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Psychoanalytic Studies

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The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics
Adrian Johnston

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To cite this Article Johnston, Adrian(2001) 'The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the

Beginning of Ethics', Psychoanalytic Studies, 3: 3, 411 424 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14608950120103686 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608950120103686

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Psychoanalytic Studies, Vol. 3, Nos. 3/4, 2001

The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics
ADRIAN JOHNSTON, The State University of New York at Stony Brook

Placing an inordinate emphasis on the closing sessions of the seventh seminar, interpreters of Lacans ethics of psychoanalysis frequently latch onto a catch-phrase which they proceed to hold up to the eyes of their readers as the condensed essence of a new, psychoanalytically informed ethico-moral paradigm: Do not give way on your desire! Lacan enigmatically proclaims that, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to ones desire.1 What usually goes unremarked in commentaries on Lacanian ethics is the profound ambiguity at the heart of this formulation, an ambiguity tied to the indeterminacy of the term desire (thus, grounding an ethics on this catch-phrase is especially risky and problematic, since it results in varying and often con icting meanings depending on which Lacanian de nition of desire one utilizes from disparate periods of Lacans teaching).2 As is well known, desire is a technical concept for Lacan, not simply an interchangeable equivalent with other words designating libidinal forces (i.e., libido, drive, cathexis, etc.); and the meaning and place of desire in Lacans shifting theoretical apparatus metamorphosizes several times over the course of his intellectual itinerary. Lacan himself seems to vacillate between sometimes employing desire in its precise technical sense (i.e., as a sublimated/aiminhibited drive bereft of its original drive-object, as the ineliminable absence of das Ding, the libidinal Real thing) and sometimes using it in a looser, more equivocal way. Perhaps because of this latter terminological laxness, interpreters tend to present Lacans ethics as a quasi-Nietzschean alternative to Kant by reading Do not give way on your desire! as Do not give way on your jouissance ! Nietzsche, vehemently opposing himself to what he understands to be Kants ethics, presents the eternal return as an inverted alternative to the categorical imperative. In Nietzsches eyes, the categorical imperative is the secular by-product of the slave revolt that historically comes to formulate a morality based upon ressentiment ; this revolutionary transvaluation of values is linked to the slave class conditions of subjugation and servitude to those who are politically and economically more powerful (this secret history of the development of the concepts of good and evil being, of course, the topic of the Genealogy of Morals). Ultimately, for Nietzsche, the categorical imperative demands nothing else than the senseless sacri ce of ones vital life forces to the Moloch of abstraction. Nietzsche states: A word against Kant as a moralist . A virtue has to be our invention, our most personal defense and necessity: in any other sense it is merely a danger. What does not condition our life harms it: a virtue merely from a feeling of respect for the concept virtue, as Kant desired it, is harmful. Virtue, duty, good
ISSN 1460-895 2 print/ISSN 1470-104 9 online/01/3/40411-14 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1460895012010368 6

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A. Johnston in itself, impersonal and universalphantoms, expressions of decline, of the nal exhaustion of life The profoundest laws of preservation and growth demand the reverse of this: that each one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes if it mistakes its own duty for the concept of duty in general. Nothing works more profound ruin than any impersonal duty, any sacri ce to the Moloch of abstraction (Nietzsche, 1968, pp. 131132)

Nietzsche doesnt explicitly say that his vague, quasi-poetic musings about the eternal return are meant to be taken as what he here paradoxically alludes to as his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. But, the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence loses a lot of its opacity if its interpreted as part of the effort to displace Kant. In the standard version of the Kantian schema, the subjects intentions are most ethical when they are least tied to the particularity of the individual (i.e., his/her inclinations, desires, wishes, circumstances, etc.). The categorical imperative (I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law) functions as a kind of sieve meant to strain out, as much as possible, these pathological materials tainting the intentional purity of duty. Conversely, the injunction of the eternal returnperhaps this injunction is capable of being rendered in the imperative form as I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my concrete, unique, and utterly individual act should be universalized, namely, should endlessly recur for all eternitydemands exactly the opposite of the categorical imperative. In a Nietzschean system of valuation, rather than being the basest, most unworthy of intentional states, the particular, idiosyncratic desires of the individual subject are the highest standards by which to measure actions. Only if an action expresses the strongest of subjective urges, urges so strong that the subject would will them to in nitely manifest themselves again and again in all their singular uniqueness, is it of any worth. What does this interpretation of Nietzsches doctrine of eternal recurrence have to do with Lacanian ethics? Most readings of the Lacanian dictum Do not give way on your desire! understand him to be proposing something similar to Nietzsche: (pure) desire is conceived of as jouissance, as the uncompromising, unconditional thrust of Trieb once operative outside the con ning consequentialist calculus of the pleasure principle.3 The subjective particularity of pure desire is ethical precisely when its strength overwhelms the mitigating in uence of the pleasure-oriented ego. Various commentaries on the seventh seminar point to the tragic gure of Antigone as proof that this is exactly what Lacan intends to convey. Antigones passionate attachment to her dead brother Polyneices drives her to transgress Creons edict forbidding the burial of the corpse. Her excessive love is then compared with the Todestrieb, since Antigone is compelled to disregard the tragic consequences that she is fully aware await her in the wake of her act. A Real passage a ` lacte (i.e., Antigones burial of her brother as a result of her desire) transgressively disrupts the reign of a Symbolic system of Law (i.e., Creons denial of funerary rites for Polyneices on the grounds of the interests of the polis).4 Is this the distilled essence of Lacans ethics of psychoanalysis? Is he, like Nietzsche, simply interested in turning Kant on his head, in unreservedly transforming Kant into Sade? Despite the initial impressions that one might be tempted to walk away with from the letter of Lacans text, the answers to the above questions are far from obvious. The interpretive position stating that Lacan praises the transgressive act as the highest good in a quasi-Nietzschean transvaluation of Kantian values pays utterly no attention to the

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fact that Lacan speaks of not ceding ones desire. His choice of words, as a result of which he doesnt explicitly suggest that subjective ethicality is necessarily dependent upon the ruthless pursuit of ones jouissance, is often ignored.5 Whats more, in the sessions of the seventh seminar devoted to Sophocles, Lacan explicitly states that desire arises from the sacri ce of jouissance :6 not ceding on ones desire would seem to entail not surrendering to the siren-song of jouissance , not capitulating to the uncompromising demands of Trieb. This interpretive angle is further reinforced when one notes that, in an essay from the same period as the seventh seminar (the 1960 Subversion of the subject), Lacan describes desire as opposing jouissance desire is a defense ( de fense), a prohibition (de fense) against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance (Lacan, 1977, p. 322). If this is indeed what Lacan means, then not giving ground on desire is a translation of Kants insistence on the exclusion of pathological drives from properly ethical intentionality, with the psychoanalytic quali cation that the detachment from these drives is itself achieved through and sustained by a subl(im)ation of inclination, a self-subversion of Trieb. Admittedly, both jouissance as well as pure desire are independent from the pleasure principle. But, does this common conceptual feature permit a free equivocation between the two terms? Before progressing any further, its rst necessary to get a basic sense of desire as de ned by Lacan (due to the amount of space that would be necessary for an exhaustive expose of this concept, only a few cursory indications are possible here; and, since Lacans de nitions of desire undergo a series of radical modi cations over the course of his teaching, attention will primarily be paid to desire as it theoretically operates during the periods surrounding the seventh seminar [approximately seminars ve through ten, roughly 19571963]). One of the easiest ways to gain a preliminary understanding of Lacanian desire is by returning to the Freudian concepts of Trieb and sublimation. For Freud, sublimation is the typical means by which Trieb adapts itself to the constraints and obstacles it comes to encounter at the level of the reality principle. Reality forbids certain drive-aims qua the attainment of satisfaction linked to determinate drive-objects. Thus, reality is said to be responsible for what Freud designates as aim-inhibition (a catalyst for sublimation). The aim-inhibited drive then seeks other forms of satisfaction via different objects; and, if these alternate modes of securing grati cation are not at odds with the various prohibitions of the reality principle (usually, socio-cultural laws and norms), then the new libidinal arrangement is dubbed a successful sublimation of the drive. However, especially in the later texts of the second topography, Freud repeatedly emphasizes that Trieb is fundamentally conservative, that drives unceasingly seek to recover their earliest forms of satisfaction.7 Furthermore, in, for example, Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that instinctual renunciation (i.e., the aim-inhibition of the drives demanded by human reality) is, despite appearances to the contrary, an unavoidable libidinal fate for all subjects.8 As such, the Freudian subject lives in a state of unsatisfactory compromise: sublimation provides pleasurable outlets for Trieb, but Trieb itself is incapable of ever being fully satis ed with these compromises, since they are, by the very de nition of the mechanism of sublimation, deviations from the original cathetic trajectory (i.e., the earliest state of affairs which all drives struggle in vain to recover; in the seventh seminar, Lacan designates this posited ground zero of the libidinal economy das Ding9). The libidinal life of the human being is therefore marked by certain constitutive lacks or absencesas Lacan puts it, the sovereign Good of das Ding is always missing from the reality of subjective ex-sistence10and this condition of (non-)existence is precisely what Lacan intends for his notion of desire to designate.

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Desire is the residual remainder/by-product of the subjection of jouissance (i.e., Trieb an sich, the unconditional attachment to das Ding) to the ego-mediated negotiations between the pleasure and reality principles. In other words, desire is symptomatic of the drives dissatisfaction with the pleasure-yielding compromises of sublimation. It often goes unnoticed in most interpretive engagements with Lacans seventh seminar that two separate lines of argumentation branch off from this set of basic, de nitional premises (concerning desire, drive, jouissance, pleasure, the Law, and das Ding): on the one hand, Lacan seeks to clarify and further develop Freuds analyses of conscience as a manifestation of a pathological moral masochism fueled by an insatiable super-ego; on the other hand, Lacan lays down the preliminary groundwor k for a psychoanalytic meta-ethical theory based on the possibility of desire coming to function in a pure, properly ethical fashion. These two dimensions of Lacans so-called ethics of psychoanalysis must not be con ated, since doing so results in either muddleheaded confusion or outright error. In the early sessions of the seventh seminar, Lacan introduces his notion of das Ding and begins specifying its role in his conceptual apparatus. A typical mistake regarding das Ding is to interpret it as simply an archaic lost object of the drives. In other words, one might initially be tempted to understand the Lacanian Real thing as designating a developmental stage of object-relations, namely, the infants dyadic fusional attachment to the mothers body prior to the traumatic Oedipal encounter with the paternal third party and his prohibition of this incestuous bond (i.e., the Non-du-Pe ` re). But, this is only partially true. Although Lacan does indeed speak of das Ding as a primordial point of investment/cathexis for the libidinal economy (i.e., a temporally anterior thing to which the drives are attached), he underlines that this paradoxical (non-)entity is as much a fantasmatic, retroactive projection generated after-the-fact of the subjects Symbolic iz constitution (i.e., after the intervention of the Law) as a genuinely lost object. Z ek expresses this as the difference between das Ding as presupposed (the Thing developmentally precedes the advent of the regulative prohibition of the symbolic order) and as posed (the Thing is the illusion of there having been a prior, jouissance-laden union with iz this Real substance).11 Z ek heavily favors this latter conception of das Ding, sometimes going so far as to argue that it doesnt exist prior to the backwards glance of the nostalgic subject of the Symbolic wishing to have lost something he/she never possessed in the rst place ( das Ding is a result of the fundamental strategy of fantasy, wherein the structural impossibility of the drives full satisfaction qua jouissance obtained12 is concealed from the subject by making it seem as if this enjoyment is hypothetically re-obtainable). 13 However, this is a misleading exaggeration that treats Lacan as wholly Hegelian. Lacan deliberately straddles the line between Kant and Hegel: brie y put, Kants noumenal Ding an sich is the thing-as-presupposed (behind or anterior to the objectival fac ade of appearances within the subjects experienced reality); Hegel, in his criticism of Kants thing-in-itselfin the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel, echoing criticisms already made by Fichte and Schelling, alleges that Kants Ding an sich is primarily a by-product of treating appearances as appearances,14 namely, a residual, illusory effect of a particular subjective epistemological stance with regards to phenomenaimplicitly treats this noumenal thing as posed by the activity of consciousness (rather than as presupposed behind consciousness). Lacan maintains that, as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, a middle ground is needed here. At one point in the seventh seminar, Lacan violently reacts against being categorized as a Hegelian: That Hegelian radicalism that was rashly attributed to me should in no way

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The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego be imputed to me. The whole dialectic of desire that I developed here is sharply distinguished from such Hegelianism. It is even more marked this year. The inevitable character seems to me to be especially marked in the effect of sublimation (Lacan, Book VII, p. 134). Right at this moment, an anonymous auditor intervenes: Mr. X: The formula for sublimation that you have given us is to raise the object to the dignity of the Thing. This Thing doesnt exist to start with, because sublimation is going to bring us to it. The question I have is, therefore, isnt this Thing not really a thing, but on the contrary a Non-Thing, and isnt it through sublimation that one comes to see it as being the Thing ()? (Lacan, Book VII, p. 134).

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This question cites the de nition of sublimation provided earlier in the seventh seminar: sublimation raises an object to the dignity of the Thing.15 And, Lacan hints at a double meaning in object here: object qua material stand-in/embodiment of the empty structural place of das Ding as well as object qua objection (i.e., the Imaginary object simultaneously represents the Real Thing while also barring access to itin Encore, Lacan conveys this in saying that the object is a failure,16 this paradoxical straddling of registers being an essential aspect of objet petit a). In response to this auditors question, Lacan at rst expresses pleasure at having been well understood.17 However, he goes on to indicate that he has reservations about fully embracing the notion of the iz Things complete non-existence, namely, in Z eks parlance, its utterly posed nature. Having already described das Ding in quasi-developmental terms at certain other moments in his elaborations, Lacan is not willing, despite his emphasis on the Imaginary-Symbolic subjects retroactive, fantasmatic embellishments generating das Ding as appearing to have been a concrete, factual entity dwelling within a paradise lost of archaic, blissful jouissance, to completely collapse this Real Thing into a posited status fully immanent to the fabric of the symbolic order. Lacans insistence on the paradoxical status of das Ding as both presupposed and posed is, in fact, due to his underlying interest in clarifying Freud. Brie y put, this compromise position between Kantianism and Hegelianism is an attempt to do justice to the problem of the factual reality of mnemic traces of the past in the Freudian psyche (a problem thats much too big to be adequately broached in the context of the present discussion). As early as the 1894 Studies on Hysteria, the 1899 paper Screen Memories, and the famous moments in the Fliess correspondence where Freud speaks of the retranscription of memory-traces and also calls into question the realist version of the seduction theory, Freud grapples with the problem of whether the past is ever preserved in a pristine, undistorted condition within the psyche. At rst glance, psychoanalysis seems to require such preservation as a basic assumption behind its view of the mind. And yet, what Freuds notion of Nachtra glichkeit emphasizes is that the past which overdetermines the psychical present is itself subjected to retroactive modi cation by this same present (the subjects past is continually reworked after-the-fact according to the structuring in uence of later ontogenetic factors). The dual nature of the Real re ects this unstable (temporal) dialectic: the inaccessible past, in its unaltered purity, is presupposed to lie behind the various formations of the unconscious, while, at the same time, the work of retranscription subsequent to this past (up through the present) is complicit in posing the presentation of this same past. Why is the preceding discussion relevant? What does this have to do with Lacans

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ethics of psychoanalysis? Sketching the general parameters of the connection (or lack thereof) between the Real ( das Ding, jouissance, etc.) and the Symbolic (the big Other, the Law, etc.) is necessary in order to properly understand Lacans perspective on morality and the Freudian eld. He states: It is to the extent that the commandment in question preserves the distance from the Thing as founded by speech itself that it assumes its value. But where does this take us? Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law. In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadnt said: Thou shalt not covet it. But the Thing nds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. (Lacan, Book VII, p. 83). This shows one of the ways in which Lacan takes his distance from a Hegelianism he previously embraced with less reservation. One of Koje ` ves one-liners appropriated by Lacan is the word murders the thing:18 the genesis of signi cation irreversibly modi es the subjects relations to the phenomenal eld of thing-entities (this modi cation is described by Hegel in the opening section of the Phenomenology on Sense-Certainty19). However, in the passage above from the seventh seminar, Lacan declares that the Law (as articulated speech, as the prohibitions laid down by the symbolic big Other), rather than simply destroying das Ding by transubstantiating it into die Sache (i.e., a Symbolic-Imaginary object), introduces this Thing to the subject, makes the subject aware of the (non-)presence of this Thing (hence Lacans ambivalent answer to the auditors question about whether the Thing is a No-Thingit exists and it doesnt exist). On the basis of this passage, one could say that das Ding qua presupposed (i.e., the Thing as a thing-in-itself anterior to Symbolic mediation) is nothing for the subject, since there supposedly is no subject prior to the intervening in uence of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; but, once das Ding is forbidden by the Law (i.e., once representational mediation makes the Real structurally inaccessible to the subject, once the Law introduces the subject to das Ding by pointing to its absence), it becomes a posited lack, a central void constitutive of the subjects desire. Additionally, Lacan, deviating from a rudimentary Freudian assumption, does not presume that the individual knows how or what to desire prior to being told what he/she desires. The implicit and explicit prohibitions encountered by the subject educate his/her desire, showing what should (not) be coveted (this would mean that, in the Oedipus complex, the child doesnt incestuously covet the mother until the father indicates that he/she shouldnt). In a way, Lacan provides a relatively complex theoretical model for the forbidden fruit syndrome familiar to pop-psychological common sense. The prohibition of the jouissance presumed to be possible with the hypothetical re-attainment of das Ding this reunion with the Real Thing is, for Lacan, a fantasy veiling the structural impossibility of such a relationis precisely what sustains the illusory belief in the possibility of pure enjoyment. The Law of the big Other provides the subject necessarily deprived of jouissance with a false rationalization making it seem as if he/she once had it, although it is now lost (the necessary is fantasmatically transformed into the contingent). This supports a sustainable form of desire, instead of the libidinal economy collapsing into hopeless resignation. Almost three years later, during the ninth seminar, Lacan puts his cards on the table. He states: If the fact that a fundamental access to jouissance qua jouissance of the Thing is prohibited, if this is what I told you throughout the whole year of the

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The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego seminar on Ethics, if it is in this suspension, in the fact that this jouissance is aufgehoben , suspended properly speaking that there lies the supporting plane on which desire is going to be constituted as such and be sustainedbecause it is really the most distant approximation from anything that the world may saydo you not see that we can formulate that the Other, this Other in so far as it at once poses itself as being and is not, that it is to be, when we advance towards desire we clearly see that the Other here in as much as its support is the pure signi er, the signi er of the Law, that the Other is presented here as a metaphor of this prohibition. To say that the Other is the Law or that it is jouissance qua prohibited, is the same thing. (Lacan, Book IX , 1962)

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Desire, which exists in the absence of das Ding, is preserved by making the Other (i.e., the Symbolic locus of the Law, the source of restrictions) into a metaphor of this prohibition, into a scapegoat for the structurally determined loss of the Real an sich (The Other stole my jouissance!the falsity here resides in the fact that something one never possessed in the rst place cannot be stolen). Thus, the Law, in all its incarnate forms, enables the subject to continue desiring, rather than undergoing the traumatic destitution that would result from a full apprehension of the inherent deadlock of the libidinal economy. Thus, in both the tenth seminar and Kant avec Sade , Lacan goes so far as to directly identify desire with its prohibitionDesire then is the law.20 The introduction of the Law generates desire ex nihilo. Instead of forbidding a pre-existent set of urges in the individual, it teaches the subject what to covet, if only as an inaccessible vanishing point whose appearance of possible accessibility is a mirage engendered by the seemingly contingent nature of the Law and its authority. Furthermore, Lacan insinuates that there is a correlation between the severity of the big Others prohibitions and the intensity of the subjects (unconscious) desires. This is the exact point at which Lacans conceptual labors outlined above yield their essential insights into the overlap between the ethico-moral domain and Freudian psychoanalysis. When Lacan discusses the relation between desire and guilt, hes principally interested in accounting for the Freudian economic paradox of masochism (not, as is usually alleged, in issuing a prescriptive, quasi-Sadean ethics of guilt-free jouissance ). The most misleading feature of virtually every extant commentary on Lacans ethics of psychoanalysis is the attribution to him of the imperative Do not give way on your desire! In the seventh seminar, Lacan does not present the link between desire and guilt in the form of a command, an injunction to persist in ones desire. Instead, he merely states that guilt is the result of ceding on (i.e., not enacting in reality, refraining from concrete actualization) ones desiresJe propose que la seule chose dont on puisse e tre coupable, au moins dans la perspective analytique, cest davoir ce de sur son de sir (Lacan, 1986, p. 368). At the beginning of this seminar, Lacan remarks that psychoanalysis is confronted, across the range of its analysands, with the omnipresence of guilt in human life.21 Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of moral masochism, in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality pathologize the ethical eld. At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological metaphysics of morals. As the seventh seminar progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that guilt is being descriptively discussed as a negative affect (and not prescriptively judged in a negative,

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disapproving light as a true ethical shortcoming of the subject based upon his/her lack of resolve with respect to his/her desire or jouissance ). Lacan repeatedly makes reference to the Freudian super-ego as an excessive, greedy, and out-of-control agency.22 Echoing Freud, he observes that, the more one sacri ces to it, the more it demands.23 The super-ego isnt satis ed with mere external/behavioral conformity to ethico-moral precepts; it uncompromisingly insists upon the impossible puri cation of intentionality itself (thus, the super-ego is, in a manner of speaking, a spontaneous Kantian). Lacan connects his earlier establishment of the equivalence between desire and the Law with the Freudian theory of the super-ego: Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents that everything that is transferred from jouissance to prohibition gives rise to the increasing strengthening of prohibition. Whoever attempts to submit to the moral law sees the demands of his superego grow increasingly meticulous and increasingly cruel. Why isnt it the same in the other direction? It is a fact that it isnt the case at all. Whoever enters the path of uninhibited jouissance, in the name of the rejection of the moral law in some form or other, encounters obstacles whose power is revealed to us every day in our experience in innumerable forms, forms that nevertheless perhaps may be traced back to a single root. We are, in fact, led to the point where we accept the formula that without a transgression there is no access to jouissance, and, to return to Saint Paul, that that is precisely the function of the Law. Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law. (Lacan, Book VII, pp. 176177). At the beginning of this quotation, Lacan alludes to an observation that Freud formulates in his 1924 paper The economic problem of masochism. In the concluding paragraphs of that essay, Freud notes that the more the subject complies with realitys prohibition of aggression, the greater the guilt the subject feels, the harsher the demands of the super-ego become. Unlike external authorities, which can only observe and punish externalized acts of transgression, the super-ego sees and judges the subjects inner intentions. Freud pinpoints this as a paradox of sorts: the more the subject overtly obeys the rules of reality, the more the super-ego (unconsciously) in icts the negative affect of guilt.24 This paradox is illuminated by the theory of the super-ego as presented in Civilization and Its Discontents: the super-ego is a subliminatory channel for the ids sadism; the id diverts the aggressive drives onto the subjects own ego when the reality principle prevents it from discharging this aggression against others; thus, the more the moral subject refrains from enacting these aggressive drives in reality (i.e., the more he/she heeds the ethical principles of his/her social milieu), the more the id is compelled to utilize the super-ego to work off aggression against the ego (hence, the greater the feeling of guilt, since Freud claims that guilt is the pain consciously experienced by the ego as a result of the unconscious subliminatory dynamic occurring at the level of id and super-ego). How does Lacan integrate this line of Freudian reasoning? iz Lacans reference to Saint Paul holds the key here. Z ek uses this reference to point out that, in Lacanian theory, it isnt simply a matter of claiming that the Law arouses desire out of nowhere through its prohibitions: its also the case that obedience to the Law is cemented in place by the struggle to fend off these desires, that the more rigid the subjects adherence to the rules, the presumably greater is his/her need to repress increasingly powerful urges to contravene it.25 Consequently, when Lacan speaks about

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being guilty for having ceded or given ground relative to ones desire, what he really means is the following: the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels, since such concessions only aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely, internal repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscient authority of the sadistic super-ego). Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan clearly advances this claim in saying that, Freud reminds us that its not evil, but good, that engenders guilt (Lacan, p. 45). At no point does Lacan contest the Freudian de nition of guilt as a negative affect resulting from the super-egos punishment of the ego. Hence, Lacan, in following Freud here, isnt treating guilt as a properly ethicomoral sentiment, but, rather, as a symptom of super-ego aggression (with this aggression itself being acknowledged as arising from ceded, aim-inhibited desires whose intensity increases the longer and more severely theyre held in check). Consequently, one can be guilty before the tribunal of the super-ego without, for all that, being actually guilty in an ethico-moral sense per se. Many of the misinterpretations of Lacanian ethics are linked to an erroneous equivocation between guilt as a negative affect (i.e., as symptomatic of moral masochism) and guilt as indicative of a true ethical failure on the part of the subject (i.e., guilt as a signal of non-pathological conscience). The sole form of jouissance (i.e., direct drive satisfaction, as Lacan de nes it in the seventh seminar26) available to the desiring subject of the Law is the obscene enjoyment of super-egoistic aggression, the getting off on a moral masochism whose trigger is pulled by transgressive desires aggravated by being held back from actualization in reality (a jouissance which, sadly enough, isnt even directly, consciously experienced as enjoyable by the individual, since the ego registers it as guilty suffering).27 This aspect of Lacans work hardly amounts to a new ethics of psychoanalysis, if ethics is to be understood as a body of prescriptive principles re ecting certain ideals for human conduct. Instead, it serves as a Lacanian translation of the Freudian economic paradox of the masochism, this paradox being the result of the vicious circle operative between the libidinal economy and the super-ego. And, because Lacan understands the super-ego as a parasitic by-product of the inherent structuration of the libidinal economy (i.e., as the only pathetic form of jouissance available to the subject of desire), he, unlike many Freudians, refrains from laying the blame for moral masochism on civilization The greediness by which he characterizes the superego is structural, not an effect of civilization, but discontent (symptom) in civilization (Lacan, p. 28). Any lingering doubts about whether the greediness of the super-ego is the central concern of the seventh seminar should be dispelled by an examination of one of the concluding paragraphs of the session entitled The moral goals of psychoanalysis (June 29, 1960). Lacan states: We have never stopped repeating that the interiorization of the Law has nothing to do with the Law. Although we still need to know why. It is possible that the superego serves as a support for the moral conscience, but everyone knows that it has nothing to do with the moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned. What the superego demands has nothing to do with that which we would be right in making the universal rule of our actions; such is the ABC of psychoanalytic truth. (Lacan, Book VII, p. 310). Its crucial to note that Lacan refuses to indulge himself in the vulgar Freudian critique of ethics so often attributed to him today, namely, the claim that Kantian conscience/duty is wholly super-egoistic in a Sadean manner. Instead, he carefully separates the

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interiorization of the Law (i.e., the super-ego and its vicious circle of legal prohibition, exacerbation of desire, and the obscene, id-level jouissance of punishment for the arousal of desirethis vicious circle is what, in Encore, he describes by asserting that the fundamental injunction of the super-ego is Enjoy!28) from the Law itself. Lacan indicates that the question of the ethico-moral legitimacy of universal maxims of practical reason is entirely separate from the perverse use to which the libidinal economy often puts duty. Thus, one could argue, Lacan prepares the way for ethics by zeroing in on those factors that threaten and subvert it (factors which Kant, for example, given the relative simplicity of his model of drive qua inclination as well as the comparatively impoverished state of psychological knowledge during his time, doesnt adequately address as potential, insidious distorting in uences facing the intentionality of the ethical subject). He warns of the various pathological pitfalls thwarting the subject in its quest for the assumption of a properly ethical position. However, this is worlds apart from making claims that being ethical is equivalent to following ones desire to the end, to acting-out ones repressed urges in rebellious de ance of all (consequentialist) barriers. On the contrary, Lacan indicates that the desperate Sadean subject who follows this route only meets with crushing disappointment, encountering his/her destitution in the face of the absence of obtainable full enjoyment: witness Antigones private breakdown after defying Creon,29 Oedipus guilt after ful lling the repressed incestuous dreams of the universalized Freudian human being, and Electras horror and regret after accomplishing her ostensible desire to slay her adulterous mother.30 Lacan merely brings one to the point where the essential question that must be answered if a psychoanalytic ethics is to be possible at all poses itself: Can conscience function beyond the super-ego, namely, is the subject able to break out of the cycle running from Law to desire to guilt? If not, then the Freudian diagnosis of conscience as a symptomatic by-product of the superegos id-driven sadism really does represent the end of ethics in any meaningful, philosophically consistent mode. Both Freud and Lacan have made signi cant inroads into demystifying the origins and mechanisms of feeling guilty. However, it remains doubtful if psychoanalysis has yet pronounce d its de nitive verdict as regards being guilty. Notes
[1] I propose then that, from an analytic point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to ones desire. Whether it is admissible or not in a given ethics, that proposition expresses quite well something that we observe in our experience. In the last analysis, what a subject really feels guilty about when he manifests guilt at bottom always has to do withwhether or not it is admissible for a director of conscience the extent to which he has given ground relative to his desire (Lacan, Book VII, 1992, p. 319). [2] de sir offers an extensive semantic eld which is amenabl e to exploitation in a number of ways. It is a borderline signi er which readily facilitates movement between the contiguous elds of philosophy and psychoanalysi s (Macey, 1988, p. 115). [3] Like Kant, Lacan stresses the way the law functions to divide the subject from itself; for Kant duty is set against inclination, for Lacan the desire of the subject is opposed to the ego. In both cases, the ethical act is opposed to the subjects self-de nition in terms of its own good. In Freudian terms, the ethical emerges in what is beyond the pleasure principle, in service to what is wholly other to the narcissistic ego. That Lacan follows the implications of such a view beyond its Kantian expression is evidenced by the parallel Lacan draws between the positions of Kant and Sade. The law of the signi er embraces the morality of Sade as readily as it does the categorical imperative of Kant. The provocative reference to Sade only serves to underscore the main point at stake in Lacans concept of the law. What is at issue is less a defense of any particular moral code than an insistence on an ethics of desire where desire is taken in opposition to the homeostases of the ego. The Sadean ethic is an imperative of pure transgression (Boothby, 1991, pp. 174175).

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[4] Dans le cadre dune e thique du de sir, Antigone repre sente donc une forme de labsolutisme moral, du fanatisme he ro que. Son de sir est marque par un aveuglemen t (ate ` ). Dans le cadre de la question du rapport du sujet a ` la Loi, Antigone illustre donc lattitude de quelquun dont le de sir passionnel se moque de toute Loi ge ne rale pour faire de son propre de sir la Loi exclusive de sa conduite. Son de sir nest pas seulement au-dela ` de la pitie et de la crainte, il est aussi au-dela ` du bien et du mal. Il est sublime parce quil est au-dela ` de ce qui est humain. Si Antigone ne ce ` de en effet pas sur son de sir, elle ne de sire cependan t plus rien dautre que laccomplissemen t de son de sir qui, de ce fait, nit par se muer en une Chose impersonnelle. Antigone se sacri ce a ` son de sir (Bernet, 1994, pp. 4243). [5] Where does the ethics of psychoanalysi s really lie? Lacans eagerness to situate Freuds contributions to ethics within the context of Kant and Sade and his de nition of ethics in terms of aiming towards das Ding and the real both suggest that his ultimate position puts the highest value on the side of desire as limited by the law rather than on the side of jouissance (Lee, 1990, p. 169). [6] que produit la frustration de la jouissance? Elle produit tout au plus la relance du de sir, mais aucune espe ` ce de constitution dobjet quel quil soit (Lacan, 1994, p. 125). Sublimate as much as you like; you have to pay for it with something. And this something is called jouissance . I have to pay for that mystical operation with a pound of esh (Lacan, Book VII, p. 322). [7] The Nature of the Instincts.This view would enable us to characterize instincts as tendencies inherent in living substance towards restoring an earlier state of things: that is to say, they would be historically determined and of a conservative nature and, as it were, the expression of an inertia or elasticity present in what is organic. ( SE 18, p. 259). The forces which we assume to exist behind the tensions caused by the needs of the id are called instincts. They represent the somatic demands upon the mind. Though they are the ultimate cause of all activity, they are of a conservative nature; the state, whatever it may be, which an organism has reached gives rise to a tendency to re-establish that state so soon as it has been abandoned. ( SE 23, p. 148). [8] As regards the social source of suffering, our attitude is a different one. We do not admit it at all; we cannot see why the regulations made by ourselves should not, on the contrary, be a protection and a bene t for every one of us. And yet, when we consider how unsuccessfu l we have been in precisely this eld of prevention of suffering, a suspicion dawns on us that here, too, a piece of unconquerabl e nature may lie behindthis time a piece of our own psychical constitution. ( SE 21, p. 86). [9] the relations of the subject to something primordial, its attachment to the fundamental, most archaic of objects, for which my eld of das Ding, de ned operationally, establishes the framework (Lacan, Book VII, p. 106). [10] It is precisely as we shift into discourse that das Ding, the Thing, is resolved into a series of effects You will not be surprised if I tell you that at the level of the Vorstellungen, the Thing is not nothing, but literally is not. It is characterized by its absence, its strangeness (Lacan, Book VII, p. 63). [11] the Real in a sense precedes the symbolic order and is subsequentl y structured by it when it gets caught in its network: this is the great Lacanian motif of symbolization as a process which morti es, drains off, empties, carves the fullness of the Real of the living body. But the Real is at the same time the product, remainder, leftover, scraps of this process of symbolization, the remnants, the excess which escapes symbolization and is as such produced by the symbolization itself. In Hegelian terms, the Real iz is simultaneously presupposed and posed by the symbolic (Z ek, 1989, p. 169). [12] Thats not it is the very cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance expected Structure, which connects up here, demonstrates nothing if not that it is of the same text as jouissance, insofar as, in marking by what distance jouissance missesthe jouissance that would be in question if that were itstructure does not presuppos e merely the jouissance that would be it, it also props up another (Lacan, Book XX, 1998, pp. 111112). [13] The illusion that pertains to a qua surplus-enjoymen t is therefore the very illusion that, behind it, there is the lost substance of jouissance . In other words, a qua semblance deceives in a Lacanian way: not because it is a deceitful substitute of the Real, but precisely because it invokes the impression of some iz substantial Real behind it; it deceives by posing as a shadow of the underlying Real (Z ek, 1993, pp. 3637). La Me ` re est impossible. Telle est la castration ve ritable. La rivalite oedipienne dissimule cette absence de la Chose (Juranville, 1984, p. 107). [14] The inner world, or supersensible beyond, has, however, come into being: it comes from the world of appearanc e which has mediated it; in other words, appearanc e is its essence and, in fact, its lling. The supersensibl e is the sensuous and the perceived posited as it is in truth; but the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance . The supersensible is therefore appearanc e qua appearanc e (Hegel, 1977, 147, p. 89). [15] We have to guide us the Freudian theory of the narcissistic foundations of the object, of its insertion in the imaginary register. The object that speci es directions or poles of attraction to man in his openness,

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in his world, and that interests him because it is more or less his image, his re ectionprecisely that object is not the Thing to the extent that the latter is at the heart of the libidinal economy. Thus, the most general formula that I can give you of sublimation is the following: it raises an objectand I dont mind the suggestion of a play on words in the term I useto the dignity of the Thing (Lacan, Book VII, p. 112). The failure is the object The object is a failure ( un rate ). The essence of the object is failure (Lacan, Book XX, p. 58). What you are saying strikes me as on the right track; its obvious you follow my presentation of these questions without dif culty. Something is offered to us as analysts, if we follow the sum of our experience and if we know how to evaluate it. You state that the attempt at sublimation tends in the end to realize the Thing or to save it. Its true and its not true. Theres an illusion there (Lacan, Book VII, p. 134). the conceptual understandin g of empirical reality is equivalent to a murder (Koje ` ve, 1980, p. 140). the symbol cancels the existing thing it opens up the world of negativity, which constitutes both the discourse of the human subject and the reality of his world insofar as it is human. Primal masochism should be located around this initial negativation, around this original murder of the thing (Lacan, 1988, p. 174). It is as a universal too that we utter what the sensuous [content] is. What we say is: This, i.e., the universal This; or it is, i.e., Being in general. Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being in general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty we mean to say (Hegel, 97, p. 60). Desire then is the law. It is not only the fact that in analytic doctrine, with the Oedipus complex as its central corpus, it is clear that what constitutes the substance of the law is the desire for the mother, that inversely what normatives desire itself, what situates it as desire, is what is called the law of the prohibition of incest. (Lacan, Book X, 1963). the law and repressed desire are one and the same thing; this is even Freuds discovery (Lacan, 1989, p. 68). If there is, in fact, something that psychoanalysi s has drawn attention to, it is, beyond the sense of obligation properly speaking, the importance, I would even say the omnipresence , of a sense of guilt. Certain internal tendencies of ethical thought attempt to evade what it must be said is this disagreeable aspect of moral experience. If I am certainly not one of those who attempt to soften, blunt, or attenuate the sense of guilt, it is because in my daily experience I am too insistently brought back to it and reminded of it (Lacan, Book VII, p. 3). Freud brought to the question of the source of morality the invaluabl e signi cance implied in the phrase Civilization and Its Discontents or, in other words, the breakdown by means of which a certain psychic function, the superego, seems to nd in itself its own exacerbation , as the result of a kind of malfunctioning of the brakes which should limit its proper authority. It remains to be seen how within this breakdown in the depths of the psychic life the instincts may nd their proper sublimation (Lacan, Book VII, p. 143). at the heart of everything Freud taught, one nds the following: the energy of the so-called superego derives from the aggression that the subject turns back upon himself. Freud goes out of his way to add the supplementar y notion that, once one has entered on that path, once the process has been begun, then there is no longer any limit; it generates ever more powerful aggression in the self (Lacan, Book VII, p. 194). Freud af rms that the form in which the moral agency is concretely inscribed in manand that is nothing less than rational according to himthe form he called the superego, operates according to an economy such that the more one sacri ces to it, the more it demands (Lacan, Book VII, p. 302). The turning back of sadism against the self regularly occurs where a cultural suppression of instincts holds a large part of the subject s destructive instinctual component s from being exercised in life. We may suppose that this portion of the destructive instinct which has retreated appears in the ego as an intensi cation of masochism. The phenomen a of conscience , however, lead us to infer that the destructivenes s which returns from the external world is also taken up by the super-ego, without any such transformation, and increases its sadism against the ego. The sadism of the super-ego and the masochism of the ego supplement each other and unite to produce the same effects. It is only in this way, I think, that we can understand how the suppression of an instinct canfrequently or quite generallyresult in a sense of guilt and how a persons conscience becomes more severe and more sensitive the more he refrains from aggression against others. One might expect that if a man knows that he is in the habit of avoiding the commission of acts of aggression that are undesirable from a cultural standpoint that he will for that reason have a good conscience and will watch over his ego less suspiciously. The situation is usually presented as though ethical requirements were the primary thing and the renunciation of instinct followed from them. This leaves the origin of the ethical sense unexplained . Actually, it seems to be the

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other way about. The rst instinctual renunciation is enforced by external powers, and it is only this which creates the ethical sense, which expresses itself in conscience and demands a further renunciation of instinct. ( SE 19, p. 170). The superego dialectic of Law and transgression does not lie only in the fact that Law itself invites its own transgression, that it generates the desire for its own violation; our obedience to the Law itself is not natural, spontaneous , but always-alread y mediated by the (repression of the) desire to transgress the Law . When we obey the Law, we do so as part of a desperate strategy to ght against our desire to transgress it, so the more rigorously we obey the Law, the more we bear witness to the fact that, deep within ourselves, we feel the pressure of the desire to indulge in sin. The superego feeling of guilt is therefore right: the more we obey the Law, the more we are guilty, because this obedience , in effect, is iz a defense against our sinful desire (Z ek, 2000, p. 142). The problem involved is that of jouissance , because jouissance presents itself as buried at the center of a eld and has the characteristics of inaccessibility, obscurity and opacity; moreover, the eld is surrounded by a barrier which makes access to it dif cult for the subject to the point of inaccessibility, because jouissance appears not purely and simply as the satisfaction of a need but as the satisfaction of a drive (Lacan, Book VII, p. 209). Lacans maxim of the ethics of psychoanalysi s (not to compromise ones desire) is not to be confounde d with the pressure of the superego. That is to say, in a rst approach it may seem that the maxim Do not give up on your desire! coincides with the superego command Enjoy!do we not compromise our desire precisely by renouncing enjoyment? Is it not a fundamenta l thesis of Freud, a kind of Freudian commonplace, that the superego forms the basic, primitive kernel of the ethical agency? Lacan goes against these commonplaces : between the ethics of desire and the superego, he posits a relationship of radical exclusion. That is to say, Lacan takes seriously and literally the Freudian economic paradox of the superegothat is, the vicious cycle that characterizes the superego: the more we submit ourselves to the superego imperative, the greater its pressure, the more we feel guilty. According to Lacan, this feeling of guilt is not a self-deception to be dispelled in the course of the psychoanalyti c curewe really are guilty: superego draws the energy of the pressure it exerts upon the subject from the fact that the subject was not faithful to his desire, that he gave it up. Our sacri cing to the superego, our paying tribute to it, only corroborates our guilt. For that reason our debt to the superego is unredeemable: the more we pay it off, the more we owe. Superego is like the executioner slowly iz bleeding us to deaththe more he gets, the stronger his hold on us (Z ek, 1994, pp. 6768). Nothing forces anyone to enjoy ( jouir) except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissanceEnjoy! (Lacan, Book XX, p. 3). What parents I was born of, God help me! To them I am going to share their home, the curse on me too, and unmarried. Brother, it was a luckless marriage you made, and dying killed my life (Sophocles, Antigone , 1991, lines 919923, p. 194). No tears for me, no friends, no marriage. Brokenhearte d I am led along the road ready for me. I shall never again be suffered to look on the holy eye of the day. But my fate claims no tearsno friend cries for me (Sophocles, Antigone, (lines 929934, p. 195). Weep greatly for me, my brother, I am guilty. A girl aming in hurt I marched against the mother who bore me (Euripides, Electra 1959, lines 11831185, p. 59).

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