Ethical Erogenous Zones

We are all completely agreed that love is a form of suicide.

Love appears in The Four Fundamental Concepts in three guises: naively, though perhaps self-contentedly, in the imaginary; seductively in the symbolic; and impossibly in the real. My interpretation not only attempts to expose a coherence in Lacan's thinking about love specifically in Seminar XI, but it also enables us to comprehend, in retrospect, Lacan's ideas about the ethics of psychoanalysis in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. In Encore, in fact, Lacan urges us to read him backwards: “What is nice about what I tell you - don't you agree? - is that it's always the same thing. Not that I repeat myself, that's not the point. It's that what I said before takes on meaning afterward” (Encore 36).

In particular, the distinction between desire and Love in Seminar XI allows us to apprehend the Love in Antigone as destructive, impossible, as an absolute condition that is itself “ethical” only insofar as it gives rise to desire that one must not cede. To my knowledge, Lacan's “ethical desire” that must not be given up has not been disentangled, as it needs to be, from the overpowering, incestuous Love that Antigone feels for her brother(s), one in the place of a father. I say “as it needs to be,” since an underlying concern of this essay is what sort of value psychoanalysis could possibly have in the practical arenas of the clinic or social change were its ethics to be defined as tantamount to jouissance and the death drive, resulting in an unqualified glorification of “those who go crazy through a trance” (Ethics 323).

Love, while it is a passion that involves ignorance of desire, nevertheless leaves desire its whole import. When we look a bit more closely, we see the ravages wreaked by this.

To anyone interested in Lacan's idea of love as it emerges in The Four Fundamental Concepts, his statement that Freud's work on transference “led Freud to ta