Jacques Lacan and the ethics of psychoanalysis
The radical power of Lacan’s thought
Readers of Jacques Lacan have long been attentive to his radical reaccounting of the genesis and nature of subjectivity, a reaccounting which, as we will see in more detail shortly, positions the subject not as the product of its own activity, as the history of philosophy has traditionally rendered it, but figures it instead as the product of the activity of an Other.1 In this regard, as more and more are beginning to recognize, Lacan’s project can be seen in many ways as a sort of psychoanalytic parallel to Levinas’s phenomenology.2 Lacan’s work, like Levinas’s, presents a subject who is radically exterior to itself, a subject emergent from, and thereby with access to, that which is absolutely beyond it. As such, Lacan’s work, like Levinas’s, is useful for those who seek, as we do, to overcome the post-critical disjunction which we identified with Meillassoux and Badiou in Chapter 1.3
What has been less recognized up to this point is Lacan’s conviction, in further concert with Levinas, that this radical reaccounting of the nature of subjectivity demands an equally radical reenvisioning of the nature of ethical deliberation and action. What is interesting for us now, however, is not where Levinas’s and Lacan’s thoughts appear to harmonize, but where they are discordant. For where Levinas saw in the absolute Other a benison to be welcomed and obeyed, Lacan identified, with Schelling, a potentially overwhelming and inhuman absolute which not only threatens to destroy subjective life, but also could in fact drive it into madness, psychosis, and even the destruction of others—what we could call, in a word, evil. In contrast to Levinas’s ethics of assent, Lacan therefore proposes, as we shall see, an ethics of resistance. What we gain through an understanding of Lacan’s work is thus not only a means of further understanding how the kind of inverted subjectivity established in relation to the Other qua absolute can be used to overcome the limits of the Kantian critique, thereby making available a potentially universal and actual absolute ground for ethical decision making; we further discover a strategy for reconceiving the nature of the ethical decisions grounded thereupon not as assent, but as resistance.
Lacan begins his account of the nature of subjectivity similar to Levinas: defining the subject as something emergent from an Other who is situated beyond the powers of conscious representation. Taking Freud’s now infamous statement that “Wo es war soll ich werden,”4 which Lacan translates as “Where it was, the Ich . . . the subject, must come into existence,”5 as his guiding principle, Lacan defines the subject as that which appears in a space opened up by the withdrawal of something situated radically outside of and beyond it. “There where it was just now,” he writes, “there where it was for a while, between an extinction that is still glowing and a birth that is retarded, ‘I’ can come into being and disappear from what I say.”6 “The subject” for Lacan is nothing more than “this emergence,” this trajectory from out of a field of that which is absolutely beyond it into being. As such, he maintains, the nature of the subject is entirely determined by this absolute outside, this “it,” as he calls it, which both precedes and grounds subjectivity, all the while remaining absolutely beyond it and unconscious to it. In order to understand the nature of the subject properly, Lacan therefore concludes, we must first attempt to understand the nature of this absolute unconscious “it.”
For Freud, famously, this “it,” identified as the ID, was nothing other than the drives or instincts (Treib) located in the biological impulses of a material body. These material drives, Freud argued, were the ultimate ground of conscious life. The ego or subject, as emergent from this ground, is, he thought, little more than the “surface of the mental apparatus . . . what may be called reason and common sense,” he famously analogized, are nothing more than the “tip of the iceberg” of subjective life.7 The hidden depths which buoyed and supported mental life, he thought, are ultimately the material demands of the ID. So it was according to Freud that the ultimate ground for subjective life, though lying properly outside the powers of “reason and common sense,” is nevertheless identified as originating within the body of a singular being. As such, he reasoned, the unconscious ground of subjectivity, while outside the scope of egoic life, is not truly absolute, for it does not lie absolutely outside of and beyond the being of the subject. The position of the unconscious is for Freud merely relatively outside the subject’s grasp. But, Lacan asks, if this is the case, how are we to account for the apparent surprise and radical disruption of the return of the repressed, for example? How do we account for the apparent radical asymmetry between the demands of the unconscious and the interests of the subject? It was questions of this sort which motivated in large part Lacan’s break with the Freudian schema and his conviction that the “notion that the unconscious as merely the seat of the instincts will have to be rethought.”8 It was to a critical rethinking of the unconscious as radically and absolutely outside the subject that Lacan initiated his work. And, it was in the service of this critical rethinking that Lacan restructured the nature of the subject, opening it up to that which lies absolutely beyond itself and its own interiority—grounding it in what he called the Other.
There appear to be at least three different ways in which Lacan sought to rethink the concept of the unconscious “it” as the ground and structure of subjective life. He describes it, alternatively, as: 1) a kind of gap or rupture, “impediment, failure, split” within the signifying field inhabited by the subject;9 2) the “discourse of the Other,” which establishes the symbolic network within which a subj ect emerges;10 and thereby, perhaps most famously and often quoted, 3) “structured like language.”11 The plurivocity of these accounts of the nature of the unconscious, though at first confusing and unsettling, should not be taken as a sign of some contradiction or irresoluteness in Lacan’s thought; nor should it be taken to express three different formulations, each perhaps representative of a different period in Lacan’s oeuvre, as they sometimes are by Lacanian scholars.12 After all, these three iterations appear concurrently in Lacan’s most detailed examination of the nature of the unconscious, the 1964 seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. It would seem then that these three statements, though perhaps at first seemingly divergent, all internally cohere with one another. Lacan’s three declarative statements concerning the nature of the unconscious thus seem to express not three different claims concerning the nature of the unconscious ground of subjective life, but three different visions of it: the absolute unconscious approached from three different vantage points, as it were.
According to Lacan, the unconscious can either be addressed: 1) genetically, with regard to its origins in “the discourse of the Other”; 2) phenomenologically, as it appears in the subject’s imperfect appropriation of that discourse (i.e., “impediment, failure, split,” and slips of the tongue); or 3) structurally, as ordered according to the structures of the language of that discourse, its laws, grammar, and rules, for example. However it is approached, what is important to note is the consistency Lacan has across all three of these accounts in identifying the unconscious ground of subjectivity with what he terms the Other, an Other who is situated, as we will see, absolutely beyond the life of the subject.13 Indeed, this is the hard core of his difference with Freud: Lacan identifies the ultimate seat of the subjective instincts as that which is not merely unconscious to the subject, as Freud did, but as that which is positioned other than, outside of, and absolutely beyond the subject. The subject for Lacan is “situated in the very locus of the Other,” in that which is entirely outside the scope of not only its “reason and common sense,” but its very materiality.14 Indeed, according to Lacan, “it is only in the Other,” conceived of as this absolute “outside,” “that the subject is constituted.”15
As such, the subject emerges on the scene, according to Lacan, as always already decentered from its own existence—always already in contact with that which is absolutely outside of and beyond itself.16 This is what Lacan famous refers to as “the subversion of the subject.”17 The subject for Lacan arises on a ground which is not just relatively “not-its-own,” like the relative foreignness of the drives and instincts demanded by the material needs of the body, as it is for Freud, but on a ground which is absolutely not-its-own. To understand this better it is useful to examine further the nature of the Other which Lacan sees as constituting the subject’s emergence—to ask with Lacan, “Who then is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since at the heart of my assent to my own identity it is still he who agitates me?”18
According to Hans-Dieter Gondek, the Other in Lacan must be understood not as some person, this or that other, but as “first of all faceless.”19 “The Other,” he argues, “is a site. The Other only obtains a face when someone actually inhabits this place, for instance the mother, or an ‘exemplar’ of the opposite sex.”20 The Other for Lacan is thus not someone, though someone may at times inhabit the symbolic space occupied by the Other. Nevertheless, the Other in itself represents something larger than any single person: a superstructure or network in which every singular person participates, and even creates, without ever fully controlling or mastering individually. To understand this distinction between the singular others which make up the Other and the Other properly, Sean Homer suggests distinguishing between the lowercase “o” other of individual identities and the uppercase “O” Other which grounds and structures subjective life as the unconscious. According to Homer, while the lowercase “o” other refers to specific others, other subjects with “faces,” for example my mother, neighbor, or colleague, “the big Other, on the other hand, is that absolute otherness that we cannot assimilate to our subjectivity.”21 This distinction, suggests Homer, serves to underscore Lacan’s point that the unconscious force which structures subjective life is not only outside of and beyond the subject itself; it furthermore cannot be located within any particular person, place, or thing. It is absolutely outside the scope of perception.
Lacan of course suggests as much himself, arguing that “we must distinguish two others, at least two—an other with a capital O, and an other with a small o, which is the ego.”22 It is the latter, capital O Other, according to Lacan, which “is already there in every opening, however fleeting it may be, of the unconscious.”23 Thus, thinks Lacan, “it is only in th[is] Other that the subject is constituted as ideal.”24 That is, it is only in an Other so ot her that it cannot even be isolated, identified with, or located in any specific other that the subject is grounded. Thus, claims Lacan, “the unconscious, which I represent to you as that which is inside the subject [as that which is the subject’s own-most] . . . can be realized only outside, that is to say, in the locus of the Other in which alone it may assume its status.”25 What “we are dealing with” in Lacan is, in other words, as Lorenzo Chiesa puts it, a “transindividual unconscious that differs from both intrasubjectivity, the unconscious as the ‘Other who is within me,’ and intersubjectivity, the unconscious of the Other subject.”26
What we discover in Lacan’s account of the Other qua “transindividual unconsciousness” is a ground of subjective life which is totally non-relational—which is, in other words, located absolutely and radically beyond itself. Nevertheless, argues Lacan, it is this absolutely non-relational power which structures the nature and life of the subject. “The Other is,” Lacan writes, “the locus in which is constituted the I who speaks to him who hears, that which is said by the one being already the reply, the other deciding to hear it whether the one has or has not spoken.”27 It is thus this absolutely Other, he reasons, which holds “the master position” in the nature and structure of subjective life.28 Indeed, one could even go so far as to say that the subject is ultimately for Lacan nothing more than an imperfect reflection of this absolute Other. “It is from the Other that the subject receives even the message that he emits,” declares Lacan. When the I speaks, when it declares itself, it does so in a language and voice given to it by some Other. The very selfhood, identity and singularity, of the I is given to it by and structured around the Other, according to Lacan.29 Thus, Lacan declares, “the subject is subject only from being subjected to the field of the Other, the subject proceeds from his synchronic subjection in the field of the Other.”30 So it is that we discover in Lacan a subject inexorably in contact with that which is absolutely Other, an account which, like Levinas’s, “reverses the topology of the traditional imagery,” to use Lacan’s words.31
What we gain from this understanding of the absolute alterity of the unconscious Other which structures subjective life is a subject which is always already, from the very moment of its naissance to its eventual extinction, radically outside of itself, scattered across the field of the Other, irrevocably ex-centric to itself.32 Lacan’s subject thus lacks any coherence with itself, as the idealist traditions of Western thinking would have it. This subject even lacks the integrity of a singular entity. Instead, according to Lacan, the subject is irrevocably fragmented. It is a cobbled together assemblage of signs and signifiers which it takes up from an Other it can never fully know or relate directly to, but can neither extract itself entirely nor distance itself sufficiently from. For, as Lacan puts it, it is only in the Other that “the subject authentically reintegrates his disjointed limbs, and recognizes, reaggregates his experience.”33 This explains Lacan’s repetition in his 1954–1955 seminar on The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis of Rimbaud’s famous line that “I is an other.” For Lacan, “the subject is decentred in relation to the individual. That is what I is an other means.”34 As something assembled in the absent space that is the Other, the “I” for Lacan is not primarily its own, but primordially a possession of the Other. The seat of the subject’s existence thus lies not only beyond the grasp of its conscious powers, situated in a zone that it cannot comprehend or even address; it is located in something that it cannot even identify in any singular object, person, place, or thing. To be an I, for Lacan, is thus not only to be alienated from oneself, it is to be composed of a multitude of influences, each of which it is equally alienated from. This bi-valent alienation comes from the fact that, according to Lacan, the subject occupies a liminal space between the one and many, between a singular self and the plural Other.35 To be a subject in relation to this multitudinous absolute is thus for Lacan to be always out of joint. It is to be always already othered. This is the ultimate significance of Lacan’s repetition of Rimbaud’s claim. To be a subject for Lacan is to never fully be any one thing. It is instead to be “an Other,” to be in contact with an absolute reality which can never be reduced to nor resolved into a static concrete ontological object.
In line with Levinas’s analysis, Lacan recognized that his “formulation [of the relationship between the subject and the Other as unconscious] totally changes the function of the subject as existing.”36 As an assemblage of an absolutely unconscious Other which cannot be localized in any singular thing, the subject for Lacan can likewise never be accounted for as a fully formed being. Instead, it must be conceived of as somehow less than, or in want-of-being.37 To explain how this could be the case, Lacan turned to an analysis of the nature of desire, which he took to be, in many ways, an expression of the essence of subjective life.38
Lacan begins his account of desire (désir) by distinguishing it from need (besoin) and demand (deamande).39 According to Philippe Von Haute, need for Lacan “is grounded in a physiological lack, and in principle, there is an adequate object by which it can be satisfied.”40 As such, need grows from the concrete material nature of the body and thus, while at times disconcerting and surprising to the subject, can nevertheless be reconciled to something inside of or inherent to the subject, if only that part of the subject that is disparate from the subject’s understanding of itself, the reality of the subject’s materiality—the ineluctable “thinghood” of its existence. Demand, for Lacan, as Von Haute puts it, is emergent from need and “pertains fundamentally to linguistically articulated need” in the “intersubjective relationship.”41 Demand is thus for Lacan nothing more than the attempt to formulate need within the symbolic field of the Other—to express to the Other the reality of one’s material needs. Desire, for Lacan, is radically distinct from both need and demand, for it is not tied to the material body and its survival. To the contrary, “desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need.”42 Desire thus articulates for Lacan a relation to the Other which is less determinate than need, a relation which cannot be reduced to the materiality of the body nor tied to any concrete ontological object. It is thus a relation, he thinks, which is entirely subsumed within the relationship of the absolutely Other. Desire, he claims, is inexorably “bound up with the desire of the Other.”43 It is, he claims, “the desire of/for the Other,” qua absolute structure.44 This can have at least three different meanings.
First, desire is for Lacan the desire for the Other’s desire (i.e., the desire to be desired by the Other). It is the desire to capture the Other’s attention and gaze, gain its approval, and summon its interest. While the nature of this element of desire can be mediated through our relationship to particular, singular others, one’s mother, neighbor, or colleague, the capture of these concrete desires will never be enough, Lacan assures us. For the Other aimed at in desire is not the other of singular personas. It is instead the big O Other of the collective unconscious field which constitutes the subject’s nature—the absolute Other. What the subject desires when it desires the desire of the Other is, in other words, the desire to capture the ground of its own nature, to be able to radically affirm itself. What the subject desires is to find itself worthy of desire.
The second meaning of Lacan’s account of desire as “desire of/for the Other” is the desire of the Other. When we desire, thinks Lacan, it is not properly our desire that is articulated—it does not originate from within us nor belong wholly to us. Originating as it does with an Other who is situated absolutely outside of and beyond us, the subject’s desires are nothing more than a pale reflection of the Other’s desire. Thus, what a subject may take to be the authentic experience of some desire, the desire for some accomplishment or recognition for example, is really nothing other according to Lacan than an expression in the subject of the Other’s desire, what the Other has determined to be of value. The subject’s desires, he argues, are the result of its internalization of the desires of the Other as represented to it through one’s engagement and interaction with the concrete singular others of its community. What the subject desires, Lacan cautions us, is nothing other than what those around us deem desirable. To make this clear, take the value of gold as an example, the value of which is not emergent from any intrinsic property it possess. Its value does not rest upon the judgment of any singular subject. The value of gold comes from the fact that it is desired by others. Hence the fluctuation of its value which adjusts to the perceived desire of others. Likewise, Lacan thinks, the desire which fuels subjective life is produced by and in relation to the desire of the Other.
The third and final meaning of Lacan’s analysis of desire as “desire of/for the Other” is his conviction that what is desired from the Other is its very otherness, that which makes the Other stand outside of and beyond us, what Lacan identified as the object petite a of the Other. What we desire in our desire for the Other is to capture what is elusive therein. We desire the otherness of the Other: we want to be able to pin it down, appropriate its power, and make it our own. What we desire, thinks Lacan, to use words borrowed from Levinas, is to be able to reduce the otherness of the Other to the structure of the self. What he thinks we desire in this mode is to evict the Other from the “master position” and assume lordship over one’s own being—it is to appropriate the source of one’s own being within oneself, aggregating one’s disparate being into a singular solid whole. It is, to put a point on it, the desire to be able to satisfy oneself.
It is these three modes of desire, all bound up together, working interdependently with one another, which Lacan thinks determine the nature of the subject’s desire and thereby the essence of its conscious life. Hence his claim that the aim of analysis must be “that the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire,” thereby fulfilling the Delphic command to know oneself.45 The problem is however, as Lacan details, that the ultimate aim of desire, regardless of how it appears, lies in the field of the big O Other. So it is, he concludes, that one’s desires are doomed to remain forever unsatisfied; for no matter how successful one may be in capturing the attention, affection, and desire of any number of singular others or achieving what it is that they find desirable, one can never achieve through these means direct access to or complete relation to that which is absolutely beyond it. So it is that the nature of desire for Lacan is to remain forever unstable, vulnerable, and distressing to the subject. It is this inescapable truth which opens up for Lacan a fundamental ethical problem for the subject.
As the product of its desires, Lacan positions the subject as inhabiting a curious ontological between: somehow less than being, but not yet nothing—a kind of becoming, or what he calls a manqué-a-etre, a “want-to-be.”46 Lorenzo Chiesa expresses the curious ontological status of the Lacanian subject well: “The Lacanian subject is a subjectivized lack, not a lacking subject or subject of impossibility, even though he presupposes the assumption and overcoming of a purely negative moment.”47 As a “subjectivized lack,” the subject for Lacan expresses itself as a kind of absence or privation, but not, curiously, of being.48 Though the subject may fall short of being, it expresses a privation within the unconscious, within the Other. Remember, that where “it,” the unconscious, was, according to Lacan, the I becomes/emerges. The subject thus expresses a kind of disruption and subjectivized lack not of being, thinks Lacan, but of the Other. And, this Other, he claims, as we have seen, cannot be accounted for as a simple entity—after all, “there is no Other of the Other.”49 The Other itself thus expresses for Lacan a kind of lack of being. Indeed, according to Lacan, “the gap of the unconscious may be said to be pre-ontological.”50 The unconscious for him is thus “neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized.”51
If the subject is to be accounted for as a privation or disruption within the field of the unconscious Other, it must be understood therefore as a disruption within that which is not-yet-being. Indeed, claims Lacan, “‘I’ am in the place from which a voice is heard clamoring ‘the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.’”52 The I is an interruption in the field of the unrealized unconscious—a kind of bubble arising out of the not-yet-something of the Other. As a result, the ontological status of the Lacanian subject is questionable at best. Lacan puts it this way: “Being of non-being, that is how I as subject comes on the scene,” as the expression or manifestation of that which cannot be expressed as such.53 The Lacanian subject, far from being a consistent being, is thus, as he puts it, a “subject-with-holes,” something porous and insubstantial. It is not-yet-something, but at the same time not-quite-nothing.54
Understood thusly, the subject is less some determinate entity for Lacan, less some present actuality, than a kind of possibility or anticipation. It is not something which appears then in the present now of existence, but something which is held out for the future as a kind of trajectory. For Lacan the subject is, in a sense, purely anticipatory and only fully realized in the “future perfect sense.”55 As Von Haute puts it, “The subject ‘is’ not of this (phenomenal) world, and in contrast with the [traditional] subject of consciousness, it must be thought of as ‘eccentric’ (ex-centric).”56 Only conceived thusly, as an eccentric/decentered “not-yet,” can we talk about the “existence” of the Lacanian subject. What’s more, the naissance of the subject from the Other through desire is not for Lacan a perfect exchange. It is forever imperfect—leaving in its wake what Slavoj Zizek has called, borrowing from Schelling, an “indivisible remainder.”57 Because the subject emerges in and through its relation with an elusive Other, to be a subject, for Lacan, is to be fractured, which Lacan represents with the symbol of the barred subject ($). To be a subject in Lacan’s world is to be what Bruce Fink has called split. “The subject is split,” he writes, “between ego and unconscious, between conscious and unconscious, between an ineluctably false sense of self and the automatic functioning of language (the signifying chain) in the unconscious.”58 To be a subject, Fink concludes, is to be “nothing but this very split.”59 The emergence of the subject is effected for Lacan through this splitting.
To be a subject, Lacan suggests, is thus to find oneself in this incomplete state of transition, barred equally from fully becoming itself (fully manifesting as a determinate entity replete in its own existence) as well as from falling back into the oblivion of non-being (collapsing back and losing itself entirely into the field of forces occupied by the Other). It is instead always to be in lack—to be in want, either of being or, alternatively, of oblivion. To be a subject is for Lacan, in a word, to desire: to desire to be, to be stable, satisfied, and at rest, or to not be, to be reabsorbed back into the totality of the Other. Nevertheless, as Philippe Von Haute argues well, though “the subject is constituted in and through the encounter with an Other,” this encounter does not fully define it, for “there is always one signifier too few to definitively determine the signified” subject.60 So it is, Lacan concludes, that desire, and through it the nature of subjectivity, is problematic. One’s relation to the Other, he maintains, is far from easy or uncomplicated. To the contrary, for Lacan the ontological status of the subject makes the Other a problem for and to it, one which has the potential of overwhelming subjectivity and leading to all sorts of pathologies and evils. The power of the Other is thus, he concludes, something which the subject must learn to regulate in his or her life—it is something which the subject must protect itself against. Such is the task of ethics according to Lacan.
Since according to Lacan the Other is “first of all faceless,” as Gondek put it, less a determinate entity than a field of forces, it is not an appearance to which the subject can address itself directly, nor is it something which can ever be attained nor possessed entirely by the subject. Thus, though it operates as the ground of the being qua desire for the subject, its absolute separation from the subject ensures that the subject will never be satisfied nor complete. This is the foundation of a problem which haunts the nature of subjectivity for Lacan. W here Levinas wants to maintain that the Other, as a singular person, comes as a benison, and is someone who, as we have seen, comes in “peace” to “found and justify” the subject’s freedom, Lacan readily admits that the subject’s relation to the Other qua absolute ground poses a profound and inescapable temptation, threat, and irritation. The Other is for Lacan a thorn in the flesh of subjectivity, one which, if not dealt with properly, can lead to pathology, destruction, and what he somewhat surprisingly terms evil.61 As a result, the Other according to Lacan must never be seen as a benevolent master. Instead, it must be acknowledged as something analogous to Schelling’s numinous absolute: a force which is terrifying in its potential power to disrupt and collapse the entirety of subjective existence.62 It is for this reason that Lacan’s analysis is so useful to the project at hand. Not only does he, like Levinas, recognize that the Other manifests to the subject as an absolute force, one which functions as the foundation for ethical life, he moreover recognizes that such a force poses a inexorable danger to the life of the subject. Indeed, it was in recognition of this fact that, as we will see more clearly momentarily, that Lacan sought to develop a model of ethical life which could resist and regulate the influence of the Other in the life of the subject. Only through such a regulation, he suggested, could some semblance of a good life be lived
To expound upon the potential danger inherent to the nature of the “absolute Other of the subject” Lacan drew upon a term which he borrowed from the Heideggerian oeuvre: das Ding, the Thing.63 The Thing, for Lacan, represents “whatever is [perceived as] open, lacking, or gaping at the center of our desire.”64 It thus expresses for him whatever a subject aims to attain in its desire—the object a of the Other. As such, he thinks the Thing can “present itself paradoxically as the rule of a certain Gut or good,” as the promise of the fulfillment and satisfaction of the subject.65 In truth, however, he assures us, the subject “cannot stand the extreme good that das Ding may bring him.”66 In fact, he claims, the more a subject pursues das Ding as a good, the more that subject will come into contact with some evil.67 As a result, Lacan concludes, “everything about it that is articulated as good or bad divides the subject in connection with it, and it does so irrepressibly, irremediably, and no doubt with relation to the same Thing. [Thus] there is not a good and bad object, there is good and bad, and then there is the Thing,” which operates as the absolute ground of both.68 The Thing, according to Lacan, as the absolute ground of subjective existence, gives rise equally to the possibilities of good and evil alike. In an attempt to explain the terrible ambiguity of the Thing as the aim of desire, Lacan summons a familiar image:
that of the terrible dumb brother of the four Marx brothers, Harpo. Is there anything that poses a question which is more present, more pressing, more absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating, more calculated to thrust everything that takes place before us into the abyss or void than that face of Harpo Marx, that face with its smile which leaves us unclear as to whether it signifies the most extreme perversity or complete simplicity?69
The Thing, like the face of Harpo Marx, Lacan thinks, can never be resolved on one side or the other of ethical evaluation: never wholly good nor fully corrupt. As the absolute ground and aim of desire, Lacan thinks, it has the power of motivating within us both “extreme perversity” and profound good. Therefore, he concludes, despite our tendencies to perceive in it some absolute good, the Other, qua Thing or object of desire, should never be mistaken to be a “sovereign good,” before which a subject should bow and scrape.70 To the contrary, he insists, it is incumbent upon the subject to see in the Other a “disruptive” and “nauseating” force which one must learn to protect oneself against.71 Such a task, he argues, is the aim of ethics. It was for this reason that Lacan declares “the status of the unconscious” qua absolute Other or Thing to be “ethical.”72
Lacan began his reformulation of ethics in light of the perverse power of the Other by first redefining the nature of guilt and transgression. According to Lacan, “From an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is having given ground relative to one’s desire [for the Other].”73 For Lacan, in the absence of any immediately given absolute good, the only universal and actual absolute upon which one can ground ethical judgment legitimately is one’s desire for the absolutely Other/Thing which stands “beyond-of-the-signified.”74 The Other, as the ground of the subject’s existence, is for Lacan the only accessible ground for ethical decision making.75 As such, ethical judgment can only be mediated in regard to one’s desire for and relation to the Other/Thing, according to Lacan. Hence his claim that the only ethical question one can ask is whether or not one has been faithful to the elusive nature of one’s desire. The fundamental question of ethics is for him this: whether or not you have “acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?”76
When answering this question, it is essential to remember th at for Lacan the Other from which these desires flow is not good. To “act in conformity” with one’s desire does not mean for him then to pursue the Other wholly, nor attempt to satisfy oneself in acquisition of the Thing. To “act in conformity” is not for Lacan to affirm the value of the Other as the object and aim of desires, nor is it to cede to its authority, comply with its demands, or confess its supremacy. To the contrary, to “act in conformity” with one’s desires is for Lacan to acknowledge, in both intention and action, the ambiguous power of the Other as the absolute ground of existence. It is to recognize that while the Other conditions the possibility of one’s existence, it also threatens to disrupt or overturn that existence, casting it into oblivion. As such, the ethical status of the Other as absolute must be acknowledged, thinks Lacan, in line with Schelling, as the potentiality for both good and evil. Good and evil are not absolute terms in their own right, he therefore concludes. Instead, they appear to be relative terms, each defined in relation to the Other as the sole absolute.77 They are modalities, he thinks, of one’s comportment in relation to the Other/Thing as the object and aim of desire. The goal of ethical deliberation is thus for Lacan not to ask “How can I faithfully attain the Other as the object/aim of my desires?” It is instead to ask “How can I relate appropriately to the aim of my desires, to the Other/Thing?” It is to ask, in other words, “How can I maintain a proper distance and proximity to the Other, neither giving in to it too fully, nor giving up on it entirely?” This is what it means for Lacan to desire rightly: to relate correctly to the Other/Thing; or, to renew the metaphor evoked by Schelling of the sun as the absolute source of life, it is neither to pull oneself too far from the Other nor to draw too close to it.
In recognition of the need to define a proper distance from and relation to the Other/Thing, Lacan posited his one ethical maxim, which he repeats throughout his Ethics of Psychoanalysis: ne pas céder sur son désir—don’t give up on nor give in to your desire.78 For Lacan, only when one has acted in accordance with this maxim, when one has maintained an appropriate relation to the Other as the object/aim of one’s desire, neither giving in to its demands nor giving up on its allure, can one say that the good has been preserved and one has acted well. On the other hand, Lacan reasons, when one fails to relate to the Other appropriately, either giving in to the temptation it presents or giving up on its elusiveness, evil must necessarily result. Lacan explored the effects of such evils in the form of the various destructive pathologies which could result from a subject’s improper relation to the Other: neurosis on the one hand, which he thinks occurs when a subject has given up on its desires, and psychosis on the other hand, which he thinks results from a subject’s having given in too fully to its desires.79 It is worth addressing each of these pathologies briefly in order to understand further the exigency of Lacan’s formulation of ethics as a mode of resistance to the Other.
On the one hand, appearing as the order, structure, and regulatory conditions for existence, the Other/Thing can manifest to the subject as what Lacan terms “the Law” governing desire—those prohibitions which set the limit case of desire, saying to desire “thus far shall you come and no further.”80 As moral law, the Other/Thing operates, he thinks, to set the regulatory conditions and operational boundaries of desire, circumscribing its nature and defining the limits which constitute it. As such, they are essential, he argues, to the formulation and maintenance of desire, and with it subjectivity. Unfortunately, at the same time, as we have seen, the absolute nature of the Other/Thing lends it a certain numinous power. As such, the moral law, though originally nothing more than the borders which define the limits of desire and subjectivity, all too quickly, according to Lacan becomes like a noose restraining the subject, cinching ever tighter the boundaries defining permissible action for the subject.81 So it is, Lacan argues, that the moral law can invert into its opposite:
Show[ing] itself to be the more demanding the more refined it becomes, crueler and crueler even as we offend it less and less, more and more fastidious as we force it, by abstaining from acts, to go and seek us out at the most intimate levels of our impulses or desires. In short, the insatiable character of this moral conscience, its paradoxical cruelty, transforms it within the individual into a parasite that is fed by the satisfactions accorded it.82
What ultimately results, argues Lacan, is a pathological “self-hate,” accompanied by the temptation to give up entirely on one’s desires, and subsequently given in to the infinitely cruel demands of the Other as a moral absolute.83 The result is what Lacan terms neurosis.84 So it is that we discover, Lacan claims, that “from the beginning,” neurosis operates in the “ethical dimension where it is, in effect, situated.”85 And, “what happens once the limit is exceeded,” once the moral law expands to the point of neurotic obsession within the subject, Lacan asks? “The [subject] is not as such capable of advancing any further toward what is supposed to be its goal. Instead it is scattered and diffused.”86 In this way, Lacan warns, the very Thing which functions as the object and cause of subjective existence as desire becomes part of a “neurotic apparatus” which threatens to destroy the subject.87 It has to be said that something of this attempt seems to be at the heart of Levinas’s analysis of the ethical demands of the Other presented in Chapters 2 and 3. Only in Lacan do we begin to see in this acquiescence to the absolute Other something dangerous and perverse. The potentiality of the Other qua moral absolute to invert into that which gives rise to the neurotic evil must therefore be resisted and countered, thinks Lacan. The question is this:
Will it [the I] or will it not submit itself to the duty that it feels within like a stranger, beyond, at another level? Should it or should it not submit itself to the half-unconscious, paradoxical, and morbid command of the superego, whose jurisdiction is moreover revealed increasingly as the analytical exploration goes forward and the patent sees that he is committed to its path?88
Lacan’s answer to this question is a vehement “No!” Indeed, he insists, that for the sake of its survival and well-being a subject’s “true duty [is] to oppose that command.”89 So it is that the first meaning of Lacan’s ethical maxim ne pas céder sur son désir becomes apparent. One must not give up on one’s desire! One must not yield to the temptation to give in entirely to the restrictions and demands of the Other as a moral absolute. Instead, one must cultivate an active resistance to the temptation it presents. One must develop the strength to say, “No, I will not yield my desires nor my existence to you!”
But, this response must also be tempered, according to Lacan, for the other side of his ethical maxim is to not give in too fully to the temptation presented in the Other to actualize the object of desire either. According to Lacan, while “whoever attempts to submit to the moral law sees the demands of his superego grow increasingly meticulous and increasingly cruel”; at the same time, “whoever enters the path of uninhibited pleasure (jouissance), in the name of the rejection of the moral law in some form or other, encounters [other] obstacles,” obstacles which, Lacan assures us, “may be traced back to a single root,” namely, the absolutely Other.90 These obstacles are, for Lacan, the loss of subjectivity, only here threatened from a different direction, from within. When one gives in too fully to his or her own desires, Lacan thinks, the evil of psychosis necessarily results.91 According to Lacan, psychosis is the result of an attempt to transgress completely the moral law established by the Other, which limits and structures existence. It is, in other words, the attempt to live without limits—to become the absolute master of one’s own being through the absolute satisfaction of one’s desires.92 What such an attempt ultimately aims at, Lacan thinks, is an attempt to envelop the Other/Thing within oneself—to absorb the Other into one’s own being and thereby “fill up” the lack (manqué) which constitutes subjectivity. The result of such a transgression of the natural limits which constitute subjectivity is, for Lacan, another form of evil.93
Such an attempt is exemplified by Lacan throughout his work in the actions and writings of the Marquis de Sade. According to Lacan, “Sade lays out a vision of Nature as a vast system of attraction and repulsion of evil by evil,” which he in turn attempts to “assimilate[e]” into himself through the “integration into a fundamentally wicked nature.”94 What Lacan sees in Sade is someone who has given in too fully to his desires—someone who has attempted to shed himself of the inherent frustrations and limitations of the subjective life of desire and, in turn, to absorb and integrate into himself all that he perceives himself to lack.95 In his attempts to cast off any and every limit put on his desires, Sade represents for Lacan the psychotic subject par excellence—the ultimate expression of one form of evil. The result, of course, was Sade’s collapse into absolute meaninglessness, violence, and chaos. Such are the fruits of failing to relate properly to the Other as the absolute ground of existence. So it is, Lacan insists, that just as much as one must not give up on one’s desires, falling into a neurotic self-abnegating totalitarian vigilance, neither should one give in too fully to one’s desires, resulting in a psychotic collapse of sanity. Both excesses are for Lacan the root of determinate evil in the life of the subject and the world as a whole. As such, Lacan insists, the task of ethics must be to learn to relate appropriately to the absolutely Other by cultivating an ethics of resistance which “keeps us a long way from” the uninhibited pleasure promised to us by our desires without giving up on them entirely.96 Only in this way can the good be pursued, according to Lacan: by neither giving in to nor giving up on desire. By acknowledging and maintaining healthy limits in one’s relation to the Other and the self.
For Lacan, ethics consists in learning how to desire just the right amount. It consists in learning both how to protect and to pursue that desire appropriately, by neither giving up nor giving in to the overwhelming power possessed by the absolutely Other. It was on this basis that Lacan defined psychoanalytic treatment as the first step in the development of a kind of ethical discipline. To be ethical, Lacan thought, requires learning to embrace and maintain the precarious and vulnerable position one finds oneself in in relation to the absolutely Other. Indeed, this is for him the goal of psychoanalysis: to cultivate a good life through the development of a proper relationship to the Other in one’s desires. In order to achieve a good life, Lacan thinks, one must cultivate the strength necessary to resist the temptation the Other will always pose. This is the aim of psychoanalysis, for Lacan: to learn to say “no” to the Other, to resist the temptation to neurotically obey its commands entirely without giving in to the temptation to psychotically reject its limitations wholesale. Only by learning to resist the threat posed by the Other through such a no-saying, Lacan argues, can the subject hope to establish some good, both for itself and for others. In this way, Lacan’s work provides a modality in which we may envision the possibility of an absolutely grounded ethics as resistance to the Other—one which pursues the good by way of a diligent “nay-saying” of the commands of the Other. What we have in Lacan’s ethics is, in other words, a model of demonic resistance which, while acknowledging the power of the absolute in the Other, refuses to affirm it as a good. But how might such a naysaying ethics of resistance be practically cultivated within the life of a subject? To answer this question we will turn in the next and final chapter to the work of Michel Foucault.