Ethics and tragedy in Lacan in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, Cambridge University Press 2003
Analysis is not here to help us come to terms with the sacrifices that society inflicts upon us, nor to compensate for these sacrifices with the narcissistic satisfaction linked to our awareness of the “tragic split” that divides us and prevents us from ever being fully satisfied.
Psychoanalysis is not here to repair the damage, to help the social machine to function more smoothly and to reconstruct whatever was ill-constructed. It is there to take us further along the path that our “problems” have put us on,
Instead, it proposes a wholly different game, which reverses the perspective on the good, so that the latter is no longer seen as something that can be earned by certain sacrifices, but rather as something that we can use as a “payment” to get access to the one thing that really matters:
We come finally to the field of the service of goods; it exists, of course, and there is no question of denying that. But turning things around, I propose the following . . . There is no other good than that which may serve to pay the price for access to desire.
This zone that Oedipus enters by renouncing the service of goods is thus not some kind of nirvanic state where one is no longer driven by any desire or aspiration, completely detached from “worldly matters.” It is not that the renunciation of goods and of power prevents or stops us from formulating any demands. On the contrary, it is precisely this renunciation that puts us in the position to make demands, as well as in the position to act in conformity with the desire that exists in us.
But what exactly is this renunciation about? As said above, it is not about renouncing the “pleasures of life.” Psychoanalytical experience rather shows that the true opposition is not between pursuing pleasure or happiness and renouncing them, say, in the name of some duty. Duties that we impose on ourselves and experience as “sacrifices” are, as often as not, a response to the fear of the risks involved in the case if we did not impose these duties. In other words, they are precisely the way we hang on to something that we fear most of all to lose. And it is this fear (or this “possession”) that enslaves us and makes us accept all kinds of sacrifices.
Lacan’s point is that this possession is not some empirical good that we have and don’t want to lose. It is of symbolic nature, which is precisely what makes it so hard to give up. To renounce this “good” is not so much to renounce something that we have, as it is to renounce something that we don’t have but which is nevertheless holding our universe together. In other words, “psychoanalysis teaches that in the end it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration” (S VII, p. 307).
This formula is, in fact, crucial for the “ethics of psychoanalysis,” which could be defined as that which liberates us by making us accept the risk of castration. In a certain sense, it puts us in the position where we have nothing to lose.
However, while not false, this way of putting things can be misleading, since it suggests some kind of ultimate loss beyond which we no longer can desire or get attached to anything, which is precisely not the point.
The loss in question is rather supposed to liberate the field of the desire – liberate it in the sense that the desire no longer depends upon the interdiction (of the Law) but is led to find and articulate its own law.
However, this is far from being obvious. The relation between desire and law is a complex one. One the one hand, it is too simplistic to maintain that interdictions and prohibitions suppress our desire and prevent its full realization. On the other hand, it is also not quite precise enough to say
that they are constitutive of desire, that it is the very act of interdiction that constitutes the desire.
The occurrence of desire is correlative with the occurrence of the signifying order, which is broader than the realm of laws and prohibitions. Desire occurs when a need is articulated in the signifier, thus becoming a demand. Desire is the something in the demand that can never be satisfied – that is, reduced back to a need. The very fact that I address my demand to the Other introduces something in this demand that eludes satisfaction; for example, a child who demands food from her parents will not be satisfied simply by the food that she receives. This is what accounts for the metonymy of desire
Impasse of desire
What we are dealing with is an inherent impossibility for desire ever to be (fully) satisfied, and this configuration is at the same time the motor and the impasse of desire.
The intervention of the law, far from simply “repressing” our desire, helps us deal with the impasse or impossibility involved in the mechanism of the desire as such.
To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire. The fundamental operation of the law is always to forbid something that is in itself impossible. The fact that the law links this impossible to some particular object should not prevent us from seeing this.
By designating a certain object as forbidden, the law does two things: it isolates the impossible Thing that the desire aims at but never attains, and it provides an image of this Thing. This image (my neighbor’s wife, for instance) has to be distinguished from what, on the level of the symbolic, is nothing else but the signifier of the impossible as such.
The law condenses the impossible involved in desire into one exceptional “place.” Via this logic of exception, it liberates the field of the possible. This is why the intervention of the law can have a liberating effect on the subject. It makes it possible for Achilles not to spend every minute of his life trying to figure out why he cannot catch up with the tortoise, or trying obstinately to do so. It can make him a productive member of the community.
This is the reason why Lacan, although he refuses to put analysis into the service of producing happy members of the community, also refuses to subscribe to the discourse advocating the liberation of desire from the repression and the spoils of law.
His point is that the law supplements the impossibility involved in the very nature of desire by a symbolic interdiction, and that it is thus erroneous to assume that by eliminating this interdiction, we will also eliminate the impossibility involved in the desire.
What he warned against, for instance, in the turmoil of 1968, was not some chaotic state that could result from the abolition of certain laws and prohibitions.
He didn’t warn against human desire running crazy. On the contrary, he warned against the fact that desire, tired of dealing with its own impossibility, will give up and resign to anything rather than try to find its own law.
Psychoanalysis is not here to repair the damage, to help the social machine to function more smoothly and to reconstruct whatever was ill-constructed. It is there to take us further along the path that our “problems” have put us on, it is there as the “guardian” of the other way, the one that consists in finding our own way around our desire.
Emblematic of this “other way” is the story of Oedipus who, although unknowingly, steps out of the shelter of interdiction, is led to give up the thing that captivated him, and enters the realm where “the absolute reign of his desire is played out . . . something that is sufficiently brought out by the fact that he is shown to be unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled” (S VII, p. 310).
This is what makes it possible for Lacan to insist upon the fact that the renunciation of goods and of power that is supposed to be a punishment, “is not, in fact, one” (S VII, p. 310). Consequently, tragedy, at least in the perspective of what Lacan calls the tragic dimension of analytical experience, is not necessarily all that “tragic,” but can produce the kind of liberation that takes place in the case of Oedipus.
Hamlet: the desire lost
Laurence Olivier decided to accompany his film version of Hamlet with these
words: This is a tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind. The comic ring of these words, the fact that the whole tragedy of Hamlet can indeed be expressed in this kind of Witz, should remind us of the central ambiguity at work in the impossible involved in desire, ambiguity that can take the path of comedy as well as tragedy. Shakespeare explores its tragic dimension, and Lacan follows him on this path:
The fundamental structure of the eternal Saga, which is there since the origin of time, was modified by Shakespeare in the way that brought to light how man is not simply possessed by desire, but has to find it – find it at his cost and with greatest pain.
Indeed, the story of Hamlet is not about giving up or not giving up on one’s desire.
Hamlet is a man who has lost the way of his desire, and the question
“What to do?,” so central to the play, points to this fact.
One of the features that has always preoccupied interpreters of Hamlet is precisely the hero’s incapacity to act, his doubts and hesitations that make him postpone the act of killing Claudius.
Two readings of this incapacity that became the most famous are the romantic and the (early) psychoanalytic reading. The first one, based on Goethe’s interpretation, emphasizes the antinomy of thought and action: the hero is an “intellectual,” and this attitude of knowledge and reflection makes, to use Hamlet’s own words, the currents of his enterprises turn awry and lose the name of action.
The early analytical interpretation, based on some remarks of Freud, but developed extensively by several analysts of the “first generation,” is also quite well known. In killing Hamlet’s father and marrying his mother, Claudius realizes Hamlet’s unconscious desire, the child’s desire for his mother, the Oedipal desire to eliminate the one who seems to stand in the way of this desire. Faced with Claudius’ actions, Hamlet finds himself in the position of an accomplice, and cannot strike against the usurper without simultaneously striking at himself.
Although preserving the two pivotal notions of these readings (knowledge
and desire), Lacan’s interpretation subverts them at the very core. As to the Oedipal reading, Lacan points out that if we accept its perspective, then Hamlet is driven by two tendencies: the one that is commended by the authority of his father and the one that corresponds to his will to defend his mother, to keep her for himself. Both these tendencies should lead him in the same direction: to kill Claudius. Moreover, had he immediately gone for his stepfather, wouldn’t this be because he had found a perfect opportunity to get rid of his own guilt? Thus, everything drives Hamlet in this one direction, but still he does not act. Why? A genuine tour de force that Lacan performs in relation to this question is to point out that although desire is in fact something that Hamlet tussles with all along, this desire has to be considered at the exact place where it is situated in the play.
And this kind of consideration leads Lacan to conclude that the desire at stake is far from being Hamlet’s desire: it is not his desire for his mother, rather, it is his mother’s desire.
It is not only in the famous climactic “closet scene” that Hamlet is literally
driven mad by the question of his mother’s desire: Why and how can she
desire this spiteful, inadequate, unworthy object, this “king of shreds and
patches”? How could she abandon so quickly the splendid object that was
Hamlet’s father, and go for this wretch that can give her but some fleeting
satisfaction?
This question of his mother’s desire also plays an important part in the other question, the one that concerns the role of knowledge in Hamlet. Concerning the portrait of Hamlet as that of a “modern intellectual” whose absorption in thought and meditation weakens his ability to act, Lacan insists upon a fact that already caught Freud’s attention: on several occasions, Hamlet has no problem whatsoever with “acting.” He kills Polonius without a twitch; he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to death with no remorse.
For Lacan, this clearly points to the fact that the difficulty Hamlet has with this one act lies in the nature of this particular act. Although it is true that the “rub” that makes this act so troublesome is the rub of knowledge, what is at stake is not simply Hamlet’s knowledge, but his knowledge about the knowledge of his father. It often happens that most obvious things are the hardest to notice, and Lacan was the first to point out this most striking feature of Hamlet.
what is at stake is not simply Hamlet’s knowledge, but his knowledge about the knowledge of his father. What distinguishes Hamlet’s drama from that of Oedipus and what, in the first place, sets off the whole drama of Hamlet, is the fact that the father knows.
What distinguishes Hamlet’s drama from that of Oedipus and what, in the first place, sets off the whole drama of Hamlet, is the fact that the father knows.
Father knows what?
Father knows – what? He knows that he is dead, which does not only refer to the empirical fact that he passed away. It refers above all to the fact that he was betrayed, that he was cheated out of his symbolic function, and that, also as love object, he was immediately abandoned by the queen (and it is at this point that the question of the desire of Hamlet’s mother is included in this question of his father’s knowledge).
However, what is at stake is not simply the fact the Other knows, but
the fact that the subject knows that the Other knows.
Lacan points out that there is a direct correlation between what, on the side of the subject, can be expressed in terms of “the Other doesn’t know,” and the constitution of the unconscious: one is the reverse side of the other. To put it very simply, the presupposition that the Other doesn’t know is what helps to maintain the bar that separates the unconscious from the conscious.
To put it very simply, the presupposition that the Other doesn’t know is what helps to maintain the bar that separates the unconscious from the conscious.
Chicken joke
An amusing illustration of this can be found in the joke in which a man believes himself to be a grain of seed. He is taken to the mental institution where the doctors finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. As soon as he leaves the hospital, he comes back very scared, claiming that there is a chicken outside the door and that he is afraid that it will eat him.
“Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?” Here we can grasp very well the correlation between the Other who doesn’t know and the unconscious.
Another interesting thing that is not unrelated to this question of the codependence between the “not knowing” of the Other and the unconscious, is one very peculiar feature of Hamlet, namely that fact that he feigns madness. Lacan stated,
[Shakespeare] chose the story of a hero who is forced to feign madness in order
to follow the winding paths that lead him to the completion of his act . . . [H]e
is led to feign madness, and even, as Pascal says, to be mad along with everyone
else. Feigning madness is thus one of the dimensions of what we might call the
strategy of the modern hero.
In relation to the joke that we recalled before, we could say that Hamlet is
pretending to be scared of being eaten by a chicken, which is the only way
he can keep the others from guessing what he knows about the knowledge
of the Other, but also the only way he can himself deal with this unbearable
knowledge.
In Hamlet, the Other knows and makes this known to the subject. What inaugurates the story of Hamlet is the fact that “something is lifted here –
the veil that pushes down on the unconscious line. This is precisely the
veil that we try to lift in analysis, not without getting, as you know, some
resistance.”
The veil in question is, of course, the veil of castration. Yet this does not mean simply that Hamlet is confronted with the fact that the Other is himself subject to castration, which is what occurs in any “normal” course of the subject’s history.
What is at stake with Hamlet’s knowing about his father’s knowledge is the difference between the fact that “the Other doesn’t exist” (which is another way of saying that the Other is subject to castration) and the fact the Other nevertheless functions – that is, has a palpable symbolic role and efficacy.
It is this difference that gets abolished in Hamlet, leading to the breakdown of the symbolic Other.
Key point
This breakdown of the symbolic Other is thus related neither to the fact that the subject knows about the lack in the Other nor to the fact that the Other himself knows about it, but to the fact that the subject knows that the Other knows.
It is only at this point that the knowledge in question can no longer remain unconscious. For Lacan, the unconscious is not simply about the subject not knowing this or that. A thing can remain unconscious although the subject knows perfectly well about it (as in the joke that we used as example).
As far as the subject can pretend or believe that the Other doesn’t know that he “doesn’t exist,” the (symbolic) Other can function perfectly well and constitute the support of the subject’s desire.
As far as the subject can pretend or believe that the Other doesn’t know that he “doesn’t exist,” the (symbolic) Other can function perfectly well and constitute the support of the subject’s desire.
What provokes its breakdown is the fact that the subject’s knowledge coincides with the knowledge of the Other.
Hamlet’s famous words about the time being “out of joint” could be understood to refer precisely to this breakdown of the symbolic order.
Hamlet’s destiny is sealed by the fact that he is called upon “to set it right.” This appeal could be considered the very opposite of what happens in analysis. By lifting the same veil that is so brutally lifted for Hamlet, analysis leads the subject to a relative autonomy vis-a-vis the Other, whereas what happens in Hamlet is that the hero’s destiny gets enclosed in the destiny of the Other in a most definite and conclusive way.
The debt that he has to pay, or settle, the debt that triggers this infernal machine, is the debt of the Other (his father). When he finally finds his desire and with it his ability to act, it is in relation to the Other (Laertes). He carries out his act during an event arranged by the Other (Claudius and Laertes); he kills Claudius with the weapon of the Other (Laertes); and he does it at the “hour of the Other” (the hour of death, when he is already mortally wounded). Lacan draws our attention to the fact that what prompts Hamlet into action and, although indirectly, to the carrying out of his act, is what takes place in the scene of Ophelia’s burial. It is the image of Laertes who, in a violent expression of his grief for Ophelia, leaps into her grave. It is this representation of a passionate relationship of the subject to an object, that makes Hamlet (re)discover some of this passion and zeal. Seeing Laertes in grief, he utters some very emphatic words,
What is he whose grief Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow Conjures the wand’ring stars, and makes them stand Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane
– and leaps into the grave himself. All of a sudden, we have this peculiar
affirmation of what Hamlet is (implying also what he is here to do). He
seems to have found his desire, “doubtlessly only for a brief moment, but
a moment long enough for the play to end,” and he has found it via what
remains an imaginary identification with the Other (his once friend and now rival, Laertes).
But still, even after this “metamorphosis” Hamlet does not simply go on and kill Claudius. Instead, he engages in what is supposed to be a friendly duel with Laertes. He engages in what could be called yet another metonymy, during which he gets mortally wounded by the poisonous rapier, the rapiers get accidentally switched, he finds himself in the possession of the deadly weapon, learns about the treachery, and only then, already dying, does he kill Claudius.
One could say that in Hamlet the problem is not that of an action failing
to catch up with desire. It is rather that action has nothing to catch up with,
since it is precisely desire that is lacking in Hamlet.
The tragedy of Hamlet is the tragedy of desire that has lost its support in the unconscious (in the Other) and cannot find its own way, but can only try to hang onto what remains of the Other in the form of “empirical others” that surround the hero.
Hamlet’s relationship to desire never gets a resolution. His act is conclusive only on account of being, most literally, his final act. There seems to be no inherent necessity for Hamlet to accomplish his act. He does it by “catching the last train”; he accomplishes it by attaching it to something that is already being accomplished, or being drawn to a close, namely, his life.