Abstract
This Chapter addresses the second part of Lacan’s critique of Kant’s famous apologia of the gallows in the Critique of Practical Reason, as it is presented in Section 10 of his essay ‘Kant with Sade’. Nobus explains how Lacan exposes the fallacies of Kant’s argument that rational beings will always choose life over lust, on the basis of Sade’s own life-history and various reflections concerning human rights, freedom of thought, self-governance and courtly love. Clarifying Lacan’s references and allusions, Nobus shows how Lacan disagrees with Kant when it comes to the status of the (moral) Law, and how in Lacan’s conception of the Law the latter is always associated with desire.
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Notes
- 1.
The phrase ‘ton corps est à toi’, which Fink has translated as ‘your body is your property’ (660, 7) is taken from the title of a 1927 novel by the French writer Victor Margueritte. See Margueritte (1927).
- 2.
Lacan’s idea, here, that jouissance implies the acceptance of death echoes Bataille’s definition of eroticism as ‘assenting to life up to the point of death’ (Bataille, 2001, p. 11).
- 3.
The reference to Foucault’s book, and in particular to its third part, only appeared in the Critique and the Sade-versions of ‘Kant with Sade’, where it was attached, as a footnote, to the sentence ending in ‘…one of the noblest steps of humanity’ (p. 661). The fact that the Sade-version of Lacan’s text was in all likelihood produced after the Écrits version, despite it being published earlier, may suggest that Lacan did not intentionally delete this footnote for Écrits, but that it was accidentally omitted.
- 4.
For the nineteenth-century political struggle between the Right (the Bourbons, the monarchists, the Catholics) and the Left (the intellectual heirs of the French Revolution, scientists, free-thinkers) over the interpretation and restriction of individual freedoms, and Pinel’s indirect involvement in the debate, see Weiner (1994, pp. 236–237). Foucault deemed Pinel’s ‘liberation’ of the insane, especially his ‘moral treatment’ method of communal living and ‘wise restraint’, to be just an alternative, and somehow more devious form of institutional control, serving the disciplinary purpose of internalized self-control. This criticism has itself been the subject of detailed criticism. See, for example, Midelfort (1989), which has attracted its own critical response by Gutting (1994).
- 5.
- 6.
The qualification ‘in vain’ was added for the Écrits version of ‘Kant with Sade’.
- 7.
Another reading of this passage would be that it is precisely because of the intervention of the symbolic Law that need becomes desire or, to put it in yet another way: need is transformed into desire by virtue of the Law.
- 8.
For the Ancient Greeks and Romans, suicide constituted an honourable solution to severe personal difficulties, including the pain of illness, whereas in Christian thought it remained unacceptable. Throughout his life, Kant vehemently opposed suicide as a valid course of action for a rational human being, arguing that under no circumstances should human beings be given the right to end their own lives, because it is degrading for human worth. See, for example, Kant (1997b, pp. 144–149) and Kant (2012). In France, suicide was de-criminalized in the 1810 penal code, but in other Western European countries it remained an illegal act until the second half of the twentieth century. In England, for instance, suicide was not de-criminalized until 1961.
- 9.
According to Kant’s biographer Manfred Kuehn, ‘[s]pontaneous laughter or uncontrolled joy did not seem to be in his nature’ (Kuehn, 2001, p. 64). In his Critique of Judgement, Kant defined laughter as ‘an affect arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing’ and humour as a manner belonging to ‘agreeable rather than to fine art’, because ‘the object of the latter…demands a certain seriousness in its presentation’ (Kant, 2007, pp. 161 and 164). As to Sade, whereas there is no evidence that he himself was endowed with a great sense of humour, there is definitely a great deal of black humour in his libertine novels, although some people would no doubt wish to protest against this. Nowhere, however, can one detect a profound sense of comedy in these novels, at least not at the level where the libertine tormentors are cracking jokes, play tricks on each other or can be heard laughing out loud.
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Nobus, D. (2017). Sade Against Kant. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_10
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