Ethics and Desire

Cyrano de Bergerac is alive and well. Whether with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England or with the Tyrone Guthrie Repertory Theater in Minneapolis, he is alive and doing famously. This romantic tale tells the outlandish story of the Gascon soldier — swordsman-poet-lover — who, because of his felt ugliness (that monstrous ithyphallic nose!), dared not declare his passionate love for his cousin, Roxanne, directly, but only through a handsome though inarticulate other (named Christian) for whom Cyrano's poetic flair supplied the words of romantic ardor. Clearly it is the tale of the impossible dream, of unrequited love, of frustrated desire in someone whose only comfort is the wave of a “white plume” at the moment of death (which in the French original is simply panache). And yet this unlikely hero is alive and well. As Anthony Burgess, current translator of the Rostand text, put it when the play opened in New York: “He is one of the rare personages of literature who seems to stand outside the proscenium arch or book-covers which enclose him. Like Falstaff or Don Quixote or Leopold Bloom. Apparently we need him, or he wouldn't be strutting and fretting on Broadway” (New York Times, Nov. 18, 1984).

What do we need him for? Certainly not as a role model! And yet — the idea may be worth some thought. Cyrano de Bergerac may be the last of the great troubadours, and Jacques Lacan, in developing what he calls the “ethics of psychoanalysis,” does so under the guise of an “ethics of desire,” for which the courtly love of the troubadours, with all its illusion and fantasy, supplies a kind of paradigm. At any rate, for heuristic purposes let us take Cyrano's quest for the object of desire as a starting point in order to help us understand what Lacan means by saying that the ethics of psychoanalysis is radically an ethics of desire.

Lacan formulates his conception of an “ethics” for psychoanalysis most succinctly in the final session of his year-long series of seminars entitle