Jason B. Jones

Department of English
Emory University
jbjones@emory.edu

 

Review of: Alenka Zupancic, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.

 

The point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so traumatic, disturbing, shattering–or funny–about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. (“Signs”)

 

Though they appear nowhere in her splendid first book, Ethics of the Real, these sentences neatly telescope the rigor, clarity, and good humor characteristic of Alenka Zupancic’s work.¹ These traits will not surprise attentive readers of Slavoj Zizek’s collection, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Lacan, But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, or the two volumes in the SIC series from Duke University Press, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects and Cogito and the Unconscious, all of which feature significant contributions by Zupancic. Beyond the obvious attraction for admirers of the particular Ljubljanian conjunction of philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and pop culture, Ethics of the Real merits the serious attention of anyone interested in one of the great ethical crises of our time: Why is nothing but fundamentalism deemed worth dying for any longer?

 

Ethics of the Real satisfies three quite disparate interests. First, it offers a fascinating Lacanian account of causality and freedom in the ethical domain. In this sense, it belongs in the tradition of works such as Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire and Charles Shepherdson’s Vital Signs. Second, Zupancic advances stimulating and novel readings of Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses, Molière’s Don Juan, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, and Claudel’s The Hostage. Zupancic’s reading of The Hostage is insightful in its own right; it should have the additional merit of attracting the attention of American scholars to Lacan’s extensive discussion of Claudel’s play in Seminar VIII: Le transfert. Finally, Ethics of the Real is also useful as a guide to two recent trends in Lacanian theory and scholarship: first, the argument that politics and ethics can be understood as a mode of traversing the (social) fantasy; and second, the increased attention to Alain Badiou’s philosophical and political thought.² In this review, I concentrate on Zupancic’s interrogation of causation and her readings of tragedy.

 

Zupancic begins by quickly mapping the terrain laid out by Lacan in both Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and “Kant with Sade.” For Lacan, psychoanalytic praxis must refuse any idea of “the good.” Analysis cannot center on the analyst’s conception of the good, because then it would turn into a gratification of the analyst’s narcissism, measuring progress in the treatment by the extent to which the analysand slavishly imitates the analyst’s ego. Then again, the analysis clearly cannot focus on the analysand’s idea of the good, either, because the suffering that drives the analysand to analysis in the first place indicates a disconnect between the analysand’s desire or drive and his or her idea of “the good”–an idea that is bound up with the ego. Finally, the analysis also cannot appeal to cultural ideals of “the good” without turning psychoanalysis into a strictly normative endeavor. Instead, by the end of the Ethics seminar, Lacan proposes that “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire [cédé sur son désir]” (321; see Dean 33n14 for a discussion of the stakes involved in this translation). This formulation has caused considerable controversy when applied to Antigone, the figure under discussion in the last section of the seminar. Are we to take Antigone as an ethical hero? Moreover, shortly after this seminar, Lacan begins increasingly to emphasize the drive, instead of desire, as the endpoint of analysis. In the later view, desire is understood as a defense against the satisfaction of drive. How can we reconcile these two arguments in a discussion of ethics? Zupancic shows with great clarity that the drive should be understood as the farthest point of desire, as it were, and not as strictly opposed to it. That is, one can only reach the drive by going through desire.

 

Fine, but where is Kant in all of this? The crucial Kantian point, for Zupancic, is that “ethics demands not only that an action conform with duty, but also that this conformity be the only ‘content’ or ‘motive’ of that action” (14). This is the only way the subject can free herself of pathological contaminants of her will.³ However, as Zupancic points out, this is thoroughly paradoxical: “how can something which is not in itself pathological (i.e., which has nothing to do with the representation of pleasure or pain, the ‘usual’ mode of subjective causality) nevertheless become the cause or drive of a subject’s actions?” (15). Or, more simply, “how can something which, in the subject’s universe, does not qualify as a cause, suddenly become a cause?” (15).

 

What is the difference in outcome of an act done according to one’s duty and one done exclusively for that duty’s sake? Nothing. There is a perceptible difference however, at the level of form. Zupancic points out that this introduces a pure form: a “form which is no longer the form of anything, of some content or other, yet it is not so much an empty form as a form ‘outside’ content, a form that provides form only for itself” (17). The form itself is “pure” insofar as it is exclusively a surplus. Zupancic connects Kant’s surplus with that famous Lacanian surplusage, the objet a. Although pure form and objet a would appear to be antagonistic (a form vs. an object), Zupancic suggests that such a reading is too hasty. For Kant, the proper drive of the will is “defined precisely in terms of pure form as an absence of any Triebfeder [drive]” (18). Similarly, for Lacan, “desire can be defined precisely as the pure form of demand, as that which remains of demand when all the particular objects (or ‘contents’) that may come to satisfy it are removed. Hence the objet petit a can be understood as a void that has acquired a form” (18). For both Kant and Lacan, there is thus a form of deferred action at work (Zupancic calls it a “temporal ‘in-between'” [19]). In Kant, the absence of motive itself must acquire motive force. For Lacan, likewise, the objet a marks the “that’s not it” coextensive with any object one might attain; it thus becomes the motive for desire to slide to the next potential object.

 

To understand this temporal ambiguity, Zupancic embarks on a closely-argued investigation of causality, freedom, and determinism. Kant places humans entirely under the laws of causality. It will not do to affirm “psychological” freedom against “biological” or “material” determinism, because one could always adduce psychological causes for one’s actions. Here Zupancic takes, as it were, a left turn: Rather than grounding her discussion of freedom on “Of the Deduction of the Principles of Pure Practical Reason,” she focuses on the “Critical Elucidation of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason.” In that chapter, she finds a theme dear to any psychoanalytically-inclined reader’s heart: guilt. Guilt, in Zupancic’s reading of Kant, is the very foundation of freedom.

 

We must be very clear about this “guilt,” however. The essential point is the “fact that we can feel guilty even if we know that in committing a certain deed we were, as Kant puts it, ‘carried along by the stream of natural necessity.’ We can feel guilty even for something which we knew to be ‘beyond our control'” (26). The point here is not that we “really” or “deep-down” wanted to commit the deed that we inescapably committed, nor that we are mistaken about the extent to which events were beyond our control. Instead, the guilt registers our freedom. According to Zupancic:

 

Where the subject believes herself autonomous, Kant insists on the irreducibility of the Other, a causal order beyond her control. But where the subject becomes aware of her dependence on the Other (such and such laws, inclinations, hidden motive… ) and is ready to give up,… Kant indicates a “crack” in the Other, a crack in which he situates the autonomy and freedom of the subject. (28)

 

For Zupancic, this is therefore another meeting ground between Kant and Lacan: Kant is, in effect, claiming that “There is no Other of the Other.” Freedom comes because “there is in causal determination a ‘stumbling block’ in the relation between cause and effect” (29). This does not mean of course that we can clap our hands together, rejoice in the gap between cause and effect, and revel in our freedom. Freedom is not characterized by “the arbitrary, or the random as opposed to the lawlike” (33). Instead, freedom is the “point where the subject itself plays an (active) part in lawful, causal necessity” (33, emphasis in original). Zupancic’s argument clarifies the Lacanian proposition that psychoanalysis is neither a mode of determinism nor of performative voluntarism, and that those aren’t even the most interesting or politically efficacious models of subjectivity available.

 

An excellent example of this “freedom” is, as Zupancic points out, the psychoanalytic idea of the “choice of neurosis” (35). Consider, for example, this description from Freud’s “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912):

 

It must be understood that each individual, through the combined operation of his innate disposition and the influences brought to bear on him during his early years, has acquired a specific method of his own in his conduct of his erotic life–that is, in the preconditions to falling in love which he lays down, in the instincts he satisfies and the aims he sets himself in the course of it. This produces what might be described as a stereotype plate (or several such), which is constantly repeated–constantly reprinted afresh–in the course of the person’s life. (99-100)

 

On the one hand, nothing strips the subject of autonomy more than this “stereotype plate.” On the other hand, though, even grammatically Freud indicates that the subject has something at stake here: it is the subject who lays down the preconditions for falling in love, and so forth. Zupancic claims, following Lacan, that this “choice” is in fact “the very condition of possibility of psychoanalysis”–the end of analysis occurs when the subject can take up a new position vis-�-vis her determinants; when she can, in other words, choose a different neurosis (35). Zupancic summarizes the dilemma of freedom nicely:

 

The subject is forced to confront herself as mere object of the will of the Other, as an instrument in the hands of mechanical or psychological causality. At this point Kant intervenes with his second gesture, which concerns the choice of the Gesinnung [disposition]. This gesture opens the dimension of the subject of freedom. The subject of freedom is indeed the effect of the Other, but not in the sense of being an effect of some cause that exists in the Other. Instead, the subject is the effect of the fact that there is a cause which will never be discovered in the Other; she is the effect of the absence of this cause, the effect of the lack in the Other. (40-41)

 

I cannot do justice to the complexities of Zupancic’s argument here, but I hope that this brief account demonstrates the advantages of engaging closely with her work. Ethics of the Real is more than a gloss on the canonical Lacanian references to Kant; it so forcefully connects the two thinkers that we are left wondering how, precisely, we got along without Kant in psychoanalysis. Moreover, Zupancic’s argument usefully clarifies the dynamics by which the Lacanian category of the Real can achieve genuine political and social purchase. Even though we “know that ‘God is dead’ (that the Other does not exist)” and “He knows it too” (255), an ethics of the Real could gesture towards a realization of the infinite.

 

To make these claims clearer, I want briefly to sketch Zupancic’s novel argument about Oedipus. She advances the startling proposition that Oedipus is not guilty of anything, and therein lies his tragedy. Her reading begins with Oedipus’s self-blinding. Oedipus blinds himself after learning that he has, after all his precautions, fulfilled the prophecy that said he would murder his father and marry his mother. The traditional interpretation of Oedipus’s self-inflicted wound is that he thereby acknowledges his guilt and takes up his foretold destiny. However, Sophocles shows us something slightly different when Oedipus appears before the Chorus. Oedipus wails, “A curse upon the shepherd who released me from the cruel fetters of my feet, and saved me from death, and preserved me, doing me no kindness! For if I had died then, I would not have been so great a grief to my friends or to myself” (467). The Chorus extends this argument: “I do not know how I can say that you were well advised; you would have been better dead than living but blind” (467). This sentence refers both to Oedipus’s self-punishment–suicide would clearly be the nobler way out of this situation–and to his past–better to have died as an infant than to live under the misconception as to his parentage. Oedipus rebukes the Chorus, however, crying “Do not try to show me that what has been done was not done for the best” (469).

 

Zupancic argues that rather than internalizing his guilt, Oedipus identifies with his symptom: “Oedipus does not identify with his destiny, he identifies–and this is not the same thing–with that thing in him which made possible the realization of this destiny: he identifies with his blindness” (179). Oedipus the King thus ends somewhat like an analysis: with the traversal of fantasy, in which the analysand becomes, not the subject of desire, but the subject of the drive. This process is more of an “objectification” than a “subjectification”; that is, the analysand identifies with his or her enjoyment rather than with his or her desire. As Renata Salecl puts it, the logic of the drive is “‘I do not want to do this, but I am nonetheless doing it'”; she further explains that this logic of the drive is opposed to the logic of desire “since the subject does not desire to do something, but nonetheless enjoys doing exactly that” (106). At the end of analysis, the subject comes to identify with the enjoyment that he or she has disavowed for so long. Similarly, Oedipus literalizes his blindness as a way to continue being blind, even after he is confronted with knowledge.

 

However, it is not enough to say that Oedipus is self-deceiving. Zupancic insists that when Oedipus says “it’s not my fault,” we are convinced (181). She asserts that “guilt, in the sense of symbolic debt, arises when the subject knows that the Other knows” (182-83). This refers not simply to a knowledge of one’s actions. Instead, it is a sort of “‘surplus-knowledge,’ a knowledge to which the desire of the subject is attached. This ‘surplus-knowledge’… is related to the place from which knowledge (of parricide and incest, for example), is enunciated” (185-86). Oedipus’s problem is that his knowledge has been displaced from the beginning. This “rob[s] him of his desire (which alone could have rendered him guilty). In exchange he is given over to someone else, to the ‘social order’ (to the throne) and to Jocasta” (186). He cannot recognize his father. Oedipus’s complaint is thus:

 

If only I were guilty! If these words suggest a complaint about injustice…, they also suggest something perhaps even more radical. If only I were guilty–but you took from me even that honour, that place in the symbolic (open to me by right)! After all the suffering I have undergone, I am not even guilty (this emphasizes the non-sense of his destiny, not its Sense or Meaning). (195)

 

To the extent that Oedipus’s destiny is meaningful, it will not be due to the oracle’s prophecy.

 

While in this argument Oedipus is not guilty of desiring to marry his mother and murder his father, it does not follow that he is not responsible for his destiny. Zupancic also draws attention to Oedipus’s confrontation with the Sphinx, following Lacan’s argument from Seminar XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse. In this argument, the crucial thing about Oedipus’s solving the riddle isn’t that he somehow divined an unknowable truth, but rather, in answering it “the subject actually gives something–he must give or offer his words; thus he can be taken at his word” (Zupancic 203). The subject’s answer thus produces an irrevocable truth that was in no way determined in advance. The result is the curious psychoanalytic perspective on ethics and freedom: “Meaning is never determined in advance; in order to find its determination and be ‘fixed,’ an act of the subject is required” (210); or, to put it another way, Oedipus “installs the Other (the symbolic order) while simultaneously demonstrating that the Other ‘doesn’t exist'” (211).

 

Ethics of the Real is an arresting book, one that amply repays the attention it exacts. As a guide to Lacanian arguments about ethics, Zupancic’s book serves the dual purposes of explication and polemic, while sacrificing neither. Her readings, both of Kant and Lacan on the one hand, and of literary works on the other, are provocative and insightful. The result is a book about the “ethics of the real” that takes both ethics and the real seriously.

 

Notes

 

1. The quoted passage is from “Signs and Lovers,” Zupancic’s presentation at the Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups Conference at Emory in May. The paper is forthcoming in ERR, the journal of APW.

 

2. The argument that politics should amount to a sort of traversing of the fantasy has been most ably articulated by Zizek in many places, most recently in The Ticklish Subject 247-399. On Badiou, also see Ticklish 128-67; additionally, the Umbr(a) issue featuring Badiou is an excellent introduction to his work (in addition to the four essays by Badiou, see Gillespie “Subtractive” and “Hegel”; Fink).

 

3. Keeping in mind here the Kantian, and not psychoanalytic, definition of pathological: the pathological is anything that compels our actions. It is thus the field of normality itself, and not opposed to the normal.

Works Cited

 

• Dean, Tim. Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
• Fink, Bruce. “Alain Badiou.” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 11-12.
• Freud, Sigmund. “The Dynamics of Transference.” 1912. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 12. London: Hogarth, 1953-74. 97-108. 24 vols.
• Gillespie, Sam. “Hegel Unsutured: An Addendum to Badiou.” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 57-70.
• —. “Subtractive.” Umbr(a) 1 (1996): 7-10.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.
• Salecl, Renata. “The Satisfaction of Drives.” Umbr(a) 1 (1997): 105-110.
• Sophocles. “Oedipus Tyrranus.” In Sophocles I: Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrranus. Ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994. 323-483.
• Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso, 1999.
• Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.
• —. “Signs and Lovers.” ERR 3 (Forthcoming): manuscript. Paper delivered at “Reading: The Second Annual Conference of Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups.” Emory University, Atlanta, GA. 19-21 May 2000.