Right from the start, the book sets out to explore a big, ancient question in philosophy: What is the _eros_ of thinking? What's the passion that drives someone to philosophize, to pursue a peculiar kind of truth, and what effects does this pursuit have on the person and their relationships with others?. Back in ancient times, doing philosophy wasn't just an academic exercise; it was seen as a way of life, involving a whole "game" of mastery, rivalry, and freedom in knowing, and it needed to defend itself against those who weren't genuinely committed. Philosophers were supposed to be _philoi_, or friends, but the text immediately raises the question: friends of what, and in what sense?. It's a compelling way to start, suggesting that philosophy is deeply intertwined with our passions and our ways of being in the world. The author tells us that the reason for turning to the work of Lacan, a psychoanalyst, and Foucault, a historian, is to rediscover these very questions. They argue that both thinkers, in their different ways, tried to bring back this ancient question of truth and eros, essentially "re-eroticizing" philosophical or critical thought for our modern era. Apparently, their combined efforts helped create an intellectual buzz that really captured the imagination of a generation, and we're perhaps still feeling its effects today. The book aims to explore the _ethos_, the characteristic spirit, of this renewed passion for philosophy or critical thought, which, interestingly, sometimes stirred up fears of corrosive nihilism or cynical inactivity. One of the central arguments the book makes is that this question of truth and eros gradually led both Lacan and Foucault into long and intricate reflections on ethics. Conversely, the unusual or unfamiliar nature of ethics in their work is linked to the way it's inseparable from this ancient question of the passion of thought. It's like tracing a thread – the ancient drive for truth is connected to our deepest passions, which then circle back to how we think about ethics and how we ought to live. Immediately, the book touches on something that might strike anyone trying to read Lacan or Foucault: the difficulty of their styles of thought or philosophy. Lacan and Foucault were from different generations and held differing, often opposing, views. It's even uncertain if they were friends or rivals, as they didn't write much about each other. However, right from the start, their efforts to rethink eros and put passion back into thought were "fraught with great difficulty". This difficulty wasn't just a stylistic quirk; the author suggests it was at the very heart of their attempts to invent new ways of thinking. This challenging style often led to accusations of being obscure, charlatan-like, or overly intellectual. Foucault, however, saw it differently. He suggested that people were drawn to Lacan for the sheer pleasure of engaging with a discourse that didn't have traditional institutional backing. And if it was difficult, it was precisely _because_ it was intended to provoke a sense of "realizing themselves" in the process of reading or listening. Think about that – the difficulty wasn't a barrier to meaning, but perhaps a _tool_ to help the reader or listener engage more deeply and personally. Interestingly, philosophers, particularly those trained in France, were quite drawn to Lacan despite or because of this difficulty. Through his demanding style, Lacan forged strong connections between psychoanalysis and fields like the history of philosophy, epistemology, logic, and the history of science. This highlights how influential his way of thinking was, reaching far beyond the confines of psychoanalytic practice. Foucault's later work would actually involve trying to move away from the huge significance psychoanalysis had gained in contemporary French philosophy, largely due to Lacan. This gives us a little hint of the intellectual dynamics between the two thinkers the book explores. For Foucault, part of this search for a new style that _didn't_ shy away from "the question of the subject" provided an opportunity to revisit a central philosophical question that had run through all his work: What _is_ thought (_pensée_)?. What is its unique, complex history, and what are its hidden critical possibilities?. Around 1975-76, he specifically started asking how thought is connected to subjectivity and "the question of the subject". More specifically, he questioned how thought could be considered part of a "way of life". What role has it played, and what role _could_ it play, in how someone leads or conducts their life?. This is how Foucault's late search for a new style, particularly explored through a history of sexuality that reached back to the Greeks, brought him back to the ancient problem of philosophical ethics and, specifically, to the eros of thought in the conduct of one's life. The book touches upon a criticism often leveled against Foucault's later work: that his "concern with himself" was self-centered, individualistic, and thus lacking social or political engagement. The author suggests how Foucault might respond to this: he'd argue that having a "concern for oneself" has been a defining characteristic and a fundamental difficulty of critical or philosophical thought since Socrates. It's part of what it means to be a philosopher. Quoting Foucault, the text notes that the critical function of philosophy stems from the Socratic imperative: "Be concerned with yourself, i.e. ground yourself in liberty, through mastery of self". So, for Foucault, thinking critically or philosophically inherently involves being concerned with oneself, and the challenge lies in figuring _how_ to do this. He asserts that "subjectivity" belongs to critical thought and cannot be avoided. Foucault sought to move away from views that linked asceticism with a transcendent reason based on law, science, or theology. His goal was to restore the Socratic principle that critical philosophy involves concern for oneself. His challenge was to invent an _askêsis_, a "subjectivizing" practice for critical thought, where the self-relation isn't based on rejecting parts of oneself, and the goal isn't submission to an external law independent of experience. This search for a style embracing the subject was a search for an experience and practice of critical thought that wouldn't be separate from the knowledge and power forms we accept, nor based on the assumption that the subject should be rejected for an ideal of rationality. The book then poses powerful questions Foucault was wrestling with: What would it mean to be freely concerned with ourselves without sacrificing a part of ourselves for a "higher truer nature"?. What would it mean to speak truly and critically about ourselves without prior assurance of universal principles?. The text states that the eros of this kind of critical thought would not be sacrificial, renunciatory, perfectionist, Salvationist, or progressivist, nor would it seek to make people accept pre-defined principles. Foucault wasn't content merely to expose the dissatisfaction with our "erotic asceticism". He wanted to raise the possibility of a different, non-ascetic way of shaping our "erotic subjectivity," another kind of philosophical _askêsis_. He explored the role of friendship, particularly among men, in this _askêsis_, noting that traditional definitions of friendship had become problematic, leaving the meaning of "friendship" open. The text includes a fascinating quote from Foucault discussing asceticism as not just pleasure renunciation: "It is up to us to advance into a homosexual asksis that would make us work on ourselves and invent, I do not say discover, a manner of being that is still improbable". This really underscores the idea of actively creating or inventing new ways of living and relating. Ultimately, the book suggests that Foucault's difficulty in his passionate relations and his creative work was about inventing a new, non-ascetic eros in the exercise of critical thought. In his later work, Foucault framed this difficulty around the question: "What does it cost for reason to tell the truth?". This rephrased an earlier concept from his critical practice: the "intolerable" (_l'intolérable_). The intolerable was a term for situations people would no longer tolerate, even without a pre-existing plan or theory for action. They demand information about these conditions, not just from authorities, but from anyone with relevant experience. The role of the "specific intellectual," in Foucault's view, isn't to provide policy solutions but to analyze the costs of everyone's participation in maintaining the intolerable situation. _Discipline and Punish_ is given as an example of this kind of "specific" critical thought. This concern with the cost of truth connects to the idea of "philosophical friendship in difficulty". Unlike Platonic eros, which involved friends turning towards a shared timeless wisdom, this friendship is between those who experience the contingency of their historical existence and expose themselves to the "unchartered sophia" of a new relation to themselves. The book clarifies that Foucault's "crisis" in his final work wasn't a personal one about his ideals or values. His philosophical practice, his _ascesis_, his self-experimentation in his work, was not like a spiritual autobiography or conversion seeking an exemplary life (unlike Augustine). It wasn't a search for a pre-social identity (unlike Rousseau) or for certainty (unlike Descartes). Nor was it a search for a constitutive desire (unlike Freud) or a basic choice (unlike Sartre). On the contrary, it was about "se déprendre de soi-même" – detaching oneself from oneself. It was based on the idea that "the subject is not given" and involved questioning the very assumptions our thought and action rest on. It's interesting to note that Foucault actually admired Lacan for the difficulty he found in his own search for a new style. Shortly before his death, Foucault paid homage to Lacan, saying that Lacan's strength and interest came from being the first since Freud to put the question of psychoanalysis back on the relationship between the subject and truth. Lacan tried to ask the "spiritual" question of the cost the subject pays to tell the truth about themselves and the effect this truth-telling has on the subject. According to the book, Lacan found in psychoanalysis a new way to frame this "spiritual" question of telling the truth (_dire-vrai_) about our sex, our eros. He articulated it for a modern time marked by markets, bureaucracy, and science, where older forms of identification had lost their power. Lacan is described as an orator who brought this eros and its difficulties into the fields of the medicine of sex and the practice of philosophy. Lacan is presented as a great orator who didn't value traditional publishing, calling it _poubellication_ ("publishing trash can"). His central vehicle was his thirty-year Seminar, and he only undertook its transcription later. He did, however, confess in one Seminar (_Encore_, 1972) that he wished he could have published one book on ethics. This suggests that ethics held a special place for him, a great work he couldn't quite bring himself to finish, with the Seminar serving as a vast preparation. In this way, Lacan resembled ancient ethical masters like the Stoics or Cynics, leaving behind disciples, tangled notes, and anecdotes. The core principle behind Lacan's "difficulty" wasn't to separate the teaching's formative eros from its content, but to weave the content _into_ the manner of transmission. The difficulty of his style was, in essence, the difficulty of learning and teaching about the unconscious. His Seminar structure had a philosophical precursor in Alexandre Kojève's influential seminar. But the text also compares Lacan to Socrates, another ancient master notorious for writing difficulties, whose dictum was "impiety is ignorance". Like Socrates, the difficulty of Lacan's teaching was the difficulty of speaking truly of oneself – it was an ethical difficulty. However, while Lacan's style was like an ancient master's, it was tailored for a vastly different modern world where the reference point of "man" was no longer certain and worldview was denied. What made Lacan's difficulty modern, what distinguished teaching the unconscious from ancient wisdom, was his principled refusal of any assumption of a knowledge of the Good or an Ideal to imitate. His ethic was a teaching about the difficulties we have with our ideals and our supposed Good, and thus with our passionate relations. This requires a different kind of passion than one based on a presumed Good, escaping the rivalry, mastery, and identification such a supposition carries. It requires another eros for a time dominated by ideologies of Science and Free Enterprise that deny finding eros in the world's general goodness. The challenge was how to be "friends" in this modern world, a question Lacan believed Freud answered. Freud's innovation was supplying a new eros in knowing or speaking truth about ourselves: psychoanalytic discourse promises something new in the field where the unconscious produces impasses, especially concerning love. This new eros is experienced in wanting to know about ourselves, the eros of the difficulty with the good or the ideal. Lacan's "Freudian School" introduced this eros, constantly stating that psychoanalysis is not idealism, not an ethic of the good. His aim was to "extract ethics from Biendire" (speaking well, or speaking the good). This perspective on a new Freudian ethic seems to have developed in the 1930s amidst rising fascism. The War confirmed his "inveterate hatred or horror of 'idealism'" and thus of an ethic of the good. His early focus on agressivity and eroticism provided a theoretical basis for this horror, viewing the relation to ideals as rooted in violence and alienation ("imaginary passion"). This introduces a peculiar ethical difficulty: psychoanalytic ethics cannot be based on traditional, idealizing views of love or friendship. The bond between analyst and patient is different from ancient philosophical friends or Christian neighbors; it's neither _eros_ nor _agape_, not wisdom or altruism. An analyst isn't a "good Samaritan". Lacan suggested that only by leaving these traditional ideal forms of love/friendship can the true voyage begin. Psychoanalysis helps us see that our complex irrationalities are more defining than our "vaguely policed personalities". Furthermore, Lacan asserted the Freudian concept of the unconscious had an ethical novelty or singularity: "The status of the unconscious is ethical". Freud's thinking was an ethical event. The Freudian subject of the unconscious differs from Aristotle's soul (functional principle) and Descartes' thinking substance. It's a non-functional libidinal principle, thinks where "I" am not, is particular, and not inferable from a general theory of humanity. Briefly, the text mentions the connection between Lacanian psychoanalysis and radical politics/French feminism in the late 1960s. It then discusses Foucault's 1969 paper "What is an author?" where he posited Marx and Freud as unique authors whose foundational texts, unlike those in natural science, are altered when reexamined, modifying the discipline itself. This contrasts with figures like Galileo, whose founding act is incorporated into subsequent transformations without the text needing reexamination to change the science. Lacan saw Freud's models of the mind (homeostatic, hydraulic) as echoing the ancient medical idea that what is good is good for you, like Aristotle's ethics. But Freud's concept of something beyond the pleasure principle, linked to aggression, departs from this. Aggression is part of our identity, our self-relation depends on others, making an isolated "perceptual apparatus" insufficient. Lacan emphasized the part of Freud's drive theory that inserts us into a fatal "imaginary passion" with no cure. For Lacan, Freud was a "biologist of the mind" because he found something in the body (the endless trouble) that goes beyond what the mind considers good. The ethic of Freud's medicine, and psychoanalysis, was the ethic of this endless difficulty, an "impossible task". Lacan's teaching aimed to provide a "school" for this ethic, this impossible task. It wasn't a school led by a master who knows the general good. Instead, the master refuses this knowledge, making the eros of our not-knowing the basis of a new medicine and philosophy. Lacan, the orator, taught the difficulty and violence of our relation to ideals and the passion and cost of truth-telling about ourselves. He brought this difficulty and passion into contemporary philosophy. He left no fixed doctrine, leaving it to those he formed to establish the "book" of this ethics. The author suggests that perhaps thinking itself starts with finding oneself in a peculiar, undefined difficulty. The problem of "style" in philosophy becomes finding words and actions appropriate to this difficulty. The styles of Foucault and Lacan are difficult not just conceptually but in this "subjective" philosophical sense: a difficulty "with themselves" in their thinking. This makes them philosophers, not just brilliant historians or original therapists. What's distinctive is that they connect this difficulty to the ancient question embodied by Socrates: What is the eros of doing philosophy?. By linking the philosophical passion for truth to their personal difficulties, they offer a unique image of philosophy and a new kind of _philia_ (friendship). The friendship of philosophers wouldn't be a shared love for an abstract Idea, but the passionate confrontation of their difficulties with themselves and each other. To engage with another philosopher's thought "philosophically" means rethinking _their_ difficulty, not just reconstructing their doctrine. Philosophical friendship is the passion of understanding others' difficulties through one's own and vice versa. This is the sense in which Foucault and Lacan might be considered friends. The book itself, by rereading them through their difficulties, seeks to define a difficulty or question their work leaves us: the question of what ethics is, has been, and might be today. The book highlights Lacan's Seminar on Ethics (1959-60) as particularly significant, being the only one he wanted to prepare for publication. Lacan himself said in _Encore_ (1972) that he continued his path because he was never done with ethics, and his path was one of "I-do-not-want-to-know-anything-about-it" (_je n’en veux rien savoir_). This suggests a principled position regarding knowledge, particularly in ethics. The Seminar occurred during the Algerian War, and Lacan sent parts on Antigone to his step-daughter in jail for her independence struggle involvement, grounding his ethical reflections in contemporary events. It was also a critical moment for Lacan and French psychoanalysis following a split in the institution. Lacan saw Freud as a hero of a "revolution" in ethical thought, revealing a "discontent" in civilization with no salvation. He saw Freud as a hero of a new ethical practice responding to the "tragedy" in modern, scientific culture. Lacan was preoccupied with ethics, believing our entire conception of ethics needed rethinking. He argued that Freud's originality lay in reconceptualizing our sense of ourselves as ethical beings, promising something new. Lacan declared that the promise of Freud's "revolution" – something new in the ethics of desire, love, eros, a "strange beauty of an original modern 'erotic'" – was still before us. This "revolution in thought (_pensée_) that the effect of analytic experience brings with it concerning the ethical domain" meant a revolution in our very conception of ethics. Traditionally, ethics focused on virtue's ends or duty's rules, asking about moral knowledge: how to know the rational good to pursue or the rational rules to follow. Ancient ethics revolved duty around virtue; Kant reversed this, making the good revolve around obligation. Freud, Lacan argued, introduced a third revolution, reconnecting ethics and experience (_pathos_) without relying on a supposed knowledge of the good. Freud connected ethics and eros in a new way: both knowledge of the good life and the abstract moral law revolve around the "desire" each person testifies to in their unconscious. Freud started from the ancient philosophical idea that ethics can't derive solely from obligation, but man's acts tend towards a good. Psychoanalysis restored desire as the principle of ethics; even censorship gets its energy from it. Desire is the root of ethics. The ancient step in philosophy was asking how to live best, but the conception of "life" has changed throughout history (discovering nature, responding to fate, seeking autonomy, maximizing pleasure, etc.). These varying conceptions shaped the question of how to live. By postulating the unconscious, Freud effectively offered a new view of living one's life, where the ego isn't the master, and the subject is at home in the unconscious. Freud's reintroduction of eros into our lives meant that the question of ethical knowledge, giving a true account (_logos_) of one's life, became an erotic problem. The unconscious is a strange, laborious knowledge about our lives that we've repressed. Transference, the erotic bond in analysis, arises from the place desire holds in our living, of which the unconscious is the knowledge. Crucially, unmasking truth in analysis is not based on a general theory of who we should be or what we must do. Psychoanalysis is not wisdom (_sagesse_) about the good, nor a theory (_morale_) of universal right action. Instead, it raises new questions about desire's place in demands for wisdom and obedience to law, introducing a new task. While philosophy tried to rationalize the good or moral rules, Freud questioned the place of "desire" and "discontent" in our ethical lives and civilization. The challenge is what we can make of ourselves based on the "discontent" analysis reveals. Our "Freudian or libidinal 'embodiment'" is described as both "perverse" and "polymorphous". Bodily zones are sources of libidinal "energy" whose fate requires singular interpretation _after the fact_. Freud's departure from mechanistic models meant recognizing this non-methodical character of bodily destinies; this "energy" cannot be calculated but only interpreted in its effects. This implies there's no general wisdom or method for aligning one's life with what's truly good. Giving a true account of life isn't about mastering it or submitting to a master who teaches mastery. The book introduces the concept of the "causality of fortune" to describe the role of eros in our living. Lacan saw this as a causality irreducible to social or psychological determinism. Freud called this "psychical causality" or the effects of events breaking new paths. Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller reframed it as "metonymical causality": the libidinal body causing symptoms not mechanically but as a "displacement" due to a fundamental lack. Lacan brought this into an ethical context, linking causality to the ancient problem of responding to what happens to us – fortune, luck, chance (_tuche_), and the opportune moment (_kairos_). This "psychical causality" is "tuchical causality," a causality of fortune. Psychoanalysis rediscovers the sense in which development is animated by the accident/obstacle of _tuche_, which pre-Socratic philosophy also sought to understand. Others, like Bernard Williams with "moral luck," also revisited the theme of _tuche_, linking it to the incompatibility between the ideal of self-sufficiency and contingency, particularly in erotic contexts like friendship and self-control. Williams suggested it has been a limitation of moral philosophy to assume reason can tell us how to respond rationally to anything that happens, aiming to make us autonomous. Lacan, however, inserted _tuche_ into a Freudian context, linking the "fragility of goodness" to the "morbidity of desire". Goodness is fragile because desire is morbid, meaning fortune and destiny speak of a mortal truth beyond Aristotelian excellence. This perspective shapes Lacan's account of tragedy, especially Antigone. Lacan's view is that "the Law" is not general but "structural". It structures desire, not just applying to it. Particular laws derive from a prior law structuring desire itself. The fundamental, paradoxical Freudian discovery for Lacan is that desire _itself_ is the source of the moral law and obligation. Lacan interprets Freud's myth of the primal horde not as history, but as a modern structural myth giving "epic form to what operates from structure" – the law of desire. Repressed desire appears as a fundamental crime causing guilt. Freud's story shows "repressed desire" is a redundancy; the Law _is_ our desire, its imperative necessity. This means that moral necessity, the "I ought," is fundamentally a libidinal necessity drawing all its energy from desire. "Ought" is related to "is" in a complex way Lacan captures with the French _il faut_ ("it must"/"he fails"). Reintroducing desire into ethics raises a problem: Can there be an "I ought" or responsibility that isn't just a superego command?. Can there be an ethics of what is prior to formulating rules of conduct?. This leads to the Freudian precept Lacan embraced: _Wo es war, soll ich werden_ ("Where id was, there shall I be"). The _sollen_ here is not guilt or simple determination; the "I" is not a generic ego but one that doesn't yet know who it is, appearing through the improbable _tuche_ of fortune. The specific ethical problem psychoanalysis presents is not knowing the law of our own erotic fatalities. Previous ethical thought tried to overcome this by supposing someone _does_ know – adopting a "god's eye view". Freud, Lacan argues, discovered the eros underlying this supposition, naming it "transference". Transference is the supposition of a subject who would know. Analyzing it reveals our basic inability to know, master, or possess the law of our own desire. Psychoanalysis thus introduces a new kind of responsibility – responsibility _for_ our own desire. This involves a new eros: telling the "truth" of a desire we can't know but which is "written" in our destinies. Analysis must expose the assumption that desire is knowable, the faith that someone (self or analyst) knows it. This faith is what Lacan calls _bêtise_ (stupidity), and analysis aims to free us from it. At the end of analysis, one learns that no one can know, not even the analyst. The analyst's "presence" is felt when credited with knowing about the patient's disturbing desire; the analyst's refusal to know sets the work going. Lacan saw analysis as a form of love that never presumes to know what is good for another. It provides relief from the _bêtise_ of those who "always knew better". This distinguishes it from _philia_ (love uniting based on shared knowledge of the good) and _caritas_ (charity based on knowledge of salvation). Freud recoiled from "Love thy neighbour" and didn't base treatment on sympathy. Psychoanalysis is a love not based on ideal self-mastery or salvation, but one that exposes even self-love to a traumatic, fateful cause. Lacan's term _âmour_ merges "soul" and "love," implying a fundamentally traumatic link between them. The bonds of _âmour_ contain aggressivity and dissociation (_hainamoration_, love-hate). While tradition sees love as uniting, Freud/Lacan see it as "supplementing" the hazards of our libidinal destinies. The truth of love stories isn't ideal symmetry but the structurally enigmatic desire we transfer onto the analytic bond's asymmetries. The eros of analysis brings a new ethical question: responsibility to something prior to distributing goods or formulating obligations. It's responsibility to the "necessity" of desire's law, which Lacan calls "the real". Freud's ethical revolution reroutes the eros of accounting for life from the Ideal to the Real. Unlike summaries that see ethics as concerned with ideals, psychoanalysis deepens our relation to the real. Progress in ethics, for Freud, is articulating man's bearings in relation to the real. To see the unconscious as ethical means redefining ethics. Lacan felt analysts needed to read great works of ethical philosophy, but to mark a contrast. Psychoanalysis is not idealism; it moves towards the real. It introduces a new "realism" in ethics, seen in Freud's idea of analysis as "education to the real". This realism is of necessity in civilization, distinguishing psychoanalysis from ethical philosophies between Aristotle and Freud. Psychoanalysis, an ethics "of the real," confronts philosophical "idealisms" with it. In our troubled libidinal existence, it finds something prior to ideals of Virtue, Duty, and Utility – something these ideals betray and can't avoid. These ideals are seen as "idealizations" or "fictions" of discontent, rationalizing the "impossible" (sexual impasse). They are invitations from the real. The interval between Aristotle and Freud covers most of Western ethical thought. Lacan focuses on Aristotle (good/eudaimonia), Kant (duty), and Bentham (utility). These figures represent different ethical thoughts with different views on the ethical bond, knowledge, and relevant experience. Lacan provides "psychoanalytic portraits," interpreting their key concepts as idealizations of discontent, asking what bond, obligation, or _jouissance_ (a concept Lacan uses to denote a difficult, often painful, excess enjoyment that goes "beyond" pleasure) might arise from the "invitation to the real" within these fictions. Lacan saw Aristotle's "ethics of the Good" as no longer a real possibility for modern scientific/industrial civilization. Reading Aristotle shows a discontinuity: we can't see ourselves as Aristotelian souls (_psyches_) whose excellent activities constitute virtue. Lacan contrasts Freud's subject of the unconscious with Aristotle's soul. For Aristotle, the soul is body functions; for Freud, the subject is in touch with the soul via the body, thinking with the body in ways the soul doesn't use. Hysteria and obsessional symptoms show how unconscious "thoughts" burden the soul, interrupting harmony with the world. This "disharmony" of unconscious bodily thought, this incompatibility of eros and ethos, characterizes modern civilization and its tragedies. Aristotle's friendship doctrine is a "fiction" supplementing libidinal impossibility, no longer credible. Lacan's view of Aristotle highlights the "desire to know". He argues a troubled eros underlies Aristotle's wisdom; the desire isn't natural contemplation but provoked by the body's trouble, leading to wanting to know our good. Philosophical desire to know stems from libidinal disturbance. It's the desire of the great _bêtise_, transference (supposing someone knows). This links back to Socrates, who knew about the eros of the search for the good. Aristotle, in a sense, "naturalized" this pursuit. Lacan saw Aristotle's teaching as supposing the soul's essence is seeking knowledge, just the desire Socrates induced. In his Seminar on Transference, Lacan commented on Plato's Symposium. He saw the discussion as "transferential," exposed by Socrates saying Eros is lack and speaking truly of it means speaking from this lack. Socrates displaced the discussion of eros onto the prior desire to know about it, making himself a master of this desire-to-know. This created an "agon" (struggle) requiring new skill (_techne_) and virtue; opinion (_doxa_) was insufficient. Lacan saw a similarity to Freud's struggle with hysterical women. The hysteric, like Socrates, didn't know her good but knew the eros of its pursuit, demanding the doctor provide knowledge of her desire/eros. Socrates, inducing ignorance, created a demand for knowledge, resembling the unconscious. Lacan's portrayal of Aristotle is of a man who ignored perversion and sex, classifying them as "bestiality". Aristotelian virtuous friendship was "out-of-sex," missing the "other partner". The "truth" of _philia_ would be this "perversity," this _âmoralité_ (amorality), the pleasures Aristotle excluded are what the neurotic dreams of. _Âmoralité_ marks something in man's eros departing from his ethos, subverting his place in society and self-rule. Lacan contrasts Aristotle's focus on the "good of the Man" with Christianity's focus on "the Woman". Christianity sees male sexuality as passivity regarding fault, replaces philosopher's good with God's Law, and introduces charity (renunciation) for the humble. Analyzing Aristotelian friendship from a Freudian perspective has social/political consequences. The city/household isn't naturally harmonious but must deal with the disharmony of our libidinal existence. We are political animals, but troubled in our eros/homes. Supposing a harmonious Good is tyrannical violence, whose consequences are seen in tragedy. Aristotle's ethics and poetics are linked; living well means living beautifully. Aristotle saw contemplation as the noblest beautiful life; tragedy presents beauty in living _without_ knowing the Good, born of the mortality of our _âmours_. Tragedy is the "primal scene" of philosophical ethics. The rivalry: Aristotle teaching a knowable Good vs. a tragic universe where law is prior to good and incompatible with it, where one transgresses. Lacan's portrait of Kant focuses on the role of libido in freeing morality from "pathology". Freud analyzed the eros in respecting the law/oneself. Lacan sees an eroticism in Kant's _Critique of Practical Reason_, summarized as "Kant with Sade". Kant's account of freedom in submission to a law freed from passions is paradoxical, rooted in free and pure submission to the categorical imperative. Lacan captures the eroticism of the Kantian struggle in the "paradoxical cruelty of conscience". Conscience becomes crueler the less it's disobeyed, more demanding the more refined, tracking hidden desires. This reveals the _gourmandise_ (greediness) of the superego, a parasite feeding on gratifications. Lacan proposes reading Kant alongside the Marquis de Sade. Libertinage revealed something "unnatural" about desire/eros, irreducible to natural self-love. Sade built an erotics on this truth. This "unnatural" eros appears in Freud's account of gratifying oneself by obeying conscience; Freud modeled the superego-ego relation on sadist-victim or masochist-master. Conscience and sadism are possibilities of a structure seeing desire as unnatural/prior to any good. Sadism identifies with superego; internalizing/de-sexualizing makes superego appear to exercise sadism from within. Neurotic symptoms demonstrate gratification beyond self-interest in submitting to duty, with masochistic gratification in charity/forgiveness and sadistic in pity/compassion. Our eros makes us obligated beings prior to specific obligations. Desire confronts us as an imperative/necessity we can't locate, transcendent due to repression. "The law is repressed desire". A civilization based on abstract duty unleashes the symptom of eros. Superego's _gourmandise_ is structural, a symptom of discontent in civilization. Freud couldn't make us Kantian noumenal selves; erotic freedom isn't moral autonomy. The law of desire (_nomos_) is _heteros_ (other), not controllable. Freud raised another erotics/obligation: obligation to ourselves/others as _âmoral_ beings with discontent as their truth, obligation to what in desire submits us to obligations. Jeremy Bentham offered utility as a new ethical approach, rethinking the "good" through empirical history and calculation. Lacan admired this logic. Lacan's portrait of Bentham explores eros's part in this efficient civilization. Kant's abstract law and Bentham's calculable utility stem from the same source: the law of a libido released from ancient eudaimonia. Bentham's logic was legislative, aiming for no waste in language/law. Lacan questions eros's role in this "moral hygiene". Law concerns distributing _jouissance_, but _jouissance_ is "useful for nothing" (_la jouissance est ce qui ne sert à rien_). It's not measured but deciphered, endlessly written in our destinies, the law of desire saying "Jouis" (Enjoy!). Bentham tried to align logical necessity (pleasure/pain) with libidinal necessity, but _jouissance_ escapes measurement, making this fail. The attempt to control comes from this failure. The ethics of utility involves violence towards _jouissance_ that isn't needs, towards expenditures with no return. Old words served for "the jouissance that is necessary". The analyst, unlike the Aristotelian friend, Kantian moralist, or Benthamite hygienist, doesn't center us with wisdom, autonomy, or productivity. Psychoanalysis decenters us, submitting us to singular desire, unpredictable _âmours_. It questions an erotic bond not based on communality/reciprocity/equality but on singular relation to the real. Aristotle described coming together as a species; Kant, via respect; Bentham, via utility. Freud asked how we're brought together by sharing the structure of repression/law, the structure of the decentered subject responding to the real. What community is possible for divided subjects?. This question of bond is linked to "beauty" in living, changing across history. It's in tragic drama, Baroque, Shakespeare, Kant's aesthetics, Romanticism, Modernism, and transgressive beauty in utilitarian culture. This links Freudian "aesthetic" and "ethic". Freud's beauty isn't imitating the Good (Aristotle), symbol of morality (Kant), or calculable utility (Bentham). Its value is sublimation: presenting the _réel_ behind ethical fictions. Sublimation offers something other than symptoms. Analytic and aesthetic experience share a kinship. Sublimation is the other side of Freud's ethics exploration. It satisfies our imperious desire, unlike the "philosophy of values". Its value is erotic, for our souls (_âmes_) and loves (_âmours_). It points to the promise of a new bond and erotics. Sublimation is ethical and aesthetic; history of art and love are linked. Idealization in art (troubadour lady) is like idealization in _âmours_. Architecture, through sublimation, relates experience of space to the _unheimlich_ in our eros, trying to contain the void (_vide_) in our dwelling. Painting's value is sublimation of the gaze (_objet a_), an object like breast/feces whose fate is unpredictable, before which we endlessly present ourselves. The gaze is a "tuchical cause" of seeing/being seen, linking to regard/self-regard and pathological forms (paranoia, hysteria, perversions). Literary art is particularly close to ethics, staging the irreconcilability of beauty/living and the philosophical Good. Tragedy, especially Antigone, best shows this. Psychoanalysis has a "tragic essence" – it's mortal. Lacan saw Freud as a tragic hero who rediscovered this essence. Feminine figures taught Freud about the unconscious. "What does the woman want?" was a central, unresolved problem for Freud/Lacan, linked to the feminine relation to the law of desire. Antigone, not Oedipus, captured Lacan's attention in Sophocles. Freud's heroism lay in not recoiling from the fatal feminine beauty but analyzing it, seeking a bond where it could have a place. The ethical revolution involves asking if a passionate truth-bond can include "femininity" and the unknowable necessity in our _âmours_. Lacan saw Antigone as a heroine of a tragedy rediscovered by Freud. Her passion is incommensurable with the city's law/good (Creon). It's not a conflict Hegel saw as resolvable in the modern state, but an irreconcilable wrong. Anouilh's allegorical _Antigone_ (suggesting Fascism) is valid. The violence Antigone's fate exposes is immemorial, always forgotten. Creon represents the _bêtise_ of faith in a knowable Good fully embodied in city justice. His error is confidence in this Good, leading to fatal excess when it tries to reign universally. Analytic passion doesn't need to rationalize impossible desire, thus not evading the "feminine" face of _jouissance_ (_en plus_). Feminine beauty becomes the beauty of troubled eros whose truth is discontent. Analytic catharsis finds the beauty of sublimation seen in tragedy. Psychoanalysis recreates the real in history, leading to the beauty/surprise of recognizing one's fate. It opens an unchartered voyage of sublimation. The analytic social bond is tragic because it's not progressivist. For this bond, evil is more than the absence of Good. Freud didn't trust progress or Marxist revolution (seen as desire for a knowing master). The problem of evil is unavoidable as long as we cling to progress that eliminates it. Assuming a good dictates duties allows evil to retain revolutionary force. Our world doesn't protect from fortune or guarantee good. Eros has no pastoral state or objective good. No one is to blame for the violence of desire's law. The ethical problem is what we do with this violence, the bonds we form. Desire is the only "ethical universal". Freud put this tragic question at ethics' center, promising new possibilities for _âmours_. Lacan wondered why analysis, putting love at ethics' center, didn't investigate "an erotic" further. Lacan's search for a new "erotic" was intransigent, pitiless, perhaps inhuman. His institutional struggles had a "tragic essence". He even thought psychoanalysis might perish. Foucault's history of sexuality project arose in this "tragic" moment for Lacan. Ethics began to preoccupy him in a new way. The project took shape during Foucault's creative "crisis" around 1975-76. Foucault began questioning taking Freud as a figure of the creative present; rather, he saw Freud receding into the past from which we must depart. He questioned how we turned "desire"/"sexuality" into an ethical universal, a source of tragedy. How did we associate it with an enigmatic Law needing endless interpretation? How did the "hermeneutic of the self" take hold, associating self-deception with sex/eros?. Foucault's genealogy of sexuality/desire sought a new passion of thought, new erotic possibilities, but still connected to the question of truth/spirituality Lacan raised after Freud. Foucault focused on truth-telling (_Wahrsagen_). He admired Lacan's ethic of difficult truth in libidinal existence. But he posed skeptical questions: Must eros center on a signifying chain leading to desire's impasse? Is this just a specific interpretation practice?. Does the "subjects of desire" idea continue a confessional tradition?. Can we invent other truths/passions for truth/games of truth beyond the psychoanalytic one?. Foucault bet we could, that we were already departing from being "subjects of desire," becoming something else. His problem was the _Wahrsagen_ of truth and its relation to reflexivity. He sought a new _Wahrsagen_ for love/friendship without 19th-century sexuality categories or Freudian hermeneutics. His truth problem was about love/friendship, a "new erotic". He argued the concept of "desire" as an ethical universal is historical, contingent. His genealogy traced how Western man became a "subject of desire". The duty to expose desire hasn't always existed. The Delphic "Know yourself" wasn't "Be faithful to your desire". He questioned how self-deception became linked to sex/eros. Foucault distinguished "ethics" (becoming a type of moral person) from "moral code" (prescriptions). Ethics is about how people were incited to acquire a moral nature given a code. He used a fourfold scheme: image of ideal person/life, authority inciting it, means provided, description of sexual experience's relevance. In antiquity, erotic experience (_aphrodisia_) threatened self-mastery. Means involved discipline for noble self-possession. Christianity began internalizing eros, finding sexuality within, shifting means to deciphering inner thoughts. Sexual ethics changed from penetration/others to libido/will/self-relation, with the male organ becoming a mark of passivity. Purity of thoughts became central. Freud's _Interpretation of Dreams_ is a hermeneutics of desire/confessional work, asserting desire as core. This traces transformations in conceiving ethical being from antiquity to Freud. Foucault saw our current task as shedding this internalization of ourselves as "subjects of desire". He felt our time showed a dissatisfaction, wanting a new erotic subjectivity beyond older models. He saw contemporary liberation movements departing from "sexuality" categories and the idea of desire's inner truth. Gay movements exemplify this. Foucault admired the pragmatic focus on _how things are done_, seen in _Discipline and Punish_. He was curious about the precision in contemporary gay literature describing body/activities, linking it to a life where activity precedes "spirituality". This contrasts with sublimation. Sublimation assumes desire is terrible, needing cultural articulation, not direct practice. It's civilization's response to desire's trouble. Foucault reversed this: it's our concept of desire that makes us believe art satisfies it more fundamentally than "perverse" activities. He questioned why we dissociate desire from activity and "reinvest" it. Foucault asked why life itself couldn't be a work of art, not just objects. Creativity is linked to inventing ways of living, not just internal relation to self (vs. Sartre). Beauty is an important ethical category for living. The ancient idea of creating oneself beautifully (Socrates) was motivated by choosing noble existence, not abstract law. Liberation movements offered a chance to revive this. Foucault sought a new "erotic" after desire, restoring improbability, innovation, the beauty of experimentation. This moves beyond psychoanalytic theatre; eros's truth isn't necessarily tragic. Desire is a historical invention, not prior to history. Replace fate of libidinal existence with historical determination of subjectivizations. History determines who we can be through forms from which we might depart. Community was central to Foucault's ethics: the bonds we have, who we are. His focus on subjectivity aimed to rethink community, how/why people bond, the eros of identity. Foucault analyzed psychoanalysis regarding "degeneracy," which Freud theoretically refused but opposed with "archaic" desire linked to symbolic law. Freud reintroduced law of civilization against social norm. Foucault saw psychoanalysis as positing a non-historical identity source, a theory of the subject prior to history/subjectivizations. This "archaic" element is Freud's 19th-century/tragic face, reinterpreted by Lacan structurally. Foucault argued sexuality deployment should be based on contemporary power techniques, not archaic crime. Analyze fascism via historical construction of identity/identification, not foundational crime. Desire is an element in history constructing relations, not the "other" of relations. Question what's desirable about identities, don't reduce them to forms of desire. Psychoanalysis was limited by inability to imagine a mode of being without degeneracy, unlike ancient thought. Foucault sought anti-racist eros where identity is questioned, enabling departure from historical identifications. Kant made freedom a condition of ethics. Foucault, inserting identity into critical philosophy, departs from Kant. Freedom isn't experiencing a law; it's the condition of "undefined work" opening new possibilities, exposing inherited necessity. Critical philosophy separates the possibility of not being what we are from the contingency that made us. Foucault studied "practices of freedom" from antiquity, governed by a politico-pedagogical matrix, undone as inner freedom separated from civic duty. He analyzed change in the "ethical subjectivity" of power, from philosopher-leaders to virtuous monarchs, to Machiavellian princes, to figures governing objective state populations. The question of public/critical speech links practices of freedom and critical discourse. Parrhesia (free speech) is key, its crisis leading to philosophy's invention. Parrhesia links to "truth of conscience" in Christian pastoral. Foucault aimed to rethink it via his concern for truth and the passion of free critical community. "What is thought? What is philosophy?" haunted Foucault. He rejected philosophy judging other discourses from outside. Philosophy is "critical work of thought on itself". It explores how it can change using foreign knowledge. It doesn't legitimate what's known but asks how to think otherwise. Foucault's history of thought systems was motivated by this philosophical concern. His theme wasn't society but "true/false discourse" and its reality effects. This entanglement with truth isn't just epistemology but political. "The political question, to sum up, is not error... it is truth itself". Question: Why certain truths about ourselves at a time/place, and at what cost?. Linking true/false divides to governing self/others is the political problem. Critical exam finds other divides/ways of governing – "political spirituality". Spirituality links to a third truth: living a "true life". Making ourselves beings, who we can be. Foucault's entanglement raises philosophical questions about truths in knowledge, politics, poetics. Can philosophy maintain distinct concern for truth or is it reduced to science, politics, art?. Foucault sought to preserve critical distance, asking what else can be known/done/lived by studying history of thought systems. He aimed to introduce "events in thought" into social history, calling for critical intelligence. Questions about the cost of history of thought to philosophy and thought events' effects on history ask about philosophy's nature. Parrhesia lectures define this concern/passion. Truth isn't single; there are different truths/ways of saying it. Two traditions: "analytics of truth" (how we get/evaluate truths, about what objects) and "critical attitude to the truth" (meaning/risks/costs of saying truth). Foucault focused on the latter: "What does it cost for reason to tell the truth?". Parrhesia is speech expressing speaker's relation to truth at risk, as duty to help others/self. Focusing on critical attitude changes view of history. The path from Athens to Rome isn't decline but development of linking knowledge, politics, conduct. Foucault studied this marginalized history via parrhesia. His grid for parrhesiac history asks: who speaks truth (to whom/conditions), about what, risks, relation to politics. He turned to Socrates, a great parrhesiac, who problematized truth-saying vs. rhetoric, politics, wisdom, poetry, inventing the philosophical game. Socrates introduced giving an account (_logos_) for one's life (_bios_). This involved ignorance/need for a master living in harmony with their logos. Foucault aimed to keep this Socratic critical attitude alive, studying its controversial relations. This links to his entanglement of critique. Foucault wrote from a crisis in post-Kantian political critique. Difficulty: inserting critique into a history with a utopian telos based on social Man, outside power. Crisis in the intellectual's role. Questioning Ideologiekritik, he sharpened the problematization, distinguishing specific/universal intellectuals. Nietzsche questioned truth/freedom and absolute knowledge, offering critique without Utopian spirituality or political theory enclosure. Foucault followed this, analyzing rationalization in specific fields (madness, illness, etc.) without a grand theory. Critical thought emerges in social movements questioning identity, without high liberation hopes, finding Nietzschean critique of power. Foucault explored the "etho-poetic" tradition where artistic creation is a model/technique for living well. How Socratic free speech shaped life as beautiful work. He contrasted "psycho-metaphysical" vs. "bio-aesthetic" uses of parrhesia, different responses to "Know yourself" and images of true life. Plato introduced Socratic parrhesia into knowledge, politics, poetry. Foucault saw a crisis in philosophy's relation to these areas, opening possibility for new skeptical, problematizing parrhesia. This confronts him with the question of the eros of thinking/critical passion. Foucault rejected vague notions of passion for truth, contrasting Aristotelian contemplation with Nietzschean "will to knowledge". The will to knowledge is invented, event-like, interested, involving paradoxical falsification. Developed in his studies of "discursive practices". His _History of Sexuality_ volume titled "Will to Knowledge" links this to eros/history. Antiquity made Eros central to philosophy. Part of Socratic parrhesia, linked to knowing, self-mastery, beauty of freedom. Platonic contemplation placed in erotico-pedagogical context. Plato replaced pederastic difficulties with metaphysical link between eros and otherworldly existence. Little _amour fou_ before Ovid, where individuals lose identity/self. Eros entered contemporary philosophy via existentialism, phenomenology, Romanticism, liberation movements, Bataille. "Modern sexuality from Sade to Freud" didn't liberate sex's nature but "denatured" it, making it a limit. Rethinking limits, Foucault saw eros in a parrhesiac situation like Socrates-Plato. Rejecting the duty to desire, we need critical thought not based on religion/government/science. Need skeptical distance from knowledge/government strategies regarding sexuality. Philosophy can use this distance to freely create new ways of living. This brings back uncertainty about saying truth of eros. Defines critical "curiosity": not just gaining knowledge, but disengaging oneself from oneself (_se déprendre de soi-même_), the "straying" (_égarement_) of the knower. Foucault's eros is this curious, experimental passion to disengage self, discovering possibilities. The author reviews this work not to promote a new master but to isolate "the question of ethics". Moral theory avoids this, focusing on universal goods, making "who we are" secondary. Foucault/Lacan offer a different philosophy. The question of ethics is most difficult/open in their work, yet most intimate/subjective, linked to style, leading to truth/passion. This converges around an impasse in French psychoanalysis in the mid-70s. Their thinking finds ethics in something irreducible to the subject's formation in language/history (symbolic idealism). Foucault's transcendence moments, Lacan's _jouissance en plus_. Lacan's realism of what's left out of idealization, Foucault's pragmatism of what's free in determinations. Rethinking subjectivity isn't postulating what must be, but new thinking. No traditional theory for desire exceeding good or what's intolerable. They diagnose a crisis in ethical thought: not about rational grounds, but what ideals mean to us/experience – costs, consequences, limits. They promote a "suspiciousness" about moral theory demands, a Nietzschean suspicion lost by contemporary theory (Williams). We live among ethical traditions without knowing why to adopt them. Pluralism keeps them all, monism seeks one theory. Neither questions what might rethink traditions. Foucault/Lacan raise this question. Ethics is always about what's new, involving suspicion of received values. Ancient masters mastered excesses with wisdom. Philosophy became academic, like modern science. Foucault/Lacan's philosophies require different social forms, not traditional schools or parties. They reflect a crisis: Can ethical authority be non-bureaucratic/charismatic/scientific/mediatic?. Can truth be a condition of the question confronting us with who we might become?. Making the question of ethics unavoidable, linking identity to action/goodness, is the modern form of the Socratic principle that the unexamined life is not worth living. Finally, the book prompts questions: What is the place of eros (_jouissance_, suffering, pleasure) in the truths we live by? What is the place of truth in the ways we live together?. So, in essence, the book delves into how Foucault and Lacan revived the ancient philosophical question of the eros, or passion, behind the pursuit of truth. They did this by exploring its complex relationship with ethics, not as a set of universal rules or ideals, but as a dynamic process tied to our deepest desires, our struggles with ideals, and the historical and psychological forces that shape who we are. Their work, though difficult, challenges traditional notions of the subject, morality, and knowledge, suggesting that ethics today involves confronting the "real" of our existence, embracing a critical "suspiciousness" about received values, and finding new, perhaps improbable, ways of living and relating in a world where old certainties have dissolved. It's a journey through philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, and literature, all centered on the enduring, difficult question of what it means to live a "true life" driven by the complex forces of eros. This really opens up a lot of avenues for further thought, doesn't it? For instance, how do we navigate the "difficulty" of thinking in our own lives, and what kind of _askêsis_ might be relevant for us today? How does the idea of "tuchical causality" influence our understanding of responsibility? And if desire is the root of ethics, what does that mean for building ethical communities in the modern world? These are just a few of the questions this book seems to invite us to ponder long after reading the excerpts.