Reading the subject in 'Ethics of the Real' by Alenka Zupancic: Part 3 - The (Moral) Pathology of Everyday Life (Ch 1)

The title of the chapter before our consideration is 'The (Moral) Pathology of Everyday Life', and we are introduced to the idea of pathology as that which does not belong to the order of the ethical, according to Kant or better yet what the order of the ethical is subtracted from. This does not mean that pathology here is in some way constructed or thought of as abnormal - a predicament or consideration if you prefer which Foucault, perhaps in consonance with some sections of civil society indulges in. Rather, pathology is recognized as prosaic, everyday and indeed inherent in the normal. Pathology for Kant is when we act, impelled as it were - not by the conduct of our actions themselves but because of an incentive, something which may be produced as a result or, better yet - a reward for our labours, as is customary in contractual relations in capitalism. The word he uses is Triebfeder, which the author also translates as 'drive'. 

In less prosaic terms, there is a kind of attachment to our suffering as it were, which is voluntarily chosen by the subject. A literary example is cited in Swan in Love, from Proust's series. The hero's love for Odette causes him suffering and this leads him to seek to relinquish this love, so that his suffering may cease. Apon more careful examination however, he realises that he does not want this as his love for Odette is now a part of who he is, instead, he only wishes for his suffering to stop. As the author puts it, 'his experience of the pleasure of love depends on the ... condition.'

The lesson here is worth noting. What the subject is really attached to is not this or that particular pleasure, but the frame within which pleasure or pain are commensurable to the subject. The psychoanalytic name for which is fantasy. 

We may now apprehend why Lacan insists on a moment of ex nihilo creation as the only opening for a true theoretical materialism. And the author also observes, similarly that the Lacanian insistence of suicide as the only successful act. A new subject may emerge, but she would not be the same as before.

In terms of a challenge to custom and doxa, a tendency which is perhaps prevalent today as well, though perhaps not in the same measure as in Kant's time is the distinction between a higher and lower faculty of desire. The exercise of power for instance was acknowledged by Kant himself as possibly pleasurable. A joy experienced in being able to perform a gymnastic skill, may allow us to feel this. As may the delight of constructing a philosophical argument. These are not distinguished in psychoanalysis from sensual pleasures. Desire being an emergent and unary force.

It is this distinction (that between lower, perhaps carnal and higher ie. sublimated pleasures) that is contradicted in the formulation presented. To quote the author herself, "the feelings of pleasure, by virtue of which they constitute the determining ground of the will is always similar in character." 

Those of us familiar with the characterization of jouissance will recognize a certain Kantian ethical resistance against the possibility of gradualism as capable of securing a lasting change in disposition. This is to be read as his critique of improvement and reform as possible strategies in any ethical venture. In ways, the ethical engagement here may be thought of as corollary if not structurally similar to the moment of decision or inspiration, where the force to make a change or seize a chance grips us. 

Emphasis is placed by the author on how a Kantian ethics as presented, is not an act of adherence. This is brought out in the distinction between legality, where an act is in accord with the law, and that act in which 'the idea of duty arising from the law is also an incentive...'. The latter would be an example of morality.

This is the sense in which the ethical proper is surplus to legality. A position which a reader of philosophy may notice, is aligned with Badiou's  grasp of the Real as a conceptual category initially posited by Lacan. The Real as thought here is not demarcateable within the mutually exclusive alternatives of the knowable and the unknowable. The unknowable here is already known, in the sense of it being perhaps a limit or the degenerate case of the knowable. The is not the Real which we are mentioning, forgetting as it does the other of a discourse.  Illegality hence would still fall within the register of legality for Kant, as it sorts acts based apon their ability to either conform or not with duty. The project of an ethics of the real, as posited by the author in the title would be that which escapes such a register. To emphasize, even were an ethical act to conform with duty - this is not what would make it ethical.

Here, I would like to point perhaps a divergence in the work in question from a more Kantian position which would posit the freedom to question yet only beneath the observance of obedience. However I think we have made some headway in our liberties since Kant wrote 'An answer to the question 'What is Enlightenment?' and I do not think he would look unfavorably upon this updated formulation. 

To account for this excess in the ethical, which makes it supernumerary as it were, that is a site capable of introducing supernumerary claims, and as a register which is beyond or perhaps not necessarily bound to that of legality and it's dichotomy, the author suggests that we may require recourse to the meaning given to form by Kant.

To be clear the author does acknowledge the difference between her and the Kantian approach to ethics. For Kant, for an action to be ethical it must not only conform with duty, but this conformity is to be its only driving force or motive, so to speak. This is how the Kantian emphasis on form may allow us to disclose a drive. The author puts this quite nicely - "Kant's point, I repeat, is not that all traces of materiality have to be purged from the determining grounds of the moral will, but, rather that the moral law has itself to become 'material' in order for it to function as a motive force for action. 

An advantage of the form of theory, that we should note is the ability of this medium to explicate subjective relations to oneself, a world and others without formulating prescriptions in any substantive sense. Indeed in an analysis, as for Kant, an understanding which grasps for content at the expense of form cannot but be pathological. 

Recall however the observation made by Lacan regarding something akin to a primordial perversion in Kant, that which would lead him to frame a deontological ethics in the first place. Perhaps not unlike the extent of epistemic doubt Descartes entertains in formulating his cogito. This is an insight which the author - Alenka Zupancic picks up on, to quote - "This is the real 'miracle' involved in ethics.  The crucial question of Kantian ethics is not 'how can we eliminate all the pathological elements of will, so that only the pure form of duty remains? but rather how can the pure form of duty itself function as a pathological element, that is as an element capable of assuming  the role of a driving force or incentive of our actions?"

The author notices a curious paradox here, regarding the disparaging of such action even if it were to coincide with an ethical act, merely on the basis that were the act in question itself to be a driving impetus for the subject - it would not seem to require sacrifice, suffering or renunciation. On these grounds, it may seem lacking. 

The question which is yet forwarded however is how the surplus introduced by the ethical in relation to the legal is conceptualized. The wager of the text in consideration is that this surplus can only be recognized as a form. 

This exploration of form embarked upon by the author recognizes this emergent concept so to speak, not empty of content as much as 'outside' content. In fact she does state that this may be a form that 'provides form only to itself.' In this sense one may well recognize in such a formulation the Kierkegaardian notion of a private god, and some may want to even make the comparison of a private religion, not unlike Jews under Christian persecution.  Do note that these examples of mine are substantive examples, in the sense that they refer to real predicates which may be read about or encountered in the world. In this sense, not exactly a form outside of content. And this does seem to be an important point that is made in the text. In being confronted by a surplus that serves no purpose, we may be led to say that this would represent the failure of form and not the presence of one. A 'pure waste' is in fact the term used to describe this surplus. 

I think this is worth tarrying with for a moment. Were we to entertain a Badiouian subtractive ontology for instance, which recognizes a form in that which can repurpose a formless - though essentially open void. Or rather that which can produce a purpose via the form in question, functioning as such as a structure - then what may a form which resembles a pure waste, be with respect to content? And here we may be forced to hypothesize, a form that seeks some other content, or better yet - that may produce it. 

The author, does carefully notice an important difference between the Kantian notion of the ethical, and the Lacanian notion of desire, even if both were conceptualized to address similar problems. Kant insists that the ethical, that surplus to legality can be recognized only as a form. Note not in a form, but as a form - as there is no necessity for the form itself to be substantive. The phrase used to depict this is 'not only in accord with duty, but also only for the sake of duty.' The Lacanian conception of desire, however, is as an object, and not a form - and in this sense, or rather in the study of how a body, a subject, or a discourse appropriates an object we learn something of its desire. Or, better yet - the inconsistency in its desire as it represents them. Yet, here too the author notices definite similarities.  

What kind of similarities are we talking about here? Well in its representation in the text it seems to entail a sublation of a kind. If the Kantian ethical act is defined as that which is done without seeking an object, or without an object drive, to use the author's words or object cause to use Lacan's, there is yet the introduction of practical reason, a seeming necessity here which does or rather is driven by an object drive, or to use the Kantian term for it 'echte Tribfeder' which may be translated to 'real object drive.' Yet there seems to be an assertion made by the author which is over and above this - that is that the object drive of the will is defined precisely in terms of pure form in the absence of any triebfeder. Here is where the similarity becomes apparent to us. The object petit a is utilized to mark the absence of the object of desire, or rather the pure form of its apprehension. To quote the author 'the void around which desire turns.' 

A touch of excess indeed, is marked by the author when she writes that even after the object of desire is attained and the subject has what she or he may want, desire continues on its own. Object petite a here, becomes a marker of what the subject still has not got. In this sense, we can see how the Real was initially formulated by Lacan, as that which resists symbolization absolutely - or to represent this from the other side, the symbolic as our only register which can mediate between the imaginary and the real. The link between the object petite a and the Kantian notion of form, in a sentence, is this - 'desire can be defined precisely as the pure form of demand.' And, perhaps more dangerously - what remains of demand, when all particular objects which can satisfy it are removed. To quote Jaques Lacan himself - "That's not it, means that, in the desire of every demand there is but the request for object a."  

In speaking of motivations and their possible pathological dimensions, it is forthcoming of a psychoanalyst to be able to bring to our notice not so much some primordial pathology in desire, a rather cynical position with its own philosophical proponents ranging from the Buddha to Schopenhauer, but a way in which that which was experienced as pathological in desire is marked by desire - when the object is attained, lost or is simply no longer a factor. This interpretation of the object petit a as it were, may be in a sense akin to the Badiouian notion of fidelity to an event as what marks a subject. Indeed periodization here, a term which some may claim is what history is about, becomes a function of the recognition by a subject of what constituted the real of their desire. 

***

At this point in the study, I must notice a temptation in myself - given the heavy reliance and reference to Kant, to be able to share with you a little piece of his work that once really had me tied up. I may be forgetting which text, I think it is referenced in the Critique of Pure Reason, though he probably makes the argument in another book, that freedom presupposes morality. Now, for a long time the continental tradition has been against metaphysics, even if there are some remarkable 20th century exceptions arising out of France, yet - I think we may still have something to learn from a philosopher who, if nothing else is capable of bearing a certain fidelity to a subject - not merely to enshrine a past but in a daring to come to terms with what made any possible narrative of that subject possible in the first place. Also, I think it would be instructive to any curious amateur philosopher to be able to sample some of Kant's prose and argument which is rather singular in its precision and rigor. 

This may be a project which is shelved however for I do think we should persist with our study of Alenka Zupancic's text presently.