As indicated at the end of the recent blog Cosa vuoi? on desire in Jacques Lacan, I wish now to reflect briefly on the implications of this line of thought for moral theology. Let me say at the outset that I have been for many years, and remain to this day, a fervent disciple of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on this question. Their programme could be summed up in the phrase “educating desire” (A. MacIntrye). The human being is seen as an essentially rational being who has the redoubtable task of controlling his (or her) various desires so that they do not wreck havoc in his life and that of those with whom he intimately associates. The only way to do this is to practice individual acts of moderation etc. so as to develop the corresponding virtues, which make the moral life possible. All this constitutes a theoretical and practical model of human thriving which has served generations of human beings in various cultural contexts. The thought of Lacan, inspired by Freud, however, puts this schema into what is technically known as “epistemological crisis”. An epistemological crisis occurs within a discipline, such as ethics or moral theology, when new data…

            In the mouth or under the pen of Jacques Lacan the simple question “cosa vuoi?” becomes a bomb. The bomb is intended, as so often in his case, to explode our illusions about ourselves. In what follows I wish to share with the reader a few, almost arbitrary, reflections on this simple but potent weapon.             A first line of reflection concerns the use of the Italian language. Lacan was very theatrical, indeed histrionic, in his therapeutic and didactical styles. Switching for two words out of French into Italian, whether written or spoken, certainly would have had a certain dramatic effect. Pronounced with the strong intonation of a question in Italian and accompanied by an insistent hand gesture, this question immediately puts the interlocutor under psychological pressure on various fronts. The two most obvious of these concern the two words of which the question is composed.             “Cosa”, or better still “Cosa?”, in the context of Lacan’s thought, is an extremely loaded term, loaded like a gun. The word succinctly poses questions and insinuates judgements. The first question is: “Do you know what you want?” or “Do you really think what you want is…