Abstract
This Chapter focuses on the fifth section of Lacan’s essay ‘Kant with Sade’, in which Lacan addresses the function of presence in the Sadean fantasy, which is synonymous here with the fantasy as it is articulated by Sade’s libertine heroes. Nobus explains the antinomies between desire, pleasure and jouissance, and he unpacks Lacan’s argument that, in the grand libertine scheme of things, the ineluctable cycle of pleasure always prevents the libertines from realizing their fantasy, so that jouissance is only ever situated at an asymptotic point—where it can be imagined and anticipated, but never fully achieved.
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Notes
- 1.
It is believed that the notion of Schwärmerei was originally coined by Martin Luther, some time during the 1520s. It became a staple of German Enlightenment philosophy during the eighteenth century, and Kant employed it on a regular basis to expose the hollowness of all types of mystical and spiritual reflections. In the aforementioned passage from the Critique of Practical Reason, schwärmende is rendered as ‘enthusiastic’, yet Schwärmerei is more commonly translated as ‘fanaticism’ or ‘exaltation’. Peter Fenves has explained the etymology of the term as follows: ‘Schwärmerei derives from the swarming of bees. The likeness between the aggregates of swarming bees and the congregations of swarming churchmen gives Schwärmerei its highly amorphous and irreducibly figural shape. A commonality between human beings and animals—not human beings and God—is implied in every use of the word. Like bees, Schwärmer fly through the air on erratic paths, and, again like bees, they hover there without any easily understood means of support’ (Fenves, 1993, p. xi). The reader will now understand why Lacan associated Schwärmerei with ‘black swarms’ (p. 652)—the notion’s soundscape also evoking the German word schwarz (black), in a further invocation of the colour of swarming bees. In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan himself had already indicated how Kant was radically dismissive of all mystical beliefs, referring to them as Religionsschwärmereien (Lacan, 1992, p. 84). In the following year’s seminar, on transference, Lacan in turn designated Plato’s belief in the Sovereign Good as a Schwärmerei (Lacan, 2015, p. 5), and he repeated the point in his 1962–1963 seminar on anxiety (Lacan, 2014b, p. 217). For the history of the term Schwärmerei and the philosophical debates it triggered, see La Vopa (1997), and Tavoillot and Tavoillot (2015, pp. 117–122). For Freud’s use of the term and the significance of the ‘swarm’ in Lacan’s theory, see Clemens (2013).
- 2.
Unlike its two previous incarnations, La Nouvelle Justine has never been translated into English, and the only English version of Juliette is the 1968 translation by Austryn Wainhouse (Sade, 1968). The scale of the enterprise would of course be gargantuan: in French, the combined stories of Justine and Juliette come in at just under 2,000 pages.
- 3.
Fink has rendered ‘l’expérience sadique’ simply as ‘sadism’, which has the disadvantage that it reduces the eroto-philosophical event Lacan is attempting to understand to a mere category of sexual psychopathology. In addition, here and elsewhere in the text, Lacan distinguished the Sadean fantasy from the sadistic event, although he would subsequently construct the former on the basis of the latter. In other words, throughout his text Lacan remained very careful not to conflate the sadistic event, as driven by the libertines, with Sade’s literary fantasy, much less with the fantasy that seemingly presided over his personal life. Sade’s literary fantasy does not coincide with the sadistic fantasy, because the entire Justine-cycle was actually written from the perspective of the victim. And in Section 8 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan would make it clear, although probably not clear enough, that Sade-the-man was everything but a real-life incarnation of his ‘sadistic’ heroes, and not just because he spent 27 years of his life in detention.
- 4.
At the end of this section of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan repeated a point he had made numerous times over during the 1950s: ‘[D]esire…cannot be indicated anywhere in a signifier of any demand whatsoever, for it cannot be articulated [pour n’y être pas articulable] in the signifier even though it is articulated there [encore qu’il y soit articulé]’ (pp. 652–653). The idea, here, is that signifiers, as elements of language, can be used to formulate a demand, but always fail to render desire. Put differently, desire always runs through the demand, without it ever being identifiable in a particular signifying element of this demand. An almost identical phrase appeared in ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’, although with a causal relationship added: ‘[I]t is precisely because desire is articulated [articulé] that it is not articulable [articulable]’ (Lacan, 2006e, p. 681).
- 5.
In the endnote to this passage of ‘Kant with Sade’, Fink stated that there ‘seems to be a reference to the Greek mysteries’, here, yet I do not believe that the ‘black fetish’ is any way connected (in the guise of the phallus) to ancient Greek rituals (p. 832, note 773, 3). Lacan’s term ‘black fetish’ should probably also not be understood as a conventional, black-coloured sexual prop, but in all likelihood it refers to an African magical statue, of the kind the surrealists had celebrated in their search for representations of pure, unconstrained creative expression, and whose significance in sub-Saharan rituals of god worship had already been described by Charles de Brosses back in 1760 (De Brosses, 1988; Mack, 1995). Lacan may have come across images of such objects in the pages of the surrealist journals Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution and Le Minotaure, to which he himself had at one point contributed, as well as in the richly illustrated ethnographic works on ‘black Africa’ by Michel Leiris (Leiris, 2009; Clarck-Taoua, 2002), not to mention via André Breton’s personal collection of African objects (Ades, 1995). In the lecture of 16 January 1963 of his seminar on anxiety, Lacan commented on the sadist’s desire as follows: ‘In carrying through his act, his rite…what the agent of sadistic desire doesn’t know is what he is seeking, and what he is seeking is to make himself appear…as a pure object, as a black fetish’ (Lacan, 2014b, p. 104). All of this does not explain, of course, how Lacan would have been prompted to make the connection between African power objects and Sade’s libertine heroes in the first place. In all likelihood, it was inspired by a controversial private performance by the French-Canadian late-surrealist artist Jean Benoit. On 2 December 1959, on the occasion of the 145th anniversary of Sade’s death, Benoit appeared as a gigantic African power object to a 100-or-so specially invited guests at the house of Joyce Mansour in Paris, in a one-off ‘execution of the will of the Marquis de Sade’. After slowly removing the various parts of his self-made ‘black’ costume, he approached the fireplace, took out a red-hot iron from the coal, and branded himself on the chest with the letters S A D E. I have not been able to establish whether Lacan attended the event, which took place shortly before he started exploring Sade’s moral philosophy, but his close association with the surrealist movement could have definitely secured him a personal invitation. In any case, in Benoit’s performance the libertine literally became the ‘black fetish’. See Le Brun (1996, pp. 30–42), Breton (1977) and Apostolidès (2007).
- 6.
In another brilliant instance of Sadean black humour, Juliette offers Clairwil the best advice: ‘For the fulfillment of your aims, my dear…I know of little else than what may be termed moral murder, which is arrived at by means of counsels, writings or actions’ (Sade, 1968, p. 525, italics added). As I shall show later on, Lacan was adamant that the Sadean fantasy, and more specifically the libertine ideology of criminal excess, should be distinguished from Sade’s own fantasy, i.e. the one that presided over his life, yet in the instance above the author may very well have been speaking in his own name.
- 7.
Fink has translated ‘Puisqu’il [le désir] part soumis au plaisir’ as ‘For desire disappears under pleasure’s sway’, yet much like in the previous paragraph of the text the verb ‘part’ probably means ‘leaves’, ‘departs’, ‘proceeds’ or better still ‘sets forth’, here. Lacan did not suggest that pleasure neutralizes desire, but rather that desire is bound up with (the law and the limitations of) pleasure, insofar as desire follows the (libidinal) cycle of tension increasing or decreasing. The only thing that would make desire disappear is jouissance, i.e. an unblemished and limitless satisfaction, yet the latter remains literally and metaphorically off-limits, insofar as it can never be fully attained. As to the association of pleasure with a reduction of tension, this is of course eminently Freudian. See Freud (1955c).
- 8.
In his lecture on Sade at the State University of New York—Buffalo of March 1970, Foucault interpreted the libertines’ eroticization of death as the ‘greatest offense against nature’ (Foucault, 2015, p. 142), because it annihilates nature’s gesture of having created us, yet this argument relies on nature being perceived as a creative force, which is by no means representative of how many of Sade’s libertines think. If anything, most Sadean libertines celebrate the destructive rather than the creative force of Nature. As to the Eleusinian mysteries, these were the most famous initiation ceremonies of Ancient Greece. In the paragraph preceding this statement, Lacan referred to the ineluctable interference of pleasure on the libertines’ pathway to jouissance as ‘the ever early [toujours précoce] fall of the wing, with which desire is able to sign the reproduction of its form’. The point is unquestionably arcane, but the image of the ‘wing of desire’ (l’aile du désir) has a long history in Western culture, from the Greek poet Meleager’s epigram ‘The Message’, in which it is said ‘On the wing of desire/I come towards my beloved/by land and not by sea’, to Alphonse de Lamartine’s 1817 poem ‘Immortality’, which includes the line ‘Carried away far from the world on the wing of desire/I plunged with you in these obscurities’, not to mention various other occurrences in the works of Saint Augustine, Mirabeau, Flaubert and Georges Sand. As such, the ‘form of desire’ has indeed been regularly reproduced with the ‘sign’ of a wing, and it is this image that Lacan was conjuring up here. In addition, the primordial Greek god of Eros, the emblem of desire and sexual attraction, has always been represented as a winged figure, and in Roman culture a winged phallus (fascinus) was regularly used as a protective charm against the threat of the evil eye.
- 9.
Fink’s translation is much more precise than Lacan’s French at this point of the text. The original reads ‘Le plaisir donc, de la volonté là-bas rival qui stimule, n’est plus ici que complice défaillant’, and this should indeed be understood as ‘Thus, the pleasure, which is there [in Kant’s system] the stimulating [as in “incentivizing”] rival of the will [to comply with the moral law], is here [in Sade’s system] but a failing accomplice [of the will to jouissance]’.
- 10.
Sensory pain impulses travel in so-called ‘afferent fibres’ from the peripheral tissues to the spinal cord and then to the brain. How this happens at the molecular level is still not fully understood, but it is generally believed that the mechanisms are much more complex than those involved in the so-called ‘reward cycle’, which controls pleasure-related experiences. For a brief overview of pain mechanisms, see Dormandy (2006, pp. 480–487).
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Nobus, D. (2017). Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_5
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