As Lacanians, we should be especially attentive to shifts and inconsistencies in Lacan’s own teaching. Perhaps the greatest shift occurs in the course of his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis: there is a subtle but radical change in how he reads the motif of “Kant with Sade.”[1] At the beginning, he refers to Saint Paul, to Paul’s notion of a law which enables (calls for) its sinful transgression, while towards the end, law itself becomes the law of desire.
To clarify this shift, let’s begin with the famous passage from Paul’s Romans 7:“So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.”[2]One of the last echoes of this stance is found in the work of Georges Bataille who, for this reason, remains strictly premodern, stuck in this dialectic of the law and its transgression, of the prohibitive law as generating the transgressive desire, which forces him into the debilitating perverse conclusion that one has to install prohibitions in order to be able to enjoy their violation – a clearly unworkable pragmatic paradox. What Bataille is unable to perceive are simply the consequences of the Kantian philosophical revolution: the fact that the absolute excess is that of the Law itself. The Law intervenes in the “homogeneous” stability of our pleasure-oriented life as the shattering force of absolute destabilizing heterogeneity. In Buddhism, you are taught to sacrifice desire in order to attain the inner peace of Enlightenment in which sacrifice cancels itself. For Lacan, the true sacrifice is desire itself: desire is an intrusion which throws off the rails the rhythm of our life. It compels us to forfeit everyday pleasures and comforts for discipline and hard work in the pursuit of the object of our desire, be it love, a political Cause, science… In short, Lacan’s reading of Kant’s ethics is not fully consistent.
The basic line of Lacan’s reading of Kant is adequately rendered in Russell Sbriglia’s summation of Joan Copjec’s elaboration of her notion of the “sartorial superego”[3]:“whereas utilitarianism blithely assumes that ‘man can be counted as zero,’ psychoanalysis insists that, if counted man can indeed be, he can only be counted as ‘minus one.’[4] Confident that the goal of man is the maximization of pleasure and that pleasure can therefore be used to regulate and manipulate man, utilitarianism presumes that ‘man is basically and infinitely manageable,’ that he is, in short, ‘fundamentally ruly” (85). The psychoanalytic objection to this supposition, Copjec clarifies, rests not on the protest that man is more than ‘rationalist engineers’ like Bentham allow, but rather that ‘man is, in a manner, less than utilitarians realize insofar as ‘he is radically separated from, and cannot know, what he wants’ (87)—a separation and an unknowing that renders man fundamentally unruly. Hence Copjec’s conclusion that ‘the difference between the utilitarian and the Lacanian subject is the difference between zero and minus one, between a subject who is driven to seek the maximization of his pleasure in his own greater good, and a subject for whom pleasure cannot function as an index of the good, since the latter is lost to him’—lost because the subject is ultimately ‘subject to a principle beyond pleasure’ (87), that principle being, of course, what psychoanalysis dubs the death drive.”Up to this point I cannot but fully agree: for Kant, freedom effectively is not the freedom to pursue one’s pleasures without constraints; it is on the contrary “the freedom to resist the lure of the pleasure principle and to submit oneself to the law of the death drive” (96). Freedom does not reside in spontaneously following one’s cravings; it is a form of resistance to these cravings, a form of self-control. But now we come to the problematic point: Lacan sees the limit of Kant’s notion of categorical imperative in Kant’s ignorance of how the distinction between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of enunciation works in the case of categorical imperative—a failure that makes it seem as though it “come[s] from nowhere,” which, in turn, allows the addressee to “presume to occupy the vacant enunciative position” and “take itself as the source of the statement”: “the ethical subject hears the voice of conscience as its own.”(96–98) With his autonomous ethics, Kant thus “sealed up again the gap he so dramatically opened” (96): it appears that the subject itself issues the moral imperative he obeys in acting ethically.
Again, in Lacanese, what Kant failed to do was to distinguish between the subject of the enunciated (the subject of the statement that Kant correctly understood the categorical imperative to be) and the subject of its enunciation which is decentered with regard to the moral subject. This agency that pushes the subject to act ethically is, of course, what psychoanalysis identifies as the superego. And here Sade enters as the “truth” of Kantian ethics: the categorical imperative is not libidinally neutral since the pain we, its subjects, experience when doing our duty brings enjoyment to the decentered superego agency. From this standpoint, we can claim that “acting ethically, paradoxically, entails not identifying with the moral law (as in Kant), but dis-identifying with it; it entails not heeding this ‘impulse,’ but ‘recoil[ing]’ in ‘moral revulsion’ (88) from this ‘incomprehensible part of our being’ (92).”
However, the actual “incomprehensible part of our being” is not the superego but desire itself which is constitutively decentered with regard to subject, desire which makes subject barred, a void. And, as it was formulated with brilliant simplicity by Lacan, the reason Sade was not able to think the barred subject ($) resides in his misconception of the difference between the two deaths, the biological death of the common mortal body and the death of the other “undead” body. It is clear that what Sade aims at in his notion of a radical Crime is the murder of this second body. Sade deploys this distinction in the long philosophical dissertation delivered to Juliette by Pope Pius VI in the book 5 of Juliette:“there is nothing wrong with rape, torture, murder, and so on, since these conform to the violence that is the way of the universe. To act in accordance with nature means to actively take part in its orgy of destruction. The trouble is that man’s capacity for crime is highly limited, and his atrocities no matter how debauched ultimately outrage nothing. This is a depressing thought for the libertine. The human being, along with all organic life and even inorganic matter, is caught in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, generation and corruption, so that ‘there is indeed no real death,’ only a permanent transformation and recycling of matter according to the immanent laws of ‘the three kingdoms,’ animal, vegetable, and mineral. Destruction may accelerate this process, but it cannot stop it. The true crime would be the one that no longer operates within the three kingdoms but annihilates them altogether, that puts a stop to the eternal cycle of generation and corruption and by doing so returns to Nature her absolute privilege of contingent creation, of casting the dice anew.”What, then, at a strict theoretical level, is wrong with this dream of the “second death” as a radical pure negation which puts a stop to the life-cycle itself? In a superb display of his genius, Lacan provides a simple answer: “It is just that, being a psychoanalyst, I can see that the second death is prior to the first, and not after, as de Sade dreams it.” (The only problematic part of this statement is the qualification “being a psychoanalyst”—a Hegelian philosopher can also see this quite clearly.) In what precise sense are we to understand this priority of the second death—the radical annihilation of the entire life-cycle of generation and corruption—over the first death which remains a moment of this cycle?
Aaron Schuster points the way:“Sade believes that there exists a well-established second nature that operates according to immanent laws. Against this ontologically consistent realm he can only dream of an absolute Crime that would abolish the three kingdoms and attain the pure disorder of primary nature.”[5]In short, what Sade doesn’t see is that there is no big Other, no Nature as an ontologically consistent realm—nature is already in itself inconsistent, unbalanced, destabilized by antagonisms. The total negation imagined by Sade thus doesn’t come at the end, as a threat or prospect of radical destruction; it comes at the beginning; it always-already happened; it stands for the zero-level starting point out of which the fragile/inconsistent reality emerges. In other words, what is missing in the notion of Nature as a body regulated by fixed laws is simply the subject itself: in Hegelese, Sadean Nature remains a Substance, and Sade continues to grasp reality only as Substance and not also as Subject, where “subject” does not stand for another ontological level different from Substance but for the immanent incompleteness-inconsistency-antagonism of Substance itself. And, insofar as the Freudian name for this radical negativity is death drive, Schuster is right to point out how, paradoxically, what Sade misses in his celebration of the ultimate Crime of radical destruction of all life is precisely the death drive.
This brings us back to Kant, to Kant’s preeminence over Sade: Kant characterized the free autonomous act as an act which cannot be accounted for in the terms of natural causality, of the texture of causes and effects: a free act occurs as its own cause and opens up a new causal chain from its zero-point. So, insofar as “second death” is the interruption of the natural life-cycle of generation and corruption, no radical annihilation of the entire natural order is needed for this—an autonomous free act already suspends natural causality, and subject as $ already is this cut in the natural circuit, the self-sabotage of natural goals. The mystical name for this end of the world is “night of the world,” and the philosophical name is radical negativity as the core of subjectivity.
To quote Mallarmé, a throw of the dice will never abolish the hazard, i.e., the abyss of negativity remains forever the unsublatable background of subjective creativity. We may even risk here an ironic version of Gandhi’s famous motto “be yourself the change you want to see in the world”: the subject is itself the catastrophe it fears and tries to avoid. And is the lesson of Hegel’s analysis of French revolutionary Terror not exactly the same (which is why the parallel between Sade’s absolute crime and revolutionary Terror is well grounded)? Individuals threatened by the Terror have to grasp that this external threat of annihilation is nothing but the externalized/fetishized image of the radical negativity of self-consciousness—once they grasp this, they pass from revolutionary Terror to the inner force of the moral Law.
So, I think Lacan ultimately doesn’t claim that the Kantian categorical imperative is sustained by a Sadean superego injunction to enjoy: what happens in an authentic ethical act is another dis-identification, a dis-identification between the moral law and the superego. If my desire is sustained by a superego imperative (as is the case in every form of transgressive desire, a desire that thrives on violating what the law prohibits), then this desire is by definition compromised—in acting in this way, I betray my desire.
And to dispel the impression that we are dealing here with distinctions of no practical or political interest, think about Ukraine today, in 2024. The country is confronting a forced choice: life or freedom? However, this choice has an additional twist: both choices imply death. If, in the present situation, you choose life (surrender), you choose death (disappearance as a nation, as Russia repeatedly made it clear). If you choose freedom (i.e., continued armed resistance, but with the prospect of less Western support), you choose (for many Ukrainians and their habitat) actual death and destruction.
There is a French novel which seems to rely on the same choice: Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore. The novel’s original title is Le rivage des Syrtes, with Syrtes referring to the southern-most region of Orsenna, a fictional stand-in for Italy where there seem to be cars but no electricity, a country ruled by the ancient and decadent city of the same name which seems to be, but isn’t quite, Venice. For the last 300 years, Orsenna has been in a state of suspended war with Farghestan, the barbarian desert country across the sea to the south; Farghestan, with its two main cities on the coast and endless deserts seems a great deal like Libya, although some of the places change sides: Mount Etna moves to Libya and becomes Tängri; the ruins of Sabratha leave Libya for Italy and become Sagra; Sirt goes to Italy and becomes Syrtes.
Aldo, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, belongs to one of the ruling families of Orsenna. Sent as a state observer to Orsenna’s dilapidated naval base of Syrtes, he crosses the forbidden line that divides the dead sea by sailing to the city of Rhages on the enemy’s shore. There his ship is welcomed with three cannon shots. Having by this irreparable act rekindled the war that will destroy Orsenna, Aldo accomplishes the suicidal gesture a whole people secretly yearned for: when he returns from Syrtes to Orsenna, he discovers that the ruling elite of Orsenna is using the pretense of a war with Farghestan to whip up nationalist patriotism…
Beyond the obvious reproach that Gracq is depicting a descent of Orsenna into Fascism (evoking the external threat to create an emergency state, etc.), one should discern here a deeper existential dilemma: what is more desirable, a calm inert life of small satisfactions, which is not a true life at all, or taking a risk which may well end in a catastrophe? However, Ukraine is not facing this choice but an almost exactly opposite one. If it wants to return to calm daily life it needs to take the risk of pursuing war (military resistance), i.e., of exposing itself to potential death. If it wants to avoid war, it faces with great certainty another form of death (disappearance as a nation under Russian occupation).
One should note here that it is the West which has the choice wrongly attributed to Ukraine: risking a war (by supporting Ukraine) or choosing peaceful life (by suffering a humiliation of betraying its ally). And, as many critical analysts are pointing out, even the Western European choice of peace does not really guarantee a long-term peace because if Russia gets Ukraine, it will in all probability not stop there but pursue its expansion towards the West, so that the European West will later confront the same choice in much tougher conditions. Here, then, the Western peaceniks (from Viktor Orban and other radical Right figures to pseudo-Leftists) simply cheat by attributing the choice which is not even truly their own to Ukraine.
In Lacanian terms, the true choice is not between life and death but between the two deaths: symbolic death (loss of symbolic identity) and actual biological death. Perhaps, this is the best definition of our global predicament today. The lesson is thus that the ongoing conflict between Russia and the West has deep philosophical roots. When Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, recently said that Immanuel Kant, who spent his entire life in the region of Kaliningrad (German Koenigsberg), has a “direct connection” to the war in Ukraine, he was right. According to Alikhanov, it was German philosophy, whose “godlessness and lack of higher values” began with Kant, that created the “sociocultural situation” that led, among other things, to the First World War:
“Today, in 2024, we’re bold enough to assert that not only did the First World War begin with the work of Kant, but so did the current conflict in Ukraine. Here in Kaliningrad, we dare to propose — although we’re actually almost certain of it — that it was precisely in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals […] that the ethical, value-based foundations of the current conflict were established.”[6]
The governor went on to call Kant one of the “spiritual creators of the modern West,” saying that the “Western bloc, which was shaped by the U.S. in its own image,” is an “empire of lies.” Kant, he said, is referred to as the “father of almost everything” in the West, including freedom, the idea of the rule of law, liberalism, rationalism, and “even the idea of the European Union.”[7] And if Ukraine resists Russia on behalf of these Western values, Kant is effectively also responsible for the Ukrainian resistance to Russia. Alikhanov’s “crazy” statements are thus a useful reminder of the high metaphysical stakes of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
Alikhanov is also right in another sense: Kant brutally dispelled the myth of the sacred origins of the rule of law and made it clear that the origin of every legal order is illegal violence—a lesson inacceptable for the Russian spiritualism advocated by Alikhanov. One cannot but quote here a remark misattributed to Otto von Bismarck: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”[8]Notes:
[1] See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge 2015.
[2] Quoted from Romans 7 NIV – Released From the Law, Bound to Christ – Bible Gateway.
[3] See Russell Sbriglia, “Minus One, or the Mismeasure of Man” (unpublished manuscript).
[4] Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, p. 87. Numbers in parentheses of unattributed quotations refer to the pages of this book.
[5] Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis. From this point, all unattributed quotations refer to the pages of this work.
[6] Governor of Russia’s Kaliningrad says German philosopher Immanuel Kant ‘directly tied’ to war in Ukraine — Meduza.
7 Op.cit.
[8] I owe this reference to Yuval Kremnitzer.
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