The Care of the Self versus the Ethics of Desire: Two Diagrams of the Production of Subjectivity (and of the Subject’s Relation to Truth) (Foucault versus Lacan)

Abstract

With the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious, and the introduction of desire into questions of an individual’s motivation, Freud in one fell swoop renders all previous accounts of ethics, and thus of the subject, partial.¹ Bluntly put, psychoanalysis demonstrated explicitly for the first time, that there is something else that determines our behaviour up and beyond (or indeed, below) the ‘good,’ whether it be our own, someone else’s, the good of society/humanity, or ‘the good’ in a more general and abstract sense.² It is this revolution in ethical thought that is the subject of Jacques Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (cited in references as EP), a revolution that is also a redefinition inasmuch as the latter is then not to do with the good at all, at least not in the above sense, and also not to do with what Lacan calls ‘the service of goods’ (that includes the accumulation of wealth, commodities and so forth), but with that very desire — unpredictable, non-productive and unconscious — that will necessarily upset any such moral position. It is also this that marks psychoanalysis with tragedy insofar as such desire, in operating contra this good (and especially the good of the individual), is also a being towards death.