An optimisitic negative ethics

Psychoanalytic ethics are distinct from traditional conceptions of ethics in that psychoanalysis does not prescribe any positive content to the ethical. Rather such a prescription appears to be the ethical’s opposite. Traditional political ethics are based on a ‘positive’, or stand alone essence to the social, such as a ‘state of nature’, or ‘species being’ approach. These perspectives have been used in the work of Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, John Rawls and Terry Eagleton. Psychoanalytic theory has some similarity in this regard, however, it also has some crucial differences.

The core difference is that the former theories are stand alone, they are ethical on their own and as such require no further justification from any larger foundation- they are the Truth, with rational laws naturally stem from them. In the psychoanalytic point of view there is no positivity to social life. Indeed the social- both the subject and the object- are constituted by a lack. It is this lack; a fundamental impossibility of achieving Truth (and thus finding the final solution to ethics) which creates an opportunity for the ethical.

The concept of lack as inherent to the human condition stems from both psychoanalysis and the ‘turn to language’ in the 1960s and 70s. These have been combined most prominently, and fruitfully, in the work of Jacques Lacan and most recently, Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau.

Lack occurs in both the subject which is alienated from its image, and in the symbolic Other, where there is no correspondence between the signifier (the word) and the signified (the thing-in-itself). Instead meaning is created purely through the play of signifiers. It is this play, and the necessary attempts to achieve an impossible closure that form the basis of Laclau’s Discourse theory.

According to Discourse theory, particular content (e.g. signifiers) attempts to suture the social by filling the gap in the symbolic order. Any content which succeeds (although not permanently) in doing so has become an empty signifier, and generally a hegemonic discourse (a discourse which becomes the condition of possibility for any truth claim).

A hegemonic discourse conceals the lack in the social. A necessary condition of this lack is that there is no true universal, or Truth. Rather there is an ultimate undecidability, and therefore any order which is presented as universal is always based on exclusion. For Zizek, this fantasmatic exclusion is the role of ideology, in presenting the social as full, or at least potentially full, and externalising the necessary lack. We see this occurring most dramatically in Nazi Germany with its notion of the Jew.

Therefore for Psychoanalysis, rather than attempt to find a fullness which is impossible, and necessarily exclusive, the ethical is to show the radical contingency of any social construction, and the manner in which any universal is based on the elevation of a particular, and thus the exclusion what Zizek terms a singular.


As Ernesto Laclau states ‘ A free society is not one where a social order has been established that is better adapted to human nature, but one which is more aware of the contingency and historicity of any order’ . To show the contingency of any order, according to Slavoj Zizek, one has to either break through the fantasy (which provides jouissance to subject in the possibility of closure), or alternatively engage in a radical ethical act which changes the fundamental conditions of possibility.

However, this leaves upon questions, particulary in regards to what appears to be a logic contradiction in the necessity of contingency, and also in the political possibilities of such an ethic.