ABSTRACT
Paul M. Livingston refers to Lacan’s 1959–60 seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, who notably specifies the psychoanalytic perspective as one on which “the question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real”. Livingston argues that in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein declares that “ethics is transcendental” and, while holding that there can be no propositions of descriptive or normative ethics, he nevertheless interrogates sympathetically “drive to run up against the boundaries of language” which he associates with the ethical tendency in the 1929 “Lecture on Ethics”. The aim of this chapter is to articulate how both conceptions of ethics as occupying a liminal position with respect to the totality of the symbolic can succeed in formulating what might be called (in contradistinction to “academic” or “philosophical” ethics) a real ethics: that is, an ethics that can comprehend and find terms to respond to the real ethical problems of global sociopolitical organisation today, including those involved in the global dominance of capitalism and anthropogenic violence over non-human forms of life. Livingston argues that, for both Lacan and the early Wittgenstein, the drive to the ethical evinces an essential tendency, inherent to our situation as speaking subjects as such, to witness the implications of our position as such subjects with respect to the totality of the symbolic. The articulation that both give to this limit-position with respect to the symbolic allows their respective analytic projects to evince the terms in which a real ethics might begin to respond to the systematic real and symbolic violence, grounded in the totalising effects of capitalism and symbolic enframing, that dominates collective planetary life today.
