Editorial
The papers in this issue come mainly from the work of the ISLP cartels presented at the cartel study day in June 2020: a unique study day for ISLP in that it took place in the middle of a pandemic with a small group of people presenting in person to those attending via zoom. Covid restrictions may have limited our ability to meet face to face but they didn’t get in the way of the work. Four of the papers presented here are the fruit of the preparatory work for the planned conference on Lacan’s seminar on ethics which was to be held in August 2020 in Dublin but which, unfortunately, has had to be postponed until 2021, due to the advent of Covid19. The other two papers come from the ISLP study day of June 2017.
Both Liam Barnard and Donat Desmond, in their papers, consider questions around Lacan’s references to Aristotle in his Ethics seminar and specifically his use of pre-existing thought as a foil against which to introduce his own views. Liam Barnard highlights how, despite considering Aristotle’s ethical goals to be far removed from a psychoanalytic ethic, Lacan sets out to repurpose the work of Aristotle to create a new ethics for psychoanalysis. Lacan describes this reformulation of Aristotle’s schemas and his placing of das Ding in the place of the Sovereign good as ‘putting new honey into old pots’.
Following on from this, Donat Desmond asks why Lacan should introduce Bentham into the mix in his discussion. He proposes that in noting the difficulties of devising an ethics that takes the real into account, something which has not been achieved by philosophy up to now, Lacan, in carving out his own ethic, presents Aristotle’s and Bentham’s philosophies as forming a sort of Hegelian like triadic dialectic of thesis, antithesis, with its synthesis being found in Freud.
Another theme taken up by Lacan in his Ethics is the theme of sublimation. Before launching into the Lacanian take on sublimation, Anne Woodbyrne’s paper reminds us of Freud’s work on the subject, particularly in reference to the work of Leonardo da Vinci as illustrative of the link between sublimation and creativity.
While Freud saw sublimation as a desexualised redirecting of the aim, not so Lacan, he places it in the same role as the symptom; a representation of our forbidden desire. Patricia McCarthy takes up the question of the fate of this rejected knowledge in her examination of the texts of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and Les Non-dupes errant.
My own paper, possibly sparked by our current circumstances in the middle of this pandemic, seeks to address the question of what Lacan meant by a second death. In establishing a link between the knowledge of one’s own death and the emergence of desire, Lacan questions the ethics of an analysis which ends with identification with the analyst and proposes an ethics which brings the analysand face to face with his own death.
The question of existence is also at stake in Donna Redmond’s paper. Here, with the aid of the work of Pascal Quignard, she explores the primal phantasy in its function as a screen. A screen which is formed to cover over the anxiety, horror, forsakenness, yearning, alterity, otherness, incompleteness that cannot be articulated when we are faced with the fundamental question, one which informs the ethics of psychoanalysis; how is it possible to exist in the face of the incomprehensible mystery of our lives?
Monica Errity