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JACQUES LACAN: KANT WITH SADE
Translated by James B. Swenson Jr.
This text should have served as a preface to Philosophy in the Bedroom. It appeared in the journal Critique (no. 191, April 1963) as a review of the edition of the works of Sade for which it was destined.*
That the work of Sade anticipates Freud, be it in respect of the catalogue of perversions, is a stupid thing to say, which gets repeated endlessly among literary types; the fault, as always, belongs to the specialists.
Against this we hold that the Sadian bedroom is equal to those places from which the schools of ancient philosophy took their name: Academy, Lyceum, Stoa. Here as there, the way for science is prepared by rectifying the position of ethics. In this, yes, a ground-clearing occurs which will have to make its way through the depths of taste for a hundred years for Freud's path to be passable. Count sixty more for someone to say the reason for all of that.
If Freud was able to enunciate his pleasure principle without even having to worry about marking what distinguishes it from its function in traditional ethics, even without risking that it should be heard as an echo of the uncontested prejudice of two millenia, to recall the attraction which preordains the creature to its good, along with the psychology inscribed in various myths of goodwill, we can only credit this to the insinuating rise across the nineteenth century of the theme of "happiness in evil."
Here Sade is the inaugural step of a subversion, of which, however amusing it might seem with respect to the coldness of the man, Kant is the turning point, and never noted, to our knowledge, as such.
Philosophy in the Bedroom comes eight years after the Critique of Practical Reason. If, after having seen that the one accords with the other, we show that it completes its we will say that it gives the truth of the Critique.
For this reason, the postulates in which the latter culminates: the alibi of immortality where it represses progress, holiness, and even love, anything satisfying which might come of the law, the guarantee which it requires from a will for which the object to which the law refers would be intelligible, losing even the flat prop of the function of utility to which Kant had confined them, restore the work to its diamondlike subversion. Which explains the unbelievable exaltation which any reader not forewarned by academic piety receives from it. Nothing which might have been explained about it will ruin this effect.
[...]
Assuredly Christianity has educated men to pay little attention to the jouissance of God, and that is how Kant slips by his voluntarism of the Law-for-the Law, which really piles it on, so to speak, with respect to the ataraxia of Stoic experience. One might think that Kant is under pressure from what he hears too closely, not from Sade, but from some mystic nearer to home, in the sigh which stifles what he glimpses beyond having seen that his God is faceless: Grimmigkeit? Sade says: Being-Supreme-in-Wickedness.
Pshaw! Schwarmereien, black swarms, we expel you in order to return to the function of presence in the Sadian fantasy.
This fantasy has a structure that one will find further along and in which the object is only one of the terms in which the quest which it figures can die out. When jouissance is petrified in it, it becomes the black fetish in which the form-most definitely offered in such a place and time, and still today, for one to adore the god-can be recognized.
It is this which befalls the executor in sadistic experience when, at its most extreme, his presence is reduced to being no more than its instrument.
But that his jouissance congeals there, does not withdraw it from the humility of an act to which he cannot but come as a being of flesh and, to the bones, the serf of pleasure.
This duplication does not reflect, nor reciprocate (why wouldn't it mutualate?) the one which occurs in the Other of the two alterities of the subject.
Desire, which is the henchman [suppot] of this splitting of the subject, would doubtless put up with being called will-to-jouissance. But this appellation would not render desire more worthy of the will which it invokes within the Other, in tempting this will to the extremity of its division from its pathos; for to do this, desire sets forth beaten, promised to impotence.
Because it sets forth submitted to pleasure, whose law is to turn it always too short in its aim. A homeostasis which is always too quickly recovered by the living being at the lowest threshold of the tension upon which it subsists. Always precocious is the fall of the wing, with which he is given to sign the reproduction of his forms Nevertheless this wing here has the task of raising itself to the function of figuring the link of sex to death. Let us leave it to rest behind its Eleusinian veil.
Thus pleasure, down there the stimulating rival of will, is here no more than a faltering accomplice. In jouissance's own time, it would be simply out of play, if fantasy did not intervene to sustain it by the very discord to which it succumbs.
[...]
Thus we are in a position to interrogate the Sade, mon prochain whose invocation we owe to the perspicacity of Pierre Klossowski. Extreme, it dispenses him from having to play the wit [des recours du bel esprit].20
Doubtless it is his discretion which leads him to shelter his formula behind a reference to Saint Labre. We do not find this reason compelling enough to give him the same shelter. That the Sadian fantasy situates itself better in the bearers of Christian ethics than elsewhere is what our structural landmarks allow us to grasp easily.
But that Sade, himself, refuses to be my neighbor, is what needs to be recalled, not in order to refuse it to him in return, but in order to recognize the meaning of this refusal. We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment.
For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity.
Sade thus stopped, at the point where desire is knotted together with the law. If something in him held to the law, in order there to find the opportunity Saint Paul speaks of, to be sinful beyond measure, who would throw the first stone? But he went no further.
It is not only that for him as for the rest of us the flesh is weak, it is that the spirit is too prompt not to be lured. The apology for crime only pushes him to the indirect avowal of the Law. The supreme Being is restored in Maleficence.
Listen to him bragging of his technique, of immediately putting everything which occurs to him into operation, thinking moreover, by replacing repentance with reiteration, to have done with the law within. He finds nothing better to encourage us to follow him than the promise that nature, woman that she is, will magically always yield to us more.
It would be a mistake to trust this typical dream of potency.
It sufficiently indicates, in any case, that it would not be possible for Sade, as is suggested by P. Klossowski even as he notes that he does not believe it, to have attained the sort of apathy which would be "to have reentered the bosom of nature, in a waking state, in our world,"21 inhabited by language.
Of what Sade is lacking here, we have forbidden ourselves to say a word. One may sense it in the gradation of the Philosophy toward the fact that it is the curved needle, dear to Bunuel's heroes, which is finally called upon to resolve a girl's penisneid, and quite a big one.
Be that as it may, it appears that there is nothing to be gained by replacing Diotima with Dolmance, someone whom the ordinary path seems to frighten more than is fitting, and who-did Sade see it?-closes the affair with a Noli tangere matrem. V . . . ed and sewn up, the mother remains forbidden. Our verdict upon the submission of Sade to the Law is confirmed.
Of a treatise truly about desire, there is thus little here, even nothing. What of it is announced in this crossing taken from an encounter, is at most a tone of reason.
R. G. September 1962
* For which it was destined on commission. I add here, because it's droll, that they put themselves in the position of having to re-commission it from me when the success of Ecrits rendered it plausible ( to the person who replaced me?)
300 Words About “Kant With Sade”
This essay is mostly about the nature and power of fantasy, but its sizable set-up is provocative and profound enough to earn three-hundred words. In it Lacan links Immanuel Kant, champion of dignity and rationality, with the Marquis de Sade, who wrote philosophical plays advocating beating off onto the tortured bodies of recently deflowered virgins. Specifically, Lacan sees de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom as filling out a gap in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.
De Sade’s laissez-faire ethical philosophy revolves around pursuing pleasure. For Kant, such a project is doomed. No sensation, emotion or appetite constantly provides the same pleasures. Therefore, no universal law can be formulated in regards to pleasure, except perhaps to its avoidance. De Sade, writing six years after Kant’s Critique, was not dissuaded. De Sade argues for a categorical right to work one’s will upon and to receive satisfaction from the bodies of others.
To Lacan, de Sade’s categorical imperative is necessary to make Kantian ethics possible. Kant purges all contingencies from human life, which he calls pathological. To replace them: the dictates of pure reason. These pathologies, however, are still part of living in the world. What Kant insists is that subjects experience and legislate themselves as though they were Other. Morality, to Kant, demands we hijack someone else’s (our own) body and force it to obey external demands, rather than its own desires.
This leads Lacan to explain desire as fundamentally transgressive. Desire, as a temptation to experience impossible heights of pleasure (jouissance), rejects all law- natural and moral. Desire is just as impractical as Kant’s imperative. Both Kant’s unshakeable honesty and self-denial and de Sade’s torture orgies demand enormous, stupid sacrifices. Referring to the mirror stage, one’s desire always seeks to un-split their subject and achieve the impossible perfection of their ego-ideal.
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Main concepts of Lacan
Mirror stage
Main article: Mirror stage
Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as "formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience." By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity. In "the Imaginary order," his or her own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".[19]
As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value.[7] In his fourth Seminar, "La relation d'objet," Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship."
The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of objectification, the Ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called alienation. At six months, the baby still lacks physical co-ordination. The child is able to recognize himself or herself in a mirror prior to the attainment of control over his or her bodily movements. The child sees his or her image as a whole and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the lack of co-ordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this contrast initially as a rivalry with his or her own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens the child with fragmentation—thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the child identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart forms the Ego.[7] Lacan understands this moment of identification as a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery; yet when the child compares his or her own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation.[20]
Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic," since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth." The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from "insufficiency to anticipation."[21] In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self.
In the mirror stage a "misunderstanding" (méconnaissance) constitutes the Ego—the "me" (moi) becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as his or her own, the child turns his or her head towards this adult, who represents the big Other, as if to call on the adult to ratify this image.[22]
Other/other
While Freud uses the term "other", referring to der Andere (the other person) and "das Andere" (otherness), under the influence of Alexandre Kojève, Lacan's use is closer to Hegel's.
Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts: the big Other is designated A (for French Autre) and the little other is designated a (italicized French autre).[23] He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: "the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a, so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other."[24] Dylan Evans explains that:
"1. The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego. He [autre] is simultaneously the counterpart and the specular image. The little other is thus entirely inscribed in the imaginary order.
2. The big Other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law, and hence the big Other is inscribed in the order of the symbolic. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other is thus both another subject, in his radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness, and also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject."[25]
"The Other must first of all be considered a locus," Lacan writes, "the locus in which speech is constituted".[26] We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the Other for another subject.[27]
In arguing that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject but rather in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness—"the unconscious is the discourse of the Other."[28] When conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".
"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child," Dylan Evans explains, "it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message".[7] The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this Other is not complete because there is a "Lack (manque)" in the Other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the Other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete Other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete Other is the "barred Other."[29]
Feminists thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan's concepts of castration and the Phallus. Some feminists have argued that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles, while other feminist critics, most notably Luce Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis.[30] For Irigaray, the Phallus does not define a single axis of gender by its presence/absence; instead, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, in criticising Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other.[31] Other feminists, such as Judith Butler, Jane Gallop, and Elizabeth Grosz, have interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory.[32][33]