His heroes amuse themselves by deflowering little girls. This bloody and sacrilegious violence tickled Sade’s fancy. But even when they are initiating virgins, they often treat them as boys rather than make them bleed. More than one of Sade’s characters feels a deep disgust for women’s “fronts.” Others are more eclectic in taste, but their preferences are clear. Sade never sang the praises of that part of the female body so joyously celebrated in The Arabian Nights. He has only contempt for the poor “unmanly creatures” who possess their wives in conventional fashion. If he had children by Madame de Sade, we have seen under what circumstances; and in view of the strange group orgies at La Coste, what proof is there that it was really he who was responsible for Nanon’s pregnancy?
We must not, of course, attribute to Sade the opinions held by the confirmed homosexuals of his novels, but the argument put into the mouth of the Bishop in The 120 Days of Sodom is close enough to his heart to be considered as a confession. He says, concerning pleasure, “. . . the boy is worth more than the girl. Consider the problem from the point of view of evil, evil being almost always pleasure’s true and major charm; considered thus, the crime must appear greater when perpetrated upon a being of your identical sort than when inflicted upon one which is not, and this once established, the delight automatically doubles.” It was easy enough for Sade to write to Madame de Sade that his sole wrong had been “to love women too much”; this was a purely official and hypocritical letter. And it is through a mythical dialectic that he gives them the most triumphant roles in his novels. Their wickedness makes a striking contrast with the traditional gentleness of their sex. When they overcome their natural abjection by committing crime, they demonstrate much more brilliantly than any man that no situation can dampen the ardor of a bold spirit. But if, in imagination, they become first-rate martinets, it is because they are, in reality, born victims.
The contempt and disgust which Sade really felt for these servile, tearful, mystified, and passive creatures run all through his work. Was it his mother whom he loathed in them? We may also wonder whether Sade did not hate women because he saw in them his double rather than his complement and because there was nothing he could get from them. His great female villains have more warmth and life than his heroes, not only for esthetic reasons but because they were closer to him. I do not recognize him at all, as some readers claim to, in the bleating Justine,9 but there is certainly something of him in Juliette, who proudly and contentedly submits to the same treatment as her sister. Sade felt himself to be feminine, and he resented the fact that women were not the males he really desired. He endows Durand, the greatest and most extravagant of them all, with a huge clitoris which enables her to behave sexually like a man.
It is impossible to tell to what extent women were anything but surrogates and toys for Sade. It may be said, however, that his sexual character was essentially anal. This is confirmed by Sade’s attachment to money. Trouble involving embezzlement of inheritances played an enormous role in his life. Theft appears in his work as a sexual act, and the mere suggestion of it is enough to cause orgasm. And though we may refuse to accept the Freudian interpretation of greed, there is the indisputable fact, which Sade openly acknowledged, of his coprophilia. In Marseilles, he gave a prostitute some sugar almonds, telling her that “they would make her break wind,” and he looked disappointed when nothing happened. We are also struck by the fact that the two “fantasies” which he tries to explain most fully are cruelty and coprophagy. To what extent did he practice them? It is a far cry from the practices begun in Marseilles to the excremental orgies of The 120 Days of Sodom, but the care with which he describes the latter practices, and particularly the preparations, proves that they were not merely cold and schematic inventions, but emotional fantasies.
On the other hand, Sade’s extraordinary gluttony in prison cannot be explained by idleness alone. Eating can be a substitute for erotic activity only if there is still some infantile equivalence between gastrointestinal and sexual functions. This certainly persisted in Sade. He sees a close bond between the food orgy and the erotic orgy. “There is no passion more closely involved with lechery than drunkenness and gluttony,” he points out. And this combination reaches a climax in anthropophagous fantasies. To drink blood, to swallow sperm and excrement, and to eat children mean appeasing desire through destruction of its object. Pleasure requires neither exchange, giving, reciprocity, nor gratuitous generosity. Its tyranny is that of avarice, which chooses to destroy what it cannot assimilate.
Sade’s coprophilia has still another meaning. “If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure in the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.” Among the most obvious sexual attractions, Sade includes old age, ugliness, and bad odors. His linking of eroticism with vileness is as original as his linking it with cruelty, and can be explained in like manner. Beauty is too simple. We grasp it by an intellectual evaluation which does not free consciousness from its solitude or the body from its indifference, whereas vileness is debasing. The man who has relations with filth, like the man who wounds or is wounded, fulfills himself as flesh. It is in its misery and humiliation that the flesh becomes a gulf in which consciousness is swallowed up and where separate individuals are united. Only by being beaten, penetrated, and befouled could Sade succeed in destroying its obsessive presence.
He was not, however, masochistic in the ordinary sense of the word. He sneers bitterly at men who become slaves to women. “I leave them to the base pleasure of wearing the chains with which Nature has given them the right to burden others. Let such animals vegetate in the baseness of their abjection.” The world of the masochist is a magical one, and that is why he is almost always a fetishist. Objects such as shoes, furs, and whips, are charged with emanations which have the power to change him into a thing, and that is precisely what he wants: to remove himself by becoming an inert object. Sade’s world is essentially rational and practical. The objects, whether material or human, which serve his pleasure are tools which have no mystery, and he clearly sees humiliation as a haughty ruse. Saint-Fond, for example, says: “The humiliation of certain acts of debauchery serves as a pretext for pride.” And Sade elsewhere says of the libertine that “the degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.”
Nevertheless, these two attitudes are intimately related. If the masochist wants to lose himself, he does so in order to be entranced by the object with which he hopes to merge, and this effort leads him back to his subjectivity. In demanding that his partner mistreat him, he tyrannizes him; his humiliating exhibitions and the tortures he undergoes humiliate and torture the other as well. And, vice versa, by befouling and hurting the other, the torturer befouls and hurts himself. He participates in the passivity which he discloses, and in wanting to apprehend himself as the cause of the torment he inflicts, it is as an instrument and therefore as an object that he perceives himself. We are thus justified in classing behavior of this kind under the name of sado-masochism. However, we must be careful, for despite the generality of the term, the concrete forms of this behavior may be quite varied. Sade was not Sacher-Masoch. What was peculiar in his case was the tension of a will bent on fulfilling the flesh without losing itself in it. In Marseilles, he had himself whipped, but every couple of minutes he would dash to the mantelpiece and, with a knife, would inscribe on the chimney flue the number of lashes he had just received. His humiliation would immediately be transformed into swagger. While being sodomized, he would whip a prostitute. It was a favorite fantasy of his to be penetrated and beaten while he himself was penetrating and beating a submissive victim.
I have already said that to regard Sade’s peculiarities as simple facts is to misunderstand their meaning and implication. They are always charged with an ethical significance. With the scandal of 1763, Sade’s eroticism ceased to
be merely an individual attitude: it was also a challenge to society. In a letter to his wife, Sade explains how he has erected his tastes into principles. “I carry these principles and tastes to the point of fanaticism,” he writes, “and the fanaticism is the work of my tyrants and their persecutions.” The supreme intention that quickens all sexual activity is the will to criminality. Whether through cruelty or befoulment, the aim is to attain evil. Sade immediately experienced coitus as cruelty, laceration, and transgression; and out of resentment he obstinately justified its morbidity. Since society united with Nature in regarding his pleasures as criminal, he made crime itself a pleasure. “Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, but rather the idea of evil.” In the pleasure of torturing and mocking a beautiful woman, he writes, “there is the kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.” It was not by chance that he chose Easter as the day to whip Rose Keller, and it was at the moment that he sardonically suggested that he confess her that his sexual excitement reached its climax. No aphrodisiac is so potent as the defiance of Good. “Our desires for great crimes are always more violent than our desires for small ones.” Did Sade do evil in order to feel guilty, or did he escape guilt by assuming it? To reduce him to one or another of these attitudes is to deform him. He never remains at rest in a state either of self-satisfied abjection or of flighty impudence, but keeps oscillating back and forth dramatically between arrogance and a guilty conscience.
Thus, we can perceive the significance of Sade’s cruelty and masochism. This man, who combined a violent temperament—though quickly exhausted, it would seem—with an emotional “apartness” almost pathological in character, sought a substitute for anxiety in the infliction of suffering or pain. The meaning of his cruelty is very complex. In the first place, it seems to be the extreme and immediate fulfillment of the instinct of coitus, its total assumption. It asserts the radical separation of the other object from the sovereign subject. It aims at the jealous destruction of what cannot be greedily assimilated. But, above all, rather than crowning the orgasm impulsively, it tends to induce it by premeditation. It enabled him to apprehend through the other person the consciousness-flesh unity and to project it into himself. And, lastly, it freely justified the criminal character which Nature and society had assigned to eroticism. Moreover, by being sodomized, beaten, and befouled, Sade also gained insight into himself as passive flesh. He slaked his thirst for self-punishment and accepted the guilt to which he had been doomed. And this enabled him to revert immediately from humility to pride through the medium of defiance. In the completely sadistic scene, the individual gives vent to his nature, fully aware that it is evil and aggressively assuming it as such. He merges vengeance and transgression and transforms the latter into glory.
There is one act which stands as the most extreme conclusion of both cruelty and masochism, for the subject asserts himself in it, in a very special way, as tyrant and criminal; I am speaking of murder. It has often been maintained that murder was the supreme end of sexuality in Sade. To my mind, this view is based on a misunderstanding. Certainly the vigor with which Sade denied in his letters that he had ever been a murderer was a matter of self-defense, but I think that he was sincerely repelled by the idea. He does, of course, overload his stories with monstrous slaughters. But he does so because there is no crime whose abstract significance is so glaringly obvious as murder. It represents the exacerbated demand for unrestrained and fearless freedom. And besides, by indefinitely prolonging the death throes of his victim, the author can perpetuate on paper the exceptional moment in which a lucid mind inhabits a body which is being degraded into matter. He still breathes a living past into the unconscious remains. But what would the tyrant actually do with this inert object, a corpse?
There is, no doubt, something vertiginous in the transition from life to death; and the sadist, fascinated by the conflicts between consciousness and the flesh, readily pictures himself as the agent of so radical a transformation. But though he may occasionally carry out this singular experiment, it cannot possibly afford him the supreme satisfaction. The freedom that one hoped to tyrannize to the point of annihilation has, in being destroyed, slipped away from the world in which tyranny had a hold on it. If Sade’s heroes commit endless massacres, it is because none of them gives full satisfaction. They bring no concrete solution to the problems which torment the debauchee, because pleasure is not his sole end. No one would seek sensation so passionately and recklessly, even if it had the violence of an epileptic seizure. The ultimate trauma must, rather, guarantee by its obviousness the success of an undertaking whose stake exceeds it infinitely. But often, however, this ultimate trauma puts an end to the undertaking without concluding it, and though the trauma may be prolonged by murder, such a murder merely confirms its failure.
Blangis strangles his partners with the very fury of orgasm, and there is despair in the rage wherein desire is extinguished without finding satisfaction. His premeditated pleasures are less wild and more complex. An episode from Juliette, among others, is significant. Excited by the young woman’s conversation, Noirceuil, who “cared little for solitary pleasures,” that is, those in which one indulges with a single partner, immediately calls in his friends. “There are too few of us. . . . No, leave me. . . . My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way. . . .” It is not out of any abstract scruples that he forbids himself such excesses, but rather because after the brutal orgasm he would find himself frustrated again. Our instincts indicate to us ends which are unattainable if we merely act upon our immediate impulses. We must master them, reflect upon them, and use our wits in trying to find ways of satisfying them. The presence of other consciousnesses than our own is what helps us most to get the necessary perspective on them.
Sade’s sexuality is not a biological matter. It is a social fact. The orgies in which he indulged were almost always collective affairs. In Marseilles, he asked for two prostitutes and was accompanied by his valet. At La Coste, he set up a harem for himself. The libertines in his novels form actual communities. The first advantage was the number of combinations for their debauches, but there were deeper reasons for the socialization of eroticism. In Marseilles, Sade called his valet “Monsieur le Marquis” and wanted to see him “know” a prostitute under his name rather than “know” her himself. The enactment of the erotic scene interested him more than the actual experience. The fantasies in The 120 Days of Sodom are narrated before being carried out. By means of this duplication the act becomes a spectacle which one observes from a distance at the same time that one is performing it. It thus retains the meaning that would otherwise be obscured by solitary animal excitement. For if the debauchee coincided exactly with his movements and the victim with his emotions, freedom and consciousness would be lost in the rapture of the flesh. The flesh would be merely brute suffering, and the rapture merely convulsive pleasure. Thanks, however, to the assembled witnesses, a presence is maintained about them which helps the subject himself remain present. It is through these performances that he hopes to reach out to himself; and in order to see himself, he must be seen. Sade, while tyrannizing, was an object for those who watched him.
Conversely, by witnessing on the flesh to which he had done violence the violence which he himself had borne, he repossessed himself as subject within his own passivity. The merging of the for-oneself and the for-the-other is thus achieved. Accomplices are particularly required in order to give sexuality a demoniacal dimension. Thanks to them, the act, whether committed or suffered, takes on definite form instead of being diluted into contingent moments. By becoming real, any crime proves to be possible and ordinary. One gets to be so intimately familiar with it that one has difficulty in regarding it as blameworthy. In order to amaze or frighten oneself,
one must observe oneself from a distance, through foreign eyes.
However precious this recourse to others may be, it is not yet enough to remove the contradictions implied in the sadistic effort. If one fails, in the course of an actual experience, to grasp the ambiguous unity of existence, one will never succeed in reconstructing it intellectually. A spectacle, by definition, can never coincide with either the inwardness of consciousness or the opacity of the flesh. Still less can it reconcile them. Once they have been dissociated, these two moments of the human reality are in opposition to each other; and as soon as we pursue one of them, the other disappears. If the subject inflicts excessively violent pain upon himself, his mind becomes unhinged: he abdicates; he loses his sovereignty. Excessive vileness entails disgust, which interferes with pleasure. In practice, it is difficult to indulge in cruelty, except within very modest limits; and in theory, it implies a contradiction which is expressed in the following two passages: “The most divine charms are as nothing when submission and obedience do not come forth to offer them,” and: “One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.” But where is one to find free slaves? One has to be satisfied with compromises. With paid and abjectly consenting prostitutes, Sade went somewhat beyond the limits that had been agreed upon. He allowed himself some violence against a wife who maintained a certain human dignity in her docility.
The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings Page 4
