1

Lacan’s Antigone, Between Até and Polyneices

Or an Ethics, Above or Beyond Politics

Draft only, excuse diacritics: comments or queries to

<agathapalintalethos@gmail.com>

Jacques Lacan’s almost equally controversial contemporary Leo Strauss’ On Tyranny represents Strauss’ clearest statement of what we might be called “the philosophic demotion of the city.” Simonides the wise poet who addresses the tyrant Hieroin Xenephon’s Hiero is a stranger. His “tyrannical teaching” underscores at once the proximity and the distance between thephilosopher and the tyrant. Both, like Simonides himself are hypsipolis, “beyond the polis”, and not simply good citizens. Yet Strauss, despite what some critics aver, does not simply identify the philosopher and the tyrant. The philosopher’s eros for the truth is of a different kind, and for Strauss of a more noble kind, than the eros of the tyrant. The tyrant’s remains the political desire for fame. Even if the teaching concerning tyranny, valorising extralegal rule by the wise, remains theoretical, it serves to illustrate what Strauss elsewhere calls the problematic nature of nomos or law as such. Human beings as political animals need law to regulate their interactions, so that each can pursue his own ends. Yetthe law, even when framed by wise founders, can at best be general in scope, covering the majority of foreseeable cases. There will always be exceptions: both exceptional political emergencies, and exceptional individuals. To do justice to these, the equity or phronesis of rulers is ideally required, above the law. However, for the law to have force, so Strauss

2

claims in Natural Right and History, it must present itself as being unproblematically foundational, without exceptions. This is where we see the famous Platonic notion of the kalon pseudon or noble lie finds its place in Strauss’ “primitive” or politicalPlatonism.

And thus it is perhaps not surprising that the single greatestdistance between Lacan’s and Strauss’ otherwise strikingly comparable readings of the great Platonic dialogue on love (given in France and America, moreover, within 12 months of each other) came from the weight Lacan gives to the testimony of the impassioned tyrannical figure, Alkibiades. Lacan remains fixated on Socrates, even though he too, famously and heterodoxically, thinks that Alkibiades’ intervention in the Symposium is key to understand that dialogue on love’s meaning,beyond Diotima’s (for Lacan as for Strauss, “sophistical” depiction of an impossible ascent out of embodiment and particularity).

Lacan’s animating fascination with Socrates, which has been noted by critics and is so central in Seminar VIII On Transference, manifests itself in a career-long ambivalence about the statusand desire of the first political philosopher. What was clearer was the way Lacan thinks that Alkibiades’ testimony concerning the hidden treasures or agalmata in Socrates gave thelie to Diotima’s poetic depiction of eros as ascending towardsthe final vision of oceanic Beauty. It reintroduced into the Platonic discourse concerning love all of eros’ urgency, its possessive and covetous singularity, and the strange bond between love and the transferential desire to know that psychoanalysts encounter every day in the clinical setting. Not the philosopher, but the tyrant preeminently, can speak the truth to desire. Now Plato’s Republic, we know, pointedly associates the poets, and pre-eminently the tragedians, with political tyranny. Through the anomic and unmeasured desires their dramas stage, they encourage the type of paranomia in thepsyche which Thucydides assigned above all to Alkibiades. It

3

is not surprising then, even by these classical lights, that whereas Strauss turns to philosophy and the philosopher as thefigure beyond the city’s goods and passions, the psychoanalystJacques Lacan repeatedly turns to tragic poetry as he tries togive form to a distinct ethical vision for psychoanalytic practice. What will indeed become clear as we proceed in thispaper is that the Lacanian elevation of the literary genre of tragedy will correspond in his work to a kind of psychoanalytic demotion of the city, carried out in the name of Lacan’s post-Freudian account of eros. This is his match for Strauss’ philosophic devaluation of political life before the transpolitical claims of philosophic zetesis. Yet at the same time, just as Strauss’ Platonic categories would lead us to expect, Lacan’s psychoanalytic demotion of the city and of intramundane morality explicitly involves elevating not wisdomor the good, but the beautiful—i.e. what we might call in contextthe poet’s “thing”—given a higher ethical value, just beneath what the psychoanalytic ethics of desire can reveal.

The preeminent locus where Lacan’s psychoanalytic elevation of tragedy takes place is, as chance would have it, in the final four sessions of his seventh seminar of 1959-‘60. These were the classes which were to immediately precede Lacan’s turn thefollowing teaching year to Plato’s Symposium in Le Transfert. The seminar as a whole (Seminar VII) bears the portentious title The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Lacan initially hoped to prepare it for publication as a self-standing book. This surely highlights the importance he accorded to this seminar, and the reflections he developed therein. Remarkably, Seminar VII spans Aristotle, Kant, Sade, and Bentham, as well as Freud—in short,and with typical Lacanian bravura, well nigh the entire history of Western philosophical discourse on ethics. As is well known, the Seminar’s culmination comes with Lacan’s reading of a Sophoclean tragedy which has been absolutely central to modern philosophy, and holds a privileged place in Western ethical reflection, but about which the father of

4

psychoanalysis had nevertheless been largely silent. The tragedy in question is the Antigone, the final of Sophocles’ three great dramas concerning the House of Labdacus, King Oedipus, and his ill-fated progeny.

While Lacan’s definitive statement concerning tragedy thus comes in Seminar VII, however, his interest in the literary genrespans several of his seminars. This is hardly surprising in a pupil of Freud, given the paradigmatic status the latter assigned, if not to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannis, then to the mythSophocles adapted in that drama. Lacan’s Seminar VI devotes a series of key sessions to a reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, inwhose terms Lacan significantly revises the Freudian account of the role of the mother in shaping subjects’ desire, and first begins to develop his later understanding of the fantasy. After completing his analysis of the Symposium in Seminar VIII, Lacan again turns to Claudel’s great tragic trilogy(Hostage, Crusts, and The Humiliation of the Father), to continue his delineation of the nature and action of transference in psychoanalysis. In this way, Lacan’s “return to Plato” in Seminar VIII as it were “book ended” at either side by the poets.Most importantly, however, in the latter half of Seminar II on the ego, Lacan devoted a series of important, if typically dense, sessions to Sophocles’ dramatisations of the Oedipus story. As Shoshana Felman has beautifully shown, these comparatively little-treated sessions decisively anticipate Seminar VII’s and VIII’s attempts to think through the ethical aims of psychoanalytic practice, as much as metapsychological theory. “While Freud reads Sophocles’ text in view of the consolidation—the confirmation—of his theory,” Felman comments, “Lacan rereads the Greek text, after Freud, with an eye to its specific pertinence not to theory but to psychoanalytic practice”. (Felman, 1024) For this reason, we should begin this paper by looking at what Lacan makes of psychoanalysis’ “specimen story” to frame our reading of Seminar VII, and so to begin our ascent towards grasping Lacan’s

5

singular, tragic-psychoanalytic ethical vision, in its simultaneous proximity and great distance from the Greek philosophic ideal pronounced by Leo Strauss.

What is characteristically remarkable about Lacan’s treatment of Sophocles’ Oedipus dramas—and we need to use the plural—is that he nowhere takes them to illustrate or clarify the Freudian Oedipal complex. Lacan likes Delphically to repeat that Oedipus clearly did not have an Oedipus complex. His emphasis in Seminar II and elsewhere, in terms of Oedipus’ alleged drives, is on the scopic drive, and Oedipus tragic drive to know. More clearly if more controversially, Lacan argues that Freud did not turn to Sophocles primarily to illustrate the Oedipus complex. If he had wanted to illustrate the insistence of incestuous desire and parricidal rivalry in the human adventure, Lacan notes, any number of ancient Greek or near-Eastern myths could have served him as well. (VIII*) Rather, it is the fact that Oedipus did not know the significance of what he was doing that detains Lacan.Oedipus’ destiny, the shape of his desire, was rather laid outfor him on the “other scene” of the Oracle, in a telling mythical figuring of Lacan’s notion of the unconscious as the discourse of the Other:

Oedipus’ unconscious is nothing but this fundamental discourse whereby, long since, for all time, Oedipus’ history is out there—written, and we know it, but Oedipusis ignorant of it, even as he is played out by it since the beginning. This goes back—remember how the oracle frightens his parents, and how he is consequently exposed, rejected. Everything takes place in function ofthe Oracle and of the fact that Oedipus is truly other than what he realises as his history—he is the son of Laius and Jocasta, and he starts out his life ignorant ofthis fact. The whole pulsation of the drama of his destiny, from the beginning to the end, hinges on the

6

veiling of this discourse, which is his reality without his knowing it. (Sem II, 245)

Earlier in the seminar, Lacan has described in as direct language as we find in his oeuvre the meaning of this notion ofthe unconscious as the discourse of the other:

... the subject’s question in no way refers to the results of any specific weaning, abandonment, or vital lack of love or affection; it concerns the subject’s history insofar as the subject misapprehends, misrecognises it; thisis what the subject’s conduct is expressing in spite of himself. (SII 58)

Analysis, at this juncture, is then conceived by Lacan in terms of a conscious symbolisation of this split-off, unacknowledged or misrecognised component of the analysand’s own history which is shaping his symptoms: “we help him to complete the historisation of the facts that have already determined a certain number of historical ‘turning points’ in his existence”; again, analysis aims to assist the analysand “to recognise and name his desire” (E 261*; SII 267) This then is why, in another break with the Freudian Oedipus, Lacanadvises his students that “if the tragedy of Oedipus Rex is an exemplary literary work, psychoanalysts should also know this beyond which is realised in the tragedy of Oedipus at Colonus.” (SII, 257) The reason is that it is in this tragedy, after the completion of Oedipus Rex, that the exiled, blinded tyrant comes to actively himself re-tell the fate that has befallen him as hisown. Only at Colonus, as Lacan reads Sophocles, does Oedipus fully assume the words of the oracle whose force he has hitherto resisted with every part of his conscious being, evenas they have shaped his fate. Oedipus is in this manner a kind of mythical or tragic analysand, as six years later Lacanwas with similar boldness to suggest Socrates was a premodern presage of the modern psychoanalyst.

7

The action of Oedipus at Colonus does in fact largely consist of Oedipus being forced despite himself to reveal his identity and to narrate the horrifying tale of his life. Having wandered into Attica a stranger, first the chorus, aided by Antigone, then Athens’ heroic King Theseus compel Oedipus to reveal who he is and to tell all. The two other issues at stake in the action of the drama similarly underline that the meaning of the tragedy, as Lacan’s reading suggests, concerns the symbolisation of Oedipus’ life, and the settling of his legacy. First, significantly enough from a Lacanian perspective, there is the need to decide the place and manner of Oedipus’ burial, and how this site shall be marked—a point of significant continuity with what will emerge in the Antigone.(*) Second, there is the issue of Oedipus’ living legacy, andthe quarrel of his two sons Eteocles and Polyneices who are about to go to war over the sovereignty of Thebes. Lacan is taken in particular by the following exchange in the tragedy. The lines come from the drama’s second scene, with Oedipus is in dialogue with his daughter-sister Ismene:

Oed: And did you think the gods would yet deliver me. Ism: The present oracles give me that hope.Oed: What oracles are they?Ism: The people of Thebes shall desire you, for their safety, after your death, and even while you live.Oed: What good can such as I bring any man?Ism: They say it is in you that they must grow to greatness.Oed: Am I made man in the hour when I cease to be? (ref#)

Lacan charges this last line in particular with decisive significance for his interpretation. In Oedipus at Colonus, Lacancomments:

Oedipus says the following sentence: “Is it now that I am nothing, that I am made to be a man?” This is the end of Oedipus’ psychoanalysis—Oedipus’ psychoanalysis ends only at Colonus … this is the essential moment that gives meaningto his history. (SII, 250)

8

It must be said that this is a strong reading of both this moment, and of the central play in Sophocles’ Theban trilogy as a whole. With that said, again the framing of the drama supports the notion that some, very great significance attendsthe final, symbolic action of Oedipus’ tragic existence. Already at the beginning of Oedipus at Colonus, the oracles reportthat the repentant exile has attained a kind of favoured status with the gods, through his great unwitting transgressions. At the tragedy’s end, after he has called down a dreadful curse on his brother-sons Polyneices and Eteocles, Oedipus is hailed by a voice of the gods to now descend to Hades, amidst thunder and lightning. Then Oedipus vanishes in some unspeakable fashion, before the awe-struck gaze of King Theseus—in what seems to have been a remarkably open description of the final epopteia at Eleusis. The site of this mystery, the exile has enjoined Theseus in advance, will from thenceforth become hallowed ground. For Lacan, what the tragic poet is underscoring by describing Oedipus’ sacred status in his final moments—“touch me not!”, Oedipus tells hiscompanions as he leads them to the site of his end—is the veryreal ethical splendour that attends Oedipus’ absolute acceptance of his own, singular, destiny. So there is a second register of this final denouement highlighted by Lacan in his reading of Oedipus at Colonus. This is that the symbolic assumption of his fate, and of the oracular signifiers that have foretold it, comes at the very moment that Oedipus actively assumes his own death: “there is then nothing left for me to tell / but my desire, then the tale is ended.” (*line 105) As we will see, Lacan is going to argue that Sophoclean tragedy here gives poetic form to nothing other than what Freud aimed at in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and his other last writings in the uncanny notion of the death drive: “You will have to read Oedipus at Colonus. You will see that the last word of man’s relation to this discourse which he does not know is—death.” (SII, 245) For Lacan, that is—in what is the closest, unmistakable proximity between his discourse and

9

that of the young Heidegger—the full symbolic assumption of one’s singular fate at which psychoanalysis aims necessarily involves this conscious assumption of one’s “being-towards-death”. Lacan’s reading of Antigone five years later will underscore, also, that it is such an assumption that gives thetragic hero her undeniable sublimity, éclat, or fascination:

Freud’s theory may appear … to account for everything, including what relates to death, in the framework of a closed libidinal economy, regulated by the pleasure principle and by the return to equilibrium … The meaning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that this explanation is insufficient …. What Freud teaches us … is that the last word of life, when life has been dispossessed of speech, can only be this ultimate curse which finds expression atthe end of Oedipus at Colonus. Life does not want to heal … What is, moreover, the significance of the healing, of the cure, if not the realisation, by the subject, of a speech which comes from elsewhere, and by which he is traversed? (SII 271-2)

As we will see, in a sense everything is already present in this early, comparatively unremarked, Lacanian analysis of Oedipus at Colonus of what will be unfolded more fully in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. First, as Felman nicely suggests, Lacan is himself as it were going to “Colonus”, in the sense of avowing as his own the last Freud’s most scandalous teaching disowned by nearly all of his epigones: the death drive. Most of Freud’s legatees disavowed Freud’s last texts,just as if we were to stop reading Sophocles’ Theban plays at Oedipus Rex. Second, in avowing the death drive as at the heart of what is at stake in the ends of psychoanalysis, Lacan is signalling its radical distance—noted amongst others by Jonathan Lear (*)—from anything the classical philosophical orbit of theoria could imagine:

10

The Freudian experience starts out with a notion which isexactly contrary to the theoretical perspective. It starts out by positing a universe of desire …/ In the classical, theoretical perspective, there is between subject and object a co-fitting, a co-gnisance … It is analtogether different register of relations that the Freudian experience is inscribed. Desire is a relation of a being to a lack … The libido is the name of what animates the fundamental conflict at the heart of human action…insofar as the libido creates the different stagesof the object [oral, anal, etc.], no object would ever again be it [of no object can desire ever say: that’s it] … Desire, a function central to the whole of human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. (SII, 260-262)

Thirdly, Lacan is pitching a claim that if there is a specificethics to psychoanalysis, or something specific that it can contribute to the history of Western ethical ideas, it will concern how subjects comport themselves towards this uncanny desire for death or death drive* that psychoanalysis uncovers.Of this desire which will be at the heart of psychoanalytic ethics, Lacan suggests, the philosophical tradition has wantedto know next to nothing, if it has not overlooked it entirely:

This allows me to say that, up until Freud, every enquiryconcerning the human libidinal economy was more or less based on a moral, ethical preoccupation—in the sense thatit was less a matter of studying than of minimising and disciplining desire. (SV, at Kesel 48)

Psychoanalysis has had to seek out this troubling truth of human desire in the Western literary heritage. This is the central reason why Lacan follows Freud in handing the laurel to the poets in the ancient Platonic quarrel. What this all can mean, and how propitious its ethical prospects are, is what we need to assess now.

11

II. From Aristotle to the Freudian Thing

Outside of Freud, Aristotle is the individual thinker Lacan refers to most in the seminars. For Lacan as for the medievals, it is just to call Aristotle simply “the philosopher”. For Lacan, this is because his physics and his cosmology, alongside Ptolemies’ spherocentric astronomy, form the inescapable horizon of premodern philosophical thought, until the advent of the modern scientific revolution. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, for Lacan in Seminar VII, has a similar foundational status in the field of ethical and moral inquiry. It is, he notes, “properly speaking the first book to be organised around the problem of an ethics.” (SVII 36) Aristotle’s ethics lies at the basis of all ethical systems which maintain that the aim of the good life and of good action is the happiness of the individual. This remains in some sense an unsurpassable position, Lacan observes. Lacan sees it also operating in alternative modes of psychoanalysis to hid own, which seek to satisfy the demand for happiness which the analysand inescapably directs towards the analyst. (cf. end SVII*) However, if Aristotle is in this way a foundational reference in Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis, it is because Lacan is going to set his own ethics up from the startin contrast to the Stagiran’s:

If one believes that the whole of Aristotle’s morality has not lost its relevance for moral theory, then one canmeasure from that fact how subversive our experience is, since it serves to render this theory surprising, primitive, paradoxical, and in truth, incomprehensible. (SVII, 5)

In particular, Lacan draws our attention to the passages in NE VII (chapter 5), where Aristotle indicates a class of experiences which are “brutish” (theriotes). These include the mad desire of a woman to rip open the bellies of pregnant

12

mothers-to-be, and “certain savage tribes around the Black Sea, some of whom are said to have a taste for raw meat and others for human flesh”. Also of this kind for Aristotle are perverse forms of behaviour, like male homosexuality, which are acquired by habits, including in “those who have been victimised since childhood.”(NE VII.5 1142b15-25; 31-35) In farthest contrast to psychoanalysis, Aristotle is concerned toexclude these abhorrent forms of desire from the field of ethical consideration. For him, they are not “human,” yet ethics concerns the human good. “Where a certain category of desires involved,” Lacan remarks:

… there is, in effect, no ethical problem for Aristotle. Yet, these very desires are nothing less than those notions that are situated at the forefront of our [psychoanalytic] experience. A whole large field of whatconstitutes for us the sphere of sexual desires is simpleclosed by Aristotle in the realm of the monstrous anomalies … What happens at this level has nothing to do with moral evaluation. (SVII, 5)

With this said, the other side of Lacan’s engagement with Aristotle in the first sessions of Seminar VII is an extended attempt to contrast the Philosopher’s ethical standpoint with that introduced by Freud. And here, perhaps surprisingly, Lacan argues that—in contrast to Bentham, who openly maintained that ethics was grounded in consciously created “fictions” (*)—Freud’s position has at least one formal feature in common with Aristotle. This is the claim that ethics must rest upon the foundation of some conception of nature or reality, including the reality of human desire and the drives. In the history of Lacan’s seminars, as de Kesel and others have noted, this is a significant moment. It is going to lead to the introduction into Lacan’s thought of a more and more elaborated and central discourse concerning “theReal.” The Real is in Lacan’s thought the third register of human experience in contrast to the imaginary and the symbolic

13

orders which had hitherto occupied him. As Lacan comments to his audience:

More than once at the time when I was discussing the symbolic and the imaginary and their reciprocal interaction, some of you wondered what after all was the “real”. Well, as odd as it may seem to that superficial opinion which assumes any inquiry into ethics must concern the field of the ideal, if not of the unreal. I,on the contrary, will proceed from the other direction, by going deeply into the notion of the real. Insofar as Freud’s position constitutes progress here, the question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real. To appreciate this, one has to look at what occurred in the interval between Aristotle and Freud. (SVII, 11)

For Lacan, in line with overwhelming exegetical consensus, Aristotle’s ethics is rooted in his hylomorphic philosophy of nature (or physis). According to this position, human beings like all animals are moved by their innate potentials (dunameis) to pursue their own happiness or eudaimonia, conceived as the fullest actualisation (energeia) of these capacities. Just as for Aristotelian physics a stone always falls downwards towards the centre of the earth and fire ascends towards the heavens, since that is their natural places in the kosmos, so too human potentials inescapably pointus towards a highest telos (end or purpose) for men: what the medievals would later, adapting Aristotle for Christian ends, call the summum bonum. Pleasure in kalon (noble or beautiful) actions, far from being of no moral significance, is as an indicator that we are on the right path towards this final goal. However, with the advent of the modern physical sciences, Lacan like Strauss, Alisdair Macintyre, and many others, argues that everything changed, in terms of our understanding of the natural world. “In the interval between Aristotle and Freud, we have experienced a complete reversal

14

of point of view.” (SVII, 64) Lacan—who avows his debt here to Alexandre Koyre—has in mind in particular, first, the astronomical revolution represented primarily by Kepler’s discovery that the planets do not move in circular orbits; second, the Gallilean positing of inertial motion and the universal force of gravity; and third, the far-reaching mathematisation of physics achieved by Newton. The combined effect of these discoveries was to discredit the notion of final causes in nature, and the meaningfulness of talk concerning a human telos rooted in our particular place in the universe. Freudian metapsychology was of course to be framed in the terms of the 19th century biological and psychophysical sciences. Sigmund Freud cut his scientific teeth in the neurological labs of Meynert and Brucke. He was profoundly influenced by the psychophysical theories of Helmholz and Fechner. These thinkers inherited the radical break with Aristotelian natural premises achieved in the previous three centuries. For them, the animating principle of life was no longer conceived in the terms of a teleologically unfolding physis. Living organisms, as against inorganic objects, are justthose parts of the universe which respond to stimuli. The “energy” that animates these responses, in turn, is not a force inwardly or intrinsically directed towards the actualisation of the organism’s innate potentials. Rather, itis an indifferent source of stimulation which, if it passes certain levels, threatens to be damaging to the organism. Theorganism thus sustains itself, not through the unfolding of its own inner dynameis, but by keeping this indifferent stimuli, if not wholly at bay, then below a threshold beyond which pain and finally extinction will ensue. (cf. de Kesel 67)

Freud’s brave new attempt from the mid-1890s to rethink the human psyche on the basis of analysand’s clinical testimony concerning their own symptoms and the “bestial” drives that underlay them would of course proceed by adapting these

15

biological presuppositions of his scientific time. In Freud’searly works, the pleasure principle which is held to govern the workings of the psyche from its earliest inception is a direct adaptation of the stimulus-reaction model. There is only the highly important proviso that the aim of this principle is the pleasure the organism attains by evacuating excess energy, by gratifying some desire or avoiding an external source of pain. Even the pleasure principle’s aim isnot, first of all, the organism’s self-preservation—a perspective which will be radicalised when Freud comes to the death drive. Indeed, the biological paradigm Freud adapts in these earliest works, notably the 1895 Entwurf which occupies Lacan’s attention in the early sessions of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis already points to the last Freud’s chthonic-sounding postulation of a “death drive” in the human psyche, if not in nature herself. The pleasure principle of the earlywork aimed to keep stimuli at as low a level as possible. This explains why Freud would at times talk of a “constancy principle.” In the psychophysical terms of Beyond Good and Evil of1927, the death drive is an inertia principle. It as at were simply takes the work of the pleasure principle to its final goal, the complete removal of all stimulus from the organism, at the cost of the organism’s perishing.

Where then does reality or what Lacan will, differently, call the Real fit into the Freudian picture? And how will it bear upon any attempt to rethink an ethics, which will remain consistent with modern, post-Newtonian understandings of nature? With typical bravura, Lacan asserts that Freud’s seemingly wholly disenchanted, value-free efforts in the Entwufto construct a model of how a psyche, governed only by its pleasure principle can come to relate to reality concern “ethics properly speaking,” even more than psychology. If we reread the text, he promises:

… you will see that beneath a manner that is cool, abstract, scholastic, complex and arid, once can sense a

16

lived experience and that this experience is at bottom moral in kind. (SVII, 38)

We begin to see the substance behind the Lacanian provocation when we recall how for the young Freud, as Lacan notes, external reality first takes on shape for the infant psyche onthe basis of “negative” experiences of pain or disappointment.The human psyche is initially indifferent to external, physical and social reality, Freud maintains. If its Not de lebens (natural needs like hunger and thirst) could be continually satisfied by its capacity to hallucinate satisfiers for these needs on the basis of its memories of previous satisfactions, it would never even be motivated to develop what Freud terms the “reality-principle” which will govern the individual’s later relations with the external world. The intimate relation the child has with its first others, in the long period of its near-complete dependency on the mother and other providers, approximates to such a primitive pleasure state. However, the child’s needs are physiologically grounded, and demand external objects. The psyche is embodied and subject to harm from impacts with external objects. And the parents are not omnipotent, permanently capable of meeting the child’s every need more or less instantaneously, at the mere sound of a cry. It follows that when the child experiences some needs for which they cannot hallucinate satisfying objects, it is compelled—at riskof pain and over-stimulation—to develop the means of engaging with the external world or “reality testing”. The means are principally conscious attention, motility, the ability to withstand the heightened tension associated with dissatisfaction, language, and a memory for which different external objects have in the past been sources of pleasure andpain.

It is above all the role of memory, which he closely aligns with the reality of language, that Lacan is going to emphasisein Seminar VII and elsewhere. In the background, Lacan has

17

Freud’s topological model of the psyche as a kind of multi-layered mnemic system developed in Chapter 7 of the Traumdeutung (Interpretation of Dreams). The psyche’s mnemic system holds the memory traces of all the individual’s previous experiences of pleasures and pains. In Seminar VII, Lacan drawsour attention to Freud’s surprising stipulation as early as the Entwurf that the unconscious (Bws) mnemic system—as opposed to what will later be designated the preconscious, rational memory— lies “between perception and consciousness”, as if (Lacan says) “between hand and glove”. . As Lacan reflects, ifFreud is right:

What are we led to articulate the apparatus of perceptiononto? Onto reality, of course. Yet, if we follow Freud’s hypothesis, on what theoretically is the control of the pleasure principle exercised? Precisely on perception, and it is here that one finds the originalityof his contribution. (SVII, 31)

The originality is to suggest that for the psyche to become conscious of even its most basic external perceptions, these perceptions must pass by way of the psyche’s store of unconscious memories. Freud’s thought is that they are there “scanned,” or compared to the psyche’s previous experiences. In particular, the new perception will—as Lacan presents things—be as it were “judged” against the individual’s mnemic traces of previous experiences of pleasure and pain. On this model, then, the decisive adequatio involved in psychic life is not first of all the famous correspondence of ideas or perceptions and things. It is the adequatio, for which all experiences are tested, of new perceptions with the memory representations of previous pleasurable discharges of stimuli.If the objects or state of affairs presently experienced adequate with such a previous experience of pleasure, the psyche experiences these as “good.” Here, Lacan claims, lies the basis of “why ethical thinkers have at all times not been

18

able to avoid trying to equate these two terms … pleasure and the good.” (SVII, 33-34*)

One part of understanding what Lacan makes of all this is to say that Lacan is going to argue that the unconscious mnemic traces of the Entwurf and Traumdeutung are “signifiers.” That is, they are meaningfully linguistic or “discursive”, according to Lacan’s para-structuralist understanding of the nature of language. In the unconscious mind, each thus finds its place in, or is catagorized, in relation to other such traces. At the unconscious level, however, the mode of categorisation is that of the Freudian primary process: namely, according to the apparently irrational mechanisms of condensation and displacement, which Lacan associates respectively with metaphor and metonymy. The same experience on this model, directly indebted to Freud’s Interpretation of DreamsChapter 7, can and will be differently “recorded” by the mind.On the conscious level of the “secondary processes”, it will be categorised rationally according to date, place, and natural kind, at least insofar as the subject’s linguistic community divides such kinds (for instance, it is a snake, versus a lizard, or a dog …). At the unconscious level, the experienced snake may be spontaneously associated with a host of the individual’s previous experiences of snakes, but objects which physically resemble it; symbolic resonances (forinstance, Edenic) from the individuals’ symbolic order; and even according to the contingencies of the signifier “snake” in the particular natural language: “snake-rake/cake/snail/make …” For Lacan, cognisant of the history of modern philosophy, we also note, this psychic work of conscious and unconscious categorization is going to be equated with a more adequate model of what the post-Kantian tradition identifies as the necessary conceptual or historical“mediation” of all subjective experiences of the world..In oneof Lacan’s own often highly idealistic-sounding formulations from Seminar VII:

19

… after all, we know nothing else except this discourse. That which emerges in the Bewusstsein [consciousness] is Wahrnehnung, the perception of the discourse, and nothing else. (SVII 62)

But Lacan, following Freud, is going to stress how “precarious” the human psyche’s relation to external reality initially is. For on the Freudian model, since the psyche is governed by the pleasure principle, it would rather not at allhave to “judge” between objects which yield pleasure and thosewhich do not. If it is drawn to develop the capacity of linguistic judgment, and of the “reality principle” more widely which allows it to shape its thought and action in response to the external world, this is primarily as a kind of“defence” against excessive dissatisfaction:

The profound ambiguity of this approach to the real demanded by man is first inscribed in terms of defence—a defence that already exists even before the conditions ofrepression as such are formulated. (SVII, 31)

Indeed, Freud makes a series of intriguing remarks which situate his claims in relation to linguistic judgment in the short, intriguing essay “On Negation (Verneinung)”. These remarks are crucial for establishing Lacan’s claim to a linguistic reconception of the meaning of Freud. For the Freud of this essay, the linguistic capacity of saying that “this is not thus and so” vital to “reality-testing” is predicated on a founding experience of a “cut” or “break” in the subject’s relations with its goods:

… it is evident that a precondition for the setting up ofreality testing is that objects shall have been lost which once brought real satisfaction. (Freud SE19, 238)

This notion of a fundamental cut or break with the subject’s first means of satisfaction, as we have indicated, is at the fundamental heart of Lacan’s modernist understanding of the

20

human condition. For Lacan, it represents nothing less than the founding metapsychological presupposition for the fundamental fissure between words and things which makes possible the human institution of language as a differential order of signifiers “unmotivated” by the real, as Saussure hadproposed. In Seminar VII, it is not primarily “On Negation” thatis his foil for developing his conception of what reality or “the Real” can amount to, following Freud. It is typically, apreviously little-remarked passage from the Entwurf in which Freud presents the enigmatic notion of das Ding, to which Freud in fact never returns in his entire oeuvre. For Lacan, this passage indicates the “substratum” (le substrat) of the reality principle as Freud articulates it, in the same way as the psyche’s first experience of the “good” of satisfaction underlies the pleasure principle. Here is the passage from the Entwurf, in which Freud is considering how a baby is drawn to test or judge its external perceptions:

Let us suppose that the object which furnishes the perception resembles the subject—a fellow human being [Nebenmensch]. If so, the [child’s] theoretical interest [in it] is also explained by the fact that an object like this was simultaneously [the child’s] first satisfying object and further his first hostile object, as well as his sole helping power. For this reason, it is in relation to a fellow human-being that a human being learns to cognise. Then the perceptual complexes proceeding from this fellow human being will in part be new and non-comparable—his features, for instance, in the visual sphere; but other visual perceptions—e.g. those ofmovements of his hands—will coincide in the subject with memories of quite similar visual impressions of his own, of his own body, which are associated with memories of movements experienced by himself. Thus the complex of thehuman being falls apart into two components, of’ which one makes an impression by its constant structure and

21

stays together as a thing [als Din beisammenbleibt], while the other can be understood [verstahen] by the activity of memory—that is, can be traced back to information from [the subject’s] own body. This dissection of a perceptual complex is described as cognising it; it involvesa judgment and when this last aim has been attained it comes to an end. (*; SVII 51-2)

At least three points emerge from this pregnant passage, whichare decisive for understanding Lacan’s larger position on the structure of the psyche, and the ethics of psychoanalysis. First, Freud here is clear that the child’s thinking develops in closest conjunction with its relations to, and attempt to comprehend, its first Other(s)—usually in Western and most other cultures, the mother. We have seen this above, in the theory of the mirror stage and the advent of imaginary desire,rooted in the child’s first identifications with its siblings and providers. The kind of anthropomorphism Freud and other materialist critics have posited in the human religious or “god-forming instinct” (Nietzsche) has for Lacan its deepest root here. It is not simply that when we imagine non-human nature as the bearer of purposes and intentions that we wishfully misrepresent the real truth of the world. We only ever came to understand this world through trying to interpretthe speech and actions of our first significant Others, on whom we remained wholly dependent to satisfy our Nots der lebens in the decisive first years of life. This primary place of theOther in the subject’s psychic life underlies Lacan’s famous, gnomic formula that the unconscious is the “discourse of the Other. Its mnemic signifiers and their connections or “facilitations” are the psychic precipitates of the subjects’ experiences of pleasure and pain, at the hands of the Other.

This brings us to the second point Lacan draws from Freud’s reflection on the Nebenmensh and das Ding, the Thing. Das Ding is importantly something “beyond” or outside what the subject’s unconscious is able to represent. This is why Lacan is going

22

to call it Real with a capital R, as against the “reality” thesubject is able to symbolically register and so “come to termswith.” However, for all that, the Real Thing emerges out of Freud’s remarkable, linguistic framing of the child’s early experience, to which Lacan was so distinctly attuned in framing his own theory of the place of the symbolic order in shaping human experience. In order to comprehend the Other, Freud tells us, the child comes from early on to make judgments (urteils) concerning what it perceives. The urteils primarily operate, Freud here like contemporary neoKantians still agreed, by dividing up predicates, corresponding to features of objects, from linguistic subjects, aiming at the things themselves. But what Freud brings to this is the claimthat the process of forming judgments emerges out of a “dissection of the perceptual complex” In this “dissection,”the predicates the child is able to identify in any new perception are drawn from its stock of memories of previous experiences: what the Entwurf situates as the mnemic traces of the unconscious psi-system, ordered according to the pleasure principle. There is, however, something of the object itself “which makes an impression by its constant structure and staystogether as a thing [als Din beisammenbleibt], and which eludes any adequation with the child’’s previous memories. In terms of the content of this thing which remains constant behind its apparent alterations, the “thing” escapes predication and remains in this way “alien”. Certain it is that this is what Lacan reads Freud as indicating here:

The Ding is the element that is initially isolated by the subject in his experience of the Nebenmensch as being by its very nature alien, Fremde. (SVII, 52)

We will see below when we come to Lacan’s Antigone the importance of this thought concerning the Thing or the Other as “in itself” eluding predication or discursive categorisation. It plays a decisive role in Lacan’s conception of what it is that Antigone is defending in

23

Polyneices, although he has died a traitor against his own city. The Thing about the Neighbor or Nebenmensch, Lacan claims, is none other than the “unforgettable”, “prehistoric Other” Freud posits in the letter to Fliess of 6 December 1896. Hysterical attacks always involve the satisfaction of some repressed desire, Freud claims here as in his other earlywritings on hysteria. However, here he adds that their performance is always directed at a singular other person in the individual’s early life, “who is never equalled later,” and who is positioned as uniquely able to deliver the act’s unconscious significance. (Freud 1985, 213)

The third thing Lacan draws from Freud’s positing of das Ding inthe Entwurf then concerns its ethical significance. Ethics, we have seen Lacan agreeing with Aristotle, concerns the subject’s relations with the real of nature. But then, reality for the subject always emerges along the path of the disappointments of the pleasure principle; according to Freud.And for Lacan, what Freud’s Entwurf shows is that the field of unconscious mnemic traces, “as an unconscious space is to be considered as subject to the pleasure principle” (SVII 33). Itfollows that the way das Ding is a constant, enigmatic dimensionof the Other “beyond” what the subject is able to register in these mnemic traces is of the highest ethical significance. The Thing represents, if you like, not a relative disappointment of the subject’s primitive aspiration to immediate pleasure, capable of engendering new psychic “facilitations” and new forms of adaptive behaviour. It is anabsolute disappointment of what the psyche’s “judgment apparatus” is capable of assimilating, insofar as it is governed by the pleasure principle. Try as the subject might,she will be unable to ever adequately experience or remember das Ding. It represents something in this way “more real” for her than the things and people the subject will consciously encounter in the course of her life.

24

We recalled above how the later Freud posited the death drive as a radicalisation of the pleasure principle’s tendency to keep the level of somatic stimulation at an acceptably low level. The Freudian death drive goes beyond the pleasure principle as an innate, blind impulse to release all stimulation from the organism, at the price of the organism’s own dissolution. Lacan’s founding move in Seminar VII is to bringtogether the death drive with Freud’s thought concerning das Ding. The death drive for Lacan operates as an unconscious impulse of the subject to try, impossibly, to return to and signify the Thing. The direct satisfaction of the drive is impossible, insofar as the Thing by its nature eludes such symbolisation. But for Lacan, despite the pleasure principle,the death drive want to “adequate” with this unsymbolisable, Real Other which undergirds what Lacan calls an original “division of the experience of reality.” Every perception of the subject’s, in fact, will unconsciously “evoke the good that das Ding brings with it”(SVII71)—although only always to confirm again that “this is not That [das Ding]!”, as Lacan repeats. (*) The death drive in this sense corresponds to the subject’s fundamental truth, beyond the conscious and unconscious “lies” by which we would conceal it (SVII 73):

That’s what Freud indicates [in “On Negation”] when he says that “the first and most immediate goal of the test of reality is not t find in a real perception an object which corresponds to the one which the subject representsto himself at this moment, but to find it again, to confirm it is still present in reality.’ (SVII, 52)

And so, finally, we come to the ground of Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis, and the specific claim it can contribute to the discourse of Western ethics. The Thing as it were comes to take the place in Lacan’s renovated Freudian discourse, where once the sovereign good of Aristotelian philosophy was. In a monumental claim, Lacan says:

25

Well now, the step taken by Freud at the level of the pleasure principle is to show us that there is no Sovereign Good—that the Sovereign Good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good. Such isthe foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud. (SVII 70)

There is for Lacan then one kind of telic centre left for an ethical thought which would accept in full a disenchanted ontology consistent with modern natural scientific premises. This centre is das Ding, the forbidden first object of the deathdrive. In Lacan’s thought after 1959, this Thing takes the place of the nirvanic evacuation of stimuli the last Freud hadpositioned beyond the pleasure principle. As the highest goodoperates to orient and attract the human being by our nature in Aristotle, so Lacan will talk of a kind of “gravitational” weight exerted by das Ding on the subject, despite their most profound resistances (SVII 61-62, 73), by this Thing. The physical or modern astronomical metaphor Lacan uses here is not idle. For Lacan, the death drive is radically other to what classical, philosophical—as against poetic—thought could have conceived. Lacan will instead associate it with the Galilean break in physics inaugurated by the law of inertia, positing motion as a state (versus the Aristotelian theory forwhich sine causa non est effectus) and overturning the notion that each thing has a “natural” place in the furniture of the world, to which it tends of itself to return. The Freudian positing of the death drive, Lacan claims, “is tied to history… a question of the here and now, not ad aeternum”, and in particular to the advent of modern mathematical physics, “as engendered by the omnipresence of the signifier.” (SVI 236) A psychoanalytic ethics will aim to direct the subject to the truth of their own desire, including this enigmatic death drive. (cf. SVII 73) This—and not any facile libertarianism, about which Lacan is directly glib—is the force of Lacan’s

26

famous claim that the imperative of psychoanalytic ethics is that the subject not cede on her own desire (SVII*); and that the only thing that the subject can be guilty of, is to have so ceded on her desire (SVII*).

However, in contrast to the Aristotelian model, it has to be said that it is far from clear that the individual subject’s approach to the Thing, the first lost object that supports thedeath drive as Lacan reconfigures it, is a beneficent thing. “The subject cannot stand the extreme good which das Ding may bring him …”, Lacan is clear, any more than the Freudian organism can withstand the nirvanic dissolution of all tensionat which its death drive nevertheless aims. (SVII 73) It is not clear in fact that a subject’s being-true to das Ding, beyond the goods represented to her as the fruits of the pleasure principle, will not involve a radical evil for the subject, the aphanisis or dissolution of his identity. As Lacan reflects:

What is the new figure that Freud gave us in the opposition reality principle/ pleasure principle? It is without a doubt a problematic figure. Freud doesn’t for a moment consider identifying adequacy to reality with a specific good. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he tells us that civilization or culture certainly asks too much of the subject. If there is indeed something that can be called his good or his happiness, there is nothing to be expected in that regard from the microcosm (i.e. from himself) nor moreover from the macrocosm. (SVII, 34)

We are beginning then to see the full force of our claim in the Introduction that Lacan’s is at a deep level a fundamentally modern position by Straussian lights, if we define “modern” by an unflinching probity that can countenanceno beneficent illusions to conceal a final truth which may be deeply apolitic*. (deK 100*) We need then now to understand how Lacan’s psychoanalytic ethics addresses this fundamental

27

ambivalence attending identifying the ethical demand with the imperative to be true to one’s desire, when this desire is at the same time rooted in the death drive and the traumatic first encounter with das Ding. In order to do this, and to see just how deep this ambivalence runs, we turn first to Lacan’s famous reflections in Seminar VII and his notoriously esoteric ecrit “Kant with Sade” on Immanuel Kant, as the greatest, distinctly modern moral philosopher.

III The Thing and Its Vicissitudes, From Kant to Sade

Lacan’s engagement with Kant begins from an appreciation of the historic importance of the philosopher of Konigsberg’s attempt to refound ethical discourse, outside of the Aristotelian orbit. (SVII 72) Lacan has in mind above all The Critique of Practical Reason, and Kant’s explicit attempt there to deny that human beings have direct access to a highest good orSummum Bonum which could shape their ethics. For Lacan as for someone like Alisdair Macinytre, Kant was responding to the real crisis for ethical thinking represented by the post-Galilean undermining of Aristotelian physics, upon whose conception of nature all classical and then medieval, eudaimonistic ethics had turned. The very strain of having to revise the very foundations of ethics, given the undoubted successes of the new physics, explain the highly striking features of Kant’s moral theory—notably the attempt to conceive of the demands of morality as wholly beyond the appeal to forms of pleasure and happiness natural for such animals as we are:

Kant’s ethics appears at the moment when the disorientingeffect of Newtonian physics is felt, a physics which has reached a point of independence relative to das Ding, to the human Ding [i.e. in Aristotle, the highest flourishing]. Itwas Newtonian physics that forced Kant to revise radically the function of reason in its pure

28

[theoretical] form. And it is also in connection with the questions raised by science that a form of morality has come to engage us; it is a morality whose precise structure could not have been perceived until then—one that detaches itself purposefully from all reference to any object of affection, from all reference to what Kant called the pathologisches Objekt, a pathological object, whichsimply means the object of any passion whatsoever. No Wohl, whether it be our own or that of our neighbour, must enter into the finality of moral action. (SVII 76)

What takes the place of Aristotle’s phronesis, which would weigha concern for what is practically possible in any given situation given the subject’s larger orientation towards flourishing, is Kant’s famous categorical imperative. This isan imperative rooted neither in the natural inclinations of its subject, nor any “Ding an sich”—our epistemic access to whichthe first Critique of Pure Reason has cast into systematic doubt, and which the second Critique can only restore under the ambivalent sign of being “postulates of practical reason.” (*;cf. de Kesel pp. 111-112) Nor will Kant’s famous moral Law bend to being shaped by the passing demands of a moment. It is rather a Law which preserves a right to radically overturn all such considerations or inclinations—as in Kant’s famous claim that, when it comes to behaving according to one’s duty,“you can, because you must”:

… the breakthrough is achieved by Kant when he posits that the moral imperative is not concerned with what may or may not be done. To the extent that it imposes the necessity of a practical reason, obligation affirms an unconditional ‘Thou Shalt’. (SVII 315)

Indeed, Lacan notes in a way which resonates particularly for us, in light of Strauss’ critique of the moderns’ alleged attempt to deny the truths of natural right, Lacan stresses how

29

Kant’s ethics does not stop short of effectively demanding a, perhaps impossible, reform of nature to meet its demands:

Let us be clear about this: when we reflect on the maxim that guides our action, Kant is inviting us to consider it for an instant as the law of nature in which we are called upon to live […] note that he affirms the law of nature, not of society. (SVII 77)

Lacan, like many others, is struck by the kind of extremism ofKant’s attempt here, when viewed against the background eitherof Aristotelian ethics, or the way we tend more informally to think of moral experience:

His radicalism even leads to the paradox that in the lastanalysis, the gute Wille, good, will, is posited as distinctfrom any beneficial action … one must have submitted oneself to the test of reading this text in order to measure [its] extreme, almost insane character … (SVII 77)

Here as elsewhere, in the background of Lacan’s engagements with Kant in Seminar VII and elsewhere, is Freud’s own decisive recourse to Kant’s practical philosophy in formulating the famous later metapsychology. (cf. SVII 7) In this later theory, the superego is added to ego and id as the internal agency of social Law. It originates, Freud argues, in the resolution of the child’s Oedipus complex, at which point we know the child’s gendered identity is also held by Freud to bestabilised, and it has been made to forego its aggressive, rivalrous wishes towards either parent. Where such a rivalrous identification was, the superego comes to be: “[a]s the child was once under the compulsion of its parents,” “The Ego and the Id” explains, “so the child’s ego now submits to the categorical imperative of the superego.”1 So too for Lacan, Kant is decisive as a theorist who elevates the 1 F on cat imperative: S.E. 4, p.68 ;S.E. 13, pp.xiv & 22. ;S.E. 19, p.167 ;S.E. 22, pp.61 & 163

30

internal role of Law in the history of ethics, and in his own attempt to locate a conceptual genealogy for the ethics of psychoanalysis. It is no surprise that the other key reference in Seminar VII to highlight this decisive function of the Law comes from revealed religion. It is the Mosaic Decalogue, whose commandments Lacan argues represent a kind ofminimal civilizational precondition aimed at keeping das Ding atbay, and thus undergirding even the achievement of language:

… [they] are tied in the deepest of ways to that which regulates the distance between the subject and das Ding—insofar as that distance is precisely the condition of speech, insofar as the ten commandments are the conditions of the existence of speech as such. (SVII, 69)

This emphasis on the necessity of the Law is where Lacan partscompany decisively with many of the post-structuralist thinkers whom elements of his teaching influenced. Lacan is not politically, or more widely, a utopian or messianic thinker. Nor does he think psychoanalysis leads of necessity towards any kind of libertarian position, on the model being articulated at around the same time by Herbert Marcuse. Indeed, Lacan underlines in the opening session of Seminar VII how its clinical testimony to the malaises of modern subjects comes closer to suggesting the opposite:

The naturalist liberation of desire has failed historically. We do not find ourselves in the presence of a man less weighed down with laws and duties than before the great critical experience of so-called libertine thought. If we find ourselves led to consider even in retrospect the experience of that man of pleasure… we will soon see that in truth everything in this moraltheory was to destine it to failure. (SVII 4)

31

However, Lacan follows Freud in seeing in Kant a certain naivety concerning the nature of the Law and its relation to desire, in the construction of his moral theory. For Freud, the stern, categorical nature of Kant’s moral Law are testimony not to its higher rationality. They show its infantile origin, in the child’s identifications with the first bearers of social prohibitions, as it perceives them in the light of its own fledgling understanding:

The superego is in fact just as much a representative of the id as of the outer world. It originated through the introjection into the ego of the first objects of the libidinal impulses in the id, namely the two parents, by which process the relation to them was desexualised … Nowthe superego has retained essential features of the introjected persons: namely their power, their severity, their tendency to watch over and to punish … The superego, the conscience at work in it, can then become harsh, cruel, and inexorable against the ego which is in its charge. The categorical imperative of Kant is thus adirect inheritance of t Oedipus complex. (at Rabate 103)

On Lacan’s reading, the truth here is admitted in a kind of exceptional or symptomatic moment in the construction of his moral theory. According to that theory, the only motive for following the categorical imperative in Kant is supposed to bea sense of duty (achtung) for the Law as such, in its rational dignity*. However, Lacan notes that, in fact, Kant does for all that posit a further motive, exceptional in his system, whereby the purely rational Law affects the subject. Significantly, the motive in question is a species of pain [schmertz]:

In effect, Kant acknowledges after all the existence of one sentiment correlative of the moral law in its purity, and […] it is nothing other than pain itself. I will read you the passage concerned […] ‘Consequently, we can

32

see a priori that the moral law as the determining principleof will, by reason of the fact that it sets itself against our inclinations, must produce a feeling that onecould call pain [Schmertz]. And this is the first and perhaps only case, where we are allowed to determine, by means of a priori concepts, the relationship between a knowledge which comes from practical pure reason, and a feeling of pleasure or pain [zum Gefuhl der Lust oder Unlust]. (SVII, 80)

What Kant is obliquely registering here, despite himself, is the hidden superegoic support for the rational sublimity of law: what Lacan will describe as the peculiar process whereby the Law becomes a support for the Jouissance, or forbidden enjoyment, it apparently is there to oppose. The peculiar Schmertz at play here, caused only by “knowledge of practical pure reason,” from a psychoanalytic perspective gives figure to the subject’s conscious experience of guilt. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud had noted the peculiar phenomenon that very often subjects, like obsessionals, who most scrupulously abide by the letters of the Law, are the most racked by a crippling sense of unconscious guilt. The only possible explanation for this peculiar phenomenon, Freud assesses, is that the very libidinal energy which the Law has prohibited direct satisfaction of, has been “transferred from Jouissance to prohibition.” (SVII 176; Freud*) Every forbidden wish, which for the subject may remain wholly unconscious and abhorrent toits sense of identity, is in this way “inscribed in the book of debts of the Law,” both fueling and demanding internal punishment. (SVII 176) It is as if the superego thus embodied a kind of shortcircuit between Law and Jouissance: a Law saturated with Jouissance, that takes a malevolent enjoymentfrom subjecting the ego to its cruel and ferocious imperatives. In a typically bold interpretive gesture, Lacan contends that this peculiar logic of the superego was anticipated in Saint Paul’s famous critique of the sufficiency

33

of Law in Romans. In a famous passage, Lacan even suggests wecan even rewrite Romans 7:7 in the language of psychoanalysis, replacing “the Thing” for Paul’s sin (hamartia):

Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know the Thing by means of the Law. In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet if the Law had not said: ‘Thou shalt not covet’. But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kind of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. … without the Law, I was once alive. But when the commandment appeared, the Thing flared up, returned once again, I met my death. And for me, the commandment that was supposed to lead to life turned out to lead to death,for the Thing found a way and thanks to the commandment seduced me; through it I came to desire death [m’a fait desir de mort]. (SVII 83)

Lacan’s dark claim that, despite Kant’s own conscious intentions, his refiguring of ethics on the foundation of Law could be the “support” for illicit Jouissance, “so the sin becomes what Saint Paul calls inordinately sinful” is at the heart of Lacan’s famous, seemingly unlikely association of Kant with the Marquis de Sade. (SVII 189) In Seminar VII, Lacan openly proclaims that his making of this association between the famously prudish philosopher and the famously lewd productions of his near-contemporary has a pedagogic function,to generate “a kind of shock or eye-opening effect that seems necessary to me if we are to make progress …” (SVII 78) In “Kant avec Sade”, published some * years later, the provocation is developed in one of Lacan’s densest, most allusive writings. Typically, Lacan wants imnportantly to overturn or place on a different footing all the accepted notions concerning the Marquis de Sade’s place in the prehistory of psychoanalysis:

34

The notion that Sade’s work anticipated Freud’s … is a stupidity repeated in works of literary criticism, the blame for which goes, as usual, to the specialists. / I on the contrary maintain that the Sadean bedroom is of the same stature as those places which the schools of ancient philosophy borrowed their names: Academy, Lyceum,and Stoa … (Lacan 2006: 645/765)

Like Adorno and Horkheimer some years earlier—and perhaps directly influenced by their “Juliette, or the Enlightenment and Morality”—Lacan’s claims concerning Sade’s relations to Kant begins from his observations on the absolute formality ofKant’s moral theory. This formality according to Lacan puts Kant in the uncomfortable position of not being able to rule out the kind of coldness and cruelty advocated by Sade’s heroes, in their pitiless search for sexual Jouissance:

If one eliminates from morality every element of sentiment [as Kant would have us do], if one removes or invalidates all guidance to be found in sentiments, then in the final analysis the Sadian worlds is conceivable—even if it is its inversion, its caricature—as one of thepossible forms of the world governed by a radical ethics,by the Kantian ethics as elaborated in 1788. (SVII 79)

For Lacan like other commentators have noted, there is something peculiarly anerotic about de Sade’s apparent attempt to“say it all” or “show it all”, and to dream up utopian schemesin which his libertines can satisfy their every whim. Indeed,as in the political pamphlet one of his characters proposes inPhilosophy in the Boudoir entitled “Another Effort Frenchman, If YouWould Become Republicans,” Sade paradoxically advocates that the subject’s pathological feelings are what most stand in theway of his fully indulging in absolute freedom of rapine, theft, sodomy, murder, rape, slander … (SVII 79-80) Hence, Lacan argues that we can formulate a Sadean categorical

35

imperative meaningfully worthy of that title as Kant had construed ethics:

If you adopt the opposite of all the laws of the Decalogue, you will end up with the coherent expression of something which in the last instance may be articulated as follows: ‘Let us take as the universal maxim of our conduct the right to enjoy any other person whatsoever as the instrument of our pleasure.’ (SVII 79)

Perhaps more theoretically unusual then in Lacan’s reading than his association of Kant’s moral Law with an almost-Sadeancultivation of sinful Jouissance, is this claim that try as Sademight to conceive of an absolutely liberated experience, his thought ultimately becomes more and more “Kantian” or “legalistic”. What de Sade’s exotic adventures show us, Lacan claims, is that “whoever enters the path of uninhibited Jouissance, in the name of the rejection of the moral law in some form or another, encounters obstacles whose power is revealed to us every day in our [clinical] experience.” (SVII 176-7) The reader can then see the complexity of the imbrications between Law and Jouissance as Lacan is asking us to conceive them in Seminar VII. While on one side, following the Law a la Kantianism becomes a means for the Thing to “flare up” in unconscious guilt; the path of transgression chosen by Sadeobliquely reinstates a new species of superegoic Law. This Law represents in the Sadean conception a kind of Other supposed to enjoy the spectacle of the libertines’ endlessly-repeated outrages, a “Being-Supreme-in-Evil” as Sade’s wicked Saint Fond envisages the Deity in Juliette. His system thus, again paradoxically, puts in place a real transgression of lawthen sets up a law of transgression:

Sade ... stopped at the point where desire and the law became bound up with each other [se noue]. / If something in him lets itself remain tied to the law in order to take the opportunity, mentioned by Saint Paul, to become

36

inordinately sinful, who would cast the first stone? But Sade went no further./ It is not simply that the flesh isweak, as it is for each of us; it is that the spirit is not willing not to be deluded. [Sade’s] apology for crimemerely impels him to an oblique acceptance of the Law. The Supreme Being [as for instance the Nature of Pius VI]is restored in Evil Action [le Maléfice] (Lacan 2006: 667/790).

For Lacan, then, the psychoanalytic imperative to “not cede onone’s desire” has little to do with the Sadean project of an allegedly “natural liberation of desire.” (SVII 3) Sade’s fantasies of infinite, repetitive violations indeed represent for Lacan the expression of a will to be deluded about the truth of desire no less stubborn in Sade as in Kant. The other feature of Sade’s oeuvre that attracts Lacan’s repeated commentary in this connection is indeed the peculiar “supernaturalism” that seems to cling to his allegedly naturalistic revels. On the side of the Sadean agent, there istheir remarkable, unflagging potency, beneath which Lacan senses a much more mundane fear of impotence, and the need to constantly restore the sadists’ flagging eros. On the side of the victim, Lacan notes how, no matter how gross are the violations prosecuted upon them, the Sadean victims are eithersimply replaced by others equally ravishing in their beauty, or themselves miraculously recuperate in order again to tempt the sadist’s exactions. For Lacan, this feature of the Sadeantexts speaks to how we are dealing here with a fantasm, strictly speaking, there to conceal a disavowed truth:

In the typical Sadean scenario, suffering doesn’t lead the victim to the point where is dismembered and destroyed. It seems rather that, in the phantasm, the object of all the torture is to retain the capacity of being an indestructible support ... the object there is no more than the power to support a form of suffering, which is in itself nothing else but the signifier of a

37

limit. Suffering is conceived as a stasis which affirms that which is cannot return to the void from out of whichit emerges. (SVII 261)

Having followed Lacan’s difficult reflections on Kant with Sade, then, we can be tempted to the reflection that psychoanalysis, without hope of relief, “leaves us clinging tothe dialectic” between Law and transgression” discerned by Freud with Saint Paul. (SVII 84) And indeed, Seminar VII seems to point in two directions, after Lacan’s encounter with the two radical aufklarers. Each of these two directions responds to one side of the paradoxical situation Lacan’s notion of the death drive and das Ding places us in. On one hand, honouring the sense in which no direct approach to das Ding is possible ordesirable for human beings, at the cost of their aphanisis, Lacan proposes the necessity that we should “have to explore that which, over the centuries, human beings have succeeded inelaborating that transgresses the Law on the level of the nous,puts them in a relationship to desire which transgresses interdiction, and introduces an erotics which is beyond morality.” (SVII 84 [altered translation’]). In our context, this mention of nous can hardly fail to attract our attention. And indeed, following this thread, Lacan is drawn in Seminar VII to propose what is a general theory of culture around the motif of sublimation: including the attempt to distinguish religion, science, art and morality with a view to their relations with the primal Thing—although notably, philosophy is occluded here. On the other hand, responsive to the particular claims of an ethics of psychoanalytic practice, Lacan tries to articulate a particular ethics of the subject’ssingularity. This ethics of psychoanalysis would respond to the inescapable “gravitational force” of das Ding in shaping individuals’ different lives, beyond both the pleasure principle and anything glimpsed in Kant or Sade. Both of these threads come together in the three culminating sessions

38

of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis on Sophocles’ tragedy of Antigone, the highpoint of the seminar.

It is to these sessions that we now turn.

IV From Kant’s Gallows to the Atē of Antigone: The Tragic Beauty of Ethical Action

We have not yet examined the premier episode in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason that occupies Lacan in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. It is decisive in showing the direction Lacan’s own species ofpost-Kantian psychoanalytic ethics. This is the episode of the man faced with a choice between spending one night with his beloved at the cost of being sent to the gallows, and walking free. He is compared by Kant with a man asked by a tyrant, like the unreformed Hiero, to give false witness against an innocent man, who shall be on the basis of this testimony be killed, or tell the truth at the price of being sent to the gallows by the wicked political ruler. For Kant, the comparison is meant to highlight how the demands of morality operate on a wholly different, higher level than eventhe demands of sexual desire. For Kant tells us that the man in the second case would inescapably feel the force of the moral law, in guilt, if he was to break the categorical imperative against lying—even though by doing this he would save his skin. This is because this moral law would impress upon him its “you can, because you must!”, asking him (in psychoanalytic terms) to go beyond the pleasure principle: to transcend his own personal, pathological interests in the matter for the sake of duty. In contrast, asked to choose between the pleasure of a night of passion and the finality ofdeath, Kant thinks no one could possibly hesitate to forego the pleasure and save their life.

It is fair to say that, coming from a psychoanalytic perspective, Lacan thinks of Kant’s moral psychology here as

39

even more naïve than we saw above Lacan takes Kant’s view of Law to be. The clinical testimony of analysands, not to mention the wider human experiences documented in history and literature, reveal that Kant should not have been so complacent in assuming no one would trade death for one night with his Lady. It is worthwhile noting, Lacan comments, “thatone only has to make a conceptual shift and move the night spent with the lady from the category of pleasure to that of Jouissance, given that Jouissance implies precisely the acceptance of death … for the example to be ruined.” (SVII 189) We recall that Lacan has argued in the opening moves of Seminar VII that the pleasure principle is undergirded by the subject’s encounter with the unsymbolizable first Other, and the drive to experience again this irreplaceable singularity—even at thecost of the “death” or aphanisis of his symbolic and imaginary identity or principium individuationis. Lacan’s term for the in-this-way-painful enjoyment that attends approaching the forbidden, first Good of the Thing is Jouissance. Such painful Jouissance is a crucial clinical datum, at play in the drive to repeat operative for instance in war returnees recurrent, traumatic dreams of being back at the front. It also operatesin the often much more mundane compulsions to repeat at play in the neuroses, and the perverse fantasies that undergird them, which we saw above Aristotle excludes from ethical consideration as theriotes (brutish):

All of which leads to the conclusion that it is not impossible for a man to sleep with a woman knowing full well that he is to be bumped off on his way out, by the gallows or anything else, […]; it is not impossible that this man coolly accepts such an eventuality on his leaving—for the pleasure of cutting up the lady concernedin small pieces, for example. (SVII 109)

As we will see, Lacan in Seminar VII is awake to how different cultural milieu have invented honorific codes wherein subjects become bound to put aside self-interest in the way Kant’s

40

thought here is interested in. However, beyond Kant, these codes ask for such self-sacrifice not in the name of anything like the universal categorical imperative, but in the service of a singular valorised object, ideal, person or nation. Lacan’s premier example is the courtly love of the troubadours, with its highly stylised elevation of the Dame towhich we will return:

Our philosopher from Konigsberg … doesn’t seem to have considered that under certain conditions of what Freud would call Uberschatzung or overvaluation of the object—and that I will henceforth call object sublimation—under conditions in which the object of a loving passion takes on a certain significance… that under certain conditions of sublimation, then, it is conceivable for such a step to be taken [as described in Kant’s first example]. (SVII107-8)

Our psychoanalyst from Paris’s interest in Kant’s gallows example however is not limited to this worldly, almost swaggering correction of the Kant’s legendarily anerotic naivety. Lacan senses a kind of cheat in the way Kant sets up the comparison between the two situations he wishes us to reflect upon: the man faced with sexual pleasure or death, versus the tyrant’s subject, forced to choose between giving true witness and accepting death, or lying and condemning his comrade. The second case is made more complex than Kant’s setting up of the “double apologue” implies. The reason it isso is that there is not one life, but two at stake here: the subject’s own, and that of his comrade. There is also the matter of whatever symbolic ties of trust or promise bind the subject to this other. If he were to lie in order to save himself, that is, it is not clear that it would be only the categorical imperative (“thou shalt not lie”) the subject would be violating. He would also be violating the practical maxim that one should defend one’s friends against vicious tyrants, and that one should not betray one’s beloved, even at

41

the cost of lying on their behalf, when this is unavoidable. Hence, Lacan asks of Kant: “what is at issue here? That I attack another who is my fellow man in that statement of the universal rule, or is it a question of false witness as such?”(SVII 190) To hone what is at stake in the example, for thesereasons, Lacan suggests we change the example:

What if I changed the example? Let’s talk about true witness, about a case of conscience which is raised if I am summoned to inform on my neighbour or my brother for activities which are [truly] prejudicial to the security of the state? That question is of a kind that shifts theemphasis placed on the universal rule. (loc cit.)

In Lacan’s revision, the tyrant’s subject’s choice becomes between bearing true witness against his comrade, which will surely condemn this other who has pursued a criminal desire; or else lying to save the other, breaking the categorical imperative, at the cost of accepting death oneself. The different stakes of the Lacan’s and Kant’s gallows examples can hence be laid out in the following way:

Figure*: Kant’s gallows example

Who is saved(pleasure)

Who is condemned(pain)

The subject tells thetruth, followscategoricalimperative

The other The subject

The subject lies,breaks CI

The subject himself The other, who isinnocent

Figure *b: Lacan’s revised gallows example

Who is saved(pleasure)

Who is condemned(pain)

The subject tells thetruth, follows

The subject himself The other, who isguilty

42

categoricalimperative

The subject lies,breaks CI

The other The subject

There is a lot going on here. And it is just to say that Lacan’s brief elaborations on his thought here are enigmatic even by his, famously esoteric standards. What is decisive interms of Lacan’s larger direction in Seminar VII is that the second, revised example aligns a duty to tell the truth, no matter what, with a recognition that the other’s real desire may be a transgressive desire. How should one proceed in thiscase? Should one “alternatively blow hot and cold,” in order to “spare” the good pleasure of “my fellow man”, at the cost of bearing false witness against the truth of their desire? (SVII 190) Or is there not rather a kind of duty to tell themthe truth, if one can, even despite their own resistances? The reader has perhaps then begun to see that this type of case, and this ethical dilemma, is not foreign to the psychoanalyst. It is their daily bread. And so we can come to understand why Lacan repeatedly claims a kind of, at first seemingly otiose, identity between the pure categorical formality of Kant’s moral law and what Lacan sometimes calls alaw of desire orienting for psychoanalysis. To the extent that Kant’s “Thou shalt” opens up a kind of “voidance [sic.]” of all the subject’s “pathological” attachments to whatever gives him pleasure, so too “we analysts are able to recognise that place as the place occupied by desire. Our experience gives rise to the reversal that locates in the centre an incommensurable measure, an infinite measure that is called desire.” (SVII 316) The highest truth of the subject’s desireconcerns his desire for a Ding from his own prehistory, as far beyond all his imaginary and symbolic identifications as Kant’s moral Law asks us to be, as universal rational subjects. But this Ding, and the way his drive for its

43

recollection will have shaped him, are absolutely singular or idiosyncratic:

The truth that we are seeking for in a concrete experience [i.e. an analytic cure] is not that of a superior law. If the truth that we are seeking is a truth that frees, it is a truth that we will look for in a hiding place in our subject. It is a particular truth … it appears… with the character of an imperious Wunsch. Nothing can be compared to it that allows it to be judgedfrom the outside. … The Wunsch does not have the character of a universal law, but, on the contrary, of the most particular of laws—even if it is universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being. (SVII 24)

It is to this truth that the ethics of psychoanalysis calls the analyst to bear true witness, in Lacan’s reckoning. But on this basis, you can see why he will also be drawn to Sophocles’ Antigone as a source to elaborate what is in play in this ethics. For the eponymous heroin of this great ancient work— as for modern analysts faced with analysands beneath whose guilt and symptoms lies a transgressive Wunsch about which their better self wishes not to know—is presented with the choice to cede on her desire, or else to bear witness to the singular being of her brother Polyneices, even though his transgressive ambition has made him justly an enemy of the Theban polis. “I am not the one who has decreed that Antigone is to be a turning point in the field that interests us, namely ethics,” Lacan observes:

People have been aware of it for a long time. And even those who haven’t realised this are not unaware of the fact that there are scholarly debates on the topic. Is there anyone who doesn’t evoke Antigone whenever there is aquestion of a law that causes conflict in us even though

44

it is acknowledged by the community to be a just law? (SVII 243; cf. 240)

For Lacan as for Hegel, this tragedy represents the most “perfect” of its literary genre. However Lacan explicitly sets his reading of the text against that of Hegel, and all those readings of the tragedy which would seek out in it “a lesson in morality,” if by morality is implied the seeking of general laws to govern equally the conduct of all. (SVII 249) For Lacan, of primary interest in this ancient tragedy—let alone others—is not the “conflict of discourses” between the law of the gods and the family represented by Antigone, versusthat of the city championed by King Creon. (SVII 249) Rightly, Lacan points out that considerable work need to be done to see any kind of reconciliation in the ends Sophocles plays out in Oedipus at Colonus, or to the Antigone. (SVII 250) No,for Lacan, the beauty as well as the interest of the tragedy of Antigone is above all about the eponymous heroin, and how herposition “relates to a criminal good”—at once the desire of her brother, and then her own desire to see his boy properly buried and symbolised by the Other represented by the polis ofThebes. (SVII 240) It is the vision of human being which operates in the tragic heroes that makes ancient tragedy at “the forefront of analytic experience,” as Lacan typically rewrites Freud. (SVII 243) As unlikely as this would have seemed before Lacan had ventured here, the figure of Antigone—like Socrates in Seminar VIII—is going to positioned as an ancient antecedent of the atopic position and praxis of the modernpsychoanalyst.

The singularity of Lacan’s reading of Antigone has then to be remarked from the start. It has attracted a voluminous scholarly critique. Lacan, it has been noted, systematically sidelines the theatrical dimension of Sophocles’ work. He does so explicitly, with a somewhat bawdy, offhand gesture concerning the question of stagecraft. (SVII 252-3) Moreover,critics have questioned with Aristotelian authority the

45

extraordinary focus Lacan lays upon the character of the heroin in the tragedy, rather than the action. Again, while not denying its importance, Lacan claims it can be reduced to a “subsidence, the piling up of different layers of the presence of the hero in time”; or a kind of anamorphotic device, designed to bring the central image of the hero into the right kind of perspective. (SVII 265; 272-3) As Lacan emphasises in the first, orienting session of his three sessions on the drama:

What does one find in Antigone? First of all, one finds Antigone. (SVII 250)

…[the Antigone] focuses on an image that possesses a mystery which up til now has never been articulated, since it forces you to close your eyes the very moment you look at it. Yet that image is at the centre of tragedy, since it is the fascinating image of Antigone herself. We know very well that over and beyond the dialogue, over and beyond the question of family and country, over and above the moralising arguments, it is Antigone herself who fascinates us, Antigone in her unbearable splendour. She has a quality that both attracts us and startles us, in the sense of intimidates us; this terrible, self-willed victim disturbs us. (SVII 247)

With typical modesty, Lacan suggests that his reading is at once unprecedented, and recaptures the true meaning of the Sophoclean, tragic vision of man, “at a time which preceded the ethical formulations of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle”—thus the entire philosophical reception of tragedy. (SVII 285;cf. 284) In passing, we can nevertheless qualify this claim, in the light of what we saw of Strauss’ assessment of tragedy,based in the Platonic texts. Following Plato, Strauss too significantly by-passes the diegetic action of the tragedies, claiming instead that the tragedian is in the business of a

46

kind of sublimation. Strauss calls the effect in play “enchantment”. The tragic poets, for him are in this way not significantly distinguished by Strauss or by Plato from the Homeric epic poets, as we can note. The tragic poets, as muchas Hesiod or Homer, are as it were theogonic demiurges. They elevate images of the gods and heroes to captivate and shape the erotes of the young. In the light of Strauss, we might say that Lacan’s founding orientation on tragedy is Platonic, in subordinating considerations of tragic action as “what spreadsitself out in front so that the image [of the hero] may be produced. (SVII 273) Lacan does, also, accept from Aristotle the famous connection, made in a single line of the extant Poetics, between tragedy and the function of catharsis: eleou kai phobou perainousa ten tōn toioutōn pathematōn katharsin (roughly: to accomplish or purify pity and fear by means of these same affects). (SVII 244; cf. 244-246) For Lacan, too, Antigone “hasas its aim catharsis, the purgation of the pathemata, of the emotions of fear and pity.” (SVII 247) However, Lacan gives this aim or telos a very different figuring than the philosopherin the Poetics.

If Lacan insists so strongly that “he is sure [the spectator] is fascinated by the image of Antigone” (SVII 252), it is because she in the play is herself utterly immune to eleos (pity) or phobos (fear), from start to finish. (SVII 258) The tragedy itself is one of “an exceptional hardness”, for Lacan.(SVII 273) With a characteristic eye to the linguistic detailsof the text, Lacan emphasises the way Antigone is described asōmos (inflexible); how her speeches evince an implacable character (SVII 273; cf. 281), unheralded cruelty and scorn towards her sister (SVII 263), and “the kind of fierce presence that Antigone represents.” (SVII 265) In all these ways, Lacan claims, she is being presented to us by Sophocles as a kind of image of pure desire, beyond the calculations of the pleasure principle. “There is nothing Dionysiac about theact and the countenance of Antigone,” Lacan observes: “Yet she

47

pushes to the limit the realisation of something that might becalled the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire.” (SVII 282) As the most direct evidence that this is what Sophocles himself was aiming at, Lacan point us towards the chorus’ unusual hymn to eros as conquering all. (cf. SVII 248; 268-9) The hymn bursts forth incongruously after Creon has announced to Antigone her punishment of being buried alive: as Creon says “to learn at last what hope there is for those who worship death”. (*) Thehymn, we note, is uncannily close to Agathon’s bizarre claim to the superiority of eros in tragedy, in which—very significantly, as we’ll see—also compares its power to that ofAte, a key word in Lacan’s reading of Antigone. It speaks of the enarges blepherōn imeros, “desire made visible” that “burns in the eyes of a bride of a desire.”(*) At the moment of its conclusion, Antigone herself appears, in a way which Lacan takes to indicate that Antigone herself is the “bride of desire”. The chorus at this point “loses its head”, as Lacan puts it; calling her a “sight beyond all bearing, at which my eyes cannot but weep, Antigone forth faring, to her bridal-bower of endless sleep.” (SVII 268; 298; cf. Rabate 78) It isthis shocking image of the condemned, unrepentant Antigone which Lacan sees as the means to purify us of everything of the order of pity and fear, “properly speaking the order of the imaginary”: “… we are purged of it though the interventionof one image among others.” (SVII 247-8) Instead, insofar as Antigone pursues her course, trembling before nothing, that wespectators can “learn a little more about the deepest level ofhimself than he knew before.” (SVII 323)

As well as exerting this cathartic function for us, Antigone’sunbearable splendour (éclat), Lacan claims, has something to teach us concerning what he will call “the ethical function ofthe beautiful” in general (see the next section below), and asit operates in tragic poetry in particular. (cf. SVII 295) Ifwe look at all of the seven extant tragedies we have of

48

Sophocles (the Ajax, Antigone, Elextra, Oedipus Rex, The Trachiniae, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus), we note a remarkable parallel between the heroes as they are presented to us in those dramas. As Lacan reflects, having recalled their different plots to his auditors:

You have noted the following. If there is a distinguishing characteristic to everything we ascribe toSophocles, with the exception of Oedipus Rex, it is that for all his heroes the race is run. They are at a limit that is not accounted for by their solitude relative to others [as monoumenoi, aphiloi, phrenos oiobōtai]. There is something more; they are characters who find themselves right away in a limit zone, find themselves between life and death. The theme of between-life-and-death is moreover formulated as such in the text, but it is also manifest in the situations themselves. (SVII 272; cf. 271; 294)

Lacan describes this dimension or “zone” in which the Sophoclean here is located as one wherein, uncannily “death … crosses over into the sphere of life, [and] … life … moves into the realm of death.” (SVII 248) He expresses surprise that, in assessing the meaning of tragedy, minds as eminent asHegel and Goethe seemed to have wholly passed over its importance. (loc cit.) For, says Lacan, it is “when passing through that zone that the beam of desire is both reflected and refracted until it ends up giving us that most strange andprofound of effects, which is the effect of beauty on desire.”(SVII 248) Drawing on some earlier commentary on de Sade, Lacan famously describes this zone as one between a first and second death. The “second death” here refers in de Sade to the wish for absolute or cataclysmic destruction, which the wicked Pope Pius VI of Juliette attributes to the order of nature herself. For the sadistic Pontiff, it is not enough to physically kill his victims. One must also try to then abolish all trace of them, or what in Lacanese can be called

49

their symbolic memory: “to be of greater service to nature, one should seek to prevent the regeneration of the body that we bury … we should also seek to take his second life, if we are to be even more useful to nature.” (SVII 211) For Lacan, de Sade here points us towards the useful possibility of distinguishing between a subject’s physical life and death, and his symbolic life and death, as it is registered in the court of his political community’s collective memory.2 The phenomena of ghosts attested to in literature and folk tradition give figure to the uncanny situation of subjects, like Hamlet’s father, who have been physically killed, but whose life and death have not been truly symbolised.3 For Lacan, on the other side, the entire “race-is-run” situation of the tragic heroes represents the uncanny situation of men and women who are symbolically dead and yet remain physically alive. Antigone is only the most perfect, and most explicit, exemplification of this at once fascinating and horrifying human possibility, opened up by our symbolic being. Even before the kerygma of Creon which will seal her fate, Lacan stresses that Antigone has expressed clearly enough her perception that her soul had died and that she was destined togive help, ōphelen, to the dead. (SVII 270; Ant. lines 559-560) In the peculiar temporality of the tragic drama, Lacan notes, Antigone’s condemnation is achieved in the first half of the Antigone—just as, we note, the die has been cast by the oracle for Oedipus before Oedipus Tyrannis has even begun. The middle third of the action in Antigone is then given over to “lamentation, commentary, and appeals relative to an Antigone condemned [already] to a cruel punishment.” (SVII 248)

Arguably the central term Lacan’s Antigone attends to—and literally the last word he utters in the analysis— is the

2 Lacan adapts the idea, by way of the claim that even the possibility of conceiving such a destruction of “the very cycles of transformations of nature” depends on the non-natural, symbolic order. (SVII 248)

3 Symptoms etc.

50

Greek word atē which Lacan highlights in the context of examining the tragedian Agathon’s unusual speech to eros in Plato’s Symposium.4 This word, difficult to translate, is carried in our tongue in the word “atrocious”. It is often rendered as “misfortune,” although Lacan contests the sufficiency of this translation. (SVII 264) Lacan exaggeratesthat atē and derivatives appear at least 20 times in the Antigone(it appears only 14 (*)). Certainly, at a decisive point, Antigone is rebuked by the chorus for having gone in search of

4 Lacan sees Agathon’s entire speech as a commentary on the, derivative, status Eros has in the universe of the tragic plays: “in every tragedy situated in its full context, in the ancient context, love always figures as an incident in the margins and, as one might say, lagging behind.” (VII,14) Lacan stresses two passages in particular in this context. The first is where Agathon says at 197d that love is “careful of good things, careless of bad things: in hardship [en pono], in fear [en phobo], in the heart of passion and in talk [en logo] our best guide and guard [kubernetes, epibates].” For Lacan, what Agathon is giving away here beneath the highly stylised, sophistical phrases is that “pono, phobo, logo are in the greatest disorder” in Agathon’s own speech, such that they need someone capable of restoring the rudder: “What is in question is always to produce the same effect of irony, indeed of disorientation which, in a tragic poet, has really no other meaning than to underline that love is really what is unclassifiable, that which comes to put itself crosswise in all significantsituations, that which is never in its place, that which is always out of season. (VII, 11)” Second, Lacan points to the curious, surely deliberatelyparodical, attempt at a “lovely proof” of Eros’s softness or delicacy Agathon proffers at 195d-e. The “proof” draws from a line from Homer’s Illiad XIX (lines 92-93): “… hers are delicate feet: not on the ground/Does she draw nigh, she walks instead upon the heads of men.” However, the lines in question concern Até or “mischief” lie close to the heart of Lacan’s understanding of tragic poetry: “the calamity which is behind everytragic adventure and which, as the great poet [Homer] tells us … passes rapid, indifferent, and forever striking and bending heads, driving men mad; that is what Ate is.” (VII 14) Agathon would have his audience apply the same thought to Eros, remarking in passing—Lacan suggests “to confirm the phantastic character of this discourse”—that people’s skulls are in fact “not really soft at all”. (Symp. 195e; VII 14) The hidden meaning here for Lacan is that what Eros above all “lags behind” in the world of tragedy is always this Ate, which rules.

51

her atē, and in this way sealing her doom. For Lacan, in any event, atē:

… is an irreplaceable word. It designates the limit thathuman life can only briefly cross. The text of the Chorus is significant and insistent—ektos atas. Beyond thisatē one can only spend a brief period of time, and that’s where Antigone wants to go. It’s not a moving journey atall. One learns from Antigone’s own mouth testimony on the point she has reached: she literally cannot stand it anymore. (SVII 263)

If the word “misfortune” does not adequately capture the gravity, and the full dimensions of what atē invokes, this is because it is a misfortune that is tied to one’s destiny, tiedin this case to the terrible history and fate of Antigones’ family. “One does or does not approach atē,” Lacan explains, “and when one approaches it, it is because of something that is linked to a beginning and a chain of events, namely, that of the misfortune of the Labdacides family.” (SVII 264) If Antigone has accepted her symbolic death, even before Creon condemns her, that is, it is because of “the intolerable dramaof the one [Oedipus] whose descendants have just been destroyed in the figures of her two brothers.” (SVII 263) We are returned with this atē then to the same “signifying” dimension, between the subjective and objective (loc cit.), of theoracle that pronounced Oedipus’ fate at the time of his birth.As Lacan comments in concluding his analysis:

Think about it. What happens to her desire? Shouldn’t itbe the desire of the Other and be linked to the desire ofthe mother? The text alludes to the fact that the desireof the mother is the origin of everything. The desire ofthe mother is the founding desire of the whole structure,the one that brought into the world the offspring that are Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone and Ismene; but it is also a criminal desire. (SVII 283)

52

But what is it then that Antigone above all insists upon, and which becomes the vehicle for her to satisfy her desire to make an end to her life? As we indicate above, it is the desire to properly bury her brother Polyneices. Polyneices isa traitor to the polis of Thebes and enemy of her brother, slain by Eteocles’ forces outside the city walls. So what is it about Polyneices, Lacan then asks, that Antigone insists upon symbolically marking, at the price of her own horrid death at the hands of Creon, to be buried alive in her own tomb? Lacan is clear. Unlike Goethe and several other commentators, who have had just as great problems accepting the authenticity of Antigone’s famous justification for her actions as we saw Roy had in accepting that Plato cold have written Alkibiades into the Symposium, Lacan savours these famous lines from Antigone’s final kommos [lament] (SVII, 254-256): *-*:

O but I would not have done the forbidden thingFor any husband or for any son.And why? I could have had another husbandAnd by him other sons, if one were lost;But father and mother lost, where would I get Another brother? For thus preferring you,My brother, Creon condemns me and hales me away.Never a bride, never a mother, unfriended,Condemned alive to a solitary death. (*; Rabate, 70)

Polyneices, just as her brother, Antigone is telling us, is someone “unique”. And it is this uniqueness, without recourseto Zeus or justice (Dike) that above all gives form to her implacable desire. In contrast to Hegel and others, Lacan claims that if she acts in the name of any kind of nomos or Law, it is one that is agrapta or unwritten: which allegedly means beyond “all those gods below who have imposed laws on men.” (loc cit.) There is almost a tautologous dimension to whatAntigone is saying, Lacan stresses, a “that’s how it is because that’s how it is.” (SVII 278) Even at the physical

53

level, Lacan stresses, we should recall that there really is not much of Polyneices left after his body has been left exposed to the elements, and the carrion birds. What Antigonekeeps faith in in Polyneices, that is to say, can be nothing substantive: neither anything about his physical being nor even about his symbolic being, which has been disgraced. (SVII279) And so here at the culmination of Lacan’s Antigone, we rejoin our earlier analysis of das Ding, which the reader will recall was a kind of irreplaceable, unrepresentable and constant being in the Other, beyond what the child is able to symbolise of her being by comparison with its own pleasurable or unpleasurable mnemes. The Thing, we saw Freud already suggesting, is thus associated with the linguistic subject or name of the object, prior to and potentially isolable from itsown predications. It will be possibility of recuperating thislost, primordial being that animates the subject’s death drive. Just so, it for Lacan can be nothing other than the name “Polyneices” itself that Antigone is hell-bent on seeing rightfully preserved—or rather, behind it, a singular Thing: “the ineffaceable character of what is … from the moment the emergent signifier freezes it like a fixed object in spite of the flood of possible transformations.” (SVII 279)5 As Lacan says:

5 Polyneices, Lacan has his Antigone say:

… may be whatever you say he is, a criminal. He wanted to destroy the city, lead his compatriots away in slavery. He led our enemies on to the territory of our city, but he is nevertheless what he is, and he must be granted his funeral rites. He doubtless doesn’t have the same rites as theother. You can, in fact, tell me whatever you want, tell me that one is a hero and a friend, and the other is an enemy. But I answer that it is of no significance that the latter doesn’t have the same value below. As far as I am concerned, the order that you dare refer me to doesn’t mean anything, for from my point of view, my brother is my brother. (SVII 278)

It is surely not insignificant that “Polyneikes” the name itself means “many troubles/quarrels”.

54

The unique value is essentially that of language. Outside of language it is inconceivable, and the being ofhim who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit of the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached. It is nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man. (SVII 279)

Nearly every term in this quote is vital for situating Lacanian psychoanalysis, down to the evocation of an ex nihilo creation which situates Lacanian psychoanalysis, in a deep register, closely alongside the monotheistic religions. Lacan’s Antigone is a heroin who does not cede on her desire. This desire is shaped by the ate and merimna (care or anxious thought (SVII 264)) of the Labdacides family—every bit as deeply and unfailing as the shape of the most modest analysand’s malaises will be shaped by her own family’s specifichistory, and her place in this “discourse of the Other”. Fearlessly pursuing her atē, Antigone accepts her own symbolic and then real death, an outlaw to her native polis—and for this reason, inescapably aesthetically fascinating for reasonswe will see in our closing section. The desire is directed topreserving her brother’s name, despite all the “many troubles”(poly neika) to which his life amounted. Beneath this name, whatis at stake is his singular uniqueness: a Thing which Antigonecannot trade or forego, despite all the provocations to self-pity and fear offered her by Ismene and Creon. In each of these features, the remarkable Sophoclean tragedy seems for Lacan to anticipate the shape and aims of the psychoanalytic image of human-being, and the ethical action of psychoanalyticpraxis as an attempt to give symbolic form to the singular, repressed desire of the analysand. The tragedy is “perfect”,

55

Lacan agrees with Hegel, although we can see how different hisreasons are for saying this than that of the great philosopher. This is why, in the final sessions of Seminar VII, Lacan returns from the dense philological analysis of Antigoneto draw ethical consequences for his audience. “It is becausethe tragic epos does not leave the spectator in ignorance as towhere the pole of desire is and shows that the access to desire necessitates crossing not only all fear but all pity,” Lacan comments:

The spectator has his eyes opened to the fact that even for him who goes to the end of his desire, all is not a bed of roses. (SVII 323)

The distance could then scarcely be greater between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the “therapeutic ethic” denounced by *, which positions it as answering to a demand for happiness closed to anything higher. Lacan in fact draws three ethical maxims for analytic practice from his Antigone. The first we know: not to cede on one’s desire, as Antigone cannot be shaken on her path to “perpetuate, eternalise, immortalise” her own specific atē. The second is a definition of the hero assomeone who can be betrayed with impunity, but still will not cede on her path. We are being asked to consider the pursuit of analysis as an ethical purification not less difficult and total than the ordeal of Antigone:

That this problematic is central for access to any realisation whatsoever constitutes the novelty of the analysis. There is no doubt that in the course of this process the subject will encounter much that is good for him, all the good he can do for himself, in fact, but less us not forget what we know so well … he will only encounter [the truth of his desire] if at every moment heeliminates from his wishes the false goods, if he exhausts not only the vanity of his demands, given that

56

they are all no more than regressive demands, but also the vanity of his gifts. (SVII 300)

Third, then, there is the notion that “there is no other good than that which may serve to pay the price for access to desire”. (SVII 321) What the psychoanalytic concern with desire, as against a more worldly demand for happiness, bringsinto focus is that “doing things in the name of the good, and even more in the name of the good of the other, is … far from protecting us against not only from guilt but also from other kinds of inner catastrophes. To be precise, it doesn’t protect us from neurosis and its consequences.” (SVII 319) The lesson of tragedy, Lacan concludes, is not moral at all, in any ordinary sense of the term. (SVII 323) Just so, as we must now delineate, the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis is, like human being according to the famous choral hymn to humankind in the Antigone, ikripolis apolis, “above and outside of the city.”(SVII 275)

V. The Ethical Function of Beauty, or: The Psychoanalytic Demotion of the City

Lacan’s Antigone has divided critics, as we suggested above. Inhis exclusive focus on the figure of the heroine, classicist Nicole Loraux notes, Lacan asks us to effectively put aside the final third of tragedy. (Leonard 114) More troubling, as Leonard and Guyomard have argued, is the choice of Antigone asa representative of “pure desire”. Since Lacan’s interpretation points so much to the importance of the name, it is well to recall that “Antigone” is she who is against generation. Her attachment to Polyneices, as the chorus’ bridal metaphors indicate, borders at every moment to a kind of incestuous resistance to redirecting her desire outside of her own shattered family. In raising Antigone’s suicidal loyalty to her brother to paradigmatic status, does not Lacan suggest that “the pure desire which Antigone personifies” and

57

which exemplifies the kind of desire psychoanalysis will aim at an incestuous one? (at Leonard 127) The “law” the analysand shall be drawn to discover in analysis, Lacan certainly tells us, will always be “strictly speaking” his ownate, rooted in the discourse of the Other which began before his birth: “although this ate does not always reach the tragic level of Antigone’s ate, it is nevertheless clearly related to misfortune.” (SVII 300) More troubling from our perspective, in any case, is the troubling implications of positing Antigone’s explicitly a- or antipolitical gesture as a paradigm of ethical conduct. Lacan admits that the “ordinary man”, as against the hero, will be unlikely to be able to attain to the purity of Antigone’s unwavering desire. The other side to this is that Antigone’s abstract “No!” to the political order, unmoved by all practical concerns for her ownor others’ goods, is morally highly ambivalent, at best. As Lacan comments, even Creon in the Antigone at a certain point begins to waver in the surety of his conviction in condemning Antigone as he has done: “we will see later what he is, that is, like all executioners and tyrants at bottom, a human character.” By contrast, Antigone is an almost “inhuman” martyr. And: “only the martyrs know neither pity nor fear. Believe me, the day when the martyrs are victorious will be the day of universal conflagration. The play is calculated todemonstrate that fact.” (SVII 267)

Let us recall again Leo Strauss’ differentiation of the philosopher from tyranny, with which this paper comparatively began, and how it was at the same time based in what we calleda philosophical devaluation of the city. The eros of the philosopher, like that of the tyrant, pushes him beyond merelyaccepting the given norms of his community. Yet the philosopher, beyond the tyrant, is singularly independent of the need for others’ recognition in order to satisfy his characteristic eros. In this perspective, political life comes very close to being reduced to a necessary precondition for

58

philosophy only; flattened out beneath the ascendant philosophic gaze into the unredeemable realm of the erotes for bodily pleasure and fame. By the time we ascend in Lacan’s thought towards the implacable splendour of Antigone’s supererogatory fidelity to her brother, it seems to us that a comparable psychoanalytic devaluation of the city, and of citizen morality, beckons. Guyomard, Loraux, Bollack and Leonard all note that the elevation of Antigone to such sublime status in Lacan’s Antigone corresponds to a devaluation of the role and import of Creon in the tragedy. At the very least, the figure of Creon seems to us to become the site of significant elisions in Lacan’s discourse: elisions which point, beyond the issue of how to read Antigone, to a kind of flattening out of political life under the undifferentiated category of le services des biens. On the one hand, Creon is charged by Lacan, as he is also charged by Goethe or Lacan’s contemporary Cornelius Castoriadis as having crossed a limit, and even made an error or hamartia. This is what he comes to see by the end, yielding ground on his decision in a way Antigone does not. (SVII 258-9; 267; 277) On the other hand, Creon is characterised by Lacan repeatedly as the political man par excellence: Creon, in contrast to Antigone’s ethical position beyond morality, pursues the good: “something that isafter all his role. The leader is he who leads the community.He exists to promote the good of all.” (SVII 258) And it is under this heading of seeking the good that Lacan is going to relativise some of the key distinctions he has himself made earlier in Seminar VII, as he retraced the history of Western ethics. Creon, he first tells us, is as a Kantian—a politicalruler whose language is in perfect conformity with Kantian practical reason. His refusal to admit burial for Polyneices as an enemy of the polis, Lacan claims, “is a maxim that can be given as a rule of reason with a universal validity.”(SVII 259) We can leave aside the accuracy of positing Creon as a Kantian, since Lacan himself will later give it up. In his closing sessions, Creon appears not as Kantian, but as a

59

proto-Aristotelian, for reasons seemingly near-identical to those which led Lacan to pose him as a deontologist:

With reference to this example [of Creon], I spoke to youof the service of goods that is the position of traditional ethics. The cleaning up of desire, modesty, temperateness, that is to say, the middle path we see articulated so remarkably in Aristotle; we need to know what it takes the measure of … In the end the order of things on which it claims to be founded is the order of power, of a human—far too human—power … it is obvious that it [traditional ethics] can hardly take two steps inexpressing itself without sketching in the ramparts that surround the place where, as far as we are concerned, thesignifiers are unleashed or where, for Aristotle, the arbitrary rule of the gods holds sway—insofar as at this level the gods and beasts join together to signify the world of the unthinkable. (SVII 314)

Lacan stresses, as his more recent political readers have not always done, that his concern in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is not with politics. “One shouldn’t be contemptuous of the order of powers,” he comments: “one simply needs to know their limits in relation to our field of inquiry.” (SVII 315) Nevertheless, from this perspective, Lacan goes on to enunciate a remarkable levelling out of political life per se, “the position of power of any kind in all circumstances, whether historical or not”. Faced with the insistence of unconscious desire, political regimes from tyrannies to democracies or aristocracies have always held to the same position with which Lacan has suggested—via Creon—that ‘Kant with Aristotle’ might at the same time improbably agree6:

What is Alexander’s proclamation when he arrived in Persepolis or Hitler’s when he arrived in Paris? The preamble isn’t important: ‘I have come to liberate you

6 At the same time imaginary equated with symbolic

60

from this or that.’ The essential point is ‘Carry on working. Work must go on.’ Which, of course, means: ‘Let it be clear to everyone that this is on no account the moment to express the least surge of desire.’ / The morality of power, of the service of goods, is as follows: ‘as far as desires are concerned, come back later. Make them wait.’ (SVII 315)

In the face of such sweeping devaluations of political life—onthe basis of a pointed depoliticising of Greek tragedy—a perspective informed by classical thought is likely to blanch.(cf. eg: Copobianco 2001) However, the second more general “positive” thread we raised above as running through the second half of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, namely Lacan’s kind of general theory of kultur, confirms on its terms this psychoanalytic demotion of the political realm as that of services des biens. We recall that the denouement Lacan’s thought has led us to after his analysis of de Sade alongside Kant concerns the imbrications of Law and the desire for its transgression. Sade’s attempt to liberate desire had reinstate the perverse law of Jouissance, as surely as Kant’s deontological morality was animated by a guilty schmertz that stands testimony to the repression of subjects’ desire. For Lacan, underlying this “dialectic” was the death drive which points the subject beyond the pleasure principle towards the Real Thing. This primordial, lost Ding the subject can as little cease being haunted by as s/he can directly approach Itwithout courting psychic disaster, or what Lacan at one point—recalling the “massive attack” of the cold war period—calls “massive Jouissance”. (*) In this context, in a characteristic refiguring of Freudian teaching, Lacan ventures to raise the never-adequately spelt out notion of sublimation in Freud’s oeuvre. Freud had never stabilised a theoretical concept of sublimation, as one of the vicissitudes of the drive he raisedin 1914. (*) It is in his oeuvre, alongside idealisation, one of the two “positive” reworkings of our primordial sexual and

61

aggressive energies into channels which promote civilization. It involves a desexualisation of sexual energies or else a change in their aim, if not their object: as when a great artist rechannels his unsatisfied amorous wishes into his works of alluring beauty. Beyond this, however, Freud never proceeds. By contrast, in Seminar VII, Lacan systematically reshapes the notion of sublimation, and then turns it into nothing less than the basis, in Kesel’s words, for “a contribution to the wider domain of a universal, cultural Bildung.” (SVII 165)

Lacan’s proposition in Seminar VII is to reconceive sublimation as a means to “rediscover the relation to das Ding somewhere beyond the Law.” (SVII 84) Like a psychoanalytic avatar of eros himself, it will mediate between the pleasure principle andthe subject’s need for symbolic and imaginary identity, with the death drive and the subject’s fatal attraction to Jouissance and das Ding. The means to do this is to frame sublimation as concerning, not the change of the aim of the drive, but as primarily concerning the status of the drive-object. In his famous, succinct definition, Lacan is going to assert that what occurs in sublimation is that “it raises the object—and Idon’t mind the suggestion of a play on words in the term I use—to the dignity of the Thing.” (SVII 112) For Freud, idealisation was the vicissitude of the drive which concerned the overvaluation of the object. According to Lacan’s categories, idealisation lies at the basis of the subject’s ego ideal and symbolic identity. Sublimation, we can by contrast see, concerns the relationship between the symbolic order and the Real that precedes and threatens to upset it. We have in fact, in the captivating beauty of Antigone, already seen Lacan’s premier example of sublimation, operatingaccording to exactly these terms: “… it being precisely the function of the beautiful to reveal to us the site of man’s relationship to his own death, and to reveal it to us only in a blinding flash.” (SVII 295) Antigone’s “glow of beauty,”

62

with its “violent illumination… coincides with the moment of transgression or of the realisation of Antigone’s ate,” Lacan argues. It is only insofar as she moves into her “relationship with a certain beyond”—the beyond of the Real and das Ding— that she so “dazzles us”: and her beauty can exercise its purifying, cathartic effect upon us. (SVII 281) Punning on the Dame or Lady sublimated in the poetry and courtly love rituals of the Troubadors, Lacan says that sublimation is what is able to turn the ce dam [the damage, wound, or doom] posed by the Thing into notre dame [our Lady]. (SVII 84) Yet, on these terms, we see that sublimation as Lacan conceives it thus embraces all forms of what Lacan dubs forms of “erotics … above morality” that human beings have conceived: from religion and religionschwarmereien [religious enthusiasms] to art and science, if not ethics most broadly. (SVII 87; 130; 214)

Lacan’s conceptions of science, religion, and of philosophy—the last of which is interestingly not addressed in these terms in Seminar VII—are controversial and extremely difficult tounravel not least in relation to clinical practice. What concerns us here is only the way that in the session given thetitle “The Ethical Function of the Beautiful” by Jacques-AlainMiller, Lacan explicitly prioritises aesthetics over morality as a form of sublimation. Morality, Lacan here argues, is identified with “the function of the good”. (SVII 218) This “function” is identified in turn, as Kesel comments, with “theentire symbolic world … as both the material and spiritual ‘values’ and ‘goods’ to which we are libidinally bound.” (de Kesel 198) So far from being even a necessary precondition for ascending towards the type of truth of the Real at which psychoanalysis aims, Lacan argues, “the sphere of the goods erects a strong wall across the path of our desire.” (SVII 230) What is so interesting here is that, just as we saw in his reading of Creon Lacan comes close to collapsing together Kant and Aristotle, and all the different regimes, when it

63

comes to describing the function of the good in light of das Ding, Lacan comes close to seamlessly running together the symbolic order of social exchange with the realm of aggressive, imaginary conceits which he is elsewhere at such pains to differentiate:

The domain of the good is the birth of power. The notionof the control of the good is essential … i.e. to exercise control over one’s good is to have the right to deprive others of them … For the function of the good engenders, of course, a dialectic. I mean that the powerto deprive others is a very solid link from which will emerge [the specific dimension of] the other as such. (SVII 229)

It is in contrast to this that Lacan elevates the beautiful as“an element of the field of the beyond-the-good principle.” (SVII 237) The subject’s solely-moral concern for his own good, or that of the other—whether to promote it or deprive him of it—represents a first “frontier” or “barrier” preventing his confrontation with the truth of desire. Retrospectively or prospectively, we now see more clearly the theoretical ground underlying his scepticism concerning Plato’s Schwarmerein of the highest Good which runs through Lacan’s Symposium. In Jacques Lacan’s own erotic ladder, beauty which is the stuff of poetry rather than science or of philosophy has a higher status, mediating between symbolic andReal: “beauty in all its shining radiance, beauty which has been called the splendour of truth.” (SVII 217) For Lacan, itis important to stress, the beautiful is not Truth, nor Truth beauty. The beautiful, Lacan repeats, also represents its ownkind of, albeit higher, barrier against recognising the truth of desire: “the beautiful has the effect of suspending, lowering, disarming desire” or even of “blinding” it and us. (SVII 238; 281) Antigone’s ethical stance is supremely beautiful. But its beauty is as secondary to its ethical nature as bloom is to the flower. This ethical nature

64

concerns her fidelity to the truth of her singular desire. “It is obviously because truth is not pretty to look at that beauty is, if not its splendour, then at least its envelope,” Lacan qualifies. (SVII 217) Indeed, Lacan indeed suggestivelyclaims that you can tell how close the analysand’s testimony has come to confronting a repressed drive, with the unerring accuracy of a Geiger counter, by the frequency with which their discourse becomes lyrical or aesthetic:

It is at the very moment when a thought is clearly about to appear in a subject, as in the narration of a dream for example, … that one recognises as aggressive relativeto one of the fundamental terms of his subjective constellation, that, depending on his nationality, he will make some reference to a passage from the Bible, to an author, whether a classic or not, or to some piece of music. (SVII 239)

Nevertheless, Lacan’s siding of psychoanalysis in Seminar VII with the poets above the city, if not yet against the philosophers, is as clear in this part of Lacan’s discourse asit becomes with his Antigone. “The beautiful in its strange function with relation to desire,” Lacan continues, “doesn’t take us in [ne nous leurre pas], as opposed to the function of thegood.” It “keeps us awake,” Lacan specifies, “and perhaps helps us to adjust to desire insofar as it is itself linked tothe structure of lure [leurre].” (SVII 239) Again: “beyond the place of restraint constituted by the concentration and circuit of goods,” Lacan affirms that it is the ethical function of the beautiful to “nevertheless … allow us to draw closer to the central field” which it will remain for psychoanalysis to mine. (SVII 216)