“The only thing I say I know,” Socrates tells us in the Symposium, “is the art of love (ta erôtika).” The Stanford Encycl. of Philosophy interprets this as a subtle play on words because erôtika and erôtan (to ask) sound etymologically connected, so “he knows about the art of love in that–but just insofar as–he knows how to converse elenctically.” The interrogative Socratic Method refutes and proves by making space (or simply drawing us to space with question), not by offering proof, not by force, and not by logic. While proof and logic might occur in the elenchus, it is the emptiness of aporia (puzzlement) that finally is the way to knowledge, a way that proceeds dialectically, without end, in the realm of endlessness. To know, first one must pass through this aporatic disaster, where all orientations dissolve into confusion, especially our most sacred a priori senses of self, time, and space. We don’t possess knowledge, only barriers to our access. Love is the only thing Socrates knows. This coming from the man who when on trial and with his life on the line claimed to know nothing. Love’s disruption is the topological flipside of nothing. If Socrates knows anything, it is only one thing (love) or no thing, love or nothing, one or zero (1, 0; 1 + 0 = 1). This zero is not the zero of the number line, but the zero of multiplicity, in Badiou’s sense. While this One is not The One in Badiou’s sense, rather, it is the Spinozistic One substance, the plane of immanence. Here, now, on the plane of immanence, you need nothing to know love. It does not want. It is the only food that satisfies the elenchic hunger. It is when it is. It cannot be mistaken, but it also cannot be known, because it is knowledge, so it repels any representative description, hence why we’re always trying and failing. And asking. It is the only thing Socrates knows.
We can only dream love, while love dreams us.
In the dream, contingency rules, and the laws of the universe do not hold. Later we know the dream as dream, but in the dream, we know it as reality. In the same way that we irrefutably know love, we know the dream is a dream, precisely because we know it is not reality, but did not know that in the dream. It is the accursed share of experience, even though it is experience. It is in this way that dreams and love transgress reality by being reality. Only the dream is a contingent reality, while love is real reality. Both are forms of knowledge. The former is negative knowledge, insofar as what we know about the dream is that it is not reality, while the later is positive knowledge, insofar as love never wavers from being. We don’t have love. Like being in a dream, we are in love. It is non-negotiable, like being underwater. So coming into knowledge, whether dream-negative knowledge or love-positive knowledge, requires disruption of the brink between dream and reality, past and future, here and there. To know love we know nothing, and keep knowing it. To know the dream is to know it is not. If what we experience becomes understood as a dream, it has been disoriented. If what we dream becomes reality, it requires, also, a reorientation. If it didn’t, then you would already know. Poetry, like love, is engaged in this disorienting practice and method. Knowing is, finally, the removal of barriers to the knowable, not a construction project. What we might think of as the basic difference between aletheia and veritas.
Do I know that? No.
By simply placing erôs and erôtan together in the paranomosaic pun, Socrates makes a negative argument about the space between them. Whether or not they are “actually” etymologically connected, they irrefutably double each in their first three letters. While erôs closes with its sibilant hiss, erôtan adds a syllable that begins with the hard tap of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, finishing off what “s” began, bringing us to the first aperture (“A”), then settling us down on the softer version of the air-blown tapped t: the soft n of pressing one’s tongue against the hard palate. The sequential short and long syllables of erôs double this opening spacemaking as a simple, atomic rhythmic unit: short, long; unstress, stress, an originary iamb.
erôs, iamb.
erôs, erôtan.
To continue the poem of love we must continue to ask.
This simple polysemic (non) placement suggests the space between erôs and erôtan does not exist, then it obviously exists, then it does not exist, then it obviously exists. Stuck in the crux of polysemy’s evocation of the dream/reality topology (in a dream one body can be multiple people, like we can endlessly unfold meanings in words; while in reality, stitched into a sentence, a word has a specific meaning). Socrates places (topos) love (erôs) so as to call forth another word that becomes present in absence, hence doing the job of love. We don’t have love, we are in it, so we cannot know it, we must love it while never knowing all of it. The beloved is this: what we care for while letting being be. What we love. The elenchus is an indirect method that always works because it takes you nowhere. To attain knowledge one must be indirected, disoriented, perhaps even nailed to the crux of love and helplessly spun. Knowledge undoes convention and ideology. It does not do. So love and knowledge are inextricably bound.
Ask me, ask me, ask me
Ask me, ask me, ask me
Because if it’s not love
Then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
The bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
Will bring us together
