In arguing that the subject’s relationship to itself changes as a consequence of symbolic divestiture, Žižek promotes a conception of ethics that psychoanalytic theorists will recognize as Lacanian insofar as it depends upon an intrasubjective relationship. Lacan’s statement that the only ethics proper to psychoanalysis involves the subject’s relationship to its desire (“do not give way on your desire”) explicitly contrasts both with the ethics of responsibility to the other extolled in Levinas and Derrida and with the “service of goods” that underwrites utilitarian versions of ethics. While remaining committed to an intrasubjective version of ethics, Žižek derives a somewhat different ethical stance from the later Lacanian theory of the sinthome.
Decidedly, this is not the ethics of the “service of goods,” the traumatic encounter with the impossible demand of the Other, some officious busy-ness in the lives of our neighbours, or adherence to the Golden Rule. Instead, the ethical stance requires taking responsibility for one’s own excessive dimension and jouissance. (Rothenberg, Excessive 194)