Symbiosis and separation Book

"No guilt? No ethics!" -Freud

Seminar VII is a big deal to a small-and-smaller audience. First you have to be interested in either psychoanalysis or ethics (good!), and then interested in the other (beautiful!). What you can expect is the demystifying of the apparent obviousness of conscience and pleasure in ethical terms, or guilt and desire in psychoanalytical terms. Fundamentally, any ethics necessitates a theory of subjectivity, of subjective formation, in particular the installation of the Uber-Ich/superego function that is irreducibly decisive in what gets mediated between happiness and duty. "The ethics of psychoanalysis" refers to the ethical issues of conducting an analysis, whereas "the psychoanalysis of ethics" seeks the very source of notions of the good, the beautiful, and the true. To the abstract philosophical contemplation of the good life, Lacan brings the concrete psychoanalytical foundation of the subject's desire.

How can psychoanalysis help answer the eternally heart-gnawing question'"What is to be done?"'when all the old sources of certitude are discredited, and it seems the only options are atomized relativism or dogmatic absolutism? In the last instance, as personal as it may seem, it is a political question, but the scandalous liaisons of psychoanalysis and politics are too multifarious to be treated here. To the extent that psychoanalysis has been enlisted in the ranks of Leftist armies of theoretical liberation, it has provided a keen perspective on why doing the right thing is an almost impossibly tall order, something "disclosed" rather than "enacted." To the extent that it has been usurped by the traditional forces of conservatism, psychoanalysis is wielded as a deterministic explanation of why we all need strict authorities for proper adjustment within civil society. As usual, the Left wins cultural hearts and minds ("Do what you love!") while the Right wins on the economic ground ("Do what you're told!"), hence we all lose.

With the exception of the highly technical exploration of "das Ding" in the first section, this is the most colloquial Lacan I have read. There is hardly a single matheme! Nary a graph! There are long extemporaneous periods where he seems to be just shooting the breeze, casually surveying the historical literature in relation to notions of proper conduct. And the sessions evidently go a bit off the rails: something happened in February/March so that whatever course had been charted in winter takes a noticeable detour and for a while everyone struggles to find the new track. But the compass is quite clear, even if the path is anything but direct: "das Ding" is the center of gravity holding together the diffuse drives of the pleasure principle, and it is as a function of these coordinates that the subject seeks The Good. Although it remains the case that we piece together reality principally as it pleases us, this is not the whole story, nor does it asseverate the simplistic notion that we only do good to feel good. Now is as fine a time as any to mention in passing that the kinship of Freud and Nietzsche is frequently bandied about, not unjustifiably either, but the solution to angst and discontent is hardly a voluntaristic will to power whose fantasmatic support is a dubious Attic nostalgia.

Speaking of things Greek, there's Antigone. Due to the light-handed editorial apparatus* (in sharp contrast to Fink's meticulous note-heavy and mostly helpful approach) much of it remains Greek to me, because it is Greek on the page. But the process by which Lacan's discourse elaborates "das Ding" through the problem of sublimation, the paradoxes of jouissance, the essence of tragedy, and the tragic dimension of analytical experience remains legible and, indeed, worthy of the inscriptions (those are the subheadings). "The splendor of Antigone" constitutes a sort of prismatic apex through which are refracted the entire spectrum of significantly overdetermined elements: not just the obvious hue of the good(s), but the object, signifier, beauty, truth, desire, duty, drive, law, language, guilt, happiness, pleasure, fate, fear, pity, and'last and, um, last'death.

*There are numerous minor misspellings, but it's incredible to me that the meaningless "antimony" is used FOUR TIMES instead of the correct "antinomy."

I am impatient to continue forging through the available literature, which will entail a partial rereading of Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, a desperately nonpartisan effort to engage with de Kesel's Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar VII (whose polemical retort "there is no ethics of the real" reads to me [and Mari Ruta in [book:Unconscious Incarnations: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives on the Body|36869201], at least] like that which Fredric Jameson christened a "strategy of containment"), and Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor: New Essays on Jacques Lacan's the Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Therefore, rather than persist in the foolhardy, arduous, autoerotic time-sink of summarizing S.VII, I'll sweep these weeks of effort under some tell-tale tidbits worth memorizing:

"The justification of that which presents itself with an immediate feeling of obligation, the justification of duty as such - not simply in one or other of its commands, but in the form imposed - is at the heart of an inquiry that is universal.

...the question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real.

[This year] extends from the recognition of the omnipresence of the moral imperative, of its infiltration into all our experience, to the other pole, that is to say, the pleasure in a second degree we may paradoxically find there, namely, moral masochism... my thesis is that the moral law, the moral command, the presence of the moral agency in our activity, insofar as it is structured by the symbolic, is that through which the real is actualized - the real as such, the weight of the real [i.e., precisely not the ideal]... Moral action is, in effect, grafted on to the real. It introduces something new into the real and thereby opens a path in which the point of our presence is legitimized.

Contrary to received opinion, I believe that the opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle or between the primary process and the secondary process concerns not so much the sphere of psychology as that of ethics properly speaking.

But it is not simply in the approval that society gladly accords it that we must seek the power of sublimation. It is rather in an imaginary function, and, in particular, that for which we will use the symbolization of the fantasm ($â—‡a), which is the form on which depends the subject's desire. In forms that are historically and socially specific, the a elements, the imaginary elements of the fantasm come to overlay the subject, to delude it, at the very point of das Ding. The question of sublimation will be brought to bear here.

It is after all as a function of the problem of ethics that we have to judge sublimation; it creates socially recognized values.

…when one aims for the center of moral experience, the beautiful is closer to evil than to the good…

The good cannot reign over all without an excess emerging whose fatal consequences are revealed to us in tragedy.

The question of the Sovereign Good is one that man has asked himself since time immemorial, but the analyst knows that it is a question that is closed. Not only doesn't he have that Sovereign Good that is asked of him, but he also knows there isn't any. To have carried an analysis through to its end is no more nor less than to have encountered that limit in which the problematic of desire is raised... he will only encounter that good if at every moment he eliminates from his wishes the false goods, if he exhausts not only the vanity of his demands, given that they are all no more than regressive demands, but also the vanity of his gifts.

What the superego demands has nothing to do with that which we would be right in making the universal rule of our actions; such is the ABC of psychoanalytic truth. But it is not enough to affirm the fact; it must be justified.

Doing things in the name of the good, and even more in the name of the good of the other, is something that is far from protecting us not only from guilt but also from all kinds of inner catastrophes... If analysis has a meaning, desire is nothing other than that which supports an unconscious theme, the very articulation of that which roots us in a particular destiny, and that destiny demands insistently that the debt be paid... Last time I opposed the hero to the ordinary man, and someone was upset by that. I do not distinguish between them as if they were two different human species. In each of us the path of the hero is traced, and it is precisely as an ordinary man that one follows it to the end."