The Philosopher's Courtly Love: Leo Strauss, Eros, and the Law

MATTHEW SHARPE

THE PHILOSOPHER’S COURTLY LOVE? LEO STRAUSS,

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 drawingon recent theoretical work in psychoanalytic theory, conceived after Jacques Lacanas another, avowedly non-historicist theory of Law and its relation to eros. The

paper has four parts. Part I, ‘The Philosopher’s Desire: Making an Exception, or‘‘The Thing Is...’’’, recounts Strauss’ central account of the complex relationshipbetween 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 intostriking proximity with the Lacanian-psychoanalytic account of the dialectic ofdesire and the Law. Part II, ‘Of Prophecy and Law’, examines Strauss’ analysis

of Law as first presented in his 1935 book, Philosophy and Law, and central to hislater ‘rebirth of classical political philosophy’. Part III, ‘Primordial Repression andPrimitive Platonism’, is the central part of the paper. Lacan’s psychoanalyticunderstanding 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 istranscendental to subjectivity, and has a founding symbolic force, which mitigatesagainst 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 whateros 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 justification for this ancient practice.

KEY WORDS: belief, courtly love, Law, Philosophy, Prophecy, Strauss, the many,

the Other

Les non-dupes errent, Jacques Lacan

JustwhowasLeoStrauss anyway? Is there anychance that hewill bebornposthumously ashimself? A different self than he seemed? Lawrence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche

The supposed influence of ‘Straussians’ on the current Bush admin-istration has revived much older debates about political theorist LeoStrauss’ ‘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: 357–388 � Springer 2006DOI 10.1007/s10978-006-9001-3

modernity wrote two-layered or ‘esoteric’ texts has been attacked asinviting hermeneutic chaos, or wilful projections onto classical sour-ces.1 Critics have charged that Strauss’ reading of Platonic philoso-phy, which significantly challenges the hegemonic reading ofPlatonism as an other-worldly metaphysics, is untenable.2 Strauss hasbeen charged with corrupting the American youth in his teaching postat Chicago, and of preaching a politically dangerous elitism at oddswith the Lockean principles of American liberalism. In line with thisimputed ‘elitism’, Strauss has been criticised for reviving the Platonicdoctrine of the noble lie,3 despite the fact that Plato’s ‘support’ for thisdoctrine is found in the heart of the Republic’s defence of the ‘city inspeech’, which Strauss argued is something like a gigantic reductio adabsurdum of the notion that philosophers can justly rule.4

Each of these criticisms has been spiritedly rebutted by defendersof Strauss, not least because they each serve to elide the genuine forceand challenge of Strauss’ work. One topic that Strauss’ manifoldcritics 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 Plato’sNomoi. In 1935, Strauss published Philosophy and Law, a series of‘preliminary reflections’ on the nature of philosophy in the work ofMaimonides, Averroes, Avicenna, and Al Farabi, all theoristsworking 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 YorkReview of Books, 32 (30 March, 1985); Cf. L. Strauss, ‘‘On a Forgotten Kind ofWriting’’, Chicago Review, Winter/Spring 1934; D.L. Levine, ‘‘Without Malice But

With Forethought: A Response to Burnyeat’’, in K.L. Deutsch and W. Negorskieds., Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker (Lanham, MD: RowmanLittlefield, 1994); S. Drury, ‘‘The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss’’ (London: St.

Martin’s, 1988), 11.2 For example, J. Gunnell, ‘‘The Myth of the Tradition’’, American Political

Science Review 72 (March 1978); Levine, supra n. 1, 361–368; N. Tarcov, ‘‘On aCertain Critique of Straussianism’’, in Deutsch et al., supra n. 1, 259–274.

3 For example, by Drury, in supra n. 1, ch. 2; S. Drury, Leo Strauss and the

American Right (London: St Martin’s Press, 1999), ch.2.4 Compare with L. Strauss, City and Man, ch. 2, ‘‘On Plato’s 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 SHARPE358

Law in these writers that Strauss indeed came to his discovery of ‘theart of writing’, as indicated by his 1936 article ‘Quelques Remarquessur la Science Politique de Maimonides et de Farabi’ (see Part IIbelow).6 Strauss’ understanding of Law is of course taken very seri-ously by legal scholars as discernibly non-�Straussian’ as CostasDouzinas.7 Straussians, including Harry Jaffa and William Kendall,have made significant contributions to debates concerning theAmerican founding, and the spirit of its laws.8

This essay poses a critical response to Strauss’ political philosophythat takes as its primary object Strauss’ philosophy of Law. It doesthis by drawing on recent theoretical work in psychoanalytic theory,conceived after Jacques Lacan as another, avowedly non-historicisttheory 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 closereading, and the often acrimonious controversies that surround hiswork. These parts serve to establish in some detail Strauss’ under-standing of the relation between Law and eros that will be critiqued inthe second half of the paper (Parts III and IV).

Part I, ‘The Philosopher’s Desire: Making an Exception, or ‘TheThing 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, whichis that aspect of his work that brings it into striking proximity withthe Lacanian-psychoanalytic account of the dialectic of desire and theLaw.10 Part II, ‘Of Prophecy and Law’, examines Strauss’ analysis ofLaw as first presented in his 1935 book, Philosophy and Law, andcentral to his later ‘rebirth of classical political philosophy’. Part III,‘Primordial Repression and Primitive Platonism’, is the central partof the paper. Lacan’s psychoanalytic understanding of Law isbrought 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, 3–30.7 C. Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart, 2000).8 For example, H. Jaffa, American Conservatism and the American Founding

(Durwitz N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1984)), W. Kendall, The ConservativeAffirmation in America (Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1985).

9 Compare with, for example, J. Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against theHistoricists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

10 Compare with J. Lacan, Seminaire VIII: Le Transfert, whose first twelve ses-sions are a reading of Plato’s Symposium.

LEO STRAUSS, EROS, AND THE LAW 359

of the position is ultimately how, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, theLaw is transcendental to subjectivity, and has a founding symbolicforce, which mitigates against speaking of it solely or primarily interms of more or less inequitable ‘rules of thumb’, as Plato did. PartIV, ‘Is the Law the Thing?’ then asks the question of what eros mightunderlie Strauss’ paradoxical defense of esoteric writing in the age of‘permissive’ modern liberalism – that is, outside of the ‘closed’ socialconditions which he, above all, alerts us to as the decisive justificationfor this ancient practice.

As theConclusion defends, I contend that Strauss’ understanding ofphilosophical eros is an instance of the properly dialectical logic ofcourtly love, as read byLacan inSeminarsVII andXX. In this logic, theLaw that Strauss laments as tyrannizing over thought becomes, iron-ically, the cause of the philosopher’s eros. But now I turn tomy subject.

THE PHILOSOPHER’S DESIRE: MAKING AN EXCEPTION, OR THE THING IS ...

A significant difficulty facing many of Strauss’ left-liberal critics isthat the centre-piece of his rereading of Plato, the reading of theRepublic in City and Man,11 closely resembles criticisms of modernideocratic politics that have attained hegemonic status within thewider Western humanities after World War II. In parity with Der-rida’s or Levinas’ different critiques of Western philosophy, orLyotard’s avowal of the end of meta-narratives, Strauss reads Plato’sRepublic as a corrective to all ‘idealistic’ attempts to demand toomuch from politics via philosophy:

Xenophon tells us that Socrates ... cured [Plato’s brother, Glaucon, a key interloc-utor in the action of the Republic] of his extreme political ambition ... Certain it isthat the Republic supplies the most magnificent cure ever devised for every form of

political ambition.12

Yet, unlike the ‘post-structuralists’, Strauss does not draw from thisreading of the Politeia – or of ‘the political’ as such – anything like apost-modernist or post-Heideggerian view of philosophy as limited

11 Compare with A. Bloom, ‘‘Interpretive Essay’’, in The Republic of Plato 2ndedition, translation with notes and an interpretive essay by Allan Bloom (USA: BasicBooks, 1981); Zuckert, supra n. 4, 146.

12 Strauss, supra n. 4, p. 65; Zuckert, supra n. 4, 149.

MATTHEW SHARPE360

only to the sceptical undoing of all claims to Truth, or to preparingthe site for the epochal emergence of some new god or gods.13 Withregard to ‘the city’, equally, Strauss refuses to sponsor a Millsean-type position that the inaccessibility of an Absolute PoliticalKnowledge legislates the desirability of an open and pluralistic publicor political sphere. Despite the claims of critics like Peter Levine,Strauss is not a Nietzchean perspectivist posing ‘nobly’ as a PlatonicAristotelian, or an orthodox Jewish theologian.14 There is a naturalright that does, and ought to have a political bearing, for Strauss,however different his understanding of this Right is from more ‘or-thodox’ readings of Plato.15 The thing is that, to invoke Plato’s caveallegory from the start of Book VII of the Republic, the philosopherwho has seen the light of natural right beyond the city must descendagain into the city.16 Accordingly, the light of this natural Right mustitself 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 ofa natural law (nomos tes phuseos) was ‘a contradiction in terms’.17

And herein, in Hamlet’s 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 isneither an Aristotelian teleology nor any normatively orienting Pla-tonic doctrine of Ideas? Near to the heart of Natural Right andHistory, Strauss tells us in the midst of a celebrated commentary on‘classical natural right’ that ‘there is a universally valid hierarchy ofends’. He lists these as wisdom, then justice, then ‘public safety’, aregime’s independence as a political whole.18 Nevertheless, as Strauss

13 Compare with L. Strauss, ‘‘An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism’’, inThe Rebirth of Classical Rationalism edited with an introduction by T. Pangle(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); also ‘‘Relativism’’, in ibid., andL. 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, 98–99, 120–121; Compare with T. Pangle, ‘‘Introduction’’ to

Leo Strauss, Studies in Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1983), 3; Zuckert, supra n. 4, 150–151, 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 ff.

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.


goes on immediately to qualify, if there is thus a natural hierarchy ofends, there are ‘no valid rules of action’ that would hold for allcases.19

The enigma wrapped in these contrary (not contradictory) state-ments unfolds in the light of Strauss’ reading of Aristotle’s teachingon 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 first is that, in line with the teaching ofPlato’s Republic, there is no ‘simply best’ regime for all times andplaces. There are rather a variety of legitimate regimes, which each‘dilute natural right’ in compromise with relevant necessities andlimiting circumstances.20 The second ‘more surprising’ Aristotelianassertion is that ‘all natural right is changeable’: as Strauss repeats,‘Aristotle says explicitly that all right – hence all natural right – ischangeable: he does not qualify that statement in any way’.21

At issue here is how, in ‘certain conditions’, it may always becomenecessary to qualify or violate the ordinary rule of law in a city, if thiscity’s very survival is at stake. To quote the decisive text at length:

Justice has two different principles or sets of principles: the requirements of publicsafety, or what is necessary in extreme situations to preserve the mere existence orindependence of society, on the one hand, and the rules of justice in the more precisesense on the other. And there is no principle which defines 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 define precisely what constitutes an extreme situation incontradistinction 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 ofprevious experience, could reasonably be regarded as a normal situation into anextreme 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 weshould do, or what form of regime is best absolutely, it neverthelessdoes 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, 156–157.21 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 SHARPE362

Thus the question arises as to what is the best regime. The first answer given by suchmen 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 responsibleto 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 ostensiblylegislates by itself, to a natural right that legislates only who it is thatshould legislate. This shift is facilitated by reference to extremenecessity, in a way that in fact mirrors or evokes the terms of Sch-mitt’s 1923 Political Theology.

Strauss’ position, in its way, draws a political conclusion fromwhat seems in Plato’s Republic to justify a turn away from politicsaltogether: namely, the notion of Book IV, that justice is only pos-sible within a certain type of individual, not any political regime.25 Itis a striking feature of Strauss’ Of Tyranny, in line with this Platonicturn, that his understanding of political tyranny is developed througha reading of Xenophon’s Hiero – a dialogue between the ‘wise’ Si-monides and the tyrant Hiero, as to what is the best form of life forindividual men.26 The tyrant in Strauss’ On Tyranny is not con-demned, as a modern might naively expect, on grounds of any crimess/he might have committed in her/his quest for and exercise of power.Towards the centre of the essay, indeed, Strauss makes clear thattyranny differs only ‘by degree’ from other forms of rule.27 In thecentral chapter (‘The Teaching Concerning Tyranny’), Strauss noteshow, according to the classical-Platonic tradition:

... the rule of a tyrant who, after coming to power by means of force or fraud, orhaving committed any number of crimes, listens to the suggestions of reasonablemen, 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,Xenephon’s Hiero is conducted on exclusively ‘hedonistic terms’. Thetyrant, as Strauss says, is ‘eros incarnate’. One dimension of this

24 L. Strauss, On Plato’s 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’’, inReview of Metaphysics, XXII/1 (September 1965), 69.

27 Strauss, ibid., 94.28 Strauss, ibid., 76–77.


claim is that the tyrant is he who is most able, by dint of his politicalposition, to indulge his own (bodily) desires, without care for any-thing that is common between subjects.29 In a way that can make thereader think of Strauss’ Platonic reading of the birth of Nazi tyrannyfrom the modern liberal-democratic spirit of Weimar,30 Strausssuggests that since the bodily desires of the tyrant are the same type(s)of desires that also motivate ‘the many’, tyranny is naturally alliedwith rule by the hoi poloi or democracy.31 What Simonides advisesHiero in Xenephon’s Hiero, in turn, is that happiness is what JonElster has termed ‘a state that is essentially a by-product’ – the tyrantcan attain the most lasting happiness as a ruler, if he foregoes tryingdirectly to satisfy these basic desires.32 Instead, he should becomewhat Strauss elsewhere calls a ‘gentleman’,33 working to enhance thecity so that he is admired – by staging events, publicly rewardinghonorable actions by subjects, and delegating to others the moreunpalatable tasks of being a ruler.34

The philosopher as an individual, for his part, would both mirrorand differ strikingly from the tyrant he would advise. His exceptionalstatus, certainly, does not turn for Strauss on the just ordering of hissoul, if we read ‘justice’ in either a Christian or Aristotelian sense, toindicate a wholly an-erotic austerity or moderation. For Strauss,following Plato, the philosopher is far from being an ascete. He is themost erotic type of individual. As Strauss comments, in a way thatrecalls Socrates’ enigmatic sayings on eros in the Symposium andTheages, ‘only in philosophy does eros come fully into its own’.35

29 Cf. Gourevitch, supra n. 26, 72–75.30 Leo Strauss, ‘‘Why We Remain Jews’’, in Deutsch et al. (eds.), Leo Strauss:

Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker., 45–46; Leo Strauss, ‘‘Preface’’, Spinoza’sCritique of Religion, translated by E.M. Sinclair (New York: Scocken Books, 1965),6–7.

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, 67–68.35 Strauss, supra n. 24, 90.

MATTHEW SHARPE364

Moderation is a political virtue: one which as such pertains only tohis speech or actions in the polis, not his thought. The philosopher’sthought should be immoderation itself, or, as Plato avows, a kind ofmania.36 One key stake of Strauss’ debate with Kojeve within OfTyranny, then, is precisely the latter’s Hegelian equation of all humandesire with the desire for recognition (see Conclusion). For Strauss,the philosopher’s desire, contra Kojeve, is the desire for a knowledgeof what is good or admirable by itself - ‘the best and most pleasantthing’.37 And this desire takes him far beyond the political level of thestruggle for recognition. Indeed, it is the philosopher’s extra-politicaleros, for Strauss, rather than his civic virtue, that fits the philosopherto rule. This is because his erosmakes him beyond or indifferent to thegoods whose possession stands as the proximate cause of all politicaldissension, not just the malaise of tyrants. Yet, in a way that is tragicif it is not the stuff of Thracian or Aristophanic comedy, this elevatedphilosophic eros is at the same time the most far-reaching reason whythe best politeia is impossible:

We arrive then at the conclusion that the philosophers are unwilling to rule. / Whyare 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 forlooking down at human affairs, let alone for taking care of them.38

36 L. Strauss, ‘‘What is Political Philosophy?’’ in What is Political Philosophy andOther Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 32. Compare with ‘‘AGiving of Accounts’’ (with Jacob Klein): ‘‘In other words, the virtue of a philoso-pher’s thought is a certain kind of mania [inspired frenzy], while the virtue of the

philosopher’s public speech is sophrosyne [discretion or moderation]. Philosophy is assuch transpolitical, transreligious, and transmoral, but the city is and ought to bemoral 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.


In Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, that is, the philosophers are thosewho know what the ‘real Thing’ or sovereign Good is – that is, thephilosophical way of life – however this question might split othersubjects.39 One reason why the Politeia’s ‘city in speech’ must then beunjust, for Strauss, is exactly that it does not do justice to the callingand eros of the philosopher. As Plato misquotes Pindar in the Gor-gias, the Law as such ‘Leads with the strongest hand/Doing violenceto the most just’.40 Strauss hence continues in City and Man in thefollowing, telling terms:

The philosophers believe that while still alive they are already firmly settled in the

‘islands of the blessed’. Hence only compulsion could induce them to take part in thepublic life in the just city... Having perceived the truly grand, the philosophers regardthe human things as paltry. Their very justice – their abstaining from wronging their

fellow human beings – flows from the contempt for the things for which the non-philosophers hotly contest. They know that the life not dedicated to philosophy andtherefore 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 Lacan’s SeminarXI, that in Strauss’ Platonic political philosophy, the relation betweenthe philosopher and the city is a ‘missed encounter’.42 The city, if it isto approach justice, needs to enlist the philosophers. Yet the phi-losophers desire something different again. Vitally, however, this‘missed encounter’ between the philosophers and the city is as it werea ‘two-way street’. It is not only that the philosophers have neithertaste nor time for the ardors and perils of ruling, as we saw at the

39 Compare with Lacan’s comments on the summum bonum in Seminar VII: TheEthics of Psychoanalysis. These comments make a decisive conceptual link betweenthe summum bonum of classical thought, and the maternal Ding or first ‘‘lost’’ object

in Freudian psychoanalysis. They also hence situate Lacan’s conception of psycho-analysis as post-Kantian, insofar as Kant’s moral philosophy, also, is predicated onthe 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, 484b1–10; compare with G. Agamben, Homo Sacer translatedby D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 30–35.

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), 52–64.

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close of Part I. The ‘many unwise’, equally, have no taste to be ruledextra-legally by an elite few, however wise their claim. To cite NaturalRight and History again:

... the few wise cannot rule the many unwise by force. The unwise multitude mustrecognize the wise and obey them freely because of their wisdom. But the ability ofthe 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 whichStrauss shares with Lacanian psychoanalysis comes most fully intoframe – namely, the status of the Law in its relation to desire or eros.This problematic marks both the closest proximity and the greatestdistance between these two theoretical discourses: both are discourseswhose proper field or concern is the relation of the Law and what wemight call, in the manner of Strauss, the ‘erotic things’. But in thisway, this topic will also function in what follows as the hinge whereinthe space for a genuinely critical reading of the one by the other canbe opened.

As Strauss commented in a discussion with Jacob Klein, moralitydoes not represent the simply highest thing in his philosophy.44 Oncethe natural right of the wise becomes the normative pivot of classicalphilosophy, indeed, as Natural Right and History makes clear:

... justice and moral virtue in general can be fully legitimated only by the fact thatthey 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 moralwithout 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 finally instrumental weighingof 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 differ regarding thestatus of morality ... in your scheme of things morality has a higher place than in my

scheme.’’ Compare Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 151–152: ‘‘The latter questioncan also be expressed by asking whether, by transforming opinion about moralityinto 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).


end that would transcend morality and the laws of the polis,according to Strauss’ reading of classical natural right.47 In thewords of Of Tyranny, ‘the human problem cannot be solved at thepolitical level’; ‘knowledge is intrinsically good, whereas action isnot’.48 Now, by itself, as Jaffa has pointed out, such a grounding ofLaw in something that transcends the Law (like revelation or physis)is not an unprecedented thing – in fact, it characterizes both theclassical and Judaeo-Christian heritages. However, as Strauss’reading of the Hiero in Of Tyranny, or his reading of Plato’sStatesman49 elaborate, his reading of the Platonic conception ofLaw is distinguished from more standard readings of either of thesetraditions.

To take Strauss’ reading of the Statesman, it focuses in particularon the passages of the Politicus wherein Plato’s stranger takes up theproblematic central to the Republic, and raised by Part I above:namely, the possibility of a coincidence between the rulers or makersof the law, and the wise philosophers. The few wise men in a poliscannot physically be everywhere, Plato observes. Hence, even if theycould be forced or persuaded to risk political power,50 there would bea need for laws to augment or supplement their wisdom. (There ishere then a notable parallel to be drawn between Plato’s thought ofLaw and the Phaedrus’ position on the necessary shortcomings ofwriting compared to the spoken word.)51 The many unwise who haveneither sympathy towards the wise, nor understanding of their

47 See for example Harry Jaffa’s precuse response to Shadia Drury, H. Jaffa,‘‘Dear Professor Drury’’, in Political Theory. 15/3 (August 1987), 316–325. Jaffa’sresponse 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 betweenclassical 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 scientific’’ 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,

147–155.51 Strauss, supra n. 4, 52–60.

MATTHEW SHARPE368

wisdom, can equally be persuaded to accept the rule of the wise, Platocontends, if they see that the wise are also bound by the laws of theregime.52 Despite this empirical or political necessity, however – andthis is the decisive thing to which we will return in Part III – Plato yetpersists in describing the Law as ‘an obstinate and ignorant tyrant’.53

If it is necessary, this necessity is not ontological but political, and isonly given grant by the existence of the unwise many. It remainsstrictly undesirable by itself, if not a necessary evil.

Strauss, for his part, does not challenge or qualify these Platonicstatements in History of Political Philosophy in any way. As we willexamine below, indeed, in Natural Right and History Strauss concursthat the lawsof anypolisare at best ‘rules of thumb’ to guidebehavior.54

... all laws, written or unwritten, are poor substitutes but indispensable substitutesfor the individual rulings by wise men. They are crude rules of thumb which aresufficient 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 ineradicabledifference between the political and the supra-political spheres.55

The King in the best possible city, as the Eleatic stranger elaborates inthe Statesman, has the right to ‘justly change the laws or act againstthe laws’, in what reads again like a classical anticipation of Schmitt’sposition in Political Theology.56 According to Strauss, nevertheless,certain it is that the rulers should not declare, if at all possible, thatthey are making exceptions to the rule of law, when these becomenecessary. As Strauss writes in Natural Right and History:

Civil society is incompatible with any immutable rules, however basic; for in certainconditions the disregard of these rules may be needed for the basic preservation ofsociety, but for pedagogic reasons, society must present as universally valid certain

rules which are [only] generally valid ... the effectiveness of the general rules dependson their being taught without qualifications, 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 Machiavelli’s 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 emergingnatural sciences. Compare with L. Strauss, ‘‘Niccolo Machiavelli’’, in Strauss andCropsey, eds, supra n. 49, 299–300.

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).


It is the matter or meaning of this political ‘pedagogy’ that mostcritics of Strauss find hardest to accommodate. In order to under-stand adequately its bearing, I would however propose, we need toweigh how Strauss’ ‘primitive Platonism’ is decisively informed by hisearly readings of ‘prophetology’ in the medieval Jewish and Islamicphilosophers of Law.58

Strauss’ late work, The Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws,emphasizes that Plato’s Laws ‘opens with the word ‘‘God’’; there isno other Platonic dialogue that opens in this manner’.59 But in hisearlier works, Philosophy and Law and Persecution and the Art ofWriting, Strauss had already stressed how the medievals’ readings ofPlato’s texts were open to a political register of this corpus typicallyclosed to modern interpretations. Plato’s Laws was read by Al Farabiand Maimonides as the work of ‘prophecy’ par excellence, Straussnotes. In medieval Islam and Judaism (as against the Christiantradition), as Strauss stresses, the prophets were conceived not – ornot only – as diviners of future things. Above all, they were figured aslegislators. The nature of this political role, in turn, turned around anappreciation of the natural inequality between individuals foreign tomodern philosophies. The divine Law, Al Farabi and Maimonidesmaintained, is beyond the comprehension of all but a few subjects. Inorder for it then to be conveyed to the unwise many, a figure will beneeded who is able both to understand the divine Law, and also –which is more politically important – to present it in ways that ‘themany’ can grasp. For the first more theoretical task, the prophet isrequired to be intellectually perfect – here is the point of parity withthe 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 different. What I instead propose is decisive isthe 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 Green’s Jew and Philosopher has shown, however, this is amisreading – 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: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1993), especially ch. 5. Compare with Strauss, Phi-

losophy and Law, ‘‘The Legal Grounding of Philosophy: The Commandment toPhilosophise and the Freedom to Philosophise’’, 61 ff. Compare with, for example,Zuckert, supra n. 4, 105–107.

59 L. Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1983), 2; compare with Zuckert, supra n. 4, 161.

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imagination is required, or the ability to present the Law in edifyingstories concerning its meaning, its origin, and its ends.60

Maimonides himself stated that the prophet should also himselfbe a believer and (hence) an eminently moral man. Yet, after 1936,Strauss came to suggest that this was Maimonides’ exoteric positiononly. In Philosophy and Law, Strauss already asserted that ‘proph-ecy proper can only be radically understood from the context ofpolitics’.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, itbeing given that Plato affirms the dogma of particular providence only because of its

political utility: a city governed by laws, and not by philosophers, cannot be perfectunless the belief that God rewards or punishes men according to their actions is thereestablished. [Laws, 663d-e] We do not dispute this. But it is in precisely this sense thatMaimonides 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 byeveryone if done in the sciences and the arts’.63 In the terms of Plato’scave myth, they are the artisans whose shapes cast the shadows ontothe walls of the cave, like the poets in ancient Greece of such evidentconcern to Plato’s Socrates. The prophets or the legislators shape theopinions or doxa of those within the city: we need to remember thatSolon presented his code of laws in poetic form, or the differentappreciation of poetry Plato himself presents in the Nomoi.64 Butdoxa as against truth or any episteme, Strauss argued throughout hiswork, is – without exception – the ‘element’ of society.65

With these necessary exegetical parameters in place, we can nowturn to the critical argument.

60 Strauss, Philosophy and Law, supra n. 5, 103; cf. 50, 99–103.61 Strauss, Philosophy and Law, supra n. 5, 85–87, 89, 91–92, 94–95, 97–98.62 Strauss, supra n. 6, 23 (my italics).63 Strauss, Natural Right, supra n. 13, 158.64 Compare with Zuckert, supra n. 4, 156–164: ‘‘The Image of the Philosopher as

Poetic Legislator in the Laws’’.65 L. Strauss, ‘‘Forgotten Kind of Writing’’, supra n. 1, 221–222; compare with

supra n. 26, 26: ‘‘society will always tyrannise over thought’’.


PRIMORDIAL REPRESSION AND PRIMITIVE PLATONISM

In a way that arguably reflects psychoanalysis’ own Judaic parentage,there is much in Strauss’ prophetological conception of the Law thatmirrors psychoanalytic understandings. In Jacques Lacan’s laterformulation, in particular, the agency of the Law is conceived asminimally double, in a way that strikingly resembles the divisionStrauss establishes between the Law as a set of general prohibitions,and its necessary imaginative or prophetic representation in storiesconcerning the Law’s origins and meaning.66 What Lacan called the‘symbolic Law’ (or the Law of ‘the Other’) is the social Law which isfounded on the dual taboos of murder and incest, in the terms ofFreud’s own phylogenetic myth in Totem and Taboo.67 According toLacan, however, this symbolic Law can only exert its force uponindividuals, or secure their identification, insofar as its agency isrepresented by them in fantasms which – precisely – (re)narrate itsorigins and represent to them what the Law means.68

The most preeminent Lacanian political theorist, Slavoj Zizek, hasarguably built his entire political theory around this ‘dual’ Lacanianconception of the nature of the Law.69 On the one hand, Zizek con-tends that any political regime is minimally bound by an explicit bodyof Laws that guarantee a minimum of civility. These are the ‘symbolic’Laws written down in the regime’s founding documents and governingcodes, like the stelai in front of the law courts that frame the actionand the argument of Plato’s Euthyphro. On the other hand, however,Zizek has argued since his 1989 Sublime Object of Ideology that anyregime’s Laws will always have an unwritten and more or less implicitunderside. Zizek’s formalization of this supra-legal underside in termsof his post-Lacanian conception of ‘ideological fantasy’ is in factarguably his most original and most important contribution topolitical theory. According to Zizek’s 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 thepivotal issue here.

69 See, for example, chapter 2 of my Slavoj Zizek: A Little Piece of the Real(Ashgate: London, 2004).

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regime has its own defining set of ideological fantasies. These ideo-logical fantasies are nothing short of the defining stories or – inclassical terms – the muthoi of the regime. They serve, firstly, torenarrate retrospectively the regime’s foundations, in such a way thatthe violence of these foundations is concealed or ‘repressed’.70 Sec-ondly, the regime’s ideological fantasies frame for subjects how theyshould interpret the Laws’ frozen and forbidding letters.71 In olderphilosophical language, we could describe Zizek’s ideological fanta-sies of a regime as those doxa that give breath to l’esprit des lois, andconcrete 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 and political doxa that is decisive inunderstanding the agency of the Law.72With these parities established,however, the pivotal separation between Strauss’ philosophy of Lawand the Lacanian understanding of Law needs to be precisely located.To not beat around the bush: from a Lacanian perspective, what ismissing in Strauss’ account of the relation of ‘philosophy and law’ is aregistration of the sui generis status and dignity of Law as such.

For Lacanian psychoanalysis, the decisive issue is that the agencyof the Law is not something we could ever wholly take or leave, orspeak of externally, according to a sovereign calculus of means andhigher 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. InKantian terms – and Lacan stressed that it was Kant’s work thatopened up le champ Freudien – the agency of the Law upon thesubject is transcendental. Interpellation or education into the Law,Lacan argued, involves a component of loss that is inelidable for allsubjects – if not exactly a fall. At the decisive point of its education,Lacanian psychoanalysis argues, the child must have been made, byforce 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 ofChicago Press, 1995) 13–14.

71 On the diachronic register of fantasy, in terms of the need to explain (away) theviolence of a regime’s origins, compare with, especially, S. Zizek, For They Know NotWhat They Do (London: Verso, 2002, 2nd edn), ch. 5. For one of Zizek’s more direct

accounts of the role of fantasy in directing subjects on how to interpret the letters ofthe explicit or ‘‘symbolic’’ laws, see Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Womanand Causation (London: Verso, 1994), ch. 3.

72 Compare with, especially, Zizek, Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays onWoman and Causation ibid., ch. 3.


to be the fully satisfying Thing (‘the phallus’) for the mother. Inexchange for the traumatic inscription of this first prohibition or non!upon the subject, as Lacan famously puns, the child gets in exchangea 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 theywill by Law (not) be able to desire. In Lacan’s precise formulation:

The effects on a human being of the fact that he becomes a subject of law are, inshort, that he is deprived of what matters to him most and, in exchange, he is himselfdelivered over to the texture which is woven between generations.73

The full effects of this position, which will deny the possibility thatany individual or group of individuals can have immediate access tosomething ‘truly grand’, wholly above the Law, will become fullyclear in Part IV. It is sufficient to say at this point that this ‘primordialrepression’ of the child’s desire to be the ‘most blessed’ Thing exactedby the Law is what opens up the lack or beance, which Lacan takes tobe constitutive of eros, no less than Diotima in Plato’s Symposium.74

Given a Lacanian understanding of the force of Law, the issue isthat Strauss’ Platonic conception of the nomoi as at best ‘rules ofthumb’ would disavow the necessary and traumatic force of Law. Tosay this is of course not to deny that Strauss was aware of thecomponent of sacrifice associated with being a political subject, whichis (for example) one of the pivotal terms at issue in his brilliant 1932criticism of Carl Schmitt, and of his wider position. Strauss’ lastingdefense of religion or revelation as one of the two ‘vital’ roots ofWestern humanity, moreover, is surely underlain by a deep senseof 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 Plato’s Symposium, on Aristophanes. It is striking that

Strauss’ seminar series on the Symposium was given at nearly the same time exactly

as Lacan’s Seminar VIII On Transference, the first half of which is on the samePlatonic text.

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provides to ‘the many’ in the face of the most extreme political orother circumstances.75 What I mean to question critically is Strauss’contention that the force of Law comes to it from its framing orpresentation in salutary myths, without which its general rules mustremain both saliently untrue, and decisively inefficacious for the un-wise many.

The stakes of Strauss’ conception of Law are made fully clear onthe central page (p.162) of Natural Right and History. Echoing Plato’sStatesman, 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 taughtwithout qualifications, without ifs and buts. But the omission of the qualifications

which makes the rules most effective makes them at the same time untrue. Theunqualified rules are not natural right but conventional right.76

The corollary of this position, as Strauss details, is exactly theprophetological conception of Law recounted in Part II. Since alllaws must lay claim to generality, but unqualified or general laws canonly 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 ‘‘thepolitical’’. One could point here also to Strauss’ times, and to his biography as aGerman 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 thatmodern liberalism’s anti-sacrificial (and hence post-political) trajectory begins withSchmitt’s key source, Thomas Hobbes. His readings of both Thucydides and Aris-

tophanes thus turn around a recognition of how subjects turn their belief towards theGods not in order ‘‘to do what they know they can do for themselves’’, but ‘‘todetermine the course of events they do not feel able to control’’, as Catherine Zuckertremarks. Compare with Zuckert, supra n. 4, 181. Here, indeed, Strauss approaches

the materialist understanding of religion as ‘‘illusion’’, as against error or lie, inFreud. Compare with S. Freud, ‘‘The Future of an Illusion’’, in Penguin FreudLibrary Volume XII: Civilisation, Society and Religion translated by J. Strachey

(London: Penguin, 1991), especially ch. 3. As Slavoj Zizek comments concerningStrauss’ understanding of religion in his Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle: ‘‘... we shouldbear in mind here that, when Strauss is emphasizing the differences between exoteric

and esoteric teachings, he conceives of the opposition in a way which is almost theexact opposite of today’s New Age propagation of esoteric wisdom: the content ofNew Age wisdom is some kind of spiritual higher reality accessible only to the

initiated few, while common mortals see around them only vulgar reality; forStrauss, on the contrary, in a properly dialectical way, such narratives of a spiritualmystery 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.


the many. The ‘pedagogic’ stories best secure the sanctity of Law, inturn, if they are ‘prophetic’ in the sense Strauss understandsMaimonides in and after his 1936 ‘Remarks’. To cite Natural Rightand 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 divinelyestablished and involving an absolute duty for fallen man. Only in the latter sense isjustice, as commonly understood, unquestionably good.77

Again, it is precisely such a position that many of Strauss’ critics mostvehemently decry.78 The theoretical necessity of any such move isavoided, however, if we do not accept the way that Law as such isconceived here – that is, as a set of norms that are more or lessdescriptively accurate or ‘true’ to what is and might be the case. Onecan 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’, withwhat Weber calls ‘juridical formalism’ in Economy and Society: thedistinctly modern liberal idea sponsored by Kelsen and others thatthe law ought to be a ‘law without gaps’.79 In the terms of NaturalRight and History, what is at issue is whether, by conceiving Law inthis way, his account does not deny the possibility that the Law couldbe wholly ‘noetically heterogenous’ to both theory and religious‘prophecy’, such that it would never be just an ‘untrue’ – any more thana ‘true’ – set of norms that would describe the world. As Strauss’occasional ‘salutary’ remarks concerning the Law and the sacredwould instead indicate (see Conclusion), political subjects ratherexperience the Law as belonging to an entirely different order than anysuch (true or false) empirical descriptions or predictions altogether. AsHobbes within the ‘great Tradition’ also argued, that is (‘law ingeneral is not counsel, but command’80), what defines the words ofLaw as Law is exactly the Law’s 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 isgood 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. 656–657, 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

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the ‘force of law’. Contra Plato or Strauss, the Law as Law is neverthen just or primarily deficient theoria. It proximally shows itself, andis experienced by political subjects, as something that has ‘alwaysalready’ been there, and as something whose prohibitive letters havelaid a defining claim upon their being and identity. If it lacked thisperformative force, it would not be Law, good or bad.

Ironically, then, both the parameters and the shortcomings ofStrauss’ conception of Law as ‘untrue’ in Natural Right and Historyare rendered apparent in Zizek’s incisive account of the ‘pathologicalnarcissism’ characteristic of today’s liberal subjects:

... we could also approach ‘pathological narcissism’ on the basis of Saul Kripke’scriticism of the theory of description... According to Kripke the name always

functions as a ‘rigid designator’, referring to the same objects even if all propertiescontained 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-fier’. i.e. of a signifier 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 betweenspeaker and hearer. If, for example, I tell someone ‘you are my master’, I confer uponhim 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 createthereby a new symbolic reality, that of a master-disciple relationship between the two ofus. 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 tothe 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: whyare you telling us, critically, that the Law is a thing of hearsay when theLaw is – exactly – a thing of hearsay? According to Lacanian theory,that is, as subjects of Law, political subjects can never, fully, knowwhat they do – a moment of non-knowing is foundational for sub-jectivity as such. The founding force of Law is exactly to deny usimmediate access (by sight or reason, the founding means of thephilosopher) to that summum bonum (or ‘Thing’) that would fantas-matically have answered to our fondest eros. But, to refer to thequotation 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 PopularCulture (USA: MIT Press, 1992), 103–104.


recognition or reconnaissance (as against connaissance), is to bestructurally located in terms of an ontology of human things.82

I would thus question Zizek’s claim in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettlethat 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 forthe teacher himself, something that he himself cannot fully penetrate and articulate inconceptual terms. Consequently, a philosopher uses parabolic and enigmatic speechfor two reasons: [first] 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 todescribe the highest philosophical content.83

What is exactly most contestable in Strauss’ reading of the classicalphilosophers is how close it comes to occluding the sense that, as Zizekcontinues, ‘the secrets of the Egyptians are secrets also for the Egyp-tians themselves’.84 Because his account lacks any registration of thetranscendental force of Law-as-‘hearsay’ (not [un]true description) onthe philosophical few as speaking beings, his position instead sails veryclose to the position that ancient philosophers’ recourse to ‘enigmaticand parabolic speech’ was decisively (if not wholly) governed bycontingent 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 employruses, prove ‘particular providence’ through interpreting acts ofmercy and rage, and so on, is ‘in itself a common idea’.85 What Zizeksurely approaches here is a position he has defended since The Sub-lime Object of Ideology – namely, that political regimes’ ideologicalfantasies or muthoi do not function primarily to get subjects toidentify wholly with the regime’s 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 realitiesof power, authority, and the irony or cynicism that can be played out ‘‘between thelines’’, 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 theancient philosophers� recourse to ‘‘enigmatic and parabolic speech’’ was rathergoverned by needs and limitations which were solely contingent and political, notnecessary and epistemological.

85 Zizek, Iraq, supra n. 75, 181 (italics mine).

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his teacher Althusser). Instead, their primary function is to afford tosubjects a sense of distance, or of ‘ideological distanciation’, from thenecessary and constitutive force of the Law.86 In later modern liberalsocieties, Zizek follows Peter Sloterditj, we witness this ‘ideologicaldistantiation’ in something like a privileged instance, in the apparentcynicism of contemporary consumerist subjects towards all forms ofpublic authority, bemoaned by conservative and progressive criticsalike.87 The deep falsity of this cynicism, Zizek contends, is indicatedby the overwhelming conformism of these subjects, judged in terms ofwhat they do, not what they say.88 What these subjects miss – and areencouraged to miss by the new marketing’s ubiquitous commodifi-cation of dissent – is the dimension and depth of their unconsciousadherence to the Law. Liberal subjects, Zizek maintains, continue tobelieve in the law, and to be its subjects. It is just that this foundingsubjective belief is misrecognised by them as only characterizing theOthers (or, in Heideggerian language, das man) supposed not to knowthe truth, which each takes himself to be lucidly aware of.

The elementary stance of today’s liberal subject, Zizek henceargues, is exactly a perception of her/himself as a nonconformist rebelwho plays by the rules only instrumentally, in order to fulfill 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)supposethat Others are nevertheless duped by the rules, and take themabsolutely seriously. This is why Zizek claims that the modern liberalsubject believes in the Law. He just believes ‘through the Others’. Inexactly 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 theinsufficiency of the very distinction between esoteric and exoteric: namely, the

scandalous fact that there is more truth in the ‘public’ teaching than in the esotericsecret, that the very writers who endeavor to dupe the uneducated by encoding theirtrue 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), 28–30.88 Ibid.89 Zizek, Iraq, supra n. 75, p. 172.


It is this critical thought whose dialectics I want to pursue now, interms 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 ofStrauss’ work, it is worth emphasizing the difference of this Lacaniancriticism of Strauss from other critical responses to his work. Inparticular, we are as far as possible from the widespread criticism thatStrauss was an elitist. Rather, the claim is that, in a more profoundsense, Strauss’ position is too common. His conception of the Law,which treats it as ‘untrue’ and necessary only politically, in order tocater to and for the ‘many unwise’, is arguably itself untrue. It involvesa false disavowal of the constitutive status of the law to political sub-jectivity as such. Ironically, given Strauss’ and his followers’ ardentcriticisms of modern liberalism, it also mirrors the self-consciousnessof subjects in modern liberal democracies, whose political doxa is alsogoverned by what Jurgen Habermas has called ‘civic privatism’ – thefalse sense that the law is there for them, rather than their beingsubjects of the law.90 Given the Lacanian theory of Law, by contrast,any subject-position that posits that a subject(s) could be wholly abovethe Law is unsustainable. The constitutive element of non-knowing or‘hearsay’ constitutive of the subject but disavowed by such a positioncan only return – as it were ‘by Law’ – in telling symptomaticinconsistencies. The ethical falsity of the position of today’s ‘patho-logical narcissist’, for example, is evident in how their ‘strategic’ ap-proach to their ‘careers’, social life, and so on, presupposes foranything like its success on the supposition that others do not knowwhat 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 ‘getahead’, and so on. The liar can only succeed by trading on the belief ofothers in the sincerity of his words. Arguably Zizek’s most novelLacanian proposal in political theory (which has been explored inparticular 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: BeaconPress, 1973), 37, 38, 76–92.

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Zizek, ‘the basic need of a human being is not to believe himself, but tohave another subject who will believe for him’.91

... perhaps the most succinct definition of ideology was produced by Christopher

Hitchens, when he tackled the difficult question of what the North Koreans effectivelythink of their ‘beloved leader’, KimYong Il: ‘mass delusion is the only thing that keepsthe people sane’. This paradox points towards the split in the heart of an effectively

functioning ideology: individuals transpose their belief onto the big Other (embodiedin the collective), which thus believes in their place – individuals thus remain sanequa individuals, maintaining the distance towards the ‘big Other’ of the officialdiscourse.92

The resemblance between this theoretical formulation, and Strauss’theoretical understanding of the Law as ‘untrue’ or necessary only forthe 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 ofthis 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 notpractice) of the ancients’ ‘forgotten’ art of esoteric writing, central tohis ‘rebirth of classical rationalism’ in post-World War II America.The strangeness of Strauss’ position concerns what such a defencecan mean or bespeak in this permissive liberal age and regime, wherethe very political censorship (or ‘persecution’), which Strauss alsoshows us, historically necessitated this ancient practice simply nolonger apply, and one can – for instance – openly publish articlespraising ‘counter-cultural’ or diabolical figures 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 today’s modern liberal or ‘permissive’ society, that is, the persecu-tory agency of the Law facing ancient philosophers, which Persecutionand the Art of Writing tells us necessitated their unusual mode ofcommunication, 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 accessedJanuary 2002.

92 Zizek, ibid., 16 (my italics).93 Zizek, Iraq, supra n. 75, 174 (my italics).


would defend or even practice esoteric writing a la Plato or Maimo-nides, and the historical situation in which he undertook this defenseor practice. In this way, the question of the animating desire or erosof Strauss’ ‘rebirth of classical philosophy’, and of its relation tothe Law, re-emerges as much more puzzling than it first appears(see Part I).

Strauss’ explicit position, as we saw in Part I, is that the phi-losopher’s eros drives him to search for the truth of physis or of ‘thewhole’. The very pursuit of this Truth is the summum bonum orhighest way of life, one which makes the things over which theunwise many dispute seem unimportant. In order to pursue thistruth, however, the philosophers must reserve for themselves theright to call skeptically into question the founding stories of theircities, 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 thepersecution of philosophers in pre-modern regimes, and their needfor esoteric writing techniques. One might, therefore, suppose thatStrauss, himself a philosopher, might have celebrated the liftingof the prohibitions on free enquiry that modern liberalism hasenacted, however critical he might have been of other aspects of themodern age.

But certain it is that Strauss does not take this path. The entirecritical 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 closedLaw, itself sub-philosophical, is necessary only for the unwise many,and an anerotic necessity for the philosophers, if it does not tyrannizeover thought as such. The scandalous possibility that Strauss’ bearingtowards modern liberalism however directly suggests is that thisposition involves a remarkable mis-statement or mesconaissance.What Strauss’ bearing towards modern liberalism rather indicates isthat the real Thing of Straussian desire is not any esoteric wisdombeyond 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 everyrespect a misfortune for philosophy. The official recognition of philosophy in the

Christian world made philosophy subject to ecclesiastical supervision. The precari-

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ous position of philosophy in the Islamic-Jewish world guaranteed its privatecharacter and therewith its inner freedom from supervision.94

Here, then, we can finally appreciate the force of this paper’s title,and of its wider critical position. If philosophy, as Strauss conceivesit, 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. Despiteits 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 historicallysupplanted in the West. Now, the only way that this position evenmakes sense is on the apparently very non-Straussian supposition thatthe Law is not an obstacle to, or instrument for, the attainment ofsome sovereign Good that would exceed it, but also the minimalprecondition for the visage of the sovereign philosophical Good to beopened up at all – as if that sovereign Thing, as Lacan argues, wouldonly 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 altogetherunprecedented thing in the history of ideas. It finds its precedent inthe tales of the troubadours, and the paradigm of courtly love. Onthe surface, these tales – like Strauss’ philosophy – also put on stageand lament a series of irksome necessities – the knight’s incrediblequests and tasks, and so on – that apparently prevent the heroesfrom reaching the object of their highest eros. Yet in Seminar VIIand Seminar XX, Lacan ventures to read this literary genre asharboring an ironic, if not esoteric, teaching about eros. Accordingto Lacan, the obstacles these tall tales erect between the knightsand their Ladies stand as a ruse. Their much-lamented agency infact conceals a much deeper impasse that chacacterizes human erosas 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 thegrounds 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 thehereafter from the modern rationalist attack.’’

96 See, for example, Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, supra n. 94, 23.


Lady or any one Thing, or way of, could fully satisfy human eros assuch:

It is a highly refined 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 themost amazing thing that has ever been attempted.97

If there is any ‘esoteric’ teaching of Strauss’ position, as both hiscritics and his supporters suppose, it accordingly turns out not to liebeneath the surface of his texts. It would lie on their surface or – asEdgar Allen Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’ also would suggest – exactlywhere we would not think to look because it was right in front of oureyes. The reason for this ironic exigency, also, would not be coinci-dental, given a Lacanian account of the dialectical relation betweenLaw and eros. It would concern exactly that topic, which we haveexamined at the heart of this essay, namely the philosophy of Lawand of its relation to eros. The deepest dialectical consequence of theLacanian conception of the Law as necessary or transcendental for allsubjects, that is, is not simply that all humans tend to desire what isnamed by the Law as prohibited or ‘off limits’. More deeply, humaneros is caused by the Law. The Lacanian position is indeed that thevery space for subjects’ fantasmatic beliefs or doxa concerning a fullysatisfying Thing is in fact opened by the founding prohibitions ofsocial law – whether this Thing would be philosophy as a way of lifeor a courtly Lady.

As Lacan paraphrases another ancient source, Saint Paul, in TheEthics of Psychoanalysis:

Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know the Thing by means of theLaw. In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: ‘Thoushalt not covet it.’ But the Thing finds 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 flared up, returned once again, I met my death. And for me, thecommandment 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 cameto 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.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS: OF EROS AND ITS VICISSITUDES

In his ‘Restatement on Xenephon’s Hiero’, Strauss at one pointcriticizes Kojeve on the ground that Kojeve’s teacher Hegel, likeHobbes, ‘constructs human society by starting from the untrueassumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacksawareness 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, Straussin 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 accordinglylost to Strauss’ position is the dialectical logic inherent in a differentHegelian teaching, from the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is thedoctrine Hegel puts against Kant concerning the Thing-in-Itselfsupposedly lost to subjects through the mediation of understanding –or in Lacanian language, through the mediation of the Law. In He-gel’s words, such an object ‘... only comes to be through being leftbehind’, 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 Dostoevsky’sanxiety 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 whohave not fully acceded to this Law are instead the subjects of nothingmore noble than inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety, or worse. AsLacan argued in ‘Kant Avec Sade’, even sadism in this light is very farfrom the blissful living out of what most subjects can only fantasizeabout. Instead, since for the perverse subject the Law itself is absentor 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 toenter the symbolic order’ of Law:

99 L. Strauss, ‘‘Restatement on Xenophon�s 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.


... the irony of this should not escape us: the pervert, this ‘transgressor’ par excellencewho purports to violate all the rules of ‘normal’ and decent behavior, effectivelylongs for the very rule of Law.102

To underscore, one more time then, the law of our position here, as itwere: our criticism of Strauss’ work does not enter into well-worndebates about Strauss’ interpretive methodology. Nor do we contestwhat he claims this methodology allows us to discover about theancients. Politically, we do not charge against Strauss any kind ofelitism, or that the politics of his position is governed by any esoteric‘secret’ – perhaps unwritten?, etc.– teachings. Our issue is rather withStrauss’ philosophy of Law: what is arguably the pivot of his ownposition, both historically and philosophically. At this level, we donot bring against Strauss a relativistic position that bemoans thatStrauss claims to uncover an unhistorical Truth, as if this could befinally avoided. Equally, we do not presuppose as unquestionable thedoxa of the contemporary liberal-democratic cave, as if this politicalregime were either the ‘end of history’, or without limitations of itsown. Rather, we assert that Strauss’ philosophy of Law, which endsby viewing it as a practically salutary but theoretically ‘untrue’necessity, is false to its object. The Law, we propose, is the Law, toparaphrase 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, notcontingent, 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 isJewish, and it is carried through into Christianity in the notion oforiginal 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 finally propose, necessarily results –by Law – in notable inconsistencies in his position of theoreticalenunciation. The first of these is that, as with any subject-position,which would disavow the constitutive role of ‘hearsay’ in humansubjectivity, this position receives this disavowed belief back from theOther in an inverted form. In the case of Strauss, it can thus be saidthat 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 Zizek�s dis-cussion of Strauss ends by recourse to Lacan�s ‘‘Kant With Sade’’, although Zizek�sposition is arguably unclear at this point. See Zizek, Iraq, supra n. 75, 182 ff.

103 Compare with S. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do, supra n. 71.

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in closed Law, and not only because his criticism of permissivemodern liberalism reads every bit ‘as if’ he did believe, in his ownname. It is also because Strauss, here at least like modern liberalsubjects, ‘truly believed’ in the Law, through the unwise many Otherssupposed not to know.

Finally, in this light, a new perspective is thrown on Strauss’renowned political conservatism or ‘ultra-conservatism’.104 Thispolitics is even bemoaned by his students, Stanley Rosen and Law-rence Lampert, as imprudently outdated in later modernity, if it doesnot itself endanger philosophy at the hands of revelation.105 For us,Strauss’ political opposition to the possibility that Lawrence Lampertfor one wants to open – namely, that the type of fearless intellectualprobity Nietzsche defended might found a new politics – is necessaryto Strauss’ position. Its deepest source is Strauss’ desire to preserve‘Platonic political philosophy’ as the erotic Thing. It is just that, asStrauss’ own statements concerning the non-existence of the PlatonicIdeas or any set of right rules prescribed in Nature might have led usto reflect,106 the most exceptional thing about this philosopher’sThing appears to have escaped Strauss himself. In a truly amazingexigency, philosophy’s very status as exceptional would be sustainedby 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’’, inP.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 authorwas led by dissatisfaction with Strauss’ Farabian concealment of the dilemma ofdecadence. 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 withthe 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, 98–99, 120–121; Cf. T. Pangle, ‘‘Introduction’’ to L.

Strauss, Studies in Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),p.3; Zuckert, supra n. 4, 150–151, 154.


But this makes the question of the philosopher’s eros a differentthing again.

MATTHEW SHARPE

School of International and Political StudiesMelbourne School of Continental PhilosophyDeakin University, Pigdons Road, Geelong, VIC, 3217, Australia

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The Philosopher's Courtly Love: Leo Strauss, Eros, and the Law

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