasure” of language, the interlocutor is a matter of
indifference, it is because what’s important is simply having someone to serve as a
prop for one’s babbling or linguistic tricks (“linguisterie,” or linguistricks, as Lacan
playfully writes), the delightful muddle that language not only makes possible, but is
its “immortal and ageless condition.” (The need for interpreters implies that the
intention to communicate is still operative: the kind of speech Socrates is describing is
not sheerly meaningless wordplay, but a kind of a confusion masquerading as
meaning). To the mute pleasure of Philebus is thus contrasted the loquacious joy of
logos. On the one hand pleasure is silent, on the other it cannot shut up.

Unlike the pleasurable manipulations of logos, where the same thing flits around
becoming everything and nothing, philosophy is devoted to the truth. It wants to be
precise, to pin things down, to stop the endless becoming, to substitute the “treasure

4
of wisdom” for the “treasure of pleasure” (which it will argue to be an even better
pleasure). And yet there is also something relentless, not to say unbounded, about
philosophy itself. This is suggested by the conclusion of the Philebus, which ought to
be compared to that of the Symposium. The latter ends with Socrates continuing to
lecture his fellow symposiasts into the wee hours even after most have either left or
drunkenly passed out, holding forth on the nature of comedy and tragedy, and how a
tragic playwright should be equally skilled at writing comedies. (Incidentally, the
famous line of the Philebus concerning “all of life’s tragedies and comedies” (50b),
echoes this conclusion of the Symposium). Here philosophy seems closest to the
“generosity” of babbling, and indeed Socrates appears almost indifferent to his
remaining half-asleep audience. If in the Symposium Socrates cannot stop
philosophizing, in the Philebus he is not allowed to stop. In what we might take to be
an act of philosophical coquetry, Socrates tries to exit the conversation, only to be
pulled back in by an eager Protarchus. Just as the dialogue begins in media res, it ends
equally abruptly, as if the text we are reading were cut out of a much longer (virtual)
dialogue. Usually such a literary technique would be associated with a modernist
aesthetics of the fragment, but Plato has done something even more ingenious: the
Philebus is essentially a fragment which espouses a theory of nicely bounded wholes.

PROTARCHUS: We are all agreed now that what you said is as true as
possible, Socrates.
SOCRATES: So will you let me go now?
PROTARCHUS: There is still a little missing, Socrates. Surely you will not
give up before we do. But I will remind you of what is left! (67b)

True to its doctrine of desire, the Philebus finishes with a lack (“there is still a little
missing…”). In the beginning pleasure drops out, and at the end there is a lingering
dissatisfaction: what better way to dramatically illustrate the unfulfillment which
drives desire? In fact, the course of the dialogue traces a conversion: its last lines seal
the victory of philosophy, which pace Socrates’s request to depart does not “let go.”
Socrates’s seduction has been successful, Protarchus has been converted to the side of
philosophy and philosophical dialectic, the love of pleasure has been transformed (or
sublimated) into a love of wisdom, with its higher pleasure. Let us examine this
process of seduction more closely. Its turning point comes relatively early in the
dialogue, with the mollusk argument. Without reason, memory, and judgment,
Socrates contends, not only would one be unable to recall past pleasures or anticipate
future ones, but one would not even be able to recognize pleasure in the present: “you
would not realize that you are enjoying yourself even while you do” (21c). Bereft of
the human being’s cognitive architecture, Philebus’s life of pure pleasure would be
reduced to that of “a mollusk, or one of those creatures in shells that live in the sea”
(21c)—a particularly vicious insult considering Plato’s contempt for shellfish as the
lowliest of life forms, whose “extreme stupidity” is matched by their “extreme
dwelling place” (Timaeus 92a-b). Protarchus is utterly dumbfounded by Socrates’s
analogy. “Socrates, this argument has left me absolutely speechless for the moment”
(21d). This is the “torpedo fish” moment of the dialogue, to cite another of Plato’s
aquatic creatures. Socrates has stunned his interlocutor just like the electric ray
mentioned in the Meno: “Indeed, if a joke is in order, you seem, in appearance and in
every other way, to be like the broad torpedo fish, for it too makes anyone who comes
close and touches it feel numb, and you now seem to have had that kind of effect on
me, for both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you”

5
(80a-b). Protarchus is numbed by Socrates’ mollusk image, which effectively turns
the “fair” Philebus into a dumb quivering oyster; this shocking de-sublimation should
be seen as the key to the philosopher’s strategy to woo Protarchus away from his
handsome rival. The joke Socrates later makes about subjecting pleasure to a rigorous
examination and thus “giving pain to pleasure” (23b) constitutes a further humiliation
of Philebus’s candidate for the good, and by extension Philebus himself.

The mollusk argument also performs another important function. First, as a satiric
image, it serves to denigrate Philebus and rob him of his attractiveness; second, on a
theoretical level, it sets up the ontological in-between status of human beings. There
are three essential stages of pleasure in the Philebus: Mollusks, Humans, and Gods.
At the mollusk level, there is pleasure but it is an unconscious pleasure, pleasure that
does not know itself to be pleasure. A mollusk enjoys but knows nothing about this
enjoyment (not even that it feels it, according to Socrates—a strange idea). With
humans, this unknowing pleasure comes into possession of itself, thanks to the
addition of reason, memory, and judgment. Human life is the mixed life of pleasure
and intelligence, and this mixture constitutes the good for human beings. If
intelligence is the more important component of the mixture it is because it is not only
thanks to intelligence that the human being can possess its pleasure, but it is also able
to properly order and measure it, and thus lead a fulfilling existence. But beyond this
fulfillment there is the highest level of the gods, where there is no pleasure at all, only
the calmness and equanimity of a purely intellectual life. If an oyster enjoys but
knows nothing about it, a god knows but takes no enjoyment in it (at least not in any
humanly recognizable way).9 Human beings are in-between creatures, caught between
palpitating shellfish and the impassive neutrality of the gods, as if a fragment of the
divine mind had gotten stuck in a squishy oyster. That is why, although the Philebus
articulates an ethics appropriate to the human “mixed life,” there is still, faintly
audible in the background, an echo of the tragic lament that it would be better not to
be born this way, into a mortal body subject to corruption and generation and the
pains and pleasures attendant upon such processes. Pleasure is not a perfection of
eternal being but part of the hurly-burly of the corruptible sublunar world.

Plato’s Hedontology

What is the subject matter of the Philebus? As our discussion thus far would seem to
suggest, it is about the nature of pleasure and the good life. This is reinforced by the
subtitle added to ancient manuscripts, peri hēdonēs, ēthikos (on pleasure and ethics).
Nonetheless, historically speaking, the true subject of the dialogue is far from clear.
To quote one recent overview:

Since ancient times, opinions have been divided. At the beginning of his
commentary (§1-6) Damascius presents different positions: some, relying on
the subtitle given by Thrasyllus, say that it is pleasure; a certain Pisitheus
(pupil of Theodorus of Asine) that it is intelligence; Iamblichus, Syrianus,
and Proclus that it is the final cause of the universe and the immanent good
to all; Proclus again, that it is only the Good (a mixture of pleasure and
9
However, the Timaeus speaks of the pleasure of the demiurge: “Now when the Father who had
begotten the universe observed it set in motion and alive, a thing that had come to be as a shrine for the
everlasting gods, he was well pleased, and in his delight he thought of making it more like its model
still” (37c-d).

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 intelligence) of all animated beings. The agreement is not greater between
modern commentators. For Schleiermacher “the initial question [of pleasure
or thought, which is good, or better?] is not the only one, and perhaps not the
main object of dialogue.” Friedländer thinks it is the link between “pleasures
and the highest ontological questions,” and Gadamer, that the problem is
“what to choose and how to act,” whereas according to Taylor we are before
a debate between hedonists and antihedonists.10

The Philebus is a complex and difficult text, due to its meandering character and its
inclusion of a number of different topics whose interrelation is not always apparent.11
It contains an ontology, analyzing reality into four essential categories (more on this
below); a psychology that distinguishes between pleasure and pain, as psychic
perceptions of corporeal and psychic processes, and desire, which is a function of
memory and anticipation, and famously compares the soul to a book in which words
and images are inscribed (this finds its psychoanalytic echo in Freud’s “mystic
writing pad”); an ethics of the mixed life of pleasure and intelligence, which, in its
evaluation of diverse pleasures, makes a distinction between not only good and bad
but true and false pleasures and culminates in a Nietzsche-style ranking of goods; and
a philosophy of art, focusing on the enjoyment of the theater, the different blends of
pleasure and pain evoked by tragedies (“they are enjoying themselves at the same
time they are pouring forth tears” 48a) and comedies (“a strange mixture of pleasure
and pain this comic malice is” 49a)—these composite, troubled pleasures provide an
insight, beyond the theater, into “all of life’s tragedies and comedies” (50b). In an
attempt to grasp the unity of the text, I will hazard my own hypothesis about its
subject matter, which is close to that proposed by Paul Friedländer: the intertwining
of pleasure and ontology, ethics and metaphysics, the good for human beings and the
cosmic order of things—what might be called, in a word, hedontology.12

In a crucial section of the Philebus, often separated from the rest of the dialogue and
studied in its own right, Plato divides reality or “everything that actually exists now in
the universe” into four distinct categories: the unlimited (apeiron), the limit (peras),
things resulting from the mixture of these two (meikta), and the cause of this mixture
(aitia) (23c-d). It is the third category of mixed things that concerns Plato most,
complex entities that are composed by a manifold of elements held together according
to fixed ratios. Such things include language, musical compositions, the seasons, the
human body, the cosmos itself: whatever has stable being, Plato argues, results from
the imposition of order on inherently disordered or fluctuating elements. The coming-
into-being of any definite thing depends upon “the measures imposed by the limit,”
for without such measures nothing can remain the same; being would dissolve into “a

10
Monique Dixsaut, “Introduction,” La fêlure du plaisir: études sur le Philèbe de Platon 1.
Commentaires, ed. Monique Dixsaut (Paris: Vrin, 1999), pp. ix-x.
11
See Robert Bury’s colorful description: “The Philebus might be compared to a gnarled and knotted
old oak-tree, abounding in unexpected humps and shoots, which sadly mar its symmetry as compared
with the fair cypress-trees and stately pines by whose side it stands in the ‘grove of Academe’: but yet
it contains as much of sound timber as the best of them. Beneath the difficulties of expression and the
peculiarity of form which mark this dialogue there is a sound core of true Platonic thought.” The
Philebus of Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1897), p. ix.
12
“For in the Philebus, the main theme is the connection (established in the Republic) between pleasure
and the ultimate questions of ontology. It is this tension more than anything else that determines the
specific characteristic of the Philebus.” Paul Friedländer, Plato: The Dialogues, Second and Third
Periods, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (Princeton: Princeton University, 1969), p. 313.

7
kind of plurality” without determinate shape or form (26d, 24a). “Any kind of mixture
that does not in some way or other possess measure or the nature of proportion will
necessarily corrupt its ingredients and most of all itself. For there would be no
blending in such cases at all but really an unconnected medley, the ruin of whatever
happens to be contained in it” (64d-e). The limit is thus the positive condition of
being, allowing something to come into existence and maintain its identity in time.

How is this related to pleasure? Socrates explains:

It is the goddess herself, fair Philebus, who recognizes how excess and
overabundance of our wickedness allow for no limit in our pleasures and
their fulfillment, and she therefore imposes law and order as a limit on them.
And while you may complain that this ruins them, I by contrast call it their
salvation. (26b-c)

Socrates’s argument is not simply that the law is necessary to discipline pleasure, but
that the limit imposed by the law saves pleasure from itself. Following the Philebus’s
metaphysical scheme, pleasure can only be what it is, i.e. something enjoyable and
satisfying, within a certain limit: far from being an obstacle to its realization the limit
is positively constitutive of pleasure, it is what makes pleasure agreeable, fulfilling,
harmonious, satisfying, in a word, pleasurable. Lacan argues exactly the same, in the
very seminar where he dismisses the Philebus: “Pleasure is not a merciless torturer
[bourreau sans merci]; pleasure keeps you within a fairly buffered limit precisely in
order to be pleasure.”13 Lacan is alluding here to a verse of Baudelaire:

Now, while humanity racks up remorse

in low distractions under Pleasure’s lash,
groveling for a ruthless master [bourreau sans merci]—come
away, my Sorrow, leave them! Give me your hand…14

But he has reversed the poet’s meaning: pleasure is not a “ruthless master,” it is not a
tyrant (think of Plato’s Eros tyrannos) or a merciless torturer whipping us and
pressing for more. We are not “slaves” to pleasure (moreover, pleasure is not
associated with transgression and guilt). Lacan instead affirms the classical idea that
pleasure consists in harmony, balance, and measure. Pleasure entails self-mastery and
an equilibrium of forces. In the passage above, Socrates attributes the source of the
limit to the law (nomos), and rather incredibly turns Aphrodite from the goddess of
passion and sexual license into a lawgiver—such is the philosopher’s tour de force
with respect to popular theology. Here we have a possible answer to the question of
the proper name of the goddess: harmony (Harmonia) is what is divine, and this
harmonic limit has a conventional or lawful character. Elsewhere, Plato emphasizes
the natural basis of the limit. In a striking passage from the Timaeus, Plato argues that
the intestines function as an natural barrier to the infinite movement of desire, without
which all culture and philosophy would dissolve into a kind of suicidal grande bouffe:

13
“Le plaisir n’est pas un bourreau sans merci, le plaisir vous maintient dans une limite assez
tamponnée précisément pour être le plaisir.” Lacan, Seminar XIV, La logique du fantasme 1966-1967,
session of June 14, 1967.
14
Charles Baudelaire, “Meditation,” Les Fleurs du Mal, transl. Richard Howard (Boston: David R.
Godine, 1982), p. 173.

8
 Those who framed our species knew how ungovernable our appetite for food
and drink would be, and how we would out of sheer greed consume more
than a moderate or necessary amount; in order therefore to prevent our rapid
destruction by disease and the prompt and untimely disappearance of our
species, they made the lower belly, as it is called, and wound the bowels
round in coils, thus preventing the quick passage of food, which would
otherwise compel the body to want more and make its appetite insatiable, so
rendering our species incapable through gluttony of philosophy and culture,
and unwilling to listen to the divinest element in us. (72e-73a)

Deleuze once wrote that the mouth can be used for speaking and eating, but not both
at the same time. Here we learn that the crucial organ behind speech and logos is in
fact the intestines, which slow the passage of food through the body, creating an
interval between alimentation and excretion. In this interval, the mouth becomes freed
for other activities: philosophy and culture. The intestines are an organ of
deceleration, they act as a natural limit to and brake on the frenzy of feeding that
would otherwise consume the species. The body is wisely constructed in such a way
as to slow down the mad rush of desire and establish a regular rhythm over its
disintegrations and repletions. Philosophy and culture take place in the time between
fillings. One can thus understand the superiority of the gods: they never need to take a
break from thinking in order to replenish themselves, what is a passing interval in
human life is for them a permanent condition.

This discussion of eating and drinking, with its unexpectedly close connection
between the bowels and the life of the mind, is not an isolated passage. Eating and
drinking serve as paradigmatic examples of pleasure throughout the dialogues,
including the Philebus. They illustrate the restorative and transitional character of
pleasure. Pain is a disintegration of and the pleasure the return to a bodily
equilibrium; or, more precisely, pleasure and pain consist in psychic perceptions of
these corporeal processes—a model that Plato extrapolates to processes affecting the
soul alone. The soul experiences lacks and fillings just as the body is subject to
corruption and generation. What unifies Plato’s account of pleasure is the general
scheme of the filling of a lack, the rectification of a disturbance, the return to
harmony. Pleasure is not the positive expression of health and vitality, but rather a
cure or remedy; it is not a perfection of the living being’s active flourishing, but a
movement that reestablishes a neutral state devoid of pleasure or pain.15 Plato’s model
of pleasure would seem to fit only the satisfaction of needs. However, eating and
drinking are also emblematic of the excesses of pleasure, as the passage from the
Timaeus makes clear—the real source of evil in Plato is not sexual desire or lust for
power but culinary perversion (see the allegory of the luxurious city in the Republic,
where a distaste for vegetarianism and desire for fine dining unleashes an extravagant
chain of consequence ending in conflict and war). If pleasure consists in the
restoration of balance, the transition from disturbance to harmony, how can it also be
something excessive and unlimited? For Plato, unlimited pleasure is pleasure without

15
As Gerd Van Riel argues, Plato distinguishes the natural state of the body, consisting of different
elements held together in a harmonious ratio, from the neutral condition of life devoid of pleasure and
pain. While the former is never perfectly realizable since human beings are subject to constant change
(the Heraclitean flux), not all changes perceived by the soul. These unperceived changes are crucial for
understanding Plato’s argument about true pleasure. See Van Riel, Pleasure and the Good Life: Plato,
Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 26-27.

9
satisfaction. It takes the form of a transition that has broken free from any external
goal and become an end in-itself. It is a continuous rush of filling and emptying, a
movement of generation without a fixed end-point, a pure becoming without being.
The soul in the grips of such craving loses its sense for limits and satisfaction: it is
prey to a hunger that can never be sated and a thirst that cannot be quenched. As
Baudelaire put it, pleasure becomes a merciless torturer. This is a danger intrinsic to
pleasure as such, which explains Plato’s hesitation with respect to its divinity. Plato
regards pleasure with suspicion. Pleasure cannot be trusted, it is not a reliable ethical
guide but only becomes good (satisfying and fulfilling) when order and limit are
imposed upon it. Indeed, as Protarchus proclaims, it is pleasure that best exemplifies
the ontological category of the unlimited: “I don’t think that one could find anything
that is more outside all measure than pleasure and excessive joy” (65d).

Plato’s Apeiron and Lacan’s Jouissance

Rather than simply misrecognizing “the status of enjoyment in the order of beings,”
we can see in Plato’s hedontology the conceptual basis for Lacan’s distinction
between pleasure and enjoyment. Lacan takes over the Platonic line of argument on
the double source of the limit: the limit is inscribed in the natural configuration of the
organism, which is extended and reinforced by the laws of culture.

If the living being is something at all thinkable, it will be above all as subject
of the jouissance; but this psychological law that we call the pleasure
principle (and which is only the principle of displeasure) is very soon to
create a barrier to all jouissance. If I am enjoying myself a little too much, I
begin to feel pain and I moderate my pleasures. The organism seems made to
avoid too much jouissance.16

But it is not the Law itself that bars the subject’s access to jouissance—it
simply makes a barred subject out of an almost natural barrier. For it is
pleasure that sets limits to jouissance, pleasure as what binds incoherent life
together, until another prohibition—this one being unchallengeable—arises
from the regulation that Freud discovered as the primary process and relevant
law of pleasure.17

The organism spontaneously moderates its appetites and movements according to the
natural compass of pleasure. This tendency to moderation is further strengthened by
the law, which reigns in the free movement of desire precisely in the name of
satisfaction (Socrates: the law “saves” pleasure). Moral education builds on and
further elaborates the natural bodily limits of pleasure and pain. (The Judeo-Christian
tradition provides a totally different way of thinking the relation between law and
desire, intertwining law with sin, guilt, transgression, and death—but that is another,
very Lacanian, story). Now, pleasure is not only something contained within a limit,
but it actively affirms the limit: in pleasure there is a sense of harmony and balance
which goes together with self-mastery and control. But life never exactly works like

16
Lacan, “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever,” in The
Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenie Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1970), pp. 194-195.
17
Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,”
Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 696.

10
this. The psyche does not operate solely according to the pleasure principle, but is
driven to disrupt the limits that it otherwise strives to maintain. Psychic life is marked
by a fundamental and ineradicable ambivalence. “Probably we would all be as quiet
as oysters if it were not for this curious organization which forces us to disrupt the
barrier of pleasure or perhaps only makes us dream of forcing and disrupting this
barrier” (Lacan too employs the shellfish analogy—pity the oyster).18 Beyond the
barrier of pleasure lies enjoyment; and if pleasure is good, in the sense of affirming
the limits constitutive of mixed being, then enjoyment is evil. When Lacan says that
“jouissance is evil,”19 we can read this in a Greek way. Far from signifying anything
positive or beneficent, the infinite for Plato is a privative term: whatever lacks borders
is chaotic, discordant, ruinous, a-peiron. The nature of enjoyment is to overrun limits.
Not because of a desire for transgression per se (although transgression can become
an object of enjoyment), but because it is indifferent to them; or again, it is not that
jouissance wants pain (though pain can be invested with enjoyment) but it makes one
insensitive to the pain that would normally force a moderation and curtailing of its
movement. This Greek interpretation is very different from the (predominant)
Christian one: what is evil about jouissance is not connected to the superegoic drama
of guilt and transgression, but, in a more naïve and even machinic way, concerns the
pressure it puts on the organism. Enjoyment does not respect its boundaries, the limits
that the organism needs to maintain in order to preserve itself. What is at stake in
these limits is not simply halting or stopping the movement of the drives, but, more
importantly, effecting a deceleration. The function of the limit is to slow down the
mad rush of enjoyment and introduce a rhythm in its constant pressure.

Despite the fruitfulness of this approach, Lacan’s jouissance is ultimately not

assimilable to the Platonic model. It calls for a very different understanding of the
relationship between order and disorder, and, correspondingly, a different ethics and
aesthetics. At the core of this vision is the idea that the classical ideal of harmony,
balance, and measure is not only unachievable, but also, on some primordial level,
undesirable. While oriented by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain,
limited “satisfying” pleasure—pleasure that is just enough—is never enough to
sustain life. The psyche lives from an enjoyment that does not care about what is good
or satisfying for the self, and is indifferent to its life and death. The essential features
of Lacan’s jouissance can be described as follows. First, enjoyment is something that
cannot be assigned its proper place in life; it refuses to be contained within a larger
framework, order, or Gestalt. Jouissance eludes any structure that would capture it,
not simply because it is particularly slippery or rebellious, but due to its parasitic
character: it escapes through the very mechanisms meant to keep it at bay. Yet this
failure, far from spelling the ruination of psychic life, is precisely what dynamizes it,
what provides it with its peculiar tension, without which life would become
insensitive, apathetic, inert (with the proviso that apathy can itself become an object
of jouissance and the site of a strangely excessive “liveliness”: see Sade). In aesthetic
terms, jouissance is best represented as a stain in the picture. Enjoyment is a kind of
distortion of life that cannot be set aright or put into proper perspective without life
itself dissolving, losing its consistency and vital charge. To put it differently, rather
than a disturbance of an underlying equilibrium, jouissance is the positive expression
of the lack of such an equilibrium, the smudge that bears witness to the essentially
18
Lacan, “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness,” p. 195.
19
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 184.

11
warped or deranged character of psychic life. Second, unlike Plato, it is not the
transitional character of pleasure, the addictive rush of emptying and filling, that is the
most important factor for Lacan. Insatiable hunger is only one aspect of enjoyment.
Rather, in phenomenological terms, what defines jouissance is the transition between
the personal and the impersonal, activity and passivity, self-control and self-loss.
Jouissance entails the disappearance of the ego, which becomes absorbed into the
movement of an impersonal force that takes over and follows its own path. (This loss
of self, together with the protective boundaries that constitute it, explains why
enjoyment may be connected with affects like terror and anxiety).20 Psychic life is
never simply a matter of mastering one’s desires, but consists in a kind of second
degree “orderly disorder” or “disorderly order,” a sinuous and ultimately
unmasterable choreography between control and loss of control. Lacan mentions the
example of neurotic fantasy: the neurotic dreams of forcing the barrier of pleasure, he
or she imagines what it would be like to be totally overwhelmed by desire (his or her
own, or the other’s), so that fantasy both tantalizingly evokes, while also framing and
controlling, an unmasterable jouissance. But the impact of this fantasy is itself not
controllable: it insinuates itself into life in unexpected ways, unconsciously
dominating the neurotic’s work, relationships, habits, etc. The defense mechanisms
meant to canalize and control enjoyment end up uncontrollably proliferating it in
unforeseen ways. Third, insofar as Plato’s ethics is a cosmological ethics, where the
ordering of human desires is situated in the broader context of the cosmic order, the
loss of this cosmological framework has important ramifications for the human
being’s self-conception and its moral bearing. I will not develop this here, except to
note that it is very important for Lacan’s history of ethics. In brief, the advent of
modern science, by destroying the classical cosmological picture, provokes an
existential disorientation: the human being lacks a meaningful place in a contingent
and mathematized nature, which it can no longer connect to through its bodily Gestalt.
The psychoanalytic ethics that follows in the wake of this disenchantment paints a
new picture of the human being, closer to the fractured tableaus of modern art: the
missing place of the soul becomes the void of the subject, whose substance is
provided by a partial object that embodies an excessive and unplaceable jouissance.

Some further points. Enjoyment is related to language, and from a Lacanian

perspective, what is remarkable about the Philebus is the way it thematizes both the
antinomy between enjoyment and language and the peculiar enjoyment that pertains
to language itself. “Jouissance is prohibited to whoever speaks, as such”21—is this not
the position of Philebus, who refrains from speaking precisely in order to better
enjoy? Philebus’s silence, however, is not like the pure silence of an oyster, but is a
silence mediated by speech (and in fact, he does occasionally speak during the
dialogue, and it is implied that Socrates and Philebus had already been discussing for
some time before the action starts): it is a kind of argument in favor of pleasure’s self-
evident goodness, a way of “saying” that nothing needs to be said, that pleasure
requires no explanation or rational justification. Socrates, on the other hand, points
out that there is a pleasure inherent to language, the revels of the speaker who is
“beside himself” with the metamorphic power of discourse. These should be read
together: the non-discursive beyond of enjoyment that Philebus represents is not
20
On this point see Paul Moyaert, “What Is Frightening about Sexual Pleasure?—Introducing Lacan’s
Jouissance into Freudian Psychoanalysis via Plato and Aristotle,” in Sexuality and Psychoanalysis:
Philosophical Criticisms, ed. Jens de Vleminck and Eran Dorfman (Leuven: Leuven University, 2010).
21
Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject,” p. 696.

12
simply other to language but interior to it; rather than simply lying outside the limits
and constraints of speech, the unlimited is produced by and within discourse itself.

If we return to Plato’s ontology, it is instructive to attempt to apply his distinctions to

Lacan’s system. If we were to directly and rather brutally transpose the Platonic
fourfold into Lacanian terms, we would get: enjoyment (the unlimited), the symbolic
law or symbolic order (limit), pleasure (mixed being), and the partial object or object
a (cause). Pleasure and enjoyment, the symbolic order and the object a, this is the
Lacanian fourfold. While certainly suggestive, again this translation does not really
work, and this is especially apparent with respect to the notion of cause.22 In Plato’s
metaphysics, the cause of the mixture is identified with reason: it is through reason
that the soul is able to order its desires, like the demiurge forming chaos into cosmos.
For Lacan, in contrast, ethics is not about the taming of a surplus, the plastic shaping
of pleasures and pains into a balanced whole, but rather a confrontation with the
surplus that is produced by the very imposition of the limit. The cause of the mixture
is itself the point of excess and instability in the structure. Put otherwise, there is no
neutral or unbiased way to combine the limit and the unlimited, no detached reason
that can act as an ethical “metalanguage.” Every shaping of enjoyment is also a means
of enjoyment, and a possible entryway for the re-appearance of the unlimited.23 It is
this inescapability of the apeiron that gives to ethics its weight, making it more than a
matter of sculpting the bodily drives or properly using pleasure, but something
marked by paradoxes and impasses. Ultimately what this inescapability refers to is not
simply the impossibility of ever fully taming a seductive and unruly enjoyment, but
that it is ethics itself which generates the imbalance that it fights against: the cause of
order is the very disorder that it endeavors to capture within the limits of its creation.

What is True Pleasure?

The other important dimension of the Philebus that is underestimated by Lacan

concerns Plato’s distinction between true and false pleasure. Historically speaking,
this has proven to be one of the most controversial aspects of the dialogue, and
Protarchus himself is highly resistant to Socrates’s proposals on this score until finally
relenting. In his gloss on classical ethics, Lacan argues that “all the philosophers have
been led to discern not true pleasures from false, for such a distinction is impossible
to make, but the true and false goods that pleasure points to.”24 An illustration of this
is provided near the beginning of the Philebus, when Socrates argues for the
difference between the pleasures of the debauched and the sober, the foolish and the
wise. Protarchus’s reply confirms Lacan’s position: “The pleasures come from
opposite things. But they are not at all opposed to one another” (12d; original
emphasis). In other words, moral distinctions must be situated on the level of the
objects of pleasure, and not within pleasure per se; a fool and a sage will enjoy very
different things, but the gratification they derive from them is not qualitatively
distinct. Žižek cites a striking example from Sergei Eisenstein, who once wrote that
the ecstasy of a Christian knight in the presence of the Holy Grail and that of a
kolkhoz farmer before a new milking machine are indistinguishable: while the

22
Also conspicuous here is the absence of the Lacanian category of the subject, which, as I previously
suggested, emerges in wake of the soul’s exile from nature.
23
To give one simple example of this, think of obsessional neurosis where the desire for mastery and
self-control itself becomes an involuntary passion which takes control of a person’s entire life.
24
Lacan, Seminar VII, p. 221.

13
outward objective form radically changes the enjoyment remains the same.25 Along
these lines, Aldous Huxley wrote an essay titled “Wanted, a New Pleasure,” where he
laments that, despite the whirlwind advances of modern science it has yet to give us a
new pleasure: “As far as pleasures are concerned, we are no better off than the
Romans or the Egyptians.”26 While the technical means of gratification and its
cultural shapes have certainly changed, the underlying enjoyment—the human
being’s pleasure-potentials—has remain depressingly constant throughout history.
Lacan echoes this sentiment in his complaint that psychoanalysis has not managed to
invent a single new perversion.27 Although he does not do so, Lacan might have
(reflexively) proposed the talking cure as the new perversion invented by
psychoanalysis: is not the strange practice of laying on a couch and saying whatever
comes into one’s mind to a partner that remains largely unseen and unheard, multiple
times a week for years on end, a bold new love affair—as Rimbaud said, le nouvel
amour—for the twentieth century? (It even invented a funny name for this new love:
transference). One could add that the kind of pleasure peculiar to psychoanalysis—the
perversion of the activity of speaking that is free association—was already anticipated
by Plato in his remarkable description of the compulsive pleasure of logos, the rush of
“moving every statement, now turning it to one side and rolling it all up into one, then
again unrolling it and dividing it up.” The difference with psychoanalysis is that, if
Plato opposes the “true” pleasure of philosophical dialectic to the “false” sophistic
pleasure that comes quasi-automatically with speech, in psychoanalysis the search for
truth and the perverse pleasure of babbling are bound together. Psychoanalysis is
situated at the intersection of philosophy and sophistry, giving a new sense to what I
called Plato’s “utopian community of discourse.” It is within the endless sliding and
playful short-circuits of discourse that effects of truth are to be found; the rolling up
and turning around and dividing of statements and words is the medium of truth.

Plato wants to establish the “impossible” distinction, that is, the distinction between
not true and false goods but true and false pleasures. The weight of the later tradition
stands against him. As an early commentator Theophrastus argued, all pleasures are
true, for if there were such a thing as false pleasure then there would be “pleasure that
is not pleasure,” an evident absurdity.28 Again, one is inclined to agree with
Theophrastus, at least until the advent of psychoanalysis—is not this paradoxical
notion of a “pleasure that is not pleasure” the singular contribution of psychoanalysis
to modern ethics: the notion of “neurotic unpleasure,” of pleasure that cannot be felt
as such? This is the strange and troublesome form of pleasure that Freud made the
centerpiece of his work: the symptom to which one is passionately attached, even
while complaining about the misery it brings and seeking to unburden oneself of it
(this complaining being yet another kind of “pleasure that is not pleasure”). If we set
aside Freud for the moment, almost all of modern philosophy has followed the same
line of reasoning in dispensing with the notion of false pleasure: though pleasure may
arise under false pretences, owing to erroneous judgments or beliefs, the feeling as

25
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 2008), p. 62.
26
Aldous Huxley, “Wanted, a New Pleasure,” Music at Night, and Other Essays (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1931), pp. 249-250.
27
“Perhaps we should give up the hope of any genuine innovation in the field of ethics—and to a
certain extent one might say that a sign of this is to be found in the fact that, in spite of all our
theoretical progress, we haven’t even been able to create a single new perversion.” Lacan, Seminar VII,
pp. 14-15.
28
Theophrastus’s criticism is recorded by Damascius, Lectures on the Philebus, ¶167, p. 80.

14
such cannot be disputed. Pleasures may be bound up with all kinds of
misapprehensions, fantasies, and illusions, but what is denied is the idea of an illusory
pleasure, a pleasure that would somehow dissemble its actual joyfulness. Thus
Descartes argues: “We cannot be misled in the same way [as we may be with respect
to external perceptions—A.S.] regarding the passions, in that they are so close and so
internal to our soul that it cannot possibly feel them unless they are truly as it feels
them to be.”29 Hume adds that “a passion must be accompany’d with some false
judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ‘tis not the passion,
properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment.”30 This is exactly what
Protarchus already held, that “no one would dream of calling the pleasure itself false,”
but only the judgment associated with it (38a). So what is Plato’s point?

Let us approach the problem from the reverse angle, and skip to the final part of the
argument where Socrates explains what he means by true pleasure. True pleasure is
pure pleasure, that is, a pleasure that is not occulted by pain or the prior feeling of a
lack. Purity is the ultimate locus of truth, not judgment. By true pleasure Socrates
means a pleasure that is completely and wholly pleasurable, like a pure speck of white
unadulterated by any other color (51b). True pleasure is pleasure purified of desire. Or
rather, it takes the form of a satisfaction that is not preceded by the perception
(aisthesis) of a lack and the striving to fill it. Metaphysically speaking, Plato finds
himself in a conundrum with respect to the notion of true pleasure. Earlier in the
dialogue, it is established that pleasure has the structure of a process of generation or
a restorative movement. There is no being but only a becoming of pleasure; pleasure
has an essentially transitional character. This leads to the idea that pleasure is
necessarily mixed with pain, and that the most overwhelming pleasures are those
intensified by an inner tension between pleasure and pain. The joy in philosophical
contemplation and the aesthetic appreciation of geometrical shapes, agreeable scents,
and “smooth and bright” sounds (51d) pose a serious problem for Plato’s theory since
they do not seem to involve a filling of a lack nor are they mixed with pain. How to
square the existence of these uncontaminated joys with the general definition of
pleasure? Plato has a remarkable formula for describing the nature of true pleasure:
the filling of a lack that was never felt as such. The true pleasures share the same
underlying structure as the mixed or false ones, but without the preceding sensation of
a lack. In Plato’s words, they consist of “all those based on imperceptible and painless
lacks, while their fulfillments are perceptible and pleasant” (51b). Now this might
easily appear as a metaphysical sleight-of-hand, a way to save the general definition
of pleasure in light of phenomena that plainly contradict it, and thus to make all
pleasures fit into the model of eating and drinking. This is Aristotle’s view: instead of
speaking of the repletion of an unfelt lack, it would be better to define pure pleasure
in a positive way, as the enjoyment of unhindered activity. Nevertheless, there is
something fascinating about Plato’s idea of an imperceptible or unconscious desire.
For Plato, a true pleasure is one that fills the soul without it ever being aware that it
was previously missing something; it is relief from a pain that was never experienced,
a balm for a wound we never knew we suffered. This turns on its head one of the
standard ways of conceiving the relation between desire and satisfaction: instead of

29
René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume I,
trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stroothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985),
p. 338.
30
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 463.

15
striving for a satisfaction that can never be reached, there is the unforeseen or
surprising gratification of a desire one never knew one possessed.

A Speculative History of Pleasure

This brings us back to Freud: it is the precisely the relationship between desire and
satisfaction that lies at the heart of the difficulties he faced in his theorization of
Lust—as he himself pointed out, the German word is ambiguous, containing both
meanings of desire and satisfaction. “‘Lust’ has two meanings, and is used to describe
the sensation of sexual tension (‘Ich habe Lust’ = ‘I should like to,’ ‘I feel an impulse
to’) as well as the feeling of satisfaction.”31 What is the link between these aspects of
libidinal life, how to combine the two faces of Lust? It is interesting that Freud never
thought to connect his observations on the ambiguity of Lust with his reflections on
the meaning of antithetical words.32 Perhaps Lust too has a “dreamlike” quality where
contrary senses float side by side. Moreover, although barely acknowledged in the
secondary literature, Lust would seem to qualify as one of Hegel’s speculative words,
like the famous Aufhebung condensing both preservation and cancellation; these are
especially endeared to philosophical thought.33 Recall what Hegel writes in the
Science of Logic: “It is remarkable that a language comes to use one and the same
word to express two opposed meanings. Speculative thought is delighted to find in
language words which by themselves have a speculative sense; the German language
possesses several of these.”34 Freud is much less “delighted” than Hegel at the
prospect of this linguistic ambiguity, which he tries to resolve, not very successfully,
with his theory of psychic economy. But it makes one wonder whether Lust might not
be the missing keyword of the dialectic, posing the question of the desire that drives
the dialectic machinery and its possible “satisfying” resolution. Could Freud and
Hegel meet at the crossroads of the theory of Lust and the Lust of theory?

Along these lines we can sketch what might be called a speculative history of
pleasure. This (admittedly very schematic) outline is intended to be neither a survey
of the different philosophical views on pleasure nor a list of the cultural forms that
have organized enjoyment, but rather a history that clarifies the possible combinations
of desire and satisfaction, and their dialectical transformations.

Let us start with Greek hedonism, taking Plato as our guide. At this initial
stage the relationship between the two terms is an external one of
“disharmony.” Desire and satisfaction are related to one another through
their opposition: either satisfaction spells the end of desire (one no longer
wants what one has); or else desire renders satisfaction impossible (desire is
always desire for something else and thus can never satisfied with whatever
it possesses). This contradiction is the basis of Plato’s critique of hedonism,
which he views as a fruitless endeavor akin to trying to fill the leaky pitcher

31
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), vol. VII, p.
212 fn. 1. Hereafter SE.
32
See Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,” SE XI, pp. 155-161.
33
Jean-Luc Nancy mentions Lust in passing, in his La remarque spéculative (un bon mot de Hegel)
(Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1973), pp. 159, 174.
34
G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press
International, 1969), 107.

16
 of the Danaïdes—hedonism, a useless passion. The Platonic view continues
to inform modern notions of desire and pleasure from Schopenhauer to
Sartre, which emphasize the tragic impossibility of desire and its necessary
failure. Pleasure is defined in a negative fashion, as relief (“Perhaps all
pleasure is relief,” William Burroughs wrote). Even further, pleasure is said
not to exist, since it is only relief from suffering without any positive reality
of its own (Plato did not defend this extreme view). It is lack that sets desire
into motion, and any satisfaction attained can only be a momentary release
from desire’s relentless forward thrust. What is lacking is the object that
would really satisfy desire, whether it is Being, the synthesis of the for-itself
and the in-itself, or a transcendent full enjoyment. Conversely, if such a total
satisfaction were realizable, it would amount to oblivion. The ultimate
horizon of desire-as-lack is a peaceful Nirvana lying beyond the cycle of lack
and fulfillment, a consummate satisfaction that would halt desire’s march not
temporarily but for all eternity: a living death, or the neutral life of the gods.

This external opposition is overcome in Christianity and Christian erotic

culture, which constitutes a new development in the relation between desire
and satisfaction. This overcoming is exemplified by the two most
conspicuous modalities of Lust in medieval Christianity: the poetry of
courtly love and the mystical contemplation of God. The former consists in
an adulterous love affair between the troubadour-knight and the unattainable
Lady whom he serves; though the love remains unconsummated, apart from
her granting the occasional favor, it is rich in bodily imagery and sexual
through and through. Courtly love is a cult of desire, a poetic praise of
amorous suffering (masochism) and the difficult joy of desiring. Desire
rendering satisfaction impossible is transformed into the enjoyment of the
very impossibility of satisfaction, which, at its height, takes the form of a
“dying from not dying of desire.” The unreachable object is not external to
or beyond desire, but its positive condition. Desire does not lack anything; it
is rather full of its own striving and intensity. Mystical contemplation, on the
other hand, fuses desire and satisfaction in a different way, in the form of
expanding fulfillment rather than restless striving. In contemplation desire is
at every moment sated yet the satisfaction continues to grow. Desire and
satisfaction go hand-in-hand. Aquinas writes, “For even of the angels, who
know God perfectly and delight in him, the Scripture says, They long to gaze
on Him.”35 To cite another description: “Desire for God maintains desire, and
generates and grants satisfaction. In the dynamic of ‘God’s infinity and
man’s mutability’, ‘every attainment is a real attainment’, and ‘one has the
sense of accomplishment or fulfillment; yet there is no stopping’. There is
both satisfaction and expanding desire.”36 The contradiction in which
satisfaction suppresses desire is here transformed into an internal accord
whereby desire is sustained and supported by satisfaction. In Christian erotic
culture the relationship between desire and satisfaction is an immanent one
where the two terms are harmonized, although in opposite directions: either

35
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, vol. 20, Pleasure
(Ia2ae. 31–39) (London: Eyre, 1975), 57; original emphasis.
36
Nicoletta Isar, “The Vision and Its ‘Exceedingly Blessed Beholder’: On Desire and Participation in
the Icon,” Res 38 (Autumn 2000), p. 72.

17
 the “harmonious harmony” of mystical contemplation (spiritual marriage) or
else the “disharmonious harmony” of inflamed desire (adulterous passion).

In a further turn of the screw, psychoanalysis introduces a crucial innovation

into this scheme, with its revolutionary idea of neurotic unpleasure or the
unfelt pleasure of the symptom (“Enjoy your symptom,” to cite the
Lacanian-Žižekian slogan). With the symptom, desire and satisfaction fall
apart, or rather they are joined together in and through their very disjunction.
Desire and satisfaction form a “disharmonious disharmony,” where desire
goes one way and satisfaction another. Not only is my desire unsatisfied (I
am unhappy, discontented, looking for something else), but there is a strange
“enjoyment” harassing me that I cannot get rid of (it repeats in my work, my
relationships, my dreams, cropping up when I least want or expect it).
Compared with the Christian alternative of marriage (to God) or adultery
(with the unattainable Lady), the neurotic symptom constitutes another kind
of partner, indeed the worst one of all: oneself. Through the process of
analysis, I come to identify with this intimate alien intruder, to see in the
complex of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors afflicting me the mutilated
product of my own desires and fantasies. The symptom is a compromise
formation which holds together the field of conflicting impulses, and hence
my divided self, giving to my life a precarious yet persistent form. If the
speculative history of pleasure culminates here, in the neurotic symptom, it is
because of the way it forces a break with the naïve determination of pleasure
as “good feelings,” whether these feelings are tranquil and relaxing or else
exciting and intense, the two standard modalities of pleasure. The notion of
pleasure is removed from the immediate natural evidence of what is pleasing
and enjoyable, in favor of the paradoxical idea of an unconscious pleasure or
a pleasure that cannot be felt as such. On a descriptive level, what this
Freudian “pleasure” refers to is not any particular feeling-state, but rather the
tenacity, enthusiasm, and verve of certain patterns and activities that hold the
psyche in their grip and press to elaborate themselves, though they bring no
conscious pleasure and even the opposite. It enjoys, while I suffer.

Till the end of his career, Freud complained of not being able to find a solution to the
mystery of Lust. “We would readily express our gratitude to any philosophical or
psychological theory which was able to inform us of the meaning of the feelings of
pleasure and unpleasure which act so imperatively upon us. But on this point we are,
alas, offered nothing to our purpose. This is the most obscure and inaccessible region
of the mind.”37 But what if Freud’s failure was not simply the result of a theoretical
limitation, but bore witness to an essential contradiction at the heart of psychic life?
Freudian theory is torn between two different approaches to pleasure. On the one
hand, there is Freud’s tragic view: desire is doomed to dissatisfaction, and the search
for pleasure fraught with insurmountable obstacles. Human existence is riven by
libidinal conflicts, frustrated by reality, and blocked by the imperatives of culture. On
the other hand, psychoanalysis effects an unheard-of extension of the notion of
pleasure, uncovering furtive and unsuspected satisfactions precisely where they would
seem to be most absent. From the slips and bungled actions of everyday life to the
catastrophic symptoms of mental illness, the pleasure principle seems to be at work

37
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE XVIII, p. 7.

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everywhere. Instead of satisfaction being impossible to attain, the opposite conclusion
imposes itself: pleasure is impossible to avoid. If classical ethics maintains that
happiness is fundamentally achievable despite the many obstacles that must be
navigated along the way, modern ethics (the ethics of psychoanalysis) reverses this
picture: what characterizes human beings is their exceptional ingenuity at engineering
their own discontent, at finding creative ways to thwart their flourishing. The search
for happiness is plagued by an inner obstacle, and it is this self-sabotaging character
of psychic life that Freud expressed with his paradoxical idea of the death drive. Yet,
there is a catch: despite their self-imposed misery people turn out to be oddly content
in their discontent. Satisfaction finds its way, even (and especially) in the most offbeat
and troublesome forms. Instead of seeking to actualize its capacities and powers, the
human being is that animal that strives to sabotage its own being but is so miserable it
cannot even manage to do that—this double failure gives an original spin to
“happiness.” What we are dealing with is the Freudian version of Hegel’s negation of
the negation, the drifting of a failed or botched negativity that opens onto a strangely
compelling, though often not enjoyable and even quite painful, pleasure.38 And to take
this Freudo-Hegelianism one last logical step further, could we not say that the history
of pleasure comes to its completion by affirming, as the highest expression of what
pleasure is, the contradictory notion of a pleasure that is not pleasure? The history of
Lust ends in a troubled paradise with the injunction to “Enjoy your symptom!”

38
My approach owes a lot to Mladen Dolar’s article “Hegel and Freud,” e-flux journal no. 34 (April
2012).

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It is here that Plato’s notion of true pleasure can find a renewed relevance, after
Freud. Whereas Plato restricts true pleasure to certain high quality goods (agreeable
scents, consonant harmonies, pure colors, true knowledge), we can abstract the notion
from this imaginary delimitation and define it in a more formal manner. True pleasure
reveals the disjunction between desire and satisfaction, in such a way that this
disjunction itself becomes an unlikely object of enjoyment. The ethics of true pleasure
could be seen as a sublimation of neurosis or a sublime neuroticism. It does something
with the structure of insatiable lack that organizes the neurotic’s existence, and the
indeterminacy of his or her desire (procrastination, indecisiveness, uncertainty about
the object of desire). Its pathos is that of not getting what you want but enjoying
something else which turns out to be even better than what you thought you wanted—
with the proviso that this “better” is also “worse” since it necessarily has something
strange and disconcerting about it, a disturbance which can also be quite comical. The
object of true pleasure is always to some degree surprising and unpredictable, since
there exists no slot for this thing, it does not fit into the preexisting coordinates of
one’s desire. It is like an answer without a question, to turn around the philosophical
cliché of questions without answers. (One could say that the lesson of psychoanalysis
is that the only way to respond to a question without an answer is with an answer
without a question). The oddness of this encounter often leads one to retroactively
domesticate it by saying that what was found is what one had been searching for all
along—in this way the standard logic of desire and satisfaction is reaffirmed. This
mending is exactly what Plato’s metaphysics of desire does. But true pleasure
insinuates itself in a gap that undermines this logic. True pleasure does not make good
the subject’s lack; it leaves it where it is, but adds something extra on the side. To a
lack that can never be filled there corresponds a surplus joy which answers to no
preceding want. True pleasure is neither a perfect synthesis of desire and satisfaction,
nor the joy of desiring without satisfaction, but rather the perfect form of their
disjunction: life does not work out, something is irremediably broken, desire is always
wanting, and discontent reigns supreme, yet there can suddenly appear an object that
unsettles this unhappy dynamic and provides an errant unplaceable joy.

The Theory of Pleasure and the Pleasure of Theory

I will conclude with some brief remarks on what might easily appear as the most
outlandish and even laughable aspect of Plato’s theory of pleasure: his thesis that
philosophy is the best pleasure. Since Freud (if not much earlier) we are accustomed
to taking sexuality for the gold standard of pleasure, against which all other pleasures
are judged; intellectual gratifications are, by comparison, a relatively modest and
polite affair. As Freud puts it, “their intensity is mild as compared with that derived
from the sating of crude and primary instinctual impulses; it does not convulse our
physical being.”39 What if we were to take the claim made by Greek philosophers
seriously, that theory is the greatest and most intense pleasure, even better than sex?
There is a kind of joke in the Philebus about this substitution of philosophy for sex
(pointed out by Seth Benardete).40 Socrates treats sexual eros sarcastically, as
something ridiculous and shameful and hence only done under the cover of darkness
(66a). He describes the “contractions of the body to the point of leaping and kicking,
39
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, SE XXI, pp. 79-80.
40
See Seth Benardete, The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato’s Philebus (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), p. 196.

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color changes of all sorts, distortion of features, and wild palpitations.” This “drives
the person totally out of his mind, so that he shouts aloud like a madman.” Finally,
“this state causes him and others to say of him that he is almost dying of these
pleasures” (47a-b). Here we can detect a sly reference to philosophy as a practice of
dying. Who dies better, the lover of bodies or the lover of wisdom? Reading the
Philebus together with the Phaedo, we can characterize what is at stake as a contest
between two deaths, where philosophy aims to outdo the sexual death (la petite mort)
with its own fatal practice. Sexual pleasure culminates in a paroxysm of the body,
which puts the limits of bodily experience under pressure, so that one is “dying” from
this pleasure: this is what the shattering experience of sexuality refers to, that the most
intense feeling of bodily limits is the point of dissolution of these limits. Intellectual
pleasure also involves an ecstatic transcendence of the body, though in a different
manner. In thinking one momentarily forgets the existence of the body, one leaves
one’s body behind—this is the origin of the popular joke about the absent-minded
professor, the thinker so absorbed in his meditations that he does not notice the ditch
in front of his feet (this is actually the most ancient joke about philosophy, involving a
star-gazing Thales whose clumsy tumble provokes the laughter of the Thracian maid).
Since Nietzsche, it is customary to accuse philosophers, a notoriously feeble and
sickly breed, of hating the body and of taking revenge upon it with their conceptual
gymnastics and supreme valuation of the life of the mind. In the Phaedo Socrates
makes a plea for death as freeing the soul from the evils of corporeality. But it is not
out of asceticism or self-loathing that philosophers despise the body, but rather joy.
Their joy in thinking is so great—to use Nietzsche’s phrase, it wants “deep, deep
eternity”—that the body can only appear as an obstacle, as a frail and finite thing that
needs to eat and defecate and sleep and so on, that gets sick and weary and (sexually)
distracted, all of which interrupt the pure activity of thinking. The fantasm of the soul
without a body is the fantasm of a never-ending intellectual joy. If death does not
frighten the philosopher, it is because he knows that the afterlife is a kind of endless
Platonic dialogue, where the mind will be free to philosophize for eternity.41

Philosophy’s determination of its own activity as the best of all pleasures—is this not
a case of narcissism at its purest? The Republic takes this to its mathematical extreme,
with its hedonic calculus by which the life of the philosopher is demonstrated to be
precisely 729 times more pleasurable than the life of the tyrant (587b-e). (Without
going into the details of the calculation, we can note that commentators have pointed
out its Pythagorean subtext: 729 is the number of the “magic square,” 27 x 27, which
is the amount of days and nights in the year, or the number of months in the “great
year,” according to Philolaus; it may also refer to a musical interval, or perhaps some
other secret mathematical meaning). Yet, as Lacan underlined, Plato’s denial of
pleasure for the gods means that even philosophical pleasure, no matter how much
greater or purer it is than any other, is ontologically and morally relativized: it
remains a “human, all too human” affair. Aristotle is the more true exponent of
hedontology. For him, pleasure belongs to the category of being rather than
becoming; it is a perfection of the living being’s self-actualization, the “energy”
(energeia) that sustains and animates life. His God is a veritable cosmic philosopher
enjoying the eternal pleasure of thought thinking itself—a portrait of the theorist as
41
This is how Socrates describes the afterlife in the Apology: “What one would not give, gentlemen of
the jury, for the opportunity to examine the man who led the great expedition of Troy, or Odysseus, or
Sisyphus, and innumerable other men and women one could mention? It would be an extraordinary
happiness to talk with them, to keep company with them and examine them” (41b-c).

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prime mover. The circling of the stars is the visible manifestation of the self-thinking
thought’s supreme auto-erotic enjoyment. (It would be interesting to read the noesis
noeseos as the first articulation of the drive in the history of philosophy: the theory
drive). This hedonic-onto-theology is affirmed, in his own way, by Hegel, who quotes
a long passage on the divine mind from Aristotle’s Metaphysics at the end of the
Encyclopedia, leaving it untranslated and uncommented at the summit of his system.

Psychoanalysis effects a decisive blow to this philosophical narcissism, while at the

same time preserving, in a new and altered form, philosophy’s idealization of
thinking. Commenting on not Plato but Aristotle, Lacan declares that “Thought is
jouissance.”42 If Lacan, like Aristotle, attributes the highest pleasure to theoria, for
the psychoanalyst it is parapraxes, jokes, dreams, and symptoms that constitute our
modern “theoretical” pleasure, the enjoyment of unconscious thought. In this shift a
threefold subversion takes place, which follows the logic of the imaginary, symbolic,
and real: theory’s heavenly image is debased by its transposition into the stupidest of
slips and the bizarreries of dreams, while the substance of thought is referred to the
materiality of the signifier (wordplay and nonsensical combinations, or as Plato would
have it, the rolling, turning, and dividing of discourse, its “immortal and ageless
condition”); finally the ideal of pure pleasure is supplanted by masochism. It might be
surprising to see Lacan identify jouissance with thought rather than sexuality, usually
considered to be the proper field of psychoanalysis. But the key to the psychoanalytic
approach to sexuality lies precisely in its intellectualization, in its treating sexuality
not only as a serious matter of study, but as something that itself thinks.43 If in Greek
philosophy the theory of pleasure culminates in the pleasure of theory, for
psychoanalysis, to borrow Eric Santner’s witticism, what is at stake in the theory of
sexuality is the sexuality of theory. For Lacan, the real skandalon of psychoanalysis is
not sexuality per se (something which, as Socrates said, should remain in the dark),
but the idea that sexuality thinks, that it has a discursive or symbolic structure. It is
this intersection of sexuality and thought, eros and logos, that marks the peculiar
intensity of human life, and defines the research field of psychoanalysis, in its
subversion and continuation of the most ancient aspirations of philosophy.

42
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. Encore 1972–73, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 70.
43
Alenka Zupančič develops this point at length in What is Sex? (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2017).

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