Kant with Sade, Lacan with Levinas

In his 1963 essay “Kant with Sade,” Jacques Lacan pairs two unlikely figures of Enlightenment ethics, conjoining without comparing them through the preposition “with.” In Lacan’s 1959–60 Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where he first addresses the strange affinities of Kant and Sade, Lacan anticipates his later essay when he translates the Greek particle meta as “with” or “after,” and goes on to suggest that “Meta is, properly speaking, that which implies a break [la coupure]” (SVII E: 265; F: 308). ¹ Whereas the “with” of “Kant with Sade” brings together two apparently disparate thinkers, revealing the uncanny proximity of their ethical systems, Lacan shows that the very act of making this conjunction is founded on the break, limit, or blind spot that each brings out in the other’s system. Moreover, the conjunction of Kant with Sade not only indicates the break that joins the two figures, but also itself marks a break in the history of ethics, a rupture that will have opened the way for the emergence of psychoanalysis—not as the elaboration of the Sadian catalog of perversions, but as one of modernity’s epochal responses to the escalating intensity of both moral law and pathological objects in the aftermath of traditional ethics based on either revelation or the common good.

Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade” institutes a comparative literature otherwise than comparison, insofar as the essay pursues a mode of reading logically and ethically prior to similitude, a reading in which texts are not so much grouped into “families” defined by similarity and difference, as into “neighborhoods” determined by accidental contiguity, genealogical isolation, and ethical encounter. “Kant avec Sade” articulates a principle and practice of comparative literature in which the juncture of texts or discourses is predicated not only on historical congruencies, structural isomorphisms, or dialectical contradictions, but also on the critical act through which one text takes the place of, or “neighbors” on, the other. Through this mode of reading by way of asymmetrical substitution, Lacan presents an account of Kant and Sade in which each thinker reveals hidden truths and limitations in the other, precisely in the non-reciprocity of their relationship.

At this moment in the early sixties when Lacan initiated his rectification of the history of ethics, Emmanuel Levinas was also beginning to insist on the priority of ethics to ontology and epistemology. Lacan and Levinas took no more cognizance of each other than did Kant and Sade. Despite his evident interest in phenomenology and ethics, Lacan remained strangely silent on the work of Levinas; so too, Levinas has repeatedly dismissed the insights of psychoanalysis into the structure of subjectivity and the Other as merely “psychologistic.” But it is precisely as modern “neighbors,” both strange and proximate, rather than as either brothers, enemies, or friends that we can read Lacan “with” Levinas. Lacan’s reading of Sade as the repressed truth of Kant reveals the perverse underside of the history of Enlightenment, in which the “pathological” object of too-much enjoyment is systematically sacrificed for the sake of the desire of a universalized Other, whether instituted as Reason, Freedom, Knowledge, or the State. By in turn reading Lacan “with” Levinas, as neighbors who, although coming from distinct traditions and aiming at different ends, together articulate the primacy of responsibility and jouissance to being and knowing, we can begin to imagine an ethics otherwise than sacrifice, to hear the call of a good after the dialectic of Good and Evil.

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During the late sixties and middle seventies, at the height of the so-called “sexual revolution” in the Western world, Lacan frequently insisted in his seminar that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” If the conventional critique of periods of sexual experimentation is that they represent the futile attempt to compensate for the collective failure of authentic love relationships, Lacan argues that, on the contrary, it is love that makes up for the lack of sexual relationships. Lacan’s point is not, of course, that “free love” was a meager copy of some higher form of sex, but rather that sex...