EROS, AND THE LAW ABSTRACT. This essay poses a critical response to Strauss political philosophy that takes as its primary object Strauss philosophy of Law. It does this by drawing on recent theoretical work in psychoanalytic theory, conceived after Jacques Lacan as another, avowedly non-historicist theory of Law and its relation to eros. The paper has four parts. Part I, The Philosophers Desire: Making an Exception, or The Thing Is..., recounts Strauss central account of the complex relationship between philosophy and the city. Strauss Platonic conception of philosophy as the highest species of eros is stressed, which is that aspect of his work which brings it into striking proximity with the Lacanian-psychoanalytic account of the dialectic of desire and the Law. Part II, Of Prophecy and Law, examines Strauss analysis of Law as rst presented in his 1935 book, Philosophy and Law, and central to his later rebirth of classical political philosophy. Part III, Primordial Repression and Primitive Platonism, is the central part of the paper. Lacans psychoanalytic understanding of Law is brought critically to bear upon Strauss philosophy of Law. The stake of the position is ultimately how, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Law is transcendental to subjectivity, and has a founding symbolic force, which mitigates against speaking of it solely or primarily in terms of more or less inequitable rules of thumb, as Plato did. Part IV, Is the Law the Thing? then asks the question of what eros might underlie Strauss paradoxical defense of esoteric writing in the age of permissive modern liberalism that is, outside of the closed social conditions which he, above all, alerts us to as the decisive justication for this ancient practice. KEY WORDS: belief, courtly love, Law, Philosophy, Prophecy, Strauss, the many, the Other Les non-dupes errent, Jacques Lacan Just whowas LeoStrauss anyway? Is there anychance that he will be bornposthumouslyas himself? A dierent self than he seemed? Lawrence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche The supposed inuence of Straussians on the current Bush admin- istration has revived much older debates about political theorist Leo Strauss rebirth of classical rationalism in modern America. Criti- cisms of Strauss have ranged over a number of well-worn topoi. Strauss assertion that all great philosophers and writers until Law Critique (2006) 17: 357388 Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s10978-006-9001-3 modernity wrote two-layered or esoteric texts has been attacked as inviting hermeneutic chaos, or wilful projections onto classical sour- ces. 1 Critics have charged that Strauss reading of Platonic philoso- phy, which signicantly challenges the hegemonic reading of Platonism as an other-worldly metaphysics, is untenable. 2 Strauss has been charged with corrupting the American youth in his teaching post at Chicago, and of preaching a politically dangerous elitism at odds with the Lockean principles of American liberalism. In line with this imputed elitism, Strauss has been criticised for reviving the Platonic doctrine of the noble lie, 3 despite the fact that Platos support for this doctrine is found in the heart of the Republics defence of the city in speech, which Strauss argued is something like a gigantic reductio ad absurdum of the notion that philosophers can justly rule. 4 Each of these criticisms has been spiritedly rebutted by defenders of Strauss, not least because they each serve to elide the genuine force and challenge of Strauss work. One topic that Strauss manifold critics have tended to avoid, however, is Strauss philosophy of Law. This topic was central to the construction of Strauss mature position, as it has been central to political philosophy per se since Platos Nomoi. In 1935, Strauss published Philosophy and Law, a series of preliminary reections on the nature of philosophy in the work of Maimonides, Averroes, Avicenna, and Al Farabi, all theorists working in societies of revealed Law. 5 It was in the context of Strauss investigation of the relationship between philosophy, prophecy and 1 Compare with, for example, M. Burnyeat, Sphinx Without a Secret, New York Review of Books, 32 (30 March, 1985); Cf. L. Strauss, On a Forgotten Kind of Writing, Chicago Review, Winter/Spring 1934; D.L. Levine, Without Malice But With Forethought: A Response to Burnyeat, in K.L. Deutsch and W. Negorski eds., Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker (Lanham, MD: Rowman Littleeld, 1994); S. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (London: St. Martins, 1988), 11. 2 For example, J. Gunnell, The Myth of the Tradition, American Political Science Review 72 (March 1978); Levine, supra n. 1, 361368; N. Tarcov, On a Certain Critique of Straussianism, in Deutsch et al., supra n. 1, 259274. 3 For example, by Drury, in supra n. 1, ch. 2; S. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (London: St Martins Press, 1999), ch.2. 4 Compare with L. Strauss, City and Man, ch. 2, On Platos Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 109; C. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 152. 5 L. Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Essays Towards Understanding Maimonides and His Predecessors translated by Fred Baumann (USA: The Jewish Publication Soci- ety, 1987). MATTHEW SHARPE 358 Law in these writers that Strauss indeed came to his discovery of the art of writing, as indicated by his 1936 article Quelques Remarques sur la Science Politique de Maimonides et de Farabi (see Part II below). 6 Strauss understanding of Law is of course taken very seri- ously by legal scholars as discernibly non-Straussian as Costas Douzinas. 7 Straussians, including Harry Jaa and William Kendall, have made signicant contributions to debates concerning the American founding, and the spirit of its laws. 8 This essay poses a critical response to Strauss political philosophy that takes as its primary object Strauss philosophy of Law. It does this by drawing on recent theoretical work in psychoanalytic theory, conceived after Jacques Lacan as another, avowedly non-historicist theory of Law and its relation to eros. 9 The paper has four parts. Parts I and II keep unapologetically close to the letter of Strauss texts, given Strauss own hermeneutic stress on the need for close reading, and the often acrimonious controversies that surround his work. These parts serve to establish in some detail Strauss under- standing of the relation between Law and eros that will be critiqued in the second half of the paper (Parts III and IV). Part I, The Philosophers Desire: Making an Exception, or The Thing Is..., recounts Strauss central account of the complex rela- tionship between philosophy and the city. Strauss Platonic con- ception of philosophy as the highest species of eros is stressed, which is that aspect of his work that brings it into striking proximity with the Lacanian-psychoanalytic account of the dialectic of desire and the Law. 10 Part II, Of Prophecy and Law, examines Strauss analysis of Law as rst presented in his 1935 book, Philosophy and Law, and central to his later rebirth of classical political philosophy. Part III, Primordial Repression and Primitive Platonism, is the central part of the paper. Lacans psychoanalytic understanding of Law is brought critically to bear upon Strauss philosophy of Law. The stake 6 L. Strauss, Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi, translated by Robert Bartlett, Interpretation, Fall 1990, 18/1, 330. 7 C. Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart, 2000). 8 For example, H. Jaa, American Conservatism and the American Founding (Durwitz N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1984)), W. Kendall, The Conservative Armation in America (Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1985). 9 Compare with, for example, J. Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 10 Compare with J. Lacan, Seminaire VIII: Le Transfert, whose rst twelve ses- sions are a reading of Platos Symposium. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 359 of the position is ultimately how, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Law is transcendental to subjectivity, and has a founding symbolic force, which mitigates against speaking of it solely or primarily in terms of more or less inequitable rules of thumb, as Plato did. Part IV, Is the Law the Thing? then asks the question of what eros might underlie Strauss paradoxical defense of esoteric writing in the age of permissive modern liberalism that is, outside of the closed social conditions which he, above all, alerts us to as the decisive justication for this ancient practice. As the Conclusiondefends, I contendthat Strauss understanding of philosophical eros is an instance of the properly dialectical logic of courtly love, as read by Lacan in Seminars VII andXX. In this logic, the Law that Strauss laments as tyrannizing over thought becomes, iron- ically, the cause of the philosophers eros. But nowI turn to my subject. THE PHILOSOPHERS DESIRE: MAKING AN EXCEPTION, OR THE THING IS ... A signicant difculty facing many of Strauss left-liberal critics is that the centre-piece of his rereading of Plato, the reading of the Republic in City and Man, 11 closely resembles criticisms of modern ideocratic politics that have attained hegemonic status within the wider Western humanities after World War II. In parity with Der- ridas or Levinas dierent critiques of Western philosophy, or Lyotards avowal of the end of meta-narratives, Strauss reads Platos Republic as a corrective to all idealistic attempts to demand too much from politics via philosophy: Xenophon tells us that Socrates ... cured [Platos brother, Glaucon, a key interloc- utor in the action of the Republic] of his extreme political ambition ... Certain it is that the Republic supplies the most magnicent cure ever devised for every form of political ambition. 12 Yet, unlike the post-structuralists, Strauss does not draw from this reading of the Politeia or of the political as such anything like a post-modernist or post-Heideggerian view of philosophy as limited 11 Compare with A. Bloom, Interpretive Essay, in The Republic of Plato 2nd edition, translation with notes and an interpretive essay by Allan Bloom (USA: Basic Books, 1981); Zuckert, supra n. 4, 146. 12 Strauss, supra n. 4, p. 65; Zuckert, supra n. 4, 149. MATTHEW SHARPE 360 only to the sceptical undoing of all claims to Truth, or to preparing the site for the epochal emergence of some new god or gods. 13 With regard to the city, equally, Strauss refuses to sponsor a Millsean- type position that the inaccessibility of an Absolute Political Knowledge legislates the desirability of an open and pluralistic public or political sphere. Despite the claims of critics like Peter Levine, Strauss is not a Nietzchean perspectivist posing nobly as a Platonic Aristotelian, or an orthodox Jewish theologian. 14 There is a natural right that does, and ought to have a political bearing, for Strauss, however dierent his understanding of this Right is from more or- thodox readings of Plato. 15 The thing is that, to invoke Platos cave allegory from the start of Book VII of the Republic, the philosopher who has seen the light of natural right beyond the city must descend again into the city. 16 Accordingly, the light of this natural Right must itself equally be dimmed if it is to show up at all in the unnatural twilight of political life. As Strauss put it, for the Greeks, the idea of a natural law (nomos tes phuseos) was a contradiction in terms. 17 And herein, in Hamlets words, lies the rub. What, therefore, is the natural right that the ascendant philoso- pher sees after he has made his rough ascent out of the city, if it is neither an Aristotelian teleology nor any normatively orienting Pla- tonic doctrine of Ideas? Near to the heart of Natural Right and History, Strauss tells us in the midst of a celebrated commentary on classical natural right that there is a universally valid hierarchy of ends. He lists these as wisdom, then justice, then public safety, a regimes independence as a political whole. 18 Nevertheless, as Strauss 13 Compare with L. Strauss, An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism, in The Rebirth of Classical Rationalism edited with an introduction by T. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); also Relativism, in ibid., and L. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), Introduction, and ch. 1. 14 P. Levine, Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities (USA: State University of New York Press, 1995), 153. 15 Strauss, supra n. 4, 9899, 120121; Compare with T. Pangle, Introduction to Leo Strauss, Studies in Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 3; Zuckert, supra n. 4, 150151, 154. and one could also recall here Strauss contention concerning the generic location of the Socratic dialectic within the city. Compare with, for example, Zuckert, supra n. 4, 138 . 16 Strauss, Natural Right and History, supra n. 13, 152. 17 L. Strauss, On Natural Law, in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 138. 18 Strauss, Natural Right and History, supra n. 13, 161. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 361 goes on immediately to qualify, if there is thus a natural hierarchy of ends, there are no valid rules of action that would hold for all cases. 19 The enigma wrapped in these contrary (not contradictory) state- ments unfolds in the light of Strauss reading of Aristotles teaching on natural right, exactly in the centre of Natural Right and History. Strauss credits Aristotle as the author of two politic doctrines con- cerning natural right. The rst is that, in line with the teaching of Platos Republic, there is no simply best regime for all times and places. There are rather a variety of legitimate regimes, which each dilute natural right in compromise with relevant necessities and limiting circumstances. 20 The second more surprising Aristotelian assertion is that all natural right is changeable: as Strauss repeats, Aristotle says explicitly that all right hence all natural right is changeable: he does not qualify that statement in any way. 21 At issue here is how, in certain conditions, it may always become necessary to qualify or violate the ordinary rule of law in a city, if this citys very survival is at stake. To quote the decisive text at length: Justice has two different principles or sets of principles: the requirements of public safety, or what is necessary in extreme situations to preserve the mere existence or independence of society, on the one hand, and the rules of justice in the more precise sense on the other. And there is no principle which denes clearly in what types of cases public safety and in what type of cases the precise rules of justice have priority. For it is not possible to dene precisely what constitutes an extreme situation in contradistinction to a normal situation. Every dangerous external or internal enemy is inventive to the extent that he is capable of transforming what, on the basis of previous experience, could reasonably be regarded as a normal situation into an extreme situation. Natural right must be mutable in order to be able to cope with the inventiveness of wickedness. 22 Although Strauss natural right thus does not prescribe what we should do, or what form of regime is best absolutely, it nevertheless does point towards an answer to the question of who should rule that is, he or they who are best able to adjudicate concerning cir- cumstances. 23 To cite Strauss Symposium seminar: 19 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 162. 20 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 156157. 21 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 157, 158. 22 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 161. 23 Compare N. Robertson, The Closing of the Early Modern Mind: Leo Strauss and Early Modern Political Thought, Animus 3 (1998), 4. MATTHEW SHARPE 362 Thus the question arises as to what is the best regime. The rst answer given by such men as Aristotle and Plato and Socrates before them is: that in which the wise rule, irresponsibly and absolutely. Irresponsibly in the sense that they are not responsible to other human beings. That the wise should be responsible to the unwise seems to be against nature. 24 What is apparent here, that is, is precisely a shift in Strauss under- standing of classical natural right from a natural right that ostensibly legislates by itself, to a natural right that legislates only who it is that should legislate. This shift is facilitated by reference to extreme necessity, in a way that in fact mirrors or evokes the terms of Sch- mitts 1923 Political Theology. Strauss position, in its way, draws a political conclusion from what seems in Platos Republic to justify a turn away from politics altogether: namely, the notion of Book IV, that justice is only pos- sible within a certain type of individual, not any political regime. 25 It is a striking feature of Strauss Of Tyranny, in line with this Platonic turn, that his understanding of political tyranny is developed through a reading of Xenophons Hiero a dialogue between the wise Si- monides and the tyrant Hiero, as to what is the best form of life for individual men. 26 The tyrant in Strauss On Tyranny is not con- demned, as a modern might naively expect, on grounds of any crimes s/he might have committed in her/his quest for and exercise of power. Towards the centre of the essay, indeed, Strauss makes clear that tyranny diers only by degree from other forms of rule. 27 In the central chapter (The Teaching Concerning Tyranny), Strauss notes how, according to the classical-Platonic tradition: ... the rule of a tyrant who, after coming to power by means of force or fraud, or having committed any number of crimes, listens to the suggestions of reasonable men, is essentially more legitimate than the rule of elected magistrates as such. 28 Instead, as Gourevitch has put it in a renowned article on Strauss, Xenephons Hiero is conducted on exclusively hedonistic terms. The tyrant, as Strauss says, is eros incarnate. One dimension of this 24 L. Strauss, On Platos Symposium edited with a Foreword by Seth Bernadatte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 9. 25 Strauss, supra n. 4, 109; Zuckert, supra n. 4, 152. 26 L. Strauss, Of Tyranny revised and enlarged (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1983); compare with V. Gourevitch, Philosophy and Politics, I, in Review of Metaphysics, XXII/1 (September 1965), 69. 27 Strauss, ibid., 94. 28 Strauss, ibid., 7677. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 363 claim is that the tyrant is he who is most able, by dint of his political position, to indulge his own (bodily) desires, without care for any- thing that is common between subjects. 29 In a way that can make the reader think of Strauss Platonic reading of the birth of Nazi tyranny from the modern liberal-democratic spirit of Weimar, 30 Strauss suggests that since the bodily desires of the tyrant are the same type(s) of desires that also motivate the many, tyranny is naturally allied with rule by the hoi poloi or democracy. 31 What Simonides advises Hiero in Xenephons Hiero, in turn, is that happiness is what Jon Elster has termed a state that is essentially a by-product the tyrant can attain the most lasting happiness as a ruler, if he foregoes trying directly to satisfy these basic desires. 32 Instead, he should become what Strauss elsewhere calls a gentleman, 33 working to enhance the city so that he is admired by staging events, publicly rewarding honorable actions by subjects, and delegating to others the more unpalatable tasks of being a ruler. 34 The philosopher as an individual, for his part, would both mirror and differ strikingly from the tyrant he would advise. His exceptional status, certainly, does not turn for Strauss on the just ordering of his soul, if we read justice in either a Christian or Aristotelian sense, to indicate a wholly an-erotic austerity or moderation. For Strauss, following Plato, the philosopher is far from being an ascete. He is the most erotic type of individual. As Strauss comments, in a way that recalls Socrates enigmatic sayings on eros in the Symposium and Theages, only in philosophy does eros come fully into its own. 35 29 Cf. Gourevitch, supra n. 26, 7275. 30 Leo Strauss, Why We Remain Jews, in Deutsch et al. (eds.), Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker., 4546; Leo Strauss, Preface, Spinozas Critique of Religion, translated by E.M. Sinclair (New York: Scocken Books, 1965), 67. 31 Compare with Gourevitch, supra n. 26, 72. 32 Strauss, supra n. 26, 97. 33 For example, Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 142. 34 Compare with Gourevitch, supra n. 26, 6768. 35 Strauss, supra n. 24, 90. MATTHEW SHARPE 364 Moderation is a political virtue: one which as such pertains only to his speech or actions in the polis, not his thought. The philosophers thought should be immoderation itself, or, as Plato avows, a kind of mania. 36 One key stake of Strauss debate with Kojeve within Of Tyranny, then, is precisely the latters Hegelian equation of all human desire with the desire for recognition (see Conclusion). For Strauss, the philosophers desire, contra Kojeve, is the desire for a knowledge of what is good or admirable by itself - the best and most pleasant thing. 37 And this desire takes him far beyond the political level of the struggle for recognition. Indeed, it is the philosophers extra-political eros, for Strauss, rather than his civic virtue, that ts the philosopher to rule. This is because his eros makes him beyond or indierent to the goods whose possession stands as the proximate cause of all political dissension, not just the malaise of tyrants. Yet, in a way that is tragic if it is not the stu of Thracian or Aristophanic comedy, this elevated philosophic eros is at the same time the most far-reaching reason why the best politeia is impossible: We arrive then at the conclusion that the philosophers are unwilling to rule. / Why are they unwilling to rule? Being dominated by the desire, the eros, for knowledge as the most pleasant and blessed possession, the philosophers have no leisure for looking down at human aairs, let alone for taking care of them. 38 36 L. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? in What is Political Philosophy and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 32. Compare with A Giving of Accounts (with Jacob Klein): In other words, the virtue of a philoso- phers thought is a certain kind of mania [inspired frenzy], while the virtue of the philosophers public speech is sophrosyne [discretion or moderation]. Philosophy is as such transpolitical, transreligious, and transmoral, but the city is and ought to be moral and religious. . . . To illustrate this point, moral man, merely moral man, the kalosgathos in the common meaning of the term, is not simply closer to the phi- losopher than a man of the dubious morality of Alcibiades. in J. Klein and L. Strauss, A Giving of Accounts, in L. Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. K.H. Green (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 463; reprinted in The College (Annapolis and Santa Fe), 22/1 (1970), 4. 37 Strauss, supra n. 26, 105. 38 Srauss, supra n. 4, 125. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 365 In Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, that is, the philosophers are those who know what the real Thing or sovereign Good is that is, the philosophical way of life however this question might split other subjects. 39 One reason why the Politeias city in speech must then be unjust, for Strauss, is exactly that it does not do justice to the calling and eros of the philosopher. As Plato misquotes Pindar in the Gor- gias, the Law as such Leads with the strongest hand/Doing violence to the most just. 40 Strauss hence continues in City and Man in the following, telling terms: The philosophers believe that while still alive they are already rmly settled in the islands of the blessed. Hence only compulsion could induce them to take part in the public life in the just city... Having perceived the truly grand, the philosophers regard the human things as paltry. Their very justice their abstaining from wronging their fellow human beings ows from the contempt for the things for which the non- philosophers hotly contest. They know that the life not dedicated to philosophy and therefore even political life at its best is like life in a cave ... 41 We shall return to the matter of these formulations in Part IV. OF PROPHECY AND LAW It would not be overly ironic then to say, invoking Lacans Seminar XI, that in Strauss Platonic political philosophy, the relation between the philosopher and the city is a missed encounter. 42 The city, if it is to approach justice, needs to enlist the philosophers. Yet the phi- losophers desire something dierent again. Vitally, however, this missed encounter between the philosophers and the city is as it were a two-way street. It is not only that the philosophers have neither taste nor time for the ardors and perils of ruling, as we saw at the 39 Compare with Lacans comments on the summum bonum in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. These comments make a decisive conceptual link between the summum bonum of classical thought, and the maternal Ding or rst lost object in Freudian psychoanalysis. They also hence situate Lacans conception of psycho- analysis as post-Kantian, insofar as Kants moral philosophy, also, is predicated on the loss of immediate access to or knowledge of the highest good. Cf. A. Zupancic, Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 1999), esp. ch. 1. 40 Plato, Gorgias, 484b110; compare with G. Agamben, Homo Sacer translated by D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3035. 41 Srauss, supra n. 4, 125. 42 Compare with J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis translated by Allan Sheridan with a new introduction by D. Macey (Penguin: London, 1994), 5264. MATTHEW SHARPE 366 close of Part I. The many unwise, equally, have no taste to be ruled extra-legally by an elite few, however wise their claim. To cite Natural Right and History again: ... the few wise cannot rule the many unwise by force. The unwise multitude must recognize the wise and obey them freely because of their wisdom. But the ability of the wise to persuade the unwise is extremely limited ... the political problem consists of reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent. 43 It is precisely in the context of the resultant political need of tem- pering wisdom with consent, that the theoretical problematic which Strauss shares with Lacanian psychoanalysis comes most fully into frame namely, the status of the Law in its relation to desire or eros. This problematic marks both the closest proximity and the greatest distance between these two theoretical discourses: both are discourses whose proper eld or concern is the relation of the Law and what we might call, in the manner of Strauss, the erotic things. But in this way, this topic will also function in what follows as the hinge wherein the space for a genuinely critical reading of the one by the other can be opened. As Strauss commented in a discussion with Jacob Klein, morality does not represent the simply highest thing in his philosophy. 44 Once the natural right of the wise becomes the normative pivot of classical philosophy, indeed, as Natural Right and History makes clear: ... justice and moral virtue in general can be fully legitimated only by the fact that they are required for the sake of the ultimate end or that they are conditions of the philosophic life. From this point of view, the man who is merely just or moral without being a philosopher is a mutilated human being. 45 Strikingly, that is to say, Strauss return to Platonic political phi- losophy also involves a turn towards a nally instrumental weighing of the Law. 46 Morality and the laws of the polis are a means to an 43 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 141. 44 J. Klein and L. Strauss, A Giving of Accounts, in Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, supra n. 36, p. 4: Mr Klein and I dier regarding the status of morality ... in your scheme of things morality has a higher place than in my scheme. Compare Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 151152: The latter question can also be expressed by asking whether, by transforming opinion about morality into knowledge about morality, one does not transcend the dimension of morality in the politically relevant sense of the term. 45 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 141. 46 A point Hannah Arendt also makes in H. Arendt, What is Authority? in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 1993). LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 367 end that would transcend morality and the laws of the polis, according to Strauss reading of classical natural right. 47 In the words of Of Tyranny, the human problem cannot be solved at the political level; knowledge is intrinsically good, whereas action is not. 48 Now, by itself, as Jaa has pointed out, such a grounding of Law in something that transcends the Law (like revelation or physis) is not an unprecedented thing in fact, it characterizes both the classical and Judaeo-Christian heritages. However, as Strauss reading of the Hiero in Of Tyranny, or his reading of Platos Statesman 49 elaborate, his reading of the Platonic conception of Law is distinguished from more standard readings of either of these traditions. To take Strauss reading of the Statesman, it focuses in particular on the passages of the Politicus wherein Platos stranger takes up the problematic central to the Republic, and raised by Part I above: namely, the possibility of a coincidence between the rulers or makers of the law, and the wise philosophers. The few wise men in a polis cannot physically be everywhere, Plato observes. Hence, even if they could be forced or persuaded to risk political power, 50 there would be a need for laws to augment or supplement their wisdom. (There is here then a notable parallel to be drawn between Platos thought of Law and the Phaedrus position on the necessary shortcomings of writing compared to the spoken word.) 51 The many unwise who have neither sympathy towards the wise, nor understanding of their 47 See for example Harry Jaas precuse response to Shadia Drury, H. Jaa, Dear Professor Drury, in Political Theory. 15/3 (August 1987), 316325. Jaas response puts this case clearly, noting that, by itself, the thought that morality is transcended by something beyond law, if not good and evil, is shared between classical philosophy and revelation. 48 Strauss, supra n. 26, 27, 133, note 32; Gourevitch, supra n. 26, 76, 133, note 32. 49 A dialogue which, he argues, is both more sober and more scientic than the Republic L. Strauss, Plato, in L. Strauss and J. Cropsey, eds, History of Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 3rd edn), 69. 50 Compare with, for example, Strauss, supra n. 4, 125; Zuckert, supra n. 4, 147155. 51 Strauss, supra n. 4, 5260. MATTHEW SHARPE 368 wisdom, can equally be persuaded to accept the rule of the wise, Plato contends, if they see that the wise are also bound by the laws of the regime. 52 Despite this empirical or political necessity, however and this is the decisive thing to which we will return in Part III Plato yet persists in describing the Law as an obstinate and ignorant tyrant. 53 If it is necessary, this necessity is not ontological but political, and is only given grant by the existence of the unwise many. It remains strictly undesirable by itself, if not a necessary evil. Strauss, for his part, does not challenge or qualify these Platonic statements in History of Political Philosophy in any way. As we will examine below, indeed, in Natural Right and History Strauss concurs that the laws of any polis are at best rules of thumb toguide behavior. 54 ... all laws, written or unwritten, are poor substitutes but indispensable substitutes for the individual rulings by wise men. They are crude rules of thumb which are sucient for the large majority of cases: they treat human beings as if they were members of a herd. ... this necessity is the proximate cause of the ineradicable dierence between the political and the supra-political spheres. 55 The King in the best possible city, as the Eleatic stranger elaborates in the Statesman, has the right to justly change the laws or act against the laws, in what reads again like a classical anticipation of Schmitts position in Political Theology. 56 According to Strauss, nevertheless, certain it is that the rulers should not declare, if at all possible, that they are making exceptions to the rule of law, when these become necessary. As Strauss writes in Natural Right and History: Civil society is incompatible with any immutable rules, however basic; for in certain conditions the disregard of these rules may be needed for the basic preservation of society, but for pedagogic reasons, society must present as universally valid certain rules which are [only] generally valid ... the eectiveness of the general rules depends on their being taught without qualications, without ifs and buts. 57 52 Strauss, Plato, 75. 53 Plato, Statesman, trans. B. Jowett, at www site: http://eserver.org/philosophy/ plato/politicus.txt. 54 It is only after Machiavellis famous claim that dame fortuna can be tamed, Strauss argues, that it becomes possible to conceive of the notion of a political science which would control human fate, in a parallel with the newly emerging natural sciences. Compare with L. Strauss, Niccolo Machiavelli, in Strauss and Cropsey, eds, supra n. 49, 299300. 55 Strauss, Plato, supra n. 49, 75 (my italics). 56 Compare with Strauss, Plato, supra n. 49, 76. 57 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 158 (my italics). LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 369 It is the matter or meaning of this political pedagogy that most critics of Strauss nd hardest to accommodate. In order to under- stand adequately its bearing, I would however propose, we need to weigh how Strauss primitive Platonism is decisively informed by his early readings of prophetology in the medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers of Law. 58 Strauss late work, The Argument and Action of Platos Laws, emphasizes that Platos Laws opens with the word God; there is no other Platonic dialogue that opens in this manner. 59 But in his earlier works, Philosophy and Law and Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss had already stressed how the medievals readings of Platos texts were open to a political register of this corpus typically closed to modern interpretations. Platos Laws was read by Al Farabi and Maimonides as the work of prophecy par excellence, Strauss notes. In medieval Islam and Judaism (as against the Christian tradition), as Strauss stresses, the prophets were conceived not or not only as diviners of future things. Above all, they were gured as legislators. The nature of this political role, in turn, turned around an appreciation of the natural inequality between individuals foreign to modern philosophies. The divine Law, Al Farabi and Maimonides maintained, is beyond the comprehension of all but a few subjects. In order for it then to be conveyed to the unwise many, a gure will be needed who is able both to understand the divine Law, and also which is more politically important to present it in ways that the many can grasp. For the rst more theoretical task, the prophet is required to be intellectually perfect here is the point of parity with the philosopher. But for the second, practical task, perfection of the 58 Shadia Drury has charged that a principal shortcoming of Strauss position is how he deleteriously conceives of philosophy within the horizon of divine revelation. To emphasize, my contention here is dierent. What I instead propose is decisive is the lasting bearing Strauss reading of medieval prophetology had upon his philos- ophy of Law. Compare with Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, supra n. 3, 61. As Kenneth Hart Greens Jew and Philosopher has shown, however, this is a misreading the mantle of prophecy was rather what philosophy needed to don in order to survive in societies of revealed law. See K.H. Green, Jew and Philosopher: the Return of Maimomides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (Albany: NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), especially ch. 5. Compare with Strauss, Phi- losophy and Law, The Legal Grounding of Philosophy: The Commandment to Philosophise and the Freedom to Philosophise, 61 . Compare with, for example, Zuckert, supra n. 4, 105107. 59 L. Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Platos Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 2; compare with Zuckert, supra n. 4, 161. MATTHEW SHARPE 370 imagination is required, or the ability to present the Law in edifying stories concerning its meaning, its origin, and its ends. 60 Maimonides himself stated that the prophet should also himself be a believer and (hence) an eminently moral man. Yet, after 1936, Strauss came to suggest that this was Maimonides exoteric position only. In Philosophy and Law, Strauss already asserted that proph- ecy proper can only be radically understood from the context of politics. 61 His 1936 Remarks on the Political Science of Maimo- nides and Farabi, however, go one more, and more controversial, step further: ... it will be objected that the agreement between Plato and the prophets is specious, it being given that Plato afrms the dogma of particular providence only because of its political utility: a city governed by laws, and not by philosophers, cannot be perfect unless the belief that God rewards or punishes men according to their actions is there established. [Laws, 663d-e] We do not dispute this. But it is in precisely this sense that Maimonides accepts the biblical doctrine. 62 The prophet, as understood by Strauss, is thus an individual who, perhaps not believing himself, has the poetic ability to present the crude rules of thumb of the Law to the others as sacred, inviolable, unchangeable prescriptions [in a way] which would be rejected by everyone if done in the sciences and the arts. 63 In the terms of Platos cave myth, they are the artisans whose shapes cast the shadows onto the walls of the cave, like the poets in ancient Greece of such evident concern to Platos Socrates. The prophets or the legislators shape the opinions or doxa of those within the city: we need to remember that Solon presented his code of laws in poetic form, or the dierent appreciation of poetry Plato himself presents in the Nomoi. 64 But doxa as against truth or any episteme, Strauss argued throughout his work, is without exception the element of society. 65 With these necessary exegetical parameters in place, we can now turn to the critical argument. 60 Strauss, Philosophy and Law, supra n. 5, 103; cf. 50, 99103. 61 Strauss, Philosophy and Law, supra n. 5, 8587, 89, 9192, 9495, 9798. 62 Strauss, supra n. 6, 23 (my italics). 63 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 158. 64 Compare with Zuckert, supra n. 4, 156164: The Image of the Philosopher as Poetic Legislator in the Laws. 65 L. Strauss, Forgotten Kind of Writing, supra n. 1, 221222; compare with supra n. 26, 26: society will always tyrannise over thought. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 371 PRIMORDIAL REPRESSION AND PRIMITIVE PLATONISM In a way that arguably reects psychoanalysis own Judaic parentage, there is much in Strauss prophetological conception of the Law that mirrors psychoanalytic understandings. In Jacques Lacans later formulation, in particular, the agency of the Law is conceived as minimally double, in a way that strikingly resembles the division Strauss establishes between the Law as a set of general prohibitions, and its necessary imaginative or prophetic representation in stories concerning the Laws origins and meaning. 66 What Lacan called the symbolic Law (or the Law of the Other) is the social Law which is founded on the dual taboos of murder and incest, in the terms of Freuds own phylogenetic myth in Totem and Taboo. 67 According to Lacan, however, this symbolic Law can only exert its force upon individuals, or secure their identication, insofar as its agency is represented by them in fantasms which precisely (re)narrate its origins and represent to them what the Law means. 68 The most preeminent Lacanian political theorist, Slavoj Zizek, has arguably built his entire political theory around this dual Lacanian conception of the nature of the Law. 69 On the one hand, Zizek con- tends that any political regime is minimally bound by an explicit body of Laws that guarantee a minimum of civility. These are the symbolic Laws written down in the regimes founding documents and governing codes, like the stelai in front of the law courts that frame the action and the argument of Platos Euthyphro. On the other hand, however, Zizek has argued since his 1989 Sublime Object of Ideology that any regimes Laws will always have an unwritten and more or less implicit underside. Zizeks formalization of this supra-legal underside in terms of his post-Lacanian conception of ideological fantasy is in fact arguably his most original and most important contribution to political theory. According to Zizeks contention, each political 66 It is worthwhile to note the parallel, liminal status of law-maker as prophetic mythopoios and statesman in Strauss position. We cannot address this further here. 67 S. Freud, Totem and Taboo, in Penguin Freud Library Volume 13, The Origins of Religion (London: Penguin, 1990). 68 Compare with, especially, S. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), ch. 1. The brackets around (mis) in (mis)represent are not gratuitous. At one level, there is no accurate external representation of the law possible. This transcen- dental (hence non-empirical, non-phenomenal) aspect of the Law, in fact, is the pivotal issue here. 69 See, for example, chapter 2 of my Slavoj Zizek: A Little Piece of the Real (Ashgate: London, 2004). MATTHEW SHARPE 372 regime has its own dening set of ideological fantasies. These ideo- logical fantasies are nothing short of the dening stories or in classical terms the muthoi of the regime. They serve, rstly, to renarrate retrospectively the regimes foundations, in such a way that the violence of these foundations is concealed or repressed. 70 Sec- ondly, the regimes ideological fantasies frame for subjects how they should interpret the Laws frozen and forbidding letters. 71 In older philosophical language, we could describe Zizeks ideological fanta- sies of a regime as those doxa that give breath to lesprit des lois, and concrete content to the Laws abstract universality. For Zizek no less than for Strauss, it is this supra-legal or supple- mentary level of ideological fantasy andpolitical doxa that is decisive in understanding the agency of the Law. 72 With these parities established, however, the pivotal separation between Strauss philosophy of Law and the Lacanian understanding of Law needs to be precisely located. To not beat around the bush: from a Lacanian perspective, what is missing in Strauss account of the relation of philosophy and law is a registration of the sui generis status and dignity of Law as such. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, the decisive issue is that the agency of the Law is not something we could ever wholly take or leave, or speak of externally, according to a sovereign calculus of means and higher ends. Here again, or above all, one might suggest that psy- choanalysis Judaic heritage is evident. The speaking subject, as such, is the subject of the symbolic Law, according to Lacanian theory. In Kantian terms and Lacan stressed that it was Kants work that opened up le champ Freudien the agency of the Law upon the subject is transcendental. Interpellation or education into the Law, Lacan argued, involves a component of loss that is inelidable for all subjects if not exactly a fall. At the decisive point of its education, Lacanian psychoanalysis argues, the child must have been made, by force of social Law, to give up on its primordial wish to know and/or 70 Compare, for example, Strauss, Natural Right and History, supra n. 13, 15, especially note 24. See also L. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, (University of Chicago Press, 1995) 1314. 71 On the diachronic register of fantasy, in terms of the need to explain (away) the violence of a regimes origins, compare with, especially, S. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do (London: Verso, 2002, 2nd edn), ch. 5. For one of Zizeks more direct accounts of the role of fantasy in directing subjects on how to interpret the letters of the explicit or symbolic laws, see Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causation (London: Verso, 1994), ch. 3. 72 Compare with, especially, Zizek, Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causation ibid., ch. 3. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 373 to be the fully satisfying Thing (the phallus) for the mother. In exchange for the traumatic inscription of this rst prohibition or non! upon the subject, as Lacan famously puns, the child gets in exchange a nom or name. In patronymic societies, to wit, this is the sir-name, which situates the subject within the wider social order outside of her/ his family, because it delineates rigidly for them who and what they will by Law (not) be able to desire. In Lacans precise formulation: The effects on a human being of the fact that he becomes a subject of law are, in short, that he is deprived of what matters to him most and, in exchange, he is himself delivered over to the texture which is woven between generations. 73 The full effects of this position, which will deny the possibility that any individual or group of individuals can have immediate access to something truly grand, wholly above the Law, will become fully clear in Part IV. It is sucient to say at this point that this primordial repression of the childs desire to be the most blessed Thing exacted by the Law is what opens up the lack or beance, which Lacan takes to be constitutive of eros, no less than Diotima in Platos Symposium. 74 Given a Lacanian understanding of the force of Law, the issue is that Strauss Platonic conception of the nomoi as at best rules of thumb would disavow the necessary and traumatic force of Law. To say this is of course not to deny that Strauss was aware of the component of sacrice associated with being a political subject, which is (for example) one of the pivotal terms at issue in his brilliant 1932 criticism of Carl Schmitt, and of his wider position. Strauss lasting defense of religion or revelation as one of the two vital roots of Western humanity, moreover, is surely underlain by a deep sense of the salutary worth of religion, and the normative orientation it 73 Lacan, cited at S. Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996), 78. 74 Compare L. Strauss, On Platos Symposium, on Aristophanes. It is striking that Strauss seminar series on the Symposium was given at nearly the same time exactly as Lacans Seminar VIII On Transference, the rst half of which is on the same Platonic text. MATTHEW SHARPE 374 provides to the many in the face of the most extreme political or other circumstances. 75 What I mean to question critically is Strauss contention that the force of Law comes to it from its framing or presentation in salutary myths, without which its general rules must remain both saliently untrue, and decisively inecacious for the un- wise many. The stakes of Strauss conception of Law are made fully clear on the central page (p.162) of Natural Right and History. Echoing Platos Statesman, Strauss states in his own voice that the Law, in its aspi- ration to be general, is also thereby untrue: ... the effectiveness of the general rules [of a polis] depends on their being taught without qualications, without ifs and buts. But the omission of the qualications which makes the rules most eective makes them at the same time untrue. The unqualied rules are not natural right but conventional right. 76 The corollary of this position, as Strauss details, is exactly the prophetological conception of Law recounted in Part II. Since all laws must lay claim to generality, but unqualied or general laws can only be conventional, there will be a political need for pedagogic myths to conceal this merely conventional or untrue status from 75 Again, we began by recalling his classically sober appraisal of the limits of the political. One could point here also to Strauss times, and to his biography as a German Jewish emigre. One of the decisive points Strauss brings against Carl Sch- mitt, in his devastating comments on The Concept of the Political, is indeed that modern liberalisms anti-sacricial (and hence post-political) trajectory begins with Schmitts key source, Thomas Hobbes. His readings of both Thucydides and Aris- tophanes thus turn around a recognition of how subjects turn their belief towards the Gods not in order to do what they know they can do for themselves, but to determine the course of events they do not feel able to control, as Catherine Zuckert remarks. Compare with Zuckert, supra n. 4, 181. Here, indeed, Strauss approaches the materialist understanding of religion as illusion, as against error or lie, in Freud. Compare with S. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Penguin Freud Library Volume XII: Civilisation, Society and Religion translated by J. Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), especially ch. 3. As Slavoj Zizek comments concerning Strauss understanding of religion in his Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle: ... we should bear in mind here that, when Strauss is emphasizing the dierences between exoteric and esoteric teachings, he conceives of the opposition in a way which is almost the exact opposite of todays New Age propagation of esoteric wisdom: the content of New Age wisdom is some kind of spiritual higher reality accessible only to the initiated few, while common mortals see around them only vulgar reality; for Strauss, on the contrary, in a properly dialectical way, such narratives of a spiritual mystery would have been the very model of fables concocted ad captum vulgari. S. Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2004), 168. 76 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 158. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 375 the many. The pedagogic stories best secure the sanctity of Law, in turn, if they are prophetic in the sense Strauss understands Maimonides in and after his 1936 Remarks. To cite Natural Right and History again: If the principles valid in civil society are diluted natural right, they are much less venerable than if they were regarded as secondary natural right, i.e. as divinely established and involving an absolute duty for fallen man. Only in the latter sense is justice, as commonly understood, unquestionably good. 77 Again, it is precisely such a position that many of Strauss critics most vehemently decry. 78 The theoretical necessity of any such move is avoided, however, if we do not accept the way that Law as such is conceived here that is, as a set of norms that are more or less descriptively accurate or true to what is and might be the case. One can in fact see a paradoxical kind of continuity here between Strauss conception of what law would have to be, if it were to be true, with what Weber calls juridical formalism in Economy and Society: the distinctly modern liberal idea sponsored by Kelsen and others that the law ought to be a law without gaps. 79 In the terms of Natural Right and History, what is at issue is whether, by conceiving Law in this way, his account does not deny the possibility that the Law could be wholly noetically heterogenous to both theory and religious prophecy, such that it would never be just an untrue any more than a true set of norms that would describe the world. As Strauss occasional salutary remarks concerning the Law and the sacred would instead indicate (see Conclusion), political subjects rather experience the Law as belonging to an entirely dierent order than any such (true or false) empirical descriptions or predictions altogether. As Hobbes within the great Tradition also argued, that is (law in general is not counsel, but command 80 ), what denes the words of Law as Law is exactly the Laws performative force, or what is called 77 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 153. 78 ... the city cannot leave it at saying, for instance, that deception ... is bad in peace but praiseworthy in war. It cannot help viewing with suspicion the man who is good at deceiving, it cannot help regarding the devious or disingenuous ways which are required for any successful deception as simply mean or distasteful, Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 149. 79 M. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (1920) ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 979, cf. 656657, 758, 811. 80 T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. XXVI Of Civil Laws. Full text available at www- site http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-contents.html MATTHEW SHARPE 376 the force of law. Contra Plato or Strauss, the Law as Law is never then just or primarily decient theoria. It proximally shows itself, and is experienced by political subjects, as something that has always already been there, and as something whose prohibitive letters have laid a dening claim upon their being and identity. If it lacked this performative force, it would not be Law, good or bad. Ironically, then, both the parameters and the shortcomings of Strauss conception of Law as untrue in Natural Right and History are rendered apparent in Zizeks incisive account of the pathological narcissism characteristic of todays liberal subjects: ... we could also approach pathological narcissism on the basis of Saul Kripkes criticism of the theory of description... According to Kripke the name always functions as a rigid designator, referring to the same objects even if all properties contained in its meaning prove false. Needless to say, the Kripkean notion of the rigid designator overlaps perfectly with the Lacanian notion of the master signi- er. i.e. of a signier that does not denote some property of the object but estab- lishes, by means of its own act of enunciation, a new inter-subjective relation between speaker and hearer. If, for example, I tell someone you are my master, I confer upon him a certain symbolic mandate that is not contained in the set of his positive properties but results from the very performative force of my utterance, and I create thereby a new symbolic reality, that of a master-disciple relationship between the two of us. The paradox of the pathological narcissist is that, for him, language does indeed function according to the theory of descriptions: the meaning of words is reduced to the positive features of the denoted object ... 81 The Lacanian response when Strauss or Plato argues that the Law is untrue, and/or only a thing of hearsay, will accordingly be some- thing like an adaptation of the famous saying by Groucho Marx: why are you telling us, critically, that the Law is a thing of hearsay when the Law is exactly a thing of hearsay? According to Lacanian theory, that is, as subjects of Law, political subjects can never, fully, know what they do a moment of non-knowing is foundational for sub- jectivity as such. The founding force of Law is exactly to deny us immediate access (by sight or reason, the founding means of the philosopher) to that summum bonum (or Thing) that would fantas- matically have answered to our fondest eros. But, to refer to the quotation above, it is in the space of this founding ignorance or lack- of-knowledge that the need for and reality of social pacts, founded on 81 S. Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (USA: MIT Press, 1992), 103104. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 377 recognition or reconnaissance (as against connaissance), is to be structurally located in terms of an ontology of human things. 82 I would thus question Zizeks claim in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle that Strauss always wrote as though he was: ... aware of the ambiguity of the status of a secret: a secret is not only what a teacher knows but refrains from divulging to the non-initiated a secret is also a secret for the teacher himself, something that he himself cannot fully penetrate and articulate in conceptual terms. Consequently, a philosopher uses parabolic and enigmatic speech for two reasons: [rst] in order to conceal the true core from the common people, who are not ready for it; and [second] because such a speech is the only way to describe the highest philosophical content. 83 What is exactly most contestable in Strauss reading of the classical philosophers is how close it comes to occluding the sense that, as Zizek continues, the secrets of the Egyptians are secrets also for the Egyp- tians themselves. 84 Because his account lacks any registration of the transcendental force of Law-as-hearsay (not [un]true description) on the philosophical few as speaking beings, his position instead sails very close to the position that ancient philosophers recourse to enigmatic and parabolic speech was decisively (if not wholly) governed by contingent and political needs, as against any necessary or epistemo- logical lack that the philosophers would share with the many unwise. Zizek is much closer to the mark when he proposes that Strauss conception of the prophet-legislators as necessarily having to employ ruses, prove particular providence through interpreting acts of mercy and rage, and so on, is in itself a common idea. 85 What Zizek surely approaches here is a position he has defended since The Sub- lime Object of Ideology namely, that political regimes ideological fantasies or muthoi do not function primarily to get subjects to identify wholly with the regimes Laws (here he distances himself from 82 It is worth noting that this dimension of belief is what pertains to the perfor- mative dimension of language of how we do things with words [Austin]. As such, it sustains both the human capacity to make promises, and also the political realities of power, authority, and the irony or cynicism that can be played out between the lines, and which preoccupies Strauss hermeneutical texts. 83 Zizek, Iraq, supra n. 75, 167. 84 Zizek, Iraq, supra n. 75, 167. To wit, as we saw at the close of Part II, Of Prophecy and Law and above, Strauss argument seems rather to read as if the ancient philosophers recourse to enigmatic and parabolic speech was rather governed by needs and limitations which were solely contingent and political, not necessary and epistemological. 85 Zizek, Iraq, supra n. 75, 181 (italics mine). MATTHEW SHARPE 378 his teacher Althusser). Instead, their primary function is to aord to subjects a sense of distance, or of ideological distanciation, from the necessary and constitutive force of the Law. 86 In later modern liberal societies, Zizek follows Peter Sloterditj, we witness this ideological distantiation in something like a privileged instance, in the apparent cynicism of contemporary consumerist subjects towards all forms of public authority, bemoaned by conservative and progressive critics alike. 87 The deep falsity of this cynicism, Zizek contends, is indicated by the overwhelming conformism of these subjects, judged in terms of what they do, not what they say. 88 What these subjects miss and are encouraged to miss by the new marketings ubiquitous commodi- cation of dissent is the dimension and depth of their unconscious adherence to the Law. Liberal subjects, Zizek maintains, continue to believe in the law, and to be its subjects. It is just that this founding subjective belief is misrecognised by them as only characterizing the Others (or, in Heideggerian language, das man) supposed not to know the truth, which each takes himself to be lucidly aware of. The elementary stance of todays liberal subject, Zizek hence argues, is exactly a perception of her/himself as a nonconformist rebel who plays by the rules only instrumentally, in order to fulll her/his true self. The problem is that, in order to attain to any consistency (or have any success) at all, this subject-position must (pre)suppose that Others are nevertheless duped by the rules, and take them absolutely seriously. This is why Zizek claims that the modern liberal subject believes in the Law. He just believes through the Others. In exactly a parallel vein, then, perhaps we also have to contend that: ... the problem with Strauss is the status of his own texts ... what, precisely, is the esoteric teaching of Strauss books-say, of his Persecution and the Art of Writing, which is about the need to distinguish the esoteric and exoteric message of great works? There is only one consistent answer: the esoteric teaching here can be only the insuciency of the very distinction between esoteric and exoteric: namely, the scandalous fact that there is more truth in the public teaching than in the esoteric secret, that the very writers who endeavor to dupe the uneducated by encoding their true message are, in their turn, the ones who are truly duped. What, then, if the true secret of the Straussians (and, perhaps of Strauss himself), is not their secret disbelief, their cruel Nietzschean world-view, but their disavowed belief? 89 86 S. Zizek, with J. Butler and E. Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000), 103; Zizek, Plague, 21. 87 S. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 2830. 88 Ibid. 89 Zizek, Iraq, supra n. 75, p. 172. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 379 It is this critical thought whose dialectics I want to pursue now, in terms of the relations between Law and eros raised in Part I. IS THE LAW THE THING? Given the heated controversies that have attended the reception of Strauss work, it is worth emphasizing the difference of this Lacanian criticism of Strauss from other critical responses to his work. In particular, we are as far as possible from the widespread criticism that Strauss was an elitist. Rather, the claim is that, in a more profound sense, Strauss position is too common. His conception of the Law, which treats it as untrue and necessary only politically, in order to cater to and for the many unwise, is arguably itself untrue. It involves a false disavowal of the constitutive status of the law to political sub- jectivity as such. Ironically, given Strauss and his followers ardent criticisms of modern liberalism, it also mirrors the self-consciousness of subjects in modern liberal democracies, whose political doxa is also governed by what Jurgen Habermas has called civic privatism the false sense that the law is there for them, rather than their being subjects of the law. 90 Given the Lacanian theory of Law, by contrast, any subject-position that posits that a subject(s) could be wholly above the Law is unsustainable. The constitutive element of non-knowing or hearsay constitutive of the subject but disavowed by such a position can only return as it were by Law in telling symptomatic inconsistencies. The ethical falsity of the position of todays patho- logical narcissist, for example, is evident in how their strategic ap- proach to their careers, social life, and so on, presupposes for anything like its success on the supposition that others do not know what they are wise to that is, that the laws are rules of thumb only, that it is only good to appear honest in order to network and get ahead, and so on. The liar can only succeed by trading on the belief of others in the sincerity of his words. Arguably Zizeks most novel Lacanian proposal in political theory (which has been explored in particular by Robert Pfaller) is that political ideology does not pri- marily structure the beliefs political subjects entertain about them- selves. It primarily structures their beliefs concerning Others. To cite 90 J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis translated by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 37, 38, 7692. MATTHEW SHARPE 380 Zizek, the basic need of a human being is not to believe himself, but to have another subject who will believe for him. 91 ... perhaps the most succinct denition of ideology was produced by Christopher Hitchens, when he tackled the difcult question of what the North Koreans effectively think of their beloved leader, KimYong Il: mass delusion is the only thing that keeps the people sane. This paradox points towards the split in the heart of an effectively functioning ideology: individuals transpose their belief onto the big Other (embodied in the collective), which thus believes in their place individuals thus remain sane qua individuals, maintaining the distance towards the big Other of the ocial discourse. 92 The resemblance between this theoretical formulation, and Strauss theoretical understanding of the Law as untrue or necessary only for the many, is surely arresting. What though can we say, in its light, concerning the relation be- tween philosophy as an erotic thing and the Law, raised in Part I of this paper? The contention that I want to argue in Part IV is intro- duced if we stop to consider the strangeness of Strauss defence (if not practice) of the ancients forgotten art of esoteric writing, central to his rebirth of classical rationalism in post-World War II America. The strangeness of Strauss position concerns what such a defence can mean or bespeak in this permissive liberal age and regime, where the very political censorship (or persecution), which Strauss also shows us, historically necessitated this ancient practice simply no longer apply, and one can for instance openly publish articles praising counter-cultural or diabolical gures like Machiavelli, Nietzsche, if not Marx. As Zizek comments: [Strauss] problem is not that he tries to return to classical political thought at the end of modernity, and can do so only asserting the mechanism of the beautiful lie sustained by brutal esoteric knowledge; his problem is, rather, that this very dis- tinction between the exoteric beautiful lie and the esoteric terrifying truth, daring and shocking as it may appear, is hopelessly dated ... 93 In todays modern liberal or permissive society, that is, the persecu- tory agency of the Law facing ancient philosophers, which Persecution and the Art of Writing tells us necessitated their unusual mode of communication, is itself lacking. There is then an apparent contradic- tion between the content of Strauss position, to the extent that he 91 S. Zizek, Repeating Lenin, http://wwwlacan.com/replenin.htm accessed January 2002. 92 Zizek, ibid., 16 (my italics). 93 Zizek, Iraq, supra n. 75, 174 (my italics). LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 381 would defend or even practice esoteric writing a la Plato or Maimo- nides, and the historical situation in which he undertook this defense or practice. In this way, the question of the animating desire or eros of Strauss rebirth of classical philosophy, and of its relation to the Law, re-emerges as much more puzzling than it rst appears (see Part I). Strauss explicit position, as we saw in Part I, is that the phi- losophers eros drives him to search for the truth of physis or of the whole. The very pursuit of this Truth is the summum bonum or highest way of life, one which makes the things over which the unwise many dispute seem unimportant. In order to pursue this truth, however, the philosophers must reserve for themselves the right to call skeptically into question the founding stories of their cities, which in both the classical and the medieval periods under- girded the regimes Law[s]. [Part II] This pursuit, together with the natural right of the wise that sustains it, are in this way potentially dynamite for any closed city. This exigency explains both the persecution of philosophers in pre-modern regimes, and their need for esoteric writing techniques. One might, therefore, suppose that Strauss, himself a philosopher, might have celebrated the lifting of the prohibitions on free enquiry that modern liberalism has enacted, however critical he might have been of other aspects of the modern age. But certain it is that Strauss does not take this path. The entire critical weight of his work instead falls precisely on modern liberalism, which he contends vulgarizes both philosophy and (thus) the city itself. In Part II, we saw how Strauss explicitly maintains that closed Law, itself sub-philosophical, is necessary only for the unwise many, and an anerotic necessity for the philosophers, if it does not tyrannize over thought as such. The scandalous possibility that Strauss bearing towards modern liberalism however directly suggests is that this position involves a remarkable mis-statement or mesconaissance. What Strauss bearing towards modern liberalism rather indicates is that the real Thing of Straussian desire is not any esoteric wisdom beyond the all-too-rigid, always closed, Law. Rather, this most bles- sed thing is the censoring agency of the Law Itself. As Strauss com- ments in Persecution and the Art of Writing: ... the precarious status of philosophy in Judaism as well as in Islam was not in every respect a misfortune for philosophy. The ofcial recognition of philosophy in the Christian world made philosophy subject to ecclesiastical supervision. The precari- MATTHEW SHARPE 382 ous position of philosophy in the Islamic-Jewish world guaranteed its private character and therewith its inner freedom from supervision. 94 Here, then, we can nally appreciate the force of this papers title, and of its wider critical position. If philosophy, as Strauss conceives it, is indeed a matter not only of philia but also of eros (as per Part I), the paradoxical thing is that, in Strauss erotic economy, liberal tol- erance shows up as the most undesirable form of intolerance. Despite its good intentions, that is, Strauss argues that modern liberalism, threatens to remove the political conditions for the pursuit of phi- losophy 95 not less but more than the closed societies it historically supplanted in the West. Now, the only way that this position even makes sense is on the apparently very non-Straussian supposition that the Law is not an obstacle to, or instrument for, the attainment of some sovereign Good that would exceed it, but also the minimal precondition for the visage of the sovereign philosophical Good to be opened up at all as if that sovereign Thing, as Lacan argues, would only have been given a name (nom) as that which is prohibited (non!) by the Law. 96 (See III above.) According to Lacanian theory, then, however curious Strauss strange erotics of philosophy might appear, it is not an altogether unprecedented thing in the history of ideas. It nds its precedent in the tales of the troubadours, and the paradigm of courtly love. On the surface, these tales like Strauss philosophy also put on stage and lament a series of irksome necessities the knights incredible quests and tasks, and so on that apparently prevent the heroes from reaching the object of their highest eros. Yet in Seminar VII and Seminar XX, Lacan ventures to read this literary genre as harboring an ironic, if not esoteric, teaching about eros. According to Lacan, the obstacles these tall tales erect between the knights and their Ladies stand as a ruse. Their much-lamented agency in fact conceals a much deeper impasse that chacacterizes human eros as such namely, the fundamental impossibility that any one 94 L. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 23. 95 Zuckert, supra n. 4, 195. Zuckert argues that Strauss public position was to proceed ... by showing that reason could not disprove revelation ... to protect the grounds of popular morality and so the political conditions for the pursuit of phi- losophy as well as [my italics] the grounds for popular hope for happiness in the hereafter from the modern rationalist attack. 96 See, for example, Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, supra n. 94, 23. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 383 Lady or any one Thing, or way of, could fully satisfy human eros as such: It is a highly rened way of making up for (supplier a`) the absence of the sexual rapport by feigning that we are the ones who erect an obstacle thereto. It is truly the most amazing thing that has ever been attempted. 97 If there is any esoteric teaching of Strauss position, as both his critics and his supporters suppose, it accordingly turns out not to lie beneath the surface of his texts. It would lie on their surface or as Edgar Allen Poes Purloined Letter also would suggest exactly where we would not think to look because it was right in front of our eyes. The reason for this ironic exigency, also, would not be coinci- dental, given a Lacanian account of the dialectical relation between Law and eros. It would concern exactly that topic, which we have examined at the heart of this essay, namely the philosophy of Law and of its relation to eros. The deepest dialectical consequence of the Lacanian conception of the Law as necessary or transcendental for all subjects, that is, is not simply that all humans tend to desire what is named by the Law as prohibited or o limits. More deeply, human eros is caused by the Law. The Lacanian position is indeed that the very space for subjects fantasmatic beliefs or doxa concerning a fully satisfying Thing is in fact opened by the founding prohibitions of social law whether this Thing would be philosophy as a way of life or a courtly Lady. As Lacan paraphrases another ancient source, Saint Paul, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know the Thing by means of the Law. In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadnt said: Thou shalt not covet it. But the Thing nds a way by producing in me all sorts of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. But even without the Law, I was once alive. But when the commandment appeared, then the Thing ared up, returned once again, I met my death. And for me, the commandment that was supposed to lead to life turned out to lead to death, for the Thing found a way and thanks to the commandment seduced me; through it I came to desire death. 98 97 J. Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX edited by J-A. Miller, translated with notes by B. Fink (New York, London: W.W. Norton, 1998), 69. 98 J. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Book VII edited by J-A. Miller, trans- lated by D. Porter (New York, London: WW. Norton, 1997) 83. MATTHEW SHARPE 384 CONCLUDING REMARKS: OF EROS AND ITS VICISSITUDES In his Restatement on Xenephons Hiero, Strauss at one point criticizes Kojeve on the ground that Kojeves teacher Hegel, like Hobbes, constructs human society by starting from the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints .... 99 As we have now seen, our posi- tion is unfaithfully faithful to Strauss on precisely this point. However things stand with Hegel or Hobbes, we have argued, Strauss in his conception of philosophers himself conceives of men who, while aware of sacred restraints, are not deeply bound by their force, since they know that the general laws are untrue. What is accordingly lost to Strauss position is the dialectical logic inherent in a dierent Hegelian teaching, from the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is the doctrine Hegel puts against Kant concerning the Thing-in-Itself supposedly lost to subjects through the mediation of understanding or in Lacanian language, through the mediation of the Law. In He- gels words, such an object ... only comes to be through being left behind, or being proscribed by the transcendental agency of (social) mediation. 100 If, accordingly, this prohibition is somehow occluded, what follows is not access to the forbidden, most blessed Thing. Lacan, for these reasons, went so far as to contradict Dostoevskys anxiety that without God as sanction of the Law nothing is prohib- ited, to say instead that without God, nothing at all is permitted! 101 What the psychoanalytic clinic attests, he means, is that subjects who have not fully acceded to this Law are instead the subjects of nothing more noble than inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety, or worse. As Lacan argued in Kant Avec Sade, even sadism in this light is very far from the blissful living out of what most subjects can only fantasize about. Instead, since for the perverse subject the Law itself is absent or a lost object, his eros becomes slavishly tied to the ritualised re- staging (witness the notorious variations on a theme in Sade) of ... the act of castration ... the primordial loss which allows the subject to enter the symbolic order of Law: 99 L. Strauss, Restatement on Xenophons Hiero, in On Tyranny, supra n. 26, 192. 100 Zizek, Plague of Fantasies, supra n. 68, 13. 101 Lacan, at Zizek, Plague of Fantasies, supra n. 68, 77. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 385 ... the irony of this should not escape us: the pervert, this transgressor par excellence who purports to violate all the rules of normal and decent behavior, eectively longs for the very rule of Law. 102 To underscore, one more time then, the law of our position here, as it were: our criticism of Strauss work does not enter into well-worn debates about Strauss interpretive methodology. Nor do we contest what he claims this methodology allows us to discover about the ancients. Politically, we do not charge against Strauss any kind of elitism, or that the politics of his position is governed by any esoteric secret perhaps unwritten?, etc. teachings. Our issue is rather with Strauss philosophy of Law: what is arguably the pivot of his own position, both historically and philosophically. At this level, we do not bring against Strauss a relativistic position that bemoans that Strauss claims to uncover an unhistorical Truth, as if this could be nally avoided. Equally, we do not presuppose as unquestionable the doxa of the contemporary liberal-democratic cave, as if this political regime were either the end of history, or without limitations of its own. Rather, we assert that Strauss philosophy of Law, which ends by viewing it as a practically salutary but theoretically untrue necessity, is false to its object. The Law, we propose, is the Law, to paraphrase Exodus, 3:14. The traumatic abyss intimated in the rep- etition of the subject as its own predicate in this biblical declaration, for us, would indicate how, at its base, the Law is necessary, not contingent, and (so) that it holds for all speaking subjects as such. 103 The pre-modern heritage of this notion, of course, is not Greek. It is Jewish, and it is carried through into Christianity in the notion of original sin and the Paulinian-Augustine teaching concerning con- cupiscence. Strauss denial of this necessity in his conception of the philoso- pher as a sovereign exception, we nally propose, necessarily results by Law in notable inconsistencies in his position of theoretical enunciation. The rst of these is that, as with any subject-position, which would disavow the constitutive role of hearsay in human subjectivity, this position receives this disavowed belief back from the Other in an inverted form. In the case of Strauss, it can thus be said that politically that is, within the polis he did remain a true believer 102 Zizek, Plague of Fantasies, supra n. 68, 14. It is interesting that Zizeks dis- cussion of Strauss ends by recourse to Lacans Kant With Sade, although Zizeks position is arguably unclear at this point. See Zizek, Iraq, supra n. 75, 182 . 103 Compare with S. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do, supra n. 71. MATTHEW SHARPE 386 in closed Law, and not only because his criticism of permissive modern liberalism reads every bit as if he did believe, in his own name. It is also because Strauss, here at least like modern liberal subjects, truly believed in the Law, through the unwise many Others supposed not to know. Finally, in this light, a new perspective is thrown on Strauss renowned political conservatism or ultra-conservatism. 104 This politics is even bemoaned by his students, Stanley Rosen and Law- rence Lampert, as imprudently outdated in later modernity, if it does not itself endanger philosophy at the hands of revelation. 105 For us, Strauss political opposition to the possibility that Lawrence Lampert for one wants to open namely, that the type of fearless intellectual probity Nietzsche defended might found a new politics is necessary to Strauss position. Its deepest source is Strauss desire to preserve Platonic political philosophy as the erotic Thing. It is just that, as Strauss own statements concerning the non-existence of the Platonic Ideas or any set of right rules prescribed in Nature might have led us to reect, 106 the most exceptional thing about this philosophers Thing appears to have escaped Strauss himself. In a truly amazing exigency, philosophys very status as exceptional would be sustained by the Law that it ostensibly lives by denying or calling into question, and whose closure would see philosophers always exposed to cen- sorship and persecution. 104 A. Sollner, Leo Strauss: German Origin and American Impact, in P.G. Kielmansegg et al. (eds.) Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigres and American Political Thought Since World War II (USA: Universty of Cambridge, 1995), 133. 105 S. Rosen, The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry (Routledge: New York, 1993), vii: This is not the place to describe the itinery to which the present author was led by dissatisfaction with Strauss Farabian concealment of the dilemma of decadence. The extraordinary achievement of Leo Strauss must not be minimised. But on Strauss own account, they exhibit an impasse between reason and revelation, which by the nature of the claims of each, gives the edge to revelation. Stated with the brevity appropriate to a preface, this awards the victory to poetry. See also L Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 5. 106 Strauss, supra n. 4, 9899, 120121; Cf. T. Pangle, Introduction to L. Strauss, Studies in Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p.3; Zuckert, supra n. 4, 150151, 154. LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 387 But this makes the question of the philosophers eros a dierent thing again. MATTHEW SHARPE School of International and Political Studies Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy Deakin University, Pigdons Road, Geelong, VIC, 3217, Australia MATTHEW SHARPE 388