The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII

Le Séminaire #7

by Jacques Lacan

A charismatic and controversial figure, Lacan is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century and his work has revolutionized linguistics, philosophy, literature, psychology, cultural and media studies.

He gained his reputation as a lecturer, disseminating his ideas to audiences that included Jean-Paul Sartre and Luce Irigaray amongst other hugely influential names. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is a transcript of his most important lecture series.

Including influential readings of Sophocles' Antigone and Elizabethan courtly love poetry in relation to female sexuality, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis remains a powerful and controversial work that is still argued over today by the likes of Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Theory, France, Academic

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.

Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.

Reviews

[Goatboy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to admit I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to write about this one. For those new to Lacan and wanting to get a sense of his thinking from his own words, this isn't a bad place to start. Not saying this is easy reading but it's definitely more approachable than what I have read in Ecrites.

I feel like I truly started to understand some of Lacan's basics concepts (even if there is still much that I couldn't ever truly grasp as solid for long). Maybe one of the most frustrating parts of reading this seminar is that I spent much of it wondering what exactly it had to do with ethics as I understood the term. And it's not as if Lacan starts the seminar by outlining what he intends by the title of the seminar or what the general area he plans to cover is exactly. Does he intend to talk about the desired ethics of the analyst in practice? The ethics possible for the analysand? The ethics possible for any human or society? (In the end the answer was all three because of course they are all intricately related.) In terms of being readily understandable Lacan can be his own worst enemy! However, by the time I finished the seminar and worked through his concepts of das Ding, Desire, Kant/Sade, courtly love, etc. I really felt I had a somewhat firm grasp of how parts of this theoretical system fit together. The way I became convinced of this is when I tried to offer my friend a short description of this work and instead found myself rattling off all of these concepts and ideas and how they all fit together. I've never been able to do that with Lacan before.

And then when you get to the end and everything he has been lecturing on starts to sort of snap into place, there was almost this feeling of electricity running through me. In fact, there was a passage on one of the last pages that struck me as so human, so sympathetically aware of our human condition (similar to my impression of the first 50 or so pages of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents) that it just stopped me in my tracks. I will quote it here but my guess is that because there seems nothing very complicated or cryptic in the wording and nothing overtly deep in what's said, that its effect was strongly caused by everything that Lacan said right up to this point...

"What I call "giving ground relative to one's desire" is always accompanied in the destiny of the subject by some betrayal – you will observe it in every case and should note its importance. Either the subject betrays his own way, betrays himself, and the result is significant for him, or, more simply, he tolerates the fact that someone with whom he has more or less vowed to do something betrays his hope and doesn't do for him what their pact entailed – whatever that pact may be, fated or ill-fated, risky, shortsighted, or indeed a matter of rebellion or flight, it doesn't matter.

Something is played out in betrayal if one tolerates it, if driven by the idea of the good – and by that I mean the good of the one who has just committed the act of betrayal – one gives ground to the point of giving up one's own claims and says to oneself, "Well, if that's how things are, we should abandon our position; neither of us is worth that much, and especially me, so we should just return to the common path." You can be sure that what you find there is the structure of giving ground relative to one's desire.

Once one has crossed that boundary where I combined in a single term contempt for the other and for oneself, there is no way back. It might be possible to do some repair work, but not to undo it. Isn't that a fact of experience that demonstrates how psychoanalysis is capable of supplying a useful compass in the field of ethical guidance?

I have, therefore, articulated three propositions.

First, the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one's desire.

Second, the definition of a hero: someone who may be betrayed with impunity.

Third, this is something that not everyone can achieve; it constitutes the difference between an ordinary man and a hero, and it is, therefore, more mysterious than one might think. For the ordinary man the betrayal that almost always occurs sends him back to the service of goods, but with the proviso that he will never again find that factor which restores a sense of direction to that service."

That, right there, was the moment when Lacan's "highfalutin abstract philosophy" hit me right in the gut and spoke to me of my own life experience in words that cut like a velvet knife.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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 ($◇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.”

[Theo Austin-Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like literally every review I do this is a rambling stream-of-rememberances-of-random-passages-and-impressive-sounding-but-poorly-understood-jargon but all I really need to do to in order for the uninitiated to get a taste of this work is to mention one essential line Lacan delivers a little over halfway through the seminar, and because I’m lazy I’m just going to roughly paraphrase it, that there is an impatience that exists to tell the truth about the truth, but in wanting to tell it there is often not much truth left - that seems to me to be a decent summation of Lacan’s teaching method, it’s somewhat analogous to when you as a freshly pubescent and audacious young man used to spend hours upon hours, going way past your usual sleeping schedule, sending a torrential flood of excessively smutty and lewd snapchats to one or two girls you only really knew tenuously. Once the 3AM/4AM lull hits, and as soon as this sad little reciprocal gift exchange has come to its logical conclusion (a Potlatch where the aim of the game is for each player to see who can expose themselves in the most degrading way possible, and as a heady consequence find out who can be the most ashamed of themselves in the morning) you hit the pillow hard with an acute sense of dissatisfaction. But just then as now, I loved it. This book was great, and there’s no one better than Lacan to give you blue balls. Now for a few more fairly standard and milquetoast comments.

Really quite ridiculously good to be honest, perhaps even fundamental in a sense. This seminar was taught 63 years ago and I still don’t believe we’ve quite come to grips with the distinction between the service of goods borne out by traditional ethics and the approach toward the Sadean second death that Lacan has evoked here. Of course the issue of desire, that whole problematic, is as elusive as ever. And if Lacan was unable to integrate Das Ding, that enigmatic beyond which refracts and distorts from a distance, then we sure as shit are gonna have a hard time doing so, but that probably isn’t the most attractive of projects anyway, as we as subjects stamped by the signifier probably couldn’t withstand it, even if we try to bring it forth through an anamorphosis or through the patsy of art. Might have to reread Seminar XI now, because my god I hated that one.

[Seppe]

Een eerste functioneel grasduinen in dit werk, zeer spannend en absoluut frustrerend om te lezen.
Uitvoerige confrontatie met psychoanalytische theorie en ethiek van Bentham en Kant, filosofie van Heidegger (Das Ding) en Griekse tragedie Antigone. Volgens mij komt Lacan na een lang voorspel pas tot de zaak zelf bij de laatste colleges, maar misschien vergis ik me daarin.
Centraal werk in begrip van drift en sublimatie in Lacans theorie, ook schijnbaar meer leesbaar gezien er amper mathemen en grafieken te bespeuren zijn.
Voor een meer diepgaand begrip is in groep ermee aan de slag gaan en wat hulp door secundaire literatuur wel noodzaak, benieuwd hoe de betekenissen zich tonen in dat geval.

[Nathan]

Seminar VII was my summer project so it is difficult distill its essence. These talks overflow with intellectual wine, with creative liquor. They are never neat or easy. If you understood everything Lacan said, you would never be challenging your assumptions. His style takes one beyond the limit of the signifying chain. That is why it is so hard to summarize his thought; it goes against the grain of its surface.

The first part of the seminar positions itself in relation to "Das Ding" or the Freudian Thing, or the Thing that is not just an object. Because Das Ding does not specifically refer to a symbolic object, but a real one, it cannot be symbolized. "It creates a void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it." (120). Thus, the object of desire is the empty thing. Whether this object is a person or a thing or a place, it is always an emptiness. "When one approaches that central emptiness, my neighbor's body breaks into pieces."

The second, or middle section, deals with various schemes we have standardized to mediate the relation to the object. For instance, the ten commandments, the injuction to love the nighbor, Aristotle's concept of the Supreme Good. All these ethical systems designate a relation between the subject and object. "Everything that qualifies representations in the order of the good is caught up in refraction." (76)

"We make reality out of pleasure." (225)

One can see the richness of the Lacanian aphorism lies not in its ability to make pithy something we already know, but to challenge it and test its limit.

The end section deals famously with Antigone and the description of her desire. Lacan associates concepts of 'the good' with what he calls 'service of goods' and power. "The domain of the good is the birth of power" (229). This is the system that Lacan distances himself from. "The ethics of psychoanalysis has nothing to do with... the service of goods" (303). It is instead, to not give ground to one's desire.

He says of the human body, "It was once, though it no longer is, a divine form. It is the cloak of all possible fantasms of human desire. The flowers of desire are contained in this vase whose contours we attempt to define." (298) I find that articulation rather poetic.

There was another theme that often emerged, that of mimesis and creation. I found his take on Plato's critique of imitation strikingly original and generous. To Lacan, the idea of Forms is near the service of goods. He asks, " Does art imitate what it represents? " and answers enigmatically, "In offereing the imitation of an object, [artists] make something different out of that object. Thus they only pretend to imitate" (141).

All in all, I think it was worth reading. The only mistake in reading this book, would be to be looking for some kind of final answer. Instead, one should appreciate the fruitful questions that Lacan poses to anyone interested in philosophy, the humanities and arts.

[Hon Lady Selene · Rating 4 out of 5]

In December 1969, after a chaotic exchange with his students at the newly established University of Vinceness, Lacan proclaims:

"What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master".

This discourse of a master, which is consistent with the discourse of anger, of domination and submission, was discussed in this, Lacan's earlier work, Seminar VII.

He mockingly questions whether Descartes's notions of anger aren't enough for the reader: for Descartes, anger is a subspecies of hate, influenced by small corporeal parts in the blood, which he calls esprits. Not enough.

Lacan's hypothesis is that anger is a passion which is manifested by means of an organic or physiological correlative, that requires a reaction to a disappointment or a failure of an expected correlation between a symbolic order and the response of the real. In other words, anger is essentially linked to something expressed by Charles Peguy - it's when the little pegs refuse to go in the little holes.

By Lacanian observation, this all returns to the connection between Object and Ego: the ideal-I never fully corresponds to the entity the subject experiences as "one's self", which spurs disappointment and hostility. Echoed by Sartre and Heidegger, according to Lacan, we are never fully ourselves because the relationship with which our ego comes into being is a relationship with an image that is not us, that is an unattainable ideal (created in the mirror-stage of childhood, the otherness of the image we assume of ourselves, the negative dimension of our existence, based on our primary infant attachment to the caregiver). We never measure up to our Ideal-I and this failure emerges in our psycho-social lives in the form of insecurity and hostility.

He alludes to the Christian parable of the Good Samaritan to suggest that even our greatest acts of sacrifice are driven in part by the need to shore up the ideal image of ourselves - the gratifying vision of ourselves, for example as saintly, self-sacrificing people.

Lacan's model of consciousness is based on the principle that the self is never fully self-aware, that what it experiences as 'itself' is a misrecognition, driven by its masters: the object libido and what Freud calls the ego libido.

[Amir matin Ghariblu]

تا به امروز که چند سمینار رو مفصل مطالعه کردم و چندتایی رو هم از نظر گذروندم و کمابیش با سایرشون از طریق منابع درجه چندم آشنا شدم، این سمینار به نظر از همه نفس‌گیرتر و از البته مشکل‌تر به نظرم رسیده و در عین حال جز مهم‌ترین هاست به نظر و نمیدونم به عنوان سرآغاز میشه سراغش رفت یا خیر (در واقع بعیده ایده خوبی باشه) ولی گره‌گشای خیلی از مفاهیم لکان و ضرورت شکل‌گیری اونهاست.

[Jayu Eleuthéria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lacan surely took his time before reaching the actually interesting portion of this seminar.

[cait · Rating 3 out of 5]

gave a presentation on das ding and sublimation in front of my role model lacan scholar and he said i did excellent!!!!!!! severe ego boost fr

[Caroline Loftus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literally life-changing. Reading this has made me feel more alive.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly fascinating, so important but nothing has ever made me feel stupider or want to cry more than this book.

[0 · Rating 2 out of 5]

According to Lacan, psychoanalytic ethics involves remaining faithful to one's desire, no matter the social cost--and there will be a social cost, because desire is both transgressive of social order and absolute, i.e., it cannot be justified by reference to anything other than itself. The only 'law' that desire obeys is its own, and its law seems to be to transgress established laws. Its singularity imbues it with an air of incommunicability--desire resists explanation. It just is. And that is where it draws its force from.

The paragon of psychoanalytoc ethics is Antigone. Antigone remained so faithful to her desire for her brother Polynices that she was willing to be put to death for the crime of burying him. Near the conclusion of the play, just before Antigone steps into her tomb to be buried alive, she stops to give a speech which attempts to justify her actions. She insists that she would not have defied the city's laws if it were her husband or her child who had died, since she could easily marry another husband or birth another child. But Polynices is different: he is irreplaceable, he is "my brother, born of the same father and mother." That is why she defied Creon, to her death--because Polynices was her brother. What are we to make of this explanation?

Obviously, we should hear the allusion to incestuous desire in her speech. She desires Polynices, and through him, her parents. Incest, as we learn from Freud and Levi-Strauss, is prohibited by moral law. The figure who first instantiates moral law in the child's life is the child's father. The child's Oedipal complex involves the father's intervention into the incestuous relationship between the child and the mother; the father prohibits the child from gaining sexual enjoyment from her.

The law which the father wields to prohibit the child's sexual satisfaction is a moral law, which provides the foundations for judging acts to be good or bad in accordance with it. Acts which follow the moral law of the prohibition of incest will be deemed good; acts which aim to transgress the law will be deemed bad, or evil. The authority of the father's law doesn't originate in the father himself; the father's law derives its authority from a social law which prohibits incest. Behind the child's real father is the symbolic father, the father of the social code. And the authority of the social laws themselves, as well as the authority of the governing patriarchs who write the laws, derives from an originary father, a mythical father beyond all human laws and orders: God, the primal father. As we read in Freud's Totem and Taboo. this mythical primal father, the source of all earthly authority, derives his authority only from the fact that he is dead. The lesson we learn from Totem and Taboo, says Lacan, is that "God is dead"--but "God himself doesn't know that."

Recall Freud's myth of the primal horde: the primal father was the strongest alpha male in the tribe of apes. He demonstrated and secured his power by keeping all of the tribe's women to himself, prohibiting every other member of the tribe from mating with them. As the only one who was permitted to sexually enjoy the women in his tribe, he soon found himself to be the father to every child in the tribe. One day, his sons, jealous and vengeful of this tyrannical patriarch, banded together to overthrow him. They wanted access to the women, too. It wasn't fair that he kept them all to himself. We read in this myth the originary event whose mnemic traces are responsible for our own Oedipal predispositions today.

So the sons took vengeance on their father and killed him. After having deposed their tyrant, they found themselves in an uneasy state: they now had access to the women they had so badly desired, but how were they to proceed? Without an orderly law to guide them, how could they ensure that the women would be divided up amongst themselves equally? Each of them sensed in the others a desire to possess all of the women for himself, which would return them to the original authoritarian patriarchy they had just freed themselves from. In order to ensure that no tyrant ever come to reign again, they did something remarkable--they consumed the dead father's body, taking him and his spirit into themselves. In so doing, they internalized his prohibitions against their sexual enjoyment of women, and their aggressivity towards him. Now the sons all agreed to follow the dead father's commandments voluntarily. This is the triumph of the dead father: by dying, he became the omnipotent, immortal father of religion who provides the basis for all morality and social custom. And this dead God lives on in each of us who abide by a social code. Behind the moral commandment to "love your neighbor as yourself," then, is a tremendous fear and hatred of the sexual and aggressive drives of ourselves and our neighbors. This is why we can love our neighbors only to the extent that they appear to follow the law--to the extent that they appear unhappy, deprived of complete satisfaction--and to the extent that they appear satisfied, we hate them.

Behind the child's father, the civic father of the state; behind the civic father, the primal God father.
And behind the primal God father, the drives. The father's prohibition against incest derives its authority from this dead God we call morality. Civilization is founded on the repression of the drives. This does not mean that the drives go away. Repression, remember, is coextensive with the return of the repressed in the form of a symptom.

So when the father intervenes to prohibit the child from incest with the mother, what the child is being instructed to do is to repress its drives. The child's access to the mother becomes mediated by the child's relationship with the father. The child cannot gain the enjoyment it seeks from its mother; it must look elsewhere, or else be punished. What the father asks the child to do is to exchange the anarchy of its drives for the laws of civilization--for Lacan, this means, to exchange the full enjoyment of the drives for the mediation of the drives by the signifier. The mother's body is overwritten with language, with the name of the father. And the word, says Hegel, is the death of the Thing.

A note on the Thing: Das Ding is the name that Lacan gives to the mother, the child's first "object" of desire. I put "object" in quotation marks because Das Ding is categorically not an object at all--Das Ding is what, in every object (die Sache), is prohibited, is beyond objective presence. Lacan refers us to Kant here, drawing an analogy between profane, phenomenal objects of consciousness and the transcendent, unknowable sublime Thing which, precisely because it is beyond objective correlates, is prohibited from being given to us, is prohibited from being given any meaning, any name.

The father prohibits the child from the mother; in this act, the mother becomes Das Ding. The child will spend the rest of its life searching for substitute objects to replace this originary lost object, but to no avail: Das Ding is once and forever lost. Its memory lives on in the "beyond" of every object--Das Ding is not an object, but the transcendent, nameless, timeless, groundless ground of all objective presence; it is an absence in the field of presence, an absence around which the field of meaning and signification organizes itself; it is the hole around which the vase is formed. It persists as a trace, a remainder, an excess, an absence, the stain of every object, since objects are nothing but Things that have been covered over by the mediation of the dead letter of the father's signifier.

When the father prohibits the child from access to Das Ding, to the mother, Das Ding does not disappear--it merely goes into the realm of the "beyond," the beyond which constitutes it as a lost object, as a transcendent and prohibited object. In spite of, or rather, precisely because of the father's prohibition of Das Ding, everything which comes to pass in the child's life will be an effect of the child's continued pursuit of Das Ding. All of the objects the child will choose for themselves--lovers, passions, pursuits, and the rest--will be chosen on the basis of the object's resemblance to Das Ding, on the extent to which the object communicates an echo of Das Ding's sublime presence to the child. The child looks for Das Ding everywhere and finds it nowhere: but what it finds everywhere are traces of Das Ding in the objects that are mediated by daddy's signifiers. Somewhat paradoxically, Das Ding only exists once it is lost--it's the father's prohibition of it that brings it into being. It is only one the signifier intervenes to separate the child from Das Ding that Das Ding is retrospectively projected into a mythical and nameless time before time that the child never actually had access to, since it was from birth surrounded by, born into a world always already covered over by daddy's signifiers, structured by the paternal law.

What is a child to do in this situation, having already internalized the prohibition against incest, which is to say the prohibition against jouissance, the prohibition against Das Ding?
We have three options available to us:
- First, we can mourn our losses, and come to resent the laws that prohibit us from ever attaining complete satisfaction: this is the position of neurosis.
- Second, we can try to overcome the laws that prohibit us from attaining Das Ding by willfully engaging in transgressive acts that violate daddy's laws: this is the position of perversion.
- Finally--and this is the position which Freud and Lacan see as the ethical position--we can alter our expectations, accept that The Thing is lost, and let go of the desire for complete satisfaction. This involves a transformation which Lacan calls "traversing the fantasy" (the fantasy of complete satisfaction), which brings us into a depressive position Lacan called "subjective destitution." This is a risky journey. On the other side of the loss of the fantasy, though, is a sublime happiness which Lacan associates with the defense of sublimation. Sublimation involves not only reconciling ourselves to live in a state of perpetual desire, but actually coming to enjoy the process of desire itself, coming to desire desire as an end in itself, as an ultimate good. Instead of desiring Das Ding, then, what we come to desire when we sublimate our drives is to keep Das Ding at a distance, so that our desire remains open and unfulfilled. Remember, we have already imbibed daddy's symbolic law with all of its prohibitions against satisfaction of the drives, so the closer we get to Das Ding anyway, the more anxious we will become, as we sense the looming presence of the castrating father behind the approaching desirous body of the mother.

Lacan has presented us with a structural account of desire: behind every object of desire, a transcendent, prohibited Thing which causes that desire--the mother's body. The Thing is lost, truly lost for good, and even if we could get it, we wouldn't actually want it, it would be a terrifying experience akin to death. However, what we can insist on is the importance of obsessively pursuing manifestations of the The Thing through the different objects which cause our desire to catch flame. Our allegiance is to The Thing.

To return to Antigone: what does it mean to not give ground relative to your desire? It means becoming oblivious to the intervention of anyone or anything else as she pursues her incestuous desire for Polynices. Note that desire entails the subject's refrain from perverse attempts to actually obtain the Thing--Antigone does not actually try to have sex with Polynices--but she allows her desire for him to remain unfulfilled, and therefore, to remain alive. She is so committed to cultivating this desire that it becomes an end in itself. She can give no reason or justification for her love of her brother--"it is because he is my brother" is, for her, a self-referential statement, one that admits of no symbolic mediation. This indicates Polynices' status as Antigone's Absolute; as her Thing. She was so faithful to her desire for her Thing that she did not care if she died, if she lost her symbolic identity, if she violated Creon's laws. Note that she did not take pleasure in violating Creon's law--she was not a pervert. She simply did not care--nothing compared to her brother, to her Thing.

What does this mean for the ethics of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice? The analyst's object cause of desire should be the patient's speech. The analyst should want nothing more than to hear the patient speak freely. And a "good" analysis will be one in which the analysand comes to discover, beneath their desires, the perverse, meaningless pulsation of the drives; comes to accept those drives as constitutive of the life of their desire; and comes to dedicate themselves to the ruthless pursuit of their own Thing, regardless of what anyone else has to say about it. This is an ethics of singularity. It has nothing to do with the three major ethical traditions of philosophy: not Aristotelian virtue ethics, nor a utilitarian calculus of competing goods, nor a Kantian fidelity to a moral law (Lacan elides the then-burgeoning tradition of existential ethics, perhaps because it is too close, as always, to his own). We are here at the "beyond" of "Beyond Good and Evil"--a good beyond the "Good" of the moral law, a good that comes to be good precisely insofar it is prohibited by the moral law--a good which will appear to others to be evil.

Antigone was a criminal. She violated the law. This is the wager of Lacanian ethics--to say that she and she alone acted ethically, because she acted in the name of her good which was hers alone, over against the laws of the city, that her acts were justified because they were in accord with her singular desire, a desire which can never be given any justification because it is the means and ends, the Absolute good of the subject.

But there's something too precious here, too abstract, and too absolute in all of this. Lacan's insistence that the Thing is constituted through the prohibitions of the law inflects his ethics with an explicitly anti-social tendency, one which is taken up by Slavoj Zizek and Lee Edelman, amongst others. In this model, ethics is equated with the subject's perverse transgressions of the law; an act is ethical to the extent that it overcomes symbolic prohibitions against enjoyment and releases repressed sexual and aggressive drives which animate the subject's desire. On this account, fascist terrorism appears to be more ethical than vintage stamp collecting. Ruti acknowledges that sometimes it is ethical to destroy, but if destruction of the social order becomes the Absolute good, then we have missed the mark. Ruti wants to hold onto the ethical import of acts which may appear to be anti-social, but shifts the emphasis away from the element of transgression and towards the element of sublimation of the drives as the constitutive feature of an ethical act. Sublimation entails the use of drives for the sake of creating something new, rather than destroying something old (although destroying the old can be a first and necessary step in the creation of the new).

Ruti draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological ontology of the flesh to make her point: ethics ought to involve going beyond the instituted social order of the spoken towards the silent chaos of the Real--not for the sake of freeing oneself from the Symbolic, but for the sake of returning to the Symbolic with new drive energies to infuse into it. The ethical actor will attempt to harness sexual and aggressive drives in the creation of new signifiers that they weave into the Symbolic for the sake of creating a more expressive and egalitarian society. Ethics involves weaving back and forth between the Symbolic and the Real. Insofar as the Real always resists being fully incorporated, and sublimation is an endless task.

[Kevin Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hardly an exaggeration to call this the political game-changer of the century. This series of long drawn-out digressions doesn't fail to deliver any promises, but the volume of suspense, delay of exposition, and relentless scholarship can be exhausting.

The ethical ramifications of a previously neglected moral novelty in Freud's theories plays out: reality turns out to be a hallucination and the Thing emerges; the poetry of courtly love astral-projects into its lordly Lady as sublimation trumps historical progression; Kant and Sade gaily join arms and skip towards the jouissance of evil; the one true God is a truly jealous God and His commandments become the founding condition of speech; Lacan shows Antigone to be an exemplary tragic hero and sends Hegel spinning into the depths of ineptitude.

Anyway, turns out psychoanalysts aren't just gonna hand you happiness and also that happiness isn't even that important to begin with, since the only measure of the good is to never give ground according to your own desire. Could be jouissance, or abstention from jouissance. Who knows? Definitely not some guy you pay to tell you what you want to hear, that's for sure.

[Omar Abu samra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can tell this is profound but opaque but insane at the same time. So. I have no clue. Go read it

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lacan begins with a simple opposition, that between Freud's pleasure principle and reality principle. On the side of the pleasure principle, Lacan places the unconscious, as well as the good, whereas the reality principle is placed in the realm of the conscious. The notion of "the good" Lacan uses to critique those twin avatars of "traditional ethics," utilitarianism and deontology, the former (under the heading of Bentham) as the distribution of the "service of goods," and the latter (under the heading of Kant) as the question of the Supreme Good. Lacan replaces Kant's transcendental with das Ding (as the beyond of the pleasure principle), a void, present in its absence as an empty place, which does not even brook substitution, not even at the level of the m(O)ther's body (there is a critique of Kleinianism here) - it is therefore an "object" (Thing) prior to the good or the bad, and is therefore neither a good nor bad object. Lacan frames the seminar as a traversal from the pleasure principle to the reality principle as the locus of praxis or ethical action, which is to say, from good to evil (though sometimes the reality principle is linked to the superego). By "pleasure," he means something like jouissance, jouissance as the satisfaction of the drive, insofar as jouissance poses the first barrier to the field of desire, insofar as jouissance is produced from the transgression of the Law which acts as its very underside (this is Lacan's reading of Sade in relation to Kant). This is related to superegoic guilt insofar as the moral conscience weighs more heavily on us the more we conform to it. It arises through the introjection of the Oedipus complex, and finds one instantiation in the decalogue as a series of prohibitions. To love one's neighbor as oneself maintains us within the realm of jouissance, more precisely that of the neighbor's, and thus maintains us within the question of the good. The potlatch is used as an example to move us beyond the service of goods. By "evil," Lacan means something like desire, insofar as it is the very metonymy of our being, something we can persevere in. This is where the question of sublimation is forwarded, as a change in aim and not object (alongside perversion, it is one of two ways in which das Ding pushes desire past the pleasure/reality principle dichotomy). Courtly love is used to explore sublimation as the idealization of the object of desire, but Lacan finds something ambiguous in its function through the rejection of performing oral sex: the void must be kept at a distance, it cannot be brought too close to the subject. This brings us to the second barrier, beyond the good, which is the beautiful. Lacan does not agree with Freud that sublimation is merely a question of cultural sanction. Lacan's reading of Antigone is meant to bring us past this point to the inhumanity of her act as the true ethical act, one that is grounded in her love for her (dead) brother, love as the sublimation of desire. In this sense, I want to push back against Copjec's reading, for I think she too quickly draws an equivalence between sublimation and the drive, though here they are counterposed. And by ontologizing the drive, she brings us back to the logic of the non-all, but there is no reason that this couldn't have been done through desire as metonymy. Lacan reads Oedipus' desire as the desire to know (the end of desire), and that analysis brings one to the confrontation with their own death (thus, Oedipus is able to sacrifice the service of goods). Lacan ends, interestingly enough, with a reference to Mencius: the laws of Heaven are the laws of desire.

[Franco Laborde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lacan andaba con un coup de foudre cuando dictó este seminario. Es romántico, sí, y un lector muy ingenioso.

Lee de manera fantástica a San Agustín: la paradoja del bien está en que la «Idea soberana de Bien» sólo puede efectuarse sobre una cosa que sea pasible de ser enmendada, por lo tanto, lo que ya es bueno, debe ser corrompido para que así participe en la idea soberana. Y Lacan se ríe, pienso, cuando se pone a jugar con el significante «bien» y su acepción marxista: «¿Ustedes se refieren a un bien, es decir, a una cosa?»

Cuando llega el tema de Antígona uno se da cuenta de que Lacan no es humilde. Sabe perfectamente lo que está haciendo. Intenta desarmar la trama de Antígona (tragedia que se rehabilita en el romanticismo con Hölderlin, Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard y compañía) traduciendo él mismo, desde el griego, los párrafos que pertenecen al coro.

Claro, Lacan no dice de Antígona lo mismo que dijo Hegel. Pero a la vez sí. Lacan escribe «Antígona es la que es». Hegel, en la Fenomenología, lo expresa de manera más terrible: «Ella es y nada más».

George Steiner, quien es quizás la autoridad contemporánea sobre el tema, descansa a Lacan en su famoso libro Antígonas.

[Billie Pritchett]

Roughly, Lacan wants to say that at most what an analyst can do is get the patient to awaken to the fact that he is responsible for his own desires. Note, Lacan does not say that the analyst can reveal to a patient what his real desires are. No easy task, that. Impossible, in fact.

There are a number of other tidbits you can get from this seminar set, but most fun is Lacan's reading of Antigone as the exemplary, authentic hero we would all do well to become. She's exemplary for Lacan because she doesn't give way to her desire and takes responsibility for the fact that the penalty is death. In using the Antigone model, Lacan is alluding to our ordinary situation in which we must be willing to consider what we desire relative to cases in which the sacrifice may be a metaphorical death. Are we willing to make a decision even if the result would be unpopular, for instance?

[Iakovos Farkonas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't even know how to describe this one, Lacan is so provocative and self-evident. His informative critique on moral concepts, that i had not even imagined, is so unique combined with a depressive tendency to push each conceptual structure that he is analyzing into his own "scandalous" perspective.
I love how he is singlehandedly showing that most of the aspects of psychoanalysis are a battle between the human and the social norms. He is encouraging people to explore every bit of themselves and leaving us with a question of responsibility.
It's not a recommended choice for beginner readers but if you want to put yourself on the limits then this is a book for you. I personally fell in love with the book and i recommend it highly.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read and finished 08/15/23

Coming back to this one was interesting as he begins to circumscribe jouissance and the object-a before he really discovers it. It was hard taking it very seriously near the end since he is still overly preoccupied with desire and hasn’t yet moved beyond into the drive - obviously the paths towards desire are a lure not only concretely, but also theoretically. I noticed how at times he was still beholden to the masculine paradigm of all with constitutive exception and I sure am glad that he he went to the beyond of the feminine in his later life; the feminine mathematical non-all is far more enlightening than his Freudian years (though again, completely necessary). He also struck me as much more idealistic in these earlier years this time around with his obsession with Truth and how one should remain loyal to it, when he breaks with Freud and posits truth’s impotence in later years is where his work really leaves us with the future of radical thought.






First reading finished 01/29/23

No wonder this is the seminar that put him on the map. I wish all of his seminars were like this one, though he still relies on his infamous style that has been dubbed “bullshit” by some of his followers. Lacan has the tendency to state things that have no foundation for those hearing it, as they can be quite radical and “unheard of” priorly, without elaborating any further. I assume he does this purposefully and my heart goes out to all those in the audience dealing with his style who didn’t have the decades worth of commentaries following in his wake “to hold on to”. This style is why people like Zizek have so much to talk about in regards to Lacan and oftentimes the former’s work is just demonstrating the reason behind or elaborating on the things that the latter had claimed years before. This Seminar is a little more direct and to the point and it is a welcome respite from his sometimes infuriating method of transmission.

An example of Lacan’s tendency from this seminar, which happens to be the first part that drew me in, would be when he claimed that everyone in the audience were “creationists” and not “evolutionists” following an earlier (just as perplexing) statement that modern science would not have been possible outside of the Judeo-Christian paradigm. Though I didn’t fully comprehend this enunciation, I was able to “understand it for the sake of it”, whereas the statement about creationism really left me wondering. He addressed the audience with the “you” of divine interpellation, which set me on an interesting track.

My first interpretation consisted of applying one of his earlier notions “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” where I presumed the intention behind his enunciation was that our signifying articulation is so seeped in, founded on, and structured by creationist mythology (and religion) the everyday language we use to explain our world unconsciously posits a singular Being of creation. For instance, a few days earlier a good friend of mine, lamenting how we can’t help but fully identify with our jobs, followed his lamentation with, “…that’s the idea”. My question is, whose idea? When my friend says, “we inevitably identify with our job, that’s the whole idea”, he unconsciously posits the existence of a divine creator who had an idea one day to make it so people identified with their jobs to pacify the particular subjected to the universal and then willed it into being (forgive my use of Hegelian jargon). One can point to one of the reasons why Marxism was such an effective tool (weapon) for the proletariat: it gave them the means for articulating their condition without resorting to positing an original intelligent creator (whose apparent falsity leaves a “bone in the throat” for all those taking part in the communication), but instead posits the dialectic itself as the point of creation. It is the result of the activity of all the speaking subjects of an articulation doomed to particularity (partiality) and chained to the interminable moment, “Now”, which leads to all manner of contradictions and social crises (again I apologize for my recourse to Hegelian jargon). Marxism as newly created signifying articulation allowed for those living within the signified articulation to cut straight to the “heart of the matter” and the truth of the contemporary moment. The truth in this regard often has enormous revolutionary consequences, obviously not excluding the work just referenced.

Well, assuming he had some frustrated audience members, Lacan returned to this notion to further articulate his intention and it seemingly had nothing to do with my presumption, though with Lacan that doesn’t mean I’m wrong because he often takes an asymmetrical stance in order to “avoid being dogmatic”. His “point of departure” for the elaboration was to oppose “evolutionism” and he even went so far as to call the evolutionist perspective “dangerous”. He claims that evolutionism excludes the possibility of the creatio ex nihilo of the signifier and obfuscates the speaking subject’s role in the historical trajectory of its own existence. It obviates our ability to create the signifier, which in turn forms the world we inhabit. The evolutionist perspective tends to posit the way things are as the end product of a process we ourselves had nothing to do with and also cements our world into a fixed order. And this order, posited by the evolutionist, leaves room for an intelligent creator or an “invisible hand”, if you will, at its central point or origin. Only the creationist perspective, particularly the one where God is literally the Word or literally dead, allows for the radicality that dares to pursue the creation of a new order.

[Mawr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to Lacan's impenetrable way of expressing himself, I was able to understand maybe 20% of the book (e.g., his analysis of 'Antigone'). The translator didn't even have the decency of adding footnotes to explain Lacan's use of German and Greek expressions (though I could understand SOME of them).

My advice to those curious about Lacan's ideas is to read books written by other writers about those ideas, writers who have some mercy for their readers, mercy enough to make the ideas understandable.

[Paresse McPearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There is no other good than that which may serve to pay the price for access to desire - given that desire is understood here, as we have defined it elsewhere, as the metonymy of our being. The channel in which desire is located is not simply that of the modulation of the signifying chain, but that which flows beneath it as well, that is, properly speaking, what we are as well as what we are not, our being and our non-being - that which is signified in an act passes from one signifier of the chain to another beneath all the significations.”

So true bestie

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

the use of christofictions has a poor utility for jouissance as a radical capacity or drive to evil (ie something maximally socially determined as such) and
lacan would have had better luck via cain and abel which would have also established ground for a link between oedipus and incest prohibitions a la levi-strauss. i’m always a fan of discussions of ethics but i gotta say i think levinas handled this better.

[leren_lezen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really a relatively accessible seminar by Lacan? Where he lays out core notions regarding the Thing, the ethics of acting in accordance with one's desire (or, perhaps better stated in line with the later lacan, to act in accordance with one's jouissance), critiquing utilitarian and humanistic ethics (and morality in general over ethics), why Antigone is a badass (and one should be willing to die for one's ethics) and sublimation.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to know where to start with Lacan, but his lengthy examination of Sophocles' "Antigone," ostensibly in the content of professional ethics, from this volume is probably a better and more accessible place than most.

[Tiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

La fin de l’analyse est-elle ce que l’on nous demande? Ce que l’on nous demande, il faut l’appeler d’un mot simple, c’est le bonheur.

La seule chose dont on puisse être coupable, au moins dans la perspective analytique, c’est d’avoir cédé sur son désir.

[Jared]

Lacan: "we might as well just characterize this object as a lost object ...the object indeed has never been lost."

Also Lacan: "have I managed to make myself understood? It seems to me difficult to be any clearer."

[will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Often exhilarating, often maddeningly obscure. A dense tapestry of references. One reads with the sense of approaching some clearly stated revelation that perhaps never arrives—and maybe that’s the point. Nevertheless, the journey is highly enriching.

[JCJBergman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lacan, you Freud fanboy.

Nah but seriously this is overly dense. Requires a genuine will to read. Not bad stuff though.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

the flowers of desire are contrived in this vase whose contours we attempt to divine.

[Brendan Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I still haven’t read Antigone