Kant, Sade and the Libertine Enlightenment

Abstract

One might be excused for dismissing a comparison of Immanuel Kant and the Marquis de Sade as far-fetched, were it not for Jacques Lacan’s provocative essay Kant avec Sade(1966), in which the author hypothesized that Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir(1795) ‘completed’ and exposed the ‘truth’ of the Critique of Practical Reason(1788) (1966, p. 765). Lacan’s main concern here was to interconnect Sade’s and Kant’s thinking on the concept of (radical) evil. Arguably, one of the metaphysical propositions the Köigsberg professor had not purs ued to its logical conclusion is the notion of evil performed for no pathological reasons, but out of principle, that is, merely for the sake of it. While Kant proffered the disclaimer that no human was wanton enough to be capable of such wholesale perversity, Sade, in Lacan’s reasoning, elevated wickedness to a noumenon of universal law, effectively turning it by default into a Kantian categorical imperative. This justification of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, of pleasurable violence born of ethical and aesthetic disinterestedness, was to furnish the rationale for the ultimate killing machine of Auschwitz, so Horkheimer and Adorno had already postulated in their critique of technical reason, The Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944).