Kant with Sade: A Scholion

1. Lacan opens his text by referring to the statement made by Jean Paulhan of the Académie Française in his work The Marquis de Sade and His Accomplice which stated that: Reiterating them through ten volumes and supporting them with a thousand examples, a Krafft-Ebing was to consecrate the categories and distinctions the Divine Marquis traced. Later, a Freud was to adopt Sade's very method and principle. There has not, I think, been any other example in our Letters, of a few novels providing the basis, fifty years after their publication, for a whole science of man.[2] Lacan said quite bluntly that this was a stupidity.…