The Palgrave Lacan Series

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Calum Neill
School of Psychology and Sociology
Edinburgh Napier University
Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Derek Hook
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, USA
Jacques Lacan is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the
20th century. The reach of this influence continues to grow as we settle into
the 21st century, the resonance of Lacan’s thought arguably only beginning
now to be properly felt, both in terms of its application to clinical matters
and in its application to a range of human activities and interests. The
Palgrave Lacan Series is a book series for the best new writing in the
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matic, multi-authored collections. The books in the series will explore
aspects of Lacan’s theory from new perspectives and with original insights.
There will be books focused on particular areas of or issues in clinical work.
There will be books focused on applying Lacanian theory to areas and issues
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book, whatever its particular concern, will work to expand our understand-
ing of Lacan’s theory and its value in the 21st century.

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 Dany Nobus

The Law of Desire

On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’
Dany Nobus
Department of Psychology
Brunel University London
Uxbridge, United Kingdom

The Palgrave Lacan Series

ISBN 978-3-319-55274-3 ISBN 978-3-319-55275-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0
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 For NP
Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν
 Acknowledgements

Although I never confessed to it through the holy Sacrament of Penance

when I was a pupil at an established Roman Catholic boys’ school in
Belgium, my interest in Sade’s libertine novels dates back to my teenage
years. At that time, the books could only be obtained from libraries if
one had received special permission from a head librarian, because they
had been dutifully consigned to a closed section that was commonly
known as ‘book-hell’, and in good Lacanian fashion, the fact that a strict
prohibition rested upon these volumes hugely inflamed my desire to
read them. The story of how and when I eventually worked my way
through Sade’s eroto-philosophical texts will not be of interest to any-
one, but when during my mid-20s I had to choose a topic for a Master’s
dissertation in psychoanalysis, I was involuntarily drawn to Lacan’s
‘Kant avec Sade’, which at the time I found both fascinating and
intimidating, although for different reasons than Sade’s own works.
The project was eventually published in two parts, in two consecutive
issues of the Belgian journal ‘Psychoanalytische Perspektieven’: D. Nobus,
‘Moeten Wij Sade Herdenken? I. Aan gene zijde van verguizing en
vergoddelijking’, Psychoanalytische Perspektieven, 1993, 21, pp. 63–93;
D. Nobus, ‘Moeten Wij Sade Herdenken? II. De psychoanalyse voor het
Sadiaanse universum’, Psychoanalytische Perspektieven, 1994, 22,
pp. 101–132. Although none of the texts in this book is directly based
upon these papers, I should nonetheless acknowledge those people who
vii
viii Acknowledgements

supported the project at the time, and who regularly entered into Sadean
and other discussions with me about one or the other aspect of Lacan’s
text: Julien Quackelbeen, who sadly passed away in 2016, Paul
Verhaeghe, Filip Geerardyn and Katrien Libbrecht.
Almost 20 years after this youthful endeavour to shed some light on
‘Kant with Sade’, I was invited by Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook and Calum
Neill to write a detailed commentary on an essay in Lacan’s Écrits for their
three-volume Reader’s Guide to the book. ‘Kant with Sade’ was not my only
choice, and it definitely was not my first, but in the end this is the essay I
ended up being asked to unpack and clarify. With hindsight, it would be
disingenuous to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the task, and that I am
exceptionally grateful to the editors of this Reader’s Guide for assigning it to
me. Yet as my work, and the associated feelings of intellectual and emo-
tional torment, progressed, what started off as a commentary grew into a
more substantial piece of work, which eventually crystallized into this
book. As such, Volume 3 of the Reader’s Guide to Écrits will include a
more succinct version of it, without the background information to
Lacan’s text, without the examples taken from Sade’s works, and without
the detailed elaborations and the scholarly apparatus in the notes.
As I was working on this project, outlines of its argument were presented
at the following institutions, whose hosts are thanked for their invitations,
and especially for giving me the opportunity to respond to questions and
suggestions from the audience, which has allowed me to sharpen the text in
various places: Das Unbehagen—A Free Association for Psychoanalysis, at
the New School University in New York, NY; the Lacanian School of
Psychoanalysis in San Francisco, CA; the Centre for Freudian Analysis and
Research in London. I would also like to thank Nektaria Pouli, Stijn
Vanheule, Junior Ingouf, Calum Neil, Derek Hook, Benjamin Ware,
and an additional anonymous reader, for scrutinizing the entire manuscript
and for making numerous suggestions for improvement. I am also grateful
to Élisabeth Roudinesco for confirming certain aspects of the historical
context of Lacan’s article. Finally, a special word of thanks should go to
Bruce Fink, who also read through a complete draft of the manuscript, and
whose comments on my interpretations of ‘Kant with Sade’ were invariably
insightful and always constructive, despite my occasional criticism of his
seminal translation of Lacan’s text.
 Contents

Introduction xiii

1 A New Ethical System 1

2 Lacan Reads Kant 9

3 Sade’s Kantian Maxim 17

4 Regarding the Pain of Others 29

5 Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures 37

6 The Sadean Fantasy 47

7 Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy! 65

8 Sade’s Practical Reason 73

9 The Law Sustains Desire 87

10 Sade Against Kant 99

ix
x Contents

11 The Moral Principle of Desire 107

12 Desire and Happiness 113

13 Lacan Against Sade 123

14 Some More Effort . . . 131

Conclusion 141

Bibliography 149

Index 167
 List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 The Sadean fantasy 49

Fig. 8.1 Sade’s practical reason 74

xi
 Introduction

Of the 28 substantial papers and six shorter contributions that make up

Jacques Lacan’s Écrits, the piece entitled ‘Kant avec Sade’ (‘Kant with
Sade’) is generally regarded as one of the toughest nuts to crack, and this
opinion is shared by some of the most eminent and knowledgeable
commentators on Lacan’s work. Addressing an audience in Rio de
Janeiro in 1985, Lacan’s son-in-law and literary executor Jacques-Alain
Miller referred to the paper as ‘a difficult text’ and ‘an écrit that has not
been utilized very much’, insinuating that the first characteristic may
very well be responsible for the second (Miller, 1998, p. 201).1 Four
years later, at a conference at Kent State University in Ohio, Miller
confirmed this observation—despite, or perhaps by virtue of his having
studied and discussed the paper painstakingly for almost five years at his
seminars in Paris—thus making the initial verdict next to official:
‘Jacques Lacan’s “Kant with Sade” is probably one of the most difficult
texts in the Écrits’ (Miller, 1996, p. 212). The qualification of ‘difficult’
would probably not be very significant in this context, if the other texts
in Écrits were an easy read, but since the others are already widely
considered to be distinctly cryptic the word ‘difficult’ could only be
synonymous here with ‘inaccessible’ or ‘impenetrable’. Remarkably, this

1
Unless otherwise noted, all translations from foreign-language sources are my own.

xiii
xiv Introduction

qualification would not be too far removed from how Lacan himself put
it to an Italian journalist in October 1974: as to ‘Kant with Sade’, ‘I am
incomprehensible’ (Lacan, 2013a, p. 83). Without wanting to reflect,
here, upon the reasons as to why Lacan’s text is difficult—they should
become clear from the contents of this book—or upon my own motives
for taking on the task of shedding light on Lacan’s ‘darkest’ moment, I
thus need to inform the reader from the start that clarifying ‘Kant avec
Sade’ constitutes a considerable challenge. And I should also apologize in
advance if my commentary and interpretation fail to unravel some of its
mysteries. It should be emphasized, however, that ‘Kant with Sade’ may
be one of the few texts in Écrits whose import cannot be fully appre-
ciated without detailed commentary and interpretation, because it is far
from clear what Lacan is saying in it, and this persistent obscurity is as
testing for a francophone readership as it is for those who can only access
the text in translation. I can only hope that my own critical analysis of
‘Kant with Sade’ in this book will be a less daunting experience for the
reader than Lacan’s original text, without it therefore detracting any
reader from exploring this most demanding of écrits, if only because this
exercise will undoubtedly generate additional clarifications and alterna-
tive interpretations.
Much like so many other papers in Écrits, ‘Kant avec Sade’ bears
the stamp of the circumstances under which it was written. Hence,
before any serious consideration is given to its contents, it is neces-
sary to reconstruct its context. In 1958, the Belgian-Chinese-French
editor Claude Tchou created the imprint Cercle du livre précieux,
with the purpose of producing and selling, through private subscrip-
tion, luxury critical editions of literary and scientific works, often
covering erotic subject matters. In 1961, it was announced that this
imprint would make available, under the general editorship of the
French poet Gilbert Lely, the complete works of Donatien-
Alphonse-François de Sade (1740–1814) (Lely, 1961). During the
first half of the nineteenth century, the shocking contents of Sade’s
infamous libertine novels had prompted writers to coin the new
clinical category of ‘sadism’ (Azar, 1993, pp. 42–45), and during
 Introduction xv

the 1960s the public sale of his books was still banned in France.2
Indeed, when shortly after World War II another French publisher,
Jean-Jacques Pauvert, had taken it upon himself to release Sade’s
complete works in an accessible paperback edition, the initiative
resulted in a high-profile court case which, although relaxed on
appeal, initially ordered for the incriminating books to be confiscated
and destroyed, and their publisher to be sentenced to pay a very
large fine (Garçon, 1963; Brochier, 1991; Pauvert, 2004, pp. 248–
251 & pp. 260–264). With the edition of the Cercle du livre précieux
the risk of legal interference with the project would have been
avoided on account of the fact that the books were not publicly
available, but only sold in a limited edition of 2,000 numbered
copies via a book club to private subscribers.3 In consequence,
between 1962 and 1964, the complete works of Sade were released
in an exculpatory, ‘definitive edition’ of 15 volumes, under the
general editorship of Lely, whose own monumental biography of
the so-called ‘divine Marquis’ inaugurated the precious set.
At the end of March 1962, when pursuing his seminar L’identification
(Identification), Lacan informed his audience that he had committed himself
to writing up the discussion of Sade’s works he had commenced in his
seminar of 1959–1960 on the ethics of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1992), in a
preface he had promised for an edition of Sade’s works (Lacan, 1961–1962,
session of 28 March 1962). There can be no doubt that the edition in
question, here, was the one being prepared by Tchou and Lely, since

2
The term ‘sadism’ was in all likelihood introduced by the French writer Charles Nodier in
1834, 20 years after Sade’s death. During the nineteenth century it regularly appeared in the
writings of Alfred de Vigny and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. In 1890, the notion was
employed by the Austrian forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing to designate a
specific type of psychopathology in which someone derives sexual pleasure from subjecting
other living creatures to acts of physical and emotional cruelty. Although Krafft-Ebing did not
engage in a detailed critical study of Sade’s libertine novels, he felt justified in utilizing Sade’s
fictional libertine heroes as paradigmatic examples of a specific clinical instance of sexual
perversion. See Krafft-Ebing (1890).
3
In his introductory brochure, the editor was at great pains to show how this new edition of
Sade was not in breach of the court’s ruling in the Pauvert-case, since the books would be
strictly reserved to an elite, notably those members of the book club who had been registered
with them for more than six months, as well as universities, libraries and medical doctors. See
Lely (1961).
xvi Introduction

Pauvert’s project had already been completed, and no other edition of the
works of Sade was being launched. In March 1962, Lacan did not indicate
whether his article would be included as a preface to the entire edition, to a
specific volume or to a particular text within a volume. Yet on 16 January
1963, in a lecture that was part of his subsequent seminar L’angoisse (Anxiety),
he disclosed that his listeners would be able to read all about his rapproche-
ment between Kant and Sade in a preface to Sade’s La philosophie dans le
boudoir, which would be published in the not-too-distant future (Lacan,
2014b, p. 104). However, when later that year Volume III of Sade’s complete
works, containing Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu and La philosophie dans le
boudoir, came off the press, there was no trace of Lacan’s text in it, and it was
not included in any of the other volumes either.
To complicate matters, on 12 June 1963, Lacan told his audience that
a paper entitled ‘Kant avec Sade’ had appeared in the April issue of the
journal Critique (Lacan, 2014b, p. 281). In conformity with this jour-
nal’s policy of publishing in-depth scholarly review essays, Lacan’s text
had effectively appeared there as a presentation of the new complete
edition of Sade’s works, despite the fact that only three of the 15 planned
volumes had been published at the time, and that the first two in the
series were taken up by Lely’s biography of the Marquis. In a long
footnote preceding his text, Lacan detailed the contents of Volume III,
including the names of the three scholars (Angelo Hesnard, Maurice
Heine and Pierre Klossowski) who had written prefaces to Sade’s texts,
yet without saying anything about the original destination of his own
paper (Lacan, 1963, p. 291).4

4
Because the footnote is not reproduced in Écrits—neither in the original French version nor in
the English translation—and because its content is not immaterial to the editorial history of ‘Kant
avec Sade’, I am translating it here, with some additional clarifications in square brackets: ‘Volume
III of the complete works [of Sade], whose publication by the stated firm [Cercle du livre précieux]
is underway, contains the texts of Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, that is to say of the 1791 novel
[rather than Les infortunes de la vertu, the posthumously published short story from 1787, or La
nouvelle Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, the third, extensively reworked version of 1797] and of
La philosophie dans le boudoir. A short announcement precedes these texts, which rectifies the
bibliographical data that are to be found in Volume II. Indeed, Volumes I and II, which have
already been published, reproduce a Vie du marquis de Sade [Lely’s biography, originally published
in two volumes by Gallimard in 1952 and 1957, and first translated into English in a heavily
abridged edition as The Marquis de Sade: A Biography by Elek Books in 1961] which has been
 Introduction xvii

Assuming that the editors of Critique would have required at least a

month to review the contents of an issue and steer it through the printing
process, Lacan must have been informed that his paper would not appear
in Volume III of Sade’s complete works some time between mid-January
and the beginning of March 1963. Why exactly Lacan’s text was refused,
and by whom, is still somewhat couched in mystery. Speaking in Rio de
Janeiro in 1985, Miller claimed that the editor of Sade’s complete works,
i.e. Gilbert Lely, had rejected Lacan’s paper, because he had deemed it to
be unintelligible, and that Lacan had subsequently tried to get it accepted
for publication in La nouvelle revue française, France’s leading literary
magazine, which was edited at the time by the distinguished French writer
and critic Jean Paulhan. When, still according to Miller, the text was again
refused, Lacan would have subsequently offered it to Critique, allegedly
managing to secure its acceptance there because of a certain ‘family
relationship’ (Miller, 1998, pp. 205–206).5 However, drawing on an
interview with the French literary theorist Jean Roudaut, Sylvie Patron
has pointed out in her detailed narrative history of the first 50 years of
Critique that Lacan’s text had originally been refused ‘under the pretext of
unintelligibility’, and that he had ‘more or less imposed it’ onto the editor

quoted in the present essay in the Gallimard edition [see Lacan, 2006g, p. 668, note 9]. Three
texts serve as prefaces to these works, two of which—one original text by our friend Angelo
Hesnard, entitled “Rechercher le semblable, découvrir l’homme dans Sade”, and one reprinted by the
late Maurice Heine on the Marquis de Sade et le roman noir—precede Justine, and the third text,
which appears before La philosophie, is a paper [Sade et la révolution] that had already been
included in Sade mon prochain by Pierre Klossowski, to which we will refer at the end of this essay
[see Lacan, 2006g, p. 667, and p. 668, note 22]. We also take the opportunity here to indicate
that, if this edition, which is being presented as “definitive”, has every reason to succeed, there is at
present still no French edition of the complete works of Kant nor, for that matter, of the complete
works of Freud. A systematic translation of these works should have been undertaken already. For
Kant, this kind of enterprise should have been obvious, in a country where so many young forces
are now qualified on account of their philosophy education. Its almost complete absence should
make us reflect upon the way in which the responsible agencies have given their guidance to these
works’ (Lacan, 1963, p. 291, footnote 1).
5
The journal Critique had been founded in 1946 by Georges Bataille, the former husband of
Lacan’s second wife Sylvia Maklès, and Bataille acted as its editor until his death, on 9 July 1962.
The editorship was then taken over by Jean (-Baptiste) Piel, who was married to Sylvia’s sister
Simone Maklès, so Miller suggested here that Lacan had effectively asked his wife’s brother-in-law
to publish his paper. There is a picture of Lacan, the two Maklès sisters and Jean Piel in a
collection of photographs of Lacan published by his daughter Judith, on the tenth anniversary of
her father’s death. See J. Miller (1991, p. 68).
xviii Introduction

of Critique (Patron, 2000, p. 169). Were Patron to be right, and ‘unin-

telligibility’ had only been a pretext, then it would be interesting to know
what the real reason for the refusal had been. Jean Allouch has speculated
in this respect that Lacan’s text may have been excluded from Volume III
of Sade’s complete works, because the author had not complied in it with
what the editor and publisher had expected him to do, i.e. formulating a
clinical-psychoanalytic interpretation of La philosophie dans le boudoir
(Allouch, 2001, p. 45). And indeed, were it to be the case that Lacan
had been expected to read Sade ‘with Freud’—either in the classical sense
of Freudian insights being applied to La philosophie dans le boudoir with a
view to revealing its unconscious, latent subtext, or in the quintessentially
popular psycho-biographical fashion, of the style and contents of a literary
text being explained with reference to an unresolved (traumatic) event in
the author’s life-history—then this would not be what the paper encap-
sulated, except perhaps for the interpretation of the final scene in Sade’s
book, when the mother’s vagina and anus are sewn shut, which Lacan
unhesitatingly construed as the maternal body (the ultimate object of
desire) falling again under the spell of the paternal law and becoming
strictly prohibited, and which in many ways comes across as the weakest,
most conventional and prosaic part of the essay. In other words, insofar as
Lacan relied in ‘Kant with Sade’ on a psychoanalytic methodology to read
Sade’s text, he adopted neither a standard psycho-biographical or psycho-
historical approach, nor a typically Freudian style of textual analysis (with
the exception, perhaps, of the final scene), but engaged instead in a type of
psychoanalytic literary criticism that clearly drew on the hackneyed struc-
turalist principles of a-historicism, narrative form and intertextual con-
nectivity, despite Lacan employing his own concepts as critical tools.6 It
may very well be the case, then, that Lacan’s text had been refused,
because instead of complying in it with the editor’s and publisher’s briefs,

6
Given how keen psychoanalysts, including Freud himself, have always been to venture out into
the realm of literature, it is still surprising that before Lacan published ‘Kant with Sade’ very little
psychoanalytic research had been devoted to the ‘Sadean universe’. In 1933, the non-psycho-
analyst Pierre Klossowski released the first-ever psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade’s libertine
novels, and over the next 30-odd years a mere three psychoanalytically inspired studies of Sade
were published. See Klossowski (1933), Aulagne (1948), Guillemain (1953), Marchand (1956).
 Introduction xix

he had decided to ignore all instructions from above, simply doing his
own thing, feeling neither directed nor restricted in his approach, and not
making any concessions to his readership. In an essay where the possibility
of a fully liberated, unconstrained desire is being put into question,
Lacan’s own uncompromising pursuit of the desire to write whatever he
wanted would have thus encountered its limit here in the editor’s and
publisher’s forceful and non-negotiable implementation of an authorial
directive. If, as Lacan argued in ‘Kant with Sade’, it is futile to conceive of
a lawless desire, and fruitless to hope for a desire that will circumvent or
undo the law, then this may be what he himself experienced first hand
when he submitted his paper to the Cercle du livre précieux.
To complicate matters further, when Élisabeth Roudinesco published her
intellectual biography of Lacan in 1993 she claimed that it was actually Jean
Paulhan who had refused Lacan’s text for Sade’s complete works, on account
of it being unreadable (Roudinesco, 1997, p. 312).7 Seven years after writing
this statement, Roudinesco received a letter from Claude Tchou, in which he
assumed full responsibility for rejecting Lacan’s text, because it had been
‘unworthy of him’ (indigne de lui), whereas Paulhan’s descendants in turn
confirmed that the editor of La nouvelle revue française had nothing whatso-
ever to do with the whole matter (Allouch, 2001, pp. 27–29).8 Although it
seems entirely reasonable for the publisher to be responsible for the rejection
of a text, the precise grounds for the decision still remain terribly vague. What
could it possibly mean for Lacan’s essay to have been ‘unworthy of him’?

7
Roudinesco also wrote that ‘Kant avec Sade’ ‘was intended to serve as an introduction to the third
volume of Sade’s complete works’ (Roudinesco, 1997, p. 312), yet Lacan’s own comments clearly
indicate that it was only meant to introduce La philosophie dans le boudoir. This is effectively what he
says in his lecture of 16 January 1963, and also in the first sentence of the preamble to the Écrits
version of ‘Kant avec Sade’ (Lacan, 2006g, p. 645). For the record, it should be noted that, in 1985,
Miller suggested that ‘Kant avec Sade’ was supposed to be an introduction to the edition as a whole,
and that Lacan himself had petitioned the editor to take on this task. The latter point is refuted by a
footnote Lacan attached to the preamble of the 1971 Écrits version of ‘Kant avec Sade’, when it was
reprinted in a pocket edition. Here, Lacan stated explicitly that ‘Kant avec Sade’ had been commis-
sioned (Lacan, 2006g, p. 668, note 1). In a sense, the fact that the editor must have solicited Lacan to
write the text, rather than he himself asking for it to be included, is already borne out by Lacan saying
in his lecture of 28 March 1962 that he had ‘promised’ to deliver the paper.
8
In the 2009 revised edition of her book, Roudinesco consequently deleted Paulhan’s name, and
simply remarked that Lacan’s text had been withdrawn from Volume III because it had been
considered unreadable (Roudinesco, 2009, p. 1876).
xx Introduction

Didn’t the publisher and editor know that Lacan had a reputation for writing
arcane, conceptually demanding texts? Wouldn’t it have been more
‘unworthy of him’ if he had produced a lucid, transparent and altogether
accessible paper?
Judging by Lacan’s announcement in his 1961–1962 seminar, and his
own dating of ‘Kant avec Sade’ at the very end of it, he completed the paper
during the Spring and Summer of 1962.9 Tempting as it may be to consider
the article that was published in Critique as the first, original version of it, the
lengthy footnote preceding the actual ‘text of the text’, which I have translated
above, makes sufficiently clear that Lacan revisited it, if only because it does
not make sense for this footnote to have been included in the manuscript that
he would have submitted to the editor of Sade’s complete works. Purely for
reasons of time, it is unlikely that Lacan extensively revised his paper before
submitting (or imposing) it to Critique, but we nonetheless need to assume
that, had the text appeared where it was originally meant to appear, it would
have been a different text.10 As to the ‘Kant avec Sade’ that was included in
Écrits, which appeared in French bookstores on 15 November 1966
(Roudinesco, 2014, p. 98), this is a substantially modified version of the
Critique paper. For the Écrits version, entire paragraphs were rewritten by
Lacan, often in light of the most recent developments in his thought. Many
passages were also corrected by François Wahl, a former analysand of Lacan’s
and his assigned editor at the du Seuil publishing house (Roudinesco, 1997,

9
Lacan’s full date mark reads ‘R.G., September 1962’ (Lacan, 2006g, p. 667), which Miller has
interpreted as Rome/Guitrancourt (Miller, 1998, p. 204). I have not been able to establish
whether Lacan spent time in Rome during 1962, but if he did it would have been for personal
rather than professional reasons, there being no evidence that he participated in a conference in
the Italian capital during that period. As to Guitrancourt, this is where Lacan had his country
house, and where he would spend most of his weekends.
10
In the absence of a Lacan-archive, it is impossible to ascertain how much the text that appeared
in Critique differs from the original manuscript that was submitted to the Cercle du livre précieux.
Did Lacan add other things to it apart from the opening footnote? Did he delete or rewrite
passages? We may never know, but my feeling is that he changed very little to its contents.
Towards the end of the Critique paper, there is even a remaining reference to the fact that the text
is serving as a preface . . . (Lacan, 1963, p. 308). However, the fact that the paper published in
Critique differs from the original manuscript is also evidenced by a comment Lacan added to
footnote 20 of the Critique version, in which he informed his readership that the previous sentence
(in the footnote) was originally included in the body of the essay (Lacan, 1963, p. 312, note 20).
 Introduction xxi

pp. 321–328).11 Interestingly, during the Summer of 1966 the Cercle du livre
précieux announced a new, updated edition of the complete works of Sade,
the second volume of which was published on 31 October that year, i.e.
exactly two weeks before Écrits. This volume, which effectively combined two
volumes into one, included Sade’s Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, La
philosophie dans le boudoir and Aline et Valcour, as well as the same set of
commentaries as in the first edition of the complete works, with one notable
exception: now La philosophie dans le boudoir also contained a postface
entitled ‘Kant avec Sade’ by Jacques Lacan (Lacan, 1966b).12 This version
of the text is slightly different from the Écrits version, and silently corrects
some of the obvious editorial errors in the latter.13 In the Écrits version, Lacan

11
Wahl had been in analysis with Lacan between 1954 and 1960. He died on 15 September 2014, at
the age of 89. This is not the place to mention, let alone interpret the textual variants of ‘Kant avec
Sade’. The reader can find these listed, side by side, in de Frutos Salvador (1994, pp. 226–255) and
Allouch (2001, pp. 162–195). However, in comparing the textual variants of ‘Kant avec Sade’ to those
of the other papers in Écrits, the reader will notice that ‘Kant avec Sade’ is one of the most rewritten
articles in the entire collection, so that Lacan’s date mark of September 1962, which remains in place
in Écrits, is no doubt accurate in terms of the completion date of the original text, but not in terms of
the contents of the écrit as such. In other words, despite what Lacan’s date mark suggests, the text of
‘Kant avec Sade’ that appeared in Écrits was not written in 1962, but probably some time during 1964,
or maybe as late as 1965 or even 1966, when Lacan started to select the texts to be included in Écrits.
This is also evinced by certain conceptual developments in the paper, which Lacan had not arrived at
until 1964. In addition, whereas for some of the other papers in Écrits, Lacan dutifully signalled the
fact that he had rewritten sections of the original (see, for example, Lacan, 2006a, p. 267, notes 39 and
44), this is not the case for ‘Kant avec Sade’.
12
Bizarrely, this is not at all obvious from the book’s table of contents, where Lacan’s postface was
mentioned after the indexes, thus suggesting that it was somehow a postface to the entire volume.
Looking at the page numbering in this table of contents, it also appears that Lacan’s text is literally
thrown off here, because the page spread clearly shows that it must feature at the end of La
philosophie dans le boudoir. A facsimile reprint of this updated, second edition of the complete
works of Sade was released in 1973 by Éditions Tête de Feuilles in Paris.
13
For example, in the Écrits version (Lacan, 1966a), footnote 1 on page 779 should have been attached
to ‘Premier Consul’ on the previous page (or to the end of this sentence, for that matter), because in the
footnote Lacan accepted Lely’s view that, contrary to what some scholars had claimed (and continue to
claim), Sade’s arrest on 6 March 1801 was unlikely to have been ordered directly by the First Consul
(Napoleon Bonaparte) (Lacan, 1966a, p. 779). In the version of ‘Kant avec Sade’ in the 1966 (second)
edition of Sade’s complete works, this footnote appears where it belongs. Strangely enough, in the
English edition of ‘Kant with Sade’, this particular footnote is attached to another part of the sentence
following the one in which the First Consul is mentioned (Lacan, 2006e, p. 657, note 9), which gives
the reader the impression that Lacan was disputing the possibility, here, that Sade’s ‘manservant’
contributed to his arrest . . . It should also be noted that, unlike the Écrits version, the 1966 postface
does not have a date mark (Lacan, 1966b, p. 577).
xxii Introduction

did not mention—neither in the preamble nor elsewhere—that his text had
been included in the complete works of Sade after all, albeit as a postface,
which suggests that the text of this postface (and this is also evinced by the
corrections) is of a later date than the one included in Écrits, despite its having
been published earlier.
When a two-volume pocket edition of Écrits was planned in 1969, Lacan
again revised ‘Kant avec Sade’, whereby he added a footnote to the preamble,
in which he stated that in 1966 the Cercle du livre précieux had decided to
recommission the text ‘when the success of my Écrits rendered it plausible
( . . . to the person who had replaced me?)’ (Lacan, 2006g, p. 668, note 1).14
With 5,000 copies sold in less than a fortnight (Roudinesco, 1997, p. 328),
the publication of Écrits was admittedly extraordinarily successful. However,
it is impossible for this editorial success to have informed the decision by the
Cercle du livre précieux to recommission ‘Kant avec Sade’, because as I
mentioned above the second volume of the new edition of Sade, which
included Lacan’s text, was actually published two weeks before Écrits. Lacan’s
remark that the success of Écrits had suddenly made ‘Kant avec Sade’ more
plausible ‘to the person who had replaced me’ also insinuates that it was
Pierre Klossowski—the person who had written the preface to La philosophie
dans le boudoir in the first edition of Sade’s complete works, although only
indirectly, since this preface was effectively a reprint of a chapter from his
previously published Sade mon prochain—who had petitioned the editors to
recommission the text, yet there is no evidence to support this claim.15 In

14
From now on, references to Fink’s translation of ‘Kant avec Sade’ will simply be given by page
number, both when they occur in the body of the text and in the notes.
15
In his letter to Roudinesco, Tchou wrote that he had decided to include Lacan’s text in the
second edition of the complete works of Sade, because the psychoanalyst had shown his good
intentions and had proceeded to revise and correct his contribution (Allouch, 2001, p. 27,
footnote 23). Given that the 1966 versions of ‘Kant avec Sade’ are at least as, if not more hermetic
than the 1963 version, I find Tchou’s explanation difficult to accept. Also, if Klossowski did have
something to do with it, then it is still unfair to say that he had ‘replaced’ Lacan in the first edition,
simply because some of Sade’s works were preceded by more than one preface, unless we were to
assume that, in the absence of Lacan’s paper, the editor had decided to simply replace it with one
of Klossowski’s previously published texts. A quick glance at the 1961 brochure in which the
project was announced, and which also included a subscription form and a detailed analysis of the
contents of each volume, suffices to exclude the latter possibility. Apart from the two books by
Sade, the subscription form stated that Volume III of the complete works would also include a
preface by Pierre Klossowski, so Klossowski’s text had already been secured before Lacan’s was in
 Introduction xxiii

1999, 18 years after Lacan’s death, a new edition of the two-volume Écrits
was published, including yet another, slightly modified version of ‘Kant avec
Sade’—modifications which on occasion restore the 1966 version of the text,
yet not always exactly, and for which one can only assume the editors of the
publishing house (du Seuil) and/or Jacques-Alain Miller to be responsible.
Thus, all in all, there are six different versions of ‘Kant avec Sade’: (1)
The manuscript Lacan originally submitted for publication to the Cercle
du livre précieux, as a preface to La philosophie dans le boudoir in the first
edition of Sade’s complete works, and which was rejected (and never
published as such); (2) The 1963 text published in Critique; (3) The
1966 text published in Écrits; (4) The corrected 1966 text published as a
postface to La philosophie dans le boudoir in the second edition of Sade’s
complete works; (5) The 1971 version prepared for the pocket-edition of
Écrits; and (6) The 1999 version included in the reprint of the pocket-
edition of Écrits. The standard English translation of ‘Kant avec Sade’ by
Bruce Fink, which is the one that I have been referring to, generally
follows the 1971 version of the text, whilst preserving all the textual
divisions of the 1966 Écrits version, yet unfortunately it also repeats
some of the latter’s (admittedly minor) editorial errors.16
All of this does not explain, of course, how Lacan had become involved in
the project in the first place. Why did the publisher and editor of Sade’s
complete works commission a preface to La philosophie dans le boudoir from
Lacan? The majority of the other contributors to the collection were either
renowned Sade-scholars, such as Maurice Heine and Pierre Klossowski,

place (Lely, 1961). Given the prefaces to Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu in this volume, it would
seem much more likely that the editor had wanted both an original text (by Lacan) and a reprint
(by Klossowski). In any case, regardless as to what Lacan himself went on to claim, it is factually
incorrect that Klossowski had replaced him in the first edition of Sade’s complete works.
16
Indentations at the top of the pages aside, the 1966 Écrits version has 15 sections, each separated
by a blank line, whereas the 1971 version only has 14. By comparison, the Critique version has 13,
separated by an asterisk, and the 1966 ‘Sade-version’ has 11, also separated by an asterisk. For the
sake of completion, I should mention that, apart from Fink’s translation, there are two other
English translations of ‘Kant avec Sade’. A 1989 translation by James B. Swenson Jr also relies on
the 1971 version of Lacan’s text, yet without the textual divisions, and has the advantage of being
followed by a very detailed set of annotations. A 2009 ‘tentative and provisional’ translation by
William J. Richardson is based on the 1966 Écrits version, and numbers each of the paragraphs,
whilst also including additional section headings, ‘so as to make Lacan’s text more readable’. See
Lacan (1989), Swenson Jr (1989) and Lacan (2009).
xxiv Introduction

clinicians who had made substantial contributions to sexology, such as

Angelo Hesnard, or established essayists and literary critics, such as Yves
Bonnefoy and Gaëtan Picon. In 1962, all of Lacan’s major texts had
appeared in specialized psychoanalytic journals, and he had only published
two substantial works of ‘psychoanalytic literary criticism’, notably the
‘Séminaire sur “La lettre volée”’ (‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’)
(Lacan, 2006c) and ‘Jeunesse de Gide ou la lettre et le désir’ (‘The Youth of
Gide, or the Letter and Desire’) (Lacan, 2006d), the latter having been
published in Critique no less (Lacan, 1958). During the 1950s, Lacan
produced numerous detailed analyses of various literary-philosophical
works, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Lacan, 2014a, pp. 277–419),
Sophocles’ Antigone (Lacan, 1992, pp. 241–287), and Plato’s Symposium
(Lacan, 2015, pp. 17–163), yet these had been delivered to a relatively small
group of people, as part of a psychoanalytic training programme at the Sainte-
Anne Hospital in Paris. Starting in November 1959, Lacan had devoted a
yearlong seminar to the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ (Lacan, 1992), in which he
paid a great deal of attention to Sade’s works, yet his reading of Sade during
this year remained unpublished and would not have been known outside the
limited circle of psychoanalysts-in-training that was in attendance. I have no
way of proving this, but I am inclined to think that Lacan had been asked to
write a preface to La philosophie dans le boudoir, partly because of his being the
intellectual figurehead of the Société française de psychanalyse—the ‘other’
psychoanalytic group in France, which had separated itself from the founda-
tional Sociéte psychanalytique de Paris, to which Angelo Hesnard belonged—
and partly because of his lifelong association with the surrealists, who had
discovered Sade by virtue of Guillaume Apollinaire, and who had celebrated
the Marquis as a visionary genius, an authentic free spirit and a revolutionary
liberator of human desire (Brighelli, 2000, pp. 179–200).17

17
In 1909, Apollinaire was the first to publish an anthology of Sade’s works in France (Sade, 1909),
and it is this edition which prompted the surrealists during the 1920s to explore the Sadean universe.
At one point, virtually all the key figures in France’s avant-garde artistic movement—Robert Desnos,
Paul Éluard, André Breton, René Char, Luis Buñuel, René Crevel, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Maurice
Nadeau and so on—publicly expressed their intellectual affinity to Sade, and their creative projects
were often inspired by his life-history and his texts. See also Le Brun (1989, pp. 113–145).
 Introduction xxv

Also, despite the fact that Lacan’s paper was never published in its
rightful place, he insisted on maintaining its original purpose, as a
preface to La philosophie dans le boudoir. In other words, regardless of
the changing status the text acquired with its varying publication
outlets—review essay, stand-alone écrit, postface—and irrespective of
the numerous changes to its original contents, Lacan never altered the
style, tone and function of his paper, and he remained rather cautious
when it came to exposing the limitations of Sade’s work, because he
felt that this is not what the writer of a preface is supposed to do. For
example, when, at one point, he questioned Sade’s ‘sense of comedy’,
he stopped in his tracks by saying that ‘a preface is not meant to do
the author a disservice’ (p. 661).18 Likewise, when, at the very end of
his text, he suggested that Sade had failed to understand something
crucial about the inextricable link between desire and the law, he
confessed: ‘I have forbidden myself to say a word about what Sade is
missing here’ (p. 667). For Lacan, a preface is designed to introduce,
situate, contextualize and tease out the intricacies of a text, in a
broadly sympathetic appreciation of the author and his work, also
explicating its impact and significance. It is important for the reader
to bear this critical function of ‘Kant avec Sade’ in mind when
approaching the paper, because it allows one to understand the
particular focus and the main developments of the text.
It rapidly becomes clear, then, that the title ‘Kant avec Sade’ is
effectively a double metonymy. Lacan was not at all interested in
comparing and contrasting the (rather uneventful) life of Immanuel
Kant, the famous academic philosopher of Königsberg, with the (rather
tumultuous) life of D.A.F. de Sade, the infamous French Marquis who

18
In 1971, Lacan attached a footnote to this sentence which was deleted again in 1999 (but
evidently not by him), in which he wondered: ‘What would I have written by way of a postface?’
(p. 668, note 15). So, although the Cercle du livre précieux published Lacan’s paper as a postface to
La philosophie dans le boudoir in 1966, for Lacan the text was still, and would only ever be a
preface. As we shall see later on, in Section 14 of ‘Kant with Sade’ Lacan did identify various flaws
in Sade’s libertine works—a certain preachiness, the rather mediocre erudition supporting the
endless recitation of historical and anthropological factoids, a lack of witticism, and the failure to
recount a single act of proper seduction, in which vice would triumph over virtue on account of
the latter’s eventual submission to the former—but this did not stop him from praising the
‘somber beauty’ of the ‘tragic experience’ that was being depicted there (pp. 664–666).
xxvi Introduction

spent 27 years of his life behind bars. When, starting from Section 8 in
the text (p. 656), he intermittently referred to key events in Sade’s life, it
was primarily to demonstrate the limits of his ‘art’, insofar as to Lacan
one should not assume that the licentious content of Sade’s novels is a
reliable indicator of the author’s morals, his politics and his life-style,
much less that the prevailing sexual tendencies in Sade’s work are but a
fictional extension of his own mental economy—the ‘sadists’ in the
novels having been created by a man who is himself an inveterate ‘sadist’.
One of the crucial lines of Lacan’s argument in ‘Kant with Sade’ is
precisely that the contents of Sade’s libertine novels, which he also
designated as ‘the Sadean fantasy’ (p. 653), i.e. the fantasy Sade articu-
lated as a literary text within the space of his creative imagination,
cannot be mapped directly onto the author’s life. More specifically, the
fact that it is the ‘sadistic’ fantasy of Sade’s libertine heroes that tends to
dominate within the Sadean fantasy—whose full spectrum also includes
the more ‘masochistic’ side of the victims, as epitomized by the peren-
nially virtuous Justine—did not, for Lacan, demonstrate that this is also
the type of ‘practical reason’ which would have presided over his daily
routines, outside the fictional space of the literary narrative. Although
Sade’s incessant articulation of the libertines’ ‘sadistic’ fantasy of abso-
lute destruction inevitably played a crucial part in the author’s own
Weltanschauung, for Lacan the latter was much more constructed around
Sade’s relationship to his own act of writing, and to the specific function
he wanted to accord to his libertine novels, as exclusive ‘instruments’ of
fantasy, than to the personal realization of the cruel and barbaric fantasy
of his fictional heroes.
Much like ‘Kant’ in the title of the paper referred to Kant’s books and
ideas rather than to the man, the ‘Sade’ in ‘Kant with Sade’ was thus
meant to be understood primarily as Sade’s works, and the views
expressed within them by a host of fictional characters. As a matter of
fact, the focus of Lacan’s paper is even tighter, because rather than
aiming to combine all of Kant’s writings with the whole of Sade’s literary
output, which also includes much more mainstream short stories,
novels, essays and plays, it essentially restricts itself—and this is the
second metonymy—to a discussion of the links between a mere two
texts: Kant’s Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft, originally published in
 Introduction xxvii

1788, and Sade’s La philosophie dans le boudoir, from 1795.19 And

because Lacan’s text was always intended as a preface to the latter
volume, it should not come as a surprise that the emphasis is firmly
placed on this one particular book—Kant’s treatise being placed in a
secondary, supporting role.20
In the fourth paragraph of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan mentioned that, to the
best of his knowledge, this link between Kant and Sade had ‘never been
pointed out as such’ (p. 645), thus emphasizing the originality of his direction
of inquiry. Either Lacan’s literature study had been too superficial, or he had
conveniently decided to ‘forget’ some of his source materials, but the

19
In ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan stated that ‘Philosophy in the Bedroom [sic] came eight years after the
Critique of Practical Reason’ (p. 646), which is clearly a mistake. When Lacan first mentioned the
two books in the same breath, in the session of 23 December 1959 of his seminar on the ethics of
psychoanalysis, he dated them correctly, but nonetheless remarked that Sade’s book had come out
six years after Kant’s (Lacan, 1992, p. 78). In 1962, when Lacan was writing the first version of
‘Kant avec Sade’, the most widely available French translation of Kant’s Kritik der Praktischen
Vernunft was the one by François Picavet (Kant, 1943), yet Lacan decided to rely on the ‘very
acceptable’ 1848 translation by Jules Barni (Kant, 1848) (p. 668, note 2). In what follows, I will
refer to the 1997 English translation of the Kritik by Mary Gregor (Kant, 1997b), yet the reader
should note that in Fink’s translation of Écrits, it is Lewis White Beck’s earlier translation of the
Kritik (Kant, 1949) that is referenced (p. 668, note 3). As to La philosophie dans le boudoir, it is the
1965 translation by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (Sade, 1965) that has been utilized in
the English Écrits (p. 668, note 4), but this has now been superseded by a vastly superior
translation by Joachim Neugroschel (Sade, 2006), which is therefore the one that I shall use.
The superiority of Neugroschel’s translation can already be gauged from the way in which the title
of Sade’s book has been rendered. Whereas Seaver and Wainhouse simply called it Philosophy in
the Bedroom, Neugroschel acknowledged that Sade’s boudoir is really not a bedroom but, as Belaval
(1976, pp. 7–8) has indicated, a space situated between the bedroom (where people sleep or have
sex) and the salon (where people rest and converse), and therefore a place where philosophy and
eroticism may become intertwined. See also Delon (1999).
20
Of course, this does not mean that Kant was less important for Lacan’s own intellectual
trajectory than Sade. The significance of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason for Lacan’s theory
of psychoanalysis, and especially for his consideration of a ‘psychoanalytic ethics’, scilicet an ethics
that is apposite for psychoanalytic practice, cannot be overestimated. If Kant operates somewhat in
the background of ‘Kant with Sade’, it is again because Lacan was writing a preface to Sade. Since
the text serves this very specific purpose, Lacan also assumed that his readers were familiar with the
Critique of Practical Reason, exhorting those who ‘are still virgins with respect to the Critique’
(p. 648) to read the book before considering his own text. Needless to say, although Lacan did not
expect his readers to have any detailed knowledge of Philosophy in the Boudoir (a preface is
designed to be read before one reads the text itself), I myself would strongly recommend that
the readers of this book, here, also read Sade’s book before reading Lacan’s text, because this will
greatly improve their understanding of it. In this way, ‘Kant with Sade’ evidently loses its
introductory value and de facto becomes a postface.
xxviii Introduction

connection between Kant and Sade—their works and ideas, rather than their
personalities, of course—had definitely been made before, and moreover
along the same lines, notably in ‘Excursus II’ of Adorno and Horkheimer’s
Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment), which was first pub-
lished in 1944 (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997).21 In this remarkable text, the
principal proponents of the Frankfurt School drew a parallel between Kant’s
Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and Sade’s Juliette ou les prospérités du vice, in
order to show that Sade’s libertine heroes sound uncannily like Kant when
they profess their moral maxims, with the proviso that they represent the
dialectical underside of Kant’s system. Much like Kant, Juliette and her
acolytes reject any consideration of extrinsic, socially sanctioned moral values
when advancing their doctrine. They believe unreservedly in the power of
reason, provided it is stripped of its emotional dimensions (what Kant
designated as the ‘pathological’), so that it becomes a formal, rigorous,
‘apathetic’ faculty. But Adorno and Horkheimer also argued that Sade’s
heroes are Kantian philosophers who are actually purer than Kant himself,
if only because they do not believe that autonomous, dispassionate, scientific
reason will automatically engender moral benevolence and contribute to the
establishment of a harmonious world order. According to Adorno and
Horkheimer, Sade’s libertines are far more rational than the philosopher of
Königsberg, insofar as the latter’s conviction that the simple ‘fact’ of pure
reason would spontaneously generate a practical, moral law of mutual respect
constitutes in itself a point of irrationality.22 These propositions are not at all

21
We know from Adorno’s correspondence with Walter Benjamin that in 1938 Adorno was already
sufficiently familiar with Justine to quote passages from it (Benjamin & Adorno, 1999, p. 286). And in
July 1937, Adorno had informed Benjamin that Horkheimer might be contributing a ‘major essay on
Sade’ for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Benjamin & Adorno, 1999, p. 197). The essay in question
never appeared there, but may have been turned into ‘Excursus II’ of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Indeed,
although there is some discussion as to the authorship of ‘Excursus II’, in all likelihood this part of the
book was written by Horkheimer alone (Figal, 2004, p. 8). Both Horkheimer and Adorno were no
doubt introduced to Sade’s works by Erich Fromm, who had presented the Marquis’ ideas at the
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research during the early 1930s, and who had published a review of
Geoffrey Gorer’s seminal monograph on Sade (Gorer, 1934) in the School’s journal (Fromm, 1934).
22
Sade was exceptionally well-read, but neither from his texts nor from the contents of his
personal library (Seifert, 1983, pp. 175–278; Mothu, 1995) can it be inferred that he ever
picked up a copy of Kant’s philosophical books, which he would have had to read in
German. Vice versa, and considerations of character aside, it would have been impossible
for the philosopher of Königsberg to cast his eye over Sade’s libertine fictions, at least not
 Introduction xxix

dissimilar to what Lacan posited in ‘Kant with Sade’, yet I cannot prove that
he was familiar with Adorno and Horkheimer’s work, much less that he relied
on it when developing his own theses.23
Given the cultural prominence of Sartre and de Beauvoir in France during
the 1950s, I would definitely be surprised if Lacan had not read de Beauvoir’s
seminal essay ‘Faut-il brûler Sade?’, which was originally published in ‘Les
temps modernes’ (de Beauvoir, 1990). In this particular text, de Beauvoir
averred, almost in passing and without any further elaboration: ‘With a
severity similar to Kant’s, and which has its source in the same puritan
tradition, Sade conceives the free act only as an act free of feeling’ (de
Beauvoir, 1990, p. 55). Lacan never referred to de Beauvoir’s work on
Sade, but the two had met during the 1940s at a private performance of a
play by Picasso, and continued to be on friendly terms (Roudinesco, 1997,
pp. 168–169). De Beauvoir’s coupling of Kant and Sade was not nearly as
tight as Horkheimer and Adorno’s intricate intellectual braid of Kant, Sade
and the Holocaust, but at least it demonstrates again that Lacan was clearly
mistaken when he claimed that the link between Kant and Sade had never
before been made.24

around the time when he was writing Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, because the first of
these (La courtisane anaphrodite ou la pucelle libertine) was not published until 1787, in a
limited edition with a very small circulation.
23
Dialektik der Aufklärung was not translated into French until 1974 (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1974),
but Lacan could have easily read it in German or in English. Neither in his seminars nor in his published
texts did Lacan ever mention Adorno and Horkheimer (Le Gaufey et al., 1998), and for all I know he
did not have a copy of their book in his personal library (Roudinesco, 2005). Nonetheless, the similarity
between Lacan’s theses in ‘Kant with Sade’ and Adorno and Horkheimer’s arguments is striking, and
there are other analogies between the two works. For example, the Frankfurt School philosophers
referred to Sade’s meticulously constructed sexual installations as the ‘gymnastic pyramids of Sade’s
orgies’ (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997, p. 88), whereas in ‘Kant with Sade’ Lacan too insisted on the
extraordinary complexity of Sade’s ‘human pyramids’ (p. 664). It is also worth mentioning that, in
1887, Nietzsche had already exposed Kant’s categorical imperative as something that ‘gives off a whiff of
cruelty’ (riecht nach Grausamkeit), in the second essay of his On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche,
1996, p. 47), a book with which Lacan was definitely familiar (Lacan, 1992, p. 35). Nietzsche did not
go so far as to attribute a Sadean ‘smell’ to Kant’s ethics, but the resonances between Nietzsche’s critique
of Kant and Lacan’s reading of Kant with Sade are clear. An interesting exploration of these resonances
can be found in Derrida (2014, pp. 159–165).
24
For the sake of completeness, I should also mention that on 12 May 1947 Georges Bataille gave a
lecture to the ‘Collège philosophique’ entitled ‘Le mal dans le platonisme et dans le sadisme’, which was
published the year after in a revised form as ‘Sade et la morale’, in which he alluded to Kant’s conception
of fine art in the Critique of Judgement as ‘intrinsically purposive’, and therefore emblematic of moral
xxx Introduction

It should also be noted, here, that when Lacan associated Kant

with Sade for the first time on 23 December 1959 (Lacan, 1992,
p. 78), French Sade-scholarship was already highly advanced, by
virtue of a series of influential studies by Maurice Heine (1950b),
Jean Paulhan (1945), Pierre Klossowski (1947), Maurice Blanchot
(1986) and Georges Bataille (1957a, 1957b), and the painstaking
biographical work by Gilbert Lely (1952, 1957). It is highly likely
that Lacan was introduced to Sade’s works by Bataille, but even
without this direct line of influence, he would have been immersed
in a post-War cultural and intellectual atmosphere that took Sade
very seriously, perhaps for the first time in French history (Marty,
2011). Furthermore, one year before Lacan started writing ‘Kant
with Sade’, Michel Foucault published Folie et déraison, his massive
thesis for the French State Doctorate, in which Sade featured
prominently as a major figure of contestation in the history of
French institutional psychiatry (Foucault, 1961). Although he was
not in the habit of acknowledging all his sources, Lacan was clearly
inspired by all these works when he wrote up ‘Kant with Sade’, and
in what follows I will endeavour to show that the contributions of
Blanchot, Klossowski and Bataille in particular, constitute an
important intellectual backdrop for Lacan’s arguments.25 Finally,

action (Kant, 2007, p. 135; Bataille, 1976, p. 452). I have not been able to ascertain whether Lacan
attended the lecture—in all likelihood he did not, because I am quite sure he would have participated in
the discussion, whose record does not include him by name—or was familiar with Bataille’s essay, but
the intellectual convergences and the existing ‘family relationship’ between the two men may very well
have elicited a conversation on the topic. As to Sade and the Holocaust, shortly after the end of World
War II, the French novelist and poet Raymond Queneau wrote in his ‘Lectures pour un front’: ‘It is
undeniable that the world imagined by Sade and willed by his characters (and why not by Sade himself?)
is a striking prefiguration of the world ruled by the Gestapo, its tortures and its camps’ (Queneau, 1950,
p. 172). The point struck a chord with Albert Camus, who expanded upon it in his 1951 book The
Rebel (L’homme révolté), thus painting a much bleaker picture of Sade’s significance than that promoted
by the surrealists (Camus, 2000).
25
In the Critique version of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan placed a footnote at the end of the third
paragraph of the tenth section, which read: ‘If our readers are retained by this point of our essay
[Philippe Pinel’s famous, yet no doubt mythical “gesture” of 1793, whereby he ordered the
removal of the chains of the mad people incarcerated at the Bicêtre asylum in Paris], we can
refer them to Michel Foucault’s admirable Histoire de la folie, published by Plon in 1961, and
specifically to its third part’ (Lacan, 1963, p. 307, footnote 14). For the 1966 and 1971 Écrits
versions of the text, this footnote was deleted, but it was included in the same place in the 1966
 Introduction xxxi

I should mention that on 11 April 1961 Adolf Eichmann, one of

the most highly ranked Nazi officials, was put on trial in Jerusalem,
charged with the mass deportation and large-scale extermination of
millions of Jewish people. At one point during the trial, judge
Raveh questioned Eichmann about a remark he had made pre-
viously under police interrogation, in which he had emphasized
that he had only ever lived his life in accordance with the Kantian
definition of duty. In response to the judge’s question, Eichmann
surprised everyone by reciting, almost verbatim, Kant’s definition of
the categorical imperative: ‘I [Adolf Eichmann] meant by my
remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be
such that it can become the principle of general laws’ (Arendt,
2006, p. 136). Following this statement, Eichmann declared that
he was familiar with Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, but that
he had stopped complying with its precepts from the moment he
was charged with the duty to implement the so-called ‘Final
Solution’. In her reading of this extraordinary moment, Hannah
Arendt argued that Eichmann never really relinquished his Kantian
sense of duty at all, but that he simply ‘distorted it to read: Act as
if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the
legislator or of the law of the land—or . . . ’ ‘Act in such a way
that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it’ (Arendt,
2006, p. 136). Arendt did not go so far as to say that Eichmann
had interpreted Kant in a Sadean fashion, but in her report
Eichmann definitely appeared as a diligent, albeit twisted Kantian
and, by extension, as a cold and callous, yet rational mass-murderer
who incarnated the destructive obverse of Kant’s categorical
imperative—the kind of figure Adorno and Horkheimer may have
had in mind when, in response to the atrocities of World War II,
they exposed the Sadean dangers of Kant’s moral philosophy, and
of the Enlightenment values in general. Arendt reported on the case

‘Sade-version’ of ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan, 1966b, p. 569, note). In the three English editions of
‘Kant with Sade’, the footnote has not been reproduced. In Fink’s translation, it should have been
attached to the word ‘humanity’ at the beginning of the fourth line on p. 661.
xxxii Introduction

for The New Yorker in February and March 1963, but in France
too the newspapers devoted numerous pages to the events in
Jerusalem. Lacan had already linked Kant and Sade 16 months
before the trial started, but Eichmann’s declared Kantianism may
have emboldened him in his views, and may have given him a
renewed strength of purpose when he began composing ‘Kant with
Sade’ during the Spring and Summer of 1962.
Throughout the chapters of this book, I will conduct a step-by-
step reading of ‘Kant with Sade’, articulating what I believe to be
the central lines of Lacan’s thought, clarifying allusions, borrowings
and implicit references, elucidating Lacan’s tacit knowledge, and
situating his ideas within their broader intellectual context which,
as far as Lacan’s own work is concerned, goes back to his explora-
tion of the ethics of psychoanalysis in his seminar of 1959–1960
(Lacan, 1992). To allow the reader to use the book as a running
commentary and conceptual travel guide, I have decided to struc-
ture it in accordance with Lacan’s own textual divisions. As such,
each chapter in the book covers one specific section of Lacan’s text
in the English edition of Écrits, so that a simple numbering of these
sections will allow the reader to go straight to the corresponding
chapter. However, because the twelfth section of ‘Kant with Sade’
(p. 663) is just one sentence, and serves as an introduction to the
following part of the paper, I have taken the twelfth and thirteenth
sections as one in Chapter 12 of the book, so that Chapters 13 and
14 of the book refer respectively to Sections 14 and 15 of Lacan’s
text. Unlike Lacan’s article, my own text is not primarily intended
as a preface, yet many readers will no doubt employ it in this way.
Echoing Lacan, I could have decided, therefore, not to be critical
about the text that is being introduced, since prefatory remarks are
allegedly not meant to do a disservice. Be that as it may, I have felt
it necessary to alert the reader on occasion to those passages in
‘Kant with Sade’ where Lacan’s own explanations and elaborations
are rather contentious and problematic, because otherwise my text
would have been in quite a few places no more than a paraphrase of
 Introduction xxxiii

Lacan’s.26 At the same time, I do not wish to claim, of course, that

my critical analysis of ‘Kant with Sade’ is the only possible inter-
pretation of the text, let alone that it is the most accurate exegesis of
what remains an exceptionally demanding écrit. The reader will
undoubtedly benefit from alternative interpretations, as well as
from the three yearlong seminars held by Miller between 1982
and 1985 (Miller, 1982–1983, 1983–1984, 1984–1985), and the
two contemporary texts mentioned above (Miller, 1996, 1998).
Some of these books and papers will also provide the reader with
scholarly discussions of one or the other aspect of Lacan’s text that
are much more elaborate than what my own contribution allows.27

26
A paraphrase rendered all the more unnecessary by the fact that it already exists. Indeed, shortly
before ‘Kant avec Sade’ was reprinted in the 1971 pocket edition of Écrits, an unsigned paraphrase
(dated November 1968) of Lacan’s paper appeared in Scilicet, the journal of Lacan’s École
freudienne de Paris (NN, 1970). In Rosart’s exhaustive Sade-bibliography of 1977, published in
a special issue of the journal Obliques, this paraphrase was attributed to Lacan himself (Rosart,
1977, p. 300), yet it is unthinkable that Lacan would be the author of a restatement of his own
paper, partly because this kind of captatio benevolentiae is not what he would have ever agreed to
do, partly because all of his own contributions to Scilicet were de facto signed. To the best of my
awareness, none of Lacan’s other papers were ever officially paraphrased, that is to say published as
such with Lacan’s endorsement, and ‘Kant avec Sade’s exception can be seen as further proof that,
even in Lacan’s own School, the text was regarded as ‘difficult’. Before the francophone reader gets
too excited, I should also mention that the paraphrase covers less than half of Lacan’s text, and is
in many places less than enlightening, not in the least because quite a few passages in it are just
literal quotations from Lacan. Apart from this narrative paraphrase, there is another English
rephrasing of Lacan’s text, which follows Richardson’s translation (Lacan, 2009), and which the
author calls a ‘scholion’ (Hughes, 2009).
27
For alternative readings of ‘Kant with Sade’, see Marchaisse (1982), Baas (1992), Roudinesco
(1997, pp. 309–318), Reinhard (1995), Sample (1995), Bencivenga (1996), David-Ménard
(1997), Žižek (1998, 1999), Zupančič (1998, 2000), Allouch (2001), Rabaté (2001, pp. 85–
114), De Kesel (2009), Pinheiro Safatle (2002), Martyn (2003, pp. 171–216), Bosteels (2005),
Banham (2010), Fukuda (2011), Marty (2011, pp. 171–267), Schorderet (2011, pp. 44–51),
Lauwaert (2013, 2014, pp. 137–170), Fink (2014), Roudinesco (2014), Wright (2015) and
Zevnik (2016). In addition, there is an internal document produced by the ‘New Lacanian School’
which contains the transcripts of a series of lectures on ‘Kant with Sade’ delivered by prominent
French Lacanians (Wülfing, 2004), and a two-volume collection of commentaries on some of
Lacan’s references and the two schemas in the text (Zweifel, 2004, 2005).
 1
A New Ethical System

In 1904, the German pioneering sexologist Iwan Bloch published, under

the pseudonym of Dr Eugène Dühren, the first ever edition of Sade’s
mammoth Les cent vingt journées de Sodome (The Hundred-and-Twenty
Days of Sodom), the manuscript of which had been deemed lost after
Sade’s transfer from his cell in the royal jail of the Bastille to the asylum of
Charenton on 4 July 1789, shortly after the outbreak of the French
Revolution and ten days before the most formidable bastion of royal
despotism was seized and plundered (Pauvert & Beuchot, 1999,
p. 101). Both in his preface and in his extended ‘scientific annotations’
to the book, Dühren repeatedly emphasized the striking similarity
between Sade’s fictional heroes and the clinical cases described by
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the most famous sexologist at the time, in his
celebrated (and constantly updated) Psychopathia Sexualis (Sade, 1904,
p. 3, p. 534—notes 70/71, p. 535—note 90; Krafft-Ebing, 1901).
Twenty-five years later, a Lyonese medical doctor by the name of
Salvator Sarfati devoted the first doctoral thesis to Sade, in which he
endorsed Dühren’s view by saying that Sade’s writings were ‘illustrated
monuments of sexual psychopathology which have contributed to science,

© The Author(s) 2017 1

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_1
2 1 A New Ethical System

before Krafft-Ebing did, the full range of perversions’ (Sarfati, 1930,

p. 1). Yet Sarfati also extended their ‘scientific’ value by identifying in
them the seeds of a doctrine ‘that would be developed, one-hundred-
and-twenty-five years later, by the Vienna School’ (Sarfati, 1930,
p. 117)—to be read as: ‘by Freud’. This is the point that was picked
up by the French medical doctor, journalist and Sade-connoisseur
Maurice Heine in a review of Sarfati’s work (Heine, 1950a, pp. 107–108),
and it emboldened him to promote the hybrid paradigm of ‘freudo-sadism’,
which was received with great enthusiasm by the French surrealists.1 In his
influential Anthology of Black Humour, the founder of the surrealist move-
ment André Breton accordingly wrote: ‘[P]sychologically speaking, it [Sade’s
writing] can be considered the most authentic precursor of Freud’s work’
(Breton, 2009, p. 46).
After World War II, the idea that Sade’s libertine novels foreshadowed
Freudian psychoanalysis reappeared in Jean Paulhan’s ‘Le Marquis de Sade
et sa complice ou les revanches de la pudeur’, which was originally published
in 1945 (Paulhan, 1945), and later reprinted in numerous editions under
the title ‘La douteuse Justine ou les revanches de la pudeur’, as a preface to
Sade’s Les infortunes de la vertu (Paulhan, 1959).2 In the fifth section of
this essay, Paulhan opined, not without deliberate hyperbole: ‘Reiterating
them through ten volumes and supporting them with a thousand exam-
ples, a Krafft-Ebing was to consecrate the categories and distinctions the
Divine Marquis traced. Later, a Freud was to adopt Sade’s very method
and principle. There has not, I think, been any other example, in our
Letters, of a few novels providing the basis, fifty years after their publica-
tion, for a whole science of man’ (Paulhan, 1990, p. 18). In his deposition
at the court case against Pauvert on 15 December 1956, Paulhan reiter-
ated the intellectual synergies between Sade and Freud on three separate
occasions (Garçon, 1963, pp. 48–50), but by that time other key figures
within the new wave of French Sade-scholarship had also ascertained
Sade’s proto-freudianism. For example, in his seminal 1949 article ‘La

1
After seeing Buñuel’s L’Âge d’or, Heine had already written an open letter to the director, in
which he underscored, without elaborating, the obvious ‘freudo-sadism’ of the film. See Heine
(1931).
2
For an English translation of this essay, see Paulhan (1990).
 A New Ethical System 3

raison de Sade’, Blanchot had identified a number of themes in Sade’s

work that could be easily interpreted as anticipating Freud (Blanchot,
2004, p. 39), whereas in 1957 even Sade’s biographer Gilbert Lely had
rekindled Heine’s ‘insight’, quoting the same passage from Sade’s Justine
ou les malheurs de la vertu as Blanchot had used, in support of the thesis
that in 1791 the Marquis was already professing some of the ideas that
would later become cornerstones of the Freudian edifice (Lely, 1957,
p. 333, p. 555, footnote 1). And in ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, de Beauvoir
had written that in Philosophy in the Boudoir, Sade had clearly anticipated
Freud’s ‘pan-sexuality’ (de Beauvoir, 1990, p. 38).
In the opening paragraph of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan designated this
recurrent portrayal of Sade as a precursor of Freud as nothing more
nothing less than ‘a stupidity’ (une sottise), which is endlessly repeated in
certain works of ‘literary criticism’ (les lettres) (p. 645). Although he did
not clarify his reasons nor his precise target, one plausible explanation
could be that for Lacan the analogies that had been drawn between Sade
and Freud (and Krafft-Ebing) should not be taken seriously, since they
had primarily served the purpose of rendering Sade more palatable, and
the publication of his work more justifiable.3 Instead of seeing Sade as
presaging Freud, Lacan aligned the Sadean boudoir with the famous

3
As to Lacan’s target, he could have been aiming his words at any one of Sarfati, Heine, Breton,
Blanchot, Lely and de Beauvoir, but there is little doubt that it was Paulhan he had in mind. Apart
from the fact that Paulhan was one of the Sade-specialists who had explicitly portrayed Sade as a
precursor of Freud, he was also fond of referring to literature and literary criticism as ‘les lettres’
(Paulhan, 1987, p. 87; 1941). When Lacan first told his audience of his plan to write up his ideas
on Kant and Sade, he immediately offered a critical reading of Paulhan’s ‘La douteuse Justine’
(Lacan, 1961–1962, session of 28 March 1962). Furthermore, in 1971, Lacan attached a footnote
to the first sentence of the last section of ‘Kant with Sade’, in which he disclosed that the sentence
in question had been directed at a ‘future academician’ (Paulhan was elected to the Académie
française in January 1963, shortly after Lacan had completed the first version of ‘Kant with Sade’),
who had ‘recognized himself in the one [the sentence] that opens this article’ (p. 668, note 21). I
am not sure how, in 1971, Lacan knew that Paulhan had recognized himself in the first sentence of
‘Kant with Sade’, unless we indeed need to assume, as Miller (1998, pp. 205–206) has indicated,
that Lacan—after having been rejected by the publishers of Sade’s complete works—had sent his
paper for publication to Paulhan’s Nouvelle Revue française, only to be rejected once again by its
editor, because the opening line of the text was insinuating that he was a fool . . . That Paulhan
may have had something to do with the (non-) publication of ‘Kant with Sade’ after all, could also
be inferred from what Lacan wrote in a preface to the pocket-edition of Écrits. After playing on the
word ‘âneries’ (nonsense) and referring to ‘stupid comments’ as ‘paulhaneries’, Lacan stated: ‘Even
dear Paulhan did not hold it against me [the stupid comments]—he who knew how ‘Kant with
4 1 A New Ethical System

locations (the Platonic Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum and the covered

walkway called Stoa, from which the Stoic tradition derived its name),
where the ancient philosophers had debated the meaning of life, and
where eager young citizens had received instruction into the ethical
principles underpinning the establishment of a sustainable social system
(p. 645).4 Rather than calling him a precursor of Freud, Lacan suggested
that Sade should thus be recognized as a (moral) philosopher, and that his
works should be situated within the history of ethics. If there is a link at all
between Sade and Freud, it has nothing to do, then, with the former
anticipating the latter, but merely with the latter being able to formulate
his fundamental ‘scientific’ concept of the ‘pleasure principle’ and espe-
cially its ostensible contradictions—the fact that one can experience
pleasure in one’s own and someone else’s pain—because Sade had some-
how prepared the ethical ground for it (p. 645). Indeed, Sade’s libertine
heroes relentlessly insisted on the ‘natural fact’ that human beings are
driven by but one ‘moral’ principle, notably that of the selfish pursuit of
pleasure, whereas Freud argued—in a scientific rather than an ethical vein
—that unconscious mental processes are governed by the sole aim of
obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain (Freud, 1958, p. 219). In addition,
for Sade’s libertines, there should be no limit to a human being’s com-
pliance with this natural ‘moral’ principle. Even when someone only
derives pleasure from inflicting pain, torturing and killing others, or
from his or her own suffering, the acts are legitimate on account of their
being authentic and truthful. Towards the latter part of his career, Freud
too realized that the pleasure principle by no means excludes the existence
of a primary (erotogenic) masochism, which is tantamount to human
beings finding ‘pleasure in pain’, and which may be reinforced by out-
ward-facing destructive impulses being redirected towards the ego (Freud,

Sade’ would detonate in his bestiary [amongst the authors populating his journal]’ (Lacan, 1970,
p. 10).
4
Lacan’s list could have also included Epicurus’ garden, of course. As we shall see, the fact that
these Ancient Greek locations were primarily designed for educational purposes is of particular
relevance for the dramatic action in Philosophy in the Boudoir, which presents itself as a treatise on
the education of young girls, and which includes a lengthy pseudo-political pamphlet cum
instruction manual on the foundations of a new revolutionary republic. Here and elsewhere,
Fink has translated ‘boudoir’ as ‘bedroom’.
 A New Ethical System 5

1955c, pp. 54–55; 1961a, pp. 161–170).5 Hence, if Freud came up with his
own psychoanalytic ‘pleasure principle’—without therefore running the risk
of being misunderstood as defending Rousseau’s belief in the virtuous,
uncorrupted state of human nature—it was, according to Lacan, because
Sade had somehow cleared the ethical path for it, roughly 100 years before
Freud, and because throughout the nineteenth century the theme of ‘delight
in evil’ (bonheur dans le mal) had gradually gained momentum (p. 645).6
Lacan was no doubt alluding, here, to how the idea of someone feeling good
about committing an evil act had slowly yet steadily entered the literary
imagination during the nineteenth century, insofar as it had been celebrated
by Romantic decadent writers such as Baudelaire, Huysmans, Mirbeau,
d’Annunzio, Swinburne and Lautréamont—those, one could say, who had
explored the ‘depths of taste’ (p. 645), often in direct allegiance to Sade’s
libertine novels. In addition, he could have been thinking also about how, in
the course of the nineteenth century, forensic psychiatrists had insisted on
the disjunction between the nature of the criminal act and the nature of the

5
In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan pointed out that in Civilization and Its
Discontents Freud did sound almost exactly like Sade. After reading Freud’s words that for human
beings the neighbour is not only ‘a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts
them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation,
to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him
pain, to torture and to kill him’ (Freud, 1964b, p. 111), he half-jokingly said: ‘If I hadn’t told you
the title of the work from which this passage comes, I could have pretended it was from Sade’
(Lacan, 1992, p. 185). Although Freud would have known about Sade, he does not seem to have
read any of his works. Unlike ‘sadism’, Sade is never mentioned in any of Freud’s published
writings nor, for that matter, in private correspondence. The only trace of Sade in Freud’s personal
library is a printed copy of an 1897 lecture on the Marquis de Sade by the German neurologist
Albert Eulenburg, which was originally delivered before the Berlin Psychological Society. In this
text, Eulenburg depicted Sade as a precursor of Nietzsche and Stirner. See Eulenburg (1901).
6
Lacan wrote ‘delight in evil’ (‘bonheur dans le mal’) in quotation marks yet, as will become clear from
my discussion of Section 3 of Lacan’s text, not everything placed in quotation marks in ‘Kant with
Sade’ is de facto a quote. In the last paragraph of Section 13 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan referred to
‘another happiness . . . whose name I first uttered’ (p. 664), by which he presumably alluded to the
‘delight in evil’ from the opening section of his text. Taking Lacan at his word, here, this would
suggest that Lacan himself coined the phrase in question. Also, when Lacan wrote at the end of the
previous paragraph (p. 645) that one should add ‘another sixty years before one could say why
[Freud’s path had become passable]’, this is most likely an allusion to his own work. Indeed, Lacan’s
seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, on which ‘Kant with Sade’ is based, took place in 1959–
1960, almost exactly 160 years after Sade released the last of his scandalous novels—the monumental
La nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu, suivie de L’histoire de Juliette, sa sœur, which appeared in
no less than ten volumes.
6 1 A New Ethical System

person committing it: an evil act, they argued, is not necessarily committed
by an evil person, and can stem from madness rather than badness. The
literary work which most closely echoes Lacan’s ‘delight in evil’ (bonheur dans
le mal) is Barbey d’Aurevilly’s short story ‘Le bonheur dans le crime’ (Barbey
d’Aurevilly, 1985), but the expression bonheur du Mal had also already been
used by Blanchot in ‘La raison de Sade’ (Blanchot 1986, p. 28; 2004, p. 18),
where it has been translated as ‘the pleasures of Evil’.
For Lacan, Sade had thus been the first to formulate, through the mouth
of his libertines, a new ethical system that does not take its bearings from
common principles of moral goodness, and that does not aim to secure a set
of socially sanctioned values about mutual support, benevolence, courtesy
and respect. Yet for this in itself to have been possible, he asserted, Kant’s
Critique of Practical Reason would have been the necessary turning point, if
only because Kant had set out to propose a comprehensive theory of morality
which does not rely on conventional distinctions between good and bad,
which regards emotional factors of sympathy and compassion as ‘pathologi-
cal’, which deems the anticipated consequences of one’s actions to be
irrelevant with regard to human beings proceeding to fulfil their moral
duty, and which constructs the moral law as simultaneously subjective and
universal. Without seeing Sade as the literary extension of Kant, Lacan
posited quite firmly that Sade’s work—here, Philosophy in the Boudoir—in
a sense completed Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, and even revealed its
truth (p. 646). This is indeed one of the most important theses of ‘Kant with
Sade’: in Philosophy in the Boudoir Sade presented the disturbing truth of
Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, a truth which Kant himself had failed to
recognize and disclose, as Horkheimer and Adorno had already suggested
when they claimed that Kant was not nearly as rational a philosopher as he
had wished to be. How Sade did this, and how this truth should be under-
stood, is what Lacan set out to explain in the rest of his paper, although it is
fair to say that he never really clarified the precise status of this truth. Should
it be restricted to its literary qualities, or should it also be recognized in its
philosophical, moral and political dimensions? Is this truth merely a matter
of Sade indulging in an act of limitless creative freedom, or does it have
concrete implications for the development of an ethical system? Is it a factual
or a mere fictional truth? And what is the function of writing when it comes
to giving shape to this truth in its relation to fantasy, desire and the law?
 A New Ethical System 7

These questions remain very much on the horizon of Lacan’s discourse, and
do not receive a satisfactory answer within the space of ‘Kant with Sade’.7
In order to show, then, how Kant’s work was already highly subversive in
and of itself, Lacan summarized two of Kant’s ‘postulates (presuppositions) of
pure practical reason’ (Kant, 1997b, pp. 102–111). The first postulate is that
of the immortality of the soul (Unsterblichkeit der Seele). For Kant, the
ultimate object(ive) of the moral law is the realization of the ‘highest good’
(Bewirkung des höchsten Guts), which is the moment when supreme virtuous-
ness and supreme happiness coincide. For this highest good to be achieved, a
rational being’s will would need to be in ‘complete conformity’ (völlige
Angemessenheit) with the moral law, that is to say, a rational being would
need to attain a state of ‘holiness’ (Heiligkeit). Since no rational being will ever
be capable of holiness during his or her earthly existence, and because the
moral law should neither be adjusted nor imposed unrealistically, Kant
argued that the immortality of the soul needs to be postulated in order to
understand why a rational being would never give up trying to comply with
the moral law. Endless progress towards perfect compliance is possible if it is
presupposed that the soul is immortal, and that holiness can still be achieved
after the rational being’s phenomenological death. In this way, rational beings
should also be prepared to relinquish or postpone all the temporary satisfac-
tions that they derive from their virtuous compliance with the law, in order to
achieve higher stages of moral perfection.
Kant’s second postulate of practical reason is the existence of God, who
is designated as a ‘supreme intelligence’ and the ‘supreme cause of nature’,
and whose existence needs to be presupposed in order to render the highest
good altogether possible (conceivable, thinkable and achievable). In the
absence of God, the ultimate object(ive) of the moral law cannot be
guaranteed, which will inevitably affect a rational being’s will to promote
the realization of the highest good. In other words, the existence of God

7
The questions would be reactivated and to some extent answered, yet without reference to Lacan,
by Michel Foucault in his lectures on Sade at the State University of New York-Buffalo in March
1970. Foucault presented, here, his most detailed and wide-ranging interpretation of Sade’s
libertine novels, in which he demonstrated that he was at least as engaged with the texts as his
French contemporaries (Klossowski, Blanchot, Barthes and Deleuze), and which also shows that
he cannot be ignored as a key figure in twentieth-century Sade-scholarship. See Foucault (2015,
pp. 93–146).
8 1 A New Ethical System

needs to be postulated, because the object(ive) of the moral law needs to

appear as a consistent, intelligible and feasible achievement to the rational
being, whose duty it is to comply with the law. In the last paragraph of
Section 1 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan did not refer to Kant’s God, but
simply highlighted the Critique’s ‘need for a [divine] will to which the
object that the law concerns [i.e., the highest good] is intelligible’ (p. 646).
Lacan did not say anything, here, about Kant’s third postulate—that of a
rational being’s freedom from the sensible world (Kant, 1997b, p. 110)—
but he pointed out how in the Critique Kant had gone so far as to
completely eradicate the function of ‘usefulness’ or ‘utility’ (das
Nützliche) as a possible good in itself (Kant, 1997b, p. 51), a function
which he had still included, albeit only as a ‘setting’ (Einfassung) of the will,
in his first treatise on moral theory, the 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics
of Morals (Kant, 2012, p. 10).8 Following all of this, Lacan could not resist
telling his readers (and apparently he shared his elation with everyone else
in his environment) how, in studying Kant’s work, he had experienced
‘incredible exaltation’ (p. 646) (Miller, 2003, p. 27).

8
The sentence in which Lacan articulated this point is quite ambiguous. Fink translates ‘perdant
même le plat appui de la fonction d’utilité où Kant les confinait’ as ‘losing even the lifeless support of
the function of utility to which Kant confined them’, which is generally accurate, but which does
not resolve the question as to what the ‘them’ actually refers to. In an endnote attached to this
paragraph (p. 831, note 766, 2) Fink interprets the ‘them’ as referring to Kant’s postulates, and he
goes on to speculate that they lose their function of utility in Philosophy in the Boudoir. However,
one of the things that Lacan will endeavour to show in ‘Kant with Sade’ is precisely that Kant’s
postulates do not lose their usefulness in Sade’s work, inasmuch as some of Sade’s libertine heroes,
such as the minister Saint-Fond and the Italian Cordelli in Juliette, also continue to presuppose the
immortality of the soul and the existence of God. In all likelihood, Lacan’s ‘them’ refers to ‘will’
and ‘object’ (and possibly even to ‘law’) in the previous part of the sentence, so that Lacan can
indeed be seen as commenting, here, on a sentence in the first section of Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals—published three years before the Critique (hence also Lacan’s use of the past
tense in ‘to which Kant confined them’) and drawing on lectures delivered by Kant in 1780 (Kant,
1997a, p. xvii)—whose French translation preceded the Barni-translation of the Critique Lacan
was using. In this particular sentence, Kant’s term Einfassung was rendered as ‘encadrement’ by
Barni (like the frame of a painting) (Kant, 1848, p. 15), which Lacan seems to have retranslated
here (on the basis of the standard German Vorländer-edition of Kant’s works, which he also had in
front of him) as ‘plat appui’ (literally ‘flat support’), and which Gregor and Timmermann have
rendered in English as ‘setting’ (like a jeweller’s setting, which keeps a precious stone in a ring).
Immediately after this part of the sentence, Lacan referred (in French) to the Critique’s ‘diamant de
subversion’—a diamond, one could say, which has been released on account of Kant removing the
‘setting’ of utility . . .
 2
Lacan Reads Kant

At the end of Section 2 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan exhorted those

unfamiliar with Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason to stop reading his
article, and to return to it after they had perused the philosopher’s book
(p. 648). The recommendation was undoubtedly fair and just, but it
should have come at the very beginning of this section, because it is quite
unlikely that a reader who is not up to speed with the intricacies of
Kant’s moral theory will be able to follow and appreciate Lacan’s
exposition of it in this part of the paper, if only because he synthesized
in it a great many of Kant’s ideas and arguments, without making any
concessions to the uninitiated. If the terminology in this section comes
across as unusual and abstruse to the more psychoanalytically inclined
reader, it is only because Lacan was strictly working within a Kantian
conceptual framework, without even the slightest recourse to classic or
contemporary psychoanalytic notions. By contrast, the reader who is
fully conversant with the Critique of Practical Reason—its nomenclature
as well as its theses—should be able to situate Lacan’s references without
difficulty, and will definitely be at an advantage when it comes to
making sense of this part of the text.

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10 2 Lacan Reads Kant

In the first four paragraphs (p. 646), Lacan outlined Kant’s account
of the ‘concept of an object of pure practical reason’ from the second
chapter of the first book of the Critique of Practical Reason (Kant,
1997b, pp. 50–58). In this part of his work, Kant underscored that the
German language is at an advantage compared to languages whose
vocabulary is strongly indebted to Latin, because German has two
words to express ‘good’ and another two words for ‘bad’. In German,
‘good’ can be rendered as ‘das Wohl’ or as ‘das Gute’, whereas for ‘bad’
one can use ‘das Übel’ or ‘das Böse’. ‘Wohl’ and ‘Übel’ generally capture
how an individual feels (‘good’ or ‘bad’) in response to a certain object,
event or situation. In Kant’s own terms, the words refer to ‘our
sensibility and to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure it [the object]
causes’ (Kant, 1997b, p. 52). The upshot is that the lexical ambiguity
of the English sentence ‘I’m feeling good about doing (a) good (deed)’,
and its French equivalent ‘On est bien dans le bien’, disappears in
German, where a literal translation of the sentence would read: ‘Man
fühlt sich wohl im Guten’ (p. 646).1 Yet because ‘das Wohl’ is associated
with a personal sensation of pleasure, that is to say with the subjective
experience of feeling good, it does not by definition accord with what a
reasonable human being would conceive as a ‘good’ thing to do. The
example Kant gave is that of a human being who agrees to have surgery.
Bearing in mind that at the time Kant was writing there were no
reliable procedures for inducing general anaesthesia in a patient, sur-
gery would have been an extremely painful event, and thus something
that would cause a great deal of displeasure. Nonetheless, the surgery
may still be seen as a good thing to do, if only because it can have a life-
saving effect (Kant, 1997b, p. 53). Hence, it is quite possible for
someone to feel bad about doing a good thing and mutatis mutandis
for someone to feel rather good about doing something intrinsically
bad. For a dedicated Enlightenment philosopher like Kant, it would
have been difficult to imagine the latter possibility, and so he did not
really consider it, but as Lacan pointed out in the opening paragraphs

1
To the best of my knowledge, this German sentence does not appear as such in any of Kant’s
works, and can be safely regarded as Lacan’s own construction.
 Lacan Reads Kant 11

of ‘Kant with Sade’ (p. 645) the idea of ‘delight in evil’ (‘bonheur dans
le mal’) had gradually infiltrated the Western cultural imagination
during the nineteenth century.2
Purely on the basis of Kant’s definition of ‘das Wohl’, a term which
can be rendered in English as ‘well-being’ or ‘feeling good’, and without
needing to subscribe to Freudian psychoanalysis, it already becomes
apparent, then, that the rules governing the pursuit and maintenance
of subjective well-being can be designated as some kind of ‘pleasure
principle’ (p. 646).3 Yet according to Kant, this type of regulatory
system could never constitute the foundation for a moral law, because
good (pleasure) and bad (displeasure) are merely a subject’s affective
responses to an arbitrary and capricious empirical object. The experience
of well-being is taken up in a chain of transient and unpredictable
phenomena, whereby ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are but momentary effects of a
set of specific circumstances whose precise nature and impact cannot be
accurately foreseen. Put differently, were there to be a law of well-being,
it could never determine the human being as an active and free, rational
will—the typical Enlightenment subject—but only as a receptive organ-
ism whose fluctuating sensibilities are dependent upon and conditioned
by an empirical object. Moreover, apart from the fact that the link
between the subjective experience of well-being and the empirical object
is fragile—for no phenomenon, as Lacan put it, ‘can lay claim to a
constant relationship to pleasure’ (p. 646)—the sensation that results
would be all too idiosyncratic and short-lived for it to become the
foundation for a moral law that is universal, and would therefore be
applicable to everyone.

2
In the first sentence of Section 2 (p. 646), Lacan played on a famous phrase by Goethe from the
very end of the second part of Faust, in which the Chorus Mysticus proclaims: ‘das Ewig-
Weibliche/Zieht uns hinan’—‘The eternal feminine draws us on high’ or, in Stuart Atkins’
translation, ‘Woman, eternally, shows us the way’ (Goethe, 1994, p. 305)—to associate ‘delight
in evil’ with a situation in which the ‘eternal feminine’ would no longer draw upwards, elevate and
attract. This could in itself be interpreted in at least two different ways: as the ‘eternal feminine’
(the feminine ideal, perfect femininity) becoming threatening and repulsive, or as (erotic) attrac-
tion falling under the spell of another, less exalted concept of femininity, such as that of the
‘femme fatale’, which also gained momentum during the nineteenth century. See Dijkstra (1986).
3
See also Lacan (1992, p. 72).
12 2 Lacan Reads Kant

By way of radical alternative, Kant proposed the establishment of a

moral law which completely bypasses all considerations of ‘goodness’
that take their bearings from a certain relationship between the subject
and the object. Whether something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ should not depend
on what an object elicits in the subject (pleasure or displeasure), but on
the extent to which the subject’s will acts in accordance with an a priori
law. If there is an object(ive) of the moral law, it can only involve, in
Kant’s perspective, the convergence of a rational human being’s will with
the formulation of this very law, and not—as in traditional conceptions
of morality—a certain set of precepts as to which empirical objects
(events and situations) are agreeable and which are not. Beyond ‘das
Wohl’, Kant thus continued to recognize ‘das Gute’ as the object of the
moral law, but this is very much a ‘concept’ of an object rather than an
object per se, partly because it has no connection with any empirical
object whatsoever, partly because (as I explained above, in the context of
Kant’s postulate of the immortality of the soul) the object cannot
actually be attained by any rational human being during his or her
earthly existence.
Following Kant, when the will frees itself from the lures of all
empirical sensibilities—which he did not hesitate to call ‘pathological’
(Kant, 1997b, p. 17)—it will hear the ‘voice of reason’ (die Stimme der
Vernunft) (Kant, 1997b, p. 32). This voice will distinctly articulate the
moral law as a categorical imperative: ‘So act that the maxim of your will
could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal
law’ (Kant, 1997b, p. 28, p. 646). Although Kant’s moral law appears to
the rational human being as a command (imperative), it is radically
different from the Biblical ‘ten commandments’, for instance, because it
is devoid of contents, stripped of every reference to specific objects and
reduced to a pure form. Rather than prescribing or prohibiting certain
actions, Kant’s moral law equips the rational will with a tool for judging
whether the practical principle (maxim) underpinning a particular
action is admissible, and this judgement must be based on an assessment
of the extent to which the principle in question can have universal value,
i.e. whether it can be deemed valid for everyone, in each and every case.
As Kant described it, the moral law is categorical (as opposed to
hypothetical), universal (applicable to all rational beings) and
 Lacan Reads Kant 13

unconditional (unaffected by any condition that would be imposed

upon it by an empirical object, event or situation).
Of course, the question is why a rational human being would decide
to follow this moral law or, more concretely, what incentives (Triebfeder)
a will would require for it to comply with the categorical imperative.
This is the issue Kant addressed in the third chapter of the first book of
the Critique of Practical Reason (Kant, 1997b, pp. 62–89), and Lacan
summarized some key points of it in the fifth paragraph of Section 2 of
‘Kant with Sade’ (p. 647). In essence, Kant argued that the moral law
should determine a subject’s will directly, in an unmediated fashion, and
not owing to the ‘cooperation of sensible impulses’—amongst which he
did not hesitate to include ‘regard for oneself’ (Selbstsucht, solipsismus),
which is in itself made up of ‘self-regard’, ‘benevolence toward oneself’
(both also known as self-love) and ‘satisfaction with oneself’ (Arrogantia,
self-conceit) (Kant, 1997b, p. 63). Needless to say, when the moral law
infringes upon self-love and strikes down self-conceit, this will be
experienced by the rational human being as painful. Yet since the
moral law remains something positive in itself, it will actually become
weightier (more powerful, important and influential) when ‘regard for
oneself’ is removed, because the latter acts as a counterweight to the
subject’s direct observance of the moral law (and the highest good that
can be expected of it). And so Lacan stated that in Kant’s moral
philosophy, the Good (which coincides with a situation in which the
moral law determines the subject’s will directly, without internal or
external incentives) is some kind of ‘anti-weight’, which derives its
force from the rational reduction (subtraction) of the weight of
Selbstsucht (p. 647).
It would be wrong to think, however, that Lacan simply embraced
Kant’s philosophy here, and employed it as a template for considering
Sade’s ethical system. For in the remaining paragraphs of Section 2, he
formulated two key criticisms of Kant’s theory.4 First, he alerted the

4
This is not the place for me to discuss the validity of Lacan’s interpretation of Kant. For critical
readings of Lacan’s critique of Kant’s Critique, see Baas (1992), David-Ménard (1997) and
Zupančič (2000).
14 2 Lacan Reads Kant

reader to an ostensible paradox (p. 647): when Kant insisted on the

necessity for all empirical objects (and subjective sensibilities) to be
excluded as possible grounds for morality, there seemed to appear a
new, incontrovertible object, notably the object of the moral law itself,
which is heard by the subject as ‘something that is already signifying’, a
‘voice in conscience’ (p. 647). Lacan intimated, here, that Kant’s persis-
tent attempt at securing a strictly rational, exclusively formal and
distinctly non-empiricist foundation for morality ran aground on the
manifestation of the categorical imperative as a new empirical object in
its own right, notably the meaningful sound of the voice of reason. As
will become clear from my exposition of subsequent sections of ‘Kant
with Sade’, Lacan believed that on this point Sade had been more honest
than Kant, insofar as Sade had dared to recognize the moral law as a
fundamental empirical object in itself, by situating it in the merciless
cruelty and relentless brutality of ‘Nature’.
Lacan’s second critical comment concerned the status of the moral
law as a categorical imperative. Drawing on Kant’s distinction between
analytic and synthetic propositions in his Critique of Pure Reason (Kant,
1998), Lacan posited that the logic of the categorical imperative requires
that it can only be applied with certainty to analytic maxims, and not to
synthetic ones. The requirement that the maxim of a rational human
being’s will should incorporate the principle of a universal law is, for
Lacan, only something that can be accepted with positive conviction, if
and only if it concerns a proposition whose predicate is already encap-
sulated within its subject concept, as in ‘All triangles have three sides’
or—with an example Lacan took from the Critique of Practical Reason
(Kant, 1997b, p. 25)—as in ‘All deposits have a worthy depository’
(p. 647). Analytic (or expliative) maxims are by definition universal,
because their predicate (three sides, a worthy depositary) does not add
anything that is not already included in the concept of the subject (the
triangle, the deposit), and so their universality does not need to be
demonstrated. In synthetic (or ampliative) propositions, the predicate
is not identical with the subject, and so the relationship between the two
is not self-evident. Some form of argument, proof or demonstration is
required before these propositions can be regarded as universally valid,
and even then there may still be an element of doubt as to their validity.
 Lacan Reads Kant 15

Lacan illustrated this point with a famous sentence from Alfred Jarry’s
comic play Ubu Rex, in which the central character of Pa Ubu exclaims
(and these are the final lines of the play): ‘Beautiful though it [Germany]
may be, it’s not a patch on Poland. Ah gentlemen, there’ll always be a
Poland. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any Poles!’ (Jarry, 1968, p. 73). In
Lacan’s Kantian adaptation, the line reads: ‘Long live Poland, for if there
were no Poland, there would be no Poles’ (p. 647). What makes the
sentence amusing is that it presents a synthetic proposition (‘All Poles
are inhabitants of Poland’) as if it were an analytic judgement. Lacan
indicated that while the ‘analytic explanation’ of Poles’ existence being
dependent upon Poland ‘is [seemingly] irrefutable’, because the predi-
cate Poland is clearly included in the subject concept (Pole), it is of
course perfectly possible for Poles to maintain themselves in the absence
of their home-land (p. 647). Hence, although Pa Ubu formulated his
salutation in analytic terms (with the object ‘Poland’ being included
within, and as identical to the subject of the ‘Poles’), in actual fact the
relationship between the object and the subject is synthetic and needs to
be demonstrated. And so Lacan asserted that, in having to rely de facto
on analytic propositions for the implementation of his categorical
imperative, Kant had once again showed himself to be incapable of
attaching the moral law to an (empirical, phenomenal) object that is
not already included in the concept of its subject qua maxim of the will
(p. 647). Only as a synthetic proposition would the maxim of the will
disconnect the subject from the object, and would the latter’s validity, as
a predicate, need to be demonstrated in its relation to the former. Lacan
thus criticized Kant for including the object of the ‘highest good’ within
the very formulation of the categorical imperative as an analytic proposi-
tion, which had effectively stopped him from having to demonstrate the
value of this good, but which had also (as Horkheimer and Adorno had
already suggested) put him at risk of readily assuming the existence of
moral goodness within the law, which is not at all obvious. Much like Pa
Ubu, Lacan claimed, Kant had made the mistake of turning what should
be a synthetic proposition into an analytic judgement.
At the end of Section 2 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan concluded that
throughout the Critique of Practical Reason the object thus keeps slipping
away (p. 647), although it leaves behind traces at each and every point of its
16 2 Lacan Reads Kant

involvement with the moral law. And indeed, one could say that even the
‘highest good’—the one and only object Kant acknowledged as essential to
the process of morality—endlessly recedes into the distance, as a utopian,
asymptotic presence that can only be attained beyond the boundaries of a
rational human being’s earthly existence. With the Kantian object refusing
to be caught, but with it being felt ‘behind the scenes’, and it being detected
in small remnants of its imposing presence—like the handkerchief the lady
leaves to her knight before he is going into battle in the medieval accounts
of courtly love—Lacan ended this section by declaring that Kant’s work has
certain erotic qualities, innocent no doubt, but distinguishable all the same,
which he promised to evince by clarifying the nature of the endlessly
receding object in question (p. 647). The comment was clearly ironic,
because Kant’s works are notoriously arid and not at all endowed with
the power to titillate, not even in those places where he had recourse to
concrete examples. Nonetheless, the way in which the object of the moral
law keeps returning as an empirical force behind Kant’s carefully crafted
philosophical veils, be it in the shape of the ‘voice of reason’ that sends out
to the rational human being its unassailable command to obey, emboldened
Lacan to say that there is more eroticism in Kant’s Critique of Practical
Reason than what a quick cursory reading might reveal.
Having summarized the central tenets of Kant’s moral philosophy,
Lacan went on to invite his readers to follow him into Sade’s boudoir,
remarking wittily that what he had in mind was evidently a joint reading
of Philosophy in the Boudoir rather than, say, a combined entry into its
location, or a shared endorsement of its philosophy (p. 648).
 3
Sade’s Kantian Maxim

When, towards the end of 1795, Philosophy in the Boudoir started to

circulate clandestinely in Paris, the French Revolution had just
entered a new stage—the Directory regime marking the end of
Robespierre’s ferocious reign of terror with a new constitution, a
new legislature and a new round of summary executions. For about
a year, Sade had lived as a free man, but his scandalous reputation, his
political choices and his years of detention had cost him dearly.
Dispossessed of his wealth, removed of his citizenship rights, and
embroiled in a bitter legal dispute with his former wife, he decided to
capitalize on his literary talents by rereleasing his vast philosophical
novel Aline et Valcour (in eight small volumes) and devoting himself
to new writing projects.
Philosophy in the Boudoir is essentially a play about the sexual and
moral education of a charming 15-year-old girl called Eugénie de
Mistival, by a trio of unbridled libertines (Madame de Saint-Ange, her
brother the Chevalier de Mirvel and the philosopher-villain Dolmancé)
and two ‘extras’. The narrative structure unfolds as a series of seven

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DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_3
18 3 Sade’s Kantian Maxim

dialogues in dramatic form, replete with stage directions.1 Lacan called it

a ‘pamphlet’ (p. 648), no doubt because it was printed in a limited
edition, without the name of a publisher, and as a posthumous work of
the anonymous ‘author of Justine’. Rather than summarizing the text, he
immediately drew attention to a strange peculiarity of its composition.
In the middle of the fifth dialogue, Eugénie asks ‘whether a government
truly needs a set of morals, whether they can really influence the essence
of a nation’ (Sade, 2006, p. 103), to which Dolmancé responds that it so
happens he has just bought a pamphlet entitled Frenchmen, Some More
Effort if you Wish to Become Republicans, which will answer all of
Eugénie’s questions. Casting her eye over the document, Madame de
Saint-Ange instructs her brother to read it aloud, and what follows is the
full 45-page text of the pamphlet, which takes up almost a quarter of the
entire book. Lacan referred to it as a ‘pamphlet within the pamphlet’
(p. 648) and as a ‘factum’ (diatribe), drawing attention to how it was
commonly regarded as a ‘mystification’, but emphasizing that it deserves
to be recognized for its ‘closer relationship to the real’, similar to how
Freud had interpreted the ‘dream within the dream’ (p. 648).2 Again,

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
 Sade’s Kantian Maxim 19

instead of summarizing its contents, Lacan restricted himself to pointing

out that the gist of this ‘factum’ may be captured in a moral maxim,
whose projected universality follows the key principle of the Kantian
categorical imperative (p. 648).
In Lacan’s version, the Sadean maxim sounds as follows: ‘“I have the
right to enjoy your body”, anyone can say to me, “and I will exercise this
right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish
to satiate with your body”’ (p. 648). It is important to note that,
although the maxim appears in quotation marks in ‘Kant with Sade’,
Lacan did not lift it as such from Philosophy in the Boudoir nor, for that
matter, from any other work by Sade. The fact that it does not concern
an actual quote is also attested to by Lacan’s modification of it for the
Écrits version of ‘Kant with Sade’, which would not have been permitted
had it been extracted verbatim from Sade’s text. For the Écrits version,
Lacan substituted the small clause ‘anyone can say to me’ for ‘I will say
to whoever I like’, which appeared in the Critique version of ‘Kant with
Sade’.3 This substitution radically alters the syntax of the sentence, and

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).
20 3 Sade’s Kantian Maxim

feeds into Lacan’s subsequent argument about the fundamental non-

reciprocity of the Sadean ‘relationship’ and the distinction between the
‘enunciating subject’ and the ‘subject of the statement’. Lacan conceded
that ‘any reasonable being’ is likely to recognize the black humour in this
sentence, and so we also need to assume that, in formulating the Sadean
maxim in this particular way, he wanted to preserve something of Sade’s
satirical intent (p. 648).4 However, the maxim’s humour, which would
stem from the sheer absurdity of a society embedding this principle
within its legal structures as an essential human right, should not detract
from its seriousness, partly because (as Freud would have it) humour is

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.
 Sade’s Kantian Maxim 21

in itself ‘a contribution made to the comic through the agency of the

super-ego’ (and thus of moral conscience) (Freud, 1964a, p. 165), partly
because (in a strict Kantian sense) reasonable interpretations should not
be confused with basic rationality and prospective universality, which are
intrinsic formal aspects of pure practical reason (p. 648).5 Later on in the
text (p. 649), Lacan maintained that the preposterousness of a social
order endorsing this maxim has no bearing whatsoever on the value of its
edict (its kerygma) as a universal and unconditional, categorical impera-
tive. The Sadean maxim qualifies, because like Kant’s moral law it is
based on a ‘radical rejection of the pathological’, and it does not take
account of anything else but the rational, formal aspects of its exposition
(p. 649).6 Lacan then proceeded to unpack the fundamental principle of
non-reciprocity which underpins this Sadean maxim of the right to
jouissance, and which he not only recognizes in the Sadean subjective
structures, but in all developmental processes, insofar as they concern a
relationship between the subject and the signifier (the symbolic order,
the Other).7

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 philoso-
pher’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 imperti-
nence 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
22 3 Sade’s Kantian Maxim

Much could no doubt be said, here, about how Lacan’s own views had
already changed by the late 1950s, when he moved away from his earlier
notion of inter-subjectivity towards the concept of ‘subjective disparity’,
which defines all relationships between the subject and the Other as de
facto unequal, dissymmetrical and conflict-ridden (Lacan, 2015, p. 3).8
In the Sadean universe, non-reciprocity is the non-negotiable foundation
for each and every type of sexual configuration and, by extension, for all
patterns of human interaction. As Angela Carter put it in The Sadeian
[sic] Woman, without referring to Lacan: ‘There is no question of
reciprocal sensation [in Sade’s novels]; the idea of it is abhorrent to the
Sadeian libertine, except under certain special circumstances where two of
a kind meet and perform rituals of which both understand the signifi-
cance. In these cases, violence is a form of play. Otherwise, the dichot-
omy between active and passive, evil and good, is absolute, and, what is
more, perceived as unchanging, an immutable division between classes.
Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed’
(Carter, 1979, pp. 141–142). Dolmancé explains to Eugénie: ‘If the
people serving our pleasure reach orgasm [jouissent], they are obviously
occupied more with themselves than with us, thereby interfering with our
bliss [notre jouissance]. There is no man who doesn’t wish to be a despot
when he has an erection—evidently he feels less pleasure if others seem to
have as much pleasure as he . . . The thought of seeing another person
come [jouir] like him leads to an equality that troubles the ineffable lures
experienced by despotism’ (Sade, 2006, p. 154). Hence, in Lacan’s for-
mulation of the Sadean maxim, there is meant to be an absolute sub-
jective disparity between the victim and the aggressor. At no given point

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.
 Sade’s Kantian Maxim 23

will there be a shared, mutual experience of jouissance, although this does

not by definition exclude the possibility of roles being redistributed, the
victim becoming a tormentor at a later stage (and vice versa), which is
what Lacan called ‘my turn next time’ (‘la charge de revanche’) (p. 649).9
In order to understand the following parts of Lacan’s text (p. 650), it
is essential to analyse the syntactical structure of the Sadean maxim. The
first thing to note—and this is where the Écrits version of the maxim
differs crucially from its Critique version—is that the first person singu-
lar ‘I’, with which the sentence opens, does not coincide with the
grammatical subject of the statement, which is situated at the level of
the objective personal pronoun ‘me’. It would not have been clear from
the syntax of the Critique version of the maxim, but in the Écrits version
the enunciating subject of the full sentence is the one who is being
subjected (as a victim) to the law of jouissance of ‘I have the right to enjoy
your body . . . ’, which is in itself enunciated by an abstract, anonymous

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 subse-
quently 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).
24 3 Sade’s Kantian Maxim

Other (‘anyone can say [it] to me’) (p. 648).10 Lacan pointed out that, by
ostensible contrast with Kant’s moral imperative, it transpires that in the
Sadean maxim the law is primarily imposed upon the Other, rather than
upon ourselves, for after all it is from the Other that I (as a passive target)
hear the law being enunciated. The Other proclaims to have the ‘right to
enjoy’, whereas I am no more than the body who is about to be enjoyed
‘without any limit’ by this Other. Yet Lacan declared that the difference
between the Sadean maxim and the Kantian categorical imperative is
indeed only apparent, only occurring ‘at first blush’ (‘de prime abord’)
(p. 650), because in Kant’s system too it is from the place of the
Other that we are being summoned by the command of the moral
imperative.11 As I explained above, Kant believed that once a rational
human being has relinquished all ‘pathological’ considerations for
empirical objects, he or she will hear the moral law being articulated
by the voice of reason. Kant assumed that rational human beings and the
voice of reason are part and parcel of the same self-reflexive process,
whereas for Lacan this is a false assumption, because the subject is
effectively split (divided), here, between a position from where the
moral law is enunciated (sent out), and a position to which the moral
law is being applied (where it is received). Relying on the Sadean maxim,
which he defined as ‘more honest than Kant’s appeal to the voice within’
(p. 650), Lacan thus also criticized Kant for failing to acknowledge the
fundamental ‘bipolarity’ in the way the moral law is being conveyed, i.e.
for covering up the subjective splitting that occurs as soon as the moral

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.
 Sade’s Kantian Maxim 25

law is enunciated.12 Put differently, in Lacan’s reading of Kant, the

philosopher had erroneously assumed that the relationship between the
‘voice of reason’ and the rational being who is hearing this voice is truly
analytic—much like he did with the relation between a deposit and the
depository. However, for Lacan, the principle of the moral law is by
definition synthetic, inasmuch as the object (here, the rational being
hearing the voice of reason) is not de facto included in the subject (here,
the voice of reason that is being heard by the rational being) of the
proposition. Whereas Kant had conflated the enunciating subject (of the
voice of reason) with the (rational) subject of the (moral) statement—
and had in a sense considered both to be reciprocal—Lacan insisted that
the moral law requires both poles to be kept separate. If not, one ends up
again presenting a synthetic judgement as if it were an analytic one, like
Pa Ubu half-jokingly did in his celebration of Poland as the necessary
and sufficient condition for the existence of Poles (p. 650).
Emphasizing the disparity between the enunciating subject and the
subject of the statement, Lacan also argued that in the Sadean maxim
the enunciating subject is being detached (‘s’y détache’) from the actual
enunciation of the law (p. 650).13 Again, as with Pa Ubu’s (slightly
modified) ‘Long live Poland’, one may deservedly wonder in whose
name Sade’s representatives of the moral law are speaking. In the
second part of Frenchmen, Some More Effort if you Wish to Become
Republicans, the anonymous author of the revolutionary pamphlet
drew on the first article of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and
of the Citizen’—which had been adopted in August 1789 and which
still counts as one of the most important documents in the history of
human rights—not to nuance, but to justify his law of jouissance: ‘All
men are born free, all are equal before the law [this is the first article];
we must never lose sight of these principles. Hence, no sex is granted

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.
26 3 Sade’s Kantian Maxim

the legitimate right to seize the other sex exclusively, and never can any
class possess the other arbitrarily . . . If it is therefore incontestable that
nature has given us the right to express our desires for all women
without exception, it is equally incontestable that we have the right
to force them all to submit to us; and not exclusively—for that would
contradict what I have said above—but for the moment . . . Let me
repeat: the issue at hand is sensual pleasure [jouissance] and not prop-
erty’ (Sade, 2006, pp. 127–128). Here, the author of the pamphlet
pontificated in the name of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, but
his discourse differed radically from that endorsed by the French
National Constituent Assembly, because he also spoke in the name
of human Nature, which (unlike Rousseau) he defined as brutal,
selfish, cruel and merciless (p. 650). Hence, although the pamphleteer
articulated the law of the right to jouissance, he was only reiterating a
moral dictate emanating from the radically free Other of human
Nature. The discourse of the right to jouissance, as it appeared in the
pamphlet, had been instructed by Nature, which is the true place from
which it had been enunciated, although it is hardly a place that can be
located with any degree of certainty.
Lacan added to this that the detachment of the enunciating subject
does not make the moral law less effective, both in its function as a
command and in its determining effect on the subject of the statement
(the ‘target-subject’, on whom the law is being imposed, and which thus
becomes victimized). In the first instance, Lacan claimed, the Sadean
discourse of the right to jouissance, despite its coming from the Other, is
as commanding as the Kantian ‘So act that . . . ’, the latter stemming
from the depths of the ‘voice of reason’ (p. 650).14 Secondly, the law of
limitless jouissance establishes a fundamental polarity between the Other
(who articulates it, although in the name of Nature) and the ‘target-
subject’, who is being enjoyed, and who shall bear the cross of the whole
experience. As Lacan put it, the right to jouissance ‘drills [a hole] in the
Other’s locus’ (p. 650), because it cannot operate without the existence

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’.
 Sade’s Kantian Maxim 27

of someone who sacrifices, or is being forced to sacrifice his or her own

jouissance for the sake of the Other—a subject in the literal sense of the
term.15 For the law of jouissance to be implemented, the existence of a
‘subject of non-jouissance’ is thus an absolute pre-condition, and for as
long as the law is applied to this subject as an enjoyable target it will be
in a state of suffering, if only because (as Dolmancé explained in the
aforementioned passage) the serving subject is itself radically barred from
the right to enjoy, in the moment when the aggressor exercises his own
right. In the next section of the text, Lacan elaborated on this point by
exploring the function of pain in the ‘Sadean experience’, which is
meant to represent the characteristic relationship between the tormen-
tors and their victims.

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.
 4
Regarding the Pain of Others

Throughout the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant hardly paid any

attention to the experience of pain, save as a by-product of the will’s
virtuous compliance with the moral law, or as something that merely
belongs to the empirical world of sensible experience and which, as such,
should have no bearing on pure practical reason. Although he was
critical of the Stoics’ unwavering belief in a human being’s moral
capacity to attain virtue and the highest good during the time of his
earthly existence (Kant, 1997b, p. 106), Kant also felt that the Stoics’
radical contempt for pain was entirely justified, because pain does not ‘in
the least diminish the worth of his [the sufferer’s] person but only the
worth of his condition’ (Kant, 1997b, p. 53).1

1
Contempt is the most common English translation of the Greek noun καταφρóνησις, which
appears in the last sentence of chapter 19 of Epictetus’ Enchiridion, and which conveys a sense of
supremely confident, arrogant disdain. In the most recent translation of the Enchiridion, the noun
has been turned into a verb: ‘And the way to be free is to look down on externals’ (Epictetus, 2008,
p. 228, italics added). In Section 4 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan used the term mépris, which Fink
has translated as ‘scorn’.

© The Author(s) 2017 29

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_4
30 4 Regarding the Pain of Others

Gauging the status of contempt within the Sadean experience, Lacan

invoked the oft-recounted anecdote of how Epictetus ended up with a
crippled leg, which had first appeared in Book 7 of Origen’s Contra
Celsum as something the philosopher Celsus had mentioned in (the now
lost text of) The True Word (Αληθής Λόγος): ‘When his master was twisting
his leg, [Epictetus] said, smiling and unmoved “You will break my leg!” and
when it was broken, he added “Did I not tell you that you would break it?”’
(Origen, 2013, p. 622). Were the target-subjects (the victims) in the Sadean
experience to respond in this way, with radical contempt for their predica-
ment, the libertines’ jouissance would fall flat and turn into disgust (p. 651).
As I explained above, under no circumstance should the victims experience
jouissance themselves. However, as Dolmancé put it to Eugénie, it is much
better for them not to be indifferent (or act contemptuously) either, and for
them to experience a certain degree of pain, be it in the form of humiliation,
personal disgrace or an assault on their modesty [pudeur]: ‘[A] singularity of
our organs . . . can make the torment of our neighbour agreeable, which
often happens. In that case, who can doubt that we must indisputably prefer
the torment that amuses us, to the absence of pain, which signifies a
privation for us?’ (Sade, 2006, p. 93).2 Lacan stated that in the Sadean
maxim pain ‘projects its promise of ignominy’ (p. 650), because as soon as
the law is enunciated, through the mouth of the Other, the target-subject is
likely to experience a sense of personal disgrace, dishonour and humiliation.
In addition, because the target-subject is by definition not a libertine, or not
in the libertine position, he or she does not know how to transform pain into
pleasure (or is, quite simply, not allowed to do so), and so the pain will
exacerbate the victim’s sense of humiliation. In the final dialogue of
Philosophy in the Boudoir, Dolmancé instructs Eugénie to position herself
next to her mother, Madame de Mistival, so that he can compare both

2
Here and elsewhere in this section of Lacan’s text, Fink has translated pudeur as ‘modesty’, which
is indeed the standard English translation of the term, but unfortunately ‘modesty’ has predomi-
nantly moral connotations and does not really capture the sexual overtones of the French word,
whose semantic spectrum ranges from chastity and decency to shame and prudishness. In
Philosophy in the Boudoir, Sade himself distinguished between pudeur and modestie in one of
Dolmancé’s numerous recitations of anthropological factoids: ‘There are countries whose inhabi-
tants dress modestly [la pudeur des vêtements] without being modest in their customs [la modestie
des mœurs]’ (Sade, 2006, p. 72).
 Regarding the Pain of Others 31

women’s buttocks. After a brief inspection, he proclaims: ‘I want to enjoy

myself for a moment and fuck both butts!’, to which Madame de Mistival
replies: ‘God Almighty! What an outrage!’ (Sade, 2006, p. 166).
Lacan posited that, compared to Kant’s pure practical reason, the
Sadean ‘moral’ experience is modified, because it revolves entirely around
jouissance (p. 651). On the side of the libertine aggressor, the will to
jouissance is as absolute as the victim’s will to resist should be. Because of
this, the latter’s suffering will always be the former’s delight, and the latter’s
agonizing disgrace will always be the former’s cherished immodesty. If the
libertines experience pain, it is never as a passive empathic reaction to the
victim’s pain, but only ever as an intentional means to an end, proficient as
they are in transforming pain into pleasure. Dolmancé explains: ‘Who
cares, they [the libertine rogues] dare to say, about our neighbour’s pains?
Do we feel them? No. Quite the opposite! We have just demonstrated that
these pains engender a delicious sensation [in us]’ (Sade, 2006, p. 65).
Lacan claimed that the libertines’ will to jouissance appropriates and
monopolizes the victims’ will, insofar as it has already traversed it—insofar
as it has already nestled itself at the point of the victims’ modesty. In a
sense, the same is true for the libertine aggressors themselves. The libertines
can profess the law of the right to jouissance without suffering from it,
because they are already positively affected by it on account of their
‘immodest’ disposition or, as Sade would have it, on account of the
‘singularity of their organs’. That is why Eugénie is never a genuine
Sadean victim, but always already a libertine, albeit a rather inexperienced
one who requires some additional instruction. When Eugénie is deflow-
ered anally by Dolmancé, she screams in agony, but only a few seconds
later ‘pain is imperceptibly turning into pleasure’ (Sade, 2006, p. 55).
When the Chevalier is subsequently charged with the task of taking
Eugénie’s vaginal virginity, the effect is similar: her anguish is rather
short-lived and almost instantly gives way to pleasure: ‘All pains are
forgotten! . . . I pity the girls who’d be intimidated by such an attack!
What great pleasures they’d reject for a minor hurt!’ (Sade, 2006,
p. 101). At every end, Eugénie’s libertine education is seen to be complete
when she is greatly turned on by the image of her mother’s tortured body:
‘[T]he sufferings of that slut inflame my imagination so intensely that I
don’t quite know what I’m doing’ (Sade, 2006, p. 172).
32 4 Regarding the Pain of Others

In another cryptic sentence, Lacan wrote that in the Sadean experience

‘modesty is an amboceptor with respect to the circumstances of being
[amboceptive des conjonctures de l’être]’ (p. 651). The now obsolete term
‘amboceptor’ was originally coined by the nineteenth-century immunolo-
gist Paul Ehrlich as the name for an immune body that binds both the
blood-cell and its complement. An amboceptor is literally a ‘double recep-
tor’, with the caveat that the two elements involved are each other’s
opposite. Prior to the publication of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan had already
used the term in his Seminar IV on Object Relations, with reference to the
mediating (binding and coordinating) function of the horse in the phobia
and fantasy of Freud’s Little Hans (Lacan, 1994a, p. 316; Freud, 1955a).3
He had also employed it in his ‘Anxiety’ seminar, in order to capture the
liminal function of the breast in the relationship between the mother and
the child: ‘On what side does the breast stand? On the side of what sucks or
on the side of what is sucked? . . . When I say amboceptor, I’m emphasizing
that it is just as necessary to spell out the maternal subject’s relation to the
breast as the nursling’s relation to the breast’ (Lacan, 2014b, pp. 166–167).
Applied to the Sadean universe, what he seems to have had in mind, then, is
the observation that whenever two or more complementary beings come
together (are being conjoined) in the Sadean ‘relationship’ between the
tormentor and the victim, modesty (sexual timidity and decency) is a
liminal function, because it operates between the two poles of the interac-
tion—the libertine’s immodesty being in itself an assault (violation) on the
modesty of the target-subject. The libertine would not be able to pontificate
about the necessity of immodesty, were it not for the fact that he assumes
the existence of modesty on the side of the target-subject. Were everyone to
be immodest, and the moral law of the right to jouissance were effectively a
universal rule, the libertine would no longer have a need to issue his edicts,
and would paradoxically lose much of his jouissance. This is why Lacan had
stated earlier that the libertine’s will to jouissance drills a hole in the Other,
for the will to jouissance rests on the fundamental assumption that some-
where there is a locus of non-jouissance, upon which the libertine’s own
jouissance depends (p. 651). In Sade’s universe, the libertine’s jouissance

3
I am grateful to Stijn Vanheule for alerting me to this passage in Lacan’s Seminar IV.
 Regarding the Pain of Others 33

requires the existence of a suffering subject, a non-compliant victim, who

acts as the necessary counterpart of the Other’s moral law.
For the Sadean libertine, jouissance is thus extremely precarious, because it
is largely conditioned by the existence of a target-subject whose body can be
enjoyed, without this subject itself being given the right to enjoy, or without
it being allowed to react with the dismissive power of stoic contempt. The
target-subject preferably needs to experience pain, whose verbal manifesta-
tion often appears as an echo of the libertine’s own expressions of jouissance
(p. 651). Illustrating Sade’s black humour in Philosophy in the Boudoir,
Brissenden has conveyed it perfectly: ‘At the height of one of his incredibly
complicated group acts of coition, when uttering the usual Sadean screams of
joy, pain, ecstasy and execration, he [Sade] remarks with unusual tact that
“the fear of appearing monotonous prevents us from recording expressions
which, upon such occasions, are all very apt to resemble one another”’
(Brissenden, 1974, p. 285).4 But the echos do not only occur amongst the
libertines, in the realm of grunting and moaning. When Dolmancé pene-
trates Eugénie anally without ‘preparing the route’, she exclaims: ‘You’re
killing me!’ (Sade, 2006, p. 99). When Madame de Mistival has her anus
sewn up by Dolmancé, she screams: ‘You’re killing me!’ (Sade, 2006, p. 172).
Crucially though, the victims’ pain needs to be maintained at a certain level so
that they do not lose consciousness, which is often difficult to avoid on
account of the horrible tortures to which they are being subjected. When it
does happen that a victim faints, the only thing the libertines can do is to
return to ‘philosophy’, and sing the praises of Nature and the lascivious selfish
freedoms it has instilled into the hearts of its human creatures, whilst waiting
for their victim to come round and hoping that it has not perished.
At this point, Lacan introduced a third term into his analysis of the
Sadean dynamic between the libertines and their victims. After the Other
and the subject, he now presented the object. As I detailed above in my
discussion of Section 1 of ‘Kant with Sade’, in Kant’s philosophy the object
of the moral law is endlessly receding. Having dismissed all considerations

4
The direct quote from Philosophy in the Boudoir, here, is Sade’s apology to the reader for not
reproducing the grunts and moans of Dolmancé, the Chevalier and Augustin-the-gardener when
they all ejaculate at the same time. See Sade (2006, p. 83).
34 4 Regarding the Pain of Others

for an empirical object as purely ‘pathological’, Kant’s only remaining

object(ive) of the moral law was that of the rational will’s perfect compli-
ance with its edict, which would effectively result in the realization of the
highest good, as the ultimate convergence of virtue and happiness.
However, this object is in itself unattainable, at least during the time of a
rational being’s earthly existence. Hence, the object appeared here as a
typical figuration of the ‘thing-in-itself’ (das Ding an Sich)—a noumenon
which can be thought, but which cannot be experienced and known (Kant,
1997b, pp. 47–49).5
In the Sadean scenario, Lacan claimed, the object of the moral law
loses its Kantian inaccessibility, because it is materialized in the figure of
the libertine tormentor, whom he designated as the incarnated ‘torment-
ing agency’, an object endowed with being-in-the-world (Dasein, in the
Heideggerian sense of ‘conscious human presence’). In the next section
of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan would go on to explore this function of
‘presence’ in greater depth. Here, he restricted himself to saying that the
libertine’s being-in-the-world is in itself intrinsically divided, with the
moral law qua object remaining detached from the tormentor qua
subject (p. 651). To the libertines, the law presents itself merely as an
abstract ‘point of emission’, a disembodied voice, like a voice on the
radio, which is heard but never seen, whereby they are simply commit-
ting themselves to executing what is being dictated. ‘Nature, the mother
of us all, never speaks to us except about ourselves’, Dolmancé pro-
claims, ‘Nothing is as egotistical as nature’s voice. And what we hear
most sharply in that voice is the holy and immutable advice to enjoy
ourselves, no matter what it costs others’ (Sade, 2006, p. 65). In Lacan’s
reading, Dolmancé’s distinctly heard ‘voice of Nature’, which orders
him to become a ruthless libertine instructor, is not all that different
from the way in which a psychotic subject would experience an auditory

5
In the Critique version of ‘Kant avec Sade’, Lacan referred to ‘la Chose-en-soi transcendantale’
(Lacan, 1963, p. 297), which he changed into ‘l’impensable de la Chose-en-soi’ (‘the unthinkability
of the thing in itself’) for the Écrits version of the text (p. 651). In doing so, he presumably meant
to emphasize the epistemic unattainability of the Kantian thing-in-itself, rather than its strict
‘unthinkability’, because if there is one thing that distinguishes the thing-in-itself, it is that it can
be thought as an element of pure speculative reason, but cannot be known, reached, accessed.
 Regarding the Pain of Others 35

hallucination (p. 651). Although the voice is coming from within, it is

heard as coming from the outside, which does not make it less powerful
and effective, on the contrary.6
Kant, however, continued to situate the object of the moral law
outside the realm of sensory experience—a realm which Lacan, with
reference to the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant, 1998), called the ‘trans-
cendental aesthetic’ here (p. 651)—and as not determined by it, even
less so than the noumena of pure reason. Whereas the latter may still
occasionally appear in the empirical world, the moral law is imposed upon
the sensible world as a supersensible nature (Kant, 1997b, p. 38). Lacan
argued that Kant may have also deemed it inconceivable for the moral
law to impose itself upon the subject (a rational human being) as an
object in its own right, because this type of object-law could have
required the assumption of a God who is not just endowed with
supreme intelligence (as the guarantee of its intelligibility), but also
with less lofty features.7 After all, the moral law as a voice-object (and
thus as something Other than the rational subject) could potentially
detach itself from rationality, and become irrational, pathological, evil.
As I explained above, the only object(ive) Kant was able to associate with
the moral law is the highest good (the coincidence of virtue and happi-
ness in the afterlife), whose intelligibility (because it is rational in its own
right) only required the supposition of God as supreme intelligence. Like
all good Christians, Kant did not wish to consider the possibility of
God’s enjoyment (jouissance, Genuß), in whose service a rational human
being might be tempted to comply with the law, or whose paradisiacal
sphere he may be looking forward to joining in the afterlife, provided he
leads a virtuous earthly existence. And so he simply stated that a rational
being who complies with the law will experience a certain ‘satisfaction
with one’s [own] existence’, a kind of ‘contentment with oneself’

6
In this part of the text (p. 651), Lacan was clearly thinking, also, of what Freud had written in
‘On Narcissism’, where he had associated the ego-ideal with the function of ‘conscience’, which
acts as a watchman on behalf of the ego-ideal, and which may manifest itself in the guise of voices,
notably in cases of psychosis. See Freud (1957b, pp. 94–96).
7
Lacan was no doubt reminded, here, of how in cases of psychosis the voice of the auditory
hallucination tends to impose itself upon the psychotic subject as a cruel, malevolent force, and
often acquires the features of a divine agency.
36 4 Regarding the Pain of Others

(Selbstzufriedenheit), ‘in which one is conscious of needing nothing’

(Kant, 1997b, pp. 98–99). In this principle, Lacan recognized an
exaggeration of the Stoic ataraxia (ἀταραξία lucid tranquility and
detachment), which he designated as Kant’s answer to a human being’s
earthly concern over the fact that God is but a faceless, supreme
intelligence, who does not promise much enjoyment as a recompense
for one’s moral compliance, even in the afterlife (p. 652). And indeed,
Kant was extremely sceptical of all religious beliefs in the possibility of a
fusion with the divine nature, which he regarded as ‘monstrosities on
reason according to the taste of each’ and ‘enthusiastic theosophical
dreams [schwärmende theosophische Träume]’ (Kant, 1997b, p. 101–
103). Without quoting this particular passage, Lacan speculated that, in
this particular context, Kant was probably thinking of the mystic Jakob
Boehme, his fellow countryman, who, in the best manicheistic tradition,
had ascertained a duality in the divine nature between the first principle
of ‘God the Father’ and the second principle of ‘God the Son’, whereby
the first (which is also the generator of all subsequent things) was
supposedly characterized by Grimmigkeit (bitterness, wrathfulness,
harshness and contraction) (Boehme, 1909).8 For Kant, God was
neither bitter nor joyous, neither wrathful nor happy, neither good
nor bad, but simply intelligent perfection in his substance as the author
of Nature.

8
Although I cannot prove Lacan wrong, it is much more likely that the target of Kant’s criticism
was actually the Swedish scientist cum mystical philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, whose psychic
experiences and spiritual visions Kant had debunked in his 1766 book Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
(Kant, 1992, pp. 305–359). Much like he had done in his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis,
Lacan also connected the Grimmigkeit of Boehme’s God, here, with what Saint-Fond—one of the
libertines in Sade’s Juliette—had elaborated in a satirical take on Robespierre’s sacred cult of the
Supreme Being, by way of an alternative theology of the ‘Being-Supreme-in-Wickedness’. See
Lacan (1992, p. 215), Sade (1968, p. 399) and Deprun (1987). The translator of Lacan’s ethics-
seminar rendered Être suprême en méchanceté as ‘Supreme-Being-in-Evil’, whereas Fink has
translated it as ‘supremely-evil-being’ (p. 652). Lacan had no doubt come across the work of
Boehme via Alexandre Koyré’s monumental 1929 treatise on the German mystic, which effec-
tively introduced the French intelligentsia to his doctrine, and which still counts as one of the
most thorough critical studies of the man and his work. See Koyré (1929).
 5
Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures

Embracing Kant’s concept of Schwärmerei, Lacan dispelled these laconic

reflections upon God’s attributes, in order to concentrate on the typical
being-in-the-world (Dasein) of the libertine tormentor or, as he called it,
‘the function of presence in the Sadean fantasy’ (p. 652).1 The full

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 psycho-
analysis, 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

© The Author(s) 2017 37

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_5
38 5 Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures

formal structure of this fantasy would not appear until Section 6 of

‘Kant with Sade’, but Lacan already anticipated, here, the way in which
it is organized around a specific sequence of functions and experiences,
linking desire to jouissance, the tormentor qua object to the victim qua
subject in the place of the Other, pleasure to pain and sexuality to death.
For the reader who is unfamiliar with Sade’s works—not just Philosophy
in the Boudoir, but also and primarily La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs
de la Vertu suivie de l’Histoire de Juliette, sa sœur—Lacan’s developments
in this section will appear as extremely opaque, yet I will endeavour to
demonstrate how they emanate directly from the libertines’ philosophy
of excess in these novels, as illuminated by Blanchot’s terse exposition of
‘Sade’s Reason’ (Blanchot, 2004).2
At the end of Philosophy in the Boudoir, waiting for Madame de
Mistival to regain consciousness, Dolmancé summed up what liberti-
nage is all about: ‘If, as merely the blind instruments of its inspirations,
nature ordered us to set the universe ablaze, the sole crime would be to
resist! And all the scoundrels on earth are purely the agents of nature’s
caprices . . . ’ (Sade, 2006, p. 168). Echoing Dolmancé, Lacan averred
that in the sadistic experience (l’expérience sadique), the presence of the
executioner ‘is reduced to being no more than the instrument’ of
Nature’s inspirations (p. 652).3 The libertines hear the voice of

(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.
 Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures 39

Nature, and in this voice they recognize an unequivocal command for

them to egotistically seek out the highest form of jouissance, which they
associate with the perpetration of the perfect, ultimate, transcendental
crime. The libertines’ sadistic fantasy of committing the supreme crime
and, in doing so, of generating the utmost state of ecstasy is their answer
to what they detect by way of mysterious desire in the signifiers of
Nature’s demanding voice, despite this desire never being fully articu-
lated there as such.4 The sadistic fantasy of excess, which always comes at
the expense of virtue, although it effectively requires virtue to be repre-
sented in the suffering target-subject (the one who has to bear the cross
in the whole experience), is the libertines’ response to what they believe
Nature wants from them. In proceeding to realize this fantasy, they
relinquish all common human feelings of sympathy, respect, compas-
sion, charity, benevolence, kindheartedness, affection, gratitude, shame,
guilt and remorse—all those empirical objects and hypothetical impera-
tives that Kant too would have designated as ‘pathological’, and there-
fore as goods to be discarded from practical reason—in order to become
both the reliable instruments of Nature’s desire, and the invincible
incarnations of supreme jouissance. Lacan wrote that in the libertines’
presence (in their being-in-the-world) jouissance becomes petrified (s’y
pétrifie) and fixated (s’y fige), which makes them acquire the monstrous,
threatening form of a ‘black fetish’ (fétiche noir) (p. 652)—a figuration
similar to the power objects with which tribal people have traditionally
worshipped and expressed their fear of the gods.5 In Juliette, the

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
40 5 Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures

eponymous heroine at one point questions two arch-libertines about

their views on the ‘human race’. ‘I strongly doubt’, Saint-Fond responds,
‘whether at any moment in the day I for my part am not animated by the
most vehement impulse . . . to cause harm to humankind; there is no
more execrable species’. ‘But you—august beings that you are’, Juliette
enquires, ‘do you really think of yourselves as human?’ ‘Why no!’, says
the other libertine, ‘no, when one bears so little resemblance to the
common herd, when one dominates it so absolutely, it is impossible to
be of its race’. ‘You know’, says Saint-Fond, ‘she is quite right; we are so
many gods . . . ’ (Sade, 1968, pp. 242–243).
But there is the rub. Although the libertines see themselves as gods,
and relentlessly affirm their sovereignty and superiority in everything
they do, they simultaneously have to admit that all the crimes they
commit are but pale reflections of the ultimate criminal act they are so
keen to perpetrate, and that the jouissance they experience is but a
meager approximation of the eternal bliss they are looking for.
Although the libertines’ jouissance seems unrestricted, it is always to

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).
 Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures 41

some extent insufficient and always somehow mediocre compared to the

supreme state of limitless satisfaction they fantasize about. In Sade’s
libertine novels, hubris and despair are tightly woven together, and the
more the libertines contemplate committing the most vicious crime, the
more they are forced to accept their human limitations. For example, in
La Nouvelle Justine, the libertine monk Jérôme laments: ‘For twenty
years now, I can only get an erection when thinking about a crime that
would be superior to anything a human being can do in this world.
Unfortunately, I have never found one: all that we do here is but an
image of what we would like to be able to do. And the impossibility of
outraging nature is in my opinion the greatest torture that has ever been
imposed upon humans’ (Sade, 1995, p. 625). Even a figure as exalted as
the ‘holy’ libertine Pope Pius VI cannot but admit to his immanent
impotence: ‘Regret nothing but that we are unable to do enough, lament
nothing but the weakness of the faculties we have received for our share
and whose ridiculous limitations so cramp our penchants’ (Sade, 1968,
p. 781). The Sadean libertines can only conceive of the perfect crime and
an unlimited jouissance in their fantasy, which they try to articulate in
endless philosophical disquisitions. When it comes to putting their ideas
into practice, they have to concede that they always desperately fall short
of their grandiose visions of terror and brutality. Juliette’s libertine
friend Clairwil admits to her companion that she would like ‘to find a
crime which, even when I had left off doing it, would go on having
perpetual effect, in such a way that so long as I lived, at every hour of the
day and as I lay sleeping at night, I would be constantly the cause of a
particular disorder and that this disorder might broaden to the point
where it brought about a corruption so universal or a disturbance so
formal that even after my life was over I would survive in the everlasting
continuation of my wickedness . . . ’ (Sade, 1968, p. 525).6 There are

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.
42 5 Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures

numerous other examples in Sade’s libertine novels of this relentless

search for the ‘crime of crimes’, involving the largest number of victims
being subjected to the widest range of criminal acts and suffering end-
lessly from the most extreme forms of pain. In the face of such high
ambitions, and however divine they think they are, the libertines cannot
but fail. As Lacan puts it: the libertine has to admit to ‘the humility of an
act in which he cannot help but become a being of flesh and, to the very
marrow, a slave to pleasure’ (p. 652). In a perceptive reflection upon this
ineluctable disparity between grand libertine aspiration and poor physi-
cal performance, Aaron Schuster has captured the essence of the problem
as follows: ‘[L]ibertinism is haunted by the figure of the bad infinite’
(Schuster, 2016, p. 41).
In this complex dynamic between the libertines’ astral fantasy of
eternal criminal bliss and their sorrowful earthly pleasures, Lacan
detected another important reason as to why the ‘sadistic experience’ is
never fully accomplished. Over and above the fundamental disjunction
between the enunciating subject (the tormentor) and the subject of the
statement (the victim)—which Lacan called ‘the subject’s two alterities’
here (p. 652)—in the formulation of the moral law, the sadist-execu-
tioners lose their grip on the whole situation every time their aspirational
jouissance becomes reintegrated within the cycle of human sexual plea-
sure. If Nature’s desire is to be situated in its cruel and brutal caprices,
and the libertines hear the command to follow suit in Nature’s voice,
then their own interpretation of this command, which coincides with
their ‘will to jouissance’ (volonté de jouissance) and their search for the
ultimate crime, can never be fully realized, precisely because, when all is
said and done, they are but imperfect human beings (p. 652). The most
superior libertines are those who have succeeded in relinquishing each
and every human passion and have become merciless, inhumane mon-
sters, yet quite often this newly acquired state of supremacy also prevents
them from having an erection, experiencing any form of sexual desire, or
being able to enjoy themselves sexually, and so their jouissance becomes
restricted to the relentless exposition of the libertine ideology. Even
when it is translated into a ‘will to jouissance’, libertine desire is governed
by the law of pleasure, Lacan posited (p. 652), which implies that the
expression of a ‘will’ is as close as the libertines will ever get to achieving
 Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures 43

their jouissance. The gradual increase in (sexual) tension and the promise
of limitless bliss are being cut short by the occurrence of orgasm, which
is but a moment of sexual pleasure and a return to a state of relative
equilibrium or the ‘lowest threshold of tension’ (p. 652).7 But this does
not stop the libertines from pursuing their goal and seeking out new and
better opportunities, whereby they even go so far as imagining the
possibility of finding their supreme jouissance in the moment of their
own death. Olympia Borghese, one of Juliette’s libertine girlfriends says:
‘The stocks, the pillory, the scaffold itself would for me be a privilege,
the throne of delight, upon it I’d cry death defiance, and discharge in the
pleasure of perishing the victim of my crimes . . . ’ (Sade, 1968, p. 663).
Later on, Juliette herself concedes: ‘There is nothing I fear less in this
world than the noose. Is it not common knowledge that death upon the
gallows is accompanied by a discharge? And discharging is something
that will never hold terrors for me. If ever a judge sends me to the
scaffold, you will see me go forward with light and impudent step . . . ’
(Sade, 1968, p. 1014). As such, the most extreme reduction of tension is
still being eroticized, death becoming intertwined with sex in the dra-
matic scene of the libertines’ own execution as it appears in their fantasy.
Lacan did not elaborate on this puzzling conjunction, but leaves it ‘to
rest behind its Eleusinian veil’, thus allowing the mystery to remain
intact (p. 652).8

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
44 5 Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures

In Kant’s moral philosophy pleasure is but a human being’s affective

response to an empirical object, an arbitrary ‘pathological’ quality which can
never constitute the basis upon which a formal moral law is issued, nor the
incentive for or the anticipated effect of a rational being’s compliance with
this law. By contrast, for the Sadean libertines it is, as Lacan put it, a ‘flagging
accomplice’ (p. 652), because it is simultaneously part and parcel of the
jouissance they are seeking to attain, and a bleak shadow of the limitless
satisfaction they have in mind.9 And in those moments when the libertines
do attain some form of jouissance—when, for example, their carefully staged
orgies allow them to reach one protracted orgasm after another—neither
pleasure nor desire completely disappear, precisely because their fantasy of
committing the supreme crime forces them to construct the experience as a
mere (sexual) approximation of the ultimate criminal act. Lacan stated that it
is the libertines’ fantasy which sustains their desire, insofar as it prompts
them to go on to do ever more excessive, destructive and exhilarating things,
whilst providing them with a certain degree of pleasure in its own right
(p. 652). As the libertine Belmor says to Juliette: ‘[H]ow delicious are the
pleasures of the imagination . . . All the earth is ours in these enchanted
moments; not a single creature resists us, to our aroused senses each affords
the kind of pleasure which to our boiling imagination each appears capable
of giving; we devastate the planet . . . and repopulate it with new objects, and

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]’.
 Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures 45

immolate these in their turn; the means to every crime is ours, we commit
them all; we multiply the horror an hundredfold; and all the deeds ambi-
tioned by all the most infernal and the most malignant spirits that ever were,
in their most disastrous effects were nought compared to what we dare
desire . . . ’ (Sade, 1968, p. 522). ‘Taking pleasure in fantasy is easy to grasp
here,’ Lacan commented (p. 653).
In terms of the relationship between pleasure and pain, Lacan also
pointed out that because the physiological cycle of pain is longer than
that of pleasure, pain can be sustained for a more protracted period of time,
and thus in a sense constitutes a better approximation of jouissance.10 As
Dolmancé explains to Eugénie: ‘After all, there is no doubt that since pain
affects us much more sharply than pleasure, the shocks reacting upon our
nerves when we arouse this agonizing sensation in another person are
likewise more violent . . . Now, since these drives establish themselves in
the lower regions of the body by means of their intrinsic retroactive
motion, they also inflame the organs of pleasure and prepare them for
the acts of passion’ (Sade, 2006, p. 64). But even the cycle of pain reaches
its ‘natural end’, either on account of the libertines transforming it back
into pleasure, or on account of their target-subjects simply passing out. At
the end of this section, Lacan stipulated that ‘in the sensory aspect of the
Sadean experience’ (p. 653), the libertines’ fantasy will proceed from this
possibility (of the victim passing out) in order to ‘fixate’ a desire—in
Nature as well as in themselves, as the blind instruments of Nature’s
caprices—for an unassailable victim, someone who is the perfect incarna-
tion of virtue, whose suffering can be infinitely prolonged, and who can be
killed numerous times over. In the next section of the text, this would lead
him to explore two paradoxical instances of libertinage in Sade’s Juliette:
Saint-Fond’s incongruous belief in his victims’ afterlife, and the essential
function of the so-called ‘second death’ in the system of Pope Pius VI
(Sade, 1968, pp. 369–370, 771–777).

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).
 6
The Sadean Fantasy

As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, Lacan substantially revised

the 1963 Critique version of ‘Kant with Sade’ when it was decided that the
paper should be included in Écrits. Whereas for some parts of it, these
revisions were mainly ‘cosmetic’—Lacan (and/or his editor) slightly chan-
ging the wording of certain sentences here and there—in the sixth section of
the text he added four completely new paragraphs (p. 653, 7 & 8; p. 654,
1 & 2) and extensively rewrote two others (p. 653, 5 & 6), so as to include
key developments in his own thinking at the time. To follow Lacan’s
argument in this section of the paper the reader thus needs to be familiar
with large swathes of his work between 1962 and 1965, and in particular
with his theoretical exposition of the fantasy’s two constitutive operations of
alienation and separation from his 1964 seminar on the four fundamental
concepts of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1994b, pp. 203–215), whose central
themes reappeared in the Écrits text ‘Position of the Unconscious’ (Lacan,
2006h).
To formalize the structure of the ‘Sadean fantasy’, which would be
effectively restricted, here, to the ‘sadistic’ fantasy of Sade’s libertines,
insofar as next to nothing is being said about how the quintessentially
virtuous Justine sees the world, Lacan proceeded from his own, ‘most

© The Author(s) 2017 47

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_6
48 6 The Sadean Fantasy

general’ algebraic notation of the fantasy: $ ◇ a (p. 653). Lacan had

introduced this formula in the session of 21 May 1958 of his seminar Les
formations de l’inconscient (Lacan, 1998, pp. 408–409), and had spent
many sessions of the subsequent seminar, Le désir et son interprétation,
elaborating on its subjective meaning and unconscious function,
whereby he had at one point also referred to it as the symbolic form
for the ‘fundamental fantasy’, and the most truthful representation of
the so-called ‘object-relation’ (Lacan, 2014a, p. 434). Cutting a long and
complicated story short, $ is Lacan’s way of writing what he called the
‘divided’ or ‘split’ subject, which should not be understood in the
classical Freudian sense, as a subject that is torn between two or more
(mental) functions, but rather as a subject that is not fully self-transpar-
ent, that is barred from having complete, unmediated access to itself and
to the outside world, on account of its being conditioned by and
subservient to the symbolic order of language. With the letter a, which
was derived from the French word for ‘other’ (autre), Lacan represented
the object (of desire), with the caveat that this object too is conceived as
a partial, incomplete and intrinsically lacking entity—it never being fully
satisfying with regard to the lack from which the subject’s desire for it
would stem. Between 1958 and 1962, Lacan interpreted the lozenge ◇
in a number of different ways, but from Seminar VIII onwards he
suggested that it should be read as ‘desire for’ (désir de) (Lacan, 2015,
p. 374; Lacan, 1961–1962, sessions of 9 and 16 May 1962; Lacan,
2014b, p. 100). Hence, in writing the fundamental fantasy as $ ◇ a,
Lacan wanted to problematize the relationship between subject and
object, in a radical critique of the so-called ‘object-relations’-movement
in psychoanalysis, which continued to advocate the possibility of human
beings establishing perfect, fully adequate relationships between them-
selves (as subjects) and others (as objects). For Lacan, the only way a
divided subject can relate to an object (of desire) is via the fantasy, yet
rather than instituting a harmonious relationship between subject and
object, the fantasy reconfirms that there is no ‘natural’, pre-determined
bond between subject and object, but only a fundamentally incongru-
ous, disproportionate and deficient association between the two.
Applying this formula of the fundamental fantasy to the ‘case’ of
Sade’s libertines, Lacan proposed that the order of the two terms, $ and
 The Sadean Fantasy 49

a, should be inverted in accordance with two essential points he had

made earlier, in Sections 5 and 3 of his paper. In Section 5, echoing
Dolmancé’s explanation of the principles of libertinage, Lacan had
suggested that, in their interpretation of Nature’s capriciousness,
which is acknowledged as the emblem of the desire they believe to detect
in Nature’s commanding voice, the libertine tormentors become the
blind instruments, and thus the objects of Nature’s ‘holy and immutable
advice to enjoy’ (Sade, 2006, p. 65). Although they themselves cannot
avoid being creatures of flesh and blood and, more importantly, divided
subjects conditioned by the symbolic order of language, the libertines
present themselves as objects in their own fantasy. As the chosen agents
and executors of Nature’s desire, which Lacan represented here with the
letter d (p. 653), and which in a sense constitutes the true agency behind
the entire construction, the libertines convey Nature’s voice via their
own, endlessly reiterated and rationally exposed ‘will to jouissance’,
which Lacan in turn formalized as V (p. 654). On the side of the
libertine subject, the sequence can thus be summarized as: d → a → V
(see Fig. 6.1).1

V S

d a ◊ $

Fig. 6.1 The Sadean fantasy

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.
50 6 The Sadean Fantasy

On the ‘other side’ of the libertines’ fantasy, which Lacan also designated
as ‘the side of the Other’ (Lacan, 2014b, p. 103), the target-subject qua
victim always appears, or is forced to accept its status, as a divided subject,
insofar as it is attacked and annihilated because of its strict compliance with
a symbolic law of morality that promulgates dignity and respect, modesty
and gratitude, pity and virtue, faith and devotion. As Lacan had argued in
Section 3 of ‘Kant with Sade’, the libertines’ alleged ‘right to jouissance’
cannot be implemented without their drilling a hole in the Other’s locus
(p. 650), that is to say, without the identification of a ‘subject of non-
jouissance’ on the side of the Other—a subject aspiring to the highest moral
good, who can never be allowed to experience jouissance, or even its earthly
expression called ‘pleasure’, and who should preferably be kept in a state of
pain. Whereas the libertine, as the ‘apparent agent’ of the fantasy, ‘freezes
with the rigidity of an object’ (p. 653), the victim thus becomes the ‘$ of
[Kant’s] practical reason’ (p. 654), a rational subject who remains strictly
loyal to the dictates of its own moral law, despite the horrendous suffering
that this moral obedience brings about. And so the conventional formula
of the fundamental fantasy should be inverted: a ◇ $.2
In the opening paragraph of Section 6 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan
had already mentioned that the lozenge ◇ should be read as ‘desire
for’, irrespective of the direction in which it is read, by which he had
alerted his readership from the start that the formula’s inversion, of a
◇ $, should not be taken to mean that in the libertines’ fantasy the
libertines now become the ‘objects-being-desired’, the target-victims
occupying the position of ‘desiring subjects’. The lozenge ◇, Lacan
stipulated, is like the mathematical sign for identity =, to be read in

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 excep-
tionally 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’.
 The Sadean Fantasy 51

the same way from right to left, with the key proviso that the
formula for the fantasy is based on ‘an absolute non-reciprocity’
between the two terms of the equation (p. 653).3 Much like the
small clause ‘anyone can say to me’, which Lacan added in 1966 to
the maxim of the right to jouissance in the third section of ‘Kant
with Sade’, this point was only made when Lacan rewrote his paper
for Écrits, and it corresponds with his reflections on the fantasy in
his 1964 seminar on the four fundamental concepts of psychoana-
lysis.4 In this particular seminar, Lacan divided the lozenge ◇ in the
formula $ ◇ a into two fundamental operations, as represented by a
!
vector ( _ ) running from $ to a (the lower half of ◇) and another
vector ( ^ ) running from a to $ (the upper half of ◇) (Lacan,
1994b, pp. 203–229). He thereby defined the former as alienation
and the latter as separation, emphasizing that it concerns two ‘cir-
cular, albeit non-reciprocal’ operations (Lacan, 2006h, p. 712).5
Alienation and separation are circular, because one operation inevi-
tably leads to the other, ad infinitum, but they are non-reciprocal,
because one operation never compensates for the other in a process
of mutual cancellation. When, in ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan adopted
this nomenclature, it was to underline that, however much the
libertines’ presumed right to jouissance may depend on the presence
of suffering target-subjects, the latter do not constitute the ideal
complement to the libertines’ position as blind instruments of
Nature’s caprices. In the conventional fantasy, of $ ◇ a, the object
remains inadequate with respect to the subjective lack that has triggered

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 incompa-
tible 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).
52 6 The Sadean Fantasy

the desire for it; in the libertines’ inverted fantasy, of a ◇ $, the

divided subject on the side of the Other is equally by no means the
perfect correlate of Nature’s desire as expressed in the libertines’ object-
position or, for that matter, in their will to jouissance.
Lacan’s argument was undoubtedly indebted, here, to Blanchot’s
work on Sade, although he himself never explicitly referred to it, at
least not in ‘Kant with Sade’.6 In ‘Sade’s Reason’, Blanchot had dis-
cerned an apparent contradiction in the libertine logic: ‘When “being
the master of myself” means “being the master of others”, when my
independence [as a libertine] does not come from my autonomy, but
from the dependence of others on me, it is obvious that I forever remain
connected to others and that I need them, even if only to obliterate
them’ (Blanchot, 2004, p. 23). The fact that the libertines need their
victims to assert their sovereignty is a problem, because it renders
sovereignty impure, subservient, paradoxical. Yet Blanchot had also
realized that in Sade’s libertine universe the victims are but a means to
an end. Although it may seem that the only thing the libertines want is
to inflict as much suffering as possible on the greatest number of
virtuous victims, this is not their final aim. As pleasurable objects of
torture as they may be, the victims are not representative of what the
libertines, in their obstinate pursuit of jouissance, are really looking for:
‘[I]nsofar as the Sadean man appears surprisingly free in relation to his
victim, upon whom however his pleasure depends, it is because the
violence is directed at something other than his victims, it goes truly
beyond them and only assists in verifying frenetically, infinitely, with
each individual case, the general act of destruction through which he
reduces God and the world to nothing’ (Blanchot, 2004, p. 26).
If it is not to capture, torment, mutilate and torture virtuous victims,
what exactly is it, then, that the libertines want to achieve? If the docile
bodies of the helpless subjects with which they satiate their right to

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 acknowl-
edged 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).
 The Sadean Fantasy 53

jouissance—without any limit to the capriciousness of their exactions—

are but ever so many exchangeable objects of pleasure, what, if anything,
would allow them to satisfy their will to jouissance, so that it no longer
needs to exist as ‘will’ but can consider itself to be fully accomplished in
its aim? According to Blanchot, it is a transcendental negation
(Blanchot, 2004, p. 26), a destructive act so grand that it wipes away
all and everything: virtuous human beings, God and even Nature itself.
According to Lacan, it is what he dubbed ‘the brute subject of pleasure’
(le S sujet brut du plaisir) which, following Kant, would of course be ‘the
“pathological” subject’ par excellence (p. 654). How this undivided, raw,
rough and uncut pleasure-subject should be interpreted is not at all clear
from ‘Kant with Sade’, yet this should not stop us from trying to
understand what Lacan intended to convey. For one, it should be
obvious by now that Sade’s libertines have no intention whatsoever of
generating pleasure in their victims, on the contrary. When Lacan
referred to ‘the brute subject of pleasure’, this should not be understood,
therefore, as what the libertines hope to see taking shape, by way of
transformative experience, in their victims. Secondly, ‘the brute subject
of pleasure’ should not be conflated with a subject (target-victim) that
gives the libertines endless, unlimited pleasure, because this type of
subject, assuming that it could be found and preserved—and, as I will
demonstrate further on, the libertines are definitely doing whatever they
can to maintain such a subject—would still be no more than a means to
an end. What, in my opinion, Lacan was trying to capture with ‘the
brute subject of pleasure’ is what, in Freud’s meta-psychological paper
‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ appeared under the name of a ‘purified
pleasure-ego’ (ein purifiziertes Lust-Ich)—a pure, unblemished, undi-
vided, complete subject of pleasure, which displays not a single flaw in
its libidinal economy, because it has succeeded in expelling ‘whatever
within itself becomes a cause of unpleasure’ into the outside world, from
which it has radically separated itself off (Freud, 1957c, p. 136).
Needless to say, Freud was under no illusion that this type of Lust-Ich
disappears with the advent of the reality-principle or, better still, that the
possibility of the return to a state of purified pleasure once the ego has
been retransformed into a ‘reality-ego’ (Real-Ich), is but a neurotic
illusion. When Lacan referred to ‘the brute subject of pleasure’, without
54 6 The Sadean Fantasy

referring to Freud, he seems to have in mind, then, a primordial state of

subjective being, of the kind that would have existed before the symbolic
structure of language affected the human condition with its constraints
and restrictions—of the kind, that is, before moral and other laws
interfered with a human being’s pleasure and, in obstructing and pro-
hibiting it, also transformed it into a longed-for yet unattainable jouis-
sance. In other words, the perfect complement to the libertines’ will to
jouissance would be the radical destruction of the symbolic order as such,
which would effectively remove all obstacles to the realization of a
perfect, libertine utopia.7
Like the image of the resplendent republic in the revolutionary pamph-
let that Dolmancé is carrying with him when he arrives at Madame de
Saint-Ange’s boudoir, this libertine utopia is doomed to remain what it
has always been: a fantasy. But this does not discourage the libertines from
putting in ‘some more effort’ to make it happen. Sadly, their will to
jouissance, if it does not prematurely run aground in their own experiences
of pleasure, always has to pass through the divided subjectivity of their
victims, which Lacan formalized as: V → $ → S (see Fig. 6.1). Combining
Blanchot and Lacan, one could say that the libertines fantasize about
radically negating the impact of the symbolic order, with a view to re-
creating a pre-symbolic state of being. Sadly, the only thing they can do
(as opposed to fantasize about) in order to achieve this aim is torture
virtuous human beings, commit crimes of adultery, incest, sodomy,
sacrilege and blasphemy (and preferably all of these at the same time),
and rally against the ‘moronic religion of Christianity’ and ‘the tepid
imposter of Nazareth’ (Sade, 2006, p. 108). It is all rather mediocre
compared to their aspiration of setting the universe ablaze . . .

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.
 The Sadean Fantasy 55

Putting all of this together in a ‘quadripartite structure’, Lacan pro-

duced a ‘didactic schema’ (Fig. 6.1) as a graphic modulation of the
Sadean fantasy, which is to be interpreted, here, as the ‘sadistic’ fantasy
of Sade’s libertine heroes (p. 653).8 In a few extremely dense comments
on this schema, Lacan defined the object a (the libertines’ chosen
position as the blind instruments of Nature’s desire) as what operates
in ‘the place of the cause’ (p. 654), no doubt because, in a Kantian sense,
it acts as the determining ground of the will to jouissance, which sets the
whole fantasy in motion.9 The will to jouissance (V) itself he associated
with the exclusive logical disjunction (in Latin, vel) of alienation, which
he had discussed at length in his seminar on the four fundamental
concepts of psychoanalysis, and which is ‘derived from what is
known . . . as union [in set theory]’ (Lacan, 2006h, p. 713). It would
take me too long, here, to explicate the intricacies of Lacan’s exclusive

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).
56 6 The Sadean Fantasy

logical disjunction of alienation.10 Suffice it to say that, in ‘Kant with

Sade’, he intimated that the relationship between $ and S should also be
regarded as a forced choice between two options, whereby one option (S) is
always by definition excluded, similar to the option of ‘money’ in the
highwayman’s prototypical question to his victim: ‘Your money or your
life?’. Although the libertines’ will to jouissance aims to restore an original,
pure experience of unblemished satisfaction (S)—a complete, sovereign
being, in Blanchot’s terminology—the only viable option is for them to
please (and pleasure) themselves with a subject of non-jouissance, a moral
subject in pain, a divided subject of practical reason ($) (p. 654). To the
libertines’ own chagrin, S is inconceivable without $, yet $ is but a poor
approximation of S, because it is de facto deprived of its own satisfaction,
and ever so limited in the satisfaction that it can generate in the tormentors.
Bizarre as it may seem, Lacan recognized the same logic, here, as in
Kant’s system of a rational human being’s compliance with the formal
moral law. The libertines are not irrational individuals, however mad or
‘perverted’ they may appear. For they are able to justify their intentions
and support their ‘sadistic’ acts with interminable analytical disquisitions
on the ruthless brutalities of Nature. And like the Kantian rational
human being, they ensure that nothing ‘pathological’ stands in their
way, for although they live for jouissance they are adamant that the only
way to achieve this goal is to transform themselves into cold, callous,
cruel and calculating ‘instruments’. As Blanchot put it: ‘All the great
libertines, who live only for pleasure [in Lacan’s interpretation: for
jouissance], are great only because they have obliterated within them
every capacity for pleasure’ (Blanchot, 2004, p. 38). But the similarity
between the Kantian subject and the Sadean libertine does not stop

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).
 The Sadean Fantasy 57

there. Much like the former always to some extent fails to be fully
compliant with the moral law, as a purely formal principle, and thus
needs to project the highest good onto the afterlife, the latter regretfully
has to acknowledge that his earthly criminal endeavours pale in compar-
ison to what his fantasy allows him to imagine. For the libertines too, the
object(ive) of their ‘moral’ law continues to escape, insofar as their
longed-for jouissance is constantly recuperated within the cycle of plea-
sure, either because their own bodies do not function according to
‘divine’ processes, or because their victims keep passing out or die too
soon. There is, however, one major difference between Kant and Sade:
whereas the Kantian subject continues to chase the object(ive) of the
moral law as a thinkable yet unknowable ‘thing in itself’, which is called
the highest good, the Sadean libertine single-mindedly pursues his own,
endlessly receding ‘thing’, but he calls it criminal jouissance. And it is
here that Lacan situated the true value of reading Kant ‘with Sade’, i.e. of
utilizing Sade as an instrument for dissecting Kant’s moral philosophy.
In his libertine novels, by virtue of his sadistic libertines, Sade reveals
what rational human beings really want when they express their will in a
pure, de-pathologized fashion: transcendental death and destruction.11

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 conscious-
ness, 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).
58 6 The Sadean Fantasy

Lacan then posited that the curvy line (la ligne sinueuse) that runs
from V to S via $ ‘allows for a calculus (un calcul) of the subject’
(p. 654). This may be interpreted in at least two different ways: whilst,
on the one hand, the libertines devise, and literally calculate, extremely
sophisticated torture arrangements for their victims, on the other hand
they also compute, in the greatest detail, the size of genitals, the
volume of sperm, the quantity of orgasms, the number of penetrations
and the amount of victims. Although commenting on Sade’s own
literary preoccupations rather than on the sexual practices of his
libertine heroes, Francine du Plessix Gray hit the nail on the head
when she wrote: ‘[T]his is a pornographer who often seems more
interested in the sheer mathematics of sexuality . . . than in the carnal
act itself’ (du Plessix Gray, 2006, p. vii).12 As regards the victims,
Blanchot highlighted how many of Sade’s libertines greatly enjoy the
thought, not to mention the act, of torturing a multitude of people or,
failing that, of indefinitely prolonging their victims’ pain. In ‘Kant
with Sade’, Lacan reiterated this observation when he wrote that ‘there
is a statics [a monotony] of the fantasy [in the libertines’ philosophy of
eroticized crime], whereby the point of aphanisis, assumed to lie in $,
must in one’s imagination [i.e., in the libertines’ vision of excess] be

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).
 The Sadean Fantasy 59

indefinitely pushed back’ (p. 654).13 Despite the horrendous ordeals to

which they are being subjected, many of the libertines’ victims are
indeed remarkably resilient and, as if transcending the very limits of
their human existence, distinctively indestructible—the virtuous
Justine being the prime example of someone who, time and again,
manages to re-emerge more or less unscathed from the relentless
onslaughts on her bodily and mental integrity, until she is finally killed
by a flash of lightning (Sade, 1968, p. 1190).
In many instances, the victims also inexplicably manage to pre-
serve the exquisite delicacy of their physical features. Lacan was
adamant that this incomparable and unassailable beauty has nothing
to do with the libertines consistently selecting the most sexually
attractive targets (p. 654), but rather with them erecting a last
vestige against the satisfaction of their desire for absolute destruction,
and thus against the unspeakable horror of seeing their criminal will
come to full fruition. Beauty, as he had already put it in his seminar
on the ethics of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1992, p. 203 & pp. 216–
217), is the second barrier (after ‘goodness’) against the object(ive) of
jouissance, which would not only require the annihilation of human-
ity, God and Nature, but also of the libertines themselves. Rather
than turning their victims into bleeding wrecks, the libertines thus
prefer to see them being kept in a state of beautiful half-deadness or,
as Lacan himself had called it following his analysis of Sophocles’
Antigone, in a zone ‘between two deaths’ (Lacan, 1992, pp. 270–
287): dead to the world or dead in their inescapable fate as sacrificial

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.
60 6 The Sadean Fantasy

objects of libertinage, but physically very much alive and well in the
full radiance of their bodily splendour.14
Fortunate as many victims may be when they are spared a terrible
death as martyrs at the hands of their tormentors, their ‘hardly believable
survival’ (p. 654) evidently also plays into the libertines’ fantasy, because
the only thing they want is for their victims’ suffering to be prolonged
indefinitely. When the cruel surgeon Rodin suggests to his partner-in-
crime Rombeau that he should dissect Justine alive, the latter objects:
‘The pleasure of killing a woman is soon over; she no longer feels
anything when she is dead; the pleasure of making her suffer disappears
along with her life . . . Let’s brand her, let’s mark her indelibly; with this
deprivation . . . she will suffer to the last moment of her life, and our lust,
infinitely prolonged, will thereby become even more delicious’ (Sade,
1995, p. 568). For the same reason, the libertines gathered together in
Madame de Saint-Ange’s boudoir decide against the idea of killing
Eugénie’s mother. Instead, Dolmancé instructs his servant Lapierre,
who has contracted ‘the most horrible syphilis ever seen on earth’, to
‘spurt his venom into both channels’ of Madame de Mistival’s body,

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).
 The Sadean Fantasy 61

after which she is being sewn up and sent home, so that the poison
‘burns out the bones’ and she is slowly but surely eaten from the inside
by the horrible disease (Sade, 2006, pp. 169–171).
Drawing on Juliette rather than Philosophy in the Boudoir, Lacan
offered two other examples of the libertines’ unquenchable thirst
for infinite torments. The first, which had already been mentioned
by both Blanchot (2004, pp. 23–24) and Klossowski (1992,
pp. 75–77), concerns the minister Saint-Fond who, contrary to
one of the cardinal principles of libertinage, reckons with the
possibility that his victims, after they have been tortured to
death, may still experience some form of bliss in a heavenly afterlife
(p. 655). And so he is forced to confess to his friends—although
not without shame and embarrassment, because he realizes all too
well how much his belief contradicts the libertines’ abhorrence of
religion—how, in order to ensure that the victims’ agonies will be
everlasting in hell, he has come to adopt a rather idiosyncratic
sexual practice: ‘[I]n order to bar the victim from celestial joys, it
is necessary to have him sign a pact, writ in his heart’s blood,
whereby he contracts his soul to the devil; next to insert this paper
in his asshole and to tamp it home with one’s prick; and while
doing so to cause him to suffer the greatest pain in one’s power to
inflict’ (Sade, 1968, p. 369).15
The second example, which Lacan may have borrowed also from
Klossowski (1992, pp. 84–90), concerns the so-called ‘system of
Pope Pius VI’, with whom Juliette has secured an audience (and a

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 conscious-
ness, see again Klossowski (1992, pp. 99–121).
62 6 The Sadean Fantasy

grandiose orgy) at the Vatican.16 Over a post-coital meal, the

Pontiff, who also happens to be the most depraved libertine ever
to occupy the Holy See, agrees to share his doctrine with his
French companion. In essence, the Holy Father is convinced that
in ‘all living beings the principle of life is no other than that of
death: at the same time we receive the one we receive the other, we
nourish both within us, side by side’ (Sade, 1968, p. 769). Yet he is
also of the opinion that what is conventionally called ‘death’, i.e.
when a living being is no longer alive, this death is ‘only imagin-
ary’, because the now ostensibly inert matter that remains after the
living being has ‘died’, constitutes in itself a new form of life,
insofar as ‘it enriches the soil, fertilizes it, and serves in the
regeneration of the other kingdoms as well as its own’ (Sade,
1968, p. 770). And so his Holiness concludes that whenever a
human being is sacrificed on the altar of libertinage, this act only
deprives the victim of his ‘first life’, and that to do justice to
Nature’s extreme cruelty, one would also need to be able to wrest
away the ‘second life’, so that the decaying corpses are prevented
from re-entering a new cycle of regeneration (Sade, 1968, pp. 771–
772). Once again, Lacan noted the ‘incoherence in Sade’s work’
(p. 655), which is effectively twofold here: for one, libertines are
not supposed to believe in a ‘hereafter’, even when they are the
Pope—although one could probably argue that he believes in an
‘after-death’ rather than an ‘afterlife’—and secondly, it is difficult
to see how a desire to kill life twice can be combined with a desire
for suffering to be prolonged. Tongue in cheek, Lacan remarked
that this incoherence of Sade’s work is generally ‘overlooked by
sadists’ (p. 655), who allegedly tend to be hagiographic too.
Needless to say, the ‘sadists’ are the Sade-scholars rather than the
‘sexual perverts’, here, but it is fair to say that, apart from Heine
and Lely, many other Sade-specialists had picked up on the

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.
 The Sadean Fantasy 63

inconsistencies and contradictions in Sade’s work.17 Incoherence

aside, Lacan also acknowledged that there is generally more variety
on the side of the tormentors than on the side of the victims, who
merely represent ‘the monotony of the subject’s relation to the
signifier’ (p. 654), insofar as they all suffer in equal measure from
their crushing alienation with regard to the moral law of virtuous-
ness. From Pope Pius’ doctrine, Lacan then distilled the idea of the
‘second death’ (p. 655), which he had introduced previously in his
seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, and which was designed to
capture the ‘point at which the very cycles of the transformations
of nature are annihilated’ (Lacan, 1992, p. 248).18

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).
 7
Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy!

Heeding Klossowski’s reflections on the system of Pope Pius VI

(Klossowski, 1992, pp. 89–90), Lacan compared the wish for the second
death to Freud’s controversial notion of the death drive (Todestrieb),
which the founder of psychoanalysis had originally introduced in
‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in an attempt to account for the
manifestation of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ (Wiederholungszwang) in clin-
ical cases of traumatic neurosis (Freud, 1955c).1 For Freud, the ‘dom-
inating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is
the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due
to stimuli’ (Freud, 1955c, pp. 55–56). Whereas he had initially asso-
ciated this so-called ‘constancy-’ or ‘Nirvana principle’ with the pleasure
principle, he subsequently argued that the latter is a modification of the
former under the influence of the life-drive, so that the Nirvana princi-
ple (the mental tendency to reduce stimuli to nothing, or to keep levels
of excitation as low as possible) should not be situated within the realm

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.

© The Author(s) 2017 65

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_7
66 7 Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy!

of the pleasure principle at all, but be conceived as operating exclusively

in the service of the death drive (Freud, 1961a, p. 160). The idea of an
intrinsic organic tendency towards the reduction of excitation had
already appeared in Freud’s 1895 ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’,
where it was called the ‘principle of neuronal inertia’ (Freud, 1966,
p. 296). Freud’s subsequent change of heart about the relationship
between the Nirvana principle and the pleasure principle would explain
why Lacan stated that, in Freud’s work, the wish for a second death was
‘very clearly, perhaps too clearly’ reduced to ‘something analogous to the
pleasure principle’ (p. 655). Another important point requires clarifica-
tion, here. When, in a footnote, Lacan emphasized that the second
death’s wish (vœu de la seconde mort) constitutes a ‘subjective dynamism’
(dynamisme subjectif) (p. 668, note 7), the term ‘subjective’ should
probably be understood, here, in the same way as in the grammatical
case of the ‘subjective genitive’. It is thus implied that the second death is
not just what is being wished for (the ‘objective genitive’ of the ‘wish for
the second death’), but that the (principle of the) second death is in itself
the expression of a primary wish (for an absolute physical death).2
At this point in his text, Lacan identified Sade’s, or rather Pope Pius’
second death with Freud’s death drive, yet without going so far as to
rekindle the idea that Sade would be a precursor to Freud, and with the
caveat that he exchanged Freud’s biological foundation of the death
drive (the natural cycle of all organic matter returning to an inorganic
state) for a more abstract, symbolic setting.3 Indeed, from the mid-
1950s, Lacan had designated the death drive as ‘the mask of the sym-
bolic order’, which ‘tends beyond the pleasure principle’ and ‘beyond
the limits of life’ (Lacan, 1988b, p. 326). Five years later, in his seminar

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).
 Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy! 67

on the ethics of psychoanalysis, he had defined the death drive even

more radically as ‘a function of the signifying chain . . . insofar as a
reference point . . . can be situated relative to the functioning of nature’
(Lacan, 1992, p. 211). Taken out of its biological context, the final aim
and object of the death drive, then, is not the radical destruction of the
natural cycle of regeneration, but the absolute ‘annihilation of the
signifying network, of the text in which reality is inscribed and through
which it is historicized’ (Žižek, 2014, p. 74). In Section 8 of ‘Kant with
Sade’, Lacan would also allude to this point with reference to the
peculiar contents of Sade’s last will and testament.
Apart from the Freudian death drive, the principle of the second
death is of course reminiscent of the Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana, as
Lacan (p. 655) again repeated after Klossowski (1992, p. 90). As an
ostensibly nihilistic spiritual philosophy, Buddhism situates the supreme
end of life and the height of perfection in a state of being that has
transcended the cycles and constraints of individual existence as such.
For Buddhists, the highest good lies in the realization of a state of non-
being, when existence itself exists no more, and when the movement that
has been maintained in a certain life-form has been reduced to nothing.
Ancient and widespread as these beliefs may be, Lacan indicated that it
only takes some ignorant Western puppets (fantoches) to discard them as
utter nonsense or, as had been the case with Freud’s notion of the death
drive, to radically dispute the ontological and clinical reality of the ‘pain
of existence’ (douleur d’exister) that lies behind a human being’s wish to
enter this state of absolute nothingness. Lacan alluded here to what the
nineteenth-century French orientalist and philosopher Ernest Renan
had disclosed in the introduction to a collection of papers on religious
history: ‘My work on Buddhism was composed in the latter months of
the life of Eugène Burnouf [the eminent French philologist and orien-
talist, who died in May 1852]. It was intended for the Revue des deux
Mondes, and was indeed the first contribution I sent to that review. M.
Buloz [François Buloz, the then editor of the journal], of all men the
least Buddhistic, praised me regarding some accessories, but, respecting
the body of the work, declined to believe the truth of the assertions it
contained. To him, a real Buddhist in flesh and blood appeared quite
inadmissible. In the face of all the proofs I adduced in support of my
68 7 Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy!

thesis, he obstinately replied: “It is impossible that people could be so

stupid.” Burnouf died, and my essay remained in my desk’ (Renan,
1886, pp. 1–2). When Freud renamed the constancy principle ‘Nirvana
principle’, he credited the British psychoanalyst Barbara Low for it
(Freud, 1955c, p. 56; 1961a, p. 159), yet the idea could have been
equally transmitted to him via the work of Schopenhauer (2014), whose
thesis that death is the true purpose of all life Freud had mentioned in
‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ as similar to his own perspective on the
death drive (Freud, 1955c, p. 50). As to the ‘pain of existence’, Freud
also concurred with Schopenhauer that suffering is the essence of the
human condition (Schopenhauer, 2004), although in ‘Beyond the
Pleasure Principle’ he preferred to call it, with Schiller, ‘die Schwere des
Daseins’ (the burden of existence) (Freud, 1955c, p. 45), whereas in ‘The
Future of an Illusion’ he simply stated that, as human beings, we ‘suffer
grievously from life’ (Freud, 1961b, p. 54).4 It is as if these critics, who
had often relied on sociological arguments—suffering and pathology
stemming from conflictual interpersonal relationships and adverse social
environments, rather than from the simple fact of existence—never
properly listened to melancholic patients, or never fully appreciated
how agonizing it can be for a human being to experience life as an
eternal existence, whether in dreams, or in the conscious thought that
life might go on forever (p. 656).5 Echoing Sartre (1989), although
without the humanist interpersonal touch, Lacan intimated that hell can
be put back in its rightful place when it is confined to what human

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).
 Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy! 69

beings ‘traditionally inflict in this world’ (p. 656). The thought, or the
religious promise, of immortality is therefore far from appealing.
If the sociological, or the social psychological (interpersonal) perspec-
tive in psychoanalysis led to the dismissal of Freud’s death drive, then it
also contributed, Lacan continued, to a fundamental misunderstanding
about the relationship between sadism and masochism, which shows
that ‘the circles of those who have a surer experience of forms of sadism’
(p. 656)—the social theorists who study interpersonal behaviour, rather
than the clinicians, we need to assume—have not shed any light on the
Sadean fantasy. Without specifying his sources, Lacan vehemently
opposed a certain conceptualization of the ‘relation of reversion’
between sadism and masochism, whereby the former would be the
complement and mirror-image of the latter, and both would be working
in tandem in a combined ‘sado-masochistic’ dynamic of domination and
submission (p. 656). To find evidence of this ‘relation of reversion’ in
the psychoanalytic literature, Lacan need not have looked further than
Freud’s own reversible dynamic of activity-passivity in his classic con-
ceptualization of sadism and masochism, as it had appeared, for exam-
ple, in ‘The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ (Freud, 1953b,
p. 158) and ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (Freud, 1957c, pp. 127–
128). However, the psychoanalytic social theorist whose views on the
reversibility of sadism and masochism Lacan criticized, here, is most
likely to be Erich Fromm.6 Instead of considering their social or clinical
value, Lacan ridiculed these views by referring to an old Polish joke:
‘Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the
opposite’ (p. 656). In the so-called ‘sado-masochistic character’, sadism
and masochism are like capitalism and communism in the joke: they
appear to be radically different, but underneath the surface they are
exactly the same. Amusing as it may be, Lacan believed this outlook to
be fundamentally flawed, although it was being disseminated in the

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.
70 7 Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy!

psychoanalytic literature as if it were a serious and truthful explanation

of the relation between sadism and masochism.7
Putting these ‘stupidities’ aside, Lacan admitted that ‘there are doc-
trinaires who strive for tidier appearances’ (une toilette plus soignée), and
go on to claim that the sadist ‘denies the Other’s existence’ (p. 656).8 By
way of antiphrasis, he ‘conceded’ that this is indeed what his own
analysis of the Sadean fantasy might suggest, were it not for the fact
that he had actually intended to show that sadism’s Other (the target-
victim), instead of being denied the right to exist, becomes the repository
for the sadists’ own pain of existence (p. 656). The sadists themselves
seem keen to be transformed into Whiteheadian ‘eternal objects’—
immortal potentials and universals that exceed the boundaries of tem-
poral existence (Whitehead, 1978, p. 44).9 As I demonstrated above, the
libertines never completely succeed in evacuating their own pain of

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 ‘person-
alist 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,
 Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy! 71

existence, insofar as their own ineluctable mediocrity vis-à-vis their

grand project of radical destruction constantly imbues them with a
new source of suffering. Nonetheless, Lacan wondered whether this
possibility (of becoming an eternal object) would not befall everyone,
sadist and victim alike, on condition that one adheres, for instance, to
the Christian spirit of redemption and the belief in the immortality of
the soul (p. 656), yet instead of pursuing this option he first reconsidered
the case of Sade himself (p. 656).10
Returning to Sade—the man and the author, rather than the work—
Lacan proposed, then, that the creator of the most viciously brutal
libertines was far from being duped by the sadistic fantasy he had
impelled upon his heroes. Lacan insinuated, here, that Sade somehow
knew very well that his libertines’ desire for absolute destruction was just
a fantasy, which allowed him not to be fooled or taken in by his own
creative imagination. Although he equipped his libertine heroes with a
sadistic fantasy, and may have fuelled his libertine novels with his own
sexual fantasy, for Sade the Sadean fantasy remained essentially a literary,
fictional universe, which did not take over his lived experience. Put
differently, if Sade himself had wanted to become an ‘eternal object’, it
was definitely not by adopting the position of a sadist in his own life.
Instead of acting upon his literary fantasy, Lacan posited, Sade had
allowed ‘the rigor of his thinking’ to be ‘integrated into the logic of
his life’ (p. 656), and in the next section of ‘Kant with Sade’ he would
therefore argue that it was through his writings, rather than through his
identification with the sadistic libertine that Sade had succeeded in
becoming an eternal object. In doing so, he had not ‘sadistically’
discharged the pain of existence onto the Other, but had taken it entirely
upon himself, in the trials and tribulations of his own troubled existence.

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?’.
 8
Sade’s Practical Reason

Tacitly revisiting the long polemical tract Sade had inserted, more or less
arbitrarily, under the title of ‘Frenchmen, Some More Effort if You Wish to
Become Republicans’ into the fifth dialogue of Philosophy in the Boudoir,
and assuming that this ‘pamphlet within the pamplet’, much like the
dream within the dream, may indeed be more emblematic of Sade’s own
politics than any other part of the book, Lacan set his readership an
assignment. How does the fourfold structure of the Sadean fantasy, as
graphically represented in Section 6 of ‘Kant with Sade’, and which is
effectively an articulation of the ‘sadistic’ relationship between the
libertines and their victims, relate to Sade’s personal outlook on life?
Using the logical sequence a → V → $ → S, is it possible to shed light
on Sade’s ‘politics’, his morals, his desire, his sexuality, and his social
position, as the repeatedly incarcerated author of the most scabrous
novels ever written? If Sade’s vision of a utopian republic based on the
universal right to jouissance in the fifth dialogue of Philosophy in the
Boudoir was not just a literary fantasy, but to some extent also a
subjective Weltanschauung, how did the latter manifest itself, and how
can it be understood with the terminology of the fundamental fantasy of
absolute destruction that governs the actions of his libertine heroes?

© The Author(s) 2017 73

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_8
74 8 Sade’s Practical Reason

The assignment set (p. 656), Lacan provided the reader with his own
outline answer. In sum, he proposed that the solution is to be found
neither in a simple duplication of the first schema—Sade-the-man
being a real-life replica of the ‘sadistic’ heroes that populate his liber-
tine novels—nor in any kind of ‘symmetrical reversal along an axis or
around some central point’ (pp. 656–657)—Sade the wayward aristo-
crat and incorrigible fantasist only ever being made to suffer by the law
enforcers and moral guardians of successive political regimes—but
rather in a ‘90-degree rotation of the graph’ (p. 657). This operation
leaves the original sequence of the terms, a → V → $ → S, unchanged,
but redistributes a and $ to the ‘side of the subject’ and V and S to the
‘side of the Other’.1 The new schema, which is designed to represent
Sade’s personal ideology, his morals and his life philosophy, in short
his own ‘practical reason’ rather than that of his libertine protagonists,
appeared as follows (Fig. 8.1).

a V

$ S

Fig. 8.1 Sade’s practical reason

1
What Fink has translated as ‘90-degree rotation of the graph’ is what Lacan called ‘un pas de
rotation d’un quart de cercle’. Encapsulated within the dense texture of Lacan’s ruthless theoretical
exposition, this ‘quarter turn’ can only appear to the uninitiated as a mere technical point, and
Lacan himself may not have made much of it when he was thinking through the logic of his
second schema in the early 1960s. However, at the end of the 1960s, this ‘quarter turn’ would
come fairly close to acquiring conceptual status, when Lacan reactivated it as the organizing
principle behind his theory of the four discourses. In the opening lesson of his 1969-’70 seminar
‘The Other Side of Psychoanalysis’, he stated: ‘I have been speaking about this notorious quarter
turn [quart de tour] for long enough, and on different occasions—in particular, ever since the
appearance of what I wrote under the title “Kant with Sade”—for people to think that perhaps one
day it would be seen that this isn’t limited to what the so-called Schema Z [here, the second
schema of “Kant with Sade”] does, and that there are other reasons for this quarter turn [quart de
tour] than some pure accident of imaginary representation’ (Lacan, 2007, p. 14).
 Sade’s Practical Reason 75

By not merely reproducing the first schema when accounting for Sade’s
outlook on life, Lacan made it clear that he did not think the mental
economy of the man responsible for articulating the grand libertine
fantasy of absolute destruction to be an identical blueprint of that of his
characters. In doing so, he implicitly distanced himself from the likes of de
Beauvoir, who saw in the Duc de Blangis—one of the four murderous
libertines in The 120 Days of Sodom—a ‘projection of himself’ (i.e., Sade),
and who unashamedly interpreted words spoken by some of Sade’s
libertine characters as personal confessions (de Beauvoir, 1990, p. 8,
p. 22 & p. 24). However, in not symmetrically reversing the first schema,
Lacan also refused to allocate Sade to the place of the passive victim, which
would have involved his being deprived of any kind of sexual desire, or of
his desire being systematically crushed under the barbaric jouissance of his
own ‘libertine’ tormentors. In doing so, he implicitly opposed the view
expressed by Paulhan, according to whom the real Sade was to be found in
the pitiful image of the virtuous Justine—relentlessly persecuted, betrayed,
exploited and abused by scores of merciless men and women, for the pure
purpose of their own personal gratification (Paulhan, 1990).
Lely’s biography of Sade would have taught Lacan that the Marquis was
not exactly a paragon of virtue, and that long before he started devoting
himself to writing he had already been imprisoned and sentenced to death
for a series of sexual escapades.2 As a self-confessed libertine, Sade actively
pursued all kinds of risky sexual adventures, involving beggars, prostitutes,
chamber maids, cooks, valets and secretaries, not to mention his wife and
sister-in-law, and there is no evidence that he enjoyed anything else but
being the undisputed master of erotic ceremonies, even when he insisted
on being whipped and sodomized. But Lacan would also have known that

2
Sade probably started putting pen to paper as far back as the late 1760s, when he was in his
twenties, but it was not until the early 1780s that his ‘literary talents’ seem to have taken off. By
that time, however, his name and reputation had already been tarnished by a string of widely
publicized sex offences, including the so-called ‘Arcueil’ or ‘Rose Keller Affair’ of 3 April (Easter
Sunday) 1768, and the Marseilles incident of 27 June 1772, the latter resulting in Sade and his
valet Latour being sentenced to death on the grounds of poisoning and sodomy. The reader will
find more details about these and other instances of Sade getting into trouble with the law on
account of his sexual proclivities in the numerous Sade biographies. See, for example, Pauvert
(1986), Lever (1993), Bongie (1998), du Plessix Gray (1999) and Schaeffer (1999).
76 8 Sade’s Practical Reason

Sade was far from being a murderous sexual predator, and that he rarely
went further than what would now be regarded as fairly elementary acts of
bondage and domination, although within the legal context of eighteenth-
century France these sexual activities would have been punishable as
criminal acts, especially when they involved sodomy. As Sade confessed
in his famous ‘grande lettre’ to his wife, written on 20 February 1781 from
his prison cell at the fortress of Vincennes: ‘Yes, I am a libertine, I admit it;
I have conceived everything conceivable in that genre, but I have definitely
not done everything I have conceived of and definitely never shall. I am a
libertine, but I am neither a criminal nor a murderer’ (Sade, 1997, p. 229).
In the eyes of the French police, and especially in those of his mother-in-
law, Sade was most definitely a criminal, but for all we know he was right
when he said that he was not a murderer, that he had not done everything
he had ever fantasized about, and that he had no intention of acting upon
all his fantasies.3 Somehow Sade had succeeded in not being duped by his
literary fantasy or, as Breton put it in his Anthology of Black Humour, in
not being taken in by his own creative imagination—not in the least
because of his intermittent reliance on black humour when detailing the
totally outrageous exploits of his libertine characters (Breton, 2009, p. 46).
This perspective on the author as someone who is not being deceived by
his own literary creation, applies in two ways. Whatever de Beauvoir may
have believed, in his private life Sade did not try to ‘realize the dream
which was to haunt his books’ (de Beauvoir, 1990, p. 13), and vice versa
his books were not the literary realization of his private sexual theatre. For
Lacan, Sade was by no means the epitome of virtue, but he was not exactly
a ‘sadist’ either, at least not in the nineteenth century’s understanding of
someone whose sexual satisfaction is exclusively conditioned by the humi-
liation, torture and murder of others.
Did Lacan’s ‘90-degree rotation’ of his first schema imply, then, that
we ought to approach Sade-the-man as a masochist? The proposition

3
Interestingly, Sade’s admission ‘I have conceived everything conceivable in that genre’ came at
least four years before he started composing The 120 Days of Sodom, which was meant to contain a
full and definitive description of all 600 simple, complex, criminal and murderous passions. So if
he is indeed to be believed about his already having conceived everything in 1781, it would not
have been in writing . . .
 Sade’s Practical Reason 77

that Sade was not a Justine-like victim of his own virtuous existence does
not exclude the question, because the libertines’ victims are not supposed
to derive any form of (masochistic) enjoyment from the torments to
which they are subjected, if only because (as Dolmancé explains to
Eugénie) this would effectively diminish the libertines’ own despotic
jouissance. Lacan never went so far as to categorize Sade as a masochist,
and his reluctance to diagnose masochism in Sade is undoubtedly to his
credit, because it stops the reader from seeing the complexity of Sade’s
Weltanschauung being reduced to a mere category of sexual psychopathol-
ogy, which was moreover invented long after Sade’s death, and with
reference to another creative writer.4 The fact that Sade seemed to have
enjoyed being whipped and sodomized is not in itself sufficient proof that
he was a masochist, or had masochistic tendencies—after all, many of
Sade’s most brutal libertines also derive sexual satisfaction from their own
pain, and see this as a reliable indicator of their libertine disposition. The
fact that Sade spent 27 years of his life in prison is not proof of his
masochism either, because there is no evidence whatsoever that he enjoyed
being confined, and one would also need to come up with persuasive
arguments of his consciously or unconsciously choreographing his own
successive incarcerations. In the session of 13 March 1963 of his seminar
L’angoisse, just weeks before the first publication of ‘Kant with Sade’ in
Critique, Lacan posited: ‘Sadism is not masochism back to front. This is
not a reversible couple. The structure is more complex. Though I’m only
singling out two terms [sadism and masochism] today, you may presume,
in reference to several of my main schemas, that it has to do with a
fourfold function, a foursquare function. One passes from one to the
other by rotating it 90 degrees [une rotation au quart de tour], and not

4
I will no doubt be contradicted by those conversant with Lacan’s Seminar XVII, in which he
claimed that Sade the practitioner was assuredly a masochist. Be that as it may, Lacan also
emphasized there that Sade was much more than a mere practitioner, insofar as he was also a
theoretician, at which point Lacan did not think Sade was a masochist at all. See Lacan (2007,
pp. 66–67). Despite the fact that nowhere in ‘Kant with Sade’ Lacan designated Sade as a
masochist, some commentators on the text have nonetheless adopted this point of view, whereby
they have defined the second schema as the ‘schema of masochism’. See, for example, Fink (2014,
pp. 123–128). As to the term ‘masochism’ itself, this was coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in
the 1890 drawing on the writings of the nineteenth-century Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-
Masoch, especially with reference to his 1870 novella Venus im Pelz. See Azar (1993).
78 8 Sade’s Practical Reason

through any symmetry or inversion’ (Lacan, 2014b, p. 177). The wording

is almost identical to that used in ‘Kant with Sade’, yet Lacan’s earlier
argument in this seminar that the masochist desires to see himself being
embodied as a particular figuration of object a, notably as a common
object of exchange (Lacan, 2014b, p. 105), is no longer valid in the second
schema of ‘Kant with Sade’, because Sade’s desire (d) is not represented in
it as directed towards a, but as strictly focused on $. And it is precisely
because in the second schema of ‘Kant with Sade’, d is connected to $
rather than to a, that this schema is effectively more than just a 90-degree
rotation. It represents a quarter turn with an additional twist, which may
very well reiterate the fact that for Lacan Sade-the-man is by no means a
mainstream masochist.5
When glossing the newly distributed terms in the second schema,
Lacan started with V (p. 657), thus counter-intuitively avoiding the two
obvious starting points, of d → $ and a. Much like in the first schema, V
represents a will to jouissance, yet Lacan made it immediately clear that
this will is now stripped of its sexual overtones and enters the realm of
absolute moral control, so that it conjures up Nietzsche’s notorious ‘will
to power’ (in French, ‘volonté de puissance’). Were the person who acts
upon this will to experience any form of sexual satisfaction, it would be
hidden behind an emotionless façade of sovereign authority. Reflecting
upon Sade’s ‘politics’, i.e. his doctrine of the right to jouissance as the key
to his utopian republic, Lacan recognized this will to jouissance not in
Sade himself, but rather in the figure of his stout-hearted mother-in-law,
the unyielding Présidente de Montreuil, who saw it as her personal

5
Apart from the fact that in the second schema, d is no longer connected to a but to $, the lozenge
◇, which modulates the relation between a and $ in the first schema, and which is to be read as
‘desire for’, has disappeared in the second schema. There is a good logical reason for this, because
(as Lacan would state in Section 9 of ‘Kant with Sade’) at least ‘one foot’ of the fantasy needs to be
in the Other, whereas in the second schema both a and $ are on the side of the subject. Hence, the
quarter turn by definition excludes the possibility of a fantasmatic relation between a and $—
masochistic or otherwise—and this may explain why at no point in this section, Lacan referred
explicitly to Sade’s fantasy, but only to his republic, i.e. to his politics or to his ‘practical reason’.
Put differently, the second schema never appears to have been designed to represent Sade’s
subjective fantasy per se, as opposed to that of his libertine heroes, but rather as a general
representation of his subjectivity (his personal predicament, his moral outlook, and especially
his position as a writer of libertine novels) in relation to the Other.
 Sade’s Practical Reason 79

mission to ensure that the heinous husband of her eldest daughter would
not escape his just punishment, and who even managed to obtain a series
of so-called ‘lettres de cachet’ from the French king, ordering Sade’s arrest
and imprisonment—without trial, for an indefinite period of time, at
the behest of the family, and by royal decree.6 Hence, insofar as Sade
himself would have been an advocate of the unassailable right to jouis-
sance, Lacan believed that, quite ironically, he himself had not exercised
it, or at least that his exercise of this right had to be situated elsewhere
than in the direct expression of sovereign power, whose function was to
be situated strictly on the side of the Other, in the frightful figure of his
persecutory mother-in-law.
Following his original sequence of terms, Lacan posited that the effect
of Sade being on the receiving end of the Other’s will to jouissance is
tantamount to his subjective division, $, which should be understood in
this context as his physical disappearance from the scene of public life

6
Marie-Madeleine Masson de Plissay married Claude-René Cordier de Launay in August 1740.
After Claude-René’s father had acquired a barony in Normandy, the family changed their name to
de Montreuil, and when Claude-René became the chief judge (president) of the Cour des Aides, a
court of law dealing with matters of government finance, Marie-Madeleine became commonly
known as la Présidente de Montreuil. From the year of Sade’s marriage to their daughter Renée-
Pélagie, on 17 May 1763, until his release from the madhouse of Charenton on 2 April 1790, to
where he had been transferred from the Bastille in July 1789, i.e. for more than 25 years, she was
Sade’s indefatigable nemesis, her relentless quest to see her son-in-law behind bars culminating in
her obtaining a ‘lettre de cachet’ from King Louis XVI in 1777, which superseded all existing legal
judgments against the miscreant and allowed the family to secure his detention for as long as they
wished. In the end, Madame de Montreuil’s ‘lettre de cachet’ put Sade away for 13 years, until
Robespierre’s new revolutionary government abolished all royal decrees. By an extraordinary twist
of fate, when during the Summer of 1793 Sade was appointed to the role of president of la Section
des Piques, one of the new geographical districts in Paris with its own legislative assembly, he had
the totally unexpected opportunity to take revenge on his hated in-laws, because they happened to
be living in his own district. But the creator of some of the most depraved, merciless libertines
could not bring himself to signing their death warrant. As he wrote to his legal advisor Gaspard
Gaufridy, ‘the meeting was so chaotic that I couldn’t take it any more! . . . I was forced to
relinquish my presidency . . . They wanted me to put to the vote a horror, an inhumanity. I
categorically refused. Thank God, I’ve washed my hands of it . . . During my presidency, I
inscribed the Montreuils on a list of citizens to be spared. If I’d said a single word, they would
have been lost. I remained silent. That’s the kind of revenge I chose!’ (Bourdin, 1929, p. 342).
Much like the anonymous pamphleteer in Philosophy in the Boudoir, throughout his lifetime, Sade
remained vehemently opposed to the death penalty. Madame de Montreuil died in 1801. For the
history of the ‘lettre de cachet’, including numerous examples obtained from the Archives of the
Bastille, see Farge & Foucault (2014).
80 8 Sade’s Practical Reason

and from people’s memories, and which would have been given the final
stamp of approval when, during the early 1810s, the Emperor Napoleon
Bonaparte (formerly known as the First Consul) personally signed two
consecutive ministerial decrees to keep Sade locked up in the asylum of
Charenton (Lely, 1957, p. 580; Lever, 1993, pp. 545–546; du Plessix
Gray, 1999, p. 408; Schaeffer, 1999, pp. 499–500, 657).7 But apart
from Sade himself, the Other’s will to jouissance also affected key figures
in the Marquis’ immediate environment, notably those who had decided
to devote themselves unconditionally to his libertine cause, or who had
continued to support him in his darkest hour (p. 657). Lacan singled out
Sade’s wife, his sister-in-law and his valet, and situated them in the place
of S, firmly on the side of the Other, but fully sharing in his quandaries.
Unlike the S in the schema of the Sadean fantasy, where it represents a
pure experience of unblemished satisfaction, the S in the schema of
Sade’s practical reason is undoubtedly more fractured, but it still appears
as a much more unchecked, and therefore blissful state of being than
anything Sade himself would have lived through, if only because Sade’s
accomplices seem to have been more adept at escaping the wrath of
Madame de Montreuil and her acolytes than the master they elected to
serve. Lacan wrote that those complicit with Sade’s antics were ‘incar-
nating the heroism characteristic of the pathological’ (p. 657), in the
Kantian sense of their having been totally at the mercy of their passion.
Of course, in the end they disappeared too—in provincial châteaux,
consumed by illness, or swallowed up in the creases of history—but
somehow they succeeded in getting away with the transgressions of
libertinage relatively scot-free.8

7
Although Napoleon sealed Sade’s fate towards the end of his life, Lacan agreed with Lely that the
First Consul himself probably did not order Sade’s arrest in March 1801, when the police raided
the offices of his publisher, and the Marquis was detained for the first time because of the books he
had written. As I pointed out earlier (see Introduction, note 13), the footnote in which Lacan
expressed his agreement has been misplaced in Fink’s translation, thus giving the reader the
impression that Lacan was making a point about Sade’s manservant.
8
Sade’s wife Renée-Pélagie Cordier de Montreuil (1741–1810) remained totally devoted to her
husband until his release from Charenton in 1790, when she decided to file for divorce, having
become a resident of the Parisian convent of Sainte-Aure. Lever writes about her: ‘Passion had
lifted this woman of limited intelligence and tranquil flesh to sublime heights, compelling her, as it
were, to love beyond her means’ (Lever, 1993, p. 362). She died at her château of Echaffour in
 Sade’s Practical Reason 81

Without claiming that the Marquis had unconsciously orchestrated

his own predicament, Lacan recognized in Sade’s division cum disap-
pearance ($) a corollary of his own desire as the author of Justine, Juliette,
Philosophy in the Boudoir, and other libertine texts, hence the vector
d → $ (p. 657). When Justine came off the press in 1791, the novel did
not bear the name of its author; when Philosophy in the Boudoir was
published four years later, the title page stated that it was a ‘posthumous
work by the author of Justine’, and when he released the ten volumes of
La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette, Sade used the same subterfuge. Of
course, the wish to remain anonymous could have stemmed from the
simple aim to avoid prosecution, but Sade was also in the habit of
disowning his own works. Shortly before seeing Justine in print, he
wrote to his lawyer-friend Maître Reinaud: ‘They are now printing a
novel of mine . . . Burn it and do not read it if by chance it falls into your
hands: I renounce it’ (Sade, 1967, p. 488).9 Until his dying days, Sade
vehemently denied that he was the author of the scandalous novels that
had been attributed to him, and which had eventually been used as a
pretext for punishing him ‘administratively’ and keeping him detained
during the last 13 years of his life (du Plessix Gray, 1999, pp. 380–381).
‘[A]s a subject, it is through his disappearance that he makes his mark
[qu’il signe]’, Lacan wrote (p. 657), whereby he also alluded to the fact

Normandy. Her sister Anne-Prospère (1751–1781) eloped with Sade to Italy in October 1772,
after the Marseilles affair. She died of smallpox in 1781, when her brother-in-law and former lover
was sequestered at Vincennes. As to Sade’s manservant Latour, after having been sentenced to
death for sodomy for his participation in the Marseilles incident, he too escaped with Sade and his
sister-in-law to Italy. Upon the Marquis’ return to France, he joined his master as a voluntary
prisoner at the fortress of Miolans, from which he subsequently helped Sade to escape, after which
he seems to have vanished altogether. Lacan’s lines ‘it can be seen that the subject’s division does
not have to be pinned together [réunie] in a single body’ (p. 657) and ‘This division here pins
together [réunit] as S the brute subject’ (p. 657) were added for the Écrits version of ‘Kant with
Sade’ and again reflect his take, in Seminar XI, on the disjunction V being based on the principle
of the union (réunion) in set theory.
9
When Sade realised that he was being detained because of his writings, and in particular for
having authored Justine, he did not hesitate to argue his case: ‘I cannot be the author of this
book . . . [A]ll the philosophical personages in this novel are villains to the core. However, I myself
am a philosopher; everyone acquainted with me will certify that I consider philosophy my
profession and my glory . . . And can anyone for one instant, save he suppose me mad, can anyone,
I say, suppose for one minute that I could bring myself to present what I hold to be the noblest of
all callings, under colors so loathsome and in a shape so execrable?’ (Sade, 1991b, p. 153).
82 8 Sade’s Practical Reason

that no known portrait or likeness of Sade has survived, and that in the
famous fifth clause of his last will and testament—drawn up at the
asylum of Charenton in January 1806—he had insisted that ‘the traces
of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the
memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men’ (Sade, 1991c,
p. 157).10 Sade’s ardent wish to be erased forever, to be killed off once
more after his physical death, no doubt reminded Lacan of Pope Pius’
fantasy of the second death, but he recalled instead how the chorus in
Oedipus at Colonus had lamented the hero’s tragic fate (p. 657): ‘Not to
be born [μὴ φυναι] comes first by every reckoning; and once one has
appeared, to go back to where one came from as soon as possible is the
next best thing’ (Sophocles, 1998, p. 547).11 Whereas for Oedipus, the

10
Although first-hand descriptions of Sade’s physical features in young adulthood and as an
ageing inmate have survived, the only known image of Sade is a small profile in pencil by Charles
van Loo, dated around 1770, which shows an elegant and charming French aristocrat. However,
its status as an authentic portrait of Sade in his prime remains disputed. Partly for practical reasons
(the estate where he had wanted to be laid to rest had been sold by the time he died), Sade’s last
will and testament were not respected, but he would most certainly have balked at the thought of
being given a religious funeral. When the cemetery of Charenton needed to be excavated, Sade’s
body was exhumed and his grave disappeared. Charenton’s assistant physician Dr Ramon
obtained his skull, but when he handed it to a German disciple of Gall by the name of Johann
Caspar Spurzheim the skull itself disappeared. It is believed that one of the molds of the skull
made for Spurzheim is now part of the collections of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. See Lever
(1993, pp. 565–567) and Delon (2014, p. 322)
11
μὴ φυναι are the first words of verse 1224 of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and they are sung
by the chorus, in a gripping reflection upon Oedipus’s inescapable fate. In Fink’s translation of
‘Kant with Sade’, where the words have been rendered as ‘not to be born’ (p. 657), in accordance
with Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ classic translation of Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles, 1998, p. 547), they
have been misattributed to verse 1225 (p. 668, note 10), yet in his Écrits Lacan himself
misattributed them to verse 1125. Without explicitly referring to Sophocles, Lacan had already
alluded to this verse in Seminar II, where he translated it as ‘mieux vaudrait n’être pas né’ (‘The
greatest boon is not to be’) and ‘mieux vaudrait ne pas être né’ (‘It would be better not to be born’)
(Lacan, 1988b, p. 233), and where he also referred to Freud’s mention of it in his book on jokes,
in which he had used a response to it in the satirical journal Fliegende Blätter—’this happens to
scarcely one person in a hundred thousand’—as an illustration of a particular technique of joking
(Freud, 1960, p. 57). In Seminar III, Lacan had rendered the words as ‘n’être pas né tel’ (not to be
born like this) (Lacan, 1993, p. 244), and he returned to the verse in Seminar VII, yet erroneously
designating it as the last words of Oedipus, and now offering the translation ‘plutôt, ne pas être’
(rather not to be), whilst adding: ‘That’s the choice with which a human existence such as
Oedipus’s has to end. It ends so perfectly that he doesn’t die like everybody else, that is to say
accidentally; he dies from a true death in which he erases his own being. The malediction is freely
accepted on the basis of the true subsistence of a human being, the subsistence of the subtraction
of himself from the order of the world’ (Lacan, 1992, p. 306). Lacan returned to it again in
 Sade’s Practical Reason 83

chorus’s invocation would allow him to ascend towards the gods, Sade’s
own invocation would eternalize his name in a different way, despite
himself and against his own wishes, through the body of his works. And
this is where Lacan located the key to Sade’s practical reason, and to the
fantasy that presided over his life.
Indeed, what in Lacan’s opinion occupied the place of the instrument,
the black fetish and the object a in Sade’s politics and morals is nothing
more, nothing less than his writings (p. 657).12 Although he would have
been well aware of the fact that the Présidente de Montreuil’s domineering
will to jouissance had been unleashed by Sade’s sexual mischief rather than
his libertine novels, and that Sade’s books had only landed him in jail
some ten years after her assiduous persecution had come to an end, Lacan
was adamant that the moral backlash had been sustained by the oeuvre
(Sade as a text) rather than the man, whereby it had simultaneously
elicited the most extreme of moral responses and secured his

Seminar VIII, where he translated it as ‘puissé-je n’être pas’ (‘would that I were not’) and ‘ne fus-je’
(‘were I not’) (Lacan, 2015, p. 301). The choir’s position, here, that it is always better not to have
been born, constitutes a central point of reference for anti-natalist philosophers such as
Schopenhauer (2004), Cioran (1976) and, most recently, Benatar (2006). Finally, it should also
be noted that Sophocles’ verse is not original, because it duplicates a famous line from a sixth-
century BC poem by Theognis of Megara: Πάντων μὲν μὴ φῦναι ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἄριστον (For
mortal beings best of all is never to have been born at all), and can also be found in the poetry of
Bacchylides. For a further exploration of the verse’s significance, see Dolar (2016).
12
Unfortunately, this crucial link between Sade’s works and the object a in the second schema has
completely disappeared from Fink’s translation. In the Écrits edition of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan
wrote: ‘sa malédiction moins sainte que celle d’Œdipe, ne le porte pas chez les Dieux, mais s’éternise: a)
dans l’œuvre’, whereby ‘a) dans l’œuvre’ is the start of a new paragraph. In Fink’s translation, we read
in one and the same paragraph: ‘Sade’s curse is less holy than Oedipus’, and does not carry him
toward the Gods, but is immortalized in his work’ (p. 657). As such, the algebraic notation a) is no
longer there, and the only reason I can think of to explain this omission is that ‘a)’ was interpreted
not as indicative of the object a, but as the beginning of a list of things—a), b), c), etc.—and was
eventually dropped, because b) did not follow and so a) was seen as a confusing and superfluous
marker. In his ‘tentative and provisional’ translation of Lacan’s text, which was published after
Fink’s version, Richardson made the same editorial decision (and mistake), for this very reason:
‘The text reads s’éternise: a), as if there were to follow a b). This does not happen, however, and I
have chosen to omit the “a)” to avoid confusion—of which we have already quite enough.’
(Lacan, 2009, p. 40, footnote 26). Although Lacan did not mention it, the status of Sade’s
writings as the black fetish and object a in his practical reason connects nicely with Juliette’s
recommendation to Clairwil that of all the crimes one can imagine, the most excessive and
enduring is the so-called ‘moral murder’, which is committed through writing. See Sade (1968,
p. 525) and Chapter 5, note 6.
84 8 Sade’s Practical Reason

indestructibility and therefore his immortality. By way of illustration, he

referred to an influential moralistic essay by the nineteenth-century critic
Jules Janin, in which the author conceded (and deplored) that, whilst no
one really dares to pronounce Sade’s name, his libertine books are so
ubiquitous—allegedly hidden, but ever so easy to find—that one may
reasonably assume that most people have read them.13 Drawing on the
transcript of the proceedings in the court case against Pauvert, Lacan
further claimed that whereas everyone (the judge, the solicitors and the
witnesses; prosecutors as well as defendants) seems to agree that Sade’s
books are boring [‘Œuvre ennuyeuse’], and that his literary style is weak, at
the same time everyone also continues to be bothered and disturbed by it
all (p. 657).14 In an attempt to account for this strange effect, he suggested

13
Although it was ostensibly intended as a serious and sincere dissertation on the unspeakable
horrors committed by one criminal mind, Janin’s biblio-biographical ‘impression’ of Sade,
originally published in the Revue de Paris of 30 November 1834, comes across as a strangely
twisted eulogy of the Marquis and his literary legacy. Saturated with extravagant invectives and
hyperbolic vituperations, Janin’s melodramatic prose barely conceals a persistent sense of lofty
excitement. Although the author never admits to anything but extreme disgust at the streams of
blood and the proliferation of tortured corpses in the Sadean universe, the reader is left wondering
whether underneath this surface of moral correctness the author is not deeply seduced by it all, the
inflated rhetoric being but a cleverly pursued ploy of subversive irony. The passage to which Lacan
referred, here, was also quoted by Maurice Garçon in his defense speech at the Pauvert trial
(Garçon, 1963, p. 90). Since Lacan omitted the same part of Janin’s sentence as Garçon, it would
appear that Lacan took the phrase from Garçon rather than from the original. Janin’s full
sentences read: ‘For do not fool yourselves, the marquis de Sade is everywhere; in all the libraries,
he sits on a certain mysterious and hidden row which one always finds; it is one of those books that
are normally placed behind St John Chrysostom, or Nicole’s Traité de morale, or Pascal’s Pensées.
Ask all those Commissaries if they really take that many inventories after death without finding
the marquis de Sade. And since it is one of those books which the law does not recognize as
personal property, it always happens that some businessman’s clerk, or his boss, grabs it first and
then passes it on for public consumption’ (Janin, 1839, p. 152). On Janin, see Brighelli (2000,
pp. 159–164).
14
In his defense of Pauvert, Garçon quoted a letter by Jean Cocteau, in which the renowned
French writer and filmmaker had written: ‘He [Sade] is boring, his style is weak, and his only
worth comes from the reproaches directed towards him’. Hearing this statement, the judge
presiding over the trial responded: ‘I’m in agreement on one point: that he’s boring.’ Garçon
concurred: ‘On that point we all agree’ (Garçon, 1963, p. 62). Garçon had been elected to the
Académie française in 1946, hence Lacan’s chosen address of the judge and Maurice Garçon as
‘your honor and member of the Académie française’ (p. 657). When, in this same paragraph, Lacan
emphasized how Sade’s allegedly boring work is nonetheless always bothering people, he conjured
up the concluding prose doxology of the Eucharistic prayer in the Catholic mass: ‘Per ipsum, et
cum ipso, et in ipso’, ‘Par lui, avec lui et dans lui’, ‘Through him, and with him, and in him’.
Unfortunately, this allusion is lost in the English translation. Interestingly, in Seminar VII, Lacan
 Sade’s Practical Reason 85

that the Sadean fantasy, i.e. the written discourse of Sade’s libertine novels,
confronts everyone with the issue of human desire, inasmuch as ‘it is
asking you [the reader] . . . to square accounts with your desires’ (p. 658).
One could no doubt detect in these words a faint echo of de Beauvoir’s
conclusion to ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, where she posited: ‘The supreme
value of his [Sade’s] testimony lies in its ability to disturb us. It forces us to
re-examine thoroughly the basic problem which haunts our age in differ-
ent forms: the true relation between man and man’ (de Beauvoir, 1990,
p. 64). However, Lacan’s point was unquestionably more provocative,
because it intimates that Sade compels us to re-examine a much more
fundamental relationship than that between ‘man and man’, namely the
relationship we entertain with ourselves. Instead of interpreting the dis-
turbing exhortation stemming from Sade’s works as a demand for human
beings to investigate the way they relate to each other, Lacan regarded it as
a demand for human beings to come to terms with themselves. Or, as the
philosopher Susan Neiman put it: Sade’s works ‘titillate and repel in ways
you shouldn’t be titillated and repelled. They appeal to the meanest and
worst of desires: whether you react with disgust or with boredom, you are
implicated as voyeur of acts that should not see the light of day’ (Neiman,
2004, p. 170). In pursuing this point, Lacan entered a tacit dialogue with
Georges Bataille, who had defined human eroticism, and par excellence
Sade’s triumphant literary invocation of the violence of desire, as ‘the
problematic part of ourselves’ (Bataille, 2001, p. 273). Indeed, Bataille’s
numerous influential texts on Sade, as well as his broader reflections on
the intricate relationship between desire and the law, constitute the
essential yet unacknowledged backdrop for Lacan’s arguments in the
following sections of ‘Kant with Sade’, in which he embarked on a
more general consideration of the status of human desire.

himself had stated: ‘Although in the eyes of some the work of the Marquis de Sade seems to
promise a variety of entertainments, it is not strictly speaking much fun. Moreover, the parts that
seem to give the most pleasure can also be regarded as the most boring [les plus ennuyeuses]’ (Lacan,
1992, p. 78).
 9
The Law Sustains Desire

Moving away from the Sadean fantasy, Lacan started elaborating his
own psychoanalytic theory of desire, pitting Sade against Kant, and
arguing how neither the rationalist philosopher nor the libertine moralist
had appreciated the strict inseparability of subjective desire and the
moral law. Following in the intellectual footsteps of Bataille, yet without
ever mentioning him by name, and extending a principle he had also
found in Freud, yet without referring to a specific text, Lacan argued
that desire and the law are not antagonistic forces, but rather interde-
pendent components of a single bipolar psychic system (p. 658).
Reading Kant ‘with Sade’, he demonstrated how, despite Kant’s great
philosophical efforts, the emergence of a non-empirical formal law in a
rational free will does not eradicate desire, but merely represses it, as a
result of which it is simultaneously sustained and invigorated. Mutatis
mutandis, reading Sade ‘without Kant’, he showed how, despite Sade’s
grand libertine fantasy of an absolute, unrestrained liberation of ‘natural’
desire, there is no such thing as a raw, pure, ‘natural’ desire—even when
it is being translated into an allegedly universal right to jouissance—but

© The Author(s) 2017 87

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_9
88 9 The Law Sustains Desire

only ever a mediated desire, a desire that is dependent upon the symbolic
Other of language and the law. The first part of this dual argument is
developed in Sections 9 to 13 of ‘Kant with Sade’, whereas the second
part unfolds in Sections 14 and 15. For the first part, Lacan rekindled a
famous double apologue from the Critique of Practical Reason, whereas
for the second part he probed deeper into the logic of Philosophy in the
Boudoir and the constitution of the Sadean republic, as articulated in the
book’s ‘pamphlet within the pamphlet’. The first stage of Kant’s double
apologue received a critical airing in Sections 9 and 10, whilst the second
stage was addressed in Section 11.
However, before properly exposing Kant to Sade, Lacan opened
Section 9 with an arcane synthesis of the three key pillars upon which
he had constructed his theory of desire during the 1950s and early
1960s, although not in chronological order of development, without
listing them in a systematic fashion, and without making any conces-
sions to those who had not participated in the process. They can be
summarized as follows: (1) Insofar as desire is attached to an object, the
latter continues to escape and therefore causes rather than satisfies desire;
(2) Insofar as there is a subject of desire, the subject does not control,
let alone possess his or her desire, but is rather subjected to and possessed
by it, without knowing exactly where it is coming from and in which
direction it is going; (3) Desire is not an autonomous force, but some-
thing conditioned by the Other’s desire, although the latter remains
equally opaque and can only be accessed via a fantasy, which therefore
mediates between the subject of desire and the Other, as well as between
the subject and the elusive object of desire.
Building upon the first pillar, Lacan suggested that the Sadean
universe serves as a prime example of how the object of desire
remains as ‘ungraspable as is the object of the Law according to
Kant’ (p. 659). As I explained earlier on, in Chapter 2 of this book,
Kant formulated a moral law which operates without any reference
to empirical objects, and whose sole object(ive) would be the realiza-
tion of the highest good in the moment when complete virtuousness
and complete happiness coincide. Because no rational being is
intrinsically holy, this object is endlessly receding and can only
 The Law Sustains Desire 89

maintain its function as a rational goal for moral action on the basis
of the postulate of the immortality of the soul. Likewise, when the
Sadean libertines conspire to realize their evil plan of transcendental
destruction, they are constantly reminded of the restrictions imposed
by their earthly existence. In order to realize their desire, they wish
for nothing better than to relinquish the burden of their human
bodies, but time and again they find themselves tragically con-
strained by the ineluctable limitations of life and the finite cycle of
pleasure. ‘[A]nnihilation she [Nature] seeks’, Pope Pius VI exclaims,
‘by less she is not fully satisfied, it is not within our power to extend
our murders to the point she desires’ (Sade, 1968, p. 772).
The Sadean libertines are a band of brothers and sisters who have
chosen to obey a moral code that allows them to answer only to
themselves, as instruments of Nature. If ethics, as Lacan claimed in
Seminar VII, is about formulating a judgement on the nature of one’s
action (Lacan, 1992, p. 291), then the judgement made by the liber-
tines, and the underlying question they repeatedly ask themselves, is
not whether their action is of any consequence to anyone else, but
whether it lives up to their ideal. True libertines are never concerned
about the effect of their actions on other people. They radically reject
social conventions and the moral obligations they impose. They only
ever engage in ‘fraternal’ personal relations and never become intimate
with each other, let alone fall in love. They bond as partners in crime
and kindred spirits, but as people who share the same ideal they also
constantly admit to not being on a par with the object of their desire, as
a result of which the latter perpetually escapes. Hence, whereas the
repetitive alternation between philosophical disquisitions and sexual
hubris in Sade’s libertine novels may indeed elicit a sensation of
boredom in the reader, the staccato rhythm of the narrative structure
responds to the internal logic of desire, as something that is never
fulfilled, that runs aground before it reaches its destination, that
fundamentally fails to meet its object(ive) each and every time it
ventures out on the pathway towards its realization. This is why
Lacan situated the object of desire in the interstices, the pauses and
the scansions of the Sadean fantasy, at those points when philosophy
90 9 The Law Sustains Desire

(theoretical exposition) turns into orgy (erotic performance), and when

the orgiastic arrangements disband in order to give way again to
philosophical reflections—at those points in Philosophy in the Boudoir
when Sade included a stage direction such as ‘The arrangement breaks
up’.1 And so desire, in its most radical Sadean variation, shares with the
moral law, in its equally radical Kantian formulation, the same char-
acteristic of being attached to an ephemeral object whose complete
attainment is forever caught up in a subjective movement of eager
anticipation.
As to the second pillar, Lacan echoed a fragment of the refrain of a
1943 poem entitled ‘The Explanation of Metaphors’ by Raymond
Queneau: ‘But what’s with all these metaphors . . . and why?’ (p. 658).2
Queneau’s poem presents human beings as creatures who are fundamen-
tally lost, always in search of something to hold onto, but always failing
to find their way, partly due to physical shortcomings but also on
account of their disproportionate and contradictory efforts at finding a
support that does not even exist. In Lacan’s terminology, it is impossible
for a subject to find his way in the desires that connect the molecules of

1
In French, the stage directions read ‘La posture se défait’ and ‘La posture se rompt’ (Sade, 1998,
pp. 96 and 108), whereby ‘posture’ refers to the sexual combinatory the characters have been
‘performing’. In his text, Lacan quoted the latter sentence, which Wainhouse and Seaver have
translated as ‘They dissolve their position’ (Sade, 1965, p. 293), and Neugroschel has rendered as
‘The arrangement breaks up’ (Sade, 2006, p. 101). In his translation of Lacan’s text, Fink has
opted for ‘Change of positions’ (p. 658)—despite referring the reader to Wainhouse and Seaver’s
version of Philosophy in the Boudoir—which has the disadvantage of suggesting that the characters
are about to change their sexual positions, and which fails to capture the crucial meaning of things
breaking up, coming apart, becoming undone. Much like he had done in Section 6 of ‘Kant with
Sade’ (p. 654), Lacan added the idea of the object as cause of desire when he rewrote his paper for
Écrits, following a conceptual development in his seminar Anxiety (Lacan, 2014b, p. 101). See also
Chapter 6, note 9.
2
Like his earlier ‘quote’ from Jarry’s Ubu Rex, Lacan’s line is a free adaptation of the original,
which reads: ‘—Unreal in fact. So, one will likely ask,/What is the meaning of this metaphor:/
“Thin as a hair, wide as the light of dawn”/And why these less than three-dimensional hands?’
(Queneau, 2008, p. 131). However, as was the case with the quote from Antigone in Section 6 of
his text (p. 654), this particular line from Queneau’s poem is actually not directly relevant to
Lacan’s argument, and is merely intended as the placeholder for the general spirit of the poem. In
other words, as with the quote from Antigone, the significance of Lacan’s reference to Queneau
needs to be sought outside the directly quoted line.
 The Law Sustains Desire 91

life (p. 658).3 Like the farmer in Jean de la Fontaine’s famed fable of
‘The Peasant and the Snake’, the subject will end up being betrayed
every time he expresses his desire for kindness and charity towards an evil
creature, who therefore does not deserve to be treated with dignity and
respect, but at the same time it is by no means easy to distinguish the
kind from the cruel.4 In addition, as the ever-charming Monsieur
Verdoux exemplified in Chaplin’s eponymous 1947 film, one subject’s
love and devotion towards his disabled wife may very well coexist with
the opposite desire to murder rich spinsters (p. 658).5 Alternatively,
Monsieur Verdoux could have decided to sacrifice himself for the sake of

3
Lacan’s point, here, probably appears to many a reader as exceedingly cryptic and bizarre, yet in
Juliette Saint-Fond argued that all human beings are naturally evil, and that after death, this evil
force will rejoin the natural essence of evil, ‘the primary matter of the world’s composition’, which
is entirely made up of ‘maleficent molecules’ (molécules malfaisantes), whereby ‘molecule’ should
simply be understood here as a ‘small particle’. The more wicked a human being is during his
earthly existence, the less painful it will be when he rejoins these ‘maleficent molecules’ post
mortem, and vice versa the more virtuous a human being is during his earthly existence, the more
he will suffer when he is taken up again in the natural cycle, and becomes finally ‘absorbed into the
source of wickedness, which is God . . . ’ (Sade, 1968, p. 398). In Section 6 of ‘Kant with Sade’,
Lacan had already alluded to Saint-Fond’s ‘maleficent molecules’ with the term ‘particles of evil’
(p. 655; and Chapter 6, note 15), whereas in Section 9, he referred to them as the ‘molecules that
are monstrous insofar as they assemble here for an obscene [spinthrienne] jouissance . . . ’ (p. 658).
Yet he now also opposed these ‘molecules of the afterlife’ to the ‘more ordinary’ ‘molecules of life’,
which are by no means ‘purer in their valences’—in Kurt Lewin’s sense of objects and events being
either attractive (positively charged) or aversive (negatively charged)—than the ‘molecules of the
afterlife’, because the life-molecules are inherently ambivalent in their emotional charge, since they
are connected by desire rather than jouissance. Unfortunately, this entire development can no
longer be gauged from Fink’s translation, because he has rendered Lacan’s admittedly elliptical ‘Les
molécules, monstrueuses à s’assembler ici pour une jouissance spinthrienne, nous réveillent à l’existence
d’autres plus ordinaires à rencontrer dans la vie, dont nous venons d’évoquer les équivoques’ as ‘The
molecules that are monstrous insofar as they assemble here for an obscene jouissance, awaken us to
the existence of other more ordinary jouissances encountered in life, whose ambiguities I have just
mentioned’ (p. 658). At no given point did Lacan talk about the ‘other more ordinary jouissances’
being equivocal; the phrase ‘l’existence d’autres plus ordinaires’ can only refer, I think, to the
existence of other, more ordinary molecules, i.e. the molecules of desire, whereby Lacan was
making a point about these molecules of desire being characterized by the simultaneous experience
of two or more opposing emotions, and thus by an ambivalent charge.
4
Again, Lacan abbreviated and adapted the final lines of La Fontaine’s fable, which in full reads as
follows: ‘Charity is a virtue, but toward whom?/Best choose the ones you show it to!/As for
ungrateful cads, none are there who,/sooner or later fail to meet their doom.’ See La Fontaine
(2007, pp. 142–143).
5
Mr Verdoux is eventually sentenced to death, but by guillotine rather than by the electric chair,
as Lacan claimed (p. 658).
92 9 The Law Sustains Desire

his family, rather than killing wealthy women and stealing their money,
whereby he would have emulated the Bodhisatta—the being destined to
become the Buddha in his final life—who unselfishly ensured the survival
of an emaciated tigress and her starving cub by offering himself up as a
meal.6 Or Monsieur Verdoux could have applied the Kantian moral law
before embarking on his criminal plan, which would have definitely
forced him to abandon his strategy altogether. Regardless of the situation,
Lacan argued, subjects’ desires remain ambivalent and are largely based on
what they believe the other desires—living comfortably, or food in order
to survive—which also implies that they may be quite mistaken in
thinking they know what the other wants (p. 658). In the end, the ‘subject
of desire’ completely disappears as a command-and-control centre, insofar
as it is reduced to the sound of a disembodied, signifying voice—Kant’s
‘voice of reason’, or Dolmancé’s ‘voice of Nature’—which, according to
Lacan, is ‘speaking nonsensically most of the time’ (‘sans queue ni tête à ce
qu’elle [la voix] dit le plus souvent’) (p. 659), and which reconfirms the
subject in its status as a ‘barred’ function, $.7
Thirdly, in Lacan’s theory of desire, there is no such thing as a
sovereign, autonomous, unmediated desire, and this is clearly borne
out by Kant as well as by Sade. In his critique of Kant’s Critique in
Sections 2 and 3 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan had already pointed out
that, despite Kant’s insistence on the need for a non-empirical formal
law which acts directly upon a free rational will, the latter’s compliance
with the moral law, i.e. the subject’s acquiescence with the law as a moral
duty, is crucially dependent on the appearance of the commanding voice
and meaningful sound of something Other—the signifier of the ‘instruc-
tion’ coming from ‘elsewhere’ in the subject, from a detached point of
enunciation in the area of conscience. In situating this Other outside the
subject, in acknowledging its place as properly Other by recognizing it in

6
The story of the Buddha and the tigress is part of the Jatakas, the birth stories of the Bodhisatta.
7
Lacan wrote that in the symbol of the ‘bar’ (/), ‘the signifier $ bastardizes him [the subject]’
(p. 659), by which he alluded to the fact that in heraldry a diagonal band running from the
viewer’s upper right (dexter) to the lower left (sinister) of a shield, and which is called ‘bend
sinister’ in English, is believed to be associated with bastardy. In French blazon, this type of band
is also known as ‘barre’—the same word Lacan utilized to designate the divided subject.
 The Law Sustains Desire 93

the caprices of Nature, Lacan felt that Sade had been ‘more honest than
Kant’ (p. 650), but this does not alter the fact that his libertines’ desires,
as manifested in their will to jouissance, are any less heteronomous,
impure and contaminated. Repeating a formula he had invented during
the early years of his teaching, and which was strongly indebted to
Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Lacan
emphasized that the subject’s ‘desire is the Other’s desire’ (p. 658), so
that subjective desire can never be considered without pondering the
impact of the Other, the symbolic structure of language and the law, or
what, in Kant’s book, is designated as the voice of Reason and in Sade’s
libertine ideology the voice of Nature.8 To complicate matters further,
during the late 1950s Lacan had also come to the conclusion that the
only way in which a subject can have access to the Other’s desire is via a
fantasy (p. 658), which is again perfectly illustrated in the Sadean
universe, where the libertines’ relentless speeches on the ruthless cruelty
of Nature’s desire—a discourse which functions, moreover, as the key
impetus for their own desire and will to jouissance—is of course nothing
more, nothing less than a precise articulation of the subjective side of
their own ‘sadistic’ fantasies. Agreeing with Rousseau that human beings
should follow Nature, yet countering Rousseau’s optimistic belief in
natural kindness, the Sadean libertines declare that natural inclinations
are fundamentally violent, cruel and merciless. Yet in doing so they do
not come closer to a ‘realistic’ interpretation of Nature’s desire, because
they are merely expressing an alternative, and equally dogmatic, fantas-
matic answer to the question as to what Nature wants. As we have seen
above, in the Sadean fantasy all of this results in the libertines turning
themselves into the instruments of Nature, through which they become

8
In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, a compilation of lectures delivered by Kojève and
assiduously attended by Lacan during the 1930s, Kojève argued that human desire sets itself apart
from non-human, ‘animal’ desire at the point where it is capable of directing itself towards non-
material objects, most fundamentally towards another desire, so that it eventually becomes a desire
to be recognized by another desire. During the early 1950s, Lacan reformulated this idea as ‘le désir
de l’homme est le désir de l’autre’ (man’s desire is the desire of/for the other), and after the
introduction of the notion of the Other in 1955, this principle itself was rephrased as ‘le désir
est le désir de l’Autre’ (desire is the desire of/for the Other). See Kojève (1969, pp. 39–40), Lacan
(1988a, p. 146), Lacan (1988b, pp. 235–247).
94 9 The Law Sustains Desire

figurations of the black fetish, the object a, whereas in the general, non-
Sadean case of the subject’s desire being conditioned by the Other’s
desire, the construction of a fantasy merely results in the subject dis-
appearing or vacillating once more as the agency of desire (p. 658).9 As
to the object of desire, both in the general case and in the Sadean version
of it, the fantasy renders the object present, but only ever as an imaginary
representation of the real object. Vice versa, were the real object to
appear, it would only ever be as the ‘slag’ (scorie) (p. 658) of the fantasy,
because the fantasy tends to exaggerate the object’s scale and dimensions.
When the libertine Belmor extols the pleasures of the imagination to
Juliette, it is because he realizes, and not without certain misgivings, that
the only way in which he can fully attain the true object of his desire, i.e.
the endless multiplication of horrors and the complete devastation of the
planet, is via a fantasy, which evidently implies that he can never fully
attain it as such (Sade, 1968, p. 522).
Armed with these principles, Lacan returned to the relationship
between desire and the moral law, two seemingly opposing functions
with the shared characteristic of being driven and maintained by an
elusive object (p. 659). As we have seen, Kant detached the moral law
and the fulfilment of duty from all empirical objects of desire, which he
designated as pathological, and presented the human being as a con-
scious rational will who obeys an internal commandment for the pure
sake of morality, regardless of subjective wishes and irrespective of the
pain and unhappiness that this act of dutiful compliance might entail. In
doing so, Kant believed that the rational human being would be con-
firmed in his transcendental freedom from the empirical, phenomenal
world of causal relationships, and would embrace the postulate of the
immortality of the soul in support of his practical reason. In this sense,
the moral law does not curtail a human being’s freedom; on the con-
trary, in following the categorical imperative and doing one’s duty, the
human being frees himself from the pathological constraints of desire
and acquires a new, moral freedom to pursue a higher goal.

9
Lacan wrote that ‘the subject does not come to after blacking out’ (‘le sujet ne revient pas de sa
syncope’), whereby he joked that the whole situation is a clear ‘case of necrophilia’ (p. 658).
 The Law Sustains Desire 95

Highlighting the ambiguity of the notion of ‘freedom’ (or liberty)—a

notion which was as important for Sade as it was for Kant—Lacan set out
to unpack Kant’s famous double apologue of the gallows, which had
appeared in the Critique of Practical Reason just before the formulation of
the categorical imperative.10 In Sections 9 and 10 of ‘Kant with Sade’, he
restricted himself to a critique of the first stage of the apologue, which Kant
presented as follows: ‘Suppose someone asserts [vorgibt] of his lustful
inclination that, when the desired object and the opportunity are present,
it is quite irresistible to him; ask him whether, if a gallows were erected in
front of the house where he finds this opportunity and he would be hanged
on it immediately after gratifying his lust, he would not then control his
inclination. One need not conjecture very long what he would reply’
(Kant, 1997b, p. 27). The point of Kant’s example is clear: whatever
someone may claim, ‘lustful inclinations’ are not irresistible at all, because
a rational human being will immediately renounce his sexual desire and the
promise of gratification if he knows that his life is at stake. Faced with the
choice between sex and certain death or life without sex, a rational human
being will not hesitate to opt for the latter. Hence, the death penalty
functions as an effective deterrent, strong as someone’s inclinations may
be. In Seminar VII, Lacan had already expressed his disagreement with
Kant’s observation, on the grounds that it is not at all inconceivable for an
individual to contemplate the situation carefully, and to act upon his

10
In ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, his famous inaugural lecture as Oxford’s Chichele Professor of
Social and Political Theory, which was delivered on 31 October 1958 and published the same
year, Isaiah Berlin stated: ‘To coerce a man is to deprive him of his freedom. Freedom from what,
and for what? At least two hundred senses of this very porous and protean word have been
recorded by historians of thought. I propose to examine no more than two of these senses of
freedom or liberty . . . The first of these senses of liberty I shall call the negative sense. It arises in
answer to the question: “What is the area within which a man is, or should be, left to do what he
wants to do, without interference from others?” The second, which I shall call the positive sense,
arises in answer to the question: “What or who is the source of control or interference that can
determine someone to do one thing rather than another?”’ (Berlin, 2014, pp. 360–361). I have
not found any evidence that Lacan was familiar with Berlin’s lecture, but in ‘Kant with Sade’ he
clearly played off these two senses of liberty: the negative sense of being free from constraints (the
demands of one’s passions for Kant, and the constraints of conventional morality for Sade), and
the positive sense of being free to govern oneself and to act upon one’s will (the rational will to
achieve the highest good for Kant, and the unrestrained liberation of the passions, i.e. the will to
jouissance, for Sade).
96 9 The Law Sustains Desire

desire, despite the lethal consequences (Lacan, 1992, pp. 108–109). In

‘Kant with Sade’, he surmised that for Kant’s example to work in his
favour, it is necessary to assume that the human being in question is an
‘ideal bourgeois’ (p. 660), someone who would not dare to stoop so low as
to become the victim of his own passions, someone whose passions are not
as irresistible as he claims, someone whose uprightness of character alleg-
edly commands unconditional respect.11 But it is entirely possible, Lacan
argued, that a different kind of person, and not necessarily a ‘hoodlum’ (‘le
mauvais garçon’) (p. 660), would be more truthful than this ideal bourgeois
about the irresistibility of his inclinations, so much so that he would be
prepared to testify about his lust under oath, and would as a ‘partisan of
passion’ (p. 660) react to his impending execution with utter contempt, or
with an even stronger desire to follow his propensities. For Lacan, the
threat of capital punishment does not by definition extinguish a subject’s
allegedly irresistible desire. The death penalty does not necessarily turn the
subject into a coward, because desire may very well operate as a ‘moral law’
in itself—a principle whose absence renders life meaningless, and for whose
preservation someone may be prepared to put his life itself at risk.12

11
Exactly the kind of person, Lacan sneered, to whom Kant ‘takes his hat off’ (p. 660), by which
he implicitly referred to a passage from chapter 3, Book 1, of the Critique of Practical Reason, in
which Kant elaborated on a famous remark by the French essayist Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
(1657–1757): ‘Fontenelle says: “I bow before an eminent man, but my spirit does not bow”. I can
add: before a humble common man [einem niedrigen, bürgerlich gemeinen Mann] in whom I
perceive uprightness of character in a higher degree than I am aware of in myself my spirit bows,
whether I want it or whether I do not and hold my head ever so high, that he may not overlook my
superior position’ (Kant, 1997b, p. 66). In the French translation of the Critique by Barni, which
is the one Lacan was using, Kant’s phrase was rendered as ‘l’humble bourgeois’ (Kant, 1848,
p. 253).
12
Drawing on a passage from Juvenal’s eighth satire, also quoted by Kant at the very end of the
Critique of Practical Reason (Kant, 1997b, p. 131), Lacan averred that desire may occupy, as a
categorical imperative, the place of honour in Juvenal’s example, which runs as follows: ‘So be a
good soldier, an honest guardian, a judge of integrity; if you are called as a witness in some
ambivalent and dubious case, though Phalaris should command you to lie—and should wheel in
his bull while dictating your perjuries—the worst sin still is to rate survival above honour, by
choosing life to lose one’s very grounds for living [Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas]’ (Juvenal,
1998, p. 64). In substituting desire for honour, here, Lacan thus pointed out that, as a raison d’être
for living, desire should not be relinquished in favour of the preservation of life itself or, by
contrast with Kant, that the wish to preserve desire may be morally superior to the wish to live. In
the text of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan silently added the word ‘non’ to the last clause of Juvenal’s
sentence in order to maintain the spirit of the message.
 The Law Sustains Desire 97

Of course, punishment is not synonymous with the symbolic Law,

but even when the Law is present in full force—as Lacan recognized in
Sophocles’ Antigone, notably when Creon decrees that political traitors
such as Polynices should not be granted a proper burial—it still does not
prevail over desire, but only reveals itself as sustaining desire and as being
fundamentally supported by it (p. 660).13 Without referring to a specific
text, but undoubtedly recalling a line of argument by Freud in Totem
and Taboo (Freud, 1955b, pp. 30–31), Lacan stated that ‘Law and
repressed desire are one and the same thing’ (p. 660), and so he could
boast that merely by virtue of Professor Freud, he was already ‘ahead at
half-time’ (p. 660), i.e. halfway through his discussion of Kant’s double
apologue.14

13
For a further development of this point, see De Kesel (2009, pp. 221–222). When Lacan
insinuated that punishment is merely the business of law enforcers, including the police, he
alluded to Hegel’s philosophy of right in order to indicate that the notion ‘police’ may encompass
the State and the whole of civil society, yet he nonetheless distinguished, much like Kant, between
an act of punishment (for breaking the Law) and an act of Law-making, which is what makes
certain acts legal and others illegal. See Hegel (1991, pp. 260–270 and p. 450).
14
Both in the Critique version and in the Sade-version of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan wrote ‘Loi’, with
a capital ‘L’. In the Écrits version, the capital letter has disappeared, which is no doubt an editorial
error. Fink has reproduced ‘loi’ as ‘law’ in his translation, which I have corrected in the quote. As
to Freud, here is what he proposed in Totem and Taboo about the peculiar function of prohibi-
tions, in tribal societies as well as in the mental life of the neurotic: ‘The prohibition owes its
strength and its obsessive character precisely to its unconscious opponent, the concealed and
undiminished desire [der im Verborgenen ungedämpften Lust]—that is to say, to an internal
necessity inaccessible to conscious inspection’ (Freud, 1955b, p. 30, italics added).
 10
Sade Against Kant

Lacan felt that he was definitely one up against Kant, and without even
having required the support of Sade, nor the doctrine of human rights
and its underpinning principles of freedom of thought and self-govern-
ance (‘ton corps est à toi’), nor the ‘daring deeds’ of courtly love (p. 660).1
Drawing on a chessboard metaphor, he attributed his intellectual victory
purely to the pawns (the infantry), as epitomized by the Freudian
offensive in the previous Section, but still proceeded to demonstrate
how the first part of Kant’s double apologue could be dismantled in
other ways too.
Putting Sade in the place of Kant’s ‘ideal bourgeois’, Lacan contended
that the threat of death may not de facto compel a person to renounce his
desire. Someone’s conscious realization of the fact that in following his
desire he will be transgressing the moral law, and place himself into some
form of lethal danger, may very well inflame his urge to act upon this

1
The phrase ‘ton corps est à toi’, which Fink has translated as ‘your body is your property’ (660, 7)
is taken from the title of a 1927 novel by the French writer Victor Margueritte. See Margueritte
(1927).

© The Author(s) 2017 99

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_10
100 10 Sade Against Kant

desire, insofar as its transgressive quality functions as the conduit for

desire to acquire the potential of jouissance.2 In Seminar VII, Lacan had
formulated the point as follows: ‘[I]t is important to note that one only
has to make a conceptual shift and move the night spent with the lady
from the category of pleasure to that of jouissance, given that jouissance
implies precisely the acceptance of death . . . for the example to be
ruined. In other words, it is enough for jouissance to be a form of evil,
for the whole thing to change its character completely, and for the
meaning of the moral law itself to be completely changed. Anyone can
see that if the moral law is, in effect, capable of playing some role here, it
is precisely as a support of the jouissance involved . . . ’ (Lacan, 1992,
p. 189). As we saw earlier, Juliette’s libertine friend Olympia conceived
of the scaffold as a ‘throne of delight’, upon which she envisaged
discharging ‘in the pleasure of perishing the victim’ of her monstrous
crimes (Sade, 1968, p. 663). In the case of Sade himself, it would be too
simple to claim that he could not have foreseen the disastrous conse-
quences of his actions when, on Easter Sunday 1768, he decided to
amuse himself with Rose Keller, or when, in June 1772, he proceeded to
stage an orgy with his valet and four local girls, or when, throughout the
1790s, he carried on writing inordinately obscene novels of massive
proportions. Did he feel invulnerable, invincible, above the law? Or
was he quite simply naïve? Whatever his motives, Lacan intimated that
Sade’s compulsion to write, much like his ‘lustful inclination’, was
definitely not alleviated by the menace of his incarceration or execution,
and may even have been exacerbated by them. To substantiate this
point, he could have quoted a letter Sade sent to his wife from the
solitude of his prison cell, long before his books landed him in jail:
‘These principles and these inclinations are in me to the point of
fanaticism, a fanaticism that arises from the persecutions of my oppres-
sors. The more they persist in their oppression, the more deeply my
principles become rooted in my heart, and I here declare to the world:
Speak not to me of freedom if you offer it at the cost of my principles . . . Yes,

2
Lacan’s idea, here, that jouissance implies the acceptance of death echoes Bataille’s definition of
eroticism as ‘assenting to life up to the point of death’ (Bataille, 2001, p. 11).
 Sade Against Kant 101

I proclaim it to the world: I would not change, even if the scaffold stood
before me’ (Sade, 1980, p. 168).
Of course, in saying and doing so, Sade was considered a criminal,
and by four successive political regimes no less; yet Lacan did not think
that the Marquis’ principles and inclinations warranted this label, nor
did he accept that Sade suffered from what early nineteenth-century
alienists, in the wake of Philippe Pinel’s ‘visionary’ observations on the
nature and treatment of mental illness, had come to designate as ‘moral
insanity’—a type of madness that only perturbs a person’s affective
faculties, leaving reason, judgement and intelligence intact (p. 661).
Taking his lead from Foucault’s recently published Folie et déraison
(Foucault, 1961), Lacan was distinctly sceptical of Pinel’s new clinical
doctrine on mental illness.3 For although it may have freed the mentally
ill from their chains and from the solitary confinement of their dun-
geons, it also introduced a much more insidious and potentially much
more exploitative power structure, insofar as it established a new, abso-
lute form of authority—incarnated by the alienists and the hospital
administration—which reduced the patient to a silent object of medical
investigation and social exclusion. ‘Willy-nilly’, Lacan claimed, ‘he
[Pinel] supported the destruction [l’abattement], on the right and the
left, by thought of the freedoms that the Revolution had just promul-
gated in the very name of thought’ (p. 661).4 Sade himself would have
agreed. Despite the relatively mild regime at the asylum of Charenton,

3
The reference to Foucault’s book, and in particular to its third part, only appeared in the Critique
and the Sade-versions of ‘Kant with Sade’, where it was attached, as a footnote, to the sentence
ending in ‘ . . . one of the noblest steps of humanity’ (p. 661). The fact that the Sade-version of
Lacan’s text was in all likelihood produced after the Écrits version, despite it being published
earlier, may suggest that Lacan did not intentionally delete this footnote for Écrits, but that it was
accidentally omitted.
4
For the nineteenth-century political struggle between the Right (the Bourbons, the monarchists,
the Catholics) and the Left (the intellectual heirs of the French Revolution, scientists, free-
thinkers) over the interpretation and restriction of individual freedoms, and Pinel’s indirect
involvement in the debate, see Weiner (1994, pp. 236–237). Foucault deemed Pinel’s ‘liberation’
of the insane, especially his ‘moral treatment’ method of communal living and ‘wise restraint’, to
be just an alternative, and somehow more devious form of institutional control, serving the
disciplinary purpose of internalized self-control. This criticism has itself been the subject of
detailed criticism. See, for example, Midelfort (1989), which has attracted its own critical response
by Gutting (1994).
102 10 Sade Against Kant

he wrote to the Minister of Police: ‘I have been unduly deprived of my

freedom for almost four years, and it is only by virtue of a certain
philosophy that I have been able to bear until now the various vexations
that I have had to endure, under frivolous and ridiculous pretexts. The
laws and regulations concerning individual liberty have never been as
openly defied as in my case, since it is without any sentence or any other
legal act that they persist in keeping me under lock and key’ (cited in
Lever, 1991, p. 605).
It is worth recalling here some of the key events during the last 13
years of Sade’s life. Sade was arrested on 6 March 1801 at the offices of
his publisher Massé, on the grounds of having authored Justine and
Juliette. The Marquis protested his innocence, but the Parisian Police
Prefect Dubois decided that a full trial would create too much of a
scandal, and therefore proceeded to obtain permission from the Minister
of Police to punish him ‘administratively’, i.e. without any judicial
hearing. After a month in police custody, Sade was incarcerated at the
prison of Sainte-Pélagie, a former convent now housing young mis-
creants and miscellaneous debtors. On 14 March 1802, he was trans-
ferred from there to the infamous madhouse of Bicêtre, after he was
accused of assaulting some newly arrived thugs on his ward, and of
keeping ‘an enormous wax instrument . . . which showed traces of its
ignoble introduction’ (cited in du Plessix Gray, 1999, p. 387).
Concerned about its adverse impact upon the family’s reputation,
Sade’s (estranged) wife and children insisted that he be placed in a less
sordid institution, and so on 27 April 1803 he was transferred again to
the asylum of Charenton as a ‘police patient’, whose ongoing detention
was required, because he was suffering from ‘a perpetual state of libertine
dementia’ (cited in Lever, 1993, p. 519). At Charenton, Sade benefited
from the Pinelian humanitarian treatment methods introduced by its
Director François Simonet de Coulmier (1741–1818), who also allowed
his famous prisoner to stage plays with and for the patients, as well as
open theatrical performances for the general public. In January 1806,
Coulmier came into conflict with the newly appointed Chief Medical
Physician Antoine-Athanase Royer-Collard (1768–1825), who did not
share Coulmier’s liberal views on ‘moral treatment’, and who argued
that Sade should be transferred again to a proper prison. In a famous
 Sade Against Kant 103

letter of 2 August 1808, quoted approvingly by Foucault (2006, p. 107;

2015, p. 19), and alluded to by Lacan (p. 661), Royer-Collard wrote to
the Minister of Police: ‘There is one man in Charenton whose brazen
immorality has made him all too famous, and his continuing presence in
the hospital entails serious improprieties. I am referring, of course, to the
author of the infamous novel Justine. This man is not mad. His only
delirium is that of vice, and it is by no means in an establishment
reserved for the medical treatment of insanity that vice of that sort
should be cured. The individual infected by it must be submitted to
the severest form of sequestration’ (Sade, 1991a, pp. 505–506). Despite
his persistence, Royer-Collard failed to see his request being granted. In
October 1810, the Minister of the Interior ordered Coulmier to segre-
gate Sade from the other patients, to bar him from all types of contact
with them and to deprive him of all writing materials. Coulmier
responded that he was the Director of a humanitarian institution and
that he did not want to become a jailor. When, at the end of May 1814,
Coulmier resigned, the new Director Roulhac de Maupas asked the
Minister of the Interior to arrange for Sade’s transfer to a prison, but
Sade’s poor health prevented this from happening. He died at
Charenton on 2 December 1814, having spent the last ten-and-a-half
years—and not 13 years, as Lacan put it (p. 661)—of his life there.5
As to the issue of human rights, Lacan (p. 661) suggested that Kant’s
‘ideal bourgeois’ would not be infringing upon the personal rights of his
beloved when acting upon his lustful inclination, but merely take advan-
tage of the situation to indulge in an act of consensual sex, and could
therefore feel justified in pursuing his desire by relying on article 4 of the
very first Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, upon which the
anonymous author of the revolutionary pamphlet in Philosophy in the
Boudoir had also drawn: ‘Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything
which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each
man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the
society the enjoyment [jouissance] of the same rights. These limits can only

5
On the asylum of Charenton, and Royer-Collard’s influence, see Haustgen (1989) and Sevestre
(1991).
104 10 Sade Against Kant

be determined by law’ (Morange, 2004, p. 118). Although this declaration

was not signed until one year after the publication of the Critique of
Practical Reason, and only in France, Kant’s thought-experiment could
thus be interpreted as violating an essential human right, much like Sade’s
‘administrative’ punishment for being the author of Justine and Juliette
effectively contradicted article 11 of the same Declaration: ‘The free
communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious rights
of man; every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with free-
dom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be
defined by law’ (Morange, 2004, p. 119). Of course, Lacan was very much
aware of the fact that a declaration of human rights, including the ‘uni-
versal’ one that was passed in 1948, does not always translate into concrete,
emancipatory actions, much less into substantially improved living condi-
tions for all human beings, even in those countries that pledge their
allegiance to its principles. Insofar as they constitute a Law, the truth of
human rights, Lacan posits, is that they generally ‘boil down to the free-
dom to desire in vain’ (p. 661), because they generally increase hopes and
aspirations rather than fulfilling them.6 As a type of Law, a declaration of
human rights articulates the fundamental human needs that have to be
respected and satisfied, yet in doing so it contributes, more than anything
else, to the creation and preservation of desire. Lacan stated that when it
comes to the conflict between needs and desires, it is the Law which
‘empties the shell’ (‘vide l’écaille’) (p. 661), by which he probably meant
that it is the Law which feeds itself on the disjunction between needs and
desires: in establishing human rights on the basis of what it regards as
essential human needs, it elicits human desire, and so once again shows
itself to be sustaining desire rather than eradicating it.7 Adding a more
controversial note to the discussion, Lacan suggested that, were Kant’s
‘ideal bourgeois’ not to give up on his desire, but to remain truthful to his
allegedly irresistible, transgressive inclination, and thus offer himself up for
subsequent execution, this in itself could be understood as an illegal or

6
The qualification ‘in vain’ was added for the Écrits version of ‘Kant with Sade’.
7
Another reading of this passage would be that it is precisely because of the intervention of the
symbolic Law that need becomes desire or, to put it in yet another way: need is transformed into
desire by virtue of the Law.
 Sade Against Kant 105

reprehensible act of self-governance. For in doing so, the ‘ideal bourgeois’

could be seen as re-claiming his right to consciously, voluntarily give up his
life, i.e. to autonomously assert his individual right to die, which is not
inscribed in any declaration of human rights, no doubt because it is not
seen as partaking of human needs. Lacan implicitly advocated, here, the
legal recognition of suicide as the ultimate personal freedom.8
Finally, Lacan disputed the validity of the first half of Kant’s double
apologue with reference to a more lighthearted concept, that of the
medieval ethic of courtly love. Without giving the reader any details as
to how this critique should be understood, he indicated that it requires not
only erudition but also a ‘sense of comedy’ (p. 661), something on which
neither Kant nor Sade were allegedly known to have placed much value.9
To follow what Lacan had in mind, here, one needs to divert one’s
attention to Seminar VII. As part of a lengthier analysis of Kantian ethics,
he had argued there that the overvaluation of the inaccessible Lady in the
practice of courtly love could very well have prompted a lover to prefer a
night of passion over his own life, now that his exalted ‘feminine object’
was finally available. ‘All of which leads to the conclusion’, Lacan asserted,
‘that it is not impossible for a man to sleep with a woman knowing full well
that he is to be bumped off [zigouillé] on his way out, by the gallows or
anything else’ (Lacan, 1992, p. 109).

8
For the Ancient Greeks and Romans, suicide constituted an honourable solution to severe
personal difficulties, including the pain of illness, whereas in Christian thought it remained
unacceptable. Throughout his life, Kant vehemently opposed suicide as a valid course of action
for a rational human being, arguing that under no circumstances should human beings be given
the right to end their own lives, because it is degrading for human worth. See, for example, Kant
(1997b, pp. 144–149) and Kant (2012). In France, suicide was de-criminalized in the 1810 penal
code, but in other Western European countries it remained an illegal act until the second half of
the twentieth century. In England, for instance, suicide was not de-criminalized until 1961.
9
According to Kant’s biographer Manfred Kuehn, ‘[s]pontaneous laughter or uncontrolled joy did
not seem to be in his nature’ (Kuehn, 2001, p. 64). In his Critique of Judgement, Kant defined
laughter as ‘an affect arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing’ and
humour as a manner belonging to ‘agreeable rather than to fine art’, because ‘the object of the
latter . . . demands a certain seriousness in its presentation’ (Kant, 2007, pp. 161 and 164). As to
Sade, whereas there is no evidence that he himself was endowed with a great sense of humour,
there is definitely a great deal of black humour in his libertine novels, although some people would
no doubt wish to protest against this. Nowhere, however, can one detect a profound sense of
comedy in these novels, at least not at the level where the libertine tormentors are cracking jokes,
play tricks on each other or can be heard laughing out loud.
 11
The Moral Principle of Desire

And so Lacan moved to the second part of Kant’s double apologue, in

order to demonstrate that here too the philosopher had been too rash in
predicting the outcome of his thought-experiment. Kant wanted the first
part of the apologue to prove how a rational human being would gladly
renounce his lustful inclination, irresistible as it may be, because of his
love of life. For the second part, he intended to show how this very love
of life may itself be renounced in favour of the preservation of the
categorical imperative, so that the latter appears as ruling both over
transitory empirical pleasures and over the most fundamental empirical
quality of a rational being’s earthly existence—the conscious experience
of life itself. Here is what Kant wrote: ‘But ask him [the same rational
being who featured in the first part of the apologue] whether, if his
prince demanded, on pain of the same immediate execution [unter
Androhung derselben unverzögerten Todesstrafe], that he give false testi-
mony against an honorable man whom the prince would like to destroy
under a plausible pretext, he would consider it possible to overcome his

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108 11 The Moral Principle of Desire

love of life, however great it may be. He would perhaps not venture to
assert whether he would do it or not, but he must admit without
hesitation that it would be possible for him. He judges, therefore, that
he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and
cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have
remained unknown to him’ (Kant, 1997b, pp. 27–28). Kant’s concept
of freedom, here, should again be understood as a rational being’s
liberation from the laws of the phenomenal world and, more specifically,
as the subject’s liberation from the ‘pathological’ passions, including the
passion for life, which only the moral law makes possible. As Kant
himself put it, ‘freedom in the strictest, that is, in the transcendental,
sense’ occurs when a will is ‘altogether independent of the natural law of
appearances in their relations to one another, namely the law of caus-
ality’ (Kant, 1997b, p. 26). In other words, freedom stems from the
acknowledgement of moral duty: You can because you must!1 Applying
his theorem that a free will can only find a determining ground in the
lawgiving form, and not in the matter (content, empirical object) of the
law, Kant suggested that bearing false witness can never constitute a
universally applicable rule of conduct, which implies that the rational
human being is left with no other option than to forfeit his own life. In
this case, the weight of the moral law frees the rational subject of his love
of life, and allows him to accept his own death for the sake of the
categorical imperative.
In Seminar VII, Lacan had already criticized this part of Kant’s
apologue on the grounds that it presents a less complicated alternative
than the first part, and that behind the issue of bearing false witness a
more fundamental moral question must be raised, notably whether a
rational being should be allowed to ‘attack the rights of another who is
my fellow man [semblable]’ (Lacan, 1992, p. 190). In the first part,
Lacan argued, Kant’s individual is not given the choice between the
‘pleasure of lust’ or the ‘pain of execution’, but between two forms of
combined pleasure and pain, and thus between two instances of

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.
 The Moral Principle of Desire 109

jouissance. If he proceeds to spend the night with his lady, he will

experience the pleasure of satisfying his lustful inclinations and the
pain of the gallows. Alternatively, if he decides that his life is too
dear to him, he will maintain the pleasure of being alive, whilst
having to deal with the pain of renouncing his lustful inclinations.
In the second part, however, the individual is facing a much more
straightforward choice between the pleasure of staying alive or the
pain of being executed, since bearing false witness or refusing to do
so will not in themselves generate much pain or pleasure (Lacan,
1992, pp. 189–190). The upshot is that, in the second example, it
should be easier for the individual to weigh the alternatives, because
rather than being faced with a complicated calculation of jouissance,
it is quite simply a question of pleasure or pain.
Lacan agreed with Kant that bearing false witness could never qualify as
a universally applicable practical law, but at the same time he identified a
confounding factor: the act of bearing false witness is instructed by an
unscrupulous ruler and results in an innocent person losing his life. What if
the person against whom one is asked to testify were to be put at risk of
losing his life because of a truthful testimony, the truth about this person
being exactly what the ruler would be looking for in order to condemn him
to death?2 Bearing true witness would definitely be admissible as a uni-
versally applicable practical law, but what if it is done to incriminate one’s
fellow man in the service of a repressive authoritarian agency? If telling the
truth is a fine Kantian maxim, what if it is merely an act of self-preserva-
tion, or an act of cowardly compliance with authority, leading to someone
else’s human rights being violated? Were Kant’s example to be changed
into a command that the individual bear true witness in order to give the
ruler a reason for executing his adversary, would the philosopher still argue
that the categorical imperative must prevail? In ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan

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).
110 11 The Moral Principle of Desire

intimated that in his fervent ambition to articulate a purely formal law,

which is devoid of all content, matter and empirical references, Kant had
been too quick in discarding certain options as determining grounds for
the will, and had failed to appreciate the fact that acting upon one’s desire,
when freed from any ‘pathological’ considerations such as pride, content-
ment or self-interest, can also be constructed as doing one’s duty in
accordance with the moral law (p. 662). If someone really does have
irresistible inclinations and decides to act upon them, in spite of the
awkward circumstances and the lethal consequences, then this is a good
Kantian ethical act.3 If someone decides to counter a tyrant’s demands,
irrespective of the type of testimony that is being called for, because he
believes that no one has the right to usurp legitimate sovereignty for the
sake of absolute power or, as Lacan put it, ‘to enslave the Other’s desire’
(p. 662), and despite the risks associated with this opposition, then this is
surely a good Kantian ethical act too. Hence, rather than conceiving of the
moral law as liberating the rational being from the clutches of desire, Kant
should have realized that it is perfectly possible for desire itself to be
elevated to the rank of a formal moral principle.
At the end of this Section, Lacan reminded his readership of some of the
conceptual pillars upon which he had built his own theory of desire, and
which he had set out at the beginning of Section 9, primarily with a view to
demonstrating how Kant had been too dismissive of desire (Begierde) as a
possible principle of a universal practical law. In the opening chapter of the
Critique of Practical Reason, Kant had argued that desire radically under-
mines the purpose of a universal law, because instead of the establishment
of ‘omnilateral concord’ it creates ‘the most extreme opposite of harmony’,
‘the worst conflict’ and ‘the complete annihilation of the maxim’ (Kant,
1997b, pp. 25–26). For Kant, desire only ever results in rivalry, competi-
tion, jealousy and aggression, especially when two people’s desires converge
upon the same object. He gave two brief examples: ‘In this way there results
a harmony like that which a certain satirical poem depicts in the unanimity
between a married couple bent on going to ruin: “O marvellous harmony,

3
For a further analysis of this point, see Zupančič (1998) and Žižek (1999).
 The Moral Principle of Desire 111

what he wants she wants too” and so forth, or like what is said of the pledge
of King Francis I to the Emperor Charles V: “What my brother Charles
would have (Milan), that I would also have”’ (Kant, 1997b, p. 25).4
Drawing on his interpretation of Kojève’s reading of Hegel, Lacan reiter-
ated that desire is always the Other’s desire, which implies that desire
cannot be dissociated from the structure of language (the Other), and thus
from a certain symbolic Law, but also that the object of desire is not so
much a material thing but something much more abstract and intangible,
notably the Other’s recognition. Hence, for Lacan the object of desire is
never, as Kant believed, some kind of concrete empirical good, but rather
‘to be desired by the Other’, which is exactly what Kant seems to have
overlooked. Once this is taken into account, ‘the harmony of desires’
would be conceivable, ‘but not devoid of dangers’, Lacan asserted
(p. 662). For in joining hands, in finding a space of mutual recognition,
there is no guarantee that the desires will enter a strong alliance of
productive collaboration, with a strict sense of purpose and a clear direction
of travel. Echoing what he had said earlier about Monsieur Verdoux, Lacan
contended that subjects are always blind to the nature of their desire, and so
can easily be led astray by it, or indeed being driven to ruin, or going round
in circles. The ‘harmony of desires’ may therefore lead to the blind leading
the blind, with the known disastrous consequences, as depicted by Pieter
Bruegel the Elder in his 1568 masterpiece ‘De Parabel der
Blinden’.5A more common occurrence, however, which would also be
more in accordance with Kant’s universal practical law of ‘omnilateral
concord’, would be for the interconnected desires to move backwards or,
better still, for them to be going in circles, in which case there is forward
motion, but no one is getting anywhere, or, to put it in yet another way:
although everyone knows that things are moving, the destination is never
reached . . . To this, Lacan added that if there is a universal rule at all

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’.
112 11 The Moral Principle of Desire

governing desire in this case, it would be the rule of the gaze, which is
precisely the point where the eye cannot be reduced to its physiological
function of seeing, but can be seen to express a desire, and thus to
constitute a locus of subjectivity (p. 663).6

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).
 12
Desire and Happiness

Mainly drawing on Freud and Sade, Lacan established that the

Kantian law of practical reason is not nearly as pure as the philoso-
pher had wished it to be. Although Kant had been at great pains to
articulate a purely formal categorical imperative, devoid of any
reference to empirical objects, stripped of all subjective experiences
of pleasure, and liberated from the ‘pathological’ faculty of desire,
the moral law surreptitiously sustains desire, and so it rests on an
idealization, which is also why Kant needed to introduce the postu-
late of the immortality of the soul. Only in the afterlife will it be
possible for a rational human being to become holy, to enter a state
of perfect compliance with the moral law, to achieve the highest
good—as the only true object(ive) of the law—and to experience the
convergence of virtue and happiness.
Emphasizing his point, Lacan now reminded his readership of Kant’s
definition of happiness in ‘Theorem II’ of the first chapter of the Critique
of Practical Reason: happiness is ‘a rational being’s consciousness of the
agreeableness [Annehmlichkeit] of life uninterruptedly accompanying his

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114 12 Desire and Happiness

whole existence’ (Kant, 1997b, p. 20).1 If this is indeed what happiness

consists of, then it can only be conceived in terms of a complete renuncia-
tion of the ‘pathway of desire’ (p. 663), because desire is strictly incom-
patible with the conscious experience of uninterrupted agreeableness.
Despite his critique of Epicurean and Stoic ethics, Kant was in agreement,
here, with how these ancient schools of philosophy had associated happi-
ness with the state of lucid tranquillity they called ataraxia (ἀταραξία).2
For Epicurus as well as for all the key representatives of the Stoic tradition
(Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus
Aurelius), happiness is predicated upon the eradication of all ‘dishonour-
able’, lesser pleasures, i.e. those stemming from the satisfaction of the
inferior desires (also known as the ‘passions’), those that are likely to injure
others, and those that are ineluctably followed by pain. Yet whereas the
Epicureans accepted that pleasure could be a valid source of happiness
when it is genuine, sincere and more than mere sensuality, the Stoics
argued that individuals would only be able to live in agreement with the
cosmic order of Nature, which they regarded as animated by a drive
towards preservation and progress, via the unconditional pursuit of a set
of cardinal virtues (justice, courage, temperance, sobriety, honour, for-
titude, wisdom etc.). For the Epicureans, carefully calculated pleasure may
still be a good measure for happiness, whereas for the Stoics happiness is
strictly synonymous with virtue (living in accordance with Nature),
regardless of its association with pleasure or pain (Cicero, 1931).
Against the Epicurean tradition, Kant developed his moral law upon the
principle that pleasure, which always stems from the satisfaction of one or
the other desire, or from the presence of an object whose reality is desired,
should never constitute a motive (reason, incentive, determining ground)

1
In his ‘Notes to “Kant with Sade”’, Fink gives the exact quotation from Kant (p. 834, note 785,
8), but in the body of the text, he translates Kant’s notion of Annehmlichkeit, which Lacan himself
rendered as agrément—in an explicit correction of the French translation by Barni—with the
confusing term ‘pleasure’. The latter is also employed by Kant, who calls it Lust, but with an
altogether different meaning than Annehmlichkeit.
2
An earlier reference to ataraxia had appeared at the end of Section 4 of ‘Kant with Sade’ (p. 651),
where Lacan identified it as Kant’s solution to the problem of God being perceived by the rational
being as just a faceless, supreme intelligence, who does not promise any form of enjoyment, not
even in the afterlife.
 Desire and Happiness 115

for a rational being’s decision to act morally. Yet by contrast with both the
Epicureans and the Stoics, he did not consider happiness to be a valid
motive for moral action either, because much like the other ‘pathological’
grounds, he saw it as being synonymous with self-love, and as too
transient, empirical and material for it to qualify as a proper determining
ground of the will.
Drawing once more on Freud and Sade, Lacan argued that in
advocating a complete renunciation of desire—and thereby of sen-
sual pleasure, as the satisfaction of desire—the Epicureans, the Stoics
and Kant had not only failed to acknowledge ‘the subject’s truth’
(p. 663), but also misjudged the effect of this renunciation on the
rational being’s state of mind. In an effort to question psychoanaly-
tically the viability of a dispassionate, virtuous existence or, in the
case of Kant, the consistency of a purely formal categorical impera-
tive, Lacan summarized Freud’s views on desire, pleasure and repres-
sion. Mapping his own concepts onto Freud’s work, he stated that
psychoanalytic experience had discovered how an unconscious desire
is generally repressed because its realization is likely to elicit a
sensation of unpleasure at the level of the reigning set of conscious
representations in the ego (p. 663). In wanting to preserve its
integrity against the emergence of an incompatible desire, the ego
enforces its law and represses the desire, as a result of which the
desire becomes unconscious, and the ego maintains a certain degree
of pleasure. Yet rather than sinking into a sphere of inactivity, the
unconscious desire returns with a vengeance, thus creating pleasure
in terms of the mechanisms presiding over the unconscious, but also
a new experience of unpleasure as far as the ego is concerned. Hence,
from a psychoanalytic perspective, the relationship between (uncon-
scious) desire and the (conscious) law of the ego includes two sources
of pleasure and two sources of unpleasure: the unconscious pleasure
emanating from the satisfaction of a desire that is incompatible with
the internal law of the ego; the conscious pleasure associated with
the ego’s desire to enforce the law, when it defends itself against the
emergence of an unconscious desire; the conscious unpleasure of the
ego when it is besieged by the emergence of an incompatible desire;
the conscious unpleasure of the ego when the repressed, unconscious
116 12 Desire and Happiness

desire returns in a symptomatic form.3 When this intra-psychic

dynamic is applied to the Epicurean and Stoic conceptions of happi-
ness—as the inner state of tranquillity stemming from the renuncia-
tion of the passions—it becomes immediately clear that happiness is
but a philosophical illusion, because the superior pleasure associated
with the renunciation of the inferior desires will be diminished by
the constant return of the repressed desires striving for satisfaction.

3
Lacan captured all of this in the first two sentences of Section 13 of ‘Kant with Sade’. In the first
paragraph (p. 663), Fink has translated Lacan’s notion ‘déplaisir’ as ‘displeasure’, yet insofar as
‘déplaisir’ is the French translation of Freud’s term ‘Unlust’, it should have been rendered as
‘unpleasure’, at least if Strachey’s English translation of Freud’s works is to be adopted. Lacan’s
second sentence, which reads ‘Semblablement le plaisir redouble-t-il son aversion à reconnaître la loi,
de supporter le désir d’y satisfaire qu’est la défense’, is extremely awkward, but I do not think that
Fink’s translation does full justice to what Lacan was trying to convey. An alternative may be:
‘Similarly, pleasure redoubles its aversion to recognize the law in supporting the desire to satisfy it,
which constitutes defense’ (p. 663). As to the Freudian sources on which Lacan was relying, here,
the two main texts are the second lecture of Freud’s 1909 lectures at Clark University, and the
1915 meta-psychological paper on repression. In the first text, Freud wrote: ‘All these experiences
[of pathogenic mechanisms in hysteria] had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse
[Wunschregung or, in Lacan’s terminology, “desire”] which was in sharp contrast to the subject’s
other wishes and which proved incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his
personality. There had been a short conflict, and the end of this internal struggle was that the
idea [Vorstellung] which had appeared before consciousness as the vehicle of this irreconcilable
wish fell a victim to repression, was pushed out of consciousness with all its attached memories,
and was forgotten. Thus the incompatibility of the wish in question with the patient’s ego was the
motive for the repression; the subject’s ethical and other standards were the repressing forces. An
acceptance of the incompatible wishful impulse or a prolongation of the conflict would have
produced a high degree of unpleasure [Unlust]; this unpleasure was avoided by means of repres-
sion, which was thus revealed as one of the devices serving to protect the mental personality.’ To
which he added: ‘The investigation of hysterical patients and of other neurotics leads us to the
conclusion that their repression of the idea [Idee] to which the intolerable wish is attached has been
a failure. It is true that they have driven it out of consciousness and out of memory and have
apparently saved themselves a large amount of unpleasure. But the repressed wishful impulse
continues to exist in the unconscious. It is on the look-out for an opportunity of being activated,
and when that happens it succeeds in sending into consciousness a disguised and unrecognizable
substitute for what had been repressed, and to this there soon become attached the same feelings of
unpleasure which it was hoped had been saved by the repression’ (Freud, 1957a, pp. 24 and 27).
In a more abstract vein, Freud made a similar statement in his paper on repression: ‘Let us rather
confine ourselves to clinical experience, as we meet with it in psycho-analytic practice. We then
learn that the satisfaction of an instinct [in Lacan’s terminology, a “desire”] which is under
repression would be quite possible, and further, that in every instance such a satisfaction would be
pleasurable in itself; but it would be irreconcilable with other claims and intentions. It would,
therefore, cause pleasure in one place and unpleasure in another. It has consequently become a
condition for repression that the motive force of unpleasure shall have acquired more strength
than the pleasure obtained from satisfaction’ (Freud, 1957d, p. 147).
 Desire and Happiness 117

With reference to various Stoic sources, the philosopher Anthony

Kenny has summed up the issue brilliantly: ‘Given the frail, con-
tingent natures of human beings as we know ourselves to be, the
denial that contingent goods can constitute happiness is tantamount
to the claim that only superhuman beings can be happy. The Stoics
in effect accepted this conclusion, in their idealization of the man of
wisdom . . . It was unsurprising, after all this, that the Stoics admitted
that a wise man was harder to find than a phoenix. They thus
purchased the invulnerability of happiness only at the cost of making
it unattainable. Since a wise man is not to be found, and there are
no degrees of virtue, the whole human race consists of fools’ (Kenny,
2004, p. 286).4 Lacan contended that the notion of ataraxia had
‘deposed their [the Stoics’] wisdom’ (p. 663). And implicitly refer-
ring to the fact that the Stoics regarded a human being’s full
compliance with the cardinal virtues as indicative of someone’s
voluntary acceptance of the laws of Nature, he added that in this
respect the Stoics did not deserve praise for degrading desire either,
because in doing so they had not so much elevated the (symbolic)
Law (of Nature), but rather cast it aside, given that Nature’s Law—
as Sade’s libertines tend to repeat ad nauseam—is also, and perhaps
primarily, characterized by the very capriciousness of desire, espe-
cially in its most brutal manifestations of absolute cruelty.5 As to
Kant, because his categorical imperative is also based upon a

4
To some extent, the Stoics themselves were aware of the problem, but at the same time they
refused to accept that the wise, happy man was really no more than a mythical ideal.
5
This point is captured in the last sentence of the third paragraph of Section 13. In French, the
sentence reads: ‘On ne leur tient aucun compte de ce qu’ils abaissent le désir; car non seulement on ne
tient pas la Loi pour remontée d’autant, mais c’est par là, qu’on le sache ou non, qu’on la sent jetée bas.’
Fink has translated this as: ‘We fail to realize that they degraded desire; and not only do we not
consider the Law to be commensurably exalted by them, but it is precisely because of this
degrading of desire that, whether we know it or not, we sense that they cast down the Law’
(p. 663). In my interpretation of Lacan’s admittedly abstruse sentence, the impersonal pronoun
‘on’ represents Lacan’s own opinion, whereby he is indicating that the Stoics should not be
credited for degrading desire, because in doing so they also dismiss the Law. And so I would
propose the following alternative translation: ‘We need not give them [the Stoics] any credit for
degrading desire, because apart from the fact that the Law is not elevated accordingly, it is precisely
owing to this degradation, whether we know it or not, that we sense the Law to be cast down [jetée
bas]’ (p. 663).
118 12 Desire and Happiness

renunciation of the ‘pathological’, its formal impact will be equally

contaminated by the material objects of the faculty of desire. To his
credit, this is what he himself acknowledged when he accepted that
no rational being is intrinsically holy, yet it did not stop him from
projecting happiness onto the afterlife in his postulate of the immortal-
ity of the soul, or from using it as an argument in support of the
rational being’s non-negotiable duty to comply with the moral law
during the time of his earthly existence (Kant, 1997b, pp. 102–103).6
In his libertine novels, Sade had advanced a radically different
ideology of desire and happiness. Much like the Stoics, Sade’s liber-
tines campaign for the recognition of Nature as the supreme sovereign
authority. Yet unlike their Greek and Roman counterparts, they do
not believe that Nature is driven by virtue, neither in the form of
justice, courage, wisdom or temperance, nor in the shape of any other
mechanism that might contribute to progress and development. Much
like the Stoics, Sade’s libertines unreservedly argue in favour of an
ethical stance that involves humanity’s voluntary submission to the
laws of Nature. Yet unlike their fellow philosophers, they believe that
Nature is intrinsically monstrous—a cruel, callous, brutal and selfish
force that knows no other law than that embedded in the principle of
radical evil. As we saw earlier, for Sade’s libertines, the ultimate goal in
life is the realization of a state of absolute destruction, which goes so
far as to include self-immolation and the annihilation of Nature itself,
and for which—in accordance with the spirit of libertinage—they
deem the liberation of desire to be an essential precondition.
Through the mouth of his ‘sadistic’ heroes, Sade wants to release the
ferocious force of Nature’s desire in the hearts of those who have
committed themselves to be the instruments of the Natural order.

6
For the sake of Lacan’s argument, it would have been better if he had made this remark after his
critique of the Epicureans and the Stoics in the third paragraph of Section 13, but as it stands he
did not return to Kant’s idea of happiness until the penultimate paragraph of Section 13, after a
brief detour via Sade. It should also be noted that this is the last time Lacan referred to Kant in his
essay. When, in Sections 14 and 15, he would develop a critique of the Sadean fantasy, it is
without reference to Kant, which again demonstrates the non-reciprocity of the relationship
between Kant and Sade. Lacan thought Kant with Sade, yet at no given point did he think
Sade with Kant.
 Desire and Happiness 119

Whereas Kant aspired to formulate a moral law that would relieve the
rational being from the burden of all transient empirical pleasures
obtained from the satisfaction of desire, Sade set out to achieve the
exact opposite. In his libertine philosophy, he wanted to set a rational
being’s desire free from the burden of religion, morality, and all social
institutions that are aimed at curtailing its ferocious potential. By
implication, he therefore also required his republic to be based on a
limited framework of policies, rules and regulations, and a minimal set
of laws. Although his ethical system was very much the opposite of
Kant’s, Sade shared Kant’s belief in the insuperable antagonism
between desire and the law. In order to set desire free, in order to
ensure that desire instills freedom in the citizens of the republic, the
law itself needs to be set free, i.e. it needs to be unpacked, unleashed
and allowed to disappear to the point where but the smallest remnant
of its regulatory power remains intact.7
Lacan claimed that at exactly the right point (‘là où il faut’) Sade had
taken up Saint-Just (p. 663), one of the main political leaders during the
French Revolution, and one of the chief architects of the so-called ‘Reign of
Terror’, when thousands of purportedly anti-revolutionary elements lost
their head under the guillotine. It is worth emphasizing Lacan’s phrase ‘là
où il faut’, which Fink has translated as ‘where one should’ (p. 663),
because Lacan believed that the liberation of desire, and the associated
liberation of the law, encompasses more innovative aspirations than the
mere politicization of happiness. With regard to the latter, he implicitly
referred to Saint-Just’s famous ‘Rapport au nom du Comité de salut public
sur le mode d’exécution du decret contre les ennemis de la Révolution’,
delivered to the National Convention on 3 March 1794, at the height of
the Reign of Terror, in which he had proclaimed: ‘It is a generally felt cause
that all the wisdom of a government consists of reducing the party that is
opposed to the revolution, and of making people happy at the cost of all

7
One could once again raise the question as to whether Sade’s libertines were promoting ethical
and political ideas that were shared by their creator. Lacan did not distinguish, here, between the
Sadean fantasy and Sade’s own practical reason, but one should not readily assume that when
Lacan referred to Sade in this section he really had the author in mind, rather than his fictional
universe.
120 12 Desire and Happiness

vices and all the enemies of freedom . . . May Europe learn that you want to
have neither an unhappy person nor an oppressor upon French territory;
may this example bear fruit upon the earth; may it propagate the love of
virtue and happiness. Happiness is a new idea in Europe’ (Saint-Just,
2004b, pp. 672–673). In ‘Kant with Sade’, as well as in Seminar VII
(Lacan, 1992, p. 292), and in the 1958 paper The Direction of the
Treatment (Lacan, 2006f, p. 513), Lacan reformulated Saint-Just’s point
as happiness having become a political factor (or matter), yet on each
occasion he expressed his doubts as to the novelty of the idea, indicating in
‘Kant with Sade’, for instance, that ‘it has always been a political factor’ and
that it may very well feed into the hands of ‘the scepter and the censer’, i.e.
the power of the Church—priestcraft thus becoming as involved in its
pursuit as statecraft (p. 663).8 And indeed, although Sade never referred to
Saint-Just in any of his libertine novels nor, for that matter, in the political
pamphlet that was inserted in Philosophy in the Boudoir, the latter’s legend-
ary opposition to extensive, detailed laws accords with Sade’s anti-legalistic
political philosophy. ‘We require few laws. Where there are many, the
people are slaves’, Saint-Just noted in his own doctrine for a revolutionary
republic (Saint-Just, 2004c, p. 1136). ‘The sword of the laws . . . always
hangs ominously over the passions’, claimed the anonymous author of
Frenchmen, Some More Effort if you Wish to Become Republicans, to which
he added: ‘[L]aws may be so mild, so few in number, that all men, no
matter what their characters, can easily comply’ (Sade, 2006, pp. 111 and
119). Of course, the idea that a complex legal system is not a necessary
precondition for safeguarding the existence of the ideal commonwealth,
especially when one can rely on the power of human rationality and the
strength of an appropriate educational system, has a long history, which
can be traced back to Plato’s Republic (see Plato, 2007, p. 127). Tongue-in-
cheek, Lacan wrote here that the struggle for the liberation of desire

8
Lacan may have borrowed the idea of the intellectual convergence between Sade and Saint-Just
from an evocative 1948 essay by Blanchot (1995), which in itself gave rise to an even more
instructive juxtaposition of Sade’s and Saint-Just’s views in Blanchot’s lengthy introduction to a
separate publication of ‘Frenchmen, Some More Effort . . . ’ (Blanchot, 1993). The latter text was
published after the Critique version of ‘Kant with Sade’, which already included the paragraph on
Saint-Just, so Lacan could not have taken his idea from Blanchot’s second paper.
 Desire and Happiness 121

required the law to become a widow, ‘the Widow par excellence’ (p. 663),
by which he alluded to the historical slang word for the guillotine (Veuve,
widow), and to the seemingly inevitable terror upon which the political
fight for freedom is predicated. The day after the so-called ‘Thermidorian
Reaction’ of 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II), 26-year-old Saint-Just
himself was guillotined, alongside Robespierre and other leading figures of
the Revolution. Lacan insinuated that if only the young man had suc-
ceeded in maintaining the mischievous, satirical stance he had adopted in
his first literary text—the long, mildly pornographic poem entitled
‘Organt’, which had been published anonymously in 1789 (Saint-Just,
2004a)—he could have emerged from the Thermidorian Reaction as a
victor, saving his head as well as his reputation. Sade’s own involvement
with the Revolution is multi-dimensional and not always consistent, and I
cannot do justice to its complexity within the space of this book. Suffice it
to say that after the abolition of the lettres de cachet in March 1790, Sade
was released from prison, and ended up working as a playwright, a soldier
and a magistrate, despite his aristocratic background, which he consistently
disavowed (hence, Lacan’s expression ‘Sade, the former aristocrat’
(p. 663)). Following a speech at the National Convention in November
1793, he was arrested again, probably on account of his vehement rejection
of all forms of God-worship, which ran counter to Robespierre’s newly
established cult of the Supreme Being. As we have seen, both in his life and
in his work, Sade remained radically opposed to the death penalty, which
he and/or the author of Frenchmen, Some More Effort . . . believed to be
unjust, impracticable and inadmissible (Sade, 2006, pp. 119–120).9 Both
for Saint-Just and for Sade’s libertines, reinforcing this principle came at
the cost of mass murder, but it was squarely implemented in the service of
freedom, equality and fraternity.
Of course, the main difference between Sade and Saint-Just is that the
latter continued to embrace Rousseau’s belief in the natural goodness of
humankind, whereas the former, or at least his fictional libertines, could

9
On Sade and the revolution, see Klossowski (1992, pp. 47–65). On Sade and the death penalty,
see Derrida (2014, pp. 161–165). On Sade’s arrest in December 1793, and how he himself
miraculously managed to escape the guillotine, see du Plessix Gray (1999, pp. 345–352).
122 12 Desire and Happiness

only conceive of Nature as radically evil. In serving Nature’s desire, the

libertines transform themselves into black fetishes whose will is predicated
upon the self-assumed right to jouissance. As a result, their happiness
depends neither on the renunciation nor on the pursuit of pleasure, but
on something that is situated ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, despite the
fact that, time and again, the ineluctable cycle of pleasure limits their quest
for absolute destruction. Returning to what he had written at the very
beginning of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan asserted that Sade had fractured ‘the
ancient axis of ethics’ (p. 663), because insofar as happiness remains an
ethical goal and the supreme good in Sade’s system, as axiomatic a moral
precept as it had been in all the major philosophical schools since Plato and
Aristotle, it is no longer regarded as of communal benefit, but as intrinsi-
cally selfish—pervaded by self-interest rather than predicated upon an
altruistic concern over the equal well-being of all citizens. Drawing on
the idea that Natural law is synonymous with selfishness, relying on the
principle that all human beings are born free and equal before the law, and
without ever going so far as to question the rational status of humankind,
which enables human beings to correctly apprehend Natural law, Sade
professes another kind of happiness, which Lacan had described in the
opening page of his text as ‘happiness in evil’ (‘bonheur dans le mal’)
(p. 645), because it aligns happiness with vice, criminality, pain, death
and destruction. Much like the Stoics, the Sadean libertines aspire to living
their lives according to Nature, yet because they hear the voice of Nature as
commanding limitless jouissance, they do not arrive at the Stoic conclusion
that life in accordance with Nature is de facto virtuous, but at exactly the
opposite dictate, notably that obeying Nature is strictly synonymous with a
celebration of vice. As such, Sade’s ‘criminal’ obverse of Kant’s moral
philosophy imposes not only a reconsideration of the precise status of
desire but also a re-examination of the right to jouissance that is allegedly
derived from this desire (p. 663).10 This is the task to which Lacan would
devote himself in the next section of ‘Kant with Sade’.

10
Because Fink translated Lacan’s ‘bonheur dans le mal’ as ‘delight in evil’ at the beginning of
‘Kant with Sade’ (p. 645), the connection between ‘another happiness’ (‘un autre bonheur’) at the
end of Section 13 and the programmatic ‘happiness in evil’ from the beginning of the paper is no
longer evident from the English translation of Lacan’s text.
 13
Lacan Against Sade

Section 14 is not only one of the longest in ‘Kant with Sade’, but also the
part that was least rewritten when Lacan prepared his Écrits, and the
division with the clearest argument, in spite of Lacan’s typical stylistic
mannerisms and the great many ellipses, allusions and implicit refer-
ences. In essence, Lacan contended that despite his grand literary fantasy
of ruthless libertines ‘setting the universe ablaze’ on the basis of a self-
proclaimed right to jouissance, Sade had failed to liberate desire from the
constraining, regulatory force of the law. As he had already suggested in
Sections 5 and 6 of his text, this structural failure first of all expresses
itself in the discourse of the libertines themselves, who time and again
admit to the mediocrity and inadequacy of their exploits. Whether it is
the monk Jérôme deploring the fact that human beings are inherently
incapable of outraging Nature, or Clairwil wishing for the ‘everlasting
continuation of wickedness’ (Sade, 1968, p. 525), or Saint-Fond despe-
rately trying to ensure that his victims continue to be tortured in the
afterlife, or Pope Pius pontificating about the need for a second death,
on each and every occasion the libertines have to concede that they can
only realize their project of radical negation and absolute destruction in
their fantasy, and that whilst the boundaries of this fantasy may be

© The Author(s) 2017 123

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_13
124 13 Lacan Against Sade

pushed illimitably, crossing the limits of the fantasy itself would seem to
constitute an inescapable impossibility. Adding to this, Lacan averred in
Section 14 that Sade’s failure to fully execute the principle of the right to
jouissance can also be identified at the level of his own writing. ‘I have
conceived everything conceivable in that [libertine] genre’, Sade dis-
closed to his wife as early as 1781 (Sade, 1997, p. 229), but this
admission did not stop him from carrying on inventing and describing
more radical, more sinful and more ferocious criminal acts, in an endless
spiral of widening and deepening literary excess, which suggests that
something resisted the full realization of his devious plan. When, at the
very end of Juliette, Noirceuil receives the news that he will be appointed
to a senior government position, he invites his libertine friends to share
in his elation, which he believes to be proof of the fact that vice is always
rewarded and virtue is doomed to remain unhappy. ‘[B]ut we would
perhaps not dare say so’, he hesitates, ‘were it a novel we were writing’.
To which Juliette responds: ‘Why dread publishing it, . . . when the truth
itself, and the truth alone, lays bare the secrets of Nature, however
mankind may tremble before those revelations. Philosophy must never
shrink from speaking out [“la philosophie doit tout dire”]’ (Sade, 1968,
p. 1193). Sade too, Lacan intimated, never shrunk from speaking out in
his novels (p. 664). And much like Juliette, Sade also insisted that
‘philosophy’ has the duty to say everything—the whole truth and
nothing but the truth, about the fundamental cruelty of Nature and
the human place within it—yet without therefore succeeding in doing
so, neither in the ‘sadistic’ sphere of the libertine characters he created,
nor in the very conception and execution of his own libertine oeuvre.
Sade felt compelled to write, but in committing words to paper, he was
consistently forced to accept that the full realization of his vision of
excess continued to escape him, and so he felt compelled to write more
and more, ad infinitum.1

1
The manuscript of the gigantic Les journées de Florbelle ou la nature dévoilée, written during
Sade’s years at Charenton, was burnt after his death at the request of his son. Judging by the
surviving notebooks, it would have filled some 20 volumes in print.
 Lacan Against Sade 125

Lacan opened Section 14 with a question: ‘How far does Sade lead us
in the experience of this jouissance, or simply of its truth?’ (p. 664). If he
did not give the solution straight away, or even contemplated giving any
kind of straightforward, unequivocal response, his remarks would all
converge upon a simple answer: not very far, not far enough, not as far as
Sade would have wanted it to be led, only as far as it showed itself to be
ineluctably constrained by the cycles of pleasure, desire and the law. In
deciding to commit the most detailed descriptions of the most ghastly
atrocities to paper, Sade had somehow managed to cross the limits of his
own fantasy—the one ruling over his desire in real life—but Lacan did
not believe that this new fictional space of the ‘Sadean fantasy’ was
therefore a fully accomplished, limitless arena of jouissance. In two highly
lyrical paragraphs, Lacan compared Sade’s exceedingly complex sexual
installations—as depicted in the numerous illustrations accompanying
his libertine novels—to the baroque fountains at the famous Villa d’Este
in Tivoli, near Rome; but whereas the latter derive part of their splen-
dour from the spectacular flow of water, Lacan wondered what exactly
was flowing in Sade’s ‘human pyramids’ (p. 664). In these depictions,
which have not been reproduced in any of the English editions of Sade’s
libertine novels, Lacan recognized ‘unpredictable quanta by which the
love-hate atom glistens in the vicinity of the Thing from which man
emerges through a cry’ (p. 664), i.e. a force-field whose elements of
combined love and hate may have their energy increased or decreased in
ways that cannot be foreseen, which makes them approximate the
fundamentally unknowable Kantian thing-in-itself, or even the funda-
mental strangeness of the Freudian and Heideggerian ‘Thing’ (das Ding)
in its appearance as both materiality and void, and from which the
participants re-emerge either with the scream of voluptuous orgasm or
the cry of deadly expiration. Whatever it is, Lacan claimed, it is not
supposed to have anything to do with desire and the fantasmatic
structure sustaining it.2 Insofar as Sade’s work may indeed be considered
an outline, a sketch or a blueprint (‘épure’) (p. 664) of his actual, real-life

2
For Lacan’s explorations of the Freudian and Heideggerian ‘Thing’, see Lacan (1992, pp. 43–70
and pp. 101–114).
126 13 Lacan Against Sade

fantasy, he would have had to transcend the latter’s boundaries in order

to conceive everything in the libertine genre.3 Yet at the same time, this
literary Sadean fantasy would have remained attached to Sade’s real-life
fantasy and therefore subjected to the latter’s limitations, following the
interlocking dynamic of desire and the law.
All in all, Lacan identified four instances of Sade not having succeeded
in lifting the experience of jouissance above the realm of desire and the
law at the level of his own writing. Starting with Philosophy in the
Boudoir, he claimed that for all the transcendental wickedness Sade
had attributed to the Supreme Being in Saint-Fond’s libertine theology
(Sade, 1968, p. 399), one is left wondering about Eugénie’s ‘modula-
tions of the heart’ (p. 664).4 If wickedness reigns supreme, why does
Eugénie admit, in an echo of her two main instructors: ‘I’m crazy about
my father, but I feel that I hate my mother’ (Sade, 2006, p. 21).
Secondly, and without going so far as to suggest that Philosophy in the
Boudoir should be dismissed as a bad piece of writing, Lacan feels that
the work suffered from excessive preachiness (p. 664), combined with
‘dreary’ historical information, and anatomo-physiological descriptions
of the human body and its sexual functions that would not be misplaced
in a mediocre medical textbook.5 Apologizing on behalf of Sade, Lacan
(p. 664) reminded his readership that Philosophy in the Boudoir explicitly

3
Lacan’s sentence ‘Ces limites [du fantasme], nous savons que dans sa vie Sade est passé au-delà’,
which Fink has translated as ‘We know that Sade went beyond these limits [of the fantasy] in real
life’ (p. 664) might be interpreted as Lacan referring to the aforementioned Arcueil-affair on
Easter Sunday 1768, or the Marseilles-scandal of June 1772, or a couple of other incidents where
Sade could be seen as acting out his fantasy, yet he did not regard these events as particularly
significant, describing them as ‘sorties’ (outings) (p. 660), and situating them firmly within the
boundaries of Sade’s real-life fantasy. If Sade moved beyond the limits of his real-life fantasy, it was
within the space of his writings. . . .
4
Fink has translated Lacan’s ‘modulations de cœur’ as ‘changes of heart’, which may give the reader
the impression that Eugénie at one point has a change of heart about her mother, yet nothing
could be less true: throughout her instruction, Eugénie remains adamant that she detests her
mother, culminating in her taking control over her final punishment. If Eugénie’s heart shows any
kind of modulation, it is between the hate for her mother and the love for her father, the latter in
Lacan’s view also being the representative of law and order.
5
In composing an ‘educational work’ that draws on historical and anthropological factoids, it
would have been better, Lacan quipped, if Sade had adopted the style of François de La Mothe le
Vayer (p. 664), the famous tutor of Louis XIV.
 Lacan Against Sade 127

presented itself as a treatise on the education of young girls—its full title

is Philosophy in the Boudoir or, The Immoral Mentors: Dialogues Aimed at
the Education of Young Ladies—and was therefore undoubtedly subject
to ‘the laws of a genre’ (p. 664). However, this is precisely where he also
believed the shoe was pinching. Although Sade had taken the lingering
anal-sadism, i.e. the obsession with corporeal punishment, spanking and
flagellation, in the traditional educational treatises, to a much higher
level by advocating the delights of anal intercourse, he was still comply-
ing with certain stylistic and structural genre-constraints, and did not
fundamentally question the validity of education per se. In other words,
in his attempt to portray the essential corruptness of human nature, he
still needed to rely on a narrative framework in which education is
required for this corruptness to be unleashed. What he should have
done, Lacan intimated, is to undermine the very need for an educational
practice as neither necessary nor effective (p. 665). Thirdly, Lacan
pointed out that for all Sade’s attempts at celebrating the prosperities
of vice, there is not a single example to be found in all his libertine novels
of virtue being truly corrupted. One year before she is invited to
Madame de Saint-Ange’s boudoir, the delightful young Eugénie made
the Madame’s acquaintance at a convent, and although Saint-Ange tells
her libertine friends that nothing happened back then, they are also
assured of the fact that Eugénie has a certain ‘natural aptitude’ (Sade,
2006, p. 8). When Eugénie arrives, she immediately confesses to Saint-
Ange how eagerly she had been awaiting the moment to be in her arms
again (Sade, 2006, p. 10). Eugénie may require some additional techni-
cal instruction, but she definitely does not require corruption. Vice
versa, those boys and girls who do present themselves as paragons of
virtue never relinquish their belief in the moral values of dignity, kind-
ness and respect. Horrendous as the tortures that befall upon them may
be, they never consent to the libertine ideology of crime and destruction.
In Sade’s works, virtue is never transformed into vice, which is what
prompts Lacan to write that, when all is said and done, it is not just the
misfortunes but also the ‘triumph of virtue’ (p. 665) that is paradoxically
being confirmed there.
Finally, Lacan (p. 665) recognized another instance of Sade’s failure
to liberate desire from the constraints of the law in his scanty use of
128 13 Lacan Against Sade

witticism—a stylistic technique which would have allowed him to

criticize more effectively not only the doctrinal principles against
which his libertines were rallying, but also the laws of the genre and,
most importantly, the syntactic and semantic laws of language as such.
As we saw from our discussion of Section 3 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan
did acknowledge the black humour and the satirical elements in Sade’s
works. Here too he pointed towards the occasional funny twist, such as
the one occurring at the very end of Sade’s posthumously published
‘Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man’, where the priest, instead
of converting the libertine dying man to good Christian values, is said to
have become ‘a man corrupted by Nature—and all because he had been
unable to explain what he meant by Corrupted Nature’ (Sade, 2008,
p. 160).6 Alluding to Alexander Pope’s influential ‘An Essay on
Criticism’ (Pope, 2008), in which the great British poet had suggested
that wit constitutes one of the three essential qualities of good criticism,
Lacan wished Sade had spiced up his writings with some of the piquancy
of Ernest Renan’s classic and hugely controversial Life of Jesus (p. 665).7
In this study, the French orientalist and philosopher, to whom Lacan
had already referred in Section 7 of ‘Kant with Sade’, had portrayed
Jesus as a master-provocateur, who goes about launching round after
round of scathing invectives against the Pharisees, and who regularly
draws on mockery and irony to drive his critique home (Renan 1991,
pp. 169–173) (p. 665). Endorsing Renan’s outlook, Lacan remarked
that the effect of Jesus’ wit on Pharisaism could not have been better:
before long an Apostle (the Apostle Paul) emerged from their ranks, and
in the end proper Pharisee values such as righteousness and humility
prevailed (p. 666). Lacan argued that if Sade had drawn on the power of
wit, which is here represented in the shape of derision and mockery, he

6
For some reason, Lacan never considered the darkly satirical epigraph of Philosophy in the
Boudoir, which Sade had borrowed from Alexis Piron’s comedy La métromanie ou le Poète: ‘May
every mother get her daughter to read this book’. At the same time, however, in emphasizing the
lack of wit in Sade, he did not follow the surrealists, who believed that Sade’s works were never
intended in other way than as a protracted expression of the most extreme mockery.
7
Without giving any concrete examples, Lacan sneered at French literary criticism after World
War II for having become so pedantic that it completely forgot about the importance of wit
(p. 665).
 Lacan Against Sade 129

would have been able to make a better case for calumny (slander,
defamation) in his utopian republic than that based on the argument
that, in the end, it will only expose the ‘perverse man’ and give the
‘virtuous and sensitive man’ an opportunity to ‘acquire one more degree
of moral perfection’ (Sade, 2006, pp. 120–121).
In sum, Sade had not succeeded in overcoming the massive challenges
associated with the ambition of conceiving and saying everything, partly
because he remained subjected to the symbolic law of language, partly
because the symbolic language of the law, and its corollaries of crime and
punishment, may very well have elicited and sustained his ambition in
the first place. As he had confessed to his wife: ‘[My] fanaticism . . . arises
from the persecutions of my oppressors. The more they persist in their
oppression, the more deeply my principles become rooted in my heart’
(Sade, 1980, p. 168). Nonetheless, persistent as he may have been, he
had not managed to move outside the sphere of desire and the law, into
an unblemished experience of jouissance. According to Lacan, this is
what gave Sade’s work its ‘somber beauty’ (p. 666), and what opened up
its tragic dimension, both in terms of the cathartic effects resulting from
its radical crossing of fear and pity, and in terms of a certain conjunction
of ‘bewilderment and shadows’ (p. 666), which he opposed to the
‘bewilderment and illumination’ Freud had considered to be character-
istic of the joke.8 However, qualifying his own point, Lacan also

8
In Seminar VII, Lacan had reminded his audience of a line (1449b, 26–27) from Aristotle’s
Poetics, in which the philosopher had referred to catharsis as what is accomplished δι᾽ ἐλέου καὶ
φόβου (literally, ‘through pity and fear’) (Aristotle, 1995, p. 46). In Lacan’s interpretation, it was
‘in connection with this power of attraction that we should look for the true sense, the true
mystery, the true significance of tragedy—in connection with the excitement involved, in con-
nection with the emotions and, in particular, with the singular emotions that are fear and pity,
since it is through their intervention, δι᾽ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου, through the intervention of pity and
fear, that we are purged, purified of everything of that order [of desire]’ (Lacan, 1992, pp. 247–
248). However, one year later, Lacan corrected himself by saying that it is not fear and pity that
facilitate the crossing of desire, but fear and pity that require to be crossed and superseded (Lacan,
2015, p. 279, where Aristotle’s line has been reproduced incorrectly). It is the latter interpretation
of Aristotle’s verse that reappeared in ‘Kant with Sade’. As to ‘bewilderment and illumination’
(Verblüffung und Erleuchtung), this is the sequence of reactions singled out by the Dutch
psychologist Gerardus Heymans in a 1896 paper, as typical for the effect of a joke, and which
Freud adopted in his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. See Heymans (1896,
p. 36) and Freud (1960, pp. 12–13).
130 13 Lacan Against Sade

designated Sade’s works as ‘feeble tragedy’ (tragique gâteux), which was

allegedly only a stone’s throw away from ‘noble tragedy’ (p. 666).9 In
doing so, he alluded to the lengthy literary analysis of Paul Claudel’s
Coûfontaine-trilogy—L’otage (1911), Le pain dur (1918) and Le père
humilié (1920)—which he had conducted in May 1961, as part of
Seminar VIII (Lacan, 2015, pp. 263–325). Intermittently referring to
Sade, Lacan had argued there that, in portraying a woman who feels
forced to ‘voluntarily’ engage in the ‘law of marriage’ for the mere sake
of rescuing the Pope and who ends up sacrificing herself for the greater
good of humankind, Claudel’s distinctly Christian take on tragic drama
had taken classical tragedy—as represented, for instance, in the stories of
Oedipus and Antigone—beyond the conventional imposition of a legal
or divine order, and thus beyond its historical constraints (Lacan, 2015,
p. 276).10

9
Fink has translated Lacan’s ‘tragique gâteux’ as ‘senile tragedy’ (p. 666), which is technically
correct, but which could perhaps be rendered more subtly as ‘feeble tragedy’.
10
When, in the last sentence of Section 14, Lacan wrote that in this, i.e. Claudel’s ‘most authentic
tragedy’, ‘Melpomene [the Muse of tragedy] . . . along with Clio [the Muse of history], is decrepit
[croulante, “feeble” or indeed “senile”], without our knowing which one will bury the other’
(p. 666), he was not alluding to particular characters in Claudel’s work, but to the fact that this
work had clearly surpassed the limits of ‘historical tragedy’. For Claudel’s trilogy, see Claudel
(1945). For a more detailed analysis of Lacan’s reading of Claudel, see Kowsar (1994) and
Moyaert (2004).
 14
Some More Effort . . .

In the Winter of 1947, Pierre Klossowski published a collection of essays that

would establish him as one of the key figures in post-War French Sade-
scholarship. Although two of the texts focused on the Nietzschean idea of the
death of God, and did not engage directly with Sade’s works, Klossowski
decided to place the entire volume under the sign of Sade, giving it the
evocative title Sade mon prochain (Klossowski, 1947). Whereas the surrealists
had glorified Sade for his freedom of spirit and for his persistent mockery of
social and literary conventions, Klossowski recognized in Sade the epitome of
a tragic figure, whose perpetual search to unleash the full force of Nature’s
destructive passions in the heart of humankind had run aground in the
production of a mere literary fantasy—a fantasy which was moreover
internally fractured by the insuperable rift between the ‘sadistic’ libertines’
aspirations of absolute destruction and the limits of their earthly existence.
More provocatively, Klossowski also argued that Sade’s rabid atheism was
but a carefully crafted mask, behind which one could detect a profound love
of God. In Klossowski’s interpretation, Sade’s libertines thrive on sacrilegious
acts (profanation, desecration, incest, sodomy, parricide etc.), precisely
because they accord value to the divine order and the sacred principles
emanating from it. The upshot is that, for Klossowski, Sade’s characters

© The Author(s) 2017 131

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_14
132 14 Some More Effort . . .

never truly renunciate God, nor any of the Christian moral precepts which
they so vehemently rally against. Instead of radically transgressing traditional
religious distinctions between good and evil, they merely invert the categories
and thus remain embedded within the dialectic they so ardently seek to
dispel. Instead of radically renouncing the Christian values of mutual
recognition, selflessness and respect, they merely subvert the way in which
these values are applied, insofar as they remain indissolubly attached to the
presence of their neighbour (le prochain)—the latter evidently shaped into a
virtuous victim—in order to sustain their mastery as instruments of Nature.1
After he himself had acknowledged the tragic aspects of Sade’s project,
connecting them to the Christian thematic of Claudel’s trilogy, Lacan
felt encouraged to delve deeper into Klossowski’s arguments, especially
those pertaining to the status of the neighbour.2 He agreed with
Klossowski that the Sadean fantasy ‘is better situated among the stays

1
For highly instructive discussions of Klossowski’s idiosyncratic take on Sade, see Gallop (1981,
pp. 67–112) and Dean (1992, pp. 170–178).
2
Although this was the first time Lacan explicitly referred to Klossowski’s work in ‘Kant with
Sade’, it was definitely not the first time he drew inspiration (and examples) from it. As I pointed
out earlier in my exposition of Sections 6 and 7 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan no doubt borrowed the
examples of Saint-Fond’s paradoxical belief in the afterlife, Pope Pius VI’s vision of a ‘second
death’, and the latter’s relationship with Buddhism, from Klossowski’s texts. I should also
mention, here, that the English translation of Sade mon prochain (Klossowski, 1992) follows the
1967 edition of the book, which no longer contains the two texts on the death of God, but
includes a new contemporary text entitled ‘Le philosophe scélérat’ (‘The Philosopher-Villain’), and
substantially revised versions of all the other papers. For this new edition, Klossowski also deleted
the original epigraph to the book, to which Lacan alluded in the second paragraph of Section 15
(p. 666). In translation, the epigraph read as follows: ‘If some freethinker [esprit fort] had taken it
upon himself to ask Saint Benoît Labre what he thought of his contemporary the Marquis de Sade,
the Saint would have answered without hesitation: “He is my neighbour”’ (Klossowski, 1947,
p. 9). Klossowski did not elaborate on the meaning of this supposed response, but in all likelihood
he wanted to invoke the fact that Saint Labre—a quintessential ‘Fool for God’, who deliberately
mortified himself and opposed all social conventions for the pure sake of coming closer to Christ
—could have recognized in Sade a similar ‘craziness for God’. For the record, it is also worth
noting that the last sentence of the first paragraph of Section 15, in Fink’s translation of ‘Kant
with Sade’, is based on the 1971 pocket-edition of Lacan’s text. As note 21 on p. 668 indicates, in
1971 Lacan deleted a footnote that had appeared in all previous versions, and replaced it with a
new sentence in the body of the text, and a slightly modified footnote, which nonetheless still
conjured up the figure of Jean Paulhan as the ‘future academician’ and ‘expert in malicious
comments’ whose work, unlike Klossowski’s, was stained by the typical tics of the ‘highbrow
literati’ (bel esprit), for want of perspicacity (p. 668, note 21). See also Chapter 1, note 3. In what
may be just another matter of detail, Lacan wrote the title of Klossowski’s book, here, as Sade, mon
prochain, adding a comma between the first two words, which Fink has reproduced.
 Some More Effort . . . 133

[les portants] of Christian ethics’, and posits that this is what his own
‘structural reference points’ had confirmed (p. 666). How these refer-
ence points should be understood, here, is not entirely clear. Lacan may
have been involuntarily reminded of the pervasive dimension of redemp-
tion and sacrifice in Sade’s libertine novels. Sade’s libertine heroes are
forced to sacrifice virtuous boys and girls, in order to position themselves
as instruments of Nature, yet in the end they often proceed to sacrificing
themselves, or dream of being sacrificed for the pure purpose of bringing
their vision of absolute destruction to fruition.3 In all probability,
however, he was thinking of how Sade’s libertines explicitly position
themselves vis-à-vis the Law, and more specifically with respect to the
commandment ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, which is
considered to be one of the central tenets of Christian doctrine.4 In
Frenchmen, Some More Effort . . . , the anonymous pamphleteer had
expressed his profound reservations with regard to the commandment
in the most forceful terms: ‘Christian morality . . . sets up doctrines so
full of sophisms that we cannot possibly accept them; for when we desire
to establish principles, we must take care not to provide sophisms as
their foundations. This absurd morality tells us to love our neighbors as
ourselves. Nothing would assuredly be more sublime if it were possible
for deceit to bear the traits of beauty. It is not a matter of loving your
neighbors as yourselves, since this contradicts all the laws of nature, and
since its mere inspiration must direct all the actions of our lives; it is
simply a question of loving our neighbors as brothers, as friends whom

3
A similar point was made by Blanchot in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, with reference to
Robespierre and Saint-Just: ‘The Terrorists are those who desire absolute freedom and are fully
conscious that this constitutes a desire for their own death, they are conscious of the freedom they
affirm, as they are conscious of their death, which they realize, and consequently they behave
during their lifetimes not like people living among other living people but like beings deprived of
being, like universal thoughts, pure abstractions beyond history, judging and deciding in the name
of all of history’ (Blanchot, 1995, p. 320).
4
This does not imply, however, that the command is specifically Christian. In the New Testament,
it can be found in Matthew 22:39, as Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ question concerning the
great commandments in law: ‘And the second [great commandment] is like unto it, Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself’. Yet this is effectively a reiteration of Leviticus 19:18, where God is
addressing himself to the people of Israel: ‘Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the
children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord’.
134 14 Some More Effort . . .

nature gives us . . . ’ (Sade, 2006, p. 188). To the best of my knowledge,

Klossowski did not single out this passage in his book, but his reading
would have undoubtedly underscored how the libertine opposition to
the divine command again betrays a surreptitious allegiance to its moral
spirit, thus illustrating again how the Christian ethic insidiously per-
vades the Sadean fantasy. With Klossowski, Lacan highlights the impor-
tance of Sade’s vehement protest against the Christian ethic, but he
disagrees over the precise meaning of the opposition. Whereas for
Klossowski, it paradoxically signalled Sade’s implicit love of God, for
Lacan it is indicative of his retreat from the sphere of jouissance, and of
his ongoing attachment to the dialectic between desire and the Law
(p. 667).
To understand Lacan’s point, one needs to consult his remarks in
Seminar VII on Freud’s own critique of the Biblical commandment, in
the fifth chapter of Civilization and its Discontents (Freud, 1964b,
pp. 109–112). Questioning the rationale, the meaning and the feasibility
of the injunction, Freud formulated a whole string of arguments against
it, the strongest one referring to the fact that the neighbour is not
particularly deserving of my love if it turns out that he is not at all like
me, that he does not present me with an ideal image of myself, or that he
does not show any kind of love and consideration for me. ‘If the
commandment had run “Love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves
thee”’, Freud conceded, ‘I should not take exception to it’ (Freud,
1964b, p. 110), but since in most cases the neighbour is a complete
stranger, and one who may not be particularly well disposed towards me,
but rather appears as my enemy, it is absurd to expect of me that I give
him my unconditional love. Whereas one cannot fully comply with the
commandment, Freud nonetheless understood its source and origin:
‘The element of truth behind all this . . . is that men are not gentle
creatures who want to be loved . . . ; they are, on the contrary, creatures
among whose instinctual endowments [Triebbegäbungen] is to be reck-
oned a powerful share of aggressiveness’ (Freud, 1964b, p. 111). And in
what sounded almost like an uncanny echo of Sade’s pamphleteer, Freud
concluded that the commandment ‘is really justified by the fact that
nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man’
(Freud, 1964b, p. 112). Of course, this is only an echo of Sade inasmuch
 Some More Effort . . . 135

as Freud too believed that the ‘original nature of man’ or the ‘laws of
nature’ were intrinsically violent, brutal and cruel. Whereas for Freud,
man’s natural aggressiveness justified the commandment—much like
the law of the incest-prohibition is justified because of the ‘natural’ desire
to commit incest—for Sade the ‘cruel nature of man’ made the com-
mandment unjustifiable. Apart from this, Sade and Freud would no
doubt also have agreed that the commandment remains absurd, and
needs to be exposed in its fallacious assumptions.
When commenting on these passages in Seminar VII, Lacan made
three important observations. First, he pointed out that the command-
ment not only governs the relationship between ‘man’ and ‘fellow man’
(the ‘Nebenmensch’, who is not identical to me, but someone who is in
the position of a stranger), but also the relationship of ‘man’ to himself.
As such, Lacan assimilated the commandment back within an intra-
subjective dynamic between the subject and what is simultaneously most
intimate and most alien to him, and what could be designated as the
‘neighbour within me’ (Lacan, 1992, p. 76). Second, he argued that
Freud’s scepticism about the neighbour’s good intentions should also be
applied to the subject who stands before this neighbour. If evil is found
to dwell in my neighbour’s heart, then there is no reason to think that it
would not also dwell in mine (Lacan, 1992, p. 186). Third, following
Freud’s argument about the inter-dependence of the Biblical command-
ment and the ‘natural’ cruelty of man, Lacan articulated a new, para-
doxical interpretation of why human beings (Sade, Freud and no doubt
quite a few others) back away from it: ‘The resistance to the command-
ment “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” and the resistance that
is exercised to prevent his [the human being’s] access to jouissance are
one and the same thing’ (Lacan, 1992, p. 194). This is a paradoxical
interpretation, because one may reasonably expect someone to oppose
the commandment in order to reclaim the right to cruelty. In this vein,
Sade’s pamphleteer would reject it, because he wants to reinstate the
right to jouissance. Lacan’s reading is counter-intuitive, here, because it
proposes that in rejecting the one (the commandment), one also rejects
the other (what the commandment is designed to regulate and deplete,
the ‘natural cruelty’, which Lacan conceptualized as jouissance). Whereas
the opposition to the commandment may be perceived as stemming
136 14 Some More Effort . . .

from a human being’s desire to see the ‘law of nature’ being recognized,
Lacan thus inverted the dynamic. The opposition to the command, or
the human being’s retreat before its principle, is identical to the retreat
before the cruelty that lies within us, precisely because the command (as
Freud posited) is built upon the premise that cruelty resides in our
hearts. ‘[T]he retreat from “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”
is the same thing as the barrier to jouissance’, Lacan continued. ‘I retreat
from loving my neighbour as myself [and, we may add, from loving the
neighbour within myself], because there is something on the horizon
there that is engaged in some form of intolerable cruelty. In that sense,
to love one’s neighbour may be the cruelest of choices’ (Lacan, 1992,
p. 194).5
In ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan conveyed these ideas in two highly con-
densed paragraphs. He first of all stated that Sade ‘refuses to be my
neighbour’ (p. 666)—as exemplified in the pamphleteer’s rejection of
the commandment—and then indicated that this refusal, which Sade
shared with Freud, originates in the fact that he ‘does not have neigh-
bourly enough relations with his own malice [méchanceté] to encounter
his neighbour in it’ (p. 666).6 In light of Lacan’s observations in Seminar
VII, the latter point can be rephrased as Sade being unable to accept the
command because he could not face the naked reality of his own cruelty.
And this also explains why the pamphleteer was adamant ‘to wipe out
forever the atrocity of capital punishment’ (Sade, 2006, p. 119)—not so
much, as he himself put it, because it is unjust with reference to the
reigning law of Nature, and ineffective with regard to the prevention of
crime, but because the death penalty is an essential correlate of the
Christian doctrine of Charity (the love of one’s neighbour).7 Hence,

5
For more extensive explorations of Lacan’s conceptualization of the neighbour, see De Kesel
(2009, pp. 140–152), Žižek et al. (2005) and Neill (2011, pp. 150–167).
6
The original French sentence reads ‘Nous croyons que Sade n’est pas assez voisin de sa propre
méchanceté, pour y rencontrer son prochain’, in which Lacan plays off ‘voisin’ and ‘prochain’—the
two French words for neighbour—and conjures up Sade’s own epithet (méchanceté) of God in
Saint-Fond’s discourse.
7
On the Christian dimension of the cruelty associated with the death penalty, both with reference
to Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s categorical imperative, and to Lacan’s reading of Sade, see Derrida
(2014, pp. 158–165).
 Some More Effort . . . 137

rather than being truthful to his proposed liberation of desire, in the

uncompromising expression of a ruthless will to jouissance, Sade had
once again failed to achieve his goal, remaining stuck ‘at the point where
desire and the law become bound up with each other’ (p. 667).
Bringing his paper to a close, Lacan contended that the law from
which Sade wanted to liberate desire, and which he found himself
perpetually reconfirming, is not just an external legal principle, but
also, and primarily, an internal law, which operates as the necessary
pre-condition for the emergence of desire, and allows the prohibited
object (the inaccessible Thing) to become invested with the fantasy of
limitless jouissance. Alluding to Saint Paul’s epistle to the Romans, he
endorsed the thesis that the presence of the law makes sin ‘inordinately
sinful’ (p. 667); it is only by virtue of the law that sin acquires ‘an
excessive, hyperbolic character’ (Lacan, 1992, p. 84).8 Whether through
his endlessly repeated paeans to crime, or in his carefully choreographed
sexual installations, which are ideally designed to integrate as many
sacrilegious acts as possible, Sade is time and again compelled to accept
the Law or to reinstate a figuration of the Supreme Being. It is not that
his flesh is weak, Lacan commented (p. 667), but that his spirit is too
willing ‘not to be deluded’ by the idea that the abolition of the law
would truly liberate desire.9 If Sade, through the mouth of his libertine
heroes, professes a radical belief in the inexhaustible force of ‘mother
Nature’, then this is no more than a ‘typical dream of potency’ (p. 667),
in which we would be foolish to place our faith. Dream or fantasy,

8
The reference is to Romans 7: 7–13: ‘(7) What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay,
I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt
not covet. (8) But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of
concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead. (9) For I was alive without the law once: but
when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. (10) And the commandment, which was
ordained to life, I found to be onto death. (11) For sin, taking occasion by the commandment,
deceived me, and by it slew me. (12) Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and
just, and good. (13) Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it
might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment
might become exceedingly sinful.’ For Lacan’s comments on these lines in Seminar VII, see Lacan
(1992, pp. 83, 177 and 189).
9
The wording is once again Biblical and taken from Matthew 26: 41: ‘Watch and pray, that ye
enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’
138 14 Some More Effort . . .

potency or jouissance, Sade had failed to re-enter mother Nature’s

bosom, because he had been incapable of escaping his ‘submission to
the Law’ (p. 667).10 And this is what Lacan also recognized in the final
scene of Philosophy in the Boudoir, at the point where Eugénie takes a
‘huge needle and a thick, red, waxen thread’ (Sade, 2006, p. 171) and
starts sewing up her mother’s vagina, after she has been dutifully infected
with syphilis by Dolmancé’s servant Lapierre.11 Without shying away

10
Lacan again referred to Klossowski here, in what may be a deliberately modified quotation
about Sade’s alleged apathy. Klossowski wrote: ‘En se comparant à autrui, le philosophe de l’apathie
affermit sa conviction qu’il est seul; ou plutôt, qu’il a cessé d’appartenir au monde unique de tous les
hommes, et qu’il est parvenu à l’état de veille, dans son propre monde, au sein de la Nature’
(Klossowski, 1947, p. 94). In English, the sentence could be translated as: ‘In comparing himself
to others, the philosopher of apathy strengthens his conviction that he is alone; or rather, that he
has stopped belonging to the unique world of all men, and that he has attained, in a waking state,
in his own world, the bosom of Nature’. To this sentence, Klossowski attached a footnote: ‘Tel
semble être l’aboutissement nécessaire de la pensée sadiste. Ce n’est pas à dire que les personnages de Sade
y parviennent, ni peut-être même Sade’ (Klossowski, 1947, p. 94, footnote 1). In translation: ‘This
seems to be the necessary outcome of sadist thinking. Which is not to say that Sade’s characters
succeed in it, and perhaps Sade does not succeed in it either’. In ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan quotes a
section of Klossowski’s sentence as follows: ‘d’être rentré au sein de la nature, à l’état de veille, dans
notre [sic] monde’, which Fink has translated as ‘returned to nature’s bosom, in the waking state, in
our world’ (p. 667). Apart from reordering the sentence, Lacan changes ‘son propre monde’ (his
own world) into ‘notre monde’ (our world), whereby he qualifies the latter as ‘inhabited by
language’ (p. 667). It seems to me that Lacan could have deliberately altered the structure and
meaning of the sentence, because he wanted to indicate that the philosopher of apathy (the
libertines, Sade himself), rather than entering an otherworldly ‘natural’ world, had only entered
our common, symbolic world. In his annotations to ‘Kant with Sade’, Fink claims that the
sentence (and the note) appear in the English version of Klossowski’s book, but this is not the case.
As I mentioned above, the English version is based on the 1967 edition of Sade mon prochain, and
for this edition Klossowski deleted the passage in question.
11
The scene reminded Lacan of a sequence in Luis Buñuel’s 1953 film El—subsequently released
in the US as This Strange Passion—in which the morbidly jealous male protagonist Francisco
Galvan (played by Arturo de Córdova) at one point enters his wife’s bedroom with a curved
needle, thread, scissors, rope, cotton wool and antiseptic. The viewer is left to imagine what he
intends to do to his wife with these tools, because the bedroom door closes, shutting the camera
out. In 1954, Buñuel was asked about the link between this sequence and the shocking finale of
Philosophy in the Boudoir, to which he responded: ‘When choosing certain elements I did not really
think of imitating Sade, but it’s possible I did so unconsciously. I’m more naturally inclined to
view and conceive a situation from a Sadian [sic] or sadistic point of view rather than, say, a
neorealistic or mystical one. I said to myself: What should the character use—a gun? a knife? a
chair? I ended up choosing more disturbing objects, that’s all’ (Bazin, 1982, p. 92). As to Lacan’s
endorsement of the film, Buñuel wrote in his autobiography: ‘In general, [the film] wasn’t very
well received . . . My only consolation came from Jacques Lacan, who saw the film at a special
screening for psychiatrists at the Cinémathèque in Paris and praised certain of its psychological
truths’ (Buñuel, 1983, pp. 203–204).
 Some More Effort . . . 139

from a certain degree of vulgar psychoanalytic reductionism, Lacan

interpreted the scene as Eugénie resolving her penis envy—more speci-
fically, the hatred towards her mother instilled by the fact that she
blames her for not having a penis—by sending her mother off on the
path of a painful yet certain death, and as proof of the fact that, when all
is said and done, ‘the mother remains prohibited’: ‘Noli tangere matrem.
Raped and sewn shut’ (p. 667).12 Lacan wrote that Sade’s decision to
replace Diotima—the Maninean priestess who initiated Socrates into the
mysteries of love, according to Plato’s Symposium (Plato, 2004, pp. 41–
56)—with Dolmancé as the main instructor evidently did not help when
it came to ‘closing the affair’, not in the least because Dolmancé is
known to have the strongest repulsion for ‘the usual orifice’ (the vagina)
(p. 667). Yet as to Eugénie’s penis envy, he seemed to ignore the fact that
before sewing up her mother’s vagina, and Dolmancé subsequently
doing the same to her anus, Eugénie had already penetrated her mother
vaginally with a massive dildo, which would effectively contradict the
idea that the mother remains off limits. Indeed, apart from the fact that
at the end of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan engaged in a crude type of
psychoanalytic reductionism, it is not quite true that in the final scene
of Philosophy in the Boudoir the maternal body appears as fundamentally
prohibited, because Madame de Mistival is only sewn shut after she has
been penetrated and infected. It would be more accurate to say that the
closure of her orifices serves the purpose of ensuring that she really does
meet her end, in a ‘sadistic’ reversal of the healing function of the suture.
In addition, as to the entire scene being submitted to the law, Lacan
could have tried to substantiate his argument by referring to the fact that
the libertines feel all the more permitted and encouraged to immolate
Madame de Mistival, because they have actually received a letter of
approval from Eugénie’s father. Indeed, at the beginning of the sixth

12
Noli tangere matrem (Do not touch the mother) is Lacan’s variant of what Jesus says to Mary
Magdalene in the Latin version of John 20: 17: ‘Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not [Noli me
tangere]; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.’ The sentence ‘Raped and sewn shut’ translates
Lacan’s ‘V . . . ée et cousue’ and thus closes the ellipsis by interpreting V . . . ée as Violée (raped).
However, at least two other interpretations are possible, and Lacan clearly wanted the reader to
consider all of these: Vérolée (infected with syphilis) and Voilée (veiled).
140 14 Some More Effort . . .

dialogue, a letter is delivered to Madame de Saint-Ange, in which

Eugénie’s father addresses himself directly to the libertine commère: ‘I
ask you to punish my spouse rigorously . . . Please do me a favour and
pull the wool over her eyes thoroughly, and believe me: no matter how
far you drive the girl’s instruction, I won’t complain . . . Whatever you
do is fine so far as I’m concerned . . . I beg you: don’t send Eugénie back
to me unless she’s well instructed. I’m willing to let you gather the first
harvest, but rest assured that you will also have worked a bit for me’
(Sade 2006, pp. 158–159). Yet in this respect, the paternal law does not
really ‘close the affair’, but opens it up to libertine intervention—rather
than prohibiting access to the maternal body, the paternal law enables
and facilitates the whole process (Sade, 2006, p. 172).
Nonetheless, Lacan stated that Sade’s works contain little or nothing
by way of a treatise on desire in its pure form (p. 667), i.e. in its naked
detachment from the law. At the most, they include some rational
declarations on the status of desire, and some reasons for the insepar-
ability of desire and the Law, as it manifests itself in the eroto-philoso-
phical encounters between a loose band of ferocious libertines and a
largely interchangeable succession of virtuous victims (p. 667).
 Conclusion

When Georges Bataille died in July 1962, there was never any doubt
that a special issue of Critique, the journal he had founded in 1946,
should be devoted to his memory and legacy. The issue eventually
appeared as a double installment in August 1963, four months after
Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ had been published in Critique, and it featured
tributes to the journal’s founder by some of France’s most renowned
intelligentsia, including Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre
Klossowski, Michel Foucault and Michel Leiris. In his lengthy contribu-
tion to the commemorative issue, Foucault paid homage to Bataille’s
philosophical analyses of sexuality, eroticism and transgression, which
prompted him to revisit the influence and impact of Sade on the
development of a language and space for human desire. ‘How is it
possible to discover, under all these different figures’, Foucault won-
dered, ‘that form of thought we carelessly call “the philosophy of
eroticism”, but in which it is important to recognize . . . an essential
experience for our culture since Kant and Sade—the experience of
finitude and being, of the limit and transgression?’ (Foucault, 1977,
p. 40). Given the fact that Lacan had recently devoted an entire essay to
the not-quite-obvious link between Kant and Sade, and notably in the

© The Author(s) 2017 141

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0
142 Conclusion

same journal, one could have expected Foucault to engage with Lacan’s
text, or at least to provide the reader with a reference to it, especially
since Lacan himself had expressed his appreciation for Foucault’s work,
in an act of intellectual generosity for which he was not particularly well-
known. But Foucault remained silent about ‘Kant with Sade’.
When, in 1965, Jean-Jacques Pauvert decided to extract ‘Français,
encore un effort . . . ’ from La philosophie dans le boudoir, in order to
release it as a separate volume, Blanchot accepted the task to write a
new preface for it, in which he duly acknowledged the ‘profound
reflections of both Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski’ (Blanchot,
1993, p. 219), yet without paying any attention to Lacan’s essay.
Critique was sufficiently well-established for Blanchot to have known
about the text, and given its central concern with Philosophy in the
Boudoir, and the pamphlet within it, it is quite unlikely that Blanchot
had not consulted it. Maybe he had decided to ignore it on account of
the fact that Lacan himself had failed to mention Blanchot’s own
previous work on Sade in it, despite his clearly having relied on it.
Much like Foucault, Blanchot remained silent about ‘Kant with Sade’.
A year after ‘Kant with Sade’ was included in Écrits, the French literary
avant-garde journal Tel Quel devoted a special issue to ‘La pensée de Sade’
(Sade’s Thought), including some of the usual suspects (Klossowski,
Barthes), alongside essays by the writer Phillippe Sollers, the philosopher
Hubert Damisch and the psychoanalyst Michel Tort. The latter figure was
broadly sympathetic to the Lacanian cause, and was an active participant in
Lacan’s seminar. In his essay entitled ‘L’effet Sade’ (‘The Sade effect’) (Tort,
1967), he wrote extensively about the fantasy, without distinguishing—as
Lacan had done—between Sade’s literary fantasy and that which would
have ruled the Marquis’ life, and without showing any trace of a certain
‘Lacan effect’ on his own, distinctly psychoanalytic views. None of the
other contributors to the special issue made a single mention of ‘Kant
with Sade’ either. In 1967, Gilles Deleuze published a lengthy introduction
to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, which was as much a study
of Sade and sadism as it was an exploration of Sacher-Masoch and
masochism (Deleuze, 1991). Deleuze relied on all the established French
Sade-scholars (Klossowski, Bataille, Blanchot), and drew extensively on
psychoanalytic concepts to argue in favour of a strict separation of sadism
 Conclusion 143

and masochism. In addition, he engaged with Kant’s conception of the

categorical imperative in the Critique of Practical Reason, referred to the
theoretical disquisitions of Philosophy in the Boudoir, and analysed the
moral principles underpinning Sade and Masoch’s (fictional) ideologies.
Deleuze acknowledged Lacan for highlighting the significance of Freud’s
concept of disavowal (Verleugnung), and for arguing that what has been
excluded symbolically will return in the real (Deleuze, 1991, pp. 31 and
64), yet as to Lacan’s arguments in ‘Kant with Sade’, he merely pointed
out, in a footnote, that Lacan had underscored in it the ‘elusive character of
the object of the law’ (Deleuze, 1991, p. 137, note 26). In February 1968, a
two-day conference on Sade was organized in Aix-en-Provence, which
brought together a large gathering of literary critics, eighteenth-century
scholars, philosophers and psychoanalysts. In his paper on the sadistic
fantasy and reality, the psychoanalyst Jacques Caïn—a member of the
Société Psychanalytique de Paris who was not at all attuned to Lacan’s ideas
—mentioned how Lacan had made an important contribution to the issue
in question, yet there is no evidence that he had studied Lacan’s paper
(Caïn, 1968, p. 283). When, in March 1970, Foucault gave a long lecture
on Sade at the State University of New York in Buffalo, his choice of
subject-matter (‘Why did Sade write?’ and the incessant alternation
between ‘theoretical discourses’ and ‘erotic scenes’ in Sade’s libertine
novels) prompted him to investigate the function of writing and the fantasy
for connecting truth to desire. On occasion, Foucault’s words had an
unmistakable Lacanian ring to them, as when he asserted that ‘writing
[in the case of Sade] serves as an intermediary element between the
imaginary and the real’ (Foucault, 2015, p. 107), yet at no given point
was Lacan mentioned by name, and his ‘Kant with Sade’ never explicitly
appeared on Foucault’s radar. When, during the early 1970s, the Italian
film director Pier Paolo Pasolini decided to adapt Sade’s The 120 Days of
Sodom into a film, he reportedly ‘read everything [on Sade] that could be
read’ (Brighelli, 2000, p. 276). Most unusual for a film, the end credits of
Salò contained an ‘essential bibliography’ of five key texts, listed in alpha-
betical order by the author’s surname: Barthes, Blanchot, de Beauvoir,
Klossowski, Sollers. Sade-scholars no doubt deplored the absence of
Bataille, Deleuze, Foucault, Paulhan, Heine and Lely, but did anyone
deplore the absence of Lacan?
144 Conclusion

On 29 October 1974, Lacan was in Rome for a conference of his École

freudienne de Paris. Questioned by an Italian journalist about his pur-
portedly Kantian concept of the real, he responded: ‘I have written only
one thing about Kant, which is my short paper entitled “Kant with
Sade”. To be quite frank, I make Kant into a flower of sadism [fleur
sadique]. No one paid the slightest attention to that article. Some
second-rate fellow commented on it somewhere, and I don’t even
know if his commentary was ever published. But no one has ever sent
me any remarks on that article. It is true that I am incomprehensible’
(Lacan, 2013a, p. 83). I am not quite sure who Lacan had in mind, here,
when he referred to the ‘second-rate fellow’. Maybe he was thinking of
the anonymous author of the Paraphrase de ‘Kant avec Sade’, which had
indeed been published in 1970, notably in Lacan’s own journal Scilicet
(NN, 1970). If so, the designation ‘second-rate’ was definitely justified,
partly because the text was effectively no more than a loose paraphrase,
written in so convoluted a style that Lacan’s own essay reverts back into
‘light reading’, partly because it only restated a very small portion of
Lacan’s original essay. The only essay that was published during Lacan’s
life-time in which the author explicitly engaged with ‘Kant with Sade’ is
by Sollers (1977), yet his remarks only cover the last three sections of the
text and do not address Lacan’s reading of Kant nor, for that matter, the
two schemas, the complex dynamic between desire and the Law, and the
problematic relationship between Sade (the man, the author) and his
‘Sadean fantasy’. As such, it is fair to say that throughout Lacan’s lifetime
‘Kant with Sade’ was completely ignored by Sade-scholars, philosophers
and psychoanalysts alike. Maybe the Sade-scholars believed that Lacan
was too much of a psychoanalyst and not enough of a literary critic to be
taken seriously. Maybe the philosophers thought that Lacan was too
much of a Sade-scholar and insufficiently versed in the Kantian tradition
to be given credit for his work. Maybe the psychoanalysts felt that
Lacan’s paper was too literary-philosophical, and lacking in concrete
clinical applications to be given serious consideration. Maybe all of them
agreed that ‘Kant with Sade’ was simply unreadable, either because this
is what they had heard, or because this is what they had discovered
through personal experience. And after all, Lacan himself had admitted
that the text was incomprehensible . . .
 Conclusion 145

Ignored and neglected by one and all, ‘Kant with Sade’ nonetheless
received a great deal of attention by Lacan himself, more in fact than
most of his other essays in Écrits. After its first publication in April
1963, Lacan returned to ‘Kant with Sade’ on a regular basis in his
seminars, not only in the context of his yearlong seminar on The Logic
of the Fantasy (Lacan, 1966–67), but equally in further elaborations of
his theory of desire, and in advanced conceptual developments of the
inter-relations between jouissance, desire and truth. ‘As to “Kant with
Sade”, I’ve written things that are actually pretty good’, he admitted to
his audience in March 1974, ‘things no one evidently understands . . . ’
(Lacan, 1973–74, session of 19 March 1974). Of the 34 essays that
were included in Écrits, ‘Kant with Sade’ comes third in Lacan’s tally of
references to his own work, after the seminal ‘Rome Discourse’ (Lacan,
2006g) and the 1955 paper on ‘The Freudian Thing’ (Lacan, 2006b),
although the latter paper received only one more mention than ‘Kant
with Sade’ (Le Gaufey et al., 1998, p. 66). If ‘Kant with Sade’ had been
published 10 years earlier, or some time during the 1950s—but it
would undoubtedly have been a very different text—Lacan would have
had more time to re-engage with his essay, and it may very well have
come out top of the list. Unlike his contemporaries, including those
philosophers and psychoanalysts attending his seminar, Lacan thought
extremely highly of ‘Kant with Sade’ and did not let an opportunity go
by to remind his audience of what he had accomplished in it—
incomprehensible as it may have been.
Since Lacan’s death in 1981, ‘Kant with Sade’ has received more
extensive critical attention, both in France and in other parts of the
world, yet compared to some of Lacan’s other adventures in the world
of literature, such as the essay on E. A. Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’ (Lacan,
2006c), the seminar sessions on Antigone (Lacan, 1992, pp. 241–287),
and the yearlong seminar on Joyce (Lacan, 2016), ‘Kant with Sade’ is
by no means a household reference in contemporary explorations of
the so-called ‘literary Lacan’. This is all the more remarkable since one
of Lacan’s main arguments in ‘Kant with Sade’, which set him apart
from mainstream psychoanalytic interpretations of literary texts, is that
there is no strict correspondence between authors and their work,
between the author’s subjective fantasy and the literary fantasy that
146 Conclusion

appears in the space of creative imagination. Indeed, over and above

Lacan’s claim that Sade had revealed Kant’s truth—insofar as he had
demonstrated how a purely formal law, which excludes all considera-
tions for empirical objects and dispels pleasure and emotion as mere
pathological motives for dutiful compliance, does not by definition
facilitate the advent of the highest good, but may easily descend into
the sphere of radical evil—‘Kant with Sade’ offers a truly innovative
perspective on the status and function of creative writing, which does
away with conventional psychoanalytic reductionism.
Finally, whereas with few exceptions Lacan’s text continues to be
ignored by Kant- and Sade-scholars alike, since Lacan’s death psycho-
analysts and psychoanalytically inclined philosophers and cultural
critics have been more responsive to its message. Unfortunately, this
has not always implied that the subtleties and intricacies of Lacan’s
arguments have been properly appreciated, nor that the text has been
given the close reading that it most definitely requires and deserves. To
add insult to injury, psychoanalytic commentators have often injected
concepts and ideas into Lacan’s paper that seem most alien to it. The
most striking example concerns the notions of perversion and sadism.
The former only appears once in Lacan’s entire text, in the very first
paragraph, and in a fairly trivial context. If the latter appears more
frequently, Lacan always seems to qualify its meaning, never goes so far
as to advance a psychoanalytic theory of sadism, does not conflate the
‘Sadean fantasy’ with the clinical category of sadism, and radically
avoids mapping the ‘Sadean fantasy’ onto Sade’s subjectivity. Purely
relying on Lacan’s text, it is impossible to say that it deals with
perversion, sadism or sado-masochism, much less with Sade’s sadism.
Remarkably, this has not stopped even the most astute commentators
from claiming that ‘Kant with Sade’ is an essay on perversion, on the
perverse fantasy, or on fantasy in perversion (Miller, 1998, p. 74).
Were Lacan to have wanted to conceive his essay as a psychoanalytic
contribution to the study of perversion, then there is no doubt in my
mind that he would have said so, or that he would have used the
requisite terminology. And the same may be said for other notions that
are undoubtedly related to the scope of Lacan’s text, but that do not
appear within its texture, not even implicitly: the Real, the Symbolic
 Conclusion 147

and the Imaginary, anxiety, the phallus, the Oedipus complex, the
Name-of-the-Father, identification. In many ways, ‘Kant with Sade’
still remains to be discovered and properly evaluated in its implications
for the status of Kantian moral philosophy, the style and scope of
Sade’s libertine novels, the psychoanalytic conceptions of desire, jouis-
sance, fantasy and the Law, and the power of creative writing as literary
fantasy.
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 Index

A B
Adorno, Theodor W., xxviii–xxix, Bad(ness), 10–12
xxxi, 6, 15 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 6
Alienation, 47, 51, Barthes, Roland, 141–143
55–56, 63 Bataille, Georges, xxx, 85, 141–143
Allouch, Jean, xviii Baudelaire, Charles, 5
Amboceptor, 32 Beauty, 59
Analytic propositions, 14–15, 25 Being-in-the-world, 34, 37, 39
Antigone, 130, 145 Belmor (libertine), 44, 94
Anti-weight, 13 Benevolence, 13
Anxiety, 146–147 Between two deaths, 59
Aphanisis, 58 Black fetish, 39, 83, 94, 122
Apollinaire, Guillaume, xxiv Black humour, 20, 33, 76, 128
Apologue, 95, 99, Blanchot, Maurice, xxx, 3, 6, 38,
105, 107 52–54, 56, 58, 61, 141–143
Arendt, Hannah, xxxi Bloch, Iwan, 1
Aristotle, 4, 122 Body, 19, 23–24, 33, 45, 57, 89, 126
Ataraxia, 36, 114, 117 maternal, xviii, 139–140
Atheism, 131 Boehme, Jakob, 36

© The Author(s) 2017 167

D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0
168 Index

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 80 D
Bonnefoy, Yves, xxiv Damisch, Hubert, 142
Borghese, Olympia (libertine), 43, 100 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 5
Breton, André, 2, 76 Death, 7, 38, 43, 61–62, 95, 100,
Brissenden, Robert Francis, 33 108, 122
Bruegel the Elder, Pieter, 111 second, 45, 62–63, 65–67,
Buddha, 92 82, 123
Buddhism, 67 transcendental, 57
Buloz, François, 67 Death drive, 65–69
Burnouf, Eugène, 67–68 Death penalty, 95–96, 121, 136
De Beauvoir, Simone, xxix, 3, 75–76,
85, 143
C De La Fontaine, Jean, 91
Caïn, Jacques, 143 Deleuze, Gilles, 142–143
Calculus, 58 Desire, xix, xxv, 6, 26, 38–39,
Capitalism, 69 42, 44–45, 49, 52, 59, 62,
Carter, Angela, 22 75, 85, 87–92, 95–97,
Categorical imperative, 12–15, 19, 99–100, 104, 110, 113–118,
21, 24, 94–95, 107–109, 113, 122, 125, 135, 140–141,
115, 117, 143 143–146
Cause, 55 law of, 87, 94, 97, 113, 119,
Celsus, 30 123, 126–127, 129, 134,
Chaplin, Charlie, 91 137, 140, 144
Charles V, 111 lawless, xix
Chrysippus, 114 liberation of, 119–120, 123, 127,
Cicero, 114 137, 140
Clairwil (libertine), 41, 123 nature’s, 55, 93, 118, 122
Claudel, Paul, 130, 132 object of, xviii, 89, 111
Cleanthes, 114 as the Other’s desire, 93–94, 110
Comedy, Comic, xxv, 21, 105 Sade’s, 78, 125
Communism, 69 subject of, 92
Compulsion to repeat, 65 unconscious, 115
Conscience, 21 Destruction, xxvi, 52, 54, 57, 59, 67,
Constancy principle, 65, 68 71, 73, 75, 89, 118, 122–123,
Contempt, 30, 33, 96 127, 131, 133
Coulmier, François Simonet Diotima, 139
de, 102–103 Disavowal, 143
Courtly love, 16, 99, 105 Displeasure, 10, 12
 Index 169

Dolmancé (libertine), 17–18, 22, 27,
30–31, 33–34, 38, 45, 49, 54,
60, 77, 138–139
Dream, 18, 68, 73, 137
Duc de Blangis (libertine), 75
Dühren, Eugène, 1
Du Plessix Gray, Francine, 58
Duty, xxx, 8, 94, 108–110
E 103–104, 108, 119–121, 131
Ego, 4, 115
pleasure-, 53
purified, 53
reality-, 53
Ehrlich, Paul, 32
Eichmann, Adolf, xxxi, xxxiii
Epictetus, 30, 114
Epicurus/Epicureanism, 114–16
Eugénie, 17–18, 22, 30–31, 33, 45,
77, 126–127, 138–140
Evil, 5–6, 35, 100, 118, 121, 132
delight in, 5–6, 11
happiness in, 122
F highest good, 7–8, 10, 13, 15–16,
Fantasy, 6, 32, 37–38, 41–45,
48–51, 54–55, 58, 60, 75, 80,
82–83, 87, 93–94, 123, 126,
134, 137, 142–143, 146
algebraic notation, 48
fundamental, 48, 50, 73
inverted, 49–50, 52
of limitless jouissance, 137
literary, 73, 76, 123, 126, 131,
142, 145–146
perverse, 146
Sadean, xxvi, 47–63, 70, 73, 85,
87, 89, 125–126, 132, 144, 146
Sadistic, 38–39, 42, 47, 55, 71,
93, 143
unconscious function, 48
Fink, Bruce, xxiii
Foucault, Michel, xxx, 101, 103,
141–143
Francis I, 111
Freedom, 8, 33, 95, 99, 101,
Freud, Sigmund, 2–5, 18, 20, 32, 53,
65–66, 68–69, 97, 113, 115,
134–136, 143
Freudo-sadism, 2
Fromm, Erich, 69
G
Gaze, 111–112
God, 8, 37, 52–53, 59, 131–132, 134
as supreme intelligence, 7, 35–36
as supreme cause of nature, 7
death of, 131
enjoyment of, 35
Good, Goodness, 10–12, 132
29, 34–35, 57, 88, 113, 146
Grimmigkeit, 36
H
Hallucination, 35
Happiness, 7, 34–35, 88, 113–118,
120, 122
politicization of, 119
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 93,
111
170 Index

Heine, Maurice, xvi, xxiii, xxx, 2–3, Joyce, James, 145

62, 143
Hesnard, Angelo, xvi, xxiv
Holiness, 7, 88, 113, 118
Horkheimer, Max, xxviii–xxix, xxxi,
6, 15
Human rights, 20, 25, 99, 103–104,
109
Humiliation, 30
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 5
I
Identification, 146
Imaginary, 143, 146
Immortality, 7, 12, 69, 71, 84, 89,
94, 113, 118
Incentive, 13, 44, 114
Instrument, 38, 45, 49, 51, 55–57,
89, 93, 118, 132–133
Inter-subjectivity, 22
J Klossowski, Pierre, xvi, xxii–xxiii,
Janin, Jules, 84
Jarry, Alfred, 15
Jérôme (libertine), 41, 123
Joke, 129
Jouissance, 22–23, 27, 30–33, 38–45,
52, 54, 57, 75, 77, 100, 103,
108–109, 125–126, 129,
134–138, 145–146
law of, 23, 25–27
object(ive) of, 59
right to, 21, 24–26, 31–33,
50–53, 73, 78–79, 87,
122–124, 135
will to, 31–32, 42, 49, 52–56,
79–80, 83, 93, 137
Juliette (libertine), 40–41, 43–44,
61, 94, 100, 124
Justine (Sadean victim)47, 59–60,
75, 77
K
Kant, Immanuel, xvi, xxv, xxviii–xxx,
xxxii, 6–12, 14–16, 21, 24–25,
29, 31, 34–35, 37, 44, 50, 53,
56–57, 87, 92–93, 95–96, 99,
103–105, 107–111, 113–115,
117, 119, 141, 143–144, 146
Critique of Practical Reason, xxvi,
xxviii, xxx, 6, 8–10, 13–16, 29,
88, 92, 95, 104, 110, 113, 143
Critique of Pure Reason, 14, 35
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals, 8
Keller, Rose, 100
Kenny, Anthony, 117
xxx, 61, 65, 67, 131–132, 134,
141–143
Kojève, Alexandre, 93, 111
Krafft-Ebing, Richard vonxv, 1–3
L
Lacan, Jacques, xiii–xv, xvii–xxi,
xxiii, xxv–xxvii, xxix–xxxiii,
3–8, 10–11, 13–16, 18–19,
22–26, 30–35, 37, 38, 42–45,
47–48, 51–54, 56, 59, 61, 63,
65–69, 71, 73–85, 87–88, 92,
95–96, 99–101, 103–105,
107–109, 111, 113, 115,

120–124, 127–8, 130,
132–134, 136, 138–146
“Kant with Sade”, xiii–xiv, xvi,
xviii–xx, xxii–xxiii, xxv–xxvii,
xxix, xxxii–xxxiii, 3, 6–9, 11,
13–15, 19, 32–34, 38, 47,
50–53, 56, 58, 67, 71, 73,
77–78, 85, 88, 96, 109, 120,
122–123, 128, 136, 139,
141–146
Écrits, xiii–xiv, xx, xxi–xxiii, xxxii,
19, 22, 47, 51, 123, 142, 145
“Position of the Unconscious”, 47
“Rome Discourse”, 145
“Seminar on ‘The Purloined
Letter’”, xxiv
Seminar IV, Object Relations, 32
Seminar V, The Formations of the
Unconscious, 48
Seminar VI, Desire and Its
Interpretation, 48
Seminar VII, The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, xv, xxxii, 59,
63, 67, 89, 95, 100, 108,
120, 134–136
Seminar VIII, Transference, 48
Seminar IX, Identification, xv, xx
Seminar X, Anxiety, xv, 32, 77
Seminar XI, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, 47, 51, 55
Seminar XIV, The Logic of the
Fantasy, 145
“The Direction of the
Treatment”, 120
“The Freudian Thing”, 145
“The Youth of Gide”, xxiv
Lack, 48, 51
Index 171
Lapierre (libertine), 60, 138
Lautréamont, Comte de, 5
Law, xxv, 6, 11, 24–25, 30–31, 34,
88, 93, 100, 104, 108–110,
113, 115, 117, 119–121,
125–127, 133, 137–140, 146
liberation of, 119
moral, xxviii, 8, 11–16, 21,
24–26, 29, 32–35, 42, 44, 50,
54, 56–57, 63, 90, 92, 96,
99–100, 108, 114, 118–119
natural, 108, 122
of Nature, 117–118, 133,
135–136
of pleasure, 42
paternal, xviii, 140
a priori, 12
symbolic, 97, 111, 129
Leiris, Michel, 141
Lely, Gilbert, xiv–xvii, xxx, 3, 62, 75,
143
Libertine, 22, 30–31, 33–34, 37,
40–45, 47–50, 52–56, 58–61,
70–71, 73, 75–77, 89,
117–118, 121–124, 131
Life drive, 65
Love, 134
courtly, 16, 99, 105
Low, Barbara, 68
M
Marcus Aurelius, 114
Masochism, xxvi, 4, 69–70, 77–78,
142–143
Maxim, 12, 15, 19, 21, 51, 110
Sadean, 19–20, 22, 24–25, 30, 51
Melancholia, 68
172 Index

Miller, Jacques-Alain, xiii, xvii, xxiii of the moral law, 8, 12, 14, 16,
Mirbeau, Octave, 5 33–35, 57, 88, 113, 143
Mirvel, Chevalier de (libertine), 17, 31 subject of, 88
Mistival, Eugénie de, see Eugénie voice-, 35
Mistival, Madame de, 30–31, 33, 38, Object a, 48, 78, 83
60, 139 Object-relation, 48
Modesty, 30–32, 50 Oedipus, 82, 130
Montreuil, Présidente de, 78, 80, 83 Oedipus complex, 146
Origen, of Alexandria, 30
Other, 21–22, 24, 26–27, 30, 32–33,
N 35, 38, 50, 52, 70, 79–80, 92,
Name-of-the-Father, 146 110–111
Nature, 14, 26, 33–34, 36, 39, 42,
45, 49, 51–53, 55–56, 59,
62–63, 67, 89, 93, 114, P
121–124, 127, 131–133, Pain, 4, 13, 27, 29–30, 31, 33, 38,
135–136, 138 42, 45, 50, 56, 58, 61, 77,
Need, 104 107–109, 114, 122
Negation, 53 of Existence, 67–68, 70–71
Neighbour, 30–31, 132–136 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 143
Neiman, Susan, 85 Patron, Sylvie, xvii–xviii
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 78 Paul (Apostle), 128, 137
Nirvana (Principle), 65–68 Paulhan, Jean, xvii, xix, xxx, 2, 75, 143
Noirceuil (libertine), 124 Pauvert, Jean-Jacques, xv–xvi, 2, 84,
Non-reciprocity, 20–22, 51 142
Penis envy, 139
Perversion, 2, 146
O Phallus, 146
Object, 10, 12, 15–16, 25, 33–35, Phobia, 32
48, 50, 90, 110, 114, 118 Picasso, Pablo, xxix
of desire, xviii, 48, 55, 88, 89, 94 Picon, Gaëtan, xxiv
(see also object a) Pinel, Philippe, 101
empirical, 11–12, 14–15, 24, 34, Plato, 4, 120, 122, 139
39, 44, 88, 94, 108, 113, 146 Pleasure, 4, 10–12, 22, 26, 30, 31,
eternal, 70–71 38, 42–45, 50, 52–54, 56–57,
feminine, 105 60, 100–109, 113–116, 119,
moral law as, 34–35 122, 125
of practical reason, 9 brute subject of, 53

Pleasure Principle, 4–5, 11, 65–66
Poe, Edgar Allan, 145
Pope, Alexander, 128
Pope Pius VI (libertine)41, 45, 61,
63, 65–66, 82, 89, 123
Presence, 34, 37–38
Psychoanalysis, 2, 11
Q
Queneau, Raymond, 90
R
Real, 143–144, 146
Reality principle, 53
Reason, xxviii
practical, xxvi, 7, 21, 29, 31, 50,
56, 74, 83, 94, 113
pure, xxviii
voice of, 12
Regard for oneself, 13
Religion, 61
Renan, Ernest, 67, 128
Repression, 115
Robespierre, Maximilien, 17, 121
Rodin (libertine), 60
Rombeau (libertine), 60
Roudaut, Jean, xvii
Roudinesco, Élisabeth, xix
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 26, 93,
121
Royer-Collard, Antoine-
Athanase, 102–103
S (libertine), 17–18, 54, 60,
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold
von, 142–143
Index 173
Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-
François, xiv–xix, xxi–xxvi,
xxviii–xxix, xxxii, 1, 3–6,
13–14, 16–17, 19, 22, 25, 31,
33, 41–42, 47–48, 52–53, 55,
57–58, 63, 66, 71, 73–77,
79–85, 87–90, 93, 95, 99–102,
104–105, 113, 115, 117–119,
121–122, 124–130, 133–135,
137–143, 146
The 120 Days of Sodom, 1, 75, 143
Aline et Valcour, xxi, 17
‘Dialogue between a Priest and a
Dying Man’, 128
Frenchmen, Some More Effort, 18,
25, 54, 73, 88, 120–121, 133,
142
‘Grande Lettre’, 76
Juliette, xxviii, 38–39, 45, 61, 81,
102, 104
Justine, xvi, xxi, 3, 18, 81,
102–104
La nouvelle Justine, 41, 81
Last Will and Testament, 67, 82
Philosophy in the Boudoir, xvi,
xviii, xxi, xxiii, xxiv–xxv, xxvii,
6, 16–17, 19, 30, 33, 38, 61,
73, 81, 88, 90, 103, 120,
126–127, 138–139, 142–143
Sadism, xiv, xxvi, 69–70, 77, 142,
144, 146
Sadistic experience/fantasy, 38–39,
42, 47, 55, 73
Sado-masochism, 69, 146
Saint-Ange, Madame de
127, 140
Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, xv
174 Index

Saint-Fond (libertine), 40, 45, 61, enunciating, 20, 22, 25–26,

123, 126 42, 92
Saint-Just, Louis Antoine of non-jouissance, 27, 50, 56
de, 119–121 pleasur, 53
Sarfati, Salvator, 1–2 of the statement, 20, 22, 25–26,
Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxix, 68 42
Satire, 20, 128 Subjective disparity, 22
Satisfaction, 41, 44, 56, 76–78, 80, Suicide, 105
114–116, 119 Super-Ego, 21
with oneself, 13, 35 Surrealism, xxiv, 2, 131
Schiller, Friedrich, 68 Swinburne, Algernon-Charles, 5
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 68 Symbolic Order/Structure, 21,
Schuster, Aaron, 42 48–49, 54, 66, 88, 93, 97, 111,
Schwärmerei, 37 117, 129, 146
Second life, 62 Synthetic propositions, 14–15, 25
Self-regard, 13
Seneca, 114
Separation, 47, 51
T
Sex(uality), 38, 43, 58, 73, 95
Tchou, Claude, xiv–xv, xix
Shakespeare, William, xxiv
Thing, 125, 137
Signifier, 21, 63, 67, 92
Thing-in-itself, 34, 57, 125
Socrates, 139
Tormentor, 23, 32, 34, 37, 42,
Sollers, Phillippe, 142–144
49, 63
Sophocles, xxiv, 59, 97
As object, 38
Soul
As subject, 34
immortality of, 7, 12
Tort, Michel, 142
Sovereignty, 40, 52, 110
Traumatic Neurosis, 65
Stoics, Stoicism, 4, 29, 33, 36,
Truth, 6, 67, 104, 115, 124–125,
114–118, 122
134, 143, 145
Subject, 12, 14–15, 21–22, 25, 27,
32–33, 35, 39, 45, 48, 63, 81,
90, 108, 111, 115, 135
brute, 53 U
calculus of, 58 Unconditionality, 13, 21
of desire, 92 Universality, 12, 14, 19, 21
divided (barred), 24, 48–50, 52, Unpleasure, 115
54, 56, 78–79, 81, 92 Usefulness, 8
 Index 175

V W
Verdoux, Monsieur, 91–92, 111
Victim, 22–23, 27, 30,
31–33, 38, 42–43,
45, 52–54, 57–61,
63, 70–71, 77, 100,
132
Vigny, Alfred de, xv
Virtue, 29, 34–35, 39,
45, 50, 75–76,
113–114, 117,
120, 124, 127
Voice, 35, 92
in conscience, 14
of nature, 34, 38–39, 42, 49,
92–93, 122
–object, 35
of reason, 12, 14, 16, 24–26,
92–93
Wahl, François, xx
Well-being, 11
Whitehead, Alfred North, 70
Will, 12–13, 29, 34, 94, 108–109
free, 11, 87, 108
incentives of the, 13, 114–115
to jouissance, 31–32, 42, 49,
52–56, 79–80, 83, 93, 137
to power, 78
maxim of the, 15
Wish, 66
Witticism, 128
Writing, xxvi, 6, 75, 100, 124, 126,
143, 146
Z
Zeno, 114