Outlines of Jacques Lacan’s Ethics of Subjectivity

Abstract

What does Lacanian psychoanalysis contribute to the well-established, but ever-renewed, discipline of ethics? Does he provide us with a new moral theory? Is it critical rejection of previous or possible moral theories? Or, is it something in between these two extremes? If Lacan is right, ethics becomes both unavoidable and irremediably incomplete, if the desire inhabiting it is supposed to culminate in a moral perspective and practice that is both unproblematic and unambiguously prescriptive. “[P]sychoanalysis might seem at first to be of an ethical order,” he remarks, in his seminar devoted to “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.”¹ There are several reasons why this makes good sense, and they provide a fitting place to begin this chapter.