拉岡（Jacques Lacan）主張精神分析重新開啟了「慾望」的向度，並發現倫理與道德的力量是來自於慾望本身：是慾望引起了對慾望本身的防禦。這個從慾望的辯證展開的倫理向度，讓精神分析顛覆了傳統倫理學以「善─快感」為依歸的視野。在拉岡的慾望與慾望客體拓樸中，善─快感只是慾望的誘餌。善讓人看不清慾望的本質是一種跨越禁止的「踰越」（transgression），而慾望的滿足正是受到禁止與死亡威脅的「絕爽」（jouissance）。沙德的著作所呈現的極端的惡世界就是這樣一種踰越的「絕爽」的展現。但拉岡強調還有另一個可以讓人察覺到超越快感原則、超越善的要素，那就是「美」。美與慾望始終處於一種特殊且曖昧的關係。一方面，似乎慾望可以被排除在美的範疇之外，但另一方面美的顯現也遏止、禁止了慾望。 經由踰越的「絕爽」，美始終與惡、死亡掛勾。正如拉庫─拉巴特（Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe）強調，拉岡從慾望構想重新閱讀佛洛依德所建立的精神分析倫理學其實是一種「美學─倫理學」（esthéthique）。美，死亡的容貌，不僅左右著人的慾望與行為。美更以一種令人暈眩盲目的光芒指出了人與其死亡之關係的所在之處。

Lacan contends that psychoanalysis reopens the dimension of “desire” and attributes the ethical and moral forces to desire itself: it is desire that brings about a defense against desire itself. Such an ethical dimension unfolded by the dialectics of desire allows psychoanalysis to subvert the traditional ethics based on the “good-pleasure.” In Lacan’s topography of desire and its object, the good-pleasure merely serves as a lure of desire. The good blurs the fact that the essence of desire is a kind of “jouissance” that transgresses prohibitions, whereas the satisfaction of desire is precisely a jouissance prohibited and threatened by death. The very works of Sade portrays a world of extremely evil that exemplifies this jouissance of transgression. Yet Lacan stresses that there is another element which could bring into view a dimension beyond the pleasure principle and beyond the good, namely, the beautiful. The beautiful has always remained in a special and ambiguous relation with desire. On one hand, it seems that desire could be excluded from the field of the beautiful; on the other, the manifestation of the beautiful also curbs and prohibits desire. Through the transgressive jouissance, the beautiful is always related to the evil and death. As Lacoue-Labarthe emphasizes, Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis, based upon a rereading of Freud through the conception of desire, is in fact an “aesthethic” (esthéthique). The beautiful, as the visage of death, not only directs men’s desires and behaviors, but moreover with a dizzying and glaring splendor points to the locus where men are related to their death.