Judgement

Abstract

At the beginning of Seminar VII, Lacan summarises the traditional question of ethics as, ‘Given our condition as men, what must we do in order to act in the right way?’ (Lacan, 1992: 19). To this he conjoins his own definitional emphasis and understanding that ethics ‘essentially consists in a judgement of our action’ (Ibid.: 311). He adds to this definition that judgement must be evident, albeit implicitly, not only from the exterior of the action, that is, that ethical judgement is not exclusively something one engages in or pronounces from the outside, but it, judgement, must also pertain to the action itself. The judgement necessary to ethics cannot be reduced to a juridical conferment which would be pronounced after the fact but must be inherent to the act itself in order for that act to be considered ethical as opposed to the act simply being judged right or wrong, beneficial or detrimental etc. on the basis of some pre-existing table of prescriptions. Without this last proviso, ethics would unavoidably be reduced to a posterior conclusion which would be identical, in structure at least, to the legal. The problem with such a reduction to the legal is that the content which would ensue is entirely arbitrary, being, as it would be, without any support. As we have seen before, the law must conceal in mythical obscurity its own impossible foundations.