Lacan’s ethics and foucault’s “care of the self”

Abstract

"With the “discovery” of the unconscious, and the introduction of desire into questions of an individual’s motivation, Freud in one fell swoop renders all previous accounts of ethics, and thus of the subject, partial.1 Bluntly put, psychoanalysis demonstrated, explicitly for the first time, that there is something else that determines our behaviour up and beyond (or indeed, below) the “good,” whether it be our own, someone else’s, the good of society/humanity, or “the good” in a more general and abstract sense.2 It is this revolution in ethical thought that is the subject of Jacques Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, a revolution that is also a redefinition inasmuch as the latter is then not to do with the good at all, at least not in the above sense, and also not to do with what Lacan calls “the service of goods” (that includes the accumulation of wealth, commodities and so forth), but with that very desire—unpredictable, non-productive and unconscious—that will necessarily upset any such moral position. It is also this that marks psychoanalysis with tragedy insofar as such desire in operating contra this good (and especially the good of the individual) is also a being towards death. The goal of Lacanian analysis—if it can be said to have one—is then less a “cure” or the production of a healthy productive individual (that is, the building up of the ego and the making of a “good” person) than the assumption of what might be called the subject of the unconscious that can only take place via the dismantlement of the various imaginary identifications that led to the former, including the various ethical ones (precisely about being a “good” person and so forth).