your youth – cutting welfare to pay off the national debt? Haven’t you ceded too much? Or, maybe there is the unbearable question that poses itself, as you lie awake restless in the early hours: what have you done with your life? Has it been worthwhile? As Lacan says, this giving ground, ‘is always accompanied in the destiny of the subject by some betrayal…’ (ibid, 321 emphasis added). For Lacan, this is the ethical question. Maybe, you have ceded to the demands of others, i.e. betrayed your own singular desire? And Lacan makes his opposition to Aristotle clear; there will always be a bourgeois compromise with power.
In the context of the secular postmodern: all is radical uncertainty and pure accident – Quantum physics, Bohr, Heisenberg, Relativity – indeterminacy at the infinitesimal level leading to the radically chaotic nature of the Real, beyond the traditional Laws of nature. The self is a fetishistic illusion; there is no self, awaiting realisation. To coin that wonderful phrase from Kundera, this is ‘the unbearable lightness of being’. Being that is so incredibly free and so light.
[T]he absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
(Kundera 1984, 5)
Maybe such lightness or dizziness caused Catherine Millot to worry for Lacan for an instant: ‘We had climbed to the summit of Etna. At the edge of the huge crater among the gas and smoke, I suddenly became anxious and overwhelmed at the crazy idea that he might throw himself in, as Empedocles had done and pull me with him’ (Millot. 2016, 115).
By contrast, recall the old psychoanalytic joke (Žižek 2014, 67-69) about the terribly anxious man who was preoccupied with himself because he was convinced he was just a grain or a seed. He went to a psychiatrist who convinced him after many sessions that he was really a man not a seed. He left the psychiatrist’s office pleased to have his real identity as a man stabilised.