In Lacan's view, Kant's moral law inevitably brings about sense of guilt in the subject, not only because the moral law is tied up with its prohibition and the subject's consequent desire to transgress it, but also because the law being in the very formal indeterminacy, the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of 'translating' the abstract injunction of the moral law into a series of concrete obligations. The subject, however, suffers from its own being guilty even more when the relentless superego demands it to enjoy itself without limits (which is impossible) as well as to stop short of the lethal domain of jouissance. Because of the subject's sense of guilt, ethical problems in psychoanalysis converge from the question of how to respond to the subject's sense of guilt. Confronted with this problematic, Lacan's ethics attempts to move beyond the horizon of law and constitutive guilt into drive that produces jouissance by the compulsion to encircle again and again the site of the lost Thing. By supplementing Kant with Sade, Lacan locates the goal of psychoanalytical ethics at theimpossible point of intersection between law and pathological enjoyment, the 'vanishing mediator' between the two, which has to be presupposed if we are to account for the tension between the two. Lacan's endeavor to formulates a new 'ethics of the real' thus effectively amounts to a return to the point at which pathological enjoyment itself becomes Law, a point at which insistence upon one's pathological enjoyment equates to fulfilling one's duty, and a point at which Duty itself is marked by a stain of surplus-jouissance. The return is best illustrated in the repetitive movement of drive, the movement to the return to a certain Real of violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the reign of law. If we can say that Lacan's ethical position lies in ethics of drive and jouissance, it means that drive is attitude of 'going right to the end' and unconditional insistence which follows its course irrespective of all pathological considerations. Because surplus-jouissance in psychoanalytical ethics is something which always-already has happened the moment we are within the ethical domain and its 'primordially repressed' founding gesture, the forced choice of the subject to participate in repulsive obscene acts of violence as in anti-Semitism in no way abolishes the subject's responsibility; one is always already responsible in so far as one enjoys doing it.
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