Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
I propose that, from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire. […] Doing things in the name of the good, and even more in the name of the good of the other, is something that is far from protecting us not only from guilt but also from all kinds of inner catastrophes. To be precise, it doesn't protect us from neurosis and its consequences. If analysis has a meaning, desire is nothing other than that which supports an unconscious theme, the very articulation of that which roots us in a particular destiny, and that destiny demands insistently that the debt be paid, and desire keeps coming back, keeps returning, and situates us once again in a given track, the track of something that is specifically our business.
If this passage seems clear as mud to you, you're in good company.
We've already warned you that Lacan's seminars were delivered in a notoriously difficult style. And a lot of Lacan's critics say that his dense language is there to mask the fact that his work is lacking real substance. But stick with us, okay?
It may help to think of Lacan in the way he thought of himself: as a defender of desire. Lacan believes desire is what opposes "the good"—that is, what gets recognized as good in society.
According to Lacan, society dictates that we renounce our desires in order to act in accordance with abstract principles. Paradoxically, it's our acting in accordance with these principles—not our violating them—that makes us feel guilty. And that leads, in Lacan's vivid language, to "inner catastrophes."
We're not exactly sure what an inner catastrophe is, but it sounds bad.
The only way around these catastrophes is to relate to our desires differently, in a way that's not just about denial. (If this sounds like what Freud said about death, then good. It should, since The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is very much a response to Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.")
So Lacan said we had to be willing to put desire first—even before our ideas of what's normatively good or bad. Now, Lacan isn't commanding his readers to become monstrous narcissists. He is trying to be provocative, that's for sure.
But what he really seemed to want was force readers them to ask themselves what they've done for their desires lately.
Lacan goes on to call desire "the metonymy of our being," borrowing a literary term to characterize the force that determines our "particular destiny": desire. This is typical of Lacan. Language is arguably even more central to his ideas and our beings than desire, since desire doesn't exist without language, either.
We guess you could say Lacan was desirous of language.
All of this may seem beside the point, but it's just a lot of words to say: Lacan loved literature. And like Freud, he assigned literary texts key roles in teaching us about the psyche's dark n' dirty corners.