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2 Philosophy’s Preparation for Death Who, as fearlessly as this clinician (Freud-Lacan), so firmly rooted in the everydayness of human suffering, has questioned life as to its meaning—not to say that it has none, which is a convenient way of washing one’s hands of the matter, but to say that it has only one, that in which desire is borne by death. —Jacques Lacan, The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Powers1 It might seem that Lacan is not really interested in ethics at all. He says that he is not looking for a new route to human happiness and wellbeing . Nor does he wish to refine Kant’s deontological ethic with a new determination of the moral law and its relation to desire. Certainly, Lacan does raise these questions, but his purpose is to put the whole question of the human good and the relation of law and desire—the traditional frontiers of philosophical ethics—on an entirely new footing and to bring them to a new articulation. This position can seem anti-philosophical. In Badiou’s reading of Lacan, for example, we meet a Lacan who presents himself as an outsider of philosophy, perhaps an anti-philosopher. Alain Badiou describes him in this way, saying it is even “perilous to approach Lacan from a philosophical point of view.”2 To point out the anti-philosophical dimensions of Lacan’s thought, Badiou focuses on the relation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and, not Hegel, but Plato, which he describes in terms of “rivalry,” “contestation,” and “rupture.” But, however set aside, surpassed , or deconstructed, Plato’s philosophy in fact remains a reference or a touchstone for Lacan. His eighth seminar was a long interpretation of Plato’s Symposium dialogue, showing the relations and ruptures between Plato’s philosophical usage of the themes of love, desire, and truth and their usage in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Love and truth may be two of 35 36 Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor the great Platonic themes, in relation to the soul, that Lacan returned to again and again. Other essays in this collection take up these themes. For now, let us question the Lacanian demystification of philosophy in terms of a notion crucial to Lacan’s Seminar VII: the death drive. If, as in Plato, ethical life was in some ways a “preparation for death,” whereby death’s “sting” was greatly diminished in that it stung only the body and left the immortal soul free, and in fact liberated that soul from its imprisonment in the body, what is the relationship toward death in the Lacanian ethic of psychoanalysis for which there is certainly no immortal soul to care for nor is there any destination of that soul in an afterlife? As we have seen, far from being an outright enemy of philosophy, Lacan is perhaps better understood as saying that something essential to philosophy has, probably from necessity, been set aside as too destabilizing or unapproachable, something that thus marks the limits for philosophy, a limit beyond which it cannot proceed. For Lacan, this limit is not just death, not just the act of dying, but specifically what he calls “the death drive,” the Freudian Todestrieb, which Lacan translates as la pulsion de mort. Badiou marks this limit and presents the psychoanalytic rupture with Platonic ontology by way of a resonance he brings into view between Lacan and the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus. Retracing the Heideggerian route, Badiou shows how Lacan likewise deconstructs Plato by going back behind him, or before him, to a prePlatonic thinking, particularly that of Heraclitus, that came before the ontological metaphysics of Plato, and that may have in fact conditioned it, but which was subsequently silenced, left in fragments by the tradition of thought that emerged from Plato. According to Badiou’s reading—and it is hardly beyond reproach—where Plato is the philosopher of the greater, higher unity of a transcendental Eidos, a true philosopher of the infinite, Heraclitus is a thinker of difference and of the gap, a philosopher of the enigmas of finitude and of the lack of final resolution and closure in being. Heraclitus is the first philosopher to “allow us to think the death drive,” something that was foreclosed in Plato’s thought. Insofar as Plato identifies or unifies difference through the Eidos, “there was no room for it (the death drive),” Badiou writes,3 despite Plato’s declaration, in relation to the great thematic of the care...

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