The Object

Six lessons on what desire is actually after — the Symposium, Freud's conditions of love, transference, and closeness produced to order.

A course on the thought of The Machinery of Desire.

What you will learn

Describe the setting and rules of the Symposium and why the speeches are ordered as they are.
State Aristophanes' account of love and identify what it explains that a simple attraction story cannot.
Reconstruct the ascent in order and state what love is 'of' at each stage.
Explain the objection that the ladder discards the person it began with, and how a defender might answer it.
Explain the Silenus image and what Alcibiades claims is inside Socrates.
State what Lacan takes from the scene, and why Socrates' denial rather than Alcibiades' declaration is the load-bearing moment.
State the four conditions Freud describes in the special type of object-choice.
Explain what the phenomenon of the contented triangle shows about where the desire is located.

The Drinking Party — Seven men agree to take turns praising love, and the fourth speaker produces the story every subsequent theory has had to answer.
Diotima's Ladder — Socrates reports being taught that the beloved is a rung — and the argument works, which is the problem.
The Thing Inside the Statue — Alcibiades arrives too drunk to follow the rules, announces what he loves Socrates for — and Socrates denies having it.
The Conditions — Freud finds that whom a person can want is governed by conditions they did not choose and cannot see — and that one of them requires a rival.
Produced by the Situation — Freud's patients kept falling in love with him. His conclusion — that it was the arrangement and not the man — is the most consequential thing in this course.
Made to Order — The experiment that produced closeness between strangers on demand — and the three things it found did not matter at all.

Symposium (c. 385 BCE) — Plato's dialogue in which seven men at a drinking party each give a speech in praise of love.
Contributions to the Psychology of Love (1910-18) — Freud's three papers on the conditions governing whom a person can want.
Observations on Transference-Love (1915) — Freud on patients falling in love with their analysts, and what produces it.

transference, object a, sublimation, self-disclosure

Part of the Simposeum course library.