kant and sade- the ideal couple

8/8/2019 Kant and Sade- The Ideal Couple

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Kant and Sade: The Ideal CoupleSlavoj Zizek.Lacan.com.

Of all the couples in the history of modern thought (Freud and Lacan, Marx and

Lenin), Kant and Sade is perhaps the most problematic: the statement "Kant is Sade"is the "infinite judgement" of modern ethics, positing the sign of equation between thetwo radical opposites, i.e. asserting that the sublime disinterested ethical attitude issomehow identical to, or overlaps with, the unrestrained indulgence in pleasurableviolence. A lot-everything, perhaps-is at stake here: is there a line from Kantianformalist ethics to the cold-blooded Auschwitz killing machine? Are concentrationcamps and killing as a neutral business the inherent outcome of the enlightenedinsistence on the autonomy of Reason? Is there at least a legitimate lineage from Sadeto Fascist torturing, as is implied by Pasolini's film version of Sal, which transposes itinto the dark days of Mussolini's Salo republic? Lacan developed this link first in his

Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59)1, and then in the crits "Kant with

Sade" of 19632.

1.

For Lacan, Sade consequently deployed the inherent potential of the Kantianphilosophical revolution, in the precise sense that he honestly externalized the Voice ofConscience. The first association here is, of course: what's all the fuss about? Today, inour postidealist Freudian era, doesn't everybody know what the point of the "with" is-the truth of Kant's ethical rigorism is the sadism of the Law, i.e. the Kantian Law is asuperego agency that sadistically enjoys the subject's deadlock, his inability to meetits inexorable demands, like the proverbial teacher who tortures pupils with impossible

tasks and secretly savors their failings?Lacan's point, however, is the exact opposite of this first association: it is not Kant whowas a closet sadist, it is Sade who is a closet Kantian. That is to say, what one shouldbear in mind is that the focus of Lacan is always Kant, not Sade: what he is interestedin are the ultimate consequences and disavowed premises of the Kantian ethicalrevolution. In other words, Lacan does not try to make the usual "reductionist" pointthat every ethical act, as pure and disinterested as it may appear, is always groundedin some "pathological" motivation (the agent's own long-term interest, the admirationof his peers, up to the "negative" satisfaction provided by the suffering and extortionoften demanded by ethical acts); the focus of Lacan's interest rather resides in theparadoxical reversal by means of which desire itself (i.e. acting upon one's desire, not

compromising it) can no longer be grounded in any "pathological" interests ormotivations and thus meets the criteria of the Kantian ethical act, so that "followingone's desire" overlaps with "doing one's duty." Suffice it to recall Kant's own famousexample from his Critique of Practical Reason:

"Suppose that someone says his lust is irresistible when the desired objectand opportunity are present. Ask him whether he would not control hispassions if, in front of the house where he has this opportunity, a gallowswere erected on which he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his

lust. We do not have to guess very long what his answer may be."3

Lacan's counterargument here is: what if we encounter a subject (as we do regularly in

psychoanalysis), who can only fully enjoy a night of passion if some form of "gallows"is threatening him, i.e. if, by doing it, he is violating some prohibition?

There was an Italian film from the 60's, Casanova 70, starring Virna Lisi and Marcello


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Mastroianni that hinged on this very point: the hero can only retain his sexual potencyif doing "it" involves some kind of danger. At the film's end, when he is on the verge ofmarrying his beloved, he wants at least to violate the prohibition of premarital sex bysleeping with her the night before the wedding-however, his bride unknowingly spoilseven this minimal pleasure by arranging with the priest for special permission for thetwo of them to sleep together the night before, so that the act is deprived of itstransgressive sting. What can he do now? In the last shot of the film, we see himcrawling on the narrow porch on the outside of the high-rise building, giving himselfthe difficult task of entering the girl's bedroom in the most dangerous way, in adesperate attempt to link sexual gratification to mortal danger So, Lacan's point isthat if gratifying sexual passion involves the suspension of even the most elementary"egotistic" interests, if this gratification is clearly located "beyond the pleasureprinciple," then, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, we are dealing with an

ethical act, then his "passion" is stricto sensu ethical4

Lacan's further point is that this covert Sadean dimension of an "ethical (sexual)passion" is not read into Kant by our eccentric interpretation, but is inherent to the

Kantian theoretical edifice.5 If we put aside the body of "circumstantial evidence" for it

(isn't Kant's infamous definition of marriage-"the contract between two adults of theopposite sex about the mutual use of each other's sexual organs"-thoroughly Sadean,since it reduces the Other, the subject's sexual partner, to a partial object, to his/herbodily organ which provides pleasure, ignoring him/her as the Whole of a humanPerson?), the crucial clue that allows us to discern the contours of "Sade in Kant" is theway Kant conceptualizes the relationship between sentiments (feelings) and the moralLaw.

Although Kant insists on the absolute gap between pathological sentiments and thepure form of moral Law, there is one a priori sentiment that the subject necessarilyexperiences when confronted with the injunction of the moral Law, the pain ofhumiliation (because of man's hurt pride, due to the "radical Evil" of human nature);

for Lacan, this Kantian privileging of pain as the only a priori sentiment is strictlycorrelative to Sade's notion of pain (torturing and humiliating the other, being torturedand humiliated by him) as the privileged way of access to sexual jouissance (Sade'sargument, of course, is that pain is to be given priority over pleasure on account of itsgreater longevity-pleasures are passing, while pain can last almost indefinitely). Thislink can be further substantiated by what Lacan calls the Sadean fundamental fantasy:the fantasy of another, ethereal body of the victim, which can be tortured indefinitelyand nonetheless magically retains its beauty (see the standard Sadean figure of ayoung girl sustaining endless humiliations and mutilations from her deprived torturerand somehow mysteriously surviving it all intact, in the same way Tom and Jerry andother cartoon heroes survive all their ridiculous ordeals intact).

Doesn't this fantasy provide the libidinal foundation of the Kantian postulate of theimmortality of the soul endlessly striving to achieve ethical perfection, i.e., is not thephantasmic "truth" of the immortality of the soul its exact opposite, the immortality ofthe body, its ability to sustain endless pain and humiliation?

Judith Butler pointed out that the Foucaultian "body" as the site of resistance is noneother than the Freudian "psyche": paradoxically, "body" is Foucault's name for thepsychic apparatus insofar as it resists the soul's domination. That is to say, when, inhis well-known definition of the soul as the "prison of the body," Foucault turns aroundthe standard Platonic-Christian definition of the body as the "prison of the soul," whathe calls "body" is not simply the biological body, but is effectively already caught into

some kind of pre-subjective psychic apparatus.6 Consequently, don't we encounter in

Kant a secret homologous inversion, only in the opposite direction, of the relationshipbetween body and soul: what Kant calls "immortality of the soul" is effectively theimmortality of the other, ethereal, "undead" body?


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2.

It's via this central role of pain in the subject's ethical experience that Lacanintroduces the difference between the "subject of the enunciation" (the subject whoutters a statement) and the "subject of the enunciated (statement)" (the symbolicidentity the subject assumes within and via his statement): Kant does not address thequestion of who is the "subject of the enunciation" of the moral Law, the agent

enunciating the unconditional ethical injunction-from within his horizon, this questionitself is meaningless, since the moral Law is an impersonal command "coming fromnowhere," i.e. it is ultimately self-posited, autonomously assumed by the subjecthimself). Via the reference to Sade, Lacan reads absence in Kant as an act of renderinginvisible, of "repressing," the moral Law's enunciator, and it is Sade who renders itvisible in the figure of the "sadist" executioner-torturer-this executioner is theenunciator of the moral Law, the agent who finds pleasure in our (the moral subject's)pain and humiliation.

A counterargument offers itself here with apparent self-evidence: isn't all this utternonsense, since, in Sade, the element that occupies the place of the unconditionalinjunction, the maxim the subject has to follow categorically, is no longer the Kantian

universal ethical command Do your duty! but its most radical opposite, the injunctionto follow to their utmost limit the thoroughly pathological, contingent caprices thatbring you pleasure, ruthlessly reducing all your fellow humans to the instruments ofyour pleasure? However, it is crucial to perceive the solidarity between this featureand the emergence of the figure of the "sadist" torturer-executioner as the effective"subject of the enunciation" of the universal ethical statement-command. The Sadeanmove from Kantian Respect-to-Blasphemy, i.e. from respecting the Other (fellowbeing), his freedom and autonomy, and always treating him also as an end-in-itself, toreducing all Others precisely to mere dispensable instruments to be ruthlesslyexploited, is strictly correlative to the fact that the "subject of the enunciation" of theMoral Injunction, invisible in Kant, assumes the concrete features of the Sadeanexecutioner.

What Sade accomplishes is thus a very precise operation of breaking up the link

between two elements which, in Kant's eyes, are synonymous and overlapping:7 theassertion of an unconditional ethical injunction; the moral universality of thisinjunction. Sade keeps the structure of an unconditional injunction, positing as itscontent the utmost pathological singularity.

And, again, the crucial point is that this breaking up is not Sade's eccentricity-it laysdormant as a possibility in the very fundamental tension constitutive of the Cartesiansubjectivity. Hegel was already aware of this reversal of the Kantian universal into theutmost idiosyncratic contingency: isn't the main point of his critique of the Kantianethical imperative that, since the imperative is empty, Kant has to fill it with some

empirical content, thus conferring on contingent particular content the form ofuniversal necessity?

The exemplary case of the "pathological," contingent element elevated to the status ofan unconditional demand is, of course, an artist absolutely identified with his artisticmission, pursuing it freely without any guilt, as an inner constraint, unable to survivewithout it. The sad fate of Jacqueline du Pr confronts us with the feminine version ofthe split between the unconditional injunction and its obverse, the serial universality of

indifferent empirical objects that must be sacrificed in the pursuit of one's Mission.8 (Itis extremely interesting and productive to read du Pr's life story not as a "real story,"but as a mythical narrative: what is so surprising about it is how closely it follows thepreordained contours of a family myth, the same as with the story of Kaspar Hauser, in

which individual accidents uncannily reproduce familiar features from ancient myths.)Du Pr's unconditional injunction, her drive, her absolute passion was her art (whenshe was 4 years old, upon seeing someone playing a cello, she already immediately


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claimed that this is what she wanted to be). This elevation of her art to theunconditional relegated her love life to a series of encounters with men who wereultimately all substitutable, one as good as the other-she was reported to be a serial"man eater." She thus occupied the place usually reserved for the MALE artist-nowonder her long tragic illness (multiple sclerosis, from which she was painfully dyingfrom 1973 to 1987) was perceived by her mother as an "answer of the real," as divinepunishment not only for her promiscuous sexual life, but also for her "excessive"commitment to her art 3.

This, however, is not the whole story. The decisive question is: is the Kantian moralLaw translatable into the Freudian notion of superego or not? If the answer is yes, then"Kant with Sade" effectively means that Sade is the truth of the Kantian ethics. If,however, the Kantian moral Law cannot be identified with superego (since, as Lacanhimself puts it in the last pages ofSeminar XI, moral Law is equivalent to desire itself,while superego precisely feeds on the subject's compromising his/her desire, i.e. theguilt sustained by the superego bears witness to the fact that the subject has

somewhere betrayed or compromised his/her desire),9 then Sade is not the entiretruth of Kantian ethics, but a form of its perverted realization. In short, far from being

"more radical than Kant," Sade articulates what happens when the subject betrays thetrue stringency of the Kantian ethics.

This difference is crucial in its political consequences: insofar as the libidinal structureof "totalitarian" regimes is perverse (the totalitarian subject assumes the position ofthe object-instrument of the Other's jouissance), "Sade as the truth of Kant" wouldmean that Kantian ethics effectively harbors totalitarian potentials; however, insofaras we conceive of Kantian ethics as precisely prohibiting the subject to assume theposition of the object-instrument of Other'sjouissance, i.e. to calling on him to assumefull responsibility for what he proclaims his Duty, then Kant is the antitotalitarian parexcellence

The dream about Irma's injection that Freud used as the exemplary case to illustrate

his procedure of analyzing dreams is a dream about responsibility-(Freud's ownresponsibility for the failure of his treatment of Irma)-this fact alone indicates thatresponsibility is a crucial Freudian notion.

But how are we to conceive it? How are we to avoid the usual trap of the mauvaise foiof the Sartrean subject responsible for his existential project, i.e. of the existentialistmotif of ontological guilt that pertains to the finite human existence as such, as well asthe opposite trap of "putting the blame on the Other" ("since the Unconscious is thediscourse of the Other, I am not responsible for its formations, it is the big Other whospeaks through me, I am merely its instrument")?

Lacan himself pointed the way out of this deadlock by referring to Kant's philosophy asthe crucial antecedent of the psychoanalytic ethics of the duty "beyond the Good".

According to the standard pseudo-Hegelian critique, the Kantian universalist ethic ofthe categorical imperative fails to take into account the concrete historical situation inwhich the subject is embedded, and which provides the determinate content of theGood: what eludes Kantian formalism is the historically specified particular Substanceof ethical life. However, this reproach can be countered by claiming that the uniquestrength of Kant's ethics resides in this very formal indeterminacy: moral Law does nottell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, i.e. it isnot possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation fromthe moral Law itself-which means that the subject himself has to assume theresponsibility of "translating" the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series ofconcrete obligations.

In this precise sense, one is tempted to risk a parallel with Kant's Critique ofJudgement: the concrete formulation of a determinate ethical obligation has thestructure of aesthetic judgement, i.e. of a judgement by which, instead of simply


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applying a universal category to a particular object or of subsuming this object underan already given universal determination, I as it were invent its universal-necessary-obligatory dimension and thereby elevate this particular-contingent object (act) to thedignity of the ethical Thing.

So there is always something sublime about pronouncing a judgement that defines ourduty: in it, I "elevate an object to the dignity of the Thing" (Lacan's definition of

sublimation). The full acceptance of this paradox also compels us to reject anyreference to "duty" as an excuse: "I know this is heavy and can be painful, but whatcan I do, this is my duty" The standard motto of ethical rigor is "There is no excusefor not accomplishing one's duty!"; although Kant's "Du kannst, denn du sollst! (Youcan, because you must!)" seems to offer a new version of this motto, he implicitlycomplements it with its much more uncanny inversion: "There is no excuse for

accomplishing one's duty!"10 The reference to duty as the excuse to do our dutyshould be rejected as hypocritical; suffice it to recall the proverbial example of asevere sadistic teacher who subjects his pupils to merciless discipline and torture. Ofcourse, his excuse to himself (and to others) is: "I myself find it hard to exert suchpressure on the poor kids, but what can I do-it's my duty!" The more pertinent

example is that of a Stalinist politician who loves mankind, but nonetheless performshorrible purges and executions; his heart is breaking while he is doing it, but he cannothelp it, it's his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity

What we encounter here is the properly perverse attitude of adopting the position ofthe pure instrument of the big Other's Will: it's not my responsibility, it's not me who iseffectively doing it, I am merely an instrument of the higher Historical Necessity Theobscenejouissance of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myselfas exculpated for what I am doing: isn't it nice to be able to inflict pain on others withthe full awareness that I'm not responsible for it, that I merely fulfill the Other's Willthis is what Kantian ethics prohibits. This position of the sadist pervert provides theanswer to the question: How can the subject be guilty when he merely realizes an"objective", externally imposed necessity? By subjectively assuming this "objectivenecessity," i.e. by finding enjoyment in what is imposed on him. So, at its most radical,Kantian ethics is NOT "sadist," but precisely what prohibits assuming the position of aSadean executioner.

In a final twist, Lacan thus nonetheless undermines the thesis of "Sade as the truth ofKant." It is no accident that the same seminar in which Lacan first deployed theinherent link between Kant and Sade also contains the detailed reading of Antigone inwhich Lacan delineates the contours of an ethical act that DOES successfully avoid thetrap of the Sadean perversion as its hidden truth-in insisting on her unconditionaldemand for her brother's proper burial, Antigone does NOT obey a command thathumiliates her, a command effectively uttered by a sadistic executioner So the maineffort of Lacan's seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis is precisely to break up the

vicious cycle of Kant avec Sade. How is this possible? Only if-in contrast with Kant-oneasserts that the faculty of desiring is not in itself "pathological." In short, Lacan assertsthe necessity of a "critique of pure desire": in contrast to Kant, for whom our capacityto desire is thoroughly "pathological" (since, as he repeatedly stresses, there is no apriori link between an empirical object and the pleasure this object generates in thesubject), Lacan claims that there is a "pure faculty of desire," since desire does have anon-pathological, a priori object-cause-this object, of course, is what Lacan calls objet

petit a.

1.Lacan, Jacques, Le seminaire, Livre VII: L'thique de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil,1986, chap. VI.


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2.Lacan, J., "Kant avec Sade," in crits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 765-790.

3.Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, New York: Macmillan, 1993, p. 30.

4.// if, as Kant claims, no other thing but the moral law can induce us to put aside allour pathological interests and accept our death, then the case of someone who spendsa night with a lady even though he knows that he will pay for it with his life, is the caseof the moral law." Alenka Zupancic, "The Subject of the Law," in Cogito and theUnconscious, ed. by Slavoj Zizek, Durham: Duke UP 1998, p. 89.

5.The most obvious proof of the inherent character of this link of Kant with Sade, ofcourse, is the (disavowed) Kantian notion of "diabolical Evil," i.e. of Evil accomplishedfor no "pathological" reasons, but out of principle, just for the sake of it." Kant evokesthis notion of Evil elevated into a universal maxim (and thus turned into an ethicalprinciple) only in order to disclaim it immediately, claiming that human beings areincapable of such utter corruption; however, shouldn't we counter this Kantiandisclaimer by pointing out that de Sade's entire edifice relies precisely on such anelevation of Evil into an unconditional ("categorical") imperative? For a closer

elaboration of this point, see Chapter Chapter II of Slavoj Zizek, The IndivisibleRemainder, London: Verso 1996.

6.Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997, p.28-29.

7.David-Menard, Monique, Les constructions de l'universel, Paris: PUF 1997.

8.du Pr, Hilary and Piers,A Genius in the Family. An Intimate Memoir of Jacqueline duPr, London: Chatto and Windus 1997.

9.Alenka Zupancic, op.cit., as well as Bernard Baas, Le dsir pur, Louvain: Peeters

1992.

10.For a more detailed account of this key feature of Kant's ethics, see Chapter II ofSlavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder, London: Verso 1996.From: Lacan.comAvailable: http://lacan.com/frameXIII2.htm
http://exturl%28%27http//lacan.com/frameXIII2.htm')http://exturl%28%27http//lacan.com/frameXIII2.htm')

kant and sade- the ideal couple

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