Abstract
Chapter 12 offers a combined interpretation of Sections 12 and 13 of Lacan’s essay ‘Kant with Sade’, in which the relationships between pleasure, jouissance and happiness are explored. Nobus shows how Lacan draws out the consequences of his reading of Kant with Sade in order to formulate a principle of happiness that may not be admissable in Kant’s practical reason, but that is nonetheless of great moral and political significance. This is the principle of ‘happiness in evil’, to which Lacan had already alluded in the first section of ‘Kant with Sade’. Nobus situates this principle within Lacan’s theory of desire, as commensurate with the (moral) Law, and he explains why Lacan opposes it to the Epicurean and Stoic traditions.
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Notes
- 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.
- 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 repression, 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).
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 9.
- 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.
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Nobus, D. (2017). Desire and Happiness. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_12
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