Kant with Sade, Lacan with Levinas

Abstract

In his 1963 essay Jacques Lacan pairs two unlikely figures of Enlightenment ethics, conjoining without comparing them through the preposition with. In Lacan's 1959-60 Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where he first addresses the strange affinities of Kant and Sade, Lacan anticipates his later essay when he translates the Greek particle meta as with or after, and goes on to suggest that Meta is, properly speaking, that which implies a break [la coupure] (SVIIE: 265; F: 308).1 Whereas the with of brings together two apparently disparate thinkers, revealing the uncanny proximity of their ethical systems, Lacan shows that the very act of making this conjunction is founded on the break, limit, or blind spot that each brings out in the other's system. Moreover, the conjunction of Kant Sade not only indicates the break that joins the two figures, but also itself marks a break in the history of ethics, a rupture that will have opened the way for the emergence of psychoanalysis-not as the elaboration of the Sadian catalog of perversions, but as one of modernity's epochal responses to the escalating intensity of both moral law and pathological objects in the aftermath of traditional ethics based on either revelation or the common good. Lacan's avec institutes a comparative literature otherwise than comparison, insofar as the essay pursues a mode of reading logically and ethically prior to similitude, a reading in which texts are not so much grouped into families defined by similarity and difference, as into neighborhoods determined by accidental contiguity, genealogical isolation, and ethical encounter. avec