Abstract
Section 8 of Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ is entirely devoted to the construction of what Nobus designates as ‘Sade’s practical reason’. In this Chapter, all the elements of Lacan’s second schema are explained, and it is demonstrated how this second schema is not the inverse of the first schema—as it appears in Section 6 of the essay—but rather a quarter turn with an additional twist. Most crucially, this Chapter shows how Lacan situates Sade’s libertine novels in the place of the object (cause) of desire, and how Sade’s practical reason should not be judged in light of the contents of his libertine novels, but rather on the basis of a critical assessment of his relationship with his own writing. Nobus argues that Lacan is not at all interested in offering a psycho-biographical reading of Sade, but primarily in the status and function of writing as an object of desire in the mental economy of the writer.
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- 1.
What Fink has translated as ‘90-degree rotation of the graph’ is what Lacan called ‘un pas de rotation d’un quart de cercle’. Encapsulated within the dense texture of Lacan’s ruthless theoretical exposition, this ‘quarter turn’ can only appear to the uninitiated as a mere technical point, and Lacan himself may not have made much of it when he was thinking through the logic of his second schema in the early 1960s. However, at the end of the 1960s, this ‘quarter turn’ would come fairly close to acquiring conceptual status, when Lacan reactivated it as the organizing principle behind his theory of the four discourses. In the opening lesson of his 1969-’70 seminar ‘The Other Side of Psychoanalysis’, he stated: ‘I have been speaking about this notorious quarter turn [quart de tour] for long enough, and on different occasions—in particular, ever since the appearance of what I wrote under the title “Kant with Sade”—for people to think that perhaps one day it would be seen that this isn’t limited to what the so-called Schema Z [here, the second schema of “Kant with Sade”] does, and that there are other reasons for this quarter turn [quart de tour] than some pure accident of imaginary representation’ (Lacan, 2007, p. 14).
- 2.
Sade probably started putting pen to paper as far back as the late 1760s, when he was in his twenties, but it was not until the early 1780s that his ‘literary talents’ seem to have taken off. By that time, however, his name and reputation had already been tarnished by a string of widely publicized sex offences, including the so-called ‘Arcueil’ or ‘Rose Keller Affair’ of 3 April (Easter Sunday) 1768, and the Marseilles incident of 27 June 1772, the latter resulting in Sade and his valet Latour being sentenced to death on the grounds of poisoning and sodomy. The reader will find more details about these and other instances of Sade getting into trouble with the law on account of his sexual proclivities in the numerous Sade biographies. See, for example, Pauvert (1986), Lever (1993), Bongie (1998), du Plessix Gray (1999) and Schaeffer (1999).
- 3.
Interestingly, Sade’s admission ‘I have conceived everything conceivable in that genre’ came at least four years before he started composing The 120 Days of Sodom, which was meant to contain a full and definitive description of all 600 simple, complex, criminal and murderous passions. So if he is indeed to be believed about his already having conceived everything in 1781, it would not have been in writing…
- 4.
I will no doubt be contradicted by those conversant with Lacan’s Seminar XVII, in which he claimed that Sade the practitioner was assuredly a masochist. Be that as it may, Lacan also emphasized there that Sade was much more than a mere practitioner, insofar as he was also a theoretician, at which point Lacan did not think Sade was a masochist at all. See Lacan (2007, pp. 66–67). Despite the fact that nowhere in ‘Kant with Sade’ Lacan designated Sade as a masochist, some commentators on the text have nonetheless adopted this point of view, whereby they have defined the second schema as the ‘schema of masochism’. See, for example, Fink (2014, pp. 123–128). As to the term ‘masochism’ itself, this was coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the 1890 drawing on the writings of the nineteenth-century Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, especially with reference to his 1870 novella Venus im Pelz. See Azar (1993).
- 5.
Apart from the fact that in the second schema, d is no longer connected to a but to $, the lozenge ◇, which modulates the relation between a and $ in the first schema, and which is to be read as ‘desire for’, has disappeared in the second schema. There is a good logical reason for this, because (as Lacan would state in Section 9 of ‘Kant with Sade’) at least ‘one foot’ of the fantasy needs to be in the Other, whereas in the second schema both a and $ are on the side of the subject. Hence, the quarter turn by definition excludes the possibility of a fantasmatic relation between a and $—masochistic or otherwise—and this may explain why at no point in this section, Lacan referred explicitly to Sade’s fantasy, but only to his republic, i.e. to his politics or to his ‘practical reason’. Put differently, the second schema never appears to have been designed to represent Sade’s subjective fantasy per se, as opposed to that of his libertine heroes, but rather as a general representation of his subjectivity (his personal predicament, his moral outlook, and especially his position as a writer of libertine novels) in relation to the Other.
- 6.
Marie-Madeleine Masson de Plissay married Claude-René Cordier de Launay in August 1740. After Claude-René’s father had acquired a barony in Normandy, the family changed their name to de Montreuil, and when Claude-René became the chief judge (president) of the Cour des Aides, a court of law dealing with matters of government finance, Marie-Madeleine became commonly known as la Présidente de Montreuil. From the year of Sade’s marriage to their daughter Renée-Pélagie, on 17 May 1763, until his release from the madhouse of Charenton on 2 April 1790, to where he had been transferred from the Bastille in July 1789, i.e. for more than 25 years, she was Sade’s indefatigable nemesis, her relentless quest to see her son-in-law behind bars culminating in her obtaining a ‘lettre de cachet’ from King Louis XVI in 1777, which superseded all existing legal judgments against the miscreant and allowed the family to secure his detention for as long as they wished. In the end, Madame de Montreuil’s ‘lettre de cachet’ put Sade away for 13 years, until Robespierre’s new revolutionary government abolished all royal decrees. By an extraordinary twist of fate, when during the Summer of 1793 Sade was appointed to the role of president of la Section des Piques, one of the new geographical districts in Paris with its own legislative assembly, he had the totally unexpected opportunity to take revenge on his hated in-laws, because they happened to be living in his own district. But the creator of some of the most depraved, merciless libertines could not bring himself to signing their death warrant. As he wrote to his legal advisor Gaspard Gaufridy, ‘the meeting was so chaotic that I couldn’t take it any more!…I was forced to relinquish my presidency…They wanted me to put to the vote a horror, an inhumanity. I categorically refused. Thank God, I’ve washed my hands of it…During my presidency, I inscribed the Montreuils on a list of citizens to be spared. If I’d said a single word, they would have been lost. I remained silent. That’s the kind of revenge I chose!’ (Bourdin, 1929, p. 342). Much like the anonymous pamphleteer in Philosophy in the Boudoir, throughout his lifetime, Sade remained vehemently opposed to the death penalty. Madame de Montreuil died in 1801. For the history of the ‘lettre de cachet’, including numerous examples obtained from the Archives of the Bastille, see Farge & Foucault (2014).
- 7.
Although Napoleon sealed Sade’s fate towards the end of his life, Lacan agreed with Lely that the First Consul himself probably did not order Sade’s arrest in March 1801, when the police raided the offices of his publisher, and the Marquis was detained for the first time because of the books he had written. As I pointed out earlier (see Introduction, note 13), the footnote in which Lacan expressed his agreement has been misplaced in Fink’s translation, thus giving the reader the impression that Lacan was making a point about Sade’s manservant.
- 8.
Sade’s wife Renée-Pélagie Cordier de Montreuil (1741–1810) remained totally devoted to her husband until his release from Charenton in 1790, when she decided to file for divorce, having become a resident of the Parisian convent of Sainte-Aure. Lever writes about her: ‘Passion had lifted this woman of limited intelligence and tranquil flesh to sublime heights, compelling her, as it were, to love beyond her means’ (Lever, 1993, p. 362). She died at her château of Echaffour in Normandy. Her sister Anne-Prospère (1751–1781) eloped with Sade to Italy in October 1772, after the Marseilles affair. She died of smallpox in 1781, when her brother-in-law and former lover was sequestered at Vincennes. As to Sade’s manservant Latour, after having been sentenced to death for sodomy for his participation in the Marseilles incident, he too escaped with Sade and his sister-in-law to Italy. Upon the Marquis’ return to France, he joined his master as a voluntary prisoner at the fortress of Miolans, from which he subsequently helped Sade to escape, after which he seems to have vanished altogether. Lacan’s lines ‘it can be seen that the subject’s division does not have to be pinned together [réunie] in a single body’ (p. 657) and ‘This division here pins together [réunit] as S the brute subject’ (p. 657) were added for the Écrits version of ‘Kant with Sade’ and again reflect his take, in Seminar XI, on the disjunction V being based on the principle of the union (réunion) in set theory.
- 9.
When Sade realised that he was being detained because of his writings, and in particular for having authored Justine, he did not hesitate to argue his case: ‘I cannot be the author of this book…[A]ll the philosophical personages in this novel are villains to the core. However, I myself am a philosopher; everyone acquainted with me will certify that I consider philosophy my profession and my glory…And can anyone for one instant, save he suppose me mad, can anyone, I say, suppose for one minute that I could bring myself to present what I hold to be the noblest of all callings, under colors so loathsome and in a shape so execrable?’ (Sade, 1991b, p. 153).
- 10.
Although first-hand descriptions of Sade’s physical features in young adulthood and as an ageing inmate have survived, the only known image of Sade is a small profile in pencil by Charles van Loo, dated around 1770, which shows an elegant and charming French aristocrat. However, its status as an authentic portrait of Sade in his prime remains disputed. Partly for practical reasons (the estate where he had wanted to be laid to rest had been sold by the time he died), Sade’s last will and testament were not respected, but he would most certainly have balked at the thought of being given a religious funeral. When the cemetery of Charenton needed to be excavated, Sade’s body was exhumed and his grave disappeared. Charenton’s assistant physician Dr Ramon obtained his skull, but when he handed it to a German disciple of Gall by the name of Johann Caspar Spurzheim the skull itself disappeared. It is believed that one of the molds of the skull made for Spurzheim is now part of the collections of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. See Lever (1993, pp. 565–567) and Delon (2014, p. 322)
- 11.
μὴ φυναι are the first words of verse 1224 of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and they are sung by the chorus, in a gripping reflection upon Oedipus’s inescapable fate. In Fink’s translation of ‘Kant with Sade’, where the words have been rendered as ‘not to be born’ (p. 657), in accordance with Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ classic translation of Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles, 1998, p. 547), they have been misattributed to verse 1225 (p. 668, note 10), yet in his Écrits Lacan himself misattributed them to verse 1125. Without explicitly referring to Sophocles, Lacan had already alluded to this verse in Seminar II, where he translated it as ‘mieux vaudrait n’être pas né’ (‘The greatest boon is not to be’) and ‘mieux vaudrait ne pas être né’ (‘It would be better not to be born’) (Lacan, 1988b, p. 233), and where he also referred to Freud’s mention of it in his book on jokes, in which he had used a response to it in the satirical journal Fliegende Blätter—’this happens to scarcely one person in a hundred thousand’—as an illustration of a particular technique of joking (Freud, 1960, p. 57). In Seminar III, Lacan had rendered the words as ‘n’être pas né tel’ (not to be born like this) (Lacan, 1993, p. 244), and he returned to the verse in Seminar VII, yet erroneously designating it as the last words of Oedipus, and now offering the translation ‘plutôt, ne pas être’ (rather not to be), whilst adding: ‘That’s the choice with which a human existence such as Oedipus’s has to end. It ends so perfectly that he doesn’t die like everybody else, that is to say accidentally; he dies from a true death in which he erases his own being. The malediction is freely accepted on the basis of the true subsistence of a human being, the subsistence of the subtraction of himself from the order of the world’ (Lacan, 1992, p. 306). Lacan returned to it again in Seminar VIII, where he translated it as ‘puissé-je n’être pas’ (‘would that I were not’) and ‘ne fus-je’ (‘were I not’) (Lacan, 2015, p. 301). The choir’s position, here, that it is always better not to have been born, constitutes a central point of reference for anti-natalist philosophers such as Schopenhauer (2004), Cioran (1976) and, most recently, Benatar (2006). Finally, it should also be noted that Sophocles’ verse is not original, because it duplicates a famous line from a sixth-century BC poem by Theognis of Megara: Πάντων μὲν μὴ φῦναι ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἄριστον (For mortal beings best of all is never to have been born at all), and can also be found in the poetry of Bacchylides. For a further exploration of the verse’s significance, see Dolar (2016).
- 12.
Unfortunately, this crucial link between Sade’s works and the object a in the second schema has completely disappeared from Fink’s translation. In the Écrits edition of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan wrote: ‘sa malédiction moins sainte que celle d’Œdipe, ne le porte pas chez les Dieux, mais s’éternise: a) dans l’œuvre’, whereby ‘a) dans l’œuvre’ is the start of a new paragraph. In Fink’s translation, we read in one and the same paragraph: ‘Sade’s curse is less holy than Oedipus’, and does not carry him toward the Gods, but is immortalized in his work’ (p. 657). As such, the algebraic notation a) is no longer there, and the only reason I can think of to explain this omission is that ‘a)’ was interpreted not as indicative of the object a, but as the beginning of a list of things—a), b), c), etc.—and was eventually dropped, because b) did not follow and so a) was seen as a confusing and superfluous marker. In his ‘tentative and provisional’ translation of Lacan’s text, which was published after Fink’s version, Richardson made the same editorial decision (and mistake), for this very reason: ‘The text reads s’éternise: a), as if there were to follow a b). This does not happen, however, and I have chosen to omit the “a)” to avoid confusion—of which we have already quite enough.’ (Lacan, 2009, p. 40, footnote 26). Although Lacan did not mention it, the status of Sade’s writings as the black fetish and object a in his practical reason connects nicely with Juliette’s recommendation to Clairwil that of all the crimes one can imagine, the most excessive and enduring is the so-called ‘moral murder’, which is committed through writing. See Sade (1968, p. 525) and Chapter 5, note 6.
- 13.
Although it was ostensibly intended as a serious and sincere dissertation on the unspeakable horrors committed by one criminal mind, Janin’s biblio-biographical ‘impression’ of Sade, originally published in the Revue de Paris of 30 November 1834, comes across as a strangely twisted eulogy of the Marquis and his literary legacy. Saturated with extravagant invectives and hyperbolic vituperations, Janin’s melodramatic prose barely conceals a persistent sense of lofty excitement. Although the author never admits to anything but extreme disgust at the streams of blood and the proliferation of tortured corpses in the Sadean universe, the reader is left wondering whether underneath this surface of moral correctness the author is not deeply seduced by it all, the inflated rhetoric being but a cleverly pursued ploy of subversive irony. The passage to which Lacan referred, here, was also quoted by Maurice Garçon in his defense speech at the Pauvert trial (Garçon, 1963, p. 90). Since Lacan omitted the same part of Janin’s sentence as Garçon, it would appear that Lacan took the phrase from Garçon rather than from the original. Janin’s full sentences read: ‘For do not fool yourselves, the marquis de Sade is everywhere; in all the libraries, he sits on a certain mysterious and hidden row which one always finds; it is one of those books that are normally placed behind St John Chrysostom, or Nicole’s Traité de morale, or Pascal’s Pensées. Ask all those Commissaries if they really take that many inventories after death without finding the marquis de Sade. And since it is one of those books which the law does not recognize as personal property, it always happens that some businessman’s clerk, or his boss, grabs it first and then passes it on for public consumption’ (Janin, 1839, p. 152). On Janin, see Brighelli (2000, pp. 159–164).
- 14.
In his defense of Pauvert, Garçon quoted a letter by Jean Cocteau, in which the renowned French writer and filmmaker had written: ‘He [Sade] is boring, his style is weak, and his only worth comes from the reproaches directed towards him’. Hearing this statement, the judge presiding over the trial responded: ‘I’m in agreement on one point: that he’s boring.’ Garçon concurred: ‘On that point we all agree’ (Garçon, 1963, p. 62). Garçon had been elected to the Académie française in 1946, hence Lacan’s chosen address of the judge and Maurice Garçon as ‘your honor and member of the Académie française’ (p. 657). When, in this same paragraph, Lacan emphasized how Sade’s allegedly boring work is nonetheless always bothering people, he conjured up the concluding prose doxology of the Eucharistic prayer in the Catholic mass: ‘Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso’, ‘Par lui, avec lui et dans lui’, ‘Through him, and with him, and in him’. Unfortunately, this allusion is lost in the English translation. Interestingly, in Seminar VII, Lacan himself had stated: ‘Although in the eyes of some the work of the Marquis de Sade seems to promise a variety of entertainments, it is not strictly speaking much fun. Moreover, the parts that seem to give the most pleasure can also be regarded as the most boring [les plus ennuyeuses]’ (Lacan, 1992, p. 78).
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Nobus, D. (2017). Sade’s Practical Reason. In: The Law of Desire. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0_8
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