Dany Nobus: Writing as an Instrument of Torture – An Exploration of Kant’s Practical Reason via Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’

Of the twenty-eight substantial papers and six shorter contributions that make up Lacan’sÉcrits, ‘Kant with Sade’ is generally regarded as one of the toughest nuts to crack, and this opinion is shared by some of the most eminent and knowledgeable commentators on Lacan’s work. In this seminar, I will unpack one of the crucial lines of Lacan’s argument in ‘Kant with Sade’, notably that the contents of Sade’s libertine novels, which he also designated as “the Sadean fantasy”, i.e. the fantasy Sade articulated 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—whose full spectrum also includes the more ‘masochistic’ side of the victims, as epitomized by the perennially virtuous Justine—this does not, for Lacan, demonstrate that sadism is also the type of ‘practical reason’ that would have presided over his daily routines, outside the fictional space of the literary narrative. Although Sade’s incessant articulation of the libertines’ brutal fantasy inevitably plays a crucial part in his own Weltanschauung, for Lacan the latter was much more constructed around the author’s relationship to his own act of writing, and to the specific function he wanted to accord to his libertine novels, rather than to the personal realization of the ‘sadistic’ fantasy of his fictional heroes. As such, this seminar will also explore the function of writing for Sade, and more specifically its significance for the articulation of desire, fantasy and the law, in a dialogue with Foucault’s comments on Sade in his lectures at the State University of New York-Buffalo in March 1970.

Dany Nobus is the Pro Vice Chancellor for External Affairs at Brunel University London. In 2006 he became Chair of Psychology and Psychoanalysis and Head of the School of Social Sciences (now College of Health and Life Sciences), where he is still the Convenor of the MA Programme in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Society. Professor Nobus is a world-renowned authority on the history, theory and practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has published five books and authored over 100 articles, book chapters and reports in various academic and professional journals.