Themi - Lacans Ethics and Nietzsches Critique of Platonism

Lacans Ethics and
Nietzsches Critique of Platonism

SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Charles Shepherdson, editor

TIM THEMI

Cover art courtesy of Thanasi Bakatsoulas. The work is entitled Sun-Ilios.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2014 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Themi, Tim, 1975

Lacans ethics and Nietzsches critique of platonism / Tim Themi.

pages cm. (Insinuations : philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4384-5039-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Psychoanalysis and philosophy. 2. Psychoanalysis and culture. 3. Platonists. 4. Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981. 5. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18441900. I. Title.

BF175.4.P45T54 2014

170dc23

2013015893

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Nietzsche, the way he points to the Greeks,
the will to power, and all subsequently who teach it
to Lacan for keeping Freudian experience alive.

An early version of the material in

The works of Friedrich Nietzsche: cited in-text with the abbreviations listed here. Roman numerals denote standard subdivisions and Arabic numerals section numbers: for example, GM III:20 refers to section twenty in Essay Three of the Genealogy of Morals. Prefaces are indicated with the letter P. Details of translations used are provided in the bibliography.

AC = The Antichrist

BGE = Beyond Good and Evil

BT = The Birth of Tragedy

CW = The Case of Wagner

EH = Ecce Homo

GM = On the Genealogy of Morals

GS = The Gay Science

HAH = Human, All too Human

KGW = Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke

KSB = Studienausgabe: Smtliche Briefe

PPP = The Pre-Platonic Philosophers

PTA = Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

TI = Twilight of the Idols

WP = The Will to Power

Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The works of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud: also cited in-text. Roman numerals with the letter S refer to book numbers of Lacans Seminar; page references are in Arabic numerals and refer to English translations: for example, SVII:50 refers to page 50 of Lacans seventh Seminar. Arabic numerals following the letters SE refer to the volume number of Freuds Standard Edition: for example, SE2:70 refers to page 70 of Volume 2.

Lacans 19591960 Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, forges from the Freudian field an ethics of desire that is striking in its riposte to the moral Good of Plato and Aristotle. Right from the first Seminar of the 1950s, the suggestion from Lacan was that the whole trajectory of Western Moralism has led us down the path for the race to destruction (SI:277). A Nietzschean resonance becomes manifest when we consider Nietzsches view that Platonism enacts a history of nihilism that protracts through Christianity and the modern science era of today. The six chapters of this book explore the number of ways in which Lacans ethics of psychoanalysis, as an ethics of desire, extends on Nietzsches critique of Platonismwhere as a corollary it will also be possible to take a Nietzschean optic to Lacan to illuminate the latters work in a new genealogical light.

This genealogical light may be new to readers of Lacan because although in his twenties, Lacan read and expressed great admiration for Nietzsche

As Alan Bass explains, Nietzsche comes close to Freud by seeing the unconscious as the greater part of the mind conceived in relation to the body, drives and affects; by having understood repression; by having analysed guilt as internalised aggression; and by sensing that morality and ideals are defensive distortions of the drives.

One such NietzscheLacan study that Ons may have overlooked is by Alenka Zupani, contributed to the Short Circuits series edited by Slavoj iek.

Nietzsches ethics, and by extension his entire philosophy, calls for a revaluation of all values (EH IV:1). This is because he felt they had been turned against life by the way, historically, that Platos metaphysics of the Good had later combined with Judaism to form Christianity, what Nietzsche calls a Platonism for the masses (BGE P). Lacan, for his part, in drawing subsequently on the Freudian experience, fashions out an ethics of psychoanalysis that is also skeptical of the Sovereign Good inherited from Western moral traditions, suggesting they create a barrier toward desire that leads to the inner catastrophes of neurosis (SVII:319). The present book reads Lacan and Nietzsche together on this specific point where they criticize our received notions of the Good and seek to propose an alternative. The aim, then, is to see in what way the respective ethics of Lacan and Nietzsche can contribute to and shed further light on each other.

that Aristotle has a narrowly idealized notion of nature (SVII:13), distorted through the lens of the Sovereign Good, might be seen to support Nietzsches view that philosophy after Plato can be classed as Platonism because caught in an imaginary that leads to neurosis or nihilism. I suggest that this combined NietzscheLacan analysis confronts the bad asceticism of a morality that turns against life, and begins to extend our understanding of the discontent that Freud detects beneath Western civilization.

A way out of this discontent that Freud explored was sublimation, seen by him as the creative process whereby our baser drives could be channeled into healthier, nobler ideals or forms of culture without harmful recourse to repression. Freud, however, was to find that sublimation was no easy task. Nietzsche felt the problem to be that Plato, historically, had advocated the sublimation of the drives into an ideal of the Good which was overly ascetic in structure and seen not as created but as discovered, supernatural, real and true. Living then beneath this reified ideal, Nietzsche held, inhibited the ability of future generations to sublimate their own drives into less repressive ideals and neurotically ascetic modes of being.

thus examines the precise mechanism of sublimation as Lacan treats it in a major division of his Seminar VII. I show him pointing to the products of certain types of sublimation as causing more repression and more perversion, precisely the two problems that sublimation needs to solve. The aim then is to see how Nietzsches major aesthetic distinction between lack and abundance (what I call weak and strong) might be understood in the light of Lacans treatment of sublimation and used to determine which sublimations are of most ethical value, that is, which are conducive to producing only further human strength and flourishing. Placed in stark opposition to Platos negative stance, the chapter finishes with the highest esteem that Lacan and Nietzsche have for the strongest sublimations of tragic art.