The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 by Lacan Jacques Miller Jacques-Alain

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 by Lacan Jacques Miller Jacques-Alain

Author:Lacan, Jacques, Miller, Jacques-Alain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis


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What is involved here is discussed by Freud in Moses and Monotheism in connection with the business of the moral law. He thoroughly integrates it there into the adventure which, as he writes in his text, only found its further development and its fulfillment in the Judeo-Christian story.

As far as other religions are concerned – he vaguely defines these as Oriental, thereby alluding apparently to a whole range that includes Buddhism, Lao-Tseu, and others – he affirms, with a boldness that one can only wonder at, that they are all nothing more than the religion of the Great Man. Thus things there remained stuck halfway, more or less aborted, without reaching the point of the primitive murder of this Great Man.

I am far from agreeing with all that. Yet in the history of the avatars of Buddhism, one can find a great many things which, legitimately or not, can be made to illustrate Freud’s theory; in other words, it is because they did not push the development of the drama through to the end that they stayed where they are. But it is, needless to say, odd to find this strange Christo-centrism in Freud’s writings. There must have been a reason for him to have slipped into it almost without realizing it.

In any case, we find ourselves brought back to following the path to the end.

So that something like the order of the law may be transmitted, it has to pass along the path traced by the primordial drama articulated in Totem and Taboo, that is to say, the murder of the father and its consequences, the murder at the origin of culture of the figure about whom one can say nothing, a fearful and feared as well as dubious figure, an all-powerful, half-animal creature of the primal horde, who was killed by his sons. As a result of which – and the articulation here is important – an inaugural pact is established that is essential for a time to the institution of that law, which Freud does his best to tie to the murder of the father and to identify with the ambivalence that is thus at the basis of the relations between son and father or, in other words, involves the return of love once the act is accomplished.

All the mystery is in that act. It is designed to hide something, namely, that not only does the murder of the father not open the path to jouissancethat the presence of the father was supposed to prohibit, but it, in fact, strengthens the prohibition. The whole problem is there; that’s where, in fact as well as in theory, the fault lies. Although the obstacle is removed as a result of the murder, jouissance is still prohibited; not only that, but the prohibition is reinforced.

This fault that denies is thus sustained, articulated, made visible by the myth, but at the same time it is also camouflaged by it. That is why the important feature of Totem and Taboo is that it is a myth, and, as has been said, perhaps the only myth that the modern age was capable of.



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