Abstract
It is widely believed that Jacques Lacan fails to explain adequately how the subject, allegedly no more than an effect of signifiers in the Symbolic order, can take responsibility for her actions. I argue that the subject can find an appropriate measure for her actions in an awareness of the role her desire plays in her self- and world-constitution. I propose a measure derived from Simone Weil’s ethics of decreation: the subject accepts a “non-personal” symbolic understanding of herself that opens up space in her world of signifiers for all that is unknown, threatening, or demanding about the other’s desire. Lacan’s critics must therefore respond to Weil’s contention that ethics requires almost no “self” at all.
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Notes
In the English edition of selections from her notebooks (Weil 1956), there are three passing references to Freud (pp. 421, 471–472, 609).
The quote from Simone Weil may be found in Weil 2002, p. 21. Lacan briefly mentions it again in the lessons of 4/8, 4/15, and 5/13/1959.
As we shall see, it is not at all clear that faith for Weil provides that kind of resolution.
For Lacan’s religious background and attitudes toward Catholicism, see Roazen 1996, which is an interview with Lacan’s younger brother, a Benedictine monk.
A consideration of the parallels between Weil and Lacan’s thought after Seminar VII is beyond the scope of my research to date.
What determines the range of this possibility? How far should one go in leaving room for the other’s indeterminacy? This question will be addressed later in connection with jouissance.
In the halakha, the body of Jewish religious law, this is the prohibition of lashon hara, “sins of the evil tongue” or “negative speech,” which in its strictest form prohibits any attribution at all, since even the good that one says about a person could be interpreted in a negative way by someone else. My thanks to T. A. Perry for pointing this out to me.
Letter to Bousquet, quoted in Vetö 1994, p. 171n60. Vetö continues: “And she confesses to him: ‘From my childhood I have desired only to receive this revelation . . . evil actions are those that hide the reality of things and beings, or those that it would be impossible to do if one truly knew that things and beings existed.’”
This oversimplifies matters considerably. According to Lacan, the infant eventually reacts to its disappointment by attributing the total self-satisfaction it wants to its mother. The child then tries to discover a lack in the mother that only the child can fill. The long-term result is Lebensneid: envy of the other “insofar as this other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or superabundant vitality” beyond anything of which the subject could possibly be aware in another person (1992, p. 237).
Freud thought that the infant’s first response to this initial trauma was to try to find satisfaction by hallucinating it. The infant soon learns, however, that a more effective strategy is to piece together a knowledge of reality out of the impressions it stores up in its search for desire-satisfaction. Symbolic ‘reality’ evolves out of the refinement of our illusions: new impressions are written over old impressions, new relations are established between pre-existing signifiers, all in an effort to work towards a version of reality we can live with and that we think we stand a good chance of recognizing again in the future. This is what Lacan seems to mean when he says that “we make reality out of pleasure” (Lacan 1992, p. 225). The “pleasure” referred to here is that of Freud’s “pleasure principle”—essentially the absence of disturbance.
Very soon after Seminar VII, with the paper, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” first presented in September, 1960 (2002a, pp. 281–312), Lacan adopts the term objet petit a, or “object a.” Das Ding is “something akin to, although not reducible to, objet petit a” (Neill 2011, 84).
De Kesel notes that, in this respect, Lacan’s theory of sublimation is grounded in a relation more primordial, and more along the lines of an object-relations theory, than Freud’s (de Kesel 2009, pp. 167, 196).
In what Lacan calls the “mirror stage,” the child identifies with the “specular image,” the image of itself or of another which provides the basis for the child’s first realization of itself as a subject. See “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” in Lacan 2002a, pp. 3–9.
Children, of course, often consciously treat inanimate objects as though they were alive, but similar behavior towards certain artifacts (for example, cars, computers, and other machines, especially when they malfunction) is quite common throughout adulthood.
The parallel with Lacan is all the more striking in that Weil, too, was fascinated by the 12th-century Albigensian Cathars, whose culture of courtly love she greatly admired for its austere moral standards, grounded in what she saw as a religion of pure Christian love. Weil considered the Albigensian Crusade, because it succeeded in utterly destroying this unique culture, to be one of the great tragedies of history.
Existence, however, might not be the point: “It makes no sense to say the good exists or the good does not exist; one can only say: the good” (Weil 1970, p. 316).
Weil’s political activism should be proof enough that in “waiting” she is not advocating quietism. The practical aspects of waiting are closely tied to Weil’s notion of attention.
She describes the forms of the “implicit” love of God as love of neighbor, love of the beauty or order of the world, love of religious practices, and friendship (2001, pp. 83–142).
For the reader unfamiliar with the thought of Simone Weil, a good place to start is Waiting for God (2001), a translation of Attente de Dieu. This is a selection of letters and essays she entrusted, towards the end of her life, to her friend Father Joseph Perrin.
By “need” Weil clearly means “desire” here. She is not always consistent about distinguishing the two, despite her warning that we too often confuse them (1956, p. 496).
“Freud confronts this commandment directly. And if you take the time to read Civilization and Its Discontents, you will see that that is where he begins, where he remains throughout, and where he ends up. He talks of nothing but that” (Lacan 1992, p. 179).
Lacan takes this Greek term from Alcibiades’ speech in praise of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium (215b). Alcibiades compares Socrates to the sileni or statuettes sold in the marketplace which, when one opens them up, are found to contain tiny figures of the gods (agalmata). “The peak of the obscurity into which the subject is plunged in relation to desire, agalma is that object which the subject believes that his desire tends toward, and through which he presses to an extreme the misperception of petit a as cause of his desire” (Lacan 1987, p. 87). The term agalma, roughly synonymous with das Ding, therefore refers even more explicitly to what is unique, inexpressible, and invisible—that is, ‘godlike’—about the other person.
See Evans 1998 for a classification of the many meanings of jouissance in Lacan.
“We possess a little power. By abdicating from it and consenting to everything, we become all-powerful. For nothing can then happen without our assent” (Weil 1970, p. 297).
Weil was in Marseilles during the years 1940–42. She died only a year later, while working for the French Resistance in England.
Why the reluctance to believe that we are nothing but an effect of signifiers, carried along by the Symbolic? Simone Weil would likely suggest that one can use this knowledge, this confrontation with the “void” of human existence, in order to pass to the state of decreation. “The void, that is to say, the end of the regime of motives, therefore appears as the state of being beyond perspective” (Vetö 1994, p. 66).
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Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was presented at the conference on “Psychology and the Other” held at Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2011. I would like to thank the conference participants, as well as anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments and suggestions. I owe an immeasurable debt to the outstanding teaching of Jeffrey Bloechl and William Richardson, both of whom taught courses on Lacan at Boston College. I take sole responsibility, however, for any infelicities or inaccuracies in my interpretation of Lacan.
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Reed, R.C. A Lacanian Ethics of Non-Personal Responsibility. Pastoral Psychol 62, 515–531 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-012-0467-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-012-0467-7