The Real & Ethics

Speaking about the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan says,

It is because the real is not easy to access, so to speak, that it servers us as the reference point around which the revising of ethics must revolve.

I think this is an important statement, because it says that the real is the (the as definite article) that which imaginary ideals and symbolic laws (morals, codes of conduct, etc.) are all a response to.

To belabor the point a bit: Ethical frameworks, ideals, social bonds, laws, etc. do not have some sort of ultimate "good" (ideal/Law) at their center that they are articulating!

Rather, they have the real as the common thing that they are constructed as a response to.

Lacan, Jacques, From an Other to the other: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVI. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink, p. 163.