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Kant avec Sade

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Lacan argues that Kant's ultra-pure, no-exceptions moral rule and the Marquis de Sade's cold, limitless cruelty are actually the same thing at their core — both strip away all human feeling to follow an abstract demand all the way, regardless of who gets hurt.

Definition

Lacan's 1963 essay "Kant avec Sade" argues that Sadian ethics is not the depraved opposite of Kantian moral philosophy but rather its structural truth and completion. The essay demonstrates that Kant's categorical imperative — purified of all "pathological" (affective, sensuous) content, demanding that moral action be governed solely by universal maxims — is formally isomorphic with the Sadian imperative to pursue jouissance without limit, coldly, indifferent to the suffering of objects. Both systems subtract the empirical subject from their calculus: Kant excludes all Wohl (well-being) from morality; Sade's executioner excludes the victim's suffering from the logic of enjoyment. What Kant represses — das Ding, the raw proximity of jouissance, the neighbor as site of malignant excess — Sade brings into the open as program. The Lacanian thesis is thus a double one: it exposes the "perverse underside" of Kantian ethics while simultaneously "ennobling" Sade by revealing that his libertinage constitutes a coherent ethical project.

The structural argument goes deeper than biographical coincidence (both Kant and Sade are children of the same Enlightenment moment). Lacan claims that the moral law, "looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state." The Kantian purification of ethics — eliminating all reference to the pathological object — does not arrive at neutral universal reason but at pain and das Ding as the sole remaining sentient correlatives of pure practical reason. Sade makes explicit what Kant occludes: that the form of the Law itself generates obscene surplus-enjoyment (superego jouissance), and that this obscenity resides not in empirical residues smudging a pure form but in the form itself. The essay thus stands as a hinge between Lacanian ethics, the theory of jouissance, and the critique of ideology.

Evolution

In Seminar VII (1959–60), the structural pairing of Kant and Sade is already fully operative, even before the 1963 essay. Lacan there argues that the Sadian world is "conceivable — even if it is its inversion, its caricature — as one of the possible forms of the world governed by a radical ethics, by the Kantian ethics as elaborated in 1788" (lacan-seminar-7, p. 88). This is the philosophical preparation: Lacan establishes that both ethics arrive at das Ding by eliminating the pathological object, and that pain (not pleasure) is the residual sentient correlative of pure practical reason. The proximity of jouissance to the moral law — and the announcement that a forthcoming lecture will address "the Sadean account of the problem of morality" (lacan-seminar-7, p. 197) — marks the Seminar as the generative site of the essay.

The 1963 Écrits essay itself is the canonical crystallisation, described by Nobus (via Žižek) as "the theme which, perhaps, provides the key to the entire Lacanian theoretical edifice" (todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds, p. 238). The essay adds the formal semiotic and logical apparatus — the table of the four discourses' ancestors, the graph of desire — to what the Seminar had articulated only in structural terms. The shift from Seminar VII to the essay is a shift from ethical phenomenology to formalization.

In secondary literature of the 1990s–2000s, the concept ramifies in two directions. Zupančič (alenka-zupancic-ethics-of-the-real, 2000) extends the thesis by arguing that Kant's postulate of the immortality of the soul is the "most convincing illustration" of the Kant–Sade proximity: both Kant and Sade respond to the same structural impasse — the incommensurability between the body's finite capacity and the infinite demand of jouissance — and both fantasize an indestructible body rather than an immortal soul. This is a genuinely new contribution, locating the essay's thesis in Kant's theoretical metaphysics rather than only in his practical philosophy. Žižek, by contrast, uses "Kant avec Sade" as an ideological-critical lever, arguing in The Sublime Object that the obscenity of moral Law resides in "this form itself" rather than in empirical residues (zizek-sublime-object, Introduction), and deploying it in Less Than Nothing to read Mozart's Così fan tutte as staging the "mechanical materialism" of passion-subtracted universality (zizek-less-than-nothing). Žižek's later exchange with Nobus (todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds, pp. 238–262) reveals a further internal complication: Žižek maintains that "Sade is a closet Kantian" but "fails at the point where he cannot be a Kantian" — Sade cannot sustain the truly traumatic dimension of Kantian freedom (diabolical evil, "second death") and thus falls short of the Kantian position he structurally occupies.

Key formulations

Ethics of the Real: Kant and LacanAlenka Zupančič · 2000 (p.14)

The 'Lacanian blow' to ethics can thus be summarized: the best thing philosophy has to offer in the name of ethics is a kind of 'Practical Philosophy in the Bedroom'... 'Kant with Sade' constitutes 'the prime example of the eye-opening effect that analysis makes possible'

Zupančič's condensed formula captures both moves of Lacan's essay: it desublimes Kantian ethics while simultaneously revealing Sade's discourse as an ethical project — and names it the paradigm of psychoanalytic critique of philosophy.

Seminar VII · The Ethics of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1959 (p.88)

the Sadian world is conceivable - even if it is its inversion, its caricature - as one of the possible forms of the world governed by a radical ethics, by the Kantian ethics as elaborated in 1788

This is Lacan's own most direct structural statement of the homology: Sadian ethics is not the negation of Kantian ethics but its inverted double, the repressed underside made visible.

The Sublime Object of IdeologySlavoj Žižek · 1989 (page unknown)

This is why Lacan conceives Sade as the truth of Kant: 'Kant avec Sade'. But in what precisely does this obscenity of the moral Law consist? Not in some remnants, leftovers of the empirical 'pathological' contents sticking to the pure form of the Law and smudging it, but in this form itself.

Žižek's formulation sharpens the Lacanian thesis into an ideological-critical argument: the Law's obscenity is structural, not incidental — the formal purity of the Law is itself the site of jouissance.

Žižek Responds!Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · 2022 (p.238)

'Kant with Sade' is 'the theme which, perhaps, provides the key to the entire Lacanian theoretical edifice'

Nobus, citing Žižek, establishes the essay's architectonic centrality for Lacanian theory as a whole — making its interpretation a high-stakes hermeneutic battleground.

Žižek Responds!Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · 2022 (p.262)

I still 'maintain that Sade is a closet Kantian and then proclaim that his Kantianism fails at the point where he cannot be a Kantian.'

Žižek's refined thesis introduces an asymmetry into the Kant–Sade pairing: Sade structurally presupposes Kant but cannot sustain Kantian freedom at its most radical (diabolical evil / second death), marking a limit within the homology.

Cited examples

Kant's postulate of the immortality of the soul (from the Critique of Practical Reason) *(literature)*

Cited by Ethics of the Real: Kant and LacanAlenka Zupančič · 2000 (p.93). Zupančič argues that Kant's deduction of the soul's immortality — required for 'endless progress' toward moral perfection — structurally mirrors the Sadian fantasy of an indestructible body that can be infinitely tortured. Both respond to the same impasse: the incommensurability between finite bodily capacity and the infinite demand of jouissance, making the immortality postulate a 'fantasy of pure practical reason' in the Lacanian sense.

Mozart's Così fan tutte *(art)*

Cited by Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismSlavoj Žižek · 2012 (page unknown). Žižek reads Così fan tutte as enacting the logic of 'Kant avec Sade' by showing how sexual passion, once systematized and made interchangeable (the women unknowingly 'swap' lovers), turns into its mechanical opposite — cold, affectless execution of pleasure without pathological attachment, precisely parallel to the Kantian ethical subject acting from duty alone.

Syberberg's film version of Wagner's Parsifal and Amfortas's externalized wound *(film)*

Cited by The Sublime Object of IdeologySlavoj Žižek · 1989 (page unknown). Žižek uses Syberberg's staging — in which Amfortas's wound becomes an externalized, obscene partial object — to illustrate how the superego's obscene enjoyment is not a residue but intrinsic to the Law's form itself, which is the core claim of 'Kant avec Sade.'

Tensions

Within the corpus

Whether Sade fully equals Kant or fails at a crucial point — the degree of symmetry in the Kant–Sade homology

  • Zupančič treats the Kant–Sade proximity as a nearly perfect structural mirror: both are responses to the same impasse (infinite demand vs. finite body), and the immortality postulate shows Kant 'providing exactly the same answer' as Sade. The homology is essentially symmetrical. — cite: alenka-zupancic-ethics-of-the-real-kant-and-lacan-2000, p. 93

  • Žižek insists on an asymmetry: Sade is a 'closet Kantian' but 'his Kantianism fails at the point where he cannot be a Kantian' — Sade cannot sustain the truly traumatic dimension of Kantian freedom (the Real of diabolical evil, 'second death'), meaning the homology is structurally incomplete on Sade's side. — cite: todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-publishing-2022, p. 262

    This disagreement matters for the ethical stakes of the essay: a perfect symmetry implies mutual critique (both exposed), while the asymmetry preserves a Kantian moment (radical freedom) that exceeds Sade and points toward a different ethics.

Across frameworks

vs Frankfurt School

Lacanian: Lacan argues that the form of the moral Law itself — not merely its ideological misuse — generates obscene surplus-enjoyment. The Kant–Sade thesis shows that universal rational ethics and Sadean jouissance are structurally identical at the level of form: purifying morality of pathological content does not neutralise but intensifies the drive, making the superego the inescapable shadow of the Law. There is no Enlightenment reason innocent of this complicity.

Frankfurt School: Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment similarly diagnoses Enlightenment reason as turning into domination and myth, and explicitly links the Kantian moral law to sadistic control (as in their analysis of Sade and Nietzsche). However, they locate the problem in the historical-social instrumentalisation of reason and the regression of bourgeois subjectivity — a dialectical-materialist critique — rather than in a structural-logical homology immanent to the formal structure of the Law as such.

Fault line: Lacan locates the Kant–Sade nexus in the timeless structure of the Law and the drive (a structural claim), whereas Frankfurt School thinkers locate it in the historical dialectic of Enlightenment rationality and bourgeois domination (a genealogical-historical claim).

vs Ego Psychology

Lacanian: For Lacan, the superego is not a benign internalisation of parental authority that can be therapeutically strengthened to support healthy moral functioning; it is the obscene underside of the Law, structurally linked to jouissance and das Ding. 'Kant avec Sade' demonstrates that the most rigorous moral law and the most extreme superego cruelty share the same formal structure — ego-strengthening cannot resolve this.

Ego Psychology: Ego psychology (Hartmann, Loewenstein, Kris) treats the superego as one of three agencies whose conflicts can be mediated by a strong, autonomous ego. The therapeutic goal is to reduce superego severity, modulate drives through the ego's reality-testing, and achieve 'conflict-free ego functioning.' The Sadean dimension of the Law would be interpreted as a pathologically harsh superego to be analytically softened.

Fault line: Lacan holds that the cruelty of the superego is constitutive and ineliminable — built into the structure of the Law — whereas ego psychology treats it as a contingent pathological excess that therapeutic ego-strengthening can resolve.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: The 'Kant avec Sade' thesis implies that ethical purity — the drive to transcend all 'pathological' (sensuous, particular) inclination in favor of a universal principle — does not lead to human flourishing but to the death drive, pain, and jouissance without limit. The ideal of a fully autonomous self-actualising subject is structurally complicit with the Sadean will to power over the other.

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Maslow, Rogers) posits that human beings have an intrinsic drive toward growth, authenticity, and self-actualisation. Moral and psychological development consists in removing neurotic blocks to this natural tendency. The Kantian aspiration toward rational autonomy is understood as consonant with, not opposed to, genuine human fulfilment.

Fault line: Where humanistic psychology presupposes an original plenitude and a self whose natural goodness needs only to be liberated, Lacan posits a constitutive lack and a drive whose 'liberation' from all pathological constraint produces not self-actualisation but the Sadean horizon of limitless jouissance.

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (52)

  1. #01

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.61

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Historical Backdrop and Terminology**

    Theoretical move: Fink reconstructs the terminological and conceptual genealogy of Lacan's *fantasme* by contrasting it with Klein's imaginary-only 'phantasy,' arguing that Lacanian fantasy is irreducible to the imaginary because it is always already structured by the symbolic—and later indexed to the real through the migration of object *a*—a distinction formally encoded in the matheme (S/ ◊ a) and the L Schema.

    the L Schema is still centrally involved in Lacan's diagrams of Sadean fantasy in 'Kant with Sade,' written in 1962 (Lacan, 2006a, pp. 774 and 778)

  2. #02

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.84

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Conclusion**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacanian ethics requires the analyst to continually deconstruct their own fantasmatic Weltanschauung (which constitutes countertransference) in order to serve the analysand's desire, and gestures toward a resolution of the desire/drive conflict not through sublimation but through a changed relation between desire and the drives.

    he reviews a number of different ethical systems, including Aristotle's, Kant's, Sade's, and Bentham's

  3. #03

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.125

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > <span id="page-123-0"></span>[AN INTRODUCTION TO](#page-7-0) "KANT WITH SADE"

    Theoretical move: The passage situates Lacan's "Kant with Sade" essay within its historical and intellectual context, arguing that the pairing of Kant and Sade as a theoretical move was independently arrived at by both Lacan and Adorno/Horkheimer, raising the question of whether the Sade–Kant conjunction is an unavoidable structural insight about the relationship between the moral law and perversion.

    "Kant with Sade" was written in 1962 and came out in April 1963 in the journal Critique. Lacan first seriously discussed Kant in the same breath with Sade in December 1959 in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

  4. #04

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.127

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Adorno's Critique of "Science" and "Reason"**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Adorno's critique of Kant and Sade anticipates Lacan's own position in "Kant avec Sade": both thinkers see Sade as completing rather than opposing Kant's project, exposing the totalitarian logic latent in Kantian universality and scientific rationality, which Lacan further formalizes by recasting the categorical imperative in cybernetic terms.

    Adorno sounds most like Lacan when he says that Sade's work 'constitutes the intransigent critique of practical reason, in contradistinction to which Kant's own critique itself seems a revocation of his own thought'

  5. #05

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.128

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Desire and the Law**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues, following Lacan, that law and repressed desire are structurally identical because the law's prohibition constitutes and sustains the very desire it forbids; repression and the return of the repressed are equally one and the same thing, both operating at the level of discourse (the symbolic order as law) rather than the individual subject.

    One of the central problematics in 'Kant with Sade' is the relationship between desire and the law, and one of Lacan's conclusions regarding their relationship is that 'law and repressed desire are one and the same thing'

  6. #06

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.135

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Sade and the Discourse of Human Rights**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Sade's moral maxim is structurally more transparent than Kant's categorical imperative because it explicitly locates enunciation in the Other rather than the subject; and crucially, both systems secretly harbour jouissance at the very point of the law's enunciation, making affect irreducible to any universalising moral framework—a point that implicates the superego as the site where jouissance imposes sacrifice of jouissance.

    Lacan, a contrast can be drawn between Kant's moral imperative insofar as it is enunciated by the voice within and Sade's moral imperative as it is enunciated by the Other

  7. #07

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.136

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Ten Commandments**

    Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates Lacan's reading of the Ten Commandments in Seminar VII as a site where Kantian universalizability and Sadean libertine logic converge, and where the Law's prohibition is shown to be the very mechanism that brings das Ding (the Thing) to life — establishing the Law as the condition of possibility for jouissance and desire rather than its simple negation.

    Lacan suggests that, curiously enough, one can find overtones of Kant's ethical formulations—the requirement of a universalizable maxim—in a good deal of libertine literature.

  8. #08

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.138

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Perversion and the Other**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that the Sadean pervert's fundamental operation is to make the Other exist so as to secure his own completeness as an unbarred subject; this allows a structural differentiation of the three clinical categories (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) according to the status of the Other, and reveals the sadist's impossible attempt to recover a primordial jouissance prior to language, repression, and castration.

    Let us consider the first schema Lacan (2006a, p. 774) provides for sadism in 'Kant with Sade'

  9. #09

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.139

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Perversion and the Other** > *Schemas of Perversion*

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that the Sadean schema from "Kant with Sade" is best understood as a specific trajectory within the Graph of Desire—analogous to Hamlet's parcours in Seminar VI—and that its four-vertex, unilaterally oriented structure distinguishes it from both the L Schema and the Four Discourses while bearing family resemblances to both, suggesting that rotating the schema generates four distinct clinical structures (including sadism and masochism).

    Lacan's discussion of his schemas in 'Kant with Sade' are terse to say the least, and it is necessary to examine the seminars given around the time Lacan was writing this article

  10. #10

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.140

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Perversion and the Other** > *Schemas of Sadism*

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that sadistic fantasy inverts the standard neurotic fantasy formula (S/ ◊ a): rather than finding object a in the partner, the sadist identifies himself as the whole, undivided object that acts upon the Other, revealing the constitutive role of the big Other and the complexity of Lacan's multiple, co-existing concepts of the subject.

    V and d are clearly the pivotal point where Lacan locates the Kantian will, volonté

  11. #11

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.149

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Notes**

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/commentary section providing bibliographic and clarificatory footnotes for the preceding chapter; it contains scattered theoretical asides but no sustained independent argument.

    Lacan (2006a, p. 790) even suggests that the Supreme Being takes the form of the devil for Sade. [. . .] Freud (1961c) refers to 'Kant's Categorical Imperative [as] the direct heir of the Oedipus complex'

  12. #12

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.248

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > *Sex Life*

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case (Patrick), Fink argues that masochistic sexual scenarios are not simply the inverse of sadism but rather fantasy structures that transform and disguise the fundamental desire to be loved, while the "S&M" arrangement functions precisely to neutralize the enigma of the Other's desire and replace it with transparent demand.

    sadism was somehow the truth of his masochistic sexual fantasies, as though the one were merely the fl ip side of the other (see Chapter 8, 'An Introduction to "Kant with Sade,"' in the present volume).

  13. #13

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > [INDEX](#page-8-0)

    Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages from an index section of Bruce Fink's "Against Understanding, Volume 2"), listing concepts and page references with no substantive theoretical argument.

    "Kant with Sade" 42, 105–30; Adorno's critique of science and reason 106–8; desire and the law 108–11, 126–7; the Good or doing the right thing 111–15; perversion and the Other 117–28

  14. #14

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.142

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Perversion and the Other** > cause of desire è desire è object of desire

    Theoretical move: The passage reframes sadism not as the infliction of suffering but as the production of anxiety in the partner, arguing that this anxiety functions as proof for the sadist of the big Other's existence and desire—thereby inverting the neurotic's fantasy structure and situating the sadist's aim at the object yielded to the law rather than pain itself.

    In 'Kant with Sade,' Lacan, as we have seen, speaks in particular about the division of the subject into the enunciating subject and the subject of the statement.

  15. #15

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.148

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Two Further Implied Turns of the Screw**

    Theoretical move: This concluding passage is largely non-substantive, offering two implied schemas (X and Y) derived from a 90-degree rotation of the Sadean and masochistic schemas in "Kant with Sade," without theoretical elaboration, and closing with a bibliographic/biographical note on the seminar's provenance.

    There are many opaque formulations in 'Kant with Sade' that I have not ventured to comment on here

  16. #16

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.14

    Introduction

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's engagement with Kant constitutes a double move: exposing the perverse underside of Kantian ethics (via "Kant with Sade") while simultaneously crediting Kant with discovering the irreducible dimension of desire and the Real in ethics — a discovery that must itself be supplemented by a further step toward the drive, which frames the project of an "ethics of the Real."

    The 'Lacanian blow' to ethics can thus be summarized: the best thing philosophy has to offer in the name of ethics is a kind of 'Practical Philosophy in the Bedroom'... 'Kant with Sade' constitutes 'the prime example of the eye-opening effect that analysis makes possible'

  17. #17

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.93

    Good and Evil

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's postulate of the immortality of the soul is structurally a fantasy in the Lacanian sense: it responds to the same impasse as Sadeian fantasy—the incommensurability between the body's finite capacity for pleasure/pain and the infinite demand of jouissance—thereby demonstrating that "Kant with Sade" finds its most precise illustration in the immortality postulate, whose truth is not an immortal soul but an immortal body.

    It is well known that Lacan wrote an essay entitled 'Kant with Sade' in which he displays and brings to our attention the extraordinary proximity of Kant and Sade.

  18. #18

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_148"></span>**perversion**

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines perversion not as deviant sexual behaviour but as a distinct clinical structure, characterized by the operations of disavowal (in relation to the phallus) and a specific positioning of the subject as object/instrument of the Other's jouissance—inverting the structure of fantasy—and argues this structure is equally complex to neurosis, differing not in richness but in the inverse direction of its structuration.

    the formula for perversion appears as [inverted matheme] in the first schema in 'Kant with Sade' (Ec, 774), the inversion of the matheme of fantasy

  19. #19

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_150"></span>**philosophy**

    Theoretical move: The passage maps the ambivalent relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy in both Freud and Lacan, showing how Lacan simultaneously opposes philosophy's totalising systems (linking it to the Discourse of the Master) and draws extensively on specific philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger—to construct his own theoretical apparatus.

    It is Kant's moral philosophy (the Critique of Practical Reason) which most interests Lacan, and he discusses this at length both in his seminar on ethics (1959–60) and his essay on 'Kant with Sade' (1962).

  20. #20

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_199"></span>**superego**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's progressive retheorization of the Freudian superego: from a symbolic agency tied to the Law and the Oedipus complex, to a paradoxical structure that is simultaneously the Law and its destruction, culminating in its identification with the Kantian categorical imperative and the jouissance-commanding voice of the Other.

    In 1962, Lacan argues that this is none other than the Kantian categorical imperative… the will of the Other, who assumes the form of Sade's 'Supreme Being-in-Evil'

  21. #21

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_176"></span>**Schema L**

    Theoretical move: Schema L is Lacan's first and most sustained diagrammatic formalization of psychoanalytic structure, demonstrating that the symbolic relation between the Other and the subject is always partially blocked by the imaginary axis, while also representing the decentered subject stretched across four structural loci; it is positioned as the originary quaternary from which all subsequent schemata derive, and as the precursor to Lacan's mature topological work.

    the two schemata of Sade—see Ec, 774 and Ec, 778

  22. #22

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function > 77. *On the Sociological Reality of Crime and Law and on the Relation of Psychoanalysis to their Dialectical Foundation*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic theory must be rigorously bounded to its clinical experience and cannot be extrapolated to collective entities (national character, collective superego), while simultaneously demonstrating that the superego and Oedipalism are historically and sociologically conditioned phenomena whose pathogenic force is tied to the disintegration of the conjugal family unit—and that psychoanalysis "unrealizes" crime without dehumanizing the criminal, opening access to the criminal's imaginary world through transference.

    this agency is nevertheless graspable only in the psychopathological state—that is, in the individual… the antinomy, at the individual's biological pole, of the ideal of pure Duty that Kant posited as a counterweight to the incorruptible order of the star-spangled heavens.

  23. #23

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.590

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > ///. *On the Ideals of the Person* > *IV. Toward an Ethics*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the superego, properly understood from the vantage point of speech and existence, is fundamentally a *voice*—a loud, authoritative vocal imperative without ground other than its own resonance—and that this reframing opens onto an ethics oriented by desire rather than fear, one that cannot be reduced to ego-strengthening or humanist moralism.

    I am not, I might remark, the one who is responsible for bringing people back to the crossroads of practical reason.

  24. #24

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.663

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Sade's *Philosophy in the Bedroom* completes and reveals the truth of Kant's *Critique of Practical Reason*: both the Kantian moral law and the Sadean maxim of universal jouissance share the same deep structure—the split between the enunciating subject and the subject of the statement—showing that the moral imperative always requisitions us as Other, and that Sade's formulation is more honest precisely because it makes this split visible rather than covering it with the fiction of an inner voice.

    If, after showing that the former is consistent with the latter, I can demonstrate that the former completes the latter, I shall be able to claim that it yields the truth of the Critique.

  25. #25

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.668

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the "Kant with Sade" thesis by demonstrating that Sadean experience supplies the missing third term of Kantian moral philosophy—the object (as voice, as Dasein of the tormenting agent)—while showing that jouissance, fantasy, and desire structure Sadean experience through the matheme ($ ◇ a), which formalizes the non-reciprocal relation between the split subject and object a.

    the third term that, according to Kant, is lacking in moral experience—namely, the object that Kant, in order to guarantee it to the will in the implementation of the Law, is constrained to relegate to the unthinkability of the thing in itself. But is this not the very object we find in Sadean experience

  26. #26

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.671

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade > SCHEMA I

    Theoretical move: Through a reading of the Schema I graph applied to Sade's work, Lacan demonstrates that the Kantian moral will and Sadean will-to-jouissance are structurally identical: both produce the barred subject ($) through alienation, both operate across the between-two-deaths, and the moral law itself represents desire in the case where the object (rather than the subject) is missing—thereby grounding a rapprochement between Law and desire via the objet petit a as cause.

    Thus Kant, being interrogated 'with Sade'—that is, Sade serving here, in our thinking as in his sadism, as an instrument avows what is obvious in the question 'What does he want?' which henceforth arises for everyone.

  27. #27

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.677

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade > SCHEMA I

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kant's apologue from the Critique of Practical Reason as a lever to argue that desire—not the moral law—is the deeper truth that Kant's examples inadvertently reveal, while simultaneously gauging the limits of Sade's attempt to articulate a right to jouissance, showing that Sade's work ultimately fails to transcend the fantasy structure it tries to expose.

    we have not brought in either our knight—which would have been easy, since it would be Sade, whom we believe to be qualified enough here

  28. #28

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.683

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade > SCHEMA I

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Sade's work, far from constituting a genuine treatise on desire, ultimately confirms that desire is the flip side of the law—Sade never truly escapes the Law but obliquely reinstates it, demonstrating that he lacks sufficient proximity to his own malice to encounter the neighbor in it, and thus never achieves the traversal of fantasy his work seems to promise.

    My structural reference points make it easy to grasp that the Sadean fantasy is better situated among the stays of Christian ethics than elsewhere.

  29. #29

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.686

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade > *Notes*

    Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of editorial and bibliographic notes (endnotes) for the "Kant with Sade" essay, providing source references, publication history, and minor clarifications; it is non-substantive in theoretical terms, with the sole partial exception of note 7, which glosses the concept of the wish for a second death.

    It is a subjective dynamism: physical death is the object of the wish for a second death.

  30. #30

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.849

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject<sup>1</sup> > NOTES TO IN MEMORY OF ERNEST JONES: O N HIS THEORY OF SYMBOLISM" > NOTE S T O "GUIDIN G REMARK S FO R A CONVENTIO N O N FEMAL E SEXUALITY " > NOTES TO "KANT WITH SADE"

    Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes to Lacan's "Kant with Sade," providing lexical, intertextual, and editorial glosses on French wordplay, cross-references to Seminar VII and other Lacanian texts, and bibliographic citations — it performs no independent theoretical argument.

    Kant's postulates presumably lose 'even the lifeless support of the function of utility to which Kant confined them' in Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom.

  31. #31

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.852

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject<sup>1</sup> > NOTES TO IN MEMORY OF ERNEST JONES: O N HIS THEORY OF SYMBOLISM" > NOTE S T O "GUIDIN G REMARK S FO R A CONVENTIO N O N FEMAL E SEXUALITY " > NOTES TO "KANT WITH SADE"

    Theoretical move: This passage is a series of editorial footnotes providing bibliographical, intertextual, and philological annotations to Lacan's "Kant with Sade" essay; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument.

    NOTES TO "KANT WITH SADE"

  32. #32

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.869

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts

    Theoretical move: This passage is the prefatory apparatus and classified index of major concepts from Lacan's Écrits, compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller with a brief note by Lacan himself; it organizes the theoretical architecture of the Écrits as a system around the Symbolic Order, the Signifier, the subject, and their clinical and epistemological ramifications, while asserting that Lacanian discourse constitutes a closed, coherent formalization.

    'Kant with Sade' (desire and the Law, the structure of fantasy)

  33. #33

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.880

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *III. Desire and Its Interpretation* > *2, Schreber's schema*

    Theoretical move: This passage deploys Lacan's major schemas (Schreber's psychotic schema, Sade's fantasy schemas, networks of overdetermination, and the Graphs of Desire) as a classified index, showing how foreclosure, fading of the subject, overdetermination, and the logic of anticipation/retroaction structure the subject across psychotic, perverse, and neurotic clinical fields.

    Schemas of the Sadean fantasy... V, the will as a will to jouissance, which is detached from pleasure just as the barred subject is detached from the real

  34. #34

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.885

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *Position of the Unconscious*

    Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it comprises editorial apparatus for the Écrits — bibliographic notes on individual essays' publication histories and a classified index of Freudian German terms with their page references — and makes no independent theoretical argument.

    This essay was to have served as a preface to *Philosophy in the Bedroom*... published in *Critique CXCI (1963): 291-313.*

  35. #35

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.88

    **VI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Kantian ethics and Sadian ethics are structural mirrors of each other—both arrive at *das Ding* by eliminating all pathological (affective) reference from the moral law—and that this convergence reveals the fundamental relationship between the moral law, desire, and the Real, with pain as the sole sentient correlative of pure practical reason.

    the Sadian world is conceivable - even if it is its inversion, its caricature - as one of the possible forms of the world governed by a radical ethics, by the Kantian ethics as elaborated in 1788

  36. #36

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.197

    **XIV** > **Love of one's neighbor**

    Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Freud's *Civilization and Its Discontents* and *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*, argues that jouissance remains forbidden even after the death of God, and that the commandment to love one's neighbor is ethically explosive precisely because the neighbor harbors the same "fundamental evil"—the same proximity to das Ding—that I harbour in myself; altruism and utilitarianism are exposed as frauds that allow us to avoid confronting the malignant jouissance at the heart of the ethical problem, which only Sade (and Kant) begin to articulate honestly.

    it's not for nothing that it is contemporary with Sade… in the domain of the articulation of ethical questions, it seems to me that Sade has some very solid things to say, at least in connection with the problem that currently concerns us.

  37. #37

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.103

    The voice and the drive > The voice of reason

    Theoretical move: By tracing the "voice of reason" across Kant, Freud, and Lacan, Dolar argues that the power of reason is paradoxically grounded in a voice whose origin escapes consciousness, and that this voice structurally coincides with unconscious desire—culminating in Lacan's identification of the Kantian categorical imperative with pure desire, and repositioning the ego (not the unconscious) as the true locus of irrationality.

    Lacan, in another famous passage, even drew the radical conclusion that the two coincide: the Kantian categorical imperative, he says, is simply desire in its pure form.

  38. #38

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.208

    Notes > Chapter 4 The Ethics of the Voice

    Theoretical move: These notes to "The Ethics of the Voice" develop the structural homology between the superego's categorical imperative and the Kantian moral law, trace the voice's ethical function across Rousseau, Kant, Freud, and Lacan, and culminate in the claim that the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father returns in the Real precisely as the voice in psychosis.

    when the law is actually there, desire doesn't hold, but only because the law and the repressed desire are one and the same thing, this is just what Freud has discovered

  39. #39

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.109

    The voice and the drive > The voice of the superego

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the voice occupies an irreducible ambiguous position between the ethical and the perverse: the ethical voice is pure enunciation without statement (demanding the subject supply the statement/act), while the superego is a "fat voice" that fills this void with positive content, guilt, and transgressive enjoyment — yet neither exhausts the voice, which always marks a void in both the subject and the Other. The chapter then opens onto the political dimension by following Aristotle's division between mere voice (phone) and speech (logos) as the foundation of the political.

    To put it in Kantian terms: the voice of the superego is not the voice of reason but, rather, the voice of reason run amok, reason berserk.

  40. #40

    Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.39

    POWERS OF HORROR > PHILOSOPHICAL SADNESS AND THE SPOKEN DISASTER OF THE ANALYST

    Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that analytic speech achieves a "poetic" catharsis by passing through abjection rather than sublating or purifying it, positioning the analyst's mimetic identification with the analysand as the site where Freudian jouissance disrupts the Kantian-Hegelian tradition of ethical consciousness that would reduce defilement to normative sadness and silence.

    Poetic catharsis...takes us away from purity, hence from Kantian ethics, which has long governed modern codes...the Kant of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Ethics...advocated an 'ethical gymnastics' in order to give us, by means of consciousness, control over our defilements

  41. #41

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

    <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 4**

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 4, providing scholarly citations and brief glosses for key theoretical moves in the chapter, including references to Lacan's "Kant with Sade," extimacy, enunciation vs. statement, fetishism, and perversion — but doing no primary theoretical work itself.

    I rely for this comparison of Kant and Freud on Lacan's 'Kant with Sade,' trans. James Swenson, October, no. 51 (Winter 1989).

  42. #42

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Sinthome (exemplified by Amfortas's externalized wound) designates a paradoxical element that is both destructive and constitutive of the subject's ontological consistency; this structure is then mapped onto the Enlightenment project itself, where the obscene superego enjoyment is shown to be not a residue but the necessary obverse of the formal moral Law, such that renunciation of 'pathological' content itself produces surplus-jouissance.

    This is why Lacan conceives Sade as the truth of Kant: 'Kant avec Sade'. But in what precisely does this obscenity of the moral Law consist? Not in some remnants, leftovers of the empirical 'pathological' contents sticking to the pure form of the Law and smudging it, but in this form itself.

  43. #43

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.233

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio Is Wrong

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that music (via Wagner's *Tristan*) lies about its own affective status—its true "truth" resides not in the grand metaphysical affect but in the ridiculous narrative interruptions that enable it—and then uses this insight to critique Damasio's homeostatic/adaptationist account of emotion by invoking the psychoanalytic "death drive" as the minimal structure of freedom: a dis-adaptation from utilitarian-survivalist immersion that ruptures biological determinism.

    between utilitarianism as the radical 'ontic' denial of freedom... and the Kantian (and, let us not forget, Sadeian) assertion of unconditional autonomy (of the moral law, of the caprice to enjoy)—in both cases, there is a rupture in the chain of being.

  44. #44

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.393

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 1The Subject, This "Inwardly Circumcised Jew"

    Theoretical move: This notes section deploys several theoretical pivots: the "spectral Real" is articulated in three versions linked by the subject's gaze as vanishing mediator; Kantian ethics is re-situated as the ethics inherent to both modern science and capitalist circulation-logic; and the Hegelian notion of form (das Formelle) is distinguished from its Kantian counterpart to ground the critique of political economy.

    it is ultimately only the form of duty that matters—in which duty is to be accomplished for the sake of duty. This means that Lacan's emphasis on how Kant's ethics is the ethics inherent to the Galilean-Newtonian universe of modern science has to be supplemented by the insight into how Kant's ethics is also the ethics inherent to the capitalist logic of circulation as an end in itself

  45. #45

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.70

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's account of the state reveals an irreducible split in self-consciousness between objective (ritual/institutional) and subjective (monarchical will) aspects—a gap that totalitarianism perversely exploits by inverting the Kantian ethical structure, so that overcoming natural pity becomes the "duty," turning violation of ethical instinct into proof of moral grandeur.

    No wonder Eichmann considered himself a Kantian: in him, the Kantian contrast between the subject's spontaneous egotistic strivings and the ethical struggle to overcome them is turned around into the struggle between the spontaneous ethical strivings and the 'evil' effort to overcome these barriers

  46. #46

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.189

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > When the God Comes Around

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the trauma of the Shoah forces theology through a dialectical succession of positions—from sovereign to finite to suffering God—and that only the theological frame can adequately register the scope of such catastrophe; this dialectic mirrors the Universal-Particular-Singular triad of Christian confessions (Orthodoxy-Catholicism-Protestantism), culminating in a Protestant God of arbitrary, Law-suspending cruelty whose dark underside is the necessary correlate of the excess of Christian love over Jewish Law.

    this dark excess of ruthless divine sadism—excess over the image of a severe, but nonetheless just, God—is a necessary negative, an underside, of the excess of Christian love over the Jewish Law

  47. #47

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.354

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism?

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that fundamentalism is defined by the immediate identification with fantasy (becoming the "dupe of one's fantasy") which forecloses the enigma of the Other's desire; this structural analysis is then extended to show that liberal multiculturalism's tolerant repression of passion produces the same segregationist logic it claims to oppose, leaving aggressive secularism and fundamentalist passion as mirror-image dead ends.

    the fundamentalist becomes the dupe of his fantasy (as Lacan put it apropos of the Marquis de Sade)

  48. #48

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.98

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's *Ethics* seminar represents a deadlock—not a triumph—because it cannot clearly distinguish pure desire from immersion in primordial jouissance ("passion for the Real"); the resolution lies in the move from desire to drive, while the broader argument shows that Bataille's premodern dialectic of Law/transgression is superseded by the Kantian insight that the absolute excess is the Law itself, a move Lacan only partially executes.

    So, far from announcing a triumphant solution, Lacan's 'Kant avec Sade,' his assertion of Sade as the truth of Kant, rather names an embarrassing problem that Lacan failed to resolve

  49. #49

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.397

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 2Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section of The Parallax View, containing scholarly footnotes with citations and brief argumentative asides; the theoretically substantive moments include Žižek's critique of Boostels on Kant avec Sade, a gloss on Lacan's tripartite (ISR) staging of anxiety, and a reading of Medea vs. Antigone as two versions of feminine subjectivity.

    Lacan's 'Kant avec Sade' 'directly posits the Sadeian universe of morbid perversion as the "truth" of the most radical assertion of the moral weight of the symbolic Law in human history (Kantian ethics).'

  50. #50

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.96

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian ethical revolution—which displaces all external authority onto autonomous self-limitation—makes the "Sadeian perversion" not Kant's hidden truth but rather his *symptom*: Sade emerges precisely from Kant's failure to follow his own breakthrough to the end, and the only genuine resolution of the hysteric's demand for a Master is the analytic position of subjective destitution.

    Sade is the symptom of Kant: while it is true that Kant retreated from drawing all the consequences of his ethical revolution, the space for the figure of Sade is opened up by this compromise of Kant

  51. #51

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.262

    Žižek Responds! > [Response to Nobus](#contents.xhtml_ch10a)

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kant's ethical ambiguity—between freedom as traumatic Real and freedom as asymptotically unattainable—mirrors the Sadean confusion about "second death," and both are resolved by the Hegelian-Lacanian move of grasping Substance as Subject (i.e., recognising that radical negativity/death drive is already the zero-level of reality, not a terminal destruction to be achieved).

    I stick to my interpretation—why? Let's begin with Nobus's claim... For this reason I still 'maintain that Sade is a closet Kantian and then proclaim that his Kantianism fails at the point where he cannot be a Kantian.'

  52. #52

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.238

    Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Interpretation of Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”](#contents.xhtml_ch10)

    Theoretical move: Nobus argues that Lacan's "Kant with Sade" constitutes the impossible-yet-central nucleus of Žižek's entire intellectual project, and that a rigorous critique of Žižek must reconstruct the coherence of his scattered readings of that essay through a centripetal force mirroring the centrifugal force required to read Lacan's text itself.

    'Kant with Sade' is 'the theme which, perhaps, provides the key to the entire Lacanian theoretical edifice'