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[[Right ]] after the war, many intellectuals seemed to find the accursed [[Sade ]] nec�essary [[reading]]: [[Bataille]], Klossowski, Paulhan, Blanchot, [[Merleau-Ponty]], and even S. de Beauvoir-before [[Barthes]]. Would Sade [[guarantee ]] a certain [[claim ]] to "[[modernity]]," indeed to revolutionary audacity, in front of the right-think�ing bourgeois? [[Lacan]]'s [[text ]] was supposed to be a preface to La [[Philosophie ]] dans Ie boudoir. in the [[complete ]] works published by the Cercle du Livre Precieux. According to Lacan, Pauhlan rejected it. Ironically, it appeared in Critique (Bataille's journal) as a review of the edition from which it had been excluded. Lacan clearly positioned himself in the camp of those who were pro. He made the Sadian boudoir the equivalent of the ancient [[schools ]] of [[philosophy ]] (the Academie, the Lycee, or the Stoa); he interpellated the judge but also the academician-namely, Jean Cocteau-who dared to say, during the proceed�ings instituted against the publisher Pauvert, that Sade was "boring," "a phi�losopher and a moralist." He was ironic [[about ]] Merleau-Ponty who accused the [[sadist ]] of "negating the [[existence ]] of the [[other]]"; for Lacan the sadist rejects the [[pain ]] of [[living ]] in the other. The Works of [[Jacques Lacan ]] 117 What original [[thesis ]] could Lacan argue? He argues that there is a striking analogy between Sade's requirement of the [[freedom ]] of [[jouissance ]] and the [[universal ]] rule of Kantian conduct. Sade, especially in the pampWet Franfais, [[encore ]] un effort si vous voulez erre republicains. reveals the [[truth ]] about the Critique of [[Practical ]] [[Reason ]] published eight years earlier. Sade made "the inaugural step of a [[subversion ]] ... of which [[Kant ]] is the turning point al�though, as far as we [[know]], never recognized as such." [[Freud ]] was going to complete this subversion in which it is not a matter of elaborating a "cata�logue of perversions," but of exactly situating the relations of law and jouis�sance, of [[life ]] and [[death]], or else of the [[divided ]] [[subject ]] with the [[object ]] a of his [[desire ]] and the [[Other, the ]] transcendent locus of the "commandments whose imperative is represented as categorical, in other [[words ]] an unconditional im�perative." Thus, it would be wrong to judge the [[content ]] of the commandment that is given. Whether vile or noble, what is most important is that the com�mandment be logically receivable as universal, that it hold for all cases, even if not everyone obeys it, and that it indicate what is possible and not what is actualized; "it is a matter of taking things as they are set up at their basis, not as they are ordered" in [[practice]]. Sade's honesty was to reveal that "the im�perative is imposed upon us as to the Other not as to ourselves," that is, pronounced by the mouth of the Other and not as a [[voice ]] from [[inside]], Sade, therefore, unmasked the [[splitting ]] [[[refente]]] of the subject that [[others ]] usually bypassed. It is thus through the [[ethical ]] reference that Lacan elaborates the "savage reference" of a Sade who would have pushed to its extreme the first Declaration of Man's Rights. Sade's text allows Lacan to [[construct ]] the [[perverse]]'s [[structure ]] and [[fantasy]], just as the [[case ]] of [[Schreber ]] had allowed him to do so with [[psychosis]]. It is possible to follow Lacan's [[analyses ]] of Kant and Sade from L'Ethiql,4e (43), the text on Merleau-Ponty (49), Le [[Transfert ]] (47), and L'[[Identification ]] (50), until L'[[Angoisse ]] (52), not to mention many later references. He appeals to these analyses to raise the question of the [[difference ]] between the [[pleasure ]] [[principle ]] and the death [[instinct]], and to further his [[reflection ]] on "between�two-deaths" (in this case, it became the quest for unaltered beauty and im�mortality beyond the other's [[real ]] death and beyond the pain, inseparable from his degradation or from his ignominy). "It is as an object that the Sadian subject is obliterated" (50), whereas, in Masoch's works, the subject is oblit�erated to become an object. There is no complementarity between Sade and Masoch. After all, Lacan says, Sade was masochistic in life and [[sadistic ]] (Sa�dian) in his works. Really? For Piera Aulagnier (50), the perverse becomes an object for the jouissance of a [[phallus ]] whose bearer he does not suspect, he becomes the [[instrument ]] of the jouissance of a God. Lacan responds to Au�lagnier's argument that it is necessary to define the phallus. It is around the jouissance of the Other-jouissance of a God, a "supreme [[Being ]] in mali-

ciousness," the locus where "the Law and jouissance as [[forbidden ]] are one and the same" -that Lacan tries to decipher "this monumental challenge" that the Sadian works [[represent ]] for him. Perverse fantasy would be located entirely on the side of the Other. Indeed, [[psychoanalysis ]] has undoubtedly more to learn from Sade than from Kant. [[Recall ]] [[Claudel]]'s trilogy (43). Re�member also the context of the [[time]]: a [[culture ]] that had not fully recovered from what Hannah [[Arendt ]] calls "[[totalitarianism]]," whether it is [[Nazism ]] or [[Stalinism]], whose [[fascination ]] upon the intellectuals of the 60s has not been [[analyzed ]] yet.