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The Marquis de Sade
Part I: Simone de Beauvoir's essay 'Must We Burn Sade?', originally published as 'Faut-il bruler Sade?', translated by Annette Michelson
Part II: Selections from the writings of the Marquis de Sade (chosen and translated by Paul Dinnage)
Part III: Chronology and bibliography (compiled by Paul Dinnage)
De Sade has given his name to a perversion that is especially prevalent today. Simone de Beauvoir, in a shattering yet sober and supremely informed analysis of his work, insists that this strange man's imagination should become more widely known. Only by revealing and disseminating de Sade's long-banned words will the original ignorance that creates perversion be cleared.
This is a remarkable book by and about one of the most controversial figures in history. The ten selections from De Sade's writing include previously unpublished pieces from such masterworks as 120 DAYS IN SODOM.
Part II: Selections from the writings of the Marquis de Sade (chosen and translated by Paul Dinnage)
Part III: Chronology and bibliography (compiled by Paul Dinnage)
De Sade has given his name to a perversion that is especially prevalent today. Simone de Beauvoir, in a shattering yet sober and supremely informed analysis of his work, insists that this strange man's imagination should become more widely known. Only by revealing and disseminating de Sade's long-banned words will the original ignorance that creates perversion be cleared.
This is a remarkable book by and about one of the most controversial figures in history. The ten selections from De Sade's writing include previously unpublished pieces from such masterworks as 120 DAYS IN SODOM.
174 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1952
72 people are currently reading
1809 people want to read
About the author
Simone de Beauvoir
424 books11.6k followersWorks of Simone de Beauvoir, French writer, existentialist, and feminist, include
The Second Sex
in 1949 and
The Coming of Age
, a study in 1970 of views of different cultures on the old.
Simone de Beauvoir, an author and philosopher, wrote novels, monographs, political and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. People now best know She Came to Stay and The Mandarins , her metaphysical novels. Her treatise, a foundational contemporary tract, of 1949 detailed analysis of oppression of women.
Simone de Beauvoir, an author and philosopher, wrote novels, monographs, political and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. People now best know She Came to Stay and The Mandarins , her metaphysical novels. Her treatise, a foundational contemporary tract, of 1949 detailed analysis of oppression of women.
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November 18, 2014
de Beauvoir’s Bookended Life Concerns
1927:
"The theme is almost always this opposition of self and other that I felt upon starting to live. Now has come the time to make a synthesis of it.”
Simone de Beauvoir, philosophy student, Sorbonne, July 10, 1927
1979:
Jessica Benjamin:
"So when you wrote in 'L'lnvitée' that...what really upsets [Françoise] about Xavière is that she has to confront in her another consciousness, [is that] not an idea that particularly came (from) Sartre?
Simone de Beauvoir:
It was I who thought about that! It was absolutely not Sartre!
Jessica Benjamin:
But that is an idea which it seems to me appears later in his work.
Simone de Beauvoir:
Oh! Maybe! (Laughter) In any case, this problem . . .of the other’s consciousness, it was my problem."
Simone de Beauvoir, interview with Jessica Benjamin and Margaret Simons
Interrogatories
The interrogatory title of this essay implies a number of other questions, not all of which are expressly answered.
Who is the "we" that might do the burning? The State, society (i.e., the collective of both men and women), women (as a subset of society) or feminists (as a subset of women)?
One thing this essay is not, at least in my opinion, is a gender-based analysis or condemnation of Sade.
It is very much a philosophical and moral analysis of his works, which only in one or two instances comments on the relationship between the two sexes as such.
Overall, Beauvoir was more concerned with establishing the philosophical and moral seriousness of Sade’s works.
Pierre Klossowski - "Roberte agressée par les esprits qu'elle a censures"
An Hegelian Purple Patch
"Must We Burn Sade" was published in an amazing eight year purple patch for Beauvoir.
She started writing "The Second Sex" in 1946 and published it in 1949.
While writing "The Second Sex", she re-read Hegel’s "The Phenomenology of Spirit" (having first been exposed to Hegel in 1926 and having first read the book in its entirety in 1940).
She finished the novel "The Mandarins" in 1954. In between, she worked on this essay on her trip to the United States in 1951 (during which she stayed with Nelson Algren whom she had met on the 1947 trip that was documented in her book, "America Day by Day").
She published the essay in two parts in "Les Temps Modernes" in December, 1951 and January, 1952. It was published in book form in 1953.
I mention Hegel by way of anticipating the extent to which Beauvoir’s most famous book and this essay were influenced by her reading of "The Phenomenology of Spirit".
Reasonable Aberrations
At the time of this essay, as well as now, public opinion of Sade swings between the satanic and the divine. Some associate him with cruelty. Others hail him as a prophetic genius who heralded "Nietzsche, Stirner, Freud, and surrealism."
The scandal about his writing and ideas is understandable. The praise is a reaction. But Beauvoir equally regards the cult that deified and hailed Sade as a “divine Marquis” as a betrayal and disservice to the man and his achievements.
For her, he was "neither villain nor idol, but a man and a writer [who] has come back at last to earth, among us."
Public opinion is primarily divided along moral lines. How do we feel about the conduct which he indulged in or wrote about?
However, Beauvoir feels that his merit sits somewhere between these two extremes:
"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."
Just as Hegel built an elaborate system to explain his worldview, so did Sade. In a way, his private system was a personal moral framework designed to replace that imposed by the State or society:
"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."
A Repertory of Sexual Possibilities
Sade is associated with cruelty, but beyond that, little is understood about what he or his characters did that qualifies for this description.
In reality, his "aberrations" consisted mainly of whipping (and being whipped) and sodomy (and being sodomised), sometimes at the same time.
The debauchees were usually paid prostitutes who consented to whatever was expected of them. When Sade asked the Marseilles prostitute, Rose Keller, to consent to being "known from behind" by his valet, Latour (while Sade watched), she declined. Instead, Sade fondled and whipped her with a cat−o'−nine−tails, while he himself was buggered by Latour.
For this and similar acts, he spent a total of 27 years in prison, during most of which he converted his experiences and the products of his imagination into literature.
Regardless of our own moral judgment of these activities, Beauvoir didn’t see fit to analyse Sade solely or even primarily in terms of gender issues.
In other words, there is a sense of neutrality about what he or we get up to in the boudoir or the brothel or between the sheets:
"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."
It’s almost enough for Beavoir to justify Sade’s greatness as a writer, philosopher and moralist that:
"Sade established systematically, according to the prescriptions of a kind of synthetic art, a repertory of man's sexual possibilities."
Courtesy: ScreetownGhost, deviantArt
http://screetownghost.deviantart.com/...
Private Affairs of State
Sade believed that the State should remain out of private and moral affairs:
"It is not the opinions or vices of private individuals that are harmful to the state, but rather the behavior of public figures."
Beauvoir extrapolated:
"The real plagues [on the State and society] 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.’"
Transgression
For all of his opposition to the legislation of morality, Sade still derived greater pleasure from his activities, precisely because they were both legally and morally transgressive:
"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, there is the kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.’"
Conversely, virtue in its own right had no appeal for Sade. It was a form of empty subjection to the State or society:
"Happiness lies only in that which excites and the only thing that excites is crime…
"Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; ‘true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.’"
Eroticism
Sade’s private pleasures clearly went beyond the boundaries of both marriage and social norms at the time (even if many others indulged in them):
"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."
His fantasies were primarily sexual:
"Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite."
Ultimately, Sade’s existence becomes subordinate to eroticism:
"He subordinated his existence to his eroticism because eroticism appeared to him to be the only possible fulfillment of his existence… Sade made of his eroticism the meaning and expression of his whole existence."
The Sex Life of the Imagination
Ironically, Sade’s appetite for eroticism was satiated more by literature than by the sexual act itself:
"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."
Real life is almost secondary to literature and the life of the imagination:
"I have imagined everything conceivable in this sort of thing, but I have certainly not done, and certainly never will, all that I've imagined."
Beauvoir adds:
"…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 make-believe.
"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…that erotic universe of which, out of sensuality, boredom, defiance, and resentment, he had constructed the only world which counted for him."
Again, she highlights the link with crime and vice:
"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."
The Illusion of Sovereign Power
Still, sex has overtones of other drives. Beauvoir explains Sade in terms of a thirst for "the illusion of power" (not for power as such, but the illusion):
"’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."
The Enchanted Domain
In his capacity as author, Sade remains sovereign in the world of his literature and his imagination (to which list, we could potentially add philosophy):
"…he is free to make things happen in this forbidden domain."
Beauvoir sees analogies with the world of Gothic fiction:
"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."
Master and Slave
It’s in this context that Beauvoir analyses both Sade the person and author and his work in terms of the concepts outlined by Hegel in "The Phenomenology of Spirit".
Beauvoir had a lifelong interest in the relationship between the consciousness of the Self and the consciousness of the Other. She embraced Hegel’s analysis whole-heartedly when she became aware of it.
It features heavily in the Introduction to "The Second Sex". But it is even more integral to this essay.
The problem is that the erotic or violent conduct which we now call Sadism involves cruelty, hurt and pain inflicted by the Self against an Other. Sade refers often to "the pleasure to be derived from making people suffer."
Whether or not it is consensual, Beauvoir explains it in terms of the Self.
Only if it resulted in death or murder would it constitute a real "life and death struggle" as described by Hegel.
However, it is more obvious that the relationship between Self and Other is analogous to Hegel’s Master/Slave relationship.
According to my reading, this relationship occurs within each person’s consciousness. However, I suspect that in both "The Second Sex" and this essay, Beauvoir transfers the concept to the sensual world.
In the sensual world of "The Second Sex", the Master is invariably the male and the Slave is the female. The dilemma for women is how to go beyond the Master/Slave relationship with men and enjoy mutual recognition.
It doesn’t seem to be important to Beauvoir in this essay that Sade is a male and his activities are described from his point of view.
What seems to be important is that the male (Sade) is trapped, his development is arrested at the Master/Slave level, and hasn’t progressed or sublated to the stage of mutual recognition.
Sade remains a master, a despot, a tyrant.
Sade’s Apartness
Beauvoir believes that the sex act can be and result in mutuality, reciprocity and recognition.
However, these consequences are missing in Sade.
Sade asks, "What able−bodied man . . . does not wish . . . to bedevil his ecstasy?"
Sade remains trapped in a world in which:
"the sexual act creates the illusion of sovereign pleasure...
"Pleasure requires neither exchange, giving, reciprocity, nor gratuitous generosity. Its tyranny is that of avarice, which chooses to destroy what it cannot assimilate."
Beauvoir speculates that:
"... 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."
She sees in Sade "a combination of passionate sexual appetites with a basic emotional 'apartness' which seems to me to be the key to his eroticism."
Sade is never able to overcome the apartness or separation of the Self and the Other. He is never able to experience mutuality, reciprocity or recognition. He even went as far as to say:
"…any enjoyment is weakened when shared...
“One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater."
Isolation without Abandonment
It’s almost as if Beauvoir is suggesting that Sade has never experienced love:
"…he shrinks from the kind of equality which is created by mutual pleasure…
"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."
Sade is always self-conscious, cold, cerebral. He is afraid that if he drops his guard "freedom and consciousness would be lost in the rapture of the flesh."
Instead, he sits back, disengages and watches himself as a spectacle. Notwithstanding the presence of the debauchee, the debaucher remains effectively solitary. Sade builds this worldview into a philosophy:
"Man is isolated in the world...All creatures are born isolated and have no need of one another."
In effect, Sade's philosophy is founded on a denial of the need for recognition.
From Other to Fraternity
Just as Sade does not value the mutual recognition of Self and Other, he sees no need for fraternity:
"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?
"…My neighbor is nothing to me; there is not the slightest relationship between him and myself."
Beauvoir regards Sade's world as an "ethical darkness."
She doesn’t look to him for revelations or easy answers. There are none.
However, Beauvoir values Sade, because he forces us to ask the right questions, even if they disturb us:
"If ever we hope to transcend the separateness of individuals, we may do so only on condition that we be aware of its existence [the ethical darkness]. 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."
Or to put it in more gender-neutral Hegelian terms, the true relation between Self and Other.
SOUNDTRACK:
Wilco - "Impossible Germany" (Live)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I79m...
"Nothing more important
Than to know
Someone's listening;
Now I know
You'll be listening."
1927:
"The theme is almost always this opposition of self and other that I felt upon starting to live. Now has come the time to make a synthesis of it.”
Simone de Beauvoir, philosophy student, Sorbonne, July 10, 1927
1979:
Jessica Benjamin:
"So when you wrote in 'L'lnvitée' that...what really upsets [Françoise] about Xavière is that she has to confront in her another consciousness, [is that] not an idea that particularly came (from) Sartre?
Simone de Beauvoir:
It was I who thought about that! It was absolutely not Sartre!
Jessica Benjamin:
But that is an idea which it seems to me appears later in his work.
Simone de Beauvoir:
Oh! Maybe! (Laughter) In any case, this problem . . .of the other’s consciousness, it was my problem."
Simone de Beauvoir, interview with Jessica Benjamin and Margaret Simons
Interrogatories
The interrogatory title of this essay implies a number of other questions, not all of which are expressly answered.
Who is the "we" that might do the burning? The State, society (i.e., the collective of both men and women), women (as a subset of society) or feminists (as a subset of women)?
One thing this essay is not, at least in my opinion, is a gender-based analysis or condemnation of Sade.
It is very much a philosophical and moral analysis of his works, which only in one or two instances comments on the relationship between the two sexes as such.
Overall, Beauvoir was more concerned with establishing the philosophical and moral seriousness of Sade’s works.
Pierre Klossowski - "Roberte agressée par les esprits qu'elle a censures"
An Hegelian Purple Patch
"Must We Burn Sade" was published in an amazing eight year purple patch for Beauvoir.
She started writing "The Second Sex" in 1946 and published it in 1949.
While writing "The Second Sex", she re-read Hegel’s "The Phenomenology of Spirit" (having first been exposed to Hegel in 1926 and having first read the book in its entirety in 1940).
She finished the novel "The Mandarins" in 1954. In between, she worked on this essay on her trip to the United States in 1951 (during which she stayed with Nelson Algren whom she had met on the 1947 trip that was documented in her book, "America Day by Day").
She published the essay in two parts in "Les Temps Modernes" in December, 1951 and January, 1952. It was published in book form in 1953.
I mention Hegel by way of anticipating the extent to which Beauvoir’s most famous book and this essay were influenced by her reading of "The Phenomenology of Spirit".
Reasonable Aberrations
At the time of this essay, as well as now, public opinion of Sade swings between the satanic and the divine. Some associate him with cruelty. Others hail him as a prophetic genius who heralded "Nietzsche, Stirner, Freud, and surrealism."
The scandal about his writing and ideas is understandable. The praise is a reaction. But Beauvoir equally regards the cult that deified and hailed Sade as a “divine Marquis” as a betrayal and disservice to the man and his achievements.
For her, he was "neither villain nor idol, but a man and a writer [who] has come back at last to earth, among us."
Public opinion is primarily divided along moral lines. How do we feel about the conduct which he indulged in or wrote about?
However, Beauvoir feels that his merit sits somewhere between these two extremes:
"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."
Just as Hegel built an elaborate system to explain his worldview, so did Sade. In a way, his private system was a personal moral framework designed to replace that imposed by the State or society:
"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."
A Repertory of Sexual Possibilities
Sade is associated with cruelty, but beyond that, little is understood about what he or his characters did that qualifies for this description.
In reality, his "aberrations" consisted mainly of whipping (and being whipped) and sodomy (and being sodomised), sometimes at the same time.
The debauchees were usually paid prostitutes who consented to whatever was expected of them. When Sade asked the Marseilles prostitute, Rose Keller, to consent to being "known from behind" by his valet, Latour (while Sade watched), she declined. Instead, Sade fondled and whipped her with a cat−o'−nine−tails, while he himself was buggered by Latour.
For this and similar acts, he spent a total of 27 years in prison, during most of which he converted his experiences and the products of his imagination into literature.
Regardless of our own moral judgment of these activities, Beauvoir didn’t see fit to analyse Sade solely or even primarily in terms of gender issues.
In other words, there is a sense of neutrality about what he or we get up to in the boudoir or the brothel or between the sheets:
"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."
It’s almost enough for Beavoir to justify Sade’s greatness as a writer, philosopher and moralist that:
"Sade established systematically, according to the prescriptions of a kind of synthetic art, a repertory of man's sexual possibilities."
Courtesy: ScreetownGhost, deviantArt
http://screetownghost.deviantart.com/...
Private Affairs of State
Sade believed that the State should remain out of private and moral affairs:
"It is not the opinions or vices of private individuals that are harmful to the state, but rather the behavior of public figures."
Beauvoir extrapolated:
"The real plagues [on the State and society] 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.’"
Transgression
For all of his opposition to the legislation of morality, Sade still derived greater pleasure from his activities, precisely because they were both legally and morally transgressive:
"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, there is the kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.’"
Conversely, virtue in its own right had no appeal for Sade. It was a form of empty subjection to the State or society:
"Happiness lies only in that which excites and the only thing that excites is crime…
"Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; ‘true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.’"
Eroticism
Sade’s private pleasures clearly went beyond the boundaries of both marriage and social norms at the time (even if many others indulged in them):
"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."
His fantasies were primarily sexual:
"Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite."
Ultimately, Sade’s existence becomes subordinate to eroticism:
"He subordinated his existence to his eroticism because eroticism appeared to him to be the only possible fulfillment of his existence… Sade made of his eroticism the meaning and expression of his whole existence."
The Sex Life of the Imagination
Ironically, Sade’s appetite for eroticism was satiated more by literature than by the sexual act itself:
"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."
Real life is almost secondary to literature and the life of the imagination:
"I have imagined everything conceivable in this sort of thing, but I have certainly not done, and certainly never will, all that I've imagined."
Beauvoir adds:
"…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 make-believe.
"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…that erotic universe of which, out of sensuality, boredom, defiance, and resentment, he had constructed the only world which counted for him."
Again, she highlights the link with crime and vice:
"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."
The Illusion of Sovereign Power
Still, sex has overtones of other drives. Beauvoir explains Sade in terms of a thirst for "the illusion of power" (not for power as such, but the illusion):
"’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."
The Enchanted Domain
In his capacity as author, Sade remains sovereign in the world of his literature and his imagination (to which list, we could potentially add philosophy):
"…he is free to make things happen in this forbidden domain."
Beauvoir sees analogies with the world of Gothic fiction:
"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."
Master and Slave
It’s in this context that Beauvoir analyses both Sade the person and author and his work in terms of the concepts outlined by Hegel in "The Phenomenology of Spirit".
Beauvoir had a lifelong interest in the relationship between the consciousness of the Self and the consciousness of the Other. She embraced Hegel’s analysis whole-heartedly when she became aware of it.
It features heavily in the Introduction to "The Second Sex". But it is even more integral to this essay.
The problem is that the erotic or violent conduct which we now call Sadism involves cruelty, hurt and pain inflicted by the Self against an Other. Sade refers often to "the pleasure to be derived from making people suffer."
Whether or not it is consensual, Beauvoir explains it in terms of the Self.
Only if it resulted in death or murder would it constitute a real "life and death struggle" as described by Hegel.
However, it is more obvious that the relationship between Self and Other is analogous to Hegel’s Master/Slave relationship.
According to my reading, this relationship occurs within each person’s consciousness. However, I suspect that in both "The Second Sex" and this essay, Beauvoir transfers the concept to the sensual world.
In the sensual world of "The Second Sex", the Master is invariably the male and the Slave is the female. The dilemma for women is how to go beyond the Master/Slave relationship with men and enjoy mutual recognition.
It doesn’t seem to be important to Beauvoir in this essay that Sade is a male and his activities are described from his point of view.
What seems to be important is that the male (Sade) is trapped, his development is arrested at the Master/Slave level, and hasn’t progressed or sublated to the stage of mutual recognition.
Sade remains a master, a despot, a tyrant.
Sade’s Apartness
Beauvoir believes that the sex act can be and result in mutuality, reciprocity and recognition.
However, these consequences are missing in Sade.
Sade asks, "What able−bodied man . . . does not wish . . . to bedevil his ecstasy?"
Sade remains trapped in a world in which:
"the sexual act creates the illusion of sovereign pleasure...
"Pleasure requires neither exchange, giving, reciprocity, nor gratuitous generosity. Its tyranny is that of avarice, which chooses to destroy what it cannot assimilate."
Beauvoir speculates that:
"... 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."
She sees in Sade "a combination of passionate sexual appetites with a basic emotional 'apartness' which seems to me to be the key to his eroticism."
Sade is never able to overcome the apartness or separation of the Self and the Other. He is never able to experience mutuality, reciprocity or recognition. He even went as far as to say:
"…any enjoyment is weakened when shared...
“One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater."
Isolation without Abandonment
It’s almost as if Beauvoir is suggesting that Sade has never experienced love:
"…he shrinks from the kind of equality which is created by mutual pleasure…
"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."
Sade is always self-conscious, cold, cerebral. He is afraid that if he drops his guard "freedom and consciousness would be lost in the rapture of the flesh."
Instead, he sits back, disengages and watches himself as a spectacle. Notwithstanding the presence of the debauchee, the debaucher remains effectively solitary. Sade builds this worldview into a philosophy:
"Man is isolated in the world...All creatures are born isolated and have no need of one another."
In effect, Sade's philosophy is founded on a denial of the need for recognition.
From Other to Fraternity
Just as Sade does not value the mutual recognition of Self and Other, he sees no need for fraternity:
"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?
"…My neighbor is nothing to me; there is not the slightest relationship between him and myself."
Beauvoir regards Sade's world as an "ethical darkness."
She doesn’t look to him for revelations or easy answers. There are none.
However, Beauvoir values Sade, because he forces us to ask the right questions, even if they disturb us:
"If ever we hope to transcend the separateness of individuals, we may do so only on condition that we be aware of its existence [the ethical darkness]. 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."
Or to put it in more gender-neutral Hegelian terms, the true relation between Self and Other.
SOUNDTRACK:
Wilco - "Impossible Germany" (Live)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I79m...
"Nothing more important
Than to know
Someone's listening;
Now I know
You'll be listening."
October 21, 2017
ساد ما را مجبور می کند تا مسئله اساسی عصر خویش را به طور کامل و به شکل های مختلف بازبینی کنیم: رابطهی واقعی بین انسان و انسان
سیمون دوبوآر
سیمون دوبوآر
November 18, 2016
دوستانِ گرانقدر، در موردِ این کتاب نمیدانم چی بگویم؟! و چه بنویسم!... میدانم که در پایان بعد از خواندنِ این کتاب، حالتِ سردرگمی به شما دست خواهد داد
ابتدا درودِ فراوان بر دوستِ خردگرایِ من «امین قضایی» که همچون همیشه ترجمه هایش همچون شخصیتش، خوب است و درست
لازم به توضیح است که بگویم: فهمِ جملات و مفاهیمِ کتاب کمی پیچیده است، پَس تصور نکنید ایراد از ترجمۀ جنابِ قضایی بوده است، چراکه وی عادت به توضیحات در موردِ واژگان و روان نمودنِ ترجمه ندارد، و با پیش فرضِ اینکه خواننده از اکثرِ واژگانِ به کار برده شده آگاهی و شناختِ قبلی دارد، کتاب را ترجمه میکند
دوستانِ عزیزم، این کتابِ 66 صفحه ای، از آن دسته از کتبی است که با یک بار خواندن، فهمِ آن دشوار است... به هر حال سخن از «ساد» در میان است... واقعاً نگاهش به روابطِ جنسی بسیار عجیب بوده است، آنقدر عجیب که واژۀ «سادیسم» از او و رفتارش پدیدار شده است
اولین فکری که از ذهنِ من خطور کرد این بود که، می توانم «ساد» را درک کنم؟! نه... همدردی با «ساد» در حکمِ خیانت به اوست!... «ساد» خودپسندی را بر دوستی برتر میداند، اما این مانع از واقعیت بخشیدن به دوستی نمیشود
شهوترانیِ جمعی و سکسِ گروهی ارتباطی اصیل میانِ هرزه هایِ «ساد» ایجاد میکند،... من جسمِ خود را در جسمِ دیگری تجربه میکنم، پس همواره من برایِ من وجود دارد، واقعیتِ تکان دهندۀ همزیستی، ما را از اندیشیدن رها میکند
دوستانِ عزیزم، «اروتیسیسم» برایِ «ساد» بهترین و تنهاترین راهِ ارتباط است و به بیانِ دیگر، گویا گاییدنِ یک انسان بهتر از درک کردنِ اوست
ولی اشتباه برداشت نکنید، اعمالِ «ساد» هیچ شباهتی به «پورنوگرافی» ندارد، دوستانِ خوبم، میشود اینگونه رَوایش کرد که «ساد» به واسطۀ «اروتیسیسم»، نه تنها به طور جسمانی دخول را انجام میدهد، بلکه احساس میکند که از نظرِ روحی هم این دخول صورت گرفته است، بین «اروتیسیسم» و «پورنوگرافی» تفاوت بسیار است
خواندنِ این کتاب و قضاوت در موردِ «ساد» دقیقاً همان چیزیست که نویسندۀ این کتاب «سیمون دوبوآر»، شما را با ذکاوتِ بسیار بالا مجبور به آن میکند،... من شخصاً نمیتوانم به راهِ حل هایِ ارائه شده توسطِ «ساد» رضایت دهم، شما را نمیدانم
عزیزانم «ساد» در سال 1795 نوشته بود: لذتِ جنسی به نظرِ من هوسی است که تمامیِ دیگر هوس ها، مطیع آن هستند، و تنها در این هوس، همۀ هوس ها یکی میشوند
در نهایت باید بگویم، «ساد» در تنهاییِ سلولِ زندانش در تاریکی اخلاقی زیست، تا ما را مجبور به اندیشیدن در موردِ رابطۀ انسان با انسان کرده باشد
***************************
امیدوارم این توضیحات، کافی و مفید بوده باشه
<پیروز باشید و ایرانی>
ابتدا درودِ فراوان بر دوستِ خردگرایِ من «امین قضایی» که همچون همیشه ترجمه هایش همچون شخصیتش، خوب است و درست
لازم به توضیح است که بگویم: فهمِ جملات و مفاهیمِ کتاب کمی پیچیده است، پَس تصور نکنید ایراد از ترجمۀ جنابِ قضایی بوده است، چراکه وی عادت به توضیحات در موردِ واژگان و روان نمودنِ ترجمه ندارد، و با پیش فرضِ اینکه خواننده از اکثرِ واژگانِ به کار برده شده آگاهی و شناختِ قبلی دارد، کتاب را ترجمه میکند
دوستانِ عزیزم، این کتابِ 66 صفحه ای، از آن دسته از کتبی است که با یک بار خواندن، فهمِ آن دشوار است... به هر حال سخن از «ساد» در میان است... واقعاً نگاهش به روابطِ جنسی بسیار عجیب بوده است، آنقدر عجیب که واژۀ «سادیسم» از او و رفتارش پدیدار شده است
اولین فکری که از ذهنِ من خطور کرد این بود که، می توانم «ساد» را درک کنم؟! نه... همدردی با «ساد» در حکمِ خیانت به اوست!... «ساد» خودپسندی را بر دوستی برتر میداند، اما این مانع از واقعیت بخشیدن به دوستی نمیشود
شهوترانیِ جمعی و سکسِ گروهی ارتباطی اصیل میانِ هرزه هایِ «ساد» ایجاد میکند،... من جسمِ خود را در جسمِ دیگری تجربه میکنم، پس همواره من برایِ من وجود دارد، واقعیتِ تکان دهندۀ همزیستی، ما را از اندیشیدن رها میکند
دوستانِ عزیزم، «اروتیسیسم» برایِ «ساد» بهترین و تنهاترین راهِ ارتباط است و به بیانِ دیگر، گویا گاییدنِ یک انسان بهتر از درک کردنِ اوست
ولی اشتباه برداشت نکنید، اعمالِ «ساد» هیچ شباهتی به «پورنوگرافی» ندارد، دوستانِ خوبم، میشود اینگونه رَوایش کرد که «ساد» به واسطۀ «اروتیسیسم»، نه تنها به طور جسمانی دخول را انجام میدهد، بلکه احساس میکند که از نظرِ روحی هم این دخول صورت گرفته است، بین «اروتیسیسم» و «پورنوگرافی» تفاوت بسیار است
خواندنِ این کتاب و قضاوت در موردِ «ساد» دقیقاً همان چیزیست که نویسندۀ این کتاب «سیمون دوبوآر»، شما را با ذکاوتِ بسیار بالا مجبور به آن میکند،... من شخصاً نمیتوانم به راهِ حل هایِ ارائه شده توسطِ «ساد» رضایت دهم، شما را نمیدانم
عزیزانم «ساد» در سال 1795 نوشته بود: لذتِ جنسی به نظرِ من هوسی است که تمامیِ دیگر هوس ها، مطیع آن هستند، و تنها در این هوس، همۀ هوس ها یکی میشوند
در نهایت باید بگویم، «ساد» در تنهاییِ سلولِ زندانش در تاریکی اخلاقی زیست، تا ما را مجبور به اندیشیدن در موردِ رابطۀ انسان با انسان کرده باشد
***************************
امیدوارم این توضیحات، کافی و مفید بوده باشه
<پیروز باشید و ایرانی>
December 3, 2024
Eitelkeit als gesamtgesellschaftlicher Kitt, nicht nur für die Intellektuellen?
Simone de Beauvoir hat nicht viele philosophische, theoretische Texte verfasst. Nach einer nur äußerst kurzen Phase zwischen 1944 und 1947, der Moralphilosophie gewidmet, verstummte sie philosophisch gänzlich. In dem Sammelband Soll man de Sade verbrennen? – Drei Essays zur Moralphilosophie des Existentialismus sind die drei umfänglichsten Aufsätze von Beauvoir übersetzt, die sich allesamt, wie der Untertitel schon anzeigt, mit den moralischen Folgerungen aus der Existentialismusphilosophie französischer Provenienz beschäftigen. Vor allem versucht sie Folgendem zu begegnen:
Indessen werfen auch zahlreiche Anhänger einer nicht religiösen Moral dem Existentialismus vor, er gebe dem sittlichen Akt keinerlei objektiven Inhalt; man behauptet, dass der Existentialismus ein Subjektivismus, ja ein Solipsismus sei.
Der Solipsismusvorwurf wirkt schwer, denn er verurteilt eine philosophische Denkrichtung zur Beliebigkeit und Trivialität, da Solipsismus darin besteht, dass es keine gemeinsame Basis für Argumente zwischen je zwei Individuen gibt. Der Existentialismus, der eine tiefe Kluft zwischen den einzelnen Menschen akzeptiert, muss also einen anderen Weg für allgemeinverbindliche Aussagen finden. Exakt diesen Versuch unternimmt Beauvoir in ihren moralphilosophischen Aufsätzen und findet ihn in dem Wunsch nach Anerkennung.
Im ersten Aufsatz Soll man de Sade verbrennen? (1955) entwirft Beauvoir ein Psychogramm von Sade. Sie kommt zu dem Schluss, dass er zwar die Wahrheit der menschlichen Existenz, das Getrennt-Sein von den anderen, erfasst, aber einen einseitigen Weg einschlägt, diese Kluft zu überbrücken, nämlich die Gewalt.
Im zweiten Aufsatz Für eine Moral der Doppelsinnigkeit (1947) findet sie die Gemeinsamkeit zwischen den Individuen über die je eigene Transzendenz, die die Transzendenz des Gegenüber benötigt, um zu existieren. Nur durch die anderen, durch ihr Handeln sei das eigene Dasein gerechtfertigt. Ein Leben ohne Anerkennung sei sinnlos.
Abschließend, im dritten Aufsatz Pyrrhus und Cineas (1944) erörtert sie die Dimension des Handelns, das unvermeidliche Scheitern jedes Planes, aber die Notwendigkeit, es stets wieder zu versuchen, auch wenn es ein Pyrrhussieg bleibt.
Nicht Cineas, sondern Pyrrhus hat recht. Pyrrhus bricht auf, um zu erobern: möge er das tun. »Und dann?« Dann wird er schon sehen.
Beauvoirs Moralphilosophie steht und fällt mit ihrer Annahme, dass ein Individuum, um glücklich sein zu können, in den Augen seiner Mitmenschen gerechtfertigt sein muss. Wer diese These ablehnt oder problematisiert, wird kein Wort von dem, was sie über Gewalt, über Kunst, über Ethik und Politik in diesen Aufsätzen schreibt, einordnen, verstehen noch ihm zustimmen können. Für Beauvoir bildet die Eitelkeit, der Wunsch nach Anerkennung, die Sehnsucht nach Respekt, Verehrung und Begehren das Medium allgemeinverbindlichen Handelns. In der Eitelkeit werden die Differenzen zeitweilig versöhnt: Sie benötigt einen freien Willen, um sich in einer freiwilligen Anerkennung zu laben. Aus diesem Grunde kämpft der freie Mensch für die Freiheit aller Menschen, nämlich um ein umso größeres Publikum zu besitzen, das ihn verehren, rechtfertigen, zum Vorbild nehmen kann.
Der Zauber der Liebe, der Furcht, der Bewunderung kann einen Menschen in einen Gott verwandeln; der demütig Anbetende ist nur ein Objekt, sein Idol jedoch ist für niemanden ein Objekt; auf wen hin könnte man diese reine, höchste Freiheit übersteigen? Darüber hinaus gibt es nichts mehr.
Eine sehr stimmige, überaus krasse und ehrliche Moralphilosophie, die auf ihre Weise tatsächlich den Solipsismusvorwurf der Existentialisten zugunsten der Eitelkeit entkräftet und auch vor Legitimation von revolutionärer Gewalt nicht zurückschreckt (vor allem vor dem Hintergrund der Résistance-Erfahrungen). Dennoch nimmt es kaum Wunder, dass sie und auch Jean-Paul Sartre dieses Projekt nicht weiterverfolgt haben. Die Ehrlichkeit und unumwundene Verlautbarung der eigenen Existenzwünsche besitzt aber tatsächlich Vorbildcharakter.
Simone de Beauvoir hat nicht viele philosophische, theoretische Texte verfasst. Nach einer nur äußerst kurzen Phase zwischen 1944 und 1947, der Moralphilosophie gewidmet, verstummte sie philosophisch gänzlich. In dem Sammelband Soll man de Sade verbrennen? – Drei Essays zur Moralphilosophie des Existentialismus sind die drei umfänglichsten Aufsätze von Beauvoir übersetzt, die sich allesamt, wie der Untertitel schon anzeigt, mit den moralischen Folgerungen aus der Existentialismusphilosophie französischer Provenienz beschäftigen. Vor allem versucht sie Folgendem zu begegnen:
Indessen werfen auch zahlreiche Anhänger einer nicht religiösen Moral dem Existentialismus vor, er gebe dem sittlichen Akt keinerlei objektiven Inhalt; man behauptet, dass der Existentialismus ein Subjektivismus, ja ein Solipsismus sei.
Der Solipsismusvorwurf wirkt schwer, denn er verurteilt eine philosophische Denkrichtung zur Beliebigkeit und Trivialität, da Solipsismus darin besteht, dass es keine gemeinsame Basis für Argumente zwischen je zwei Individuen gibt. Der Existentialismus, der eine tiefe Kluft zwischen den einzelnen Menschen akzeptiert, muss also einen anderen Weg für allgemeinverbindliche Aussagen finden. Exakt diesen Versuch unternimmt Beauvoir in ihren moralphilosophischen Aufsätzen und findet ihn in dem Wunsch nach Anerkennung.
Im ersten Aufsatz Soll man de Sade verbrennen? (1955) entwirft Beauvoir ein Psychogramm von Sade. Sie kommt zu dem Schluss, dass er zwar die Wahrheit der menschlichen Existenz, das Getrennt-Sein von den anderen, erfasst, aber einen einseitigen Weg einschlägt, diese Kluft zu überbrücken, nämlich die Gewalt.
Im zweiten Aufsatz Für eine Moral der Doppelsinnigkeit (1947) findet sie die Gemeinsamkeit zwischen den Individuen über die je eigene Transzendenz, die die Transzendenz des Gegenüber benötigt, um zu existieren. Nur durch die anderen, durch ihr Handeln sei das eigene Dasein gerechtfertigt. Ein Leben ohne Anerkennung sei sinnlos.
Abschließend, im dritten Aufsatz Pyrrhus und Cineas (1944) erörtert sie die Dimension des Handelns, das unvermeidliche Scheitern jedes Planes, aber die Notwendigkeit, es stets wieder zu versuchen, auch wenn es ein Pyrrhussieg bleibt.
Nicht Cineas, sondern Pyrrhus hat recht. Pyrrhus bricht auf, um zu erobern: möge er das tun. »Und dann?« Dann wird er schon sehen.
Beauvoirs Moralphilosophie steht und fällt mit ihrer Annahme, dass ein Individuum, um glücklich sein zu können, in den Augen seiner Mitmenschen gerechtfertigt sein muss. Wer diese These ablehnt oder problematisiert, wird kein Wort von dem, was sie über Gewalt, über Kunst, über Ethik und Politik in diesen Aufsätzen schreibt, einordnen, verstehen noch ihm zustimmen können. Für Beauvoir bildet die Eitelkeit, der Wunsch nach Anerkennung, die Sehnsucht nach Respekt, Verehrung und Begehren das Medium allgemeinverbindlichen Handelns. In der Eitelkeit werden die Differenzen zeitweilig versöhnt: Sie benötigt einen freien Willen, um sich in einer freiwilligen Anerkennung zu laben. Aus diesem Grunde kämpft der freie Mensch für die Freiheit aller Menschen, nämlich um ein umso größeres Publikum zu besitzen, das ihn verehren, rechtfertigen, zum Vorbild nehmen kann.
Der Zauber der Liebe, der Furcht, der Bewunderung kann einen Menschen in einen Gott verwandeln; der demütig Anbetende ist nur ein Objekt, sein Idol jedoch ist für niemanden ein Objekt; auf wen hin könnte man diese reine, höchste Freiheit übersteigen? Darüber hinaus gibt es nichts mehr.
Eine sehr stimmige, überaus krasse und ehrliche Moralphilosophie, die auf ihre Weise tatsächlich den Solipsismusvorwurf der Existentialisten zugunsten der Eitelkeit entkräftet und auch vor Legitimation von revolutionärer Gewalt nicht zurückschreckt (vor allem vor dem Hintergrund der Résistance-Erfahrungen). Dennoch nimmt es kaum Wunder, dass sie und auch Jean-Paul Sartre dieses Projekt nicht weiterverfolgt haben. Die Ehrlichkeit und unumwundene Verlautbarung der eigenen Existenzwünsche besitzt aber tatsächlich Vorbildcharakter.
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June 16, 2024Kitap Sadizm kelimesini borçlu olduğumuz Sade'ı tanımak, onu acı vermekten keyif almaya iten şeyleri anlamak adına girişilmiş bir uğraş. Beauvoir'e göre Sade'ı diğerlerinden ayıran sadece kendine ve çevresindekilere karşı daha dürüst olması. Sade'ın dünyada olup biten zorbalıklara kayıtsız kalıp, toplumu yaşanabilir kılmak için hakimlerin ve yargıçların hükmüne güvenle sığınan insanın kayıtsızlığının, bir zorbanınkinden daha kibirli ve alçakça olduğuna inandığı için zorbalığı seçtiğini söylüyor.
''Öldürmek var, yargılamak yoktur Sade'a göre.''
Böylece Sade, kolay olanı seçip uyumluluğun altına sığınarak kendi hayatını sağlama alanlara karşılık, kendi canı pahasına, hapse düşmek, izole edilmek pahasına acı vermeyi, içinden gelen gücü yaşatmayı tercih ediyor. Beauvoir'e göre, Sade bunu yaparak işkence edilene de gücü ele almak için açık bir kapı bırakıyor. Güçlü ve zorba doğanın karşısındaki acziyetini, doğayı groteskçe taklit edip ona karşı gelmekte buluyor Sade. Kendini doğadan üstün sayıp, doğanın yasalarını yumuşatarak kültüre entegre eden topluma karşılık, Sade insanı hayvandan farksız görmüyor.
''Suçlu bir şekilde öldürme edimi insanın tek hüneridir.''
Sade hem kendi yaşamı, hem de karakterleri aracılığıyla güç uygulamanın, zorbalığın kibirini, hakimlerin yargıçların kibirine tercih ediyor. Suçlu, zalim olarak görülmeyi göze alarak içinden geleni yapma cesaretine sahip. En azından içinden bir şeyler geliyor...
Ben Sade üzerinden güç-suç-yasalar-doğa üzerine ilerleyen tartışmayı çok doyurucu buldum. Kısa ve öz, okuması çok keyifli bir kitap. Fikirlerine karşı çıksanız bile temellendirmeleri çok karşı koyulabilecek türden değil. Şöyle de bir avantajı var savunduklarının; kültürü o kadar entegre bir şekilde taşıyoruz ki zihnimizde, kültürün dayattıklarını kendimizin sanıp benimserken hiç şüpheye düşmüyoruz. Böyle olunca da kendimize ait olan, içimizde dönüp duran şeyleri tanımaktan uzak kalıyoruz. Birine acı çektirmek, ölen birini görmek gibi şeylerin düşüncesi bile tiksinç geliyor belki. Ama bunlar ölümle, üstelik de temelinde kendi ölümümüzle ilgili tasarılarımızdan doğduğu sürece ne kadar ''öteki''ni düşünerek varılan yargılar ayırt etmeye pek muktedir değiliz. Sade'ın bu iki yüzlülüğü grotesk bir tutumla gözümüze soktuğunu düşünüyorum.
Sade'in işkence ettiği kadınlardan biri olmak istemezdim ama bir yandan da Sade'ın yaptıkları ve yazdıkları üzerine düşünmek keyif veriyor. Ben de işkence edilen olmak pahasına, işkence etmeyi göze aldığımda bu iki yüzlülüğümden kurtulup, başımın üzerinde ateşten bir hale ile dolaşacağım günleri özlemle bekliyorum.
''Öldürmek var, yargılamak yoktur Sade'a göre.''
Böylece Sade, kolay olanı seçip uyumluluğun altına sığınarak kendi hayatını sağlama alanlara karşılık, kendi canı pahasına, hapse düşmek, izole edilmek pahasına acı vermeyi, içinden gelen gücü yaşatmayı tercih ediyor. Beauvoir'e göre, Sade bunu yaparak işkence edilene de gücü ele almak için açık bir kapı bırakıyor. Güçlü ve zorba doğanın karşısındaki acziyetini, doğayı groteskçe taklit edip ona karşı gelmekte buluyor Sade. Kendini doğadan üstün sayıp, doğanın yasalarını yumuşatarak kültüre entegre eden topluma karşılık, Sade insanı hayvandan farksız görmüyor.
''Suçlu bir şekilde öldürme edimi insanın tek hüneridir.''
Sade hem kendi yaşamı, hem de karakterleri aracılığıyla güç uygulamanın, zorbalığın kibirini, hakimlerin yargıçların kibirine tercih ediyor. Suçlu, zalim olarak görülmeyi göze alarak içinden geleni yapma cesaretine sahip. En azından içinden bir şeyler geliyor...
Ben Sade üzerinden güç-suç-yasalar-doğa üzerine ilerleyen tartışmayı çok doyurucu buldum. Kısa ve öz, okuması çok keyifli bir kitap. Fikirlerine karşı çıksanız bile temellendirmeleri çok karşı koyulabilecek türden değil. Şöyle de bir avantajı var savunduklarının; kültürü o kadar entegre bir şekilde taşıyoruz ki zihnimizde, kültürün dayattıklarını kendimizin sanıp benimserken hiç şüpheye düşmüyoruz. Böyle olunca da kendimize ait olan, içimizde dönüp duran şeyleri tanımaktan uzak kalıyoruz. Birine acı çektirmek, ölen birini görmek gibi şeylerin düşüncesi bile tiksinç geliyor belki. Ama bunlar ölümle, üstelik de temelinde kendi ölümümüzle ilgili tasarılarımızdan doğduğu sürece ne kadar ''öteki''ni düşünerek varılan yargılar ayırt etmeye pek muktedir değiliz. Sade'ın bu iki yüzlülüğü grotesk bir tutumla gözümüze soktuğunu düşünüyorum.
Sade'in işkence ettiği kadınlardan biri olmak istemezdim ama bir yandan da Sade'ın yaptıkları ve yazdıkları üzerine düşünmek keyif veriyor. Ben de işkence edilen olmak pahasına, işkence etmeyi göze aldığımda bu iki yüzlülüğümden kurtulup, başımın üzerinde ateşten bir hale ile dolaşacağım günleri özlemle bekliyorum.
August 16, 2018
"Her an boşu boşuna, haksız olarak, binlerce insan acı çekiyor, ölüyor, ama hiçbirimizin kılı bile kıpırdamıyor buna: Varlığımız kendi olanaklarını yalnız böyle olaylar pahasına kazanıyor da ondan. Sade'ın erdemi herkesin yalnız kendi kendine utançla itiraf ettiği şeyi yüksek sesle bağırmasında değil, Sade bu işin kavgasını da üstlenmiştir. Kayıtsızlığa karşı kıyıcılığı seçmiştir. Bireyin kendisini insanların kötülüğünden çok iyiniyetine kurban gittiğini sandığı şu çağda bu kadar yankı uyandırması da bundandır; bu müthiş iyimserliği yıkmak konusunda bireyin yardımına koşmuştur Sade.."
Zaman zaman konu çok dağılsa da sanırım kitabın özeti buydu.
Zaman zaman konu çok dağılsa da sanırım kitabın özeti buydu.
Read
January 20, 2020Sade okumadan önce onun hakkında yazılan bir kitap okumak istedim. Benim için iyi bir seçim oldu.
Read
March 19, 2017Sometimes the legacy of a writer can be more interesting than the writer himself. Donatien Alphonse François, le Marquis de Sade, has not gone into history as an especially gifted author. Most people will remember him as the ‘inventor’ of sadism, as the ultimate libertine. During his lifetime, of which he spent 27 years in various prisons and asylums, he wrote countless novels, short stories and plays.; most of them consisting of long, detailed descriptions of murder, rape, torture, blasphemy and coprophilia, with the occasional quasi-philosophic conversation. They aren’t necessarily great, or even good literature, but they do, in my opinion at least, give an fascinating insight in the mind of an psychotic man and a very specific 18th century subculture.
His works were, not entirely without reason, banned is most countries. Although they still circulated in small groups (see Luis Buñuel’s 1930 film L’age d’or), they seemed to have been forgotten. This changed during the middle of the 20th century. Society became more open and some countries decided to life their bans. It led to two reactions. On the one hand there were those who argued that the books should immediately be banned again. On the other hand there were those who defended De Sade, those who admired his unique view on society.
One of the defenders was the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In her essay Faut-il brûler Sade she asks if the Marquis still has any relevance in our modern society. The answer, she quickly reveals, is yes. She immediately admits that he didn’t have much literary talent. His philosophy however, could still be very useful. She sees him as the ultimate fighter for freedom. His look on the human condition and the relationship between the individual and the state could still be very relevant in today’s society.
She tries to explain De Sade’s works within this interpretation. At times it feels a bit far-fetched. Her explanations of De Sade’s thoughts not always substantiated and she tends to make quite a lot of assumptions without any real evidence. His open atheism, homosexuality and stance against capital punishment were indeed extremely progressive for 18th century standards. Painting him as a philosophical hero may go too far. It’s more likely that he just tried to provoke as many people as possible with his writings. He may certainly have had philosophical ideas, but De Beauvoir’s interpretation is too improbable.
If you want a realistic, conventional biography of De Sade and his works, this essay will not be very interesting. There are simply too many assumptions for a serious psychological profile. It does however, give a unique view of this man; one that may not be entirely realistic, but is nevertheless an intriguing one.
His works were, not entirely without reason, banned is most countries. Although they still circulated in small groups (see Luis Buñuel’s 1930 film L’age d’or), they seemed to have been forgotten. This changed during the middle of the 20th century. Society became more open and some countries decided to life their bans. It led to two reactions. On the one hand there were those who argued that the books should immediately be banned again. On the other hand there were those who defended De Sade, those who admired his unique view on society.
One of the defenders was the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In her essay Faut-il brûler Sade she asks if the Marquis still has any relevance in our modern society. The answer, she quickly reveals, is yes. She immediately admits that he didn’t have much literary talent. His philosophy however, could still be very useful. She sees him as the ultimate fighter for freedom. His look on the human condition and the relationship between the individual and the state could still be very relevant in today’s society.
She tries to explain De Sade’s works within this interpretation. At times it feels a bit far-fetched. Her explanations of De Sade’s thoughts not always substantiated and she tends to make quite a lot of assumptions without any real evidence. His open atheism, homosexuality and stance against capital punishment were indeed extremely progressive for 18th century standards. Painting him as a philosophical hero may go too far. It’s more likely that he just tried to provoke as many people as possible with his writings. He may certainly have had philosophical ideas, but De Beauvoir’s interpretation is too improbable.
If you want a realistic, conventional biography of De Sade and his works, this essay will not be very interesting. There are simply too many assumptions for a serious psychological profile. It does however, give a unique view of this man; one that may not be entirely realistic, but is nevertheless an intriguing one.
June 19, 2016
خیلی سخت بود خوندنش و حتی درکشم سخت بود
April 26, 2016
خیلی سخت و پیچیده توضیح داده بود و در مقابل نقد آلبر کامو در مورد ساد این کتاب هیچی نبود
April 24, 2025
"Sade’i yakmalı mı?" – Yoksa psikiyatriste mi göndermeliydik?
Simone de Beauvoir’un felsefi ve edebi ciddiyetle incelediği Marquis de Sade, bende daha çok patolojik bir erotizm vakası izlenimi bıraktı. Adam mazoşist mi desem, sadist mi desem, ikisi de yetmez. Bu başka bir boyut. Cinselliği şiddetle birleştirmekten, başkalarına acı çektirirken zevk almaktan ve hatta bu acıyı sistemli bir estetik gibi sunmaktan haz alan bir karakter. Sade, düpedüz bir cinsel hedonist — ama işin karanlık tarafında.
Ama mesele sadece seks değil. Bu metinlerin arkasında çok daha rahatsız edici bir şey var: Tiranlık. Sade’in kurduğu evrenlerde mutlak güç daima bir kişide toplanıyor. Diğerleri nesneleşmiş, itaat etmeye mahkûm. Kadın, erkek, çocuk, hizmetçi fark etmiyor — hepsi bir "efendi"nin arzularını doyurmak için var. Bu, sadece erotik bir anlatı değil; bu, mutlak kudretin ve zalimliğin estetiği. İnsana "arzu" kılığında sunulan şey aslında çok daha karanlık: Zorbalık.
Karısı desen ayrı telden çalıyor, yeri geliyor zindan kaçırıyor, yüzlerce sevgiliyle olan aldatmaları affediyor, yeri geliyor, yakalanıp zindana atılmasını sağlıyor. Baldızla yatmalar, uşakla seks deneyleri, yüzlerce kadınla ilişki derken Sade’in hayatı bir tür erotik laboratuvara dönüşmüş. Kadının biriyle sevişirken odadaki başka bir kadını kırbaçlamak mı dersin, yoksa hizmetçisiyle başka bir kızı seviştirmek mi… İnsanın midesine oturan hikâyeler. Ve işin kötüsü, bunu sadece cinsel bir sapkınlık değil, bir düşünsel özgürlük pratiği olarak savunmaya çalışıyor.
Beauvoir onu “özgürlük düşüncesini uçlara taşıyan biri” olarak okuyor ama ben daha çok uçuruma savrulmuş bir ruh görüyorum. Ahlaki sınırların test edilmesi mi bu, yoksa sadece sınırsız arzulara ve iktidar saplantısına kurban gitmiş bir adamın psikolojik çözülmesi mi? Belki de ikisi birden.
Arzu nerede başlar, şiddet nerede biter? Ahlak nedir, kime göredir? Tiranlık sadece siyasette mi olur? Ve biz neden bu kadar rahatsız olmamıza rağmen hâlâ okuyoruz & yazıyoruz Sade’i?
Simone de Beauvoir’un felsefi ve edebi ciddiyetle incelediği Marquis de Sade, bende daha çok patolojik bir erotizm vakası izlenimi bıraktı. Adam mazoşist mi desem, sadist mi desem, ikisi de yetmez. Bu başka bir boyut. Cinselliği şiddetle birleştirmekten, başkalarına acı çektirirken zevk almaktan ve hatta bu acıyı sistemli bir estetik gibi sunmaktan haz alan bir karakter. Sade, düpedüz bir cinsel hedonist — ama işin karanlık tarafında.
Ama mesele sadece seks değil. Bu metinlerin arkasında çok daha rahatsız edici bir şey var: Tiranlık. Sade’in kurduğu evrenlerde mutlak güç daima bir kişide toplanıyor. Diğerleri nesneleşmiş, itaat etmeye mahkûm. Kadın, erkek, çocuk, hizmetçi fark etmiyor — hepsi bir "efendi"nin arzularını doyurmak için var. Bu, sadece erotik bir anlatı değil; bu, mutlak kudretin ve zalimliğin estetiği. İnsana "arzu" kılığında sunulan şey aslında çok daha karanlık: Zorbalık.
Karısı desen ayrı telden çalıyor, yeri geliyor zindan kaçırıyor, yüzlerce sevgiliyle olan aldatmaları affediyor, yeri geliyor, yakalanıp zindana atılmasını sağlıyor. Baldızla yatmalar, uşakla seks deneyleri, yüzlerce kadınla ilişki derken Sade’in hayatı bir tür erotik laboratuvara dönüşmüş. Kadının biriyle sevişirken odadaki başka bir kadını kırbaçlamak mı dersin, yoksa hizmetçisiyle başka bir kızı seviştirmek mi… İnsanın midesine oturan hikâyeler. Ve işin kötüsü, bunu sadece cinsel bir sapkınlık değil, bir düşünsel özgürlük pratiği olarak savunmaya çalışıyor.
Beauvoir onu “özgürlük düşüncesini uçlara taşıyan biri” olarak okuyor ama ben daha çok uçuruma savrulmuş bir ruh görüyorum. Ahlaki sınırların test edilmesi mi bu, yoksa sadece sınırsız arzulara ve iktidar saplantısına kurban gitmiş bir adamın psikolojik çözülmesi mi? Belki de ikisi birden.
Arzu nerede başlar, şiddet nerede biter? Ahlak nedir, kime göredir? Tiranlık sadece siyasette mi olur? Ve biz neden bu kadar rahatsız olmamıza rağmen hâlâ okuyoruz & yazıyoruz Sade’i?
November 12, 2023
از آنجایی که جامعه و طبیعت لذات او را جرم تلقی میکرد، او خودِ جرم را به لذت تبدیل کرد. او مینویسد: «این ابژهی عیاشی نیست که ما را تهییج میکند، بلکه ایدهی شر است.»
July 31, 2020
این کتاب بیان میکند که ساد، هرچه بود؛ غلط یا درست؛ بد یا نیک، زشت یا زیبا، ستمگر با ستمدیده، بر واقعیت خودش ایستاد و از آن دفاع کرد و همین شیوهی دفاع کردنش بود که باعث ماندگاریش شد. ساد به جای تسلیم شدن، جنگید و اصول را به چالش کشید.
October 15, 2025
ja verbrand hem pls
October 22, 2015
Marquis de Sade'ı bir feminist gözüyle irdelemesini beklerken onun cinsel ahlaka öfkesini yazdıklarıyla vermesine değinilerde bulunmuş ve onu olumlamıştır. Cinsel tabular ve olmazsa olmaz ahlak bekçiliğinin kuyusunu kazan ve insanın en derinden sakladığı kendi sırlarını bile günyüzü eden Marquis de Sade (bence) anlaşılmadı ve uzunca da anlaşılmayacak.
November 2, 2017
اه، کشتارگران، زندانبان ها و ابلهان همهی رژیم ها و حکومت ها، چه وقت خواهد رسید که علم آموزش دادن انسان را به علمِ کشتن و زندان انداختن او ترجیح دهید؟
June 16, 2022
jossain 3-4 tähden välillä liikutaan…
kamppailin nimikkoesseen kaa
”Uskoakseni tämä onkin yksi kirjallisuuden täysin korvaamattomista ja olennaisista tehtävistä: se auttaa meitä kommunikaatioon alueella, joka on kaikkein yksinäisintä meissä ja joka toisaalta liittää meidät kaikkein läheisimmin toisiimme.”
kamppailin nimikkoesseen kaa
”Uskoakseni tämä onkin yksi kirjallisuuden täysin korvaamattomista ja olennaisista tehtävistä: se auttaa meitä kommunikaatioon alueella, joka on kaikkein yksinäisintä meissä ja joka toisaalta liittää meidät kaikkein läheisimmin toisiimme.”
July 30, 2019
Marquis de Sade'ın hayatına ve felsefesine Simone de Beauvoir tarafından güzel bir bakış olmuş. Bu kitapla hem Sade'ın hayatına dair önemli birkaç şeyi öğrenmek mümkün oluyor hem de Sade'ın felsefesini Beauvoir'ya göre genel olarak kavrama imkânı elde ediyorsunuz.. Bundan önce yine Sade'a dair Pierre Klossowski'nin Komşum Sade kitabını okumuştum. Her ne kadar Sade'ı Yakmalı Mı'ya göre daha derin bir araştırma ve inceleme söz konusu olsa da Sade'ı Yakmalı Mı daha yalın ve temel bir anlatıma sahip. Bu kitapta da yer yer Klossowski'nin görüşlerine yer verilmiş ve zaman zaman Beauvoir'ca eleştirilmiş. Eğer bu Marquis de Sade kimdir, genel olarak felsefesi nedir öğrenmek istiyorsanız hem Sade'ı Yakmalı Mı'yı hem de Komşum Sade'ı tavsiye ederim; ancak Komşum Sade dediğim gibi Sade'ı Yakmalı Mı'ya göre daha ağır, o nedenle ilk olarak bu kitaptan başlamak faydalı olabilir.
January 3, 2013
Simone de Beauvoir attempts to explain de Sade's thinking. There are some perceptive comments by her and interesting biographical details from what we know of his life. It probably helps to read most of his novels before reading this otherwise it can seem complicated and does contain plot spoilers.
August 17, 2019
«مغرور، تند مزاج، سودایی و افراطی در همهچیز با قوهی تخیلی فاسد که تاکنون نظیر آن دیده نشده است. خلاصهی کلام من اینطوری هستم، یا مرا میکشید و یا همانطور که هستم قبولم میکنید چون من عوض نخواهم شد.»
و آنها کشتن او را برمیگزینند.
ساد دلالتگر اخلاق سیاسی است، آنهم به واسطهی سکسوالیتهای بیمرز. روشنگری ناگزیر از مازاد خویش است؛ مازادی که ساد آن را به تصویر میکشد و روشنگری را به وحشت میاندازد.
شاید نوشتهی دوبووار در قیاس با عقل ساد بلانشو و ساد همسایهی من کلسوفسکی بررسی ضعیفتری بهنظر برسد اما همچنان جزو معدود منابع و متونی است که ما در فارسی، راجعبه ساد در اختیار داریم.
آری، «باید وحشت آفرید؛ آنچنان که -هرگز- کسی حتی شبیهش را هم ندیده باشد.»
و آنها کشتن او را برمیگزینند.
ساد دلالتگر اخلاق سیاسی است، آنهم به واسطهی سکسوالیتهای بیمرز. روشنگری ناگزیر از مازاد خویش است؛ مازادی که ساد آن را به تصویر میکشد و روشنگری را به وحشت میاندازد.
شاید نوشتهی دوبووار در قیاس با عقل ساد بلانشو و ساد همسایهی من کلسوفسکی بررسی ضعیفتری بهنظر برسد اما همچنان جزو معدود منابع و متونی است که ما در فارسی، راجعبه ساد در اختیار داریم.
آری، «باید وحشت آفرید؛ آنچنان که -هرگز- کسی حتی شبیهش را هم ندیده باشد.»
January 29, 2025
• “Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which you have 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 my slow degrees in the boredom of the dungeon and then by calumny and oblivion. This latter death he had himself desired. “I like to think that my memory will be effaced from the minds of men”
• The memory of Sade has been disfigured by preposterous legends; his very name has buckled under the weight of such words as “sadism” and “sadistic”
• 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.
• 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 startling nor 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 neither as author nor as sexual pervert he compels our relationship. It is by virtue of the relationship which he created between those 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
• 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 will to remain incommunicable.
• Sade’s life and personality remain obscure on many points. We have no authentic portrait of him
o Marseille trial testimony: handsome figure of a man, full faced. He’s 53 then.
o He gained weight after, prevent remains of grace and elegance
• Little information on his childhood. Came to know resentment and violence at early age.
• One might try to deduce his life from his work, e.g. Klossowski who sees in Sade’s implacable hatred of his mother they key to his life and work
• When we meet Sade he is already mature
• Superficially, Safe at 23 was like all other young aristocrats of his time. Cultured, theater, arts, reading. Dissipated, kept a mistress—la Beauvoisin—and frequented brothels. He married (ReneePelagie de Montreiul) without enthusiasm and in conference to parental wishes, a young girl of the petty aristocracy.
• Was arrested months after wedding for excesses that, we have letters, he begged the governor to keep secret the reason of arrest.
• A year later an Inspector warns procuresses to stop giving their girls to the Marquis
• He realizes that there is no conciliation possible between his social existence and his private pleasures.
• He had not the slightest wish to renounce his privileges.
• Other young aristocrats encountered similar declining class position, loss of concrete power and no longer retaining any real hold on the world. They try to revive this symbolically, in the privacy of the bedchamber the status for which they were nostalgic, that of the lone and sovereign feudal despot.
• I am quite prepared to believe that he was a coward. Beyond the walls of his “little house” it did not occur to him to make full use of his strength
• If he talked so much about the strength of his soul, it was not because he really possessed it, but because he longed for it.
• The fear of want haunted him. A symptom of a much more generalized anxiety. He was maladjusted. Behavior disorderly. Accumulated debts, flying into rage, running away or yielding at 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.
• He subordinated his experience into his eroticism because eroticism appeared to him to be the only possible fulfillment of his existence.
• Some sexual perverts must give themselves away.
• Scandal of 1763> He reacted first with prayer, humiliation, shame. Begged to be allowed to see his wife
• Sade tells us repeatedly that his ultimate attitude has its roots in resentment
• To inflict enjoyment—Sade understood this 150 years before the psychoanalysts, and his work abound in victims submitted to pleasure before being tortured—can be tyrannical violence; and the torturer disguised as lover delights to see the credulous lover, swooning with voluptuousness and gratitude, mistake cruelty for tenderness
• Madame de Sade concealed his delinquencies for years. Abetted. Sade never displayed the least gratitude.
o she was his most triumphant success.
• Sade was finally beaten by his mother-in-law and by the law, and was an accomplice of this defeat.
• Two short terms in prison
• Three years of exile, playing husband and lord conscientiously. Two children by his wife.
• 1771 imprisoned for debt, released. His virtuous zeal has cooled off.
• seduces SIL
• 1771 “the affair of the aphrodisiac candies” takes proportions. He and his valet Latour sentenced to death in absentia. Effigy’s burned in town square of Aix.
• He was arrested and his wife helped him escape. He remained a hunted man—no more normal life.
• 1777 MIL has him arrested (she never forgave him for marrying her daughter)
• And now begins another story. For 11 years a man lay dying in captivity but a writer was born. The man was quickly broken. Reduced to impotence, not knowing how long his imprisonment would last, his mind wandered in delirious speculation.
• The flesh surrendered, and he sought compensation for his sexual starvation in the pleasures of the table. ED binging.
• From 1782 on he demanded literature afford him what life no longer granted him: excitement, etc.
• He wrote as he ate, in a frenzy.
• Sade freed 1790. Wife asked for separation. His kids stranger to him.
• 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.
• 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.
• He’s publishing accounts of his assaults, not fearing confinement. Locked up 1801 until death.
• 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
• Sade made of his eroticism the meaning and expression of his whole existence.
• To say that he tried everything and liked everything is to beg the question.
• His accomplices and victims kept quiet, save the two flagrant scandals. His journals and memoirs lost, his letters cautious, and in his books, he events more than he reveals about himself.
• Sade established systematically, according to the prescriptions of a kind of SYNTHETIC ART, a repertory of man’s sexual possibilities.
o He certainly never experienced nor even dreams them all up himself.
o Not only does he tell tall stories, but most of the time, he tells them badly.
o Nevertheless, there are some situations in his novels which he treats with special indulgences. These we must examine.
• 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
• As a result of his immoderateness, the sexual act creates the illusion of sovereign pleasure which gives it its incomparable value in Sades eyes
o Two partners merging in ambiguous unity
• Normally, it is as a result of the vertigo of the other made flesh that one is spellbound within his own flesh.
• 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 concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is impaired. Any enjoyment is weaker 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.
• Sodomy: there is no perversion of which he speaks so often ad with so much satisfaction, and even impassioned vehemence.
• Was Sade a sodomite? Was he basically masochistic?
o 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
o More than once of Sade’s characters feels a deep disgust for women’s “fronts”
o Some confirmed homosexuals in his novels.
o The contempt and disgust which Sade really felt for these servile, tearful, mystified and passive creatures runs all through his work.
o Was it his mother whom he loathed in them?
o Or did he see in them his double rather than his complement? His great female villains have more warmth and life than his heroes, not only for aesthetic reasons but because they were closer to him.
There is certainly something of him in Juliette
o It is impossible to tell to what extent women were anything but surrogates and toys for Sade.
o It may be said that his sexual character was essentially anal.
o Sade openly acknowledged his coprophilia. Fantasies, though—to what extent are practiced?
o His gluttony in prison: eating can be a substitute for erotic activity only if there is some infantile equivalence between gastrointestinal and sexual functions. He sees a close bond between food orgy and erotic orgy.
o Coprophilia has another fold: the ugly. His linking of eroticism with vileness is as original as his linking it with cruelty. Beauty is too simple. The man who has relations with filth, like the man who wounds or is wounded, fulfills himself as flesh.
o Fetish: 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 y becoming an inert object.
o 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
o He participates in the passivity he discloses
o His ethics: whether through cruelty or befoulment, the aim is to attain evil. This is the significance of his cruelty and masochism.
o There is one act that 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: murder.
o It has often been maintained that murder wa the supreme end of sexuality in Sade.
o 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.
o Murder represents the exacerbated demand for unrestrained and fearless freedom
o Did he only wish to shock?
o He hated the mawkish sensibility which the time confused with poetry
o 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. He borrowed the literary forms and the tried and test doctrines of contemporary society for this. 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 it
o It was, paradoxically, the very necessity of Sade’s work which imposed upon it its aesthetic limits.
o There is no future either for or in his work
Not only do the orgies, to which he invites us, tale 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.
Unless eroticism has some social, familial, or human basis, it ceases to be in any way extraordinary.
Biological crudity reverts.
Systematically exhausts the anatomical possibilities of the human body, but they do not reveal uncommon emotional complexes
He fails to endow them with aesthetic truth
Yet his forms of sexual behavior are unknown until them, mother-hatred, passive sodomy, frigidity, etc.
o Are we, then, to admire him as a real innovator in psychology?
o The impartial reader hesitates.
o He anticipates Freudian pansexuality. He makes eroticism the mainspring of human behavior.
o Sade’s nature was thoroughly irreligious. No trace of metaphysical anxiety in him
o Others emphasize role of nature. His idea of relation of man to nature: expressions of hesitation of a thinking that at times restrains its boldness and at others breaks completely loose.
o Eroticism appears in Sade as a mode of communication, the only valid ne. The penis is the shortest path between n two hearts
o To sympathize too readily with Sade is to betray him. For it is our misery, subjection, and death that he desires. Nor does he forbid us to defend ourselves.
o What he demands is that, in the struggle of irreconcilable existences, each one engage himself concretely in the name of his own existence. We may kill, but we may not judge.
o Sade’s immense merit lies in his taking a stand against abstractions and alienations which are merely flights from the truth about man. No one was more passionately attached to the concrete than he. Ethic of authenticity.
o His heroes give their lives a valid meaning. No stupid suicide here.
o 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.
o He lived through ethical darkness and emerged with no revelation, but at least he disputed all the easy answers.
o If we ever hope to transcend the separateness of individuals, we may do so only on condition that we be aware of its existence.
o 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
• They chose to kill him, first my slow degrees in the boredom of the dungeon and then by calumny and oblivion. This latter death he had himself desired. “I like to think that my memory will be effaced from the minds of men”
• The memory of Sade has been disfigured by preposterous legends; his very name has buckled under the weight of such words as “sadism” and “sadistic”
• 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.
• 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 startling nor 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 neither as author nor as sexual pervert he compels our relationship. It is by virtue of the relationship which he created between those 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
• 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 will to remain incommunicable.
• Sade’s life and personality remain obscure on many points. We have no authentic portrait of him
o Marseille trial testimony: handsome figure of a man, full faced. He’s 53 then.
o He gained weight after, prevent remains of grace and elegance
• Little information on his childhood. Came to know resentment and violence at early age.
• One might try to deduce his life from his work, e.g. Klossowski who sees in Sade’s implacable hatred of his mother they key to his life and work
• When we meet Sade he is already mature
• Superficially, Safe at 23 was like all other young aristocrats of his time. Cultured, theater, arts, reading. Dissipated, kept a mistress—la Beauvoisin—and frequented brothels. He married (ReneePelagie de Montreiul) without enthusiasm and in conference to parental wishes, a young girl of the petty aristocracy.
• Was arrested months after wedding for excesses that, we have letters, he begged the governor to keep secret the reason of arrest.
• A year later an Inspector warns procuresses to stop giving their girls to the Marquis
• He realizes that there is no conciliation possible between his social existence and his private pleasures.
• He had not the slightest wish to renounce his privileges.
• Other young aristocrats encountered similar declining class position, loss of concrete power and no longer retaining any real hold on the world. They try to revive this symbolically, in the privacy of the bedchamber the status for which they were nostalgic, that of the lone and sovereign feudal despot.
• I am quite prepared to believe that he was a coward. Beyond the walls of his “little house” it did not occur to him to make full use of his strength
• If he talked so much about the strength of his soul, it was not because he really possessed it, but because he longed for it.
• The fear of want haunted him. A symptom of a much more generalized anxiety. He was maladjusted. Behavior disorderly. Accumulated debts, flying into rage, running away or yielding at 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.
• He subordinated his experience into his eroticism because eroticism appeared to him to be the only possible fulfillment of his existence.
• Some sexual perverts must give themselves away.
• Scandal of 1763> He reacted first with prayer, humiliation, shame. Begged to be allowed to see his wife
• Sade tells us repeatedly that his ultimate attitude has its roots in resentment
• To inflict enjoyment—Sade understood this 150 years before the psychoanalysts, and his work abound in victims submitted to pleasure before being tortured—can be tyrannical violence; and the torturer disguised as lover delights to see the credulous lover, swooning with voluptuousness and gratitude, mistake cruelty for tenderness
• Madame de Sade concealed his delinquencies for years. Abetted. Sade never displayed the least gratitude.
o she was his most triumphant success.
• Sade was finally beaten by his mother-in-law and by the law, and was an accomplice of this defeat.
• Two short terms in prison
• Three years of exile, playing husband and lord conscientiously. Two children by his wife.
• 1771 imprisoned for debt, released. His virtuous zeal has cooled off.
• seduces SIL
• 1771 “the affair of the aphrodisiac candies” takes proportions. He and his valet Latour sentenced to death in absentia. Effigy’s burned in town square of Aix.
• He was arrested and his wife helped him escape. He remained a hunted man—no more normal life.
• 1777 MIL has him arrested (she never forgave him for marrying her daughter)
• And now begins another story. For 11 years a man lay dying in captivity but a writer was born. The man was quickly broken. Reduced to impotence, not knowing how long his imprisonment would last, his mind wandered in delirious speculation.
• The flesh surrendered, and he sought compensation for his sexual starvation in the pleasures of the table. ED binging.
• From 1782 on he demanded literature afford him what life no longer granted him: excitement, etc.
• He wrote as he ate, in a frenzy.
• Sade freed 1790. Wife asked for separation. His kids stranger to him.
• 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.
• 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.
• He’s publishing accounts of his assaults, not fearing confinement. Locked up 1801 until death.
• 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
• Sade made of his eroticism the meaning and expression of his whole existence.
• To say that he tried everything and liked everything is to beg the question.
• His accomplices and victims kept quiet, save the two flagrant scandals. His journals and memoirs lost, his letters cautious, and in his books, he events more than he reveals about himself.
• Sade established systematically, according to the prescriptions of a kind of SYNTHETIC ART, a repertory of man’s sexual possibilities.
o He certainly never experienced nor even dreams them all up himself.
o Not only does he tell tall stories, but most of the time, he tells them badly.
o Nevertheless, there are some situations in his novels which he treats with special indulgences. These we must examine.
• 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
• As a result of his immoderateness, the sexual act creates the illusion of sovereign pleasure which gives it its incomparable value in Sades eyes
o Two partners merging in ambiguous unity
• Normally, it is as a result of the vertigo of the other made flesh that one is spellbound within his own flesh.
• 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 concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is impaired. Any enjoyment is weaker 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.
• Sodomy: there is no perversion of which he speaks so often ad with so much satisfaction, and even impassioned vehemence.
• Was Sade a sodomite? Was he basically masochistic?
o 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
o More than once of Sade’s characters feels a deep disgust for women’s “fronts”
o Some confirmed homosexuals in his novels.
o The contempt and disgust which Sade really felt for these servile, tearful, mystified and passive creatures runs all through his work.
o Was it his mother whom he loathed in them?
o Or did he see in them his double rather than his complement? His great female villains have more warmth and life than his heroes, not only for aesthetic reasons but because they were closer to him.
There is certainly something of him in Juliette
o It is impossible to tell to what extent women were anything but surrogates and toys for Sade.
o It may be said that his sexual character was essentially anal.
o Sade openly acknowledged his coprophilia. Fantasies, though—to what extent are practiced?
o His gluttony in prison: eating can be a substitute for erotic activity only if there is some infantile equivalence between gastrointestinal and sexual functions. He sees a close bond between food orgy and erotic orgy.
o Coprophilia has another fold: the ugly. His linking of eroticism with vileness is as original as his linking it with cruelty. Beauty is too simple. The man who has relations with filth, like the man who wounds or is wounded, fulfills himself as flesh.
o Fetish: 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 y becoming an inert object.
o 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
o He participates in the passivity he discloses
o His ethics: whether through cruelty or befoulment, the aim is to attain evil. This is the significance of his cruelty and masochism.
o There is one act that 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: murder.
o It has often been maintained that murder wa the supreme end of sexuality in Sade.
o 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.
o Murder represents the exacerbated demand for unrestrained and fearless freedom
o Did he only wish to shock?
o He hated the mawkish sensibility which the time confused with poetry
o 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. He borrowed the literary forms and the tried and test doctrines of contemporary society for this. 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 it
o It was, paradoxically, the very necessity of Sade’s work which imposed upon it its aesthetic limits.
o There is no future either for or in his work
Not only do the orgies, to which he invites us, tale 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.
Unless eroticism has some social, familial, or human basis, it ceases to be in any way extraordinary.
Biological crudity reverts.
Systematically exhausts the anatomical possibilities of the human body, but they do not reveal uncommon emotional complexes
He fails to endow them with aesthetic truth
Yet his forms of sexual behavior are unknown until them, mother-hatred, passive sodomy, frigidity, etc.
o Are we, then, to admire him as a real innovator in psychology?
o The impartial reader hesitates.
o He anticipates Freudian pansexuality. He makes eroticism the mainspring of human behavior.
o Sade’s nature was thoroughly irreligious. No trace of metaphysical anxiety in him
o Others emphasize role of nature. His idea of relation of man to nature: expressions of hesitation of a thinking that at times restrains its boldness and at others breaks completely loose.
o Eroticism appears in Sade as a mode of communication, the only valid ne. The penis is the shortest path between n two hearts
o To sympathize too readily with Sade is to betray him. For it is our misery, subjection, and death that he desires. Nor does he forbid us to defend ourselves.
o What he demands is that, in the struggle of irreconcilable existences, each one engage himself concretely in the name of his own existence. We may kill, but we may not judge.
o Sade’s immense merit lies in his taking a stand against abstractions and alienations which are merely flights from the truth about man. No one was more passionately attached to the concrete than he. Ethic of authenticity.
o His heroes give their lives a valid meaning. No stupid suicide here.
o 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.
o He lived through ethical darkness and emerged with no revelation, but at least he disputed all the easy answers.
o If we ever hope to transcend the separateness of individuals, we may do so only on condition that we be aware of its existence.
o 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
January 16, 2025
100 pages of fanatical nonsense by a women who clearly enjoys Sade’s work for all the wrong reasons.
To answer her question, I say “ Burn”.
Also about 60 pages too long.
The author of this essay has some interesting arguments but having now completed 120 days, I disagree with, or feel her arguments are weak. Interesting too that this essay is 70 years old , when acts of homosexuality were still illegal ( sodomy being illegal even between man and wife).
I admit though that it would have been interesting to meet a woman who would attempt to defend, and spend her life’s work studying the works of a man who writes ( and glorifies) rape, incest,buggery of infants children and the elderly, coprophilia, sexual torture ( including that of pregnant women) and murder.
To answer her question, I say “ Burn”.
Also about 60 pages too long.
The author of this essay has some interesting arguments but having now completed 120 days, I disagree with, or feel her arguments are weak. Interesting too that this essay is 70 years old , when acts of homosexuality were still illegal ( sodomy being illegal even between man and wife).
I admit though that it would have been interesting to meet a woman who would attempt to defend, and spend her life’s work studying the works of a man who writes ( and glorifies) rape, incest,buggery of infants children and the elderly, coprophilia, sexual torture ( including that of pregnant women) and murder.
October 28, 2024
aslında bu kitabı daha önce de okumuştum ama sodomun 120 gününden sonra bir daha okumak istedim. beauvoir'in kendisi bir feminist olduğu için tam olarak ne düşündüğünü biraz merak ettim. "bir kadınla yatarken zorba olmayı ismeyen kimse erkek değildir" cümlesi giriş kısımlarında yüzümüze çarpıyor. sonraki sayfada beauvoir'un "sanırım o evin duvarları dışında gevşeğin ödleğin tekidir de kuşkusuz" diyerek sonra söyleyecğini başta söylüyor ancak zeusun hakkını zeusa da veriyor. iyi ve kötünün kolayça ayırt edilemeyeceği bu ortamda iyiliğe karşı kendisini kötünün bir nevi temsili olarak gördüğünü söylüyor. "zevki cezalandırmak belki egemenlik çizgileri taşıyan bir edim oluyor. Sade bunu psikianalistlerden 150 yıl önce anlamıştı." Bu nedenle iyilik onu baya kaşındırıyor. minnet duygusundan nefret ediyor. Aynı zamanda aristokrasi sınıfından da nefret ediyor kendisi. Halk da yabancı kendisine buna ek olarak. Yani aslında yalnızlığı ve şatosunda soyutlanmış her şeyden herkesten nefret eden ve kendi erotizmini sapkınlıkları ile birleştirerek kendine oyun alanı yaratmış bir adamdan bahsediyoruz.
Seks kısmına gelirsek. Kendisi haz ve acıyı beraber yoğurmayı insanlığa öğretmiş ilk kişilerden herhalde. Kitaplarındaki edebi kısım her zaman güdük kalmasına rağmen... "bölüşülen her zevk azalmaya başlar. ona göre hoş duygular yumuşak ve tehlikesiz oluyor. oysa ten en dramatik biçimin etini ancak kan akıtıcı olarak, mahvedici olarak hazırlayabilir." Özellikle sodomun 120 günündeki vğcuttan çıkan her türlü kir ter ve boka hasta olma durumunu beauvoir nesneyi yok ederek isteği karşılamaktan, doyurmaktan başka bir şey değil diyor. Mazoşizmde de bunun olduğunu söylüyor: Cansız nesne haline gelerek kendini yok etmek. O yüzden aslında kitapta hem birine acı çektirme hem de o sırada başkası tarafından sikilme gibi ikili kombinasyonlar çok fazla. kendi vücutlarını geçiş olarak kullanan cı ve hazzın kölelerigibi bir durum var. Şurada beauvoir çok güzel anlatıyor bunu
"kurbana acı çektirirken sade kendisine bakanların gözlerinde bir nesnedir. Tersine acı çektirdiği vücuda bakarken edilginliğinin ortasında bir özne olarak kendine gelmektedir. böylece başkalarından gelen ve kendine dönen bu iki durum birbirine karışarak tamamlanmaktadır."
Seks kısmına gelirsek. Kendisi haz ve acıyı beraber yoğurmayı insanlığa öğretmiş ilk kişilerden herhalde. Kitaplarındaki edebi kısım her zaman güdük kalmasına rağmen... "bölüşülen her zevk azalmaya başlar. ona göre hoş duygular yumuşak ve tehlikesiz oluyor. oysa ten en dramatik biçimin etini ancak kan akıtıcı olarak, mahvedici olarak hazırlayabilir." Özellikle sodomun 120 günündeki vğcuttan çıkan her türlü kir ter ve boka hasta olma durumunu beauvoir nesneyi yok ederek isteği karşılamaktan, doyurmaktan başka bir şey değil diyor. Mazoşizmde de bunun olduğunu söylüyor: Cansız nesne haline gelerek kendini yok etmek. O yüzden aslında kitapta hem birine acı çektirme hem de o sırada başkası tarafından sikilme gibi ikili kombinasyonlar çok fazla. kendi vücutlarını geçiş olarak kullanan cı ve hazzın kölelerigibi bir durum var. Şurada beauvoir çok güzel anlatıyor bunu
"kurbana acı çektirirken sade kendisine bakanların gözlerinde bir nesnedir. Tersine acı çektirdiği vücuda bakarken edilginliğinin ortasında bir özne olarak kendine gelmektedir. böylece başkalarından gelen ve kendine dönen bu iki durum birbirine karışarak tamamlanmaktadır."
September 26, 2014
Bastante interesante.
Simone de Beauvoir nos trata de explicar como El Marques de Sade pensaba, nos ayuda a interpretar todo lo que dice en sus libros. Lo leí ya que estoy interesada en leer Las 120 Jornadas de Sodoma pero antes quería entender un poco al Marques de Sade.
November 15, 2014
El marqués de Sade era un dogmático, amargado y pesado. El ensayo de Beauvoir vale la pena.
January 18, 2024
a sort of “affirmation” about a controversial author, written by an author about whom I have mixed feelings. Beauvoir's attempt to rehabilitate Sade may inadvertently perpetuate harmful patriarchal norms.
her emphasis on intellectual freedom overlooks the potential harm these writings can inflict on women, reinforcing oppressive power dynamics rather than challenging them within the feminist framework.
her emphasis on intellectual freedom overlooks the potential harm these writings can inflict on women, reinforcing oppressive power dynamics rather than challenging them within the feminist framework.
July 29, 2018
This is actually a pretty good book and an interesting perspective on de Sade. The translation however is terrible. The translator chose not to translate paragraphs that were 'too obscene', which leaves large chunks of the page in French.
On the plus side I've learned a lot of new French words for various anatomical bits.
On the plus side I've learned a lot of new French words for various anatomical bits.
Read
November 24, 2024good, interesting
February 6, 2026
“[Sade’s] surprise is that of the child who keeps striking at a vase until it finally breaks.” <3
January 22, 2026
yap queen, aber interessant moral mal auf subjektiver ebene zu betrachten statt als objektiver beurteiler von oben. auch gute kant kritik.
entwerft euch!
entwerft euch!
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