Troy Southgate

Sep 30, 2024

THE French psychoanalyst and philosopher, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), is occasionally criticised for reducing his German predecessor, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), to the level of a mere footnote. This, despite one or two of his neo-Freudian theories closely approaching Nietzsche’s own philosophical observations.

Nonetheless, in Book II of La Séminaire: Le Transfert (1960-61), Lacan says of Nietzsche’s 1886 work, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, that the title represents something that is both thoughtless and superfluous. As he explains, it is

“not, as one is used to say in a kind of refrain, beyond Good and Evil, which is a nice formula to obfuscate what is in question, but simply beyond the Good”.

The Slovene commentator, Slavoj Žizek, discussing this notion, merely states the obvious when he suggests that “the moment one traverses the Good, one also leaves behind the Evil.” Indeed, surely that is the entire point of Nietzsche’s fundamental contention? Not merely in Beyond Good and Evil, of course, but also in works such as On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Antichrist (1895).

Whilst Nietzsche correctly identified the manner in which certain sections of society, particularly those with a religious bent, have their own interpretations of what is ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ his purpose was not to undermine the existence of those things we regard as such, particularly when there are so often points of consensus, but to highlight how the imposition of a rigid moral structure allows people to employ such formulae in the service of ressentiment. In actual fact, Nietzsche even suggests establishing a workable typology of morals and this is hardly the modus operandi of a man who is wantonly committed to ‘evil’.