‘Kant with Sade’: The Law with Desire

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In June of 1964, Lacan gathered together a group of close associates and announced, via tape recording, the founding of the Ecole freudienne de Paris; in which such thinkers as Michel de Certeau, Felix Guattari, and Luce Irigaray would later play a part. In a statement that shortly followed the inauguration of this new school, Jacques Lacan published a treatise on its goals. He wrote that “rectification is required in this community if psychoanalysis is to preserve its essential character”. A character that “resides in an absolute object…the reality of desire”, that must “be given scientific status”. Shortly before the founding of this new school, Lacan wrote that “Spinoza’s position is not tenable for us”, and that “experience shows us that Kant is more true”. In order to show that Kant’s pure reason “is sustained only by giving a specification for the moral law which looked at more closely is simply desire in its pure state”, a desire that can only exist if “everything that is the object of love in one’s human tenderness”, or in other words all pathological (fixative objects) are rejected in search of a transcendental desire. For all of these reasons he wrote ‘Kant with Sade’, a profound (albeit obtuse) meditation on desire, the law and what happens when the two become inextricably bound.

The essay begins with a refutation of the commonplace notion that Sade’s work served “as a catalogue of perversions”; a sort of 18^th century Kinsey report that predicted Freud’s exegesis of human sexuality. Sade, however, did “begin the ground work that was to progress for a hundred years in the depths of taste in order for Freud’s path to be passable”, but did so by beginning “the insinuating rise in the nineteenth century of the theme of delight in evil”. Sade then continued Kant’s work and predicted Freud’s, by casting a suspicious eye on the altruistic theory of human nature which prior moralists had utilized. Firstly, it is important to recognize that Kant had both a pathological law (the law of the state) and a transcendental law (the compulsion of the super-ego). The law of the state we follow because we have to, which “entails in itself a kind of distance from them…the universe of social customs and rule appear as a nonsensical machine that must be accepted as such”. (Ideology) Transcendental law then consists of the construction of the categorical imperative, a moral drive which by ‘excluding everything the subject may suffer from due to his interest in an object, whether drive or feeling”, creates a secondary mandate within the subject rather than exterior to it. Or “a law that has no other phenomenon than something that is already signifying, the latter is obtained from a voice in conscience which articulating in the form of a maxim in conscience, proposes the order of a purely practical reason or will there”. This transcendental law “is a necessary, unconditional authority without being true, it is…a given fact the truth of which cannot be theoretically demonstration; but its unconditional validity should nonetheless be presupposed for our moral activity to have any sense”. We then “achieve the maturity proper of the autonomous enlightened subject precisely by submitting to the irrational compulsion of the categorical imperative.” Slavoj Zizek explains this as, “according to Kant, the faculty of desiring does not possess a transcendental status, since it is wholly dependent upon pathological objects and motivations”. In other words, the transcendental good (or moral good) in Kant only emerges after desire and the law of the state is excluded.

This is precisely where Lacan diverges from Kant. Lacan sees even laws encouraging the repression of desire, as consisting of desire in its pure state. This is a very subtle point and should not be misread as a simple contradiction. Men then create an absolute good, not for the sake of morality, but rather to combat the fact that “no phenomenon can lay claim to a constant relationship to pleasure”, and, “the quest to feel good would thus be a dead end were it not reborn in the form of das Gute, the good that is the object of the moral law”. All laws consist of a repression of desire (a point one can easily find in Freud); however, this in itself results in creation of a surplus enjoyment. For example, a vegan who deprives themselves of meat creates an internal categorical imperative to not enjoy meat’s many pleasures. In this rejection, though, is the expression of desire – both the pleasure that comes with the ascetic’s rejection (the delight of self-control) and also the creation of meat as a much more pleasurable object than it is in the eyes of those who don’t think twice when they eat a steak. There is then a surplus enjoyment that is constructed around the object (meat) that has nothing to do with its biological components or the pure physical pleasure of eating animal tissue. Here, the law is not the repression of desire, but also represents a “will tojouissance”. This object-less cause of desire is its transcendental component. Here we can see that Lacan sees desire as always-already transcendental. When we desire, we accomplish an act only because it is mandated, and when we do this we accomplish a non-pathological act. This is because we remain in “the universal-symbolic domain, without any reference to an empirical-contingent object”. Sade completed Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by creating laws of unmasked desire, exposing the futility of keeping the domain of commandant and pleasure separated. In this, Sade is a satirist in the true sense of the word, a master comedian who exposed the true repercussions of Enlightenment philosophy. Furthermore, if we have learned anything from Freud it is the satirists we must read with the most gravity, since it is the fundamental maxims of psychoanalysis “to take more seriously what is presented to us as not entirely serious”.

The central maxim driving Sade’s work is this:

“I have the right to enjoy your body,” anyone can say to me, “and I will exercise this right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your body”

This is a transcendental moral law for two reasons: firstly, it seeks no rationalization and is justified in and of itself; secondly, it leaves no place for consideration, compassion, or circumstance and for this reason maintains its universality. The fact that it is stated by an unspecified other simply exposes the split of the subject; i.e. the fact that the superego is split in such a way that it might was well be a command from outside. Like my previous example of the vegan’s quandary, the fact that is enacted on an object (in this case another individual) irrelevant, which is something one senses Sade is aware of in the interchangeability and anonymity of victims in his works. Even the pleasure that following this law creates is “no more than a flagging accomplice”, the important part of the Sadean act is preserving the fantasy that accompanies and sustains it.

What I hope the reader has gathered from the following sections is the fact that we create internal moral imperatives that construct and consist of our desires, and that these imperatives diverge from those of the state. Now, a difficulty presents itself. We must stay true to these desires in order to be ethical subjects; however, how do we know what our true desires are and what desires are ingrained in us? The solution, for Lacan, lies in psychoanalysis.

Analysis is driven by the need to uncover the causes of our desires, or in simple terms, to discover why is it that we want what we want. In Lacan’s ‘Presentation on Transference”, the structure of Lacanian psychoanalysis is enumerated. He begins by stating that “what happens in an analysis is that the subject, strictly speaking, is constituted through a discourse to which the presence of the psychoanalyst, prior to any intervention he may make, brings the dimension of dialogue”. He continues by asserting that, “truth is the name of the ideal moment that this discourse introduces into reality…psychoanalysis is a dialectical experience, and this notion should prevail when raising the question of the nature of transference”. Drawing on his early statements in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, not only does the patient construct the imaginary form of the analyst (the Big Other or the pathological law of Kant) of subject onto the patient. This lending of subject-hood occurs prior to intervention, and is part and parcel with the symbolic agreement to begin therapy, rather than a result of therapy itself.

Lacan imparts an interesting aside later in this section to discuss a “new type of alienation of man” that “will come into being as much through the efforts of a collective belief as through the activity of selecting techniques with all the formative scope of ritual”. This means that the particular power invested into therapists, allows for a potential scope of damage they are capable of committing due to the patients reliance on them in the discursive process that constitutes therapy. They have the power of revealing our most secret desires to ourselves, “the core of our fantasy”, which “is unbearable to us”. Within the subject there are unwanted wants that if brought to the attention of the subject by another result in a breakdown in the constitution of the subject, the silencing of the subject, and with that silencing comes the emergence of the symptom. If the unconscious is the other’s language, than the symptom is our other language.

If a therapist exposes the patient too quickly to the real of their desires, they will not only deny them but they are also at risk for another more dangerous breakdown. Lacan contends that it is the therapist’s role to stand in place of the big other, but also to always evade the patient. The analyst participates by questioning and not by mandates. The ultimate goal of analysis is to show the patient that the big other does not exist, and allow them to discover their own authentic desire.

This is where the dangers of therapy lie. A therapist who simply commands the patient to act a certain way does not allow the patient to realize their own desires, but instead forces them to adopt those of the analyst. If an analyst simply pushes normative behavior the patient will adopt that behavior but remain alienated from their desire. Their behavior after therapy will be seen by them as a farce or drag and their psychological problems will be dangerously pushed farther under the surface to reemerge as symptoms more evocative and more damaging than those that landed them on the analyst couch.