Introduction
I love Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade.
I do not, but I was told that is how we were all going to open our presentations.
A figure both named the Nietzschean moral revolutionary and yet tied to the morality of fascism. Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade confronts us with pure horror, a person already warded off without confrontation. The 120 Days of Sodom was originally banned by the conservative government in the 1950s. The same with Salò in Italy in the 70s but now Sodom is published as a penguin classic and Salò can be rented on DVD from Netflix. The Insurmountable repugnance of his novels make him out to be nothing but a pornographer and sex criminal. Here however, in the subterranean backrooms of the academy away from all the legitimate discourse on Sade we can confront his horror. As we know from Lacan, Sade is primarily a moral philosopher, the most interesting of them, far better than Aristotle at least. A contemporary of Jeremy Bentham - the creator of utilitarianism - but Sade leaves utilitarianism as a painful embarrassment. Of course, 8 years after Kant’s 2nd critique we get philosophy in the bedroom.
It is the fundamental mistake of the post-war French literary theorists to try and build the case that Sade somehow predates Freud as an analyst; he is a moral philosopher, just one that dares confront the limits of humanity. A man of both revolutionary France and yet stuck to the Ancien Régime, a constitutional monarchist and yet absolute atheist. Sade is a walking contradiction.
Literature will never be separated from the clinic, whether it is the Greek tragedies of Oedipus and Antigone in Freud and Lacan, Proust, Beckett, and Artaud as well as many more for Deleuze and Guattari, Mythology of course for Jung. But it is Kraft-Ebbing we can thank for this by naming the disorders Sadism and Masochism after the patients rather than the Dr. Sade has been forced into the discourse of analysis and is now always introduced as “the guy sadism is named after.” Just like the French reception of Nietzsche we can thank Bataille for keeping Sade alive as a philosopher first, unlike these literary theorists Bataille takes Sade for who he truly is, a philosopher of transgression. It is the manifesto for Acéphale, entitled “the sacred conspiracy” where they open with a quote from Sade that summarises his political contradiction:
An already old and corrupt nation, courageously shaking off the yoke of its monarchical government in order to adopt a republican one, can only maintain itself through many crimes; for it is already in crime, and if it wants to move from crime to virtue, in other words from a violent state to a peaceful one, it would fall into inertia, of which its certain ruin would soon be the result.
- Georges Bataille, The Sacred Conspiracy (quoting De Sade)
The world is already constantly in crime and so the transgressions must keep coming. If it ever stops, if the orgy ends, then we are fucked. The revolution must keep going, the 121st day can never come. Permanent revolution is the only way the world can keep going according to Sade. The 121st day presents itself as a horror to Sade but here we are in the world of the last men, keeping calm and carrying on. If you have cum to or been to Max’s excellent seminars on the psychology of love life this problem of no one being able to find satisfaction presents itself as a struggle to the clinic but we are putting that all aside to deal with what this all means for the politics of sexual liberation. It is on this central premise - the end of sexual liberation, that we shall begin:
Žižek ends Chapter 6 of ‘How to Read Lacan’ with the following:
We are bombarded from all sides by different versions of the injunction ‘Enjoy! Enjoyment today effectively functions as a strange ethical duty: individuals feel guilty not for violating moral inhibitions by way of engaging in illicit pleasures, but for not being able to enjoy. In this situation, psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy - not forbidden to enjoy, just relieved of the pressure to do so.”
- Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan
This notion of the imperative to enjoy is the basis for the entire presentation. The true title of the presentation is “The 121st Day of Sodom: What are you doing after the orgy? (The politics of sexual liberation). The revolutions of the 60s were supposed to have freed our enjoyment and yet here we are, after the orgy with nothing to do. We are confronted with 3 versions of Sodom, Sodom itself in revolutionary France, Salò in the last days of fascist Italy and Love Island, Sodom but after the orgy. Throughout the presentation I will distinguish Sade’s Sodom from Pasolini’s Sodom by using Sodom for Sade and Salò for Pasolini. Importantly the first 2 take place in the dying days of a social order whilst Love Island is on the 121st Day. What is at stake in all of this is the very idea of liberating enjoyment, desire, sexuality and as Baudrillard maintains this has happened, just not in the way we hoped. My answer is also no, any true sexual liberation is not happening, the orgy has already ended. As well as this there is something remarkably interesting in the fact that there are two texts independent of each other which tie Sade to Kant, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality and of Course Lacan’s Kant avec Sade I will offer a commentary on these two texts and how they differ and why Lacan’s account is better for understanding Sade. The section on Tiqqun and the Italian years of lead has been cut. I will save it for another time. We shall begin then with the 3 Sodoms.
Part 1: The 3 Sodoms or Love Island after the Orgy
The Marquis De Sade’s masterpiece, the 120 Days of Sodom: Or the School of Libertinage, is the sole defining text of what it means to liberate enjoyment. De Sade, in what appears as a self-commentary on what it means to be a “libertine” exposes that his and the philosophy or other libertines lacks any real meaning because they are constantly confronted with the question: what are you doing after the orgy? The 121st Day never ends, there is no 122nd Day. The subtitle and the way Sade breaks off the narrative to often edge the reader by saying he will not describe an action is how I justify this reading of Sodom. That the subtitle is “the school of libertinage'' implies this is what being a libertine is as if it is the instruction manual for anyone who wants to take up this philosophy as a way of life. Unfortunately, though it is unfinished not unlike how reels of Salò were stolen from Pasolini. There are only 30 days of Sodom, parts 2 through 4 are merely brief summaries of what happens on the remaining 90 days. We do know the actual ending; the libertines simply slaughter all the children as the 120 days end. The same with Salò, the final shot of the film is two of the fascist guards dancing together and then that is it. The fate of the libertines and the fascists are unknown but that is the point, we know they have nothing to do after this, their transgressions remain impotent against the rigour of the law. But as Lyotard says, “the rigour of the law gives more than one person a hard on.”1 It is not however immediately that the libertines come to recognise the worthlessness of their transgressions, in the introduction the Duc says:
Only the law stands in my way, but I defy it - my gold and my influence place me beyond the reach of those crude scales meant only for the common people.
- The Marquis De Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom
The defying of the law of course actualises through the orgy at Sodom that the 4 libertines plan as one last action. As if saying “gentleman the old world is dying, the new world is struggling to be born, now is the time of monsters. How about it gentleman? One last crime, one last crime that will be the perfect crime, you haven’t seen anything yet” Is this not what Lyotard wants when he tells us to accelerate the decadence of values? “Do we want to be merely the saviours of a fallen world, then, the hearts of a heartless world, prophets for an inarticulate humanity?”2 Lyotard asks us, but Lyotard is a story for another time. What are we doing after the Orgy? I’ve said this phrase about 100 times in the past few weeks, but it is the guiding question of the 120 Days. Already by the 8th Day the orgy has fallen apart as Curval declares:
There are no more than two or three crimes to commit in the world, said Curval. Once those are done there is no more to be said - what remains is inferior and one no longer feels a thing. How many times, good God, have I not wished it were possible to attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze - those would be crimes indeed, and not the little excesses in which we indulge, which do no more than metamorphose in the course of a year, a dozen frozen creatures into clods of earth.
- The Marquis De Sade, The 120 days of Sodom
This passage is the central thesis of Sodom, that every transgression is diminished; it will never be the same as the first time. They want to set the world ablaze with crime, but they cannot. Rather than seeing the libertines of De Sade as the self-legislating sovereign individuals we can see that clearly the opposite is the case. They are married to the law. It is the rigour of the law that gives them a hard on. In his essay on breaking bad Mark Fisher remarks that it might have been Lacan that said, “when we talk about going beyond good and evil, we usually mean going beyond good.”3 This remains the case if we try to understand Sade through Nietzsche in any way as the completion of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values. The libertines of Sodom are tied to evil, in his big speech on the 8th day Curval says “Evil acts make me hard - I find in evil a charm piquant enough to awaken every sensation of pleasure in me, and I give myself to evil for evil alone, and without any other interest than evil alone.”4 Without their transgressions they would have nothing. They are not even in control of their own desire (of course we know no one truly is but putting that all to the side), the entire structure of both the novel and film is that an old former prostitute recounts the story of her life, and the libertines then copy these actions for instance all the well-known stuff with shit does not begin until the prostitute starts telling them about the customers who wanted her to shit for them. Throughout the novel the libertines even interrupt the storytellers when they leave out details. The Other is eternally present in the function of Sadean fantasy.
Who is represented at Sodom? Our four libertines are half of the Ancien Régime and half of the revolution. The Duc and The Bishop represent the aristocracy and the church whilst the President (Curval) and Durcet (the banker) represent the bourgeois revolutions of rule of law and capital. Although Curval is a magistrate he is not the law because “the law is not the gallows; we have known this since Antigone.5” Of course, if you recall the quote Acéphale uses to open the sacred conspiracy both worlds - the old and the new - are held up by crime but if we want Sodom as a social commentary then we must move on to Salò.
Salò is of course the film “adaptation” of Sade’s novel whilst it takes most of the themes, plot, and structure of the novel the most crucial difference is that it is set in the last days of the fascist Salò republic. For those unaware this is Italy after the south had been invaded by the Allies and the fascists were pushed into the northern half of Italy. It was run by the Nazis and their army, and it only lasted for 19 months. Throughout the film you can hear bombs falling and gunshots and War on its way to Salò. Instead of taking place over 120 days it seems more like a few weeks as the film goes from scene to scene incredibly quickly, Curval’s speech on the 8th day takes place only 40 minutes into the film as it is only 2hrs long. Unfortunately, I must describe the film to you because the woke brigade prevented me from screening it.
Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom. It is not Kant or Sade it is Kant avec Sade, Kant with Sade. But Salò finds itself in opposition to Sodom. The same question with Kant avec Sade remains with Salò, is it that Kant is a sadist or that Sade is a Kantian - of course it is the latter. With Salò then, is it that Sade invents the fascist symptom or that fascism is Sadean. Around 40 minutes into the film we get our answer as the fascists prepare for the wedding of the first couple; the duke comes to a similar realisation as Curval in the novel. He says:
Observing, as we do, with equal passion and apathy. Guido and Vaccari masturbating the two bodies belonging to us inspires a series of interesting reflections. We Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we’re masters of the state. In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power. Nevertheless, look. The obscene gesticulation is like that of the deaf-mutes’ language, with a code none of us, despite unrestrained caprice, can transgress. There is nothing to be done. Our choice is categorical. We’ve to subject our pleasure to a sole gesture.
- Pier Palo Pasolini, Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom
Unfortunately, before the Duke can finish, he is interrupted by Guido successfully making the boy cum. Alas it is clear the sole gesture he is referring to is the fascist Sodom. Like in the novel the fascists have the system of laws used to govern the conduct of not just the victims but themselves as well. The main law that all the libertines follow whether film or novel is that they cannot deflower the girls, anal is permitted but their vaginas must be left untouched. Although the duke claims they are observing with equal passion and apathy but really, it is apathy over passion. In the scene the four fascists are sitting on the floor cross legged and kneeling barely paying attention to the symbolic ritual happening across from them. Since before the children can be married, they must cum for the first time and once they do Guido proclaims the boy has “become a man.” There is something however that the fascists have recognised they cannot transgress despite their “unrestrained” desires. That thing of course is the law so enter Kafka.
Article 6 and 7 of the universal declaration of human rights read as follows
6: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
7: We are all equal before the law.
Before the law however stands a doorkeeper.6 The man from the country demands entry to ‘the law;’ he thinks that "the law should be always accessible to everyone.”7 Even knowing that this is merely the first door of many he still demands access to the law.8 As he waits and waits, he begins to forget about the other doorkeepers, this is the only door preventing access to the law.9 As the man from the country dies outside the law, the door is closed as only the man from the country could be permitted to enter it.10 K. Our protagonist in the opening chapter demands that he is told what he has done wrong, but it is never articulated to him.11 The law remains alien throughout the novel; the subject is never allowed to truly know or gain access to the law. “You see, Willem, he admits he doesn’t know the law, and at the same time claims he is innocent.”12 The guards say. “The Law,” Derrida writes, “keeps itself [se garde] without keeping itself, kept [gardée] by a doorkeeper who keeps nothing, the door remaining open and open onto nothing.”13 The libertines, both the Fascists and the French desire access to the law so that they can destroy it, to set the world ablaze with crime but they know they cannot. There is nothing to be done. Our choice is categorical. We’ve to subject our pleasure to a sole gesture. But the libertines are not before the law, they are before the whore. As they are told how to desire by the prostitute storyteller only after hearing what she tells them do they act on their desires. Of course, this is how Lacan describes the Sadean fantasy in Kant avec Sade, but we shall get there soon.
The nine billion names of God is a short sci-fi story that Baudrillard uses at least twice that I can remember to explain the end. Whether that is the end of the real or the end of the orgy both can be explained through this story. In the story Tibetan monks believe that the entire universe was created to list the 9 billion names of God and once this task is completed God will end the universe. Due to the alphabet they created they believe it will take them 15,000 years to complete the task so instead they employ the help of two westerners to bring them a computer and to write a program for the task to be completed. Unsurprisingly the computer scientists are sceptical this will happen but held regardless. They set the program to be done just as they leave and so as they walk down from the mountain monastery the stars start to go out one by one. The universe simply fades out without a bang. Similarly, the libertines slaughter the children over the last few days of Sodom and then the chips are down, their symbolic identities of libertines strip away, and they find themselves faced collectively with the big question: WHAT DO WE DO NOW THE ORGY IS OVER?14
With this question of what we do now the orgy is over we shall analyse Love Island and how Baudrillard fits in with Sade. For Baudrillard modernity was the orgy it was the era where everything was liberated but now this is all over, it has been liberated and the orgy has ended.15 Whether its political, sexual, unconscious, and so on the liberation has happened and now we are resigned to the simulation of liberation.16 Nowadays one no longer says: “You’ve got a soul and you must save it,” but: “You’ve got a sexual nature, and you must find out how to use it well.” “You’ve got an unconscious, and you must learn how to liberate it.”17 Baudrillard writes in Forget Foucault. By liberation Baudrillard does not seem to mean emancipated and completely unconstrained from all limits but these concepts have left behind any individual meaning and now only signify themselves. Which is the classic definition of hyperreality, where signs no longer signify anything than themselves - there is no outside signification. Political liberation does not mean we the subjects are politically free, but that politics has left the political and now invades every part of life. Baudrillard writes:
Each category is generalised to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political anymore, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual anymore, and sex loses its determinants.
Jean Baudrillard, After the Orgy
It might be tempting to see a conservative element in Baudrillard that its based sex has lost its determining essence and it was always a construct from the start etc. This however would be completely mistaken. If we want to avoid the classic Baudrillard fatalism of everything being meaningless simulation, then clearly, we must approach Baudrillard’s text as really saying that a radical politics that places its praxis in the liberation of one’s desires is pointless because it has already happened. Just of course not in the way we really wanted hence the moral imperative to enjoy that we started with. That is how they were liberated - so that they could be further included in the circulation of capital or the libidinal economy. Pornhub could not exist 50yrs ago either technologically or socially. This does not mean we need to become conservative and say it was better back then because sexuality and desire were more repressed, so they were not captured as effectively. “Back in my day you could see tits in action movies but now you pronounce and rainbow bread.” Once you open Pandora's box you cannot close it. Conservative thought is fantasy. Housewives were hooked on Valium due to the misery of their lives although plenty of men took it as well. Equally however it is important not to be utopian about it and say everything is fine because sexuality and desire has been liberated and now freed from its previous content. The problem for Baudrillard is that the political movements were still trying to reproduce the conditions of the orgy. The essays in the transparency of evil were first published in 1990 but they might be older I am not sure. Regardless ideas like sexual liberation did not just disappear after the movements in the 60s they have continued limping on and are still around today but only really in some marginal movements. Schizoanalysis being one of them and Queer theory more broadly with ideas like Queer emancipation and so on. Which brings us nicely on to the other Baudrillard essay I want to discuss “Transsexuality.” Baudrillard spells Transsexuality with two Ss so it is quite literally Trans Sexuality because he is not writing about Trans people as we know it or just using the old term etc. Transsexuality for Baudrillard is transcending i.e., going beyond sexuality. Hence, he says “we are all transsexuals symbolically.”18 It's about the signs of sex and for Baudrillard these signs have found themselves separated from any real reference other than itself, so sexuality loses any meaning. “The myth of sexual liberation is still alive then” he says, “but at the level of the imaginary it is the transsexual myth with its androgyny that holds sway.”19 I can only presume by imaginary Baudrillard means in the sense of images it was this sentence referencing the imaginary that first made me think about his relationship to psychoanalysis. He hates it more than Deleuze and Guattari. Sexual liberation by taking on the imagery of androgyny then leads to the disappearance of sexuality as its substance is replaced with pure reproduction of the concept of sexuality. Obviously, none of this has led to the disappearance of resistance to sexual liberation or the end of conservatism. Baudrillard has this remark in Transsexuality that ”after the orgy, then a masked ball.”20 Conservatism then operates more effectively post orgy because it can include more subject within conservative ideology, in the Uk it was the conservative party that legalised gay marriage. This is how Baudrillard views power - that it invites us to participate to enjoy rather than explicit exclusion. To counter this point clearly that is not always the case, in the US and the UK Trans people are constantly under attack both socially and legally so clearly it does not invite everyone to participate. I said I was going to talk about Love Island so keeping all this Baudrillard in mind we shall move on to Love Island.
I have only seen 40 minutes total of Love Island and it was this year's season where they changed it up slightly, but Zizek wrote his matrix essay without watching it so potato potato. This part might be up for the most scrutiny as well then. The basic premise of Love Island is that several women and men are held in a villa separated from society for a certain amount of time and they must couple up with each other or they will be eliminated. Like all reality shows, winning does not matter but instead the real prize of Love Island is getting teeth whitening sponsorships on Instagram once you leave the villa. We can already see the pastiche of the economics of kinship. I maintain that Love Island is Sodom but after the orgy, meaning Love Island takes on the same function as Sodom but now the orgy is over it loses any of the meaning of either Sade’s or Pasolini’s work. You will not have Gemma turn to the camera and proclaim, “we fascists are the only true anarchists.” Or Luca telling her that he “wants to set the world ablaze with crime.” Sodom is a space where the orgy takes place as a transgressive act against the law. Instead, we get this incessant demand for each contestant to articulate their desires with the phrase “so what’s your type?” Answers are usually something empty like “brunette” or standard “like big ass.” As if that is all there is to sexuality - this is what happens when sexuality is separated from psychoanalysis. In the first episode for instance there is some drama because one girl asks the guy the public decided she would couple up with “what’s your type.?” He responds with something along the lines “I like a girl with a big ass” but she responds, “I do not have a big ass” he attempts to explain himself by stating “not like Kim K big but decently sized big your ass is fine.” That is a paraphrase, but it is the gist of the conversation. It is as if they do not know Love is giving something you do not have to someone who does not want it. When I was writing this it reminded me of one time when I was in French class. I was maybe 15 and we were learning about something to do with French words for relationships like describing your ideal partner. I sucked at French, so I went with blonde and beautiful because it was easy to say and so the other teacher in the room asked me if it was true and I responded idk. Just like the contestants of Love Island I was asked to articulate my desires as if at that moment I knew what I wanted that I was supposed to know my type. It seems then that no longer is it know thy self but know thy symptom. This is the logic of Love Island and more broadly how sexuality operates once it has been “liberated” from the clinic. The subject must already know who they are and what they want. Everyone on Love Island is a Transsexual because they are empty subjects that could be anyone mere bodies without references. As these empty bodies they cannot be openly neurotic but know what it is they want. They are the purely rational subject and therefore easily reproducible. Sodom after the orgy then is as if Sodom simply ended on the 8th day after Curval proclaimed the worthlessness of their actions. There is not even an orgy, if they do fuck it is as a single couple.
In 2+2 =5, the British artist Jake Chapman’s rewriting of 1984, in which the world of 1984 is no longer the grey repressive soviet style society but instead the world where enjoyment is mandated. The motto of the party is no longer war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength but instead BE COMFORTABLE IN YOUR OWN SKIN, BELIEVE IN THE MOMENT, BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTH IT.21 Enjoyment cannot be escaped “I would prefer not to” is heretical. In chapter 2 when Winston is helping his neighbour Zena, she asks him if he would like to Fuck, he says No but her kids demand that they fuck, and the kids will go hang out at a museum or art gallery.22 As Lyotard says ”to suggest to someone: let’s fuck, would truly be to treat oneself as representing the sexual liberation movement. Same domination as from the doctor, this time from the militant.”23On that note I will conclude Part 1 and move on to Part 2.
Part 2: Lacan avec (or against) Adorno & Horkheimer
Kant writes in the critique of practical reason that:
The greatest achievement of philosophy would be the elucidation of the means employed by Providence to achieve the ends which she has in view for Man, and following this, the mapping out of conduct which might assist this unfortunate biped creature to find his way along life’s thorny path, so that he may anticipate the strange whims of a destiny that is known by dozens of different names, and yet which he has still not managed to comprehend or define.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
The Marquis De Sade has his answer to this which is to become an empty egoist through the school of libertinage. De Sade has an answer to this because that quote is actually the opening of Justine by De Sade and not Kant’s 2nd critique. That is the only trick for this talk. Regardless the link between Kant and De Sade was of course not first formulated by Lacan in his excellent essay “Kant avec Sade” but instead maybe (I do not know if they were first) by Adorno and Horkheimer in chapter 3 of Dialectic of Enlightenment entitled Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality. The slightly awkward thing is that we are all looking at different texts by De Sade as the centrepiece of our analysis, Adorno and Horkheimer are looking at Juliette, Lacan is using Philosophy in the bedroom, and I am using the 120 days of Sodom. What I want to show however is that Lacan’s Kant avec Sade is better than Adorno and Horkheimer’s Enlightenment and Morality for understanding De Sade and his relationship to Kant. Although none of us are really talking about De Sade, Adorno and Horkheimer are talking about Enlightenment and Morality, I am talking about transgression and the politics of liberating desire, and I read Kant avec Sade as doing the same thing.
If you remember from the Schizoanalysis talk Kant defines enlightenment as “man's emergence from self-induced immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another person.”24 This is how Adorno and Horkheimer open their chapter on Sade so you can probably see where it is going from here. And you would be right to predict it as They write “The work of the Marquis De Sade portraits understanding without the guidance of another person: that is, the bourgeois individual freed from tutelage.”25 De Sade and his work therefore represent the freedom of no longer caring for others or the Other. De Sade remains the free individual, the Kantian self legislator, the very representative of bourgeois philosophy. Ironic as he was an aristocrat but not a Marquis. The figure of Juliette the evil sister of Justine who no longer cares for such pathetic ideas as “virtue” “God” “the greater good” does whatever she pleases so long as it satisfies her. If she can even be satisfied in the first place. Justine is too good natured, so she still believes in God and virtue and for that she is constantly sexually abused. “I have become whore through kindness and libertine through virtue.” Justine declares. The point of Justine is to show that abiding by morals and virtue will only hold you back and make you a victim of the worst possible abuses. Juliette as the free sovereign individual faces no such issues in her life so therefore, we ought to be like Juliette. As I said Adorno and Horkheimer are not doing a commentary on De Sade, the point of this text is to critique bourgeois morality, especially the morality of individualism. Most of the chapter is not even about De Sade. Adorno and Horkheimer summarise the thesis of the chapter by writing “The moral teachings of the Enlightenment bear witness to a hopeless attempt to replace enfeebled religion with some reason for persisting in society when interest is absent.”26 This goes back to their broader claims about the rise of positivism and the demythologisation of the world, any real social bond is dissolved hence the lack of interest. Bourgeois morality however attempts to keep this alive for society to function. Sade however is the undercurrent of this contradiction as he unveils the truth of the matter, the self-interest of the Sadist against any notion of the Other holding him back.27
Lacan however in Kant avec Sade says the opposite. It is not that Kant in his cold rationality, renouncing any subjecting feelings as pathological realises Sadean ethics. Rather it is Sade in his declaration of the right to enjoyment who realises Kantian ethics despite his transgressions against the law. Hopefully, we have learnt by now that his transgressions do nothing to overcome the law. As I have not read much of Lacan which has also probably become clear. My reading of Kant avec Sade is what made this presentation, towards the end of the essay Lacan writes the following:
The proposition that happiness has become a political factor is incorrect. It has always been a political factor and will bring back the sceptre and the censor that make do with it very well. Rather, it is the freedom to desire that is a new factor, not because it has inspired a revolution—people have always fought and died for a desire—but because this revolution wants its struggle to be for the freedom of desire. Consequently, the revolution also wants the law to be free, so free that it must be a widow, the Widow par excellence, the one that sends your head to the basket if it so much as baulks regarding the matter at hand. Had Saint Just's head remained full of the fantasies in Organt, Thermidor might have been a triumph for him. Were the right to jouissance recognized, it would consign the domination of the pleasure principle to an obsolete era. In enunciating this right, Sade imperceptibly displaces for each of us the ancient axis of ethics, which is but the egoism of happiness.
- Jacques Lacan, Kant avec Sade
Retroactively I find that the entire function of the text can be understood through this passage. Those who struggle for the freedom of desire end up reproducing the Sadean fantasy which is what makes Lacan’s account of Sade better than Adorno and Horkheimer’s. This is the last point I want to make and how it all comes back to the earlier discussion of the transgression in Sadean philosophy. Lacan says the opposite of Adorno and Horkheimer, the Sadist has not destroyed the Other and can now live freely instead they are completely subordinated to the Other as an “eternal object.”28 For instance, the victims of the sadist never die until they are purposefully disposed of, and their deaths are postponed so that the libertines can keep their victims.29 But it is in this that the libertines end up as objects because without their Other, the victims, they would be nothing. “What does crime matter to me, as long as I am satisfied?”30 Durcet proclaims, but without the victim there can be no crime. Thus, they are not their own self legislator they NEED their victim they are completely subordinated to the voice of the Other. So, I think Adorno and Horkheimer are entirely wrong when they say Sade’s work portrays “the bourgeois individual freed from tutelage.” Because whether it is the libertines in Sodom, the libertines in the bedroom, Justine’s abusers or Juliette herself they are all nothing without the other. The libertine requires the law to exist as something they can transgress or else their actions would be even more worthless than they already are. My close personal friend Dr Isabel Millar in her essay “Kant avec Sade a Ghost in the Shell” explains it very well, she writes:
In the Sadean universe the right to jouissance is dependent upon the non-negotiable inequality between victim and aggressor in any sexual configuration and thereby all forms of social interaction.
Isabel Millar, Kant Avec Sade a Ghost in the Shell
Similarly on the 15th Day Durcet (the banker) proclaims that nature herself has created this inequality within us allowing for the Sadistic passions to take place where the strong abuse the weak simply because they can. Which all goes back to the necessity of the Other’s voice in articulating the Sadean fantasy. Curval is more honest than most when he says he knows his transgressions are worthless and that the effects they have on him deplete with every action. In Sodom and Salò they are completely subordinated to the voice of the storyteller and just as all speech requires a response The libertines only ever produce a simulacrum of the storyteller’s actions. She will tell them about a customer who came to the brother and wanted her to shit in his mouth and so then the libertines will require the children to shit in their mouths etc.
What this all means for the politics of sexual liberation or liberation of desire etc is that it does not become this pure satisfaction where we can finally desire freely. Instead as Lacan writes in Kant avec Sade “the discourse of the right to Jouissance clearly posits the Other qua free - the Other’s freedom - as its enunciating subject.”31 The right to Jouissance then posits that the subject will finally be free from the Other’s enunciation of the law that if the right to Jouissance was recognised then Adorno and Horkheimer’s picture of Sade would be correct. Everyone would simply be free to desire as they please, hang on tight and spit on me etc. But hopefully you have come to realise from this presentation that it is not the case it is false. If even Sade’s characters know what they are doing is not the destruction of the law and what they get up to is far worse than anyone else, then no one else has any chance of destroying the law via transgression. Sexual liberation and the freedom of and to desire is not the final stage of emancipating the subject. For as we know:
There are no more than two or three crimes to commit in the world, once those are done there is no more to be said - what remains is inferior and one no longer feels a thing. How many times, good God, have I not wished it were possible to attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze - those would be crimes indeed, and not the little excesses in which we indulge, which do no more than metamorphose in the course of a year, a dozen frozen creatures into the clods of earth.
- The Marquis De Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom
Conclusion
If there is anything that truly represents the weird contradiction of De Sade it is that when speaking to the reader in the introduction, he tells us that women are better for serving in the kitchen then men.41 But perhaps Sade has won, not because of our newfound sexual freedom instead that the libertines in Sodom recognise they pale in comparison to the forces of Nature and that Man will always be lesser. If only the Libertines could see us now, climate change is the ultimate Sadean praxis, the domination and destruction of Nature. Sade would have loved the threat humans now pose to non-human nature. The libertines at Sodom can now rest easy knowing their transgressions are complete. Thank you.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor & Horkheimer, Max Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 2016)
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life (USA: Stanford University Press, 1998)
Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault (California: Semiotexte, 2007)
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Endnotes
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), p.23
ibid., p.115
Mark Fisher, ‘Beyond Good and Evil: Breaking Bad.’ in (ed.) Darren Ambrose, K-Punk: the collected and unpublished writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) (London: Repeater Books), p.233
The Marquis De Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom (Stirlingshire: Penguin Books, 2016), p.153
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (USA: Norton & Company: 2006), p.656
Franz Kafka, The Essential Kafka (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2014), p.161
ibid
ibid
ibid
ibid., p.162
ibid., p.4
ibid., p.7
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life (USA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.49
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London UK: Verso, 2009) p.3
ibid
ibid
Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (California: Semiotexte, 2007), p.39
Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p.23
ibid., pp.24-25
ibid., p.25
Jake Chapman, 2+2=5 (UK: Urbanomic, 2021), p.5
ibid., p.37
Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p.45
Immanuel Kant, an answer to the question: What is Enlightenment? (London: Penguin Books, 2009), p.1
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 2016), p.86
ibid., p.85
Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p.85
Lacan, Ecrits, p.656
ibid., p.654
De Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, p.203
Lacan, Ecrits, 650