{"id":8808,"date":"2012-02-26T15:34:50","date_gmt":"2012-02-26T20:34:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8808"},"modified":"2014-04-05T07:11:10","modified_gmt":"2014-04-05T11:11:10","slug":"ethics-zupancic-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/02\/26\/ethics-zupancic-review\/","title":{"rendered":"ethics zupancic review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason B. Jones. “The Real Happens” Emory University jbjones AT emory.edu Review of: Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan<\/em>. New York: Verso, 2000.<\/p>\n

The point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so traumatic, disturbing,\u00a0shattering–or funny–about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. (“Signs”)<\/p>\n

Ethics of the Real<\/em> merits the serious attention of\u00a0anyone interested in one of the great ethical crises of our time: Why is nothing but fundamentalism deemed worth dying for\u00a0any longer?
\n
\nZupan\u010di\u010d begins by quickly mapping the terrain laid out by Lacanian both Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and “Kant with\u00a0Sade.” For Lacan, psychoanalytic praxis must refuse any idea of\u00a0“the good.” Analysis cannot center on the analyst’s conception\u00a0of the good, because then it would turn into a gratification of\u00a0the analyst’s narcissism, measuring progress in the treatment by\u00a0the extent to which the analysand slavishly imitates the\u00a0analyst’s ego. Then again, the analysis clearly cannot focus on\u00a0the analysand’s idea of the good, either, because the suffering\u00a0that drives the analysand to analysis in the first place\u00a0indicates a disconnect between the analysand’s desire or drive\u00a0and his or her idea of “the good”–an idea that is bound up with\u00a0the ego. Finally, the analysis also cannot appeal to cultural\u00a0ideals of “the good” without turning psychoanalysis into a\u00a0strictly normative endeavor. Instead, by the end of the Ethics\u00a0seminar, Lacan proposes that “the only thing one can be guilty\u00a0of is giving ground relative to one’s desire [c\u00e9d\u00e9 sur son\u00a0d\u00e9sir]” (321; see Dean 33n14 for a discussion of the stakes\u00a0involved in this translation).<\/p>\n

This formulation has caused\u00a0considerable controversy when applied to Antigone, the figure\u00a0under discussion in the last section of the seminar. Are we to\u00a0take Antigone as an ethical hero? Moreover, shortly after this\u00a0seminar, Lacan begins increasingly to emphasize the drive,\u00a0instead of desire, as the endpoint of analysis. In the later\u00a0view, desire is understood as a defense against the satisfaction\u00a0of drive. How can we reconcile these two arguments in a\u00a0discussion of ethics? Zupan\u010di\u010d shows with great clarity that the\u00a0drive should be understood as the farthest point of desire, as\u00a0it were, and not as strictly opposed to it. That is, one can\u00a0only reach the drive by going through desire.<\/p>\n

Fine, but where is Kant in all of this? The crucial Kantian\u00a0point, for Zupan\u010di\u010d, is that “ethics demands not only that an action conform with duty, but also that this conformity be the only ‘content’ or ‘motive’ of that action<\/span><\/strong>” (14). This is the only way the subject can free herself of pathological contaminants of her will.<\/p>\n

However, as Zupan\u010di\u010d points out, this is thoroughly paradoxical<\/span><\/strong>: “how can something which is not in itself pathological (i.e., which has nothing to do with the representation of pleasure or pain, the ‘usual’ mode of subjective causality) nevertheless become the cause or drive of a subject’s actions?” (15). Or, more simply, “how can something which, in the subject’s universe, does not qualify as a cause,\u00a0suddenly become a cause<\/strong>?”<\/p>\n

What is the difference in outcome of an act done according to one’s duty and one done exclusively for that duty’s sake? Nothing.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a perceptible difference however, at the level\u00a0of form.<\/span> Zupan\u010di\u010d points out that this introduces a pure form<\/span>: a “form which is no longer the form of anything, of some content\u00a0or other, yet it is not so much an empty form as a form ‘outside’ content, a form that provides form only for itself” (17). The form itself is “pure” insofar as it is exclusively a surplus<\/span>. Zupan\u010di\u010d connects Kant’s surplus with that famous Lacanian surplusage, the objet a<\/span>. Although pure form and objet a<\/span> would appear to be antagonistic (a form vs. an object), Zupan\u010di\u010d suggests that such a reading is too hasty. For Kant, the proper\u00a0drive of the will is “defined precisely in terms of pure form as an absence of any Triebfeder [drive]” (18). Similarly, for Lacan, “desire can be defined precisely as the pure form of demand, as that which remains of demand when all the particular\u00a0objects (or ‘contents’) that may come to satisfy it are removed<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Hence the objet petit a<\/span> can be understood as a void that has acquired a form” (18). For both Kant and Lacan, there is thus a form of deferred action at work (Zupan\u010di\u010d calls it a “temporal ‘in-between'” [19]). In Kant, the absence of motive itself must acquire motive force. For Lacan, likewise, the objet a<\/span> marks the “that’s not it” coextensive with any object one might attain; it thus becomes the motive for desire to slide to the next potential object.<\/p>\n

Guilt, in Zupan\u010di\u010d’s reading of Kant, is the very foundation of freedom. We must be very clear about this “guilt,” however. The essential point is the “fact that we can feel guilty even if we know that in committing a certain deed we were, as Kant puts it, ‘carried along by the stream of natural necessity.’ We can feel guilty even for something which we knew to be ‘beyond our control'”<\/p>\n

Where the subject believes herself autonomous, Kant insists on the irreducibility of the Other, a causal order beyond her control. But where the subject becomes aware of her dependence on the Other (such and such laws, inclinations, hidden motive… ) and is ready to give up,… Kant indicates a “crack” in the Other, a crack in which he situates the autonomy and freedom of the subject. (28)<\/p>\n

For Zupan\u010di\u010d, this is therefore another meeting ground between Kant and Lacan: Kant is, in effect, claiming that “There is no Other of the Other.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Freedom comes because “there is in causal determination a ‘stumbling block’ in the relation between cause and effect” (29). This does not mean of course that we can clap our hands together, rejoice in the gap between cause and effect, and revel in our freedom. Freedom is not characterized by “the arbitrary, or the random as opposed to the lawlike” (33).<\/p>\n

Instead, freedom is the “point where the subject itself plays an (active) part in lawful, causal necessity” (33, emphasis in original). Zupan\u010di\u010d’s argument clarifies the Lacanian proposition that psychoanalysis is neither a mode of determinism nor of performative voluntarism, and that those aren’t even the most interesting or politically efficacious models of subjectivity available.<\/span><\/p>\n

An excellent example of this “freedom” is, as Zupan\u010di\u010d points out, the psychoanalytic idea of the “choice of neurosis” (35). Consider, for example, this description from Freud’s “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912):<\/p>\n

It must be understood that each individual, through the combined operation of his innate disposition and the influences brought to bear on him during his early years, has acquired a specific method of his own in his conduct of his erotic life–that is, in the preconditions to falling in love which he lays down, in the instincts he satisfies and the aims he sets himself in the course of it. This produces what might be described as a stereotype plate (or\u00a0several such), which is constantly repeated–constantly reprinted afresh–in the course of the person’s life. (99-100)<\/p>\n

On the one hand, nothing strips the subject of autonomy more than this “stereotype plate.” On the other hand, though, even grammatically Freud indicates that the subject has something at stake here: it is the subject who lays down the preconditions for falling in love, and so forth. Zupan\u010di\u010d claims, following Lacan, that this “choice” is in fact “the very condition of possibility of psychoanalysis”–the end of analysis occurs when the subject can take up a new position vis-\u00e0-vis her determinants; when she can, in other words, choose a different neurosis<\/span> (35). Zupan\u010di\u010d summarizes the dilemma of freedom nicely:<\/p>\n

The subject<\/span> is forced to confront herself as mere object of the will of the Other<\/span>, as an instrument in the hands of mechanical or psychological causality. At this point Kant intervenes with his second gesture, which concerns the choice of the Gesinnung [disposition].<\/p>\n

This gesture opens the dimension of the subject<\/span> of freedom. The subject of freedom is indeed the effect of the Other, but not in the sense of being an effect of some cause that exists in the Other<\/span>. Instead, the subject<\/span> is the effect of the fact that there is a cause which will never be discovered in the Other; she is the effect of the absence of this cause, the effect of the lack in the Other.<\/span> (40-41)<\/p>\n

I cannot do justice to the complexities of Zupan\u010di\u010d’s argument here, but I hope that this brief account demonstrates the advantages of engaging closely with her work. Ethics of the Real<\/span> is more than a gloss on the canonical Lacanian references to Kant; it so forcefully connects the two thinkers that we are left wondering how, precisely, we got along without Kant in psychoanalysis. Moreover, Zupan\u010di\u010d’s argument usefully clarifies the dynamics by which the Lacanian category of the Real<\/span> can achieve genuine political and social purchase. Even though we “know that ‘God is dead’ (that the Other does not exist)” and “He knows it too” (255), an ethics of the<\/strong> Real<\/span> could gesture towards a realization of the infinite.<\/p>\n

To make these claims clearer, I want briefly to sketch Zupan\u010di\u010d’s novel argument about Oedipus. She advances the startling proposition that Oedipus is not guilty of anything, and therein lies his tragedy. Her reading begins with Oedipus’s self-blinding. Oedipus blinds himself after learning that he has, after all his precautions, fulfilled the prophecy that said he would murder his father and marry his mother. The traditional interpretation of Oedipus’s self-inflicted wound is that he thereby acknowledges his guilt and takes up his foretold destiny. However, Sophocles shows us something slightly different when Oedipus appears before the Chorus. Oedipus wails, “A curse upon the shepherd who released me from the cruel fetters of my feet, and saved me from death, and preserved me, doing me no kindness! For if I had died then, I would not have been so great a grief to my friends or to myself” (467). The Chorus extends this argument: “I do not know how I can say that you were well advised; you would have been better dead than living but blind” (467). This sentence refers both to Oedipus’s self-punishment–suicide would clearly be the nobler way out of this situation–and to his past–better to have died as an infant than to live under the misconception as to his parentage. Oedipus rebukes the Chorus, however, crying “Do not try to show me that what has been done was not done for the best” (469).<\/p>\n

Zupan\u010di\u010d argues that rather than internalizing his guilt, Oedipus identifies with his symptom: “Oedipus does not identify with his destiny, he identifies \u2014 and this is not the same thing \u2014 with that thing in him which made possible the realization of this destiny: he identifies with his blindness” (179). Oedipus the King thus ends somewhat like an analysis:<\/p>\n

with the traversal of fantasy<\/span>, in which the analysand becomes, not the subject of desire, but the subject of drive<\/span>. This process is more of an “objectification” than a “subjectification”; that is, the analysand identifies with his or her enjoyment rather than with his or her desire. As Renata Salecl puts it, the logic of the drive is “‘I do not want to do this, but I am nonetheless doing it'”;<\/span> she further explains that this logic of the drive is opposed to the logic of desire “since the subject does not desire to do something, but nonetheless enjoys doing exactly that” (106). At the end of analysis, the subject comes to identify with the enjoyment that he or she has disavowed for so long. Similarly, Oedipus literalizes his blindness as a way to continue being blind, even after he is confronted with knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, it is not enough to say that Oedipus is self-deceiving. Zupan\u010di\u010d insists that when Oedipus says “it’s not my fault,” we are convinced (181). She asserts that guilt, in the sense of symbolic debt, arises when the subject knows that the Other knows” (182-83). This refers not simply to a knowledge of one’s actions. Instead, it is a sort of “‘surplus-knowledge,’ a knowledge to which the desire of the subject is attached. This ‘surplus-knowledge’… is related to the place from which knowledge (of parricide and incest, for example), is enunciated” (185-86). Oedipus’s problem is that his knowledge has been displaced from the beginning. This “rob[s] him of his desire (which alone could have rendered him guilty). In exchange he is given over to someone else, to the ‘social order’ (to the throne) and to Jocasta” (186). He cannot recognize his father. Oedipus’s complaint is thus: If only I were guilty! If these words suggest a complaint about injustice…, they also suggest something perhaps even more radical. If only I were guilty–but you took from me even that honour, that place in the symbolic (open to me by right)! After all the suffering I have undergone, I am not even guilty (this emphasizes the non-sense of his destiny, not its Sense or Meaning). (195) To the extent that Oedipus’s destiny is meaningful, it will not be due to the oracle’s prophecy.<\/p>\n

While in this argument Oedipus is not guilty of desiring to marry his mother and murder his father, it does not follow that he is not responsible for his destiny. Zupancic also draws attention to Oedipus’s confrontation with the Sphinx, following Lacan’s argument from Seminar XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse. In this argument, the crucial thing about Oedipus’s solving the riddle isn’t that he somehow divined an unknowable truth, but rather, in answering it “the subject actually gives something–he must give or offer his words; thus he can be taken at his word” (Zupan\u010di\u010d 203). The subject’s answer thus produces an irrevocable truth that was in no way determined in advance. The result is the curious psychoanalytic perspective on ethics and freedom: “Meaning is never determined in advance; in order to find its determination and be ‘fixed,’ an act of the subject is required” (210); or, to put it another way, Oedipus “installs the Other (the symbolic order) while simultaneously demonstrating that the Other ‘doesn’t exist'” (211).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason B. Jones. “The Real Happens” Emory University jbjones AT emory.edu Review of: Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000. The point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, the whole … Continue reading “ethics zupancic review”<\/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":[38,79,24,15,106,41,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-ethics_real","category-lacan","category-subjectivity","category-the-act","category-the-real","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8808","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=8808"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12662,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8808\/revisions\/12662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}