to her own symbolic annihilation—it has rightly been noted that Lacan thus un-
intentionally confuses “the assumption of the human condition,” its finitude, sym-
bolic castration, with “the apology of suicide as an ultimate, sublime form of the
[ethics of ] refusal.”^247 More importantly, I believe that in Seminar VII we face an
insurmountable deadlock concerning the economy and function of suffering. On
more than one occasion, Lacan endeavors to dissociate pure desire from sheer pain.
For example, he states that the pain that “defends the edge” of the field of desire
does not correspond to its entire content; however, he never says anything about
the nature of what, in this field, would not be painful.^248 He prefers to remind
us that, after all, “the economy of [sado-]masochistic pain ends up looking like
the economy of goods.”^249 To put it bluntly, this means that pathological sado-
masochism ultimately involves a “utilitarian” pain forthe sake of pleasure and, as
such, does not go beyond the pleasure principle. Beginning from this presupposi-
tion, in another lesson of Seminar VII, Lacan is then able to specify that Sadeanism
(and hence, implicitly, Kantianism) is equivalent to the “divinization... of the
limit in which being subsists in suffering”;^250 in other words, Sado–Kantian pain
would locate itself on the limit of the field of desire, and would serve the purpose
of allegedly “defending” (the semblance of ) being againstthe void of real desire. It
is important to emphasize here that such a definition of Sado–Kantianism overtly
contradicts the description of its functioning that Lacan provided earlier in Semi-
nar VII. As we have seen, in that instance he correctly pointed out that Kant’s cate-
gorical imperative (as well as Sade’s command to enjoy) requires an elimination
of the “realm of sentiment”: they are both beyond the utilitarian economy of pain
forpleasure, and what they finally achieve is the pain inpleasure of “massive” jouis-
sance.^251 By definition, the suffering involved in “massive” jouissancecannot lie on the
“limit” provided by the pathological masochism which services goods; conversely,
if jouissanceis found to lie within the field of desire, the latter is thus inextricable
from pain, which is precisely what Lacan intended to deny....
( 5 ) I suggest that Lacan might offer his audience too manyhints of topographical
distinctions between Antigone’s pure desire and Sado–Kantian “massive” jouissance.
The field of pure desire is located beyonda margin—the barrier separating us from
the Real-of-the-Symbolic—which, as we have just seen, is thought to be a defen-
sive reification of pain and which, although Lacan does not state it explicitly, is
(contradictorily) associated with “massive” jouissance.Yet at the same time, pure de-
sire is also understood as an alternative way of temporarily inhabiting the limit/
margin, one which is opposed to that of pathological pain. On this issue, Lacan’s
claim that Sadean suffering as a reification of the margin “is a stasis which affirms
that that which iscannot return to the void from which it emerged”^252 should defi-the subject of the fantasy... and beyond