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An Unblinking Gaze:

On the Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade

Geoffrey T. Roche

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy in Philosophy, the University of Auckland, 2004

ABSTRACT

Throughout the 20th Century, a number of philosophers, writers, artists and film

makers have implied that there is some profound significance to the work of Donatien

Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). The project at hand is to

evaluate the claim that Sade, in some sense, is a philosopher, and to assess what his

philosophy amounts to. There are two aspects to this task. Firstly, I will consider the

various philosophical interpretations of Sade’s work. This part of the study will serve

as a guide into the Sadeian labyrinth, and will establish some of the more central

interpretive themes, in particular the claim that Sade’s thought anticipates that of the

Nazis, or that he brings early Modern thought to its logical conclusion. Secondly, I

will inquire into Sade’s writings themselves. Of particular interest are Sade’s thoughts

concerning the nature of sexuality, psychology, and the human condition in general,

his critique of conventional morality, and his description of the nature of power.

ii

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, thanks are due to my supervisors, Stefano Franchi and Robert

Wicks, without whom this project would have been both unthinkable and impossible.

In particular, I wish to thank Stefano for helping with the construction of the thesis,

and his insistence that deeper insights were available in regions where I could only

see an inky darkness. I am also indebted to family and friends who aided this project

in less direct ways, in particular my parents, for their encouragement and support over

the years. I also wish to thank Caroline Warman, David Martyn, Jeff Love, Robert

Nola, Dennis Robinson, Stephen Davies, Charles Pigden, Karen Riley, Tim Rayner,

Barry Moffatt, Amanda Lennon, Sterling Lynch, Adèle de Jager, Lauren Ashwell, and

Robert C. Solomon, for suggestions, advice, support and assistance. I thank Sébastian

Charles, Masha Mimran and Syliane Charles for providing copies of unpublished

articles. For helping me with my French, I thank Rosemary Arnoux, Selma Kradraoui,

and the teachers at Alliance Française in Lyons. I also thank The Foundation for

Research, Science and Technology, Tuapapa Rangahau Putaiao, for the award of

Bright Futures Scholarship (Doctoral) 664, and the opportunity to attend conferences

overseas, and the University of Auckland for both the Doctoral Scholarship and, with

the assistance of the Overseas Exchange programme, the opportunity to study in

Lyons. I am also grateful to Tessa Laird, David Carman, Astrid Scott, Brian Soppit

and the late John Park, for their inspiration.

iii

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor

fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people! My manner of

thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with

the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and if were, I’d not do so.

Sade (in a letter to his wife; 1783).

...philosophy, Justine, is not the art of consoling the weak; it has no other aim but to bring

soundness to the mind and to uproot prejudices.

Sade La Nouvelle Justine (1797)

He preaches his horrible doctrine to some; to others, he lends his books.

A.A. Royer-Collard (psychiatrist, in a letter to

the police; 1808).

iv

Contents

Key to Abbreviations, Sources and Translations viii

Preface 1

Introduction 5

Chapter I. Reconnaissance

1.1 Geoffrey Gorer: Citoyen Sade 17

1.2 Juliette de Lorsange, CEO: Angela Carter on Sade 20

1.3 Sade and Nazism in Secondary Literature 25

1.4 Sade and Absolute Revolt 27

1.5 Sade and Dialectics: Adorno and Horkheimer 28

1.6 The Worm at the Core: Crocker on Sade 33

1.7 Sade and Mainstream Philosophy 37

1.8 The Unique One: Maurice Blanchot on Sade 40

1.9 Annie Le Brun on Sade 43

1.10 A Cloacal Eye: Bataille on Sade 51

1.11 The Language of Unreason: Foucault on Sade 71

1.12 Conclusion 91

Chapter II. Machine Man: Ontologies

2.1 Introduction 93

2.2 God and Creation 94

2.3 The Non- Uniqueness of Humans 96

2.4 Death 98

2.5 Naturalism vs. Non-Naturalism 101

Chapter III. Enigma of the Will: Psychology

3.1 Introduction 103

3.2 Theory of Pleasure: Materialist Model 104

3.3 Theory of Pleasure: Intellectual Aspect 107

v

3.4 Theory of Pleasure: Aesthetics 111

3.5 Apathy 114

3.6 Triumph of the Will 120

3.7 Power Over Others 122

3.8 Sadism as Syndrome 125

3.9 The Enigma of Sadism 132

Chapter IV. Sterile Pleasures: Sexuality

4.1 Introduction 133

4.2 The Bataille Doctrine 135

4.3 The Benthamite Doctrine 142

4.4 Outcome of the Rejection of the Traditional Teleology 144

4.5 Homosexuality 145

4.6 Sade contra Rousseau on the Role of Women 147

4.7 Against Reproduction 154

4.8 On Love and Friendship 157

4.9 On Marriage 161

4.10 Joy Divisions 164

4.11 Conclusion 166

Chapter V. Swimming with Sharks: Ethics I

5.1 Introduction 167

5.2 Moral Nihilism 168

5.3 Treatment of Rival Ethical Theories 173

5.4 The Free Will Problem 177

5.5 Why Be Immoral? 180

5.6 The Imprudence Argument 181

5.7 The Self-Harm Argument 184

5.8 The Don’t Be a Schmuck Argument 186

5.9 Monsters, Inc. 190

5.10 The Anti-Social Contract 195

5.11 Doctrinal Dispute 197

5.12 Conclusion 201

vi

Chapter VI. Rome vs. Jerusalem: Ethics II

6.1 Introduction 203

6.2 The Antichrist 203

6.3.1 Non-Transcendent Teleology: the Adoration of Kali 206

6.3.2 Non-Transcendent Teleology: The Beast in Man 210

6.3.3 Non-Transcendent Teleology: Property and Theft 212

6.4 The Slave Revolt in Morals 218

6.5 The Sadeian Caste System 221

6.6 The Extermination of Christianity 230

6.7 Historical Context of the Pagan Return 231

Chapter VII. The Government of Reason: Politics

7.1 Introduction 239

7.2 Antipodes 241

7.3 How to Philosophize with a Brick in the Face 253

7.4 Anarchy 256

7.5 The Pleasure of Control 259

7.6 Despotism without Tears 263

7.7 Anus Mundi 266

7.8 The Anatomical Gaze 274

7.9 Excremental Assault 281

7.10 Conclusion 286

Conclusion. 291

Appendix: Sade and Nazism 295

Bibliography 307

vii

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS,

SOURCES, AND TRANSLATIONS

I have used English translations where available. No English translation presently

exists for La Nouvelle Justine or Aline et Valcour. I have modified translations

wherever necessary to preserve relevant aspects of the original text, where the

translation is in error, or for stylistic reasons. Where I have done so, I have given a

page reference to the original French text. If no translation is cited, the translation

is my own. Unless otherwise noted, references are to the texts listed below.

AV : Aline et Valcour ou le Roman philosophique. ed. Jean M. Goulemot

(Paris : le livre de poche, 1994)

CL: The Crimes of Love trans. Margaret Crosland (London: Peter Owen, 1996).

GT: The Gothic tales of the Marquis de Sade trans. Margaret Crosland (London:

Picador, 1990).

J: [the story of] Juliette [or, Prosperities of Vice] trans. Austryn Wainhouse

(New York: Grove, 1968). [Part two of] La nouvelle Justine, ou Les malheurs de

la vertu, suivie de L’histoire de Juliette, sa sœur, the second part of the third

version of Justine, published in 1797.

LNJ : La Nouvelle Justine (2 vols). (Paris: Collection 10:18, 1978).

LP : Letters from Prison. trans. Richard Seaver. (New York: Arcade

Publishing, 1999).

MV: The Misfortunes of Virtue and other Early Tales trans. David Coward

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). (This is the first version of

Justine).

MM: The Mystified Magistrate and other writings trans. Richard Seaver (New

York: Arcade Publishing, 2000).

Œ : Œuvres (3 vols.) ed. Michel Delon, Jean Deprun (Paris: Bibliothèque de la

Pléiade / Gallimard, 1990, 1995, 1998).

PB: Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings trans. Richard

Seaver (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000).

120: The 120 Days of Sodom and other writings trans. Austryn Wainhouse and

Richard Seaver (New York: Arrow, 1990).

viii

Preface

Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) has something of a

shadow- presence in our culture. We all know the term Sadism, and anyone who reads

is aware of who Sade was, if not of what he wrote. Throughout the 20th Century,

novelists and artists have frequently implied that there is some profound significance

to his writings, and contemporary high culture’s obsession with nihilism and vulgarity

has made him a star.1 It would be easy to simply dismiss Sade’s contemporary

popularity, and the attendant plays, books and movies, as a particularly morbid, or

misguided, form of intellectual kitsch. 2 Sade’s work is bombastic, long winded and

nauseating. As for Sade the philosopher, he borrows heavily from other thinkers and

at times argues so inconsistently that it is impossible to tell whether he wrote in jest or

was simply incompetent. What is more, secondary literature on Sade often lacks

critical distance, tending towards hagiography and even doctrinal identification.3

1 Contemporary high culture: I have in mind in particular the work of Jake and Dino Chapman, Wim

Delvoye, Jeff Koons, Zhu Yu, and Paul McCarthy. Zhu Yu ate a stillborn baby in a performance piece

entitled Eating People (2000). For discussion, see Fei Dawei, “Transgresser le principe céleste:

dialogue avec le groupe cadavre,” Artpress : représenter l’horreur Hors Série (mai 1 2001) : 60-64. 2 Literary references: Sade is referred to in passing in Nabokov’s Lolita (Claire Quilty tries to get

Dolores Haze to perform in a film based on the Philosophy in the Bedroom). Milan Kundera

(Slowness), A.S. Byatt (Babel Tower) and Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles) discuss

Sade in their works. Angela Carter’s engagement with Sade will be discussed in Chapter I. Plays and

Movies: The two most important plays written on Sade are Peter Weiss’s Marat/ Sade (1966) and

Yukio Mishima’s Madame Sade (1965). Philip Kaufman’s Quills (2000), based on a play by Doug

Wright, is only the latest of a long line of filmic treatments of Sade, and limits him to the 1960’s radical

clichés of ‘liberator of sexuality’ and ‘satirist of official hypocrisy.’ Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo or the

120 Days of Sodom (1975) comes as close as a filmic treatment could come to Sade’s vision without

being banned (it has in fact been banned in the United States owing to questions concerning the age of

some of the actors) or unwatchable. Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s films are filled with references to

Sade’s work, in particular The Milky Way (1969) and L’Âge d’or (1930). The most interesting

cinematic references to Sade are, however, obscure. The Russian ambassador in Kubrick’s Dr.

Strangelove (1964) is named Ambassador Desadeski; the main character of Nagisa Oshima’s The

Realm of the Senses (1976), who asphyxiates her lover (at his request), before cutting off his penis, is

named Sada. 3 A number of critics refer to the victims of torture described in Sade as ‘patients’ or ‘unfortunate

creatures’ -the same terminology used by Sade’s characters- and describe the hideous medical

1

Sade’s work remains philosophically significant, however, for two reasons.

Firstly, it stands as the most extreme expression of an aspect of Eighteenth Century

thought which is now largely forgotten. We remember this age as one of

‘Enlightenment,’ rather than the Age of Disillusion, and of intellectual despair. Sade

illustrates how terrifyingly disruptive the most advanced thought of his age actually

was. It has been said that modern man has been confronted with three ‘revolutions;’

the Copernican Revolution, the Darwinian Revolution and the Freudian Revolution.

Accordingly, we have learned that we are not in the centre of the universe, that we do

not have a supernatural origin, and that we do not have authority over our mental

states. In pushing the materialism and atheism of his age to hitherto unconsidered

extremes, and in rejecting the notion of Man’s uniqueness or possibility of

transcendence, Sade anticipated the philosophical implications of all three

Revolutions.

Secondly, of all the writers and thinkers of the 18th century, Sade was among the

few to gaze, without flinching, into the worst of human nature, in particular the

capacity of inflicting want, pain and destruction upon others. If a comparison is to be

made, Sade ranks alongside Goya. The raw fury of his work reveals something of the

world that traditional philosophy, hitherto, has never been able to confront. Writes

Robert F. Brissenden, “if the heavenly city of the philosophers is one possible and

imaginary condition for man’s existence, the hellish dungeons beneath the snow-

bound castle of the Duc de Blangis [main character of Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom]

running with blood and excrement, provide us with another; and any balanced view

must take both into account.”4

experiments in Sade’s works as ‘poetry.’ Critics also tend to describe those whom Sade found

disagreeable (his gaolers, in particular) in the same sarcastic terms used by Sade himself. Also, notably,

the words ‘rape’ and ‘murder’ scarcely appear in secondary literature in Sade, despite the frequency of

these acts in Sade’s work. See, for example, Béatrice Didier Sade Un écriture du désir (Paris: Denoël/

Gonhier, 1976) p.187; Chantal Thomas Sade, la dissertation et l’orgie (Paris: Éditions Payot, 1978)

pp.96, 148,149; Nelly Stéphane “Morale et nature,” Europe: Revue littéraire- mensuelle 522

(1972):23-42, p.35. 4 R.F. Brissenden “La Philosophie dans le Boudoir; or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World,” in

Harold E Pagliaro, ed., Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century (Cleveland, Press of Case Western

Reserve University, 1972): 113-141, p.137.

2

3

The project at hand is to evaluate the claim that Sade, in some sense, is a

philosopher, and to assess what his philosophy amounts to. There are two aspects of

this task. Firstly, I will consider the various philosophical interpretations of Sade’s

work. Secondly, I will inquire into Sade’s writings, independent of previous

interpretations. I will not be concerned with those aspects of his life and work that

have somewhat distracted most writers from the actual intellectual content of his

work- that is- the arguments, presuppositions, and doctrines that it communicates.

This is what it means to treat Sade as a philosopher, as opposed to treating him as the

arcane enigma ‘Sade’ (or- more preposterously- the ‘divine Marquis’). If Sade’s work

is a labyrinth inhabited by monsters, its walls will be breached, its inhabitants will be

captured for study, and their secrets will be yielded.

INTRODUCTION

The intention of this project is to seek out Sade the philosopher. Related to this task is

the surveying of the various interpretations of Sade as philosopher, in part for the sake

of assessment, but also in order to find a pathway into his work. Here I will outline

some interpretive and methodological issues that have arisen.

Two types of literature have been surveyed; a). secondary literature written by

literary specialists, a fraction of which touches upon philosophical themes, or is

theoretical in nature, and b). philosophical literature which treats Sade, in a critical

way, as a thinker in his own right. Work of the latter type is limited to a handful of

references, most of which are brief.

Several issues concerning the specialist literature need to be addressed. Firstly,

there is the question concerning the very idea of reading Sade as a philosopher, this

being a minority view amongst Sade specialists. Not only are most specialists more

interested in biographical, textual, or purely interpretive treatments of Sade’s work;

many explicitly reject the idea that Sade could be read as a philosopher in a literal

way. Sade is, on this view, an amateurish plagiarist, his ‘philosophy’ best understood

as a hateful revenge attack against the cosmos on a purely abstract plane.1 In keeping

with such interpretations is the tendency to reduce Sade to pure fiction, or pure text. 2

Roland Barthes, the most prominent member of this school, describes Sade as the

creator of a ‘new language’ in which bodies and their intersections take the place (in

some sense) of grammatical units. Accordingly, Barthes holds that Sade was not

1 See Thomas Moore Dark Eros: the imagination of Sadism (Woodstock, Connecticut: Spring

Publications, 1990) p.54; Noël Chatelet “Le libertine à table” in Michel Camus, Philippe Roger, eds.

Sade écrire la crise (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1983): 67-83, p.78; David Coward, “Introduction,” the

Marquis de Sade The Misfortunes of Virtue and other early tales trans. David Coward (Oxford

University Press, 1999) p. vii. 2 See for example Marcel Hénaff The Invention of the Libertine Body trans. Xavier Callahan

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) p.290. This is in spite of Hénaff’s own claims of

Sade’s significance in diagnosing the black heart of late capitalism, which aligns him with the

interpretation offered by Adorno and Horkheimer, to be discussed in Chapter I. Muriel Schmid, in Le

soufre au bord de la chaire: Sade et l’Evangile, agrees with this view (Genève: Labor et Fides, 2001)

pp.51, 125, 152. I thank Rosemary Arnoux for bringing this book to my attention.

5

interested in discussing the real world, reasoning that “written shit has no odour.”3

Other critics hold that Sade’s work is simply too horrific to be read in a literal way.

Rather, argues John Phillips, Sade is to read as a writer of black comedy. 4 A number

of points can be made here. Firstly, Sade himself asserted that he was a philosopher,

both in private correspondence (as expressed in the quotes at the beginning of this

essay), and in the presentation of his works. This must surely inform our

hermeneutics. Secondly, Sade was quite clearly preoccupied with ethics and

psychology - what he knew of as ‘moral science’ and the inquiry concerning the

‘human heart.’ That he was engaged in a recognizably philosophical discussion –and a

central one at that– there is little doubt. Finally, the argument that Sade’s works are

‘fictions,’ therefore not philosophical, is to assume a questionable dichotomy between

narrative and philosophy. The Narrative (the Platonic dialogue, the ‘philosophical

tale,’ the libertin novel, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the fictional work of Dostoyevsky,

Camus or Sartre) has frequently been used to communicate philosophical ideas, and

was a wisely chosen vehicle in an age when personal identification with atheism was

particularly dangerous. Further, Sade frequently blurs the line between fictional

narrative and prescription, most significantly in giving the reader advice as to how

one ought to live one’s life. Finally, for a thinker who has gone beyond the limits of

purely linear reasoning and the standard oppositions of truth and falsity, description

and prescription, sincerity and insincerity, or good and evil, literary form may be a

superior means of philosophical expression.5 Sade’s work, as this essay will show,

presents a number of intractable interpretive problems, in particular his relationship

with the text and the reader, and there is a bewildering amount of contradiction within

his work. 6 The problem of the intention of the author goes beyond the scope of this 3 Roland Barthes Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Seuil, 1971) .Quoted in Laurence L. Bongie Sade: A

Biographical Essay (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) p.297. 4 John Phillips “Laugh? I nearly died! : Humor in Sade’s fiction,” The Eighteenth Century. Theory and

Interpretation 40 (1) (fall 1999):46-67, p.55, 61; John Phillips “Sade in the Corridor,” Nottingham

French Studies 37 (2) (autumn 1998): 26-36, p.34. 5 Here I am virtually quoting Jacob Golomb, Nietzsche and Zion (Ithaca and London: Cornell

University Press, 2004) p.96. 6 For discussion on Sade’s style, lack of sincerity, and attempt to ‘brainwash’ or nauseate the reader,

see Timo Airaksinen The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade (London and New York: Routledge,

1995) p.13, Susan Neiman Evil in Modern Thought: An alternative history of Philosophy (Melbourne:

Scribe publications, 2002) p.180; Geoffrey Bennington “Sade Laying Down the Law,” Oxford Literary

6

project. In any case, I have no interest in writing a What Sade Really Said, a project as

philosophically uninformative as it would be impossible. Using Sade’s text as a

framework for a more generally applicable inquiry into morality and human nature,

whilst maintaining fidelity to the text, I feel, will be a more philosophically

informative approach. A balance must be found between structured, distanced

analysis and the more nuanced approach of thinking ‘through’ the text; between

Marcelin Pleynet’s ideal of a reading that “thinks through the multiplicitous

articulations of textual contradictions and which thinks its own insertion into the order

of these contradictions,” and Jules Jenin’s advice that we study Sade as an

entomologist studies a scorpion. 7

In reply to Phillips, for whom Sade’s work is too horrific to be read as an account

of reality, I note that this a particularly un- Sadeian approach. That is to say, it is to

assume that the world is not, to a large extent, a frightening and obscene place, and

that man is not capable of atrocity. A Nouvelle Juliette, rewritten for the early 21st

Century, would be a project banal in its obviousness. The sex slave-traders of Eastern

Europe, the rapist priests, the warlords of Africa who use mass starvation as a

strategic tool; the Board of Directors of DynCorp, Their Excellencies Robert Mugabe,

Kim Jong-Il, and Teodoro Obiang Nguema; Huda Ammash, Army Specialist Sabrina

Harman, Father Athanase Seromba, Armin Meiwes, Jeffrey Dahlmer, and Marc

Dutroux; - these are the real-life Juliettes, Minskis, Durands and Noirceuils. The

Review 6(2) (1984):38 -56, p.54; Béatrice Didier Sade: Un écriture du désir (Denoël/Gonthier, 1976)

p. 199. Sade’s work contains a few clues as to how he saw himself in relation to the text and how he

viewed the reader. He was apparently aware of his stylistic shortcomings, as his marginal notes show

(120:568, 570). He frequently made direct addresses to the reader, extolling them to follow his advice

(AV: 346). His characters also insinuate that they are not to be trusted (“[w]e do have something of the

treacherous, yes; a touch of the false, you may believe it”; PB: 278). Sade also argued that the opinions

of the characters in a text were not necessarily those of the author. See Jean-Pierre Han, Jean-Pierre

Valla “A propos du système philosophique de Sade,” Europe 522 (October 1972): 105-123, p.108. 7 Marcelin Pleynet “The Readability of Sade,” The Tel Quel Reader ed. Patrick ffrench (sic) and

Roland-François Lack (London and New York: Routledge,1998):109-122,p. 119; Jules Janin “Le

marquis de Sade,” Revue de Paris, 1834, pp.321-322. Quoted in Françoise Laugaa-Traut Lectures de

Sade (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973) p.125.

7

horrors of Silling (the castle of Sade’s the 120 Days of Sodom) are as much a part of

our world as are Haengyong and Abu Ghraib. 8

Of the work on Sade that takes a more philosophical approach, problems remain,

and some perhaps surprising omissions need to be explained. Firstly, much of this

material is hampered by a lack in critical rigor, or is philosophical without engaging

with the philosophy in Sade’s work. That is, it is philosophy about Sade. Philippe

Sollers, in “Sade dans le texte” (1967), argues that Sade has ‘disproved’ the principle

of causality and hence the underlying principle of all civilisation, religion and

philosophy, which Sollers refers to as a ‘neurosis.’9 An oft-cited and influential essay

by Jacques Lacan, “Kant avec Sade” (Kant with Sade), also falls into this category

(Lacan reduces all of Sade to the ‘Law of jouissance’), as does the work of Philippe

Mengue, for whom Sade has given a new type of ‘law.’10 Other studies are hampered

by an incomplete knowledge of the theoretical content of Sade’s works, which

accounts for the wild variation in interpretation. Timo Airaksinen, in The Philosophy

of the Marquis de Sade, does not so much interpret as misidentify Sade as a Kantian

thinker, for whom the ‘joy of sin’ is the ‘perverse pleasure’ of being ‘irrational’ (as,

8 At the time of writing (2004), Haengyong is thought to be an operational death camp in North Korea.

See Antony Barnett “Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag,” Observer, Sunday

February 1, 2004. URL: www.guardian.co.uk/korea/article/0,2763,1136483,00.html. (accessed

November 11th 2004). 9 Philippe Sollers “Sade dans le texte” In Tel Quel 28 (1967) :38-50. For discussion, see Caroline

Warman Sade: from Materialism to Pornography (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002) pp.8-9. 10 Lacan reduces all of Sade to a single aphorism: the ‘right to jouissance’ (‘jouissance’ is defined in

the Larousse dictionary as ‘intense pleasure,’ but it also means ‘orgasm’, which is closer to Sade’s

typical usage of the term. It has no exact English translation). This principle appears to be taken from a

single line in Sade’s Philosophie dans le Boudoir. But Lacan does not find a corresponding philosophy

in Sade to back it up: “[o]f a treatise truly about desire, there is thus little here, even nothing” (Lacan

p.75). See Jacques Lacan ‘Kant with Sade’ trans. James B. Swenson, Jr. October 51 Winter (1989):55-

104. I Thank David Martyn for pointing this text out to me. For an analysis of this essay, see Jean

Allouch Ça de Kant, cas de Sade : Erotologie analytique III (Paris : L’unebevue, 2002). Philip

Mengue’s work is strongly influenced by that of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Jean- François

Lyotard. Mengue regards Sade as a “nihilist of meaning,” and yet also reads Sade as introducing a new

concept of ‘law,’ an ‘ethic’ that does not “ignore or deny” the “unconsciousness” (p.228). Given that

Sade had no concept of a subconscious, and was ambiguous on the subject of laws, this reading would

appear to owe to Lacan more than to Sade himself. Philip Mengue L’ordre Sadien : Loi et narration

dans la philosophie de Sade (Paris : Éditions Kimé, 1996).

8

for a Kantian, doing immoral things is tantamount to causing ‘moral harm’ to one’s

‘moral self’).11 Airaksinen then proceeds to analyse the structure of ‘perverse will’

(the pleasure of doing that which the agent knows is irrational), but his discussion

here has more to do with the insights of Edgar Allen Poe than Sade (for whom doing

‘good’ simply makes no sense for the ‘strong’). Simone de Beauvoir’s essay “Must

We Burn Sade?” is another case in point; she makes no stronger, or informative,

claim than that Sade “disturbs us” and that he “rejected all the easy answers.”12

I give a final note concerning the censorship of Sade’s works. Roger Shattuck

describes Sade’s work as “potential poison, polluting our moral and intellectual

environment,” and his status in literary and academic circles as indicative of an “eerie

post- Nietzschean death wish.”13 Sade specialists dismiss this view as moralizing

hogwash, but the view is an interesting one. 14 To fear Sade, to acknowledge his

power to morally corrupt- is to grant his work a great deal of negative respect; more,

in fact, than do a number of specialists. Further, as Lorna Berman notes, “it would

seem that those who have banned Sade’s works have done so precisely out of fear of

just such a latent destructive impulse in human nature.”15 If Sade’s philosophy is

really so poor, it has to be asked how such a doctrine could be so dangerously

seductive. As philosophers, we wish to know how it is even possible to ‘poison’

people simply by writing philosophically informed pornographic novels.

Sade since 1814.

From the time of Sade’s death in 1814 until the 1930’s, Sade’s works were known

almost exclusively by psychologists and literary figures (Sade’s literary legacy still

11I thank Caroline Warman for clarifying this point for me. Timo Airaksinen The Philosophy of the

Marquis de Sade (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). pp.156, 168. 12 See Simone de Beauvoir “Must we Burn Sade?” trans. Annette Michelson (120:3-64). 13 Roger Shattuck Forbidden Knowledge: from Prometheus to Pornography (New York: Harcourt

Brace & Co., 1996) p.239, 299. 14 For Michel Delon’s reaction to Shattuck, see Michel Delon “Du danger de la littérature,” Europe

835-836 (novembre- décembre 1998) :3-8. 15 Lorna Berman “The Marquis de Sade and his Critics,” Mosaic 1 no.2 (1968):57-72. Quoted in

Colette Verger Michael The Marquis de Sade: The Man, His Works, and His Critics, An Annotated

Bibliography (New York& London: Garland Publishing Inc, 1986) p.308.

9

remains largely unexplored).16 Earlier interpretations had been hampered by the

scarcity and illegality of his works, which may account for what appears to be a

shocking naivety of some of the earliest proclamations of Sade’s importance. 17 In the

1920’s, the Surrealists, following the lead of Guillaume Apollinaire, were the first

intellectual group to openly revere him as an intellectual ancestor. Apollinaire

declared Sade “the freest spirit ever to have lived,” and the character Juliette an angel-

the embodiment of the New Woman- that would “rejuvenate the world.” 18André

Breton and Paul Eluard, following his lead, found in Sade’s work the promise of a

radical departure from the limits of morality, philosophy, and Western culture in

general. In 1926, in the 8th Surrealist manifesto, Paul Elaurd wrote that Sade had been

imprisoned “ …for having wanted to return to civilised man the force of his primitive

instincts, for having freed the erotic [amoureuse] imagination and for having

struggled desperately for absolute justice and equality.” 19 Ever since, Sade has been

16 On André Breton and Sade, and Swinburne and Sade, see Françoise Laugaa-Traut Lectures de Sade

(Paris: Armand Colin, 1973) pp.151, 207. On Samuel Beckett’s reading of Sade, see James Knowlson

Damned to Fame (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) p.293. I Thank Craig Matthews for bringing this

passage to my attention. See also Patricia Mines “The role of the Marquis de Sade in the late novels of

Victor Hugo,” Nottingham French Studies 36 no. 2 (autumn 1997): 10-23. Three essays that discuss the

relationship between Sade and Dostoyevsky: William C Brumfield “Thérèse philosophe and

Dostoyevsky’s Great Sinner,” Comparative Literature 32 (1980), 238-253; Robert Louis Jackson

“Dostoevskij and the Marquis de Sade,” Russian Literature Vol. IV-1 (13) (January 1976):27-45. Jeff

Love “Sade et l’innocence divine” in Norbert Sclippa, ed. Lire Sade, (Paris: l' Harmattan, 2004)

pp.157-172. On Sade and Kafka see Brad Epps “Technoasceticism and Authorial Death in Sade, Kafka,

Barthes and Foucault,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 8.3 (1996); Gustav Janouch

Conversations with Kafka trans. Goronway Rees (New York: New Directions Books, 1971) p.131.

(The torture described in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, in which the ‘sentence’ of a convict is inscribed

into the body, appears in various forms in the work of Sade ;120: 611; J:619). For Aldous Huxley’s

thoughts on Sade, see his Ends and Means (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938) p.271. 17 For an anecdote concerning the difficulty of finding Sade’s works in 1920’s Paris, see Luis Buñuel’s

autobiography, My Last Breath trans. Abigail Israel (London: Vintage, 1994) pp.217-218. I thank

Astrid Scott for bringing this text to my attention. 18 Guillaume Apollinaire Œuvres complètes (Paris : André Balland et Jacques Lecat, 1966) Vol. II

p.231. Surrealist artists that were preoccupied with Sade include Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Hans

Bellmer and Clovis Trouille. Dali’s works and writings are full of references to Sade, usually involving

excrement, anuses and so on. 19 Paul Éluard “D.A.F. Sade, Écrivain fantastique et révolutionnaire” In La Révolution surréaliste, n° 8,

1st December 1926. Quoted in Laugaa-Traut p.194.

10

hailed as a figure of liberation of the human spirit, an interpretation most dramatically

expressed by Georges Bataille. It was, however, the exhaustive work of two scholars,

Gilbert Lely and Maurice Heine, which secured Sade’s place in French letters with the

publishing of two celebrated biographies.20

Sade- the thinker- had also been discovered in England. In 1934, Geoffrey Gorer

published The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade, in which he describes Sade as

both humanist political thinker and insightful psychologist. As opposed to the more

impressionistic tone of the Surrealists, Gorer’s work marks the beginning of a more

‘classicist’ interpretation, according to which Sade can, and should, be approached as

an 18th Century philosopher, albeit an eccentric one. This approach has only been

revived in the last ten years and remains controversial.

By the end of World War II, a third interpretation was proposed. Theodor

Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Albert Camus, and Raymond Queneau saw in Sade the

key to understanding European fascism, in particular its purported roots in the

brutalizing, nihilistic potential of Occidental culture in general. Camus’ less literal

interpretation sees in Sade’s writing a prophetic ‘dream of revenge.’ Adorno,

Horkheimer and Crocker, by contrast, make explicit the association between Sade,

Nazism, and early Modern thought. Insofar as Sade was a writer who had lived during

the 18th Century, and that he had in some sense engaged with the philosophy of his

age, the implication is that the roots of Nazism as a cultural phenomena are profound

to a disturbing degree. Again, this interpretation remains controversial.

Since the emergence of Sade scholarship in the mid- 20th Century, there has

been little consensus or even critical engagement between the various interpretive

camps (there is near unanimous agreement, however, that Sade was not in fact a

religious thinker, as suggested by Lorna Berman, Pierre Klossowski, and Jean

Paulhan).21 Those who regard Sade as a liberator are quick to dismiss associations

20 Gilbert Lely Sade (Paris : Gallimard, 1960); Maurice Heine Le Marquis de Sade (Paris : Gallimard,

1950). 21 For discussion, see: Jean Deprun “Sade et l’abbé Bergier,” Raison Présente 67 (1983) :5-11 ; Pierre

Klossowski Sade my Neighbour trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University

Press, 1991); Jean Paulhan The Marquis de Sade and his Accomplice in Justine, Philosophy in the

Bedroom and Other Writings (London: Grove Press, Arrow Books, 1991):3-37; Béatrice Didier “Sade

théologien” in Michel Camus, Philippe Roger, eds. Sade écrire la crise (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1983)

219-240: 220, 221,223.

11

with Nazism as merely superficial; those who regard Sade as essentially beyond the

categories and restraints of philosophy tend to dismiss literal analysis of his texts as

beside the point. Of the ‘classicist’ camp, only Caroline Warman, in Sade: From

Materialism to Pornography (2002), has taken the trouble to critique the dominant

strands of Sade scholarship in a systematic and thorough way (yet even here she

scarcely mentions Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, key intellectual figures,

although not regarded highly by most Sade scholars).

Two dominant trends have emerged in the last twenty years. Firstly, a great

deal of research has been done on Sade’s relationship with his intellectual, historical

and literary context. This has revealed Sade, to some extent, to be preoccupied with

the same basic themes as the philosophers of his age, and has somewhat reduced his

mythic status as a figure of absolute ‘otherness’ (this does not, however, negate his

status as a figure of absolute revolt). Secondly, there have been a number of papers

and books written from a particular doctrinal perspective, whether Bataillian,

Foucaultian, Barthesian, or Lacanian. Some of these ‘schools’ appear to be quite cut

off from Sade scholarship as a whole, with particular students only referring to and

considering the works of their own particular interpretive lineage. In short, Sade

scholars offer a number of markedly different interpretations of Sade’s works, like

explorers with incredible, contradictory tales of some unknown continent. That

continent, to a large extent, remains uncharted.

In order to illustrate the central themes and preoccupations of the existing

literature, and to find a passage into Sade’s work, I will present the work of ten critics

whose work I take to be representative of ‘philosophical interpretation.’ These

approaches fall roughly into three groups. Firstly, I will present the work of Geoffrey

Gorer and Angela Carter, who both treat Sade as a thinker in a conventional sense,

and who have found Sade’s work to be of some merit in the political and social

sphere. That is, they read Sade as a positive thinker, though exclusively in the radical

sense of ‘overturning values.’ Secondly, I will discuss those who consider Sade to be

the link between the Age of Enlightenment and the rise of Nazism. Finally, I will

address the more positive, and dominant, ‘liberator’ reading, according to which Sade

12

is both a figure of cultural revolt, and in some sense stands radically outside the

intellectual mainstream. The authors I will consider here are Maurice Blanchot,

Georges Bataille, and Michel Foucault. This general discussion will end with a

consideration of the interpretation offered by Annie le Brun, a critic whose position

can be read as a synthesis of Sade reception hitherto. Bataille and Foucault, given

their role in bridging the gap between Sade criticism and philosophy proper, will be

given extended treatments.

It should be kept in mind that these distinctions are not mutually exclusive. Annie

le Brun, for example, prefers to work more closely with Sade’s text than others, and is

consequently highly critical of the more interpretative approaches of Bataille and

Foucault. As such, she has a certain affinity with those who prefer a more literal

approach to Sade’s work. More significantly, the ‘liberator’ reading of Sade does not

necessarily negate the belief that Sade has ideological affiliations with the Nazis and

other totalitarian regimes. The Surrealists, Breton and Bataille in particular, took Sade

to be the advocate of a radical break with Christian morality. Although a clean break

with Judaeo-Christian morality or belief does not necessarily lead to total moral

nihilism, this is, apparently, a point that Sade insisted upon and that his less critical

readers accept. Le Brun and Bataille are apparently enthusiastic about this leap into

the ‘abyss’; Crocker, Adorno and Horkheimer, clearly, are not. The disagreement,

then, is not one of interpretation of Sade but of absolute moral values. What passes

for Le Brun and Bataille as ‘liberation of the passions’ appears to other critics as the

megalomania of a self-anointed few. Ultimately, the project of interpreting Sade may

lead to a deepening and reconciliation of existing interpretations of Sade’s work,

rather than a simple process of elimination.

A final word should be said concerning Sade’s personality. Various attempts

have been made to assess Sade’s character, whether by sifting through the

biographical data or through the psychoanalysis of his prose style.22 Sade’s text

elevates egocentricity, deceitfulness, and lack of guilt or empathy to the level of

philosophical doctrine, and his vision of human nature shows, as Philippe Roger puts 22 Jenny H. Batlay and Otis E. Fellows have suggested that the very tedium of Sade’s texts is

symptomatic of the death drive; Timo Airaksinen suggests that Sade’s work is itself an act of sadism

against the reader (hence, revealing the reader to be a masochist). See Airaksinen p.13; Jenny H Batlay, Otis E. Fellows “Diderot et Sade: Affinités et divergences, ” L’Esprit Créateur 15 no.4

( winter 1975): 449-459, p.456.

13

it, a “spiritual one-eyedness.”23 However, to categorize Sade as merely ‘mad’ or a

sociopath is to evade the hard philosophical issues that his work brings to light.

Observes Airaksinen:

Of course, [moral] perversity may be an illness of the mind; but…such a pathological

model either actively conceals the main issue or fails to illuminate it. The concept of

illness permits society to dispose of the perverse person and of anyone whose mental

constitution comes too close to perversity. The classification erects a barrier between the

sick and the healthy, and solicits the use of different principles of explanation with respect

to each group.24

I finish with a disclaimer. In this project, I will not be concerned with, as it were,

auditing the Sadeian text for intellectual royalties owing. Scholarly work of the last

thirty or so years has already well established that Sade’s work is very much part of

his age. Of his age, true, but in the sense that all extraordinary creations are. To write

off Juliette as a pastiche of plagiarisms of better thinkers would be like describing

Wright Flyer I as a motorized kite. The conclusions that Sade draws from found

premises and hypotheses bear little relation to anything that his intellectual elders

could have imagined.

23 Philippe Roger Sade : la Philosophie dans le pressoir (Paris : Bernard Grasset, 1976) p.18 ; Muriel

Schmid Le soufre au bord de la chaire : Sade et l’Evangile (Genève : Labor et Fides, 2001) p. 143. 24Airaksinen p.29.

14

To the reader: In this project, I shall quote and discuss passages in Sade that many

will find extremely offensive. Most of the secondary literature on Sade, and some

anthologies, avoid such explicitness. To treat this subject in an accurate and scholarly

manner, I feel, requires that the material at hand is not bowdlerized; to do is to

seriously misrepresent his work.

15

16

Chapter I: RECONNAISSANCE

Literature Review When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

Oscar Wilde Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

And the den nam’d Horror held a man

Chain'd hand and foot, round his neck an iron band, bound to the impregnable wall.

In his soul was the serpent coil’d round in his heart, hid from the light, as in a cleft

rock;

And the man was confin’d for a writing prophetic.

William Blake The French Revolution (1791).

1.1 : Geoffrey Gorer : Citoyen Sade

Geoffrey Gorer (1905-1985) wrote The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade

(hereafter LI), in 1934, motivated, he wrote, by the wish to understand the rise of

Nazism.1 He noted that the term ‘sadism’ was constantly used to describe the

destructive nature of the new movement. Gorer writes: “For this reason this first

edition [of The Life and Ideas] placed a major emphasis on the political aspect of de

Sade’s life and writings; and numerous parallels were drawn between the actions and

sayings of de Sade’s characters and those of various Nazi and fascist politicians, and

some public figures and events in Great Britain and the United States” (LI: 9). Gorer

was in apparent agreement with those that saw similarities between Sade’s ‘libertine’

characters and the Nazis, in particular in the novel Juliette. But the later Gorer takes

Sade for a humanist who sought to expose, rather than endorse, the cynicism and

hypocrisy of the ruling classes of his age. Writes Gorer, “[Sade] exposes a system of

corruption and intrigue together with a hard-heartedness and sanctimonious cynicism

which might have served as a model to Hitler’s Germany... he cuts himself entirely

from the revolutionary thinkers of his time to join those of the mid- nineteenth

century. For this reason he can with some justice be called the first reasoned socialist”

(LI: 102; 142). Gorer’s assessment of Sade’s morality is based on a single text, the

novel Aline et Valcour (1795), which he takes to be a reliable representation of Sade’s

1 Geoffrey Gorer The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade (London: Panther, 1963).

17

actual beliefs. The novel features a tangential incident set in a socialist utopia, the

Kingdom of Tamoé. Tamoé is located off the coast of New Zealand, and is ruled by

Zamé, an absolute monarch. Zamé spends some time lecturing a visiting European on

the social ills of Europe, and explains the principles by which his kingdom is

governed. The narrative, as Gorer has it, serves as a soap-box from which Sade

lambastes man’s inhumanity to man, in particular the ills of colonialism, war, the

prison system, prostitution, private property, torture, and racist exploitation. The

institution of the nuclear family is criticized, as it promotes inequality. Gorer’s Sade

also makes sound suggestions on education, agriculture (described as the source of all

true wealth), and optimal population growth, and how to attain it. Sade also proposes

a European Union, in order to bring about an everlasting peace (LI: 105-114).

Gorer also has high praise for Sade’s insights into psychology, in particular his

psychology of sex and pleasure. As such, he takes Sade for a precursor of Kinsey and

Freud (LI: 146-147). His Sade is also an aesthete and epicurean, an advocate of the

personal cultivation of new routes to sensory stimuli. Writes Gorer: “The study and

development of the arts has no other aim than to enable us to perceive beauty and

harmony in shapes, sounds and colours that were before either meaningless or

repulsive.” What one individual or cultural group may find delicious another will find

revolting. Over time and through practice, individuals may be able to override what

they considered to be ‘objectively based’ notions of revulsions, as one learns to

embrace the exotic tastes of another culture (150).2

Gorer goes on to systematize Sade’s psychology of sex. Sade, according to Gorer,

describes people into three categories- the ‘weak’ or ‘repressed,’ the ‘natural

perverts,’ and the ‘libertines.’ The ‘weak’ lack the imagination or psychological

strength to go beyond normal sexuality, and erroneously associate their own lack of

sexual vigour or imagination for ‘virtue.’ Unlike the ‘natural perverts,’ the ‘libertines’

“consciously imitate the obsessions of the second class to enlarge their experience. It

is almost exclusively with these two categories that de Sade deals, though the first

class furnishes the vile bodies with which the experiments are made” (LI: 147).

Gorer’s interpretation of Sade as social critic, utopian political theorist and sexual

liberator leads to irreconcilable contradictions, however. He insists that Sade’s scenes

2 Sade uses the same analogy between exotic sexual practices and ‘gamey’- tasting food in La Nouvelle

Justine (LNJ 2: 83).

18

of torture and degradation are to be understood as a critique of social reality (LI:

79,157), and that he proposes a plausible portrayal of the psychological desire. As for

sadism itself, Gorer denies that this was Sade’s intention at all, stating that “The

people who imagine that de Sade intended Justine and Juliette to be incitements to

cruelty show extraordinarily little insight, unless they indeed are speaking from

personal experience, and find even the coldest and most objective descriptions

exciting” (LI:158). Yet it seems unlikely that Gorer actually believed this, given the

frequent lapses in his description of Sade as being a benevolent humanist. Gorer

himself observes that Sade shared certain personality characteristics with ‘lust-

murderers’ (LI: 182). Further, of Sade’s novels Justine (1791) and Juliette (1797),

Gorer notes that Juliette is written in the first person, whereas Justine is not: “[h]e will

not put himself in the position of the Sadist’s victim and complement; over five long

volumes he will imagine himself the cruel and masterful woman who does not leave

alive a single man whom she had really prolonged contact” (LI: 176). Gorer’s

biographical gloss on Sade is tellingly biased- of the notorious ‘Rose Keller’ case

(Sade was charged with torturing and threatening to kill a young woman), Gore writes

merely that she was “treated in a way she did not like” (LI: p.27).

Sade, clearly, does not merely broaden the horizons of sexual experience. He

apparently suggests that we stab people to death as we rape them (J: 338, 367, 517-

520, 670). Gorer’s discussion of sadistic pleasure (‘algolagnia’) in any case, gives the

lie to such convolutedly moralizing pronouncements. In the passage cited above and

elsewhere, Gorer implicitly accepts the elitism of the Sadeian ‘libertines’ who regard

their victims as ‘weak’ and lacking ‘courage’ (Gorer’s summary of Sade’s psychology

of pleasure is fairly accurate, but scarcely coheres with his own reading of Sade as

being a humanist). He then slips into ‘Sadese,’ describing the ‘victims’ as providing

the ‘vile bodies’ for ‘experimentation.’ (One could add here that Gorer’s distinction

between ‘natural’ perverts and ‘libertines’ does not fully cohere with Sade’s writings,

but this is a minor point).

19

1.2 Juliette de Lorsange, CEO: Angela Carter on Sade

He wore a black cloak with many layers of capes in the shoulders and a top-hat from

which trailers of black crepe depended at the back. He was ready for any funeral and he

carried a cane tipped with a silver ball that looked as if it could kill…

‘You must know that I am a connoisseur of catastrophe, young man. I witnessed the

eruption of Vesuvius when thousands were coffined alive in molten lava. I saw eyes burst

and fat run out of roast crackling in Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Dresden. I dabbled my

fingers in the blood beneath the guillotine during the Terror. I am a demon for a

cataclysm.’

Angela Carter The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman (1972). 3

Angela Carter (1940-1992), a British novelist, occupied a central position in

discussions on feminism and postmodernism during the 1980’s. Her novels are

concerned with the Gothic, the fairy-story and with sexuality, in particular the fluidity

of gender roles. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffmann (hereafter DM, 1973),

the tale, in part, of a diabolical doctor who wishes to destroy the structures of reason,

is clearly inspired by Sade. Two especially Sadeian characters in this novel are the

Count and the Cannibal King. The Count is an amalgam of various Sadeian

characters, including Sade himself, and the Cannibal King is based on Ben Mâacoro,

King of Batua, the cannibal kingdom in Sade’s Aline et Valcour ( the latter being a

glaring omission from Geoffrey Gorer’s treatment of this text). In Carter’s novel, the

two spiritual brothers meet, and the cannibal king decides to eat the Count. In

authentic Sadeian style, the cannibal king explains: “[i]t seemed I might be able to

crown my own atrocities by making my brother in atrocity my victim. That I might, as

it were, immolate myself, to see how I should bear it” (DM: 162). The Sadeian

Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (hereafter SW, 1978; later published as The

Sadeian Woman: an Exercise in Cultural History in 1979) explores a reading of Sade

that is both intelligent and positive, albeit guardedly so. 4 Carter takes Sade to be a

3 Angela Carter The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (London: Penguin, 1972) pp.122 -

123. 4 Angela Carter The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Harper Colophon

Books, 1978). I thank Dennis Robinson for bringing this book to my attention.

20

(perhaps unwitting) pioneer of the feminist movement, and characterizes Sade’s

Juliette as a feminist Übermensch. Besides Apollinaire, Carter was the first critic to

reveal an aspect of Sade that had been overlooked by commentators that seems

obviously positive- the endorsement of freedom for women. (It is an interesting

question as to why not even Simone de Beauvoir had noted this earlier. What is even

stranger is that the first English edition of Sade’s major works, published in 1965 by

Grove Press of New York, did not include prefaces that used this aspect of Sade’s

work in order to suit the mood of the time. Instead, the translated essays by Maurice

Blanchot, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paulhan included in these editions focus on

the more sinister, almost demonic aspect of Sade’s works). Carter’s intention, as she

explains it, is not a critical study or a historical analysis, but a “ late- twentieth-

century interpretation of some of the problems he raises about the culturally

determined nature of women and of the relations between men and women that result

from it” (SW: 1). Sade is typically understood to have written the most appalling

pornography –even the most explicit pornography permitted in liberal societies is mild

fare compared to Sade’s endless rapes, tortures and executions of women. But Carter

notes that there is more to Sade than this, noting in particular that Sade chose the

character of Juliette, a woman, as the mouthpiece of his own philosophy. Sade installs

women as beings of power in his fictional world, which, she claims, sets him apart

from all other pornographers and most of the writers of his period. 5 Society is

structured in such a way that there will always be the have’s and the have-nots, and

Juliette, as Carter reads her, proves that women can just as successfully become a

‘have’ as a man (SW: 77). Juliette’s savvy is contrasted with Justine, who Carter

reads as a “selfless heroine of Rousseau in the egocentric and cruel world of Hobbes”

(SW: 47); “Justine is a pilgrimage of the soul in search of God written by an atheist;

Juliette is a version of Faust written by a man who believed that if man exists, we do

not need to invent the devil” (SW: 103). 6

5 This is not strictly accurate. Catherine Cusset notes that the 18th Century Libertine novel was

frequently allegorized by a female character and her adventures. Catherine Cusset No Tomorrow: The

Ethics of Pleasure in the French Enlightenment (Charlottesville & London: University Press of

Virginia, 1999) p.12. 6 Sade himself refers to Hobbes, and there are certainly similarities, but Sade does not appear to have

read Hobbes in the original. Han and Valla have noted the similarity, describing Sade’s vision as that

of Hobbes without a contract. See Han and Valla “A propos” p.117. Sade writes, in La Nouvelle

21

In the two texts that Carter concentrates on, Juliette and Philosophy in the

Bedroom (1795), Sade’s characters endlessly argue for sexual freedom for women.

Not only is no sexual possibility not considered and analyzed in detail; Sade, writes

Carter, argues for the woman’s being free to enjoy herself in whatever way she

pleases. Anything that may impede her sexually, Sade often attacks for this reason

alone. The institution of marriage is questioned, as is any notion of biological destiny.

Sade, writes Carter, is also ahead of Freud and European men in general in another

respect- he knows exactly what the clitoris does, and where it is.7

Whatever else he says or does not say, Sade declares himself unequivocally for the right

of women to fuck- as if the period in which women fuck aggressively, tyrannously and

cruelly will be a necessary stage in the development of a general human consciousness of

the nature of fucking ; that if it is not egalitarian, it is unjust. Sade does not suggest this

process as such; but he urges women to fuck as actively as they are able, so that powered

by their enormous and hitherto untapped sexual energy they will then be able to fuck their

way into history and, in doing so, change it (SW: 27).

Carter also points out that for Sade, sex and politics are aspects of the same

‘economy’- he offers an absolutely sexualized world where sexuality underlies

everything. Sex is not a moral issue but a political reality. People, on this view, get

into politics for the sex, or the pleasure of power; sexual freedom implies political

power over one’s own destiny. According to Carter’s reading, Juliette is Sade’s

‘master morality’ personified: “[i]f Justine is a pawn because she is a woman, Juliette

transforms herself from pawn to queen in a single move and henceforth goes wherever

she pleases on the chess board” (SW: 79). Her life is an arithmetical progression from

one atrocity to the next. Of Juliette’s monstrous penchant for mass destruction, Carter

observes that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster” (SW: 27) and

asks, “if we admire the campaigns of a great general, is it hypocrisy to refuse to

Justine, “[l]a justice ou l’injustice d’une action, dit Hobbes, dépend du jugement seul de celui qui l’a

faite...ce qui le tirera hors de blâme et justifiera son procédé... ” (LNJ 2:112). 7 The clitoris was already known in Sade’s time (by European men). Renaldus Columbus claimed to

have ‘discovered’ the clitoris in 1559. Writes Thomas Laqueur, “[h]e tells his “most gentle reader” that

this is “pre-eminently the seat of women’s delight.” Columbus De re anatomica (Venice, 1559)

pp.447-448. Quoted in Thomas Laqueur Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

(Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 1990) p.64, n.7.

22

admire Juliette’s?” (SW: 80). Juliette represents for Carter, in a necessarily

exaggerated fashion, the modern woman.

Juliette stands for the good old virtues of self-reliance and self-help; ‘looking after

Number One’, as we say in Britain. She is an advertisement of the advantages of free

enterprise and her successes in business- her gambling houses, brothels and dispensaries

thrive, her investments always yield fruitful returns- are so many examples of the benefits

of the free market economy. And not only does she illustrate the advantages of self- help

but also of mutual aid…[w]here would Juliette be without the friends who advise her

investments, protect her from the law and warn her when the time comes...to cut her

losses and flee to the anonymous securities of her Swiss bank account? (SW: 101).

Carter reads Sade as recognizing the master type who will succeed in the

economic arrangements of modernity - “the fiscal morality of a market place red in

tooth and claw.” Sade is presenting a virtue ethics for capitalists, on this view, one in

which intellect, talents and insensitivity are supreme. “Juliette is rationality

personified and leaves no single cell of her brain unused. She will never obey the

fallacious promptings of her heart. Her mind functions like a computer programmed

to produce two results for herself- financial profit and libidinal gratification” (SW:

79).

Carter notes a number of slips in Sade’s thinking. Firstly, his moral discussions

run into contradiction- he dismisses the elements of morality as fictions, yet insists on

the pleasure to break rules. Secondly, his feminism (assuming Carter’s interpretation

is correct, that Sade is in fact a feminist to begin with) is incomplete, insofar as it

tends to fall back on a male model of sexuality. Sade ‘dithers,’ as Carter puts it, on

crucial points of sexuality and sexual roles, undermining any simple positive reading

of Sade as a friend of the feminist movement. Women become men through strapping

on dildoes, or by having huge clitorises; the phallus retains its centrality. The

character Clairwil, in Juliette, is so obsessed with the ‘prick’ that she is convinced that

a dissection will reveal one lodged in her brain. Says Carter, “this is one of the

contradictions of Sade’s female libertines that they ingest, but do not integrate within

themselves the signs of maleness” (SW: 90).

Ultimately, Carter’s reading of Sade is not straightforwardly positive. As she says

of Juliette’s throwing her own daughter into a fire- for fun (J:1186-1187), Juliette is

“absolutely free from any of the lingering traces of the human responses that can only

23

be learned through the society of others who are not accomplices, who are not aspects

of the self that confirm the omnipotence of the self” (SW: 99). This, for Carter,

suggests the natural egoism and narcissism of the child. Here, Carter agrees with

Adorno and Horkheimer’s treatment of the character Juliette; despite her iron self-

control and her triumph of the barriers of pain, shame, disgust and morality, she is,

fundamentally, an embodiment of “intellectual pleasure in regression” (SW: 148). As

for Sade’s obvious misogyny, Carter takes it as “a single strand in total revulsion

against a mankind of whom, unlike Swift, he cannot delude himself he is not a

member.” Somewhat inconsistently, Carter states that

Swift saw mankind rolling in a welter of shit, as Sade does, but Sade’s satire upon man is

far blacker and more infernal than Swift’s- for Sade, mankind doesn’t roll in shit because

mankind is disgusting, but because mankind has overweening aspirations to the

superhuman (SW: 34).

This does not quite reconcile with Carter’s reading of Sade as inculcating, in suitably

confident people, the wish to transcend their species through acts ‘beyond Good and

Evil.’ The ‘superhuman’ aspirations of Juliette themselves may appear infantile,

insofar as they stand as a childish rebellion against the demands of socialization.

Carter (as many others do) describes Sade as both the diagnostician and symptom.

This tension in Carter’s reading is not fully resolved or addressed.

Although Carter acknowledges Sade’s wish for a secular republic and other

social changes, at bottom, despite his talk of ‘overcoming’ and of libertinism, he is

above all a pessimist. Carter cites Sade’s description, for example, of humanity as a

“fallen race” (SW: 140). Likewise, in the short story Eugénie de Franval, a character

denies a daughter the right to bear children, arguing that the human race ought to die

out, stating that “[a] plant whose only product is poison cannot be rooted out too

quickly” (SW: 136-136). Sade, Carter notes, is too intelligent to be a Satanist–Satan is

a redundant concept in a world so manifestly evil.

When an atheist casts a cool eye on the World, flesh and the devil fuse; when an atheist

casts a cool eye on the world, he must always find Satan a more likely hypothesis as

ruling principle than a Saviour. Criminality may present itself as a kind of saintly self-

mastery, an absolute rejection of hypocrisy (SW: 33).

24

Carter also reads Sade as a pessimist of the future. There is Durand, an alchemist

accomplice of Juliette’s, who uses the black art of poisoning and her knowledge of

biology to destroy. An early pioneer of weapons of mass destruction, she wipes out a

city’s population with bubonic plague (SW: 115). Durand, for Carter, represents the

return to pure mythology- the reduction of Enlightenment’s lofty hopes of harnessing

nature through technology to pure chaos. Carter’s Sade also sees in the future a new

age where the commercial class takes the reigns of power, and where knowledge of

the natural world brings neither peace nor harmony, but will certainly make a

minority very rich and powerful (SW: 113).

1.3: Sade and Nazism in Secondary Literature

Theodor Weisengrund Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-

1973), and the later, post-war Albert Camus (1913-1960), are not so much concerned

with interpreting Sade as with understanding those political and cultural phenomena

that gave rise to Nazism. All three suggest that, in some sense, these cultural

associations link back to Sade. A very brief, and rarely discussed, expression of this

same association is given by Raymond Queneau (1903-1976). In his 1945 article

“Lectures pour un front.” This article is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, Queneau

links Sade with an exact contemporary- William Blake (1757-1827) - and notes a

close family resemblance between Sade’s work and the ‘transgression of the law’

implicit in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Secondly, unlike either Adorno,

Horkheimer or Camus, Queneau addresses the specific content of Nazi ideology, as

described by the dissident Hermann Rauschning (who held that nihilism was the ‘fin

et principe’ of Nazi ideology). 8 Thus, Sade, as the first articulator of a fully fledged

rejection of all values, is thought to have anticipated Nazism, taken to be the first

political and national manifestation of this upsurge of nihilism. Queneau’s brief word

on Sade presents, in compact form, the entire thesis of the ‘negative dialectical’

reading of Sade of Adorno and Horkheimer, yet with perhaps greater concern for the

specifics of Nazi thinking. Finally, Queneau goes on to note the irrelevance to this 8Before fleeing to the United States, Hermann Rauschning was a Nazi party member and mayor of

Danzig. During the Second World War he wrote several books on what he felt to be the nihilism at the

centre of Nazi ideology. Having exaggerated the amount of contact he actually had with Hitler, his

worth as a historical source is in dispute. See Hermann Rauschning The Revolution of Nihilism:

Warning to the West trans. E.W. Dickes (New York: Alliance Book Corporation, 1939).

25

understanding of Sade as to whether or not Sade himself was a ‘terrorist.’ In

Queneau’s view, Sade’s ideas cannot be separated from the reality of the Nazi death

camps. Further, he questions the divide made between the morality of his characters

and of Sade himself.

…il est incontestable que le monde imaginé par Sade et voulu par ses personnages (et

pourquoi pas par lui ?) est une préfiguration hallucinante du monde où règnent la

Gestapo, ses supplices et ses camps. Or Sade fait partie intégrante de l’idéologie

surréaliste, par exemple ; et Breton, dès 1939, montrait quelque embarras dans l’exégèse

de cet auteur. Que Sade n’ait pas été personnellement un terroriste (et Desbordes a très

bien expliqué pourquoi),9 que son œuvre ait une valeur humaine profonde (ce que

personne ne peut contester), n’empêcheront pas tous ceux qui ont donné une adhésion

plus ou moins grande aux thèses du marquis de devoir envisager, sans hypocrisie, la

réalité des camps d’extermination avec leurs horreurs non plus enfermées dans la tête

d’un homme, mais pratiquées par des milliers de fanatiques. Les charniers complètent les

philosophies, si désagréable que cela puisse être. 10

Significantly, Queneau here makes clear his acknowledgement of the ‘profound

human value’ of Sade’s work (as I will suggest later in the study, to associate Sade’s

thought with that of the Nazis and other such movements is to emphasise, rather than

deny, his significance as a thinker and ‘voyant’). The last line of the passage cited

above –“ philosophies end with charnel houses”– introduces a new understanding of

Sade as central to the understanding of Modernity (Nazism, of course, in particular),

the history of ideas, and the destructive implications of ideas themselves. The

association of Sade and Philosophy through Nazism remains controversial. (This topic

will be returned to in Chapter VII).

Adorno and Horkheimer make a contentious association between the ethical

thought of Kant and that of Sade, but their discussion has the merit of focusing on

some key philosophical claims that at least can be approached in a clear way. Lester

G. Crocker’s work adds depth to the association made by Adorno and Horkheimer

between Sade, the Enlightenment and the rise of Nazism. Camus’ interpretation, on

9 This refers to a biography by Jean Desbordes, Le vrai visage du Marquis de Sade (Paris: Éditions de

la Nouvelle revue Critique, 1939). 10 Raymond Queneau “Lectures pour un front,” in Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (Paris : Gallimard,

1965) :215-216. Quoted in Françoise Laugaa-Traut p.279.

26

the other hand, can only be understood from the perspective of his own thoughts on

the human condition.

1.4 Sade and Absolute Revolt

Albert Camus saw the commonality between Fascism and Sade in terms of what he

calls ‘absolute revolt.’ Camus perceives, in both Fascism and Sade, a response to the

meaninglessness of the universe, on the one hand, and on the other, a revolt against

the ‘universal death sentence’ at the core of the human condition. In both, for Camus,

pursuit of violence and power are the response to existential crisis, in particular the

realization of the meaninglessness of the cosmos. Camus also describes both Sade and

Nazism as manifestations of cynicism and despair; cynicism in the moral and political

spheres, and despair at the human condition and the collapse of traditional systems of

belief. Insofar as Camus largely agrees with the presupposition of cosmic

meaninglessness, his relationship with Sade is highly ambiguous, and went through a

major shift at the end of World War II.11 His earliest references to Sade are in fact

very positive. His Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942) at times reads like a

Sadeian tract.12 He writes, for example, of the “freedom of not being responsible” (

MS : 58); and of the doctrine of the “absurd,” according to which “A man’s rule of

conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and

variety of experiences he has been in a position to accumulate” (ibid:59). As for

ethics, he writes that one can be moral “on a whim” (65). Further, Camus refers to

Sade in this text as one of the great philosophical novelists (92). There are other

Sadeian resonances in Camus’ works. The play Caligula (1941) considers the idea

that absolute despotism is as appropriate as any other response to the Absurd. The

short story The Renegade (1957), about a missionary who is ‘converted’ to nihilism,

rapes an African girl and has his tongue ripped out, is strongly reminiscent of Sade, as

is the conclusion of The Outsider (L’Etranger, 1942) (The convict’s dialogue with the

priest is very similar to Sade’s Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, in turn

11 For discussion, see Jean Gassin “Le sadisme dans l’œuvre de Camus” in La Revue des Lettres

Modernes 360-365 (1973):121-144; Raymond Gay-Crosier “Camus et Sade: Une relation ambiguë,”

Zeitshrift für Französische Sprache und Literatur 98 (1988): 166-173. 12 Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Penguin, 2000).

27

derived from Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville).13 Finally, Camus’

The Fall associates sexuality with the will to destruction, one of Sade’s principal

themes: “I told myself that the ideal solution would have been the death of the person

I was interested in…But one cannot long for the death of everyone or, to go to

extremes, depopulate the planet in order to enjoy a freedom that is unthinkable

otherwise” (F: 50). It is in The Rebel (L’Homme révolté, 1951) in which Camus

associates Sade with modern atrocity, rather than as liberator.

The only logic known to Sade was the logic of his feelings. He did not create a

philosophy, but pursued a monstrous dream of revenge. Only the dream turned out to be

prophetic. His desperate demand for freedom led Sade into the kingdom of servitude; his

inordinate thirst for a form of life he could never attain was assuaged in the successive

frenzies of a dream of universal destruction. In this way, at least, Sade is our

contemporary.

...Two centuries ahead of his time and on a reduced scale, Sade extolled totalitarian

societies in the name of unbridled freedom- which, in reality, rebellion does not demand.

The history and the tragedy of our times really begin with him (R: 36-37, 47). 14

Camus goes on to describe Sade as the prophet of “barbed wire and observation

towers” (R: 42). His association of Nazism and Sade is not fully developed; Camus

reads his own existential assumptions into Sade and Nazism, and does not dwell on

the actual ideological content of either, besides making the observation that, like

Camus himself, both are opposed to traditional religious belief.

1.5 Negative Dialectics: Adorno and Horkheimer

Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1944 text Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der

Aufklärung) (hereafter DE) is the first text that contains a sustained philosophical

meditation on Sade as a theorist in his own right.15 The choice of Sade as material

13 Albert Camus “The Renegade” in Exile and The Kingdom trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage,

1986):34-61; Albert Camus L’Etranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); Albert Camus Caligula (Paris:

Gallimard, 1993). 14 Albert Camus The Rebel trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1984). 15 Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. John Cumming (London:

Verso, 1997).

28

appears to be unorthodox in the context of a Marxist critique of Fascism, but the

choice does not appear to be ironic.16

The very idea of taking Sade seriously as a thinker is a testimony to a far-

reaching pessimism with regards to philosophy itself; to reinstate Sade’s status as a

‘philosopher,’ is to reject entirely the comforting association between morality and

thought. It is to incriminate thought. This reinstatement validates (at least the first half

of) an aphorism of Adorno’s, that “the basest person is capable of perceiving the

weakness of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most

intelligent.”17 Dialectic of Enlightenment is presented as a ‘diagnosis of the ills of

modernity,’ and Sade is treated as a symptom of what they term a ‘negative Hegelian

progression.’ Horkheimer himself said that the text also represented a move from

Marx to Schopenhauer. This observation matches the pessimism of the text, and the

inclusion of Sade as a guide to the Weltanschauung.

No reader finds the argumentation in this work easy to follow. What is clear is

that Kant, Nietzsche and Sade are the three figures, according to Adorno and

Horkheimer, who “elicited the implications of the Enlightenment” (DE: xvi). The sign

of the Enlightenment, for Adorno and Horkheimer, is the ascendancy of the

‘autocratic subject.’ Sade’s antiheroes are the apotheosis of this new type of being.

They are liberated from God, the Church, government, and ethical concern for the

Other. This ascendancy leads to what Adorno and Horkheimer calls “the mastery of

the blindly objective.” Both Sade and Nietzsche- “black authors of the bourgeoisie,”

recognize the Enlightenment’s trend towards overturning all forms of control (DE:

44). In particular, the authors note in Sade and Nietzsche an advocacy of power as its

own justification, and similar accounts of the alleged origins of the ‘slave morality’ of

the Judaeo-Christian tradition (Sade’s ‘genealogy of Morals’ will be discussed in

Chapter VI). It is also pointed out that Sade’s views on sex are not entirely different

from those of Nietzsche, who writes of sexual love as “in means, war; and, basically,

the deadly hatred of the sexes” (DE: 10). Where Nietzsche draws away from Sade,

16 Adorno observes in his Minima Moralia that “[t]heory must needs deal with cross-grained, opaque,

unassimilated material, which as such admittedly has from the start an anachronistic quality, but is not

wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic. ” Theodor Adorno Minima Moralia

trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974) p.151. 17Adorno Minima Moralia p.50.

29

according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is in his insistence and prejudice in favour of

the grand world- historical crime over the minor theft.18

In the second chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Juliette or Enlightenment

and Morality,” Adorno and Horkheimer begin with a discussion of Kant and how his

notion of logic prefigures the modern world’s equation of ‘logic’ with

systematization. Although Kant recognized the need for mutual love and respect

within the political, the Enlightenment, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, did not.

Once this rigorous systematization was brought into the political sphere, they argue,

fascism was the result. As Horkheimer writes in the Eclipse of Reason, “the statement

that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries,

and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its

opposite.” 19 Sade portrays “understanding without the guidance of another person”

(DE: 86). Whereas for Kant this meant freedom from superstition, for Sade, the

authors contend, it means the surrender to the domination of brute force. As such,

Sade stands as an ‘early monument’ to the sense of planning of the totalitarian leaders

of the day. Further, Sade is a prophet of our own age, as he has conceived of a world

in which there is an “organization of life which is deprived of any substantial goal.”

Organized sport is seen as particularly Sadeian. Just as Sade’s orgies make use of

every moment, every orifice, and every bystander in intense and purposeful, but

ultimately pointless activity, modern sports are intensive, goal-oriented activities

which, despite variations, combinations and exhaustion, are pointless.20 The schema

of the activity becomes more important than the content. Enlightenment reason

reveals itself as incapable of providing substantial goals, and human feelings are only

included in the political or economic order of things if they can be sold, in a synthetic

form (DE: 91).

Sade, together with Nietzsche, “constitutes the intransigent critique of practical

reason, in contradistinction to which Kant’s critique itself seems a revocation of his

own thought.” Sade himself makes the “scientistic the destructive principle” (DE: 94).

18 As will be discussed in later chapters, Sade’s characters are in fact preoccupied with crimes on a

world- historical scale. 19 Max Horkheimer Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974) p.29. 20 This negative description of sport may owe something to Schopenhauer’s scathing remarks on

parlour games as a means of evading boredom, which, in turn, repeats Kant’s assertion in the

Anthropology.

30

Sade does not recognize, as does Kant, any ‘moral law within,’ but instead identifies it

as a myth, along with the myth of civilization. Sade’s character Juliette – a “rake

without illusions”- (DE: 109) lives by this insight, and revels in attacking

Enlightenment civilization with its own clearly corruptible instruments. In the

following passage, Juliette is described as the Anti-Kant.

In regard to self-control, {Juliette’s} directions are at times related to Kant’s as the special

application as to its basic proposition : “therefore virtue, to the extent that it is founded

upon inner freedom, also contains an affirmative commandment for men, which is to

bring all of their abilities and inclinations under its control [i.e., of reason], and therefore

under self-control, which prevails over the negative commandment not to be ruled by

one’s emotions and inclinations [the duty of apathy]; because, unless reason takes the

reins of government into its hand , emotions and inclinations will be in control.”21

Juliette preaches on the self-discipline of the criminal : “Work out your plan a few days

beforehand ; consider all its consequences ; be attentive to what might assist you… what

might betray you, and weigh up all these things with the same callousness you would

apply if you were certain to be discovered”[ J:640-641] (DE:95). (Square brackets are

Adorno and Horkheimer’s).

Both Kant and Sade advocate apathy, but for wholly different reasons. They are

identified as signs of the same crisis, nevertheless. Adorno and Horkheimer appear to

regard this onslaught on compassion by philosophy as the central problem of

modernity. In Sade, the removal of compassion from the outlook of the characters

leads to (what Adorno refers to as) the “barbaric success-religion of today,” and a

fragmentation of society through the abandonment of all linkages between

individuals. Here, Adorno links the rejection of ‘compassion’ with a return to pre-

Christian morality: “The barbaric success-religion of today is consequently not simply

contrary to morality: it is the homecoming of the West to the venerable morals of our

[non-Christian?] ancestors” 22 (Sade’s advocacy of a return to the morality of the Pre-

Christian peoples is discussed in Chapter VI). Love, companionship, marriage, and

familial ties are all dismissed as ‘untruths,’ as they cannot be ‘verified.’ We are all

alone– as is often said of the modern age– when everyone is expendable. Sade is not

21 Metaphysische Anfänge der Tugendlehre, ed.cit.,Vol. VI, p.408 (Adorno and Horkheimer’s

footnote). 22 Adorno Minima Moralia p.187.

31

the first to have made such scandalous suggestions, however- Adorno and

Horkheimer point out that even Democritus had denounced parental love as

economically motivated (DE: 116). But Sade pushes further, towards the destruction

of civilization, or at least the transformation of its institutions into the tools of a

privileged elite.

The authors finish the chapter in stating that Sade stands as a writer who told us

the truth- that the world is cruel, and that a fortunate life in a world of cruelty is a

“vicious contradiction ... in the light of the mere existence of that world” (DE:

118).The memories of the war are fresh in the minds of the authors- both Jewish

Germans, whose text frequently refers to the Nazi experience, beatings, deportations

and pogroms. For them, Sade represents all that the Enlightenment spawned and

failed to control. Only a thinker as awful as Sade, they insist, could shed light on the

abominations of the present. As for those naïves that point out the ‘obviously’

fictional nature of the Sadeian universe, Adorno and Horkheimer reply- “only

exaggeration is true” (118). Other thinkers are dismissed as giving assurances seeking

only to console - as was Sade’s own view.

Adorno and Horkheimer differ from other critics of Sade in that they emphasize

the logical, methodical nature of Sade’s works, as opposed to the more figurative and

symbolic treatments. Adorno and Horkheimer’s understanding of Nazism as primarily

a movement grounded on ‘ruthless efficiency’ is problematic, as is their association of

Nazism with the ‘bourgeoisie’ (and the ‘bourgeoisie’ with Nazism). 23 (In particular,

Nazi doctrine prioritized the destruction of the Jews ahead of heavy industry’s

demand for slave labour; wholesale destruction on racial- ideological grounds, rather

than ruthless efficiency, appears to have been the dominant trend). 24 Further, Adorno

and Horkheimer do not treat the specific doctrines of Nazism, instead focusing on

their prior theoretical interpretation. I will return to this issue in Chapter VI.

23 For discussion of this criticism, see Richard Rorty “The Overphilosophication of Politics,”

Constellations 7 (March 2001):128-32, p.130. I thank Sterling Lynch for bringing this article to my

attention. 24 For discussion see Ian Kershaw Hitler 1936-1945 Nemesis (London: Penguin, 2001) p.492; also

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Hitler’s Willing Executioners (London: Abacus, 1996) p.296; Robert S.

Wistrich Hitler and the Holocaust (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2001) p.2.

32

1.6: The Worm at the Core: Crocker on Sade

De nombreux lecteurs ont tendance à rejeter les écrits de Sade. Peu agréables à lire, ils

sont souvent ennuyeux et frisent même le ridicule. Ils sont insignifiants tant du point de

vue littéraire que pornographique, en dépit de leur influence sur l’a-littérature. Pour ce qui

est du style, il est médiocre et plat. Cependant, après avoir surmonté ces obstacles

considérables, on découvre en Sade un véritable penseur. Sans être un esprit profond, ce

penseur n’en présente pas moins une perspicacité terrifiante, et la ligne de pensée qu’il a

révélée est aussi importante que provocante.

Lester G. Crocker Au cœur de la pensée de Sade

Lester G. Crocker’s two exhaustive studies of the thought of the French

Enlightenment, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French

Thought (1959; hereafter AC) and Nature and Culture: Ethical thought in the French

Enlightenment (1963, hereafter NC) are two of the best treatments of Sade’s

placement in intellectual context; his essay “Au cœur de la pensée de Sade” is one of

the most concise and elegant treatments of the thought of Sade yet written.25 Crocker,

acknowledging that Sade was not the most brilliant of thinkers, nevertheless presents

him as a major intellectual figure, and grants him a central place in the history of 18th

Century French thought. Rather than standing radically outside the optimism of 18th

century thought, Crocker holds that Sade is continuous with a profound pessimism.

Notes Françoise Laugaa-Traut, “[l]a réinsertion du texte sadien dans un contexte

philosophique et littéraire fait apparaître l’importance de Sade comme penseur et

comme écrivain et contribue à modifier la représentation d’un siècle des Lumières

rationaliste et optimiste. ” 26 The pessimism of the age extended to man in general,

described, for the most part, as brutal, superficial, credulous, and incapable of either

reason or loving virtue and the social good for their own sake, and to reason itself.

Reason, it was feared, was incapable of unifying morality and truth. The very

25 Lester G. Crocker An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought

(Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins Press) 1959.

————— Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore: the

Johns Hopkins Press, 1963

————— “Au Cœur de la pensée de Sade,” Thèmes et figures du Siècle des lumières. Mélanges

offerts a Roland Mortier. ed. Raymond Trousson (Genève : Droz, 1980) : 59-71, p.59. 26 Laugaa-Traut p.290.

33

architects of political philosophy, such as Rousseau, were deeply uncertain about the

applicability of democracy, and feared that all political organization would degenerate

into despotism, remarking that full democracy was “for gods, not men.” 27 Crocker

writes of Rousseau, Diderot, Laclos and Sade, that “Their pessimism stems partly

from their answer to this question: To what does the world give its approbation,

esteem and admiration? To follies, or to sheer success and power, was the reply.”28

For Bayle, human life was fundamentally corrupt and reason the slave of the passions,

and that, were humanity a product of Nature, it is apparently a product of a natural

order in a state of sickness. 29 Voltaire’s views were scarcely less pessimistic, once

describing the world as “a little ball of mud upon which insects eat each other.”30

Sade’s comments on the horrors of the world are to be read in this context.31

Utilitarianism is another cause of the ‘nihilist dissolution,’ insofar as it proposed,

with the new emphasis on the individual, to induce “a revolt of the ego against the

frustration of its demands, against sacrifice for others, and simultaneously a revolt

against rationalistic ethics in favor of the instincts and the effective elements of the

personality” (NC: 334). Among Sade’s chief influences, Crocker notes that the

elements of Sade’s materialism, and its philosophical implications, can be traced to

Count Buffon (1702-1788), Marie-Jean –Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de

Condorcet (1745-1784), Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron

d’Holbach (1723-1789), Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) and Lucretius (c.

27 Rousseau The Social Contract trans. Maurice Cranston. (London: Penguin Books, 1968) pp. 30-32,

125; also pp. 131, 134-135, 323. Rousseau A Discourse on Inequality trans. Maurice Cranston

(London: Penguin 1984) pp.133-134. 28 Crocker an Age of Crisis p.323. 29 Lester G. Crocker an Age of Crisis pp.25, 221; Pierre Bayle Historical and Critical Dictionary

(1697) (selections) translated with introduction and notes, by Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis, New

York, Kansas City: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1965) pp.290-291. 30Voltaire, Zadig (Paris: Larousse, 1993) p.91; also Voltaire Candide and Other Tales introduction by

H.N. Brailsford; trans. Tobias Smollett (London: J.M.Dent & Sons, 1937) pp.74, 99, 249, 329. 31 In Reflections on the Novel, for example, Sade writes that “[t]here was not a man alive who had not

experienced in the short span of four or five years more misfortunes than the most celebrated novelist

could portray in a century. Thus, to compose works of interest, one had to call upon the aid of hell

itself, and to find in the world of make-believe things werewhith one was fully familiar merely by

delving into daily life in this age of iron” (120:109). Similar: J: 557, 1160; 120:778, 784; J: CL:73;

GT:25. Sade refers to Voltaire’s Zadig on the first page of both versions of Justine.

34

99-c.55 B.C.E). Sade’s sensationalism is drawn from the writings of Nicolas Fréret

(1688-1794) (ΠVol.III:1393, fn.1-4). 32 None of these thinkers were overtly

nihilistic, yet, according to Crocker, the implications of their thought lead directly to

Sade’s “dark pool”: “[n]ihilism (not only as a philosophy, but as a psychology) is the

worm at the core of our culture. It is the flaw we must constantly overcome. Sade was

the first to bring the full truth of this danger into the general consciousness of the

Western World” (NC: 398-400).

Crocker gives a brief summary of Sade’s system. The obvious internal flaws of

Sade’s system are noted; Sade simply denies our natural tendency towards

cooperation and kindness towards one another; that is, most of what we mean when

we speak of ‘humanism.’ Sade, writes Crocker, “ denies that pity, sympathy, justice,

the surpassing of self, and the demand for limit are natural, whereas in fact they

constitute a large part of the initial adjective in the phrase, “human nature” (NC: 428-

429). Sade also contradicts himself when he speaks of the illusory basis of all values,

and yet speaks of pleasure as a valuable thing in itself (NC: 425). Sade’s ‘project’ also

fails as it leads directly to exhaustion. The pursuit of higher levels of sensation and

pleasure, Crocker holds, can only lead to ennui (NC: 427). But Crocker feels that

these are minor shortcomings compared to the enormity of what he achieved, and the

difficulty of coming to terms with his revelation.

Nazism and Sade’s immorality are drawn together in Crocker’s history of ideas

(NC: 58). The ‘taste for the superhuman,’ in Camus’ words, is in fact the denial of our

instinct for collective harmony (to go beyond other humans) enhanced by cultural

development. For Crocker, it emerges as a known possibility in Sade’s time and texts

and is fully expressed by the Holocaust and similar atrocities.

Accompanying these developments [denial in philosophy of validity of norms

available to reason] was the desire for a total integration of man in nature, with refusal of

any transcendence, even though it was admitted that his more complex physical

organization gave him certain special abilities and ways of living. The important thing, as

La Mettrie, d’Holbach, and others made clear, is that he is submitted to the same laws;

everything is response to need – mechanically, some added, like a tree or a machine. Man

32 For discussion of Sade’s materialism, see in particular Jean Leduc “Les Sources de l’athéisme et de

l’immoralisme du marquis de Sade,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 68 (Genève:

Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1969):7-66; Warman Sade: from Materialism to Pornography; Jean-Pierre

Han, Jean-Pierre Valla “A propos” pp.110, 111.

35

merely carries out natural forces- without any freedom whatsoever- in all he does,

whether he loves or hates, helps or hurts, gives life or takes it….[a]n unbroken line of

thought leads from such eighteenth-century views to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Nazi

infamies ...

Nihilism is the rejection of the prevailing organization of instincts which is imposed

by any culture, and ipso facto of all moral restrictions to the id (a revolt against repression

of the instincts). Totalitarianism is a defense of culture based on the acceptance of the

truth of nihilism; it pretends to nothing more than a tyrannical and arbitrary imposition of

a superego and contemplates the remaking of the individual, through the pressures of total

conditioning, so that the id is inhibited and the ego enslaved. If the effort toward

humanistic self-control and voluntary co-operation does not succeed, culture is left with

no other way to defend itself (NC: 333-334, 395).

Besides theoretical similarities, Crocker also notes a similarity in the psychology

of Sade’s characters and the motives of the individuals responsible for the Nazi

atrocities. He draws together the acts of Nazi torturers and those depicted in Sade’s

novels, noting that they both progress from indifference to other people and acts, and

finally act purely for the enjoyment of sensation. In particular, Crocker cites Adolf

Eichmann’s comments whilst on trial in Jerusalem. Before his execution, Eichmann

claimed to have enormously enjoyed the thought that he was responsible for the death

of millions, just as characters in Juliette acquire satisfaction from the enormity of their

crimes (NC: 422). In anticipating both the theoretical and psychological contours of

modern evil, Sade, for Crocker, “foretold the course of the crisis of Western

civilization:”

...Sade speaks with the loudest voice to our own time, and through our own time, for it is

our age that has had to live the truths he revealed, to live through the night he uncovered.

It is in the twentieth century that the failure of rationalism, revealed in history and

psychology, has plunged our arts and often our acts into the absurd of nihilism (NC: 421).

Crocker regards Sade as posing the most important question facing, not merely

philosophy, but civilization itself. In his novels, we are not only confronted with a

vision of planetary holocaust (NC: 428). We are presented with a premonition of the

collapse of the values that distinguish us from base nature and guide us towards

higher ideals; the will to prevent such a global catastrophe from occurring. The world

has not become a kinder or more just place in the two hundred years since Sade wrote

36

his books, or even in the last fifty years, despite the promises our leaders made

following the Second World War. Sade is dangerous as he affirms this abyss, rather

than proposing a solution, or denying that such an abyss exists at all.

1.7 Sade and Mainstream Philosophy

Recent studies on Sade have greatly improved our understanding of his placement

in the context of Western thought. Two outstanding examples are works by Caroline

Warman (Sade: from Materialism to Pornography, 2002) and Svein-Eirik Fauskevåg

(Sade ou la tentation totalitaire, 2001).33 Only in the last few years, however, has

Sade gained the attention of more mainstream philosophers, as opposed to Sade

specialists or historians of ideas. Timo Airaksinen’s work, The Philosophy of the

Marquis de Sade (1991), has been mentioned above. Michel Onfray’s work, in

particular his irreverent introduction to philosophy, Antimanuel de philosophie (2001),

places Sade firmly alongside the thinkers of the Western canon.34 Anglo-American

philosophers have recently approached Sade as a philosopher, that is, as a writer

whose ideas are worth considering in their own right. These discussions of Sade are

significant, however brief, as they approach Sade directly, without the filtering of

more literary or ‘Continental’ critiques of his work. These philosophers quote Sade

directly and make no attempt at figurative interpretation. Almost two centuries since

his death, Sade the philosopher finally emerges.

Richard Joyce, in his metaethical study The Myth of Morality (2001), defends

his own version of ‘error theory,’ according to which, as the name suggests, all moral

theory rests on a philosophical error.35 He cites Sade’s character Eugénie (Philosophy

in the Bedroom) in an argument against ‘internalism about motivation’ (‘MI’), a

33 Svein- Eirik Fauskevåg Sade ou la tentation totalitaire : Etude sur l’anthropologie littéraire dans La

Nouvelle Justine et l’Histoire de Juliette. (Paris: Honoré champion éditeur, 2001). I thank Caroline

Warman for bringing this book to my attention. Caroline Warman Sade: from Materialism to

pornography (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002). 34 Michel Onfray Antimanuel de philosophie: leçons socratiques et alternatives (Rosny: Bréal, 2001)

pp.141-142. 35 This is slightly different to John Mackie’s ‘error theory,’ according to which all moral sentences are

false. See Richard Joyce the Myth of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). I thank

Charles Pigden for pointing this passage out to me.

37

doctrine Joyce takes to be both a ‘non-negotiable commitment of moral discourse,’

and false. Joyce gives the following form to this thesis:

MI: It is necessary and a priori that any agent who judges that one of his available actions

is morally obligatory will have (defeasible) motivation to perform that action.

According to this view, people have an overriding motive to do the good.

Consequently, it is only out of akrasia (‘moral weakness’) that anyone ever does

something immoral. Joyce thinks that this is incorrect, and turns to Sade for examples.

Writes Joyce, “Some of the villains from the Marquis de Sade’s work... are not just

interested in hedonism and sadism-they appear to be self-consciously pursuing

whatever they consider to be bad” (Joyce: 20). If it is possible, argues Joyce, that

Eugénie is not merely irrational or weak of will, MI has to be abandoned. As for the

fictionality or impossibility of Eugénie, Joyce does not consider this a problem in

moral thought: “Assertions of impossibility have to be explained, not merely insisted

upon” (Joyce: 23). (Sade’s engagement with ethical thought will be discussed in

Chapter V).

Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought: an alternative history of philosophy

(2002) also treats Sade as a thinker (again, as a moral thinker). Most of her thirty-four

page treatment of Sade is a summary of interpretations already given by other writers,

but she makes a number of salient points of her own. She notes that those who read

Sade as a ‘liberator’ can only have seriously considered half of what Sade had written,

and makes a pointed comment on the national specificity of Sade’s defenders:

Critics who call [Sade] a fighter of freedom, enemy of guilt, privilege, and mediocrity, or

a lover of everything from the concrete in itself [Le Brun] to the abstractness of

transgression in general [Foucault et. al.] ignore half the content of his work. For those

who didn’t make it to the end of Juliette: Sade’s heroes celebrate torturing to death their

own children, and anybody else’s they can get their hands on, as means to a better

orgasm….

Our willingness to aestheticize Sade may itself have limits. I am not certain, for

example, that the late twentieth century would have tolerated a Sade industry among

German intellectuals as it tolerated a French one.36

36 Neiman p.173.

38

Neiman gives a concise summary of what she takes to be Sade’s primary

philosophical goal: the underpinnings of our faith in the world’s goodness. She notes,

however, Sade’s reliance on accepted religious and philosophical structures and

categories. In particular, the Argument from Design is ridiculed; if God exists, he

must be the most evil entity in the cosmos. If Providence transforms all bad acts into

good purpose, then being a criminal may in fact be divinely approved. Neiman notes

that Sade relies as much on parody and descriptions of how the world actually is as on

theoretical refutation, yet his demolition of everything worth believing in is no less

tortuous for that.

Neiman finds the association between Sade and Kant (as suggested by Adorno

and Horkheimer) highly problematic, and suggests that their association relies more

on innuendo than argumentation. She notes that Adorno and Horkheimer appear to be

proposing an alternative- an appeal to the emotions- that has already been ruled out by

Sade’s merciless attack on Rousseau. 37

The “cold law” of Kant and Moses does not proclaim feeling and knows neither love nor

the stake. Would it be more or less Sadean if we added the stake? Is the coldness that

links Sade to Königsberg and Sinai something we’d rather replace by the heat of passion?

In Sade’s terms or Rousseau’s? Sade and Kant are linked [by Adorno and Horkheimer]

because both traffic in formal structures. Perhaps one ought to add Bach as well, and

denounce him for tormenting harmony by subjecting it to the precision of rule (Neiman:

192).

Neiman does concede that Adorno and Horkheimer make a valid point: “Kant’s moral

law has no basis in the structure of reality. It rests instead on what he calls the fact of

reason. This means that reason justifies itself. Kant would not justify morality on

instrumental grounds, so he offers no arguments to persuade us to be moral. Rather,

he says, it’s a fact of reason that we should be. But as Adorno and Horkheimer point

out, facts do not help us when they’re not there” (EMT: 193). Neiman sees in fact a

commonality between Sade and Kant on this point- the rejection of the idea that there

is a relationship between authentic virtue and reward. The entire argument of Justine

and Juliette, she notes, is to illustrate this.

37 Adorno & Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment p. 114.

39

Rather than presenting virtue triumphant, he sought to show it in disrepair. For only when

love of virtue is disconnected from all questions of reward can it be seen as sublime. Such

revelation is particularly needed by those of us who live in corrupted ages. If we expect

virtue to be rewarded, we may easily abandon it when it’s not. If we know in advance

how often it is ill-requited, we’ll be better prepared to meet adversity with the virtue that

is its own reward. Was he telling the truth here, he could almost pass for Kant (Neiman:

180).

Neiman notes, however, that Sade’s ‘project’ is closer to that of Hume, insofar as they

are both sceptics: “[w]hile Hume undertook to humiliate reason, Sade sought to

torture it” (Neiman: 194). Hume’s position is unstable. He shows that the traditions

upon which we rely for our morality are supported by nothing more than custom and

habit, yet prescribes that the ‘wise few’ can forgo them. Sade’s solution, notes

Neiman, is to wholeheartedly accept the disjuncture. Neiman reads Sade’s enthusiasm

for the entire destruction of the world as a solution to the gap between reason and

nature: “[i]f nature leads to its own obliteration, you may, of course, decide to view

annihilation as a natural goal” (196). She notes that this may be an entirely consistent

outcome of a possible defence of the unity of nature and purpose. This reading is

interesting, and perplexing. For Neiman, Sade represents the terminus of 18th Century

moral thought on the question of ethics and the problem of evil. As such, Neiman

meshes the interpretation offered by Camus and Crocker; Sade’s thought is at once a

howl at a godless sky, and a lucid (if laboured) exposition of the darker thought of the

period.

1.8 The Unique One: Maurice Blanchot’s Sade

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French literary theorist, critic and novelist.

His essay “La Raison de Sade” (1949, Sade, in the English translation, hereafter S)

treats Sade, in approximate terms, as a Nietzschean, for whom power is both “fact and

law, axiom and value” (Blanchot: 65). 38 Sade, in Blanchot’s view, writes of the

achievement of the poor who rise up through the ranks via crime, or the privilege of

those of high birth, who are cunning enough to maintain their position. In Sade, for

Blanchot, solitude and power are interchangeable; the achievement of one implies the

38 This originally appeared in a book entitled Lautréamont et Sade (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,

1949). The English version, “Sade,” is in PB: 37-73.

40

other. Even if it is the case that Sade’s psychology is simply wrong- that people are

naturally social and cannot really stand true solitude (it is used as a punishment for

criminals, after all) – Sade’s unique individuals, Blanchot claims, are powerful

through their solitude. These are the individuals who have chosen- and are able to-

break off from the rest of civilization: “Sade’s cast of characters is composed

primarily of a tiny number of omnipotent men who have the energy and initiative to

raise themselves above the law and place themselves outside the pale of prejudice,

men feel that nature has singled them out and, feeling themselves worthy of this

distinction, strive to assuage their passions by any and all means” (ibid: 41). Blanchot

notes also a paradox in Sade - Sade may advocate (in places) that all men are equal,

but for Blanchot this merely means that

...no one is worth more than any other, all are interchangeable, each is a unit, a cipher in

an infinite progression. For the Unique Person, all men are equal in their nothingness, and

the Unique One, by reducing them to nothing, simply clarifies and demonstrates this

nothingness (54).

Blanchot reads in Sade a Nietzschean superman, but it stands as a hypostatized hatred

of mankind (S: 60). In fact, according to Blanchot, hate is all that Sade stands for,

retaining the idea of God purely as the object of such hate. He maps out a dialectical

shift in Sade’s thought; Sade begins as advocating crime and base instincts as being

good, as they are in harmony with nature. But the Sadeian protagonist realizes that

destruction merely promotes nature, and that acts of destruction are ultimately futile.

He is merely an instrument of nature’s laws. If crimes are in the spirit of nature, there

is no true crime against nature (this problem will be discussed in Chapter VI). The

dialectic ends with the ‘unique one,’ who has achieved the state of apathy; the

elimination of the capacity for empathy of others or the feeling of normal pleasure in

themselves (68). Blanchot’s Sade also teaches that the truly liberated libertine has

learnt to find anything pleasurable, including torture. He notes that Justine and Juliette

go through more or less similar experiences of torture and degradation, yet Justine is

the ‘victim,’ and Juliette is the libertine. Being a Sadeian libertine in fact makes harm

impossible, as one has learned to find pain and even death enjoyable. Blanchot here

quotes Sade:

41

The true libertine loves even the reproaches he receives for the unspeakable deeds he has

done. Have we not seen some who loved the very tortures human vengeance was readying

for them, who submitted to them joyfully, who beheld the scaffold as a throne of glory

upon which they would have been most grieved not to perish with the same courage they

had displayed in the loathsome exercise of their heinous crimes? There is the man at the

ultimate degree of corruption (51).39

Blanchot takes the character Amélie, in Juliette, as merely the extreme of this trend.

She actually wishes to die (this interpretation and example is adopted by Bataille, as

discussed below). Finally, Blanchot’s Sade has discovered negation as the means to

power- negation of the ‘other’; denial that the other even exists in any meaningful

sense.

...the true man knows that he is alone, and he accepts it; everything in him which relates

to others-to his whole seventeen centuries’ heritage of cowardice-40 he repudiates and

rejects: for example, pity, gratitude, and love are all sentiments he crushes and destroys;

by destroying them, he recuperates all the strength that he would have had to dedicate to

these debilitating impulses and, what is even more important, from this labor of

destruction he draws the beginning of a true energy (67).

Here Sade’s ‘Unique One’ appears as a figure who is guilty of either inconsistency or

bad faith, for to negate the reality of the other is to deny that oneself exists in any real

sense, insofar as the other is basically a member of the same class. Sade recognizes

this, his character Saint-Fond stating that he and anyone else who achieves such

destruction is a ‘god’ in comparison to the average person (59). Blanchot’s Sade is

clearly a proto- Nietzschean figure, insofar as he is depicted as passing through this

field of absolute negation to arrive at a life-affirming hero- the ‘Unique One.’ Yet

Blanchot appears to render Sade harmless, or at least admirable, by presenting him as

a positive thinker whose apparent advocacy of mass destruction is merely incidental

to the ‘expression of energy’ (65). Blanchot also marks Sade as a proto-Freudian.

Dreams, says Blanchot’s Sade, are recognized as “the work of the mind restored to

39 Blanchot does not give a citation here. A passage similar in spirit is in Juliette (J: 1039), but the

Nietzschean idea of capital punishment as vengeance is not, to my knowledge, articulated elsewhere in

Sade’s works. 40 The association with Nietzsche is explicit here.

42

instinct and thus delivered from the influences of waking morality” (69).41 Finally,

Blanchot describes Sade’s system as a personal product- a standpoint epistemology of

the pervert, but one that illuminates the experience of everyman.

Blanchot’s interpretation of Sade has been critiqued on a number of points. Le

Brun has questioned the view that Sade’s characters are propelled by a death wish.

Sadeian heroes, she says, want to stay alive at all costs (this will be discussed below

in the discussion on Bataille). Jane Gallop questions the rendering of an absolutely

isolated sovereign man, noting that there is in fact a lot of talk of friendship (l’amitié)

in the 120 Days, a ‘lighter, friendlier’ aspect that Bataille’s reading omits.42

Caroline Warman questions Blanchot’s trivialization of those aspects of Sade’s

philosophy that place him in the stream of Enlightenment thought. As Warman notes,

Blanchot’s reading of Sade omits much of the content of Sade’s actual philosophical

speculations, in particular on the topic of materialism, which Blanchot dismisses as

“les theories à la mode.”43 Warman also questions the reduction of Sade’s thought to

a celebration of ‘The Unique One,’ given the degree to which Sade’s libertines rely on

teamwork.

44 Blanchot has also written of Sade in the context of his philosophy of

language, the merits of which have also been questioned by Le Brun (Blanchot’s

theory of language will be discussed below, in the discussion on Foucault).45

1.9 Annie Le Brun on Sade

41The authenticity of this citation is in doubt. Sade refers to dreams once in a short story:

“When we are awaiting the outcome of some event, and the way it will affect us occupies our mind all

day long, we are quite certain to dream about it; now, our mind, which is exclusively occupied with its

objective, nearly always causes us then to see one aspect of this event about which we have not thought

much the previous day.” Sade, “Faxelange, or The Wrongs of Ambition” (CL: 22n). The only other

reference to dreams Sade makes is in a letter to his wife, in which he calls them “very ridiculous

things.” Sade; Gilbert Lely, editor L’Aigle, Mademoiselle, lettres publiées pour la première fois sur les

manuscrits autographes (Paris: Les Editions Georges Artigues, 1949) p.151, quoted in Lorna Berman

Thoughts and Themes of the Marquis de Sade (Kitchener, Ontario: Ainsworth Press Ltd, 1971) p.150. 42 Gallop associates this idea with Nietzsche’s concept of ‘star friendship,’ although it seems doubtful

that there is anything in 120 that is ‘light and friendly.’ Jane Gallop Intersections A reading of Sade,

with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University press, 1981) p.73. 43 Maurice Blanchot “La Raison de Sade” in Maurice Blanchot Sade et Restif de La Bretonne (Brussels

1986) p.14. Quoted in Warman p. 7. 44 Warman pp.7, 10. 45 Le Brun Sade: a Sudden Abyss p.180.

43

Annie Le Brun (b.1943), writes Lawrence Bongie, is “indisputably one of the more

significant figures in recent Sade criticism, a latter-day surrealist and possibly the

Marquis’ most ardent contemporary champion.”46 She has written a number of studies

on Sade, the most important being Sade: a Sudden Abyss (Soudain un bloc d’abîme,

Sade, 1986, hereafter SSA).47 The text swings between analytic and purely figurative

registers, between ‘philosophy’ and ‘poetry’; as such, it takes some effort to extricate

Le Brun’s interpretation. Yet it is there, and it is significant for several reasons.

Firstly, Le Brun, unlike Camus, Adorno and Horkheimer, rejects the association of

Sade with any political ideology, in particular Nazism. Le Brun’s Sade is close in

spirit to the Surrealists, in particular Bataille. For both Le Brun and Bataille, Sade

represents absolute freedom of the passions, and a complete rejection of morality.

Secondly, Le Brun considers Sade “the first, if not the only, author to have seriously

conceived of a universe without God” (SAA: 152). If one embraces atheism with the

wholeheartedness of Sade, she argues, everything follows, as atheism leads to a

“reconsideration of the social position man has usurped in the universe.” Ordinary

atheists, lacking Sade’s “stark gaze,” merely fall back onto an “ideological mire”

(152). Le Brun has, consequently, little patience for Klossowski’s interpretation of

Sade as a closet theist (74).

Le Brun holds that theoretical writings on Sade have largely missed the point of

his works. She rejects the interpretations offered by Barthes and Foucault, charging

them with neglecting Sade’s concern with reality, in particular the concrete

relationship between the body and thought. Le Brun reads Sade as insisting that there

are “neither ideas without bodies nor bodies without ideas” (147), and takes Sade to

46 Laurence Bongie Sade: a Biographical Essay (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press,

1998) p.297. 47 Annie Le Brun Sade : A Sudden Abyss trans. Camille Nash (San Francisco: City Lights Books,

1990).

—————— .“Sade and the Theatre” In Deepak Narang Sawhney, ed. Must we burn Sade? (New

York: Humanity Books, 1999): 99-113.

———————. Sade, aller et détours (Paris: Plon, 1989)

——————. Les châteaux de la subversion (Paris : J.J. Pauvert aux Editions Garnier Frères,

1982)

——————. “Volupté perdue ? ” In Revue de la Bibliothèque national de France 7 (Jan

2001) :19-24

44

be preoccupied with the ‘concrete,’ in particular the concrete, blasphematory power

of words (as opposed to the ‘text’). She also chastises those who have neglected

Sade’s coherence, or drown his works in abstract, ‘disembodied’ literary analysis. To

miss the concrete aspect of Sade, Le Brun contends, is to betray a “criminal frivolity,”

adding that “critical and textual evaluations of Sade are scarcely better than the worst

condemnations” (3, 6, 40,180). In short, she contends, Sade scholars have not been

philosophical enough (61). She singles out Georges Bataille for critique in particular,

despite their commonalities. Both thinkers take Sade to reveal the truth of the human

condition, in particular the destructiveness of the erotic instinct; both take Sade to be a

heroic figure of revolt against morality itself, and both are aware of the horrific nature

of Sade’s writing. Their shared enthusiasm for Sade’s ‘libertine’ code is perhaps their

most striking commonality. Yet Le Brun disagrees with Bataille’s view that Sade’s

work expresses a death wish. Instead, she regards Sade as life-affirming and

“luxuriously erotic,” pointing out that “no Sadian hero actually seeks death” (92).

Finally, Le Brun’s study, like those of Crocker and Neiman, places Sade

squarely in the history and economy of Western thought. She notes Sade’s debt to the

philosophy of the age, noting that Sade was not merely adopting the language and

concepts of the materialists, but taking their worldview to a new level of purity. Le

Brun understands Sade’s writing to be a radicalisation and a simplification of existing

thought. Le Brun cites Fréret, Diderot, the Curé Meslier, Grimm, Toland, d’Holbach

and Machiavelli in particular as Sade’s sources (30, 42-43,140). What sets Sade

apart, she suggests, is Sade’s “physical awareness of infinity” (43). Although he owes

a great deal to other thinkers, Le Brun notes that he radicalizes their ideas, shortens

their philosophical material, and adds sarcasm and ‘cruelties’

That Le Brun’s interpretation of Sade is closer in spirit to that of Bataille and

Foucault, yet is informed by a detailed knowledge of Sade’s work, demonstrates that

the ‘philosophical’ and ‘a-philosophical’ interpretations ( and the ensuing debate as

to whether Sade is a philosopher or a figure radically outside philosophy) need not be

mutually exclusive. In this sense, Le Brun’s interpretation, regardless of its

shortcomings, has the merit of incorporating both aspects of Sade’s work. For Le

Brun, Sade is a reasoning being, yet his reason is in the service of the Unthought.

Le Brun repeatedly characterises Sade’s thought with two metaphors. Sade’s text

functions as either a ‘machine’ (or ‘atheist machine’) or as an optical instrument (SSA:

153). In Sade’s work, philosophy becomes a monstrous distortion of the human need

45

for order (53). Discussion of these metaphors of optics and machines takes precedence

over text-based analysis of ideas, and no argument is offered as to why these readings

are accurate (66, 68, 98, 130, 154, 157). This is significant, as Le Brun evaluates other

interpretations against her own notions of Sade as a ‘scourer’ of ideologies. In

particular, as with others, she takes Sade to be opposed to any particular political

orientation. 48 She discusses at length the lack of political orientation in Sade’s Aline

et Valcour, in which the narrator openly admits to writing a text that is politically

ambiguous (again, an aspect unaccounted for in Geoffrey Gorer’s account). Sade

offers three choices of political attitude: “acceptance, reform, or individual revolt”; it

is left to the reader to decide for themselves (106-109). Political decision, in Sade’s

view, Le Brun argues, is subordinate to individual taste.

Much of Le Brun’s discussion holds that Sade’s text has no core doctrine or

consistency of ideas beyond the imperative to abandon ideas, to return to the ‘purity’

of ‘body’ and ‘desire.’ In the following passage, Le Brun portrays Sade as revealing

the ‘truth’ that we are ‘all criminals,’ and that Fascism is the very opposite of this

‘ideological cleansing’ (67, 73). All ‘crime’ is an expression of human nature (for Le

Brun, as for Sade, only cruelty is considered a ‘true’ expression of human nature); the

notion that crime is simply due to an aberrant ideological choice is

...a comfort Sade does without and makes his readers do without. In laying bare the most

unjustifiable passions in the heart of Silling, Sade foils that questionable play of

justifications which can be made to serve any feelings, especially the loftier ones, from

motherly love to heroism. The fact that these justifications are all equally inadmissible

alters nothing. They all dress up human savageness in ideological uniforms. Fascism,

which draws on all the gaudy stereotypes of race, family, fatherland and countryside,

constitutes one of the most spectacular examples of this ideological masking, so utterly

opposed to the disrobing found in Sade.

Le Brun then states that those who associate Sade with Fascism are in denial about

their ‘true selves,’ without offering, beyond the authority of Sade himself, evidence to

support this assessment of human nature (67). Finally, she offers a curiously non-

48 Slavoj Žižek gives a similar, though more straightforward, argument. Interpreting Sade through

Lacan, Žižek insists that Sade represents ‘absolute autonomy’, whereas Nazism represents the exact

opposite- the rhetoric of sacrifice of the few for the good of the state. See Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly

Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004) p.126.

46

Sadeian argument as to why this ‘latent criminality’ should be acknowledged: “in

thinking these criminal tendencies elsewhere, one loses the power to prevent their

apparition close to hand” (67).

Le Brun’s evaluation of Sade as being uncommitted to any political ideology is

based on a single text, Aline et Valcour, and does not deal with the more resolutely

‘libertine’ texts, the 120 Days of Sodom, Justine and Juliette. As Le Brun

acknowledges, there is a doctrine of ‘libertinage’ that is constant throughout these

texts. She notes the coherence of this doctrine, its consistency across novels and

characters, and its major features. Le Brun notes for example that the character

Juliette does not actually learn anything from her ‘professors’ of libertinage

throughout the course of the novel, as she already thinks in the same “mode of

thought” (189-190). She also notes that Sade’s thought is “extremely coherent” (152,

212) and that his own thinking is largely that of his characters (40-41, 72). She

associates the same doctrine with both Sade’s libertines and with Sade himself, and

recognises it, in symbolic form, in the cadaverous splendour of the vulture (12).

Simply put- Le Brun reads Sade as teaching the expression of murderous desire

regardless of the consequences. Le Brun describes Sade’s doctrine of ‘Libertinage’ in

some detail. It teaches that pity, kindness and community are doctrines of the ‘weak’

(57, 185). As for economics, it regards the poor as merely tools for the use of the

wealthy, or offers what appears to be a brutal parody of supply-side propaganda (164).

In the practical sphere, libertinage makes various demands on the adherent’s conduct

(such as the cultivation of ‘apathy’ for the pursuit of the ‘pleasure of crimes,’ or the

maintenance of secrecy for the execution of ‘infamies’ (50). One of the most

common topics of philosophical conversation for the libertines, as Le Brun notes, is

the ‘voluptuous pleasure’ of killing people.

Le Brun’s text, then, offers a sketch of a coherent doctrine of a homicidal

narcissism. Juliette, she tells us, is “the embodiment of the finest idea of freedom that

one can possibly acquire” (192) (Juliette, it should be remembered, expresses her

‘freedom’ through mass murder, arson, poisoning, and, finally, immolating her own

daughter after allowing her lover Noirceuil to rape her ; J:1186). Le Brun avoids

discussing the theoretical specifics of this ‘idea of freedom,’ or even clearly

acknowledges its presence within the text as a fully fledged doctrine. At one point,

she writes that to be a ‘libertine’ requires merely that one has a ‘sense for excess’; a

‘sixth sense’: “[e]xcess, indeed, is the one condition necessary for the Sadian hero to

47

exist.” The victims, she writes, are those who lack this sense: “...if Sade’s victims are

indeed characters who do not resist excess, falling by the thousand before the

excessiveness of libertines, isn’t this more on account of their inability to conceive of

excess, than their inability to tolerate it physically?”(182). Le Brun assumes that the

victims die because they cannot conceive of the excess that kills them. This notion of

‘excess’ may be given a more prosaic formulation- Sade’s serial killers are successful,

like real life serial killers, because their acts cannot be anticipated by normal, trusting

people until it is too late.

Le Brun’s treatment of Sade as an ethicist (broadly construed; that is, ‘ethics’ as

concerning the highest values and virtues for a particular doctrine) is complex. Le

Brun identifies (correctly, I think) a close affinity between the ethics of Sade and

Nietzsche, and regards Sade’s tirade against traditional morality and religion as akin

to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, reading both as holding the Christian God

accountable as the “thief of energy” (137-138). The two thinkers diverge, she

suggests; Nietzsche diagnoses Christian ethics as decadent, whereas Sade allegedly

withholds judgment, and merely illustrates.49 Also insightful is Le Brun’s reading of

Sade as revealing the naivety of the moral thought of the age, that is, as engaging in

the early modern debate on moral theory (47). More problematic is Le Brun’s attempt

to show Sade as morally superior to the normative morality he attempts to undermine.

She notes that Sade opposed the death penalty (141,172). Le Brun also contrasts

Sade’s ‘ethics’ with what she takes to be the worse evils of conventional, ‘bourgeois’

morality. According to Le Brun’s Sade, conventional morality demands the

subordination of the particular to the general will, and makes demands on our conduct

that are allegedly impossible to live up to (70,170).

Le Brun also makes a number of associations between conventional morality,

the morality of the Revolution, and the (alleged) aesthetic horrors of the Social Realist

school. The moralizing of the bourgeoisie and the revolutionaries, writes Le Brun, are

“accomplished at the cost of a systematic dematerialization of the body…the orthodox

art of the revolutionary era can be said to anticipate the future horrors of socialist

realism.” She goes on to describe the horror of this transformation: “one encounters 49 I question this reading. Sade’s’ libertine’ novels are peopled by protagonists who speak with one

voice on the question of ‘that stupid religion’, and their largely silent victims. The only ‘victim’

character who argues in turn is Justine, but her arguments seldom go beyond pious clichés. Sade’s

critique of Christianity is discussed in Chapter VI.

48

the same violence: a violence perpetrated against the individual body to transform it

into anonymous human material for nourishing the ideological machine” (144-145).

‘Morality,’ for Le Brun, is associated with ‘ideology,’ “weepy sensibility and

revolutionary virtue” (145).50 She contrasts Robespierre, who executed in the name of

morality, with Sade, in particular the latter’s criticism of the use of the guillotine

(171). Robespierre, writes Le Brun, writes in the “cold, white, cutting tones” of death,

in contrast to Sade’s humanity and his awareness that ‘ideas have bodies.’ “So which

of the two do we call moral?” asks Le Brun: “Robespierre, for whom the end justifies

the means? Or Sade, showing that the means justify the end?” (171). Le Brun

associates Robespierre with morality itself, although it would be more accurate to say

that he was merely hypocritical, or inconsistent, rather than being a representative of

morality as such. Le Brun appears to think that killing people for enjoyment is

morally superior, due to its honesty, than killing in the name of ideology. There is an

incompatibility here between the assertion that Sade is heroically beyond all morality,

on the one hand, and, on the other, the wish to show that Sade is morally superior,

through emphasising a single purported virtue- Sade’s ‘honesty’ or ‘life-affirmation.’

More to the point, it is unclear how Le Brun can object to the ‘violence’ of bourgeois

‘ideology,’ and consistently praise the ‘erotic’ torture machines in Sade that

themselves reveal the “nothingness of bodies” (161).51

Finally, Le Brun attributes the ‘erotic’ with moral significance, or at least a

significance that overrides other values. Sade, for Le Brun, proposes a new scale of

values that ranks desire and the ‘erotic’ at the pinnacle. She describes The 120 Days of

Sodom variously as a “sumptuous banquet,” shimmering “like myriad rare pearls

slipping through the folds of night,” and praises Sade for freeing “eroticism from the

blinkering idea of beauty” (88,188). The one passage she cites from 120 illustrates

what she means to be the ‘erotic’ is as follows:

…They leave the scalpel, they plunge into a hand, they search inside her bowels and force

her to shit through the cunt; then, through the same opening, they set about splitting the

wall of the stomach. Then they turn back to her face: they cut off her ears, burn the inside

50 See also Le Brun “Sade and the Theatre” pp.111-112. 51 One of Sade’s characters, a reader of Sade, in fact (he reads Philosophy in the Bedroom as he kills),

murders people with a guillotine. Accordingly, Le Brun’s disjunction between the horrors depicted in

Sade and those of the Terror is problematic (LNJ 2:377-378).

49

of her nostrils and extinguish her eyes by pouring molten Spanish wax in them, they cut a

circle around the skull and hung her up by the hair while attaching stones to her feet, so

that her body is weighed down and the cranium torn off (74-75; similar: 193).52

The reader can decide for oneself whether this could be taken to be a “sumptuous

banquet.” In any case, Le Brun’s claim that Sade is not preoccupied with beauty is

actually inconsistent with the text. Sade’s brand of absolute horror requires an

acknowledgement of beauty in order to rail against it, or to soil it. States his character

Saint-Fond, “[b]eauty [in a victim] tends to excite us further; virtue, innocence,

candour embellish the object...all these qualities tend to enflame us more” (J: 270).

Sade’s works are full of clichéd descriptions of feminine beauty; in Juliette, victims

are described variously as having “the face of love” with the most beautiful eyes

possible”; “never in my life had I feasted my eyes on a more beautiful body”,

“nothing so fresh, nothing so plump, nothing so pretty,” “radiant as an angel”; “Venus

herself would be envious,” and so on (J: 1012, 1073, 1053, 1126, 1073).

Le Brun’s discussion of Sade takes several other tangents, such as her proposal

that Sade is a critic of “reason itself,” that he exposes the “fierceness of desire,” that

he “frees us from power relationships exercised by knowledge,” and that he marks the

‘end of man’ (54, 60, 156). These Foucaultian avenues are not explored further in Le

Brun (such themes will be discussed later in this chapter and in Chapter VII).

This completes the survey of those who have interpreted, or treated, Sade as a

philosopher. Yet to be discussed is the view that Sade’s work is of some vital,

philosophical significance, yet cannot be approached as one would a philosophical

text. That is, the philosophical dimension of Sade’s work is considered a mere surface

feature, whether a part of a deeply subversive distortion, or secondary to some deeper

insight or project far removed from philosophical practice. This is the view of

Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault.

52 Even more bizarrely, Le Brun refers to the other passage cited here as showing ‘erotic brutality,’

despite the fact that it only concerns the spectacle of mass execution. It is apparently not sex that Le

Brun is interested in. The citation in Sade is 120: 658, 659.

50

1.10 A Cloacal Eye: Bataille on Sade

…if [Sade] had not existed he would have had to be invented…

Bataille The Accursed Share (AS Vol. III: 252).

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) almost single-handedly established Sade’s place in the

realm of ideas, and is unusual, as a non-specialist, in having had a major influence on

Sade scholarship. A good deal of the secondary literature on Sade (for example, that

of Michel Foucault, Marcel Hénaff, David Allison, David Martyn, Deepak Narang

Sawhney, Alphonso Lingis, and Béatrice Didier) takes for granted that there is a

natural intellectual affinity between his work and that of Bataille. Bataille frequently

introduces Sade into his meditations in such a way as to suggest a complete

identification. He takes Sade to be largely in agreement with his own discussions of

sexuality, ‘general economics,’ and what he refers to as the ‘Sovereign.’ In this

section, I will attempt to disentangle Sade from Bataille’s embrace, in order to clarify

the relationship between the two.

In the 1930 essay “The Use-Value of D.A.F. Sade (An open letter to my current

comrades),” Bataille discusses what, for him, is Sade’s true message- total revolution,

and the wish to “release dangerous movements and be their first victims.”53 In so

doing, he lambastes those members of the Surrealist circle who he felt had entirely

misunderstood Sade, who instead ‘worship’ him in the manner of “primitive subjects

in relation to their king” (UV: 17). Given the anodyne version of Sade embraced by

André Breton and others, Bataille’s has the merit of being under no illusions as to

what Sade’s work entails, this being the most striking, and vital, feature of his

interpretation. Sade reappears again in most of Bataille’s subsequent works, in

53 Georges Bataille “The Use Value of D.A.F.Sade (an open letter to my current comrades)” trans.

Allan Stoekl, in David B. Allison, Mark S. Roberts and Allen S. Weiss, editors, Sade and the Narrative

of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp.16-32. See also Michel Surya

Bataille: An Intellectual Biography trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London and

New York: Verso; 2002) p.264.

51

particular Erotism (hereafter ER, 1957), the Accursed Share (hereafter AS, written

1949, published 1967) and Tears of Eros (hereafter TE, 1961). 54

Bataille shares with Sade a number of thematic preoccupations. Bataille’s

fictional work, in particular Story of the Eye, is similar to that of Sade to the point of

appearing derivative. As in Sade, in Bataille there is a great deal of scatology, sex

scenes in churches, blasphemy, humiliation, rape, torture, and necrophilia.55 There are

also philosophical similarities, although these have often been exaggerated. The most

obvious theoretical commonality is in their ethical orientation. Sade’s view that

civilization and morals have softened man is close to Bataille’s attitude (J: 776). Both

writers draw a link between the absence of God and the nullity of morality, suggesting

a traditionally religious view of moral thought ( Bataille’s project of founding an

anti-‘ethics,’ without reason or justice, is explicitly a Godless ethics ). 56 Bataille

54 Georges Bataille Erotism: Death and Sensuality trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights

Books, 1986)

———————. Le Bleu du Ciel (Paris: 10:18, 1957)

———————. Ma Mère (Paris 10:18, 1966)

———————. Literature and Evil trans. Alaister Hamilton (New York and London: Marion

Boyars, 1997)

-——————. Story of the Eye by Lord Auch trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City

Lights Books, 1977)

——————. Madame Edwarda, Le Mort, Histoire de l’œil (Paris: 10:18, 1973).

——————–. Inner Experience trans. with an introduction by Leslie Anne Bolt (New York:

SUNY Press, 1988)

——————. The Tears of Eros trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989)

——————. The Accursed Share (in three volumes) trans. Robert Hurley (New York/ Zone

Books. Vol. I: 1991; Vol. II and III: 1993).

—————– . “Evil in Platonism and Sadism” trans. El Albert, in Deepak Sawhney, editor Must

we burn Sade? (New York: Humanity Books, 1999) pp.243-262. 55 In Bataille’s Novel Story of the Eye, for example, a “scrumptious streetwalker from Madrid” is raped

in a pigsty full of liquid manure, and the spectacle of a decapitated car crash victim- a young girl- is

described as “very beautiful.” In an outline for a sequel (set fifteen years after the original, placing the

action in 1943), the heroine ‘accidentally’ finds herself in a ‘torture camp’ and is beaten to death in a

scene Bataille describes as, again, very beautiful (SE: 5, 55,102). According to Bataille’s biographer

Michel Surya, in 1944 Bataille planned to make a pornographic film based on The 120 Days of Sodom.

The main character, a soap manufacturer, acts out scenes from Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom with

some prostitutes, eventually killing one of them. See Surya p.349. 56 For discussion, see Surya p.430.

52

states that Sade took the mentality of the aristocracy to its limit under the pretence of

criticizing it (ER: 166). Bataille also notes that, though Sade’s work remains on the

fictional plane (ER: 175; AS Vol. II: 183) he “stated his [principles] but never really

put them to practice” (TE: 142). Bataille admires Sade for his nihilism and his total

disregard for his fellow man, and notes that he was a “connoisseur of torture” (ER:

171-172, 189; TE: 206).57 Yet he also describes Sade as in some sense an ethical

figure. In Erotism, Bataille holds that, because “violence is silent,” Sade’s attitude is

“diametrically opposed to that of the torturer” (ER: 186, 252). The paragraph below

illustrates the tension in this account. Sade, for Bataille, represents both the attitude of

‘sovereignty’ that stands beyond concern for the fellow man, and the (assumedly)

moral attitude of the revolutionary.

He was an enemy of the ancien régime and fought against it…He worked out his criticism

but he was a Jacobin and the secretary of a section. He worked out his criticism of the

past along two lines: on one he sided with the Revolution and criticized the monarchy, but

in the other he exploited the infinite possibilities of literature and propounded to his

readers the concept of a sovereign type of humanity whose privileges de Sade visualised

were outrageous compared with those [of] kings and lords (ER: 166).

Ironically, Bataille continues the Surrealist attempt to retain Sade as a figure of

revolutionary liberation from morality, and, simultaneously, as a revolutionary

moralist (insofar as revolution, unless it is a nihilistic revolution, requires a moral

centre). This tension is not resolved in his work.

Despite numerous similarities in their writing, Bataille and Sade are actually very

different thinkers. Bataille lacking a formal philosophical education, was largely

informed by his reading of Nietzsche, Hegel (as interpreted by Alexandre Kojève;

1902-1968), and the Christian mystical tradition. He was also taught briefly by Lev

Shestov (also known as Leon Chestov, 1866-1938). Whereas Sade referred to himself

as a philosopher, Bataille’s attitude towards conventional philosophy was largely

negative, and he often referred to himself as a mystic. 58 Nor did he regard Sade’s

57 For discussion of Bataille’s moral nihilism, see IE: 136; E: 171 AS I p.152-153; III: 370; 448 n37;

EPS: .250; also Surya p.323. 58 Bataille frequently dismisses traditional philosophers as ‘system builders’, ‘babblers,’’ insects’ and

‘careful little men’ (IE: xi, xxii, 14, 66) and reason itself as ‘puerile’ (AS Vol. III p.256).

For explanations for Bataille’s mystic epistemology, see ER: 123, 149,162, 256; AS Vol. I: 58, 191.

53

thought highly, noting its incoherence and its lack of persuasive force (ER: 179,

188,191,195; AS Vol.II:177; LE: 110-111). Instead, Bataille associates Sade with his

own interest in the interrelationship of taboo, sacrifice, transgression, and sexuality.

Sade, largely informed by the 18th century philosophe tradition, was familiar with a

very different philosophical outlook, and lacked a concept of the sacred (as Sade

wrote in the poem La Vérité [1787], “[i]l n’est rien de sacré”).59 Bataille, like Sade,

describes life as endless flux and destruction, and holds that harmony would destroy

the natural order (ER: 55, 86; AS Vol. I p.23; Sade J: 768, 771). The ontological

similarities end there. Bataille, unlike Sade, holds that humans have a “certain dignity,

a certain nobility” and a “sacred truth” that distinguishes them from animals, whereas

(as to be discussed in Chapter II) Sade emphasises the continuity of humans and other

animals (ER: 29, 149,150). Further, unlike most of Sade’s libertines, Bataille

maintains that there is a soul that survives the physical annihilation of the body (I E:

19; Sade, J: 401). These differences have lead Michael Richardson to remark that,

whereas Bataille implicitly admits idealism, “Sade was the materialist that Bataille

claimed to be, for his materialism was consistent and unyielding.”60

Another divergence between Sade and Bataille is their use of Christian sources.

Sade’s discussion of the Bible and other Christian texts betrays an encyclopaedic

knowledge of scripture and religious scholarship. Yet, unlike Bataille, his attitude

towards the Christian heritage is entirely negative, using his knowledge of Christian

sources purely order to discredit their doctrine. He would not, unlike Bataille, cite

the Saints or Christian religious art in defence of the claim that a woman’s body is

‘dirty,’ that sex leads to death, is basically sinful, or is linked with sex and sadism

(AS Vol. I: 38; ER: 230-231; TE: 83).61

Throughout his writings, Bataille retains two psychological assumptions; a). there

is an innate human instinct for sadism; and b). This instinct for sadism is inseparable

from the sexual instinct. In defence of both of these associations, Bataille relies

59 “La Vérité” In Œuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade edited by Annie Le Brun and Jean-Jacques

Pauvert (Paris: Pauvert, 1986). Vol. I: 553-556, p.556. 60 Michael Richardson, “Introduction,” in Georges Bataille The Absence of Myth: Writings on

Surrealism trans. Micheal Richardson (London and New York: Verso, 1994):1-27, p.19. 61 Nevertheless, Bataille insists that he is in fact free from Christian doctrine and, further, that there is

an “indefinite and general taboo” against sexual liberty as opposed to that associated with Christianity;

ER: 92.

54

largely on the authority of Sade. Sade, in The 120 Days of Sodom, Juliette and la

Nouvelle Justine in particular, insists that the taste for cruelty is shared by all with the

strength to express it, and typically describes heterosexual intercourse as ideally

involving rape, sadism and murder ( Writes Sade: “[m]urder is a branch of erotic

activity, one of its extravagances”; J:940). Like Sade, Bataille insists that all men

have a desire for violent, destructive behaviour. Bataille also notes the public’s

universal taste for violence in the manifestation of barbaric activities in the most

‘sophisticated’ cultures (Bataille notes for example “lynch law” as practiced in the

United States; ER: 186). Bataille goes on to suggest that all people desire dangerous

and expensive–as he calls them– ‘sovereign,’ activities, in proportion to their

strengths and means, noting that most people must fulfil this need through the

imagination, in spy novels and suchlike ( ER: 72, 86-87, 186). Bataille also takes at

face value Sade’s contention that there is a natural association (Bataille calls is a

‘general mechanism’) linking erection, ejaculation and ‘breaking the law’:

“[i]ndependently of Sade, the sexual excitement of burglars has not escaped notice.

But no one before him had grasped the general mechanism linking the reflex actions

of erection and ejaculation with the transgression of the law” (ER: 196; Sade J: 124).

The most important associations Bataille makes with his own thought and that of

Sade are those concerning sexuality. To a large extent, this association is apt. Neither

has a conception of sexual relationships as such, nor sexual love or mutual care. Sex is

described entirely in terms of the attainment of a sensation. Bataille occasionally

discusses more commonplace, though by no means less disturbing, associations of sex

and death, for example the association of sexual jealousy or possession (ER:20). But,

for the most part, Bataille does not seek to diagnose or explain such tendencies.

Instead, he describes violence as essential to sexual activity. Bataille holds that

‘[p]hysical erotism has in any case a heavy, sinister quality,” that sexuality, when

taken to its natural limit, leads to murder, and that Sade was the great pioneer who

affirmed this ‘truth’ (ER: 19; TE: 140). Bataille describes sex above all as a ‘limit-

experience,’ which, in general terms, involves the experience of merging with the

universe (AS Vol. II: 168,169,171). As “filth,” for Bataille, is the “secret of being,”

this does not in itself entail a positive account of sexuality (AS Vol. II: 118). It is

frequently the violence and ‘disorder’ of sex that Bataille regards as of central

55

importance, rather than the sex itself. 62 As such, actions as torture may suffice to

attain this state also, insofar as such an activity would be both violent and nauseating.

The following passage, from Inner Experience (1943, published 1957), makes clear

this association of ‘limit-experience’ independent of actual penetrative sex– torture,

beating up one’s spouse, or simply laughing may suffice.

The extreme limit of the “possible”– We are there in the end. But so late?...what,

without knowing it we reached it? (in truth, nothing is changed) by a detour: one man

bursts out laughing, the other is goaded and beats his wife, we become dead drunk, we

make others perish in torture (IE: 37). 63

A recurring theme in Bataille’s discussion of Sade is the idea that the ‘sovereign’ –

invariably a male- plays the active role, whereas the female is described variously as a

victim or as sacrificial victim. To take sexuality to be concerned with communication

or harmony at all, according to Bataille’s Sade, is to deny its ‘truth.’

De Sade makes his heroes uniquely self-centred; the partners are denied any rights at all:

this is the key to his system. If erotism leads to harmony between the partners its essential

principle of violence and death is invalidated. Sexual union is fundamentally a

compromise, a half-way house between life and death. Communion between the

participants is a limiting factor and it must be ruptured before the true violent nature of

eroticism can be seen, whose translation into practice corresponds with the notion of the

sovereign man. The man subject to no restraints of any kind falls on his victims with the

devouring fury of a vicious hound (ER: 167; similar AS Vol.II:174-178)

Again, the male is in the active role, whereas the woman is ‘dissolved.’ The two

sexually engaged people realize their ‘discontinuity;’ they merge into the one entity.

Yet a non-symmetrical relationship remains- the male remains as an active subject;

the female loses her identity. 64

62 Paul Hegarty Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist (London: SAGE Publications, 2000) pp.105-

106. 63 In The Story of the Eye, Bataille describes “going beyond all limits” as sucking the breast of a

girlfriend and simultaneously urinating in the presence of her mother. Story of the Eye p.39-40. 64 ‘Critics’ of Bataille often describe his work as preoccupied with ‘play’ and ‘communion,’ as opposed

to total egotism and the treatment of the other as a mere victim of aggression. Roland Champagne

writes that “[e]rotism for Bataille is an avenue of access into the playfulness of human sovereignty and

56

What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its

practitioners?–A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?

The whole business of erotism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that

the heart stands still. The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire

presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity….

In the process of dissolution, the male partner has generally an active role, while the

female side is essentially the one that is dissolved as a separate entity (ER: 17-18).

Later in this same text, Bataille states that the woman is not fully alive when being

penetrated, suggesting that, were she to be killed during sex, she would not actually be

present. She is not merely sick; she is already dead. Bataille discusses the ‘surprise’ a

person would feel, were he ignorant of the association between madness and

eroticism, if he were to watch “some woman who had struck him as particularly

distinguished” passionately making love.

He would think she was sick, just as mad dogs are sick. Just as if some mad bitch had

usurped the personality of the dignified hostess of a little while back. Sickness is not

putting it strongly enough, though; for the time being the personality is dead. For the time

being its death gives the bitch full scope, and she takes advantage of the silence, of the

absence of the dead woman. The bitch wallows-wallows noisily- in that silence and that

absence... (my italics; ER: 106).

On most of the points outlined above –the association of sexuality with the desire to

kill the ‘partner’ (the victim, in fact); the ‘inauthenticity’ and inferiority of shared

erotic pleasure; the reduction of the other (typically a woman) to the level of inert

object- Bataille is quite correct in reading Sade as advocating much the same doctrine

(J: 268-269). In the passage above, like Sade, Bataille tends to conflate the living

with the dead- an ‘erotics’ that denies the presence of the other person. It is,

essentially, masturbatory or even necrophilic, as neither Sade nor Bataille can

distinguish between sex with another person from merely penetrating a cadaver. the abyss, an image crucial to Bataille’s literary art of death and anxiety.” In similar terms, Micheal

Richardson writes: “[w]hat is at stake in sex for Bataille is communication between two beings, and in

pushing sexuality to its limits, he wants to test to breaking point the emotional boundaries of the

personality of the man and the woman.” Bataille’s treatment of Sade complicates this interpretation.

Roland A. Champagne Georges Bataille (New York: Twane Publishers, 1998) p.65; Richardson p.16.

57

An implication of Bataille’s description of the primacy of male sexuality is that

female sexuality cannot exist. That a man may be an erotic object of a woman’s

desire, Bataille concedes, is a theoretical possibility, but implausible. Women “put

themselves forward as objects for the aggressive desire for men.” Consequently,

“prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude;” an essential part of a

woman’s role in sex is to renounce her pride, for the essence of sex is to “despoil”

(ER: 130-131, 145).

It is intentional like the act of the man who lays bare, desires and wants to penetrate his

victim. The lover strips the beloved [la femme aimée] of her identity no less than the

blood-stained priest his human or animal victim. The woman in the hands of her assailant

is despoiled of her being. With her modesty she loses the firm barrier that once separated

her from others and made her impenetrable. She is brusquely laid open to the violence of

the sexual urges let loose in the organs of reproduction; she is laid open to the impersonal

violence that overwhelms her from without (ER: 90).

Bataille briefly considers the possibility that only neurotics are attracted by the

thought of sexual murder, or that sadism is merely an atavistic throwback. In a section

of Erotism entitled “Vice is the deep truth at the heart of man,” Bataille writes:

It might be said that we wear our sadism like an excrescence which may once have

had a meaning in human terms but now has lost it, which can easily be eradicated at will,

in ourselves by asceticism, in others by punishment. This is how the surgeon treats the

appendix, the midwife the afterbirth, and the people their kings. Or are we concerned on

the contrary with a sovereign and indestructible element of mankind, yet one that evades

conscious appraisal? Are we concerned; in short, with the heart of man, not the muscular

organ, but the surge of feelings, the intimate reality that it symbolizes?

If the first of these alternatives holds, the reasonable man would be justified; man will

produce instruments for his own well-being indefinitely, he will subdue all nature to his

laws, he will be free from war and violence without having to heed the fateful propensity

which has hitherto bound him to misfortune. (ER: 184).

But Bataille rejects this interpretation, hence aligning himself with Sade’s account of

the human condition. Bataille reasons that sadism cannot be dismissed as a non-

essential human trait, for two reasons. The first is that sadism brings humanity “into

harmony with the ceaseless and inevitable annihilation of everything that is born,

58

grows, and strives to last.” This principle is very similar to the naturalistic thinking of

Sade’s character Pope Pius VI, in Juliette, who reasons, “In all living things the

principle of life is in no other than that of death;” that is, as death and destruction are

part of the natural order, so too is the instinct to destroy (J:769). (Yet, in both Sade

and Bataille, this is an argument as to why destruction, not sadism per se, is a part of

the natural order). The second reason offered by Bataille is essentially a restating of

Bataille’s affirmation of destruction, and its association with the sacred and the

‘sovereign.’ This reasoning is uniquely Bataillian- Sade, as noted above, has no

concept of the sacred.

Secondly [sadism] bestows a kind of divine or, more accurately, sacred significance on

that excess and that harmony. Our desire to consume, to annihilate, to make a bonfire of

our resources, and the joy we find in the burning, the fire and the ruin are what seem to us

divine, sacred. They alone control sovereign attitudes in ourselves, attitudes that is to say

which are gratuitous and purposeless, only useful for being what they are and never

subordinated to ulterior ends (ER: 185). 65

Bataille also credits Sade for revealing a link between sexuality and a wish to destroy

oneself; “this tormenting fact: the urge towards love, pushed to its limit, is an urge

towards death” (ER: 42). (One could perceive here a hint of the Surrealist’s interest in

love, and sexuality, as a rendering asunder of the categories of the ‘reasonable’).

Besides appealing to the authority of Sade in defending this claim, Bataille cites

examples from natural history, of animals who expend themselves in coitus

(suggesting the danger of sex), the mystic insights of St. Theresa, and the association

of sex and death implicit in the French expression for orgasm, ‘la petite mort’ (‘the

little death’) (ER: 29,170, 234-240, AS: Vol. II: 105, 177; TE: 20). Bataille also notes

that childbirth is dangerous (although its relevance to the sex-self destruction

association is not clear) and that “depression following the final spasm [of orgasm]

may give a foretaste of death” (ER: 102, 232). Bataille takes the character Amélie (in

Juliette) to be representative of this association of sexuality with the will to self

destruction. Amélie, an impressionable young woman, tells Borchamps that she

wishes to be killed as the “victim of the cruel passions of a libertine.” She adds: “[n]ot

that I wish to die tomorrow- my extravagant fancies do not go as far as that; but that is

65 Note that this argument does not actually concern sadism as such, but the destruction of objects.

59

the only way I want to die; to have my death the result of a crime is an idea that sets

my head spinning” (ER: 175-176; similar; AC Vol.II:182). In Erotism, Bataille writes:

An impersonal denial, an impersonal crime!

Tending towards the continuity of beings beyond death!

De Sade’s sovereign man does not offer our wretchedness a transcendent reality…But in

[the character] Amélie de Sade links infinite continuity with infinite destruction.

(ER: 176). 66

Sade’s characters are extremely glib about life and death, so it is not possible to

dismiss Bataille’s interpretation out of hand (Durand, in Juliette, states that she once

avoided execution “merely for form’s sake”; J: 1025). It is, however, problematic to

interpret Sade as a theorist of a universal death drive on the strength of a single minor

character in a single novel, who is given only twelve lines of a text of some 2,000

pages. As noted above, Le Brun has argued that Bataille’s assertion that ‘eroticism

opens onto death’ contradicts fundamental aspects of Sade’s thought, observing that

the chief Sadeian characters do virtually anything in order to survive.67 The character

Borchamps cited in the passage above thinks in fact that Amélie had not been sincere

in her desire to be killed: “what she had told me about the way she wanted to end her

days, this, the more I pondered it, had simply been an effort on her part to be

ingratiating; it did not correspond to her real feelings” (Amélie is killed in appalling

agony regardless; J: 876). The lesson to be drawn would seem to be that one should

be careful with what one agrees to when dealing with post-morality sophisticates. But

Annie Le Brun’s criticism of Bataille is not entirely correct either- it could simply be

that Bataille has cited the wrong example. In Juliette, the character Durand contends

that “sensual excitement may even bring on thoughts of death and induce in one an

eager expectancy of death,” and Juliette herself suggests that death would be orgasmic

(J: 1014; 1039). 68 Sade’s characters also enjoy strangling or hanging themselves to

66 In Juliette, this character is referred to as Amélie, not “Amélie de Sade.” 67 Le Brun Abyss p.91. 68 Juliette’s argument is poor. She reasons that, as all of life’s necessities carry some element of

pleasure, and death is a necessity, then death must be pleasurable. Juliette states that it is common

knowledge that death is accompanied by a ‘discharge’, probably referring to the common knowledge

that a hanged man has an erection and ejaculates. This illustrates Sade’s understanding that female

60

enhance orgasm, and deliberately catch sexually transmitted diseases (LNJ2: 328,

340n, 344; J: 1147).69 (Even Justine exhibits an eroticized death wish; she falls in

love with the evil Marquis de Brassac despite his depravity, and states that she wo

gladly sacrifice her life to him; MV: 35). Sade’s characters, although perverse, do not

kill themselves in self- annihilating paroxysms as a rule.

uld

A more complex theme in both Sade and Bataille is the relationship between

sexuality and sin. Bataille acknowledges that there is no such thing as ‘obscenity’ in a

fundamental sense, accepting that it exists entirely ‘in the mind’(ER: 215). Bataille’s

work incessantly associates sex and sin nevertheless. His numerous comments on the

physical, sexualized body, on the sex act, on prostitutes, and childbirth suggests a

negative attitude concerning sexuality and the body in general, as does his obsession

with the ‘filthy.’ Bataille describes sex as infernal, anguished, and disgusting, and

avoids discussing any particular sexual act. He describes prostitutes as “fallen

beings,” “vomited forth” from nature, who “live like pigs” (E: 135, 246; AS Vol. II:

140, 147,178). According to Bataille, nudity is, in a fundamental way, ‘obscene,’ and

the sight of a woman’s breasts “the pure incarnation of sin” (ER: 17, AS Vol.I:5; IE:

127). The penis is variously described as ‘accursed,’ as a ‘larvae,’ and a ‘bestiality’

(ER: 138-139; SE: 74); semen as a type of excrement (UV: 21); the vagina as a

“swampy region” (SE: 21); or a “wound about to suppurate” (AS Vol. II: 130,149).

He writes of the womb as ‘muck,’ and refers to the stench of the bodies of mothers

and sisters (SE: 49; AS Vol. II: 63). He describes the cycle of birth, sex and death a

“shipwreck in the nauseous,” and cites Leonardo da Vinci and St. Augustine to defend

this association of sexuality with disgust (TE: 23, 66, 69; ER: 58; 144-145; 178; AS

Vol.II:126; 81; 62-63 104). Even childbirth is described as a ‘transgression:’

orgasm, like that of men, is accompanied by a ‘discharge.’ The idea that death could be sexually

exciting is one of the central themes of Nagisa Oshima’s film the Realm of the Senses (1976). 69 La Mettrie, for whom death is “not without a certain voluptuousness,” may have had an influence on

Sade on this point. La Mettrie also wrote that he wished to die accompanied by beautiful women,

preferably while having sex- “I want it to be difficult to say which contributed most to my end, Fate or

voluptuousness.” Julien Offray De La Mettrie Machine Man and Other Writings translated and edited

by Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp.107-108, 114). This image is

repeated in Sade’s Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man; PB: 175.

61

The menstrual discharge is further associated with sexual activity and the accompanying

suggestion of degradation: degradation is one of the effects of violence. Childbearing

cannot be disassociated from this complex of feelings. Is it not itself a rending process,

something excessive and outside the orderly course of permitted activity? Does it not

imply the denial of the established order, a denial without which there could be no

transition from nothingness to being, or from being to nothingness? There may well be

something gratuitous about these assessments… (ER: 54).

With this outlook, Bataille must explain why anyone would want to have sex at

all. He gives three responses. Firstly, he holds that we express our true love for

someone by overcoming our nausea of the physical act of having sex (AS Vol.II:95-

96, 113). 70 Secondly, Bataille suggests that “every horror conceals a possibility of

enticement” (AS Vol. II: 96). This claim becomes problematic however, as Bataille

cannot explain why corpses are not sexually attractive (AS Vol.II:97).71

Finally, for Bataille it is the very sinfulness of sexual activity that makes it

significant. Without the sin of breaking taboos, according to Bataille, sex is not

‘erotic.’ Therefore, sex within marriage, where there are no traditional taboos against

sex, is not erotic; marriage itself providing only a “narrow outlet for pent-up violence”

(ER: 109- 112). Bataille’s affirmation of the sinfulness of sex, rather than sex in and

of itself, is clearest in the introduction to his pornographic novel Madame Edwarda.

In this text, Bataille lambastes against ‘freethinkers’ who would seek to eradicate

sexual ‘sinfulness’ (ER: 17, 128, 135, 266).

Bataille’s work suggests a commonality with Sade that overcomes the overt

theoretical differences of the two thinkers. On the one hand, Bataille’s association of

sex with sin seems to have little in common with the stated views of Sade’s

characters. Sade, in particular in Philosophy in the Bedroom and Juliette, writes

repeatedly on the groundlessness of sexual prudery. Accordingly, he refers to 70 The ‘proof of love’ theory does not really explain why anyone would want to show their love

though overcoming their physical revulsion with sex. One could show one’s goodwill or even love by

cleaning or unblocking a friend’s toilet, but this is done for the benefit of having a toilet that works and

is clean. In Bataille’s scheme, there is no parallel function to sex, as it is not pleasurable as such. In any

case, the lack of fit with psychological reality hardly requires comment. 71 Sade discusses the piquancy of sex with hideously ugly people in The 120 Days of Sodom, but his

theory is based on a comparatively straightforward theory of pleasure (120: 233). Bataille discusses

necrophilia in le Mort. See Bataille Madame Edwarda, Le Mort, Histoire de l’œil (in one volume)

(Paris: Collection 10:18, 1973).

62

prostitutes, in their cynicism in sexual matters, as the “only authentic philosophers”

(PB: 208, 318). Further, Sade wrote incessantly on particular sexual acts, whereas

Bataille in fact appears reluctant to discuss the specific ‘transgressive gestures’ in

Sade’s work.72 Yet, under the surface, Sade and Bataille appear to speak with the

same voice. Having affirmed death and destruction, and not birth and creation, as the

central life-principles, both Sade’s libertines and Bataille appear to find the concept of

procreation deeply disturbing. In both Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom and Bataille’s

pornographic novel Story of the Eye, the protagonists avoid vaginal penetration,

showing a marked preference for voyeurism and play with excrement (SE :8, 13, 14,

15,20, 37,46, 48, 51,75) . The one vaginal penetration in Story of the Eye is described

as ‘insipid’ and physically painful (SE:67); likewise, the ‘friends’ of The 120 Days of

Sodom describe the horror of the female form, as does Belmor of Juliette, who

describes the vagina as a “fetid gulf” (J:510). 73 Sade repeatedly portrays the

sexualized body as punished and degraded, as if to imply that sexuality is evidence of

a Fall.74 Secondly, both Bataille and Sade associate sex with death, a natural enough

association for a Christian, given the association of sin with death, and sex with sin.

Sade’s characters frequently ‘punish’ pregnant women for daring to reproduce,

effectively extending the sin of sex to the sin of reproduction– it is not only the

sexualized, but the reproductive body that is punished (120:440; J:502-517). Both

writers, in the name of ‘authenticity’ and the ‘natural,’ seek to convince the reader

that sexuality cannot and should not be separated from the notion of sin and from the

infliction of pain. Both insist on the naturalness and desirability of torturing and

killing people, which they take to be innate drives. Further, both Bataille and Sade

regard mutually caring sexual relationships and the will to introduce new life into the

world, as unnatural and undesirable; as, in Bataille’s words, ‘degradation’ and

72 Bataille makes a single reference to coprophilia, in the novel Le bleu du Ciel (Paris: Jean-Paul

Pauvert, 1957) pp.84-85. 73 For discussion of the absence of vaginal penetration in Bataille, see Paul Hegarty Georges Bataille:

Core Cultural Theorist (London: SAGE Publications, 2000) p.127. 74 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (1860) and J.K.Huysmans (1885) regarded Sade’s apparent hatred of

the body as a symptom of Catholic atavism. For discussion, see Laugaa-Traut pp. 147,165; Herbert

Josephs “Sade and Woman: Exorcising the Awe of the Sacred” in Studies in Burke and his Time 18

(177): 99-113 pp.102, 104, 111. In La Nouvelle Justine, Sade does indeed refers to the “exécrables

chairs” (execrable flesh) of his characters’ victims (LNJ 2: 73).

63

‘violence.’ They take the perverse for the ideal, and the natural (specifically the

instinct for mutual care, and for reproduction) for the perverse.

On this theme, it can be argued that Bataille’s intuitive ‘method,’ his sweeping

claims and juxtapositions, discloses aspects of Sade’s thought that a more scholarly,

textual approach would miss. Bataille places Sade in the context of the Occult, in the

shadows cast by Christianity, rather than in the light of the Enlightenment. Bataille

writes that, in pre-Christian societies, passions were unleashed and taboos temporarily

lifted in particular ritualistic contexts, which allowed for the controlled release of

psychic forces. In Erotism, Bataille writes that “[t]ransgression in pre-Christian

religions was relatively lawful; piety demanded it” (ER: 126). Under Christianity, the

possibility of transgression is no longer sanctioned; it is made evil, and the ritual

transgressions are transformed into Christianity’s imagined other- the Witch’s

Sabbath and its attendant horrors. Writes Bataille, “[i]maginary or not, the stories of

the Sabbaths mean something; they are the dream of a monstrous joy. The books of de

Sade expand these tales; they go much further but still in the same direction” (ER:

127). On the face of it, this association is questionable. There are no positive

references to witchcraft or other superstitious beliefs in Sade’s surviving works, and a

number of explicit rejections. In the short story An Inexplicable Affair Vouched for by

an Entire Province, Sade writes of “feeble-minded people” who believe that they can

summon the ‘prince of darkness’ through strange rituals (MV: 170). In the same

Enlightenment spirit, a character in Aline et Valcour criticises supernatural beliefs (an

astrologer and voyant who exploits the gullibility of his clients; AV: 523).

Nevertheless, insofar as it brings to light the relationship between the notion of sin

and Christianity in Sade’s work, Bataille’s association is illuminating. As Nietzsche

noted, Eros and sin were associated by Christianity: “Christianity gave Eros poison to

drink - he did not die of it, to be sure, but degenerated into vice.” 75 The implication

here is that Bataille and Sade’s association of sexuality and sin is an artefact of the

Christian age. Both Sade and Bataille frequently return to it in their work, despite

avowals to the contrary.

According to Bataille’s ‘general economics,’ any system (the biosphere, or a

nation, for example) receives more energy than it can expend in simply maintaining

75 Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil trans. R.J. Hollingdale with an introduction by Michael

Tanner (London: Penguin, 1999) § 168 p.105.

64

itself. Bataille holds that the supply of energy available is endless, owing to the output

of the sun, and that growth is limited only by the roundness of the earth. 76 Part of the

excess has to be expended, whether destroyed or lost without profit (it is not clear if

Bataille is offering a descriptive or prescriptive thesis; insofar as he extrapolates from

an is to an ought about how the worlds works, his theory appears to commit a

straightforward naturalistic fallacy).77 Bataille discusses this ‘spending’ in terms of

luxury or ‘sovereign spending,’ yet his use of language suggests that it is not a

straightforward economic model. He associates this ‘sovereign economics’ to

erotism– itself taken to be a spending of resources– the sacred, in turn defined in

terms of overturning taboos, and to the notion of sacrifice, in particular human

sacrifice. In turn, as noted above, Bataille associates sexuality with human sacrifice.

Sade takes a central place in Bataille’s association of spending, sadism, violence, and

eroticism, and implies rather than directly imposes these associations onto Sade’s

work. In Erotism, Bataille writes that Sade does not formulate the principle of

wasteful expenditure, “but he implies them by asserting that pleasure is more acute if

it is criminal and the more abhorrent the crime the greater the pleasure…” (ER: 169;

see also AS Vol. I: 23).

[Erotism] demands a boundless energy which, stopping at nothing, limits the destruction.

In its ordinary form, it is the vice to which physicians gave the name sadism; in its

reasoned, doctrinaire form, elaborated by the Marquis de Sade himself in the interminable

solitude of the Bastille, it is the pinnacle, the fulfilment of limitless eroticism…eroticism

responds to man’s determination to merge with the universe (Bataille’s italics) (AS Vol.

II: 168).

Bataille here assumes both an innate instinct for destruction, and that such destruction

is associated with a will to unify with the cosmos. The following passage, from the

same discussion, is more problematic.

76 Geoffrey Bennington “Introduction to Economics I” In Bailey Gill, Caroline, ed. Bataille: Writing

the Sacred (London and New York: Routledge, 1995): 46-57, p.49. 77 Where Bataille- paradoxically- offers reasons as to why one should spend excessively, his goals

seem reasonable. For example, Bataille held that the extravagant spending of resources would prevent

wars. Bataille had not considered the opposite claim- that wars are frequently brought about by

competition for scarce resources or territory. See Bennington “Introduction to Economics I” p.50.

65

De Sade’s doctrine is nothing more nor less that the logical consequence of these

moments that deny reason. By definition, excess stands outside reason. Reason is bound

up with work and the purposeful activity that incarnates its laws. But pleasure mocks at

toil, and toil we have seen to be unfavourable to the pursuit of intense pleasure. (E: 168;

similar: AS Vol.II:180)

Bataille makes the following assumptions here and elsewhere: a). Sade is concerned

with excess; b). excess stands outside of reason; c). reason is bound up with

purposeful activity and toil; d). hence Sade is not concerned with reason. The first

assumption- that Sade stands for excess, is sound, to a point (in La Nouvelle Justine,

the character Madame d’Esterval remarks, “que serait la volupté sans excès?”; LNJ

2:107), as is the association of Sade with destruction and ‘limit’ experience. In Sade,

there are numerous descriptions of ruinous luxury, wastage and excess. Juliette

features elaborately staged orgies that follow the roughly the same plan. There is a

description of the scene, in Baroque style, detailing the drapery, the bouquets and so

on, accounts of the types of food and drink, the table settings; the costumes worn by

the libertines and those to be raped and killed. The action moves on to frenzied

rutting, the participants and their victims dissolving into a single mass of flesh.

Finally, the scene is laid waste- dead and injured victims and animals are piled high,

and the pyre- described variously as the “Greek sacrifice” or “holocaust”- is lit

( J:240-241, 585, 873, 747, 963-965, 1112, 1178; 120: 672). Sade, like Bataille,

discusses the sublime of the spectacle of destruction, and his characters express the

will to become volcanoes, that is, pure agents of destruction (Bataille IE:125; Sade

LNJ2:43-45; J: 522, 1016-1018). Although Sade did not discuss mystic or alternate

states of consciousness in his work, as Bataille implies (LE: 115-116, 119), his

characters indeed speak of the attainment of the “greatest possible upheaval in the

nervous system,” and “the final limit of what our human faculties can endure” (J:

340). Transgression and the overcoming of restraints through ultimately murderous

acts are clearly a commonality between the two thinkers. Yet there are other aspects

of Sade’s work that elude Bataille’s ‘general economy.’ In particular, Bataille’s

opposition of reason, purposefulness and toil, on the one hand, and pleasure, the

‘sovereign,’ and the cessation of thought, on the other, is problematic (the relationship

between pleasure and reason in Sade will be more fully discussed in Chapter III).

Here I will note that Bataille’s association of Sade with excess is problematic, and

66

suggest that Sade’s accounts of economics, and pleasure, are very different to those of

Bataille.

Sade’s characters, in particular in Juliette, are certainly concerned with

destruction and chaos on a large scale, and spending their resources in pointlessly

extravagant ways. Although they appear to reason in terms of utility, their

rationalizations are quite clearly just that- rationalizations. Where they offer reasons

as to why the poorer regions of Rome should be torched, or the entire Catholic

population of France should be killed, the reasons offered- usually the pretext of ‘the

health of the nation’- are frequently revealed to be secondary to the urge to destroy

(J:499-501, 726). A dialogue in Juliette, between Chigi and Olympia, illustrates this

deep complicity between the two thinkers. Chigi, in attempting to rationalize his call

for universal anarchy, makes the following claim:

I grant you that without laws the sum of crime increases, that without laws the world turns

into one great volcano belching forth an uninterrupted spew of execrable crimes; and I tell

you this situation is preferable, far preferable to what we have at present (J:732).

Likewise, in the essay “The Use Value of D.A.F. Sade,” Bataille calls for a total

overturning of the established moral order, and describes Sade as the figurehead of

such a revolution. His rationale, like Sade’s in the passage above, is that total chaos is

preferable to the present situation- the “crushing...yoke of morality” (UV: 27).

Without a profound complicity with natural forces such as violent death, gushing blood,

sudden catastrophes and the horrible cries of pain that accompany them, terrifying

ruptures of what had seemed to be immutable, the fall into stinking filth of what had been

elevated- without a sadistic understanding of an incontestably thundering and torrential

nature, there could be no revolutionaries, there could only be a revolting utopian

sentimentality.

…[s]ince it is true that one of a man’s attributes is the derivation of pleasure from the

suffering of others, and that erotic pleasure is not only the negation of an agony that takes

place at the same instant but also a lugubrious participation in that agony, it is time to

choose between the conduct of cowards afraid of their own joyful excesses, and the

conduct of those who judge that any given man need not cower like a hunted animal, but

instead can see all the moralistic buffoons as so many dogs (UV: 29, 30).

67

Here the similarity is clear- both Sade’s Chigi and (the early, pre-World War II)

Bataille call for total surrender to a purported human potential for complete chaos and

destruction, on the grounds that such disorder is morally right – as morality,

commonly understood, is ‘oppressive.’ Both essentially argue that morality should be

abandoned, on allegedly moral grounds. Sade’s characters do not propose a way out

of this impasse, yet are apparently aware of a deeper structure at work. On several

occasions in the text of Juliette, Sade’s characters note that irrational forces are

responsible for the doctrines proposed (Noirceuil, notes Juliette, has few peers “where

it comes to constructing rational bases to one’s irrational extravagances” ;J: 139).

Likewise, Saint-Fond suggests that Juliette’s vaunted atheism is grounded on nothing

more than personal taste, or some cognitive error:

“Profoundly an atheist,” I [Juliette] replied, arch enemy of the dogma of the soul’s

immortality, I will always prefer your system to Saint-Fond’s, and I prefer the certitude of

nothingness to the fear of an eternity of suffering.”

“There you are,” Saint-Fond rejoined, “always that perfidious egoism which is the

source of all the mistakes human beings make. One arranges one’s schemes according to

one’s tastes and whims, and always by drifting farther from truth. You’ve got to leave

your passions behind when you examine a philosophical doctrine (my italics; J: 401).

Hence, Sade’s work coheres, although not in a straightforward way, with the notion of

an ‘unreason’ that, for Bataille, in some sense lies beneath or outside of reason. Sade’s

characters’ ‘tastes and whims,’ in this text, usually involve the desire to destroy and

kill. As such, he notes the ease with which the most malignant urges can present

themselves to the council of reason. Insofar as Bataille takes Sade to see in man an

innate, irrational drive for destruction, and that reason plays a secondary causative

role in human activity that leads to such destruction, his interpretation is correct. Bataille’s adoption of Sade is less accurate with regards to his ‘economic’ theory,

however. According to Bataille’s ‘general economy,’ the ‘economics of scarcity,’

concerned with utility, is a denial of the vitality of life. Bataille holds that societies

produce more than required, and their defining operation, rather than their modes of

accumulation, is ‘exuberant spending;’ the purposeless destruction of resources (AS

Vol. I: 23). Yet it is straightforward to read Sade as the opposite of Bataille’s

characterisation.

68

The acquisition and hoarding of money is a recurring theme in Sade, characters

obtaining almost as much pleasure from amassing wealth as from spending it. Just as,

for Marx, capitalism leads to the fetishization of wealth, both Juliette and Clairwil are

frequently moved to masturbation surrounded in gold. States Clairwil:

I idolize money, I’ve often frigged myself sitting amidst the heaps of louis d’or I’ve

amassed, it’s the idea that I can do whatever I like with the money before my eyes, that’s

what drives me wild. I find it quite natural that others have the same taste; but nonetheless

I won’t have you deprive yourself: only fools are unable to understand that one can be

simultaneously niggardly and lavish, that one can love wasteful squandering upon one’s

pleasures and refuse a farthing to charity (J:286; also 324, 410).

Sade’s characters are, in keeping with Bataille’s description of the ‘sovereign,’

economically parasitic (AS vol. III: 198). But they lack the ‘sovereign indifference’ to

money that Bataille associates with sovereignty (AS Vol.1:76) The libertines are both

canny and careful with their money, and know how to make it, whether selling

warrants for arbitrary arrest, running brothels or gambling dens, or the contract

killing of entire towns with chemical agents ( J:213, 540, 551, 683; 120:191). Juliette,

who repeatedly states her holdings (her narrator occasionally notes the exchange rate

to ensure that the reader knows exactly how wealthy she is), invests her money

wisely, living on the interest. She only spends disposable income on her exploits (J:

409, 648, 806, 940, 1080). The Society of the Friends of Crime, a secret society of

very wealthy paedophiles and murderers described in Juliette, is similarly prudent. It

is managed in accordance to common sense, ‘non-sacrificial’ economic principles,

and has as its primary concern the interests of its ‘shareholders.’ It only accepts

members who can foot the annual fee of twenty-five thousand livres (virtually

defining the libertines as an economically privileged group); where the Treasurer

reports a favourable balance at the end of the year, the surplus is divided amongst the

members. As a precaution, the society maintains an emergency fund to help members

who get into legal difficulties (J: 419). The libertines also know how to acquire

wealth (“for some months we had been living this frivolous and profitable life...” [my

italics] J:627). In sacrifice, for Bataille, one destroys things or people for two reasons-

to maintain balance, in some sense, with the cosmos, or the biosphere, and to confront

the reality of death. In Sade, as we have seen, there is a concern with unifying with

69

the destructive principle of the world, but Sade’s characters, and their societies, are

equally concerned with the simple acquisition of pleasure, and with fiscal stability.

With regards to other interpretations of Sade under consideration, it should be noted

that Bataille’s outlook has points of contact with that of Adorno and Horkheimer,

moral views excepted. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Bataille is critical of what he

considers the superficiality of contemporary thought, and, in similar tones, writes of

modern thought as having reduced itself to banality, to the “belief in machines”

(IE:28). Bataille also associates the Nazi death camps with the ‘government of

reason.’ In keeping, seemingly, with Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘negative dialectics,’

Bataille places the Holocaust and Hiroshima squarely in a historical dialectic. In a

review of Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive, Bataille writes: “comme les

Pyramides ou l’Acropole, Auschwitz est le fait, est le signe de l’homme. L’image de

l’homme est inséparable, désormais, d’une chambre à gaz” (BŒ Vol. XI: 226). 78 If

one does not hold, like Bataille, that Sade’s killers are opposed to the exercise of

reason in their killing, his interpretation of the Shoah approaches that of Adorno and

Horkheimer. As Sade, according to Bataille, is opposed to legalized, orderly killing

(clearly, not killing per se), Bataille takes it to be an error to associate Sade with the

atrocities of the Nazis. In a lecture given in 1947, Bataille states that “the definition

of evil given in Philosophy in the Bedroom is the profound condemnation of

everything that we have seen the Germans do. Because it is clear that compared to the

executions of the Terror that Sade contemplated in Philosophy in the Bedroom, Nazi

executions responded still more to the images, to the suggestions of Sade. 79 But also,

they responded continually to the fundamental objection that Sade made to the

executions of the Terror since, from beginning to end, the unchaining of the passions

that raged at Buchenwald or Auschwitz was an unchaining that was the government of

Reason” (EPS: 253-254, also 244; similar AS Vol.III:253). Interestingly, in this very

statement, Bataille states that there is a direct relationship- that the Nazis had

‘responded’ to Sade, itself a claim that goes even further than that of Camus or

78 For discussion of Bataille’s thoughts on Hiroshima revealing a ‘new morality,’ see Surya pp. 360-

362, 416, 433. 79 There are no Terrors or executions actually described in Bedroom, although there are allusions to the

Terror in the inserted pamphlet, Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans.

Bataille may also be referring to the executions that Sade witnessed during the Terror, which took place

as Sade was writing this text.

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Adorno and Horkheimer in associating Sade with Nazism. (Whether or not Sade’s

characters are entirely ‘passionate’ killers, as Bataille insists, or more closely

resemble the Nazis, is a question to be answered in Chapter VII).

In conclusion, there are two related problems with Bataille’s ‘merge’ with Sade.

Firstly, Bataille’s interpretation is informed by only one principle text, The 120 Days

of Sodom, and his comments on other texts are cursory. Bataille’s interpretation

misses Sade’s complexity. His reading is not incorrect as such; it merely fails to

acknowledge a number of basic contradictions, or juxtapositions, within Sade’s work.

There are a number of other generally un-Bataillian suggestions in Sade’s work,

suggesting that any monolithic interpretation is incorrect. Sade’s narrative voice

describes St. Peter’s as a wastage of talent and resources, and criticizes duelling,

dismissing it as a revolting anachronism. Additionally, his philosopher- king, Zamé,

rejects state execution precisely because it is merely a secular version of human

sacrifice rituals, based, as they were, on “the absurd supposition that there is nothing

more dear to the Gods than human blood” (J: 657, 948; AV: 332).

The second problem with Bataille’s relationship with Sade is that he (and his

critics) reduces Sade to the status of esteemed but superseded antecedent of himself;

someone who “knew nothing about the basic interrelation of taboo and

transgression…but [who] took the first step.” (ER: 196).80 Nevertheless, Bataille’s

interpretation can be said to reveal a deeper animus within Sade’s text that goes

beyond the myriad contradictions at the surface level of meaning.

1.11 The Language of Unreason: Foucault on Sade.

Foucault’s biographers frequently note that Sade was one of the writers that he

most admired and knew best, and his name frequently appears in Foucault’s work in a

variety of contexts. 81 In reading Foucault, one gets the impression that Sade plays a

key role in his understanding of literature, of philosophy, and of madness.

Foucault’s interpretation of Sade is strongly influenced by, and is to some extent

continuous with, the interpretation offered by Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, 80 Roland A. Champagne, for example, writes that Bataille “projects Sade’s insights farther than could

be seen in the Eighteenth century.” Ronald A. Champagne Georges Bataille (New York: Twane

Publishers, 1998) p.25. 81 James Miller The Passion of Michel Foucault (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

2000) p.108; David Macey The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage, 1995) p.76.

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some critics suggesting that Foucault’s interpretation owes more to these critics than

Sade himself. 82 Both Foucault and Bataille take Sade to stand radically outside the

dominant streams of his culture; that he represents, in some sense, a dialectical,

occulted ‘other,’ a deeper truth, omitted from the ordinary understanding of humanity.

Whereas Bataille discusses Sade in terms of ‘sovereignty’ and the ‘sovereign man,’

Foucault refers to Sade in relation to the Unreason and of man’s ‘unacknowledged

twin.’ Also, both thinkers assign to Sade the role of expressing ‘desire’ in a radical

way. Whereas Sade, for Bataille, represents ‘desire’ as physical, sexualized violence,

Foucault understands Sade’s ‘desire’ as a literary phenomenon.

We have already seen a bewildering range of interpretations of Sade’s work, many

of which are incompatible. Foucault’s reading, to some extent, notes that Sade had

taken ideas from the discourses of his age, yet places Sade far outside the categories

of official discourse. As such, Foucault’s reading, unlike those already discussed, has

the merit of being consistent with the inconsistency and excesses of Sade’s work, and

of suggesting that the entire project of reading Sade as an ideologist or philosopher in

a fixed, stable sense may be simply incorrect.

Foucault gives three interpretations of Sade, two of which overlap. In Madness

and Civilisation (hereafter MC, 1961) Sade appears as a representative of the shadow-

side of human nature, locked away by new forms of control and classification. In the

essays “Language to Infinity” (hereafter LI, 1963) “Préface a la transgression” (1963)

and in The Order of Things (hereafter OT, 1966), Foucault discusses Sade as a

primarily literary phenomenon, yet links this interpretation with the previous

reading.83 Finally, in an interview given to the film magazine Cinématographe in

1975, “Sade, sergeant of Sex” (hereafter SS), Foucault gives an entirely different

interpretation – Sade, Foucault concedes, could be taken to be the very representative

of the forms of institutional control, rather than its opposite.84 Sade is also mentioned

82 Macey p.113. 83 Michel Foucault The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 1994). —————— Madness and Civilization trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988).

—————— “Language to Infinity” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. in Donald F.

Bouchard, ed. Language, counter-memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977):

53-67.

—————— “Préface a la transgression,” Critique 19 (1963):751-769. 84 Michel Foucault “Sade, Sergeant of Sex” an interview conducted by G. Dupont, trans. Robert J.

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in the History of Sexuality (hereafter HS, 1976-1984). These interpretations will be

discussed in turn. 85

In Madness and Civilization, Foucault describes a dialectical opposition between

‘reason’ and what he refers to as the ‘unthought.’ The emergence of the modern age,

for Foucault, was coincident with a new understanding of humans as being essentially

rational; heterodox elements, deemed undesirable, had to be policed and removed

from circulation. The classification, diagnosis, policing and incarceration of heterodox

elements, and the development of the techniques of surveillance and control,

according to this account, came to a head towards the second half of the 18th Century.

Foucault refers to this process as the ‘Great Confinement;’ a rounding- up of those

found to be unfit to participate in the Age of Reason- the mad, the libertines, the

unemployable, the homicidal maniacs (OT:278, MC:282; Discipline and Punish,

hereafter DP: 102, 240, 285).86 For Foucault, Sade represents this unacknowledged

twin, as man’s “ultimate truth” (MC: 23, 82,282), described elsewhere as “nothing

and night,” “the secret of unreason’s nothingness” and the “cycle of non-being” MC:

93, 115,116, 209, 285; OT: 323). Writes George Canguilhem,

The unthought (whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shrivelled- up

nature or a stratified history; it is, in relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a

brother but a twin, born, not of man, but beside him and at the same time, in an identical

newness, in an unavoidable duality.87

Hurley, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: essential works of Michel Foucault vol. 2 ed. James

D. Faubion. Paul Ranibow (London: Penguin, 1998):223-227. This originally appeared as

Sade sergent du sexe–Cinématographe 16 (Dec.1975): 3-5. I thank Tim Rayner for bringing this

text to my attention. 85 Michel Foucault The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality vol.1 trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin,

1998).

——————The Use of Pleasure: History of Sexuality vol.2 trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin, 1992).

—————— The Care of the Self: History of Sexuality vol.3 trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin, 1990). 86 Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:

Vintage, 1995). 87George Canguilhem “The Death of Man, or the Exhaustion of the Cogito” trans. Catherine Porter. In

The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994) p.326. See also MC: 76-78.

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In Sade’s “calm, patient language,” the “final words of unreason” are collected

together; an irrepressible psychic force that emerges into the world through a

“sovereign discourse” that runs counter to that of the “voice of reason” (MC: 188,198,

282; OT: 336). The Classical period had stored, within an “enormous reservoir of the

fantastic,” a memory of its own opposites; madmen, libertines, invalids; a dormant

memory of abstract unreason, “transmitted intact from the sixteenth to the nineteenth

century” (MC: 209). Whereas sadism itself, notes Foucault, is as ‘old as the world,’

the transformation of language into a ‘discourse of desire’ is concurrent with the work

of Sade, and hence, the beginning of literature.

Sadism appears at the very moment that unreason, confined for over a century and

reduced to silence, reappears, no longer as an image of the world, no longer as a figura,

but as language and desire. And it is no accident that sadism, as an individual

phenomenon bearing the name of a man, was born of confinement and, within

confinement, that Sade’s entire oeuvre, is dominated by the images of the Fortress, the

Cell, the Cellar, the Convent, the inaccessible Island which thus form, as it were, the

natural habitat of unreason (MC: 209-210).

The essay “Language to Infinity” continues this thought. Sade’s significance,

Foucault writes, is not in the predilection for cruelty nor the link between literature

and evil (Foucault here makes an explicit break with Bataille’s analysis; LI: 60). As

with other writers of ‘tales of terror,’ Sade represents a new language that is not

merely transgressive, but which seeks “the limits of the possible,” to speak of that

which lies “outside of words” (LI: 61). This is achieved through “subjecting every

possible language, every future language, to the actual sovereignty of this unique

Discourse which no one, perhaps, will be able to hear” (LI:61). This claim is repeated

in The Order of Things, where Sade is taken to represent a further dialectical shift

(OT: 384). Sade, for Foucault, pushes the Classical ‘episteme’ until it turns into its

opposite, the pure expression of desire (This is similar to Adorno and Horkheimer’s

description of Sade as representing the Enlightenment’s complete inversion). Foucault

writes:

Sade attains the end of Classical discourse and thought. He holds sway precisely upon

their frontier. After him, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below

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the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now

attempting to recover…in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought (OT: 211).

Sade is taken to be the bridge at which discourse and desire - that which is

unknowable to reason and discourse- intersect. Sade’s writing, rather than as a means

of transparent communication, is used to communicate something, paradoxically,

beyond communication, yielding a literature that is the very negation of the very

function of classical discourse, which seeks to represent. The impossibility of

expressing desire’s unreason by means of language’s representative properties forces

other techniques. It is, instead, the force of accumulation and combination of scenes in

Justine and Juliette that allow the “possibilities of desire” to rise to the surface, from

the depths below (OT: 210-211). This interpretation of Sade is again similar to that of

Bataille, who perceived in the very repetitiveness of Sade’s work its meaning: “due to

the decision to subordinate literature to the expression of an inexpressible

event...[b]oredom seeps from the monstrosity of Sade’s work, but it is this very

boredom which constitutes its significance” (TE:115-116). It is also similar to

Bataille’s idea of excess as revealing the limits of the established order. For Foucault,

it is the excess of Sade’s discourse that reveals the limits of the classical episteme.

Foucault goes on to characterise Sade’s work as a manifestation of “the precarious

balance between the law without desire and the meticulous ordering of discursive

representation:”

Here, the order of discourse finds its Limit and its Law; but it is still strong enough to

remain coextensive with the very thing that governs it….the libertine is he who, while

yielding to all the fantasies of desire and to each of its furies, can, but also must, illumine

their slightest movement with a lucid and deliberately elucidated representation. There is

a strict order governing the life of the libertine: every representation must be immediately

endowed with life in the living body of desire, every desire must be expressed in the pure

light of a representative discourse (OT: 209).

Foucault’s account holds that a). Sade’s work incorporates elements from other texts

and discourses, and yet b). stands radically outside all other discourses. Literature

differs from classical discourse in that it abandons the idea of language as a

transparent or pure medium of communication, and which turns in on itself, much as

modern art began with the surrender of painting’s purely illusory role to

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photography. 88 Sade’s work, he notes, is full of representation; it ‘represents

everything,’ yet “designates nothing other than itself” (OT: 304). Foucault describes

modern literature, in the words of John Johnston, as a discourse that has become “free

of its social function and hence no longer obsequiously obedient to discourse, or its

function as primarily representative.”89

The influence of Barthes and especially Blanchot is evident in this notion of

literature’s discovery of its own autonomy, through discovering and reflecting back

on itself. 90 Blanchot, in “La littérature et la droit à la mort” (“Literature and the Right

to Death,”1949) describes literature as a radical negation, hence, a radical freedom,

where anything goes and nothing follows. Poetry in particular is described here as a

privileged form of language, as it “has the ability and right to speak to everything, to

say everything,” hence, disclosing its own disruptive power, its own impossibility,

and its own being. 91 Foucault applies this account of literature to Sade, agreeing with

Blanchot’s view that Sade was driven by a desire to ‘say everything’; an endless

reduplication of existing languages that results in “a play of mirrors that has no limits”

(LI: 54).

Perhaps that which we should rigorously define as “literature” came into existence at

precisely the moment, at the end of the eighteenth century, when a language appeared

that appropriates and consumes all other languages in its lightning flash, giving birth to

an obscure but dominant figure where death, the mirror and the wavelike succession of

words to infinity enact their roles (LI: 66).

Blanchot’s metaphor of cancer may also be applied to Sade’s text, as Foucault

understands it here. Cancer cells are of the same substance, more or less, of healthy

living tissues. They simply do not follow the programmed functions of healthy organ 88 Sean D. Kirkland “The Spectre of Literature in Foucault’s The Order of Things,” Henry Street: a

graduate review of literary studies 8:2 (fall 1999):15-35, p.26. 89 John Johnston "Discourse as Event: Foucault, Writing and Literature," Modern language Notes 105

(fall 1990) 800-818: 803. 90 See Roland Barthes “Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France, 7 January 1977” trans. Richard

Howard. Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater, eds, The Continental Philosophy Reader (London:

Routledge, 1996) :364-377 91 Maurice Blanchot The Work of Fire trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1995) p.106, quoted in Gerald L. Bruns Maurice Blanchot: The refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore &

London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) pp.41, 43.

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tissue, and through their uncontrolled growth, they kill the organism within which

they live, of which they are a part of, even as they are nourished by it. Cancer, for

Blanchot, “destroys the very idea of a program, blurring the exchange and the

message... one of... the ways to dislocate the system, [is] to disarticulate, through

proliferation and disorder, the universal programming and signifying power.”92

Sade’s endless repeatings of everything that had been and will ever be said

insubordination of the discourse that seeks towards its annihilation.

are an

As noted above, and as following chapters of this study will show, almost every

individual element of Sade’s literature and philosophy can be traced to a particular

source text (Foucault himself notes that Sade had assembled his work from, among

other things, heavy borrowings from Rousseau; MC:283). Yet there is still something

that eludes the attempt to dismiss Sade as merely an eccentric plagiarist. Sade’s work,

in particular the texts with philosophical themes, frequently inverts the intended moral

ideals of the philosophers he has borrowed from, in particular the philosophes. He

scathingly notes the shortcomings of the moral philosophies of the age, and he fills his

works with mutually incompatible theories. Detailed analysis of Sade’s text reveals a

constant pattern of deliberate, perhaps malicious, ideological juxtapositions (i.e.

women are equals vs. women are inferior; nature guides conduct vs. nature does not

guide conduct; crime is pleasurable vs. crime does not exist). Sade’s work is also,

plainly, an artifact of an incessant desire to say everything- everything that the

dominant discourses of the time refused to confront. Sade’s “encyclopaedia of

inhuman practices,” insofar as it has a single significance at all, is not straightforward

(J: 1130). There is, therefore, something unnerving to Sade’s work that Foucault’s

interpretation captures. 93 Foucault suggests that Sade is writing about language; its

limits, and its possible roles outside discourse. In deliberately writing a text that

enfolds all possible discourses, all philosophies, all thoughts- thinkable and very

nearly unthinkable-; and regurgitates them up as an uninterrupted stream of atrocities,

Sade did not merely corrupt the idea of the author as unifying principle. Foucault

92 Maurice Blanchot L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1980) p.137. Quoted in Bruns

pp.30-31 93 Sade occasionally refers to the limits of language usage and the way in which language encodes

moral categories, and his own word usage is often highly idiosyncratic (the ‘sublime’ for Sade typically

involves the highly vulgar or horrific, for example). See J: 418.

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implies that Sade has reduced thought itself - ethics, metaphysics, the lot- to

meaningless babble, to rubble.

Three questions are- is this how Sade’s text actually functions? Which texts does

Sade invert, and at what level of meaning does the inversion take place? Is it a

knowing, sophisticated inversion of values, principles and theoretical meanings, or

merely a game played with sense and meaning? And, if so, is it a successful strategy?

A thorough exegesis of Sade’s work is required to answer these questions. Foucault’s

account poses several other questions. What this ‘language of desire’ amounts to, and

what it may suggest concerning understanding Sade, requires elaboration. Also

requiring discussion is Foucault’s assumption of an opposition of two entities; the

Sadeian text and the official discourse, variously framed as an opposition between

‘classical’ discourse and that of ‘literature,’ of ‘sovereign discourse’ and the ‘voice of

reason.’ There is also an assumed opposition in Foucault’s discussion between

‘desire’ and ‘reason.’ I will suggest that the ‘field of vectors,’ as Foucault would put

it, is more complex than his account suggests.

In Madness and Civilization, Foucault places Sade firmly within the context of the

‘Great Confinement.’ He writes in particular of Sade’s cell as the “natural habitat of

Unreason” (MC: 210) and identifies him with “error, illusion, dreams and madness,”

and all that is “unaccounted for by Descartes” (OT: 323).94 But Foucault’s association

of Sade with the ‘mad’ is not straightforward, and there is some doubt as to whether

Sade was himself a part of the ‘Great Confinement’ of the unemployable, the

libertines, invalids, and the insane. Sade was not, initially, one of the population

Foucault describes as without resources or social moorings– he was an aristocrat with

property, and who had served with a certain distinction in the military. Nor was he

particularly unemployable. Sade proved himself a highly versatile employee when

necessary, as evidenced by his successful (insofar as he, an aristocrat, survived it)

political career during the Terror. Nor was he treated like an animal, as Foucault

describes the ‘mad’ in Madness and Civilisation. Once in prison (at least, until

Napoleon), he was treated as a member of his class and was envied by other prisoners

for his privileges. It would be ironic if Foucault were to classify Sade as mad in the

strictly clinical sense, given that only psychiatrists such as Iwan Bloch and ‘Jacobus

94 Sade, given his admiration for Descartes, may well have found this statement perplexing (AV: 712).

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X’ have classified Sade as such.95 Sade certainly fits into the grey zone of those

‘diagnosed’ with ‘derangement of morals’ (MC: 66). But Foucault does not describe

Sade as mad in this sense. He notes, in Madness and Civilisation, that Sade was

described by an unnamed official as a “dreadful lunatic” who wrote in order to

“corrupt the time to come”; elsewhere, he describes Sade as not suffering from an

organic madness (MC:228; 202; also “Sergeant of Sex,” hereafter SS, p.225). Rather,

Foucault describes Sade as standing outside of the dictates of social control and of

official designations of the socially acceptable. More specifically, Sade is associated

with a discourse which is beyond the dictates of official discourse.

In the preface of Madness and Civilization, Foucault associates Sade’s Juliette

with Thrasymachus and Callicles (MC: xi-xii).96 This association may hold the key to

understanding what, in Foucault’s dialectic, Sade represents. In the Socratic

dialogues, Thrasymachus (Republic) and Callicles (Gorgias) both argue against

Socrates on the nature and validity of moral principles. Both reject Socrates’ defence

of morality, and for this insolence in the face of officially approved philosophical

discourse, they are reduced to infuriated silence. In Sade, writes Foucault, vengeful

destruction ...is only the first phase of Sade’s thought: the ironic justification, both rational and

lyrical, the gigantic pastiche, of Rousseau. Beyond this demonstration-by-absurdity of the

inanity of contemporary philosophy beyond all its verbiage about man and nature, the real

decisions are still to be made: decisions that are also breaks, in which the links between

man and his natural being disappear…

The famous Society of the Friends of Crime, the project of a Swedish constitution,

once we remove their stinging references to the Social Contract and to the proposed

constitutions for Poland or Corsica, establish nothing but the sovereign vigour of

subjectivity in the rejection of all liberty and all natural equality… (MC: 283).97

95 Dr. Iwan Bloch Marquis de Sade his life and works (Marquis de Sade: Der Mann Und Seine Zeit)

trans. James Bruce (New York: Castle Books, 1948); Dr. Jacobus X*** Le Marquis de Sade et son

œuvre (Paris : Charles Carrington, 1901). Both names are nom de plumes. 96 Jean Deprun notes that Sade may well have known of Plato’s Gorgias (hence Callicles), and that

there was available to Sade an excellent translation of Gorgias, by one P. Grou. See Jean Deprun “Sade

devant la “Règle d’or” In Corrado Rosso, Carminella Biondi, eds. La quête du bonheur et l’expression

de la douleur dans la littérature et la pensée françaises (Genève: Droz, 1995): 307-311, p.309. 97 Foucault associates the Society of the Friends of Crime (which forbids its members from interfering

with politics) with a Swedish Masonic conspiracy, which confuses two different episodes in the novel

Juliette.

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The madness of Sade, for Foucault, is not madness at all, but the ‘sovereign refusal’ to

take the dogmas of traditional philosophy seriously, in particular the call to keep the

appetites in check, and the doctrine of the harmony of reason with morality. The

Western canon, on this view, confines to the category of the ‘un-reason’ and

‘madness’ every viewpoint that rejects morality, just as Socrates rhetorically reduces

Thrasymachus to spluttering and coughing. Sade, then, is identified with an ancient

lineage of anti-moralists; the ‘dialectical other’ of Western thought, present since its

very inception. The association in the passage above with the Society of the Friends of

Crime, the secret society featured in the novel Juliette, is also significant. When

Socrates asks Thrasymachus how he would plan to live a life beyond the constraints

of the law, he replies that it would be necessary to form “secret societies.”98 On this

reading, Foucault’s Sade is similar to that of Crocker, insofar as he takes Sade’s voice

to be a voice in a sense acknowledged by the philosophical literature itself.

Thrasymachus is an early instance of the ‘imagined opponent’ of the philosopher who,

realizing the possibility of denying morality, seeks to defend it. Socrates had

Thrasymachus, Voltaire had his Fox, Kant had those who dismiss all morality as the

mere phantom of the imagination. Sade, in taking the place of this imagined opponent,

continues this discourse, as it were, from the other side.

Even if we grant Foucault a very broad conception of the ‘mad,’ and assume that

the ‘unreason’ incorporates the reasoned counter-morality of Thrasymachus, there is

still the issue of Sade’s placement in relation to other ‘discursive practices.’ Foucault’s rigid dichotomy of reason, philosophy and official discourse, on the one

hand, and incarceration, madness, and refusal of official discourse, on the other, does

not acknowledge the plurality of discourses in Sade’s period. If we assume, like

Foucault, that Sade’s work stands apart as a discourse of its own, it can be said that

there are at least two other discourses besides official philosophical discourse; the

libertin discourse, and the philosophe discourse. The dominant, official philosophical

discourse of 18th Century France was dominated by Catholic thought. As such, it was

largely confined to doctrinal disputes, such as that between the Jansenists and Jesuits.

The philosophes, in particular La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach, and Helvétius,

constitute a different discourse altogether. These thinkers, tending towards

98 Plato The Republic trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1987) p.112.

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materialism and atheism, were a small, radical minority, and were considered

dangerous, as were any other writers who challenged the established order. Voltaire

had his books publicly burned by the state executioner. La Mettrie went into exile, as

did Rousseau; Diderot and Mirabeau had been locked up; Sade had himself been

imprisoned with Laclos for a time. The vanguards of atheism- d’Holbach and La

Mettrie in particular- published anonymously and went to considerable lengths to

ensure that they could deny authorship. In Sade’s age, philosophical writing, in

particular atheistic writings and critiques of religion, was itself subjected to a

confinement of sorts (Sade’s insistence that it was his philosophical writings that had

led to his imprisonment, and not his sadistic rapes, {and certainly not his ‘insanity’}

suggests that Sade himself associated imprisonment with intellectual status).99

A third distinct, ‘para-philosophical’ discourse had also emerged owing to the

persecution of any publisher or author who challenged the clergy, the government, the

throne, or sexual mores. The Libertin novel, a mixture of atheistic freethought,

political satire, and pornography, constitutes a historically important discourse to

which Sade’s work is closely related. There is no sharp distinction between the

libertin novel and the work of the philosophes, they themselves having written a

number of key works, for example Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets (1748) and Boyer

d’Argen’s Thérèse philosophe (circa 1780). The philosophes also wrote tracts on such

topics as the joy of guilt-free sex (La Mettrie’s La Volupté, 1746), or the

establishment of a state brothel system for the ‘public good’ (Helvétius’ Treatise on

Man of 1758).100 Rousseau’s penchant, in his youth, for public exhibitionism and

other ‘paraphilias,’ and Helvétius’ for having himself whipped in Parisian brothels,

further blur the distinction between Sade the ‘libertine’ and his intellectual

predecessors. 101 Philosophical (philosophe) writing in Sade’s time, simply put, was

as socially respectable as punk rock and, for anyone with something to say, was

considerably more dangerous to get involved in. This makes problematic Foucault’s

association of ‘confinement,’ ‘libertinage’ and irrationality, or the implied

99 Sade attributed his imprisonment to his “considered reflections,” although he did not start writing

until after he was first imprisoned (PB: 137). 100 For discussion on the relationship between philosophy and libertine writing, see Patrick Wald

Lasowski “Préface,” in Romanciers libertins du XVIIIe siècle ed. Patrick Wald Lasowski (Paris:

Gallimard, 2000): ix- lx. 101 Neil Schaeffer The Marquis de Sade: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1999) pp.61-62.

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identification of censorship with rationality, given that it appears that rationality was,

in the case of Sade’s philosophical influences, in a basic sense being locked away.

Foucault, we have seen, grants that Sade has enfolded all other discourse into a

new discourse all of its own, in sovereign isolation from all other discourses. Another

possibility is that Sade is aligned with another ‘sovereign discourse,’ that of the more

militant philosophe or libertin writers. Despite the garbled nature of his writing, Sade

no doubt had a point in arguing, for example, that homosexuality should be

decriminalized, and that marriage was to be avoided until it outgrew its status as

socioeconomic exploitation. In a basic sense, at least some of Sade’s work is

eminently sane. Yet there are aspects of Sade that put him beyond the designations of

‘rogue philosophe’ or even libertin author. It is common for Sade scholars to refer to

Sade as a libertine writer, and to his characters as libertines (as, indeed, they refer to

themselves). Sade referred to himself as a libertine.102 Sade’s work is clearly

associated with this original sense of the term, being both pornographic and

philosophical, and, for the sake of convenience, I will use the term ‘libertine’ in

Sade’s sense as a convention. Yet the term ‘libertine’ did not originally refer to people

who were sadistic mass murderers. Virtually every person who has written on Sade

has accepted Sade’s usage of the term, despite the fact that it appears to be a serious

distortion of its original sense.103 No writer, philosopher, philosophe or libertin, went

to Sade’s extreme in rejecting, not only conventional morality, but any morality at all.

It may simply be irrelevant that Sade borrowed and inverted the intended sense of

three other discourses rather than one- the libertines and philosophe authors, no doubt,

would have been as appalled at what Sade had done to their work, given that they held

essentially the same values in common. 104 The question is, once again, - is there an

internal, essential relation between Sade’s work and any other discourse, official or

102 See Sade “My Grand Letter,” February 20th 1781. Letters from Prison trans. Richard Seaver (New

York: Arcade Publishing, 1999):176-191; p.188. 103 The Larousse dictionary defines ‘libertin’ as “Qui est de mœurs très libres, qui mène une vie

dissolue,” essentially the same as the English definition: “dissolute or licentious person.” Both English

and French terms have associations with ‘free thought’, especially during the 17th and 18th Centuries,

and the libertine novel of the same period. The sense of the term has softened since the 18th century. 104 Cusset characterises libertin literature as continuous with the values of the Enlightenment, in

particular in its critique of social, moral and religious prejudice, and in bringing pleasure and reason

into harmony. See Cusset No Tomorrow p.90.

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clandestine? And precisely which discursive practices did Sade seek to absorb and

distort? That even the libertin discourse was corrupted by Sade’s treatment, perhaps

for all time, perhaps suggests the scope and depth of his disruption.

Two other points can be made against Foucault’s classification of Sade. In

Madness and Civilisation, Sade is described as an atavistic figure; a representation of

a ‘long, silent memory’ of the Occidental psyche. There is certainly something of the

arcane in Sade’s writings, in particular the preoccupation with torture. But there are

many strikingly modern aspects also; - biochemical weapons, electrocution,

descriptions of the machines of mass destruction incorporating such features as

conveyor belts and rotating knives, all arguably closer to the early modern world than

the world of centuries past (J:337-338; LNJ 2:377).105 Also problematic is Foucault’s

association of criminality with the ‘unreason.’ Criminality in Sade’s age was

frequently simply a matter of life and death. Sade, through the character Dubois, notes

that for those born into poverty, the choice is between “Wealth, by any means

necessary, or the Wheel” (MV: 127). The whole point of Sade’s Justine (subtitled, as

it is, “the Misfortunes of Virtue”) is that only the mad would adhere so stubbornly to

morality in a world so corrupted and unjust. Some criminal groups of the period, in

particular pirates, were not only reasonable but in fact politically sophisticated.

Two critics have noted that Sade’s work has more in common with the

mechanisms of power than its opposites, a theme that will be pursued later in the

study. Sébastian Charles describes Foucault’s Sade as representing“l’introduction du

désordre du désir dans un monde dominée par l’ordre, la régularité et la

classification,” but concludes by noting that Sade himself seems to represent

mechanisms of power.106 In similar terms, Stephen Pfohl, a sociologist, focuses on

what he perceives as an intimate connection between Classical reason and Sade’s

105 On the role of the guillotine in Sade’s work, see Lucienne Frappier-Mazur Writing the Orgy: Power

and parody in Sade trans. Gillian C. Gill (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996)

pp.124-125; Michel Delon “Sade dans la Révolution,” Il Confronto Letterario Supplemento 15

(1991):157-165, p.162. 106 Charles Sébastian Charles “Foucault lecteur de Sade: de l’infinité du discours à la finitude du

plaisir,” First International Congress Sade in North America, March 12-15; Charleston, South Carolina.

pp.7, 10.

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work, noting what he considers to be sadism within Classical reason.107 In his book

Images of Deviance and Social Control, Pfohl notes what we have all known for half

a century now- that the truly dangerous people in the world are not, in fact, the

‘schizos’ who talk to themselves or the aliens, but those that are, as far as psychology

is concerned, completely sane; the ones that make ‘difficult decisions’ that are ‘too

complicated’ for the rest of us to understand.108 This is the group that Pfohl sees in

Sade’s novels. In particular, he notes the “extreme individualism of classical thought.

Insomuch as classical theorizing strips individuals of all but the most instrumental

forms of calculative judgement, good intentions aside, the question must be asked: is

there not something sadistic about the isolated individual application of classical

reasoning?” Pfohl suggests that sadism, as described in Sade’s work, is an

“unacknowledged and shadowy double of classical reasoning’s abstract commitment

to rational hedonism.”

De Sade’s arguments concerning the rational benefits of systematically administered pain

resemble the arguments of his early criminological counterparts. Like sadistic

pornography, classical criminology advocates the application of strict disciplinary

punishments in isolation from the complex, contradictory, and often unequal social

landscapes within which people make choices between conformity and deviance. This is

not to reduce the logic of classical thought to the logic of sadism. It is, however, to note

disturbing historical connections between these two excessively rational modes of

thought. Each in its own way seeks to pin punishment onto individuals in isolation from

the historical complexities of their social context. Does this mean that the logic of

classical reasoning and the logic of sadism are historically intertwined? This much may

be said for sure: without some commitment to equalizing the human social conditions in

which choices for or against deviance are culturally made, the classical perspective will

favour a very specialized form of rationality- there rationality of the advantaged, the rich,

and the powerful. The rationality of the disadvantaged, the poor and the powerful will

either be denied or classed as deviant. 109

107 Stephen Pfohl “Seven Mirrors of Sade: Sex, Death, CAPITAL, and the Language of Monsters of

Sade” In Deepak Sawhney, editor, Must we Burn Sade? (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books,

1999): 51-77. 108 Stephen Pfohl Images of Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological History second edition (New

York: Mcgraw-Hill, Inc. 1994) p.1. 109 Pfohl Deviance p.95-96

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I am uncertain of Pfohl’s characterisation of a ‘logic of sadism’ that leads to the

‘punishing’ of people independent of their social context. Nevertheless, Pfohl’s

characterisation of Sade’s work as primarily a pornographic fantasy of power rings

true. 110 In any case, it suggests an understanding of the contents of Sade’s work that

is missing from Foucault. Significantly, both Pfohl and Foucault hold that the

positivism of the scientist is itself intrinsically sadistic.111

In another essay, Pfohl notes that the principal characters of all of Sade’s texts

are advantaged, rich and powerful, and classify the people upon whom they prey as

weak in means and mind. 112 For Pfohl, the chief difference between Foucault’s social

engineers and jailors and the Sadeian libertines is that the libertines are interested only

in pleasure, and are quite aware of this fact. It was desire for power that attracted them

to their offices or laboratories. The clinicians and legislators of the real world,

suggests Foucault, must mask themselves; the pleasures of total control must remain

secret, their cynicism must remain hidden (HS Vol.I:86). ‘Sanity,’ for Pfohl, is loosely

defined by the ‘dominant system’ as physical and mental fidelity to a system that

rewards obedience with financial success (and with financial success, immunity) and

punishes (the) deviance (of the poor) with imprisonment or worse, apparently without

regard to notions of justice or other universal values. Pfohl finishes by citing Adorno

and Horkheimer:

As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno observe, positivism’s claim to represent a

universal form of truth only holds within “the court of calculative judgement” in which its

methods are historically situated. In reality, positivism “adjusts the world for the ends of

self-preservation and recognizes no function other than the preparation of the object from

mere sensory material in order to make it the material of subjugation.”113

By 1975, Foucault himself had come to accept that Sade may have been more of a

disciplinarian than a figure of resistance. In a lecture dated 29th January 1975, given at

the Collège de France. In the context of a discussion on the relationship between the

‘monstrous individual’ and the law, Foucault identifies the libertines of Sade as

110 Pfohl ibid. p.134. 111For discussion see Pfohl Deviance p.471-4; Foucault DP: 202; HS Vol. I: 45, 48. 112 Pfohl “Seven Mirrors” pp.59, 70. 113 Pfohl Deviance p.472; DE : 83-84.

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‘criminal- despots’- those who have elevated their own irrational, homicidal whims to

the state of general law.

In most of [Sade’s] novels, in Juliette in any rate, there is this regular coupling of the

monstrosity of the powerful with the monstrosity of the man of the people, the

monstrosity of the minister with the monstrosity of revolt, and their mutual complicity.

Juliette and la Dubois are obviously at the centre of this series of couples of ultrapowerful

monstrosity and rebellious monstrosity. In Sade, libertinage is always linked to the

corruption of power... [t]here are no politically neutral or average monsters in Sade;

Either they come from the dregs of the people and have risen up against established

society, or they are princes, ministers, or lords who wield a lawless superpower over all

social powers. In any case, power- the excess of power, the abuse of power, despotism- is

always the operative element of libertinage in Sade. It is this superpower that transforms

simple libertinage into monstrosity.114

Here, the libertine figure in Sade is no longer discussed in terms of ‘desire’ or

‘representation,’ but of the potential, of socioeconomic supremacy, for abuse and

corruption. In the “Sade, Sergeant of Sex” interview, given in December of the same

year, Foucault describes Sade’s work as not “open fantasy but a carefully

programmed regulation,” and Sade himself as a “meticulous anatomist” (SS: 223).

When asked about the alleged link between Sade and Fascism, Foucault gave the

following response:

It’s a complete historical error. Nazism was not invented by the great erotic madmen of

the twentieth century but by the most sinister, boring, and disgusting petit-bourgeois

imaginable. Himmler was a vaguely agricultural type who married a nurse. We must

understand that the concentration camps were born from the conjointed imagination of a

hospital nurse and a chicken farmer. A hospital plus a chicken yard...

…It bothers me that in recent films certain elements are being used to resuscitate

through the theme of Nazism an eroticism of the disciplinary type. 115 Perhaps it was

Sade’s. Too bad then for the literary deification of Sade, too bad for Sade: he bores us.

114 Michel Foucault Abnormal: Lectures at the 1974-1975 ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella

Salomoni. Translated by Graham Burchell. (New York: Picador, 2003). pp.100-101. 115 Foucault is probably referring to Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter (1974). For discussion on

the Sadeian themes in this film, see Primo Levi The Drowned and the Saved trans. Raymond Rosenthal

(London: Abacus, 1988) pp.32, 33.

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He’s a disciplinarian, a sergeant of sex, an accountant of the ass and its equivalents (SS:

227).

Given Foucault’s musings on Sade’s importance over a number of years, this can

easily be read as a flippant response. Sade is reduced to a pornographic cliché (Nazis

could not be associated with Sade, according to Foucault, because they were not

‘erotic,’), and the Holocaust is completely removed from its social, historical and

intellectual contexts. Further, that there may be psychological commonalities between

the perpetrators of the killers and Sade’s characters (sadism, in particular) is not

considered. 116 At the end of the interview, however, Foucault appears to

acknowledge a certain similarity between Sade and Nazism after all, noting

are characterized by an excessive preoccupation with discipline and order. (Foucault

does not, however, make the association here with the January lecture, in whic

describes Sade’s libertines as figures of the corruption of power).

that both

h he

You know I am not for Sade’s absolute sacralization. After all, I would be willing to

admit that Sade formulated eroticism proper to a disciplinary society: a regulated,

anatomical, hierarchical society whose time is carefully distributed, its places partitioned,

characterized by obedience and surveillance (SS: 226).

This later understanding of Sade, as anatomist, disciplinarian and regulator of bodies,

is very different to that of earlier texts, and approaches the interpretation of Adorno

and Horkheimer. It suggests that Sade was close to the discourses of control, as

described by Foucault (the discourses of medicine and the penal system- of the control

of bodies and minds) if not actually speaking with the same voice. At some stage,

116 It was also common for staff of the death camps to take photographs and films of killings for their

own enjoyment, and both gas chambers and gassing-trucks had observation windows. Pleasure in

seeing the suffering of others was clearly a commonality. For discussion, see Aleksander Lasik

“Historical-Sociological Profile of the Auschwitz SS” in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds.

Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the

United States Holocaust Museum, 1994): 271-287, p.285.

Foucault describes the Holocaust as a petite-bourgeois dream of cleanliness, adding: “Millions of

people were murdered there, so I don’t say it to diminish the blame for those responsible for it, but

precisely to disabuse those who want to superimpose erotic values on it” (SS: 226). Even so, Foucault’s

assessment does not explain how so many Germans could have gotten the idea into their heads that

Jewish Germans, a majority of whom were bourgeois themselves, were ‘dirty.’

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Foucault’s account of Sade is completely reversed, as if anticipating a general change

in how Sade was to be interpreted. Accordingly, Foucault’s earlier, rigid placement of

Sade outside Classical, official discourse, is problematic both in terms of

straightforward textual interpretation, and according to Foucault’s own methodology.

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault warns against such a traditional

categorisation. The history of ideas, as he sees it, is the science of “obscure

continuities and returns” (AK: 137-138).117 It requires that the student goes beyond

traditional assumptions as to where the various relations between types of discipline

and ‘discourse’ lie. He cautions that we should be mindful of the murky ‘discursive

unity’ of a given book with other books: “The frontiers of a book are never clear-

cut…it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other

sentences: it is a node within a network” (AK: 74). Sade’s oeuvre- Foucault knew this-

is the acme of such a work, given its myriad borrowings, plagiarisms, its references to

revolution- period conspiracy theories. Yet Foucault, arguably, commits the very fault

he cautions against in Archaeology, in not looking beyond the ‘façade of the system’

which places Sade and scientific/ medical discourse (for example) in different textual

categories. Further, Foucault- in describing Sade as the very figure of rupture and

change in two distinct aspects (the birth of modern literature, the ‘invention’ of

sadism) obscures the “field of vectors” by the anointing of a “founding saint” (AK:

144, 150).

We learn from Foucault that Sade’s work is full of descriptions of prisons, that it

is excessive and repetitive, and that it stands radically outside other discourses whilst

using them as source material. We do not learn of the specific content of his works.

Instead of discussing the ideas in Sade, or the characters, Foucault places a great deal

of significance on particular images within Sade- the figures of the sisters Justine and

Juliette, the chateau of Silling, and the lightning bolt that kills Justine.118 He is more

concerned with striking juxtapositions, of marginal relevance to a textual

interpretation, for example the (not implausible) claim that Sade’s literary tradition is

117 Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge,

1995). 118 Georges van Den Abbeele discusses the lightning bolt that kills Justine in detail, noting that, for

Foucault, it represents the end of the classical episteme, the close of the age of reason, and the birth of

literature. Georges Van Den Abbeele “Sade, Foucault, and the Scene of Enlightenment Lucidity,”

Stanford French Review 11, no.1 (1987): 7-16, pp. 10, 15.

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derived from the ‘confessional’ (HS Vol. I: 20-21).119 Foucault also makes assertions,

without textual support, which take on significance as his interpretation of Sade

unfolds. For example, he claims that Sade wrote his works solely for his own

consumption, as shown by their ‘unreadability’ and hence their status at the ‘limit’ of

expression (HS Vol. I: 23; LI: 64-65). (Sade was in fact eager to have his work

published, {although he strenuously denied authorship of Justine and Juliette}, and to

get his plays performed in public. Money was a motive also, and Justine- far from

being unreadable, was a commercial success in its time).120 The second problem with

Foucault’s account is its vagueness. Sade is said to represent the ‘discourse of desire,’

but what exactly this desire is, and how it is to be expressed in a purely literary sense,

is not specified. Even were it a plausible account of the relationship between the

practice of writing and the will, its relevance to Sade is not explained. The same could

be said of Foucault’s account of the ‘unthought.’ It could be that the unthought can

only be defined in negative terms, according to what it is not, but again, more work

needs to be done to demonstrate that it really is that which Sade was concerned with.

A tension emerges- Foucault both asserts that Sade is beyond a fixed representation,

as the confabulation of all representations, all theory, and yet there is the suggestion

that there is a correct interpretation. As Georges Van Den Abbeele notes, instead of

clarifying whatever worth there may be in Sade’s work, Foucault uses the term ‘Sade’

as a term for the obscure.121 The mythos of the “poisonous de Sade” (MC: 228) would

seem to play a greater role for Foucault than his actual writings, raising questions

concerning his account of both madness and literature.

In Foucault’s work, we have some suggestions as to what may be found, but a

detailed exegesis – an internal- account, of Sade- is necessary to assess its claims.

Firstly, to reiterate, Foucault cautions against finding a fixed reference, or any simple

relationship between the author, the text, and the theorizing therein. The literary

119 This view is well argued for by Béatrice Didier, who notes the similarity between Sade’s lists of

‘virtues to be vexed’ for Justine and the catechism. See Béatrice Didier “Sade théologien” In Michel

Camus, Philippe Roger, eds.: 219-240. 120 See Maurice Lever Sade: A Biography trans. Arthur Goldhammer (San Diego, New York and

London: Harvest/ Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994) p.382. 121 Georges Van Den Abbeele writes that, given Foucault’s preference for “instantaneous illumination,”

“one can argue over whether we really know anything more or less about Sade after reading Foucault.”

Van Den Abbeele pp.12, 16.

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version of the first interpretation- that Sade has created a mirrored, infinite repeating

of all previous discourses in order to create a new literature- may well be both

implausible and irrelevant to us, given that we are concerned with philosophical

interpretations of Sade. Yet, a philosophical version of the same account may be

pertinent. That is, Sade may have deliberately set up an endless mirroring of

philosophical doctrines, leading to the loss of all perspective, to theoretical paralysis.

Secondly, Foucault’s interpretations raise the question of what relationship Sade

has with other discourses. Was Sade standing in the position of ‘sovereign unreason,’

or the ‘accountant of the ass?’ Was Sade the subject of the Confinement, or its

doctrinal Overlord? Could he have been both at once? Where does the wedge go,

exactly?

Regardless of whether we accept Foucault’s treatment of Sade, a study on Sade

remains a project of Foucaultian interest, and there are a number of points of

association between the writings of the two figures. There is a certain resemblance,

for example, between the later Foucault’s ‘ethic’ or ‘style’ of self-overcoming, of

learning to “think differently than one thinks,” and the apparent objective of Sade’s

‘educational’ Philosophy of the Bedroom in which the reader is encouraged to follow

the example of Eugénie’s libertine education. (HS Vol. II p.8, also p.11, 69) Both

Foucault and Sade are preoccupied with the legal and ‘medical’ classification of

sexual practices.122 There is also a common interest in the status of hermaphrodites

and other ‘intragendered’ people. Sade’s novels feature many near-hermaphrodites-

women with obstructed vaginas and penis-like clitorises –a grouping whose marginal,

quasi-moral classification Foucault was preoccupied with (HS Vol. I: 38; Sade J: 23,

1032; 120:221; LNJ vol. 1: 172; vol. 2:122, 136.).123 Further, both Foucault and Sade

are concerned with the pleasures of power, and the injustices, class interests and

122 Both Sade and Foucault were preoccupied with the legal and moral status of sexual practices, and

both encountered the institutional control of sexuality. Sade was hung in effigy for sodomy; Foucault

was ‘diagnosed’ as a homosexual whilst in his teens. For Foucault’s discussion of the medicalisation of

homosexuality, see HS Vol. 1:40, 101,105, 119. For comments on the medicalisation and persecution

of homosexuality in Sade, see J: 237; MV: 179, 212; MM: 55; 120: 113,495. 123 Michel Foucault Les Anormaux : Cours au Collège de France, 1974-1975. (Paris : Hautes Études -

Gallimard- Seuil, 1999); Michel Foucault. Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B. (Paris : Gallimard,

collection “Les vies parallèles” 1978).

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ulterior motives of the judicial system and related institutions (HS Vol.I:95). Yet,

despite these commonalities of interest, and Foucault’s apparent preoccupation with

Sade, Foucault does not address them in his work. As the exegesis of Sade unfolds,

we find that the relationship between Sade and Foucault, between interpreted and

interpreter, may be reversed- we may find that we learn about Foucault’s project

through reading Sade, rather than the other way around.

1.12 Conclusion.

The various interpretations of Sade’s work discussed in this chapter fall roughly

into two categories. There are those – in particular Le Brun, Adorno and Horkheimer,

Neiman, and Joyce– who either treat Sade as a philosopher in a straightforward

manner, or hold that within his work is a coherent philosophical doctrine, and hold

that it is this doctrine that is of interest, rather than other traits ( such as textual or

symbolic qualities). Others, in particular Foucault and Bataille, find Sade’s work of

philosophical interest, yet withhold from Sade the honorific ‘philosopher,’ deeming

the philosophical passages in Sade of secondary importance. Bataille and Foucault

hold that Sade reveals a side to human nature that is typically occulted from

philosophical discourse, yet Bataille dismisses Sade’s philosophical passages as

merely tiresome, and Foucault describes his work variously as a pastiche, or as a

textual sublimation of desire. Likewise, for Camus, Sade is not so much a thinker as a

‘dreamer of revenge.’

The question is: Sade a philosopher, or not? If not a philosopher exactly, is he of

philosophical interest, nonetheless? If so, what is it about his work that is so

interesting? Does he have some utility as an object of philosophical speculation (on

the nature of sexuality, or of evil, perhaps), or is he a thinker in his own right who

ought to be engaged with as such? If Sade engages with other thinkers and

discourses, what is the nature of this engagement? Does Sade merely absorb other

thinkers into a satirical collage, or hurl abuse, or does he approach other thinkers in a

thoughtful and sophisticated manner? What are Sade’s primary philosophical

concerns, and are they the same concerns that have been attributed to him by his

admirers and critics? And what, exactly, is the range and depth of Sade’s thought?

Finally, is his thought readable in a straightforward manner, and is it coherent (as

suggested by Gorer and Le Brun), or is it purposefully multidimensional and resistant

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to linear interpretation? The remainder of this study will attempt to clarify these

issues.

Chapter II: MACHINE MAN

Sade’s Ontologies

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter

as everything else and we are all part of the same compost pile.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club 1

2.1 Introduction.

It is not possible to discuss Sade’s thoughts on sexuality, psychology, ethics, or

other topics without beginning with his ontological assumptions, which are the

conceptual foundation of his thought. Sade gave very little attention to this aspect of

his thought, however, and typically takes the cogency of his ontology for granted. As

such, this chapter will be brief.

Few of Sade’s critics who assume the presence of a philosophy in Sade mention

Sade’s ontology at all. Those that interpret Sade’s thought as a path that leads directly

from materialism to moral nihilism have not sought to track this trajectory. Nor have

they accounted for the fact that other thinkers (d’Holbach, La Mettrie, Diderot) with

essentially the same ontology were not themselves nihilistic (beyond stating, as does

Le Brun, that Sade was simply a more coherent thinker).

As mentioned in the preceding chapter, Sade’s ontology draws heavily from the

materialism of his age. In brief, Sade is an empiricist of sorts, stating, in the early

work Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, that “I am convinced only by

evidence, and evidence is provided by my senses alone” (MV: 152). He rejects the

argument from design, the notion of a divine creator, or immortal soul; assumes that

humans lack unique properties that distinguish them from animals, reduces mental

phenomena to physical processes, and assumes hard determinism to be true. The

question, which will be the topic of the following chapters, is whether the ethical

principles that Sade draws from this ontology are warranted.

1 Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club (New York: Verso, 1996) p. 134.

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2.2 God and Creation.

Sade rejects the argument from design; both the idea that there are grounds for

believing in a ‘first cause,’ and that the natural world suggests the work of a divine

creator. Sade, in a manner similar to that of David Hume, argues that conceptual

confusion is responsible for the notion of a first cause. States Madame Delbène (in

Juliette, 1797): “cause was the name given to all beings that bring about some change

in another being distinct from themselves, and effect the word for any change wrought

by whatever cause in whatever being. As this terminology gives rise in us, at best, to a

very muddled idea of being, of action, of reaction, of change, the habit of employing it

in time led people to believe they had clear-cut and precise perceptions of these

things, and they finally reached the stage of fancying there could exist a cause which

was not a being or a body either, a cause which was really distinct from all

embodiment and which, without movement, without action, could produce every

imaginable effect” (J:35). Sade, in denying a traditional teleology, proposes that the

mere appearance of purposeful design in the cosmos does not entail its significance.

From Sade’s Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man (1782):

PRIEST: And so everything in the world is necessary?

DYING MAN: Of course.

PRIEST: But if all is necessary, there must be order in everything?

DYING MAN: Who argues that there is not?

PRIEST: But who or what is capable of the order that exists if not an all-powerful,

supremely wise hand?

DYING MAN: Will not gunpowder explode of necessity when lit by a match?

PRIEST: yes.

DYING MAN: And where is the wisdom in that?

PRIEST: There isn’t any.

DYING MAN: So you see it is possible that there are things which are necessary but were

not wisely made, and it follows that it is equally possible that everything derives from a

first cause in which there may be neither reason nor wisdom (MV:153). 2

2 This passage may allow for a Bataillian reading. The traditional association of ‘reason’ with the

‘cosmos’ is severed; reason is not the royal road to the Absolute. The universe may simply be pure

chaos; to achieve understanding here may require surrendering reason itself.

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Likewise, Madame Delbène argues that “the universe runs itself....[it] is an

assemblage of like entities which act and react mutually and successively with and

against each other; I discern no start, no finish, no fixed boundaries, this universe I see

only as an incessant passing from one state into another, and within it only particular

beings which forever change shape and form, but I acknowledge no universal cause

behind and distinct from the universe and which gives it existence and which procures

the modifications in the particular beings composing it” (J:43; similar: LNJ 1:80,136,

137,). 3 Were the world in fact created by God, Sade’s characters note, the suffering

of the world would suggest that the Creator is evil (repeating one of the most popula

arguments applied by the philosophes).

r

rnal

s

4 Saint- Fond, one of the few theistic

libertines in Sade’s works, develops this claim into an entire theology: “I see ete

and universal evil as absolutely indispensable in the world. The author of the universe

is the most wicked, the most ferocious, the most horrifying of all beings. His work

cannot be anything but the incarnation of his criminality. Without his wickedness

raised to its extremist pitch, nothing would be sustained in the universe” (J: 400). This

doctrine is developed into a reductionist account of life itself, described in terms of

“the perpetual re-entry and emergence of wicked elements into and out of the matrix

of maleficent molecules” (J: 400).5 Saint-Fond argues that the good man is in fact evil

as he does not follow the universal principle towards evil: [t]he man you speak of is

merely feeble, and feebleness is an evil.” As punishment in this world, such a person

is condemned to suffer at the hands of the weak: “[w]eaker than the absolutely and

entirely vicious being, and more completely engulfed by the maleficent molecules

with which his elementary dissolution will conjoin him, this man will have to suffer a

great deal more: and there, precisely, is what ought to oblige every man to render

himself in this world as vicious and wicked as possible” (J: 398). Clairwil, in reply,

3 In La Nouvelle Justine Sade discusses man as being a ‘product of movement’ also. In a typically

appalling passage, a character describes the convulsive movements of a recently killed victim as

‘proof’ of the ‘movement’ which is an innate property of matter. This is most probably a reference to

the experiments conducted by Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) with frog’s legs and electrical currents (LNJ

2: 244). 4 For discussion, see Neiman pp.188-189. 5 This thesis is similar to the reconstituted Satanism of Alaister Crowley (1875-1947) and Anton LaVey

(1930-1997), according to which Satan is a personification of natural forces. Saint Fond explains that

the ‘maleficent molecules’ “compose what poets and others of ardent imagination have named

demons” (J: 398).

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states that Saint-Fond’s system is “the most bizarre of all the systems yet to have

occurred to the mind of man,” suggesting that he has simply invented his own god in

order to hate him. Saint- Fond’s theology is not endorsed by any other character, but

functions as a scathing satire on religious belief (similar: LNJ 2: 40, AV: 431,

433,434). 6

Sade also draws attention to those natural phenomena that count against the

notion of a benevolent God who creates humans in his own image, or in accordance

with traditional gender identity or sexual role, such as ‘monsters,’ or women without

uteruses or with penis- like clitorises (J: 23, 1032; 120:221,602; LNJ. 1: 172; 2: 122,

136,). The general point here is that direct observation of the world provides ample

grounds to doubt the verity of its traditional descriptions.

2.3 Non- uniqueness of humans.

Sade holds that there is no immortal soul, no distinction between humans and other

life forms, and, ultimately, no fundamental difference between life forms and

inanimate matter. To account for the ‘illusion’ that there exists a soul that inhabits an

otherwise inert body, he argues that the ‘self’ itself is an idea created by the memory

of successive impressions―again in the manner of the British Empiricists. From La

Nouvelle Justine (1797) “...ce corps est un machine sensible...la conscience

momentanée de l’impression qu’il reçoit et la conscience du moi, par le souvenir des

impressions successivement éprouvées” (LNJ 1: 242). Against the notion of an

immortal soul, Madame Delbène states: “supposing this soul to exist, tell me, if you

please, how one can avoid recognizing its total dependence upon the body and the fact

that it must share in all the vicissitudes of the body’s fate” (J:44). She goes on to

define the soul, as a distinct entity, out of existence, as “nothing other than matter

subtilized to a certain degree, by the means of which refinement it acquires the

faculties that so amaze us...”(J:49). Whether the soul is an acting or a thinking

principle, she argues, its materiality is demonstrable by “two irrefutable syllogisms”:

6 For discussion, see Schmid Le soufre au bord de la chaire p.31. Jean M. Goulemot writes that the

idea that evil in some sense balances the good in the world is derived from Diderot (AV: n. 366, p.832).

Manichaeism was a popular topic among the philosophes in general. Sade also writes in a positive, if

ambiguous, way about Deism in Aline et Valcour (AV: 235, 354).

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(1) As active principle it is divisible: for the heart, long after its separation from the body,

preserves its action continuing to beat;7 now, whatever is susceptible of division is

material. (2) Whatever is susceptible of structural degeneration is material, that which is

essentially spirit cannot deteriorate; well the soul is affected by the condition of the body,

the soul is weak in youthful bodies, decrepit in superannuated frames; it thus undergoes

corporeal influence, anything that degenerates structurally is material: the soul declines

and hence it is material (J:49-50; similar: LNJ 1: 1 94, 243, 245; LNJ 2 : 232, 241 ;

AV:264, 266).

Sade describes mental events in terms of physical phenomena. The following passage

is typical (note that Sade only discusses mental events when discussing pleasure; he

does not discuss nerves, electrical fluid and so on in any other context).

Those little murmurs you hear, my good friend, are caused by my extremely sensitive

nervous system ; the objects which excite our passions create such a lively commotion in

the electrically charged fluid that flows in our nerves, the shock received by the animal

spirits composing this fluid is of such a degree of violence, that the entire mechanism is

rattled by these effects, and one is just as powerless to suppress one’s cries when overwhelmed by the terrible blows imparted by pleasure, as one would be when assailed

by the powerful emotions of pain (120:489; also LNJ 1:362; 2:110).

Sade rejects the notion of human uniqueness on the grounds that there are

physiological similarities with other animals.8 In La Nouvelle Justine, Sade’s

character Bressac argues that turtles, midges and humans are essentially the same, as

they are brought into being by the same ‘movements’ and are each equally ‘modified’

to suit their way of life, and concludes that it is not correct to speak of the

‘superiority’ of one organism over the next. Similarly, in Juliette, Braschi (Giovanni

Angelo Braschi, Pope Pius VI {1717-1799}) argues that “the rot-spawned worm is of

no less nor more considerable value in my eyes than the mightiest king on earth” (LNJ

7 This is similar to La Mettrie, who describes an experiment in which the heart is removed from a live

frog. La Mettrie pp.26-27. 8 Sade follows the thought of his age. Against Descartes’ argument as to the uniqueness of humans,

Bayle had noted the contingencies of human intelligence, rejecting the idea that there was such a thing

as a uniquely human soul. In his Dictionary, he referred to earlier thinkers who had proposed the

intellectual superiority of birds and even social insects over humans. See Bayle: 213, 224-228, 234,

240. See also Crocker Age of Crisis p. 85.

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2: 234-235; similar: LNJ: 1: 151, 2:234, 235; J: 781). In denying the uniqueness of

humanity, human reason itself is demoted from sign of our divine nature, or the means

to a higher truth. Instead, it is described as mere adaptation; the “scales we weigh

objects in... the faculty given me by Nature whereby I may dispose myself in a

favourable sense toward such-and-such an object....depending upon the amount of

pleasure or pain I derive from these objects...”J: 34). Sade’s vision reduces the

human, hence the political order, and human history, to the physical order of things.

For Sade, there are no Messiahs, anointed kings or heroes, no divine plan and no

historical progress. Men’s actions are nothing more than the outcome of natural laws

(J: 121). History is simply the record of atrocities perpetuated by exceptionally

powerful individuals, propelled by their passions rather than by reason, their lust for

power and their cruelties the result of innate dispositions. Here Sade follows the

reasoning of Helvétius, who had suggested that the destruction of ‘popery’ in

England was due to the “great acrimony of the seminal matter” of Henry VIII, and

d’Holbach, who held that “blood too much enflamed in a conqueror, a painful

indigestion in the stomach of a monarch, a whim that passes in the mind of a woman,

are sometimes causes sufficient to bring on war, to send millions of men to the

slaughter, to root out an entire people...to spread desolation far and wide upon the

surface of our globe.” 9 The Great Man is merely a volcano, a shudder of the tectonic

plates, “vomited forth from nature...to aid her in destruction” (J: 582-583; LNJ:

2:242). Sade described politics exclusively in terms of the tyranny of such Great Men,

a topic discussed in Chapter VII. Notably, Sade does not acknowledge the logical gap

between the rejection of the traditional teleology, and the rejection of the

meaningfulness of human history.

2.4 Death.

Sade describes living systems as being continuous with dead matter, a view derived

from the thought of the philosophes. Helvétius states that the blood that “carries

nutrition to all the members of a child, and successively enlarges every part, is a

principle of destruction,” as it eventually “ossifies the vessels, destroys their springs,

9 D’Holbach System of Nature Vol. I. Adapted from the trans. by H.D. Robinson (London: Clinamen

Press, 1999) p.42; Helvétius A Treatise on Man; his Intellectual Faculties and his Education (1758)

trans. W. Hooper (2 vols.) (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969) I: 34.

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and produces the seeds of death.”10 Likewise, for Bayle, living things are essentially

“matter modified.” 11 This eradication of the dichotomy of the living and the dead is a

direct consequence of the denial of the existence of an immortal soul. Death is taken

to be necessary aspect of the cycle of creation, destruction and regeneration. Braschi

explains:

In all living things the principle of life is no other than that of death; at the same time we

receive the one we receive the other, we nourish both within us, side by side. At the

instant we call death, everything seems to dissolve; we are led to think so by the

excessive change that appears to have been brought about in this portion of matter which

no longer seems animate. But this death is only imaginary, it exists figuratively but in no

other way....[t]here is, in the final analysis, no essential difference between this first life

we receive and this second, which is the one we call death (J:769-770).

The principle according to which death is a part of the natural cycle does not entail,

as Sade suggests, that life itself is illusory. One can assume that death is a part of life

and still maintain that there are some basic differences between sentient life and the

general furniture of the world. Also implausible is Sade’s crude reduction of human

life to natural processes. He assumes that, because our bodies nourish further life

(fruit trees, insects, and so on) we ourselves do not die. 12 In keeping with his

reduction of human existence to the natural order of things, humans are reduced to

undifferentiated biomass. 13 He does not acknowledge a relevant ethical distinction

between fertilized eggs and newborn babies, or between people and dirt. Accordingly,

Sade’s characters describe murdering a person as trivial; like breaking a glass, or

killing a chicken. Victims (and only victims) are reduced to pure means, or physical

characteristics, or a mere ‘scum’ or ‘vapour’ thrown up by mundane earth processes.

They are referred to variously as “pleasure – machines,” “robots” (automates), or

“lust-objects”; “material suitable to answer voluptuous purposes” with “charming

10 Helvétius A Treatise on Man; his Intellectual Faculties and his Education (1758). trans. W. Hooper

(2 vols). (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969) Vol. II p.126. 11Bayle p.300. See also Voltaire Candide p. 309; Denis Diderot Political Writings trans. John Hope

Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992) p. xxxii; also Diderot’s

Early philosophical works trans. Margaret Jourdain (New York: Burt Franklin, 1972) pp.12-13, 39. 12 For discussion, see Warman p.165. 13 This is similar to La Mettrie, p.91.

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physiognomy” or “commodities” - “we’d rape it first, murder it afterward” (J: 147,

206, 760-761, 870, 910, 1040; MV: 115).14 This rhetoric rather obfuscates Sade’s

ethical discourses; where he discusses, for example, abortion, he is not defending

women’s rights so much as the ethical triviality of killing children, or in fact, anyone

at all (J:68; ΠIII:241; similar: PB:249).15 In Philosophy in the Bedroom, Sade,

through the character Dolmancé, states:

This destruction of which man is wont to boast is, moreover, nothing but an illusion;

murder is no destruction; he who commits it does not but alter forms, he gives back to

Nature the elements whereof the hand of this skilled artisan instantly re-creates other

beings: now, as creations cannot but afford delight to him by whom they are wrought, the

murderer thus prepares for Nature a pleasure most agreeable, he furnishes her materials,

she employs them without delay, and the act fools have had the madness to blame is

nothing but meritorious in the universal agent’s eye. It is our pride that prompts us to

elevate murder into crime. Esteeming ourselves the foremost of the universe’s creatures,

we have stupidly imagined that every hurt this sublime creature endures must perforce be

an enormity; he have believed Nature would perish should our marvellous species chance

to be blotted out of experience,… but what an inconsequence, Eugénie! (my italics; PB:

238; similar: AV: 239; LNJ 1: 108, 147,363; 2:73, 111,162). 16

The view that death is not to be feared is on firmer ground; as the time before one’s

life is impossible to imagine, it is not reasonable to fear death. Advises Delbène;

And, pray tell, what were you before birth? ...Several unqualified lumps of unorganized

matter as yet without definite form or at least lacking any form you can hope to

remember. Well, you’re going to turn back into those same or similar lumps of matter,

you’re going to become the raw material out of which new beings will be fashioned, and

this will happen when natural processes bring it about.

... [e]h Juliette, have you existed since the beginning of time? No; and does that fact make

you grieve and despair? Have you any better cause to despair at the fact that you’re not

14 see also Fauskevåg pp. 16, 56, 90,156, 56. 15 Sade’s much vaunted calls for the abolition of the death sentence, accordingly, are inconsistent (AV:

332, 336, 613). 16 Note that Sade’s character insists of the incorrectness of ‘pride’, despite the fact that the ‘libertines’

are clearly proud of themselves and regard modesty a ‘false’ virtue. For discussion, see Lacombe Sade

et ses masques (Paris: Payot, 1974) pp. 217, 218,220, 221.

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going to exist till the end of time? La la, calm yourself, my pigeon; the cessation of being

affrights only the imagination that has created the execrable dogma of an afterlife (49).17

2.5 Naturalism vs. Non-Naturalism

As noted in Chapter I, Sade’s work presents to the reader what frequently appears

to be a mass of incompatible theories, which would account for the massive

divergences of interpretation. To borrow Eric S. Raymond’s analogy, I suggest that

Sade was more interested in establishing a doctrinal bazaar, rather than constructing a

cathedral.18 Most philosophical works are ‘cathedrals,’ constructed by individuals in

isolation, with stable, monolithic literary- philosophical identities. Sade’s work, by

contrast, is a bazaar- a cacophony of voices and ideas, with the goal of imposing upon

the reader an overall effect (such as profound moral self-analysis, perhaps, or total

moral confusion), rather than a singular revelation, in mind. Structurally, Sade does

not present ideas in a linear fashion, but as mutually opposed ideologies. The fact that

these are always presented as paired oppositions (women are equal to men/ women

are not equal to men; anarchy is desirable/ anarchy would only reinforce existing

power structures; crime is pleasurable/ crime does not exist, and so on) suggests- to a

point- that this is a deliberate feature of his work. Sade’s work unfolds as a series of

diptychs. To a large extent, the following chapters will be concerned with identifying

what these opposing doctrines are, and how they engage with one another.

Sade proposes two alternatives to the traditional Judaeo- Christian teleology

proposed concerning moral guidance. On the one hand, Sade’s characters negotiate a

solution to their mutual desires, in the absence of moral absolutes, resolutely avoiding

any notion of teleological thinking. In particular, Braschi, in Juliette, proposes that

there is no relationship between man and nature such that a morality can be derived

from the order of things. In the same vein, other characters develop a mutually

beneficial strategy of reciprocation rather than a morality as such. This response to

the problem of morality, and the free will problem, will be discussed in Chapter V. In

17 In The Misfortunes of Virtue, a different approach is given. Whereas Delbène speaks of death as a

welcome release to everyone, Justine acknowledges that her own death is only welcomed because of

the life she has lead- “Death is to be feared only by those fortunate enough to lead pure, cloudless

lives” (MV: 142). 18 Eric S. Raymond makes this analogy with regards to traditional versus open –source, Linux- type

software development models.

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Chapter VI, I will discuss the non-transcendental teleology that Sade’s characters

propose. This doctrine holds that the world is driven by an underlying Telos, a Nature

characterized by endless strife and domination, and that humans are obliged to

participate in it through remorseless assertion of their strength and power. In the

following chapter, Sade’s reductionist conception of mental processes is further

discussed. In Chapter IV, the implications of the rejection of a traditional Judaeo-

Christian teleology as regards to sexuality will be discussed.

Chapter III: ENIGMA OF THE WILL

Psychology

Moralists, by a clearer insight into the evil, will naturally acquire a

clearer skill in the cure.

Helvétius 1

3.1 Introduction.

On the subject of psychology, Sade presents himself as engaged in several tasks.

Firstly, he presents himself as a diagnostician of the human condition, in particular the

capacity for the enjoyment of cruelty and destruction. This aspect of Sade’s writing is

continuous with his literary self-image of scientific thinker. Sade frequently insists

that his ‘tableaux’ will “help toward the development of the human spirit,” and

lambastes the “stupid restraint of those who venture to write upon such matters...

Inhibited by absurd fears, they only discuss the puerilities with which every fool is

familiar, and dare not, by addressing themselves boldly to the investigation of the

human heart, offer its gigantic idiosyncrasies to our view” (PB: 670, 671; similar

120:106, J: 175n, 1122). As such, Sade makes a significant, if somewhat obvious,

advance over those philosophers (Hobbes, for example) who had claimed that a desire

for cruelty in the human soul simply does not exist. 2 Sade also contributes to moral

thought in discussing the appeal of immoral conduct, although this was apparently not

his intention.

Sade’s second adopted role is that of the defiant critic of conventional morality,

and what we would term ‘normalization.’ In the essay “Reflections on the Novel”

(1800), Sade adopts the role of one who has evaluated, according to the standards of

1 Helvétius Essays on the Mind (De L’Esprit, 1758) trans. Anon. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970)

p.120. 2 Hobbes writes: “[c]ontempt, of little sense, of the calamity of others is that which men call

CRUELTY, proceeding from security of their own fortune. For, that any man should take pleasure in

other men’s great harms without other end of his own I do not conceive it possible.” Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 1994). p.32.

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philosophy and science (in particular materialism), the assumptions that have branded

him a deviant, and found himself vindicated.

…when man has weighed and considered all his restrictions, when, with a proud look his

eyes gauge his barriers, when, like the Titans, he dares to raise his bold hand to heaven,

and, armed with his passions…he no longer fears to declare war against those who in

times past were a source of fear and trembling to him, when his aberrations now seem to

him naught but errors rendered legitimate by his studies-should we then not speak to him

with the same fervor as he employs in his own behavior? (Sade’s italics; 120: 113-114).

That role for which Sade is best known is that of the proponent of the ‘doctrine of

libertinage,’ a proposal for a project, on ostensibly hedonistic grounds, of

psychological self-sculpting for the attainment of superior pleasures. In the absence

(in non- Naturalist mode) of any Telos or higher ideal, the libertines have only this

project to pursue. This chapter will outline these aspects of Sade’s work, and the way

in which the three roles interrelate.

3.2 Theory of Pleasure: Materialist model

Sade holds that the experience of pleasure is due to the movement of ‘animal spirits’

or ‘molecules’ within the brain, and that the intensity of pleasure is proportional to the

‘violence’ of the movement of these objects. Hence, Sade associates extremes of

experience with extremes of pleasure. The following description of the pleasure of

violence, from The 120 Days, is typical: “[the Duc] noticed that a violent commotion

inflicted upon any kind of an adversary is answered by a violent thrill in our own

nervous system; the effect of this vibration, arousing the animal spirits which flow

within these nerves’ concavities, obliges them to exert pressure on the erector nerves

and to produce in accordance with this perturbation what is termed a lubricious

sensation” (120:200). The taste for the horrific, the hideous and the nauseating are

explained in similarly reductionist terms- the most pleasing experience is simply that

which exerts the greatest force on the nervous system (120: 233, 489; J :95, 286-287,

845, 1172 ; LNJ 2 :108).3

3 This idea is probably derived from Helvétius, who describes the sublime in materialist terms: “[t]he

more lively the sensation is, the more beautiful the verse appears, and when it makes the strongest

impression possible it becomes sublime. It is therefore by the greater or less force that we distinguish

the beautiful from the sublime.” Helvétius Treatise on Man Vol. II p.229.

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Yet Sade does not hold that there is a direct correlation between bodily sensation

and pleasure. He also rejects the assumption, made by Bentham, that pleasure and

pain are opposite poles of a single continuum.4 Like Gilbert Ryle, Sade notes that

one’s mood determines whether a particular sensation is experienced as pleasurable or

unpleasant, and that neither pleasure nor pain can be defined in terms of a localized

bodily sensation; like Nietzsche, Sade occasionally describes pleasure and pain in

terms of gradients of the same physical processes. 5 As noted in the quote above,

Sade holds that the imagination of the subject will dictate whether a stimulus is

experienced as pleasurable or painful. Each person, he argues, experiences pleasure

in their own unique way.6 Painful sensations become pleasurable to very blasé

people. Observes Sade, “[i]s there anything commoner to see, on the one hand, people

who have accustomed their palates to a pleasurable irritation, and next to them, others

who couldn’t put up with that irritation for an instant?” (J: 267; similar; PB: 280).

From the short story Eugenie de Franval:

happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination; it is a way of being moved,

which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling; apart form the satisfaction of

our needs, there is no one way of making all men feel equally happy; every day we see

one individual become happy through something which is totally displeasing to another;

there is therefore no certain happiness, no other can exist for us except that which we

4 William P. Alson “Pleasure,” In Paul Edwards, Ed. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Volume 6 (New

York: The Macmillan Company & the Free Press, 1967) 341-347, p.341. 5 See Gilbert Ryle The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1958) chapter 4. Writes Nietzsche:

“There are even cases in which a kind of pleasure is conditioned by a certain rhythmic sequence of little

unpleasurable stimuli: in this way very rapid increase of the feeling of power, the feeling of pleasure, is

achieved. This is the case, e.g., in tickling, also the sexual tickling in the act of coitus; here we see

displeasure at work as an ingredient of pleasure.” Friedrich Nietzsche The Will to Power trans. Walter

Kaufman & R.J. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967) section 699 (March –June

1888) p.371. 6 This view coheres with recent findings in neurobiology. Recent research conducted by Patrick

MacLeod suggests that the neurons associated with the sensation of pleasure are not specialised.

Instead, they integrate the ‘images’ given by the different senses, of which some are called up by

memory, and others may be set by one’s culture. Further, no-one has the same sensation of taste. Jean-

Yves Nau “Les neurosciences découvrent les sources du plaisir sensorial,” Le Monde Mercredi 31

Décembre 2003.

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make for ourselves as a result of our constitutions and our principles!” In Eugenie de

Franval (GT: 46; similar: J: 317).

The imagination is thought to modify and transform bodily sensation.7 Many

pleasures described in his work are entirely ‘imaginary’ in nature, for example the

pleasure of blasphemy, or speculations on the possibility of a crime that perpetuates

itself decades after one’s death (J: 294, 369, 525). Some characters assert that the

imagination is the only source of pleasure.8 The character Durand, speaking of sex,

states that “[t]he imagination is the only cradle where pleasures are born, it alone

creates, fashions, orients them; where the imagination is still, when it does not

contribute inspiration or embellishment, all that remains is the physical act, dull, gross

and brutish” (J:1127, also 184; similar: LNJ1 :354, 355).9 Sade’s mental model holds

that the imagination is itself an entirely physical process, and his language implies

that one can directly introspect and influence one’s own mental processes. From

Juliette: “enable [your philosophy] to forge, to weave, to create new fantasies which,

injecting energies into the voluptuous atoms, cause them to collide at greater speed

and more potently with the molecules they are to make vibrate: these vibrations are

your delight” (J: 341; also LNJ 1:361). An implication of this scheme is that, with

sufficient training, one could learn to enjoy any sensation. (Other passages, however,

7 Fauskevåg notes a similarity here with the description of the imagination offered by Nicolas Bergasse

(1750-1832) (Fauskevåg p. 74). Sade scholars frequently note, erroneously, that Justine and Juliette go

through the same experiences, and yet only Juliette experiences them as pleasurable, owing to her

greater ‘sophistication’ as a libertine. Whilst working as a prostitute, Juliette complains of rough,

“insulting” handling at the hands of clients, and negotiates with the Pope and other characters so that

she does not come to harm (J: 128, 199, 756). Juliette is a moderately powerful figure throughout the

novel, being both politically connected and wealthy, and for most of the time she is in complete control

of her situation. Justine, on the other hand, is powerless throughout the novel. She is branded-

physically, with an iron, as a prostitute (as was customary in Sade’s age), has toes cut off and is finally

killed by a bolt of lightning. Juliette never suffers such things. For discussion, see Jean-Pierre Han,

Jean-Pierre Valla, “A propos” p.109. 8 This is similar to the view of La Mettrie, who held that illusions were preferable to reality, so long as

they are more pleasurable. La Mettrie p.125. 9 Sade’s account of the imagination is not entirely positive. In Juliette, Madame Delbène states that the

imagination is the source of “all our errors,” God, in particular ( J: 36).

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imply that the imagination is not subordinate tot the will; as soon as the sexual act is

complete, notes one character, the ‘voluptuous illusion’ vanishes) .10

The materialist model cannot account for more complex pleasures, in particular

that of overcoming the ‘chimerical ties’ that prevent us from doing terrible things to

one another, or of the pleasure of cruelty (LNJ 2: 190). Accordingly, Sade discusses

intellectual pleasures, in particular the sense of liberation afforded by intellectual

analysis, and the pleasure of reflection and analysis itself.

3.3 Theory of Pleasure: Intellectual aspect.

Sade makes a distinction between ‘physical happiness,’ explicable (Sade thinks)

according to the materialistic model, and ‘intellectual happiness.’ Saint-Fond, in

advising Juliette on the pleasures of torturing a girl, explains:

The felicity I recommend to you will be infinitely keener; beyond the physical happiness

acquired from enjoyment, there will be intellectual happiness born of the comparison

between her fate and yours; for happiness consists more in comparisons of this sort than

in actual physical enjoyments. 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 other’s hardships which cause us to experience our enjoyments to the full;

surrounded by persons whose happiness is equal to ours, we would never know

contentment or ease… (Sade’s italics; J: 1161).

Sade applies this principle to socioeconomic relations, hence universalizing the

principle of the ‘intellectual pleasure’ of sadism. The pleasure of amassing wealth for

Sade is essentially the pleasure of perceiving oneself as better off than one’s

fellows.11 Consequently, any attempt to achieve happiness for all through economic

equality will fail. As the pleasure of wealth is not due to the direct bodily sensation

that it affords, but the perception of one’s own station as being above that of others,

s

it

10 La Nouvelle Justine, in Sade Œuvres complètes édition mise en place par Annie le Brun et Jean-

Jacques Pauvert (Pauvert: Paris, 1986-1991) Vol. 9 p.448; quoted in Fauskevåg p.76. 11 Steven Pinker holds a similar view. He notes that the poor of industrialized nations are materially far

better off than the aristocracy of a century ago, yet are still less happy (and die younger) than the more

wealthy. This is because, he says, people’s sense of well-being “comes from an assessment of their

social status.” Steven Pinker The Blank Slate (London: Penguin, 2002) p.304

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is a psychological impossibility to make everyone equally happy. Whether through

simple sadism or acquisition, one is happy because one knows that others are not.

S’il y a, je le suppose, dix portions de bonheur dans une société composée de dix

personnes, les voilà toutes égales, et, par conséquent, aucune d’elles ne peut se flatter

d’être plus que l’autre ; si, au contraire, un des individus de cette société parvient à priver

les neuf autres de leur portion de bonheur pour les réunir sur sa tête, assurément il sera

véritablement heureux ; car il pourra dès lors établir des comparaisons qu’il lui était

impossible de concevoir auparavant. Le bonheur ne gît pas dans tel ou tel état de l’âme : il

consiste dans la seule comparaison de son état à celui des autres, et quelle comparaison

reste-t-il à faire, quand tout le monde nous ressemble ? Si tout le monde possédait une

fortune égale, en serait-il un seul qui osât se dire riche? (my italics; LNJ 2:109, also

p.147; J: 411).

Sade makes some problematic assumptions concerning the pleasure of cruelty,

however. His characters associate its pleasure with a ‘delicate’ imagination and

‘excessive sensibility;’ accordingly, they associate it with sophistication (J: 1179). 12

Elsewhere, this very sensitivity is described as, not refinement, but receptiveness to

brute physical processes- the destructive Will: “…the more sensitive an individual,

the more sharply this atrocious Nature will bend him into conformance with evil’s

irresistible laws…” (J: 991n). Both views are in conflict with another central Sadeian

premise- that a taste for cruelty is a universal trait (PB: 255). This conflict can be

resolved by asserting that the libertines are simply more ‘authentic,’ and that most

people lack the opportunity or the strength to assert their natures. The assumption that

the rarity (of being “unique in one’s species” [J: 218]) of the taste for cruelty is an

indication of ‘refinement’ or ‘delicacy,’ however, is questionable, even if we were to

accept (against Sade’s own reasoning) that the trait is so rare (Sade notes

anthropological and historical sources, and numerous traveller’s accounts, including

his own, to support the claim that people have an innate taste for cruelty).13 Secondly,

12 This association is found in the work of Sade scholars. Béatrice Didier, for example, draws a

distinction between “sadisme dégénéré” and “sadisme proprement dit [....] Ce serait une excitation du

désir produite par la vue ou par la représentation mentale ou esthétique de la souffrance d’autrui.”

Didier Sade: Un écriture du désir p.129. 13 In his Voyage d’Italie, Sade writes of a cocagne he witnessed in Naples: “the most barbarous

spectacle in the world that one can possibly imagine.” This involved a public festival in which food

was displayed in a public square; at the shot of a cannon, people were permitted to grab what they

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what the pleasure of cruelty amounts to in Sade is limited to ‘active schadenfreude;’

that is, the infliction of pain on another in order to enjoy the spectacle of their

misfortune, the enjoyment of seeing that another person is suffering (rather than the

aesthetic or ‘intellectual’ appeal of such a spectacle). From the pleasures of making a

pretty girl cry by cutting off her hair, to gluing someone to a toilet seat, or giving an

especially traumatic lecture on nihilism, through to the most elaborate mechanized

tortures, the motive is essentially the same (120: 589, 605; LNJ 1:140). That is not to

say that aesthetic or intellectual pleasures are not discussed in Sade; simply that the

pleasure of cruelty as such is not truly aesthetic or intellectual.

Sade does not recognize a dichotomy between pleasure and the workings of the

intellect, or philosophy proper. This is in keeping with his reductionist ontology;

philosophy is dependent on mental processes, which are in turn physical in nature.

Thought itself is passionate and subordinate to desire, all expression of the passions,

for Sade, is pleasurable; and all pleasure is associated with sex. From La Nouvelle

Justine: “[l]’élément du flambeau de la philosophie c’est le foutre. Tout les principes

de morale et de religion s’anéantissent bientôt devant les passions” (LNJ 1 : 95 ;

similar : J:401, MV: 42; AV:243). Further, insofar as philosophy’s role (for Sade) is to

destroy the “yoke of lies and stupidity,” its pleasures are the pleasures of liberation, of

destroying myths (J: 52, 53). States Delbène: “ [f]requently we hear the passions

declaimed against by unthinking orators who forget that these passions supply the

spark that sets alight the lantern of philosophy; who forget that it is to impassioned

men we owe the overthrow of all ...religious idiocies” (J:88). Philosophy is also

described as the matrix within which pleasures are structured and arranged, and

thoughts are described as a blazing fire, or as explosives. The joy of philosophy is not,

could, resulting in a bloody riot. In Voyage d’Italie (Paris: Tchou, 1967) p.440; cited in Berman

Thoughts and Themes p.141. This same spectacle appears in Juliette (J: 999-1000). Lacombe notes the

influence on Sade of abbé Banier and abbé Le Mascrier’s Histoire des Cérémonies religieuses de tous

les peuples de la terre (Paris, 1741), which detailed the variety and inventiveness of torture in history.

See Roger G. Lacombe Sade et ses masques (Paris: Payot, 1974) p.215; also J: 70n, 262n. Sade most

probably accepted an association made by Helvétius: “But suppose a man to have extreme sensibility,

what follows? That he will sometimes have sensations unknown to the common rank of men: that he

will feel what a less delicate organisation will not permit another man to feel.” Helvétius Treatise on

Man Vol. I p.159.

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for Sade, the intellectual satisfaction of resolving of a conceptual problem, but the

ecstasy of a cleansing fire.

How many and various are the desires aroused by the thought of a crime! I liken it to a

spark which swiftly sets alight everything combustible at hand, whose ravages increase in

proportion to the fuel it finds, and which ends up producing a blaze in us such as is not to

be extinguished save by rivers of fuck. But, Juliette, some theory must exist governing

this as there is a theory governing everything else, and it too must possess its principles, it

rules...teach me, my angel, you know what my dispositions, my penchants are, teach me

how to regulate all this (J:634; also 308; also similar:120: 239). 14

Sade also combines intellectual and physical pleasures. Delbène explains: “there’s

more to it than just experiencing sensations- they must be analysed. Sometimes it is as

pleasant to discuss as to undergo them; and when one has reached the limit of one’s

physical means, one may then exploit one’s intellect”(J:60). Were Juliette of our

epoch, she would discuss the sensations of sex in terms of endorphins and serotonin

uptake. After being penetrated both vaginally and anally, Juliette is asked by Madame

Delbène which is the more pleasurable sensation. She replies:

...each gave me such pleasure I cannot decide which gave me the more. Reverberations

are yet going through me of sensations at once so confused and so voluptuous that I

would be hard put to assign them their proper origins.”

“Then we’d best try it again,” Télème observed; “The Abbot and I will vary our

attacks, the lovely Juliette will have the goodness to interrogate her sentiments and to

favour us with a more exact account thereof” (J: 56).

Sade also holds that criminal acts are in themselves intellectually satisfying, although

there are no arguments in his surviving works as to why this is the case. 15 14 Catherine Cusset argues that Juliette is the most successful Sadeian character for this reason : “Ce

que nous apprend Sade avec l’invention de Juliette, c’est que la liberté est le choix de la limite.” I

personally find this reading implausible; Juliette kills literally dozens of people and finally immolates

her own daughter during an orgy, so it is not clear that she could be said to embody an ethic of keeping

to limits, even in relation to other libertines. Catherine Cusset “la passion selon Juliette,” L’Infini 31

(fall 1990):17-26, p.25. 15 For an account of the intellectual pleasures of going beyond morality, see Emil M. Cioran On the

Heights of Despair trans. Ilinca- Zarifopol- Johnston (Chicago &London: University of Chicago Press,

1992). p.120.

110

3.4 Theory of Pleasure: Aesthetics

A criminal’s lawyers are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the

deed to the advantage of him who did it.

Friedrich Nietzsche 16

Aesthetic pleasure, or rather, that which is described as aesthetic pleasure, plays a

major role in Sade’s thought. For Timo Airaksinen, Sade’s aesthetics is universalized

to validate a mode of life; Sade “paints wickedness as a strong and grand phenomenon

which provides glory and spectacle, and entails all the opportunities for enjoyment,

creativity and satisfaction…. [t]o him, the banality of evil would simply mean that

evil without enjoyment is indeed boring.”17 Sade deploys the rhetoric of aesthetics in

several ways, and it is necessary to track how this aspect links with his account of

pleasure.

In keeping with his general view of human nature, Sade notes that his aesthetics

of the ghastly is scarcely atypical. Executions, tortures and gladiatorial combat have

long been popular events, as Sade’s characters note (PB: 334). 18 Soldiers have

occasionally spoken in poetic terms of the sublime beauty of the battlefield, and even

the Bible contains numerous descriptions of spectacular battles and acts of vengeful

destruction. 19 The same taste for horror is present in the most refined arts; as John

Richetti notes, Sade’s work itself shows the degree to which learning and

sophistication can coexist with the most horrific bestiality.20 In noting the extremely

grisly nature of Christian iconography, Sade observes that accurate and compelling

portrayal in oils of the Passion of the Christ requires study of death and dying

16 Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil §110 p.97. 17 Airaksinen p. 14 18 See also Helvétius Essays on the Mind. p.179. 19 For discussion, see Jeffrey H. Goldstein, ed. Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent

Entertainment (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jonathan Glover Humanity: A

Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Pimlico, 2001). p.55. 20John Richetti “The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) and the French Libertine Tradition” in George

Stade, ed. European Writers: The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment Vols. 3-4 (New York:

Scribner, 1984):615-638, p.632.

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(LNJ1:213).21 The taste for fantastical, violent sexual (or sexualized) spectacle is also

common enough, and is scarcely confined to the purely pornographic; one only has to

consider the works of Delacroix. 22 Nietzsche formulates this insight in Beyond Good

and Evil: “[a]lmost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization

and intensification of cruelty –that is my proposition; the ‘wild beast’ has not been

laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has merely become- deified.”23

The association of mass homicide, spectacle and aesthetics is not unusual in our own

time. In the days following the destruction of the Twin Towers, a number of

prominent cultural figures applauded their destruction as worthy on purely aesthetic

grounds. (Like the Crucifixion, the imagery of the 9/11 attack acquired instant and

enduring iconic power which is, arguably, merely a pious gloss. Sade would perhaps

suggest that Christian iconography, like the endless replays of some catastrophe on

the nightly news, merely satisfies a desire to see suffering on a spectacular scale). 24

Where Sade’s libertines differ from the aestheticians of 9/11 is their desire to actually

cause such spectacular acts of destruction for purely aesthetic purposes (note that,

despite Sade’s talk of ‘refinements’ and ‘style,’ the pleasure is still to be found

primarily in the infliction of pain). From Juliette:

Refinements enter into the thing, as happens with all pleasures; from this moment this

personal stamp is added, all limits are abolished, atrocity is wound to its topmost pitch,

21 Sade asks whether Michelangelo would have felt pangs of conscience if, for the purposes of

rendering the Crucifixion more accurately, he had crucified a young boy. He also states that ‘everyone

knows’ that a girl was killed in the production of a painting by Guide (perhaps Guido Reni, known also

as Le Guide {1575-1642}), Madeleine en pleurs. Theodore Gericault (1791 - 1824), whilst working on

his masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818), kept corpses and severed limbs in his studio for

reference. 22 Eugène Delacroix’s (1798-1863) The Death of Sardanapalus, featuring an indifferent king watching

his men massacre his concubines in cold blood, is as brutal as anything in Sade. 23 Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil p.159. 24 Karlheinz Stockhausen, a German composer, described the terrorists’ actions as “the greatest work of

art one can imagine;” Damien Hirst, similarly, stated that the terrorists “need congratulating” because

of their “artistic achievement.” See Rebecca Allison “9/11 wicked but a work of art, says Damien

Hirst” (Guardian, Wednesday September 11, 2002). Gail Haffern, a New Zealand artist, in agreement,

has produced a number of sculptures honouring the aesthetics of the attack. Linda Herrick “Tribute to

the Towers,” New Zealand Herald September 9, 2002.

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for the sentiment that produces it exhales it in keeping with the increase or worsening

of the torture; all one’s achievements now lie short of one’s intentions. The agonies

must be now slow and abominable if they are to quicken the soul at all, and one wishes

that the same life could revive a thousand times over, in order to have the pleasure of

murdering it that often, and that thoroughly.

Each murder is a commentary and critique of the others, each demands

improvement in the next; it is shortly discovered that killing is not enough, one must kill

in hideous style; and though one may be unaware of the fact, lewdness almost always

has the direction of these matters (italics mine;J:791). 25

Sade’s libertines soon tire of the art of torturing and murdering individuals; eventually

even city-wide arson with sophisticated incendiary munitions, or even genocide,

cannot sate them (LNJ 1:297, 366 ; LNJ 2 :243 ; J :501, 729). The prospect of a

planetary holocaust becomes their ideal. States Curval (in The 120 Days of Sodom):

“There are,” said Curval, “but two or three crimes to perform in this world, and they,

once done, there’s no more to be said; all the rest is inferior, you cease any longer to feel.

Ah, how many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out

of the universe, make a general darkness, or use that star to burn the world! Oh, that

would be a crime, oh yes, and not a little misdemeanour such as are all the ones we

perform who are limited in a whole year’s time to metamorphosing a dozen creatures into

lumps of clay ” (120: 364; similar: J: 774-775, 1185; LNJ 1: 296, 297, 366).

An entire aesthetics of the sublime is implied here and in similar passages. Sade’s

thought is compatible with two possible explanations. The passage above, and others

like it, expresses the wish to participate in the cosmic processes of destruction, like

Hindu gods: “we devastate the planet...and repeople it with new objects, and immolate

these in their turn...” (J: 522). Implied here, in a sense similar to Bataille’s reading, is

the notion of the attainment of oneness with the cosmos through direct involvement

with its processes. Cosmic unity, the Sadeian imperative to maximize destruction, and

the aestheticizing of crime, are united. In what resembles a diabolical fusion of the

principles of Sartre and Nietzsche, Sade proposes an entire lifestyle infused with full

25 A similar tract is Thomas de Quincey’s Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827). See

Thomas de Quincey On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts and Other Related Texts

(Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004).

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knowledge of the horrors of the world, and also the acceptance that oneself is

responsible for its horrors, through actively participating in them.

This is the ‘external’ aspect of a Sadeian aesthetics of mass destruction. An

internal aesthetics of the sublime is also compatible with Sade’s account.

For Kant, the aesthetic experience of the sublime discloses knowledge of one’s moral

nature. The sublime experience involves a spectacle of awe-inspiring grandeur; the

starry stars above, or some spectacle of Nature’s awesome power. Either one feels that

one is physically overwhelmed, or one senses one’s utter insignificance. Yet this very

experience reveals to ourselves the metaphysical truth of our intellectual freedom.

Sade’s description of the sublime resembles this account, but in an inverted way. For

Kant, the moral reality disclosed is our capacity to shape the world as a moral world.

Sade, like Kant, claims to be disclosing an important feature of human psychology,

but in a sense that brings to mind J. Robert Oppenheimer rather than the Moral Law

Within. Sade’s characters see in volcanic eruptions a confirmation that the world is

characterized by endless, meaningless destruction- it is nature that is the primary

object of sublime contemplation, rather than, for Kant, the moral self. Yet the

aesthetics of the libertines is even more direct than romantic contemplation– they also

cause disasters (volcanic eruptions, mass arson and so on ) through the application of

scientific knowledge – that is, their rational faculties, and hence their power to

manipulate the natural order of things, and to destroy its inhabitants (LNJ 2 :42).

Sade’s characters, hence, feel a sense of awe of their own intellectual capacity for

destruction. Further, in discovering in themselves the capacity for such destruction,

and of finding this pleasing, the libertines disclose to themselves the capacity for

absolute moral disregard. Where Kant saw a ‘moral law within,’ Sade sees, in the

interior of man, only an endless abyss, or the Rausch of Godhead.

3.5 Apathy

The pleasure of mass destruction, or of murder, does not come automatically. Sade

proposes a ‘doctrine of apathy,’ a complex merging of hedonistic and stoical

principles, in order to encourage the reader to overcome innate resistance to such

pleasures. The reasoning is as follows: the greatest pleasures are criminal; the sense of

guilt prevents one from enjoying committing criminal acts; hence, one must overcome

the feeling of guilt. This is achieved through repetition of the act until the discomfort

is overcome, and the act becomes pleasurable. Many everyday pleasures require a

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certain amount of adjustment and of overcoming sometimes considerable discomfort

(the terror of one’s first bicycle ride, the nausea of one’s first cigar) - often followed

by the euphoria of accomplishment.26 Sade’s scheme is comparable, differing only in

that a total psychic transformation is proposed, rather than simple taste acquisition.

Call this the doctrine of apathy. Two distinct types of apathy are discussed in Sade’s

work, although Sade, confusingly, treats them as being continuous. Call these organic

apathy and moral apathy.

Organic apathy, the result of simple hedonism, is the consequence of over-

stimulus of pleasurable sensation. Overindulgence in sex, food and alcohol, Juliette

explains, “have a gradual degenerating effect and tend before long to render excesses

indispensable.... it is in excess that pleasure exists”(J:709). This state is described as

stoicism, rather than simple burnout: “[s]toical training enervates the soul ...it passes

into one of apathy which soon metamorphoses into pleasures a thousand times diviner

than those which frailties would procure it...delights infinitely more trenchant than

the ones which would have resulted from excitement or the dreary heats of love” (J:

484). More piquant pleasures must be pursued, more bizarre tastes need to be

cultivated if the libertine is to enjoy anything at all: “ [o]ne grows tired of the

commonplace, the imagination becomes vexed, and the slenderness of our means, the

weakness of our faculties, and the corruption of our souls lead us to these

abominations” (120 : 329). 27 This principle is summarized in the classic Sadeian

aphorism: “great pleasures are only born from surmounted repugnances” (J: 1051,

similar: 184). (Sade himself refers to the analogy of acquiring new food tastes in this

context). 28 A heterodox aesthetics of the hideous and disgusting is proposed for the

attainment of “the greatest possible upheaval in the nervous system”: “ugliness, 26 For discussion, see Theodor Adorno Minima Moralia p.46. 27 This is similar to the ‘opponent process theory,’ proposed by Richard L. Solomon and John D.

Corbit. In short, the theory is that the overcoming of deep seated repugnances is followed by a rush of

elation, in order to return the body to homeostasis. The theory was originally proposed with drugs in

mind; Baumeister applies it to the pleasure of sadism and killing. R.L. Solomon, J.D. Corbit “An

Opponent process theory of motivation: I. Temporal dynamics of affect,” Psychological Review 81

(1974):119-145; cited in Roy M. Baumeister Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (New York:

A.W.H Freeman/ Owl Book, 1999) pp.234-236. 28 Concerning the attractiveness of ugly people, the character Severino remarks: “ne voyez-vous pas

tout plein de gens préférer le gibier faisandé à la viande fraîche?” (“do people not prefer gamey game

to fresh meat?” LNJ 2: 83).

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degradation deal a far stouter blow, the commotion they create is much stronger, the

resultant agitation must hence be more lively” (J: 340; 120: 233 also J: 744). Sade

never discusses the overcoming of disgust concerning sexual acts per se, however;

only with regards to unusual paraphilias.29

Moral apathy involves a different process and rationale. Its attainment is the

excision of normal emotional response, in particular the moral sentiments, principally

guilt and pity.30 A key assumption here is that one’s moral disposition is malleable.31

Sade, as noted above, confuses this with organic apathy, and on one occasion

proposes that organic apathy causes moral apathy: “[i]t is regrettably only too

commonly observed that sensual excess drives out pity in man....[w]hether this is

because most carnal excesses require a kind of apathy of soul or whether the violent

effect they produce on the nervous system weakens the sensitivity by which it

operates, it nevertheless remains a fact that a professional libertine is rarely a

compassionate man” (MV.30 ; 263fn). The two types of apathy are quite distinct,

however. Despite his insistence that moral sentiments are due entirely to ‘chimeras’

and ‘false education,’ Sade’s characters clearly regard the attainment of moral apathy

as a considerable achievement, a fact which acknowledges of the reality of moral

sentiments (J: 450, 548-549, 845, 1053).32 Organic apathy, on the other hand, is

merely the outcome of simple debauchery.

Sade’s reasoning is as follows. As the voice of conscience prevents one from

committing terrible crimes, and it is terrible crimes that afford the most shocking–

therefore the most pleasurable– sensations, it is necessary to overcome conscience.

29 Freud considered the capacity and pleasure of overcoming disgust (in particular the ‘disgust’ of

seeing the genitals) an essential part of the sexual instinct. Sigmund Freud Volume 7: On Sexuality;

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and other Works. trans. under the general editorship of James

Strachey; ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1977) p.64. 30 Fauskevåg calls this process an ‘artificial desocialisation;’ Philippe Roger describes it as

‘brainwashing.’ Roger Sade La Philosophie dans le pressoir p.55; Fauskevåg p.184. 31 This contradicts the libertine’s insistence that they cannot help themselves from committing crimes,

or become better people as, clearly, they think that they can become increasingly bad. The malleability

of the moral sense is a recurring theme in Aline et Valcour. Léonore, in the course of her voyage

around the world, loses the ‘moral sentiments’ of her youth, and Sainville, surrounded by captive slave-

girls in Africa, realizes for an instant that he no longer misses his beloved Léonore (AV:274, 639). 32 This fits with the actual experience of people involved in mass murder- they will feel normal,

‘animal’ guilt, but will learn to overcome it. For discussion, see Baumeister pp.305-342.

116

Various means are proposed as to how this is accomplished. Clairwil advises Juliette

that this voice is silenced through the application of “strength, discipline, and a certain

ruthlessness with oneself” (J: 450, also p. 274). A more concrete piece of advice is

that repeated performance of a particular forbidden act will lead to an overcoming of

nausea, fear, or pangs of conscience. Eventually, the student will cross the ‘morality

barrier’ and learn to enjoy the specified pleasure or task, leading eventually to the

experience of pleasure, or even ecstasy (MV: 124; CL: 35). 33 Explains the character

Tergowitz: “accustom yourself awhile to the idea that frightens you, you’ll soon come

to cherish it: that’s the method I have followed to familiarize myself with all known

crimes: I yearned to commit them, but they scared me; fixing my mind upon them, I’d

masturbate, and I perform them today as effortlessly as I blow my nose” (J: 888).

Sade also notes that moral reorientation is easier for children than adults, suggesting

that moral malleability is a child-like trait. Clairwil gives the following comment on

libertine training:

... the necessary procedure for a young person one was endeavoring to train up for life

would be to blunt [their] sensibility; blunting it, you will perhaps lose a few weak virtues,

but you will eliminate a great many vices, 34and under a form of government which

severely castigates all vices and which never rewards virtues, it is infinitely better not to

do evil than to strive to do good (J: 278).

Similarly, a young executioner tells Juliette that the training for his “rationalized and

scientific ferocity” begins early: “from childhood on we are taught a system of values

wherein human life is nothing and the law everything…” (J: 307).

Sade’s characters also hold the apathetic state to be epistemically privileged; that

is, its attainment is taken to be necessary for deeper insights into the nature of the

world.35 This is partly because the libertines find that the attainment of “new

33 For discussion of the psychology of enjoying overcoming social instincts, and the pleasure of killing,

see C. Fred Alford What Evil means to us (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) p.102. For a

discussion on the enjoyment of criminal activity, see Baumeister pp.203-249. 34 Again, Sade insists that virtue is ‘weak’ and vice is ‘strong.’ 35 Michel Camus contrasts the apathy of Sade’s characters with that of the Stoics, for whom apathy was

required for receptivity to the Logos, conceived as cosmic harmony. For Sade, according to Camus, it

is openness to Nature that leads to openness to the Logos. Michel Camus “ L’impasse mystique du

Libertin ” In Michel Camus, Philippe Roger, eds.:259-276, p.270.

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perspectives” is itself pleasurable (J: 18). Numbness in some senses is said to enhance

others: “...by numbing two or three of the faculties of sensation one may extract

astonishing things from the others...it is when we have achieved depravation,

insensibility, that Nature begins to yield us the key to her secret workings...(J:710).

Sade associates moral apathy with reason, and interior sensations with morality,

hence, falsity or error. To become apathetic, for Sade, is to encounter the ‘truth’ that

moral precepts are lies and that the moral conscience is not an intrinsic feature of

human existence. This dichotomy is expressed by the character Président de Balmont,

in Aline et Valcour: “ [q]uand vous cédez au sentiment de la pitié plutôt qu’aux

conseils de la raison, quand vous écoutez le cœur de préférence à l’esprit, vous vous

jetez dans un abîme d’erreurs, puisqu’il n’est point de plus faux organes que ceux de

la sensibilité.” (Non- libertine) Madame de Blamont’s reply reinforces this

dichotomy: “j’aime mieux être imbécile et sensible que de posséder le génie de

Descartes” (AV: 712).

Sade’s characters do not apply this principle consistently. They value the interior

sensations associated with pleasure, including the ‘delicious vibrations’ made by their

moral sense as it is being overridden. Sade associates only moral feelings with ‘error’;

pleasurable feelings are invariably described as grounded on truth.

Two problems arise from the attainment of apathy. Throughout Juliette, Sade’s

characters indicate that the Libertine lifestyle leads to the acquisition of tastes and

manias that cannot be satisfied. Towards the end of the novel, Juliette states that,

despite her “enchanted life,” “I do not cease to want; I consider myself poor; my

desires are infinitely in excess of my possibilities; I would spend twice as much as I

had it; and I leave no stone unturned to increase my wealth, criminal or not, there is

nothing I am unwilling to do for money” (my italics; J: 1168; 598, 120: 364).

Secondly, the libertines find that, due to over- stimulus, they are incapable of physical

pleasures at all. Only intellectual pleasures, if any, are left. 36 Rather than taking up

intellectually demanding hobbies, Sade’s characters propose to imaginatively

reconstruct the notion of crime, hence, morality, despite the fact that they consider it

an “arbitrary and meaningless word” (J: 170-171). In some cases, notes Chantal 36 Sade’s account is partly continuous with the views of his contemporaries on the problems related to

‘libertinage.’ Firstly, Sade appears to be in agreement with d’Holbach’s claim that endless debauch

leads to ennui and weariness. D’Holbach pp. 99, 256. Cusset notes that this was a common theme in

libertine literature. For discussion, see Cusset No Tomorrow p. 145.

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Thomas, Sade’s characters hold that prejudices should remain where their violation

can become pleasurable. 37 This is, on their own terms, an escape into illusion. (An

impoverished conception of pleasure seems to be at play here. Sade appears to hold

that only crime can be pleasurable, even if crime does not exist. It is like saying that

you can only truly enjoy eating bacon if you were brought up an observant Jew or

Muslim, and therefore sense that it is sinful). Clairwil explains that it is “illusion

which invests crime with its attractiveness, and a weak spirit encounters greatest

difficulty committing it when, totally self-possessed, illusion there is none” (J: 450).

Sade also makes a curious association of the ‘failure’ of libertinage as a purely

hedonistic project, the sense of emptiness its failure imparts, and the ‘cheapening’ of

human life. He declares that this sense of emptiness (what we might perhaps call

‘existential despair’) is a proof of the non-divine origin of humanity.

…there’s the effect of irregular desires: the greater the height they arouse us to, the

greater the emptiness we feel afterward. From this cretins derive proof of God’s

existence; whereas for my part I find here only the most certain proofs of a materialistic

attitude: the more you cheapen your existence, the less I’ll be inclined to believe it is the

handiwork of a deity (J: 312).

The apparent failure of libertinage is also due to a misunderstanding of the

relationship between ‘criminal pleasure’ and morality. Just as the libertines overcome

the discomfort of illegal activities, they eventually overcome the pleasure associated

with those same activities. Their formulation of the relationship between crime and

pleasure is misconstrued. Rules do not impede pleasure- it is the existence of the rules

that allows for the pleasure of breaking them to be obtained. Once the rule has been

successfully transgressed, pleasure associated with breaking that rule is impossible.

More extreme activities are sought in order to obtain the same thrill. Where this is not

possible, the libertines find that they cannot satisfy their desires; their criminal

ambitions are frustrated. Assessed by the standards of hedonism, Sade’s proposal is

apparently a failure.

37 Thomas Sade, la dissertation et l’orgie p.72.

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3.6 Triumph of the Will.

Although it would appear that Sade’s libertine doctrine is a failure, the trajectory of

Sade’s characters suggests a different motive is at play. In Sade, there are two views

suggested - one implied, the other explicit- concerning the relationship between

pleasure and power. The more overtly stated view is that power is a means to

pleasure. The alternate view is that power itself is pleasurable, or constitutes a

different order of pleasure.38 If this is the case, it is possible that Sade’s characters are

not motivated by simple hedonism at all.

All of Sade’s accounts of pleasure can be construed in terms of power; either

power over oneself or power over others. At some point, the reductionist model of

pleasure is abandoned completely. As the character Dorval explains, happiness

depends on, more than anything else, “exercising the power to appease our avid little

whimsies” (J: 124-125). There are no purely intellectual pleasures discussed in Sade’s

work; those pleasures which are described in terms of aesthetics (such as murder or

mass destruction) are in fact primarily concerned with power.

The first expression of this Will is complete self mastery; mastery over the fear of

death, over instinctual nausea associated with excrement, and over one’s reluctance to

harm others, that is, the social instincts (although, of course, Sade would not describe

them as such). 39 Organic and moral apathy are to be understood in terms of such

mastery, but the overcoming of the instinct of nausea, central to the Libertine project,

is distinct from both. It is a ritual intended to prove absolute self control.40 This

38 The first view is that of Helvétius; the second is that of Nietzsche. The association of power and

pleasure had also been considered by the philosophes. Rousseau notes within himself the potential for

becoming a tyrant, observing that “if I were rich, [I would be] a disdainful spectator of the miseries of

the rabble.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau Emile or On Education trans. Alan Bloom Penguin (London:

Penguin, 1979) p. 344; Helvétius Treatise on Man Vol. I, pp.130, 134, 201, 310, 311.

For discussion, see Fauskevåg p.93. For Nietzsche’s criticism of Helvétius on this point, see The Will

to Power §751 p.397. 39For discussion, see Lacombe p.203. 40 Coprophagy appeared in the initiation rites of the Chewa people of East Africa, just as, for other

African tribespeople, initiation into adulthood may require rituals involving flagellation, exposure to

stinging ants or extensive tattooing or scarification. Boris de Rachewiltz Eros Noir: Moeurs sexuelles

de l’Afrique de la préhistoire à nos jours (Paris : La jeune Parque, 1963) p.191. Sade often associates

coprophilia with sexuality, but this association is not straightforward. Freud discusses the pleasure of

defecation, and of the rituals involving faeces “typical of neurotics.” For Freud, such pleasures are

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accounts for Juliette’s claim that eating excrement is “one of the culminating episodes

of the libertine experience” (J: 163). Robert F. O’Reilly’s suggestion that coprophilia

and cannibalism in Sade represents a Nietzschean practice of “devouring and

reshaping the world” may be off the mark, but not by much. Katherine Landolt, more

accurately, suggests that the cultivation of exotic pleasures is a means of overcoming

nature, and bestows upon the libertine the sign of uniqueness, in being able to

overcome an unspeakable nausea.41

Sade’s characters, as discussed in the section on Bataille, attain mastery over the

fear of death, whether for the sake of self- mastery or for the pursuit of physical

pleasure. They treat death as utterly trivial; a last cheap thrill, possibly accompanied

by a final arc of ejaculate. Having no truck with either God or the good of the

community, they have no problem with suicide or death through misadventure. Timo

Airaksinen, as noted in Chapter I, reads Sade as essentially an advocate of a profound

perversion. He associates the libertines’ death wish with the conceptual failure of

Sade’s entire a-morality. Airaksinen defines “genuine good” as “what is desirable in

the long run: safety and pleasure.” Accordingly, he characterizes Sade’s perversity as

being essentially ‘self deception’ and ‘negligence’: “…evil is damage- but never

injury-and appears to be a decisional error that is brought about by some kind of

ignorance, mistake, or weakness. [...] One cannot aim at evil, because logically

speaking one’s aims are the good of the person. All evil collapses back into akrasia,

intelligible owing to the richness of nerve endings in the ‘mucous membrane’ of the anus, but he does

not discuss actual coprophilia (Freud Sexuality p.104). Havelock Ellis repeats Freud’s suggestion that

an association of faeces and urine with eroticism is due to childish theories concerning sexuality. Ellis

also takes the child’s fascination for urination and defecation to be a “rudimentary form of the artistic

impulse,” and at the same time a “manifestation of power.” Havelock Ellis Psychology of Sex: A

Manual for Students third impression (London: William Heinemann {Medical Books} Ltd, 1934)

p.139. 41 Katherine Landolt “The Attempt and Failure to Break Out of a Materialist Framework as performed

by the Characters of the Histoire de Juliette under the direction of the Marquis de Sade” in Papers in

Romance Vol. 2 No. 3 (spring 1980):182-193: 186, 191; Robert F. O’Reilly “Desire in Sade’s Les 120

journées de Sodome,” Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century Vol. 217 (1983):249-256, p.251. See

also Noëlle Châtelet “Le libertine à table” in Michel Camus, Philippe Roger, eds.: 67-83, p.76. Note

also that, curiously, Sade’s libertines demonstrate their transcendence over merely human instinct in

the manner of medieval penitents- by filling their mouths with filth. For discussion of this practice, see

Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex translated by H.M. Parshley (London: Picador, 1988) p.685.

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self-deception, and negligence.” 42 Deliberately putting oneself in harm’s way with

no higher goal or end in view than one’s own pleasure (given that, presumably, death

will end one’s own pleasure) is considered to be perverse.

Against Airaksinen, I do not think that Sade’s libertines are really so perverse in

this sense. The libertines, whilst engaged in masochistic practices, typically do not run

the risk of death or even serious injury to themselves (J: 885; also 292, 301,439;

120:478). Yet even where Sade’s characters do things which are intensely pleasurable

but rather dangerous, it can still be argued that there is nothing particularly perverse in

their decision making, regardless of the specifics. People die through misadventure all

the time whilst doing intensely pleasurable things (flying light aircraft, climbing

mountains) - we typically do not consider them perverse. One may ask if there really

is such an essential relationship between the ‘good’ and personal safety, and whether

Sade’s account of pleasure is perhaps more sympathetic to the human condition than

the view that one should best try to die in one’s bed, and not whilst having sex (and

that everyone else would agree, if only they could think it through).43 If life is

unbearable, further, an especially exciting death may be eminently rational. 44

3.7 Power over Others

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien asks how one man asserts his

power over another. Winston answers: “[by] making him suffer.” O’Brien agrees:

“[o]bedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is

obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.” 45

In exactly the same way, Sade’s torturers experience the ecstasy of having total power

42 Airaksinen p. 36 43 Most philosophers have died in their beds. A. Quinton “Deaths of philosophers” In the Oxford

Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995):178. 44 Glanville Williams writes: “[a] study by E. Stengel and Nancy Cook indicated that the great majority

of so-called attempted suicides were not on fact single-minded efforts at self destruction but had a

hidden “appeal character;” in other words, the suicide seemed to gamble with his life, consciously or

subconsciously hoping that either the attempt would succeed or, if it failed, his life would be improved

as a consequence of the attempt.” Glanville Williams “Suicide” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Vol. VIII. Paul Edwards. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967) p.44. 45 George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 1989) p.279.

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over another person. 46 Clairwil, commenting on the rush she obtains from poisoning

people, comments that “it is exquisite to have the lives of others arbitrarily in one’s

power” (J: 523). Likewise, states Princess Borghese, “[s]tripping people of their

liberty amuses me, I like holding captives; I know that while they are incarcerated my

victims suffer: this perfidious idea excites me, I should love to be able to maintain

entire nations in this cruel situation” (J: 712). Sade also assumes that that all powerful

politicians, in fact anyone with any authority at all, whether judges, teaches, surgeons,

or priests- will abuse their positions.47 Sade portrays all political figures as being

equally cynical, and equally in the thrall of the pleasures of total power. The figures of

the ancien régime are described as monsters; the revolutionaries of Juliette plan to rid

the world of ideological imperfections, by using assassination or other terroristic

tactics, or through massacring entire economic or religious classes. 48 Whether power

corrupts or simply attracts the already immoral is unclear, as Sade’s characters assume

that desire for power over others is a universal trait. States Juliette: “I affirm that the

fundamental, profoundest, and keenest penchant in man is incontestably to enchain his

fellow creatures and to tyrannize them with all his might” (J: 317; also pp. 861, 966n;

AV: 461). Sade also suggests that the character traits of the despot are the

requirements of political ascendency rather than purely its negative effects on the

personality (AV: 462; J: 757). 46 For discussion of this phenomenon, see Baumeister pp.242-243; Ervin Staub The Roots of Evil: The

origins of Genocide and other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

pp.128, p.133, 139,149, 226. 47 Despite his political incertitude, Sade presented himself as an acute observer of the abuse of power,

commenting in an official pamphlet: “[c]itizens...I know where the abuse of power leads...I have

studied men and know them; nothing is more difficult than to set limits on delegated authority.” Sade

Œuvres complètes (Paris: Cercle du Livres Précieux, 1964) 11:173. Quoted by Shelby Spruell: “The

Marquis de Sade- Pornography or Political Protest?,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the

Western Society for French History 9 (1982):238-249, pp. 246-247. Helvétius, La Rochefoucauld,

Montesquieu, la Mettrie and Rousseau had already noted the egoism in human nature, and the resulting

problems concerning the selection of leaders. For discussion, see Fauskevåg pp. 93, 105. 48 In the name of a global revolution and a universal republic, the Northern Lodge of Stockholm plans

on exterminating all the kings of the world, the extermination of Catholicism, and establishing the

‘liberty of the world.’ Yet the means to be employed include poisoning water supplies and causing

epidemics in order to weaken ‘despotic’ governments, and the elimination of individual freedom (J:

864-870). For discussion on the dangers of moral absolutist thinking, see Baumeister Chapter 6,

pp.169-203; Staub p.76, 88.

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Sade also describes economic power as continuous with political power. As

Fauskevåg notes, “[d[ans La Nouvelle Justine et l’Histoire de Juliette, l’accumulation

de l’argent est donc un moyen de concentration de pouvoir entre les mains du fort, et

un instrument de violence pour rompre les liens humains et sociaux”).49 Essentially

feudal economic relationships are maintained, just as the architecture of feudalism

continues in Sade’s work. 50 Money is the means of acquiring assistants and

middlemen in capturing and imprisoning victims, and for paying off corrupt police

and judges (J: 624). The promise of riches, as on the more sadistic contemporary

game shows, is used to reduce human beings to playthings or wild animals (J: 995,

AV: 201, 258; 120: 194, 196; 205, 396, 398). 51 Accordingly, money is described as

potential crime (120: 197). A number of the paraphilias in Sade’s works are

intelligible as fetishizations of the paraphernalia of power. His characters frequently

wear terrifying clothing with which to torment their victims, or masturbate in piles of

gold coins, imagining the crimes they can commit with such wealth (J: 286, 315,

410).

Finally, as discussed earlier in the chapter, Sade’s characters assert their power

over the world of things, or over people that they have reduced (that is, from their

point of view) to the level of inanimate objects. Every prominent libertine character in

Sade is preoccupied with power over the environment, of proving themselves equals

of God, invariably through destruction.52 In contrast with the optimistic conception of

49 Fauskevåg p. 70. Sade’s description of the very wealthy largely follows Helvétius’ dictum that “gold

is a sorcerer that frequently converts an honest man into a knave,” and that wealth is continuous with

power. Voltaire also made a close association of wealth, economic arrangements and human rights

abuse, in particular slavery. See Candide and other tales pp.160, 165. See also Helvétius Treatise on

Man Vol. II p.282n; Fauskevåg p.69. 50 The preponderance of castles, dungeons, caves and fortressed islands in Sade is frequently

commented upon, as are the feudal relationships that Sade’s libertine characters maintain with their

victims and employees (who are never free to simply leave, and are frequently killed; LNJ 2: 17-18).

For discussion see Fauskevåg pp.110, 112,116, 117. 51 In Juliette, Ferdinand, King of Naples, holds a public event each year in which the poorer townsfolk

are allowed to fight each other in the rush to grab items from a huge pile of luxury goods and

foodstuffs. Hundreds of people are crushed in the struggle (J: 1000-1001). This scene is similar to that

witnessed by Sade himself in Italy (see note 13, in this chapter). 52 For discussion see Michel Camus, “L’impasse Mystique du Libertin” In Michel Camus, Philippe

Roger, eds.:259-276, p.273 ; Fauskevåg p.27

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science associated with the 18th Century, Sade’s characters conceive of science as the

power to destroy in spectacular fashion. 53 The chemist Almani declares that he has

spent his life studying nature’s secrets simply because he wants to cause a volcano to

erupt at his prompting (LNJ 2 :42-43); Count Bracciani uses advanced incendiary

weapons to set fire to all Rome, and so on. This marks the zenith of the Libertine

vision.

3.8 Sadism as Syndrome.

Sade is well known for extolling the pleasures of cruelty, and for associating this

pleasure with both strength and sophistication. Yet, as noted above, his affirmation of

the pleasure of cruelty runs aground; not only does it fail to convince on its own

hedonistic terms, it amounts to the assertion that it is pleasurable to see someone more

unfortunate than oneself. This insight fits poorly with the libertines’ self-image of

gloating, resplendent evil.

Here I suggest that Sade the diagnostician of the human condition is of equal

interest to Sade the ‘evangelist of evil.’ A cluster of Sade’s comments, isolated and

scattered throughout his works, suggest a penetrating, if brief, psychological portrait

of the sadistic will. The fictional villains that usually feature in philosophical

discussions of evil (Iago, Milton’s Satan) appear two-dimensional; their malignancy is

merely the will to do bad, to do the opposite of that which is good (which would

merely acknowledge the primacy of the good).54 Sade’s characters, by contrast, are

not cruel out of some mysterious, atavistic capacity for enjoying torture, and even go

as far as to suggest reasons as to their taste for torturing and killing (at least we can

give Sade the credit of not considering the inquiry into the evil will to be itself

morally repugnant). They even ponder the problem when there is no obvious answer 53 For discussion, see Robert S. Baker “The Nightmare of the Frankfurt School: the Marquis de Sade

and the Problem of Morality in Aldous Huxley’s Dystopian Narrative” In Nugel- Bernfried, ed. Now

More than Ever: Proceedings of the Aldous Huxley Centenary Symposium: Munster, 1994 (New York:

Peter Lang, 1995):245-260, p.258. Philippe Roger suggests that the increasingly sophisticated torture

machines in Sade are a parody of scientific progress. Philippe Roger La Philosophie dans le pressoir

p.60. 54 Sade, in Voyage d’Italie, notes that the very rarity of the “bizarre mania of doing evil for the sole

pleasure of doing it... spares me the trouble” of offering an analysis, although he suggests that it is due

to a “disordering of the imagination.” Voyage d’ Italie (Paris: Tchou, 1967) p.356. Quoted in Berman

Thoughts and Themes p.163.

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(Borchamps, commenting on his rape and torture of a girl: “[c]an you tell me what it

was bred such feelings in me? I myself do not know; I simply describe to you what I

experienced”; J: 901; Similar; 120; 492, 495).

In general, as noted above, it is the thirst for the sensation of power that Sade’s

characters crave, which itself suggests an inner weakness. This weakness, owing to

the lucidity, vigour and thoroughness of the libertines, cannot be reduced to simple

akrasia, that is, weakness of will, self-deception and negligence. A naturally strong

person, assumedly, is not preoccupied with acquiring a sense of power, or would even

know what such a sense would be like, given that this is a continuous state. A

different type of strength is the ability to overcome fear, and to confront stronger

adversaries. Sade’s characters are, on this view, weak, typically attacking, with

overwhelming force, the physically weak, defenceless and unsuspecting (a large

number of their victims are children, a fact seldom mentioned by the specialists). The

libertines are essentially bullies. They very rarely destroy or even challenge their

equals, and when they kill their peers they do it by stealth and deceit, typically using

poison, or a quick shove over a precipice. It is not the vanquishing of a worthy

adversary, and the possibility of defeat, that gives the libertine pleasure, but the sense

of total power: “[t]he more atrocious the hurt he inflicts upon the helpless, the greater

shall be the voluptuous vibrations in him” (J: 119; similar: 120:251).

Sade makes a number of specific observations concerning the nature of sadism.

Saint-Fond, Prime Minister of France, enjoys humiliating, degrading and torturing his

victims before, or whilst, killing them. When Juliette notes that he would be quite

terrifying to his many victims, Saint- Fond gives the following reply : “…the very

essence of my enjoyment is in making those victims so suffer in the selfsame way

from the thing which plagues my existence (my italics; J: 248). Saint-Fond is driven

to torture through the wish to project his pain onto someone else, although he does not

go into details as to what this pain is. Similarly, Omphale, a pious friend of Justine,

observes that “[t]hose who are wretched are consoled when they see those around

them suffer” (MV: 77). The desire to inflict pain, then, is a desire to project one’s own

psychic pain onto another person. 55

55 This matches the observations of C. Fred Alford, who applies a similar model to the psychology of

sadistic behaviour, and Richard G. Rappaport with regards to serial killers. Alford interviewed working

people, prisoners, and college students to discover how people understand evil. He concluded that

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In Aline et Valcour, Sade observes that the cruelty of a person is proportional to

how much hardship they have endured, citing Captain James Cook (1728-1779). Cook

found that the more his crew experienced hardships, the crueller they became: “[l]e

capitaine Cook observe dans ses relations, que plus les gens de son équipage étaient

malheureux, plus il les trouvait cruels” (AV: 608, n). In the same novel, Sade notes

that only the weak seek vengeance, as they lack the strength to endure their situation.

States the character Bersac: “J’ai fait, en étudiant les hommes, une remarque assez

singulière: c’est qu’il n’y a presque jamais que les âmes basses qui se livrent au

sentiment de la vengeance; infiniment plus sensibles à l’insulte, parce qu’elles n’ont la

force de rien endurer, elles ne peuvent en soutenir la blessure, et comme ces êtres-là

méritent peu, ils croient toujours qu’on ne leur rend jamais assez” (ibid.: 624).

Although Sade does not take cruelty to be vengeful, the association is certainly

implied. In particular, Sade’s characters mutilate and torture women, or infibulate the

entrance to the womb, for the ‘crime’ of being mothers (PB: 363). Hostility towards

women is intelligible as a generalized vengeance against womankind for having borne

him.

Further drawing sadism and inner pain together, Sade advises indifference

towards the suffering of others in order to better cope with one’s own misfortune,

again suggesting a relationship between sadism and an inability to tolerate suffering.

Sadeian apathy is akin to armour, or perhaps scar tissue. Delbène gives Juliette the

following advice: “...the less one is sensitive, the less one is affected, and the nearer

one draws to veritable autonomy; we are never prey but to two things: the evil which

befalls others, or that which befalls us: toughen ourselves in the face of the first, and

the second will touch us no more, and from then on nothing will have the power to

disturb our peace” (J: 99).

Cruelty is also associated with sexual frailties, which is consistent with the

central place Sade grants sexuality. In the 120 Days of Sodom, Durcet, one of the four

‘evil’ is experienced as an overwhelming feeling of emptiness or dread, and found that many people

who had done violently sadistic things, by their own estimation, were motivated to transfer this feeling

onto another. See Alford What Evil Means To Us pp.100, 119,121. Similarly, Richard Rappaport holds

that the quest for relief of pain (the inner, unresolved turmoil) is the essential dynamic which impels the

serial killer. Richard G.Rappaport, M.D., “The Serial and Mass Murderer: Patterns, Differentiation,

Pathology,” American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry 9 no.1 (1988). 39-48; 157.

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chief killers, becomes frustrated that he cannot get an erection. In frustration, he

furiously whips the children that the ‘four friends’ have imprisoned, on the pretext (as

is typical with Sade’s characters) that he is punishing them. Sade writes: “...et comme

l’impuissance donne toujours en peu de cette sorte d’humeur qu’on appelle

taquinisme en libertinage, ses visites furent étonnamment sévères” (“as impotence

always provokes that kind of mood called a teasing [sadistic] one56 in the idiom of

libertinage, his inspections were astonishingly severe” (120: 313; Œ III: 118). In fact,

many of Sade’s male libertine characters suffer erectile problems. 57

Finally, Sade associates ‘infamy’ with simple boredom. This point concerns

‘infamous’ (Sade’s term) behaviour in general, not specifically sadism. In the 120

Days of Sodom, Madame Duclos recounts a client she once had in her brothel, whose

pleasure was to clean the nether-regions of a prostitute with champagne (she was

asked not to have washed or wiped herself for six weeks) and then drank the

compound whilst masturbating across her buttocks. “I understand perfectly,” states

Durcet: “[o]ne becomes grows tired of the commonplace, the imagination becomes

vexed, and the slenderness of our means, the weakness of our faculties, the corruption

of our souls lead us to these abominations” (120: 327-328). The apathy of the

libertines is described here as weakness and lack of imagination, in contrast to other

accounts.

These observations are not associated with an articulated theoretical position.

They could simply be ‘orphaned’ thoughts, which arguably cannot be said to represent

Sade’s thought. Nevertheless, a voice emerges from within Sade’s work that runs

counter to the advocacy of the jouissance of torturing people. The passages in Aline et

Valcour in particular are placed in such a way that suggests that Sade took them

seriously. The reference to Cook is in a footnote; as such, it is either representative of

56 This is a mistranslation. Delon notes that ‘taquinisme’ in fact meant ‘sadism’ in Sade’s time. See Œ

Vol. III 118 n, p.1154. 57 The male libertine characters are often described as having problems with maintaining erections,

discharge or orgasm, which is often described as more violent and painful than pleasing (J:1097;

120:274, 292, 313). Restif (also spelled Rétif) de la Bretonne wrote that old men are especially sadistic,

and that they derive pleasure in proportion to the youth and beauty of the victim (an observation that

perhaps coheres with Sade’s suggestion of a link of sadism and impotence). Rétif de La Bretonne

L’anti-Justine ou les délices de l’amour (Paris: La Bibliothèque privée, 1969) p.1. Cited in Françoise

Laugaa-Traut pp. 89-91.

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the author’s own views, or is meant to appear to be representative of the author’s own

thoughts. The second observation, concerning vengeance, is made by Bersac, an actor

and a minor character. Though not a sadistic and homicidal libertine, he shares with

them the view that crime is natural, and holds that wars and tyranny are necessary to

the order of things (AV:624- 626). His point of view, therefore, is not opposed to that

of Sade’s dominant voice. It is also significant that Sade makes these comments in

Aline et Valcour, the only full length novel which he desired to be publicly associated

with, being published (unlike Juliette and Justine, which he strenuously disavowed)

in his own name.58

Several other suggestions have been made concerning Sade’s work and the

psychological dynamics of sadism, weakness and loneliness. Bourbon Busset reads

Sade’s sadism as symptomatic of a spiritual weakness, stating that “[p]ersonne de plus

éloigné de l’érotisme sadique qu’un homme fort, qui trouve dans la sexualité

l’épanouissement normal de sa vitalité.”59 The will to inflict suffering, according to

Geoffrey Gorer, is related to the desire to alter one’s environment and its inhabitants-

that is, the creative desire in man (this could be aligned with Busset’s interpretation,

insofar as weakness can be taken to be, or is analogous to, a lack of creativity). In its

positive mode, for Gorer, this desire takes the form of creativity. The sadist lacks the

talent to enjoy the power of pleasing or impressing others with his art, and so is

limited to torturing people for his egoistic gratification. A healthier person who feels

the satisfaction of having an impact on others, of a less malignant sort (Rousseau’s

feeling of satisfaction of others enjoying his opera, for example) does not require that

others are crushed or reduced to a subhuman state. 60

58 One could hazard a Freudian reading of the relationship between Sade’s anonymous, ‘libertine’ texts,

Justine, Juliette and The 120 Days of Sodom, and those texts that he gladly had published under his

own name. His libertine works are the ‘dream state’ (they were anonymous, and Sade always

strenuously disavowed them), where the narcissistic ego, disinhibited, lives out its fantasy of wish

fulfilment, and the ‘official’ Aline et Valcour represents the superego; the socialized mask. The

perspective of the ‘waking state’ of Aline et Valcour allows for an understanding of the mentality of the

other works, which is not possible from within the libertine perspective. 59 Jacques de Bourbon Busset “La négation érotique,” La Table Rond 19, no.1 (1963) :109-112, p.111. 60Gorer defines ‘sadism’ as “the pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the external world

produced by the will of the observer.” I would add a). that this extends to both the world and its

inhabitants, and b). it is not appropriate do define sadism as a general ‘will to power,’ although the

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The observations of Gorer and Busset fits closely with the Motive Psychology of

Hans Morgenthau. Power and love, for Morgenthau, spring from the same root of

loneliness. Love seeks to unite people by dissolving the boundary between them;

power involves the imposing of one will over the other. Power can be manifested, in a

positive way, through creativity, or negatively, through control, which in an extreme

form involves the inflicting of pain.61 In this sense, it is significant that Sade’s

characters, even when they associate with each other, frequently express loneliness,

whether because they are physically separated from others, or because they regard

everyone else as mere tools or objects (J:583; LNJ 1 : 152, 237, 299; 2 :42). Minski

the Russian cannibal giant, the most isolated of Sade’s characters, takes his despotism

to the point of turning human beings into furniture, or food. He is cut off from his

species to such an extent that he wishes he had not already raped and killed every

member of his family “so that I might have the pleasure of butchering them anew.”

Yet he feels empty: “[w]hat’s left for me these days?” he laments, surrounded by his

victims: “I have nothing but ordinary victims to sacrifice, my heart grows heavy, all

pleasures fade, they pall, the enjoyment is gone-” (J: 598, also 584). Sade’s characters

have no intimate relations with others and have no creative projects.62 They leave

nothing but corpses and ash in their wake.

In short, aspects of Sade’s work imply that his sadists are not sophisticated

eroticists, but spiritually weak people, in some emotional pain, who lack meaningful

contact with others, and have an overwhelming need to feel that they have power over

others or their environment. Not only does this portrait undermine a straightforward

reading of the Sadeian text as an advocacy of sadism; it also undermines Sade’s (and

Bataille’s) claim that there is a direct and natural link between the sexual instinct and

the will to inflict pain and death (Sade’s account of human sexuality, discussed in the

next chapter, is disturbing nevertheless). 63

association is basically sound. Gorer p. 156; Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Confessions trans. Anon

(1904). (Ware: Wordsworth, 1996) p.368. 61 For discussion, see H. Morgenthau “Love and Power,” Commentary 33 no.3 (March 1962), 247-251.

Cited in Baumeister p.243. 62 Sade’s characters have sex with each other, and are occasionally on friendly terms, but the two

domains are kept distinct. This will be discussed in the following chapter. 63 Simultaneous orgasm of the killer, typically described as a “délicieuse jouissance,” and the death of

the victim is also a common motif (LNJ 1:214, 433, 434; LNJ 2: 12, 19 28, 29, 73, 186, 232, 278; J:

130

A final word on the relationship between weakness and sadism is required. In all

of these observations, the sadistic will is associated with pain and misfortune, and the

inability to passively accept one’s inflictions. But weakness alone does not account

for the manifestation of cruelty. Further, not every libertine character goes through

hardships – something else is necessary to ‘enable’ sadism. The difference between

the two psychological types (the sadist, and the individual who merely endures

hardships) is, in short, the difference between Justine and Juliette. Justine goes

through trials that do not even harden her heart, let alone make her a sadist, yet she is

not so different from her sister. She is equally capable of irrational, risky behaviour,

and falling in with the ‘wrong crowd,’ as evidenced by her love for the bisexual

matricide the Marquis de Brassac, despite his “depravity”(Sade’s term; MV: 35). She

is also as familiar with the doctrine of the libertines as is Juliette, and also seems a

little morally autistic, for example when she tests out a suspected poison on the family

dog (MV:46:) Unlike Juliette, who for the most part merely agrees with and repeats

what she has been told, Justine frequently engages in debate with her captors, at times

with aggression. She is also, by the end of La Nouvelle Justine, suspiciously reluctant

to adopt a more normal lifestyle. Although not a twin (Juliette is a year older), Justine

and Juliette are psychically connected- when Juliette experiences a pang of remorse,

she has a prophetic dream involving her sister (J: 549).There are two, crucial,

differences between Justine and Juliette. Firstly, Justine adheres to absolute moral

principles. Secondly, Justine has inner restraints that prevent her from following

destructive or criminal impulses (or even to follow common sense, such as going to

the police, or trusting monks, regardless of what they do to her). 64Juliette would

attribute her ‘lack of restraint’- her freedom from the ‘chimeras’ of remorse and 1183; 120: 570-762). Many of Sade’s critics take it for granted that this association of libido and

destruction is valid, yet in defending the association they typically go no further than appealing to

Sade’s authority as a psychologist. See, for example, Lorna Berman “The Marquis de Sade and

Courtly Love,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 11 no. 3 (April 1999):285-300, p.286; Frances Ferguson

“Sade and the Pornographic Legacy,” Representations 0 issue 36 (Autumn, 1991):1-21, p. 7 ; Josué V

Harari “D’un raison à l’autre: le dispositif Sade,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 230

(1985) :273-282, p.282; Josephs “Sade and Woman” p.99 ; Beatrice Fink “The Case for a Political

System in Sade,” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century vol. 88 (1972): 493-512, p. 506;

Camille Paglia “Sexual Personae ; the cancelled preface” In Paglia Sex, Art and American Culture

(London: Viking, 1992) 101-124, pp.105-106. 64 See Baumeister p.263.

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conscience– to her philosophical education; yet Justine has received essentially the

same education. This suggests that the crucial difference between the two sisters is not

reducible to intelligence or education. It could be innate; on the other hand, it could be

grounded in the freedom to choose between good and evil.

3.9 Enigma of Sadism

Although the above discussion sheds light on how sadism can become pleasurable, the

pleasure of inflicting pain remains paradoxical. Firstly, Sade’s characters require that

their victims experience terror and pain, and that the sadists themselves are aware of

the pain that their victims are subjected to. Yet these same characters are apparently

unconcerned with knowing the experiences of others. States Dolmancé, in Philosophy

in the Bedroom, “there is no possible comparison between what others experience and

what we sense; the heaviest dose of agony in others ought, assuredly, to be as naught

to us, and the faintest quickening of pleasure, registered in us, does touch us…” (PB:

283). There is not a single word in Sade of what the victims are going through, or, in

fact, who they are as people. Only superficial and external observations are made-

victims merely sob in terror or pain; even Justine describes her pain as if it were

happening to someone else (MV: 52, 61-62). Ironically, Sade, presenting himself as a

navigator of the extremes of human experience, never attempts to describe pain.

Secondly, there is a tension between the pleasure of having power over others (others

as others) and the tendency to reduce people to objects. The need for the sensation of

power, as a psychological dynamic, requires that one recognize the victims as people,

so that they are seen to be acknowledging one’s own power. One cannot be powerful

alone, amongst objects.

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133

Chapter IV: STERILE PLEASURES

Sade and Sexuality

Some of them want to use you

Some of them want to get used by you

Some of them want to abuse you

Some of them want to be abused

Eurythmics Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (1983)

4.1 Introduction.

There is little agreement on what Sade’s writings on sex and gender entail. Angela

Carter, Camille Paglia, and Annie le Brun hold that Sade gives a positive message of

liberation to women; others hold that Sade is the very embodiment of misogyny. 1

Sade has been praised as a great erotic liberator; others find in his writing only

coldness, prudery and nausea. 2As for the common claim that Sade was a pioneering

sexologist, he was clearly preoccupied such paraphilias as necrophilia, incest,

paedophilia and bestiality, though he made no attempt to explain such practices

(LNJ1:199; 2: 12, 192, 385; J: 189, 745, 746; AV: 512; 120:297, 306). 3 Sade argued

in favour of legalizing paedophilia, and the theme of child prostitution and sexual

slavery frequently appears in his work. In Philosophy in the Bedroom, the rape of

children is discussed and apparently advocated (PB: 320; LNJ 2: 28, 29, 66).

Otherwise, Sade’s thoughts on sex and prudery are largely in keeping with that of the

philosophes, in particular Diderot, Voltaire, Helvétius (who proposed the use of

women captured from vanquished states as sex slaves), La Mettrie (who expressed the 1 Paglia refers to herself as a ‘Sadean’. Paglia pp.105-106 2 For an account of Sade as claustrophobic, mechanical or prudish, rather than erotic, see Didier Sade :

Un écriture du désir p.7 ; also Crocker “Au cœur” p.60; Michel Delon “Le Corps Sadien,” Europe

835-836 (Nov- Déc. 1998) :22-33,27 ; Béatrice Fink “La Langue de Sade,” French Literature Series

10 (1983) :103-122, pp.108-109. Roger La Philosophie dans le pressoir p.56. 3 For discussion, see Béatrice Didier “Inceste et écriture chez Sade,” Lettres Nouvelles, Mai-Juin

(1972) : 150-158 ; Stéphane “Morale et nature,” p.39 Richetti p.624; Roger G. Lacombe Sade et ses

masques pp.261, 262.

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wish to die surrounded with beautiful women, an image repeated in Sade’s Dialogue

between a Priest and a Dying Man) and the libertin writers, as mentioned in Chapter I

(PB: 175; J: 515; 522). 4 Sade also refers to earlier philosophers on the topic of sexual

mores, for example Diogenes the Cynic’s penchant for having sex in public (J: 63).

The accounts of the explorers Louis Antoine de Bougainville (1729-1811) and Cook

also exerted an influence on the sexual imagination of 18th century France, Sade

included.5 On the subject of sex, another major influence on Sade was Restif de la

Bretonne. Bretonne sought to distinguish himself from the work of Sade, arguing that

his own works were concerned with erotic pleasure (so that women could ‘better

serve’ their husbands), and described Sade as a ‘vivisector’. One of the few writers of

the time to address Sade’s work directly, Bretonne wrote an ‘antidote’ to Sade’s

Justine, entitled the Anti-Justine. What is indisputable, despite these intellectual links,

is that Sade’s treatment of sex goes far beyond all other discourses, whether the

relative reserve of the philosophes or the jovial innocence of the libertin authors. 6

There are two distinct ideologies in Sade’s work concerning sexuality and

gender, a fact that accounts for the bifurcation of interpretations. Each is directly

related to the two doctrines that emerged in Chapter II. The first ideology, which

describes sexuality in terms of consumption and aggression, is linked to the principle

of a natural order characterized by destruction, and the view that human agency as

continuous with this natural order. Call this the ‘Bataille doctrine.’7 The second

4 “If either a beautiful slave or concubine become among the people the reward of talents, virtue, or

valour, the manners of that people will not be readily corrupted. It was in the heroic ages that the

Cretans imposed on the Athenians the tribute of ten beautiful virgins, from which Theseus released

them.” Helvétius A Treatise on Man (ii.291). See also Helvétius A Treatise on Man Vol. I p.129, 146;

Vol. II pp.75, 219-221; Helvétius Essays on the Mind pp.83, 114; La Mettrie p.111

On the relationship between Diderot and Sade on sexuality, see Brissenden. 5 Available in Sade’s time were the following: Louis Bougainville Description d’un Voyage autour du

monde (Paris: 1771-72); James Cook Journal d’un voyage autour du monde en 1768, 1769, 1770, et

1771, traduit de l’Anglais par M. de Fréville (Paris: 1773). Sade gives paginated references to both

Cook and Bougainville in the footnotes to Aline et Valcour (AV: 226n, 261n). 6 Laugaa-Traut pp.90, 176. Sade mentions Bretonne in Juliette and Reflections on the Novel (J: 461;

120: 108, 111). 7 The ‘Bataille doctrine’ coheres with that aspect of Sade’s work that Bataille correctly identifies, rather

than being an accurate reflection of Bataille’s thought. More pedantically, it could be termed ‘the

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doctrine rejects all teleology, treats sexuality as merely the means to physical

pleasure, and (ostensibly) adheres to the Utilitarian ethic of pleasure maximization

across a population. Call this the ‘Benthamite doctrine.’ I will discuss these two

doctrines in turn, before noting their commonalities, and the way in which Sade

attempts, with difficulty, to bring them together.

4.2 The Bataille doctrine.

The Bataille doctrine concerning sex is based on the principle that sexuality is

continuous with the human ‘passions,’ which are in turn a direct manifestation of

natural impulses, hence, the urge towards violence, dominance and the will to

destruction. Rape and murder are deemed natural outcomes of the sexual impulse.

The association of sexuality with domination, sadism and homicidal aggression is not

straightforward, even within Sade’s text. As noted in the previous chapter, Sade

associates sadism with a particular group of ‘symptoms’ (boredom, frustration,

impotence, and so on), suggesting that sadism is not primarily sexual in nature.

Further, Sade’s work, despite its stated doctrines, better supports the implication of

Diderot’s The Nun, insofar as sexualized sadism is associated with unusual social

situations and their long-term effects.8 (It is still open to question, however, whether

army barracks, prisons, boarding schools and so on make people into sexual sadists, or

if it is the secrecy of barracks life that enables the inner sadist to emerge). Further,

Sade’s libertine characters do not typically slay each other whilst having sex,

suggesting that the association of destruction and sex has more to do with implied

power relationships than with some innate human drive.

Three of Sade’s claims need to be distinguished here. These are: a). sexuality is

linked with an urge for pure pleasure without consideration for the feelings of the

other; b). sexuality is closely linked with an urge to dominate and subjugate the other;

and, finally, c). sexuality is closely linked with an urge to inflict cruelty and to kill the

other. The last claim here is a direct outcome of Sade’s assumption of the naturalness,

hence the correctness, of the ‘strong’ dominating the ‘weak,’ as will be discussed at

length in Chapter VI. Sade transposes the relationship of predator and prey to the

Bataille’s Sade doctrine.’ I do not mean to say that what I call the ‘Bataille doctrine’ is an accurate

portrayal of Bataille’s ‘philosophy.’ 8 For a discussion of Sade’s relation to Diderot, see Batlay and Fellows “Diderot et Sade,” p.455.

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sexual relationship between humans, essentially recognizing no distinction between

the predatory aggression of the hunter with the instrumental aggression of the rapist or

‘lover’ (J: 738). It could simply be that Sade associates sex and the will to destroy, as

both types of inclination are repressed by social conditioning. In any case, this is an

empirical question. David Buss, in The Evolution of Desire (2003), discusses

sexualized violence towards women in only two contexts- partner abuse, and rape.

Violence towards the female partner, writes Buss, is normally associated with

jealousy, which is in turn associated with (unstable) strategies to retain the ‘breeding

partner.’ Where this jealousy becomes homicidal, Buss suggests, it is maladaptive. 9

(Insofar as women do not prefer sadists, sexual sadism itself is clearly maladaptive, in

particular in forms of social organisation where women are free to choose, or leave,

their partners. Buss notes also that sexual pleasure plays a role in insemination, as

was in fact believed in Sade’s time. Simply being bad in bed, let alone being a sadist,

reduces one’s chances of contributing to the gene pool). 10 Sade’s association of

sexuality with at times homicidal drives cannot be dismissed, however. He notes that

many men would prefer to kill their partners than see them unfaithful, an observation

that coheres with Buss’s own observations (J: 259; Buss p.130).

The association of sexuality with domination and cruelty, rather than homicide

outright, is more complex. The central question here is whether sex is intrinsically

associated with an urge to dominate, or whether the will to dominate another person

can be expressed sexually. (Notably, in making the association of sex with the will to

objectify and dominate, Sade is close to a number of canonical thinkers. Lucretius

describes ‘frenzied lovers’ as being driven by an impulse to inflict pain; Socrates

writes that “in the friendship of the lover there is no real kindness; he has an appetite:

9 David M. Buss The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 2003)

p.130. 10 Obviously, evolutionary theory strongly suggests the implausibility of Sade’s account of human

nature. Sade’s characters typically rape, tend to kill every woman they rape, and kill all the infants

present, in particular their own, or abandon them to the ‘seraglios’ (harems) of their secret societies.

For discussion on the relationship between orgasm and insemination, see Buss pp.230, 231. On the

Renaissance view that female orgasm played a role in conception, see Laqueur p. 102.

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as wolves love lambs so lovers love their love.” 11 There are also similarities in the

thought of Kant, Sartre, and Freud).12 Some have rejected the association of sexuality

and sexual license with aggression entirely, dismissing the notion as groundless

conservative scaremongering.13 Another possibility is that sadism and sex go together

insofar as sexualized violence and humiliation is all the more traumatizing, given the

deeply intimate nature of sexual contact. The psychological torture and humiliation of

Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 was clearly sexualized, insofar as it

involved nudity, forced masturbation and sexualized poses, but the motive was not

straightforwardly sexual. Whether such acts were primarily sadistic or primarily

sexual, or whether rape is primarily sexual or primarily an act motivated by cruelty, is 11 Lucretius On the Nature of the Universe trans. R.E. Latham (London: Penguin, 1983) p.164; Plato

“Phaedrus” in The Phaedrus, Lysis and Protagoras of Plato trans. J. Wright (London: Macmillan and

Co, 1888) p.37. The latter quote is cited in Crocker “Au cœur” p.68. 12 Sigmund Freud considered the need to respect the sexual partner as detrimental to sexual satisfaction,

writing that “the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his sexual

activity, and only develops full potency when he is with a debased sexual object; and this in turn is

partly caused by the entrance of perverse components into his sexual aims, which he does not venture

to satisfy with a woman he respects.” Sigmund Freud Volume 7 On Sexuality: Three Essays on the

Theory of Sexuality and other Works trans. James Strachey; ed. James Strachey & Angela Richards

(London: Penguin, 1977) p.254, also p.236. See also Freud Collected papers (London: Hogarth Press,

1950) IV, p.210. Yet Freud also associated sadism with primitive or childish associations of sex with

blood and violence, or (in the context of penis envy) a sense of powerlessness (Freud Sexuality pp. 71,

111, 115, 198,199, 200, 252, 268, 321). Havelock Ellis, like Freud, associates sadism with childishness

and impotence, and also suggests that sadism is not sexual at all, instead viewing it as active

schadenfreude. Ellis Psychology of Sex pp. 76, 173, 175.

Immanuel Kant also held that the sexual act to be deeply degrading for both parties, but in

particular because it leads to the objectification of the other person, and because it leads to ‘animality.’

His only solution- a contract to use each other’s genitalia- suggests an essentially masturbatory

conception of sex. Immanuel Kant Lectures on Ethics ed. Peter Heath & J.B. Schneewind; trans. Peter

heath. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) p.156, 159, 378. 404. I thank Robert C.

Solomon for bringing this text to my attention. Finally, Jean-Paul Sartre describes sexual desire as

fundamentally an urge to subjugate and enslave the other person. Masochism occurs for Sartre where

one attempts to escape one’s essential freedom, and making oneself an object; sadism occurs where the

sadist attempts to make an object of the other. Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness: a

phenomenological essay on ontology trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Books,

1992) pp 474- 482, 511-522,781. 13 For discussion, see Fred R. Berger “Pornography, Sex and Censorship’” in Alan Soble, ed.

Philosophy of Sex (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield publishers, Inc., 1980) :322-347;

137

in fact a question that Sade’s work is not clear on. This is because he makes little

distinction between simple sexual pleasure, cruelty, and the pleasure of arson or

poisoning, all of which are associated with sexual excitement (J: 240, 704, 987).

According to the Bataille doctrine, simply put, ideal sex is sadistic rape, insofar as it is

violent, cruel, and non-consensual.14

Sade’s description of sex as simple pleasure is common to both the ‘Bataillian’

and ‘Benthamite’ modes. It clashes with a deeply held belief that sexuality is, or ought

to be, associated with direct, positive communication with a loved one, or at least

someone one feels both physical and emotional attachment to. In the words of

Aristophanes, sexual love is “to heal the wound in human nature.”15 Call this the

‘communicative’ account of sexuality. Several philosophers, notably Robert C.

Solomon and Thomas Nagel, have attempted to define sexuality as such, Nagel

going as far as to define sex (following Sartre) as having a ‘relational structure’: “it

involves a desire that one’s partner be aroused by the recognition of one’s desire that

he or she be aroused.”16 Consequently, non-communicative sex (insofar as it does not

follow this structure) is considered perverse, or at least problematic. A ‘small-scale

orgy,’ for example, reasons Nagel, may “degenerate into mutual epidermal

stimulation by participants otherwise isolated from each other.”17

Sade’s account is no doubt distasteful for anyone who takes the communicative

model to be morally, qualitatively, or even aesthetically superior, and it is tempting to

reject his picture of sexuality as simple consumption as merely a reflection of his

autistic understanding of human relations. This is too easy.

It is necessary to distinguish between the prescriptive and descriptive roles of a

philosophy of sex- that is, between a sexual morality and a ‘natural history’ of human

sexuality. We can fully agree that non-communicative sex is bad sex; but it is still

14 For discussion on this question, see Baumeister p.231; Pinker pp.359-71. 15 Plato Symposium trans. Alexander Nehemas, Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing

Company, 1989) pp.25-28. 16 Solomon does not think that communicative sex need be necessarily pleasant, suggesting that the

expression of dislike or anger may be non-perverse. Robert C. Solomon “Sexual Paradigms” In Alan

Soble, ed. Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary readings (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman &Littlefield,

Publishers, Inc: 1980): 89-98; pp.96, 97; Thomas Nagel “Sexual Perversion” In Soble ed. Philosophy

of Sex: 76-88, p.84 17 Nagel “Perversion” p.86.

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sex, and may still reflect something of our nature. As a prescriptive account of sex,

Sade’s ‘Bataille doctrine’ can be dismissed out of hand for obvious reasons. But the

insistence that non-communicative sex or even rape is less enjoyable for all men, or

even perverse (in the same sense that any immoral act is not necessarily perverse) –

for all men and across cultures and history- is questionable. Sade bases his account of

sexuality on the historical record, and accounts of other cultures, a well as his own

psychological speculations. By contrast, Solomon and Nagel’s treatment of sexuality,

insofar as it is a description of sexuality, may well reflect the philosopher’s vice of

assuming local cultural norms, or even personal preference, to be universal truths.

Further, there is something of a false dichotomy in the debate between

‘communicative’ sex and ‘(merely) pleasurable’ sex. One can accept the prescription

of sexuality as communication without denying the idea of sexual activity as

pleasurable in its own right, or even as an art or an aesthetic. By the same token, no-

strings, merely indulgent sex with another willing hedonist may still give the

momentary Heimlichkeit of shared pleasure. Nagel’s suggestion that a preoccupation

with sexual technique is ‘sadistic,’ as it prevents one from renouncing the role of

‘agent,’ I think, reflects the narrowness of this dichotomy.18

On the one hand, the Communicative Model is found in a number of cultures.

Shared sexual pleasure, communication, and psychological compatibility are central

principles of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana and other erotic texts of the East.19

Religious teaching (notably, not Christian teaching) also emphasises the importance

of communication and shared erotic pleasure. In Talmudic law, sexual satisfaction of

the wife is regarded as so central that its absence is considered just grounds for

divorce; likewise, the prophet Muhammad emphasises the importance of foreplay,

stating that sex without it is a form of cruelty.20 Lucretius, one of the few classical

thinkers that Sade cites, also thought that the pleasure of sex is shared.21 Even

mainstream pornography maintains the illusion of direct communication; the model

18 Nagel “Perversion” p.85. 19 The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana trans. Sir Richard Burton and F.F. Arbuthnot (London: Thorsons,

1999). 20 Adin Steinsaltz The Essential Talmud trans. Chaya Galai (New York: Bantam, 1976) p.133.

Geraldine Brooks Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (New York: Anchor

Doubleday, 2003) p.39. 21 Lucretius p.168.

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makes eye contact with the camera, as if to simulate face to face communication with

the masturbator.22

Yet, in fact, the principal of communicative, mutually pleasurable sex is not a

cultural universal, and anthropological data tends to support Sade’s (descriptive)

conception of sexuality rather than that of Nagel and Solomon. Many cultural

practices are consistent with the view that sex is the use of another’s body as a means

to pleasure, or that the pleasure of the other person (usually the woman) is irrelevant,

if not actually undesirable. Otto Kiefer, in Sexual Live in Ancient Rome, writes that

the Romans of antiquity “regarded sexual activity as sensual satisfaction and woman

as man’s plaything,” noting that this was the opinion of Ovid.23 David M. Buss notes

that some cultures (typically those where women are not granted the same rights as

men) lack a concept of female orgasm. Where the existence of female sexual pleasure

is acknowledged, it is, in some cultures, deliberately eradicated through

clitoridectomy. 24 Prostitution is also a widespread cultural phenomenon (frequently

supported by local cultural practises, as in the case of the ‘Devadasis’ of India, who

are forced into slavery as temple prostitutes), as is the sequestering of women for the

exclusive sexual use a handful of powerful men (J: 317). 25 Buss also notes that male

fantasies often involve large numbers of practically anonymous partners, and focus on

physical aspects of the ‘partner’ rather than feelings.26 Evolutionary anthropologist 22 For discussion, see Jennifer Lyon Bell “Character and Cognition in Modern Pornography”

www.utu.fi/hum/mediatutkimus/affective/bell.pdf. (accessed September 2004). 23 Otto Kiefer Sexual Life in Ancient Rome trans. by Anon, from Kulturgeschichte Roms unter

Besonderer Berückschtigung der Römischen Sitten ( London : Abbey Library, 1976) p.225. 24 W. H. Davenport writes: “in most of the societies for which there are data, it is reported that men

take the initiative and, without extended foreplay, proceed vigorously toward climax without much

regard for achieving synchrony with the woman’s orgasm. Again and again, there are reports that

coitus is primarily completed in terms of the man’s passions and pleasures, with scant attention paid to

the woman’s response. If women do experience orgasm, they do so passively.” W. H. Davenport “Sex

in cross-cultural perspectives” in F.A. Beach, ed. Human sexuality in four perspectives (Baltimore: the

Johns Hopkins Press, 1977):115-163. Cited in Buss p. 226; see also Buss p.138. 25. The monopoly of a powerful minority of men of sexual access to women of fertile age (whether as

concubines, mistresses or wives) is a widespread pattern in a number of cultures, if not actually a

cultural universal. Buss cites the same cultural practices here as does Sade (the harem in particular)

Buss pp. 63, 130-137, 140, 193. 26 Bruce Ellis and Donald Symons write: “[t]he most striking feature of [male fantasy] is that sex is

sheer lust and physical gratification, devoid of encumbering relationships, emotional elaboration,

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Barbara Smuts has observed that societies in which men rarely attack or rape women

are the exception, not the norm. 27 Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will, notes that

rape in warfare is a widespread practice that goes as far back as there have been

written records.28 Sade writes: “Greek commanders gave their soldiers the right [to

rape] as a reward for valour. After the capture of Carbines, the army of Tarentum [les

Tarentins] collected all the boys, the virgins, and the young women who could be

unearthed in the town, stripped them and exposed them in the market place, where

everybody chose what he wanted...” (J: 182; Œ III: 340). Sade also notes the custom

of lending wives and daughters out to travellers and guests: “[a] traveller arriving in

Pegu rents a girl for the duration of his stay in the country; with her he does whatever

he pleases; afterward, much enriched by her experience, she returns to her family and

if anything finds a surfeit of suitors eager to marry her” (J: 183). Ritual uses of sexual

intercourse (the rites of Dionysus for example), and the ‘use’ of sex purely for

procreation (as in Catholic tradition) also fall outside the communicative model,

insofar as the Other is merely a means to an end.

The rejection of the ‘communicative’ model is not, of course, unknown in our

own culture. A number of writers (Catherine Millet, Michel Houellebecq, and Henry

Miller, for example) have written of the pleasures, or the state of ecstasy peculiar to

commitment-free sex with strangers, or the orgy.29 As Buss argues, there is no

compelling reason to think that this attitude is particularly neurotic, immature or

perverse (whether it is moral is a separate issue). 30Hence, Sade’s account of sex as a

description of human, in particular, male sexuality cannot be ruled out.

complicated plot lines, flirtation, courtship, and extended foreplay.” These fantasies betray a

psychology attuned to seeking sexual access to a variety of partners.” B.J. Ellis and D. Symons “Sex

differences in sexual fantasy: an evolutionary psychological approach,” Journal of Sex Research 27

(1990): 527-556. Quoted in Buss p.82. 27 Barbara B. Smuts “Male aggression against women: An evolutionary perspective” In Human Nature,

3 (1992): 1-44, p. 1. Quoted in Buss p.277. 28 Susan Brownmiller Against Our Will: Men, women, and rape (New York: Bantam Books, 1975).

Cited in Buss p.277 29 For discussion, see Arno Karlen, Threesomes: Studies in Sex, Power and Intimacy (New York:

Beech Tree Books / William Morrow, 1988) pp.95-98. 30 Buss p.215.

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4.3 The Benthamite Doctrine.

The ‘Benthamite’ doctrine is based on four cardinal premises; a). the rejection of

traditional teleology; b). the assumption that the maximizing of pleasure is the greatest

good c). the assumption that sex is highly pleasurable; and d). the affirmation of

sexuality as being important exclusively as a physical pleasure. In accordance with the

rejection of teleology, Christian notions concerning homosexuality, prudery and

monogamy are rejected, as is the notion of a traditional role of women, the

significance of childbirth, and the importance placed on marriage. In accordance with

Utilitarian thought, Sade declares prudery a ‘chimerical’ virtue, the legal status of

prostitution an absurdity, and a sexual promiscuity in girls and women a virtue (MV:

179, 277; PB: 208). In Juliette:

Only in these multiple and iterated extravagances does a girl’s true virtue reside; the more

she gives herself, the more lovable she is; the more she fucks, the more happiness she

distributes and the more she is instrumental to her countrymen’s happiness… [t]hey are

sordid barbarians, these husbands who stick by the vain pleasure of plucking a rose: it’s

despotism, they claim this right at the expense of other men’s well-being (J: 62).

Sade proposes that ‘mutual aid,’ hence, having as much sex as possible with as many

(here, men) as possible, is the meaning of human existence, again appealing to the

‘general interest.’ Is anyone able to tell me, for I sincerely wish to know, of what use a prudent, well-

behaved woman can be to society? And whether there is anything more superfluous than

the practice of this virtue which, with every passing day, only further numbs and mines

our sex?…Up until the time a girl marries, of what conceivable advantage can preserving

her virginity be to her? And how can folly be carried to the point where one believes a

female creature is worth more or less for having one part of her body a little more or less

enlarged? For what purpose has Nature created every human being? Is it not for giving

mutual aid one to the other, and consequently for giving others all the pleasures it is in

one’s power to dispense? (italics mine; J: 60-61).

As with the Bataille doctrine, Sade’s Benthamite treatment of sexuality is separated

from any notion of communication, shared pleasure or care between two people. Girls

and ‘lewd women’ are admonished to give themselves in the abstract, to anyone,

exactly as Utilitarianism does not distinguish between the utility of one’s loved ones

and total strangers. Scenes in which libertine characters have sex are merely

142

microcosms of this same ‘general economy’ of sexual pleasure. They do not make

love or have sex with each other, nor are they interested in such paradigmatically

romantic states as simultaneous climax, for example; they essentially use each other’s

bodies to masturbate with (accordingly, Sade tends to elevate the masturbation

fantasy, or even writing about it, to the status of an actual sexual act; J: 640-641).

Sade’s preoccupation with necrophilia, bestiality and mechanized sexual toys fits this

account. Insofar as sex is reduced to pleasure with an ‘object,’ the ‘partner’ may as

well be a toy, a statue, corpse or dog (LNJ 2: 12, 385; J: 188, 189, 367, 745, 746,

1190). In the following passage from Juliette, it is not clear if the sexual ‘objects’

even exist. Durand the alchemist describes her ability to produce what appear to be

interactive erotic spectacles in her own home; that is, sexuality removed from reality

entirely.

“There is not a single passion,” replied Durand, “not a single whim or fancy, not a living

being on this globe, nor an extravagance or eccentricity, however unusual or picturesque

it be, that cannot be enjoyed here; merely give me several hours forenotice, I will procure

you anything under the sun; let your desire be irregular, let it be fantastic, let it be

gruesome, and this in no matter what degree, I solemnly promise to provide you the

means to execute it. Nor is that all. If there be any men or women anywhere in the world,

with whose tastes or practices you were eager to be acquainted, I will have them here; and

unseen by them, you will watch them in action through a gauze curtain...all individuals,

all races, all nations, all sexes, all ages, simply specify what you wish...” (J: 542-543).

Whether this passage describes a drug –induced state, an optical illusion or some

other sort of virtual reality is unclear.31 In any case, it illustrates perfectly three

aspects of the Sadeian wish fulfilment fantasy. Firstly, the sexualised other is reduced

to an object (“I will procure anything under the sun”). Secondly, sex is conceived of

as something one does to someone (or something) - quite possibly, something deeply

unpleasant. Thirdly, sexual pleasure is voyeuristic; sex is described here as something

that one watches, through a gauze curtain. Direct physical contact, that is, intimacy

with another human being, is apparently marginalized.

31 Drug induced state: substances that cause hallucinations appear in Sade’s works elsewhere. From the

tortures in The 120 Days: “[h]e has her swallow a drug which unhinges her imagination and causes her

to see horrible things in the room” (120:608, §60).

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4.4 Outcomes of the rejection of Traditional Teleology.

One can speak generally of two schools of thought concerning sexuality in Sade’s

period. According to the doctrine of a ‘Natural Law,’ as held by, among others,

Aristotle, Kant and Rousseau, there is an innate ‘naturalness’ of certain sexual

practices and the innate ‘wrongness’ of others. Aristotle, for example, deals with the

homosexual or cannibal by declaring that they are simply not fully human, and stating

that their pleasures were not truly pleasures except for the depraved. 32 Likewise, both

Kant and Rousseau considered married heterosexual pairings a part of the physical

and moral order of things, and that homosexuality and masturbation were violations of

this order.33 Sade’s critique of the notion of gender and sexuality is a direct

consequence of rejecting this model. Without a conception of a divine or ideal, in

particular an ideal heterosexual and monogamous human nature, man has no divine

nature that could be perverted or debased. All tastes, including sexual preferences, are

contingent upon physiological states. Hence, one could not be held accountable for

one’s tastes or sexual predilections. ‘Perversion’, therefore, could not be anything

more than a statistical anomaly. 34

Sade dismantles standard notions of gender identity; both the notion of a distinct

sexual dimorphism, and (paradoxically, given Sade’s denial of free will on

materialistic grounds) the notion that sexed (‘engendered’) orientation or behaviour is

physically determined. His female characters frequently become masculine through

changing their dress, thoughts and manner (Juliette maintains her feminine

appearance, when not using her sex for leverage, simply for the sake of camouflage)

or the use of prostheses (J: 28, 91, 457, 299, 1019, 1175). 35 Sade also describes

individuals who are physically outside the usual male/female dichotomy. As

mentioned above, a number of key characters have, for example, obstructed vaginas

and clitorises that function, sexually, as penises.36 (David Martyn suggests that Sade

32 Aristotle Ethics trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 1976) p.325. 33 Rousseau Emile: 333-334; Alan Soble “Kant and Sexual Perversion” In the Monist 86:1 (2003): 57-

92. 34 See La Mettrie: 11, 23, 25, 30, 101; Helvétius Essays on the Mind: 83,106, 116. 35 For discussion, see William F. Edmiston “Plots, Patterns and Challenges to Gender Ideology in

Gomez and Sade,” The French Review Vol.73, No.3 (Feb 2000): 463-474. 36 Durand Célestine and Madame d’Esterval (in Juliette) are such characters. Sade’s male sadistic

characters are frequently described as having feminine features (J: 23, 1032; 120:221; LNJ. 1: 172; 2:

144

is the first Western writer to propose the possibility of surgical transformation from

one gender to the next, but the brutal ‘sex change operation’ described in the 120

Days of Sodom seems to be a form of torture rather than a positive contribution to the

discussion on gender identity; 120: 655).37

4.5 Homosexuality

Sade declares that the ‘naturalness’ of heterosexuality and the unnaturalness of

alternatives is a myth, citing the frequency of homosexuality and bisexuality in other

cultures.38 From The Philosophy in the Bedroom: “[w]e discover a hemisphere, we

find sodomy in it. Cook casts anchor in a new world: sodomy reigns there. Had our

balloons reached the moon, it would have been discovered there as well…O my

friends, can there be an extravagance to equal that of imagining that a man must be a

122, 136). Foucault has noted that during the 18th Century such physiological abnormalities were

regarded as actually immoral; it would seem that Sade makes this association as well. Rousseau

appears to have believed this; when unable to accept that the prostitute Zulietta is at once beautiful,

regal and witty, he is relieved to find that she has only one nipple (C: 310). For discussion, see Patrick

Graille Les Hermaphrodites aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 2001). Gender

fluidity was in fact not such a rare idea in, or just prior to, Sade’s time. Thomas Laqueur notes that

gender identity was relatively fluid until the early modern period. He notes, for example, the cryptic

gender of Elizabeth I, and the widely held medical belief, during the 16th and 17th centuries, that women

could spontaneously become men. Michel de Montaigne, in his Travel Journal (first published in

1774), writes of a group of girls in Chaumont-en-Bassagni who “plotted together a few years ago to

dress up as males and thus continue their life in the world;” one of the pair fell in love with another girl

and married her, and was eventually hanged “for using illicit devices to supply her defect in sex.”

Laqueur pp.125-127. Although Sade (in his ‘feminist’ mode) tends to eliminate the physiological

distinction between men and women, he also presents the traditional and, in his own time, dated view

that women are a degenerate expression of the male form (J: 510-511). 37 The section from The 120 Days of Sodom is as follows: “[a]fter having sheared off the boy’s prick

and balls, using a red-hot iron he hollows out a cunt in the place formerly occupied by his genitals; the

iron makes the hole and cauterizes simultaneously: he fucks the patient’s new orifice and strangles him

with his hands upon discharging.” For positive discussion of this passage, see David Martyn Sublime

Failures: The Ethics of Kant and Sade (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003) p. 210. 38 It should be noted that Sade was not particularly advanced in his own time in this respect. Louis

Crompton notes that the law against homosexuality was abolished in France in 1791; Philosophy in the

Bedroom appeared in 1795. Louis Crompton Homosexuality & Civilization (Cambridge, Massachusetts,

and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) p 524. I thank Shanon

Daly for bringing this text to my attention.

145

monster deserving to lose his life because he has preferred enjoyment of the asshole to

that of the cunt [...] ? (PB: 277). Sade also notes the implausibility of the doctrine that

all semen is ‘intended by nature’ for production.39 There is, however, a tension in

Sade’s treatment of homosexuality. On the one hand, Sade portrays homosexuality

and anal sex as deeply transgressive; a shocking, and therefore exciting, violation of

nature (J: 312). Sade’s comments also suggest that a certain degree of homosexual

desire is normal for all males (J: 455n; 1124). But if homosexuality is due to a

physiological difference, or even normal, it is not a freely chosen rebellion. Sade’s

arguments concerning the morality of homosexuality seem more defensive than

defiant, such as the claim that “...l’homme doué de goûts singuliers est un malade;

c’est si vous le voulez, une femme à vapeurs hystériques” (LNJ 1: 357). 40

Sade dismisses the principles of monogamy and prudery on similar grounds,

rejecting both as being artefacts of Christian influence (PB: 323-4; J: 69). A woman

who does not follow her natural sexual inclinations is a “victim of her opinions and of

the chilly esteem she hopes for, almost always in vain, from men, she’ll have lived

dry and joyless and shall die with her regrets” ( J: 492; also LNJ 1 :39). Women are

said to be naturally ‘vulguivaguous’ (vulgivagues)- that is, not ‘belonging’ to any

particular males of the group, adding that “[s]elf interest, egoism and love degraded

these primitive attitudes, at once so simple and natural” (PB:318; similar, AV: 633;

LNJ 1: 41).41 From Juliette;

In Tahiti, Cook discovered a society in which all the women give themselves indifferently

to all the assembled men.42 But if a later consequence of this rite is pregnancy, the woman

39 Nocturnal emissions are taken to be ‘proof’ that wastage of semen is not ‘contrary to nature’ (LNJ 1:

79). 40 See also MV: 179, 212; MM: 55; AV: 310. Sade also refers to his own sentencing for pederasty (120:

495). 41 Sade here describes egoism as ‘unnatural;’ by contrast, in ‘Bataillian’ mode Sade describes egoism

as in fact natural. Delon notes that Sade has probably adopted la Mettrie’s term here, as used in a

discussion on the sexual mores of Sparta, in the Anti-Seneca. The etymology is based on the Latin term

vulgivalgus, ‘vagabond’, which appears in Lucretius. La Mettrie writes that women are “vulgivagous,”

like “dogs” (the term is missing from the English translation, rendering La Mettrie simply as “women

were shared and were common” (Œ III: 132n 2, p.1340; La Mettrie: 136). 42 This is what Cook actually writes: “A very considerable number of the principle people of Otaheite

[Tahiti], of both sexes, have formed themselves into a society in which every woman is common to

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smothers the child the instant it is born: splendid evidence this, that there do after all exist

people of sufficient intelligence to set their pleasures on a higher plane than the futile

laws enjoining us to increase numerically!… a similar society thrives at Constantinople

(J: 69).

Accordingly, laws against adultery are rejected as cruel and unjust (AV: 569), and

spousal jealousy and concerns for the honour of the husband are dismissed as self-

righteous manifestation of a man’s arrogance, pride and fear of humiliation (J: 259-

260 PB: 221, 224 AV: 310, 365). 43

4.6 Sade contra Rousseau on the role of Women. Continue, therefore, always be as you are, chaste guardians of our morals and all the

gentle bonds of our peace, exploiting on every occasion the rights of the heart and of

nature in the interests of duty and virtue.

Rousseau A Discourse on Inequality (1755)44

Prudish, God-fearing, or otherwise timorous women, take daily and confident use of these

counsels, it is for you the author intends them.

Sade Juliette (J: 153n). The relationship between Sade and Rousseau is complex. 45 There is a considerable

every man, thus securing a perpetual variety as often as their inclination prompts them to seek it, which

is so frequent that the same man and woman seldom cohabit together for more than two or three days.

… If any of the women happen to be with child...her poor infant is smothered the moment it is born ...

[that it not] interrupt the mother in the pleasures of her diabolical prostitution.” Captain James Cook

Captain Cook’s Voyages 1768-1779 ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: The Folio Society, 1997) 56-57. 43 The evolutionary psychological line seems to give a more plausible explanation for this than simple

egoism. See Buss pp.125-129. 44 Rousseau A Discourse on Inequality p.65. 45 The complexity of the relationship between Sade and Rousseau is reflected by the divergence of

opinion in the secondary literature. Philippe Roger notes that Sade admired Rousseau and collected his

works. (Sade expresses his admiration for Rousseau in Aline et Valcour; the novel’s principals go on a

pilgrimage to visit him; AV: 69; n. p.811). Nelly Stéphane takes Sade to be the ‘anti-Rousseau;’ Alice

Laborde has suggested that Sade harboured a secret desire to become Rousseau’s equal. Sade agreed

with Rousseau on some matters, for example the absurdity of making suicide a criminal offence.

Elsewhere, however, Sade refers to Rousseau as a ‘misanthrope’ (LNJ 2: 223). Michel Delon comes

closest to identifying the commonality between the two thinkers, observing that “Rousseau et Sade se

147

overlap in the moral thinking of the two thinkers, which will be discussed in the

following chapter. Here I will discuss Sade’s relation to Rousseau on the topic of

sexuality. Rousseau’s Confessions (hereafter C; 1781) is replete with Sadeian themes,

in particular Rousseau’s masochism, his penchant, in his youth, for stealing and

exposing himself in public, his homoerotic encounters, his clothing fetishism, his

confession of such tastes; his infatuation with a Venetian prostitute (a woman named

Zulietta, who has more than a passing resemblance to Sade’s Juliette), his

involvement with child prostitution, and his own libertine friends and acquaintances

(C:13-16, 26, 33, 63,84, 160, 291,426). 46 Pertinent to the discussion at hand, Sade’s treatment of the subject of women appears to be a direct reply to Rousseau, and is

based on principles Rousseau himself held to. Sade’s statements on women and their

role are an implicit response to this doctrine, as well as the entire cultural edifice it

situent sur les marges des Lumières, Rousseau car il refuse l’équivalence entre progrès et bonheur,

Sade parce qu’il dénonce la convergence du bonheur individuel et de la prospérité collective.” Michel

Delon “Sade contre Rousseau, en marge des Lumières,” Magazine- Littéraire 389 (July- August

2000) :39-43p.42. See also Stéphane “Morale et nature,” p.39; Alice M. Laborde “Sade: l’érotisme

démystifié,” L’Esprit Createur15 (1975):438-448: 446; Philippe Roger “Rousseau selon Sade ou Jean-

Jacques travesti,” Dix-huitième siècle 23 (1991):383-405, p.402. 46 Zulietta, like Juliette, is beautiful and intelligent, quick tempered and potentially lethal; she threatens

to shoot Rousseau with her pistols for his insolence. She is also a brunette, like Juliette, and like

Durand, is physically unusual; she only has one nipple, which makes her, for Rousseau, a ‘monster.’

Like Juliette, she avoids vaginal sex to avoid pregnancy. Rousseau met her in Italy, the scene of much

of the action of Juliette, including Juliette’s stint as a prostitute. Confessions pp.304-311, 415. In 1741,

when Rousseau was 29, together with his friend Carrio, Rousseau ‘purchased’ a girl of 11 or 12, named

Anzoletta. He notes that this is an arrangement “common in Venice” (C: 311). (Rousseau made this

‘purchase’ whilst secretary to the French Ambassador; In Juliette, the French ambassador to Venice

himself has a girl of 16 abducted from her family; J: 1084). Rousseau also discusses his acquaintance

Klüpfel, the preacher and chaplain to the Prince of Saxe-Gotha, who kept a ‘little girl.’ Rousseau says

of a meeting with Klüpfel that “I indulged in a somewhat coarser enjoyment” with this girl, who was,

Rousseau notes, “at everybody’s disposal” and “little adapted for her profession.” (C: 433, 434).

Rousseau refers to three personages in the course of the Confessions that fit the designation ‘libertine’;

Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1723-1807), who apparently did not believe in morality, his friend

Gauffecourt, who (at the age of sixty) attempted to seduce his wife with money and a ‘libertine book,’

and Mme (Françoise Louise Éléonore de La Tour) de Warens (1699-1762), who, according to

Rousseau, “could have slept with twenty men in one day with a calm conscience” (C: 223, 380, 457).

148

represents.47 Sade’s treatment goes beyond simple parody, although parodic elements

are present. 48

In his introduction to his translation of Emile (hereafter E, 1762), Allan Bloom

reads Rousseau as predicting the feminist movement, portraying it as the final act in a

complete cultural bourgeoisification of the world. For Bloom’s Rousseau (and, it

appears, for Bloom himself), rationalism and egalitarianism would end sexual

differentiation. The designations ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘husband’ and ‘wife,’ ‘parent’

and ‘child,’ it is feared, will become roles, and not designations that refer to natural

properties. Bloom writes that this would inevitably lead to the reduction of all of us to

the level of “the selfish Hobbesian individual, striving for self- preservation, comfort,

and power after power. Marriage and the family would decay and sexes be

assimilated. Children would be burdens and not fulfillments” (all the worse for

questionable theories of ‘natural kinds’; if the institutions of marriage and filial piety

are so vital, they should have stronger foundations than such a questionable ontology;

E: 24). Bloom’s own reading of Rousseau supports the reading of Sade as the Anti-

Rousseau, given that he wrote enthusiastically of exactly this cultural shift, and

advocated the elimination of such apparently concrete social roles and institutions as

the ‘mother,’ the ‘wife’ or the ‘marriage.’

Both Sade and Rousseau note the contingent relationship between sexual

behavior and human relationships. Both hold there is no natural bind that attaches

sexual partners- for Rousseau, marriage and monogamy are a moral institution; the

very reason why Sade rejects them (E: 16). Rousseau recommends absolute honesty

with children on sexual matters, as “a single proved lie told by the master to the child

would ruin forever the whole fruit of the education” (E: 216; 171). Yet Rousseau’s

sexual revolution is very limited, and, as Deutscher notes, his arguments on sexual

47 In Philosophy in the Bedroom for example, Rousseau is cited as saying that adultery is wrong, as the

wife could have a child who is not her husbands,’ to which Madame de Saint-Ange replies- avoid

pregnancy (PB: 223). 48 Sade’s ‘libertine education,’ (the setting of the Philosophy of the Bedroom is described as

“Dolmancé’s academy”; PB: 185) appears to be a parody of Rousseau’s educational ideal, and his role

as author of guidebooks for the young. It is also no coincidence that Sade’s most famous character,

Justine, goes by the name of Sophie, the name of the ideal female partner for Rousseau’s Emile. For

discussion see Jacques Broche “Sade ou le langage terroriste,” La Petite revue de philosophie 2,

(spring 1981): 25-36.

149

matters tend towards ‘kettle logic’ and the ad hoc.49 To teach sexual propriety, which

he takes to be a ‘natural good,’ Rousseau recommends that one take the student to a

ward of syphilitics (E: 231). Sade, taking the side of rigorous pragmatism, instead

recommends frequent medical checks (J: 424). Where Rousseau suggests that adultery

may lead to an unwanted pregnancy, Sade recommends condoms and sponges (J: 424;

PB: 223). In an ironic touch, Sade adopts Rousseau’s advice to women not to grant

their favors too eagerly, to “make your favours rare and precious, if you know how to

make them valued” (E: 478,479). Writes Sade, “[if] your husband [proposes] sodomy

to you... don’t be overhasty accepting the invitation: one must always have the look of

refusing what one covets. If fear of having children forces you to suggest the thing

yourself, advance the excuse that you are afraid of dying in labor; maintain that one of

your friends has told you that her husband manages matters with her in that fashion”

(J:79).

In ‘Benthamite’ mode, Sade disagrees with Rousseau on three specific points.

Firstly, Sade questions both the claim of physical and psychological difference

between men and women, and its relevance. Women, according to Rousseau, are

‘made to please man’ and are unsuited to traditionally male-dominated activities, such

as carpentry or running (E:437).50 Women are child-like in both appearance and

psychology, and are intellectually weak, being incapable of independent or abstract

thought (E: 211,386, 387). 51 They are insidiously manipulative and incapable of self

control (E: 377). Rousseau rejects the charge that he is claiming that women are

inferior, but that they have a ‘role’, which is complementary to that of men (E: 361).

Her function, he argues, is to ‘please’ and ‘console’ men in their pains- she is to look

49 Penelope Deutscher Yielding Gender: feminism, deconstruction and the history of philosophy

(London and New York: Routledge, 1997) p.97. In a kettle logic, several mutually contradictory

explanations are sustained at once, suggesting that the actual motive for retaining the defended point of

view is repressed. The term derives from a joke discussed by Freud. A man lends another a kettle, and

it is returned damaged. When confronted, the borrower says that, firstly, he never borrowed a kettle,

second, the kettle had a hole in it already, and thirdly, he’d returned the kettle undamaged. See

Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey, Standard Ed.

(New York: Norton, 1990) p. 72. See also Freud The Interpretation of Dreams trans. James Strachey

(New York: Avon, 1970), 152-3. 50 Robert Wokler Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p.126. 51 Wokler pp. 127-128. This is despite the fact that Rousseau acknowledges the materialist framework,

noting that, between men and women, “the machine is constructed in the same way” (E: 358).

150

pretty and to remain submissive (E: 358, 365, 366, 437, 442,437). (Significantly, the

‘tasks’ that Rousseau holds to be appropriate for women- lace-making, dancing and

singing, and cooking for the home, are economically trivial; women are largely

withheld from economic relevance and independence; E: 425, 394). Yet, according to

Rousseau himself, economic inequality is a cause of tyranny). Rousseau insists that

he is simply clarifying that the sex roles are established in the ‘physical and moral’

order of things, and yet his Emile is filled with admonitions and advice on how one is

to best embody the ‘good woman’- a state which is assumed to be natural. As

Deutscher notes, Rousseau conflates the descriptive with the prescriptive. 52 Much of

this ‘advice’ is quite explicitly related to the enforcement of a ‘natural’ hierarchy

between men and women; women should be pretty and entertaining, but not too

pretty, educated or intelligent, as she will become a source of grief, sexual jealousy, or

an embarrassment to her husband (E: 409, 363, 409).53 Women are to remain without

knowledge, art or education, lest they become too powerful (that is, independent); an

obvious impossibility if women were simply incapable of such cultivation.

Maintenance of power over a woman is frequently behind Rousseau’s reasoning;

when choosing a wife, Rousseau advises, one should choose a ‘mediocre’ woman to

avoid jealousy or conflict (E: 410).54 Rousseau also holds that any woman who

wishes to liberate herself from men to be a victim of philosophical fashion (E:

386).Were a woman to ‘betray’ the ‘destiny’ of her sex, she would become w

having abandoned her only ‘strength’ (meaning, of course, her feminine weakne

passivity), which is inextricably tied up with her sex (E: 363, 364). Rousseau’s

assumption that the ‘natural’ is the good, and that anything with a cultural origin is

bad, is the origin of his confusion here, and it is precisely on this point that Sade turns

to in his response. In legislating on what is natural, and privileging the natural over

the good, Rousseau leads to incoherence as he mistakenly assumes the division and

specialisation of the sexual roles to be entirely a natural kind, and not, at least to a

certain extent, a cultural construct.

eak,

ss and

52 Deutscher p.95. Much of Sade’s thought is open to the same charge. 53 Note that Sade makes exactly the same association of virtue and mediocrity that Rousseau makes,

differing in that he affirms extravagance and excess instead. 54 Again, Rousseau makes the same association of mediocrity and morality that Sade (and later,

Nietzsche) makes.

151

In reply, Sade attacks the assumed physiological inferiority to men, women’s

psychological inferiority to men (both intellectual and emotional), the notion of the

complementary nature of gender distinctions, and the purported teleological

significance of such a difference. 55 Sade uses the imagery of enchainment and ‘divine

impulse’ in making his case. This colonization of the Rousseauian lexicon is apt, as

Sade exploits inconsistencies between Rousseau’s gender theory and his political

thought. In particular, Rousseau criticises the idea that there could be a natural ‘right’

of force of the strong over the weak, but assumes that this is exactly the right that men

have over women (The Social Contract, hereafter SC: 52; Discourse on Inequality,

hereafter DI: 77). 56

In Sade’s short story Eugénie de Franval (1788), explicit references to

Rousseau’s thought and language are made. A submissive married woman, wearing

“her chains for the first few years without suspecting her enslavement,” eventually

breaks free from social convention (GT: 14). Identical language is used in Philosophy

in the Bedroom. Against the marriage contract, Sade writes that “[t]he act of

possession can only be exercised upon a chattel or an animal, never upon an

individual who resembles us, and all the ties which can bind a woman to a man are

quite as unjust as illusory” (PB:319). From Philosophy in the Bedroom:

O charming sex, you will be free: as do men, you will enjoy all the pleasures of which

Nature makes a duty, from not one will you be withheld. Must the diviner half of mankind

be laden with irons by the other? Ah, break those irons: Nature wills it.

For a bridle having nothing but your inclinations, for laws only your desires, for morality

Nature’s alone ; languish no longer under brutal prejudices which wither your charms and

hold captive the divine impulses of your hearts ;57 like us, you are free, the field as it is to

55 Yet, albeit rejecting such principles dear to Rousseau, Sade has apparently adopted Rousseau’s

intellectual self image as existing above and beyond all stultifying convention, as the great liberator and

iconoclast: “I am cynical, impudent, violent and fearless,” he declares in the Confessions; “I thought

that I was born to destroy all illusions”(C:33,405). 56 Rousseau The Social Contract translated by Maurice Cranston. (London: Penguin Books, 1968); A

Discourse on Inequality trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin 1984). 57 Sade’s footnote: “Women are unaware to what point their lasciviousness embellishes them. Let one

compare two women for roughly comparable age and beauty, one of whom lives in celibacy, and the

other in libertinage: it will be seen by how much the latter exceeds in éclat and freshness; all violence

does Nature is far more wearing than the abuse of pleasure; everyone knows bed improves a woman’s

looks” (PB:323).

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us ; have no fear of absurd approaches ; pedantry and superstition are things of the past ;

no longer will you be seen to blush at your charming delinquencies ; crowned with myrtle

and roses, the esteem we conceive for you will henceforth in direct proportion to the scale

you give your extravagances (PB: 323).

Against Rousseau’s arguments for the ‘natural’ inability of women to be anything

other than coquettish, Sade suggests that, if only women were educated better, they

would show themselves to be the equals of men (E: 363).58 The ideal education for

the heroine, commencing at the age of seven, is described in Eugénie de Franval:

“…Mademoiselle de Franval ...was given teachers for writing, drawing, poetry,

natural history, declamation, geography, astronomy, anatomy, Greek, English,

German, Italian, together with instructors for handling weapons, dancing, riding and

music.” (GT: 17). Five teachers would arrive daily for such instruction, and lessons

would commence at nine and finish at two daily. Juliette, like de Franval, also handles

firearms. She also manages her own finances and has sex purely for pleasure, as

would a man (J: 299). Her tutors and mentors, Delbène and Clairwil (who deliver

much of the novel’s philosophy) and Durand (a chemist and poisoner) contrast with

Rousseau’s explanations of the ‘subordination’ of women. Sade explicitly rejects the

traditional, arcane associations of women with witchcraft and other supernatural

powers, as well as rejecting the notion that physical difference could possibly justify

differential treatment (J:506). Yet Sade grants her the freedom of choosing not to

reproduce, even the capacity to destroy, as do men. For Sade, notes Carter, ‘the

Goddess is Dead’ (Carter: 110-113; J: 506). 59

Regarding Rousseau’s insistence on the ‘natural modesty’ that is natural to, and

necessary of women, Sade declares that sexual contact is a requisite for mental health:

“The importance of the need to fuck is no less high than our need to eat and drink…it

is as ridiculous to pretend that chastity is a virtue as it would be to assert that it is a

virtue to deprive oneself of food” (J : 63 ; also pp.84, 434n ; LNJ 1 : 39, 77 ;

58 This follows the thought of Helvétius. See Essays on the Mind pp.339-340. 59 For a critique of the ‘natural complement’ theory and the question of physical differences between

men and women, see Ann Ferguson, “Androgyny as an Ideal for Human Development” in Alan Soble,

ed. Philosophy of Sex 232-255, p.234-238.

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AV :310). 60 Sade also notes that a woman’s capacity for sexual union and pleasure

has no relation at all to how often she can become pregnant (PB: 228).

One may object that Sade, like Rousseau, has buttressed his rhetoric with

characters that are fantastic and implausible. But Sade, being a connoisseur of the

fantastic and factual, packs Juliette with references to women who apparently lived in

blissful ignorance of Rousseau’s feminine ideal. He refers to, among others, Empress

Theodora, wife of Justinian (c.500-548 C.E; PB:256; J:1187), the poisonesses La

Voisin (born Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin; burned for poisoning and sorcery in

1680) and Marie Madeleine d’Aubray, marquise de Brinvilliers (c.1630–76 ; J :

262) , Empress Agrippina 1(5 – 59 C.E; J: 172, 564), Empress Valeria Messalina,

third wife of Claudius (CE c.22-48), the poet Sappho (6th Century B.C.E ; J: 60),

Queen Zingha of Angola (1583-1663; PB : 256 ; J ;69; Œ III: 242), “Zoé, a Chinese

emperor’s wife”(possibly Empress Wu Zetian, a ruthless autocrat, 625-705 C.E. ; PB:

256, Œ III:133) and Sade’s contemporary, Catherine II, Empress of Russia (1729-

1796; J:874- 885). A key Sadeian principle of psychology- that absolute power

liberates absolutely- applies equally as to women as to men. In reply to the objection

that such characters are the exception, not the rule, it could be the case that women

like Catherine the Great are rare, as women were rarely given the opportunity to enjoy

such circumstances. If anything, Sade’s list shows that ambition and ruthlessness may

be normal for women in positions of power. (Rousseau, in the Confessions, oddly,

describes such colourful women; consequently, he presents counterexamples to his

own ideal characterization of womanhood. Therein we find quite positive descriptions

of Comtesse de Menthon, a ‘woman of great wit,’ Zulietta, and Madame de Warens

[C: 185]. In fact, Rousseau attributes his own good education to the women in his life

[C: 289]).

4.7 Against Reproduction.

Sade, in Benthamite mode, argues that women should have control over their own

bodies, advising the avoidance of pregnancy through the use of alternative sexual

techniques. He also discusses contraceptives and, less frequently, methods of inducing

60 This was not an original position. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), writes of a

girl who was cured of amenorrhea by having sex with fifteen men in one night. Cited in Laqueur p.107.

La Mettrie, too, considered celibacy a risk to mental stability. See La Mettrie pp.8, 72.

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abortion (MV: 90; PB: 225-230; J: 79; AV: 516). As Nature does not consider murder

a crime, Sade reasons, then abortion is not criminal either (Sade here assumes that

abortion is on a moral par with murder; J: 67n). From Philosophy in the Bedroom:

…there is not the least wrong in diverting a man’s semen into a detour by one means or

by another; because propagation is in no sense the objective of nature; she merely

tolerates it; from her viewpoint, the less we propagate, the better; and when we avoid it

altogether, that’s best of all….deflect that perfidious liquor that whose vegetation serves

only to spoil our figures, which deadens our voluptuous sensations, withers us, ages us

and makes us fade and disturbs our health; get your husband to accustom himself to these

losses; entice him into this or that passage… tell him you detest children, point out the

advantages of having none (PB:248; similar, J: 435).

Sade’s characters argue that there is no particular reason as to why a rational agent

should want to have children, and sufficient reasons as to why it is immoral to do

so.61 The world, they insist, is no place for human beings, and that the human race

a plant that should simply be rooted out (GT: 25; J: 373, 1009).

is

,

icide).

62 It is in the context

of willed sterility that the significance of anal sex in Sade is to be understood. As

Marcel Hénaff notes, anal sex in Sade is a total symbolic affirmation of sterility over

fertility; a principle that, if universalized, would end the human race.63 On this point

Sade’s advice against reproduction and non-fertile sex departs from both the

Benthamite and Bataillian doctrines as described above. In denying that pleasure

could possibly make up for the pain of being alive, Sade appears to counter the

Benthamite principle (which would, on such grounds, merely recommend su

61 Helvétius, for example, felt that people only married and had children out of imprudence. Helvétius

Essays on the Mind pp.433, 451, 452. 62 Note that this view is incompatible with the view that there is a teleology according to which one

should participate in the cycle of destruction and creation; in this context, to father more ‘warriors.’

Sade can only conceive of participating in ‘nature’ in terms of destruction. This will be addressed again

in Chapter VI. 63 Notably, by the 250th page of the 120 Days of Sodom, the only approximately sexual act described is

‘thigh-fucking.’ Playing with and eating human excrement, which are not sexual activities in any sense,

are the main themes of the first part of the text. For discussion, see Marcel Hénaff Libertine Body

pp.204-205. For Sade’s comments on the ‘arcane allure’ of anal sex, see J: 312; LNJ 1: 47n, 49, 78.

Frottage against the thighs was the preferred method of sexual intercourse in Classical Greece, which

may indicate that Sade is making a specific allusion. See Kenneth James Dover Greek Homosexuality

(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977).

155

Similarly, the declaration that the human race should simply end does not cohere with

the principle of participating in Nature’s cycle of domination and destruction.

64A

third, even more nihilistic position appears; a direct assault on the very principle of

reproduction. Call this the ‘Sterile doctrine.’

Whereas the Benthamite Sade associates non-fertile sex with simple prudence,

and liberates women from the reproductive role, the ‘sterile’ Sade expresses both an

absolute horror of the reproductive role, an abhorrence of all female sexual

characteristics, and a form of misogyny which identifies women with this role. 65

Characters have their female victims cover their breasts in bandages, and anally

penetrate them on principle (120: 298, 306, 440). Women, frequently pregnant, or

with infants, are tortured precisely because they have committed the ‘crime’ of being

mothers. It is for this reason, assumedly, that torture of women in Sade is typically

concentrated on the reproductive organs- vaginas are ritualistically sewn shut or

mutilated, wombs are ripped out, babies are crushed in front of their mothers

(alternatively, mothers are forced to kill their own children, before being slaughtered

in turn). 66 Duclos, in 120 Days of Sodom, holds that all mothers are all guilty as they

have taken the unnecessary “risk of exposing us to all the ills and sorrows the world

64 Rather than consistently affirming a life of struggle, Braschi argues that propagation of the human

race is a wrong, as “[man] usurps from Nature the honour of a new phenomenon” - our existence as a

species prevents Nature from bringing – forth new species of organism (J: 767). Compare: “One gives

birth only to unhappy children! And they too are preachers of death.” Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake

Zarathustra trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003) p.73. 65 “The difference between a man and a woman, of this we may be perfectly confident, is quite as

pronounced, quite as important as between man and ape; our grounds for refusing to include women in

our species would be quite as valid as for refusing to consider the chimpanzee our brother. Next to a

naked woman stand a man of the same age and naked too; now examine them attentatively, and you

will be at no pains to discern the palpable and marked difference which (sex aside) exists in the

composition of these two beings; you will be obliged to conclude that woman is simply man in an

extraordinarily degraded form; there are internal differences as well, and these are brought to light by

anatomical comparison: the dissection should be performed carefully and simultaneously.” Footnote, J:

511. Similar: 120 422, 440; LNJ 2: 164. J: 486, 498, 519, 656, 894, 913-924, 988-990, 1100, 1110;

120:650). 66 There are literally dozens of examples of this: J: 1100- 1110; 120:650); PB: 367; 120: 611-665;

LNJ; 1; 235; 2: 12, 73. For discussion, see Caroline Weber “The Sexist Sublime in Sade and Lyotard,”

in Philosophy and Literature 26 (2002): 397-404. I thank Stephen Davies for bringing this article to my

attention.

156

holds in store for us” (120: 476; MV: 41). Our relationship with other humans, and the

world itself, begins with our mothers. The ripping apart of the pregnant mother’s

body, a key image in Sade, is an expression of profound hatred and disgust for both.

Universalizing to all women the crime of bringing oneself into the world hardly

speaks of a heroic affirmation of the world, or a positive appreciation of its natural

workings. The sexualized mutilation of women for being women also coheres with the

idea of sadism as revenge, rather than due to a deep seated psychic and sexual urge.

This aspect also makes the very identification of women with the reproductive role

that the Benthamite doctrine explicitly denies (it is also one-sided; no-one in Sade is

tortured to death for being a father).

A final point can be made here. As Carter notes (as discussed in Chapter I), Sade’s

women characters are not free from the phallus. Clairwil is bisexual, but so deeply

identifies with the phallic that she at once embodies and worships it: “I live in the

name of nothing but the penis sublime; and when it is not in my cunt, nor in my ass, it

is so firmly anchored in my thoughts that the day they dissect me it will be found in

my brain” (J: 492-493). Juliette, too, literally suffers from penis envy.67 Again, the

framework of the Christian worldview appears in Sade’s text. St. Augustine held the

erect penis as the revolt of the flesh over the spirit; through worshipping it, for an

Augustinian, the materialist revolt against ‘spirit’ is complete.68

4.8 On Love and Friendship.

Sade’s libertines take both positive and negative views on the notion of love and

friendship, yet, in keeping with the principles discussed above, retain a rigid

distinction between friendship and physical love.

In keeping with a typically 18th Century disdain for the ‘irrational,’ several

characters insist that neither love nor friendship truly exists. 69 States Minister Saint

67 “Manlike in my tastes as in my thinking, how bitterly I regretted that I was unable to burn some more

real incense before my idol” (‘incense’ here means semen; J: 699). 68 Thomas Nagel “Sexual Perversion” in Soble ed. pp.76-88, p.84. A direct affront to the Augustinian

attitude, and a confirmation of the potency of the symbol, is Sade’s footnote noting the pleasure of

seeing one’s own erection (J: 455). 69 For discussion on the 18th Century attitude towards the emotions, see Cheshire Calhoun and Robert

C. Solomon, editors What is an Emotion? Classic Readings in Philosophical Psychology (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1984) p.227.

157

Fond to Juliette, “[w]hatever originates in the heart is false; for my part, I believe in

the senses alone, I believe alone in carnal habits and appetites…in self-seeking, in

self-aggrandizement, in self-interest” (J: 232). Yet other characters acknowledge the

reality of romantic sentiments through cautioning against emotional involvement,

recommending, rather, that one simply use other people for simple sexual

gratification. 70 Two extended discourses, one addressed by a woman to women

(entitled “Instructions to Women Admitted into the Sodality of the Friends of Crime”)

the other by a man to men, are offered in Juliette. The first such discussion is a

brochure issued to female members of the Society of the Friends of Crime. ‘Apathy’

is recommended in sexual relations, not only for the sake of maximizing pleasure, but

to avoid the entrapment that marriage entails. Sade describes love as (as we would

now say) a psychopathological condition; an instinct for attachment to men which

should simply be purged, like wisdom teeth or the appendix. 71 Sade also assumes an

‘economy of lack’ concerning sexual pleasure; love is the “veritable and certain kiss

of death to enjoyment,” reasons the author of the “Instructions to Women,” as “her

inevitable concern to give pleasure to her lover will prevent her from tasting any

herself” (J: 432). The monologue given by the Comte de Belmor (Juliette) is more

illuminating.

The word love is used to designate that deep-seated feeling which propels us, as it were

despite ourselves, toward some foreign object or other; which provokes in us a keen

desire to become united to it, to ever lessen the distance between it and ourselves…which

delights us…ravishes us…renders us ecstatic when we achieve that union, and which

casts us into a despond, which tears us asunder, whenever the intrusion of external

considerations constrain us to rupture this union. If only this extravagance never led to

anything more serious than pleasure intensified by the ardour, the abandon, inherent in it,

would merely be ridiculous; but as it leads us into a certain metaphysic[s], which,

confounding us with the loved object, transforming us into it, making its actions, its

needs, its desires quite as vital and dear to us as our own- through this alone it becomes

exceedingly dangerous, by detaching us from ourselves, and by causing us to neglect our

interests in favour of the beloved’s; by identifying us, so to speak, with this object, it

70 Sade revives the old philosophical view that sexual pleasure is superior to romantic love, and that the

latter will only cause pain. Both Epicurus and Lucretius, in particular, taught this. For discussion, see

Simon Blackburn Lust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 71 For discussion of this view, see Elizabeth Rapaport “On the Future of Love: Rousseau and the

Radical Feminists,” The Philosophical Forum 5, Nos. 1-2 (1973-74), pp.185-205.

158

causes us to assume its woes, its griefs, its chagrins, and thus consequently adds to the

sum of our own ( J: 502).

The braggadocio of the libertine here gives way to, quite simple, fear of getting

emotionally hurt. Belmor holds that the torment of romantic love is a cross (Sade’s

word) simply too painful to bear.

If the reward for so many pains, or their counterpart, were anything beyond an ordinary

spasm, I might perhaps recommend risking it; but all the cares, all the torments, all the

anguishes and nuisances of love never yield anything but what might be conveniently

obtained without it; why then must one put on these chains! (J: 502).

This attitude coheres with the observation made in the previous chapter concerning

the relationship between sadism, emotional vulnerability, and a lack of inner restraint

to violence. Belmor, elsewhere in the novel, proposes the execution of France’s

fifteen million Catholics, and professes the wish to kill six small boys per week (J:

499, 500, 521). Yet he states that he could not bear the emotional hurt associated with

romantic love. He appears to be an emotional cripple, able to engage with others only

in killing them.

The libertine characters of Juliette do, however, frequently fall in love with each

other. 72 Where such partnerships emerge, they are invariably described in terms of a

love of extraordinary equals, proud of each other’s achievements.73 Belmor himself

states that “[f]riendship requires openness and equality; when one of two friends

dominates the other, friendship is destroyed.” Belmore insists that women cannot be

friends with men for this very reason (J: 505). The notion of friendship dovetails into

the doctrine of superiority (to be discussed at length in later chapters) in passages such

as this, in which Noirceuil seduces Juliette.

Noirceuil glanced their way. “Feeble-minded creatures,” he murmured; “pleasure-

machines, sufficient to our purposes, but, truly, their appalling insensitivity depresses

me.” His eyes now rested meditatively upon me. “You, Juliette, your subtler mind

72 There is, for example, the lesbian relationship between Durand and Juliette, between Juliette and

Clairwil (although Juliette later poisons Clairwil), the sexual relationship between Clairwil and her

brother Brisatesta, and between Brisatesta and fellow Gulag convict Tergowitz. 73 For discussion, see Carter Sadeian Woman pp.96-97.

159

conceives me, understands me, yes, anticipates me, I relish your company. And,” he

added, further narrowing his eyes, “you cannot hide it: you are in love with evil” (J: 147-

148; 592; similar: LNJ 2:98-99, 174)74.

Sade also suggests that, by their nature, such relationships between ‘higher types’

will soar beyond such base prejudices as the prohibition on incest, or even (it should

be kept in mind) killing each other. 75 Yet- and this is a curiously Kantian point-

Sade’s characters insist that the ground of the relationship is not sexual, but

intellectual, in nature. Friendship between libertines is entirely bracketed off from

physical sexuality; the friendship comes first. Duvergier gives a very positive

description of love, yet makes it quite clear that it is entirely distinct from sexual

pleasure.

There are two manners of loving a man: morally and physically. A woman can morally

idolize her husband and morally and momentarily love the young blade who pays her

court; she can cavort with him without in any sense or decree offending the moral

sentiments she entertains for and owes him she worships: every individual of our sex who

is of a different opinion is an idiot who is steering nowhere but toward disaster (J: 151).

Noirceuil continues:

Belinda is ugly, she’s forty-two, not one hint of the gracious anywhere about her person,

not a single attractive feature, no, she’s a slug, grossly ill-favoured. But Belinda is clever,

she has wit, a delicious character, a million things which mate nicely with my sentiments

and tastes; I’d have no desire to bed with Belinda, but I’d be wild about her conversation

nevertheless. I’d intensely desire to have Araminthe, but I’d cordially detest her the

74 Catherine Cusset notes that the equally close relationship between Juliette and Durand similarly

contradicts the libertine doctrine of complete isolation. She notes that it is not a contractual relationship

between two libertines but a link based on exclusivity and sentimentality. Consequently, it is a major

contradiction of the novel. See Catherine Cusset “la passion selon Juliette.” 75 In the story Eugénie de Franval (1800), Eugénie is ‘trained’ do dismiss the incest prohibition. The

father maintains that their love transcends social norms: “[t]he domination of beauty and the sacred

rights of love know nothing of futile human conventions; their ascendancy annihilates these just as the

rays of the sun purify the earth from the fogs that enshroud her at night” (GT: 31). The principle that

‘true love’ overrides local custom or even morality has a certain family resemblance to Friedrich

Nietzsche’s aphorism, “That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”

Beyond Good and Evil §153 p.103.

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moment the fever of desire had abated, because in her I have found a body only, and none

of the moral qualities which would win her a place in my heart (J: 260).

Sade acknowledges the contingency of the relationship of fellowship and sexual

attractiveness, yet he refuses to acknowledge the fluidity of the relationship between

friendship and sex, or that sexual contact creates a relationship with an entirely

different structure to non-sexual friendship. For Sade, there is no conception of

making love, of expressing closeness with someone through sex. On the contrary-

having sex with someone is said to make love for that person impossible, stating that

“il est impossible d’aimer ce que l’on a foutu” (LNJ 1: 397, also 359,360). 76 In a

sense, these passages reflect Belmor’s fear of getting too attached to another person in

a deep sense; of losing one’s sense of individuality. Duvergier’s dichotomy (there are

two ways of loving a man; morally and physically; that is, morally or physically)

expresses this fear.

4.9 On Marriage

Nobody ever marries, said one philosopher, except when they don’t know what they

are doing, or when they don’t know what to do.

Sade, Eugénie de Franval (1788) (GT:24).

All of Sade’s advice concerning marriage is addressed to women. His rejection of

marriage is largely grounded on principles already discussed, in particular the

rejection of the notion that people are morally required to be monogamous,

heterosexual, or involved in raising children. Sade’s rejection of marriage is also in

keeping with his rejection of the traditional associations of marriage with conjugal

fidelity, generational continuity, mutual service, or any other notion of a goal that

transcends the atomized individual. Sade also argues that the institution of marriage,

for women, is little more than a socioeconomic trap. From Philosophy in the

Bedroom:

76 Buss notes that a “negative shift in attraction” after orgasm, for men, is not atypical. Buss suggests

that this is more common in men who are not interested in a committed relationship. Buss pp.83-84.

161

Indeed, Eugénie, consider the young girl scarcely out of her father’s house or her pension,

knowing nothing, without experience: of a sudden she is obliged to pass thence into the

arms of a man she has never seen, she is called to the altar and compelled to swear to this

man an oath of obedience, of fidelity, the more unjust for her often having nothing in the

depths of her heart but the greatest desire to break her word. In all the world, is there a

more terrible fate than this, Eugénie? However, whether her husband pleases her or no,

whether or not he has tenderness in store for her or vile treatment, behold! She is married;

her honor binds her to her oaths: it is attained if she disregards them; she must be doomed

or shackled: either way, she must perish or despair. Ah, no! Eugénie! It is not for that end

we are born; those absurd laws are the handiwork of men, and we must not submit to

them. And divorce? Is it capable of satisfying us? Probably not. What greater assurance

have we of finding the happiness in a later bondage that eluded us in an earlier? (PB:

223).77

Sade’s account of marriage is similar to that of Friedrich Engels, who considered

marriage as continuous with prostitution; insofar as both involve services tangible and

intangible provided in return for economic support.78 Engels describes bourgeois

marriage as “…conditioned by the class position of the parties and is to that extent

always a marriage of convenience….this marriage of convenience turns often enough

into the crassest prostitution-sometimes of both partners, but for more commonly of

the woman, who only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out

her body on piecework as a wageworker, but sells it once and for all into slavery.”79

Sade describes marriage in exactly these terms:

A man ridiculous enough to demand that a woman never give herself to anyone except

himself would be behaving quite as absurdly as he who would not tolerate his mistress or

wife ever dining with someone else; not only would such an attitude be downright queer,

it would be tyrannical; for by what right, being incapable of satisfying the woman single-

handed, can he require that this woman suffer and not seek to console herself by whatever

means at her disposal? ...she is under no obligation to cede to her keeper save when her

pays for her services, and while she does definitely owe him the use of her body when he

77 Sade writes elsewhere that “[m]ismatched individuals are imprisoned all their lives in nightmarish

unions” (J: 296). 78 For discussion, see Alison M. Jaggar “Prostitution” in Soble ed. Philosophy of Sex 348-368, pp.353-

356. 79 Frederick Engels The Origin of the Family, Private and the State (New York: International

Publishers, 1942), p.63. Quoted in Jaggar “Prostitution” p.354.

162

contracts for it, before the bargain is struck and after she ahs fulfilled her part of it, she is

free, the rest of her hours are her to employ as she likes, and it is then that, business

attended to, she may devote herself to pleasure and the inclinations of her heart; and why

should she not, since her only commitment to her keeper is physical? The paying lover, or the husband, must perfectly well understand that he cannot exact

from the object of his doting those feelings of the heart which obviously cannot be

bought…from a woman a husband or a lover expects not virtue but the appearance of

virtue (J: 152-153; ΠIII: 314).

In the society of Sade’s time (and to this day, in many places), prostitution was the

only form of employment available to women that would bring in an income

comparable to that of men, or an adequate standard of living without getting married.

Sade, notes Carter, makes prostitution look like the more attractive option through the

depiction of marriage as socioeconomic entrapment. 80 Unsurprisingly, Juliette’s one

marriage is for money (J: 551). She and Clairwil know the economic worth of their

bodies, even though they claim to prostitute themselves for enjoyment, but it is

evident that, in Juliette, sex for money is a paradigmatic relationship. Sade’s advice

here is continuous with the libertine association of money and sex. For the libertines,

as discussed in the previous chapter, money is the means to force one’s will upon

others, whether through simply paying for sex, or through payment of legal aid,

bribery, or for the abduction of victims (LNJ 2: 28, 29, 66,173; AV: 258). Notes

William C. Brumfield, the ‘doctrine of libertinism’ is largely a rationalisation of

sexual exploitation based on economic dependency.81 Sade warns the woman reader

not to fall victim to this very entrapment. This, and Sade’s portrayal of libertines as

abusive and sadistic husbands, complicates the view that Sade is simply proposing the

doctrine of his characters (assuming that he intended to be read by women; 120:192.

J: 225; LNJ 2:137). Significantly, in the utopian kingdom of Tamoé, divorce is legal,

and perfect economic equality between ‘boys and girls’ is required to ensure that

marriages are for love alone (AV: 319).

80 Carter Sadeian Woman p.9. 81 William C. Brumfield “Thérèse philosophe and Dostoyevsky’s Great Sinner,” Comparative

Literature 32 (1980): 238-253, p.246.

163

4.10 Joy Divisions

Embedded within the text of Philosophy in the Bedroom is a pamphlet entitled “Yet

One More Effort Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans” (Français, encore

un effort si vous voulez être républicains). This has been variously interpreted as

being a revolutionary tract, or a parody of such a document (a discussion that will be

returned to in Chapter VII), and has already been cited above concerning Sade’s

views of homosexuality and marriage. In a strikingly confused way, this text runs the

Benthamite and Bataille doctrines together, suggesting that Sade may not even have

been aware of the conflict. On the topic of marriage, and ostensibly adhering to the

principle of equality, Sade writes: “[n]ever may an act of possession be exercised

upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the

possession of slaves; all men are born free, all have equal rights...according to which

never may there be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands

upon the other” (PB: 319). Yet the text also endorses the Law of the Strong, absolute

egoism, and the pleasure of cruelty.

The text proposes that each city establish brothels, named ‘Temples of Venus,’ in

order to foster “nothing but fond feelings for a government which so obligingly

affords him every means of satisfying his concupiscence” (PB: 317).

Various stations, cheerful, sanitary, spacious, properly furnished and in every respect safe

[!], will be erected in divers points in each city; in them, all sexes, all ages, all creatures

possible will be offered to the caprices of the libertines who shall come to divert

themselves, and the most absolute subordination will be the rule of the individuals

participating; the slightest refusal or recalcitrance will be instantly and arbitrarily

punished by the injured party... (PB: 316-317).82

The women and children kept in these brothels are apparently not free to leave, and

may be ‘punished’ for giving resistance. Their differential treatment is justified

according to a ‘Natural Aristocracy’ of the Strong and the Weak, and according to the

Bataille-doctrine view that to share pleasure (meaning- to restrain from inflicting

82 Shaeffer notes that an actual revolutionary petition made proposed a national brothel system. See

Schaeffer p.436. Helvétius’ identical proposal has been noted above. See A Treatise on Man Vol. I

pp.129 p.291-292.

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pain) is to diminish it for oneself. 83 Here Sade explains why there is no minimal age

for the ‘objects’ kept in the brothel.

The issue of her well-being, I repeat, is irrelevant. As soon as concern for this

consideration threatens to detract from or enfeeble the enjoyment of him who desires her,

and who has the right to appropriate her, this consideration for age ceases to exist; for

what the object may experience, condemned by Nature and by the law to slake

momentarily the other’s thirst, is nothing to the point; in this study, we are only interested

in what agrees with him who desires (PB: 320).

Applying the same principle, Sade also writes that men have an absolute natural right

to rape women, owing to their physical weakness, and to ‘punish’ those that resist

rape and to “compel their submission” (PB:319; similar, p.174). He attempts to avoid

contradiction with the principle of equality in the following footnote:

Let it not be said that I contradict myself here, and that after having established, at some

point further above, that we have no right to bind a woman to ourselves, I destroy those

principles when I declare now we have the right to constrain her; I repeat, it is a question

of enjoyment only, not of property; I have no right of possession upon that fountain I find

by the road, but I have certain rights to its use; I have the right to avail myself of the

limpid water it offers my thirst; similarly, I have no real right of possession over such-

and-such a woman, but I have incontestable rights to the enjoyment of her; I have the

right to force from her this enjoyment, if she refuses me it for whatever the cause may be

(319n).

Elsewhere in the text, Sade adds that rape is ‘trifling,’ as it

...wrongs one’s neighbour less than theft, since the latter is destructive to property, the

former merely damaging to it. Beyond that, what objections have you to the ravisher?

What will you say, when he replies to you that, as a matter of fact, the injury he has

committed is trifling indeed, since he has done no more than place a little sooner the

object he has abused in the very state in which she would have been put by marriage and

love (PB: 325).

83 The same proposal occurs in a political pamphlet in Juliette (J: 321).

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The backgrounds assumptions here are noteworthy. Sade refers to the rape victim as

an object. Accordingly, Sade does not acknowledge the psychological pain of rape,

only the physical (this is remarkable, for an authority on sadism). Further, Sade

considers rape a crime against the husband, not the rape victim herself- in accordance

with the view that women are possessions. Yet Sade employs the rhetoric of

utilitarianism and ‘uprooting prejudices’ in defending the sexual freedom of women.

Women can be sexually free so long as this freedom is on the male’s terms.

If we admit, as we have just done, that all women should be subjugated to our desires, we

may certainly allow them ample satisfaction of theirs... I say that women, having been

endowed with considerably more violent penchants for carnal pleasure than we, will be

able to give themselves to it wholeheartedly, absolutely free of all encumbering hymeneal

ties, of all false notions of modesty, absolutely restored to a state of Nature; I want laws

permitting them to give themselves to as many men as they see fit; I would have them

accorded the enjoyment of all sexes and, as in the case of men, the enjoyment of all parts

of the body; and under the special clause prescribing the surrender to all who desire them,

there must be subjoined another guaranteeing them a similar freedom to enjoy all they

deem worthy to satisfy them (PB: 321).

4.11 Conclusion.

In conclusion, I note that Sade’s account of sexuality is in fact two accounts. One, the

Benthamite doctrine, anticipates the state of sexuality as it is widely understood in the

21st Century - an arena of sensation, with only historical ties to its biological function.

The other appears to be a hypertrophy of the total subordination of women, divorced

from its traditional, theological justifications. There is one significant continuity; both

accounts have essentially masturbatory notions of sexuality- sex is merely the use of

the other’s body for physical pleasure. To reiterate- this chapter has discussed, in passing, the two moral schemes

introduced in Chapter II. The first holds that morality is to be derived from the ‘laws

of nature,’ and that this nature is characterized by strife and the struggle for

dominance. The other is an attempt, in the absence of any such teleology, to

coordinate action in the absence of absolute moral truths. The two following chapters

will discuss each of these in turn.

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Chapter V: SWIMMING WITH SHARKS Ethics I.

It’s mercy, compassion and forgiveness I lack, not rationality.

Arlene Machiavelli /Beatrix Kiddo

Quentin Tarantino Kill Bill Volume 1.

5.1 Introduction

As discussed in preceding chapters, there are two general approaches to the problem

of morality in Sade. The first, the ‘Bataille doctrine,’ to be discussed in the following

chapter, holds that it is possible to derive a morality from the natural order. The other

view- that it is impossible to derive a morality from the natural order- and the

alternatives that it proposes, is discussed in this chapter.

Much of the ethical discussion in Sade’s work assumes the latter view, yet only in

Juliette is the former explicitly rejected. Braschi, in the midst of a monologue which

is largely faithful to libertine (Bataillian) Orthodoxy, momentarily rejects this view,

stating that morality must be grounded entirely upon its subjects- the human, and

states –perplexingly- that there is a moral law inherent in us.

Man ... has no relationship to nature, nor Nature to man; Nature cannot bind man by

any law, man is in no way dependent upon Nature, neither is answerable to the other, they

cannot either harm or help each other; one has produced involuntarily- hence has no real

relationship to her product; the other is involuntarily produced- hence has no real

relationship to his producer. Once cast, man has nothing to do with Nature; once nature

has cast him, her control over man ends; he is under the control of his own laws, laws that

are inherent in him. With his casting man receives a direct and specific system of laws by

which he must abide, under which he must proceed ever after; these laws are those of his

personal self-preservation, of his multiplication, laws which refer to him, which are of

him, laws which are uniquely his own, vital to him but in no way necessary to Nature, for

he is no longer of Nature, no longer in her grip, he is separate from her (italics mine) (J:

766-767; also p.923).

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Braschi does not develop this line of reasoning, and does not elaborate on what the

‘laws of man’ entail. As such, this is another of Sade’s orphaned passages, and its

function in the Sadeian matrix is unclear. This chapter will discuss the options that

Braschi leaves open to his libertine colleagues- whether to simply accept moral

nihilism, or to formulate a strategy (with morality- like features) in the absence of all

moral absolutes or teleological schemes. The first part of the chapter concerns the

various meta-ethical positions in Sade, and his critique of existing moral thought. The

remainder of the chapter will deal with Sade’s response to the traditional claim that it

is irrational to be immoral.

5.2 Moral Nihilism.

Moral Nihilism is a commonly voiced ethical doctrine in Sade’s works, although it is

often spoken in conjunction with the Bataille doctrine (with which it is, strictly

speaking, incompatible).1 Minski, the Russian cannibal giant described in Juliette, is

the most coherent advocate of this doctrine in Sade. He has travelled the world and,

having acquainted himself with the ‘vices’ (his term) of a thousand different cultures,

accepts Cultural Relativism, and, hence, Moral Nihilism. In Africa, he develops a

taste for cannibalism, and now lives in a castle, on an island, in a lake, somewhere in

Italy, alone with his staff and his hundreds of imprisoned victims. Minski has little

fellow feeling for other libertines, such is the purity of his nihilism (these details are

important, as will be explained below). 2 He explains his meta-ethical standpoint (note

here that by ‘justice’ and the ‘just,’ Sade’s characters mean ‘morality’; in Sade’s age

the two terms were largely interchangeable).

…we had better, I think, come to some sort of understanding upon what we mean by just

and unjust. If now you meditate a little upon the ideas lying behind these terms, you will

1 For recent defences of Ethical Nihilism and Error Theory, see Charles Pigden The Reluctant Nihilist

or Nihilism and Moral Philosophy (Dunedin: Department of Philosophy, University of Otago,1991);

Ian Hinckfuss The Moral Society: Its Structure and Effects (Canberra: Department of Philosophy,

Australian National University, 1987), available from www.philosophy.ru/library/hinck/contents.html,

or www.uq.edu/philosophy/morsoc/ (retrieved September 2004). Richard Joyce The Myth of Morality

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). I thank Denis Robinson and Katrina Lawson for

bringing these texts to my attention. 2 Minski befriends Juliette and her entourage, but kills her best friend (J: 591). In order to escape with

their lives, Juliette knocks Minski out with a dose of stramonium (J: 599, 609).

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recognize that they are most profoundly relative, and profoundly lacking in anything

intrinsically real. Similar to concepts of virtue and vice, they are purely local and

geographic ; all that which is vicious in Paris turns up, as we know, a virtue in Peking,

and that is quite the same thing here… [a]midst these manifold variations de we discover

anything constant? Only this: each country’s peculiar legal code, each individual’s

peculiar interests, provide the sole basis for justice. (my italics; J: 605).

Despite the allegations of your demi-philosopher Montesquieu, justice is not eternal, it is

not immutable, it is not in all lands and in all ages the same; those are falsehoods, and the

truth is the reverse: justice depends purely upon the human conventions, the character, the

temperament, the national moral codes of a country... let us have the courage to tell men

that justice is a myth, and that each individual never actually heeds any but his own; let us

say so fearlessly (my italics; J: 606- 607; similar: 12, 170, 174, 215,731 PB: 208, 354;

120: 198).

Noirceuil comes to the same conclusion, arguing that all acts are indifferent from the

standpoint of Nature. That is, he holds that a). if ethics is to hold, nature is the

foundation of moral beliefs, and b). nature gives no such foundation. Unlike Braschi,

he does not consider the possibility that ethics could be grounded on human needs

rather than ‘nature.’

...all acts are indifferent; that they are neither good nor bad intrinsically, and if man now

and then so qualifies them, the sole criteria by which he performs his judgment are the

laws he has elaborated for himself or the form of government under which he chances to

live; but from the standpoint of Nature, and barring all else from consideration, all are

acts are as one, none better, none worse than the rest [my italics].

Consequently, ...if from somewhere within us there arises a murmur of protestation against the acts of

wickedness we concert, this voice is nothing whatever but the effect of our prejudices and

education, and that if we had been born and reared in some other climate, it would address

us in a very different language (J: 170-171; similar: LNJ 2:111).

This is Noirceuil’s argument;

1). morality is not eternal

2). morality is not immutable

Therefore

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3). morality is contingent on human conventions and cultural norms

(Cultural Relativism thesis).

Therefore

Morality is without foundation.

A number of assumptions in these passages need to be unpacked. Firstly, it is assumed

that notions of justice and morality, to be valid, must be universal and unchanging.

Secondly, it is assumed that the moralities of different cultures are so different that no

common properties could be identified. Thirdly, the very fact that notions of justice

and ethics are the work of men (“elaborated for himself”) is taken to be grounds for

not believing in them.

Whether notions of justice or morality (as opposed to their expression) really

change over time is debatable. Another, equally plausible view is that we are

gradually learning to apply the principles we already had in a more coherent manner.

The claim for Moral Relativism is more problematic. A standard argument against

Moral Relativism is that there is in fact little difference in fundamental moral

principles across cultures. Rather, it is argued, the ‘peculiar legal codes’ of different

cultures are due to different economic and environmental conditions (Sade makes this

very point in the short story Florville and Courval or Fatality).3 Yet, as Sade (in

‘libertine’ mode) would note, cultures do in fact differ widely in how they treat, for

example, women, non-members, or slaves. The entire basis of Sade’s call to return to

the morality of Rome, and the charge that Christian morality is sick (as to be

discussed in Chapter VI), itself presupposes a deep moral difference between cultures.

The step from Moral Relativism to Moral Nihilism requires the assumption that,

for a moral theory to be sound, it must be universal and eternal. This appears to be a

straightforward claim; if one accepts the view that morality is entirely relative, and

3 Sade writes: “... [o]ne might as well doubt the reality of a river, because it divides into a thousand

different streams. Well, what better proof is there both of the existence of a virtue and of its necessity

than man’s need to adapt it to all his different ways of life and to make it the basis of all of them? Show

me a single race that lives without virtue, a single one among whom good deeds and humanity are not

the fundamental bonds, I will go further, show me even a band of villains who are not kept together by

some principles of virtue, I will renounce my cause; but on the contrary it is show to be useful

everywhere, if there is no nation, no state, no society, no individual who can do without it, if man, in

fact, cannot live happily or safely without it, would I be wrong, my child, in exhorting you never to

relinquish it?”(GT: 104-105).

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that ethics is not supposed to be, the conclusion is unavoidable. What is not a

straightforward claim, however, is the view that ethics is the ‘mere’ work of men, a

recurring claim throughout Sade’s work.4 Like Rousseau, Sade had difficulty with

the idea that ethics could manage without God to underwrite it. The implication is that

ethics cannot be merely human, as humans themselves are not in a sense ‘eternal and

universal.’ To be good is to be associated with something universal and eternal;

something divine. This intuition is expressed clearly in Rousseau’s Emile:

[the good man] is ordered in relation to the common centre, which is God, and in relation

to all the concentric circles, which are the creatures. If the divinity does not exist, it is

only the wicked man who reasons, and the good man is nothing but a fool (E: 292;

similar: E: 91; DI: 70, 101).5

The loss of the Absolute only leads to Moral Nihilism only if one assumes that

such a link to the Absolute is necessary. Sade himself recognizes that the rejection of

Ethical Naturalism does not necessarily lead to Moral Nihilism, as noted by Braschi.

Braschi rejects both forms of Ethical Naturalism (that of Rousseau and that of the

Bataillian doctrine), yet concludes that man must develop his own laws: “he is under

the control of his own laws, laws that are inherent in him” (J: 767).

(One possible solution to the problem of morality, which will not be pursued in

this study, is to abandon the principle that an absolute moral ground to morality is

necessary. Charles E. Larmore, for example, argues that moral scepticism is based on

a questionable assumption of the relevance of metaphysics to ethical thought. Writes

Larmore, “Our deepest moral commitments…are commitments whose meaning for us

[whatever their origin] is that we come with them to the world, and not that we infer

4 Sade also reverses this thinking; as morality is the work of men, not of God, to go beyond morality is

to become superhuman. In The 120 Days the ‘four friends’- ( the four main characters) speak of “what

mortals call crimes,” for example, as if placing themselves beyond their species (120:293). 5 The reading of Rousseau as a reluctant Sadeian is reinforced by an earlier passage in this text- “[h]ow

many times in my researches have I grown weary as a result of the coldness I felt within me! How

many times have sadness and boredom, spreading their poison over my first meditations, made them

unbearable for me! My arid heart provided only a languid and lukewarm zeal to the love of truth. I said

to myself, “Why torment myself in seeking what is not? Moral good is only a chimera. There is nothing

good but the pleasures of the senses” (E: 291).

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them from the world.6 Similarly, Simon Blackburn describes what he calls the

‘Rationalist’ approach to moral theory as an artefact of a bygone age). 7

The four meta- ethical standpoints in Sade’s work are set out in the two tables

below. Braschi (for a single paragraph, as noted) believes neither in deriving morals

from Nature, nor Moral Nihilism. Therefore, he holds a view compatible with the

Benthamite principle (as discussed in Chapter IV). The Bataille principle does hold

that a ‘morality’ of sorts can be derived from Nature. Finally, Minski and Noirceuil

assume that Ethical Naturalism is false, and conclude that Moral Nihilism is true. Meta-ethical positions in Sade.

Braschi Benthamite Principle Bataillian

Principle

Minski, Noirceuil

Ethical Naturalism No & Yes † No Yes No

Moral Relativism ? No No Yes

Moral Nihilism ? No No Yes

Rousseau / Zamé

yes

Bataillian Principle Ethical Naturalism?

Braschi † Benthamite Principle

†Braschi is inconsistent on this point.

Notably, the only meta-ethical approach in Sade’s work that logically entails

destructive and homicidal acts is the Bataillian doctrine. This is because it affirms

6 Charles E. Larmore Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)

p.149 7 Simon Blackburn Being Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p.133.

No

Minski & Noirceuil Nihilism

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destruction as a value. A nihilistic doctrine, by definition, is ethically neutral. Minski

and Noirceuil could spend their lives merely helping the aged and growing roses

without contradicting their principles (as, by definition, they do not have any); they

merely prefer to rape and murder. Sade’s characters are not concerned with

formulating, or adhering to, a particular metaphysics of morality. They frequently

express both Benthamite and Bataillian principles in the same breath, despite their

incompatibility (this being the cause of the sense of disorientation and frustration in

reading Sade carefully). What Sade’s characters are concerned with, however, is

living without recourse to morality; or, if one accepts their rhetoric, the art of survival

in a fallen world. Sade thereby deals with moral philosophy in a radical way. Rather

than discussing ethics primarily at the level of theory, Sade theorizes as to how one

could live without morality. Writes Beatrice Fink, Sade’s work “is an attempt to

explore the behavioural characteristics of groups when the constraints exerted by the

outside world have been removed. How do people act, asks Sade, when there is not so

much the fear as the fact of retribution among an intelligent and powerful elite?” 8

Before addressing this discussion, I will outline Sade’s other observations concerning

ethical thought.

5.3 Treatment of rival ethical theories

Sade does not give a sustained critique of existing ethical theory, and, as noted, makes

no attempt at doctrinal coherence concerning normative ethics. He makes several

salient points, and observations, whether into his own thought, or into ethical thought

itself. Firstly, Sade criticizes the conception of ethics as ‘reciprocal exchange.’ In a

passage that mirrors Bataille’s association of his ‘sovereign economics’ with

‘sovereign ethics,’ Noirceuil states that conventional morality ‘stinks of commerce,’

as opposed to the ‘natural health’ of the life of crime:

…in my view the value of the virtuous sentiment deteriorates when I remember not

only that it is not a primary natural impulse, but that, by definition, it is a low, base

impulse, that it stinks of commerce; I give unto you in order that I may obtain from you

in exchange (Sade’s italics; J:144).

8 Beatrice Fink “Political System” p.506.

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The implementation of an ethical system based on contract or covenant is also

criticized. In both Juliette and Aline et Valcour, the Social Contract is rejected as a

rotten deal (the same argument is given both by King Zamé, a follower of Rousseau,

and by Dorval, a libertine).

...when the weak individual agreed to surrender part of his independence to ensure the

rest of it, the maintenance of his goods was incontestably the first thing he desired, and so

to enjoy in peace whatever little he had, he made its protection the prime object of the

regulations he wanted formulated. The powerful individual assented to these laws which

he knew very well he would never obey (J: 115; also AV: 336).

Sade’s engagement with Utilitarianism has already been introduced; both his

problematic application to Benthamite principles to sexuality, and his criticism of

classical Utilitarianism’s psychological assumptions. Besides a number of sarcastic

comments, Sade also reveals some of the theory’s shortcomings. 9 In particular, Sade

notes that it yields counterintuitive conclusions. Utilitarianism holds that pleasure is

the highest good, yet demands that one regard the interests of others as important as

one’s own. To adhere to the demands of society’s principles or the ‘greater good,’ as

Sade puts it, is to ‘inflict cruelties’ upon oneself (J: 143). In overriding the principle

of justice, Utilitarianism also justifies causing pain to the innocent (medical

experiments, for example- Sade’s preferred example; LNJ 1: 212; MV: 57, 59,104; J:

727-728). Rather than deal with such inconsistencies, Sade simply endorses

hedonism, presenting himself to the reader as an ethicist of a distinctly Epicurean

stripe: “Imitate me, if you wish to be happy”, he tells the reader; “I guarantee

happiness” (LNJ 1: 138, 366; 2:77). As such, Necali Polat notes, Sade anticipates the

very critique of Bentham’s utilitarianism offered by Rawls: “…what the Sadean

intervention does is to merely extract from the Benthamite principle, as superfluous,

the priority of the greater number over the lesser number, down to one single

9 D’Albert, in Juliette, discusses his corrupt political plans, adding that “...it is impossible to render all

men equally happy; therefore we hold our mission fulfilled when we have been able to satisfy several

among the many” (J: 215). In La Nouvelle Justine the character Chrysostôme asks rhetorically, “…est-

il essentiellement utile que les autres soient heureux?” (“is it necessarily useful that others could be

happy?”; LNJ 2:34; similar: LNJ 1: 294).

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individual. Which is precisely the move one finds in later liberal political theories,

such as that of John Rawls, against Utilitarianism.” 10

The applications of Utilitarian thought in the novel Aline et Valcour are especially

ambiguous (the utopian society of Tamoé therein, based on Utilitarian principles, will

be discussed at length in Chapter VII). Sade’s application of Utilitarian thought to

legal matters in particular seems more an unintentional critique of Utilitarianism’s

incompatibility with justice than an endorsement. Sade describes a Bohemian criminal

gang leader- a free-thinking hero- who presides over a rape case. Instead of punishing

the rapist (who, incidentally, threatened to shoot the victim in the head), he states that

the rapist “took as he had to” (prise comme il fallait) and orders the plaintiff and

defendant to marry, adding that “…le devoir d’un juge n’est pas de punir, il est de

rendre les deux parties contentes autant qu’il est possible” (the responsibility of a

judge is not to punish- it is to render both parties as content as is possible”; AV: 539)11

In keeping with the thought of both Kant and Hume, Sade also notes the inability

of instrumental reason (that is, confined to truths about the formal relations of ideas)

to formulate an ethics. Sade notes that it would not be contrary to reason to prefer the

destruction of millions for the sake of a minor pleasure. Juliette explains:

If from immolating three million human victims you stand to gain no livelier pleasure

than that to be had from eating a good dinner, slender though this pleasure may appear in

the light of its price, you ought to treat yourself to it without an instant’s hesitation; for if

you sacrifice the good dinner, the necessary result is a privation for you, whereas no

privation results from the disappearance of the three million insignificant creatures you

must do away with to obtain the dinner, because between it and you there exists a

10 Necati Polat “Three Contemporaries: The International, Bentham, and De Sade,” Social Text 65,

Vol.18, no.4 (winter 2000): 1-23, p.8. 11 Robert Nozick writes of such suggestions :“Deterrence theorists of the utilitarian sort would suggest

(something like) setting the penalty P for a crime at the least point where any penalty for the crime

greater than P would lead to more additional unhappiness inflicted in punishment than would be saved

to the (potential) victims of the crimes deterred by the additional increment in punishment…This

utilitarian suggestion equates the unhappiness the criminal’s punishment causes him with the

unhappiness a crime causes its victim. It gives these two unhappinesses the same weight in calculating

a social optimum.” Robert Nozick Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974) p.61.

175

relationship, however tenuous, whereas none exists between you and the three million

victims (J: 642). 12

Perversely, Sade draws the same conclusion as Hume, stating that it is sensibility, not

reason, which is the basis of making moral judgements. Clairwil- totally out of

character- describes a person without sensibility as “an inert mass, equally incapable

of good or evil, and human only insofar as he has a human shape” (J :277). Sade turns

Hume’s logic against itself by prioritizing reason, and instrumentality, over morality.

On her own terms, through attaining the state of apathy, Clairwil transcends humanity

and renders herself incapable of being a moral agent.

Finally, Sade’s characters universalize principles with disastrous consequences,

thus throwing a spanner in the works for Kant. For Kant, one decides whether an act

is moral or not through the ‘universalization’ test. If one can consistently will that

every one perform the same act, the act passes the test. There are acts, however, that

appear to be ethically neutral, yet their universalization would have disastrous

consequences (a common example is paying up the full balance of one’s credit card at

the end of every month-were every card holder to do this, the credit card companies

would collapse). A more striking example is voluntary extinction of the human race.

In the short story Eugénie de Franval, Monsieur de Franval speaks with his wife

concerning their daughter’s plans to marry. Monsieur de Franval warns that all

husbands are “treacherous, unfaithful, cruel or despotic” and that their daughter

should avoid marriage and having children (Sade here takes the two to be

synonymous).

12 David Hume, in 1739, Adam Smith, in 1759, and Jean –Jacques Rousseau, in 1762, had already

made essentially the same point. Adam Smith, in 1752, writes of the typical person’s attitude towards

the extermination of all China: “… [i]f he would lose his finger tomorrow, he would not sleep to-night;

but provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a

hundred million of his brethren.” Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments. (Indianapolis: Liberty

Classics, 1976) pp.233-234. Rousseau, in Emile, writes: “[p]rivate interest, which in case of conflict

necessarily prevails over everything, teaches everyone to adorn vice with the mask of virtue. Let all

other men do what is good for me at their expense; let everything be related to me alone; let all

mankind, if need be, die in suffering and poverty to spare me a moment of pain and hunger. This is the

inner language of every unbeliever who reasons” (E: 314). Finally, Hume wrote that it was rational “to

prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” David Hume, Hume’s Moral

and Political Philosophy ed. Henry D. Aiken (New York: Hafner Press, 1948) p.25.

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‘Must one let the world come to an end, then?’

‘One might as well; it is never too early to exterminate a plant which yields nothing but

poison’ (GT: 25).13

Philosophy, for Sade, is to “combat, discredit, destroy, extirpate”- he leaves the slate

clean, leaving others to do what they will with the empty space (J: 592). Sade

undermines every major ethical proposal of his age without need of a coherent ethics,

just as a virus can fell a donkey without teeth and claws.

5.4 The Free Will Problem

We are in nature’s hands like a pendulum in the hands of a watchmaker; she kneads us as

she wishes, or rather as she can. So when we follow the imprint of the original

movements which govern us, we are no more criminal than the Nile is because of its

floods or the sea because of the ravages it causes.

La Mettrie14

In keeping with his materialism and determinism, Sade assumes that all human acts

are determined and that, consequently, there is no free will. Hence, there is no

morality, or just grounds for punishment. 15 Writes Sade (through Madame Delbène):

All moral effects...are to be related to physical causes, unto which they are linked most

absolutely: the drumstick strikes the taut-drawn skin and the sound answers the blow: no

physical cause, that is, no collision, and of necessity there’s no moral effect, that is, no

noise. Certain dispositions peculiar to our organisms, the neural fluids more or less

irritated by the nature of the atoms we inhale, by the species or quantity of the nitrous

particles contained in the food making up our diet, by the flow of humours and by yet a

13 Predictably, Monsieur de Franval is sexually possessive of his daughter. He is also inconsistent,

given that he has already had a child. 14 La Mettrie p.103. 15 Here Sade follows La Mettrie, who held that some ‘unfortunately born’ could not help but find

criminal activities intensely pleasurable, and that the ‘sentiment’ of guilt is in fact the erroneous “fruit

of education,” and d’Holbach, who thought that there were no criminals, only those “unfortunately

born,” who could not help themselves from committing acts deemed deviant or criminal by the rest of

society (La Mettrie pp.141, 155; d’Holbach System of Nature pp. 7, 50, 59, 137, 172, 212). Abbé

Bergier, similarly, held that some people required stronger sensations of pleasure than others due to

their natural constitution. See Jean Deprun “Sade et l’abbé Bergier,” p.8.

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thousand other external causes- this is what moves a person to crime or to virtue and

often, within the space of a single day, or both...16 And so it is madness, it is simply

extravagance to refrain from doing whatever we please, and, having done it, to repent of

it. (J: 15).

The sense that we have free will is dismissed as a mere cognitive illusion. The

character Bernis (Juliette) states that “...in the moment when the decision is taken it is

not we who determine it, it is enjoined upon us... and as a consequence our will is not

free” (J: 677). Elsewhere, Sade writes that personality traits are determined in the

womb: “ [i]t is in the mother’s womb that are fashioned the organs which must render

us susceptible of this or that fantasy; the first objects which we encounter, the first

conversations we overhear, determine the pattern; do what it will, education is

incapable of altering the pattern” (LNJ 1:356). Sade concludes that, with sufficient

information, it would be possible to predict all of a person’s behavior: “l’ homme est

une espèce de machine presque toujours déterminée par l’habitude” (AV: 522). Sade

also holds that one’s capacity for feeling pity is physiologically determined (AV: 644,

645). Hence, the libertines hold that they may lack an innate moral sense through no

fault of their own, as they had no choice but to act on their desires, which they did not

consciously choose (AV:344). 17 The libertines insist that one cannot be punished for

one’s ‘tastes’ (“…sommes-nous les maîtres de nos goûts?”), that these tastes cannot

be changed through education, and that they themselves are “blind instruments of the

will of Nature” or even mentally ill (LNJ 1: 362, also 356, 357; 120: 499; AV: 344;

CL: 30). (An unstated assumption here is that ‘criminal tastes’ entail an uncontrollable

desire, and that the desire to commit crime is simply a ‘taste’; LNJ 1: 358, 361). 18

Consequently, any punishment for ‘crimes,’ Sade’s characters insist, is an injustice. In

dissolving the distinction between human agency and the natural order, Sade dissolves

St. Augustine’s distinction between natural and moral evil. Writes Sean Spence, a

neurologist, the more we know how sociopaths and killers differ at the neurological

16 This is similar to La Mettrie, p.141. 17 Roy F. Baumeister largely rejects the idea that people lack self control, regarding it as a dangerous

cultural artefact. He concludes that “the very notion of an ‘irresistible impulse’ seems to me to be a

cultural construction and one that is highly questionable on psychological grounds.” Steven Pinker, on

the other hand, thinks that sociopathy and other anti-social traits may be hereditary. Baumeister pp.274-

277; Pinker pp. 259-263. 18 For discussion, see also Fauskevåg pp.21- 25; Han and Valla “A propos” p.111.

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level, “it seems that the space for moral evil contracts” - exactly as d’Holbach, La

Mettrie and Sade suggested. 19 Significantly, Sade repeats this doctrine in both the

pornographic, ‘libertine’ works (The 120 Days of Sodom, Justine, La Nouvelle

Justine, Juliette) and the non-pornographic Aline et Valcour. Zamé, who gives some

rather crude arguments for hard determinism, suggests that even the most gentle laws

are unjust (AV: 346-347). There is perhaps some merit to making, as did Hobbes, a

distinction between premeditated crime and ‘passionate’ crimes.20 But Sade’s subjects

appear to be claiming to be ‘blind instruments’ of passion continuously, which

Hobbes would classify as madness. Sade’s apologetics for murder, were it

consistently applied, amounts to no more than an insanity defence.

As Carter and others have noted, there are some obvious contradictions in

Sade’s works concerning free will. The libertines consider themselves free of the pull

of social convention and the ‘natural,’ yet also pride themselves on apparently

following the ‘authority’ of the ‘passions,’ despite the fact that they are, in effect,

agencies of the given order of things. Further, crime, within the terms of Sade’s

scheme, is conceptually impossible, the very notion of crime being reliant upon the

traditional moral framework. Juliette compares herself and her friends to

mountainous peaks, “...and virtuous folk resemble those flat stretches of Piedmont

countryside whose mournful evenness depresses,” but she must also accept that,

according to her own philosophy, she did not choose to become a serial killer any

more than a volcano chooses to kill villagers (J:951). Sade’s character Chigi makes

this explicit: “we all, through some blind force that is in us, a force both irrational and

essential, we are but stupid machines of the vegetation whose secret workings,

explaining the origin of all motion, also demonstrate the origin of all human and

19 Sean Spence “Bad or Mad?” New Scientist 181 (20 March 2004):38-41, p.40. For discussion on this

topic, see also James Waller Becoming Evil: how ordinary people commit Genocide & Mass Killing

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Jonathan H. Pincus Basic Instincts: What makes Killers Kill

(New York: Norton & Company, 2001). 20 “A crime arising from a sudden passion is not as great as when the same ariseth from long

meditation…” Thomas Hobbes Leviathan Edwin Curley, ed. (Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett

Publishing Company, Inc.1994) p.200. There is one case of ‘passionate’ murder in Aline et Valcour, in

which a man, named Don Juan, ‘blinded’ by tempestuous passion, stabs his lover to death and then is

overcome with remorse (AV: 566). Goulemot notes that this episode is highly ambiguous (847, n. 584).

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animal activity” (J: 743; also 120: 199, 784; similar: LNJ 1:356). This doctrinal

tension is never resolved in Sade’s work.

I will now turn to the ‘Why be Moral?’ question.

5.5 Why be Immoral?

Many treatments of the ‘why be moral?’ question in philosophy, notes John

Van Ingen, often miss the point, formulating some implausible version of ‘universal

egotism’ that succeeds in fulfilling analytic assumptions of what a philosophical

theory should have (in particular internal consistency and universality), but having

virtually no applicability in the real world.21 Sade, by contrast, is apparently interested

in real-world applicability. He is also apparently concerned with the possibility that

being immoral is possible without committing the philosophical sins of incoherence or

irrationality. If he succeeds, this may tell us something of the nature of the

relationship between reason and morality. If he fails, it will be instructive to see where

his strategy fails.

One response to the ‘why be moral?’ question is simply to hold that philosophy

has no duty to give a reply, as Paul W. Taylor and Brian Medlin have argued. Brian

Medlin expresses this view as follows: “I’m a philosopher, not a rat-catcher-and I

don’t see it as my job to dig vermin out of such burrows as individual egoism.”22

Francis Herbert Bradley has objected that the question is fundamentally confused, as

it assumes that virtue is only good as a means. This, he believes, is an attitude that can

only corrode morality. 23 On this view, the very inquiry into the relationship between

rationality and morality is itself, arguably, perverse. This answer is not satisfying. We

want to know why there is something basically wrong with Sade’s egotism. For

philosophy to avoid or refuse to answer this, as with any other question- seems

dogmatic, or to simply throw in the towel. If ethical thought is to have real-world

21 John Van Ingen Why Be Moral? The Egoistic Challenge (New York: Peter Lang, 1994) p.37-55. 22 Brian Medlin “Ultimate Principles and Ethical Egoism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 35

(1957), 111-118. Quoted in Van Ingen p.79. Paul W. Taylor holds that this ‘ultimate question’ is not

decidable through reason. Paul W. Taylor Principles of Ethics: An Introduction. (Encino, California:

Dickenson Publishing, 1975) p. 225, quoted in Van Ingen p.20. 23 F.H. Bradley “Why should I be moral?” In Ethical Studies (selected essays), 3-28 (New York:

Liberal Arts Press, 1951). Quoted in Van Ingen p.26.

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applicability, the real-world applicability of its opposites should be considered, just as

military strategy requires a consideration of that of the enemy.

One rather evasive response to this discussion is to declare all criminals as either

insane or foolish.24 Another, more fruitful approach is to argue that the immoral life is

undesirable. Two traditional arguments offered are the imprudence argument (simply

put- crime leads to the gallows); and the self harm argument (crime causes damage to

oneself, or harms one’s interests, regardless of whether one is intercepted).

5.6 The Imprudence argument

Sade himself considers the imprudence argument. Juliette’s pious husband, the

Comte de Lorsange, makes this intriguing statement. Men who propose a doctrine of

absolute immorality, he cautions, want simply to deceive, to “seduce you and abuse

your good faith.”

...in addition to deceiving you, they deceived themselves; there is the worst of it, there is

what never enters into the wicked man’s calculations; to get himself one pleasure he loses

a thousand, to pass one happy day he destines himself to a million dismal days; such is

the contagion of vice that he who is attacked by it wishes to infect everyone around him…

(J: 553).

Juliette does not debate Lorsange, but refutes him by means of a practical

demonstration- she poisons him (noting that he becomes increasingly pious as the

poison takes effect in his brain), takes all his money, and continues in her exploits. In

the structure of the novel, her methodology functions as a response to the imprudence

argument.

Sade’s characters do not advocate just any criminal lifestyle, which would simply

be irrational. 25 They give several specific pieces of advice for successful criminal

24 This is the so-called ‘Socratic View’ as taken in Socrates’ early dialogues. For discussion, see

Martha C. Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Hobbes (in a quote that illustrates the intellectual gulf

that separates him from Sade), expresses this view also: “... [t]he source of every crime is some defect

of the understanding, or some error of reasoning, or some sudden force of the passions.” Thomas

Hobbes Leviathan ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc,

1994) p.191. 25 For a discussion on the poor returns of crime, see Baumeister pp.108-112.

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living. Firstly, the importance of secrecy is stressed. An entire treatise on camouflage

and stealth is scattered throughout Juliette, covering the importance of, among other

things, logistical support, preplanning, camouflage, and avoiding scandals (J: 83, 261,

279, 299, 635, 638, 925, 987; also PB: 288). Sade also suggests techniques to avoid

one’s natural reactions to betray one’s crimes. After a criminal act, advises Juliette,

“...you will be best advised, especially as a beginner, to avoid company for a while,

since the visage is the mirror of the soul and despite us the muscles that shape our

facial expression will inevitably, try as we will to prevent it, reflect our inmost

feelings” (J:653). 26 Secondly, the student must maintain sang-froid. Clairwil states:

The cold-blooded crimes will be perhaps less splendid than somber, but they will be less

ready of detection, because the phlegm and premeditation wherewith they will be

perpetrated will guarantee leisure to so arrange them as not to have to fear their

consequences; the other category, those perpetuated barefacedly, brashly, thoughtlessly,

impulsively, will speedily bring their author to the gibbet (J: 279-280).

Thirdly, the student must be mindful of the inconsistencies of the law. Sade observes-

and this is still largely true today- that punishments for criminal offences are class-

based. White-collar crime is typically punished much more leniently than more

‘working class’ crime (J: 215, 124). 27 The poor petty thief is executed, whereas

Juliette gets away scot-free when she declares herself bankrupt and ruins the

livelihoods of dozens of people. 28 Clairwil advises:

...having regard to the laws of the country where he resides, in such sort that if the pettiest

is punished and the most frightful is not, then it is very assuredly the most frightful you

26 This suffices as a reply to Robert Nozick’s argument as to why criminal activity does not pay.

Nozick writes that the “antisocial being” tends to “overestimate one’s chances of success in evading

detection and punishment,” and that we have an uncontrollable tendency to feel guilt and shame, and to

communicate this to others. See Robert Nozick Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World

(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001) pp. 272-273. 27 Stephen Pfohl notes that corporate, organizational, or white- collar crime, whilst being among the

most costly forms of lawbreaking to society as a whole, is relatively lightly punished. Pfohl Images of

Deviance p.84. 28 Again, this was a complaint made by earlier philosophes. See Denis Diderot Jacques the fatalist and

his Master (1796) trans. J. Robert Loy (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1959) p.220;

La Mettrie p.131.

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must let [your student] commit. For, once again, it is not from crime you must shelter

him, but from the sword that smites the perpetrator of crime: crime entails no

disadvantages, its punishment entails many (J: 279-280; see also 116, 204, 487,

777). 29

The most important advice in Sade concerning crime is to simply evade the reach of

the law. Sade proposes three ways in which this can be achieved. One can operate in

collusion with those in power, become powerful oneself, or establish secret societies

and coordinate with other immoral people. Sade’s thought here follows that of

Thrasymachus and Glaucon, in Plato’s Republic, and Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias. 30

Thrasymachus seeks a satisfactory reply to the suggestion that morality is simply

whatever is convenient for those in positions of power. After Socrates’ rejection of

this proposal, Glaucon restates the argument in a different form, adding that it could

be in one’s best interests to be a tyrant, and gives a detailed description of what being

a successful tyrant would entail. The prospective tyrant requires a secret society of

colleagues who have also secured important offices in government. They will have a

vested interest in keeping society as safe and stable as possible, so that they may

predate upon it all the more easily. They will behave in an honorable manner whilst in

the public eye, only committing crimes against others when no one can catch them

out. The tyrant will have to be deceitful. Socrates says that such a life will be

difficult, to which Glaucon replies, “nothing worth while is easy.”31 Sade’s characters

reason in much the same manner. Yet his treatment of the secret society is more fully

sketched out than that of Glaucon, and exposes some of its doctrinal problems. Before

treating these, I will address what I will term the self- harm argument and the don’t be

a schmuck argument.

29 Thrasymachus, in Plato’s Republic, makes the same point; “when a man succeeds in robbing the

whole body of citizens and reducing them to slavery, they forget these ugly names and call him happy

and fortunate...” Plato The Republic pp.85-86. 30 Whether Sade had read the Republic or not is not known, although he had certainly seen the name

Glaucon; Rousseau refers to Glaucon in his ‘demonstration’ that the honest life is superior to that of the

wealthy tyrant (E: 19). Jean Deprun has noted the similarity between Sade and Callicles, and that there

was an excellent translation available in Sade’s time. Jean Deprun “Sade devant la ‘Règle d’or,’”

p.309. Foucault makes the association of Juliette and Thrasymachus, as noted in Chapter I (MC: xi-xii). 31 Plato The Republic p. 112.

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5.7 The Self-Harm argument.

It has been suggested that being immoral will lead to unhappiness. Voltaire, for one,

ridicules the notion that the honourable man in chains is happier than a ‘voluptuous

tyrant’ fondling his latest mistress in his ‘purple bed,’ and himself could give no

stronger argument against immorality than prudence.32 Socrates gives a more

thoughtful reply to the challenge laid down by Glaucon and Thrasymachus. The tyrant

will have access to base physical pleasures to his heart’s content, he concedes, but he

argues that this is a poor quality sort of pleasure, the sort that ‘commoners’ indulge in.

To indulge only in sex, food, wine and getting into fights is, allegedly, to allow

oneself to become a victim to the worst aspects of one’s nature- described by Socrates

as a great dragon-lion creature who is insensate to any idea of decency; a creature that

we come to know in our dreams, who wishes to have sex with the Gods, or our

parents, or who wishes to kill, or eat forbidden food. Socrates explains to Glaucon:

“I think that some of the unnecessary pleasures and desires are lawless and violent.

Perhaps we are all born with them, but they are disciplined by law and combination of

reason and the better desires till in some people they are got rid of altogether, or rendered

few and feeble, though in some they retain their numbers and strength.”

“But what desires do you mean?”

“The sort that wake while we are asleep, when the reasonable and humane part of us is

asleep and its control relaxed, and our fierce bestial nature, full of blood and drink, rouses

itself... [a]s you know, there is nothing too bad for it and it’s completely lost to all sense

and shame. It doesn’t shrink from attempting intercourse (as it supposes) with a mother or

anyone else, man, beast or god, or from murder or eating forbidden food. There is, in fact,

no folly or shamelessness it will not commit.”33

Although Socrates describes this aspect as a part of all of us, he thinks that to give

in to its demands is to become enslaved, and to allow the divine part of ourselves to

be starved. Furthermore, owing to the dynamics of the tyrant’s social arrangements,

he will by necessity be surrounded by rather base people; anyone of quality would be 32 Voltaire Philosophical Dictionary (1764) trans. Theodore Besterman (London: Penguin, 1972) p.68.

This is Socrates’ argument in Gorgias. 33Plato Republic p.392. In Gorgias Socrates resorts to a rather weak analogy between the body and the

state, and to punishment after death, which he admits may simply be “ludicrous old wives’ tales.” Plato

Gorgias trans. Robin Waterfield (London: Penguin, 1994) p.126.

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frightened away or will present competition. In other words, a thoroughly immoral

lifestyle would be incompatible with the basic human needs of living in a community

and abiding by its social rules. Crime, it is said, is contrary to our needs as social

beings. As Voltaire asserts (note the inconsistency with the Voltaire passage cited

above): “[t]he wicked have only accomplices, the voluptuous have companions in

debauchery, self-seekers have associates, princes have courtiers. Only the virtuous

have friends.” 34 Sade gives replies to both the claim that an immoral life will be

bereft of higher pleasures, and the claim that one will have no true friends.

Sade recognizes no hierarchy between higher and lower pleasures in a qualitative

sense, and, in keeping with his ontology, does not recognize a divine self or higher

goal to which one should aspire. Sade also denies that tyranny and philosophy are

mutually exclusive pleasures- his philosophical characters (Saint-Fond, Braschi,

Catherine the Great) frequently are tyrants. (The assumption that philosophy is a

‘higher pleasure’ is also open to question- the theme of the agonies of meditation,

from Pascal to Bayle through to Schopenhauer, suggests that at least a few

philosophers would have questioned the association of philosophy with pleasure).

Further, two of Sade’s ‘favorite things’- anal sex and writing ‘freethought’ literature

(even without the pornographic content) were illegal and severely punished.35 Sade

tends to identify immorality with illegality- that is, ‘wickedness’ with ‘crime,’

frequently describing sodomy, in particular, as a criminal, ‘unnatural’ act. Sade

himself recognizes the contingent relationship of morality and law, so he is

inconsistent on this point- given that he frequently criticizes what he takes to be unjust

laws (to be discussed in Chapter VII). Yet the point stands- the fact that Sade’s style

34 Voltaire Philosophical Dictionary p.29. Similarly, Hume holds that one must sacrifice “inward peace

of mind, consciousness of integrity, a satisfactory review of [his] own conduct”; that he loses

fellowship with his peers for the sake of the “feverish, empty amusements of luxury.” David Hume

Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983),

p.82. Writes Richard Joyce, “This is a more promising argument [than moral harm to self], but it has

inevitable limits. Our stipulated criminal participates in a sincere and caring manner in his local

community, and wouldn’t dream of cheating his friends. It is only upon a neighbouring community that

his harmful activities are visited.” Joyce p.33. 35 Sade’s Justine and Juliette were published anonymously for this very reason; when arrested for their

authorship in 1799, he claimed to be merely their copyist (PB: 111-112). He also attributed his

dangerously blasphemous poem “La Vérité” to La Mettrie. In Œuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade

ed. Annie le Brun, Jean-Jacques Pauvert (Paris: Pauvert, 1986). Vol. I p.551.

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of philosophy was itself essentially illegal rather complicates Socrates’ assertion that

‘lawless’ pleasures block the path to philosophy. For Sade, quite literally, philosophy

was itself a lawless pleasure (as it was for Socrates himself, in the end); and obeisance

to the law in 18th century France, for an intellectual, would itself be self-harm for

those who sought to go beyond the confines of accepted doctrine. Further, where

Sade associates immorality with the ‘crime’ of anal sex or homosexuality, his thinking

is typical of the period (Kant not only accepted that sodomy, homosexuality and

masturbation were immoral, but argued the case in the terms of his own ethical

thought). 36

Whether Sadeian characters could have truly satisfying relationships with their

peers is not a straightforward question, and will be discussed more fully in the

discussion of the Secret Society below. As discussed in the previous chapter, Sade’s

characters do have a conception of love and friendship amongst other libertines.

Competition with one’s peers is welcomed; fear of conflict is dismissed as a trait of

the weak. Sade’s characters are birds of a feather, and would assumedly not be able to

enjoy, or keep, any other company (all of this contradicts both the reading of Sade as

advocating absolute isolation from other people, and the Machiavellian principle,

stated by Juliette, of avoiding the use of accomplices).37

5.8 The Don’t be a Schmuck argument.

Sade argues that it would actually be imprudent, in a completely corrupt age, to follow

the law. Law-abiding citizens, like Justine, are schmucks (or, in Australian or British

English, mugs). He states also that committing crimes is a necessity of survival, in

particular for the very poor. From The Misfortunes of Virtue:

36 For discussion of Kant’s sexual morality, see Soble “Kant and Sexual Perversion.” 37 Machiavelli’s name appears frequently in Sade, yet Sade does not discuss or borrow from

Machiavelli at length. Instead, he repeatedly states the same two Machiavellian principles; a). if you

use accomplices, destroy them as soon as possible; and b). maintain power through violence, fear, and

ruse (J: 147, 316; 479-480, 637, 934 AV: 725). Sade tends to vulgarize Machiavelli, attributing him

such advice as using mass starvation or murder to maintain power (PB:315,336). For discussion of

Sade’s use of Machiavelli, see Fauskevåg pp.104, 124; Catherine Cusset “Sade, Machiavel et Néron,”

Dix-huitième Siècle 22 (1990): 401-411.

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There are two kinds of wicked men in the world: those whom great wealth and prodigious

influence put beyond the reach of so tragic an end [the scaffold], and those who, if

apprehended, will not avoid it. The latter kind, born with nothing, if they have any wit at

all, can have only two prospects in view: either Wealth or the Wheel (MV: 127). 38

Again, Sade applies rigid notions of right and wrong (the poor, he writes, must

become wicked to escape the Wheel) to a scenario that cannot justify such

classifications or condemnations. 39 Only a severely dogmatic moralist could declare

Juliette immoral simply because she turned to prostitution, or Justine truly virtuous

because she foolishly trusts every monk, no matter how many times she is abused. It

is an open question as to whether the laws and institutions of a state are ethical at all if

people incur the full force of the law in merely stealing food, or cohabiting out of

wedlock, as was frequent in the 18th century. Sade makes a point in noting that being

rational is only contingently related to being law-abiding (in 1797, for a British

woman to avoid wedlock yet enjoy sex, as Sade recommends, would have

automatically made her a criminal in the eyes of the law; sufficient grounds for being

sent to Australia). 40 Yet this is quite different to a critique of being moral. In an

environment in which not even killing is forbidden, as Simon Blackburn notes,

society (for those that cannot protect themselves) has simply dissolved, and no

decision concerning moral orientation can be made.41 Sade also uses the ‘don’t be a

schmuck’ argument in a dishonest way. He demonstrates that, in some cases, it is

necessary to break the law to acquire the basic necessities of life (as this world is

38 The Wheel, notes David Coward, “was a form of torturous execution. The criminal was

spreadeagled on a horizontally slung cartwheel and his limbs were broken by successive blows with an

iron bar until death ensued. When mercy was recommended, the victim was strangled before the

sentence was carried out or, to expedite matters, the executioner was allowed to deliver heavy blows

(the coups de grâce) to the chest or stomach” (MV: 269-270, n127). 39 Sade’s characters use exactly the same cynical logic in a political context, as discussed in Chapter

VII. 40 Patrick Colquhoun, in his Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (1797), claimed that 115,000

people- one in eight- was a member of the ‘criminal class’ of the City of London. Colquhoun classified

scavengers and gypsies as members of this class, as well as 50,000 ‘harlots,’ many of whom were

simply women cohabiting out of wedlock, in an age when divorce was impossible. Cited in Robert

Hughes The Fatal Shore (London: Pan, 1987) p.24. 41 Simon Blackburn Being Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p.71.

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‘utterly corrupt’) as a defence of breaking the law for the mere pleasure of it (the

libertines- by definition- never commit immoral acts out of necessity).

Sade’s case for the rationality, if not the reasonableness, of immorality is

strengthened if this argument is dropped. To be truly immoral actually requires that

many others are not immoral. Accordingly, John Van Ingen notes that the ‘why be

moral?’ question should really be “why should I be moral in a society with a relatively

stable political and legal system in which a large majority of the population not only

respects the law but also holds similar versions of a conventional morality?”42

Likewise, John Bigelow suggests immoral conduct may be ‘adaptive’ to the

environment under stable social conditions. 43 He has illustrated this with his ‘Rats

and Lemmings’ computer model, which is based on research into Simpson’s Paradox

and Game Theory. Bigelow explains: “[i]magine the lemmings to be altruistic and

self-sacrificing, or alternatively imagine them to be irrational, inefficient or lazy —

either way, by one means or another, imagine that they behave in ways that benefit

their neighbours at their own expense. Imagine the rats to be selfish, rational and

efficient, and regularly to gain benefits at the expense of their neighbours.” Bigelow

has found that, in populations in which the lemmings outnumber the rats, the rats

flourish, so long as their numbers remain small. In populations in which the rats

dominate, life is made worse for both lemmings and rats. Therefore, being a rationally

self interested, lazy and parasitic person- that is, a Sadeian libertine- may be

advantageous so long as the population only sustains a limited number of beings such

as oneself. Bigelow concludes: “In these games [of the type similar to Bigelow’s Rats

and Lemmings] it is a surprising result that populations robustly sustain a proportion

of Suckers or Lemmings in the long term. Sharks and Rats never disappear

completely, but nor do they ever take over completely. Thus, Simpson's Paradox

42 Van Ingen p.10. 43 Writes Bigelow: “Simpson’s paradox is a counterintuitive phenomenon that occurs when conclusions

are drawn from individual sets of data, and yet the opposite conclusion can be drawn if the data sets are

all added together. This indicates a way, in particular, in which patterns could evolve under Darwinian

natural selection which runs strongly against “adaptationist” expectations. In a similar way, business

“inefficiencies” could be unexpectedly resilient even in an ideally “free market.” Bigelow; paper

abstract: “Simpson's Paradox and the Game of Life” Centre for Biomedical Engineering, University of

Adelaide. Wednesday 8th August 2001. Sourced at:

www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/Groups/centre_bme/seminars/2001/Bigelow01.html

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places a constraint on how selfish, how efficient and how rational businesses or

organisms can become. On balance, this is probably cheerful news.”44 Ultimately,

Sade’s contention that adopting a ‘ratty’ strategy in a society of other rats is not

plausible. The flourishing of his characters (if one can call it that) is largely due to

their wealth and power, or assets that can be converted into the protection of the

wealthy and powerful (such as sexual attractiveness, in the case of Juliette), and not

primarily because of their lack of morality. Whether one is a rat or a lemming in a

‘totally corrupt age’ may in fact be trivial, and one’s fate may be more or less the

same unless one attains enough power over other rats (the theme of power in Sade

will be further developed in following chapters). In fact, Bigelow’s finding- that being

a rat only pays off when everyone else is a lemming- exactly matches the world of

Sade’s novels. Sade’s libertine characters do not live in utterly corrupted

environments. They are able to lie, cheat, steal, and deceive people precisely because

their victims are trusting and assume that others are trustworthy, parasiting upon the

ethical structures of the society upon which they prey. What is not so cheerful news is

the possibility that, so long as there are not many other sociopaths, sociopathy may

map onto, or constitute, a perfectly rational strategy. 45

Sade associates the attainment with power with immorality, and being moral with

being weak. In a ‘ratty’ society, clearly, being powerful is better than being weak, but

it is not obvious that there is such a link between the attainment and holding of power

and immorality. 46 If one assumes that weak people can be evil, and strong people can

be moral, Sade’s account founders.47

44 Gary Malinas, John Bigelow, "Simpson's Paradox", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

(Spring 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2004/entries/paradox-simpson/>. Last accessed September 2004.

I thank Lauren Ashwell and David Braddon-Mitchell for bringing this study to my attention.

John Maynard-Smith’s ‘hawks and doves’ model yields largely the same conclusion. Aggressive, hard-

fighting hawks win every conflict with timid, quick-to-retreat doves, yet in hawk-dominated

populations, the hawks pay the cost of frequent fights with one another. See John Maynard Smith

Evolution and the Theory of Games (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 45 Linda Mealey has suggested that psychopaths may represent a ‘minority strategy.’ Linda Mealey

“The Sociobiology of sociopathy: An integrated evolutionary model,” Behavioural and brain Sciences

18 (1995): 523-99. 46 One could become more powerful through cultivating a reputation for being trustworthy, for

example. Democracy, ideally, forces such a situation. A business example could work just as well; in a

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5.9 Monsters, Inc.

With one notable exception (who will be discussed presently), every libertine

character in Sade is associated in some way with a secret society or organization, and

every libertine crime is committed either in secrecy or with the collusion of secretive

or untouchably powerful people or organizations (the relationship between the

Bataillian doctrine and the topic of power in Sade’s work will be discussed in Chapter

VII). A common and significant feature of each of these societies is their degree of

social cohesion, and their adherence to a particular code of practice. Writes Beatrice

Fink, “[r]ather than being totally unstructured, the alternatives to official society

proposed by Sade all exhibit explicit codes of behaviour and institutions which

organize daily existence in a minute, even regimental fashion.” 48 The secret society

provides several advantages over the lifestyle of the ‘lone wolf’ criminal. It pools the

financial and information resources of the group of like minded individuals, provides

contacts for its members in other cities and countries, and it satisfies the social needs

of the members.49 The intriguing factor here, as Fink notes, is that the Libertines

escape the confines of society only to accept the confines of another.

There are three types of such societies in Sade. The first group are ready-made

institutions which allow for predation and abuse of the powerless. Schools, asylums

and convents are typical examples (LNJ 1: 171, 178, 201, 257; 2:41, 298).50 The country known for rampant corruption and poor quality goods and services, a company could achieve

higher profitability through cultivating a trustworthy name. 47 I suspect that this association of virtue and the renouncing of worldly power is due to Sade’s

Christian heritage. 48 Fink “Political System” p.501. 49 Sade’s account is not novel, however; discussions of secret societies and their exotic moralities

appear in the writings of Rousseau, Helvétius and Diderot. Rousseau was preoccupied with secret

societies, and his speculations concerning shadowy conspiracies are similar to those of Sade. He

discusses the secretive Council of Ten who ran Venice by stealth, and suggested that wars had been

started by cynical financiers with profits to be made thereby. He also refers to the machinations of the

Jesuits (C: 595; SC: 170, DI: 149). Both Helvétius and Diderot had considered the moral systems of

criminal groups; Helvétius Treatise on Man vol. II p.309; Diderot “Droit naturel” In Œuvres politiques,

ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1966): 29-35, p.34. Quoted in Bennington “Sade Laying Down the

Law,” pp. 40-41. 50 Deepak Sawhney, Stephen Pfohl, Adorno and Horkheimer and others have noted the similarities

between Sade’s description of the Libertines and the negative aspects of Capitalism. In reply, I suggest

that the real source of the problem is the nature of organizational structures, rather than the economic

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second group is the ‘shadow government, ’which typically plans vast conspiracies

involving mass murder. Two notable examples are the Northern Lodge of Stockholm,

a Masonic group, which conspires to lead France to revolt and cause global anarchy,

and the Secret Government of Venice, which plots to destroy entire rebellious villages

with biochemical agents (J: 864, 1150, 1188, 1192). 51

The third group are made up of wealthy, powerful individuals (typically made up of

‘pillars of society,’ such as ministers, high court judges, and police chiefs) who seek

to pool their resources for the pleasures of raping, torturing and murdering women

and children (the only difference is of scale; that described in 120 has only four core

members; that in Juliette has four hundred). The most thoroughly described such

society is the Society of the Friends of Crime, described in Juliette.

The text of Juliette includes the full statutes of the Society, which covers all

aspects of its functioning. This text, running to ten pages and forty-five particular

dynamic as such, given that socialist systems also create oppressive structures. Deepak Sawhney

“Unmasking Sade” In Sawhney ed. Must we burn Sade? (New York: Humanity Books, 1999): 15-

30:27; Stephen Pfohl “Seven Mirrors” p.56. 51 Many of the most bizarre and horrifying schemes described in Sade’s work are derived from the

paranoia of the period, in particular the conspiracy theories that were circulating during the French

Revolution. In Juliette, Sade suggests that French government officials were plotting to starve the

population through manipulation of the grain supply, that an international Masonic conspiracy

dedicated to exterminating all the world’s monarchies was responsible for the fall of the Swedish

government, and that plans were afoot to kill the entire Catholic population of France (the latter idea

was not so much a conspiracy theory as a continuation of the trend of systematic imprisonment and

execution of clergymen; J:478-479, 500-501, 549, 850-871). Sade’s text also states that the French

Revolution had been instigated by the Jacobins and Jesuits (J: 501n). Lacombe cites several texts that

detail such conspiracy theories that bear a textual resemblance to Sade’s work, in particular Le

Tombeau de Jacques Molay by Cadet- Gassicourt (which details the role played by the Masons in the

fall of the Swedish government), and the work of abbé Barruel. Barruel accused the Masons for

instigating the French Revolution. He also linked the Masons with the atheistic philosophes, an

association that Sade also makes. Barruel’s conspiracy theory involves a plot to kill all the kings and

the pope, demoralise the people, exhaust the population, corrupt morality, and ruin the public treasury.

It was also commonly believed that the Templars and Masons engaged in elaborate and bizarre orgies,

another Sadeian motif. Lacombe pp.62-83; 94-100. For discussion on the roll played by the

Freemasons in disseminating Enlightenment ideas and a-religious literature, see Margaret C. Jacob The

Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: George Allen & Unwin,

1981).

191

statutes, serves as a codification of all libertine social interaction.52 A dissection of

this document is revealing; it shows that, even though the society is established to

provide organizational support for illegal activity, it has its own principles of ethics

and social cohesion and, hence, its own notions of legality and illegality. 53

The introduction of the document is a restatement of two counter-moral

principles; firstly, the denial of free will, and, secondly, the Bataillian doctrine.

Through crime, “it is the Sodality’s belief that...the individual serves Nature” (J: 418).

Yet the first statute makes a clear distinction between the doctrine of natural

superiority and the legally enforced equality of all members of the Sodality:

1. No distinction is drawn among the individuals who comprise the Sodality; not that it

holds all men equal in the eyes of Nature- a vulgar notion deriving from infirmity, want of

logic, and false philosophy- but because it is persuaded and maintains that distinctions of

any kind may have a detrimental influence upon the Sodality’s pleasures and are certain

sooner or later to spoil them (J: 418).

We can therefore describe the Sodality as being -micro-Benthamite and macro-

Bataillian. Benthamite principles are adhered to with regards to its own members (co-

operation for maximum pleasure) but, with regards to non- members, in particular the

six hundred children imprisoned in the ‘seraglios,’ adheres to the principle that the

strong should predate upon the weak. Whether Sade’s doctrine here stands depends on

whether this dual ideology can be sustained without inconsistency.

Two other aspects of the Sodality’s principles sit uneasily with the rest of Sade’s

works. Firstly, for the purposes of maximizing utility, the Sodality adheres to what

appears to be a social contract, despite Sade’s mockery of it, as noted earlier in the

chapter. Secondly, there is a sense of fraternity and mutual support (romantic love is

banned, in keeping with the observations concerning love and friendship discussed in

52 Such codes exist in The 120 Days of Sodom and La Nouvelle Justine also; the Statutes of the Sodality

of the Friends of Crime differs in that it is written specifically for the libertines themselves (120:241-

249; LNJ 1:316-319) 53 One statute suggests that the Sodality is Sade’s fantasy of a place where he could feel at home.

Statute 17 reads: “No condemnation of a court of law, no public disgrace, no defamation of character

will disqualify a candidate for admission...Rejected by the world, these outcasts will find consolations

and friends in a society which recognizes their value...(J:421).

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Chapter IV; J: 423). 54 The eighth statute reads: “[t]he Members of the Sodality,

united through it into one great family, share all of their hardships as they do their

joys; they aid one another mutually in all life’s situations...” (J: 420, 423).

Accordingly, members are required to address each other en tutoyant, to express

fraternity (J: 423; ΠIII: 556n.2).

The ethics of the Sodality are enforced with an elaborate political and legal

structure. The Sodality elects, by secret ballot, a President each month, of either sex,

whose chief duty is to see that the Sodality’s laws are respected (J: 420). The

Sodality’s membership of four hundred members is to be made up of equal numbers

of men and women (J: 424).55 The rules and regulations of the Sodality fulfil several

functions, besides merely pooling resources. Firstly, the rules protect the members

from each other. Bullying, dueling, and the carrying of weapons- not so much as a

walking stick- within the Sodality’s premises are all forbidden (suggesting a certain

amount of distrust; J:421, 424, 425). Murder is banned, except of the victims in the

‘seraglios.’ Cruelty towards another member is forbidden: “no cruel passion, save

whipping upon the buttocks only, may be given vent to” (J: 421). Sexually transmitted

diseases are checked by the Sodality surgeon, and seriously diseased members are

expelled (J: 424). The role of the Censor, the Sodality’s disciplinary officer, is to

maintain “decorum and a propitious atmosphere...to see to the preservation of quiet,

moderating laughter and conversations and everything else that is not in the spirit of

libertinage or that is damaging to it” (J: 423). As noted above, an emergency fund is

maintained for members in legal trouble (J: 420).

The rules also protect the society as a collective. Betrayal of its secrets is

punished with execution; involvement in politics (which would assumedly attract

undue attention) is banned also (J: 421, 424, 425). The society is also protected from

54 Juliette’s natural instinct for fellow feeling is expressed as camaraderie for other moral outsiders:

“By some quirk of the imagination, by some curious way of reckoning, thanks to some feeling I’d

perhaps had difficulty explaining clearly, even to myself, I never wanted to wrong anyone as corrupt as

I. It is doubtless here the old story of honor among thieves, or of mutual respect; but it was operative in

me (J: 159; similar: 969). 55 In keeping with Sade’s commitment to ideological vertigo, and in matching every doctrine with its

opposite, the Society’s president gives a talk on misogyny, whilst the society’s female members are

issued with a pamphlet advising on the viciousness of men (J: 431; 502).

193

infiltration by non-partisans with a rigorous selection process. During a month-long

probation period, members must be utterly subservient; refusal during this period to

participate in any sexual act is punished with immediate execution (J: 21).

Interestingly, secret societies (“factions, cabals, cliques”) within the secret society are

strictly forbidden (J: 422).

Two aspects of Libertine protocol have no direct relation to either Benthamite or

Bataillian principles. There is a high value placed on ideological conviction for its

own sake- in effect- the libertines have a concept of ‘thought-crime.’ Juliette realizes

this when, whilst listening to Prime Minister Saint-Fond discussing the genocide of

two –thirds of the population of France, she visibly shudders with horror. For this

involuntary show of all-too-human feelings, she is expelled from the Society and

exiled from Paris (J: 549). (Likewise, Juliette herself throws her companion Olympia

into the crater of Mt. Vesuvius because she “lacked depth and rigor in her principles”;

J: 1019). Secondly, there is a preoccupation with, as Foucault puts it, transforming

desire into discourse. Members are expected to give papers “contrary to polite custom

and religion” at the beginning of each Assembly; those deemed worthy are printed

and kept in the Sodality archives (J: 420).56 Members are also required to give

confession “the dates of which coincide with what Catholics call the four great

festival days of the year;” those who have done the most terrible things collect a prize,

so long as they can provide witnesses (J:422). The official posts specified in the

Statutes includes printers, scribes, and- bizarrely- a Censor of Texts and Publications

(J: 422); the Sodality also maintains “a print shop, type setters, a dozen copyists, and

four [proof?] readers (J: 425).

Sade has done us the service of trying to formulate the ethics, or rather the

cooperative strategy, of such a group in as coherent a way as he was able. The pure

nihilism of Minski is unassailable; no purchase can be found on its surfaces. The

complexity of the Secret Society, however, may allow us to pick its locks. Two

features of the Sodality of the Friends of Crime- its utilization of the Social Contract,

and its commitment to coordinated self interest, require further analysis.

56 The same pattern is found in the 120 Days, in which a story-teller, brought to Silling for the purpose,

gives a four hour monologue each evening (120:246).

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5.10 The Anti-Social Contract

The Society of the Friends of Crime has an implied society or partnership contract,

defined as follows: “[t]he society contract assumes that two or several persons agree

to place something in common, with an eye to reaching a ... goal from which mutual

benefit will be derived.”57 Members are obliged to pay annual fees to cover the costs

incurred; profits and losses are the same for every member. Details on finances show

this: “when the Treasurer reports a favourable balance at year’s end, he divides it

among his fellow Members; and in that other case where disbursements have

exceeded revenue, a tax is levied and the deficit made up to the treasurer”(J:419).

Two passages in La Nouvelle Justine make explicit the contractual nature of the

criminal society, stressing both its plausibility and its lack of underlying moral

sentiment. The gang leader Sylvestre explains to Justine that the solidity of his gang

requires certain sacrifices, but that these sacrifices repay themselves handsomely

(LNJ1: 380-381).58 Another gang member, Cœur -de –Fer (‘Ironheart’), discusses the

internal dynamic of criminal groups with Justine. As all criminals are egoistic, reasons

Justine, criminal societies will inevitably fly apart. In reply, Cœur-de -Fer explains to

Justine that the social cohesion of his gang has nothing to do with virtue as such: “[c]e

n’est nullement par vertu que, me croyant, je le suppose, le plus fort de la troupe, je ne

poignarde pas mes camarades pour les dépouiller; c’est parce que, me trouvent seul

alors, je me priverais des moyens qui peuvent assurer la fortune que j’attends de leurs

secours” (LNJ 1:87). Sade sees reciprocal co-operation in terms of an underlying

mental calculus, rather than as a morality. As has been shown in both sociological

research and game theory analysis, there are situations where it is rational for egoists

to cooperate, even though individual defection may appear to be individually

57 Jean Imbert Le droit antique (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1961) p.112. Quoted in Hénaff

p.219. 58 “ … la solidité de notre association devient utile à sa conservation et que, pour son maintien, nous

préférons quelques sacrifices dont tous les moyens que nous avons ici de faire de mal savant nous

dédommager amplement. Ne t’imagine pas que nous nous chérissons beaucoup pour cela ; nous nous

voyons tous les jours de trop près pour nous aimer : mais nous sommes obligés d’être ensemble, et

nous nous y maintenons par politique, à peu près comme les voleurs dont la sûreté de l’association n’a

d’autres bases que le vice et la nécessité de l’exercer ” (LNJ 1 :381).

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rational.59 Insofar as Sade’s libertines do, after negotiations, settle on rules of conduct,

hence, notions of justice and punishment, this makes problematic his dismissal of

‘true’ justice as being ‘chimerical’(J:171).

2). Coordinated self interest does not alone yield an ethics.

The emergence of a mutually beneficial behavioural stratagem amongst the libertines

clearly does not lead to an elegant synthesis of private and public good. This

observation is in keeping with Sade’s refusal to reduce morality to rational self

interest. If there were a rational, instrumental explanation for behaving in a moral

manner, this would not, for Sade, provide a moral reason. It is an argument for

prudence (as Sade’s character Saint-Fond puts it, “What the devil would the merit be

in virtue if vice weren’t preferable to it?”; J: 318). As such, Sade follows Rousseau in

critiquing those theorists (Bernard Mandeville, and in our own time, Robert Nozick)

that attempted to define morality as collective, rational self interest. 60 The social 59 Pinker pp.255-258; Steven Kuhn "Prisoner's Dilemma" In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

(Fall 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/prisoner-dilemma/>. Accessed September 2004;

Robert Axelrod “The Emergence of Cooperation Among Egoists," The American Political Science

Review 75 (1981): 306-318. 60 In The Fable of the Bees or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1725), Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733)

had argued that humans are by nature base and egoistic, and that vice, corruption and the satisfaction of

desire were the only viable basis for building a thriving economy. For the greatest ‘publick benefit’, he

argued, it is only necessary that we act in accordance with our instinct for ‘private vices’, but conduct

ourselves in a rational manner; the ‘invisible hand’ of the market place (as Smith would later refer to it)

would sort out the rest. Sade appears to have known of this principle. Sade’s Aline et Valcour the

philosopher-king Zamé states that, in his Utopian state, “… je tâche de profiter des défauts ou des vices

pour les rendre les plus utiles possible au reste des citoyens” (AV: 365). See Bernard Mandeville The

Fable of the Bees or Private vices, Publick Benefits, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988). I

thank Charles Pigden for pointing this text out to me. D’Holbach, too, effectively reduced morality to

rational self interest; D’Holbach System of Nature pp. 99,108, 221.

In Invariances, Nozick writes: “The function of ethics is to protect and promote voluntary

cooperation and coordination between people, to guide this cooperation (through norms of division of

benefits), and to demarcate the domain of such cooperation (which people are to be the participants):

also, to specify what is to be done when the above rules, norms, etc. are not followed, that is, to

specify norms of response to different kinds of non- cooperation (should it be met by boycott,

punishment, retribution?) ;and to guide or mandate character virtues relevant to cooperation, and to

people’s response to noncooperators” (Nozick Invariances pp 266-267). As for the notion of ethics as

196

arrangements that foster mutual altruism are typically symmetrical; that is, the

rewards, punishments and temptations concerning cooperation or defection from the

‘social contract’ are the same for each ‘player.’61 The fact is that the real world is not

an even playing field. In this sense, Sade is correct to reject the supposition that it is.

The members of Sade’s Society of the Friends of Crime are all extremely wealthy

and hold high offices in the government- their power is evinced in the fact that a

statute bans them from using their influence in politics (J: 425). They cannot afford to

harm each other (Necati Polat notes that Sade’s libertines interact with one another as

‘equal sovereigns,’ that is, as nation-states).62 Accordingly, Sade’s characters do not

cooperate with people who give nothing in return, are more valuable to them against

their own free will (children to be raped and killed, primarily), and people who do not

pose a threat. 63 Individuals who are too weak to participate as equal players are

reduced to their exchange value, as sex objects.64

5.11 Doctrinal dispute

...quel peut être le rapport de l’exception avec l’exception ?

Maurice Blanchot65

To succeed as an immoral agent, one must operate in conjunction with other

immoral agents- that is, as a society. This solution leads to some doctrinal problems.

This is because, as Fink notes, “Sade never fully develops the mechanics of libertine assisting people (or other entities) that may not, or cannot, directly cooperate with us, Nozick writes of

these ‘Higher levels of ethics’ that they are “matters of personal choice or personal ideal,” rather than

the core of morality (ibid. p.281). 61 Steven Kuhn “Prisoner's Dilemma." 62 Polat p.14. President Saint-Fond can afford to expel Juliette precisely because she has no political

rank, and her monetary assets are essentially gifted to her by wealthier people with higher connections

(J: 550). 63 Rousseau had essentially made the same point: “There is no profit so legitimate that it cannot be

exceeded by what can be made illegitimately and an injury done to a neighbour is always more

lucrative than any service” (DI: 147-148; see also SC: 21). 64 Monsieur Dubourg explains the principle of capitalism to Justine, a girl of 12, when she refuses to

have sex with him for money: “on what grounds do you believe that Wealth should extend a helping

hand seeing that you serve its purpose in no way whatsoever?” (MV:13). 65 Maurice Blanchot “Sade” (Preface to La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette) in Œuvres Complètes (Paris:

Cercle du livre Précieux, 1966-1967) VI : 11-43, p.20. Cited in Fink “Political system in Sade” p.511.

197

relationships, namely those of power with power.”66 Firstly, membership of the secret

society apparently entails the same conflicts and anxieties that (for Sade) characterize

conventional morality and social compromise; that “human legislation” which forces

one to “forego certain things” (J: 143). This places Sade’s insistence on the injustice

and impossibility of social compromise in an interesting light. Delbène, earlier in

Juliette, states that “words like punishments, rewards, commandments, prohibitions,

order, and disorder are merely allegorical terms drawn from what transpires in the

sphere of human events and intercourse” (Sade’s italics; J:41). At this, one can reply-

so what? The libertines of the Sodality themselves do not consider their own

commandments and prohibitions as merely allegorical (again, note the curiously

religious tone in Delbène’s reasoning; ethics is ‘merely’ human, therefore is in some

sense diminished).

Secondly, there is a basic doctrinal contradiction involved in the Secret Society, of

which there are two aspects. Firstly, there is a tension between the Benthamite and

Bataillian principles. Secondly, there is a tension between the contractual nature of the

Society, and the libertines’ disdain for such contracts (expressed less elegantly– there

is a tension between the Benthamite-Contract doctrine and the Bataille-Isolationist

doctrine). The libertine position, writes Hénaff, “is to affirm naked, undisguised

strength or to recognize it wherever it is obliged to operate in disguise.” As such, the

contractual relationship is an “abdication or domestication of strength.” 67 Sade’s

disdain for contractual agreements, to be consistent, ought to apply whether the

contract is in the name of good or evil (especially so if such a dichotomy has been

dismissed as groundless, as is the case for the resolutely nihilistic characters). Beatrice

Fink notes this problem also: “Although master libertines overtly pledge loyalty to

one another as a measure of enlightened self- interest, at times they dispose of one

another when they are so inclined, eg. la Durand’s false accusations intentionally

leading to Clairwil’s murder by Juliette” 68

Likewise, the conflict between Benthamite and Bataillian principals is evident in

the first lines of the Statutes. The introductory passage states clearly that there are no

crimes; even to murder is allegedly to act in accordance with Nature. Were a member

66 Fink “Political System”p.511. 67 Hénaff p.221. 68 Fink “Political System” p.505.

198

to start killing other members in the midst of an orgy, they would only be

contradicting the Benthamite principal. Yet the members contradict this principal

insofar as they imprison and torture children. It cannot be both ways.

Imagine that Minski travels up to Paris and joins the Sodality (suppose that he

convinces the President that he is in fact from Paris, which is a requisite). He agrees to

submit to the one-month probation period, and swears to atheism and the ‘god of

pleasure,’ as required, in accordance with Statute Nº3 (J:419). (Note that the Statutes

do not require that one swear on Statute N°8, which unites all members as “one great

family”). A welcoming orgy ensues. Minski cannot penetrate anyone without killing

the recipient of his enormous member, so he glumly accepts passive anal sex and so

forth. Yet, if he is to honour his vows and ‘worship pleasure,’ he will simply have to

start killing. The Censor calls a stop to the orgy, and tells Minski that he must leave,

as he has broken the rules. Suppose that Minski replies as follows:

a). I was asked to swear to atheism, and the god of pleasure; I was not asked to swear to

any other principal. I am a man of my word (just a quirk, mind you- I am a nihilist, after

all).

b). The 8th statute is groundless. Even if every Sodality member here really was a family

member, this gives no grounds for mutual care- the rules of the Sodality themselves state

that all offspring of Sodality members are abandoned to the Seraglio, as child sex slaves,

at the age of seven. I myself raped and killed every member of my own family, male and

female (J: 580). I do not understand such irrational sentiments as love for family

members. Frankly, I doubt that you do either. Perhaps you refer to your peers here as

siblings in a metaphorical sense; this is not, however, an argument.

c). I am a giant, forty- five and in my prime, and can easily overpower every one of you,

in particular as you have banned all weapons from the chamber. You see yourselves as

superior to all others by the grace of your intelligence and wealth. I personally own an

entire Italian district. I note that your doctrine is absurd and contradictory, hence

demonstrating my intellectual superiority. In keeping with the Law of the Strong, the

reduction of all value to my own sovereign pleasure, and out of sheer boredom, I will,

without contradicting either myself or your principles- take my pleasure with every one of

you until you are all dead, wondering vaguely what it must feel like to be amongst the

weak of this world whilst doing so.

As the Censor screams for mercy, Minski wryly cites the 8th Statute again, which

states that alms or charities to non- members in distress are strictly forbidden (J: 420).

(Noticing the hint of incomprehension on the Censor’s terrorized face, Minski adds

199

that the Society is hereby dissolved- its more or less plausible, if contradictory,

doctrine unworthy of such pathetic wretches). Another tries to reason with Minski; -

certainly, His Honour is clearly a superior specimen, but the rules of the Sodality-

based, as they are, on the principle of maximizing pleasure, must be adhered to-

Reason demands it. Minski notes that, as he absolutely must kill in order to acquire

pleasure, adherence to his own pleasure maximization requires it. He adds that the

laws of the Sodality are merely the work of men, and weak men at that, to protect

themselves from the strong with a spurious notion of ‘brotherhood.’ The Sodality and

its laws is merely a means to maximizing the pleasure of a small group; the

Brotherhood of Man is not a central principle of either the Sodality or Minski (J: 593).

Insofar as immediate execution is the fate of anyone who breaks the rules of the

house, he notes that the Sodality has essentially the same scorn for hospitality as

himself (J: 591). Absolute contempt for the lives of others is another key Libertine

principle, as is the acknowledgement of any contractual reciprocity. Through ripping

apart every member of the Sodality, Minski –according to the logic of the Libertines

themselves- makes them his inferiors, and proves his superiority through mocking

their laws.69 In turning the Hall of Pleasure into his own private abattoir away from

home, Minski merely concentrates the same logic of destruction to a smaller point.

This doctrinal conflict illustrates a crucial point concerning the behaviour of

criminal society. Minski is an incredible character, who lives an utterly implausible

life. His household is staffed by fifty “evil-looking blackamoors,” and seven hundred

victims, regularly restocked by one hundred agents (J: 580-582). He has no equal or

familiar in his house, relying entirely on his wealth and his physical strength to

maintain security. His only engagements with others are – literally- penetrating and

then eating them. Whether such a character could survive with such simple, bestial

master-slave relationships is doubtful. The Sodality, on the other hand, is no more

implausible than any other paedophilia ring. The immorality of Minski- insofar as it

does not even admit of the possibility of cooperation- is so pure that it has no real-

world plausibility. The Sodality makes compromises with Libertine orthodoxy,

insofar as it requires for its implementation a certain fellow feeling, a certain notion of

virtue- ‘quasi-virtue,’ perhaps, ‘quasi-punishment’ and so on. Immorality, to function

with any degree of cooperation, requires an impoverished moral sense, but a moral

69 Hénaff p.244.

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sense all the same- the minimal social glue for the predatory corporate organisation to

function. (A consequence of this analysis is that a secret society of criminals is far

more stable, hence dangerous, if the members actually believe in the moral code of

that society). Libertines and their affiliates must have just enough social sense to

cooperate with each other, but not enough to make them feel pity for the non-

members who they harm. For this to work, Libertines must also be able to distinguish

members, or potential members, from non-members.70 Without a). a doctrine that

distinguishes between members and non-members, and b). the belief that such a

difference could be ethically relevant (or that all, or most, non-members are hostile, in

accordance with the ‘don’t be a schmuck’ argument), it would be impossible, or at

least very difficult, to maintain the balance between disdain for outsiders and respect

for insiders.71 Without such an ‘aristocratic’ principle, Sade’s libertines cannot act in

accordance with two distinct moral codes. The following chapter will discuss this

doctrine, the Natural Aristocratic Principle in Nature.

5.12 Conclusion

Sade’s texts are so horrific that he may have in fact overstated the argument against

being moral, insofar as a more subtle account of criminality may have appeared more

appealing. Perhaps it is more honest to describe criminality in such a way, in

revealing its essential truth. If Sade had merely wanted to encourage vice, he would

have described criminality in abstract, poetic language, and through avoiding

unpleasant details. By forcing an association of immorality with the most brutal

violence and degradation- ( in the manner of Goya, rather than Tarantino) - it is as if

Sade wishes to inoculate the reader.72

Minski rapes and kills his victims without remorse. He proclaims himself

“intelligent enough to destroy every creed, to flout every religion…proud enough to

70 Juliette presents herself to new acquaintances with paperwork concerning her earlier contacts and

allegiances, and impresses with her philosophical sophistication, suggesting a combination of economic

and intellectual elitism. Even so, negotiations with more powerful libertines, such as Minski and

Braschi, are especially tense (J: 579, 756, 937,981, 993; also 120: 639). 71 This schema maps onto what anthropologists refer to as ‘in-group –out-group bias.’ For discussion,

see Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

(Boston, Ma: Mariner Books. 1997) pp.195, 196. 72 Roger Shattuck considers, and rejects, this position. See Shattuck p.292.

201

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abhor every government, to refuse every tie, to ignore every check, to consider myself

above every ethical principle...” (J: 583). It seems enough to declare him evil without

having demonstrated that he is irrational also. It is also tempting to write off Sade’s

proposal as a doctrinal structure that collapses into itself, like a dying star. Yet

characters the equal of Sade’s Minski, from Pyongyang to Kampala, appear in the

newspapers all the time. That such monsters actually thrive is a question for ethical

counterintelligence and forensic psychology, rather than an exercise in pure theory. 73

Sade gives no straightforward reason as to why a life of crime or despotism

should be pursued, and illustrates the shortcomings of such a life even in the absence

of interception by the law. Yet he shows also shows the difficulty, or futility, in trying

to argue why such a life should be abandoned using reason alone.

This chapter has discussed Sade’s negotiation with ethics from a thoroughly a-

moral standpoint. The following will explore the other approach in Sade- the attempt

to derive a morality from the order of things.

73 Ian Hinckfuss writes: “...society not only harbors the mere possibility of the free rider. It positively

generates an entire class of them.” Hinckfuss p.55. Hinckfuss’ sense is different to mine; he holds that

it is morality itself that is morally questionable, as, he argues, it is essentially a means of controlling

society for the benefit of the few. I merely agree that human society is full of syndicated, egoistic free

riders. Hinckfuss’ vision of a society ruled by shadowy immoral elites, where what passes for morality

really is mere crowd control, is not far off the mark, however. North Korean society could well be such

a situation. South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-Ok had this to say of his captors, the Government of

North Korea, “The North Koreans were all talented and good people; only 200 or so were evil, and they

were in charge.” “The Madness of Kim Jong-Il,” The Observer Sunday, November 2nd, 2003.

Chapter VI: ROME vs. JERUSALEM Ethics II.

The watchwords of the battle, written in characters which have remained legible

throughout human history, read: “Rome vs. Israel, Israel vs. Rome.” No battle has been as

momentous as this one. Nietzsche Genealogy of Morals1

6.1 Introduction

As was noted at the end of Chapter II, two distinct doctrines are proposed in Sade

concerning the relationship between ontology and morality. Firstly, as discussed in the

previous chapter, Sade holds that there is no relationship at all between the order of

things and morality. The second view, to be discussed here, is a teleological

philosophy according to which one should live in accordance with nature. Sade rejects

not only the specific beliefs and doctrines of Christianity, but also its morality,

dismissed as a psychic artefact of a spiritual sickness. In its stead, Sade proposes a

philosophy according to which Man is to live according to his innate nature,

characterized by a desire to subjugate and destroy others. Accordingly, the doctrine of

equality and the notion that life is sacred are rejected. Christianity is dismissed as

detrimental to the spiritual health of the state. Accordingly, Sade’s characters propose

to kill every Catholic in France. This chapter will track the vector of this thought.

6.2 The Antichrist

A dead God! Nothing so droll as this incoherent term out of the Catholic’s lexicon. God

means eternal; dead means noneternal. Blithering Christians, what do you propose to do

with your dead God?” (J: 560).

Sade’s criticism of Christianity, to a point, follows the popular anticlericalism of

his age, in particular that of Voltaire. Sade repeats Voltaire’s accusation that religious

doctrine and institutions are a tool used by the powerful to subjugate the weak (the

1 Friedrich Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (in one volume) trans. Francis

Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956) p.185.

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opposite view- that religion is a psychological subterfuge used by the ‘weak’ to

overthrow the ‘strong,’ is discussed below). Juliette, in conversation with King

Ferdinand of Naples, describes religion as an “...opium you feed the people, so that

drugged, they do not feel their hurts, inflicted by you” (J: 930; similar: MV: 37,157).

The Papacy is described as a dynasty based on intrigue, murder, and exploitation of

the gullibility of the populace, and the priests are described as lecherous, cynical,

cruel, and hypocritical (J:393, 751-753, 968; MV :64, 101).2 The character Friar

Claude explains that the hypocrisy and cynicism of the clergy is due to what the

French call deformation professionnelle: “[d]welling closer to the being it

presupposes, we are in a better position than others to perceive the features of the

falsehood” (J: 458; similar: 459, 766-798). Sade also associates the cloistered life of

clergy, monks, and nuns with the development of psychosexual abnormalities, a large

number of Sade’s more sexually exotic characters being associated with the Church.

Further, according to Sade’s psychology, where authority figures have unchecked and

unquestioned power, it is inevitable that such trust and power is abused.

Although Sade’s attack on Christian belief and dogma follows well established

anticlerical lines, as everywhere, he takes it to an unprecedented extreme. Again in

keeping with Voltaire, Sade cites the religious intolerance of Jewish and Christian

dogma as the cause of the senseless slaughter of millions (MV: 160; J: 499, J: 790n).

Sade employs the standard Argument from Evil; God cannot be simultaneously all

good, all knowing and all powerful whilst terrible things happen (MV: 127). 3Against

the reply that human agency requires free will, which therefore requires the possibility

that human agents will do ill, it is argued that human psychology is itself the creation

of an omnipotent and omniscient being (J:372). Against the Doctrine of Hell, Sade

argues that it is merely unjust, and vindictive, to have condemned billions of souls to

eternal damnation, or to have created men at all (J: 373-380). Sade has his characters

enact various demonstrations to make his points- the man who believes himself 2 For Sade’s observations on the hypocrisy of the church, see MV: 5, 15, 276; 120: 217, 266, 268, 270,

274, 335, 446; J: 24, 57,461, 573, 630, 707. For discussion on the depiction of clergy as sexual

predators in 18th Century pornography, See Jean - Marie Goulemot Ces Livres qu'on ne lit que d'une

main: Lecture et lecteurs de livres pornographiques au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions Alinea, 1991). 3 For comparable views in Voltaire, see his Philosophical Dictionary pp. 331- 332. For discussion of

Sade’s borrowings from Voltaire, see Jean Deprun “Quand Sade récrit Fréret, Voltaire, et d’Holbach,”

Obliques 12-13 (1977):263-266.

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absolved of atrocities after making confession, for example, or Saint-Fond’s ritual

slaying which, according to his understanding of Catholicism, should enable him to

send the victim straight to Hell with the aid of a communal wafer, a forbidden (and

non-consensual) sexual act, and a contract with the devil written in the victim’s own

blood (J: 369, 547). The very possibility of such reductios, Sade’s characters

conclude, would indicate that the religious dogma that permits them would be merely

insulting to a supremely wise entity (J: 391; MV: 157). Sade also discusses

inconsistencies between the Bible and Church doctrine, and irregularities in the Bible

itself, betraying a knowledge of both scriptural sources and secondary literature that

betrays an intriguing mastery of biblical scholarship (he notes, for example, that the

Exodus account is implausible, as Pharaoh ’s cavalry units would not have been

deployed in a desert terrain, and that the doctrine of Hell is inconsistent with either

Ecclesiastes or the original, Hebrew concept of Gehenna [LNJ 1:126, J:388]). 4

Sade’s assault on Christianity goes far beyond such Freethought staples, however,

in both depth and ferocity. The philosophes were content, to a point, to merely accuse

the Church of perverting the very morality that it publicly upheld, and did not

generally question its morality (they had touched upon this idea, a topic which will be

discussed briefly at the end of the chapter). Not only did Sade take an axe to the

morality that underlies the Judaeo-Christian heritage; he proposed an entirely new

Weltanschauung with which to supplant it. Strength, power, and domination, for Sade,

are the true values; the Truth of Man, occulted by the inauthentic, sickly and life-

denying values of Christianity. Sade holds that conventional morality is passive and

conceptually secondary, and that it is the so-called criminal will that expresses

richness and energy (in a single stroke, Sade neutralizes the argument that to will evil

is merely to acknowledge the ‘good’). To account for the existence of Christian

morality, as will be discussed below, Sade argues that it began as a psychological

subterfuge to defeat the natural masters.

4 This apparent erudition may be due to such secondary sources as Bayle’s Dictionary, however,

although Bayle is not mentioned in Sade’s surviving works.

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6.3.1 Non-Transcendent Teleology: the Adoration of Kali

Who dares misery love,

And hug the form of death

Dance in destruction’s dance

To him the mother comes

Vivekananda5

Sade’s characters propose a teleology that emphasizes war, strife, and destruction

as fundamental natural principles (introduced in previous chapters as the ‘Bataille

doctrine’). As with the doctrine of Rousseau, Sade’s teleology assumes that a).

morality can be derived from the Natural order, and that b). Man, if only he can learn

to overcome the restraints of Christian morality, is at home in a world whose harsh

truth is continuous with his own inner nature. This teleology is explained on three

levels of organization; at the cosmic level, at the ecological, or ‘biological’ level, and

as a general theory of human nature. At each of these strata, Sade associates energy

with evil, and virtue with stasis. Hence, good and evil map onto stasis and energy.

William Blake (1757-1827) gives a more formulaic and ethically neutral expression of

this idea.

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love

and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call God & Evil. Good is the passive

that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.6

At the cosmic level, Sade’s characters hold that the cosmos is steady by a balance of

chaos and order, and that both are necessary parts of the world. Noirceuil explains:

5 Quoted in Ajit Mookerjee Kali: The Feminine Force. (New York: Destiny Books, 1988) p.71. 6 William Blake “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” Plate 3, In William Blake Selected Poems ed. P.H.

Butter (London: Everyman, 1991) p.52. This duality of passive vs. active, matter vs. reason is the

standard Stoic principle as described in Cicero. In a letter dated April 17th 1781, Sade claimed to have

learned Cicero by heart. Sade, L’Aigle, Mademoiselle, lettres publiées pour la première fois sur les

manuscrits autographes. Gilbert Lely, ed. (Paris: Les Editions Georges Artigues, 1949) p. 89. Quoted

in Berman Thoughts and Themes p. 702.

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A totally virtuous universe could not endure for a minute; the learned hand of Nature

brings order to birth out of chaos. And wanting chaos, Nature must fail to attain anything:

such is the profound equilibrium which holds the stars aright in their courses [...] She

must have evil, it is from this stuff that she creates good, upon crime her existence is

seated... (J: 172; similar: LNJ 1:154, 296).

Likewise, Curval, in The 120 Days of Sodom, states:

...to inspire [crimes and murders] Nature has wrought her law, and the one commandment

she graves deep in our hearts is to satisfy ourselves at no matter whose expense (120:

534).

Sade, of course, is preoccupied with affirming destruction, yet reasons that chaos is

necessary for the maintenance of a higher order of stability. Sade also considers only

destructive acts as those which cohere with Nature’s dictates-not even the ‘breeding

of warriors,’ as proposed by Nietzsche.7 Sade’s system, being a mirror image of

Rousseau’s, runs into similar problems. That is, Sade classifies those who have no

innate inclination to do evil of being immoral (‘Sade-immoral’), according to his own

scheme. This point is directly addressed in The Misfortunes of Virtue. Dubois argues

that conscience is nought but the fear of being caught; the “gloomy mind-workings

which are but the product of ignorance, cowardice and education” (MV: 125). In

reply, Justine argues against the theory that conscience is unnatural, noting that it is

her own nature to follow the good.

You admit that there is a finite quantity of good and evil in Nature and that it follows

therefore that there must be a certain number of people who do good and another category

of persons who do evil. The policy which I have chosen is, by your principles, natural.

You cannot therefore ask me to depart from the laws which Nature prescribes for me.

Furthermore, since you say you have found happiness in the career which you have

followed, I should in my turn find it equally impossible to meet with felicity by departing

from the course on which I am embarked (MV:126).

Dubois does not address this objection. Without proposing another normative

principle, Sade can only suggest that choosing to do evil is to choose the more

7 “Man shall be trained for war and woman for the procreation of the warrior. All else is folly.”

Nietzsche Zarathustra p.91.

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aesthetically pleasing, or the more interesting, alternative, if one is so inclined (the

importance of aesthetics in Sade’s scheme is discussed in Chapter III).

The Bataillian principle, as expressed in the passages quoted above, holds that

humans both can and should impact upon cosmic processes ( exclusively in terms of

murder and destruction), lest the wheels of the cosmos seize. To read the doctrine as

stated, in a strictly literal way, leads to complications. The Bataille doctrine implies

that human life is, in some sense, meaningful, insofar as humanity is an emanation of

the cosmos, and that it has an important role to play in the cosmos’ functions.

Therefore, this teleology has a structural similarity to the doctrine that Sade seeks to

supplant, and appears to conflate with the view that human life is trivial and

essentially indistinguishable from that of other organic systems (as discussed in

Chapter II). 8 Yet, paradoxically, only those that engage in destroying others are

considered moral, as only they participate in the ‘health’ of the cosmos. The idea that

humans could participate in cosmic processes is not out of the question (we now know

that we can impose our will on the biosphere to such an extent that we could end life

completely, so the view that we can impact upon the cosmos is not itself implausible.

The terra-forming of other planets is now a seriously considered scenario; Arthur C.

Clarke has theorized on turning Jupiter into a second Sun). Yet the assumption that

people (in particular, Sadeian libertines ) ought to work to sustain the world is

curious, given that Sade’s characters frequently hold God to task for creating the

world to begin with (J:399). Further, there are logical problems with the very notion

of either violating or acting in accordance with ‘Nature’s Laws.’ Human activities are

taken to be ‘Sade- immoral’ only if they are harmful to nature, as it is against nature’s

laws to extinguish itself (Noirceuil explains: “one can rationally describe as a crime

only that which might conflict with her laws”; J: 171).Yet, by definition, such an

operation would be to perform a miracle- as Sade acknowledges- a logical

8 Sade’s characters are not consistent on this point. A chemist who wishes to cause a volcanic eruption

states that nature is a ‘minotaur’: “instructed in her frightful secrets, I imitate her, in detesting her”

(LNJ2:44, 45). Accordingly, Marcel Hénaff interprets Sade’s characters as fundamentally opposed to

Nature, and holds that Sade distinguishes himself from the ‘Materialist vulgate’ on precisely this point.

Also, Juliette cites Machiavelli’s view that Nature must be mastered, rather than simply obeyed:

“nature is a woman to be mastered only by one who goes to her whip in hand” (J: 526). See also

Marcel Hénaff “Sade and the Enlightenment Project” Presented at the First International Congress

Sade, Charleston, South Carolina; USA March 12-15, 2003. Trans. Norbert Sclippa p.11.

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impossibility.9 In short, the best that Sade can argue is that, for some, ‘crime’ is

natural and beneficial to the ‘general order,’ and then only if the empirical

assumptions can be supported (i.e. murdering large numbers of people is actually

necessary to sustain the world). Insofar as everyone, in any case, is mortal, this seems

unlikely.

A more fluid interpretation of the Bataille doctrine may be more fruitful. Sade’s

central claim, again, is that Christianity and the thought of Rousseau have suppressed,

or skirted around, some vital truth of the nature of Man. The affirmation of calm over

chaos is to deny the way the cosmos actually works, and to deny that our fate and our

destiny is continuous with the cosmos in which we dwell. It is also, Sade holds, to

deny the facts of human nature. As such, Sade aligns himself, to a point, with the

doctrines of Hinduism, which affirms both the cycles of creation and of dissolution.

The figure of Kali, goddess of Destruction, could be said to be the symbolic analogue

of what Sade is attempting to reintroduce into his philosophy (writes Carter: “Clairwil

and Juliette, like Tantric devotees of Kali, engage in sexual rituals in a graveyard, at

Durand’s instigation. Kali herself dances upon severed heads, juggles with limbs,

wears necklaces of skulls and copulates with corpses. Snakes issue from her vulva.

Durand is as destructive as Kali, a sumptuous infecundity whose masterpieces are

plagues”). 10 Yet Kali is only one part of a duality, and to emphasise the will to Chaos

at the neglect of the other is to commit exactly the same error that Sade’s critique

makes of Christianity, as Justine has noted.

It should also be noted that Sade’s conception of virtue - as being necessarily

opposed to violence, or even action- is characteristically Christian, or perhaps, more

accurately, Buddhist, and is not universally held ( as previous chapters have shown,

Sade assumes an especially pure form of morality, only to discredit it). The God of the

Torah gives clear approval for wars of conquest, despite the Messianic hope for peace

expressed in Isaiah.11 Acknowledgement that war and strife are part of the order of

things does not alone lead to the abandonment of all moral principles.

9 “To be convinced of the truth of a miracle, I should have to be quite certain that the event which you

call miraculous ran absolutely counter to the laws of Nature, since only events occurring outside

Nature can be deemed a miracle” (MV:156). 10 Carter p.115. 11 See for example Exodus 17 and18, and Deuteronomy 25.

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6.3.2 Non-Transcendent Teleology: The Beast in Man

This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill ‘em, and I'm going to kill ‘em before they kill me.

You're talking about the American way – of survival of the fittest.

Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s (1902-1984) 12

In order to close the gap between the way of Man and that of the natural processes of

the Cosmos, Sade transposes the image of the relationship of predator and prey to

human affairs. Dom Lopèz, Portuguese employee of the cannibal king of Batua,

explains:

Son étude la plus réfléchie nous apprend chaque jour que le sacrifice de la faiblesse à la

force est partout la première de ses lois: les rameaux touffus du chêne, en privant la plante

qui végète à ses pieds des rayons de l’astre qu’ils absorbent, la font languir et de sécher.

Le loup dévore l’agneau, le riche énerve le pauvre, et partout la force écrase ce qui

l’entoure sans que la nature réclame jamais en faveur de l’opprimé…sans qu’elle le

venge, sans qu’elle le soulage, sans même qu’elle imprime au cœur de l’homme de

protéger ou de secourir ce que le despotisme ou la force anéantissent à ses yeux (AV:

461).

In La Nouvelle Justine, the same doctrine is offered, linked to the more general

dynamic of the ‘equality of good and evil in the world.’

“[d]es loups qui mangent des agneaux, des agneaux dévorés par des loups, le fort qui

sacrifie le faible, le faible la victime du fort, voilà la nature, voilà ses vues, voilà ses

plans : un action et une réaction perpétuelle, une foule de vices et de vertus, un parfait

équilibre, en un mot, résultant de l’égalité du bien et du mal sur la terre, équilibre

essentiel au maintien des astres, à la végétation, et sans lequel tout serait à l’instant

détruit” (LNJ 1:364).

In associating the Law of the Jungle with the dynamics of economics (“the wolf eats

the lamb, the rich fatigue the poor”) Sade aligns himself with Nietzsche and the Social

12 “Builders and Titans: Twenty innovators who Change How the World Works,” Time Magazine

website www.time.com/time/time100/profile/kroc2.html (accessed October 2004).

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Darwinists of the 19th Century, as well as industrialists such as Ray Kroc. 13 Charity,

in reversing this natural order, is dismissed as merely encouraging indolence: “c’est

s’opposer à celui de la nature; c’est renverser l’équilibre qui est la base de ses plus

sublimes arrangements; c’est travailler à une égalité dangereuse pour la société; c’est

encourager l’indolence et al fainéantise... ” (LNJ 2 :347, 348). At this level, the

association of wolves with capitalism does not go beyond a loose metaphor, or

beyond the bare assertion that there is a ‘sublime arrangement’ according to which

there are supposed to be rich and poor classes.

Again, at a strictly literal level, Sade’s analogy is problematic. Caroline Warman

tracks the view that destruction is part of the natural order of things to the biologist

Count Buffon (1707-1788), who had written that violent death was as a natural part of

the order of things, insofar as the activities of carnivores kept population numbers in

check.14 If Warman’s understanding of Sade is correct, Sade has extended to the

behaviour of human beings the conclusions derived from biological observations on

inter-species behaviour. But it is difficult to see where he could find support for this

transposition. Sade has assumed that human existence is constrained by the same

Malthusian principles that dictate animal life, which is simply not the case. Even

where economic pressures force communities to abandon or kill the very young or

very old, this scarcely equates to legitimating wanton killing, or the imposition of

crushing economic hardships upon others. At best, economic constraints on

population levels would legitimate infanticide, contraception, abortion, or euthanasia,

if anything at all (admittedly, contraception was not an option for most people in

Sade’s age, or even in our own, for Catholic populations). Further, intra-species

killing amongst predators, even in competition for mates or territory, is extremely

rare. Humans do not kill each other (any more) in the same way that the fox kills the

13 For ‘wolf and lamb’ imagery in Nietzsche, see Zarathustra pp.309-310, Genealogy of Morals in The

Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals p.178. For Nietzsche’s association of socialism with

‘slave morality,’ see Nietzsche The Will to Power p.398. 14 Buffon “Les Animaux carnassiers,” In Histoire naturelle, vol. vii, ch. I. Quoted in Warman p.164.

For discussion on the relationship between Sade’s ‘biologic’ thinking and that of his age, see Jean

Deprun “Sade et la philosophie biologique de son temps.” In Le Marquis de Sade, centre aixois

d’études et de recherches sur le XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1968):189-205.

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hare. 15Yet it is a fact of history and anthropology that humans kill each other, and

compete for resources in a vigorous way, though not in a manner typical of

carnivores. The beast in Man is above all a calculating, reasoning, human beast.

6.3.4 Non-Transcendent Teleology: Property and Theft

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed,

but they produced Michelangelo – Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance ...[i]n

Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and

peace, and what did that produce?...The cuckoo clock.

Harry Lime, in Graham Green The Third Man (screenplay)

The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them

of their wealth, to see their near and dear bathed in tears, to ride their horses and sleep on

the white bellies of their wives and daughters.

Ghengis Khan (1167-1227) 16

Consistent with the Bataille doctrine is the view that rapine, theft, and war are not a

problem to be solved, but a basic truth of Man that must be embraced. Like Harry

Lime, Sade does not go into details as to how warfare and non-reciprocal exchange fit

into a broader ‘general economics’ (as opposed to the ‘narrow economics’ of

reciprocal, beneficial exchange). Sade is not interested in a straightforward, a-moral,

inquiry into, for example, the relationship between war and cultural development, or

the economic importance of the sex industry in 18th Century Paris. His resolute

15 Whether cannibalism was ever a widespread practice in human populations, or whether it was

practiced beyond merely eating those killed in war, is a controversial topic. Nevertheless, the

anthropological data rather supports Sade rather than Rousseau; there is no doubt that cannibalism was

practiced in Fiji and New Zealand, for example. For discussion, see Bill Arens The Man-Eating Myth:

Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) and Timothy Taylor The

Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death (London: Fourth Estate, 2002). Sade discusses cannibalism

at length in Aline et Valcour, citing Cook, M. M. Meunier and Paw as anthropological references (AV:

227n). 16 Trevor Royle A Dictionary of Military Quotations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990). Quoted in

Buss p.277.

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immorality limits him to pointing out, in a slightly puerile way, the ‘paradox’ that

theft or war could be construed as beneficial. Nevertheless, Sade has a point that is

(like all his better points) at once obvious, disturbing, and profound. That is, there is a

considerable gap between how our civilization operates, or has operated historically,

and our day to day morality. The view proposed is a more bloody version of

Mandeville- were everyone to live according to Christian meekness and piety, very

little would ever get done. Mandeville was content to note that people are industrious-

and benefit society- out of such ‘vices’ as greed and pride. Sade takes this a step

further, in asserting that the wheels of human progress are driven by the Will to

Domination; the desire to kill, to wipe out entire civilizations, to instrumentalize the

vanquished to our own ends.

Again, Sade follows Rousseau’s reasoning in an unfaithful (that is to say,

highly original) manner. Rousseau holds that introspection will disclose the inner

voice of Natural Law; the voice of conscience. Sade, similarly, holds that ruthlessly

honest introspection will disclose the Passions –greed, lust, violence, destruction- the

voice of Khan, rather than Kant. He describes the passions as “blind instruments” or

“laws” of the “will of Nature”: the “means that [nature] employs to accelerate her

designs” (LNJ 1: 55, 148, 149, also 151, 214, 293). Where Sade admits of instincts for

common feeling, he adds that they are subordinate to the ‘higher’ passion of egoism

(in La Nouvelle Justine, a man kills his brother over a quantity of gold, stating that

“…mon action vous prouvera, mes camarades, que vos intérêts me sont plus chers que

tous les liens de la nature, et que je sacrifierai toujours tout, dès qu’il s’agira de vous

servir ”( LNJ 2: 292).

The Bataille doctrine, as stated, is present within Rousseau’s thought. Rousseau

had considered the possibility of one who advocates a ‘right of the strongest,’

dismissing him as “the man who brings terror and chaos into the human kind” (SC:

52-53; DI: 77). 17 Nevertheless, Rousseau believed that such a doctrine was at the

heart of civilized society, and that it was there for all to see who were willing to peer

behind the mask: “my hero will cut every throat until he is sole master of the universe.

Such is the moral portrait, if not of human life, at least of the secret ambitions of the 17This doctrine appears also in the work of Restif de la Bretonne. His morally nihilistic character

Gaudet states: “[m]y friend, there are only two classes in the world, that of slave, and that of master.”

Restif de la Bretonne Paysanne pervertie, ou les dangers de la ville (A la Haie, 1784) 2 vols. Quoted in

Crocker Age of Crisis p.440.

213

heart of civilized man” (DI: 149).18 Rousseau blames civilization for this evil; Sade

assumes that it was there in the human heart all along (how Rousseau can hope that

we can all find the same moral law within, despite our civilized state, is a question

that goes beyond this project). Hence, Sade’s thought follows a vector similar to

Rousseau’s. That is, Sade’s doctrine goes something like this: that which is good is

that which is natural. How do I know which inclination or impulse is good? I inquire

into my heart, and I do as it tells me. Rousseau himself states that the heart of

civilized man is a rapacious killer; the rest follows. Only the complexities of

Rousseau’s understanding of human nature separates the two doctrines.

Concerning war, Sade merely asserts that it is in accordance with Nature’s plans.

Braschi, in Juliette, explains:

These wars, these famines she hurls at us, these pestilences she now and again looses with

the aim of wiping us off the face of the earth, these great villains she fabricates in

profusion, these Alexanders, these Tamurlanes, these Ghengis Khans, all these heroes

who lay the world waste, by these tokens, I say, does she not plainly demonstrate that all

our laws are contrary to hers, and that her purpose are to destroy them? [...] these murders

[...] are in some sort instrumental to her, since she is a great murderess herself... (J: 768).

As such, Sade’s discussion does not go beyond Kali- veneration; war plays a role

insofar as it returns the living to the movement of matter “which renews and

reorganizes itself within the entrails of mother earth...the regenerating womb” (J:770).

A single line alluding to Heraclitus of Ephesus leaves open other possibilities,

however. Braschi again:

18 In fact Rousseau appears to have known people (or claimed as much), who lived by this ideology

personally. In the Confessions Rousseau writes of the doctrine of his acquaintance and onetime

friend, Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm (1723- 1807): “I remembered the compendium of his

morality, which Madame d’Epinay had told me of, and which she adopted. This consisted of one single

article, namely, that the sole duty of man is, to follow in everything the inclinations of his heart. This

code of morality, when I heard of it, afforded me terrible material for thought, although at that time I

only looked upon it as a witticism. But I soon saw that this principle really was his principle of

conduct, and, in the sequel, I had only too convincing proof of it at my own expense. It is the inner

doctrine, of which Diderot has so often spoken to me, but of which he has never given me any

explanation” (C: 457).

214

Crimes [are] essential to the laws of the kingdoms, and essential to the laws of Nature. An

ancient philosopher [Heraclitus] called war the mother of all things. The existence of

murderers is as necessary as that bane… (J: 771). 19

The fragment of Heraclitus to which Sade alludes is as follows:

War is father of all, king of all: some it shows as gods, some as men; some it makes

slaves, some free.20

Another reads:

One should know that war is common, that justice is strife, that all things come about in

accordance with strife and with what must be. 21

These passages suggest a way in which Sade’s doctrine concerning war can be further

developed. The Sadeian implication of these aphorisms is that war is good, as it

creates distinctions among men. Elsewhere, Sade holds that feudalism and economic

inequality are requisites of economic and cultural flourishing (LNJ 2:225). The

relationship between war and cultural strength is straightforward. One plunders the

other group for their resources, and reduces the vanquished to slavery, so that one’s

own community can concentrate on more tertiary-sector activities, like the arts and

sciences. The principle here is that reciprocal exchange is not the typical, or the most

efficient, mode of economic development, or territorial expansion, for a group with

overwhelming physical or strategic superiority. To assume that economic relations are

independent of the threat of violence is naïve. 22 Dorval speaks:

19 Nietzsche offers an identical argument, writing that “[n]o act of violence, rape, exploitation,

destruction, is intrinsically ‘unjust,’ since life itself is violent, rapacious, exploitative, and destructive,”

and that to counter the “radical life- will” with legal or moral systems “can only bring about man’s utter

demoralization and, indirectly, a reign of nothingness.” Nietzsche Genealogy of Morals in the Birth of

Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals p.208. 20 From Hippolytus Refutation of All Heresies, translated by Jonathan Barnes. Quoted in Jonathan

Barnes Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1987) p.102. 21 Origen, Against Celsus VI xliii Quoted in Barnes Early Greek Philosophy p.114. 22 There are, of course, more complex relationships between warfare and economic activity. A stronger

power can force open a country’s market against the will of its leaders, such as the Opium/ Anglo-

Chinese Wars of 1839-42, 1856-60. A stronger state can also coerce other, less powerful states into

215

Kind friends, by a single feature alone were men distinguished from one another when,

long ago, society was in its infancy: the essential point was brute strength. Nature gave

them all space wherein to dwell, and it was upon this physical force, distributed to them

with less impartiality, that was to depend the manner in which they were to share the

world. Was this sharing to be equal, could it possibly be, what with the fact that naked

force was to decide the matter? In the beginning, then, was theft; theft, I say, was the

basis, the starting point; for the inequality of this sharing 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 (J: 114).

Sade also associates the art of thievery with (what could be termed) his ‘virtue ethics’-

If we glance at the history of ancient times, we will see theft permitted, nay, recompensed

in all the Greek republics; Sparta and Lacedaemon openly favoured it; several other

peoples regarded it as a virtue in a warrior; it is certain that stealing nourishes courage,

strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and

consequently to our own (PB: 313).

Sade does not explicitly associate war up with theft, or any other economic

Realpolitik, perhaps because, again, he is more intent on merely thumbing his nose at

the Decalogue than proposing a more complete schema (in The 120 Days of Sodom,

the wars of Louis XIV are said to merely drain the State’s treasury and “exhaust the

substance of the people,” as well as enriching a “swarm of bloodsuckers,” including

the Four Friends; 120:191). On the one hand, his account of both war and economics

is simplistic and narrow. Where war is discussed at all, it is either good because it

kills people, and for no other reason, or bad, for the same reason. Sade does not even

refer to the grandeur or spectacle of battle (this is unusual, given the Libertine attitude

towards violent spectacle as discussed in Chapter III). Just as Rousseau considered

the mechanical sciences as ‘mere’ ambition and mathematics an expression of avarice,

Sade sees all economic activity as theft (CS: 16). From Juliette:

participation in its own wars in exchange for access to its markets, such as the case with New Zealand’s

relationship with the United States, since the Vietnam War to the present day.

216

...theft, instituted by Nature, was not ...banished from the face of the earth; but it came to

exist in other forms: stealing was performed juridically. The magistrates stole by having

themselves feed [sic] for doing the justice they ought to render free of charge. The priest

stole by taking payment for serving as intermediary between God and man. The merchant

stole by selling his sack of potatoes at a price one-third above the intrinsic value a sack of

potatoes really has (J:115).

Sade’s purist notions of what is and is not theft, and his woolly notion of ‘intrinsic

value,’ do not detract from the essential point. A great deal of wealth and territory,

historically, has been acquired through what was essentially theft. Warfare is no

longer the economic or political strategy it once was, but for entirely Sadeian- that is,

instrumental, reasons- it is too expensive, its arts now too effective.23

To conclude: The analogy of the beast of prey applied to economic activity is

crude, but perhaps not that crude. Corporations will discontinue products that are

known to be lethal, will maintain safety standards in offshore manufacturing plants,

will maintain humane standards for their employees, or stop selling weaponry to

poorer nations, only when the legal costs are no longer in the interests of the

shareholders- that is, in the interests of the Board of Directors.

A reconstituted Sade, or perhaps, more accurately, Harry Lime, would add that it

is this same ruthlessness that drives the wheels of civilization. Human progress is

driven along by impulses for wealth and power, which, in the past, frequently took the

form of open war. Further, warfare itself- or its sublimated forms (for example the

‘Cold War’) has always been a powerful catalyst of technological and scientific

progress (the jet aircraft, the ballistic and cruise missiles, the first operational

computers, the helicopter, radar, and the nuclear bomb saw fully functional, active

service for the first time during World War II ). If humanity has any form of non-

transcendental Telos, it is assumedly associated with the progress of civilization, in

particular economic and technological progress (artistic progress is arguably only

possible where economics and technology are developed to the point where an artistic

and intellectual elite can flourish, and is historically related to advances in technology,

in particular optics and information systems). Hence, the Telos is expressed through

this competitive drive, and through individuals that embody it, whether Napoleon,

Ghengis Khan or Ray Kroc.

23 I thank Aaron Davidson for the discussion that gave shape to this thought.

217

6.4 The Slave Revolt in Morals

Sade denies that Christian morality is a sound moral code in keeping with

universally valid and self evident principles. Its origins, he notes, are quite alien to the

peoples of Europe or the Classical world. In a footnote to Yet One More Effort, Sade

writes that Christianity is filled with “impieties” which are derived from the “ferocity

and innocence” of the Jews, adding that “the Christians seem only to have formed

their doctrine from a mixture of the vices they found everywhere” (PB: 299).

(Elsewhere, Sade emphasises the Jewish– hence, in his mind, the lowly– origins of

Christianity, referring to Jesus as a “Jewish slave of the Romans,” a “grubby Nazarene

fraud” and a “clumsy histrionic from Judea” (PB: 296, 299). 24

More specifically, Sade argues that Christian morality is to be understood as the

artefact of a spiritual sickness. When, according to Sade, the Jews and Christians

were oppressed by the Romans, they conspired, out of their weakness, desperation and

resentment, to develop a doctrine of brotherly love, equality, and the virtue of poverty

and meekness, in an attempt to reduce their harsh treatment at the hands of their

‘natural’ masters. Their ethics is described by Sade as servile and hypocritical,

contrary to the Natural Order (LNJ 2: 35; J: 145). Their religion is described variously

as a myth for the fearful and ignorant, for “imbeciles who unfailingly believe all

they’re told and never examine anything critically,” and the doctrine of the immortal

soul a dogma “comforting to the downtrodden and unlucky” (J: 48& n, PB: 305; also

120:498; LNJ 1: 32; 2:109). Dolmancé, in Philosophy in the Bedroom, explains:

It is a very false tone you use when you speak to us of this Nature which you interpret as

telling us not to do to others what we would not have done to us; such stuff never came

but from the lips of men, and weak men. Never does a strong man take it into his head to

speak that language. They were the first Christians who, daily persecuted on account of

their ridiculous doctrine, used to cry at whosoever chose to hear: “Don’t burn us! Don’t

24 Concerning the Jews, Sade’s writing largely repeats the anti-Semitism present in the writings of

Voltaire. In Frenchmen, Yet One More Effort, Sade writes that Jews are natural murderers; in Aline et

Valcour a character ridicules a Marrano Jew’s observance of kashrut laws, and in La Nouvelle Justine,

Sade describes a Jewish lawyer, Abraham Pexoto, as a deeply immoral scam artist (PB:334, AV:520,

521; LNJ 1: 425-429).

Jewish slave: this comment comes from one of Sade’s Revolutionary pamphlets. Oeuvres complètes

du Marquis de Sade ed. Annie le Brun and Jean-Jacques Pauvert (Paris: Pauvert, 1986-91) 3:364,

quoted in Schaeffer p.437.

218

flay us! Nature says one must not do unto others that which unto oneself one would not

have done!” Fools! How could Nature, who always urges us to delight in ourselves, who

never implants in us other instincts, other notions, other inspirations, how could Nature,

the next moment, assure us that we must not, however, decide to love ourselves if that

might cause others pain? (PB: 253; similar: J: 178; PB: 283, 309, 310, 360, LNJ 1:283,

363; 2: 264-265).

Sade describes the French Revolution in similar, if more subtle, terms. The following

is a footnote to Juliette, added to later editions.

L’égalité prescrite par la Révolution, n’est que la vengeance du faible sur le fort, c’est ce

qui se faisait autrefois en sens inverse ; mais cette réaction est juste, il faut que chacun ait

son tour. Tout variera encore, parce que rien n’est stable dans la nature, et que les

gouvernements dirigés par des hommes, doivent être mobiles comme eux. 25

The thought is similar- the revolution is revenge of the strong against the weak- yet,

as the narrator adds, “each will get his turn,” as nothing is stable in nature.

Sade also proposes that Christian morality is motivated by resentment towards the

rich and powerful, and the desire to merely drag others down to one’s own level:

“[t]he proponents of that absurd doctrine of equality will always be recruited from the

ranks of the weak; it is never espoused save by him who, unable to rise to the class of

the strong, can at least find comfort in pulling that class down to his own level” (J:

418n, also 748). The doctrine of hell is suspected of being little more than a

sublimated revenge fantasy (“[d]oes not the act of imposing a punishment out of all

proportion to the fault speak far more in behalf of vindictiveness and cruelty than of

justice?” ; J: 378).

25 The Wainhouse translation gives the incorrect sense. The phrase “…that everyone should have his

turn is only meet” should perhaps read “It is necessary that each has their turn.”

“The equality prescribed by the Revolution is simply the weak man’s revenge upon the strong; it’s just

what we saw in the past, but in reverse; that everyone should have his turn is only meet [sic]. And it

shall be turnabout again tomorrow, for nothing in Nature is stable and the governments men direct are

bound to prove as changeable and ephemeral as they” (J:120, n12a; Œ Vol. III: 287). In this section

the character Dorval complains that the noble “have become the slaves of the kings” (again, Sade’s

characters show inconsistency between thoughts and deeds; Dorval himself specializes in robbing

noblemen).

219

Sade also makes a direct comparison of Christian and Classical cultures. Sade

declares that “[i]t is to strong passions alone invention and artistic wonders are due;

the passions should be regarded...as the fertilizing germ of the mind and the puissant

spring to great deeds… Those beings who are not motivated by strong passions are

mediocre beings” (J: 731). Christianity, in denying the passions, promotes mediocrity

as a virtue, and has made humanity ‘soft’ (J: 776). Accordingly, its emphasis on

sobriety and temperance would be catastrophic if strictly adhered to: “...si la

tempérance et la sobriété dominaient malheureusement dans le monde, tout y

végéterait il n’y aurait plus ni mouvement ni force et tout retomberait dans le chaos”

(LNJ 1:192). By contrast, the idols of Greece and Rome, writes Sade, “elevated the

soul, electrified it, and more: they communicated to the spirit the virtues of the

respected being.” Whereas the Greek and Roman pantheons inspire wisdom and

heroism, Sade describes the saints of the “Christian Elysium” lacking in any

greatness, heroism or virtue. Sade adds: “[s]o alien to lofty conceptions is this

miserable belief, that no artist can employ its attributes in the monuments he raises;

even in Rome itself, most of the embellishments of the papal palaces have their

origins in paganism, and as long as this world shall continue, paganism alone will

arouse the verve of great men” (PB: 299; similar: LNJ 1:139, AV: 454). The ancient

past is frequently referred to as a source of superior moral principles.

Remember that sect of Greek philosophers who maintained there was crime in seeking to

meddle with the various shades in the Nature- ordained spectrum of social classes [...] Be

equally certain...that men of the stamp of Denis, Nero, Louis XI, Tiberius, Wenceslas,

Herod, Andronicus, Heliogabalus, Retz based their happiness upon similar

principles...(J:283).

In accordance with the doctrine of ‘master morality,’ the moral sentiments- remorse,

guilt and conscience- are dismissed as either ‘chimerical’, due to faulty reasoning, or

psychological weakness; the mark of an easily enslaved mind, or the psychological

artefact of Christian indoctrination (J: 13; MV: 124). In Aline et Valcour, Sade makes

clear the divide between ‘reason’ and moral sentiment. States Président de Balmont,

“ Quand vous cédez au sentiment de la pitié plutôt qu’aux conseils de la raison, quand

vous écoutez le cœur de préférence à l’esprit, vous vous jetez dans un abîme

d’erreurs, puisqu’il n’est point de plus faux organes que ceux de la sensibilité...”.

220

Madame de Blamont’s (who, to repeat, is not a libertine) reply reinforces this

dichotomy: “j’aime mieux être imbécile et sensible que de posséder le génie de

Descartes” (AV: 712). In the same novel, and elsewhere, it is argued that, even if one

accepted a normative Judaeo-Christian morality, pity would still not qualify as a

virtue. Again, the resemblance here to Kant is evident.

Pity acts on people only according to their softness. The more vigorous an individual is,

the less he is susceptible to that kind of perturbation, whence it would result…that the

person the least open to pity, would be incontestably the best constituted. But let us

analyse this sentiment embellished in our day with such superb names and yet felt less

than ever. The proof is that this pusillanimous impulse acts on us only physically, that the

moral shock which it conveys is absolutely subordinated to the senses, is that we feel

much more sorry for the misfortune which takes place under our eyes than for that which

happens 100 leagues from us…Pity then is not a virtue at all, since it acts on us only in

proportion to the impression received, to the vibration imparted to the fibres of our soul

by the greater or lesser distance of the misfortune that has occurred ( AV: 644, 645). 26

6.5 The Sadeian Caste System

For the most part, Sade’s characters assume a sharp dichotomy between ‘natural

masters’ and ‘natural slaves.’ The teleological order of the libertines dictates that the

slaves were “created to be our tools and whom we suffer to exist solely in the interest

of our passions” (J: 354; similar: 120:426). The libertines consider themselves to be

proud, powerful, dynamic, intelligent, imaginative, cynical, solitary, independently

minded, passionate, and egoistic. The slaves, by contrast, are described as stupid,

group- oriented, and psychologically weak. No character in Sade makes the transition

from one class to the other, owing to the implicit assumption that the relevant traits

are innate and unchanging. Although there is a process of ‘libertine education’

described in Sade’s works (as discussed in Chapter III), the apt pupil is typically a-

moral before lessons begin.

26 Sade Aline et Valcour (Paris:Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1956) Vol. IV pp.17-18., Quoted in Lorna

Berman Thoughts and Themes p.238. Sade’s thought here resembles that of Helvétius, who dismissed

remorse merely the “foresight of bodily pain” (Treatise of Man Vol. I p.127). See also Nietzsche

Writings from the late Notebooks ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2003) p.172; Genealogy of Morals in The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of

Morals pp.200-202. For recent discussion of the ‘error’ of guilt, see Hinckfuss p.44.

221

Yet the classification of ‘masters’ and ‘slaves,’ or ‘libertines,’ and their victims,

is far from straightforward. In an attempt to explain or justify their dominion (that is,

in an attempt to reduce power to another category), the libertines seek to clarify a

doctrine of innate superiority. Superiority across three categories is discussed;

biological, or physical superiority, intellectual superiority, and economic superiority

(that ‘libertine power’ is simply a terminal category {that is, irreducible to innate

caste characteristics} is not considered).

Sade takes the Celts, “our earliest ancestors,” to be a paradigmatically superior

people, noting that ‘Celt’ in German meant ‘courageous’ or ‘Lords of War.’ He

attributes to the Celts his own counter-morality, implying that his doctrine is a

renewal to an older, more authentic moral outlook. Noirceuil states: “the Celts...held

that the highest and most sacred of our rights was that of might, which is to say, of

Nature; and they considered that when Nature deems wise to assign a superior quality

of potential to some of us, she does so only to confirm the prepotency over the weak

which she invests in us strong” (J: 173). 27Noirceuil attempts to link the natural

aristocracy of the age of the Celts to modern economic inequalities. He continues:

“[i]f since Celtic days matters have changed physically, they haven’t morally. The

opulent man represents what is mightiest in society; he has brought up all the rights;

he ought therefore to enjoy them... [i]t’s all the same thing, whether I filch my

neighbour’s purse, rape his son, his wife, or his daughter: these are mere pranks, of

too slight importance and scope ever to be of any utility to Nature...” (J: 173-174). 28

In order to enforce his power and satisfy his ‘caprices,’ Noirceuil adds that one must

enforce “discipline, forbearance, and compliance” from the ‘subordinate’ class of men

(J: 174).

27 For discussion of Sade’s admiration of the Celts, see Lacombe Sade et ses masques p.28. 28 Compare Nietzsche, on the ‘higher morality’ of the ‘nobles’: “we can imagine them returning from

an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had

committed a fraternity prank...” Friedrich Nietzsche Genealogy of Morals in The Birth of Tragedy and

the Genealogy of Morals p.174. It should also be noted, to put Sade’s work in context, that neither

Diderot nor Helvétius took rape particularly seriously. In his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville,

Diderot’s idyllic Tahitians rape a woman upon her arrival. The scene is supposed to be comic- the

woman is disguised as a man, and the Tahitians, being more in tune with nature, immediately realize

the deception. Diderot Political Writings p.46. Helvétius’ brothel proposal, as discussed in Chapter IV,

is also indifferent to the issue of forced sex.

222

Two extended monologues in Sade’s surviving work also describe the master-

slave relationship in terms of ‘caste’ (we would now consider this ‘race’ theory).29

Minister Saint-Fond argues against those theorists who had suggested that apparent

intellectual differences between ‘master’ and ‘slave’ castes could be accounted for as

differences in education. He proposes an experiment. Placing two infants, one of

‘each class,’ side by side, “you’ll observe that the child of the first class manifests

tastes and aims most unlike those the child of the second class demonstrates; and you

will perceive the most striking dissimilarity between the sentiments and dispositions

proper to each.” Saint-Fond goes on to assert that natural slaves are no more humans

than are chimpanzees: “[n]ow perform the same study upon the animal resembling

man the closest, upon, for example, the chimpanzee; let me, I say, compare this

animal to some representative of the slave caste; what a host of similarities I find! The

man of the people is simply the species that stands next above the chimpanzee on the

ladder; and the distance separating them is, if anything, less than that between him

and the individual belonging to the superior caste”(J:322-323).

Sade also notes that the oppression of an ‘inferior’ population is a widespread

cultural and historical phenomenon, if not actually an anthropological norm.

In La Nouvelle Justine, the character Verneuil states that humans are naturally divided

into natural masters and natural slaves, and that each people has a corresponding

‘despised caste’ (caste méprisée): “les Juifs formaient celle des Égyptiens, les Ilotes

celle des Grecs; les Parias celle des Brames; les Nègres celle de l’Europe ” (LNJ 2 :

222-223).30 If it is a racial distinction that is applied here, it is not Eurocentric. Sade

makes the same distinction between the Greeks and Helots, both European

populations, and between the Ancient Egyptians and Jews, who are both ‘Semitic.’ In

fact, Saint- Fond’s conclusion to his discussion indicates that, in Sade, the doctrine of

inequality runs much deeper than differences between races. After comparing

29 Sade also briefly discusses race theory, in particular the gradations of different classes of men and

primates, in “Quatrième cahier des Notes ou Réflexions; extraites de mes lectures ici ou fournies par

elles”, written in the dungeon of Vincennes between June 1780 and August 1780. In Sade Œuvres

complètes de Sade ed.Annie Le Brun and Jean-Jacques Pauvert (Paris: Pauvert,1986) Vol. I :469-485,

p.471. 30 For discussion of this passage, see Fauskevåg p.104, 129; Jean Pierre Faye “Juliette et le Père

Duchesne, foutre” In Camus, Roger, ed. Sade écrire la crise 289-302, p.301. See also Han and Valla

“A propos” p.119

223

‘inferior’ peoples with chimpanzees, Saint- Fond states: “You should certainly never

lump Voltaire and Fréron in the same class, any more than you would the virile

Prussian grenadier and the debilitated Hottentot. Therefore, Juliette, cease to doubt

these inequalities...” (J: 322-323). Élie Fréron (1718-1776) was a critic and journalist

who attacked the principles of the Enlightenment, and Voltaire frequently made him

the butt of his ridicule. 31 Yet Fréron and Voltaire, obviously, are of the same

ethnological and social group; the difference being that Fréron is an anti-philosophe

Catholic, whereas Voltaire is not. Other texts suggest again that the distinction

between libertines and their victims has little to do with race. Ben Mâacoro, the

Cannibal King of Batua in Aline et Valcour, is clearly a libertine figure, despite being

African, and is enthusiastic about acquiring white sex slaves (who would be, by

definition, victims). Likewise, the killers of The 120 Days of Sodom make a point of

selecting as victims the children of their own race and economic group (120: 226-

227). Race can therefore be ruled out as the defining distinction between libertines

and victims (expressed here in terms of that between masters and slaves).

The superior strength and intelligence of the libertine are typically given as

defining characteristics. The character Dorval associates the ‘natural rights’ of the

Nobleman with historical ties with vagabondage, and with superior strength, and the

Rousseauian ideal of a return to ‘natural ways.’

There was a time when the German magnates counted among their rights that of highway

robbery. This right derives from the earliest and most fundamental institutions in

societies, where the free man or vagabond got his livelihood in the manner of the beasts

of the forests and the birds of the air: by wresting food from whatever convenient or

possible source; in those days, he was a child and student of nature, today he is the slave

of ludicrous prejudices, abominable laws, and idiotic religions. All the good things of this

world, cries the weak individual, were equally distributed over the surface of the globe.

Very well. But by creating weak and strong, Nature with sufficient clarity announced that

she intended these good things to go to the strong alone... (J: 122).

31 For discussion on the anti- philosophes, see Darrin M. McMahon Enemies of the Enlightenment: The

French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press,

2001).

224

Sade also suggests that intellectual traits have supplanted brute strength as the

deciding qualities of the ‘strong.’ Dalville, in the Misfortunes of Virtue, states: “[t]he

adroitness and wit of humankind determined the relative positions of individuals, for

soon it was not physical strength which decided rank but the strength a man acquired

through wealth. The richest man was the strongest man, the poorest was the weakest”

(MV: 110).

Sade also attempts to demonstrate a close link between economic strength, power,

and innate, superior traits. In Juliette, Dorval, a thief, argues that there is a non-

arbitrary distinction between the powerful man, who exploits a subject population,

and the poor thief.32 The poor thief who robs from the ‘natural’ masters, states

Dorval, “is doing nothing that isn’t completely natural, he is trying to redress the

balance which, in the moral as well as the physical realm, is Nature’s highest law...”

yet, adds Sade, this “isn’t quite what I was aiming to prove; however, proofs aren’t

needed ... [w]hat I should like to convince you of is that neither does the powerful

individual commit a crime or an injustice when he strives to despoil the weak.”

Dorval then makes the following moral claim: “...theft perpetrated by a strong man is

assuredly a better and more valid act, within the terms and from the standpoint of

nature” (my italics). This is because, in attempting to take from the strong, “the weak

man must make use of physical forces he does not possess, he must adopt a character

that has not been given him, in short, he must in some sense fly in the face of nature”

(my italics; J:117). Sade/Dorval adds an additional ‘moral principle’ in order to

justify such a distinction: “That sage mother’s [Nature’s] laws... stipulate that the

mighty harm the feeble” (J: 117). At this point, Sade’s case risks collapsing into a

tautology (simply put, ‘the master is the one who masters’). To avoid this, Sade needs

to identify essential traits that distinguish between the natural master and the natural

slave. He eventually settles upon a vaguely defined notion of authenticity.

The strong individual, unlike the weak, never dons masks, he at all times acts true to his

own character, his character is the one he has received from Nature, and in whatever he

does is an honest and direct expression thereof and in the highest sense and degree

natural...his tyrannies and outbursts...pure emanations of what he is... (J: 117).

32 This is a clear case of a character being ‘body-snatched’ by Sade’s voice. Dorval is arguing from the

perspective of someone who believes that the wealthy- who he himself specializes in robbing- are more

honest in being despotic than the poor thief who steals from them.

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The ‘powerful man,’ then, a). despoils the weak and b). acts in accordance with

nature out of c). an authentic expression of his true nature. By contrast, the weak man

goes against nature, in using physical forces that he lacks. Dorval assumes, in making

this charge, that a). it is possible to go against nature, b). that it is somehow wrong

(invalid) to go against nature, and c). that it is possible to use resources (whether

intellectual or physical) that one does not have. He also assumes that d). ‘honest and

direct’ expressions of one’s actual powers are in a sense ‘virtuous.’

To a point, it could be argued that Sade’s characters are applying a double

standard. When discussing the first Christians or the French Revolutionaries, cunning,

craft and ‘sneakiness’ are considered vices (J: 119- 121). Yet when Clairwil- a

libertine- succeeds in defeating some men, she declares: “how sweet are the victories

the weak contrive to win over the strong” (J: 520). Sade’s introduction of the notion

of ‘honesty’ fits awkwardly both with the Sadeian rejection of all morality, and with

the conduct of his characters. Humaneness is dismissed as due to ‘fear and egoism’:

“this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose

character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy” (PB: 360; similar: LNJ1:

138). Yet the libertines tend to view bravery as simple stupidity, and pride themselves

on their own egoism (“[t]o disesteem a man because he fears danger- is to hate him

for loving life”; J: 949, also 248). The ‘weak,’ according to the libertines, formulate a

collective strategy and a doctrine of equality to convince others not to harm them. The

Four Friends retreat to an impregnable fortress, and the Sodality of the Friends of

Crime adopt a Social Contract for essentially the same reasons. The charge that the

first Christians were ‘dishonorable’ in avoiding hurt through proposing their doctrine

cannot be a moral charge, as, for the libertines themselves, the highest of all goods is

the pursuit of happiness (J:910). Nor can the subterfuge of the Slave Revolt in Morals,

or the ‘inauthentic’ expression of one’s true strength, be moral (that is, Sade-moral)

wrongs on Sade’s view.

The defining characteristic of the libertines is not, therefore, racial, reducible to

specific caste traits, or explicable in terms of ‘authenticity,’ and remains unstated.

Certain rankings of the superior and inferior in Sade in fact appear to be deliberately

juxtaposed, perhaps in order to undermine the whole notion of innate superiority.

Characters in Juliette, for example, argue variously that men and women are equal;

that men are superior to women, and vice versa (J: 354, 505-506). Nor is intelligence

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the deciding factor. Justine, who is forced to work as a slave at one point, is quite

capable of discussing philosophy (MV: 111). Five factors, in general, distinguish the

libertines from their victims- their atheism, their cynicism, their immorality, their lack

of a sense of pity or remorse, and their power, whether in the form of wealth or

political influence. Wealth is only a necessary condition; being, like power itself, an

‘enabler’ of libertine exploits; there are plenty of cases of innocent people in Sade

who are slaughtered for their money (wealth trumps high birth- for the Sodality of the

Friends of Crime, only the income of prospective members is considered ; J:424). Not

even atheism, it appears, is a necessary condition of being a libertine, as evidenced by

the case of Saint-Fond ( who believes in God only to hate him, as discussed in

Chapter I), Mondor (who makes confession after killing people) or Abraham Pexoto,

a Jew (LNJ: 425-429; J:547). The capacity for remorse or guilt is unusual for

libertines, but Juliette has to fight it nevertheless (J: 549). Cynicism is necessary for

‘libertinage’ (that is, harming and killing for pleasure), though not sufficient.

Brigandos, the leader of a criminal gang (in Aline et Valcour) is cynical, and his

notion of justice is problematic (as discussed in Chapter V), yet he never oppresses,

tortures or kills other people. The same can be said of Le Chevalier, in Philosophy in

the Bedroom (discussed below).

Ultimately, only one factor universally distinguishes the ‘master’ from the

‘slave’ in Sade’s work. The libertine possesses power. The master is the dominant

member of a power relationship, and lacks the restraints that would prevent him, or

her, from harming or killing the victim. The term ‘master’ is, therefore, largely a

relational term. The relationship between Saint-Fond and Juliette illustrates this. They

have the same general libertine traits- passion, cynicism and intelligence. Yet Saint

Fond is far more powerful. Not only is he the source of Juliette’s wealth early in her

career (seven million francs a year) – if she does not cooperate with him and become

his poisoner and spy, which requires that she betray her own friends, he threatens her

with imprisonment in the Bastille (J: 231, 237). Juliette herself seems confused about

the nature of the relationship, referring to Saint-Fond as an ‘accomplice’ and to

herself as his ‘slave,’ and feeling it necessary to express her submission to him by

eating his excrement (J:236). Saint-Fond’s clarifies the situation for us. He advances

Juliette’s career purely to magnify his own sense of power over others: “...I’ll raise

you so high in the world you’ll have no more trouble believing in your superiority

over others: you cannot imagine the joy I derive in advancing you to atop the very

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pinnacle, and making your pre-eminence conditional upon profound humility and

unbounded obedience toward me alone. I wish you to be the idol of others and, at the

same time, my slave...” (J: 323). 33 Whilst listening to a plan to two kill thirds of

France through famine, Juliette involuntarily shows human feelings of moral concern.

Having betrayed herself to the Libertine equivalent to the Thought Police, she is

forced to leave Paris (J: 549, 550). Juliette is coerced and exiled by other libertines.

Further, Juliette loses members of her own entourage to the murderous impulses of

Minski, again indicating her lower ranking. Sade’s claim that power is anchored by

innate superiority is therefore problematic.

Sade’s libertines themselves in fact discuss the possibility is that there is no such

thing as innate superiority, and that there are no such morally relevant distinctions

between themselves and those upon whom they exploit. Le Chevalier, in Philosophy

in the Bedroom, is that rarest of creatures in Sade’s menagerie– the libertine

moderate: “I am libertine, impious, I am capable of every mental obscenity, but my

heart remains to me...” (PB: 341). He rejects Dolmancé’s view that economic

difference can justify inhumane treatment of others.

Look at those others wasted by the drudgeries that support your existence, and at their

bed, scarcely more than a straw or two for protection against the rude earth whereof, like

beasts, they have nothing but the chill crust to lie down upon; cast a glance at

them…Barbaric one, are these not at all human beings like you? And if they are of your

kind, why should you enjoy yourself when they lie dying? (PB: 340-341).

Like Dolmancé, le Chevalier is opposed to religious belief, yet adheres to the

Rousseauian notion of the “sacred voice of Nature”- the very doctrine that Dolmancé

(and other libertines) has inverted (PB:341). Dolmancé’s reply does not answer the

question as to whether those whom one exploits are in fact essentially different to

oneself. Rather, Dolmancé repeats that the sense of remorse is merely a ‘pain’ caused

by the mind’s ‘miscalculations,’ and insists that le Chevalier will eventually lose,

through contact with the ingratitude of others, “those...virtues for which, perhaps, like

you, I was also born” (PB:341, 342). Eugénie declares Dolmancé the winner of the

debate, and Le Chevalier gives up, simply adding: “I’ll save my ethics for others”

33 Saint-Fond also uses the ‘tu’ form of informal address when talking with Juliette (J: 245).

228

(PB: 342-343). The objection that power is assigned arbitrarily occurs also in Juliette.

Juliette has this to say to Archduke Leopold, a libertine:

How did you get your rank? By luck. What did you do to merit your rank? That first of

kings who earned it through his courage or his cunning, he could perhaps claim to some

esteem; but he who has it through mere inheritance, may he hope for more than

compassion? (J: 616-617).

Again, for the King of Sardinia, another libertine:

...wisdom laughs at a little fellow like you who, because he has some of his forebears’

parchments stored away in some box, fancies himself empowered to rule over men; your

authority...no longer reinforced by periodical lootings, ...rests upon nothing solider than

opinion (J:568).

In the first of these passages, Juliette notes that there was once a meritocracy- of

courage and cunning- that dictated rank, but no more. In the second passage, Sade

implies that paperwork is the only remnant of the relationship between the Kings of

the past and their present representatives. It is also significant that Juliette accuses the

most powerful heads of state of lacking any qualities that could justify their posts, as

it is these very characters who give the most extreme expressions of the master/ slave

relationship, seeing themselves as ‘gods, ’ and their subjects as “swarming insects”

(J:243; 748, PB:216). Regardless of Sade’s intended sense, his characters serve to

illustrate Helvétius’ view that people with absolute power frequently fell to the

delusion that they were a higher order of being.34

Sade’s characters largely fail to reduce, or validate, their power in terms of a

single trait, and entertain the possibility that, within larger power structures, there

could be very little relationship between power and innate qualities. The power of the

libertines (in Juliette in particular) is not due to any one personal trait, but one’s place

in the socioeconomic matrix, in particular the specific relationships that one has

within that matrix, as shown by the emphasis on secret societies, wealth, and official

power. The administration, relations and mechanisms of power will be discussed in

chapter VII.

34 Helvétius A Treatise of Man Vol. II p.351.

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6.6 the Extermination of Christianity

On the question of what is to be done with Christianity, Sade distinguishes himself

from all but the most radical thinkers of his age. Like the philosophes, Sade is critical

of Christianity, in particular Catholicism, and in particular for its intolerance of other

religions and belief systems. Yet, unlike Sade, Voltaire and others had promoted

religious tolerance.35 Two reasons for religious tolerance are given. Firstly, in the

absence of absolute religious truth, it is argued, it makes no sense to persecute

religious beliefs. Secondly, pragmatic grounds are offered- historically, religious

intolerance leads to violent and bloody disputes, as would, assumedly, persecution of

all Christians by non- Christians. Rousseau and Locke are not of this opinion,

reasoning that the intolerant cannot be tolerated. 36 Rousseau proposes that

Christianity should be replaced, and a national cult erected in its stead (its sole

“negative dogma” being “no intolerance”; SC: 186). Sade’s characters, by contrast,

are unconcerned with resolving the paradox of tolerating the intolerant. Further, they

have no interest in the values of peace or avoidance of suffering, and no belief in

respect for the beliefs of others. Moreover, they do not accept that their own beliefs

concerning religion are fallible (they are quite certain that Catholicism is false). As

such, they are intolerant of religion in the extreme, and make proposals accordingly.

As Adorno and Horkheimer have it, they apply instrumental reason, stripped of the

Enlightenment’s traditional concern for humanism.

Sade’s politically powerful characters propose four distinct solutions to the

‘Church Question.’ One solution is to simply colonize religious doctrine and

institutions for the state’s- (that is, the ruler- libertines’) own ends, a doctrine that

which will be discussed further in Chapter VII. Another other option is to eliminate

Christianity through legalistic and punitive means. In Yet another effort, Frenchmen,

if you would become Republicans, the narrator proposes the removal of priests and the

exiling and imprisonment of Christians, “a scythe to mow the land clean of all those

phantoms, and a steady heart to hate them.” But Sade’s narrator thinks that execution

35 Voltaire Philosophical Dictionary p.389. See also Hertzberg p. 300. 36 See, for example, John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration In Focus edited by John Horton and

Susan Mendus (London: Routledge, 1991).

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or exile are not ideal solutions -“these are royal atrocities” (PB: 306; similar: J: 970-

972). The Comte de Belmor, of Juliette, suggests a more extreme solution. He

proposes genocide; the death of every Catholic in France. He reasons that this would

eliminate irrational superstition, and because it would be “a hundred times better that

our fair part of Europe be inhabited by ten million honest folk rather than by twenty-

five million rascals.” He goes on to describe Catholicism and its adherents as a

‘plague,’ and the coming destruction as the end of “eighteen hundred years of thorns

in France’s side” (J: 499, 501).

States Belmor:

... we must arrest and slaughter all the priests in a single day and deal similarly with all

their followers; simultaneously, inside the space of the same minute, destroy every last

vestige of Catholicism ; and concurrently proclaim atheistic systems, and instantly entrust

to philosophers the education of our youth ; paint, publish, distribute, give out,

everywhere display those writings which propagate incredulity, unbelief, and for fifty

years persecute and put to death every individual, without exception, who might think to

re-inflate the balloon (J:499-500).

Belmor proposes the establishment of a death squad of twenty-five thousand men for

the execution of this operation: “...the elements of success are some political support,

secrecy, and firmness: no flabbiness, that’s essential, and no keeping people waiting

in line. You fear martyrs, you’ll have them so long as a single worshipper of that

abominable Christian god is left alive” (J: 500-501; similar: LNJ 2:403). Belmor’s

genocidal scheme is consistent with the acts of Sade’s primary libertine characters,

who make a point of torturing and killing those who express Christian morality or

piety. This is most explicit in The 120 Days of Sodom, in which children are killed for

breaking the regulations concerning religious observance (120: 248).

6.7 Historical Context of the Pagan Return

Sade was not, by far, the first to depict the origins of Christianity as lowly and

dishonourable, or to propose that the morality of Christianity was life- denying and

detrimental to French cultural and political life. Helvétius dismissed the ancestors of

Judaeo-Christian tradition as mere ‘dregs’ and ‘wretches.’37 Rousseau described the

37 Helvétius A Treatise on Man Vol.2 p.143.

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first Christians as living under a “hypocritical submission” until the time was right “to

usurp that authority which they made a show of respecting while they were weak,”

prefiguring Sade’s and Nietzsche’s view that Christian morality originated as a

psychological subterfuge (SC:178-179, 184). Following the reasoning of Machiavelli,

Rousseau considered Christianity incompatible with the needs of a warlike state, and

proposed that it be replaced with a minimalist Deism, explicitly subordinate to the

needs of politics (SC:87). Further, Rousseau proposed the reintroduction of Roman

symbols, including the Fascis, such was his enthusiasm for ancient Rome (E: 322; SC:

184).

The most extreme and sustained expression of the ‘pagan Return,’ however, was

that of d’Holbach. In his L’Esprit du Judaïsme ou Examen Raisonné de la Loi de

Moyse, & de son influence sur la Religion Chrétienne (The Spirit of Judaism or

Reasoned Examination of the Law of Moses and its Influence on the Christian

Religion, 1750) -a copy of which Sade owned- d’Holbach called for the elimination

of the influence of the Jews.38 D’Holbach reasoned that the religion of Jesus,

described as a ‘pollution,’ had been foisted upon the Romans by the Jews as an act of

vengeance. Further, d’Holbach argued that Judaism itself emerged as a deception by

Moses and, later, the Priests and Prophets to subjugate the people and the Kings of

Israel. In order to free Europe of this ‘irrational’ creed, d’Holbach calls for the

elimination of the entire cultural edifice, although he does not specify how this is to

be accomplished. He finishes his work with these words: “Europe! Happy land where

for so long a time the arts, sciences, and philosophy have flourished; you whose

wisdom and power seem destined to command the rest of the world! Do you never tire

of the false dreams invented by the impostors in order to deceive the brutish slaves of

the Egyptians? [...] Leave to the stupid Hebrews, to the frenzied imbeciles, and to the

cowardly and degraded Asiatics these superstitions which are as vile as they are mad

....”39 As noted above, Sade explicitly associates the origins of Christianity with the 38 For discussion on this text, see Arthur Hertzberg The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1968/ The Jewish Publication Society of America Philadelphia,

5728) p.310. Alain Mothu lists d’Holbach’s L’esprit du Judaïsme among those in Sade’s library. Alain

Mothu “Les lectures ‘nécessaires’ du Marquis de Sade,” La lettre clandestin 3 (1994):311-319 p.317. 39 [Baron d’Holbach] L’Esprit du Judaïsme ou examen raisonné de la loi de MOYSE, & de son

influence sur la Religion Chrétienne (‘Londres’ [probably false] 1750) p. 200-201. Quoted in Arthur

Hertzberg The French Enlightenment and the Jews p.310.

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Jews, and largely repeats the ‘slave revolt’ theory, though in a more straightforward

manner. Sade also repeats the view, promulgated by Voltaire, d’Holbach, and others,

that that all of the great religious figures were ambitious charlatans: “Lycurgus,

Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great

thought-tyrants, knew how to associated the divinities they fabricated with their own

boundless ambition...they were always... to consult [their Gods] exclusively about, or

to make them exclusively respond to what they thought likely to serve their own

interests” (PB:300). 40

Nor was Sade the first to express interest in the morality of the Pagans as a

possible alternative. Notably, where Sade describes the early Christians as a ‘horde of

troublemakers,’ he alludes to the same Classical authors (Tacitus and Lucian) that

Voltaire and Rousseau had turned to (J: 283, 758, 759). 41 Rousseau felt that

seventeen centuries of Christianity had made Europe decadent and soft, and called

upon Europe to “...reclaim…your first innocence” (DI: 153). Children should be

taught to steal, as practiced in Sparta, Rousseau suggested, rather than being “glued to

books,” and he thought that hunting should be encouraged, as it “hardens the heart”

to “blood and cruelty” (E: 119,128, 320). Even where Rousseau is discussing

Christian (that is, conventional) morality in a positive way, he tends to align himself

with Sade’s association of morality with weakness and a lack of passion. We have

morality, Rousseau reasons, as we are weak: “[i]t is man’s weakness which makes

him sociable; it is our common miseries which turn our hearts to humanity; we would

owe humanity nothing if we were not men” (E: 221; also: SC: 77). Diderot and

Helvétius were similarly suspicious of Christian morality. Diderot suspected

40 On this subject, one particularly influential anonymous tract was the “Three Impostors,” known also

by its Latin title, De Tribus Impostoribus. It is thought to have first appeared in French in 1719, but its

actual origins are obscure. See Anonymous, Treatise of the Three Impostors and the Problem of

Enlightenment, A New Translation of the Traite Des Trois Imposteurs (1777 Edition) With Three

Essays in Commentary, translated by Abraham Anderson (Lanham, Maryland, U.S.A.: Rowman &

Littlefield Pub Inc, 1997). For discussion, see Silvia Berti, Francoise Charles-Daubert, Richard Henry

Popkin, editors, Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe:

Studies on the Traite Des Trois Imposteurs (Archives Internationales D'histoire Des Idées, 148)

(Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996). 41 For discussion, see Hertzberg pp.299-300. Lucian satirized the Christians in his Passing of

Peregrinus, a story of a philosopher sage who at one point becomes a leader of the Christians to take

advantage of their gullibility.

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conventional morality to be “meek slavish conformance to the laws.”42 Helvétius

discussed at length the merit of pride as a virtue, and the superior warrior virtues of

the Vikings. He suggested, like Diderot, that virtue was frequently due to “a want of

talents,” and that “to the same defect we owe all our virtues.” 43 He also had praise for

the “fierce and savage” Northern Nations, “infinitely more courageous and warlike

than people indulged in luxury, softness, and subject to arbitrary power.”44 He

presents the following passage as testament to their greatness of Viking culture, which

goes some way to illustrate the radicalism of philosophe thought with regards to the

question concerning Morality.

“Our warriors, greedy of death,” says one of their [Viking] poets, “seek for it with fury;

being struck in battle by a mortal blow, they fall, and laughing die.” This truth is

confirmed by one of their kings, named Lodbrog: “With what unknown joy am I seized! I

hear the voice of Odin call me; I see, coming [from the gates of Valhalla] beautiful

virgins half naked; they bear a blue scarf, which augments the whiteness of their bosoms;

they advance towards me and offer me the most delicious beer, in the bleeding skulls of

my enemies.45

It is against this intellectual nostalgia that Sade offers his thoughts on the

greatness of the Celts, discussed above. Whereas Helvétius is content to note the

passion and the poetry of the Vikings, Sade makes a more direct claim- the morality

of the Celts ought to be revived and applied directly to the modern world. Sade

emphasizes just how different the morality of the pre-Christian peoples of Europe

really was, and that it was based on very different standards and principles. Notes

Christopher Hibbert, the European understanding of crime and punishment was

completely transformed by the adoption of the Mosaic Law. Punishment was often

settled with a fine, or a duel, which of course would place the wealthy and strong, and

those trained in the art of war (that is, the nobles) at an advantage (an institution Sade

proposes in Aline et Valcour, to be discussed in Chapter VII). Until the rediscovery of

Roman law, murder, robbery and rape were regarded, not as sins, but as torts that

could be settled by compensation. Rape was regarded not as a crime against the 42 Diderot Political Writings pp.181-182. 43 Helvétius Essays on the Mind pp. 290. 44 Ibid. p.349. 45 Helvétius Essays on the Mind p.327-328.

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woman so much as a violation of the property of the woman’s husband (exactly as

Sade views it, as discussed in Chapter IV). 46 Writes Hibbert, around the 7th Century,

“In a society where every fighting man was a valuable asset, execution and mutilation

could not reasonably be considered suitable for lesser offences, such as murder or

theft... injuries which interfered with a man’s ability to work or fight were

compensated at a higher rate than those which disfigured him.” 47

Finally, Sade relentlessly emphasises the gulf that separates the morality of

modern Europe from that of the Roman Empire, so enthusiastically championed by

Rousseau and Voltaire. Both writers, even as they asserted the moral superiority of

Ancient Rome and Greece, were content to overlook certain negative aspects, in

particular slavery and (Rome in particular) cruelty. In his Philosophical Dictionary,

Voltaire notes that the Jews were tolerant and did not use torture, despite stating that

they were “cannibals” and “the cruellest people on earth.”48 Yet he also asserts that

the Romans were more moral than the Jews, and that “the Romans inflicted torture

only on the slaves, but the slaves were not reckoned to be human.”49 Similarly,

Rousseau writes of the Greeks that they lived for freedom, and that “slaves did all the

work...” (SC: 142). Sade’s characters, to be sure, discuss at length the naturalness of

the slave caste, but they are far less glib about the ‘mere’ fact that the Romans treated

humans like beasts. Catherine Cusset, in the essay “Sade, Machiavel et Néron,”

suggests that Sade’s celebration of Nero – in a manner completely at odds with the

thought of his time, was specifically to scandalize and incriminate the enthusiasm the

philosophes had for Imperial Rome.50 Further, whereas the philosophes admired the

grandeur of Rome despite its more repugnant aspects, Sade’s characters admire Rome

because it was so barbaric, mentioning it only in the context of gladiatorial combat,

throwing people to wild animals, or crucifying them (J: 337, 604, 803, 999, 1011,

1123- 1124). Further, they assert that Rome was great because of its lack of concern

for its more unfortunate subjects. From Encore un effort:

46 Christopher Hibbert The Roots of Evil: A Social History of Crime and Punishment (London: Penguin,

1963). p.18 47 Ibid. p.17 48 Voltaire Philosophical Dictionary 389, 395. 49 Ibid. p. 322, 395. 50 Catherine Cusset “Sade, Machiavel et Néron,” Dix-huitième Siècle 22 (1990): 401-411, p.402.

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What people were at once greater and more bloodthirsty than the Romans, and what

nation longer preserved its splendour and freedom? The gladiatorial spectacles fed its

bravery, it became warlike through the habit of making a game of murder. Twelve or

fifteen hundred victims filled the circus’ arena every day, and there the women, crueller

than the men, dared demand that the dying fall gracefully and be sketched while still in

death’s throes. The Romans moved from that to the pleasures of seeing dwarfs cut each

other to pieces; and when the Christian cult, then infecting the world, came to persuade

men there was evil in killing one another, the tyrants immediately enchained that people,

and everyone’s heroes became their toys (PB: 334, also 299; similar: J:784).

Note that Sade links up the greatness of Rome precisely with its brutality, and its

collapse with the ‘softening’ of the belief that human life is sacred. Exactly the same

group of associations- the grandeur and barbarity of Rome, and the doctrine of

inequality- is made in an official letter Sade wrote whilst serving as a Revolutionary

functionary. On November 7th 1793, Citoyen Sade, vice- president of the Section des

piques, was given the job of rechristening the streets of the neighborhood in his

jurisdiction with appropriately revolutionary names. Included in his letter to the

Comité de surveillance is the following proposal:

La rue de l’Arcade s’appellera

RUE DE SPARTACUS

Les Romains, malgré leur grandeur, portaient l’inhumanité au point

de sacrifier des hommes dans leurs spectacles : l’esclave Spartacus

fut condamne a cet avilissement : il crut que le titre d’homme devait

l’en mettre a l’abri ; il se révolta contre les barbares qui voulaient

s’amuser de sa mort ; il se fit un parti, soutint la liberté, l’égalité de

l’homme ; et la postérité le verra toujours comme un des plus zèles

défenseurs des droits de l’humanité. 51

Citoyen Sade- in terms identical to the official Revolutionary view, proposes to name

a street after the celebrated Roman slave. Even though Sade’s ‘official’ morality is the

exact opposite of that of the libertines, he consistently makes the association of Rome,

its grandeur, and its barbarity, as if to point out a lacuna in the Revolutionary

penchant for the Classical world. Unlike Rousseau or Voltaire, Sade notes that the

51 Sade Opuscules et Lettres politiques (Paris: 10/18, 1979) p.137.

236

Romans were ‘inhuman.’ Whichever Sade is the true one – Citoyen Sade or Libertin

Sade- whether Sade wanted to warn of the actual implications of returning to Rome,

or was sincerely in favour of razing Jerusalem- is unclear.

In the following chapter, the doctrine of the Natural Right of the Strong, as

applied to the political domain in Sade’s work, will be discussed.

237

238

Chapter VII: THE GOVERNMENT OF REASON

Sade’s Politics

Power is nothing without control.

Pirelli slogan.

7.1 Introduction.

On the subject of politics, there is no consensus on what Sade had in mind, what his

work amounts to, or whether he treated the topic, as such, at all. The political aspect

of Sade’s work is a relatively neglected area, and a number of influential scholars (in

particular Hénaff, Le Brun, Blanchot, Bataille, and Klossowski) scarcely mention it at

all, giving the reader the impression that Sade only depicts isolated libertines, entirely

cut off from the rest of the world. Sade’s one direct statement on his political

orientation only clarifies that he was, at least publicly, unable to commit to any

particular political ethic or ideology.1 In 1792, he wrote the following lines to his

lawyer and friend, Gaufridy:

It is not, in truth, for any of the parties, yet it is a composite of all of them. I am an anti-

Jacobin, I hate them to the death; I love the King, yet I detest the former abuses; I love the

vast majority of the articles of the Constitution, others of them revolt me; I would like the

nobility returned to their glory, because taking it away from them accomplishes nothing; I

wish the King were the head of the nation; I do not at all want the national Assembly, but

two houses as in England, which gives the King a mitigated authority, balanced by the

concurrence of a nation necessarily divided into two orders, the third [i.e., the clergy] is

unnecessary, I want nothing of them. There you have my profession of faith. What am I

now? Aristocrat or democrat? Please tell me, lawyer, because, as for me, I do not have the

faintest idea.2

1 For discussion, see Thomas Sade, la dissertation et l’orgie p.14 ; Alain Verjat “L’imaginaire de Sade

et la Révolution” in Chalas-Ives, ed. Mythe et révolutions (Grenoble: PU de Grenoble, 1990):185-197,

p.187. See also Lacombe Sade et ses masques pp.123, 127-129. 2 Letter to Gaufridy, December 5th 1791. In Sade Correspondance inédite du Marquis de Sade de ses

proches, et de ses familiers ed. Paul Bourdin (Paris : Librairie de France, 1929) pp.301-2. Quoted in

Shaeffer pp.414-415.

239

In Chapter I, I noted that there are various interpretations concerning Sade’s

political orientation. Sade has been interpreted as a totalitarian, as a liberator of the

human spirit, as a socialist, and as a revolutionary. There are also various views as to

whether Sade was promulgating a particular doctrine, was simply confused, or wished

to undermine the reader’s faith in any particular political solution. I wish to sidestep

the impossible hermeneutic task of deciding what Sade himself had in mind. He

himself had no clear statement on political matters, true, but his characters are not

politically ambivalent, and have specific ideas concerning political power. What will

be discussed here is the relationship between the various political positions which

they offer, how they cohere with the doctrinal matrix as discussed in previous

chapters (in particular the various ethical and psychological assumptions), and their

intersections. Further, Sade’s depiction of the powerful, and how they think and

function, is an essential part of his overall description of the world and how to survive

in it (Sade is also insistent that what he describes concerns the real world, frequently

noting, in footnotes throughout Juliette, that the atrocities performed by his characters

refer to actual events). 3 Besides preparing the way for a final assessment of the Sade-

Nazism association, the chapter will also serve as a reply to the claim that Sade’s

work is resolutely a-political.

Sade’s complex and intimate involvement with the French Revolution, and his

debt to other writers on politics, population control and economics, are themes that go

far beyond the scope of this study. 4 Nor will I be concerned with readings of Sade as

3 Juliette is full of lurid caricatures of living political and church figures. Juliette herself meets Gustav

of Sweden, Pope Pius VI, Ferdinand of Naples, Victor-Amédée of Savoy, and Leopold of

Tuscany. Another character, Brisatesta, brother of Clairwil, is an intimate of Catherine the Great

(Juliette pp.874-880). In The 120 Days of Sodom Sade refers to a certain ‘Bishop de X***,’insinuating

that this was a real serial killing cleric, and refers to himself as the Marquis de S***, who was burned

in effigy for the crime of sodomy (120:191, 495). Sade also writes that a particular vivisecting doctor is

based on an acquaintance (J: 729) Further, throughout Juliette there are a number of assertions that

particular plots and atrocities are based on fact, such as a plot to set fire to every hospital in Rome:

“[t]his project was actually conceived while I was at Rome, and I alter nothing but the names of the

actors” (J: 726,762, 858). He also alludes to the sexual exploits of Marie Antoinette (934) and the link

between the sex trade industry and the Italian church (980). 4 For discussion of Sade’s political career, see Michel Delon “Sade Thermidorien” In Michel Camus,

Philippe Roger, eds Sade, écrire la crise:99-118 ; Michel Delon “Sade dans la Révolution” pp.160-

161 ; Michael La Chance “Marat, Sade: Despotiser de corps” in 1789: Conférences 1989 (Montréal:

240

a revolutionary in a sense which is not straightforwardly political- those, for example,

who read Sade as a liberator of the libido, the psyche, or the confines of language. 5

7.2 Antipodes

Oh Sainville! A great revolution will come to your people!

Zamé, Aline et Valcour (AV:372).

It is the epistolary novel Aline et Valcour, ou le roman philosophique (1795),

that is most commonly cited in discussions of Sade’s purported socialism ( in

particular by Geoffrey Gorer, as discussed in Chapter I), and is the closest Sade comes

to an endorsement of a straightforwardly socialist politics. 6 This is the only surviving

Dépt. d’études françaises, Université de Montréal, 1990):5-32, pp.17, 23; Lucienne Frappier –Mazur

“A Turning Point in the Sadean Novel: The Terror” In Sawhney, ed. Must We Burn Sade? : 115-131;

Marcelin Pleynet “The Readability of Sade” in The Tel Quel Reader ed. Patrick ffrench (sic), Roland-

François Lack (London and New York: Routledge, 1998):109-122, p.188; Michaël La Chance “Marat,

Sade: Despotiser de corps” in 1789: Conférences 1989 (Montréal: Dépt. d’études françaises, Université

de Montréal, 1990):5-32, p.17.

For discussion on the sources of Sade’s thoughts on politics and population control, see Jean Ehrard

“Pour une lecture non sadienne de Sade: mariage et démographie dans Aline et Valcour” In Roger,

Camus ed. Sade, écrire la crise: 241-258; Yves Giraud “La ville du bout du monde: Sade, Aline et

Valcour” In Studi di letterature francese 11, 1985:85-100, p.98. Lacombe p.156-161, 168 -178 ;

Giraud p.92 ; AV:866, fn. 406. Philippe Roger “La trace de Fénelon” In Camus and Roger, eds. Sade

écrire la crise pp.149-175. Sade also mentions abbé de Saint-Pierre’s proposal for a Pan- European

republic (AV: 531). 5 Béatrice Didier and Philippe Roger both take Sade to be engaged in a destruction of the confines of

language itself. See Philippe Roger Sade La Philosophie dans le pressoir pp.189-190; Didier Sade: Un

écriture du désir pp 129, 203, 222. James N. Glass “Rousseau’s Emile and Sade’s Eugénie: Action,

Nature and the Presence of Moral Structure,” The Philosophical Forum: a Quarterly 7, no. 1 (Fall

1975):38-55, pp.340. Kazuhiko Sekitani, “Révolution française et érotisme vus à travers les textes

politiques de Sade,” Etudes de langue et littérature françaises 62 (March 1993):16-28. 6 There are socialist aspects of Sade’s libertine works. The libertines are frequently described by the

narrative voice as ‘bloodsuckers,’ and, as discussed in preceding chapters, the association of

immorality and economic power is explicit (120:191, 195,700; J: 167, 213, 683). The doctrine of the

natural rightness of economic equality appears elsewhere also. In La Nouvelle Justine, for example,

several thieves argue that, as Nature creates all men equal, they are justified in correcting the imbalance

241

‘philosophical novel’ that Sade admitted to have written, and the first to have

appeared under his own name. 7 Like his short stories, it has a moral orientation quite

unlike that of the ‘libertine’ works. Within this text are a number of unremarkable and

unoriginal suggestions concerning economic and defense policies, such as the

importance of agriculture to national wellbeing, and the necessity of strengthened

naval power to defend trade routes (AV: 236; 237). It is Letter XXXV, however, that

has received the most interest.

In Letter XXXV, Léonore is kidnapped by Turkish pirates and is feared sold to

a Sultan. Sainville, in the course of his rescue attempt, and following a rumour that

Léonore is aboard Captain James Cook’s research vessel Endeavour, travels the world

in search of her. 8 On his travels he encounters two exotic societies; the Kingdom of

Batua, in West Africa, and the Kingdom of Tamoé, a tiny Republic off the coast of

New Zealand (AV :279).9 As interpretation of Sade’s politics has focused on the latter,

I will begin here.

Upon arrival in Tamoé, Sainville meets Zamé, self-described philosopher king of

the island (AV: 281). Sainville is surprised that Zamé understands French. In reply,

Zamé explains that he is familiar with the ways of Europeans, and tells his story.

Many years earlier, a French battleship discovered the island, and for a month, the

crew took advantage of the “weakness and innocence” of the islanders, committing

“many disorders” (AV: 388). Nevertheless, Zamé took the chance to see the world,

and travelled to Europe, remaining there for three years. Having seen the hypocrisy

and absurdity of European laws and practices, he returned to Tamoé, and transformed

the Republic into the ideal state, based on the lessons learned.

The figure of Zamé, and his doctrine, is largely in keeping with the political

thought of his age. He is an ‘enlightened despot,’ or, as Fink describes him, “a

between rich and poor (LNJ 1: 68; 83). Only in Aline et Valcour, however, is economic difference and

exploitation discussed as an actual wrong. 7 Schaeffer p.455. 8 Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy (1728-1779) was the first explorer to circumnavigate and

accurately chart New Zealand, and has the status of ancestor figure for European (Pakeha) New

Zealanders. It may amuse the reader to know that the author was born in New Zealand, in a region

called The Bay of Plenty, a rather Utopian name given by Captain Cook himself. 9 This appeared as a separate book in the 10:18 series. Marquis de Sade Histoire de Sainville et de

Léonore introduction par Gilbert Lély. (Paris: 10:18, 1963).

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paternalistic autocrat.”10 He rules entirely in accordance with his own education and

judgement. Like Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, Zamé is distrustful of the notion of

Democracy (notably, even Rousseau feared that democracy was only suited to small,

poor countries, remarking that full democracy was “for gods, not men”; SC: 30-32,

125). 11 When Sainville asks him why the island lacks any political or legal apparatus

besides his own authority, Zamé states: “[s]i les lois sont justes, elles n’ont pas besoin

d’être déposées ailleurs que dans le cœur de chaque citoyen, et elles s’y placeront

naturellement.” He adds that a British- style parliamentary system would be

undesirable: “[m]oins de danger pour le peuple, sans doute, mais bien plus d’entraves

pour moi; plus je diviserai mon pouvoir, plus je l’affaiblirai, et comme je n’ai envie

que de faire le bien, je ne veux pas que rien m’en empêche” (AV: 298).

Every aspect of life on Tamoé is dictated by principles laid down by Zamé, and

many of his directives appear (to modern eyes, at least) draconian. Reasoning– based

on his experiences in Europe– that luxury goods harm the economic wellbeing of the

state, and that crime is entirely due to economic difference, Zamé has (or claims to

have) eliminated all luxury, economic inequality, and private property.12 An

extremely limited diet is enforced; meat is banned, as is every beverage other than

water (AV: 283, 285, 352, 357). All property is held in common, and there is no hard

currency. Zamé boasts that this ‘system’ (call it ‘Zamism’) is “closer to nature,” citing

the authority of Diogenes and Epicurus (not, curiously, Rousseau) on the virtues of

‘natural’ living (AV: 294). He declares: “[é]tablissez l’égalité des fortunes et des

conditions, qu’il n’y ait d’unique propriétaire que l’État…et tout les crimes dangereux

disparaîtront; la constitution de Tamoé vous le prouve” (AV: 319, 321, 337, 339). The

Republic is both an autarky (all trade, and all interaction with other states is

prohibited) and a command economy. Industry on Tamoé is restricted to agriculture,

10Fink “Political System” p.503. 11 Candide and Other Tales p.398; Diderot Political Writings pp 32, 91. For discussion, see also Isaiah

Berlin “the art of Being Ruled” In Times Literary Supplement February 15th 2002 p.15. For discussion

on the theory of ‘Enlightened Despotism’ in the 18th Century, see Geoffrey Bruun The Enlightened

Despots (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc, 1967). 12 Juliette makes similar pronouncements, describing the city as a “pit that swallows up all the wealth

of the nation, and thereby impoverishes it”; a place where inequality, “that all-destroying poison,” is

visible everywhere (J: 928). Rousseau, on such grounds, proposed that Paris be destroyed (E: 469).

243

textiles, construction and defence, despite the presence of significant gold deposits on

the island (AV: 288, 289, 329).

Zamism permeates all aspects of life on Tamoé. Zamé, who clearly does not

believe in the principle of separation of church and state, holds that it is “necessary”

to “have a god” in order to maintain control (again, this view is in keeping with the

thought of the 18th Century, in particular that of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the architects

of the Cult of Reason proposed during the French Revolution. People, it was thought,

need a religion; a ‘rational’ religion stripped of dogma is better). 13 Zamé is both the

founder and the high priest of the island’s religion (a combination of rationalist Deism

and solar worship), and leads the entire population in its daily dawn Prayer to the Sun,

at which the following prayer is said: “[y]ou who steer our thoughts, who regulates

our actions, who purifies our hearts, our sentiment, of respect, and love, you inspire”

(AV: 354, 355). He has everyone on the island brought up to regard him as their

father, and to love a deity which is essentially a personification of the established

order (AV: 322). As such, he is both a cult leader and the only personality cult in

Sade’s work.

Censorship on Tamoé is strictly enforced, and all art and entertainment is

subordinate to the interests of the state. All publishing is limited to the necessities of

education and industry, and all theatrical works (some written by Zamé himself) are

written for the purposes of the moral education of the community.14 Anything more

elaborate, notes Fink, “would stimulate creativity and controversy and thus a desire

for change.” 15 Education, too, is subordinate to the needs of the state. Besides

‘religious’ (that is, cult) indoctrination, Children’s tastes are consciously shaped for

good citizenship at an early age (AV: 361). Writes Fink, “[i]nstruction is purely

factual; there is no teaching of aesthetic, speculative or policy-oriented disciplines.

The child, that is, is educated to understand the system and meet its technical

requirements, not to innovate or make decisions for himself.” 16 Education is also

13 During the Revolution, Sade himself served as an official in the ceremonies of the Cult of Virtue. See

Lever, pp.445-449. 14 One play that is mentioned, written by Zamé himself, deals with the subject of adultery. The function

of the play is not to provide catharsis but to allow the public to see their own guilt (Goulemot’s note;

AV: 359). 15 Fink “Political System” p.503. 16 Fink “Political System” p.509.

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used to give children the belief that it is to the State, and not to their families,

allegiance is owed (an idea derived from Rousseau).

that

17 States Zamé: “it is the state

which feeds the citizens, who raises the children, which treats them, judges them;

which condemns them; and I am nothing other than its first citizen” (AV: 366).

Education in Tamoé, being focused on civic virtue and practical skills, mirrors

education in our own society. To varying degrees, the educational systems of all

modern states emphasise practicality (over the emphasis, in Sade’s day, on such

subjects as Latin and Greek), and civic duty. The emphasis on civic duty is more

explicit in the education systems of, say, South Korea and France than in New

Zealand or Canada, yet even here the values and principles that the State upholds,

such as multiculturalism, are instilled at school. Insofar as it is a society in which

Rousseau’s proposals for educational reform has been implemented, Tamoé is

prophetic. The same could be said of Zamé’s subordination of the family to the

authority of the state. This is a common enough idea in our age, yet, again, a recent

idea that was only officially implemented from the time of the French Revolution.

Now, it is taken for granted in Western- style democracies that the state is the sole

authority in family matters, and that laws of the state have precedence over family

ties. We take it for granted that the State has the power, and the right, to remove

mistreated children from their parents, to take husbands from their wives in order to

serve in the military, and so on. Further, under the ancien régime (under the lettre de

cachet system) one could be imprisoned, not by order of a court of law appointed by

the state, but by the request of a family member. The universal and absolute nature of

state power, now so familiar to us, is only visible at all through the distorting lens of

Sade’s strange ‘utopian’ vision. Insofar as we may regard Zamé’s edicts concerning

eating meat both presumptuous and paternalistic, the same may be said of his laws

concerning civil identity.

Other aspects of Tamoean social engineering are also of note. No health care,

besides the policing of diet and the banishment of the sick from the island, is

provided. Special permission has to be granted to avoid marriage; men are whipped to

17 Rousseau, in The Government of Poland, proposes that infants see nothing but the Fatherland from

the moment of birth, so that their mother’s milk is laced with love for their country. Rousseau

The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed, trans., and annotated by Victor Gourevitch

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) p. 189. Quoted in Robert Wokler Rousseau: A very

Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p. 118-119.

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recover virility. The unmarried (célibataires) and the “répudiés de l’un et de l’autre

sexe” are housed in a separate part of the island (AV: 364, 367). Adultery is banned,

although divorce is permitted (AV: 283, 365). Sade’s description of the inhabitants of

Tamoé, in terms of ‘race and blood,’ is also consistent with the preoccupation with

social engineering.18

It is the town planning of Tamoé that betrays its nature as an architectonic of

total power. The whole of the island, as Jean M. Goulemot puts it, is “un système

généralisé de contrôle” (AV: p.837, n.424). The streets and buildings are laid out in a

perfectly circular pattern so that one of Zamé’s representatives is able to observe his

subjects from a central observation point: “…afin que l’œil vigilant du commandant

de la ville pût s’étendre avec moins de peine sur tous les sujets de la contrée” (AV:

368-370). It is, in fact, Bentham’s Panopticon; in contemporary terms, every citizen is

on closed-circuit television. The enforced isolation of the island is also significant.

The citizens are forbidden from leaving (a privilege granted Zamé, but denied

everyone else), and all but military vessels are destroyed to make departure

impossible. There is no interaction with other states, despite the opportunity to trade

with gold. Notes Fink, “[i]solation notably precludes comparisons with other life

styles and thus minimizes the unsettling weighing of alternatives.”19 Zamé, for an

avowed pacifist, spends a considerable amount of time discussing military

preparedness. He proudly shows off the precision and might of his navy in a mock

battle, and discusses the strict meritocracy of the army, a defence force of 42,000

personnel (a militia of 3,000 soldiers for each of Tamoé’s fourteen towns; AV:314,

326, 330, 329, 370). This is curious, as the island has not been visited by foreigners in

at least sixty years, suggesting that there is an ulterior motive for such militarism.20 In 18 Although Tamoé is off the coast of New Zealand, Sade describes its inhabitants as white and blond

with blue eyes, wearing European dress and living in European style dwellings, provoking one critic to

suggest that Sade is immune to exoticism. See Yves Giraud, “La ville du bout du monde”: Sade, Aline

et Valcour,” Studi di letteratura Francese 11 (1985):85-100, p.92. Sainville, in describing the women,

states that “en général, le sang est superbe à Tamoé” (AV: 315, 331, 363, 367). This old idea of ‘blood’

being the agency of ‘biological heritage’ reappears elsewhere in the novel. For example, the character

Valcour states that “… le sang de mes ancêtres coule pur dans mes veines” (AV: 676). 19 Fink “Political System”p.508. 20 Zamé states that the island was visited by the French navy at the end of the reign of Louis XIV,

which ended in 1715. Sainville’s travels are contemporary with the third voyage of Cook, 1776 -1779

(AV: 277, 288).

246

Juliette, written two years later (1797), a clear association is made between the

maintenance of authoritarian rule and military readiness. A king is, states Juliette, “to

the body politic as a doctor is to the physical body: you may call him when you are ill,

you must show him to the door once health returns, else he’ll prolong the malady so

as to be of eternal aid, and while pretending to cure, he’ll bide with you to the grave”

(Sade adds in a footnote: “Not until the fatherland was in danger did the Romans

name a dictator” J: 936&n).

The Laws of Tamoé (the bans on ‘controlled substances’ such as meat and

alcohol, censorship, forbidden sexual activity, and so on) are enforced with a range of

punishments. Whilst milder crimes are punished with public humiliation (clearly a

chastisement, or even collective revenge, rather than a ‘correction’), or being forced

to wear specially marked clothes, more serious violations are punished with exile in a

canoe with a week’s provisions- in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, banned

from returning on pain of death (AV: 325, 344). Another of Zamé’s suggestions- that

murderers are punished according to the economic value of the dead to the community

– shows that individuals are not judged as equal in the eyes of the law (AV:343). 21

The most intriguing aspect of Zamé’s doctrine is his belief that he rules his

kingdom without the use of laws. Laws, he states, are not only unjust but vain- a

spider’s web in which flies are killed and from which the wasps always escape (AV:

337). 22 He also argues that laws create crime : “Plus vous leur offrez de digues, plus

21 Zamé notes that this was the custom of the ancient Francs and Germans. This reflects Sade’s interest

in a return to the ethics of the pre-Christian Europeans, as discussed in the previous chapter. 22 Here Zamé’s discussion matches that of the libertines, who frequently complain that the justice

system is blind, corrupt, or insufficient. These criticisms are made in monologues that typically involve

slips from Bataillian to Benthamite mode and back again. For example, the highwayman Dubois argues

that his crimes are themselves the ‘fault of the law’ rather than his own. He has to kill all the people he

robs, as the punishment for aggravated robbery is death. Yet he observes that murder gives him a

‘pleasurable tickling” (LNJ 1: 85). Similarly, a character in La Nouvelle Justine complains of “absurd

laws” that “prevent me from treating my wife as I see fit,” namely, imprisoning her and drinking her

blood (LNJ 2:168). Other, general comments made concerning the legal system: a man may do many

good things in his life, but will be harshly punished for doing one bad thing; the courts will find guilty

that person that they think is most likely to have committed the crime; people can change their ways;

the justice system punishes those who are ignorant of the law; some laws are patently arbitrary, in

particular the lettre de cachet system; the judges and magistrates are corrupt and hypocritical (AV: 16,

337, 344; MV:21; J:376, 215, 358; LNJ 2:404). Further, the theme of the judge who derives sexual

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vous leur préparez de plaisir à les rompre ; c’est, comme vous dites, l’infraction seule

qui les amuse ; peut-être ne se plongeraient-ils pas dans cette espèce de mal, s’ils ne le

croyaient défendu ” (AV :340; also 338, 339).23 His justice system, he declares, is

based on prevention and the ‘hope of correction’ (l’espoir de corriger), on the grounds

that to imprison and punish merely embitters the wrong- doer (AV: 327).24 Zamé also

assumes (in keeping with Sadeian ontology) that hard determinism is true. The

criminal is merely a “hapless instrument of blind nature”; hence, “perhaps even the

softest law is tyrannic” (AV: 347). He also argues against the death penalty, his

arguments ranging from the well- known (miscarriages of justice cannot be reversed)

to the irrelevant (the execution of criminals originated with Celtic rites; AV: 332, 336). 25 As people cannot be improved through legislation, Zamé holds that they can only

be made compliant through changing their motives, and through examples and

‘compensations.’ He explains this principle to Sainville:

–Voyez cet arbre, poursuivit Zamé, en m’en montrant un dont le tronc était plein de

nœuds; croyez-vous qu’aucun effort puisse jamais redresser cette plante?

–Non.

–Il faut donc la laisser comme elle est ; elle fait nombre et donne de l’ombrage ; usons-en

et ne la regardons pas. Les gens dont vous me parlez sont rares. Ils ne m’inquiètent point ;

j’emploierais le sentiment, la délicatesse et l’honneur avec eux, ces freins seraient plus

sûrs que ceux de la loi. J’essaierais encore de faire changer leur habitude de motifs, l’un

ou l’autre de ces moyens réussirait : croyez-moi mon ami, j’ai trop étudié les hommes

pour ne pas vous répondre qu’il n’est aucune sorte d’erreurs que je ne détourne ou

n’anéantisse, sans jamais employer de punitions corporelles. Ce qui gêne ou moleste le

physique n’est fait que pour les animaux ; l’homme, ayant la raison au-dessus d’eux, ne

doit être conduit que par elle et ce puissant ressort mène à tout, il ne s’agit que de savoir

le manier ( AV:340).

Given that, as noted above, Tamoé has both (by our standards) draconian laws,

and applies harsh punishments to offenders, we have a portrait of a society in which

pleasure from sentencing people to death occurs frequently in Sade’s work (J: 126, 222; 237; 120:363,

531; AV: 334). For commentary see Bongie p. xi. 23 Chigi, the chief of Police in Juliette, makes the same claim (J: 734). 24 This complaint is made in Juliette (J: 730). 25 Many of Sade’s characters argue against the death penalty. Zamé’s case differs, as his arguments are

consistent here with his own ethics (LNJ. 1:152, 153; J: 122 AV: 739).

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the reality of the penal system scarcely matches the official rhetoric of humanistic

values and the principle of ‘correction’ (if not in New Zealand, certainly in other

Western states). Again, Tamoé is uncomfortably similar to contemporary society.

A global reading of Sade’s corpus mitigates against reading the Tamoé episode

as a straightforward expression of political ideology. In particular, the morality of

Tamoé is based entirely on principles that Sade savages elsewhere- namely, the

principle of equality, the undesirability of luxury, and the idea that a commonplace

morality can be derived from nature. The doctrine of enforced equality is taken to an

extreme that would lead to immediate conflict even on Zamé’s own grounds (because,

as Zamé explains, laws simply make more attractive the forbidden, prohibition would

create a black market economy of everything banned, and a desire to simply leave the

island, or perhaps even to mutiny).26 Zamé, a benevolent philosopher- king, is a

psychological impossibility for Sade (as discussed below, power is closely associated

with its ‘enjoyment,’ and Sade typically warns that the powerful are not to be

trusted).27 Yet one suspects that he returned from Europe as much a Sadeian as a

Rousseauian. Zamé makes several doctrinal lapses whilst conversing with Sainville,

betraying thoughts that would be catastrophic for his subjects to seriously consider.

For example, he suggests that the same set of rules could not possibly suit everyone,

or that criminals are chained to the “superior laws of nature,” even though the official

doctrine is ostensibly grounded on the same ‘laws of nature’ (AV: 348, 352). These

incongruities are brought to a head as the episode concludes. Sainville informs the

reader that the citizens of Tamoé are “un peuple doux, sensible, vertueux sans lois,

pieux sans religion,” despite clearly having both laws and a state religion, and lacking

the freedom to truly exercise the virtues (AV: 371). Finally, in order to aid Sainville

in his travels, Zamé gifts Sainville with 7,570,000 livres in gold bullion, despite

having claimed to be the equal of his citizens, and to have banned luxury and wealth

26 Given his penchant for marshmallow syrup, roast beef, and only the most expensive rosewater, it is

hard to believe that Sade himself could have considered Tamoé a Utopia. Marquis de Sade Letters from

Prison pp.295, 154, 157, 160-161, 169, 295. 27 This may not necessarily be an indication of actual parody, given that, throughout the novel,

characters frequently adopt theoretical points of view that do not cohere with their behaviour. Léonore

is both a good Christian and a devout atheist, for example (AV: 570, n. 587). For discussion, see Pierre

Favre Sade utopiste : sexualité, pouvoir et état dans le roman “Aline et Valcour” (Paris : Presses

universitaires de France, 1967).

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from the island (AV: 375). Again, he grants to himself, and to his guest, that which is

denied his subjects. 28

Tamoé was not, in fact, intended to be read in isolation. As noted above, it

makes up one half of a diptych, the other wing being the Kingdom of Batua. Le Brun

and Roger note that in both Aline et Valcour (with regards to political doctrine) and

the 120 Days of Sodom (with regards to sexual ‘penchants’) the author invites the

reader to choose their favourite position from within the text. Sade states, in the

introduction to Aline et Valcour: “the wiser reader should amuse or occupy himself

with the different political systems presented, whether for or against, and adopt those

which best promote his ideas or inclinations (AV: 46, also 120:254).”29

Batua is a Kingdom somewhere on the West Coast of Africa, with a population

of 30,000. Like Tamoé, Batua is ruled by an absolute monarch, Ben Mâacoro.

The kingdom is essentially Minski’s Castle on a larger scale- a totalitarian sexual

utopia for one- and makes as little sociological sense. Principal economic products are

maize, monkey meat, human flesh and the trade in sex slaves (AV: 257, 258). Political

control is maintained through brute force, rather than the finely calibrated system of

indoctrination of Tamoé (AV: 236, 238). Writes Fink: “... [b]rainwashing is

accomplished by a priestly class which, in exchange for social privileges, inculcates in

the inhabitants the principles of superstition, fear and contempt for others.”30 Only

women perform any function besides the role of King or Village Chief, making up all

of the country’s labourers, sex slaves, or soldiers (the only functions Sade lists). Yet

they are taught to be absolutely submissive to men, and are locked up, punished, or

condemned to death for the least misdemeanour, or sacrificed to the Cult of the

Serpent, despite the fact that, bizarrely, they hold all the arms and do all the

productive labour (AV:223, 248). Women are also considered lowly whilst pregnant,

28 The sum is so vast that Sainville can buy a new vessel and have it fully crewed without making a

dent in his fortune, and the sum of gold he carries causes him serious legal problems upon arrival in

Europe. On the continuity of socioeconomic elites in Sade’s work, see Michel Delon “Sade

Thermidorien” p.107. 29 Le Brun Sudden Abyss pp. 106, 108-109 ; Roger “ La trace de Fénelon” pp.165, 167. 30 Beatrice Fink “Political System”p.508 See also Shelby Spruell “The Marquis de Sade- Pornography

or Political Protest?,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 9

(1982):238-249.

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and, if the King’s concubines, are killed if made pregnant by the King- customs in

keeping with the ‘will towards sterility’ outlined in Chapter IV.31

Upon arrival in Batua, Sainville meets Sarmiento, a Portuguese expatriate,

whose function is to ‘inspect’ ‘pleasure objects’(that is, women for the harem) for the

delectation of the King (AV:239, 272, 274). Sarmiento’s philosophy- which is that of

his adopted home- is of a piece with that of other libertines. Sarmiento speaks of the

same ontology and reductionist psychology – of “violent irritations” and “shocks of

the atoms” as the Libertines (AV: 240, 264). Likewise, he denies free will, and blames

his acts on his ‘natural despotism,’ concluding, in classic Sadeian style, “j’ai trouvé le

bonheur dans mes systèmes, et n’y ai jamais connu le remords” (AV: 243). Sarmiento

argues that, as destruction is natural, and that man’s nature leads him to destruction,

war is not criminal.32 He argues that the weak are created by Nature to be dominated,

and that crime does not exist. When Sainville criticizes the trade in black slaves,

Sarmiento replies that the very fact that they were enslaved at all proves their natural

inferiority.33

Direct comparison of Batua and Tamoé is revealing, and perhaps discloses

Sade’s intentions. Zamé is the weakest philosophe character in all of Sade’s surviving

works. Unlike the likes of Juliette or Clairwil, Zamé never discusses the actual

premises of his doctrine- rather, he imposes the doctrine of equality and mediocrity

onto the people, and presents the aberrant individual with the threat of a certain death

in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Further, every point he makes is countered

somewhere else in the novel.34 His dialogue is also one- sided, lacking the back-and-

forth of the discussion between Sainville and Sarmiento that immediately precedes it.

Zamé is deeply inconsistent, in sharp contrast to the frequently unassailable logic of

the lone-wolf libertines such as Minski. The two figures have theoretical 31 Accordingly, Sarmiento argues that Nature merely tolerates reproduction (AV: 254). 32 D.N. Beach “The Marquis de Sade: First Zimbabwean Novelist,” Zambezia VIII (i) (1980): 53-6,

pp.56, 58. 33 Beach p.58. This is more or less Aristotle’s argument in the Politics, Aristotle The Politics, ed. S.

Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Book I, chapters iii-vii. For discussion on

Greek philosophical views on slavery, see Stephen L. Esquith, and Nicholas D. Smith (1998).

“Slavery,” In E. Craig, ed, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge). Retrieved

November 17, 2004, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/S055SECT1. 34 The importance of the market for luxury goods to the economy is discussed later in the novel (AV:

643).

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commonalities. Neither Sarmiento nor Zamé believe in free will, or accept normative

notions of ethics or justice. Both Zamé and Ben Mâacoro use religious indoctrination

to maintain power (AV: 260), and both societies are monolithic, as opposed to open,

societies. Neither trusts their citizens to follow instructions without either thorough

indoctrination, constant surveillance, or the direct threat of punishment, and neither

assume that the citizens will simply see the reasonableness of their legislation. Zamé

holds to the principle of equality and respect for all, Ben Mâacoro does not. More

importantly, power in Batua is visible and crude, its relationship plainly linked to

brute force, whereas, on Tamoé, it is invisible but meticulously organized.

Reading the Tamoé and Batua episodes in a literal way- that is, as a political

proposal or manifesto, may not be the most profitable approach. A great deal of

thought went into Tamoé, but apparently more thought went into the planning of the

ultimate micromanaged state than into political doctrine as such. With regards to

Tamoé, Fink writes:

The hallmark of a serious political philosophy, whether analytical or normative, is a

preoccupation with the phenomenon of power in society: its origins, magnitude,

distribution, limitation, validation etc. Immediately we are confronted with the fact that

Sade’s writings demonstrate an almost ubiquitous concern with the concept of power and

its ethical validation, use and consequences at the level of interpersonal and intergroup

relationships.35

Whether Tamoé and Batua are to be read as satires (Tamoé, as one of revolution, Ben

Mâacoro’s Batua, as Fink suggests, as a parody of the absolute Monarchy) is

unclear. 36 What can be ruled out is the reading of either as being a positive political

treatise, or even as an open- ended smorgasbord: there are only two options offered:

Darfur or North Korea. If Aline et Valcour was intended as a straightforward

statement of Sade’s political views, the overall picture is one of utter hopelessness. 37

35 Fink “Political System” p.494. 36 Ibid. p.500. 37 Unsurprisingly, no critic who has carefully read Sade as a political theorist has given him a positive

reception. Giraud takes Aline et Valcour to be a confession of absolute political pessimism that secretes

“boredom, uniformity and general anaesthesia.” Giraud “La ville du bout du monde,” p.100. Roger G.

Lacombe notes sardonically that Sade seems more concerned with discussing punishments to be meted

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Fink’s approach-according to which Sade’s political thought concerns the “tools and

mechanics of psychological conditioning and control”- appears to be the most fruitful

one, and will be returned to below. 38

7.3 How to Philosophize with a Brick in the Face.

The pamphlet Yet Another Effort ( Encore un effort) is the only surviving text by Sade

that both resembles a political tract, and was not written as part of his official duties as

a revolutionary. Encore un effort loosely follows the format of a political pamphlet of

the revolutionary period, and is the only extended and argumentative political

discourse in Sade’s work that is not an explicit defence of authoritarianism. The text

utilizes the slogans and ideals of the Revolution, and is ostensibly in favour of

Rousseauian or Benthamite principles –Equality and Happiness. The author states that

‘liberty and equality’ are the basis of society, and that our ‘reciprocal obligations’ are

prescribed by humanity, fraternity, and benevolence (PB: 307,308). With regards to

education reform, Sade writes: “get promptly to the task of training the youth, it must

be amongst your most important concerns...rather than fatigue your children’s young

organs with deific stupidities, replace them with excellent social principles...let them

be instructed in their duties toward society; train them to cherish the virtues...make

them sense that this [individual] happiness consists in rendering others as fortunate as

we desire to be ourselves ”(PB:303). The text concludes: “...the laws we promulgate

have, as ends, nothing but the citizen’s tranquillity, his happiness, and the glory of the

republic” (338). As the text progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that

the author is committed to neither liberty, equality, nor the advocacy of reciprocal

obligations. As discussed in Chapter VI, the pamphlet proposes that both Christianity

and its moral code are eliminated. The author rejects the principle of duty to other

people: “[t]his absurd morality [that] tells us to love our neighbours as ourselves”

(309). (Similarly, in Juliette, Sade expresses scepticism with regards to the ideological

integrity of the Revolution, accusing its supporters of rejecting God but retaining

essentially religious ideals and principles).39 Whether Sade is suggesting that a). the out than a call for class struggle. Lacombe Sade et ses masques pp.141, 149, 157. See also Michel

Delon “Sade dans la Révolution” p.158; Philippe Roger “La Trace Fénelon” p.160. 38 Fink “Political System”p.510. 39 “And what goes beyond all understanding is that the Jacobins of the French Revolution wanted to

smash the altars of a God who spoke precisely their own language. Yet more extraordinarily, they who

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French Revolution has not gone far enough in eliminating the very morality of

Christianity or, perhaps b). the Revolutionaries have not understood what the return to

Rome entails, is not clear.

Also discussed above (in Chapter IV) is the proposal for the establishment of

brothels, which conflates Benthamite and Bataillian principles. Sade asserts that there

is a relevant distinction between the excesses of existing political institutions and

those of the libertines; the distinction Sade makes between “l’absurde despotisme

politique” and the “très luxurieux despotisme des passions de libertinage” (the ‘absurd

political despotism’ and the ‘luxurious despotism of the passions of libertinage’):

The poverty of the French language compels us to employ words which, today, our happy

government, with so much good sense, disfavours; we hope our enlightened readers will

understand us well and will not at all confound absurd political despotism with the very

delightful despotism of libertinage’s passions” (PB:344,fn).

As discussed, the brothel system is essentially an apparatus of the state, established to

bribe the libertines with sex slaves, so that they do not interfere with official power.

This assumes that the libertines have the means to upset official power. Therefore, as

a). the libertines themselves are very powerful, and b). ‘private’ despotism as

exercised in the state brothels is in fact sponsored by the state, the distinction between

private and public despotism is problematic. The sex slaves are essentially pawns in

an economy between two rival powers. Insofar as Sade himself rejects all authority as

equally illegitimate, describes his libertines, frequently, as political figures, and

associates all libertinage as actualized by socioeconomic privilege, it is not possible to

make such a distinction between private and public despotism.40

There is also a clash between the authoritarianism and the anarchic aspects of

Encore un effort. The author rejects the death penalty as “cruel and inhuman,” yet

calls for the systematic killing of the handicapped and therefore “unfit to live” (PB:

310, 335-336). Robbery and slander is defended, and the punishment of being robbed detest and want to destroy the Jacobins act in the name of a God who speaks like the Jacobins. If this

isn’t the ne plus ultra of human folly, I ask you where it is to be found” (Supplementary note; J: 749). 40 Several critics have mentioned this distinction without directly addressing its basic untenability, for

example Chantal Thomas “Isabelle de Bavière: Dernier heroine de Sade” in Camus and Roger, ed.,

Sade, écrire la crise 47-66:56; Michel Delon “Sade Thermidorien” p.110; Mengue L’ordre

Sadien p.256.

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is proposed (305,314); yet the text also proposes the preparation of the entire state for

war, the elimination of the nuclear family (as a rival source of authority to the State),

life imprisonment for clergymen, and (unspecified) punishment for those that resist

rape in the state brothels (PB: 314, 306, 318-319, 322, 334). 41

There are two further, dizzying, conflations. On the one hand, Sade argues in the

terms of his own core ontological assumptions. On the grounds of his rejection of free

will, he rejects the principle of laws that are equally applicable to all (PB: 310).42 On

the grounds of his ontology (according to which the lives of humans are trivial),

murder is not a crime; on the grounds of (a cynical abuse of the) principle of self

defence, it is a political necessity (PB: 330-335). Yet, finally, Sade condemns the

Revolution as a crime of metaphysical proportions- the murder of the very concept of

Law (note the conservatism here- there is no higher morality or ideology that

transcends that of the ancien régime, and its anchor- point- the life and body of the

King). 43 41 Sade reasons that, if the slander is an exaggeration, it may yet reveal ugly truths about the person

slandered. If it is unfair, the person will work all the harder to show that he is virtuous. 42 This appears to be a non sequitur- if there is no free will for anyone, there ought to be the same

regulatory principles applied to all. If some are incapable of exercising judgement, one simply

recognizes a category of people who should be withdrawn from circulation. 43 Sade himself, in particular in the earlier works such as Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man

(1782), shows a marked conservatism. This conservatism does not concern this study, as is not

supported by any doctrinal standpoint in Sade’s work (although, of course, it has a vague resemblance

to the Aristocratic principle). In the Dialogue, the ‘dying man’ states: “I forgive all errors save those

which may imperil the government under which we live; kings and their majesty are the only things

that I take on trust and respect.” He goes on to state that “The man who does not love country and his

king does not deserve to live” (MV: 157). Sade’s nostalgia for the old order is also expresses disdain for

the ‘immorality’ of the emergent bourgeois class, and repeated statements to the effect that feudalism is

necessary for cultural flourishing (L N J 2:225; J:116, fn.).

Writes David Coward, “Sade’s pre- Revolutionary political views reflect a mixture of patrician

conservatism and the progressive values of the Enlightenment. Like many of the old nobility, he

resented the erosion of aristocratic power and privilege which had been the centralizing monarchy’s

policy since the time of Richelieu; yet at the same time he was opposed to the excesses of the old

feudal tyranny” (MV: 282). Even Aline et Valcour, the most ‘socialist’ of Sade’s works, contains

passages that suggest this; in a critique of the virtue of charity, beggars are described by a central

character as “vermin” who are “sure of a living at the expense of dupes;” and the hero of the novel (an

aristocrat, who has a butler) insults a rival by stating that “mon valet demain peut être votre égal.”

(“tomorrow my servant may be your equal”; AV: 642; 673).

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Sade argues that the revolution, to follow its trajectory to the bitter end, requires

the end of law: “Is it though that goal [the progress of our age] will be attained when

at last we have been given laws?” (296). He goes on to describe the newly established

Republic as an institution grounded upon and dependent on criminality, and its

victims, the Aristocrats, as “honourable suicides” (PB: 338). Murder, Sade reasons,

can no longer be regarded as a crime, asking rhetorically “[i]s it not by murders that

France is free today?” (PB: 332). Republican France, having made a complete break

with the laws of the ancien régime, is taken to be addicted to ferocity and

‘dynamism.’ In keeping with Sade’s reductionist ontology, he argues that crimes are

necessary to politics as the ‘political organism’ is essentially plant-like. The

Republic, he states, is essentially criminal; and crime is associated with vigour and

health, stating, “[w]hat happens to the tree you transplant from a soil full of vigour to

a dry and sandy plain? All intellectual ideas are so greatly subordinate to Nature’s

physical aspect that the comparisons supplied us by agriculture will never deceive us

in morals” (PB: 333).

Encore un effort is too problematic to be treated as a straightforwardly

revolutionary tract, or even a parody of one- its lattice of contradictions protect it from

instrumentalization to any particular doctrine. Literal philosophical analysis may

simply be inappropriate. Scrambling the jabbering of all available discourses, text is

deployed in the service of Nothing and No-One.

7.4 Anarchy

Given Sade’s endless tirades against everything that stands, it is understandable that

he has been read as an exponent of anarchy. Yet, as my discussion has, to some

extent, already shown, this is not the principled anarchy of theorists such as Pëtr

Kropotkin.44 As noted in Chapter V, Sade’s libertines are dependant upon power

structures as tools of domination, and they require a concentration of power, not its

dissipation. It is, therefore, particularly problematic to simultaneously praise Sade’s

libertin doctrine and (what is taken for) Sade’s call for radical overthrow of the very

political and economic structures that enable libertine activities. Where Sade’s 44 Jacques Broche, for example, considers Sade as endorsing an absolute freedom that calls for a

complete destruction of all sources of authority, stating that the “employment of liberty involves the

complete abolition of all forms of power.”Jacques Broche “Sade ou le langage terroriste,” La Petite

revue de philosophie 2, (spring 1981):25-36, p.34.

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characters call for anarchy, it is necessary to identify what principles, if any, are

behind such calls.

The libertines hold that personal and general interest are incompatible. Dolmancé,

in Philosophy in the Bedroom, states:

...laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal

interest. Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is

composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for

three quarters of his life; and so the wise man, the man full of contempt for them, will be

wary of them, as he is of reptiles and vipers which, although they wound or kill, are

nevertheless sometimes useful to medicine; he will safeguard himself against the laws as

he would against noxious beasts; he will shelter himself behind precautions, behind

mysteries, the which,[sic], for prudence, is easily done (Il s’en mettra l’abri par des

precautions, par des mystères, toutes choses faciles à la richesse et à la prudence) (PB:

287-288; ΠVol. III:102-103; similar J:176).

So long as the laws are well formulated and simply prevent harm inflicted upon

others, they serve to ‘regulate desires’ (as with the rules of the Sodality of the Friends

of Crime). As Clairwil – of all people– observes: “it is the duty of every society to

eliminate from its midst such elements whose conduct may be prejudicial to the

community; and this justifies a quantity of laws which, when viewed alone from the

standpoint of the individual’s self- interest, might appear monstrously unjust” (J:

377). Dolmancé also appears to make a false dichotomy, insofar as he does not

recognize that the interests of a society is assembled of individuals (there is no such

false dichotomy, however, if he simply accepts the Bataille doctrine, and actually

believes that the ban on homicide is against his ‘personal interest’). Other discussions

in favour of anarchy in Sade tend to conflate the Bataillian and Benthamite doctrines.

From Encore un effort:

Cruelty is natural. All of us are born furnished with a dose of cruelty education later

modifies; but education does not belong to nature, and is as deforming to Nature’s sacred

effects as arboriculture is to trees. In your orchards compare the tree abandoned to

Nature’s ministry with the other your art cares for, and you will see which is the more

beautiful, you will discover from which you will pluck the superior fruit.

Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted:

therefore it is a virtue, not a vice. Repeal your laws, do away with your constraints, your

chastisements, your habits, and cruelty will have dangerous effects no more, since it will

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never manifest itself save when it meets with resistance, and then the collision will always

be between competing cruelties; it is in the civilized state cruelty is dangerous, because

the assaulted person nearly always lacks the force or the means to repel injury; but in the

state of uncivilization [d’incivilisation ] , if cruelty’s target is strong, he will repulse

cruelty; and if the person attacked is weak, why, the case here is merely that of assault

upon one of those persons whom Nature’s law prescribes to yield to the strong-‘tis all

one, and why seek trouble where there is none? (PB: 253-254; ΠVol. III: 69; similar: J:

1120).

The first half of this paragraph is in keeping with the Bataille doctrine. Cruelty is

natural and ‘sacred’ (note the inversion of Rousseau here), and is merely an

expression of man’s innate ‘energy,’ which has been corrupted by the influence of

civilization. The release of energy through cruelty is considered beneficial here,

although Sade does not explain how, and his fruit-tree metaphor is vague (in any case,

the metaphor is poorly chosen; pruned trees, as with all domesticated organisms, are

of course vastly superior sources of food to their wild varieties). In giving a

straightforwardly Utilitarian justification for anarchy, Sade switches back to

Benthamite mode. He argues that laws are undesirable, as they create a situation

where the cruelty of official power is dangerously powerful (similarly, Chigi argues:

“I’d rather be oppressed by my neighbour who I can oppress in my turn than to be

oppressed by the law before which I am helpless”; J: 732). All justice would

therefore be vigilante justice (which is in fact criticized by Sade in the tale Émilie de

Tourville {1787}; MV: 203).

The view that civilization creates ‘excessive’ cruelty (which is a category that

Sade, in Bataille mode, cannot recognize) contradicts the previous claim that

civilization (and its prohibitions of open cruelty) corrupts our ‘natural cruelty.’ The

passage above also assumes some ‘hydraulic’ theory of criminality; that is, ‘cruelty’ is

said to only manifest itself when pressure is exerted by prohibition, which, again, does

not fit with Sade’s own psychology of pleasure (as discussed in Chapter III). Further,

as with any advocacy of anarchy, it is assumed here that a state of ‘incivilization’ is

even possible. In any case, by the end of the passage, it is clear that Anarchy is not

really being advocated at all, but an intensification of power relationships, validated in

accordance with ‘Nature’s Law’ of the Strong.

Similar passages in Juliette only continue this doctrinal conflict. Juliette argues

that universal anarchy will simply open wide “the door to every sort of horror” (J:

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733). Chigi responds with the Benthamite principle: “crime is...not a plague in the

world since, although rendering half the world’s population unhappy, it renders the

other half very unhappy indeed” (J: 734; similar: PB: 313). Conceding that this might

not actually be the case, he insists that general anarchy will always be less dangerous

than a country ruled by the corrupt, even if “without laws the world turns onto one

great volcano belching forth an uninterrupted spew of execrable crimes” (J:733). The

only options on offer, it is assumed, are a deeply corrupt political order,

indistinguishable, in fact, from organized crime, or a world in flames. We have here a

fusion of utter despair, contempt for humanity, and the desire for destruction- not so

much a political principle as a wish to see the whole ant heap dowsed in kerosene.

Sade’s minimal claim- that pure anarchy is not as dangerous as corrupt, inept or

immoral government- cannot be dismissed out of hand, and the view that civilization

has actually made men crueller than hitherto has been considered by Hinckfuss,

Baumeister and others. 45 Yet pure anarchy is not, for Sade’s characters, either a

desirable state or a political possibility. Simply put, Sade is too pessimistic to

advocate anarchy.

7.5 the Pleasure of Control.

The despotic form of political power is a logical outcome of the Sadeian

principles discussed in the preceding chapters, in particular its a-moral principles and

psychological assumptions. 46 Sade frequently criticizes the ‘tyranny’ of the many

45 For discussion, see Baumeister p.381. Ian Hinckfuss notes that the ‘state of nature’ was quite

possibly preferable to modern civilization. He notes in particular “The massacre of the moral Catholic

highlanders by the moral Protestants at Culloden and its aftermath, the genocide of the peaceful and

hospitable stone-age Tasmanians by people from moral Britain, the mutual slaughter of all those dutiful

men on the Somme and on the Russian front in World War I, the morally sanctioned slaughter in World

War II, especially in the area bombing of Hamburg, London, Coventry, Cologne, Dresden, Tokyo,

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent slaughter in Korea, Vietnam, Northern Ireland and the

Middle East all of this among people the great majority of whom wanted above all to be good and who

did not want to be bad. If life in a ‘state of nature’ was less secure than this, things must have been very

exciting indeed for our stone-age ancestors.” Hinckfuss p.29. 46 The definitive work on this topic- the relationship between Sade’s philosophy and its relationship to

‘totalitarianism’ is that by Svein- Eirik Fauskevåg, Sade ou la tentation totalitaire : Etude sur

l’anthropologie littéraire dans La Nouvelle Justine et l’Histoire de Juliette (Paris : Honoré champion

éditeur, 2001).

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over the interests of the individual, but his characters frequently affirm the opposite-

the tyranny of the minority over the many. Though despotism is occasionally

denounced in the libertine novels, these denunciations are highly ambiguous. 47 The

powerful libertines (Braschi, Catherine the Great, the King of Naples, Minister Saint-

Fond) regard statecraft purely as a means of maintaining power for sake of personal

pleasure; every other libertine (in particular Juliette) is either a satellite of the more

powerful, or (like Minski) has complete control over a smaller, more tightly

controlled population, such as a prison or convent.

Sade’s despots dictate according to five distinct principles. The first, grounded

on Sade’s theory of pleasure, is simply that one’s own happiness takes precedence

over the welfare of the subject population. States Saint- Fond: “[a] contemptible fool,

that statesman who neglects the State finance his pleasures; and if the masses go

hungry, or if the nation goes naked, what do we care so long as our passions are

satisfied? Mine entail inordinate spending; if I thought gold flowed in their veins, I’d

have every one of the people bled to death” (J: 234).

The second principle holds that power itself is pleasurable. the more power-

hence, the more pleasure, the better. For Sade, this means domination and

exploitation. 48 As Fauskevåg notes, what this amounts to is little more than the

elevation of egoism to the level of political ideology; the elevation of individual

whims to the status of absolute ideals. 49 Intellect, power, and money are considered

47 Fauskevåg p.128. Juliette gives a lengthy political and economic critique of Naples for the benefit of

its King, specifically noting the “all-destroying poison” of economic inequality, and the extravagance

of the people. Yet Juliette arrives at the King’s palace in a six-horse coach, the equivalent of a stretch

limousine. The discourse ends with an orgy, during which the King casually strangles a page (J: 924-

941). 48 This view was common amongst the philosophes. Rousseau feared that even he himself would

succumb to the pleasures of power, given the chance: “I have a hundred times thought with terror that

if I had the misfortune today of filling a particular position in a certain country, tomorrow I would

almost inevitably be a tyrant, an extortionist, a destroyer of the people, and a source of harm to the

prince; due to my situation I would be an enemy of all humanity, of all equity, of every sort of value….

if I were rich [I would be] a disdainful spectator of the miseries of the rabble.” (E: 344; see also 224,

SC: 30-33.). Helvétius held the same view. See Helvétius A Treatise on Man: Vol. II p.126. What is

remarkable is that both Helvétius and Rousseau proposed political systems that required technocrats or

law-givers that were not prone to such human failings. 49 Fauskevåg pp.10, 60.

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as the three interchangeable elements of Libertine economics. To be a libertine

requires the inclinations and means to follow one’s impulses, and “[a] man with much

intellect, much power or much money cannot possibly amuse himself the way

everybody else does” (J: 940). A very specific pleasure recurs frequently in Sade- the

pleasure of total mobilization of others into a single coordinated spectacle, whether of

order, as in a military parade, or destruction, as in the case of the Roman Circus.

Even King Zamé follows this pattern, showing off the orderliness and perfection of

his state by preparing a number of spectacles for his guests- a staged naval battle, a

musical performance, and a display of the ‘blood stock’ of the islanders :“Fifty of the

most beautiful girls brought together for inspection” (AV:351).

The third principle is the view that all others are hostile forces, hence validating

harsh treatment of non-members of one’s own group. This is continuous with Sade’s

ethical thought, as discussed in Chapter V. Democracy is held to be impossible, as the

people are held to be too corrupt or foolish to rule themselves; the only way of

controlling them being to keep them in total subjugation. 50 As politics is merely the

enslavement and destruction of the weak at the hands of the strong, the only means of

survival is to become powerful-which is only possible through means antithetical to

morality.51 We may speak here of a doctrine which is not truly political at all, but

merely a method of survival- of survivalist alienation.52 Minister Saint- Fond explains

this to Juliette:

… in a totally corrupt world there is never any danger being more rotten than one’s

neighbors; rather, ‘tis there to assure oneself of the whole sum of felicity and ease which

virtue would procure us in a moral society. But the mechanism that directs government

cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from

every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be

corrupt itself, and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that

you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more

energetic than the governed: well, if the energy of the governed simply amounts to so

50 Michel Delon “Sade Thermidorien” p.107. 51 “Human society”, wrote Rousseau, “contemplated with a tranquil and disinterested eye [,] appears at

first to display only the violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak” (SC: 21). 52 I thank Amanda Lennon for this term.

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many crimes threatening to be unleashed, how can you expect the energy of the governor

to be anything different? (J: 480).53

The fourth principle is simply that of the Bataille principle- the attainment of

absolute mastery over the weak is in accordance to the ‘laws of nature.’ The suffering

of the poor is described as being in accordance with a “law of nature” and “useful to

the general plan,” and that they were created to serve the rich (LNJ 1: p. 90; 2: 286,

389, 391). In accordance with this distinction between ‘natural masters’ and ‘natural

slaves,’ the subjects of political control are reduced to a faceless mass, or to the

categories of the natural sciences.54 The libertines frequently describe their subjects as

“polluting vermin, ” “dangerous animals,” “common excrement” or “scum thrown up

by nature, ” fit only to be thrown to the lions “comme on faisait des chrétiens,

autrefois, à Rome” (LNJ 2: 224, 368, 392-395).

The fifth principle is that terrible things must be done for the sake of the greater

good, or glory, of the State. This principle is only offered in discussing mass murder,

whether Catholics, peasants or the handicapped. Sade’s characters, for example,

suggest that feudal law is superior as it is the best for the grandeur and prosperity of

the state (again, “à l’exemple de Rome”), LNJ 1: 295; 2:225), and use the language of

medicine to justify bloodshed: “[b]lâmeriez-vous un homme surchargé d’humeurs qui

prendrait une médicine, pour se rendre plus dispos et plus sain? C’est absolument la

même chose.” (LNJ 2:392; also J: 726).

Whilst not appearing to be a positive contribution to political thought as such,

Sade’s pencil-sketch of a political doctrine is interesting, nevertheless, and for the

same reason as to why his counter-ethics is interesting. It is an attempt to express the

doctrine of a resolutely despotic regime as honestly as possible, hence revealing its

key assumptions.

53 Note also the association of virtue with weakness, and crime with energy. 54 For discussion, see Fauskevåg p.121, 136-141.

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7.6 Despotism Without Tears

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the

revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution.

The object of power is power. George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four55

“I think and discourse like Hobbes and Montesquieu” Juliette tells Ferdinand,

King of Naples (Ferdinand IV, 1751-1825) during one of her lectures. But she does

not discourse like Hobbes or Montesquieu. Rather, she and her libertine accomplices

are preoccupied with maintaining political power. Their understanding of politics, as

method and theory, is essentially a methodology of total control and domination of the

masses for their own ends. Juliette continues: “…it is not despotism I forbid you, I am

too familiar with its charms to deny it to you; I simply advise the suppression or the

rectification of whatever jeopardises or interferes with the maintenance of this

despotism, if it is upon the throne you choose to stay” (J:934). Fauskevåg, following

Hannah Arendt, notes that Sade’s work explores a number of methods typical of

totalitarian regimes, in particular the use of isolation, propaganda, terror, and secrecy. 56 I will largely follow Fauskevåg’s exposition.

Firstly, Sade advises that all rival sources of authority or power be either

neutralized or instrumentalized to one’s own ends. Both options are suggested with

regards to organized religion. Clairwil sees the church entirely as a rival source of

authority, and advises Prince Ferdinand accordingly: “atheize and incessantly

demoralize the people whom you wish to subjugate, so long as they cringe before no

god but you, so long as there are no morals except yours, you will always be their

sovereign” (J :971). Zamé, as noted above, and Madame Delbène are more moderate;

Delbène noting that the “revolting dogmas” of Christianity are “indispensable to those

who have taken upon themselves the chore of infecting public opinion” (J:48). On the

same grounds, the obliteration of the nuclear family and the collectivising of child

55 Orwell p.276. 56 Fauskevåg pp.105-.109.

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rearing, is recommended by Zamé and the author of “Yet Another Effort” alike (PB:

322; AV: 317, 364). 57

Secondly, Sade recommends the maintenance of a false front. Power is always

associated with secrecy, which is in turn associated with isolation.58 Absolute

remoteness from the common people is also recommended. As Saint-Fond says to

Juliette, “ do not forget that if the kings are beginning to lose their credit in Europe,

it’s the vulgarity they’ve become attainted with that has been their downfall; had they

remained aloof and invisible like the sovereigns of Asia, the whole world would yet

tremble at the sound of their names” (J:316). Propaganda is also recommended.

“Errors are necessary to us,” states Braschi (Pope Pius VI, who is, of course, both the

Pope and an atheist), adding that “it does not follow that we must deceive ourselves”

(J: 677). Braschi explains the principle of propaganda, the art of making “pygmies

appear to be giants”: “The foremost preoccupation of man and of the statesman…is to

penetrate others without letting his own thoughts be known” (J: 480, 759).59

Philosophers, for the character Francavilla, are left with the authority only to

promulgate the interests of the government- that is- philosophers are to be employed

as propagandists (J: 969).60 One of the most disorientating passages in Sade concerns

a proposal to incorporate the libertine text into the machinery of social control. Saint-

Fond, in a monologue on despotism, proposes the dissemination of works that

promote ‘loose morals’ in order to flush out dissenting voices, in exactly the same

manner as Mao Tse-Tung’s ‘Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom’ campaign. When the

‘weak’ are encouraged to break their bonds, the strong “will find instruction therein

upon how to load further and heavier chains upon the captive masses” (J: 319). In

keeping with the need to disseminate untruths, education is regarded as a threat to

power by the libertines of Juliette, or as a carefully managed tool of thought control, 57 For discussion see Fauskevåg: 110. This proposal reflects the social engineering proposals of

Helvétius (A Treatise on Man p.138). 58 On this point, Fauskevåg notes Hannah Arendt’s observation that secrecy is “the beginning of real

power.” Hannah Arendt Le système totalitaire, traduit de l’américain par Jean- Loup Bourget, Robert

Davreu et Patrick Lévi. (Paris : France Loisirs, 1989) p.181.Quoted in Fauskevåg p.116. 59 For discussion, see Fauskevåg p.130. 60 La Mettrie gives the same proposal, writing: “Use the force of specious arguments to prop up their

tottering faith, bring their weak genius, by the force of your own, down to the level of your own, down

to the level of their father’s religion and, like our sacred Josses [editor’s note- A character in Molière’s

Amour médicin] lend the most revolting absurdities an appearance of plausibility.” La Mettrie p.169.

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as on Tamoé (J: 321; AV: 361). Further, various economic measures are also

suggested in order to maintain control over the populace. On the one hand, Juliette

proposes the encouragement of ‘enfeebling debauchery’ in order to keep the

populace’s minds from considering political matters, on the grounds that “human

beings cease to be observant when they are happy” (J: 320, 934). 61 On the other,

Saint –Fond recommends the perpetuation of grinding poverty and economic

inequality. Saint –Fond explains: “[t]he common herd will be kept in a state of

subservience, or prostate bondage, which will render them powerless even to strike

for, let alone attain to, domination, or to encroach upon or debase the prerogatives of

the rich. Tied to the glebe as in olden days, the people will be held like any other

property, and, like it, will be subject to all the various mutations of value and

ownership” (J:321). Clairwil advises Ferdinand:

…their slavery must be perpetual and grinding, and every possible means of escape

from it must be denied them, as will assuredly be the case when the figures who support

and surround the government are there to prevent the people from breaking loose from

irons which it is in the upper class’ interests to tighten day and night. You cannot

imagine how far such tyranny is able to extend (J: 970-971).

Finally, Sade’s characters recommends state terrorism and mass killing as a political

tool; of “cementing the throne of the sovereign” through bloodshed (LNJ 1:300).

Sade’s explanation never goes beyond stating that population control is necessary,

hence, the necessity of killing people en masse. 62 In The Misfortunes of Virtue the

character Monsieur Dubourg states, “France has more citizens than it needs. The

government sees everything in broad terms and is not overly concerned with

61 Helvétius had made the same point, which is somewhat ironic, given that his own utopian proposals

involved rewarding loyal citizens with brothel passes. He writes of Venice: “Who but an ignorant and

voluptuous people could support the yoke of an aristocratic despotism? This the government knows,

and encourages it subjects to debauchery: it offers them at once fetters and pleasures: they accept the

one for the other; and, in their base souls, the love of luxury always outweighs that of liberty. The

Venetian is nothing better than a swine, that is nourished by his master, for his use, and is kept in a

stable, where he is suffered to wallow in the mire.” Helvétius Treatise on Man Vol. II p.74. 62 This goes against the advice Juliette gives Ferdinand, King of Naples: “[w]hen they weary of you,

they’ll turn the guns against your castle” (J: 935).

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individuals provided that the machinery runs smoothly overall” (MV: 15; similar: J:

577).63 Clairwil advises Ferdinand:

….The government must regulate the population, must command all the means of

snuffing it out if it becomes troublesome, for increasing it if that is esteemed

advantageous; its justice must never be weighed elsewhere in the scales of the ruler’s

interests or passions, combined solely with the passions and interests of those who, as

we have just said, have obtained from him all the allotments of authority necessary to

multiply his own a hundredfold when they are conjugated. [Sade’s footnote: “See, on

this subject, the speech of the Bishop of Grenoble in the fourth volume of La Nouvelle

Justine, pp.275ff”].Glance at the governments of Africa and Asia: all of them are

organized in accordance with these principles, and all invariably maintain themselves

thereby (J: 970-971).

In La Nouvelle Justine the character Dubois, in a political tract of some ten pages,

proposes that the government introduce various measures to control population

growth. Infanticide and the immediate execution of ‘surplus’ members of peasant

families is also recommended. States Dubois, “il fût permis de tuer comme les boeufs

qu’on vend à nos boucheries” (“one would be permitted to kill them as cows are sold

in our butcheries”; LNJ 2: 388). Dubois also recommends the establishment of public

wheat storage facilities, established purely for the purposes of financially ruining

peasants, who are then to be executed as ‘punishment’ for being beggars

(LNJ 2:394). 64

7.7 Anus Mundi

The desire for control of the subject, and the preoccupation with systems of control,

as evinced by the accounts of Tamoé and Batua, are brought together in the Libertine

works. A general pattern in Sade is the pushing of all ideologies and philosophies to

the point where they break, or become monstrous. Here I will discuss a related

pattern- Sade’s tendency to divorce the rituals and structures of the most powerful

63 Zamé also discusses politics in terms understanding the “secret of the machine” (AV: 309). 64 Given both the economic absurdity of slaughtering peasants, and the fact that this very plan was

feared in a widespread Revolution- period conspiracy theory, Sade is probably in ‘satire’ mode here.

All the same, Stalin’s creation of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, intended to force peasants into

collectivisation, was no more reasonable.

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institutions (organized religion, law, medicine) from their purported ideological, legal

or moral purposes, and incorporate them- with some alteration- into the will to

control. This pattern, in the case of Tamoé, has been outlined already at the macro-

level. I will now turn to the patterns in Sade’s work that concern the domination of the

body and mind of the individual.

As discussed in Chapter III, the ultimate desire of the libertines is to have power

over the subject. Political power is simply the means of increasing the scope of this

power. The Sadeian structure is also a preoccupation with the intensification of this

power. This intensification involves a transposition of the ordering and disciplinary

mechanisms of the school, the convent, the barracks, the prison and the hospital to the

Sadeian space. The structures, symbols and rituals of the institutionalized space

reappear, divorced from any notion of legal or moral authority, transformed into the

pure signs of power. (Alternatively, Sade’s sites of coercion are schools, hospitals and

prisons; J: 982; LNJ1:170-172). This process is a direct consequence of the cynicism

of the libertines, their rejection of all traditional notions of justice or ethics, and the

instrumentalization of all institutions (the Church, for example) to their own ends.

Sade’s image of the libertines- dressed as executioners- torturing and murdering with

the aid of barbaric machines, is exactly as a state execution would appear to someone

who has completely rejected, or is incapable of understanding, the stated principles of

such an act.

The Architecture and equipment of the Sadeian space is one of the most

characteristic features of Sade’s work; every detail concerns either the maintenance or

the enjoyment of total control. Tamoé, as noted, is isolated; all citizens know their

place, and all is arranged so that all are visible to the ‘master.’ The libertines commit

their atrocities within an enclosed space which is essentially based on the same

principles, turned inwards. The most developed, and the prototype of such spaces in

Sade, is the Château of Silling, the setting of The 120 Days of Sodom. Silling is

situated on the summit of a mountain “almost as high as the Saint-Bernard,” in the

most treacherous sector of the Black Forest in south-west Germany (120:236). As the

Four Friends approach their destination, they destroy all the bridges behind them, and

arrive on November 1st, when it would be impossible to escape through the ice and

snow. As with all such locations in Sade, Silling is an impregnable fortress, with a

deep moat and thirty feet walls, with chambers and dungeons that extend far beyond

ground level. Another characteristic is the absolute secrecy of the place: “...to what

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degree might not the villain be reassured who brought his victim here! What he had to

fear? He was out of France, in a safe province, in the depths of an uninhabitable

forest.... [in a redoubt which] only the birds of the air could approach” (120:240).65 In

order to forestall escape or external attack (“which,” notes the narrator, “was a little

dreaded”), all the gateways are walled up: “there was no longer any trace left of where

the exits had been” (120:240-241). The architecture of the Sadeian site is that of a

prison. In fact, the upper floors of Silling are converted into a prison at the end of the

narrative (120:671).

The interior is more thoroughly planned still, and, like the exterior, establishes a

pattern that recurs throughout Sade’s work. Like Tamoé, the interior of Silling is

functionally identical to Bentham’s Panopticon.66 The central chamber has a circular

or semi-circular form, as in an amphitheatre. It has niches in which the victims (the

‘subjects,’ as Sade refers to them) are on display, and an ottoman, in black upholstery,

in the centre in an elevated position (LNJ 2:201). The room is typically lined with

mirrors, often covering the walls and ceiling, is very well lit (Sade frequently gives

the exact number of candles used), and is linked to further niches, torture machines,

trap-door pulleys, laboratories, and dungeons (120: 237-238; LNJ1: 306; 2:376; J:195,

659, 975). Note that the subject (Sade’s term) must be able to see the symbols of

power lest they consider insubordination.

On either side of the central throne an isolated column rose to the ceiling; these two

columns were designed to support the subject in whom some misconduct might merit

correction. All the instruments necessary to meting it out hung from hooks attached to

65 Note the inconsistency with the Sadeian principle, discussed in Chapter V, according to which one

must become a criminal as the world is utterly corrupt and lawless. The precautions taken by the

libertines assume that people are in general just, and that they will intervene in concert if they view

actions as being morally wrong. 66 Allen W. Weiss has noted the functional similarity of Sade’s preoccupation with mirrors and the

Panopticon of Bentham. See Allan W. Weiss “Structures of exchange, acts of transgression” in David

B. Allison, Mark S. Roberts, Allen S. Weiss, eds. Sade and the Narrative of Transgression

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995):199-212; p.204. For discussion of Sade’s

preoccupation with visibility and control, see Giraud “La ville du bout du monde.” Other examples of

panoptic systems in Sade: LNJ 2:306, 376, 120: 237-238.

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the columns, and this imposing sight served to maintain the subordination so

indispensable to parties of this nature... (my italics; 120:237).

Variations on this theme emphasize the need for visibility and ease of control of the

subject. From the short story Eugénie de Franval:

Eugénie, on a pedestal, represented a young savage exhausted from the chase, leaning

against the trunk of a palm tree, the branches of which concealed an infinite number of

lights arranged in such a way that they illuminated [her] charms...this animated statue was

surrounded with a canal, six feet wide and filled with water which acted as a barrier to the

young savage... [a]t the edge of this encircling moat was placed Valmont’s armchair, to

which was attached a silken cord. By operating this thread he could turn the pedestal in

such a way that he could see the object of his adoration from many sides... (GT: 56).

In the 120 Days of Sodom, as in Juliette, elaborate systems of pulleys and cables are

employed to control the subjects.

Each child in each quatrain shall have one end of a chain of artificial flowers secured to

his arm, the other end of the chain leading to the niche, so that when the niche’s

proprietor wishes any given child in his quatrain, he has but to tug the garland, and the

child shall come running and fling himself at the master’s feet (120:245; similar: J: 588,

589).

The Sadeian space, then, is essentially a machine for controlling people, and reducing

them to objects. 67 Metaphorically, such an arrangement reveals a preoccupation with

moving the body of the coerced subject, en masse, as part of a larger unit.68 In more

elaborate arrangements, the body of the subject disappears entirely, becoming a

component in a greater system of parts designed with a specific instrumental goal. In a

passage in Juliette, men are placed into a conveyor belt system for providing sexual

pleasure: “a mechanism ensured that once those pricks had discharged, they

disappeared in a trice and were replaced by new ones the next instant” (J: 973). From

another orgy scene: “At the four sides of the room were that many raised platforms,

67 For discussion of this reading, see Philippe Roger Sade: La Philosophie dans le pressoir p.61. 68 For discission on this pattern, see Foucault DP: 158,164. On the relationship between the theatre and

power in Sade, see Pierre Frantz “Sade: texte, Théâtralité,” in Camus and Roger, eds. Sade écrire la

crise: 193-215, p.210.

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upon each of which a couple of Negroes lashed a girl of sixteen or seventeen who,

once torn to shreds, would vanish through a trap door, to be replaced the same instant

by a fresh one” (J:1112). Torture and death machinery incorporating rotating drums

and knives, pulleys, and trapdoors, all of which are put into action with the “touch of

a lever,” are frequently described in Sade’s work (J: 334, 338, 1010, 120: 665-669,

724, 784). The culmination of Sade’s list of tortures is the ‘hell passion,’ which

involves the immolation of victims in a manner reminiscent of a meatworks.

before launching her [the torture victim], he slips a ribbon around her neck, thereby to

signal which torture, according to his best belief, will be most suitable for that particular

patient, which torture will prove most voluptuous to inflict upon her, and his acuity and

judgment in these matters, his tact and discrimination are truly wonderful (120:667).

Once the machines are running and the torturers are at work a ‘villain’ “spends fifteen

minutes contemplating each operation…he falls into a comfortable armchair whence

he can observe the entire spectacle” (120: 669).

Already mentioned is the libertine’s preoccupation with formulating rules and

regulations for their own conduct. They are also preoccupied with formulating such

regulations for their victims, the most developed version being the Statutes (referred

to also as the ‘protocols’) of the Château of Silling in The 120 Days of Sodom

(120:238, 241-249). Two related attitudes are expressed concerning such rules. On the

one hand, there is the view that to be compelled to follow rules at all is associated

with weakness, of being dominated (Dorothée, in La Nouvelle Justine, states that laws

are a trap for the easily controlled, adding that “il n’y a de lois dans l’univers que les

vôtres”; LNJ 2: 196). On the other, a paradox already discussed in Chapter V, is that

the libertines impose rather obsessive rules upon themselves; even when outside a

particular disciplinary space.69

The libertines frequently wish to make their victims think that they are being

punished, rather than being merely tortured, occasionally going to the length of

having a ‘trial’ (J: 742). When Justine finds herself imprisoned in a remote convent

school, she is frequently beaten and raped, but before these beatings she is made to

69 The Statutes of Silling give details of strict monetary penalties for harming the cooks. Juliette gives a

particularly anal account of her daily routine, in which each hour is accounted for and assigned a

particular function (J: 409; 120: 241-249).

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read aloud the particular rule that she is said to have broken (LNJ 1: 316-324; 34;

2:80-82). The following passage, from Juliette, illustrates the language and rituals of

discipline and punishment in the context of sadistic pleasure. The libertine approaches

the victims with his ‘escort,’ conducts an ‘inspection,’ and exposes ‘culprits’ to be

‘punished.’

The president gave orders that during his inspection nobody be admitted into the premises

apart from ourselves, who made up his escort; and he commenced his tour forthwith. Such

a man, with such prepossessions, was able, as you can imagine, to uncover a prodigious

number of culprits; he was accompanied on his rounds by a quartet of executioners, two

flayers, six flagellators… to the lash he condemned thirty aged between five and ten,

twenty-eight between ten and fifteen, sixty-five between eighteen and twenty-one; three

children in the six-to-ten age group were condemned to be flayed alive… (J: 517).

Two other features of the Sadeian disciplinary system- documentation and the

markings worn by the subject- are noteworthy. Administrative or official

documentation appears frequently in Sade’s work, in particular lists of people to be

killed, death warrants and lettres de cachet (J:216, 237,324,). 70 Juliette’s links with

wealth and legal protection- the matrix of power relations upon which she, a minor

libertine power, depends, are maintained, in part, through the sheaf of letters of

recommendation she presents to every new acquaintance, as if visiting the local

prefecture (J: 981,994). Official documentation, Sade emphasises, is also an

instrument of administrative killing. “I have but to put my signature to that

[document],” notes a judge in Juliette; “and a very attractive person dies tomorrow.

She is in prison at the moment; [her family’s] only grievance is that she prefers

women to men” (J: 237; similar: 213). When the character Belmor presents his plan to

kill every Catholic in France, he notes that most important logistic issue is the

identification of the target population, and the necessary paperwork: “separating the

sheep from the goats would not take long. Compiling my lists should require no more

than a year’s work in shadow silence...” (J: 501).

70 The lettre de cachet was a warrant by the French king for imprisonment or death. Originally the

privilege of the aristocracy, by the 18th century they were requested by middle and lower classes for the

institutionalisation of deranged or profligate family members. Sade himself was imprisoned through the

lettre de cachet system by his mother in law. For discussion, see Shaeffer p.168.

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Another key administrative tool in Sade is clothing. On Tamoé, assumedly to

facilitate surveillance, all stages of the human life-cycle are assigned colours; grey for

the old, pink for adults and green for the young. Different clothing is also used to

identify ‘sinners’ (AV: 325).71 Within the space of Château Silling, coloured ribbons

are used to designate victims, the ribbon corresponding to the torture used to kill them

(120:667). Elsewhere, the victim is dressed in the black crêpe of those to be executed

by the authority of the law (LNJ1: 324; J: 325). Likewise, the libertines dress

themselves as cannibals, demons or tigers (J: 325, 1177; 120: 615, 667), or in the

insignia of the power over life and death- the skull and crossbones device, worn on

the brow (J: 333).72 In combining the text with the sign- the official document with

the need to identify the subject, Sade invents a new type of administrative tool.

Whereas, in the 18th century, it was routine practice in France to tattoo or brand

criminals or prostitutes, Sade describes the inscribing of the official document onto

the body. 73 His characters brand serial numbers on the bodies of their victims to

facilitate ordering them to their deaths, are branded with a text describing the manner

in which they will be further tortured to death, or tattoo the victim with words of

poison instead of ink (120 :610, 666; MV:61-62; J: 619). 74 In The 120 Days of

Sodom, victims are reduced to, and referred to, their serial numbers, rather than their

names (120:666-668; similar: J: 517). The text of the 120 Days pursues this logic of

71 Notes Goulemot, this was a practice typical of Medieval and Classical societies to control heretics,

Jews and plague victims. In Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage to Bougainville, also, sterile women

wear grey (AV: 325n 370). 72 Jean Leduc notes that Nero- a character frequently referred to by Sade, would dress in a tiger skin.

Jean Leduc “Les Sources de l’athéisme” p.45. According to the police records, Sade would terrorize his

victims in a manner reminiscent of official torturers. For example, he made a point of displaying before

a victim, Rose Keller, a range of torture implements, forcing her to select the whip with which she was

to be beaten. For discussion, see Lever p.119. 73 For discussion, see Foucault Discipline and Punish p.118. 74 “...he brands each [girl victim] upon the shoulder, imprinting a number on the flesh; it is to indicate

the order in which he [the torturer] will receive them” (120: 666). In Justine the protagonist is also

branded (MV: 61-62). The tattooing of a victim with the text of their ‘sentence’ is similar to the

tattooing- machine described in Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony (1919). Coward notes that

thieves and prostitutes were still frequently being branded in Sade’s time, and that convicts carried the

letters TF (travaux forces) until the ending of the practice in 1832 (MV: fn 265). Also J: 619; 120:610.

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orderly, administrated destruction to the end, concluding with a tabulation of

survivors and the dead:

The following capitulation lists the inhabitants of the Château of Silling during that

memorial winter:

Masters...................................................4

Elders......................................................4

Kitchen staff...........................................6

Storytellers.............................................4

Fuckers...................................................8

Little boys...............................................8

Wives......................................................4

Little girls...............................................8

Total............................46

FINAL ASSESSMENT

Massacred prior to the 1st of March,

In the course of the orgies......................10

Massacred after the 1st of March............20

Survived and came back........................16

Total...............46 (120:673).

It is paradoxical that the libertines inform their victims that no notion of

universal law or morality is valid, then inform those same victims that they are to be

punished and executed, rather than merely tortured and murdered. A possibility is that

the libertines are validating their own worldview- according to which all law is

arbitrarily assigned- through a practical demonstration. The interior of Silling is as

the libertines describe the outside world- there is no morality, in the accepted sense,

and no justice- only the avoidance of pain or death inflicted through adherence to

arbitrary rules, laid down by a leadership that is senseless and despotic, guided

entirely by the impulse to destroy as thoroughly and methodically as possible. On the

one hand, the very strangeness of Silling suggests that this is not how the outside

world appears. On the other, we know that it is well within human potential to create

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such a space, and on German, or French, soil. 75Were anyone to survive such a place

as Silling (recall that only atheists, and those who are forced to participate in the

destruction of others, survive to the end of the book) they are unlikely to have the

same trust in the innate goodness of the world and its inhabitants ever again.

7.8 The Anatomical Gaze

Not content with colonizing the structures of law and order, the libertines also

adopt the gaze of the anatomist and the rituals of the hospital. 76 Medical language

and a certain ‘medical gaze’ permeate Sade’s work as thoroughly as does the language

of punishment and discipline. He frequently discusses his characters in anatomical

terms (whether the “charming physiognomy” of the victims or the precise details of

the ‘wrinkled members’ of the Four Friends), and his introduction to a young girl of

the mysteries of sex, as Lacan puts it, reads like a “contemporary medical

pamphlet.”77 In a discussion on the ‘natural inferiority’ of women to men, in a

footnote, Sade casually recommends the reader to perform a dissection to see the

difference for himself. More disturbing still is the anatomical detail with which he

discusses torture and murder (J: 332,511).

There are, in particular, numerous ‘medical examinations’ in Sade’s works. The

libertines reduce their subjects (often referred to as “unfortunate patients”) to objects

of scientific inquiry, examining and assessing them, and deciding upon their fates

accordingly (LNJ 1: 346). They invent elaborate classificatory schema in order to

categorize victims according to physiology and ‘pleasure function,’ in the manner of

Victorian naturalists (LNJ1: 270-271, 120:232). In La Nouvelle Justine, a libertine

doctor sexually molests the children in his school, examining them under the pretext

of issuing them with epidemic certificates (LNJ1: 323). Associated with the desire to

75 This is perhaps as the Terror could have looked to Sade himself. Yet 120 was written in 1785, before

the Terror had begun. 76 Some passages in Sade appear to be a simple satire of the medical profession. A short story, The

Mystified Magistrate, contains an explicit satire on medical theory; a man posing as a doctor terrifies a

patient with “aphorisms culled from Hippocrates and commentaries from Galen,” and convinces him

that he is insane (MM: 13). A number of the tortures in The 120 Days of Sodom and La Nouvelle

Justine, in particular the bleeding of victims and the application of highly toxic enemas, are similar to

the medical procedures of the period (LNJ. 2:132; 120:613, 614,615). 77 Lacan “Kant with Sade” p.72. Also, see PB: 241, 243, 260.

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measure, quantify and classify is also a desire to eliminate all the “flaws in the

pattern.” 78 In The 120 Days of Sodom, all such elements (Catholic piety, having

slightly imperfect teeth, being insufficiently subordinate) that are deemed

unacceptable or aberrant are destroyed in the person of the victim. The libertines

examine their child victims for blemishes: “This done, the child was led away, and

beside her name inscribed upon a ballot, the examiners wrote passed or failed and

signed their names... one, as lovely as a day, was weeded out because one of her teeth

grew a shade higher from the gum than the rest..” Those that ‘fail’ the test are thrown

out into the snow to die from exposure; those that ‘pass’ are raped and tortured to

death later (120:225-231).

This pattern of systematic extermination of the ‘aberrant’ occurs throughout

Sade’s work. The libertines advocate the killing of children, orphans (described as

‘vegetative parasites’), the infirm and the ‘unfortunate,’ the torching of public

schools, poorhouses and hospitals (LNJ 1:33; J: 604, 710, 726-729; PB: 335-336).

Sade’s characters differ from their real, 18th century counterparts in being all the more

thorough. Foucault notes the 1780 proposal to burn down the Bicêtre asylum

buildings to control a “putrid fever”; Sade’s characters plan to torch every hospital

and poor-house in Rome in order to eliminate the poor and sick themselves (J: 726;

Foucault MC: 204). Pinel notes that Catholicism causes insanity; Sade’s character

Belmor plans on solving the problem for all time by having every practitioner of the

‘irrational creed’ eliminated (J: 501; Foucault MC: 255). Both Philosophy in the

Bedroom and Juliette contain passages justifying such massacres in the name of the

‘greater good,’ and in the medical rhetoric of a ‘necessary amputation.’ From “Yet

Another Effort”: “Do you not prune the tree when it has too many branches? And do

not too many shoots weaken the trunk? (PB: 336-337). From Juliette: “What does the

horticulturalist do when he espies that branch? He cuts it off, without qualms. The

statesman must proceed likewise: one of the basic laws of nature is that nothing

superfluous subsist in the world. …my desire is that they be totally eliminated,

extirpated; exterminated, killed... killed as one kills a breed of noxious animals” (J:

726; similar: 2:207, 209). This pattern is what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman takes to

be a key feature of Modernity; the mentality of the “Gardeners who treat society as a

virgin plot of land to be expertly designed and then cultivated and doctored to keep to

78 Orwell p.267.

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the designed form.”79 In the same way, the interests of the individual disappear in

discussion on the merits of medical experimentation. In Juliette, a character reports

on the practice of her doctor friends, summarizing the general attitude of the doctors

in Sade’s world.

Almost all of them use no other means of testing out a remedy, and it’s surely nothing to

them [vraiment un vide pour eux]; I am reminded,” she added, “of what young Iberti, my

personal doctor, said to me only the other day upon arriving at my bedside fresh from one

of those experiments. ‘What concern to the State is the existence of the vile beings that

ordinarily crowd those dens?’ he said in response to the look of disapproval I assumed in

order to find out how he would justify himself; ‘you would be doing society an enormous

disservice by not permitting us medical artists to test our talents upon society’s

dishonoring dregs. These have their use; Nature, in making them weak and defenseless,

indicates what is to be... (J: 727; ΠVol. III: 833). 80

Further, Sade describes a medical gaze that tortures and murders in the name of

the abstract ideals of health. In Justine, Monsieur Rodin, a “callous and brutal”

surgeon, has imprisoned a twelve year old girl for medical experiments, and argues

for the utilitarian rationale for such a venture (MV: 57,59 ,104). The science and

technology of the human body is wrested from the purpose and principles of medical

practice. The ‘patient’ disappears entirely; medicine is transformed into an inquiry

into the human machine, or into the most complex and painful way of killing

someone. Here, the pleasures of sadism and the pleasure of ‘revealing truth’

intersect.81 In The 120 Days of Sodom, Sade gives a vast list of surgically or

scientifically informed tortures. One involves asphyxiation in a ‘pneumatic machine;’

another involves giving injections of a “venereal distemper” (120: 603-611, 629, 652-

659 MV: 57, 59). Still other experiments involve starvation (“in order to study the

effects of famine”), live organ transplantation, or removal, including the brain;

involuntary sex change surgery, and procedures which are specified as tortures (“her

nerves were laid bare...the nerves are tied to a short stick...” (120: 649, 653, 658, 652).

79 Zygmunt Bauman Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000)

p.113. 80 In a corresponding footnote, Sade states that Iberti was a real figure, a friend, in fact, and that this

was his real name (729n). 81 Foucault HS1: 71.

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The operations are invariably agonizing and fatal (“...he knows just enough about

surgery to botch all four operations”; 120:655). In Juliette ( notably, predating

Shelley’s Frankenstein by two decades), a victim is tortured and killed, then struck

with an artificial thunderbolt; in the same novel, a man raises his children dumb, like

animals, in order to study their psychological development (J : 741, 1176). In

similar fashion, chemistry is discussed only in discussing ways of killing thousands of

people: “[a] treacherous bugger regularly deploys a drug which, sprinkled on the

ground, very wonderfully kills whosoever walks thereupon; he sprinkles it about

rather frequently, and over wide areas (120:637; similar: LNJ 2:207, 209; J:540,

1150).

Here I return to the discussion of Foucault’s interpretation of Sade, as discussed

at the end of Chapter I. Sade’s work, according to the early Foucault, is a document

of the revolt against this rigorous reordering; Sade himself being the very voice of

that unnameable madness deemed unfit for the Age of Reason. I suggest that this

understanding of Sade is in fact upside-down. Sade’s description of the disciplined,

obedient subject, his colonizing of the disciplinary mechanism of the prison or the

hospital, the rituals of power and the accumulation of documentation, suggest that his

work is the ultimate discursive artifact of Foucault’s Age of Control, of “infinite

examination and compulsory objectification” and “inhuman vigour” (DP: 189; MC:

234). Sade confirms the negative, Foucaultian view of society, as described in

Discipline and Punish, and particularly the view that this society is consistent with the

Enlightenment values and theories. In depicting every possible method of domination

and coercion, and the way in which institutional systems can be incorporated into a

universal and intensive mechanism of control, Sade appears to be – Foucault’s

precursor. 82 It was perhaps an awareness of this link that led to Foucault’s

characterization of Sade as the exact flip- side of scientific discourse, writing, in The

Order of Things, that “ Les 120 Journées is the velvety, marvelous obverse of the

Leçons d’anatomie comparée” [of Georges Cuvier {1769-1832}] (OT: 278).83 Sade

had intimate and direct knowledge of the Prison, the Asylum, the Barracks, the 82Fink does not make this association, but her appraisal of Sade is in very Foucaultian terms. “Political

System”p.512. 83 Concerning such Sadeian themes as the pleasure of institutional control, the creation of the obedient

subject, the importance of document accumulation, the rituals of power, See also DP: 40, 128-129,

181-182,189, 264. (HS I: 45, 48, 71-73).

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School, and the Hospital, institutions which, for Foucault, represented the emergence

of new techniques of administration, so such a relationship between Sade and those

institutions that he was subjected to (institutions make the man, as Montesquieu said)

is only natural. 84

The most obvious similarity between Sade’s work and the account of the

hospital of the 18th Century is the incredible cruelty involved. Foucault notes that

there was a specific doctrine of using fear as a ‘psychiatric technique’ (MC: 180, 245),

and many of the pronouncements given by psychiatrists that Foucault cites have a

distinctly Sadeian ring to them. There is, for example, the account of one Dr.

Sauvages, who advises that the physician must “become a philosopher” in the sense

identical to that of Sade- that is, one must purge all natural human feelings of

sympathy in favour of a particular notion of the good (MC: 183). There is François

Leuret, who advised other physicians of the mad as follows: “[a] single string still

vibrates in [the patient], that of pain, have courage to pluck it” (MC: 182).85 The

details of the terrifying methods employed reinforce the association; for example the

‘spinning machine’ used by Joseph Mason Cox (1763-1818) to spin melancholia out

of the mad (eventually used simply as a punishment or threat), or the methods of

Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738), who claimed to have cured convulsives in 1777 by

burning the ‘patient’ to the bone with red-hot pincers.86 Sade’s characters also use the

exact same methods to ‘cure’ the mad that Foucault describes. In Madness and

Civilization, Foucault describes the curing of a man of the delusion that he is a king,

and another who believes himself to be God, through, essentially, the humiliation of

confronting banal reality.87 Similarly, the character Vespoli (in Juliette) degrades

84 In his formative years, Sade was educated by Jesuits, well known for their discipline (and sexual

abuse of students). As a young man, Sade served with distinction as a captain in the cavalry, and during

the Revolution he served as an inspector of hospitals and as a judge. In the latter role, Sade found

himself representing the very institution responsible for the mass execution of fellow aristocrats.

Finally, of course, Sade spent twenty - seven years in prisons, and spent his final years in the Charenton

lunatic asylum. In a letter to his wife written in July 1783, Sade insinuates that he was sodomized by

his Jesuit teachers (120:132; LP: 313). Shaeffer makes the association of Sade’s treatment by the

Jesuits and the conduct of the libertines of his novels (Schaeffer p.23). 85 François Leuret, Fragments psychologiques sur la folie (Paris, 1834) pp. 308-321. Quoted in

Foucault MC :182. 86 MC: 176-177, 185. 87 Ibid. pp.260, 263.

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humiliates, then murders, a man who believes himself to be God, another who thinks

that he is Jesus, and a woman who believes herself to be the Virgin Mary (J:982,

984).

Most interesting is the underlying theory of the psychiatrists, which was,

according to Foucault, that of the Materialists- the very same theorists that Sade draws

from. La Mettrie, d’Holbach and Helvétius appear in both Madness and Civilization

and Discipline and Punish as the theoretical overlords of the Great Confinement and

the new technologies of control. 88 Just as La Mettrie, d’Holbach and Helvétius

reduce man to a machine that can be manipulated according to elementary theor

causation, Sade’s libertines, as torturers, crush their victims by reducing them to their

physical, earthly presence (DP: 106,128,136,138). The actual attempt to understand

the mind of the insane man, the criminal, the innocent victim or the ‘people,’ to

attempt to see the world from the perspective of the subject, is not permitted.

ies of

89 As

Foucault notes, the medical authority figure knew madness only in that he had power

over it, just as the libertine knows the subject only in having the power to manipulate

(MC: 272). In the words of Sade, we hear a grotesque parody of the vulgarity of

positivism: “il avait mieux le foutre que le comprendre.”90 This is, as Foucault puts

it, the “merciless language of non-madness” of those who confine their neighbours in

an act of ‘sovereign reason’ (MC: ix).

In Chapter I, I outlined the discussion as to whether Sade can be associated with

Nazism. Those who have noted the similarity emphasize the role played by

organization and political power in Sade. Camus’ characterization of Sade’s work as

extolling of “totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom”- the freedom of

the few- is essentially correct (R: 42). Adorno and Horkheimer’s association of Sade

with Nazism is based on similar observations- the advocacy of power, in both Sade

and Nazism, as its own justification; the association, or reduction, of scientific

thinking to the impulse, with ruthless efficiency, to destroy; the development of

organization without any substantial goal beyond the acquisition and exercise of

power; the transformation of political and economic power into a tool of the

88 Ibid. pp.37, 126, 142, 132, 136,155,173; DP: 204. 89 Marcel Hénaff makes this point: “The victim, irremediably mute, is only the guinea pig in an

experiment, the argument in a demonstration.” Hénaff Libertine Body p.247. 90 Œuvres complètes (Paris : Editions Têtes de Feuilles, 1973) vol.13, p.280-281.Quoted in Mengue

p.103.

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privileged elite, and the emergence of absolute political cynicism: “the statement that

dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and

there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its

opposite.”91 Such traits in Sade are acknowledged by Foucault, who grants that his

‘eroticism’ is “proper to a disciplinary society: a regulated, anatomical, hierarchical

society whose time is carefully distributed, its places partitioned, characterized by

obedience and surveillance” (SS: 226). One trait missing from these accounts of

Sade’s work however, is the pattern of systematic destruction of ‘aberrant’

individuals. This is precisely the trait Foucault attributes to the Nazis, and not to Sade.

Foucault describes the Holocaust as a petite- bourgeois dream of cleanliness- a

campaign to eliminate undesirable, aberrant elements, adding: “[m]illions of people

were murdered there, so I don’t say it to diminish the blame for those responsible for

it, but precisely to disabuse those who want to superimpose erotic values on it”

(SS:226). Hence- Nazism and Sade cannot be confused, as Sade is ‘erotic.’ Bataille

makes the disjunction of Sade from Nazism in a similar way, describing the

“unchaining of the passions that raged at Buchenwald or Auschwitz” as “an

unchaining that was the government of Reason” (my italics), and not of the ‘passions’

(EPS:253-254; also 244; similar: AS Vol. III:253). Le Brun takes Sade to be

concerned with the stripping away of ideologies, and returning to the ‘authenticity’ of

bodies; Norbert Sclippa holds that Sade’s characters cannot be proto-Nazis as they

are not concerned with interfering with politics. 92

In reply, I note that Le Brun, Foucault (with the exception of the “Sergeant of Sex”

interview, where he adopts a different interpretation), Sclippa and Bataille are

working from a one- sided account of Sade that omits its meticulous ordering of

disciplinary relations, the descriptions of massive, politically enabled destruction of

human lives, and above all the doctrinal continuity of authoritarian rule and that of the

libertines. That which Adorno, Horkheimer and Camus emphasize in their reading of

91 Max Horkheimer Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974) p.29. 92 Norbert Sclippa writes: “I do not think personally that Adorno, Horkheimer or Camus have shown

that a link exists between Sade and Nazism. Sade’s materialism, as any other “faith,” proposes a

hopeful message of life, which extends to all men. And like any faith, it can be abused... a total

rejection of established laws and institutions [as in Sade] would be the opposite of Nazism, their

Epitome.” Sclippa also adds that the Society of the Friends of Crime “have in their rules NOT to

disturb the existing political order.” Personal correspondence via e-mail, August 4th 2002.

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Sade, and that which has been discussed in this chapter, is almost completely

unaccounted for in the work of Bataille and Le Brun. This is a serious error of

omission, and only out of a questionable taste for paradox could the similarity

between Sade’s dungeon and the practice of the Nazis be denied outright.

7.9 Excremental Assault

Many of the tortures in Sade are merely the infliction of pain through whatever

means imaginable, ranging from forcing the victim to kneel on gravel to complex

procedures involving dismemberment, boiling oil or explosives (120: 618- 636).

Psychological torture is also used. Absurd or impossible instructions are given,

inevitably resulting in torture when the subject ‘fails’ to follow the instructions

correctly. From the Statutes of Silling:

Should any subject in some way refuse anything demanded of him, even when

incapacitated or when that thing is impossible, he shall be punished with utmost severity;

‘tis for him to provide, for him to discover ways and means (120:248).

In similar fashion, girls are tortured if they fail to interpret a piece of music ‘correctly’

through their movements, forced to ice-skate an impossibly difficult obstacle course

whilst fireworks are thrown at them, or to dance barefoot on broken glass (J: 613,

626, 1182; 120:613, 640). What remains to be accounted for are the forms of torture

which are associated with control and coercion. Sade’s characters are not merely

concerned with the thrill of killing or the pleasure of inflicting physical or

psychological pain. They want the more staid pleasure of total submission: “... tous

les sujets que vous voyez ici ne s’y réunissent que pour obéir à vos ordres: la

soumission la plus complètes la prévalence la plus entière...” (LNJ 2 : 196). This is

attained through three principal means: silence, terror, and degradation.

To silence the victim is to remove from them the most elemental freedom- the

capacity to communicate, whether to complain or to cry from help. In order to reduce

the victim to silence, they are tortured if they attempt to communicate with one

another, or even for the expression of feelings (120:248). Submission is also enforced

by more direct means, such as the removal or mutilation of the tongue or mouth, or

blinding the victim (J: 908, 1183, 620; 120: 620, 649).

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Every means is used to terrorize the victim into submission. The mutilated

corpses of previous victims, or (as noted above) the tools of torture are placed on

display (J: 1059, 120:606). The “least evidence given of lack of respect or lack of

submission” is punished with instant death (120:248). Victims are also informed that

they have no hope of escape, as in the following passage from The 120 days:

Give a thought to your circumstances, think what you are, what we are, and may these

reflections cause you to quake–you are beyond the borders of France [in the Black Forest

region in Germany] in the depths of an uninhabitable forest, high amongst naked

mountains; the paths that brought you here were destroyed behind you as you advanced

along them...insofar as the world is concerned, you are already dead... (120:250-251).

Various means are employed to humiliate and degrade the victims, both physically

and morally. They are forced to desecrate or defecate on religious ritual objects, and

are executed for the performance of any religious act; in The 120 Days, such

desecrations are intensified during Christian holidays (120: 248, 581, 589). Victims

are typically stripped naked, or given thin, inadequate clothing which is easily

removed, making it impossible to escape. Again, from The 120 Days: “...the little

boys and the little girls ...shall always be differently and splendidly costumed, ...but

all these costumes shall be of taffeta or of lawn; at no time shall the lower half of the

body be discomfited by any raiment, and the removal of a pin shall suffice to bare it

completely” (120:245; similar: MV: 111).

Already discussed in Chapter III is the Libertines’ preoccupation with eating

excrement. What remains to be explained is the preoccupation with forcing others to

eat excrement, to prevent others from washing, or forcing them from defecating

anywhere but in a chapel, and then only according to a strict regime. Just as Sade’s

libertines demonstrate their own mastery over nausea through coprophagy, they

torture their victims through forcing them to violate that those deep seated instinctual

revulsions that they have silenced in themselves. In Yet another effort, being “smeared

in filth in public places” is the recommended punishment for the “blessed charlatans”

of the church (PB: 306). In other texts, victims are regularly forced to soil their own

clothes or to be prevented from relieving themselves, to eat excrement or defecate in

the full view of others, to be covered in excrement, or have excrement forced into

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every orifice (LNJ 2 : 82, 210, 269, 290, 311, 383 ; 120 : 372, 373, 579, 621; J:906,

907, 916). From the “Statutes of Silling:”

...it is strictly forbidden to relieve oneself anywhere save in the chapel, which has been

outfitted and intended for this purpose, and forbidden to go there without individual and

special permission, the which shall often be refused, and for good reason, the month’s

presiding officer shall scrupulously examine, immediately after breakfast, all the girl’s

water closets, and in the case of a contravention discovered in the above-designated place

or in the other, the delinquent shall be condemned to suffer the penalty of death (120:242)

No subject, whether male or female, shall be able to fulfil duties of cleanliness

whatsoever they may be, and above all those consequent upon the heavy need relieved,

without express permission from the month’s presiding officer, and if it be refused him,

and if despite that refusal he surrender to this need, his punishment shall be of the very

rudest [kind]. (120:249).93

Excremental assault, a term used by Emil Fackenheim and Terence des Pres, defines

the methods used in Nazi death camps to abolish the prisoner’s sense of self worth

and psychologically break the victim. 94 Writes Fackenheim: “excremental assault

was designed to produce in the victim a “self-disgust” to the point of wanting death

even committing suicide. And this-nothing less- was the essential goal. The Nazi logic

of destruction was aimed, ultimately, at the victim’s self-destruction.”

or

95

93 Micheline Maurel has this to say of this particular torture: “[i]magine what it would be like to be

forbidden to go to the toilet; imagine also that you were suffering from an increasingly severe

dysentery, caused and aggravated by a diet of cabbage soup as well as by the constant cold. Naturally,

you would try to go anyway. Sometimes you might succeed. But your absences would be noticed and

you would be beaten, knocked down and trampled on. By now, you would know what the risks were,

but urgency would oblige you to repeat the attempt, cost what it may...I soon learned to deal with the

dysentery by tying strings around the lower end of my drawers.” Micheline Maurel An Ordinary Camp

trans. Margaret S. Summers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958) pp.38ff. Quoted in Emil L.

Fackenheim To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books,

1982) p. 209. 94 “Excremental Assault” is Chapter 3 of Terence des Pres, The Survivor (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1976). Cited in p.208. Primo Levi uses the term ‘excremental coercion.’ Primo Levi

The Drowned and the Saved translated by Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1988) p.90. On this

topic, see also Danuta Czech “The Auschwitz Prisoner Administration” in Yisrael Gutman, Michael

Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy: 363-378, p.375. 95 Fackenheim p. 209.

283

This is also the goal of Sade’s libertines- to subjugate their victims to the point

that they willingly participate in their own destruction. Besides simply watching their

loved ones murdered in front of them, victims are frequently coerced into killing each

other. 96 This is the goal of their absolute submission (states Borchamps, about to

execute an unwitting victim: “remember....it’s step by step to lead them gradually to

death”: J: 917). Either the victims prefer that those close to them to die quickly rather

than slowly and painfully at the hands of the libertines, or they are only allowed to

live if they participate in the destruction of others. Mothers are forced to stab sons,

and lovers are forced to stab each other (J: 920, 120:663). Libertines force their

victims to kill and eat one another through starvation, to eat their own body parts, or

to cut off their own limbs in order to obtain food (120: 621, 647, 653, 656, 663) As

Juliette says of Saint-Fond: “The great art of Saint-Fond consisted in always placing

his victims in such a situation that of two evils they had inevitably to elect the one

which more nicely suited his perfidious libertinage” (J:363; also 922; 120: 650, 670).

This principal is basic to the administrative structure of Silling: “...Messieurs decide

to dispatch the rest of the subjects one by one. Messieurs devise new arrangements...

[they] agree to give a green ribbon to everyone whom they propose to take back with

them to France; the green favour is bestowed, however, upon condition the recipient is

willing to lend a hand with the destruction of the other victims”(120:670). 97 This

deep coercion serves three functions: it is pleasurable for the sadists to witness the

moral destruction of the victims; it reduces the work that has to be done to physically

kill them, and it imposes upon any survivors the role of collaborator.98 The objective

of such degradation is not simply to enjoy the pleasure of control. It is to reduce the

victim to the status of an animal. The Duc tells his victims:

96 scenes involving mothers watching the murder of their infants, or forced abortions, are especially

common (J: 988-990, 1010, 1122; 120: 619, 661, 664-665, 638, 639). In another, a man is forced to eat

his mistress (120:653). 97 Similarly, in the Misfortunes of Virtue, monks have survivors of an ‘orgy-massacre’ swear not to go

to the police (MV: 102). 98 In one scene in Juliette, an army captain orders two groups of ten soldiers to massacre each other,

perhaps a comment on the ease with which institutional control can be used to kill (J:922).

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...consider that it is not at all as human beings we behold you, but exclusively as animals

one feeds in return for their services, and which one withers with blows when they refuse

to be put to use (120:252).

Sade’s characters, as noted, refer to their victims variously as vermin or animals,

or mere material (Alberti, a character in Juliette, takes this dehumanization to this

extreme of stating of a victim that “such offal is fit for nothing but to be boiled down

onto soap”; J: 1131; similar: 120:666). To degrade the victim, to remove their human,

civilized characteristics (their clothes, their ability to clean themselves) also allows

the torturer or killer to regard the victim as somehow inhuman, through turning them

into beings not permitted, or even able, to function as human beings.

To reduce the victim to the status of an object is deeply paradoxical for a number

of reasons, despite the fact that such a process is clearly within the compass of human

possibility. Firstly, as discussed in Chapter III, the pleasure of power is primarily the

pleasure of being seen as powerful by the other. If the other ceases to exist as a human

being at all, the dynamic is lost. Secondly, the very complexity and intensity of the

degradation of the victim is to affirm their status as already being more than merely

human, or merely dead matter. For a thinking sadist, degradation of the victim,

therefore, ought to be a failure. Further, the libertines have caught themselves in a

doctrinal trap. They assert that there is no higher order of human existence, that they

themselves are no more than animals, or excrement (Braschi announces that he

“worships shit”; J:763). Yet, in order to demonstrate their supremacy over their

victims, they reduce their victims to an animalistic state, to alimentary functions-

eating and excreting- and to following instructions. They are, therefore, reduced to

the base preoccupations, and to the ontological categories, of their masters– entities

that have no freedom, and allegedly no capacity for moral action.

For Primo Levi, the excremental coercion of the camps was not merely a

destruction of the victim’s will to live. It is a violent imposition of the torturer’s

nihilism onto the victim: “[w]e have embraced you, corrupted you, dragged you to

the bottom with us. You are like us, proud people, dirtied with your own blood, as we

are.” 99 The objective of the camp system, as in Sade’s scheme, is to rid the world of

99 Primo Levi The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 2000) p.90. See also Danuta Czech “The

Auschwitz Prisoner Administration” in Gutman, Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy 363-378, p.370; Leo

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everything that is unintelligible, undesirable and erroneous according to the ontology

of the rulers– the obliteration of the spirit, the principle of morality; of whatever

distinguishes human life from a living death. The reduction of the victim to the level

of animal is not driven by an ontological given, but an essentially irrational article of

faith- an ideology that is forced upon the body of the victim, as with the victims of

any given Crusade or Inquisition, rather than a calmly stated, self- evident truth. The

Sadeian edifice, constructed in the name of strength, power and health, is circular and

artificial. Silling is a house of cards.

7.10 Conclusion

…go undress the four destined for holocaust and whose brows are wreathed in the foliage

of death’s tree, go strip them, and of their raiments, whereof there is no further need,

make the employment I have prescribed to you. The emissaries step forward; the four

victims are despoiled of every article of clothing, which is flung piece by piece into the

roaring blaze…

Sade Juliette (J: 1178)100

There is no political doctrine in Sade as such. There is, rather, an insightful

description of the means of control and subjugation. There is also a direct link

between the doctrine of Libertinage and the establishment of, or cynical abuse of

comprehensive and intensive power relationships, by whatever means necessary, for

purely egoistic ends. As such, Sade’s discussion of power and control continues the

doctrinal tension in libertine doctrine. On the one hand, the libertines adhere to the

Bataillian principles of energy and chaos, as symbolized by the motif of the volcano.

Yet, on the other, complex administrative and logistical systems are established or

requisitioned in order to control over a subject population. The Libertine doctrine calls

for destruction and domination on a massive scale, which requires organization, out of

Eitinger “Auschwitz- A Psychological Example” in Gutman, Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy: 469-482,

p.473. 100 Sade appears to be the first writer to associate the term ‘holocaust’ with mass murder. In his age, the

word was applied to fires of great destructiveness- although his usage follows the original sense. Two

further examples: “Laurette, leur mère, et mme de Verneuil devaient contenir les holocaustes…” (LNJ

2:216) “…atop the holocaust, bound hand and foot, the old crone was burned alive…: (J: 747).

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sheer logistical necessity (one exception to this rule– a libertine activity which does

not require resources and planning– is arson).

Work in this, and previous chapters, goes some way towards overcoming the

purely metaphorical nature of the association of Sade and Nazism, and in undermining

some of the reasons offered as to why the association is groundless. In Chapter VI,

the doctrine of Natural Aristocracy, an explicit (albeit problematic) doctrine of

‘master race’ and ‘slave race,’ was discussed. In this chapter, it was noted that

rigorously systematized and ‘reasoned killing’ are dominant trends in Sade’s thought.

What is missing, from both those who note the Sade-Nazi association and those who

reject it, is a commentary on the specifics of Nazi doctrine.

To conclude, there are a number of similarities between the descriptions of both

the doctrine and the exercise of power in Sade and that of the Nazis. There is the

doctrine of innate supremacy, of ‘natural masters’ and ‘natural slaves;’ the validation

of the ‘right of the strong’ to capture and subjugate others; the systematic

extermination of religious or economic groups, or those ‘unfit to live,’ or of the very

fabric of Judaeo-Christian morality; the nostalgia for the glories of Europe’s pre-

Christian past- its (to recall Rousseau) “first innocence.” In terms of practice, in Sade

we see the rituals of control and humiliation, the use of surveillance, secrecy, terror,

propaganda and indoctrination; the mechanized killing, the medical experiments, the

branding, marking and tattooing of victims, even the rhetoric- the suggestion of

turning victims into soap, the rhetorical reduction of the target population to

vermin.101 The differences between, say, the thought of Saint-Fond or Chigi, and that

of Hitler, Stalin or Marat, are minor, offering similar rationales (the ‘greater good,’

101 Only one Sade scholar- Schaeffer- has made explicit the association of the disciplinary system in

Sade’s 120 Days with that of the Nazi death camps (Schaeffer p.345). For discussion on starvation-

inducement experiments, see Berenbaum ed. p.270. For discussion of the use of Jewish sex slaves in

the camps, and Himmler’s personal involvement of the ‘punishment’ of Jewish women, see Czech

p.376, Wistrich Hitler and the Holocaust p.240.For discussion of the immediate killing of sick

prisoners in the Auschwitz camp, see Irena Strzelecka “Hospitals” In Gutman and Berenbaum, eds.

Anatomy: 379-392, p.389. For discussion of the experiments of Josef Mengele, see Helena Kubica “The

Crimes of Josef Mengele” in Gutman and Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy: 317-337, pp.321, 324, 324;

Robert Jay Lifton The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York:

Basic Books, 2000). For discussion of forced abortions and murder of babies, the impossibly

contradictory rules, the destruction and desecration of religious ritual objects, and the coerced

destruction in the camps, see Fackenheim pp.213, 216. p.207, 218-219.

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the ‘health’ of the State) for the extermination of millions who fail to fit the

ideological model. One key difference is that, besides Zamé, there is no personality

cult or Führerprinzip. Le Brun holds that fascism dresses up human savagery with an

ideological dress- the exact opposite of the ‘honesty’ of Sade. In reply, I note that

Sade’s characters themselves discuss the importance of propaganda to hide their true

motives. It is not even clear whether, like Orwell’s O’Brien, the libertines are simply

more lucid than most dictators concerning the nihilism that drives them. 102 The entire

libertine doctrine of ‘natural aristocracy,’ in fact, could itself be an ideological

masking of human savagery, a view that Sade’s characters indeed occasionally ponder

(“[o]ne arranges one’s schemes according to one’s tastes and whims”; J:401, also

p.555). The association of Sade and Nazism, to be brought to a close, would require

an analysis of the specifics of Nazi ideology. Although this topic goes beyond the

scope of this project, an attached appendix to this project addresses some key

similarities.

Whether Sade predicted any specific modern atrocity is a question concerning the

supernatural rather than philosophy. The correct question is- in driving the rhetoric,

the ideology, the philosophy, and the bureaucratized terror of his age to their

furthermost limits, did Sade see the direction in which the Occident, morally, was

headed? The reply seems to be- yes, he did. The question to follow is: what might this

mean for ideology and philosophy, and the culture of the Occident? ( Concerning

Sade scholarship and Sade- interpretation, an entirely different question is - why have

no Sade scholars noted the similarity between Sade and Nazism, and have rejected the

association without addressing the primary reasons offered for this association {the

emphasis, in Sade, on structure and organization in killing}? Hitherto, it has been left

almost entirely to non-experts – philosophers, writers, film makers and biographers-

Schaeffer, Camus, Adorno and Horkheimer, Pasolini- to make the association at all).

What can we say, then, about the political relevance of Sade? As I claimed in

Chapter I, to associate Sade’s thought with that of the Nazis and other such

movements is to emphasise, rather than deny, his significance as a thinker, and on

Sade’s terms. On several occasions, Sade informs the reader that he had the power of 102 O’Brien states: “[w]e are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are

doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German

Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close...but they never had the courage to recognize their

own motives.” Orwell p.275.

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prophecy; in both Aline et Valcour and Juliette he tells the reader that he had

predicted the revolution itself.103 In his Reflections on the Novel (1800), Sade states

that the craft of the novelist is to depict the possibilities of human existence (120:106).

Such a project requires, by extension, an investigation into the possibilities of political

reality as well (writes Fink, Sade “opts to experiment with extremes, a laboratory

method resorted to by scientists in order to intensify and clarify the causes and effects

of their research).” 104 If Sade had indeed anticipated the Shoah and other modern

Holocausts, or, more generally, a malignancy at the heart of Civilization, it would

appear that his project had been a success. Beyond the visions of Blake, the systems

of Hegel or even the frenzy of Nietzsche, Sade saw in the chaos and the anxious

meditations of his age another world, another Enlightenment, and another Revolution.

103 The frontispiece of Aline et Valcour reads “Écrit à la Bastille un an avant la Révolution de France”

(AV: 3). The same claim is made in a footnote in Juliette (J: 66). 104 Fink “Political System” p.506.

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Conclusion

The question that initiated this essay remains unanswered. That is, is Sade a

philosopher, or not? This study tends towards the view that Sade indeed is a

philosopher of sorts, whilst accepting that aspects of the less literal readings (that of

Foucault, principally) have their merits. As I hope to have shown, the most

interesting, and relevant, aspects of Sade’s work are only visible through the optic of

philosophy. Further, Sade’s texts resemble philosophical works, in particular the

populist philosophical tracts and pamphlets of his time. Sade clarifies the senses of the

terms used, uses footnotes, and italicizes words for emphasis. His characters argue,

cite Machiavelli, ridicule Rousseau, propose thought experiments and shoot each

others’ theories down. More crucially, Sade’s work functions as does all good

philosophical writing. Sade forces the reader to meditate on central, personal

questions of morality, such as the ‘why be moral’ question, to a degree that is quite

possibly unsurpassed. Sade forces the reader, in asking oneself why one continues to

read at all, to confront their own most basic moral assumptions. What began as a hunt

for Jabberwocky ends as a glimpse at the world through the monster’s eyes. No matter

how brief or unconvincing this vision may be, the experience is bruising. Sade will

not necessarily send the reader out into the street with an axe; nor will he necessarily

send the reader to Yeshiva or a monastery. Yet Sade cannot be taken lightly. If

philosophy begins in wonder, in Sade it ends in a shipwreck on a dark, boiling sea, far

from civilization. To read Sade, and to take him seriously, is to risk intellectual death

by misadventure.

Sade is not a typical philosophical writer, to be sure, and his intentions are far

from clear, but the same could be said of other, less obscure thinkers ( it is not clear

whether Mandeville wrote The Fable of the Bees in jest, for example). There is a

multidimensional and open- ended aspect of Sade’s thought that is captured by

Foucault’s account, for whom Sade represents the enfolding and inversion of all other

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discourses. Yet this interpretation does not do justice to Sade, insofar as it reduces his

work to an amateurish collage. Sade attacks moral ideas with a high degree of

sophistication that is seldom acknowledged. For this reason- and not for the endless

descriptions of rape and murder, Sade is a deeply subversive, and frightening, thinker.

The range and depth of Sade’s thought is considerable. From the beginning of the

study, it is clear that Sade’s philosophy possesses the traits of any complete

philosophical system, beginning with his rigorously scientific and rationalistic

ontology. On materialistic and rationalistic grounds, Sade classifies humans as a type

of animal, rejects the existence of souls, or free will, and so on. As such, Sade is

shown to be a student of the radical thought of his age, rather than a radical outsider.

In Chapter III, Sade’s doctrine as it pertains to psychology was discussed. Here,

his account of the psychology of sadism is found to be sophisticated and insightful,

and throws into doubt, rather than confirms, the association of sexuality with an

instinct for destruction. Rather, Sade associates the will to cruelty with the desire for

the sensation of power and control. Power, its pleasures, its distribution and its

techniques, appears to be the central theme in Sade’s thought. This chapter also tracks

Sade’s inversion, or continuation, of conventional theories concerning pleasure and

aesthetics.

Chapter IV further undermines ‘traditional’ accounts of Sade as liberator and

eroticist, and the notion that Sade is primarily concerned with the sexual act itself, as

implied by Bataille. Instead, Sade is shown to be a forceful critic of Rousseau’s

discussion of the role of women, and of the institution of marriage. Sade’s treatment

of the notion of homosexuality and ‘perversion’ also places him far ahead of his

contemporaries. Sade’s misogyny, however, counts against a straightforwardly

positive reading.

In Chapter V, Sade is shown to be an imaginative and insightful moral thinker. He

relentlessly probes ethical systems for weaknesses, and explores their counterintuitive

implications. Sade exposes serious, and now widely acknowledged, flaws in

Utilitarian thought, and explicitly rejects attempts to reduce ethics to a rational,

mutually beneficial behavioural stratagem. Further, Sade’s ‘applied a-moral

philosophy’ – sheds light on the cooperative strategies of criminal society, and the

limits of the ‘self harm’ argument.

In Chapter VI, Sade’s critique of Judaeo- Christian morality, and his inversion of

the teleology of Rousseau, were discussed. Sade cannot be said to merely destroy pre-

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existing values, doctrines and philosophies, however. Sade also seeks to supplant

them with an entirely new Weltanschauung, one which affirms death and destruction

as necessary aspects of the order of things.

Whereas VI concerns the theoretical justification of absolute power, Chapter VII

concerns the way in which power is managed, at both the level of the state and at the

level of the institution. Through formulating a doctrine of absolute despotism, Sade

does us the service of identifying its salient features.

We need not agree with Sade’s verdict of the world, his pessimism, or his

assessment of human nature, to see the worth of his work. It takes, as Adorno and

Horkheimer realized, a disturbing thinker to shed any light at all on the horrors of our

age, a world that is frequently both frightening and obscene. Hegel wrote that

philosophy is the world as it is brought to consciousness, and that art is an unfolding

of truth. If this is so, and if the truth of the world is frightening, then Sade is both

artist and philosopher.

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APPENDIX:

Sade and Nazism

I suggest that philosophy, if it is bad philosophy, may be dangerous, and therefore

deserves that degree of negative respect which we accord to lightning and tigers.

Bertrand Russell Philosophy and Politics (1947).1

A.1 Introduction

This appendix supplements the discussion concerning the alleged connection between

Nazism and the thought of Sade. The doctrine of Nazism requires an entire, quite

different, study in itself; here I merely note what the ideological commonalities are.

The implication of this association is a serious one. Adorno, Horkheimer and

Crocker in particular take Sade to represent Enlightenment – that is, Western thought-

at its logical terminus. Therefore, to make the association of Sade with Hitler is to

reveal the roots of Hitlerian ideology in the very heart of Western intellectual culture.

It should also be explained that it is an association that is at question- that is, whether

Sade’s thought anticipates the Nazis– either their specific acts, or their doctrine.

Defenders of Sade, either implicitly or explicitly, approach the question as if they are

countering the accusation that Sade was actually responsible for Nazism. 2 Whether or

not this is a deliberate straw man, this approach is to misconstrue the issue. Such a

question is a case for historians of ideas (and an easy one at that) – and does not

concern the inquiry into the economy of ideas and their implications.

As noted in the previous chapter, the association between Sade and Nazism is

not decisively established. Of those thinkers who have proposed the association, none

has made the distinction between drawing a specifically doctrinal comparison, or

between the acts committed by the Nazis and those depicted by Sade. Sade, for 1 Bertrand Russell Philosophy and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947) p.7. 2 Sawhney writes that “[t]he issue of whether or not Sade was responsible for Nazism and the death

camps is one which continues to generate controversy to the present day...” Deepak Narang Sawhney

“Unmasking Sade” in Sawhney ed. Must We Burn Sade? : 15-30, pp.20-21.

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Camus, represents a prophetic ‘dream of revenge;’ Adorno and Horkheimer dwell on

the incessant orderings of bodies, and the commonality of Sade and Nietzsche, rather

than that of Sade and Hitler. 3 Further, their understanding of Nazism is highly

problematic. They identify Nazism with an expression of rigorous rationality and

capitalist efficiency, which does not cohere with Nazi practice or doctrine. A rational,

capital– driven Nazism – a Nazism focused on rational, instrumental goals, such as

maximizing the output of war material or winning the ‘conventional’ war - would not

have led to the decision to murder six million Jews. In so doing (many of the victims

of the Holocaust were trained or potential slave laborers in crucial armaments

factories) the Nazis were destroying a workforce that was in fact desperately needed. 4 Therefore, the imperative to kill every Jew is a feature of Hitler’s thought of whic

the Adorno & Horkheimer account cannot account for. This is because they do not

account for the unconventional war that Hitler was (or, rather, believed himself to be)

fighting, as I will explain below.

h

Because of this gap between interpretation and actual Nazi policy, the

association of Sade and Nazism made is at risk of appearing little more than

metaphoric (Nazism is ‘sadistic’; Sade’s thought is ‘somewhat similar to that of an

inner- circle Nazi’). A direct comparison of Nazi thought and that of Sade, however,

shows that there is in fact a deeper resemblance. Despite the range of ideologies,

racial myths, pseudo- sciences and so on that were grouped under the aegis of

Nazism, Nazi ideology was primarily Hitler’s ideology. Further, that of his inner

circle (in particular Himmler) is largely continuous with that of Hitler, in particular on

the subject of race. As Goering put it, “[i]n the last analysis, it is the Führer who

decides.”5 (It may be more accurate to speak of Hitlerism here, rather than Nazism,

when discussing particular doctrines).

3 One particularly weak treatment of this topic- and the only extant article dealing exclusively with it-

is Colette C. Peter “Maurrassisme, Sadisme et Nazisme,” Esprit 411 (1972):184-192. The author goes

no further than noting that Sade and Nazism embody ‘violence.’ There is no discussion of the specific

content of either Sade’s works or those of the Nazis. 4 For discussion see Kershaw Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis p.492; Wistrich Hitler and the Holocaust

p.2.also Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Hitler’s Willing Executioners (London: Abacus, 1996) p.296. 5 Gerald Fleming Hitler und die Endlösung (Munich, 1982) p.64. Quoted in Wistrich Hitler and the

Holocaust p.77; see also p. 228. By all accounts, Nazi ideology was Hitler’s ideology. Hitler was

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Hitler’s thought is clearly expressed in Mein Kampf (1924) and in his recorded

private conversations, in particular those recorded in the Table Talk (1941-1944;

hereafter MK and TT). These texts show clearly that Sade had clearly anticipated a

central – possibly the only - guiding ideology of Nazism.6

Many are reluctant to acknowledge that Hitler was a human being at all, much

less one that could think. This approach is understandable at an emotional level, but is

an error of strategic judgement, as well as, in elevating Hitler to supernatural status,

paying him unwarranted respect. I take to be a less extreme version of the same view

the reluctance among philosophers (though not historians) to accept the suggestion

that Adolf Hitler, or any other prominent Nazis, had what could be called a

philosophical outlook (or in any case an outlook that is related to philosophical

doctrines), or, had they one, that it was historically relevant. Kai Nielsen, for example,

has argued that Hitler’s anti-Christian and anti-Jewish thought is historically

irrelevant. He writes that the association of Nazism with anti-religious intellectual

currents in Germany “attributes far too much causal power to the beliefs of a few

intellectuals.” 7 Similarly, Richard Rorty states that “[t]he rulers of Nazi

Germany...were greedy selfish thugs, not people guided by a mistaken philosophical

outlook.”8

Nielsen’s comment presupposes that ideas are the sole domain of ‘intellectuals’;

that the rulers themselves were ideologues, (what is more, repeating popular

ideologies), is not considered. Rorty’s comment assumes a dichotomy between people

who are ‘greedy selfish thugs,’ on the one hand, and people capable of sustaining a

dismissive of Nazi intellectuals, in particular the ‘official’ Nazi philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg

(Hitler’s Table Talk p.422). 6 Adolf Hitler Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-1944 His Private Conversations introduced by Hugh Trevor-

Roper, trans. Norman Cameron, R. H. Stevens (London: Phoenix Press, 2000).

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Pimlico, 1995). 7 Kai Nielsen Ethics without God (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989) p.13. 8 Richard Rorty and Chronis Polychroniou, “On Philosophy and Politics, The Cold War, and the Left,”

New Politics 8, no. 3 (summer 2001): 128-39, p.130. I thank Sterling Lynch for pointing this article out

to me. For a discussion of the interplay of Nazi ideology and dominant intellectual currents in Germany

(in particular the rejection of Christianity and humanistic values, and the celebration of power as its

own justification), see Hans Kohn The Mind of Germany: the Education of a Nation (New York:

Harper &Row, 1960).

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philosophical or ideological viewpoint. That an individual can be both a selfish thug

and a holder of a philosophical viewpoint was, to his credit, no paradox for Sade.

I feel that this approach– of excluding Hitler from philosophical discourse, the

history of ideas, and perhaps also philosophical education– is mistaken on a number

of levels. Firstly, to adopt this position from the outset is to render philosophy too

pure to get its hands dirty with bad ideas, hence, useless as a diagnostic or strategic

tool. Bad ideas should be granted negative respect, as Russell put it, as one respects

lightning and tigers. Nazism may have been grounded or (mis)guided by intellectual

rubbish, but it was nevertheless grounded on intellectual rubbish.

Secondly, the reluctance to give the ideologies of tyrants serious critical

attention, on the grounds that it is ‘obviously rubbish,’ is to invite serious distortions

in our understanding of the history of ideas. As I hope the Sade project goes some

way in illustrating, the History of Western Thought is considerably messier than

suggested by the folksy philosopher’s hero narrative of ‘the great thinkers.’

Hitler did, in fact, have a specific ideology concerning the Jews, Christians and

Communists, what they represented, and what should be done about them– views that

cannot be reduced either to traditional anti-Semitism, or to the enduring folklore of

the ‘Zionist conspiracy.’9 Further, his ideology has links with a philosophical

(broadly construed) discourse that stretches back to Sade’s era. I suggest that even if 9 This is not to deny that there is a link between conspiracy theories and traditional anti-Semitism and

Nazism. There is a direct link between The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion – the anti-Semitic

tract that appeared in Russia in the 1910’s and was later circulated as ‘evidence’ of a ‘global Zionist

conspiracy,’ and the political cynicism of Sade’s age. The Protocols was compiled by Sergei Nilus in

1911 for the Czar’s secret police, and was purported to be the mission statement of a secret cabal of

Jews who wish to take over the world through promoting, among other things, atheism, communism

and (!) Nietzsche. It is partly made up of text taken directly from Maurice Joly’s 1864 satire on the

reign of Napoleon III, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell

Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu). Both texts describe the type of conspiracy theory- a shadowy

Masonic or Jesuit conspiracy- that originated during the French Revolution. Most intriguingly, the

Protocols express exactly the type of absolute moral and political cynicism that Hitler embodied. The

Dialogue aux Enfers is available as a zipped file from Project Gutenberg at

www.gutenberg.org/etext/13187 (accessed November 2004). See also The Protocols of the Elders of

Zion trans. Victor E. Marsden (Florrisant, MO: Liberty Bell Publications, 2004); Benjamin W. Segel,

Richard S. Levy A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

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Hitler had simply adopted a philosophical Weltanschauung to justify the

manifestation of pathological hate (which is, of course, entirely possible), it is of both

philosophical and cultural importance that such an outlook could have been associated

with such destruction.

A.2 Weltanschauungskrieg.

Pope and Rabbi shall be no more

We want to be Pagans once again

No more creeping to churches

We are the joyous Hitler Youth

We do not need any Christian virtues

Our leader, Adolf Hitler, is our saviour.

Hitler Youth song10

Here I will outline Hitler’s thought concerning Christianity, Judaism (or, rather, the

Jews), and Communism.11 The purpose of this discussion is to point out the

ideological commonalities between Hitler’s views on Judaeo-Christian morality and

that of Sade, as outlined in Chapter VI. Recall the dominant ideas in Sade’s thought

concerning Christianity; a). that its morality originated with the Jews, in particular

Jesus, dismissed as “one of Titus’ slaves,” and their historical experience as a

‘slavish’ people; b). that Christian morality originated as a psychological subterfuge

to defeat the Romans; c). that the acceptance of this doctrine, and the belief in the

sanctity of human life, led to the fall of Rome; and finally, d). that Christianity has

caused humanity to forget the ‘truth’ that there is an essential, morally relevant

distinction between ‘natural masters’ and ‘natural slaves.’ Hitler’s thought follows

this pattern.

As noted above, neither the ‘task’ of murdering the Jews nor the war on Russia

made any sense in terms of conventional war. They did make sense in terms of

10 Quoted in Carl Friedrich, “Anti-Semitism: Challenge to Christian Culture” in Jews in a Gentile

World: the Problem of Anti-Semitism, ed. Isacque Graeber and Stuart Henderson Britt (New York:

Macmillan, 1942) p.8; Quoted in Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin Why the Jews? (New York:

Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster, 1983) p.160. 11 In neither the Table Talk nor Mein Kampf does Hitler discuss the specifics of Jewish religious belief.

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Hitler’s ideologically driven goal. Hitler considered Communism and ‘World Jewry’

as essentially the same entity (Communism being the political instrument of the

Jews), and took its destruction as his primary task. Hitler referred to these campaigns

collectively as the Weltanschauungskrieg, a ‘War of Worldviews.’12 Underpinning

this campaign, ultimately, is Hitler’s doctrine of the Natural Aristocracy of Nature. In

short: the doctrinal commonality that Hitler shares with Sade is the very factor that

characterizes Nazi ideology.

Hitler’s doctrine assumes the following: a). the principle of equality is false, as

b). there are large, and ethically relevant, differences amongst people. In particular, c).

there is a natural distinction between ‘natural’ masters and ‘natural’ slaves. The Jews

were accused of pioneering and promoting this doctrine in three ways- in instigating

Christianity, in promoting Marxism, and in advocating the doctrine of equality of

racial groups. To train “Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs” in intellectual professions,

insists Hitler, is exactly like “training a poodle”: “it is criminal lunacy to keep on

drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him”

(MK:391). Hitler adds: “the Jew shrewdly draws form [educating people of African

heritage] a new proof for the soundness of his theory about the equality of men that he

is trying to funnel into the minds of the nations” (MK: 391). The Jewish doctrine of

equality is, Hitler writes, a violation of what he calls the “natural principle in Nature”:

“[t]he Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle in Nature and

replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their

dead weight” (MK: 60). Further, Hitler holds that the Jews introduced Christianity

specifically in order to cause the ruin of stronger races through its unnatural morality.

From the Table Talk:

The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world-in order to ruin

it- re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social

question…It is Jewry that always destroys this [natural] order. It constantly provokes the

weak against the strong, bestiality against intelligence, quantity against quality. It took

12 On 30th March 1941, Hitler informed his military commanders that the war with the Soviet Union

would be a “struggle between two opposing world outlooks” [Kampf zweier Weltanschauungen

gegeneinander]. F. Halder, Kriegstagbuch, 1939-1942 (Stuttgart, 1962-4), vol. 2, pp.336-7; Lucy

Dawidowicz The War Against the Jews, 1933-45 (London/ New York, 1983), p.157. Quoted in

Wistrich Hitler and the Holocaust pp.103-104.

300

fourteen centuries for Christianity to reach the peak of savagery and stupidity. We would

therefore be wrong to sin by excess of confidence and proclaim our definite victory over

Bolshevism...[a] people that is rid of its Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order

(17 February 1942 ;TT:314).

Finally, Hitler holds that the fall of Rome was due to the corrupting influence of

Christian morality. 13 On the 21st of October 1941, as part of a talk comparing

‘Jewish Christianity’ with ‘Jewish Bolshevism,’ Hitler compared the fall of Rome

with latter- day Bolshevism, the product, Hitler, believed, of Jewish influence.14 The

following statement, made several months later, continues in the sa

me vein:

But for the coming of Christianity, who knows how the history of Europe would have

developed? Rome would have conquered all Europe, and the onrush of the Huns would

have been broken on the legions. It was Christianity that brought about the fall of Rome-

not the Germans or the Huns… One day ceremonies of thanksgiving will be sung to

Fascism and National Socialism for having preserved Europe from a repetition of the

triumph of the Underworld… (27th January 1942; TT: 253).

Hitler expresses his hope for the future of the Nazi movement in terms virtually

identical to those used by Sade’s Belmor, who says of his planned Christian Genocide

that “it will ensure France’s health and happiness forever” (J:501). Note, in particular,

Hitler’s discussion of genocidal ideological engineering in the name of ‘tolerance.’

Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another

hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn’t, like

whoever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar. We are entering into a

conception of the world that will be a sunny era, an era of tolerance… What is important

above all is that we should prevent a greater lie from replacing the lie that is disappearing.

The world of Judaeo-Bolshevism must collapse (27th February 1942, TT: 343-344).

13The theory is historically questionable. For discussion, see Henry Chadwick “Envoi: On Taking

Leave of Antiquity” in John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, Oswyn Murray, eds, The Oxford History of the

Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) 807-828, p.826. 14 Werner Jochmann, ed. Adolf Hitler: Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944. Die

Aufzeichnungen Hienrich Heims (Hamburg, 1980) p.99; Aufzeichnungen des persönlichen Referenten

Rosenbergs Dr. Koeppen über Hitlers Tischgespräche 1941, Bundesarchiv R6/34a, Fols. 1-82 (Notes

of Dr Werner Koeppen, liaison of Alfred Rosenberg at FHQ, on Hitler’s ‚table talk’, 1941) pp.60-61.

Cited in Kershaw Hitler 1936-1945 p.488.

301

Hitler’s ideology, as shown in these passages, is similar to that outlined in Sade, down

to the same appeal to the ‘natural order’ (and is analogous to the ‘Bataille doctrine).’

The one doctrinal difference is Hitler’s appeal to ‘providence’ or the Will of God,

although, of course, little seems to be left of any recognizably Judaeo- Christian

principle in Hitler’s monotheism.15 Hitler even uses the same racist clichés as does

Sade (referring, for example, to Africans as ‘Hottentots,’ or comparing them to

monkeys; J: 323). Another commonality between the two doctrines is the attitude

towards the sanctity of human life. Robert S. Wistrich writes that “Hitler consistently

regarded the ethics of Biblical monotheism as the curse of mankind, especially the

fifth commandment-‘Thou shalt not kill.’” 16 Again like Sade’s characters, Hitler held

conscience to be a creation of the pernicious influence of the Jews. Writes Jonathan

Glover, “[t]he effort to break free from the constraints of conscience was one of the

central aspects of the Nazi’s own revaluation of values. They believed in crossing the

moral or emotional barriers against cruelty and atrocity.” 17 Nazism emphasized the

‘ethics’ of hardness towards others, characterized humanitarian ethics as a ‘poison’,

piety a ‘disease’, and considered compassion as weakness, cowardice and self-

deception. 18

The details concerning the ‘Final Solution’ concerning the Jews hardly requires

repetition. What is not so well known is that Hitler’s attitude, and that of other

prominent Nazis (in particular Goebbels) towards Christianity was of a piece with this

same ‘struggle.’ Christianity, for Hitler, was a continuation of the very worst aspects

of the intolerance of the Jews (Recall Sade: “[a] careful examination of [Christianity]

will reveal...that the impieties with which it is filled come...from the Jew’s

15 This was a part of publicly stated Nazi doctrine; the belt buckles issued to German soldiers bore the

legend Gott mit Uns (God is with us). 16Wistrich Hitler and the Holocaust p.245. Ian Kershaw also states that the “ideological objective of

eradicating ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was central, not peripheral, to what had been deliberately designed as

a ‘war of annihilation’”… Kershaw, Hitler 1936-1945 p.461; also pp.488-489. 17 Glover Humanity p.356. 18 For discussion see Chapter 37, “The Nazi Moral Identity”, in Glover, Humanity pp.355-359; Robert

S. Wistrich “The Cross and the Swastika” in Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, eds, Nietzsche,

Godfather of Fascism? (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002) p.163; Kershaw

Hitler 1939-1945 pp.39-41.

302

ferocity...PB: 299). In Mein Kampf, Hitler has this to say of the intolerance of

Christianity:

Christianity could not content itself with building up its own altar; it was absolutely

forced to undertake the destruction of the heathen altars...intolerance is, in fact, its

absolute presupposition... such phenomena in world history arise for the most part from

specifically Jewish modes of thought, in fact, ...this type of intolerance and fanaticism

positively embodies the Jewish nature...with the appearance of Christianity the first

spiritual terror entered into the far freer ancient world...

Hitler concludes this line of reasoning with what appear to be a call for the end of

Christianity- through “coercion and terror.”

...since [the emergence of Christianity] the world has been afflicted and dominated by this

coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion, and terror only by terror. Only

then can a new state of affairs be constructively created (MK: 413).

Writes Ian Kershaw, “[t]he assault on the practices and institutions of the Christian

churches was deeply embedded in the psyche of National Socialism.” 19 Besides the

‘philosophical’ views concerning the nature of Christianity, Hitler viewed it as an

ideological rival, speaking ominously both of a ‘showdown’ with the Church once the

war was over, and the necessity of purging it lest its influence lead to revolt against

the regime. 20 One well known case of the Nazi regime’s executing Christians for

their beliefs was the guillotining, in 1943, of every member of the White Rose group

(their only action being the circulation of pamphlets that noted the incompatibility of

Nazi policy and Christian morality). 21 Official action against Christianity was

otherwise minimal, owing to the political risks entailed. In 1937, Hitler informed his

19 Kershaw Hitler Vol. II p.40. 20 Elke Fröhliche, editor Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Teil II, Diktate 1941-1945, Munich

etc., 1993-1998 II/4, 177 (26 April 1942). Quoted in Kershaw Hitler Vol. II p. 509. See also Vol. II

pp.235, 516; Hitler’s Table Talk pp. 409,607, 626. Karl Dietrich Bracher The German Dictatorship:

The Origins, Structure and Consequences of National Socialism trans. Jean Steinberg (London:

Penguin, 1970) pp.475, 478, 483. 21 Kershaw Hitler 1936-1945 pp.552, 663. I thank Selma Kradraoui for bringing the White Rose to my

attention.

303

inner circle that a ‘Church Struggle’ would have to wait until the end of hostilities,

although individual followers tended to take matters into their own hands.22 Notably,

elite units, the SS and the Nazi party pressured their members to leave both their

religious denominations and congregations.23

A.3 Other Commonalities

Space and the concern for relevance do not allow for a more thorough comparison of

the Sadeian and Hitlerian texts, but there are other resonances. In both the work of

Sade and in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Table Talk, there is the same contempt for

the ‘granite stupidity’ of humanity, in particular the populace’s extreme susceptibility

to propaganda; the tendency to describe the population as an undifferentiated mass;

the same description of the ‘inferior types’ as vermin, or the vector of a disease; the

view that continual warfare is necessary for a state to purge ‘weak blood,’ the view

that ‘bourgeois marriage’ is a “sin against nature ” and that the cult of virginity is

absurd; that all priests are actually hypocritical atheists; that the Saints were all

insane; that a strong leader should cut off all feeling for the members of one’s family

(MK:341,165; TT:353, 384, 420, 513, 651, 661). Another commonality is the

claustrophobic sense of chaos and despair in Mein Kampf - Hitler’s conspiracy

theories concerning the shadowy machinations of the Jews, the fear that culture itself

was on the verge of disappearing into a nihilistic abyss, the spectre of a “slowly

rotting world,” and the view that one simply had to commit evil- on a massive scale-

merely in order to survive (MK: 235).

A.4 Historical associations

Hitler’s “intellectual” anti-Judaism is historically related to a well established, if now

largely forgotten, discourse which stretches back to the Enlightenment period. This

discourse, introduced in Chapter VI, holds that the Jews were to blame for ‘saddling’

Europe with Christianity and its ‘alien’ morality.24 Sade’s work, in carrying

22 Kershaw Hitler 1936-1945 p.39. 23 Alexander Lasik “Historical-Sociological Profile of the Auschwitz SS” in Israel Gutman, Micheal

Berenbaum Anatomy: 271-287, p.279. 24 I call Hitler’s anti-Semitic writings “intellectual” anti-Semitism, as they have a closer resemblance to

‘philosophical’ writings on the Jews than to traditional Christian anti-Semitism (‘traditional’ anti-

Semitism being hostility towards Jews based on traditional, pre-‘Enlightenment’ notions of the Jews as

304

d’Holbach’s doctrine one step forward- in proposing the genocide of Catholicism-

stands as the most extreme expression of this doctrine. Similarly, the originator of the

term “anti-Semitism,” Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904), denounced Christianity as a

“disease of the human consciousness,” which he took to be a manifestation of

Judaism.25 Eugen Dühring (1833- 1921), a political economist and philosopher,

argued that Christianity was itself “Semitic,” and, again in terms similar to those of

d’Holbach and Sade, held that all monotheistic religions preach hatred of life.26

Similar thoughts gained ground in England. In 1920, Winston S. Churchill, in a

newspaper article entitled “Zion versus Bolshevism,” wrote that the Jews were

conspiring to “overthrow civilization” with an “impossible equality”- essentially the

same doctrine promulgated by Hitler himself. 27

Despite all of these later thinkers on the ‘Jewish Question,’ however, Robert S.

Wistrich notes that many of Hitler’s comments on the Jews and Christians hark back

to the thinkers of Sade’s era. Writes Wistrich: “...Hitler’s diatribes against the

barbarism, credulity, ignorance and “poverty of spirit” encouraged by the Christian

Churches also contain crude echoes of eighteenth-century rationalists like Gibbon and

being usurious, vampiristic, ‘Christ-killers,’ and so on). Hitler, of course, was happy to encourage such

traditional expressions of anti-Semitism, but does not appear to have been a traditional anti-Semite,

especially given his negativity towards Christianity.

Other “intellectual” streams of anti-Semitism hold that the Jews are too superstitious to become

‘Enlightened’ (Fichte, Kant), or too ‘materialistic’ (Houston Stewart Chamberlain, T. S. Eliot). Hitler’s

Mein Kampf and Table Talk do not adhere to either of these views, although in Mein Kampf he repeats

the old ‘Enlightenment’ canard that the Jews had bequeathed to the Christian church its intolerance and

fanaticism. Although Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century is widely regarded as

a central source of Nazi anti-Semitic theory, Chamberlain hardly refers to Judaeo-Christian morality,

much less criticize it. His attack on Judaism largely repeats the traditional Christian accusations that,

again, the Jews are ‘materialistic,’ and that they have no idea of ‘divine grace’ and redemption by faith,

and argues that Jesus was not a Jew. See Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the

Nineteenth Century (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1910). 25 Quoted in Uriel Tal, “Anti-Christian Anti-Semitism,” In The Catastrophe of European Jewry:

Antecedents, History, Reflections: Selected Papers ed. Yisrael Gutman and Livia Rothkirchen (New

York: Ktav Pub. House, 1976) p.94. Cited in Prager and Telushkin p.160. 26 Tal p. 95; cited in Prager and Telushkin p.160. 27 Winston S. Churchill, “Zion versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,”

Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8th 1920 p. 1.

305

Voltaire.” 28 Hitler’s admiration for Frederick the Great, King of Germany (1712-

1786) also suggests an admiration for, if not actual influence, of 18th century thought.

Fredrick was close to, and frequently assisted, the French philosophes, in particular

Voltaire, d’Alembert, and La Mettrie, and professed atheism to those close to him.

Hitler made a point of comparing himself with Frederick II specifically because

Frederick was both a great leader and a great theoretician.29 In particular, Hitler cited

the correspondence between Frederick and Voltaire as a favourite text, and admired

Fredericks’s policy concerning race policy and the control of Jewish internal

migration (TT: 84, 476).

28 Wistrich “Between the Cross and the Swastika” p.163. 29 Kershaw Hitler I p.277.

306

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