Abstract
In Section 9 of Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan summarizes the main axioms around which he has constructed his theory of desire. Nobus offers a systematic reading of Lacan’s theory, and employs this as a basis for explaining Lacan’s critique of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, which revolves, here, around the famous apologia of the gallows. Nobus clarifies why Lacan does not share Kant’s conclusion that rational beings will always let their love of life take precedence over their desire for sexual satisfaction. He further draws attention to how Lacan does not see (sexual) desire and the (moral) Law as antagonistic forces, but as mutually reinforcing principles that are part and parcel of one and the same psychic constellation.
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Notes
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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).
- 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).
- 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).
- 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.
- 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 prohibitions, 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).
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Nobus, D. (2017). The Law Sustains Desire. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_9
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