In 1984 Michel Foucault published the long awaited sequel to his Histoire de la sexualité. The Use of Pleasures, as volume two was titled, ends with a final chapter called “True Love,” which offers a reading of Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus. In many ways, this chapter is crucial to understanding Foucault's whole project in the History of Sexuality. For one thing, it takes up and responds to Lacan's reading of the Symposium in his wellknown 1961 seminar on transference and thus is central to understanding the relation between the Histoire and psychoanalysis. For Lacan, the essence of the Symposium is its exploration of the transferential relationship and the logic of substitution that relation implies between Socrates, Alcibiades, and Agathon. In his reading, Alcibiades and Agathon, while not identical, are substitutable as objects of desire, insofar as each of them is beautiful. At the same time, Socrates is the object of Alcibiades’ desire precisely because Alcibiades desires to be his object. Subject and object, desire and its tokens, all become part of an economy of substitution in which Agathon (literally “Mr. Good”) and Alcibiades (the beautiful boy par excellence) become place holders in a dance that leads from the empirical to the sublime through a logic of transference and counter-transference as all three characters play musical couches at the conclusion of Plato's great dialogue.

Foucault's reading, in the end, does not so much contest Lacan's interpretation as historicize it, asking how it is that Love or Desire (Eros) came to be seen as a problem of truth rather than a simple question of regime or of the “use” of pleasures. As we shall see later, in so doing, he offers a powerful recontextualization of psychoanalysis's framing of desire in relation to the “truth” of the subject. But Lacan's seminar on transference was the second in a sequence devoted to texts from antiquity. The first was 1960's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which featured an extended reading of the Antigone (1986). And while Foucault offers an important response to the problem of desire and its relation to truth, as first posited by Plato and reinterpreted by Freud and Lacan, he does not do the same for Antigone.