by SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
“Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which was never seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”
They chose to kill him, first by slow degrees in the boredom of the dungeon and then by calumny and oblivion. This latter death he had himself desired. “When the grave has been filled in, it will be sown with acorns so that eventually all trace of my tomb may disappear from the surface of the earth, just as I like to think that my memory will be effaced from the minds of men....” This was the only one of his last wishes to be respected, though most carefully so. The memory of Sade has been disfigured by preposterous legends; 1 his very name has buckled under the weight of such words as “sadism” and “sadistic.” His private journals have been lost, his manuscripts burned—the ten volumes of Les Journées de Florbelle, at the instigation of his own son-his books banned. Though in the latter part of the nineteenth century Swinburne and a few other curious spirits became interested in his case, it was not until Apollinaire that he assumed his place in French literature. However, he is still a long way from having won it officially. One may glance through heavy, detailed works on “The Ideas of the Eighteenth Century,” or even on “The Sensibility of the Eighteenth Century,” without once coming upon his name. It is understandable that as a reaction against this scandalous silence Sade's enthusiasts have hailed him as a prophetic genius; they claim that his work heralds Nietzsche, Stirner, Freud, and surrealism. But this cult, founded, like all cults, on a misconception, by deifying the “divine marquis” only betrays him. The critics who make of Sade neither villain nor idol, but a man and a writer can be counted upon the fingers of one hand. Thanks to them, Sade has come back at last to earth, among us.
1
The aging Sade ordering baskets of roses to be brought to him, smelling them voluptuously and soiling them afterwards in the mud of the gutters with a sardonic laugh. Present-day journalists have taught us how this kind of anecdote is manufactured.
But just what is his place? Why does he merit our interest? Even his admirers will readily admit that his work is, for the most part, unreadable; philosophically, it escapes banality only to founder in incoherence. As to his vices, they are not startlingly original; Sade invented nothing in this domain, and one finds in psychiatric treatises a profusion of cases at least as interesting as his. The fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention: it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself. Sade's aberrations begin to acquire value when, instead of enduring them as his fixed nature, he elaborates an immense system in order to justify them. Inversely, his books take hold of us as soon as we become aware that for all their repetitiousness, their platitudes and clumsiness, he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless, its win to remain incommunicable. Sade tried to make of his psychophysical destiny an ethical choice; and of this act, in which he assumed his separateness, he attempted to make an example and an appeal. It is thus that his adventure assumes a wide human significance. Can we, without renouncing our individuality, satisfy our aspirations to universality? Or is it only by the sacrifice of our individual differences that we can integrate ourselves into the community? This problem concerns us all. In Sade the differences are carried to the point of outrageousness, and the immensity of his literary effort shows how passionately he wished to be accepted by the human community. Thus, we find in his work the most extreme form of the conflict from which no individual can escape without self-deception. It is the paradox and, in a sense, the triumph of Sade that his persistent singularity helps us to define the human drama in its general aspect.
In order to understand Sade's development, in order to grasp the share of his freedom in this story, in order to assess his success and his failure, it would be useful to have precise knowledge of the facts of his situation. Unfortunately, despite the zeal of his biographers, Sade's life and personality remain obscure on many points. We have no authentic portrait of him, and the contemporary descriptions which have come down to us are quite poor. The testimony at the Marseille trial shows him at thirty-two, “a handsome figure of a man, full faced,” of medium height, dressed in a gray dress coat and deep orange silk breeches, a feather in his hat, a sword at his side, a cane in his hand. Here he is at fifty-three, according to a residence certificate dated May 7, 1793: “Height: five feet two inches, hair: almost white, round face, receding hairline, blue eyes, medium nose, round chin.” The description of March23, I794 is a bit different; “Height: five feet two inches, medium nose, small mouth, round chin, grayish blond hair, high receding hairline, light blue eyes.” He seems to have lost his “handsome figure,” since he writes a few years later, in the Bastille, “I've taken on, for lack of exercise, such an enormous amount of fat that I can hardly move about.” it is this corpulence which first struck Charles Nodier when he met Sade in 1807 at Sainte-Pélagie. “An immense obesity which hindered his movements so as to prevent the exercise of those remains of grace and elegance which still lingered in his general comportment. There remained, nevertheless, in his weary eyes an indefinable flash and brilliance which took fire from time to time, like a dying spark on a dead coal.” These testimonies, the only ones we possess, hardly enable us to visualize a particular face. It has been said 2 that Nodier's description recalls the aging Oscar Wilde; it suggests Montesquiou and Maurice Sachs as well, and it tempts us to imagine a bit of Charlus in Sade, but the data is very weak.
Even more regrettable is the fact that we have so little information about his childhood. If we take the account of Valcour for an autobiographical sketch, Sade came to know resentment and violence at an early age. Brought up with Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, his contemporary, he seems to have defended himself against the selfish arrogance of the young prince with such displays of anger and brutality that he had to be taken away from court. Probably his stay in the gloomy chateau of Saumane and in the decaying abbey of Ebreuil left its mark upon his imagination, but we know nothing significant about his brief years of study, his entry into the army, or his life as an amiable man of fashion and debauchee. One might try to deduce his life from his work; this has been done by Klossowski, who sees in Sade's implacable hatred of his mother the key to his life and work. But he derives this hypothesis from the mother's role in Sade's writings. That is, he restricts himself to a description of Sade's imaginary world from a certain angle. He does not reveal its roots in the real world. In fact, we suspect a priori, and in accordance with certain general notions, the importance of Sade's relationship with his father and mother; the particular details are not available to us. When we meet Sade he is already mature, and we do not know how he has become what he is. Ignorance forbids us to account for his tendencies and spontaneous behavior. His emotional nature and the peculiar character of his sexuality are for us data which we can merely note. Because of this unfortunate gap, the truth about Sade will always remain closed to us; any explanation would leave a residue which only the child. hood history of Sade might have clarified.
2
Jean Desbordes, Le Vrai Visage du Marquis de Sade ( Paris. 1939).
Nevertheless, the limits imposed on our understanding ought not to discourage us, for Sade, as we have said, did not restrict himself to a passive submission to the consequences of his early choices. His chief interest for us lies not in his aberrations, but in the manner in which he assumed responsibility for them. He made of his sexuality an ethic; he expressed this ethic in works of literature. It is by this deliberate act that Sade attains a real originality. The reason for his tastes is obscure, but we can understand how he erected these tastes into principles.
Superficially, Sade, at twenty-three, was like all other young aristocrats of his time; he was cultured, liked the theater and the arts, and was fond of reading. He was dissipated, kept a mistress—la Beauvoisin—and frequented the brothels. He married, without enthusiasm and in conformance to parental wishes, a young girl of the petty aristocracy, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, who was, however, rich. That was the beginning of the disaster that was to resound—and recur—throughout his life. Married in May, Sade was arrested in October for excesses committed in a house which he had been frequenting since June. The reasons for arrest were grave enough for Sade to send letters, which went astray, to the governor of the prison, begging him to keep them secret, lest he be hopelessly ruined. This episode suggests that Sade's eroticism had already assumed a disquieting character. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that a year later Inspector Marais warned the procuresses to stop giving their girls to the Marquis. But the interest of all this lies not in its value as information, but in the revelation which it constituted for Sade himself. On the verge of his adult life he made the brutal discovery that there was no conciliation possible between his social existence and his private pleasures.
There was nothing of the revolutionary nor even of the rebel about young Sade. He was quite prepared to accept society as it was. At the age of twenty-three he was obedient enough to his father 3 to accept a wife whom he disliked, and he envisaged no other life than the one to which his heredity destined him. He was to become a husband, father, marquis, captain, lord of the manor, and lieutenant general. He had not the slightest wish to renounce the privileges assured by his rank and his wife's fortune. Nevertheless, these things could not satisfy him. He was offered activities, responsibilities, and honors; nothing, no simple venture interested, amused, or excited him. He wished to be not only a public figure, whose acts are ordained by convention and routine, but a live human being as well. There was only one place where he could assert himself as such, and that was not the bed in which he was received only too submissively by a prudish wife, but in the brothel where he bought the right to unleash his fantasies.
And there was one dream common to most young aristocrats of the time. Scions of a declining class which had once possessed concrete power, but which no longer retained any real hold on the world, they tried to revive symbolically, in the privacy of the bedchamber the status for which they were nostalgic, that of the lone and sovereign feudal despot. The orgies of the Duke of Carolais, among others, were bloody and famous. Sade, too, thirsted for this illusion of power. “What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything about you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you... every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.” The intoxication of tyranny leads directly to cruelty, for the libertine, in hurting the object that serves him, “tastes all the pleasures which a vigorous individual feels in making full use of his strength; he dominates, he is a tyrant.”
3
Klossowski is surprised by the fact that Sade bore his father no ill will. But Sade did not instinctively detest authority. He admits the right of the individual to exploit and to abuse his privileges. At first, Sade, who was heir to the family fortune, fought society only on the individual, emotional level, through women: his wife and mother-in-law.
Actually, whipping a few girls (for a consideration agreed upon in advance) is rather a petty feat; that Sade sets so much store on it is enough to cast suspicion upon him. We are struck by the fact that beyond the walls of his “little house” it did not occur to him to “Make full use of his strength.” There is no hint of ambition in him, no spirit of enterprise, no will to power, and I am quite prepared to believe that he was a coward. He does, to be sure, systematically endow his heroes with traits which society regards as flaws, but he paints Blangis with a satisfaction that justifies the assumption that this is a projection of himself, and the following words have the direct ring of a confession: “A determined child might have frightened this colossus... he grew timid and cowardly, and the idea of an equally matched fight, however safe, would have sent him fleeing to the ends of the earth.” The fact that Sade was at times capable of extravagant boldness, both out of rashness and generosity, does not invalidate the hypothesis that he was afraid of people and, in a more general way, afraid of the reality of the world.
If he talked so much about his strength of soul, it was not because he really possessed it, but because he longed for it. When faced with adversity, he would whine and get upset and become completely distraught. The fear of want which haunted him constantly was a symptom of a much more generalized anxiety. He mistrusted everything and everybody because he felt himself maladjusted. He was maladjusted. His behavior was disorderly. He accumulated debts; he would fly into a rage for no reason at all, would run away, or would yield at the wrong moment. He fell into every possible trap. He was uninterested in this boring and yet threatening world which had nothing valid to offer him and from which he hardly knew what to ask. He was to seek his truth elsewhere. When he writes that the passion of jealousy “subordinates" and “at the same time unites” all other passions, he gives us an exact description of his own experience. He subordinated his existence to his eroticism because eroticism appeared to him to be the only possible fulfillment of his existence. If he devoted himself to it with such energy, shamelessness, and persistence, he did so because he attached greater importance to the stories he wove around the act of pleasure than to the contingent happenings; he chose the imaginary.
At first Sade probably thought himself safe in the fool's paradise which seemed separated from the world of responsibility by an impenetrable wall. And perhaps, had no scandal broken out, he would have been but a common debauchee, known in special places for rather special tastes. Many libertines of the period indulged with impunity in orgies even worse. But scandal was probably inevitable in Sade's case. There are certain “Sexual perverts” to whom the myth of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is perfectly applicable. They hope, at first, to be able to gratify their “vices” without compromising their public characters. If they are imaginative enough to visualize themselves, little by little, in a dizziness of pride and shame, they give themselves away—like Charlus, despite his ruses, and even because of them. To what extent was Sade being provocative in his imprudence? There is no way of knowing. He probably wished to emphasize the radical separation between his family life and his private pleasures, and probably, too, the only way he could find satisfaction in this clandestine triumph lay in pushing it to the point where it burst forth into the open. His surprise is that of the child who keeps striking at a vase until it finally breaks. He was playing with fire and still thought himself master, but society was lying in wait. Society wants undisputed possession. It claims each individual unreservedly. It quickly seized upon Sade's secret and classified it as crime.
Sade reacted at first with prayer, humility, and shame. He begged to be allowed to see his wife, accusing himself of having grievously offended her. He begged to confess and open his heart to her. This was not mere hypocrisy. A horrible change had taken place overnight; natural, innocent practices, which had been hitherto merely sources of pleasure, had become punishable acts. The young charmer had changed into a black sheep. He had probably been familiar since childhood—perhaps through his relations with his mother—with the bitter pangs of remorse, but the scandal of 1763 revived them dramatically. Sade had a foreboding that he would henceforth and for the rest of his life be a culprit. For he valued his diversions too highly to think, even for a moment, of giving them up. Instead, he rid himself of shame through defiance. It is significant that his first deliberately scandalous act took place immediately after his imprisonment. La Beauvoisin accompanied him to the chateau of La Coste and, taking the name of Madame Sade, danced and played before the Provençal nobility, while the Abbé de Sade was forced to stand dumbly by. Society denied Sade illicit freedom; it wanted to socialize eroticism. Inversely, the Marquis' social life was to take place henceforth on an erotic level. Since one cannot, with any peace of mind, separate good from evil and devote one's self to each in turn, one has to assert evil in the face of good, and even as a function of good.
Sade tells us repeatedly that his ultimate attitude has its roots in resentment. “Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they are sometimes very distant; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.” 4 And Dolmancé 5 attributes his vice to the wickedness of men. “It was their ingratitude which dried up my heart, their treachery which destroyed in me those baleful virtues for which, like you, I may have been born.” The fiendish morality which he later established in theoretical form was first a matter of actual experience.
4
Aline et Valcour.
5
La Philosophie dans le Boudoir.
It was through Renée-Pélagie that Sade came to know all the insipidity and boredom of virtue. He lumped them together in the disgust which only a creature of flesh and blood can arouse. But he learned also from Renée, to his delight, that Good, in concrete, fleshly, individual form, can be vanquished in single combat. His wife was not his enemy, but like all the wifecharacters she inspired, a choice victim, a willing accomplice. The relationship between Blamont and his wife is probably a fairly precise reflection of Sade's with the Marquise. Blamont takes pleasure in caressing his wife at the very moment that he is hatching the blackest plots against her. To inflict enjoyment-Sade understood this 150 years before the psychoanalysts, and his works abound in victims submitted to pleasure before being tortured—can be a tyrannical violence; and the torturer disguised as lover delights to see the credulous lover, swooning with voluptuousness and gratitude, mistake cruelty for tenderness. The joining of such subtle pleasures with the performance of social obligation is doubtless what led Sade to have three children by his wife.
And he had the further satisfaction of seeing virtue become the ally of vice, and its handmaiden. Madame de Sade concealed her husband's delinquencies for years; she bravely engineered his escape from Miolans, fostered the intrigue between her sister and the Marquis, and later, lent her support to the orgies at the château of La Coste. She went even so far as to inculpate herself when, in order to discredit the accusations of Nanon, she hid some silverware in her bags. Sade never displayed the least gratitude. In fact, the notion of gratitude is one at which he keeps blasting away most furiously. But he very obviously felt for her the ambiguous friendship of the despot for what is unconditionally his. Thanks to her, he was able not only to reconcile his role of husband, father, and gentleman with his pleasures, but he established the dazzling superiority of vice over goodness, devotion, fidelity, and decency, and flouted society prodigiously by submitting the institution of marriage and all the conjugal virtues to the caprices of his imagination and senses.
If Renée-Pélagie was Sade's most triumphant success, Madame de Montreuil embodies his failure. She represents the abstract and universal justice which inevitably confronts the individual. It was against her that he most eagerly entreated his wife's support. If he could win his case in the eyes of virtue, the law would lose much of its power, for its most formidable arms were neither prison nor the scaffold, but the venom with which it could infect vulnerable hearts. Renee became perturbed under the influence of her mother. The young canoness grew fearful. A hostile society invaded Sade's household and dampened his pleasures, and he himself yielded to its power. Defamed and dishonored, he began to doubt himself. And that was Madame de Montreuil's supreme crime against him. A guilty man is, first of all, a man accused; it was she who made a criminal of Sade. That is why he never left off ridiculing her, defaming her, and torturing her throughout his writings; he was killing off his own faults in her. There is a possible basis for Klossowski's theory that Sade hated his own mother; the singular character of his sexuality suggests this. But this hatred would never have been inveterate had not Renée's mother made motherhood hateful to him. Indeed, she played such an important and frightful role that it may well be that she was the sole object of his attack. It is certainly she, in any case, whom he savagely submits to the jeers of her own daughter in the last pages of La Philosophie dans le Boudoir.
If Sade was finally beaten by his mother-in-law and by the law, he was accomplice to this defeat. Whatever the role of chance and of his own imprudence in the scandal of 1763, there is no doubt that he afterwards sought a heightening of his pleasures in danger. We may therefore say that he desired the very persecutions which he suffered with indignation. Choosing Easter Sunday to decoy the beggar, Rose Keller, into his house at Arcueil meant playing with fire. Beaten, terrorized, inadequately guarded, she ran off, raising a scandal for which Sade paid with two short terms in prison.
During the following three years of exile which, except for a few periods of service, he spent on his property in Provence, he seemed sobered. He played the husband and lord of the manor most conscientiously. He had two children by his wife, received the homage of the community of Saumane, attended to his park, and read and produced plays in his theater, including one of his own. But he was ill-rewarded for this edifying behavior. In 1771, he was imprisoned for debt. Once he was released, his virtuous zeal cooled off. He seduced his young sisterin-law, of whom he seemed, for a while, genuinely fond. She was a canoness, a virgin, and his wife's sister, all of which lent a certain zest to the adventure. Nevertheless, he went to seek still other distractions in Marseille, and in 1772 the “affair of the aphrodisiac candies” took on unexpected and terrifying proportions. While in flight to Italy with his sister-in-law, he and Latour, his valet, were sentenced to death in absentia, and both of them were burned in effigy on the town square of Aix. The canoness took refuge in a French convent, where she spent the rest of her life, and he hid away in Savoy. He was caught and locked up in the château of Miolans, but his wife helped him escape. However, he was henceforth a hunted man. Whether roaming through Italy or shut up in his castle, he knew that he would never be allowed a normal life.
Occasionally, he took his lordly role seriously. A troupe of actors was staying on his property to give The Cuckold, Whipped and Happy. Sade, irritated perhaps by the title, ordered that the posters be defaced by the town clerk, as being “disgraceful and a challenge to the freedom of the Church.” He expelled from his property a certain Saint-Denis, against whom he had certain grievances, saying, “I have every right to expel all loafers and vagrants from my property.” But these acts of authority were not enough to amuse him. He tried to realize the dream which was to haunt his books. In the solitude of the château of La Coste, he set up for himself a harem submissive to his whims. With the aid of the Marquise, he gathered together several handsome valets, a secretary who was illiterate but attractive, a luscious cook, a chambermaid, and two young girls provided by bawds. But La Coste was not the inaccessible fortress of Les 120 Journées de Sodome; it was surrounded by society. The maids escaped, the chambermaid left to give birth to a child whose paternity she attributed to Sade, the cook's father came to shoot Sade, and the handsome secretary was sent for by his parents. Only Renée-Pélagie conformed to the character assigned to her by her husband; all the others claimed the right to live their own lives, and Sade was once again made to understand that he could not turn the real world of hard fact into a theater.
This world was not content to thwart his dreams; it repudiated him. Sade fled to Italy, but Madame de Montreuil, who had not forgiven him for having seduced her younger daughter, lay in wait for him. When he got back to France, he ventured into Paris, and she took advantage of the occasion to have him locked up on the 13th of February, 1777, in the château of Vincennes. He was brought to trial and sent back to Aix and took refuge at La Coste, where, under the resigned eye of his wife, he embarked on an idyl with his housekeeper, Mademoiselle Rousset. But by the 7th of November, he was back again at Vincennes, “locked up behind nineteen iron doors, like a wild beast.”
And now begins another story. For eleven years—first at Vincennes and then in the Bastille—a man lay dying in captivity, but a writer was being born. The man was quickly broken. Reduced to impotence, not knowing how long his imprisonment would last, his mind wandered in delirious speculation. With minute calculations, though without any facts to work on, he tried to figure out how long his sentence would last. He recovered possession of his intellectual powers fairly quickly, as can be seen from his correspondence with Madame de Sade and Mademoiselle Rousset. But the flesh surrendered, and he sought compensation for his sexual starvation in the pleasures of the table. His valet, Carteron, tells us that “he smoked like a chimney” and “ate enough for four men” while in prison. Extreme in everything, as he himself declares, he became wolfish. He had his wife send him huge hampers of food, and he grew increasingly fat. In the midst of complaints, accusations, pleas, supplications, he still amused himself a bit by torturing the Marquise; he claimed to be jealous, accused her of plotting against him, and when she came to visit him, found fault with her clothes and ordered her to dress with extreme austerity. But these diversions were few and pallid. From 1782 on, he demanded of literature alone what life would no longer grant him: excitement, challenge, sincerity, and all the delights of the imagination. And even then, he was “extreme”; he wrote as he ate, in a frenzy. After Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond came Les 120 Journées de Sodome, La Novelle Justine, Aline et Valcour. According to the catalogue of 1788, he had by then written 35 acts for the theater, half a dozen tales, almost all of Le Portefeuille d'un homme de lettres, and the list is probably still incomplete.
When Sade was freed, on Good Friday of 1790, he could hope and did hope that a new period lay open before him. His wife asked for a separation. His sons (one was preparing to emigrate and the other was a Knight of Malta) were strangers to him; so was his “good, husky farm wench” of a daughter. Free of his family, he whom the old society had called an outcast was now going to try to adapt himself to the one which had just restored to him his dignity as a citizen. His plays were performed in public; Oxtiern was even a great success; he enrolled in the Sectiondes Piques and was appointed president; he enthusiastically wrote speeches and drew up petitions. But the idyl with the Revolution did not last long. Sade was fifty years old, had a questionable past and an aristocratic disposition, which his hatred of the aristocracy had not subdued, and he was once again at odds with himself. He was a republican and, in theory, even called for complete socialism and the abolition of property, but insisted on keeping his castle and properties. The world to which he tried to adapt himself was again an all too real world whose brutal resistance wounded him. And it was a world governed by those universal laws which he regarded as abstract, false, and unjust. When society justified murder in their name, Sade withdrew in horror.
Anyone who is surprised at Sade's discrediting himself by his humaneness instead of seeking a governor's post in the provinces, a post that would have enabled him to torture and kill to his heart's content, does not really understand Sade. Does anyone suppose that he “liked blood” the way one likes the mountains or the sea? “Shedding blood” was an act whose meaning could, under certain conditions, excite him, but what he demanded, essentially, of cruelty was that it reveal to him particular individuals and his own existence as, on the one hand, consciousness and freedom and, on the other, as flesh. He refused to judge, condemn, and witness anonymous death from afar. He had hated nothing so much in the old society as the claim to judge and punish, to which he himself had fallen victim; he could not excuse the Terror. When murder becomes constitutional, it becomes merely the hateful expression of abstract principles, something without content, inhuman. And this is why Sade as Grand Juror almost always dismissed the charges against the accused. Holding their fate in his hands, he refused to harm the family of Madame de Montreuil in the name of the law. He was even led to resign from his office of president of the Sectiondes Piques. He wrote to Gaufridy, “I considered myself obliged to leave the chair to the vice-president; they wanted me to put a horrible, an inhuman act to a vote. I never would.” In December, 1793, he was imprisoned on charges of “moderantism.” Released 375 days later, he wrote with disgust, “My government imprisonment, with the guillotine before my eyes, did me a hundred times more harm than all the imaginary Bastilles.” It is by such wholesale slaughters that the body politic shows only too obviously that it considers men as a mere collection of objects, whereas Sade demanded a universe peopled with individual beings. The “evil” which he had made his refuge vanished when crime was justified by virtue. The Terror, which was being carried out with a clear conscience, constituted the most radical negation of Sade's demoniacal world.
“The excesses of the Terror,” wrote Saint-Just, “have dulled the taste for crime.” Sade's sexuality was not stilled by age and fatigue alone; the guillotine killed the morbid poetry of eroticism. In order to derive pleasure from the humiliation and exaltation of the flesh, one must ascribe value to the flesh. It has no sense, no worth, once one casually begins to treat man as a thing. Sade was still able to revive his past experience and his old universe in his books, but he no longer believed in them with his blood and nerves. There is nothing physical in his attachment to the woman he calls “The Sensitive Lady.” He derived his only erotic pleasures from the contemplation of the obscene paintings, inspired by Justine, with which he decorated a secret chamber. He still had his memories, but he had lost his drive, and the simple business of living was too much for him. Liberated from the social and familial framework which he nevertheless needed, he dragged on through poverty and illness. He quickly ran through the money realized from the unprofitable sale of La Coste. He took refuge with a farmer, and then in a garret, with a son of “The Sensitive Lady,” while earning forty sous a day working in the theatricals at Versailles.
The decree of June 28, 1799, which forbade the striking of his name from the list of aristocratic emigrés on which it had been placed, made him cry out in despair, “Death and affliction; these are the rewards of my constant attachment to the Republic.” He received, however, a certificate of residence and citizenship; and in December, 1799, he played the part of Fabrice in Oxtiern. But by the beginning of 1800, he was in the hospital of Versailles, “dying of hunger and cold,” and threatened with imprisonment for debt. He was so unhappy in the hostile world of socalled “free” men that one wonders whether he had not chosen to be led back to the solitude and security of prison. We may say, at least, that the imprudence of circulating Justine and the folly of publishing Zoloé, in which he attacks Josephine, Tallien, Madame Tallien, Barras, and Bonaparte, imply that he was not too repelled by the idea of another confinement. Conscious or not, his wish was granted; he was locked up in Sainte-Pélagie on April 5, 1801, and it was there and later at Charenton—where he was followed by Madame Quesnet, who, by pretending to be his daughter, obtained a room near his own—that he lived out the rest of his life.
Of course, Sade protested and struggled as soon as he was shut up, and he continued to do so for years. But at least he was able again to devote himself in peace to the passion which had replaced sensual pleasure, his writing. He wrote on and on. Most of his papers had been lost when he left the Bastille, and he thought that the manuscript of Les 120 Journées de Sodome-a fifteen-yard roll which he had carefully hidden and which was saved without his knowing it—had been destroyed. After La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, written in 1795, he composed a new opus, a modified and completely developed version of Justine, followed by Juliette, of which he disclaimed the authorship and which appeared in 1797. He had Les Crimes de l'Amour publicly printed. At Sainte-Pélagie, he became absorbed in an immense, ten-volume work, Les Journées de Florbelle. The two volumes of La Marquise de Ganges must also be attributed to him, though the work appeared without his name.
Probably because the meaning of his life lay henceforth in his work as a writer, Sade now hoped only for peace in his daily life. He took walks with “The Sensitive Lady” in the garden of the retreat, wrote comedies for the patients, and had them performed. He agreed to compose a divertissement on the occasion of a visit by the Archbishop of Paris. On Easter Sunday, he distributed the holy bread and took up the collection in the parish church. His will proves that he had renounced none of his beliefs, but he was tired of fighting. “He was polite to the point of obsequiousness,” says Nodier, “gracious to the point of unctiousness... and he spoke respectfully of everything the world respects.” According to Ange Pitou, the ideas of old age and of death horrified him. “This man turned pale at the idea of death, and would faint at the sight of his white hair.” He expired in peace, however, carried off by “a pulmonary congestion in the form of asthma” on December 2, 1814.
The salient feature of his tormented life was that the painful experience of living never revealed to him any solidarity between other men and himself. The last scions of a decadent aristocracy had no common purpose to unite them. In the solitude to which his birth condemned him, Sade carried erotic play to such extremes that his peers turned against him. When a new world opened to him, it was too late; he was weighed down with too heavy a past. At odds with himself, suspect to others, this aristocrat, haunted by dreams of despotism, could not sincerely ally himself with the rising bourgeoisie. And though he was roused to indignation by its oppression of the people, the people were nevertheless foreign to him. He belonged to none of the classes whose mutual antagonisms were apparent to him. He had no fellow but himself. Perhaps, had his emotional make-up been different, he might have resisted this fate, but he seems always to have been violently egocentric. His indifference to external events, his obsessive concern with money, the finical care with which he worked out his debauches, as well as the delirious speculations at Vincennes and the schizophrenic character of his dreams, reveal a radically introverted character. Though this passionate self-absorption defined his limits, it also gave his life an exemplary character, so that we examine it today.
Sade made of his eroticism the meaning and expression of his whole existence. Thus, it is no idle curiosity that leads us to define its nature. To say with Maurice Heine that he tried everything and liked everything is to beg the question. The term “algolagnia” hardly helps us to understand Sade. He obviously had very marked sexual idiosyncrasies, but they are not easy to define. His accomplices and victims kept quiet. Two flagrant scandals merely pushed aside, for a moment, the curtain behind which debauch usually hides. His journals and memoirs have been lost, his letters were cautious, and in his books, he invents more than he reveals about himself. “I have imagined everything conceivable in this sort of thing,” he writes, “but I have certainly not done, and certainly never will, all that I've imagined.”
His work has not unreasonably been compared to the Psychopathie Sexualis of Krafft-Ebing, to whom no one would dream of attributing all the perversions he catalogued.
Thus, Sade established systematically, according to the prescriptions of a kind of synthetic art, a repertory of man's sexual possibilities. He certainly never experienced nor even dreamed them all up himself. Not only does he tell tall stories, but most of the time, he tells them badly. His tales resemble the engravings that illustrate the 1797 edition of Justine and Juliette. The characters' anatomy and positions are drawn with a minute realism, but the awkward and monotonous expressionlessness of their faces makes their horrible orgies seem utterly unreal. It is not easy to derive a genuine testimony from all the coldblooded orgies that Sade concocted. Nevertheless, there are some situations in his novels which he treats with special indulgence. He shows special sympathy with some of his heroes, for example, Noirceuil, Blangis, and Gernande, and particularly Dolmancé, to whom he attributes many of his own tastes and ideas. Sometimes, too, in a letter, an incident, or a turn of dialogue, we are struck unexpectedly by a vivid phrase which we feel is not the mere echo of a foreign voice. It is precisely such scenes, heroes, and texts as these that we must examine closely.
In the popular mind, sadism means cruelty. The first thing that strikes us in Sade's work is actually that which tradition associates with his name: beatings, bloodshed, torture, and murder. The Rose Keller incident shows him beating his victim with a cat-o'-nine-tails and a knotted cord and, probably, 6 slashing her with a knife and pouring wax on the wounds. In Marseille, he took from his pockets a parchment “cat” covered with bent nails and asked for switches of heather. In all his behavior toward his wife, he displayed obvious mental cruelty. Moreover, he has expressed himself over and over on the pleasure to be derived from making people suffer. But he hardly enlightens us when he merely repeats the classical doctrine of animal spirits. “It is simply a matter of jangling all our nerves with the most violent possible shock. Now, since there can be no doubt that pain affects us more strongly than pleasure, when this sensation is produced in others, our very being will vibrate more vigorously with the resulting shocks.” Sade does not eliminate the mystery of the conscious pleasure which follows from this violent vibration. Fortunately, he suggests more honest explanations elsewhere.
6
Sade's confessions do not corrobate Rose Keller's testimony on this point.
The fact is that the original intuition which lies at the basis of Sade's entire sexuality, and hence his ethic, is the fundamental identity of coition and cruelty. “Would the paroxysm of pleasure be a kind of madness if the mother of the human race [Nature] had not intended that anger and the sexual act express themselves in the same way? What able-bodied man... does not wish... to bedevil his ecstasy?” Sade's description of the Duke of Blangis in the throes of orgasm is certainly to be interpreted as a transposition in epic terms of Sade's own practices. “Horrible shrieks and dreadful oaths escaped his heaving breast. Flames seemed to dart from his eyes. He frothed at the mouth, he whinnied...” and he even strangled his partner. According to Rose Keller's testimony, Sade himself “began to shriek very loud and fearfully” before cutting the cords which immobilized his victim. The “Vanilla and Manilla” letter proves that he experienced orgasm as if it were an epileptic seizure, something aggressive and murderous, like a fit of rage.
How are we to explain this peculiar violence? Some readers have wondered whether Sade was not, in fact, sexually deficient. Many of his heroes, among them his great favorite, Gernande, are inadequately equipped, and have great difficulty in erection and ejaculation. Sade must certainly have been familiar with such fears, but this semi-impotence seems rather to have been the result of excessive indulgence, as in the case of many of his debauchees, several of whom are very well endowed. Sade makes frequent allusions to his own vigorous temperament. It is, on the contrary, a combination of passionate sexual appetites with a basic emotional “apartness” which seems to me to be the key to his eroticism.
From adolescence to prison, Sade had certainly known the insistent, if not obsessive, pangs of desire. There is, on the other hand, an experience which he seems never to have known: that of emotional intoxication. Never in his stories does sensual pleasure appear as self-forgetfulness, swooning, or abandon. Compare, for example, Rousseau's outpourings with the frenzied blasphemies of a Noirceuil or a Dolmancé, or the flutters of the Mother Superior in Diderot La Religieuse with the brutal pleasures of Sade's tribades. The male aggression of the Sadist hero is never softened by the usual transformation of the body into flesh. He never, for an instant, loses himself in his animal nature; he remains so lucid, so cerebral, that philosophic discourse, far from dampening his ardor, acts as an aphrodisiac. We see how desire and pleasure explode in furious attacks upon this cold, tense body, proof against all enchantment. They do not constitute a living experience within the framework of the subject's psychophysiological unity. Instead, they blast him, like some kind of bodily accident.
As a result of this immoderateness, the sexual act creates the illusion of sovereign pleasure which gives it its incomparable value in Sade's eyes; for all his sadism strove to compensate for the absence of one necessary element which he lacked. The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other. The curse which weighed upon Sade—and which only his childhood could explain—was this “autism” which prevented him from ever forgetting himself or being genuinely aware of the reality of the other person. Had he been cold by nature, no problem would ever have arisen; but his instincts drove him toward outside objects with which he was incapable of uniting, so that he was forced to invent singular methods for taking them by force. Later, when his desires were exhausted, he continued to live in that erotic universe of which, out of sensuality, boredom, defiance, and resentment, he had constructed the only world which counted for him; and the aim of his strategies was to induce erection and orgasm. But even when these were easy for him, Sade needed deviations to give to his sexuality a meaning which lurked in it without ever managing to achieve fulfillment, an escape from consciousness in his flesh, an understanding of the other person as consciousness through the flesh.
Normally, it is as a result of the vertigo of the other made flesh that one is spellbound within his own flesh. If the subject remains confined within the solitude of his consciousness, he escapes this agitation and can rejoin the other only by conscious performance. A cold, cerebral lover watches eagerly the enjoyment of his mistress and needs to affirm his responsibility for it because he has no other way of attaining his own fleshly state. This behavior, which compensates for separateness by deliberate tyranny, may be properly called “sadistic.” Sade knew, as we have seen, that the infliction of pleasure may be an aggressive act, and his tyranny sometimes took on this character, but it did not satisfy him. To begin with, he shrinks from the kind of equality which is created by mutual pleasure. “If the objects who serve us feel ecstasy, they are then much more often concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is consequently impaired. The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.” And he declares, more categorically, “Any enjoyment is weakened when shared.”
And besides, pleasant sensations are too mild; it is when the flesh is torn and bleeding that it is revealed most dramatically as flesh. “No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain; its impressions are unmistakable.” But in order for me to become flesh and blood through the pains I have inflicted, I must recognize my own state in the passivity of the other. Therefore, the person must have freedom and consciousness. The libertine “would really deserve pity if he acted upon an inert, unfeeling object.” That is why the contortions and moans of the victim are necessary to the torturer's happiness, which explains why Verneuil made his wife wear a kind of headgear that amplified her screams. In his revolt, the tortured object asserts himself as my fellow creature, and through his intervention I achieve the synthesis of spirit and flesh which was first denied me.
If the aim is both to escape from one's self and to discover the reality of other existences, there is yet another way open: to have one's flesh mortified by others. Sade is quite aware of this. When he used the “cat” and the switch in Marseille, it was not only to whip others with, but also to be whipped himself. This was probably one of his most common practices, and all his heroes happily submit to flagellation. “No one doubts these days that flagellation is extremely effective in restoring the vigor destroyed by the excesses of pleasure.” There was another way of giving concrete form to his passivity. In Marseille, Sade was sodomized by his valet, Latour, who seems to have been accustomed to render him this sort of service. His heroes imitate him sedulously, and he declared aloud in no uncertain terms that the greatest pleasure is derived from a combination of active and passive sodomy. There is no perversion of which he speaks so often and with so much satisfaction, and even impassioned vehemence.
Two questions immediately arise for those given to labeling individuals. Was Sade a sodomite? Was he basically masochistic? As to sodomy, his physical appearance, the role played by his valets, the presence at La Coste of the handsome, illiterate secretary, the enormous importance which Sade accords to this “fantasy” in his writings, and the passion with which he advocates it, all confirm the fact that it was one of the essential elements of his sexual character. Certainly, women played a great role in his life, as they do in his work. He knew many, had kept La Beauvoisin and other, less important mistresses, had seduced his sister-in-law, had gathered young women and little girls together at the château of La Coste, had flirted with Mademoiselle Rousset, and finished his days at the side of Madame Quesnet, to say nothing of the bonds, imposed by society but reworked in his own fashion, which united him with Madame de Sade. But what were his relations with her? It is significant that in the only two testimonies on his sexual activity, there is no evidence that Sade “knew” his partners in a normal way. In Rose Keller's case, he satisfied himself by whipping her without touching her. He asked the Marseille prostitute to let herself be “known from behind” by his servant or, if she preferred, by himself. When she refused, he contented himself with fondling her while he was being “known” by Latour.
His heroes amuse themselves by deflowering little girls. This bloody and sacrilegious violence tickled Sade's fancy. But even when they are initiating virgins, they often treat them as boys rather than make them bleed. More than one of Sade's characters feels a deep disgust for women's “fronts.” Others are more eclectic in taste, but their preferences are clear. Sade never sang that part of the female body so joyously celebrated in The Arabian Nights. He has only contempt for the poor “unmanly creatures” who possess their wives in conventional fashion. If he had children by Madame de Sade, we have seen under what circumstances; and in view of the strange group orgies at La Coste, what proof is there that it was really he who was responsible for Nanon's pregnancy?
We must not, of course, attribute to Sade the opinions held by the confirmed homosexuals of his novels, but the argument put into the mouth of the bishop in Les 120 Journées de Sodome is close enough to his heart to be considered as a confession. He says, concerning pleasure, “A boy is better than a girl. Consider him from the viewpoint of the evil which is almost always pleasure's real attraction. The crime committed with a creature completely like yourself seems greater than that with one who is not, and thus the pleasure is doubled.” It was easy enough for Sade to write to Madame de Sade that his sole wrong had been “to love women too much”; this was a purely official and hypocritical letter. And it is through a mythical dialectic that he gives them the most triumphant roles in his novels. Their wickedness makes a striking contrast with the traditional gentleness of their sex. When they overcome their natural abjection by committing crime, they demonstrate much more brilliantly than any man that no situation can dampen the ardor of a bold spirit. But if, in imagination, they become first-rate martinets, it is because they are, in reality, born victims.
The contempt and disgust which Sade really felt for these servile, tearful, mystified, and passive creatures runs all through his work. Was it his mother whom he loathed in them? We may also wonder whether Sade did not hate women because he saw in them his double rather than his complement and because there was nothing he could get from them. His great female villains have more warmth and life than his heroes, not only for aesthetic reasons but because they were closer to him. I do not recognize him at all, as some readers claim to, in the bleating Justine, but there is certainly something of him in Juliette, who proudly and contentedly submits to the same treatment as her sister. Sade felt himself to be feminine, and he resented the fact that women were not the males he really desired. He endows Durand, the greatest and most extravagant of them all, with a huge clitoris which enables her to behave sexually like a man.
It is impossible to tell to what extent women were anything but surrogates and toys for Sade. It may be said, however, that his sexual character was essentially anal. This is confirmed by Sade's attachment to money. Trouble involving embezzlement of inheritances played an enormous role in his life. Theft appears in his work as a sexual act, and the mere suggestion of it is enough to cause orgasm. And though we may refuse to accept the Freudian interpretation of greed, there is the indisputable fact, which Sade openly acknowledged, of his coprophilia. In Marseille, he gave a prostitute some sugar almonds, telling her that “they would make her break wind,” and he looked disappointed when nothing happened. We are also struck by the fact that the two fantaisies which he tries to explain most fully are cruelty and coprophagy. To what extent did he practice them? It is a far cry from the practices begun in Marseille to the excremental orgies of Les 120 Journées de Sodome, but the care with which he describes the latter practices, and particularly the preparations, proves that they were not merely cold and schematic inventions, but emotional fantasies.
On the other hand, Sade's extraordinary gluttony in prison cannot be explained by idleness alone. Eating can be a substitute for erotic activity only if there is still some infantile equivalence between gastrointestinal and sexual functions. This certainly persisted in Sade. He sees a close bond between the food orgy and the erotic orgy. “There is no passion more closely involved with lechery than drunkenness and gluttony,” he points out. And this combination reaches a climax in anthropophagous fantasies. To drink blood, to swallow sperm and excrement, and to eat children mean appeasing desire through destruction of its object. Pleasure requires neither exchange, giving, reciprocity, nor gratuitous generosity. Its tyranny is that of avarice, which chooses to destroy what it cannot assimilate.
Sade's coprophilia has still another meaning. “If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure in the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.” Among the most obvious sexual attractions, Sade includes old age, ugliness, and bad odors. His linking of eroticism with vileness is as original as his linking it with cruelty, and can be explained in like manner. Beauty is too simple. We grasp it by an intellectual evaluation which does not free consciousness from its solitude or the body from its indifference, whereas vileness is debasing. The man who has relations with filth, like the man who wounds or is wounded, fulfills himself as flesh. It is in its misery and humiliation that the flesh becomes a gulf in which consciousness is swallowed up and where separate individuals are united. Only by being beaten, penetrated, and befouled could Sade succeed in destroying its obsessive presence.
He was not, however, masochistic in the ordinary sense of the word. He sneers bitterly at men who become slaves to women. “I leave them to the base pleasure of wearing the chains with which Nature has given them the right to burden others. Let such animals vegetate in the baseness of their abjection.” The world of the masochist is a magical one, and that is why he is almost always a fetishist. Objects, such as shoes, furs, and whips, are charged with emanations which have the power to change him into a thing, and that is precisely what he wants, to remove himself by becoming an inert object. Sade's world is essentially rational and practical. The objects, whether material or human, which serve his pleasure are tools which have no mystery, and he clearly sees humiliation as a haughty ruse. Saint-Fond, for example, says, “The humiliation of certain acts of debauchery serves as a pretext for pride.” And Sade elsewhere says of the libertine that “the degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.”
Nevertheless, these two attitudes are intimately related. If the masochist wants to lose himself, he does so in order to be entranced by the object with which he hopes to merge, and this effort leads him back to his subjectivity. In demanding that his partner mistreat him, he tyrannizes over him; his humiliating exhibitions and the tortures he undergoes humiliate and torture the other as well. And, vice versa, by befouling and hurting the other, the torturer befouls and hurts himself. He participates in the passivity which he discloses, and in wanting to apprehend himself as the cause of the torment he inflicts, it is as an instrument and therefore as an object that he perceives himself. We are thus justified in classing behavior of this kind under the name of sadomasochism. However, we must be careful, for despite the generality of the term, the concrete forms of this behavior may be quite varied. Sade was not Sacher-Masoch. What was peculiar in his case was the tension of a will bent on fulfilling the flesh without losing itself in it. In Marseille, he had himself whipped, but every couple of minutes he would dash to the mantelpiece and, with a knife, would inscribe on the chimney flue the number of lashes he had just received. His humiliation would immediately be transformed into swagger. While being sodomized, he would whip a prostitute. It was a favorite fantasy of his to be penetrated and beaten while he himself was penetrating and beating a submissive victim.
I have already said that to regard Sade's peculiarities as simple facts is to misunderstand their meaning and implication. They are always charged with an ethical significance. With the scandal of 1763, Sade's eroticism ceased to be merely an individual attitude: it was also a challenge to society. In a letter to his wife, Sade explains how he has erected his tastes into principles. “I carry these principles and tastes to the point of fanaticism,” he writes, “and the fanaticism is the work of my tyrants and their persecutions.” The supreme intention that quickens all sexual activity is the will to criminality. Whether through cruelty or befoulment, the aim is to attain evil. Sade immediately experienced coitus as cruelty, laceration, and transgression; and out of resentment he obstinately justified its morbidity. Since society united with Nature in regarding his pleasures as criminal, he made crime itself a pleasure. “Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, but rather the idea of evil.” In the pleasure of torturing and mocking such a woman, he writes, “there is the kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.” It was not by chance that he chose Easter as the day to whip Rose Keller, and it was at the moment that he sardonically suggested that he confess her that his sexual excitement reached its climax. No aphrodisiac is so potent as defiance of the Good. “Our desires for great crimes are always more violent than our desires for small ones.” Did Sade do evil in order to feel guilty, or did he escape guilt by assuming it? To reduce him to one or another of these attitudes is to deform him. He never remains at rest in a state either of self-satisfied abjection or of flighty impudence, but keeps oscillating back and forth dramatically between arrogance and a guilty conscience.
Thus, we can perceive the significance of Sade's cruelty and masochism. This man, who combined a violent temperament-though quickly exhausted, it would seem—with an emotional “apartness” almost pathological in character, sought a substitute for anxiety in the infliction of suffering or pain. The meaning of his cruelty is very complex. In the first place, it seems to be the extreme and immediate fulfillment of the instinct of coitus, its total assumption. It asserts the radical separation of the other object from the sovereign subject. It aims at the jealous destruction of what cannot be greedily assimilated. But above all, rather than crowning the orgasm impulsively, it tends to induce it by premeditation. It enabled him to apprehend through the other person the consciousness-flesh unity and to project it into himself. And, lastly, it freely justified the criminal character which nature and society had assigned to eroticism. Moreover, by being sodomized, beaten, and befouled, Sade also gained insight into himself as passive flesh. He slaked his thirst for selfpunishment and accepted the guilt to which he had been doomed. And this enabled him to revert immediately from humility to pride through the medium of defiance. In the completely sadistic scene, the individual gives vent to his nature, fully aware that it is evil and aggressively assuming it as such. He merges vengeance and transgression and transforms the latter into glory.
There is one act which stands as the most extreme conclusion of both cruelty and masochism, for the subject asserts himself in it, in a very special way, as tyrant and criminal; I am speaking of murder. It has often been maintained that murder was the supreme end of sexuality in Sade. To my mind, this view is based on a misunderstanding. Certainly the vigor with which Sade denied in his letters that he had ever been a murderer was a matter of self-defense, but I think that he was sincerely repelled by the idea. He does, of course, overload his stories with monstrous slaughters. But he does so because there is no crime whose abstract significance is so glaringly obvious as murder. It represents the exacerbated demand for unrestrained and fearless freedom. And besides, by indefinitely prolonging the death throes of his victim, the author can perpetuate on paper the exceptional moment in which a lucid mind inhabits a body which is being degraded into matter. He still breathes a living past into the unconscious remains. But what would the tyrant actually do with this inert object, a corpse?
There is, no doubt, something vertiginous in the transition from life to death; and the sadist, fascinated by the conflicts between consciousness and the flesh, readily pictures himself as the agent of so radical a transformation. But though he may occasionally carry out this singular experiment, it cannot possibly afford him the supreme satisfaction. The freedom that one hoped to tyrannize to the point of annihilation has, in being destroyed, slipped away from the world in which tyranny had a hold on it. If Sade's heroes commit endless massacres, it is because none of them gives full satisfaction. They bring no concrete solution to the problems which torment the debauchee, because pleasure is not his sole end. No one would seek sensation so passionately and recklessly, even if it had the violence of an epileptic seizure. The ultimate trauma must, rather, guarantee by its obviousness the success of an undertaking, whose stake exceeds it infinitely. But often, however, it stops it without concluding it, and though it may be prolonged by murder, the murder merely confirms its failure.
Blangis strangles his partners with the very fury of orgasm, and there is despair in the rage wherein desire is extinguished without satisfaction. His premeditated pleasures are less wild and more complex. An episode from Juliette, among others, is significant. Excited by the young woman's conversation, Noirceuil, who “cared little for solitary pleasures,” that is, those in which one indulges with a single partner, immediately calls in his friends. “There are too few of us.... No, leave me.... My passions, concentrated upon this single point, are like the beams of the sun focused by a lens. They immediately burn any object brought into focus.” It is not out of any abstract scruples that he forbids himself such excesses, but rather because after the brutal orgasm he would find himself frustrated again. Our instincts indicate to us ends which are unattainable if we merely act upon our immediate impulses. We must master them, reflect upon them, and use our wits in trying to find ways of satisfying them. The presence of other consciousnesses than our own is what helps us most to get the necessary perspective on them.
Sade's sexuality is not a biological matter. It is a social fact. The orgies in which he indulged were almost always collective affairs. In Marseille, he asked for two prostitutes and was accompanied by his valet. At La Coste, he set up a harem for himself. The libertines in his novels form actual communities. The first advantage was the number of combinations for their debauches, but there were deeper reasons for the socialization of eroticism. In Marseille, Sade called his valet “Monsieur le Marquis” and wanted to see him “know” a prostitute under his name rather than “know” her himself. The enactment of the erotic scene interested him more than the actual experience. The fantasies in Les 120 Journées de Sodome are narrated before being carried out. By means of this duplication the act becomes a spectacle which one observes from a distance at the same time that one is performing it. It thus retains the meaning that would otherwise be obscured by solitary animal excitement. For if the debauchee coincided exactly with his movements and the victim with his emotions, freedom and consciousness would be lost in the rapture of the flesh. The flesh would be merely brute suffering, and the rapture merely convulsive pleasure. Thanks, however, to the assembled witnesses, a presence is maintained about them which helps the subject himself remain present. It is through these performances that he hopes to reach out to himself; and in order to see himself, he must be seen. Sade, while tyrannizing, was an object for those who watched him.
Vice versa, by witnessing on the flesh to which he had done violence the violence which he himself had borne, he repossessed himself as subject within his own passivity. The merging of the for-oneself and the for-the-other is thus achieved. Accomplices are particularly required in order to give sexuality a demoniacal dimension. Thanks to them, the act, whether committed or suffered, takes on definite form instead of being diluted into contingent moments. By becoming real, any crime proves to be possible and ordinary. One gets to be so intimately familiar with it that one has difficulty in regarding it as blameworthy. In order to amaze or frighten oneself, one must observe oneself from a distance, through foreign eyes.
However precious this recourse to others may be, it is not yet enough to remove the contradictions implied in the sadistic effort. If one fails, in the course of an actual experience, to grasp the ambiguous unity of existence, one will never succeed in reconstructing it intellectually. A spectacle, by definition, can never coincide with either the inwardness of consciousness or the opacity of the flesh. Still less can it reconcile them. Once they have been dissociated, these two moments of the human reality are in opposition to each other; and as soon as we pursue one of them, the other disappears. If the subject inflicts excessively violent pain upon himself, his mind becomes unhinged: he abdicates; he loses his sovereignty. Excessive vileness entails disgust, which interferes with pleasure. In practice, it is difficult to indulge in cruelty, except within very modest limits; and in theory, it implies a contradiction which is expressed in the following two passages: “The most divine charms are as nothing when submission and obedience do not come forth to offer them,” and “One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.” But where is one to find free slaves? One has to be satisfied with compromises. With paid and abjectly consenting prostitutes, Sade went somewhat beyond the limits that had been agreed upon. He allowed himself some violence against a wife who maintained a certain human dignity in her docility.
But the ideal erotic act was never to be realized. This is the deeper meaning of the words Sade puts into the mouth of Jerome: “What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.” It was not merely that really heinous crimes were forbidden in practice, but that even those which one could summon up in the midst of the wildest ravings would disappoint their author: “To attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze—these would be crimes indeed!” But if this dream seemed satisfying, it was because the criminal projected into it his own destruction along with that of the universe. Had he survived, he would have been frustrated once again. Sadistic crime can never be adequate to its animating purpose. The victim is never more than a symbol; the subject possesses himself only as an imago, and their relationship is merely the parody of the drama which would really set them at grips in their incommunicable intimacy. That is why the bishop in Les 120 Journées de Sodome “never committed a crime without immediately conceiving a second.”
The moment of plotting the act is an exceptional moment for the libertine because he can then be unaware of the inevitable fact, namely, that reality will give him the he. And if narration plays a primary role in Sadistic orgies and easily awakens senses upon which flesh-and-blood objects cease to act, the reason is that these objects can be wholly attained only in their absence. Actually, there is only one way of finding satisfaction in the phantoms created by debauchery, and that is to accede to their very unreality. In choosing eroticism, Sade chose the makebelieve. It was only in the imaginary that Sade could live with any certitude and without risk of disappointment. He repeated the idea throughout his work. “The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination.” “Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.” It was by means of his imagination that he escaped from space, time, prison, the police, the void of absence, opaque presences, the conflicts of existence, death, life, and all contradictions. It was not murder that fulfilled Sade's erotic nature; it was literature.
It might seem, at first glance, that by writing Sade was merely reacting as many other prisoners do in the same situation. The idea was not completely new to him. One of the plays presented at La Coste in 1772 was probably written by him; and his strongbox, forced open by order of Madame de Montreuil, contained certain “leaflets,” probably notes on sex, in his own hand. Nevertheless, when he was imprisoned at Vincennes, he waited four years before undertaking a real work. In another cell of the same fortress, Mirabeau, who was also groaning that he was “being buried alive in a tomb,” tried to divert himself by doing translations, writing an essay on the lettres de cachet, and carrying on a pornographic correspondence. He was trying to kill time, to distract his weary body, and to undermine a hostile society. Sade was driven by similar motives; he set to work; and more than once, while composing his novels, he had to whip himself up. He also wanted to revenge himself on his torturers. He writes to his wife in a joyous rage, “I'll wager you imagined you were working wonders in reducing me to agonizing abstinence from the sins of the flesh. Well! you were quite mistaken... you've made me create phantoms which I must bring to life.”
Although his decision may have been prompted by his confinement, nevertheless it had much deeper roots. Sade had always spun stories for himself around his debauches; and the reality which served as a frame of reference for his fantasies may have given them a certain density, yet it also cramped them by its resistance. The opacity of things blurs their significance, which is the very quality which words preserve. Even a child is aware that crude drawings are more obscene than the organs and gestures which they represent, because the intention to defile is asserted in all its purity. Blasphemy is the easiest and surest of sacrilegious acts. Sade's heroes talked on and on indefatigably; and in the Rose Keller affair he indulged in endless speechifying. Writing is far more able than the spoken word to endow images with the solidity of a monument, and it resists all argument. Thanks to the written word, virtue maintains her dreary prestige even at the very moment when she is denounced as hypocrisy and stupidity. Crime remains criminal in its grandeur. Freedom may still throb in a dying body.
Literature enabled Sade to unleash and fix his dreams and also to transcend the contradictions implied by any demonic system. Better still, it is itself a demonic act, since it exhibits criminal visions in an aggressive way. That is what gives it its incomparable value. Anyone misunderstands Sade who finds it paradoxical that a “solitary" should have engaged in such a passionate effort to communicate. He had nothing of the misanthrope who prefers the company of animals and virgin forests to his own kind. Cut off from others, he was haunted by their inaccessible presence.
Did he wish only to shock? In 1795 he wrote, “I shall present you with great truths; people will listen and give thought to them. Though not all may find favor, some at least will remain. I shall have contributed in some way to the progress of enlightenment, and I shall be content.” 7. And in La Nouvelle Justine, “To falsify such basic truths, regardless of their consequences, reveals a fundamental lack of concern for human beings.” After presiding over the Section des Piques and drawing up speeches and petitions in society's name, he must have liked, in his more optimistic moments, to think of himself as a spokesman for humanity. Of this experience he retained not the evil aspects, but those which were genuinely rewarding. These dreams quickly faded, but it would be too simple to consign Sade to satanism. His sincerity was inextricably bound up with dishonesty. He delighted in the shocking effects of truth; but if he set himself the duty of shocking, it was because in this way truth might be made manifest. While arrogantly admitting his errors, he declared himself in the right. He wished to transmit a message to the very public he was deliberately outraging. His writings reflect the ambivalence of his relation to the given world and to people.
7
La Philosophie dans le Boudoir
What might surprise us even more is the mode of expression he chose. We might expect a man who had so jealously cultivated his singularity to try to translate his experience into a singular form, as, for example, Lautréamont did. But the eighteenth century offered Sade few lyrical possibilities; he hated the mawkish sensibility which the time confused with poetry—the time was not yet ripe for a poete maudit. And Sade was in no way disposed to great literary audacity. A real creator should, at least on a certain level and at a given moment, free himself of the yoke of the given and emerge beyond other men into complete solitude. But there was in Sade an inner weakness which was inadequately masked by his arrogance. Society was lodged in his heart in the guise of guilt. He had neither the means nor the time to reinvent man, the world, and himself. He was in too much of a hurry, in a hurry to defend himself. I have already said that he sought in writing to gain a clear conscience; and in order to do this, he had to compel people to absolve him, even to approve him. Instead of affirming himself, Sade argued; and in order to make himself understood, he borrowed the literary forms and the tried and tested doctrines of contemporary society. To the product of a rational age, no arm seemed surer to him than reason. He who wrote, “All universal moral principles are idle fancies” submitted docilely to general aesthetic conventions and contemporary claims for the universality of logic. This explains both his art and his thought. Though he justified himself, he was always trying to excuse himself. His work is an ambiguous effort to push crime to the extreme while wiping away his guilt.
It is both natural and striking that Sade's favorite form was parody. He did not try to set up a new universe. He contented himself with ridiculing, by the manner in which he imitated it, the one imposed upon him. He pretended to believe in the vain fancies that inhabited it: innocence, kindness, devotion, generosity and chastity. When he unctuously depicted virtue in Aline et Valcour, in Justine, or in Les Crimes de l'Amour, he was not being merely prudent. The “veils” in which he swathed Justine were more than a literary device. In order to derive amusement from harassing virtue, one must credit it with a certain reality. Defending his tales against the charge of immorality, Sade hypocritically wrote, “Who can flatter himself that he has put virtue in a favorable light if the features of the vice surrounding it are not strongly emphasized?” But he meant the very opposite: how is vice to be made thrilling if the reader is not first taken in by the illusion of good? Fooling people is even more delicious than shocking them. And Sade, in spinning his sugary, roundabout phrases, tasted the keen pleasures of mystification. Unfortunately, he generally amuses himself more than he does us. His style has often the same coldness and the same insipidity as the edifying tales he transposed, and the episodes unfold in accordance with equally dreary conventions.
Nevertheless, it was through parody that Sade obtained his most brilliant artistic successes. As Maurice Heine points out, Sade was the precursor of the novel of horror, but he was too deeply rationalistic to lose himself in fantasy. When he abandons himself to the extravagances of his imagination, one does not know which to admire the most, his epic vehemence or his irony. The wonder is that the irony is subtle enough to redeem his ravings. It lends, on the contrary, a dry, poetic quality which saves them from incredibility. This somber humor which can, at times, turn on itself, is more than a mere technique. With his shame and pride, his truth and crime, Sade was the very spirit of contentiousness. It is when he plays the buffoon that he is really most serious, and when he is most outrageously dishonest, that he is most sincere. His extravagance often masks ingenuous truths, while he launches the most flagrant enormities in the form of sober and deliberate arguments; he uses all kinds of tricks to avoid being pinned down; and that is how he attains his end, which is to disturb us. His very form tends to disconcert us. He speaks in a monotonous embarrassed tone, and we begin to be bored, when all at once the dull grayness is lit up with the glaring brilliance of some bitter, sardonic truth. It is then that Sade's style, in its gaiety, its violence, and its arrogant rawness, proves to be that of a great writer.
Nevertheless, no one would think of ranking Justine with Manon Lescaut or Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It was, paradoxically, the very necessity of Sade's work which imposed upon it its aesthetic limits. He did not have the perspective essential to an artist. He lacked the detachment necessary to confront reality and recreate it. He did not confront himself; he contented himself with projecting his fantasies. His accounts have the unreality, the false precision, and the monotony of schizophrenic reveries. He relates them for his own pleasure, and he is unconcerned about imposing them upon the reader. We do not feel in them the stubborn resistance of the real world or the more poignant resistance that Sade encountered in the depths of his own heart. Caves, underground passageways, mysterious castles, all the props of the Gothic novel take on a particular meaning in his work. They symbolize the isolation of the image. Perception echoes data's totality and, consequently, the obstacles which the data contain. The image is perfectly submissive and pliant. We find in it only what we put into it. The image is the enchanted domain from which no power whatever can expel the solitary despot. It is the image that Sade was imitating, even while claiming to give it literary opacity. Thus, he disregarded the spatial and temporal coordinates within which all real events are situated. The places he evokes are not of this world, the events which occur in them are tableaux rather than adventures, and time has no hold on Sade's universe. There is no future either for or in his work.
Not only do the orgies, to which he invites us, take place in no particular time or locality, but—what is more serious—no living people are brought into play. The victims are frozen in their tearful abjection, and the torturers in their frenzies. Instead of giving them lifelike density, Sade merely daydreams about them. Remorse and disgust are unknown to them; at most they have occasional feelings of satiety. They kill with indifference; they are abstract incarnations of evil. But unless eroticism has some social, familial, or human basis, it ceases to be in any way extraordinary. It is no longer a conflict, a revelation, or an exceptional experience. It no longer reveals any dramatic relationship between individuals but reverts to biological crudity. How is one to feel the opposition of others' freedoms or the spirit's descent into the flesh, if all we see is a display of voluptuous or tortured flesh? Horror itself peters out in these excesses at which no consciousness is actually present. If a story like Poe's “The Pit and the Pendulum” is so full of anguish, it is because we grasp the situation from within the subject; we see Sade's heroes only from without. They are as artificial and move in a world as arbitrary as that of Florian's shepherds. That is why these perverse bucolics have the austerity of a nudist colony.
The debauches which Sade describes in such great detail systematically exhaust the anatomical possibilities of the human body, but they do not reveal uncommon emotional complexes. Nevertheless, though he failed to endow them with aesthetic truth, Sade adumbrated forms of sexual behavior unknown until then, particularly those which unite mother-hatred, frigidity, intellectuality, “passive sodomy,” and cruelty. No one has emphasized with more vigor the link between the imagination and what we call vice; and he gives us, from time to time, insights of surprising depth into the relation of sexuality to existence.
Are we, then, to admire him as a real innovator in psychology? It is difficult to decide. Forerunners are always credited with either too much or too little. How is one to measure the value of a truth which, to use Hegel's term, has not become? An idea derives its value from the experience it sums up and the methods it initiates. But we hardly know what credit to give a new and attractive formulation if it is not confirmed by further developments. We are tempted either to magnify it with all the significance that it acquires later on or else to minimize its scope. Hence, in the case of Sade, the impartial reader hesitates. Often, as we turn a page, we come upon an unexpected phrase which seems to open up new paths, only to find that the thinking stops short. Instead of a vivid and individual voice, all one hears is the droning drivel of Holbach and La Mettrie.
It is remarkable, for example, that in 1795 8 Sade wrote, “Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.” Not only does Sade, in the first part of this text, anticipate what has been called the “pansexuality” of Freud, but he makes of eroticism the mainspring of human behavior. In addition, he asserts, in the second part, that sexuality is charged with a significance that goes beyond it. Libido is everywhere, and it is always far more than itself. Sade certainly anticipated this great truth. He knew that the “perver sions” that are vulgarly regarded as moral monstrosities or physiological defects actually envelop what would now be called an intentionality. He writes to his wife that all “fancy... derives from a principle of delicacy,” and in Aline et Valcour he declares that “refinements come only from delicacy; one may, therefore, have a great deal of delicacy, though one may be moved by things which seem to exclude it.” He understood, too, that our tastes are motivated not by the intrinsic qualities of the object but by the latter's relationship with the subject. In a passage in La Nouvelle Justine he tries to explain coprophilia. His reply is faltering, but clumsily using the notion of imagination, he points out that the truth of a thing lies not in what it is but in the meaning it has taken on for us in the course of our individual experience. Intuitions such as these allow us to hail Sade as a precursor of psychoanalysis.
8
Ibid.
Unfortunately, he reduces their value when he insists upon harping, like Holbach, on the principles of psychophysiological parallelism. “With the perfecting of the science of anatomy, we shall easily be able to show the relationship between man's constitution and the tastes which have affected him.” The contradiction is glaring in the striking passage in Les 120 Journées de Sodome where he considers the sexual attraction of ugliness. “It has, moreover, been proved that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates. Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.” One might wish that Sade had defined this link between horror and desire which he indicates only confusedly; but he stops abruptly with a conclusion that cancels the question that has been posed: “All these things depend upon our structures and organs and on the manner in which they affect one another, and we are no more able to change our tastes for these things than to vary the shapes of our bodies.”
At first glance, it seems paradoxical that this man who was so self-centered should have given such prominence to theories which deny any significance to individual peculiarities. He asks that we make a great effort to understand the human heart better. He tries to explore its strangest aspects. He cries out, “What an enigma is man!” He boasts, “You know that no one analyzes things as I do,” and yet he follows La Mettrie in lumping man together with the machine and the plant and simply does away with psychology. But this antinomy, disconcerting though it may be, is easily explained. It is probably not so easy to be a monster as some people seem to think. Sade, though fascinated by his own personal mystery, was also frightened by it. Instead of expressing himself, he wanted to defend himself. The words he puts into Blamont's mouth 9 are a confession: “I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted, I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasures.” The first of these tasks of liberation was, as he repeated countless times, to triumph over remorse. And as for repudiating all feelings of guilt, what doctrine could be surer than that which undermines the very idea of responsibility? But it would be a big mistake to try to confine him to such a notion: if he seeks support in determinism, he does so, like many others, in order to lay claim to freedom.
From a literary point of view, the commonplace-ridden speeches with which he intersperses his debauches finally rob them of all life and all verisimilitude. Here, too, it is not so much the reader to whom Sade is talking, but himself. His wearisome repetitions are tantamount to a purification rite whose repetition is as natural to him as regular confession is to a good Catholic. Sade does not give us the work of a free man. He makes us participate in his efforts of liberation. But it is precisely for this reason that he holds our attention. His endeavor is more genuine than the instruments it employs. Had Sade been satisfied with the determinism he professed, he should have repudiated all his moral anxieties. But these asserted themselves with a clarity that no logic could obscure. Over and above the facile excuses which he sets forth so tediously, he persists in questioning himself, in attacking. It is owing to this headstrong sincerity that, though not a consummate artist or a coherent philosopher, he deserves to be hailed as a great moralist.
9
Aline et Valcour.
“Extreme in everything,” Sade could not adapt himself to the deist compromises of his time. It was with a declaration of atheism, Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond, that in 1782 he launched his work. The existence of God had been denied more than once since the appearance in 1729 of Le Testament du curé de Meslier. Rousseau had dared to present a sympathetic atheist, Monsieur de Wolmar, in La Nouvelle Héloïse. In spite of this, the Abbé Mélégan had been thrown into prison in 1754 for having written Zoroastre; and La Mettrie was obliged to take refuge at the court of Frederick II. The atheism vehemently espoused by Sylvain Maréchal and popularized by Holbach, in Le Système de la Nature of 1770 and by the satires collected under the title Recueil philosophique, was nonetheless a dangerous doctrine in an age which placed the scaffold itself under the aegis of the Supreme Being. Sade, in parading his atheism, was deliberately committing a provocative act. But it was also an act of sincerity. I feel that Klossowski, despite the interest of his study, is misinterpreting Sade in taking his passionate rejection of God for an avowal of need. The sophism which maintains that to attack God is to affirm Him finds a great deal of support these days, but this notion is actually the invention of those to whom atheism is a challenge. Sade expressed himself clearly on the matter when he wrote, “The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.”
And if this is the first mystification he attacks, it is because he proceeds, like a good Cartesian, from the simple to the complex, from the gross lie to the more misleading error. He knows that in order to free the individual from the idols to which society has bound him, one must begin by ensuring his independence in the face of heaven. If man had not been terrorized by the great bugbear to which he stupidly pays worship, he would not so easily have surrendered his freedom and truth. In choosing God, he denied himself, and that was his unpardonable offence. Actually, he is responsible to no transcendent judge; there is no heavenly court of appeal.
Sade was not unaware of the extent to which the belief in hell and eternity might inflame cruelty. Saint-Fond toys with such hopes so as to extract pleasure from the limitless suffering of the damned. He diverts himself by imagining a diabolical demiurge who would embody the diffuse evil of Nature. But not for one instant did Sade consider these hypotheses as anything more than intellectual pastimes. He is not to be recognized in the characters who express them, and he refutes them through his mouthpieces. In evoking absolute crime, his aim is to ravage Nature and not to wound God. His harangues against religion are open to reproach because of the tedious monotony with which they repeat timeworn commonplaces; but Sade gives them still another personal turn when, anticipating Nietzsche, he denounces in Christianity a religion of victims which ought, in his view, to be replaced by an ideology of force. His honesty, in any case, is unquestionable. Sade's nature was thoroughly irreligious. There is no trace of metaphysical anxiety in him; he is too concerned with justifying his existence to speculate on its meaning and purpose. His convictions on the subject were wholehearted. If he served at mass and flattered a bishop, it was because, old and broken, he had chosen hypocrisy. But his testament is unequivocal. He feared death for the same reason that he feared senility. The fear of the beyond never appears in his work. Sade wished to deal only with men, and everything that was not human was foreign to him.
And yet he was alone among men. The eighteenth century, in so far as it tried to abolish God's reign upon earth, substituted another idol in its place. Atheists and deists united in the worship of the new incarnation of the Supreme Good: Nature. They had no intention of forgoing the conveniences of a categorical, universal morality. Transcendental values had broken down; pleasure was acknowledged as the measure of good; and through this hedonism, self-love was reinstated. For example, Madame du Chatelet wrote, “We must begin by saying to ourselves that we have nothing else to do in this world but seek pleasant sensations and feelings.” But these timid egotists postulated a natural order which assured the harmonious agreement of individual interests with the general interest. A reasonable organization, obtained by pact or contract, would suffice to ensure the prosperity of society for the benefit of all and each. Sade's tragic life gave the lie to this optimistic religion.
The eighteenth century often painted love in somber, solemn, and even tragic tones; and Richardson, Prévost, Duclos, and Crébillon, whom Sade quotes with respect, and, above all, Laclos, whom Sade claimed not to know, created more or less satanic heroes. But their wickedness always has its source, not in spontaneity, but in a perversion of their minds or wills. Quite the contrary, genuine eroticism, because of its instinctive character, is reinstated. Natural, healthy, and useful to the species, sexual desire merges, according to Diderot, with the very movement of life, and the passions it brings are likewise good and fruitful. If the characters in La Religieuse take pleasure in “sadistic” viciousness, it is because instead of satisfying their appetites they repress them. Rousseau, whose sexual experience was complex and largely unhappy, also expresses this in edifying terms: “Sweet pleasures, pure, vivid, painless, and unalloyed.” And also: “Love, as I see it, as I have felt it, grows ardent before the illusory image of the beloved's perfection, and this very illusion leads it to enthusiasm for virtue. For this idea always enters into that of the perfect woman.” 10 Even in Restif de la Bretonne, though pleasure may have a stormy character, it is nonetheless rapture, languor, and tenderness. Sade was the only one to reveal selfishness, tyranny, and crime in sexuality. This would suffice to give him a unique place in the history of the sensibility of his century, but from this insight he derived even more remarkable ethical consequences.
10
Cf. Sade: “It is horror, vileness, the frightful, which give pleasure when one fornicates. Where are they more likely to be found than in a corrupt object? Many people prefer for their pleasure an old, ugly, even a stinking woman to a fresh and pretty girl.”
There was nothing new in the idea that Nature is evil. Hobbes, with whom Sade was familiar and whom he quotes freely, had declared that man is a wolf to man and that the state of Nature is one of war. A long line of English moralists and satirists had followed in his steps, among them Swift, whom Sade used and even copied. In France, Vauvenargues continued the puritan and Jansenist development of the Christian tradition which identifies the flesh with original sin. Bayle and, more brilliantly, Buffon established the fact that Nature is not wholly good; and though the myth of the Noble Savage had been current since the sixteenth century, particularly in Diderot and the Encyclopedists, Emeric de Crucé had already attacked it at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Sade had no trouble finding any number of arguments to support the thesis which was implied in his erotic experience and which was ironically confirmed by society's imprisoning him for having followed his instincts. But what distinguishes him from his predecessors is the fact that they, after exposing the evil of Nature, set up, in opposition to it, a morality which derived from God and society; whereas Sade, though rejecting the first part of the generally accepted credo: “Nature is Good; let us follow her,” paradoxically retained the second. Nature's example has an imperative value, even though her law be one of hate and destruction. We must now examine more closely the ruse whereby he turned the new cult against its devotees.
Sade conceived the relation of man to Nature in various ways. These variations seem to me not so much the movements of a dialectic as the expressions of the hesitation of a thinking that at times restrains its boldness and at others breaks completely loose. When Sade is merely trying to find hasty justifications, he adopts a mechanistic view of the world. La Mettrie affirmed the moral indifference of human acts when he declared, “We are no guiltier in following the primitive impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.” Similarly, Sade, in order to excuse himself, compares himself to plants, animals, and the elements. “In her hands I am only a tool that she [Nature] manipulates as she pleases.” Although he constantly took refuge in similar statements, they do not express his real thoughts. In the first place, Nature, for him, is not an indifferent mechanism. There is such significance in her transformations that one might play with the idea that she is governed by an evil genius. Nature is actually cruel and voracious, informed with the spirit of destruction. She “would desire the utter annihilation of all living creatures so as to enjoy her power of recreating new ones.” However, man is not her slave.
Sade had already pointed out in Aline et Valcour that he can wrest himself free and turn against her. “Let us dare do violence to this unintelligible Nature, the better to master the art of enjoying her.” And he declared even more decisively in Juliette, “Once man is created, he is no longer dependent upon Nature; once Nature has launched him, she has no further hold on him.” He goes further. Man, in his relation to Nature, is comparable to “the froth, the vapor which rises from the rarified liquid in a heated vessel. The vapor is not created; it is a resultant; it is heterogeneous. It derives its existence from a foreign element. It can exist or not, without detriment to the element from which it issues. It owes nothing to the element and the element owes nothing to it.” Though man is of no more value to the universe than a bit of froth, it is this very insignificance which guarantees his autonomy. The natural order cannot control him since he is radically alien to it. Hence, he may make a moral decision, and no one has the right to dictate to him. Why then, with all the paths open to him, did Sade choose the one which led, through the imitation of Nature, to crime? To answer this question, we must understand his system in its totality; the aim of this system was precisely to justify the “crimes" which Sade never dreamed of renouncing.
We are always more influenced than we realize by the ideas we fight against. To be sure, Sade often uses naturalism as an ad nominem argument. He took sly pleasure in turning to evil account the examples which his contemporaries tried to exploit on behalf of the Good, but no doubt he also took for granted that might makes right. When he tries to demonstrate the fact that the libertine has the right to oppress women, he exclaims, “Has not Nature proved, in giving us the strength necessary to submit them to our desires, that we have the right to do so?” One could find many similar quotations. “Nature has made us all equal at birth, Sophie,” says La Dubois to Justine, “If Nature wishes to disturb this first stage of general laws, it is for us to correct her caprices.” Sade's basic charge against the codes imposed by society is that they are artificial. He compares them, in a particularly significant text, to those that might be drawn up by a community of blind men. 11 “All those duties are imaginary, since they are only conventional. In like manner, man has made laws relative to his petty knowledge, his petty wiles, and his petty needs—but all this has no reality....When we look at Nature we readily understand that everything we decide and organize is as far removed from the perfection of her views and as inferior to her as the laws of the society of blind men would be to our own.”
11
Pensee printed by Maurice Heine, Le Marquis de Sade ( Paris 1950). See below pp. 200—203.
Montesquieu had advanced the idea that laws were dependent on climate, circumstances, and even the arrangement of the “fibers” of our bodies. It might be concluded that they express the various aspects assumed by Nature in time and space. But the indefatigable Sade takes us to Tahiti, Patagonia, and the antipodes, to show us that the diversity of enacted laws definitively negates their value. Though they may be related, they seem to him arbitrary. And it should be noted that for him the words “conventional” and “imaginary” are synonymous. Nature retains her sacred character for Sade: indivisible and unique, she is an absolute, outside of which there is no reality.
It is obvious that Sade's thinking on this point was not quite coherent, that it was not at all times equally sincere, and that it was constantly developing. But his inconsistencies are not quite so obvious as one might think. The syllogism: Nature is evil, and therefore the society that departs from Nature merits our obedience, is far too simple. In the first place, society is suspect because of its hypocrisy. It appeals to Nature's authority even though it is really hostile to her. And besides, society is rooted in Nature, despite its antagonism to her. Society manifests its original perversion by the very way in which it contradicts Nature. The idea of general interest has no natural basis. “The interests of individuals are almost always opposed to those of society.” But the idea was invented in order to satisfy a natural instinct, namely, the tyrannical will of the strong. Laws, instead of correcting the primitive order of the world, only aggravate its injustice. “We are all alike, except in strength,” that is, there are no essential differences among individuals, and the unequal distribution of strength might have been offset. Instead, the strong have arrogated to themselves all the forms of superiority and have even invented others.
Holbach, and many others along with him, had exposed the hypocrisy of codes whose sole purpose was to oppress the weak. Morelly and Brissot, among others, had shown that the ownership of property has no natural basis. Society has fabricated this harmful institution out of whole cloth. “There is no exclusive ownership in Nature,” wrote Brissot. “The word has been struck from her code. The unhappy starveling may carry off and devour his bread because he is hungry. His claim is his hunger.” In La Philosophie dans le Boudoir Sade uses almost the same terms to demand that the idea of possession be substituted for that of proprietorship. How can proprietorship claim to be a universally recognized right when the poor rebel against it and the rich dream only of increasing it by further monopolizing? “It is by complete equality of wealth and condition and not by vain laws that the power of the stronger must be weakened.” But the fact is that it is the strong who make the laws for their own profit.
Their presumptuousness is odiously apparent in their arrogation of the right to inflict punishment. Beccaria had maintained that the aim of punishment was to procure redress, but that no one could claim the right to punish. Sade indignantly spoke out against all penalties of an expiatory character. “Oh, slaughterers, gaolers, and imbeciles of all regimes and governments, when will you come to prefer the science of understanding man to that of imprisoning and killing him?” He rebels particularly against the death penalty. Society tries to justify it by the lex talionis, but this is just another fantasy without roots in reality. In the first place, there is no reciprocity among the subjects; their existences are not commensurable. Nor is there any similarity between a murder committed in a burst of passion or out of need, and coldly premeditated assassination by judges. And how can the latter in any way compensate for the former? In erecting scaffolds, society, far from mitigating the cruelty of Nature, merely aggravates it. Actually, it resists evil by doing greater evil. Its claim on our loyalty is without foundation.
The famous contract invoked by Hobbes and Rousseau is just a myth; how could individual freedom be recognized in an order that oppresses it? This pact is to the interest of neither the strong, who have nothing to gain in abdicating their privileges, nor the weak, whose inferiority is thereby confirmed. There can be only a state of war between these two groups; and each has its own values, which are irreconcilable with those of the other. “When he took a hundred louis from a man's pocket, he was committing what was for him a just act, though the man who had been robbed must have regarded it quite otherwise.” In the speech which he puts into the mouth of Coeur de Fer, Sade passionately exposes the bourgeois hoax which consists in erecting class interests into universal principles. Since the concrete conditions under which individuals live are not homogeneous, no universal morality is possible.
But ought we not to try to reform society, since it has betrayed its own aspirations? Cannot individual freedom be put precisely to this use? It seems not improbable that Sade may at times have envisaged this solution. It is significant that in Aline et Valcour he describes with equal indulgence the anarchic society of cannibals and the communistic society of Zamé in which evil is disarmed by justice. I do not think that there is any irony at all in the latter picture, any more than in the appeal, “Frenchmen! A further effort” 12 inserted into La Philosophie dans le Boudoir. Sade's activity during the Revolution clearly proves that he wished to be integrated into a collectivity. He suffered bitterly from the ostracism to which he was subjected.
12
It has been maintained that Sade does not endorse this statement since he puts it into the mouth of the Chevalier. But the Chevalier merely reads a text of which Dolmancé, Sade's mouthpiece, admits he is the author. See below pp. 122—57.
He dreamed of an ideal society from which his special tastes would not exclude him. He really thought that such tastes would not constitute a serious danger to an enlightened society. Zamé assures us that he would not be disturbed by Sade's disciples: “The people you speak of are few; they do not worry me at all.” And Sade, in a letter, maintains: “It is not the opinions or vices of private individuals that are harmful to the state, but rather the behavior of public figures.” The fact is that the libertine's acts have no real influence; they are not much more than games. Sade takes refuge behind their insignificance and goes so far as to suggest that he would be ready to sacrifice them. Motivated as they are by defiance and resentment, these acts would lose their significance in a world without hatred. If the prohibitions which make crime attractive were abolished, lust itself would be eliminated. Perhaps Sade really longed for the personal conversion that would result from the conversion of other men. He probably expected, also, that his vices would be accepted as something exceptional by a community which respected singularity and which would, therefore, recognize him as an exception. He was sure, in any case, that a man who was content with whipping a prostitute every now and then was less harmful to society than a farmer-general.
The real plagues are established injustice, official abuses, and constitutional crimes; and these are the inevitable accompaniments of abstract laws which try to impose themselves uniformly upon a plurality of radically separate objects. A just economic order would render codes and courts useless, for crime is born of need and illegality and would vanish with the elimination of these grounds. The ideal regime, for Sade, was a kind of reasonable anarchy: “The reign of law is inferior to that of anarchy. The greatest proof of what I advance is to be found in the fact that all governments are obliged to plunge into anarchy when they wish to remake their constitutions. In order to abrogate its old laws, a government is obliged to establish a revolutionary regime in which there are no laws. New laws are ultimately born of this regime, but this second state is nevertheless less pure than the first, since it is derived from it.” This argument probably does not sound very convincing, but what Sade understood remarkably well was that the ideology of his time was merely the expression of an economic system and that a concrete transformation of this system would put an end to the humbug of bourgeois morality. Very few of his contemporaries developed such penetrating views in such an extreme way.
Nevertheless, Sade did not definitely take the path of social reform. His life and work were not guided by these utopian reveries. How could he have gone on believing in them very long in the depths of his dungeon cells or after the Terror? Events confirmed his private experience. Society's failure was no mere accident. And besides, it was obvious that his interest in its possible success was of a purely speculative nature. He was obsessed by his own case. He cared little about changing himself and much more about being confirmed in his choices. His vices condemned him to solitude. He was to demonstrate the necessity of solitude and the supremacy of evil. It was easy for him to be honest because, maladjusted aristocrat that he was, he had never encountered men like himself. Though he mistrusted generalizations, he ascribed to his situation the value of a metaphysical inevitability: “Man is isolated in the world.” “All creatures are born isolated and have no need of one another.” If the diversity of human beings could be assimilated—as Sade himself frequently suggests—to that which differentiates plants or animals, a reasonable society would manage to surmount it. It would be enough merely to respect each one's particularity.
But man does not merely undergo his solitude; he demands it against everyone. It follows that there is a heterogeneity of values, not only from class to class, but from individual to individual. “All passions have two meanings, Juliette: one, which is very unjust as regards the victim; the other, which is singularly just to the person who exercises it. And this fundamental antagonism cannot be transcended because it is the truth itself.” If human projects tried to reconcile themselves in a common quest for the general interest, they would be necessarily inauthentic. For there is no reality other than that of the self-enclosed subject hostile to any other subject which disputes its sovereignty. The thing that prevents individual freedom from choosing Good is that the latter does not exist in the empty sky or the unjust earth or even at some ideal horizon; it is nowhere to be found. Evil is an absolute resisted only by fanciful notions, and there is only one way of asserting oneself in the face of it: to assent to it.
For there is one idea that Sade, throughout his pessimism, savagely rejects: the idea of submission. And that is why he detests the hypocritical resignation which is adorned with the name of virtue. It is a stupid submission to the rule of evil, as recreated by society. In submitting, man renounces both his authenticity and his freedom. It was easy for Sade to show that chastity and temperance are not even justified by their usefulness. The prejudices that condemn incest, sodomy, and all sexual vagaries have but one aim: to destroy the individual by imposing upon him a stupid conformism. But the great virtues extolled by the age had a deeper meaning; they tried to palliate the all too obvious inadequacies of the law. Sade raised no objection to tolerance, probably because, so far as he could observe, no one even tried to practice it; but he did attack fanatically what is called humaneness and benevolence. These were mystifications which aimed at reconciling the irreconcilable: the unsatisfied appetites of the poor and the selfish greed of the rich. Taking up the tradition of La Rochefoucauld, he shows that these are merely masks to disguise self-interest.
The weak, in order to check the arrogance of the strong, have invented the idea of fraternity, an idea which has no solid basis: “Now I beg of you to tell me whether I must love a human being simply because he exists or resembles me and whether for these reasons alone I must suddenly prefer him to myself?” What hypocrisy on the part of privileged persons who make a great to-do about their philanthrophy and at the same time acquiesce in the abject condition of the poor! This false sentimentality was so widespread at the time that even Valmont, in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, was moved to tears when he performed an act of charity; and it was obviously the currency of this mode of feeling that made Sade unleash all his dishonesty and sincerity against benevolence. He is certainly joking when he claims that in maltreating prostitutes he is serving the cause of morality. If libertines were permitted to molest them with impunity, prostitution would become so dangerous a profession that no one would engage in it. But he is quite right in cutting through sophisms and exposing the inconsistencies of a society that protects the very things it condemns, and which, though permitting debauchery, often punishes the debauchee.
He reveals the dangers of almsgiving with the same somber irony. If the poor are not reduced to hopelessness, they may rebel; and the safest thing would be to exterminate all of them. In this scheme, which he attributes to Saint-Fond, Sade develops the idea in Swift's famous pamphlet, and he certainly does not identify himself with his hero. Nevertheless, the cynicism of this aristocrat, who fully espoused the interests of his class, is more valid to him than the compromises of guilty-minded hedonists. His thinking is clear—either do away with the poor or do away with poverty, but do not use half-measures and thus perpetuate injustice and oppression, 13 and above all do not pretend to be redeeming these extortions by handing out a trival dole to those you exploit. If Sade's heroes let some poor wretch die of hunger rather than defile themselves by an act of charity that would cost them nothing, it is because they passionately refuse any complicity with respectable people who appease their consciences so cheaply.
13
This policy of all or nothing is found among present-day Communists. They repudiate bourgeois charity; and there are many who, on principle, refuse any private help to the needy.
Virtue deserves no admiration and no gratitude since, far from reflecting the demands of a transcendant good, it serves the interests of those who make a show of it. It is only logical that Sade should come to this conclusion. But after all, if selfinterest is the individual's sole law, why despise it? In what respect is it inferior to vice? Sade answered this question often and vehemently. In cases where virtue is chosen, he says, “What lack of movement! What ice! Nothing stirs me, nothing excites me... I ask you, is this pleasure? What a difference on the other side! What tickling of my senses! What excitement in my organs!” And again: “Happiness lies only in that which excites and the only thing that excites is crime.” In terms of the hedonism of his time, this argument carries weight. The only objection one might make is that Sade generalizes from his own individual case. May not some people be excited also by the good? He rejects this eclecticism. Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; “true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.” This statement may seem surprising, since Sade had actually made the imagination the mainspring of vice; but vice teaches us a certain truth through the very fantasies on which it feeds, and the proof is that it ends in orgasm, that is, in a definite sensation; whereas the illusions on which virtue feeds are never concretely recouped by the individual. According to the philosophy that Sade borrowed from his age, sensation is the only measure of reality, and if virtue arouses no sensation, it is because it has no real basis.
Sade explains what he means more clearly in the following parallel between virtue and vice: “The first is chimerical; the other is real. The one is based on prejudices; the other, on reason. If... from one; I feel hardly anything from the other.” Virtue, chimerical and imaginary, encloses us in a world of appearances; whereas vice's intimate link with the flesh guarantees its genuineness. Using the vocabulary of Stirner, whose name has rightly been linked with Sade's, we might say that virtue alienates the individual from that empty entity, Man. It is only in crime that he justifies and fulfills himself as a concrete ego. If poor man resigns himself or vainly tries to fight for his fellows, he is maneuvered and duped, an inert object, a plaything of Nature; he is nothing. He must, like La Dubois or Coeur de Fer, try to pass over to the side of the strong. The rich person who accepts his privileges passively also exists like an object. If he abuses his power and becomes a tyrant, then he is someone. Instead of losing himself in philanthropic dreams, he will cynically take advantage of the injustice that favors him. “Where would be the victims of our villainy if all men were criminals? We must never cease to keep the people tied to the yoke of error and the lie,” says Esterval.
Are we back to the idea that man can only act in obedience to his evil nature? Is he not destroying his freedom with the pretext of safeguarding his authenticity? No, for though freedom may be unable to go counter to given reality, it is able to wrest itself away from it and assume it. This procedure is similar to Stoic conversion which, by deliberate decision, turns reality to its own account. There is no contradiction in Sade's extolling crime and at the same time getting indignant about men's injustice, selfishness, and cruelty. 14 He has only contempt for the timid vices, for the rash crimes which merely reflect passively the heinousness of Nature. One must make oneself a criminal in order to avoid being evil, as is a volcano or a member of the police. It is not a matter of submitting to the universe, but of imitating it in open defiance.
14
The similarity with Stirner at this point is striking. Stirner also condemns “vulgar” crime and extols only that which makes for the fulfillment of the ego.
This is the attitude that Almani, the chemist, assumes at the edge of Mount Etna. “Yes, my friend, yes, I abhor Nature. And the reason I loathe her is that I know her all too well. Knowing her dreadful secrets, I felt a kind of ineffable pleasure in copying her heinousness. I shall imitate her, though I hate her.... Her murderous nets are spread for us alone. Let us try to catch her in her own trap.... In presenting to me only her effects, she concealed all her causes. I am therefore limited to imitating the former. Unable to guess the motive that put the dagger into her hands, I have been able to take away her weapon and use it as she did.” This text has the same ambiguous ring as the words of Dolmancé: “It was their ingratitude that dried up my heart.” It reminds us that it was in despair and resentment that Sade devoted himself to evil. And it is in this respect that his hero is distinguished from the ancient sage. He does not follow Nature lovingly and joyously. He copies her with abhorrence and without understanding her. And he wills himself to be something without approving himself. Evil is not at one with itself; selflaceration is its very essence.
This laceration must be experienced in a state of constant tension; otherwise, it congeals into remorse and, as such, constitutes a mortal danger. Blanchot has observed that whenever the Sadistic hero, as a result of some scruple, restores to society its power over him, he is doomed to the worst kind of catastrophe. Repentance and hesitation mean that one recognizes that one has judges. It therefore means accepting guilt instead of assuming that one is the free author of one's acts. The man who consents to his passivity deserves all the defeats that the hostile world will inflict upon him. On the other hand: “The genuine libertine likes even the charges that are leveled against him for his execrable crimes. Have we not known men who loved even the tortures appointed by human vengeance, who suffered them gladly, who looked upon the scaffold as a throne of glory? These are men who have attained the highest degree of deliberate corruption.”
At this ultimate degree, man is delivered not only of prejudices and shame, but of fear as well. His serenity is that of the ancient sage who regarded as futile “things which do not depend on ourselves.” But the sage confined himself to a completely negative self-defense against possible suffering. The dark stoicism of Sade promises positive happiness. Thus, Coeur de Fer lays down the following alternatives: “Either the crime which makes us happy, or the scaffold which prevents us from being unhappy.” Nothing can threaten the man who can transform his very defeats into triumphs. He fears nothing because for him everything is good. The brutal factitiousness of things does not crush the free man because it does not interest him. He is concerned only with their meaning, and the meaning depends only upon him. A person who is whipped or penetrated by another may be the other's master as well as his slave. The ambivalence of pain and pleasure, of humiliation and pride, enables the libertine to dominate any situation. Thus, Juliette can transform into pleasure the same tortures that prostrate Justine. Fundamentally, the content of the experience is unimportant. The thing that counts is the subject's intention.
Thus, hedonism ends in ataraxia, which confirms the paradoxical relation between sadism and stoicism. The individual's promised happiness is reduced to indifference. “I have been happy, my dear, ever since I have been indulging cold-bloodedly in every sort of crime,” says Bressac. Cruelty appears in a new light, as an ascesis. “The man who can grow callous to the pains of others becomes insensitive to his own.” It is no longer excitement we must seek, but apathy. A budding libertine, no doubt, needs violent emotions in order to feel the truth of his individual existence. But once he has possessed it, the pure form of crime will be enough to ensure it. Crime has “a character of grandeur and sublimity which prevails and always will prevail over the dull charms of virtue” and which renders vain all the contingent satisfactions one might be tempted to expect. With a severity similar to Kant's, and which has its source in the same puritan tradition, Sade conceives the free act only as an act free of all feeling. If it were to obey emotional motives, it would make us Nature's slaves again and not autonomous subjects.
This choice is open to any individual, regardless of his situation. One of the victims locked up in the monk's harem where Justine is languishing away manages to escape her fate by proving her worth. She stabs one of her companions with a viciousness that arouses the admiration of her masters and makes her the queen of the harem. Those who remain among the oppressed do so because they are poor-spirited, and they must not be pitied. “What can there possibly be in common between the man who can do everything and the one who doesn't dare do anything?” The contrast of the two words is significant. For Sade, if one dares, one can. Blanchot has commented upon the austerity of this morality. Almost all of Sade's criminals die violent deaths, and it is their merit that transforms their misfortunes into glory. But in fact, death is not the worst of failures, and whatever the fate Sade reserves for his heroes, he assures them a destiny which allows them to fulfill themselves. This optimism comes from an aristocratic vision of mankind, which involves, in its implacable severity, a doctrine of predestination.
For this quality of mind which enables a few elect spirits to rule over a herd of condemned souls appears as an arbitrary dispensation of grace. Juliette was saved and Justine lost from the beginning of time. Even more interesting is the view that merit cannot entail success unless it is recognized. The strength of mind of Valerie and Juliette would have been to no avail had it not deserved the admiration of their tyrants. Divided and separated though they be, it must be admitted that they do bow down together before certain values, and they choose reality in the different guises which for Sade are, without question, equivalent to one another: orgasm—nature—reason. Or, to be more precise, reality imposes itself upon them. The hero triumphs through their mediation. But what saves him finally is the fact that he has staked everything on the truth. Sade believes in an absolute which is beyond all contingencies and which can never disappoint the one who invokes it as a last resort.
It is only out of pusillanimity that everyone does not embrace such a sure ethic, for there can be no valid objection to it. It cannot offend a God who is a mere figment of the imagination; and since Nature is essentially division and hostility, to attack her is to conform to her all the more. Yielding to his naturalistic prejudices, Sade writes, “The only real crime would be to outrage Nature,” and adds immediately afterward, “Is it conceivable that Nature would provide us with the possibility of a crime that would outrage her?” She takes unto herself everything that happens. She even receives murder with indifference, since “the life principle of all creatures is death; this death is merely a matter of imagination.” Only man attaches importance to his own existence, but he “could completely wipe out his species without the universes feeling the slightest change.” He claims to have a sacred character which makes him untouchable, but he is only one animal among others. “Only man's pride has made a crime of murder.”
Indeed, Sade's plea is so forceful that he ends by denying any criminal character to crime. He realizes this himself. The last part of Juliette is a convulsive attempt to rekindle the flame of Evil, but despite volcanoes, fires, poison, and plague, if there is no God, man is merely smoke. If Nature permits everything, then the worst catastrophes are a matter of indifference. “To my mind, man's greatest torment is the impossibility of offending Nature!” And if Sade had staked everything only on the demoniacal horror of crime, his ethic would have ended in radical failure; but if he himself accepted this defeat, it was only because he was fighting for something else, namely, his profound conviction that crime is good.
In the first place, crime is not only inoffensive to Nature; it is useful to her. Sade explains in Juliette that if “the spirit of the three kingdoms” were confronted with no obstacles, it would get so violent that it would paralyze the working of the universe. “There would be neither gravitation nor movement.” As a result of its inner contradiction, human crimes save it from the stagnation which would also endanger an overly virtuous society. Sade had certainly read Mandeville The Grumbling Hive which had had a great success at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Mandeville had shown that the passions and defects of individuals served the public welfare and even that the greatest scoundrels were the ones who worked most actively for the common good. When an inopportune conversion made for the triumph of virtue, the hive was ruined. Sade also declared repeatedly that a collectivity that fell into virtue would thereby be pushed into inertia. We have here a kind of presage of the Hegelian theory according to which “the spirit's restlessness” could not be abolished without involving the end of history. But, for Sade, immobility appears not as a static plenitude but as a pure absence. Mankind makes every effort by means of the conventions with which it is armed to cut all its ties with Nature; and it would become a pale phantom were it not for a few resolute souls who maintain within it, in spite of itself, the rights of truth—and truth means discord, war, and agitation.
In the strange text where he compares us all to blind men, 15 Sade says that it is already enough that our limited senses prevent us from attaining the core of reality. Let us, therefore, not spoil our pleasure even more. Let us try to transcend our limits: “The most perfect being we could conceive would be the one who alienated himself most from our conventions and found them most contemptible.” In its proper context, this statement recalls both Rimbaud's demand for a “systematic derangement” of all the senses and the attempts of the surrealists to penetrate beyond human artifice to the mysterious heart of the real. But it is as moralist rather than as poet that Sade tries to shatter the prison of appearances. The mystified and mystifying society against which he rebels suggests Heidegger's “the one” in which the authenticity of existence is swallowed up. For Sade, too, it is a question of regaining authenticity by an individual decision. These comparisons are quite deliberate. Sade must be given a place in the great family of those who want to cut through the “banality of everyday life” to a truth which is immanent in this world. Within this framework, crime becomes a duty: “In a criminal society one must be a criminal.” This formula sums up his ethic. By means of crime, the libertine refuses any complicity with the evils of the given situation, of which the masses are merely the passive, and hence abject, reflection. It prevents society from reposing in injustice and creates an apocalyptic condition which constrains all individuals to ensure their separateness, and thus their truth, in a state-of constant tension.
15
See below pp. 200—203.
Nevertheless, it is in the name of the individual that it seems possible to raise the most convincing objections to Sade's notions; for the individual is quite real, and crime does him real injury. It is here that Sade's thinking proves to be extreme: the only thing that has truth for me is that which is enveloped in my own experience; the inner presence of other people is foreign to me. Hence, it does not concern me and cannot dictate any duty to me. “We don't care a bit about the torment of others; what have we in common with this torment?” And again: “There is no comparison between what others experience and what we feel. The strongest pain in other people is certainly nothing to us, but we are affected by the slightest tickle of pleasure that touches us.” The fact is that the only sure bonds among men are those they create in transcending themselves into another world by means of common projects. The only project that the hedonistic sensualism of the eighteenth century has to offer the individual is to “procure pleasant sensations and feelings.” It fixes him in his lonely immanence. Sade shows us in Justine a surgeon who plans to dissect his daughter in order to further science and thereby mankind. Seen in terms of its transcendent future, mankind has value in his eyes; but what is a man when reduced to his mere vain presence? Just a pure fact, stripped of all value, who affects me no more than a lifeless stone. “My neighbor is nothing to me; there is not the slightest relationship between him and myself.”
These statements seem contradictory to Sade's attitude in real life. It is obvious that if there were nothing in common between the tortures of the victims and the torturer, the latter would derive no pleasure from them. But what Sade is actually disputing is the a priori existence of a given relationship between myself and the other by which my behavior should be guided in the abstract. He does not deny the possibility of establishing such a relationship; and if he rejects ethical recognition of other people founded on false notions of reciprocity and universality, it is in order to give himself the authority to destroy the concrete barriers of flesh which isolate human minds. Each mind bears witness only for itself as to the value it attributes to itself and has no right to impose this value upon others. But it can, in a singular and vivid manner, demand recognition of such value in its acts. This is the course chosen by the criminal, who, by the violence of his self-assertion, becomes real for the other person and thereby also reveals the other as really existing. But it should be noted that, quite unlike the conflict described by Hegel, this process involves no risk for the subject. His primacy is not at stake; regardless of what happens to him, he will accept no master. If he is defeated, he returns to a solitude which ends in death, but he remains sovereign.
Thus, for the despot, other people do not represent a danger that could strike at the heart of his being. Nevertheless, this outside world from which he is excluded irritates him. He wants to penetrate it. Paradoxically enough, he is free to make things happen in this forbidden domain, and the temptation is all the more dizzying in that these events will be incommensurable with his experience. Sade repeatedly stresses the point that it is not the unhappiness of the other person which excites the libertine, but rather the knowledge that he is responsible for it. This is something very different from an abstract demoniacal pleasure. When he weaves his dark plots, he sees his freedom being transformed for others into a destiny. And as death is more certain than life, and suffering more certain than happiness, it is in persecutions and murder that he takes unto himself this mystery. But it is not enough to impose oneself upon the bewildered victim in the guise of destiny. Duped and mystified as he is, one possesses him, but only from without. In revealing himself to the victim, the torturer incites him to manifest his freedom in his screams or prayers. If it is not revealed, the victim is unworthy of torture. One kills him or forgets about him. He may also escape his torturer by the violence of his revolt, be it flight, suicide, or victory. What the torturer demands is that, alternating between refusal and submission, whether rebelling or consenting, the victim recognize, in any case, that his destiny is the freedom of the tyrant. He is then united to his tyrant by the closest of bonds. They form a genuine couple.
There are occasional cases in which the victim's freedom, without escaping the destiny which the tyrant creates for it, succeeds in getting around it. It turns suffering into pleasure, shame into pride; it becomes an accomplice. It is then that the debauchee is gratified to the full: “There is no keener pleasure for a libertine mind than to win proselytes.” To debauch an innocent creature is obviously a satanic act; but in view of the ambivalence of evil, we effect a genuine conversion by winning for it a new adept. The capturing of a virginity, among other things, appears in this fight as a ceremony of initiation. Just as we must outrage Nature in order to imitate her, though the outrage is canceled out since she herself demands it, so, in doing violence to an individual, we force him to assume his separateness and thereby he finds a truth which reconciles him with his antagonist. Torturer and victim recognize their fellowship in astonishment, esteem, and even admiration.
It has rightly been pointed out that there is never any permanent bond among Sade's libertines, that their relationship involves a constant tension. But the fact that Sade systematically makes selfishness triumph over friendship does not prevent him from endowing friendship with reality. Noirceuil is very careful to let Juliette know that he is interested in her only because of the pleasure be finds in her company; but this pleasure implies a concrete relationship between them. Each feels confirmed within himself by the presence of an alter ego; it is both an absolution and an exaltation. Group debauchery produces genuine communion among Sade's libertines. Each one perceives the meaning of his acts and of his own figure through the minds of the others. I experience my own flesh in the flesh of another; then my fellow creature really exists for me. The shocking fact of coexistence eludes our thinking, but we can dispose of its mystery the way Alexander cut through the Gordian knot: we must set ourselves down in it by acts. “What an enigma is man!—Yes, my friend, and that's what made a very witty man say that it's better to f... him than to understand him.” Eroticism appears in Sade as a mode of communication, the only valid one. We might say, parodying Claudel, that in Sade “the penis is the shortest path between two hearts.”
To sympathize with Sade too readily is to betray him. For it is our misery, subjection, and death that he desires; and every time we side with a child whose throat has been slit by a sexmaniac, we take a stand against him. Nor does he forbid us to defend ourselves. He allows that a father may revenge or prevent, even by murder, the rape of his child. What he demands is that, in the struggle between irreconcilable existences, each one engage himself concretely in the name of his own existence. He approves of the vendetta, but not of the courts. We may kill, but we may not judge. The pretensions of the judge are more arrogant than those of the tyrant; for the tyrant confines himself to being himself, whereas the judge tries to erect his opinions into universal laws. His effort is based upon a he. For every person is imprisoned in his own skin and cannot become the mediator between separate persons from whom he himself is separated. And the fact that a great number of these individuals band together and alienate themselves in institutions, of which they are no longer masters, gives them no additional right. Their number has nothing to do with the matter. There is no way of measuring the incommensurable. In order to escape the conflicts of existence, we take refuge in a universe of appearances, and existence itself escapes us. In thinking that we are defending ourselves, we are destroying ourselves. Sade's immense merit lies in his taking a stand against these abstractions and alienations which are merely flights from the truth about man. No one was more passionately attached to the concrete than he. He never respected the “everyone says” with which mediocre minds lazily content themselves. He adhered only to the truths which were derived from the evidence of his own actual experience. Thus, he went beyond the sensualism of his age and transformed it into an ethic of authenticity.
This does not mean that we can be satisfied with the solution he offers. For if Sade's desires to grasp the very essence of the human condition in terms of his particular situation is the source of his greatness, it is also responsible for his limits. He thought that the solution he chose for himself was valid for everyone else, to the exclusion of any other. Wherein he was doubly mistaken. For all his pessimism, he was, socially, on the side of the privileged, and he did not understand that social injustice affects the individual even in his ethical potentialities. Even rebellion is a luxury requiring culture, leisure, and a certain detachment from the needs of existence. Though Sade's heroes may pay with their lives for such rebellion, at least they do so after it has given their lives a valid meaning; whereas for the great majority of men it would be tantamount to a stupid suicide. Contrary to his wishes, it is chance, and not merit, which would operate in the selection of a criminal elite. If it is objected that he never strove for universality, that he wanted only to ensure his own salvation—that does not do him justice. He offers himself as an example, since he wrote—and so passionately!—of his own experience. And he probably did not expect his appeal to be heard by everyone. But he did not think that he was addressing only the members of the privileged classes, whose arrogance he detested. The kind of predestination in which he believed was democratically conceived, and he would not have wanted to discover that it depended upon the economic circumstances from which, as he saw it, it should allow one to escape.
Moreover, he did not suppose that there could be any possible way other than individual rebellion. He knew only two alternatives: abstract morality and crime. He was unaware of action. Though he might have suspected the possibility of a concrete communication among subjects through an undertaking which might unite all men in the common realization of their manhood, he did not stop there. Denying the individual all transcendence, he consigns him to an insignificance which authorizes his violation. But this violence in the void becomes absurd, and the tyrant who tries to assert himself by such violence discovers merely his own nothingness.
To this contradiction, however, Sade might oppose another. For the eighteenth century's fond dream of reconciling individuals within their immanence is, in any case, unfeasible. Sade embodied in his own way his disappointment with the Terror. The individual who is unwilling to deny his particularity is repudiated by society. But if we choose to recognize in each subject only the transcendence which unites him concretely with his fellows, we are leading him only to new idols, and their particular insignificance will appear all the more obvious. We shall be sacrificing today to tomorrow, the minority to the majority, the freedom of each to the achievements of the community. Prison and the guillotine will be the logical consequences of this denial. The illusory brotherhood ends in crimes, wherein virtue recognizes her abstract features. “Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime,” said Saint-Just. Is it not better to assume the burden of evil than to subscribe to this abstract good which drags in its wake abstract slaughters? It is probably impossible to escape this dilemma. If the entire human population of the earth were present to each individual in its full reality, no collective action would be possible, and the air would become unbreathable for everyone. Thousands of individuals are suffering and dying vainly and unjustly at every moment, and this does not affect us. If it did, our existence would be impossible. Sade's merit lies not only in his having proclaimed aloud what everyone admits with shame to himself, but in the fact that he did not simply resign himself. He chose cruelty rather than indifference. This is probably why he finds so many echoes today, when the individual knows that he is more the victim of men's good consciences than of their wickedness. To unleash this terrifying optimism is to come to his aid. In the solitude of his prison cells, Sade lived through an ethical darkness similar to the intellectual night in which Descartes wrapped himself. He emerged with no revelation, but at least he disputed all the easy answers. If ever we hope to transcend the separateness of individuals, we may do so only on condition that we be aware of its existence. Otherwise, promises of happiness and justice conceal the worst dangers. Sade drained to the dregs the moment of selfishness, injustice, and misery, and he insisted upon its truth. The supreme value of his testimony is the fact that it disturbs us. It forces us to re-examine thoroughly the basic problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation between man and man.