Žižek. S. Interrogating the Real. Continuum Books. 2005. [reprinted 2010]
Consider Don Giovanni’s decision in the last act of Mozart’s opera, when the Stone Guest confronts him with a choice: he is near death, but if he repents for his sins, he can still be redeemed; if, however, he does not renounce his sinful life, he will burn in hell forever. Don Giovanni heroically refuses to repent, although he is well aware that he has nothing to gain, except eternal suffering, for his persistence – why does he do it? Obviously not for any profit or promise of pleasures to come. The only explanation is his utmost fidelity to the dissolute life he has chosen. This is a clear case of immoral ethics: Don Giovanni’s life was undoubtedly immoral; however, as his fidelity to himself proves, he was immoral out of principle, behaving the way he did as part of a fundamental choice. Or, to take a feminine example from opera: George Bizet’s Carmen. Carmen is, of course, immoral (engaged in ruthless promiscuity, ruining men’s lives, destroying families) but nonetheless thoroughly ethical (faithful to her chosen path to the end, even when this means certain death).
… renouncing the guarantee of some big Other is the very condition of a truly autonomous ethics. … How are we to avoid the common misperception that the basic ethical message of psychoanalysis is, precisely, that of relieving me of my responsibility, of putting the blame on the Other – ‘since the Unconscious is the discourse of the Other, I am not responsible for its formations; it is the big Other who speaks through me, I am merely its instrument’?
Lacan himself indicated the way out of this deadlock by referring to Kant’s philosophy as the crucial antecedent of psychoanalytic ethics. According to the standard critique, the limitation of the Kantian universalist ethic of the ‘categorical imperative’ (the unconditional injunction to do our duty) resides in its formal indeterminacy: moral Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, and so leaves the space open for empty voluntarism (whatever I decide to be my duty is my duty). However, far from being a limitation, this very feature brings us to the core of Kantian ethical autonomy: it is not possible to derive the concrete norms that I must follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself – which means that the subject himself must assume responsibility for the translation of the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse, along the lines of, I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what else can I do, this is my duty …’ Kant’s ethics of unconditional duty is often taken as justifying such an attitude – no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kantian ethics when attempting to justify his role in the planning and execution of the ‘final solution’: he was simply doing his duty by obeying the Führer’s orders.
However, the aim of Kant’s emphasis on the subject’s full moral autonomy and responsibility is precisely to prevent any such manoeuvre of shifting the blame on to some figure of the big Other.
Initially, the big Other represents the subject’s alienation within the symbolic order: the big Other pulls the strings, the subject doesn’t speak, he is ‘spoken’ by the symbolic structure, etc. In short, the ‘big Other’ is the name for social substance, for that on account of which the subject never fully dominates the effects of his or her acts – i.e., on account of which the final outcome of his or her activity is always something other than what was intended or anticipated. Separation takes place when the subject takes note of how the big Other is in itself inconsistent, lacking (barré, as Lacan liked to put it): the big Other doesn’t possess what the subject is lacking. In separation, the subject experiences how his own lack apropos of the big Other is already the lack that affects the big Other itself.
In what, then, does the gap that forever separates psychoanalysis from Buddhism consist? In order to answer this question, we should confront the basic enigma of Buddhism, its blind spot: how did the fall into samsara, the Wheel of Life, occur?
This question is, of course, the exact opposite of the standard Buddhist concern: how can we break out of the Wheel of Life and attain nirvana? (This shift is homologous to Hegel’s reversal of the classic metaphysical question, how can we penetrate through false appearances to their underlying essential reality? For Hegel, the question is, on the contrary, how has appearance emerged out of reality?) The nature and origin of the impetus by means of which desire, its deception, emerged from the Void, is the great unknown at the heart of the Buddhist edifice: it points toward an act that ‘breaks the symmetry’ within nirvana itself and thus makes something appear out of nothing (another analogy with quantum physics, with its notion of breaking the symmetry).
The Freudian answer is drive: what Freud calls Trieb is not, as it may appear, the Buddhist Wheel of Life, the craving that enslaves us to the world of illusions. Drive, on the contrary, goes on even when the subject has ‘traversed the fantasy’ and broken out of the illusory craving for the (lost) object of desire.