Kant was the one who introduced the dimension of desire into ethics, and brought it to its ‘pure state’. This step, crucial as it was, nevertheless needs another ‘supplementary’ step, which Kant — at least according to Lacan — did not take: the step that leads beyond desire and its logic, into the realm of the drive.
An ethics of the Real is not an ethics orientated towards the Real, but an attempt to rethink ethics by recognizing and acknowledging the dimension of the Real (in the Lacanian sense of the term ) as it is already operative in ethics. The term ethics is often taken to refer to a set of norms which restrict or ‘bridle’ desire – which aim to keep our conduct (or, say, the ‘conduct’ of science) free of all excess. Yet this understanding of ethics fails to acknowledge that ethics is by nature excessive, that excess is a component of ethics which cannot simply be eliminated without ethics itself losing all meaning. In relation to the ‘smooth course of events’, life as governed by the ‘reality principle’, ethics always appears as something excessive, as a disturbing ‘interruption’. (EOR 4)