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In the sixth chapter of the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan refers to the taoist Choang-tsu's well known parable of the dream butterfly. Choang-tsu poses the question of how, after waking from a dream of being a butterfly, he can tell whether he is Choang-tsu who has woken from the dream of being a butterfly or whether he is the butterfly now dreaming he is Choang-tsu. This article argues that Lacan's treatment of the parable allows us to discern two instances of fantasy; the fantasy of being the butterfly and the fantasy of being Choang-tsu. These two instances help to demonstrate the centrality of the process of identification to the function of fantasy and allow us to grasp an ethical dimension entailed in one's subjective relation to the object(s) of fantasy.

This article seeks to redress an often elided aspect of Lacan’s treatment of ethics; the importance of judgement to the possibility of ethical action. Where writers like Žižek and Zupančič have presented the act as something akin to an asubjective miracle that imposes on the subject, this article will argue for an understanding that locates judgement and hence subjective reflection as crucial to Lacan’s ethical project. Placing the act in the context of the emergence of subjectivity, the article shows how judgement can be seen to be already evident in Lacan’s appropriation of Freud’s Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. This results in an understanding of ethics that always already entails responsibility for the judgement one would make in assuming one’s position of subjectivity.