10 Ethics and tragedy in Lacan
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Lacan’s discussion of the ethics of psychoanalysis is closely connected to his discussion of tragedy, yet one must not forget that this connection is not an immediate one. Ethics, as well as tragedy, is approached in relation to another central notion, that of desire. Whatever link there is between ethics and tragedy, it springs from this notion. One should also bear in mind that, in Lacanian theory, there is a very direct link between desire and comedy. Lacan introduces, develops, and illustrates his famous graph of desire through his reading of Freud’s book on the Witz (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious), adding some of his own examples and bringing the discussion to its climax with a brief but poignant commentary on Aristophanes and Molière.1 At the end of the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the seminar in which the central question of the relationship between action and the desire that inhabits us is explored in its tragic dimension, Lacan reminds us again of this other, comic dimension:
However little time I have thus far devoted to the comic here, you have been able to see that there, too, it is a question of the relationship between action and desire, and of the former’s fundamental failure to catch up with the latter.
(SVII, p. 313)
Indeed, the “relationship between action and desire” is what defines the field of ethics, and the exploration of tragedy as well as comedy offers a productive way to examine the different forms that this relationship can take. Although we will focus on the perspective of tragedy (the perspective that is largely identified with Lacan’s discussion of ethics), the other, comical dimension should at least be mentioned as another possible entry into this topic.
Lacan’s position on the ethics of psychoanalysis cannot be simply identified with his commentaries on different works of tragedy (and comedy). Hamlet is not here to illustrate some model of ethical conduct. Neither are Antigone or Sygne de Coûfontaine. They are here because they all give body to a certain impasse of desire, as well as to a certain way of dealing with this impasse. In other words, they are here because the impasse of desire is what psychoanalysis primarily deals with, brings forward, and bears witness to. They are here because this impasse is the stuff that dreams are made of – dreams that are none other than those that led Freud to the discovery of the unconscious.
The first remarkable feature that strikes the eye regarding Lacan’s engagement with tragedy is the fact that everything happens within a precise and relatively short period of his teaching, between 1958 and 1961. While conducting his sixth seminar, Desire and Its Interpretation, he embarked on a long and elaborate commentary of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The following year, which is the year of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, he presented his famous reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. And the year after that, while focusing his seminar on the topic of transference, he proposed a stunning analysis of Paul Claudel’s Coûfontaine trilogy (The Hostage, Crusts, and The Humiliation of the Father). In addition to that, there are abundant references to Oedipus (to both Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus) in all of the above-mentioned Seminars.
It seems as if in these years Lacan wanted to explore and – one is tempted to say – to develop to its bitter end the fundamental conceptual frame that characterizes this period of his teaching, and that could be formulated in terms of an absolute antinomy between the signifying order and the realm of jouissance. Lacan situated jouissance on the side of the Thing (Freud’s das Ding), and this schema constituted the pivotal notion of the seminar on Ethics. Absolutely isolated and separated from both the Symbolic and the Imaginary, das Ding appears as an inaccessible Real or, rather, as the Real the access to which can require the highest price. Insofar as it sets out to render this access, psychoanalysis itself constitutes a tragic experience. For Lacan, to state that “tragedy is in the forefront of our experiences as analysts” (S VII, p. 243), and to posit an equivalence between “the ethics of tragedy” and “that of psychoanalysis” (S VII, p. 258), refers precisely to the price the subject has to pay to get access to this Real. For the Real constitutes the very kernel of the subject’s being, the kernel that is simultaneously created and extirpated by the advent of the signifying order. Lacan does not imply that the order of the signifier robs the subject of some previous (and full) possession of her being – this being is utterly coextensive with the symbolic order and yet it is separated from it by a gap that can be described as existential.
Oedipus: the risk of castration
The notion that articulates together the two sides of the dichotomy of the signifier and the Thing is that of desire. The structure of desire is the structure of the signifying order, of language and its inherent differentiation. Hence Lacan’s insistence on the metonymical character of desire. However, what the desire ultimately aims at and what, at the same time, functions as its absolute condition, is situated on the side of the Thing. Desire incarnates the very split, or gap, between the signifying order and the Real, and one could be led to think that it is this split that accounts for the tragic nature of the experience of desire. Yet this is not exactly what Lacan has in mind. Not satisfied with simply pointing out this split at the very core of human existence, Lacan does not join in the lamentation of the tragic nature of the human condition. Rather to the contrary, he subtly reverses the very perspective that leads to such lamentations. For, according to him, the essence of tragedy does not lie in its displaying of this supposed tragic split of the human subject; instead, it lies in the fact that the tragic hero or heroine is precisely someone who (willingly or not) embarks on the path of abolishing the split in question. This is where the tragedy springs from: from what one has to do (experience or “pay”) in order to gain access to the Real that the subject as such is by definition separated from. In other words, there is nothing “tragic” about the split itself that the signifier introduces into the subject. Recognizing this split is a common experience that can entail a certain amount of frustration and all kinds of neurosis, but does not in itself amount to what can be justly referred to as “tragic experience.” The glorification of this split as “tragic,” the positing of the pathetic grandeur of human existence as resulting from this wound at its core, is seen by Lacan as the ideological counterpart of every existing (political) order. Its message is simply the following: rather than pursue your desires, you should renounce them, accept the tragic impossibility that lies at their core, and join the path of the common good.
There is a very distinct political undertone to Lacan’s developments in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis that has to do precisely with this critique of the tragic split. “There is absolutely no reason,” he claims, “why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream” (S VII, p. 303). What does this “bourgeois dream” consist of? It consists of the attempt to link individual comfort with the service of goods (private goods, family goods, domestic goods, the goods of our trade or our profession, the goods of the community, etc.). If what Lacan calls “the universal spread of the service of goods” implies “an amputation, sacrifices, indeed a kind of puritanism in the relationship to desire that has occurred historically” (S VII, p. 303), then the goal of analysis can not and should not be to make the subject as comfortable as possible with this “amputation.” Analysis is not here to help us come to terms with the sacrifices that society inflicts upon us, nor to compensate for these sacrifices with the narcissistic satisfaction linked to our awareness of the “tragic split” that divides us and prevents us from ever being fully satisfied. Instead, it proposes a wholly different game, which reverses the perspective on the good, so that the latter is no longer seen as something that can be earned by certain sacrifices, but rather as something that we can use as a “payment” to get access to the one thing that really matters:
We come finally to the field of the service of goods; it exists, of course, and there is no question of denying that. But turning things around, I propose the following . . .: There is no other good than that which may serve to pay the price for access to desire.
(S VII, p. 321)
This reversal of the perspective on the good gets a very poignant illustration in the figure of Oedipus. Lacan focuses on the crucial period of time that passes between the moment when Oedipus is blinded and the moment when he dies (which roughly corresponds to the period covered by Oedipus at Colonus): a period of time that Lacan compares with what takes place at the end of analysis.
First of all, Lacan emphasizes that Oedipus has been duped precisely by his access to happiness, “both conjugal happiness and that of his job as a king, of being the guide to the happiness of the state” (S VII, p. 304), that is, the happiness related to the “service of goods.” In his act of blinding himself, Lacan recognizes an act of giving up the very thing that captivated him (namely, this “happiness”). At the same time, Lacan insists on the fact that this giving up the good that captivated him doesn’t prevent him from demanding everything, all the honors due to his rank. Although he has renounced the service of goods, none of the preeminence of his dignity in relation to these same goods is ever abandoned. Moreover, Oedipus continues to pursue the very desire that led him beyond the limit, namely, the desire to know. According to Lacan, “He has learned and still wants to learn something more” (S VII, p. 305). This zone that Oedipus enters by renouncing the service of goods is thus not some kind of nirvanic state where one is no longer driven by any desire or aspiration, completely detached from “worldly matters.” It is not that the renunciation of goods and of power prevents or stops us from formulating any demands. On the contrary, it is precisely this renunciation that puts us in the position to make demands, as well as in the position to act in conformity with the desire that exists in us. But what exactly is this renunciation about? As said above, it is not about renouncing the “pleasures of life.” Psychoanalytical experience rather shows that the true opposition is not between pursuing pleasure or happiness and renouncing them, say, in the name of some duty. Duties that we impose on ourselves and experience as “sacrifices” are, as often as not, a response to the fear of the risks involved in the case if we did not impose these duties. In other words, they are precisely the way we hang on to something that we fear most of all to lose. And it is this fear (or this “possession”) that enslaves us and makes us accept all kinds of sacrifices. Lacan’s point is that this possession is not some empirical good that we have and don’t want to lose. It is of symbolic nature, which is precisely what makes it so hard to give up. To renounce this “good” is not so much to renounce something that we have, as it is to renounce something that we don’t have but which is nevertheless holding our universe together. In other words, “psychoanalysis teaches that in the end it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration” (S VII, p. 307). This formula is, in fact, crucial for the “ethics of psychoanalysis,” which could be defined as that which liberates us by making us accept the risk of castration. In a certain sense, it puts us in the position where we have nothing to lose. However, while not false, this way of putting things can be misleading, since it suggests some kind of ultimate loss beyond which we no longer can desire or get attached to anything, which is precisely not the point. The loss in question is rather supposed to liberate the field of the desire – liberate it in the sense that the desire no longer depends upon the interdiction (of the Law) but is led to find and articulate its own law.
However, this is far from being obvious. The relation between desire and law is a complex one. One the one hand, it is too simplistic to maintain that interdictions and prohibitions suppress our desire and prevent its full realization. On the other hand, it is also not quite precise enough to say that they are constitutive of desire, that it is the very act of interdiction that constitutes the desire. The occurrence of desire is correlative with the occurrence of the signifying order, which is broader than the realm of laws and prohibitions. Desire occurs when a need is articulated in the signifier, thus becoming a demand. Desire is the something in the demand that can never be satisfied – that is, reduced back to a need. The very fact that I address my demand to the Other introduces something in this demand that eludes satisfaction; for example, a child who demands food from her parents will not be satisfied simply by the food that she receives. This is what accounts for the metonymy of desire:
The man, a new Achilles in pursuit of another tortoise, is doomed, on account of his desire being caught in the mechanism of speech, to this infinite and never satisfied approach, linked to the very mechanism of desire which we simply call discursivity.2
What we are dealing with is an inherent impossibility for desire ever to be (fully) satisfied, and this configuration is at the same time the motor and the impasse of desire. The intervention of the law, far from simply “repressing” our desire, helps us deal with the impasse or impossibility involved in the mechanism of the desire as such. To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire. The fundamental operation of the law is always to forbid something that is in itself impossible. The fact that the law links this impossible to some particular object should not prevent us from seeing this. By designating a certain object as forbidden, the law does two things: it isolates the impossible Thing that the desire aims at but never attains, and it provides an image of this Thing. This image (my neighbor’s wife, for instance) has to be distinguished from what, on the level of the symbolic, is nothing else but the signifier of the impossible as such. The law condenses the impossible involved in desire into one exceptional “place.” Via this logic of exception, it liberates the field of the possible. This is why the intervention of the law can have a liberating effect on the subject. It makes it possible for Achilles not to spend every minute of his life trying to figure out why he cannot catch up with the tortoise, or trying obstinately to do so. It can make him a productive member of the community. This is the reason why Lacan, although he refuses to put analysis into the service of producing happy members of the community, also refuses to subscribe to the discourse advocating the liberation of desire from the repression and the spoils of law. His point is that the law supplements the impossibility involved in the very nature of desire by a symbolic interdiction, and that it is thus erroneous to assume that by eliminating this interdiction, we will also eliminate the impossibility involved in the desire. What he warned against, for instance, in the turmoil of 1968, was not some chaotic state that could result from the abolition of certain laws and prohibitions. He didn’t warn against human desire running crazy. On the contrary, he warned against the fact that desire, tired of dealing with its own impossibility, will give up and resign to anything rather than try to find its own law.
We have already quoted Lacan’s thesis according to which “it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration.” However, as should be clear from what we just developed, this does not mean that interdiction keeps us safe from being exposed to castration (that is, from undergoing a loss of something that we have). The “fear of castration” is the fear of losing that which constitutes a signifying support for the lack involved in the experience of the desire as such. Interdiction is what provides that support; it is what gives a signifying form to the lack (or to the experience of “castration”) which is already there.
Psychoanalysis, as Lacan conceived it, is not something that will restitute the good old law where it is lacking. Although many clinical problems can indeed be traced to the failure of the law to function for the subject as a stabilizing factor, the job of psychoanalysis is in no way to make sure that the subject will finally subscribe to the ideal of this or that authority. One should rather say that once things have gone so far (as to produce a neurosis, for instance), they can only go further. In principle, it is easier to go by the law than to find one’s own way around desire. But all the malfunctions and dysfunctions that appear in the clinic (as well as in the psychopathology of everyday life) remind us not only that this doesn’t always work, but also that it never works perfectly. Psychoanalysis is not here to repair the damage, to help the social machine to function more smoothly and to reconstruct whatever was ill-constructed. It is there to take us further along the path that our “problems” have put us on, it is there as the “guardian” of the other way, the one that consists in finding our own way around our desire. Emblematic of this “other way” is the story of Oedipus who, although unknowingly, steps out of the shelter of interdiction, is led to give up the thing that captivated him, and enters the realm where “the absolute reign of his desire is played out . . . something that is sufficiently brought out by the fact that he is shown to be unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled” (S VII, p. 310). This is what makes it possible for Lacan to insist upon the fact that the renunciation of goods and of power that is supposed to be a punishment, “is not, in fact, one” (S VII, p. 310). Consequently, tragedy, at least in the perspective of what Lacan calls the tragic dimension of analytical experience, is not necessarily all that “tragic,” but can produce the kind of liberation that takes place in the case of Oedipus.
Hamlet: the desire lost
Laurence Olivier decided to accompany his film version of Hamlet with these words: This is a tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind. The comic ring of these words, the fact that the whole tragedy of Hamlet can indeed be expressed in this kind of Witz, should remind us of the central ambiguity at work in the impossible involved in desire, ambiguity that can take the path of comedy as well as tragedy. Shakespeare explores its tragic dimension, and Lacan follows him on this path:
The fundamental structure of the eternal Saga, which is there since the origin of time, was modified by Shakespeare in the way that brought to light how man is not simply possessed by desire, but has to find it – find it at his cost and with greatest pain.3
Indeed, the story of Hamlet is not about giving up or not giving up on one’s desire. Hamlet is a man who has lost the way of his desire, and the question “What to do?,” so central to the play, points to this fact. One of the features that has always preoccupied interpreters of Hamlet is precisely the hero’s incapacity to act, his doubts and hesitations that make him postpone the act of killing Claudius. Two readings of this incapacity that became the most famous are the romantic and the (early) psychoanalytic reading. The first one, based on Goethe’s interpretation, emphasizes the antinomy of thought and action: the hero is an “intellectual,” and this attitude of knowledge and reflection makes, to use Hamlet’s own words, the currents of his enterprises turn awry and lose the name of action. The early analytical interpretation, based on some remarks of Freud, but developed extensively by several analysts of the “first generation,” is also quite well known. In killing Hamlet’s father and marrying his mother, Claudius realizes Hamlet’s unconscious desire, the child’s desire for his mother, the Oedipal desire to eliminate the one who seems to stand in the way of this desire. Faced with Claudius’ actions, Hamlet finds himself in the position of an accomplice, and cannot strike against the usurper without simultaneously striking at himself.
Although preserving the two pivotal notions of these readings (knowledge and desire), Lacan’s interpretation subverts them at the very core. As to the Oedipal reading, Lacan points out that if we accept its perspective, then Hamlet is driven by two tendencies: the one that is commended by the authority of his father and the one that corresponds to his will to defend his mother, to keep her for himself. Both these tendencies should lead him in the same direction: to kill Claudius. Moreover, had he immediately gone for his stepfather, wouldn’t this be because he had found a perfect opportunity to get rid of his own guilt? Thus, everything drives Hamlet in this one direction, but still he does not act. Why? A genuine tour de force that Lacan performs in relation to this question is to point out that although desire is in fact something that Hamlet tussles with all along, this desire has to be considered at the exact place where it is situated in the play. And this kind of consideration leads Lacan to conclude that the desire at stake is far from being Hamlet’s desire: it is not his desire for his mother, rather, it is his mother’s desire.4 It is not only in the famous climactic “closet scene” that Hamlet is literally driven mad by the question of his mother’s desire: Why and how can she desire this spiteful, inadequate, unworthy object, this “king of shreds and patches”? How could she abandon so quickly the splendid object that was Hamlet’s father, and go for this wretch that can give her but some fleeting satisfaction? This question of his mother’s desire also plays an important part in the other question, the one that concerns the role of knowledge in Hamlet.
Concerning the portrait of Hamlet as that of a “modern intellectual” whose absorption in thought and meditation weakens his ability to act, Lacan insists upon a fact that already caught Freud’s attention: on several occasions, Hamlet has no problem whatsoever with “acting.” He kills Polonius without a twitch; he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to death with no remorse. For Lacan, this clearly points to the fact that the difficulty Hamlet has with this one act lies in the nature of this particular act. Although it is true that the “rub” that makes this act so troublesome is the rub of knowledge, what is at stake is not simply Hamlet’s knowledge, but his knowledge about the knowledge of his father. It often happens that most obvious things are the hardest to notice, and Lacan was the first to point out this most striking feature of Hamlet. What distinguishes Hamlet’s drama from that of Oedipus and what, in the first place, sets off the whole drama of Hamlet, is the fact that the father knows. Father knows – what? He knows that he is dead, which does not only refer to the empirical fact that he passed away. It refers above all to the fact that he was betrayed, that he was cheated out of his symbolic function, and that, also as love object, he was immediately abandoned by the queen (and it is at this point that the question of the desire of Hamlet’s mother is included in this question of his father’s knowledge).
However, what is at stake is not simply the fact the Other knows, but the fact that the subject knows that the Other knows. Lacan points out that there is a direct correlation between what, on the side of the subject, can be expressed in terms of “the Other doesn’t know,” and the constitution of the unconscious: one is the reverse side of the other. To put it very simply, the presupposition that the Other doesn’t know is what helps to maintain the bar that separates the unconscious from the conscious. An amusing illustration of this can be found in the joke in which a man believes himself to be a grain of seed. He is taken to the mental institution where the doctors finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. As soon as he leaves the hospital, he comes back very scared, claiming that there is a chicken outside the door and that he is afraid that it will eat him. “Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?” Here we can grasp very well the correlation between the Other who doesn’t know and the unconscious.
Another interesting thing that is not unrelated to this question of the codependence between the “not knowing” of the Other and the unconscious, is one very peculiar feature of Hamlet, namely that fact that he feigns madness. Lacan stated,
[Shakespeare] chose the story of a hero who is forced to feign madness in order to follow the winding paths that lead him to the completion of his act . . . [H]e is led to feign madness, and even, as Pascal says, to be mad along with everyone else. Feigning madness is thus one of the dimensions of what we might call the strategy of the modern hero.5
In relation to the joke that we recalled before, we could say that Hamlet is pretending to be scared of being eaten by a chicken, which is the only way he can keep the others from guessing what he knows about the knowledge of the Other, but also the only way he can himself deal with this unbearable knowledge.
In Hamlet, the Other knows and makes this known to the subject. What inaugurates the story of Hamlet is the fact that “something is lifted here – the veil that pushes down on the unconscious line. This is precisely the veil that we try to lift in analysis, not without getting, as you know, some resistance.”6 The veil in question is, of course, the veil of castration. Yet this does not mean simply that Hamlet is confronted with the fact that the Other is himself subject to castration, which is what occurs in any “normal” course of the subject’s history. What is at stake with Hamlet’s knowing about his father’s knowledge is the difference between the fact that “the Other doesn’t exist” (which is another way of saying that the Other is subject to castration) and the fact the Other nevertheless functions – that is, has a palpable symbolic role and efficacy. It is this difference that gets abolished in Hamlet, leading to the breakdown of the symbolic Other. This breakdown of the symbolic Other is thus related neither to the fact that the subject knows about the lack in the Other nor to the fact that the Other himself knows about it, but to the fact that the subject knows that the Other knows. It is only at this point that the knowledge in question can no longer remain unconscious. For Lacan, the unconscious is not simply about the subject not knowing this or that. A thing can remain unconscious although the subject knows perfectly well about it (as in the joke that we used as example). As far as the subject can pretend or believe that the Other doesn’t know that he “doesn’t exist,” the (symbolic) Other can function perfectly well and constitute the support of the subject’s desire. What provokes its breakdown is the fact that the subject’s knowledge coincides with the knowledge of the Other.
Hamlet’s famous words about the time being “out of joint” could be understood to refer precisely to this breakdown of the symbolic order. Hamlet’s destiny is sealed by the fact that he is called upon “to set it right.” This appeal could be considered the very opposite of what happens in analysis. By lifting the same veil that is so brutally lifted for Hamlet, analysis leads the subject to a relative autonomy vis-à-vis the Other, whereas what happens in Hamlet is that the hero’s destiny gets enclosed in the destiny of the Other in a most definite and conclusive way. The debt that he has to pay, or settle, the debt that triggers this infernal machine, is the debt of the Other (his father). When he finally finds his desire and with it his ability to act, it is in relation to the Other (Laertes). He carries out his act during an event arranged by the Other (Claudius and Laertes); he kills Claudius with the weapon of the Other (Laertes); and he does it at the “hour of the Other” (the hour of death, when he is already mortally wounded). Lacan draws our attention to the fact that what prompts Hamlet into action and, although indirectly, to the carrying out of his act, is what takes place in the scene of Ophelia’s burial. It is the image of Laertes who, in a violent expression of his grief for Ophelia, leaps into her grave. It is this representation of a passionate relationship of the subject to an object, that makes Hamlet (re)discover some of this passion and zeal. Seeing Laertes in grief, he utters some very emphatic words,
What is he whose griefBears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrowConjures the wand’ring stars, and makes them standLike wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,Hamlet the Dane.7
– and leaps into the grave himself. All of a sudden, we have this peculiar affirmation of what Hamlet is (implying also what he is here to do). He seems to have found his desire, “doubtlessly only for a brief moment, but a moment long enough for the play to end,”8 and he has found it via what remains an imaginary identification with the Other (his once friend and now rival, Laertes). But still, even after this “metamorphosis” Hamlet does not simply go on and kill Claudius. Instead, he engages in what is supposed to be a friendly duel with Laertes. He engages in what could be called yet another metonymy, during which he gets mortally wounded by the poisonous rapier, the rapiers get accidentally switched, he finds himself in the possession of the deadly weapon, learns about the treachery, and only then, already dying, does he kill Claudius.
One could say that in Hamlet the problem is not that of an action failing to catch up with desire. It is rather that action has nothing to catch up with, since it is precisely desire that is lacking in Hamlet. The tragedy of Hamlet is the tragedy of desire that has lost its support in the unconscious (in the Other) and cannot find its own way, but can only try to hang onto what remains of the Other in the form of “empirical others” that surround the hero. Hamlet’s relationship to desire never gets a resolution. His act is conclusive only on account of being, most literally, his final act. There seems to be no inherent necessity for Hamlet to accomplish his act. He does it by “catching the last train”; he accomplishes it by attaching it to something that is already being accomplished, or being drawn to a close, namely, his life.
We will now turn to two other tragedies which deal explicitly with the question of an inherent link that exists between desire and perspective of the end. Precisely insofar as desire is by definition inconclusive, involved in the potentially infinite metonymy of signifiers and objects, the question of the “realization of desire” (Lacan’s terms) is closely connected to the question of putting an end to this possibly endless metonymy.
Antigone and Sygne: the realization of desire
Although Antigone and Sygne de Coûfontaine, the heroine of Claudel’s play The Hostage, find themselves in very different positions and give body to two somewhat opposing ethical configurations, they nevertheless have one essential thing in common. This essential thing is the “realization of desire.”
What exactly does the realization of desire mean in the context of Lacanian theory? As we have shown elsewhere,9 it is clear that it does not mean the fulfillment of desire. It does not mean the realization of that which the subject desires. In Lacanian theory, there is no such thing as the desired object. There is the demanded object and then there is the object-cause of desire which, having no positive content, refers to what we get if we subtract the satisfaction that we find in a given object from the demand (we have) for this object. Essentially linked to this logic of subtraction which gives rise to a (possibly) endless metonymy, desire is nothing but that which introduces into the subject’s universe an “incommensurable or infinite measure,” as Lacan puts it. Desire is nothing but this “infinite measure,” or, to borrow Kant’s term, a “negative magnitude.” In this perspective, to realize one’s desire means to realize, to “measure” the infinite, and to give body to this negative magnitude. We said before that the realization of desire does not mean the realization of that which the subject desires; it does not mean the realization of a previously existing object of desire. The only existing object of desire is the lack that sustains its metonymy. In this perspective, the realization of desire can only mean one thing: to make an “independent,” “self-standing” object out of this very lack. It means, strictly speaking, the production or “creation” of the object of desire. The object of desire, as object, is the result of this act (of realizing the desire). Producing the object of desire means making an object out of the infinite measure that is at work in desire in the form of lack or void.
In the sliding of signifiers, in the movement from one signifier to another, something is constantly eluded, or perceived as being eluded, as being under- or overshot. There is thus a lack of signifier that is present in every (signifying) representation, inducing its metonymic movement. Desire is formed as something supporting this metonymy. In this context, the “realization of desire” refers to the operation in which this void, which is only perceptible through the failure of signifiers to represent the Thing, gets its own representation. That is not to say that the Thing finally finds its signifier: there is no signifier of the Thing but there is a possibility of an object coming to represent this very lack of the signifier. And it is precisely such an object that can function as the incarnation of the Thing. (Later on in his teaching, Lacan conceived of this kind of object also in terms of a signifier: a unique signifier which represents the very lack of the signifier, the “signifier without signified.”) The difference between the metonymy of desire and the realization of desire is the difference between the void present in every representation without being itself represented, and the void that gets its own representation. Lacan’s topological example of an object that can represent the Thing is the example of a vase. A vase is “a hole with something around it.” A vase is what gives body to the emptiness or void in its center. It makes this emptiness appear as something. A vase can be considered “as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing” (S VII, p. 121). The “realization of desire” is to be situated precisely in the perspective of this nothing coming to be represented as something. That is to say, the lack which is involved in the endless metonymy of desire is, so to speak, isolated as such and presented in a unique representation, in a privileged and separate object, an object like no other object.
If one defines the realization of desire in terms of a creation of a unique object that incarnates the very void involved in the metonymical movement of desire, one can see better how it relates to the story of Antigone. Antigone is, in fact, one of the most splendid “vases” produced in the history of literature. For Antigone, one particular act comes to represent the Thing. This, of course, is not to say that the act in question is the Thing or that the burial of Polynices is the “realization of Antigone’s desire.” The Thing is nothing but the void that Antigone’s actions give body to, and the realization of desire is nothing but what makes this void appear as such. In Antigone, the Thing is represented in this Other thing which is Polynices’ burial or, more precisely, it is represented in what Antigone is subjected to because of her insistence on this Other thing. The Thing is represented in the very figure of Antigone who gives body to the emptiness or void at the core of desire. The fact that she is to die because of her insistence has, of course, a crucial role in this particular “realization of desire.” For what is the function of death in this configuration? Because of what is introduced by the advent of the symbolic order, death is not simply something that happens to us sooner or later (thus detaching us “empirically” from the symbolic order which has its own autonomous life), but can itself become a stake or a wager in the symbolic order. Whenever someone says, “I would rather die than . . .” this is precisely what happens. Cutting oneself off from the symbolic order becomes a possibility within the symbolic order, something that can be (symbolically) represented as such. It is the breakdown of the symbolic order as represented within the symbolic order. In Antigone, we are dealing precisely with this: the representation of the very break with the realm of the representation.
Death can enter the symbolic order as a kind of an absolute signifier, as a “negative” signifier of everything that the subject is. “Negative,” because instead of endlessly enumerating all that can constitute a subject’s being, it condenses this “all” in the form of the “loss of all.” We have a perfect example of that in Antigone’s famous lamentation that takes place after she is sentenced to death. In her long speech she mourns the fact that, among other things, she will never know the conjugal bed, the bond of marriage, or have children. The list of things that she will be deprived of by her early death (not only the things that she has and will lose, but also the things that she does not have but could have had, had she continued to live) does not have the function of expressing a regret. It has a very precise function of making a “whole” out of the inconclusive metonymy of her existence and of her desire. By accepting the death and speaking of it in the above-mentioned terms, Antigone puts an end to the metonymy of desire by realizing, in one go, the in(de)finite potential of this metonymy. Precisely because of its being in(de)finite, this potential can only be realized (constituted as an accomplished, “whole” entity) as lost, that is, cast in the negative form. Here, the realization equals representation of the subject’s being that is by definition non-representable. This is what Lacan refers to when, in relation to Antigone, he speaks about the “point where the false metaphors of being [l’étant] can be distinguished from the position of Being [l’être] itself” (S VII, p. 248), locating this point in the circumstance that Antigone is to be buried alive in a tomb. The realization of desire thus implies the realization of the Thing, in the sense of introducing the Thing in the symbolic order at the expense of the symbolic order which is replaced, so to speak, by one privileged object that represents the very void at its center.
Yet this is not the only path that the realization of desire can take. In the year following his seminar on ethics, Lacan discussed a very different configuration while commenting on Paul Claudel’s play, The Hostage. The heroine of this play, Sygne de Coûfontaine, is, no less than Antigone, under the ethical imperative to realize the Thing. However, the crucial difference resides in the fact that for Sygne, the path that leads to its realization in a privileged object or signifier that could represent it, is closed from the outset. More precisely even, the first thing that Sygne is asked to do in the name of the Thing, is to discard its signifier. She is asked to realize her Thing by discarding that which is already there to represent it. She is asked to realize it outside any signifying support, in the very denial (Versagung) of the signifier. She cannot even rely on the signifying support in a negative way, as in the case of “representing the non-representable” which is so crucial in Antigone.
This accounts for what is, from an aesthetic point of view, the most striking difference between Antigone and Sygne de Coûfontaine. In the case of Antigone, Lacan insists a lot on the effect of a “sublime splendor” or “sublime beauty” produced by the figure of Antigone. This effect, of course, has nothing to do with what Antigone looks like, but has everything to do with the place she occupies in the structure of the play. In the case of Sygne, on the other hand, Lacan points out that in spite of the martyrdom that she goes through and which could have produced the same effect, it is quite the opposite that happens. During the final scene of the play, Sygne is presented to us as being agitated by a nervous tic of her face. Lacan emphasizes that
This grimace of life that suffers is no doubt more detrimental to the status of beauty than the grimace of death and of the tongue hanging out that we can evoke in relation to the figure of Antigone when Creon finds her hanged.10
We thus have the grimace of life as opposed to the grimace of death, and the destiny of the beautiful seems to be decided between the two. Yet, upon a closer look, one notices that the difference between the positions of the two heroines cannot be formulated simply as the difference between life and death, but rather concerns the possibility of death functioning as the absolute (albeit negative) signifier of the subject’s being. What is at stake in Antigone is not simply the limit between life and death, but rather the limit between life in the biological sense of the word and life as a capacity of the subject to be the support of a certain truth of desire. Death is precisely the name of this limit between two lives, it is what underlines the fact that they do not coincide, and that one of the two lives can suffer and cease to exist because of the other. Death is what marks, crystallizes, and localizes this difference.
In the case of Sygne de Coûfontaine, the situation is very different.11 In Sygne’s story, death doesn’t have this value of the limit. Death (which Sygne would gladly embrace were the opportunity to present itself) is not an option or at stake. One could even say that Sygne is already dead when the play begins: she continues to exist, but having lost all reason to live or, more precisely, having lost the possibility of being the support of a certain truth. Her cause in life is dead. She is waiting for death to come; she has nothing to lose. And yet, it turns out that she has nonetheless something to lose: precisely, death. What she is asked to do (in the name of the cause that is already lost but that has been her only cause), is to live in the most emphatic sense of the term: to marry, to make love, to procreate. We are really at the opposite of Antigone and her lamentation in which she recognizes that she will never marry, enjoy the conjugal bed, or have children. All that Antigone is being deprived of constitutes the martyrdom of Sygne, the crucial detail residing in the fact that she is supposed to live this “resurrection” with the one who has murdered her cause and her parents.
In the case of Antigone, the other life (life as support of the “Other thing” involved in the desire) becomes visible and is “realized” in the scene of death as the something of life that death cannot get to. It is thus visible per negativum, it is visible via the bedazzlement, the sublime splendor that is the very image of something that does not have an image. In the case of Sygne, this presupposition changes and the situation is reversed: she cannot die for her cause, she cannot realize it through the sacrifice of all that she has. She can only realize it by giving up what she is – through the rejection of the very signifier that represents her Being. The result is that in her case, the realization of desire produces something which is not a representation of the void, but rather its most material presence in the form of the heroine’s flesh, which is brought into the foreground by the tic that animates it.
Lacan introduces his discussion of the representation of the Thing with the example taken from, as he puts it, “the most primitive of artistic activities,” that of the potter. If, to a large extent, his commentary on Antigone can be related to the fundamental topology of the vase as emblematic representation of Nothing, then his commentary on The Hostage could be, topologically, related to another “artistic activity.” What we have in mind is the work of Rachel Whiteread, which would doubtlessly have drawn Lacan’s attention, had he lived to see it, if for no other reason than that hers is also a work of the potter, of “sculpting the Nothing,” but in a way and with a result that are rather the opposite of that of the traditional potter. In the case of the vase, we have “nothing” with something around it. The material form of the vase gives body to the nothing at its center. This nothing is created with the creation of the vase and represented by it. This also means that the void or emptiness owes its objectivity to the something that surrounds it. Now, the question is how to make this emptiness “stand for itself”? How to render this emptiness without interposing the surface of representation? Rachel Whiteread exhibits the emptiness in the most literal meaning of the word. She takes a created object, for instance, a closet, a room, or a house, all of these belonging to those objects that give body to the emptiness in their center; one could say that what she starts with is nothing else but different representations of the Thing which, because of their incorporation in our daily life and routine, have somehow lost the power to fascinate us as such. What she then does is to fill up the empty space and then remove the something that has previously delimited and “given body” to this empty space. Her first work of this kind is “Closet” (1988), a plaster cast of the inside of a wardrobe. What was previously a void constituted in the reference to its material frame now becomes itself a solid object, standing for itself. She does the same in the case of the room. We get a big plaster cube: the void has been made solid and the walls have disappeared. Closet, room, table, chair, bed, house – all these things that we are very familiar with once again become Things. However, this time, the Thing is no longer simply “present as absent”; the very absence now becomes the most material presence (one could almost say that the Thing is now “absent as present”). And it is precisely this full presence which allows for no void or empty space that is the very body of absence; it is, so to speak, the thickest absence or void.
Whiteread’s sculptures offer a very suggestive topological illustration of what the “realization of desire” means when it cannot take the path of the representation – when the void (as the real object of desire) cannot even be represented in a “negative form.” In the case of Sygne de Coûfontaine, as well as in the case of Whiteread’s work, the void of the Thing is realized in a material way: as twitching flesh, or as a massive block of matter. This is not to say that the tic of Sygne’s face is equivalent to Whiteread’s block of matter, it is rather that the tic makes us aware of the presence of her entire body as a “block of matter” that remains there after its symbolic support is taken away. In both of these cases, the Thing no longer appears as something existing beyond symbolic reality, something that can only be represented in the reality in a negative form. It has been “condescended” to reality, without simply merging with it: the Thing is now part of the reality as a “stumbling block” of reality itself. The Thing is the thing on account of which the reality never fully coincides with itself.
Let us conclude with what, here, cannot take any other form than that of a hint. This presence of the Thing as a “stumbling block” of reality already borders on what we mentioned at the beginning as the other possible approach to the question of “desire and ethics”: the perspective of comedy. If comedy also deals with the relationship between action and desire, and with the former’s fundamental failure to catch up with the latter, then one should stress the following difference between tragedy and comedy. Whereas in tragedy, the failure in question is essentially linked to the figure of the lack (which originates in the fact that the action always “undershoots” the Thing that desire aims at), in comedy, the failure rather materializes in the form of a surplus (resulting from the fact that the action goes too far or “overshoots” the desire). One could say that in the case of comedy, if Achilles cannot catch up with the tortoise, it is because he passes it with his first step. An example of this would be a situation (very much in line with Marx Brothers comedies) when you say to someone, “give me a break,” upon which your interlocutor pulls a brake out of his pocket and gives it to you, thus, so to speak, putting an end to the possibly endless metonymy of desire.
1. See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire V. Les Formations de l’inconscient (Paris: Seuil, 1998).
2. Lacan, Le Séminaire V. Les Formations de l’inconscient, p. 122.
3. Jacques Lacan, “Hamlet,” Ornicar? 24 (1981), p. 24.
4. Jacques Lacan, “Hamlet,” Ornicar? 25 (1982), p. 20.
5. Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlet,” Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 20.
6. Lacan, “Hamlet,” Ornicar? 25 (1982), p. 30.
7. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 3rd edn., ed. David Bevington (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1980) 5.1.254–58.
8. Lacan, “Hamlet,” Ornicar? 25 (1982), p. 24.
9. See Alenka Zupani, Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2000), p. 251.
10. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire VI. Le Transfert (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 324.
11. For a more detailed Lacanian analysis of the play, see Slavoj 
i
ek, The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 115–19, and Alenka Zupani, Ethics of the Real, pp. 211–59.