{"id":9210,"date":"2012-07-31T23:22:24","date_gmt":"2012-08-01T04:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9210"},"modified":"2012-09-20T18:57:22","modified_gmt":"2012-09-20T23:57:22","slug":"ethics-lacan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/07\/31\/ethics-lacan\/","title":{"rendered":"ethics Lacan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis<\/em>, p. 314.<\/p>\n

This is Lacan’s maxim of the ethics of psychoanalysis: “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire<\/strong>.\u00a0 Ibid., p. 319.<\/p>\n

The first thing to state categorically is that Lacanian ethics is not an ethics of hedonism: whatever “do not compromise your desire” means, it does not mean the unrestrained rule of what Freud called “the pleasure principle,” the functioning of the psychic apparatus that aims at achieving pleasure<\/span>.<\/p>\n

For Lacan, hedonism is in fact the model of postponing desire on behalf of “realistic compromises”: it is not only that, in order to attain the greatest amount of pleasure, I have to calculate and economize, sacrificing short-term pleasures for more intense longterm ones; what is even more important is that jouissance hurts<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 123<\/p>\n

An ethical act<\/span> is one that does not comprise or express the entire person, but is a moment of grace, a “miracle” which can occur also in a non-virtuous individual. This is why such acts are diffcult to imagine, and why, when they do occur, one often tends to invent a narrative which normalizes them. 122<\/p>\n

For Western observers in particular, such stories may also have served to provide a rational explanation for behavior that was otherwise totally inexplicable. The story about the recreated paradise was thus a fantasy concocted to rationalize the traumatically “incomprehensible” fact that the the Ismaiii followers were ready to function as perfect killing machines, willing to sacrifice their own lives in the accomplishment of the task \u2014 a fantasy, in short, that enabled Westerners to re-translate a pure “ethical” act<\/strong> into an act determined “pathologically” (in the Kantian sense of the term).\u00a0 How, then, does such an ethics stand with regard to the panoply of today’s ethical options? It seems to fit three of its main versions: <\/strong>1) liberal hedonism, 2) immoralism 3) “Western Buddhism'”<\/p>\n

The larger problem here is that psychoanalysis seems able to accommodate itself to all today’s predominant ethical stances-the three mentioned above plus a further two: the Levinasian-Derridean ethics of responsibility to Otherness<\/strong>; and the conservative advocacy of the need to reassert the symbolic law (in the guise of paternal authority) as the only way to resolve the deadlock of hedonistic permissiveness.<\/p>\n

So what is wrong with the rule of the pleasure principle? In Kant’s description, ethical duty functions like a foreign intruder that disturbs the subject’s homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act “beyond the pleasure principle,” ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of his or her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic superegoic injunction.<\/p>\n

George Bizet’s Carmen<\/em>. Carmen is, of course, immoral (ruthlessly promiscuous, ruining men’s lives, destroying families), but nonetheless thoroughly ethical (faithful to her chosen path to the end, even when this means certain death).\u00a0 Along these lines, Lee Edelman has developed the notion of homosexuality as involving an ethics of “now;’ of unconditional fidelity to jouissance, of following the death drive<\/span> by totally ignoring any reference to the future or engagement with the practical complex of worldly affairs. Homosexuality thus stands for the thorough assumption of the negativity of the death drive<\/span>, of withdrawing from reality into the real of the “night of the world.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Along these lines, Edelman opposes the radical ethics of homosexuality to the predominant obsession with posterity (i.e., children): children are the “pathological” moment which binds us to pragmatic considerations and thus compels us to betray the radical ethics of jouissance.\u00a0 (Incidentally, does this line of thought \u2014 the idea that homosexuality at its most fundamental involves the rejection of children \u2014 not justify those who argue that gay couples should not be allowed to adopt children.<\/p>\n

The figure of an innocent and helpless child is the ultimate ethical trap, the emblem-fetish of betraying the ethics of jouissance<\/em>.\u00a0 124<\/p>\n

Friedrich Nietzsche (a great admirer of Carmen) was the great philosopher of immoral ethics, and we should always remember that the title of Nietzsche’s masterpiece is “genealogy of morals;’ not “of ethics”: the two are not the same. Morality<\/span> is concerned with the symmetry of my relations to other humans; its zero-level rule is “do not do to me what you do not want me to do to you.” Ethics<\/span>, in contrast, deals with my consistency in relation to myself, my fidelity to my own desire.<\/p>\n

We can see now why Lacan’s motto “il n’y a pas de grand Autre” (there is no big Other<\/span>) takes us to the very core of the ethical problematic: what it excludes is precisely this “perspective of the Last Judgment:’ the idea that somewhere even if as a thoroughly virtual reference point, even if we concede that we can never occupy its place and pass the actual judgment-there must be a standard which would allow us to take the measure of our acts and pronounce on their “true meaning:’ their true ethical status. Even Derrida’s notion of “deconstruction as justice” seems to rely on a utopian hope which sustains the specter of “infinite justice:’ forever postponed, always to come, but nonetheless here as the ultimate horizon of our activity.<\/p>\n

The harshness of Lacanian ethics lies in its demand that we thoroughly relinquish this reference to the big Other<\/span>-and its further wager is that not only does this renunciation not plunge us into ethical insecurity or relativism (or even sap the very fundamentals of ethical activity), but that renouncing the guarantee of some big Other<\/span>is the very condition of a truly autonomous ethics.<\/p>\n

Recall that the exemplary dream Freud used to illustrate his procedure of dream analysis was a dream about responsibility (Freud’s own responsibility for the failure of his treatment of Irma)-this fact alone indicates that responsibility is a crucial Freudian notion. But how are we to conceive of this responsibility? How are we to avoid the common misperception that the basic ethical message of psychoanalysis is, precisely, that we should relieve ourselves of responsibility and instead place the blame on the Other (“since the Unconscious is the discourse of the Other, I am not responsible for its formations, it is the big Other<\/span> who speaks through me, I am merely its instrument”) ?\u00a0 Lacan himself pointed the way out of this deadlock by referring to Kant’s philosophy as the crucial antecedent of psychoanalytic ethics<\/strong>.\u00a0 127<\/p>\n

According to the standard critique, the limitation of the Kantian universalistic ethic of the “categorical imperative<\/strong>” (the unconditional injunction to do one’s duty) resides in its formal indeterminacy: the moral Law does not tell me WHAT my duty is, it merely tells me THAT I should accomplish my duty, and so leaves room for an empty voluntarism (whatever I decide will be my duty is my duty). However, far from being a limitation, this very feature brings us to the core of Kantian ethical autonomy: it is not possible to derive the concrete obligations pertaining to one’s specific situation from the moral Law itself \u2014 which means that the subject himself must assume the responsibility of translating the abstract injunction into a series of concrete obligations<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse: “I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty . . .” Kant’s ethics<\/strong> is often taken as justifying such an attitude-no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kant when trying to justify his role in planning and executing the Holocaust: he was just doing his duty and obeying the Fiihrer’s orders. However, the aim of Kant’s<\/strong> emphasis on the subject’s full moral autonomy and responsibility was precisely to prevent any such maneuver of putting the blame on some figure of the big Other. 128<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?\u00a0\u00a0 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 314. This is Lacan’s maxim of the ethics of psychoanalysis: “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.\u00a0 Ibid., p. 319. The first thing to state categorically … Continue reading “ethics Lacan”<\/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":[38,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9210","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=9210"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9333,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9210\/revisions\/9333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}