Abstract
In the sixth section of his essay ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan develops his schema of the Sadean fantasy. In this Chapter, Nobus explains all the elements of the schema, as well as the trajectory that connects them, and he draws on the disparity between pleasure and jouissance in order to clarify notions such as ‘brute subject0 of pleasure’, ‘between-two-deaths’ and ‘second death’. The Chapter concludes with a discussion of the ethical system of Saint-Fond (one of Sade’s libertines in his novel Juliette), and in particular the paradoxes associated with Saint-Fond’s aspiration to ensure that his victims’ suffering does not end with their physical death.
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Notes
- 1.
The letter V is evidently taken from the French ‘volonté de jouissance’, a notion also invoking ‘volonté de puissance’, which is the common French translation of Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Wille zur Macht’ (will to power). Given that the English translation of this notion is ‘will to jouissance’, one could argue that, here and elsewhere in the English version of ‘Kant with Sade’, the V should be changed into a W. However, as I shall explain later on, Lacan also interpreted the V as the first letter of the Latin word vel (which means ‘or’), representing the lower half of the ◇, which he then regarded as a certain type of logical disjunction, for which the conventional notation in propositional logic is v. As such, there are good reasons for maintaining the letter V in English.
- 2.
In the second and third paragraphs of Section 6, Lacan wrote: ‘Elle [the algebraic form of the fantasy] y articule en effet [1] le plaisir auquel a été substitué un instrument (objet a de la formule) à [2] la sorte de division soutenue du sujet qu’ordonne l’expérience. Ce qui ne s’obtient qu’à ce que son agent se fige en la rigidité de l’objet, dans la visée que sa division de sujet [the agent’s division] lui soit tout entière de l’Autre renvoyée.’ Although Fink’s translation of these extremely dense, yet exceptionally precise sentences is on the whole accurate, ‘la sorte de division soutenue du sujet qu’ordonne l’expérience’ could perhaps be rendered more correctly as ‘the kind of sustained division of the subject, as ordered by the experience’, rather than ‘the kind of sustained division of the subject that experience orders’ (p. 653). In addition, ‘que sa division de sujet lui soit tout entière de l’Autre renvoyée’ should perhaps not be translated as ‘having his division as a subject entirely reflected in the Other’ (p. 653), but as ‘having his division as a subject entirely reflected to him by the Other’.
- 3.
I therefore disagree with Fink’s remark that Lacan’s comment appears to imply that the ‘object desires the subject and the subject desires the object’ (p. 832, note 774, 5). Although Lacan clarifies that the lozenge should always be read as ‘desire for’, from left to right and from right to left, it should never be taken as a reciprocity of desire between subject and object. If, for instance, one decides to read the formula from right to left, this by definition excludes the option of the formula simultaneously being read from left to right, and vice versa.
- 4.
Repeating what he had said earlier in his text about subjective structures, i.e. relationships between the subject and the Other (as the repository of signifiers), being ‘intrinsically incompatible with reciprocity’ (p. 649), Lacan underscored, here, that a non-reciprocal relation ‘is coextensive with the subject’s formations’ (p. 653).
- 5.
In another concise gloss on the structure of the lozenge, Lacan wrote: ‘The sign ◇ registers the relations envelopment-development-conjunction-disjunction’ (Lacan, 2006f, p. 542, note 17).
- 6.
In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan did refer to Blanchot, and urged his audience to consult his work on Sade and Lautréamont (Blanchot, 2004; Lacan, 1992, pp. 200–201), whereas in the last session of his seminar on identification, Lacan acknowledged Blanchot’s 1948 novel L’Arrêt de mort (Blanchot, 2000) as a confirmation of his own ideas on the ‘second death’ in the ethics seminar (Lacan, 2003, p. 46).
- 7.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that Lacan wrote ‘brute subject of pleasure’ rather than ‘brute subject of jouissance’, because he regarded jouissance as something that sets in after the symbolic law has taken effect—as an experience of prohibited and therefore intrinsically ‘painful pleasure’. To destroy the symbolic law is therefore tantamount to removing jouissance too, because pleasure is no longer forbidden. In a session of his Seminar X on anxiety which post-dates the completion of the Critique version of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan did refer in this context to ‘subject of jouissance’ (Lacan, 2014b, p. 173), yet it should be noted that the Critique version did not contain a definition of the S in the schema nor, for that matter, of the V. The definitions of these terms were only included when Lacan rewrote ‘Kant with Sade’ for Écrits. Once again, I am grateful to Stijn Vanheule for alerting me to the passage in Lacan’s Seminar X.
- 8.
The schema obviously relies on 5 terms (d, a, V, $ and S) rather than 4, but Lacan situated the starting point of the construction in a rather than in d, and saw V (the will to jouissance) as the libertines’ expression of Nature’s desire, so that V is always already intended as a representation of d. Indeed, on the only other occasion when Lacan drew the schema of the Sadean fantasy, in his seminar on anxiety, he deleted the vector d → a altogether, and replaced V with d (Lacan, 2014b, p. 104). In ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan did not explain why a quadripartite structure is always required from ‘the vantage point of the unconscious’ (depuis l’inconscient) (p. 653), but from the beginning of his teaching he had insisted on adding a fourth term (death) to the threefold, Freudian structure of the Oedipus complex (Lacan, 1979, p. 424) and when, during the 1950s, he started to conceptualize the unconscious as structured like a language, he captured this structure with the terms S1 and S2, to which he then added $ and a. These four terms subsequently became the key operators of Lacan’s theory of the four discourses (Lacan, 2007). For a more extensive exploration of the various fourfold structures in Lacan’s teaching, see Miller (1984–1985, 1986).
- 9.
The definition of the object a as cause of desire (or, here, as cause of the will to jouissance) was also added by Lacan when he rewrote ‘Kant with Sade’ for Écrits. This idea, which would become a staple of Lacan’s teaching during the 1960s and 1970s, was first introduced in the 1962–1963 seminar on anxiety (Lacan, 2014b, p. 101). Also, playing on Kant’s point in chapter 2 of ‘The analytic of pure practical reason’ that the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are ‘modi of a single category, namely that of causality’ (Kant, 1997b, p. 56), Lacan jokingly suggested that the status of the object a (the object of desire) as cause might become the linchpin for an alternative Kantian Critique, to be called Critique of Impure Reason (p. 654). I should also mention that, when Pope Pius VI explained his philosophical doctrine to Juliette, he distinguished between vices and virtues on the basis of an epistemological criterion that seems totally apposite in this context: ‘[W]hat we characterize as vices are more beneficial, more necessary than our virtues, since these vices are creative and these virtues are merely created; or, if you prefer, these vices are causes, these virtues only effects…’ (Sade, 1968, p. 771). Lacan had quoted this passage in his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1992, p. 210).
- 10.
Because Lacan will draw again on the logical disjunction (vel, V) of alienation, in Section 8 of ‘Kant with Sade’, as an operation that is based on the principle of the union (réunion) in set theory, I should nonetheless explain that Lacan’s point has to do with the fact that the truth table of the inclusive disjunction in a propositional calculus follows the definition of the union in set theory: the union of two sets is made up of those elements that belong to one or the other set, and those elements that belong to both, whereas the inclusive disjunction is valid when one or the other of two propositions is true, and when both are true. I can refer the reader who wishes to explore this part of Lacan’s teaching further to Sipos (1994, pp. 105–122), Fink (1990), Fink (1995, pp. 49–55), Laurent (1995) and Nobus (2013).
- 11.
When Lacan wrote that Sade ‘avows what is obvious in the question “What does he want?” (Que veut-il?)’ (p. 654), he did not actually clarify what exactly he believed Sade was avowing by way of response to this question, nor, for that matter, how the ‘he’ in the question should be understood. And so my own answer, here, could easily be seen as a subjective interpretation, or worse as my own fantasy, which would not be too far removed from one of Lacan’s own definitions of the fantasy, i.e. that it is an answer to the mystery of the Other’s desire, an elaborate response to the question as to what the Other wants. I feel nonetheless justified in my reading, because of the way in which Lacan himself captured the gist of ‘Kant with Sade’ at the very end of his seminar on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: ‘I have proved that his [Kant’s] theory of consciousness, when he writes of practical reason, is sustained only by giving a specification of the moral law which, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state [le désir à l’état pur], that very desire that culminates in the sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love in one’s human tenderness—I would say, not only in the rejection of the pathological object, but also in its sacrifice and murder. That is why I wrote Kant avec Sade’ (Lacan, 1994b, pp. 275–276). Thus, the ‘he’ in the question ‘What does he want?’ does not so much refer to Kant or Sade, or to the Sadean libertine, but to the human subject in general, insofar as its pure (unadulterated, un-socialized and un-alienated) desire would be entirely geared towards (a fantasy of) radical destruction. As to the question ‘What does he want?’, Lacan stated in ‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’ that ‘the Other’s question…which takes some such form as “Che vuoi” [the expression is taken from Jacques Cazotte’s Le diable amoureux (Cazotte, 2011)], “What do you want?”, is the question that best leads the subject to the path of his own desire’ (Lacan, 2006e, p. 690).
- 12.
The most powerful analysis of the libertines’ chronic obsession with numbers is to be found in Hénaff (1999, pp. 27–32), who distinguished no less than four principles of ‘arithmetical reduction’: measuring, assessing, adding and drawing up accounts (bookkeeping). By way of example, Hénaff reproduced Sade’s hilarious footnote to the account of a large-scale orgy in which Juliette and her friend Clairwil have been participating, and whose description had already included numerous calculations of the number of ‘fuckings’ involved: ‘In such sort that these two winning creatures [Clairwil and Juliette], not counting oral incursions—for mouth-fucking produces upon the fucked too faint an impression to merit consideration here—had, at this stage, been fucked, Clairwil one hundred and eighty-five times and Juliette one hundred and ninety-two, this both cuntwise and asswardly. We have deemed it necessary to provide this reckoning [cette addition] rather than have ladies interrupt their reading to establish a tally, as otherwise they would most assuredly be inclined to do’ (Sade, 1968, pp. 488–489, note 9). Here is an example from Philosophy in the Boudoir. After Dolmancé has measured the gardener Augustin’s cock—‘Thirteen inches long and eight and a half around’—he allows himself to be sodomized by the mighty organ. As Augustin proceeds, Dolmancé asks Eugénie ‘How many inches to go?’, to which she replies ‘Barely two!’. Dolmancé calculates: ‘So I’ve got eleven up my ass…What sheer bliss!’ (Sade, 2006, p. 78 & 82).
- 13.
The Greek term aphanisis (άφάνισις, literally: ‘rendering invisible’ or ‘making disappear’) was originally introduced by Ernest Jones in a 1927 paper on ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality’ to describe the total extinction of ‘sexual capacity and enjoyment’, as opposed to the partial threat of castration (Jones, 1950, p. 440). When Lacan borrowed the term, he generally employed it not with reference to sexuality, but as a designation for the so-called ‘fading of the subject’ (Lacan, 1994b, p. 208), the moment when the subject manifests itself in the very act of its own disappearance. In ‘Kant with Sade’, the aphanisis of the subject, situated at the point of $, refers more specifically to the moment when the victims faint under the pain that is inflicted upon them, at least in the schema of the Sadean fantasy.
- 14.
On the eve of the official start of the 120 days of Sodom, the Duc de Blangis delivers a lengthy sermon to all the little boys and girls who have been chosen for immolation in an increasingly frenzied cycle of orgies. The message is shockingly clear: ‘Give a thought to your circumstances, think what you are, what we are, and may these reflections cause you to quake—you are beyond the borders of France in the depths of an uninhabitable forest, high amongst the naked mountains; the paths that brought you here were destroyed behind you as you advanced along them. You are enclosed in an impregnable citadel; no one on earth knows you are here, you are beyond the reach of your friends, of your kin: insofar as the world is concerned, you are already dead, and if yet you breathe, ’tis by our pleasure, and for it only’ (Sade, 1990, pp. 250–251). In this context, Lacan also referred to Antigone in ‘Kant with Sade’ (p. 654), whereby he quoted (although with a misspelling that has been reproduced in the English version) the famous first line (781) of the Chorus’ response to Creon’s decree that the eponymous heroine be buried alive: Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν (Love invincible in battle) (Sophocles, 1998, p. 77). What he had in mind, though, was not so much this particular line, but three subsequent lines (795–797), in which the Chorus sings ἐναργὴς βλεφάρων ἵμερος εὐλέκτρου νύμφας, which can be translated as ‘the visible desire that comes from the eyes of the beautiful bride’ (Sophocles, 1998, p. 79). Lacan thus intended to remind his readership of how Sophocles, prior to Antigone reappearing on the scene to hear her sentence and being taken away to her cavern, had also highlighted both her beauty and the radiant splendour of her desire. It is also clear that these are the lines Lacan had in mind, rather than the one quoted directly, from a brief mention of the passage in Seminar VIII, where Lacan referred to Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν as the title of the choir’s song. See also Lacan (2015, p. 276). For a fuller exploration of this point, see Lacan (1992, p. 268) and De Kesel (2009, pp. 206–207).
- 15.
Through Saint-Fond’s discourse, Kant’s postulate of the immortality of the soul also explicitly re-enters the libertine ideology (Chapter 1, note 8). Pressed by Clairwil to disclose his personal doctrine, Saint-Fond concedes: ‘I acknowledge a Supreme Being and yet more firmly believe in the immortality of the soul’ (Sade, 1968, p. 396). Saint-Fond’s belief in a ‘supremely-evil-being’ who, as the author of the universe, is ‘the most wicked, the most ferocious, the most horrifying of all beings’, and who will therefore ensure that the elements of wickedness—in Lacan’s words, the ‘particles of evil’ (p. 655)—perpetually recombine in a ‘matrix of maleficent molecules’ (Sade, 1968, pp. 399–400), remains one of the most poignant examples of how the Sadean libertines are by no means adverse to postulating, in a Kantian fashion, the existence of God. On the Sadean disavowal of the immortality of the soul, and God’s indispensable place in the libertine consciousness, see again Klossowski (1992, pp. 99–121).
- 16.
Although it is unlikely that the ten volumes of La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette all appeared in 1797 (Ract-Madoux, 1992), Giovanni Angelo Conte Braschi (1717–1799), who became Pope Pius VI in 1775, would have still been alive when Sade wrote Juliette, and it is no doubt precisely because of this that he decided to write his Holiness into it.
- 17.
All the main Sade-scholars of Lacan’s generation (Blanchot, Klossowski, Bataille, etc.) had at one point highlighted how the Sadean universe is riddled with philosophical paradox.
- 18.
It is worth emphasizing that the term ‘seconde mort’ does not appear as such in Pope Pius’ discourse, which only makes mention of a ‘seconde vie’. One could therefore credit Lacan with having invented the notion, were it not for the fact that it had already appeared in the Bible’s book on Revelation (chapter 20, 6 and chapter 21, 8): ‘Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection; on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years…But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death’. See also Lacan (1992, pp. 210–214). For a critical reflection upon Lacan’s ‘invention’ of the second death, see Castel (2014, pp. 121–123).
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Nobus, D. (2017). The Sadean Fantasy. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_6
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