You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
If there is indeed some truth to Freud's Copernican revolution, then ethics and morality are in serious jeopardy. According to the basic Freudian conception of human nature, all facets of subjectivity are ultimately derivatives of or reactions to the conflict between “the two principles of mental functioning,” namely, the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Human nature contains no innate ethico-moral sentiments, no intrinsic conceptions of goodness, justice, respect, or virtue. The infantile organism enters the world as nothing more than a bundle of drives, an aggregate of mechanistic sexual and aggressive tendencies. The sole rules governing this id-creature are the dynamics of the primary processes and the libidinal law of pleasure. Gradually, the constraints imposed upon this being by the reality principle (defined as all the various hindrances, both natural and cultural, to the pursuit of pleasure) hammer into shape a socialized subject that appears to operate in accordance with the norms and values of his/her social milieu. The journey from infantile organism to socialized subject is, in Freudian parlance, nothing other than the trajectory running from id to superego.
In “Kant avec Sade,” Lacan, appearing to echo Freud's suspicions about the origins and motives of ethico-moral intentionality, raises the issue of the status of the “voice of conscience,” the internal enunciator of the moral law. In his system of pure practical reason, Immanuel Kant takes for granted the reliability of this inner monologue subtending ethical decisions. The voice of conscience is assumed to be the trustworthy direct delegate of the moral law, unproblematically guaranteeing the ethical worth of the subject's acts. Lacan accuses Kant of having neglected to explore the phenomenality of the voice itself, treating the voice of conscience as if it were purely formal/noumenal. Lacan calls for a revision of the “Transcendental Aesthetic” that includes the auditory status of the v