Lacan appears an unlikely hero for the destitute populations of the world or for those unrescinded Marxists still intent upon a communist future. If Lacanian psychoanalysis was able to offer an alternative reading of the discursive turn, one which did not wholly reject materialism or structure, this reading put any restoration of communism inspired by historical materialism to bed. Instead, psychoanalysis appears more equipped to understand the flourishing appeal of capitalism than provide a new revolutionary hope for the proletariat. As was illustrated in the previous chapter, a Lacanian interpretation of Marxism is able to update the latter’s explanatory understanding of the seductive grasp of capitalism but Marxist politics were dismissed as yet another utopian illusion – despite anything Marx might have had to say about this categorisation. As yet, however, I have not explored the relationship between psychoanalysis, politics, and the Good.
Lacan, both as a psychoanalyst and continental philosopher, was part of a French avant-garde movement that was, according to Eagleton (2009: 273-274), rather contemptuous of everyday life and practical concerns. For this batch of theorists – here we include the likes of Derrida, Levinas and Sartre – there is something inauthentic about the commonplace. It is as if starving is rather vulgar and mundane, whereas philosophical expression – whether artistic, literary or bodily – speaks to the heart of being.
Nonetheless, despite the esoteric nature of Lacanian theory, there is much to be celebrated. The advantage of being ‘ahead of one’s time’ is that new avenues of exploration come to the surface – if initially their work appeared abstract, this philosophical vanguard produced new ways of understanding the concrete and as such produced changes in the commonplace itself[1]. Lacan may have been more at home narrating the eccentric paths of desire but his discourse speaks to political practice as well. Moreover, psychoanalysis, much more than most subsets of continental philosophy, has been able to identify with the everyday, even if at the abstract level of illusion. Žižek certainly has established his reputation on the dialectics of abstract and the concrete, most commonly through his contrasting use of examples (see Kunkle, 2008; Pfaller, 2007; Stamp, 2007). Most firmly, psychoanalysis – more than either theories of late- or post- modernity – has been able to consider the appeal, necessary failure, and the consequences of the essentialist ambitions of ideology that are tied to images of ‘the Good’.
Vitally, both Freud and Lacan indexed the desire for an essential kernel of being as a moral demand upon the body. For Freud, essentialism arrived in the guise of the sovereign Good, otherwise known as civilised morality or the Law. Freud, primarily in Civilisation and its Discontents (1930) – perhaps the first text in political psychoanalysis – but also in Moses and Monotheism (1939), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) and Totem and Taboo (1960), begins with the premise that the body pays a high a price – guilt – for its insertion in civilisation. Freud’s psychoanalytic treatment sought to reduce the burden on the subject – not through political change but, rather, subjective realignment – allowing it to receive some enjoyment from bodily instinct. Thus, although Freud begins with the problem of morality, he ends only with ethics[2], making no effort to enter in politics and certainly not political economy.
For Lacan, morality lies in the form, rather than content, of signification. That is, whilst we might determine a particular discourse to be moral in the sense that it suggests a form of the Good – a prescriptive way of being – morality is located in the form of transcendental demands. Here Lacan indexed morality to ‘the law’ – not the law in a legislative sense but, rather, as the governing structures of shared social life; the guidelines of symbolic exchange otherwise known as the law of the signifier (Evans, 1996: 98). Morality depends not so much upon the content of the law but, rather, its expression. That is, when the symbolic order asserts itself as a meta-law – a law without further need for justification – it becomes normative.
In this chapter I discuss the possibilities for a normative or prescriptive positioning which does not fall prey to the positivism which has been the subject of critique in the previous two chapters. As such, in this chapter and the next (on politics) I discuss the prospects for using Lacanian psychoanalysis in our response to the troubling contradictions of global capitalism. Inherent in this problematic are strong normative judgements, not only about the comparative value of human life and the acceptability of inequality and exploitation but about the prospects for the future of shared social life. In contrast to these lofty ambitions, psychoanalysis – in contrast to Marxism – is more likely to be accused of nihilism. Nonetheless, Lacan orientated his psychoanalytic treatment around an ethical imperative: that the analysand should come to identify with that which causes their desire, otherwise known as an ethics of drive or as an identification with the sinthome. This imperative is ultimately an attempt to subvert the morality of the symbolic law. Despite this apparent subversion of the Good, it is not without (political) value.
As with Freudian analysis, the ethical pursuit of Lacanian theory was orientated at the body of the individual rather than the interactions of a community of bodies: Lacanian ethics is a response to the guilt experienced by the subject from having to forego its bodily instincts upon entry into the symbolic order. For this reason, whilst we might be able to assert a normative basis to the Lacanian clinic, there is much reason to debate whether the political consequences of Lacan’s work, particularly in regards to political economy, go beyond nihilism.
Ironically, it is because Lacan situated the clinical problematic in terms of language rather than civilisation – breaking down the dualism between the individual and community and turning Freud’s meta-psychology into a sociological endeavour – that Lacanian theory offers the possibility of being translated into the collective realm. Where Freud’s work had been used to provide a supplementary theory of subjectivity to political theory, Lacanian analysis has been used as a theory of the political itself. Yet, whilst we might be able to assert a non-nihilistic basis to the Lacanian clinic, there is reason to debate whether the political consequences of Lacan’s work, particularly in regards to political economy, go beyond existentialism – Can the avant-garde elite reveal, or even heal, the wounds of Homo Sacer?
Thus, the question I shall consider in this chapter and the following (on politics) is whether Lacanian psychoanalysis can provide an alternative conception of political practice after the apparent downfall of Marxist communism. If global capitalism has become both all-encompassing and fatally flawed, yet its once powerful political opponent has lost its voice, can a Lacanian orientated approach provide an alternative restoration of Marxism, or indeed radical Leftist politics, which would provide the political resources to respond strongly to the symptoms of global capitalism?
This chapter begins with a consideration of the manner in which psychoanalysis has come to reject the Good as a form of the super-ego. Following an understanding of the notion of guilt I turn to the manner in which Lacan responded to problem of ethics and the way in which these responses changed over time. The implications for these forms of ethics will then be discussed around Zupančič’s reading of the Kantian imperative and the prospects of drive for the formulation of a sense of collective experience.
The Good as a Bodily Function
Freud was not so much concerned with the content of the Good but, rather, with its formal imposition upon the body[3]. For Freud, morality was a libidinally bound sense of the Good which served to bind civilisation together against individual gratification[4]. By contrast to traditional moral philosophy, Freud did not posit a systemised prescription for being, nor debate the distinctions between differing conceptions of the Good. Rather, whilst acknowledging the necessity of the value-form in binding together civil society, he was concerned with the effect each of these prescriptions has upon individual subjectivity.
Like Marx, Freud’s description of the structure of society and of the individual foreclosed upon the possibility of an abstract prescription of what should be. Yet, Freud did not share Marx’s hopeful reading of history and human endeavour. Instead, he asserted that the “tendency to aggression is an original, autonomous disposition in man and … represents the greatest obstacle to civilisation” (Freud, 1930:74). The necessary channelling of aggression by the structures of civil society, along with the distortion of other instinctual drives – primarily relating to sexuality – leads to the perversion of these drives. As such, Freud’s primary political position was that civilisation represses and distorts the contrasting passions of human drive – represented by Freud as the battle between the drive towards life (Eros) and towards death (Thanatos). Civilisation, through government and other forms of societal policing – most notably ideological binding – then becomes a trade-off between individual gratification and collective security.
The image presented by this struggle between collective security and individual desire suggests that constant external control is required, that libidinal anarchy is only held back by the explicit presence of external authority. However, Freud noted that this was not the case. Obedience does not require physical vigilance, only the internalisation of the possibility of violence into the body through the symbolic law. The role of authority is taken on by the internalised expectations of the wider community, symbolised in law and experienced through societal forms of policing (1930: 78). It is as if, according to Freud, the body is a conquered town which is kept in cheque by a remaining force (ibid.: 77).
Freud called this internalised force the super-ego, that stern guardian whose vigilance never achieves satisfaction. If external authority could be satisfied by obedience, no such satisfaction is available via the super-ego (1930: 82). Instead, the demands of the super-ego are unquenchable: the more the subject attempts to turn their back on drive and conform to the internalised requirements of civilised morality, the more is demanded. As Freud notes:
The more virtuous a person is, the sterner and more distrustful is his conscience, so that the very people who have attained the highest degree of saintliness are in the end the ones who accuse themselves of being the most sinful. (1930: 80)
For Freud then, the super-ego, as the site of moral conscience or what Lacan will come to call the demand of the Other, was not at all progressive. It does not offer a ‘moral’ sense of the Good but, rather, exemplifies the effect of such demands upon the body. Moreover, beyond the individual body, Freud was concerned with the collective expression of the repression of drive – he suggested that society posits too strong a demand upon the individual and experiences various negative consequences. As such, Freud advocated a practice that we might label ethical – as opposed to the abstraction of morality – in response to these conditions. That is, against his unease with moral consciousness in both the individual and societal instantiations, Freud still maintained a clinical practice which sought to establish a ‘compromise’ between the individual and the moral demands of society.
Alternatively, Lacan’s reading of the Freudian super-ego and the associated demands of the Good holds to no such sense of balance. According to Lacan (1992: 6), the demands of the super-ego cannot be reduced to the requirements of civilised society but are rather the effects of symbolic castration, his version of the Oedipus complex[5]. Lacan did not consider the Oedipus complex to be strictly an effect of the nuclear family structure. Rather, (symbolic) castration is an ahistorical trauma that is expressed in a temporal, historical manner both in terms of the initial entry of the subject into the symbolic order and the manner in which this trauma is both repressed and returns throughout the lifetime of the subject.
It is this kind of analysis which has led to psychoanalysis being accused of both a Eurocentric bias and non-historical universalism. This is an accusation which must be wholly rejected as a misreading of the impetus of psychoanalysis. The trauma caused by the Oedipus complex is certainly ahistorical in itself but it must be stressed that the complex itself does not occur (Lacan, 1992: 308). That is, the Oedipus complex (taken as symbolic castration and the subject’s loss of jouissance upon their forced insertion into language) does not have a presence in itself – it cannot be the subject of positivist research – but, rather, is an absent trauma to which history (and subjectivity) is a response. Certainly the mechanism through which this collective dynamic is expressed may have altered – along with our methods of understanding it – but we can only endorse Freud’s identification of this fundamental dialectic of the human condition, one that can be considered analogous to that introduced earlier between the Real and jouissance.
The super-ego is ultimately a subjective reaction to the trauma of castration. In Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, the psychoanalytic understanding of morality and the super-ego was extended, such that Lacan considered that the super-ego is not only the subject’s ‘moral’ conscience but, more productively, an unconscious site of enjoyment. Thus, where Freud fundamentally conceived the unconscious to be an area of resistance to enjoyment or drive, Lacan regarded the unconscious, permeated as it is by the super-ego, to be the very place of compliance (and jouissance).
In the Lacanian conception, the super-ego is the obscene supplement to the symbolic law. Here Lacan’s reference to the Law is not limited to legislation but, rather, refers to the structures of civil society, whether moral norms or governmental structures. The symbolic law could otherwise be known as the ‘Good’, the moral standards of behaviour constructed and policed within society. I have previously considered the symbolic order to be structured around empty signifiers which structure an abstract (universal) imaginary horizon: ideological fantasy moving the symbolic law towards a transcendental sense of the Good. In this sense, Lacan ultimately came to conceive of the super-ego as the guilt that acts as a form of surplus-jouissance that supplements the inadequacies of this order.
Nonetheless, as Žižek (2008a:89) suggests, for Lacan the super-ego “has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned”. Instead, as shall be discussed, the super-ego demand is the point of ethical betrayal, urging the subject to ignore the cause of their desire and instead to suture the symbolic law. The super-ego demand is not a matter of the moral conscience filling out ambiguity in the law but, rather, an ‘obscene’ imperative to enjoy through the symbolic order. For this reason, Žižek comes to suggest that the law which is the object of psychoanalysis is the super-ego which emerges at the point of failure of that law (Žižek, 1994a: 54). The jouissance that stems from the super-ego – an enjoyment I have previously labelled J2 – comes by way of a supplement to the ‘official’ order. The super-ego is not the official ideology but, rather, the underlying relations of enjoyment which hold it in place. As such, this enjoyment is quite distinct from the order to which it is attached. As an illustration, if the explicit moral ideology of a community is anti-racist, both in its explicit laws and socially enforced norms – such that ‘you are just a dirty racist’ is a legitimate rebuke – then the super-ego supplements this position as a transgressive undercurrent of racist jokes and unacknowledged racial boundaries. Indeed, Žižek (ibid.: 57) goes on to suggest that it is this undercurrent that provides the shared basis for community identification.
Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola Apocalypse Now exemplifies the super-ego supplement to an official ideology. Kurtz, a soldier in the elite unit, snaps after witnessing an act of brutality and begins operating independently of the Army with a ‘savagery’ of which they disapprove. US Army generals state that he is ‘clearly insane’, whereas Kurtz explains to Willard, the agent sent to ‘eliminate’ him, that he now conceives of the act of brutality as genius, displaying the truth of warfare. The problem with Kurtz is that he displayed the underlying structure of Army life too explicitly. In contrast to the official army doctrine of clean and fair war, Kurtz had come to see with ‘clarity’ the underlying truth of warfare. Where he was insane and had to be eliminated with ‘extreme prejudice’ was in demonstrating this point too literally[6].
For Žižek, the enjoyment that stems from the super-ego provides the necessary support for the failure of the symbolic order. Conversely, this enjoyment cannot be displayed too openly – like Kurtz did – lest it disturbs the law. Indeed, this kind of enjoyment can only really function as a transgression of the law itself – without the law it becomes psychotic. As has been noted previously, the failure of jouissance before the letter leads to attempts to find other forms that would provide a suture. Super-ego enjoyment is one of those forms – in attempting to fill out the symbolic order, the super-ego allows the subject an alternative sense of enjoyment. This enjoyment, however, is never enough, meaning that the more the subject experiences 2nd order jouissance, the more they require. Indeed, this is the very structure of desire, as the inconsistencies within the symbolic law create desire in itself. Moreover – and here Lacanian theory links back to the morality of the Freudian super-ego – these failures lead to a sense of guilt within the subject.
Lacan suggests that the guilt imposed on the subject by the super-ego when the subject attempts to fulfil their primal loss is a secondary guilt. The true guilt of the subject occurs at the point of symbolic castration and the (forced) choice into language. That the super-ego presses more guilt upon the subject the more they attempt to suture this wound suggests that guilt is indeed misplaced[7]. This operation of the super-ego is well illustrated by consumer subjectivity under late capitalism, to which I now turn, before returning to the question of psychoanalysis and the Good.
Capitalism and the Enjoyment Society
Žižek suggests that super-ego enjoyment is the prevalent form of contemporary jouissance. Indeed, one of the key practices of contemporary psychoanalysis has emerged around this form of enjoyment. This practice can be deemed the ‘psychoanalysis of capital’(Özselcuk & Madra, 2007). The psychoanalysis of capital is characterised by the work of Stavrakakis (2000, 2007), Glynos (2001b), Todd McGowan (2004) and a certain reading of Žižek. These authors focus on what Žižek has described as ‘enjoyment as a political factor’. Moreover, this study focuses on a structural move from a society in which enjoyment is prohibited by moral norms[8], to one in which it is explicitly demanded and has come to be administered largely through the consumption of commodities.
The paradox of the capitalist society of enjoyment is that rather than producing greater freedom, we are more exposed to the impossibility of enjoyment and are reduced to inventing new forms of discipline and control which create a distance from that enjoyment. We may now be free to enjoy our sexuality but in order to do so we have adopted a more stringent attitude towards attraction, not only in terms of spending more time improving and worrying about our appearance but through obtaining the perfect sexual relationship.
Instead of freely enjoying our sexuality, the reduction in prohibition has resulted in further dissatisfaction with enjoyment. Ultimately there is something quite destabilising about being allowed what you desire – desire functions most effectively when an obstacle is in its path; being faced with the openness of raw jouissance is a rather traumatic possibility. Under the super-ego society, much enjoyment is available in the very (largely unconscious) creation of these obstacles.
The enjoyment society is characterised by the structuring of desire through the commodity form (Stavrakakis, 2007: 232). Commodities act as the embodiment of objet a, offering the prospect of full enjoyment. The failure of a commodity to achieve the promise of fantasy is taken to be a sign of the failure of a singular act of consumption and this lack is carried over into the next purchase, the next object that offers the possibility of full enjoyment. Enjoyment is forever postponed but the deferral is the epitome of jouissance itself. It is not that the subject of the commodity receives enjoyment from failure itself – as we shall soon discuss, this would bring a change in subjective position to that of drive – but, rather, that so long as the possibility of fantasmatic fulfilment remains, enjoyment stems mainly from the possibility of enjoyment, rather than the (failed) point of culmination. Such is the logic of advertising. Effective advertising constructs a fantasmatic scenario around the commodity such that the commodity itself does not suggest a certain lifestyle but the image of the lifestyle itself suggests the commodity (see Stavrakakis, 2000).
In regards to this point, Žižek describes Coca-Cola as the perfect embodiment of objet a and as such the ultimate capitalist merchandise, deeply embedded in the logic of the super-ego and surplus-jouissance. In Coke, we have a drink removed of all the objectively necessary properties of a satisfying drink; it provides no nutritional benefit – it certainly does not quench thirst – or provide the ‘satisfied calm’ of an alcoholic beverage. Instead, all that is left is the mysterious ‘X’, the surplus over enjoyment that is characteristic of the commodity. Žižek thus argues that diet-coke is the final step in this process – the commodification of nothing itself – since the caffeine that gives Coke its distinctive taste has been removed and “We drink the nothingness itself, the pure semblance of a property that is in effect merely an envelope of a void” (Žižek, 2000d: 23).
The Coke marketing team have perhaps taken this critique as a challenge – they certainly seem to have been reading Žižek’s books[9] – witness the recent launch of Coke ‘Zero’; quite literally nothing in a can. Coke’s marketers further revealed their understanding of Lacanian theory with the marketing campaign which accompanied Coke Zero. This campaign portrays Coke Zero as an element of perfection as its malignant elements have been removed; advertising slogans are culturally specific variations of ‘Why can’t all the good things in life come without downsides’ or ‘Ridding the world of the negative consequences that limit us all’. Ultimately, perhaps Coca-Cola and Marx have more in common that one might think, both attempting utopia by retaining the object without the obstacle that propels the cause.
Conversely, Daly (2009: 290) argues that the enjoyment of consumption should not be reduced to “materialistic superficiality”. Rather, the increasing influence of ‘ethical’ consumption has come to supplement the interaction between super-ego guilt and enjoyment; not only does the commodity itself not fill the gap but it is also never good enough for the liberal conscience: the paper is never recycled enough, fair-trade coffee does not quite pay the farmer a fair price etc.
With capitalism, therefore, the articulation of the super-ego has undergone an historical alteration. This adjustment is simply a different attempt to come to terms with the traumatic symbolic impossibility of castration but one best understood through a Lacanian reading. If the super-ego was once considered the mechanism of conformity by Freud, under capitalism and the Lacanian reading, it is also an expression of transgressive enjoyment. What is most important, however, for the development of our argument is that the super-ego is ultimately a conservative force, even in its transgressive sense. The super-ego may appear transgressive against the law but it does not threaten the law itself; transgression becomes an element of the law itself. Thus, the super-ego is conservative both in the sense of a response to the subjective trauma of castration and as a political device.
For this reason, psychoanalysis, in both its Freudian and Lacanian variations, is strictly opposed to any sense of morality in an abstract sense. Freud did argue that the relaxation of moral prohibitions would be desirable for the health of the subject but he did not believe that any sense of the Good could be invoked which would avoid the displacement of the super-ego. He postulated that guilt was the biggest problem facing civilised humanity; “the price we pay for cultural progress is a loss of happiness, arising from a heightened sense of guilt” (Freud, 1930: 91). Psychoanalytic practice refuses to add to this sense of guilt, rather hoping to reduce the burden felt by the subject in favour of an acceptance of that level of enjoyment still available to the subject.
In this sense, psychoanalytic theory does not seek to enter into debate over the differing conceptions of the Good. Instead, it is engaged with the form of the Good. As such a large degree of the history of psychoanalytic thought has been directed towards the problems of what Freud deems the ‘cultural super-ego’ and moral philosophy, characterised by commandments such as ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ (1930: 102). Lacan’s reading of Kant’s categorical imperative is particularly instructive in this regard. Kant regarded his imperative – ‘so act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal laws’ – as the key to regulating civilised behaviour. Lacan turned around this maxim in his essay Kant avec Sade (Lacan, 2006), suggesting that Kant’s imperative was an example of the pathology of the moral law and little more than the demand of the super-ego (Žižek, 1989: 81). As such, Lacan subverted Kant’s imperative such that it was analogous with that conceived by the Marquis de Sade; “Anyone can say to me, I have the right to enjoyment of your body, and I shall exercise that right without any limit to put a stop to whatever capricious demands I may feel inclined to satisfy”(Lacan, 2006: 648).
Later, however, Žižek will reverse this Lacanian position, which appears to be based on Lacan’s earlier work which focused on lack rather than excess. In a foreword to Zupančič’s Ethics of the Real (2000) Žižek describes his “envious hatred” at having not being able to see the value of Kantian ethics earlier (2000c: xiii, emphasis added). I shall return to Kant later in this chapter. For now, the argument moves onto Lacan’s conception of the ethics of psychoanalysis.
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis – From Desire…
Despite this rejection of morality, Lacanian psychoanalysis is not divorced from the moral. Lacanian theory is neither nihilistic nor hedonistic, instead it suggests that all morality is a repressive illusion that prevents an expression of the unmediated enjoyment of the body. Although Lacan expressly noted in his seminar on ethics that he spoke of ethics rather than morality, he also acknowledged that psychoanalysis is deeply submerged in a moral problematic (Lacan, 1992: 2). Moreover, Lacan contended that moral experience is not limited to the super-ego but, rather, begins at the point of castration – the super-ego being a possible response to the guilt of castration (ibid.: 7).
Psychoanalysis is thus implicated in moral experience but not in terms of the production of the Good. Instead, Lacan insisted upon an ethical approach considered to be at the heart of analytic practice, one strictly opposed to the idealism of the transgressive enjoyment that characterises morality. For Lacan, if moral experience “puts man in a certain relation to his own action that concerns not only an articulated law but also a direction, a trajectory, in a word, a good that he appeals to, thereby engendering an ideal of conduct” (ibid.: 3) then the dimension of ethics is situated beyond this dimension, although is embedded in moral experience.
Lacan was seeking to establish an approach which prescribed a form of being for the subject that would not reify into a systematic programme. In doing so, his ethics proposes no ideal content for the subject but, rather, a formal approach to the subject’s desire in relation to their unique experience of symbolic castration. Moreover, the clinical application of this approach in analysis does not produce a permanent state within the subject but, rather, a transitional dialectical which dissolves during the process of its application. That is, the goal of analysis is not a final point of stability but rather a dialectical form which holds no permanent content.
At this point in our analysis, however, it is unclear how this form of ethics relates to Marxism and political economy. In order to return to this line of argument I will first expand a reading of Lacanian ethics, before considering its application to politics. For Lacan, the field of ethics did not involve the ideal, the symbolic or the imaginary, although as Eagleton has shown in his excellent study Trouble with Strangers (2009), normative positions are available in terms of each of these registers. Rather Lacanian ethics concerns “the location of man in relation to the Real” (ibid.: 11). Ultimately, for Lacan, ethics constituted a secondary judgement: ethics is a judgement of our actions, under the condition in which those actions constitute a judgement in themselves (Lacan, 1992: 311).
Consequently, Lacan postulated that morality meets ethics at the problem of guilt in relation to desire. The subject has a right to feel guilty but only because they have given way to their desire. Lacan described this as a last ethical judgement; the final judgement of judgements provided by the psychoanalytic treatment (ibid.: 313). By this Lacan was not suggesting that the subject should endlessly pursue the object that comes to embody their desire – objet a. Rather, the subject can only be guilty if they give up on the form of objet a; the cause of desire. The Lacanian maxim might then be better read as: ‘Do not give way on that which causes your desire’.
The cause of desire is the original loss which occurs when the subject enters language and experiences castration in their own unique circumstances. The subject becomes free, becomes a subject, when they come to recognise that there is “no cause of their cause” (Zupančič, 2000: 29-34). That is, the only cause of the cause is the subject itself. Here the subject comes into being at the point of castration, of the forced choice; the subject must accept the impossible conclusion that they were free to chose their unconscious. Thus, as Zupančič states, ‘The Other of the Other is objet a, the object cause which determines the relation between the subject and the Other in so far as it escapes both’ (ibid.: 38).
A pertinent example of this recognition – taking ownership for one’s own desire through the very recognition that it is not my own – comes in the reflective autobiography of tennis star Andre Agassi (2009). Agassi, a tennis prodigy who came to be recognised as a ‘great’ despite a turbulent career, describes how he hated playing tennis having been forced into it at a very early age by a domineering father. Yet, Agassi states that his story is about: “a person waking up in a life that they didn’t choose, in a life that they maybe don’t want, and not being sure how to take ownership of their own life, and figuring that out” (Associated Press, 2009).
Conversely, desire was not Lacan’s last word on the ethics of psychoanalysis. He attempted two more structural revisions at theorising the notion of cause: cause as the subject of drive and as an identification with the sinthome. If Lacan’s rethinking of the radicality of desire, leading to a support for the subject of drive, was little more than a change in positioning[10], his support for the identification with the sinthome, although continuous with his earlier work, was more radical in itself, though the resulting conclusion maybe more conservative.
In his initial work, Lacan argued that successful analysis could occur through the symbolic order. This version of Lacan, characterised, according to Fink (1997: 206), by his essay on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’ focused much of its attention upon the letter of what is being said by the analysand. Here Lacan contended that the subject has been broken by the signifier and must come to accept that the body has been overwritten by the signifier. In order to come to terms with this circumstance, the analysand must assume responsibility for the forced choice into language through language itself. To do this, the subject must come to accept the organisation of their desire, not by the Other but through the unconscious. This version of Lacan is quite a tragic one. Indeed, in his seminar on ethics, Lacan had recourse to discuss in great detail the tragic figures of Antigone and King Lear as ethical exemplars.
The use of these examples continues to be controversial today in Žižek’s work. Certainly Antigone has little to say of poverty, human rights or Marxism, although she does speak to civic affairs. There is no doubt a tragic aspect to Lacanian theory, certainly for those readers who find it difficult to accept Lacan’s notion of the original forced choice. Lacan was not a utopian and, like Freud, he was not optimistic about the human condition. This alone, however, is not enough to dismiss his notion of ethics. Optimism is not the only possibility for progressive ethics or politics, although hope might be. Indeed, as Lacan came to identify in his later sense of ethics, grander possibilities for jouissance and change emerge once any notion of pure jouissance is abandoned.
As part of this abandonment, Lacan came to realise that there is nothing pure or radical about desire; desire is dependent upon the symbolic law. Instead of identifying the subject as founded within unconscious desire, Lacan began to identify the subject with drive, or the cause of desire. The cause of desire is loss itself; it is desire purified, or, the desire of desire, otherwise known as drive. This movement within Lacan’s work changes, in Fink’s words “Not so much the general idea of what analysis wishes to achieve that changes but the terms in which those goals are expressed” (ibid.:207). That goal remained constant throughout Lacan’s work: to separate the Other from the subject such that the latter can achieve a state in which satisfaction can be achieved.
…to drive…
Drive, in Freud’s original conception, corresponds to the plurality of instincts possessed by the human body. For Lacan these instincts were produced through the effect of the signifier on need, an effect which translates need into the fragmentation of drive. Freud suggested that the nature of the human condition was such that these instinctive drives were repressed, renounced or averted, in favour of the Law, leading to a sense of societal malaise or unhappiness. The issue with Freud’s theory of culture, as Johnson (2005: 243- 254) suggests, infers the possibility of a ‘free’ human before civilisation. Although Freud considered civilisation, and thus repression, as a necessary evil, his Hobbesian conception of shared social life still holds open the possibility of a ‘time before the fall’ (see Freud, 1960). There is not, however, either a pure drive or a pure instinct; drive occurs only through the sublimation of language and as such only in relation to desire. One cannot consider instinct or drive to be an original biology of humanity. Rather, if the human animal can be considered to have a nature or biological status, it is that of a broken animal whose only enjoyment is a fractured one.
The benefit of Freud’s reading of drive is his distinction between conscious and unconscious drive, which roughly corresponds to the Lacanian couplet desire/drive. Where the conscious is struck by the loss of the object, the unconscious continues to enjoy this loss, just as in drive (Johnston, 2005: 373). This unconscious enjoyment explains the difficulty – or impossibility – of fundamentally altering the subject (or society). The subject’s relationship to jouissance can be altered but the subject itself remains relatively stable. The only possibility of massive restructuring exists through what Žižek labels the act, or ‘psychic suicide’ by which the subject renounces their attachment to the sinthome, that which was fundamentally structuring their enjoyment – I reflect on the political possibilities of the act in further detail in Chapter Seven.
Drive is thus caught between the thrusts of the human body, being over determined by the structural repetition of the symbolic order. Rather than the fantasmatic attempts to obtain the object, drive only has an aim, that of movement around the object. The important move is then from objet a as the object that represents loss (and thus the possibility of subverting that loss) to loss as an object in itself . Drive is not the failed (fixation) of desire; whilst desire moves metonymically from object to object in search of ‘the impossible Thing’, drive remains stuck around one particular object. This fixity is not the breakdown of desire – that in the search for the Thing the universal thrust of desire is caught up in the object – rather drive goes beyond desire: drive is this fixation itself. Here, the Thing is not an object to be found – an object which could fill a void – but, rather, circulation around the void itself which brings its own modality of jouissance. This jouissance of drive is not a full (J1), jouissance, rather drive still remains within the dialectic of impossibility inherent in the structure of language and the corresponding structuration of drive (Fink in Johnston, 2005; 247).
This is not to suggest that the subject of drive is not grammatically structured, some kind of blob living only for a pleasure obtained through the very failure to obtain satisfaction. Lacanian psychoanalysis is certainly not a libertine ethos, the subject being able to wallow in their own enjoyment. Lacan himself argued that historical movements – situated around the 18th Century – based around the ‘natural liberation of desire’ have failed and have served only to raise the level of obligation and create greater pathologies (Lacan, 1992: 3). Moreover, political movements during Lacan’s time, most pertinently the movements around 1968 and the work of Deleuze and Marcuse (1956), have also failed to production a political liberation of desire.
Nonetheless, Lacan argued that a more satisfying of enjoyment is available for the subject of drive than the subject of desire. Objet a still exists for the subject of drive and it is to this object (rather than to the Other) that the subject of drive orientates themselves – the subject recognises the presence of the Other but does not appeal to it for satisfaction. More importantly, for the subject of drive the fullness of jouissance no longer exists, or, at least, the subject comes to acknowledge that the Other is not responsible for their jouissance.
It is this recognition that was the key to ethics for the later Lacan. If for the early Lacan the ethical was the result of the subject coming to terms with lack, with the failure (castration) which caused their desire, for the later Lacan the ethical concerned fidelity to the lost enjoyment which remained in drive. It is not that there has been a loss of jouissance, that there is not enough jouissance, but now we have too much – jouissance is an excessive stain to which the subject must respond (Zupančič, 2000: 240-242). Lacanian theory is not about finitude but, rather, the infinite, of the immortality of the subject in the face of death drive (ibid.: 249). In this sense, not giving up on your desire means that in order to preserve one thing, one has to be ready to give up on everything else (ibid.: 258).
Thus, for the early Lacan at least, the course of analysis takes the subject from demand, to desire, and ends in drive. The Lacanian subject cannot be considered to be only the subject of drive or the subject in the Real but, rather, according to Fink, has an imaginary, symbolic and Real face (1997: 210) This change in position – from the subject of the symbolic to the subject in the Real – involves the vital move of ‘traversing the fantasy’, bringing about a change in the relationship between desire and satisfaction at the end of analysis. The subject that remains is not the subject of unconscious desire, as in the earlier Lacan but, rather, can be considered the subject of the Freudian id, that sense of enjoyment which exists independently from language; what might traditionally be regarded as a non-subject (Fink, 1997: 208).
Thus drive is transformed in analysis. From being hidden by the demands of the Other, drive is established as the Other’s desire, before – in the final stage of analysis – being freed to pursue objet a. This can be considered to correlate with the three stages of analysis: alienation, separation, and the traversal of the fantasy in which the transitory subject becomes the subject of the Real (Fink, 1997: 209).
By traversing the fantasy, the clinical subject alters their relationship to objet a. Both the object and the fundamental fantasy remain but the subject now identifies itself, rather than the object, as the cause of that fantasy (Žižek, 1989: 65). In this sense objet a continues to exist but now only as a materialisation of the lack with which the subject must now identify. The identification with lack corresponds to an identification with the symptom, which Žižek suggests occurs as the final stage of analysis. This involves a realisation that it is only the symptom that gives any sense of consistency to the subject (ibid.: 75).
Conversely, traversing the fantasy is not the ultimate road to jouissance. In traversing the fantasy, the subject does not obtain a ‘post-fantasmatic’ grasp of reality in which naked reality (and jouissance) itself appears. Then subject may have journeyed across the frontiers of their fantasmatic horizons but there is no ladder outside of fantasy, only a key to its cause. Not only does the subject remain in the grips of objet a but is also more taken by the fantasy than ever. Additionally, despite Fink’s assertion that the trans-fantasmatic subject is able to finally enjoy their enjoyment as the metonymy of desire stops hounding the subject, for Lacan this enjoyment does not exist (Fink, 1997: 209-210). Rather, the last fantasy to be unveiled is that of a successful cure and a breakdown in the belief of the ‘jouissance of the Other’. In this sense analysis come to an end with the analysand is ‘cured of the cure’.
…to the sinthome
Drive, however, was not Lacan’s last word on the ethics of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s final movement was to suggest that the subject has ended the analytic relationship when they come to identify with their symptom, or sinthome, depending on the reading of Lacan (see Thurston, 2002). Lacan introduced the sinthome – an extension of the concept of the symptom – as the fourth ring of the Borromean knot, the other three being the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real, with the fourth ring holding the other three together. The sinthome becomes enjoyment-in-meaning: as the level of enjoyment that persists in the subject after the letter, the sinthome is what makes meaning possible. The sinthome is the ultimate support for the subject and that which ultimately gives it a semblance of coherence (Hoens & Pluth, 2002). As such, the sinthome gives the subject a certain fixity not apparent in Lacan’s earlier work. It is, one might suppose, Lacan’s final answer to the failure of analysis. Consequently, this reading of the later Lacan, although still in the tragic-comedic dialectic, suggests a more comedic conception of the human condition as it acknowledges that we are doomed to search for an object that does not exist.
Nonetheless, we are not in a position to posit a comedic form of being as the ideal Lacanian state. A comedic ethics is certainly the horizon that Lacan is aiming for, an argument which is extended in Zupančič’s work (2006a, 2008). Tragedy turns to comedy when the subject comes to accept that the subject has not lost ‘the Thing’ but, rather, never had it in the first place. This is the logic of both Lacan’s assertion that the subject needs to come to terms with the cause of their desire and their identification with the sinthome. Again, however, it is not a final state but, rather, a method of change – Lacan did not prescribe any position at the end of analysis.
Therefore, for Lacan, an identification with the sinthome does not suggest an alternative way of being but, rather, suggests the possibility of change, for the subject at least. This change is not a radical restructuring as such but, rather, a repositioning in relation to the essential coordinates of subjective being. In terms of politics, Žižek has expanded this further with his notion that the first step in radical transformation is to identify with the symptom. In order to traverse the fantasy, or break down the relations of enjoyment which currently structure ideology, one must come to identify with that which is excluded from ideology itself.
Nonetheless, what works for the subject appears to be difficult, or impossible, to institutionalise in politics. I shall return to this debate in the following chapter but it is worth continuing to note that whilst Freud had begun his analysis hoping to develop a causal treatment which would permanently remove symptoms, by the end of his work he gave up on this hypothesis (Vergaeghe & Declercq, 2002: 59). Indeed, Lacan began with this conclusion; the subject receives jouissance from their symptom and is thus motivated to maintain a relationship with the symptom, although he argued that this relationship could be altered through analysis. Although the symptom would remain, by regaining the territory previously held by fantasy, the subject would be able to achieve a more – but not ultimately – satisfying relationship to the symptom, such that the symptom itself does not need to exist, although its cause would remain.
Such an understanding causes a reconsideration of the notion of the Good and any response to capitalism. If the spontaneous response to hunger is a charitable one – to offer as a gift the food that one has – Freud teaches us that this demand is simply one of the super-ego. Singer’s imperative to give to the poor, introduced in the initial chapter, is the strongest exemplar of this position. Citing a range of moral philosophy, Singer (2009) argues that we are ‘sinful’ by withholding or consuming wealth which could be transferred to the world’s poor without endangering our own lives. There is a seductive logic to this quasi-communist moral philosophy. Conversely, not only does Singer fail to engage with capitalism and political economy, considering how widespread change might occur but he also struggles with the ‘human’ element of this moral philosophy. Holding to an evolutionary conception of human nature and relying upon experimental psychology, Singer considers a number of elements of ‘human nature’ that prevents charitable giving, including the ‘bystander effect’ and the ‘diffusion of responsibility’ and concludes that a ‘culture of giving’ can be created through the manipulation of these factors, including public identification of givers and the needy, to create a culture in which giving becomes part of self-interest (Singer, 2009: 45-78).
Singer, however, does not critically consider the role of the super-ego in his political demand. Instead, he acts as the voice of the super-ego. He suggests that it is our ‘duty’ to give what we do not need. This obligation is the elementary form of the super-ego, which as both Freud and Lacan have reminded us, is not only unquenchable but as a form of jouissance, leads to perverse consequences of the displacement of desire and jouissance, outside of its prescribed sense of the ‘Good’[11]. This raises a dilemma which is vital to this thesis. Critics of psychoanalysis would be justified at shrugging their collective shoulders at the demands of the super-ego in this case. If the Western subject feels a sense of guilt in the disparity between their wealth and the abject poverty of others, then this is fully justified; the subject should feel guilty. If the price to pay for an act of charity is a pathological displacement of drive within the wealthy subject, so be it.
Perhaps, we might be able to concede this point. If, upon walking down the street one may happen across a beggar demanding change, what might one do? Certainly both Freud and Lacan would suggest this demand is the demand of the super-ego. If the subject submits, and hands over some remittance, they will only feel guiltier. The circumstances of the beggar may be improved but the giving subject pays a greater price than the few coins they may have handed over. It is as if, according to Eagleton; “the French [theorists] prefer to be thought wicked than wet behind the ears” (2009:275). Nonetheless, this exchange might be one we are willing to live with. Moreover, the Lacanian analysand at the end of analysis would be able to indulge in a charitable act without engaging in the affairs of the super-ego; for this subject, such an act is not in the name of filling a gap in the Other but, rather, is an act of charity in and of itself.
For Eagleton (2009:294), however, it remains unclear why one should favour the Lacanian conception of ethics over what he regards as a socialist ethics in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. If Lacan regarded the domain of the Good as a battle for power, surely so is a desire for the Real or a refusal to give way to desire. Moreover, Eagleton states that if continental philosophy rejects the question of the Good because it immediately suggests the question of ‘Whose good?’, then this is no reason to discredit the process of creating a more just society.
Although Žižek (1994a: 68) addresses this point directly, his response remains unclear. Žižek suggests that there is a radical disjunction between ethical action and the Good. Acting in the name of the Good provides an infinite number of excuses to avoiding accessing our individual desire. For Žižek, even if these “excuses” are well-founded in a political sense, we must not give into the “demands of reality”. Nonetheless, he suggests that:
This ethics of persisting in one’s desire irrespective of the common Good inevitably gives rise to anxiety; is not such a radical attitude the preserve of a few ‘heroes’, while we ordinary people also have a right to survive? Consequently, do we not also need an ‘ordinary’ ethics of ‘common Good’ and distributive justice that would meet the requirements of the majority, despicable as it may appear in the eyes of the suicidal heroic ethics advocated by Lacan? (ibid.: 69)
Žižek further suggests that to consider the consequences of one’s actions is to immediately pathologisise our desire – it is to move away from the object-cause of desire – and as such it is an ethical compromise. Unfortunately, although symptomatically, Žižek does not return to this point. All this makes clear is that a disjuncture remains between ethics and the Good. We can take either of two conclusions from this apparent omission. Either Žižek is simply unable to answer the question which he has provoked or there is no programmatic answer to such a question – its answer lies in the form of the reply which dissolves the question almost as soon as it is asked[12].
These questions speak to the heart of the dilemmas of this thesis. If the problem I am dealing with is material and practical in its nature (providing a sustainable material existence for the global populace whilst remaining within ecological limits) then what is the relevance of Lacanian ethics? Moreover, how can these ethics co-exist with a reference to Marxism?
Lacan does not suggest an ideal form or relationship to jouissance but, rather, suggests a dialectical transition for establishing a relationship to the (unique) cause of one’s desire established in castration. There is no collective ideal but, rather, an individualised process. From this apparent incommensurability the journey back into the political begins. Along with the previous question. I shall seek to consider two factors: can the ethics suggested by psychoanalysis be applied equally outside of the boundary formed by the body of the analysand, and, whatever is the case, can the ethics of psychoanalysis be translated into a form of political practice?
Driving Together?
Lacan’s support for the application of ethics to the collective could at best be described as inconclusive. Although his work clearly offers significant insights into the structure and well-being of the subject that can also be transposed to an understanding of society and politics, it is not immediately clear why these ethics should be favoured over others forms, particularly in regards to the context of this thesis. As Eagleton (2009:298) suggests, it is not clear how an ethics framed against the normality of the polis could become a form of politics for the polis – if the Other doesn’t exist, how could one come to care about the material deprivation of others?
Two primary objections exist. The first is regularly thrown at Lacanian theory – it is a standard reproach against Žižek’s work (see Devenney, 2007; Homer, 2001; Robinson & Tormey, 2005): the Lacanian ontology produces too tight a restriction on ethical or political action. This critique generally does not take aim at Lacanian ontology but, rather, its consequences. Like Marxism, Lacanian ethics stem from a firm notion of what is (or rather, what does not exist) instead of what should be. For this reason any form of ethics or politics which takes Lacanian ontology seriously could not support any sense of scientific Marxist political practice, nor any form of deconstructionist ethics, characterised by the likes of Derrida and Simon Critchley (see 2007b).
This rejection, however, should not be put down to sheer ontological bloody-mindedness. Lacanian’s do not stick to their guns for the sake of it. Likewise, any ethical position that takes its orientation from Lacanian theory does not need to be an ethics of the Real. Indeed, Eagleton’s reading of Lacan (2009: v) suggests that ethical theories can be developed out of the imaginary and symbolic, as well as the Real.
The second objection to the Lacanian rejection of the Good is harder to dismiss. If Lacanians reject the Good, where does this leave Leftist politics? A response to this question begins with the ambiguous endorsement of an ‘ethics of drive’ which animates the work of several contemporary (political) readers of Lacan. The proto-typical model of this movement comes from Glynos (2001b) who suggests, through a reading of Žižek’s work, that capitalism operates according to an ethics of desire, such that, to quote Glynos; “Lacan’s logic of desire and the logic of capitalism share a deep homology in structuring contemporary subjectivity” (ibid.:87). Moreover, if we are to move on from capitalism, subjectivity can no longer be constituted by desire. For Glynos then, the logical move is to follow the ethics of psychoanalysis and move onto the logic of drive as an organising principle (ibid.: 96). He finishes the argumentation, however, with the question, “What would a community of subjects of the drive look like?” (ibid.: 103).
Analyses like these misread the dimension of the economic, giving undue status to ideology and subjectivity – in this sense Glynos’ work belongs to the ‘psychoanalysis of capital’ noted earlier – and excluding the dimension of class, to which ideology is simply a response[13]. Moreover, they also give drive a kind of mystical political quality, one that can only be explained by the fact that it is not desire. Drive suggests an alternative mode of being (much like feminine enjoyment) that becomes desirable for Lacanian-orientated political theorists because it seems to suggest a way out of the dead-end of desire, capitalism and the administrated enjoyment of post-democracy. Such a mythical beyond speaks to the circumstances of both political psychoanalysis and anti-capitalism; both cannot conceive of a resolution within their horizon of possibility. Drive or feminine enjoyment (the politics of which shall be expanded upon in detail in the following chapter) suggest this possibility but like all objects of desire, this sublime mystic only exists as long as one maintains an appropriate distance. Hence the number of texts which finish with a call for an alternative mode of being, without moving to extend upon these possibilities.
Daly (2009: 296), for example, in an otherwise excellent discussion that builds on a patient analysis of the difficulties in the use of psychoanalysis in politics, ends his paper with (in the penultimate paragraph) a suggestion that “Žižek’s Lacanian radicalism can be thought of as something that tries to break out of the endless cycle of desire and to move towards a certain logic of love”. This statement, which follows a brief discussion of traversing the fantasy, is then supplemented by a small definition of the Lacanian concept of love that appears divorced from the detailed analysis earlier in the paper.
Additionally, Žižek too – in his earlier work at least – was optimistic about the potential for the development of an ethics of drive as a guide to Leftist political action. In For They Know Not What They Do, Žižek (1991a) suggested there were four predominant forms of subjectivity. The first three – the ethics of hysterical desire, obsessional demand and perverted enjoyment – all remain within the logic of desire. Žižek suggests that the only ‘hope’ lies with the fourth ethical attitude available, drive. For Žižek the logic of drive is beyond the other attitudes in being ‘inherently ethical’, hence Lacan’s assertion that the subject must not give way to their drive. Žižek goes on to describe the ethics of drive as the “only possibility for the Left to attain a distance on the present and discern the signs of something new” (ibid.: 273).
This ‘drifting off’ from the collective applications of drive is symptomatic of the difficulty of matching the theory of drive with intersubjective practice. Marx is one of many philosophers who have suggested that ethical practice requires an end to instrumentality; the full expression of species being involves creative self-development for no point other than itself. Human existence peaks when we associate with each other for no purpose other than association (Eagleton, 1997: 18). Nonetheless, despite his avowed attachment to a classless society, Marx was specifically vague about the shape of the communism society to come, a society in which humans associated as ends rather than means. Indeed, perhaps the point here is that the very prescription of the shape of that society lends itself to the kind of instrumentality which would make it an impossibility.
It is unclear, therefore, how far the ethics of drive is able to be advanced into the political in terms of an alternative response to political economy. If psychoanalysis suggests a new way of being, it appears to apply to the selected few who have access to the knowledge of its art (and it must be acknowledged, analysis is a bourgeois pursuit). The “hotline” to the Real, as Eagleton puts it, does not seem to be available to the masses (2009: 281). Certainly a communal ethic of drive holds no utopian – in the sense of a quest for jouissance – longing: drive still remains subject to the dialectical interactions of lack and excess although a different (fantasmatic) relationship will certainly exist. Rather, it is the notion of a social form without excess and antagonism that is properly utopian. Even an ethics of drive will operate around the constitutive excess of objet a, perhaps more than ever.
Returning to Kant
One text that does not finish with the drive but, rather, begins with it, is Zupančič’s Ethics of the Real (2000). Providing an intriguing construction of Lacanian ethics, Zupančič reads Kant through Lacan to consider the interactions of Lacanian ethics – specifically drive – with Kant’s understanding of the Good. By doing so she is not only able to combine the Kantian imperative with the disruptive element of ethics – a disjuncture between ethics and the Good (Žižek, 2000c: xi) – but is also able to re-consider the notion of the Good in relation to ethics of drive without dismissing it entirely.
Zupančič’s project is essentially to restore the ethical status of Kant’s work by reference to the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis. In order to do this, Zupančič’s first task is to reconsider what she perceives to be historical mis-readings of Kant. This restoration begins with the notion of the pathological. The pathological is not the opposite of the normal – our ‘normal’ actions are generally pathological. Instead, actions are pathological if they are not ethical. We act pathologically when our will is determined by an external object. The pathological, therefore, is correlated with desire: what is pathological is the impossible desire for an object (2000: 9). In this sense, our deepest convictions – and most notably our notions of the collective Good – are fundamentally pathological (ibid.: 23).Because the ethical is not pathological, or normal, Kantian ethical action is always subversive, arriving from outside of the law of desire (ibid.: 11).
Zupančič (2000: 1) argues that psychoanalysis has provided two ‘blows’ to traditional ethics. First, has been documented earlier in this chapter; for Freud the moral law was nothing but the defence provided by the super-ego against castration. Such an assertion called into question the notion of any foundation for ethical judgement, whilst placing ethics at the heart of the psychoanalytic project. Zupančič, following Lacan’s assertion that the “best thing philosophy has to offer in the name of ethics is a kind of ‘Practical Philosophy of the Bedroom” (ibid.: 2) considers Lacan’s combination of Kant with Sade to be the second blow.
This second blow to ethics, however, offers the possibility of its rehabilitation through Kant. For Lacan, Kant was the first philosopher to go beyond the super-ego. If Sade offered the perverse Truth of Kant, at the same time Sade has an ethical value (ibid.). Morality might be impossible but ethics are not – ethics becomes a conceivable project only by reference to the impossibility of an anchoring sense of morality. Zupančič argues that Kant provided the break with the form of morality that “spelled out obligations in terms of the possibility of fulfilling them” (ibid.: 3). In doing so, Kant inadvertently discovered desire as the essential dimension of ethics. Traditional ethics was defined by an excessive element, outside of the Good, that threatened the status of the ethical. Kant turned this excessive threat into the very condition of possibility for the ethical.
Kant’s (ethical) categorical imperative makes a distinction between actions done in the name of duty and actions done for the sake of duty itself. Actions that solely conform with duty are actions of the law. Actions that both conform with duty but do so only for the sake of duty (without reference to the object of duty) are ethical. Zupančič considers the ethical to be a surplus, a supplement, to the law. Thus the ethical does not speak to the dualism legal-illegal but is rather outside of this register – an excess element that cannot be accounted for within the realm of law. Zupančič goes on to suggest that the ethical-as-supplement has the same form as objet a. This ethics can be considered to be an ethics of the Real, rather than the Good. Not an ethics orientated towards the Real but, rather, an attempt to rethink ethics by recognising the dimension of the Real as it is already in operation in ethics.
As such, the Kantian ethical imperative reflects Lacan’s ethics of drive. Desire-in-law is directed at an object which is always not the object demanded. The object demanded is desire-as-cause. In Kantian terms, what is ethical is not desire of the object but, rather, desire for the sake of the desire itself. In Lacan terms, this desire of desire itself – pure desire – is drive (ibid.: 17). In this way some notion of the Good exists but not as a transcendental signifier, or super-ego imperative. Instead the Good becomes an object of the ethical; an ethical relation between the lack in the subject and the lack in the Other.
As such, Zupančič states that her goal in ‘Ethics of the Real’ is to:
provide a conceptual framework for an ethics which refuses to be an ethics based on the discourse of the master but equally refuses the unsatisfactory option of a ‘(post)modern’ ethics based on the reduction of the ultimate horizon of the ethical to ‘one’s own life’. (ibid.: 5)
Zupančič’s project is thus vitally related to my own. Her discourse of the master could be considered the neutral administration tools activated by the (neutral) hegemony of the United Nations in understanding the dynamics of poverty and environmental degradation. Postmodern ethics require no translation. The most important element of Zupančič’s self-definition of her project, however, is the final phrase “reduction of the ultimate horizon of the ethical to one’s own life”. Thus far I have considered the operation of the psychoanalytic ethos to be limited only to individual subjectivity, being unable to translate it to a form of political community, or even collective ethics. Yet, despite Zupančič’s apparent attempt to rethink ethics outside of the limitations of the individual – a move which could only be deemed political – her work remains within a subjective framework. This framework, admittedly, has been expanded not only through Lacan’s own reference to the Other but through a discussion with Kant’s categorical imperative and the supreme Good. Such a consideration does provide valuable guidance for any attempt to translate Lacanian ethics to politics – a topic to which I will soon turn – but it does not give guidance to the latter sphere. More importantly, Zupančič’s work does not speak to the economy.
Perhaps, as Eagleton comes to suggest, Lacanian ethics do not translate well to the collective realm. The reading of ethics suggested so far in this chapter is an ethics of the exception, not the norm. It is a dialectical ethics that is in excess of the existing but gives no sense of how it could become the norm itself – how it might become the basis for shared social life, or even an alternative mode of being to that currently operative under the reign of capital. As Eagleton states:
An ethics which illuminates the moment of conversion, revelation, disruption or revolution, as this one valuably does, cannot be projected on to social life as a whole, which will inevitably prove unequal to it. The Real is thus in danger of behaving like Freudian super-ego or Kantian moral law, rubbing our noses in our own frailty by making demands which we find impossible to fulfil. (2009: 298)
Thus, even without considering the destabilising effects of political economy, psychoanalysis’ wholesale rejection of the sovereign Good in the name of private ethics leaves open the question of how to proceed. Indeed, since the turn to language and the defeat of essentialism(s), this is the question which has haunted the Left – how to orientate political action without the kind of systematic formalisation which would contradict its own movement. If, as Zupančič’s stated, we do not wish to return to the essentialism of the discourse of the master – having come to acknowledge the trauma of the demand for jouissance which comes from the passion for the Real which characterised the 20th century – nor wallow in the relativism of post-modern relativity, how can politics continue? Moreover, in light of the horror of the material contradictions of capitalism, how can the Left respond in a meaningful manner?
In order to respond to these pressing questions, in the chapters which follow, I first examine attempts to form a political project from Lacan’s work, most notably from Stavrakakis’ work on post-fantasmatic democracy, before turning to the possibilities for formulating a psychoanalytic response to global capitalism via a construction of the economy itself.
[1] Indeed, it is the wager taken in this thesis that a new, abstract, consideration of global capitalism we be able to product material changes.
[2] I shall distinguish between ethics and morality later in this chapter and in Chapter Five. At this stage it is enough to note that morality entails a transcendental horizon and ethics an interpretation of that horizon.
[3] Freud did make reference to the possibility of various progressive moves to lessen the demand of morality upon the body but this was not the central direction of his work.
[4] In this sense, Freud’s concept of morality is analogous to Hobbes’ sovereign – morality involves a necessary deferral to an external point in order to maintain individual security.
[5] If Freud referred to the Oedipal myth to explain the prohibition against incest, symbolic castration transfers this prohibition to jouissance.
[6] Kurtz also illustrates the manner in which the trauma of the Real dislocates the subject and offers the possibility of radical change, when he recalls the horrific instant and its affect upon him:
We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.
Whether this change is for the ‘Good’ or not, is of course another matter.
[7] Indeed, this is an argument not far from Freud’s own reading. In his conclusion to Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud argued that not only may a variety of neurotic symptoms develop from the repression of drive but a sense of guilt may actually develop not from disobedience to the law but, rather, the prevention of satisfaction of the drives (1930: 96-97).
[8] This move can be read both spatially, as totalitarian regimes have given way to capitalism and Western values, and temporally, as a development within the now globally dominant Western society.
[9] Previous marketing campaigns – Coke ‘Enjoy!’ and ‘Coke is it’ suggest that this is the case.
[10] Indeed, Lacan’s ethical reference to desire occurred relatively early in his work (up to the early 1960s), although it did include his seminal seminar, ‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’ (Fink, 1997:205).
[11] I experienced this effect myself in a first significant overseas trip to Europe. Upon encountering a number of beggars on the streets of Paris, I was initially stunned and steered clear of their desperate demands. However, haunted by a particularly edifying image of a hunched over elderly women, I resolved to give whenever asked. Upon handing over a small remittance, however, I became even more discombobulated by the poverty around me. Not only had I not altered the circumstances of those to whom I was giving but my inability to give to all of those I encountered became increasingly apparent. It was a brutal reminder of both the depth of super-ego guilt and the limitations of charity – as a result, I resolved to intervene in the political circumstances which caused this poverty that disturbed me so much, rather than give up the small surplus I lived on as a student. In a large way, this thesis is a response to the evils of capitalism I witnessed on that journey.
[12] Interestingly, Žižek (1994a: 84) notes (and rebukes) his efforts to bridge such a gap in Looking Awry (1991b) in which he supported a democratic non-violation of the Other’s fantasy space.
[13] I shall expand on the relationship between class and ideology in detail in Chapter Six.
