Johnston, Adrian. “The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics.” Psychoanalytic Studies. 3.3/4 (2001): 411-424.
🙂 In this article Johnston takes on Lacan’s “Do not give way on your desire!” What does this mean? It does not mean, “do not give way on your jouissance!”
AJ starts with Nietzsche. Why? Because Nietzsche is totally against Kant.
In the standard version of the Kantian schema, the subject’s intentions are most ethical when they are least tied to the particularity of the individual (i.e., his/her inclinations, desires, wishes, circumstances, etc.).
The categorical imperative (“I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law”) functions as a kind of ‘sieve’ meant to strain out, as much as possible, these pathological materials tainting the intentional purity of duty.
Conversely, the injunction of the eternal return—perhaps this injunction is capable of being rendered in the imperative form as “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my concrete, unique , and utterly individual act should be ‘universalized’, namely, should endlessly recur for all eternity ”—demands exactly the opposite of the categorical imperative.
In a Nietzschean ‘system of valuation’, rather than being the basest, most unworthy of intentional states , the particular, idiosyncratic desires of the individual subject are the highest standards by which to measure actions.
Only if an action expresses the strongest of subjective urges, urges so strong that the subject would will them to infinitely manifest themselves again and again in all their singular uniqueness, is it of any worth. 412
Most reading s of the Lacanian dictum “Do not give way on your desire!” understand him to be proposing something similar to Nietzsche: (pure) desire is conceived of as jouissance, as the uncompromising , unconditional thrust of Trieb once operative outside the confining consequentialist calculus of the pleasure principle.
The subjective particularity of pure desire is ethical precisely when its strength overwhelms the mitigating influence of the pleasure-oriented ego.
Various commentaries on the seventh seminar point to the tragic figure of Antigone as proof that this is exactly what Lacan intends to convey. Antigone’s passionate attachment to her dead brother Polyneices drives her to transgress Creon’s edict forbidding the burial of the corpse. Her excessive ‘love’ is then compared with the Todestrieb, since Antigone is compelled to disregard the tragic consequences that she is fully aware await her in the wake of her act.
A Real passage á l’acte (i.e., Antigone’s burial of her brother as a result of her desire) transgressively disrupts the reign of a Symbolic system of Law (i.e., Creon’s denial of funerary rites for Polyneices on the grounds of the interests of the polis).
Is this the distilled essence of Lacan’s ‘ethics of psychoanalysis?’ Is he, like Nietzsche, simply interested in turning Kant on his head, in unreservedly transforming Kant into Sade?
Lacan explicitly states that desire arises from the sacrifice of jouissance: <span style=”font-weight: bold; font-size: 11pt;”>not ceding on one’s desire</span> would seem to entail not surrendering to the siren-song of jouissance, not capitulating to the uncompromising demands of Trieb.
Lacan describes desire as opposing jouissance—“desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance” 413
Lacan means, then “not giving ground on desire” is a translation of Kant’s insistence on the exclusion of pathological drives from properly ethical intentionality, with the psychoanalytic qualification that the detachment from these drives is itself achieved through and sustained by a subl(im)ation of inclination, a ‘self-subversion’ of Trieb. 413
Lacanian Desire
One of the easiest ways to gain a preliminary understanding of Lacanian desire is by returning to the Freudian concepts of Trieb and sublimation. For Freud, sublimation is the typical means by which Trieb adapts itself to the constraints and obstacles it comes to encounter at the level of the reality principle. Reality forbids certain drive-aims qua the attainment of satisfaction linked to determinate drive-objects. Thus, reality is said to be responsible for what Freud designates as ‘aim-inhibition ’ (a catalyst for sublimation).
The aim-inhibited drive then seeks other forms of satisfaction via different objects; and, if these alternate modes of securing gratication are not at odd s with the various prohibitions of the reality principle (usually, socio-cultural laws and norms), then the new libidinal arrangement is dubbed a successful sublimation of the drive .
Furthermore in Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that ‘instinctual renunciation’ (i.e., the aim-inhibition of the drives demanded by human reality) is, despite appearances to the contrary, an unavoidable libidinal fate for all subjects.
As such, the Freudian subject lives in a state of unsatisfactory compromise: sublimation provides pleasurable outlets for Trieb, but Trieb itself is incapable of ever being fully satisfied with these compromises, since they are, by the very definition of the mechanism of sublimation, deviations from the original cathetic trajectory (i.e., the ‘earliest state of affairs’ which all drives struggle in vain to recover; in the seventh seminar, Lacan designates this posited ‘ground zero’ of the libidinal economy das Ding). The libidinal life of the human being is therefore marked by certain constitutive ‘lacks’ or ‘absences’—as Lacan puts it, the ‘sovereign Good’ of das Ding is always missing from the reality of subjective ‘ex-sistence’ — and this condition of (non-)existence is precisely what Lacan intends for his notion of ‘desire’ to designate. 413
Desire is the residual remainder/by-product of the subjection of jouissance (i.e., Trieb an sich, the unconditional attachment to das Ding) to the ego-mediated negotiations between the pleasure and reality principles. 414
In other words, desire is symptomatic of the drives’ dissatisfaction with the pleasure-yielding compromises of sublimation. 414
Lacan’s seventh seminar contains two separate lines of argumentation:
1. Lacan seeks to clarify and further develop Freud’s analyses of conscience as a manifestation of a pathological ‘moral masochism’ fueled by an insatiable super-ego;
2. Lacan lays down the preliminary groundwork for a psychoanalytic meta-ethical theory based on the possibility of desire coming to function in a ‘pure’, properly ethical fashion.
These two dimensions of Lacan’s so-called ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ must not be conflated, since doing so results in either muddleheaded confusion or outright error.
To be continued …
