The Aesthethics of Psychoanalysis

Lacan contends that psychoanalysis reopens the dimension of "desire" and attributes the ethical and moral forces to desire itself: it is desire that brings about a defense against desire itself. Such an ethical dimension unfolded by the dialectics of desire allows psychoanalysis to subvert the traditional ethics based on the "good-pleasure." In Lacan's topography of desire and its object, the good-pleasure merely serves as a lure of desire. The good blurs the fact that the essence of desire is a kind of "jouissance" that transgresses prohibitions, whereas the satisfaction of desire is precisely a jouissance prohibited and threatened by death. The very works of Sade portrays a world of extremely evil that exemplifies this jouissance of transgression. Yet Lacan stresses that there is another element which could bring into view a dimension beyond the pleasure principle and beyond the good, namely, the beautiful. The beautiful has always remained in a special and ambiguous relation with desire. On one hand, it seems that desire could be excluded from the field of the beautiful; on the other, the manifestation of the beautiful also curbs and prohibits desire. Through the transgressive jouissance, the beautiful is always related to the evil and death. As Lacoue-Labarthe emphasizes, Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis, based upon a rereading of Freud through the conception of desire, is in fact an "aesthethic" (esthethique). The beautiful, as the visage of death, not only directs men's desires and behaviors, but moreover with a dizzying and glaring splendor points to the locus where men are related to their death.