(Insinuations - Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature) Tim Themi-Lacan - S Ethics and Nietzsche - S Critique of Platonism-State University of New York Press (2015)

Lacans Ethics and
Nietzsches Critique of Platonism
SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
Charles Shepherdson, editor
Lacans Ethics and Nietzsches

Critique of Platonism
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
10987654321
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.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations
xi
INTRODUCTION 1
1. THE DEFLATIONARY ONTOLOGY OF LACAN AND
NIETZSCHE
1.1 Lacans Tripartite Schema with Nietzsches Critique of

Platos Good
1.2 Lacans Freudian Thing in the Critique of Aristotles Good
8
15
2. DISTINGUISHING WEAK SUBLIMATION FROM THE STRONG

2.1 The Promise of Sublimation and Its Discontents
2.2 Lacans Treatment of Sublimation
2.3 Nietzsches Distinction between Weak and Strong
23
24
30
36
3. BEFORE THE GOOD: STRONG ETHICS IN SOPHOCLES

ANTIGONE 41
3.1 Creon against Antigone: In the Name of the Good
41
3.2 Antigone against Creon: Lacan, the Beautiful, a

Second Death
47
3.3 Before the Good: Nietzsches Strong Dionysian Catharsis
54
4. BIRTH OF THE GOOD: WEAK ETHICS IN SOCRATES
ALCIBIADES
65
4.1 Lacans Analysis of Symposium Speeches Prior to Socrates
65
4.2 The Speech of Socrates: Denaturalizing with Diotima
70
4.3 Enter Alcibiades: Renaturalizing with Object Agalma 76
viii /
CONTENTS
5. GOD OF THE GOOD: CHRISTOCENTRIC OEDIPAL

MORALITY
87
5.1 The Deaths of God in Lacans Seminar VII 87
5.2 Recapitulating a Decade Later in Seminar XVII 93
5.3 The Nietzschean Appraisal from The Anti-Christ 97
6. SERVICE OF GOODS: NATURE AND DESIRE IN MODERN
SCIENCE
107
6.1 Lacans Critique of Science in Seminar XVII 108
6.2 Nietzsches Empiricist-Centered Positive Comments on
Science
117
6.3 Lacans Mathematics-Centered Positive Comments on
Science
123
CONCLUSION 129
Notes
137
Bibliography
169
Index
181
Acknowledgments
An early version of the material in Chapter 1 appeared as How Lacans Ethics

Might Improve Our Understanding of Nietzsches Critique of Platonism: The
Neurosis and Nihilism of a Life Against Life, in Cosmos and History: The
Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 4 (2008): 32846. I also acknowledge the support of Russell Grigg among many others, including family and
friends.
ix
Abbreviations
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.
xi
Introduction
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 Nietzsche1
in his mature work, where Freud is the dominant influence, Lacan generally leaves Nietzsche undiscussed. This is despite the fact that Nietzsches
thought rises to prominence in Lacans post-war Paris2and that well before,
Nietzsche is felt by some of Freuds early collaborators to anticipate much in
Freud. In 1908, for instance, where there are two meetings of Freuds Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society dedicated to discussing Nietzsches work, Paul Federn
remarks: Nietzsche has come so close to our work that we can ask only,
where has he not come close?3
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.4 Silvia Ons concurs that Nietzsche
discovered the symptom in morality and that this brings him close to
2/
L AC A N S E T H IC S A N D N I E T Z S C H E S C R I T IQ U E O F P L AT O N I SM
Freud on the criticism of Christianity, the notion of the id, and the idea
of the drives and repetition, but then expresses surprise to find there are
few references to Nietzsches work in Freuds and Lacans writings, and that
although there are some studies on the link between Freud and Nietzsche,
there are no studies so far on Nietzsche and Lacanadding that the intensity of the interconnections, and their implications, deserve such attention.5
One such NietzscheLacan study that Ons may have overlooked is by
Alenka Zupani, contributed to the Short Circuits series edited by Slavoj
iek.6 The Series Foreword by iek is also instructive apropos of what
the present book attempts, insofar as iek talks about reading one author
through the lens of another to produce a decentering of the interpreted
text and the hegemonic ideology that may surround it, revealing its
unthought, its disavowed presuppositions and consequences or disavowed
truth, giving the reader something new, perhaps anotherdisturbing
side of something he or she knew all the time. Although iek adds that
the underlying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a
privileged instrument of such an approachby reading Lacans ethics with
Nietzsches, the present book is open to the possibility that the latter can also
bring to light something hidden, lost, or new in the former.7
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).8 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.
Chapter 1 begins with Nietzsches deflationary critique of Platos Good
for enabling the distinction between real and imaginary to become confused
throughout the history of metaphysics that followed. I read this critique with
Lacans addition to the real and imaginary of a third category, namely the
symbolic, as it appears in the context of his own Seminar VII critique of the
Good. The aim is to see how Lacans tripartite schema may prove additionally
serviceable for Nietzsches purpose of demystifying the Good in order to
overcome it. Then I consider Lacans use of Freud to ground Aristotles Good
in a polymorphous perversity at the base of desire. In this way Lacans view
I N T R O D U C T IO N
/3
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.
Chapter 2 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.
Nietzsche valued tragic art for its ability to present us with the harshest,
most amoral truths of our existence without also subjecting us to nihilism,
pessimism, and despair. Problems arose when the Platonic Socrates began
to counsel against tragedy, from fearing it would sway us from the Good
by inflaming all our passions. Lacan, however, seems closer to Nietzsche in
arguing that tragedy can lure us to face the difficulties of the human condition,
by using beauty effects that teach us about desire in a way that is crucial for
an informed ethics.
Chapter 3 thus turns to Lacans Seminar VII reading of Sophocles
Antigone, to see how Lacan might be offering it as a treatise on how a prePlatonic ethics would once have functioned. I discuss Antigones confrontation
with Creon, aiming to show that Lacan finds Creon identifying with the Good
4/
in a way that creates a barrier toward desire. I inquire into Antigones own
desire and the heroic second death, or beauty effect, Lacan has her typify,
which I argue to give a truer picture of desire, broaching the drive in the
real. Then I situate the discussion in what for Nietzsche was the Dionysian
context of the festival where tragedy in Athens was performed, to see how
this illuminates the radically pre-Sovereign-Good economy, or ethics of
transgression, that both Nietzsche and Lacan took to bear an empowering
value that was subsequently lost through Platoeven by the time of Aristotle.
The book now continues to track this loss historically by focusing
on Nietzsches critique of the denaturalising of natural values (AC 25)
following it through the further three distinct epochs that Lacan and
Nietzsche both tend to center on: that surrounding Plato himself (in chapter
4), Christendom (in chapter 5), and that of Modern Science (in chapter 6).
Chapter 4 considers if Lacans reading of Platos Symposium in the
19601961 Seminar VIII, Transference, supports Nietzsches view that what
Socrates enacts in the moral sphere is excessively denaturalizing. I examine
the evidence of this denaturalizing through an analysis of the first half of
Lacans Seminar VIII, which tracks sequentially the speeches of Symposium
into an inflationary zenith before reaching a final confrontation between the
manifestly pious Socrates and a sensuous Alcibiades. I argue that Lacans
analysis of the transference to Socrates, the longest transference that the
history of thought has known (SVIII 1:4), illuminates well how denaturalizing
can adversely disvalue and disavow very real aspects of nature pertaining to
our desire. The aim is also to see if Lacan can deepen Nietzsches insight
further in the sexual direction with the concept of object a. Last, I suggest
that an excessive denaturalizing was the consequence of Platos thought that
prepared the ground for Christianity.
When Nietzsche announced, God is dead, it was because he thought
belief in the Christian god had become unbelievable (GS 343). Nietzsche,
moreover, saw himself as the next step by also calling into question the
morality that this God of the Good was buttressingexplaining this with
the caveat that although God is dead, we still have to vanquish his shadow
(GS 108). Thus, when Lacan later infers that the true formula of atheism is
not God is dead but God is unconscious (SXI:59), and that this does not
seem to liberate us but again, far from it (SXVII:119), he is not necessarily
rejecting Nietzsches announcement but rather likewise pointing to the work
to be done on what remains of God as shadow.
Chapter 5 examines Lacans treatment of the Judeo-Christian thematic
in his Seminar VII, and his returning to the issue in his 19691970 Seminar
XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and reads it alongside Nietzsches
view that Christianity is the fulfillment of denaturalizing and hence our
I N T R O D U C T IO N
/5
greatest moral blunder in the West. The aim is to see if Lacans analysis can
be strengthened by Nietzsches focus on how the anti-nature (EH IV:7)
attitude of Christianity functions, and of the forebear in both Plato and
Judaism this attitude finds. I argue that Nietzsches critique of Christianity,
for affecting an envy-based revolt on its Greco-Roman masters, adds a key
historical dimension to the hysterics structure we find Lacan reworking in
Freud. I suggest that this combined NietzscheLacan analysis best equips
us to deal with what Lacan at times no less than Nietzsche takes to be the
great harm in Christianizing our values beneath a Father, God, or Law of the
absolute Goodespecially when the ascetic ideal this creates then encroaches
on the modern scientific era.
Lacan and Nietzsche agree that a dimension of past asceticism does
in fact continue into the era of modern science, despite sciences service of
goods (SVII:303) and despite, for Nietzsche especially, sciences capacity to
refute the dogma of anti-nature religions. As part of Nietzsches ethics, however,
we also get a critique of the anti-empirical interpretations of epistemology
and science that he saw as an extension of the anti-nature viewgiven that
the empirical invokes our bodily senses and the natural sphere they belong to
as fundamentally real. This seems to implicate Lacans own view of science,
which focuses more on its formalistic than on its empirical aspects.
Chapter 6 thus examines how Lacans Seminar XVII builds on the
critique of science that marks the close of his Seminar VII, aiming to see if
Lacan can extend on Nietzsches own critique of the ascetic effects of modern
science. Then it considers the specifically pro-science and pro-empirical
elements of Nietzsches critique of Platonism, to examine Lacans ethics of
science from this critiques perspective. The task becomes to see if Lacans
attempt to mathematically formalize the gaps in sciencethrough which
desire returnsis appropriate to Nietzsches aim of preserving a space for a
scientifically informed yet still philosophical creation of non-ascetic values.
I also suggest from the Nietzschean perspective that the Lacanian project
need not traffic only with the more mathematical and less empirical aspects
of science, and that this would lessen any antinomy between Nietzsches more
empiricist-centered and Lacans more mathematics-centered positive views
on science.
This book sets out to discover how Lacans ethics of psychoanalysis,
as an ethics of desire and the drive, contributes to our understanding of
Nietzsches ethico-historical critique of Platonism. Its principal conclusion
will be that significant contributions can be made back and forth between
the discourses of Lacan and Nietzsche particularly on the topics of ontology
(chapter 1), sublimation (chapter 2), tragic art (chapter 3), Socrates (chapter
4), Christianity (chapter 5), and modern science (chapter 6).
Chapter 1
The Deflationary Ontology of

Lacan and Nietzsche
Nietzsche wanted to surpass the Good of Platonism because he believed it

to have turned against nature, the body and its senses, and thus eventually
against our capacities for a creative, flourishing life. This chapter considers
how Lacans own analysis of the Good in his 19591960 Seminar VII, The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, extends on Nietzsches project.
Section 1.1 discusses the real and imaginary distinctions that Nietzsche
argues were confused historically by Platos Good. Then it considers Lacans
tripartite schema of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real to augment
Nietzsches purpose of deflating the Gooda purpose Lacan is found to share
when motioning to discuss the evolution of history, in order to demystify
the Platonic and the Aristotelian view of the good, indeed of the Supreme
Good (SVII: 216). Section 1.2 turns to Lacans returning of Aristotles Good
to the polymorphous perversities at the base of desire, to the Freudian
Thing, the unruly real. I observe this Thing to manifest as our most amoral
truths, painful truths we try to exclude, which leads Lacan to infer a pleasure
principle in the projection of the Good as the center of the cosmosas if
this were an ultimate reality or essence of nature that guaranteed happiness,
design, protection.
I suggest for Lacan as well as Nietzsche that the metaphysics of the
Good will mean some error, fiction, or fantasy in the imaginary has been
mistaken as true or real, when it is really only a symptom of the repression
of a particular aspect of the truth, or modicum of the real, if not the source of
the repression itself. This will bring us to the discontent that Nietzsche, Freud,
and Lacan each take the inflationary Good of moralism to cause: for what
this Good disavows inevitably returns, by virtue of the disavowed being real.
7
8/
1.1 Lacans Tripartite Schema with

Nietzsches Critique of Platos Good
I will not, in fact, be able to avoid a certain inquiry into historical
progress. It is at this point I must refer to those guiding terms,
those terms of reference which I use, namely, the symbolic, the
imaginary, and the real. (Lacan, SVII:11)
Lacans guiding terms of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real make up
what he refers to in a 1953 text as the three registers of human reality.
Marc De Kesel notes this text to hold the first version of Lacans triadic
move, which Marcelle Marini suggests would then form the framework
of his entire theory.1 Before discussing this tripartite schema, I examine
Nietzsches criticism of Platos Good and the proto-Christian Platonism he
takes it to spawn, so as to situate the criticism Lacan also makes of this Good
for being merely imaginary. In light of this shared criticism, the task is to
see how all three parts of Lacans schema are useful to Nietzsches project of
revaluating this Goods values.
Nietzsches project is based on the claim that Platos Good reverses what
is real and imaginary in the field of ethics. In his Twilight of the Idols of 1888,
his climactic final year of writing, Nietzsche suggests that moral judgment
henceforth shares with religious judgment a level of ignorance at which even
the concept of the real, the distinction between the real and the imaginary, is
lacking. He indicates this reversal is finally coming undone in the modern
era when adding that at such a level truth denotes nothing but things which
we today call imaginings (TI VII:1).
A few sections later, Nietzsche designates Platos role in this initial moralreligious reversal when portraying him to have deviated from the instincts
of the Hellenes and become morally infected when, like an antecedent
Christian, he already has the concept good as the supreme concept (TI
X:2). It is the inflationary nature of this Good, that is, its projection into a
supernatural imaginary, that leads Nietzsche to conclude he should prefer
to describe the entire phenomenon Plato by the harsh term higher swindle
or, if you prefer, idealism, than by any other (TI X:2).2
Nietzsche takes the best Hellenic instincts, which Plato deviated from,
to be typified in the Sophist culture or realist-culture of those such as
Thucydides. In contrast to Thucydides strong, stern, hard matter-offactness, Nietzsche suggests Plato is a coward in the face of reality who
flees into the ideal (TI X:2).3 We find this contrast also in one of Nietzsches
unpublished notes of 1888, which states that the high culture of Thucydides,
as necessarily as Platos does not, belongs to the Periclean age which has
T H E D E F L AT IO NA RY O N T O L O G Y O F L AC A N A N D N I E T Z S C H E
/9
its predecessors in Heraclitus, in Democritus, in the scientific types of the old

philosophy, adding that today every advance in epistemological and moral
knowledge has reinstated the Sophists (WP 428).
Brian Leiter explains that Nietzsches conviction that the best philosophers
came before Plato comes from the methodological naturalism, empiricism,
and realism he often shares with themin viewing, for instance, nature
as continuous throughout, of which we have emerged as merely one of its
products, so that even the understanding of human beings must proceed
apace with the understanding of the rest of nature.4 The empiricism entailed
in this view, that is, Nietzsches often stated view that evidence of truth
comes only from the senses (BGE 134), also stands in stark contrast to
what Nietzsche decried as the Platonic slander of the senses that was a
preparation of the soil for Christianity (WP 427).5
Lacan for his part illustrates with the Cathars, a puritanical Christian
sect, how such a slander of the senses in the form of the belief that evil is
in matter because it entails generation as well as corruption, conditions
the ascetic task of turning away to an imaginary Beyond, an Edenic
world characterised by purity and light, as if the true world of the original
good creator (SVII:124). And although commentators suggest that after Plato
there were in fact sceptics in the Academy he startedparticularly under the
leadership of Arcesilausthis period of Academic scepticism, from about
274 to 74 BC, was both preceded and followed by the religiously dogmatic,
doctrinal codification of Platos metaphysics of the forms and of the Good
that was to prove so conducive to later onto-theological ventures.6
Mark McPherran notes that Plato was already assimilating the prevailing
Pythagorean, possibly Orphic, religious views of his time on the souls
catharsis and reincarnation7and although Nietzsche is skeptical of Platos
integrity on doctrines like the separate immortality of souls, claiming
here that Plato merely wanted to have taught as absolute truth what he
himself did not regard as even conditionally true (WP 428), still Nietzsche
holds Plato responsible for the distinctive promulgation of these beliefs and
our eventual moral-religious capture by them. Laurence Lampert suggests that
because interpreters of Plato as competent, as different, and as separated by
time as Plutarch, Montaigne, and Nietzsche all read Plato in a similar way,
this should inspire contemporary scholars to pay more attention to the view
they share, a view also held by other great readers such as Francis Bacon
and Descartes.8
This religious sense to Plato is there in Phaedo, where the Good is
seen as the divine force that causes things to be now placed as it is best
for them to be placed, and where skeptics are rebuked who give no thought
to the Good which must embrace and hold together all things.9 As Charles
10 /
Kahn notes, whereas in Meno the immortality and pre-existence of the soul
was taken for granted, in Phaedo it is systematically argued for10and it
enables Plato to conceive like a proto-Christian of a postmortem judgment
by the Good, when writing about heaven for those who have duly purified
themselves by philosophy and are thus freed from these regions within
the earth, released as from prisons, to live henceforth altogether without
bodies.11 What Nietzsche saw as the anti-nature in Plato manifests in this
tendency to treat earth and body as a prison and fantasize of life without
them. Accordingly, Maudemarie Clark refers to Platos Phaedo as a great
panegyric to the ascetic ideal.12
We can see in Platos Republic how his ascetics affect his epistemology.
This is not only in the marginalization of anything bodily in the acquisition
of knowledge, namely the sensesa marginalization that Deborah Modrak
points to also being in Phaedo13but also in the view that, as Plato put it,
the idea of Good is this reality, then, that gives their truth to the objects
of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, as the cause of
knowledge, and of truth, as if objects of knowledge not only receive from the
presence of the Good their being known but also their very existence and
essence.14 When Plato has his Socrates add that even then, the Good itself
is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power,
the interlocutor Glaucon will only very ludicrously answer, Heaven save us,
hyperbole can no further go.15 But more in accordance with this suggestion
of hyperbole, Nietzsche would remark firstly that the Good is not real but
imaginary and only falsely claimed to be real, to be most real even, whereas
the opposite is closer to the truth; and second that this Good is thus inimical
toward what is actually realas a rivalespecially toward the bodily parts
that constitute so much of earthly experience.
Lacan in his Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, also gives, for
instance, the following indication of his own lack of sympathy toward this
highest truth and value status of Platos Good, when saying of King Creon, as
he appears in Sophocles Antigone, that his error...is to want to promote
the good of alland I dont mean the Supreme Good, for let us not forget
that 441 BC is very early, and our friend Plato hadnt yet created the mirage
of that Supreme Good (SVII:259). By calling Platos Good mirage, Lacan
is ostensibly agreeing with Nietzsche that it is more correct to predicate it
imaginary than real or true. Moreover (as I argue in chapter 3), Creon is
being shown by Lacan to give a proto-Platonic example of the ethical error
the Good can involve, how the good cannot reign over all without an excess
emerging whose fatal consequences are revealed to us in tragedy (SVII:259).
This suggests that not only is the Good not actually real for Lacan, neither
/ 11
is it good either in terms of the effects it has, effects that can be tragically
fatal, again a view that is shared by Nietzsche.
The mirage structure of this Good is well surmised by the Nietzschean
maxim: the less real, the more valuable. This is Platonism (WP 572)where
Nietzsche notes that one of the strategies for believing what is less real has
more value, is to label such an entity most real regardless. And this for
Nietzsche is what Plato did with his idea of the Good, he substituted an
imaginary for the real, which, as Lacan also says in the pejorative sense of
Plato, relegated what is actually real to no more than an imitation of a morethan-real, of a surreal, since for him everything that exists only exists in
relation to the idea, which is the real (SVII:141).
We know Lacan is taking the pejorative sense because it follows what
he calls Platos aberration and unyielding position in placing art at the
lowest level among human works, because by imitating earthly objects, Plato
held art to only imitate what was already an imitation of a better world
Beyond, reducing art to mere shadow of a shadow (SVII:141).16 This lends
itself to Nietzsches view that Plato rendered the earthly less-than-real or
inferior because of its distance from a world of the Good imagined above.
For Nietzsche held that it was this otherworld that enabled the earthly to
be rebaptized false precisely on account of properties that make it real:
change, becoming, multiplicity (WP 584); or death, change, age, as well as
procreation and growth (TI III:1)in short, all the things that can challenge
us in life and also make us suffer.17 To talk then of another world for
Nietzsche was sheer phantasmagoria, a moral-optical illusion that was
constructed out of the contradiction to the actual world so that we may
escape, even revenge ourselves on life (TI III:6).
Lacan gives further evidence in Seminar VII of a similarly skeptical
stance by directly pronouncing there is no Sovereign Good, that this is
what Freud has shown him, that the good as such, the eternal object of the
philosophical quest in the sphere of ethics and philosophers stone of all the
moralists, is radically denied by Freud (SVII:96). Later Lacan explains that
this radical repudiation of a certain ideal of the good is necessary because
the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desire (SVII:230),
whereas an ethics would be better served by a greater self-awareness. And
again he shows it is this same inflated Good as Nietzsche he has in mind
when invoking to discuss the progress of thought and evolution of history
so as to demystify the Platonic and the Aristotelian idea of the good, indeed
of the Supreme Good (SVII:216).18
It is apropos of the historical part of this inquiry that Lacan states he
must make use of his three terms of reference, the symbolic, the imaginary,
12 /
and the real (SVII:11). But Lacan has a nuanced way of using these terms
that, if we are not careful, may impede their use not only for Nietzsches goal
of rejecting Plato, but also for Lacans own critique of the Good.
We have seen how the real for Nietzsche, in contradistinction to all
Platonism, is the earthly world of becoming, the world of nature without and
within. All the grounds on which this world has in the past been designated as
mere appearance, for Nietzsche, establish rather its reality (TI III:6). Lacan
does not at all deny the reality of natural kinds as he does, rather, point to
how things of the human world are things in a universe structured by words,
that language, symbolic processes, dominate and govern all (SVII:45). This is
because once we bring things into focus with words like human, animal,
plant, mineral, atom, mass, energywords that invoke concepts,
categories, formulas, and imageswe enter into the symbolic and imaginary
registers through which reality is mediated for us.
Richardson thus points to a distinction between the real and reality
in Lacan, where reality refers to the images and symbolic structures of
language we use to circumscribe the real. Accordingly, Richardson calls the
real the raw experience of what-is, the not yet symbolized or imaged that is
also impossible to completely inscribe in any symbolic system or represent
in any form of image.19
The real as this pre-symbolized, pre-imaged substrate to our human
reality is also a straight forward reading of what Lacan in Seminar VII calls
the real in its totality, both the real of the subject and the real he has to
deal with as exterior to him (SVII:118). But Lacan will often use the term
the real for what in Seminar VII he mostly calls the Thing, a potentially
disturbing aspect of our experience because, Lacan explains, the Thing
is that which in the real, the primordial real...suffers from the signifier
(SVII:118)that is, suffers from repression, and then returnsleading Charles
Shepherdson to discuss a difference in Lacan between a pre-symbolic real
and a post-symbolic real.20
Insofar as our attempts to structure the real employ the methods of
science, then just as with language, Lacan refers not to the imaginary but
to the symbolic register, to the increasing power of symbolic mastery that
has not stopped enlarging its field since Galileo (SVII:122), alluding to the
latters famous metaphor of the book of nature being written in mathematics.
But Lacan is also showing the influence of Koyr who at times emphasized
the symbolic over against the empirical aspect of science.21 Given Galileos
meticulous incline plane experiments, use of telescopes, and persecution by
the Church, it leads Lacan to entertain what for Nietzsche might be thought
the misleading thesis that modern science, the kind that was born with
/ 13
Galileo, could only have developed out of biblical or Judaic ideology, and not
out of ancient philosophy or the Aristotelian tradition (SVII:122).22
The mathematical aspect of the symbolic is, in any case, also evident
in Nietzsche when he points to the epistemic role played by the science of
formulae, sign systems: such as logic and that applied logic, mathematics (TI
III:3); or when he praises Greeks and Romans for having natural science on
the best possible road because in concert with mathematics and mechanics
(AC 59). But when adding the caveat that in our sign systems alone, reality
may not appear at all, not even as a problem, Nietzsche shows his empiricist
unwillingness to stray from the bedrock of the evidence of the senses (TI
III:3)unlike Platonism, which could Pythagoreanize mathematics as if it
were a portal to a supernatural Beyond.23
Although next to Lacan, Nietzsche seems more empiricist in his account
of science, he is no nave empiricist, holding that when we use our sense
data to image the external world, this involves a degree of interpretation
and thus, to an extent, simplification, omission, and even falsification.24 But
equally there are idealists of the philosophical tradition Lacan rejects as
small beer when compared to Freud, who affirm that we are the ones
who give shape to reality and that there is no point in looking any further
(SVII: 30). Thus, when sensory images are how Richardson introduces Lacans
imaginary register25Lacan and Nietzsche can both stress the import of not
conflating empirical imaging with the main subjective sense the imaginary
takes in psychology, where sensible images are further embellished or invested
in a subjects imagination. Here we enter the place of dreaming, fantasy,
identification, and projection, but also that of creativity and the arts. It is
where as Kant might say, the imaginary takes the lead of the understanding
so that the two faculties are set into free playor as Freud might say free
associationuntil ones images correspond to nothing directly real in the
external world any longer, but can still be of much significance apropos of
ones desire.26
What is real is also there outside, Freud tells us, whereas what is
unreal, merely a presentation and subjective, is only internal.27 Examples
of these latter internals relevant for Nietzsches purpose would be an
anthropomorphic God who created the universe; a heavenly world that the
pious return to after death; and a Sovereign idea of a moral Good as the
cause or telos of all things considered. Such entities for Nietzsche are wholly
unreal and imaginary, existing only in the minds of those who entertain them.
And where such entities entail moral claims, then taken literally, Nietzsche
adds, they designate only nonsense, but as semiotics, sign-language, and
symptomatology, they reveal the precious realities and inner worlds of
14 /
those who did not know enough to understand themselves (TI VII:1),
which calls to mind Lacans view of the unconscious structured as a language.28
Insofar as life is regulated by such morality that both conceals and
reveals, Lacan refers in Seminar VII to the moral law as an agency or
action which is not only structured by the symbolic and grafted onto the
real, but also what causes something else or Other to emerge, whereupon
the real is actualised (SVII:201). This indicates the two aspects of the real
that Shepherdson discusses in Lacan. The pre-symbolic real is what Lacan
is indicating the moral law is grafted onto, what Sean Homer also refers to
as the concrete or brute materiality that exists prior to symbolisation;
whereas the post-symbolic real is this mysterious Other invoked by Lacan,
that thereupon is actualized and later re-emerges.29
This post-symbolic real suggests a return of the repressed, perhaps
caused by the oppositional way our morality had led us to symbolize portions
of the real, returning them thus to mind as what we prefer to forget. Such
can be the effect of desire when stemming from the parts of the real that
make up our own bodies: the private parts, the hairy ones to be precise, the
animal ones, Bataille would write, just two years before Lacan would launch
his own seminar on ethics.30 For such desire can bring to mind what morally
we might prefer to deny, like the subject who censures, Lacan observes, as
if he doesnt want it (SVII:14).
As pulsing beneath our thoughts, dreams, reflections in the imaginary,
such desire can bear what Lacan notes as the kind of discomfort that makes
it so difficult for our neurotic patients to confess certain of their fantasms
(SVII:80). Hence, desire is pushed from mind, or such is the plan, making
it un-conscious as if the source of all our illswhence indeed it can be if it
seeps out unbeknownst to our selves, through the cracks and joining of our
best symbolic structures, at the interstitial peripheries of our proudest, most
inflationary moral structures.
Such desire is also critical for the anti-Platonist project of Nietzsche, as
it is precisely where one is tempted to image and symbolize the real only so
as to elide it better. To slough the real off, to conceal rather than reveal while
pretending in fact to do the oppositeas if to promote ourselves as not so
much inimical to the real but living in accordance with a higher, ultimate
reality like Platos Good which, for Nietzsche, was always an all-too-human
construction. But such a construction we cannot always admit to being author
of, if it is one in the imaginary used to cover over what is actually realthe
real that is nothing so concerned to alleviate anxieties, fulfill our whims, or
grant us cosmic paths to a true world in the Beyond.
Here with such cosmological projections, the true world is supposed
to be the good worldwhy? (WP 578), Nietzsche asks, noting how often it
/ 15
is the case that to imagine another more valuable world is an expression of

hatred for a world that actually makes one suffer, how it is the ressentiment of
metaphysicians against actuality that is here creative (WP 579).31 But perhaps
there is some-thing residually real that even Nietzsche leaves out?when we
consider what Lacan in his Ethics Seminar will call das Ding, the somewhat
diabolical Freudian Thing. It purports to be our own hyper-perverse little
portion of the real, arising as a little disturbance in the head, and a concept
I examine in the section to follow.
1.2 Lacans Freudian Thing in the Critique of Aristotles Good

Well, as odd as it may seem to that superficial opinion which
assumes any inquiry into ethics must concern the field of the
ideal, if not of the unreal, I, on the contrary, will proceed instead
from the other direction by going more deeply into the notion
of the real...one has to look at what occurred in the interval
between Aristotle and Freud. (Lacan, SVII:11)
In the previous section, by way of Nietzsches critique of Plato, I discussed
Lacans tripartite schema as a deflationary ontology that also rejects the Good.
I suggested it is the aspect of the real at the base of desire that is aimed at
antipathetically by Platos Good. Now I explore this antipathy through Lacans
Seminar VII concept of the Thing, through how it appears as a perverse
sense of the real, and how Lacan contrasts it with one of the products of
Platos Academy, the thought of Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics Lacan
invokes as among the most exemplary and certainly the most valid points
of departure (SVII:22).
Lacan asks us to look at Aristotle to consider how far that notion
of nature is different from ours, because Aristotles is one to support an
ethics which believes it can legitimately involve the exclusion of all bestial
desires from the field of morality, as if nature were innately inclined to foster
happiness and human fulfilment (SVII:13). These excluded elements,
however, constitute a category of desires, of sexual desires, which Lacan
suggests is now situated in the forefront of our experience (SVII:5), making
his own notion of nature closer to the Bataille who writes that nature
herself is violent, especially following our failures to bring its many stirrings
completely to heel.32 This is evident in the questions since raised by the clinic
of psychoanalysis, some of which had also found support in the sexologies
of those such as Havelock Ellis, where desire seems to work against any
individual or social Good.33 Regarding the latter, Lacan would add that the
16 /
pile of garbage is one of the sides of the human dimension that it would be
wrong to mistake (SVII:233).
Back in the fourth century BC, however, Aristotle has a view of the
macrocosm that he believes supports him. Lacan notes how in Aristotle
notions of microcosm and macrocosm are presupposed from the beginning
as intimately connected, so that ethics can be brought together in a Sovereign
Good, through a point of insertion, attachment or convergence, in which
ethics becomes politics and beyond that with an imitation of the cosmic
order (SVII:22). To borrow the language of Kant, as Lacan at one point
does, it is as if the starry heavens above would naturally lure some moral
law within (SVII:316) toward a god at the centre of the Aristotelian world
governed by nous (SVII:23). Thus, for Aristotle, Lacan infers, insofar as
there is something divine in man, it is in his bond to nature (SVII:13).34
A criticism Nietzsche makes of the Stoics also applies to Aristotle here,
for Nietzsche held that whereas the Stoics believed their morality had them
living according to nature, these deceptive words masked the fact that the
Stoics were reading and imposing their own ideals into nature, so that nature
was then forced to live according to the Stoa (BGE 9). While exploring
Nietzsches encounter with the Stoic Epictetus, moreover, R.O. Elveton
observes that it is actually the Platonic myth of a rationally designed cosmos
that survives in Epictetuss repeated appeals to the teleology discoverable in
nature, precisely the myth dismissed by Nietzsche as one of the Christian/
Platonic Wests central philosophical prejudices.35
Nevertheless, when Aristotle begins his Nicomachean Ethics with what
he calls the well said claim that the Good is That at which all things aim,
he immediately indicates a deflationary intention by seeking to narrow his
inquiry into this Good to strictly human activity.36 As Gabriel Lear explains,
Aristotle seeks to put the metaphysical issue aside as a distraction from the
business of practical philosophy, and in capturing this practicable aspect of
the human good, claims his approach is to be preferred to Platos.37 Lacan
appears to agree in motioning to discuss Aristotle because the Nicomachean
Ethics is properly speaking the first book to be organised around an ethics
(SVII:36), which is not to say Lacan will not find issues with parts that bear
on Aristotles metaphysical convictions.
Aristotle defines our striving for the Good as striving for happiness
[eudaimona], which he believes one is naturally befitted for unless one were

of disease, sexual perversion, given to insanity, had hailed from tribes
of barbarians, savage tribes, or had been abused from childhood in a
way which affected habit or arrested development.38 We can see where
metaphysics is involved in Aristotles hopes for our ability to aim for the
Good when he considers animals to be unnatural because not rational, and
/ 17
to be hence determinable as aberrations from the essence of nature as he

defines it.39 Daniel Graham thus resituates Aristotles notion of nature with his
belief in a first unmoved mover, identified with divinity as a transcendent
final cause of the cosmos, a transcendent source of reality that has more
in common with the Platonic forms than Aristotle would like to admit.40
For Lacan, however, psychoanalysis has since turned such an ethics on
its head by revealing a far smaller distance between us and a whole register
of desire that Aristotle calls monstrous and situates outside of the field of
morality (SVII:5). Lacan attributes this turnor returnto Freuds discovery
of the unconscious, but hints at it being also nascent in the fact that by
the end of the nineteenth century, following on from the moment when
the disorienting effects of Newtonian physics is felt (SVII:76), science was
further revealing the real of what we conceived of as nature or the universe
to be far less moral-rational by design than previously hoped, as we came to
find ourselves in the middle of a huge construction site, in a funny little
corner, like a watch that someone forgot (SVII:316).
Nietzsche surmises the meta-ethical implications when surveying the
universe overall and declaring that in it becoming aims at nothing and
achieves nothing (WP 12), and none of our aesthetic or moral judgments
apply to it (GS 109). But Nietzsche continues to speak of a return to nature
that, like it or not, is a more frightful nature and naturalness than returnto-nature idealists like Rousseau imaginedadding that great tasks in the
field of ethics are no longer possible without our mindfulness of the frightful
aspects as well (TI IX:48).41
When it comes to these aspects, in what he calls their repellent,
unchristian, immoral truth (GM I:1), Nietzsche would encourage for the
few who are able a realist, scientific rationality and a grand-style, artisticcreative sublimationrather than say any heretofore repression, fantasy,
or phobic denial. Nevertheless, Freud in fact would claim that despite the
many instances (SE14:16) where Nietzsche was his antecedent, Nietzsche
had failed to recognize infantilism, that is, had not expressly elaborated on
a polymorphous and perverse sexuality born in every infant child.42 Thus,
relative to psychoanalysis, Nietzsches ethics may seem closer to Aristotles in
that, despite the absence of inflated metaphysics, it aims for a greater pathos
of distance (GM I:2) between us and the perverse than psychoanalysis, with
its immense detailing of this perversity at the core of human nature from
birth, would later perhaps deem so admissible.43
This perverse core is what Lacans Seminar VII finds so understated
in Aristotles notion of nature and pertains to das Ding (SVII:71), The
Freudian Thing (SVII:132). At one point he likens this Thing to Freuds use
of the term das Es [the It] (SVII:137), suggesting the Freudian Thing is
18 /
close to the Freudian Id. But Lacan also warns that the primacy of the Es
(SVII:137) was forgotten with the uptake of the later Freuds use of the term
id, where the focus seemed to shift towards fortifying the ego. This is why
Lacan can instead be found calling a certain zone of reference the Thing
(SVII:137), rather than the id, which he soon begins to qualify paradoxically
as our excluded and thence decentered center.
This center can be read as originating out of the amoral impulses of
our bodies as experienced from within, given what Lacan suggests are the
residues of archaic forms of the libido, forming a nucleus at the source
of the Triebe [drives] which is irreducible, and never completely resolved
(SVII:93). Such drives are said by Freud to ideationally represent these more
archaic, somatic impulses when they come to mind, for they do so by way of
language and image in addition to being felt, by way of what Lacan refers to as
the signifier.44 Yet to the contrary of all Platonism, including Aristotles, Lacan
must add that at the center of these signifiers there is no Sovereign good
(SVII:70), only the Thing which is the-beyond-of-the-signified (SVII:54),
and at the centre only in the sense that it is excluded (SVII:71).
It is excluded because it includes for Lacan our memories of what
Freud disclosed as the already sexualized pre-genital characteristics
surrounding infantile functions of sensing, eating, evacuation, and pleasure,
with its eternal polymorphism, from the oral to the anal and the genital
(SVII:92). These latent perversions are what De Kesel suggests constitute the
complete psychoanalytic subversion of the subject as Aristotle conceives it,
insofar as now from the Freudian perspective, desire is at odds with natural
self-realisation.45
Freud defines these subversive and thus largely disallowed, repressed,
unconscious desires as egoistic, sadistic, perverse or incestuous (SE19:132).
He also calls them our individual sense of the prehistoric (SE19:220), a
second sense he takes himself to have discovered in each of our childhoods,
to go with the first Darwin discovered for the species.46 This is likely behind
Lacans view of the Thing as the pre-historic Other that is impossible to
forget (SVII:71), although forget it we try, for when it arises it is transgressive
toward our moral norms and cultural forms, leading us to experience the
Thing as trauma, as a disturbance in the headwhether emerging in ourselves
or observable in the behavior of another.
Hence, for Lacan, the Thing is split offSpaltung (SVII:209)by a
child during the course of socialization, made object of that great wave of
primal repression said by Freud to usher in a sexual latency for the child
around the age of five, as the Oedipal material cleaves into the incest taboo,
whence it encounters the threat of castration. This, for Freud, explains how
our more directly sexual impulses become absent until years later in puberty
/ 19
where, as Lacan puts it, they can return only by forming a magic circle
(SVII:134) around the Thing below, which is still as present as it is in part
forbiddena kernel of the real in our desire.47
Certain aspects of this Thing would only cause us pain to reconsider, let
alone experience, which for Freud explains the perpetual resistances toward
the claims of psychoanalysis, and the tenacity of subsequent scholars to refute
them nigh by any means at the intellects disposal.48 For Lacan, moreover, it is
the unspeakable nature of this Thing that explains why the pleasure principle
aims not to try and satisfy as many of our drives as directly as possible,
but to avoid excess, too much pleasure (SVII:54), so that in the name of
the pleasure principle, the optimum tension will be sought (SVII:52). This
optimum keeps us from a full disclosure of our Thing and enables us to
maintain the distance (SVII:58), to search for pleasure drifting from signifier
to signifier that never leads directly to the Thingeven though unconsciously,
one searches if not for the Thing than at least because of it; although one
doesnt find it, Lacan must add, only its pleasurable associations (SVII:52).
Such associations are wrought from objects that signify some hidden
resemblance with the Thing, through a play of similarities made possible by
the signifier. For the signifier is distant enough from the Thing to accord
with any reality principle that should happen to prevail and teach that certain
things will not give us pleasure, as they are morally forbidden and thus may
entail a punishment. This is why Lacan suggests that the way in which ethical
principles are formulated when they impose themselves on consciousness
has the closest relationship to the second principle introduced by Freud,
namely, the reality principle (SVII:74).
This proximity of the principles of morality and reality is where we
can also re-find the temptation to reinterpret reality in collusion with our
pleasure principle, that is, to deny the parts that can tempt us, challenge us,
lead us awry or make us suffer. And truth is many times the casualty here, the
truth of what is actually real, as Nietzsche argues of the entire phenomenon
Plato (TI X:2), Freud of the resistances to psychoanalysis, and both of the
inability of many to relinquish the opiates of religion. With such opiates the
reality principle is coopted by pleasure in the imaginary until what is defined
as reality is not our best approximation to the truth but a means to cover
over itespecially over the frightfully immoral Thing-like aspects that, De
Kesel notes, are for Lacan the real but defined as the part of reality that fails
to become integrated in the symbolic world, insofar as the symbolic may be
a reaction formation against the overwhelming field of stimuli.49
The fearing of the Thing within can lead us to cover over some of the
reals external aspects as wellinsofar as this external covering may seem to
give us comfort, by buttressing our inner denials with more empirically false
20 /
beliefs. We can take, for example, how belief in the Devil may help us disavow
our sexual instincts and have them come from someone else; how belief in an
external Heaven and Hell, acting as postmortem reward or punishment, can
help motivate us for this inner sex-negating task; or how belief in a clockwork,
incorruptibly end-directed universe guided by a Sovereign Good, may help
us believe we can and should be a little more clockwork and incorruptibly
end-directed ourselves.
What is called reality here is merely fantasy as a means of pleasure, as a
means of avoiding pain, as we come to what Lacan calls the notion of a deep
subjectivisation of the outside world, stemming from a tendency that sifts
and sieves so that reality is only perceived as radically selected (SVII:47).
For Lacan, a subject only deals with select bits of reality (SVII:47), as
admission of any other can invoke the Thing that yields a loss of pleasure. Thus,
Lacan will conclude, In truth, we make reality out of pleasure (SVII:225)
where that universal, the good itself, as part of this process is not really the
object of a science but of what may be considered to be a phony science
(SVII:218). That our pleasure and reality principles collude in this way, so
that each one is really the correlative of the other (SVII:74), is a key point
Lacan in his Ethics Seminar wants to make, while stressing that this concerns
not so much the sphere of psychology as it does that of ethics (SVII:35).
It concerns an ethics because to circle closer to the Thing that is
forbidden by our reality principle, yet still the real aim of much desire, leads
not so much to pleasure but to moral anguish of the heaviest kind. And the
realities we construct reflect as much, as we try to deny the existence of what
may come and tempt us, of what we simply fear too much. But henceforth
if desire dams up, breaks the levee with a return of the Thing, this is how
Lacan depicts us going beyond the pleasure principle, whose other name for
Freud is death-drive. It signals a post-symbolic sense of the real, arriving
as a return of the repressed.50
Here outside the perimeter created by our pleasure-reality principles
is what Lacan calls the jouissance of transgression (SVII:195), a jouissance
of the real that the Thing would bring, said by Lacan to be the most direct
or complete satisfaction of a drive that is possible, but to the point of selfdestruction.51 This is why Lacan senses that the relationship of the subject to
das Ding is marked as bad and leads to compromise through the symptom
(SVII:74), one perhaps like the Good. But if this Good is too asceticor, as
Lacan puts it, if its aim is to serve human defence and a lying about evil
so that at the level of the unconscious, the subject lies (SVII:73)it can
only repress desire toward a further pathological outcome.
Lacan held Freuds realism to show that there is nothing in common
between the satisfaction a jouissance affords in its original state and that which
/ 21
it gives in the indirect or even sublimated forms that civilisation obliges it

to assume (SVII:200). But it is Lacan who introduces the term jouissance
to refer to this enjoyment or satisfaction of a drive that goes beyond our
pleasure-reality principles, whereupon we reach our moment of transgression.
It suggests for Lacan our periodical propensity to trample sacred
laws underfoot (SVII:195), as excessive as the terms death-drive and
beyond the pleasure principle imply, which is why he notes that it can be
unconsciously masochisticlike the criminally perverse deeds Freud saw as
being only preliminarily sadistic before eventually expressing themselves as an
unconscious need for punishment, where a hidden sense of guilt finally
finds expression.52 But for Ons when Nietzsche infers that the ascetic Good
leads people to repudiate what is natural in them because, in part, they
have derived some enjoyment from it, this also brings him together with
Lacan in referring to a pleasure beyond the pleasure principle53where, as
Nietzsche put it, pleasure is felt and sought in ill-constitutedness, decay, pain,
mischance, ugliness, voluntary deprivation...self-flagellation (GM III:11).
Punishing consequences can always come of transgression, as going
beyond usual principles of pleasure reality often will entail risk. But if we also
are feeling guilty about it, even when things remain at the level of repressed
wishes, we may yet still seek to pay the price in this peculiar masochistic way
referred to as well. This can be so if, blinded by the Good, we are unknowingly
causing the Thing to be actualised beyond our pleasure-reality principles
and self-awareness, such that transgression casts its shadow deep into an
unconscious that, thanks to the Good, we know next to nothing about and
refuse to acknowledge as our own.
Lacans Seminar VII shows that ignorance of the Thing yields results
too damaging to accept. But abreast of a genealogy of the Good from this
combined NietzscheLacan analysis, we can grasp how such a Good as we
find in Platonism, including Aristotles version, only causes more of the very
problems it is meant to solve. This is not to say that our aim will become to
blindly obey or force the real, which, as Zupani points out, would be to take
the real as a kind of substitute, as a kind of modern equivalent of the notion
of supreme Good that must be realised at any price.54 Rather, the aim is to
increase our awareness of the real and realize that there is no cosmic Good
to automatically sublimate it for usand that such a Good, with the denials
it involves, will only cause more repression that, besides mass neurosis, will
lead us to externalize in more criminally extreme forms of perversion when
the real returns.
In the next chapter I consider if the creative process of sublimation, as
Lacan and Nietzsche theorize it, offers a way out of the dangers of repression
that also avoids externalizing criminally perverse destruction. I do so to see if
22 /
a combined NietzscheLacan analysis of sublimation produces a better ethical

strategy than the world of the Good of hitherto metaphysics.
That is why when we ask what is beyond the barrier erected by
the structure of the world of the good, when we ask where is the
point on which this world of the good turnsas we wait for it to
drag us to our destruction, our question has a meaning that you
would do well to remember has a terrifying relevance.
Lacan, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
May 18, 1960
Chapter 2
Distinguishing Weak Sublimation

from the Strong
Nietzsche criticized the Good of Platonism and the Christendom to follow

for creating an ideal that inhibited stronger, creative cultural types. He held
we could make more intelligent use of drives and passions if we did not
make an ideal out of demonizing or denying them. This chapter examines
whether Lacans treatment of sublimation, held by Freud to be a nonpathogenic
vicissitude of the drive, can help us to the nobler aims Nietzsches ethics incites.
Section 2.1 explores Lacans discussion of what sublimation faces,
proceeding from The Problem of Sublimation division of his Ethics
Seminar VII. Section 2.2 examines his attempt to treat the problem through
an awareness of the primacy of the signifier relative to the drives and the
optimal relation to the Thing this primacy enables. Section 2.3 suggests
Nietzsches major aesthetic distinction between lack and abundance (what
I call weak and strong), can be understood in light of Lacans view of
sublimation and used to determine which sublimations are of most ethical
and cultural value.
I show that by reading Nietzsches aesthetic distinction with Lacans
treatment of sublimation we can appreciate why Lacan joins Nietzsche in
admonishing the Plato who places art at the lowest level among human
works (SVII:141), and understand why Nietzsche in turn places Platos Good
near the lowest levels of value. I suggest Nietzsche does so because of the
Goods propensity to form a repressive ideal that inhibits stronger types of
sublimation, those where human authorship of ideals is avowed and affirmed
even in their unconscious aspect where they touch on the Thingenabling
us to bestow on earthly life what Lacan calls sublimations capacity to raise
an object to the dignity of the Thing (SVII:112).
23
24 /
2.1 The Promise of Sublimation and Its Discontents

...sublimation is a way out...without involving repression.
(Freud, SE14:95)
We are in the final section of the 1914 paper On Narcissism: An Introduction,
when Freud suggests that sublimation is a way out of neurosis, a way in
which ideals can be met without involving repression (SE14:95). Thus, rather
than ideals being allowed to repress our drivesso that the drives could only
be expressed in symptom form, or in the violence of criminally acted-out
perversionsublimation was a process whereby Freud discerned our baser
drives could be satisfied in higher cultural activities. This positive view of
sublimation is also at the International Psycho-Analytical Congress of 1971,
where Frederick Hacker begins his presentation with the observation that
according to the original Freudian concept, sublimation enacts the functions
of desexualization and deaggressivation which alter a drives primitive aims
and objects, to enable full instinctual discharge in a socially acceptable
manner without the neurotic development or impoverishment of the
organism.1
Even so, Freud had also stressed that although an ego ideal demands
such sublimation, it cannot enforce it (SE14:95), likely because ideals can
become too inimical toward the primitive drives to ever enable what at the
conclusion of On Narcissism Freud implies of a possible convergence of
ideal-formation and sublimation (SE14:102). What Freud means by this
convergence is indicated in a 1911 letter written to a Boston physician who
complained that his patients were not able to sublimate themselves toward
their best ideals. Freud writes: It teaches that a drive cannot be sublimated
as long as it is repressed.2
Lacans Seminar VII returns to the relations of this forming of an ideal
to sublimation (SVII:95)3especially in the division named The Problem of
Sublimation by its editor Jacques-Alain Miller. Here Lacan is found retracing
Freuds steps to explore whether sublimation can or not afford a way out
of neurosis, hinting that this may indeed involve a question of ideals when
reminding us that what governs us on the path of pleasure is no Sovereign
Good, leaving us in a thoroughly enigmatic position relative to that which
lies within das Ding (SVII:95). Freuds point is that some ideals are more
repressive of the drives than they are conducive to their sublimation, that it is
precisely in neurotics that we find the highest differences and far harder to
convince an idealist of the inexpedient location of their libido (SE14:95). This
question of ideals thus is relevant to Nietzsches ethics, insofar as Nietzsche
held Platos ideal of the Good to far surpass any point of expediency or
D I ST I N G U I SH I N G W E A K SU B L I M AT IO N F R OM T H E ST R O N G
/ 25
moderation and leave us, rather, prone to a repressively ascetic religious

capture by the forms of idealism to follow in the West.
This chapter considers how we might encourage our capacity for
sublimation by working out which ideals (or products of sublimation in
general) are positive and which are repressive, so as to replace the latter
with the former.4 I start here with the two problematic scenarios with which
Lacan begins The Problem of Sublimation, those through which sublimation
must offer a way out. The first is our possible overdominance by the drives;
whereas the second is the opposite problem of an overzealous moral ideal
designed to keep such drives at bay.
Beginning with the first scenario, Lacan suggests that to give free reign to
the drives, so that their aims were experienced without mediation, would not
yield a normative balance with the world as they do not naturally lead to
the domain of the pastoral (SVII:88). Lacan dismisses an idyllic view of the
drives by pointing to what in Freuds thought as a whole from the beginning
resists being absorbed into this domain; namely, a very special quality of
malice, of bad influence (SVII:89). Later when referring to Sades works,
Lacan notes this malice to appear only fleetingly, in a brief flash amidst
our incredulity and disgust, as that which may cause something strange
to vibrate in us which we call perverse desire, insofar as the darker side of
natural Eros enters into it (SVII:232). Lacan had even cited from Freud while
claiming he could have pretended it was from Sade, aiming to mock those
who turn a deaf ear and prefer fairy stories about us instead (SVII:185).5
Lacan also notes the difficulties involved in making our drives feel
satisfied by moderation, that which soberly regulates a human beings
relations with his fellow man (SVII:110). Such difficulties he takes Freud
to have shown, whose invitation to inspect the historical record we can also
follow regardless of our meta-psychological convictions, where we find him
pointing to Genghis Kahn, pious Crusaders and the horrors of the recent
World War, before concluding that when all of this suggests a boundless
potential for aggression in us, we have no choice but to bow humbly before
the truth of this view (SE21:112).
Such historical examples show that it is not always the propensity of
the drives to be tame, that they can also inflame as what Lacan calls das
Ding (SVII:110), and links partly to the Freudian id of the texts of the
second topic with Freuds term das Es (SVII:137), meaning literally the
It.6 But for Lacan although Freuds use of the term ego in the second topic
was immediately countered with this invention of the term das Es, that
primacy of the Es is now completely forgotten, despite that this is where the
essential function and shock value of the analytical experience began
(SVII:137).
26 /
Russell Grigg notes this forgotten primacy to concern a shift toward

the ego that began in the 1930s, still in Freuds lifetime, where support for
Freuds views on sexuality and the Oedipus complex, the death drive and
the splitting of the ego declined in the psychoanalytic movementadding
that it was against this shift that Lacan began to argue for a return to
Freud in the 1950s.7 It is this forgotten primacy that leads Lacan now in his
19591960 Seminar VII to explore das Es at the level of ethics, preferring
to refer to its primordial and primary zone with his term the Thing so as
to avoid its past occlusions (SVII:137).8
Such occlusions concern ethics as they allow the Thing to flare
unconsciously as a return of the repressedin distorted form unbeknownst
to ourselvesentailing what Lacan refers to as transgression beyond the
limits normally assigned to the pleasure principle in opposition to the reality
principle (SVII:109). This includes what is commonly known as perversion
(SVII:109), but because when forgotten it eludes control, Lacan is compelled
to paint such macabre political scenarios throughout his Ethics Seminar. He
speaks of impotent crowds left dazed as they move toward the slaughter
house (SVII:231), amidst the rise of nuclear weaponry which, as he put it
just two years before the Cuban Missile Crisis shook the world, threatens
the planet itself as a habitat for mankind (SVII:104).
In lieu of such frightful possibilities, it is tempting to cleave to the
Good to contain the drives more firmly; but this is what forms the second
problematic scenario that sublimation needs to counter. It involves our
domination by a zealously repressive ideal that Lacan notes to bear an
insatiable character of cruelty (SVII:89)that which, as Freud put it,
ends up lording it over us like a garrison in a conquered town (SE21:124).
For such an ideal can grow so opposed to our drives that it does not so
much encourage ethical behavior as it does, rather, punish us for even having
drivescalling the ego to account, Freud explains, not only for its deeds
but equally for its thoughts and unexecuted intentions (SE23:205).
This conflation of thought with deed leads to dangerous dishonesty
if we then refuse to admit to our Thing from fear of conscience, for in this
way the Thing is displaced externally, such as in the violent persecutions of
medieval Christendom, where all the evil is projected to the other as Jew,
pagan, heretic, or witch, to make of their slaughter a duty. But even if the
Thing is suppressed, it is absorbed by the moral ideal and turned back on the
subject with what Lacan calls a paradoxical cruelty, as the ideal begins to ape
the Thing it is meant to oppose, drawing on its violence like a parasite that is
fed by the satisfactions that are accorded to it, growing crueller and crueller
even as we offend it less and less by abstaining from acts, prosecuting us at
the most intimate levels of our impulses or desires (SVII:89). The zealotry of
/ 27
this ideal, commanding the Good like a Crusade or Inquisition, conjures up

the inner catastrophes of neurosis and its consequences (SVII:319) Lacans
seminar forewarns of. He notes it to form the kind of superego that forces
us to internalize aggression until we are riddled with melancholia and selfhate, a moralism decried as a malfunctioning of the brakes which should
limit its proper authority (SVII:89, 143).9
Such in fact were the tragic discontents disclosed by Freud of civilization,
but also by Nietzsche before him. Taught as we are to forego certain drives
so that civilization can afford us security, we find them continuing to assert
demands that cause us pain and illness.10 What Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan
stress is that the illness is exacerbated if we choose repression as our ideal
means of instinctual abatementa means that, Freud adds, should be
replaced by a better and securer procedure with a reduction in strictness
and more play given to truthfulness (SE19:220). Otherwise we are met with
the ferocity of an ascetic ideal made Sovereign, as if turning against the
drives were an end in itself, causing the bad conscience Nietzsche disclosed
in Genealogy of Morals as fundamentally nihilistic or against life.11
Having come to this elaboration of the two adverse servitudes that
sublimation can be sought to remedythat of the unmediated violence of the
drives; and that of an ascetic or repressive GoodI turn now to the nature
and limits of sublimation itself so as to assess its remedial power.
De Kesel notes that although Freuds treatments of sublimation are
seriously heterogeneous in themselves, Freud always has a more or less
positive concept in mind where drives are diverted from primitive aims
to become the driving force behind art, science, and other typical cultural
activities. Moreover, De Kesel adds, Freud characterises sublimation as a
vicissitude of the drive that must be distinguished from repression, as the drive
is still able to gain pleasure. Such is the planwithout repressionbut in
following Freud, De Kesel continues, Lacan distinguishes three subcategories
of culture: art, religion, and science.12 And the problem here is that such
sublime cultural activities also can rely on repressing some portion of the
truththe most obvious case lying with religionwhere loss of truthfulness
is one of the problems with repression that sublimation needs to counter.
Lacans key example of this loss of truthfulness in sublimation concerns
the Thing. He suggests that the sublimations of art, for instance, can involve
a repression of the Thing through the hysterics process of encircling
(SVII:12930, 141), while the sublimations of religion involve displacement
through obsessional traits of avoiding (SVII:130). But the sublimations of
positive science also can involve this loss through what Lacan calls a paranoid
procedure of unbelief, where first the Thing is repudiated or foreclosed
(SVII:1301).
28 /
Obsessional neurosis, hysteria, and paranoia are thus what De Kesel

describes as being for Lacan the pathological counterparts to the healthy
drive vicissitudes that make up the sublimations of religion, art, and science.13
But Lacan also seems to claim that he has provided a formula that leaves these
counterparts brought together (SVII:129). This leads back to the suspicion
that significant traces of repression are carried through into sublimation,
especially because Lacan also suggests that a prior elision of the Thing marks
the space through which every sublimation must occur, that in every form
of sublimation, emptiness is determinative (SVII:130). De Kesel hence is led
to complain that for Lacan the term sublimation sometimes applies to the
most divergent things, meaning that the term itself might empty itself out,
and come to lose both remedial and conceptual power.14
Sublimation would lose such power if it were to equally apply to and be
bound by pathogenic states of repression. With respect to ethics, moreover,
this could mean that even sublimation leaves much of the Thing beneath the
thresholds of knowing, whence it may continue to operate nonetheless. This
is why Lacan is again found referring to the eschatological when examining
sublimation in the field of morality, referring to the possibility with advances
in weaponry when a group of men act in such a way that the question of
existence is posed for the whole of the human species (SVII:105). Here Lacan
wants us to instead take stock and not be blinded toward desire by any
sublime fiction of the Good, to recollect that somewhere inside ourselves
whether in the act of worshipping, creating, or being scientificdas Ding is
next to the subject (SVII:105).
That sublimation can create fictions that blind us toward the Thing
is also manifest for Lacan in the poeticising praxis of courtly love, where
the romanticised Lady, as sublimated object of desire, seems emptied of all
real substance (SVII:149), deprived of flesh and blood (SVII:126). Lacan
uses this to again refer in general terms to what the instinct aims for in
sublimationand what, in general, we cannot help but demandto be
deprived of something real (SVII:150).
Additional problems concern the limit to how much renunciation
we can take, as sublimation, when tainted by repression, will not offer full
satisfaction. Lacan notes in fact that complete sublimation is not possible
for the individual and we find ourselves faced with limits, that there is
something that cannot be sublimated as there exists the demand for a certain
level of direct satisfaction, without which harm results, serious disturbances
occur (SVII:91). Here Lacan is building on the Freud, for instance, of the
1908 article Civilised Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness, where
Freud uses an engineering analogy of the limit to how much heat can be
converted into mechanical energy in our machines to suggest that, similarly,
/ 29
a certain amount of direct sexual satisfaction seems to be indispensable

for most organisations, and a deficiency in this amount, which varies from
individual to individual, is visited by phenomena which, on account of their
detrimental effects on functioning and their subjective quality of unpleasure,
must be regarded as an illness (SE9:188). For some types of people, Freud
thus notes, it would have been more healthy for them to be less good
(SE9:191).
This notion of types brings us to a further point Freud makes about
limits and sublimation: that it is a matter of constitution (SE9:191) that
determines how much sublimation each can generate. Some find it easy,
whereas others find it hard. But so hard can some find it that in one of his
1912 Papers on Technique, Freud notes that for weaker types, depicted as
being of only moderate worth, one must be content if one has won back
some degree of capacity for work and enjoyment, as to press them unduly
towards sublimation could make life even harder for them (SE12:119).
Freuds directive is to be tolerant of weaker types so as not to push them
beyond their capacity, but as an extension we can also consider the detrimental
effects on capacity oppressive ideals can add: for ones capacity for sublimation
also depends on access to educative conditions and ideals that are not so
privative in structure.
In any case, Freud argues even a higher type like Leonardo da Vinci
has repression mixed in with his sublimations, which at various points holds
him back to indecision and despair that is neurotic in essencedespite
what Freud calls his still at times extraordinary capacity for sublimating
the primitive instincts that left his epoch far behind (SE11:1326). In the
postscript to his 1921 Group Psychology essay, moreover, Freud explains this
presence of repression in the sublimations of higher types with the notion
that our configurations of desire typically contain any degree of admixture
of sublimated drives with the unsublimated, they can be transformed back
into them, just as they arose out of them (SE18:139).
Hacker aptly surmises such problems when stating that sublimation is
available to only a very few, only under particularly favorable circumstances,
and even so remains constantly subject to regressive pulls resulting in
defusion (resexualization and reaggressivation) and desublimation.15 This
mixing of the sublimated with the not, moreover, returns us to the difficulty in
differentiating sublimation from modes of defense thought to be pathogenic in
structurethose such as the character trait, built on a reaction formation
that is antagonistic to the anal drive, as Lacan points to in Freuds Three
Essays (SVII:945).16 But if we are then to join Freud in saying that it is
the amount of social valorization that these vicissitudes of the drive achieve
that determines whether sublimation has been reached, more problems arise
30 /
when we consider that cultural judges of varying times and traditions do

not always find consensus here, and that psychoanalysts in this role of judge
will often fare no better. Hacker notes that some analysts can class the same
act of social protest an uncontrolled acting out of unresolved Oedipal and
other infantile conflicts that others call a heroic sublimation authentically
expressing a truly humane vision.17
With technology now reaching the point where we are more than
capable of exterminating one another to the last man (SE21:145), as Freud
had already anticipated in the troubling conclusion of Civilisation and Its
Discontents, what can still be required is a properly working concept of
sublimation to guide our way out, despite its above-mentioned limitations.
The following section will examine Lacans attempt to negotiate the limits of
sublimation, and read it as an attempt to stop such limits from closing inso
that we may continue to pass through, as the Argonauts of culture Nietzsche
demands, without losing anything more than our tail-feathers.
2.2 Lacans Treatment of Sublimation

I discussed the two main problems sublimation can be thought to remedy:
first the unmediated violence or perversity of the drives; second the ideal that
is meant to oppose them but turns their perversity back on the self to create
neurosis. Then I discussed two main problems that sublimation seems to
preserve: first a repression of our awareness of the Thing at the center of our
drives that leads to violence unknowingly; second a repression of the amount
of direct satisfaction we attain that leaves us sublimating beyond our capacity.
This led to a further problem of how to tell if sublimation was taking place
at all, especially when indexed to the amount of social valorization achieved,
as this can vary across different judges.
Lacans Seminar VII tries to circumvent these problems by distinguishing
the Trieb [drive] and the Instinkt [instinct] (SVII:90). De Kesel notes that
when Lacan says the drive should in no way be confused with instinct, it
is to point to the primacy of the signifier in our relation with the drives.18
But it is also for Lacan the Trieb and not the Instinkt that is the main
concern of psychoanalysis because of Freuds ability to render the drives
unmasked through interpretation, amidst a play of signifiers in the play
of substitutions (SVII:90).
Lacans conviction that drives come already tangled up in signifiers
and thus should not be confused with our relation to our natural milieu
(SVII:90), has its predecessor in Freuds view that the Trieb is a psychical
representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and
/ 31
reaching the mind19whereupon such stimuli can undergo ideation by our

symbolic and imaginary structures. The Instinkt, conversely, is located deeper
within our somatic portion of the real, where it remains as instinct, and is
never the drive, as long as it is yet to reach the frontier Freud points to
between the mental and the somatic (SE14:122).
Lacan builds his concept of the Thing into this drive-instinct distinction
when, after stating that in Freud the Trieb is unmaskedthe Trieb and not
the Instinkt, he adds, for the Instinkt is not far from the field of das Ding
(SVII:90). This not far suggests that das Ding remains coupled closer with
the instinct on the somatic level of the real.20 But when Lacan adds that
any object of the drive is not the same as that which is aimed at on the
horizon of the instinct (SVII:98), it suggests that the object is coupled with
the drive at the level of the signifier instead: for insofar as this object is
aimed at by the drive and not the instinct, ideation and representation have
already occurred. Opening up then is a difference between the more somatic
pair instinct-Thing at the level of the real, and the more psychical pair
drive-object at the imaginary and symbolic levelwhere Lacan suggests it
is precisely on the slope of that difference that the problem of sublimation
is situated for us (SVII:98).
It is with this difference in mind that Lacan had stated that the problem
of Sublimierung [sublimation] must begin with a recognition of the plasticity
of the instincts (SVII:91), where plasticity now refers to the instinct after
it has reached the mental sphere and become the drive which aims for an
object via the signifier. Later Lacan emphasises that everything that has to do
with the Trieb [drive] raises the question of plasticity and limits (SVII:94),
because by conflating drive with instinctsomething which Lacan takes to
occur through a translation difficulty of the term Trieb21the temptation
was to treat the drives as biological, instinctual fixities instead of capable
of what Lacan calls that drift via the signifier that can open a door, a
way or a career of sublimation and give satisfaction to the subject in more
than one way, that drift where the whole action of the pleasure principle
is motivated (SVII:90).
Having pointed to this primacy of the signifier in our entanglement
with the drives, soon Lacan is adding that, nevertheless, the true nature of
the Trieb insofar as it is not simply instinct is also to have a relationship to
das Ding as such, to the Thing as it is distinct from the object (SVII:111).
De Kesel explains that the drive thus reveals itself in the distance from the
Thing with which it is a relation, suggesting a paradoxical relation of both
nearness and farness as the drive orbits the Thing in search of an object,
where all of the objects through and by which the drive lives (as an object
relation) are marked by this distance.22
32 /
Lacan would only add further that this object relation has to be
read Freudianly (SVII:98), that is, according to the Freudian theory of
the narcissistic foundations of the object and its insertion in the imaginary
register (SVII:112). We can grasp this by recalling how past object choices
instill ideals in us, as we try to emulate, through identification, those to
whom we direct desire. Often it is an authority figure that we emulate, the
one supposed to teach us how to distance ourselves from the Thing. But
if this is taught in a way that is overly ascetic, it yields what Lacan calls
the problem of identification, where psychological splitting results as a
subject becomes repressed and dependent on an idealised, forced image
of itself (SVII:98).
Lacans point is that a subject chooses an object that is perpetually
interchangeable with the love the subject has for its own image (SVII:98),
which is to say we love an object because it reflects our self-image, as the
reflection of our identifications past and the ideals they led us to incorporate.
This hall of mirrors is why Lacan suggests the object of our drives is not just
chosen but founded even on the basis of our own self-image, that is, founded
narcissistically through this mirage relation, in a narcissistic relation, an
imaginary relation (SVII:98).23
When Lacan returns to state that precisely that object is not the
Thing to the extent that the latter is at the heart of the libidinal economy
(SVII:112), he again refers to the relation of nearness and farness toward the
Thing of not just the drive but its narcissistically founded object as well. De
Kesel thus suggests that this Thing at the heart enables Lacan to locate the
object of sublimation exclusively inside the narcissistic microcosm, where
the sublimated drive maintains itself in the space between the level of the
imaginary and the symbolic objects on the one hand, and that of the Thing on
the other. Sublimation here is seen to represent an optimum distance toward
the Thing, which, De Kesel adds, gives the drives true nature a chance.24
For now we can found an object through the signifying images of our own
self-love, impelled by the passions of the Thing from remembered loves past,
without splitting off from the Thing in a way that would lead to a subjects
repression.
Sublimation, then, defined by Freud as redirecting our primitive
instinctual aims toward higher cultural ends, can be encouraged when
thought in the Lacanian schema, as we are reminded that it is the drive we
have access to which is already in a sense diverted from its primitive aim:
For this is what makes it the drive and not the instinct. It means that we
can found an object that signifies the Thing at an optimal distancerather
than head directly toward the Thing (as in criminal perversion), or attempt
to blindly repress it (as in neurosis).
/ 33
Each object of the drive is thus already a kind of substitute relative to

the Thing, although not with proper sublimation one that can only return
post-repression, with what Lacan calls the ambiguity and the double causality
of the symptom as compromise formation (SVII:110). For we are already well
placed for sublimation if we let the Lacanian primacy of the signifier come to
the fore, as the optimum distance to the Thing an awareness of this primacy
creates means that if we encourage the habitand increase the awareness
we can be the kind of subject who knowingly raises an object...to the
dignity of the Thing (SVII:112), which is how Lacan eventually formulates
sublimation most definitively for himself.25
Dylan Evans reaffirms that it is because the drive is, as Lacan puts it,
already deeply marked by the articulation of the signifier (SVII:293), that we
can use the signifier to alter how objects appears to us, foregrounding some of
their properties to make them seem sublime, which draws on and evokes the
passions of the Thing. In Evanss words, then, sublimation relocates an object
in the position of the Thing.26 For now the Thing is a little more present in
its absence as it shines forth in the passion with which we raise an earthly
object to the sublime, in a process akin to the imaginative activity involved
in love and artistic creativity in general.
Even then, an additional way in which Lacan enhances this space
for sublimation is by not allowing the Thing to be reduced to the Mothers
body. He notes, for instance, that the key to Kleinian theory depends on
its having situated the mythic body of the mother at the central place of
das Ding, which leads to the reduction of the notion of sublimation to a
restitutive effort upon the injured body of the mother, as if sublimation
were only an attempt to repair imaginary lesions felt as a loss following
birth and weaning (SVII:106). Although Lacan discerns a partial truth
(SVII:111) to this, taking it as if it cornered all the phenomena leads to what
he considers not the best solution to the problem of sublimation (SVII:106),
but to what, rather, reduces the problem of sublimation and yields somewhat
puerile results (SVII:107).
Lacan explains that this maternal repair notion approximates better to
the lower or amateur forms of art, and thus risks reducing all creative acts
down to this level. And what for Lacan gets completely left out in this way
is Freuds insistence that the products of sublimation must also achieve social
recognition, of the kind, moreover, linked to the championship of a certain
progress (SVII:107). This, Lacan adds, is what Freud paradoxically insisted
on to the surprise of many writers, but it is also how Lacan bridges his
aesthetics with his ethics, noting that as a psychological process sublimation
creates a certain number of forms, among which art is not alone, for it
also creates socially recognised values, which, given Freuds insistence on a
34 /
championed social progress, means that it is as a function of the problem

of ethics that we have to judge sublimation, including the sublimations of
art (SVII:107).
Zupani clarifies Lacans ethics here with reference to Nietzsches,
suggesting that when Nietzsche defines nihilism not as the absence of values
but as the absence of a power or mechanism for creating values, this
mechanism is what Lacan links to the notion of sublimation to insist that
the question of sublimation must be considered as a problem of ethics. For
Zupani, then, at stake for Lacan in sublimation is the creation of values, not
simply the act of adhering to already existing values.27 Sublimation thereby
enables us to create values like an artist in the field of ethics and portray new
values in our works of art, where we can infer the implications of any product
of sublimation and make an ethical judgment. For although sublimation is
a creative process that produces products in different fields, in none does
it necessarily have to passively submit unthinkingly to preexisting values.
Sublimation can question, alter, improve, and seek progress, and in doing so
is felt by Lacan to be far from the gymnastic, dance and other exercises that
the acceptance of Kleinian categories (SVII:107) can lead one to valorize
in the name of sublimationas if such exercises were in any way equivalent
to what we find mounted and depicted in the Louvre.
Sublimation for Lacan thus is far from simply providing facile pleasures
to make good a mythical maternal loss, and suggests an enhancing of the
possibilities of stronger, more active forms of sublimation occurring, insofar
as it resists the passively conformist reduction of sublimation that fails to
question prevailing values.28 But we can see such a questioning at play when
Nietzsche, for example, criticizes Wagners gaining of social recognition for
the invention of Parsifals redemption in the theatre. This was for Nietzsche
of scant progressive value because he felt Wagner was being championed
for submitting his sublimations to preexisting ideals which were repressive
in structurethose which were morbid, Christian and obscurantist, the
product of an insane hatred for knowledge, spirit and sensuality (GM III:3),
as per the romanticism of suffocating from the rumination of moral and
religious absurdities (CW 3).29
Nietzsche also warns against conflating artists with what in such
works they are able to represent, conceive, and express (GM III:4). For
the homage to redemptive chastity and the ascetic ideal, for instance, as
Nietzsche discerns in Wagners Parsifal, might be the work of a counterfeiter
who, with the power of any resulting fame, continues to exercise as much
un-Christian luxury only hypocritically in private. Nietzsches praise of Bizets
Carmen, here, at the expense of Wagner, can also be read in a proto-Lacanian
way, insofar as Nietzsche rebukes Wagner for a populist idealizing of love
/ 35
to contain an eternal feminine or higher virgin which redeems man,

and praises Bizet for showing love translated back into nature, as fatality,
cynical, innocent, cruel, as a war that touches on a deadly hatred between
the sexes (CW 23). For here we may discern a ghostly prefiguration of
the Lacanian dictum that there is no sexual relation (SXVII:116), that is,
of there being no naturally occurring harmony between the sexes to wholly
redeem the animosity that difference bringswhat Freud at one point more
broadly called some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction
between the sexes.30
Lacan suggests a counterfeit tendency also can enter the field of
psychoanalysis, referring to a barrier that can form, because of the Things
starkness, on top of which the sublimations of the systems of knowledge,
includingwhy not?that of analytical knowledge itself can be projected
(SVII:203). Lacan gives the example of Freuds 1910 split with Jung, when
the latter became caught in the sublimated fantasy of a spiritual, isomorphic
connection between the images in our heads (microcosm) and the universe
outside (the macrocosm), while passing it off as analytic truth. For Lacan,
rather, the Freudian project has caused the whole world to re-enter us, has
definitely put it back in its place, that is to say, in our body, and nowhere else,
which is why Lacan concludes in the deflationary manner that there is no
point now in seeking the phallus or the anal ring in the starry sky (SVII:92).
What occurs in such inflated moments at the level of sublimation
is what Lacan calls a space of relaxation where any cultural discourse can
delude itself on the subject of das Ding (SVII:99), where the aim is to
colonise the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes, and where what
Lacan calls the a elements, the imaginary elements of the fantasm come
to overlay the subject (SVII:99).31 Lacans own aim is that the question of
sublimation will be brought to bear here (SVII:99), due to the loss of truth
involved if we believe in the products of any sublimation excessively predicated
on repression of the Thing.
Having returned, however, to the neurotic end of the spectrum where
it is hard to tell apart sublimation and repression, we find there are still
some sublimations we wish to foster at the expense of others if our goal is
to create better ideals than those hitherto that sanctioned repression and led
to delusion, or the violence of a criminally acted out perversion. What we
need then is a firm criterion to evaluate the products of sublimation and thus
by implication the sublimations themselves. The following section considers
if such a criterion is to be found already in Nietzsche and if, by weaving
it into Lacans ethics, we can better understand both Lacans treatment of
sublimation and why Nietzsche places Platos sublimation of the Good at the
lower levels of value.
36 /
2.3 Nietzsches Distinction between Weak and Strong

Regarding all aesthetic values, I now avail myself of this main
distinction: I ask in every instance is it hunger or superabundance
that has here become creative? (Nietzsche, GS 370)
Nietzsches program in ethics, and to a large extent his entire philosophy
can be read as hinging on two main distinctions. The first is the inflationary
distinction between reality and appearance inherited from ChristianPlatonic metaphysics, the history of which is tracked in the section of his
1888 Twilight of the Idols entitled How the Real World at last Became
a Myth (TI IV). The second is the distinction between weak and strong
of his own aesthetics, cited from the 1886 Book V of The Gay Science as
between hunger and superabundance.32 Nietzsche then uses this second
distinction, of his aesthetics, to condemn and dismiss the first, of metaphysics,
for being creativity in the weak sense: that is, for having stemmed from states
of hunger, suffering, impoverishment (GS 370), impotence, hatred
(GM I:7), and ressentiment (GM I:10) toward the earthly worldleading to
the phantasmagoria of another world that, for Nietzsche, was christened
reality out of revenge and really just a myth (TI III:6).
It is via a backwards inference from the work to the maker that
Nietzsche arrives at his aesthetic distinction, extending it to apply now not just
to works of art but to every way of thinking and valuing, where one can infer
back from the deed to the doer, and, Nietzsche adds, in the case of morality,
from the ideal to those who need it (GS 370). This is how the question
of ideals for Nietzsche, especially in his 1887 Genealogy of Morals, came to
incorporate the question of the conditions and circumstances in which they
grew (GM P:6). For by using his aesthetic distinction, Nietzsche could adjudge
weak and slavish those ideals he took to stem from authors who were seeking
mere escape or redemption from themselves, who were in no condition to
affirm the bare realities of life as such and needed anaesthesia (GS 370).
Throughout his work, Nietzsche tends to qualify creativity in this weak
sense as nihilistic, idealist or romantic in structuretaking the idealism to
occur, for instance, where human authorship of what was constructed was
disavowed, so that the constructed could be mistaken for a supernatural
otherworld by which to escape ones earthly disappointments. In the case
of romanticism, Nietzsche saw it as when one relinquished their artificially
built second world but retained the resentment toward the earth that led
to this escapism in the first place: leaving one still too weak or pessimistic
to affirm our earthly world for what it is, and prey to the development of
pessimism into nihilisman insufferable state of near valuelessness where
all one has left is the repudiated world (WP 37).33
/ 37
Our actual world for Nietzsche thus is nothing other than the earthly
world of appearance insofar as it is not, as in Platos metaphysics, relegated
to the status of mere appearance so as to be negatively contrasted with
another world imagined wholly beyond the senses. Our actual world is rather
the world of appearance that, for Nietzsche, here signifies reality once more
(TI III:6)that which is experienced by the human body and grounded in its
evidence of the senses (TI III:3).
Nietzsche infers that creativity in the strong sense is genuinely rich
and healthy enough to affirm earthly appearance as the only reality there
is, even in its most questionable and terrible (TI III:6) momentswhat
Lacan calls the Thingwithout recourse to imaginary seconds worlds as a
palliative measure. And for Nietzsche such a palliative was the metaphysical
real in-itself, which he found all idealism to crown with the Good from
Plato to the Kant where it appears fundamentally as the same old sun, but
shining through mist and skepticism; the idea grown sublime, pale, northerly,
Knigsbergian. Nietzsche saw this same-old-sun to be finally jettisoned by
the yawnings of reason in the cockcrow of positivism, whereupon the
so-called real world of Platonism and its inflationary Good at last became
a myth (TI IV).
As opposed to weak states of creativity that can lead to such a myth,
Nietzsche discusses the strong in terms of the psychology of the artist as an
intoxication, stemming from a physiological precondition marked by the
feeling of plenitude and increased energy (TI IX:8). He views this plenitude
to arise from such events as sexual excitement, victory, and cruelty, from
that which comes in the train of all great desires and strong emotions (TI
IX:8). For in such states, Nietzsche explains, one is able to render appearance
selected, strengthened, corrected (TI III:6)insofar as in this condition
one enriches everything out of ones own abundance, gives to things in
gratitude for their existence, until they mirror the strength of ones own
power and ones own perfection (TI IX:9).
Nietzsche discusses the opposite intoxication of weakness, rather, as
an anti-artisticality of instinct (TI IX:9), one full of feelings and emotions
that are not so much strong as they are heavy, morbid, different in kind.
He points to such emotions combining to make up a mode of being which
impoverishes and attenuates things, to depreciate and make them leaner
mirroring thus for Nietzsche the inner states of weakness of such anti-artists
who are full of resentment and have not turned out well, and consequently
dwell amongst the starvelings of life (TI IX:9).
Even so, in an unpublished note of his final 1888 year of work entitled
The most dangerous misunderstanding, Nietzsche remarks that although
to him no mistake seems possible regarding his distinction between
strong acts of creativity that are able to bestow, and weak acts that instead
38 /
impoverishhistory contains the gruesome fact that the exhausted have

always been mistaken for the fullest and the fullest for the most harmful
(WP 48). Nietzsche explains this with respect to the fanatic, the possessed,
and religious epileptic state the weak could takea state of intoxication
that excites fear and thereby misleads us into thinking that to make oneself
sick, mad, to provoke the symptoms of derangement and ruin, is somehow
to become stronger, more superhuman, more terrible, wiser (WP 48).
Nietzsches distinction, however, and the many psychological
observations that accompany it, can find extra support in Lacans treatment
of sublimation and the clinic it emerges from. Creativity in Nietzsches strong
sense, for instance, would correspond to the optimum relation we can have
with the Thing in sublimation: where the Thing is at a serviceable distance
nearness for creativity as we have acceded to a non-neurotic attitude toward
our drives, enabling us to use them to raise earthly entities into objects
aglow with dignity and affirmationgranting them the status sublime
according to what Nietzsche himself calls the bestowing virtue.34 Creativity
in Nietzsches weak sense, moreover, corresponds to the nonoptimal relation
we can have with the Thing in sublimation: one more marred by repression,
ignorance, hostility, and bad conscience as the Thing becomes denigrated,
falsified, turned back violently against the self and forced so far from
conscious mind that states of deprivation ariseleading us to similarly
deprive earthly objects of their potential beauty or see in them, as with
Platonism, something dangerous to negate so as to reach another world
imagined high beyond the stars.35
What even further assists this bringing together of Lacan and Nietzsche
is that Lacan shares the critical view of Platos stance on art. For when Lacan
remarks in his Seminar VII that we can only sense the aberration that is
articulated in the unyielding position of the philosopher, he is referring not
to Nietzsches anti-Platonism but to when Plato places art at the lowest level
among human works (SVII:141).
Lacan here is criticizing Plato for denying arts ability to reveal any
hidden reality, especially any pertaining to the Thing, and refers instead to
the Czanne who paints his apples to suggest he is also doing something
very different from imitating applesbecause as artist, Czanne, for Lacan, is
establishing his apple-object in a relationship with the Thing that the work
is intended to encircle and to render both present and absent (SVII:141).
This understanding of art: as the source of something realLacan can directly
contrast with the Plato who held the artist was merely copying a sensory
object that was an imperfect copy of its idea already, as if everything that
exists only exists in relation to the idea which itself is the real (SVII:141).36
This reduction of art to a shadow of a shadow, or to an imitation of an
/ 39
imitation, is, for Lacan, a trap one must not enter (SVII:141). For not only
can art indeed reveal the realthat is, the unconscious, excluded reality of
the Thingthis real has nothing at all ideal about it.
To instead call the idea real, and everything earthly or sensory copy,
was what Nietzsche calls the greatest of re-baptisms, adding that in Platos
case we fail to recognise how astonishing it is as it was later adopted by
Christianity (WP 572). But for Nietzsche this rebaptism also makes Plato
the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced (GM III:25). For insofar
as Plato claims to discover out there, beyond the earth, what he has only
created in his own head, it can follow that what he creates is hostile to the
creative process just enactedfor this process has just been disavowed, along
with its all-too-human origins.
Nietzsche thus finds Platos barring of the poets in the Republic to be
a significant pointer as to the structure of the metaphysics of morality that
followed in the West, invoking Plato versus Homer as the complete, the
genuine antagonism (GM III:25).37 And this is because whereas for Nietzsche,
Homers poetry gilds and deifies the forces of nature and embodied-life here
on the earthPlato preaches a beyond to deify as utmost Good, especially
insofar as it was seen as opposite to the earth, leading Nietzsche to call Plato
even the great slanderer of life (GM III:25).
Platos world of the Good, on this account, amounts to believing in
what one has created as if it were the truth in a way that erases all truth
of its createdness, what Nietzsche now calls its last fumes of evaporating
reality (TI III:4).38 He also describes this as mistaking the last for the first
(TI III:4), or as mistaking the consequence for the cause (TI VI:1): that is,
when ideas engendered by a certain condition have been misunderstood as
the cause of that condition, leading to the error of imaginary causes (TI
VI:4). And this is what the idea of the Good was for Nietzsche: Not the
cause but an effect of a Platonists encounter with the earth, which was then
mistaken as cause of earth itself. But what is most important apropos of
a comparison of Lacans ethics and Nietzsches critique is that Lacans main
example of a superlative form of creativity in his Ethics Seminar is Sophocles
Antigone: a work of tragic artthat is, the very form that Nietzsche praised
as highest in value and Plato debased as lowest.
Zupani hints at why tragedy can bear this high value for Nietzsche
and Lacan, but not for Plato, when noting that the Lacanian theory of
sublimation does not suggest that sublimation turns away from the real in the
name of some idea, and does not work against the passions and the drives,
but aims, rather, to create a stage on which it is possible to challenge the
given criteria of morality, and eventually formulate new, different ones.39
Plato had already created his idea and thus wanted it installed, not challenged;
40 /
while Lacan and Nietzsche see a danger in this and so instead are found
returning to the artist to search for other creative possibilities and their source
in the drives. But because of the lack of idealness inherent in this source
which is nothing other than the Thing or real of an experience potentially
tragicit is tragic art that grants us fuller access to the real we have to work
with; and for Nietzsche, especially, it does so in a way that even leaves us
more strongly equipped to handle the real in future.
In the next chapter I examine Lacans Ethics Seminar reading of
Sophocles Antigone to see in what sense, as an example of a strongest type
of sublimation, it has the ethical benefit of procuring more empowerment. I
argue that Lacans reading gets us closer to the real in a way that Nietzsche
takes to be of much value to a strong ethical projecta value that Platos
metaphysical turn in morality can be criticized for rendering increasingly lost.
Chapter 3
Before the Good

Strong Ethics in Sophocles Antigone
In chapter 2 we arrived at a distinction between weak and strong creative

acts. This chapter examines Lacans Ethics Seminar reading of Sophocles Antigone to see how this augments Nietzsches emphasis on tragic art. Section 3.1
begins with the confrontation of Antigone with Creon, demonstrating Lacans
linking of Creon to a repressive version of the Good. Section 3.2 explores
Antigones own desire and the heroic second death, or beauty effect, Lacan
has her typify to give a truer picture of desire, which, I argue, broaches
the drive in the real. Section 3.3 situates Creon and Antigone in what for
Nietzsche was expressly the Dionysian context of the festival where tragedy
in Athens was performed, and where an ethics of transgression is found to
bear a strong, empowering value that Platos Good would later render lost to
cultureeven, I argue, by the time of Aristotle.
3.1 Creon Against Antigone: In the Name of the Good

441 BC is a time that Lacan reminds us preceded the ethical formulations
of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (SVII:259, 285). It is also when Sophocles
presents us with Antigone1with what, for Lacan, is the story of a hero being
questioned along the paths of solitude, and situated in a sphere where
death encroaches on life, apropos of what Lacan will call the second death
(SVII:285). In the context of the play, it is Antigone who is thrown to deaths
encroachment by her opposition to Creon, ruler of Thebes, who has just
decreed her brother Polynices should lie unburied on the ground: as feast for
41
42 /
dogs and carrion birds, unsheltered by any gravein punishment for having
dared to lead an army against Thebes.
Creons logic seems simple. As Lacan formulates it, one cannot at the
same time honour those who have defended their country and those who
have attacked it (SVII:259). But although disobeying Creon will mean a certain death, Antigone is compelled to bury Polynices anywaybecause in her
mind still, as Lacan succinctly puts it, my brother is my brother (SVII:278).
What for Lacan is especially intriguing about Antigone: O unhappy child
of an unhappy father, as the Chorus evokes her2is that as daughter of the
late King Oedipus, her brother is also her Father, as her Father is also a
brother to her, a half-brotherhalf-Father in this extraordinary casegiven
that she and her Father Oedipus were of the same womb.3
The artfulness of Sophocles is to present us with a play set within the
history of this troubled housethe house of a past unwitting incestthat
begins with a confrontation where initial allegiances may be torn. Creon and
Antigone both seem to have a point, both some claim to justice, and it is difficult to so easily affix the predicate good to the one interlocutor and evil
to the other.4 Lacan will discern the key difference to be that Creon identifies
himself with the common Good (as I show in this section), whereas Antigone
finally claims no such thing (as I show in section 3.2). But although Creons
invoking of the common Good will turn closer to the commonly catastrophic,
still it serves part of the ethical basis of tragic art for Lacan and Nietzsche,
which is to remember, repeat, and work through the folly of repressive versions of the Gooda folly that Platos later more inflationary Good will be
shown to preserve with equally tragic consequences.
Creon, then, whose name means ruler, lord, master in the Greek,5
is he whose function in the play for Lacan is to be the one who seeks the
good (SVII:259). Furthermore, in acting thus Creon is only doing for Lacan
what a leader should: He leads the community. He exists to promote the
good of all (SVII:259). Creons error of judgment, however, his
as Lacan cites in the Greek,6 is to want to promote the good of all as the
law without limits (SVII:259). That is, Creon wants to make the Good a
sovereign law, but in doing so for Lacan goes beyond or crosses the limit
(SVII:259) concerning treatment of the dead. This is the limit of which we
commonly assume enough has been said, Lacan observes, when we add
that Antigone defends it and that it takes the form of the unwritten laws of
the , with the latter often interpreted as the Justice or the Doctrine of
the gods (SVII:259).
To support the claim that Creons Good crosses the line, Lacan refers to
the Goethe who also suggests that Creon, while taking himself to be serving
the common Good, is rather driven by his desire and deviates from the
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 43
straight path in striking at his enemy Polynices beyond limits within which
he has the right (SVII:254).7 Polynices after all is already dead; the war enacted is over. Thus, for Creon to deny him burial still can seem like an attempt
to inflict on him what Lacan will call that second death (SVII:254)to kill
him twice, so to speak, by leaving him of the gods below deprived, unhallowed, unholy.8 This is beyond Creons jurisdiction as a mortal; be him King
of Thebes or not. And even if there is some doubt as to his initial awareness
of this breach, there is no doubt, Lacan concludes, that Creon in his innocence crosses over into another sphere (SVII:259), the sphere of .
Creons innocence in this crossing, his didnt know (SVII:236) as
Lacan often characterizes all such states, stems from his being too quick to
identify himself with the Good. And though this good-of-all Creon seeks is
not yet the inflationary Good of Platonismfor as Lacan reminds us, 441
BC is very early and Plato hadnt yet created the mirage of that Supreme
Good (SVII:259)Creons Good will still partake of certain proto-Platonic
features. This can be seen by considering the metaphysics of the Good that
followed Plato in the West, particularly in what Nietzsche called its Christian
form diluted for the masses (BGE P), as it increasingly had much to say on
who qualifies for the benefits of a preferred afterlife. For we can observe this
tendency in Creon when, in the name of what he takes to be the Good, he
takes it upon himself to ensure that Polynices, by remaining unburied, will
not have access to any preferred afterlife.
Lacan finds a connection with Hamlet here, whose life is set in the
later Christian era, because for Lacan if Hamlet stops on the point of killing
Claudius, his Fathers murderer and Mothers seducer, when the best chance
arisesit is not because of an Oedipal identification, as Freud conjectured,9
but because Hamlet finds him praying, finds him being Good, which, Hamlet
fears, perchance may lead that blasted soul to go to heaven. As Lacan puts
it, simply to kill him is not enough, he wants to kill him twice as well,
wants him to suffer hells eternal torture (SVII:251). So as would befall the
sinners of Paul, and before that of Plato in Phaedo and Republic,10 Hamlet
and Creon would wish on those who had done them wrong the loss of any
Good beyond death, inflicting thus a sense of what Lacan will call a second
death (SVII:251).
Another proto-Platonic aspect to Creons Good emerges if we consider
with Lacan the ethical progression from Aristotle to Kant as having sought
to make clear the identity of law and reason (SVII:259).11 Lacan notes in
Creons Law the kind of rhetoric that seems to be in perfect conformity
with that which Kant calls the Begriff or concept of the good, and seeks its
rationalization in the language of practical reason, as a maxim that can
be given as a rule of reason with a universal validity (SVII:259).12 This is
44 /
what Lacan explains by formulating Creons stance to be that one cannot

at the same time honour those who have defended their country and those
who have attacked it (SVII:259). By using the proverbial carrot-and-the-stick
then, Creons reason becomes practical in taking steps to deter any further
attacks of such kinds on the cityas much as it may pain him or others to
take this stance.
In Creons world, however, there are many kinds of gods with a stake
in the good. After there was only the One of the Platonic tradition, with its
tendency to make the divine and the laws it enshrined moralistically pure in
reason, what Lacan was calling an identity of law and reason, which also
accords with the historical process Nietzsche termed de-naturalization.13
But in Creons time of a pre-Platonic divine there is not, Lacan reminds us,
anything yet like Aristotles prime mover in existenceonly the mythological gods who one could never be so sure of embodying that middle path
that Lacan felt Aristotle articulated so remarkably (SVII:314). Moreover,
as Lacan had stated earlier, for we that have lived for a long time under
Christian law, we no longer have any idea what the gods are (SVII:259).
Such gods can be recollected by focusing on how Creon tries to invoke
the divine to buttress his decreeas their polytheistic structure means, for
instance, that he is faced with the possibility that some of the gods may favor
his opponents. This is likely why he is soon forced to reattach or rationalize
his pursuit of the Good to questions concerning self-interest.14 He claims no
personal investment for himself in his Good, while sensing all the indicative
signs of self-interest only in those around him. As a consequence of this onesidedness, he proceeds to get the psychology of others completely wrong, but
starting with his own and likely stemming from it too, insofar he mistakes
himself to be acting purely for the Good of fellow citizensto teach a lesson
that strikes fear to those who might think again to attack the city.
The problem Lacan points to with such languages of practical reason,
invoking as they often do a universal Good, is that they do in fact often conceal a very personal investment in the pronouncement. This can happen to the
point where there is created what Lacan calls a barrier (SVII:230) toward
ones desire, such that the Good is deployed in the guise of some alibi on
the part of the subject, merely to serve the subjects defences (SVII:221).
Being open and amenable to progress in reason, which requires the
ability to incorporate complex criticism, is rarely the result of this paradoxical comportment. And thus inevitably, a more careful examination of Creons
logic reveals him to be hardly the exemplar of reason at all.15 His arguably
legitimate desire to not bestow equal honors on the corpses of those who
defended the city and those who attacked it need not have entailed the lat-
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 45
ters slow en plein air mutilation. This was a very particular decision. Even
rolling Polynices body into a ditch outside city limits would have been far
less traumatic for the next of kin, who are after all his own relatives too. But
instead he allows the gnawed off limbs to be scattered round town by birds
and dogs, causing an offense, Lacan observes, both to heaven and earth
(SVII:279).
Furthermore, no matter how practical part of the intentions may have
been behind Creons initial decree and invoking of the Goodwhen critical
objections begin to arise of everyone from his own son to the prophet and
the people of Thebes, rather than assess their objections as to their possible
legitimacy, he accuses them of being bribed or mutinous, threatening them
all with tortures and death! And this includes not only his own son who
is betrothed to Antigoneand not only the prophet Teiresias who he later
concedes he has never known to sound falsehoods to the city16but also
the sentry at the start of the play whose only crime was to have lost at drawn
lots, meaning it was he who had to report to a rampant King that someone
had defied his decree, in what for Lacan already reached the height of cruelty (SVII:267).
Finally then with Creon, thrust upon the stage by Sophocles in a time
only slightly preceding the Good of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (SVII:285),
we can observe the inklings of a transitional point in Western culture that
illuminates Lacans stated desire to examine the progress of thought through
the evolution of history (SVII:216)which he later adds requires a little
ethnography for us to recall what the gods are (SVII:259)in order to
demystify the Platonic and the Aristotelian view of the good, indeed of the
Supreme Good, and to situate it on the level of the economy of goods, where
practical considerations of the pleasure and reality principles occur in the
ethical register of utilitarianism (SVII:216).
If Creon is central to this demystifying task, it is because he finds it
difficult to disguise and buttress his desire with a divine Goodsomething
Plato and Paul will find it simpler to do when there is posited solely the one
God of the one pure Good, striking deep Its root through all. For Creon
only has Zeus on top, who he at one point refers to as protecting kindred
blood,17 and thus by implication perhaps the sibling bond between Antigone
and Polynices. Even then Zeus has his rivals. There is brother Hades, for
instance, whose jurisdiction Creon has already trampled on with his irregular treatment of the dead. Then there is the invoked Aphrodite, who mocks
without resistance,18 the Chorus reminds us, all who might oppose the amorous loyalty existing, say, between Antigone and Creons son Haemon, who
is after all her fianc.19
46 /
Such gods are not uniform enough to be guarantee for a Kings decree,
and this is why I take that Creon must demystify the Good he posits straight
into the utilitarian register himselfthat is, to situate it in the practical
language of consequences for the common good. But when impractical consequences do start to arise regardless, Creon, in whose rigid mind everything
is political, Lacan notes, or in other words, a question of interest (SVII:268),
is still too invested in his own identification with the Good to properly listen,
and only more simplistic logic emerges. To defy the King, he tells his initially
gently interceding son, is to lead to the very disobedience that can undermine
the citys safety in a time of warobedience saves the greatest number,20 so
the King must be obeyed be him right or wrong.21
The Kings will is Law, it is always the Good, Creon all but claims in
a gross act of hubris, only to find himself being demystified now as his logic
becomes increasingly the poorly laid alibi for his own displaced, distorted
desire. Sophocles shows him paranoid of dissent, worried about being untested in his role. He seems overly aggressive, hasty, closed, what Shepherdson
describes as Creons being situated in the narcissistic register, where the
threats to his ego are conspicuously displayed (I wont be beaten by a woman,
etc), which marks him as a narcissist who cannot perform his symbolic
function (Ill show them whos in charge, etc.)22 Thus from the underside
of the barrier of the Good he has created within, Creon can only project
unbeknownst to himself his own structures, his own faults, sometimes in
code and sometimes not. All the sickly predicates belonging to his own splitsubject he lets hurl with acid tongue to others, until the prophet Teiresias
finally appears, almost in the guise of psychoanalyst to reply, And there you
speak of your own symptom, Sir!23
It is at this turning point when suffering this stern rebuke from Teiresiaswhereupon Creon experiences his first fully conscious doubt and begins
to bucklethat Creon exists and insists, Lacan tells us, to illustrate a function that is inherent in the structure of the ethic of tragedy, which is also
that of psychoanalysis (SVII:258). And this is to bring us closer to what for
Lacan is the very real ethical factum that the good cannot reign over all
without an excess emerging whose fatal consequences are revealed to us in
tragedy (SVII:259).
Antigone is this excessit is with her this tragedy truly begins. But as
I argue in the next section, it is the splendor she embodies in her clash with
the Good, and what this splendor can only barely veil, that illustrates more
precisely the strong value of tragedy that, for Nietzsche especially, the Platonic
tradition was subsequently to forgetsomething which Lacans analysis of
Antigone will cast much light on, broaching as it does the drive in the real.
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 47
3.2 Antigone against Creon:

Lacan, the Beautiful, a Second Death
I have mentioned with aid of Lacans Ethics Seminar how Creons denial of
burial for Polynices appeals to the Good but crosses a limit Antigone defends,
a limit regarding how the dead should be treated, which concerns Antigone
as Polynices is her brother. Lacan situates the classical interpretation of this
confrontation as follows: Creon represents the laws of the city and identifies
them with the decrees of the godswhich Lacan immediately challenges
by adding: But its not as obvious as all that, for it cannot be denied that
Antigone is after all concerned with the chthonic laws, the laws of the earth
(SVII:2767).
I also mentioned how the problem arises because of the multiple nature
of the divinities in the time of Sophoclesbefore Plato and Christianity. But
it is also because of their earthly nature, where both god and goddess would
walk the earth with their own two feet, and were willing to do more than just
walk. Thus, they were no guarantee to favor Creons more republican decree
over Antigones own desire or instinctfor the latter concerns a brother, a
brother and his death, which leaves her desire rooted in what the gods more
directly were at the time, what Lacan calls the most radically chthonian of
relations that are blood relations, meaning Antigone is also in a position
to place the of the gods on her side (SVII:277).
This earthly rootedness leads her, when brought to heel before Creons
Good, to what, for Lacan, is the invocation of something that is of the order
of law, but which is not developed in any signifying chain (SVII:278). Shepherdson thus likens what Antigone invokes to the Thing as Lacan had earlier
depicted itthere as the very correlative of the law of speech in its most
primitive origin, there from the beginning, as the first thing that separated
itself from everything the subject began to name and articulate (SVII:83),
what Lacan also calls the beyond-of-the signified, and sees as marked by
an emotional relationship (SVII:54).24 What Antigone invokes then is not
part of any specific state legislation, but of what Lacan will observe to be of
a certain legality which is a consequence of the laws of the gods that are said
to be , which is translated as unwritten (SVII:278).25
Antigone henceforth is able to say to Creon, when confronted on her
defiance of his decree, You made the laws, or Zeus is by no means the one
who proclaimed those things to me (SVII:278).26 And in this way she can be
read as refusing to recognize the easy identification of the divine with laws
that come in the form of public decrees, made by mortal Kings who invoke
the Good as extant with the signifiers of state. Antigone seems to appeal to
48 /
a higher authority, so to speak, although lower is likely more preciseto

laws that are unwritten, unalterable, and of unknown origins in the Thing,
as a consequence of gods who are themselves earthly, chthonic, divinely animalistic and thus unseemly at times in their appetites, too.27
Although for Lacan the ambiguity arises because just like Creon, Antigone is in a position to place the of the gods on her side (SVII:277),
Lacan will discern that regardless she is not always interested in justifying
herself in this religious manner. By reference to the Greek, Lacan even suggests that Antigone is implying to Creon in their first exchange that her own
orders did not particularly come from Zeus or either (SVII:278)!28
At times it seems more with duty to family that Antigone is clad when
it comes to explaining her actionsthe very duty Lacan notes to form half
of the dialectic Hegel saw here. But for Lacan it must be said that if Hegel
saw in Antigone the most perfect of plays it was for the wrong reason
(SVII:240), attracted by what he saw as the clear opposition there between
the discourse of the family and that of the state, whereas for Lacan, again,
things are much less clear (SVII:236). This is because in a key later passage,
even the discourse of the family seems not so much on Antigones mind in
terms of motivation, and this is such that Lacan notes even Goethe feeling
rattled (SVII:254). Lacan reports this passage leaving Goethe so shocked
that he vacillates (SVII:278), before emitting a wish that one day some
scholar will reveal to us that this passage is a later addition (SVII:255). For
it has Antigone claiming almost callously that she would not have defied
the law for a husband or a child, as she could always have made another
child with another husband (SVII:255).29
This utterance of Antigones may well strike us as coarsenot only
because her betrothed lover in Creons son has just defied the King in her
defense, and somewhat fatally as chance soon has it, but also because her
utterance disturbs the impression of her as pious champion to the discourse
of family and the gods. For if she would not have defied the decree for a
husband or a child, then neither would she have for whatever gods would be
there to sanction their proper burial as wella burial that, after all, would
still involve immediate family.
The sage from Weimar finds that all a bit strange, Lacan notes, adding
that Goethe was not the only one (SVII:255)as over the centuries there
were other scholars left uncertain of this passage, and to the point of sharing
Goethes wish that it be found a later addition. But Lacan dispels this wish
by reporting at least four or five nineteenth century scholars who found
that such a position is untenable (SVII:255), and that the passage was also
used as a literary example by Aristotle in his Rhetoric without any hint or
odour of a scandal, that is, by someone who was living just ninety years
after Sophocles (SVII:255).30
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 49
Nevertheless, as is proper to Lacans analytical method that looks for

truth not just in the mistake but in the slag of a fantasy31Lacan reminds
us that Goethes wish is the truth of a prudent man who knows the value
of a text, and who always takes care not to formulate ideas prematurely
(SVII:255). Thus, it is precisely because something strange or Other has been
inferred of this passage, and by a scholar of such caliber, that Lacan is alerted
to its potential interest to us, for helping us to define properly just what is
the aim of Antigone (SVII:256).
If we are to believe the bidet-water commentary that Lacan with due
wit characterizes as typical of the more virtuous writers who write about her,
then Antigones refusal to yield is testimony to her status as the heroine, as
she who shows the way of the gods, is made for love rather than for hate,
and who, in short, is a really tender and charming little thing (SVII:262).
But with the passage Lacan points to leaving Goethe shocked, we can begin
to see how only a very partial reading could sustain Antigone in this virtuous position of the Good.32
On the question of whether Antigones is the image of charity, then,
Lacan will at best answer perhaps, but only if we confer on the word charity a savage dimension (SVII:278).33 For right from the start this savagery
appears when she reproaches her sister for not helping with the burial. Lacan
notes that the term , enmity (SVII:263), is used in this connection.
Antigone in fact uses it thrice herself against her sister in the plays opening
exchange, a word also used to express hate.34 She also seems to take Creons
decree personally: For I say, against me35she tells her sister, bearing nigh
a paranoid logic. For how certain can we be that it was just to spite her that
the good Creon,36 as she calls him, passed his decree?
She is ,37 Lacan cites the Chorus calling her, adding that we
translate this as best we can by inflexible when it more literally means
something uncivilised, something raw, as per eaters of raw flesh (SVII:263).
An example is when Antigone is brought before Creon and her distraught
sister begs to share in her punishment. Lacan notes the harsh rebuke, Go
back to your Creon, since you love him so (SVII:263). Antigones earlier
reproach of her sister that to not help with the burial would be to dishonour
what the gods hold in honour,38 can also be read in the context of raw enmity
rather than piety. Lacan, in fact, detects in such moments something inhuman, something that propels beyond the limits of the human, into a zone
where we might better disclose just what it is her desire aims at (SVII:263).
So into this zone Lacan will go, pursuing his quarry beyond the question of family and country, beyond piety toward the gods and over and
beyond the moralising arguments, searching for that line of sight that defines
desire (SVII:247). And what he finds is that if Antigone both attracts and
startles us, if she fascinates, intimidates, and disturbs us all at once as
50 /
this terrible, self-willed victim, it is all the while by giving off an unbearable
splendour that for Lacan is the true significance of tragedy, along with its
power of attraction (SVII:247).
Lacan will find this splendor to somehow broach on death, while also
relating to the effect of beauty on our desire (SVII:248).39 But the place
whence Antigones particular splendor stems is invoked precisely for Lacan
in what he calls the plays pivotal passage (SVII:248), which he thus returns
to twice (SVII:268, 281). This is where Haemon tries to defend Antigone, but
all in vain, as Creon orders she be placed alive in a tomb (SVII:268). The
Chorus is moved to invoke Eros...Aphrodite, and the ruin that comes
in a girls soft cheek40so that by the time Antigone arrives to hear her
sentence, they confess they cannot bear it. Something here, Lacan suggests,
causes the Chorus to lose its head (SVII:281).
Antigone now begins her famous lament, her complaint, the
(SVII:281), as Lacan cites in the Greek, making up a passage that he reports
also causes some commentators to cast doubt, sensing it to injure the socalled unity of the character where the aim this time is to depict her as
wholly cold and inflexible (SVII:280). The lament eventually leads to the
passage where even Goethe has his doubt; but again, wherever Lacan detects
something alien or Other at playthen there too, as method, he has us look
for the ciphers that would lay.
Presumably, Antigone has just heard the manner of what will soon be
her execution, as she immediately sets to expressing grief for what of life will
be lost. And in some ways echoing the patient, resourceful Odysseus when,
in the underworld, he met the shadow of brave Achilles41the Chorus tries
to prettify Antigones death for her. They tell her not only because she will be
buried young, but also alive, that she goes to death struck not by sickness,
or paid by the sword, but autonomous.42 As Lacan puts it, they tell her she
is practically half-goddess (SVII:281). But like Achilles before her, Antigone will have none of it, calling this mockerythough her stature, Lacan
observes, is far from diminished as a result (SVII:281).43
Achilles had responded to Odysseuss praise that even in the underworld, he still appeared most Lordly among men, by saying he would rather
serve as farmhand to the poorest peasant, than Lord it over wasted dead.44
Similarly, when Iphigenia is to be sacrificed by her Fathers hand, to stir a
becalmed fleet bound for Troy, she offers that to gaze into the sunlight is the
sweetest thing for mortals, as beyond the grave is nothingness.45 Following
Plato and Paul, however, mortals would imagine a better world, where there
was little associated with the earthly realmonly bliss in the oppositewhich
is why, moreover, it was considered the Good, to be a better place. Sophocles precedes the dominion of such formulations and thus, like Achilles and
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 51
Iphigenia, when his Antigones fate is all but sealed he has her not rejoicing
that bliss begins, but lamenting on what she loves most of life. And in doing
so, she can be thought to embody what Nietzsche saw as the life-affirming
consequences of the pre-Platonic view that, as Heraclitus put it, after death
comes nothing hoped for nor imagined.46
Knowing of nothing better to come, Antigones lament casts a powerful
affirmation of earth, while thrust into a zone between life and death where,
for Lacan, her life is seen from the other side as already lost (SVII:280).
But her lament forms no objection to life as such. She offers it no slander.
And it is not as if she would die on her knees:47 She could not be broken,
but is found with a strength to match Achilles, such that the genitive preconditions of life itself appear beautiful. For when this unhappy maid, this
soft-cheeked girl, croons of no wedding day, no bridal hour, with death only
for groom and dower48she all but embodies lifes desire, keeps it burning
despite the tragedies it can bring. , the Chorus rings out.49
And what god or man would not want to save her now? Or long for such
of lifes princely ventures? As Lacan notes it is thus not Antigone but the
Chorus that loses resolve here, handing over victory to what Lacan extracts
from their signifiers as Antigones ...desire made visible
(SVII:268)with nothing more moving, Lacan concurs, than the desire
that visibly emanates from the eyelids of this admirable girl (SVII:281).50
Something like the Freudian instinctual excitement (SVII:249) is what
Lacan attaches to the beauty effect here, which has the Chorus shifting in
what for Lacan is the key moment of transgression, the moment of crossing over (SVII:281). And this is not only because of the Choruss transgression of loyalties demanded by stately edictsor because Antigone will soon
herself cross more fully into the zone between life and death by being buried
alivebut also for Lacan because of the violent illumination, and glow of
beauty, that coincides with the Chorus then making reference to Antigone
of what he calls her At (SVII:281).
At [] thence becomes a key issue for Lacan in his treatment of
Antigone. In Greek it suggests the limit where an infatuation can be sent by
the gods, a misfortune leading unto reckless ruin.51 The Chorus tells Antigone she has gone far beyond the limits of daring, and now has nothing left
but to pay for some crime of her Fathers.52 Antigone all but gasps here,
declaring that with the memory of her Father, they touch on the thought
most painful to her.53
Like black sands churned from ocean deeps, as the Chorus had earlier
depicted it54Antigones At surges from this memorial buried deep inside
her, driving her beyond the limits that the risk of death usually dissuades
from. For hers is an almighty At, deriving from an especially transgressive
52 /
Father and an especially accursed share in the house. The At, Lacan offers in
analytical terms, pertains to a subjects unique individual law, which began
to be articulated before them in previous generations (SVII:300). It can carry
misfortune for all of us to a certain degree, though rarely to the tragic level
of Antigones, Lacan thankfully adds (SVII:300). At today is like the skeletons in the closetand every family has onethat all have learned it best
not spoken of.
But because of her particularly haunted At, Antigone was always
destined for Lacan to be suspended in the zone between life and death
(SVII:280). This is first because insofar as it compels her defiance of Kingly
law, she is already dead to the common Good that Creon services in his
capacity as King, as her act is sure to lead to excommunication and death.
This she knows, but she goes ahead anyway. It puts her in that zone for Lacan
where she cuts the typical figure of the Sophoclean hero, marked by the
stance the-race-is-run (SVII:272), where as living corpse, as already dead
once, a second death awaits as foregone conclusion.55 Second, when it comes
to her particular choice of action, Lacan notes that not only is it motivated
by no common Good, it is motivated even by a criminal good (SVII:240).
This is because something so different from everyone elses, from beyond
the limits of Ator as Lacan cites in Greekhas become Antigones good (SVII:270). It is one so beyond the pale that for Lacan it makes
Antigone feel her life is not worth living, dragging her forever toward death,
forced by the memory of an intolerable drama (SVII:263).
This drama of Antigones At, emerging fully when the Chorus invokes
her Father, leads to the passage where Goethe has his doubt, where her pretexts of duty to the gods and family as a whole drop away, and all she is left
with is the claim that her brother is her brother. This claim rings true, but
can now be seen to turn round a deeper one: that her brother is also her
Father when it comes to Oedipus, that criminal father, as Lacan puts it, the
consequences of whose crimes Antigone is still suffering from (SVII:279).56
As for Polynices, the other brother who is not also Antigones Father, he
shares in the singularity of this unthinkable crime in having had with his
Father the same Mother, in having also come from Jocastas ill-fated womb.57
Bataille asks, Is there anything more firmly rooted in us than the horror of incest? For to contemplate even having such desire in ones life, let
alone being begotten by a god foretoken case of it, may bring on a feeling
of horror akin to death; because, Bataille adds, we look on physical union
with the mother or father or with a brother or sister as inhuman.58 Mostly
we feel we would rather die than even go there in free association, or wake
to an accursed dream of it, let alone discover that this is where we are from.
Alas for Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, she always has this horror buried
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 53
deep inside her, and sometimes most traumatically buried not so deep at all.
Hence, when it comes to Polynices lying dead, unburied on the ground, her
Thing is exposed and she needs to bury it further, both to conceal and to
commemorate its realness, as often is the way with post-traumatic repetition.
And when Creons punishment issues that Antigone will now herself be buriedburied alivethe idea is consecrated precisely for Lacan of Antigone
having always dwelt in the zone between life and death (SVII:280).
Even so, for Lacan, a beauty effect is what marks this second death
where the Thing appears, suggesting to him that following the Good, the
beautiful forms a second barrier only one that gets us closercloser to a
central, unspeakable field of radical desire (SVII:216), to what Lacan also
calls the field of our absolute destruction, beyond putrefaction (SVII:216).
If the Good is further from this field it is because its function is often to
morally reject desire; particularly, Lacan adds, in Freuds use of the good,
which can be summed up in the notion that it keeps us a long way from our
jouissance (SVII:185). For Lacan jouissance implies precisely the acceptance
of death (SVII:189). Hence, we shy away, but desire dams up. Beauty is the
phosphorescence left behind upon the gates, where thoughts of return will
lure us like that of forbidden fruit. So when Lacan notes beauty to appear
as instinctual excitement, he must add it can also stop desire frightfully
in its tracks; for apropos of the Thing we both desire and fear, beauty gets
closer (SVII:21617).59
Lacan thus alludes to a question of power (SVII:249) regarding beauty; for unless we are strong, the desire that beauty both thinly veils and
threatens to unleash may certainly overwhelm us. As leading onto ruin where
a life is soonest lost, beauty now issues what looks to be a harsh factum
of our experience, leading Lacan to bid that it is obviously because truth
is not pretty to look at that beauty is, if not its splendor, then at least its
envelope (SVII:217). But with this invocation of a truth so harsh it needs
beauty to encase itwhich, for Lacan, is the aesthetic phenomenon where
it is identified with the experience of beauty (SVII:217)we come to one
of Nietzsches key notes of 1888, which reads: We possess art lest we perish
of the truth (WP 822).
Nietzsche muses along similar lines in his Twilight of the Idols of the
same yearhis climactic final year of writingwhen observing that as well as
being a great stimulus to life, art also brings to light much that is ugly, hard,
questionable; only this time he asks: does it not thereby seem to suffer from
life? (TI IX:24) His solving of this paradox involves the tragic form of art he
held could not only lure us with its beauty toward frightful truths, but also test
and strengthen us in the processmaking of itself in this way a creative ethical
imperative.
54 /
The place we come to with Lacans Antigone may thus be said to bode
well with Nietzsches thoughts on tragedy and beauty: that it is a question of
strength (WP 852), as Nietzsche puts it, or a question of power (SVII:249),
as Lacan does, where one encounters beauty; that the strong can draw closer
to what tragic truths beauty refers towhereas for weaker types, it is more
a matter of needing to forget, of using whatever strength is left to keep such
tragic truths at bay.
That the tragic poet can aim precisely for these truths is what for
Nietzsche communicates a victory over them, a display of fearlessness in the
face of the fearsome and questionable (TI IX:24), which, Nietzsche infers,
can also lure spectators to a similar victory, from having faced in the process
their own most fearsome truths as well. But Aristotle had a different view as
to the benefits of tragedy, whereas Plato suggested little benefit at all, and to
the point where tragedy might be morally forbidden! In the following section
I approach the question of tragedys effects through Aristotles notion of the
tragic catharsisas Lacan and Nietzsche both have offered a critique of it. I
argue that Lacans critique supports Nietzsches in alerting us to an empowering ethical function in tragedy that had waned by the time of Aristotle, given
that he was already under the sway of a Platonist type inflationary Good.
3.3 Before the Good: Nietzsches Strong Dionysian Catharsis

At the end of a supplementary note in his Ethics Seminar, directly following
his three chapters on Antigone, Lacan offers that when inquiring into the
effect of tragedy, We always think we have to defer to Aristotle, but then fall
short insofar as the effect concerned cannot be fully explained in terms of
moral catharsis (SVII:287). Lacans comments on catharsis will instead relate
to the beauty effect already discussedthat which he takes to derive from
the relationship of the hero to a limit, which in Antigones case concerns a
certain At (SVII:286).
To recapitulate, this limit pertains to a sense of death additional to the
physical, yet increases the chance of physical death and even anticipates it.
Hence, the figurative term second death Lacan deploys. In Antigones case
it pertains to the memory of the intolerable drama of her house, which
Lacan reminds us is linked to a beginning and a chain of events in the
misfortune of the Labdacides family (SVII:2634). No ordinary misfortune
is that of Oedipus, incestuous Father of this house, so Antigone is borne
along by a passion that overwhelms any self-preservation (SVII:254). Her
life henceforth is played out such that always death encroaches (SVII:285),
which for Lacan is aptly signified in Creons order to bury her alive.
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 55
As acting on her desire, then, despite the deathly cost, Antigones is

a frightful beauty that eventually shifts the Chorus toward her. For where
there is desire both wanted and rejected: wanted because referring to some
instinctual excitement (SVII:249) and rejected through horror of consequencesthere for Lacan is also where the beam of desire is both reflected
and refracted in the imaginary, which is the effect of beauty on desire
(SVII:248).60 No doubt this startles us; but still, Lacan adds, one cannot
say desire is completely extinguished (SVII:249). Beauty is this shunned
desire glowing in its not too distant absence; its rejected excitement is still
most real and redolent of power relations, Lacan adds, for it is notably
something that makes you lose them (SVII:249)which is why if feeling
weak it is best we turn away.
And turn away the Greeks of fifth century Athens did notturning up
en masse each year to see this desire unleashed in tragic art, at the festival of
Dionysos which thus, for Nietzsche, characterized the great strength of the
classical epoch. But Nietzsche was also critical of what he saw as Aristotles
later fourth-century view that tragedys aim was to cause half-medicinal,
half-moral discharges of the effects (WP 852), and of what he took to be
Aristotles great misunderstanding in believing the tragic affects to be two
depressive affects, terror and pity (WP 851).
In sleight contrast to Nietzsche, however, Lacan finds a way to give
Aristotle at least some benefit of the doubt. He points firstly to the incomplete nature of Aristotles Poetics, telling us that roughly half was lost,
which left the subject of tragic catharsis strangely isolated to only the
one passage (SVII:245).61 Then Lacan looks to Aristotles Politics where the
topic of catharsis is also raised, only this time in connection with music
(SVII:245). He quotes Aristotle saying there, the catharsis which I discussed
elsewhere in the Poetics (SVII:245), which suggests to Lacan that there was
more on catharsis in the Poetics than later had survived.62 In any event, the
implication is that what we do have on the tragic catharsis in Aristotle is
rather limited, and in this we can find Lacan in some agreement with the
philologist Nietzsche.63
When Lacan declares it is thus in the Politics that we learn much more
about catharsis (SVII:245), it is because he finds Aristotle stating that some
modes of music stimulated states of exaltation and Dionysian frenzy, in
which afterward one became calm; which is what catharsis means, Lacan
deduces, in Book VIII of the Politics (SVII:245). Except not everyone was
susceptible to exaltation, as Lacan decants from Aristotle the further observation that there were the as opposed to the ,64 where
the former were prey to other passions, namely fear and pity (SVII:245).
But these are precisely the passions assigned to tragic catharsis in the Poetics,
56 /
and these two only, by and large, mentioned several times as the principal
effect of tragic art in the half or so of the text we have left.65
So what happened to the ecstatic (SVII:246) when it came to tragedy? Why did Aristotle de-emphasize this key aspect of catharsis, reducing
tragic spectators to the pathological? As Lacan remarks, that Aristotle came
scarcely a century after the time of the birth of tragedy (SVII:247) would
make it seem strange if he got this wrong. But Lacan counters any self-doubt
by noting that the music Aristotle wrote of in his Politics also has a role in
tragedy (SVII:246), and thus along with it, presumably, the more ecstatic
types of catharsis as well.66
In any case, key socio-symbolic changes occurred in the century following the birth of tragedy it took Aristotle to arrive. Athens had peaked
in the fifth century following stunning military victories over the vastly more
numerous and powerful Persians, but then declined heading into the fourth
after the long and costly war with Sparta that Thucydides founded history
as a discipline to record so well.67 Socrates and his pupil Plato had appeared
in the course of this decline, with Platos own pupil Aristotle coming after
again in the reign of Macedonia and Alexander the Great.68 Of all this timing,
Nietzsche had much to say in relation to tragic art and what it implied of an
older, stronger Hellenic instinct that was in the process lost. For right from
his first work, The Birth of Tragedy of 1872, and through to those last such
as the Twilight of the Idols of 1888, Nietzsche held Socrates to enact a stance
fatal to tragic art through a form of rationality that was hostile to instinct (BT
135) (TI II, X). Nietzsche saw this stance as fixated on moralism, regardless
of any cost, making knowledge of the Good a sovereign of allwhich later
became further inflationary, and anti-instinct, when Plato then emerged.69
Although Lacan uses the phrase birth of tragedy (SVII:247) in his
Ethics Seminar without referencing Nietzsches classic of the same name, he
reverses this in his Transference Seminar of the following year in noting that
undoubtedly Nietzsche put his finger on it when pointing to a profound
incompetence of Socrates every time he touches on this subject of tragedy.
Lacan adds that to see this incompetence today it is enough to open at random any dialogue of Plato, offering Gorgias 502b-d as an example (SVIII
6:5).70 But perhaps it must also be said that the original title of Nietzsches
classic was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, which points to
his thesis therein that music incites not just the Dionysian ecstasy and
joy but also the tragic myth (BT 167)that tragedy arose from the
tragic chorus and was originally nothing but chorus, with purely religious
origins (BT 7).71
Returning to the Ethics Seminar, and Lacan also can be found remarking that there is after all some distance between the teachings embodied in
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 57
tragic rites and their subsequent interpretation in the form of an ethics,

which in Aristotle is a science of happiness (SVII:258). Moreover, Lacan saw
this science to be anchored in the Good that is essentially the philosophers
stone of all the moralists (SVII:96) and linked to an index of pleasure
(SVII:221)even joining Nietzsche at one point in calling it a phony science
(SVII:218).72 Lacan in fact is quite close to Nietzsche in noting that from
the origin of moral philosophy, it is this same Good we can find saturating
morality ever since Plato, certainly since Aristotle, and down through the
Stoics, the Epicureans, and even through Christian thought itself in Saint
Thomas Aquinas (SVII:221)the latter of which Nietzsche calls a Platonism
for the masses (BGE P).73
Lacan is nonetheless surprised to find Aristotle indexing the tragic
catharsis to pleasure74wondering why pleasure is invoked on this occasion given that certain ecstatic states, not to mention tragic events, can be
found causing a crisis that sometimes threatens pleasure (SVII:246). Here
we find Nietzsche as quick to pounce on Aristotle as Antigone is on Creon
when brought before the Good: for Nietzsche held that Aristotle was indeed
mistaken on the effects of tragedy and the belief that two depressive affects
in terror and pity could be so pleasingly purged through their arousal (WP
851). Nietzsche felt the opposite to be the case, that the habitual arousal of
terror and pity is harmful to health and disorganises, weakens, discourages, as a handmaid of pessimism, and later resignation (WP 851).75
And prone to resignation the Greeks were not for Nietzsche, but again,
far from itprone rather to what he called will to power in the will to
life (TI X:4), which better explains their achievement. Nietzsche will thus
instead employ his power differential when it comes to tragedy. And although
in some ways he arrives at something close to the distinction Lacan extracts
from Aristotles Politics between the pathetic and the ecstatic, Nietzsche will
press the point harder to suggest that in tragic art only the weak would feel
the fear and pity, whereas the strong were powerful enough to experience
ecstatic pleasure. Pleasure in tragedy, Nietzsche concludes, characterises
strong ages and natures (WP 852).76
To henceforth see tragedy as solely for the arousal of fear and pity, as
if only these two were invoked and could thence be purged as a way of selfenhancement, is for Nietzsche now not only to be physiologically in error
but to reduce things to the weaker subjects perspective, even though tragedy
was not meant for them (WP 852). But insofar as the weaker did partake,
Nietzsche inferred that so as to make tragedy palatable for themselves (WP
852), they had little choice but to see it as distorted through the halo of the
Goodas if tragedys aim were not only to cleanse us of fear and pity medically, but also to morally avert us from the dangers of beauty and desire so
58 /
that we could learn to shun these in ourselves, through feelings of horror

toward those on the stage who foolishly neglect our moral limitations.
In Aristotles case thus for Nietzschecaught up as he found him in
an epoch already under the sway of a Platonic kind of Good77the aim of
tragedy might only appear to be to return us to the calm, moral mean or
middle path, after a fright, that the timidly cautious would also champion.
And this denouement of a feeling of safety, from an affirmation of the small
and conservative as a lesson relearned, might also then explain any pleasure.78 But for Lacan as well as Nietzsche here, there is something more that
is happening...
To understand this something more, we must go back in Lacans Ethics
Seminar to the section prior to those on Antigone entitled The Function of
the Beautiful (SVII:23141). Here we find Lacan travelling back in time, back
before the emergence of the Platonic and the Aristotelian view of the Good
(SVII:216), to remark on the potlatch (SVII:235) economies of societies
past. In a practice Lacan notes has largely disappeared due to modern expansions, and that seems now counter-intuitive as well, the potlatch concerned
ritual ceremonies of not the competition for and accumulation of goods but
the extensive destruction of a variety of goods, consumer goods as well as
luxury goods and goods for display (SVII:235).
What this suggests to Lacan is that before the Good of Plato, and before
this Good would demystify again in modern times to the level of the economy of goods (SVII216), earlier cultures had enabled through the destruction
of goods an access to that radical field of desire that is itself destructive in
many respects. And whereas this field now is difficult to even acknowledge
as real, the potlatch for Lacan bears witness to a time where it was possible to retreat from goods and the conflict they cause (SVII:235). For it
was a retreat that enabled a maintenance and discipline of desire, due to its
conscious open destruction of goods (SVII:235), based on the transgression
of taboos in the Good that normally service the accumulation of goods in
the workaday ethical register of utilitarianism (SVII:216).79
Lacan gives two examples of how this forgotten practice can re-emerge,
with the second far less welcoming than the first. He mentions first how at the
start of the twelfth century, the barons of Narbonne returned to festivals that
involved huge destruction, not only of goods that were consumed directly
as part of the festivities, but also of animals and harnessesdestroyed by
feudal Lords who would throw down challenges and rival each other in
attempting to destroy the most (SVII:235). Then hauntingly so from our
modern perspective, Lacan mentions a kind of destruction of goods opposite
to this consciously and controlled way, namely, the massive destruction
of our world wars that, for Lacan, only seems to us to be an inexplicable
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 59
accident, or a sudden resurgence of savagery, whereas it is rather necessarily

linked to the leading edge of our discourse (SVII:235).
Creon is this leading edge in Lacans discourse on tragedy, as Creon
serves to remind us of the dangers of seeking the Good in a way that denies
anything other. Antigone is this Other for Lacan, for At concerns the
Other, the field of the Other, and it doesnt belong to Creon but is rather the
place where Antigone is situated (SVII:277)as the real repressedand the
returns indeed are tragic. So rather than a cautionary tale to install the Good,
Lacan has the tragic doing the opposite, warning of the Good that compresses
desire as if to snuff the Thing out, but only to cause even more destruction.
Like the potlatch, then, tragic art can also be seen to enable a controlled destruction of goods beyond the Good, and access to the drive beyond
our usual taboos and limits, through poetic acts depicted on the stage. But
although tragic art may only seem to be a weaker sense of this practice
because it is a simulation where actors act and spectators watch rather than
participate in the transgressionwhen we consider the caliber of the prose
involved, we get a much stronger chance of knowledge emerging that more
than compensates for any lack of physical agency: For with better knowledge
of desire we can sublimate it toward better ethics.
Nietzsche also shows awareness of this vestigial presence of organized
transgression when he describes tragedys Dionysian-religious aspect as the
will to life rejoicing in the sacrifice of its highest types (TI X:5). Both Kingly
Creon and the splendid Antigone are, for instance, cut down by the plays end,
albeit in different ways and for different reasons, as are Creons son and wife.
But that we are forewarned of these sacrifices by two Choral invocations of
what Lacan calls the most hidden and supreme god, Dionysos (SVII:268),
gives us perhaps our best indication of this older pre-Platonic, non-utilitarian
economy having presence in the play.
In the first Choral invocation, that preceding the appearance of the
prophet Teiresias, we are told of a King Lycurgus who, Lacan notes, was mad
enough to persecute the servants of Dionysos (SVII:281). Sparing ourselves
the grisly details, it suffices to know he is punished by the god in the harshest
possible terms. And although there is to Lacan nothing Dionysiac about the
act and the countenance of Antigone (SVII:282), still we can sense that King
Creon is in a similar position to this King Lycurgus: One more subtle but
perhaps also similar to that of King Pentheus in Euripides Bacchae, where
consequences soon emerge of denying the Dionysian affirmation of desire its
rightful place to speak.80
In the second invocation, that following Teiresiass prophecy of terrible
things and in what becomes the Choruss final song, Dionysos is invoked as
the god that saves (SVII:282). But the wine god of ecstasy is no ordinary
60 /
savior, and no indication that all shall live. For Lacan he means the limits
of the field of conflagration have been breached (SVII:269), and that certain
individuals will now become, in the language of Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy,
returned to the core oneness of everything existentas if the individuation that separated them was the primal cause of evil, a spell that the
mystery doctrine of tragedy would now see broken (BT 10).
Antigone in a sense is the ideal sacrificial object to embody this return
to continuity with beings eternal becoming. Lacan sees her as the anamorphic cylinder of the tragedy, raised to a point of vertigo in daring, beauty, and
desire until the only way is down in spite of herself as victim and holocaust
(SVII:282). She is for Lacan the advent of the absolute individual (SVII:278),
there as , bearer of the signifying cut that confers the indomitable power of being what one is in the face of everything that may oppose
(SVII:282). Thus within the structure of the potlatch, Sophocles can be seen
to be outdoing his poet rivals, like the Feudal barons Lacan referred to, by
destroying in Antigone goods of the highest possible value.
Apropos of the text, however, Antigones sacrifice may appear as selfsacrifice, to embody what for Lacan might be called the pure and simple
desire of death (SVII:282). But it is likely going too far if we then say with
Lacan, through his temporarily adopted [un-tragic] perspective,
that she incarnates that desire, the desire of death (SVII:282), unless it is
his second death we have in mindthat additional to the physical, but also
more conscious of it. For if Antigone were only weakly suicidal, her death
would have happened mute in the night. Instead it is little short of a nova
for Thebes that is not without its lessons for all, crossing twenty-five centuries
to get here.81
Nietzsches notion of the will to power can also hold Antigone to reach
a point where not only is she most willing, like every living thing, but also
most able to discharge her full quanta of strengthinsofar as life itself is
will to power, with self-preservation only one of its most frequent results
(BGE 13).82 In this way, Antigone is seen finding death at the proper time,
which for Nietzsche is to die proudly when it is no longer possible to live
proudly, of ones own free choice (TI IX:36). So the predictable death that
mars the outcome of her desire need not be read as weakly suicidal, for
survival was just subordinate to the main concern of a brother who is no
ordinary brother, but signifier incarnate of a tremendous storehouse of drive
stemming from her Atbeyond what for Lacan is the limit concerning
the relation of mortals to gods (SVII:282).
This positive will to power reading also accords with what Lacan in his
Ethics Seminar calls the death-drive as a will to create from zero, a will to
begin again, a will to make a fresh start (SVII:212). For the chancing-all
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 61
of a second death, in reply to a repressive symbolic order, is a way to reclaim

desire from the reals lost and hidden depths. Even so, it was only by ill luck
that Antigone perished in the end, only moments before Creon and son burst
into her tomb to save her. Likely she felt that once her fate was sealed, up
in the tomb, she should immediately, actively, hang herself to avoid slowly,
passively, starving to death in the dark. But the sight of her corpse sets off a
tragic chain that leaves Creon severely punished for his blunder with respect
to the gods, but through two more innocents, his son and wife, who along
with Antigone will also perish.
Such deaths should come as no surprise given the kind of gods around
and festivals where tragedy was staged. For in an amphitheater of divinities
that were nothing denaturalized in the later Christian-Platonic sense, the
god and goddess bestrode the earth, a blast of corporeal passions, invoking
a different relation to law akin to the potlatch not long past. Here our taboos
on sex, death, rapturous frenzies, and forbidden truths could be briefly suspended by the deities on such occasions. Moreover, Lacan adds, not only do
societies live very well by reference to laws that are far from promoting their
universal application, but even more remarkably, these societies prosper as
a result of the transgression of these maxims (SVII:78).83
Sophocles Antigone refuses to hesitate here, and this is whence her
splendor comes. As Bataille would say, the power of her beauty stems not
from being meekly suicidal but in assenting to life up to the point of death,
mindful of the return to continuity implied, which Bataille saw as the
meaning of eroticism and sacramental element of the older religions,
where transgression through sacrifice was ritualized and periodically sanctioned.84 But as Lacan reminds us, we Christians have erased the whole
sphere of the gods (SVII:260), replacing it with a God-of-the-Good, but
also with the barrier of a now maligned beauty that distorts the second
death (SVII:260). For our Christians fear that beauty will only lure them
to a second death in an afterlife of hell; whereas our secular utilitarians
fear the ruinous expenditure of all their works, rendering them dead and
bankrupt to this material world.
This also recollects the difference between Antigone and Creon in relation to their desire: Antigone is closer in the place of beauty, toward the second death where she barely veils its erotic splendor, as she is more conscious
of her desire and its deathly consequences. Creon, conversely, has no idea of
the tragedies that will befall him, and in this way for Lacan typifies not the
heroic stance of race-is-run but the modern one of he didnt know, where
there is nothing beautiful about him until it is much too late; where, as Lacan
so aptly phrases, the mortal fruit that Creon harvests through his obstinacy
and his insane orders is the dead son he carries in his arms (SVII:277).
62 /
Here Sophocles seems also moved to his finest sentiments regarding

Creon, spoken through a messenger, who has just surveyed the kind of savagery that, as Lacan notes of our world wars, resurges only seemingly by
accident:
Chance raises a man to the heights, chance casts him down,
And none can foretell what will be from what is.
Creon was once an enviable man;...
Now all is lost; for life without lifes joys
Is living death; and such a life is his.85
In his own way then, Creon also comes to echo the rise and fall of
what for Nietzsche, as the self-professed last disciple of the philosopher Dionysos, is eternal recurrence (TI X:5)as Creon ends with this living death
where Antigone begins, where she is almost knowingly the sacrificial victim,
chosen by the poet in accordance with the potlatch ceremony and its ethics
of transgression.86 Like the finely cellared bottle that will not be drunk by
mortal lips, but smashed against the teeming voyage of lifes desireAntigone
is for Nietzsche the Yes to life beyond death and change (TI X:4), where
everything pertaining to sex and death is affirmed as guaranteeing all growth,
all progress, and future.
But Nietzsche felt the Christian-Platonism to come to cast an evil-eye
for filth and morbidity on lifes precondition in the genitive activities, thus
losing the positive sense of Dionysos, and the festival plays in his honour,
which deified the sexual in a religious-artistic manner so that specifically
the sexual symbol was to the Greeks the symbol venerable as such (TI X:4).
It was all fuel for the Dionysian catharsis, which through Lacans Antigone
we are also moved to here: Not, as Nietzsche emphatically concludes his
Twilight of the Idols, so as to get rid of fear and pity as if to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement dischargeas he found
that Aristotle understood itbut rather to go beyond pity and terror and
realise in oneself the eternal joy of becoming, which also encompasses joy
in destruction (TI X:5).87
Here with this Dionysian return to tragedy we can restore beautys path
to the truths of our existence, as a question of how much desire we can be
lured into affirming as we consider what our optimum ethical stance may be.
To make ready this stance, Lacan has pointed out in his Ethics that a radical repudiation of a certain ideal of the good is necessary, if one is to grasp
the direction in which our experience is leading (SVII:230). I have shown
this direction to broach the terrain that Nietzsche already inhabits with his
BEFORE THE GOOD
/ 63
contrasting of the Good to a much more favored tragic perspectivewhose

other name is Dionysos.
By directing this analysis to the City Dionysia where Sophocles Antigone was performed, a better ethics of transgression can be recovered that was
lost within the dominion of the monotheistic Good, which thought as if to
snuff desire out. For as Lacan put it, this snuffing gesture in the name of the
Good can hardly take two steps in expressing itself without sketching in the
ramparts that surround the place where the signifiers are unleashed and
the arbitrary rule of the gods hold swaywhere as a result of the Goods
returning repressed, gods and beasts join together to signify the world of
the unthinkable (SVII:314).
The next chapter turns to Lacans reading of Platos Symposium to study
the specific role of Socrates in the emerging of Western moralizing thought.
The aim is to see if this augments Nietzsches view that Socrates enacts the
anti-nature turn that left us unduly suffering and ignorant of ourselves, that
a continuing positive stance on such things as tragic art may well have alleviated in advance.
It is because the tragic epos does not leave the spectator in ignorance as to where the pole of desire is and shows that the access
to desire necessitates crossing not only all fear but all pity, because
the voice of the hero trembles before nothing and especially not
before the good of the other, because all this is experienced in
the temporal unfolding of the story that the subject learns a little
more about the deepest level of himself than he knew before.
Lacan, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
July 6, 1960
Chapter 4
Birth of the Good

Weak Ethics in Socrates Alcibiades
In chapter 3 we saw a strong ethics of tragedy in Greece prior to the Good.

This chapter takes Lacans reading of Platos Symposium in the 19601961
Seminar VIII, Transference, to see how it adds to Nietzsches view that the
Good Socrates enacts is hyper-denaturalizing. Section 4.1 examines Lacans
analysis of the Symposium speeches before Socrates. Section 4.2 examines
Socrates speech to find a denaturalizing zenith reached where the real is
occluded. Section 4.3 shows Lacans analysis of a final confrontation between
a manifestly pious Socrates and the sensuous Alcibiades points to a return of
the realand deepens Nietzsches final 1888 diagnosis of what he came to
call The Problem of Socrates (TI II) because of a Good that was excessively
anti-nature, anti-instinct, and hence anti-life.
4.1 Lacans Analysis of Symposium Speeches Before Socrates

It was already 370 BC by the time Plato writes of a drinking party that
Socrates attends in 416. With the twilight of Athens prime nigh ceasing to
glow, Plato forges in the dusk a classic in the history of the West become
known since then as Symposium.1 For it was at this symposium, as Plato
recounts, that the topic of Love was proposed for discussion, where Socrates
might have been last to speak if not for the intrusion of Alcibiades at the
end. Alcibiades was at the time a young Athenian general, of great and wild
repute. But before that, when younger still, Lacan tells us, Socrates was said
to have been his protos erasts, the first to have loved him (SVIII 2:3).2 So
65
66 /
with this late and drunk arrival immediately punctuating Socrates speech on
love, Alcibiades is in the position of what Lacan discerns is the demon of
Socrates (SVIII 11:13), akin even to an irruption of the real (SVIII 5:2).
Before this, things had proceeded in an orderly manner, with five fine
speeches delivered and captured by Plato even before Socrates was due. And
with such a diversity of personage before the watchful eye of Socrates, there
were likely to be no complaints from the twenty-five centuries of philosophy
to follow when it was proposed that their speeches should be in praise of
Lovejust as there were no complaints from Socrates himself, who proceeded
then to claim to understand nothing but love-matters (177e).
Lacan will allow that Socrates at least knows something about love, for
he places him at the foot of the longest transference that the history of
thought has known (SVIII 1:4). This chapter considers how Lacans analysis
of this transference, which was further instituted by Platos writing, sheds
light on Nietzsches view that Socrates was both agent and symptom of
the dissolution of Greece (TI II:2) and a two millennia corruption in the
field of ethics. For when Nietzsche asks: How did the most beautiful growth
of antiquity, Plato, contract such a disease? Did the wicked Socrates corrupt
him after all? (BGE P)generally his answer is Yes, while referring to what
follows historically as Platonism.
Nietzsche will give many names to this alleged corruption, a significant
and perhaps controversial one being denaturalizing.3 It names a process in
the field of morality that devalues and excludes very real aspects of nature
pertaining to desire by reinterpreting the instincts as vices or errors, what
Nietzsche often attributed to Platos invention of the pure spirit and the
Good, a dogmatists error, he adds, which left us prey to religion, for
Christianity is Platonism for the masses (BGE P). The present section
begins by gathering evidence for this denaturalizing in Lacans treatment of
the Symposium speeches prior to Socrates. Following that in sections 4.2 and
4.3, I discuss the speech of Socrates and his confrontation with Alcibiades.
Proceeding into the Symposium, then, and Phaedrus is first to give
speech to Love, calling it not just a god but also a great god (178a), even
the most venerable and valuable (180b). This he attributes to its greater
age, citing the theologies of Hesiod and Parmenides for support (178b). But
Phaedrus must then concede that this god seems oddly neglected by his fellow
Greeks, something he was constantly complaining (177a) of to the doctor
Eryximachos in the past. This had led the latter to suggest Love as the topic of
discussion, whereby Phaedrus was dubbed the father of the subject (177d).
But Love is not (SVIII 3:8) at all a god in Lacans view, although neither,
he adds, is it in Socrates eitherbecause for Socrates love is not something
divine, just something he loves, even that he only loves that (SVIII 2:10).
B I RT H O F T H E G O O D
/ 67
Meanwhile, Phaedrus might already be seen to be distorting Greek theology to suit his own purpose, which Lacan even foreshadows as that of a
curious hypochondriac (SVIII 3:7, 13).
This can be seen in the examples Phaedrus chooses to illustrate the
greater godliness of Love, as they seek their substantiation in the fact that
other gods had valorized a loving act between mortals by bestowing impressive rewardssuch as a returning from the dead in the case of Alcestis (179b),
or a more blessed afterlife in the case of Achilles (179e). For the ability to
bestow such rewards might suggest these other gods are of greater venerability
and power. Moreover for Lacan, there is almost something Christian in Phaedruss need to speak about theology in order to speak about love (SVIII
3:10)for it is not too far a leap from Phaedrus to imagine the greatest God
of all is Love, and only that, who is further the only God, and now so old He
predates even the entire universe by being its eternal Creator.
The significance of Lacan sensing a proto-Christian aspect in Phaedruss
view, or in Platos account of it, is that Nietzsche took Plato to institute much
of the denaturalizing of which the Christian God was the later fulfillment.4
But what Lacan does find of value in Phaedruss speech is that it introduces
us to the dialectic between the active lover, erasts, and the passive beloved,
ermenoswhere love is defined as the reciprocal function (SVIII 3:12),
where the beloved acts as a lover in return. This substitution of lover for
beloved bears not only on the signification of love to this day, for Lacan,
but also on what happens in transference (SVIII 3:1, 5)especially on the
secret of the transference to Socrates who often, Lacan notes, claims to know
nothing but to be able to recognise infallibly, wherever he encounters them,
where the lover is and where the beloved (SVIII 1:4).
Next to speak is Pausanias who immediately sets to correcting Phaedrus by claiming that Love, although indeed a god, is not one but two
(180ce), only one of which should be praised as high whereas the other
instead debased as low. Appealing also to theology for support, Pausanias
infers that the two kinds correspond to there being two Aphrodites: a high
and a lowwho he always takes to be present with love from her being the
goddess of desire or love-passion (180d). Lacan notes that the Aphrodite
he places on high comes from her birth having nothing to do with women,
from her instead being born from the splattering onto the earth of the rain
engendered by the castration of Uranus by Kronos (SVIII 4:5).5 Male over
female is but one of the binaries Pausanias makes where he privileges one side
over against the other.6 Thus, for the Aphrodite born of mother, from the
union, Lacan gleans from Hesiod, of Zeus and Dione who is a Titaness,
Pausanias feels able to place her with what Lacan notes is a depreciatory and
contemptuous accent (SVIII 4:5) among the lower common levels.
68 /
Once armed with this distinction of high and low, the discourse of
Pausanias leaves the realm of theology to enter one that for Lacan is akin to
sociology, becoming a kind of observer of societies (SVIII 4:5). As mostly
concerned with man-boy love, Pausanias notes that it is forbidden in the
totalitarian societies of barbarians and yet commanded in the totalitarian
part of Greece (SVIII 2:11). While in Athens, things to Pausanias fare best
of all because of supple interdictions to ensure that only his highest type
of love occurs (SVIII 4:5).
This notion of types refers to the other privileged binaries Pausanias
makes: that the highest love is when soul is privileged over body (180b);
when moral virtue is aimed at over sensual or material gain; when males are
involved but not females; and when everything is built to last rather than be
just a bump in the night. We may begin to suspect the usual Platonic privileging of an eternal, denaturalized Being over against natures sensual proliferations of becoming and differenceyet Lacan is skeptical of any claim that
Pausanias is simply Platos view put through an intermediary. Lacan senses
rather the psychology of the rich man (SVIII 4:7), more concerned for a
secure return on investment than for any chance of virtue, and suggests that
Pausaniass discourse is weighted to suggest the Gospels malediction that
what is really worthwhile is forever refused to the rich (SVIII 4:11), which
still accords with Platos general disvaluing of the materialistic. From a cryptic
clue given by Kojve, moreover, Lacan will even add that Aristophanes attack
of hiccups at the end of Pausaniass speech signals that Aristophanes is actually convulsed with laughterand so is Plato! (SVIII 4:112)
With close attention to the signifier, Lacan seizes on seven repetitions
of the stem paus (SVIII 4:12) in reference to the pausing of Pausaniass
speech, as Aristophanes tries to pause his hiccups, a term also playing on
the name Pause-anias in Greek (185ce).7 This suggests to Lacan that with
a rare parodying of the verbal devices of the sophist, Plato hints at holding
Pausaniass view to be something derisory (SVIII 4:12). What supports this
interpretation is that for all Pausaniass talk of a proper love imbued with the
desire of the beloved to gain the Good through the elder (185b), this elder
is still being paid sexually in return, a transaction that for Lacan seems far
from being Platos opinion (SVIII 4:9). Furthermore, when Socrates is later
given precisely this kind of sexual offer from Alcibiades, Socrates accuses
him of trading brass for gold (219a), which would be closer to Platos view
because, relative to Pausanias, Socrates is thus further down the denaturalizing
pathin privileging a deeper cut from the bodily real with his chasteness and
moralizing Good defined more against nature.
As closer to what Nietzsche would privilege, the doctor Eryximachos
is next and keeps to the division of Love into two by differentiating physi-
/ 69
ologically instead. High and low are now seen in terms of bodily health or
decay, the latter of which Nietzsche calls dcadence, a siphon by which the
will to power declines in a physiological regression (AC 17).8 But when
Eryximachos adds that medicine is knowledge of the bodys loves (186c),
Lacan also remarks that one could not give a better definition of psychoanalysis (SVIII 5:8). For the master-physician, according to Eryximachos,
must know to encourage the bodys nobler loves and substitute them for
all the baser, so that we ourselves become ennobled as we steer toward a
better choice of loves (186cd).
What Lacan must also point out, however, at the stage of science where
the Greek doctor dwells, is that his differentiating of health and sickness
involves inflating the traffic between man as a microcosm (SVIII 5:12) and
the macrocosm that surroundsas if something like a storm could directly
cause intemperateness in us, or possibly even vice versa.9 Nietzsche would
agree that to foster this kind of cosmological speculation today, after Copernicuswhere ever since we have been rolling toward X, away from the
centre (WP 1)(GM III:25)is to regress to what Lacan calls a primitive
position of thinking (SVIII 5:12), regardless of how fruitful a placebo such
cosmic positioning may once have been.
In recovering from hiccups Aristophanes is next and, with what Lacan
sees as a mockery of precisely this cosmological conception of man (SVIII
5:12), he proceeds to construct a fantastical story designed more for laughs
than for more false beliefs. He tells of us humans as originally like two people
fused into one, with increased power coming from two heads and eight limbs,
despite that our movements resembled clowning acrobats on the tumbling
mat. Only then we thought to challenge Olympus, and were split in two as
a punishment for this (189d90c). And it is thus that from an original other
half we feel torn from birth, incapable of harmony on our own, compelled to
re-find our other half in all our subsequent romantic ventures. Yet nowhere
else for Lacan in the Symposium speeches recorded by Plato is love taken so
seriously, or so tragically (SVIII 6:10)noting that Aristophanes is the first
one who speaks about love as we speak about it, in a way which grabs
you by the throat (SVIIII 6:9)!
This is because in his role as the comic, rather than as what pretends
to the cosmic, Aristophanes is the only one for Lacan able to refer with impunity to the genital organ as such (SVIII 6:16). In a way that recollects for
Lacan the dream work of little Hans (SVIII 6:16), Aristophanes imagines
that the gods re-screwed our genitals from back to front after our split, so that
henceforth we could fulfill our desire to remake one from two sexually and
gain some relief and satiety (191c). But by no means does Aristophanes
then reduce love to the pleasures of the bed (192c), and Lacan commends
70 /
him for noting that the seriousness we bring to love is too great to be
wholly explained in this way (SVIII 6:9). Nevertheless, with the absence of
any genital reference in the other speeches, we might wonder whether love
was really being discussed at all, or whether it was rather being occluded
through the gradually emerging Platonic aim of denaturalizationfor there
is nothing more nature than the genital function, especially in the throes of
the actual, physical, consummation of love.
Agathon speaks next but with little to allay this concern: Only a tenuous point of contact with the genitalia occurs, requiring of Lacan all the
due subtleties of interpretation.10 And whereas in opposition to Phaedrus,
Agathon will hold that Love is not the oldest but the youngest god, in simpatico with himand further in simpatico with the emerging denaturalizing
tendencyAgathon will hold Love to have removed the various violences
and strange doings among the gods and bring amity and peace, once He
began to rule them all (195c, 197b). But as Lacan will come to remark, all
this talk of the benign has little to do with the real divinities as they appeared
to the Greeksthe ever still sexualized, bodily divinities that Nietzsche thus
found to be non-denaturalizing in the excessive anti-nature manner of ensuing Platonism.
Nietzsche might even say here of Agathon, as one of the later poets
contemporary to when the Dionysian basis of tragedy is beginning to break
down, that he eulogizes Love with an accordant superficiality (BT 14). Lacan
also suggests that Agathons speech is that of a cheerful host that, because
lacking in truth, earns him such a rebuke from Socrates that Lacan will depict
it as his being executed (SVIII 4:13). But in Socrates own contributions
now to follow, whether there is any more truth to them is an open question: For although he will have little trouble in making dialectical prey of an
opposing view, this, Nietzsche reminds us, is often the diversion a philosopher makes so as to be able to speak dogmatically about his main interest
(WP 446). The enigma of Socrates is that this is not something he always
refrains from admittingwhich is why, perhaps, Lacan will soon be tempted
to join Nietzsche in finding Socrates this most questionable phenomenon
of antiquity (BT 13).
4.2 The Speech of Socrates: Denaturalizing with Diotima

With the enigma of Socrates sitting beside him, making ready for speechthe
handsome young Agathon, fresh from a speech of his own, is also in what
for Lacan is the beloved position of Socrates. Lacan moreover senses that in
Agathon the ermenos, the beloved, is going to become ertmenos, the one
/ 71
interrogated,11 as Socrates manoeuvres, manipulates, he is always the

mastereven though, Lacan adds, for us who are reading it there may
appear to be a way of escape (SVIII 8:4). Not so for Agathon, who sits a
little closer to the flame, whence he is captured by Socrates raising of what
is significant for Lacan regarding desire, namely: the function of lack (SVIII
8:4). For to love is to love some-thing, to desire it; but it has to be what we
lack or else we would be satiated, or else we would not want it (200ab).
This was Socrates proposition and Agathon is led to agree. But Agathon
had claimed that Love requires beauty in its chosen object; thus, Socrates
infers, Love itself must be ugly, if to love is to want what one does not have.
And because Agathon also had defined beautiful things as good, then that
Love desires them makes it lacking here too; making Love seem bad as well
(201ac). So much for what was meant to be Agathons eulogy on Loveand
so he repents in saying, I greatly fear, Socrates, I knew nothing of what I
said (201b); then, I see no means, Socrates, of contradicting you, let it be
as you say; to which Socrates replies, No, it is truth, my lovable Agathon,
whom you cannot contradict: Socrates you easily may (201c).
Socrates, however, can also be found contradicting truth. In exploring
Lacans reading of Socrates speech in this section, I show that false claims
are part of Socrates dialectical ascesis that, at the birth of the Good, seeks to
escape the real via an ascetic ideal according to what Nietzsche calls denaturalizing. This is because nature, for Nietzsche, is sensory, sensual, bodily,
earthly, presenting itself in degrees of variation, in nuanced gradations of
difference and flux. But any portion to which Socrates applies his dialectical
lens tends to get oversimplified into binary opposites.12 Everything is pressed
beneath an eitheror set of options, what Lacan also describes as the yes or
no, of presence or absence (SVIII 8:10). We see this in the case of desire
for Socrates when it is instantly caught in the binary of have or lack; two
choices only. This is how Socrates could make Agathons definition of Love
as desiring good and beautiful things entail that Love itself must be bad and
uglybecause for Socrates one only desires what one lacks, as if one were
the opposite of whatever is desired.
Such binaries also are visible in Socrates example of those who are tall.
They cannot desire tallness, he tells us, because they already have it (200b).
But a counter emerges if we consider tall people who wished they were not
so tall, say from hating the extra attention. Clearly, they are tall, yet they
desire it not, which entails that those who are both tall and happy with it,
do desire to be tall despite that this is something they have. Such could be
one of the lines of escape Lacan alluded to in the Socratic dialectic, yet
Socrates tries to account for this one in a revealing way. He tells us that for
the strong and healthy to desire to be soto desire something they do not
72 /
lackis to say they wish to remain so in the future also (200d). But what
Socrates fails to add is that this means they do in a sense desire what they
already have, for wishing to remain strong and healthy tomorrow does not
make one weak and sickly today.
This counter to Socrates reduction of desire to absolute lack can be
extended to include the Love that Agathon, by virtue of Loves accorded
godhood status, had defined as being of surpassing beauty and goodness
(197c). For this need not, as Socrates infers, prevent this god from wishing
to remain good and beautiful, or from desiring some other that is also good
and beautiful, whether in the same way or in a different way, like a fellow
divinity or an excellent mortal. Nietzsche might even say here, by way of his
major aesthetic distinction, that it is only the weak perspectiveas a state
of lack falsely universalizedwhich forgets that desire or love can also come
from states of overflowing strength and fullness.13
Nietzsche held this weak perspective to be plebeian, which for him,
moreover, was where all of Socrates looks, origins and character belonged
(PPP 17:144). Nietzsche held Socrates was rabble (TI II:3), and thus so used
to states of lack that he wished to moralize away that natural states of power
do subsist to conjure desire as a result of their relative fullness. To deny the
actuality of such power differentials is, for Nietzsche, a symptom of decline
by those unable to cope with actuality, who need to invent an opposite world
through moral-optical illusion (TI III:6) and call it the Good, with an ascetic
ideal enabling ones imaginarized ascent to this Being conceived as a binary
opposite to nature. Such a supreme Being, however, as Nietzsche reminds us
with aid of his favored pre-Platonic in Heraclitus, is forever but an empty
fiction that from fear, torpor, rancor, and lack, has only been lyingly added
(TI III:2).
Nevertheless, Socrates hesitates here, right where he deceives Agathon
by reducing desire to absolute lack, without making this predictable ascent to
Being and the Good in a straightforward manner. And for Lacan if Socrates
feels compelled to avoid this immediate ascent, it is for reasons not found in
the renowned classicist Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (SVIII 8:2), known for
his vitriol toward Nietzsche, but for reasons, rather, I outline below.14
Socrates in fact ceases here to speak in his own name. Instead he begins
to narrate a lesson in love he says was given to him by a Mantinean woman
named Diotima, who he also seems to claim, with a distinct lack of integrity
in observation reporting, was able by bidding the Athenians offer sacrifices
ten years before the plague to procure so much delay in the advent of the
sickness (201d).15 But as the commentary of Wilamowitz argues, if Socrates
has to defer to Diotima it is to displace responsibility for the humiliation
dealt to Agathons pride onto an imaginary third party (SVIII 8:2). Arguably
/ 73
Socrates had used the concept truth in the same way, when suggesting it
was not he but truth that had made a fool of Agathons argument. And
thus perhaps it is for similar reasons that Socrates now claims he had once
spoken to Diotima in much the same terms as Agathon had to him, saying
Love was a great god, and was of beautiful things, and that she likewise had
refuted Socrates with his own arguments, in showing by his own definitions
that god was neither beautiful nor good (201e).
Lacan, however, tells us he is completely against this position (SVIII
8:2), held by Wilamowitz, and against those satisfied with what he calls such
miserable reasons (SVIII 8:8). For Lacan wishes to make a rather more
sophisticated philosophical point, namely that Diotima is invoked because
things could not go any further with the properly Socratic method (SVIII
8:7), because the limits of its binary logic-chopping dialectic had already been
reachedfor in oversimplifying things, Socrates negates the real so that now,
having reached its periphery and in order to put forward a positive account,
he can only do so on the plane of myth.16 This, Lacan tells us, is what the hand
over to Diotima is really for, noting the same technique to occur throughout
the whole Platonic work, in the Phaedo, in the Timaeus, in the Republic,
where we find myths emerging, when they are required, to supply for the
gap in what cannot be assured dialectically (SVIII 8:9).17
Another line Lacan explores returns to the split of Aristophanes, suggesting Diotima might be Socrates other half, the woman who is in him
(SVIII 8:9). This can be so if Diotima pertains to the initial identifications
Socrates made with his mother, a mid-wife reportedly, like Socrates himself
would become metaphorically speaking, insofar as he depicted his dialectics
as a midwifery of the soul.18 And although Diotima is also literally no midwife, she does for Socrates have the gift of divination, of making divine things
appear to birth themselves in mortal souls. One can go further here in the
analytical direction, this time in relation to the concept of transference, to
suggest that Socrates deferral to a woman that taught him of love maneuvers
the transference of Agathon toward him. For Socrates has not only just shown
the younger up with superior dialectics, but has done so with a first example
that made him meditate on the notion of father (199d)and having made
short work of it from this ever loaded notion, if Father-Socrates then defers
to a woman, it is to put her up in the position of Mother, so that Agathon is
reduced to the place of a child listening to his all-knowing parents.
In this way, Socrates may have drawn from the primitive roots of the
unconscious, eliciting their transference toward him as the one supposed to
knowwhere the ermenos [beloved] becomes the ertmenos [interrogated],
as Lacan put it, then eventually another of Socrates erasts [lovers]. But as
we will see when it comes to Alcibiades, Socrates is not so easy to fathom
74 /
once he has maneuvered himself into the beloved position, and not only
because he will often paradoxically claim to know nothing, but also because
of what Nietzsche calls denaturalizingevidence of which begins to shine
most brightly now in the Diotima part of Socrates speech.
Diotima proceeds to take the argument beyond where Socrates and
Agathon left off, telling them both, in effect, that just because Love, by their
definition, desires beautiful things and thus cannot be beautifulthat this
does not make it ugly either. Rather it is betwixt the two (202b), between
being beautiful and being ugly; but this is where she must resort to myth
to say how this is so. For unless she can relegate Love from its completely
godly status, she would risk either blaspheming against the new notion of
gods that wants to portray them as perfectly wholesome, or risk abandoning
the Socratic reduction of desire to absolute lack.19
Lacan assures us that he has checked the innumerable mythical
accounts about the birth of Love (SVIII 8:11), and that Diotimas myth is
found in Platos Symposium and nowhere else. It tells us that if Love is forever betwixt having beauty and lacking it, this is due to his having Poros as
Father and Penia as Mother, where Poros is the personification of having many
resources at ones disposal, and Penia of being in impoverished lack (203).
In accordance with Socrates view of desire, the copulation of course
was of Penias prompting, from her being of the wantonness that comes of
lack. But that this occurred at Aphrodites birthday party is also meant to
explain why desire is always the corollary of Love, and why Love has what
Lacan calls an obscure relationship with beauty (SVIII 8:11)it is because,
Diotima suggests, Aphrodite is herself beautiful (203c). And although it is
unclear if Poros has a status of godthat Loves mother is Penia, lack, practically disqualifies both her and son. For a god can never be lacking in this
Diotima account, as such an oscillation between have and lack can make the
divine seem all too human. Love is thus suspended between beautiful and
ugly, where he is also suspended between the divine and the human, in this
between-zone as what Diotima calls daimnas an intermediary of the gods
and a great spirit (202e).
Diotima points to other intermediaries like doxa, opinion (202a), dangling not only betwixt gods and mortals but also between truth, which gods
possess, and ignorance, which we are of without them. The role of intermediaries is thus to be a traffic (202e) between gods who are beautiful, happy,
virtuous, wise, and humans who are ugly, sad, sinful, ignorant. And because
Love is between the two, Diotima can account for how wherever there is Love
there is both a lover lacking and a beloved who is beautiful, tender, perfect
and heaven-blest (204c). But when she adds that what is loved must also be
good, being at a loss to imagine why anyone would love or desire anything
/ 75
bad (205e), it reads as an allusion to what Nietzsche calls in Socrates the

absurdity of a doctrine of identity (WP 132), that bizarrest of equations of
reason = virtue = happiness (TI II:4), as if reason defined at the expense of
instinct is always virtue, always the Good, and what we always desire because
it always makes us happy. Psychoanalysis would also sense the absurdity here,
with its discovery of neurosis to be caused by repression. And though Lacan
already refers to Diotimas equation of desire with the good as a surprise
and as a leap (SVIII 9:2), Diotima goes further to suggest that not only do
we always desire the Good, we wish to have it forever [aei] (206a, 207a).20
With this typical Platonic wish for the eternal, aei, beginning to show,
Diotima will speculate on sexuality in a way that suits what Lacan notes is the
whole perspective which unfolds in the Socratic line of descendants, both in
Socrates and in Plato, which holds the generation and destruction that rules
the domain of what is perishable makes of it an inferior order of reality
(SVIII 9:2).21 For although the Platonic Socrates, via Diotima, must concede
that the aim of beauty is to lure us to beget, which touches most intimately on
our mammalian heritage, she interprets the aim of begetting to be an ascent
away from natures becoming by the reproducing of ourselves in offspringso
that part of us remains when we ourselves eventually perish. In this way, and
despite the explicit genital functions, sex is seen as a way to escape our earthly,
bodily reality of change and deathas a way to reach the eternal.
It is not only with these functions shared with animals that love
ascendsfor we can also, says Diotima, seek as lovers of fame to create
deathless memory of our valor (208ce). Additionally, we might arise
toward permanency and Being by loving and aspiring to the beauty of the
immortal works of poets such as Hesiod and Homer, or of lawmakers such
as Lycurgus and Solon (209d). But finally and best of all, says Diotima, we
might even reach the immortal heights and plenteous crop of philosophy
(210d), through a love of the highest beauties of virtue and wisdom, in a
ladder of love finally reaching the Good itself.
Diotima lastly gives a bottom-up summary of how our love of beauty
readies us for this ascent. First we recognize our love of an individual body,
our desire for its fleshy beauty; then we recognize the beauty of other human
bodies, thus recognizing the property of beauty in general. Now in the realm
of abstract qualities, seen by Plato as more real than the real itself, we can
continue our ascent by noting higher kinds of abstract beauty, like beautiful
organizations or bodies of knowledge; so that in the end, Diotima tells us,
we come to know the very essence of beauty in the beautiful itself which,
she concludes, is what makes life worthwhile to livefor this essence is
pure and unalloyed, not infected with the flesh and colour of humanity or
mortal trash; it is virtuous, Good, and what is more the truth (211c12a).
76 /
Here Socrates finally abandons the mask of Diotima and returns to

speak in his own name, concluding that of all this truth he is indeed persuaded and that this is why we must all, like him, and above all else, honour Love (212b). But for Nietzsche all such talk of a beauty-in-itself that is
moral and good because shorn of anything earthly or bodily stands at the
foot of our greatest blunder in the history of the West, as for him what we
get in Plato, Socrates, and Diotima is an aesthetics of decadence, insofar as
the beautiful in itself is a figment of the imagination like all idealism (CW
15), which, if taken as real, as a means to escape what is earthly and real,
can only then corrupt our instincts and capacities for a more robust reason.
Nietzsche saw that after a while such idealism would even seem required to
defend against the instincts as a state of emergency (TI II:10)when in
Freudian terms the repressed returnedeven though the idealism may itself
have let the drives dam and take up such excessive form.22
Yet almost as if to answer Nietzsches prayers retroactively here there
is suddenly a crash at the door; where, for Lacan, after Socrates fascinating mirage and however fascinating all these beautiful stories appear, we
are torn away from any world beyondas the entry of a drunken man,
decked in garlands and himself a feast, is enough to bring us back to it as
it really is (SVIII: 9:9).23
4.3 Enter Alcibiades: Renaturalizing with Object Agalma

Enter Alcibiades, who is going to change everything (SVIII 10:1), Lacan
tells us, and who immediately moves to place a wreath on Agathons head,
whose success in the theater they were celebrating. But Alcibiades fails to
notice Socrates there and inadvertently sits between them. When he does
notice, he jumps up startled into two accusations: First that Socrates was
lying in wait for him again; and second that with Agathon Socrates was once
again conniving to sit beside the handsomest person in the room (213c).
Socrates is quick to respond, begging Agathon protect him from the spiteful jealousy Alcibiades brings to bear whenever he finds him even to look
upon or converse with a single handsome person (213d). Banter ensues, until
Eryximachos informs the new guest he too must pay them out with speech
in praise of Love; to which Alcibiades retorts that it is Socrates who is so
jealous he would go mad to hear him praise anything else, even a god; that
Socrates would not be able to keep his hands off (214d).
Here Lacan detects an almost panicky shut up from Socrates, an
embarrassed wont you hold your tongue (SVIII 11:2). Yet Alcibiades tells
him to protest not, saying banter aside he could never praise anyone else in
/ 77
Socrates presence. Eryximachos beckons him to go ahead then, and praise

Socrates! whence for Lacan there results the new order of things, as now
each agrees to prescribe a topic to the person on his right (SVIII 11:2).24
But Alcibiades has agreed to praise and is uneasy at heaping so before the
others, as if to praise Socrates would be to speak some truth that, Lacan
thinks, might unmask him (SVIII 10:3). This could give Alcibiades too
public a revenge for the discrepancy in their views. Hence, they arrive at
what Lacan calls a gentlemans agreement (SVIII 11:3), that truth is not
only permitted but assured on Alcibiades proviso that Socrates intercede
should anything go awry.25
When Alcibiades does begin his praise, however, it is with two seemingly derisive similitudes. First he likens Socrates to the pudgy Silenos-figures,
crafted like jewelry boxes to house in their bellies images [agalmata] of
gods (215b). Silenos was a satyr companion of Dionysos, and continuing the
association Alcibiades secondly likens Socrates to the satyr Marsyas (215b),
the piping satyr who, Lacan notes, Apollo had flayed for rivaling his divine
music (SVIII 11:3). Alcibiades is again toying with Socrates looks, but it
also becomes a kind of circuitous praise when he adds that Socrates differs
only from Marsyas in seducing not by the pipe but, Lacan notes, because he
produces exactly the same effect by his words (SVIII 11:3).
Here the great Alcibiades, the proud, robust leader of men who is
wealthy, gifted, sired of finest stockand reportedly still as handsome as
ever26admits to being reduced to the condition of a common slave by
Socrates, intoxicated as with some kind of hypnoid state. Plato has him tell of
strange effects leaving him worse than any wild fanatic: With heart leaping, tears gushing forth, he admits he is left in a tumult by Socratessuch
that he feels his own is a life not worth living (215e6a).
Alcibiades explains that this is because Socrates alone makes him feel
ashamed for what he is, tells him he is sorely deficient and neglects himself
whenever he would attend to the affairs of Athens, that when he leaves he
falls victim to the favours of the crowd (216ab). But as I will show in this
section, Alcibiades is only being denatured here and given what Nietzsche
calls bad conscience by the Socrates to whom, nonetheless, he remains
most captive.27 Hence he runs; but is always brought back ashamed by former admissions (216c). There is something else that brings Alcibiades back,
however, critical to Lacans reading, which I also discuss to see what light it
sheds on Nietzschesand it arises when Alcibiades returns with what Lacan
calls a quasi-repetitive insistence (SVIII 11:3) to the comparison of Socrates
with the Silenos-figure.
Silenos was depicted as a pot-bellied drunkard, concealing wisdoms
deep inside, leading King Midas once to take him captive, to see if he might
78 /
extract them. This is why craftsmen contrived the figurines to open out and
house images of the gods inside, to represent this wisdom. Alcibiades is again
taunting Socrates for his looks, but also for feigning to be utterly stupid and
ignorant as if he were stalking the handsome, whereas actually when it came
to beauty he despises it [kataphronei] (216d). But as with the Silenos doll,
Alcibiades thinks he has seen this ugly casing open out to reveal the images
inside [ta entos agalmata] (217a), describing them with nigh an adolescent
gush as so divine and golden, so perfectly fair and wondrous (217a), that
he feels compelled to do, Lacan suggests, whatever Socrates is pleased to
command (SVIII 10:4).
Alcibiades wants these agalmata and, like Midas before him, thinks he
has a way of capturing his Silenos in order to extract them. For having heard
of Socrates serious affection for his youthful bloom (217a)what Lacan
more specifically calls his sex-appeal [hra] (SVIII 11:4)Alcibiades thinks
himself free at any time by gratifying Socrates desires to siphon all that
our Socrates knew (217a). As Lacan puts it, he tries to get Socrates to have
sex with him (SVIII 2:5), in a scene which is considered far from banal
(SVIII 11:4), leaving translators perturbed, wishing to proceed no further
(SVIII 2:67)! But if this indignation were to remain unanalyzed, it would
rob us of a key point Lacan wants to make apropos of the transference to
Socratesthat it is precisely in his failed seduction attempt that Alcibiades is
displaced from his prized position as Socrates beloved [ermenos].
Soon Alcibiades is organizing private wrestling bouts and inviting
Socrates for private dinnersfor all the world, as Alcibiades even puts it,
like a lover [erasts] scheming to ensnare his favourite (217d). But Socrates
continues to pass on any chance; until finally, a frustrated Alcibiades contrives
to have him spend the night and lays out exactly how he feels: that Socrates
is the only worthy lover he has ever had but only looks shy of mentioning
it. He tells Socrates he would gladly gratify him in this or any other need,
for he believes that in return he would gain the highest possible excellence,
that is, the divine agalmata (218cd).
If not for Alcibiades striking first, this would still have been the perfect
exchange envisioned earlier by Pausanias. But again we find Socrates rejecting,
and Lacan reminds us that this temperance is not at all in this context,
this pre-Platonic context, indicated as necessary or a virtue (SVIII 11:5).
Nietzsche would say that what Socrates exhibits here, in a time where sexual
hunts were a venerable outlet, a mode of bonding and a kind of sport
(WP 120), is denaturalizing as a means to powerthat as bearer of bodily
desiderata, Alcibiades is being steadily debased then entranced by Socrates
priestly otherworldly pretense of being a kind of mouthpiece of the in itself
of things, a telephone from the beyond (GM III:6).28
/ 79
Socrates can be read in this denaturing way when suggesting that if

it were true that there be some treasure in him to make others Goodthis
would make him owner of a stupendous beauty vastly superior to Alcibiades physicality. For this is where he rebukes Alcibiades for fetching genuine
beauties for reputed beauties, as if also valuing the physical were merely to
trade in brass for gold (219a)! But Socrates then warns Alcibiades to be more
wary, as if he were not now any container for some supernatural beyond;
saying, you may be deceived and I may be worthless (219a). And whether
or not this is what Nietzsche notes is the shrewdness in Socrates art of
self-mockerywhose sole purpose is to damage the feeling of rancour in
a tortured dialectical opponent at its roots (WP 432)it is almost for Lacan
as if Socrates here is admitting to us all: be careful, at the place where you
see something, I am nothing (SVIII 11:5)!
Despite the suggestion that Socrates may have nothing of a divine Good
in him and may be void and empty, Alcibiades is undeterred, and this makes
Lacan join in Socrates suspicions of his loftily stated motives, as if Alcibiades were only saying to himself I want it because I want it, whatever it is,
whether it is for my good or whether it is for my harm (SVIII 11:8). And so
Socrates will resist responding physically, remaining instead on his preferred
denaturing terrain, as Alcibiades contrives to wrap his coat about and draw
under his cloak where they slept all night and nothing more, as Socrates
laughs these youthful charms to scorn (219c)leaving Alcibiades feeling
as if he had only spent the night with a father or elder brother (219d).
Alcibiades calls this rejection Socrates deed of lofty disdain (219c).
It has him oscillating betwixt being at a loss and in abject thraldom, both
feeling affronted and marvelling at the sobriety and integrity of Socrates
(219d). Opposite values collide, reversing in what for Nietzsche is the denaturing direction, as now Alcibiades is beholding Socrates as assuredly a man
so sensible and so resolute (219d). Soon he is telling the symposium how
Socrates saved his life in battle, and seemed to fear not death, cold, or other
earthly deprivations. But Lacan suspects that Socrates takes to these privations
all too well, as if the will to nothingness Nietzsche saw behind all denaturalizing shifts into the beyond, where man would rather will nothingness than
not will at all (GM III:28), is here becoming manifest. Lacan in fact senses
this asceticism to be caused by a profound indifference in Socrates, even
toward what is most dramatic (SVIII 11:9).
Socrates could not be interested, let alone corrupted, by moneys or
honors, as Alcibiades explainsand would sometimes stand in the same
spot for twenty-four hours in some sort of philosophers daze (220cd). But
Lacan will refer to the latter as one of Socrates attacks, where there is no
way of waking him (SVIII 2:10), like the one that held him up on the way to
80 /
Agathons (174d), and that pertains perhaps to a psychotic core (SVIII 7:7).
Lacan feels able to conjecture in this pathologizing way because Socrates, for
him, is in short a madman who believes he is at the service, at the command
of a goda man who thinks by the strength of mere oracles to be a kind
of messiah, of a god that hallucinates him via an acoustic demon, so that
he avoids the holes into which he might fall (SVIII 6:5).29
This warning, however, deserts Socrates when finally before the courts;
where, Nietzsche notes, he was hindered by his daemon from saving himself
and thus insults the judges.30 But if Socrates fears not this deadly outcome of
his praxis, it is possibly from what Lacan calls his delusion of immortality
(SVIII 7:8), his belief in a reward for his ascetic ideal in a specially Socratic
looking afterlifeone made pure with all the the forms of what Lacan calls
his dialectic of the forced question (SVIII 7:7), which leads to the myth of
metempsychosis, or reincarnation, that always accompanies in the margin
the development of Platonic thought (SVIII 8:5).
Socrates would also at times claim to know nothing of all this, that all
these ventures in the beyond were, as he had earlier put it, as disputable as
a dream (175e).31 But likely he at least partly believes it, as does Alcibiades
when Plato reports him insisting for a third and final time that although
Socrates seems empty, as if he knew nothingand although like a mocking
Satyr he seems to offer up only a nonsensical discourseonce one got to
know him this discourse would open out for a glimpse inside, whence would
shine the divine agalmata, images of virtue, replete with all things proper
for the study of grace and worth (222a). That said, Alcibiades is clearly still
unready to forgive the sexual rejection dealt, what he calls Socrates rude
behaviour to him and many others who had found in Socrates a way of
loving so deceitful, that he might rather be their favourite than their lover
(222b). And so Alcibiades concludes his speech by turning to the other handsome beauty in the room to say: I tell you this, Agathon, to save you from
his deceit; that by laying our sad experiences to heart you may be on your
guard, and escape learning by your own pain (222b).
Here after what Plato reports as some laughter at the frankness that
marked this finale, Socrates pipes in with what Lacan very deliberately calls
an interpretation (SVIII 11:9). For Socrates seems to reverse everything
back in on itself when he proceeds to tell all and sundry that it is really
Alcibiades discourse that is projecting the Satyric or Silenic play-scene and
which is now shown up; that it was Alcibiades speech that had its real
objective concealed inside it and that came out only seemingly by chance at
the endand that this was to create a rift between Socrates and Agathon, so
that Alcibiades could remain both Socrates sole beloved and the sole lover
of Agathon; in short, to have them both all to himself (222d)!
/ 81
So if now Alcibiades is obsessed, as Lacan put it, inflamed by

Socrates love (SVIII 12:12), Nietzsche might call this the predictably negative consequence of the Socratic rationality at any cost that is neurotically
prejudiced in opposition to the instincts (TI II:11). Lacan will seem to agree
when with respect to Alcibiades libido he notes, Socrates only merit is to
designate it as transference love, to refer it back to his true desire (SVIII
12:12). For whether Socrates interpretation also brings Alcibiades back to
the path of his good (SVIII 11:8) is an open question Lacan suggests we
allow some ambiguity around, as perhaps his good is only the good as
Socrates conceives it (SVIII 11:8): And Socrates, with the superfetation of
the logical (TI II:4) Nietzsche deems he carries, might not know everything
about it. There might be an additional transference, and Socrates might be
somewhere wrong!
To be sure, Socrates could only ever at best be half-right about love
for Lacan, who has now an interpretation of his own. For much like all
philosophy to follow, Socrates cannot help but omit for Lacan what psychoanalysis has since discovered to be nothing less than the pivot, centre, key
of human desirethe concealed presence of a whole lot of partial objects,
which our Id is a vast trophy of (SVIII 10:9). Later Lacan will label such
trophies object a, and continue to depict them as constitutive of a heretofore
abandoned and discredited field that psychoanalysis enters after it has first
been excluded by philosophy (SVIII 10:12). And whether, as Lacan puts it in
the vernacular, this object a is breast, phallus, or shit (SVIII 10:12), of this
he takes Alcibiades to construct the agalmata he thinks he saw in Socrates.32
For as Lacan says elsewhere, again in the lingua franca, it is because Alcibiades has not seen Socrates prick that he can imagine all the treasures of the
moral Good when he exalts in Socrates the agalma.33
If Socrates nevertheless does still know something about love, what
he knows for Lacan is that when it comes to this agalma he does not have
it (SVIII 11:10). Hence, Socrates might sense that if he yields to the physical approach he would lose his hold as this lack would become directly
apparent. So if Socrates then does sense something of the real object aimed
at, behind the stand-in fantasy of the agalma, he senses it for Lacan in the
youthfulness of the handsome Agathon beside him and diverts (SVIII 11:10)
the desire of Alcibiades there. But still Socrates cannot know everything about
it there, for he cannot know, as the proto-typical Platonic philosopher, too
much about the objects a that the agalmata veilwhence for Lacan the agalmata came.
Lacan suggests the a are constantly covered over by philosophy because
they subvert its transcendental Good and are thus not manageable, not accessible to its dialectic (SVIII 10:12). Such objects are rather closer to what for
82 /
Nietzsche always makes up what the idiosyncrasy of philosophers (TI III:1)

has tried to escape with its romantic ventures into the beyond. For this lack
of access to philosophy of the objects a directly pertains to how here at its
Platonic stage: at the very birth of the Sovereign GoodSocrates begins to
denaturalize, and thus to misrecognize, the divinities as they existed for the
Greeksthose that Lacan reminds us right from the start in Homer could
only appear in the rock of scandal (SVIII 11:13), in the midst of all sorts
of unseemly behavior, even those as wanton as stealing, cheating, adultery
(SVIII 11:12).
Real gods can lack and real gods can fill, like us in a sense; for after all,
we made them in our own image, that is, in the image of our inner portions of
the real as it shows itself to our dreams and imaginaries. But as we have seen
implicit in the speeches of Symposium, Plato begins to elide the real of bodily
nature that the gods for Lacan are implacably a revelation ofto elide the
Freudian Thing and its collection in mnemonic precipitates of all our experienced objects aand decorates the hole this creates with puritan fantasies of
souls and forms, with idealisms of a beauty-in-itself which is nothing somatic
yet somehow more real than anything else; and also the truth, the essence of
virtue and all things considered, in an inflationary dialectic leading back up
to where there is projected onto what Lacan calls this now impenetrable
vacuum the Platonic notion of the Sovereign Good, occupying the centre
of our Being (SVIII 1:2).
All such talk for Nietzsche was but an attempt to feign a positive value
on the hypnotic sense of nothingness that occurs when the ascetic ideal is
rendered Sovereigncausing the kind of self-denial that is really depressed
and thus, like all pessimistic religions, must seek redemption by trying to
count itself as the supreme good, as if desperate now to call nothingness
God (GM III:17).34 And Socrates, who Nietzsche indeed held to be in some
such state of dcadence (TI II:1112), essentially does no other when he
attempts to purge and deny the properly Hellenic divine of its rich and deified,
instinctive animalitywhen Plato has him indulging the fancies of Diotima
toward the void and empty, denaturalizing heights.
Nietzsche attributes the historical success of this to the moral fanaticism of Plato; that, for Nietzsche, which destroyed paganism by revaluing
its values and poisoning its innocenceuntil what was then destroyed was
higher than what became master! (WP 438)35 This is likely what enables
Lacan to sense that Alcibiades is the demon of Socrates (SVIII 11:13), that
is, a message from the real gods that Plato and Socrates sought to leave behind,
which, like a knock at the door, late in the houras pre-denaturalizing godly
fictionsare forever among our most important modes of revelation of the
real (SVIII 3:8). For here they show us through Alcibiades, through his
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interruption of the nigh empty speech of everyone else, that love is neither
so spiritually harmonious, nor a ladder to some peace in the beyondthat
the desire it unleashes can also be demonic, a disturbance in the real of
Homeric proportions.
In his expressed grievances, however, Alcibiades also reveals what for
Lacan is the true representation of what is implicated in the Socratic ascesis, namely an asceticism, that is not absent in the dialectic of love as it
was later developed in Christianity (SVIII 11:13, 7). For although stopping
short of love thy neighbor, the Socratic love thy soul (SVIII 11:7) still
weds the real in Alcibiades to bad conscience, binding the instincts back in
on themselves by implying them all shameful and bad, as if they can lead
to nothing good, those of our drives that naturally yearn by word, sword, or
sexual conquest. But in his will to resist neurosis, Alcibiades, as one of the
stronger aristocratic Hellenic types, acts out with a perverse decadence that
is typical of what Freud calls the positive side of neurosis.36 This is evident
when Thucydides, for instance, although with little by way of moral accent,
will leave recorded for posterity that Alcibiades bore a quality in his way
of life that went far beyond the pale of the normal, that despite his many
excellences as a leader, would leave him prey to public envy and hysteria.37
What remains for Nietzsche at the ensuing decline of Athens is thus
two decadence movements running side by side (WP 427). The first matches Alcibiades as a sensual charmingly wicked decadence, loving art and
show38whereas second is the gloomy religio-moral pathos of Socrates
himself, discernible in the Platonic slander of the senses, denaturalizing
the Hellenic world in preparation of the soil for Christianity (WP 427).39
But even though this second, neurotic decadence can be the cause of the
perversion of the firstthe dominance of Christians to come will have it
acting as if the cure of the first, of precisely what it too often causes when the
repressed returns! This is as if Socrates, by way of setting up the ascetic bad
conscience in Alcibiades: through a dialectizing of his body with adversarial
binaries like the anti-nature Goodwere the means to cure precisely the wild,
uncontrolled transgression that this can inflame and cause him.40
Nietzsche thereby concludes on all this denaturalisation of moral values, this mischief that had already reached its climax in Plato, that Socrates
represents a moment of the profoundest perversity in the history of values
(WP 430). But a history it seems not easily stopped, as even to this day we
find those such as Lacan forced into respite from their work on Symposium,
tiring while trying to gather the many effects transmitted to us from this
moment at the birth of the Good that can indeed appear, as Lacan also puts
it, to be a sort of perversion without object; leading him to exclaim: This
Socrates is killing me! (SVIII 6:4)before confessing to feeling much better
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for it in the morning; whence he proceeds to note how Socrates, in the end,
before the courts and in provoking his judges (SVIII 6:5), seems only too
happy to be killed himself.
This is where Lacan remarks that when Nietzsche discovers Socrates in
The Birth of Tragedy, it went to his head, and that all Nietzsches subsequent
work came from therefrom undoubtedly his discovery that the Platonic
Socrates was of profound incompetence in every instance regarding tragedy
(SVIII 6:5). But for Nietzsche this was specifically because Plato and Socrates
became emigrants from reality (WP 429)that is, from the real tragedy
pursues and puts on the stagelusting instead for cosmic optimism as a
smokescreen for a bitter pessimism on the strength required to face life as is.
And likewise for Nietzsche was their transcendental psychology an attempt
to rid us of the bodily drives that no doubt have led to tragedy in the past,
but do not become any less real for any such idealist efforts in otherworldly
counterfeiting.
Hence, our Socrates in the endunlike Antigone, Iphigenia, and unlike
Achillesmourns not his departing of our beloved earth. He is glad to die.
He laments it not. And there is thus in his finale what Lacan calls a tragic
minimum (SVIII 6:5), as one senses that Socrates is finally freed of what
he could never really affirm: the real of earthly life and body without the
distorting halo of the Good. Hence his death reads as a happy ending. For
Nietzsche it was even a confession: as if Socrates were only saying softly to
himself that he was no savior, and had no cure; that death alone is a physician here, as Socrates himself has only been a long time sick (TI II:12).
Like the Silenos that Midas captured, it was as if the only wisdom
Socrates could offer in the end when, with his last words, he orders Crito to
send a cock to Asclepius41is that not to be born were best; and second
best to at least die soon!42 But nothing turns to gold today from touching this
position; as beneath much gold there is not even brass: only the objects a.
The Lacanian focus on object a would imply no contradiction to
Nietzsches position on our instincts when, for instance, in opposition to the
idyll of those such as Rousseau, Nietzsche speaks of a need to return to a more
frightful nature (TI IX:48); or, when rebuking the low-mindedness toward
sensuality of those imbued of Christian spirit, he speaks of the most honourable womans cults of Athens before the venerated symbols of sex (WP
148); or even when he speaks of a womans mouth, a girls breath, and a
girls breast as every bit delightful as the holy lie of the Book of Manu that
holds a girl is always pure in her openings below the navel (AC 56).
Due to the Freudian experience, however, that Lacan has subsequently
to draw onthe extra focus on object a this brings justifies our calling it a contribution to Nietzsches re-naturalizing project that is new. The aim becomes to
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even less ignore such objects insofar as their occlusion damns desire, darkens
perception with an evil-eye, then forces us to flee to whitewash the gaze in
some makeshift metaphysicians beyond. The aim would rather be a greater
mindfulness of the objects a, such that we can better sublimate them into a
will to power more deeply charged by this new assimilation.
On the question now of whether Lacans reading of Symposium misses
anything of what Nietzsche saw as denaturalizingagain, it is more a matter of emphasis than omission, and the parallels outlined above would for
Nietzsche be much to Lacans credit. Yet perhaps the great boon to be lost if
Lacanians bypassed Nietzsche would be his sustained, original insight into
the machinations of power hidden deep within the recesses of anti-natural
moralityof morality as anti-nature (TI V:4)and how its moral psychology feeds on a manipulative debasement of the earthly, sensuous, here-andnow, of much disservice to a potentially healthy epoch.
As the philosopher, Nietzsche is accordingly more often on the case of
philosophy; few from its history escape at some point a critical note seeming
thoroughly deserved yet ignored heretofore: least of all our Platonic Socrates.43
But things for Nietzsche would only worsen in the Christendom to come.
In the following chapter I turn to Lacans treatment of the Judeo-Christian
thematic, to see how this contributes to what is by far the most strident element of Nietzsches critique.
Chapter 5
God of the Good

Christocentric Oedipal Morality
In chapter 4 we discerned the Socratic origins of the denaturalizing Good. But

this kind of Good for Nietzsche also had a marked Judaic root to its genealogy, which later found fulfillment in Christianity by grafting onto Platos. This
chapter examines Lacans own treating of the Judeo-Christian thematic, to see
how this sheds light on Nietzsches view of Christianity as the fulfillment of
denaturalization and hence our greatest moral blunder in the West. Section
5.1 begins with the Death of God chapter in Lacans Seminar VII, analyzing what is to become Freuds linking of Oedipus to the murders of a primal
Father, a Moses, and a Jesus. Section 5.2 considers Lacans returning to this
issue in his Seminar XVII, where he comes to see in the Oedipal Father a
hysterics myth for aiding ones accession to a Christian civilization. Section
5.3 subjects Lacans modified account of this Christian-Oedipal morality to a
Nietzschean appraisal, to suggest that it is historically the Greek and Roman
masters who had to be murdered for the Christian Father, God or Law of
the absolute Good to take hold.1
5.1 The Deaths of God in Lacans Seminar VII

There is no decline in the later Freud (SVII:172), or so Lacan tells us in Seminar VII when turning to Freuds Moses and Monotheism text (SE23:1140).
Written late by the elderly Freud into his exile of the 1930s, while persecuted
by the Nazis for his ethnicity, it is a text where almost literally at the end of
it, Lacan suggests, one might say that the pen fell from his hands (SVII:171).
87
88 /
But that there was no decline in Freuds intellectual productions

towards the end of his life is contrary to what has been suggested (SVII:172)
to Lacan regarding Moses and Monotheism of late. As Yosef Yerushalmi was
to put it, for some time it seemed the only way to salvage the book is to
treat it primarily as a psychological document of Freuds inner lifeas it
was ostensibly rejected by historians and anthropologists alike, leaving its
psycho-Lamarckian assumptions in utter disrepute.2
By way of such assumptions and more, Freud came to believe there was
not one Moses but two, the first of whom was no longer a Jew, but an Egyptian
aristocrat murdered by those he sought to lead into the desert, away from
the polytheism of his birth. As I discuss in this section, this is the murder
Freud claimed was later repeated instead of remembered with a Christ upon
the cross, which also hearkened back to the original, more manifestly Oedipal
murders of the primal Fathers of the hordes Freud held we used to live in
(SE23:8990).3 But what Freud believes here seems far beyond his capacities
to know, test, verify, or discover; and Lacans affirmation that in this later
work of Freuds there is no decline, that nothing seems more firmly articulated or in any case more in conformity with all Freuds previous thought
(SVII:172), can be left looking somewhat double-edged.
Hence, it is unsurprising that when Lacan returns to Freuds treatment
of the Judeo-Christian thematic in Seminar XVII, a return I examine in section 5.2, he refers to the broadly Oedipal conjectures encountered in Moses
and Monotheism and its 1913 antecedent Totem and Taboo (SE13:1162) as
everything from a twisted, Darwinian buffoonery to a cock-and-bull story which is only myth, Freuds dream, and which to the independentminded makes no sense at all (SXVII:1117). Even so, what I consider in
section 5.3 is whether Nietzsches focus on how the denaturalizing in Christianity functionsand on the forebear in Judaism, as well as Plato, much of
this findscan be used to augment Lacans critique so as to further prevent
the distorting effects of religions based in anti-nature.4
Beginning then with Lacans Seminar VII broaching of the Judeo-Christian thematic, and proceeding by way of the chapter entitled The Death of
God (SVII:16779), we can note first up what Lacan observes to be a strange
Christocentrism in Freud that is needless to say, odd to find (SVII:176).
This perceived oddness is due both to Freuds public avowal of atheism and
remaining affinity with Judaic culture despite it, as both of these would not
normally be conducive to seeing Christianity as any kind of progressive fulfilment.5 But as is often Lacans method, likely born of his experience of
parapraxis in the clinic, wherever he detects anything strange or Other in a
text is precisely where he has us focus.6 And it is no different with Freuds
strange Christocentrism, when Lacan immediately begins to speculate that
GOD OF THE GOOD
/ 89
there must have been a reason for him to have slipped into it almost without
realising it (SVII:176).
The Christocentrism emerges across a long, historical conjecture drawn
by Freud in Moses and Monotheism about a series of three murders, each
marking out a stage in monotheisms progression. First is the conjectured
murder of the primal Father of the hordes Freud held we used to live in,
somewhere in the Palaeolithic eras. Second is the conjectured murder of the
Egyptian Moses by the Jews he was leading to the Promised Land, during the
fourteenth century BC. Third is the known murder or execution of Christ in
the first century AD, which Freud held somehow to redeem us of the earlier
two and thus bring the whole passage to what, for Lacan, is this strange or
odd Christocentric fulfillment (SE23:8890).
Lacan notes that here everything is founded on the notion of Moses
the Egyptian and of Moses the Midianite (SVII:173), that is, of there being
not one Moses but two. And perhaps heading off in advance the criticism
that this is rarely considered Freuds most solid piece of theorizing, Lacan in
fact suggests that among his seminar audience, eighty percent of whom are
psychoanalysts, the Moses and Monotheism book that launched this striking
thesis of Freuds should in fact be known by heart (SVII:173).
Within it Freud proposes that the first Moses, the Egyptian, is, as
Lacan puts it, the Great Man, the legislator, the politician, the rationalist
(SVII:173), who before heading off into the desert, first learned of monotheism from a Pharaoh Akhenaton. Akhenaton had earlier installed a monotheism in Egypt, what Freud calls the first attempt of the kind (SE23:20) and
Lacan the first attempt at a rationalist vision of the world (SVII:173). The
rationalism is evident in this religion being not centered on any image that
is animal-like or anthropoidal, but on an abstract image of the Sun symbolizing a sole head of a cosmos with no other gods, in a religion that Freud
notes excluded with much intolerance hitherto everything to do with myths,
magic and sorcery (SE23:24). But when Akhenatons reign passes, so too does
his divinity set like the sun, where, as Lacan puts it, the pandemonium of
the gods returns and utterly wipes out the reform, leaving Moses only to
keep the flame of this rationalist cause alight, by choosing people worthy
to found a community based on his principles (SVII:173).
So far we have seen what for Lacan is Freuds idea of the true Moses,
but now the task is to know how his message has come down to us
(SVII:173). This is where a second Moses, the Midianite, comes into play, as
the first was the one murdered by his little people who, Lacan adds, were
less docile than ours relative to socialism in a single country (SVII:174).7
The second Moses is the one for Freud who was the son-in-law of
Jethro, the sheep herder from the Sinai Peninsula, that is, not the rationalist
90 /
Moses from Egypt but what Lacan calls the inspired, obscurantist Moses
(SVII:172). This was the one whose Thing, Lacan explains, speaking from
the burning bush, affirmed itself to be a special God with the famous tencommandments, a hidden god who is a jealous God but not the only
God, note (SVII:173, 180). For it was not yet forbidden to honour other
gods, Lacan adds, only that one must not do it in the presence of the God
of Israel (SVII:181). This is the God that Freud refers to as Yahweh the
volcano god, reconstructible as an uncanny, bloodthirsty demon who went
about by night and shunned the light of day (SE23:34).
Freud held that this second Moses of Yahweh was later conflated with
the first of Egypt by the descendents of the Exodus, in their wish both to
cover up and commemorate how they came to join the other Semitic tribes on
the peninsulathose who belonged to Yahweh, of whom the second Moses
had become a priest. But for Freud that the demonic Yahweh also becomes
more like the Egyptian rationalist God, as most of the early life of the second Moses is replaced by that of the first, is only made possible because of
the resemblance of the fate of the first Moses to that of the primal Father.
Or as Lacan puts it: the murder, cover-up, and commemoration of the first
Moses in distorted form only draws its power from the fact that it echoes
the inaugural murder of humanity, that of the primitive father (SVII:174).
To explain this echo, we must recollect how Freud incorporates the
results of his earlier 1913 work, Totem and Taboo, in which he frames the
hypothesis with aid of Darwin, Atkinson, and Robertson Smith (SE13:1413),
that we had all originally lived in comparatively small groups or hordes
within which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual
promiscuity (SE13:125). This strongest male is in essence for Freud a violent
and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away his
sons as they grow up (SE13:141), acting as a formidable obstacle to their
craving for power and their sexual desires (SE13:143). Freud held that these
sons eventually band together, whereupon as brothers they arise to murder
the primal Father and devour him. But this is where for Lacan the fault
lies, because although the obstacle is removed as a result of the murder,
jouissance is still prohibited (SVII:176). Moreover, Lacan adds, the brothers
find that even more to the contrary of their motivations, the prohibition is
reinforced (SVII:176)!
Freud offers two main reasons for this reinforcement. First is because
the brothers find they have become each others rivals; for though they wished
it, none of them was of such overmastering strength as to be able to take
on his fathers part with success (SE13:144). Second is because they also
in part miss their primal Father; for although they resented him, they also
admired and wanted to emulate himlikely he protected them in the past
GOD OF THE GOOD
/ 91
as well. Hence, remorse emerges from what Lacan suggests Freud ties to
the ambivalence that is thus at the basis of the relations between son and
father, which shows itself in the return of love once the act is accomplished
(SVII:176). So the sons as brothers decide to make a pacta social contract
both to assist them with the exigencies of their present predicament and to
commemorate what seems to be their loss as well as liberation.
Totemic religion is what Freud tells us then emerges to consolidate this
pact, where a special animal is chosen by each clan as a father substitute to
protect them like an ancestral spirit. The chosen animal is likewise protected
by the clan, but only until the designated moment of a religious festival, where
the animal instead is slaughtered and eaten in a communal meal. This is what
Freud calls the ceremonial repetition of the killing of the father (SE23:131),
that by which the clan could re-access in symbolic form the original crime
that led to what Lacan now calls the origin of culture and the order of
law (SVII:176). But most importantly for Freud, in what he calls a deferred
obedience to the dead father who became stronger than the living one had
been, this order of law includes the moral restrictions pertaining to incest,
and hence the injunctions to exogamy (SE13:1423).8
Having recollected thus from his Totem and Taboo, Freud is able to
suggest that when a first Moses is murdered by his chosen people, from their
discontent with all the extra restrictions that came of being displaced of their
older religion, the people likewise encounter the same old fault and respond
to it in the age old way. The prohibitions they tried to escape from are only
reinforced, as again the perpetrators of the crime find themselves mourning
their loss, with each lacking the strength to take the leaders place on their
own. Thus eventually, through remorseful longing and the nostalgic wish
to undo what had been done, not only are the ways of Moses the Egyptian
returned postrepression and grafted onto those of Moses the Midianite, but
likewise did the latters Yahweh of fire and brimstone become more like the
purified and denaturalized moral, rationalist, and universal God of beams of
lightsaid to have first been tried on Egypt and the world by the Pharaoh
Akhenaton.9
For Freud, however, heading into the development of Judaism as we
know it today, there the momentum did not stop. For out from this very soil
would come a Jesus, thought by his believers to be the Father-God incarnate
as a special kind of Son, who is this time murdered without the subsequent
cover-up. Thus in relation to the previous parricides outlined by Freud, this
third murder is what Lacan observes translates and brings it to light, where
what in the light of Freuds text we are obliged to call Christian redemption
may be accomplished, as it is finally with the murder of Christ that the
monotheistic message is completed (SVII:174).
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By way of this exegesis of what for Lacan was Freuds Christocentrism,

we can see why it would be no accident for Freud that the starting-point of
Pauls new religious creation also consisted in the violent killing of another
great man (SE23:89). For although it was not this time the disciples that
killed him, still they would claim he had died for all our sins, or for our
original Sin as Paul had put it, in order to redeem usdisciples included!
Thus, it could seem that it was we rebellious criminals who had killed Him
again, only this time by de facto and without having to hide what thence
became our happy fault [felix culpa], by virtue of how it seemed to free
us of all our inherited guilt from killing the primal Father (SE23:86, 135).10
An element of cover up, however, for Freud must remain. For the
shadowy original sin (SE23:135) that Paul appealed to was naturally, for
the atheist Freud was, not really a crime against an imagined God of the
biblical traditionthe one Lacan also refers to as the God who doesnt exist
(SVII:181)but the crime against the Father of the hordes Freud held his
Jewish ancestors later acted-out instead of remembering (SE23:89) first on
Moses in the dark then on Jesus in the light. Even so, it was only the primal murder for Freud that led us to install a monotheistic God in the first
place, via an ambivalent longing for the absent Father in lieu of our remorse
for murdering him. Only now, as Lacan puts it, this process becomes more
manifest with the God upon the cross because of the drama of the passion which reveals that there isat least in ones heada resurrection after
death (SVII:177).
Freuds atheism thus concludes: we do not believe that there is a single
great god today, but that in primaeval times there was a single person who
was bound to appear huge at that time and who afterwards returned in mens
memory elevated to divinity (SE23:129). But Freud here is only replacing
one false belief with another, and already we can find Lacan stating in his
Seminar VII that the important feature of Totem and Taboo, whose primal
murder theory the Christocentrism of Moses and Monotheism relies on, is
that it is a myth (SVII:176).
I take Lacan to be already calling it a myth both because it never happened in reality as Freud thought, and because of the fault inherent in the
motivating belief that the Fathers murder would bring unlimited jouissance.
And although this latter fault for Lacan is already made visible by the myth
of Freuds, still we find Lacan claiming that at the same time it is also camouflaged by it (SVII:176). In the next section, through Lacans later Seminar
XVII, I consider the possibility that Freuds myth of a great primeval Father
is just the camouflage of a childs inflated memory of its own modern-day
father. Following that in the final sectionwhere we pass into a Nietzschean
appraisalI consider whether Lacans modification of the Freudian myth is
perhaps not without some remaining camouflage of its own.
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5.2 Recapitulating a Decade Later in Seminar XVII

Entering Lacans Seminar XVII, and focusing on its middle division entitled
Beyond the Oedipus Complex (SXVII:87142), we can immediately detect
Lacans return to Freuds handling of the Judeo-Christian thematic by virtue of
the chapter headings alone, such as Oedipus and Moses and the Father of the
Horde (SXVII:10217) and Yahwehs Ferocious Ignorance (SXVII:13342).
In the previous section I noted what Lacan in Seminar VII saw as a strange
Christocentrism (SVII:176) in Freud, and Lacans method of honing wherever he saw something alien or Other at play. And it is no different again in
Seminar XVII, where we find Lacan returning to this perceived oddness in
Freud to sift out some additional senses.
I also indicated that Lacan appears more critical of Freuds position now,
but he is even derisory when referring to the broadly Oedipalized, prehistoric
views of Freud as a twisted (SXVII:111) myth and cock-and-bull story
(SXVII:114), which Freud clings to as if it was real, necessarily happened,
and where everything began, including the necessity of being a psychoanalyst, whereas not the slightest trace has ever been seen of the father of
the human horde (SXVII:113). Nevertheless, while further evidencing what
I suggest is integral to his method, not only does Lacan now state that he
finds these twisted parts little cause to hide that he continues to preach a
return to Freud, he even claims that we must return precisely to the parts
that are twistedif only to gather that because Freud was a chap who knew
how to write and think, there must be a good reason for it (SXVII:111).
The main new reason Lacan offers for the primal Father belief was
Freuds being led astray by the fantasies of the hysteric. For Lacan it counts
as a refutation already that Freud seems to arrive at the idea of putting the
omnipotent father at the origin of desire by extracting its master signifiers from the hysterics desire (SXVII:129). This is because in referring, for
instance, to Freuds Dora case study (SE7:1122), Lacan notes that the hysteric
is often found wanting to idealize the father to the point of some inflated
master role (SXVII:95). Lacan even wonders whether this isnt where the
invention of the master began (SXVII:129).
Such a fantasy for Lacan, of an idealized Father as master of all, stems
from the powerful impression of the father that a child imaginarily identifies
with, memorializes and has recourse to in childhood (SXVII:100). The fantasy, however, rarely stops there, and soon Lacan must add that this hysteric
is wanting this master as someone paradoxically to reign over as wellso
that she reigns, and he does not govern (SXVII:129). But what gets typically
covered over by this ensuing contest between Father-master and hysteric is
that there is often, so to speak, no world title really up for grabs, as they
are often both as far from real and absolute mastery as each other. Both, for
94 /
instance, are subject to the exigencies of a civilization that none can wholly do
without. For the truth is that the father has to work, that a father has, with
the master...only the most distant of relationships, as Lacan puts it, for
it is he who works for everybody (SXVII:100), and often for someone else
who seems more like the master now, but who also has to work to control
the forces of lifewithout and within.
Such is often the hidden truth at the base of the hysterics desire to
build up and reign over a Father-masterthat he was only ever falsely
inflated or elevated in the first place. And it is thus for Lacan that what the
hysteric eventually unmasks in the masters function is that the master
is castrated (SXVII:94, 97)that is, that every father by necessity is already
subject to the law in some form, with little choice but to hand this down
to his children.
Lacan finds this same hysterics process in Freuds primal Father myth,
with the difference being that through the Christocentric lens, the primal
Father needs to be not just reigned over but cut down and murdered so as
to return in the mind as non-violent and all loving, as becomes the later
Christian idealization. But Freud has only taken the hysterics fantasy of the
great Father-master, which he had already theorized to be the inflation of an
infants nascent memory of its actual father, and projected it into the past as
if He were an actual prehistoric event! As Paul Verhaeghe explains, Freud is
here only giving form to neurotic desire for an almighty father-figure
when one is perhaps unlucky enough to have a weak fatherbut elevating
it, moreover, to a supposed historical reality.11
Lacan finds it not just strange but outrageous (SXVII:100) now that
Freud will maintain the existence of this primal Father at the origin of all
desire, who post-murder becomes the theistic all-loving father (SXVII:100)
essential to Christianity, while thinking this will also aid the progress of atheism. But if Freud thought he could foster atheism, regardless of this hysterical trajectory he drew, it was because of his reduction of the theistic to a
psychological phenomenonalbeit thought to hearken back to psyches long
past, via mnesic transmission through chromosomes, Lacan notes, he is
forced to admit (SXVII:115).
By seeing this primal Father myth as real, however, Lacan holds
that Freud himself leaves something idealized and completely masked
(SXVII:101, 125). And this is that it is not the murder of the primal Father
that created the Law, but rather the operation of the law today that determines and can cause such a fantasy (SXVII:129) in us of primal omnipotencewhether in ourselves or in the Fathers we wished to protect us, earn
our love, find us indispensible, and whose reins we one day hoped to take.
GOD OF THE GOOD
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In effect, Lacan is suggesting that Freud anachronistically confuses

cause with consequence, much in the way that Nietzsche found essential to
all religion, where ideas engendered by a certain condition have been misunderstood as the cause of that condition, resulting in the error of imaginary
causes (TI VI:4). For Freud can be read as reversing the casual sequence
in this way when he engenders out of the discontents with the law imposed
by civilization a fantasy of omnipotence, of having all the power and sexual
activity one can muster. And when Freud then projects this position of mastery, like the hysteric, into a figure of a fatheronly now a prehistoric Father
who first has to be killed as if He, His reign, and overthrow were realall
we are left ensconced in is imaginary causes, closer to myth than science.12
The reason then behind Freuds murdering of this Father in the space
of myth might be to enable us to overcome the fantasy of omnipotence in
ourselves, so that we might better accede to what is required of us by civilization and its law. This would mean that what Freud re-enacts and repeats in
symbolic form is our developmental task as children to distance (SVII:69)13
ourselves away from our more primitive and perverse, anarchic and tyrannical impulses. And what Lacan thus points to being latent in this myth of
the primal Father is that our actual fathers, as its actual origin, were always
subject to the order of law and never really all powerful mastersand that
what remained to be overcome was not them but this hysterics desire in us
that wanted to have them in this imagined primal-Master position.14
Lacan then turns to the specifically Judeo-Christian aspects of this
Father-Master, as they manifest themselves in Freuds thought, and asks:
Why does Moses have to be killed? (SXVII:115). We saw in section 5.1
that Moses, for Freud, has to be killed so as to come back, post-repression,
even stronger and more rational, moral and Egyptian with the later Jewish
prophets. But again Lacan is forced to concede that there is not the slightest
trace of evidence for this murder eithernot even in Ernst Sellin, the biblical
scholar whose 1922 work Freud invoked to buttress this strange view.
To approach Sellin, Lacan calls on another religious scholar, Andr
Caquot, to give a presentation (SXVII:20913). And alas for Freud, Caquot
finds Sellins work to be full of a merely arbitrary virtuosity which is indicative of excessive imagination, and whose Christian roots, or Christocentrism, is not possible to ignore (SXVII:2102). Lacan can only follow Caquot
in determining Sellin to proffer forth an absurd story that leaves us right
in the midst of ambiguity (SXVII:138).15 Thus, to answer his earlier question, restated now as: What in Gods name, so to speak, does Moses have
to do with Oedipus and the father of the primal horde?Lacan hints at a
displacement effect around something here latent as well, proposing that
96 /
we must now even seek to analyse the Oedipus complex as being Freuds
dream (SXVII:117, 137).
This is because contrary to the Oedipal myth that Freud borrows from
Sophocles, where the father is killed and leads to the sons jouissance of the
mother, the murder of the primal Father leads to no such thingand for
Lacan it is quite curious that the result is exactly the contrary, implying more
truth to the primal Father one because Oedipus was always blind, Oedipus
does not know (SXVII:114). But if Freud still needs the primal Father and
Moses murdered it is so that along the Judeo-Christian path the Father can
return among the prophets in a way explaining why they would also not
have anything at all to do, this time around, with jouissance (SXVII:115). For
here the Father is completely without the will to hoard in all the sexual relations. He is even accompanied by what Lacan depicts, drawing on the same
prophet Hosea Sellin focused on, as a ferocious ignorance toward sexual
relations, which are even denigrated as prostitution, znunim (SXVII:116).
The new Father-divinity behind this, Lacan reminds us, is Yahweh
himself, ferociously ignorant of whatever pertains to certain religious practices that were rife at the time and founded on a certain type of knowledge
sexual knowledge (SXVII:136). Furthermore, Lacan notes, this Yahweh is
also particularly hostile to all the other supernatural agencies who would,
unlike himself, blend in with all the inexorably sexual elements of nature
itself (SXVII:136). The great copulations of the Olympian deities, and their
fertility cults: not to mention Dionysos and Aphrodite themselvescan serve
as the appropriate points of contrast here.
As wanting to know nothing of sexual jouissance, whereas the jouissance
of aggression is still quite permitted, this Yahweh is now half way between
the violent hyper-sexual primal-Father that Freud imagines, and the Christian
God to come through Jesus as the all-loving Father up in heaven. And what
Lacan wants to point out is that this Yahweh of the midpoint, in having
already distanced himself from any explicit sexual jouissance before likewise
ordering the same for his people, brings us a step closer to the task of the
modern-day father that Freud held us destined to oppose in the Oedipal
manner. This is because unlike the primal Father, the modern-day father is
similar to Yahweh-Moses in being subject to the sexual taboos he has to hand
down to his children, the taboos that can enact an Oedipal structure as a
mode of resistance. Thus for Freud, the supposed death and return of Moses
can be seen to facilitate a path between the hyper-sexual primal Father and
the modern sexually domesticated Oedipal one.
Through Freuds Christocentric lens, however, the Christian Father-God
is said to go one step further in that, unlike Yahweh, he also creates a distance
from aggressive jouissance as well. Having shed the fire and brimstone through
GOD OF THE GOOD
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the countenance of Jesus, he now becomes the all-loving one, the one deserving
of love (SXVII:119), being this time subject to the taboos against aggression he
hands down to his flock also. For as Lacan had put it back in Seminar VII, once
the primal murder was repeated on Moses and finally on Jesus, the primitive
murder was redeemed, which, in Freud, eventually enables the function of
the Father to become a sublimation, a step forward in the apprehension of
reality and an opening up of a spiritualityor intellectuality [Geistigkeit]
(SE23:114)which acts as a normalisation of desire (SVII:181).
Freud can thus be read as doing two things here. First is seeing in the
Judeo-Christian myth a path that fosters and mirrors the development of our
ability for more advanced forms of civilization. Second is to help us adapt to
the values of the Judeo-Christian religions in a less rationally discordant manner: that is, by substituting his atheist myth of a primal and Oedipal Father
for the religious myth of a God in heaven. But as I discuss in the next section,
although Freud stops short of praising the Christian commandment to love
thy neighbor, still he can be read from the Nietzschean lens as overvaluing
the Judaic Law in a way that tempts him to universalize their very particular
take on the human conditionthat which Nietzsche argued was of very little
value and by no means an advance in intellectuality (SE23:1115).
Nietzsche held this Law of Judaism to be made up, rather, of the refuse
(AC 31) elements of advanced cultures, such as when the Greco-Roman world
enveloped Israel from the West. What I thus consider is the possibility that
what remains latent in the Freudian myth, even with Lacans attempt to more
aptly reduce it to the clinic of the hysteric, is that it is the actual GrecoRoman masters, who are actually murdered, for the Judeo-Christian Law
to take holdwith consequences that can hardly be praised as any kind of
advancement at all.
5.3 The Nietzschean Appraisal from The Anti-Christ

In section 5.1 I laid out Freuds tri-parricide view of a progressive JudeoChristian development, beginning from the account Lacan offers in Seminar
VII. In section 5.2 I sought what modification I could in Lacans later Seminar XVII, to suggest that the Oedipal primal-Father view is an atheist myth
designed to aid and abet, through symbolic simulation, our accession to the
demands of civilization. Now I explore a further possibility, inferable from
Nietzsches 1888 Anti-Christ, that it is really the Greco-Roman masters who
are murdered by the Judeo-Christian tradition, and who return not only to
Western culture at the cessation of the Dark Ages, but also to Freud as veiled
beneath his Christocentric myth. Here we arrive at the Nietzschean appraisal.
98 /
To begin with, we might examine what looks to be the great discordance

between the Judeo-Christian development as Freud in part reads it progressively, and the wholly regressive way that Nietzsche does. Freud suggests a
progressive current when referring to an intellectual advance toward ethical
heights (SE23:134), and, as Lacan noted, to a sublimation of the function
of the father as a step forward in the apprehension of reality (SVII:180).
Nietzsche, conversely, relative to the Greco-Roman status, sees the whole
current inclusive of its Christian form as a degenerative historical process he
names denaturalizing, referring to the harmful effects of what he observed
to be the denaturalising of natural values (AC 25).
To be sure, Nietzsche rarely finds much to praise in Judaism. But unlike
many of the anti-Semites of his time who he rarely refrained from inveighing against, Nietzsche determined Christianity to be far worse.16 This may
seem odd at first from our roughly secular vantage point in the West, where
Christianity has a marked residual presence. But the reason for it can be
grasped from a closer study of the concept of the denaturalising of natural
values, which, for Nietzsche, is typified most perspicuously in the history
of Israel (AC 25).
Nietzsche breaks this history up into five stages (AC 25), with each
depicted as more denaturalizing than the previous, ending with Christianity.
And although he fails to wholly keep to his numbering, with a careful reading
they can be extracted as follows, to see what light they throw on Freuds contrary claim of a Christian spiritual advancement, and to see if Lacans excavation of what he calls Freuds odd Christocentrism goes quite deep enough.
Following, then, the Moses-led exodus of the Israelites from Egypt
toward the Promised Land, which Freud speculatively dates at about 1350
BC (SE23:29), we head toward 1000 BC and to what Nietzsche offers as Israels
stage one. Nietzsche depicts this as the time of the great Kings, of Saul, David,
and Solomon, as the period of the Kingdom where, relative to what was to
follow, Israel too stood in a correct, that is to say natural relationship to all
things (AC 25). It was likewise for Nietzsche with their national God Yahweh,
the God of Israel who again, relative to what was to come, Nietzsche held to
be a natural enough expression of narcissistic affirmation, in accordance with
the logic of every nation or people which is grateful for being in power
and has a good conscience about it (AC 25).17
This national self-affirmation and protector god are kept alive, however, despite what for Nietzsche follows as Israels stage two, describing it as
anarchy within, Assyrian without (AC 25). Likely he is referring to when
the great Kingdom was forced to split into Israel in the north and Judah
in the southwith only Judah surviving, Freud observes, after the collapse
of the Northern Kingdom in 722BC (SE23:42).
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Afterward, moreover, while across the Mediterranean the Greek mind

was reaching a first Enlightenment in the West, Israel enters instead into what
Nietzsche would call a stage three, where regarding the desire to restore the
great Kingdom, every hope remained unfulfilled (AC 25). For the Kingdom
is not restored but the opposite when the Babylonians move in, the people
are exiled, and the great temple of Jerusalem is destroyed, which Freud dates
at about 586 BC (SE23:42). But instead of relinquishing their protector
god here, the people regress to what Nietzsche depicts as a priestly messianic
phase, and begin to reinterpret their disappointments post hoc.18 All misfortune is reinterpreted as punishment for disobedience of God, whereas any
good fortune is reinterpreted as reward for compliance. And in this way,
Nietzsche argues, the natural concept cause and effect is once and for all
stood on its head and banishedand all the remaining unnaturalness follows forthwith (AC 25).
Israels stage four appears as an exacerbation of this priestly phase where,
Nietzsche notes, not only is chance robbed of its innocence and misfortune
dirtied by the concept sin (AC 25), but the great Kingdom itself is reinterpreted as an epoch of decay (AC 26). Showing his moral skepticism here,
Nietzsche thinks it no accident that the powerful epoch being castigated by
the priests happens to be that where the priest was as yet nothing (AC
26). Thus, the Exile, the long years of misfortune, was transformed into an
eternal punishment for the great epochfor Israels stage one!rendering
what for Nietzsche was their proudest moment of well-being into nothing
but a danger, a temptation to be avoided (AC 25).19
This is where Nietzsche discerns the presence of the priest who writes
himself into every affairwhether birth, death, sickness or marriageso as
to denaturalize them, while claiming instead to sanctify them (AC 26).
For here the priest is King, with the priests will to power, and the antinature values ensuring his supremacy, held up as the Law, as if the will
of God (AC 26). Every deviation from priests, through what Nietzsche calls
an idiotic formula of obedience (AC 26), is held to be the very sin that
causes each and every misfortune, past and present. Nietzsche would thus
contest any attempt to see in this Judaic Law a step forward in adapting to
reality, normalizing desire, advancing the intellect, or regulating the instincts:
Because for him it was only from a very undesirable state of affairs, and a
very undesirable response to it, that this anti-nature Law of Judaism was
ever erected.20
Subsequently upon what Nietzsche calls a soil falsified in this way, we
finally come to Israels stage five, where there arose Christianity (AC 27).
But again, far from attributing any progress here, Nietzsche notes that only
an exacerbation of the heretofore denaturalizing took place. I will break up
100 /
the account of Christianity that Nietzsche proceeds to offer into a further five
stages of its own, and point to them first because it can seem as odd to find
such a radical anti-Christocentrism in a philosopher of the canon, even when
it is Nietzsche, as it is to find a portion of the opposite view in the founder
of psychoanalysis, given that it is Freud. And second, because I wish then to
use all these stages to frame an appraisal of the Judeo-Christian thematic as
Lacan treats it from Freuds Moses and Monotheism text.
The first stage of Christianity for Nietzsche is Jesus himself, seen as a
revolt against the profoundest national instinct (AC 27) of Israel and the
priestly hierarchy within it, by an underclass of the underclass within the
Roman Empire.21 Nietzsche suggests that as a kind of anarchic rabblerouser
and political criminal, it was even for his guilt that Jesus was killed (AC
27). Again it is rare to find Nietzsche with any real praise for Jesus, who he
infamously likens to a case of retarded puberty (AC 32). But relative to
what was to follow, Nietzsche finds a partial merit in his attempt to see the
blessedness of God as already present, as a Kingdom here, now, within
youalthough this, Nietzsche adds, is largely at the cost of having the mind
shrink back in horror from firm, touchable, reality (AC 29).
Paul follows as a Christian stage two, where Nietzsche finds him
instantly to undo all the glad tidings or evangelic elements of Jesuss
world in order to engage in precisely the logic of hatred (AC 42) that Jesus
resists and that Nietzsche sees as paradigmatic of ressentiment morality (AC
24)that which in the Genealogy of Morals he depicts as the slave revolt in
morality (GM I:10).22 This is where from an impotent revengefulness (AC
45), the lesser grades of a culture do not call themselves the weak, they call
themselves the good (AC 17), attempting thus a Gestalt shift in values by
seeking to make a virtue of their necessity. With Paul, however, Nietzsche felt
a most cunning version of this was created so as to target the Greco-Romans,
a version that takes little else from Jesus but the myth of his resurrection so
as to promote the egoism of a personal immortality (AC 41). For with this
afterlife ideal, and Nietzsche suspects more consciously than not, Paul felt he
could master even Rome (AC 58)that is, with idle promises of reward in
heaven or punishment in hell, he wielded the Beyond from which to radically debase the earthly will to power of Greco-Roman life.
So devastating was the anti-epistemic accoutrement Paul required to
convince us that it constitutes what is a stage of its own in Nietzschea Christian stage three. Here Nietzsche finds Paul and kind pre-emptively silencing
the very quarters from which the refutation of their beliefs would most likely
come. And that is sciencethe sound conception of cause and effect (AC
49), for it is all over with priests and gods if man becomes scientific (AC
48). Nietzsche asks us to just imagine these impudent saints in Athens to
GOD OF THE GOOD
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grasp the appropriate point of contrast, determining a lack of knowledge and

culture to be their founding premise, along with an ignorance which has
forgotten all shame (WP 197).
This anti-epistemic trait for Nietzsche is manifest in the slave revolt of
Pauls beseeching to forget the wisdom of this world (AC 45)and later
Church Fathers would do more than beseechbecause God, that is, Paul,
hath chosen the weak things, foolish things, base things, the things
which are despised, the intellectually underdeveloped included (AC 51).23 But
Paul likely had little choice at all when it came to finding support initially, as
not only did he greatly offend the Jewish priests, but, like Jesus before him, he
offered only an annoyance to educated Romansmostly because such sectarian squabbles could disturb the peace. Nietzsche actually took the What is
truth? question uttered by Pilate, the Roman Governor, in response to the
impudent misuse of this most philosophical of terms, to not only form the
sole moment of value in the Bible, but its annihilation even (AC 46).24
Alas not for long, as a fourth stage develops in a subsequent overthrow
of the Greek and Roman achievement. Even so, Nietzsche calls it the great
lie in history (WP 150) that Christianity had to take over because Rome
had fallen into corruption, noting here again that the actual causal sequence
was reversed, as Christianity was itself the corruption which, after a fourcentury-long subversion, finally caused the fall of Rome. This was done for
Nietzsche via the moralisation of the man of antiquity, weakening things
by letting natural drives be reinterpreted as vices (WP 150), which eventually conjoined the natural inclinations and a bad conscience (WP 295).
But to uncover the underlying cause of what enabled this revolt to succeed,
Nietzsche asks us to look no further than a preexisting moral fanaticism in
Greece, which he qualifies as in short: Plato (WP 438). For Plato had already
projected a denaturalizing Good as Sovereign in the cosmos, a monotheistic
Soul-of-souls whose bliss the ever-pious ascetics were promised after death,
beyond the grave. And such was the kind of fatal ambiguity for Nietzsche
that later enabled even the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand
themselves and to step on to the bridge which led to the Cross (TI X:2).
This is where the Judeo-Christian Law can be read as founded on something of primal-murder proportionswhere, as Nietzsche puts it, the effect
of this Law renders the whole labour of the ancient world in vain (AC
59). In a striking passage that harkens back to his qualifications as a Classics
professor at Basel, Nietzsche documents the sheer magnitude of the loss by
pointing out that all the scientific methods, the natural science in concert
with mathematics and mechanics, the sense for facts and the art of reading well, were already there in antiquity with its schools and its tradition
already centuries old! (AC 59)25 But all of this was lost for the millennium
102 /
to come, dominated by a Christianity that stemmed instead from a centuriesold schooling and technique in the art of holy lying (AC 44), the art
that Nietzsche notes also is not lacking in Plato (AC 55). And whereas
our retrieval of what was lost has made great strides since the Renaissance,
Nietzsche felt this was far from complete, forewarning still of all the bad
instincts, Christian instincts, somewhere within us (AC 59).26
With such bad instincts in mind, we come to a fifth and final stage
of Christianity in Nietzsche, constituted by the perverse physiological effects
he takes it to have wrung. These he observed to stem from depressant states
caused by the Churchs labeling as sin, or cosmic disobedience, the natural enough expressions of power, sexuality, and aggression that our biology
ensures will never go away, while at the same time having fought against
the intelligent, meaning it would likewise fail to wage an intelligent war
against passion, or learn to properly spiritualise, beautify, deify a desire
(TI V:1). Yet to Nietzsches reckoning, having made us ill in this way with
the emphasis of its discipline on extirpation (TI V:1), Christianity then has
the gall to posit itself as cure! For if in this repression one began to believe
the savior had come, that eternal bliss now awaited in heaven, maybe one
did feel a little less ill. But the earth as a Catholic madhouse in this way,
with epidemics of neuroses in bipolar cycles of penance-and-redemption
(AC 51), can hardly for Nietzsche be credited with humanitarian blessings
(AC 62). Rather, as promoting its expediency against what were in effect its
own self-violating constructions, Nietzsche concludes, Christianity needs
sickness almost as much as Hellenism needs a superfluity of health (AC 51).
It may appear now not just odd or strange, as Lacan had put it, but
false and harmful even for Freud to suggest any positivity to the Christian
unfolding, given the stages of denaturalizing just outlined. That said, Lacan
is also keen to note in his Seminar VII, breaking briefly with his reading of
Moses and Monotheism (1939) to draw on Freuds earlier Civilisation and Its
Discontents (1930), that there is a point where Freuds Christocentrism stops.
No doubt it is with aid of his mistaken belief in a murdered primal Father in
our chromosomes that Freud can see the God on the Cross as a redeeming
repetition and final spiritual advance over its Judaic antecedent. But what
Lacan wants to remind us of regarding this advance is that for Freud it well and
truly stops short at the commandment to love thy neighbour (SVII:1778).
I take Lacan to attribute to Freud two reasons for this. First is that
not everyone is really equal before the eyes of Freud, that is, not everyone
would seem to merit love equally simply because he happened to come by
(SVII:186). Second is that there is also a fundamental evil which dwells
within this neighbour (SVII:186), a real possibility of enmity. So to love an
enemy can devalue the love we have for a friend and diminish our means
GOD OF THE GOOD
/ 103
of self-protection. But Lacan interpolates further here, proclaiming that if

this fundamental evil dwells within his neighbor, then, as he personifies in
the first person, it follows that it also dwells within me, the unfathomable
aggressivity from which I flee, that I turn against me (SVII:186).
With this turning back on the self of aggression, we return to a key
link in Nietzsche, Freud and Lacan on the fundamental flaw of a Christian
Law that asks us to be Good with the strictest ideation, to attempt the castration, extirpation (TI V:2), as Nietzsche put it, of ever more of our naturally
occurring drives for power, aggression, sexual expression, so that we may love
everybody in a quasi-Platonic sense.27 For as Lacan notes, this is the Law
which causes sin (SVII:170), which causes more of what it seeks to forbid
and precisely by its attempt to forbid solike a damming of the tides in a
vulgar way, causing the levy to break. Lacan senses this paradox already in
Pauls Epistle to the Romans, citing from it to show how this Law causes our
desire to flare up only in relation to the law, whence it becomes the desire
for death as it takes on an excessive, hyperbolic character (SVII:834).
One should also mention the Bataille here who, in his 1957 Eroticism
which thanks Lacan as among a great many friends for their active support
in finding relevant documentssought to show that in the Christian world
the taboo was absolute, which deepened the degree of sensual disturbance by
forbidding organised transgression.28 Later, and in light of the often adverse
vicissitudes of this deepened disturbance, we can again find Lacan pointing
to Freuds horror at the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself, only
this time due to the extent to which the historical spectacle of a humanity
that chose it as its ideal is quite unconvincing, when that ideal is measured
against actual accomplishments (SVII:193).
In order then to shed psychoanalysis further of any potentially still
harmful Christian residue, we can further combine the perspectives opened
up by Nietzsches critique in section 5.3, with the Freudo-Lacanian accounts
of the Judeo-Christian theme discussed in sections 5.1 and 5.2. For although
Freud at the end of his 1927 Future of an Illusion can seem optimistic about
the final success of the voice of the intellect (SE21:53) over the clamor of
religionwe, today, may rightly suspect otherwise, not least because of the
remaining capture to myth in certain parts of Freud himself.29
A first point that can be made is that there is no actual murder of a
primal Father that the Judeo-Christian religions progressively bring to light
and redeem us of in an intellectual or spiritual advance. For as Lacan came
to affirm in Seminar XVII, this theory of Freuds was wild analysis at best, if
not Lamarckian fantasy (SXVII:115). But from Nietzsche we also can infer
that the only grand-style figures ever to have been overthrown historically,
in what could legitimately be mourned as a great cultural crime or loss, were
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the Greek and Roman nobles of antiquitywhose Christian overthrow was

indeed an intellectual disaster of murderous proportions, and whose legacy
did in fact return: in the Renaissanceeventually enabling a second attempt
at Enlightenment in the West.30
A second point pertains to how the Oedipus complex is what Lacan
comes to call Freuds dream in Seminar XVII, a shift from his Seminar VII
position that affirms as an original discovery Freuds view of incest as the
fundamental desire (SVII:667).31 For from this shift we can infer via the
Nietzschean lens that the standard Oedipal formation around incest is not
a universal essence causing all our actions, but rather only a potential consequence of imposing denaturalizing Judeo-Christian Law that makes taboo
on instinct far too strict. For if authority figures force a heavy damming up
of instincts, it is likely they would thence become in distorted formpostrepressionthe violent target of such instincts as well.
A third point can be that language and civilization do not by necessity
castrate us as Lacan in Seminar XVII suggests, but only do so insofar as the
anti-natural, Judeo-Christian type God-of-the-Good has come to prevail too
prominently. However, as such denaturalizing can paradoxically cause more
of the desire it commands against, we might indeed then require a distancing
from desire of such proportions to justify the residually morose term castration, that is, once these commandments had damned the drives until they
had become all too blackened, excessive, deathly, hyperbolic. For as Nietzsche
noted, the same expedientcastration, extirpation, is preached by those
too weak-willed to impose a moderation, who need thus a declaration of
hostility, a chasm between themselves and a passion (TI V:2).32
A fourth point is that the Greeks and Romans need not be idealized
in the extravagant or inflationary hysterics manner that Lacan depicts from
his observations of Freuds clinic. For as Nietzsche reminds us, the Greek
and Roman achievement in the arts, sciences and philosophyalong with
what goes with it in government and politics (AC 58)is tangible, empirical, superlative, real. And such masters do not need to be cut down like an
Oedipal primal-Father so as to take up some later normalizing ambivalent,
obsessional residency in our imaginaries: for they do not fit the mould of any
hyper-hetero ape, ferociously ignorant Yahweh, or emotionally manipulative
super-egoic priest. Rather they are our constant incitation to affirm earthly
nature: without and withinby sublimating full will to power.
Freud was thereby wrong on two counts to remark that at the very
beginning of the history of mankind was the superman whom Nietzsche
only expected from the future (SE18:123), for Nietzsches model for the
bermensch was never any mythical, ape-like primal-Father, but rather the
strongest, actually existing intellectuals among the Greek and Roman nobles.33
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Freud was likely grappling with his own Jewish fore-fathers with his Oedipalprimal-Father myths, particularly in Moses and Monotheism when he was
approaching death from cancer and anti-Semitism had reached most vulgar
form.34 But Freud perhaps was also doing what Nietzsche identified in Kant
as the move of a cunning Christian (TI III:6; AC 10, 55), that is, of correctly identifying the present limits of human knowledge and then, knowingly
or not, using this as grounds to construct and preserve extravagant beliefs
beyond them: For the complex psychology of an infant can be just as difficult
to verify as that of any Palaeolithic being; where objective speech acts are
barely existent, if not impossible to observe.
Freuds Judaic phylogenesis may nevertheless have also afforded him
great insight into our general neurosesfor in the post-Christianized West,
we are all participants of this heritage to a vestigial extent, like one big
unhappy family. We can even find Lacan in Seminar XVII remarking of this
Hebraic history that it is, perhaps, inconceivable that psychoanalysis could
have been born anywhere else, that Freud was born into it, and he insists on
this fact, that for attaining advances in the field he has discovered, he only
truly has confidence in these Jewsthe ones who somehow managed to live
on the reference to a text that was actualised by the ferocious ignorance
of Yahweh himself (SXVII:1356).
The problems of denaturalizing, however, will continue to arise if we
are universally assigned a development akin to that of a very particular kind
of neurotic, based in the hypersensitive recollection and fixation of parentchild relations forged in the cauldron of Judeo-Christian values. For from the
Nietzschean perspectives of section 5.3, seeing this Judeo-Christian path as in
any way progressive, as the later Freud did at least in partwhen it is imbued
with a value-system that arises historically from states of affairs and responses
to them which are hardly desideratarisks inhibiting us from continuing to
rework our proper Western heritage into real and actual intellectual advance;
whence we are again in the position to test for naturalness and recreate,
improve, any notion of Law or Good, rather than just conform to it.
What I would lastly recommend, then, is that psychoanalysis as a
venture might be better advanced in a far securer manner if it is read not
only with Lacans more expansive interrogation of it, but also with the more
deliberately sustained un-Christocentric philosophy of Nietzsche. For in the
following and final chapter I turn to how for Lacan and Nietzsche modern
science preserves some of the ascetic effects on desire that marred the views
of Platonism and its Christian form. Then I turn to the expressly pro-science
and, moreover, pro-empiricist elements in Nietzsches critique of ChristianPlatonismso as to eventually explore Lacans ostensibly different positive
comments on science from this critiques perspective.
Chapter 6
Service of Goods
Nature and Desire in Modern Science
In chapter 5 we met with Nietzsches criticism of a growing anti-science trait

in the shift from the Good of Plato to the God of Christianity, where as part
of the denaturalizing, natural causes were less sought in favor of the spiritual.
We saw how Nietzsche wanted to show that the search for natural explanations that characterizes science was seen as a threat by priests to the religious
spiritual edifice. That said, while appreciating the methods of science for the
knowledge they have accrued, the goods they can service, and the superstitions they have banished, Lacan and Nietzsche both suggest that science can
continue to function within modernity as a mode of ascetic self-deniala
denial in some ways similar to that which we saw characterizing the previous
denaturalizing stages of Platonism and its Christian form.
In this final chapter, I consider first how Lacans Seminar XVII builds on
the critique of science that marks the close of his Seminar VII, to see if this
extends on Nietzsches own critique of the ascetic effects of modern science.
This will make up section 6.1. Then I consider the specifically pro-science
and pro-empiricist elements of Nietzsches critique of Platonism, to discuss
Lacans ostensibly different positive comments on science from this critiques
perspective. This will make up sections 6.2 and 6.3 respectively. I suggest that
Lacans new theory of the four discourses, with its formalization of the variant
positions of jouissance, can deepen Nietzsches insights into the ascetic aspects
of modern science. I also show how Nietzsches more empiricist view of the
strengths of science can combine with Lacans focus on its formalistic aspect
to further reject any residue of denaturalizing morality.
107
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6.1 Lacans Critique of Science in Seminar XVII

The 19691970 Seminar XVII marks a turning point for Lacan. As seen in
chapter 5, he begins referring to the Oedipus complex as Freuds dream
which, like any, needs to be interpreted (SXVII:137).1 Grigg notes this as
sudden and unexpected coming in 1970, given the importance attached
to Oedipus in previous decades. But what Lacan wants to do now, Grigg
explains, is replace the centrality of the Oedipus complex with the theory
of the four discourses2an attempt to discern four key aspects of the social
bonds we form with each other where the Oedipus complex need not be
specially emphasized, or even included.
By elucidating the four discourses in this section, I show they are
Lacans way of going beyond an Oedipus complex shown to be Freuds particular way of going beyond the pleasure principle. The Oedipus complex
will thus no longer be seen as a scientific discovery of a universal about the
human condition, but rather as one of many possible ways of transgressing
our usual limits such that jouissance occurs, as an experience of what is still,
Lacan adds, the field that Freuds words dared to confront (SXVII:15), and
what other discourses have sought to conceal and thus revealed in symptom
form nonetheless.3 I also focus on the critique of science in these new discourses of Lacans, first to see how this sheds light on Nietzsches own critique
of science and then, in sections 6.2 and 6.3, to see if Lacans ethics retains
a residue of Christian-Platonism familiar to us from the empiricist parts of
Nietzsches critique.
Lacans four discourses are the masters, the universitys, the analysts,
and the hysterics. Each is represented by a set of symbols relating in a fixed
way, which rotate to move from one discourse to anotheralthough it is not
necessarily the case, Lacan adds, that things rotate in the same direction
(SXVII:188). Figure 6.1 shows how by rotating the masters discourse in the
anti-clockwise direction we arrive at the universitys discourse, also for Lacan
representing modern science.
Masters Discourse: S1 S2
$
a
Universitys Discourse: S2 a
(aka modern science) S1
$
Figure 6.1.
Rotating the universitys discourse two times more anti-clockwise gives

the other two discourses (see Figure 6.2 and SXVII:29, 169).
SE RV IC E O F G O O D S
Analysts Discourse:
a $
S2
S1
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Hysterics Discourse: $ S1
a
S2
Figure 6.2.
Beginning with the masters discourse, we can see on its top left an
S1, what Lacan calls the master signifier (SXVII:92), whereas the top-left
position it occupies he calls dominant (SXVII:43). The presence of S1 here
shows we are dealing with some kind of master. Later Lacan senses this topleft position to be that of the agent (SXVII:169), which along with the term
dominant can make it take on the connotation of conscious mind or ego. But
Lacan had earlier also labeled this position desire (SXVII:93), which can
point, moreover, to the presence of the unconsciousespecially when put
alongside his reminder that the agent is not at all necessarily someone who
does but someone who is caused to act (SXVII:169).
Beneath this top-left position, beneath the bar, is what Lacan thus calls
the place of truth (SXVII:93). This represents what has been divided off by
the subject, in order to achieve the predominant agency that defines it as
a subject on the top left. In the case of the master, what Lacan puts below
the bar is $, which actually represents the split subject itself, the subject as
divided (SXVII:15). Lacan is thus suggesting that the masters may not even
be aware of having split-offor repressedcertain aspects of desire in order
to achieve their mastery, that the masters discourse has, rather, masked
the division of the subject (SXVII:103).4
For Freud, what is typically repressed to this hidden place of truth is
the Oedipus complex. But Lacan wants to make this more generally applicable by suggesting that the truth is that what is in sexual knowledge is
entirely yielded up as foreign to the subject, what in Freudian discourse was
originally called the repressed (SXVII:93). This repressed could now be any
kind of prohibited and thus transgressive material, as long as it goes beyond
the pleasure principle, that is, beyond the limits usually set for instinctual
satisfaction, where we reach the jouissance which is what, Lacan adds, Freud
called the death instinct, because it can even be properly speaking what
goes against life (SXVII:45).
Parricide for the purpose of incest is one view into what lies in this
forbidden beyond, which could also contain anything pertaining to a loosening of the means required to sustain a masterly position. As MacCannell
puts it, What empowers the master is a limit to jouissance, while Lacan
refers to Fellinis then just released film adaptation of Satyricon, written by
Petronius during Neros first-century reign as a satire of its debauchery, as
110 /
a good example of drawing the distinction between what the master is and
what the rich are (SXVII:81).5 For here we can see just how many forms
of enjoyment that are not just sexual and excessive, but excessively perverse,
can dwell beyond the pleasure principle. Freud would not at all doubt this
as insist, rather, unlike the Lacan of Seminar XVII, that Oedipus was always
the nucleus.6
If the masters, regardless, now have little awareness of what is split from
conscious mind, it is for Lacan only because they have redeemed themselves
(SXVII:82), so to speak, with a strict attentiveness toward what is indicated
following the arrow to the top right of their discourse (see Figure 6.1), what
Lacan calls the place of work (SXVII:169), and where he puts the symbol
S2. This S2 represents the entire battery of signifiers which are already
there structuring our socio-symbolic world, forming a network of what is
called knowledge [savoir] (SXVII:13), which is not knowledge of everything
[savoir de tout], Lacan adds with Hegel in mindfor this does not existbut
rather all-knowing [tout-savoir] accrued so far, which in ordinary language
is called the bureaucracy (SXVII:31).
$
a
$
Figure 6.1.
The masters focus on S2 to ensure that all who can apply this know-how
are hard at work, where in the masters discourse, Lacan notes, this place
is occupied by the slave (SXVII:105). But beneath this S2 at work, on the
bottom right in what Lacan calls the place of production (SXVII:169), is
the symbol for object a. This is not just an object of desire for Lacan but the
object that bears the trace of jouissance. It signals what remains of, and what
can lead to, the most intense or anguished type of desire we have, luring us
back beyond the usual limits of the pleasure principle to repeat some kind of
ruinous, nonproductive, nonutilitarian lossto the point of masochism,
Lacan adds, or maybe even death.7
As Lacan will put it in Seminar XX, jouissance is what serves no purpose (SXX:10). But what in Seminar XVII he shows the master to want to do
is recuperate the energy of this object athis return or repeat which is the
discourses reject producing effect [effet de rejet] (SXVII:445)by turning
it into what can be used for the accumulation of capital (SXVII:177). We
can see this in the sexual nature of advertising, which relies on persuasion
by association, or in the aggressive hysteria surrounding resource wars set to
/ 111
secure the further production of what Lacan calls these tiny little objects a
that you will encounter when you leave, there on the footpath at the corner
of every street, behind every window, in this abundance of these objects
designed to be the cause of your desire (SXVII:162).8
Lacan senses these objects to be designed to be used as stoppers to fill
in the hollow, the gap caused by the loss of jouissancethat is, by the fact
that we have to distance ourselves from das Dingas if these objects then
could serve as compensation and let jouissance be recovered, while also
being put to some good use (SXVII:50). But because of such objects origins
in the split-off portions of the masters discourse, on the bottom left (see
Figure 6.1), they also bear unforseen displacements and returns. All of Lacans
references in Seminar VII to an impending ecological disaster and world wars
involving nuclear or biological weaponry belong herecatastrophes brought
about by the obsessive-compulsive competition for goods (SVII:2316). For
the master didnt know (SVII:236); this is the epithet Lacan gives to the
master whose discourse excludes fantasywhich, paradoxically, when the
repressed returns with extra force, is what makes him, fundamentally, completely blind (SXVII:108).
Modern science has a special role in this blindness for Lacan. We can
see this by rotating the masters discourse in the anticlockwise direction,
bringing us to the universitys discourse, where S2 comes to the dominant
position, on the top left (see Figure 6.1).9 Because S2 is knowledge, Lacan
also refers to this discourse as that of modern science, where the imperative
shifts from the commandment of the master to keep on working to the
imperative for us all to keep on knowing (SXVII:1056).
$
a
$
Figure 6.1.
That S1 moves to the bottom left, the place of truth, is Lacans way
of suggesting that the master still holds the secret to knowledge in the university situation (SXVII:183). Only by now, the master has long been convinced by science to invest in its research and development, leading to what
Lacan calls our capitalists discourse, with its curious copulation with science
(SXVII:110). Lacan had parodied this moment in history in Seminar VII by
saying, Give us money: you dont realise that if you gave us a little money,
we would be able to put all kinds of machines, gadgets and contraptions at
your service (SVII:324).
112 /
Lacans focus in Seminar XVII is on how this moment, when science

got its money (SVII:324), was institutionalized in the university. By placing
a in the top right of the universitys discourse, as what it directs itself toward
in the place of work, he does not simply refer to the service of goods that science supplies, but also to the a student (SXVII:105), who will do the work
to be befitted with the latest accoutrements of commodified knowledge and
the credit points meant to indicate their possession. But the aim remains the
same insofar as still represented by the a are the many goods and services
that the applied knowledge of the graduate will musterwhere, for Lacan,
as he put it in Seminar VII, the human sciences have no other function
than to form a branch of the service of goods and the service of powers
who imply, sadly, a no less systematic misunderstanding of all the violent
phenomena that reveal that the path of the triumph of goods in our world
is unlikely to be a smooth one (SVII:324).
The tragic element of all this is what Lacan indicates with the barred
S that comes next on the lower right-hand side, in the place of production,
a divided subject (SXVII:148), $, who can be neurotically repressed, dangerously ignorant, or simply discontent with itself. Here Lacan repeats his criticism of the ascetic effects of modern science, declaring that the discourse of
science leaves no place for man (SXVII:147), in that it continues to force us
to renounce desire and eventually leaves us ignorant of it.10 This criticism is
a consistent feature of Seminar XVII, but is even voiced strongly in the striking conclusion of Seminar VII where he remarks that science is animated by
some mysterious desire, but it doesnt know, any more than anything in the
unconscious itself, what that desire might mean (SVII:325). Such criticism is
also reminiscent of Nietzsche in his 1887 Genealogy of Morals suggesting that
the ever forward heads smoking day and night industriousness of modern
science can carry on the self-denying, ascetic ideal of hitherto Platonismas
too often the real meaning of science remains the desire to keep something
hidden from oneself (GM III:23).11
Nietzsche offered a similar line in his 1886 Beyond Good and Evil. In the
chapter We Scholars, he criticises the exaggerated manner of celebrating
objective spirit, with its related view that unselfing and depersonalisation
in the name of disinterested knowledge is the goal itself and redemption
(BGE 207). In his 1888 Twilight of the Idols, moreover, in the chapter What
the Germans Lack, he writes: For seventeen years I have not wearied of
exposing the despiritualising influence of our contemporary scientific pursuits, the harsh Helot condition to which the tremendous extent of science has condemned every single person today, so that our universities
are, against their will, the actual forcing-houses for this kind of spiritual
instinct-atrophy, for a brutal breaking-in with the aim of making, in the
/ 113
least possible time, numberless young men fit to be utilised...and used up

in the state service (TI VIII:3, 5).
Nietzsche also had many positive things to say about science, as did
Lacan himself. Science is a highly complex phenomenon, so it is to be expected that our recognized thinkers would find both positive and negative aspects
in the process of forming a nuanced view. But before comparing in sections
6.2 and 6.3 the more pro-science comments of Lacan and Nietzsche, I examine
now the last two of Lacans four discourses: the analysts and the hysterics.
For here we shall find some further shifts that Lacan makes from Freud on
the issue of science, which can place him differently relative to the epistemic
parts of Nietzsches critique of Platonism.
Rotating the universitys discourse anti-clockwise brings us to the analysts discourse (Figure 6.3), where the a moves to the top left in the dominant
position, and indicates how for Lacan the psychoanalysts position is substantially made from the object a (SXVII:42). This points to how the analyst, albeit by playing dead or silent, positions himself as the cause of desire
(SXVII:152), so as to draw object a out of the analysand.12 For although the
young student, for instance, was identified with this object a in the universitys discourse, this was still for Lacan in a more or less masked manner
(SXVII:148). Thus, the analysand, as prey to this mask, is represented in the
analysts discourse as split from the truth of object a by the barred S of the
top rightnow in the place of workwhich tells of the often embarrassing
work of free-association that the analysand can be directed to do.
(aka modern science) S1 $
Analysts Discourse: a $
S2
S1
Figure 6.3.
Knowledge or S2, on the other hand, slips down to the bottom left,
in the analysts site of truth (SXVII:99), where, as below the bar, it is also
part hidden. This is key for Lacan because it illustrates how Freud could err
by making the Oedipus complex play the role of knowledge with a claim to
truth, when, for instance, he would be quick to substitute this myth, this
Oedipus complex, for the knowledge that he gathered from all these mouths
of gold, Anna, Emma, Dora (SXVII:99). Lacan also makes an example of
Freuds primal Father and dual Moses theories to show how Freud was led
to construct more extravagant myths in order to prop up his Oedipal one
(SXVII:11117). This is a major shift for the Lacan who ten years earlier,
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in Seminar VII, had all but affirmed Freuds discovery of incest as the
fundamental desire, and its prohibition where culture begins in opposition
to nature (SVII:667). Seminar XVII seems closer to Batailles view that the
taboo on incest is but a special case of those we place on nature in general
pertaining to sexuality or death.13
To explain this sudden criticism of Oedipus, we can turn to another
point in Seminar XVII where Lacan states that he is distancing himself from
what Freud has said (SXVII:91). This is on the issue of science, where Lacan
suggests that psychoanalysis is not a science, because the unconscious is
foreign to the discourse of science, because what is reconstructed out of
this disjointed knowledge, such as we find it in the unconscious, will in
no way make it back into the discourse of knowledge, nor into its structural
laws (SXVII:91).14 Lacan wants to point out that science, rather, is the very
condition of analytic discourse because again, just like the masters discourse,
science leaves no place for man (SXVII:147), as it forces us to split off from
portions of ourselves, which form the unconscious and the demand for its
analysis. This was indicated by the $ in the bottom right of sciences discourse,
beneath the bar in the place of unwitting production. It also suggests how
Freud could only cause additional splittings off when, Lacan notes, he took
as knowledge that we discover in the subject (SXVII:113), his Oedipus as
if it were a scientifically proven, universal truth.
Lacans analysts discourse, conversely, is different to science, and different to Freuds, for it is aware of its S2 beneath the bar on the bottom
left, the hidden site of truth. Lacan holds this truth to be subjective, albeit,
by virtue of the signifier, a subjective configuration that has a perfectly
mappable objectivity that enables the assistance we bring in the form of
interpretation (SXVII:88). Even so, Lacan notes, an interpretation is not
this knowledge that we discover in the subject, but only what is added on
to give it a sense (SXVII:113).
This is because truth, for Lacan, is different, unique to every subjects
history, and shows itself in a fictional structure.15 That is, truth is never
known a priori as extant, it is not the case that the one Oedipal fiction fits
all, and Lacan can thus be found vociferating against any analyst who thinks
in advance to have closed all gaps between knowledge and truth, which is
not to say the two are wholly incompatible (SXVII:184), only that there is a
sense where the effect of truth is only a collapse of knowledge (SXVII: 186).
Such an awareness, albeit paradoxical, is to avoid the trap of being seduced
by the typical transference which, as Lacan discerns it, holds the analyst up
as the subject supposed to know (SXVII:186). For although Lacan wants
to make use of this transference, it is not without altogether insisting on
quite the opposite, that it is the analysand who is supposed to know, and
/ 115
who really does know, only not consciously, which is why they come to see
himand why, when they do, Lacan limits himself to a half saying, to
open ended comments, so as to halter the temptation of getting his analysts
knowledge to function in terms of truth (SXVII:523).
What is produced in such an analysis setting out, for Lacan, on the
trace left by the desire to know, for those bitten by this particularly problematic desire (SXVII:1067), is specified on the bottom right of the analysts
discourse as the master signifier, S1, which for Lacan pertains to the containment or commemoration of an irruption of jouissance (SXVII:77).16 But if
this containment should start to leak, the subject falls prey to neurosis. And
what Lacan wants to do, then, is trace this leakage back to its source in the
original S1 of the analysands past, by making use of the transference to the
one, or the master S1, supposed to know.
If we rotate the analysts discourse anticlockwise now (see Figure 6.2),
we can find the presence of this transference to the master indicated by the
S1 coming to the top-right position, in the place of work, as what the split
subject $ as agent now, on the top left, takes itself to be looking for. This
is of course the hysterics discourse that, as discussed in chapter 5, Lacan
defines as the one that wants a master (SXVII:129). But Lacan as analyst
is not seduced! For beneath this hysterics want, that is, on the bottom left in
their place of truth, is what Lacan also supposes to be their desire for some
far more abashing object a. And when it comes to this shame, Lacan adds,
You know for me that this means the real (SXVII:180).
Analysts Discourse:
a $
S2
S1
Hysterics Discourse: $ S1
a
S2
Figure 6.2.
Lacan thus begins his analysts discourse, from the dominant position,
not in the prejudicial guise of an Oedipal Father assumed as S1, but as a
semblance of a yet to be deciphered a, so as to produce that unique S1 which
is problematically repressing the a in the analysands own unconscious. As
forming a symmetry, moreover, we also find in the hysterics discourse the
analysand as the split subject $, on the top left, looking to the right for a
master S1, to do the work and produce knowledge S2on the bottom right
where knowledge occupies the place of jouissance (SXVII:94)on what it
means to master ones irruptions of jouissance. But the knowledge produced
through interpretation, which for Lacan can be limited to analytic know-
116 /
how to acquire S2 by listening to his analysand (SXVII:35), alerts the hysteric to the a in their own place of truth, in the unconscious, as indicated
on their bottom left.17
This a had only shown itself in the repressed form in the hysteric, which
is why Lacan had put the $ on their top left, to illustrate that at the level of
the hysterics discourse it is clear that we see this dominant appear in the form
of a symptom, where it is around the symptom that the hysterics discourse
is situated and ordered (SXVII:43). But as this a begins to surface, it might be
used by the analysand to seduce the master, by learning to mimic their object
a before drawing it away.18 Lacan refers this to the sexual relation, suggesting
of the woman that her truth is that she has to be the object a in order to be
desired, that it is only when this little a is substituted for woman that man
desires her, but this makes men go crazy, which thus reveals another sign
of the impotencewhere man, when he speaks, when he speaks as master,
discovers that he is a failure [en dfaut] (SXVII:154, 1756).
Insofar as this acting-out occurs on the effigy of the analyst, the hysteric
learns that there is no absolute Master, because the master is split off from
their object a as well. And for Lacan it was all along just this masters truth
that she embodies, and of which she makes herself the representative, that
the master is castrated (SXVII:97)as even for the master the a refers to a
jouissance already lost, as impossible as the real to live in like an open flame.19
This battle then that looked to be between master and slave was really
between the analyst and hystericthis insane operation (SXVII:106), Lacan
even calls it, blazing a trail beyond the pleasure principle, each in its own
unique way. But the result for Lacan means that there can emerge another
style of master signifier (SXVII:176), one this time to better navigate the difficult terrain of jouissance.20 The inflationary ideal of the Good, for instance, or
of the Good in the Name of some Oedipal Father: or of Goods-and-services
based on narrowing definitions of who we areserve as examples of old S1s
from Western history that might be better reconfigured to avoid creating a
barrier (SVII:216; SXVII:108) toward desire. For in this way, desire can be
better sublimated, from being better analyzed and better understood.
Even so, there is no guarantee that improvement occurs. Lacan himself
suggests this when agreeing with the Freud of around 1920 where his discovery backtracks (SXVII:77), at a second stage that opens with Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (SXVII:45), as opposed to the earlier Freud of optimistic
therapeutic claims. But on this question of therapeutic value, what I consider
now is whether the analytic process actually hinders its therapeutic prospects
by operating with a residue of the anti-empiricist epistemology that Nietzsche
rebukes in Platonism. Psychoanalysts have long claimed to know what they
were doing, to know, as Lacan parodies, that the mainspring of analysis is
/ 117
goodness or happiness [le bonheur], and that what they were doing was
based on sound, scientific knowledge of desire that could produce a solidly
autonomous ego or the ego free of conflict (SXVII:73). Yet this is precisely
where Lacan is found to berate them most now for their impotence, the
very impotence he also feels obliged to announce: which is therefore my
own (SXVII:163).21
Sections 6.2 and 6.3, accordingly, examine how Nietzsches anti-Platonist (or anti-anti-natural) ethics involve a final 1888 affirmation of the natural sciences and their empirical aspect especiallyas this aspect tends to be
less-emphasized in the Lacan who commends science more for its mathematical-formalistic aspect, seeing the latter as its epistemic basis and strength. It
raises the possibility that, through the Nietzschean lens, Lacans ethics may
reflect a denaturalising residue familiar to us from the history of Platos.
6.2 Nietzsches Empiricist-Centered

Positive Comments on Science
In essay III of his 1887 Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche makes a passing note
about the rare and noble exceptions to the ascetic ideal, and to the
discontent of a lack of ideals, he sees carried through into modern science (GM III:23). In his 1888 Twilight of the Idols and Anti-Christ, moreover,
Nietzsche turns his focus to these exceptions when praising the sciences and
what it would seem, for him, are their empiricist methods, for helping liberate us from the hitherto false beliefs and ascetic ideals of Platonism and its
later Christian form.22
My aim in this section and in section 6.3 is to see how Lacans ethics
compares with Nietzsches apropos of the positive comments they make on
science. For initially there may seem to be an unbridgeable antinomy between
theminsofar as Nietzsche, unlike Lacan, can be read as more favorably
disposed to the empiricist position and for reasons, as I show in the present
section, precisely related to his aim of surpassing the effects of Platonism and
its ascetic or anti-natural, denaturalizing forms.
Nietzsche surmises how the denaturing of morality has interfered with
epistemology in the Reason in Philosophy chapter of his Twilight of the
Idols. Reason is put in inverted commas in the title to suggest that irrational
factors have been at play under the guise of reason, what Nietzsche begins
his first sentence calling the idiosyncrasies of philosophers (TI III:1). Such
idiosyncrasies, Nietzsche held, emerge with the belief that for something to
be real or true and known as such, it has to be unchanging, permanent and
eternal, so as to guarantee our knowledge as secure and certain. This leads to
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the position: What is, does not become; what becomes, is not (TI III:1). For
when the world seemed full of flux and change, making it difficult to secure
the certain, the idiosyncrasy of philosophers was to conclude that becoming
must be an illusion, a deception which prevents us from perceiving that
which is (TI III:1).23 The moralizing tendency arises, Nietzsche notes, when
the question: Where is the deceiver to be found?receives the answer: It
is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral as well, it is they which
deceive us about the real world (TI III:1).
By noticing this reference to the senses as immoral, Nietzsche points
to a neurotic disposition that can form in relation to the body, which takes
our mammalian body as if it were only a pitiable ide fixe of the senses that
is imbued with impudence to behave as if it actually existed (TI III:1).
Nietzsche discerns an element of un-mastered trauma in this denigration
of the body, stemming from the fact that our body is part of the natural
world of death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth (TI III:1),
which because of the difficulties these can bring, leads to moral prejudice
against nature and body. The prejudice takes on the expressly anti-empiricist
epistemology insofar as empiricism privileges the bodily senses that are not
only part of the natural realm, but also what reveal this realm to be real as
the tangible, touchable, source of even more potential trauma in the form of
death, change, age, procreation and growth: in short, of any sort of becoming.
It is expressly relative to this neurotic intrusion into epistemology that
Nietzsche takes on his strictest empiricist position. He writes: We possess
scientific knowledge today to precisely the extent that we have decided to
accept the evidence of the sensesto the extent that we have learned to
sharpen and arm them and to think them through to their conclusions. For
the rest, Nietzsche adds, is only abortion and not-yet-science, which can
include metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology. Or, he continues,
we are rather dealing with science of formulae, sign-systems, such as logic
and that applied logic, mathematics (TI III:3).
To these latter formalistic sciences which, as I discuss in section 6.3,
Lacan tends to privilege, Nietzsche attaches the caveat that in them reality
does not appear at all, not even as a problem, and that just as little does the
question what value a system of conventional signs such as constitutes logic
can possibly possess (TI III:3). Nietzsche is likely referring with this caveat
to our logico-mathematical constructions insofar as they may be internally
consistent but proceed from premises that are not empirically real, meaning
that escaping the empirically real may be the precise value or purpose of
such constructions. For behind all logic, Nietzsche wrote in his 1886 Beyond
Good and Evil, too, there stand valuations or physiological demands for the
preservation of a certain type of life (BGE 3). And in such cases where it was
/ 119
found that the entire empirical world was incompatible with our categories
of reason, it was for Nietzsche the neurotic type, with its anti-nature valuations, which wanted to thereby conclude that our categories could not have
originated in the empirical world, but must once have dwelt in a higher
worldinstead of in a very much lower one, Nietzsche adds, referring to
earth and body, which would have been the truth! (TI III:5)
It is the inflationary claim of a supernatural source for reason (WP
579) that Nietzsche rejects here, and in many of his notes of the 1880s, holding as he does that reason derives from the sphere of utility (WP 579), as
a series of approximations that, depending on the type of subject involved,
are a simplification for practical ends, or a deception through the coarseness
of organs, or a variation in the tempo of becoming (WP 580).24 But for the
Nietzsche of Twilight of the Idols, it is again not the senses at fault for any such
coarseness or falsification of the empirical world, but rather our prejudice
in favour of reason (TI III:5). Nietzsche affirms that reason is the cause
of our falsification of the evidence of the senses (TI III:2), and what compels us to be necessitated to error when positing unity, identity, duration,
substance, cause, materiality, beingalong with the ego as being and the
ego as substance which, for Nietzsche, is what then projects its belief in the
ego-substance onto all things, until Being is everywhere thought in, foisted
on, as cause (TI III:5).
Although he will thus set apart with high reverence the name of Heraclitus for not, like the rest of the philosopher crowd, having rejected the
evidence of the senses because these showed plurality and change, Nietzsche
felt Heraclitus was also unjust to the senses for having rejected their evidence because they showed things as if they possessed duration and unity
(TI III:2). This is because again for Nietzsche, the senses do not lie at all, it
is only what we make of their evidence that first introduces a lie (TI III:2).
And it is the removal of such liesespecially those with a neurotic edgethat
is meant by his imperative to take the senses to sharpen and arm them and
to think them through to their conclusions (TI III:3).
To understand this imperative further, we can turn to the subsequent
chapter of Twilight of the Idols entitled How the Real World at last Became
a Mythwhere Nietzsche puts his views into wider historical context by
beginning with Platos idealism, passing through its exacerbated Christian
form, then following it through to the post-Kantian positivists, materialists
and mechanists of the late nineteenth century of his own time of writing.25
It is clear that Nietzsche mostly holds Plato responsible for the emergence of the anti-nature idealism in the West, which sought to repudiate
the senses so as to posit an unchanging world of Being beyond themthe
so-called real world that, for Nietzsche, was really a myth, ascetically
120 /
r epressive in its moral effects and anti-empiricist in its epistemic effects. This
is largely the culpable Plato portrayed in Nietzsches final 1888 works.26 But
previously in his 1886 Beyond Good and Evil, and in Book V of The Gay
Science also of 1886, Nietzsche had made some suddenly positive comments
about Platos idealist tendencies, but only, I suggest, because Nietzsche is keen
to stress that his own project in ethics is also a stage in advance of any reductive materialism or positivism of the late nineteenth century.27
In Book V of Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that all philosophical idealism to date was something of a disease, unless it was, as it was in Platos
case, the caution of an over-rich and dangerous health, the fear of overpowerful senses, the prudence of a prudent Socratic (GS 372). Similarly in
Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes of the Platonic way of thinking as
a noble way of thinking that consisted precisely in resistance to obvious
sense-evidenceperhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger senses and
more demanding senses than our contemporaries, but who knew how to find
a higher triumph in remaining masters of their senses (BGE 14). In both
passages, Nietzsche is praising Plato relative to we today who, he suspects,
could be equally wrong in affirming to the contrary of Plato that ideas
are worse seductresses than our senses. Nietzsche is in fact suggesting that
we, today, may have unlearned this being afraid of the senses far too
much (GS 372)!
It is not the libertine sensualists or hedonists that Nietzsche targets here,
but rather the physicists of today, and the Darwinists and anti-teleologists
amongst the workers in physiology, who, for Nietzsche, can all have the
de-spiritualising, ascetic effects discussed in section 6.1. This is because an
excessive anti-idealism may forget the question of ideals or values entirely, as
if commanding to us all: Only what can be seen and feltevery problem
has to be pursued to that point. Where man cannot find anything to see
or to grasp, he has no further business (BGE 14).
Nietzsche notes this as an imperative different from the Platonic one,
and likely has the Anglos in mind when he adds that, even so, it may be
the right imperative for a tough, industrious race of machinists and bridge
builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to do (BGE 14).28
Overall, Nietzsche is critical of this eternally popular sensualism and its
fundamentally plebeian tastes (BGE 14), because he senses it to occlude
the space required for the arts, and for genuine philosophers who should
be masters of the arts, to act in the sphere of values not only as creators but
as commanders and legislators (BGE 211).
In an earlier section of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche had also
stressed that relative to the bric-a-brac of concepts of so called positivism,
and the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philoso-
/ 121
phasters, there was even something of value in the sceptical anti-realists

precisely because of their retrograde inklings. The main thing about them,
Nietzsche notes, is not that they wish to go back but that they wish to get
away, adding that a little more strength, flight, courage and artistic power,
and they would want to rise, much like Nietzsche through philosophy, rather
than just return! (BGE 10).
Standing as he does, however, this side of a two millennia long denaturalizing, gives Nietzsche a directly epistemic concern regarding our modern
tendency to the kind of reductive or eliminative materialism or positivism
being discussed that can forget the question of values and the task of creating
improved ones. This concern is hinted at again in section 372 of Gay Science,
where Nietzsche recalls how Platos desensualisation was interpreted more
ideally, creating a long concealed vampire in the background who begins
with the senses and in the end is left with mere bones, mere clatter, with
only categories, formulas, words (GS 372). Nietzsche takes the amor and
dues of Spinozas amor intellectualis dei as examples of this desensualized
or denaturalizing inheritance, calling them mere clatter and no more than
that, with not a drop of blood in them (GS 372).29
The section ends with Nietzsches sudden praise, by contrast, of Platos
initial idealism, with the suggestion that perhaps we moderns are merely not
healthy enough to be in need of Platos idealism (GS 372), that something has
gone awry in the manner of our recourse to the senses today. This is because
Nietzsche saw that the excessive denaturalizing that Platos gambit eventually
left us prone to did not stop at the more inflationary parts of Christendom,
but extended also into the materialist overturning of such idealism in our
modern scientific agean age that thus for Nietzsche can still be trafficking
with the same denaturalized inheritance, only now projecting it into nature
as if it had become material substance.
If we return now to the sections of Twilight of the Idolswhere Nietzsche
refers to the lies of unity, materiality, substance, cause, and egowe can again
see that he is not at all contradicting his favoring of empiricism, but using it
as a means to refute the overturning projections of denaturalized morality,
by observing that through reification we have made a nice misuse of that
empiricism, have turned it into an alleged empiricism, when we take ourselves to have discovered in things only that which we had put into them! (TI
VI:3) And when Nietzsche gives the atom as a prime example of this pseudoempiricist projection tendencywriting messieurs mechanists and physicists,
how much error, how much rudimentary psychology still remains in your
atom! (TI VI:3)he is again neither conjecturing on empirical matters from
afar nor dismissing the empirical sciences as a whole but, rather, as Nietzsche
scholarship has also shown, drawing on his research into scientific thinkers
122 /
such as Boscovich (BGE 12) and Mach who also were critical of attributing
an atomistic bedrock of unchangeable substance to everyday objects observable with the senses.30
By advising then that we learn to sharpen our senses and think them
through to their conclusions, Nietzsche can be read as attempting to use fresh
advances in the sciences to overcome the denaturalized inheritance that may
prejudice our observations of the natural worldespecially insofar as such
advances may inform, setup, and preserve the space required for his philosophical project of creating improved, non-ascetic values. Science and ethics
are thus never wholly separate in Nietzsches philosophy. Rather, because of
the insights that come from the scienceswhere for him their most valuable
insights are methods (AC 13)Nietzsche wants to refer to science, wherever
applicable, to boost and inform his ethics.
This is the meaning of the long live physics! motto of Gay Science,
in its Book IV of 1882, where Nietzsche rebukes hitherto valuations and
ideals for being based on ignorance of physics or constructed so as to
contradict it (GS 335). For in order to be creators of values, new forms of
self and styles for our existence, Nietzsche concludes that we must become
the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary
in the worldand that what compels us to turn to physics in this way is,
in short, our honesty! (GS 335).31
Later in the 1887 Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche notes sciences usefulness in divesting the ascetic ideal of its exteriors, its guise and masquerade,
its temporary dogmatic hardening and stiffening accrued across the history
of metaphysicsbut only to point out again that if left unfettered, modern
science can still be working in the service of the ascetic ideal (GM III:25).
This is now because science can tend toward an overestimation of truth, to
the belief that truth is inestimable and cannot be criticised (GM III:25),
which, Nietzsche reminds us, is our flame from the fire ignited by a faith
millennia old, the Christian faith that was also Platos, that God is truth,
that truth is divine (GM III:24)a faith that this time, but ascetically again,
finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God (GM III:27).
It is insofar as science ascetically denies or forbids itself to value anything other than truth that Nietzsche concludes that science never creates
values (GM III:25), and never opposes the ascetic ideal, but only gives us
knowledge of some of the preconditions a creator of values has to work with.
That is, science cannot give the values themselves.32 Thus if Nietzsche is at
times as critical of positivism as he is of idealismdefending idealists against
positivists in 1886, and positivists against idealists in 1888it is because he
wants to preserve the ability of the philosophical arts to create ideals or values
/ 123
in conjunction with the positive sciences, including at times in a directive

capacity, unencumbered by any ossification from either side of the ledger.33
We come, then, to what is this elaboration of Nietzsches rather nuanced
affirmation of the natural sciencesand particularly of their empiricist
aspectsinsofar as they form a vital component or precondition of his creative program in ethics. In the final section of this chapter, I consider how
Lacans praise of science more for its formalistic than for its empiricist aspects
might respond to the results of Nietzsches critique here.
6.3 Lacans Mathematics-Centered Positive Comments on Science

I began section 6.2 with the observation of an antinomy between Nietzsches
praise of empiricism and Lacans preference for mathematical formalization.
But given the nuances discovered in Nietzsches praise of empiricism, this
antinomy might already be beginning to look less unbridgeable than at first
thought. Even so, Lacans positive comments on science, which see mathematization as its fundamental basis and strength, still mark out a very different
focal point relative to Nietzsches. What I thus consider in this section is
whether this difference, once it has been outlined, has any discernible effect
on their respective programs in ethics.
In his 19691970 Seminar XVII, Lacan suggests a nonempiricist view
with the claim that science emerged from what was embryonic in the Euclidian demonstrations (SXVII:158). In Seminar VII, he had even stated that
specifically modern science, the kind that was born with Galileo, could only
have developed out of biblical or judaic ideology, as the symbolic mastery
involved meant giving free rein to the play of signifiers (SVII:122). This
again suggests a nonempiricist view. The difference in Seminar XVII is that
Lacan has gone back further in history to call the Euclid, who flourished
around 300 BC, the fundamental reference in the rigorous use of the symbolic that appeared in the Greek tradition of mathematics (SXVII:155),
and holds this now to be responsible for the emergence of scienceadding
that the entire evolution of Greek mathematics proves to us that what rises
to the highest point is the manipulation of numbers as such (SXVII:158).34
Lacan contrasts his own account of the birth of science with what he
sees as attempts to organise science according to some mythical genesis that
begins with perception but then comes to a standstill with the philosophical meditation over the question of knowing what guarantees that perception is not illusory (SXVII:158). The reference to philosophical meditation
here is to that of Descartes, who sought, Lacan notes, through an auda-
124 /
cious leap from an artifice, and although others will choose different ones,
to give the guarantee of truth back to God (SXVII:159).35 For the Lacan
of Seminar XVII, however, this is not where science emerged from, at least
not initially, as he proceeds to highlight instead how with the method of
exhaustion, Archimedes prefigures what leads to what is essential, which
for us is structure, namely the calculus, the infinitesimal calculus, which
later only further emerges, and returns, Lacan adds, by Cavalieri reproducing Archimedes exploit on the parabola, in the seventeenth century, but well
before Leibniz (SXVII:158).
This mathematics-centered view can seem most contrary to Nietzsches
position that we possess scientific knowledge today to precisely the extent
that we have decided to accept the evidence of the senses (TI III:3). But the
antinomy diminishes if we consider the distinction Lacan then makes between
the sensus [senses] and perception (SXVII:158). For by way of suggesting
that not much is proved by Lockes empiricist claim that nothing is in the
understanding that was not first in the senses, Lacan notes that today the
senses can go far beyond what we may ordinarily perceive.36 With phenomena
in mind such as Hertzian waves or other waves (SXVII:161), Lacan discerns
the limit to perception when we want to be more exact by measuring and
counting and the actual counting rapidly dissolveswhen our sensus at the
level of the eye or ear, for example, leads to counting vibrations, and, through
the play of numbers, even to producing vibrations that had nothing to do
either with our senses or with our perception (SXVII:159).37
What Lacan means regarding this play of numbers going beyond not
just ordinary perception but the senses as well is indicated by his Seminar
VII comments about science, about its reemergence from biblical or judaic
ideology and its free rein to the play of signifiers, consuming around it
any reference that would limit its scope to intuited data, as it searches for
an increasingly coherent whole (SVII:122). This is where Nietzsche would
complain that reality does not appear at all, not even as a problem (TI III:3).
But insofar as Lacans point is that legitimate science uses the senses only to go
beyond ordinary perception so as to disclose phenomena such as waves, this
can be read to accord with Nietzsches caveat that the senses still provide the
evidence for scientific knowledge to the extent that we have learned to sharpen and arm them and to think them through to their conclusions (TI III:3).
For beyond our modern telescopes, spectroscopes, and more advanced instruments, the role of mathematics in this sharpening-arming, which is central to
Lacans view, is also intimated by Nietzsche in his 1888 Anti-Christ where he
observes that natural science, the kind first discovered by the Greeks, works
in concert with mathematics and mechanics to enhance the sense for facts,
the last-developed and most valuable of all the senses (AC 59).38
/ 125
Lacan then does not seem so different to Nietzsche, especially when in

Seminar XVII he expresses suspicion as to the attachment to the figure that
can attend geometry, such as in the romanticism that calls the proportional
mean of the Fibonacci series the golden number and goes astray finding
it on the surface of everything, when it is certain that this is only about
being able to visualise it (SXVII:1568). Lacan is also skeptical of attempts to
imagine the ideal unification of that which is knowledge [connaissance], as
such attempts can become caught up in the myth of a perfect coupling of the
male principle and the female principle (SXVII:159). Whether this appears as
the form-matter distinction: form, substance, content, Lacan remarks, call
it what you will; or the atoms-in-the-void distinction that Nietzsche rebuked
through Boscovich39for Lacan, insofar as progress is to be made, this is
the myth that scientific thought must detach itself from (SXVII:15960).
Returning to this kind of capture to myth three years later in Seminar
XX, Lacan plucks from the history of science the example of the fetishization of the perfectly spherical, of the circular orbit around the center that
was preserved in the Copernican revolution that was thus, for Lacan, by
no means a revolution at all until Kepler arrives to make it an ellipse, and
thereby throws into question the function of the centre (SXX:423). When,
moreover, Newton later summarizes the planetary motions in five little
letters that can be written in the palm of your hand, this, for Lacan, is what
finally rips us away from the imaginary function (SXX:43), something that
he is most keen to affirm based on his conviction that it is expressly the
imaginary function that overlays phenomena with the fantasy of a transcendentally harmonious sexual relation that simply does not exist.
The example Lacan proceeds to give of such a fantasy pertains precisely
to what concerned Nietzsche in Platonism. For quite some time, Lacan
observes, it seemed natural for a world to be constituted whose correlate,
beyond it, was being itself, being taken as eternal (SXX:43). But for Lacan
this world conceived of as the whole [tout], along with the philosopher able
to take cognisance of it (SXX:43), was only a way of disavowing through
projection the lack of any total or complete rapport with our genitive activities apropos of sexual difference. Lacan suggests that the terms active and
passive, for example, dominate everything that was cogitated regarding the
relationship between form and matter, to which each of Platos steps refers,
and then Aristotles, concerning the nature of thingsall of which, Lacan
concludes, is based on a fantasy by which they tried to make up for what
can in no way be said [se dire], that is, the sexual relationship (SXX:82).40
When Lacan thus turns to his own field to state that mathematical
formalisation is our goal, our ideal (SXX:119), it is because he wants to
emulate the physical sciences in also finding a mathematical route to thwart
126 /
the gender fantasy that, in psychoanalysis, typically takes the form of a natural
progression through the partial drivesfrom the oral to the analtoward an
inherent altruism at the genital stage that simply does not exist. As Bruce
Fink explains, when Lacan then deploys topological figures such as a Klein
bottle or Mbius strip, it is to force us to stop thinking in terms of circles
and spheres, or surfaces with an inside and outside, front-side and backside, so that the more complex figures can teach us to conceptualize free of
any gendered holist fantasy, in as rigorous a manner as analysis is currently
able to.41
Even so, Lacan will still reaffirm in this Seminar XX that the discourse
of analysis differs from scientific discourse to the extent that the analytic
thing will not be mathematical (SXX:117). And this is because the real can
only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalisation (SXX:93). Such
was the impasse that Lacan, nonetheless, thought he could provide a model
of using mathematical formalisation, insofar as mathematics means nothing and runs counter to sense [ contre-sens] (SXX:93), that is, counter
to the imaginary that ends up once again meaning some phallus of a hyperidealized sexual relation, brought together in a Sovereign Good, mystified as
a metaphysics of Being.
Glynos suggests that Lacan thus occupies a space between ethics and
science, aiming not to make mathematics foundational but to highlight
more precisely its impasses, so as to circumscribe the space in which the
subjects temporality must appear. This temporality, Glynos adds, which is
itself not formalisable, is the real jouissance of the subject and the desire
it sustains, where the aim of an analysis is to bring such desire to light by
formalizing its structure to the extent that this is possible, so as to move
the analysand to act ethically in relation to his or her desirethat is, to act
with more mindfulness, or knowing awareness.42
Lacan is thereby aiming to do no different than Nietzsche insofar as
they both want to refer to science so as to properly establish where it reaches
its limits and where what is left of subjecthoodwhich science tends to foreclosebegins.43 And Lacans use of formalization to map this limit is thus
not a return to the inflationary Platonism or overturned pseudo-materialism
that concerns Nietzschethat which sought to repudiate the real of natural becoming through atomistic fantasies, or fantasies of Beingbut rather
Lacans way of circumventing such traps in the imaginary that thinking brings,
much in the way the sciences have, but not to the point of suturing the subject,
of subjecting it again to some ascetic ideal.
Verhaeghe, however, sees in the 1964 Seminar XI a turning point in
Lacans oeuvre regarding his recognition of the limits of formalization, a turn
he takes Lacan to have made with the distinction of tuch and automa-
/ 127
ton (SXI:53). This automaton, Verhaeghe explains, refers to what remains

of Lacans earlier ambition to completely formalize psychoanalysis with
mathematics and linguistics, that is, to see the dark, hidden processes of
the unconscious as completely deterministicwhereas tuch now serves to
complement the automaton by referring to the real, in all its inexhaustibility, as precisely that chance encounter that cannot be completely formalized,
visualized, known or understood in advance.44
Even insofar as eventually Lacan does find this more nuanced position
between ethics and science, Corfield notes that Lacans discourse continues to
bear an anti-empiricist trait attributable to the influence of Alexandre Koyr,
the historian/philosopher of science Lacan most closely followed.45 Corfield
suggests we should question this influence as Galileo scholarship has later
shown that Koyr was wrong, for instance, to deny the role of observation,
measurement, and experiment in Galileos discovery of the law of free fall
that, for Koyr, gave birth to modern science.46 The implication from Corfield
is that the Lacanian project need not feel pressed to traffic solely with the
more mathematical or less empirical branches and elements of science as it
goes about seeking further progress. This, moreover, would also diminish
further any seeming antinomy between Nietzsches more empiricist-centered
and Lacans more mathematics-centered positive comments on science.47
In any event, Koyr himself, in his 1948 Chicago lecture on Newton,
shows a keen awareness of the role of both the mathematical and the empirical experimental in the advance of modern science, sensing Newtons great
significance to be in having presented us with a synthesis of both trends,
of both views.48 By combining the positive comments on science of Lacan
and Nietzsche in sections 6.2 and 6.3, I also have come to such a synthesis
by showing how omitting either the mathematical or the empirical can lead
us back to the inflationary excesses of denaturalizing Platonism: Whether
by reinvesting nature with holistic sexual imaginaries; by projecting their
overturned, atomistic reifications; or by developing logico-mathematical constructions with few empirical points of contact.
With such regressions back to fantasy, illusion, myth or error, even a
valid critique of science for its ascetic propensities, such as that attempted
with Lacan and Nietzsche especially in section 6.1, may risk re-inflaming
the moral-religious idiosyncrasies that the return of sciencefollowing the
Renaissancehelped finally to free us from.
Conclusion
This book set out to discover how Lacans ethics of psychoanalysisas an

ethics of repressed, unconscious desire that touches the drives jouissance in
the realcontributes to Nietzsches critique of Platonism for forming a moral
Good that grew ascetic to the point of illness. Nietzsche founded a new ethics
on the basis of his critique, and the task has been to see how Lacans own
ethicssubsequent to Freudian experiencethrows more light on this.
Chapter 1 deconstructs Platos hyper-idealizing of the Good, which
Nietzsche finds inflationary for conflating real with imaginary. From
Nietzsches deflationary position I was able to broach Lacans adding of a third
category, the symbolic, as it appears in his Ethics Seminar as aid to his own
demystification of the Good. Although Nietzsche refers more to the empirical when countering inflationary morality, the symbolic is also present to his
thought as logic and mathematics working in concert with mechanics and
the senses in science, and as the reading of morality as a semiotics, sign language, and symptomatology for the inner worlds of those who did not know
enough to understand themselves. Reading Lacan and Nietzsche together in
this way enacts a more encompassing surmounting of the many and varied
ways our conceptions of reality have become caught in the inflationary, moral
imaginaries Platos Good implieslike so many ingenious, even devious, ways
to try and escape the real of nature and the sexed body, without and within.
Here Lacans regrounding of Aristotles Good and notion of nature in
the polymorphous perversity of the drive at the base of desire opens out onto
the concept of the Thing. Lacans Freudian Thing pertains to our most
traumatic truths to come to terms with, and to precisely what then tempts us
to project imaginary realities into nature such as the Sovereign Good. The
projection occurs because such imaginaries seem to soothe our fears with
pleasing thoughts acting as a kind of opiate; unfortunately, however, such
imaginaries also are found to ossify across time and create a barrier toward
desire. This barrier causes what for Nietzsche is expressly the neurosis or
129
130 /
nihilism of a morality that turns against life, forming an ascetic ideal that
paradoxically causes more perversion, pain, and suffering than was initially
sought escape from. This combined NietzscheLacan analysis is what provides
an extended genealogic and analytic understanding both of Platonism and
the discontent that Freud detects beneath the veils of Western civilization.
Chapter 2 elucidated the view shared by Lacan, Freud, and Nietzsche
that morally repressing the drives enables the ideal of the Good to ape or
inflame the very violent perversity it is meant to be repressing. In this context
the precise mechanism of sublimation as Lacan treats it in his Ethics Seminar
is examined as an alternative, what Freud at one point calls a way out.
Lacan, however, much like Freud, points to the products of certain types of
sublimation causing more repression and more perversion, precisely the two
problems sublimation is called on to solve. This is because sublimation can
conjure up imaginary products that blind us toward our inmost desire, and
make the drives seem wholly debased through hyper-inflationary points of
contrast. Sublimation can preserve an element of repression in its structures,
which leads both to a neurotics crippling loss of satisfaction and to more
extreme, criminal perversion when states of frustration excessively build up
especially when the latter is accompanied by a loss of analytical knowledge.
From the crux of this dilemma, Nietzsches major aesthetic distinction
between lack and abundance, what I call weak and strong, can be grasped
in light of Lacans treatment of sublimation and used, moreover, to determine
which sublimations are conducive to furthering only human strength and
flourishing. Nietzsches strong sublimation equates to the optimal relation of
distance-and-nearness between signifier and Thing, where the Thing is neither denigrated nor denied by the products of its sublimation but treated,
rather, with dignity and care. From this combined NietzscheLacan perspective Platos Good is a weak sublimation, and his concomitant negative stance
on the strongest sublimations of tragic art stands in stark contrast with Lacan
and Nietzsches highest esteem of them.
Chapter 3 took Lacans Ethics Seminar reading of Sophocles Antigone
as a treatise on how a stronger pre-Platonic ethics functions. Antigones confrontation with Creon reveals the latter blindly identifying himself with the
Good, creating a barrier toward desire and tragic consequences when the
repressed returns. Antigone, conversely, embodies this repressed in her own
desire heroically: even in its troubled, incestuous history where it touches on
the Thing and its deathly consequenceswhich creates a beauty effect that is
as fearsome as it is exciting both to the Chorus of Theban elders within the
play and the spectators outside it.
Lacans focus on Antigones splendor broaches Nietzsches view that the
Dionysian context of the festival where tragedy was performed empowers us
C O N C LU SIO N
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to face and affirm the toughest truths about desire. This is done via a logic
of transgression hearkening back to the potlatch economies of more primitive cultures, to their practice of the organized destruction of goods, if not
the practice of human or animal sacrifice itself. Once Plato installs his Good,
however, the artistic space for transgressive desire is increasingly occluded, as
the criticism Lacan joins Nietzsche in making of Aristotle on tragic catharsis
lays bare. The tragic effect for Aristotle is fear and pity, whereas Nietzsche
and Lacan point to a joy or ecstasy involved in crossing the Good. The shift
away from tragedys joy in transgression is part of what Nietzsche calls the
denaturalizing of natural values, entailing a loss of knowledge and empowerment as well as loss of drive satisfaction.
Chapter 4 shows Lacans Transference Seminar reading of Platos Symposium throwing light on what Nietzsche sees in Socrates as excessively denaturalizing. Evidence of denaturalizing is revealed through the first half of Lacans
seminar, which tracks the speeches of Symposium into its inflationary zenith.
The zenith occurs as a divine beautiful-in-itself is said by Socrates to be the
essence of Eros because it is close to the Good and thus divested of anything
sensory, sensuous, natural, or bodily, not to mention (pre)genital. This is
where Lacan broaches the final confrontation between this manifestly pious
Socrates and a sensuous Alcibiades, which acts as an irruption of the real
or return of the repressed for Plato and Socrates, due to their attempts to
divest the Hellenic gods of their origins in naturally occurring bodily drives.
Lacans analysis corroborates Nietzsches view that with the Platonic
Socrates we see denaturalizing attempting to undervalue and exclude very real
aspects of nature pertaining to desire. But Lacan also deepens Nietzsches view
with the concept of object a: a concept that consolidates Freuds discovery, in
the decades following Nietzsches death, of infantile sexuality and its continued
functioning in the unconscious memory of adults. In this respect, Socrates
as the prototypical Platonic philosopher remains ignorant of precisely what
drives the transference of Alcibiades toward him, which is manifested in the
bad conscience and further perversity that Alcibiades develops according to
what for Nietzsche was the logical consequence of Socrates erection of an
ascetic Good. This is precisely the ideal of the Good that continues to grow
expressly anti-nature or anti-natural, which is the consequence of Platonic
philosophy that prepares the ground for Christianity.
Chapter 5 took Lacans handling of the Judeo-Christian thematic in his
Seminar VII and XVII and read it with Nietzsches view of Christianity as
the fulfillment of denaturalizing and greatest blunder in the West. Lacan is
found to distance himself from Freuds belief in a murdered primal Father: the
murder that Freud held his Jewish ancestors repeat on Moses in the dark and
Jesus in the light, in an intellectual advance toward a domesticated O
edipal
132 /
father that Christianity spiritualizes as love. Lacan also comes to see the Oedipus complex itself as Freuds dream, and the murdered-primal-Father myth
as Freuds way of hysterically inventing the strong, castrating father that the
Oedipus complex requires to help us distance ourselves from excessive enjoyment. Freuds primal and Oedipal fathers, however, do not to dissolve religion,
as Freud believed they could, but offer instead an oddly Christocentric view
of the Father that, for Nietzsche especially, does not constitute an advance in
intellectuality but only an advance in neurosis.
Lacans analysis is strengthened by Nietzsches of how the anti-nature
attitude of Christianity functions, and of the forebear in both Plato and Judaism this attitude finds. This is because Judeo-Christianity affects an envybased revenge or revolt on its Greco-Roman masters, which illuminates the
hysteric and obsessional structures Lacan reworks in Freud. The noble intellectuals of the Greek and Roman world are the Masters that the Christian
hysteric wants to reign over and murderswhere their legacy finally returns
in the Renaissance following the obsessive Dark Ages this hysterics revolt
causes. This combined NietzscheLacan analysis equips us to handle what
Lacan and Freud at times no less than Nietzsche take to be the great harm
in Christianizing our values beneath a Father, God, or Law of the absolute Good. The harm occurs in making a Sovereign ideal out of denying or
demonizing naturally occurring drives, and by making an essentialism of the
neurotic effects of this asceticismeffects that can include both the Oedipus and castration complexes, especially insofar as they find support in our
modern scientific era.
Chapter 6 shows Lacans Seminar XVII building on the critique of science that marks the close of his Seminar VII, and how his new four discourses
deepen Nietzsches own critique of the ascetic effects of modern science. This
is done by detailing the immense mishandling of jouissance that science and
its service of goods simply takes over from the God of the Good of Christianity and the Supreme Good in Plato. The discourse of science becomes
our modern way of producing the split subjectalong with all the consumer
goods, of which knowledge is one, incessantly produced to fill what Lacan
calls the hollow, the gap. Lacan even observes psychoanalysts, including
Freud in some of his moments, to contribute to the problem by seeing themselves as doing science as if to have closed all gaps between knowledge and
truth. This is only to be seduced by the transference to the analyst as the
one supposed to knowwhich only produces further splittings off by way
of its presumptions.
The specifically pro-science and pro-empiricist aspects of Nietzsches
critique of ChristianPlatonism also can be used to assess Lacans ostensibly different positive comments on science that favor formalization. But
C O N C LU SIO N
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Lacans attempt to mathematically formalize the gaps in science is assimilable to Nietzsches aim of preserving a space for a scientifically informed
yet still thoroughly philosophical creation of non-ascetic ideals or newly renaturalized values. The Nietzsche perspective also shows that the Lacanian
project need not traffic solely with the more mathematical or less empirical
elements of scienceespecially because Koyr, Lacans main influence in the
philosophy of science, observes at one point that Newtons significance is
in synthesizing the empirical and mathematical approaches. The elision of
either the mathematical or the empirical is what leads us back to the inflationary denaturalizing of the pastwhether by investing nature with holistic
sexual imaginaries, by projecting their overturned reifications, or by developing logico-mathematical constructions with no empirical contact. The directive implied by Newtons synthesis diminishes any lasting antinomy between
Nietzsches more empiricist-centered and Lacans more mathematics-centered
positive comments on science.
Lacans ethics of psychoanalysis indeed contributes to Nietzsches critique of Platonism on the topics of ontology (chapter 1), sublimation (chapter
2), tragic art (chapter 3), Socrates (chapter 4), Christianity (chapter 5), and
modern science (chapter 6). But it also can be strengthened by Nietzsches
critique in these areas, particularly on the topics of Christianity and science. I have referred, for instance, to any residue of the Judeo-Christian type
valuation that may subsist in the continued use of concepts such as castration, where difference, distance, and its affirmation is more appropriate to
the Nietzschean ethic of restoring a sense of innocence to the drive in its
multiplicities of becoming. This is not to say that naturally occurring drives
and phenomena are always morally idyllic, only that they often have been
labeled perverse relative to a Good that has lost its legitimacy and never
should have had any in the first placeinsofar as It even causes the perversions It takes itself to forbid by recourse to denial, demonization, and repression. I also referred to any residue of the antiempirical tendency that may
substitute for the proper testing of beliefs a disciples faith in a Masters Truth
from completely beyond the senses, who is quite simply supposed to know.
Future philosophical questions following from these conclusions may
include examining piecemeal, from the Nietzsche perspective, which of Lacans
other positions may retain an anti-nature ChristianPlatonist type valuation
and which, if any, are now capable of further empirical testing and corroboration, or falsification then modification. But one also might consider from the
later Lacanian perspective whether Nietzsches final 1888 affirmation of the
natural sciences, and simultaneously strident rejection of the Christian God,
bears something of the psychotics foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father,
which could make of Nietzsches writings before he succumbed to madness
134 /
some kind of sinthomeroughly in the manner of the James Joyce of Lacans

19751976 Seminar XXIII.1
Here one may turn, for instance, to the final chapter of Rabats Jacques
Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature entitled Joyces Jouissance,
or a New Literary Symptom, where first the skeptical position of Roudinesco
is registered that held Lacans later foray into knot theorywhere the sinthome was now a fourth ring to knot the real, symbolic, imaginary triadwas
Lacans own arbitrary defense against oncoming senility. From Nietzsches
position on natural science, this would suggest an inflationary venture into
the mathematical that loses empirical contact, as was common to PythagoreanPlatonist investments of mathematics. But Rabat suggests Lacan is
actually doing something much more exciting, closer to what I described
as his attempt to formalize the gaps in knowledge through which something
of the real occursthe real which itself cannot be a mathematical thing, as
I noted Lacan stating in Seminar XX.2
This issue of the sinthome can thus be fleshed out in a way that flows
from the results of the science question at the end of chapter 6, and points to
what may come next for Lacanianism viewed from a Nietzschean standpoint.
In short, it may have less to do with the personal psychology of the authors
and more to do with Nietzsches will to continue the project of Renaissance
in a way that notes the best features of Hellenism to have occurred before
Platonism happenedusing the further insights uncovered to understand,
for instance, the failure of the modern project of Enlightenment to deliver us
an age of pure reason. For Nietzsche often is skeptical of modern socialism,
democracy, and feminism: holding that ethico-political debates structured
around such tropes tend to remain caught in secularized forms of Christianity; where natural differences are negated, demonized, in hope of an equality or altruism without due limitscovering over differences that best be
affirmed taking non-Platonic Hellenismos as guide. Thus to write beyond the
Name-of-the-Father: read through Nietzsche as an anti-nature ChristianPlatonic Law or Good with known foreclosing effectsis not to go without any
quilting reference point, reduce ourselves to an inhuman-ascetic formalism,
or an all-too human set of riddles and punsbut to recover and restore what
was hastily rejected so as to knot or write the triad of the real, symbolic,
imaginary, in a much stronger way.
It is of course possible that the results of such inquiries will bear as
much on the structure of the inquirer as they do on that of the great philosopher and great psychoanalyst we find in Nietzsche and Lacan, respectively
but even this would not be completely without its value. For in the course
of this work I have shown that reading Lacan and Nietzsche together on the
questions of desire and ethics will bear results fruitful both to philosophy
C O N C LU SIO N
/ 135
and psychoanalysis and to culture in generalespecially wherever the aim

is to overcome our general maladies by understanding the history of their
emergence, and the many and varied forms they continue to take across time.
To conclude, then, while heeding Lacans reminding of the difference
between eliminative naturalist materialism and the properly Freudian
materialismwhere the latter, far from stripping us of our history, assures
us of its permanence in its symbolic form, independently of the whims of
our assent3we arrive at Lacans rephrasing of the Freudian ethical dictum,
extended with aid of Nietzsches critique and restored to its greater genealogical dimension.
Where it was [L o ctait], one might say, Where (it) was itself
[l o stait], as I would like it to be heard, it is my duty that
I come into being.
J. Lacan, The Freudian Thing, in crits,
34748 [41718 in French pagination]
Notes
Introduction
1. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System
of Thought, trans. B. Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 13.
2. For the debt to Nietzsche of post-war French thought, see Alan D. Schrift,
Nietzsches French Legacy: A Genealogy of Post-Structuralism (New York: Routledge,
1995).
3. Paul-Laurent Assoun also notes that during the 1911 Congress of Psychoanalysis in Weimar, two deputies were sent to the Nietzsche Archives to pay their
respects because of, as Ernest Jones put it, the similarities that existed. Herman
Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Vols.
I & II (New York: International Universities Press, 19621967), I: 359. Assoun, Freud
and Nietzsche, trans. R. L. Collier Jr. (London: Continuum, 2007), 1112.
4. Bass adds that analysts tended to attribute what Freud calls Nietzsches
intuitive insights to self-reflection about his own pathology, foreclosing the possibility that by beginning as a philologist who then extended the method of historical,
linguistic interpretation over the whole of philosophy, Nietzsches insights were the
result of his critique of metaphysics. Thomas Brobjer documents Nietzsches training
in historical studies to suggest that this was critical to Nietzsches understanding of the
Greeks, whence stemmed his impetus to revaluate our values. Bass, Interpretation and
Difference: The Strangeness of Care (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 12.
Brobjer, Nietzsches View of the Value of Historical Studies and Methods, Journal of
the History of Ideas 65 (2004): 3201.
5. Ons, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. S. iek
(New York: Verso, 2006), 80.
6. Zupani, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsches Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003).
7. Slavoj iek, Series Foreword, in Zupani, The Shortest Shadow, viiviii.
8. Terms such as Good will be capitalized throughout when indicating the
kind of metaphysical inflation in morality that Nietzsche finds central to Platonism.
137
138 /
N O T E S T O C HA P T E R 1
Chapter 1
1. William Richardson concurs in saying all three registers are necessary
for a complete picture of Lacans view of psychoanalysis. Lacan, Le Symbolique,
lImaginaire et le Rel (1953), Bulletin de lAssociation Freudienne 1 (1982): 413.
De Kesel, Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacans Seminar VII, trans. S. Jttkandt
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 281. Marini, Jacques Lacan: The
French Context, trans. A. Tomiche (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992),
43. Richardson, Psychoanalysis and the God-Question, Thought 61 (1986): 72.
2. As Hilary Putnam notes, the inflationary ontologist claims to tell us of
the existence of things unknown to ordinary sense perception, things that are invisible, unknown to modern physical science, where the most famous example of an
inflationary ontologist is the Plato who gave us the Theory of Forms, particularly
the Form of the Good. Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004), 17.
3. Such sections limit Heideggers view that Nietzsche consciously sets P
lato
apart from all Platonism, protecting him from it. We can observe Nietzsche in an
1887 letter to Overbeck writing: And its all Platos fault; Plato is the greatest malheur [misfortune] of Europe (KSB 8, 9). Heidegger, Nietzsches Overturning of
Platonism, in Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two (19361938), trans. D. F. Krell (New
York: HarperCollins, 1991), I: 205.
4. As Erwin Rohde put itin the admirable work Lacan declares he made
use of on antiquitys different conceptions of the immortality of the soul and
will strongly recommend that psychoanalysts ought to have read at least once
(SVII:250, 284)For the philosophic scientists of Ionia the soul had also been a
part of nature and the science of the soul a department of the science of nature,
which distinguished them from ordinary popular psychology. Leiter, Nietzsche on
Morality (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3941. Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and
Belief in Immortality among the Greeks: Volume 2, trans. W. B. Hillis (Eugene: Wipf
and Stock, 2006), 372.
5. For Nietzsches praise of empiricism see also TI III:3, and Leiter, Nietzsche
on Morality, 434. I discuss the nuances involved especially in chapter 6 on science
(section 6.2).
6. See A. A. Long, Plato and Hellenistic Philosophy, in A Companion to Plato,
ed. H. H. Benson (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 4189.
7. Rohde notes that even prior to Plato, the rise of Orphism in 550 BC was an
anachronism, as Ionian earliest pioneers of philosophy had lain the foundations of
natural science, and of all science in general, whence a religious interpretation of the
world and of mankind was hardly any longer admissible. McPherran, Platonic Religion, in A Companion to Plato, ed. Benson, 256. Rohde, Psyche: Volume 2, 336, 362.
8. Lampert, Nietzsche and Plato, in Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction
and Response to the Classical Tradition, ed. P. Bishop (Rochester: Camden House,
2004), 217, 219.
9. Plato, Phaedo, 99c, trans. H. N. Fowler, in Plato I, Loeb Classical Library,
ed. J. Henderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 341.
10. Kahn, Plato on Recollection, in A Companion to Plato, ed. Benson, 122.
/ 139
11. Plato, Phaedo, 114bc.

12. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 169.
13. Modrak concludes that Plato does preserve a role for external perception
despite, in the middle dialogues especially, expressing denigration toward it. Modrak,
Plato: a Theory of Perception or a Nod to Sensation? in A Companion to Plato, ed.
Benson, 1335, 1445.
14. Plato, Republic, 508e509b, trans. P. Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of
Plato: Including the Letters, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton: Princeton Press,
1989), 744.
15. Plato, Republic, 509bc.
16. I return to Platos devaluing of art in chapter 2 on sublimation (section 2.3).
17. Alain Badiou notes Lacans anti-philosopher epithet to also come from
opposing Plato on difference, becoming and changemaking Lacan, like Nietzsche,
closer to Heraclitus. Badiou, Lacan and the Pre-Socratics, in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. iek, 1213, 15.
18. In chapter 4 I examine the criticisms of Platos schwrmerei (SVIII 1:2)
of the Good in Lacans Seminar VIII, Transference, when focusing on the role of
Socrates in Platonism.
19. Richardson, Psychoanalysis and the God Question, 723.
20. Shepherdson, Lacan and the Limits of Language (New York: Fordham Press,
2008), 27.
21. David Corfield notes that this philosopher of science Lacan most closely
followed was known for his forthright rejection of empiricism. Corfield, From
Mathematics to Psychology: Lacans Missed Encounters, in Lacan and Science, ed.
J. Glynos and Y. Stavrakakis (London: Karnac, 2002), 180.
22. Corfield adds that Koyr was shown wrong to deny Galileo performed
incline plane experiments; that there is clear evidence of continuity with Aristotelians in Galileo, Descartes and Newton; and that natural sciences are characterised
by an interlocking multiplicity of established methodological styles, mathematisation
counting merely as one. I return to this issue in chapter 6. Corfield, From Mathematics to Psychology, 180, 185.
23. Rohde notes that Pythagoras mixes the fanciful ideas of the old popular
psychology, enlarged by theologi and purification priests, with the idea that all
being and becoming is due to the action and relation of numbers; in Psyche: Volume 2, 3767. See also Michael J. White, Plato and Mathematics, in A Companion
to Plato, ed. Benson, 22843.
24. See GS 112, BGE 4. Nadeem Hussain disputes that Nietzsche drops his falsification thesis to affirm science, citing falsificationist views in Mach, who Nietzsche
read, which are both friendly to science and the senses. Hussain, Reading Nietzsche
through Ernst Mach, in Nietzsche and Science, ed. G. Moore and T. H. Brobjer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 11214.
25. Richardson, Psychoanalysis and the God Question, 72.
26. In Interpretation of Dreams Freud notes the lead role of imagination in
free association by referring to what Schiller describes as a relaxation of the watch
upon the gates of Reason (SE4:103), which is like the dialectic Kant uses to depict
140 /
aesthetic experience as the free-play of imagination and understanding, and also

Lacans imaginarysymbolic distinction, where the symbolic refers to the functions
of reasoning well and understanding. Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790), trans. J. C.
Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), I: 9.
27. See Freud, Negation, 1925 (SE19:237). Lacan references this often in his
Seminar VII.
28. Danny Nobus notes that Lacan also calls this a tautology, for as a language
means structured. Nobus, Lacans Science of the Subject: between Linguistics and
Topology, in Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. J-M. Rabat (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 2003), 58.
29. Shepherdsons discussion directs itself toward this postsymbolic sense,
because of our tendency to install a presymbolic real as a retroactive fantasy. Homer,
Jacques Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2008), 82. Shepherdson, Lacan and the Limits
of Language, 49.
30. Bataille, Eroticism (1957), trans. M. Dalwood (London: Penguin, 2001),
143. Roudinesco portrays the shared circles and interests of Bataille and Lacan in
Jacques Lacan, 12140.
31. Lacan in Seminar XVII also remarks, One fails to see why truth would
always necessarily be beneficial. You would have to have the devil in you to imagine
such a thing (SXVII:106).
32. Bataille, Eroticism, 40.
33. See Havelock Ellis, Freuds Influence on the Changed Attitude toward Sex,
The American Journal of Sociology 45 (1939): 30917.
34. Rohde notes, Aristotle preserves a mythological element taken from the
dogmatic teaching of Plato, a restatement of primeval popular fancies; in Psyche:
Volume 2, 495.
35. Elveton, Nietzsches Stoicism: the Depths are Inside, in Nietzsche and
Antiquity, ed. Bishop, 194.
36. Jonathan Lear suggests the impersonal passivity of Aristotles remark, the it
has been well said, could be of a wish to conceal the origins of this Good in Platos
murdered-Father function in Socrates. Lacan returns to this passage of Aristotles in
SXX:52. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I i:1, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Lear, Happiness, Death and the
Remainder of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 78, 1011, 1014.
37. Lear, Happiness and the Structure of Ends, in A Companion to Aristotle:
Vol. 42, ed. G. Anagnostopoulos (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 388.
38. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I vii:89, VII v:16, VII vi:6.
39. To some bemusement from the translator Rackham, who almost doubts
himself over this, Aristotle writes, for animals have neither the faculty of choice nor
of calculation: they are aberrations from nature, like men who are insane. Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics, VII vi:6.
40. Graham, trans., Aristotle: Physics Book VIII (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), xvi.
41. Lacan also remarks that whereas a certain eighteenth-century philosophy
assumed as its task what might be called the naturalist liberation of desire, this has
/ 141
failed historically and instead we have witnessed a growth in the incidence of

genuine pathologies (SVII: 34).
42. Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche, 8. Freud, On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, 1914 (SE14:1516).
43. Even then, while stopping well short of people like St. Paul who have an
evil eye for the passions to see only what is dirty, disfiguring, and heartbreaking (GS
139), Nietzsche, in what might be deemed a portrait of the Freud to come, depicts
the need to translate man back into nature in terms of removing all the heretofore
vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and connotations until, hardened in
the discipline of science, one stands before human nature as one stands before the
rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren
songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping you are more, you
are higher, you are of a different origin! (BGE 230).
44. As Richardson put it, for Freud such drives are never experienced in their
pure state but only through some psychic representative. For Lacan, these representatives are the signifiers. As for the dynamics of it all, he addresses it in terms of desire;
see Psychoanalysis and the God Question, 72. I discuss this via the drive-instinct
distinction in chapter 2 (section 2.2).
45. De Kesel also notes that the Thing is first of all a concept critical of every
claim that speaks in the name of some transcendence or absolute, by confronting
them with their polymorphous-perverse libidinal base. De Kesel, Eros and Ethics,
634, 83.
46. See Freud, The Resistances to Psychoanalysis, 1925 (SE19:2201).
47. Richard Boothby notes it is the function of the Oedipus complex to stabilize the moment of separation, which assigns to the Thing its proper place beyond
every object of satisfaction, as indicated when Lacan closely associates das Ding with
the figure of the mother, and the prohibition of incest with the establishment of the
proper distance from it. Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan
(New York: Routledge, 2001), 215. I discuss Lacans Seminar XVII critique of Oedipus
complex in chapters 5 and 6. More on the castration complex in Lacan is in Juliet
Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole
Freudienne (New York: Norton, 1985), 126.
48. An example featuring interviews with leading figures of critical Freud
scholarship is Todd Dufresne, Against Freud: Critics Talk Back (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007). See also Freud, The Resistances to Psychoanalysis, 1925
(SE19:21124).
49. De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, 70.
50. This return is different for the psychotic, which Lacan marks by the phrase
returns in the real, after something has been foreclosed from the symbolic; see
Russell Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2008), 810.
51. As De Kesel notes, at its most intimate heart our entire pleasure economy
is haunted by what can destroy it, as Lacan defines the death drive more broadly
and more topologically as an inclination to merge with the real (the thing); see De
Kesel, Eros and Ethics, 99.
142 /
52. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, 1930 (SE21:135). Lacan often references this structure, adding that we would have really arrived at the heart of the
problem of existing perversions, if we managed to deepen our understanding of the
economic role of masochism (SVII:15). See also Freud, The Economic Problem of
Masochism, 1924 (SE19:166).
53. Ons, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, 85.
54. Zupani also calls this tendency that identifies the Real with some unspeakable authenticity or Truth the nihilistic tendency par excellence. Zupani, Ethics of the
Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), 236; and The Shortest Shadow, 130.
Chapter 2
1. Hacker, Sublimation Revisited, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 53
(1972): 219.
2. Cited in John P. Muller, Modes and Functions of Sublimation, The Annual
of Psychoanalysis 26 (1999): 1034.
3. Lacan is quoting here from Freuds On Narcissism: An Introduction,1914
(SE14:94).
4. Grigg notes that Lacans distinction between a positive ego ideal (of the
symbolic register) and a repressive superego (in the imaginary) is an attempt to consolidate what is unresolved in Freud apropos of the fathers function. Grigg, Lacan,
Language, and Philosophy, 326.
5. The quote is, Man tries to satisfy his need for aggression at the expense
of his neighbour, to exploit his work without compensation, to use him sexually
without his consent, to appropriate his goods, to humiliate him, to inflict suffering
on him, to torture and kill him (SVII:185). See chapter 5 of Freuds Civilisation and
Its Discontents, 1930 (SE21:111).
6. Lacan sees On Narcissism as also the introduction to the second topic
(SVII:95), that is, to Freuds tripartite model of ego, superego and id. Freud notes that
the term id [Es] came to him via Georg Groddeck who got it from Nietzsches use
of it for whatever in our nature is impersonal or subject to natural law; see Freud,
The Ego and the Id, 1923 (SE19:23).
7. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 63.
8. Lacan often has ego-psychology in mind with this forgotten primacy of
the Es. Roy Schafer suggests that ego-psychology, as founded by Heinz Hartmann
and Lacans training analyst Rudolph Loewenstein, has been misread by critics to value
ego conformity. Joseph Smith adds that Lacan need not be read in total contrast to
ego-psychology, only to any repressive ego function this psychology appears to support. Schafer, In the Wake of Heinz Hartmann, Int. Journal of Psychoanalysis 76
(1995): 22435. Smith, Ego Psychology and the Language of Lacan, Psychoanalysis
and Contemporary Thought 14 (1991): 14382.
9. Zupani describes this as when the Thing has moved to the register of the
Superego, where the superego itself comes to be structured like a drive, a vampirism that both commands and feeds on the renouncement of drives in the religious
/ 143
or obsessional sense; or, in the late capitalist sense, which commands the imperative
of enjoyment in a blind, addictive way that eventually makes enjoyment impossible;
The Shortest Shadow, 53, 81.
10. In Genealogy of Morals, for instance, Nietzsche writes, All instincts that do
not discharge themselves outwardly turn inwardthis is what I call the internalisation of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his soul
(GM II:16). Kaufmann footnotes in his translation the German for internalisation
[Verinnerlichung] and writes Cf. Freud. An example of Freuds similar account of
the internalisation or turning inwards of aggression by civilisation can be found in
Analysis Terminable and Interminable, 1937 (SE23:244).
11. See GM II:214 and GM III:11, 13.
12. De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, 167, 183.
13. Ibid., 183.
14. Ibid., 175.
15. Hacker, Sublimation Revisited, 219.
16. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905 (SE7:125245).
17. Hacker, Sublimation Revisited, 218.
18. De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, 1689
19. Freud, Instincts [Triebe] and their Vicissitudes, 1915 (SE14:122).
20. As De Kesel puts it, In this sense, das Ding precedes the symbolic Other,
although it nevertheless functions as the signifiers central point of orientation; in
Eros and Ethics, 90.
21. Here Lacan makes his position clear: Sublimation, Freud tells us, involves
a certain form of satisfaction of the Trieb, a word that is improperly translated as
instincts, but that one should strictly translate as drives (pulsions)or as drifts
(drives) (SVII:110). The same point is made in his Royaumont lecture later that same
year, The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire, in crits, trans. B.
Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 680. See Freud, SE14:11112, for James Stracheys
noting of this difficulty in his Standard Edition.
23. Summarizing in his On Narcissism, Freud notes that people desire an
object according to what they themselves are, were, or would like to be, according to
what was once part of themselves (like a child), and according to what nourishes and
protects them (like a parent)all of which can take a narcissistic sense and involve
introjected ego-ideals (SE14:90).
25. George Frank notes, the word sublimation comes from the Latin sublimare, which already means to raise or to elevate. With his formula for sublimation being it raises an object...to the dignity of the Thing, Lacan was likely
using this etymology, but also the homophony between dignit [dignity] and Ding
[Thing], adding and I dont mind the suggestion of a play on words in the term I
use (SVII:112). Frank, Sublimation: Inquires into Theoretical Psychoanalysis. Hans
W. Loewald, Psychoanalytic Review 78 (1991): 476.
26. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London:
Routledge, 2005), 199.
144 /
27. Zupani, The Shortest Shadow, 73.

28. Lacan criticizes Freud for overemphasizing the reaction or repercussions
side of artworks once they have become commodities (SVII:238). He calls this
weak, practically grotesque, but adds that Freud was aware of limits he imposes
on himself on the problem of creation (SVII:238). Later Lacan commends Freuds
frankness and even cynicism, saying it has great merit, although again he qualifies
this as far from exhausting the problem (SVII:293). For Freud on art as a substitute
for the long roundabout path of making real alterations in the external world, see
Two Principles of Mental Functioning, 1911 (SE12:224).
29. Hacker also warns against too hastily basing sublimation on the quicksand
of vacillating and manipulable social approval, which would be a passive conception
of sublimation. He observes, social tasks and cultural accomplishment can and are
being used as shields covering suppressive deception, as ornaments and justifications
for domination and as tools for the stifling of new developments. Hacker, Sublimation Revisited, 220.
30. Freud, Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction
between the Sexes, 1925 (SE19:24158).
31. This is an early sign of Lacans concept of object a, which causes desire,
stems from the Thing and, Evans notes, comes increasingly to acquire connotations
of the real, although it never loses its imaginary status. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 125.
32. Further formulations of this key distinction are in WP 48, 59, 8456, 1009;
TI IX:89; and in the Genealogy of Morals (GM P:3) where it comes to underpin the
pathos of distance (GM I:2) between what is strong, noble, masterful, and what is
weak, slavish, base.
33. Schopenhauer as well as Richard Wagner (GS 370) are Nietzsches key
examples of romantic pessimism, noting of Schopenhauer that as soon as the thingin-itself was no longer God for him, he had to see it as bad, stupid, and absolutely
reprehensible (WP 1005). Nietzsche deemed this pessimist to then want to universalize the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering into a binding law and compulsion, to
revenge himself on all things by branding them with his own image, the image
of his torture (GS 370). Deleuze takes this as a sense two of nihilism for Nietzsche,
where the first sense is a negative nihilism, when inflationary ideals are produced
through the negation of life; and the second a reactive nihilism, where the ideals
are reacted against and removed but not the negativity that caused them. Deleuze
also notes a third stage to emerge as passive nihilism, where new ideals are secreted
merely to preserve negative life in a state close to zero. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and
Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 14851.
34. The final chapter of part 1 of Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra, entitled
Of the Bestowing Virtue, contains a poetic 1883 formulation of the weakstrong
distinction.
35. In the same Bestowing Virtue chapter Nietzsche writes, we always suspect degeneration where the bestowing soul is lacking; but then warns against any
inflationary tendency of weak creativity when adding, Do not let it fly away from
things of earth and beat with its wings against the eternal walls! Lead, as I do, the
/ 145
flown away virtue back to earthyes, back to body and life: that it may give earth
its meaning, a human meaning! (Z I 22:2)
36. As Christopher Janaway put it, with Plato the painter makes no real thing,
only an image, which leaves us stranded at two moves from reality. Janaway, Plato
and the Arts, in A Companion to Plato, ed. Benson, 393.
37. Plato wrote of an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry, saying one
can quote many examples of this ancient antagonism. Nietzsche is pointing to what
Janaway notes is that famous quarrel playing itself out within Platos works themselves. Plato, Republic, Book X 607b. Janaway, Plato and the Arts, 388.
38. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, Plato teaches the opposite of what he
does: he creates concepts but needs to set them up as representing the uncreated that
precedes them. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and
G. Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 29.
39. Zupani, The Shortest Shadow, 778.
Chapter 3
1. Sophocles, The Antigone of Sophocles, trans. Sir Richard Jebb (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1891). Translation is available with the Greek at Perseus
Digital Library, ed. G. R. Crane (Medford: Tufts University, 2007), http://www.perseus.
tufts.edu/hopper/. I indicate where I consult alternative translations and refer to the
Greek where appropriate.
2. Sophocles, Antigone, line 37980 [
].
3. Bonnie Honig notes Judith Butler to make this point about Antigones
brother also being her Father most directly, and seconds Butlers suggestion that
Lacan is unaware of this connotation. In what follows, I suggest this connotation is
central and still visible in Lacans defter touches. Honig, Antigones Laments, Creons Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception, Political Theory
37 (2009): 8. Butler, Antigones Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000), 601.
4. Philip Holt suggests that although the modern picture of Antigone as a
heroic dissenter is not altogether wrong, it is also because the play does much to
nudge sympathies toward Antigone to counter the inclination of civic sensibilities
at the time to favor a male ruler against a traitor. Holt, Polis and Tragedy in the
Antigone, Mnemosyne 52 (1999): 685.
5. See entry under in Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, A GreekEnglish Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 993.
6. Lacan notes the term in others of Sophocles tragedies, and
in Creons own speeches as he succumbs to the blows of fate
(SVII:258). See Antigone, line 1261 [ ] Ah, the
blunders of an unthinking mind.
7. Goethe discusses Antigone in Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with
Goethe, trans. J. Oxenford (London: Dent, 1930), conversation of 28 March 1827.
146 /
Nietzsche calls this the best German book there is in section 109 of The Wanderer
and His Shadow, HAH: II.
8. Sophocles, Antigone, line 1070 [, , ]. This second
death idea can be read earlier in this exchange with prophet Teiresias, who tells Creon
that by not paying the corpse his due he tries to kill the dead all over again; line
1030 [ ]. I discuss the heroic sense of second death in section
3.2, as it is embodied by Antigone.
9. Freud writes: Hamlet is able to do anythingexcept take vengeance on the
man who did away with his father and took that fathers place with his mother, the
man who shows him the repressed wishes of his childhood realised; in Interpretation
of Dreams, 1900 (SE4:265).
10. Cf., Phaedo, lines 114bd; and Republic, Book X, lines 614a, 619e, 621d.
Rohde notes that the promise of a blessed afterlife was part of the pan-Hellenic Eleusinian mysteries, but not in the manner of the Orphism which influenced Pythagoras
and later Plato, for it contained no strange revaluation of values, contradicting the
general opinions of the time, and no view of the beyond that made this earth
seem dark and mean and death superior to life. E. R. Dodds agrees that Orphism
did not influence Eleusis but rather turned existing beliefs about the soul into a
Puritan psychology. Rohde, Psyche: Vol 1, 21923, 2289. Dodds, The Greeks and
the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 137, 149.
11. Elsewhere in Seminar VII, Lacan notes this progression to start with Aristotles antecedents in Socrates and Plato (SVII:216, 285). Dodds traces rationalism itself
back to sixth-century Ionia to the works of Hecataeus, Xenophanes and Heraclitus,
noting that Hecataeus is the first Greek who admitted he found Greek mythology
funny and tried to invent rationalist explanations, while his contemporary Xenophanes attacked myths from the moral angle, and Heraclitus saw rituals as trying to
wash off dirt by bathing in mud, or like talking to a mans house instead of talking
to its owner. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1802.
12. Lacans linking of Kant to Antigones opponent Creon can be used to qualify
the linking of Kant to Antigone in Collits and Grigg. Terry Collits, Lacans Antigone:
an Ethics for the Tragedy of our Time? in Agamemnons Mask: Greek Tragedy and
Beyond, ed. Collits and A. Sharma (Macmillan: Delhi, 2007), 117. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 130.
13. Nietzsche notes denaturalization to emerge in religions such as Judaism and develop to the extent that no God is moral enough for it, as a God is still
anthropomorphic in some respects and the anthropoid is a natural kind (WP 298).
In chapters 4 and 5, I discuss the SocraticPlatonic and Judeo-Christian origins of
Western denaturalizing, respectively.
14. The first instance is in lines 278314 when, shortly after making his decree,
news arrives that it has been defied and the chorus suggests the gods may have
prompted it, a possibility Creon must foreclose, leading to a lengthy tirade against
the corrupting powers of money.
15. With Kant in mind, Nietzsche also cautions against the aping of rationality
by those caught in the self-deceptive fraudulence of a good in itself, impersonal and
universal, who seek to give their practical reason a scientific colouring. Nietzsche
/ 147
is also critical of the joy as an objection asceticism of Kants Good, calling it harmful, retrograde Christianity, along with his way of assuming the same duty for all and
insisting on reasons limits only such that Christian moral entities can be rendered
no longer refutable beyond them (AC 1012, 55).
16. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 10945 [
].
17. Ibid., lines 6589 [ ].
18. Ibid., lines 8001 [ , ].
19. Haemon is the transliteration of meaning eager, skilful, but also
blood or bloody [], again connoting the kindred blood and perhaps Zeus
[] as the protector of [ ]. See entry in Liddell and Scott, A
Greek-English Lexicon, 39.
20. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 6756 [ ].
21. Ibid., line 667 [ ].
22. Shepherdson, Lacan and the Limits of Language, 667.
23. Sophocles, Antigone, line 1052 [ ].
I have used Watlings Penguin translation here, which is looser from the Greek but
closer to the analytical resonances. A literal translation might be, But full of this
very illness you sprang forth! See Sophocles, The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling
(London: Penguin, 1974), 154.
24. See Shepherdson, Lacan and the Limits of Language, 74.
25. Lacan likely had in mind the Rohde who writes: Religious requirements,
however, go beyond the law, with a curse on all who should leave a corpse unburied. This matter, which the chthonic deities take under their protection, is no mere
sanitary police regulation...but solely the unwritten laws of religion which are
obeyed by Antigone when she covers the dead body of her brother with a little dust.
Rohde, Psyche: Vol 2, 163.
27. Roberto Calasso notes that Mallarm mistranslated in a book on myth
by a Reverend Cox to say, If the gods do naught unseemly, then they are no longer gods at all. He was meant to say aught. Calasso thinks this may have been a
Lautramont type plagiarism plus inversion. It might also be what Lacan calls the
moment where truth emerges from the mistake (SI:261). Calasso, Literature and the
Gods, trans. T. Parks (New York: Vintage, 2001), 104. Mallarm, Les Dieux antiques
(Paris: Gallimard, 1925), XII.
28. Yannis Stavrakakis misses this when equating desire to law in Lacan with
the claim, It is thus not surprising that Antigone eventually links her desire to a
certain law, the laws of the Gods. He cites from Antigones first exchange with Creon
as evidence (lines 45860 in the Greek), which is insufficient for a claim on what
Antigone eventually does. What follows shows that Antigone does not eventually link
her desire to the laws of the Gods, neither for Lacan nor for Sophocles. Stavrakakis,
The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2007), 118.
29. Sophocles, Antigone, line 910 [ ]. Goethe bids
that Antigones stated motive here is quite unworthy; adding, I would give a great
148 /
deal for an apt philologist to prove that it is spurious and interpolated. Eckermann,
Conversations with Goethe, conversation of 28 March 1827.
30. Lacan also mentions Herodotus, The Histories Book III, where a lamenting
woman, given the choice to save one of her condemned family, chooses her brother
over her husband (SVII:255). It suggests such a choice was not completely unheard
of in Hellenic times.
31. See Lacan, Kant with Sade, in crits, 658.
32. iek complains even today Antigone is as a rule domesticated. But Grigg
adds that the riposte formed by ieks comparisons of Antigone with those typically
dubbed terrorist is pushed too far. iek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in
Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 767. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and
Philosophy, 124.
33. Lacans nuance here is close to Honigs response to iek that Antigone
can be protective without necessarily being gentle. On the other hand, Stavrakakis
joins Grigg in suspecting iek still to idealize Antigones desire in terms of the
ethico-political. Honig, Ismenes Forced Choice: Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles
Antigone, Arethusa 44 (2011): 32. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 11819. Grigg,
Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 130.
34. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 86, 934. The 1891 Jebb translation takes this
option, hate, as does Hugh Lloyd-Joness in 1994. See Sophocles, Antigone, in
Sophocles II, trans. Lloyd-Jones, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
36. Ibid., line 31 [ ]. The common term for good here
is also used by Plato later in the Story of the Cave for his idea of the Good [
]; Republic, Book VII, line 517c. Earlier use in Homer refers to serviceability, while Herodotus, a companion of Sophocles, uses it to refer to the goods of
wealth, suggesting an etymological current to Lacans desire to demystify the Good
back to the level of the economy of goods (SVII:216). See entry in Liddell
and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 4.
37. See Sophocles, Antigone, line 471 [ ].
38. Ibid., line 77 [ ].
39. Lacan is surprised that dialecticians or aestheticians as eminent as Hegel
and Goethe miss the beautydeath relation in their evaluation of the effect of the
play (SVII:248). What follows suggests Honigs view of Lacans Antigone as expression of pure monstrous desire misses the kind of splendor with which Lacan holds
her; and that Stavrakakiss view of her as caught in the lure of desire in the imaginary
misses that this already points to the real for Lacan as the field of the drive. I argue
these are two sides of a translucent veil, like ApolloDionysos in Nietzsche. Honig,
Antigones Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism, New Literary
History 41 (2010): 16. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 119, 146.
40. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 781800 [...
...].
41. See Homer, The Odyssey, Book XI, lines 48090.
, ].
/ 149
43. Honig implies it is Antigone who is trying to deify herself while the chorus
mocks her for it, to cut her down. But for Lacan the chorus had already turned to
favour Antigone, invoking Eros and Aphrodite. The difference is important as on it is
based Honigs claim that Lacans focus on Antigones monstrous desire ignores her
meaning making efforts in the dirge. Honig, Antigones Two Laws, 17. Sophocles,
Antigone, lines 81738.
44. Homer, The Odyssey, Book XI, line 490.
45. Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, lines 12501.
46. Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. B. Haxton (New York: Viking, 2001), no. 122. The
opposing view is in Platos Republic, BK III, line 386c, where he bids we not dispraise
the afterlife as this is untrue and discouraging to soldiers. Achilles would disagree
with the latter, Nietzsche also with the former. For more on the Homeric affirmation
of life by virtue of an unfancied afterlife, see Nietzsches 1872 BT 3, a point taken up
in the 1890s by Rohde at the start of Psyche. Rohde and Nietzsche had become professors of philology after studying together under Friedrich Ritschl at Bonn and Leipzig,
remaining for a time close thereafter. Another significant scholar of Greek culture in
Nietzsches life was Jacob Burckhardt of Basel, who was fifty when Nietzsche arrived as
a young twenty-four-year-old professor, attended his lectures and befriended him. See
Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, ed. O. Murray, trans. S. Stern (New York:
St. Martins Griffin, 1999), xxv. For Nietzsches 1888 praise of Burckhardt, see TI X:4.
47. Antigone [] is compounded of two words, meaning over against
[], and offspring, family [] which is homophonic with knee [] especially in Reuchlinian pronunciation: The knee known for its ability to bend, also found
in Homer in reference to bending to clasp the knees as suppliant. This is something
Anti-gone will never do, she will not bend or be brought to her knees; the latter metaphor also in Herodotus. See respective entries , , , in Liddell and Scott,
A Greek-English Lexicon, 153, 356, 357.
48. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 81316; Watlings Penguin translation is quite
capturing here.
49. Sophocles, Antigone, line 781 [Love, unbeatable at battle]. Lacans seminar
contains the translation Invincible love of combat (SVII:2678), but this weakens
the status of Love as the subject. Collits complains that the only English translation of Seminar VII we have often has the Greek quotations garbled, which is partly
why I often refer to the Greek. Collits, Lacans Antigone, in Agamemnons Mask, ed.
Collits and Sharma, 112.
]; Victory to the desire shining forth from the eyes of the sweetbedded bride.
51. See entry in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 270.
52. Sophocles, Antigone, line 856 [ ]; more
literally refers to a prize won at contest; in Oedipuss case this was something that
indeed became a crime.
54. Ibid., lines 58392.
55. iek depicts when Antigone risks her entire social existence, defying the
socio-symbolic power of the City embodied in Creon, as a passage through symbolic
150 /
death which is the ethical act proper, where rearticulation of the predominant
symbolic is possiblearguing against Butlers claim that in Lacan all resistance merely
contributes to and presumes the continuation of the law. Grigg agrees that rearticulating the symbolic via new quilting points is possible in Lacan, but is like Stavrakakis
in reading Antigone neurotically, even suicidally, rather than as an ethico-political
model for change. ieks response to Stavrakakis is that Antigone insists on performing burial, a precise symbolic gesture, so the symbolic is still at stake for her. iek,
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999),
2624. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997),
88. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 12530. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left,
115, 1189. iek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 305.
56. For how crimes of ancestors transfer, see Hegel, Hegels Aesthetics: Lectures
on Fine Art Vol I, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1988) 188; Rhode, Psyche:
Volume 2, 423.
57. It seems odd to narrow this to a hysteria of the Fathers Law as Grigg
attempts (like Luther, he says), and as Stavrakakis seconds right after wedding Antigones desire to the laws of the presumably Hellenic gods and goddesses. I tackle the
Christocentric in Freuds Oedipus in chapter 5. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 1259. Stavrakakis, Lacanian Left, 118.
58. Bataille, Eroticism, 53.
59. Zupani sketches out a later shift from an ethics of desire to one of the
drive between Lacans Seminar VII and XI (where desire becomes seen as closer to
fantasy and defense against the Real of enjoyment) but notes, nevertheless, that at
the heart of desire a possible passage opens up towards the drive, and that one might
therefore come to the drive if one follows the logic of desire to its limit. Zupani,
Ethics of the Real, 34, 235, 243.
60. Shepherdson sees the beautiful image of Antigone as a transformation of
the imaginary and its sudden relation not only to the law (the symbolic order), but
also to that blinding aspect Lacan develops under the heading of the Thing, that
unsymbolisable and terrifying fragment of the real that Antigones image somehow
contains, acting not like a mirror (in the imaginary) but like a veil, unto the real.
See Lacan and the Limits of Language, 56, 65.
61. See Aristotle, Poetics, lines 1449b2030.
62. Aristotle writes: the term purgation [] we use for the present
without explanation, but we will return to discuss the meaning that we give to it
more explicitly in our treatise on poetry. This Rackham translation footnotes: the
reference here is probably to the lost Second Book of Poetics. Aristotle, Politics, lines
1341b379, trans. H. Rackham, in Aristotle in 23 Volumes Vol. 21 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1944); also available at Perseus Digital Library, ed. Crane,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/.
63. Lacan is likely following Jakob Bernays in going to the Politics for more on
catharsis, whom he mentions as having had a distinguished career as a Latinist and a
Hellenist and as belonging to the same family from which Freud took his wife (SVII:
246). For an overview of approaches to Aristotle on catharsis, see Stephen Halliwell,
Aristotles Poetics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), appendix 5.
/ 151
64. comes from meaning to be inspired or possessed

by a god, to be in ecstasy, while has the negative connotations of feeling
pathetic, emotional. See respective entries in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English
Lexicon, 5667, 1285.
65. For fear [] and pity [], see Poetics, lines 1449b28, 1452a2,
1452b32, 1453b1.
66. More on the ecstatic catharsis and Dionysos worship is in Rhode, Psyche: Vol
2, 2867, with details on the Phrygian mode of music that went with it: the mode Aristotle also points to belonging to poetry [], Bacchic frenzy [], dithyramb [], and the exciting and emotional [ ] in
his Politics, lines 1342b17.
67. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Warner (London:
Penguin, 1988). Dodds suggests regression arose as the stress of war caused many
to slip back from the too difficult achievement of the Periclean Age; in The Greeks
and the Irrational, 192.
68. Rohde notes that in the Hellenistic-Macedonian age, a long stretch of
which the genius of Aristotle lights at the outset, Art became a plaything and an
incidental diversion: It is science that determines the general character and content.
Rohde, Psyche: Vol 2, 4923.
69. Nietzsche notes in 1888 that Socrates moralism was also hostile to science
(WP 32, 443), a shift from the Socrates presented in the 1872 BT which is already evident in his lectures straight after (PPP 17:145). Aristotle also saw that Socrates lacked
interest in physics or anything unconnected with morals, and that this influenced Plato
to focus on the supra-sensory [ ]. Dodds notes that Socrates overall
does not fit the modern view of a Greek rationalist, for he took dreams and oracles
seriously and too easily dismissed the role of emotion in ordinary behaviour. Aristotle,
Metaphysics, lines 987b17. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 185.
70. Platos most famous disvaluing of tragedy comes in Republic, Book X.
71. Aristotle also saw the origins of tragedy in dithyrambic music; Poetics, lines
1449a1012.
72. Nietzsche notes these moralities addressed to happiness to be largely
directed against the passions and, measured intellectually, to be worth very little
and not by a long shot science, but rather prudence, prudence, prudence, mixed
with stupidity (BGE 198).
73. It might seem as if the Christian Goods focus on self-sacrifice is not indexed
to pleasure, but the latter is simply deferred as a reward in an afterlife of pure
eternal bliss.
74. The tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear. Aristotle, Poetics, line 1453b12,
trans. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume Two, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
75. Nietzsche has Schopenhauers pessimism in mind, whom he rebukes for
adopting Kants notion of aesthetic pleasure without interest due to the navet with
which it submits to ascetic repression, as for Nietzsche the aesthetic evokes desires
that could not be any more personal or interesting (GM III:6). But Nietzsche is
also saying that if Aristotle were right about fear and pity as the sole tragic effect,
152 /
this would make Plato right to say that poetry is harmful and hence worth banning
in Republic, Book III, line 387d.
76. In book 8 of his Politics Aristotle also notes two classes [] of spectator:
the one free and educated [ ], the other coarser from the
laboring and artisan class [ ], with each requiring
different music to purge the passions in a pleasing manner. He does not directly link
the upper class to a stronger ecstasy or the lower to an emotional fear and pity. Possibly by then each class was an admixture of slave and master moralities, as Nietzsche
notes is often the case now even in the same human being, within a single soul (BGE
260). Aristotle, Politics, lines 1342a1721.
77. Aristotle notes that Empedocles was the first to speak of good and evil as
first principles, as if the cause of all good things is absolute good. Then he situates
Platos succeeding of the tradition, marking out nuances until his own. But insofar as
Aristotle still believes in the highest Good in the whole of nature, out there as a real
end and one of the causes, he remains in the Platonic tradition. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985a810, 987a29, 982b711, trans. H. Tredennick, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
78. As De Kesel put it, for the Aristotelian theory of catharsis, Antigone has
a purifying effect which shows how dangerous it is for mortals to meddle with the
dark world of the gods, making people accept their limits, shun arrogant hubris,
and become happy to foster self-realization by restricting desires to the rule of
mean; Eros and Ethics, 23940.
79. Bataille traces the discovery of this correlation of organised transgression
together with the taboo to the oral teaching of Marcel Mauss, noting Roger Caillois to take this up. Bataille, Eroticism, 65. Mauss, The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2000). Caillois, Man and the Sacred, trans. M. Barash (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2001).
80. In an appendix on Maenadism, Dodds argues that Euripides depiction
of Dionysian phenomena is not to be accounted for by imagination alone, as some
Victorian scholars would have it, for Pentheus is confronted by a problem which other
civil authorities have had to face in real life. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 278.
81. iek concurs that Antigones gesture is not simply pure desire for death,
for if so she could have killed herself directly and spared the people around her all
the fuss, without the unconditional insistence on a particular symbolic ritual. Where
I differ from iek is in his eliminative claim that Antigone thereby does not stand for
some extra-symbolic real, but for the pure signifierher purity is that of a signifier.
Antigones desire does not for mine refer to anything pure in the ascetic sense of
puritan morality, but to something akin to erotic enjoyment. Antigones brother-father
after all means incest, the ultimate sexual transgression and metaphor for Lacan of
the relation truth maintains with the real. iek, What some would call: A response
to Yannis Stavrakakis, Umbr(a) (2003): 133; In Defence of Lost Causes, 305. Lacan,
Ltourdit, trans. C. Gallagher, THE LETTER 41 (2009): 44.
82. Leiter is sceptical of inflationary readings of Nietzsches will to power, which
hold it to be the essence of all reality, inclusive even of inorganic beings; Nietzsche
on Morality, 13844.
/ 153
83. Holt discusses the transgression of tragic festivals on stage and in the crowd.
Colin MacCabe notes the tabootransgression correlation in Bataille is akin to Lacans
attempt to make Law and desire functions of the same psychic structure rather than
opposing forces. This does not mean desire is reduced to law as if ultimately submissive, as Stavrakakis suggests, but that transgression releases, at times explosively,
desire dammed up by law which forbids it, thus completing laws moment. This is a
key link between Batailles 1957 Eroticism and Lacans Ethics. Holt, Polis and Tragedy
in the Antigone, 65890. MacCabe, Introduction to the Penguin Edition (2000), in
Bataille, Eroticism, ix, 65. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 146. For more BatailleLacan
links see Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Bataille (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 7992;
Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 314; and Shattering
the Subject: Georges Bataille and the Limits of Therapy, European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling & Health 7 (2005): 132.
84. In surveying the anthropological views on live sacrifice that influenced Freud,
Bataille and Lacan, Boothby suggests we can even be defined as the animal for whom
ritual killing is an essential moment of its self-constitution, which links the function
of sacrifice to Lacans rereading of castration as the gateway through which the subject
comes to language. Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, 176, 183. Bataille, Eroticism, 23, 82.
85. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 115571; trans. Watling in the 1974 Penguin
edition.
86. Lacan says: At the end of Antigone Creon henceforth speaks loudly and
clearly of himself as someone who is dead among the living, he has lost all other
goods as a result of this affair, for Antigone as the hero also frees her adversary
into that zone (SVII:320).
87. This concluding of the 1888 Twilight of the Idols echoes a similar line on
tragic catharsis, as a Dionysian affirmation contra Aristotles fear and pity, in the
1872 Birth of Tragedy (BT 17, 22), indicating a longest held conviction. Boothby
might say Nietzsches joy in destruction here is the death-drive unbinding us from
the imaginary coherence of the ego, as for Lacan, the imaginary ego remains by its
very nature inimical to desire, as a resistance to the elusive process of becoming,
to the variations of desire, which only gives a stereotyped picture of reality and
is why Lacan asserts a paradoxical identity between the death drive and the realisation of a fuller vitalitydespite any concomitant images of castration and bodily
dismemberment. Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, 144, 1501. Lacan, Some Reflections
on the Ego, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953): 15.
Chapter 4
1. Plato, Symposium, in Plato III, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); will be cited in text this chapter
using the standard page section notation indexed to the edition of H. Stephanus
(vols. IIII, Paris, 1578).
2. When citing Lacans use of the Greek, I leave it as given in the Gallagher
translation of his Transference Seminar, transliterated into the Latin alphabet.
154 /
3. References to denaturalizing, including in the Platonic context, occur in

the notes collected in Will to Power sections 37, 203, 292, 2989, 430. References
in published work are in sections 246 of Anti-Christ, where Christianity is called
ultimate consequence of the denaturalizing past of Israel (as I discuss in chapter 5
section 5.3). Parallel terms include denatured, anti-nature, anti-natural, but also ascetic
ideal, decadence, moralization, neurosis, and nihilism. Denaturalizing captures these
and points to recent scholarship on Nietzsches naturalism. See Leiter, Nietzsches
Naturalism Reconsidered, in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. K. Gemes and
J. Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and the preface to the Greek
edition of Leiters Nietzsche on Morality (Athens: Okto Publishing, 2009).
4. I discuss what for Nietzsche was also the Judaic root in chapter 5.
5. It is sperm that splatters earth from the testicles of Uranus, indicating the
difficulty of using Greek theology to buttress a denaturing view of Love. For more on
Freud with this castration myth, see Jerome M. Schneck, Freud and Kronos, Am J
Psychiatry 125 (1968): 6923.
6. John Brenkman also points to this binary tendency, and argues that Lacan
returns Platos Symposium to a more balanced materialist standpoint. Brenkman, The
Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, the Symposium, Yale French Studies
55/56 (1977): 396456.
7. The verb , I stop, in its future tense, for instance, becomes sigmatic,
, I will stop, and is in such compounds as -, stilling the wind,
and - [paus-anias], allayer of sorrow. See entries in Liddell and Scott, A
Greek-English Lexicon, 1350.
8. David Pereira notes dcadence to derive from the Latin root decadereto
fall away from, used by Nietzsche for the fall away from the real of nature made by
the Good. Pereira refers to the fate of Huysmans, author of Against Nature, to support Nietzsches brilliant analysis that this type of decadence finds its destination
in Christianity, adding, it does not find its destination in psychoanalysis. Pereira,
Decadence, in Writing the Symptom, ed. L. Clifton (Hawthorne: the Freudian School
of Melbourne, 2007), 335, 343.
9. As discussed in chapter 1 (section 1.2), Lacan finds this inflation between
micro and macro also in Aristotles more materialist version of the Good, what he calls
the Aristotelian conversion with respect to Plato at the beginning of this Transference Seminar (SVIII 1:3).
10. Lacan reads a genital allusion in Agathons talk of love bringing calm on the
seas: because for a sailor, as for a man in bed, no wind in the sails means nothing
is working (SVIII 7:12)(197c). It calls to mind the binary Freud discerns in neurotic
impotence: where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot
love. See Freud, On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,
1912 (SE11:183).
11. Ertmenos is a passive form of the verb eromai [] or erta [],
I ask, inquire, becoming thus a to be asked, or, as Lacan puts it, the one interrogated. See entry in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 686.
12. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche notes what strange simplification and
falsification man lives, suggesting it is the awkwardness of language, if not still
/ 155
the faith of the metaphysicians, that continues to talk of opposites where there are
only degrees and many subtleties of gradation (BGE 2, 24).
13. I discussed Nietzsches major aesthetic distinction in chapter 2 (section 2.3).
14. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff condemned Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy in 1872, earning himself a rebuke from Rohde. In a letter to Rohde at the time,
Nietzsche dismissed his accuser lightly as prompted by others. Studies suggest some
truth to this. William M. Calder III, Dubischar, Hose, Vogt-Spira, eds., Wilamowitz in
Greifswald (New York: Olms, 2000). Calder III, The Wilamowitz-Nietzsche Struggle:
New Documents and a reappraisal, Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983): 21454. James Whitman, Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition of German Classical Philology, Journal
of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 45368.
15. If Athens had the plague ten months later, she could claim to have held
it off for the previous nine; if there were no plague at all, she could claim credit for
this too. Compare Thucydides agnosticism on the etiology of the plague and his
debunking of oracles, which is partly behind Nietzsches praise of his realism as a
cure for Platos idealism. Nietzsche, TI X:2, WP 4289, 443. Thucydides, History of
the Peloponnesian War, II: 4754, V: 103.
16. This is close to Nietzsches depiction of the Socratic logic reaching its
boundary points on the periphery where myth is the necessary consequence;
in BT 15.
17. Similarly, Nietzsche saw that with respect to art that despotic logician
occasionally had the feeling of a gap, a void, a half reproach, a possibly neglected
duty and a recurring dream saying Socrates, practice music, pointing to a realm
of wisdom from which the logician is exiled such that art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science (BT 14).
18. See Plato, Theaetetus, 150b151d.
19. For more on how Socrates and Plato sought to adopt and alter the prevailing religious structures of their time, see Mark L. McPherran, The Religion of Socrates
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); and Dodds, Plato, The
Irrational Soul, and the Inherited Conglomerate, which is chapter 7 of his Greeks
20. As Jean-Michel Rabat notes, Socrates turn to such fantasy broaches Lacans
view of love as giving what one does not have but by bypassing the aporia this
lack implies: for in truth no one has the Good, certainly not the beloved, and certainly not eternally. Rabat, Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 144.
21. Nietzsche mocks precisely this anti-nature dualism of philosophers from
Plato onward as a monotono-theism which wants to do away, above all, with the
body (TI III:1).
22. Freud notes that the repressed proliferates in the dark, in extreme forms
of expression, which are deceptive due to damming-up, fantasy; see Repression, 1915 (SE14:149).
23. For Rabat only Aristophanes, by virtue of his speech and bodily hiccups,
has warned of the trial-by-the-real that confronts Socrates, adding Plato and his readers would have known that Aristophanes derision of Socrates in The Clouds was
156 /
an important factor leading to the trial and subsequent condemnation to death of

Socrates; in Jacques Lacan, 140, 143.
24. An error occurs in chapter 10 of Lacans text, only partly corrected in 11.
Alcibiades does not appoint himself president of all to change the rules of the game,
only of the next drink [ ]. And the new game does not mean each has to
praise the one on his right, only prescribe [] there what he pleases. Compare
SVIII 10:1, 11:12, and Symposium 214cd.
25. Lacans unedited text might imply here that Alcibiades is ordered by Socrates
to speak the truth, Must I tell the truth?, as if he were intent on lying. Alcibiades,
rather, wants to speak truth but is only unsure how appropriate it is. Lambs translation is, I shall speak the truth; now, will you permit me? [ .
]. Compare, SVIII 11:3 and Symposium 214e.
26. Lacan stresses the stature of the historical Alcibiades as a political preAlexander, with star qualities akin to a modern day Kennedy or James Dean,
referring to Plutarchs Lives as his source while noting that, written four hundred
years later, it often takes on a moral accent that reduces people to zombies (SVIII
2:35). An account of Alcibiades written contemporary to him, and featuring his gifted
accomplishments and speeches to the assemblies at a time of high tension, is in the
concluding books of Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War.
27. Nietzsche notes the denaturing in bad conscience when calling us heirs
of the conscience-vivisection and self-torture of millennia, for man has all too long
had an evil eye for his natural inclinations such that they are inseparable from his
bad conscience (GM II:24).
28. Nietzsche exhibits his pro-nature appreciation of Alcibiades when he writes
of those enigmatic men predestined for victory and seduction, whose most beautiful
expression is found in Alcibiades and Caesar, and among artists perhaps Leonardo
da Vinci (BGE 200). Victoria Wohl notes homoerotic love of elder to younger was
foundational to the democratic ethos of Athens; in The Eros of Alcibiades, Classical
Antiquity 18 (1999): 34985.
29. Lacans analogy of Socrates as proto-analyst of the transference stops short at
such points. Nietzsche also held that Socrates acoustic hallucination was a morbid
element resulting of an over preoccupation with morality, interpreted in a religious
sense; WP 432, TI II:4.
30. Nietzsche cites Bk. 4, Ch. 4 of Xenophons Memorabilia as his source in
PPP 17:150.
31. Rohde holds that the real Socrates is more that of Platos Apology, who
agnostically meets death with little anticipation of an immortal life of the soul; in
Psyche: Vol 2, 4634.
32. Rabat gives as examples of object a the lips, the rim of the anus, the tip
of the penis, the vagina, the eyelids and the eye they contain, the aperture of the ear,
adding that the agalma for Lacan encompasses elements of the fetish like Melanie
Kleins part object and turns into Lacans own concept of the object petit a. Rabat,
Jacques Lacan, 145.
33. See Lacan, The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire, in
crits, 699.
/ 157
34. Nietzsche notes that this left Greece denaturalised under the pretence of
sublimation (WP 430). For the role of dialectic here, seen as the asserting of imaginary
opposites that are synthesized with others to give only further fictions as results (such
as inflationary ideas of the Good, Truth, and Beautiful), see Deleuze, Nietzsche
and Philosophy, 158.
35. Dodds sees in Platos distortion of religion an attempt to conserve fifthcentury rationality by giving it a metaphysical extension, and suggests Plato may
have been influenced in his transcendental psychology by his personal contact with
the Pythagoreans of West Greece when he visited them in about 390 BC. In Greeks
36. For Freud the neuroses contain the same tendencies, though in a state
of repression, as do the positive perversions; see Civilised Sexual Morality and
Modern Nervous Illness, 1908 (SE9:191).
37. Wohl holds that Alcibiades is an anomaly who reaffirms the sexual and
political norms he transgresses, as we can view the desire he inspires as a displacement of those same norms. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, VI: 15.
Wohl, Eros of Alcibiades, 3545.
38. Lacan suggests similarly that Alcibiades is the man of desire who displays what can be viewed as a very remarkable case of the absence of castration
fear (SVIII 11:8).
39. Benjamin Biebuyck finds in Nietzsches notes a link from this depreciation
of the senses to Pythagoras and Orphism; see Cults and Migrations: Nietzsches
Meditations on Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and the Greek Mysteries, in Nietzsche and
40. Wohl explains this with Foucault and Butler as the idea that power does
not prohibit but in fact incites and proliferates perversions, which paradoxically supports implementing ever more penetrating and wide-reaching control. Wohl, The
Eros of Alcibiades, 3534.
41. Compare the concluding paragraphs of Phaedo and The Problem of
Socrates chapter in TI. Asclepius was god of medicine, whose sanctuary was at Epidaurus beside an amphitheatre so well designed it is still in use today. In the 1882
GS 340, Nietzsche shows admiration for Socrates courage and wisdom except in
this dying reference to Asclepius because of the pessimism toward life implied, which
Nietzsche eventually took to be the core of Socrates.
42. Nietzsche refers to this Midas mythos, cited from Sophocles, in BT 3.
43. David McNeil, however, attempts to diminish the critique of Socrates by
appropriating Nietzsche himself. See Mc Neil, On the Relationship of Alcibiades
Speech to Nietzsches Problem of Socrates, in Nietzsche and Antiquity, ed. Bishop,
26075.
Chapter 5
1. Capitalizing Father, Law, etc., again suggests an inflationary notion of
their function.
158 /
2. Yerushalmi considers an unpublished draft of Moses and Monotheism and

Freuds letters at the time; Eliza Slavet the social context of his interest in the inheritance of phylogenetic memory. Yerushalmi, Freud on the Historical Novel: From
the Manuscript Draft (1934), International Journal Psycho-Analysis 70 (1989): 375.
Slavet, Freuds Lamarckism and the Politics of Racial Science, Journal of the History
of Biology 41 (2008): 3780.
3. Slavet notes that although the Lamarckism in Freuds view of memory being
repressed and inherited by descendents millennia later was suspect in the 1930s, it
was not refutable until the 1940s genetically. Slavet, Freuds Lamarckism and the
Politics of Racial Science, 64, 66.
4. See the Morality as Anti-Nature chapter V in Nietzsches TI, and AC
247 (which I explore in section 5.3). There is also a phantom affirmation of nature
Nietzsche rejects as a cowardly extension of Christianity, as it hopes the idyllic
denaturalised heaven it imagines can be here upon the earth, and is even the true
earth-in-itself awaiting fulfilment (WP 340).
5. As R. Z. Freidman put it, Rejecting Judaism, at least traditional Judaism, Freud nevertheless refuses to be separated from the Jewish people. Freud was a
godless Jew. Friedman, Freuds Religion: Oedipus and Moses, Religious Studies 34
(1998): 143.
6. The other example came from Goethes shocked (SVII:278) response to
Antigone saying she would not have defied Creon for husband or child as she could
always have made another child with another husband (SVII:255), disturbing the
notion that she acts from pious duty to family and gods and offering a window to
her real desire. Also when Alcibiades tells of how he tried to get Socrates to have sex
with him (SVIII 2:5), leaving translators and commentators perturbed (SVIII 2:67),
and becoming central to Lacan because akin to an irruption of the real (SVIII 5:2).
See chapter 3 section 3.2 and chapter 4 section 4.3.
7. Lacan had referred to our revolutions not only keeping the ten commandments alive but also pushing them to a puritan level, such that the leader of a great
socialist state upon visiting America was scandalised to see dancers raising their
legs a little too high (SVII:7980).
8. Shepherdson also considers the attempt by Carl Degler to establish a natural, genetic basis to the avoidance of incest among humans, which references the
observation of a general avoidance of incest among animals. Shepherdson, Lacan
and the Limits of Language, 17980. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline
and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 2646.
9. Further exploration of Freuds theory of the origins of Monotheism can be
found in Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998); Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in
Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996);
and Yerushalmi, Freuds Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New York: VailBallou Press, 1991).
/ 159
10. Bataille also interprets the sin of the crucifixion as a residue of the
live sacrifice that marks totemic and pre-Christian religion, where now we will the
murder symbolically before accepting the guilt for it, since our sins had put Him
up there, which in any case leads to salvation, making His murder a paradoxical
Felix Culpahappy fault! Nietzsche similarly, playing Christian prejudice against
other religions back in reverse, remarks: the sacrifice of the innocent man for the
sins of the guilty! What atrocious paganism! (AC 41). Boothby notes a general
evolution away from rituals centred upon an actual killing towards those in which
death and dismemberment are merely symbolic, from blood sacrifice to practices
of offering and oblation and finally to traditions of self-denial and asceticism in
which violence has no explicit part. Bataille, Eroticism, 8990. Boothby, Freud as
Philosopher, 177, 187.
11. Verhaeghe also takes Lacan to sense this in Freuds response to hearing of his
own father suffering harsh acts of racism like: Jew! Get off the pavement!quietly
without fighting back. Verhaeghe, Enjoyment and Impossibility: Lacans Revision of
the Oedipus Complex, in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, ed. J. Clemens and R. Grigg (London: Duke University Press,
2006), 40, 48. Lacan, SXVII:12230 and SVII:3089.
12. As Grigg explains, there is a fundamental fantasy at issue of the father
who enjoys and enjoys all the women, a fantasy which is a consequence of the
law and a retrospective effect of the institution of the prohibition of jouissance,
retroactively created as the father who enjoys in Totem and Taboo. Grigg, Beyond
the Oedipus Complex, in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed.
Clemens and Grigg, 59.
13. I use the term distance of Seminar VII even though Seminar XVII uses
castration (SXVII:125), a term I largely leave aside until I can say why it is misleading in section 5.3.
14. For Verhaeghe Lacan also shows that Freud needs the primal Father to
explain why clinical practice reveals so many weak fatherswithout casting doubt
on his Oedipus complex that presupposes powerful, castrating fathers. Verhaeghe,
Enjoyment and Impossibility, 3940.
15. Freuds main references to Sellin come in SE23:367, 512. Further exegesis
is in Robert A. Paul, Freud, Sellin and the Death of Moses, Int. J. Psycho-Analysis
75 (1994): 82537.
16. Weaver Santaniello claims that Nietzsche even elevates ancient Hebrews
and modern Jews, while being ambivalent toward the prophetic-priestly Judaism
that gave rise to Christianity, to the 19th-century Christian Jews who are his enemies. Julian Young also provides much evidence of Nietzsches consistent anti-antiSemitism. We can see this when Nietzsche writes to the anti-Semite Theodor Fritsch
to demand no further contact be made, inveighing against the muddle of principles
of this strange movement with its abominable wanting to have a say of annoying
dilettantes about the value of people and races. Santaniello, Nietzsches Antichrist:
19th-Century Christian Jews and the Real Big Lie, Modern Judaism 17.2 (1997):
164. Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge
160 /
University Press, 2010), 237, 3589, 3912, 454, 489. Nietzsche, Letter to Fritsch,
in Nietzsche Chronicle: 1887 (Hanover: Dartmouth College), http://www.dartmouth.
edu/~fnchron/1887.html (accessed April 1, 2013).
17. Although archaeologists can suggest that both the Exodus story and the
great Kingdom are partly myth, Nietzsche would say the great Kingdom is still a
healthy, affirming, yet to be denaturalizing myth. See Israel Finkelsteins chapter King
Solomons Golden Age: History or Myth, in The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel, ed. B. B. Schmidt (Atlanta: Society of
Biblical Literature, 2007), 10717.
18. In the Advance in Intellectuality section of Moses and Monotheism, Freud
writes, Why the people of Israel, however, clung more and more submissively to their
God the worse they were treated by himthat is a problem which for the moment
we must leave on one side (SE23:115). What follows through Nietzsche is a way of
treating this problem Freud leaves aside, and brings to light a critique of Judaic Law
not so pronounced in Freud or Lacan.
19. Nietzsche saw Platonists to do the same after the Golden Age of Greece,
where Gradually everything Hellenic is made responsible for the state of decay, and
Plato is just as ungrateful to Pericles, Homer, tragedy, rhetoric, as the prophets were
to David and Saul (WP 427). It is in this sense that Nietzsche remarks, The Sophists
were Greeks: when Socrates and Plato took up the cause of virtue and justice, they
were Jews or I know not what (WP 429).
20. Although Freud gives a more positive reading of the dematerialisation of
God that Jews experienced, seeing in its deprivileging of sense perception and sensuality some advance in intellectuality [Geistigkeit], still he notes the harmony in
the cultivation of intellectual and physical activity that was achieved by the Greek
and denied to the Jews (SE23:115).
21. For Freud also in some respects the new religion meant a cultural regression as it entailed a new mass of people, of a lower level who did not maintain the
high level in things of the mind to which Judaism had soared, adding superstitious,
magical and mystical elements, which were to prove a severe inhibition upon the
intellectual development of the next two thousand years. But as regards the return
of the repressed, Freud insists, Christianity was an advance and from that time on
the Jewish religion was to some extent a fossil (SE23:88).
22. Two articles on this moral psychology can be found by R. Jay Wallace and
Christopher Janaway, respectively in Nietzsche and Morality, ed. B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11055. Deleuze praises Nietzsches
affirmation of earthly nature as distinct from the negations of ressentiment in Nietzsche
23. Nietzsche is citing from The Bible, I Corinthians i, 20 ff.
24. For Nietzsche, there is a lack of rapport between Christianity and science
proper, which is in contrast to what Alexandre Leupin has attributed to Lacan in the
God is Real chapter of Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion (New York:
Other Press, 2004), 10525.
25. Paul Bishop calls this one of the clearest statements of Nietzsches assertions
of classical ideals, noting it to include the joyous, benevolent, Goethean attitude
/ 161
toward sensuality in the ideal of philology (WP 118), the art of good reading, all
of which the Christian lacks. Bishop, Nietzsches Anti-Christianity as a Return to
(German) Classicism, in Nietzsche and Antiquity, ed. Bishop, 44852.
26. For Nietzsches praise of the Renaissance for seeking to retrieve the flourishing knowledge and culture of antiquity, see AC 61 and GM I:16.
27. Lacan states, at the heart of everything Freud taught is that the energy
of the so-called superego derives from the aggression that the subject turns back on
himself (SVII:194). To borrow Onss phrase, it is both surprising and symptomatic
that Lacan does not reference Nietzsche here, given the sustained analysis of bad conscience as internalized aggression in Nietzsches GM II and III. Zupani also links the
ascetic ideal in Nietzsche, the super-ego in Freud, and Lacans reading of the superego
law in terms of the imperative of enjoyment, where, of course, Nietzsche recognises
this mode of enjoyment in the whole history of Christianity. Ons, Nietzsche, Freud,
Lacan, 80. Zupani, The Shortest Shadow, 50.
28. For Andrew Ryder, Lacans increasing systematization at the hands of iek
and others is a return to the ethics of a committed subject but at the price of other
aspects of Lacans thought more intimately linked to Batailles experiences, those that
allow for the possibility of an encounter with alterity. Bataille, Eroticism, 9, 1267.
Ryder, Inner Experience is Not Psychosis: Batailles Ethics and Lacanian Subjectivity,
Parrhesia 9 (2010): 95.
29. Roudinesco suggests Lacans School looked kindly on the aspirations of
priests and other Christians who wanted to become analysts. Deleuze and Guattari
report that Freud held to his atheism in heroic fashion, whereas others were ready to
prepare behind his back the reconciliation of the churches and psychoanalysis, when
the Church would train its own psychoanalysts and it would become possible to
write in the history of the movement: so even we are still pious! John Irwin claims the
Swiss pastor Oskar Pfister had powerfully refuted Freuds arguments against religion
in his dialogues with him. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 205. Deleuze and Guattari, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley and M. Seem (Minneapolis:
Minnesota Press, 2003), 58. Irwin, Pfister and Freud: The Rediscovery of dialogue,
Journal of Religion and Health 12 (1973): 315.
30. Dodds notes that in the third century BC, Greece was expected to consolidate its Age of Reason but went into a slow intellectual decline and succumbed to
the Return of the Irrationaladding that similar predictions made by nineteenthcentury rationalists about a perfect Age of Reason also look like proving wrong;
in Greeks and the Irrational, 2434.
31. Bataille notes that it is ridiculous to isolate a specific taboo such as the
one on incest, as it is just one aspect of the general taboo placed on sexuality or
death; Eroticism, 51.
32. For Derrida on castration in Nietzsche, see The Question of Style, in The
New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. Allison (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1985), 183.
33. See Brobjer, The Origin and Early Context of the Revaluation Theme in
Nietzsches Thinking, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 39 (2010): 25; and Nietzsches
View of the Value of Historical Studies and Methods, 3201.
162 /
34. Peter Gay notes that Freud was visited by anxious scholars to talk him
out of publishing the book, given the time of terrible travail, with the Nazi persecution...intensifying beyond the bounds of the most vicious czarist pogroms. Gay,
A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale
Chapter 6
1. Roudinesco reports that Lacan felt he might have been plagiarized when
two years later Deleuze and Guattari produced their Anti-Oedipus. Oscar Zentner
suggests that Lacan had overstated his links to Freud to preserve affiliation with the
International Psychoanalytic Association and that, following his 1964 expulsion, felt
no longer pressed to keep this up. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 348. Zentner, From the
Freudian Unconscious as a Cause to the Lacanian Unconscious as a Gaffe, in Writing
the Symptom, ed. Clifton, 3646.
2. Grigg, Beyond the Oedipus Complex, 512.
3. Lacan notes, there is no more burning question than what, in discourse,
refers to jouissance. Discourse is constantly touching on it, by virtue of the fact that
this is where it originates (SXVII:70).
4. Verhaeghe sees the S1 here in terms of Freuds primary repression, which is
bound up with identity acquisition and forms the basis for the ego as an illusory,
imaginary unity, and thus the basis for the divided subject. Verhaeghe, Enjoyment
and Impossibility, 36.
5. Juliet Flower MacCannell, More Thoughts for the Times on War and Death:
The Discourse of Capitalism in Seminar XVII, in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Clemens and Grigg, 198. Federico Fellini, Fellini-Satyricon (Culver
City: MGM/UA Home Video [1969] 1988). Petronius, The Satyricon, trans. W. Arrowsmith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959).
6. Lacan cites those whose childhood was retroactively lived out in our familial categories, whose unconscious functioned according to the good old rules of
Oedipus which, for his West-African patients, was sold to them along with the laws
of colonisation (SXVII:92). Freuds centralizing of Oedipus is visible in his return to
Little Hans in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 1926 (SE20:77172). The certainty
seems striking considering the problems noted by Joseph Wolpe and Stanley Rachman
in Psychoanalytic Evidence: A Critique based on Freuds Case of Little Hans, The
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 130 (1960), 13548. Wilhelm Reich examines
some variants in the matriarchal societies of the Trobriand Islands in Sex-Pol: Essays
19291934, ed. L. Baxandall (New York: Vintage, 1972), 89249.
7. SXVII:15, 18, 46, 48, 50. Zupani notes the shift pointed to by Miller
on what constitutes jouissance, where it is need not be a spectacular or colossal
transgression but also can be a remainder or surplus of jouissance, which is what the
a means in the four discourses. Lacan remarks, we dont ever transgress. Sneaking
around is not transgressing. Seeing a door half-open is not the same as going through
it (SXVII:19). Zupani, When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value, in Jacques
/ 163
Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Clemens and Grigg, 1558. Miller,
Paradigms of Jouissance, Lacanian Ink 17 (2000): 1047.
8. Aldous Huxley describes the technique of building a bridge of verbal or
pictorial symbols from an object to a common desire, some widespread unconscious
fear or anxiety, in the Arts of Selling chapter of Brave New World Revisited (London:
Flamingo, 1994), 6983.
9. Oliver Feltham notes this operational quarter turn that links the masters
to the universitys discourse to have an historical basis that might be seen as an
historical novel; he also refers to Lacans Radiophonie to suggest both progressive and regressive quarter turns are possible. Feltham, Enjoy Your Stay: Structural
Change in Seminar XVII, in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed.
Clemens and Grigg, 1834. Lacan, Radiophonie, in Autres crits (Paris: ditions du
Seuil, 2001), 40347.
10. Koyr also remarks that in the world of science, though there is a place
for everything, there is no place for man. He suggests science is utterly divorced
from the world of life it has been unable to explain away by calling it subjective,
substituting for our world of quality and sense perception in which we live, and love,
and die, another world of quantity, of reified geometry, giving us the tragedy of
modern mind which solved the riddle of the universe only to replace it by the riddle
of itself. Koyr, The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis, in Newtonian Studies
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), 234.
11. Bataille also notes that to think objectively a scientist must have denied
himself as a subject to begin with by yielding, often unwittingly, to taboos inherited from earlier epochs, which acted on behalf of science by having removed
the object of the taboo from our consciousness by forbidding itthe disturbing
objectachieving thus the calm ordering of ideas required for the world of action
and of objectivity. Bataille, Eroticism, 378.
12. Monique David-Menard notes that it is by plunging into the gaps of silence
in the analysts discourse that the analysand rediscovers the indeterminant truth of
their own desire: that it flows from the primal lack caused by separation, the lack of
the lost object. David-Menard, Lacanians Against Lacan, trans. B. Massumi, Social
Text 6 (1982): 99.
13. In anthropology, Bataille commends Caillois for also having recognized
this. Caillois, moreover, in his 1939 introduction to Man and the Sacred describes an
intellectual osmosis with Bataille that made it difficult to distinguish their respective
contributions in work they pursued in common. See Bataille Eroticism, 501; and
Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 15.
14. Lacan reaffirms this seven years later: Psychoanalysis is not a science. It has
no scientific statusit merely waits and hopes for it. Psychoanalysis is a delusiona
delusion that is expected to produce a science....It is a scientific delusion, but this
doesnt mean that analytic practice will ever produce a science. Lacan, Ornicar? 14
(1977): 4 [Seminar of 11.01.77].
15. Ons has that Nietzsche is close to Lacan in his conception of truth as
having the structure of fiction. Zupani sees two places where they broach truth
similarly: the equation of truth with women because it is not-whole, impossible
164 /
to say it all; and the idea that I, the truth, am speaking, insofar as Nietzsche also
notes, referring to his first caveat, Yet in spite of that...the truth speaks out of me.
Lacan, The Youth of Gide, or the Letter and Desire, in crits, 625. Ons, Nietzsche,
Freud, Lacan, 80. Zupani, The Shortest Shadow, 120.
16. As Verhaeghe explains, the road to enjoyment is the road to death. Hence
the need for an internal, instinctive break, an S1 which, for Freud, is where the child
calls for help from a supposedly almighty father figure. Verhaeghe, Enjoyment and
Impossibility, 37, 41.
17. As Feltham notes, there is impotence or a barrier across the bottom
of a discourse for Lacan, which means that what is produced (bottom right) can
remain ignorant of the truth behind it (bottom left). Thus, in the hysterics discourse,
insofar as the master is not sought in the analyst, what is produced is the universitys
discoursea dominant S2with only a partial knowledge of the jouissance object a
behind it. Feltham, Enjoy Your Stay, 1867.
18. David-Menard notes how in analysis, the analysand seeks to seduce the
analyst by trying to define the analysts desire as it is revealed in their elusive discourse which, all else being equal, tends to be the subjects own desire misplaced in
the object of his imaginary or mirror-image identification. David-Menard, Lacanians
Against Lacan, 99.
19. Or as Lacan puts it, once you have started, you never know where it will
end. It begins with a tickle and ends in a blaze of petrol. Thats always what jouissance is (SXVII:72).
20. Feltham calls this production via inversion, where the masters discourse
produces a, which the analysts discourse makes conscious to produce the master
signifier, meaning both discourses have the potential to produce each other. Feltham
Enjoy Your Stay, 186.
21. To young people distressed at sensing him to abuse, interpellate, vociferate against analysts, Lacan replies: They do not realise that I am doing something
nice, that these are little signs of acknowledgement that I am giving them, that at
the level of impotence, we are all brothers and sisters, only one has to extricate
oneself as best one can (SXVII:163).
22. Leiter suggests that any contradiction between Nietzsches 1887 and 1888
views on science is exaggerated by superficial readers, as Nietzsche is only saying
that although science may be invested ascetically, in merely seeking to deny us now
of spirit as well, it can still be informed by a different, non-ascetic ideal. Leiter,
Nietzsche on Morality, 282.
23. In an unpublished 1887 note, Nietzsche explains this need for permanence
as follows: Because we have to be stable in our beliefs if we are to prosper, we have
made the real world a world not of change and becoming, but one of being. We
have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general
(WP 507).
24. Nietzsche parodies the inflationary investments of reason as follows: Hume
had declared: There are no synthetic a priori judgements. Kant says: But there are!
Those of mathematics! And if there are such judgments, perhaps there is also metaphysics, a knowledge of things by pure reason! (WP 530) Nietzsche aims to replace
/ 165
the Kantian question, How are synthetic judgements a priori possible? by another
question, Why is belief in such judgments necessary?as for Nietzsche, these are
nothing but false judgements (BGE 11). Ray Monk notes that Bertrand Russells
oeuvre begins with the inflationary view of mathematics and reason, only to finish
with a position like Nietzsches: that the world of ideas can be ridiculed as stemming from a morbid dislike of the real world. As Russell himself was to later put it,
I have no longer the feeling that intellect is superior to sense, and that only Platos
world of ideas gives access to the real world. Monk, Russell: Mathematics: Dreams
and Nightmares (London: Phoenix, 1997), 53. Russell, My Philosophical Development
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 21112.
25. A key early attempt at discussion of this central passage is in the Nietzsches
Overturning of Platonism chapter in Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two,
I: 20010.
26. In the final chapter of Twilight of the Idols entitled What I Owe to the
Ancients, Platos idealism is dismissed as the very blunder that led to the Cross
and contrasted with the realist culture and strong, stern, hard courage of a
Thucydides (TI X:2).
27. Brobjer notes that although in BGE Nietzsche made some consistently
positive comments in praise of Plato, before BGE the critical ones are in the majority, whereas after BGE almost all of his comments became negative and hostile once
more. Brobjer, Nietzsches Wrestling with Plato and Platonism, in Nietzsche and
28. See BGE 252, where Nietzsche explicitly refers to Englishmen as an
unphilosophical race and their English-mechanistic doltification of the world a
debasement of the philosophical spirit. Bacon is mentioned along with Hobbes,
Hume, and Locke; but when it comes to the methodology of science, as opposed to
an approach to philosophy, Bacon is held by Nietzsche as one of the greats along with
Aristotle, Descartes and Comte (WP 468).
29. See also BGE 5 where Nietzsche is sceptical of Spinozas mathematicalformalizations in ethics, calling it the hocus-pocus and defense mechanism of a
sick hermit.
30. Brobjer documents Nietzsches reading of Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius,
Emil Du Bois-Reymond and Friedrich Lange. Hussain suggests similarities between
Nietzsche and Machs view that objects and egos are complexes of sensations. Robin
Small argues it was the influence of Boscovich that led Nietzsche away from any
reductive or reified materialism. See Brobjer, Nietzsches Reading and Knowledge
of Natural Science: An Overview; and Hussain, Reading Nietzsche through Ernst
Mach, in Nietzsche and Science, ed. Moore and Brobjer, 404, 11226. Small, Nietzsche
in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 90, 155.
31. Nietzsche also questions the idea that science discovers laws, saying it
consists of conventional fictions useful for the purpose of designation and communication (BGE 14, 21, 22). Clark suggests that here in the BGE of 1886, Nietzsche
has inflationary notions in mind when he is skeptical of truths, laws and necessities, but in 1888 once he abandons all association of any thing-in-itself with the term
truth, he more consistently and clearly stops referring to the findings of the empirical
166 /
sciences as fictional in the sense of being merely apparent. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth
32. Paul Franco notes that for Nietzsche in the 1878 HAH, the higher culture
of the future will be based on science, but because this seems to lack any mechanism
for the creation of new values, Nietzsche later posits the bermenschen, who will go
beyond the scientific activity of the free spirit to perform the task of creating new
values. Franco, Nietzsches Human, All Too Human and the Problem of Culture, The
Review of Politics 69 (2007): 242.
33. Though Brobjer documents how Nietzsche read a fairly large number of
books concerning natural science, including specialist works, which made him better informed and more engaged in questions relating to natural science than has
generally been assumed, he notes there is still truth to the conventional view that
in the late 1880s Nietzsche was critical of positivism, denying pure facts and
emphasizing values, which positivists more or less ignored. Brobjer, Nietzsches
Reading and Knowledge of Natural Science, 44, 46.
34. Nietzsche traces sciences origins back further to the Ionian coast origins
of philosophy in Thaleswho flourished in 585 BCfor being the first to see into
the depths of nature and explain all things in language devoid of image or fable,
as a mathematician and astronomer who turned cold against everything mythical
and allegorical (PTA 3).
35. Grigg notes the key role Lacan gives to Descartes in the birth of science, for
the conception of a mathematised nature and the cogito as the subject of science.
While acknowledging the discussion suggesting Lacans views on science later differ,
Griggs focus is on the 19651966 paper Science and Truth. In this paper the splitting of knowledge and truth caused by modern science, the subjects division between
truth and knowledge discussed in the 19691970 Seminar XVII and section 6.1, is
also earmarked. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 1368. Lacan, Science and
Truth, in crits, 7267, 733, 7378, 7423.
36. Nietzsche uses the sun rising as an example of where ordinary perception
falls short (TI III:5). He also remarks on Lockes superficiality regarding the origin
of ideas and notes that thinking also bears an unconscious domination by grammatical functions (BGE 20).
37. Planck notes that in the late nineteenth century, Hertz joined the disciplines
of optics and electrodynamics with the discovery of the propagation of electromagnetic waves through a vacuum. Max Planck, Where is Science Going? (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1933), 43.
38. Brobjer notes Nietzsche insisting he read science books almost exclusively
after breaking with Wagner, as stated in EH and the HAH preface. Franco finds a
unity between science and art implicit in HAH, while agreeing with Brobjer that
their dialectic in Nietzsche reaches balance over time. Brobjer, Nietzsches Reading
and Knowledge of Natural Science, 35. Franco, Nietzsches Human, All Too Human
and the Problem of Culture, 234, 242. Brobjer, Nietzsches View of the Value of
Historical Studies and Methods, 3012.
39. Nietzsche at one point states, I do not believe in matter and hold Boscovich to be one of the great turning-points, like Copernicus (KGW VII:2, 264). Small
N O T E S T O C O N C LU SIO N
/ 167
suggests that Boscovich abolishes the distinction between matter and space. Matter is
nothing but the field of force which occupies the whole of space. There is no longer any
empty space...for there is no filled space either: the contrast has been abolished.
Small, Nietzsche in Context, 91. Roger J. Boscovich, A Theory of Natural Philosophy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [1763] 1966).
40. As Miller put it, the scientific approach assumes a desexualisation of the
view of the world...of being in the world. Grigg notes that it is the mathematisation of the empirical world or universe that reduces and eliminates the imaginary
from science and knowledge. Miller, Elements of Epistemology, trans. Grigg, Analysis 1 (1989): 29. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 1401.
41. Fink, Knowledge and Science: Fantasies of the Whole, in Lacan and Science, ed. Glynos and Stavrakakis, 174.
42. Jason Glynos, Psychoanalysis Operates on the Subject of Science: Lacan
between Science and Ethics, in Lacan and Science, ed. Glynos and Stavrakakis, 71.
43. Lacan had earlier characterized this foreclosure with the admittedly
strange remark that science does-not-want-to-know-anything about truth as cause,
leading to the paradoxical notion of science as a successful paranoia. Lacan, Science
and Truth, in crits, 742.
44. Verhaeghe, Causality in Science and Psychoanalysis, in Lacan and Science,
ed. Glynos and Stavrakakis, 1267.
45. Leupin notes that Lacans Seminar VII claim that modern science, the
kind that was born with Galileo, could only have developed out of biblical or Judaic
ideology (SVII:122), also bears the influence of Alexandre Kojve. See Leupin, Lacan
Today, 11112; and Kojve, LOrigine Chrtienne de la Science Moderne, in Mlanges
Koyr (Paris: Hermann, 1964).
46. Corfield, From Mathematics to Psychology, 180. See also Maarten Van
Dyck, The Paradox of Conceptual Novelty and Galileos Use of Experiments, Philosophy of Science 72 (2005): 86475; Alexander J. Hahn, The Pendulum Swings Again: A
Mathematical Reassessment of Galileos Experiments with Inclined Planes, Archive for
History of Exact Sciences 56 (2002): 33961; Stillman Drake, Galileo: Pioneer Scientist
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 36; and Koyr, Galileo Studies, trans.
John Mepham (Hassocks: Harvester Press [1939] 1978).
47. Corfield concludes that trading zones with neuroscience and other empirical psychologies can also be of value. Corfield, From Mathematics to Psychology, 202.
48. Koyr, The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis, in Newtonian Studies, 1113.
Conclusion
1. The final Nietzsches Madness chapter of Youngs 2010 work may be a
place to start this further exploration. After surveying various positions, Young suggests that although we will never know for certain whether his mental condition was
caused by an underlying physical pathology, the most plausible conclusion appears
to be that Nietzsches madness was, in fact, a purely psychological condition. Leonard
168 /
N O T E S T O C O N C LU SIO N
Sax, conversely, argues that a slowly growing right-sided retro-orbital meningioma, a

cancerous brain tumor of the right optic nerve, provides a more plausible fit to the
evidence. Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII, Le Sinthome, 19751976
(Paris: ditions du Seuil, 2005). Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 562. Sax, What was the
cause of Nietzsches dementia? Journal of Medical Biography 11 (2003): 47, 50.
2. Rabat quotes Lacan in Seminar XXIII stating that the knot keeps trace of
something next to which the imagination fails [dfaille]. Rabat, Jacques Lacan, 157.
Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 359.
3. Lacan, The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts
in 1956, in crits, 390.
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Index
abundance, 3, 23, 3637, 130. See also

creativity: strong
Achilles, 5051, 67, 84, 149
acting out, 30, 116
aesthetics, 17, 33, 53, 140, 148, 151;
distinction of Nietzsches, 3, 23,
36, 72, 76, 130, 144, 155. See also
creativity: weak; strong
affirmation: of desire, 59, 62; of
difference, 134; Dionysian, 153; of
distance, 133; of earth, 3638; of
life, 51, 149; of nature, 104, 160;
of natural science, 117, 123, 139;
phantom, 158; of the real, 84; self,
98; small, 58; of the Thing, 23; of
toughest truths, 131
afterlife. See under life
agalma, 7678, 8081, 156. See also
object: object a
Agathon, 7074, 76, 8081, 154
aggression: Creons, 46; desublimated,
29; hysterical, 110; internalised, 1,
27, 103, 143, 161; jouissance of, 96,
142; natural, 102; potential for 25;
sublimated, 24; taboos of, 97
Alcibiades, 4, 6566, 68, 73, 7683, 131,
15658
Alexander the Great, 56, 156
anal, 18, 29, 35, 81, 126, 156
analysand. See under psychoanalysis
animal, 12, 14, 16, 48, 58, 75, 82, 89, 91,
131, 140, 153, 158; mammal, 75, 118
anthropology, 88, 153, 163

Antigone, 34, 10, 3942, 4555, 57
63, 84, 130, 14550, 152, 153,
158; At () of, 5152, 54, 5960,
149
anti-nature. See under nature
anti-Semitism. See under Judaism
anxiety, 14, 16263
Aphrodite, 45, 50, 67, 74, 96, 149
Apollo, 77, 148
appearance, 12, 3637
Arcesilaus, 9
Archimedes, 124
Aristophanes, 6869, 73, 155
Aristotle, 14, 7, 11, 13, 1518, 21, 41,
4345, 48, 5458, 62, 125, 129, 131,
13940, 146, 150154, 165; works of:
Metaphysics, 15152; Nicomachean
Ethics, 1516, 140; Poetics, 55,
15051; Politics, 5557, 15052;
Rhetoric, 48
art: and aesthetic distinction, 3638;
of Alcibiades, 83; devaluing of, 11,
23, 3839, 139, 145; Dionysian, 62;
and Freud, 144; Greco-Roman, 104;
Hellenistic, 151; of holy lying, 102;
imaginary of, 13; and nature, 156;
and philosophy, 12022; of reading
well, 101, 161; and the real, 3840;
and science, 155, 166; of selling, 163;
Socratic, 79; and sublimation, 23,
2728, 3334, 130; tragic, 3, 5, 3942,
181
182 /
art (continued)
5557, 59, 63, 133; transgressive, 131;
and truth, 53
asceticism: of denaturalising, 154; Good
of, 2021, 27, 101; ideal of, 3, 5, 10,
34, 7172; identification and, 32; of
Kant, 147, 151; of Platonism, 12934;
religions of, 9, 82, 159; of science,
105, 107, 112, 117, 11920, 122,
12627, 164; of Socrates, 7980, 83;
of superego, 161; of ieks Antigone,
152
Asclepius, 84, 157
Assmann, Jan, 158
Assoun, Paul-Laurent, 137, 141
Athens: Alcibiades and, 65, 77; decline
of, 83; democracy of, 156; erotics of,
68, 84; and Leiters Nietzsche, 154;
plague of, 72, 155; prime of, 56, 65;
saints in, 100; tragic festival of, 4,
41, 55
atheism: Freuds, 88, 92, 94, 97, 161;
Lacans formula of, 4
Atkinson, and Robertson Smith, 90
atomism, 12; distinction with void,
125; fantasies of, 126; psychology in,
12122; reifications of, 127
author, the: disavowal of, 14, 23, 36;
psychology of, 134; reading of, 2
Avenarius, Richard, 165
Bacon, Francis, 9, 165
bad conscience, 27, 38, 77, 83, 101, 131,
156, 161
Badiou, Alain, 139
barrier: of the beautiful, 53, 61; toward
desire, 2, 4, 44, 116, 129130; of
discourse, 164; of the Good, 22, 46,
61; toward the Thing, 35
Bass, Alan, 1, 137
Bataille, Georges, 1415, 52, 61, 103,
114, 140, 152153, 159, 161, 163
beauty: of Antigone, 4, 41, 47, 5051,
6061, 130, 150; Christians and, 102;
death and, 148; desire and, 53, 57;
INDEX
dialectic and, 157; the imaginary and,

55; Lacans function of, 58; nature
and, 156; Plato and, 66, 82; power
and, 54; Socrates and, 7176, 7880,
131; sublimation and, 38; in tragedy,
3; truth and, 62
becoming: and being, 164; as change,
11819; of the drive, 133; as eternal
return, 60, 62; Lacan and, 139, 153;
of nature, 68, 75; as the real, 1112,
126; as un-teleological, 17
being: as anti-nature, 72; and becoming,
60, 68, 139, 164; as cause, 119; as
ethics, 135; as the Good, 82; as
metaphysics, 12526; mode of, 3, 37;
Palaeolithic, 105; as permanence, 75;
in the world, 167
Bernays, Jakob, 150
Bernstein, Richard J., 158
bestowal: as creative virtue, 38, 144; as
sublimation, 23
beyond, the: Eleusinian, 146; imaginary,
9; metaphysicians, 85; Pauls, 100;
Platonic, 11; romantic, 8283;
Socratic, 7880; supernatural, 1314;
suprasensory, 3739, 119
Biebuyck, Benjamin, 157
binaries: of Pausanias, 6768; of Plato,
154; of Socrates, 7173, 83
biology: instincts, 31; natural
expressions of, 102; weaponry of, 111
Bishop, Paul, 16061
Bizet, Georges, 3435
body, the (soma), 1; affirmation of, 145;
amorality of, 18; ascetics toward, 10;
binary against, 68, 155; dismembering
of, 153; of divinities, 70; health of, 69;
and instinct, 31; and Jung, 35; and
life, 39, 51; mothers, 33; and nature,
71; neuroticised, 11819; Platonic
elision of, 8284, 131; of Polynices,
45, 147; the real of, 155; repression
of, 14; senses of, 5, 7, 37; sexed,
7576, 78, 129
Boothby, Richard, 141, 153, 159
INDEX
Boscovich, Roger J., 122, 125, 16567

Botting, Fred, and Scott Wilson, 153
Brenkman, John, 154
Brobjer, Thomas H., 137, 161, 16566
brother, the: of Alcibiades, 79; analysts
as, 164; of Antigone, 52, 60, 145, 147;
band of, 9091; chosen over husband,
148; Hades as, 45; incestuous, 152;
Oedipus as, 42; Polynices as, 41, 47
Burckhardt, Jacob, 149
burial: Antigone and, 4854, 61, 150;
of Polynices, 4143, 47; religion and,
147
Butler, Judith, 145, 150, 157
Caesar, Julius, 156
Caillois, Roger, 152, 163
Calasso, Roberto, 147
Calder III, William M., 155
capitalism, 11011, 143
Caquot, Andr, 95
castration: Alcibiades and, 157;
Christian, 10304; complex of, 141;
Derrida and, 161; as distance, 133,
159; hysterical, 132; language and,
153; masters, 94, 116; threat of, 18;
of Uranus, 67, 154
Cathars, 9
catharsis: Aristotles tragic, 5457, 131,
150, 152; Dionysian, 62, 151, 153;
reincarnation and, 9
causal sequence: denaturalizing of, 107;
reversal of, 39, 95, 101; silencing of,
100
Cavalieri, Bonaventura Francesco, 124
Czanne, Paul, 38
Chorus, the: Antigone and, 42, 4952,
55, 130, 149; Aphrodite and, 45;
Creon and, 146; Dionysos and, 59;
tragic origins in, 56
Christianity: anti-philology of, 161; antiscience of, 1078, 160; ascetics of,
8385, 117; Crusaders of, 2526; as
denaturalizing, 45, 98105, 146, 154,
158; Freuds Christocentrism, 8789,
/ 183
9198, 100, 102, 105, 132, 150; the
gods and, 44, 47, 61; Judaism of, 159;
Kants, 105, 14647; morbidity of, 34,
62; as nihilism, 12; Phaedrus and,
67; as Platonism, 810, 16, 23, 36,
39, 43, 57, 66, 119, 12122, 13134;
pleasure principle of, 151; slave revolt
in, 100101
civilization: Christian, 87; discontents
of, 3, 27, 130; exigencies of, 9495,
97, 104; internalised aggression
of, 143; sexual morality of, 28;
sublimations of, 21
Clark, Maudemarie, 10, 16566
Collits, Terry, 146, 149
Comte, Auguste, 165
conformity: of the ego, 142; of
the Good, 105; in Kant, 43; in
sublimation, 34
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 69, 125, 166
Corfield, David, 127, 139, 167
creativity, 13, 21, 23; strong, 3, 17,
3335, 3741, 60, 105, 120, 12223,
133, 166; weak, 25, 7, 910, 15, 28,
30, 36, 4344, 46, 67, 75, 82, 92, 94,
100, 116, 121, 129130, 14445, 159
Creon, 3, 10, 4150, 5254, 57, 59,
6162, 130, 14547, 149, 153, 158;
of, 4243, 145
cruelty: of Creon, 45; of the ideal, 26; of
the sexes, 35; of strength, 37
culture: activities of, 27; das Ding and,
35; deceptive, 144; early, 58, 91, 114,
131; forms-norms of, 18; the Good
and, 41, 45; Greek, 149, 161; healthy,
3, 2324, 32, 97, 135, 166; Judaic, 88;
judges of, 30; lesser, 1001, 160; loss
of, 103; Sophist-realist, 8, 165
Darwin, Charles, 18, 90; Darwinism, 88,
120, 158. See also Lamarckism
David-Menard, Monique, 16364
death: afterlife and, 13, 51, 101; beauty
and, 50, 53, 130, 148; Creon and, 42,
45; death drive, 2021, 26,
184 /
death (continued)
1034, 10910, 141, 15253, 164;
Freuds, 105; God and, 8788, 92,
96; Nietzsches, 131; priests and, 99;
reality of, 11, 75, 118; sacrifice and,
159; second death, 4, 41, 43, 47, 52,
5455, 6062, 146, 150; Socrates and,
79, 84, 156; taboos on, 114, 161
dcadence: aesthetics of, 76;
denaturalizing, 154; physiological, 69;
Socratic, 8283
defense: as alibi, 44; distortions of,
1; instincts and, 76; knots and,
134; lying and, 20; mathematicalformalization and, 165; the real and,
150; sublimation and, 29
deflationary, the: Lacan and, 1516, 35;
Nietzsches critique of, 2, 7, 129
Degler, Carl N., 158
De Kesel, Marc, 8, 1819, 2728, 3032,
141, 143, 152
Deleuze, Gilles, 144, 157, 160; and
Guattari, Flix, 145, 16162
delusion: of immortality, 80; of
psychoanalysis, 163; of sublimation,
35
democracy: Athens and, 156; Nietzsche
and, 134
Democritus, 9
demonizing: of difference, 134; of the
drives, 23, 13233
demystification: the Good and, 2, 7, 11,
4546, 58, 129, 148
denaturalizing. See under natural
denial: art and, 38; of desire, 14; of
difference, 72; drives and, 23, 13233;
of natural kinds, 12; of the Other, 59;
phobic, 17; of reality, 1921; science
and, 122, 164; self, 82, 107, 112,
159
denigration: of body, 118; of perception,
139; of sexual relation, 96; of Thing,
38, 130
depression: Christian, 102; melancholia,
27; religion and, 82; tragedy and, 55, 57
INDEX
Derrida, Jacques, 158, 161

Descartes, Ren, 9, 123, 139, 16566
desire: Alcibiades and, 157; analysts,
164; Antigone and, 41, 47, 4953,
55, 147150, 152, 158; creativity
and, 37, 151; Creon and, 42, 4446;
denaturalizing of, 66; dynamics
of, 141; ethics of, 15, 134, 150;
father and, 90, 9395, 97, 99; four
discourses and, 107, 10917; the
Good and, 11; identification and,
32; jouissance and, 126, 129131;
lack and, 7172, 7475; law and,
153; liberation of, 140; love and,
6769, 154; narcissism and, 143;
object of, 144, 163; perverse base
of, 7, 15, 1720, 2526; repression
and, 14, 1025; significance of, 13;
sublimation and, 2829; tragedy and,
5763; transference, 78, 81, 83, 85
devalue. See under value
dialectic: of artscience, 166; of beauty
death, 148; Deleuze and, 157; of the
Good, 8182; Hegel and, 48; Kant
and, 139; of love, 67, 83; Socratic,
7071, 73, 7980
difference: affirmation of, 13334;
nature and, 68, 71; sexual, 35, 125
Ding, das. See Thing, the
Dionysos: affirmation of, 59; Agathon
and, 70; Aphrodite and, 96; Apollo
and, 148; catharsis of, 5456, 15153;
festival of, 4, 41, 130; Nietzsche as
disciple of, 6263; Silenos and, 77
Diotima, 70, 7276, 82
disavowal: of authorship, 36, 39; of lack,
125; of the real, 4, 7; of the sexual,
20; iek and, 2
discontent: of civilization, 3, 27, 95,
130; of the Good, 7; Mosaic, 91; of
science, 112, 117; of sublimation, 24
displacement: of Alcibiades, 157; of
Creon, 46; Egyptian, 91; masters,
111; Oedipal, 95; Socratic, 72, 78; of
the Thing, 2627
INDEX
distance: affirmation of, 133; Aristotle

and, 17; castration and, 159; development and, 9596; Oedipal, 132, 141;
pathos of, 144; sublimation and, 38,
130; of the Thing, 19, 3133, 111
distortion: of beauty, 61; defensive, 1; of
desire, 46; of the Good, 3, 57, 84; of
instinct, 104; of Moses, 90; religious,
88, 157; of theology, 67; of the Thing,
26
disvalue. See under value
divine, the: Aristotle and, 16; Plato and,
9, 122; pre-Platonic, 4445, 4748;
Socrates and, 66, 7374, 7780, 82,
131
Dodds, E. R., 146, 15152, 155, 157,
161
Drake, Stillman, 167
dreams: Freuds Oedipal, 88, 96,
104, 108, 132; of the gods, 82;
imaginary and, 1314; incestuous, 52;
interpretation of, 139; of Little Hans,
69; Socratic, 80, 151, 155
drives, the (Trieb), 15; creativity and,
3842; damming of, 76; death and,
153; instincts and, 141, 143; partial,
126; potlatch and, 5960; the real
and, 1821, 46, 12933, 148, 150;
shaming of, 8384, 101, 10304;
sublimation and, 2333; superego
and, 142
Du Bois-Reymond, Emil, 165
Dufresne, Todd, 141
earth: affirmation of, 37, 104, 160;
Antigones affirmation of, 51;
Aphrodite and, 67, 154; bestowal on,
23, 14445; the body and, 7576;
Christian negation of, 100, 102, 158;
Creons offence to, 45; divinities of,
4748, 61; nature and, 71; Platos
negation of, 1012, 39, 50; political
negation of, 26; ressentiment toward,
36, 119, 146; Socratic negation of, 79,
8485; sublimation and, 33, 38
/ 185
economy, 4, 32, 45, 5859, 131, 14142
148
ecstasy, 56, 59, 131, 15152
ego, the, 18, 2526, 46, 100, 109, 117,
119, 121, 142, 153, 162, 165; ego
ideal, 24, 14243; superego, 27, 104,
142, 161
Egypt, 8891, 95, 98, 158; Pharaoh
Akhenaton, 89, 91
Eleusinian mysteries, 146
Ellis, Havelock, 15, 140
Elveton, R.O., 16, 140
emotions, 37, 47, 62, 104, 15152
Empedocles, 152
empiricism: anti-empirical, 116,
118120; falsification of, 19, 121, 134;
Greco-Roman, 104; Koyr and, 12,
127, 133; Lacan and, 12324, 139;
Nietzsche and, 5, 9, 13, 105, 1078,
117, 129, 132, 138, 165; science and,
167
empowerment. See under power
English, the, 165; Anglo, 120
enjoyment, 21, 29, 110, 132, 143, 150,
152, 161, 164. See also jouissance
Enlightenment, the, 99, 104, 134
Epictetus, 16
epistemology, 5, 910, 13, 1001, 113,
11618, 12021
equality, 44, 102, 134
Eros (), 25, 5051, 131, 14849;
eroticism, 61, 103, 140, 15253, 156,
159, 161, 163; homoerotic, 156. See
also love
Eryximachos, 66, 6869, 7677
eternal return, 6062
ethics: of affirmation, 13335; Bataille
and, 153, 161; of desire or drive,
150; the Good and, 1011, 1417;
the imaginary and, 8, 138; JudeoChristian, 98; of Lacan with
Nietzsche, 15, 12930; reality
principle and, 1920; science and,
108, 117, 120, 12223, 12627;
Spinoza and, 165; strong in tragedy,
186 /
ethics (continued)
3943, 4546, 5354, 5759, 6263;
sublimation and, 3336; weak in
Socrates, 6566; the Thing and,
2224, 26, 28; iek and, 148
Euclid, 123
Euripides, 59, 149, 152
Evans, Dylan, 33, 14344
evidence: Antigones desire and, 147; of
denaturalizing, 4, 66, 74, 131; Koyr
and, 139; of Lacans critique of the
Good, 11; Moses murder and, 95;
Nietzsches anti-anti-Semitism and,
159; Nietzsches madness and, 168;
Oedipus and, 162; of the senses, 13,
37, 11820, 124; of truth, 9
falsification, 13, 38, 99, 119, 133, 139,
154
family, 4849, 52, 54, 105, 14850, 158
fantasy: agalma and, 8182; comedic,
69; the Good and, 7, 1011, 155;
hysterics, 9395, 159; the imaginary
and, 1314; Lamarckian, 103; master
and, 111; as parapraxis, 49; the real
and, 140, 150; reality and, 17, 20, 35,
36; sexual relation and, 125127
father, the: Antigone and, 42, 5152, 54,
145, 150, 152; Hamlet and, 43, 146;
Iphigenia and, 50; Judeo-Christian,
5, 87, 98, 101, 132, 157; Name-of,
13334; Oedipal, 11516, 142, 159,
164; primal, 8790, 9297, 1025,
113, 131; Socrates and, 66, 7374,
79, 140
fear: beauty and, 53, 61; of castration,
157; Creon and, 44; the Good and,
12930; Hamlets, 43; the object and,
163; pity and, 55, 5758, 6263, 131,
15153; Socrates and, 7172, 7980,
84, 120; of the Thing, 3, 17, 1920,
26; truth and, 54; of the weak, 38
Federn, Paul, 1, 137
Fellini, Federico, 109, 162
Feltham, Oliver, 16364
INDEX
female. See feminine, the

feminine, the, 35, 46, 6768, 7273, 84,
90, 116, 125, 134, 141, 148, 159, 163
festival, 4, 41, 55, 58, 6162, 91, 130,
153
Fibonacci, 125
Fink, Bruce, 126, 167
Finkelstein, Israel, 160
foreclosure, 27, 126, 13334, 137, 141,
146, 167
formalism, 5, 13, 107, 117118, 123,
12527, 132, 13334, 165
Foucault, Michel, 157
four discourses, the, 1078, 113, 132,
162; analysts, 1089, 11315, 16364;
hysterics, 1089, 113, 11516, 164;
masters, 10811, 114, 116, 16364;
universitys, 108, 11013, 16364
Franco, Paul, 166
Frank, George, 143
free association, 13, 52, 113, 139
Freidman, R. Z., 158
Freud, Sigmund, works of: Analysis
Terminable and Interminable, 143;
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 116;
Civilisation and Its Discontents, 21,
2526, 30, 102, 142; Civilised
Sexual Morality, 2829, 157; Dora,
93, 113; Dream-Interpretation as
a Whole, 18; Economic Problem
of Masochism, 142; Ego and the
Id, 142; Future of an Illusion, 103;
Group Psychology, 29, 104; History
of the Psychoanalytic Movement,
17, 141; Inhibitions, Symptoms
and Anxiety, 162; Instincts and
their Vicissitudes, 3031, 143;
Interpretation of Dreams, 139,
146; Leonardo da Vinci, 29; Moses
and Monotheism, 8792, 97100,
102, 105, 158160; Negation, 13,
140; On Narcissism, 24, 14243;
Outline of Psychoanalysis, 26;
Papers on Technique, 29; Psychical
Consequences of Anatomical Sex-
INDEX
Distinction, 35, 144; Repression,

155; Resistances to Psychoanalysis,
1819, 27, 141; Tendency to
Debasement in Love, 154; Three
Essays on Sexuality, 29, 143; Totem
and Taboo, 88, 9092, 159; Two
Principles of Mental Functioning,
144
Freudian School of Melbourne, the, 154
Fritsch, Theodor, 15960
Galileo Galilei, 1213, 123, 127, 139,
167
Gay, Peter, 162
genealogy, 1, 21, 27, 36, 87, 100, 112,
117, 122, 130, 135, 14344
genital, 18, 51, 62, 6970, 75, 125126,
131, 154
Glynos, Jason, 126, 167
Graham, Daniel, 17, 140
Grigg, Russell, 26, 108, 14142, 146,
148, 150, 159, 16667
guilt, 1, 21, 92, 100, 159
God: anthropomorphic, 13; Aristotles,
16; critique of, 45, 13233;
denaturalizing and, 98101, 104, 107,
146; Freuds Oedipus and, 9597, 102;
Judeo-Christian, 8788, 9092, 158,
160; as love, 67; monotheistic, 45,
61; as nothingness, 82; as pessimism,
144; science and, 100; as truth,
12223
goddess. See under gods, the
gods, the: Antigone and, 4749, 5152,
60, 147, 150, 152, 158; Creon and,
4246, 146; goddess, 47, 50, 61,
67, 150; the Good and, 61, 63;
monotheism and, 8990; naturalHellenic, 131; polytheism, 44, 88;
of the real, 82; Symposium and, 67,
6970, 74, 7778
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 42,
4850, 52, 145, 14748, 158, 160
Good, the: Antigone and, 4950,
5254; Aristotles, 1518, 152, 154;
/ 187
of Christian denaturalizing, 87,
1001, 1035, 154; Creon and, 4147;
critique of, 15, 129134; dialectic
and, 157; Kants, 14647; of modern
science, 107, 116; Platos, 714, 37,
39, 13740, 148; pleasure principle
and, 2022, 151; of sexual relation,
126; Socrates and, 6566, 68, 7176,
79, 8184, 155; sublimation and, 35;
the Thing and, 2324, 2629; tragedy
and, 5659, 6163
goods, service of, 5, 45, 5860, 107,
11112, 116, 13132, 142, 148, 153
Greeks, the: Burckhardt and, 149;
fifth century BC, 55, 57, 62; fourth
century BC, 6570; Greco-Roman,
5, 9798, 100, 132; language of, 42,
48, 5052, 145, 147, 149, 153154;
masters of, 87, 99, 101, 104, 132, 137;
mathematics and, 12324; rationalism
and, 146, 151; science and, 13;
Socratic denaturalizing of, 82, 157,
16061. See also Hellenismos
Groddeck, Georg, 141
Hacker, Frederick J., 24, 2930, 14244
Hades, 45
Haemon, 45, 50, 147
Hahn, Alexander J., 167
Hamlet, 43, 146
Hans, Little, 69, 162
happiness, 7, 1516, 57, 75, 117, 15152
Hartmann, Heinz, 142
hate, 15, 27, 3436, 49, 100, 148
health, 3, 2829, 37, 57, 69, 7172, 85,
102, 12021, 160
Hegel, G. W. F., 48, 110, 148, 150
Heidegger, Martin, 138, 165
Hellenismos: health of, 102;
Herodotus and, 148; instinct of,
8, 56; Macedonian age, 151; panHellenic festivals of, 146; Platonic
denaturalizing of, 83, 134, 160;
proper divinities of, 82, 131, 150. See
also Greeks, the
188 /
Heraclitus, 9, 51, 72, 119, 139, 146, 149
hero, 4, 30, 41, 49, 52, 54, 61, 63, 130,
14546, 153, 161
Herodotus, 14849
Hertz, Heinrich R., 24, 166
Hesiod, 6667, 75
history: of denaturalizing, 4445; of
Freuds monotheism, 8789, 9395;
Herodotus and, 148; of Israel, 98,
101, 1035; liberation and, 141;
Nietzsche and, 137, 161; of Oedipus,
42, 130; of Platonism, 15, 78, 11,
36, 38, 11617, 119; pre-historic, 18;
of science, 111, 12223, 125, 127,
163; of Socratic transference, 6566,
76, 8283, 85; of the subject, 114,
135; Thucydides and, 56, 151, 156; of
violence, 25
Hobbes, Thomas, 165
holism, 12427, 133, 163
Holt, Philip, 145, 153
Homer, 39, 75, 8283, 14849, 160
Homer, Sean, 14, 140
homoerotic. See under Eros
Honig, Bonnie, 145, 14849
Hume, David, 16465
Hussain, Nadeem, 139, 165
Huxley, Aldous, 163
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 154
hysteric, the: aggression of, 110;
discourse of, 1089, 113, 11516, 164;
encircling of, 2728; envy of, 5, 83;
Freuds Oedipus and, 87, 9395, 97;
idealized father of, 104, 132, 150
id, the (das Es), 2, 1718, 2526
idea, the, 1011, 3739; ideology, 2, 13
ideal(s): of afterlife, 100; ascetic, 5, 10,
34, 7172, 80, 82, 112, 11617, 161;
classical, 16061; as defense, 1; of the
ego, 14244; of the Good, 11, 15, 62,
13033; healthy, 3; introjections of,
32; of love thy neighbor, 103; Plato
and, 8; the real and, 39; repressive,
INDEX
2327, 2930, 35; sacrificial, 60;

science and, 120, 122, 12526, 164; of
Stoics, 16; weak, 36
idealism, 3, 8, 11, 13, 17, 2425, 32, 34,
3640, 76, 82, 84, 11922, 155, 165;
idealization, 3, 9394, 104, 126, 148
identification, 3, 13, 32, 4244, 4647,
73, 75, 93, 113, 130, 142, 164
illusion, 11, 72, 103, 118, 127
imaginary, the: Antigone and, 148, 150;
beauty and, 55; as cause, 39, 95; as
dialectical opposite, 157; distinction
with real, 23, 714; as ego, 153,
162; in free association, 13940; of
the Good, 12930; in identification,
93, 164; in knotted triad, 134; as
object a, 144; of the obsessional,
104; science and, 12526, 167; as
superego, 142; the Thing and, 19,
3133, 35; as third-party, 72; as
Victorian, 152; as world, 37
incest, 18, 42, 52, 54, 91, 104, 109, 114,
130, 141, 152, 158, 161
inflationary, the: dialectic, 157; Father
function, 9294, 104; Good of
morality, 4, 78, 11, 14, 17, 3537,
4243, 54, 56, 69, 82, 116; investment
of reason, 119, 16465; micro
macrocosm link, 154; as nihilism,
144; of Platonism, 121, 12627,
12931, 13334, 13738; will to
power and, 152
instincts: Antigones, 47; beauty and,
51, 53, 55; creative, 37; of death, 109;
discharge of, 24; distinction with
drive, 3032, 141; the Good and,
6566, 7576, 8184; Hellenic, 8, 56;
internalizing of, 143; Judeo-Christian,
99100, 102, 104; master signifier
and, 164; sexual, 20; sublimation of,
2729; of the university, 112
intellectuality (Geistigkeit), 97, 132, 160
internalization, 1, 27, 143, 161
interpretation: of analysand, 11415;
INDEX
Antigone and, 42, 47; of drives,

30, 66, 99, 101; enthusiastic, 141;
of epistemic, 5, 13, 19; of Freuds
Oedipus, 108; Nietzsche and, 137;
Orphism and, 138; of Plato, 9, 121;
religious, 156, 159; Symposium and,
68, 70, 75, 8081; textual, 2; of tragic
rites, 57
Ionia, 138, 146, 166
Iphigenia, 5051, 84, 149
Irwin, John, 161
Israel. See under Judaism
Janaway, Christopher, 145, 160
Jebb, Richard, 145, 148
Jesus. See under Judaism
Jews, the. See under Judaism
jouissance: death and, 53; of the drive,
129; irruption of, 11516; of James
Joyce, 134; of the mother, 96; object
of, 164; as prohibited, 90, 159; as
real of the subject, 126; sciences
mishandling of, 132; of transgression,
2021; as unlimited, 92; variant
positions of, 10711, 162. See also
enjoyment
Joyce, James, 134
Judaism: anti-Semitism, 98, 105, 159;
Christian form of, 2, 45, 85, 8789,
95103, 13133; denaturalizing and,
146; Freud and, 158, 162; Israel,
90, 97100, 154, 160; Jesus, 8788,
9192, 9697, 1001, 131; Jews, the,
26, 92; Moses, 8793, 9598, 113,
131, 158; science and, 13, 12324,
167; St. Paul, 43, 45, 50, 92,
1001, 103, 141; Yahweh, 91, 93,
96, 1045
Jung, Carl, 35
Kahn, Charles, 10, 138
Kant, Immanuel, 13, 16, 37, 43, 105,
119, 139, 142, 14647, 151, 16465
Kaufmann, Walter, 143
/ 189
Kepler, 125
Klein, Melanie, 3334, 156
knotting, 134, 168
knowledge: analytical, 35, 11315, 117,
130; bodies of, 75; of the body, 69;
certain, 117; of desire, 5859, 131;
of the Good, 56; hatred for, 34, 101;
limits of, 105; Renaissance and, 161;
science and, 107, 11012, 118, 122,
12425, 132, 134, 164167; the senses
and, 10; sexual, 96, 109; Sophists and,
9; of the Thing, 21, 26, 28, 30
Kojve, Alexandre, 68, 167
Koyr, Alexandre, 12, 127, 133, 139, 163
Lacan, Jacques, works of: Autres crits,
163; crits, 135, 143, 148, 156, 164,
16668; Ltourdit, 152; Ornicar?,
163; Reflections on the Ego, 153;
Seminar I, 1, 147; Seminar VII, 15,
7, 1035, 3863, 8793, 95, 9798,
1024, 107, 11112, 114, 116, 12324,
12932, 138, 14046, 14850, 153,
15859, 161, 167; Seminar VIII, 4,
56, 6584, 139, 153154, 15658;
Seminar XI, 4, 12627, 150; Seminar
XVII, 45, 35, 8788, 9297, 1035,
10717, 12325, 13132, 14041,
159, 162164, 166; Seminar XX, 110,
12526, 134, 140; Seminar XXIII, 134,
168; Le Symbolique, lImaginaire et
le Rel, 8, 138
lack: aesthetic distinction and, 3, 23,
130, 144; band of brothers and, 91;
Christianity and, 101102, 160161;
desire and, 7072, 74, 163; the
Germans and, 112; physical agency
and, 59; the real and, 8, 40; science
and, 117, 166; sexual relation and,
125; Socratic, 8182, 151, 155
Lamarckism, 88, 103, 158
Lamb, W. R. M., 153, 156
lament, 5051, 84, 14849
Lampert, Laurence, 9, 138
190 /
Lange, Friedrich Albert, 165
language, 1214, 16, 18, 4344, 46, 60,
104, 110, 129, 140, 15354, 166
Lautramont, Comte de, 147
law, the: Antigone and, 4748, 52, 147,
150; Creon and, 4244, 46; father
and, 91, 9495, 159, 162; JudeoChristian, 5, 87, 97, 99, 101, 1035,
132, 134, 157, 16061; Lycurgus,
Solon and, 75; moral, 14, 16; natural,
142; pessimism and, 144; science and,
114, 122, 127, 165; transgression and,
21, 61, 153
Lear, Gabriel R., 16
Lear, Jonathan, 140
Leibniz, Gottfried, 124
Leiter, Brian, 9, 138, 152, 154, 160, 164
Leonardo da Vinci, 29, 156
Leupin, Alexandre, 160, 167
libido, 18, 24, 32, 81, 141
life: afterlife, 43, 61, 67, 80, 100, 146,
149, 151, 156; as against, 23,
7, 1011, 27, 65, 109, 130, 144;
Antigone and, 41, 5054; forces of,
94; moral regulation of, 14; science
and, 163; Socrates and, 75, 77, 79,
8384, 157; sublimation and, 23, 29,
39, 145; types and, 118; weak, 3637;
as will to power, 57, 5962
linguistics, 127, 137, 140
Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, 148
Locke, John, 124, 165166
Loewenstein, Rudolph, 142
love: Antigone and, 4849, 51, 149;
Athens and, 156; Christian, 1023,
132; courtly, 28; father and, 91, 94,
97; Freud and, 154; Lacan and, 155;
science and, 163; Socrates and, 6576,
78, 8081, 8384; sublimation and,
3235
Luther, Martin, 150
MacCabe, Colin, 153
MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 109, 162
Macedonia, 56, 151
INDEX
Mach, Ernst, 122, 139, 165

macrocosm, 16, 35, 69, 154
Mallarm, Stphane, 147
Marini, Marcelle, 8
masochism, 21, 110, 142
master, the: Creon as, 42; father and,
90, 9395; Greek and Roman, 5, 87,
97, 104, 132; Lacans discourse of,
10811, 11416, 16364; Nietzsche
and, 144, 152; Paul as, 100; as
physician, 69; Plato as, 82; of science,
12, 123; the senses and, 118, 120,
133; Socrates as, 71
materialism, 68, 11921, 126, 135, 154,
160, 16567
mathematics, 5, 1213, 101, 11718,
12327, 129, 13334, 139, 16467
Mauss, Marcel, 152
McNeil, David, 157
McPherran, Mark L., 9, 138, 155
memory, 18, 22, 32, 42, 5154, 75, 88,
9094, 115, 131, 158
metaphysics: Aristotle and, 15152; of
the Good, 2, 7, 9, 1517, 22; Kant
and, 164; Nietzsche and, 137, 141,
155; as phallus, 126; Platonic, 3637,
3940, 43, 85, 157; science and, 118,
122
method, 9, 12, 4950, 73, 88, 93, 101,
107, 117, 122, 124, 137, 139, 165
Midas, 7778, 84, 157
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 24, 162, 167
Mitchell, Juliet, and Jacqueline Rose, 141
Mbius strip, 126
Modrak, Deborah, 10, 139
Monk, Ray, 165
monotheism, 63, 87, 89, 9192, 101, 158
morality: Antigone and, 44, 49; ascetic,
129130, 133, 152, 156, 158, 160;
ChristianOedipal, 87, 91, 95,
99101, 14647; as defense, 1320;
of denaturalizing, 66, 68, 72, 76,
8183, 85, 154; Platonic, 7, 8, 11, 137;
science and, 107, 11718, 12022,
127, 151; sublimation and, 2528,
INDEX
34, 36, 39, 40; tragedy and, 5358;

Western, 14, 63
Moses. See under Judaism
mother, the, 33, 43, 52, 67, 7374, 96,
141, 146
Muller, John P., 142
murder, 43, 8792, 9497, 1014,
13132, 140, 159
music, 5556, 77, 15152, 155
myth: Calasso and, 147; Hellenic, 44, 56,
154, 157; of hystericfather, 8789,
9297; Judeo-Christian, 100, 1035,
160; Kleinian, 3334; Oedipal, 113,
132; Platonic, 16, 7374, 80, 140, 155;
real world as, 3637, 119; science and,
123, 127, 166; sexual relation and,
125; rationalism and, 146
narcissism, 24, 32, 46, 98, 143
nature: affirmation of, 39, 104, 156,
160; anti-nature, 5, 10, 63, 65, 70,
83, 85, 88, 99, 117, 119, 13134,
15455, 158; Aristotles notion of, 3,
1517, 129, 140, 152; denaturing, 77,
154; disvaluing of, 4, 66, 118, 131;
imaginary ascent from, 75; love and,
35; Nietzsche and, 7172, 84, 14142;
Plato and, 7, 9, 68, 82; reality of,
12, 154; science and, 107, 121, 127,
133, 138, 166; sexual elements of, 96;
taboos on, 114
natural, the: anti-natural, 85, 104,
117, 154; Aristotles notion of,
1618; cause-and-effect, 99, 107;
denaturalizing, 4, 44, 61, 6568,
7071, 74, 7879, 8283, 85, 8788,
91, 9899, 1012, 105, 107, 117,
12122, 127, 131, 133, 146, 154,
15658, 160; as differences, 134; Eros
and, 25; harmony and, 35; incest
and, 158; kinds, 12, 146; as law, 142;
liberation and, 140; materialism
and, 135; naturalism, 9; power
and, 72; renaturalizing, 76, 84, 133;
repudiation of, 21, 156; sciences, 13,
/ 191
117, 12324, 13839, 166; signifiers
and, 30; sphere as real, 5, 118, 126;
supernatural, 3, 8, 13, 36, 79, 96, 119;
values, 4, 98, 1013, 13132
Nazis, the, 87, 162
negation, 73, 144, 160
neurosis: Antigone and, 150; as antinature, 154; Freuds, 94; the Good
and, 23, 21, 129; Judeo-Christian,
102, 105, 132; in patients, 14; positive
perversions and, 157; repression and,
75; science and, 112, 115, 11819;
Socrates and, 81, 83; sublimation and,
24, 2730, 32, 35, 38, 130
Newton, Isaac, 17, 125, 127, 133, 139
Nietzsche, Friedrich, works of: AC, 4,
13, 69, 84, 97102, 104, 117, 122,
124, 147, 154, 15859, 161; BGE, 2, 9,
16, 43, 57, 60, 66, 112, 118, 12022,
139, 141, 15152, 15456, 16566;
BT, 56, 60, 70, 84, 149, 151, 153, 155,
157; CW, 3435, 76; EH, 2, 5, 166;
GM, 17, 21, 27, 34, 36, 39, 69, 7879,
82, 100, 112, 117, 122, 14344, 151,
156, 161; GS, 4, 17, 36, 12022, 139,
141, 144, 157; HAH, 146, 166; KGW,
166; KSB, 138; PPP, 72, 151, 156;
PTA, 166; TI, 8, 1112, 13, 17, 19,
3637, 39, 5354, 5657, 5960, 62,
6566, 72, 7576, 8182, 8485, 95,
1015, 11213, 11719, 121, 124,
138, 144, 149, 153, 15558, 16566;
WP, 9, 11, 1415, 17, 36, 3839,
5357, 6970, 75, 7879, 8284, 101,
119, 144, 146, 151, 15458, 16061,
16465; Z, 14445
nihilism, 1, 3, 27, 34, 36, 130, 142, 144,
154
Nobus, Danny, 140
Noys, Benjamin, 153
object a. See under object, the
object, the: Antigone as, 60; of
knowledge, 1011, 25; as lost, 163; of
love, 71; object a, 4, 35, 76, 8182,
192 /
object, the (continued)
8485, 11011, 113, 115116, 131,
144, 156, 162, 164; of repression, 18;
of the senses, 122, 165; Socrates and,
83; of sublimation, 2324, 28, 3133,
38, 143; of the Thing, 19, 141
obsessional, 2728, 81, 104, 111, 132,
143
Odysseus, 50, 141
Oedipus: complex, 18, 26, 30, 8788,
93, 9597, 10405, 10810, 11316,
132, 141, 159, 162; Hamlet and, 43;
the man, 42, 52, 54, 149150
Ons, Silvia, 12, 21, 161, 16364
ontology, 5, 7, 15, 133, 138; ontotheology, 9
oral, 18, 126
Orphism, 9, 138, 146, 157
Other, the, 14, 18, 4950, 59, 88, 93,
143
Overbeck, Franz, 138
paganism, 26, 82, 159
pain, 7, 1921, 27, 44, 51, 80, 130
paranoia, 2728, 46, 49, 167
passions, the, 3, 23, 3233, 39, 5455,
61, 67, 92, 102, 104, 141, 15152
Paul, Robert A., 159
Paul, Saint. See under Judaism
Pausanias, 6768, 78, 154
Pentheus, 59, 152
perception, 85, 12324, 13839, 160,
163, 166
Pereira, David, 154
Pericles, 8, 151, 160
Perseus Digital Library, 145, 150
perversion: Aristotle and, 1518;
Christian, 102; distance and, 95;
excessive, 110; the Good and, 21,
83, 129131, 133; masochistic, 142;
polymorphous, 2, 7, 141; power and,
157; sublimation and, 3, 2426, 30,
32, 35
pessimism, 3, 36, 57, 84, 144, 151, 157
Petronius, 109, 162
INDEX
Pfister, Oscar, 161

Phaedrus, 6667, 70
phallus, 35, 81, 126
philology, 55, 137, 14849, 155, 161
philosophy: anti-nature dualism and,
155; Christian-Platonic, 16, 1001;
English, 165; the Good and, 1011,
57; Greek and Roman, 104; idealists
of, 13; Ionian, 138, 166; Lacan and,
13940; Nietzsche and, 23, 5, 36, 62,
105, 11723, 13334, 137; Plato and,
38, 125, 145; of science, 127; Socratic,
66, 70, 73, 75, 79, 8182, 85, 131;
Sophists and, 9
physical, the, 52, 54, 5960, 70, 79, 81,
125, 138, 160, 167
physics. See under science
physiology, 37, 57, 6869, 102, 118, 120
Planck, Max, 166
Platonism: of Aristotle, 1718, 21, 152;
Christian, 2, 16, 36, 44, 57, 6162,
103, 105, 107108, 132, 160; critique
of, 5, 12934, 13739, 165; earth and,
3839; the Good of, 711, 23, 43,
45; nature and, 1214, 37, 68, 70, 72,
146, 154; as nihilism, 1, 3; science
and, 11213, 11617, 120, 12527;
Socrates and, 66, 73, 75, 78, 8085;
tragedy and, 46, 54, 5859
Plato, works of: Apology, 156; Meno, 10;
Phaedo, 910, 43, 73, 13839, 146,
157; Republic, 10, 39, 43, 73, 139,
14546, 14849, 15152; Symposium,
4, 63, 6585, 131, 15354, 156;
Theaetetus, 155
pleasure, 151; principle, 7, 1921, 26,
31, 45, 5758, 10810, 116, 141, 144
Plutarch, 9, 156
poetry, 28, 39, 5455, 5960, 62, 70, 75,
14445, 15052
political, the, 16, 26, 46, 89, 100, 104,
134, 148, 150, 152, 15657
Polynices, 4143, 45, 47, 5253
polytheism. See under gods, the
positivism, 37, 11922, 166
INDEX
potlatch, 5862, 131

power: beauty and, 5355, 61; Creon
and, 146, 149; denaturalizing and,
78; empowerment, 4, 4041, 109,
13031; Foucault-Butler and, 157;
Israel and, 98; knowledge and, 10,
12; love and, 67; natural differentials
of, 72, 1023; Persian, 56; primal
father and, 90, 93, 95, 159; the senses
and, 12021; service of goods and,
112; sublimation and, 2728, 34, 37;
tragedy and, 5051; the will to, 57,
60, 69, 85, 99100, 104, 152, 154
priest, the, 78, 90, 99101, 104, 107,
139, 159, 161
progress, 8, 11, 3334, 4345, 62, 88,
94, 9799, 105, 125, 127, 163
prohibition. See under taboo
projection, 78, 1314, 26, 35, 46, 80,
82, 9495, 101, 119, 121, 125, 127,
129, 133, 164
psychoanalysis: analysand of, 11316,
126, 16364; of Aristotle, 1718; of
At, 52; Christianity and, 100, 103,
105, 154, 161; clinic of, 15; Congress
of, 137; definition of, 69; Erwin
Rohde and, 138; ethics of, 13, 5, 7,
10, 12930, 133; formalization and,
127; gender and, 126; James Joyce
and, 134; as method, 49; neurosis
and, 75; Nietzsche and, 135; object a
and, 81, 113; primal father and, 93;
psychoanalyst of, 30, 46, 89, 1089;
resistances to, 19; science and, 114
16, 132, 163; sublimation and, 2426,
35; of tragedy, 63; of transference, 73
psychoanalyst. See under psychoanalysis
psychology: of atom, 121; Creons, 44;
ego, 142; empirical, 167; Freuds, 88;
group, 29; of imagination, 13; infants,
105; meta, 25; moral, 160; Nietzsche
and Lacans, 134; popular, 138139;
puritan, 146; reality principle and,
20; religion and, 94; rich mans,
68; science and, 118; splitting in,
/ 193
32; sublimation and, 33, 3738;
transcendental, 8485, 157
psychotic, 80, 133, 141, 161
puritan, 910, 4445, 60, 62, 66, 75, 80,
82, 91, 139, 146, 15152, 158, 164,
166
Putnam, Hilary, 138
Pythagoras, 9, 13, 134, 139, 146, 157
Rabat, Jean-Michel, 134, 140, 15556,
168
Rackham, H., 140, 150
rationality, 1617, 4344, 56, 81, 8991,
95, 97, 117, 146, 151, 157, 161
reaction formation, 19, 29
real, the: Antigone and, 53, 55, 59, 61,
148, 150; of art, 3840; body and, 5;
of desire, 1921, 158; the drive in, 4,
41, 129; formalization and, 12627;
the gods and, 70, 8283; Greeks,
Romans, and, 1045; imaginary and,
2, 7, 8, 1011, 13, 75; as instinct, 31;
knotting and, 134; of the Lady, 28;
master and, 116; of nature, 17, 118,
131, 154; neighbour love and, 102;
object a and, 144; post-symbolic, 12,
14, 20, 140; potlatch and, 58; presymbolic, 12, 14, 140, 152; primal
father and, 9395; psychosis and, 141;
science and, 112; shame and, 115;
Socrates and, 6566, 68, 71, 73, 76,
8081, 15556; as supernatural, 3; the
Thing and, 15; tragedy and, 46, 84;
world as myth, 3637, 119, 16465;
Zupani and, 142
realist, 89, 17, 20
reality, 7, 8, 10, 1214, 17, 1920,
3639, 75, 84, 92, 94, 97100, 118,
120, 124, 129, 145, 15253; principle,
1921, 26, 45, 144145, 152
reason, 37, 4344, 7576, 117, 119, 134,
13940, 14647, 161, 16465
regression, 29, 69, 9899, 127, 151, 160
Reich, Wilhelm, 162
reification, 3, 121, 127, 133, 163, 165
194 /
religion: Antigone and, 48, 147; antinature, 5, 8889, 146; ascetic, 25;
Bataille and, 61, 159; imaginary of,
8; Judeo-Christian, 92, 9597, 103,
132, 158, 16061; opiates of, 19; of
Orphism, 138; of Plato, 9, 66, 157;
science and, 107, 127; Socrates and,
8283, 15556; sublimation and,
2728, 34; of superego, 142; totemic,
91; tragedy and, 56, 59, 62; weak, 38
Renaissance, 1024, 127, 132, 134, 161
renaturalising. See under natural, the
repetition, 1, 2, 16, 42, 53, 68, 77, 88,
91, 95, 97, 102, 110, 112, 131
repression: Antigone and, 59, 61; Creon
and, 4142; Freud and, 18, 142, 146,
155, 15758, 162; the Good and,
7, 2021, 23, 120, 129130, 133; as
harmful, 3; hysteric and, 11516;
Judeo-Christianity and, 91, 95, 102,
104, 160; master and, 109; Nietzsche
and, 1, 17, 151; return of repressed,
5, 7, 12, 14, 17, 1921, 26, 33, 53, 59,
63, 65, 76, 83, 89, 9192, 9697, 104,
11011, 124, 127, 13032, 141, 1606;
science and, 112; Socrates and, 75;
sublimation and, 2430, 3235, 38; of
the Thing, 12
ressentiment, 15, 36, 100, 160; slave
revolt, 5, 1001, 132
return of the repressed, the. See under
repression
revaluation of all values. See under
values
revenge, 11, 36, 77, 100, 132, 144
Richardson, William, 12, 13, 138, 141
Ritschl, Friedrich, 149
Rohde, Erwin, 13840, 14647, 149,
151, 15556
Romans, the, 13, 87, 100101, 1034.
See also Greeks, the: Greco-Roman
romanticism, 28, 34, 36, 69, 82, 125,
144
Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 134, 137, 140,
161 62
INDEX
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 84

Russell, Bertrand, 165
Ryder, Andrew, 161
sacrifice, 50, 5962, 72, 131, 151, 153, 159
Sade, Marquis de, 25
Santaniello, Weaver, 159
Sax, Leonard, 16768
Schafer, Roy, 142
Schiller, Friedrich von, 139
Schneck, Jerome M., 154
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 144, 151
Schrift, Alan D., 137
science: art and, 155; Copernicus
and, 69; Greek and Roman, 104;
Ionian, 138; Judeo-Christianity and,
1001, 160; Lacan and, 12327,
167; Macedonian, 151; modern, 1,
45, 105, 1078, 110131, 3234;
Newtonian, 17; Nietzsche and, 118,
12122, 139, 141, 16466; phony,
20, 57, 95, 146; physics, 17, 12022,
125, 151; psychoanalysis and, 114,
117, 163; Sophist, 9; as sublimation,
2728; the symbolic and, 1213, 129
Sellin, Ernst, 9596, 159
senses, the, 5, 7, 910, 13, 37, 39, 71,
83, 101, 11822, 124, 129, 133, 139,
151, 157, 160, 165; sensuous, 4, 34,
65, 68, 71, 8385, 103, 12021, 131,
16061
sensuous. See under senses, the
sexual, the: affirmation of, 6162; of
body, 129; desires, 1518; disavowal
of, 20; modern science and, 10910,
114, 116, 12527, 133, 167; negation
of, 6870, 75, 78, 80, 8384, 1023;
of object a, 4, 131; of primal father,
90, 9596; sublimation of, 24, 26,
2829, 35, 37; as transgressive, 142,
152, 15758, 161
Shepherdson, Charles, 12, 14, 4647,
140, 150, 158
signifier, the: Antigone and, 47, 5051,
54, 60, 63, 152; of knowledge (S2),
INDEX
110, 114; of master (S1), 93, 109,

11516, 164; Pausanias and, 68;
primacy of, 3033, 141; of repression
12; science and, 12324; the Thing
and, 1819, 23, 130, 143
Silenos, 7778, 84
sinthome. See under symptom
skepticism, 2, 9, 11, 37, 99, 121, 125,
134, 152, 165
slave revolt. See under ressentiment
Slavet, Eliza, 158
Small, Robin, 16567
Smith, Joseph, 142
socialism, 89, 134, 158
Socrates, 35, 10, 41, 45, 56, 63, 6568,
7085, 87, 120, 131, 133, 13940,
146, 151, 15558, 160
Sophists, 89, 68, 160
Sophocles, 3, 10, 3942, 4548, 50,
6063, 96, 130, 145, 14748, 157
Spinoza, Baruch, 121, 165
Stavrakakis, Yannis, 14748, 150,
15253, 167
Stoics, the, 16, 57
subject, the, 1214, 18, 20, 26, 28, 31,
35, 44, 47, 52, 57, 63, 119, 126, 153,
161, 16364; as split, 18, 26, 32, 46,
69, 73, 10911, 11316, 132, 162, 166
sublimation, 3, 5, 17, 2135, 3740, 59,
85, 9798, 104, 116, 130, 133, 139,
14344, 157
substitution, 11, 21, 30, 33, 67, 69, 91,
97, 113, 116, 133, 144, 163
supernatural. See under natural
symbolic, the: Antigone and, 61,
14950, 152; Creon and, 46; and
ego-ideal, 142; four discourses and,
108, 110; Greece and, 56, 62, 84;
Judeo-Christianity and, 89, 91, 95, 97,
159; the object and, 163; in psychosis,
141; the real and, 14, 1920; as
reason, 140; science and, 1213, 123;
sublimation and, 3132; the Thing
and, 143; as third category, 2, 78,
11, 129, 13435
/ 195
symptom, 1, 7, 20, 24, 33, 38, 46, 66,
72, 108, 116, 134, 161; sinthome, 134,
168; symptomatology, 13, 129
taboo, 18, 5859, 61, 88, 9092, 9697,
1034, 114, 15253, 161, 163;
prohibition, 9091, 109, 114, 141,
157, 159
Teiresias, 4546, 59, 146
Thales, 166
theology, 6768, 118, 154
Thing, the (das Ding): affirmation of,
3740; Antigone and, 4748, 53, 150;
Aristotle and, 17, 129; distance and,
19, 111, 130; Freudian, 7, 15, 135;
the Good and, 18, 21, 59, 141; the
Id and, 26; of Moses, 90; object a
and, 144; the real and, 12, 82; reality
and, 20; sublimation and, 23, 2728,
3033, 35, 143; as superego, 142
Thucydides, 8, 56, 83, 151, 15556,
165
tragedy, 35, 1011, 27, 39, 4142, 46,
5065, 6970, 84, 112, 13031, 133,
145, 151, 153, 155, 160, 163. See also
art: tragic
transcendent, the, 17, 81, 84, 125
transference, 4, 56, 6567, 73, 78, 81,
11415, 13132, 139, 154, 156
transgression: Alcibiades and, 83;
Antigone and, 51; Christianity and,
103; ethics of, 4, 41, 6163; jouissance
of, 2021, 10809, 162; joy in, 131;
potlatch and, 5859; taboo and,
15253; the Thing and, 18, 26
trauma, 18, 45, 53, 118, 129
tripartite, 2, 78, 15, 142
Trobriand Islands, 162
truth: beauty and, 5354, 6162; denial
of, 19; disavowal of, 2; evidence of,
9; father and, 94, 96; four discourses
and, 109, 111; the Good and, 10, 39;
imaginary of, 8; Judeo-Christianity
and, 101; Jung and, 35; Klein and, 33;
Lacan and, 11317, 16364;
196 /
truth (continued)
Nietzsche and, 119, 12223, 165; in
parapraxis, 49, 147; the real and, 142,
152; repression of, 7, 27; science and,
13233, 16667; Socrates and, 7071,
7377, 82, 15557; sublimation of, 17;
tragedy and, 3; traumatic, 129, 131,
140; of violence, 25
types, 3, 9, 23, 29, 54, 56, 59, 68, 83,
130
bermensch, the, 104, 106, 166
unconscious, the: analysands, 11516;
desire and, 109, 129; as fear, 163;
formalization of, 127; Freud and,
1718; God as, 4; the Good and, 20;
as language, 14, 166; masochistic, 21;
Nietzsche and, 1; object a and, 131;
Oedipal, 162; science and, 112, 114;
Socrates and, 73; the Thing and, 19,
23, 26, 39
utilitarianism, 4546, 5859, 61, 110,
119
value(s): aesthetic, 36, 148; Antigone
and, 60; anti-Semitic, 159;
denaturalizing of, 13134; devalue,
66, 102, 139; disvalue, 4, 68, 151;
ego-conformist, 142; ethical, 3, 5,
3941; of the Good, 1011; JudeoChristian, 97102, 105; Phaedruss,
67; ressentiment, 15; revaluation of all,
2, 8, 137, 146; science and, 11822,
124, 16667; shock, 25; Socrates and,
79, 8283; strong-empowering, 41,
46; sublimation and, 23, 3335; of
text, 49; therapeutic, 116
INDEX
Van Dyck, Martin, 167

Verhaeghe, Paul, 94, 12627, 159, 162,
164
violence, 15, 24, 2627, 30, 35, 38, 51,
70, 90, 92, 94, 96, 104, 112, 130, 159
Wagner, Robert, 34, 144, 166
Wallace, R. Jay, 160
war, 25, 35, 43, 46, 56, 58, 62, 102,
11011, 151, 156
Watling, E. F., 147, 149, 153
West, the: blunder of, 5, 76, 87, 131;
Christian-Platonic, 16; denaturalizing
of, 146; discontent of, 130;
Enlightenment in, 1045; history of,
65, 116; idealism of, 25, 119; Israel
and, 9799; metaphysics of, 39, 43;
moralism of, 13, 63; transition of, 45
Whitman, James, 155
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von,
7273, 155
will to power. See under power
Wohl, Victoria, 15657
Wolpe, Joseph, and Stanley Rachman, 162
woman. See feminine, the
Xenophon, 156
Yahweh. See under Judaism
Yerushalmi, Yosef, 88, 158
Young, Julian, 159, 16768
Zentner, Oscar, 162
Zeus, 45, 4748, 67, 147
iek, Slavoj, 2, 14850, 152, 161
Zupani, Alenka, 2, 21, 34, 39, 142,
150, 16163

(Insinuations - Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature) Tim Themi-Lacan - S Ethics and Nietzsche - S Critique of Platonism-State University of New York Press (2015)

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(Insinuations - Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature) Tim Themi-Lacan - S Ethics and Nietzsche - S Critique of Platonism-State University of New York Press (2015)

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Lacans Ethics and

Nietzsches Critique of Platonism

SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Charles Shepherdson, editor

Lacans Ethics and Nietzsches

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

For Nietzsche, the way he points to the Greeks,

2. DISTINGUISHING WEAK SUBLIMATION FROM THE STRONG

3. BEFORE THE GOOD: STRONG ETHICS IN SOPHOCLES

5. GOD OF THE GOOD: CHRISTOCENTRIC OEDIPAL

An early version of the material in Chapter 1 appeared as How Lacans Ethics

Lacans 19591960 Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, forges from

that Aristotle has a narrowly idealized notion of nature (SVII:13), distorted

The Deflationary Ontology of

Nietzsche wanted to surpass the Good of Platonism because he believed it

1.1 Lacans Tripartite Schema with

its predecessors in Heraclitus, in Democritus, in the scientific types of the old

is the case that to imagine another more valuable world is an expression of

1.2 Lacans Freudian Thing in the Critique of Aristotles Good

to be hence determinable as aberrations from the essence of nature as he

it gives in the indirect or even sublimated forms that civilisation obliges it

a combined NietzscheLacan analysis of sublimation produces a better ethical

Distinguishing Weak Sublimation

Nietzsche criticized the Good of Platonism and the Christendom to follow

2.1 The Promise of Sublimation and Its Discontents

moderation and leave us, rather, prone to a repressively ascetic religious

Russell Grigg notes this forgotten primacy to concern a shift toward

this ideal, commanding the Good like a Crusade or Inquisition, conjures up

Obsessional neurosis, hysteria, and paranoia are thus what De Kesel

a certain amount of direct sexual satisfaction seems to be indispensable

when we consider that cultural judges of varying times and traditions do

2.2 Lacans Treatment of Sublimation

reaching the mind19whereupon such stimuli can undergo ideation by our

Each object of the drive is thus already a kind of substitute relative to

championed social progress, means that it is as a function of the problem

to contain an eternal feminine or higher virgin which redeems man,

2.3 Nietzsches Distinction between Weak and Strong

impoverishhistory contains the gruesome fact that the exhausted have

Before the Good

In chapter 2 we arrived at a distinction between weak and strong creative

3.1 Creon Against Antigone: In the Name of the Good

BEFORE THE GOOD

what Lacan explains by formulating Creons stance to be that one cannot

BEFORE THE GOOD

BEFORE THE GOOD

3.2 Antigone against Creon:

a higher authority, so to speak, although lower is likely more preciseto

BEFORE THE GOOD

Nevertheless, as is proper to Lacans analytical method that looks for

BEFORE THE GOOD

BEFORE THE GOOD

3.3 Before the Good: Nietzsches Strong Dionysian Catharsis

BEFORE THE GOOD

As acting on her desire, then, despite the deathly cost, Antigones is

BEFORE THE GOOD

tragic rites and their subsequent interpretation in the form of an ethics,

that we could learn to shun these in ourselves, through feelings of horror

BEFORE THE GOOD

accident, or a sudden resurgence of savagery, whereas it is rather necessarily

BEFORE THE GOOD

of a second death, in reply to a repressive symbolic order, is a way to reclaim

Here Sophocles seems also moved to his finest sentiments regarding

BEFORE THE GOOD