Ror Malone, Kareen. “Reading Desire and Tracing the Subject in Lacan and Butler: The Problem of Ethics Without Meta-Language. Theoretical Psychology Critical Contributions. Selected Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial Conference of The International Society for Theoretical Psychology. Calgary, Alberta, Canada. June 3 – 8, 2001. Eds. Stephenson, Niamh. and H. Lorraine Radtke, René Jorna, Henderikus J. Stam. Concord: Captus Press Inc, 2003. 233-241.
From the abstract: The “end” of meta-language refers to the necessity of crafting a more precise notion of the interactions that define the “extra-discursive,” authority, and the “reality” secured by language (e.g., norms). It is at the intersection of these dimensions that one may ascertain a form of agency that is both embedded within culture yet able to subvert or take an ethical position in relation to its norms. Language and loss the “inter-dit” in Lacanian interpretation, and Butler’s concept of rhetoricity are implicated as avenues through which one can understand the emergence of this sort of agency and ethics.
Any recourse to a meta-language would render clinical work an ideological game of identification with the so-called reality of the analyst.
To claim that the subject is at the same level as the law is not equivalent to claiming that she is the law, since any conflation of subject with law only reduces her, subjects her absolutely, to the law. At the same level as and yet not the law, the subject can only be conceived at the failure of the law, of language. In language and yet more than language, the subject is a cause for which no signifier can account. Malone, 234 citing Copjec in Read My Desire 1994, 209.
In Seminar XX (1974/1999), Lacan asserted that there is no meta-language, no language about language. In other words, within the Lacanian paradigm, there is no super-ordinate position of exemption from the limits of language. For Lacan, the absence of a meta-language thus implies a limit in two ways. First, language and no position in language can say it all; there is a remainder that is known only by its effects. Secondly, you cannot escape lanugage. The above impasses of language create ethical dilemmas that are often solved by notions of the good, which try to locate some trans-linguistic position that organizes the ends of speech. Regarding the impasses found in the limit of language, Lacan says that:
There is some relationship to being that cannot be known. It is that relationship whose structure I investigate … insofar as that knowledge — which as I just said is impossible — is prohibited (interdicted) thereby. this is where I play on the equivocation — that impossible knowledge is censored or forbidden, but it isn’t if you write (inter-dit” appropriately — it is said between the words, between the lines. We have to expose this kind of real to which it grants us access. Lacan 1974/1999 119.
The inherent lack of foundation in our relation to the Other takes its social bearings in relationship to prohibition. You can only know so much about the Other (your parent’s unconscious fantasy, the arbitrary rule of law etc.)
So there is a question of a non-relation to the Other that cannot be eased by discourse, a limit within discourse encountered only through discourse. This limit has social implications [for example psychotics are only too certain that they know what the Other wants and this is what Rothenberg finds problematic with Butler’s work].