A-rhetorical Bodily Effects of Language
Marco Mauas
I got interested in what Alcibiades said, in Plato's Symposium, about his encounter with Socrates, especially the bodily effects of Socrates' speech on Alcibiades. Lacan noticed, in his seminar on Transference, the “feminine scene” made by Alcibiades as soon as he entered. Here is what he notes:[1] "Namely that precisely because he is Alcibiades, the one whose desires know no limits, that this preferential field in which he engages, which is strictly speaking for him the field of love, is something where it demonstrates what I will call a very remarkable case of the absence of the fear of castration, in other words of the total lack of this famous Ablehnung der Weiblichkeit (repudiation of femininity).”
An absence of the fear of castration is a positivity. This opens up a testimony to us, one outside of phallic logic. And in the case of Alcibiades, outside rhetoric too, as when he states in The Symposium:[2]
“When I listened to Pericles and other skilled orators I thought them eloquent, but I never felt anything like this; my spirit was not left in a tumult and had not to complain of my being in the condition of a common slave: whereas the influence of our Marsyas here has often thrown me into such a state that I thought my life not worth living on these terms.”
And he continues: “Even now I am still conscious that if I consented to lend him my ear, I could not resist him, but would have the same feeling again. For he compels me to admit that, sorely deficient as I am, I neglect myself (...)”[3]
He also says he tries to run away, to cover his ears as if to escape the Sirens. But he remains there, Alcibiades. Why? Because of what?
Plato's text will tell us nothing about it.
It was a female poet, Anne Carson, translator of Sappho and the classics, known as the most famous living female poets in the English language, who gave me a small answer. In a long poem, recently published in the London Review of Books, she takes up the words of Alcibiades, she writes:[4]
“….
He tells me (which is true) that
My values are wrong: I’m just a crowd-pleaser.
He says my whole life
Is papier-mâché.
Well, I don’t want to sit by this siren till I die of old age.
So what’s the reason I can’t turn the page?
Simple answer: shame.
He’s the only man in the world who can see through my game.
…..”
Translated by Alasdair Duncan
Reviewed by Caroline Heanue
References
[1] Lacan, J., Transference : The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII, Transference. Fink, B., (Cambridge, Polity, 2015), lesson of 8 February 1961, page 157.
[2] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DSym.%3Asection%3D216a Transl. Harold Fowler
[3] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/entityvote?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0174:text=Sym.:section=216a&auth=perseus,Athens&n=1&type=place
[4] Anne Carson, Oh what a night (Alkibiades), LRB, 19 Nov 2020.