ABSTRACT
This chapter unfolds and reconstructs Lacan’s key arguments in Kant with Sade. Apart from explaining Lacan’s assertion that, in his libertine novels, Sade conveys the obscene truth of Kant’s categorical imperative, this detailed commentary on Lacan’s essay clarifies the thesis that the Sadean fantasy, that is, the fantasy Sade developed as a literary text within the space of his creative imagination, cannot be mapped directly onto the author’s life. Although it is the ‘sadistic’ fantasy of Sade’s libertine heroes that tends to dominate within the Sadean fantasy, this does not, for Lacan, demonstrate that sadism is the type of ‘practical reason’ that would have presided over his daily routines, outside the fictional space of the literary narrative. Whilst Sade’s endless reiteration of the libertines’ brutal fantasy of absolute destruction inevitably plays a part in his own worldview, Lacan intimates that this worldview is to be understood primarily in terms of the author’s relationship to his own act of writing, and to the specific function he wanted to accord to his libertine novels. As such, this systematic exploration of Lacan’s essay also elucidates the function of writing for Sade, and more specifically its significance for the articulation of desire, jouissance, fantasy and the law.
