I wouldn’t want to begin my seminar today without telling you briefly what I didn’t have time to tell you yesterday at the meeting of our Society.
We heard a remarkable paper, given by someone who wasn’t trying to revolutionize the field of hysteria, and who wasn’t in a position to bring us an immense or original body of experience, since the person involved is only just beginning his career in psychoanalysis; nevertheless, his very complete and, as was noted, perhaps overly rich presentation was extremely well articulated.
That doesn’t mean that it was perfect. And if I had felt it necessary to force the issue by intervening after the somewhat premature termination of the discussion, I would certainly have rectified certain points made concerning the relations of the hysteric to the ego ideal and the ideal ego, notably in the element of uncertainty in the linking of these two functions.
But that isn’t important. A presentation of the kind in question reveals how the categories that I have been striving to promote in this seminar for years prove to be useful and allow one to articulate things with some precision. They shed a light that is adequate to the limits of our experience. And however much one may take issue with some point of detail or other, you can see the theoretical concepts come alive as if by themselves, and make contact with the level of experience.
We have spoken about the relations between the hysteric and the signifier. In our clincial experience we can feel its presence at every moment, and last night you were presented with what might well be called a well-oiled machine that started working before your very eyes. So many points were presented to the test of experience, but the whole brought you into direct contact with the convergence of the theoretical notions I have given you and the structure that concerns us, namely, a structure that is defined by the fact that the subject is to be situated in the signifier. Directly in front of us, we see appear the “It speaks.”1
The “It speaks” derived from theory joins everyday clinical experience.
We saw the hysteric come alive in her own sphere, and not by reference to obscure forces that are unevenly divided in a space that is not moreover homogeneous – the latter is typical of a discourse that only claims to be analytical. The reason it can only claim to be analytical is that it alienates itself in all kinds of references to sciences that are altogether worthy in their own domain, but which are often only involved by the theorist so as to mask his clumsiness in moving about in his own sphere.
This is not simply a form of homage paid to the work you heard, nor is it a simple hors-d’oeuvre to what I am attempting with you, but a reminder that I am trying with all the means at my disposal, which are simply those of experience, to make the ethical dimension of psychoanalysis come alive before you.
I don’t claim to do anything more this year than I have done in years past in the form of a progressive development – from the first reference to speech and to language up to the attempt last year to define the function of desire in the economy of our experience – that is guided by Freudian thought.
In this discussion of Freud’s thought I do not proceed like a professor. The usual approach of professors to the thought of those who happen to have taught us something in the course of human history generally consists in formulating it in such a way that it can only be seen from its narrowest and most partial side. Hence the impression of taking in deep breaths one always has when one goes directly to the original texts – I am, of course, referring to texts that are worthwhile.
One never goes beyond Descartes, Kant, Marx, Hegel and a few others because they mark a line of inquiry, a true orientation. One never goes beyond Freud either. Nor does one attempt to measure his contribution quantitatively, draw up a balance sheet – what’s the point of that? One uses him. One moves around within him. One takes one’s bearings from the direction he points in. What I am offering you here is an attempt to articulate the essence of an experience that has been guided by Freud. It is in no way an effort to measure the volume of his contribution or summarize him.
That the ethical dimension is the stuff of our experience is revealed to us in the implicit deviations in ethics that appear in the so-called objectifying notions which have been gradually laid down through the different periods of analytical thought. Isn’t an implicit ethical notion contained in the concept of the offering that you often see me criticize here? Don’t those unformulated, scarcely acknowledged, yet often explicit goals that are expressed in the notion of remaking the subject’s ego or of accomplishing through analysis the restructuring of the subject’s ego – not to speak of reformation or reform with all its implications in analysis – don’t they all imply an ethical dimension? I just want to show you that it doesn’t correspond to the reality of our experience, to the real dimensions in which the ethical problem is posed. Freud suggests as much through the particular orientation he has opened up for us.
Thus by leading you on to the ground of the ethics of psychoanalysis this year, I have brought you up against a certain limit that I illustrated through a confrontation, or heightening of the difference by contrast, of Kant and Sade, however paradoxical that may seem. I have led you to the point of apocalypse or of revelation of something called transgression.
This point of transgression has a significant relation to something that is involved in our inquiry into ethics, that is to say, the meaning of desire. And my discussions of previous years have taught you to make a strict distinction between desire and need in Freudian experience, which is also our own daily experience. There is no way one can reduce desire in order to make it emerge, emanate, from the dimension of need. That provides you with the framework in which our research progresses.
Let me come back to something which has a contingent character in the comments I have made to you. In a byway of one of my lectures, I made a paradoxical and even whimsical excursion on the topic of two figures that I set in opposition to one another, those of the left-wing intellectual and the right-wing intellectual.
By using these two terms in a certain register and by setting them up in opposition to each other, I might have seemed to bear witness to that imprudence which encourages indifference on political questions. In brief, it turned out that I was criticized for having emphasized in terms I chose with some care that Freud wasn’t a progressive – yet I did go out of my way to say that Freud’s ethics in Civilization and Its Discontents were humanitarian, which is not exactly to say that he was a reactionary.
The remarks made struck some as dangerous, although their accuracy was not, in fact, challenged. I was surprised that something of the kind was said to me, and especially given the political orientation from which it came. To those who may have been similarly surprised, I would encourage them to take the time to look these things up by reading certain short works – that’s always a valuable exercise, if one wants to check up on the movements of one’s feelings.
I have brought one such work today. It is the first volume of Karl Marx’s Philosophical Works, translated by Molitor, and published by Alfred Coste. I encourage those concerned to read, for example, “The Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” or quite simply that curious little work called “The Jewish Question.” Perhaps they would get a more precise notion of what Marx would think, if he were alive now, about what is called progressivism; and I mean by that a certain style of ideology, characterized by its generosity and apparently widespread in our bourgeoisie. The way in which Marx would evaluate such progressivism will be apparent to all those who look up those sources I just mentioned; they are a good, healthy standard of a certain kind of intellectual honesty.
Thus, in saying Freud was not a progressive, I didn’t at all want to say, for example, that he wasn’t interested in the Marxist experience. But it is nevertheless a fact that he wasn’t a progressive, I am not imputing things of a political nature to Freud in saying that; it is just that he did not share certain types of bourgeois prejudice.
However, it is also a fact that Freud wasn’t a Marxist. I didn’t emphasize that because I don’t really see the interest or the ramifications of it. I will reserve for later a discussion of the interest that the dimension opened up by Freud might have for Marxism. This point will be much more difficult to introduce, since up to now no one among the Marxists seems to have noticed particularly – if it is true that Marxists still exist – the meaning embodied in the experience opened up by Freud.
Marx takes up the tradition of a thought that culminated in the work which was the object of his perspicacious comments, namely, Hegel’s Philosophy of Law – a work that articulates something that, as far as I know, we are still immersed in, namely, the foundation of the State, of the bourgeois State, which lays down the rules of a human organization founded on need and reason. Marx makes us see the biased, partial and incomplete character of the solution given in this framework. He shows that the harmony between need and reason is at this level only an abstract and dissociated solution.
Need and reason are harmonized only in law, but everyone is left a victim of the egoism of his private needs, of anarchy and of materialism. Marx aspires to the creation of a State where, as he puts it, human emancipation will be not only political but real, a State where man will find himself in a non-alienated relation to his own organization.
Now you know that, in spite of the openings that history has given to the direction pointed to by Marx, we don’t seem to have produced integral man yet, On this road, Freud shows us – and it is in this sense that he doesn’t go beyond Marx – that, however far the articulation of the problem has been taken by the tradition of classical philosophy, the two terms of reason and of need are insufficient to permit an understanding of the domain involved when it is a question of human self-realization. It is in the structure itself that we come up against a certain difficulty, which is nothing less than the function of desire, as I have articulated it in this seminar.
It is a curious and even paradoxical fact – but analytical experience can be registered in no other way – that reason, discourse, signifying articulation as such, is there from the beginning, ab ovo; it is there in an unconscious form before the birth of anything as far as human experience is concerned. It is there buried, unknown, not mastered, not available to him who is its support. And it is relative to a situation structured in this way that man at a subsequent moment has to situate his needs. Man’s captivity in the field of the unconscious is primordial, fundamental in character. Now, because this field is organized logically from the beginning, it embodies a Spaltung, which persists in the whole subsequent development; and it is in relation to this Spaltung that the functioning of desire as such is to be articulated. This desire reveals certain ridges, a certain sticking point, and it is for this reason that Freudian experience has found that man’s route to the integration of self is a complicated one.
The problem involved is that of jouissance, because jouissance presents itself as buried at the center of a field and has the characteristics of inaccessibility, obscurity and opacity; moreover, the field is surrounded by a barrier which makes access to it difficult for the subject to the point of inaccessibility, because jouissance appears not purely and simply as the satisfaction of a need but as the satisfaction of a drive – that term to be understood in the context of the complex theory I have developed on this subject in this seminar.
As you were told last time, the drive as such is something extremely complex for anyone who considers it conscientiously and tries to understand Freud’s articulation of it. It isn’t to be reduced to the complexity of the instinct as understood in the broadest sense, in the sense that relates it to energy. It embodies a historical dimension whose true significance needs to be appreciated by us.
This dimension is to be noted in the insistence that characterizes its appearances; it refers back to something memorable because it was remembered. Remembering, “historicizing,” is coextensive with the functioning of the drive in what we call the human psyche. It is there, too, that destruction is registered, that it enters the register of experience.
This is something that I will now attempt to illustrate by leading you into the sphere, not so much of the myth of Sade (the term is inappropriate) but of the fable of Sade.
On page seventy-eight of Volume IV of Juliette in the edition that is most easily accessible to you, namely, Jean-Jacques Pauvert’s, Sade expounds the System of Pope Pius VI, since it is to this pope that the theories in question are imputed.
Sade lays out for our benefit the theory that it is through crime that man collaborates in the new creations of nature. The idea is that the pure force of nature is obstructed by its own forms, that because the three realms present fixed forms they bind nature to a limited cycle, that is, moreover, manifestly imperfect, as is demonstrated by the chaos and abundance of conflicts as well as the fundamental disorder of their reciprocal relations. As a result, the deepest concern that can be imputed to this psychic subject that is Nature is that of wanting to wipe the slate clean, so that it may begin its task once more, set out again with a new burst of energy.
This discussion is completely literary, in the sense that it is not scientifically founded, but is rather poetic in character. In this luxuriant hodge-podge, from time to time one comes across what some people might take to be tedious digressions. But as you will see, they are entertaining to read. Thus, although reading always risks distracting one’s audience’s attention, I am going to read a passage from Sade’s system:
Without destruction the earth would receive no nourishment and, as a result, there would be no possibility for man to reproduce his species. It is no doubt a fateful truth, since it proves in an invincible way that the vices and virtues of our social system are nothing, and that the very vices are more necessary than the virtues, because they are creative and the virtues are merely created; or, if you prefer, the vices are causes and the virtues no more than effects. … A too perfect harmony would thus be a greater disadvantage than disorder; and if war, discord and crime were banished from the earth, the power of the three realms would be too violent and would destroy in its turn all the other laws of nature. The celestial bodies would all stop. Thier influences would be halted by the excessive power of one of them; there would be neither gravitation nor movement. It is thus men’s crimes that introduce disorder into the sphere of the three realms and prevent this sphere from achieving a level of superiority that would disrupt all the others, by maintaining the perfect balance Horace called rerum concordia discors. Thus crime is necessary in the world. But the most useful crimes are no doubt those that disrupt the most, such as the refusal of propagation or destruction; all the others are worthless or rather only those two are worthy of the name of crime. Thus only the crimes mentioned are essential to the laws of the three realms and essential also to the laws of nature. A philosopher in antiquity called war the mother of all things. The existence of murderers is as necessary as plagues; without both of them everything in the universe would be upset. … such dissolution serves nature’s purposes, since it recomposes that which is destroyed. Thus every change operated by man on organized matter serves nature much more than it opposes it. What am I saying? The service of nature requires far more total destructions … destructions much more complete than those we are able to accomplish. Nature wants atrocities and magnitude in crimes; the more our destructions are of this type, the more they will be agreeable to it. To be of even greater service to nature, one should seek to prevent the regeneration of the body that we bury. Murder only takes the first life of the individual whom we strike down; we should also seek to take his second life, if we are to be even more useful to nature. For nature wants annihilation; it is beyond our capacity to achieve the scale of destruction it desires.
I presume that you have grasped the significance of the core of this last statement. It takes us to the heart of what was explained last time, in connection with the death drive, as the point of division between the Nirvana or annihilation principle, on the one hand, and the death drive, on the other – the former concerns a relationship to a fundamental law which might be identified with that which energetics theorizes as the tendency to return to a state, if not of absolute rest, then at least of universal equilibrium.
The death drive is to be situated in the historical domain; it is articulated at a level that can only be defined as a function of the signifying chain, that is to say, insofar as a reference point, that is a reference point of order, can be situated relative to the functioning of nature. It requires something from beyond whence it may itself be grasped in a fundamental act of memorization, as a result of which everything may be recaptured, not simply in the movement of the metamorphoses but from an initial intention.
This is to schematize what you heard last time in Mr. Kaufmann’s very full and helpful summary of the work of Bernfeld and Feitelberg; it brought out the three stages at which the death drive is articulated. At the level of material systems considered to be inanimate – and, therefore, including that which involves material organization within living organisms – the operation of an irreversible tendency that proceeds in the direction of the advent of a terminal state of equilibrium is, properly speaking, something that in energetics is known as entropy. That is the first meaning that can be given to the death drive in Freud. Is that what is, in fact, involved?
Bemfeld and Feitelberg’s text adds something particularly relevant to Freud’s on the subject of the difference introduced by a living structure. In inanimate physical systems the dimensions of intensity and extension involved in the formula of energetics are homogeneous. According to Bernfeld living organizations as such are distinguished by the element of structure – in Goldstein’s sense of the structure of an organism – that causes the two poles of the equation to become heterogeneous. That is posited at the elementary level between the nucleus and the cytoplasm as well as at the level of superior organisms between the neurological apparatus and the rest of the structure. That heterogeneity is responsible for the conflict at the level of the living structure from the beginning.
It is at this point that Bernfeld says, “I will stop here.” According to him, what one finds in the drive as articulated by Freud is a general tendency of all systems to return to a state of equilibrium insofar as they are subject to the energetic equation. That may be called an instinct, as the orthodox Freudian, Bernfeld, expresses it, but it isn’t what we psychoanalysts designate as the drive in our discourse.
The drive as such, insofar, as it is then a destruction drive, has to be beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere. What can it be if it is not a direct will to destruction, if I may put it like that by way of illustration?
Don’t put the emphasis on the term “will” here. Whatever interest may have been aroused in Freud by an echo in Schopenhauer, it has nothing to do with the idea of a fundamental Wille. And it is only to make you sense the difference of register relative to the instinct to return to equilibrium that I am using the word in this way here. Will to destruction. Will to make a fresh start. Will for an Other-thing, given that everything can be challenged from the perspective of the function of the signifier.
If everything that is immanent or implicit in the chain of natural events may be considered as subject to the so-called death drive, it is only because there is a signifying chain. Freud’s thought in this matter requires that what is involved be articulated as a destruction drive, given that it challenges everything that exists. But it is also a will to create from zero, a will to begin again.
This dimension is introduced as soon as the historical chain is isolated, and the history presents itself as something memorable and memorized in the Freudian sense, namely, something that is registered in the signifying chain and dependent on its existence.
That’s what I am illustrating by quoting the passage from Sade. Not that Freud’s notion of the death drive is not a notion that is scientifically unjustifiable, but it is of the same order as Sade’s Pope Pius VI. As in Sade, the notion of the death drive is a creationist sublimation, and it is linked to that structural element which implies that, as soon as we have to deal with anything in the world appearing in the form of the signifying chain, there is somewhere – though certainly outside of the natural world – which is the beyond of that chain, the ex nihilo on which it is founded and is articulated as such.
I am not telling you that the notion of the death wish in Freud is not something very suspect in itself – as suspect and, I would say, almost as ridiculous as Sade’s idea. Can anything be poorer or more worthless after all than the idea that human crimes might, for good or evil, contribute in some way to the cosmic maintenance of the rerum concordia discors?
It is even doubly suspect, since it amounts in the end to substituting a subject for Nature – and that is how I read Beyond the Pleasure Principle. However we construct this subject, it turns out to have as its support a subject who knows, or Freud, in effect, since he is the one who discovered the beyond of the pleasure priniple. Nevertheless, Freud is consistent with himself in also pointing, at the limit of our experience, to a field in which the subject, if he exists, is incontestably a subject who doesn’t know in a point of extreme, if not absolute, ignorance. One finds there the core of Freudian exploration.
I don’t even say that at this point of speculation things still have a meaning. I simply want to say that the articulation of the death drive in Freud is neither true nor false. It is suspect; that’s all I affirm. But it suffices for Freud that it was necessary, that it leads him to an unfathomable spot that is problematic, since it reveals the structure of the field. It points to the site that I designate alternatively as impassable or as the site of the Thing. Freud evokes there his sublimation concerning the death instinct insofar as that sublimation is fundamentally creationist.
One also finds there the essential point of the warning whose tone and note I have given you on more than one occasion: beware of that register of thought known as evolutionism. Beware of it for two reasons. What I have to tell you now may seem dogmatic, but that’s more apparent than real.
The first reason is that, however much the evolutionist movement and Freud’s thought may share in terms of contemporaneity and historical affinities, there is a fundamental contradiction between the hypotheses of the one and the thought of the other. I have already indicated the necessity of the moment of creation ex nihilo as that which gives birth to the historical dimension of the drive. In the beginning was the Word, which is to say, the signifier. Without the signifier at the beginning, it is impossible for the drive to be articulated as historical. And this is all it takes to introduce the dimension of the ex nihilo into the structure of the analytical field.
The second reason may seem paradoxical to you; it is nevertheless essential: the creationist perspective is the only one that allows one to glimpse the possibility of the radical elimination of God.
It is paradoxically only from a creationist point of view that one can envisage the elimination of the always recurring notion of creative intention as supported by a person. In evolutionist thought, although God goes unnamed throughout, he is literally omnipresent. An evolution that insists on deducing from continuous process the ascending movement which reaches the summit of consciousness and thought necessarily implies that that consciousness and that thought were there at the beginning. It is only from the point of view of an absolute beginning, which marks the origin of the signifying chain as a distinct order and which isolates in their own specific dimension the memorable and the remembered, that we do not find Being [l’être] always implied in being [l’étant], the implication that is at the core of evolutionist thought.
It isn’t difficult to make what is called thought emerge from the evolution of matter, when one identifies thought with consciousness. What is difficult to make emerge from the evolution of matter is quite simply homo faber, production and the producer.
Production is an original domain, a domain of creation ex nihilo, insofar as it introduces into the natural world the organization of the signifier. It is for this reason that we only, in effect, find thought – and not in an idealist sense, but thought in its actualization in the world – in the intervals introduced by the signifier.
This field that I call the field of the Thing, this field onto which is projected something beyond, something at the point of origin of the signifying chain, this place in which doubt is cast on all that is the place of being, on the chosen place in which sublimation occurs, of which Freud gives us the most massive example – where do the view and notion of it emerge from?
It is also the place of the work that man strangely enough courts; that is why the first example I gave you was taken from courtly love. You have to admit that to place in this beyond a creature such as woman is a truly incredible idea.
Rest assured that I am in no way passing a derogatory judgment on such beings. In our cultural context, one isn’t exposed to any danger by being situated as absolute object in the beyond of the pleasure principle. Let them go back to their own problems, which are homogeneous with our own, that is to say, just as difficult. That’s not the issue.
If the incredible idea of situating woman in the place of being managed to surface, that has nothing to do with her as a woman, but as an object of desire. And it is that which has given rise to all the paradoxes of the famous courtly love that have caused so many headaches, because those concerned associate it with all the demands of a form of love that obviously has nothing to do with the historically specific sublimation in question.
The historians or poets who have attacked the problem cannot manage to conceive how the fever, indeed the frenzy, that is so manifestly coextensive with a lived desire, which is not at all Platonic and is indubitably manifested in the productions of courtly poetry, can be reconciled with the obvious fact that the being to whom it is addressed is nothing other than being as signifier. The inhuman character of the object of courtly love is plainly visible. This love that led some people to acts close to madness was addressed at living beings, people with names, but who were not present in their fleshly and historical reality – there’s perhaps a distinction to be made there. They were there in any case in their being as reason, as signifier.
By the way this is what explains the extraordinary series of ten-line stanzas by the poet Arnaud Daniel that I read to you. One finds there the response of the shepherdess to her shepherd, for the woman responds for once from her place, and instead of playing along, at the extreme point of his invocation to the signifier, she warns the poet of the form she may take as signifier. I am, she tells him, nothing more than the emptiness to be found in my own internal cesspit, not to say anything worse. Just blow in that for a while and see if your sublimation holds up.
That’s not to say there is no other solution to the perspective of the field of the Thing. Another solution that is also historically specific and, curiously enough, occurs at a period that isn’t so different from the one I have just referred to, is perhaps a little more serious. It is called in Sade the Supreme-Being-in-Evil.
I say Sade because I prefer relatively close, living references to remote ones, but it is not just an invention of Sade’s. It belongs to a long historical tradition, which goes at least as far back as Manicheism, if not beyond, that Manicheism which was already referred to in the time of courtly love.
In the time of courtly love there were people to whom I made a passing reference, the Cathars, and they did not doubt the fact that the Prince of this world was quite similar to this Supreme-Being-in-Evil. The Grimmigkeit of Boehme’s God, fundamental evil as one of the dimensions of supreme life, proves that it is not simply in libertine and antireligious thought that this dimension may be evoked.
The Cathars were not Gnostics; everything indicates that they were even good Christians. The practice of their sacrament, the consolamentum, is sufficient proof of that. The idea they had of salvation, which is not different from the fundamental idea of Christianity, was that there is a word that saves; and the consolamentum was nothing more than the transmission from one subject to another of the blessing of this word. They were people who placed all of their hope in the advent of a word. In short, people who took quite seriously the message of Christianity.
The trouble is that for such a word to be not so much effective as viable, it has to be separated from discourse. Yet there is nothing more difficult than separating a word from discourse. You put your faith in a word that saves, but as soon as you begin at this level, the whole discourse comes running after you. And this is something that the Cathars didn’t fail to notice in the shape of the ecclesiastical authorities, who manifested themselves briefly as the bad word and taught them that one still has to explain oneself even if one belongs to the pure. Now everybody knows that as soon as one begins to be questioned by discourse on this subject, even if it is the discourse of the Church, then the matter can only end in one way. You are definitively silenced.
We have now arrived at a certain limit, that is to say, the field which opens on to what is involved relative to desire. How can we get any closer? How can we question this field? What happens when one doesn’t project one’s dreams there in a sublimated way, and that thematics emerges to which the most sober of minds are reduced, the most commonplace and the most scientific, even including a certain petty bourgeois from Vienna? What happens to us whenever the hour of desire sounds?
Well, we don’t get any closer and for the best of reasons.
This will be the focus of my next lecture. One doesn’t get any closer on account of the very reasons that structure the domain of the good in the most traditional sense, which is linked by a whole tradition to pleasure. It wasn’t the coming of Freud that introduced a radical revolution in antiquity’s point of view on the good insofar as it can be deduced from the paths of pleasure. I will try next time to show you where things stood at the time of Freud; this historical crossroads I am taking you back to is that of utility.
This time I hope to gauge for you in a definitive way and from a Freudian point of view the ethical register of utilitarianism. Freud on this occasion allows himself to go definitively beyond it; he articulates that which is basically valid in it and that which at the same time bounds it, and points to its limits.
I will try to discuss the point of view not only of the progress of thought, but also of the evolution of history, in order to demystify the Platonic and the Aristotelian view of the good, indeed of the Supreme Good, and to situate it on the level of the economy of goods.2 It is essential to grasp the issue from the Freudian perspective of the pleasure principle and the reality principle, if one is go on to conceive the novelty of what Freud brings to the domain of ethics.
Beyond this place of restraint constituted by the concatenation and circuit of goods, a field nevertheless remains open to us that allows us to draw closer to the central field. The good is not the only, the true, or the single barrier that separates us from it.
What is this second barrier? I will tell you right away, and it will probably seem quite natural to you once I have told you. But it isn’t after all so self-evident. It is a domain in relation to which Freud always revealed a great deal of reticence; and it really is strange that he didn’t identify it. The true barrier that holds the subject back in front of the unspeakable field of radical desire that is the field of absolute destruction, of destruction beyond putrefaction, is properly speaking the aesthetic phenomenon where it is identified with the experience of beauty – beauty in all its shining radiance, beauty that has been called the splendor of truth. It is obviously because truth is not pretty to look at that beauty is, if not its splendor, then at least its envelope.
In other words, I will explain next time our forward march resumes that on the scale that separates us from the central field of desire, if the good constitutes the first stopping place, the beautiful forms the second and gets closer. It stops us, but it also points in the direction of the field of destruction.
That in this sense, when one aims for the center of moral experience, the beautiful is closer to evil than to the good, shouldn’t, I hope, surprise you very much. As we have long said in French: “Better is the enemy of the good.”
May 4, 1960
1 “Le ça parle.” “Le ça” is the everyday French word Lacan prefers to translate “das Es.” That is why “it” seems more appropriate in this particular context than “Id.”
2 English usage, unlike French usage, generally limits the plural of “the good,” namely, “the goods” to a specific and material meaning. Here and in what follows, however, “goods” in the plural is to be read as also retaining the ethical connotations implied by the singular.