Das Ding: Lacan i Levinas
Das Ding: Lacan and Levinas

Summary/Abstract: In this article Emmanuel Levinas’ and Jacques Lacan’s theories are discussed in the light of their relation to ethics. While Levinas dedicated his overall work to the problem of ethics, Lacan deals with it mainly in the Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where he understands the ethical as the realm of real and thus the inaccessible order. In order to access the real/ethical a detour through the order of symbolical that is esthetical, which Lacan calls the sublimation, is needed. On the other hand, the author fi nds in Levinas the order of symbolical in his try to grasp the Other which is possible for him only through the language. According to Levinas’ philosophy, the Other is irreducible to the Same and thus it is impossible to grasp in the ontologically conceptual way. The only way in which we can access it without reducing it to the Same is the ethical relation i.e. through the language of saying the unsaid. Levinas considers, and that’s where he is approximating Lacan, that the only way to access the otherness through the paradoxical relation to the other (which is inaccessible) is by saying the unsaid.

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