Abstract
Nobus elucidates how, in the third section of his essay ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan arrives at the conclusion that Kant’s categorical imperative returns as an ethical maxim in the philosophical disquisitions of Sade’s libertine heroes. The differences and similarities between Sade’s and Kant’s imperative are examined, and Nobus explains why Lacan is confident to assert that Sade’s libertines are more honest than Kant when it comes to articulating their ethical system. The Chapter also introduces and explains two key terms in Lacan’s reading of Kant and Sade: the (divided) subject and the Other.
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Notes
- 1.
For obvious reasons, it was never performed as such. The closest a theatre company ever came to performing the work was in the 2003 production XXX by the Catalan group La Fura dels Baus, which created an outrage in many European countries, despite the sex acts only being simulated and transmitted to the audience via video screens.
- 2.
The designation of ‘mystification’, here, can be interpreted in at least four different ways. Without using the term ‘mystification’ as such, Pierre Klossowski posited in ‘Sade and the Revolution’—a paper Lacan would have read when he was working on ‘Kant with Sade’—that the pamphlet, which he called a ‘tract’, is in a sense more Dolmancé’s rather than Sade’s work, whilst also stressing (much like Lacan) that precisely because of this authorship ploy, which provides a ‘protective barrier against discovery’ (Phillips, 2001, p. 70), the text should be considered more representative of Sade’s own views than any of the political orations he delivered in his own name during his years of freedom (Klossowski, 1992, p. 58). Secondly, ‘mystification’ could also be interpreted as ‘distraction’ or ‘diversion’, in which case Lacan could have been thinking of Lely’s remark that the pamphlet comes across as an arbitrary intercalation, which interrupts the dramatic flow and compromises the harmony of Philosophy in the Boudoir (Lely, 1957, p. 545). Thirdly, ‘mystification’ could be read, here, as a synonym for joke, a satirical cum ironic take on the political ideology of the French Revolution (Phillips, 2012). Finally, the term ‘mystification’ could simply stand for a text with a hidden meaning, a coded discourse which needs to be deciphered for its true meaning to become clear. As to Freud’s interpretation of the ‘dream within the dream’, this is what he adduced in the sixth chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams: ‘It is safe to suppose…that what has been “dreamt” in the dream is a representation of the reality [Realität], the true recollection [die wirkliche Erinnerung].… In other words, if a particular event is inserted into a dream as a dream by the dream-work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event—the strongest affirmation of it’ (Freud, 1953a, p. 338).
- 3.
In the Critique version of ‘Kant with Sade’, the complete sentence reads as follows: ‘I have the right to enjoy your body, I will say to whoever I like, and I will exercise this right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your body’ (Lacan, 1963, p. 294). Lacan’s original source of inspiration for the maxim is likely to have been a sentence from Sade’s Juliette ou les prospérités du vice, which he had already quoted in Seminar VII as paradigmatic for the ‘law of jouissance’ that underpins the Sadean social utopia: ‘Pray avail me of that part of your body which is capable of giving me a moment’s satisfaction, and, if you are so inclined, amuse yourself [jouissez] with whatever part of mine may be agreeable to you’ (Sade, 1968, pp. 63–64; Lacan, 1992, p. 202, where Lacan’s translator has given his own, slightly more prosaic version of Sade’s exalted French). Since the sentence had already been quoted by Blanchot in ‘La raison de Sade’, Lacan could have taken it from there rather than from the original source. See Blanchot (1986, p. 15; 2004, p. 10). Unlike Lacan’s own Sadean maxim from ‘Kant with Sade’, this original proposition does appear to promote a reciprocity of rights, yet as Blanchot had also indicated, it was never designed to justify simultaneous, mutual pleasure amongst human beings, not even amongst the libertines themselves, but rather epitomized the right of every human being to make unlimited use of any other human being, in a radically free act of sovereign power and willful subjection. See Blanchot (2004, pp. 11–17). As will be shown further on in the book, Lacan also added the component of non-reciprocity to his formalization of the libertines’ ‘sadistic’ fantasy when he rewrote Section 6 of ‘Kant with Sade’ for Écrits, drawing on ideas he had developed in his 1964 seminar on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 2006g; 1994b).
- 4.
The notion ‘black humour’ was coined by André Breton, who did not hesitate to include Sade in his Anthology of Black Humour as one of the most magisterial incarnations of it. In his presentation of the texts, Breton emphasized that Sade’s ‘plainly outrageous passages’ actually ‘relax the reader by tipping him off that the author is not taken in [en lui donnant à penser que l’auteur n’est pas dupe]’, whereby he added that in his life Sade had but inaugurated the genre of the ‘sinister joke’ [mystification sinistre], whilst still paying a very high price for it (Breton, 2009, p. 46). Indeed, as we shall see later on, Sade spent many years in prison for relatively minor sexual misdeeds and for expressing politically dissident views, and he vehemently denied, until his final days, having authored any of the libertine novels that had been attributed to him. When Lacan mentioned Sade’s black humour in ‘Kant with Sade’, he was undoubtedly thinking of Breton’s comment, here, and he may have also taken the term ‘mystification’ from it. In addition, the idea of Sade not being duped (by his own literary fantasy, and his creative freedom) is another key pillar of Lacan’s argument in ‘Kant with Sade’, insofar as it constitutes the hinge between Section 7 and Section 8 of the text, because it enabled Lacan to differentiate between the ‘practical reason’ of the fictitious Sadean libertines and the ‘practical reason’ presiding over Sade’s own life, as a writer of libertine novels. Yet if there is anything that still divides the community of Sade-scholars, it is precisely the author’s intent. In her introduction to the new English translation of Philosophy in the Boudoir, Francine du Plessix Gray stated that Sade’s intent was ‘clearly parodic’, both in the revolutionary pamphlet that is being read aloud by the Chevalier, which she designated as a pastiche of Robespierre’s principles—and which Lacan too singles out for its ‘deriding of the historical situation’ (p. 648)—and in the cruelly pornographic parts of the book, which Sade asked all mothers to give to their daughters as compulsory reading (du Plessix Gray, 2006, pp. viii–xiv). Suffused with sardonic humour as some of Sade’s works may be, it is quite unlikely that every reader will burst out laughing when, in the final dialogue of Philosophy in the Boudoir, Eugénie sews up her mother’s vagina with a huge needle and thick red thread. One could venture the hypothesis that through his act of writing, Sade intended to elicit jouissance in his readership, whilst simultaneously making his readers feel guilty and ashamed for deriving jouissance from their act of reading—and that this is where Sade’s real perversion needs to be situated—yet I am not convinced that Sade cared all that much about his readers, or that he had a specific type of readership in mind when he wrote his libertine novels. In his recent study of why Sade was taken seriously, and seemingly for the first time, during the twentieth century, Éric Marty called Breton the worst reader of Sade one can imagine, precisely because he had dared to identify him as a black humorist, and had thus refused to take him seriously (Marty, 2011, p. 16), as if humour by definition excludes seriousness.
- 5.
Combining Freud’s insight in his paper on humour with his argument in ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ that in the guise of the harsh, cruel and inexorable super-ego, ‘Kant’s Categorical Imperative is thus the direct heir of the Oedipus complex’ (Freud, 1961a, p. 167), one could go so far as to say that for all the seriousness of the categorical imperative it is also potentially humorous. Lacan himself pointed to the ‘grain of salt’ (p. 648) with which Kant’s moral law could be spiced up or, to be more precise, to the need for it to be taken with a ‘pinch of salt’. Kant would no doubt have disagreed, but one could draw attention, here, to the way in which the philosopher’s radical belief in moral duty occasionally verged on the absurd, as with the famous example from ‘On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy’, in which Kant refused to compromise on the necessity of telling the truth, even when it is in response to a murderer who is asking where his victim is hiding (Kant, 1996).
- 6.
After the Chevalier has finished reading the pamphlet, Eugénie declares that she finds some of its principles a touch dangerous, to which Dolmancé replies: ‘Only pity and charity are dangerous in this world. Goodness [la bonté] is never anything but a frailty, and the ingratitude and impertinence of the weak always force decent people to repent those attributes. If a good observer tries to catalog [calculer] all the dangers of pity and compares them with the dangers of an unflagging solidity, he will see that the dangers of pity carry the day’ (Sade, 2006, p. 149).
- 7.
It is now common practice to leave the term jouissance untranslated in English, if only because none of the standard options available—enjoyment, satisfaction, orgasm—could do full justice to the complex connotations of the French word. I should also point out, here, that in Lacan’s own work, the meaning of the notion jouissance changes over the years—from an imaginary figuration of libido, it becomes a real, unattainable and therefore impossible antagonist of desire, before also representing a discursive and therefore symbolic element of repetition. In ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan used jouissance mainly as a synonym for eternal bliss, permanent ecstasy and limitless (sexual) satisfaction, in accordance with how Sade’s libertine heroes would describe the experience. On the various ‘paradigms’ of jouissance in Lacan’s work, see Braunstein (2005), Miller (2000) and Jadin and Ritter (2012).
- 8.
As we shall see, the principle of non-reciprocity also applies to how Lacan himself plays out Sade against Kant in his text. Whilst he employs Sade as an instrument for performing certain critical tasks on Kant, he does not draw on Kant when it comes to exposing the limits of Sade. Lacan reads Kant ‘with Sade’, using Sade as a critical tool, but he does not read Sade ‘with Kant’. This is strictly in conformity with how he interpreted the function of Sade’s libertine novels within the author’s own ‘practical reason’, i.e. as an instrument of truth and desire.
- 9.
In all fairness, it rarely happens that the Sadean victims and tormentors change roles, at least not at the level of the essential positions to which Sade assigns them. Justine, the quintessential paragon of virtue, has always been and will always be a victim, whereas her libertine sister Juliette never relinquishes her role as tormentor. As to the young Eugénie in Philosophy in the Boudoir, she may be morally vulnerable and physically weak, but she is hardly innocent, and unexpectedly proves herself to be a highly enthusiastic pupil when her ‘instruction’ commences. One cannot really argue, therefore, that from first being a victim at the hands of her tormentors she subsequently becomes a tormentor in her own right, when she starts victimizing her mother. As I will show later on, Eugénie was always already a libertine, and this is also why she succeeds so swiftly in turning pain into pleasure. It does happen, however, that when one libertine momentarily ‘victimizes’ an accomplice, the latter threatens the former with an appropriate form of revenge. For example, when Dolmancé tells Madame de Saint-Ange ‘Would you be so kind, Madame, as to allow me to bite and pinch your gorgeous buttocks while I’m fucking?’, she replies: ‘As much as you like my friend. But I warn you, I’ll get even with you!’ (Sade, 2006, p. 156). In addition, it may happen that partners in crime are exposed as fake or weak libertines, and are therefore themselves singled out for immolation. This is what happens, for example, to the Italian libertine Cordelli, who is in the habit of asking God for forgiveness each time he has indulged in his passions, and who is being poisoned by Juliette and her accomplice Durand as soon as he is identified as a ‘weak-watered soul’ (Sade, 1968, pp. 1074–1075). It is also the fate of Olympia, Princess Borghese, who is thrown into the Vesuvius because she ‘lacked depth and rigor in her principles’ (Sade, 1968, p. 1019), and more specifically because she regarded the libertine bond as sacrosanct and could not bring herself to killing a libertine companion. Furthermore, at the end of Juliette, Noirceuil recounts to the heroine that he is responsible for murdering Saint-Fond. Although he does not give any other reasons than ambition and greed, we may assume that it was Saint-Fond’s unforgivable belief in the immortality of the soul that cost him his life (Sade, 1968, pp. 1162–1163).
- 10.
The difference between the ‘enunciating subject’ and the ‘subject of the statement’ is even clearer in the English translation, because Fink has placed additional quotation marks both at the end of the first clause, and at the beginning of the second clause of the law of jouissance, thus making it unambiguous that there is another sentence of direct speech within the spoken statement.
- 11.
The French text reads ‘car de façon latente l’impératif moral [de Kant] n’en fait pas moins, puisque c’est de l’Autre que son commandement nous requiert’, which is quite ambiguous, because this formulation may be interpreted either as the subject (us) being placed in the position of Other, or as the Other being on the side of the commandment. In his translation, Fink has opted for ‘the moral imperative latently does no less, since its commandment requisitions us as Other’ in the body of the text, and has suggested the alternative ‘the moral imperative latently does no less, since it is from the Other that its commandment requisitions us’ in note 770, 6 on p. 831. In my interpretation, Lacan intimated here that ‘we’ (as subjects) are not requisitioned qua Other, but only from or through the Other, so I would prefer the alternative translation suggested by Fink.
- 12.
Here, Lacan wrote law with a capital L (‘la Loi morale’), which Fink has not reproduced. In general, whenever Lacan employed a capital letter, it was to indicate the symbolic status of the concept. Hence, the moral Law would be synonymous with the symbolic Law, the Law as coming from the Other.
- 13.
Fink has translated ‘s’y détache’ as ‘stands out’, but the resonances of the verb, in this context, may be more clearly captured with the literal translation of ‘being detached’, which connotes a sense of disconnectness.
- 14.
Rather cryptically, Lacan captured the Kantian imperative, here, as ‘Tu es’, which Fink has left untranslated, but which may be rendered as ‘You are’ or ‘Thou art’.
- 15.
If the distinction between Other and subject is fairly clear in this section of Lacan’s paper—the Other being the Sadean tormentor, the ‘anyone’ who speaks in the name and for the sake of Nature, and the subject being the Sadean victim—in the following sections Lacan will often use the term Other to refer to the victim, not in the least because he will be considering the Sadean fantasy primarily from the perspective of the tormentor, for whom the victim is now in the place of a nameless Other, quite literally in most cases.
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Nobus, D. (2017). Sade’s Kantian Maxim. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_3
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