Abstract
Stuart Schneiderman is an American who came to Paris to study with Lacan in the 1970s. In 1983 he published Jacques Lacan: Death of an Intellectual Hero, a panegyric to his recently-deceased teacher that stands in stark contrast to his most recent work, The Last Psychoanalyst (2014), which declares psychoanalysis to be an immoral doctrine that destroyed the patriarchal family, attacked the Judeo-Christian tradition, and enslaved its adherents by offering a sexual hedonism that knew no shame. In the face of these accusations, this chapter considers what Lacan actually says about the advent of modern hedonism, particularly his discussions of how the ethical revolution brought about by Kant, Sade, and Bentham have stifled enjoyment rather than increasing it. In contrast to Schneiderman’s claims, at the end of Seminar XVII Lacan calls for a return to shame as a necessary step in combating the unsatisfying, counterfeit hedonism of modern life.
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Mathews, P.D. (2020). Lacan the Ethical Charlatan. In: Lacan the Charlatan. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45204-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45204-9_5
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