I. Which Sade?
It is quite easy to ignore Sade(*). One just needs to place his writings on the shelf of psychosexual deviations. And yet it is only inexactly that Sade is called a pornographer. Pornologist might be a better term. But then again, this term, too, tells us very little – if it tells us anything at all – of why and what he wrote; and he wrote abundantly, including many novels, tales, and fables you would read without even raising your eyebrows, except for their insightfulness, tenderness, and an attitude that today some might qualify as feminist(**).
Curiously, Sade called himself a philosopher. Not that we must believe his words. But we cannot obliterate them either. Nor should we obviate his warning: “I write for those who are capable of listening to me, as it is free of danger that they will read me.”
Sade as a philosopher, then. Ex hypothesis. But what does this mean? It means, first, that he is not only a great writer capable of diving into the contradictions of the human mind and full of references to other authors like Homer, Sappho, Aristotle, Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, La Boétie, La Rochefoucauld, Ninon de l’Enclos, Molière, Spinoza, Racine, Mme du Noyer, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d’Holbach, Beaumarchais… to an extent that reading Sade while overlooking his many intertextual connections is fruitless. Secondly, it means he is not just a libertine who elaborates on the Epicurean ideas(***) that had spread in France throughout the 17th and 18th centuries (especially during the Regency of Philippe d’Orléans, 1715–1723). Thirdly, it means he is not merely a social critic, prompt to denounce the corruption and hypocrisy of his time. For it means, lastly and more importantly, that if we read Sade attentively, we will find (a) a political philosophy and (b) a social anthropology in his writings. The two are exceptional, and it is necessary to take them into account to understand (c) Sade’s educational philosophy and (d) what I propose to call Sade’s philosophy of the absent body. I leave for another time, therefore, writing on Sade’s ethics of pleasure (and its Spinozist foundations).
II. Sade’s Political Philosophy
Sade begins by making a diagnosis: his world – that of the Ancien Régime as much as that of the Revolution, which he supported only partly – is ill, and it is ill because it is evil without, however, anyone acknowledging it. Which is the therapy? There can only be one, thinks Sade. To start with, the illness itself needs to become fully visible, as only then there will be a chance to suppress it, when it becomes unbearable. Furthermore, suggests Sade with irony, the revolutionaries should let all crimes go unpunished, for the Revolution lacks legitimacy to condemn them, since on behalf of it the worst crimes (beheading, hanging, raping…) have been committed; its own evil will then be signalled out whenever it attempts to judge any crime, and in this way its evil will become more and more apparent. But little will change if ignorance is not replaced by knowledge, morality by sensitivity, law by freedom, and privileges (be they old or new) by reciprocity – permanently, for Sade is a great theoretician of the revolution as an always-present state of things.
III. Sade’s Social Anthropology
Additionally, Sade studies the major evils or collective psychological forces on which his society secretly stands. These forces are: false virtue, perversion (which must not be confused with what appears to be perversion to the eyes of those who endorse a false notion of virtue), and cruelty (which also takes different meanings in Sade’s work). Sade equates false virtue with Christian morality, which, under the pretension of educating in the good and the noble, incites men to find out the worst they are capable of. In turn, perversion (in the proper sense of the term) is what reigns when those who claim to act morally act driven by evilness. Lastly, cruelty is both what results from perversion thus understood and what reason achieves when it tries to overcome such state of things based on rigour alone – cruelty as reason’s supreme coldness. Throughout his work, Sade personifies these evil forces in various literary characters, which, therefore, must be seen as philosophical or conceptual characters – like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Descartes’s evil demon, or Plato’s Socrates.
IV. Sade’s Educational Philosophy
Sade’s language is a language of rebellion against all that imprisons us, beginning with our prejudices. But it is also a language full of irony: false virtue leads to perversion, the obscene seems decent when the decent is declared obscene, the irrational may prove more rational than the rational, etc. In this, Sade writes as a philosopher, though often in a deliciously parodic tone. And it is always important not to lose sight of his educational intent: his recommendation to generalise prostitution, for example, serves the purpose of political moderation against conflicting claims to base society upon the dialectics of honour, dishonour, and revenge.
In short, Sade elegantly eludes any attempt to reduce the content of his writings to the apparent or the obvious. Put otherwise: you must read him not with two, but with a thousand eyes.
V. Sade’s Philosophy of the Absent Body
The clues as to how one must read him are everywhere, but they are often encrypted, so reading Sade needs of considerable concentration, attentiveness, and patience, as well. Take, for instance, La Philosophie dans le boudoir, which has been translated into English as Philosophy in the Bedroom (although a boudoir is not exactly a bedroom, but a room placed in between a lady’s bedroom and the rest of the rooms in the house, where she may bath, etc.; in Spanish we call it “tocador”). What is this book, published after Robespierre’s Reign of Terror ended, ultimately about? The clue to it is in the frontispiece or cover image of the book, which parodies the judgement of Paris, the mythological shepherd who caused the war told in the Iliad: instead of ending up entangled in war, due to the jealousy of Juno and Minerva, after he chooses Venus as the most beautiful goddesses, Paris is invited by Venus (assisted by the Graces in her boudoir) to renounce to any warrior-like prerogatives(****).
Yet a boudoir is also a room – indeed the only one in a house – entirely dedicated to the body and its pleasures. Repressed but desired by the supporters of false virtue, abused by the perverse, and ignored by everyone, the body is in fact the great absent from the oppressive economy of the real that Sade denounces in his writings. Paradoxically the alleged pornographer turns out to be the philosopher of the missing body – like Artaud, if in a different way(*****). Sade, then, or the politics of the body – a body that claims its will to return, to be brought back to life; for everything on which Sade writes, he makes the body tell it, he makes the body speak about it, as though it were the theatre on which all plays should be performed.
VI. Sade and Us
All of this, and very especially his philosophy of the body – which expands that of earlier libertine writers like Crébillon, Boyer d’Argens, Fougeret de Monbron, Louvet de Couvray… – makes of Sade our contemporary. For we ignore and abuse our bodies by transforming them into labour force, which we cynically portray as something noble. Plus we perversely excite our bodies to consume… anything. Thus we ignore what our bodies could do, were they free. And instead of finding it out, we cruelly repress them by making them fit, thus turning them obedient. – What would happen if we do not?
Further reading: D. A. F. de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales
(*) Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade, or, more commonly, D. A. F. (de) Sade (1740–1814), after whom Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined in 1866 the term “sadism.”
(**) In fact French feminist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) remains one of Sade’s best readers; originally published in 1951–1952, her essay Faut-il brûler Sade ? (Must We Burn Sade?) is available in English translation.
(***) As the reader surely knows, Epicurus (341-270 BCE) was an influential Greek philosopher who claimed that life has to be enjoyed above anything else. Thus his ethics of pleasure, which attempt to prevent/disrupt any possible form of suffering.
(****) As Alain Schorderet notices, the book’s cover image combines elements from Van Loo’s Les Grâces (The Graces, 1763), Boucher’s Les trois Grâces supportant l’Amour (The Three Graces Holding Love above Them, 1765), and Boizot’s La Beauté couronée par les Grâces (Beauty Crowned by the Graces, 1775).
(*****) Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), whose life, poetry, and theatre aimed at exploring the body-we-are instead of the body-we-have.
