Conclusion When Georges Bataille died in July 1962, there was never any doubt that a special issue of Critique, the journal he had founded in 1946, should be devoted to his memory and legacy. The issue eventually appeared as a double installment in August 1963, four months after Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ had been published in Critique, and it featured tributes to the journal’s founder by some of France’s most renowned intelligentsia, including Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Foucault and Michel Leiris. In his lengthy contribu- tion to the commemorative issue, Foucault paid homage to Bataille’s philosophical analyses of sexuality, eroticism and transgression, which prompted him to revisit the influence and impact of Sade on the development of a language and space for human desire. ‘How is it possible to discover, under all these different figures’, Foucault won- dered, ‘that form of thought we carelessly call “the philosophy of eroticism”, but in which it is important to recognize ...an essential experience for our culture since Kant and Sade—the experience of finitude and being, of the limit and transgression?’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 40). Given the fact that Lacan had recently devoted an entire essay to the not-quite-obvious link between Kant and Sade, and notably in the © The Author(s) 2017 141 D. Nobus, The Law of Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55275-0 142 Conclusion same journal, one could have expected Foucault to engage with Lacan’s text, or at least to provide the reader with a reference to it, especially since Lacan himself had expressed his appreciation for Foucault’s work, in an act of intellectual generosity for which he was not particularly well- known. But Foucault remained silent about ‘Kant with Sade’. When, in 1965, Jean-Jacques Pauvert decided to extract ‘Français, encore un effort ...’ from La philosophie dans le boudoir, in order to release it as a separate volume, Blanchot accepted the task to write a new preface for it, in which he duly acknowledged the ‘profound reflections of both Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski’ (Blanchot, 1993, p. 219), yet without paying any attention to Lacan’s essay. Critique was sufficiently well-established for Blanchot to have known about the text, and given its central concern with Philosophy in the Boudoir, and the pamphlet within it, it is quite unlikely that Blanchot had not consulted it. Maybe he had decided to ignore it on account of the fact that Lacan himself had failed to mention Blanchot’s own previous work on Sade in it, despite his clearly having relied on it. Much like Foucault, Blanchot remained silent about ‘Kant with Sade’. Ayearafter‘Kant with Sade’ was included in Écrits, the French literary avant-garde journal Tel Quel devoted a special issue to ‘La pensée de Sade’ (Sade’s Thought), including some of the usual suspects (Klossowski, Barthes), alongside essays by the writer Phillippe Sollers, the philosopher Hubert Damisch and the psychoanalyst Michel Tort. The latter figure was broadly sympathetic to the Lacanian cause, and was an active participant in Lacan’s seminar. In his essay entitled ‘L’effet Sade’ (‘The Sade effect’)(Tort, 1967), he wrote extensively about the fantasy, without distinguishing—as Lacan had done—between Sade’s literary fantasy and that which would have ruled the Marquis’ life, and without showing any trace of a certain ‘Lacan effect’ on his own, distinctly psychoanalytic views. None of the other contributors to the special issue made a single mention of ‘Kant with Sade’ either. In 1967, Gilles Deleuze published a lengthy introduction to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, which was as much a study of Sade and sadism as it was an exploration of Sacher-Masoch and masochism (Deleuze, 1991). Deleuze relied on all the established French Sade-scholars (Klossowski, Bataille, Blanchot), and drew extensively on psychoanalytic concepts to argue in favour of a strict separation of sadism Conclusion 143 and masochism. In addition, he engaged with Kant’s conception of the categorical imperative in the Critique of Practical Reason,referredtothe theoretical disquisitions of Philosophy in the Boudoir, and analysed the moral principles underpinning Sade and Masoch’s(fictional) ideologies. Deleuze acknowledged Lacan for highlighting the significance of Freud’s concept of disavowal (Verleugnung), and for arguing that what has been excluded symbolically will return in the real (Deleuze, 1991, pp. 31 and 64), yet as to Lacan’sargumentsin‘Kant with Sade’, he merely pointed out, in a footnote, that Lacan had underscored in it the ‘elusive character of the object of the law’ (Deleuze, 1991, p. 137, note 26). In February 1968, a two-day conference on Sade was organized in Aix-en-Provence, which brought together a large gathering of literary critics, eighteenth-century scholars, philosophers and psychoanalysts. In his paper on the sadistic fantasy and reality, the psychoanalyst Jacques Caïn—amemberofthe Société Psychanalytique de Paris who was not at all attuned to Lacan’sideas —mentioned how Lacan had made an important contribution to the issue in question, yet there is no evidence that he had studied Lacan’spaper (Caïn, 1968, p. 283). When, in March 1970, Foucault gave a long lecture on Sade at the State University of New York in Buffalo, his choice of subject-matter (‘Why did Sade write?’ and the incessant alternation between ‘theoretical discourses’ and ‘erotic scenes’ in Sade’slibertine novels) prompted him to investigate the function of writing and the fantasy for connecting truth to desire. On occasion, Foucault’swordshadan unmistakable Lacanian ring to them, as when he asserted that ‘writing [in the case of Sade] serves as an intermediary element between the imaginary and the real’ (Foucault, 2015, p. 107), yet at no given point was Lacan mentioned by name, and his ‘Kant with Sade’ never explicitly appeared on Foucault’s radar. When, during the early 1970s, the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini decided to adapt Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom into a film, he reportedly ‘read everything [on Sade] that could be read’ (Brighelli, 2000, p. 276). Most unusual for a film, the end credits of Salò contained an ‘essential bibliography’ of five key texts, listed in alpha- betical order by the author’s surname: Barthes, Blanchot, de Beauvoir, Klossowski, Sollers. Sade-scholars no doubt deplored the absence of Bataille, Deleuze, Foucault, Paulhan, Heine and Lely, but did anyone deplore the absence of Lacan? 144 Conclusion On 29 October 1974, Lacan was in Rome for a conference of his École freudienne de Paris. Questioned by an Italian journalist about his pur- portedly Kantian concept of the real, he responded: ‘I have written only one thing about Kant, which is my short paper entitled “Kant with Sade”. To be quite frank, I make Kant into a flower of sadism [fleur sadique]. No one paid the slightest attention to that article. Some second-rate fellow commented on it somewhere, and I don’t even know if his commentary was ever published. But no one has ever sent me any remarks on that article. It is true that I am incomprehensible’ (Lacan, 2013a, p. 83). I am not quite sure who Lacan had in mind, here, when he referred to the ‘second-rate fellow’. Maybe he was thinking of the anonymous author of the Paraphrase de ‘Kant avec Sade’, which had indeed been published in 1970, notably in Lacan’s own journal Scilicet (NN, 1970). If so, the designation ‘second-rate’ was definitely justified, partly because the text was effectively no more than a loose paraphrase, written in so convoluted a style that Lacan’s own essay reverts back into ‘light reading’, partly because it only restated a very small portion of Lacan’s original essay. The only essay that was published during Lacan’s life-time in which the author explicitly engaged with ‘Kant with Sade’ is by Sollers (1977), yet his remarks only cover the last three sections of the text and do not address Lacan’s reading of Kant nor, for that matter, the two schemas, the complex dynamic between desire and the Law, and the problematic relationship between Sade (the man, the author) and his ‘Sadean fantasy’. As such, it is fair to say that throughout Lacan’s lifetime ‘Kant with Sade’ was completely ignored by Sade-scholars, philosophers and psychoanalysts alike. Maybe the Sade-scholars believed that Lacan was too much of a psychoanalyst and not enough of a literary critic to be taken seriously. Maybe the philosophers thought that Lacan was too much of a Sade-scholar and insufficiently versed in the Kantian tradition to be given credit for his work. Maybe the psychoanalysts felt that Lacan’s paper was too literary-philosophical, and lacking in concrete clinical applications to be given serious consideration. Maybe all of them agreed that ‘Kant with Sade’ was simply unreadable, either because this is what they had heard, or because this is what they had discovered through personal experience. And after all, Lacan himself had admitted that the text was incomprehensible ... Conclusion 145 Ignored and neglected by one and all, ‘Kant with Sade’ nonetheless received a great deal of attention by Lacan himself, more in fact than most of his other essays in Écrits.Afteritsfirst publication in April 1963, Lacan returned to ‘Kant with Sade’ on a regular basis in his seminars, not only in the context of his yearlong seminar on The Logic of the Fantasy (Lacan, 1966–67), but equally in further elaborations of his theory of desire, and in advanced conceptual developments of the inter-relations between jouissance,desireandtruth.‘As to “Kant with Sade”,I’ve written things that are actually pretty good’, he admitted to his audience in March 1974, ‘things no one evidently understands ...’ (Lacan, 1973–74, session of 19 March 1974).