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(All parts in English)

I announced to you that today, as part of what we need to develop, I will talk about SADE.
It is not without a certain reluctance—due to the interruption that will be extended—that I approach this subject today.
At the very least, during this lecture, I want to clarify something that might be called a latent misunderstanding that could arise, namely the idea that addressing SADE would, in some way, be connected to an entirely external way of considering ourselves as pioneers, as boundary-pushers.

It would be as if, by function, by profession, we are compelled to follow a direction vaguely suggested in these terms: that we are destined to probe extremes, if I may put it this way, and that SADE, in this sense alone, would be our relative or precursor; that he opens, who knows, some dead end, aberration, or aporia where he might even—why not?—be recommended in relation to the ethical field we have chosen to explore this year.

I believe it is extremely important to dispel this misunderstanding, which is linked to a series of other issues that, in a sense, I navigate against as I attempt to make progress before you this year. This is not merely something interesting to us in the external sense I just mentioned. I would even say that, to a certain extent, a certain dimension of boredom you, the audience—so patient, so faithful—might experience regarding the field we are exploring this year is not to be dismissed as lacking its own meaning.

By this, I mean—and of course, since I am speaking to you, it is part of the genre to attempt to engage you—that the kind of communication that connects us is not necessarily aimed at avoiding something that the typical art of teaching seeks to avoid. For instance, to compare two audiences: if I succeeded in engaging the Brussels audience, well and good, it is not at all in the same way that you are engaged here with what I teach.

There is even something here, I must say, that touches on the nature and the position of the subject we have chosen this year.
If I were to adopt for a moment the perspective of what exists, which is so humanly sensitive, so valid—not from the perspective of the young analyst, but of the analyst beginning their practice—I would say that, compared to what we are trying to articulate, I could encounter the dimension of what I might call “the analytic pastoral.”

I give this term, and what I target, its noble, eternal title. A less pleasing title is one coined by one of the most repugnant authors of our time: what has been called The Intellectual Comfort.
There is a dimension of the “how to proceed?” from which impatience or even disappointment might arise when addressing matters at a certain level—not the level where, it seems, many things should be resolved through our technique, whose value and promise are undeniable. Not everything, of course! And the point at which it puts us on the lookout for something that may present itself as an impasse, even as a rupture, is not necessarily something we should avert our gaze from, even if it is precisely what should dominate all our actions.

At the start of the life of a young person beginning their role as an analyst, what I might call their backbone lends structure to their actions, rather than becoming a kind of movement toward countless forms, always ready to collapse in on itself, to become entangled in some circle—the image evoked by certain explorations in recent times. Put plainly, it is not bad for something to be exposed regarding what might derive from a hope for assurance, undoubtedly useful in professional practice, spilling over into some sentimental assurance by which, presumably, the same subjects at this crossroads in their existence find themselves trapped in some kind of infatuation, the source of intimate disappointment and hidden grievance.

This, no doubt, is what must be struggled against to make progress, in the perspective of the ethical aims of psychoanalysis, as I attempt to present this dimension to you here—not necessarily a final dimension, but one immediately encountered. At the stage we are at, I could designate and articulate it with two or three terms, those to which our journey so far has led us. I will call it the paradox of jouissance, insofar as it introduces its problematic for us, analysts, into this dialectic of happiness into which we have—who knows?—perhaps ventured imprudently.

This paradox of jouissance, we have grasped it in more than one detail, which I need only sketch before you to remind you as being, in a way, what most readily and commonly emerges in our experience.

But to lead you there, to use it, to weave it into our framework, I have this time taken the path I initially pointed out to you: the enigma of its relationship to the Law, which—indeed—derives all its value, all its prominence, from the strangeness in which, for us, the existence of this Law is situated, as I have long taught you to consider it as founded on the Other. And we must follow FREUD not as an exception, as a particular stance of an individual, nor as a profession of atheist faith, but as someone who, as I have shown you, was the first to give value and legitimacy to a myth insofar as it directly addresses the original death, bringing into our thought a response to something that had been articulated without reason, in the most expansive and articulated way, in the consciousness of our era as the realization—by the most lucid minds, and even more so by the masses—of a fact that is formulated and articulated as “the death of God.”

Here, then, is this problematic, the point of departure, which is precisely the one where the sign develops, as I proposed to you in the graph in the form of S(A). Do you know where it is placed? Here, in the upper part of the graph.

It appears as the ultimate response to the guarantee sought in the Other for the meaning of this Law, which it articulates for us at the deepest level of the unconscious. If there is no longer any lack, the Other fails, and the signifier becomes that of the death of the Other. It is based on this position, itself suspended in the paradox of the Law, that what I have called the paradox of jouissance is presented to us. This is what we are attempting to articulate from the point we have reached.

Let us observe that only Christianity gives its full content, represented by the drama of the Passion, to the natural truth that we have called “the death of God.” Yes, with a naturalness beside which the bloody spectacles of gladiatorial combat pale in comparison, Christianity offers us a drama that literally, as it expresses it, “incarnates” this death of God. And it is also Christianity that connects this to something that happened concerning the Law: specifically, something in the message that, without destroying the Law, we are told, substitutes itself for it as now the sole commandment, summarizing it, encompassing it even as it abolishes it.

And one can truly say that here we find the first historical example in which the German term Aufhebung takes its full weight, as it is both the preservation of what it destroys and a shift to a different plane. And this Law is precisely: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is explicitly articulated as such in the Gospel. It is with “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” that we must continue on our path.

The two terms—the death of God and love of neighbor—are historically intertwined, and unless one assigns the entire historical unfolding of the Judeo-Christian tradition to the realm of constitutional accident, it is impossible to disregard this message. I am well aware that the message of believers is to show us the resurrection beyond, but this is a promise, and it is precisely the passage through which we must carve our path.

Thus, it is fitting for us to pause at this bottleneck, this narrow passage where FREUD himself stops and recoils with justified horror before “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” in the literal sense in which, as he articulates it, this commandment appears to him as inhuman. In this resides everything he has to object to, everything he has to present as an objection against it.

It is in the name of εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia), the most legitimate on every level—all the examples Freud provides bear witness to this—that he, understanding the stakes of this commandment, pauses and observes, ultimately, how legitimate it is, how little the historical spectacle of humanity, which has taken it as its ideal, proves itself convincing in terms of its fulfillment.

I have explained to you the connection between this horror, this pause by an honest man so profoundly deserving—the quality that Freud embodies. He brings it forth with all its prominence in his identification of this central malice, where he does not hesitate to reveal the deepest core of humanity. I hardly need to emphasize here the point where I intertwine and tie together my two threads: it is this—the refusal, the rebellion of humanity as it aspires to happiness, that is to say, of Jedermann, of every person.

The truth remains true: humanity seeks happiness. The resistance to the commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” and the resistance that manifests itself in obstructing access to jouissance are one and the same thing.
This might appear, stated thus, as yet another paradox, a gratuitous assertion. Yet do you not recognize in it what we most commonly refer to every time we witness the subject recoiling from their jouissance?

What do we invoke? The unconscious aggression it contains, the fearsome core, the destrudo, which—regardless of the trivialities and quibbles of prudish analysts—nonetheless remains that which we constantly confront in our experience. And whether this is acknowledged or not, under whatever preconceived notion of nature, it remains the very fiber, the very fabric, of everything Freud taught.

Specifically, this: that insofar as the subject turns this aggression against themselves, it produces what we call the energy of the superego. Freud takes care to add an extra nuance: once this path is entered, this process initiated, there seems to be literally no limit; it generates, as it were, an ever-increasing aggression against the ego.

It generates this, so to speak, at the limit—that is, quite precisely insofar as the mediation represented by the Law itself comes to be lacking. The Law, insofar as it derives from elsewhere, and from that elsewhere where, for us, its guarantor, its guarantee—namely, God Himself—comes to be absent. It is therefore not an original proposition when I tell you that recoiling before “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is the same as the barrier before jouissance.

These are not two opposites, two antagonisms. This is the point that must be emphasized and where the paradoxical nature is found. Yet it must be centered. These are not two opposites. I recoil from loving my neighbor as myself precisely insofar as, on that horizon, there is something that partakes in I-don’t-know-what intolerable cruelty. In the same vein, loving my neighbor might be the most cruel path.

This is the sharp edge of the paradox as I present it to you here. Without doubt, to grasp its full significance, we must proceed, as I have said, step by step, seizing the approaches and the manner in which this line of intimate division presents itself to us, so that we might truly, if not fully understand, at least sense the accidents its path offers.

Of course, we have long since recognized in our experience the jouissance of transgression. And we are far from being able to simply articulate its nature. In this respect, our position is ambiguous.

Everyone knows that we have restored a kind of legitimacy to perversion: we have called it “partial drive,” implying by this the idea that in its totalization it harmonizes, thereby casting, at the same time, I don’t know what suspicion over the revolutionary exploration—for it was revolutionary at one moment in the last century—of Psychopathia Sexualis, the monumental work of Krafft-Ebing.

And likewise of Havelock Ellis’s work, which I would not fail, in passing, to subject to the kind of critique I believe it deserves—namely, to begin with, examples of a glaring, systematic incapacity. By this I do not mean the insufficiency of a method, but the choice of a method itself as insufficient.

The so-called scientific objectivity displayed in these books, which are nothing more than a barely criticized collection of documents, provides a vivid example of the conjunction of a certain foolishness with a knavery, a fundamental deceitfulness that I characterized in our previous discussion as a feature of a certain mode of thought, termed on this occasion “leftist,” without prejudging its blunders or encroachments in other areas.

In short, if this reading has any merit, it is solely in showing you not only the difference in outcomes and results but also the difference in tone between a certain kind of futile investigation and what, properly speaking, Freud’s thought and the experience he directs, reintroduces into this domain, which is simply called responsibility.

We are thus familiar with this jouissance of transgression. But is it enough to know that it exists? Should we not rather understand in what it consists?

Does it therefore follow naturally that trampling on sacred laws—laws that may well be profoundly challenged by the subject’s conscience—triggers, by itself, I know not what kind of jouissance? No doubt, we constantly observe in subjects this very curious dynamic, which can be articulated as a testing of some faceless fate, a risk taken, where the subject, having emerged unscathed, finds themselves thereafter seemingly affirmed in their power.

Does not the defied law here serve as a means, a marked path to access this risk? But if this path is necessary, then what is this risk? Toward what goal does jouissance progress that it must rely on transgression to reach it?

I leave these questions open for now and continue.

If, along this path, the subject turns back, what then craves the process of this reversal? Let us try, along this line, to revisit the problem. From this, we find in analysis a more grounded response: identification with the Other, they tell us, at the extreme of certain temptations. This is not even to say extraordinary temptations, but rather the extreme of these temptations—that is, perceiving their consequences. What do we recoil from? Something I have taught you to identify under the term, as I use it, altruism: we recoil from attacking the image of the Other because it is the image upon which we have formed ourselves as “I.”

Here lies the compelling power of altruism. Here too lies the homogenizing force of a certain law of equality, the one formulated in the notion of the general will. A common denominator, undoubtedly, of respect for certain rights called—who knows why—elementary, but which can also take the form of excluding from its limits, and likewise from its protection, anything that cannot integrate into its registers.

This is also an expansive force, as I articulated last time in relation to the utilitarian tendency. That is to say, at this level of homogeneity, the law of utility, as it involves distribution to the greatest number, imposes itself with a form that indeed innovates. A captivating power, something whose derision is sufficiently evident to our analytic perspective when we call it philanthropy, but which also raises the question of the natural foundations of what we call pity, in the sense where the morality of sentiment has always sought its basis.

All this rests on the image of the Other as our fellow being. It is in this similarity that we have, for our “I” and everything situating us in a certain register, been given form, and to which we are bound. And what question do I raise here, when it seems self-evident that this is the very foundation of the law “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”? There is no question.

It is indeed the same Other that is at issue. And yet, it suffices to pause for a moment to see the glaring, manifest contradictions—practical, individual, intimate, and social—that arise from the idealization expressed in the directions I have formulated concerning respect for this image of the Other, as it has a certain type, a certain line, a certain lineage, and sequence of effects.

And that infinitely problematic element, which the religious law expresses and historically manifests, I would say is shown: on the one hand, in the paradoxes of its extremes, such as holiness, and equally in the paradoxes of its social failure, in that it achieves none of what might constitute fulfillment, reconciliation, or literally bringing about its promised advent on earth. And to make this more explicit, I will directly address what seems most contrary to this denunciation of the image: namely, that ever-received statement with a murmur of more or less amused satisfaction: “God made man in His image.”

This is what religious tradition articulates, showing once again a cunning grasp of truth far greater than the orientation of psychological philosophy supposes. If they think they can dismiss this by responding that man, without doubt, returned the favor to God—redirecting their steps to another path—and confronting the fact that this statement belongs to the same source, the same body as that sacred book that also articulates the prohibition against creating graven images of God, they might attempt to take another step and consider: if this prohibition has meaning, what is it? That images are deceptive. And why?

Let us take the simplest answer: it is because, by definition, if they are beautiful images—and God knows that religious images always adhere to the canons of beauty of their time—they are always hollow. But then, man too, as an image: it is for the void left empty by the image that he is of interest.

It is because of what cannot be seen, because of what is unseen in the image, it is through this beyond the capture of the image, the void of God to be discovered—it is perhaps the fullness of man, but it is also where God leaves him in emptiness. Indeed, God’s power is to advance into this void. All this, for us, forms the apparatus of a domain where the recognition of the Other reveals itself in its dimension of adventure, where the meaning of the word “recognition” bends toward the sense it assumes in any exploration, carrying whatever tone of militancy or nostalgia we may ascribe to it.

SADE stands at this boundary and teaches us in two ways, which I would like to spell out for you:

– Insofar as he imagines crossing it, cultivating the sadistic fantasy with a kind of morose delectation—I will return to these terms—through which this fantasy unfolds. In imagining it, he demonstrates the imaginary structure of the boundary.

– Insofar as he crosses it, for he does cross it—though, of course, he does not cross it in reality but in fantasy, which is precisely what makes it so tedious.

But in theory, he crosses it through the doctrine articulated in words, which, depending on the period of his work, is called “the jouissance of destruction,” “the intrinsic virtue of crime,” “evil sought for its own sake,” and, ultimately, in singular references to those entities proclaimed by one of his characters—SAINT FOND—in Juliette’s Story. To help you locate it: he proclaims a renewed but not entirely new belief in a God as “the Supreme Being of wickedness.”

In the theory titled—within the same work—“The System of Pope Pius VI,” which he introduces as one of the characters in his novel, he pushes things further, presenting a vision of Nature as a vast system of attraction and repulsion based on “evil for evil’s sake.”

The ethical process for man, according to this approach, consists of achieving the extreme assimilation to an absolute evil, through which the inquiry into his fundamentally malicious nature is realized in a kind of inverted harmony. What I am doing here is merely sketching, summarizing, and pointing out something that, as you can see, does not present itself as the steps of a thought searching for a paradoxical formulation, but rather as its fragmentation, its rupture along the path of a progression that in itself develops into a deadlock.

Nevertheless, can we say that SADE truly teaches us something? Indeed, in the order of symbolic play, he offers a starting point, a path, an attempt to cross what I have called “the boundary” and to uncover—I will present evidence of this—the laws governing what we might call the space of the neighbor as such, a space that develops insofar as we are confronted with:

– Not that likeness of ourselves, so easily taken as our reflection and necessarily involved in the same misrecognitions that characterize our ego,

– But, properly speaking, the neighbor, who, even as the closest to us, we sometimes must embrace—if only for the act of love. Here, I speak not of idealized love, but of the act of making love.

We know very well how much the images of the ego can hinder our propulsion into this space.

Can we not, even from someone who leads us into such a discourse—one more atrocious than imaginable—still learn something about the laws of a space where we are precisely misled, deceived, and betrayed by the laws of imaginary captivation through the image of the similar? You see where I am leading you: to the precise point where I suspend our approach. Here, I do not prejudge what the Other is but emphasize the deceptions of the similar, insofar as it is from this similar, as similar, that arise the misrecognitions defining me as “I.”

I will pause briefly with a small anecdote, a little image bearing my personal signature. At one time, I spoke to you about the mustard pot. What I want to illustrate with this drawing of three pots—be they mustard or jam—is this: you have before you a whole row of them, neatly lined up on shelves, as numerous as your contemplative appetites require. What I want to highlight with this example is that it is precisely because the pots are identical that they are irreducible. I mean that, at this level, we literally stumble upon a kind of preliminary to individuation: the point where this problem typically halts, namely, that there is this one, which is not that one.

If you can attune your ears to subtlety, I would like to help you perceive the opposite of this boundary: it is because they are the same that they might encapsulate precisely the same void. That is, one placed in the position of the other is undoubtedly the other displaced by the one, but the void remains the same. You will not think, of course, that I overlook the sophistication of this little conjuring trick. Nevertheless, as with any sophism, try to grasp the truth it contains. In other words, try to understand that in the term “same,” the etymology—which is none other than metipse (myself)—makes of this “same” in “myself” a kind of redundancy.

But “same” [deriving] from metipsimus (metipsimus, the superlative of metipse: “the most myself of myself”) achieves a phonetic transformation to signify “the most myself of myself,” that which is at the core of myself, that which is beyond myself, insofar as it halts at the level of those surfaces on which one might place a label. This interior, this void—of which I no longer know whether it belongs to me or to no one—this metipsimus, is what, at least in French, serves to designate the notion of the “same.”

This justifies my use of the sophism and reminds me that this “neighbor” undoubtedly possesses all the malice Freud speaks of, but that it is none other than the same malice I recoil from within myself. To love the neighbor truly is to love them as oneself, but in doing so, it necessarily means advancing into some form of cruelty. “Theirs or mine?” you might object.

But everything I have just explained is precisely to show you that nothing here indicates these cruelties are distinct. It seems rather that they are one and the same, provided the boundaries that position me opposite the other as my semblable are crossed. Here I must clarify: this panicked frenzy, this sacred orgy, the flagellants of the cults of Attis, the Bacchantes of Euripides’ tragedies—all this Dionysianism, relegated to a lost history and referenced since the 19th century to trace back beyond Hegel, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, the remnants still open to us of this dimension of the great Pan—in an apologetic, even condemned, dimension in Kierkegaard, utopian and apocalyptic yet no less condemned in Nietzsche—this is not what I mean when I speak of this sameness between the Other and myself.

It is not about this for the very reason that led me to conclude my penultimate seminar with the correlative evocation of the tearing of the temple veil: that the great Pan is dead. I will say no more about this today, although, of course, it is not merely my turn to prophesy, but to invite you to a future moment when I must attempt to explain why the great Pan is dead, in what sense, at what moment, and likely at the precise point legend designates.

What concerns us here, where I intend to lead you step by step, ensuring you retain the thread that can always be traced back, is Sade’s approach. This approach reveals to us, within a certain field of this domain—this space of the neighbor I have been describing—access to what I will call, paraphrasing one of his works titled Ideas on Novels, an idea of a technique properly oriented toward non-sublimated sexual jouissance and the relationship of this idea to the exploration of access to the neighbor. Here, we must pause briefly to announce that this idea will present us with various lines of divergence, inevitably giving rise to the notion of difficulty.

Thus, it becomes necessary to situate the scope of Sade’s literary work as such. This might seem like a detour that will, without doubt—and I have been accused lately of being slow—delay us further. Could we not nonetheless move past this step of refinement more quickly than it seems necessary? And recall that several perspectives through which Sade’s work might be approached must be mentioned, if only to specify the one we choose.

First, is this work a conscious testimony to what it expresses, or an unconscious one? When I say “unconscious” here, I implore you not to invoke the analytical unconscious as such. I mean unconscious to the extent that the subject, Sade, does not fully identify the ways in which he integrates himself into the conditions imposed on the nobleman of his time: at the threshold of the Revolution, through the period of the Terror—which, as you know, he lived through entirely—before being relegated to the confines of Charenton asylum, reportedly by the will of the First Consul.

In truth, Sade appears to have been extremely conscious of the relationship between his work and the position of what I will call “the man of pleasure.” Within this life of the man of pleasure, Sade provides testimony against himself by publicly admitting the extremes to which this condition leads.

Everything, from the joy with which he recalls the precedents we find in history, sufficiently demonstrates and confesses to what the master has always ultimately reached when he does not bow his head before the being of God. There is no point in concealing what I will call the realistic aspect of Sade’s atrocities. Their developed, insistent, and excessive character is glaringly obvious and contributes, through some form of challenge, to plausibility, giving rise to the legitimate idea of some ironic undertone in this discourse. Yet it remains that the matters at hand can be found in Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and others; read The Grand Days of Auvergne by Esprit Fléchier to learn what a grand seigneur of the early 17th century could inflict upon their peasants.

We would be mistaken to think, influenced by the restraint imposed by the fascinations of the imaginary, that this time—though without knowing what they do—men are incapable, in certain positions, of crossing these limits. On this point, Freud himself provides us guidance, marked by his absolute lack of pretense or duplicity, when, in Civilization and Its Discontents, he does not hesitate to articulate that there is no common measure between the satisfaction derived from jouissance in its primary state and the satisfaction it can provide in its diverted or even sublimated forms, as shaped by the paths civilization imposes upon it.

At another point, Sade does not conceal his thoughts about the fact that these jouissances—forbidden by accepted morality—are nevertheless perfectly accessible and permissible under the very conditions in which certain people live, those he explicitly identifies as “the rich.” Despite the constraints we know they face, it is evident that they sometimes indulge in such pleasures.

To set things straight, I will take this opportunity to make a remark. This is a point I believe is often overlooked or neglected, and it is incidental, in the manner of Freud’s own remarks on such matters. It is this: the security of the jouissance of the rich, in the era in which we live, is, if you consider it carefully, greatly increased by what I would call “the universal legalization of labor.” Compare this with what were called “social wars” in earlier times. Try to identify their equivalents today—certainly still present at our borders, but no longer within our societies.

Now, a point about the realistic testimonial value of Sade’s work: shall we examine its sublimatory value? If we take sublimation in its most developed, even exuberant and cynical form—the way Freud amused himself by presenting it—as the transformation of sexual tendencies into a work where everyone, recognizing their own dreams and impulses, rewards the artist by granting them a broad, happy life, and thus effectively giving them access to the satisfaction of the very tendency that initially interested them, then, under this lens, Sade’s work fails.

It fails, because, truthfully, you may know—or perhaps you don’t—how much of his life the poor Sade spent either in prison or confined to special institutions. One cannot say that the success of his work—which, during his lifetime, particularly with La Nouvelle Justine followed by Juliette’s Story, achieved considerable success—was anything but clandestine, a success in the shadows, one condemned. We will not dwell on this. We simply note it to shed light on aspects that deserve initial attention.

Let us now examine—since these two dimensions we have explored do not exhaust the work—where Sade’s work is situated. It has been called unsurpassable, in the sense of representing an absolute of the intolerable in what can be expressed in words about the transgression of all human limits.

It may be admitted that no literature, in any era, has produced a work as scandalous as this. No other has more deeply wounded the sentiments and thoughts of humanity. Even today, when the writings of Miller make us tremble, who would dare rival Sade in licentiousness? Indeed, one might claim that this is the most scandalous work ever written. Maurice Blanchot, whom I quote to you, continues: “Is this not a reason to concern ourselves with it?”

That is precisely what we are doing. I urge you to read the book in which Blanchot’s two essays—one on Lautréamont and the other on Sade—are collected. It strikes me as one of the essential texts, alongside the discourse I am attempting to convey to you, provided you can muster the effort to read it. Whether I summarize it for you in the terms I have outlined, or Blanchot articulates it himself, such discussion undeniably says a great deal. In truth, it seems there is no conceivable atrocity that cannot be found in this catalog, which seems to derive its power from a kind of challenge to sensitivity whose effect is, quite literally, stunning.

If the word “stunning” means, in some sense, that the author takes control of meaning from the reader—that the reader loses their bearings—then, from this perspective, it could even be said that the effect is achieved without art. That is, without consideration for the economy of means, but rather through a sort of accumulation of details and incidents, interspersed with dissertations and justifications. These justifications, full of contradictions, are of great interest to us and will be explored in detail later. For now, I simply wish to point out that only coarse minds could assume—though they sometimes do—that these dissertations serve to indulge erotic complacency.

Even more refined minds, far beyond the coarse, have made the error of attributing these dissertations—labeled digressions—as diminishing the suggestive tension of the work. This includes, notably, Georges Bataille, who views Sade’s work as granting us access to a kind of assumption of being through the disarray it provokes, and sees in this disarray the true value of Sade’s work.

Yet attributing such significance to these dissertations and digressions is a mistake. The ennui they provoke is something else entirely. It is nothing less than the response of being—whether that of the reader or the author, it matters little—to the approach of a center of incandescence or, if I may say, of absolute zero, a point that is psychically unbreathable.

Undoubtedly, the fact that a book falls from one’s hands proves that it is bad. But here, the badness in a literary sense may be the very guarantee of that intrinsic wickedness—to use a term still in use in the 17th century—which is the very object of our inquiry.

From this perspective, Sade belongs to what I would call experimental literature: that is, art as an experience in itself, and not just any experience, but one that, I would say, rips the subject, through its process, from what I might call their psychosocial moorings. This removes it entirely from any psychosocial assessment of the sublimation at hand.

There is no better example of such a work than one I hope at least some of you have engaged with. I say “engaged with” in the same sense one might ask: “Have you ever engaged with opium?” Namely, I refer to The Songs of Maldoror by Lautréamont. I mention it here only because Maurice Blanchot’s coupling of perspectives on both authors—Sade and Lautréamont—is entirely appropriate.

In Sade, however, the reference to the social is preserved. He has the ambition of socially legitimizing his extravagant system. Hence those astonishing admissions, which appear as incoherencies and, as I will show you, lead to a kind of manifold contradiction that we would be wrong to attribute simply and purely to the realm of the absurd.

The absurd has become a somewhat convenient category of late—so convenient, in fact, that it lends itself to the kind of stammering on this theme that, as you know, earned the Nobel Prize, that magnificent universal acknowledgment of a certain kind of knavery. Without a doubt, history will highlight this as a hallmark of the stigma of a certain degradation within our culture.

What Sade shows us, articulated in the most explicit manner, are two terms I will isolate as I conclude today, announcing what will follow in our project. They are these: advancing in a certain direction—toward that central void that, for now, represents our only access to jouissance—leads to the fragmentation of the body of the neighbor.

Moreover, in articulating the law of jouissance as the foundation for some supposedly utopian societal system, he unwittingly expresses himself as follows, in italics, on page 77 of the ten-volume edition of Juliette, recently republished—quite handsomely, I must say—by Pauvert. This is still, I believe, a book available only clandestinely:

“Lend me the part of your body that can satisfy me for a moment, and enjoy, if it pleases you, the part of mine that can bring you pleasure.”

This fundamental principle, which articulates a moment in Sade’s system as he pretends it to be socially acceptable, is noteworthy. Not because it represents the first appearance of such a notion in human discourse, but because it articulates, through language, something we psychoanalysts have identified under the term partial object.

Yet when we articulate the concept of the partial object, we imply that this object aspires to reintegrate, so to speak, into the whole object:

– The object as valued, – The object of our love and tenderness, – The object that, in short, reconciles within itself all the virtues of the so-called genital stage.

I believe it is necessary to approach this problem differently and recognize that this object must, if I may say so, exist in a state of independence within the field we conventionally hold as central. The whole object, the neighbor as such, is delineated there, separated from us, standing, as if I may evoke the imagery of Carpaccio’s San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice, amidst a scene of a charnel house.

I will revisit the necessity implied by these terms to highlight another figure that, from the very outset, Sade teaches us: what I will call “the indestructible character of the Other,” as it emerges in the figure of its victim.

Observe: whether it concerns Justine or a certain lineage—surely one that is surpassable—of Sade’s work, I refer specifically to its properly erotic or even pornographic legacy. This lineage has produced one of its flowers, undeniably recognizable, as in the case of the recent Story of O, which I suspect a significant portion of my audience is familiar with.

This victim survives all forms of abuse. Her allure, even her voluptuous appeal—on which the author’s pen insistently returns—remains undiminished. This insistence, as in all descriptions of this kind, portrays her as always having “the most beautiful eyes in the world, the most pathetic and touching expression.” The author’s repetitive tendency to place his subjects under such stereotypical labels poses, in itself, a problem. It is undeniable that the image in question seems impervious to any alteration, even through wear, maintaining its exceptional quality.

In Sade, however—who is, indeed, a figure of a different kind than those offering mere diversions—we see the shadow of the idea of eternal torment appearing on the horizon. I will return to this point and, on occasion, read passages related to it.

There is, nonetheless, a strange inconsistency in this author, who maintained that, since nothing of himself should remain, he desired that nothing of his burial place be accessible to others, wishing it to be overgrown with brush. Is this not to say that here, in the fantasy, he constructs the content of what is closest to himself—what we call the neighbor, or indeed, metipsimus?

Here, as you can see, I will conclude today’s discussion on this particular observation.

Through what deep attachments does a certain relationship to the Other—what we call sadistic—reveal its true kinship with the psychology of the obsessive? An obsessive whose defenses are built as an iron framework, a rigid structure, a corset, within which he halts and entangles himself, preventing access to what Freud, somewhere, calls “a horror unknown to himself.”