Must We Burn Sade?

by Deepak Narang Sawhney (Editor)

The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) has been labeled everything from a sadomasochistic pornographer (The 120 Days of Sodom) to the fiction writer responsible for the ideas that led to the Nazi death camps. Must We Burn Sade? peels away the negative legacy that has shrouded Sade for too long. Deepak Narang Sawhney points out that "Sade's legacy has been neglected, recreated, fictionalized, and venerated by medical guilds, literary hacks, religious detractors, and intellectual movements. In the past two centuries, Sade has come to represent many things for many people. . . . It is unclear whether we know Sade the writer or the apparatus which has been set up to either condemn or to sanctify his life and work."

By contrast, this intriguing collection of essays seeks to examine Sade for what he was—a writer of novels and letters, a creator of plays and stories, and an author of essays and political manifestos. The contributors examine the literary, theatrical, political, social, and philosophical aspects of Sade's work, acquitting him of the false accusations and trials that have plagued his name by revealing his influences and motivations, and by providing an understanding of society's fear of Sade. What is so alarming about Sade's books that civilized society has felt compelled to disassociate itself from his works? This volume forces us to rethink Sade. Included are essays by Kathy Acker, David Allison, Georges Bataille, Catherine Cusset, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, Annie Le Brun, Alphonso Lingis, Stephen Pfohl, Deepak Narang Sawhney, Philippe Sollers, and Alistair Welchman.

Genres: Philosophy

262 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

Reviews

[samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

• Unmasking Sade, Deepak Narang Sawhney
o Mostly known for their pornographic, scatological, and brutally violent subject matter, the writings of Donatien-Alphonse-Francois, Marquis de Sade, have come t o hold an important place in the canon of world literature
o In his last will and testament, Sade left meticulous instructions concerning the burial of his body. His instructions stated that his body was to be buried in an unmarked grave exactly forty-eight hours after his death— an attempt to expunge from occidental history any memory of his existence.
o A histry of forgetting was the means by which civilized society attempted to extricate Sade’s life and work from the memory of men
 We know that there were clandestine booksellers who, specializing in the genre of erotic, (re) published Sade’s writings. We also know that Sade was a curiosity to medical and pathological guilds.
 Immeasurable associated, too, with the forces of revolution.
 We find Sade playing many roles; to undertand Sade the Novelist we need to discover Sade the (French) Revolutionary. To understand Sade the ImmoraEst we need to gauge the levels of corruption during the ancien regime. To understand Sade the Torturer we need to fathom the depths of the Terror in post-revolutionary France.
 We need also to grasp what may, in the end, be the incomprehensible: namely, the Sadean universe where both reality and fiction meet, where the limits of Virtue andVice are played out.
o Sade is undoubtedly a master storyteller, an alchemist who magically fuses history with fantasy to create a diabolical tale of humanity.’” Sade is the first to really portray how the two natures ofVice andVirtue collide to produce a chaotic, anarchic, and horrific world of (in)humanity which is eternally torn between the savage realm of (libidinal) desire and ethics. Sade is the first to discuss, in microscopic detail, the “logical” consequences of unleashing desire onto the other. With obsessive persistence, Sade shapes the infinitely varied universe of desire into a reality of Evil, an accomphshment that has no other comparison in Western literature.
o Finally, what is Sade’s discourse? Must we burn Sade? What is so alarming and terrifying about Sade’s books that compel civilized society to disassociate itself from his works by banning, burning, or condemning them?
• Lingis: Deadly Pleaures
o The collection begins with a study of the body’s “orgasmic voluptuousness.” Through the language of interpretation, Alphonso Lingis argues, eroticism becomes represented as something monstrous, murderous, or a deadly pleasure. It is through language and the need to produce concepts that desire is dissociated from the body, but ultimately, the “uncontainable concept of nothingness” remains.
o Sade: There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image. The sight or thought of murder can give rise to a desire for sexual enjoyment.
o Notions of sexual voluptuousness are too complacent, entail only pleasures reciprocally given and shared, stable bonding, which is what we call love. How much more there is though!
o Voluptuousness is not a stable bonding but a craving that becomes more voracious in the measure that it is fed.
o Orgasm, Freud wrote, is the pleasure that comes in the shattering of one’s inner psychic and physical equilibrium, and any torment, any inner decomposition—Freud mentions wresding with playmates, verbal disputes, intellectual strain, and railway travel—is orgasmic.
o Voluptuousness is nowise reverence and adoration incarnate for the person of another, but violence and violation of the inner space of another, and voluptuous abandon to that violation. The cruelty voluptuousness excites, which Freud named sadism, he explained as a masochistic identification with the victim, shattering and thus voluptuous.
o In sexual behaviors we first know how another human being can be conquered, trapped in his or her own cravings and pleasures, disarmed, subjugated, and then betrayed for another.
o Sexual drives can renounce all that we expect from others, all that divine law and the social contract binds them to do, because sexual drives know their power to mesmerize, seduce, and corrupt others
o Sade: Voluptuous emotion is nothing but a kind of vibration produced in our soul by shocks. . . . Our voluptuous transport—this indescribable convulsive needling which drives us wild, which lifts us to the highest pitch of happiness . . .is ignited . . . by the sight of [a lubricous object] undergoing the strongest possible sensation; now, there is no more lively sensation than that of pain
o The supreme licentious image Sade depicts is that of sodomy. Evey licentious image is sodomite. Sodomy is in every surge of lust
o Yet is not anal eroticism the most innocent of all sexual acts?
o Every caress, passing aimlessly, tirelessly over hair, fur, bare arms, thighs, belly, arousing spasms and torments of shared pleasure, comes upon orifices, mouth, ears, nostrils, armpits, anus, where it penetrates to the most shared pleasures.
o Sade pushes anal eroticism out of the innocence of shared pleasures, drives it with wild emotions, to make it a will to gore one’s partner with one’s erect penis, and to release the germ of the genus only in its excrement. Sodomy is not a project. It does not leave a result
o Anal eroticism becomes sodomy, Pierre Klossowski writes, through a Biblical interpretation, through language, through concepts, or through the quasi-concept of nothingness. It is this interpretation, it is language, that makes anal eroticism monstrous and murderous
o But it is not the silent pleasures of anal eroticism, but the language of interpretation that gives anal eroticism this sodomist intent.
o The Sadean “concept” of sodomy is not a concept that is communicated by conceiving a content. It does not induce shared understanding, but invokes a compHcity of monsters. Among them it functions as a password—a verbal formula that when recognized does not communicate a message but functions to recognize another conspirator.
o But the Sadean term sodomy is an instrument of knowledge—the voluptuous knowledge of death as nothingness. In the extreme emotions of sodomy his voluptuousness finds nothingness, the nothingness of the human species.
o Sade’s text, the libertine pedagogy,
o Dependent on a “concept,” the uncontainable concept of nothingness, Sade’s sodomy strikes as a will to know death, to know nothingness.
o Orgasm, Freud said, is the sudden passage from a built up, compacted excess of energies to a state of quiescence and inertia. It is true that after orgasm, one sleeps. But the voluptuous pleasure is not in that. It is in the discharge itself, the transubstantiations by which the bone levers and muscle thongs of a competent and manipulative body disconnect in a collapsed posture and soften into pulsating and quivering glands under the caressing hand and wet tongue of another, where glands harden into rods and pistons, which then soften, gelatinize, liquefy, dissipate in sweat and secretions and odors and hot released breaths.
o Is it not now up to us to find, beneath the “concepts” of Sade’s “system,” Sade’s own body, locus of generation and corruption, wallowing lasciviously in its corruption, corruption pullulating in his mouth as his language
o
• Stephen Pfohl is also interested in the representation of desire, in his “Seven Mirrors of Sade. With a guest appearance by the Situationist Guy Debord, Pfohl’s article views Sade’s writings as “makfing] an ethnographic spectacle of CAPITAL.” Over a cup of “breakfast chocolate,” Debord and Pfohl address the economics of the Occident, such as the enslaving and selling of Afiricans to the new world. Throughout their conversation, they argue that Sade “remains a monstrous ethnographic figure in the History of modern thought.”
• I also pose the question of desire in Sade’s work. Given the importance of Sade’s political writings, I take up the question of what exactly is Sade’s concept of the state in relation to desire. In examining Sade’s analysis of nature, I address the conflict that arises between institutions that level social constructs and the inherendy destructive impulses of nature which bring into question the very existence of these constructs.
• Commentaries on Sade have generally neglected his passion for the theater. Annie Le Brun rectifies this omission by providing an engaging account of Sade s vast appetite for writing and directing plays. So strong was his love of theater that in the summer of 1772 alone, he staged “no less than fifteen plays from the repertoire of the Comedie Francaise.” Because the function of philosophy, according to Sade, is to say everything, he remains the “indefatigable stager of desire.”
• Lucienne Frappier- Mazur, on the other hand, argues that the events of the Reign of Terror had a significant impact on Sade’s fictional writings. She examines, for instance, how the act of parricide during the Reign of Terror turns into a “complex motif” in the novel Juliette.
• Philippe Sollers presents us with an “extremely curious” letter written to Cardinal Bernis in late 1793 by none other than the “divine marquis.” Providing the reader with an “editor’s foreword,” Sollers relates how this “unpublished” letter has been handed down to us. The letter concerns itself with many issues of the day. Such issues include the reestablishment of the “deistic chimera” in France; how the horrors and crimes in Sade’s novels “reveal, for the first time in history, the special vein” of every epoch to commit such acts; and how the bloody atrocities taking place, since the famous September, are a procession “towards the tabernacle of destructive nothingness.” The letter also has a pecuUar (post)modern ring: It relays, for instance, how a visitor from Vienna maintained that we need to genuflect before “the Unconscious,” and talked vaguely about the “Lack-in-Being.”
• Differential Practices, Alistair Welchman’s “Differential Practices”
o is interested in how Sade generates an antiliterature out of literature. Antiliterature produces “a libidinally infused geometrical and arithmetical intuition” which, according to Welchman, is at the heart of Sade’s writing.
o Sade is unique in his genre
 His contemporaries, such as Laclos, are tame in comparison; and our contemporaries (Bataille’s or Miller’s novels; The Story of O) are radically Umited in graphic scope by their pressing need—hardly relevant for Sade—to dismantle a choking romantic heritage.
o Corpses, covered with blood, shit, and sex, are strewn across these pages as casually as heads are picked off daisies.
o Was Sade a hypocrite? Of course, and so are these words.
o Sade is paring his language down to an irreducible performative force.
o His language is not opposed dualistically to spiritual, mental, or semiotic language. These are only a heightening of his form
o Resolutely unsublimated
 Not only is Sade’s writing resolutely unsubfimated, and therefore an inappropriate target for theories whose sole value is that of the text, but his writing also shares almost none of the values traditionally associated with “literature.”
o he eliminates literality and succeeds in inventing an entirely new material-linguistic function.
o It is easy to misunderstand Sade’s gesture here, to make of it contemporary
o dialectic: how to make a literature out of antiliterature (after all, Sade did write books…); how to construct or reconstruct a subjectivity ourt of its ruin (after all, Sade was a subject..) But that is not at all Sade’s trajectory
o He meticulously chips away at the apparatus of (literary) representation, and leaves in the end something else, rarely attempted in Western history: a libidinally infused geometrical and arithmetical intuition (a residue
o Just as important as the asubjective, asignifying, anobjective nature of Sade’s tableaux is their counterconceptuahty
• Sade: Critique of Pure Fiction
o Catherine Gusset addresses the limits of blaspheming God in Sade’s fiction: Since there is no God, there are no limits. Thus every conceivable crime, according to Sade’s libertines, becomes possible. But with the absence of limits we find, ultimately, “desire’s limit.” Gusset suggests that this violence of blasphemy is at the core of Sadean fiction, and not “the affirmation of God’s nonexistence.”
o Limit is the main problem of Sadean libertinage: How is it possible to go endlessly beyond the boundaries of time, space, laws, norms, and biological ties? How is it possible to “enfranchise” oneself, since this is the etymological meaning of libertinage?2 We know the answers given by Sade’s heroes: atheism, pleasure, crime, and apathy.
o But this God so rationally eliminated by libertines is far from disappearing from the Sadean text
o The violence of blasphemy, not the affirmation of God’s nonexistence, characterizes Sadean fiction
o As the subject of such hatred, God is no longer a mere fantasy, but gains consistency.
o As soon as God is named in JJHistoire de Juliette, the idea of an insufficiency returns; the only limit that libertines meet in the end is God’s nonexistence.
o They resuscitate God as the limit that makes them despair because of its nonexistence
o Sadean libertines are never done with God because his very name embodies the power of imagination.
o The libertines’ anger does not aim to anmhilate God’s existence, but to resurrect his power as the ultimate guarantee of the power of fiction. Their destruction of all beliefi confronts Sadean heroes with a lack of limits that does not leave them any other choice than the endless repetition of a physical act to which they cannot but give a metaphysical meaning, therefore falling again into the trap that their system should have allowed them to escape: “Fucking” means challenging God.
• The “logic” of limits and transgression is also discussed in David Alhson’s chapter. He scrupulously evaluates the philosophical and etymological meaning of transgression. He argues that Sade, in his quest to explain how it is we act, seeks to bring the Renaissance’s and the Enlightenment’s doctrine of freedom to the level of the individual’s freedom.
• Reading the Lack of the Body: The Writing of the Marquis de Sade Kathy Acker
o is concerned with Sade’s process of writing as seduction. She argues that Sade, through his writing, wants to destroy representation by seducing the reader into a world which is not controlled by the male gaze. Sade seduces us into his “labyrinths of mirrors” in order to show us the world of nothingness, to teach us “to learn to want to not exist.”
o For a man as furious as Sade, writing must be more than fictional revenge
o Nothing can mean anything, for all is confusion. Sade is a patriarch who hates patriarchy and has nowhere else to go. And, jail rat that he is, raging in his cage or maze, he uses text to overthrow our virginities, virginities not born from the body but from the logos; he seduces us through writing into overthrowing our very Cartesian selves. Neither male nor female seem to be left.
o The body, disappeared
Sade wanted to show or to teach us who we are; he wanted for us to learn to want to not exist. This is nothingness.
• Georges Bataille’s lecture of 12 May 1947 is deeply immersed in the question of whether or not Sade was responsible for the atrocities committed by Nazis in Europe. He is especially interested in the force of the sacred— the “unleashing of passion” —as it ruptures the world of reason. Reason, according to BataiUe, is a system of governance which produces equality, the profane, and ultimately, is that which is exterior to our lives. Sade’s writings are viewed as the unleashing of passion into the world of reason, producing what we have come to know as Sade’s world, a realm of existence which “nobody wants because it is frightening.”

[Alyosha · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a previous reviewer has noted, this collection of essays is of mixed value. It implies, or should implie, a familiarity with the foundational theoretical studies of Sade (I am thinking here of those by Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, and de Beauvoir) - a prior understanding of these can help to elucidate thwse texts (many being based entirely off of them) or else even refuted by them (thus rendering some of these texts invalidated). In the end, it comes down to the purpose you have for looking to this collection. If you want a wider understanding of the interpretive value of Sade's works, then this collection is useful. That being said, for my own use I found some of the pieces to be less than useful, and a few I did not even read.

What follows is a short explication of the import of a handful of the collected pieces:

Sawhney's opening essay, "Unmasking Sade," does an adequate job of setting the stage for the rest of the work to be done by this collection: to tear apart the mythical mask surrounding Sade's works in attempts at engaging with what these works really imply and demand. He alights upon the import of the Sadean question - that of the human essence, its monstrosity, and the relation between the world of his works and our own trans-fictional world. Is the gap really so large?

Lingis' "Deadly Pleasures" is the most valuable work in the collection. He highlights the interrelationality of God, language, and sex, and their attendent norms which work to inhibit and constrain our differential passions. Expanding upon the work of Klossowski on Sade (Lingis being the English translator of his Sade, my Neighbor), Lingis expands upon the unspeakable black hole of the sodomite existence - the trangessive act and existence par excellence, which rends open the field for differential possibilities (unto the impossible itself); Sade, then, as a destructive creator behind the thinking of the unthinkable negativity which creates the space for alterity through the negation of divine Creation, and thus of its laws and authority.

Philippe Sollers publication of one of Sade's letters that had been withheld from general knowledge and publication up until 1989, is very informative as to Sade's understanding of the French Revolution. While an essentially revolutionary figure, whose essence was infinite revolt, Sade despised the Revolution. This letter details how the French ridded themselves of the God of Chirstianity only to replace it with the Supreme Being, the God of Reason, which, he thinks, is inifnitely worse. At least with Christianity there remained a hint of pagan spirit sublimated within it. With this new cult, however, all passion (which, for Sade, is the essential fundament of existence) is lost - the cold calculations of reason alone are all that remain. In this vein, Sade lays forth the essential intention of his work - to disclose to humanity its own monstrosity, that humanity is the passionate animal, the monstrous animal, and not the rational animal of the metaphysical tradition.

Welchman's piece, "Differential Practices," provides an interesting interpretation of Sade's writing as a disruptive discursive act which performs the interruption of the ordered functionings of the discursive formation, necessitating a reconfiguration and reformation of discourse to account for such works. Sade's writings function differentially to open up a transformation of discursive possibility - not only of what can be said, but of what can be done; what is right and wrong, how we can act and perform the figuraitve role of being.

Cussett's work speaks to the ficticity inherent in the libertine action - the necessity of their repositing God's existence so as to transgress it. This furious work of creation and destruction works to get nowhere, and yet it is an infinitely vibrating motion - the motion of an inifnite desire, a desire for the infinite. Fictively, through this infinitely repeatable game, the libertine becomes divine. But, by this very turn, they also commit themselves to nothingness, to disappearance, amd to failure.

In "Transgression and Its Itinerary," Allison lays out the (non-)concept of transgression, amd then itineraries its functioning in the works of Sade. This disclosure evinces the radicality of Sade's writings - not simply morally radical, but upending society, humanity, amd even nature itself. All absolutes and universals crumble under this transgressive force which is the negative essence of our very being as possibility - possibility itself being delimited through the motion of transgression. Ficticity is exposed in its primal functioning, the imagination laid bare as the source of all law, as the faculty for the infinite furtherance of desire.

Acker's piece falls short of the mark, in my eyes. She appears to get too wrapped up in binary (mis)conceptions. Sade does work to dissolve the "male gaze" of speculative knowledge, yes. Bit I disagree that he falls back into the labyrinthian problem. His work of (black) holes works to unwork this gaze, to lead the reader into the state of loss - this is the initial negation which opens onto the ppssibility of an-other affirmation; an affirmation of alterity, of difference (which I would hesitate to call "feminine", unless by this we meant that which does not exist within the order of knowledge - a word which signifies a break with the system of signification). Sade's writings rupture the male gaze, but also the feminie gaze - all gender is destroyed, for they are but fictions which overwrite the functioning flows of primordial desires, passions, and differential pulsions which are more originarily us - the destruction of the male implying a destruction of the female as well, not to mention God and the Self as well...

Bataille's piece is great for studying transgression, sacrality, and Bataille's work in general, but it has much less to do with Sade. Sade is here but an example - it is a "practical" application of Sade's works for a different understanding of morality - a sort of trans-valuation of all values.

Finally, I am divided as to Pfohl's piece. While his theoretical reading of Sade (which, for me, felt like a reiteration of Foucault through Klossowski) is insightful as to how Sade's works disclose the essentially violent workings of capitalist systems and economies, speaking to what these systems silently excrete, his mode of presentation is frustrating at best. A writer doesn't need to blatantly bash their readers over the head with their ideas - we needn't capitalize the word CAPITAL in all of its instances. Pfohl uses a number of such devices which, in my opinion, only work to weaken his endeavor by means of its gimmicky nature (the ideas should speak for themselves; such stylistic flourishes are but signs of one's background).

Suffice it to say that these short overviews do not do complete justice to these texts (I have not even covered all the works in this text). I seek only to provide a brief synopsis of sorts, so as to advise readers as to what they may be getting into or what they may find of theoretical interest within each piece. My apologies if this is of no aid to you, and if you disagree with one of my readings that I have laid out in the sketchiest fashion above then by all means message me and I would be happy to discuss the thought and the ideas.

[Young_girl · Rating 5 out of 5]

A silent crowd of four follows John like a priest walking in circles, and hits all his dead ends. Always something elsewhere more appealing than here. But by the time he gets there, elsewhere becomes just the same.

[amin ghazaei]

من کتابی با همین عنوان دارم ترجمه می کنم از سیمون دوبوآر در مورد مارکی دو ساد. مقاله ای از ساد را در مایند موتور چاپ کردم. و حالا قرار است این کتاب نه چندان مفصل را هم ترجمه کنم که به صورت الکترونیکی منشتر خواهد شد. البته کتاب سیمون دوبوآر نه این کتاب را.