LWithout Ground: Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity, by

Calum Neill, London & New York, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014, 271 pp.
(paperback), ISBN: 978-1137412713

Calum Neill’s extraordinary text on Lacanian ethics combines a series of

scholarly virtues. The book is a patient and systematic working through of a
series of related concepts and maxims in Lacan’s oeuvre pertaining to the
overarching theme of ethics. Neill’s is one in a series of texts published by
Palgrave that takes up themes in earlier Lacanian scholarship, and significantly
raises the bar (see also titles by Eyers, 2012, Redmond, 2014 and Vanheule,
2011). De Kessel (2009), for example, has previous delivered a lengthy text
commentating on Lacan’s ethics, and books by Van Haute (2002) and
Eidelsztein (2009) have carefully unpacked, for example, the vicissitudes of
Lacan’s graph of desire, a topic also subjected to rigorous treatment by Neill.
Yet the careful detail and clarity of Neill’s treatment of a series of crucial
Lacanian themes, from the notion of the unconscious, to concepts of desire,
jouissance, the phallus and the Other, sets his text – to my mind at least –
notably apart from his predecessors.

A significant factor here is the amount of time Neill devotes to extracting

the underlying conceptual basis of many of Lacan’s philosophical sources.
Regrettably, the tendency in many Lacan reading-groups and commentary
texts is to explore philosophical texts only inasmuch as they support an
emerging reading of Lacan. Neill’s attention to Badiou, Derrida, Descartes,
Kant, Levinas and Nietzsche in Lacanian Ethics is exemplary; it shows off the
range of his philosophical knowledge and situates Lacan as a philosophical
thinker in addition to a practitioner, innovator and teacher of psychoanalysis.

The book covers a significant range of theory in Lacan, and perhaps it’s
one fault is the conceptual density of its material, which means that it requires
the sustained attention and, indeed, a degree of dedicated work on the part of
its readers. This is not to say Neill’s style is difficult; quite the contrary. His
terminological choices are very precise, his prose is considered, and one gains
the feeling – sometimes rare in texts on Lacanian psychoanalysis - that each
phrase has been carefully weighed so as to convey the crucial point at hand.
 Despite the formidable complexity of many of the Lacanian concepts
tackled, the book nonetheless works well as an introduction to facets of
Lacan’s thought, especially if one focusses in on given sections of the text. The
structure of the book lends itself to such an approach. The book’s four sections
(on the subject, Lacanian ethics, the other, and the social) each provide an
incisive overview of these crucial psychoanalytic and philosophical topics, and
one hopes more than one postgraduate course in these domains will be
designed around the book’s content. Although perhaps not written primarily
with this in mind, the book works well as a didactic text, that is, as an
accompaniment to a lecture series, or an introductory overview of Lacanian
theory. A significant part of this review will focus precisely on Neill’s ability to
illuminate difficult Lacanian concepts, and to work toward satisfying readings
of many of Lacan’s more gnomic prognostications. Before doing so, let me
offer one further comment on Neill’s scholarly skills. His reading of Lacan aims
at distinctive and new insights; Neill is not prone to padding his analysis with
gratuitous quotes from existing luminaries in the field, or to surrendering his
own analytical efforts to those who have previously offered commentaries on
similar topics.

There can be no doubt: this text is a kind of empirical analysis, a loving

and protracted engagement with concepts and ideas which yields something
fresh and compelling, rather than a re-telling of familiar Lacanian mantras. Part
of this engagement – and here lies a further scholarly merit – is a courteous yet
firm set of critical distinctions whereby Neill takes a number of notable
Lacanian scholars to task for apparent misreadings of Lacanian texts. Joan
Copjec and Adrian Johnston, two of the foremost commentators on Lacan in
the US, are amongst them. This attention to the detail and implication of
Lacan’s arguments is good for Lacanian theory as a whole, which of course has
long been notorious for its obfuscation and smudging of analytical
terminology. A case in point: Neill refutes Adrian Johnston’s view that Lacan’s
famous declaration ‘the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given
ground relative to one’s desire’ can simply be read as: ‘Do not give way on your
jouissance!’. For Neill, desire and jouissance cannot simply be conflated, and a
more nuanced discussion of Lacan’s injunction follows, which is worth citing at
length:
 Not giving ground relative to one’s desire entails the assumption of
the cause of one’s desire. This is not, however, a position one could
ever assume once and for all. Assuming the locus of the cause is to
reconfigure one’s position in relation to the Other and thus to
reconfigure one’s very subjectivity… That the only thing of which one
can be guilty is of having given ground to one’s desire…cannot be
reduced to a description of the mechanism of guilt… Rather, it points
beyond the ego/super-ego relation to the stance the subject would
assume in the face of law. Giving ground relative to one’s desire
would be tantamount to assuming a position of having no choice, a
position which…would necessarily entail the denial of one’s relation
to the Other. Not giving ground relative to one’s desire is to assume
the responsibility for one’s own position of subjectivity. It is the logic
of Wo Es war, soll Ich warden, the moment in which the
subject….assumes a position in that place that would otherwise be
occupied by the law, by the Other (pp. 116-117).

Let me provide a further related example of the type of analytical work that
Neill performs. He undertakes an examination of Lacan’s appropriation of
Freud’s Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’ (‘Where It was, there must I come into
being’). For Neill, we see here

an implication of a movement from the impersonal it, the

unconscious, to the purely assumed position of subjectivity. That
which arises in and from the unconscious does so in a pulsating
moment and does so in the mode of the Other. The ‘I’ of the subject
is the pure assumption of responsibility for this arising…the language
one has at one’s disposal to express ‘oneself’ is always the language
of the Other and as such is radically other to, although also
constitutive of, the subject. For Lacan, the fantasy is the “stuff” of
the “I” that is originally repressed….[and] it can indicated only in the
“fading” of the enunciation… That is to say, it is in and through the
fantasy that the mythic ‘I’ supposed to have preceded the subject…
as an effect of the Other is relived. This being the case, it is clear that
the subject who comes to ‘be’ (soll Ich warden) in the place where ‘it’
 was (Wo Es war) must be radically incommensurate with…the
subject in fantasy (p. 43).

While more than one reading of this passage may well be necessary, one
quickly appreciates that Neill’s style is neither needless esoteric or convoluted,
and that a series of important practical points are reached through his
scholarly deliberations. His reading of Lacan’s utilization of Freud’s dictum
delivers us a considerable distance from the more ego-friendly rendering of
‘Where id was, there ego shall be’, which in James Strachey’s translation put
the emphasis on the ego’s triumphant overcoming of the id. In Neill’s
(following Lacan’s) reading, the direction of this process is reversed. The
emphasis here is placed on the terrain of the unconscious, as the site where
the subject must assume not only their fundamentally alienated character (as
the subject of the Other of language) but as responsible for those eruptions of
the unconscious that unmake the fantasy of the mythic ‘I’ of the ego. Here, to
be sure, there are not simply the two terms of ego’ and ‘id’, but a more
complex diagram. There is, firstly, the unconscious event, secondly, the ego (‘I’)
that is thus subverted, and thirdly, the subject of language, who, by readily
assuming this undoing of their ego, takes on an ethical quality. It is in carefully
elaborating this ethical injunction of psychoanalysis – the idea that the subject
must assume the productions of their unconscious even as they ‘unmake’ that
subject’s ego – that Neill deserves unique praise.

References

De Kesel, M. (2009). Eros and ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII. New
York: SUNY Press.

Eidelsztein, A. (2009). The graph of desire: Using the work of Jacques Lacan.
London: Karnac.
Eyers, T. (2012). Lacan and the concept of the ‘real’. London & New York:
Palgrave.
Redmond, J. (2014). Ordinary psychosis and the body.. London & New York:
Palgrave.
Van Haute, P. (2002). Beyond adaptation Lacan’s “subversion” of the subject.
New York, NY: Other Press.

Vanheule, S. (2011). The subject of psychosis: A Lacanian perspective. London

& New York: Palgrave.