The Dislocations of the Real
1.2 Demand the impossible
arising from law is also the incentive of the action is called its morality ’ (Kant, 1797, p. 46). The legality of an action does not concern itself with motivations: all that matters is whether or not the action is conform with law . The ethical dimension of an action thus lies beyond this corre- spondence between action and law: in relation to legality, ‘the ethical always presents a surplus or excess’ (Zupančič, 2000, p. 12). But what is the nature of this excess? As we have seen, it has something to do with the driving force behind an action: the will should be determined solely by ‘the form of the moral law’. Kantian ethics demands not only that action is conform with duty, but also that ‘this conformity be the only
“content” or “motive” of that action’ (Zupančič, 2000, p. 14). To reca- pitulate and schematize this, consider the following theses, put forward by Zupančič (2000, p. 16):
In conformity with duty (the legal)
In conformity with duty and only because of duty (the ethical) These phrases highlight that the ethical for Kant asserts itself as a supple- ment. This supplement appears to be a ‘pure waste’, in that it does not serve any purpose: in the end, the comportment of the subject remains the same, as do the consequences of the actions, despite any possible difference in his or her motivations. The bottom line is that ethics is based on some sort of wasteful excess that isn’t good for anything but, nevertheless, makes all the difference (ethical or not).
for it to function as a motive force of action’ (Zupančič, 2000, p. 15).
How, then, can something which in itself is not pathological, because it has nothing to do with the pleasure principle as the usual mode of subjective causation, come to be the drive of a subject’s actions? How can the pure form of duty, in other words, assume the place and func- tion formerly occupied by pathological elements? As Zupančič remarks, if the latter would operate as a motive for the subject, we would no longer have to worry about the first problem concerning the almost impossible task of the ‘purification of the will’ (2000, p. 16).
At this point, the parallel with Lacan’s conceptualization of the object a can be drawn. Object a is the ephemeral object that ‘drives’ desire forward. Its status is ambiguous: although it is called an object, it is not an object that we encounter in real life. This is why it is called the object-cause of desire: because it can never be given as such, it insists and forms the continual basis that supports desire’s endless search for ‘something else’ (Lacan, 1962–63). Lacan states that the ordinary objects that we engage with are related to the dimension of ‘demand’.
However, after demands have been met, something inevitably stays behind, which is precisely desire in its pure state (Lacan, 1958, p. 580).
The object of desire, then, is simultaneously ‘a rock and a lack’; some- thing that is propounded to ‘exist’, although it can never be reached and thus continues to be lacking (Shepherdson, 2008). In other words: it is the positivization of a negativity, just as Kant’s real Triebfeder , the ethical motive of ‘the form of moral law’, is the positivization of the absence of every other Triebfeder (Zupančič, 2000). The only ‘true’ object-drive of the will is nothing but this empty form. The absence of content thus, in both cases, begins to function as a positive, material incentive.
The emphasis on motivation in Kantian ethics opens onto the prob- lems of desire and freedom. We have seen that the ethical is concerned not only with what it is that we want when we act in a certain way, but also with the way that we want it . However, this assertion leads us to another difficult question: Are we free to desire what we want?
2 The dispossession of our intimacy
When dealing with ethics, the question of the subject inevitably takes center stage. More specifically, we must busy ourselves with the difficult notion of freedom: When, if ever, are we truly acting as free agents?
This is a crucial question in contemporary intellectual life. Are we the authors or even the owners of the thoughts and impulses that arise in our minds? Is the fact that ‘there is thinking’ going on in our heads the
effect of some kind of (human) agency? Phenomenological enquiries argue that this is not the case: thoughts pop up when ‘they’ want to pop up, and not when ‘I’ expect them to do so (Feyaerts & Vanheule, 2015).
Such observations led Lacan (for example, 1964, pp. 35–36) to question Descartes’ contention of the cogito : the fact that ‘there is thinking’ does not justify the claim that it is ‘I’ who am doing the thinking. It would be more accurate to say that ‘it thinks’ in my place. The I, then, is not the root of thoughts, but rather a position taken in response to thoughts (Neill, 2011, p. 27).
As discussed, it is pivotal to Kantian ethics to define what it is that drives us in our comportments. Why did we choose this or that course of action? Although we cannot be sure that we have included all rele- vant factors, we often act as if it is possible to establish a valid account of causes and motives for a specific behavior, a sufficient schema that enables us to understand why we acted the way we did. The influencing factors can then be divided into external circumstances that limit our options and push us in certain directions on one hand, and internal impulses and deliberation that appear to offer some degree of freedom and choice on the other. The problem, however, is that the existence and impact of internal factors does not necessarily imply ‘freedom’
in a straightforward fashion. Is this not the ground-shaking discovery of psychoanalysis, that what arises in the field of consciousness does not come ‘out of the blue’, but must necessarily be thought in relation to ‘something beyond’ consciousness that determines its appearance?
If there is some sort of psychical determination behind our conscious mental phenomena, then the latter cannot be regarded as ‘free’ in any meaningful sense. These issues are as urgent and relevant today as ever, and they are debated extensively and passionately in the contemporary sciences of life (see Dennett, 2003, for a discussion).
For Kant (1785, 1797), human beings as part of nature are subject to the laws of causality. He views most of our deepest convictions and incli- nations as pathological. As discussed, we only act free if we are not driven by these (unconsciously) determined impulses. To claim that you are free because you ‘do what you want’ misses the point entirely: namely, that you are not free in what it is you want. Is what we want, for instance, not curbed by the pleasure principle – perverting the dynamics of need satisfaction in service of survival (De Kesel, 2002)? In the final analysis, the human will is arguably always more or less under the spell of some (pathological) representation like pleasure or happiness. In other words, we cannot find the basis for our freedom in our psychology, because our inner world is, against common sense intuition, just as affected
by causal chains beyond our control as the outer world. Saying that a subject acted in a free manner because his behavior was ‘internally motivated’ – in other words, caused by ‘representations, desires, aspi- rations and inclinations’ (Zupančič, 2000, p. 24) – does not enable us to find freedom in any sense, for the simple reason that these internal factors are themselves subject to a strict form of (psychical) determi- nation. Psychological causality points to a being ‘under necessitating conditions of past time which are no longer in his power when he acts’
(Kant, 1788, p. 122).
Take for example the dynamics in a case of drug addiction. Imagine a man who might wish to end the diabolical spiral of substance abuse when going to bed in the early hours, after yet another night of excess. When this conviction arises in him, it is absolutely true: he is fully convinced that he cannot go on like that. He might even call up his family and declare his good intentions, only to find himself, a couple of hours later, in a state of wanting to resume the habit and use again. This does not contradict his previous exclamations; what he wants for himself simply changes along the rhythm of something ‘foreign’ inside him – whether we understand this as the physiological aftermath of years of addiction, or as a series of learned conditioned responses that activate craving, and so on. Addiction shows in an extreme way that we are not ‘free’ to choose what it is that we want – something ‘fickle’ inside us chooses for us. Alternatively, take the case of a man, described by Bruce Fink (2003), who enters analysis with the complaint that he cannot stop mastur- bating to a homo-erotic and fetishistic fantasy which, in his everyday life, is completely alien to him. This man does not ‘choose’ to ‘enjoy’
this particular fantasy, as this enjoyment estranges him and makes him suffer. It rather appears that the fantasy chose him. To put it somewhat aphoristically : a speaking being is a poem rather than a poet (Soler, 2014), someone who is written rather than the author of his thoughts.
Although these examples are taken out of the field of psychopathology, it should not be overlooked that the same applies to thoughts and feel- ings which are deemed normal or adequate: they too arise on their own, following a logic or a determination to which we have no direct access.
Kantian ethics, then, upholds that one must first of all face this dispossession of one’s ‘own’ intimacy. We must acknowledge that we are not ‘Master in our own house’, to paraphrase Freud’s famous dictum (1917a, p. 143). Although this insight has now been generally accepted on a theoretical level, it continues to stir up uncomfortable feelings. At the level of our everyday interactions, the idea that we are ‘in control’
of ourselves, along with everything that this implies, proves very hard
to abandon – even for those who conclude from these observations that ‘free will’ (and thus the very idea of personal responsibility and the possibility of ethics) is only an illusion (Dennett, 2003). The latter appear to have no other choice than to ‘go along with the crowd’, as they continue to act, against their better judgment, as if free choice were real.
3 The ethical subject
Nevertheless, this is only half of Kant’s story: he does not give in to defeatism or nihilism as he maintains the possibility of subjective freedom, and thus, of ethics (Zupančič, 2000). Kant argues that the feeling of ‘guilt’ that arises when one has made a mistake, even if this mistake is caused unintentionally by oversight or ignorance, points to the awareness that one could have done otherwise (Žižek, 1998). The feeling of guilt indicates that something inside the person ‘accuses’ him or her for the committed action, signaling that he or she was in posses- sion of his or her freedom – despite the possible extreme and inescap- able pressures of necessity that influenced him or her. The discussed guilt here has a very precise signification: it concerns the fact that ‘we can feel guilty even for something we knew to be “beyond our control”’, when we are carried along by ‘the stream of natural necessity’ (Zupančič, 2000, p. 26). In this sense, that we feel guilty is more indicative than what we feel guilty of. Zupančič argues that this guilt is mirrored in the fact that analysands sometimes feel guilty not only for the content of their unconscious desires, but ‘because of the very frame which sustains this kind of “psychological causality”. It is as if they felt responsible for the very institution of the “psychological causality” which, once in place, they cannot but submit to , to be “carried along” by’ (p. 26, emphasis added).
This is a difficult yet essential point. Freedom is purportedly located precisely in this split between ‘I couldn’t have done anything else’ and
‘nevertheless, I am guilty’ (Zupančič, 2000, p. 27). Here we meet with the paradox of Kantian ethics: only at the point where I become aware of the fact that I am carried along by the streams of necessity, can I become aware of my freedom. Thus, on the one hand, Kant incessantly reminds us of the fact that we are not free, even in our most intimate psychological being. On the other, he maintains that we are neverthe- less responsible for all of our actions. In sum, with Zupančič’s appropria- tion of Freud’s (1923) maxim: 1 ‘Man is not only much more unfree than he believes, but also much freer than he knows’ (Zupančič, 2000, p. 39).
Where man believes himself to be an autonomous ego, at the level
of psychological causality, he must find that all of his ‘spontaneous’
actions and undertakings are linked to the law of natural causality.
Zupančič (2000, p. 28) calls this the ‘postulate of de-psychologizing’ or the ‘postulate of determinism’. Instead of being free in the intimacy of our conscious minds, we find that we are determined by the Other as a causal order beyond our control. But at the very point that we admit to this foreign determination, we are confronted with a ‘crack’ in the Other, with the Other’s lack – and it is precisely there that we can find the autonomy and freedom of the subject. The task is to discover where the subject plays an active part in causal necessity.
To be brief, the subject can only experience him- or herself as a divided subject to the degree that he or she has gone through the experience of being ‘caused’ by a structure that pre-exists and transcends him or her.
Through this experience, one can discover oneself to be something impos- sible, something which denies the most fundamental aspect of human existence. That is, an entity lacking freedom and autonomy, a mere object on which circumstance operates. However, this movement of de-psychol- ogization is never complete, as there always persists some kind of left-over element, which can serve as the basis for the ethical subject to appear.
From this reading, it follows that the ethical subject needs to be teased out, needs to be brought into existence along a certain path. It must be ‘made to appear’, as it is normally occluded from sight. In the end, the subject must come to recognize the part that he or she plays in what appear to be the laws of natural necessity. Whenever we are ‘driven’ along by some kind of Triebfeder , whether it is pathological or not, we must always presuppose a subjective ‘act’ that instituted it as a sufficient cause (that is, instituted it into the maxim that guides the subject’s action). This is what the elusive idea of ‘ being responsible for the very institution of the “psychological causality”
that cannot be resisted ’ is about. Even when we act in line with a principle of ‘self-preservation’, we cannot simply uphold that this is a genetically
‘caused’ comportment. Kant holds that it entails a subjective decision that gives this principle the authority to dictate our actions. To illustrate this, picture a man who explains the fact that he incessantly cheats on his wife by referring to his evolutionally developed, hard-wired male programming, which incites him to spread his genetic material as widely as possible: can we honestly say that this man is irresistibly driven by his genetic build-up?
Obviously, at many instances we are not aware of which specific maxim determines our choices. This maxim is often left implicit, but it is never- theless not impossible to recover it through reflection.
In other words, there is no ‘cause of the cause’: ‘it may well be that you were dragged along by the torrent of (natural) necessity; but in
the final analysis it was you that made this cause the cause’ (Zupančič, 2000, p. 34). It is only because the cause of the cause (the Other of the Other) is lacking, that the subject is called upon to take upon itself the responsibility for this missing guarantee, this lack of necessity. This does not mean that a person consciously ‘chooses’ the maxims that guide his or her actions. For example, Jacques-Alain Miller (1995) discusses a case of a man for whom the psychoanalysis revealed that his object choices were always determined by a singular trait: he was attracted to women who somehow represented death. Sometimes he liked a woman because of her pale skin, another because she was ‘the corpse of the party’ (the one who stood unmoved while everyone else was dancing and having a good time), and so on (Miller, 1995, p. 238). The analysis of this man revealed that somehow his object choice was determined by an unknown maxim that made a ‘death trait’ function as a drive. When confronted with a woman marked by this peculiar trait, this man simply could not resist. This ‘decision’ must be ascribed to the subject, although it cannot be located in historical time, nor has it ever been experienced as such. It is an ‘unconscious decision’, which obviously raises the ques- tion whether or not the ‘conscious I’ is responsible for it.
To complicate things further, there is a strange temporal dynamics involved with this ‘act’ of the subject that institutes the cause as cause.
This type of act is propounded to be the act of the subject, while at the same time this act is the ‘condition of possibility’ for the subject’s arrival:
the subject is said only to arise as an effect of this act. This is reminiscent of Freud’s thesis of the Neurosenwahl : the specific dynamics of an uncon- scious structure are consolidated at a mythical point in time where a
‘subjective response’ to castration supposedly occurs (Freud, 1913a).
Freud maintained that the difference between neurosis, psychosis and perversion flows precisely from the kind of response given with regard to the threat of castration (respectively repression, forclusion and disa- vowal). Here, also, the neurotic/psychotic/perverse subject only comes into being as the effect of this choice, while we must necessarily consider it as something chosen by this very same subject. That this counterintui- tive temporality is not a trivial or merely academic matter, is evidenced in the fact that without this postulate, psychotherapy as a praxis becomes impossible (Verhaeghe, 2001, pp. 50–51; Reisner, 2003).
The emergence of the (ethical) subject is thus only possible because the Other is lacking or incomplete. Whereas our intimate phenom- enological experience gives us the impression that we are free agents, making our own choices on the basis of internal data, we find that this conscious inner life is strongly determined by a causal order beyond