Abstract
The chapter discusses the ethical import of the experience of astonishment, through the Lacanian idea that the question of ethics can be articulated only from the point of view of one’s relation to the real, namely, to meaning as groundless. As discussed previously, the experience of astonishment brings one in contact with what Lacan calls the “signifier in the Real” and can thus create a question about one’s involvement in meaning. The ethical importance of being involved in meaning is further explored through a discussion on what Lacan calls the ethical injunctions of psychoanalysis: “to become where it was” (“Wo Es war, soll Ich werden”) and “to ask about one’s desire.”
The signifier’s displacement determines subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate.
Lacan, Écrits
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- 1.
Lacan critically distances his account of ethics from ethics as an object of human sciences, calling the latter the service of goods: “The fields of inquiry that are being outlined as necessarily belonging to the human sciences have in my eyes no other function than to form a branch of the service of goods, which is no doubt advantageous though of limited value” (1986, 324).
- 2.
Later, I object to Strachey’s translation “Where Id was, there Ego shall be.”
- 3.
Wittgenstein offers a critique of this account which he, mistakenly, takes to be the only available account of the unconscious in Freud’s work. See Bouveresse (1995).
- 4.
See Lear (1990, 71–72).
- 5.
Stanley Cavell (1994) also discusses this idea when he says that an autobiographical exercise requires acknowledging that one’s identity is borrowed or determined from others, and recognizing that while the self is one’s own, at the same time it is not fully one’s own but is always already determined by others.
- 6.
Lacan’s idea that the subject is excluded from the signifier has sometimes been approached in the Lacanian literature as an argument for the existence of a non-linguistic part of the subject. Candidate notions for this non-linguistic part of the subject have included body, jouissance , sexuality. For example, Pluth interprets the above-cited passage in terms of sexuality not being reducible to language. As he says: “Lacan’s subject is an effect of language, but an effect that remains external to, and not reducible to, language. This is because the subject is not simply an effect of signifiers, but an effect of signifiers themselves interacting with something non-linguistic: sexuality” (2007, 12). I think this is a misguided interpretation, because it is based on a simplistic juxtaposition of two poles, language and body, language and sexuality, the symbolic and the real, and so on. As Lacan also warns us, distinguishing between, on the one hand, the subject qua pure organism and, on the other hand, the subject qua effect of the signifier is insufficient for a proper understanding of subjectivity: “Where is the subject in all of that? Is it in the radical, real individuality, in the pure sufferer of this capture, in the organism which henceforward is sucked in by the effects of the ‘it speaks’ [ça parle], by the fact that one living being among others has been called upon to become what Mr. Heidegger calls the ‘shepherd of being,’ having been taken up into the mechanisms of the signifier? Is it, at the other extreme, identifiable with the very play of the signifier? Is the subject only the subject of discourse, in some way torn out of its vital immanence, condemned to soar over it, to live in this sort of mirage […] making it the case that everything s/he lives is not only spoken, but, in living it, s/he lives it by speaking it, and that already what s/he lives is inscribed in an epos, a saga woven throughout the length of his or her very act? Our effort this year, if it has a meaning, is to show, precisely, how the function of the subject, playing between the two, is articulated elsewhere than in one or the other of these poles” (Lacan, n.d.-b, unpublished, 1962). Both poles can have symbolic and real aspects; for example, Lacan often reminds us that sexuality and the body are always “overwritten” and “overridden” by language (see Fink, 1995, 12). The subject emerges, according to my interpretation, in this very movement of appropriating the real through the symbolic .
- 7.
“Alienation ” as understood by Lacan can never be completely overcome. However, acknowledging its presence can create the possibility for freedom , not by undoing alienation but by recognizing it and acting accordingly. This is also the main difference between the Lacanian alienation and the notion of Entfremdung as it features in the philosophy of Hegel and Marx. The Lacanian concept of alienation is not a historical product that can be completely undone (as in Hegelian and Marxist thought) but a constitutive trait of the human subject. As Evans emphasizes: “For Lacan, alienation is not an accident that befalls the subject and which can be transcended, but an essential constitutive feature of the subject. The subject is fundamentally split, alienated from himself, and there is no escape from this division, no possibility of ‘wholeness’ or synthesis” (1996, 9).
- 8.
This is where Lacan parts ways with structuralism, and with the idea that a subject is merely the effect of symbolic structures. For a view that regards the Lacanian subject as one with language, see Borch-Jacobsen: “To say that the subject is language is also to say that language is the subject ‘himself’—or, if you will , that the two are the same” (1991, 195).
- 9.
Desiring and acting are so closely related that the concept of act ends up replacing the concept of desire in the 1960s (see Pluth, 2007, 63).
- 10.
Desire is a complex notion in Lacan’s work, and I am here leaving out a lot about how desire works and the development of the concept throughout Lacan’s work. For my purposes, however, it is worth saying a bit more about the connection between desire and the realm of meaning as groundless. One of the main characteristics of the Lacanian concept of desire is that its object is essentially linked to impossibility, to the real; as Lacan puts it, desire is always desire of the Thing (I will come back to this). Let me briefly show what the nature of this impossibility is. As we saw, the Lacanian concept of desire is a product of the fact that there is meaning, and furthermore that the signifier (not the signified) plays the fundamental role for the production of sense. Recall the discussion in a previous chapter, according to which in Lacan’s work every word (the signifier) represents the lack of the signified (Lacan’s version of the Hegelian idea that “the word is the murder of the thing”). In Lacan’s theory of meaning, the signifier takes an autonomous existence, it remains there even when the signified is absent (as discussed in Chap. 4, this is what distinguishes a signifier from a trace ; the signifier is tied up with the absence of a signified ). This autonomous character of the signifier influences the way human beings desire . The fact that the signifier persists in the absence of the actual object creates a metonymic remainder that mobilizes desire : “Desire is situated in dependence on demand— which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder which runs under it.” This metonymic remainder is the gap between the need and the demand ; the need is biological and instinctual, but through the signifier it becomes articulated as a demand (a demand for love , Lacan says). This gap between the need and the demand mobilizes desire : “Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love , but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung)” (2000, 691–692). Lacan further argues that this dominance of the signifier (and the distance it introduces from the signified) introduces in the objects of desire the dimension of what he calls the Thing, namely, an aspect of the object that is forever lost, and thus forever desirable but unattainable. In a way, the object we desire is always different from the actual object to which we were initially attached. Lacan regards the maternal figure (our first caregiver) as the first object of desire that is always already lost. There are various ways to understand this loss: the mother is not always physically there; the mother is not an extension of the baby’s body although the baby experiences her in that way; the mother’s desire is directed not only to the baby but also to the father of her child (or/and her work, a friend, an idea, etc.); but also, most importantly, the mother is an incestuous object, an object that comes with a fundamental prohibition. For a broader discussion on Lacanian desire , and an argument on why the concept remains central throughout his work, see Balaska (2018).
- 11.
The original text says qui s’interroge sur ce qu’il veut, so the translation “what it wants” is correct. However, given the distinction between wanting and desiring that Lacan draws, and given that he explicitly links the psychoanalytic task with a question on one’s desire and not ceding on one’s desire , I think this would be better given as “which asks itself what it desires .”
- 12.
Lacan also discusses the issue of creativity and of “what man does when he makes a signifier” (1986, 119) through his notion of sublimation, a stance of creating in a way that accepts and reconciles us with the real. The Lacanian sublimation is different from the Freudian sublimation as a defence mechanism. For an account of sublimation see Balaska (2018).
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Balaska, M. (2019). From Groundlessness to Creativity: The Merits of Astonishment for Lacan. In: Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_7
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