Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

OUT OF OBLIVION 129
unsettle and soon destroy all the other laws of Nature. Celestial bodies would
come all to a halt, their influences would be suspended because of the overly
great empire of one of their number; gravitation would be no more, and
motion none. It is then the crimes of man which, stemming the rise of the three
kingdoms, counteracting their tendency to preponderate, prevent their
importance from becoming such as must disrupt all else, and maintains in
universal affairs that perfect equilibrium Horace called rerum concordia
discors. Therefore is crime necessary in the world. But the most useful crimes
are without doubt those which most disrupt, such as refusal to propagate and
destruction; all the others are petty mischief, they are less even than that, or
rather only those two merit the name of crime: and thus you see these crimes
essential to the laws of the kingdoms, and essential to the laws of Nature. An
ancient philosopher called war the mother of all things. The existence of
murderers is as necessary as that bane; but for them, all would be disturbed in
the order of things. It is therefore absurd to blame or punish them, more
ridiculous still to fret over the very natural inclinations which lead us to
commit this act in spite of ourselves, for never will too many or enough
murders be committed on earth, considering the burning thirst nature has for
them. Ah! unhappy mortal! boast not that thou art able to destroy, it is
something far beyond thy forces; thou canst alter forms, thou art helpless to
annihilate them; of the substance of Nature, not by one grain can thou lessen
its mass, how wouldst thou destroy since all that is, is eternal Thou changest
the forms of things, vary those forms thou may, but 19 this dissolution benefits
Nature, since ‘tis these disassembled parts she recomposes. Thus does all
change effected by man upon organized matter far more serve Nature than it
displeases her. What is this I say Alas! to render her true service would
require destructions more thorough, vaster than any it is in our power to
operate; ‘tis atrocity, ‘tis scope she wants in crimes; the more our destroying is
of a broad and atrocious kind, the more agreeable it is to her. To serve her
better yet, one would have to be able to prevent the regeneration resultant
from the corpses we bury. Only of his first life does murder deprive the
individual we smite; one would have to be able to wrest away his second, if
one were to be more useful to Nature; for ‘tis annihilation she seeks, by less
she is not fully satisfied, it is not within our power to extend our murders to
the point she desires 20 (Sade: 1968, pp. 771–772).
In this section of L’éthique de la psychanalyse on “The Death Instinct,” Lacan uses
Sade’s Juliette (1797/1968) to rework Freud’s theory into a chain which links
memory, destruction and history. The last sentence of this passage brings us,
according to Lacan, to the heart of the death instinct. Lacan dismisses other
interpretations of Freud’s death instinct which view it as a return to Nirvana,
19. The italicized section of this passage was omitted by Lacan.
20. The actual loss of mass in the world was not possible before the development of nuclear
technology. Nuclear fission and atomic explosions occur through the loss of mass.