Lacan’s Return to Descartes

Abstract

Modern conceptions of ethics tend to suggest a conception of a subject. Without a sense of that which would enact what might be considered to be ethical and without a conception of that towards or for which a particular action might be considered ethical, it is difficult to see what meaning would be left in the term other than as an abstract morality. If events are understood such that they simply occur or if events affect no one, then we would not generally now consider them in ethical terms. Commonplace conceptions of ethics would tend assume something like a self-adequate, essential and substantial agent, an agent certain of its own self and its own thoughts, such as the Cartesian cogito, the subject which can be certain of its existence because of the fact of its thinking. Such a conception of the subject can be understood to be flawed for a number of reasons. Focusing on the Cartesian subject in particular, there appears here to be a gap which insists between the ‘I’ of the ‘I think’ and the ‘I’ of the ‘I am’ which follows as a logical conclusion from the ‘I think’. That is to say, either these two ‘I’s are not the same thing or the second is already assumed in the positing of the first. ‘I think’ already entails the subject ‘I’ and, thus, the conclusion ‘I am’ is strictly superfluous. Descartes has not really proved or substantiated anything beyond what he had already pre-supposed.