ABSTRACT
Jeremy Bentham starts his Introduction to the Principle of Morals and Legislation by putting forward the ‘Principle of Utility’ and writes: ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. A thing is said to promote the interest, or to be the interest, of an individual, when it tends to add to the sum total of his pleasures: or, what comes to the same thing, to diminish the sum total of his pain’. The image is shocking and scandalous, Joan Copjec writes, that of a ‘malign, noxious neighbor who will spare us no cruelty in the accrual of its own pleasure’. Jacques Lacan’s Seminar on Ethics, therefore, according to Copjec, shows us that ‘beneath utilitarianism’s proposition that use is pleasurable a second proposition: pleasure is usable.
