Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor

New Essays on Jacques Lacan's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Charles Freeland

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781438446486
  9781438446493
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438446509
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

A study of Lacan's engagement with the Western philosophical traditions of ethical and political thought in his seventh seminar and later work.

With its privileging of the unconscious, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic thought would seem to be at odds with the goals and methods of philosophy. Lacan himself embraced the term "anti-philosophy" in characterizing his work, and yet his seminars undeniably evince rich engagement with the Western philosophical tradition. These essays explore how Lacan's work challenges and builds on this tradition of ethical and political thought, connecting his "ethics of psychoanalysis" to both the classical Greek tradition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and to the Enlightenment tradition of Kant, Hegel, and de Sade. Charles Freeland shows how Lacan critically addressed some of the key ethical concerns of those traditions: the pursuit of truth and the ethical good, the ideals of self-knowledge and the care of the soul, and the relation of moral law to the tragic dimensions of death and desire. Rather than sustaining the characterization of Lacan's work as "anti-philosophical," these essays identify a resonance capable of enriching philosophy by opening it to wider and evermore challenging perspectives.

1

TOWARD AN ETHICS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

An alien language will be my swaddling clothes.

Long before I dared to be born

I was a letter of the alphabet, a verse like a vine,

I was the book that you all see in dreams.

—Osip Mandelstam, from “To the German Language”

A CURIOUS LITTLE BOOK

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is a curious little book. Curious for the way it came to be as a book, and curious, also, for what it attempts to achieve, for the headings, for the ends at which it may be said to aim. Much like Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, it, too, is based on student lecture notes, stenographer's notes in this case, taken during a seminar Lacan gave, his seventh seminar, at St. Anne's Hospital in Paris from November of 1959 until July 1960. Lacan himself remarked on this some twelve or thirteen years later, in his 1973 seminar, his twentieth, entitled Encore, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. He began his session of February 13, 1973, by recalling The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, remarking how important Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics had been for the seminar. Lacan had been telling his hearers about the obvious problems translating Aristotle into French when he suddenly turned from this to a reflection on how his own seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, had, perhaps like Aristotle's Ethics, been compiled and produced by a student, J-A Miller, in this case. Lacan recalled how Miller, “wrote it up … making it into a written text.” Of course, Miller had no desire to steal the seminar. He was only regretting that it had never been properly published and wished to do something about it. But, Lacan held the transcript back from publication. He said he would like to rewrite it himself one day and make it into “a written text” (S20: 53/50). But this never happened, not in Lacan's lifetime, anyway. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, its text “established” by J-A Miller, who by that time was Lacan's son-in-law and known as “faithful Acathe,” moral guardian of the work and even billed on the cover of the publications as its coauthor, was finally published in 1986 after a lengthy court battle, which Miller won,¹ through Éditions du Seuil as part of a collection, Le champ freudien, originally established by Jacques Lacan and now directed by Jacques-Alain Miller. The problem, of course, is that for both Aristotle and Lacan, the circuit from spoken lecture to written notes, and from there to a published book, which is itself then translated into perhaps dozens of foreign languages, in this circuit, something is always lost, bungled, or misinterpreted. The pages that comprise the published book, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, seem to be but a residue of that seminar, its “death mask.” In their written form, taken from stenographer's notes, the master's words never reach their destination. They nevermore run, let alone win, that race between speaker and hearer that seemingly parallels that race known through Zeno between Achilles and the tortoise, a race that shall never be won by Achilles due to the infinity that lies between each step of the way. Now that infinity between speaker and reader, that gap, that uncrossable, incomprehensible distance, is the distance of death, time, and the written word, which functions more like a veil than a wall for the way it is always inviting the reader to try and see what is on the other side. As Lacan asked of Aristotle's Ethics, so we ask of his own seminars on the ethics of psychoanalysis: How can we understand this discourse, separated from us as it is by time and circumstance? What is Lacan trying to accomplish in this seminar? What is he up to? What is he pursuing? What slippery, shiny fish does he bring up from the depths of his thought? How can we think the revolution this text brings for us to read, like a letter from another world, a revolution in the way the human situation in all its social links can be thought and articulated? Is there any reason why it is not thinkable for the philosopher? But we can never have it all. There always seems “a remainder,” something left behind, some fish not brought up from the depths, something that cannot be made-up for, something missed, in short, by The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Perhaps it is the remainder of the voice, Lacan's voice, perhaps it is a certain pleasure, a certain jouissance, a great love of truth that should not be and yet also could not fail to be something, a necessity, perhaps, linked to the impossible, something that “does not stop not being written,” something that would help us to understand, in other words, why “he got so worked up” (S20: 54–59/52–56). In any case, Lacan's contemporary reader thus inescapably feels that he/she does not have all of Lacan in the written pages of his book, that the body of the text is somehow, “not whole,” that, it is not “One,” that we, his readers, can never catch up with him, that his truth, the truth that speaks in his discourse, is never quite where one expects to look or to find it, and this but makes us run faster in that impossible-to-win race.

Lacan's seventh seminar, now published in English as The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, has since become one of the best known of Lacan's seminars, and the subject of much commentary. It created a stir in the psychoanalytic field of its time. Only three years after giving the seminar, Lacan was forced out of the IPA, the Association psychoanalytique internationale. Since that time, the seminar has become widely read outside of the field and territory of psychoanalysis, especially by philosophers. This is curious. Why would a text that seems on its surface to deal with a highly specialized and questionable field called psychoanalysis be of interest to philosophers?

AN ANTI-PHILOSOPHY?

Lacan's seminars are replete with references to philosophers and philosophical ideas, especially those of Hegel, Kant, Plato, and Aristotle. Nearly an entire seminar, Seminar VIII, from the early 1960s, was devoted to a reading of Plato's Symposium. Yet, Lacan himself occasionally spoke of his work as being a kind of “anti-philosophy.” A growing body of commentary on Lacan's work also concerns the idea that Lacan was a philosopher of an anti-philosophy, that he no longer found the philosophical tradition to be relevant to what he was trying to think through in his seminars, and that he wished to distance himself from that tradition. In light of Lacan's continuous reference to the philosophical tradition, this anti-philosophical dimension of his work seems paradoxical. What does it mean in this case to be an anti-philosophy? The overall thesis of the following essays is that this thematic is not just a metaphysical and epistemological issue, but that it is especially pertinent to and developed in the context of the question of an ethics of psychoanalysis. It is in the domain of what the philosophical tradition called practical philosophy that the Lacanian anti-philosophy is most forcefully developed. Thus, while all of Lacan's seminars reference the philosophical tradition, his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, with its focus on the tradition of philosophical reflection on ethics running from Aristotle through Kant and Bentham, seems one of Lacan's more philosophically imbued works. It is especially with regard to the question of the possibility of an ethics of psychoanalysis that we find Lacan's deepest engagement with the texts of classical philosophy. In this regard, the Lacanian anti-philosophy might well turn out to be one of the ways Lacan ironically articulates a more profound engagement with the European philosophical heritage. Especially in his work on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan develops a curious philosophy as an anti-philosophy.

This philosophical element in Lacan's work, especially his overall concern for the ethics of psychoanalysis, certainly seems to distance him from the teachings of his master, Freud, who, in his autobiographical study, is quite clear about his disdain for any attempt to link psychoanalysis with philosophy and to make it subservient to a moral system.² While these are certainly not Lacan's overall goals, it is nonetheless true that Lacan is much closer to philosophy and to a philosophical reflection on the ethical directions of psychoanalysis than Freud ever was. Lacan's first concern in his seventh seminar is not for determining a set of moral directives and imperatives that would guide action or decide upon its moral worth, nor for determining the “meaning of life.” Rather, it seems more concerned with the “directions for a cure,” and the questioning of the “ends” of analysis. It is also concerned with the practical task of enabling his patients to answer for themselves the question that hangs over each of their lives: “Why am I suffering?” Thus, Lacan's seminar can be read as being tangent with an important European philosophical tradition, namely, the “care of the soul.”

What is the beginning point, that point where the question of an ethics arises, for an ethics of psychoanalysis? Let us begin with Lacan's late seminars of the early 1970s, Seminar XIX, entitled … Ou Pire, and Seminar XX, Encore. Here, Lacan is discussing what by all appearances seems to be a strikingly classical philosophical proposition: Ya D'L'UN (“There is something of the One”). Being is L'UN. What is this UN, from which Lacan derives, however, not the philosophical foundations of unity and necessary sameness grounding the dominion of the many, but rather “pure difference,” and this almost unreadable anagram of ennui, Lacan calls L'UNIEN (“oneyance,” is offered by Marini's Jacques Lacan: The French Context as a possible translation of Lacan's neologism).³ Lacan's invention and usage of such strange new terms arises as a result of his probing a dimension of language hitherto untouched and unthought by the philosophical tradition. The term L'UN, for example, is, in Lacan's discourse, an instance of what he calls lalangue, which might be defined as the chaotic drift of polysemy that is the both the limit and the “underpinning” (supporte) for language, a dimension especially of speaking that although it is investigated only in and through language nevertheless works against it, turning it, bending into new forms. Lalangue is thus a dimension that may be said to “support” language (taken in the sense of being a more formal and grammatical discourse), but in this case, “to support” would mean “bearing up” or “putting up” with language. But more importantly, the invention of such neologisms also shows that Lacan's critical distancing of his work from the philosophical tradition will not be worked out only in the domain of concepts, but that it will also be worked out in the domain and field of language itself. Through the usage of such terms as L'UN and L'UNIEN, Lacan was playfully bending language so as to think against the philosophical tradition of the One, particularly against the idea that the “One” could provide some sort of ultimate foundation or unity of thought and being.

Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis develops over the course of his seminars into an ethic that thus has its foundations, its ends and its beginnings, in L'UN, taken precisely as a lack of foundations. Throughout his seminars, Lacan takes pains to undercut every possibility of there being any theoretical foundation, any metalanguage or metaphysical grounding for the ethics of psychoanalysis. There is no metalanguage, as he often says in his seminars, there is no transcendental “idea of reason” active here, no moral idea given in consciousness. Ethics arises only in relation to something other, some other source, something other than a pregiven desire for the Good or an a priori reign of moral law. Hence, while Lacan's seminars thus may speak of “the One,” L'UN—“the One which is not just any signifier,” as he says—it is always something indeterminate, a “between,” located between the phoneme, the word, and the sentence, indeed, between the whole of thought. But, again, Lacan's is not a philosophy of Oneness, but a philosophy—an “anti-philosophy?”—of difference. For Lacan, it is always a question of the signifier, its place, its function, its determining role in the unconscious and so in the whole architecture of thinking and the subject. One might ask in this regard, is “the One” a “master signifier from which the ‘whole of thought’ emerges”? “It is,” Lacan says, “what is at stake in what I call the master signifier” (S20: 143/131). We shall be returning to these themes over the course of the other essays in this collection.

For now, this addresses our question concerning the beginning point for an ethics of psychoanalysis. The “master signifier” is the point of inscription of the subject into what Lacan's 1960 essay “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire” (published in Écrits), calls the “treasure trove” of the signifier. This is the One mark, the “unary trait” (trait unaire), the mark of the One that makes “one,” that makes one something countable, a “subject,” a “person,” a solitary “soul.” The question at issue in the later Lacan, the Lacan of the twentieth seminar, concerns not only the question of ethics, but also the question of knowledge, of the love of knowledge, and of truth, and the love of truth. “What is knowledge?” Lacan asks. How does one “learn to learn”? What is the significance of these seemingly epistemological dimensions for ethics? We can recall that for Plato, ethics required knowledge, self-knowledge. Such knowledge would defeat self-delusion and ignorance of the Good. Virtue is or requires such knowledge, Plato famously claims. But, Lacan asks, what kind of knowledge is this? Is it knowledge of the truth of desire or does it mask that truth? Whereas the philosopher may puzzle over whether or not such knowledge (in the sense of connaissance) can be taught to others, the psychoanalytic Lacanian might wonder if it is even desirable that knowledge of the truth of desire (in the sense of savoir) be something that can even be framed pedagogically and transmitted as a doctrine or is it closer to jouissance? For, is it ever univocal? Does it speak in one voice? Or is it strikingly individual and polyvocal? What would be the role of a master and of mastery in connection with such knowledge (savoir)?

By introducing the stammering, polysemic dimension of lalangue, Lacan's work from the early 1970s shows that all such “practical knowledge,” insofar as it requires the regulated working of grammar, logic, and univocality, also has as its “other side,” as its incarnate edge and lining, the stammering polysemy, the jouissance of what Lacan is here calling lalangue, a dimension from which communication and articulation arise and upon which they break and shatter. Beyond the question usually asked by ethicists as to whether it is reason or emotions that dominate ethical life, Lacan shows in his account of the genesis of the ethical subject on the basis of the signifier and of the unconscious, how there is a dimension both beyond and beneath the domains of reason and the emotions, something that can only be approached and accounted for from the perspectives of both the structure of the signifier and the embodied, vocal stammering of lalangue. Lacan is asking, in other words, as to the emergence of the ethical subject as a subject not just of reason and the emotions, but as a subject of language, desire, and the unconscious. In doing so, he shows the spoken dimensions of polysemy and of disarticulation that are the effects and the affects of the unconscious. What Lacan seeks is to put the question concerning both the beginnings and the ends of ethics on a much wider stage than it has had in the classical philosophical tradition. Lacan's seminars are thereby calling into question the classical philosophical orientations of ethical life as being first of all concerned with the mastery of the emotions, as being bound up with or requiring a kind of ethical “knowledge” or a capacity to reason that will be able to ultimately master the turmoil of the passions and appetites, a “practical wisdom” (Phronesis), as it has been called in that tradition. He is calling into question the whole trajectory of the philosophical conception of the ethical subject as being first of all a knowing subject and the subject of such knowledge, one who is a rational hearer/interlocutor of a philosophical-ethical discourse, and who, through his/her ethical choices, will realize his/her potentiality by putting this knowledge into action and so attaining his/her ultimate Good. It is, in short, the tradition of the “care of the soul” that is in question here, a tradition that begins in the early Socrates and Plato, continues strongly through Aristotle and the Stoic and Epicurean traditions, and that has continued down into modernity in the work of the Czech philosopher Jan Patoçka, for example. It is this tradition Lacan wishes to “demystify” by showing that it has missed and occluded something deeply fundamental, namely, the dimensions of desire in relation to the functioning of language and the unconscious.

In doing so, the ethics of psychoanalysis puts another, wider perspective into play, a perspective that takes as its beginning point the discovery of the unconscious and the ascension of the ethical subject in and through the reign of the signifier. It shows how the discourses on ethics and the practical wisdom they have to offer both inhabit and yet must always attempt to put at a safe distance the dimension of the effects and affects of language, of desire, the body, and the unconscious. By the time of his twentieth seminar, Lacan is saying that the ethical subject philosophically posited as a knowing subject is but something “supposed,” “but a dream,” as he puts it, “a dream of the body insofar as it speaks, for there is no such thing as a knowing subject (il n'y a pas de sujet connaissant).” Beyond the measured articulations of the philosophical subject “who knows,” and who first of all has “self-knowledge,” Lacan approached through the neologism lalangue another dimension of the enjoyment of speaking that he calls the jouissance of speech, “an enjoying of speech qua jouissance of speech (parole jouissance en tant que jouissance de parole),” that is quite beyond and inaccessible to the measured articulations of the philosophical subject who knows what he/she wants (S20: 127/114). But this reference to jouissance requires that not only the enjoyment but also the suffering introduced by language be stressed. The effects of the introduction of language into the living human being are not always so salutary in Lacan's view as they may be for the philosophical ethical tradition, where the measured eloquence of truth brings self-mastery and has a healing effect, for language in the Lacanian universe introduces not only mastery and salvation, it also brings subjection. It can even be seen as a parasite, a disease, virulence, an Other in which the subject, from the day it is named, from the day it is a subject, is captured and defined. The aforementioned jouissance de parole is also bound with suffering. Words bring suffering by introducing a primal tear in life ultimately traced in the splendor and misery of jouissance. And it is Lacan's teaching that it is from this very binding of pleasure and suffering, of mastery and subjection, that we come to define and attain all that we call “the goods” of life, the goods that are the objects of desire and that are necessary to sustain our being. Thus, Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis was in many ways an ethics of speech and the speaking subject, an ethic folded and enfolded across the surfaces of jouissance and suffering that defines the being of a speaking subject. Not just a theory that looked down, as though from a bird's-eye point of view, on the subject trapped in the maze of language and desire, Lacan...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations of Works by Jacques Lacan
• Introduction
• 1. Toward an Ethics of Psychoanalysis
• 2. Philosophy's Preparation for Death
• 3. The “Truth about Truth”
• 4. The Knots of Moral Law and Desire
• 5. Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor
• 6. The Desire for Happiness and the Promise of Analysis: Aristotle and Lacan on the Ethics of Desire
• 7. To Conclude / Not to Conclude
• Notes
• References