Abstract
In the final section of his essay ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan engages with the work of Pierre Klossowski in order to question the status of the neighbour and the significance of the Christian command ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’. Rekindling Freud’s criticism of this command in ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, Lacan argues that Sade, or at least his libertine heroes, despised the injunction because they were perfectly attuned to their own malice, without therefore recognizing their neighbour within it. Nobus explains the background of Lacan’s (Freudian) argument, and also opens a critical perspective on the final paragraphs of Lacan’s essay, in which he delivers a rather reductionist reading of the culmination of Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir. Although Lacan intends to show, here, that desire is once again conditioned and sustained by the law, Nobus points out that Lacan’s interpretation lacks sophistication, and does not take account of the fact that the law may very well release desire, rather than simply shutting it down.
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Although this was the first time Lacan explicitly referred to Klossowski’s work in ‘Kant with Sade’, it was definitely not the first time he drew inspiration (and examples) from it. As I pointed out earlier in my exposition of Sections 6 and 7 of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan no doubt borrowed the examples of Saint-Fond’s paradoxical belief in the afterlife, Pope Pius VI’s vision of a ‘second death’, and the latter’s relationship with Buddhism, from Klossowski’s texts. I should also mention, here, that the English translation of Sade mon prochain (Klossowski, 1992) follows the 1967 edition of the book, which no longer contains the two texts on the death of God, but includes a new contemporary text entitled ‘Le philosophe scélérat’ (‘The Philosopher-Villain’), and substantially revised versions of all the other papers. For this new edition, Klossowski also deleted the original epigraph to the book, to which Lacan alluded in the second paragraph of Section 15 (p. 666). In translation, the epigraph read as follows: ‘If some freethinker [esprit fort] had taken it upon himself to ask Saint Benoît Labre what he thought of his contemporary the Marquis de Sade, the Saint would have answered without hesitation: “He is my neighbour”’ (Klossowski, 1947, p. 9). Klossowski did not elaborate on the meaning of this supposed response, but in all likelihood he wanted to invoke the fact that Saint Labre—a quintessential ‘Fool for God’, who deliberately mortified himself and opposed all social conventions for the pure sake of coming closer to Christ—could have recognized in Sade a similar ‘craziness for God’. For the record, it is also worth noting that the last sentence of the first paragraph of Section 15, in Fink’s translation of ‘Kant with Sade’, is based on the 1971 pocket-edition of Lacan’s text. As note 21 on p. 668 indicates, in 1971 Lacan deleted a footnote that had appeared in all previous versions, and replaced it with a new sentence in the body of the text, and a slightly modified footnote, which nonetheless still conjured up the figure of Jean Paulhan as the ‘future academician’ and ‘expert in malicious comments’ whose work, unlike Klossowski’s, was stained by the typical tics of the ‘highbrow literati’ (bel esprit), for want of perspicacity (p. 668, note 21). See also Chapter 1, note 3. In what may be just another matter of detail, Lacan wrote the title of Klossowski’s book, here, as Sade, mon prochain, adding a comma between the first two words, which Fink has reproduced.
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A similar point was made by Blanchot in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, with reference to Robespierre and Saint-Just: ‘The Terrorists are those who desire absolute freedom and are fully conscious that this constitutes a desire for their own death, they are conscious of the freedom they affirm, as they are conscious of their death, which they realize, and consequently they behave during their lifetimes not like people living among other living people but like beings deprived of being, like universal thoughts, pure abstractions beyond history, judging and deciding in the name of all of history’ (Blanchot, 1995, p. 320).
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This does not imply, however, that the command is specifically Christian. In the New Testament, it can be found in Matthew 22:39, as Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ question concerning the great commandments in law: ‘And the second [great commandment] is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’. Yet this is effectively a reiteration of Leviticus 19:18, where God is addressing himself to the people of Israel: ‘Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord’.
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The original French sentence reads ‘Nous croyons que Sade n’est pas assez voisin de sa propre méchanceté, pour y rencontrer son prochain’, in which Lacan plays off ‘voisin’ and ‘prochain’—the two French words for neighbour—and conjures up Sade’s own epithet (méchanceté) of God in Saint-Fond’s discourse.
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On the Christian dimension of the cruelty associated with the death penalty, both with reference to Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s categorical imperative, and to Lacan’s reading of Sade, see Derrida (2014, pp. 158–165).
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The reference is to Romans 7: 7–13: ‘(7) What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. (8) But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead. (9) For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. (10) And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be onto death. (11) For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me. (12) Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. (13) Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceedingly sinful.’ For Lacan’s comments on these lines in Seminar VII, see Lacan (1992, pp. 83, 177 and 189).
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The wording is once again Biblical and taken from Matthew 26: 41: ‘Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’
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Lacan again referred to Klossowski here, in what may be a deliberately modified quotation about Sade’s alleged apathy. Klossowski wrote: ‘En se comparant à autrui, le philosophe de l’apathie affermit sa conviction qu’il est seul; ou plutôt, qu’il a cessé d’appartenir au monde unique de tous les hommes, et qu’il est parvenu à l’état de veille, dans son propre monde, au sein de la Nature’ (Klossowski, 1947, p. 94). In English, the sentence could be translated as: ‘In comparing himself to others, the philosopher of apathy strengthens his conviction that he is alone; or rather, that he has stopped belonging to the unique world of all men, and that he has attained, in a waking state, in his own world, the bosom of Nature’. To this sentence, Klossowski attached a footnote: ‘Tel semble être l’aboutissement nécessaire de la pensée sadiste. Ce n’est pas à dire que les personnages de Sade y parviennent, ni peut-être même Sade’ (Klossowski, 1947, p. 94, footnote 1). In translation: ‘This seems to be the necessary outcome of sadist thinking. Which is not to say that Sade’s characters succeed in it, and perhaps Sade does not succeed in it either’. In ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan quotes a section of Klossowski’s sentence as follows: ‘d’être rentré au sein de la nature, à l’état de veille, dans notre [sic] monde’, which Fink has translated as ‘returned to nature’s bosom, in the waking state, in our world’ (p. 667). Apart from reordering the sentence, Lacan changes ‘son propre monde’ (his own world) into ‘notre monde’ (our world), whereby he qualifies the latter as ‘inhabited by language’ (p. 667). It seems to me that Lacan could have deliberately altered the structure and meaning of the sentence, because he wanted to indicate that the philosopher of apathy (the libertines, Sade himself), rather than entering an otherworldly ‘natural’ world, had only entered our common, symbolic world. In his annotations to ‘Kant with Sade’, Fink claims that the sentence (and the note) appear in the English version of Klossowski’s book, but this is not the case. As I mentioned above, the English version is based on the 1967 edition of Sade mon prochain, and for this edition Klossowski deleted the passage in question.
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The scene reminded Lacan of a sequence in Luis Buñuel’s 1953 film El—subsequently released in the US as This Strange Passion—in which the morbidly jealous male protagonist Francisco Galvan (played by Arturo de Córdova) at one point enters his wife’s bedroom with a curved needle, thread, scissors, rope, cotton wool and antiseptic. The viewer is left to imagine what he intends to do to his wife with these tools, because the bedroom door closes, shutting the camera out. In 1954, Buñuel was asked about the link between this sequence and the shocking finale of Philosophy in the Boudoir, to which he responded: ‘When choosing certain elements I did not really think of imitating Sade, but it’s possible I did so unconsciously. I’m more naturally inclined to view and conceive a situation from a Sadian [sic] or sadistic point of view rather than, say, a neorealistic or mystical one. I said to myself: What should the character use—a gun? a knife? a chair? I ended up choosing more disturbing objects, that’s all’ (Bazin, 1982, p. 92). As to Lacan’s endorsement of the film, Buñuel wrote in his autobiography: ‘In general, [the film] wasn’t very well received…My only consolation came from Jacques Lacan, who saw the film at a special screening for psychiatrists at the Cinémathèque in Paris and praised certain of its psychological truths’ (Buñuel, 1983, pp. 203–204).
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Noli tangere matrem (Do not touch the mother) is Lacan’s variant of what Jesus says to Mary Magdalene in the Latin version of John 20: 17: ‘Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not [Noli me tangere]; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.’ The sentence ‘Raped and sewn shut’ translates Lacan’s ‘V…ée et cousue’ and thus closes the ellipsis by interpreting V…ée as Violée (raped). However, at least two other interpretations are possible, and Lacan clearly wanted the reader to consider all of these: Vérolée (infected with syphilis) and Voilée (veiled).
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Nobus, D. (2017). Some More Effort…. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_14
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