other/Other: two ethics in Lacan

other/Other: two ethics in Lacan

Analysis, and especially psychoanalysis, is imperial and colonial, in other words, intrusive. Psychoanalysis expects individuals to share details of their sexual life and dreams regularly, and also makes individuals come clean about their innermost feelings and thoughts. Analysis, in anthropology, perversely keeps the outsider in the scene, who has the upper-hand and power in making judgments about cultures, cultural products and subjects (individuals) without understanding the specific context, history and feelings of the individuals involved. That psychoanalysis and anthropology has been kept apart as disciplines shows that those seeking control today wish to keep the intrusiveness of analysis in general alive, it is a divide an conquer strategy, and it has many positive consequences for those individuals and societies. Some of these positive consequences of intrusiveness can include such things as generating fear as an emotion, making the analyst able to affect change in other places without causing much disruption and, especially in the context of this paper, enabling concepts and signs to be placed at depth within a developed theory and knowledge. On the one hand, Lacan subscribes to intrusive analysis and suspends the ethical question.

On the other hand, Lacan is very aware of the ethical question regarding the intrusiveness of analysis and knows that ethics inevitably causes a disruption of analysis. Lacanian psychoanalysis generally has a close proximity with ethics, Lacan articulating the ethics behind psychoanalysis continuously in his seminars. Lacan was very concerned with the ethical question, precisely because he saw behind the question of ethics the very presence and possibility of reaching a truth or not, not only reaching the truth, but rather considering its existence, recognizing its existence, even without having to actually articulate it. It is because truth is elusive in Lacan that the question of ethics must be expanded, clarified and placed squarely as one of the important components of Lacanian psychoanalysis. And it is for an ethical turn regarding intrusive analysis that Lacanian psychoanalysis may be subscribed to by analysts generally.

Two Lacanian concepts can be considered thoroughly ethical concepts, that touch on the issues of ethics, law and truth each in their own way. We can take the rhyming nature of the two concepts to suggest that they are two sides around each of the three issues we have just highlighted in Lacanian psychoanalysis. These two concepts are the concepts of other and Other (i.e., the big Other), which must be looked at in turn to see what they have to show us regarding the position of ethics in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The other is any individual who does not fit into the prevailing cultural and social categories of a territorialized society. Any individual that does not fit into the language, cultural make-up and societal laws of the territory is considered as an other of that territory. It is a common assertion to make that the other of western societies today is the terrorist. Not only does the terrorist, due to his religious and social background, not 'fit in' with western societies, but he is out to get western societies, it is his duty to break the laws prescribed in western societies and act according to the formulated laws of his own group. In this sense, the other is himself/herself an unethical subject.

In Lacan, this other can be analyzed and must be analyzed. Analyzing the other is something that is integral to the workings of a text that analyzes the rest of society, the non-othered society, for the terms other and non-other, i.e., 'self,' are reflections. Therefore, Lacan is intrusive into the other, as we all are inevitably intrusive into the self primarily, and his ethics is suspended regarding this other. The very term signifies that he is excluding a category of people emphatically (for in Lacanian analysis, the point of his terminology and concepts is not just to record observations but to directly influence the reader regarding his stance on certain subjects and individuals). Thus, the other is actively othered, excluded, and the terrain of analysis as it applies to him/her is quite large in the Lacanian texts. There is no question of intrusion and subsequent ethical dilemmas. The other is, rather, free for all, an analytic concept full of possibilities of descriptors. We can also categorically other someone, we can make him/her feel excluded, and there is no consequence in Lacan of doing this. The other is a concept that demonstrates one side of Lacanian analysis with respect to ethics: that we can suspend ethics while doing this type of analysis as we suspend it doing any other type of analysis. But the concentration of this suspension to such a narrow term and related terrain suggests that even if we may leave the question of ethics out, it is only in particular contexts, specifically, only in the discussion of things that are othered. Just because we may other someone doesn't mean we can leave ethics out in the whole field of Lacanian analysis.

On to the wholly different question of the big Other (from now on, just Other). Let's begin by considering what Lacan considers the Other, which may even shed some light into the reasons for his distantiation from Freud's explanation of the Oedipus Complex. Lacan believes that 'the mother is the first Other.' We may begin our question into the ethics of Lacanian analysis by looking at this one statement. What the Other means in this context is that the mother lacks an analytical descriptor. It means that the Other, the term, is a deflective term, a deflection, whereas all the other words in this statement derive their meaning in combination. It means, simply put, that the analytic descriptor of the mother is elsewhere, it is not to be found in this statement, it is 'Other' to this statement, it is elusive. The function of the term Other in the statement 'the mother is the first Other' is similar to the function of the word '#ERROR' in a statement such as 'All elephants are #ERROR.' For all purposes, we expect a coherent statement, where the last word comprises a horizontal combinatorial relationship with the rest of the words and produces a coherent meaning, namely an analytic descriptor about all elephants. But we do not get that, instead, we get the breakdown of the statement, and we get an incompleteness of the statement, there seems to be something wrong with the computer that leaves the statement incomplete. The word Other is a function in a statement that is vertical in orientation, as if arising from another faculty in Lacan's brain that shows that the analysis of the mother resists a descriptor, exactly at the point that a descriptor is demanded. Other fills in the place of an analytic descriptor. But the example with the #ERROR function only goes so far, for the word Other signifies possibilities rather than a stoppage, rather than a complete obstacle. The word Other seems to show that there is a descriptor for mother, and indeed there are innumerable descriptors, but in a sense, any descriptor fits into the statement, and also no matter what descriptor one uses, it doesn't quite complete the Lacanian assertions and texts regarding the mother. In this sense, the Other is called “radical alterity,” it doesn't fit into the text and its purpose is not to combine the text but to spell its defeat.

How does this fit into the question of ethics in Lacanian analysis via law? The concept of the Other is a function, and whatever is Other cannot be intruded into as a law. It gives the text a dimension of mathematical law. Due to the function of Other, it is impossible to totally deduce analysis and analytic descriptors from the statement 'mother is the first Other,' which means that analysis here is stopped by the law of a function. Lacanian analysis is therefore not about ethical preferences but rather about the impossibility of having an objective ethical standpoint in the face of law. It is the law inaugurated by the Other that makes Lacanian analysis less intrusive and therefore ethically 'good.' It is the impossibility of speaking the true analytic descriptor of the mother that makes the mother significantly more untouched in Lacanian analysis than in other analytic models. The Other deflects meaning, it makes meaning elusive and it signifies the incompleteness of the sentence, and due to this a final judgment on the mother cannot be passed, she cannot be stamped with an analysis and she herself, as a being, can break down and break apart the text, as if her presence was in the text of Lacan, and the life of Lacan, beyond what Lacan could attempt to say about her.