Do not yield on one's desire

Presented by Raphael Zagury-Orly, philosopher, founding member

Clotilde Leguil, psychoanalyst and philosopher

Charlotte Casiraghi, author, president of the Philosophical Encounters of Monaco

In Seminar VII, devoted to the ethics of psychoanalysis (Seuil, 1986), Jacques Lacan, during the session of 29 June 1960, says he wants, "by way of experiment", to advance a few "propositions" and to see "what that gives for the ears of analysts". The first is this: "I propose that the only thing one can be guilty of, at least from the analytical perspective, is to have yielded on one's desire". In general, from the sentence, only the last part is retained. Most often it is heard – a veritable misunderstanding arising from the confusion between "to yield on" and "to yield to" – as a kind of hedonistic injunction, an invitation to "let everything go", to yield to all temptations, to free oneself from the burden of the Super-ego to give free rein to one's drives, to "do what one wants". The sentence being somewhat sibylline, it even allows one to wonder whether "one's" desire is the desire proper, that of the subject, or the desire of the Other: the confusion between "to yield on" and "to yield to" would be the same. Now the "new ethics" envisaged by Lacan is hardly founded on the respect or not of imperatives coming from elsewhere, from society, but on the singularity of the subject, of the desiring subject. Not to yield on one's desire would then be a form of fidelity, a fidelity to one's own subjectivity, to one's law, to what one is at the deepest part of oneself, whereas to yield on one's desire would amount to betraying oneself ("the subject betrays his way, betrays himself", writes Lacan), to manifest a sort of existential cowardice from which guilt would arise, namely the feeling of being at fault, in default, with respect to one's own desire. How is this enigmatic sentence to be understood, which has nonetheless become almost a "word", if not a mantra?

Robert Maggiori