I should begin by apologizing for the misnomer in the title presented by me in the prior video. That was actually on the foreword to the text, which was written by Zizek. The introduction is what we shall engage with now and this is by the author herself.
In reiterating the central orientation of the project which is charachteristic of the Ljublanja School, as presented earlier, that is in a commitment to grasp the ethical as a domain which has been stiched in modernity by Sigmund Freud and Jaques Lacan - in the psychoanalytic effort to locate a discourse not merely in what it explicitly states, but to substantialise the often obscene and unwritten background of mores whose discrete articulations often reveal an explicit distance from what the institution or doctrine may officially stand for, Alenka Zupancic points out the common focus of this psychoanalytic intervention into the heart of the ethical - marked by the name Immanuel Kant.
Why do we require an orthodox, that is a deontological philosopher, one who thinks of apriori commitments, prerequisite categories, such as time and space in presenting a critique of a sensorially saturated empiricism, to understand something as situated as ethics and as bodily as psychoanalysis? This seems to be a question which a curious mind would raise, and Alenka does help us out here.
In the essay Kant with Sade by Lacan, in his cumpulsion to frame a categorical imperative, that is principles which may be followed irrespective of circumstance - the author cannot but notice a certain will to perversion as it were, by Kant. Or, to use more psychoanalytic terms - a manifestation of the drive which is beyond the pleasure principle proper. We sought to unpack something of the conceptual antagonism which this may entail in a discipline of thought in the earlier video - taking up the example of the law of diminishing marginal utility. The question at some level is what is a law of thought, but here perhaps better framed as what can we posit thought seeking a commitment to. Lacan himself sees in joussaince, a pshichic mechanism which can rival the will - and perhaps its is not mere circumstance that Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom was written just eight years after the Critique of Parctical Reason.
In this sense, I think it is important to notice what may be constitutive of the antinomy noticed by Lacan between these two. Yet, what he marks in this antinomy, which in their own time were not in dialogue is a certain ethic, one he claims psychoanalysis may learn from. I was never fond of the idea of the autonomy of a movement, discourse or even a people. This is not to say that I do not recognize the value of independence. The matter is simply about how may we represent an ethic which intervenes, indeed engages predominant mores of their common time and historical moment, that animate what was thought to be possible - indeed what was thought to be thinkable, then and in some cases even now. Remember, that there is no joussaince possible without a structure which can represent the drive. The psychoanalytic name for this structure is fantasy. It is here - in this presence, that we may bear witness to, and perhaps nourish an ethic.
Yet perhaps the more immeadiate question is why would one need an ethics. The cynicism of today would reduce any ethics to an execution of an order, in this sense an act of obidience. Yet, if what was once recognized to be ethical in an act was the labour of bringing into the world perhaps an unsaturated insight at the very least, more importantly - something which we may find in ourselves a calling to, or in other words that which is not present, then this would be the most debased understanding of the term. A fall of creation as it were, to the merely given.
The introduction by the author makes this observation, regarding the ethical often being redduced to the superego in the discourse which seems to have characterized our time. As a kind of regulatory injunction, perhpas not unlike the figure of the managerial boss who oversees and directs proceedings in an office or a factory. Indeed, there may be an ethics of following orders in a workman like manner, yet the ability to abnegate our independent faculties to be subsumed and instrumentalised is not exactly an act on our part. And while it may well be possible to think of a workshop as the subject of study, philosophy and yes psychoanalysis has still not cast away the concept of an individual. This is a problem which we will return to later, perhaps under the rubric of subsumption, which is perhaps most explicitly apparent in the subsumption of the working day about which Marx makes some rather clear observations.
Without lending ourselves to distractions from this projecct proper, we should remember that psychoanalysis, in perhaps an elementary definition may be thought of as a study of a discourse in how it recognizes, appeals and hence help construct - or to use a more Derridean term, welcome - the other. In this sense, it is a mode of study which is uniquely advantaged in studying pairs. In recognizig the perverse moment or drive in Kant as it were, Lacan also sees, in his compatriaot - Sade, an ethical drive willing to brush history against the grain.
That which is real to us, is perhaps the most commonplace way in which the Lacanian concept of the Real may be introduced. Yet, the Lacanian real is not merely that which is most real to us, like war to use a visceral example. The idea of what is real is best framed as that which resists symbolization, or that aspect towards which our desire seeks some sort of discursive ennunciation of. And here, it is important to recognize that we are indeed very much in the politics of language. Misrepresenting a subject is often what is most injurious to them. Why? Because it denies the dimension of what was ethical to the subject - their axis of the real as it were. This may not simply be a question of permitting a subject to choose the terms of their own representation, a practice which psychoanalysis would in any case encourage. The practice of an analytic discourse is a careful registering of the terms deployed by a subject, their observations - and from this a raising of what seems to be the difficulty which the desire of the subject seems to be wresting with.
The politics of language which I mention, does not rest merely in its act of fidelity to the desire of the subject - but in its subversion of doxa entrenched today high and low. Ethics, were it to acknowledge this dimension, that of the Lacanian real in itself - cannot be thought of as a regulatory principle which brindles the exesses of a procedure, scientific, political etc. It is a dimension, indeed if not a drive that must acknolwdge this exess as precisely that which constitutes the conduct of science in the first place, as the impetus to the procedure, experiement or creation in question. Ethics here, to place it within psychoanalytic theory, is that which suspends our understanding of the terms of the reality principle, via a radical injunction, or as the author puts it - a 'distrubring interruption' into it.
Psychoanalysis as a discipline, since at least Lacan is said to be one which is resistant to the discourse of the master, that is a discourse without remainder where what is ennunciated is deemed adequete, commmanding or constitutive of the subject in its entirety. In other words, a silent maxim we harbour is the imposibility of a discourse where the other is not merely another perspective, position or person - but also another symbolic order, or logic - if you prefer. An ethics appears to be framed by the author in her act of resistance to the many headed discourses of the master, seductive as they are to both traditionalists and extremeists. Yet, equally abhorent is the post-modern reduction of the ethical horizon merely to one's own life, and I think you can see how this would be incommensurable with our endevour.
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