Abstract
In Section 11 of his essay ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan criticizes the second part of Kant’s apologia of the gallows in the Critique of Practical Reason. Nobus explains why Lacan disagrees with Kant when he says that rational subjects will always be prepared to give up their life in favour of the preservation of the (moral) Law. Unpacking Lacan’s argument that Kant is too rash, when drawing conclusions about human rationality, Nobus demonstrates how Lacan proposes a theory of desire in which desire can be elevated to the status of a moral principle in its own right. As such, the Chapter gives weight to Lacan’s conceptualization of desire as a force that is not excluded, but sustained by the (moral) Law.
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Notes
- 1.
In light of Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive freedom, one would have to admit that there is very little by way of authentic self-governance in Kant’s ethical system.
- 2.
In ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan alluded to how Jewish people would have been condemned under the Spanish Inquisition, to how Consistory Courts would have executed people as atheists (as in the famous cases of Casimir Liszinski, Lucilio Vanini and Etienne Dolet), and to how political dissidents would often be punished after an act of self-incrimination in a show trial, ‘where the name of the game is autocritique’ (p. 662).
- 3.
- 4.
In ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan repeated Kant’s second example, although without providing a reference (p. 662). Francis I (1494–1547) and Charles V (1500–1558) were lifelong rivals, and their enmity centred inter alia on the disputed Duchy of Milan.
- 5.
The painting humorously portrays the Biblical parable described in Matthew 15:14, which is generally rendered in English as ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’.
- 6.
The last three paragraphs of Section 11 were added for the Écrits version of ‘Kant with Sade’, and reflect Lacan’s exploration of the gaze, as one of the figurations of the object as a cause of desire, in Seminar XI (Lacan, 1994b, pp. 65–119). A detailed analysis of Lacan’s ideas on the relationship between the eye and the gaze falls beyond the scope of this book. For a scholarly, introductory exposition of these ideas, in the context of broader considerations of visuality in psychoanalysis and French philosophy, the reader will benefit from Jay (1993, pp. 329–380). At the very end of the last paragraph of Section 11, Lacan referred to the division of the subject as situated ‘between centre and absence’ (p. 663), with which he adopted the title of a collection of prose poems and drawings by Henri Michaux (Michaux, 1936). The prose poems were subsequently included in Lointain intérieur (The Far-Off Inside), in which the phrase appeared as the title both of the first section and of the final prose poem within that section (Michaux, 1963, pp. 37–38). For an English version of the prose poem, see Michaux (1994, pp. 52–54). The final line of the poem is translated, here, as ‘It was at our arrival, between center and absence, in Eureka, in the nest of bubbles…’ Lacan also employed the expression ‘between centre and absence’ in the session of 8 March 1972 of his Seminar XIX,…ou pire (Lacan, 2011, p. 121), and in his essay ‘Lituraterre’ (Lacan, 2013b, p. 331).
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Nobus, D. (2017). The Moral Principle of Desire. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_11
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