Abstract
Focusing on the first section of Lacan’s essay ‘Kant with Sade’, Nobus explains why Lacan refuses to interpret Sade’s libertine novels as a literary anticipation of Freudian psychoanalysis, and he details Lacan’s insistence on the ethical dimension of Sade’s oeuvre. In addition, the Chapter unpacks Lacan’s assertion that Sade’s book Philosophy in the Boudoir contains the truth of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.
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Notes
- 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).
- 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 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’.
- 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.
- 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.
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…
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Nobus, D. (2017). A New Ethical System. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_1
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