Of Fleshly Garments: Ascesis and Desire in the Ethic of Psychoanalysis

In the opening paragraphs of his essay “Kant avec Sade,” Jacques Lacan identifies a trend in Western European culture that he views as the indispensable backdrop to Freud's formulation of the pleasure principle. Lacan's perception of this trend—“the insinuating rise across the nineteenth century of the theme of ‘happiness in evil’”—holds a clue both to his own peculiar interpretation of ethical freedom, and to his status as the self-ironizing heir to the Enlightenment.1 Engaging with all the major ethical problems that Freud confronted—the hypothesis of aggression as innate to humanity; the postulation of the death drive as the powerful counterpart of the pleasure principle; the interpretation of culture as a defence against aggression, but a defence capable of generating more guilt than consolation—Lacan formulates an ethic that is easily misconstrued. It is not surprising then that the perception has arisen in recent critical discourse that he romanticizes and idealizes “‘failure,’ humility and limitation before the Law” and that such a “… structure of religious tragedy in Lacanian theory effectively undermines any strategy of cultural politics to configure an alternative imaginary for the play of desires.”2

Such conclusions overlook those dimensions of Lacan's discourse that have the potential to provide strong theoretical support for effective cultural critique and this is a misprision that I aim to redress with this paper. For Lacan's ethic, formulated as the imperative not to give up on, nor give in to, one's desire, far from romanticizing or idealizing the virtue claimed by the practice of traditional ascesis, specifically ironizes such claims.3 In this respect it could be read as the counter-intuitive, radical rethinking of asceticism,4 theorizing it back to back with a reinterpretation of sublimation. The dialectical tension implicit in the Lacanian ethic enables not