The Letter, Issue 69, 2020, pages 37-50
BEING PULLED HITHER AND THITHER[1]
On Sublimation, Knotting and Enjoyment
Patricia McCarthy
When it comes to the real, sublimation - a more sublime, more socially valued form of symptom – remains a symptom nonetheless. ‘If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well’ was Rilke’s rebuttal of psychoanalysis. Equally fuelled by devils, sublimation and creativity have the same stem as any other symptom, which is that our desire is forbidden. Lacan names this stem a perfectly knotted pedicle of knowledge, a knowledge of the unconscious that we don’t want to know anything about. Moving between two seminars, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and Les non-dupes errent allows me interrogate this ethical question regarding a rejected knowledge.
Keywords: sublimation; moral masochism; ethics; pleasure; the useful; limit; knotting; enciphering
Our work[2] last year on Seminar XXI Les non-dupes errent was punctuated by a return to reading The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. This rereading was undertaken in anticipation of an International Meeting of L’Association Lacanienne Internationale ALI that was to be hosted in Dublin in August. As with so many events at home and worldwide now on hold because of Covid-19, we are hopeful that the meeting with ALI may yet go ahead next year in May in one format or another, even if the pandemic has not lost its grip. In the meantime ISLP’s work continues.
This revisiting[3] of Seminar VII has been felicitous. Coupled with the insights from Les non-dupes errent, it has allowed me appreciate afresh that Lacan never relinquished the attempt to formulate an ethics of psychoanalysis in the intervening thirteen or so years and that this attempt maintains utter fidelity with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and its laws.
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