Zupan\u010di\u010d, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabat\u00e9, New York: Cambridge UP. 173-190.<\/p>\n
IT IS EASIER TO ACCEPT INTERDICTION THAN TO RUN THE RISK OF CASTRATION.<\/p>\n
To put it simply: the law gives a signifying form<\/span><\/strong> to the impossibility involved in the very phenomenon of desire<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n The fundamental operation of the law<\/strong>\u00a0is always to forbid something that is in <\/strong>itself <\/strong>impossible. <\/strong>The fact that the law links this impossible to some particular object should not prevent us from seeing this.<\/p>\n By designating a certain object as forbidden<\/strong><\/span>, the law<\/span> does two things:<\/strong><\/p>\n 1) it isolates the impossible Thing<\/strong> that the desire aims at but never attains, and<\/p>\n 2) it provides an image of this Thing<\/strong>. This image (my neighbor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The law condenses the impossible involved in desire into one exceptional \u201cplace.\u201d Via this logic of exception, it liberates the field of the possible<\/strong>. This is why the intervention of the law can have a liberating effect on the subject<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n 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<\/strong>. It can make him a productive member of the community.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n His point is that the law supplements<\/span><\/strong> the impossibility involved in the very nature of desire<\/strong> by a symbolic interdiction<\/span><\/strong>, and that it is thus erroneous to assume that by eliminating this interdiction, we will also eliminate the impossibility involved in the desire.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t warn against human desire running crazy. On the contrary, he warned against the fact that desire<\/span><\/strong>, tired of dealing with its own impossibility<\/strong><\/span>, will give up and resign to anything rather than try to find its own law<\/span><\/strong>. 178<\/p>\n We have already quoted Lacan\u2019s thesis according to which \u201cit is easier to accept interdiction than to run the risk of castration.\u201d 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).<\/p>\n The \u201cfear of castration\u201d 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 \u201ccastration\u201d) which is already there.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n One should rather say that once things have gone so far (as to produce a neurosis, for instance), they can only go further.<\/p>\n In principle, it is easier to go by the law than to find one\u2019s own way around desire.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t always work, but also that it never works perfectly.<\/p>\n Psychoanalysis is not here to repair the damage, to help the social machine to function more smoothly and to reconstruct whatever was ill-constructed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n It is there to take us further along the path that our \u201cproblems\u201d have put us on<\/strong>, it is there as the \u201cguardian\u201d of the other way, the one that consists in finding our own way around our desire.<\/strong><\/p>\n Emblematic of this \u201cother way\u201d 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 \u201cthe 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\u201d (S VII, p. 310).<\/p>\n 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, \u201cis not, in fact, one\u201d (S VII, p. 310).<\/p>\n Consequently, tragedy, at least in the perspective of what Lacan calls the tragic dimension of analytical experience, is not necessarily all that \u201ctragic,\u201d but can produce the kind of liberation<\/strong> that takes place in the case of Oedipus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Zupan\u010di\u010d, Alenka. Ethics and tragedy in Lacan. (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabat\u00e9, 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. … Continue reading “Zupan\u010di\u010d ethics and tragedy pt2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,79,21,40,72,76,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-ethics_real","category-jouissance","category-lack","category-objet-a","category-sub-destitute","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13028"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14813,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13028\/revisions\/14813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}