ethics_real – Page 2

mellard Beyond Lacan

Mellard, James M. (2006) Beyond Lacan. Albany: State U of New York 288 pages.
Chapter 7: Hart’s Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance. pp. 179 – 208.

traditional oedipal subject founded on an ethics of desire to a postraditional subject founded on an ethics of jouissance

Oedipal Subject: eros and social life,
– subject oriented to desire (and thus constrained by castration and the pleasure principle)

– subject of desire
Damage is important in our understanding the shift from the old oedipal order to the new narcissism, from the order of desire to that of the drive.

This shift, Copjec suggests, has a cognate move-epochal, historical, and ongoing, neither personal nor idiosyncratic. It shifts emphasis to concepts — either ” meaning” or “being” — Lacan associates with the vel of alienation.

Heretofore, in that process known as ” oedipalization, ” it has been a good thing for subjects to be oriented to meaning (and thus to desire within the pleasure principle and oedipal law) rather than to being (and thus to drive and jouissance within the domain of the narcissistic ).

PostOedipal, PostTraditional Subject: Thanatos and the death drive

– oriented towards jouissance and thus denying contraints of castration and aiming beyond the pleasure principle. narcissistic subject of jouissance

Femme fatale turns desire toward jouissance

In so far as sexual difference is a Real that resists symbolization, the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical non-relationship in which the Other, our partner, prior to being a subject, is a Thing. Metastases of Enjoyment, 108

We may say that the narrator-protagonist of Damage merely takes a detour through desire and ordinary oedipal subjectivity before becoming the problematical subject of our postuniverse. His detour goes through the femme fatale, one guise of the maternal object who experiences desire and, as Copjec says, serves as a “defense against the drive” by her relation to jouissance (198).

As Zizek suggests in his discussions of film noir, the role of the femme fatale foregrounds the paradoxical role of “woman ” in the construction of ” man . ” That role raises issues of desire and drive. Zizek points out that Lacan’s controversial claim that “Woman is a symptom ” (Feminine Sexuality 168 ) of a man can be understood in two radically opposed ways because in Lacan’s career Lacan himself shifted his views on the symptom. In the first, the ” early”view of the 1950s, Lacan saw the symptom, Zizek says, as “a cyphered message,” one in which therefore the “woman-symptom appears as the sign, the embodiment of man’s fall, attesting to the fact that man ‘gave way as to his desire'” (Enjoy 154).

In this view as illustrated in Zizek’s discussion of the noir universe, “woman is not an external, active cause which lures man into a fall-she is just a consequence, a result, a materialization of man’s fall. So, when man purifies his desire of the pathological remainders, woman disintegrates in precisely the same way a symptom dissolves after successful interpretation, after we have symbolized its repressed meaning” (155).

But, Zizek asks, is there not more? “Does not Lacan’s other notorious thesis — the claim that ‘woman doesn’t exist‘ — point in the same direction? Woman doesn’t exist in herself, as a positive entity with full ontological consistency, but only as a symptom of man.”

In the second view, found in the late writings and seminars and foregrounding drive and jouissance, Lacan regarded the symptom” as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship to enjoyment (jouissance).”

In this late Lacanian view, both the symptom and woman-as-symptom change. Says Zizek, ” [I]f the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. In this sense, ‘woman is a symptom of man‘ means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: all his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is ‘externalized’ in his symptom.

In other words, man literally ex-sists: his entire being lies ‘out there,’ in woman” (155) . Zizek is especially interested in film noir because, paradox ically, it expresses both these Lacanian views of woman and symptom.

The father Martyn thinks he knows is the oedipal father who in his ignorance allows him desire and pleasure. The one he does not know is the obscene, life- and joy-denying
primordial father who wills his death, murders him, and chooses to become him.

There is good reason Martyn does not know his father is or has become the anal or phallic or primordial father. According to Zizek, the anal father represents the tendency in Lacan’s seminar, especially beginning with The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ( 1959-1960), for every concept to have, as a Mobius strip does, an obverse, a paradoxical reverse or inner lining that contradicts or obviates it. The primordial father, Zizek writes, ” is the obscene, superego anal figure that is real-alive, the ‘Master of Enjoyment.'”

In Freud, this primordial father is the one who is murdered by the primal horde of brothers, murdered precisely because, expressing drive, he forbids their desire and pleasure by taking all the women for himself.

Because of the power of his drive to jouissance, he would murder them if necessary to prevent their desires or drives. Zizek suggests that politically, in the exchange of master for leader, the primordial father paradoxically follows the oedipal father. ” In all emblematic revolutions, from the French to the Russian,” says Zizek, ” the overthrow of the impotent old regime of the symbolic Master (French King, Tsar) ended in the rule of a far more ‘repressive’ figure of the ‘anal’ father-Leader (Napoleon, Stalin ).”

This historical pattern suggests to Zizek that in the myth of the primal horde Freud had things backward.”

The order of succession described by Freud in Totem and Taboo (the murdered primordial Father-Enjoyment returns in the guise of the symbolic authority of the Name) is thus reversed: the deposed symbolic Master returns as the obscene-real Leader.”

In this account, Zizek suggests, ” Freud was the victim of a kind of perspective illusion: ‘primordial father‘ is a later, eminently modern, post-revolutionary phenomenon, the result of the dissolution of traditional symbolic authority” (Metastases 206 ) .

johnston vicious circle super-ego

Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.

“desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance”

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). 413

The aim-inhibited drive then seeks other forms of satisfaction via different objects; and, if these alternate modes of securing gratifcation are not at odds 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.

However, especially in the later texts of the second topography, Freud repeatedly emphasizes that Trieb is ‘fundamentally conservative’, that drives unceasingly seek to recover their earliest forms of satisfaction. Furthermore, in, for example, 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.

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.

Das Ding
But where does this take us? Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law.

In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: ‘Thou shalt not covet it.’ But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. (Lacan, Book VII, p. 83).

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt2

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

IT IS EASIER TO ACCEPT INTERDICTION THAN TO RUN THE RISK OF CASTRATION.

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:

1) it isolates the impossible Thing that the desire aims at but never attains, and

2) 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. 178

We have already quoted Lacan’s thesis according to which “it is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration.” However, as should be clear from what we just developed, this does not mean that interdiction keeps us safe from being exposed to castration (that is, from undergoing a loss of something that we have).

The “fear of castration” is the fear of losing that which constitutes a signifying support for the lack involved in the experience of the desire as such. Interdiction is what provides that support; it is what gives a signifying form to the lack (or to the experience of “castration”) which is already there.

Psychoanalysis, as Lacan conceived it, is not something that will restitute the good old law where it is lacking. Although many clinical problems can indeed be traced to the failure of the law to function for the subject as a stabilizing factor, the job of psychoanalysis is in no way to make sure that the subject will finally subscribe to the ideal of this or that authority.

One should rather say that once things have gone so far (as to produce a neurosis, for instance), they can only go further.

In principle, it is easier to go by the law than to find one’s own way around desire.

But all the malfunctions and dysfunctions that appear in the clinic (as well as in the psychopathology of everyday life) remind us not only that this doesn’t always work, but also that it never works perfectly.

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.

Zupančič ethics and tragedy pt1

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.

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.

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. 178

zupančič why P? 2

Zupančič Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychoanalysis: 3 interventions. Aarhus University Press 2008.

It is in this sense that we should understand a crucial Lacanian thesis concerning the issue of the cause:

“Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche”

There is but the cause of that which does not work, or which does not add up. 24

(pssst … check out Dolar’s interpretation here)

There are (at least) two important ideas behind this proposition.

1. the non-immediate character of the causal relationship, which has its classic philosophical articulation in the Hume – Kant debate. The connection between cause and effect involves an irreducible gap, or leap, on account of which Hume wanted to dismiss the very notion of the cause, and which led Kant to propose rational subjectivity as the transcendental constitutive background against which the leap involved in the passage from a cause to its effect remained possible without the causal structure simple falling apart. 24

2. the other important idea involved in Lacan’s account of causality: something appears in this hole, in this interval, in this gap, in this structural split of causality, and it is for this something that psychoanalysis reserves the name of the cause in the strict sense of the term (the cause of object a, the objet as the distortional cause of itself). 25

The elements exposed above could be related to yet another discussion of causes in psychoanalysis: to the already mentioned two aspects of the question of the cause (the question of the unconscious causes, and the question of the unconscious as cause) we can add a third one, which seems even more fundamental and concerns

3. the very cause of the constitution of the unconscious. This is a debate developed in a very intriguing way by Jean Laplanche in answer to the deadlocks of the Freudian theory of sexual seduction (of children). 25 Continue reading “zupančič why P? 2”

zupančič April 2014 Toronto

philosophical ontological implications of psychoanalytic notions of sexuality and unconscious. Something happened to philosophy when this thing started to get articulated. One needs to think through this consequences of this unprecedented articulation. The concept of unconscious in its intrinsic link with sexuality is not simply concept of some newly discovered entity, of being. No.

It is not exactly an entity, it is not simply being nor non-being. Sexuality is constitutively unconscious. Fundamental negativity, non-being or gap implied in sexuality.

When Freud discovered sexuality what did this imply? He insisted against Jung, there is NO natural or pre-established place for human sexuality, it is constitutively out of its place. It is fragmented, dispersed.

3 Essays on Sexuality: Sexuality is nothing other than this out-of-placeness of its satisfaction. The sexual for Freud was not a substance to be properly described and circumscribed but rather the impossibility of its own circumscription and the limitation.

Sexual is NOT a separate domain of human activity or human life. Sexuality is something that exists in-itself only as something other. Sexuality is the very out-of-itselfness of being. Continue reading “zupančič April 2014 Toronto”

infinite of desire jouissance

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.

The problem of the infinite is not how to attain it but, rather, how to get rid of its stain, a stain that ceaselessly pursues us. The Lacanian name for this parasitism is enjoyment [jouissance]. 249

The death drive is not a drive that aims at death. It aims neither at life nor at death. The drive can be ‘mortal’ precisely because it is indifferent to death (as well as to life); because it is not preoccupied with death, because death does not interest it. … it is indifferent to death. 250

How, then, does the infinite parasitize the finite, our existence as ‘finite beings’ ?

there are two modes of this parasitism, each of them resulting in a different figure of the infinite: first, there is the infinite of desire, which might be described as a ‘bad infinity’

there is the infinite of jouissance (linked to the logic of the Real, and of the realization). Ethics itself can be situated in the passage from the one to the other.

This passage, however, can itself take two different paths.

The paradigm of the first is indicated by the figure of Antigone, and brings out the co-ordinates of ‘classical ethics’ .

The paradigm of the second is evident in the figure of Sygne de Coûfontaine, and constitutes what we might call ‘modern ethics’. 250

zupančič 7 subjectivation without subject

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.

‘Act so that the maxim of your will can always hold at the same time as the principle giving universal law’ — what is the paradox implicit in this formulation of the categorical imperative?

The paradox is that, despite its ‘categorical’ character, it somehow leaves everything wide open .

For how am I to decide if (the maxim of) my action can hold as a principle providing a universal law, if I do not accept the presupposition that I am originally guided by some notion of the good (i.e. some notion of what is universally acceptable)?

In other words, there is no a priori criterion of universality. It is true that Kant was convinced that he had found this criterion in the principle of non-contradiction. However, there is an impressive body of commentary demonstrating the weakness of this criterion. 92

Kant invents two stories which are supposed, first, to ‘prove’ the existence of the moral law and, secondly, to demonstrate that the subject cannot act contrary to his pathological interests for any reason other than that of the moral law. The first story concerns a man who is placed in the situation of being executed on his way out of the bedroom as a condition of spending the night with the woman he desires . The other story, which we have already discussed, concerns a man who is put in the position of either bearing false witness against someone who, as a result, will lose his life, or being put to death himself if he does not do so.

As a comment on the first alternative , Kant simply affirms: ‘We do not have to guess very long what his [the man’s in question] answer would be.’

As for the second story, Kant claims that it is at least possible to imagine that a man would rather die than tell a lie and send another man to his death.

It follows from these two comments that there is no ‘force’ apart from the moral law that could make us act against our well-being and our ‘pathological interests’. Lacan raises the objection that such a ‘force’ — namely, jouissance (as distinct from pleasure ) – does exist:

The striking significance of the first example resides in the fact that the night spen t with the lady is paradoxically presented to us as a pleasure that is weighed against a punishment to be undergone … but one only has to make a conceptual shift and move the night spent with the lady from the category of pleasure to that of jouissance, given that jouissance implies precisely the acceptance of death … for the example to be ruined. (Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1992, 189). 99

For Kant, it is unimaginable that someone would want his own destruction — this would be diabolical — Lacan’s answer is not that this is nevertheless imaginable, and that even such extreme cases exist, but that there is nothing extreme in it at all: on a certain level every subject, average as he may be, wants his destruction, whether he wants it or not. 100

Kant’s point can be formulated more generally: there is no (ethical) act without a subject who is equal to this act. This, however, implies the effacement of the distinction between the level of the enunciation and the level of the statement: the subject of the statement has to coincide with the subject of the enunciation – or, more precisely, the subject of enunciation has to be entirely reducible to the subject of the statement. 102

The am lying is a signifier which forms a part, in the Other, of the treasury of vocabulary. This ‘vocabulary’ is something that I can use as a tool, or something that can use me as a ‘talking machine’. As subject, I emerge on the other level, the level of enunciation, and this level is irreducible.

Here we come, once again, to the point which explains why the subject cannot ‘hide behind’ the Law, presenting himself as its mere instrument: what is suspended by such a gesture is precisely the level of the enunciation.

That ‘there is no deposit without a depositor who is equal to his task’, or ‘there is no (ethical) act without the subject who is equal to his act’, implies that we set as the criterion or the condition of the ‘realization’ of an act the abolition of the difference between the statement and the enunciation. 102

But the crucial question is why the abolition of this difference should be the criterion or the necessary condition of an act.

Why claim that the accomplishment of an act presupposes the abolition of this split?

It is possible to situate the act in another, inverse perspective: it is precisely the act, the (‘successful’) act, which fully discloses this split, makes it present. From this perspective, the definition of a successful act would be that it is structured exactly like the paradox of the liar: this structure is the same as the one evoked by the liar who says ‘I am lying’, who utters ‘ the impossible’ and thus fully displays the split between the level of the statement and the level of the enunciation, between the shifter ‘I’ and the signifier ‘am lying’.

To claim, as we are claiming here, that there is no subject or ‘hero’ of the act means that at the level of ‘am lying’, the subject is always pathological (in the Kantian sense of the word), determined by the Other, by the signifiers which precede him. At this level, the subject is reducible or ‘dispensable’.

But this is not all there is to it. Whereas the ‘subject’ of the statement is determined in advance (he can only use the given signifiers), the (shifter) I is determined retroactively: it ‘becomes a signification, engendered at the level of the statement, of what it produces at the level of the enunciation‘.

It is at this level that we must situate the ethical subject: at the level of something which becomes what ‘it is’ only in the act (here a ‘speech act) engendered, so to speak, by another subject. 103

However, the fact that the act ‘reveals’ the difference between the level of the statement and the level of the enunciation does not imply that the subject of the act is a divided subject. On the contrary, we know very well that when we are really dealing with an act, the subject ‘is all there in his act’.

What reveals the distinction between the statement and the enunciation, between the subject who says or does something and the subjective figure which arises from it, is precisely the abolition of the division of the subject. Of course, this does not mean that the subject of an act is a ‘full ‘ subject who knows exactly what he wants but, rather, that the subject ‘is realized’, ‘objectified‘ in this act: the subject passes over to the side of the object. The ethical subject is not a subject who wants this object but, rather, this object itself. In an act, there is no ‘divided subject’: there is the ‘it’ (the Lacanian ça) and the subjective figure that arises from it.

We may thus conclude that the act in the proper sense of the word follows the logic of what Lacan calls a ‘headless subjectivation’ or a ‘subjectivation without subject’.

zupančič 6 suicide

Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.

After an act, I am ‘not the same as before’. In the act, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not); the act involves a kind of temporary eclipse of the subject. The act is therefore always a ‘crime’, a ‘transgression’ — of the limits of the symbolic community to which I belong. 83

It might, therefore, be instructive to draw a distinction , with Kant’s help, between two different logics of suicide . First there is the suicide that obeys the logic of sacrifice. When duty calls, I sacrifice this or that and, if necessary, even my life . Here, we are dealing with the logic of infinite ‘purification’, in which sacrificing my life is just ‘ another step’ forward – only one among numerous ‘ objects’ that have to be sacrificed. The fact that it is a final step is mere coincidence; or, to put it in Kantian terms, it is an empirical, not a transcendental necessity.

It is this logic that governs Kant’s postulate of the immortality of the soul, and serves to preserve the consistency of the big Other.

According to this logic, it is the subject who has to separate herself infinitely from everything that belongs to the register of the pathological. At the same time, (the position of) the big Other only gets stronger; its ‘sadism’ increases with every new sacrifice the subject makes, and it therefore demands more and more of the subject. We can point to examples from popular culture, which seems to be more and more fascinated by this superegoic side of morality. Consider, for instance, Terminator 2.

The Terminator first helps people to wipe off the face of the earth everything that could lead, in the future, to the invention of machines such as the Terminator (and thus to catastrophe, and the eruption of ‘radical evil’). In the end, the Terminator him/itself remains the only model that could serve to decipher all the necessary steps for the production of such cyborgs. He/it throws him-/itself into a pool of white-hot iron in order to save the human race from catastrophe. The same type of suicide occurs in Alien 3.

Ripley first exterminates all aliens, only to find out in the end that the last one resides inside herself. In order to eliminate this last alien , she has to kill herself — she has to destroy the ‘stranger’ in herself, to cut off the last remains of the ‘pathological’ in herself.

The second type of suicide is less popular, for it serves no cause, no purpose. What is at stake is not that in the end we put on the altar of the Other our own life as the most we have to offer. The point is that we ‘kill’ ourselves through the Other, in the Other.

We annihilate that which — in the Other, in the symbolic order — gave our being identity, status, support and meaning.

This is the suicide to which Kant refers in the famous footnote from The Metaphysics of Morals in which he discusses regicide (the execution of Louis XVI) .

‘Regicide’ is not really the right term, because what preoccupies Kant is precisely the difference between the murder of a monarch (regicide) and his formal execution. It is in relation to the latter that Kant says: ‘it is as if the state commits suicide’, and describes it in terms of what he elsewhere calls ‘diabolical evil’. What we are dealing with is the difference between the ‘king’s two bodies’ . Were the monarch simply killed, murdered, this would strike a blow only at his ’empirical body’, whereas his ‘other body’, incarnated in his symbolic mandate, would survive more or less unharmed.

Yet his formal execution, which Kant — in spite of, or even because of, his almost obsessive insistence on form — describes as outrageously useless, is precisely what strikes a blow at the monarch’s ‘symbolic body’, that is, the given symbolic order.

Why is it that for Kant this act of ‘the people’ has the structure of suicide? Because people are constituted as The People only in relation to this symbolic order. Outside it, they are nothing more than ‘masses’ with no proper status. It is the monarch ( in his symbolic function) who gives people their symbolic existence, be it ever so miserable. A very audible undertone of Kant’s argument thus implicitly poses this question: if the French people were so dissatisfied with their monarch, why didn’t they simply kill him; why did they have to perform a formal execution, and thus shake the very ground beneath their feet (that is, ‘commit suicide’) ?

zupančič 5

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.

The subject cannot choose herself as subject without having first arrived at the point which is not a forced choice but an excluded or impossible choice.

This is the ‘choice’ of S, of unfreedom, of radical subordination to the Other, of the absolute determination of one’s actions by motives, interests and other causes.

The subject first has to reach the point where it becomes impossible to articulate statements such as ‘I act’ , or ‘I think’.

Passage through this impossible point of one’s own non-being, where it seems that one can say of oneself only ‘I am not’, however, is the fundamental condition of attaining the status of a free subject.

Only at this point, after we have followed the postulate of determinism to the end, does the ‘leftover’ element that can serve as the basis for the constitution of the ethical subject appear.

… this experience of radical alienation at the basis of freedom … 32

zupančič 4

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.

The advent of the subject of practical reason coincides with a moment that might be called a moment of ‘forced choice’.

Paradoxical as this may seem, the forced choice at issue here is none other than the choice of freedom, the freedom that first appears to the subject in the guise of psychological freedom.

It is essential to the constitution of the subject that she cannot but believe herself free and autonomous.

The subject is presumed to be free , yet she cannot disclose this freedom in any positive way, cannot point to it by saying:’This act of mine was free; this precise moment I was acting freely.’

Instead, the more she tries to specify the precise moment at which freedom is real, the more it eludes her, ceding its place to (causal) determination, to the pathological motives which were perhaps hidden from view at first glance.

The left side of the schema presents the ‘fact of the subject’, the fact that the subject is, so to speak, free by definition, that the subject cannot but conceive of herself as free.

The right side illustrates the choice the ethical subject faces, in which she must choose herself either as pathological or as divided.

The paradox, however, is that the subject cannot choose herself as pathological (S) without ceasing to be a subject as a result. The choice of the S is an excluded, impossible choice.

🙂 Pathological means here to be fully determined by internal causes, hate/love/jealousy/fear/anger etc, and to be determined strictly by pathological motives would preclude freedom.

The other choice would simply be that of choosing oneself as subject, as the ‘pure form’ of the subject, which is the form of the division as such.

We might also say that in this case the subject chooses herself as subject and not as (psychological) ‘ego’, the latter being understood — in all its profundity and authenticity — as the locus of the pathological. 32

zupančič 3

However, if structuralism ultimately identifies the subject with structure (the Other), Lacan intervenes, at this point, in a very Kantian manner: he introduces the subject as a correlative to the lack in the Other; that is, as correlative to the point where structure fails fully to close in upon itself.

He does this in two different ways. The first consists in introducing a moment of irreducible jouissance as the ‘proof of the subject’s existence’.

The second – and this is what interests us here – consists in defining the subject via the shifter ‘I’ in relation to the ‘act of enunciation’.

Lacan ‘s claim that there is no Other of the Other means that the Other and the statement have no guarantee of their existence besides the contingency of their enunciation.

This dependence cannot in principle be eliminated from the function of the Other, and this is precisely what attests to its lack. The subject of enunciation does not and cannot have a firm place in the structure of the Other; it finds its place only in the act of enunciation.

This amounts to saying that the depsychologizing of the subject does not imply its reducibility to a (linguistic or other) structure. The Lacanian subject is what remains after the operation of ‘de-psychologizing’ has been completed: it is the elusive, ‘palpitating’ point of enunciation.