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From Psychoanalytical Notebooks 3, 1999 : Love RESPONSIBILITY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS Richard Klein The theme of the Journeé,1
‘Responsibility in Psychoanalysis’, has led me to consider whether or
not a distinction should be made between the notions of responsibility and
duty in the teaching of Lacan. To have a responsibility and to have a duty
are, perhaps, distinct notions. A binary suggests itself: duty and
responsibility. Kantian duty is defined as an act undertaken
by a subject which gives the symbolic statement of his or her maxim a
universal value. Such a definition is already a problem for the subject
who in psychoanalysis is accepted as particular. Kant’s duty is
universal. It is for each and every subject. We could leave responsibility
in the hands of a particular subject who will carry it out in his or her
way. Lacan2 sends us straight to chapter
and verse in the second Critique
where the moral law in setting itself against our inclinations must
produce a feeling of pain. It demands renunciation like a superego and
turns enjoyment against the self, hence, the experience of pain. He says
that the morbid command of the superego is experienced as a duty, and that
the subject’s true duty is to oppose this command.3 The term duty is being used in two different
ways. Under the imperative of the superego the subject experiences its
duty as a universal, but the subject has its own duty which is to oppose
the universal. The subject’s duty is being taken as correlative to the
particular. Could one not say from the beginning that the subject has a
responsibility to oppose its superego duty? In Lacan’s Kant with Sade, Kant represents duty and Sade right.4
Lacan makes the point that La
philosophie dans le boudoir adds the dimension of truth to the Critique of Practical Reason. The truth of the former is that the
subject has the right to enjoyment, no holds barred, as it were. The title
could be translated as ‘Duty with Right’. The moral law exercises a
right to enjoyment. Duty becomes confused with a right to enjoyment. Lacan comes back to this many years later in Seminar
XX,5 and asserts that right is not duty. Right is
correlative to the superego’s will of enjoyment. Duty is no longer to be
confused with this. The subject’s duty is to oppose the will of
enjoyment, that is, to evacuate it. Then, one reads in a brief passage in Eric
Laurent’s editorial in Mental No
4 6: “In that other method of evaluating psychoanalysis we
can grasp the passing from guilt in regard to the symptom to
responsibility. It is what we call identification with the symptom”. He
is referring to evaluation by the pass in which the subject passes from
guilt in regard to the symptom. Guilt is correlative to the will of the
superego. If we should make that the cause of
duty, then the subject is passing from it to responsibility.
However, Lacan says that we should not confuse duty with the will to
enjoyment. The symptom with guilt is bound up with the will to enjoyment.
The symptom without guilt leads to an identification with the symptom. It
cannot be without guilt unless the enjoyment is extracted. One’s duty is
to renounce this will to enjoyment. That puts duty and responsibility on
the same side. Identification with the symptom is a notion
that evolves in the seminar called Le
sinthome.7 A symptom emerges at the point of sin where it is called sinthome. It belongs to Lalangue
of Lacan. He found its old orthography which injects Greek into French,
and Lacan is also injecting English into it. In the preceding Seminar
R.S.I., it is defined according to Freud’s doctrine in which the
symptom is a drive-satisfaction. Or, as he puts it on the 18th of Feb.
1975, the symptom is the way each one has of enjoying the unconscious in
so far as the unconscious determines it.8 This would be a sinthome in so far as enjoyment is a sin. There is a prohibited
enjoyment in the symptom. In sin itself a will to enjoyment makes itself
felt, and because it is a sin, it is turned against the self. The law for
the sake of the law of the symptom becomes itself a satisfaction. Lacan no
longer seems to make this correlative to duty but to right or to will.
However, this is not the symptom that the subject identifies with in the
course of analysis. It is the symptom that the subject sets out on. The concept of a sinthome reaches back to Seminar
II,9 where each time a chain of symbols reaches its
terminal point, our actions come to seek us out. There we have to account
for our crimes and pay in full, he says. Of course, this will soon become
a chain of signifiers. It does not seem to me that our actions come to
seek us out at the point the chain stops but that our actions attack the
chain, stopping it. What do we discover at this terminal point but a
signifier plus a crime, or a signifier plus sin. It is a terminal
signifier not correlative to another signifier but correlative to sin.
Crime, too, is a satisfaction in the classical doctrine, and this
satisfaction is now written by us as little a,
the object that brings a satisfaction that destroys. The silence that
ensues on the stopping of the chain is the sign of the death drive.
This symptom has been formalised by Jacques-Alain Miller as a
function from the symbolic into the real. The logical use of the sinthome,
says Lacan on the 18th of Nov. 1975,10 is to reach the real at
the end of which it has not thirst, which is to be a heretic in the good
way. This is clearer in Seminar II
11: at the terminal point of a chain of signifiers we have to
account for our crimes, but, he continues, if we know how to account for
them we wont be punished. At this terminal point there is a know-how. The
subject has a responsibility to develop a know-how in the psychoanalytical
process in which the subject accounts for its sins without punishment. It
is the artifice of the analysis. The
know-how of the psychoanalytical process is Crime without Punishment, or
sin without the negative therapeutic reaction. But that will not work
unless enjoyment is evacuated from the system. We might say that the
subject has a responsibility to acquire this know-how. Lacan says on the 13 of Jan. 1976 that one’s
responsibility goes as far as one’s know-how.12 The more
know-how the subject acquires, the more responsibility it has and the less
sin. Knowing how in analysis to account for one’s crimes is a
responsibility the analysand assumes. In this process the subject becomes
a sinthome. But know-how is an artifice which in the case of Joyce is the
form of his art. His art, says Lacan, corresponds to the phallus which
makes up for his missing Oedipus. Artifice in this seminar seems to be an
indication of a foreclosure. For Joyce the father is an artificer: ‘Old
father, old artificer, stand now and ever in good state’. It is one of
the names of the father that is a stabilising factor in Joyce’s
structure. The artifice in the case of Joyce orients him towards the
symbolic: to make himself into a book. Know-how in the case of the
neurotic orients the subject on the real of his or her crimes. One’s
responsibility goes as far as the real. Still in the same lesson he says that the
sexual does not found a relation in any way and that there is only sexual
responsibility. The real that one reaches with know-how is a trace of the
impossibility in the sexual relation. Responsibility as non-response or as
response that goes astray is a sign of this impossibility. Nevertheless,
there is sexual responsibility, and it is juxtaposed to the sexual
nonrelation. What further responsibility could there be but the
responsibility to support the Other sex with a relation that makes up for
the absent one? The three-ring Borromean knot has an effect of
nonrelation and of an equivalence between the sexes. Equivalence is
correlative to nonrelation. It seems that the sinthome names them man and
woman, creates gender, as it were, by creating non-equivalence, and as the
fourth ring makes up for the absent relation. Responsibility as
non-response or as response that goes astray is a trace of the
impossibility of the sexual relation in the sinthome. 1.
Presented at the Study Day of the ACF-VLB, Nantes,
September, 1999. 2.
J. Lacan, Seminar VII,
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Potter, Routledge, 1992,
p.80. 3.
Ibid., p.7. 4.
J. Lacan, Kant avec
Sade, 1962, in Ecrits, Seuil,
1966, Paris. 5.
J. Lacan, Seminar XX,
Encore, trans. B. Fink, Norton, 1998, p.3. 6.
E. Laurent, Mental
No 4, 4 December 1997, p.8. 7.
J. Lacan, Le Séminaire
XXIII, Le Sinthome, 1975-76, in Ornicar?
No 10. 8.
J. Lacan, Le Séminaire
XXII, R.S.I., 1974-75, in Ornicar?
No 5. 9.
J. Lacan, Seminar II,
The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis,
1954-5, S. Tomaselli, C. U. P., 1988. p.205. 10.
Le Sinthome, op.cit. 11.
op.cit., p.205. 12.
Le Sinthome, op. cit. Copyright © Richard Klein 2003. This text from the website of the London Society of the NLS, at http://www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk. Permission to use material from this site must be sought from the LS-NLS. All rights reserved. Please include this portion of the text in any printed version of this paper. |
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