Canonical lacan 24 occurrences

Kant avec Sade

ELI5

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 (23)

#01

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'
#02

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.
#03

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **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
#04

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **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).
#05

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **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'
#06

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **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
#07

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
#08

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.
#09

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.
#10

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
#11

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.
#12

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

**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).
#13

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.
#14

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.
#15

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
#16

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
#17

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
#18

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)
#19

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
#20

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).'
#21

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
#22

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.'
#23

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'