logocentric – Page 64

calum on Ž part 4

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

A ‘truth’ which is clearly, then, not ‘true’ in the Platonic sense of corresponding to some perpetual higher order but is rather ‘true’ in the sense of the moment of a pure creation which would ‘expose’ the conventions of knowledge to be inadequate and force their reconfiguration. For Žižek, the act would be such a truth insofar as the act
would be that which would resist and refuse recuperation to the preexistent symbolic matrix.

Where something like a speech act would, by definition, rely ‘for its performative power on the pre-established set of symbolic rules and/or norms’, the Žižekian act would signal a break with any preestablished or given order.

(quoting from The Ticklish Subject)… Žižek emphasises Antigone’s willingness to risk her ‘entire social existence’, her defiance of the ‘social-symbolic power of the City embodied in the ruler (Creon)’. Through so doing, Antigone could be understood to have entered the realm of ‘symbolic death’, that is to say, she can be understood to have situated herself outside the symbolic space of what was, previously, her society. For Žižek, such a moment of self-expulsion is tantamount to a ‘suspension of the big Other’, a radical break with and from the Symbolic order.

Žižek and Butler

In order to emphasise and clarify this radical character of the act, the fact that the act should be radically divorced from the Symbolic, that it should be envisaged as irrecuperable to the Symbolic, Žižek contrasts it with what he terms the performative ‘staging’ of revolt, or ‘performative reconfiguration’ 39 of the Symbolic order. Such performative reconfiguration would be exemplified in the position taken by Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power where she discusses the possibilities of subjective ‘resistance to given forms of social reality’. In The Ticklish Subject Žižek responds to Butler’s advocation of forms of resistance which would successfully reconfigure and thus, contingently at least, offer the potential of ameliorating one’s social condition(s), warning against the illusion of assuming to have successfully challenged from within that which is always already in a position to recuperate any such challenge. The distinction here, for Žižek, is that between a reconfiguration which would maintain the terms of the Symbolic and a reconfiguration which would transform the very contours of the Symbolic and thus the terms in which the reconfiguration might be understood.41

Žižek’s point can perhaps be illustrated in the common-place notion of reverse discrimination where the very points of discrimination are precisely upheld in the process of their supposedly politically correct reversal. Some negative aspects of discrimination against ‘the disabled’, for example, may be addressed through the implementation of quotas for the employment of a certain percentage of ‘disabled’ workers but such regulation cannot but uphold the demarcation of certain people as ‘disabled’ and potentially stigmatised and maintain the significance of factors otherwise deemed ‘irrelevant’ to the criteria of employment or ability to ‘do the job’.

A position like Butler’s entails, for Žižek, both an overestimation of the effectivity of ‘performative reconfiguration’ and an underestimation of the potential for the more thoroughgoing revolt which would be exemplified in the character and act of Antigone.

For Žižek, it seems, it is this thoroughgoing rupturing status of the act with regard to the Symbolic, the impossibility of situating the act in or recuperating the act to the Symbolic which renders it ethical.

What, however, are we to make of Žižek’s insistence on the act as irrecuperable to the Symbolic? In the distinction that he puts forward between performative reconfiguration and absolute reconfiguration, one might be justified in asking how the latter might be possible. Clearly here Žižek is not suggesting that everything of the Symbolic is razed. He is not suggesting, for example, that the Greek spoken in Thebes would cease to be spoken after Antigone’s act. He appears, rather, to be suggesting that the meaning of the symbolic or social edifice is unavoidably altered.

calum on Ž the act derrida part 3

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

Knowledge, for Derrida, is an indispensable prerequisite for the decision and, subsequently, for the assumption of responsibility but the decision cannot itself be reduced to knowledge without this rendering it ‘less’ than decisive, rendering it, that is, in the realm of pure calculation. On the other hand, without knowledge, there remains no possibility of responsibility insofar as responsibility would entail a context, a conception of that for and towards which one would be responsible and how.

Responsibility thus figures and can only arise between the closed automaticity of the system of knowledge and the ‘meaninglessness’ that would be beyond any systematisation.

Without exceeding knowledge, the decision is but a part of knowledge and thus not of the subject. Without returning to knowledge, the decision has no sense; it is purely arbitrary.

Is not this notion of the decision commensurate with the notion of the ethical in Lacan, with the notion of the ethical act as that which can appeal to no guarantor in the Other, as that which by definition takes place at the limits of the Symbolic order, as that which cannot be reduced to the law and yet, at the same time, must be inscribed in the Symbolic order? Is this not commensurate with the notion of the ethical as a pulsational moment which emerges from but must also assume a place in the Symbolic?

Neill’s Argument

Contra Žižek’s notion of the act which must be located absolutely beyond the Symbolic order, both Derrida’s ‘decision’ and Lacan’s ‘act’ are such that, in order to be understood as ethical, they must entail a moment of (re)inscription in the order of the comprehensible, or, for Derrida, knowledge, and for Lacan, the Symbolic.

That is to say, in insisting on the exclusivity of what he terms identification with the ‘Other-Thing’ as the defining moment of the act, Žižek might be understood to precisely
occlude the ethical potential from the act.

Returning to Antigone, if, in Žižek’s terms, her act is possible because of ‘the direct identification of her particular/determinate decision with the Other’s (Thing’s) injunction/call’, 26 then it is difficult to see in what sense such an act might be considered ethical.

It is, however, for Žižek, precisely this exclusivity, the radical suspension of the Other without recourse to a further moment of reinscription which does render the act ethical.

Antigone figures here, as we have noted, as the paramount example of the act as a moment of absolute suspension. Antigone, for Žižek, ‘does not merely relate to the Other-Thing, she – for a brief, passing moment of, precisely, decision – directly is the Thing, thus excluding herself from the community regulated by the intermediate agency of symbolic regulations’.27

It is in so excluding herself from the community, in situating herself beyond the regulations of the Symbolic order, that Antigone can be understood, for Žižek, to have engaged in a proper act, precisely because the act, for Žižek, is not simply ‘beyond the reality principle’ in the sense that it would be the engagement of a performative reconfiguration of reality, of, that is, the Symbolic.

Rather, the act is that which would ‘change the very co-ordinates of the “reality principle’’. This is not to suggest that for Žižek the act entails performing the impossible.

Žižek’s point concerns the very structuration of what would be considered (im)possible in the first place. The radical character of the act lies in the fact that it would be that which alters the very contours of what would be considered possible.

Or in moral terms, it would not be that which would challenge the received notion of the good but rather it would be that which would redefine what might be considered as good.

calum on Ž the act part 2

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

Calum says an act needs to be inscribed it in the Symbolic:

The judgement to act, that it is necessary or desirable to act, necessarily entails the judgement that acting in this way is preferable to acting in another way; for example, by doing nothing. In so judging, the subject is by necessity creating a new norm, regardless of how contingent or particular such a norm may be. In judging, then, the subject must both inscribe its judgement, its choice, in the Symbolic and assume utterly the weight of this judgement or choice. That is to say, the act, insofar as it is to be considered ethical, necessarily entails the assumption of responsibility in the field of the Other.

Yo Derrida

Politics of Friendship
In this sense, Derrida’s notion of ‘the other’s decision in me’ is actually closer to Lacan’s act than Žižek would have us believe. [cites Stavrakakis 2003 in Umbra)

In Derrida’s discussion of the decision in Politics of Friendship, the emphasis is on the incommensurability of the decision to any traditional notion of subjective agency and the related notion of responsibility.

Derrida’s point is that a decision, in the classical sense of dêcaedêre, a cut, a break, and thus an absolute decision as opposed to a mere calculation which would unfurl on the basis of a prescription, is still necessarily understood in a context.

This is precisely not to say that the decision is reducible to its context, which would be to rejoin to the logic of a calculation. The decision must, rather, be seen as breaking from the context which would precede it and be reinscribed in a context which would then be distinct from that which preceded it. It is the moment of responsibility here which would render the decision ethical and distinct from a mere occurrence or behaviour.

It is the reinscription of the decision in the realm of comprehension which allows the subject to assume responsibility.

In contrast to a traditional notion of subjective agency, a subjectivity which, in Derrida’s understanding, would be closed in on itself and thus incapable of responsibility, ‘a subject to whom nothing can happen, not even the singular event for which he believes to have taken and kept the initiative’, Derrida posits the notion of the decision as signifying ‘in me the other who decides and rends’.21

The passive decision, condition of the event, is always in me, structurally, another event, a rending decision as the decision of the other. Of the absolute other in me, the other as the absolute that decides on me in me. Absolutely singular in principle, according to its most traditional concept, the decision is not only always exceptional, it makes an exception for/of me. In me. I decide, I make up my mind in all sovereignty – this would mean: the other than myself, the me as other and other than myself, he makes or I make an exception of the same. This normal exception, the supposed norm of all decision, exonerates from no responsibility. Responsible for myself before the other, I am first of all and also responsible for the other before the other.22

We might understand Derrida here as indicating that there is that in the subject which is irrecuperable to any sense of self-identity, that which would escape the ‘monadology’ of the ego; the subject, that is, as inadequate to itself. The decision reduced to a moment of self-sufficiency of the subject would not be a decision in the traditional sense at all but would rather be contained as a moment of calculation, inextricable from the ‘calculable permanence (which would) make every decision an accident which leaves the subject unchanged and indifferent‘.23 It is in contrast to this that the notion of the other’s decision in me figures as the impossibility of self-identity, the rupture in the subject which can neither be contained nor recuperated. It is precisely from such a notion that Derrida adduces the possibility of responsibility.

Responsibility cannot remain responsibility when it is immersed in the pre-given. If subjectivity is closed upon itself, then responsibility cannot lie with the subject. The weight of the occurrence would rather remain with that system or field of understanding of which the calculation would be a moment. It is in response to the other, to ‘the other in me’ that responsibility becomes a possibility precisely because such a response cannot be contained within a pre-given system of knowledge.

To give in the name of, to give to the name of, the other is what frees responsibility from knowledge – that is, what brings responsibility unto itself, if there ever is such a thing.24

This is not, for Derrida, to separate responsibility in any absolute sense from knowledge, it is not to say that responsibility has nothing to do with knowledge. It is rather to point to the fact that, in the decision, as an ethical possibility, responsibility is impossible if the decision is reduced without remainder to knowledge.

…one must certainly know, one must know it, knowledge is necessary if one is to assume responsibility, but the decisive or deciding moment of responsibility supposes a leap by which an act takes off, ceasing in that instant to follow the consequence of what is – that is, of that which can be determined by science or consciousness – and thereby frees itself (this is what is called freedom), by the act of its act, of what is therefore heterogeneous to it, that is, knowledge.

In sum, a decision is unconscious.25

calum on Ž the act part 1

Neill, Calum. “An Idiotic Act: On the Non-Example of Antigone.” The Letter , 34, 2005, 1-28.

J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Trans. D. Porter. London, Routledge, (1986) 1992.
S. Žižek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London, Verso, 2001.
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Penguin, (1973) 1977.
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaselli., New York, Norton, (1978) 1988.
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. J.A. Miller. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Trans. D. Porter. 1992. London, Routledge, 1986,

The term ‘act’, in Lacanian theory, is differentiated from the sense of “mere behaviour” by the location and persistence of desire. This is to say that the act is necessarily a subjective undertaking and that it can be understood to be coterminous with the assumption of subjectivity and the responsibility entailed in such an assumption,the Freudian Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.

Where behaviour would describe the response to needs, for example, the act is defined by the impetus of desire. Desire makes the subject act and as such the weight of responsibility for the act committed lies with the subject. Desire cannot be treated as a given which would determine the subject’s act without the subject’s volition. The very subjectivity which would be taken to act cannot be described without the manifestation of desire which would allow its constitution. But such desire must always be particular to the subject; it is the subject’s desire. The act would be the moment of subjective assumption in which the desire which is in one is manifest and thus brought into existence. The act in this sense should be understood to be coterminous with the emergence of desire; the act is desire made manifest. It is in this sense that the Lacanian act is always, necessarily, idiotic, in the etymological sense, wherein idios would designate ‘one’s own’.

There is in the act, says Lacan, always ‘an element of structure, by the fact of concerning a real that is not self-evidently caught up in it’. This would appear to correspond to the structure we encounter in Antigone. The laws of the gods ‘speak’ from beyond, that is, on the side of the Real. Which is, of course, to say they do not in fact speak at all. They are manifest in Antigone and given expression through her act in such a way that ‘it isn’t a question of recognising something which would be entirely given, ready to be coapted’. In giving voice to the law of the gods, Antigone should be understood to have created and brought forth ‘a new presence in the world’. She should, that is, be understood to have named her desire and, moreover, assumed herself as the cause of this desire.

For Žižek, Antigone functions as the ethical example par excellence insofar as she is understood to ‘exemplify the unconditional fidelity to the Otherness of the Thing that disrupts the entire social edifice’.

Capitalising the ‘O’ of ‘Other’ in the ‘Otherness of the Thing’, Žižek can be understood to be emphasising the Thing, das Ding, as it relates to the field of the Symbolic. That is to say, das Ding as it would represent the limits of the Symbolic field, das Ding as indicative of the insistence of the lack in the Other as it is experienced by the subject. It is, as such, that das Ding would be understood as (a name for) that which would disrupt ‘the entire social edifice’.

The act, for Žižek, describes the moment of suspension of the Symbolic, the recognition of the limits of the Symbolic. In such a moment of recognition it is not that the Other would somehow be suspended to be subsequently resolved as a moment of a dialectic or integrated into a subsequent schemata. The act, for Žižek, is not a moment of Aufhebung.

Rather, in the Žižekian act, one would assume the very location of the lack which persists in the Other:“it is not so much that, in the act, I ‘sublate’/‘integrate’ the Other; it is rather that, in the act, I directly ‘am’ the Other-Thing.”

For Žižek, the ethical import of the act, (and the act is for Žižek the very definition of the ethical moment), is separated from any notion of responsibility for or towards the other. His is not an ethics of responsibility but, rather, his understanding of ethics is as the momentary and, in the moment, absolute suspension of the Symbolic order. The ethical act, for Žižek, is neither a response to the other nor a response to the Other.

The (ethical) act proper is precisely neither a response to the compassionate plea of my neighbourly semblant (the stuff of sentimental humanism), nor a response to the unfathomable Other’s call.11

Žižek contrasts this notion of the ‘ethical act’ as assumption of the lack in the Other, as the assumption of the location of das Ding, with the Derridean notion of ethics as decision. A notion described by Critchley as follows:

the political decision is made ex nihilo, and is not deduced or read off from a pre-given conception of justice or the moral law, as in Habermas, say, and yet it is not arbitrary. It is the demand provoked by the other’s decision in me that calls forth political invention, that provokes me into inventing a norm and taking a decision. The singularity of the context in which the demand arises provokes an act of invention whose criterion is universal.

Žižek perceives in this passage, and by extension, in the Derridean original, ‘two levels of the decision’.13 It is with this bifurcation of the decision that Žižek takes issue. The decision, understood as the act, would, for Žižek, have to be such that the two moments of decision he perceives in Derrida’s and Critchley’s accounts would coincide. Here, Antigone is offered as the paramount example.11

Is it not, rather, that her decision (to insist unconditionally on a proper funeral for her brother) is precisely an absolute decision in which the two dimensions of decision overlap?14

Žižek’s point here is that separating the decision into two moments, into, that is, the ‘decision to decide’ and ‘a concrete actual intervention’, is to render the decision or the act as non-absolute. That is, it is to render the act as less than an act.

The act, for Žižek, as we have seen, is situated in the moment of suspension of the Other, what he terms directly ‘being’ the ‘Other-Thing’, the assumption by the subject of the irrecuperable rent in the social edifice.

To incorporate as a necessary aspect of the act its reinscription in the Symbolic is, for Žižek, to miss the radicality of the act.

The question which insists here is that, in divorcing the act from any reinscription in the symbolic, is not one necessarily, from a Lacanian perspective at least, rendering the act as the impossibility of the ethical?

That is to say, Žižek’s deployment of the ‘act’ appears closer to what Lacan designates as passage à l’acte, an action in which one takes flight from the Other, an action which would properly entail the, albeit momentary, dissolution of the subject and consequent impossibility of the ethical.

Phrased otherwise, the act so divorced from its reinscription is not party to a judgement which, in Lacan’s understanding, would define the ethical;

an ethics essentially consists in a judgement of our actions, with the proviso that it is only significant if the action implied by it also contains within it, or is supposed to contain, a judgement, even if it is only implicit. The presence of judgement in both sides is essential to the structure.

phallic enjoyment the thing

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

In the seminar in 1957, the objet petit a begins to take on the meaning of the object of desire, which means not this or that specific object that you think you desire, but what is aimed at or sought after that seems to be contained within a particular object – for convenience, one may begin to think of it as the ‘desirable quality’ of the object, or what is desirable in the real-world object. 129

“the object of desire in the usual sense is either a fantasy which supports the desire, or a lure.” Lacan specifies here that the objet petit a is the “imaginary cause of desire” rather than “what the desire tends towards”, to emphasise that this is not a “real world object” (a thing), but an object in the sense of “object relations” – that is, the vehicle upon which a function is exercised (the breast, the stool, the genitalia), and whose relational properties (e.g. controllability for the stool, excitability for the genitalia) form the basis of the different kinds of relationship one may have with the exterior world.

Lacan never suggested that the objet petit a was derived from part objects, only that real-world objects which have something of the properties of part objects are often the ‘receptacles’ for the objet petit a. For example, money shares the property of the stool (the object of the anal function) in being something that may be lost or retained, the unexpected loss of which may be a cause of anxiety, the ‘spending’ of which may be a cause of enjoyment in its own right (how common is the phenomenon of ‘spending money for its own sake’?), and giving and retention of which both have meaning for other people. In other words, it is not money in itself that is an object cause of desire, but its stool-like properties make it a good receptacle for the object cause of desire. 129

The objets petit a may be seen as a fragment of the Phallus, which arises from castration, when the child understands that the Phallus is possessed neither by itself nor its father, nor yet any living person.

However, the lost Phallus cannot be forgotten – the Subject knows it must have existed from the fact that it has lost it.

The Phallus leaves traces of itself everywhere – a little like the mirror of the Snow Queen in the fairy tale, which breaks into a thousand pieces that lodge themselves in objects and people. These Phallic fragments are the objet petit a – the object cause of desire—and can be found in many things: fast cars, the latest technological gadget, the ‘perfect’ cocktail dress … and in other people – a woman who hankers after the love of a powerful man may well be attracted to the Phallic fragment he appears to possess.

The quest to possess the Phallic fragment is a well-spring of creativity and effort: the search for the solution to the insoluble maths problem, to invent a new chess strategy, to perfect your skill at the piano, to discover the structure of DNA …

The pursuit of the Phallus is qualitatively different from the pursuit of fame or social recognition, as it is object-focused (or objective-focused) rather than purely narcissistic (although there will necessarily be a narcissistic element in everything we do); it is to do with the attempt to incorporate in oneself the Phallic fragments.

The Name-of-the-Father is an object of identification for the Subject, as well as the representative of the Other: it is central to the construction of both Subject and its ego. It is the signifier that the Subject can enunciate as representing the object of desire; the master signifiers that take its place will have exactly the same character. This is why Lacan attributes such an important structural role to the master signifiers as being the backbone upon which the Subject is built. Consider the following example:

A man loves sailing and has built much of his image and identity around this; many of his desires revolve around the sea and sailing and the sort of society that goes with it – all this is observable in his choices of clothes, homes, women, etc. ‘Sailing’ is among his master signifiers. In his early life, this man’s father was a keen sailor, and in his identification with his father and fierce rivalry with his brothers for his father’s attention, the boy’s skill at the helm became his main ‘weapon’ of power – his representation of the Phallus (or objet petit a).

If you think of how the Name-of-the-Father hides the true object of the mother’s desire (who was, after all a seaman), one can easily see how ‘sailing’ has replaced the Name-of-the-Father as the metaphorical representation of the object of desire. 133

Just as the master signifiers are substitutes for the Name-of-the-Father, the object cause of desire replaces the lost Phallus as the only thing that can answer the subject’s lack that causes anxiety. I hope this final example will show clearly the relationship between these elements:

A woman in her forties suffered chronic insomnia, caused by her inability to stop thinking, or to ‘switch off her mind’. She was a mathematician by career, and her master signifiers included ‘rationality’ and ‘logic’: she was almost exasperatingly rational.

Beneath the bar of her master signifiers was hidden her great desire for a rational universe, for achievable solutions to problems; the Phallic enjoyment of her life revolved around this. Analysis revealed a child hood in which she had suffered greatly from a mother whose apparently illogical decisions had cost the family greatly and whose ‘childish irrationality’ was a great source of suffering and anger to the child, who proceeded to build her own personality around the signifier and the objects that she felt were her best defence. Beneath the bar of ‘irrationality’ in her unconscious was, as ever the anxiety of the helplessness – castratedness—she had experienced as a result of it as child. Because there is jouissance in the functioning of the psychological apparatus, part of the woman’s problem was that she enjoyed thinking too much (in her insomniac moments, she would solve chess problems in her mind). The defence mechanism she had developed in childhood against the anxiety caused by her helplessness against irrationality had got out of control: her jouissance was transgressing both the pleasure and reality principles. The insomnia became particularly bad whenever situations arose that caused her to re-experience castration anxiety: difficulties at work that she could not ‘solve’ however much she thought would cause her completely sleepless nights, resulting in exhaustion and a vicious circle of not being able to think clearly, and feeling even more anxious about this. 135-136

The Thing (das Ding)

The Thing attracts desire perhaps because it is the object of loss itself: the unsymbolisable and unimaginable reality of loss.

Freud’s Thing is the object of yearning, of desire; it creates jouissance, and is the object of language, while being unsymbolisable. We seek to approach it all the time in what we say, but we can only circle it. Freud held that the Thing was the ‘sovereign good’ to which subjects aspire, but which is always unattainable, because attaining it would transgress the reality principle and will be experie3nced as suffering or evil. …

Lacan’s innovation was to equate the Thing with the mother – not the real mother, obviously, but the mother-who-is-lost: the absence of mother. … the Subject is constituted by its separation from and emotional relationship with the Thing, which is unsymbolisable and therefore cannot be repressed. This relationship with the Thing is so charged with primary affects characteristic of the mother-baby relationship …

I would postulate that if a primary characteristic of the Thing is to be unsymbolised and unsymbolisable, then perhaps the Thing is what is lost at the point of birth: the environment in utero, a state in which the baby had no needs, because all its needs were being met by the functioning of the mother. … 138

Although the Thing has something of the effects of the objet petit a arises from the Phallus, and thereby indirectly from the desire of the mother, the Thing arises from the primary affects of a relationship with what is not-yet-represented – the unforgettable-but-already-forgotten other. To return to a total enjoyment of this phantasmatic mother – this mother-as-world – would require a dismantling of the Subject – a kind of regression to a pre-language state that is simply impossible.

Because the Subject is brought into being by signifiers, and the Thing exists outside the Symbolic realm, absolute jouissance in the Thing would require an exit from the realm of signifiers, which is the realm of subjectivity, and the Subject itself would be erased, annihilated. 139

… what is the most intimate thing for a Subject, and yet the most threatening, in terms of its potential to block its access to the Symbolic? The mother is in many ways the gatekeeper of the Symbolic – it is her presence/absence that creates the polarities in which proto-thinking can begin, it is she who embodies the Other, and only she can invoke the Name-of-the-Father.

Therefore, the mother – structurally inaccessible, signified as prohibited, and imagined by the baby Subject as the sovereign good – constitutes, in her absence and in the impossibility of fully accessing her, the Thing. 139-140

The Thing is therefore an object of transgression, which is observable in behaviours that begin as seeking jouissance, and end in self-destruction. The Thing may be thought of as the object of the death drive: those who seek oblivion in heroin or people who strangle themselves in the name of sexual excitement may be acting out their search for the Thing. The search for the Thing exists in tension with the pursuit of the Phallus, and of the objet petit a; this dynamic of tensions set up between the different objects can be seen as the sum of the forces of creativity. 140

phallic identification

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

Phallic Jouissance

Before the infant accesses the paternal metaphor, it supposes that the mother is there entirely for its satisfaction, and it en joys this mother-object, who is the whole and highly satisfactory world to it; at the same time, it has identified the mother as the representative of Other – the Omnipotent and Omniscient – and itself with her. Its identification with her at this stage is so intense that it experiences her as the powerful part of itself. Lacan described the infant’s psychological position at this point as being in ‘la jouissance de l’Autre’ (the enjoyment of the Other, Otherly enjoyment) … the Other referred to is a proto-Symbolic Other, as the child has not clearly situated it outside its dyadic relationship. Furthermore, the child’s enjoyment of this other is based upon its fantasy of omnipotence as conferred by its identification with the mother – an untenable albeit attractive state. 121

L’Autre jouissance is what can be observed in babies and small children; echoes of it remain in all of us. The infant is entirely sensualist and self-centred in its ‘Otherly’ enjoyment, it believes the objective world to be designed for its satisfaction, and that its will reigns supreme. However, at some point, this fantasy will be severely curtailed by the submission to the paternal metaphor and the infant’s entry into the Symbolic realm, in which it learns to take a different form of enjoyment – la jouissance phallique.

When a child begins to function well in the Symbolic realm – the realm of language, laws and all the social constructs that arise from these – it is the access to Phallic enjoyment that allows it to learn to read; to take pleasure in structured games in which there are rules (as opposed to purely physical play); to be able to include more and more elements of the real world in its imaginary games; to appreciate humour in which the joke consists in overturning rules of language or society; and to understand puns and clever rhymes where an appreciation of the underlying rule is necessary for the thing to work. The child as this stage will become interested in learning, and will start to develop its grown-up theories of the universe. All these things are manifestation of its Phallic enjoyment. But what is the impetus for the child to enter into Phallic enjoyment? Why should its symbolic castration make it go down this route? The answers to these questions are at the heart of the building of the Subject and its ego, and in them one may find the status of desire in the formation of the Subject. 122

The absences or ‘disobedience’ to the child of the mother (who is busy pursuing her own desire) are the cause of great anxiety and rage in the child: still relatively helpless, its fantasies of omnipotence (when mother is there and attentive) are damaged by the reality of its impotence (when she is not, or refuses it what it wants). The supposition that the mother is seeking the Phallus in her absence, or obeying its dictates when she goes against the will of the child, makes it the ultimate object of desire for the child, by this sequence of unarticulated thoughts:

– It must be a wonderful thing if she spends so much time on it – it must be desirable in itself; also, it must be a powerful thing if she must obey it, even more powerful than she is – the child’s desire forms around the Phallus

– Maybe if I can get it, then she will want to be with me and I will not have to face her absences and I will get whatever I want – the Phallus as an attainable object and a defence against anxiety.

After it has formulated in the imaginary the hypothesis of the Phallus, the child may, for a period, cling to the hope that it has the Phallus (which is proven by the mother’s presence), but if castration is successful and complete, then it relocates the Phallus in association with (hidden beneath) the Name-of-the-Father, in an act of symbolisation. Then, in accepting its barred (castrated) state ($), the child begins to seek the lost Phallus, which is now attachable to all manner of signifiers, in the exterior world (in its object relations, in the jargon of psychoanalysis). 123

As we have seen, the acceptance of the paternal metaphor is a way out of the impasse of its real impotence in the face of Mother’s absence or disobedience, and for two additional reasons: because the Phallus is relocated ‘elsewhere’ as a lost object, it or something of it is retrievable again; and because one may aspire, in identifying with the Name-of-the-Father, to gaining it. Because the Name-of-the-Father is a signifier, it is infinitely replaceable with others; the Phallus is an idea of the ultimate object of desire, attached to a representation that is in the unconscious but is also replaceable.

What the child supposes the Phallus to be for its mother will depend upon her real desires: a mother who is highly sociable and constantly in company may have a child who thinks that the object of her desire is contained in the concept of ‘sociability’ or ‘popularity’; a mother who is a piano teacher and whose object of desire seems to be enshrined in the ability to play the piano may have a child who, in his quest for the Phallus, becomes a concert pianist.

The desire to possess the Phallus is the motor behind much of human activity, which keeps at bay the anxiety that arises out of the acceptance of one’s lack of it. 124

Castration brings with it a new psychological need – that of possessing the Phallus, the metaphorical object of desire which will ensure the Subject’s own desirability; the Phallus now serves as the new object of the libidinal drive, whose organs of expression are not only the genitalia but also the intellect. There is just as much, if not greater jouissance in the functioning of the mind than in the functioning of any other bodily part. The ability to cross the bar of metaphor, to operate in the symbolic realm – to conceptualise, to analyse, and to rationalise – are all libidinal functions, which entail enjoyment of the mere functioning of the intellect. 124 … Phallic enjoyment is every bit as powerful component of desire as that related to a bodily function; as Lacan rather pithily said: “I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking. That’s all it means.”

The mother is not the only embodiment of the Other for the child (indeed, if she remains this way, the result is psychosis, as we have already seen).

The Other – the symbolised mental universe – is different for everyone: every small other has an Other. The child soon comes into contact with other Others – that of its father and a little later, those of its peers. With each new Other that is encountered, the desire of this Other is transmitted in language; thus, as she/he grows up, the individual’s desire becomes moulded by the desire of the many Others the Subject has identified with.

Lacan suggests that in these secondary identification, the ‘influence’ exerted by the others upon the Subject is that of a structuring (or restructuring) of desire, which passes through the medium of signifiers: ‘It does not involve the assumption by the subject of the other’s insignia, but rather the condition that the subject find the constitutive structure of his desire in the same gap opened up by the effect of signifiers in those who come to represent the Other for him, insofar as his demand is subjected to them.’ The individual Subject is thus formed by the complex interplay of many different identifications, as well as other environmental factors; so too is its desire. 127

failure of mirror stage autism

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

At first, the baby appears only to need mild, attention to its hygiene, and rest. Psychoanalysis has made much of the breast, because it is a perfect object for the newborn baby: it is food, drink, warmth, comfort, and love. The newborn, drunk on mild, hardly knows it’s been born. Psychoanalysts point to that state of contentment as something that can never be found again, they point to the breast as a lost perfect object, although not in the same way that the Phallus is a lost perfect object. But that perfect state cannot persist, because the child is growing, and as it does so, its needs become more complex. After a while, it needs to use its developing muscles, and it needs stimulation. Those needs can be met quite easily: a safe room with space to crawl about, furniture to hold onto so that it may pull itself onto its feet, a television and a couple of of toys should suffice … but they don’t.

Studies … of institutionalised babies showed that even when adequately cared for, they failed to thrive: they became listless and depressed … Lacan – and perhaps everyone else – would say that from day one, the child also needs love, but this begs the question why; love is, anyway, a lot of different things, that is so essential to the formation of the child’s mental health? The answer may lie in Lacan’s Mirror Stage, in which the mother’s loving gaze is the child’s first mirror and crucial to the formation of the infant’s sense of identity.

… the failure of this first mirror can lead to a deep fault in the foundation of the baby’s sense of identity, which is the ability to conceive of itself as an object, and a beloved object. Without the means of forming the proto-concept of ‘self’ at the right moment in infancy, there may be severe delays in cognitive development or even a complete failure to develop the concept of ‘subject’ and by extension ‘object’ and all the conceptualisations that follow, resulting in severe autism. All this would imply that ‘love’ is a primary need – perhaps the primary need – with respect to the construction of the human Subject. 113-114

But it is in the dimension of love that demand can never ‘match’ the need, and therefore the dimension in which desire flourishes.

One can only demand love obliquely, because in its very nature, it eludes language. It is not that the child does not try to ask for it, indeed, once a child is able to speak, most of its demands are expressions of its need for love. If you think about it, outside circumstances of extreme economic hardship (in the developing world or in war), it is rare for a child to have to demand something fundamental to its physical survival. Most of the time, what it asks for is ‘extra’: every day and at every opportunity, ‘plain past not filled’ or ‘chocolate cake’ or ‘not the yoghurt with bits in but that one’. It is in the inessential ‘extra’ that is coded the demand for love: in Lacan’s words, ‘the demand cancels the particularity of whatever is given by changing it into a proof of love’.

But why cannot love be demanded directly? Lacan would say that it is because love consists in ‘giving what one doesn’t have’ (Ecrits) – in other words, it can only be seen in the effort put in by the giver of love. Thus, the child ‘deduces’ the mother’s love by the effort and will she puts into satisfying the inessential part of the demand; her love is read in her proofs that her greatest desire is to be with and satisfying to the child. In this relationship, therefore, the child sees the mother’s love as depending upon the existence of a need (Lacan calls it a lack-in-being) and a desire in her – a desire the child thinks it fulfills. 115

unconscious the Other

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

For Lacan, the Subject remained that elusive thing that hides behind the ego, that is alienated from it, that is created in an act of language, and that is largely unconscious. It is the Subject that speaks, but when it speaks, it barely knows what it is saying. And I am no longer referring here to the ‘unconscious discourse’ that appears in clips of the tongue, dreams and pathological symptoms, I am referring to what the speaker (Subject) would think of as ‘conscious speech’. This is because for the most part, the Subject is unconscious of itself.

This view may seem like overstatement: one feels provoked to say, ‘But I do know what I’m talking about … I only make a slop of the tongue very rarely, 99% of the time I mean exactly what I’m saying’, etc.

But the experienced analyst knows instantly when she/he hears denegation (‘Of course, he’s likeable enough’ nearly always means I don’t like him); and even the most common everyday use of language is closely governed by the unconscious. Most of the time, there is an interplay of conscious and unconscious in our speech: we may mean exactly what we say, but we hardly ever know why we say it.

Consider the following examples:

‘Has so-and-so got a partner’ appears a simple question, but what motivates it? Is the questioner a woman worried that the so-and-so in question is interested in her man? Or is it a man interested in so-and-so? Or is it a woman who, motivated by jealousy, hopes to learn that so-and-so is unlucky in love where she herself is not? Whichever it is, the speaker is bound to deny it, and say it’s an innocent question motivated by altruistic concern or curiosity? We can never escape the unconscious – even when it is harmless. 70

‘We’ve cooked a roast for you – we got the joint from such-and-such specialist butcher’ could provoke guilt in a prodigal child, or encourage a guest to bring a bottle of better quality wine than usual (why not just ‘a roast’? Why mention the quality of it?), etc. But again, in both cases, the speaker’s intentions are entirely unconscious.

‘I’m still recovering from the weekend’ is a commonly heard phrase, but why does the speaker think the listener needs to know this? Is she/he boasting about her/his exciting social life, bolstering the edifice of an ego which includes the master signifiers ‘socially successful’ or ‘popular’? or is she/he trying to convince her/himself that she/he had a good time, when in fact she/he was very bored? 70

Even ‘Please may I have a kilo of potatoes’ could be multilayered statement: why not simply, ‘a kilo of potatoes’ – why the time spent on a formula of politesse? Is the questioner trying to show her/his good breeding? Or if, on the contrary, all politesse is dispensed with – they why the rudeness? Might that be a way of establishing higher status over the lowly greengrocer? And is a kilo enough – or is the speaker being mean and not buying enough, or displaying an anxiety about inadequacy and asking for too many? 70
These trivial examples only underline the power of the unconscious in directing the selection and combination of signifiers into chains with or without our conscious ‘will’; Lacan saw this interplay between conscious and unconscious in the Subject as being like the continuum of the surface of a moebius strip.

The Other is manifest not only in language (even though this may be its principal domain), but also in the whole set of hypotheses that exert their influence upon the Subject. The Law, societal rules, taboos, mores and expectations, and even Time are different faces of the Other. The Other is constituted by the entire symbolic realm of human productions; accessing the Other involves the crossing of the bar described in chapter 3; it also involves the act of alienation described in the Mirror Stage, which situates the Subject within the Other. These processes of alienation and symbolisation which tie together Subject and Other are the essential basis of human creativity. 70-71

mirror stage

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.

… Lacan’s subject … depends on the user accepting that there are elements of one’s identity of which one is unconscious; anyone who thinks that one’s identity is only what one wishes to say about oneself (‘I am Irish, I am an independent career woman’, etc.) is talking about what Lacan would have called the ego. Lacan’s Subject is composed of and revealed by signifiers, which it utters without knowing what they mean.

As developmental psychologies Henri Wallon pointed out, the human baby is very premature at birth compared with other animals, including the higher primates, from birth up until maybe eighteen or more months, the infant is unable to stand up, walk, or handle objects with dexterity, and the sense of ‘self’ and ‘wholeness’ that is allowed by mature proprioception (perception of the whole body within its environment) is absent. However, this human baby – immature, helpless, perceiving itself only in a fragmented way – is, at some point between the ages of six and eighteen months, going to see an image in the mirror, and realise that it is itself. This will be the first time the baby discovers itself as a unitary being, and this discovery is the source of an intense feeling of joy and excitement, which is usually shared with the adult present; the infant, having made this discovery, turns back to look at it smother, for example, and shares with her its pride and surprise. This founding act, leading to the formation of the ego and the perception of the Subject, is attended by powerful emotion. 29

Lacan said: ‘we have to understand the mirror stage as an identification … the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’. The baby’s discovery of self is an intellectual act; it involves the translation of an image into an idea – the idea of ‘me’ or ‘self’; hence, human identity is based on a primary act of intellect. But this is not a restatement of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Indeed, Lacan was completely opposed to ‘any philosophy issuing directly from the cogito’: for him, the opposite was true – I think, therefore I am not, or I am fully a subject only when I am not thinking – the very act of thinking about oneself nullifies the Subject. 30

While identifying itself in the mirror, the child also identifies with something from which it is separated: it is as an ‘other’ that the Subject identifies and experiences itself first. The founding act of identity is therefore not just emotional and intellectual, it is also schismatic, separating the Subject from itself into an object. For Lacan, the Mirror Stage is ‘the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to it being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject’. At the Mirror Stage, the intellectual perception of oneself is an alienating experience and the beginning of a series of untruths; but it is a necessary alienation that allows the Subject access to the symbolic realm. 30

Méconnaissance is a French word encompassing non-recognition of and obliviousness to something; it is sometimes translated as ‘misrecognition’ – a translation I find goes wide of the mark. ‘Misrecognition’ suggests that something has been recognised, only wrongly. In my preferred translation of obliviousness or non-recognition, the subject is completely blind to the object. One of Lacan’s most important maxims is that human beings are very largely oblivious of their own Subject; the ego is what a person says of him/herself; the Subject is the unrecognised self that is speaking. Psychoanalysis is about accompanying the patient towards his/her subjective truth, or towards the point where the objective ‘me’ and the subjective ‘I’ can be united. 35

As the child’s language develops, it begins to attach ideas to the objectified self, which is to become the ego or ‘le moi’: the ideas it attaches are often produced by a denial of reality, denegation, or wishful thinking. The three year old who cries, ‘Race you, Daddy! I’m winning!’ is showing his/her desire to win, in the face of an easily observed reality – that Daddy’s legs are four times longer and much faster. The father is likely, for his part, to let the child win – precisely because he wishes to help the development of the child’s image of itself as a winner, he is, in fact, aiding and abetting the fiction of his child’s ego (in this case a necessary defence against the anxiety of being so small and helpless). And this fiction is maintained and nurtured throughout one’s life; denegation too helps: ‘I’ve got no problem with so-and-so’ is almost always a contradiction of the truth; but it helps the speaker maintain his/her fiction that she/he is easygoing/unaffected by the so-and-so in question. 36

The factitious, ‘created’ nature of the ego is behind Lacan’s opposition to ‘any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogitio’: the cogito of Cartesian thinking relies mostly on the status of consciousness – the status in which the ego believes itself most to be in control. But for Lacan, the real ‘I’ is the Subject – I in ‘I am’ – and this is necessarily hidden by conscious thought about itself. At the Mirror Stage, one may think of the Subject as the part that ‘invents’ the stories about its image-self or ego, affixing to it signifiers as it acquires language: girl, blonde, pretty, likes chocolate, hates pink, good at drawing, etc.; but it also represses as many signifiers as it selects, and in doing so, tries to hide something of itself. Indeed, the Subject can only come into being when it is not thinking, because the very act of any thinking that involves its ego creates a smokescreen behind which it disappears. 36

ethical law

Schroeder, Jeanne L. The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.

As Alain Badiou insists, Lacanian ethics is a rejection of a Levinasian theory of the other. Levinas insists that we respect the absolute otherness of the other that the I of the subject can never fathom. But to do so, is precisely to treat the other as a transcendental thing – a noumenon. It is to assume that the other exists. To a Lacanian this is mystification. It is telling that Levinas insists that we are ethically called on to recognize the other’s face, and have a face-to-face conversation with the other. From a Lacanian perspective, Levinas is completely taken in by the feminine masquerade and thinks that a true face exists beneath the other’s opaque mask! He thinks that God exists. As such, Levinas is guilty of idolatry. 164

Lacan is revealed as the anti-Levinas. Justice requires not that we respect the ineffable otherness of the Other because to do so is to objectify the Other, and reduce her to what Badiou calls suffering animality.

As Badiou insists, otherness, diversity, and multiplicity are mere empirical facts that have no moral purchase. Otherness understood this way merely exists – it is the status of a thing. In contrast, justice insists on a notion of a radical equality that goes beyond mere empiricism. Consequently, Badiou, despite his avowed atheism, states that our ethical duty to other humans does not spring from our sympathy for their empirical suffering (animality), but from our recognition of their potential for ‘immortality.’ Political equality requires that we decide to recognize the sameness – our shared capacity for immortality—in the other despite her empirical otherness. This takes an act. 167

Lacan insists that the subject cannot hold the Other apart as Levinas would want us to, precisely because the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other.

Indeed, to proclaim the Other to be other consists in nothing but the subject’s attempt to export her internal split into the Other, thereby abjecting him. In other words, the subject is in the impossible situation of having to both engage the Other while keeping her distance. The Other is extimate, simultaneously external and internal to the barred subject. 167

To recapitulate, Kantian morality is defined by the formal demands of universality imposed by the categorical imperative. Therefore, it has no pre-existing content. The concept of good relates to substantive content – pathology. Morality consists of adopting maxims for action that are consistent with right regardless of the consequences. Kant goes so far as to posit that doing an act that is consistent with right because one desires to achieve a good result is smeared with pathology and, therefore, is not purely moral – in Christian terms it is sinful.

As we say, a problem facing Kant is that if the criterion for ethical law is purely formal, how can we recognize the ethical law and achieve right? More importantly, even if our souls were noumenal, as empirical human beings each of us is a phenomenon defined by her pathological content. Moreover it is impossible for any human being to fully know her own intentions – in Kant’s words, “The depths of the human heart are unfathomable.” Consequently, it is not merely that we can’t identify what right might be, we can never know whether we are acting rightfully in accordance with the ethical law which is real.

Nevertheless, Kant also understands that it is precisely this impossibility to know the ethical law that makes the subject an ethical creature capable of making ethical decisions. This trauma is the condition of human freedom. If we know what we had to do, we would not be free – w would not be making choices so we would have no moral responsibility for our acts. If we could see the mind of God we would become automatons. Our capacity for sin creates the possibility of holiness.

Lacan considers Kant the father of psychoanalysis. The problem with psychoanalytic ethics is precisely that we are duty bound to be true to our desire. Our desire is the desire of the Other, but the Other never answers our question, “What do you want from me?” We can never see the mind of God. Consequently we are forced to choose what to do. Although the choice is forced on us, it is radically free. It is the freedom of choice that makes the choice a moral act. And it is the fact that the act is our choice that makes it our own and imposes ethical responsibility if we choose wrongly. As Badiou says, ethics is a wager on which we must bet everything.

The ethical law constitutes a trauma. It is the repressed real to which we have no direct access, but which structures our lives. We are in a constant state of anxiety because we are duty bound to obey an ethical law we can never know. Indeed, as Kant insists, the only thing we can know is that we are always at least partially wrong and sinning against the ethical law.

We have seen that master’s and university’s discourses that characterize most modern jurisprudence reflect a profound fear of freedom. The master claims that we are obligated to obey the law merely because it is law, and not because we decide that it deserves to be obeyed. Positive laws are propsed precisely to limit the freedom of the subjects who are subjected to the law.

Being goal driven, the university’s discourse of law-and-economics seeks predictability. Consequently, it defines “rationality” in terms of predictable ends-means reasoning and seeks to squelch spontaneity. Classic law-and-economics at least pays lip-service to freedom in that it claims to merely respect the aggregate pre-existing goals of its members. It is just that sometimes we need to use the law to help—i.e. force—people to act rationally and choose the most appropriate means of achieving these ends. But note that insofar as the economist believes that the subject’s goals are pre-existing and are incapable of being rationally chosen, there is no Kantian freedom in this system at all.

From a Lacanian perspective, the fear of freedom is perfectly understandable. Freedom is terrifying. It is the abyss of the real where there are no answers. Infancy itself is a form of psychoanalysis in that the child learns how to integrate the facts of his life into the symbolic.

Positive law is in the realm of the symbolic. By adopting positive law we try to integrate the facts of our ethical life into the symbolic order. We adopt positive law precisely in an attempt to relieve us from the impossible demands of ethical law – to free us from our freedom. The symbolic is only created by the repression of the real that is its limit. Positive law is structured around a founding repression of not merely content, generally, but ethical law, specifically. 168-169

analyst’s discourse

Schroeder, Jeanne L. The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.

Discourse of the Analyst

The analyst, … takes on the role of the objet petite a itself. “[T]he agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void that provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire.” [Žižek Lacan’s Four Discourses]

This is significantly different from the two discourses of power. Both the master and university address the other with the voice of positivity. The master speaks from the position of authority telling you what to do. The university speaks from the position of expertise lecturing you why you should do it.

The analyst and the hysteric, in contrast, speak from radical negativity. In the analyst’s discourse “the analyst plays the part of pure desirousness.” The analyst asks, “What do you want to do?” … Similarly the attorney in her role as counsellor must empty herself of her positive content to identify with her client’s needs. 108

By addressing the analysand from the position of the cause of the analysand’s own desire, she stands in for that which is missing. … Consequently, the analyst’s address consists largely of silence – through an absence of speech. The analysand speaks to fill in the gap represented by the analyst. 🙂 This is the most straight forward of explanations of the Analyst Discourse

When the analyst does speak, it is not in her own voice as master or teacher. She tries to articulate the analysand’s voice, helping him to articulate his desire – to dissolve the traumatic symptom lost in the real by integrating it into the symbolic. The other addressed by the object of desire is the barred subject himself. The analyst “”interrogates the subject in his or her division, precisely at those points where the split between consciousness and unconscious shows through.”

The truth hidden beneath the analyst is knowledge. Lacan calls the analyst “the subject supposed to know.” The analysand goes to the analyst because the analysand is a barred subject – he is traumatized, unhappy, and alienated. The analyst is the expert who is supposed to know what is wrong. The knowledge that is the truth underlying the objet petite a is neither savoir faire nor expertise. Rather, this hidden knowledge is the analysand’s own unconscious knowledge. The truth of the analysand’s desire is within himself. This is not to deny that the person who is a psychoanalyst also has savoir faire – she knows how to treat patients – and expertise—she is a highly educated professional. Nevertheless, these forms of knowledge are not the truth of analysis.

The result of analysis is the master signifier. But this time, it is not the master signifier imposed upon her by the Big Other (as in the master’s discourse) but his own “new master signifiers (S1), ultimate values, formulations of their identity or being.”

Kant Hegel

Schroeder, Jeanne L. The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2008.

Being finite, we can never really know our “true” motives. In Henry Allison’s words, “[F]ar from asserting a doctrine of unqualified noumenal freedom … Kant explicitly asserts that since the intelligible character is inaccessible to us, we can never be certain whether, or to what extent, a given action is due to nature or freedom.” The pure reason that is essential to man is itself a noumenon, a thing-in-itself. Each person as an empirical individual is a phenomenon who does not have direct contact with his own noumenal, essential self. In Kant’s words, “The depths of the human heart are unfathomable.” No one can directly now his own self. “For a human being cannot see into the depths of his own heart so as to be quite certain, in even a single action, of the purity of his moral intention and the sincerity of his disposition, even when he has no doubt about the legality of the action.” Kant’s idea of a radical split between our conscious selves and another essential “true” inner self will reappear in Lacan’s rewriting of Freud in light of speculative thought. 81-82

For a Kantian, a preference is an inclination and is antithetical to morality, which must be served regardless of preferences. 83

Kant recognizes that it is precisely this impossibility of knowing and achieving the morality which is the reciprocal of freedom, that creates the actuality of human free will in the world. If man could actually see into the mind of God and know the ethical law, he would no longer be self-legislating (i.e. free). He would be submitting himself to an external force. In Kant’s metaphor, “Man would be a marionette or an automaton.” Ironically, it is man’s sin, his failure, his radical evilness, his inability to be truly free, that results in his practical freedom. As the common law tradition understands, law, as well as freedom, is a work in process.

In order for the subject to be free, she must be self-legislating, constantly creating new law. If, however she ever succeeded in the task of finishing and completely filling her world with law, it would bind her and prevent her from spontaneously creating new law. She would no longer be free.

Paradoxically, the reason the individual is able to liberate herself from nature’s causal chains, so that she might freely bind herself to the ethical law, is that every time she tries to bind herself to the ethical law, its chains slip her wrists. Man is always a moral Houdini despite himself. Lacan identifies this fundamental paradox that characterizes the moral universe as the sexual impasse. The part of personality that imagines itself completely bound by law is the “masculine,” and the part that knows that she slips away is the “feminine.” 83-84

Though Hegel agrees with Kant that the essence of personality is free will, he thinks that freedom of the Kantian individual in the state of nature could only be potential. Pure Kantian freedom is radically negative; indeed it is negativity per se.

To be completely free from bounds is to be totally lacking in content, to be a pure abstraction without individuality (i.e. noumenal). Hegel believes that in order for freedom to become actual, the individual must become concrete (i.e. phenomenal). …. Hegel thinks that this can only be achieved through intersubjective relationships with other subjects.

Consequently, because the individual rationally seeks to actualize her freedom, she passionately desires human contact. Lacan will rephrase Hegel’s sublime hysteria as “the desire of man is the desire of the Other.” 85