Abstract
This Chapter provides a systematic reading of Section 14 in Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’, in which Lacan articulates a critique of Sade. Nobus explains why Lacan is as critical of Sade as he is dissatisfied with Kant’s practical reason. Whereas in the latter case, the (moral) Law is erroneously presented as a purely formal imperative, devoid of any reference to desire, in the former case, Sade’s libertines (and to some extent Sade himself) operate with the illusory belief that desire can be liberated from all legal and moral constraints. Nobus shows how Lacan detects remnants of the law in various aspects of Sade’s work, in its contents as well as its style.
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Notes
- 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.
- 2.
For Lacan’s explorations of the Freudian and Heideggerian ‘Thing’, see Lacan (1992, pp. 43–70 and pp. 101–114).
- 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.
- 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).
- 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 connection 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).
- 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).
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Nobus, D. (2017). Lacan Against Sade. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_13
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