So, far from announcing a triumphant solution, Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade,” his assertion of Sade as the truth of Kant, rather names an embarrassing problem that Lacan failed to resolve — and did not even fully confront — in his Ethics seminar: how are we to distinguish the appearance of pure desire—the violent gesture of transgressing the social domain of “servicing goods” and entering the terrifying domain of ate, that is, the ethical stance of the subject who “does not compromise his desire”—from the fully consummated “passion for the Real,” the subject’s disappearance-immersion in the primordial jouissance? 95
What, then, is the Fall from this Kantian perspective? Consider the first moments of a feminist awakening: it all begins not with a direct attack on patriarchy, but with experiencing one’s situation as unjust and humiliating, one’s passivity as a failure to act—is this very overwhelming awareness of failure not in itself a positive sign? Does it not, in a negative way, bear witness to the fact that women clearly perceive the need to assert themselves, that they perceive the lack of it as a failure? In the same way,“Fall” is the first step toward liberation—it represents the moment of knowledge, of cognizance of one’s situation. Thus “fall into sin” is a purely formal change: nothing changes in reality, it is just the subject’s stance toward reality that undergoes a radical change.
This means that the Fall in the religious sense (the knowledge of sin) is already a reaction to the Fall proper, the retreat from the “dizziness of freedom.”This is why it is crucial to realize that Kierkegaard leaps over the first contraction of finitude, the first emergence of a sinthome which makes the subject a creature proper, and goes directly from the primordial repose to the Prohibition.We should focus on the difference between the two withdrawals from the Void of infinity: the first one is the primordial contraction that creates the sinthome — it precedes Prohibition, while it is only the second one, the retreat from the “dizziness of freedom,” which is the Fall proper: with it,we enter the domain of the superego, of the vicious cycle of the Law and its transgression.