In the third and final part of the Ethics of the Real series (and the 4th overall on ethics), we will look more deeply into the specific ethics that Zupančič is suggesting. If you have not read parts 1 and 2, I suggest you do so, as this will build on the last few newsletters.
Desire and Drive
To understand the ethics of the real, we need to understand one more set of key concepts: the Lacanian concepts of desire and drive. Zupančič describes these two approaches in part and one by one.
In the part-by-part version approach, we try to enjoy something fully by enjoying the parts of it, but “when we want to ‘put the pieces together,’ they can never make a whole.” 1 We never get the whole object of desire. This is the concept of desire.
The concept of the drive is explained as a one-by-one approach, “we begin with the One, we enjoy a multiplicity ‘one by one,’ yet we can never say that we enjoyed them all.” (107) We, thus, are never fully satisfied as we seek more.
Like the part-by-part approach, “desire maintains itself by not being satisfied.” (107). In this case, what causes a move from one thing to the next in a continued search is not something missing in what we get, but instead, it is the process of getting it that we want to repeat.
The difference is that in desire, what we want is always incomplete or lacking, whereas, with drive, the desire we want (and will always continue to want) is characterized by the feeling “not this.”
The concepts are related. They are different from a need, in which a specific object can fulfill it. In both cases, there is an inadequacy in what is sought.
However, there is also a difference; desire is kept alive by the constant lack of getting the real object. Drive gets satisfaction even when it is not getting through the object it gets. The example given is eating or binging. We are not satisfied by what we eat, so we keep going after more, but what does give us satisfaction is not in finding the exact right thing or being full, but in the pleasure of tasting.
there is also a fundamental difference between desire and the drive. Desire sustains itself by remaining unsatisfied. As for the drive, the fact that it ‘understands that this is not the way it will be satisfied’ does not stop it from finding satisfaction ‘elsewhere’. Thus in contrast to desire, the drive sustains itself on the very fact that it is satisfied. (242)
We pursue our desires, which are never fulfilled, but the act of continuously trying to fulfill those desires is the drive. The drive is satisfied by the pursuit that keeps it going.
Key to Zupančič’s ethics is Lacan’s notion of not giving way on your desire.
Zupančič quotes Lacan as follows:
What I call ‘céder sur son désir’ [giving up on desire] is always accompanied in the destiny of the subject by some betrayal.… Either the subject betrays his own way … or, more simply, he tolerates the fact that someone with whom he has more or less vowed to do something betrays his hope and doesn’t do for him what their pact entailed – whatever the pact may be, fated or ill-fated, risky, shortsighted, or indeed a matter of rebellion or flight, it doesn’t matter. (120)
Zupančič shares that this idea of giving up on one’s desire is often seen in “claims like ‘circumstances forced me to do it’, ‘I could not help it’, ‘it was beyond my control’“(118)
Being true to the desire and not giving way to the desire requires one more step to show the ethics of the real. The desire must become the drive. Zupančič explains how this happens:
If the fundamental constellation of desire implies an infinite and incommensurable measure which makes every given object turn out to be insufficient (‘That’s not it’), pure desire can be defined as the moment at which desire is forced to say for its own Cause (for its absolute condition): ‘That’s not It’. This means that the moment of pure desire is, paradoxically, the very moment at which desire loses the foundation of its purity. This implies that ‘pure desire’ is not a state, like a state of the subject whose desire would attain purity from all pathological stains (of all objects). Pure desire is a moment, a moment of torsion or of incurving which might be compared to that of the Möbius strip: if we persist in moving on one of its sides, we will suddenly find ourselves on the ‘other’ side. Pure desire is the moment when desire, in its metonymy, comes across itself, encounters its cause among other objects. At the same time, pure desire coincides with an act. This act is accomplished in the frame of the subject’s fundamental fantasy; but because what is at stake is nothing other than this very frame, it ends up ‘outside’ the fantasy, in another field: that of drive. (244)
We persist in our desire even as we realize that every attempt to fulfill the desire “is not it.” This process eventually leads to seeing the desire itself as what we desire. This motion causes the desire to be reframed into the drive.
Return to Kant
We now return to Kant and look at the two different aspects of his concept of ethics.
For Kant, there are two levels: the “categorical imperative, or the ‘formulation’ of the moral law,”  and the “level of the affect. The moral law ‘affects’ the subject, and this results in a very singular feeling that Kant calls ‘respect’” (140)
We discussed earlier how the categorical imperative is unique to each individual and their duty, but now we will focus more on this second part: the feeling of respect.
The feeling of respect is not a pathological but a practical feeling; it is not of empirical origin but is known a priori; it ‘is not the drive to morality, it is morality itself’ (141)
For Kant, respect is the only drive for ethical action, the only drive that is not pathological.
To relate this to the concepts of desire and drive. Pathological impulses are related to desire, whereas respect equates to drive.
As Zupančič explains it:
the object of the drive is not an object supposed to provide some satisfaction to the subject, but this satisfaction itself: the object of the drive is satisfaction as object. This, as we have just seen, is exactly how Kant defines respect: it ‘is not the drive to morality, it is morality itself’. Respect is thus the irreducible ‘quantum of affect’ that emerges on the part of the subject: it is nothing but the final residue of the pathological which, in fact, is no longer ‘pathological’ in the strict sense of the word. Respect is the other name of what we earlier called ‘ethical transubstantiation’, the conversion of the form (of the law) into a drive.(142)
Zupančič now returns to Kant’s categorical imperative to say that:
The categorical imperative is therefore none other than the type of the moral law. But further questions arise: what, then, is the moral law? What does it command? What does it ‘want’? The phrase ‘So act that…’ of the categorical imperative is not the answer to the question ‘What should I do?’ but, rather, to the question ‘How do I do it?’ – a question in which the ‘it’ remains an enigma. (163)
The categorical imperative tells us how to act but not what action to take. Thus, the law it establishes does not already exist; it comes into being through the act itself. (163)
This brings us back to where we concluded last week. The act itself constitutes the law as a universal law, not something that pre-exists the action.
Lacan describes desire as the desire of the other. This is not to say that the Other tells us what they want, so we want it; instead, we have to guess it continuously, like a child trying to please a parent or an employee trying to please a manager when they are unclear how to do so. (164)
In a way, this is the same as what the moral law means for Kant
The moral law is neither a law that says ‘I want this’, ‘I want you to do this!’, nor a silent law that wants nothing. The moral law has the structure of an enunciation without a statement; it has the structure of an enigma or oracle. Our intention here, we must emphasize, is not to oppose to a ‘bad law’ (the law of the superego) a ‘good law’ (a law that has the structure of the oracle). For it is precisely this structure of the oracle (or the enigma) that can open the door for the constitution of the superego, as well as for another figure of the law, the ‘law of the unknown’. It is because the moral law has the structure of an enigma that two different conceptual figures of the law and two different ethics can follow from it. (164)
- Because the law appears as an enigma, Zupančič explains that two possible ethics can arise:
The law exists, and you have to guess what it is. This makes ethics the process of continuously guessing what the right thing is.
One can understand ethics as a pursuit of the desire of the Other, as a hunt for or an attempt to figure out the desire of the Other before one ‘moves into action’. Here, however, the subject not only has to ‘guess’ the desire of the Other, but also – and above all – to see to it that the Other has a desire in the first place. The subject, of course, will never be capable of satisfying the demands of the Other. It is precisely this series of failures (‘that’s not it’, ‘try again’, ‘make another effort’…) that maintains the Other as the one who knows what It wants: if It doesn’t want this, It apparently wants something else, and knows very well what this something else is. (165)
This is the approach of desire.
- The law depends on actions to know what it is. It is through acting that an action creates what the law wants.
One can admit that it is only with his act that the subject creates what the Other (the Law) wants. Such is, for example, the act of Oedipus: Oedipus retroactively creates the symbolic debt into which he should have been born, but which was taken away from him in a series of attempts to avoid this destiny. The lesson of his story is not that ‘everything is already decided’ (by the big Other), and that whatever the subject does, he is lost in advance. On the contrary, the story of Oedipus shows us, rather, that it is the big Other who is lost without the subject. (166)2
The oracle’s enigmatic statement can only be fulfilled through Oedipus’s actions. This continued act of moving things forward is the ethics of the drive.
A Moment of Terror
With these dual perspectives on ethics, either guessing the right thing or the right thing coming retroactively from action, we now come to the ethical moment of choice. Zupančič contends that ethical decisions come up as a moment of terror.
The ultimate act of terror, the most radical terror, is when we are forced to subjectivize ourselves, where we are forced to choose. It is not only that we are allowed to choose – we must do so, and thus demonstrate that we are free subjects, whether we want to or not. (213)
Zupančič uses the example of the movie Sophie’s Choice, where a mother is asked to choose which of her two children should live. If she refuses to choose, they both will die. This is a choice as true freedom and true terror.
If ethics is always correlative to choice, we might say that the closer we come to the ethical Act, the closer we are to the most radical instance of choice – the one we have designated as the core of terror. (216)
Sophie’s choice is two choices. First, to make a choice or not. To choose which child dies or to lose both through inaction. In this choice, the categorical imperative helps, and second, which child to choose to live.
To return to the two logics of the forced choice – the one exemplified by ‘Your money or your life’ (where we must choose life without money, or lose both) and the one exemplified by ‘Freedom or death’ (where I cannot affirm my liberty except by choosing death): the first type of forced choice supports the classical logic of mastery, and thus classical ethics. (217-218)
To make the ethical choice (saving one child), the mother is forced to make the horrible choice of which child to sacrifice.
This brings us back to Kant’s ideal that an ethical act is done only for duty’s sake. In this choice, there can be no pathological motive; both results are horrible for the mother, and thus, only her duty as a mother to save one child can dictate the reason.
Now, most of our choices are not like this, and some critics of Kant have said that most of the time, there can be no ethical action. We always have pathological drives, and except for these rare moments, we can never act purely out of duty.
But Zupančič questions whether there is something more here. In Kant’s view, is there a kernel of what really matters in ethics? Is there a part of ethics that requires extreme action?
The Impossible
This causes Zupančič to look at what is essential about ethics to see how depending on what you emphasize about that essential will change the nature of the ethics:
The heart of all ethics is something which is not in itself ‘ethical’ (nor is it ‘non-ethical’) – that is to say, it has nothing to do with the register of ethics. This ‘something’ goes by several different names – although we will limit ourselves to two: for Lacan, it is ‘the Real’; for Badiou, ‘the event’. These terms concern something which appears only in the guise of the encounter, as something that ‘happens to us’, surprises us, throws us ‘out of joint’, because it always inscribes itself in a given continuity as a rupture, a break or an interruption. According to Lacan, the Real is impossible, and the fact that ‘it happens (to us)’ does not refute its basic ‘impossibility’: the Real happens to us (we encounter it) as impossible, as ‘the impossible thing’ that turns our symbolic universe upside down and leads to the reconfiguration of this universe. Hence the impossibility of the Real does not prevent it from having effect in the realm of the possible. This is when ethics comes into play, in the question forced upon us by an encounter with the Real: will I act in conformity to what threw me ‘out of joint’, will I be ready to reformulate what has hitherto been the foundation of my existence? Badiou calls this question – or, rather, this attitude – a ‘fidelity to the event’ or ‘the ethics of truth’. For Lacan, the accent is to be placed, first, on desire (‘Have you acted in conformity with the desire which inhabits you?’), for it is desire that aims at the impossible, the Real. (235)
A challenge that comes from this is that it seems that to act ethically, we must wait for the real to rupture or for an event to happen. To move beyond this, we must recognize that the event/real is a by-product of our action; no hero causes it, but it is caused.
The paradox of the Real or of the Event lies in the fact that as soon as we turn it into the direct goal of our action, we lose it. But – given that the Real, or the Event, is the heart of all ethics – does this not imply that ethics is ‘passive’ in its essence, that all we can do is wait for an ‘encounter with the Real’, and stick thereafter to its consequences? To see that the answer to this question is negative, we must at this point make an important distinction. According to the logic of the Real or of the Event, the very opposition active/passive (our waiting for the Event/our exertions designed to make it occur) is misplaced. This is because the Real (the Event) does not have a subject (in the sense of a will that wants it), but is essentially a by-product of the action (or inaction) of the subject – something the latter produces, but not as ‘hers’, as a thing in which she would be able to ‘recognize’ herself. In other words, ‘there is no hero of the Event’. (238)
The resolution to this paradox is to recognize that no one can cause the real to occur; it is a by-product of our own action or inaction. It is an emergent phenomenon—a side-effect. Returning to the Lacanian triad, we see the Real is outside our symbolic and imaginary world.
In modern culture, we are drawn to relativism. We think “we have too much knowledge and historic experience to take anything as absolute.”(255) And Zupančič gives the example of leaders who “who openly admits to being incapable of deciding anything before consulting experts or opinion polls.” (255). In the business world, this may be seen as the data-driven leader. It raises the question of how we think about ethics when driven by data in a way that relinquishes responsibility for the numbers and removes our capacity to choose.
Zupančič warns that we must confront this from the inside.
There is something we must remain faithful to, and for it, we are ready to sacrifice everything, but we must include in that sacrifice the very thing we are trying to remain faithful to.
We saw an example of this in Sophie’s Choice, where the mother sacrificed being the mother of one child to save the other. The Biblical Solomon story of splitting the baby is another such example.
And this gets us to the heart of Zupančič’s ethics of the real. Can we stay true to the new information that has come when the impossible happens? Are we willing to give up the very thing that we desire? Can we change it into the drive such that we can give up everything for our cause, including the cause itself?
Can we “take the decision to act in spite of this knowledge, and to commit the very act that this knowledge makes ‘impossible’”? (256)
What Does this mean for middle managers?
If an ethical act means being willing to give up on the very thing that constitutes how we see ourselves in the role, if it means acting even when it seems impossible, how does ethics show up at work?
As a middle manager, two things can be in contradiction: you are an employee of the organization required to follow the rules of that organization as handed down by your superiors, and you are a manager with responsibility for your team.
In a past newsletter, we discussed layoffs as an intrusion of the real. This puts the contradiction of caring for your team at odds with the organization’s demands.
Rather than define what it would mean to act ethically in that situation, I will ask a few questions:
- How might you navigate it such that you directly encounter the impossible?
- How might you sacrifice what you find most important to preserve it?
- Will you act in a way that reconstitutes who you are and makes you a subject by encountering the real in a situation?
- After the situation, how will you act based on what has changed in you?
This may be unclear, and that is the point. The ethical path can’t be stated in advance; it will depend on the person taking it. It will only become the ethical path through action reconciled to the real.
- Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p 107) All future quotations will appear inline in parentheses. ↩
- For those who don’t remember the myth of Oedipus, an oracle tells his parents that he will kill his father and marry his mother, and so he is sent away. When he grows up Oedipus learns of this oracle, and not knowing that his adoptive parents are not his real parents, he flees to not harm them, and as a result ends up killing his real father and marrying his real mother. It is by the multiple attempts to avoid his fate that Oedipus’ fate is sealed. ↩