In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Toward an Ethics of Psychoanalysis An alien language will be my swaddling clothes. Long before I dared to be born I was a letter of the alphabet, a verse like a vine, I was the book that you all see in dreams. —Osip Mandelstam, from “To the German Language” A Curious Little Book The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is a curious little book. Curious for the way it came to be as a book, and curious, also, for what it attempts to achieve, for the headings, for the ends at which it may be said to aim. Much like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it, too, is based on student lecture notes, stenographer’s notes in this case, taken during a seminar Lacan gave, his seventh seminar, at St. Anne’s Hospital in Paris from November of 1959 until July 1960. Lacan himself remarked on this some twelve or thirteen years later, in his 1973 seminar, his twentieth, entitled Encore, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. He began his session of February 13, 1973, by recalling The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, remarking how important Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics had been for the seminar. Lacan had been telling his hearers about the obvious problems translating Aristotle into French when he suddenly turned from this to a reflection on how his own seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, had, perhaps like Aristotle’s Ethics, been compiled and produced by a student, J-A Miller, in this case. Lacan recalled how Miller, “wrote it up . . . making it into a written text.” Of course, Miller had no desire to steal the seminar. He was only regretting that it had never been properly published and wished to do something about it. But, Lacan held the transcript back from publication. He said he would like to rewrite it himself one day and make it into “a written text” (S20: 53/50). But this never happened, not in Lacan’s 13 14 Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor lifetime, anyway. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, its text “established” by J-A Miller, who by that time was Lacan’s son-in-law and known as “faithful Acathe,” moral guardian of the work and even billed on the cover of the publications as its coauthor, was finally published in 1986 after a lengthy court battle, which Miller won,1 through Éditions du Seuil as part of a collection, Le champ freudien, originally established by Jacques Lacan and now directed by Jacques-Alain Miller. The problem, of course, is that for both Aristotle and Lacan, the circuit from spoken lecture to written notes, and from there to a published book, which is itself then translated into perhaps dozens of foreign languages, in this circuit, something is always lost, bungled, or misinterpreted. The pages that comprise the published book, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, seem to be but a residue of that seminar, its “death mask.” In their written form, taken from stenographer’s notes, the master’s words never reach their destination. They nevermore run, let alone win, that race between speaker and hearer that seemingly parallels that race known through Zeno between Achilles and the tortoise, a race that shall never be won by Achilles due to the infinity that lies between each step of the way. Now that infinity between speaker and reader, that gap, that uncrossable, incomprehensible distance, is the distance of death, time, and the written word, which functions more like a veil than a wall for the way it is always inviting the reader to try and see what is on the other side. As Lacan asked of Aristotle’s Ethics, so we ask of his own seminars on the ethics of psychoanalysis: How can we understand this discourse, separated from us as it is by time and circumstance? What is Lacan trying to accomplish in this seminar? What is he up to? What is he pursuing? What slippery, shiny fish does he bring up from the depths of his thought? How can we think the revolution this text brings for us to read, like a letter from another world, a revolution in the way the human situation in all its social links can be thought and articulated? Is there any reason why it is not thinkable for the philosopher? But we can never have it all. There always seems “a remainder,” something left behind, some fish not brought up from the depths, something that cannot be made-up for, something missed, in short, by The Ethics of Psychoanalysis...

Share