The Question of the Meaning of Ágalma: Between Hermeneutics, Topology, and Unconcealment—Commentary on Sessions IX and X

Abstract

The focus of this commentary covering sessions IX and X is Alcibiades’s “entrance” into the symposium and what his late inebriated ingress brings to the discussion around love. Following the speeches delivered by Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, and Aristophanes culminating in the epistemological and mythological expressions of the meaning of love which are followed by speeches delivered by Agathon and Socrates focusing respectively on the rhetorical and the philosophical expressions of the meaning of love, Alcibiades’s speech provides a unique elucidation that brings Lacan to acknowledge that Alcibiades’s entrance is essential. This commentary seeks to understand what makes this entrance “essential,” how the “experience of transference,” as a form of unconcealment, is embodied in the relationship between Alcibiades, Agathon, and Socrates, and the concept of love, through Lacan, as a question of the meaning of agalma.