Miller, Jacques-Alain. “On Shame.” SIC 6: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Clemens, Justin, and Russell Grigg eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 11 – 28. Print.
The disappearance of shame means that the subject ceases to be represented by a signifier that matters. 18
When one has come to the point at which every body tears up his visiting card, where there is no shame any more, the ethics of psychoanalysis is called into question. 19
The virtues of what has emerged as the modern man imply the renunciation of aristocratic virtue and of what it obliged in terms of braving death. One of the places this is brought about is in the work of Hobbes, which reveres aristocratic virtue while at the same time deducing that the social bond is above all established in the face of the fear of death, that is, the contrary of aristocratic virtue. Cultivated minds these days refer to this discourse in which one finds the foundation for the claim that security is essential for modern man. This is to affirm that heroism no longer means anything. 24
This is what psychoanalys is is able to point out, that the shameless are shameful. To be sure, they challenge the master’s discourse, the solidarity between the master and the worker, both being a part of the same system. He refers to the Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the Roman people, who each benefited from the master signifier.
He indicates to these students that they are placed with the others in excess, that is to say, the rejects of the system, not with the proletariat but with the lumpenproletariat. It is a very precise remark and it runs right across all the years we have lived through since. This enables him to deduce that this system that adheres to the master signifier produces shame.
The students, by placing them selves outside the system, put themselves in the place of impudence. [offensive boldness, insolent or impertinent, shameless]
This is where we can see what has changed since then.We are in a system that does not obey the same regulation because we are in a system that produces impudence and not shame, that is, in a system that annuls the function of shame.
We no longer apprehend it except in the form of insecurity — a form of insecurity that is imputed to the subject, who is no longer under the domination of a master signifier.
The present moment of this civilization is permeated by an authoritarian and artificial return of the master signifier. Every one must work in their place or be locked up. While in the system Lacan was in, it was still possible to say “make ashamed.”
Impudence has progressed greatly since, and today it has be come the norm. What does one obtain from saying to the subject,”You owe something to yourself”? There is no doubt that psychoanalysis must define its position in relation to the aristocratic reaction that I have referred to. This is indeed the question that haunts our practice: Is it for everyone? 26
Lacan’s fundamental debate — it is clear in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, as it was already in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis — has always been a debate with civilization in so far as it abolishes shame, with the globalization that is in process, with Americanization or with utilitarianism, that is, with the reign of what Kojeve calls the Christian bourgeois.
The path that Lacan proposes is the signifier as vehicle of a value of transcendence. This is condensed into S1. Again, things have changed since The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, because the signifier has been affected. Speech itself has been reduced to the pair listening and chattering.
What one attempts to preserve in the analytic session is a space in which the signifier retains its dignity. 28
We can estimate the difference between today and the period of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. We are at a point where the dominant discourse enjoins one not to be ashamed of one’s jouissance anymore.
Ashamed of all the rest, yes, of one’s desire, but not of one’s jouissance .