Eros and Ethics , livre ebook

Ero ss and E tth hiiccss


Eros and EthicsSUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
Charles Shepherdson, editorEros and Ethics
Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII

MARC DE KESEL
Translated by
SIGI JÖTTKANDTFirst published in Dutch by Acco Publishing Company, Brusselsestraat 153,
3000 Louvain, Belgium, in 2001.
The translation is funded by NWO, the state institute funding scientifi c research
in The Netherlands.
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2009 State University of New York
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kesel, Marc De.
[Eros & ethiek. English]
Eros and ethics : reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII / Marc De Kesel ;
translated by Sigi Jottkandt.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, insinuations: philosophy, psychoanalysis,
literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-2609-9 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981. Ethique de la psychanalyse, 1959–1960.
2. Psychoanalysis—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Psychoanalysis—Philosophy.
I. Jo ¨ttkandt, Sigi, 1965– II. Title.
BF173.L1463K4713 2009
150.19'5—dc22 2009005425
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1Contents

Introduction 1
Chapter 1. A Theory of the Subject 11
1. The Object Relations Theory and Its Moral Premises 13
2. Lacan’s Target: Maurice Bouvet 16
3. Lacanian Object Relations Theory: A Theory of the Subject 20
4. Ethics and Phantasm 34
5. Introducing a Real Object 38
Chapter 2. Crucial Problems 47
1. One Ethical Demand versus Another 48
2. A New Form of Guilt? 52
3. A New Ethics, A New Eroticism? 54
Chapter 3. Aristotle Revisited 57
1. The Interval between Aristotle and Freud 57
2. Aristotle and Freud against Bentham 66
3. Pleasure, Reality, and Logos 72
Chapter 4. An Intimately Distant “Thing” 83
1. “Das Ding” 84
2. A Matter of Distance 90
3. How Much Does a Thing Weigh? 98
Chapter 5. A Critique of Pure Practical Reason 105
1. Kant’s Critique of Morals 107
2. Lacan and the Critique of Practical Reason 109
3. The Lacanian “Critique of Pure Practical Reason” 113vi Contents
Chapter 6. The Weight of Enjoyment 121
1. Pleasure 121
2. Sade 131
3. The Commandment to Love Your Neighbor 140
4. An Ethics of Singularity 152
Chapter 7. Sublimation 163
1. From Doom to Dame 163
2. An “Object Relational” Concept of Sublimation 167
3. Courtly Love 175
4. Culture as Sublimation 183
5. Sublimation and Ethics 190
Chapter 8. Radiant Antigone 205
1. An Anamorphic Glance at Tragedy 205
2. The Subject in the Picture 212
3. Desire in the Picture 225
Chapter 9. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 249
1. The Analytic Toll 250
2. Measure without Measure 256
Epilogue 269
Notes 275
Abbreviations 327
Bibliography 329
Index 341 Introduction

A psychoanalytic cure is a strange business. Several times a week for a
number of years, two people share a room where one, lying on a sofa
and deliberately not looking at the other, freely blurts out whatever
springs to mind while the other pays close attention to every pause in
his narrative, seemingly with the sole aim of making him even more
confused. The fact that this ritual generally takes many years and elicits a
great deal of emotional strain from both parties doesn’t prevent either of
them—the analysand and the analyst—from regarding it as right, good,
and wholesome.
Indeed, despite its somewhat “idiotic” appearance, the cure is
undertaken in the name of the Good. The analysand goes into analysis
because things haven’t been going well; she feels unhappy in herself and
therefore goes to someone whom she imagines will be able to give her
help, support, and understanding. The analyst takes her on because he
is supposed to be—and supposes himself to be—an expert in providing
support to people in psychological diffi culty. One party hopes that she
will soon feel better, the other that all of his expertise will assist toward
that end. In this respect they both do not differ from the vast majority
of patients and care professionals with which our society has become so
well-endowed. They, too, do their utmost to accommodate our shared
drive for mental health, happiness, and well-being.
But why, then, does psychoanalysis insist on staging such a strange
scene? Why doesn’t it let both parties simply sit together and talk face to
face, man to man? This certainly does not happen in a psychoanalytic cure.
Rarely or never does the analyst answer the analysand’s questions directly,
and even rarer are the moments when the patient feels completely
understood. Here, the spontaneous empathy between patient and therapist—the
starting point of other, “normal” therapies—is resisted as much as possible.
12 Ethos and Ethics
A psychoanalytic cure is defi nitely not a matter of direct therapeutic
communication. The analyst may have his own idea of what the analysand’s
problems are, but he will never put it to her in so many words. And yet,
this is precisely what the analysand demands: someone who will fi nally
tell her what’s wrong with her, why she feels so rotten, so unhappy, why
the “good life” for which she yearns must so bitterly escape her.
It goes without saying of course that the “good life” the analysand
hankers after is something ethical—as ethical as the reasons why the
analyst wants to help the analysand. Both analyst and analysand aim for the
good, in the highest moral sense of the word. Even the analyst’s refusal
to reproach his analysand—that he should be less selfi sh, less fi xated on
his own personal happiness—is a moral choice. The analyst recognizes
the patient’s right to be happy in her own way and he recognizes her
right to demand that. To this extent, the analyst is a typically modern
professional care-giver. Even if the “good” the analysand hankers after is
a “good” she intends to reserve solely for herself, it would never be for
this reason that the analyst opposes or frustrates her.
But why, then, does he oppose and frustrate her? Why won’t he sit
face to face with her and let her go on asking her questions? Why, out of
professionalism and quality-assured know-how, does he refuse to respond
directly to the patient’s demands? Why leave the analysand trapped in
her self-made web with its dead-end stories? Why continually throw the
patient’s demands back at her, without ever trying to solve them?
Simply because they are “demands.” This is Lacan’s both short and
mysterious answer on the fi rst page of his seminar devoted to the “Ethics
of Psychoanalysis.” Mysterious and short it sounds at least to us. For
Lacan’s audience on that Wednesday, November 18, 1959, it was a
different story. When he talked about “demand,” they recognized this word
as the theoretical concept Lacan had elaborated in the previous seminars.
The larger part of the audience had already attended his seminar for six
years and had become quite used to Lacan’s typically long, laboriously
constructed sentences where, in this case, he talked about the way
in which we have to respond in experience to what I have
taught you to articulate as a demand, a patient’s demand,
to which our response gives an exact meaning. And in our
response itself we must maintain the strictest discipline, so as
not to let its deepest unconscious meaning be adulterated by
1that demand. (S7E: 1; S7F: 9)
In fact, in the previous years, Lacan had repeatedly explained how
there is always something wrong (or not wrong enough, so to speak)
about the analysand’s demand as such. That demand is less innocent than Introduction 3
it seems because it is in itself already a cunning solution to the problem.
On a purely formal (i.e., unconscious) level, it ascribes a specifi c position
to both analyst and analysand in a way that in fact avoids the whole
problem—at least for the time being. Simply by turning to him with a
demand, the analysand implicitly makes the analyst into someone who
possesses the answer to her problem. This implies, at least in the mind
of the patient, that in principle the problem has been solved since it has
been “discharged” onto the analyst.
And this is precisely the issue. The analyst, in any event, is convinced
that the analysand neither can nor wants to be rid of her problems. The
diffi culties she wrestles with, and which we, for the sake of convenience,
call “psychological problems,” involve the patient “herself,” in the most
literal sense. There is something the matter with her rather than with
her problems; she is messed up with herself. And this “herself,”
psychoanalysis has discovered, is not so much a thing whose defective parts can
be replaced or individually repaired. A person is not so much him- or
herself, but rather a desire for him- or herself. Being desire, man can
never be done with desire because, should he succeed, he would also be
fi nished off. He lives, thus, according to a permanently unsatisfi ed desire,
a desire that is for this reason inevitably a little painful and awkward,
and which continually reminds him of the fundamental lack that lies at
the heart of his being.
It is this desire that, through the formal structure o