The Lacanian Subject and the Philosophy of Education: Diagnostic with, or without, Therapeutic?

Abstract

Jacques Lacan’s ethical insights come up when he engages, inter alia, with Aristotelian and Kantian ethics. Tackling Aristotle’s ethics, Lacan complicates how human life would be best lived and fulfilled, and discussing Kant’s ethics, he sheds a different light on moral duty. In both cases, Lacan emphasizes the role of desire and law in the subject’s actions. Many Lacanian insights constitute a fertile context for political philosophy and philosophy of education to explore the ethic character of the subject. However, some postmodern political philosophers who draw on fundamental Lacanian concepts have theorized the “Self–Other” relationship in a way that ends up in a problematic ontological accommodation of evil. In this paper, I outline the aforementioned to highlight the following lacuna: much of the literature in educational philosophy that has utilized Lacan’s theory to deal with ethics has not addressed, head-on, whether the Lacanian subject is ethical, unethical, or none of these. Treating the subject as ethical or unethical would entail that Lacanian theory can mainly offer “diagnoses”. Treating the Lacanian subject as ethically neutral and, thus, as plastic, entails that Lacan’s theory leaves more ample space for “therapy”. My aim in this paper is to show that some unanswered questions regarding the (un)ethical subject in Lacan’s theory must be tackled if the philosophy of education that transfers Lacan’s ideas to the ethical educational context is to avoid self-contradiction.