We have already analyzed the way in which Lacan discusses the notion of the
real das Dingin Seminar VII. Now, we should reassess our previous examinations
in light of the fact that the notion of the Real is inextricable from the notion of
jouissanceand, what is more, that their relationship is considered, first and foremost,
from an ethical perspective. The ethics of psychoanalysis is nothing but an ethics
of the Real, an ethics of the real desire of the subject who necessarily confronts
himself with jouissance;the term “ethos” is thus indicated as the most appropriate
name for the object a,the object-cause of desire.^149
Lacan begins with two overlapping a priori assumptions which he thinks he can
obtain from Freud’s work:( 1 ) Ethics must be articulated from the standpoint of the subject’s relation to the
Real, since “in our activity, insofar as it is structured by the symbolic,” the Real is
precisely that which is “actualized” through “the moral law, the moral command-
ment.”^150 From what we have already seen, I believe the term “Real” should here
be related to the concomitant emergence of both everyday reality and the uncon-
scious phantasmatic Real-of-the-Symbolic (“really existing” jouissance): these are in
fact the two sides of the loss of the primordial Real which is exactly what “suffered”
from the instauration of the signifier/law.^151
( 2 ) In opposition to the “optimism” expressed by any kind of “naturalist” eudai-
monistic ethics, especially Aristotle’s, which ultimately associates the Sovereign
Good with happiness and pleasure, the inevitable demand for happiness all sub-
jects express clashes with the fact that “absolutely nothing is prepared for [happi-
ness], either in the macrocosm or the microcosm.”^152
This Freudian premise has profound consequences for all three terms of the
Aristotelian equation: pleasure, happiness, and the Sovereign Good. First of all,
extreme pleasure is dissociated from happiness, since it is “unbearable” for us;^153
happiness (as “moderated” pleasure) is not a biological given for man but some-
thing which should be located on the side of symbolic fictions: it requires a
“lowering of tone of what is properly speaking the energy of pleasure.”^154 In
accordance with point 1 above, this “tempering”—provided by the law—is also
what is needed to “move towards reality”^155 as opposed to the primordial Real
of a supposedly pure jouissance:in other words, the Real of das Dingis the “sup-
port of an aversion” inasmuch as it is “an object which literally gives too much
pleasure,” painful jouissance.^156
With regard to the Good, the third term of the Aristotelian equation, all this
entails that Freudian psychoanalysis reverses the foundation of the moral law
since, from its perspective, “there simply is no Sovereign Good.”^157 More
specifically, according to Lacan’s interpretation of Freud, there is no Sovereignthe subject of the fantasy... and beyond