Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity

Abstract

THE STATUS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS is ethical.' This remark made during the course of the Eleventh Seminar formulates a central theme in Lacan's project from start to finish. An entire seminar is devoted to it. Even the school that Lacan founded (only later to dissolve) was patterned, not on a professional medical association, but on an ancient school of ethics, with its master, his teachings, and his initiatory language. But Lacan's reflections on ethics involve a rethinking of the very nature of ethics; the unconscious is in an unfamiliar sense. I read Lacan's remark about the status of the unconscious as saying that the of the he reconstituted out of Freud is an theory. It belongs not to a science of prediction and control but to an ethic of self-analysis and association with others. Ethics is at stake in Lacan's recasting of Freud's metapsychology in terms of the positions and structures of the talking cure. It is his way of extracting Freud's theory from its sources in a normalizing nineteenth-century psychiatric medicine and reformulating it as an ethic of language. Psychoanalysis is not a medical treatment any more than the unconscious is a medical disorder-a dysfunction or maladaptation. Rather the unconscious is a structural or constitutive fact about ourselves as speaking subjects, and analysis is the work through which one comes to terms with this fact. Analysis does not consist in diagnosis and prescription. It is made possible by a certain ethical position: a sort of suspension or epoche of the analyst in the face of the madness of another's desire, combined with a neutral listening. This stance makes possible the transference that structures the analytic process of articulating this madness in speech. Lacan says it was hysterics who taught Freud about the unconscious: Freud chose to analyze what they said rather than to fit them into medical categories. He removed the very concept of symptom from medical classification by making it a property of the idiosyncratic ways the hysteric masked and articulated her desire in language. He then in effect elaborated a theory about what the subject must be for this kind of symptom-formation to be possible. In thus linking