Abstract
This Chapter focuses on the seventh section of Lacan’s essay ‘Kant with Sade’, in which Lacan reconsiders the elements of the Sadean fantasy in terms of Freud’s controversial concept of the death drive, and in which he also explores the relevance of the classic opposition between sadism and masochism. Nobus explains why Lacan refuses to take the Sadean fantasy as a blueprint for Sade’s own mental economy, and what it means for Sade not to have been duped by his (literary) fantasy. In addition, he extends Lacan’s discussion of the object as object (cause) of desire, and he opens up a new perspective on the vexed issue of the relationship between creative writers and their written creations.
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Notes
- 1.
Neither in the Critique, nor in the 1966 Sade-version of ‘Kant with Sade’ does this part of Lacan’s text constitute a separate section.
- 2.
This is also why, in the same paragraph, Lacan referred to Freud’s death drive as a ‘death demand’—not, as Fink has translated it, a demand for death, but as a demanding death drive, similar to how Freud referred to the demands (Ansprüchen) of the drives (Triebe) (Freud, 1955c, p. 11).
- 3.
Of course, Lacan always claimed that he was only ever rendering explicit what Freud had already surmised. Lacan’s symbolic inscription of the death drive could therefore be seen, in this context, as a rearticulation of Freud’s view that, even in animal life, ‘instincts are historically determined’, insofar as they seem to respond to a mechanism of trans-generational memory (Freud, 1955c, p. 37).
- 4.
Many post-Freudian psychoanalysts, including Anna Freud, rejected Freud’s death drive on the grounds that it was superfluous—an immaterial and unnecessary speculation—or simply morally objectionable (Fenichel, 1954). For his part, Lacan believed that Freud’s critics had failed to understand the precise effects of language, especially in their clinical practice, and were happy to just use Freud ‘at conventions’, i.e. in a purely academic, intellectual sense (p. 655).
- 5.
The interpersonal and social relations movement in psychoanalysis was inaugurated by Karen Horney and rose to prominence by virtue of Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm and Clara Thompson. In her influential critical survey of psychoanalytic theories, Thompson wrote: ‘Serious destructiveness seems to be developed by malevolent environments…or as a result of destructive cultural patterns…In short, far from being a product of the death instinct, it is an expression of the organism’s attempt to live…[Freud] sees man predominantly as an instinct ridden animal and does not give adequate weight to the overwhelming importance of social factors in moulding as well as distorting man’s potentialities’ (Thompson, 1952, pp. 52–55). For a discussion of Lacan’s critique of the notion of eternity, see Allouch (2009).
- 6.
Starting from his work on the authoritarian personality, Fromm had argued that sadism and masochism invariably go together, and that one should always refer to the ‘sado-masochistic character’, even if one or the other component tends to prevail. See Fromm (1974), which summarizes and expands ideas he had been developing since the early 1940s.
- 7.
See, for example, the work of Daniel Lagache on aggressivity, in which the ‘sadomasochistic scene’ is interpreted as a complementarity of erogenous tensions (Lagache, 1993). In 1967, Gilles Deleuze formulated the most trenchant critique of this type of ‘sadomasochistic entity’, in his influential introduction to Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. Whilst acknowledging that the Sadean libertines may enjoy pain, and that Sacher-Masoch’s hero Severin eventually declares himself cured of his masochism, if only to enter the sexual sphere of sadism, Deleuze was extremely sceptical of the reversibility between the two: ‘[W]hat we have in each case is a paradoxical by-product, a kind of sadism being the humorous outcome of masochism, and a kind of masochism the ironic outcome of sadism. But it is very doubtful whether the masochist’s sadism is the same as Sade’s, or the sadist’s masochism the same as Masoch’s’ (Deleuze, 1991, p. 40).
- 8.
At this point in his text, Lacan employed a number of sartorial metaphors, which have unfortunately disappeared in Fink’s translation. Lacan stated that amongst those who strive for ‘tidier appearances’ (une toilette plus soignée), and argue that the sadist ‘denies the Other’s existence’, some may draw on the ‘bon faiseur existentialiste’ and others on the ‘ready-made personnaliste’. The expression ‘bon faiseur’ does not refer to a ‘do-gooder’, as Fink has rendered it, but to a ‘good tailor’, as opposed to the mass-market, factory-produced clothing of the ready-made. In addition, ‘existentialiste’ and ‘personnaliste’ are the adjectives rather than the nouns, so that the expressions may be rendered more accurately as ‘fine existentialist tailoring’ and ‘personalist ready-made wear’. All of this does not explain, of course, who exactly Lacan had in mind, here. To the best of my knowledge, the idea that the sadist denies the Other’s existence does not feature in any of the existentialist and personalist texts, but it does come fairly close to what Sartre (as the quintessential representative of ‘fine existentialist tailoring’) argued in his lengthy analysis of sadism in Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 2003, pp. 401–434), and to how Emmanuel Mounier—the founder of the philosophical doctrine of personalism—described the sadist in his Introduction aux existentialismes (Mounier, 1962, p. 126).
- 9.
If the idea that the sadists transfer their own pain of existence onto the Other does not emanate directly from Lacan’s schema of the Sadean fantasy, then it is definitely embedded in the text of Philosophy in the Boudoir. After Madame de Mistival has been whipped back into consciousness, she screams: ‘Oh, my heavens! Why have you summoned me back from the depths of graves? Why have you brought me back to the horrors of life?’ (Sade, 2006, p. 169).
- 10.
Fink has translated ‘Mais pourquoi ne nous ferait-il [the eternal object] pas bien commun?’ as ‘But why wouldn’t it belong to both of us?’ (p. 656), which raises the question as to who ‘both of us’ would be in this instance. Perhaps the phrase could be rendered more accurately as ‘But why wouldn’t it be a common good for us?’, or ‘Why wouldn’t it be our common good?’.
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Nobus, D. (2017). Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy!. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_7
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