The Law of Desire

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxxiii

   PDF

2. A New Ethical System

   • Dany Nobus

   Pages 1-8

3. Lacan Reads Kant

   • Dany Nobus

   Pages 9-16

4. Sade’s Kantian Maxim

   • Dany Nobus

   Pages 17-27

5. Regarding the Pain of Others

   • Dany Nobus

   Pages 29-36

6. Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures

   • Dany Nobus

   Pages 37-45

7. The Sadean Fantasy

   • Dany Nobus

   Pages 47-63

8. Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy!

   • Dany Nobus

   Pages 65-71

9. Sade’s Practical Reason

   • Dany Nobus

   Pages 73-85

10. The Law Sustains Desire

    • Dany Nobus

    Pages 87-97

11. Sade Against Kant

    • Dany Nobus

    Pages 99-105

12. The Moral Principle of Desire

    • Dany Nobus

    Pages 107-112

13. Desire and Happiness

    • Dany Nobus

    Pages 113-122

14. Lacan Against Sade

    • Dany Nobus

    Pages 123-130

15. Some More Effort…

    • Dany Nobus

    Pages 131-140

16. Back Matter

    Pages 141-175

    PDF

This book offers the first comprehensive discussion of Lacan’s Kant with Sade, an essay widely recognised as one of his most important and difficult texts. Here, the reader will find a detailed roadmap for each section of the essay, including clarifications of the allusions, implicit borrowings and references in Lacan’s text, unique insights into the essay’s publication history, and a critical assessment of its reception. The author expertly defines key terms, explains complex theoretical arguments, and contextualises the work within a larger philosophical discourse. No prior knowledge of Lacan, Kant or Sade is assumed, allowing both newcomers and those who are well-versed in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism to benefit from the book. This engaging book clears the path for a long overdue re-discovery and a proper appreciation of one of Lacan’s most challenging works, inspiring a renewed debate on the significance of Lacanian psychoanalysis for moral philosophy and literary theory. 

• Écrits, ‘Kant avec Sade’
• Critique
• Bruce Fink
• Sexology
• Masochism
• The Other
• Ethics
• Sadean fantasy
• Freud
• sexual behaviour

“Dany Nobus has met the challenge—how to make Lacan’s most opaque essay, the notorious “Kant with Sade,” transparent—and has succeeded. This alert and lucid book gives all its due to one of Lacan’s most ignored “writings,” his systematic confrontation of Kant’s and Sade’s philosophies. Never flattening the densely allusive text, Nobus unpacks it slowly, showing why Lacan could quip that he had turned Kant into “a flower of sadism”—thanks to him those Flowers of Evil sprout into a whole bunch of heady and exhilarating speculations.” (Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania)

“Dany Nobus has achieved something that I would have thought impossible: he has taken what is arguably the most difficult text in Lacan’s Écrits, and—by dint of his well-known perspicacity and a close study of thousands of pages of Sade’s work, and hundreds more by Kant, Bataille, Klossowski, and numerous others—unfolded it step-by-step so that we ordinary mortals can get a decent grasp on it. He has even convincingly criticized my own published translation of Kant with Sade, forcing me to rethink and revise a text I worked so hard on. I couldn't recommend his book more highly!” (Bruce Fink, Lacanian analyst, translator of several works by Lacan, and author of numerous books on Lacan)

• Department of Psychology, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, United Kingdom

  Dany Nobus

Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalysis at Brunel University London, and Chair of the Freud Museum London, UK. He is the author of Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis, and, with Malcolm Quinn, Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology, alongside numerous papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis.

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