Sharpe Law Critique Strauss-libre

MATTHEW SHARPE

THE PHILOSOPHERS 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 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

JustwhowasLeoStrauss anyway? Is there anychance that hewill bebornposthumously as

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 SHARPE358

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 theConclusion defends, I contend that Strauss understanding of

philosophical eros is an instance of the properly dialectical logic of

courtly love, as read byLacan inSeminarsVII andXX. In this logic, the

Law that Strauss laments as tyrannizing over thought becomes, iron-

ically, the cause of the philosophers eros. But now I turn tomy 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 SHARPE360

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.


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 SHARPE362

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.


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 SHARPE364

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 erosmakes 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.


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 SHARPE366

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).


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

Statesman49 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 SHARPE368

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 lawsof any polisare at best rules of thumb to guidebehavior.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).


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 SHARPE370

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.


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 SHARPE372

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 and political doxa that is decisive in

understanding the agency of the Law.72With 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.


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 SHARPE374

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.


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 command80), 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 SHARPE376

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.


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 SHARPE378

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.


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 SHARPE380

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).


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 SHARPE382

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-

losophy95 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.


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 SHARPE384

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.


... 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 SHARPE386

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.


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

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