Ancient Myth & Modern Theory Week 10, Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis I think where I am not, thus

I am where I do not think. [Lacan, The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud, in crits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (London: W.W. Norton, 2006) pp.412-444 (p.430)] I will not leave behind me any of those handles which will enable you to append a suffix in the form of an "-ism." In other words, none of the terms that I have made use of here one after the other - none of which, I am glad to see from your confusion, has yet managed to impress itself on you as the essential term, whether it be the symbolic, the signifier or desire - none of the terms will in the end enable anyone of you to turn into an intellectual cricket on my account. [Lacan, Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter, (London: Routledge, 1999) p.251-252] Man is self-consciousness. He is conscious of himself, conscious of his human reality and dignity; and it is in this that he is essentially different from animals, which do not go beyond the level of simple Sentiment of self. Man becomes conscious of himself at the moment when for the first time he says I. To understand man by understanding his origin is, therefore, to understand the origin of the I revealed by speech. [Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the reading of Hegel (Basic Books: Ithaca, NY, 1980), p.3] The difference between Hegel and Freud is this: Thought bars, Freud tells us, access to knowledge. Do I need to remind you what is at stake in the unconscious? Hegels Selbstbewutsein [Self-consciousness] is the I know that I think, just as the Freudian trauma is an I do not know itself unthinkable, since it supposes an I think stripped of thought. [Lacan, Le Sminaire: livre xvi, Dun Autre lautre, texte tabli par Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p.273.] My Translation AW. man is human only to the extent that he wants to impose himself on another man, to be recognized by him. In the beginning, as long as he is not yet actually recognized by the other, it is on recognition by this other, that his human value and reality depend; it is in this other that the meaning of his life is condensed. Therefore, he is outside of himself. But his own value and his own reality are what are important to him, and he wants to have them in himself. Hence, he must overcome his other-being. This is to say that he must make himself recognized by the other, he must have in himself the certainty of being recognized by another. [Kojve, Introduction to the reading of Hegel, p.13.] the negative-or-negating relation to the object becomes a form of this object and gains permanence, precisely because, for the worker,' the object has autonomy. At the same time, the negative-or-negating middle term i.e. the forming activity [of work] is the isolated-particularity or the pure Being-for-itself of the Consciousness. And this Being-for-itself, through work, now passes into what is outside of the Consciousness, into the element of permanence. The working Consciousness thereby attains contemplation of autonomous given-being such that it contemplates itself in it. [Hegel, in Kojve, p.25] The product of work is the worker's production. It is the realization of his project, of his idea; hence, it is he that is realized in-and-by this product, and consequently he contemplates himself when he contemplates it. Now, this artificial product is at the same time just as autonomous, just as objective, just as independent of man, as is the natural thing. Therefore, it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as man. Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being; and only in this real and objective product does he become truly conscious of his subjective human reality. [Kojve, p.25]

 if we call certain objects, as appearances, beings of sense (phaenomena), because we distinguish the way in which we intuit them from their constitution in itself, then it already follows from our concept that to these we as it were oppose beings of understanding (noumena). [Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen M. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). p.360.] In the case of the concepts of space and time, we were able above to make comprehensible with little effort how these, as a priori cognitions, must nevertheless necessarily relate to objects, and make possible a synthetic cognition of them independent of all experience. For since an object can appear to us only by means of such pure forms of sensibility, i.e., be an object a of empirical intuition, space and time are thus pure intuitions that contain a priori the conditions of the possibility of objects as appearances, and the synthesis in them has objective validity. [Kant, p.222] The possibility of experience is therefore that which gives all of our cognitions a priori objective reality. Now experience rests on the synthetic unity of appearances, i.e., on a synthesis according to concepts of the object of appearances in general, without which it would not even be cognition but rather a rhapsody of perceptions [Kant, p.282] if we can demonstrate that even our purest a priori intuitions provide no cognition except insofar as they contain the sort of combination of the manifold that makes possible a thorough-going synthesis of reproduction, then this synthesis of the imagination would be grounded even prior to all experience on a priori principles, and one must assume a pure transcendental synthesis of this power, which grounds even the possibility of all experience (as that which the reproducibility of the appearances necessarily presupposes). [Kant, p.230] As pure apperception, the understanding has the ground of its possibility in a faculty which contemplates an infinity of representations and concepts which it has made itself. Forming it in advance, the transcendental imagination pro-jects the complex of possibilities which it contemplates, thus proposing the horizon within which the knowing self, and not only this, acts. [Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. by James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), p.161.] how can sensibility as a lower faculty be said to determine the essence of reason? What is to happen to the honourable tradition according to which, in the long history of metaphysics, ratio and the logos have laid claim to the central role? Can the primacy of logic disappear? Kant brought the possibility of metaphysics before the abyss. He saw the unknown [Heidegger, p.173] It suffices to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image the important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subjects becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality. [Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, in crits, p.76] the mirror stage and the narcissistic function, this alienating image around which is founded a fundamental misrecognition that calls itself the ego, I do not call it i(s), I de self I call it I (a). To redouble the indication of the alienation of identification where we misrecognize ourselves as being egos. [Lacan, Lobjet de la psychanalyse, 1965-1966, 5 janvier 1966, p.2.] Unpublished, my translation AW

All that which I have said, written, inscribed in graphs, schematized on occasion in an optical model, where the subject is reflected in the unitary trait, and where it is only by starting from there that he locates himself as an Ideal Ego. All this insists precisely on imaginary identification operating by a symbolic mark. [Lacan, Le sminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XIX: ou pire, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 2011), p.168.] My translation AW. It is in as much as he substitutes his ego for himself that he introduces the demand in the question of desire. It is because someone that is not him, but his image is substituted for him in the dialectic of desire that, in the end, he can only demand substitutes. [Lacan, Confrence du Docteur Lacan, Lampithtre de la Facult de Mdicine, Hpital Psychiatrique Sainte-Anne (Pavillon Benjamin Ball,), Mercredi 17 Juin 1959, in Lacan, Le dsir et son interpretation (III), 17 Juin 1959, p.38.] Unpublished My translation AW. This corporeal part of ourselves is, essentially and functionally, partial. It serves to remember that it is the body and that we are objectal, which means that we are objects of desire only as bodi es Desire remains always to the last term desire of the body, desire of the body of the Other, and nothing other than desire of their body. [Lacan, Le sminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre X: Langoisse, text established by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2004).p.249.] My translation AW. what Lacan called object a is a symbol denoting both an empty place in being and body and the object which one chooses to stop it up because this void place produces anxiety [Ellie Ragland, The Relation Between the Voice and the Gaze, in Reading Seminar XI: Lacans Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Richard Feldstein (Albany: State University of New York, 1995), pp.187-204 (p.189).] the meaning and function of a [is] as the object in all its generality. I have said to you: the object in the fantasy, which is to say in the most achieved form, for as much as the subject is desire, the subject is thus in an immanent relation of castration, the object is that which gives his position its support. [Lacan, Le dsir et son interpretation III, 13 mai 1959, p.23.] Unpublished, my translation AW. I ask you now the following question can one thing the imaginary, as we are taken within it by our bodies One is in the imaginary It is within it that [our] topology occurs. It permits you to think, but it is a thought after the fact the aesthetic, known otherwise as what you perceive, is not in itself transcendental. The aesthetic is ties to that which is pure contingence. [Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan: R.S.I (Les sminaires des 11 Mars, 18 Mars, 8 Avril et 13 Mai 1975), text established by Jacques-Alain Miller, in Ornicar?, Hiver (1975/1976), p.34.] A thoroughly irresponsible individual wrote a short time ago that I am powerless to resist the seductions of the Hegelian dialectic. The reproach was formulated at a time when I was beginning to articulate for you the dialectic of desire in terms that I have continued to employ since. And I don't know if the reproach was deserved at the time, but no one could claim that the individual involved is especially sensitive to these things. It is in any case true that Hegel nowhere appears to me to be weaker than he is in the sphere of poetics, and this is especially true of what he has to say about Antigone [Lacan, Seminar VII, p.249] I just wonder what the reconciliation of the end of Antigone might be. [Lacan, Seminar VII, p.249] It is because she goes toward At here, because it is even a question of going e\kto\j a1taj, of going beyond the limit of At, that Antigone interests the Chorus. It says that she's the one who violates the limits of At through her desire.

The lines I referred to above concern this and especially those that end with the formula e\kto\j a1taj, to go beyond the limit of At. At is not a(marti/a, that is to say a mistake or error; it's got nothing to do with doing something stupid. [ibid. p.277]

What does it mean to us if Antigone goes beyond the limits of the human? What does it mean if not that her desire aims at the following the beyond of At? [ibid. p.263]

You have no doubt noted the following. If there is a distinguishing characteristic to everything we ascribe to Sophocles, 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. 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. [ibid. p.272] tragedy is at the root of our experience, as the key word "catharsis" implies. For you the word is no doubt more or less closely associated with the term "abreaction," which presupposes that the problem outlined by Freud in his first work with Breuer, namely, that of discharge, has already been broached - discharge in an act, indeed motor discharge, of something that is not so simple to define It is formulated by Aristotle as a means of accomplishing the purgation of the emotions by a pity and fear. [ibid. p.243-244]

When at the end Creon returns bearing something in his arms, lines 1259- 1260, and, as the Chorus tells us, it seems to be nothing other than the body of his son who has committed suicide, the Chorus then says, "If we may say so, it is not a misfortune that is external to him; it is an)to\j a/martw/n, his own mistake. He's the one who made the mistake of

getting himself into the mess. (Amarti/a is the word used, that is "mistake" or "blunder." That's the meaning Aristotle insists on, and to my mind he's wrong, for that is not the quality which leads the tragic hero to his death. It's only true for Creon the counter- or secondary hero, who is indeed a(martw/n. At the moment when

Eurydice commits suicide, the messenger uses the word a(marta/nein . He hopes, we are told, that she isn't going to do something stupid. And naturally he and the Coryphaeus stiffen in anticipation because no noise is heard. The Coryphaeus says, "That's a bad sign." The mortal fruit that Creon harvests through his obstinacy and his insane orders is the dead son he carries in his arms. He has been a(martw/n he has made a mistake. It's not a question here of a)llotria a1th. At concerns the Other, the field of the Other, and it doesn't belong to Creon. It is, on the other hand, the place where Antigone is situated. [Ibid. p.277] she pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire. [ibid. p.279] Between the two of them, Antigone chooses to be purely and simply the guardian of the being of the criminal as such. No doubt things could have been resolved if the social body had been willing to pardon, to forget and cover over everything with the same funeral rites. It is because the community refuses this that Antigone is required to sacrifice her own being in order to maintain that essential being which is the family At, and that is the theme or true axis on which the whole tragedy turns. Antigone perpetuates, eternalizes, immortalizes that At. [ibid. p.280]

To make oneself the guarantor of the possibility that a subject will in some way be able to find happiness even in analysis is a form of fraud. Theres absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream. [ibid. p.303] I propose then that, from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having giving ground relative to ones desire [ibid. p.319] For Lacan, this traditional ethics of the service des biens is in fact always in the service of power, which continually urges its subjects to wait, to temper the manifestation of their desires, to put off any notion of fulfilment in the service of what masquerades as the collective good. It is not the role of psychoanalysis to help the analysand mitigate the force of his or her desire in the service of such a model of the good. Nor does it aim to help him/her become reconciled to the separation of the symbolic from the real, since to do so would be to enslave the analytic project itself to the service of the same, fundamentally conservative forces. And though Lacan acknowledges the necessity of an order of power (ce ne sont point ici propos danarchisme, he tell s us), it is the job of psychoanalysis to deal differently with the domain of desire, which power seeks continually to check. The only thing one can be guilty of, he tells us, cest davoir cd sur son dsir. [Johanna Malt, Impossible Contact: The Thing in Lacan and Rachel Whiteread, in LEsprit Crateur, 47.3, (2007), 55-67 (p.60).]

Part of the world has resolutely turned in the direction of the service of goods, thereyby rejecting everything that has to do with the relationship of man to desire it is what is known as the postrevolutionary perspective. The only thing to be said is that people dont seem to have realized that, by formulating things in this way, one is simply perpetuating the eternal tradition of power But what does it matter? In t his tradition, the communist future is only different from Creons, from that of the city, in assuming and its not negligible that the sphere of good to which we must all devote ourselves may at some point embrace the whole universe. [Lacan, Seminar VII, p.318] Psychoanalysis teaches that in the end it is easier to accept interdiction that to run the risk of castration. [ibid. p.307] There is no other good than that which may serve to pay the price for access to desire given that desire is understood here, as we have defined it elsewhere, as the metonymy of our being. [ibid. p.321]