Conversely, the son’s consummationof incest, the subject’s plunging into the real lack
in the (m)Other, does not entail any instantaneous return to primordial “massive”
jouissance—in this sense, the law prohibits something which is already “inacces-
sible”—but a mere “psychotic” desubjectivation in the symbolic Other, where the
subject will remain alienated (as an object of the Other’s jouissance) literally until
the “Last Judgment.”...I have repeatedly pointed out that what one finds in the place of the real object that
cannot be refound is not just the self-conscious representation of the objects of
everyday reality, but also the unconscious Real-of-the-Symbolic (the object a);
Seminar VII primarily associates the latter with the superegoic jouissanceof the
commandment, which is something “intemperate” in itself—since it paradoxi-
cally becomes “crueller and crueller as we offend it less and less”^166 —and consti-
tutes the other “obscene” side of the positive moral law. More importantly, Lacan
shows how the “inner voice” of the superego which “substitutes itself ” for the pri-
mordial Real—negatively represented in the Symbolic by the “dumbness” of das
Ding—is its “opposite and the reverse,” yet, unexpectedly, taken at its purest, it is
also “identical” to it.^167
This is where Kant’s philosophy and Sade’s novels come on the scene, and re-
veal their utmost ethical significance and danger. According to Lacan, both Kant
and Sade attempt to force their way to the Real of the Thing—and thus return to
the pure jouissanceof the primordial Real—precisely by radicalizing the ambivalent
nature of the superegoic commandment in opposite ways, by transforming it into
a universal maxim to be understood as “pure signifying system.”^168 Indeed, such
an (asymptotic) purification of the Symbolic, the complete symbolization of the
Real, can eventually achieve a real-ization of the Symbolic,its disappearance....^169
More specifically, Kant’s ethics and Sade’s “anti-ethics” similarly endeavor to ex-
acerbate and finally break with the dialectic between law and desire as inherenttrans-
gression which Saint Paul expressed in the following way: “If it had not been for
the law, I would not have known sin [transgression].”^170 The lack of mediation
between law and desire in favor of one of the two should hypothetically give rise
to either a pure jouissance of the Law,in the case of Kant, or, an—ultimately undistin-
guishable—pure law of Jouissance,in the case of Sade. In other words, the Kantian
categorical imperative “Act in such a way that the maxim of your action may be ac-
cepted as a universal maxim”^171 is nothing but a reduction of the law to its pure
form;the Sadean imperative “Let us take as a universal maxim of our conduct the
right to enjoy any other person whatsoever as the instrument of our pleasure”^172
is nothing but the reduction of the law to its object,to the “right to jouissance.”the subject of the real (other)