The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego - The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics

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The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt andthe Beginning of EthicsAdrian Johnston

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To cite this Article Johnston, Adrian(2001) 'The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and theBeginning of Ethics', Psychoanalytic Studies, 3: 3, 411 424

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Psychoanalytic Studies, Vol. 3, Nos. 3/4, 2001

The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The

Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginningof Ethics

ADRIAN JOHNSTON, The State University of New York at Stony Brook

Placing an inordinate emphasis on the closing sessions of the seventh seminar, inter-preters of Lacans ethics of psychoanalysis frequently latch onto a catch -phrase which

they proceed to hold up to the eyes of their readers as the condensed essence of a new,

psychoanalytically informed ethico-moral paradigm: Do not give way on your desire!

Lacan enigmatically proclaims that, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of

having given ground relative to ones desire.1 What usually goes unremarked in

commentaries on Lacanian ethics is the profound ambiguity at the heart of this

formulation, an ambiguity tied to the indeterminacy of the term desire (thus, grounding

an ethics on this catch-phrase is especially risky and problematic, since it results in

varying and often conicting meanings depending on which Lacanian denition of desire

one utilizes from disparate periods of Lacans teaching).2 As is well known, desire is a

technical concept for Lacan, not simply an interchangeable equivalent with other words

designating libidinal forces (i.e., libido, drive, cathexis, etc.); and the meaning and place

of desire in Lacans shifting theoretical apparatus metamorphosizes several times over

the course of his intellectual itinerary. Lacan himself seems to vacillate between

sometimes employing desire in its precise technical sense (i.e., as a sublimated/aim-

inhibited drive bereft of its original drive-object, as the ineliminable absence of das

Ding, the libidinal Real thing) and sometimes using it in a looser, more equivocal way.

Perhaps because of this latter terminological laxness, interpreters tend to present Lacans

ethics as a quasi-Nietzschean alternative to Kant by reading Do not give way on your

desire! as Do not give way on your jouissance !

Nietzsche, vehemently opposing himself to what he understands to be Kants ethics,

presents the eternal return as an inverted alternative to the categorical imperative. In

Nietzsches eyes, the categorical imperative is the secular by-product of the slave revolt

that historically comes to formulate a morality based upon ressentiment; this revolution-

ary transvaluation of values is linked to the slave class conditions of subjugation and

servitude to those who are politically and economically more powerful (this secrethistory of the development of the concepts of good and evil being, of course, the

topic of the Genealogy of Morals). Ultimately, for Nietzsche, the categorical imperative

demands nothing else than the senseless sacrice of ones vital life forces to the Moloch

of abstraction. Nietzsche states:

A word against Kant as a moralist. A virtue has to be our invention, our most

personal defense and necessity: in any other sense it is merely a danger. What

does not condition our life harms it: a virtue merely from a feeling of respect

for the concept virtue, as Kant desired it, is harmful. Virtue, duty, good

ISSN 1460-8952 print/ISSN 1470-1049 online/01/3/40411-14 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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412 A. Johnston

in itself, impersonal and universalphantoms, expressions of decline, of the

nal exhaustion of life The profoundest laws of preservation and growth

demand the reverse of this: that each one of us should devise his own virtue,

his own categorical imperative. A people perishes if it mistakes its own duty

for the concept of duty in general. Nothing works more profound ruin than anyimpersonal duty, any sacrice to the Moloch of abstraction (Nietzsche, 1968,

pp. 131132)

Nietzsche doesnt explicitly say that his vague, quasi-poetic musings about the eternal

return are meant to be taken as what he here paradoxically alludes to as his own virtue,

his own categorical imperative. But, the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence loses

a lot of its opacity if its interpreted as part of the effort to displace Kant. In the standard

version of the Kantian schema, the subjects intentions are most ethical when they are

least tied to the particularity of the individual (i.e., his/her inclinations, desires, wishes,circumstances, etc.). The categorical imperative (I am never to act otherwise than so

that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law) functions as a kind

of sieve meant to strain out, as much as possible, these pathological materials tainting

the intentional purity of duty. Conversely, the injunction of the eternal returnperhaps

this injunction is capable of being rendered in the imperative form as I am never to act

otherwise than so that I could also will that my concrete, unique, and utterly individual

act should be universalized, namely, should endlessly recur for all eternitydemands

exactly the opposite of the categorical imperative. In a Nietzschean system of valu-

ation, rather than being the basest, most unworthy of intentional states, the particular,idiosyncratic desires of the individual subject are the highest standards by which to

measure actions. Only if an action expresses the strongest of subjective urges, urges so

strong that the subject would will them to innitely manifest themselves again and again

in all their singular uniqueness, is it of any worth.

What does this interpretation of Nietzsches doctrine of eternal recurrence have to do

with Lacanian ethics? Most readings of the Lacanian dictum Do not give way on your

desire! understand him to be proposing something similar to Nietzsche: (pure) desire is

conceived of as jouissance, as the uncompromising, unconditional thrust of Trieb once

operative outside the conning consequentialist calculus of the pleasure principle. 3 Thesubjective particularity of pure desire is ethical precisely when its strength overwhelms

the mitigating inuence of the pleasure-oriented ego. Various commentaries on the

seventh seminar point to the tragic gure of Antigone as proof that this is exactly what

Lacan intends to convey. Antigones passionate attachment to her dead brother Poly-

neices drives her to transgress Creons edict forbidding the burial of the corpse. Her

excessive love is then compared with the Todestrieb, since Antigone is compelled to

disregard the tragic consequences that she is fully aware await her in the wake of her

act. A Real passage a lacte (i.e., Antigones burial of her brother as a result of her

desire) transgressively disrupts the reign of a Symbolic system of Law (i.e., Creonsdenial of funerary rites for Polyneices on the grounds of the interests of the polis).4 Is

this the distilled essence of Lacans ethics of psychoanalysis? Is he, like Nietzsche,

simply interested in turning Kant on his head, in unreservedly transforming Kant into

Sade?

Despite the initial impressions that one might be tempted to walk away with from the

letter of Lacans text, the answers to the above questions are far from obvious. The

interpretive position stating that Lacan praises the transgressive act as the highest good

in a quasi-Nietzschean transvaluation of Kantian values pays utterly no attention to the

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The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego 413

fact that Lacan speaks of not ceding ones desire. His choice of words, as a result of

which he doesnt explicitly suggest that subjective ethicality is necessarily dependent

upon the ruthless pursuit of ones jouissance, is often ignored.5 Whats more, in the

sessions of the seventh seminar devoted to Sophocles, Lacan explicitly states that desire

arises from the sacrice of jouissance:

6

not ceding on ones desire would seem to entailnot surrendering to the siren-song of jouissance, not capitulating to the uncompromising

demands of Trieb. This interpretive angle is further reinforced when one notes that, in

an essay from the same period as the seventh seminar (the 1960 Subversion of the

subject), Lacan describes desire as opposing jouissance desire is a defense (defense),

a prohibition (defense) against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance (Lacan, 1977,

p. 322). If this is indeed what Lacan means, then not giving ground on desire is a

translation of Kants insistence on the exclusion of pathological drives from properly

ethical intentionality, with the psychoanalytic qualication that the detachment from

these drives is itself achieved through and sustained by a subl(im)ation of inclination, aself-subversion of Trieb. Admittedly, both jouissance as well as pure desire are

independent from the pleasure principle. But, does this common conceptual feature

permit a free equivocation between the two terms? Before progressing any further, its

rst necessary to get a basic sense of desire as dened by Lacan (due to the amount of

space that would be necessary for an exhaustive expose of this concept, only a few

cursory indications are possible here; and, since Lacans denitions of desire undergo a

series of radical modications over the course of his teaching, attention will primarily be

paid to desire as it theoretically operates during the periods surrounding the seventh

seminar [approximately seminars ve through ten, roughly 19571963]).One of the easiest ways to gain a preliminary understanding of Lacanian desire is by

returning to the Freudian concepts of Trieb and sublimation. For Freud, sublimation is

the typical means by which Trieb adapts itself to the constraints and obstacles it comes

to encounter at the level of the reality principle. Reality forbids certain drive -aims qua

the attainment of satisfaction linked to determinate drive-objects. Thus, reality is said to

be responsible for what Freud designates as aim-inhibition (a catalyst for sublimation).

The aim-inhibited drive then seeks other forms of satisfaction via different objects; and,

if these alternate modes of securing gratication are not at odds with the various

prohibitions of the reality principle (usually, socio-cultural laws and norms), then thenew libidinal arrangement is dubbed a successful sublimation of the drive. However,

especially in the later texts of the second topography, Freud repeatedly emphasizes that

Trieb is fundamentally conservative, that drives unceasingly seek to recover their

earliest forms of satisfaction.7 Furthermore, in, for example, Civilization and Its Discon-

tents, he argues that instinctual renunciation (i.e., the aim-inhibition of the drives

demanded by human reality) is, despite appearances to the contrary, an unavoidable

libidinal fate for all subjects.8 As such, the Freudian subject lives in a state of

unsatisfactory compromise: sublimation provides pleasurable outlets for Trieb, but Trieb

itself is incapable of ever being fully satised with these compromises, since they are,by the very denition of the mechanism of sublimation, deviations from the original

cathetic trajectory (i.e., the earliest state of affairs which all drives struggle in vain to

recover; in the seventh seminar, Lacan designates this posited ground zero of the

libidinal economy das Ding9). The libidinal life of the human being is therefore marked

by certain constitutive lacks or absencesas Lacan puts it, the sovereign Good of

das Ding is always missing from the reality of subjective ex-sistence10and this

condition of (non-)existence is precisely what Lacan intends for his notion of desire to

designate.

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414 A. Johnston

Desire is the residual remainder/by-product of the subjection of jouissance (i.e., Trieb

an sich, the unconditional attachment to das Ding) to the ego-mediated negotiations

between the pleasure and reality principles. In other words, desire is symptomatic of the

drives dissatisfaction with the pleasure-yielding compromises of sublimation. It often

goes unnoticed in most interpretive engagements with Lacans seventh seminar that twoseparate lines of argumentation branch off from this set of basic, denitional premises

(concerning desire, drive, jouissance, pleasure, the Law, and das Ding): on the one hand,

Lacan seeks to clarify and further develop Freuds analyses of conscience as a

manifestation of a pathological moral masochism fueled by an insatiable super-ego; on

the other hand, Lacan lays down the preliminary groundwor k for a psychoanalytic

meta-ethical theory based on the possibility of desire coming to function in a pure,

properly ethical fashion. These two dimensions of Lacans so-called ethics of psycho-

analysis must not be conated, since doing so results in either muddleheaded confusion

or outright error.In the early sessions of the seventh seminar, Lacan introduces his notion of das Ding

and begins specifying its role in his conceptual apparatus. A typical mistake regarding

das Ding is to interpret it as simply an archaic lost object of the drives. In other words,

one might initially be tempted to understand the Lacanian Real thing as designating a

developmental stage of object-relations, namely, the infants dyadic fusional attachment

to the mothers body prior to the traumatic Oedipal encounter with the paternal third party

and his prohibition of this incestuous bond (i.e., the Non-du-Pere). But, this is only

partially true. Although Lacan does indeed speak of das Ding as a primordial point of

investment/cathexis for the libidinal economy (i.e., a temporally anterior thing to whichthe drives are attached), he underlines that this paradoxical (non-)entity is as much a

fantasmatic, retroactive projection generated after-the-fact of the subjects Symbolic

constitution (i.e., after the intervention of the Law) as a genuinely lost object. Z izek

expresses this as the difference between das Ding as presupposed (the Thing develop-

mentally precedes the advent of the regulative prohibition of the symbolic order) and as

posed (the Thing is the illusion of there having been a prior, jouissance-laden union with

this Real substance).11 Z izek heavily favors this latter conception of das Ding, sometimes

going so far as to argue that it doesnt exist prior to the backwards glance of the nostalgic

subject of the Symbolic wishing to have lost something he/she never possessed in the rstplace (das Ding is a result of the fundamental strategy of fantasy, wherein the structural

impossibility of the drives full satisfaction qua jouissance obtained12 is concealed

from the subject by making it seem as if this enjoyment is hypothetically re-obtainable). 13

However, this is a misleading exaggeration that treats Lacan as wholly Hegelian.

Lacan deliberately straddles the line between Kant and Hegel: briey put, Kants

noumenal Ding an sich is the thing-as-presupposed (behind or anterior to the objectival

facade of appearances within the subjects experienced reality); Hegel, in his criticism

of Kants thing-in-itselfin the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel, echoing criticisms

already made by Fichte and Schelling, alleges that Kants Ding an sich is primarily aby-product of treating appearances as appearances,14 namely, a residual, illusory effect

of a particular subjective epistemological stance with regards to phenomenaimplicitly

treats this noumenal thing as posed by the activity of consciousness (rather than as

presupposed behind consciousness). Lacan maintains that, as far as psychoanalysis is

concerned, a middle ground is needed here. At one point in the seventh seminar, Lacan

violently reacts against being categorized as a Hegelian:

That Hegelian radicalism that was rashly attributed to me should in no way

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be imputed to me. The whole dialectic of desire that I developed here is

sharply distinguished from such Hegelianism. It is even more marked this year.

The inevitable character seems to me to be especially marked in the effect of

sublimation (Lacan, Book VII, p. 134).

Right at this moment, an anonymous auditor intervenes:

Mr. X: The formula for sublimation that you have given us is to raise the

object to the dignity of the Thing. This Thing doesnt exist to start with,

because sublimation is going to bring us to it. The question I have is, therefore,

isnt this Thing not really a thing, but on the contrary a Non-Thing, and isnt

it through sublimation that one comes to see it as being the Thing ()?

(Lacan, Book VII, p. 134).

This question cites the denition of sublimation provided earlier in the seventh seminar:sublimation raises an object to the dignity of the Thing.15 And, Lacan hints at a double

meaning in object here: object qua material stand-in/embodiment of the empty

structural place of das Ding as well as object qua objection (i.e., the Imaginary object

simultaneously represents the Real Thing while also barring access to itin Encore,

Lacan conveys this in saying that the object is a failure,16 this paradoxical straddling

of registers being an essential aspect of objet petit a). In response to this auditors

question, Lacan at rst expresses pleasure at having been well understood.17 However,

he goes on to indicate that he has reservations about fully embracing the notion of the

Things complete non-existence, namely, in Z

iz

eks parlance, its utterly posed nature.Having already described das Ding in quasi-developmental terms at certain other

moments in his elaborations, Lacan is not willing, despite his emphasis on the

Imaginary-Symbolic subjects retroactive, fantasmatic embellishments generating das

Ding as appearing to have been a concrete, factual entity dwelling within a paradise

lost of archaic, blissful jouissance, to completely collapse this Real Thing into a posited

status fully immanent to the fabric of the symbolic order.

Lacans insistence on the paradoxical status of das Ding as both presupposed and

posed is, in fact, due to his underlying interest in clarifying Freud. Briey put, this

compromise position between Kantianism and Hegelianism is an attempt to do justice tothe problem of the factual reality of mnemic traces of the past in the Freudian psyche

(a problem thats much too big to be adequately broached in the context of the present

discussion). As early as the 1894 Studies on Hysteria, the 1899 paper Screen Memor-

ies, and the famous moments in the Fliess correspondence where Freud speaks of the

retranscription of memory-traces and also calls into question the realist version of the

seduction theory, Freud grapples with the problem of whether the past is ever preserved

in a pristine, undistorted condition within the psyche. At rst glance, psychoanalysis

seems to require such preservation as a basic assumption behind its view of the mind.

And yet, what Freuds notion of Nachtraglichkeit emphasizes is that the past whichoverdetermines the psychical present is itself subjected to retroactive modication by this

same present (the subjects past is continually reworked after-the-fact according to the

structuring inuence of later ontogenetic factors). The dual nature of the Real reects

this unstable (temporal) dialectic: the inaccessible past, in its unaltered purity, is

presupposed to lie behind the various formations of the unconscious, while, at the same

time, the work of retranscription subsequent to this past (up through the present) is

complicit in posing the presentation of this same past.

Why is the preceding discussion relevant? What does this have to do with Lacans

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416 A. Johnston

ethics of psychoanalysis? Sketching the general parameters of the connection (or lack

thereof) between the Real (das Ding, jouissance, etc.) and the Symbolic (the big Other,

the Law, etc.) is necessary in order to properly understand Lacans perspective on

morality and the Freudian eld. He states:

It is to the extent that the commandment in question preserves the distance

from the Thing as founded by speech itself that it assumes its value. But where

does this take us? Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know

of the Thing by means of the Law. In effect, I would not have had the idea

to covet it if the Law hadnt said: Thou shalt not covet it. But the Thing nds

a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the command-

ment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. (Lacan, Book VII, p. 83).

This shows one of the ways in which Lacan takes his distance from a Hegelianism he

previously embraced with less reservation. One of Kojeves one-liners appropriated byLacan is the word murders the thing:18 the genesis of signication irreversibly modies

the subjects relations to the phenomenal eld of thing-entities (this modication is

described by Hegel in the opening section of the Phenomenology on Sense-Certainty19).

However, in the passage above from the seventh seminar, Lacan declares that the Law

(as articulated speech, as the prohibitions laid down by the symbolic big Other), rather

than simply destroying das Ding by transubstantiating it into die Sache (i.e., a

Symbolic-Imaginary object), introduces this Thing to the subject, makes the subject

aware of the (non-)presence of this Thing (hence Lacans ambivalent answer to the

auditors question about whether the Thing is a No-Thingit exists and it doesntexist). On the basis of this passage, one could say that das Ding qua presupposed (i.e.,

the Thing as a thing-in-itself anterior to Symbolic mediation) is nothing for the subject,

since there supposedly is no subject prior to the intervening inuence of the Imaginary

and the Symbolic; but, once das Ding is forbidden by the Law (i.e., once representa-

tional mediation makes the Real structurally inaccessible to the subject, once the Law

introduces the subject to das Ding by pointing to its absence), it becomes a posited lack,

a central void constitutive of the subjects desire. Additionally, Lacan, deviating from a

rudimentary Freudian assumption, does not presume that the individual knows how or

what to desire prior to being told what he/she desires. The implicit and explicit

prohibitions encountered by the subject educate his/her desire, showing what should

(not) be coveted (this would mean that, in the Oedipus complex, the child doesnt

incestuously covet the mother until the father indicates that he/she shouldnt). In a way,

Lacan provides a relatively complex theoretical model for the forbidden fruit syndrome

familiar to pop-psychological common sense.

The prohibition of the jouissance presumed to be possible with the hypothetical

re-attainment of das Ding this reunion with the Real Thing is, for Lacan, a fantasy

veiling the structural impossibility of such a relationis precisely what sustains the

illusory belief in the possibility of pure enjoyment. The Law of the big Other provides

the subject necessarily deprived of jouissance with a false rationalization making it seem

as if he/she once had it, although it is now lost (the necessary is fantasmatically

transformed into the contingent). This supports a sustainable form of desire, instead of

the libidinal economy collapsing into hopeless resignation. Almost three years later,

during the ninth seminar, Lacan puts his cards on the table. He states:

If the fact that a fundamental access to jouissance qua jouissance of the Thing

is prohibited, if this is what I told you throughout the whole year of the

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seminar on Ethics, if it is in this suspension, in the fact that this jouissance is

aufgehoben, suspended properly speaking that there lies the supporting plane

on which desire is going to be constituted as such and be sustained because

it is really the most distant approximation from anything that the world may

saydo you not see that we can formulate that the Other, this Other in so faras it at once poses itself as being and is not, that it is to be, when we advance

towards desire we clearly see that the Other here in as much as its support is

the pure signier, the signier of the Law, that the Other is presented here as

a metaphor of this prohibition. To say that the Other is the Law or that it is

jouissance qua prohibited, is the same thing. (Lacan, Book IX, 1962)

Desire, which exists in the absence of das Ding, is preserved by making the Other (i.e.,

the Symbolic locus of the Law, the source of restrictions) into a metaphor of this

prohibition, into a scapegoat for the structurally determined loss of the Real an sich(The Other stole my jouissance!the falsity here resides in the fact that something one

never possessed in the rst place cannot be stolen). Thus, the Law, in all its incarnate

forms, enables the subject to continue desiring, rather than undergoing the traumatic

destitution that would result from a full apprehension of the inherent deadlock of the

libidinal economy. Thus, in both the tenth seminar and Kant avec Sade, Lacan goes so

far as to directly identify desire with its prohibitionDesire then is the law.20

The introduction of the Law generates desire ex nihilo. Instead of forbidding a

pre-existent set of urges in the individual, it teaches the subject what to covet, if only

as an inaccessible vanishing point whose appearance of possible accessibility is a mirageengendered by the seemingly contingent nature of the Law and its authority. Further-

more, Lacan insinuates that there is a correlation between the severity of the big Others

prohibitions and the intensity of the subjects (unconscious) desires. This is the exact

point at which Lacans conceptual labors outlined above yield their essential insights into

the overlap between the ethico-moral domain and Freudian psychoanalysis. When Lacan

discusses the relation between desire and guilt, hes principally interested in accounting

for the Freudian economic paradox of masochism (not, as is usually alleged, in issuing

a prescriptive, quasi-Sadean ethics of guilt-free jouissance). The most misleading feature

of virtually every extant commentary on Lacans ethics of psychoanalysis is theattribution to him of the imperative Do not give way on your desire! In the seventh

seminar, Lacan does not present the link between desire and guilt in the form of a

command, an injunction to persist in ones desire. Instead, he merely states that guilt

is the result of ceding on (i.e., not enacting in reality, refraining from concrete

actualization) ones desiresJe propose que la seule chose dont on puisse etre

coupable, au moins dans la perspective analytique, cest davoir cede sur son desir

(Lacan, 1986, p. 368). At the beginning of this seminar, Lacan remarks that psycho-

analysis is confronted, across the range of its analysands, with the omnipresence of guilt

in human life.21 Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethicsas in comprehending the precise nature of moral masochism, in fully grasping how the

constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality

pathologize the ethical eld. At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral

masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine

ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a

non-pathological metaphysics of morals.

As the seventh seminar progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that guilt is being

descriptively discussed as a negative affect (and not prescriptively judged in a negative,

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418 A. Johnston

disapproving light as a true ethical shortcoming of the subject based upon his/her lack

of resolve with respect to his/her desire or jouissance). Lacan repeatedly makes reference

to the Freudian super-ego as an excessive, greedy, and out-of-control agency.22 Echoing

Freud, he observes that, the more one sacrices to it, the more it demands.23 The

super-ego isnt satised with mere external/behavioral conformity to ethico-moralprecepts; it uncompromisingly insists upon the impossible purication of intentionality

itself (thus, the super-ego is, in a manner of speaking, a spontaneous Kantian). Lacan

connects his earlier establishment of the equivalence between desire and the Law with

the Freudian theory of the super-ego:

Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents that everything that is trans-

ferred from jouissance to prohibition gives rise to the increasing strengthening

of prohibition. Whoever attempts to submit to the moral law sees the demands

of his superego grow increasingly meticulous and increasingly cruel. Why isnt

it the same in the other direction? It is a fact that it isnt the case at all.

Whoever enters the path of uninhibited jouissance, in the name of the rejection

of the moral law in some form or other, encounters obstacles whose power is

revealed to us every day in our experience in innumerable forms, forms that

nevertheless perhaps may be traced back to a single root. We are, in fact, led

to the point where we accept the formula that without a transgression there is

no access to jouissance, and, to return to Saint Paul, that that is precisely the

function of the Law. Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes

place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law.

(Lacan, Book VII, pp. 176177).

At the beginning of this quotation, Lacan alludes to an observation that Freud formulates

in his 1924 paper The economic problem of masochism. In the concluding paragraphs

of that essay, Freud notes that the more the subject complies with realitys prohibition

of aggression, the greater the guilt the subject feels, the harsher the demands of the

super-ego become. Unlike external authorities, which can only observe and punish

externalized acts of transgression, the super-ego sees and judges the subjects inner

intentions. Freud pinpoints this as a paradox of sorts: the more the subject overtly obeys

the rules of reality, the more the super-ego (unconsciously) inicts the negative affect ofguilt.24 This paradox is illuminated by the theory of the super-ego as presented in

Civilization and Its Discontents: the super-ego is a subliminatory channel for the ids

sadism; the id diverts the aggressive drives onto the subjects own ego when the reality

principle prevents it from discharging this aggression against others; thus, the more the

moral subject refrains from enacting these aggressive drives in reality (i.e., the more

he/she heeds the ethical principles of his/her social milieu), the more the id is

compelled to utilize the super-ego to work off aggression against the ego (hence, the

greater the feeling of guilt, since Freud claims that guilt is the pain consciously

experienced by the ego as a result of the unconscious subliminatory dynamic occurringat the level of id and super-ego). How does Lacan integrate this line of Freudian

reasoning?

Lacans reference to Saint Paul holds the key here. Z izek uses this reference to point

out that, in Lacanian theory, it isnt simply a matter of claiming that the Law arouses

desire out of nowhere through its prohibitions: its also the case that obedience to the

Law is cemented in place by the struggle to fend off these desires, that the more rigid

the subjects adherence to the rules, the presumably greater is his/her need to repress

increasingly powerful urges to contravene it.25 Consequently, when Lacan speaks about

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being guilty for having ceded or given ground relative to ones desire, what he really

means is the following: the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying

the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels, since such concessions only

aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely,

internal repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscientauthority of the sadistic super-ego). Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan

clearly advances this claim in saying that, Freud reminds us that its not evil, but good,

that engenders guilt (Lacan, p. 45). At no point does Lacan contest the Freudian

denition of guilt as a negative affect resulting from the super-egos punishment of the

ego. Hence, Lacan, in following Freud here, isnt treating guilt as a properly ethico-

moral sentiment, but, rather, as a symptom of super-ego aggression (with this aggression

itself being acknowledged as arising from ceded, aim-inhibited desires whose intensity

increases the longer and more severely theyre held in check). Consequently, one can be

guilty before the tribunal of the super-ego without, for all that, being actually guilty inan ethico-moral sense per se. Many of the misinterpretations of Lacanian ethics are

linked to an erroneous equivocation between guilt as a negative affect (i.e., as symp-

tomatic of moral masochism) and guilt as indicative of a true ethical failure on the part

of the subject (i.e., guilt as a signal of non-pathological conscience).

The sole form of jouissance (i.e., direct drive satisfaction, as Lacan denes it in the

seventh seminar26) available to the desiring subject of the Law is the obscene

enjoyment of super-egoistic aggression, the getting off on a moral masochism whose

trigger is pulled by transgressive desires aggravated by being held back from actualiza -

tion in reality (a jouissance which, sadly enough, isnt even directly, consciouslyexperienced as enjoyable by the individual, since the ego registers it as guilty suffer -

ing).27 This aspect of Lacans work hardly amounts to a new ethics of psychoanalysis,

if ethics is to be understood as a body of prescriptive principles reecting certain ideals

for human conduct. Instead, it serves as a Lacanian translation of the Freudian economic

paradox of the masochism, this paradox being the result of the vicious circle operative

between the libidinal economy and the super-ego. And, because Lacan understands the

super-ego as a parasitic by-product of the inherent structuration of the libidinal economy

(i.e., as the only pathetic form of jouissance available to the subject of desire), he, unlike

many Freudians, refrains from laying the blame for moral masochism on civilizationThe greediness by which he characterizes the superego is structural, not an effect of

civilization, but discontent (symptom) in civilization (Lacan, p. 28).

Any lingering doubts about whether the greediness of the super-ego is the central

concern of the seventh seminar should be dispelled by an examination of one of the

concluding paragraphs of the session entitled The moral goals of psychoanalysis (June

29, 1960). Lacan states:

We have never stopped repeating that the interiorization of the Law has

nothing to do with the Law. Although we still need to know why. It is possiblethat the superego serves as a support for the moral conscience, but everyone

knows that it has nothing to do with the moral conscience as far as its most

obligatory demands are concerned. What the superego demands has nothing to

do with that which we would be right in making the universal rule of our

actions; such is the ABC of psychoanalytic truth. (Lacan, Book VII, p. 310).

Its crucial to note that Lacan refuses to indulge himself in the vulgar Freudian critique

of ethics so often attributed to him today, namely, the claim that Kantian conscience/duty

is wholly super-egoistic in a Sadean manner. Instead, he carefully separates the

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420 A. Johnston

interiorization of the Law (i.e., the super-ego and its vicious circle of legal prohibition,

exacerbation of desire, and the obscene, id-level jouissance of punishment for the arousal

of desirethis vicious circle is what, in Encore, he describes by asserting that the

fundamental injunction of the super-ego is Enjoy!28) from the Law itself. Lacan

indicates that the question of the ethico-moral legitimacy of universal maxims ofpractical reason is entirely separate from the perverse use to which the libidinal economy

often puts duty. Thus, one could argue, Lacan prepares the way for ethics by zeroing in

on those factors that threaten and subvert it (factors which Kant, for example, given the

relative simplicity of his model of drive qua inclination as well as the comparatively

impoverished state of psychological knowledge during his time, doesnt adequately

address as potential, insidious distorting inuences facing the intentionality of the ethical

subject). He warns of the various pathological pitfalls thwarting the subject in its quest

for the assumption of a properly ethical position. However, this is worlds apart from

making claims that being ethical is equivalent to following ones desire to the end, toacting-out ones repressed urges in rebellious deance of all (consequentialist) barriers.

On the contrary, Lacan indicates that the desperate Sadean subject who follows this route

only meets with crushing disappointment, encountering his/her destitution in the face of

the absence of obtainable full enjoyment: witness Antigones private breakdown after

defying Creon,29 Oedipus guilt after fullling the repressed incestuous dreams of the

universalized Freudian human being, and Electras horror and regret after accomplishing

her ostensible desire to slay her adulterous mother.30 Lacan merely brings one to the

point where the essential question that must be answered if a psychoanalytic ethics is to

be possible at all poses itself: Can conscience function beyond the super-ego, namely,is the subject able to break out of the cycle running from Law to desire to guilt? If not,

then the Freudian diagnosis of conscience as a symptomatic by-product of the super-

egos id-driven sadism really does represent the end of ethics in any meaningful,

philosophically consistent mode. Both Freud and Lacan have made signicant inroads

into demystifying the origins and mechanisms of feeling guilty. However, it remains

doubtful if psychoanalysis has yet pronounced its denitive verdict as regards being

guilty.

Notes[1] I propose then that, from an analytic point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of

having given ground relative to ones desire. Whether it is admissible or not in a given ethics, that

proposition expresses quite well something that we observe in our experience. In the last analysis, what

a subject really feels guilty about when he manifests guilt at bottom always has to do withwhether or

not it is admissible for a director of consciencethe extent to which he has given ground relative to his

desire (Lacan, Book VII, 1992, p. 319).

[2] desir offers an extensive semantic eld which is amenabl e to exploitation in a number of ways.

It is a borderline signier which readily facilitates movement between the contiguous elds of

philosophy and psychoanalysis (Macey, 1988, p. 115).

[3] Like Kant, Lacan stresses the way the law functions to divide the subject from itself; for Kant duty isset against inclination, for Lacan the desire of the subject is opposed to the ego. In both cases, the ethical

act is opposed to the subjects self-denition in terms of its own good. In Freudian terms, the ethical

emerges in what is beyond the pleasure principle, in service to what is wholly other to the narcissistic

ego. That Lacan follows the implications of such a view beyond its Kantian expression is evidenced by

the parallel Lacan draws between the positions of Kant and Sade. The law of the signier embraces the

morality of Sade as readily as it does the categorical imperative of Kant. The provocative reference to

Sade only serves to underscore the main point at stake in Lacans concept of the law. What is at issue

is less a defense of any particular moral code than an insistence on an ethics of desire where desire is

taken in opposition to the homeostases of the ego. The Sadean ethic is an imperative of pure

transgression (Boothby, 1991, pp. 174175).

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[4] Dans le cadre dune ethique du desir, Antigone represente donc une forme de labsolutisme moral, du

fanatisme heroque. Son desir est marque par un aveuglement (ate). Dans le cadre de la question du

rapport du sujet a la Loi, Antigone illustre donc lattitude de quelquun dont le desir passionnel se moque

de toute Loi generale pour faire de son propre desir la Loi exclusive de sa conduite. Son desir nest pas

seulement au-dela de la pitie et de la crainte, il est aussi au-dela du bien et du mal. Il est sublime parce

quil est au-dela de ce qui est humain. Si Antigone ne cede en effet pas sur son desir, elle ne desirecependant plus rien dautre que laccomplissement de son desir qui, de ce fait, nit par se muer en une

Chose impersonnelle . Antigone se sacrice a son desir (Bernet, 1994, pp. 4243).

[5] Where does the ethics of psychoanalysi s really lie? Lacans eagerness to situate Freuds contributions

to ethics within the context of Kant and Sade and his denition of ethics in terms of aiming towards das

Ding and the real both suggest that his ultimate position puts the highest value on the side of desire as

limited by the law rather than on the side of jouissance (Lee, 1990, p. 169).

[6] que produit la frustration de la jouissance? Elle produit tout au plus la relance du desir, mais aucune

espece de constitution dobjet quel quil soit (Lacan, 1994, p. 125). Sublimate as much as you like; you

have to pay for it with something. And this something is called jouissance . I have to pay for that mystical

operation with a pound of esh (Lacan, Book VII, p. 322).

[7] The Nature of the Instincts.This view would enable us to characterize instincts as tendencies inherentin living substance towards restoring an earlier state of things: that is to say, they would be historically

determined and of a conservative nature and, as it were, the expression of an inertia or elasticity present

in what is organic. (SE 18, p. 259). The forces which we assume to exist behind the tensions caused

by the needs of the id are called instincts. They represent the somatic demands upon the mind. Though

they are the ultimate cause of all activity, they are of a conservative nature; the state, whatever it may

be, which an organism has reached gives rise to a tendency to re-establish that state so soon as it has

been abandoned. (SE 23, p. 148).

[8] As regards the social source of suffering, our attitude is a different one. We do not admit it at all;

we cannot see why the regulations made by ourselves should not, on the contrary, be a protection and

a benet for every one of us. And yet, when we consider how unsuccessful we have been in precisely

this eld of prevention of suffering, a suspicion dawns on us that here, too, a piece of unconquerable

nature may lie behindthis time a piece of our own psychical constitution. ( SE 21, p. 86).

[9] the relations of the subject to something primordial, its attachment to the fundamental, most archaic

of objects, for which my eld of das Ding, dened operationally, establishes the framework (Lacan,

Book VII, p. 106).

[10] It is precisely as we shift into discourse that das Ding, the Thing, is resolved into a series of

effects You will not be surprised if I tell you that at the level of the Vorstellungen, the Thing is not

nothing, but literally is not. It is characterized by its absence, its strangeness (Lacan, Book VII, p. 63).

[11] the Real in a sense precedes the symbolic order and is subsequently structured by it when it gets

caught in its network: this is the great Lacanian motif of symbolization as a process which morties,

drains off, empties, carves the fullness of the Real of the living body. But the Real is at the same time

the product, remainder, leftover, scraps of this process of symbolization, the remnants, the excess which

escapes symbolization and is as such produced by the symbolization itself. In Hegelian terms, the Real

is simultaneously presupposed and posed by the symbolic (Z izek, 1989, p. 169).

[12] Thats not it is the very cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance

expected Structure, which connects up here, demonstrates nothing if not that it is of the same text as

jouissance, insofar as, in marking by what distance jouissance missesthe jouissance that would be in

question if that were itstructure does not presuppose merely the jouissance that would be it, it also

props up another (Lacan, Book XX, 1998, pp. 111112).

[13] The illusion that pertains to a qua surplus-enjoymen t is therefore the very illusion that, behind i t, there

is the lost substance of jouissance . In other words, a qua semblance deceives in a Lacanian way: not

because it is a deceitful substitute of the Real, but precisely because it invokes the impression of somesubstantial Real behind it; it deceives by posing as a shadow of the underlying Real (Z izek, 1993,

pp. 3637). La Mere est impossible. Telle est la castration veritable. La rivalite oedipienne dissimule

cette absence de la Chose (Juranville, 1984, p. 107).

[14] The inner world, or supersensible beyond, has, however, come into being: it comes from the world of

appearance which has mediated it; in other words, appearance is its essence and, in fact, its lling. The

supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as it is in truth; but the truth of the sensuous and

the perceived is to be appearance . The supersensible is therefore appearanc e qua appearanc e (Hegel,

1977, 147, p. 89).

[15] We have to guide us the Freudian theory of the narcissistic foundations of the object, of its insertion

in the imaginary register. The object that species directions or poles of attraction to man in his openness,

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422 A. Johnston

in his world, and that interests him because it is more or less his image, his reectionprecisely that

object is not the Thing to the extent that the latter is at the heart of the libidinal economy. Thus, the most

general formula that I can give you of sublimation is the following: it raises an objectand I dont mind

the suggestion of a play on words in the term I useto the dignity of the Thing (Lacan, Book VII,

p. 112).

[16] The failure is the object The object is a failure (un rate). The essence of the object is failure (Lacan,Book XX, p. 58).

[17] What you are saying strikes me as on the right track; its obvious you follow my presentation of these

questions without difculty. Something is offered to us as analysts, if we follow the sum of our

experience and if we know how to evaluate it. You state that the attempt at sublimation tends in the end

to realize the Thing or to save it. Its true and its not true. Theres an illusion there (Lacan, Book VII,

p. 134).

[18] the conceptual understanding of empirical reality is equivalent to a murder (Kojeve, 1980, p. 140).

the symbol cancels the existing thing it opens up the world of negativity, which constitutes both

the discourse of the human subject and the reality of his world insofar as it is human. Primal masochism

should be located around this initial negativation, around this original murder of the thing (Lacan, 1988,

p. 174).[19] It is as a universal too that we utter what the sensuous [content] is. What we say is: This, i.e., the

universal This; or it is, i.e., Being in general. Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being

in general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty

we mean to say (Hegel, 97, p. 60).

[20] Desire then is the law. I t is not only the fact that in analytic doctrine, with the Oedipus complex as its

central corpus, it is clear that what constitutes the substance of the law is the desire for the mother, that

inversely what normatives desire itself, what situates it as desire, is what is called the law of the

prohibition of incest. ( Lacan, Book X, 1963). the law and repressed desire are one and the same

thing; this is even Freuds discovery (Lacan, 1989, p. 68).

[21] If there is, in fact, something that psychoanalysi s has drawn attention to, it is, beyond the sense of

obligation properly speaking, the importance, I would even say the omnipresence, of a sense of guilt.

Certain internal tendencies of ethical thought attempt to evade what it must be said is this disagreeable

aspect of moral experience. If I am certainly not one of those who attempt to soften, blunt, or attenuate

the sense of guilt, it is because in my daily experience I am too insistently brought back to it and

reminded of it (Lacan, Book VII, p. 3).

[22] Freud brought to the question of the source of morality the invaluable signicance implied in the phrase

Civilization and Its Discontents or, in other words, the breakdown by means of which a certain psychic

function, the superego, seems to nd in itself its own exacerbation, as the result of a kind of

malfunctioning of the brakes which should limit its proper authority. It remains to be seen how within

this breakdown in the depths of the psychic life the instincts may nd their proper sublimation (Lacan,

Book VII, p. 143). at the heart of everything Freud taught, one nds the following: the energy of the

so-called superego derives from the aggression that the subject turns back upon himself. Freud goes out

of his way to add the supplementary notion that, once one has entered on that path, once the process has

been begun, then there is no longer any limit; it generates ever more powerful aggression in the self

(Lacan, Book VII, p. 194).

[23] Freud afrms that the form in which the moral agency is concretely inscribed in manand that

is nothing less than rational according to himthe form he called the superego, operates according to

an economy such that the more one sacrices to it, the more it demands (Lacan, Book VII, p. 302).

[24] The turning back of sadism against the self regularly occurs where a cultural suppression of instincts

holds a large part of the subjects destructive instinctual components from being exercised in life. We

may suppose that this portion of the destructive instinct which has retreated appears in the ego as an

intensication of masochism. The phenomen a of conscience, however, lead us to infer that thedestructiveness which returns from the external world is also taken up by the super-ego, without any such

transformation, and increases its sadism against the ego. The sadism of the super-ego and the masochism

of the ego supplement each other and unite to produce the same effects. It is only in this way, I think,

that we can understand how the suppression of an instinct canfrequently or quite generallyresult in

a sense of guilt and how a persons conscience becomes more severe and more sensitive the more he

refrains from aggression against others. One might expect that if a man knows that he is in the habit of

avoiding the commission of acts of aggression that are undesirable from a cultural standpoint that he will

for that reason have a good conscience and will watch over his ego less suspiciously. The situation is

usually presented as though ethical requirements were the primary thing and the renunciation of instinct

followed from them. This leaves the origin of the ethical sense unexplained. Actually, it seems to be the

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other way about. The rst instinctual renunciation is enforced by external powers, and it is only this

which creates the ethical sense, which expresses itself in conscience and demands a further renunciation

of instinct. (SE 19, p. 170).

[25] The superego dialectic of Law and transgression does not lie only in the fact that Law itself invites its

own transgression, that it generates the desire for its own violation; our obedience to the Law itself is

not natural, spontaneous, but always-already mediated by the (repression of the) desire to transgressthe Law. When we obey the Law, we do so as part of a desperate strategy to ght against our desire to

transgress it, so the more rigorously we obey the Law, the more we bear witness to the fact that, deep

within ourselves, we feel the pressure of the desire to indulge in sin. The superego feeling of guilt is

therefore right: the more we obey the Law, the more we are guilty, because this obedience, in effect, is

a defense against our sinful desire (Z izek, 2000, p. 142).

[26] The problem involved is that of jouissance , because jouissance presents itself as buried at the center of

a eld and has the characteristics of inaccessibility, obscurity and opacity; moreover, the eld is

surrounded by a barrier which makes access to it difcult for the subject to the point of inaccessibility,

because jouissance appears not purely and simply as the satisfaction of a need but as the satisfaction of

a drive (Lacan, Book VII, p. 209).

[27] Lacans maxim of the ethics of psychoanalysis (not to compromise ones desire) is not to beconfounded with the pressure of the superego. That is to say, in a rst approach it may seem that the

maxim Do not give up on your desire! coincides with the superego command Enjoy!do we not

compromise our desire precisely by renouncing enjoyment? Is it not a fundamental thesis of Freud, a kind

of Freudian commonplace, that the superego forms the basic, primitive kernel of the ethical agency?

Lacan goes against these commonplaces : between the ethics of desire and the superego, he posits a

relationship of radical exclusion. That is to say, Lacan takes seriously and literally the Freudian

economic paradox of the superegothat is, the vicious cycle that characterizes the superego: the more

we submit ourselves to the superego imperative, the greater its pressure, the more we feel guilty.

According to Lacan, this feeling of guilt is not a self-deception to be dispelled in the course of the

psychoanalyti c curewe really are guilty: superego draws the energy of the pressure it exerts upon the

subject from the fact that the subject was not faithful to his desire, that he gave it up. Our sacricing to

the superego, our paying tribute to it, only corroborates our guilt. For that reason our debt to the superego

is unredeemable: the more we pay it off, the more we owe. Superego is like the executioner slowly

bleeding us to deaththe more he gets, the stronger his hold on us (Z izek, 1994, pp. 6768).

[28] Nothing forces anyone to enjoy (jouir) except the superego. The superego is the imperative of

jouissanceEnjoy! (Lacan, Book XX, p. 3).

[29] What parents I was born of, God help me! To them I am going to share their home, the curse on me

too, and unmarried. Brother, it was a luckless marriage you made, and dying killed my life (Sophocles,

Antigone, 1991, lines 919923, p. 194). No tears for me, no friends, no marriage. Brokenhearted I am

led along the road ready for me. I shall never again be suffered to look on the holy eye of the day. But

my fate claims no tearsno friend cries for me (Sophocles, Antigone, (lines 929934, p. 195).[30] Weep greatly for me, my brother, I am guilty. A girl aming in hurt I marched against the mother who

bore me (Euripides, Electra 1959, lines 11831185, p. 59).

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The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego - The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics