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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|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|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|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-
188 DOSS I ER
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.
