Two words: Smoked it.

I'm not so sure I did all that well on the written part, but he kept me for a long time at the oral stage (ha ha!) and even insisted that I did know stuff I was willing to give up on. In any case, I feel pretty good about it, and even if I don't do as well as I think I did, I'm pretty happy that I didn't just humiliate myself. Woo hoo! for small victories.

Here's the summary that I wrote, it might be pretty boring for most of you, but if you're curious about what we did in this class, this is a very stripped down version that I think nonetheless captures most of the important elements and movements.

A.D.C. Cake January 18^th, 2007
Final exam general question: Advanced Philosophical Anthropology, Fall 2006

The broad historical context into which Lacan fits Freud in his Seminar on ethics (1959-1960) is the sense in which moral philosophy has lost the perspective of Aristotle. Lacan interprets Aristotle's ethical position as maintaining the possibility of a harmony between the human subject and the “sovereign good,” that ultimately the macro cosmos promotes the welfare of the human being. In this anthropology, our natural feelings of pleasure and pain lead us to a refinement of our moral actions. In Lacan's eyes, this Aristotelian anthropology is destroyed by the notion of Freud's that sexuality in particular is not a unity, but a unified complex of human drives and instincts. For Lacan, the idea that “pleasure does not begin with intentionality” destroys the Aristotelian moral perspective. Further, the moral philosophy of Kant also makes a break with the harmonic conception of moral life. It is rather the moral law that stands as the only measure of the moral worth of our actions. Kant denies that we can act according to our sensations of pleasure or pain and have anything but (at best) an accidental moral correctness. With this Kantian break, it is no longer with happiness that we associate moral life (as does Utilitarianism), but with the ideals of altruism, rationality and duty.

In this new ethical framework, Lacan is using Freud to advocate a hermeneutical contextualism that seeks to protect and describe those aspects of our moral life which are in danger of being obscured by the major moral theories. The task for an ethics of psychoanalysis is to uncover and preserve the subtleties of our spontaneous moral experience, so that we may open up a more adequate relation to them. To this end, Lacan highlights Freud's description of the two principles of mental functioning: the pleasure principle and the reality principle. For Freud, the pleasure principle is a principle of inertia which strives for a unity of perception and to this end will lead the subject by the quickest possible route toward a discharge of excitation, which Freud identifies as “unpleasure.” Yet the pleasure principle is not always adequate. It dominates the system of perception, and can often lead the subject to hallucinate an object, which may result in a relation with reality that is actually unpleasurable for the human subject. If the subject's drive for self-preservation prevails, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle, which mentalizes excitation. The reality principle allows the subject to bear a certain quantity of unpleasure for a certain amount of time, and to take distance from the unattainable promise of satisfaction. This gives the subject the condition for having a more adequate relation with reality, taming the exigencies of the pleasure principle.

So at a certain level the pleasure principle and the reality principle interact fluidly, and protect each other from possible excesses. Yet there is another element of our moral life, for Lacan, and he reads this from Freud's notorious theory of the death instinct. Here there is an “instinct” that has something destructive about it and this element gives rise to a kind of repetition that resists mentalization. Here he finds evidence for a psychic force that stands beyond the economy of the two principles and has no dialectic with them. This outside influence on our moral life he reads as “Das Ding,” “The Thing.” Das Ding has an intrinsic value for the subject which is particular for every individual. As a force from beyond, it jams the smooth interaction of the two principles, disrupting and disturbing the mental economy of the subject. In relation to Das Ding an element of my life that happens to participate in its intrinsic value becomes no longer replaceable. I must have it, or I cannot be happy. Once Das Ding makes itself known, the subject's desire becomes unsatisfiable, infinite. If the subject is unlucky enough to have this intrinsic value invested in a specific aim that is at odds with the social world, then this desire isolates the subject from the social order. It is at this point, for Lacan, where we find ethics.

Lacan describes the desire for Das Ding as the desire for a satisfaction or a representation that unifies all the satisfactions and representations in some ultimate One. Thus the story of Das Ding can be told in terms of a kind of nostalgia, the subject feels that at some point wholeness has been lost. The only way to find it again is to find that One object, Das Ding. Lacan tells two stories about the origin of Das Ding. The first story involves an inevitable effect of an ontological process, wherein our mental life is brought about by the translation of impressions into representations, which are all associated in a network through which the mental life ceaselessly moves. Mental life is in a restless dispersion, produces its own beyond, as no single representation is sufficient to unify the entire network. Das Ding is brought about by the desire of the subject to rest in a unitary whole, under One ultimate representation. The other story involves the Freudian idea (taken up by Levi-Strauss) that culture begins with a primal prohibition, the incest taboo. Lacan stresses the arbitrariness of this moral law. There is no reason why we cannot stay with our mothers, but we are prohibited to do so. Our desire for wholeness is a desire to transgress the primal prohibition and stay with our mothers. In this story the mother is Das Ding, the ultimate object that will give the ultimate satisfaction.

This fundamental difficulty, the desire to transgress the law that cannot be transgressed, is the hard core of moral life for Lacan. It is in this schema that we can see that Aristotelian moral philosophy is lost to us, insofar as it emphasizes a harmony. The macro cosmos no longer promotes our welfare, we have unpredictable desires that go against our well-being. It is only if we are lucky that we are not isolated from the social world. Lacan's answer to this is to strive to enjoy the symbolic sublimation of our infinite desire, to enjoy the satisfaction it offers us in effigy, and thus to combine the powers of the pleasure principle (through smaller satisfactions) and the reality principle (through mentalization).