71
* Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts 
Filozofski vestnik  |  Volume XXXIX  |  Number 3  |  2018  |  71–120
Jelica Šumič Riha*
Sadean Politics or a Tyranny of Jouissance**
One of the lessons to be drawn from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents is un-
doubtedly that jouissance – because it implies pain and suffering – is something 
harmful to the subject. However, this inherent cruelty of jouissance becomes a 
problem for modern moral and political philosophy with Sade, for whom the 
right to jouissance is a fundamental human right and as such universal. While 
the right to jouissance is inconceivable outside the horizon of human rights 
discourse, it represents the ultimate limit of this discourse once Sade starts 
wondering whether jouissance, being particular by definition, presents an in-
surmountable obstacle to the universal law. And, indeed, there is nothing more 
absurd for Sade than the effort of prescribing universal laws. In concrete terms,
it is a terrible injustice to require that men of unlike character all be ruled by the 
same law: what is good for one is not at all good for another.… Now, would it not 
be to carry your injustice beyond all limits were you to send the law to strike the 
man incapable of bowing to the law? Would your iniquity be any less here than in 
a case where you sought to force the blind to distinguish amongst colors?
1
 
In the light of the antinomy of the right to jouissance and law, what one might 
call Sadean ethics and a politics of jouissance emerges as the unthinkable of the 
philosophy of human rights. Indeed, if Sade still represents an unrivalled chal-
lenge for any ethical and political thought, this is because his project of emanci-
pation driven by a subversive will to jouissance that arises from transgression –  
the violation of all societal norms and laws – ends up disorganizing thought 
itself. Thus, by postulating the right to jouissance as a law binding everyone, 
Sade confronts the subject with the choice between a duty to the unconditional 
** This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy”, which is funded by the Slovenian Research Agency.
1
 Marquis de Sade, Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans in Jus-
tine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn 
Wainhouse, New York: Grove Press, 1990, p. 313. 

72
jelica šumič riha
and one’s pathological being, embodying in this manner the uncompromising, 
heroic will pushing the subject beyond the pleasure principle. Hence, if Sade 
continues to affect us, it may not be for what the reason we might think obvious 
(obscenity, provocation), if he can be considered, to borrow Hénaff’s felicitous 
formulation, to be “the archivist of the future that belongs to us,”
2
 this is because 
he elevates to an imperative valid for all that which remains radically foreign to 
everything human or, in Lacan’s words, “that which is the most lacking in the 
relationship to the individual,”
3
 namely, an ultimately inhuman jouissance that 
inevitably divides the subject. Indeed, what Sade aims at is nothing less than 
liberating jouissance in the subject as that which is the most intimate to him/
her, yet which the subject, being submitted to the demands of civilization, per-
ceives as something radically alien.
In this respect, Sade’s “despotism of the passions” in establishing the rule of 
jouissance offers one of the most radical attempts at finding a way out of the 
discontent in civilization that presents itself as an irreducible gap “between the 
satisfaction a jouissance affords in its original state and that which it gives in the 
indirect or even sublimated forms that civilization obliges it to assume.”
4
 Sade’s 
paradoxical solution to the problem of discontent, which consists in the liber-
ation of the “the man of pleasure” from the constraints of civilization, its laws, 
norms, and prohibitions, in short, the emancipation of pleasure from the tyran-
ny of civilization, is achieved by means of something that is even more tyranni-
cal than civilization: jouissance or passion, to use Sade’s own term. According 
to Sade, passion is transgressive in nature, because on its way to satisfaction 
passion knows no boundary and remains indifferent to the price to be paid by 
the subject:
no passion has a greater need of the widest horizon of liberty than has this, none, 
doubtless, is as despotic; here it is that man likes to command, to be obeyed, 
to surround himself with slaves compelled to satisfy him; well, whenever you 
withhold from man the secret means whereby he exhales the dose of despotism 
Nature instilled in the depths of his heart, he will seek other outlets for it, it will 
2
 Marcel Hénaff, Sade. The Invention of the Libertine Body, trans. Xavier Callahan, Minnea-
polis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 290. 
3
 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1959-1960. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. 
Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter, London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992, p. 55.
4
 Ibid., p. 200.

73
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
be vented upon nearby objects; it will trouble the government. If you would avoid 
that danger, permit a free flight and rein to those tyrannical desires which, de-
spite himself, torment man ceaselessly.
5
Sade’s promotion of jouissance’s excessive character, ultimately, this elevation 
of the desire for evil for the sake of evil, to an autonomous, transcendental prin-
ciple, while justified as a means for attaining human emancipation, presents a 
fundamental disharmony between the subject and an instance that requires ab-
solute submission. Sade therefore emerges as a point of crystallization indicating 
that all solutions to the discontent in civilization provided by the Enlightenment 
are centred around this fundamental choice: happiness or desire. It should im-
mediately be added, however, that the clear dividing line between happiness 
and desire was not traced by Sade but by his contemporary, Kant. Accepting the 
idea of   happiness as a means for maximizing pleasure means, for Kant, accept-
ing the will submitted to contingency; ultimately this would mean acknowledg-
ing that there is only the relativity of the ethics of pleasure, which, for Kant, is 
no ethics at all. Hence, the moral subject – in opposition to the subject of pleas-
ure whose will is pathologically affected and therefore heedlessly chases one 
object after another – looks for a particular good that presents itself as superior 
to any uncertain good “owing to its universal value,”
6
 as Lacan puts it, and is 
therefore unaffected by changes in the subjective conditions of pleasure. As a 
result, only the will that is determined by the form of law is the will that knows 
what it really wants. Ultimately, only such a “determined” or resolute will, to 
paraphrase Lacan, is the will that wants itself and can therefore demand that 
the subject does not give up on his/her desire, and this irrespective of the fact 
that he/she must pay for this “fidelity” with his/her well-being and happiness. 
Happiness, by contrast, requires the intervention of an instance that prevents 
the subject from wanting, in Rousseau’s terms, beyond the possibilities of satis-
faction. Happiness imposes moderation, restraint, in short, a “No more!”. These 
limitations are precisely what the will, cleansed of every pathological affection, 
disregards, because as a constant requirement of satisfaction it is situated be-
yond the pleasure principle. This is precisely where Sade comes in. What the 
5
 Sade, Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If you Would Become Republicans, p. 324. 
6
 Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” in Écrits, trans. B. Fink, New York, London: W . W . & Com-
pany, 2002, p. 646.

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jelica šumič riha
“pure“ Kant and Sade, the embodiment of debauchery, have in common is that 
the unconditional, characterized by its excessiveness, becomes the instrument 
of a radical change that can be inscribed in the structure of the “objective” world. 
Against the “ethics of happiness”, which is bounded by the pleasure principle, 
which prevents the subject from continuing to desire beyond the satisfaction of 
needs, Kant and Sade formulate as a criterion of morality a duty to an instance 
of the unconditional, indicating in this way that the sacrifice of the pathological 
is constitutive of the subject’s relation to duty, which both of them conceive of 
as a requirement for unconditional submission. Succinctly, the subject’s funda-
mental experience, for Kant and Sade, is the experience of a split that is caused 
by the emergence of a categorical commandment, in relation to which the sub-
ject is always “deficient”, wanting.
From the standpoint of the choice of the unconditional, this being for Kant and 
Sade a forced choice despite the fact that it drives the subject beyond the limits 
of the pleasure principle, the choice of happiness appears to be excluded from 
the outset. This is all the more surprising for Sade, who initially presents him-
self as “the man of pleasure.” Here we must take care to be very precise: What 
is meant by happiness in Sade is clearly formulated by one of his characters: “It 
is not in desire’s consumption that happiness consists, but in the desire itself.”
7
 
Sade namely agrees with Kant that, in the experience of pleasure, only intensity 
counts and not the object that causes it. Hence, when Sade demonstrates that 
behind the search for pleasure there lurks the agency of an insatiable More!, he 
undertakes an operation similar to that of “cleansing” carried out by Kant in tra-
ditional ethics of the good: just as Kant’s raising of a sheer formal determination 
of the will to an ethical criterion resulted in the elimination of the pathological 
from the field of ethics, so from Sade’s commitment to pleasure it clearly follows 
that the liberation of pleasure inevitably leads to a liberation from pleasure.
Thus, oddly enough, Sade revolutionizes the domain of ethics by positing, in 
contrast to traditional ethics, which excludes from its realm jouissance that 
serves no purpose,
8
 this utterly useless jouissance as the constituent of the sub-
7
 Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings (rev. ed.), trans. Austryn Wain-
house and Richard Seaver, New York: Grove Press, 1987, pp. 361–362. 
8
 “Jouissance is what serves no purpose.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. 
On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Knowledge. Book XX. Encore 1972–1973, New York & 
London: W.W. & Company, 1999, p. 3.

75
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
ject’s existence, moreover, by elevating it to the status of a law valid for every-
one. But how can jouissance, once driven out, be brought back? While it is true 
that the Sadean political-pedagogical project of the despotism of the passions 
implies the subject’s liberation from the demands of civilization and traditional 
ethics, which urges the subject to renounce the satisfaction of the passions, the 
emancipation Sade is truly striving for is not a liberation from the Other, so that 
the subject could do whatever pleases him/her, but the liberation of jouissance, 
a liberation that imposes submission to an even more implacable command. 
The liberation of the subject of pleasure requires his/her submission to jouis-
sance, that agency namely that subjugates more brutally than any command or 
prohibition of civilization. The Sadean position is more radical than we might 
think at first blush: it is not about the right to jouissance, but about the rights 
of jouissance, in other words, it is an extreme position where the subject must 
recognize in the imperative of jouissance his/her desire. One is tempted to say 
that, for Sade, jouissance is the law of desire.
The Antinomy of Jouissance and the Social Bond
Sade thus enters into ethics and politics as a promotor of rights, not of man, 
but of jouissance. But can there be something like an ethics of jouissance and, 
consequently, a politics of jouissance at all if ethics and politics are founded 
on a relationship with the Other, whereas jouissance, being solipsistic, autistic 
in nature, problematizes the very status of the Other? And conversely, if Sade’s 
project of emancipation aims at the realization of the tyranny of jouissance pre-
cisely at the level of the socius, then one might ask: What is the social bond that 
is founded on something which appears to be incompatible with it?
 
Sade’s despotism of the passions could best be described as a regime that main-
tains the greatest distance between law and jouissance, between what univer-
salizes and what, as an absolute particularity, resists all univerzalization. But 
this very antinomy between law as the foundation of the social bond and jouis-
sance as the agency of dissocialization is just what Sade’s ethics and politics in-
tends to sustain. It would appear then that Sade strives for the impossible: a par-
adoxical social bond that is not founded on the universality of law, but on that 
which is by definition the most particular, non-universalizable and therefore 
dissocializing: jouissance. With Sade, however, the postulation of the uncondi-
tional right to jouissance is integrated into a legal-political project. Jouissance is 

76
jelica šumič riha
imposed as an imperative for everyone, since, as Monique David-Ménard rightly 
points out, “in striving to satisfy his/her desires, everyone has the right to occu-
py the place of the unconditional.”
9
 But such a democratization of the right to 
jouissance necessarily requires a redefinition of the social order in such a way 
that jouissance is granted a “civil right” in the realm of politics. 
This clearly follows from the fundamental maxim of Sade’s ethics and politics, 
as reconstructed by Lacan: “I have the right to enjoy your body,” anyone can 
say to me, “and I will exercise this right without any limit to the capriciousness 
of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your body.”
10
 The very formulation 
“anyone can say to me,” which is to say, the Other, opens up an unheard of pos-
sibility, that of bringing together politics and the drives, or, rather, freedom and 
jouissance, within the horizon of universality. The price to pay for the inscrip-
tion of jouissance into the realm of universality is already indicated in Sade’s 
fantasy: sooner or later it will be the torturer’s turn to occupy the place of the 
victim. For the inherent egalitarianism of the right to jouissance prescribed by 
Sade’s maxim implies that everyone can use everyone as a temporary object of 
jouissance, but this also goes for the torturer. Thus the phrase that so frequently 
recurs in Sade’s text: “Do onto me that which I have done unto you.”
11
 
What is crucial here is that Sade’s promotion of jouissance reveals two blind 
spots of the Enlightenment ethics and politics. First, by linking freedom and 
jouissance, Sade exposes the unthinkable point of the philosophy of human 
rights, namely, that freedom, the main stake in ethics and politics, is not the 
freedom of the subject, but that of the Other. It is precisely this heterogeneity 
of the right to jouissance, a sort of a foreign body within the framework of hu-
man rights, that highlights the ultimate ambiguity of a freedom coupled with 
jouissance since freedom and jouissance are supposed to be incompatible. As 
Lacan justly remarks, “the discourse of the right to jouissance clearly posits the 
Other qua free – the Other’s freedom – as its enunciating subject.”
12
 Hence, the 
enunciating subject of the imperative of jouissance: “I have the right to enjoy 
9
 Monique David-Ménard, Les constructions de l’universel. Psychanalyse, philosophie, Paris: 
PUF, 1997, p. 34.
10
 Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” p. 648. 
11
 Marquis de Sade, Juliette (rev. ed.), trans. Austryn Wainhouse, New York: Grove Press, 
1988, p. 273.
12
 Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” p. 650.

77
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
your body ...” can only be “The Other qua free.”
13
 Second, by putting the will to 
jouissance, which, for Kant, is the incarnation of the pathological, in the place 
of the unconditional that causes the subject’s division, Sade succeeds in achiev-
ing what would be impossible for Kant: to elevate into the unconditional an 
instance of the sensible or pathological, an absolute particularity that is by defi-
nition resistant to universalization. Jouissance, termed a “particular absolute” 
or a “pathological absolute” by J.-A. Miller,
14
 is a paradoxical absolute as it can-
not be situated within the framework of Kant’s ethics, since, for Kant, whatever 
belongs to the rank of the pathological, by being non-universalizable and there-
fore unable to attain the status of absoluity, must be excluded. There is never-
theless, to follow Lacan, a certain affinity between Sade and Kant. For Kant, the 
exclusion of the pathological, that is, the indifference to everything that affects 
the body, is a criterion for the evaluation of the subject’s act. Sade’s despotism 
of the passions likewise requires the absolute separation of the subject of pleas-
ure, the pathological subject, from the will, which is governed by the imperative 
of jouissance. However, in contrast to Kant, Sade proves that jouissance has its 
legitimate place in the ethics of the universal precisely to the extent that the in-
difference to the pathological, as imposed by universality, does not abolish the 
possibility of jouissance, but is rather its condition. Thus, the question of what 
the radical nature of Sade’s despotism of the passions as a reinvention of the 
social bond consists in, encompasses another, which is more decisive, namely: 
Can the notion of   the social bond be found at all in Sade?
The closest to something like a political dissertation in Sade is the pamphlet Yet 
Another Effort, If You Would Become Republicans in which many commentators 
of Sade’s work, Lefort and Deleuze in particular, see the pinnacle of Sade’s iro-
ny. On the other hand, it is equally true that Sade’s work, as a whole, has to do 
with only one question: Which political regime would best realize the tyranny of 
jouissance? What is remarkable, at any rate, is that the contradictory nature of 
such an undertaking is already manifest in Sade’s work itself. On the one hand, 
Sade advocates the most brutal despotism, even slavery. On the other hand, 
however, he fervently defends the opposite of tyranny, the egalitarian republic. 
Hence the exaltation of domination, i.e., inequality in all possible forms, is cou-
pled with the celebration of the anarchical liberation, the totally free circulation 
13
 Ibid. 
14
 Jacques-Alain Miller, Extimité (unpublished seminar), 14 December 1985.

78
jelica šumič riha
of debauchery, irrespective of social status or gender. How are we to understand 
this inherent antagonism of Sade’s thought: the coexistence of two, mutually ex-
clusive political-ethical utopias: barbarian, non-egalitarian despotism, on the 
one hand, and political and sexual egalitarianism, on the other?
Generally speaking, Sade’s commentators offered two solutions for the reconcil-
iation of these two contradictory positions regarding the existence and nature 
of the social bond in Sade. According to the first solution – this being the dom-
inant interpretation today – Sade is simply an apologist for the destruction of 
any social bond, since, as one of Sade’s key characters clearly states, no bond 
“is sacred in view of people like ourselves.”
15
 According to the second solution, 
which is more fragmentary and needs to be reconstructed, Sade’s work, taken as 
a whole, is not to be read merely as a criticism of the existing social bond, rather, 
it should be seen as a staging of a new social bond grounded in jouissance. This 
contradiction, however, is only apparent as Sade’s problematization of the so-
cial bond cannot be understood without knowing who the principal target of his 
critique is. It may be useful to recall that, for Sade, who unrelentingly defends 
the primacy of particular interests against the general interest, the real issue is 
the social contract posited as the foundation of the socius, because he considers 
it to be violence against the individual’s basic egoism. The contract is a sham 
that “stinks of commerce: I give onto you in order that I may obtain from you 
in exchange.”
16
 Hence, contractualists themselves would have to admit that the 
contract is deceptive because – contrary to the fundamental assumption of the 
Enlightenment philosophers – the contract cannot secure even the satisfaction 
of egoistic interests; in a word, it cannot ensure what justifies it, namely egal-
itarian reciprocity since, by complying with laws out of their selfish interests, 
both the weak and the powerful reinforce the tyranny of laws. They are therefore 
complicit in allowing the law to oppress everyone. 
It is precisely here that the crucial differences between Sade and the 
Enlightenment thinkers can be seen. Sade attacks, with particular viciousness, 
the dichotomy between nature, the universe of necessity, and society, the uni-
verse of rules. For Enlightenment political thought, the contract, in ensuring 
15
 Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodomy and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse 
and Richard Seaver, New York: Grove Press 1987, p. 127.
16
 Sade, Juliette, p. 144; emphasis in original.

79
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
reciprocity, provides a defence against the danger of capriciousness and vio-
lence, which is another way of saying that the law is what liberates us from all 
oppression. For Sade, by contrast, “the one great trouble is that human laws 
are the fruits of nothing but ignorance or prejudice.” Indeed, Sade asks, “do we 
detect [in nature] any law other than self-interest, that is, self-preservation?”
17
 
What Sade’s critique of the contract seeks to put an end to is the grounding of 
the social bond in nature through the negation of every form of reciprocity and 
mutual recognition: “In the beginning, then was theft; … for the inequality … 
necessarily supposes a wrong done the weak by the strong, and there at once we 
have this wrong, that is to say, theft, established, authorized by Nature since she 
gives man that which must necessarily lead him thereto.”
18
 Nature, taken in its 
cruel innocence, is for Sade another name for the elimination of prohibitions. 
Hence, the point of the argument from nature, introduced in this way, is not to 
simply replace equality with inequality, virtue with vice. The point is rather to 
establish a zero degree of legality by emphasizing the rivalry between human 
laws and the sovereign law of nature brought into play by the very notion of the 
contract. If for Enlightenment philosophers laws originate in the general will of 
the subjects that enter into the contract, for Sade the very idea of   law as being 
secondary to the contract is inconceivable. Indeed, law is law only if it is not de-
rived from something that precedes it, succinctly, if it is identified with the voice 
of nature. Thus the primacy of the contract in relation to law inverts, according 
to Sade, the relationship primary–secondary entailing, as a consequence, the 
subordination of the supreme law to conventions, in short, to a mere semblance. 
The contract is therefore not illegitimate because it restricts inalienable natural 
rights – since there are no such rights, according to Sade – but because it usurps 
the place of the supreme law: the law of nature.
One issue of radical importance to Sade is that despite being wholly arbitrary 
and therefore not compulsory, law is no less oppressive, but it does it “per-
versely”, by disguising its oppression in equality. This is precisely where we 
find Sade’s irony: “I ask you now whether that law is truly just which orders 
the man who has nothing to respect another who has everything?”
19
 Law is ty-
rannical and “unnatural” or “denaturalized” because it usurps the individual’s 
17
 Ibid., p. 888. 
18
 Ibid., p. 114. 
19
 Sade, Yet Another Effort, p. 313.

80
jelica šumič riha
passion, thereby preventing him/her from exercising his/her egoism. What is 
more, law is a bad substitute for personal revenge; it poorly serves justice be-
cause it postpones the reparation of a harm and injustice, thus causing the loss 
of libidinal energy. Sade therefore strives for a re-libidinization of justice based 
on the principle of retaliation: “Do onto me everything I have done unto you.”
20
 
To Sade, the difference between the oppression that is tolerable and acceptable, 
and the oppression that is criminal, is that the despotism of the passions allows 
the possibility to oppress my oppressor, while we are powerless against the op-
pression of the law. Law cannot be oppressed, it cannot be tortured and thus no 
jouissance can be extracted from it. From Sade’s standpoint, my neighbour’s 
passion is less threatening than the law’s injustice because while I can take re-
venge in the case of a wrong inflicted on me by my neighbour, I cannot get even 
for a wrong inflicted on me by law. The wrongdoing by law cannot be stopped 
because there is never a moment when I can say “now it’s my turn.” It’s always 
the law’s turn, never mine.
Sade’s criticism of law can thus be viewed as an attempt to “sodomize” the 
Enlightenment concept of justice based on a comparison with one’s fellows, 
that is, on the specular relationship between fellowmen that originates in self-
love. In this view, the Enlightenment idea of   justice is from the outset contami-
nated by self-love: I recognize myself in another. By contrast, for Sade, for whom 
the fundamental attitude towards the other is based on envy, and not, as with 
Rousseau, on pity, the feeling that is reserved, according to Sade, for those who 
are destined to become victims, it is not a benevolent compassion that brings 
about justice. What keeps justice alive is, rather, an obscene competition with 
the other, where the other appears as an incomplete image of me. This also ex-
plains a specifically Sadean source of happiness that consists in what Veblen 
called “invidious comparison,” a paradoxical envy that the libertine has to as-
cribe to the “downtrodden,” “the luckless who must necessarily complete our 
unhappiness by the comparison they furnish between themselves and us.”
21
 The 
whole point of comparison is that it arouses envy and thus the struggle for an 
object whose sheer possession gives its owner the position of an unattainable 
superiority, of someone who lacks nothing. A profound modification of the “in-
vidious comparison” carried out by Sade consists more specifically in a perverse 
20
 Sade, Juliette, p. 7.
21
 Ibid., p. 1161.

81
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
enjoyment of inequality, a cynical appraisal of the misery of the excluded, since 
Sadean libertines are happy only if others are not: “their hardships add a fur-
ther poignancy to my joys, I would not be so happy if I did not know there was 
suffering nearby, and ‘tis from this advantageous comparison half the pleasure 
in life is born.”
22
But right away we must note that Sadean envy is not just a struggle for the pos-
session of a particular good. Envy, according to Sade, is not about craving a 
particular thing in order to satisfy a need, but rather about craving what Lacan 
termed the unattainable object of desire beyond any concrete object. The object 
onto which the envious gaze falls undergoes a veritable transmutation: from a 
mere good that can be replaced by something else, it is elevated to the dignity 
of the irreplaceable, unique Thing, a “thing that is my neighbor’s Thing,”
23
 that 
transforms this neighbour, as Lacan notes, into someone unique, “without a 
pair.” Strictly speaking, Sadean envy is nothing but a desire for the object as 
such. As J.-J. Goux rightly points out, “Sade, through the form of the universal 
substitute for value, is not enjoying this or that particular good. He is enjoying 
the general possibility of enjoyment, … the virtual omnipotence conferred by 
the general equivalent.”
24
 It is Sade’s merit to have elucidated the “irrationality” 
of envy: envy does not aim at the object itself, but, rather, at some unimagina-
ble jouissance, which is supposed to be accessible only to the Other.
25
 What the 
subject cannot tolerate in the neighbour is unbearable evidence of jouissance. 
The paradox of envy hence consists in its being aroused by a mere groundless 
assumption that the “other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or su-
perabundant vitality that the subject perceives as something that he cannot ap-
prehend by means of even the elementary of affective movements.”
26
 When one 
envies one’s fellowman “the possession of goods which would be of no use to 
the person that is envious of them,”
27
 the only way out of this impasse is through 
hatred of the other and this is so precisely because the other is presented as “the 
22
 Ibid., p. 965.
23
 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 83. 
24
 Jean-Joseph Goux, “Calcul des Jouissances,” in Les Jouissances, Paris: Seuil, 1978, p. 180.
25
 See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. A. Sheridan, 
London, Penguin Books, 1979, pp. 115–116. 
26
 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 237. 
27
 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, p. 116.

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jelica šumič riha
image of a completeness closed upon itself,”
28
 an image of a complete satisfac-
tion, thus forcing the subject to face his/her constitutive lack, revealing in this 
way something that threatens the subject at the very core of his/her being.
The Sadism of Pity or Rousseau with Sade
The articulation of jouissance and destruction, the key feature of Sadean fan-
tasy, is the axis around which Sade’s “deconstruction” of Rousseauean pity is 
centred. What is crucial here is not merely Sade’s rejection en bloc of pity, “the 
dullest, most stupid, most futile of all the soul’s impulses,” “chilling to the de-
sires,”
29
 but the fact that it is possible to extract from his arguments for cruelty 
exercised against the other, an unacknowledged sadism of the Rousseauean 
ethics of compassion.
At first glance, Rousseau and Sade seem to be the true antipodes  holding two 
mutually exclusive positions, at least this is how Sade himself perceives their 
relationship. Sade categorically rejects Rousseau’s fraternal filiation, insisting 
on human natural egoism and the natural tendency to oppress one’s fellowmen. 
What is the obvious truth for Rousseau, namely, that one should be merciful 
and compassionate to one’s fellowmen due to our fundamental similarity, is a 
real issue for Sade as one of his libertines clearly states: “does the material or 
moral similarity obtaining between two bodies entail the necessity that one of 
these bodies do good to the other?”
30
 What is more, pity deprives man of one 
of his essential natural attributes: passions that only strive for satisfaction, no 
matter how high the price. Pity, by contrast, seeks to artificially repair the nat-
ural inequality and fundamental disparities. Sade accuses Rousseau of setting 
up a kind of a stand-in for law in nature. Pity, in this view, functions at the level 
of nature itself as a defence against passion and desire, namely that agency that 
– because it knows no natural barrier – is by definition excessive. As an effort to 
domesticate the passions, pity, for Sade, “far from being a virtue, becomes a real 
vice once it leads us to meddle with an inequality prescribed by Nature’s laws.”
31
 
At another level, and more immediately, Sade exposes the repressed egoism of 
28
 Ibid.
29
 Sade, Juliette, p. 888.
30
 Ibid., p. 211.
31
 Ibid., p. 308. 

83
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
Rousseauean pity, revealing in this way a paradoxical relationship to the oth-
er. On the one hand, it is undoubtedly true that pity for Rousseau necessarily 
involves the other, our fellowman, because it cannot even be aroused unless it 
“puts us in the place of him who suffers,”
32
 as Rousseau claims. But such a pity 
is inherently narcissistic, for Rousseau, because we feel the other’s suffering as 
our own; what is thus lost is exactly the suffering of the other: we suffer in our-
selves, not in the other. That is why, at the very moment of compassion for the 
other, we must be indifferent to him/her, since we would only help the suffering 
other because – based on the principle of reciprocity – we expect that in a simi-
lar situation the other would help us. 
Due to its narcissistic nature, pity is ambivalent: it requires both identification 
with the other and the necessity of keeping the suffering of the other at a certain 
distance because pity, as Rousseau conceives of it, is moral only if it remains 
within the limits of self-love. The economy of Rousseauean pity requires a cer-
tain non-identification with the Other: the Other should be kept at a distance, 
not, of course, in order to be recognized and respected in his/her otherness, 
but rather in order to prevent the pleasure that one experiences in pity from 
turning into a destructive jouissance. Rousseau himself is to a certain extent 
aware of the danger of the perversion of pity through its contamination with 
jouissance. Succinctly put, Rousseau wants the good of others, but only if this 
good, as Lacan notes, is “in the image of my own,”
33
 in order to avoid exactly 
what is Sade’s true goal, namely, the evil desired by the subject and by his/her 
fellowman. In so doing, Rousseau systematically ignores the obverse side of the 
specular relationship between fellowmen, a relationship that involves a strug-
gle to the death. Yet precisely this lethal aspect of the imaginary relationship 
is at the centre of Sade’s attention. He refuses the imposed compassion for the 
misfortune of the other because it erects an insurmountable barrier against the 
subject’s jouissance. Thus, when Sade insists, in opposition to Rousseau, that 
watching the misfortune of another is a source of pleasure, he allows us to see 
how Rousseau’s subject inexorably extorts some pleasure from the fantasmatic 
projection into the other’s misfortune. In this respect, it is by no means irrele-
32 
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, New York: Simon and 
Schuster, 1967, p. 201. 
33
 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 187.

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jelica šumič riha
vant that the Rousseauean concept of pity, for which it is necessary to keep the 
Other “at a respectful distance,” is based on the theory of a theatrical spectacle. 
The pleasure to be experienced in such a theatrical staging is not, of course, to 
be confused with a cynical pleasure; it is not, as Rousseau himself warns, the 
pleasure of someone who, when watching a suffering fellowman, says: “You 
may perish for aught I care, nothing can hurt me.”
34
 It is rather a paradoxical 
pleasure that springs from unpleasure, or, as Rousseau states, from the anxi-
ety of someone who is compassionate towards the other, but cannot help him 
because he is condemned to the role of a spectator and thus to passivity. This 
is, of course, a subject who is, in fact, reduced to a gaze before which a terrible 
scene unfolds. This “frozen”, “immobilized” jouissance of the “paralyzed” spec-
tator irrupts in all its atrocity in the example that Rousseau borrows from the fa-
mous B. Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits. 
Rousseau himself uses this scene to illustrate a spontaneous emergence of pity 
through identification with the suffering other. It is 
the pathetic picture of a man, who, with his hands tied up, is obliged to behold 
a beast of prey tear a child from the arms of his mother, and then with his teeth 
grind the tender limbs, and with his claws rend the throbbing entrails of the in-
nocent victim. What horrible emotions must not such a spectator experience at 
the sight of an event which does not personally concern him? What anguish must 
he not suffer at his not being able to assist the fainting mother or the expiring 
infant?
35
A terrifying scene is a trap for the gaze and at the same time a feast for the eye. 
One might say that Rousseau, with the split between the eye and the gaze, stag-
es while obscuring and repressing the division of the subject, which from the 
outset is safe, a split between the proclaimed pity and a silent, surreptitious 
jouissance. The paralysis of the witness that is reduced to the gaze alone only 
intensifies pity. But this subtle choreography of the staged scene serves merely 
to conceal that this is not just about a fantasmatic gaze of the victim him-/her-
self on his/her own issueless situation. For the gaze of the helpless, paralyzed 
witness is but a stand-in for another, absent, impossible gaze, namely the gaze 
34
 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 202. 
35
 Ibid., pp. 201–2. 

85
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
of the mother, who is just as helpless, paralyzed (fainted) witness. This envis-
aging of the (absent) mother’s gaze only exacerbates the horror of the situation, 
thus allowing the irruption of cruelty and sadism in the scene. For what is at 
stake in the Rousseauean subtle mise-en-scène is a staging of the emergence 
not only of pity but also, unexpectedly, of jouissance. The organization of the 
appearance of pity according to the principles of the theatrical spectacle, by 
placing the subject of compassion in the role of a passive spectator, is meant to 
prevent the perversion of pity, the transformation from the narcissistic pleasure 
to enjoyment of the suffering of the other. Yet contrary to his original intention, 
Rousseau’s specular pity surprisingly confronts us with cruelty and sadism as 
an unavoidable supplement of imaginary pity, since it is centred on the gaze of 
a witness who quietly “enjoys” a terrifying scene from a safe distance. 
What we see at work here is a staging of the ambivalent relation of the gaze with 
jouissance, more precisely, a staging of the way in which the gaze tacitly disa-
buses the barrier that the pleasure principle erects to keep jouissance in check. 
Why else would one describe in the smallest details how the wild beast grinds 
“with his teeth … the tender limbs, and with his claws /rends/ the throbbing 
entrails of the innocent,” if not in order to situate it as a stand-in for the moth-
er’s absent gaze? The passivity of the external viewer re-doubles the mother’s 
“passivity”, not, however, to exonerate her – as a witness, the (fainted) mother 
cannot save her child either – but in order to lay blame on her, not of course 
for not saving her child, but for not watching what is happening to the child 
because, by fainting, she has “evacuated” herself from the scene. It lays blame 
on the mother for having “saved” herself, for having deprived us of the spectacle 
of her suffering, which is why her suffering must be represented by someone 
else, the witness. The unacknowledged sadism of pity is based on the fact that 
Rousseau and Sade, oddly enough, agree that both pity and jouissance can only 
be measured by the degree of violence that arouses us, as Sade bluntly states. 
This also explains why the Rousseauean subject of pity, this eminently being the 
subject of pleasure, must repress the jouissance provoked by scenes of suffering. 
Rousseau’s insistence on keeping the other at a distance in order to preserve the 
morality of pity should warn us that Rousseau must stop at a point before our 
pleasure in pity turns into enjoyment of the other’s suffering. And conversely, 
the Sadean subject of jouissance must, in order to be able to sustain himself in 
the constant state of excitement, either seek ever new victims, or intensify their 

86
jelica šumič riha
suffering, ideally, by extending the torture of always the same victim beyond the 
limits of life – to eternity. The first one, i.e. the Rousseauean subject, is happy, 
but at the cost of the renouncement of jouissance, while the other sacrifices for 
the sake of jouissance not only the well-being of the other, but also his/her own 
happiness, since the pursuit of jouissance knows no rest, he has to constantly 
seek new sources of excitement; it is therefore structurally impossible for him to 
ever reach complete satisfaction.
Although in both Rousseau and Sade the demand for satisfaction constitutes 
the horizon of their respective ethics, it is precisely here that we can show a 
difference between them. According to Rousseau, the subject’s satisfaction 
must be sought at the level of desire as a kind of denaturalized need or instinct. 
The socialized subject, for Rousseau, is no longer directly linked to nature and 
is therefore no longer able to unmistakably interpret what the voice of nature 
commands. Hence, despite the fact that needs or instincts can be considered 
to be the inscription of the voice of nature into man’s flesh, this inscription re-
mains, as Rousseau asserts, latent, waiting to be activated. What nature wants 
is no longer directly accessible to civilized man, but has to be supplemented in 
some way, in particular by imagination, which is an ambivalent supplement be-
cause it can lead the subject to the excessiveness of desire and thus to evil. The 
Rousseauean subject could then be considered to be the subject of desire, more 
precisely, the subject of a nescient, ignorant desire that is lost, and therefore 
unable to achieve its satisfaction. 
Sade, by contrast, explores the subject’s satisfaction at the level of the drives 
or, more precisely, at the level of the will to jouissance, which, unlike desire, 
does not hesitate, does not lose itself, but infallibly follows its pre-written pro-
gramme. Thus, in opposition to the Rousseauean subject, who always runs the 
risk of falling into the excessiveness of desire by misinterpreting the voice of na-
ture, the Sadean subject incarnates the sovereign “I know.” There is a tenacity 
and determination in the working of the Sadean subject that is characterized by 
the certainty of someone who is in the possession of knowledge, as if he were 
directly connected to the real: the voice of nature. He knows what the voice of 
nature demands of him, and he devotedly obeys it. This also explains why the 
same experience, the suffering of the other, is linked in Rousseau to the iden-
tification with the other, whereas in Sade, on the contrary, it is linked to the 
disidentification with the other. While for Rousseau it is necessary, in order to 

87
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
achieve one’s own happiness, to experience pity, even if the latter is motivated 
utterly egoistically – the subject is merciful to the other, because he/she fears 
that such misfortune will befall him/her too – the scenes of the misfortune and 
suffering of the other are the source of happiness for the Sadean libertine: “It is 
a thousand times sweeter to say to oneself, casting an eye upon unhappy souls, 
I am not such as they, and therefore I am their better, than merely to say, Joy is 
unto me, but my joy is mine amidst people who are just as happy as I. It is others’ 
hardships which cause us to experience our enjoyments to the full.”
36
 Worse, it 
is necessary to artificially create an inequality, to force the other into powerless-
ness, in order to finally refuse him/her our mercy. Not only is the Sadean subject 
insensitive to the well-being of the other, he is fully dedicated to “doing evil.” 
Nothing could then be more remote from Sade than the Rousseauean principle 
of natural, benevolent reciprocity. But this harming of the other is not merely a 
perversion of the Rousseauean pity, based on identification with the victim. Pity, 
as one of the fundamental ethical virtues, is entirely foreign to the tormentor 
not only because the Sadean libertine takes on the role of a “merciless master,” 
insensitive to the victim’s pleading, but because he is identified with cruelty 
as the opposite of pity. The sadist is exempted from the imaginary relationship 
with the other because he identifies with the insupportable jouissance obtained 
through torture, corporal and moral, mistreatment, and, finally, murder. 
From an Other to the other
According to the most established interpretation, Sade, in contrast to Rousseau, 
who affirms the existence of the Other, albeit in the register of the imaginary, 
because the Other remains “in the image of my own,” totally disregards the 
Other. Indeed, the Sadean law of jouissance, a singular union of cruelty and 
lust, can only bring about an infinite separation and thus the ruin of the Other 
as such: “ Assure yourself that you are absolute sovereign in a world grovelling at 
your feet, that yours is the supreme and unchallengeable right to change, muti-
late, destroy, annihilate any and all the living beings you like.”
37
 The solitude to 
which the will to jouissance condemns the Sadean tormentor clearly indicates 
that there is no room for an Other because the Sadean tormentor-master takes 
up all the room. The elimination of the Other is in fact another name for the 
36
 Sade, Juliette, p. 552. 
37
 Ibid., p. 640.

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jelica šumič riha
elimination of anything that might impede jouissance. As for the victim, he/she 
poses no problem of otherness either: excluded from the symbolic, the victim is 
from the start reduced to the instrumental status of a mute appendix, a passive 
body plugged into the tormentor’s body and destined to be enjoyed, tortured, 
exhausted, and finally thrown away after heavy use. For this reason, the ruin of 
law implied by the exclusion of the Other requires a recourse to nature. Sade’s 
assumption is that no passion, however perverse, is unnatural. Rather, “‘tis 
when we have achieved depravation, insensibility, that Nature begins to yield 
us the key to her secret workings, and… it cannot be pried away from her save 
through outrages.”
38
 By identifying passions with nature, passions are not only 
de-normed, released from the limits that every social and symbolic order impos-
es on them, but are also asserted as legitimate and attainable. As such, Sadean 
passions are therefore identified with instincts that – because they know no ob-
stacle or negation – demand immediate gratification. 
The rehabilitation of jouissance through its naturalization or through the 
“re-naturalization of cruelty”, as Klossowski, one of the most perspicacious 
Sade’s interpreters, proposes to sum up the core of Sade’s programme, is accom-
panied by the liquidation of “the reality of the other whereby the very notion of 
the other is emptied of all content.”
39
 Sadean cruelty consists, however, in the 
following paradox: with the very gesture of destroying the other, my fellow, his/
her reality is all the more asserted: 
Nothing would seem more contradictory in Sade than this break with others 
when the result of the abolition of our duties toward others and their consequent 
exclusion from our sensibility is translated clearly and constantly by acts which, 
because of their violence, need the other – acts which by their very nature re-es-
tablish the reality of the other and of myself.
40
 
Yet Klossowski’s interpretation, despite its doubtless perspicacity, is nonethe-
less ambiguous, as it allows two answers to the question of why the Other can-
not be got rid of. The first answer highlights the failure of Sade’s enterprise be-
cause Sade’s tormentors cannot succeed in completely annihilating the Other, 
38
 Ibid., p. 710. 
39
 Pierre Klossowski, Sade mon prochain, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 129. 
40
 Ibid., pp. 134–135. 

89
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
who keeps returning behind their backs. The gist of the second answer is quite 
the opposite: the indestructibility of the Other is not a sign of a failure, but is, 
actually, constitutive of the Sadean ceaseless destruction. The relentlessness of 
destruction, which, according to Klossowski, leads to a generalized a-patheia, 
may well exclude every affective consideration of the Other, but at the same 
time it inevitably resuscitates the phantom of the Other. In view of this curious 
irreducibility of the Other, we must ask: what Other are we actually dealing with 
in Sade? 
Determining the status of the Other in the economy of the Sadean jouissance is 
one of the most challenging tasks primarily because what characterizes the sad-
ist subjective position is the complete absence of any addressing of the Other. 
The Sadean libertine demands nothing from the Other, nor does he expect the 
Other to repair the injustices that have been inflicted on him. In a radical sense, 
there is, at this level, no Other for the sadist. And, indeed, Sade’s thesis on 
man’s fundamental solitude might lead us to the conclusion that we are dealing 
here with a universe without the Other. The sadist’s solitude is in fact a direct 
consequence of the Sadean main assumption, according to which the right to 
jouissance is absolute. It is a right that is imposed unconditionally, that is to 
say, beyond the limits of intersubjectivity. Thus, what characterizes the sadist, 
the master by definition, is “the delicious realization that nothing and no one 
else matters on earth.”
41
 Since the sadist is guided only by the maxim: “I have 
the right to enjoy your body ...,” the consent given to him by the victim is utterly 
irrelevant. Indeed, if the right to jouissance is absolute, then the sadist does not 
need the Other’s consent in order to comply with the imperative of jouissance. 
At this level, another aspect of the will to jouissance emerges: its cynicism, as 
illustrated by a typically Sadean question: “And of what account can the lives 
of all that trash be… when our pleasures are at stake?”
42
 In this regard, there is, 
indeed, no Other for the Sadean will to jouissance.
A more detailed analysis of the Sadean mechanism for the production of jou-
issance reveals, however, that the status of the Other is actually more ambiva-
lent and problematic than it appears at first. The sadist is namely someone who 
is wholly committed to recovering or resuscitating jouissance, not, of course, 
41
 Sade, Juliette, p. 965.
42
 Ibid., p. 999. 

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jelica šumič riha
his own, but the jouissance of the Other. The sadist is identified here with the 
Other’s will to enjoy, hence his decision to put himself actively into a state of 
passivity: to be the instrument of the jouissance of the Other. At this level, the 
Other is an indispensable presupposition for jouissance to be produced at all. 
The status of Sade’s Other may well be initially problematic – defined as a lack 
of jouissance, this being a conditio sine qua non for the sadist to place himself 
in the service of this Other’s jouissance, because if the Other were “whole”, 
complete, the sadist’s “service” would not have been needed – the Other nev-
ertheless looms over the Sadean universe. How else can we understand   Sade’s 
claim that he can “help” or, rather, serve nature, if not from the assumption that 
civilization has deprived nature of its ability to enjoy? The sadist, who does not 
deal with the whole Other, but with a barred, lacking Other, therefore sees his 
mission in restoring to the Other what it is lacking, namely, jouissance. 
The sadist, therefore, knows that his raison d’être is to serve the Other’s will to 
enjoy. Serving the will to jouissance implies knowledge of the Other’s lack of jou-
issance. The sadist “knows” that the Other wants the restitution of jouissance, 
that remnant or supplement of jouissance that would heal the Other’s lack. This 
jouissance, to which he is devoted, is therefore the jouissance of the Other. He 
“slaves” for it even when he forces the Other, his victim, into producing jouis-
sance. This is because, for the sadist, wrenching from the Other the proof of 
jouissance equals the ontological proof, the proof of the Other’s existence. In 
this respect, the sadist is not unlike God’s knight for whom, as Lacan points out, 
the existence of God is not a given, but a matter of faith;
43
 the sadist also finds 
his raison d’être: to prove that the Other exists, only if he is in some way “cata-
pulted” into the lack of the Other.
For the sadist, the Other exists only through jouissance, which needs to be en-
sured. And even if the Other does not exist, the sadist knows what the Other 
wants: jouissance. Even the absence of the Other is therefore not an obstacle 
for the sadist because his aim is to make the Other exist as the one who enjoys. 
The Sadean endeavour has no objective other than to provide jouissance to the 
Other, in order for the latter to exist, since only if the Other exists can he/she 
enjoy. The conclusion to be drawn from the sadist’s striving for the jouissance of 
the Other, for the production of jouissance in the body of the Other, regardless of 
43
 Jacques Lacan, D’un Autre à l’autre, Paris: Seuil, 2006, pp. 253, 256.

91
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
what the Other wants, regardless of whether the Other even knows that he/she is 
lacking jouissance, is then, in Klossowski words, that the sadist does not expe-
rience jouissance in his own body, but in the body of the Other, or, rather, it is in 
the body of the Other that the sadist experiences the uncanny in his own body.
44
 
Hence the necessity for the sadist to split the agency of the Other: on the one 
hand, the Other is always already there as a “lust-object” to be (mis)treated in 
a variety of ways. But for this manhandling to be possible at all, the presence 
of the Other must be secured. The Other’s Dasein, being-there, is required, and 
if he/she does not give his/her consent to this (mis)treatment, as usually hap-
pens, then he/she should be put in chains, kept there in one way or another 
in order to give proof of his/her availability. The “lust-objects” must be sum-
moned and ready to serve. However, the possibility of enjoying those “pleas-
ure-machines”, as Sade calls them, depends on its inscription into existing 
relationships of power that could secure unrestricted access to those “lust-ob-
jects”
45
 that law makes inaccessible. This is then the Other as the “object” of the 
sadist’s torture, the naive victim, to whom the sadist is completely indifferent, 
even if he cannot be indifferent to the sheer fact of the victim’s existence, to 
his/her availability. The Sadean libertine can hence state bluntly: “I have the 
inalienable right to employ force and any coercive means called for if… he [the 
fellow ] dares for one instant withhold from me what I am fairly entitled to ex-
tract from him.”
46
 Klossowski rightly draws our attention to the affinity between 
the sadist solipsistic jouissance and cruelty: postulated as the unconditional, 
jouissance becomes evil because it is indifferent to the price to be paid by the 
subject and the Other for its attainment. Indifference here coincides with inin-
differentiation. Sade’s torturer aims at no one in particular, but only requires 
ever new, equally insignificant victims. No victim counts more than any other 
because no victim is capable, as J.-A. Miller remarks, of “making a hole in the 
Other.”
47
 Even the victim’s death is insignificant. The only thing that ultimately 
counts for the Sadean libertine is how to ensure the ceaseless repetition of the 
sadist operation.
44
 Klossowski, Sade mon prochain, p. 47.
45
 Sade, Juliette, p. 744
46
 Ibid., p. 64.
47
 Jacques-Alain Miller, 1, 2, 3, 4 (unpublished seminar), 12 December 1984.

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But the sadist’s indifference to his countless victims is revealed in a completely 
different light if the sadist himself is submitted to the imperative of jouissance. 
In effect, the Sadean tormentor cannot be indifferent to the imperative of jouis-
sance, to this other Other, if we may say so, that agency for which the tormentor 
“slaves”, that agency in relation to which he is desubjectivated, transformed 
into an object, making himself “the instrument of the Other’s jouissance.”
48
 The 
sadist knows that by seeking jouissance he complies with the law of nature as 
his knowledge is primarily knowledge of the equivalence between the law of 
jouissance and the law of nature. Contrary to the libertine, who is distinguished 
by knowledge of jouissance, those who are designated to become the sadist’s 
victims, “feeble-minded creatures” whose “insensibility” can only depress their 
tormentor,
49
 are characterized by their ignorance, which is nothing but their 
not wanting to know anything about jouissance. Because the victim, unlike the 
Sadean libertine, does not hear the voice of nature and, consequently, does not 
know that by seeking jouissance he/she actually obeys nature’s command. If 
denial of jouissance is what predestines someone for the status of a victim, this 
is because the victim is split between two kinds of ignorance: ignorance of the 
true nature of the laws that he/she respects, even though he/she ought not re-
spect them because they are nothing but a make-believe, and ignorance of the 
Law he/she ought to respect, yet does not, because he/she does not know it, 
or knows it under the improper guise of a vice, i.e. as a violation of those laws 
that he/she actually obeys. As a result, nature, thwarted and repressed by vir-
tues that stem from educational “prejudices”, takes its revenge: unable to speak 
through the virtuous ignoramus, nature speaks against him/her, turning him/
her into the sadist’s victim.
It suffices to ask: Why does the Sadean victim so readily submit him-/herself to 
torture? And, in fact, we cannot find any scene in Sade where the victim puts up 
any resistance. The crucial point here is that the relationship between the tortur-
er and the victim should not be assimilated to the master-slave relationship of 
the Hegelian type. There is no dialectical relationship in Sade: the victim is not 
a bearer of any knowledge; no teleology is involved here. Rather, the reason for 
the strange passivity of Sadean victims is their virtuousness, which, for Sade, is 
48
 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of Subject and the Dialectics of Desire in the Freudian 
Unconscious” in Écrits, p. 697. 
49
 Sade, Juliette, p. 147.

93
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
nothing but another name for the not-knowing of the equivalence between the 
law of nature and the will to jouissance. The suffering of the Sadean victim is 
therefore not a suffering of a useful work. On the contrary, it is useless in two 
respects: it serves nothing, because it is completely subordinated to the capri-
ciousness of the tormentor’s will; second, the suffering of the Sadean victim will 
not give rise to any knowledge as the tormentor already knows what there is to 
know and it is through recourse to the knowledge of what the voice of nature de-
mands that the sadist usurps the right to be an executioner. It then follows that, 
if the Sadean victim endures suffering, this is because, even before becoming 
a sadist’s victim, he/she had already become a victim of conventions, norms, 
rules, artefacts, in a word, a victim of a mere semblance. By contrast, for the sad-
ist, the victim’s body is libidinally invested because of its passivity, since what 
makes the sadist enjoy is not the victim’s suffering as such, the torture inflicted 
on the victim’s body, but the situating of a fellow as a victim.
Sade is perhaps one of the first thinkers to have shown that there is an original 
connection between jouissance and knowledge. The knowledge of jouissance di-
vides the subject, but, in Sade, the two halves of this division are emancipated, 
autonomized: the victim and the sadist embody the subject’s division as a divi-
sion between knowledge and ignorance of jouissance. The convergence of the 
subject’s division and the division of knowledge / not-knowledge allows us to 
understand why the sadist is not satisfied just with torturing his victims, why, in 
addition, he has to “educate” them. What the sadist wants to “teach” the victim 
is, ultimately, that he/she enjoys, whether he/she knows it or not. The Sadean 
enterprise therefore does not merely have ethical and political implications, but 
also pedagogical implications. A troublesome point for our understanding of 
an enterprise of this kind is this: Being already in the possession of knowledge 
about the law of nature, since the programme of the will to enjoy is always al-
ready mapped out for him, the Sadean pervert is in a radical way incorrigible 
and thus uneducable. And it seems that there is no place for any educating of 
the victims either. To the extent that only the suffering of the victims’ bodies can 
yield satisfaction for the sadist, there is only merciless torture and the final elim-
ination of these “lust-objects,” as Sade calls them. What is remarkable, howev-
er, is that for Sade’s tormentors themselves, the torture inflicted on the Other 
cannot be an end in itself, but serves instead as a means for the transmission 
of knowledge about which the victim does not want to know anything, which is 
why he/she needs to be reminded about it more or less roughly. Looking from 

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jelica šumič riha
the sadist perspective, torture is, in a way, for the victim’s own ‘good’ or benefit. 
There is, however, no complete overlap between knowledge and jouissance in 
Sade. It is not possible to say, for instance, that only the one who knows enjoys. 
The whole point of his pedagogy is rather to show that the victim who does not 
know that he/she enjoys and who does not want to know anything about jouis-
sance, nevertheless enjoys.
50
Thus, to see even more clearly how knowledge and jouissance hinge on each 
other, we have to distinguish two kinds of jouissance in Sade: a discursive jou-
issance, the infamous jouis-sens, enjoyment in meaning, that is produced in the 
very preparations for obtaining jouissance, and most specifically in the detailed 
“reports”, the testimony of this jouissance by libertines themselves.
51
 Sade’s “or-
50
 Let us note in passing that this presupposed knowledge of jouissance applies to all per-
verts, not only to Sadean tormentors. For the pervert, any kind of knowledge is immediate-
ly concerned with the enjoyment of the irremediably mute body. Hence, the pervert knows 
how to obtain jouissance. He knows where to find it, namely, in the body, and he looks for 
that point where the body enjoys, while being indifferent to what the victim wants, even 
if he ends up forcing the victim into jouissance. Yet, as Lacan points out, nothing is more 
uncertain than the jouissance that the sadist strives to achieve. The sadist’s subjective po-
sition is a paradoxical one: on the one hand, he is on the look out for the emergence of jou-
issance in the Other, albeit the latter is literally forced into enjoying. The sadist jouissance 
arises namely in the very split of the victim-subject, in the gap between the pathological 
subject and the subject of desire, a gap that appears when the sadist forces the victim to 
separate him-/herself from everything that constitutes him/her as the subject of pleasure 
and the subject of the symbolic (to respect a given word, the symbolic pact). On the other 
hand, the sadist operation signals that it is exactly that which is supposed to make jouis-
sance possible that is its greatest obstacle. He wants to make the Other “whole”, to heal 
him/her with jouissance, which the Other does not even know he is lacking or, worse, 
does not want. Hence, the sadist cannot restore jouissance to the Other otherwise than by 
disregarding what the Other wants, given that the economy of jouissance that forces the 
sadist to impose his voice upon the Other, thus rendering the latter mute, reveals in this 
way the impossibility of eliminating the voice in the production of jouissance. On the one 
hand, despite the fact that the Other does not want the jouissance imposed on him/her by 
the sadist, he/she nevertheless obeys. On the other hand, however, the sheer submission 
constitutes, for the sadist, proof that jouissance is obtained. In reality, however, the jouis-
sance that the sadist works for is never ensured. But this lack of jouissance is not noticed 
by either the victim or the tormentor, being concealed, as Lacan notes, by the massive 
presence of the voice and the blinding presence of the sadist as a mere instrument of jouis-
sance. Lacan, D’Un Autre à l’autre, pp. 258–259.
51
 Here is how The 120 Days of Sodom presents the function of the report, considered to be a 
pleasure of the head, within the Sadean libidinal body: “after having immured themselves 

95
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
gasm of the head,”
52
 a peculiar kind of “jouis-sens”, far from being foreign to the 
jouissance experienced in the body, being only “of the head” and discourse, is 
rather constitutive of it, precisely because the head, for Sade, is itself one of the 
bodily organs and functions as a material instrument within the libertine ma-
chine. However, the true jouissance at stake in Sade is not that discursive jouis-
sance, important though it may be, but the jouissance of the body that has been 
postulated from the outset as being nondiscoursive, a jouissance that is external 
to discourse, or outside discourse. It is precisely at this jouissance of the mute 
body that the sadist aims. The body’s silent jouissance testifies in return that 
there is something irreducible in jouissance that cannot be translated into the 
signifier. Disconnected from the signifier, immune to the requirements of nor-
malization, this silent jouissance occurs as a kind of condensed remnant that 
does not dissolve in the signifier, as that which cannot be tamed, cannot be do-
mesticated by discourse, and which, as such, has the status of the real. Perhaps 
the best proof of the real status of the mute jouissance is that it is non-localiz-
able; it is a jouissance that is constantly displacing itself as it does not have its 
proper place; hence, it can be said to be either everywhere or nowhere. This 
also explains why the sadist discovers it in the most unexpected and impossible 
places, especially in places where the body suffers. The duality of discursive and 
silent jouissance, with the latter always maintaining primacy, clearly signals 
that Sade’s objective is not a thoughtless quest for the satisfaction of the drives, 
since jouissance produced merely by talking about jouissance, this jouis-sens, 
“enjoyment in meaning”, is used in Sade to signify that the symbolic itself is in 
the service of jouissance.
The primacy of the body’s mute jouissance therefore indicates that Sade is not 
blind to the antinomian relationship between jouissance and the subject. For 
Sade, there is an irreducible gap between the jouissance of the body that “knows” 
jouissance, but cannot speak about it, and the subject of the signifier, who could 
certainly say something about it, but cannot do this because it does not know 
anything about the jouissance of the body. Wholly in line with Lacan’s formula 
of the “cogito of jouissance,” when it comes to the experience of enjoyment, one 
within everything that was best able to satisfy the senses through lust, … the plan was to 
have described to them, in the greatest detail and in due order, every one of debauchery’s 
extravagances, all its divagations, all its ramifications, all its contingencies, all of what is 
termed in libertine language its passions.” Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, p. 218.
52
 Hénaff, Sade. The Invention of the Libertine Body, p. 97.

96
jelica šumič riha
can say at best se jouit, “it enjoys itself,” never “I enjoy.” As Sade’s economy 
of jouissance clearly demonstrates, there is no time for the subject to experi-
ence its division since the subject disappears the moment jouissance occurs or, 
better perhaps, the subject is eliminated in advance. The proof that there is no 
subject of jouissance can be seen in the subjective position of the sadist, who is 
precisely not a subject, but an instrument of the will to jouissance: “the sadist 
himself occupies the place of the object, but without knowing it, to the benefit 
of another, for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic pervert.”
53
 It 
then follows that for the sadist, too, jouissance is incompatible with the status 
of the subject. In effect, when jouissance emerges, there is no (longer) anyone 
there to say something about it. This (self)deleting of the subject is particularly 
dramatic in the case of the sadist, where we see a speaking being reduced to a 
flesh-machine made for coming, a machine made of “a head and balls,” as Sade 
nicely sums it up, where the head itself is one of the organs in the service of 
coming, of intensifying and multiplying the modalities of enjoyment.
How then can the persistence, the insistence of the will to jouissance be ex-
plained if it cannot be grafted onto the subject or onto the Other? The subject, 
in Sade, as we have seen, is reduced to an object, an instrument of the will to 
jouissance, while the Other is at best a problematic assumption, since its exist-
ence must be ensured by the production of jouissance. A number of interpreters 
have already remarked that, in Sade, we are dealing with a variation of the same 
scenario, as all orgies resemble one another. How are we to understand the 
working of the subject to whom nothing can happen but this single repetitious 
adventure, indefinitely? What agency condemns the sadist to such a repetitive 
sameness? It is essential to emphasize here jouissance’s “first time” inscribing 
an indelible trace on the speaking body. To discover a particular mode of jou-
issance is, in effect, something unforgettable for the speaking body, something 
like a “once forever”. It is enough for the speaking body to experience it once, af-
ter which it can never forget it; from now on it can only search for new opportu-
nities for the repetition of the same experience – hence the endless rerun of the 
same scenario. The indelibility of jouissance and, consequently, its capture in 
the mechanism of repetition point to its real status: for this jouissance remains 
impervious to all modification, domestication or re-education. The status of 
such a jouissance remains radically ex-sistent, and the same status is imposed 
53
 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 185.

97
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
on the subject, since jouissance situates the subject outside the law, thereby 
transforming him/her literally into an out-law.
We can see now why the Sadean libertine is presented as the incarnation of the 
compulsion to repetition. To be sure, the Sadean tormentor wants to persevere in 
his being. Setting out from the Spinozean definition according to which “being 
is to persevere in its being,” there is no one who would be more faithful to the 
programme inscribed into his flesh than precisely the pervert – on condition, 
however, that the persevering in one’s being should be understood in terms of a 
fidelity to a particular mode of jouissance. Sade himself insists that the subject 
does not persevere in his/her being such as it is imposed by jouissance out of 
his/her selfish interests, but rather irrespective of his/her best interests. There 
is then something odd about the Sadean perseverance in being because we are 
faced here with a persevering in being that comes at the cost of sacrificing the 
very substance of this persevering. The satisfaction of jouissance undoubtedly 
requires the being, ultimately, a living body, but at the same time it extends 
beyond the limits of the capacity of a living organism. The fidelity to jouissance 
thus inevitably leads to an activity against the preserving of the living substance 
resulting, ultimately, in its destruction. The sadist, therefore, is someone who 
takes on the task of pursuing the satisfaction of the passions, even if he “drops 
dead” in the process. On this point, it could then be said that Sade’s passions 
mask behind their variety a single passion or drive, the death drive. 
 
This jouissance, to which the subject is thus ready to sacrifice everything, even 
his/her living substance, may best be defined as a parasite on the living organ-
ism. One of the key lessons to be drawn from Sade is therefore that the jouis-
sance that the subject is relentlessly chasing necessarily implies a non-adapta-
tion. Jouissance, as a repetition of the demand for satisfaction, incarnates the 
function of a “More!” that knows no boundaries, not even those of the living or-
ganism. This is because, for Sade, the victim’s body, cut into pieces, annihilated, 
and thrown back into the inanimate, maintains its capacity to resist. Hence, this 
compulsion to repetition, inherent to the satisfaction of the passions, a compul-
sion that persists beyond life, even “beyond the bounds of eternity, if eternity 
has any,”
54
 as Sade himself states, is what remains of the will to enjoy in the 
54
 Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, p. 217.

98
jelica šumič riha
subject after the living organism is consumed and decomposed. Paradoxically, 
jouissance appears to be the only mode of immortality accessible to the subject.
Sade thus follows the Enlightenment vitalist materialism that sets out from 
the assumption of an eternal, indestructible life.
55
 With Sade, however, the as-
sumption of an immortal jouissance inevitably leads to the disjunction of life 
and body but with a twist. Life exceeds the body, as the latter is only a tran-
sient, ephemeral form of life. Sade is, in this respect, a Freudian avant la lettre, 
because, in Sade, the immortal jouissance is identified with the death drive, 
meaning that, subjectivated as a crime, it does not satisfy itself with murder, 
but wants, in addition, to accomplish a total annihilation, without remainder. 
Even before Freud, Sade thus shows that jouissance arises as a disruptive de-
mand that threatens the living being by imposing on it a functioning that defies 
the conditions of life. In the same vein, Sade can put forward, in the infamous 
system of Pope Pius VI, the assumption that nature itself desires death and 
total destruction, a death that destroys not only the body, but also what is left 
of the victim’s body that tortures have turned into an inorganic, formless mud-
dle. The Sadean criminal thus wants to hit the Other not only at the level of the 
life of the individual body, he wants to hit the Other in the matter that subsists 
after the accomplishment of the first crime, he wants to eliminate the Other at 
the level of the material it is made of. Sade sets out from the assumption that 
“such dissolution serves nature’s purpose, since it recomposes that which is 
destroyed.” But nature can be even better served by a total destruction because 
it breaks with the eternal cycle of creation-destruction that enslaves nature it-
self: “Murder only takes the first life of the individual whom we strike down; 
we should also seek to take his second life, if we are to be even more useful to 
nature. For nature wants annihilation; it is beyond our capacity to achieve the 
scale of destruction it desires.”
56
55
 In D’Alambert’s Dream, Diderot already formulates the thesis of two lives, the thesis that 
is inverted in Sade, as we know: “Dead, I act and react in mass – the mass of my body, 
the animalcules that form me. Dead, I act and react in molecules.” This means that after 
death, man is alive at the level of molecules. Quoted in Jacques-Alain Miller, “Lacanian Bi-
ology and the Event of the Body,” trans. B. Fulk and J. Jauregui, lacanian ink, No. 18 (Spring 
2001), p. 11. In a similar way, Sade explicitly affirms that there is no death, based on the 
materialist thesis that for matter, being in constant motion, a state of rest is impossible. 
And since matter never rests, bodies cannot die, they can only metamorphose. 
56
 Marquis de Sade, Nouvelle Justine, Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 
1966–1967, Vol. 7, p. 212. 

99
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
The truly great scoundrel, for Sade, is therefore not one who is satisfied in sim-
ply following nature’s example, copying its “foul deeds,” but one that goes be-
yond the mere modification of the forms of matter. The one who aspires to be the 
organ, the executioner of nature’s laws, does not only strive to help nature attain 
its goals: through destruction, to provide nature with the material for its future 
creations, but aims more radically at the liberation of nature from the eternal cy-
cle of destruction-creation that, instead of proving its creative potential, proves 
its impotence, its eternal return of the same. In short, a true Sadean hero strives 
to liberate nature from its need and/or will to create. This almost inconceivable 
idea is strikingly represented by the following wish:
I would like … to find a crime which, even when I had left off doing it, would 
go on having perpetual effect, in such a way that … I would be constantly the 
cause of a particular disorder, and that this disorder might broaden to the point 
where it brought about a corruption so universal or a disturbance so formal that 
even after my life was over I would survive in the everlasting continuation of my 
wickedness.
57
 
This paradoxical position makes it possible for the Sadean libertine to exonerate 
himself from the suffering that he causes: in tormenting the other, the perverse 
libertine fulfils the will of nature, since nature itself desires, seeks, evil. In Sade, 
the evil that permeates the will to jouissance is thus a destructive jouissance, 
inscribed in the very law of nature. The will to enjoyment coincides with the 
will to destruction, since nature can exercise its will only if it wrests itself from 
the “other” nature, that of laws and cycles, which restrains and limits its crea-
tive power. Nature, therefore, cannot “enjoy” otherwise than by wanting evil. 
Nevertheless, it is necessary to distinguish two types of nature’s evil jouissance. 
The first being an evil that nature does not want, as it causes it almost unwilling-
ly, unknowingly. This evil is brought about merely through the eternal cycle of 
creation-corruption-destruction. At this level, nature destroys because it simply 
needs the material for something new or, rather, something other, because at 
this level there is neither death nor a new creation; there are only new combi-
nations from the elements of decomposition. From this involuntary, unknowing 
evil, which is entirely in tune with the tradition of materialist philosophy, an 
evil, which in truth is not one   because nature cannot be held responsible for 
57
 Sade, Juliette, p. 525.

100
jelica šumič riha
the effects of its workings we suffer, it is necessary to distinguish another evil, 
the evil that nature actually wants. This is the evil at the level of the infamous 
second death, a total annihilation, which goes beyond the materialist tradition, 
since the second death is postulated as a condition for the creatio ex nihilo. At 
this level, nature knows what it is doing, indeed, it is identified with a malevo-
lent God who wants evil and does evil. 
To the question of this other instance of the Other that exercises its right to enjoy 
on both the victim and the tormentor, Sade answers: it is nature that manifests 
itself as an imperative voice that demands unconditional obedience. The voice 
of nature being imprinted, as it were, into the flesh itself, one is almost tempted 
to say that it is a demand of the flesh itself, with passions securing the trans-
mission of the voice of nature. The passions are programmed in the body as a 
constant stimulus, which, unlike the needs, is not extinguished with its satisfac-
tion. There is no stopping for the passions. For being excessive, transgressive, 
the sadist passion is nothing but the organ of the will to jouissance. As a con-
stant demand for satisfaction, which must be fulfilled regardless of the cost, the 
passions, albeit they have their seat in the organism, are an agency of a counter-
nature in the organism threatening their very material basis with annihilation. 
It is important to remember that the sadist, in satisfying his passions, does not 
strive for his own jouissance, but sweats instead for nature’s jouissance. From 
the outset, the sadist is submitted to the imperative: Enjoy! In this respect, the 
sadist’s position is a paradoxical one: in relation to the victim, the sadist is po-
sitioned as the one who is in control, in short, as a master; in relation to jouis-
sance, by contrast, he is situated as an instrument or the executor of the will of 
the Other. At best, we could say that the sadist, in relation to the victim, postures 
in the role of the Other, thereby concealing the split between the two figures of 
the Other, in relation to which he situates himself. Or, more exactly, the bound-
less power over the victim conceals that he, this all-powerful tormentor, is ac-
tually a slave of an Other, ultimately, a slave of jouissance itself, which is to be 
engendered in the victim’s body. 
From the outset the relationship between the subject and the Other is posited as 
an asymmetrical, inegalitarian relationship of domination and subordination. 
The perverse libertine is not the enunciating subject of jouissance’s “categori-
cal imperative” but rather the addressee of the commandment coming from the 

101
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
Other, namely, nature. In this respect, the libertine applies the imperative of 
jouissance first to himself: he is the first to hear the commandment of jouissance 
and the first to submit himself to it. Consequently, in defying every submission 
to the law, to the existing institutions and authorities, the Sadean libertine does 
not require sovereignty and autonomy for himself. And, in fact, the idea of   the 
subject’s autonomy is, for Sade, a contractualist illusion since the autonomy of 
free negotiating individuals entering the contract implies the forgetting of the 
true sovereign: nature, whose command de-centres the subject, rendering him/
her non-identical to him-/herself, depending on some heteronomous, extimate 
agency, namely, the will to jouissance. 
With Sade’s distinction between two kinds of laws: the sovereign law, this being 
the law of nature, and the laws-conventions imposed by society, an opposition 
is established between the Other of civilization and the Other of jouissance, this 
being a stand-in for the supreme law, a law that is inevitably in conflict with the 
laws of society. For Sade, the law of nature is a negation of the social law, as it 
commands what the legal-moral laws prohibit: the gratification of the passions. 
Hence, the Other that demands the sacrifice of jouissance, the reining in of the 
passions, must be defied. To this Other of society demanding that the subject re-
fuse to satisfy the passions, the Sadean subject says No! But this Other is an im-
proper, inauthentic Other, usurping the place of the true Other. To this “other” 
Other, which is nature as the embodiment of the will to jouissance, the subject 
cannot say No!; rather, he/she must submit to it. The position of the Sadean sub-
ject is thus characterized by a paradoxical coupling of rebellion and rejection, 
on the one hand, and submission and consent, on the other. Just as the subject’s 
duty is to say No! to the demand imposing the sacrifice of jouissance, no less 
does he/she have the duty to give his/her consent to jouissance, since it is not 
possible, for Sade, to refuse to say Yes! to the will to enjoy. 
This doubling of the agency of the Other should warn us that, with Sade, we are 
not dealing with a free, unbridled satisfaction of the libertine’s passions, de-
spite certain misleading formulations by Sade himself, but with the fulfilment of 
his duty to the Other. From this perspective, the Sadean subject shifts from the 
camp of the traditional Freudian superego, the one that prohibits jouissance, to 
the camp of the Lacanian superego, which commands jouissance; in contrast to 
the neurotic, who considers him-/herself to be lacking, always coming up short 
against the immensity of the superego’s commandment, the libertine, identified 

102
jelica šumič riha
with the instrument of the imperative of jouissance, has no difficulty in fulfilling 
the commandment of jouissance. The paradox of the sadist position is thus one 
where unbridled jouissance is equated with the fulfilment of a duty to the Other. 
Duties, being always some manner of forcing, do not differ according to their 
mode, but rather according to their stakes. Both traditional and Sadean ethics 
are therefore ethics of duty. However, while traditional ethics requires that the 
subject renounce jouissance, Sadean ethics reminds the subject of his/her du-
ties, not to the Other of civilization, but to jouissance. The subject of civilization 
is guilty, in Sade’s eyes, of having renounced jouissance, and if he/she suffers, 
he/she suffers for having given up jouissance, for having disobeyed the will to 
jouissance, raised to the rank of a universal law.
The Institutionalization of the Right to Jouissance
Sade’s despotism of the passions is based on the assumption that whereas the 
civil state represents a tyranny of laws over the passions commanding the sacri-
fice of jouissance and transforming, as a consequence, the enjoying body into a 
desert of jouissance, a reign of naked force, because this is the state that allows 
the satisfaction of the passions. According to today’s most established interpre-
tation, Sade’s idea of the despotism of the passions, which is to be realized at 
the level of the socius, is self-defeating because the apology of the will to jouis-
sance would annihilate the very possibility of the social bond. According to this 
interpretation, then, the whole point of Sade’s criticism of the Enlightenment 
ethics and politics is to denounce the radical incompatibility of the social bond 
and jouissance: to the extent that jouissance isolates and separates, jouis-
sance is the negation of the social bond. Hence, the despotism of the passions 
is to be taken literally: passions enslave, subjugate, demand total submission. 
Jouissance is inherently tyrannical: Enjoy! – regardless of the price you have to 
pay, or, better, regardless of the price the object of your enjoyment has to pay. 
In this respect, Sade’s claim that, when it comes to jouissance, everyone remains 
a “partner of his/her solitude,” is judicious. Setting out from the jouissance of 
the One, Sade inevitably runs against the impossibility of securing access to 
the Other, against an impassable barrier that separates the One from the Other. 
Perhaps it could be said, then, that if the only true Other that the sadist has to 
deal with is ultimately the body, his own body and the body of the victim, this 
is because the body itself appears as a structural obstacle to reaching the Other. 

103
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
As a result, the social bond that is founded on jouissance appears to be a contra-
diction in terms, since jouissance, as Sade conceives it, is the idiot’s autistic jou-
issance, cutting off the subject from the social bond. In contrast to love, which 
is eminently a relationship to the Other, jouissance cannot even be thought of 
in terms of a relationship, but only in terms of substance, more exactly, the sub-
stance of jouissance that implies a certain autonomy of being.
It is true that the sadist cannot obtain jouissance otherwise than by seeking it 
in the body of the Other – in the victim’s tortured body. The Other is here re-
duced to an object, a cog in the libidinal machine. Seen from the perspective of 
autistic jouissance, the Other, to borrow Klossowski’s term, is a phantom rath-
er than a substance. Jouissance is, moreover, indivisible. Nobody can take part 
in my jouissance. Indeed, jouissance excludes every consideration of the Other 
and knows no reciprocity. In Sade’s eyes, to strive for the partner’s jouissance 
means to be submitted to him/her, to become his/her slave. This is because, 
in jouissance, as Sade relentlessly repeats, everyone wants to be the master: 
“here it is that man likes to command, to be obeyed, to surround himself with 
slaves compelled to satisfy him.”
58
 This solitude, to which jouissance condemns 
the subject, is but another name for cynicism, a distinguishing trait of Sade’s 
characters, as illustrated by this rhetorical question: “If we have the right to 
have their throats cut for our interest’s sake, I see no reason why we cannot do 
the same for the sake of our delights.”
59
  It should be noted, however, that the 
cynicism of the Sadean tormentor is actually the cynicism of jouissance itself, 
since the subject can only function as an instrument of the solipsistic will to 
jouissance, ultimately a jouissance seeking satisfaction.
The Sadean libidinal economy is thus based on the antinomy of jouissance and 
the Other. The only jouissance that Sade knows of is the idiot’s solitary jouis-
sance, a jouissance that never relates to the Other, but only to the object. The 
Sadean jouissance is the jouissance of the One that, as such, dissocializes, thus 
rendering every relationship with the Other problematic. Jouissance, therefore, 
not only does not allow access to the Other, but rather breaks with the Other, 
because jouissance that seeks jouissance, ultimately, is only a relationship to 
oneself. What is a way out of this solipsism of jouissance? How can the Other be 
58
 Sade, Yet Another Effort, p. 324. 
59
 Sade, Juliette, p. 999. 

104
jelica šumič riha
“grafted” onto the autistic jouissance? How, then, can a social bond be estab-
lished if the Other does not exist at the level of jouissance? To solve this quanda-
ry, Sade has to resort to the fantasy of the will to jouissance: the Other is the one 
who wants to enjoy and I have to work for this jouissance, I have to turn myself 
into an instrument of the Other’s will to jouissance, the will that demands im-
mediate submission.
Sade’s ambition is therefore to justify jouissance even in that which is the least 
justifiable: the right to jouissance, which not only does not ensure the subject’s 
well-being nor the collective well-being, but functions as that which, by debas-
ing all the traditionally recognized foundations of socialization to a mere sem-
blance, a make-believe, or, as Sade himself says, an illusion, breaks up every 
community. Indeed, only one conclusion can be drawn from the antagonistic 
relationship between jouissance and the social bond: there is not and can be 
no such thing as  a community of jouissance. It then follows that there can be 
no “politics of jouissance” either as it can only bring about the abolition of the 
social bond. But this interpretation – according to which jouissance and the 
social bond are in a radical sense incompatible, mutually exclusive – albeit in 
many respects certainly valid, nevertheless overlooks the fact that Sade must 
presuppose at least a minimum of sociability in order to stage the relationship of 
non-sociability, the violence of domination and slavery, that is required for the 
mere satisfaction of the passions.
This inevitable restitution of sociability is already inscribed in his pedagogical 
and political project. As a matter of fact, the entire society must be organized 
according to jouissance because the autistic jouissance, the jouissance of the 
One, cannot “satisfy” even the sadist himself; in a word, this jouissance, de-
spite the attained satisfaction, is still deficient. For this autism of jouissance, as 
Sade shows very clearly, only exacerbates the demand for the social bond. Sade 
is perhaps one of the first theorists of jouissance to have shown that the only 
conceivable escape from absolute solitude is discourse because it is material-
ized in typical social bonds. How else are we to understand Sade’s unrelenting 
search for the most suitable political form that would realize the despotism of 
the passions, the despotism, to repeat once more, of the autistic jouissance at 
the political level? 

105
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
As has already been noted, what constitutes Sade’s profound originality is his 
having attempted to ground sociability solely in the will to jouissance. There are 
two interrelated issues here: firstly, Sade must demonstrate that jouissance and 
the social bond are not antinomian, and secondly, he must in addition show 
how a social bond that has its basis in jouissance, which is, by definition, in-
egalitarian, ensures social equality. Sade must, in short, solve the paradox of 
the conjunction of equality and inequality. This is only possible if the social 
relationship can be established outside of any reciprocity.  Still, it would be a 
mistake to see in Sade a naïve advocate of a “return to nature”. This is evident 
from Sade’s radical reinterpretation of the relationship between the state of na-
ture and the civil state. Sade does not conceive of the relationship between the 
state of nature and the civil state according to a contractual model, i.e. in terms 
of a mutual exclusion, where the establishment of the social order involves the 
inevitable removal of the natural order. Describing the prehistory of the civil 
state through the metaphor of bestiality is precisely the way in which the theo-
reticians of the social contract foreclose man’s inherent violence, his “inhuman-
ity”, and relegate it to a mythical past that has never been present. In contrast to 
this, Sade places man’s “bestiality” at the centre of his thinking about society. 
The true originality of Sade therefore consists in a vision of a society where the 
civil and natural states coexist. 
How is such a coexistence possible? How can one defend the simultaneous ex-
istence of the constraining laws, the existence of a state oppression, on the one 
hand, and the freedom to act according to one’s own will, according to one’s 
passions, even the most cruel, inhuman, on the other? Two answers are pos-
sible here: just like the Enlightenment philosophers, Sade postulates that the 
state of nature is a state preceding the civil state, yet unlike the Enlightenment, 
the state of nature in Sade, even after the switch of paradigms, does not simply 
disappear, as no law can entirely eradicate passions that are considered to be 
a sort of stand-in for the state of nature within the civil state. According to the 
first answer, passions are then a materialized, condensed remnant of the state 
of nature and as such impermeable to civilization. 
But another answer is also possible whereby the issue is no longer the replace-
ment of one paradigm with another, while allowing the remnants of the state of 
nature to subsist in some kind of enclave within the civil state, but the actual co-
habitation of the two states. Sade explicitly insists on the inseparability of these 

106
jelica šumič riha
two states: there is no state of nature without or outside of civilization; actually, 
it is only against the background of civilization, its “crimes” against human na-
ture, that the will to enjoy finds its proper place. Sade somehow “knows” that 
a return to the state of nature is not possible, which is why he seeks to restore 
the state of nature within the social order. This is because nature is irrevocably 
insufficient, which means that nature needs some “help” in order for its will to 
be fulfilled. Sade hence strives for a civil state whose sole goal would be to pro-
vide the means for the maximal satisfaction of the passions. Consequently, the 
relationship between the state of nature and the civil state, as Sade conceives of 
it, cannot be one of an opposition or a dialectical Aufhebung, but rather a kind of 
a perverse alliance, where the state of nature, in order to subsist, must be grafted 
onto the civil state. In fact, what we see at work in Sade is the civil state as the 
continuation of the state of nature by other means, that is, by exploiting the 
already existing non-egalitarian social order. In seeking to realize the state of 
nature within the civil state, Sade’s politics of jouissance activates exactly those 
mechanisms that work towards the foreclosure of the state of nature from soci-
ety. This means that nature, in Sade, is not simply outside society and precedes 
it; rather, it necessitates society and civilization as its pre-condition. Thus, Sade 
inverts the relation between “before” and “after”: nature is postulated as (logi-
cally) preceding society as an origin, yet an origin that is lost forever and there-
fore can only return in a “dissimulated” guise in reality, that is, in the civil state, 
for instance, through discontents in civilization, never as such. 
There are, however, two crucial issues that call into question the possibility of 
the Sadean despotism of the passions in so far as the latter requires the institu-
tionalization of the state of nature within the civil state: namely, the coexistence 
of equality and inequality, or the concept of equality that excludes reciprocity 
by promoting the universalization of the right to jouissance, that is, a univer-
salization of that which, by being what is most particular to everyone, evades 
the universal law. One of the major difficulties in arriving at an understanding 
of such an endeavour is undoubtedly the convergence of freedom and duty, the 
right to enjoy assigned to everyone, and at the same time everyone’s equal un-
conditional submission to this right. It is sufficient to have a closer look at Sade’s 
fantasy of the right to jouissance, the right to use any part of the Other’s body to 
obtain jouissance, to realize how the unbridled satisfaction of the passions is far 
from free and anarchic. Indeed, nothing could be more alien to the sadist than 
the idea that he is the master because the Other does not exist. The paradox of 

107
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
the sadist position, as has already been remarked, is that the inexistence of the 
Other is no obstacle for the sadist to be submitted to the will to jouissance. For 
the sadist, the will to enjoy persists, even though the Other does not exist. The 
sadist sees himself as one called on to restore the jouissance to the Other, and 
that, paradoxically, despite the fact that the Other does not exist.  The autonomy 
of the individual is therefore excluded from the outset because the autonomous 
individual can either refuse to give his/her consent to the will to enjoy, or reject 
the role of the victim, which, for Sade, is unthinkable. Because the whole point 
of his fantasy is precisely that one cannot say No! to the will to jouissance, one 
can only say Yes! to it, if not willingly, then by force. And vice versa, for the sad-
ist the victim’s No! to the will to jouissance is proof that the victim cannot enjoy 
and that he/she should be taught how to enjoy. Hence, the sadist takes on this 
task of making the Other enjoy. For the realization of the Sadean enterprise it is 
therefore essential that there are mechanisms and institutions that render this 
possible – and that at the level of the whole society. 
Once again, the general question of what constitutes the specifically Sadean 
libertine utopia of a radically different “elsewhere” must be raised. It certainly 
has to be admitted that the model for society or, rather, countersociety, cannot 
be an association of libertines, “the Sodality of the Friends of Crime,” as Sade 
himself calls it, a secret society within society that respects the regime in power. 
For the paradox of a society destined to the implementation of the generalized 
right to jouissance cannot be carried out in private clubs, through the installa-
tion of a subversive countersociety in the pockets of existing society, pockets of 
debauchery that may well exist within a given order. Sade is namely not inter-
ested in a relationship of domination at the level of “privacy”, which in no way 
threatens the existing social order or its institutions. For a countersociety estab-
lished within the limits of a private club does not aspire to change the general 
structures of society but only to make use of them. What Sade aims at is rather 
the universalization of the will to jouissance at the social level, in short, a utopia 
of a world without rules, which explains the invocation of a natural state, a uto-
pia that can only result in the collapse of all institutions of that order. The goal, 
for Sade, is nothing less than the realization of the law of jouissance at the level 
of the socius, that is to say, a radical transformation of the socius, and not just 
the search for shelters within the existing institutions, pockets that are more or 
less predetermined for harbouring the libidinal excesses that threaten the social 
body with dissolution. 

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The establishment of such a social and political-legal order in which the excess 
becomes the law thus necessitates a shift from the club to the state. For the re-
alization of the despotism of the passions in the domain of politics requires the 
existence of society and its institutions, ultimately, the existence of the state’s 
oppressive apparatuses whose function is to ensure that everyone, the victims 
in particular, complies with the Sadean principal maxim: “I have the right to 
enjoy your body...”. The Sadean tormentor must have a legally warranted right 
to satisfy his passions, a certainty that he can impose on his victim the status 
of the object. Hence, if “there is no such thing as a valid refusal whereby one 
individual would deny his pleasure to another,”
60
 this is because “the slightest 
refusal or recalcitrance will be instantly and arbitrarily punished by the injured 
party.”
61
 Lacan is one of the first to have emphasized the union of universal-
ization and forcing: “Such is the rule [I have the right to enjoy your body ] to 
which everyone’s will would be submitted, assuming a society were to forcibly 
implement the rule.”
62
 For nothing is less questionable for a libertine than the 
conviction that the state itself guarantees to him the right to subordinate an-
yone to his whims.
 
Or, as Sade himself states, “lust, being a product of those 
penchants [inspired by Nature ], is not to be stifled or legislated against, but 
that it is, rather, a matter of arranging for the means whereby passion may be 
satisfied in peace.”
63
 
One of the key stakes in Sade’s project for the realization of the law of nature in 
society is therefore the replacement of the existing positive laws with institu-
tions that require a minimum of laws.
64
 In order to serve their purpose, that is, to 
ensure access to the jouissance for which the sadist “slaves”, the jouissance of 
the body, these institutions must be primarily institutions of victimization. But 
precisely for that reason Sade is faced with the following problem: Which insti-
tutional form corresponds to the realization of the law of nature in society, that 
60
 Sade, Juliette, p. 420.
61
 Sade, Yet Another Effort, p. 317. 
62
 Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” p. 648. 
63
 Sade, Yet Another Effort, p. 313. 
64
 Sade rejects laws because the system of rights and duties, as established by laws, limits 
the free satisfaction of the passions. As the embodiment of perpetual movement, institu-
tions, for Sade, function as the operator of the articulation of political freedom and the 
passions. And to the extent that freedom for Sade is equated with permanent rebellion, 
only institutions can provide the material conditions for obtaining jouissance and models 
for action.

109
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
is, the law of jouissance, this being, for Sade, the highest and ultimately the only 
legitimate law? That Sade does not provide us with an unambiguous answer to 
this question is already evident from the fact that he offers three models for the 
institutionalization of the despotism of the passions: political despotism, “stat-
ist communism”, and a “libertine republic”. All three Sadean models for society 
have the same goal: to secure the rule of the passions through laws that impose 
a generalized corruption of the people and, therefore, a generalized libertinage. 
At first sight, it would seem that political despotism alone is capable of organ-
izing society according to the law of jouissance. The commandment: Enjoy! 
implies limitless power over the objects of jouissance and, because of its in-
herent inegalitarianism, it also facilitates the realization of political despotism. 
However, although debauchery, which is, as such, enslaving, appears to be a 
natural ally of the despotic power, we are dealing here with an instrumental, 
external, and thus parasitic relationship of the despotism of the passions to 
political despotism. Stated differently, If politics begins with the establishment 
of relations between free and equal individuals, despotism is confined to the 
private relationship between master and slave. It then follows that political des-
potism, although it is founded on the relationship of command-subordination, 
cannot be an appropriate realization of the despotism of the passions because 
political despotism is, strictly speaking,  not politics.
Sade’s second model of the political regime transposing the despotism of the 
passions to society is what could be termed “statist communism”. In contrast 
to political despotism, the main stake in this regime is the equality of all. By 
shifting the focus from despotism to egalitarianism, a radical mutation occurs 
in the relationship between the passions and the law. Equality in this regime 
cannot be ensured in any other way than by the total transformation of hu-
man nature, ultimately by the complete eradication of the passions. The Sadean 
“communism of goods” and the absence of the oppressive class are possible 
only through the establishment of an all-powerful, totalitarian state that can 
function only by manipulating the satisfaction of the passions, ultimately by 
exploiting the will to jouissance. The ruse of the totalitarian state à la Sade 
consists in the abusing the passions for the realization of social egalitarian-
ism. Here, the libidinal economy has been mobilized to attain the maximum of 
equality and the minimum of political despotism – but at the cost of the com-
plete loss of libidinal freedom.

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Yet neither “state egalitarianism”, which implements equality, but at the price 
of the eradication of the passions, nor political despotism, which preserves des-
potism but sacrifices equality, ensures the integral transposition of the passions 
into politics. The solution to the quandary of the despotism of the passions, 
the conjunction of equality and inequality, of freedom and submission, offered 
by the “republican” Sade requires a strict separation between the despotism of 
the passions, which complies with the law of nature, and political despotism. 
The advantage of the third solution – in which the despotism of the passions 
requires a republic, not a tyranny – can be seen in the fact that it is no longer 
founded on an external, instrumental relationship to the despotism of the pas-
sions, but rather on the relationship of a mutual conditioning. If political anar-
chy or a “libertine republic” alone provides, according to Sade, the framework 
in which every citizen is a tyrant, then the institutionalization of the right to 
jouissance is a pre-condition for the survival of the republic itself. Only on the 
condition that the republic complies with the principle ensuring “the perpetual 
immoral subversion of the established order”
65
 can it be considered to be the 
political form that enables the uninterrupted circulation of the passions. 
Sade rejects political despotism because the despot usurps the despotism of 
others. The tyrant appropriates for himself the libidinal charge inherent in do-
ing evil, something that belongs, according to Sade, to all. The “republic of jou-
issance” would then be a model for collective participation in libertinism in a 
society that is thoroughly contaminated with debauchery, for an evil that would 
inundate the whole society. What is the basis of this short-circuiting republi-
canism, equality, and freedom, on the one hand, with the despotism of jouis-
sance, on the other? What is important about Sade’s “libertine republic”, which 
does not exclude oppression, is its paradoxical character of being based on two 
mutually exclusive principles: on republican equality and freedom, and, at the 
same time, on the despotic law of nature, that is, on equality and inequality. 
Nevertheless, this does not mean that a community based on both principles is 
split between masters and slaves. On the contrary, Sade’s libertine republic is a 
paradoxical community of masters alone. 
The crucial question then is obviously: How can the requirements of the despot-
ism of jouissance be fulfilled in a community of masters? As we have seen, only 
65
 Sade, Yet Another Effort, p. 313. 

111
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
the law of nature can legitimize everyone’s right to jouissance over everyone. 
Despotism, imposed on everyone by the law of nature, cannot, of course, be 
grounded in reciprocity, which is, for Sade, an illusion anyway, but in taking 
turns, in alternation, ultimately, in revenge, as follows from the famous formu-
lation in the Histoire de Juliette: “Pray avail me of that part of your body which is 
capable of giving me a moment’s satisfaction, and, if you are so inclined, amuse 
yourself with whatever part of mine may be agreeable to you.”
66
 For Sade, only 
the principle of retaliation can ensure both the exercise of freedom and equal-
ity for all and the despotism of the passions. The difficulty here is that Sade’s 
politics of jouissance is confronted with two incompatible requirements: on the 
one hand, Sade defends absolute freedom for everyone, the right of everyone to 
enjoy, that is, the right to submit anyone to his/her pursuit of jouissance, but on 
the other, no less decisively, he demands the complete submission of everyone 
to the imperative of jouissance. 
So how can freedom be articulated with the law of nature? Only if every free 
being can be submitted to the jouissance of another free being. Everyone has 
the same duty to be subjected to the supreme law of nature. The equality of all 
means equality before nature, which is an equality on the basis of complete 
indifference. For Sade, everyone is freed from the laws of the state, all the arte-
facts and conventions that impede the passions or domesticate the drives. But, 
at the same time, Sade equally insists that there is no freedom in relation to the 
supreme law, the law of nature. Man is not first free and then submitted to the 
law of nature; rather, it is the law of nature that enables the subject to liberate 
him-/herself from the rule of law. Hence, if the subject resists the law, this is not 
in the name of some inalienable natural right that constitutes his/her autonomy. 
Rather, the will to jouissance alone grants the subject the right to defy human 
laws, not, of course, in order to allow the subject to enforce his/her own will, 
but to implement the law of nature. From the very beginning, therefore, Sade 
clearly establishes an asymmetry between the imperative of jouissance and the 
subject. The subject is never the enunciator of the imperative of jouissance; he/
she can only be its addressee and docile subordinate. The Other, this being for 
Sade nature and its law as an unconditional command, has already deprived the 
subject of the right to freely make use of him-/herself. Sade therefore does not 
acknowledge any natural, inalienable right, say, to make use of one’s own body. 
66
 Sade, Juliette, p. 108. 

112
jelica šumič riha
The law of nature has submitted to itself the subject from the outset – without 
the subject’s consent. That is why the exercise of the will to enjoy is not a right, 
but a duty.
The solution to this deadlock is only conceivable once we realize that the right 
to jouissance is the jouissance’s right to satisfaction. At the level of society, how-
ever, this implies the duty to jouissance, which has to be generalized and ex-
tended to the whole society. It is obvious therefore why jouissance, for Sade, 
is not something private, but public. Indeed, Sade demands nothing less than 
that the state and its apparatuses of repression impose jouissance as everyone’s 
obligation. Sade seeks to solve what at first glance appears to be an unsolvable 
problem: the coexistence of equality and inequality, or the cohabitation of the 
despotism of the passions, which excludes reciprocity, and the universalization 
of the right to jouissance, with the institutionalized universal prostitution in so 
far as the imperative of jouissance is indiscriminately indifferent to men and 
women, as it requires of both “the most absolute subordination.” 
What, then, is equality as Sade conceives of it? According to Sade, men have the 
right – this right is granted to them by the law of nature, the law of passion – 
to establish such institutions and adopt such laws that force women to submit 
themselves to any man, regardless of their rank. But the same right is granted 
to women too, as Sade explicitly states, “I would have them accorded the enjoy-
ment of all sexes and, as in the case of men, the enjoyment of all parts of the 
body; and under the special clause … guaranteeing them a similar freedom to 
enjoy all they deem worthy of satisfying them.”
67
 Not in the name of reciproci-
ty, but in the name of the imperative of jouissance, which applies to both men 
and women. Equality is thus possible only at the level of the equality of the 
jouissance’s unconditional demand for satisfaction, which subjugates men and 
women equally. The Sadean universalized prostitution should then be viewed 
as an inevitable consequence of the law of jouissance, which dispossesses both 
men and women of their right to freely make use of their own bodies. By sub-
mitting their bodies to the imperative of passion, by confiscating their bodies, 
as it were, the law of Sadean nature prescribes the compulsory surrendering of 
one’s own body to anyone and to everyone, excluding them from any form of 
subjectivity. With the institution of the generalized jus fruendi, the right of use, 
67
 Sade, Yet Another Effort, p. 321. 

113
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
there is no possible recourse to the principle of habeas corpus. It then comes as 
no surprise that the principle: your body is yours alone, establishing the body 
itself as the ultimate property, has no place in the libertine universe because the 
Sadean body, instead of belonging to the subject of rights, a form that submits 
use to the order of rights, belongs to the passions or the drives that entail the 
elimination of subjectivity. 
It then follows that the idea of a jouissance that would be mine, in a word, my 
exclusive “property, or “possession”, is, for Sade, simply inconceivable. Rather, 
jouissance and possession constitute, for him, an absolute contradiction. Only 
property can be exclusive, but not jouissance, because the body as the object 
of jouissance belongs to no one or, which amounts to the same, it belongs to 
anyone, hence, to everyone. All bodies are from the beginning anonymous and, 
as such, available. Hence, the best way to destroy the exclusive exchange in 
matters of jouissance is to make it total and indiscriminate. Following Sade, 
we thus inevitably stumble on the antinomy between the subject and the body. 
The Sadean communism of jouissance involves the working of a flesh-machine, 
where the group of multiple hands, mouths, and genitals constitutes a single 
body, a group-body, as it were, yet without the subject. The socialization of jou-
issance such as Sade proposes thus entails that both the victim and the sadist 
offer their bodies for the transformation that must bring about the institution of 
the despotism of the passions at the level of society. In the most radical sense, 
the body does not belong to the subject. There is then nothing that could be 
called “my body”. My body belongs to me as much as it belongs to anyone else, 
because the body, as such, is an object of the passions or the drives. One might 
say: I have the freedom to make use of the body of the other, but not my own 
body. Someone else is free to make use of my body. 
If Sade is right to claim that he is not the owner of the Other’s body, this is be-
cause the relationship of ownership is eminently inegalitarian. Hence, the rela-
tionship between the victim and the torturer is not the relation of an owner to 
his/her own thing, but a relationship that implies the role reversal. “‘I have the 
right to enjoy your body,’” anyone can say to me,” or “Pray avail me of that part 
of your body which is capable of giving me a moment’s satisfaction, and, if you 
are so inclined, amuse yourself with whatever part of mine may be agreeable to 
you,” in both cases we are dealing with a reversal of roles. The Sadean discourse 

114
jelica šumič riha
is a discourse of freedom that promises to enjoy the body of the Other, yet at the 
same time it acknowledges the Other’s right to retaliate. 
Discontent in Jouissance
Sade’s despotism of the passions sets out from the assumption that the socius 
can be organized according to jouissance. What is this assumption based on? 
Civilization, which, for Sade, is nothing but a defence against jouissance, is to 
be blamed because the subject incarnates a lack of jouissance. Sade is convinced 
that if the subject were to be freed from the demands of civilization, the subject 
would re-discover his/her full disposition of the drives. Sade sees civilization as 
devastating, ravaging the body of jouissance, and believes that the removal of 
the obstacles of civilization would restore jouissance to the body. According to 
Sade, the only obstacle to jouissance, at the level of both the individual and the 
social body, is the social or state repression exercised through their institutions 
and laws. Sade believes that the removal of these artificial barriers would open 
the access to jouissance. In brief, he is convinced that it is possible to treat the 
symptoms of civilization by removing the repression of jouissance through the 
subversion of the laws of civilization. Ultimately, we could say that the Other, to 
whom jouissance should be restored, is the body itself, as it was the body that 
was initially robbed of jouissance. Sade, therefore, seeks to resuscitate in this 
mortified body the bit of jouissance that has survived the devastation brought 
about by civilization. 
But, as we have seen, Sade’s solution is not simply to replace the state of nature 
with the civil state; he rather seeks to resuscitate the remainder of jouissance 
within the civil state, using the arsenal of civilization itself (prohibitions, law, co-
ercion, institutions, etc.). For despite all the emphasis on the primacy of nature 
with the passions, as the voice of nature engraved into our flesh, Sade knows, in 
a way anticipating Lacan, that the body, which is supposed to be enjoying, has 
nothing natural about it, rather it is a body that is moulded by civilization. This 
is not an enjoying body, but a body drained of jouissance, a body that is trans-
formed into a desert of jouissance. From the logic of the Sadean argumentation 
it nevertheless follows that jouissance cannot be achieved by merely removing 
civilization; it would be more appropriate to say that the Sadean jouissance is 
paradoxical as it is indissolubly, one could say “perversely”, linked to civiliza-
tion. Hence, far from dealing with a natural jouissance, we are dealing instead 

115
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
with a disenculturated jouissance
68
 that is obtained through the violation of civ-
ilization’s norms and prohibitions. Or, stated differently, civilization, according 
to Sade, may well be ruinous for the body, but precisely for that reason it enables 
a new kind of jouissance, a jouissance that springs from transgression. 
Hence, Sade is not blind to the fact that the body, precisely as separated from 
jouissance, is capable of some other, supplementary, yet destructive jouissance. 
On the one hand, Sade undoubtedly knows that it is actually the signifier – as an 
agency designed to inflict harm on the body and its jouissance – a condition for 
another jouissance, an excessive and thus lethal jouissance. On the other hand, 
however, he still believes that the jouissance of the body is actually accessible; 
in a word, he does not realize that this supposedly primary jouissance, this im-
perative of nature is in itself an artefact, an illusion that allows the subject to 
defend him-/herself against the devastation in his/her body caused by the sig-
nifier. As a result, he does not see that, in a radical sense, there is no jouissance 
but in civilization. 
Sade’s ingenuity therefore consists in his revealing the body as a stake in a strug-
gle between civilization and jouissance. From Sade’s elaboration of the perverse 
jouissance, the dividing line is clearly drawn between the body of civilization –  
this being a unified, whole body, yet stripped of jouissance and therefore a dead 
body – and the body of the drives, which is alive yet fragmented by the partial 
drives that are fighting for it. Therefore, there can be no organic unity of the 
Sadean body; instead of with a unified, whole body, we are dealing with a cut-up 
body, characterized by the mechanical montage assembling parts of the bodies 
of both tormentors and victims into a single body-machine whose sole purpose 
is to manufacture enjoyment. The fragmentation of the body is actually already 
68
 On this point we depart from Marie Jaanus’s otherwise inspiring interpretations of Sade. 
According to Jaanus, “For Sade there was only a body of the instincts; for him there was 
no body of the drives. He understood the law of the pleasure principle and of discharge, 
but he knew nothing about the impossible and unobtainable psychic object of the drive. 
Instead he tried to realize and enact the various strata of sexuality within the confines 
of the flesh.” As a result and taking coprophagy as a drastic example of the regression 
of the drive back into instinct, “Sade’s pervert, rather than accepting the fundamental 
objectlessness of the drive, seeks to fill in the lack, uncovered in the erogenous zone of the 
mouth, with a real object.” See, Marie Jaanus, “The Démontage of the Drive, in Reading 
Seminars I and II, Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, Marie Jaanus (eds.), Albany: SUNY Press 
1996, pp. 135 and 124. 

116
jelica šumič riha
implied by Sade’s principal maxim: I have the right to any part of your body, 
and the other has the equal right to take any part of my body. That the body 
in Sade is presented as a battlefield of the drives is also evident from the fact 
that the perverse libertine is not interested in the body as such, but rather in 
parts of the body, cutting up the victim’s body in order to focus on those parts 
of the body that are to be enjoyed in torture (beautiful eyes, beautiful mouth, 
beautiful breasts, etc.). What this body – which could be termed the body of 
jouissance, because it is partitioned between the drives, each of them striving 
for its particular satisfaction – aims at is certainly not its self-preservation. If 
anyone then Sade convincingly shows that the enjoying body is a body split 
between self-preservation and self-destruction. In the perverse fragmentation 
of the body we can therefore see one of the most stunning effects of the paradox 
of jouissance: jouissance certainly clings to life, but to life that in a sense is lit-
erally beyond life, beyond the living body, because in striving for satisfaction, 
this body of jouissance passes over the barriers imposed by the self-preservation 
of the body-organism. For the opposition between self-preservation and self-de-
struction corresponds to the division of the body between the body of pleasure –  
which knows what needs to be done to preserve itself – and the body of jouis-
sance, the libidinal body – a “derailed”, erratic body whose particular parts are 
emancipated and could therefore become organs of jouissance – which seeks 
satisfaction, regardless of the price paid by the organism. From this perspective, 
the main stake in the Sadean pedagogical-political project can be described as 
an attempt to teach the victim that he/she has two bodies, a body of pleasure 
and a body of jouissance. Hence, libertine orgies can be viewed as laboratory 
experiments where a victim sacrifices, for the sake of jouissance, his/her body 
of pleasure, that body which is only expected to respond to the will to jouissance 
with its presence. 
One of the main conclusions to be drawn from Sade is undoubtedly that there 
is a jouissance of the body, but only as the jouissance of the fragmented body, 
ultimately, the jouissance of organs. Thus, as opposed to the Deleuzian and 
Guattarian “body without organs,” we should rather speak of organs without 
the body as a function of unification, where the scattered organs, not unlike 
membra dijecta, resist any kind of organic integration of imaginary unification. 
Sade’s ultimate objective is therefore the realization of the despotism of the 
passions at the level of society, yet a society that is transformed into a single, 
gigantic “bedroom”, where an anonymous social body would become the stage 

117
sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
of the acephalic jouissance. In this light, it is not surprising that the only lesson 
that can actually be drawn from Sade is that jouissance is in and of itself evil. 
But Sade himself suppresses this lesson by assigning the will to jouissance to 
nature and, in so doing, he exonerates his sadist libertines, exculpates them for 
the wrong done to the victims’ bodies. We could therefore agree with Monique 
David-Ménard when she detects in nature Sade’s symptom.
69
 If nature is a symp-
tom, or, better perhaps, a protective screen conferring legitimacy on all the fan-
tasies of transgression, it is because Sade, a great theorist and practitioner of 
jouissance, flees from the evil that is inherent in jouissance when he claims that 
evil and destructiveness are inscribed into eternal nature. 
This is also the reason why Sade – despite the fact that he has extended the 
domain of traditional ethics to an until then inconceivable dimension beyond 
pleasure – remains, just like traditional ethics, blind to the dimension that 
Lacan calls the all-powerfulness of desire. It could in effect be said that Sade 
finds himself defeated by desire. Not, of course, like the subject of traditional 
ethics, who is protected against the omnipotence of desire by the prohibition 
that enables him/her to assign the enunciation of desire to the Other. Yet Sade 
cannot be said to have recognized either desire in “the unconscious that knows 
nothing about what supports its own enunciation.”
70
 Sade is blind to the desire 
of the Other because his work, as Lacan judiciously remarks, “never presents us 
with a successful seduction … in which the victim, even if she were in last gasp, 
would consent to her tormentor’s intention, or even join his side in the fervor of 
her consent.”
71
 But he is equally blind to his own desire. For Sade, who in this re-
spect follows Saint Paul, the omnipotence of desire is supported by prohibition 
or, rather, by the constant violation thereof. Sade namely places an equation 
between desire and transgression and one can say that the Sadean desire is a 
desire for transgression. At the same time, the Sadean subject is unwilling to 
assume this desire for transgression, this desire for destruction, in a word, this 
criminal desire, but attributes it instead to the Other, to nature. Ultimately, one 
might say that desire – faced with a more powerful rival, i.e. the unyielding will 
to jouissance – fades away in Sade. 
69
 David-Ménard, Les constructions de l’universel, p. 64. 
70
 Jacques Lacan, “Conférences à Bruxelles”, Quarto, No. 50, 1992, p. 12. 
71 
Lacan, “Kant with Sade”, p. 665. 

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In Sade’s despotism of the passions we could then see something like an im-
petuous reconciliation between the subject and jouissance. Sade denounces 
the false figures of the Other, the semblances of the Other (the father, God, the 
law, the contract, etc.) for rendering the subject unhappy. And his aim is to at-
tain a state where the subject will stop complaining about the insufficiency or 
inadequacy of his/her jouissance. For someone who takes seriously the right 
to jouissance, the jouissance’s right to satisfaction, for someone who wants to 
confront this will to jouissance, such a complaint is meaningless in any case, 
since there is no one to whom one could complain, no fatherly figure that could 
accept the complaint and respond to it. Indeed,  for someone who serves the will 
to jouissance, such a complaint is pointless for two reasons: not only is there no 
one to whom the complaint could be addressed, what is worse, there is no one 
who could complain, since the Sadean subject is nothing but an instrument of 
the will to jouissance. The instrumentalization of the sadist subject thus indi-
cates that the reconciliation with jouissance leads to a radical mutation of the 
subject. When jouissance enters the stage, the subject fades away, dissolves in a 
“becoming it (ça).”
72
 The occurrence of jouissance is precisely the moment when 
there is no longer anyone who could say “I”. And vice versa, the disappearance 
of the subject into “I have become it,” or, more exactly, the subject’s destitution 
is indeed the solution to the impasse, which consists in the impossibility of the 
subjectivation of jouissance. Hence, instead of the expected subjectivation of 
jouissance or the drive, we are dealing here with what Miller termed “the sub-
ject’s destitution by the drive.”
73
 
This radical antinomy between subjectivation and destitution explains why the 
Sadean subject cannot be the subject of the libertine operation, but can only be 
an object, an instrument of the Other. This would make it possible to see the cru-
elty, the mercilessness of the Sadean tormentor, in a different light. The sadist is 
not someone who becomes “I from it,” an agency of the subjectivation of jouis-
sance, but an “it that emerges from the I.”
74
 What is at stake in the instrumental-
ization of the sadist who lives and slaves for jouissance is indeed the destitution 
of the subject by jouissance. However, there is a disturbing, redundant surplus 
in the sadist’s manner of serving the will of the Other that should remind us 
72
 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Donc, je suis ça”, La Cause Freudienne, No. 27, p. 16.
73
 Ibid.
74
 Ibid., p. 15.

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sadean politics or a tyranny of jouissance
that, even for the sadist, that is, for the subject who is driven – regarding jouis-
sance – to the extreme limits of what is thinkable, that even for him a reconcil-
iation with jouissance, his giving consent to being nothing but the jouissance’s 
plaything, is something insufferable, which is why he has to bring into play the 
Other’s will to jouissance. 
Even for Sade, then, the encounter with jouissance as a demand that no longer 
asks anything from anyone, a demand that no longer needs the Other in order 
to persevere in its “More!”, is, in the final analysis, “impossible”, unbearable. 
Sade, in effect, renders visible the drives’ indifference to the object – because, 
for the drives, every object is “good”, suitable, since the object is, as such, irrel-
evant, because what the drives strive for is their satisfaction at any cost, rather 
than the object itself in its particularity. Thus, as J.-A. Miller points out, “sat-
isfaction as object” is the “proper” object of the drives.
75
 On the other hand, 
however, Sade is unable to entirely sustain the acephalic character of the drives, 
and must therefore exalt the will to jouissance through the Other, because, even 
in Sade, the will to jouissance is not acknowledged in and for itself, but is iden-
tified instead with the Supreme-Being-in-Evil. It is in and through the passions 
or the drives that nature lets the speaking body hear its true voice. It is precisely 
through this proof from nature that the body is submitted to the imperative of 
jouissance as nature itself is vice and cruelty incarnate.
In being devoted to serving the will of the Other, Sade went to the extreme con-
sequences of his endeavour, and as a result found himself in the position of the 
victim of the will of the Other, as the subject divided by the Other’s will. While 
in his fantasy, Sade, in fact, put himself in the place of a tormentor, an object 
that seeks the division of the Other, but this division that has been transposed 
to the Other returns like a boomerang, following its structural inexorableness, 
hitting Sade himself, the imprisoned victim of the Other’s capricious will. This 
is only possible because the reversal of the roles tormentor-victim is inherent in 
the logic of the Sadean jouissance, which is why Sade, for Lacan, is an example 
of someone who “is not duped by his fantasy”
76
: in wanting all his life to be the 
Other despite the Law, in the end he finds himself in the position of a victim. It 
could, then, be said that what grants consistency to both his work and his life is 
75
 Jacques-Alain Miller, “On Perversion” in Reading Seminars I and II, p. 313.
76
 Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” p. 656. 

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exactly the position of the object a. Sade’s fantasy as well as his thought – and 
ultimately his life itself – thus testify to the fact that there are two ways that 
allow the subject to occupy the place of the object: as a tormentor in the sadist 
orgy, identified with the instrument for the satisfaction of the will of the Other, 
or as a scape goat, one that serves as an instrument for the Other to come to his/
her ultimate “Thou are That,” that is to say, to an incurable truth.