Lacan's Ethics and Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism

Tim Themi

Description

Bringing together Jacques Lacan and Friedrich Nietzsche, Tim Themi focuses on their conceptions of ethics and on their accounts of the history of ethical thinking in the Western tradition. Nietzsche blames Plato for setting in motion a degenerative process that turned ethics away from nature, the body, and its senses, and thus eventually against our capacities for reason, science, and a creative, flourishing life. Dismissing Plato's Supreme Good as a "mirage," Lacan is very much in sympathy with Nietzsche's reading. Following this premise, Themi shows how Lacan's ethics might build on Nietzsche's work, thus contributing to our understanding of Nietzsche, and also how Nietzsche's critique can strengthen our understanding of Lacan.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction

1. The Deflationary Ontology of Lacan and Nietzche

1.1 Lacan’s Tripartite Schema with Nietzche’s Critique of Plato’s Good
1.2 Lacan’s Freudian Thing in the Critique of Aristotle’s Good

2. Distinguishing Weak Sublimation From the Strong

2.1 The Promise of Sublimation and Its Discontents
2.2 Lacan’s Treatment of Sublimation
2.3 Nietzche’s Distinction between Weak and Strong

3. Before the Good: Strong Ethics in Sophocles’ Antigone

3.1 Creon against Antigone: In the Name of the Good
3.2 Antigone against Creon: Lacan, the Beautiful, a Second Death
3.3 Before the Good: Nietzche’s Strong Dionysian Catharsis

4. Birth of the Good: Weak Ethics in Socrates’ Alcibiades

4.1 Lacan’s Analysis of Symposium Speeches Prior to Socrates
4.2 The Speech of Socrates: Denaturalizing with Diotima
4.3 Enter Alcibiades: Renaturalizing with Object Agalma

5. God of the Good: Christocentric Oedipal Morality

5.1 The Deaths of God in Lacan’s Seminar VII
5.2 Recapitulating a Decade Later in Seminar XVII
5.3 The Nietzschean Appraisal from The Anti-Christ

6. Service of Goods: Nature and Desire in Modern Science

6.1 Lacan’s Critique of Science in Seminar XVII
6.2 Nietzche’s Empiricist-centered Positive Comments on Science
6.3 Lacan’s Mathematics-centered Positive Comments on Science

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Lycée
• Philosophie
• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophy
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 10 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438450414
• Langue: English

Extrait

Lacan’s Ethics and Nietzsche’s Critique of Platonism
SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Charles Shepherdson, editor
Lacan’s Ethics and Nietzsche’s Critique of Platonism
TIM THEMI
Cover art courtesy of Thanasi Bakatsoulas. The work is entitled “Sun-Ilios.”
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Themi, Tim, 1975–
Lacan’s ethics and Nietzsche’s critique of platonism / Tim Themi.
pages cm. — (Insinuations : philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5039-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Psychoanalysis and philosophy. 2. Psychoanalysis and culture. 3. Platonists. 4. Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981. 5. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. I. Title.
BF175.4.P45T54 2014
170—dc23
2013015893
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Nietzsche, the way he points to the Greeks, the will to power, and all subsequently who teach it— to Lacan for keeping Freudian experience alive.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION
1. THE DEFLATIONARY ONTOLOGY OF LACAN AND NIETZSCHE
1.1 Lacan’s Tripartite Schema with Nietzsche’s Critique of Plato’s Good
1.2 Lacan’s Freudian Thing in the Critique of Aristotle’s Good
2. DISTINGUISHING WEAK SUBLIMATION FROM THE STRONG
2.1 The Promise of Sublimation and Its Discontents
2.2 Lacan’s Treatment of Sublimation
2.3 Nietzsche’s Distinction between Weak and Strong
3. BEFORE THE GOOD: STRONG ETHICS IN SOPHOCLES’ ANTIGONE
3.1 Creon against Antigone: In the Name of the Good
3.2 Antigone against Creon: Lacan, the Beautiful, a Second Death
3.3 Before the Good: Nietzsche’s Strong Dionysian Catharsis
4. BIRTH OF THE GOOD: WEAK ETHICS IN SOCRATES’ ALCIBIADES
4.1 Lacan’s Analysis of Symposium Speeches Prior to Socrates
4.2 The Speech of Socrates: Denaturalizing with Diotima
4.3 Enter Alcibiades: Renaturalizing with Object Agalma
5. GOD OF THE GOOD: CHRISTOCENTRIC OEDIPAL MORALITY
5.1 The Deaths of God in Lacan’s Seminar VII
5.2 Recapitulating a Decade Later in Seminar XVII
5.3 The Nietzschean Appraisal from The Anti-Christ
6. SERVICE OF GOODS: NATURE AND DESIRE IN MODERN SCIENCE
6.1 Lacan’s Critique of Science in Seminar XVII
6.2 Nietzsche’s Empiricist-Centered Positive Comments on Science
6.3 Lacan’s Mathematics-Centered Positive Comments on Science
CONCLUSION
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
An early version of the material in Chapter 1 appeared as “How Lacan’s Ethics Might Improve Our Understanding of Nietzsche’s Critique of Platonism: The Neurosis and Nihilism of a ‘Life’ Against Life,” in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 4 (2008): 328–46. I also acknowledge the support of Russell Grigg among many others, including family and friends.
Abbreviations
The works of Friedrich Nietzsche: cited in-text with the abbreviations listed here. Roman numerals denote standard subdivisions and Arabic numerals section numbers: for example, GM III:20 refers to section twenty in Essay Three of the Genealogy of Morals . Prefaces are indicated with the letter “P.” Details of translations used are provided in the bibliography.
AC = The Antichrist
BGE = Beyond Good and Evil
BT = The Birth of Tragedy
CW = The Case of Wagner
EH = Ecce Homo
GM = On the Genealogy of Morals
GS = The Gay Science
HAH = Human, All too Human
KGW = Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke
KSB = Studienausgabe: Sämtliche Briefe
PPP = The Pre-Platonic Philosophers
PTA = Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
TI = Twilight of the Idols
WP = The Will to Power
Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The works of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud: also cited in-text. Roman numerals with the letter “ S ” refer to book numbers of Lacan’s Seminar; page references are in Arabic numerals and refer to English translations: for example, SVII:50 refers to page 50 of Lacan’s seventh Seminar. Arabic numerals following the letters “ SE ” refer to the volume number of Freud’s Standard Edition: for example, SE2:70 refers to page 70 of Volume 2.
Introduction
Lacan’s 1959–1960 Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis , forges from the Freudian field an ethics of desire that is striking in its riposte to the moral Good of Plato and Aristotle. Right from the first Seminar of the 1950s, the suggestion from Lacan was that the whole trajectory of Western Moralism has led us down “the path for the race to destruction” (SI:277). A Nietzschean resonance becomes manifest when we consider Nietzsche’s view that Platonism enacts a history of nihilism that protracts through Christianity and the modern science era of today. The six chapters of this book explore the number of ways in which Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis, as an ethics of desire, extends on Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism—where as a corollary it will also be possible to take a Nietzschean optic to Lacan to illuminate the latter’s work in a new genealogical light.
This genealogical light may be new to readers of Lacan because although in his twenties, Lacan read and expressed great admiration for Nietzsche 1 —in his mature work, where Freud is the dominant influence, Lacan generally leaves Nietzsche undiscussed. This is despite the fact that Nietzsche’s thought rises to prominence in Lacan’s post-war Paris 2 —and that well before, Nietzsche is felt by some of Freud’s early collaborators to anticipate much in Freud. In 1908, for instance, where there are two meetings of Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society dedicated to discussing Nietzsche’s work, Paul Federn remarks: “Nietzsche has come so close to our work that we can ask only, ‘where has he not come close?’ ” 3
As Alan Bass explains, Nietzsche comes close to Freud by seeing “the unconscious as the greater part of the mind” conceived “in relation to the body, drives and affects”; by having “understood repression”; by having “analysed guilt as internalised aggression”; and by sensing that “morality and ideals are defensive distortions of the drives.” 4 Silvia Ons concurs that Nietzsche “discovered the symptom in morality” and that this brings him “close to Freud” on the “criticism of Christianity,” “the notion of the id,” and “the idea of the drives and repetition,” but then expresses surprise to find “there are few references to Nietzsche’s work in Freud’s and Lacan’s writings,” and that although “there are some studies on the link between Freud and Nietzsche, there are no studies so far on Nietzsche and Lacan”—adding that “the intensity of the interconnections, and their implications, deserve such attention.” 5
One such Nietzsche–Lacan study that Ons may have overlooked is by Alenka Zupančič, contributed to the “Short Circuits” series edited by Slavoj Žižek. 6 The Series Foreword by Žižek is also instructive apropos of what the present book attempts, insofar as Žižek talks about reading one author “through the lens” of another to produce a “decentering of the interpreted text” and the “hegemonic ideology” that may surround it, revealing “its ‘unthought,’ its disavowed presuppositions and consequences” or “disavowed truth,” giving the reader “something new,” perhaps “another—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time.” Although Žižek adds that “the underlying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged instrument of such an approach”—by reading Lacan’s ethics with Nietzsche’s, the present book is open to the possibility that the latter can also bring to light something hidden, lost, or new in the former. 7
Nietzsche’s ethics, and by extension his entire philosophy, calls for a “ revaluation of all values ” (EH IV:1). This is because he felt they had been turned against life by the way, historically, that Plato’s metaphysics of the Good had later combined with Judaism to form Christianity, what Nietzsche calls a “Platonism for the masses” (BGE P). 8 Lacan, for his part, in drawing subsequently on the Freudian experience, fashions out an ethics of psychoanalysis that is also skeptical of the Sovereign Good inherited from Western moral traditions, suggesting they create a “barrier” toward desire that leads to the “inner catastrophes” of “neurosis” (SVII:319). The present book reads Lacan and Nietzsche together on this specific point where they criticize our received notions of the Good and seek to propose an alternative. The aim, then, is to see in what way the respective ethics of Lacan and Nietzsche can contribute to and shed further light on each other.
Chapter 1 begins with Nietzsche’s deflationary critique of Plato’s Good for enabling the distinction between real and imaginary to become confused throughout the history of metaphysics that followed. I read this critique with Lacan’s addition to the real and imaginary of a third category, namely the symbolic , as it appears in the context of his own Seminar VII critique of the Good. The aim is to see how Lacan’s tripartite schema may prove additionally serviceable for Nietzsche’s purpose of demystifying the Good in order to overcome it. Then I consider Lacan’s use of Freud to ground Aristotle’s Good in a polymorphous perversity at the base of desire. In this way Lacan’s view that Aristotle has a narrowly idealized “notion of nature” (SVII:13), distorted through the lens of the Sovereign Good, mig