(Suny Series, Insinuations_ Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature) Lacan, Jacques_ Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm_ Themi, Tim - Lacan's Ethics and Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism-State University of

Lacan’s Ethics and
Nietzsche’s Critique of Platonism

SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
—————
Charles Shepherdson, editor
Lacan’s Ethics and Nietzsche’s
Critique of Platonism
TIM THEMI
Cover art courtesy of Thanasi Bakatsoulas. The work is entitled “Sun-Ilios.”
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Themi, Tim, 1975–

Lacan’s ethics and Nietzsche’s 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, 1844–1900.
I. Title.
BF175.4.P45T54 2014
170—dc23 2013015893
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Nietzsche, the way he points to the Greeks,
the will to power, and all subsequently who teach it—
to Lacan for keeping Freudian experience alive.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
INTRODUCTION 1
1. THE DEFLATIONARY ONTOLOGY OF LACAN AND

NIETZSCHE 7
1.1 Lacan’s Tripartite Schema with Nietzsche’s Critique of
Plato’s Good 8
1.2 Lacan’s Freudian Thing in the Critique of Aristotle’s Good 15
2. DISTINGUISHING WEAK SUBLIMATION FROM THE STRONG 23

2.1 The Promise of Sublimation and Its Discontents 24
2.2 Lacan’s Treatment of Sublimation 30
2.3 Nietzsche’s Distinction between Weak and Strong 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: Nietzsche’s Strong Dionysian Catharsis 54
4. BIRTH OF THE GOOD: WEAK ETHICS IN SOCRATES’

ALCIBIADES 65
4.1 Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s Critique of Science in Seminar XVII 108
6.2 Nietzsche’s Empiricist-Centered Positive Comments on
Science 117
6.3 Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s Ethics

Might Improve Our Understanding of Nietzsche’s 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): 328–46. I also acknowl-
edge 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: Sämtliche 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 Lacan’s Seminar; page
references are in Arabic numerals and refer to English translations: for exam-
ple, SVII:50 refers to page 50 of Lacan’s seventh Seminar. Arabic numerals
following the letters “SE” refer to the volume number of Freud’s Standard
Edition: for example, SE2:70 refers to page 70 of Volume 2.
xi
Introduction
Lacan’s 1959–1960 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis, as an ethics
of desire, extends on Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism—where as a corollary
it will also be possible to take a Nietzschean optic to Lacan to illuminate the
latter’s 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 gener-
ally leaves Nietzsche undiscussed. This is despite the fact that Nietzsche’s
thought rises to prominence in Lacan’s post-war Paris2—and that well before,
Nietzsche is felt by some of Freud’s early collaborators to anticipate much in
Freud. In 1908, for instance, where there are two meetings of Freud’s Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society dedicated to discussing Nietzsche’s 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 “anal-
ysed 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
1
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 Nietzsche’s work in Freud’s and Lacan’s writings,” and that
although “there are some studies on the link between Freud and Nietzsche,
there are no studies so far on Nietzsche and Lacan”—adding that “the inten-
sity of the interconnections, and their implications, deserve such attention.”5
One such Nietzsche–Lacan study that Ons may have overlooked is by
Alenka Zupančič, contributed to the “Short Circuits” series edited by Slavoj
Žižek.6 The Series Foreword by Žižek is also instructive apropos of what
the present book attempts, insofar as Žižek 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 “another—disturbing—
side of something he or she knew all the time.” Although Žižek adds that
“the underlying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a
privileged instrument of such an approach”—by reading Lacan’s ethics with
Nietzsche’s, 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
Nietzsche’s 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 Plato’s 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 Nietzsche’s deflationary critique of Plato’s Good
for enabling the distinction between real and imaginary to become confused
throughout the history of metaphysics that followed. I read this critique with
Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s tripartite schema may prove additionally
serviceable for Nietzsche’s purpose of demystifying the Good in order to
overcome it. Then I consider Lacan’s use of Freud to ground Aristotle’s Good
in a polymorphous perversity at the base of desire. In this way Lacan’s 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 Nietzsche’s
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
Nietzsche–Lacan 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 Nietzsche’s major aesthetic distinction
between “lack” and “abundance” (what I call “weak” and “strong”) might
be understood in the light of Lacan’s 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 Plato’s 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 Lacan’s Seminar VII reading of Sophocles’
Antigone, to see how Lacan might be offering it as a treatise on how a pre-
Platonic ethics would once have functioned. I discuss Antigone’s confrontation
with Creon, aiming to show that Lacan finds Creon identifying with the Good
in a way that creates a barrier toward desire. I inquire into Antigone’s 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 Plato—even by the time of Aristotle.
The book now continues to track this loss historically by focusing
on Nietzsche’s 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 Lacan’s reading of Plato’s Symposium in the
1960–1961 Seminar VIII, Transference, supports Nietzsche’s 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
Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s
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 Nietzsche’s insight
further in the sexual direction with the concept of object a. Last, I suggest
that an excessive denaturalizing was the consequence of Plato’s 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 buttressing—explaining 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 Nietzsche’s announcement but rather likewise pointing to the work
to be done on what remains of “God” as shadow.
Chapter 5 examines Lacan’s treatment of the Judeo-Christian thematic
in his Seminar VII, and his returning to the issue in his 1969–1970 Seminar
XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and reads it alongside Nietzsche’s
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 Lacan’s analysis can
be strengthened by Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity,
for affecting an envy-based revolt on its Greco-Roman masters, adds a key
historical dimension to the hysteric’s structure we find Lacan reworking in
Freud. I suggest that this combined Nietzsche–Lacan 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 Good—especially 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 science’s “service of
goods” (SVII:303) and despite, for Nietzsche especially, science’s capacity to
refute the dogma of anti-nature religions. As part of Nietzsche’s 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 view—given that
the empirical invokes our bodily senses and the natural sphere they belong to
as fundamentally real. This seems to implicate Lacan’s own view of science,
which focuses more on its formalistic than on its empirical aspects.
Chapter 6 thus examines how Lacan’s Seminar XVII builds on the
critique of science that marks the close of his Seminar VII, aiming to see if
Lacan can extend on Nietzsche’s own critique of the ascetic effects of modern
science. Then it considers the specifically pro-science and pro-empirical
elements of Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism, to examine Lacan’s ethics of
science from this critique’s perspective. The task becomes to see if Lacan’s
attempt to mathematically formalize the gaps in science—through which
desire returns—is appropriate to Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s more
empiricist-centered and Lacan’s more mathematics-centered positive views
on science.
This book sets out to discover how Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis,
as an ethics of desire and the drive, contributes to our understanding of
Nietzsche’s 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 Lacan’s own analysis of the Good in his 1959–1960 Seminar VII, The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, extends on Nietzsche’s project.
Section 1.1 discusses the real and imaginary distinctions that Nietzsche
argues were confused historically by Plato’s Good. Then it considers Lacan’s
tripartite schema of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real to augment
Nietzsche’s purpose of deflating the Good—a 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 Lacan’s returning of Aristotle’s 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 cosmos—as 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
1.1 Lacan’s Tripartite Schema with

Nietzsche’s Critique of Plato’s 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)
Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s triadic
“ ‘move,’ ” which Marcelle Marini suggests would then “form the framework
of his entire theory.”1 Before discussing this tripartite schema, I examine
Nietzsche’s criticism of Plato’s 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 Lacan’s schema are useful to Nietzsche’s project of
revaluating this Good’s values.
Nietzsche’s project is based on the claim that Plato’s 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 Plato’s role in this initial moral-
religious 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-of-
factness,” 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 Nietzsche’s
unpublished notes of 1888, which states that “the high culture of Thucydides,”
“as necessarily as Plato’s 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 Nietzsche’s conviction that the best philosophers
came before Plato comes from the “methodological naturalism,” “empiricism,”
and “realism” he often shares with them—in 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, Nietzsche’s 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 started—particularly under the
leadership of Arcesilaus—this period of Academic scepticism, from about
274 to 74 BC, was both preceded and followed by the religiously dogmatic,
doctrinal codification of Plato’s 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 soul’s
catharsis and reincarnation7—and although Nietzsche is skeptical of Plato’s
“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 / 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
Kahn notes, whereas in Meno “the immortality and pre-existence of the soul
was taken for granted,” in Phaedo it is “systematically argued for”10—and 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 Plato’s Phaedo as a “great
panegyric to the ascetic ideal.”12
We can see in Plato’s Republic how his ascetics affect his epistemology.
This is not only in the marginalization of anything bodily in the acquisition
of knowledge, namely the senses—a marginalization that Deborah Modrak
points to also being in Phaedo13—but 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 real—as a rival—especially 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 Plato’s Good, when saying of King Creon, as
he appears in Sophocles’ Antigone, that “his error . . . is to want to promote
the good of all—and I don’t mean the Supreme Good, for let us not forget
that 441 BC is very early, and our friend Plato hadn’t yet created the mirage
of that Supreme Good” (SVII:259). By calling Plato’s 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
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 / 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 more-
than-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 Plato’s “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 Nietzsche’s 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 “philosopher’s 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,
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 Nietzsche’s goal
of rejecting Plato, but also for Lacan’s 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,” “energy”—words that invoke concepts,
categories, formulas, and images—we 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 returns—leading 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
latter’s famous metaphor of the book of nature being written in mathematics.
But Lacan is also showing the influence of Koyré who at times emphasized
the symbolic over against the empirical aspect of science.21 Given Galileo’s
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
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 “naïve” 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 Lacan’s
imaginary register25—Lacan 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 subject’s 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 play”—or as Freud might say “free
association”—until one’s images correspond to nothing directly real in the
external world any longer, but can still be of much significance apropos of
one’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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
those who “did not know enough to ‘understand’ themselves” (TI VII:1),
which calls to mind Lacan’s 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:20–1). 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 doesn’t 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 ills—whence 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 opposite—as if to promote ourselves as not so
much inimical to the real but living in accordance with a higher, ultimate
reality like Plato’s 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 real—the
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 world—why?” (WP 578), Nietzsche asks, noting how often it
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 Lacan’s Freudian Thing in the Critique of Aristotle’s 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 Nietzsche’s critique of Plato, I discussed

Lacan’s 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 Plato’s Good. Now I explore this antipathy through Lacan’s
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
Plato’s 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 Aristotle’s 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
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
Nietzsche’s 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 Epictetus’s repeated appeals to the teleology discoverable in
nature,” precisely the myth “dismissed by Nietzsche as one of the Christian/
Platonic West’s 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 Plato’s.”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 Aristotle’s metaphysical convictions.
Aristotle defines our striving for the Good as striving for “happiness
[eudaimonía],” 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 Aristotle’s hopes for our ability to aim for the
Good when he considers animals to be unnatural because not rational, and
to be hence determinable as “aberrations” from the essence of nature as he

defines it.39 Daniel Graham thus resituates Aristotle’s 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 turn—or return—to Freud’s 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 “return-
to-nature” idealists like “Rousseau” imagined—adding 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, artistic-
creative sublimation—rather 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, Nietzsche’s ethics may seem closer to Aristotle’s 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 Lacan’s Seminar VII finds so understated
in Aristotle’s notion of nature and pertains to “das Ding” (SVII:71), “The
Freudian Thing” (SVII:132). At one point he likens this Thing to Freud’s use
of “the term das Es [the It]” (SVII:137), suggesting the Freudian Thing is
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 Freud’s 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 Aristotle’s, 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
Lacan’s 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 head—whether emerging in ourselves
or observable in the behavior of another.
Hence, for Lacan, the Thing is split off—“Spaltung” (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
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
forbidden—a 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 intellect’s 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 Thing—even though unconsciously,
one searches if not for the Thing than at least because of it; although “one
doesn’t 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 it—especially 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
real’s external aspects as well—insofar as this external covering may seem to
give us comfort, by buttressing our inner denials with more empirically false
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 self-
destruction.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 ascetic—or, 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 Freud’s realism to show that “there is nothing in common
between the satisfaction a jouissance affords in its original state and that which
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 masochistic—like 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 principle”53—where, 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.
Lacan’s 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 Nietzsche–Lacan analysis, we can grasp how such a Good as we
find in Platonism, including Aristotle’s 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 Zupančič 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 us—and 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
a combined Nietzsche–Lacan 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 turns—as 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 Lacan’s treatment of sublimation, held by Freud to be a nonpathogenic
vicissitude of the drive, can help us to the nobler aims Nietzsche’s ethics incites.
Section 2.1 explores Lacan’s 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
Nietzsche’s major aesthetic distinction between “lack” and “abundance” (what
I call “weak” and “strong”), can be understood in light of Lacan’s view of
sublimation and used to determine which sublimations are of most ethical
and cultural value.
I show that by reading Nietzsche’s aesthetic distinction with Lacan’s
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 Plato’s Good
near the lowest levels of value. I suggest Nietzsche does so because of the
Good’s 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 Thing—enabling
us to bestow on earthly life what Lacan calls sublimation’s capacity to raise
an object to “the dignity of the Thing” (SVII:112).
23
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 drives—so that the drives could only
be expressed in symptom form, or in the violence of criminally acted-out
perversion—sublimation 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 drive’s 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
Lacan’s Seminar VII returns to “the relations of this forming of an ideal
to sublimation” (SVII:95)3—especially in the division named “The Problem of
Sublimation” by its editor Jacques-Alain Miller. Here Lacan is found retracing
Freud’s 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). Freud’s 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 Nietzsche’s ethics, insofar as Nietzsche
held Plato’s 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 “Freud’s 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 “Sade’s 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 being’s
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 Freud’s term das Es (SVII:137), meaning literally “the
It.”6 But for Lacan although Freud’s 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).
Russell Grigg notes this forgotten primacy to concern a “shift toward

the ego” that began in the 1930s, still in Freud’s lifetime, where support for
Freud’s views on “sexuality and the Oedipus complex, the death drive and
the splitting of the ego declined in the psychoanalytic movement”—adding
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
1959–1960 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 repressed—in distorted form unbeknownst
to ourselves—entailing 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
drives—calling “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
this ideal, commanding the Good like a Crusade or Inquisition, conjures up

the “inner catastrophes” of “neurosis and its consequences” (SVII:319) Lacan’s
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 “self-
hate,” 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 abatement—a 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 remedy—that of the unmediated violence of the
drives; and that of an ascetic or repressive Good—I turn now to the nature
and limits of sublimation itself so as to assess its remedial power.
De Kesel notes that although Freud’s 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 plan—without repression—but 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
truth—the most obvious case lying with religion—where loss of “truthfulness”
is one of the problems with repression that sublimation needs to counter.
Lacan’s 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 hysteric’s process of “encircling”
(SVII:129–30, 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:130–1).
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 scientific—“das 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
sublimation”—and what, in general, we “cannot help but demand”—“to 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,
“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).
Freud’s 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 one’s 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 essence—despite
what Freud calls his still at times “extraordinary capacity for sublimating
the primitive instincts” that “left his epoch far behind” (SE11:132–6). 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
structure—those such as the “character trait,” built on a “reaction formation”
that is “antagonistic to the anal drive,” as Lacan points to in Freud’s “Three
Essays” (SVII:94–5).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
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 Lacan’s attempt to negotiate the limits of
sublimation, and read it as an attempt to stop such limits from closing in—so
that we may continue to pass through, as the Argonauts of culture Nietzsche
demands, without losing anything more than our tail-feathers.
2.2 Lacan’s 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.
Lacan’s 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 Freud’s ability to render the drives
“unmasked” through interpretation, amidst “a play of signifiers in the play
of substitutions” (SVII:90).
Lacan’s 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 Freud’s view that the Trieb is a “psychical
representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and
reaching the mind”19—whereupon 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 unmasked—the 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 level—where 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 instinct—something which Lacan takes to
occur through a translation difficulty of the term Trieb21—the 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
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).
Lacan’s 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 drive’s 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 subject’s
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 distance—rather
than head directly toward the Thing (as in criminal perversion), or attempt
to blindly repress it (as in neurosis).
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 habit—and 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 Evans’s 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 Mother’s
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 Freud’s 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 Freud’s insistence on a
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).
Zupančič clarifies Lacan’s ethics here with reference to Nietzsche’s,
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
Zupančič, 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 sublimation—as 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 Wagner’s gaining of social recognition for
the invention of Parsifal’s 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 structure—those 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 Wagner’s 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. Nietzsche’s praise of Bizet’s
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
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 2–3). 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 brings—what 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 Thing’s
starkness, on top of which “the sublimations of the systems of knowledge,
including—why not?—that of analytical knowledge itself ” can be “projected”
(SVII:203). Lacan gives the example of Freud’s 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 Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s ethics, we can better understand both Lacan’s treatment of
sublimation and why Nietzsche places Plato’s sublimation of the Good at the
lower levels of value.
2.3 Nietzsche’s 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)
Nietzsche’s 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 Christian-
Platonic 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 world—leading 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 structure—taking 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 one’s 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 nihilism”—an insufferable state of near valuelessness where
“all one has left is the repudiated world” (WP 37).33
Our actual world for Nietzsche thus is nothing other than the earthly
world of “appearance” insofar as it is not, as in Plato’s 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) moments—what
Lacan calls “the Thing”—without 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,
Königsbergian.” 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 one’s own abundance,” gives to things in
gratitude for their existence, until “they mirror” the strength of one’s own
“power” and one’s 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
“impoverish”—“history 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 take—a 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).
Nietzsche’s distinction, however, and the many psychological
observations that accompany it, can find extra support in Lacan’s treatment
of sublimation and the clinic it emerges from. Creativity in Nietzsche’s 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 affirmation—granting them the status sublime
according to what Nietzsche himself calls “the bestowing virtue.”34 Creativity
in Nietzsche’s 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 arise—leading 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 Plato’s 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 Nietzsche’s anti-Platonism but to when “Plato places art at the lowest level
among human works” (SVII:141).
Lacan here is criticizing Plato for denying art’s ability to reveal any
“hidden reality,” especially any pertaining to “the Thing,” and refers instead to
the Cézanne who “paints his apples” to suggest he is also doing “something
very different from imitating apples”—because as artist, Cézanne, 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 real—Lacan 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
imitation,” is, for Lacan, “a trap one must not enter” (SVII:141). For not only
can art indeed reveal the real—that is, the unconscious, excluded reality of
the Thing—this 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 Plato’s
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 enacted—for this process has just been disavowed, along
with its all-too-human origins.
Nietzsche thus finds Plato’s 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,
Homer’s poetry gilds and deifies the forces of nature and embodied-life here
on the earth—Plato 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).
Plato’s 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 Platonist’s encounter with the earth, which was then
mistaken as “cause” of earth itself. But what is most important apropos of
a comparison of Lacan’s ethics and Nietzsche’s critique is that Lacan’s main
example of a superlative form of creativity in his Ethics Seminar is Sophocles’
Antigone: a work of tragic art—that is, the very form that Nietzsche praised
as highest in value and Plato debased as lowest.
Zupančič 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;
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
tragic—it 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 Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s reading gets us closer to the real in a way that Nietzsche
takes to be of much value to a strong ethical project—a value that Plato’s
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 Lacan’s Ethics Seminar reading of Sophocles’ Anti-
gone to see how this augments Nietzsche’s emphasis on tragic art. Section 3.1
begins with the confrontation of Antigone with Creon, demonstrating Lacan’s
linking of Creon to a repressive version of the Good. Section 3.2 explores
Antigone’s 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 Plato’s Good would later render lost to
culture—even, 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 Antigone1—with 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 death’s
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
dogs and carrion birds, unsheltered by any grave—in punishment for having
dared to lead an army against Thebes.
Creon’s 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 cer-
tain death, Antigone is compelled to bury Polynices anyway—because 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 her2—is 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-brother–half-Father in this extraordinary case—given
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 house—the house of a past unwitting incest—that
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 dif-
ficult 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 Creon’s
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 ver-
sions of the Good—a folly that Plato’s 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). Creon’s “error of judgment,” however, his ἁμαρτία
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 Δίκη,” with the latter often interpreted as “the Justice or the Doctrine of
the gods” (SVII:259).
To support the claim that Creon’s 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 enact-
ed 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, unhal-
lowed, unholy.”8 This is beyond Creon’s 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 inno-
cence crosses over into another sphere” (SVII:259), the sphere of ἁμαρτία.
Creon’s innocence in this crossing, his “didn’t 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 Platonism—for as Lacan reminds us, “441
BC is very early” and “Plato hadn’t yet created the mirage of that Supreme
Good” (SVII:259)—Creon’s 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 Father’s murderer and Mother’s seducer, when the best chance
arises—it 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 hell’s 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 Creon’s 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
Creon’s 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
what Lacan explains by formulating Creon’s 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, Creon’s reason becomes practical in taking steps to deter any further
attacks of such kinds on the city—as much as it may pain him or others to
take this stance.
In Creon’s 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 Creon’s time of a pre-Platonic divine there is not, Lacan reminds us,
anything yet like Aristotle’s “prime mover” in existence—only the “mythologi-
cal 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 decree—as 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 one-
sidedness, 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 citizens—to 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 con-
ceal 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
one’s desire, such that the Good is deployed “in the guise of some alibi on
the part of the subject,” merely to serve “the subject’s 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 paradoxi-
cal comportment. And thus inevitably, a more careful examination of Creon’s
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-
ter’s 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 Creon’s initial decree and invoking of the Good—when 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 Antigone—and not only the prophet Teiresias who he later
concedes he has never known “to sound falsehoods to the city”16—but 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 cru-
elty” (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 Lacan’s 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 Good—something
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 irregu-
lar treatment of the dead. Then there is the invoked Aphrodite, who “mocks
without resistance,”18 the Chorus reminds us, all who might oppose the amo-
rous loyalty existing, say, between Antigone and Creon’s son Haemon, who
is after all her fiancé.19
Such gods are not uniform enough to be guarantee for a King’s decree,
and this is why I take that Creon must demystify the Good he posits straight
into the utilitarian register himself—that is, to situate it in the practical
language of consequences for the common good. But when impractical con-
sequences 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 city’s safety in a time of war—“obedience saves the greatest number,”20 so
the King must be obeyed be him “right or wrong.”21
The King’s 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 untest-
ed in his role. He seems overly aggressive, hasty, closed, what Shepherdson
describes as Creon’s being situated “in the narcissistic register,” where “the
threats to his ego are conspicuously displayed (‘I won’t be beaten by a woman,’
etc),” which “marks him as a narcissist who cannot perform his symbolic
function (‘I’ll show them who’s 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 split-
subject 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 Teire-
sias—whereupon Creon experiences his first fully conscious doubt and begins
to buckle—that Creon exists and insists, Lacan tells us, “to illustrate a func-
tion” 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 excess—it 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 forget—something which Lacan’s analysis of
Antigone will cast much light on, broaching as it does the drive in the real.
3.2 Antigone against Creon:

Lacan, the Beautiful, a Second Death
I have mentioned with aid of Lacan’s Ethics Seminar how Creon’s 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 gods”—which Lacan immediately challenges
by adding: “But it’s 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:276–7).
I also mentioned how the problem arises because of the multiple nature
of the divinities in the time of Sophocles—before 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 Creon’s more republican decree
over Antigone’s own desire or instinct—for 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 Δίκη of the gods on her side” (SVII:277).
This earthly rootedness leads her, when brought to heel before Creon’s
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). Shep-
herdson thus likens what Antigone invokes to the Thing as Lacan had earlier
depicted it—there 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 ἄγραπτα, 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
a higher authority, so to speak, although “lower” is likely more precise—to

laws that are unwritten, unalterable, and of unknown origins in the Thing,
as a consequence of gods who are themselves earthly, chthonic, divinely ani-
malistic and thus “unseemly” at times in their appetites, too.27
Although for Lacan the “ambiguity” arises because just like Creon, Anti-
gone is in “a position to place the Δίκη 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 sug-
gests that Antigone is implying to Creon in their first exchange that her own
orders did not particularly come from “Zeus” or “Δίκη” either (SVII:278)!28
At times it seems more with duty to family that Antigone is clad when
it comes to explaining her actions—the 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 Antigone’s 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 Antigone’s may well strike us as coarse—not only
because her betrothed lover in Creon’s 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 well—a 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
Goethe’s 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
Nevertheless, as is proper to Lacan’s analytical method that looks for

truth not just in the mistake but in “the slag of a fantasy”31—Lacan reminds
us that Goethe’s 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 Antigone’s 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 virtu-
ous position of the Good.32
On the question of whether Antigone’s is the “image of charity,” then,
Lacan will at best answer “perhaps,” but only if “we confer on the word char-
ity 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 ἐχθρὰ, enmity” (SVII:263), is used in this connection.
Antigone in fact uses it thrice herself against her sister in the play’s opening
exchange, a word also used to express “hate.”34 She also seems to take Creon’s
decree personally: “For I say, against me”35—she 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 ὠμός,”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). Antigone’s 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 “inhu-
man,” 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 “ques-
tion 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
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 Antigone’s particular splendor stems is invoked precisely for Lacan
in what he calls the play’s “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 girl’s soft cheek”40—so 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 κομμός”
(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 “so-
called 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 play—then 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 Achilles41—the Chorus tries
to prettify Antigone’s 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, Anti-
gone will have none of it, calling this mockery—though “her stature,” Lacan
observes, “is far from diminished as a result” (SVII:281).43
Achilles had responded to Odysseus’s praise that even in the under-
world, 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 Father’s 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 realm—only bliss in the opposite—which
is why, moreover, it was considered the Good, to be a “better place.” Sopho-
cles precedes the dominion of such formulations and thus, like Achilles and
Iphigenia, when his Antigone’s 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, Antigone’s 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 pre-
conditions 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 dower48—she all but embodies life’s desire, keeps it burning
despite the tragedies it can bring. Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν, the Chorus rings out.49
And what god or man would not want to save her now? Or long for such
of life’s 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 Antigone’s “ἵμερος ἐναργὴς . . . 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 cross-
ing over” (SVII:281). And this is not only because of the Chorus’s transgres-
sion of loyalties demanded by stately edicts—or because Antigone will soon
herself cross more fully into the zone between life and death by being buried
alive—but 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 “Atè” (SVII:281).
Atè [ἄτη] 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 Anti-
gone 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 it54—Antigone’s Atè 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 Atè, deriving from an especially transgressive
Father and an especially accursed share in the house. The Atè, Lacan offers in
analytical terms, pertains to a subject’s 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 Antigone’s,” Lacan thankfully adds (SVII:300). Atè today is like the skel-
etons in the closet—and every family has one—that all have learned it best
not spoken of.
But because of her particularly haunted Atè, 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 else’s,” from “beyond
the limits of Atè”—or ἐκτὸς ἄτας as Lacan cites in Greek—has become “Anti-
gone’s 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 Antigone’s Atè, emerging fully when the Chorus invokes
her Father, leads to the passage where Goethe has his doubt, where her pre-
texts 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 Antigone’s Father, he
shares in the singularity of this unthinkable crime in having had with his
Father the same Mother, in having also come from Jocasta’s ill-fated womb.57
Bataille asks, “Is there anything more firmly rooted in us than the hor-
ror of incest?” For to contemplate even having such desire in one’s 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
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 Creon’s punishment issues that Antigone will now herself be bur-
ied—buried alive—the “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 “closer”—closer 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 “Freud’s 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:216–17).59
Lacan thus alludes to a “question of power” (SVII:249) regarding beau-
ty; 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 it—which, for Lacan, is “the aesthetic phenomenon where
it is identified with the experience of beauty” (SVII:217)—we come to one
of Nietzsche’s 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 year—his climactic final year of writing—when 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 process—making of itself in this way a creative ethical
imperative.
The place we come to with Lacan’s Antigone may thus be said to bode
well with Nietzsche’s 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 to—whereas 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 tragedy’s effects through Aristotle’s notion of the
tragic catharsis—as Lacan and Nietzsche both have offered a critique of it. I
argue that Lacan’s critique supports Nietzsche’s in alerting us to an empower-
ing 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: Nietzsche’s 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). Lacan’s comments on catharsis will instead relate
to the “beauty effect” already discussed—that which he takes to derive “from
the relationship of the hero to a limit,” which in Antigone’s case concerns “a
certain Atè” (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 Antigone’s 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:263–4). 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 Creon’s order to bury her alive.
As acting on her desire, then, despite the deathly cost, Antigone’s 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 conse-
quences—there 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 not—turning 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 Aristotle’s
later fourth-century view that tragedy’s aim was to cause “half-medicinal,
half-moral discharges of the effects” (WP 852), and of what he took to be
“Aristotle’s 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 incom-
plete nature of Aristotle’s 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 Aristotle’s 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 observa-
tion that there were “the παθητικοί as opposed to the ἐνθουσιαστικοί,”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,
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 trag-
edy? 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 fol-
lowing “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 Plato’s 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
13–5) (TI II, X). Nietzsche saw this stance as fixated on moralism, regardless
of any cost, making knowledge of the Good a sovereign of all—which 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 Nietzsche’s 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 ran-
dom 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 Nietzsche’s
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 16–7)—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 remark-
ing that “there is after all some distance between the teachings embodied in
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 philosopher’s
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 pleasure74—wondering why pleasure “is invoked on this occa-
sion” 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, discour-
ages,” 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 it—prone 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 Aristotle’s 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 self-
enhancement, is for Nietzsche now not only to be physiologically in error
but to reduce things to the weaker subject’s 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
Good—as if tragedy’s aim were not only to cleanse us of fear and pity medi-
cally, but also to morally avert us from the dangers of beauty and desire so
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 Aristotle’s case thus for Nietzsche—caught up as he found him in
an epoch already under the sway of a Platonic kind of Good77—the 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 plea-
sure.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 Lacan’s Ethics
Seminar to the section prior to those on Antigone entitled “The Function of
the Beautiful” (SVII:231–41). 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 expan-
sions, 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 econ-
omy 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 pos-
sible “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 harnesses”—destroyed 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
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 Lacan’s 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 “Atè concerns the
Other, the field of the Other, and it doesn’t belong to Creon” but is rather “the
place where Antigone is situated” (SVII:277)—as the real repressed—and 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 con-
trolled 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 transgression—when 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 tragedy’s 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 play’s end,
albeit in different ways and for different reasons, as are Creon’s 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 Teiresias’s prophecy of terrible
things and in what becomes the Chorus’s final song, Dionysos is invoked as
“the god that saves” (SVII:282). But the wine god of ecstasy is no ordinary
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 Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy,
returned to the core “oneness of everything existent”—as if the “individua-
tion” 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 being’s eternal becoming. Lacan sees her as the “anamor-
phic 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 αὐτόνομος,” bearer of “the signifying cut that confers” “the indomi-
table 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, Antigone’s sacrifice may appear as self-
sacrifice, 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 “ατραγωδόι [un-tragic]” perspective,
that “she incarnates that desire,” the “desire of death” (SVII:282), unless it is
his second death we have in mind—that 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
Nietzsche’s 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 “strength”—insofar 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 one’s 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 Atè—beyond 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
of a second death, in reply to a repressive symbolic order, is a way to reclaim

desire from the real’s 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 sus-
pended 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 sanc-
tioned.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 rela-
tion to their desire: Antigone is closer in the place of beauty, toward the sec-
ond 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 didn’t 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).
Here Sophocles seems also moved to his finest sentiments regarding

Creon, spoken through a messenger, who has just surveyed the kind of sav-
agery 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 life’s 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 Dio-
nysos,” 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 life’s desire—Antigone
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 life’s 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 Lacan’s 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 one-
self of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge”—as he found
that “Aristotle understood it”—but 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 beauty’s 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 radi-
cal 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
contrasting of the Good to a much more favored tragic perspective—whose

other name is Dionysos.
By directing this analysis to the City Dionysia where Sophocles’ Anti-
gone 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 sway”—where as a result of the Good’s
returning repressed, “gods and beasts join together to signify the world of
the unthinkable” (SVII:314).
The next chapter turns to Lacan’s reading of Plato’s Symposium to study
the specific role of Socrates in the emerging of Western moralizing thought.
The aim is to see if this augments Nietzsche’s 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 allevi-
ated in advance.
It is because the tragic epos does not leave the spectator in igno-
rance 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 Lacan’s reading of Plato’s Symposium in the 1960–1961
Seminar VIII, Transference, to see how it adds to Nietzsche’s view that the
Good Socrates enacts is hyper-denaturalizing. Section 4.1 examines Lacan’s
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 Lacan’s analysis of a final confrontation between
a manifestly pious Socrates and the sensuous Alcibiades points to a return of
the real—and deepens Nietzsche’s 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 Lacan’s 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 erastēs, the first to have loved him” (SVIII 2:3).2 So
65
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
Love—just 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 Lacan’s analysis
of this transference, which was further instituted by Plato’s writing, sheds
light on Nietzsche’s 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 “Plato’s invention of the pure spirit and the
Good,” “a dogmatist’s 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 Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s view, although neither,
he adds, is it in Socrates’ either—because 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 the-

ology 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 impres-
sive rewards—such 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 Pha-
edrus’s 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 Phaedrus’s
view, or in Plato’s 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 Phaedrus’s speech is that it introduces
us to the dialectic between the active lover, erastēs, and the passive beloved,
erōmenos—where 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 Pha-
edrus by claiming that Love, although indeed a god, is “not one” but “two”
(180c–e), 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 low—who 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.
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 privileg-
ing of an eternal, denaturalized Being over against nature’s sensual prolifera-
tions of becoming and difference—yet Lacan is skeptical of any claim that
Pausanias is simply Plato’s 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
Pausanias’s discourse is weighted to suggest “the Gospel’s malediction” that
“what is really worthwhile is forever refused to the rich” (SVIII 4:11), which
still accords with Plato’s general disvaluing of the materialistic. From a cryptic
clue given by Kojève, moreover, Lacan will even add that Aristophanes’ attack
of hiccups at the end of Pausanias’s speech signals that Aristophanes is actu-
ally “convulsed with laughter—and so is Plato!” (SVIII 4:11–2)
With close attention to the signifier, Lacan seizes on “seven repetitions”
of the stem “paus” (SVIII 4:12) in reference to the pausing of Pausanias’s
speech, as Aristophanes tries to pause his hiccups, a term also playing on
the name Pause-anias in Greek (185c–e).7 This suggests to Lacan that with
a rare parodying of the verbal devices of the sophist, Plato hints at holding
Pausanias’s view to be “something derisory” (SVIII 4:12). What supports this
interpretation is that for all Pausanias’s 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 Plato’s 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 Plato’s view
because, relative to Pausanias, Socrates is thus further down the denaturalizing
path—in 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-
ologically instead. High and low are now seen in terms of bodily health or
decay, the latter of which Nietzsche calls “décadence,” 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 body’s loves” (186c),
Lacan also remarks that “one could not give a better definition of psycho-
analysis” (SVIII 5:8). For “the master-physician,” according to Eryximachos,
must know to encourage the body’s “nobler” loves and substitute them for
all the “baser,” so that we ourselves become ennobled as we steer toward a
better choice of loves (186c–d).
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 surrounds—as 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 Coper-
nicus—where 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 (189d–90c). 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 impu-
nity 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
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 denaturalization—for 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 tenu-
ous 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 sim-
patico with him—and further in simpatico with the emerging denaturalizing
tendency—Agathon 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 Greeks—the ever still sexualized, bodily divinities that Nietzsche thus
found to be non-denaturalizing in the excessive anti-nature manner of ensu-
ing 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 Agathon’s 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 ques-
tion: For although he will have little trouble in making dialectical prey of an
opposing view, this, Nietzsche reminds us, is often the diversion a philoso-
pher 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 admitting—which 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 speech—the
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 erōmenos, the beloved, is going to become erōtōmenos, the one
interrogated,”11 as Socrates “manoeuvres,” “manipulates,” “he is always the

master”—even 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 (200a–b).
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
(201a–c). So much for what was meant to be Agathon’s eulogy on Love—and
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
Lacan’s 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 denatu-
ralizing. 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 either–or 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 Agathon’s definition of Love
as desiring good and beautiful things entail that Love itself must be bad and
ugly—because 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 so—to desire something they do not
lack—is 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 Love’s 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 perspective—as a state
of lack falsely universalized—which 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 one’s 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 Agathon’s pride onto an imaginary third party (SVIII 8:2). Arguably
Socrates had used the concept “truth” in the same way, when suggesting it
was not he but “truth” that had made a fool of Agathon’s 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
reached—for 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, sug-
gesting 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 mid-
wife, 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
know—where the erōmenos [beloved] becomes the erōtōmenos [interrogated],
as Lacan put it, then eventually another of Socrates’ erastēs [lovers]. But as
we will see when it comes to Alcibiades, Socrates is not so easy to fathom
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 denaturalizing—evidence 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 beautiful—that 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 Diotima’s myth is
found in Plato’s Symposium and nowhere else. It tells us that if Love is for-
ever 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 one’s disposal, and Penia of being in impoverished lack (203).
In accordance with Socrates’ view of desire, the copulation of course
was of Penia’s prompting, from her being of the wantonness that comes of
lack. But that this occurred at Aphrodite’s 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 god—that Love’s mother is Penia, lack, prac-
tically 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 daimōn—as an intermediary of the gods
and a “great spirit” (202e).
Diotima points to other intermediaries like doxa, “opinion” (202a), dan-
gling not only betwixt gods and mortals but also between truth, which gods
possess, and ignorance, which we are of without them. The role of interme-
diaries 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
“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 Diotima’s 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 nature’s becoming by the reproducing of ourselves in offspring—so
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 death—as a way to reach the eternal.
It is not only with these functions shared with animals that love
ascends—for we can also, says Diotima, seek as lovers of fame to create
“deathless memory” of our valor (208c–e). 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 live”—for 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” (211c–12a).
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 “per-
suaded” and that this is why we must all, like him, and above all else, “hon-
our 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 returned—even though the idealism may itself
have let the drives dam and take up such excessive form.22
Yet almost as if to answer Nietzsche’s prayers retroactively here there
is suddenly a crash at the door; where, for Lacan, after Socrates’ “fascinat-
ing mirage” and “however fascinating all these beautiful stories appear,” we
are torn away from any “world beyond”—as “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 Agathon’s 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 “spite-
ful 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 “won’t you hold your tongue” (SVIII 11:2). Yet Alcibiades tells
him to protest not, saying banter aside he could never praise anyone else in
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 gentleman’s 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 seem-
ingly 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 stock—and reportedly still as handsome as
ever26—admits 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 leap-
ing,” “tears gushing forth,” he admits he is “left in a tumult” by Socrates—such
that he feels his own is a “life not worth living” (215e–6a).
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” (216a–b). 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 “for-
mer admissions” (216c). There is something else that brings Alcibiades back,
however, critical to Lacan’s reading, which I also discuss to see what light it
sheds on Nietzsche’s—and 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
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 [hōra]” (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 2:6–7)! 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
Socrates—that it is precisely in his failed seduction attempt that Alcibiades is
displaced from his prized position as Socrates’ beloved [erōmenos].
Soon Alcibiades is organizing private wrestling bouts and inviting
Socrates for private dinners—“for all the world,” as Alcibiades even puts it,
“like a lover [erastēs] 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 (218c–d).
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 power—that 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
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 Good—this
would make him owner of “a stupendous beauty” vastly superior to Alcibi-
ades’ 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-mockery”—whose 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 Alcibi-
ades 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 dena-
turing 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 denatural-
izing 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 explains—and would sometimes stand “in the same
spot” for twenty-four hours in some sort of philosopher’s daze (220c–d). 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
Agathon’s (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 god”—a 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 afterlife—one 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 nothing—and although like a mocking
Satyr he seems to offer up only a nonsensical discourse—once 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 hand-
some 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 end—and 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)!
So if now “Alcibiades is obsessed,” as Lacan put it, “inflamed” by

Socrates’ love (SVIII 12:12), Nietzsche might call this the predictably nega-
tive 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 psycho-
analysis has since discovered to be nothing less than the “pivot, centre, key
of human desire”—the 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 Alcibi-
ades 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 physi-
cal 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 veil—whence for Lacan the agal-
mata came.
Lacan suggests the a are constantly covered over by philosophy because
they subvert its transcendental Good and are thus “not manageable, not acces-
sible to its dialectic” (SVIII 10:12). Such objects are rather closer to what for
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 Good—Socrates begins to
denaturalize, and thus to misrecognize, the divinities as they existed for the
Greeks—those 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 of—to elide the
Freudian Thing and its collection in mnemonic precipitates of all our experi-
enced objects a—and 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 Sovereign—causing 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 “décadence” (TI II:11–12), essentially does no other when he
attempts to purge and deny the properly Hellenic divine of its rich and deified,
instinctive animality—when 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 fanati-
cism” of “Plato”; that, for Nietzsche, which “destroyed paganism by revaluing
its values and poisoning its innocence”—until “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 hour—as pre-denaturalizing godly
fictions—are forever among our most important “modes of revelation of the
real” (SVIII 3:8). For here they show us through Alcibiades, through his
interruption of the nigh empty speech of everyone else, that love is neither
so spiritually harmonious, nor a ladder to some peace in the beyond—that
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 asce-
sis,” 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 match-
es Alcibiades as a “sensual charmingly wicked decadence, loving art and
show”38—whereas 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 first—the 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 Good—were 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 val-
ues,” 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
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 Nietzsche’s subsequent
work came from there”—from “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 stage—lusting 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 end—unlike Antigone, Iphigenia, and unlike
Achilles—mourns 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 phy-
sician 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 Asclepius”41—is 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
Nietzsche’s 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 hon-
ourable woman’s cults of Athens” before the venerated “symbols of sex” (WP
148); or even when he speaks of “a woman’s mouth,” “a girl’s breath,” and “a
girl’s 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 on—the extra focus on object a this brings justifies our calling it a con-
tribution to Nietzsche’s re-naturalizing project that is new. The aim becomes to
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 metaphysician’s 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 Lacan’s reading of Symposium misses
anything of what Nietzsche saw as denaturalizing—again, it is more a mat-
ter of emphasis than omission, and the parallels outlined above would for
Nietzsche be much to Lacan’s 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
morality”—of “morality as anti-nature” (TI V:4)—and how its moral psychol-
ogy feeds on a manipulative debasement of the earthly, sensuous, here-and-
now, 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 Lacan’s treatment of the Judeo-Christian
thematic, to see how this contributes to what is by far the most strident ele-
ment of Nietzsche’s 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 geneal-
ogy, which later found fulfillment in Christianity by grafting onto Plato’s. This
chapter examines Lacan’s own treating of the Judeo-Christian thematic, to see
how this sheds light on Nietzsche’s 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 Lacan’s Seminar VII, analyz-
ing what is to become Freud’s linking of Oedipus to the murders of a primal
Father, a Moses, and a Jesus. Section 5.2 considers Lacan’s returning to this
issue in his Seminar XVII, where he comes to see in the Oedipal Father a
hysteric’s myth for aiding one’s accession to a Christian civilization. Section
5.3 subjects Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s Seminar VII
There is no “decline” in the later Freud (SVII:172), or so Lacan tells us in Sem-

inar VII when turning to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism text (SE23:1–140).
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
But that there was no decline in “Freud’s 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 Freud’s inner life”—as 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
(SE23:89–90).3 But what Freud believes here seems far beyond his capacities
to know, test, verify, or discover; and Lacan’s affirmation that in this later
work of Freud’s there is no decline, that nothing seems “more firmly articu-
lated” or in any case “more in conformity with all Freud’s previous thought”
(SVII:172), can be left looking somewhat double-edged.
Hence, it is unsurprising that when Lacan returns to Freud’s treatment
of the Judeo-Christian thematic in Seminar XVII, a return I examine in sec-
tion 5.2, he refers to the broadly Oedipal conjectures encountered in Moses
and Monotheism and its 1913 antecedent Totem and Taboo (SE13:1–162) as
everything from a “twisted,” “Darwinian buffoonery” to a “cock-and-bull sto-
ry” which is only “myth,” “Freud’s dream,” and which to the “independent-
minded” makes “no sense at all” (SXVII:111–7). Even so, what I consider in
section 5.3 is whether Nietzsche’s focus on how the denaturalizing in Chris-
tianity functions—and on the forebear in Judaism, as well as Plato, much of
this finds—can be used to augment Lacan’s critique so as to further prevent
the distorting effects of religions based in “anti-nature.”4
Beginning then with Lacan’s Seminar VII broaching of the Judeo-Chris-
tian thematic, and proceeding by way of the chapter entitled “The Death of
God” (SVII:167–79), 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 Freud’s 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 ful-
filment.5 But as is often Lacan’s 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 Freud’s
“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 monotheism’s 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 (SE23:88–90).
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 Freud’s 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 Freud’s 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 monothe-
ism from a Pharaoh Akhenaton. Akhenaton had earlier installed a monothe-
ism 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 symbol-
izing 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 Akhenaton’s 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 Freud’s 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
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 ten-
commandments,” 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 peninsula—those 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 sec-
ond 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 (SE13:141–3),
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 other’s rivals; for though they wished
it, “none of them was of such overmastering strength as to be able to take
on his father’s 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 him—likely he protected them in the past
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 pact—a 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 (SE13:142–3).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 leader’s 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 latter’s Yahweh of fire and brimstone become more like the
purified and denaturalized moral, rationalist, and universal God of beams of
light—said 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 Freud’s 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).
By way of this exegesis of what for Lacan was Freud’s Christocentrism,

we can see why it would be no accident for Freud that “the starting-point of
Paul’s 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 us—disciples 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 tradition—the one Lacan also refers to as “the God who doesn’t 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 pri-
mal 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 pas-
sion which reveals that there is”—at least in one’s head—“a resurrection after
death” (SVII:177).
Freud’s 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 men’s
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 hap-
pened in reality as Freud thought, and because of “the fault” inherent in the
motivating belief that the Father’s murder would bring unlimited jouissance.
And although this latter fault for Lacan is already “made visible by the myth”
of Freud’s, still we find Lacan claiming that “at the same time it is also cam-
ouflaged by it” (SVII:176). In the next section, through Lacan’s later Seminar
XVII, I consider the possibility that Freud’s myth of a great primeval Father
is just the camouflage of a child’s inflated memory of its own modern-day
father. Following that in the final section—where we pass into a Nietzschean
appraisal—I consider whether Lacan’s modification of the Freudian myth is
perhaps not without some remaining camouflage of its own.
5.2 Recapitulating a Decade Later in Seminar XVII
Entering Lacan’s Seminar XVII, and focusing on its middle division entitled
“Beyond the Oedipus Complex” (SXVII:87–142), we can immediately detect
Lacan’s return to Freud’s 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:102–17) and “Yahweh’s Ferocious Ignorance” (SXVII:133–42).
In the previous section I noted what Lacan in Seminar VII saw as a “strange
Christocentrism” (SVII:176) in Freud, and Lacan’s method of honing wher-
ever 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 Freud’s 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 psycho-
analyst,” 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 twisted—if 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
Freud’s 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 signi-
fiers from the hysteric’s desire” (SXVII:129). This is because in referring, for
instance, to Freud’s Dora case study (SE7:1–122), 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 isn’t 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 fan-
tasy, however, rarely stops there, and soon Lacan must add that this hysteric
is wanting this master as someone paradoxically to “reign over” as well—so
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
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 life—without and within.
Such is often the hidden truth at the base of the hysteric’s desire to
build up and reign over a Father-master—that 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 master’s 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 hysteric’s process in Freud’s 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 hysteric’s fantasy of the
great Father-master, which he had already theorized to be the inflation of an
infant’s 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 father”—but “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 athe-
ism. But if Freud thought he could foster atheism, regardless of this hysteri-
cal trajectory he drew, it was because of his reduction of the theistic to a
psychological phenomenon—albeit 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 “deter-
mines” and can “cause” such a “fantasy” (SXVII:129) in us of primal omnipo-
tence—whether 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.
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 misun-
derstood 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 mas-
tery, like the hysteric, into a figure of a father—only now a prehistoric Father
who first has to be killed as if He, His reign, and overthrow were real—all
we are left ensconced in is imaginary causes, closer to myth than science.12
The reason then behind Freud’s 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 civiliza-
tion 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 tyran-
nical 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 masters—and that
what remained to be overcome was not them but this hysteric’s 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 Freud’s 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 either—not 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, André
Caquot, to give a presentation (SXVII:209–13). And alas for Freud, Caquot
finds Sellin’s work to be full of a merely “arbitrary virtuosity” which is indica-
tive of “excessive imagination,” and whose “Christian roots,” or Christocen-
trism, is “not possible to ignore” (SXVII:210–2). 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 ques-
tion, restated now as: “What in God’s 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
we must now even seek to “analyse the Oedipus complex as being Freud’s
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 son’s jouissance of the
mother, the murder of the primal Father leads to no such thing—and 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 rela-
tions. 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 prac-
tices” 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 themselves—can 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 Freud’s 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
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 spirituality”—or “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 man-
ner: 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 condition—that which Nietzsche argued was of very little
value and by no means an “advance in intellectuality” (SE23:111–5).
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 Lacan’s attempt to more
aptly reduce it to the clinic of the hysteric, is that it is the actual Greco-
Roman masters, who are actually murdered, for the Judeo-Christian Law
to take hold—with 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 Freud’s tri-parricide view of a progressive Judeo-

Christian development, beginning from the account Lacan offers in Seminar
VII. In section 5.2 I sought what modification I could in Lacan’s later Semi-
nar 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
Nietzsche’s 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.
To begin with, we might examine what looks to be the great discordance

between the Judeo-Christian development as Freud in part reads it progres-
sively, 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 inveigh-
ing 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 Freud’s con-
trary claim of a Christian spiritual advancement, and to see if Lacan’s excava-
tion of what he calls Freud’s “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 Israel’s
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, how-
ever, despite what for Nietzsche follows as Israel’s 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 south—with only Judah surviving, Freud observes, “after the collapse
of the Northern Kingdom in 722BC” (SE23:42).
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 misfor-
tune 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 banished—and “all the remaining unnaturalness fol-
lows forthwith” (AC 25).
Israel’s 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 reinter-
preted 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 epoch”—for Israel’s 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 affair—whether birth, death, sickness or marriage—so as
“to denaturalize them,” while claiming instead to “sanctify them” (AC 26).
For here the priest is King, with the priest’s will to power, and the anti-
nature 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 Israel’s 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
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 Freud’s 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
you”—although 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 Jesus’s
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 radi-
cally 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 Nietzsche—a Chris-
tian 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 science—the 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
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
Paul’s beseeching to forget “the wisdom of this world” (AC 45)—and later
Church Fathers would do more than beseech—because 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 Romans—mostly because such sectar-
ian 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 four-
century-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 even-
tually “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 some-
thing of primal-murder proportions—where, 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 read-
ing 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
to come, dominated by a Christianity that stemmed instead from a centuries-

old “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 Church’s labeling as “sin,” or cosmic “disobedience,” the natu-
ral 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Freud’s earlier Civilisation and Its
Discontents (1930), that there is a point where Freud’s 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:177–8).
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
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 “castra-
tion, 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 so—like a damming of the tides in a
vulgar way, causing the levy to break. Lacan senses this paradox already in
Paul’s 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:83–4).
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 documents”—sought 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 Freud’s 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 Nietzsche’s 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
religion—we, 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 Freud’s 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
the Greek and Roman nobles of antiquity—whose Christian overthrow was

indeed an intellectual disaster of murderous proportions, and whose legacy
did in fact return: in the Renaissance—eventually 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 “Freud’s dream” in Seminar XVII, a shift from his Seminar VII
position that affirms as an original “discovery” Freud’s view of “incest as the
fundamental desire” (SVII:66–7).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 con-
sequence 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 form—post-
repression—the 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 castra-
tion, 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 expedient—castration, 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 hysteric’s manner that Lacan depicts from
his observations of Freud’s clinic. For as Nietzsche reminds us, the Greek
and Roman achievement in the arts, sciences and philosophy—along with
what goes with it in government and politics (AC 58)—is tangible, empiri-
cal, 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 within—by 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 Nietzsche’s model for the
Übermensch was never any mythical, ape-like primal-Father, but rather the
strongest, actually existing intellectuals among the Greek and Roman nobles.33
Freud was likely grappling with his own Jewish fore-fathers with his Oedipal-
primal-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 cor-
rectly 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.
Freud’s Judaic phylogenesis may nevertheless have also afforded him
great insight into our general neuroses—for 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 Jews”—the ones who somehow managed to live
“on the reference to a text” that was actualised by the “ferocious ignorance”
of “Yahweh himself ” (SXVII:135–6).
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 parent-
child 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 part—when it is imbued
with a value-system that arises historically from states of affairs and responses
to them which are hardly desiderata—risks 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 Lacan’s 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 Nietzsche’s critique of Christian-
Platonism—so as to eventually explore Lacan’s ostensibly different positive
comments on science from this critique’s perspective.
Chapter 6
Service of Goods
Nature and Desire in Modern Science
In chapter 5 we met with Nietzsche’s 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 explana-
tions 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 supersti-
tions they have banished, Lacan and Nietzsche both suggest that science can
continue to function within modernity as a mode of ascetic self-denial—a
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 Lacan’s Seminar XVII builds on
the critique of science that marks the close of his Seminar VII, to see if this
extends on Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism, to discuss
Lacan’s ostensibly different positive comments on science from this critique’s
perspective. This will make up sections 6.2 and 6.3 respectively. I suggest that
Lacan’s new theory of the four discourses, with its formalization of the variant
positions of jouissance, can deepen Nietzsche’s insights into the ascetic aspects
of modern science. I also show how Nietzsche’s more empiricist view of the
strengths of science can combine with Lacan’s focus on its formalistic aspect
to further reject any residue of denaturalizing morality.
107
6.1 Lacan’s Critique of Science in Seminar XVII
The 1969–1970 Seminar XVII marks a turning point for Lacan. As seen in
chapter 5, he begins referring to the Oedipus complex as “Freud’s 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 discourses”2—an 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
Lacan’s way of going beyond an Oedipus complex shown to be Freud’s par-
ticular 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 Freud’s 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 dis-
courses of Lacan’s, first to see how this sheds light on Nietzsche’s own critique
of science and then, in sections 6.2 and 6.3, to see if Lacan’s ethics retains
a residue of Christian-Platonism familiar to us from the empiricist parts of
Nietzsche’s critique.
Lacan’s four discourses are the master’s, the university’s, the analyst’s,
and the hysteric’s. Each is represented by a set of symbols relating in a fixed
way, which rotate to move from one discourse to another—although “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 master’s discourse in the
anti-clockwise direction we arrive at the university’s discourse, also for Lacan
representing modern science.
Master’s Discourse: S1 → S2 University’s Discourse: S2 → a

$ a (aka modern science) S1 $
Figure 6.1.
Rotating the university’s 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 / 109
Analyst’s Discourse: a → $ Hysteric’s Discourse: $ → S1

S2 S1 a S2
Figure 6.2.
Beginning with the master’s 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 top-
left 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 unconscious—especially 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-off—or repressed—certain aspects of desire in order
to achieve their mastery, that “the master’s 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 appli-
cable 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 loos-
ening 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 Fellini’s then just released film adaptation of Satyricon, written by
Petronius during Nero’s first-century reign as a satire of its debauchery, as
“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 mind—for this does not exist—but
rather “all-knowing [tout-savoir]” accrued so far, “which in ordinary language
is called the bureaucracy” (SXVII:31).

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 master’s 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 “loss”—to the point of “masochism,”
Lacan adds, or maybe even “death.”7
As Lacan will put it in Seminar XX, “jouissance is what serves no pur-
pose” (SXX:10). But what in Seminar XVII he shows the master to want to do
is recuperate the energy of this object a—this return or repeat which is “the
discourse’s reject producing effect [effet de rejet]” (SXVII:44–5)—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
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 jouissance—that is, by the fact
that we have to distance ourselves from das Ding—as 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 master’s discourse, on the bottom left (see
Figure 6.1), they also bear unforseen displacements and returns. All of Lacan’s
references in Seminar VII to an impending ecological disaster and world wars
involving nuclear or biological weaponry belong here—catastrophes brought
about by the obsessive-compulsive “competition for goods” (SVII:231–6). For
the master “didn’t know” (SVII:236); this is the epithet Lacan gives to the
master whose “discourse excludes fantasy”—which, paradoxically, when the
repressed returns with extra force, “is what makes him, fundamentally, com-
pletely blind” (SXVII:108).
Modern science has a special role in this blindness for Lacan. We can
see this by rotating the master’s discourse in the anticlockwise direction,
bringing us to the university’s 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:105–6).

Figure 6.1.
That S1 moves to the bottom left, the place of “truth,” is Lacan’s way
of suggesting that the master still “holds the secret to knowledge in the uni-
versity situation” (SXVII:183). Only by now, the master has long been con-
vinced by science to invest in its research and development, leading to what
Lacan calls our “capitalist’s 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 don’t 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).
Lacan’s 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 university’s discourse, as what it directs itself toward
in the place of work, he does not simply refer to the service of goods that sci-
ence 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 muster—where, 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, danger-
ously ignorant, or simply discontent with itself. Here Lacan repeats his criti-
cism 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 strik-
ing conclusion of Seminar VII where he remarks that “science is animated by
some mysterious desire, but it doesn’t 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 Platonism—as
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 German’s Lack,” he writes: “For seventeen years I have not wearied of
exposing the despiritualising influence of our contemporary scientific pur-
suits,” “the harsh Helot condition to which the tremendous extent of sci-
ence 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
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 expect-
ed 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 Lacan’s four discourses: the analyst’s and the hysteric’s.
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 Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism.
Rotating the university’s discourse anti-clockwise brings us to the ana-
lyst’s discourse (Figure 6.3), where the a moves to the top left in the dominant
position, and indicates how for Lacan the “psychoanalyst’s position” “is sub-
stantially made from the object a” (SXVII:42). This points to how “the ana-
lyst,” 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 univer-
sity’s 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
analyst’s discourse as split from the truth of object a by the barred S of the
top right—now in the place of work—which tells of the often embarrassing
work of free-association that the analysand can be directed to do.
University’s Discourse: S2 → a Analyst’s Discourse: a → $

(aka modern science) S1 $ S2 S1
Figure 6.3.
Knowledge or S2, on the other hand, slips down to the bottom left,
in the analyst’s “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
Freud’s 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:111–17). This is a major shift for the Lacan who ten years earlier,
in Seminar VII, had all but affirmed Freud’s “discovery” of “incest as the
fundamental desire,” and its prohibition “where culture begins in opposition
to nature” (SVII:66–7). Seminar XVII seems closer to Bataille’s 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 master’s 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 science’s 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.
Lacan’s analyst’s discourse, conversely, is different to science, and dif-
ferent to Freud’s, 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 subject’s
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
who really does know, only not consciously, which is why they come to see
him—and why, when they do, Lacan “limits himself to a half saying,” to
open ended comments, so as to halter the temptation of getting his analyst’s
“knowledge to function in terms of truth” (SXVII:52–3).
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 prob-
lematic desire” (SXVII:106–7), is specified on the bottom right of the analyst’s
discourse as the master signifier, S1, which for Lacan pertains to the contain-
ment 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 analysand’s past, by making use of the transference to the
one, or the master S1, “supposed to know.”
If we rotate the analyst’s 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 hysteric’s 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 hysteric’s 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).
Analyst’s Discourse: a → $ Hysteric’s Discourse: $ → S1

S2 S1 a S2
Figure 6.2.
Lacan thus begins his analyst’s 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 analysand’s own unconscious. As
forming a symmetry, moreover, we also find in the hysteric’s 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 S2—on the bottom right
“where knowledge occupies the place of jouissance” (SXVII:94)—on what it
means to master one’s irruptions of jouissance. But the knowledge produced
through interpretation, which for Lacan “can be limited to analytic know-
how” to acquire S2 by “listening to his analysand” (SXVII:35), alerts the hys-

teric 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 hysteric’s discourse it is clear that we see this dominant appear in the form
of a symptom,” where “it is around the symptom that the hysteric’s 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 impotence”—“where man, when he speaks, when he speaks as master,
discovers that he is a failure [en défaut]” (SXVII:154, 175–6).
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 master’s 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 hysteric—“this 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 diffi-
cult 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 are—serve 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 dis-
covery 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
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 Nietzsche’s anti-Pla-
tonist (or anti-anti-natural) ethics involve a final 1888 affirmation of the natu-
ral sciences and their empirical aspect especially—as this aspect tends to be
less-emphasized in the Lacan who commends science more for its mathemat-
ical-formalistic aspect, seeing the latter as its epistemic basis and strength. It
raises the possibility that, through the Nietzschean lens, Lacan’s ethics may
reflect a denaturalising residue familiar to us from the history of Plato’s.
6.2 Nietzsche’s 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 sci-
ence (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 liber-
ate 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 Lacan’s ethics
compares with Nietzsche’s apropos of the positive comments they make on
science. For initially there may seem to be an unbridgeable antinomy between
them—insofar 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
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 idée 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 senses—to 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
found that “the entire empirical world was incompatible” with our “categories
of reason,” it was for Nietzsche the neurotic type, with its anti-nature valua-
tions, which wanted to thereby conclude that our categories “could not have
originated in the empirical world,” but “must once have dwelt in a higher
world—instead 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, hold-
ing 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 “com-
pels us” to be “necessitated to error” when positing “unity, identity, duration,
substance, cause, materiality, being”—along 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 Hera-
clitus” 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 evi-
dence 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 lies—especially those with a neurotic edge—that
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 Myth”—where Nietzsche puts his views into wider historical context by
beginning with Plato’s 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 emer-
gence of the anti-nature idealism in the West, which sought to repudiate
the senses so as to posit an unchanging world of Being beyond them—the
so-called “real world” that, for Nietzsche, was really “a myth,” ascetically
r epressive in its moral effects and anti-empiricist in its epistemic effects. This
is largely the culpable Plato portrayed in Nietzsche’s 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 Plato’s 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 reduc-
tive materialism or positivism of the late nineteenth century.27
In Book V of Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that “all philosophical ide-
alism to date was something of a disease, unless it was, as it was in Plato’s
case, the caution of an over-rich and dangerous health, the fear of over-
powerful 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-evidence—perhaps 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 felt—every 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-
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 denatu-
ralizing, 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 Plato’s “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 Spinoza’s “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 Nietzsche’s sudden praise, by contrast, of Plato’s
initial idealism, with the suggestion that “perhaps we moderns are merely not
healthy enough to be in need of Plato’s 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 Plato’s 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 age—an 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 Idols—where Nietzsche
refers to the lies of unity, materiality, substance, cause, and ego—we 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 our-
selves 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 pseudo-
empiricist projection tendency—writing “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
such as Boscovich (BGE 12) and Mach who also were critical of attributing
an atomistic bedrock of unchangeable substance to everyday objects observ-
able 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 world—especially insofar as such
advances may inform, setup, and preserve the space required for his philo-
sophical project of creating improved, non-ascetic values. Science and ethics
are thus never wholly separate in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Rather, because of
the insights that come from the sciences—where 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 world”—and 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 science’s useful-
ness in divesting the ascetic ideal of “its exteriors, its guise and masquerade,
its temporary dogmatic hardening and stiffening” accrued across the history
of metaphysics—but 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 Plato’s, 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 any-
thing 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 idealism—defending idealists against
positivists in 1886, and positivists against idealists in 1888—it is because he
wants to preserve the ability of the philosophical arts to create ideals or values
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 Nietzsche’s rather nuanced
affirmation of the natural sciences—and particularly of their empiricist
aspects—insofar as they form a vital component or precondition of his cre-
ative program in ethics. In the final section of this chapter, I consider how
Lacan’s praise of science more for its formalistic than for its empiricist aspects
might respond to the results of Nietzsche’s critique here.
6.3 Lacan’s Mathematics-Centered Positive Comments on Science
I began section 6.2 with the observation of an antinomy between Nietzsche’s

praise of empiricism and Lacan’s preference for mathematical formalization.
But given the nuances discovered in Nietzsche’s praise of empiricism, this
antinomy might already be beginning to look less unbridgeable than at first
thought. Even so, Lacan’s positive comments on science, which see mathema-
tization as its fundamental basis and strength, still mark out a very different
focal point relative to Nietzsche’s. 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 1969–1970 Seminar XVII, Lacan suggests a nonempiricist view
with the claim that “science emerged from what was embryonic in the Euclid-
ian 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 sym-
bolic” that “appeared in the Greek tradition” “of mathematics” (SXVII:155),
and holds this now to be responsible for the emergence of science—adding
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 philosophi-
cal meditation” over “the question of knowing what guarantees that percep-
tion is not illusory” (SXVII:158). The reference to philosophical meditation
here is to “that of Descartes,” who sought, Lacan notes, “through an auda-
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 reproduc-
ing Archimedes’ exploit on the parabola, in the seventeenth century, but well
before Leibniz” (SXVII:158).
This mathematics-centered view can seem most contrary to Nietzsche’s
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 Locke’s 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 dissolves”—when “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 Lacan’s 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 Nietzsche’s caveat that the senses still provide the
evidence for scientific knowledge “to the extent that we have learned to sharp-
en and arm them and to think them through to their conclusions” (TI III:3).
For beyond our modern telescopes, spectroscopes, and more advanced instru-
ments, the role of mathematics in this sharpening-arming, which is central to
Lacan’s 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
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:156–8). 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 Boscovich39—for Lacan, insofar as progress is to be made, “this is
the myth that scientific thought must detach itself from” (SXVII:159–60).
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 fetishiza-
tion 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:42–3). 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 transcen-
dentally 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 activi-
ties 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 Plato’s steps refers,
and then Aristotle’s, concerning the nature of things”—all 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
the gender fantasy that, in psychoanalysis, typically takes the form of a natural
progression through the partial drives—from the oral to the anal—toward 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 “Möbius 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 back-
side,” 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 noth-
ing” and runs “counter to sense [à contre-sens]” (SXX:93), that is, counter
to the imaginary that ends up once again meaning some phallus of a hyper-
idealized 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
subject’s 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 desire”—that 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 subjecthood—which science tends to fore-
close—begins.43 And Lacan’s use of formalization to map this limit is thus
not a return to the inflationary Platonism or overturned pseudo-materialism
that concerns Nietzsche—that which sought to repudiate the real of natu-
ral becoming through atomistic fantasies, or fantasies of Being—but rather
Lacan’s 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
Lacan’s oeuvre regarding his recognition of the limits of formalization, a turn
he takes Lacan to have made with the distinction of “tuché and automa-
ton” (SXI:53). This automaton, Verhaeghe explains, refers to what remains

of Lacan’s earlier ambition to completely formalize psychoanalysis with
mathematics and linguistics, that is, to see the dark, hidden processes of
the unconscious as completely “deterministic”—whereas tuché now serves to
complement the automaton by referring to the real, in all its inexhaustibil-
ity, 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 Lacan’s discourse continues to
bear an anti-empiricist trait attributable to the influence of “Alexandre Koyré,
the historian/philosopher of science Lacan most closely followed.”45 Corfield
suggests we should “question” this influence as Galileo scholarship has later
shown that Koyré was “wrong,” for instance, to deny the role of observation,
measurement, and experiment in Galileo’s discovery of the law of free fall
that, for Koyré, 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 Nietzsche’s more empiricist-centered
and Lacan’s more mathematics-centered positive comments on science.47
In any event, Koyré himself, in his 1948 Chicago lecture on Newton,
shows a keen awareness of the role of both the mathematical and the empiri-
cal experimental in the advance of modern science, sensing Newton’s 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 con-
structions 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 science—following the
Renaissance—helped finally to free us from.
Conclusion
This book set out to discover how Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis—as an

ethics of repressed, unconscious desire that touches the drive’s jouissance in
the real—contributes to Nietzsche’s 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 Lacan’s own
ethics—subsequent to Freudian experience—throws more light on this.
Chapter 1 deconstructs Plato’s hyper-idealizing of the Good, which
Nietzsche finds inflationary for conflating real with imaginary. From
Nietzsche’s deflationary position I was able to broach Lacan’s 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 empiri-
cal 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 lan-
guage, 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 Plato’s Good implies—like so many ingenious, even devious, ways
to try and escape the real of nature and the sexed body, without and within.
Here Lacan’s regrounding of Aristotle’s 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.” Lacan’s “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
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 Nietzsche–Lacan 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 neurotic’s 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, Nietzsche’s major aesthetic distinction
between lack and abundance, what I call “weak” and “strong,” can be grasped
in light of Lacan’s treatment of sublimation and used, moreover, to determine
which sublimations are conducive to furthering only human strength and
flourishing. Nietzsche’s strong sublimation equates to the optimal relation of
distance-and-nearness between signifier and Thing, where the Thing is nei-
ther denigrated nor denied by the products of its sublimation but treated,
rather, with dignity and care. From this combined Nietzsche–Lacan perspec-
tive Plato’s Good is a “weak” sublimation, and his concomitant negative stance
on the strongest sublimations of tragic art stands in stark contrast with Lacan
and Nietzsche’s highest esteem of them.
Chapter 3 took Lacan’s Ethics Seminar reading of Sophocles’ Antigone
as a treatise on how a stronger pre-Platonic ethics functions. Antigone’s con-
frontation 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 consequences—which 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.
Lacan’s focus on Antigone’s splendor broaches Nietzsche’s view that the
Dionysian context of the festival where tragedy was performed empowers us
C O N C LU SIO N / 131
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 primi-
tive 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 tragedy’s joy in transgression is part of what Nietzsche calls “the
denaturalizing of natural values,” entailing a loss of knowledge and empower-
ment as well as loss of drive satisfaction.
Chapter 4 shows Lacan’s Transference Seminar reading of Plato’s Sympo-
sium throwing light on what Nietzsche sees in Socrates as excessively denatu-
ralizing. Evidence of denaturalizing is revealed through the first half of Lacan’s
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.
Lacan’s analysis corroborates Nietzsche’s 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 Nietzsche’s view
with the concept of object a: a concept that consolidates Freud’s discovery, in
the decades following Nietzsche’s 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 Lacan’s handling of the Judeo-Christian thematic in his
Seminar VII and XVII and read it with Nietzsche’s view of Christianity as
the fulfillment of denaturalizing and greatest blunder in the West. Lacan is
found to distance himself from Freud’s 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
father that Christianity spiritualizes as love. Lacan also comes to see the Oedi-
pus complex itself as “Freud’s dream,” and the murdered-primal-Father myth
as Freud’s way of hysterically inventing the strong, castrating father that the
Oedipus complex requires to help us distance ourselves from excessive enjoy-
ment. Freud’s 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.
Lacan’s analysis is strengthened by Nietzsche’s of how the anti-nature
attitude of Christianity functions, and of the forebear in both Plato and Juda-
ism this attitude finds. This is because Judeo-Christianity affects an envy-
based revenge or revolt on its Greco-Roman masters, which illuminates the
hysteric and obsessional structures Lacan reworks in Freud. The noble intel-
lectuals of the Greek and Roman world are the Masters that the Christian
hysteric wants to reign over and murders—where their legacy finally returns
in the Renaissance following the obsessive Dark Ages this hysteric’s revolt
causes. This combined Nietzsche–Lacan 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 abso-
lute 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 asceticism—effects that can include both the Oedi-
pus and castration complexes, especially insofar as they find support in our
modern scientific era.
Chapter 6 shows Lacan’s Seminar XVII building on the critique of sci-
ence that marks the close of his Seminar VII, and how his new four discourses
deepen Nietzsche’s 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 Chris-
tianity and the Supreme Good in Plato. The discourse of science becomes
our modern way of producing the split subject—along 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 them-
selves 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 know”—which only produces further splittings off by way
of its presumptions.
The specifically pro-science and pro-empiricist aspects of Nietzsche’s
critique of Christian–Platonism also can be used to assess Lacan’s osten-
sibly different positive comments on science that favor formalization. But
Lacan’s attempt to mathematically formalize the gaps in science is assimi-

lable to Nietzsche’s aim of preserving a space for a scientifically informed
yet still thoroughly philosophical creation of non-ascetic ideals or newly re-
naturalized values. The Nietzsche perspective also shows that the Lacanian
project need not traffic solely with the more mathematical or less empirical
elements of science—especially because Koyré, Lacan’s main influence in the
philosophy of science, observes at one point that Newton’s 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 infla-
tionary denaturalizing of the past—whether by investing nature with holistic
sexual imaginaries, by projecting their overturned reifications, or by develop-
ing logico-mathematical constructions with no empirical contact. The direc-
tive implied by Newton’s synthesis diminishes any lasting antinomy between
Nietzsche’s more empiricist-centered and Lacan’s more mathematics-centered
positive comments on science.
Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis indeed contributes to Nietzsche’s cri-
tique 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 Nietzsche’s
critique in these areas, particularly on the topics of Christianity and sci-
ence. 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 “castra-
tion,” 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 place—insofar as It even causes the perver-
sions It takes itself to forbid by recourse to denial, demonization, and repres-
sion. I also referred to any residue of the antiempirical tendency that may
substitute for the proper testing of beliefs a disciple’s faith in a Master’s 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 Lacan’s
other positions may retain an anti-nature Christian–Platonist type valuation
and which, if any, are now capable of further empirical testing and corrobora-
tion, or falsification then modification. But one also might consider from the
later Lacanian perspective whether Nietzsche’s final 1888 affirmation of the
natural sciences, and simultaneously strident rejection of the Christian God,
bears something of the psychotic’s foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father,
which could make of Nietzsche’s writings before he succumbed to madness
some kind of sinthome—roughly in the manner of the James Joyce of Lacan’s

1975–1976 Seminar XXIII.1
Here one may turn, for instance, to the final chapter of Rabaté’s Jacques
Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature entitled “Joyce’s Jouissance,
or a New Literary Symptom,” where first the skeptical position of Roudinesco
is registered that held Lacan’s later foray into knot theory—where the sin-
thome was now a fourth ring to knot the real, symbolic, imaginary triad—was
Lacan’s own arbitrary defense against oncoming senility. From Nietzsche’s
position on natural science, this would suggest an inflationary venture into
the mathematical that loses empirical contact, as was common to Pythago-
rean–Platonist investments of mathematics. But Rabaté 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 occurs—the 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 Nietzsche’s will to continue the project of Renaissance
in a way that notes the best features of Hellenism to have occurred before
Platonism happened—using 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 Christian-
ity; where natural differences are negated, demonized, in hope of an equal-
ity or altruism without due limits—covering 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 Christian–Pla-
tonic Law or Good with known foreclosing effects—is not to go without any
quilting reference point, reduce ourselves to an inhuman-ascetic formalism,
or an all-too human set of riddles and puns—but 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 philoso-
pher 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
and psychoanalysis and to culture in general—especially 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 Lacan’s reminding of the difference
between eliminative “naturalist materialism” and the properly “Freudian
materialism”—where “the latter, far from stripping us of our history, assures
us of its permanence in its symbolic form, independently of the whims of
our assent”3—we arrive at Lacan’s rephrasing of the Freudian ethical dictum,
extended with aid of Nietzsche’s critique and restored to its greater genea-
logical dimension.
‘Where it was [Là où c’était],’ one might say, ‘Where (it) was itself
[là où s’était],’ as I would like it to be heard, ‘it is my duty that
I come into being.’
—J. Lacan, “The Freudian Thing,” in Écrits,

347–48 [417–18 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,
Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Post-Structuralism (New York: Routledge,
1995).
3. Paul-Laurent Assoun also notes that during the 1911 Congress of Psycho-
analysis 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, 1962–1967), I: 359. Assoun, Freud
and Nietzsche, trans. R. L. Collier Jr. (London: Continuum, 2007), 11–12.
4. Bass adds that analysts tended to attribute what Freud calls “Nietzsche’s
intuitive insights” to self-reflection about his own pathology, foreclosing the possibil-
ity that by beginning “as a philologist who then extended the method of historical,
linguistic interpretation over the whole of philosophy,” Nietzsche’s insights were “the
result of his critique of metaphysics.” Thomas Brobjer documents Nietzsche’s training
in historical studies to suggest that this was critical to Nietzsche’s 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), 1–2.
Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s View of the Value of Historical Studies and Methods,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 65 (2004): 320–1.
5. Ons, “Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. S. Žižek
(New York: Verso, 2006), 80.
6. Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cam-
bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003).
7. Slavoj Žižek, “Series Foreword,” in Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow, vii–viii.
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 Lacan’s “view of psychoanalysis.” Lacan, “Le Symbolique,
l’Imaginaire et le Réel (1953),” Bulletin de l’Association Freudienne 1 (1982): 4–13.
De Kesel, Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, trans. S. Jöttkandt
(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 invis-
ible,” “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 Heidegger’s 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 it’s all Plato’s fault; Plato is the greatest mal-
heur [misfortune] of Europe” (KSB 8, 9). Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Overturning of
Platonism,” in Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two (1936–1938), trans. D. F. Krell (New
York: HarperCollins, 1991), I: 205.
4. As Erwin Rohde put it—in the “admirable work” Lacan declares he “made
use of ” on “antiquity’s 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), 39–41. 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 Nietzsche’s praise of empiricism see also TI III:3, and Leiter, Nietzsche
on Morality, 43–4. 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), 418–9.
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 Reli-
gion,” 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.
N O T E S T O C HA P T E R 1 / 139
11. Plato, Phaedo, 114b–c.

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, 133–5, 144–5.
14. Plato, Republic, 508e–509b, 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, 509b–c.
16. I return to Plato’s devaluing of art in chapter 2 on sublimation (section 2.3).
17. Alain Badiou notes Lacan’s “anti-philosopher” epithet to also come from
opposing Plato on difference, becoming and change—making Lacan, like Nietzsche,
closer to Heraclitus. Badiou, “Lacan and the Pre-Socratics,” in Lacan: The Silent Part-
ners, ed. Žižek, 12–13, 15.
18. In chapter 4 I examine the criticisms of “Plato’s schwärmerei” (SVIII 1:2)
of the Good in Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference, when focusing on the role of
Socrates in Platonism.
19. Richardson, “Psychoanalysis and the God Question,” 72–3.
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: Lacan’s Missed Encounters,” in Lacan and Science, ed.
J. Glynos and Y. Stavrakakis (London: Karnac, 2002), 180.
22. Corfield adds that Koyré was shown “wrong” to deny Galileo performed
incline plane experiments; that there is “clear evidence of continuity” with Aristote-
lians 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 Math-
ematics 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: Vol-
ume 2, 376–7. See also Michael J. White, “Plato and Mathematics,” in A Companion
to Plato, ed. Benson, 228–43.
24. See GS 112, BGE 4. Nadeem Hussain disputes that Nietzsche drops his fal-
sification 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 (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2004), 112–14.
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
aesthetic experience as “the free-play of imagination and understanding,” and also

Lacan’s imaginary–symbolic 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, “Lacan’s Science of the Subject: between Linguistics and
Topology,” in Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. J-M. Rabaté (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Press, 2003), 58.
29. Shepherdson’s 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, 121–40.
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, “Freud’s Influence on the Changed Attitude toward Sex,”
The American Journal of Sociology 45 (1939): 309–17.
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, “Nietzsche’s Stoicism: the Depths are Inside,” in Nietzsche and
Antiquity, ed. Bishop, 194.
36. Jonathan Lear suggests the impersonal passivity of Aristotle’s remark, the “it
has been well said,” could be of a wish to conceal the origins of this Good in Plato’s
murdered-Father function in Socrates. Lacan returns to this passage of Aristotle’s 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), 7–8, 10–11, 101–4.
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:8–9, VII v:1–6, 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
“failed historically” and instead we have “witnessed a growth in the incidence of

genuine pathologies” (SVII: 3–4).
42. Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche, 8. Freud, “On the History of the Psychoana-
lytic Movement,” 1914 (SE14:15–16).
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 representa-
tives 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,
63–4, 83.
46. See Freud, “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” 1925 (SE19:220–1).
47. Richard Boothby notes “it is the function of the Oedipus complex to stabi-
lize 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 Lacan’s 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 École
Freudienne (New York: Norton, 1985), 1–26.
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
(SE19:211–24).
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), 8–10.
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.
52. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, 1930 (SE21:135). Lacan often refer-
ences 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. Zupančič also calls “this tendency that identifies the Real with some unspeak-
able authenticity or Truth the nihilistic tendency par excellence.” Zupančič, 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): 103–4.
3. Lacan is quoting here from Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction,”1914
(SE14:94).
4. Grigg notes that Lacan’s distinction between a positive ego ideal (of the
symbolic register) and a repressive superego (in the imaginary) is an attempt to con-
solidate what is unresolved in Freud apropos of the father’s function. Grigg, Lacan,
Language, and Philosophy, 32–6.
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 Freud’s 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 Freud’s tripartite model of ego, superego and id. Freud notes that
the term “id [Es]” came to him via Georg Groddeck who got it from Nietzsche’s 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 Lacan’s 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 sup-
port. Schafer, “In the Wake of Heinz Hartmann,” Int. Journal of Psychoanalysis 76
(1995): 224–35. Smith, “Ego Psychology and the Language of Lacan,” Psychoanalysis
and Contemporary Thought 14 (1991): 143–82.
9. Zupančič 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 “vampir-
ism” that both commands and feeds on the renouncement of drives in the “religious”
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 inward—this is what I call the internalisa-
tion 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 Freud’s 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:21–4 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 (SE7:125–245).
17. Hacker, “Sublimation Revisited,” 218.
18. De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, 168–9
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 signifier’s 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’
(dérives)” (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 Écrits, trans. B.
Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 680. See Freud, SE14:111–12, for James Strachey’s
noting of this difficulty in his Standard Edition.
22. De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, 174.
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).
24. De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, 172–4.
25. George Frank notes, “the word ‘sublimation’ comes from the Latin ‘subli-
mare,’ ” which already means “ ‘to raise’ or ‘to elevate.’ ” With his formula for subli-
mation being “it raises an object . . . to the dignity of the Thing,” Lacan was likely
using this etymology, but also the homophony between “dignité [dignity]” and “Ding
[Thing],” adding “and I don’t 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.
27. Zupančič, 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 Freud’s
“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, “Sublima-
tion Revisited,” 220.
30. Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction
between the Sexes,” 1925 (SE19:241–58).
31. This is an early sign of Lacan’s 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 Dic-
tionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 125.
32. Further formulations of this key distinction are in WP 48, 59, 845–6, 1009;
TI IX:8–9; 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 Nietzsche’s key
examples of romantic pessimism, noting of Schopenhauer that “as soon as the thing-
in-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 univer-
salize “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), 148–51.
34. The final chapter of part 1 of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, entitled
“Of the Bestowing Virtue,” contains a poetic 1883 formulation of the weak–strong
distinction.
35. In the same “Bestowing Virtue” chapter Nietzsche writes, “we always sus-
pect 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
flown away virtue back to earth—yes, 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 Plato’s works them-
selves.” 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. Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow, 77–8.
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 379–80 [ὦ δύστηνος καὶ δυστήνου πατρὸς
Οἰδιπόδα].
3. Bonnie Honig notes Judith Butler to make this point about Antigone’s
“brother” also being her Father most directly, and seconds Butler’s suggestion that
Lacan is unaware of this connotation. In what follows, I suggest this connotation is
central and still visible in Lacan’s defter touches. Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Cre-
on’s Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception,” Political Theory
37 (2009): 8. Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000), 60–1.
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 Κρείων in Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-
English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 993.
6. Lacan notes the term ἁμαρτία “in others of Sophocles’ tragedies,” and
ἁμαρτήματα “in Creon’s own speeches” as he “succumbs to the blows of fate”
(SVII:258). See Antigone, line 1261 [ἰὼ φρενῶν δυσφρόνων ἁμαρτήματα] “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.
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 [ἄμοιρον, ἀκτέριστον, ἀνόσιον]. 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 [τὸν θανόντ᾽ ἐπικτανεῖν]. 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 anything—except take vengeance on the
man who did away with his father and took that father’s 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 114b–d; and Republic, Book X, lines 614a, 619e, 621d.
Rohde notes that the promise of a blessed afterlife was part of the pan-Hellenic Ele-
usinian 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, 219–23, 228–9. 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 Aristo-
tle’s 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 Xeno-
phanes 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 man’s house instead of talking
to its owner.” Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 180–2.
12. Lacan’s linking of Kant to Antigone’s opponent Creon can be used to qualify
the linking of Kant to Antigone in Collits and Grigg. Terry Collits, “Lacan’s Antigone:
an Ethics for the Tragedy of our Time?” in Agamemnon’s Mask: Greek Tragedy and
Beyond, ed. Collits and A. Sharma (Macmillan: Delhi, 2007), 117. Grigg, Lacan, Lan-
guage, and Philosophy, 130.
13. Nietzsche notes “denaturalization” to emerge in religions such as “Juda-
ism” 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 Socratic–Platonic and Judeo-Christian origins of
Western denaturalizing, respectively.
14. The first instance is in lines 278–314 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
is also critical of the “joy as an objection” asceticism of Kant’s Good, calling it harm-
ful, retrograde Christianity, along with his way of assuming the same duty for all and
insisting on reason’s limits only such that Christian moral entities can be rendered
“no longer refutable” beyond them (AC 10–12, 55).
16. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 1094–5 [μή πώ ποτ᾽ αὐτὸν ψεῦδος ἐς πόλιν
λακεῖν].
17. Ibid., lines 658–9 [Δία ξύναιμον].
18. Ibid., lines 800–1 [ἄμαχος γὰρ ἐμπαίζει θεὸς, Ἀφροδίτα].
19. Haemon is the transliteration of Αἵμων meaning “eager,” “skilful,” but also
blood or “bloody [αἷμα],” again connoting the “kindred blood” and perhaps Zeus
[Δία] as the protector of [Δία ξύναιμον]. See entry αἵμων in Liddell and Scott, A
Greek-English Lexicon, 39.
20. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 675–6 [σῴζει τὰ πολλὰ σώμαθ᾽ ἡ πειθαρχία].
21. Ibid., line 667 [καὶ δίκαια καὶ τἀναντία].
22. Shepherdson, Lacan and the Limits of Language, 66–7.
23. Sophocles, Antigone, line 1052 [ταύτης σὺ μέντοι τῆς νόσου πλήρης ἔφυς].
I have used Watling’s 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 unbur-
ied. 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.
26. Sophocles, Antigone, line 450 [οὐ γάρ τί μοι Ζεὺς ἦν ὁ κηρύξας τάδε].
27. Roberto Calasso notes that Mallarmé mistranslated in a book on myth
by a Reverend Cox to say, “If the gods do naught unseemly, then they are no lon-
ger gods at all.” He was meant to say “aught.” Calasso thinks this may have been a
Lautréamont 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. Mallarmé, 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 Antigone’s first exchange with Creon
as evidence (lines 458–60 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 [καὶ παῖς ἀπ᾽ ἄλλου φωτός]. Goethe bids
that Antigone’s stated motive here “is quite unworthy”; adding, “I would give a great
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 Écrits, 658.
32. Žižek complains even today “Antigone is as a rule ‘domesticated.’ ” But Grigg
adds that the riposte formed by Žižek’s comparisons of Antigone with those “typically
dubbed ‘terrorist’ ” is “pushed too far.” Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in
Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 76–7. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and
Philosophy, 124.
33. Lacan’s nuance here is close to Honig’s response to Žižek that “Antigone
can be protective without necessarily being ‘gentle.’ ” On the other hand, Stavrakakis
joins Grigg in suspecting Žižek still to idealize Antigone’s desire in terms of the
“ethico-political.” Honig, “Ismene’s Forced Choice: Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles’
Antigone,” Arethusa 44 (2011): 32. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 118–19. Grigg,
Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 130.
34. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 86, 93–4. The 1891 Jebb translation takes this
option, “hate,” as does Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s in 1994. See Sophocles, “Antigone,” in
Sophocles II, trans. Lloyd-Jones, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
35. Sophocles, Antigone, line 32 [λέγω γὰρ κἀμέ].
36. Ibid., line 31 [τὸν ἀγαθὸν Κρέοντα]. The common term for “good” here
is also used by Plato later in the Story of the Cave for his “idea of the Good [ἡ τοῦ
ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα]”; Republic, Book VII, line 517c. Earlier use in Homer refers to service-
ability, while Herodotus, a companion of Sophocles, uses it to refer to the goods of
wealth, suggesting an etymological current to Lacan’s desire to “demystify” the Good
back to “the level of the economy of goods” (SVII:216). See entry ἀγαθός in Liddell
and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 4.
37. See Sophocles, Antigone, line 471 [τὸ γέννημ᾽ ὠμὸν].
38. Ibid., line 77 [τὰ τῶν θεῶν ἔντιμ᾽ ἀτιμάσασ᾽ ἔχε].
39. Lacan is surprised that “dialecticians” or “aestheticians as eminent as Hegel
and Goethe” miss the beauty–death relation “in their evaluation of the effect of the
play” (SVII:248). What follows suggests Honig’s view of Lacan’s Antigone as “expres-
sion of pure monstrous desire” misses the kind of splendor with which Lacan holds
her; and that Stavrakakis’s 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 Apollo–Dionysos in Nietzsche. Honig,
“Antigone’s 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 781–800 [Ἔρως . . . ἐν μαλακαῖς παρειαῖς
νεάνιδος . . . Ἀφροδίτα].
41. See Homer, The Odyssey, Book XI, lines 480–90.
42. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 819–21 [οὔτε φθινάσιν πληγεῖσα νόσοις οὔτε
ξιφέων ἐπίχειρα λαχοῦσ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ αὐτόνομος].
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 Honig’s claim that Lacan’s focus on Antigone’s “monstrous desire” “ignores her
meaning making efforts” in the dirge. Honig, “Antigone’s Two Laws,” 17. Sophocles,
Antigone, lines 817–38.
44. Homer, The Odyssey, Book XI, line 490.
45. Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, lines 1250–1.
46. Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. B. Haxton (New York: Viking, 2001), no. 122. The
opposing view is in Plato’s 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 Nietzsche’s 1872 BT 3, a point taken up
in the 1890s by Rohde at the start of Psyche. Rohde and Nietzsche had become profes-
sors 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
Nietzsche’s 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. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), xxv. For Nietzsche’s 1888 praise of Burckhardt, see TI X:4.
47. “Antigone [Ἀντιγόνη]” is compounded of two words, meaning “over against
[ἀντί],” and “offspring, family [γονή]” which is homophonic with “knee [γόνυ]” espe-
cially 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 meta-
phor also in Herodotus. See respective entries ἀντί, γονή, γόνυ, in Liddell and Scott,
A Greek-English Lexicon, 153, 356, 357.
48. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 813–16; Watling’s Penguin translation is quite
capturing here.
49. Sophocles, Antigone, line 781 [Love, unbeatable at battle]. Lacan’s seminar
contains the translation “Invincible love of combat” (SVII:267–8), but this weakens
the status of “Love” as the subject. Collits complains that the only English transla-
tion of Seminar VII we have often has the Greek quotations “garbled,” which is partly
why I often refer to the Greek. Collits, “Lacan’s Antigone,” in Agamemnon’s Mask, ed.
Collits and Sharma, 112.
50. Sophocles, Antigone, lines 795–6 [νικᾷ δ᾽ ἐναργὴς βλεφάρων ἵμερος
εὐλέκτρου νύμφας]; “Victory to the desire shining forth from the eyes of the sweet-
bedded bride.”
51. See entry ἄτη in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 270.
52. Sophocles, Antigone, line 856 [πατρῷον δ᾽ ἐκτίνεις τιν᾽ ἆθλον]; ἆθλον more
literally refers to a “prize” won at contest; in Oedipus’s case this was something that
indeed became a crime.
53. Sophocles, Antigone, line 858 [ἔψαυσας ἀλγεινοτάτας ἐμοὶ μερίμνας].
54. Ibid., lines 583–92.
55. Žižek depicts when Antigone “risks her entire social existence, defying the
socio-symbolic power of the City embodied in Creon,” as a “passage through ‘symbolic
death’ ” which is “the ethical act proper,” where “rearticulation of the predominant
symbolic” is possible—arguing against Butler’s claim that in Lacan all resistance merely
“contributes to” and “presumes the continuation of the law.” Grigg agrees that rearticu-
lating 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. Žižek’s response to Stavrakakis is that Antigone insists on perform-
ing burial, “a precise symbolic gesture,” so the symbolic is still at stake for her. Žižek,
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999),
262–4. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997),
88. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 125–30. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left,
115, 118–9. Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 305.
56. For how crimes of ancestors transfer, see Hegel, Hegel’s 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 Father’s Law as Grigg
attempts (“like Luther,” he says), and as Stavrakakis seconds right after wedding Anti-
gone’s desire to the laws of the presumably Hellenic gods and goddesses. I tackle the
Christocentric in Freud’s Oedipus in chapter 5. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philoso-
phy, 125–9. Stavrakakis, Lacanian Left, 118.
58. Bataille, Eroticism, 53.
59. Zupančič sketches out a later shift from an ethics of desire to one of “the
drive” between Lacan’s 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.” Zupančič,
Ethics of the Real, 3–4, 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 Antigone’s 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 1449b20–30.
62. Aristotle writes: “the term purgation [κάθαρσιν] 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
1341b37–9, 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,
Aristotle’s Poetics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), appendix 5.
64. Ἐνθουσιαστικοί comes from ἐνθουσία meaning “to be inspired or possessed

by a god, to be in ecstasy,” while παθητικοί has the negative connotations of feeling
“pathetic,” “emotional.” See respective entries in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English
Lexicon, 566–7, 1285.
65. For fear [φόβος] and pity [ἔλεος], see Poetics, lines 1449b28, 1452a2,
1452b32, 1453b1.
66. More on the ecstatic catharsis and Dionysos worship is in Rhode, Psyche: Vol
2, 286–7, with details on the Phrygian mode of music that went with it: the mode Aris-
totle also points to belonging to “poetry [ποίησις],” “Bacchic frenzy [βακχεία],” “dithy-
ramb [διθύραμβος],” and the “exciting and emotional [ὀργιαστικὰ καὶ παθητικά]” in
his Politics, lines 1342b1–7.
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, 492–3.
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 evi-
dent 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 [οὐ τῶν αἰσθητῶν]. 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 987b1–7. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 185.
70. Plato’s most famous disvaluing of tragedy comes in Republic, Book X.
71. Aristotle also saw the origins of tragedy in dithyrambic music; Poetics, lines
1449a10–12.
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 Good’s 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 (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
75. Nietzsche has Schopenhauer’s pessimism in mind, whom he rebukes for
adopting Kant’s notion of aesthetic “pleasure without interest” due to the “naïveté” 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,
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 [διττός] of spectator:
the one free and educated [ἐλεύθερος καὶ πεπαιδευμένος], the other coarser from the
laboring and artisan class [φορτικὸς ἐκ βαναύσων καὶ θητῶν], 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. Pos-
sibly 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 1342a17–21.
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
Plato’s 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, Meta-
physics, 985a8–10, 987a29, 982b7–11, 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, 239–40.
79. Bataille traces the discovery of this correlation of “organised transgression
together with the taboo” to the “oral teaching” of Marcel Mauss, noting Roger Cail-
lois 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. Žižek concurs that “Antigone’s 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 Žižek is in his eliminative claim that Antigone thereby “does not stand for
some extra-symbolic real, but for the pure signifier—her purity is that of a signifier.”
Antigone’s desire does not for mine refer to anything “pure” in the ascetic sense of
puritan morality, but to something akin to erotic enjoyment. Antigone’s brother-father
after all means incest, the ultimate sexual transgression and metaphor for Lacan of
the relation “truth maintains with the real.” Žižek, “What some would call: A response
to Yannis Stavrakakis,” Umbr(a) (2003): 133; In Defence of Lost Causes, 305. Lacan,
“L’Étourdit,” trans. C. Gallagher, THE LETTER 41 (2009): 44.
82. Leiter is sceptical of inflationary readings of Nietzsche’s will to power, which
hold it to be the essence of all reality, inclusive even of inorganic beings; Nietzsche
on Morality, 138–44.
83. Holt discusses the transgression of tragic festivals on stage and in the crowd.
Colin MacCabe notes the taboo–transgression correlation in Bataille is akin to Lacan’s
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 sub-
missive,” as Stavrakakis suggests, but that transgression releases, at times explosively,
desire dammed up by law which forbids it, thus completing law’s moment. This is a
key link between Bataille’s 1957 Eroticism and Lacan’s Ethics. Holt, “Polis and Tragedy
in the Antigone,” 658–90. MacCabe, “Introduction to the Penguin Edition (2000),” in
Bataille, Eroticism, ix, 65. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 146. For more Bataille–Lacan
links see Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Bataille (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 79–92;
Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 31–4; and “Shattering
the Subject: Georges Bataille and the Limits of Therapy,” European Journal of Psycho-
therapy, 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 Lacan’s 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 1155–71; 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 Aristotle’s fear and pity, in the
1872 Birth of Tragedy (BT 17, 22), indicating a longest held conviction. Boothby
might say Nietzsche’s 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 realisa-
tion of a fuller vitality”—despite any concomitant “images of castration” and “bodily
dismemberment.” Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, 144, 150–1. 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. I–III, Paris, 1578).
2. When citing Lacan’s use of the Greek, I leave it as given in the Gallagher
translation of his Transference Seminar, transliterated into the Latin alphabet.
3. References to denaturalizing, including in the Platonic context, occur in

the notes collected in Will to Power sections 37, 203, 292, 298–9, 430. References
in published work are in sections 24–6 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 “Nietzsche’s naturalism.” See Leiter, “Nietzsche’s
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 Leiter’s 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): 692–3.
6. John Brenkman also points to this binary tendency, and argues that Lacan
returns Plato’s Symposium to a more balanced materialist standpoint. Brenkman, “The
Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, the Symposium,” Yale French Studies
55/56 (1977): 396–456.
7. The verb Παύω, “I stop,” in its future tense, for instance, becomes sigmatic,
παύσω, “I will stop,” and is in such compounds as παυσ-άνεμος, “stilling the wind,”
and παυσ-ανίας [paus-anias], “allayer of sorrow.” See entries in Liddell and Scott, A
Greek-English Lexicon, 1350.
8. David Pereira notes décadence to derive “from the Latin root decadere—to
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 sup-
port “Nietzsche’s 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 Aristotle’s more materialist version of the Good, what he calls
the “Aristotelian conversion with respect to Plato” at the beginning of this Transfer-
ence Seminar (SVIII 1:3).
10. Lacan reads a genital allusion in Agathon’s 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. Erōtōmenos is a passive form of the verb eromai [ἔρομαι] or erōtaō [ἐρωτάω],
“I ask, inquire,” becoming thus a “to be asked,” or, as Lacan puts it, “the one inter-
rogated.” See entry ἐρέω 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
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 Nietzsche’s major aesthetic distinction in chapter 2 (section 2.3).
14. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff condemned Nietzsche’s Birth of Trag-
edy 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): 214–54. James Whit-
man, “Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition of German Classical Philology,” Journal
of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 453–68.
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 Nietzsche’s praise of his realism as a
cure for Plato’s idealism. Nietzsche, TI X:2, WP 428–9, 443. Thucydides, History of
the Peloponnesian War, II: 47–54, V: 103.
16. This is close to Nietzsche’s 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 cor-
relative of, and supplement for science” (BT 14).
18. See Plato, Theaetetus, 150b–151d.
19. For more on how Socrates and Plato sought to adopt and alter the prevail-
ing 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
and the Irrational, 207–35.
20. As Jean-Michel Rabaté notes, Socrates’ turn to such fantasy broaches Lacan’s
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 cer-
tainly not eternally. Rabaté, 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 “Repres-
sion,” 1915 (SE14:149).
23. For Rabaté 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 read-
ers would have known that Aristophanes’ derision of Socrates in The Clouds was
“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 Lacan’s 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” [τῆς πόσεως]. And the new game does not mean each has to
praise the one on his right, only “prescribe” [ἐπιτάξαι] there what he pleases. Compare
SVIII 10:1, 11:1–2, and Symposium 214c–d.
25. Lacan’s 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. Lamb’s transla-
tion is, “I shall speak the truth; now, will you permit me?” [τἀληθῆ ἐρῶ. ἀλλ᾽ ὅρα εἰ
παρίης]. Compare, SVIII 11:3 and Symposium 214e.
26. Lacan stresses the “stature” of the historical Alcibiades as a political “pre-
Alexander,” with star qualities akin to a modern day “Kennedy” or “James Dean,”
referring to Plutarch’s 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
2:3–5). 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): 349–85.
29. Lacan’s 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 Xenophon’s Memorabilia as his source in
PPP 17:150.
31. Rohde holds that the real Socrates is more that of Plato’s Apology, who
agnostically meets death “with little anticipation of an immortal life of the soul”; in
Psyche: Vol 2, 463–4.
32. Rabaté 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
Klein’s ‘part object’ ” and “turns into Lacan’s own concept of the object petit a.” Rabaté,
Jacques Lacan, 145.
33. See Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” in
Écrits, 699.
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 Plato’s distortion of religion an attempt to conserve fifth-
century 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
and the Irrational, 209.
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 displace-
ment of those same norms.” Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, VI: 15.
Wohl, “Eros of Alcibiades,” 354–5.
38. Lacan suggests similarly that “Alcibiades is the man of desire” who “dis-
plays” what can be viewed as “a very remarkable case of the absence of castration
fear” (SVIII 11:8).
39. Benjamin Biebuyck finds in Nietzsche’s notes a link from this “depreciation
of the senses” to Pythagoras and Orphism; see “Cults and Migrations: Nietzsche’s
Meditations on Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and the Greek Mysteries,” in Nietzsche and
Antiquity, ed. Bishop, 156–7.
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 “sup-
ports” implementing “ever more penetrating and wide-reaching control.” Wohl, “The
Eros of Alcibiades,” 353–4.
41. Compare the concluding paragraphs of Phaedo and “The Problem of
Socrates” chapter in TI. Asclepius was god of medicine, whose sanctuary was at Epi-
daurus 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 Nietzsche’s ‘Problem of Socrates,’ ” in Nietzsche and Antiquity, ed. Bishop,
260–75.
Chapter 5
1. Capitalizing “Father,” “Law,” etc., again suggests an inflationary notion of

their function.
2. Yerushalmi considers an unpublished draft of Moses and Monotheism and

Freud’s letters at the time; Eliza Slavet the social context of his “interest in the inheri-
tance of phylogenetic memory.” Yerushalmi, “Freud on the ‘Historical Novel’: From
the Manuscript Draft (1934),” International Journal Psycho-Analysis 70 (1989): 375.
Slavet, “Freud’s ‘Lamarckism’ and the Politics of Racial Science,” Journal of the History
of Biology 41 (2008): 37–80.
3. Slavet notes that although the Lamarckism in Freud’s 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, “Freud’s ‘Lamarckism’ and the
Politics of Racial Science,” 64, 66.
4. See the “Morality as Anti-Nature” chapter V in Nietzsche’s TI, and AC
24–7 (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 Juda-
ism, Freud nevertheless refuses to be separated from the Jewish people. Freud was a
godless Jew.” Friedman, “Freud’s Religion: Oedipus and Moses,” Religious Studies 34
(1998): 143.
6. The other example came from Goethe’s “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 2:6–7),
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 command-
ments 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:79–80).
8. Shepherdson also considers the attempt by Carl Degler to establish a natu-
ral, 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, 179–80. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline
and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 264–6.
9. Further exploration of Freud’s 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 Der-
rida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996);
and Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New York: Vail-
Ballou Press, 1991).
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 Culpa—happy 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, 89–90. Boothby, Freud as
Philosopher, 177, 187.
11. Verhaeghe also takes Lacan to sense this in Freud’s 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: Lacan’s Revision of
the Oedipus Complex,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflec-
tions on Seminar XVII, ed. J. Clemens and R. Grigg (London: Duke University Press,
2006), 40, 48. Lacan, SXVII:122–30 and SVII:308–9.
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 mislead-
ing 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 fathers—without casting doubt
on his Oedipus complex that presupposes powerful, castrating fathers. Verhaeghe,
“Enjoyment and Impossibility,” 39–40.
15. Freud’s main references to Sellin come in SE23:36–7, 51–2. Further exegesis
is in Robert A. Paul, “Freud, Sellin and the Death of Moses,” Int. J. Psycho-Analysis
75 (1994): 825–37.
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 ene-
mies.” Julian Young also provides much evidence of Nietzsche’s consistent “anti-anti-
Semitism.” 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, “Nietzsche’s Antichrist:
19th-Century Christian Jews and the Real Big Lie,” Modern Judaism 17.2 (1997):
164. Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 237, 358–9, 391–2, 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 Finkelstein’s chapter “King
Solomon’s Golden Age: History or Myth,” in The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debat-
ing Archaeology and the History of Early Israel, ed. B. B. Schmidt (Atlanta: Society of
Biblical Literature, 2007), 107–17.
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 him—that 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 sen-
suality 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 regres-
sion” 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. Sin-
hababu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 110–55. Deleuze praises Nietzsche’s
affirmation of earthly nature as distinct from the negations of ressentiment in Nietzsche
and Philosophy, 111–47.
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), 105–25.
25. Paul Bishop calls this “one of the clearest statements of Nietzsche’s assertions
of classical ideals,” noting it to include “ ‘the joyous, benevolent, Goethean attitude
toward sensuality’ ” in the ideal of philology (WP 118), “the art of good reading,” all
of which the Christian lacks. Bishop, “Nietzsche’s Anti-Christianity as a Return to
(German) Classicism,” in Nietzsche and Antiquity, ed. Bishop, 448–52.
26. For Nietzsche’s praise of the Renaissance for seeking to retrieve the flourish-
ing 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 Ons’s phrase, it is “both surprising and symptomatic”
that Lacan does not reference Nietzsche here, given the sustained analysis of bad con-
science as internalized aggression in Nietzsche’s GM II and III. Zupančič also links the
ascetic ideal in Nietzsche, the super-ego in Freud, and “Lacan’s 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. Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow, 50.
28. For Andrew Ryder, “Lacan’s increasing systematization at the hands of Žižek
and others” is a “return to the ethics of a committed subject” but “at the price of other
aspects of Lacan’s thought more intimately linked to Bataille’s experiences,” those that
allow for “the possibility of an encounter with alterity.” Bataille, Eroticism, 9, 126–7.
Ryder, “Inner Experience is Not Psychosis: Bataille’s Ethics and Lacanian Subjectivity,”
Parrhesia 9 (2010): 95.
29. Roudinesco suggests Lacan’s 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 Freud’s arguments against religion”
in his dialogues with him. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 205. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-
Oedipus: 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 consoli-
date its “Age of Reason” but went into a “slow intellectual decline” and succumbed to
“the Return of the Irrational”—adding that “similar predictions made by nineteenth-
century rationalists” about a “perfect Age of Reason” also “look like proving wrong”;
in Greeks and the Irrational, 243–4.
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
Nietzsche’s Thinking,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 39 (2010): 25; and “Nietzsche’s
View of the Value of Historical Studies and Methods,” 320–1.
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 persecu-
tion . . . 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, 364–6.
2. Grigg, “Beyond the Oedipus Complex,” 51–2.
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 “Freud’s 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. Arrow-
smith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959).
6. Lacan cites those whose “childhood was retroactively lived out in our famil-
ial 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). Freud’s centralizing of Oedipus is visible in his return to
Little Hans in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 1926 (SE20:77–172). The certainty
seems striking considering the problems noted by Joseph Wolpe and Stanley Rachman
in “Psychoanalytic Evidence: A Critique based on Freud’s Case of Little Hans,” The
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 130 (1960), 135–48. Wilhelm Reich examines
some variants in the matriarchal societies of the Trobriand Islands in Sex-Pol: Essays
1929–1934, ed. L. Baxandall (New York: Vintage, 1972), 89–249.
7. SXVII:15, 18, 46, 48, 50. Zupančič 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 don’t ever transgress. Sneaking
around is not transgressing. Seeing a door half-open is not the same as going through
it” (SXVII:19). Zupančič, “When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value,” in Jacques
Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Clemens and Grigg, 155–8. Miller,
“Paradigms of Jouissance,” Lacanian Ink 17 (2000): 10–47.
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), 69–83.
9. Oliver Feltham notes this “operational quarter turn” that links the master’s
to the university’s discourse to have an historical basis that might be seen as an
“historical novel”; he also refers to Lacan’s “Radiophonie” to suggest “both ‘progres-
sive’ 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, 183–4. Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres Écrits (Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 2001), 403–47.
10. Koyré 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.” Koyré, “The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis,” in Newtonian Studies
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), 23–4.
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 inher-
ited from earlier epochs, which “acted on behalf of science” by having “removed
the object of the taboo from our consciousness by forbidding it”—“the disturbing
object”—achieving thus the “calm ordering of ideas” required for “the world of action
and of objectivity.” Bataille, Eroticism, 37–8.
12. Monique David-Menard notes that it is “by plunging into the gaps of silence
in the analyst’s 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, 50–1; and
Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 15.
14. Lacan reaffirms this seven years later: “Psychoanalysis is not a science. It has
no scientific status—it merely waits and hopes for it. Psychoanalysis is a delusion—a
delusion that is expected to produce a science. . . . It is a scientific delusion, but this
doesn’t 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.” Zupančič sees two places where they broach truth
similarly: the equation of truth with women because it is “not-whole,” “impossible
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 Écrits, 625. Ons, “Nietzsche,
Freud, Lacan,” 80. Zupančič, 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 hysteric’s discourse,
insofar as the master is not sought in the analyst, what is produced is the university’s
discourse—a dominant S2—with only a partial knowledge of the jouissance object a
behind it. Feltham, “Enjoy Your Stay,” 186–7.
18. David-Menard notes how “in analysis, the analysand seeks to ‘seduce’ the
analyst” by trying to “define the analyst’s desire as it is revealed” in their “elusive dis-
course” which, all else being equal, tends to be “the subject’s 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. That’s always what jouis-
sance is” (SXVII:72).
20. Feltham calls this “production via inversion,” where the master’s discourse
produces a, which the analyst’s 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, vocif-
erate 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 Nietzsche’s 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 meta-
physics, a knowledge of things by pure reason!’ ” (WP 530) Nietzsche aims “to replace
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 Russell’s
oeuvre begins with the inflationary view of mathematics and reason, only to finish
with a position like Nietzsche’s: that “the world of ideas” can be ridiculed as stem-
ming 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 Plato’s
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), 211–12.
25. A key early attempt at discussion of this central passage is in the “Nietzsche’s
Overturning of Platonism” chapter in Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two,
I: 200–10.
26. In the final chapter of Twilight of the Idols entitled “What I Owe to the
Ancients,” Plato’s “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 major-
ity,” whereas after BGE “almost all of his comments became negative and hostile once
more.” Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Wrestling with Plato and Platonism,” in Nietzsche and
Antiquity, ed. Bishop, 246.
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 Spinoza’s mathematical-
formalizations in ethics, calling it the “hocus-pocus” and defense mechanism of a
“sick hermit.”
30. Brobjer documents Nietzsche’s reading of Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius,
Emil Du Bois-Reymond and Friedrich Lange. Hussain suggests similarities between
Nietzsche and Mach’s 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, “Nietzsche’s Reading and Knowledge
of Natural Science: An Overview”; and Hussain, “Reading Nietzsche through Ernst
Mach,” in Nietzsche and Science, ed. Moore and Brobjer, 40–4, 112–26. 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 com-
munication” (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 “necessi-
ties,” 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
sciences as fictional in the sense of being merely apparent. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth
and Philosophy, 109–17.
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 “Übermenschen, who will go
beyond the scientific activity of the free spirit” to perform the “task of creating new
values.” Franco, “Nietzsche’s 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 “bet-
ter 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, “Nietzsche’s
Reading and Knowledge of Natural Science,” 44, 46.
34. Nietzsche traces science’s origins back further to the Ionian coast origins
of philosophy in Thales—who flourished in 585 BC—for 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 Lacan’s views on science later differ,
Grigg’s focus is on the 1965–1966 paper “Science and Truth.” In this paper the split-
ting of knowledge and truth caused by modern science, “the subject’s division between
truth and knowledge” discussed in the 1969–1970 Seminar XVII and section 6.1, is
also earmarked. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 136–8. Lacan, “Science and
Truth,” in Écrits, 726–7, 733, 737–8, 742–3.
36. Nietzsche uses the sun “rising” as an example of where ordinary perception
falls short (TI III:5). He also remarks on “Locke’s superficiality regarding the origin
of ideas” and notes that thinking also bears an “unconscious domination” by “gram-
matical 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 electromag-
netic 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, “Nietzsche’s Reading
and Knowledge of Natural Science,” 35. Franco, “Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human
and the Problem of Culture,” 234, 242. Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s View of the Value of
Historical Studies and Methods,” 301–2.
39. Nietzsche at one point states, “I do not believe in ‘matter’ and hold Bosco-
vich 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 mathematisa-
tion of the empirical world” or “universe that reduces and eliminates the imaginary
from science and knowledge.” Miller, “Elements of Epistemology,” trans. Grigg, Analy-
sis 1 (1989): 29. Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, 140–1.
41. Fink, “Knowledge and Science: Fantasies of the Whole,” in Lacan and Sci-
ence, 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 Écrits, 742.
44. Verhaeghe, “Causality in Science and Psychoanalysis,” in Lacan and Science,
ed. Glynos and Stavrakakis, 126–7.
45. Leupin notes that Lacan’s 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 Kojève. See Leupin, Lacan
Today, 111–12; and Kojève, “L’Origine Chrétienne de la Science Moderne,” in Mélanges
Koyré (Paris: Hermann, 1964).
46. Corfield, “From Mathematics to Psychology, 180. See also Maarten Van
Dyck, “The Paradox of Conceptual Novelty and Galileo’s Use of Experiments,” Philoso-
phy of Science 72 (2005): 864–75; Alexander J. Hahn, “The Pendulum Swings Again: A
Mathematical Reassessment of Galileo’s Experiments with Inclined Planes,” Archive for
History of Exact Sciences 56 (2002): 339–61; Stillman Drake, Galileo: Pioneer Scientist
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 3–6; and Koyré, Galileo Studies, trans.
John Mepham (Hassocks: Harvester Press [1939] 1978).
47. Corfield concludes that “trading zones” with neuroscience and other empiri-
cal psychologies can also be of value. Corfield, “From Mathematics to Psychology,” 202.
48. Koyré, “The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis,” in Newtonian Stud-
ies, 11–13.
Conclusion
1. The final “Nietzsche’s Madness” chapter of Young’s 2010 work may be a

place to start this further exploration. After surveying various positions, Young sug-
gests 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 Nietzsche’s 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 Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII, Le Sinthome, 1975–1976
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005). Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 562. Sax, “What was the
cause of Nietzsche’s dementia?” Journal of Medical Biography 11 (2003): 47, 50.
2. Rabaté quotes Lacan in Seminar XXIII stating that the knot “keeps trace of
something next to which the imagination fails [défaille].” Rabaté, Jacques Lacan, 157.
Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 359.
3. Lacan, “The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts
in 1956,” in Écrits, 390.
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Index
abundance, 3, 23, 36–37, 130. See also anthropology, 88, 153, 163
creativity: strong Antigone, 3–4, 10, 39–42, 45–55, 57–
Achilles, 50–51, 67, 84, 149 63, 84, 130, 145–50, 152, 153,
acting out, 30, 116 158; Atè (ἄτη) of, 51–52, 54, 59–60,
aesthetics, 17, 33, 53, 140, 148, 151; 149
distinction of Nietzsche’s, 3, 23, anti-nature. See under nature
36, 72, 76, 130, 144, 155. See also anti-Semitism. See under Judaism
creativity: weak; strong anxiety, 14, 162–63
affirmation: of desire, 59, 62; of Aphrodite, 45, 50, 67, 74, 96, 149
difference, 134; Dionysian, 153; of Apollo, 77, 148
distance, 133; of earth, 36–38; of appearance, 12, 36–37
life, 51, 149; of nature, 104, 160; Arcesilaus, 9
of natural science, 117, 123, 139; Archimedes, 124
phantom, 158; of the real, 84; self, Aristophanes, 68–69, 73, 155
98; small, 58; of the Thing, 23; of Aristotle, 1–4, 7, 11, 13, 15–18, 21, 41,
toughest truths, 131 43–45, 48, 54–58, 62, 125, 129, 131,
afterlife. See under life 139–40, 146, 150–154, 165; works of:
agalma, 76–78, 80–81, 156. See also Metaphysics, 151–52; Nicomachean
object: object a Ethics, 15–16, 140; Poetics, 55,
Agathon, 70–74, 76, 80–81, 154 150–51; Politics, 55–57, 150–52;
aggression: Creon’s, 46; desublimated, Rhetoric, 48
29; hysterical, 110; internalised, 1, art: and aesthetic distinction, 36–38;
27, 103, 143, 161; jouissance of, 96, of Alcibiades, 83; devaluing of, 11,
142; natural, 102; potential for 25; 23, 38–39, 139, 145; Dionysian, 62;
sublimated, 24; taboos of, 97 and Freud, 144; Greco-Roman, 104;
Alcibiades, 4, 65–66, 68, 73, 76–83, 131, Hellenistic, 151; of holy lying, 102;
156–58 imaginary of, 13; and nature, 156;
Alexander the Great, 56, 156 and philosophy, 120–22; of reading
anal, 18, 29, 35, 81, 126, 156 well, 101, 161; and the real, 38–40;
analysand. See under psychoanalysis and science, 155, 166; of selling, 163;
animal, 12, 14, 16, 48, 58, 75, 82, 89, 91, Socratic, 79; and sublimation, 23,
131, 140, 153, 158; mammal, 75, 118 27–28, 33–34, 130; tragic, 3, 5, 39–42,
181
182 / INDEX
art (continued) dialectic and, 157; the imaginary and,

55–57, 59, 63, 133; transgressive, 131; 55; Lacan’s function of, 58; nature
and truth, 53 and, 156; Plato and, 66, 82; power
asceticism: of denaturalising, 154; Good and, 54; Socrates and, 71–76, 78–80,
of, 20–21, 27, 101; ideal of, 3, 5, 10, 131; sublimation and, 38; in tragedy,
34, 71–72; identification and, 32; of 3; truth and, 62
Kant, 147, 151; of Platonism, 129–34; becoming: and being, 164; as change,
religions of, 9, 82, 159; of science, 118–19; of the drive, 133; as eternal
105, 107, 112, 117, 119–20, 122, return, 60, 62; Lacan and, 139, 153;
126–27, 164; of Socrates, 79–80, 83; of nature, 68, 75; as the real, 11–12,
of superego, 161; of Žižek’s Antigone, 126; as un-teleological, 17
152 being: as anti-nature, 72; and becoming,
Asclepius, 84, 157 60, 68, 139, 164; as cause, 119; as
Assmann, Jan, 158 ethics, 135; as the Good, 82; as
Assoun, Paul-Laurent, 137, 141 metaphysics, 125–26; mode of, 3, 37;
Athens: Alcibiades and, 65, 77; decline Palaeolithic, 105; as permanence, 75;
of, 83; democracy of, 156; erotics of, in the world, 167
68, 84; and Leiter’s Nietzsche, 154; Bernays, Jakob, 150
plague of, 72, 155; prime of, 56, 65; Bernstein, Richard J., 158
saints in, 100; tragic festival of, 4, bestowal: as creative virtue, 38, 144; as
41, 55 sublimation, 23
atheism: Freud’s, 88, 92, 94, 97, 161; beyond, the: Eleusinian, 146; imaginary,
Lacan’s formula of, 4 9; metaphysician’s, 85; Paul’s, 100;
Atkinson, and Robertson Smith, 90 Platonic, 11; romantic, 82–83;
atomism, 12; distinction with void, Socratic, 78–80; supernatural, 13–14;
125; fantasies of, 126; psychology in, suprasensory, 37–39, 119
121–22; reifications of, 127 Biebuyck, Benjamin, 157
author, the: disavowal of, 14, 23, 36; binaries: of Pausanias, 67–68; of Plato,
psychology of, 134; reading of, 2 154; of Socrates, 71–73, 83
Avenarius, Richard, 165 biology: instincts, 31; natural
expressions of, 102; weaponry of, 111
Bacon, Francis, 9, 165 Bishop, Paul, 160–61
bad conscience, 27, 38, 77, 83, 101, 131, Bizet, Georges, 34–35
156, 161 body, the (soma), 1; affirmation of, 145;
Badiou, Alain, 139 amorality of, 18; ascetics toward, 10;
barrier: of the beautiful, 53, 61; toward binary against, 68, 155; dismembering
desire, 2, 4, 44, 116, 129–130; of of, 153; of divinities, 70; health of, 69;
discourse, 164; of the Good, 22, 46, and instinct, 31; and Jung, 35; and
61; toward the Thing, 35 life, 39, 51; mother’s, 33; and nature,
Bass, Alan, 1, 137 71; neuroticised, 118–19; Platonic
Bataille, Georges, 14–15, 52, 61, 103, elision of, 82–84, 131; of Polynices,
114, 140, 152–153, 159, 161, 163 45, 147; the real of, 155; repression
beauty: of Antigone, 4, 41, 47, 50–51, of, 14; senses of, 5, 7, 37; sexed,
60–61, 130, 150; Christians and, 102; 75–76, 78, 129
death and, 148; desire and, 53, 57; Boothby, Richard, 141, 153, 159
INDEX / 183
Boscovich, Roger J., 122, 125, 165–67 91–98, 100, 102, 105, 132, 150; the
Botting, Fred, and Scott Wilson, 153 gods and, 44, 47, 61; Judaism of, 159;
Brenkman, John, 154 Kant’s, 105, 146–47; morbidity of, 34,
Brobjer, Thomas H., 137, 161, 165–66 62; as nihilism, 1–2; Phaedrus and,
brother, the: of Alcibiades, 79; analysts 67; as Platonism, 8–10, 16, 23, 36,
as, 164; of Antigone, 52, 60, 145, 147; 39, 43, 57, 66, 119, 121–22, 131–34;
band of, 90–91; chosen over husband, pleasure principle of, 151; slave revolt
148; Hades as, 45; incestuous, 152; in, 100–101
Oedipus as, 42; Polynices as, 41, 47 civilization: Christian, 87; discontents
Burckhardt, Jacob, 149 of, 3, 27, 130; exigencies of, 94–95,
burial: Antigone and, 48–54, 61, 150; 97, 104; internalised aggression
of Polynices, 41–43, 47; religion and, of, 143; sexual morality of, 28;
147 sublimations of, 21
Butler, Judith, 145, 150, 157 Clark, Maudemarie, 10, 165–66
Collits, Terry, 146, 149
Caesar, Julius, 156 Comte, Auguste, 165
Caillois, Roger, 152, 163 conformity: of the ego, 142; of
Calasso, Roberto, 147 the Good, 105; in Kant, 43; in
Calder III, William M., 155 sublimation, 34
capitalism, 110–11, 143 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 69, 125, 166
Caquot, André, 95 Corfield, David, 127, 139, 167
castration: Alcibiades and, 157; creativity, 13, 21, 23; strong, 3, 17,
Christian, 103–04; complex of, 141; 33–35, 37–41, 60, 105, 120, 122–23,
Derrida and, 161; as distance, 133, 133, 166; weak, 2–5, 7, 9–10, 15, 28,
159; hysterical, 132; language and, 30, 36, 43–44, 46, 67, 75, 82, 92, 94,
153; master’s, 94, 116; threat of, 18; 100, 116, 121, 129–130, 144–45, 159
of Uranus, 67, 154 Creon, 3, 10, 41–50, 52–54, 57, 59,
Cathars, 9 61–62, 130, 145–47, 149, 153, 158;
catharsis: Aristotle’s tragic, 54–57, 131, ἁμαρτία of, 42–43, 145
150, 152; Dionysian, 62, 151, 153; cruelty: of Creon, 45; of the ideal, 26; of
reincarnation and, 9 the sexes, 35; of strength, 37
causal sequence: denaturalizing of, 107; culture: activities of, 27; das Ding and,
reversal of, 39, 95, 101; silencing of, 35; deceptive, 144; early, 58, 91, 114,
100 131; forms-norms of, 18; the Good
Cavalieri, Bonaventura Francesco, 124 and, 41, 45; Greek, 149, 161; healthy,
Cézanne, Paul, 38 3, 23–24, 32, 97, 135, 166; Judaic, 88;
Chorus, the: Antigone and, 42, 49–52, judges of, 30; lesser, 100–1, 160; loss
55, 130, 149; Aphrodite and, 45; of, 103; Sophist-realist, 8, 165
Creon and, 146; Dionysos and, 59;
tragic origins in, 56 Darwin, Charles, 18, 90; Darwinism, 88,
Christianity: anti-philology of, 161; anti- 120, 158. See also Lamarckism
science of, 107–8, 160; ascetics of, David-Menard, Monique, 163–64
83–85, 117; Crusaders of, 25–26; as death: afterlife and, 13, 51, 101; beauty
denaturalizing, 4–5, 98–105, 146, 154, and, 50, 53, 130, 148; Creon and, 42,
158; Freud’s Christocentrism, 87–89, 45; death drive, 20–21, 26,
184 / INDEX
death (continued) Derrida, Jacques, 158, 161

103–4, 109–10, 141, 152–53, 164; Descartes, René, 9, 123, 139, 165–66
Freud’s, 105; God and, 87–88, 92, desire: Alcibiades and, 157; analyst’s,
96; Nietzsche’s, 131; priests and, 99; 164; Antigone and, 41, 47, 49–53,
reality of, 11, 75, 118; sacrifice and, 55, 147–150, 152, 158; creativity
159; second death, 4, 41, 43, 47, 52, and, 37, 151; Creon and, 42, 44–46;
54–55, 60–62, 146, 150; Socrates and, denaturalizing of, 66; dynamics
79, 84, 156; taboos on, 114, 161 of, 141; ethics of, 1–5, 134, 150;
décadence: aesthetics of, 76; father and, 90, 93–95, 97, 99; four
denaturalizing, 154; physiological, 69; discourses and, 107, 109–17; the
Socratic, 82–83 Good and, 11; identification and,
defense: as alibi, 44; distortions of, 32; jouissance and, 126, 129–131;
1; instincts and, 76; knots and, lack and, 71–72, 74–75; law and,
134; lying and, 20; mathematical- 153; liberation of, 140; love and,
formalization and, 165; the real and, 67–69, 154; narcissism and, 143;
150; sublimation and, 29 object of, 144, 163; perverse base
deflationary, the: Lacan and, 15–16, 35; of, 7, 15, 17–20, 25–26; repression
Nietzsche’s critique of, 2, 7, 129 and, 14, 102–5; significance of, 13;
Degler, Carl N., 158 sublimation and, 28–29; tragedy and,
De Kesel, Marc, 8, 18–19, 27–28, 30–32, 57–63; transference, 78, 81, 83, 85
141, 143, 152 devalue. See under value
Deleuze, Gilles, 144, 157, 160; and dialectic: of art–science, 166; of beauty–
Guattari, Félix, 145, 161–62 death, 148; Deleuze and, 157; of the
delusion: of immortality, 80; of Good, 81–82; Hegel and, 48; Kant
psychoanalysis, 163; of sublimation, and, 139; of love, 67, 83; Socratic,
35 70–71, 73, 79–80
democracy: Athens and, 156; Nietzsche difference: affirmation of, 133–34;
and, 134 nature and, 68, 71; sexual, 35, 125
Democritus, 9 Ding, das. See Thing, the
demonizing: of difference, 134; of the Dionysos: affirmation of, 59; Agathon
drives, 23, 132–33 and, 70; Aphrodite and, 96; Apollo
demystification: the Good and, 2, 7, 11, and, 148; catharsis of, 54–56, 151–53;
45–46, 58, 129, 148 festival of, 4, 41, 130; Nietzsche as
denaturalizing. See under natural disciple of, 62–63; Silenos and, 77
denial: art and, 38; of desire, 14; of Diotima, 70, 72–76, 82
difference, 72; drives and, 23, 132–33; disavowal: of authorship, 36, 39; of lack,
of natural kinds, 12; of the Other, 59; 125; of the real, 4, 7; of the sexual,
phobic, 17; of reality, 19–21; science 20; Žižek and, 2
and, 122, 164; self, 82, 107, 112, discontent: of civilization, 3, 27, 95,
159 130; of the Good, 7; Mosaic, 91; of
denigration: of body, 118; of perception, science, 112, 117; of sublimation, 24
139; of sexual relation, 96; of Thing, displacement: of Alcibiades, 157; of
38, 130 Creon, 46; Egyptian, 91; master’s,
depression: Christian, 102; melancholia, 111; Oedipal, 95; Socratic, 72, 78; of
27; religion and, 82; tragedy and, 55, 57 the Thing, 26–27
INDEX / 185
distance: affirmation of, 133; Aristotle economy, 4, 32, 45, 58–59, 131, 141–42
and, 17; castration and, 159; develop- 148
ment and, 95–96; Oedipal, 132, 141; ecstasy, 56, 59, 131, 151–52
pathos of, 144; sublimation and, 38, ego, the, 18, 25–26, 46, 100, 109, 117,
130; of the Thing, 19, 31–33, 111 119, 121, 142, 153, 162, 165; ego
distortion: of beauty, 61; defensive, 1; of ideal, 24, 142–43; superego, 27, 104,
desire, 46; of the Good, 3, 57, 84; of 142, 161
instinct, 104; of Moses, 90; religious, Egypt, 88–91, 95, 98, 158; Pharaoh
88, 157; of theology, 67; of the Thing, Akhenaton, 89, 91
26 Eleusinian mysteries, 146
disvalue. See under value Ellis, Havelock, 15, 140
divine, the: Aristotle and, 16; Plato and, Elveton, R.O., 16, 140
9, 122; pre-Platonic, 44–45, 47–48; emotions, 37, 47, 62, 104, 151–52
Socrates and, 66, 73–74, 77–80, 82, Empedocles, 152
131 empiricism: anti-empirical, 116,
Dodds, E. R., 146, 151–52, 155, 157, 118–120; falsification of, 19, 121, 134;
161 Greco-Roman, 104; Koyré and, 12,
Drake, Stillman, 167 127, 133; Lacan and, 123–24, 139;
dreams: Freud’s Oedipal, 88, 96, Nietzsche and, 5, 9, 13, 105, 107–8,
104, 108, 132; of the gods, 82; 117, 129, 132, 138, 165; science and,
imaginary and, 13–14; incestuous, 52; 167
interpretation of, 139; of Little Hans, empowerment. See under power
69; Socratic, 80, 151, 155 English, the, 165; Anglo, 120
drives, the (Trieb), 1–5; creativity and, enjoyment, 21, 29, 110, 132, 143, 150,
38–42; damming of, 76; death and, 152, 161, 164. See also jouissance
153; instincts and, 141, 143; partial, Enlightenment, the, 99, 104, 134
126; potlatch and, 59–60; the real Epictetus, 16
and, 18–21, 46, 129–33, 148, 150; epistemology, 5, 9–10, 13, 100–1, 113,
shaming of, 83–84, 101, 103–04; 116–18, 120–21
sublimation and, 23–33; superego equality, 44, 102, 134
and, 142 Eros (Ἔρως), 25, 50–51, 131, 148–49;
Du Bois-Reymond, Emil, 165 eroticism, 61, 103, 140, 152–53, 156,
Dufresne, Todd, 141 159, 161, 163; homoerotic, 156. See
also love
earth: affirmation of, 37, 104, 160; Eryximachos, 66, 68–69, 76–77
Antigone’s affirmation of, 51; eternal return, 60–62
Aphrodite and, 67, 154; bestowal on, ethics: of affirmation, 133–35; Bataille
23, 144–45; the body and, 75–76; and, 153, 161; of desire or drive,
Christian negation of, 100, 102, 158; 150; the Good and, 10–11, 14–17;
Creon’s offence to, 45; divinities of, the imaginary and, 8, 138; Judeo-
47–48, 61; nature and, 71; Plato’s Christian, 98; of Lacan with
negation of, 10–12, 39, 50; political Nietzsche, 1–5, 129–30; reality
negation of, 26; ressentiment toward, principle and, 19–20; science and,
36, 119, 146; Socratic negation of, 79, 108, 117, 120, 122–23, 126–27;
84–85; sublimation and, 33, 38 Spinoza and, 165; strong in tragedy,
186 / INDEX
ethics (continued) female. See feminine, the

39–43, 45–46, 53–54, 57–59, 62–63; feminine, the, 35, 46, 67–68, 72–73, 84,
sublimation and, 33–36; weak in 90, 116, 125, 134, 141, 148, 159, 163
Socrates, 65–66; the Thing and, festival, 4, 41, 55, 58, 61–62, 91, 130,
22–24, 26, 28; Žižek and, 148 153
Euclid, 123 Fibonacci, 125
Euripides, 59, 149, 152 Fink, Bruce, 126, 167
Evans, Dylan, 33, 143–44 Finkelstein, Israel, 160
evidence: Antigone’s desire and, 147; of foreclosure, 27, 126, 133–34, 137, 141,
denaturalizing, 4, 66, 74, 131; Koyré 146, 167
and, 139; of Lacan’s critique of the formalism, 5, 13, 107, 117–118, 123,
Good, 11; Moses’ murder and, 95; 125–27, 132, 133–34, 165
Nietzsche’s anti-anti-Semitism and, Foucault, Michel, 157
159; Nietzsche’s madness and, 168; four discourses, the, 107–8, 113, 132,
Oedipus and, 162; of the senses, 13, 162; analyst’s, 108–9, 113–15, 163–64;
37, 118–20, 124; of truth, 9 hysteric’s, 108–9, 113, 115–16, 164;
master’s, 108–11, 114, 116, 163–64;
falsification, 13, 38, 99, 119, 133, 139, university’s, 108, 110–13, 163–64
154 Franco, Paul, 166
family, 48–49, 52, 54, 105, 148–50, 158 Frank, George, 143
fantasy: agalma and, 81–82; comedic, free association, 13, 52, 113, 139
69; the Good and, 7, 10–11, 155; Freidman, R. Z., 158
hysteric’s, 93–95, 159; the imaginary Freud, Sigmund, works of: Analysis
and, 13–14; Lamarckian, 103; master Terminable and Interminable, 143;
and, 111; as parapraxis, 49; the real Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 116;
and, 140, 150; reality and, 17, 20, 35, Civilisation and Its Discontents, 21,
36; sexual relation and, 125–127 25–26, 30, 102, 142; “ ‘Civilised’
father, the: Antigone and, 42, 51–52, 54, Sexual Morality,” 28–29, 157; Dora,
145, 150, 152; Hamlet and, 43, 146; 93, 113; “Dream-Interpretation as
Iphigenia and, 50; Judeo-Christian, a Whole,” 18; “Economic Problem
5, 87, 98, 101, 132, 157; Name-of, of Masochism,” 142; Ego and the
133–34; Oedipal, 115–16, 142, 159, Id, 142; Future of an Illusion, 103;
164; primal, 87–90, 92–97, 102–5, Group Psychology, 29, 104; “History
113, 131; Socrates and, 66, 73–74, of the Psychoanalytic Movement,”
79, 140 17, 141; Inhibitions, Symptoms
fear: beauty and, 53, 61; of castration, and Anxiety, 162; “Instincts and
157; Creon and, 44; the Good and, their Vicissitudes,” 30–31, 143;
129–30; Hamlet’s, 43; the object and, Interpretation of Dreams, 139,
163; pity and, 55, 57–58, 62–63, 131, 146; Leonardo da Vinci, 29; Moses
151–53; Socrates and, 71–72, 79–80, and Monotheism, 87–92, 97–100,
84, 120; of the Thing, 3, 17, 19–20, 102, 105, 158–160; “Negation,” 13,
26; truth and, 54; of the weak, 38 140; On Narcissism,” 24, 142–43;
Federn, Paul, 1, 137 “Outline of Psychoanalysis,” 26;
Fellini, Federico, 109, 162 Papers on Technique, 29; “Psychical
Feltham, Oliver, 163–64 Consequences of Anatomical Sex-
INDEX / 187
Distinction,” 35, 144; “Repression,” of Christian denaturalizing, 87,

155; “Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” 100–1, 103–5, 154; Creon and, 41–47;
18–19, 27, 141; “Tendency to critique of, 1–5, 129–134; dialectic
Debasement in Love,” 154; Three and, 157; Kant’s, 146–47; of modern
Essays on Sexuality, 29, 143; Totem science, 107, 116; Plato’s, 7–14, 37,
and Taboo, 88, 90–92, 159; “Two 39, 137–40, 148; pleasure principle
Principles of Mental Functioning,” and, 20–22, 151; of sexual relation,
144 126; Socrates and, 65–66, 68, 71–76,
Freudian School of Melbourne, the, 154 79, 81–84, 155; sublimation and, 35;
Fritsch, Theodor, 159–60 the Thing and, 23–24, 26–29; tragedy
and, 56–59, 61–63
Galileo Galilei, 12–13, 123, 127, 139, goods, service of, 5, 45, 58–60, 107,
167 111–12, 116, 131–32, 142, 148, 153
Gay, Peter, 162 Greeks, the: Burckhardt and, 149;
genealogy, 1, 21, 27, 36, 87, 100, 112, fifth century BC, 55, 57, 62; fourth
117, 122, 130, 135, 143–44 century BC, 65–70; Greco-Roman,
genital, 18, 51, 62, 69–70, 75, 125–126, 5, 97–98, 100, 132; language of, 42,
131, 154 48, 50–52, 145, 147, 149, 153–154;
Glynos, Jason, 126, 167 masters of, 87, 99, 101, 104, 132, 137;
Graham, Daniel, 17, 140 mathematics and, 123–24; rationalism
Grigg, Russell, 26, 108, 141–42, 146, and, 146, 151; science and, 13;
148, 150, 159, 166–67 Socratic denaturalizing of, 82, 157,
guilt, 1, 21, 92, 100, 159 160–61. See also Hellenismos
God: anthropomorphic, 13; Aristotle’s, Groddeck, Georg, 141
16; critique of, 4–5, 132–33;
denaturalizing and, 98–101, 104, 107, Hacker, Frederick J., 24, 29–30, 142–44
146; Freud’s Oedipus and, 95–97, 102; Hades, 45
Judeo-Christian, 87–88, 90–92, 158, Haemon, 45, 50, 147
160; as love, 67; monotheistic, 45, Hahn, Alexander J., 167
61; as nothingness, 82; as pessimism, Hamlet, 43, 146
144; science and, 100; as truth, Hans, Little, 69, 162
122–23 happiness, 7, 15–16, 57, 75, 117, 151–52
goddess. See under gods, the Hartmann, Heinz, 142
gods, the: Antigone and, 47–49, 51–52, hate, 15, 27, 34–36, 49, 100, 148
60, 147, 150, 152, 158; Creon and, health, 3, 28–29, 37, 57, 69, 71–72, 85,
42–46, 146; goddess, 47, 50, 61, 102, 120–21, 160
67, 150; the Good and, 61, 63; Hegel, G. W. F., 48, 110, 148, 150
monotheism and, 89–90; natural- Heidegger, Martin, 138, 165
Hellenic, 131; polytheism, 44, 88; Hellenismos: health of, 102;
of the real, 82; Symposium and, 67, Herodotus and, 148; instinct of,
69–70, 74, 77–78 8, 56; Macedonian age, 151; pan-
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 42, Hellenic festivals of, 146; Platonic
48–50, 52, 145, 147–48, 158, 160 denaturalizing of, 83, 134, 160;
Good, the: Antigone and, 49–50, proper divinities of, 82, 131, 150. See
52–54; Aristotle’s, 15–18, 152, 154; also Greeks, the
188 / INDEX
Heraclitus, 9, 51, 72, 119, 139, 146, 149 23–27, 29–30, 35; sacrificial, 60;
hero, 4, 30, 41, 49, 52, 54, 61, 63, 130, science and, 120, 122, 125–26, 164; of
145–46, 153, 161 Stoics, 16; weak, 36
Herodotus, 148–49 idealism, 3, 8, 11, 13, 17, 24–25, 32, 34,
Hertz, Heinrich R., 24, 166 36–40, 76, 82, 84, 119–22, 155, 165;
Hesiod, 66–67, 75 idealization, 3, 93–94, 104, 126, 148
history: of denaturalizing, 44–45; of identification, 3, 13, 32, 42–44, 46–47,
Freud’s monotheism, 87–89, 93–95; 73, 75, 93, 113, 130, 142, 164
Herodotus and, 148; of Israel, 98, illusion, 11, 72, 103, 118, 127
101, 103–5; liberation and, 141; imaginary, the: Antigone and, 148, 150;
Nietzsche and, 137, 161; of Oedipus, beauty and, 55; as cause, 39, 95; as
42, 130; of Platonism, 1–5, 7–8, 11, dialectical opposite, 157; distinction
36, 38, 116–17, 119; pre-historic, 18; with real, 2–3, 7–14; as ego, 153,
of science, 111, 122–23, 125, 127, 162; in free association, 139–40; of
163; of Socratic transference, 65–66, the Good, 129–30; in identification,
76, 82–83, 85; of the subject, 114, 93, 164; in knotted triad, 134; as
135; Thucydides and, 56, 151, 156; of object a, 144; of the obsessional,
violence, 25 104; science and, 125–26, 167; as
Hobbes, Thomas, 165 superego, 142; the Thing and, 19,
holism, 124–27, 133, 163 31–33, 35; as third-party, 72; as
Holt, Philip, 145, 153 Victorian, 152; as world, 37
Homer, 39, 75, 82–83, 148–49, 160 incest, 18, 42, 52, 54, 91, 104, 109, 114,
Homer, Sean, 14, 140 130, 141, 152, 158, 161
homoerotic. See under Eros inflationary, the: dialectic, 157; Father
Honig, Bonnie, 145, 148–49 function, 92–94, 104; Good of
Hume, David, 164–65 morality, 4, 7–8, 11, 14, 17, 35–37,
Hussain, Nadeem, 139, 165 42–43, 54, 56, 69, 82, 116; investment
Huxley, Aldous, 163 of reason, 119, 164–65; micro–
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 154 macrocosm link, 154; as nihilism,
hysteric, the: aggression of, 110; 144; of Platonism, 121, 126–27,
discourse of, 108–9, 113, 115–16, 164; 129–31, 133–34, 137–38; will to
encircling of, 27–28; envy of, 5, 83; power and, 152
Freud’s Oedipus and, 87, 93–95, 97; instincts: Antigone’s, 47; beauty and,
idealized father of, 104, 132, 150 51, 53, 55; creative, 37; of death, 109;
discharge of, 24; distinction with
id, the (das Es), 2, 17–18, 25–26 drive, 30–32, 141; the Good and,
idea, the, 10–11, 37–39; ideology, 2, 13 65–66, 75–76, 81–84; Hellenic, 8, 56;
ideal(s): of afterlife, 100; ascetic, 5, 10, internalizing of, 143; Judeo-Christian,
34, 71–72, 80, 82, 112, 116–17, 161; 99–100, 102, 104; master signifier
classical, 160–61; as defense, 1; of the and, 164; sexual, 20; sublimation of,
ego, 142–44; of the Good, 11, 15, 62, 27–29; of the university, 112
130–33; healthy, 3; introjections of, intellectuality (Geistigkeit), 97, 132, 160
32; of love thy neighbor, 103; Plato internalization, 1, 27, 143, 161
and, 8; the real and, 39; repressive, interpretation: of analysand, 114–15;
INDEX / 189
Antigone and, 42, 47; of drives, Kepler, 125

30, 66, 99, 101; enthusiastic, 141; Klein, Melanie, 33–34, 156
of epistemic, 5, 13, 19; of Freud’s knotting, 134, 168
Oedipus, 108; Nietzsche and, 137; knowledge: analytical, 35, 113–15, 117,
Orphism and, 138; of Plato, 9, 121; 130; bodies of, 75; of the body, 69;
religious, 156, 159; Symposium and, certain, 117; of desire, 58–59, 131;
68, 70, 75, 80–81; textual, 2; of tragic of the Good, 56; hatred for, 34, 101;
rites, 57 limits of, 105; Renaissance and, 161;
Ionia, 138, 146, 166 science and, 107, 110–12, 118, 122,
Iphigenia, 50–51, 84, 149 124–25, 132, 134, 164–167; the senses
Irwin, John, 161 and, 10; sexual, 96, 109; Sophists and,
Israel. See under Judaism 9; of the Thing, 21, 26, 28, 30
Kojève, Alexandre, 68, 167
Janaway, Christopher, 145, 160 Koyré, Alexandre, 12, 127, 133, 139, 163
Jebb, Richard, 145, 148
Jesus. See under Judaism Lacan, Jacques, works of: Autres Écrits,
Jews, the. See under Judaism 163; Écrits, 135, 143, 148, 156, 164,
jouissance: death and, 53; of the drive, 166–68; “L’Étourdit,” 152; Ornicar?,
129; irruption of, 115–16; of James 163; “Reflections on the Ego,” 153;
Joyce, 134; of the mother, 96; object Seminar I, 1, 147; Seminar VII, 1–5,
of, 164; as prohibited, 90, 159; as 7, 10–35, 38–63, 87–93, 95, 97–98,
real of the subject, 126; science’s 102–4, 107, 111–12, 114, 116, 123–24,
mishandling of, 132; of transgression, 129–32, 138, 140–46, 148–50, 153,
20–21; as unlimited, 92; variant 158–59, 161, 167; Seminar VIII, 4,
positions of, 107–11, 162. See also 56, 65–84, 139, 153–154, 156–58;
enjoyment Seminar XI, 4, 126–27, 150; Seminar
Joyce, James, 134 XVII, 4–5, 35, 87–88, 92–97, 103–5,
Judaism: anti-Semitism, 98, 105, 159; 107–17, 123–25, 131–32, 140–41,
Christian form of, 2, 4–5, 85, 87–89, 159, 162–164, 166; Seminar XX, 110,
95–103, 131–33; denaturalizing and, 125–26, 134, 140; Seminar XXIII, 134,
146; Freud and, 158, 162; Israel, 168; “Le Symbolique, l’Imaginaire et
90, 97–100, 154, 160; Jesus, 87–88, le Réel,” 8, 138
91–92, 96–97, 100–1, 131; Jews, the, lack: aesthetic distinction and, 3, 23,
26, 92; Moses, 87–93, 95–98, 113, 130, 144; band of brothers and, 91;
131, 158; science and, 13, 123–24, Christianity and, 101–102, 160–161;
167; St. Paul, 43, 45, 50, 92, desire and, 70–72, 74, 163; the
100–1, 103, 141; Yahweh, 91, 93, German’s and, 112; physical agency
96, 104–5 and, 59; the real and, 8, 40; science
Jung, Carl, 35 and, 117, 166; sexual relation and,
125; Socratic, 81–82, 151, 155
Kahn, Charles, 10, 138 Lamarckism, 88, 103, 158
Kant, Immanuel, 13, 16, 37, 43, 105, Lamb, W. R. M., 153, 156
119, 139, 142, 146–47, 151, 164–65 lament, 50–51, 84, 148–49
Kaufmann, Walter, 143 Lampert, Laurence, 9, 138
190 / INDEX
Lange, Friedrich Albert, 165 Mach, Ernst, 122, 139, 165

language, 12–14, 16, 18, 43–44, 46, 60, macrocosm, 16, 35, 69, 154
104, 110, 129, 140, 153–54, 166 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 147
Lautréamont, Comte de, 147 Marini, Marcelle, 8
law, the: Antigone and, 47–48, 52, 147, masochism, 21, 110, 142
150; Creon and, 42–44, 46; father master, the: Creon as, 42; father and,
and, 91, 94–95, 159, 162; Judeo- 90, 93–95; Greek and Roman, 5, 87,
Christian, 5, 87, 97, 99, 101, 103–5, 97, 104, 132; Lacan’s discourse of,
132, 134, 157, 160–61; Lycurgus, 108–11, 114–16, 163–64; Nietzsche
Solon and, 75; moral, 14, 16; natural, and, 144, 152; Paul as, 100; as
142; pessimism and, 144; science and, physician, 69; Plato as, 82; of science,
114, 122, 127, 165; transgression and, 12, 123; the senses and, 118, 120,
21, 61, 153 133; Socrates as, 71
Lear, Gabriel R., 16 materialism, 68, 119–21, 126, 135, 154,
Lear, Jonathan, 140 160, 165–67
Leibniz, Gottfried, 124 mathematics, 5, 12–13, 101, 117–18,
Leiter, Brian, 9, 138, 152, 154, 160, 164 123–27, 129, 133–34, 139, 164–67
Leonardo da Vinci, 29, 156 Mauss, Marcel, 152
Leupin, Alexandre, 160, 167 McNeil, David, 157
libido, 18, 24, 32, 81, 141 McPherran, Mark L., 9, 138, 155
life: afterlife, 43, 61, 67, 80, 100, 146, memory, 18, 22, 32, 42, 51–54, 75, 88,
149, 151, 156; as against, 2–3, 90–94, 115, 131, 158
7, 10–11, 27, 65, 109, 130, 144; metaphysics: Aristotle and, 151–52; of
Antigone and, 41, 50–54; forces of, the Good, 2, 7, 9, 15–17, 22; Kant
94; moral regulation of, 14; science and, 164; Nietzsche and, 137, 141,
and, 163; Socrates and, 75, 77, 79, 155; as phallus, 126; Platonic, 36–37,
83–84, 157; sublimation and, 23, 29, 39–40, 43, 85, 157; science and, 118,
39, 145; types and, 118; weak, 36–37; 122
as will to power, 57, 59–62 method, 9, 12, 49–50, 73, 88, 93, 101,
linguistics, 127, 137, 140 107, 117, 122, 124, 137, 139, 165
Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, 148 Midas, 77–78, 84, 157
Locke, John, 124, 165–166 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 24, 162, 167
Loewenstein, Rudolph, 142 Mitchell, Juliet, and Jacqueline Rose, 141
love: Antigone and, 48–49, 51, 149; Möbius strip, 126
Athens and, 156; Christian, 102–3, Modrak, Deborah, 10, 139
132; courtly, 28; father and, 91, 94, Monk, Ray, 165
97; Freud and, 154; Lacan and, 155; monotheism, 63, 87, 89, 91–92, 101, 158
science and, 163; Socrates and, 65–76, morality: Antigone and, 44, 49; ascetic,
78, 80–81, 83–84; sublimation and, 129–130, 133, 152, 156, 158, 160;
32–35 Christian–Oedipal, 87, 91, 95,
Luther, Martin, 150 99–101, 146–47; as defense, 13–20;
of denaturalizing, 66, 68, 72, 76,
MacCabe, Colin, 153 81–83, 85, 154; Platonic, 7, 8, 11, 137;
MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 109, 162 science and, 107, 117–18, 120–22,
Macedonia, 56, 151 127, 151; sublimation and, 25–28,
INDEX / 191
34, 36, 39, 40; tragedy and, 53–58; 117, 123–24, 138–39, 166; signifiers
Western, 1–4, 63 and, 30; sphere as real, 5, 118, 126;
Moses. See under Judaism supernatural, 3, 8, 13, 36, 79, 96, 119;
mother, the, 33, 43, 52, 67, 73–74, 96, values, 4, 98, 101–3, 131–32
141, 146 Nazis, the, 87, 162
Muller, John P., 142 negation, 73, 144, 160
murder, 43, 87–92, 94–97, 101–4, neurosis: Antigone and, 150; as anti-
131–32, 140, 159 nature, 154; Freud’s, 94; the Good
music, 55–56, 77, 151–52, 155 and, 2–3, 21, 129; Judeo-Christian,
myth: Calasso and, 147; Hellenic, 44, 56, 102, 105, 132; in patients, 14; positive
154, 157; of hysteric–father, 87–89, perversions and, 157; repression and,
92–97; Judeo-Christian, 100, 103–5, 75; science and, 112, 115, 118–19;
160; Kleinian, 33–34; Oedipal, 113, Socrates and, 81, 83; sublimation and,
132; Platonic, 16, 73–74, 80, 140, 155; 24, 27–30, 32, 35, 38, 130
real world as, 36–37, 119; science and, Newton, Isaac, 17, 125, 127, 133, 139
123, 127, 166; sexual relation and, Nietzsche, Friedrich, works of: AC, 4,
125; rationalism and, 146 13, 69, 84, 97–102, 104, 117, 122,
124, 147, 154, 158–59, 161; BGE, 2, 9,
narcissism, 24, 32, 46, 98, 143 16, 43, 57, 60, 66, 112, 118, 120–22,
nature: affirmation of, 39, 104, 156, 139, 141, 151–52, 154–56, 165–66;
160; anti-nature, 5, 10, 63, 65, 70, BT, 56, 60, 70, 84, 149, 151, 153, 155,
83, 85, 88, 99, 117, 119, 131–34, 157; CW, 34–35, 76; EH, 2, 5, 166;
154–55, 158; Aristotle’s notion of, 3, GM, 17, 21, 27, 34, 36, 39, 69, 78–79,
15–17, 129, 140, 152; denaturing, 77, 82, 100, 112, 117, 122, 143–44, 151,
154; disvaluing of, 4, 66, 118, 131; 156, 161; GS, 4, 17, 36, 120–22, 139,
imaginary ascent from, 75; love and, 141, 144, 157; HAH, 146, 166; KGW,
35; Nietzsche and, 71–72, 84, 141–42; 166; KSB, 138; PPP, 72, 151, 156;
Plato and, 7, 9, 68, 82; reality of, PTA, 166; TI, 8, 11–12, 13, 17, 19,
12, 154; science and, 107, 121, 127, 36–37, 39, 53–54, 56–57, 59–60, 62,
133, 138, 166; sexual elements of, 96; 65–66, 72, 75–76, 81–82, 84–85, 95,
taboos on, 114 101–5, 112–13, 117–19, 121, 124,
natural, the: anti-natural, 85, 104, 138, 144, 149, 153, 155–58, 165–66;
117, 154; Aristotle’s notion of, WP, 9, 11, 14–15, 17, 36, 38–39,
16–18; cause-and-effect, 99, 107; 53–57, 69–70, 75, 78–79, 82–84, 101,
denaturalizing, 4, 44, 61, 65–68, 119, 144, 146, 151, 154–58, 160–61,
70–71, 74, 78–79, 82–83, 85, 87–88, 164–65; Z, 144–45
91, 98–99, 101–2, 105, 107, 117, nihilism, 1, 3, 27, 34, 36, 130, 142, 144,
121–22, 127, 131, 133, 146, 154, 154
156–58, 160; as differences, 134; Eros Nobus, Danny, 140
and, 25; harmony and, 35; incest Noys, Benjamin, 153
and, 158; kinds, 12, 146; as law, 142;
liberation and, 140; materialism object a. See under object, the
and, 135; naturalism, 9; power object, the: Antigone as, 60; of
and, 72; renaturalizing, 76, 84, 133; knowledge, 10–11, 25; as lost, 163; of
repudiation of, 21, 156; sciences, 13, love, 71; object a, 4, 35, 76, 81–82,
192 / INDEX
object, the (continued) Pfister, Oscar, 161

84–85, 110–11, 113, 115–116, 131, Phaedrus, 66–67, 70
144, 156, 162, 164; of repression, 18; phallus, 35, 81, 126
of the senses, 122, 165; Socrates and, philology, 55, 137, 148–49, 155, 161
83; of sublimation, 23–24, 28, 31–33, philosophy: anti-nature dualism and,
38, 143; of the Thing, 19, 141 155; Christian-Platonic, 16, 100–1;
obsessional, 27–28, 81, 104, 111, 132, English, 165; the Good and, 10–11,
143 57; Greek and Roman, 104; idealists
Odysseus, 50, 141 of, 13; Ionian, 138, 166; Lacan and,
Oedipus: complex, 18, 26, 30, 87–88, 139–40; Nietzsche and, 2–3, 5, 36, 62,
93, 95–97, 104–05, 108–10, 113–16, 105, 117–23, 133–34, 137; Plato and,
132, 141, 159, 162; Hamlet and, 43; 38, 125, 145; of science, 127; Socratic,
the man, 42, 52, 54, 149–150 66, 70, 73, 75, 79, 81–82, 85, 131;
Ons, Silvia, 1–2, 21, 161, 163–64 Sophists and, 9
ontology, 5, 7, 15, 133, 138; onto- physical, the, 52, 54, 59–60, 70, 79, 81,
theology, 9 125, 138, 160, 167
oral, 18, 126 physics. See under science
Orphism, 9, 138, 146, 157 physiology, 37, 57, 68–69, 102, 118, 120
Other, the, 14, 18, 49–50, 59, 88, 93, Planck, Max, 166
143 Platonism: of Aristotle, 17–18, 21, 152;
Overbeck, Franz, 138 Christian, 2, 16, 36, 44, 57, 61–62,
103, 105, 107–108, 132, 160; critique
paganism, 26, 82, 159 of, 5, 129–34, 137–39, 165; earth and,
pain, 7, 19–21, 27, 44, 51, 80, 130 38–39; the Good of, 7–11, 23, 43,
paranoia, 27–28, 46, 49, 167 45; nature and, 12–14, 37, 68, 70, 72,
passions, the, 3, 23, 32–33, 39, 54–55, 146, 154; as nihilism, 1, 3; science
61, 67, 92, 102, 104, 141, 151–52 and, 112–13, 116–17, 120, 125–27;
Paul, Robert A., 159 Socrates and, 66, 73, 75, 78, 80–85;
Paul, Saint. See under Judaism tragedy and, 46, 54, 58–59
Pausanias, 67–68, 78, 154 Plato, works of: Apology, 156; Meno, 10;
Pentheus, 59, 152 Phaedo, 9–10, 43, 73, 138–39, 146,
perception, 85, 123–24, 138–39, 160, 157; Republic, 10, 39, 43, 73, 139,
163, 166 145–46, 148–49, 151–52; Symposium,
Pereira, David, 154 4, 63, 65–85, 131, 153–54, 156;
Pericles, 8, 151, 160 Theaetetus, 155
Perseus Digital Library, 145, 150 pleasure, 151; principle, 7, 19–21, 26,
perversion: Aristotle and, 15–18; 31, 45, 57–58, 108–10, 116, 141, 144
Christian, 102; distance and, 95; Plutarch, 9, 156
excessive, 110; the Good and, 21, poetry, 28, 39, 54–55, 59–60, 62, 70, 75,
83, 129–131, 133; masochistic, 142; 144–45, 150–52
polymorphous, 2, 7, 141; power and, political, the, 16, 26, 46, 89, 100, 104,
157; sublimation and, 3, 24–26, 30, 134, 148, 150, 152, 156–57
32, 35 Polynices, 41–43, 45, 47, 52–53
pessimism, 3, 36, 57, 84, 144, 151, 157 polytheism. See under gods, the
Petronius, 109, 162 positivism, 37, 119–22, 166
INDEX / 193
potlatch, 58–62, 131 32; sublimation and, 33, 37–38;

power: beauty and, 53–55, 61; Creon transcendental, 84–85, 157
and, 146, 149; denaturalizing and, psychotic, 80, 133, 141, 161
78; empowerment, 4, 40–41, 109, puritan, 9–10, 44–45, 60, 62, 66, 75, 80,
130–31; Foucault-Butler and, 157; 82, 91, 139, 146, 151–52, 158, 164,
Israel and, 98; knowledge and, 10, 166
12; love and, 67; natural differentials Putnam, Hilary, 138
of, 72, 102–3; Persian, 56; primal Pythagoras, 9, 13, 134, 139, 146, 157
father and, 90, 93, 95, 159; the senses
and, 120–21; service of goods and, Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 134, 140, 155–56,
112; sublimation and, 27–28, 34, 37; 168
tragedy and, 50–51; the will to, 57, Rackham, H., 140, 150
60, 69, 85, 99–100, 104, 152, 154 rationality, 16–17, 43–44, 56, 81, 89–91,
priest, the, 78, 90, 99–101, 104, 107, 95, 97, 117, 146, 151, 157, 161
139, 159, 161 reaction formation, 19, 29
progress, 8, 11, 33–34, 43–45, 62, 88, real, the: Antigone and, 53, 55, 59, 61,
94, 97–99, 105, 125, 127, 163 148, 150; of art, 38–40; body and, 5;
prohibition. See under taboo of desire, 19–21, 158; the drive in, 4,
projection, 7–8, 13–14, 26, 35, 46, 80, 41, 129; formalization and, 126–27;
82, 94–95, 101, 119, 121, 125, 127, the gods and, 70, 82–83; Greeks,
129, 133, 164 Romans, and, 104–5; imaginary and,
psychoanalysis: analysand of, 113–16, 2, 7, 8, 10–11, 13, 75; as instinct, 31;
126, 163–64; of Aristotle, 17–18; of knotting and, 134; of the Lady, 28;
Atè, 52; Christianity and, 100, 103, master and, 116; of nature, 17, 118,
105, 154, 161; clinic of, 15; Congress 131, 154; neighbour love and, 102;
of, 137; definition of, 69; Erwin object a and, 144; post-symbolic, 12,
Rohde and, 138; ethics of, 1–3, 5, 7, 14, 20, 140; potlatch and, 58; pre-
10, 129–30, 133; formalization and, symbolic, 12, 14, 140, 152; primal
127; gender and, 126; James Joyce father and, 93–95; psychosis and, 141;
and, 134; as method, 49; neurosis science and, 112; shame and, 115;
and, 75; Nietzsche and, 135; object a Socrates and, 65–66, 68, 71, 73, 76,
and, 81, 113; primal father and, 93; 80–81, 155–56; as supernatural, 3; the
psychoanalyst of, 30, 46, 89, 108–9; Thing and, 15; tragedy and, 46, 84;
resistances to, 19; science and, 114– world as myth, 36–37, 119, 164–65;
16, 132, 163; sublimation and, 24–26, Zupančič and, 142
35; of tragedy, 63; of transference, 73 realist, 8–9, 17, 20
psychoanalyst. See under psychoanalysis reality, 7, 8, 10, 12–14, 17, 19–20,
psychology: of atom, 121; Creon’s, 44; 36–39, 75, 84, 92, 94, 97–100, 118,
ego, 142; empirical, 167; Freud’s, 88; 120, 124, 129, 145, 152–53; principle,
group, 29; of imagination, 13; infant’s, 19–21, 26, 45, 144–145, 152
105; meta, 25; moral, 160; Nietzsche reason, 37, 43–44, 75–76, 117, 119, 134,
and Lacan’s, 134; popular, 138–139; 139–40, 146–47, 161, 164–65
puritan, 146; reality principle and, regression, 29, 69, 98–99, 127, 151, 160
20; religion and, 94; rich man’s, Reich, Wilhelm, 162
68; science and, 118; splitting in, reification, 3, 121, 127, 133, 163, 165
194 / INDEX
religion: Antigone and, 48, 147; anti- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 84

nature, 5, 88–89, 146; ascetic, 25; Russell, Bertrand, 165
Bataille and, 61, 159; imaginary of, Ryder, Andrew, 161
8; Judeo-Christian, 92, 95–97, 103,
132, 158, 160–61; opiates of, 19; of sacrifice, 50, 59–62, 72, 131, 151, 153, 159
Orphism, 138; of Plato, 9, 66, 157; Sade, Marquis de, 25
science and, 107, 127; Socrates and, Santaniello, Weaver, 159
82–83, 155–56; sublimation and, Sax, Leonard, 167–68
27–28, 34; of superego, 142; totemic, Schafer, Roy, 142
91; tragedy and, 56, 59, 62; weak, 38 Schiller, Friedrich von, 139
Renaissance, 102–4, 127, 132, 134, 161 Schneck, Jerome M., 154
renaturalising. See under natural, the Schopenhauer, Arthur, 144, 151
repetition, 1, 2, 16, 42, 53, 68, 77, 88, Schrift, Alan D., 137
91, 95, 97, 102, 110, 112, 131 science: art and, 155; Copernicus
repression: Antigone and, 59, 61; Creon and, 69; Greek and Roman, 104;
and, 41–42; Freud and, 18, 142, 146, Ionian, 138; Judeo-Christianity and,
155, 157–58, 162; the Good and, 100–1, 160; Lacan and, 123–27,
7, 20–21, 23, 120, 129–130, 133; as 167; Macedonian, 151; modern, 1,
harmful, 3; hysteric and, 115–16; 4–5, 105, 107–8, 110–131, 32–34;
Judeo-Christianity and, 91, 95, 102, Newtonian, 17; Nietzsche and, 118,
104, 160; master and, 109; Nietzsche 121–22, 139, 141, 164–66; phony,
and, 1, 17, 151; return of repressed, 20, 57, 95, 146; physics, 17, 120–22,
5, 7, 12, 14, 17, 19–21, 26, 33, 53, 59, 125, 151; psychoanalysis and, 114,
63, 65, 76, 83, 89, 91–92, 96–97, 104, 117, 163; Sophist, 9; as sublimation,
110–11, 124, 127, 130–32, 141, 160–6; 27–28; the symbolic and, 12–13, 129
science and, 112; Socrates and, 75; Sellin, Ernst, 95–96, 159
sublimation and, 24–30, 32–35, 38; of senses, the, 5, 7, 9–10, 13, 37, 39, 71,
the Thing, 12 83, 101, 118–22, 124, 129, 133, 139,
ressentiment, 15, 36, 100, 160; slave 151, 157, 160, 165; sensuous, 4, 34,
revolt, 5, 100–1, 132 65, 68, 71, 83–85, 103, 120–21, 131,
return of the repressed, the. See under 160–61
repression sensuous. See under senses, the
revaluation of all values. See under sexual, the: affirmation of, 61–62; of
values body, 129; desires, 15–18; disavowal
revenge, 11, 36, 77, 100, 132, 144 of, 20; modern science and, 109–10,
Richardson, William, 12, 13, 138, 141 114, 116, 125–27, 133, 167; negation
Ritschl, Friedrich, 149 of, 68–70, 75, 78, 80, 83–84, 102–3;
Rohde, Erwin, 138–40, 146–47, 149, of object a, 4, 131; of primal father,
151, 155–56 90, 95–96; sublimation of, 24, 26,
Romans, the, 13, 87, 100–101, 103–4. 28–29, 35, 37; as transgressive, 142,
See also Greeks, the: Greco-Roman 152, 157–58, 161
romanticism, 28, 34, 36, 69, 82, 125, Shepherdson, Charles, 12, 14, 46–47,
144 140, 150, 158
Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 134, 137, 140, signifier, the: Antigone and, 47, 50–51,
161 –62 54, 60, 63, 152; of knowledge (S2),
INDEX / 195
110, 114; of master (S1), 93, 109, symptom, 1, 7, 20, 24, 33, 38, 46, 66,
115–16, 164; Pausanias and, 68; 72, 108, 116, 134, 161; sinthome, 134,
primacy of, 30–33, 141; of repression 168; symptomatology, 13, 129
12; science and, 123–24; the Thing
and, 18–19, 23, 130, 143 taboo, 18, 58–59, 61, 88, 90–92, 96–97,
Silenos, 77–78, 84 103–4, 114, 152–53, 161, 163;
sinthome. See under symptom prohibition, 90–91, 109, 114, 141,
skepticism, 2, 9, 11, 37, 99, 121, 125, 157, 159
134, 152, 165 Teiresias, 45–46, 59, 146
slave revolt. See under ressentiment Thales, 166
Slavet, Eliza, 158 theology, 67–68, 118, 154
Small, Robin, 165–67 Thing, the (das Ding): affirmation of,
Smith, Joseph, 142 37–40; Antigone and, 47–48, 53, 150;
socialism, 89, 134, 158 Aristotle and, 17, 129; distance and,
Socrates, 3–5, 10, 41, 45, 56, 63, 65–68, 19, 111, 130; Freudian, 7, 15, 135;
70–85, 87, 120, 131, 133, 139–40, the Good and, 18, 21, 59, 141; the
146, 151, 155–58, 160 Id and, 26; of Moses, 90; object a
Sophists, 8–9, 68, 160 and, 144; the real and, 12, 82; reality
Sophocles, 3, 10, 39–42, 45–48, 50, and, 20; sublimation and, 23, 27–28,
60–63, 96, 130, 145, 147–48, 157 30–33, 35, 143; as superego, 142
Spinoza, Baruch, 121, 165 Thucydides, 8, 56, 83, 151, 155–56,
Stavrakakis, Yannis, 147–48, 150, 165
152–53, 167 tragedy, 3–5, 10–11, 27, 39, 41–42, 46,
Stoics, the, 16, 57 50–65, 69–70, 84, 112, 130–31, 133,
subject, the, 12–14, 18, 20, 26, 28, 31, 145, 151, 153, 155, 160, 163. See also
35, 44, 47, 52, 57, 63, 119, 126, 153, art: tragic
161, 163–64; as split, 18, 26, 32, 46, transcendent, the, 17, 81, 84, 125
69, 73, 109–11, 113–16, 132, 162, 166 transference, 4, 56, 65–67, 73, 78, 81,
sublimation, 3, 5, 17, 21–35, 37–40, 59, 114–15, 131–32, 139, 154, 156
85, 97–98, 104, 116, 130, 133, 139, transgression: Alcibiades and, 83;
143–44, 157 Antigone and, 51; Christianity and,
substitution, 11, 21, 30, 33, 67, 69, 91, 103; ethics of, 4, 41, 61–63; jouissance
97, 113, 116, 133, 144, 163 of, 20–21, 108–09, 162; joy in, 131;
supernatural. See under natural potlatch and, 58–59; taboo and,
symbolic, the: Antigone and, 61, 152–53; the Thing and, 18, 26
149–50, 152; Creon and, 46; and trauma, 18, 45, 53, 118, 129
ego-ideal, 142; four discourses and, tripartite, 2, 7–8, 15, 142
108, 110; Greece and, 56, 62, 84; Trobriand Islands, 162
Judeo-Christianity and, 89, 91, 95, 97, truth: beauty and, 53–54, 61–62; denial
159; the object and, 163; in psychosis, of, 19; disavowal of, 2; evidence of,
141; the real and, 14, 19–20; as 9; father and, 94, 96; four discourses
reason, 140; science and, 12–13, 123; and, 109, 111; the Good and, 10, 39;
sublimation and, 31–32; the Thing imaginary of, 8; Judeo-Christianity
and, 143; as third category, 2, 7–8, and, 101; Jung and, 35; Klein and, 33;
11, 129, 134–35 Lacan and, 113–17, 163–64;
196 / INDEX
truth (continued) Van Dyck, Martin, 167

Nietzsche and, 119, 122–23, 165; in Verhaeghe, Paul, 94, 126–27, 159, 162,
parapraxis, 49, 147; the real and, 142, 164
152; repression of, 7, 27; science and, violence, 15, 24, 26–27, 30, 35, 38, 51,
132–33, 166–67; Socrates and, 70–71, 70, 90, 92, 94, 96, 104, 112, 130, 159
73–77, 82, 155–57; sublimation of, 17;
tragedy and, 3; traumatic, 129, 131, Wagner, Robert, 34, 144, 166
140; of violence, 25 Wallace, R. Jay, 160
types, 3, 9, 23, 29, 54, 56, 59, 68, 83, war, 25, 35, 43, 46, 56, 58, 62, 102,
130 110–11, 151, 156
Watling, E. F., 147, 149, 153
Übermensch, the, 104, 106, 166 West, the: blunder of, 5, 76, 87, 131;
unconscious, the: analysand’s, 115–16; Christian-Platonic, 16; denaturalizing
desire and, 109, 129; as fear, 163; of, 146; discontent of, 130;
formalization of, 127; Freud and, Enlightenment in, 104–5; history of,
17–18; God as, 4; the Good and, 20; 65, 116; idealism of, 25, 119; Israel
as language, 14, 166; masochistic, 21; and, 97–99; metaphysics of, 39, 43;
Nietzsche and, 1; object a and, 131; moralism of, 1–3, 63; transition of, 45
Oedipal, 162; science and, 112, 114; Whitman, James, 155
Socrates and, 73; the Thing and, 19, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von,
23, 26, 39 72–73, 155
utilitarianism, 45–46, 58–59, 61, 110, will to power. See under power
119 Wohl, Victoria, 156–57
Wolpe, Joseph, and Stanley Rachman, 162
value(s): aesthetic, 36, 148; Antigone woman. See feminine, the
and, 60; anti-Semitic, 159;
denaturalizing of, 131–34; devalue, Xenophon, 156
66, 102, 139; disvalue, 4, 68, 151;
ego-conformist, 142; ethical, 3, 5, Yahweh. See under Judaism
39–41; of the Good, 10–11; Judeo- Yerushalmi, Yosef, 88, 158
Christian, 97–102, 105; Phaedrus’s, Young, Julian, 159, 167–68
67; ressentiment, 15; revaluation of all,
2, 8, 137, 146; science and, 118–22, Zentner, Oscar, 162
124, 166–67; shock, 25; Socrates and, Zeus, 45, 47–48, 67, 147
79, 82–83; strong-empowering, 41, Žižek, Slavoj, 2, 148–50, 152, 161
46; sublimation and, 23, 33–35; of Zupančič, Alenka, 2, 21, 34, 39, 142,
text, 49; therapeutic, 116 150, 161–63

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Lacan’s Ethics and

Nietzsche’s Critique of Platonism

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2014 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

Production by Eileen Nizer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Themi, Tim, 1975–

1. THE DEFLATIONARY ONTOLOGY OF LACAN AND

2. DISTINGUISHING WEAK SUBLIMATION FROM THE STRONG 23

3. BEFORE THE GOOD: STRONG ETHICS IN SOPHOCLES’

4. BIRTH OF THE GOOD: WEAK ETHICS IN SOCRATES’

5. GOD OF THE GOOD: CHRISTOCENTRIC OEDIPAL

6. SERVICE OF GOODS: NATURE AND DESIRE IN MODERN

An early version of the material in Chapter 1 appeared as “How Lacan’s Ethics

Lacan’s 1959–1960 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 Lacan’s Tripartite Schema with

I will not, in fact, be able to avoid a certain inquiry into historical

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

1.2 Lacan’s Freudian Thing in the Critique of Aristotle’s Good

Well, as odd as it may seem to that superficial opinion which

In the previous section, by way of Nietzsche’s critique of Plato, I discussed

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 Nietzsche–Lacan analysis of sublimation produces a better ethical

That is why when we ask what is beyond the barrier erected by

—Lacan, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,

Distinguishing Weak Sublimation

Nietzsche criticized the Good of Platonism and the Christendom to follow

2.1 The Promise of Sublimation and Its Discontents

. . . sublimation is a way out . . . without involving repression.

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 Lacan’s Treatment of Sublimation

I discussed the two main problems sublimation can be thought to remedy:

reaching the mind”19—whereupon 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 Nietzsche’s Distinction between Weak and Strong

Regarding all aesthetic values, I now avail myself of this main

Nietzsche’s program in ethics, and to a large extent his entire philosophy

“impoverish”—“history 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

what Lacan explains by formulating Creon’s stance to be that “one cannot

3.2 Antigone against Creon:

a higher authority, so to speak, although “lower” is likely more precise—to

Nevertheless, as is proper to Lacan’s analytical method that looks for

3.3 Before the Good: Nietzsche’s Strong Dionysian Catharsis

At the end of a supplementary note in his Ethics Seminar, directly following

As acting on her desire, then, despite the deathly cost, Antigone’s is

(Suny Series, Insinuations_ Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature) Lacan, Jacques_ Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm_ Themi, Tim - Lacan's Ethics and Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism-State University of

(Suny Series, Insinuations_ Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature) Lacan, Jacques_ Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm_ Themi, Tim - Lacan's Ethics and Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism-State University of