The Palgrave Lacan Series

Series Editors Calum Neill School of Psychology and Sociology Edinburgh Napier University Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Derek Hook Duquesne University Pittsburgh, USA Jacques Lacan is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th century. The reach of this influence continues to grow as we settle into the 21st century, the resonance of Lacan’s thought arguably only beginning now to be properly felt, both in terms of its application to clinical matters and in its application to a range of human activities and interests. The Palgrave Lacan Series is a book series for the best new writing in the Lacanian field, giving voice to the leading writers of a new generation of Lacanian thought. The series will comprise original monographs and the- matic, multi-authored collections. The books in the series will explore aspects of Lacan’s theory from new perspectives and with original insights. There will be books focused on particular areas of or issues in clinical work. There will be books focused on applying Lacanian theory to areas and issues beyond the clinic, to matters of society, politics, the arts and culture. Each book, whatever its particular concern, will work to expand our understand- ing of Lacan’stheoryanditsvalueinthe21stcentury.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15116 Dany Nobus The Law of Desire

On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ Dany Nobus Department of Psychology Brunel University London Uxbridge, United Kingdom

The Palgrave Lacan Series ISBN 978-3-319-55274-3 ISBN 978-3-319-55275-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017943380

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publica- tion does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For NP Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν Acknowledgements

Although I never confessed to it through the holy Sacrament of Penance when I was a pupil at an established Roman Catholic boys’ school in Belgium, my interest in Sade’s libertine novels dates back to my teenage years. At that time, the books could only be obtained from libraries if one had received special permission from a head librarian, because they had been dutifully consigned to a closed section that was commonly known as ‘book-hell’, and in good Lacanian fashion, the fact that a strict prohibition rested upon these volumes hugely inflamed my desire to read them. The story of how and when I eventually worked my way through Sade’s eroto-philosophical texts will not be of interest to any- one, but when during my mid-20s I had to choose a topic for a Master’s dissertation in psychoanalysis, I was involuntarily drawn to Lacan’s ‘Kant avec Sade’, which at the time I found both fascinating and intimidating, although for different reasons than Sade’s own works. The project was eventually published in two parts, in two consecutive issues of the Belgian journal ‘Psychoanalytische Perspektieven’: D. Nobus, ‘Moeten Wij Sade Herdenken? I. Aan gene zijde van verguizing en vergoddelijking’, Psychoanalytische Perspektieven, 1993, 21, pp. 63–93; D. Nobus, ‘Moeten Wij Sade Herdenken? II. De psychoanalyse voor het Sadiaanse universum’, Psychoanalytische Perspektieven, 1994, 22, pp. 101–132. Although none of the texts in this book is directly based upon these papers, I should nonetheless acknowledge those people who

vii viii Acknowledgements supported the project at the time, and who regularly entered into Sadean and other discussions with me about one or the other aspect of Lacan’s text: Julien Quackelbeen, who sadly passed away in 2016, Paul Verhaeghe, Filip Geerardyn and Katrien Libbrecht. Almost 20 years after this youthful endeavour to shed some light on ‘Kant with Sade’, I was invited by Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook and Calum Neill to write a detailed commentary on an essay in Lacan’s Écrits for their three-volume Reader’sGuideto the book. ‘Kant with Sade’ was not my only choice, and it definitely was not my first, but in the end this is the essay I ended up being asked to unpack and clarify. With hindsight, it would be disingenuous to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the task, and that I am exceptionally grateful to the editors of this Reader’sGuidefor assigning it to me. Yet as my work, and the associated feelings of intellectual and emo- tional torment, progressed, what started off as a commentary grew into a more substantial piece of work, which eventually crystallized into this book. As such, Volume 3 of the Reader’s Guide to Écrits will include a more succinct version of it, without the background information to Lacan’s text, without the examples taken from Sade’s works, and without the detailed elaborations and the scholarly apparatus in the notes. As I was working on this project, outlines of its argument were presented at the following institutions, whose hosts are thanked for their invitations, and especially for giving me the opportunity to respond to questions and suggestions from the audience, which has allowed me to sharpen the text in various places: Das Unbehagen—A Free Association for Psychoanalysis, at the New School University in New York, NY; the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in San Francisco, CA; the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London. I would also like to thank Nektaria Pouli, Stijn Vanheule, Junior Ingouf, Calum Neil, Derek Hook, Benjamin Ware, and an additional anonymous reader, for scrutinizing the entire manuscript and for making numerous suggestions for improvement. I am also grateful to Élisabeth Roudinesco for confirming certain aspects of the historical context of Lacan’s article. Finally, a special word of thanks should go to Bruce Fink, who also read through a complete draft of the manuscript, and whose comments on my interpretations of ‘Kant with Sade’ were invariably insightful and always constructive, despite my occasional criticism of his seminal translation of Lacan’stext. Contents

Introduction xiii

1 A New Ethical System 1

2 Lacan Reads Kant 9

3 Sade’s Kantian Maxim 17

4 Regarding the Pain of Others 29

5 Ineluctable Libertine Pleasures 37

6 The Sadean Fantasy 47

7 Surely, It Is Just a Fantasy! 65

8 Sade’s Practical Reason 73

9 The Law Sustains Desire 87

10 Sade Against Kant 99

ix x Contents

11 The Moral Principle of Desire 107

12 Desire and Happiness 113

13 Lacan Against Sade 123

14 Some More Effort ... 131

Conclusion 141

Bibliography 149

Index 167 List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 The Sadean fantasy 49 Fig. 8.1 Sade’s practical reason 74

xi Introduction

Of the 28 substantial papers and six shorter contributions that make up Jacques Lacan’s Écrits, the piece entitled ‘Kant avec Sade’ (‘Kant with Sade’) is generally regarded as one of the toughest nuts to crack, and this opinion is shared by some of the most eminent and knowledgeable commentators on Lacan’s work. Addressing an audience in Rio de Janeiro in 1985, Lacan’s son-in-law and literary executor Jacques-Alain Miller referred to the paper as ‘adifficult text’ and ‘an écrit that has not been utilized very much’, insinuating that the first characteristic may very well be responsible for the second (Miller, 1998, p. 201).1 Four years later, at a conference at Kent State University in Ohio, Miller confirmed this observation—despite, or perhaps by virtue of his having studied and discussed the paper painstakingly for almost five years at his seminars in Paris—thus making the initial verdict next to official: ‘Jacques Lacan’s “Kant with Sade” is probably one of the most difficult texts in the Écrits’ (Miller, 1996, p. 212). The qualification of ‘difficult’ would probably not be very significant in this context, if the other texts in Écrits were an easy read, but since the others are already widely considered to be distinctly cryptic the word ‘difficult’ could only be synonymous here with ‘inaccessible’ or ‘impenetrable’. Remarkably, this

1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from foreign-language sources are my own.

xiii xiv Introduction qualification would not be too far removed from how Lacan himself put it to an Italian journalist in October 1974: as to ‘Kant with Sade’, ‘Iam incomprehensible’ (Lacan, 2013a, p. 83). Without wanting to reflect, here, upon the reasons as to why Lacan’s text is difficult—they should become clear from the contents of this book—or upon my own motives for taking on the task of shedding light on Lacan’s ‘darkest’ moment, I thus need to inform the reader from the start that clarifying ‘Kant avec Sade’ constitutes a considerable challenge. And I should also apologize in advance if my commentary and interpretation fail to unravel some of its mysteries. It should be emphasized, however, that ‘Kant with Sade’ may be one of the few texts in Écrits whose import cannot be fully appre- ciated without detailed commentary and interpretation, because it is far from clear what Lacan is saying in it, and this persistent obscurity is as testing for a francophone readership as it is for those who can only access the text in translation. I can only hope that my own critical analysis of ‘Kant with Sade’ in this book will be a less daunting experience for the reader than Lacan’s original text, without it therefore detracting any reader from exploring this most demanding of écrits, if only because this exercise will undoubtedly generate additional clarifications and alterna- tive interpretations. Much like so many other papers in Écrits, ‘Kant avec Sade’ bears the stamp of the circumstances under which it was written. Hence, before any serious consideration is given to its contents, it is neces- sary to reconstruct its context. In 1958, the Belgian-Chinese-French editor Claude Tchou created the imprint Cercle du livre précieux, with the purpose of producing and selling, through private subscrip- tion, luxury critical editions of literary and scientificworks,often covering erotic subject matters. In 1961, it was announced that this imprint would make available, under the general editorship of the French poet Gilbert Lely, the complete works of Donatien- Alphonse-FrançoisdeSade(1740–1814) (Lely, 1961). During the first half of the nineteenth century, the shocking contents of Sade’s infamous libertine novels had prompted writers to coin the new clinical category of ‘sadism’ (Azar, 1993, pp. 42–45), and during Introduction xv the 1960s the public sale of his books was still banned in France.2 Indeed, when shortly after World War II another French publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, had taken it upon himself to release Sade’s complete works in an accessible paperback edition, the initiative resulted in a high-profile court case which, although relaxed on appeal, initially ordered for the incriminating books to be confiscated and destroyed, and their publisher to be sentenced to pay a very large fine (Garçon, 1963; Brochier, 1991; Pauvert, 2004, pp. 248– 251 & pp. 260–264). With the edition of the Cercle du livre précieux the risk of legal interference with the project would have been avoided on account of the fact that the books were not publicly available, but only sold in a limited edition of 2,000 numbered copies via a book club to private subscribers.3 In consequence, between 1962 and 1964, the complete works of Sade were released in an exculpatory, ‘definitive edition’ of 15 volumes, under the general editorship of Lely, whose own monumental biography of the so-called ‘divine Marquis’ inaugurated the precious set. At the end of March 1962, when pursuing his seminar L’identification (Identification), Lacan informed his audience that he had committed himself to writing up the discussion of Sade’s works he had commenced in his seminar of 1959–1960 on the ethics of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1992), in a preface he had promised for an edition of Sade’s works (Lacan, 1961–1962, session of 28 March 1962). There can be no doubt that the edition in question, here, was the one being prepared by Tchou and Lely, since

2 The term ‘sadism’ was in all likelihood introduced by the French writer Charles Nodier in 1834, 20 years after Sade’s death. During the nineteenth century it regularly appeared in the writings of Alfred de Vigny and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. In 1890, the notion was employed by the Austrian forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebingtodesignatea specific type of psychopathology in which someone derives sexual pleasure from subjecting other living creatures to acts of physical and emotional cruelty. Although Krafft-Ebing did not engage in a detailed critical study of Sade’s libertine novels, he felt justified in utilizing Sade’s fictional libertine heroes as paradigmatic examples of a specific clinical instance of sexual perversion. See Krafft-Ebing (1890). 3 In his introductory brochure, the editor was at great pains to show how this new edition of Sade was not in breach of the court’s ruling in the Pauvert-case, since the books would be strictly reserved to an elite, notably those members of the book club who had been registered with them for more than six months, as well as universities, libraries and medical doctors. See Lely (1961). xvi Introduction

Pauvert’s project had already been completed, and no other edition of the works of Sade was being launched. In March 1962, Lacan did not indicate whether his article would be included as a preface to the entire edition, to a specific volume or to a particular text within a volume. Yet on 16 January 1963, in a lecture that was part of his subsequent seminar L’angoisse (Anxiety), he disclosed that his listeners would be able to read all about his rapproche- ment between Kant and Sade in a preface to Sade’s La philosophie dans le boudoir, which would be published in the not-too-distant future (Lacan, 2014b, p. 104). However, when later that year Volume III of Sade’scomplete works, containing Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu and La philosophie dans le boudoir,cameoff the press, there was no trace of Lacan’stextinit,anditwas not included in any of the other volumes either. To complicate matters, on 12 June 1963, Lacan told his audience that a paper entitled ‘Kant avec Sade’ had appeared in the April issue of the journal Critique (Lacan, 2014b, p. 281). In conformity with this jour- nal’s policy of publishing in-depth scholarly review essays, Lacan’s text had effectively appeared there as a presentation of the new complete edition of Sade’s works, despite the fact that only three of the 15 planned volumes had been published at the time, and that the first two in the series were taken up by Lely’s biography of the Marquis. In a long footnote preceding his text, Lacan detailed the contents of Volume III, including the names of the three scholars (Angelo Hesnard, Maurice Heine and Pierre Klossowski) who had written prefaces to Sade’s texts, yet without saying anything about the original destination of his own paper (Lacan, 1963, p. 291).4

4 Because the footnote is not reproduced in Écrits—neither in the original French version nor in the English translation—and because its content is not immaterial to the editorial history of ‘Kant avec Sade’, I am translating it here, with some additional clarifications in square brackets: ‘Volume III of the complete works [of Sade], whose publication by the stated firm [Cercle du livre précieux] is underway, contains the texts of Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, that is to say of the 1791 novel [rather than Les infortunes de la vertu, the posthumously published short story from 1787, or La nouvelle Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, the third, extensively reworked version of 1797] and of La philosophie dans le boudoir. A short announcement precedes these texts, which rectifies the bibliographical data that are to be found in Volume II. Indeed, Volumes I and II, which have already been published, reproduce a Vie du marquis de Sade [Lely’s biography, originally published in two volumes by Gallimard in 1952 and 1957, and first translated into English in a heavily abridged edition as The Marquis de Sade: A Biography by Elek Books in 1961] which has been Introduction xvii

Assuming that the editors of Critique would have required at least a month to review the contents of an issue and steer it through the printing process, Lacan must have been informed that his paper would not appear in Volume III of Sade’s complete works some time between mid-January and the beginning of March 1963. Why exactly Lacan’stextwasrefused, and by whom, is still somewhat couched in mystery. Speaking in Rio de Janeiro in 1985, Miller claimed that the editor of Sade’s complete works, i.e. Gilbert Lely, had rejected Lacan’s paper, because he had deemed it to be unintelligible, and that Lacan had subsequently tried to get it accepted for publication in La nouvelle revue française, France’sleadingliterary magazine, which was edited at the time by the distinguished French writer and critic Jean Paulhan. When, still according to Miller, the text was again refused, Lacan would have subsequently offered it to Critique,allegedly managing to secure its acceptance there because of a certain ‘family relationship’ (Miller, 1998, pp. 205–206).5 However, drawing on an interview with the French literary theorist Jean Roudaut, Sylvie Patron has pointed out in her detailed narrative history of the first 50 years of Critique that Lacan’s text had originally been refused ‘under the pretext of unintelligibility’, and that he had ‘more or less imposed it’ onto the editor

quoted in the present essay in the Gallimard edition [see Lacan, 2006g, p. 668, note 9]. Three texts serve as prefaces to these works, two of which—one original text by our friend Angelo Hesnard, entitled “Rechercher le semblable, découvrir l’homme dans Sade”, and one reprinted by the late Maurice Heine on the Marquis de Sade et le roman noir—precede Justine, and the third text, which appears before La philosophie, is a paper [Sade et la révolution] that had already been included in Sade mon prochain by Pierre Klossowski, to which we will refer at the end of this essay [see Lacan, 2006g, p. 667, and p. 668, note 22]. We also take the opportunity here to indicate that, if this edition, which is being presented as “definitive”, has every reason to succeed, there is at present still no French edition of the complete works of Kant nor, for that matter, of the complete works of Freud. A systematic translation of these works should have been undertaken already. For Kant, this kind of enterprise should have been obvious, in a country where so many young forces are now qualified on account of their philosophy education. Its almost complete absence should make us reflect upon the way in which the responsible agencies have given their guidance to these works’ (Lacan, 1963, p. 291, footnote 1). 5 The journal Critique had been founded in 1946 by Georges Bataille, the former husband of Lacan’s second wife Sylvia Maklès, and Bataille acted as its editor until his death, on 9 July 1962. The editorship was then taken over by Jean (-Baptiste) Piel, who was married to Sylvia’s sister Simone Maklès, so Miller suggested here that Lacan had effectively asked his wife’s brother-in-law to publish his paper. There is a picture of Lacan, the two Maklès sisters and Jean Piel in a collection of photographs of Lacan published by his daughter Judith, on the tenth anniversary of her father’s death. See J. Miller (1991, p. 68). xviii Introduction of Critique (Patron, 2000, p. 169). Were Patron to be right, and ‘unin- telligibility’ had only been a pretext, then it would be interesting to know what the real reason for the refusal had been. Jean Allouch has speculated in this respect that Lacan’s text may have been excluded from Volume III of Sade’s complete works, because the author had not complied in it with what the editor and publisher had expected him to do, i.e. formulating a clinical-psychoanalytic interpretation of La philosophie dans le boudoir (Allouch, 2001, p. 45). And indeed, were it to be the case that Lacan had been expected to read Sade ‘with Freud’—either in the classical sense of Freudian insights being applied to La philosophie dans le boudoir with a view to revealing its unconscious, latent subtext, or in the quintessentially popular psycho-biographical fashion, of the style and contents of a literary text being explained with reference to an unresolved (traumatic) event in the author’slife-history—then this would not be what the paper encap- sulated, except perhaps for the interpretation of the final scene in Sade’s book, when the mother’s vagina and anus are sewn shut, which Lacan unhesitatingly construed as the maternal body (the ultimate object of desire) falling again under the spell of the paternal law and becoming strictly prohibited, and which in many ways comes across as the weakest, most conventional and prosaic part of the essay. In other words, insofar as Lacan relied in ‘Kant with Sade’ on a psychoanalytic methodology to read Sade’s text, he adopted neither a standard psycho-biographical or psycho- historical approach, nor a typically Freudian style of textual analysis (with the exception, perhaps, of the final scene), but engaged instead in a type of psychoanalytic literary criticism that clearly drew on the hackneyed struc- turalist principles of a-historicism, narrative form and intertextual con- nectivity, despite Lacan employing his own concepts as critical tools.6 It may very well be the case, then, that Lacan’s text had been refused, because instead of complying in it with the editor’s and publisher’sbriefs,

6 Given how keen psychoanalysts, including Freud himself, have always been to venture out into the realm of literature, it is still surprising that before Lacan published ‘Kant with Sade’ very little psychoanalytic research had been devoted to the ‘Sadean universe’. In 1933, the non-psycho- analyst Pierre Klossowski released the first-ever psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade’s libertine novels, and over the next 30-odd years a mere three psychoanalytically inspired studies of Sade were published. See Klossowski (1933), Aulagne (1948), Guillemain (1953), Marchand (1956). Introduction xix he had decided to ignore all instructions from above, simply doing his own thing, feeling neither directed nor restricted in his approach, and not making any concessions to his readership. In an essay where the possibility of a fully liberated, unconstrained desire is being put into question, Lacan’s own uncompromising pursuit of the desire to write whatever he wanted would have thus encountered its limit here in the editor’sand publisher’s forceful and non-negotiable implementation of an authorial directive. If, as Lacan argued in ‘Kant with Sade’, it is futile to conceive of a lawless desire, and fruitless to hope for a desire that will circumvent or undo the law, then this may be what he himself experienced first hand when he submitted his paper to the Cercle du livre précieux. To complicate matters further, when Élisabeth Roudinesco published her intellectual biography of Lacan in 1993 she claimed that it was actually Jean Paulhan who had refused Lacan’stextforSade’s complete works, on account of it being unreadable (Roudinesco, 1997, p. 312).7 Seven years after writing this statement, Roudinesco received a letter from Claude Tchou, in which he assumed full responsibility for rejecting Lacan’s text, because it had been ‘unworthy of him’ (indigne de lui), whereas Paulhan’s descendants in turn confirmed that the editor of La nouvelle revue française had nothing whatso- ever to do with the whole matter (Allouch, 2001, pp. 27–29).8 Although it seems entirely reasonable for the publisher to be responsible for the rejection of a text, the precise grounds for the decision still remain terribly vague. What could it possibly mean for Lacan’s essay to have been ‘unworthy of him’?

7 Roudinesco also wrote that ‘Kant avec Sade’‘was intended to serve as an introduction to the third volume of Sade’scompleteworks’ (Roudinesco, 1997, p. 312), yet Lacan’s own comments clearly indicate that it was only meant to introduce La philosophie dans le boudoir.Thisiseffectively what he says in his lecture of 16 January 1963, and also in the first sentence of the preamble to the Écrits version of ‘Kant avec Sade’ (Lacan, 2006g, p. 645). For the record, it should be noted that, in 1985, Miller suggested that ‘Kant avec Sade’ was supposed to be an introduction to the edition as a whole, and that Lacan himself had petitioned the editor to take on this task. The latter point is refuted by a footnote Lacan attached to the preamble of the 1971 Écrits version of ‘Kant avec Sade’,whenitwas reprinted in a pocket edition. Here, Lacan stated explicitly that ‘Kant avec Sade’ had been commis- sioned (Lacan, 2006g, p. 668, note 1). In a sense, the fact that the editor must have solicited Lacan to write the text, rather than he himself asking for it to be included, is already borne out by Lacan saying in his lecture of 28 March 1962 that he had ‘promised’ to deliver the paper. 8 In the 2009 revised edition of her book, Roudinesco consequently deleted Paulhan’s name, and simply remarked that Lacan’s text had been withdrawn from Volume III because it had been considered unreadable (Roudinesco, 2009, p. 1876). xx Introduction

Didn’t the publisher and editor know that Lacan had a reputation for writing arcane, conceptually demanding texts? Wouldn’t it have been more ‘unworthy of him’ if he had produced a lucid, transparent and altogether accessible paper? Judging by Lacan’s announcement in his 1961–1962 seminar, and his own dating of ‘Kant avec Sade’ attheveryendofit,hecompletedthepaper during the Spring and Summer of 1962.9 Tempting as it may be to consider the article that was published in Critique as the first, original version of it, the lengthy footnote preceding the actual ‘text of the text’, which I have translated above, makes sufficiently clear that Lacan revisited it, if only because it does not make sense for this footnote to have been included in the manuscript that he would have submitted to the editor of Sade’s complete works. Purely for reasons of time, it is unlikely that Lacan extensively revised his paper before submitting (or imposing) it to Critique, but we nonetheless need to assume that, had the text appeared where it was originally meant to appear, it would have been a different text.10 As to the ‘Kant avec Sade’ that was included in Écrits, which appeared in French bookstores on 15 November 1966 (Roudinesco,2014,p.98),thisisasubstantiallymodified version of the Critique paper. For the Écrits version, entire paragraphs were rewritten by Lacan,ofteninlightofthemostrecent developments in his thought. Many passages were also corrected by François Wahl, a former analysand of Lacan’s and his assigned editor at the du Seuil publishing house (Roudinesco, 1997,

9 Lacan’s full date mark reads ‘R.G., September 1962’ (Lacan, 2006g, p. 667), which Miller has interpreted as Rome/Guitrancourt (Miller, 1998, p. 204). I have not been able to establish whether Lacan spent time in Rome during 1962, but if he did it would have been for personal rather than professional reasons, there being no evidence that he participated in a conference in the Italian capital during that period. As to Guitrancourt, this is where Lacan had his country house, and where he would spend most of his weekends. 10 In the absence of a Lacan-archive, it is impossible to ascertain how much the text that appeared in Critique differs from the original manuscript that was submitted to the Cercle du livre précieux. Did Lacan add other things to it apart from the opening footnote? Did he delete or rewrite passages? We may never know, but my feeling is that he changed very little to its contents. Towards the end of the Critique paper, there is even a remaining reference to the fact that the text is serving as a preface ...(Lacan, 1963, p. 308). However, the fact that the paper published in Critique differs from the original manuscript is also evidenced by a comment Lacan added to footnote 20 of the Critique version, in which he informed his readership that the previous sentence (in the footnote) was originally included in the body of the essay (Lacan, 1963, p. 312, note 20). Introduction xxi pp. 321–328).11 Interestingly, during the Summer of 1966 the Cercle du livre précieux announced a new, updated edition of the complete works of Sade, the second volume of which was published on 31 October that year, i.e. exactly two weeks before Écrits.Thisvolume,whicheffectively combined two volumes into one, included Sade’s Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, La philosophie dans le boudoir and Aline et Valcour, as well as the same set of commentaries as in the first edition of the complete works, with one notable exception: now La philosophie dans le boudoir also contained a postface entitled ‘Kant avec Sade’ by Jacques Lacan (Lacan, 1966b).12 This version of the text is slightly different from the Écrits version, and silently corrects some of the obvious editorial errors in the latter.13 In the Écrits version, Lacan

11 Wahl had been in analysis with Lacan between 1954 and 1960. He died on 15 September 2014, at the age of 89. This is not the place to mention, let alone interpret the textual variants of ‘Kant avec Sade’. The reader can find these listed, side by side, in de Frutos Salvador (1994, pp. 226–255) and Allouch (2001, pp. 162–195). However, in comparing the textual variants of ‘Kant avec Sade’ to those of the other papers in Écrits, the reader will notice that ‘Kant avec Sade’ is one of the most rewritten articles in the entire collection, so that Lacan’s date mark of September 1962, which remains in place in Écrits, is no doubt accurate in terms of the completion date of the original text, but not in terms of the contents of the écrit as such. In other words, despite what Lacan’s date mark suggests, the text of ‘Kant avec Sade’ that appeared in Écrits was not written in 1962, but probably some time during 1964, or maybe as late as 1965 or even 1966, when Lacan started to select the texts to be included in Écrits. This is also evinced by certain conceptual developments in the paper, which Lacan had not arrived at until 1964. In addition, whereas for some of the other papers in Écrits, Lacan dutifully signalled the fact that he had rewritten sections of the original (see, for example, Lacan, 2006a, p. 267, notes 39 and 44), this is not the case for ‘Kant avec Sade’. 12 Bizarrely, this is not at all obvious from the book’s table of contents, where Lacan’s postface was mentioned after the indexes, thus suggesting that it was somehow a postface to the entire volume. Looking at the page numbering in this table of contents, it also appears that Lacan’s text is literally thrown off here, because the page spread clearly shows that it must feature at the end of La philosophie dans le boudoir. A facsimile reprint of this updated, second edition of the complete works of Sade was released in 1973 by Éditions Tête de Feuilles in Paris. 13 For example, in the Écrits version (Lacan, 1966a), footnote 1 on page 779 should have been attached to ‘Premier Consul’ on the previous page (or to the end of this sentence, for that matter), because in the footnote Lacan accepted Lely’s view that, contrary to what some scholars had claimed (and continue to claim), Sade’s arrest on 6 March 1801 was unlikely to have been ordered directly by the First Consul (Napoleon Bonaparte) (Lacan, 1966a, p. 779). In the version of ‘Kant avec Sade’ in the 1966 (second) edition of Sade’s complete works, this footnote appears where it belongs. Strangely enough, in the English edition of ‘Kant with Sade’, this particular footnote is attached to another part of the sentence following the one in which the First Consul is mentioned (Lacan, 2006e, p. 657, note 9), which gives the reader the impression that Lacan was disputing the possibility, here, that Sade’s ‘manservant’ contributed to his arrest ...It should also be noted that, unlike the Écrits version, the 1966 postface does not have a date mark (Lacan, 1966b, p. 577). xxii Introduction did not mention—neither in the preamble nor elsewhere—that his text had been included in the complete works of Sade after all, albeit as a postface, which suggests that the text of this postface (and this is also evinced by the corrections) is of a later date than the one included in Écrits, despite its having been published earlier. When a two-volume pocket edition of Écrits was planned in 1969, Lacan again revised ‘Kant avec Sade’, whereby he added a footnote to the preamble, in which he stated that in 1966 the Cercle du livre précieux had decided to recommission the text ‘when the success of my Écrits rendered it plausible ( ...to the person who had replaced me?)’ (Lacan, 2006g, p. 668, note 1).14 With 5,000 copies sold in less than a fortnight (Roudinesco, 1997, p. 328), the publication of Écrits was admittedly extraordinarily successful. However, it is impossible for this editorial success to have informed the decision by the Cercle du livre précieux to recommission ‘Kant avec Sade’, because as I mentioned above the second volume of the new edition of Sade, which included Lacan’s text, was actually published two weeks before Écrits. Lacan’s remark that the success of Écrits had suddenly made ‘Kant avec Sade’ more plausible ‘to the person who had replaced me’ also insinuates that it was Pierre Klossowski—the person who had written the preface to La philosophie dans le boudoir in the first edition of Sade’scompleteworks,althoughonly indirectly, since this preface was effectively a reprint of a chapter from his previously published Sade mon prochain—who had petitioned the editors to recommission the text, yet there is no evidence to support this claim.15 In

14 From now on, references to Fink’s translation of ‘Kant avec Sade’ will simply be given by page number, both when they occur in the body of the text and in the notes. 15 In his letter to Roudinesco, Tchou wrote that he had decided to include Lacan’s text in the second edition of the complete works of Sade, because the psychoanalyst had shown his good intentions and had proceeded to revise and correct his contribution (Allouch, 2001, p. 27, footnote 23). Given that the 1966 versions of ‘Kant avec Sade’ are at least as, if not more hermetic than the 1963 version, I find Tchou’s explanation difficult to accept. Also, if Klossowski did have something to do with it, then it is still unfair to say that he had ‘replaced’ Lacan in the first edition, simply because some of Sade’s works were preceded by more than one preface, unless we were to assume that, in the absence of Lacan’s paper, the editor had decided to simply replace it with one of Klossowski’s previously published texts. A quick glance at the 1961 brochure in which the project was announced, and which also included a subscription form and a detailed analysis of the contents of each volume, suffices to exclude the latter possibility. Apart from the two books by Sade, the subscription form stated that Volume III of the complete works would also include a preface by Pierre Klossowski, so Klossowski’s text had already been secured before Lacan’s was in Introduction xxiii

1999, 18 years after Lacan’s death, a new edition of the two-volume Écrits was published, including yet another, slightly modified version of ‘Kant avec Sade’—modifications which on occasion restore the 1966 version of the text, yet not always exactly, and for which one can only assume the editors of the publishing house (du Seuil) and/or Jacques-Alain Miller to be responsible. Thus, all in all, there are six different versions of ‘Kant avec Sade’: (1) The manuscript Lacan originally submitted for publication to the Cercle du livre précieux, as a preface to La philosophie dans le boudoir in the first edition of Sade’s complete works, and which was rejected (and never published as such); (2) The 1963 text published in Critique; (3) The 1966 text published in Écrits; (4) The corrected 1966 text published as a postface to La philosophie dans le boudoir in the second edition of Sade’s complete works; (5) The 1971 version prepared for the pocket-edition of Écrits; and (6) The 1999 version included in the reprint of the pocket- edition of Écrits. The standard English translation of ‘Kant avec Sade’ by Bruce Fink, which is the one that I have been referring to, generally follows the 1971 version of the text, whilst preserving all the textual divisions of the 1966 Écrits version, yet unfortunately it also repeats some of the latter’s (admittedly minor) editorial errors.16 All of this does not explain, of course, how Lacan had become involved in the project in the first place. Why did the publisher and editor of Sade’s complete works commission a preface to La philosophie dans le boudoir from Lacan? The majority of the other contributors to the collection were either renowned Sade-scholars, such as Maurice Heine and Pierre Klossowski,

place (Lely, 1961). Given the prefaces to Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu in this volume, it would seem much more likely that the editor had wanted both an original text (by Lacan) and a reprint (by Klossowski). In any case, regardless as to what Lacan himself went on to claim, it is factually incorrect that Klossowski had replaced him in the first edition of Sade’s complete works. 16 Indentations at the top of the pages aside, the 1966 Écrits version has 15 sections, each separated by a blank line, whereas the 1971 version only has 14. By comparison, the Critique version has 13, separated by an asterisk, and the 1966 ‘Sade-version’ has 11, also separated by an asterisk. For the sake of completion, I should mention that, apart from Fink’s translation, there are two other English translations of ‘Kant avec Sade’. A 1989 translation by James B. Swenson Jr also relies on the 1971 version of Lacan’s text, yet without the textual divisions, and has the advantage of being followed by a very detailed set of annotations. A 2009 ‘tentative and provisional’ translation by William J. Richardson is based on the 1966 Écrits version, and numbers each of the paragraphs, whilst also including additional section headings, ‘so as to make Lacan’s text more readable’. See Lacan (1989), Swenson Jr (1989) and Lacan (2009). xxiv Introduction clinicians who had made substantial contributions to sexology, such as Angelo Hesnard, or established essayists and literary critics, such as Yves Bonnefoy and Gaëtan Picon. In 1962, all of Lacan’s major texts had appeared in specialized psychoanalytic journals, and he had only published two substantial works of ‘psychoanalytic literary criticism’,notablythe ‘Séminaire sur “La lettre volée”’ (‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’) (Lacan, 2006c) and ‘Jeunesse de Gide ou la lettre et le désir’ (‘The Youth of Gide, or the Letter and Desire’) (Lacan, 2006d), the latter having been published in Critique no less (Lacan, 1958). During the 1950s, Lacan produced numerous detailed analyses of various literary-philosophical works, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Lacan, 2014a, pp. 277–419), Sophocles’ Antigone (Lacan, 1992, pp. 241–287), and Plato’s Symposium (Lacan, 2015, pp. 17–163), yet these had been delivered to a relatively small group of people, as part of a psychoanalytic training programme at the Sainte- Anne Hospital in Paris. Starting in November 1959, Lacan had devoted a yearlong seminar to the ‘ethics of psychoanalysis’ (Lacan, 1992), in which he paid a great deal of attention to Sade’s works, yet his reading of Sade during this year remained unpublished and would not have been known outside the limited circle of psychoanalysts-in-training that was in attendance. I have no way of proving this, but I am inclined to think that Lacan had been asked to write a preface to La philosophie dans le boudoir, partly because of his being the intellectual figurehead of the Société française de psychanalyse—the ‘other’ psychoanalytic group in France, which had separated itself from the founda- tional Sociéte psychanalytique de Paris, to which Angelo Hesnard belonged— and partly because of his lifelong association with the surrealists, who had discovered Sade by virtue of Guillaume Apollinaire, and who had celebrated the Marquis as a visionary genius, an authentic free spirit and a revolutionary liberator of human desire (Brighelli, 2000, pp. 179–200).17

17 In 1909, Apollinaire was the first to publish an anthology of Sade’s works in France (Sade, 1909), and it is this edition which prompted the surrealists during the 1920s to explore the Sadean universe. At one point, virtually all the key figures in France’s avant-garde artistic movement—Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, André Breton, René Char, Luis Buñuel, René Crevel, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Maurice Nadeau and so on—publicly expressed their intellectual affinity to Sade, and their creative projects were often inspired by his life-history and his texts. See also Le Brun (1989, pp. 113–145). Introduction xxv

Also, despite the fact that Lacan’s paper was never published in its rightful place, he insisted on maintaining its original purpose, as a preface to La philosophie dans le boudoir. In other words, regardless of the changing status the text acquired with its varying publication outlets—review essay, stand-alone écrit, postface—and irrespective of the numerous changes to its original contents, Lacan never altered the style, tone and function of his paper, and he remained rather cautious when it came to exposing the limitations of Sade’s work, because he felt that this is not what the writer of a preface is supposed to do. For example, when, at one point, he questioned Sade’s ‘sense of comedy’, he stopped in his tracks by saying that ‘a preface is not meant to do the author a disservice’ (p. 661).18 Likewise, when, at the very end of his text, he suggested that Sade had failed to understand something crucial about the inextricable link between desire and the law, he confessed: ‘I have forbidden myself to say a word about what Sade is missing here’ (p. 667). For Lacan, a preface is designed to introduce, situate, contextualize and tease out the intricacies of a text, in a broadly sympathetic appreciation of the author and his work, also explicating its impact and significance. It is important for the reader to bear this critical function of ‘Kant avec Sade’ in mind when approaching the paper, because it allows one to understand the particular focus and the main developments of the text. It rapidly becomes clear, then, that the title ‘Kant avec Sade’ is effectively a double metonymy. Lacan was not at all interested in comparing and contrasting the (rather uneventful) life of Immanuel Kant, the famous academic philosopher of Königsberg, with the (rather tumultuous) life of D.A.F. de Sade, the infamous French Marquis who

18 In 1971, Lacan attached a footnote to this sentence which was deleted again in 1999 (but evidently not by him), in which he wondered: ‘What would I have written by way of a postface?’ (p. 668, note 15). So, although the Cercle du livre précieux published Lacan’s paper as a postface to La philosophie dans le boudoir in 1966, for Lacan the text was still, and would only ever be a preface. As we shall see later on, in Section 14 of ‘Kant with Sade’ Lacan did identify various flaws in Sade’s libertine works—a certain preachiness, the rather mediocre erudition supporting the endless recitation of historical and anthropological factoids, a lack of witticism, and the failure to recount a single act of proper seduction, in which vice would triumph over virtue on account of the latter’s eventual submission to the former—but this did not stop him from praising the ‘somber beauty’ of the ‘tragic experience’ that was being depicted there (pp. 664–666). xxvi Introduction spent 27 years of his life behind bars. When, starting from Section 8 in the text (p. 656), he intermittently referred to key events in Sade’s life, it was primarily to demonstrate the limits of his ‘art’, insofar as to Lacan one should not assume that the licentious content of Sade’s novels is a reliable indicator of the author’s morals, his politics and his life-style, much less that the prevailing sexual tendencies in Sade’s work are but a fictional extension of his own mental economy—the ‘sadists’ in the novels having been created by a man who is himself an inveterate ‘sadist’. One of the crucial lines of Lacan’s argument in ‘Kant with Sade’ is precisely that the contents of Sade’s libertine novels, which he also designated as ‘the Sadean fantasy’ (p. 653), i.e. the fantasy Sade articu- lated as a literary text within the space of his creative imagination, cannot be mapped directly onto the author’s life. More specifically, the fact that it is the ‘sadistic’ fantasy of Sade’s libertine heroes that tends to dominate within the Sadean fantasy—whose full spectrum also includes the more ‘masochistic’ side of the victims, as epitomized by the peren- nially virtuous Justine—did not, for Lacan, demonstrate that this is also the type of ‘practical reason’ which would have presided over his daily routines, outside the fictional space of the literary narrative. Although Sade’s incessant articulation of the libertines’‘sadistic’ fantasy of abso- lute destruction inevitably played a crucial part in the author’s own Weltanschauung, for Lacan the latter was much more constructed around Sade’s relationship to his own act of writing, and to the specific function he wanted to accord to his libertine novels, as exclusive ‘instruments’ of fantasy, than to the personal realization of the cruel and barbaric fantasy of his fictional heroes. Much like ‘Kant’ in the title of the paper referred to Kant’s books and ideas rather than to the man, the ‘Sade’ in ‘Kant with Sade’ was thus meant to be understood primarily as Sade’s works, and the views expressed within them by a host of fictional characters. As a matter of fact, the focus of Lacan’s paper is even tighter, because rather than aiming to combine all of Kant’s writings with the whole of Sade’s literary output, which also includes much more mainstream short stories, novels, essays and plays, it essentially restricts itself—and this is the second metonymy—to a discussion of the links between a mere two texts: Kant’s Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft, originally published in Introduction xxvii

1788, and Sade’s La philosophie dans le boudoir, from 1795.19 And because Lacan’s text was always intended as a preface to the latter volume, it should not come as a surprise that the emphasis is firmly placed on this one particular book—Kant’s treatise being placed in a secondary, supporting role.20 In the fourth paragraph of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan mentioned that, to the best of his knowledge, this link between Kant and Sade had ‘never been pointed out as such’ (p. 645), thus emphasizing the originality of his direction of inquiry. Either Lacan’sliteraturestudyhadbeentoosuperficial, or he had conveniently decided to ‘forget’ some of his source materials, but the

19 In ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan stated that ‘Philosophy in the Bedroom [sic] came eight years after the Critique of Practical Reason’ (p. 646), which is clearly a mistake. When Lacan first mentioned the two books in the same breath, in the session of 23 December 1959 of his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, he dated them correctly, but nonetheless remarked that Sade’s book had come out six years after Kant’s (Lacan, 1992, p. 78). In 1962, when Lacan was writing the first version of ‘Kant avec Sade’, the most widely available French translation of Kant’s Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft was the one by François Picavet (Kant, 1943), yet Lacan decided to rely on the ‘very acceptable’ 1848 translation by Jules Barni (Kant, 1848) (p. 668, note 2). In what follows, I will refer to the 1997 English translation of the Kritik by Mary Gregor (Kant, 1997b), yet the reader should note that in Fink’s translation of Écrits, it is Lewis White Beck’s earlier translation of the Kritik (Kant, 1949) that is referenced (p. 668, note 3). As to La philosophie dans le boudoir, it is the 1965 translation by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (Sade, 1965) that has been utilized in the English Écrits (p. 668, note 4), but this has now been superseded by a vastly superior translation by Joachim Neugroschel (Sade, 2006), which is therefore the one that I shall use. The superiority of Neugroschel’s translation can already be gauged from the way in which the title of Sade’s book has been rendered. Whereas Seaver and Wainhouse simply called it Philosophy in the Bedroom, Neugroschel acknowledged that Sade’s boudoir is really not a bedroom but, as Belaval (1976, pp. 7–8) has indicated, a space situated between the bedroom (where people sleep or have sex) and the salon (where people rest and converse), and therefore a place where philosophy and eroticism may become intertwined. See also Delon (1999). 20 Of course, this does not mean that Kant was less important for Lacan’s own intellectual trajectory than Sade. The significance of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason for Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis, and especially for his consideration of a ‘psychoanalytic ethics’, scilicet an ethics that is apposite for psychoanalytic practice, cannot be overestimated. If Kant operates somewhat in the background of ‘Kant with Sade’, it is again because Lacan was writing a preface to Sade. Since the text serves this very specific purpose, Lacan also assumed that his readers were familiar with the Critique of Practical Reason, exhorting those who ‘are still virgins with respect to the Critique’ (p. 648) to read the book before considering his own text. Needless to say, although Lacan did not expect his readers to have any detailed knowledge of Philosophy in the Boudoir (a preface is designed to be read before one reads the text itself), I myself would strongly recommend that the readers of this book, here, also read Sade’s book before reading Lacan’s text, because this will greatly improve their understanding of it. In this way, ‘Kant with Sade’ evidently loses its introductory value and de facto becomes a postface. xxviii Introduction connection between Kant and Sade—their works and ideas, rather than their personalities, of course—had definitely been made before, and moreover along the same lines, notably in ‘Excursus II’ of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment), which was first pub- lished in 1944 (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997).21 In this remarkable text, the principal proponents of the Frankfurt School drew a parallel between Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and Sade’s Juliette ou les prospérités du vice,in order to show that Sade’s libertine heroes sound uncannily like Kant when they profess their moral maxims, with the proviso that they represent the dialectical underside of Kant’s system. Much like Kant, Juliette and her acolytes reject any consideration of extrinsic, socially sanctioned moral values when advancing their doctrine. They believe unreservedly in the power of reason, provided it is stripped of its emotional dimensions (what Kant designated as the ‘pathological’), so that it becomes a formal, rigorous, ‘apathetic’ faculty. But Adorno and Horkheimer also argued that Sade’s heroes are Kantian philosophers who are actually purer than Kant himself, if only because they do not believe that autonomous, dispassionate, scientific reason will automatically engender moral benevolence and contribute to the establishment of a harmonious world order. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, Sade’s libertines are far more rational than the philosopher of Königsberg, insofar as the latter’s conviction that the simple ‘fact’ of pure reason would spontaneously generate a practical, moral law of mutual respect constitutes in itself a point of irrationality.22 These propositions are not at all

21 We know from Adorno’s correspondence with Walter Benjamin that in 1938 Adorno was already sufficiently familiar with Justine to quote passages from it (Benjamin & Adorno, 1999, p. 286). And in July 1937, Adorno had informed Benjamin that Horkheimer might be contributing a ‘major essay on Sade’ for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Benjamin & Adorno, 1999, p. 197). The essay in question never appeared there, but may have been turned into ‘Excursus II’ of Dialectic of Enlightenment.Indeed, although there is some discussion as to the authorship of ‘Excursus II’, in all likelihood this part of the book was written by Horkheimer alone (Figal, 2004, p. 8). Both Horkheimer and Adorno were no doubt introduced to Sade’s works by Erich Fromm, who had presented the Marquis’ ideas at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research during the early 1930s, and who had published a review of Geoffrey Gorer’s seminal monograph on Sade (Gorer, 1934) in the School’s journal (Fromm, 1934). 22 Sade was exceptionally well-read, but neither from his texts nor from the contents of his personal library (Seifert, 1983, pp. 175–278; Mothu, 1995) can it be inferred that he ever picked up a copy of Kant’s philosophical books, which he would have had to read in German. Vice versa, and considerations of character aside, it would have been impossible for the philosopher of Königsberg to cast his eye over Sade’s libertine fictions, at least not Introduction xxix dissimilar to what Lacan posited in ‘Kant with Sade’,yetIcannotprovethat he was familiar with Adorno and Horkheimer’s work, much less that he relied on it when developing his own theses.23 Given the cultural prominence of Sartre and de Beauvoir in France during the 1950s, I would definitely be surprised if Lacan had not read de Beauvoir’s seminal essay ‘Faut-il brûler Sade?’, which was originally published in ‘Les temps modernes’ (de Beauvoir, 1990). In this particular text, de Beauvoir averred, almost in passing and without any further elaboration: ‘With a severity similar to Kant’s, and which has its source in the same puritan tradition, Sade conceives the free act only as an act free of feeling’ (de Beauvoir, 1990, p. 55). Lacan never referred to de Beauvoir’sworkon Sade, but the two had met during the 1940s at a private performance of a play by Picasso, and continued to be on friendly terms (Roudinesco, 1997, pp. 168–169). De Beauvoir’s coupling of Kant and Sade was not nearly as tight as Horkheimer and Adorno’s intricate intellectual braid of Kant, Sade and the Holocaust, but at least it demonstrates again that Lacan was clearly mistaken when he claimed that the link between Kant and Sade had never before been made.24

aroundthetimewhenhewaswritingKritik der praktischen Vernunft,becausethefirst of these (La courtisane anaphrodite ou la pucelle libertine) was not published until 1787, in a limited edition with a very small circulation. 23 Dialektik der Aufklärung was not translated into French until 1974 (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1974), but Lacan could have easily read it in German or in English. Neither in his seminars nor in his published texts did Lacan ever mention Adorno and Horkheimer (Le Gaufey et al., 1998), and for all I know he did not have a copy of their book in his personal library (Roudinesco, 2005). Nonetheless, the similarity between Lacan’sthesesin‘Kant with Sade’ and Adorno and Horkheimer’s arguments is striking, and there are other analogies between the two works. For example, the Frankfurt School philosophers referred to Sade’s meticulously constructed sexual installations as the ‘gymnastic pyramids of Sade’s orgies’ (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997, p. 88), whereas in ‘Kant with Sade’ Lacan too insisted on the extraordinarycomplexityofSade’s ‘human pyramids’ (p. 664). It is also worth mentioning that, in 1887, Nietzsche had already exposed Kant’s categorical imperative as something that ‘gives off awhiff of cruelty’ (riecht nach Grausamkeit), in the second essay of his On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 47), a book with which Lacan was definitely familiar (Lacan, 1992, p. 35). Nietzsche did not go so far as to attribute a Sadean ‘smell’ to Kant’s ethics, but the resonances between Nietzsche’scritique of Kant and Lacan’s reading of Kant with Sade are clear. An interesting exploration of these resonances can be found in Derrida (2014, pp. 159–165). 24 For the sake of completeness, I should also mention that on 12 May 1947 Georges Bataille gave a lecture to the ‘Collège philosophique’ entitled ‘Lemaldansleplatonismeetdanslesadisme’,whichwas published the year after in a revised form as ‘Sade et la morale’, in which he alluded to Kant’sconception of fine art in the Critique of Judgement as ‘intrinsically purposive’, and therefore emblematic of moral xxx Introduction

It should also be noted, here, that when Lacan associated Kant with Sade for the first time on 23 December 1959 (Lacan, 1992, p. 78), French Sade-scholarship was already highly advanced, by virtue of a series of influential studies by Maurice Heine (1950b), Jean Paulhan (1945), Pierre Klossowski (1947), Maurice Blanchot (1986) and Georges Bataille (1957a, 1957b), and the painstaking biographical work by Gilbert Lely (1952, 1957). It is highly likely that Lacan was introduced to Sade’s works by Bataille, but even withoutthisdirectlineofinfluence, he would have been immersed in a post-War cultural and intellectual atmosphere that took Sade very seriously, perhaps for the first time in French history (Marty, 2011). Furthermore, one year before Lacan started writing ‘Kant with Sade’, Michel Foucault published Folie et déraison, his massive thesis for the French State Doctorate, in which Sade featured prominently as a major figure of contestation in the history of French institutional psychiatry (Foucault, 1961). Although he was not in the habit of acknowledging all his sources, Lacan was clearly inspired by all these works when he wrote up ‘Kant with Sade’,and in what follows I will endeavour to show that the contributions of Blanchot, Klossowski and Bataille in particular, constitute an important intellectual backdrop for Lacan’sarguments.25 Finally,

action (Kant, 2007, p. 135; Bataille, 1976, p. 452). I have not been able to ascertain whether Lacan attended the lecture—in all likelihood he did not, because I am quite sure he would have participated in the discussion, whose record does not include him by name—or was familiar with Bataille’sessay,but the intellectual convergences and the existing ‘family relationship’ between the two men may very well have elicited a conversation on the topic. As to Sade and the Holocaust, shortly after the end of World War II, the French novelist and poet Raymond Queneau wrote in his ‘Lectures pour un front’: ‘It is undeniable that the world imagined by Sade and willed by his characters (and why not by Sade himself?) is a striking prefiguration of the world ruled by the Gestapo, its tortures and its camps’ (Queneau, 1950, p. 172). The point struck a chord with Albert Camus, who expanded upon it in his 1951 book The Rebel (L’homme révolté), thus painting a much bleaker picture of Sade’ssignificance than that promoted by the surrealists (Camus, 2000). 25 In the Critique version of ‘Kant with Sade’, Lacan placed a footnote at the end of the third paragraph of the tenth section, which read: ‘If our readers are retained by this point of our essay [Philippe Pinel’s famous, yet no doubt mythical “gesture” of 1793, whereby he ordered the removal of the chains of the mad people incarcerated at the Bicêtre asylum in Paris], we can refer them to Michel Foucault’s admirable Histoire de la folie, published by Plon in 1961, and specifically to its third part’ (Lacan, 1963, p. 307, footnote 14). For the 1966 and 1971 Écrits versions of the text, this footnote was deleted, but it was included in the same place in the 1966 Introduction xxxi

I should mention that on 11 April 1961 Adolf Eichmann, one of the most highly ranked Nazi officials, was put on trial in Jerusalem, charged with the mass deportation and large-scale extermination of millions of Jewish people. At one point during the trial, judge Raveh questioned Eichmann about a remark he had made pre- viously under police interrogation, in which he had emphasized that he had only ever lived his life in accordance with the Kantian definition of duty. In response to the judge’squestion,Eichmann surprised everyone by reciting, almost verbatim,Kant’sdefinition of the categorical imperative: ‘I [Adolf Eichmann] meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws’ (Arendt, 2006, p. 136). Following this statement, Eichmann declared that he was familiar with Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,butthat he had stopped complying with its precepts from the moment he was charged with the duty to implement the so-called ‘Final Solution’. In her reading of this extraordinary moment, Hannah Arendt argued that Eichmann never really relinquished his Kantian sense of duty at all, but that he simply ‘distorted it to read: Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or of the law of the land—or ...’‘Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it’ (Arendt, 2006, p. 136). Arendt did not go so far as to say that Eichmann had interpreted Kant in a Sadean fashion, but in her report Eichmann definitely appeared as a diligent, albeit twisted Kantian and, by extension, as a cold and callous, yet rational mass-murderer who incarnated the destructive obverse of Kant’s categorical imperative—the kind of figure Adorno and Horkheimer may have had in mind when, in response to the atrocities of World War II, they exposed the Sadean dangers of Kant’s moral philosophy, and of the Enlightenment values in general. Arendt reported on the case

‘Sade-version’ of ‘Kant with Sade’ (Lacan, 1966b, p. 569, note). In the three English editions of ‘Kant with Sade’, the footnote has not been reproduced. In Fink’s translation, it should have been attached to the word ‘humanity’ at the beginning of the fourth line on p. 661. xxxii Introduction for The New Yorker in February and March 1963, but in France too the newspapers devoted numerous pages to the events in Jerusalem. Lacan had already linked Kant and Sade 16 months before the trial started, but Eichmann’s declared Kantianism may have emboldened him in his views, and may have given him a renewed strength of purpose when he began composing ‘Kant with Sade’ during the Spring and Summer of 1962. Throughout the chapters of this book, I will conduct a step-by- step reading of ‘Kant with Sade’, articulating what I believe to be the central lines of Lacan’s thought, clarifying allusions, borrowings and implicit references, elucidating Lacan’s tacit knowledge, and situating his ideas within their broader intellectual context which, as far as Lacan’s own work is concerned, goes back to his explora- tion of the ethics of psychoanalysis in his seminar of 1959–1960 (Lacan, 1992). To allow the reader to use the book as a running commentary and conceptual travel guide, I have decided to struc- ture it in accordance with Lacan’s own textual divisions. As such, each chapter in the book covers one specific section of Lacan’stext in the English edition of Écrits,sothatasimplenumberingofthese sections will allow the reader to go straight to the corresponding chapter. However, because the twelfth section of ‘Kant with Sade’ (p. 663) is just one sentence, and serves as an introduction to the following part of the paper, I have taken the twelfth and thirteenth sections as one in Chapter 12 of the book, so that Chapters 13 and 14 of the book refer respectively to Sections 14 and 15 of Lacan’s text. Unlike Lacan’s article, my own text is not primarily intended as a preface, yet many readers will no doubt employ it in this way. Echoing Lacan, I could have decided, therefore, not to be critical about the text that is being introduced, since prefatory remarks are allegedly not meant to do a disservice.Bethatasitmay,Ihavefelt it necessary to alert the reader on occasion to those passages in ‘Kant with Sade’ where Lacan’s own explanations and elaborations are rather contentious and problematic, because otherwise my text would have been in quite a few places no more than a paraphrase of Introduction xxxiii

Lacan’s.26 At the same time, I do not wish to claim, of course, that my critical analysis of ‘Kant with Sade’ is the only possible inter- pretation of the text, let alone that it is the most accurate exegesis of what remains an exceptionally demanding écrit.Thereaderwill undoubtedly benefit from alternative interpretations, as well as from the three yearlong seminars held by Miller between 1982 and 1985 (Miller, 1982–1983, 1983–1984, 1984–1985), and the two contemporary texts mentioned above (Miller, 1996, 1998). Some of these books and papers willalsoprovidethereaderwith scholarly discussions of one or the other aspect of Lacan’stextthat are much more elaborate than what my own contribution allows.27

26 A paraphrase rendered all the more unnecessary by the fact that it already exists. Indeed, shortly before ‘Kant avec Sade’ was reprinted in the 1971 pocket edition of Écrits, an unsigned paraphrase (dated November 1968) of Lacan’s paper appeared in Scilicet, the journal of Lacan’s École freudienne de Paris (NN, 1970). In Rosart’s exhaustive Sade-bibliography of 1977, published in a special issue of the journal Obliques, this paraphrase was attributed to Lacan himself (Rosart, 1977, p. 300), yet it is unthinkable that Lacan would be the author of a restatement of his own paper, partly because this kind of captatio benevolentiae is not what he would have ever agreed to do, partly because all of his own contributions to Scilicet were de facto signed. To the best of my awareness, none of Lacan’s other papers were ever officially paraphrased, that is to say published as such with Lacan’s endorsement, and ‘Kant avec Sade’s exception can be seen as further proof that, even in Lacan’s own School, the text was regarded as ‘difficult’. Before the francophone reader gets too excited, I should also mention that the paraphrase covers less than half of Lacan’s text, and is in many places less than enlightening, not in the least because quite a few passages in it are just literal quotations from Lacan. Apart from this narrative paraphrase, there is another English rephrasing of Lacan’s text, which follows Richardson’s translation (Lacan, 2009), and which the author calls a ‘scholion’ (Hughes, 2009). 27 For alternative readings of ‘Kant with Sade’, see Marchaisse (1982), Baas (1992), Roudinesco (1997, pp. 309–318), Reinhard (1995), Sample (1995), Bencivenga (1996), David-Ménard (1997), Žižek (1998, 1999), Zupančič (1998, 2000), Allouch (2001), Rabaté (2001, pp. 85– 114), De Kesel (2009), Pinheiro Safatle (2002), Martyn (2003, pp. 171–216), Bosteels (2005), Banham (2010), Fukuda (2011), Marty (2011, pp. 171–267), Schorderet (2011, pp. 44–51), Lauwaert (2013, 2014, pp. 137–170), Fink (2014), Roudinesco (2014), Wright (2015) and Zevnik (2016). In addition, there is an internal document produced by the ‘New Lacanian School’ which contains the transcripts of a series of lectures on ‘Kant with Sade’ delivered by prominent French Lacanians (Wülfing, 2004), and a two-volume collection of commentaries on some of Lacan’s references and the two schemas in the text (Zweifel, 2004, 2005).