ABSTRACT
The expression ‘ethics of the real’ is supposed to be a comprehensible expression intended to clarify other, less comprehensible concepts and issues. Yet this chapter will cast doubts on this and demonstrate that, in fact, it is a contradiction in terms that fails to understand what the ‘real’ implies for ethics. Analysts cannot ground any of their claims in the real in the way that science does for Lacanian psychoanalysis is, in fact, thoroughly ‘superficial.’ It operates on the superficial surface of the material signifier in an attempt to confront the patient with something that is absent without being elsewhere—really—present. Psychoanalysis finds its ethical raison d’être in this lack of ‘real ground’ and persevering in this superficiality. It is the only way of giving space to the analysand’s ‘essence’ (i.e. to the absence of any essence). In other words, it’s the only way to give space to desire, and the one thing that matters in the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ is to recover a way of becoming the subject of desire again. Our desire is oriented towards the real, but ethics can only be characterized as ethics of desire and not of the real.
