Summation: ‘Das Ding (II)’ (S.VII, C.5)

This is a way for me to work through difficult concepts. It also helps with memory retention. For this reason, I did not go through every theme in the chapter, especially those that I am fairly well-acquainted with. I hope it is the least bit helpful… There are some important concepts that I cover here that we did not get a chance to go through when we met. It also appears that a couple of the quotes are cut off… If you want to check them out, go to the source through properties…

Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Das Ding (II)

What is a discussion of Sublimation doing in Lacan’s Seminar VII?

VP has inspired me with his recent summary-style posts of our current reading, so I got a little busy today.

 

 

Here are some thoughts on our reading for this week, ‘The Problem of Sublimation’ in Seminar VII, focused on the first two chapters of that section.

 

(The following is a summary of my reading of a short chapter in Zupancic’s book on Nietzsche).

 

 

What is the ‘problem of sublimation?’ It is ‘as a problem of ethics that we have to judge sublimation; it creates socially recognized values.’ (107) Sublimation is a creation ex nihilo & not an act of adhering to already existing social values. So the Freudian idea that the satisfaction of the drives must find some surrogate in an already socially acceptable manner must be resisted. Sublimation has to do with creating new values. That is why it has to do with ethics.

 

Summation: ‘Das Ding’ (S.VII, C.4)

This is a way for me to work through difficult concepts. It also helps with memory retention. For this reason, I did not go through every theme in the chapter, especially those that I am fairly well-acquainted with. I hope it is the least bit helpful…

Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Das Ding

Summation: Rereading the ‘Entwurf’ (S.VII, C.3)

Last one for the evening… This is a way for me to work through difficult concepts. It also helps with memory retention. For this reason, I did not go through every theme in the chapter, especially those that I am fairly well-acquainted with. The chapter is mostly dedicated to describing some aspects of the Entwurf… I am here to comment on a couple of the observations:

Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Rereading the Entwurf

1. Bahnung, or facilitation, is an important concept that Lacan utilizes (36). Originally used in Freud’s Entwurf, Lacan believes that the English translation doesn’t do the word, or the entire work for that matter, justice. Aside from facilitation, Lacan suggests that Bahnung connotes a certain concatenation. As he point out himself, such a reformulation serves to buttress his thesis concerning the signifying chain (39).
2. Nebenmensch is another concept derived from Freud that serves a pivotal role in Lacanian thought. The “subject’s experience of satisfaction is entirely dependent on the other”, i.e. the Nebenmensch. Relating to the final few points made in my previous summation, Lacan states that “it is through the intermediary of the Nebenmensch as speaking subject that everything that has to do with the thought processes is able to take shape in the subjectivity of the subject.” Mentioned in the previous chapter, confrontation with another speaking being reveals the contents of one’s own unconscious.

Summation: Pleasure and reality (S.VII, C.2)

Me again… I took a little time to write up a fragmented summary of the second chapter. Hope it is helpful:

Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Pleasure and reality

1. To put briefly what Lacan wants to cover throughout the seminar: “It extended from the recognition of the omnipresence of the moral imperative, of its infiltration into all our experience, to the other pole, that is to say, the pleasure in a second degree we may paradoxically find there, namely, moral masochism” (20).
2. After this point is made, we are immediately confronted by an assertion that is often misconstrued by those who are unacquainted with Lacanian thought. The real is not simply a pre-symbolic supra-reality, but rather the very correlative of the symbolic: “my thesis is that the moral law, the moral command, the presence of the moral agency in our activity, insofar as it is structured by the symbolic, is that through which the real is actualized” (20).
3. Although hesitant when it comes to quickly defining the real, Lacan gets us closer to the crux of the matter by suggesting that the real is related to a “movement which traverses the whole of Freud’s thought.” In this way, it is related to “that opaque surface which to some has seemed so obscure that it is the antinomy of all thought – not just biological but scientific in general – the surface that is known as the death instinct” (20-21).
4. In defining the death instinct, this “law beyond all law”, Lacan is determined to posit it beyond the limitations of the reality/pleasure principle dichotomy, suggesting that it is part of “something which controls in the broadest of senses the whole of our relationship to the world.” The emergence of this core entity is a “rediscovery”, but a rediscovery of what exactly? This question is answered through the introduction of das Ding a little later on (21).

Summation: Outline of the seminar (S.VII, C.I)

I took a little time to write up a fragmented summary of the first chapter. Hope it is helpful:

Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Outline of the seminar

1. There is a very close relationship between morbidity and transgression. The type of transgression that Lacan is referring to is not simply related to the notion that one will expect a certain punishment after the act, but it is a part of it. Lacan points out two instances of transgression in Freud’s work (murder of the father and the death instinct), stating that it is between these two that one finds a “development whose precise significance it will be our task to determine.” (2-3)
2. It is said that an ethical stance need not rely upon a sense of obligation, but that it can go beyond this, touching upon “an ideal of conduct“. This being so, sense of obligation is not quickly dismissed. Lacan goes on to point out the significance of sense of guilt (3).
3. The “productive function of desire” is asserted as being a crucial aspect of the analytic experience. Lacan suggests that Freud’s “moral dimension … is located nowhere else than in desire itself. The agency that is in charge of censorship is said to represent a flocculation of energy that was once harboured by desire (3).
4. The naturalist attempt at liberating desires is defined by Lacan as a failure. This is because libertine thought has been unable to attenuate the weight of “laws and duties”. Libertines are said to still be subjected to “trial[s] of ordeal“. Individuals who undergo such a trial, including the Marquis de Sade, do it for a certain Judge, i.e. the Other (3-4).
5. In relation to the question of desire, Lacan draws upon Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as a piece of work that positions a “whole register of desire … outside of the field of morality.” What Aristotle throws out is seen by Lacan as the very “forefront of our experience”, including the “sphere of sexual desires”. Lacan says that he will elaborate upon this topic later on (5).
6. Using Totem and Taboo as a reference point, Lacan points out that “it is the transformation of the energy of desire which makes possible the idea of the genesis of its repression.” Here we return to the summation made in point 3. Transgression is not placed upon us “in a formal way”. Rather, it serves as a point of felix culpa, an instance where a mistake doesn’t bring about misfortune, but rather growth and plenitude (6).
7. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, its importance elevated by Lacan to extreme heights, will be an important reference point in this work. For instance, it addresses a certain “immemorial human demand” that occupies much of daily experience (6-7).
8. Lacan states that the focal point of the psychoanalytic moral experience lies in the following: Woe es war, soll Ich werden (7).
9. The root of this “I” is “already found in the ‘I’ which asks itself what it wants. The place where these questions are directed serve as the same place where “strange, paradoxical, and cruel commands” are emanated by one’s “morbid experience”, i.e. the superego injunction (7).
10. Lacan elaborates upon three specific analytic ideals: (a) “ideal of human love“: “Analysis has brought about a very important change of perspective on love by placing it at the center of ethical experience”. (b) “ideal of authenticity“: This presupposes the idea of unmasking but Lacan states that it goes beyond this. It is a certain “norm” that should be established. (c) “ideal of non-dependence“: Although there is a tendency to dabble with education during analysis, but we must not forget “constitutive reservations of the Freudian position”. What needs to be asserted involves effacing the “dimension of habits“. In this way, “the very essence of the unconscious is defined in a different register from the one which Aristotle emphasizes in the Ethics (8-10).
11. “One cannot say that we ever intervene in the field of any virtue. We clear ways and paths, and we hope that what is called virtue will take root there (10).
12. “Well, as odd as it may seem to that superficial opinion which assumes any inquiry into ethics must concern the field of the ideal, if not of the unreal, I, on the contrary, will proceed instead from the other direction by going more deeply into the notion of the real … [T]he question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real” (11).
13. The “utilitarian conversion” that Lacan speaks of refers to a “terminal moment” that directly preceded the ultimate attenuation of the importance of the master-figure with Hegel. Lacan goes on to reinterpret the importance of utilitarian thought. He does this by zeroing in on Bentham’s idea of the “fictitious”, from which he draws the corollary that “every truth has the structure of fiction”. The “characteristic of pleasure” is situated “on the side of the fictitious”, i.e. the symbolic (11-12).
14. Important paragraph concerning the understand of reality according to Freud: “That the unconscious is structured as a function of the symbolic, that it is the return of a sign that the pleasure principle makes man seek out, that the pleasurable element in that which directs man in his behavior without his knowledge … that that which one seeks and finds again is the trace rather than the trail” (12).
15. Happiness is presented as an ultimate goal. Lacan equates happiness with an encounter, a meeting. What Lacan thinks Freud brings to the table is that “absolutely nothing is prepared for it” (13).
16. Affirming the idea that the fulfillment of a wish evokes pleasure, Lacan goes on to state that this is a wish that the dreamer never wanted the wish to begin with. From here he draws the conclusion that desire is always the desire of a desire (14).