What if we brought a simple soul into this lecture hall, set him down in the front row, and asked him what Lacan means.
The simple soul will get up, go to the board and will give the following explanation: “Since the beginning of the academic year Lacan has been talking to us about das Ding in the following terms. He situates it at the heart of a subjective world which is the one whose economy he has been describing to us from a Freudian perspective for years. This subjective world is defined by the fact that the signifier in man is already installed at the level of the unconscious, and that it combines its points of reference with the means of orientation that his functioning as a natural organism of a living being also gives him.”
Simply by writing it on the board and putting das Ding at the center, with the subjective world of the unconscious organized in a series of signifying relations around it, you can see the difficulty of topographical representation. The reason is that das Ding is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded. That is to say, in reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget – the Other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on the level of the unconscious only a representation can represent.
I said “something that only a representation can represent.” Do not look upon that as a simple pleonasm, for “represent” and “representation” here are two different things, as the term Vorstellungsrepräsentanz indicates. It is a matter of that which in the unconscious represents, in the form of a sign, representation as a function of apprehending – of the way in which every representation is represented insofar as it evokes the good that das Ding brings with it.
But to speak of “the good” is already a metaphor, an attribute. Everything that qualifies representations in the order of the good is caught up in refraction, in the atomized system that the structure of the unconscious facilitations imposes, in the complex mechanism of a signifying system of elements. It is only in that way that the subject relates to that which presents itself on the horizon as his good. His good is already pointed out to him as the significant result of a signifying composition that is called up at the unconscious level or, in other words, at a level where he has no mastery over the system of directions and investments that regulate his behavior in depth.
I will use a term here that only those who have present in their minds the Kantian formulas of The Critique of Practical Reason will be able to appreciate. I invite those who do not have them present in their minds or who have not yet encountered what is, from more than one point of view, an extraordinary book to make good their memories or their general knowledge.
It is impossible for us to make any progress in this seminar relative to the questions posed by the ethics of psychoanalysis if you do not have this book as a reference point.
So as to motivate you to look at it, let me emphasize that it is certainly extraordinary from the point of view of its humor. To remain poised at the limit of the most extreme conceptual necessity produces an effect of plenitude and content as well as of vertigo, as a result of which you will not fail to sense at some point in the text the abyss of the comic suddenly open up before you. Thus I do not see why it is a door that you would refuse to open. We will in any case see in a minute how we can open it here.
It is then, to be explicit, the Kantian term Wohl that I propose in order to designate the good in question. It has to do with the comfort of the subject insofar as, whenever he refers to das Ding as his horizon, it is the pleasure principle that functions for him. And it does so in order to impose the law in which a resolution of the tension occurs that is linked to something that, using Freud’s phrase, we will call the successful lures – or, better yet, the signs that reality may or may not honor. The sign here is very close to a representative currency, and it suggests an expression that I incorporated into one of my first lectures, that on physical causality, in a phrase that begins one of its paragraphs, i.e., “more inaccessible to our eyes that are made for the signs of the money changer.”
Let me carry the image further. “The signs of the money changer” are already present at the base of the structure which is regulated according to the law of Lust and Unlust, according to the rule of the indestructible Wunschthat pursues repetition, the repetition of signs. It is in that way that the subject regulates his initial distance to das Ding, the source of all Wohl at the level of the pleasure principle, and which at its heart already gives rise to what we may call das Gut des Objekts, the good object – following the Kantian example, as the practitioners of psychoanalysis have not failed to do.
On the horizon, beyond the pleasure principle, there rises up the Gut, das Ding, thus introducing at the level of the unconscious something that ought to oblige us to ask once again the Kantian question of the causa noumenon.Das Ding presents itself at the level of unconscious experience as that which already makes the law. Although it is necessary to give this verbal phrase, “makes the law,” the emphasis it receives in one of the most brutal games of elementary society and that is evoked in a recent book by Roger Vailland. It is a capricious and arbitrary law, the law of the oracle, the law of signs in which the subject receives no guarantee from anywhere, the law in relation to which he has no Sicherung, to use another Kantian term. That is also at bottom the bad object that Kleinian theory is concerned with.
Although it must be said that at this level das Ding is not distinguished as bad. The subject makes no approach at all to the bad object, since he is already maintaining his distance in relation to the good object. He cannot stand the extreme good that das Ding may bring him, which is all the more reason why he cannot locate himself in relation to the bad. However much he groans, explodes, curses, he still does not understand; nothing is articulated here even in the form of a metaphor. He produces symptoms, so to speak, and these symptoms are at the origin of the symptoms of defense.
And how should we conceive of defense at this level? There is organic defense. Here the ego defends itself by hurting itself as the crab gives up its claw, revealing thereby the connection I developed between the motor system and pain. Yet in what way does man defend himself that is different from an animal practising self-mutilation? The difference is introduced here by means of the signifying structuralization in the human unconscious. But the defense or the mutilation that is proper to man does not occur only at the level of substitution, displacement or metaphor – everything that structures its gravitation with relation to the good object. Human defense takes place by means of something that has a name, and which is, to be precise, lying about evil.
At the level of the unconscious, the subject lies. And this lying is his way of telling the truth of the matter. The óρθòς λóγος of the unconscious at this level – as Freud indicates clearly in the Entwurf in relation to hysteria – is expressed as πρώτον ψεῦδος, the first lie.
Given the amount of time I have been discussing the Entwurf with you, do I need to remind you of the example that he gives of a female patient called Emma, whom he doesn’t mention elsewhere and who is not the Emma of the Studies on Hysteria? It is the case of a woman who has a phobia about going into stores by herself because she is afraid people will make fun of her on account of her clothes.
Everything is related to an early memory. At the age of twelve she went into a store and the shop assistants apparently laughed at her clothes. One of them attracted her and even stirred her in some strange way in her emerging puberty. Behind that we find a causal memory, that of an act of aggression she suffered in a shop at the hands of a Greis. The French translation, modeled on the English, which was itself particularly careless, says “shopkeeper” – but an old fogey is involved, an elderly man, who pinched her somewhere under her dress in a very direct manner. This memory thus echoes the idea of a sexual attraction experienced in the other.
All that remains in the symptom is attached to clothes, to the mockery of her clothes. But the path of truth is suggested in a masked form, in the deceiving Vorstellung of her clothes. In an opaque way, there is an allusion to something that did not happen on the occasion of the first memory, but on the second. Something that wasn’t apprehended in the beginning is apprehended retroactively, by means of the deceitful transformation – proton pseudos. Thus in that way we have confirmation of the fact that the relationship of the subject to das Ding is marked as bad – but the subject can only formulate this fact through the symptom.
That is what the experience of the unconscious has forced us to add to our premises when we take up again the question of ethics as it has been posed over the centuries, and as it has been bequeathed us in Kantian ethics, insofar as the latter remains, in our thought if not in our experience, the point to which these questions have been brought.
The way in which ethical principles are formulated when they impose themselves on consciousness or when about to emerge from preconsciousness, as commandments, has the closest relationship to the second principle introduced by Freud, namely, the reality principle.
The reality principle is the dialectical correlative of the pleasure principle. One is not simply, as one at first imagines, the application of the consequence of the other; each one is really the correlative of the other. Without this neither one would make any sense. Once again we are led to deepen the reality principle in a way I suggested in connection with the experience of paranoia.
As I have already told you, the reality principle isn’t simply the same as it appears in the Entwurf, the testing that sometimes takes place at the level of the ω system or the Wahrnehmungsbewusstsein system. It doesn’t function only on the level of that system in which the subject, probing in reality that which communicates the sign of a present reality, is able to adjust correctly the deceptive emergence of the Vorstellung as it is provoked by repetition at the level of the pleasure principle. It is something more. Reality faces man – and that is what interests him in it – both as having already been structured and as being that which presents itself in his experience as something that always returns to the same place.
I pointed it out when I was discussing the case of President Schreber. The function of the stars in the delirious system of that exemplary subject shows us, just like a compass, the polar star of the relation of man to the real. The history of science makes something similar seem plausible. Isn’t it strange, paradoxical even, that it was the observations of shepherds and Mediterranean sailors of the return to the same place of an object which might seem to interest human experience least, namely, a star, that revealed to the farmer when he should sow his seeds? Think of the important role that the Pleiades played for Mediterranean navigators. Isn’t it remarkable that it was the observation of the return of the stars to the very same places that, repeated over the centuries, led to the structuralization of reality by physics, which is what we mean by science? The fruitful laws involved came down to earth from the sky, to Galileo from the physics of the peripatetic philosophers. However, from that earth, where the laws of the heavens had been rediscovered, Galilean physics returned to the sky by demonstrating that the stars are by no means what we had believed them to be, that they are not incorruptible, that they are subject to the same laws as the terrestrial globe.
Furthermore, if a decisive step in the history of science was already taken by Nicolas of Cuse, who was one of the first to formulate the idea that the stars were not incorruptible, we know something else, we know that they might not be in the same place.
Thus that first demand that made us explore the structuraüzation of the real down through history in order to produce a supremely efficient and supremely deceptive science, that first demand is the demand of das Ding – it seeks whatever is repeated, whatever returns, and guarantees that it will always return, to the same place – and it has driven us to the extreme position in which we find ourselves, a position where we can cast doubt on all places, and where nothing in that reality which we have learned to disrupt so admirably responds to that call for the security of a return.
Yet it is to this search for something that always returns to the same place that what is known as ethics has attached itself over the centuries. Ethics is not simply concerned with the fact that there are obligations, that there is a bond that binds, orders, and makes the social law. There is also something that we have frequently referred to here by the term “the elementary structures of kinship” – the elementary structures of property and of the exchange of goods as well. And it is as a result of these structures that man transforms himself into a sign, unit, or object of a regulated exchange in a way that Claude Lévi-Strauss has shown to be fixed in its relative unconsciousness. That which over generations has presided over this new supernatural order of the structures is exactly that which has brought about the submission of man to the law of the unconscious. But ethics begins beyond that point.
It begins at the moment when the subject poses the question of that good he had unconsciously sought in the social structures. And it is at that moment, too, that he is led to discover the deep relationship as a result of which that which presents itself as a law is closely tied to the very structure of desire. If he doesn’t discover right away the final desire that Freudian inquiry has discovered as the desire of incest, he discovers that which articulates his conduct so that the object of his desire is always maintained at a certain distance. But this distance is not complete; it is a distance that is called proximity, which is not identical to the subject, which is literally close to it, in the way that one can say that the Nebenmensch that Freud speaks of as the foundation of the thing is his neighbor.
If at the summit of the ethical imperative something ends up being articulated in a way that is as strange or even scandalous for some people as “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” this is because it is the law of the relation of the subject to himself that he make himself his own neighbor, as far as his relationship to his desire is concerned.
My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing. That is why I invite you to take an interest in what I have called the high point of the crisis in ethics, and that I have designated from the beginning as linked to the moment when The Critique of Practical Reason appeared.
Kantian ethics appears at the moment when the disorienting effect of Newtonian physics is felt, a physics that has reached a point of independence relative to das Ding, to the human Ding.
It was Newtonian physics that forced Kant to revise radically the function of reason in its pure form. And it is also in connection with the questions raised by science that a form of morality has come to engage us; it is a morality whose precise structure could not have been perceived until then – one that detaches itself purposefully from all reference to any object of affection, from all reference to what Kant called the pathologisches Objekt, a pathological object, which simply means the object of any passion whatsoever.
No Wohl, whether it be our own or that of our neighbor, must enter into the finality of moral action. The only definition of moral action possible is that which was expressed in Kant’s well-known formula: “Act in such a way that the maxim of your action may be accepted as a universal maxim.” Thus action is moral only when it is dictated by the motive that is articulated in the maxim alone. To translate allgemeine as “universal” is not quite right, since it is closer to “common.” Kant contrasts “general” with “universal,” which he takes up in its Latin form. All of which proves that something here is left in an undetermined state. Handle so, dass die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit zugleich als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne. “Act so that the maxim of your will may always be taken as the principle of laws that are valid for all.”
That formula, which is, as you know, the central formula of Kant’s ethics, is pursued by him to the limit of its consequences. His radicalism even leads to the paradox that in the last analysis the gute Wille, good will, is posited as distinct from any beneficial action. In truth, I believe that the achievement of a form of subjectivity that deserves the name of contemporary, that belongs to a man of our time, who is lucky enough to be born now, cannot ignore this text. I simply emphasize it as we continue on our merry way, for one can, in fact, get by with very little – the person to our right and the person to our left are nowadays, if not neighbors, then at the very least people who, from the point of view of volume, are close enough to prevent us from falling down. But one must have submitted oneself to the test of reading this text in order to measure the extreme, almost insane character of the corner that we have been backed into by something that is after all present in history, namely, the existence, indeed the insistence, of science.
If, of course, no one has ever been able to put such a moral axiom into practice – even Kant himself did not believe it possible – it is nevertheless useful to see how far things have gone. In truth, we have built another bridge in our relation to reality. For some time transcendental aesthetics itself – I am referring to that which is designated as such in The Critique of Pure Reason – is open to challenge, at the very least on the level of that play of writing where theoretical physics is currently registering a hit. Henceforth, given the point we have reached in the light of our science, a renewal or updating of the Kantian imperative might be expressed in the following way, with the help of the language of electronics and automation: “Never act except in such a way that your action may be programmed.” All of which takes us a step further in the direction of an even greater, if not the greatest, detachment from what is known as a Sovereign Good.
Let us be clear about this: when we reflect on the maxim that guides our action, Kant is inviting us to consider it for an instant as the law of a nature in which we are called upon to live. That is where one finds the apparatus that would have us reject in horror some maxim or other that our instincts would gladly lead us to. In this connection he gives us examples that are worth taking note of in a concrete sense, for however obvious they may seem, they perhaps suggest, at least to the analyst, a line of reflection. But note that he affirms the laws of nature, not of society. It is only too clear that not only do societies live very well by reference to laws that are far from promoting their universal application, but even more remarkably, as I suggested last time, these societies prosper as a result of the transgression of these maxims.
It is a matter then of a mental reference to a nature that is organized according to the laws of an object constructed at the moment when we raise the question of our rule of conduct.
So as to produce the kind of shock or eye-opening effect that seems to me necessary if we are to make progress, I simply want to draw your attention to this: if The Critique of Practical Reason appeared in 1788, seven years after the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, there is another work which came out six years after The Critique of Practical Reason, a little after Thermidor in 1795, and which is called Philosophy in the Boudoir.
As, I suppose, you all know, Philosophy in the Boudoir is the work of a certain Marquis de Sade, who is famous for more than one reason. His notoriety was accompanied from the beginning by great misfortunes, and one might add by the abuse of power concerning him – he did after all remain a prisoner for twenty-five years, which is a long time for someone who, my goodness, as far as we know, never committed a serious crime, and who in certain of our modern ideologies has been promoted to a point where one can also say that there is at the very least some confusion, if not excess.
Although in the eyes of some the work of the Marquis de Sade seems to promise a variety of entertainments, it is not strictly speaking much fun. Moreover, the parts that seem to give the most pleasure can also be regarded as the most boring. But one cannot claim that his work lacks coherence. And, in a word, it is precisely the Kantian criteria he advances to justify his positions that constitute what can be called a kind of anti-morality.
The paradox of this is argued with the greatest coherence in the work that is entitled Philosophy in the Boudoir. A short passage is included in it that, given the number of attentive ears here, is the only one that I expressly recommend you read – “Frenchmen, one more effort to become republicans.”
As a result of this appeal, which supposedly came from a number of cells that were active at that time in revolutionary Paris, the Marquis de Sade proposes that, given the ruin of those authorities on which (according to the work’s premises) the creation of a true republic depends, we should adopt the opposite of what was considered up to that point as the essential minimum of a viable and coherent morality.
And, in truth, he does quite a good job in defending that proposal. It is no accident if we first find in Philosophy in the Boudoir the praise of calumny. Calumny, he writes, can in no sense be injurious; if it imputes to our neighbor worse things than one can justifiably impute to him, it nevertheless has the merit that it puts us on guard against his activities. And the author proceeds in like manner to justify point by point the reversal of the fundamental imperatives of the moral law, extolling incest, adultery, theft, and everything else you can think of. If you adopt the opposite of all the laws of the Decalogue, you will end up with the coherent exposition of something which in the last instance may be articulated as follows: “Let us take as the universal maxim of our conduct the right to enjoy any other person whatsoever as the instrument of our pleasure.”
Sade demonstrates with great consistency that, once universalized, this law, although it gives libertines complete power over all women indifferently, whether they like it or not, conversely also liberates those same women from all the duties that civilized society imposes on them in their conjugal, matrimonial and other relations. This conception opens wide the flood gates that in imagination he proposes as the horizon of our desire; everyone is invited to pursue to the limit the demands of his lust, and to realize them.
If the same opening is given to all, one will be able to see what a natural society is like. Our repugnance may be legitimately related to that which Kant himself claims to eliminate from the criteria of the moral law, namely, to the realm of sentiment.
If one eliminates from morality every element of sentiment, if one removes or invalidates all guidance to be found in sentiments, then in the final analysis the Sadian world is conceivable – even if it is its inversion, its caricature – as one of the possible forms of the world governed by a radical ethics, by the Kantian ethics as elaborated in 1788.
Believe me, there is no lack of Kantian echoes in the attempts to articulate moral systems that one finds in a vast literature that might be called libertine, the literature of the man of pleasure, which is an equally caricatural form of the problem that for a long time preoccupied the ancién regime, and from Fénelon on, the education of girls. You can see that pushed to its comically paradoxical limit in The Raised Curtain by Mirabeau.
Well now, we are coming to that on account of which, in its search for justification, for a base and support, in the sense of reference to the reality principle, ethics encounters its own stumbling block, its failure – I mean there where an aporia opens up in that mental articulation we call ethics. In the same way that Kantian ethics has no other consequence than that gymnastic exercise whose formative function for anyone who thinks I have called to your attention, so Sadian ethics has had no social consequences at all. Understand that I don’t know if the French have really tried to become republicans, but it is certain that just like all the other nations of the world, including those who had their revolutions after them – bolder, more ambitious, and more radical revolutions, too – they have left what I will call the religious bases of the ten commandments completely intact, even pushing them to a point where their puritan character is increasingly marked. We’ve reached a situation where the leader of a great socialist state on a visit to other contemporary cultures is scandalized to see dancers on the Pacific coast of the noble country of America raising their legs a little too high.
We are thus faced here with a question, that is to say, the question of the relationship to das Ding.
This relationship seems to me to be sufficiently emphasized in the third chapter of The Critique of Practical Reason concerning the motives of practical pure reason. In effect, Kant acknowledges after all the existence of one sentient correlative of the moral law in its purity, and strangely enough, I ask you to note, it is nothing other than pain itself. I will read you the passage concerned, the second paragraph of the third part: “Consequently, we can see a priori that the moral law as the determining principle of will, by reason of the fact that it sets itself against our inclinations, must produce a feeling that one could call pain. And this is the first and perhaps only case, where we are allowed to determine, by means of a priori concepts, the relationship between a knowledge, which comes from practical pure reason, and a feeling of pleasure or pain.”
In brief, Kant is of the same opinion as Sade. For in order to reach dasDing absolutely, to open the flood gates of desire, what does Sade show us on the horizon? In essence, pain. The other’s pain as well as the pain of the subject himself, for on occasions they are simply one and the same thing. To the degree that it involves forcing an access to the Thing, the outer extremity of pleasure is unbearable to us. It is this that explains the absurd or, to use a popular expression, maniacal side of Sade that strikes us in his fictional constructions. We are aware at every moment of the discomfort in living constructions, the kind of discomfort that makes it so difficult for our neurotic patients to confess certain of their fantasms.
In fact, to a certain degree, at a certain level, fantasms cannot bear the revelation of speech.
We are then brought back again to the moral law insofar as it is incarnated in a certain number of commandments. I mean the ten commandments, which in the beginning, at a period that is not so remote in the past, were collected by a people that sets itself apart as a chosen people.
As I said, it is appropriate to reconsider these commandments. I noted last time that there is a study to be done for which I would gladly call upon one of you as the representative of a tradition of moral theology. A great many questions deserve our attention. I spoke of the number of commandments. There is also the matter of their form and the way in which they are transmitted to us in the future tense. I would be glad to call upon the help of someone who knows enough Hebrew to answer my questions. In the Hebrew version is it a future tense or a form of the volitive that is used in Deuteronomy and Numbers, where we see the first formulations of the Decalogue?
The issue I want to raise today concerns their privileged structure in relation to the structure of the law. I want today to consider two of them.
I must leave to one side the huge questions posed by the promulgation of these commandments by something that announces itself in the following form: “I am what I am.” It is, in effect, necessary not to draw the text in the direction of Greek metaphysics by translating as “he who is,” or “he who am.” The English translation, “I am that I am,” is, according to Hebrew scholars, the closest to what is meant by the formulation of the verse. Perhaps I am mistaken, but since I do not know Hebrew and while I wait on further information on the subject, I rely on the best authorities, and they are of one mind on the question.
That “I am what I am” is announced first of all to a small people in the form of that which saved it from the misfortunes of Egypt, and it begins by affirming, “You will adore no God but me, before my countenance.” I leave open the question of what “before my countenance” means. Does it mean that beyond the countenance of God, i.e., outside Canaan, the adoration of other gods is not inconceivable for a believing Jew? A passage from the second Book of Samuel, spoken by David, seems to confirm this.
It is nevertheless the case that the second commandment, the one that formally excludes not only every cult, but also every image, every representation of what is in heaven, on earth, or in the void, seems to me to show that what is involved is in a very special relationship to human feeling as a whole. In a nutshell, the elimination of the function of the imaginary presents itself to my mind, and, I think, to yours, as the principle of the relation to the symbolic, in the meaning we give that term here; that is to say, to speech. Its principal condition is there.
I leave aside the question of rest on the sabbath day. But I believe that that extraordinary commandment, according to which, in a land of masters, we observe one day out of seven without work – such that according to humorous proverbs, the common man is left no happy medium between the labor of love and the most stultifying boredom – that suspension, that emptiness, clearly introduces into human life the sign of a gap, a beyond relative to every law of utility. It seems to me, therefore, that it has the most intimate relationship to something that we are on the track of here.
I leave aside the prohibition on murder, for we will have to come back to that in connection with the respective significance of the act and its retribution. I want to take up the prohibition on lying insofar as it is related to what presented itself to us as that essential relationship of man to the Thing, insofar as it is commanded by the pleasure principle, namely, the lie that we have to deal with every day in our unconscious.
“Thou shalt not lie” is the commandment in which the intimate link between desire, in its structuring function, with the law is felt most tangibly. In truth, this commandment exists to make us feel the true function of the law. And I can do no better than to place it beside the sophism in which is manifested most strikingly the type of ingenuity that is furthest from the Jewish or talmudic tradition, namely, the paradox of Epimenides, he who affirmed that all men are liars. What am I saying, in proposing the articulation of the unconscious that I gave you; what am I saying, responds the sophism? – except that I, too, lie, and, consequently, I can affirm nothing valid concerning not simply the function of truth, but even the significance of lying.
“Thou shalt not lie” as a negative precept has as its function to withdraw the subject of enunciation from that which is enunciated. Remember the graph. It is there that I can say “Thou shalt not lie” – there where I lie, where I repress, where I, the liar, speak. In “Thou shalt not lie” as law is included the possibility of the lie as the most fundamental desire.
I am going to give you a proof that is to my mind nevertheless valid. It concerns Proudhon’s famous phrase: “Property is theft.” Another proof is that of the cries of anguish lawyers emit whenever it is a question, in some more or less grotesque and mythical form, of using a lie detector. Must we conclude from this that the respect of the human person involves the right to lie? Surely, it is a question and not an answer to reply “yes, certainly.” One might say, it’s not so simple.
What is the source of that rebellion against the fact that something exists which may reduce the question of the subject’s speech to a universally objectified application? The point is that speech doesn’t itself know what it is saying when it lies, and that, on the other hand, in lying it also speaks some truth. Moreover, it is in this antinomic function between the law and desire, as conditioned by speech, that resides the primordial authority which makes this commandment among all ten one of the cornerstones of that which we call the human condition, to the extent that that condition merits our respect.
Since time is getting on, I will skip quickly forward to the issue that is the object of our discussion today relative to the relationship between desire and the law. It is the famous commandment that affirms the following – it makes one smile, but when one thinks about it, one doesn’t smile for long: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, neither his man servant, nor his maid servant, neither his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that belongs to thy neighbor.”
Putting the wife between the house and the donkey has given rise to more than one idea that one can recognize there the exigences of a primitive society—a society of Bedouins, “wogs,” and “niggers.” Well, I don’t agree.
The law affirmed there, the part concerning one’s neighbor’s wife at least, is still alive in the hearts of men who violate it every day, and it doubtless has a relationship to that which is the object of our discussion today, namely, das Ding.
It is not after all a question of just any good here. It is not a question of that which creates the law of exchange and covers with a kind of amusing legality, a kind of social Sicherung, the movements, the impetus, of human instincts. It is a question of something whose value resides in the fact that none of these objects exists without having the closest possible relationship to that in which the human being can rest as if it were die Trude, das Ding – not insofar as it is his good, but insofar as it is the good in which he may find rest. Let me add das Ding insofar as it is the very correlative of the law of speech in its most primitive point of origin, and in the sense that this Dingwas there from the beginning, that it was the first thing that separated itself from everything the subject began to name and articulate, that the covetousness that is in question is not addressed to anything that I might desire but to a thing that is my neighbor’s Thing.
It is to the extent that the commandment in question preserves the distance from the Thing as founded by speech itself that it assumes its value.
But where does this take us?
Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law. In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: “Thou shalt not covet it.” But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds 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, the Thing flared 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.
I believe that for a little while now some of you at least have begun to suspect that it is no longer I who have been speaking. In fact, with one small change, namely, “Thing” for “sin,” this is the speech of Saint Paul on the subject of the relations between the law and sin in the Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 7, paragraph 7.
Whatever some may think in certain milieux, you would be wrong to think that the religious authors aren’t a good read. I have always been rewarded whenever I have immersed myself in their works. And Saint Paul’s Epistle is a work that I recommend to you for your vacation reading; you will find it very good company.
The relationship between the Thing and the Law could not be better defined than in these terms. And we will come back to it now. The dialectical relationship between desire and the Law causes our desire to flare up only in relation to the Law, through which it becomes the desire for death. It is only because of the Law that sin, ἀμαρτíα – which in Greek means lack and nonparticipation in the Thing – takes on an excessive, hyperbolic character. Freud’s discovery – the ethics of psychoanalysis – does it leave us clinging to that dialectic? We will have to explore that which, over the centuries, human beings have succeeded in elaborating that transgresses the Law, puts them in a relationship to desire that transgresses interdiction, and introduces an erotics that is above morality.
I don’t think that you should be surprised by such a question. It is after all precisely something that all religions engage in, all mysticisms, all that Kant disdainfully calls the Religionsschwärmereien, religious enthusiasms – it’s not an easy term to translate. What is all this except a way of rediscovering the relationship to das Ding somewhere beyond the law? There are no doubt other ways. No doubt, in talking about erotics, we will have to talk about the kind of rules of love that have been elaborated over the centuries. Freud said somewhere that he could have described his doctrine as an erotics, but, he went on, “I didn’t do it, because that would have involved giving ground relative to words, and he who gives ground relative to words also gives ground relative to things. I thus spoke of the theory of sexuality.”
It’s true: Freud placed in the forefront of ethical inquiry the simple relationship between man and woman. Strangely enough, things haven’t been able to move beyond that point. The question of das Ding is still attached to whatever is open, lacking, or gaping at the center of our desire. I would say – you will forgive the play on words – that we need to know what we can do to transform this dam-age into our “dame” in the archaic French sense, our lady.
Don’t laugh at this sleight of hand; it was in the language before I used it. If you look up the etymology of the word “danger,” you will see that exactly the same ambiguity exists from the beginning in French: “danger” was originally “domniarium,” domination. The word “dame” gradually came to contaminate that word. And, in effect, when we are in another’s power, we are in great danger.
Therefore, next year we will try to advance still further into these incontestably perilous waters.
December 23, 1959