Abstract
In the fourth section of his essay ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan focuses on the significance of pain in the libertines’ vision of the world. Nobus explains how Lacan balances the Sadean experience of pain (and its counterpart of pleasure) against the heroes’ aspiration to generate a state of limitless jouissance (eternal, unblemished bliss). He also clarifies how Lacan conceptualizes the Sadean object, as what functions between the subject and the Other, in the space occupied by the libertine heroes themselves.
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Notes
- 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’.
- 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 predominantly 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 inhabitants dress modestly [la pudeur des vêtements] without being modest in their customs [la modestie des mœurs]’ (Sade, 2006, p. 72).
- 3.
I am grateful to Stijn Vanheule for alerting me to this passage in Lacan’s Seminar IV.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 effectively 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).
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Nobus, D. (2017). Regarding the Pain of Others. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_4
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