Without End: Sade’s Critique of Reason 9781501337581, 9781501337604, 9781501337598

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Without End

Without End Sade’s Critique of Reason William S. Allen

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © William S. Allen, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image © Kim Kulim All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Allen, William S., 1971– author. Title: Without end : Sade’s critique of reason / William S. Allen. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017025594 (print) | LCCN 2017043447 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501337611 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501337598 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501337581 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Sade, marquis de, 1740–1814 – Criticism and interpretation. | Sade, marquis de, 1740–1814 – Philosophy. | Philosophy in literature. Classification: LCC PQ2063.S3 (ebook) | LCC PQ2063.S3 A897 2017 (print) | DDC 843/.6 – dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025594 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3758-1 PB: 978-1-5013-5462-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3759-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-3761-1 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Diderot: You agree to my extinguishing our sun? D’Alembert: All the more willingly since it won’t be the first to be extinguished. Diderot, Le Rêve de d’Alembert What is a monster? A being whose duration is incompatible with the subsisting order. Diderot, Éléments de physiologie

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations

ix xi

Introduction: Realism, Imagination and Desire

1

1 2 3 4 5 6

Turmoil: Adorno’s Literal Reading Intoxication: The Nature of Influence Hors-­la-loi: Blanchot and the Revolution Disorientation: The Conditions of Abstraction Praxis: Crime and History Resistance: Forms Without End

Notes Further Reading Index

27 51 79 103 129 155 179 201 205

Acknowledgements An earlier version of chapter one previously appeared as ‘Dialectics in Turmoil: Adorno’s Literal Reading of Sade’, in Angelaki 22.4 (2017), I am grateful to the Taylor and Francis Group for their permission to reprint it here. Some remarks at the beginning of chapter four have appeared in a glossary entry on ‘Disaster’ in Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism, ed. Christopher Langlois (Bloomsbury, 2018). I would also like to express my sincere thanks to Kulim Kim and the Arario Gallery (Seoul) for their permission to use an image of his painting Death of Sun 1 (1964) on the cover of this book, and finally, my warmest appreciation to Patrick ffrench, and to Haaris Naqvi and Katherine De Chant at Bloomsbury, for their enthusiastic support for this project.

Abbreviations Translations have been modified throughout. Page references refer to the French or German original and then the English translation. AT

Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, eds Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971); tr. Robert HullotKentor as Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

AW

Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975); tr. Joachim Neugroschel as The Aesthetics of Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

CPJ

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, tr. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

CVJ

D. A. F. de Sade, Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome, ou l’École du Libertinage, in Œuvres I, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); tr. Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn as The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage (London: Penguin, 2016).

DA

Max Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980); tr. Edmund Jephcott as Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

EI

Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); tr. Susan Hanson as The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

HJ

Sade, Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du Vice, in Œuvres III, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 1998); tr. Austryn Wainhouse as Juliette (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

xii

Abbreviations

IR

Sade, ‘Idée sur les romans’, in Œuvres complètes 10, ed. Gilbert Lely (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1967); tr. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver as ‘Reflections on the Novel’, in The 120 Days of Sodom and other writings (New York: Grove Press, 1966).

JMV

Sade, Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, in Œuvres II, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); tr. John Phillips as Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

LS

Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade (Paris: Minuit, 1963); tr. Stuart and Michelle Kendall as Lautréamont and Sade (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

MBP

Adorno, Metaphysik. Begriff und Probleme, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998); tr. Edmund Jephcott as Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).

MM

Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979); tr. E. F. N. Jephcott as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1974).

ND

Adorno, Negative Dialektik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972); tr. E. B. Ashton as Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973).

P

Adorno, Prismen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977); tr. Samuel and Shierry Weber as Prisms (London: Neville Spearman, 1967).

PF

Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); tr. Charlotte Mandell as The Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

PG

G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, eds Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1980); tr. A. V. Miller as Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Abbreviations

xiii

PP

Kant, Practical Philosophy, tr. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

QRS

Blanchot, ‘Quelques remarques sur Sade’, Critique 3–4 (1946): 239–49.

RA

Denis Diderot, Le Rêve de d’Alembert, ed. Jean Varloot (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1962); Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, tr. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1966).

RBR

Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. and tr. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

SMP

Pierre Klossowski, Sade mon prochain (Paris: Seuil, 1967); tr. Alphonso Lingis as Sade My Neighbour (London: Quartet, 1992).

UDT Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften I, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974); tr. John Osborne as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1977).

Introduction: Realism, Imagination and Desire P. mentioned that there is at present a society of Debaucheries in Paris founded upon the principles contained in Justine, & so on, which they call Sadism. Thomas Moore, 30 November 1818 The reputation of the Marquis de Sade is well-­founded. The experience of reading his works is challenging to an extreme. Violence and sexuality appear on almost every page, and these descriptions are interspersed with extended discourses on materialism, atheism, and crime. But what has become apparent from close studies of his works is the breadth of his readings in contemporary science and philosophy, and so the question becomes one of trying to understand why Sade pursued these interests by way of an erotica of the most violent kind. As will be shown, Sade’s interests in philosophy and science lead to a form of writing that seeks to bring about a new mode of experience that is engaged in exploring the limits of sensibility as an actualization of material possibilities. In common with other Enlightenment thinkers Sade is concerned with the place of reason in the world, a place that becomes utterly transformed by a materialism of boundless excess. This concern underlies his interest in crime and sexuality, and thereby places him in the closest proximity to thinkers like Kant and Diderot, but also at the furthest extreme, in that it indicates how far the place and nature of reason is perverted. It is precisely this materialist critique of reason that is developed and demonstrated in his works, and which their reading makes persistently, excessively, apparent. To take a particularly resonant example of such a philosophical-­literary exercise, in Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles (1749), one of the most radical and pioneering texts of the French Enlightenment, blindness is not only discussed on its own terms but is also used as a figure to enable a discussion of empiricism

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and scepticism, of knowledge as grounded in nothing but a sense of touch. This leads to a view of the universe as material and disordered, blind and contingently guided, as is given voice in the deathbed speech by the character of Saunderson as well as in the meanderings of the text itself. The fact that Sade’s own thought starts with an equivalent deathbed discussion (in ‘Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribund’ from 1782), and that his life was also marked by long periods of enforced darkness, are only circumstantial points of comparison but Diderot’s approach makes it possible to consider that Sade may have also seen that literature can be a way of examining the scope of empiricism, as it is revealed through the mode of an eroticized and autonomous touch. Literature becomes the field for this experimentation in sensibility, which, in the form of eroticism, is guided by its explosive and contagious sensuality as much as by its materiality. Erotic literature is a laboratory for a particularly extreme kind of materialist thinking, which is made apparent in its reading as much as in its writing. The significance of this point is carried further with the realization that erotica does not merely demonstrate a pre-­ existing model of sensibility but extends and transforms it by way of its own logic or desires. This transformation will have its effects on the nature of the materialist vision that then ensues, and will make the issue of why Sade writes as he does more understandable. There is a key passage that helps focus the extent of this issue, for in it one of Sade’s characters dreams of an act whose influence would be endless: ‘I would like,’ said Clairwil, ‘to find a crime whose action would have a perpetual effect, even when I am no longer doing it, in such a way that there will not be a single instant of my life when, even while sleeping, I am not the cause of a particular disorder, and that this disorder should extend to the point where it brings about a general corruption, or a disturbance so formal, that even beyond my life the effect would continue to extend itself . . .’ ‘I know of little else, my dear,’ I answered, ‘for the fulfilment of your ideas than what could be called moral murder, which is arrived at by means of counsel, writing, or action’. HJ: 650/525

These lines come from Histoire de Juliette where the sentiment is repeated often enough for it to be taken as an abiding concern. Crime is attractive to

Introduction: Realism, Imagination and Desire

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Sade because it not only breaks the law but in doing so also puts the principle of the law in question, and so to consider a crime whose effects would not stop is to consider an autonomous and unrelenting critique of the basis of the law. Juliette’s response to Clairwil is somewhat surprising but all the more disturbing since it reflects directly back on the nature of the text in which it occurs. What does it entail to read a text that aspires to moral murder, which wishes to generate a corruption so general that it affects the very form of life, and that endeavours to do so seemingly by way of the very writing that we are being faced with? But Juliette goes further, since writing is to be accompanied by action and counsel: hers will be an education in word and deed through which she hopes to bring about a corruption without end, and, moreover, an education that seeks to destroy what we ordinarily treat as the ground of education: morality itself. Hence this crime, and the way that it is pursued – instigated, enacted, and embodied by the text itself – becomes a transgression of the very form of the law. These words were probably written in the late 1790s, after the convulsions of the French Revolution and the Terror, and appear in a work that was banned for many years because of its excessive violence and sexuality. In many ways the text is proof of the influence that Clairwil desires, but how was this possible, how did Sade manage to convey a disorder so formal that its effects are still as disruptive as they were when they were written? And what was the motivation for such a crime, what did he hope it would lead to? These questions will be the focus of the essay that follows as they are the keys that bring out the most difficult and significant aspects of Sade’s works. The problematic nature of his writings cannot be overlooked, but it should not obscure the fact of the works themselves: the endeavour that he has set himself and that is manifested in the libertine novels is not simply monstrous but profoundly challenging to thought. What Sade has developed is a full-­scale critique of reason that affects any understanding of the place of thought within the world, and within society, and does so through the medium of an extremely violent and sexual literature, this in itself is enough to pose a challenge to thought but, as he insists, his concern is also to make this challenge perpetual.1 If it is said that Sade is a singular writer, then this is to place him at a remove, to say that his works are unlike any others and thereby mark an extreme of

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literature. Singularity is of course not unusual, all major works are singular in the sense of being unrepeatable, and they remain exemplary in their singularity, in the form of being singular and nothing more. This sense of singularity is not obvious in Sade’s writings as they are largely lacking in interest according to any conventional literary standard, instead, their significance lies in their lack of measure and the reading experience this brings about. It is precisely because the form of this experience is singular that the proper name itself acts as a metonym of its intangibility: ‘Sade’ stands in for the fact that the experience is without any other name, for in its extremity it seems less a form of literature than its own form. This is not to place his works at such an extreme that their singularity renders them unreadable, but rather to indicate that the experience of reading Sade is one that goes far beyond reading in any ordinary sense. While there is nothing remotely difficult about Sade’s language, there are few if any texts that reach the same level of repulsive illegibility, and it is this combination that leaves the experience singular; absolute and incomparable. And yet in this extremity is found something of what literature may aspire to as an extreme that is sui generis, a reading unlike any other, which thereby grants it a form of exemplarity, and explains why Maurice Blanchot can refer to him as ‘the writer par excellence’ [PF: 311/321]. While much valuable research has been done on the textual sources of Sade’s thinking, particularly by Jean Deprun, Michel Delon, and, more recently, Caroline Warman, these have largely stayed within a philological perspective. Although I will draw upon these works I will assess Sade’s thought from within the broader perspective of the history of materialist thinking, which will thereby take into account the relation of materialism to idealism in the lineage of thought that passes through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and on to Adorno and Blanchot. Doing so is necessary because Sade’s erotica presents a problem for any thinking of materiality and ideality, and their relation in literature and philosophy, and it is only through these issues that it is possible to recognize the significance of his works, and their place in the history of European thought, as a lasting challenge to the claims of Enlightenment reason. Consequently, in order to gain a better understanding of Sade’s thinking, and how it informs his writings, it is necessary not just to refer to those texts that he used but also to the wider field of materialist thought in contemporary

Introduction: Realism, Imagination and Desire

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France. For this reason, the role of Diderot becomes crucial as he was the most sophisticated and widely-­read commentator on scientific and philosophical issues in the Enlightenment. Of equal importance is the fact that he sought to develop his ideas by way of literary exercises, like Lettre sur les aveugles but more substantially in Le Rêve de d’Alembert. The latter text is a remarkable speculative inquiry into sensibility and monstrosity in a world stripped of divine order and released to its own endless transformations, and as such it presents a valuable companion piece to Sade’s more extreme endeavours. Although it will only be possible to consider Sade’s relation to the Diderot’s thought briefly, by doing so it will become easier to recognize how his works were grounded in contemporary thought and yet emerged in a form that was entirely their own. While Diderot has long been recognized within Marxist thinking as a precursor of modern materialism, this position has not been taken up by later writers in critical theory. Sade, by contrast, holds a pivotal role in the historical analysis of rationality developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialektik der Aufklärung as it is precisely his extremity that seems to make possible the relation between the conditions of Enlightenment thought and the excesses to which it has been taken in the twentieth century. So where Diderot provides a perspective on the origins of Sade’s thought, the work of critical theory takes a view on the implications of his writings. What will become apparent is that these implications extend further than a simple correlation between Sadean excess and the oppressive violence of the twentieth century, and that Adorno was able to perceive this complexity more successfully than Horkheimer. But if this understanding is to be developed fully, then Blanchot’s study of Sade also needs to be examined as it is in his reading that the singularity of Sade’s thinking and writing is discussed for the first time. Blanchot is not a materialist in the tradition of Diderot and Adorno but he was able to grasp the depth of the challenge to reason that was entailed by Sade’s works, and to realize that this was made evident in the nature and status of his writings. It is for this reason that the reading of Sade in this essay will be articulated between Adorno and Blanchot, and yet will move on to assess how his thought travels far beyond both writers in his attempts to realize his desires.

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I In the essay ‘Idée sur les romans’ from 1800 Sade likens the novelist’s art to that of a painter, who must cleave closely to nature in order to examine it in all its detail, whether these be fortunate or not. If novelists seek to portray everything, then they should not just follow nature but also yield to their imagination, which is also part of nature, and embellish what they see: ‘But in counselling you to embellish, I forbid you to stray from verisimilitude [vraisemblance]’ [IR: 17/111]. This appears to be a contradiction, and would leave the realism of Sade’s fiction in doubt, but it directly follows from his sense of nature as excessive that any form of reality in art would also have to reflect nature’s possibilities as well as its actuality, not just humanity as it is or purports to be, as he writes, but also as it could be when subjected to the ‘full impact of passion’ [IR: 12/106]. Verisimilitude is not static but includes the dimensions of imaginative trajectory implicit within nature, which it is necessary for the novelist to discern if they are to understand everything about the depths of the human heart and the manifold ways of nature. Rather than a contradiction, Sade’s maxim is a double-­bind in which nature must yield to imagination just as fantasy must not stray from reality, which is to say that it is a realism that is as speculative as it is materialist. Before this thought is considered anachronistically, it should be recalled that for Sade such notions of materiality and sensibility are drawn from many philosophical and scientific works of his time, and it is by this route that his ideas can be usefully contrasted with the works of Kant and Hegel, and later with those of André Breton and Georges Bataille. Briefly, an illustration of this point can be found in Le Rêve de d’Alembert, where the characters of Théophile de Bordeu and Julie de l’Espinasse discuss the manner in which sensibility is a part of materiality, which gives rise to its obverse: L’Espinasse: But now another fancy [extravagance] occurs to me. Bordeu: You don’t need to tell me, I know it. E: Go on, what is it? B: You see intelligence united with portions of very energetic matter, and the possibility of all sorts of imaginable prodigies. Others have thought like you.

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E: You’ve guessed, but I don’t respect you any more for it. It’s just that you have a marvellous penchant for the fantastic [folie]. B: Fine. But what is frightening about this idea? There would be an epidemic of good and evil geniuses; the most constant laws of nature would be interrupted by natural agencies; our general physics would become more difficult, but there would be no miracles at all. RA: 48–49/185

Diderot’s reflexive approach, in which ideas occur to the speakers in the same mode of material effervescence as that which is being described, does little to reduce the potential horrors of this discovery, or the difficulties with which such a thought is broached, but it does indicate the firmness of Sade’s thoughts on the relation of imagination and nature, and how he was merely extending the most radical ideas of the lumières to their widest possible extent. In terms of understanding Sade’s relation to realism it is evident that this imaginative dimension occurs in the didactic role that the writings take up, in which it is a question of not only providing a description of nature and humanity but also of extrapolating its possibilities, what it can or even should be like. From which it can be seen that the place of nature in libertine thought is both descriptive and normative. This is a point that it is important to be clear about, for it means that Sade is deliberately setting out both to understand and to provoke, to challenge the conventional thinking of nature by extending it as far as possible, which thereby indicates its inherent and ineradicable possibilities. Realism is subordinated to polemic but only insofar as the latter is rigorously tied to detailed descriptions of the former, Sadean excess depends on the empirical, a move that authorizes itself on the basis that the empirical is itself Sadean. The tendentious circularity of Sade’s thinking is not as simplistic as it looks as its excessive pursuit pushes the possibility of it reaching any closed unity into an endlessly eccentric path of destabilization. That is, the apparent dialectic of reflection and description is propelled onto a course without centre or goal, without any natural limits or propriety, which only leads to ever greater extravagance. Understanding this exploded dialectic will be one of the main threads in the chapters that follow, since its form is perplexing both in its status and its implications, and provides one of the sharpest means of approaching the philosophical significance of his writings.

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As evidence of this profusion of tendencies Sade continues his recommendations in ‘Idée sur les romans’ by stating that although geographical verisimilitude should be respected, this is not necessary in relation to history, and while one should not feel bound by the limitations that the project initially imposes, it should in its denouement remain faithful to the preceding events, to what is believable, but also to the inspiration of the imagination. Realism in descriptions and conclusions is important, to an extent, but historical origins and fidelity are not, which says much about the status of history in Sade’s writings, as will become apparent. Thus the order of the empirical is recognized only to be breached, and with no more of a rationale than that these developments are performed well, for, as he concludes, these rules have not always been followed in his own writings. In this tensed relation between pleasure and credibility Sade feels no greater loyalty to either aspect but only to their continued interpolation. Verisimilitude, which is repeatedly referred to in this essay as if it were the touchstone of novelistic success, its evidence and guarantor, can only be understood when it is derived from the sense of nature that subtends it in Sade’s thought: Nature, even stranger than the moralists portray it to us, eludes at every moment the barriers that their politics would like to prescribe; uniform in her design, uneven in her effects, her constantly troubled breast resembles the depths of a volcano, from which are thrown in turn either precious stones serving man’s indulgences or fireballs that annihilate them; mighty, when she peoples the earth with such as Antoninus and Titus; frightful, when she spews forth an Andronicus or a Nero; but always sublime, always majestic, always worthy of our studies, of our brushstrokes, and of our respectful admiration, because her designs are unknown to us, because it is never upon what those designs cause us to feel that we, slaves to her whims or needs, should base our feelings towards her, but on her grandeur, on her energy, no matter what the results may be. IR: 19/113

Realism draws its imperative from a nature whose aims are unknown and so our own feelings cannot be the ground for any relation to it, instead this should derive from its objective force and scale, regardless of the consequences. The experience of the sublime is not a marker of the supersensible destination of

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humanity as it is in Kant, but of the communication of nature and the imagination in which the direction of movement between the two is never settled. Verisimilitude then occurs in the form of an ambivalent material ecstasy, for what Sade is seeking, in Bataille’s words, is what thought generally refuses: a sournoise community and complicity between the two spheres, one that is insidious or underhand, disreputable and unavowed.2 In some ways, it is unnecessary to discuss Sade’s works in relation to the sublime, given their excess and terror and overwhelming lack of humanity or reason, but the discussion becomes more relevant when it is recalled how Edmund Burke’s sublime in particular derives from an analysis of the differential relation between pleasure and pain, where pain is seen as granting the greater level of stimulation. Moreover, the experience of the sublime disrupts the relation between self and nature to the same degree but in a different way to the disruption of the relation between self and society, for just as the experience of the sublime leads to a sense of isolation it also exposes a continuity of force that joins the terror within with the excess without. Sade gives a greater level of concreteness to Burke’s ideas, which leads to another notion of corporeality than that which has been developed in phenomenological thinking, since this is a thought of the body and of the sensuous that derives from the non-­subjective and inhuman force that traverses and disposes of it. More pointedly, Burke’s notion of the sublime is inherently linked to an experience of terror that need not be a direct experience but can be merely its idea.3 Thus the sense of the sublime can be triggered in the absence of its cause, an idea that is drawn from the rhetorical understanding of the sublime found in Longinus. For the early thinkers of the sublime there was a difference between the experience felt in encountering wild natural scenery, and that to be found through the literary evocation thereof, but the relation between the two was not clearly developed. This uncertainty arose from the ambiguity over whether the sublime operated as an idea or as a physical sensation, and it was thus that the act of reading became central to its understanding since it enabled a study of whether the sense of terror that was conveyed by a text was felt or suggested. For Burke, the act of reading about terrifying scenes could convey delight as it was an experience of the idea of pain rather than its actuality; it was precisely because it was not happening but was suggested that its idea could arouse delight. But, in a

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formulation from 1704 by one of the earliest writers on this topic, John Dennis, it is evident that reading is not just about suggestion as the Sublime does not so properly persuade us, as it Ravishes and Transports us, and produces in us a certain Admiration mingled with astonishment and with surprise, which is quite another thing than the barely Pleasing or the barely persuading; that it gives a noble Vigour to a Discourse, an invincible force which commits a pleasing Rape upon the very Soul of the Reader; that whenever it breaks out where it ought to do, like the Artillery of Jove, it Thunders blazes and strikes at once, and shews all the united force of a Writer. Now I leave the Reader to Judge, whether Longinus has not been saying here all along that Sublimity is never without Passion.4

The ideas here could not be closer to what takes place in Sade’s novels; where the passions transport and ravish as they are conveyed through writing. But Sade also takes the broader point that the idea of terror can bring about a sense of the sublime just as much as its physical experience can, such that the very idea of crime arouses excitement in the libertines [JMV: 334/207]. Hence, what is significant is the fact that Sade is intent on removing the distinction between theory and praxis, between the abstract and the sensible sublime, for rather than the idea of terror provoking a sensation of delight that is sufficient unto itself, the idea of crime gives rise to its actual deployment. There is thus a displacement of subjectivity in Sade’s writings as it is first evacuated through the rape or ravishment of the soul, which transports it, and the subsequent rediscovery of a sensibility within the actualities of its abduction, the violent, chaotic, and inhuman world of the natural sublime. What is found in Sade’s thought is that crime is the mode of this displacement as the actualization of the idea of terror, and it is this discovery that makes his works so powerful as they are intent on not remaining mere words or ideas but on engaging and demonstrating their own actualization.

II To understand how the imagination operates in Sade’s writings, which will provide a way of understanding their status as forms of literature and his aims in writing

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in this way, it is possible to gain a preliminary outline by looking at two key passages that appear in Juliette. I will focus largely on Juliette in this essay, as it is the most extensive and detailed of Sade’s libertine works, and the last one that he actually saw into print.As the counterpart to Justine, Juliette follows the experiences of a young girl as she is exposed to a life of libertinage, but unlike Justine, Juliette takes to this life with enthusiasm. The first half of the novel relates her development as she passes from one tutor to another, learning about debauchery and philosophy, and in doing so showing herself to be a very capable student. This part of the novel then comes to an abrupt halt, for in a moment of weakness Juliette recoils from committing a crime and is rejected by her colleagues, thereafter she has to find her own way. Fearing for her life she flees to Italy and here the story takes a different tack: where before she had been a student, now she begins to act as a tutor to others. Not only does she venture widely as she travels from Florence to Rome, and Naples and Venice, and so on, but in these travels she becomes even more violent and debauched than before. However, where the first half of the novel contained many philosophical discourses as Juliette is introduced to the ramifications of a life of vice, in the second half these discourses are generally less extensive and less philosophical and are replaced by a cultural travelogue. In Chapter Two I will examine the first part of the novel to show how philosophy and debauchery contribute to Juliette’s development but it is useful to look briefly at the second half, for in this section Sade drew on his own experiences of travelling through Italy in 1775–76 as they were documented in his journal Voyage d’Italie. On his return to France, Sade started working on his travel memoirs with the intention of turning them into a book, as he believed that his insights into customs, politics, and culture would establish him as a critic and thinker. Eight months later he was arrested and taken to the prison at Vincennes but he continued to work on the manuscript for several years in the hope of launching his writing career. However, the confinement of prison saw his development as a writer take another direction, and although the journal would remain unpublished until 1967 it would serve as the background for the second half of Juliette. Consequently, this section contains some of his earliest reflections on art and life, as they are elaborated twenty years later in Juliette’s narrative. Arriving in Florence, Juliette and her companions visit the galleries, and on entering the Palazzo Vecchio, she remarks: ‘I love the arts, they inflame my

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mind; nature is so beautiful that one must cherish everything that imitates her . . . Ah! Can there be too much encouragement for those who love and copy her? The only way of laying bare [arracher] some of her mysteries is to study them without end; it is only in scrutinizing her down to her most secret folds that one comes to the annihilation of all prejudices’ [HJ: 729/611]. After admiring some classical nudes, she passes into another room of sculptures, but of a very different nature: A bizarre idea is executed in this room. One sees a sepulchre filled with cadavers in which all the different stages of dissolution can be observed, from the moment of death up to the total destruction of the individual. This sombre execution is of a wax so naturally coloured that nature could not be more expressive or more truthful. In considering this masterpiece the impression is so strong that the senses seem to mutually inform themselves [s’avertir]. Without wanting to, one covers one’s nose; my cruel imagination amused itself at this spectacle; how many beings had my wickedness forced to undergo these terrible changes [gradations] . . . To go on: nature doubtless carried me to these crimes since they still delight me, if only in their recollection. HJ: 730/613; cf. CVJ: 333–34/343

These sculptures are the work of the Sicilian artist Gaetano Zummo (or Zumbo), and the description closely matches Sade’s notes from his visit.5 It is the apparent veracity of the display that is impressive, and one that in its visceral presence seems to manifest itself to a variety of senses. The newly-­ found anatomical truth of such wax figures was a great attraction to audiences at La Specola, which had only opened six months before Sade’s visit. But the response that is drawn from Sade is not just about the body but about its decay, which confounds any sense of transcendental persistence and instead presents a vivid demonstration of material resurgence. Death becomes the gateway to a new and different kind of reincarnation as bodies dissolve into other forms of existence. It is the possibility of this changed understanding of nature that seems so exciting to Juliette, for this indifferent and vivacious materiality cuts across the senses as well as the division between thought and memory, and reason and imagination. Significantly, the breaching of the boundaries within her mind links it to the continuity that is perceived in the sculptures themselves,

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which thus exposes her to this upsurge of matter. The novelty and richness of this anatomical vision appear to guarantee its truth, but for Sade it also indicates the nature of the scientific experience as one of pursuing such encounters as far as possible, since the analysis of nature in which it is progressively flayed is seemingly endless, one can always go further in this expérience. Which is to say that it is an experience to be undergone, it is not just about detachment but is rather subjective and sensible; it is to be experienced if it is to be understood, with all the sensory and imaginative ramifications that Juliette describes. And to study nature in this way is to collaborate, to copy and to recreate it through repetition, destruction, and differentiation. It is also in Juliette that there occurs one of the most studied passages in Sade’s writings, the recipe for discerning vice that Juliette imparts to Comtesse de Donis, which is also the first major speech that Juliette delivers for herself, and it condenses much of what she has learned over the years of her training. Within this recipe, which will be discussed in Chapter Four, the imagination is stimulated to produce ideas far beyond its ordinary sphere by the repeated action of writing and reading one’s own thoughts. With each iteration of this cycle the ideas become more extreme but also more concrete, allowing the libertine to discover the particular shape of the desires that excite them most. As will be seen, this cycle follows an autoerotic model of excitation, but it also indicates the material basis of imaginative excess in Sade’s thought, and the exponential possibilities opened out by this material basis. To understand this escalation it is necessary to examine an earlier discussion of the powers of the imagination delivered by Comte de Belmor, which shows how this understanding converges with the idea of an infinite crime. Belmor begins his discussion with the thought that the excessively criminal imagination that Juliette sees in him, and that attracts her to him, is, in his words, ‘precisely what seduced me in you’ [HJ: 647/521]. This suggests that the possibility of recognizing and responding to such an imagination lies in the extent to which it is reflected in the observer, and it is through this sensible resonance that it is then able to express itself without limits. For in this reciprocal movement the imagination is able to move far beyond its initial stimuli and sketch out excesses that surpass existence, as Belmor says, but necessarily ideas emerge through this progressive augmentation that cannot

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be satisfied: ‘I don’t know if reality can equal these images, and if the enjoyment of that which we don’t have is not worth a hundred times that which we possess’, which leads him to conclude, ‘that which you offer me is only beautiful, that which I invent is sublime’ [HJ: 648/522]. Such a thought does not imply a simple idealism of pleasures, for what is sublime is the actual movement of the imagination beyond its limits, which is to say that these discoveries generate jouissance in concrete acts of transgression. It is in the breaching of new possibilities in reality, rather than in its transcendence, that there is a sense of the sublime, as it is precisely in what the imagination can experience, can feel, that this sense of infinite exposure arises, for the invention has occurred through its material extension in words or deeds. It is thus that this thought converges on Clairwil’s desire for a crime that does not cease, but what is of interest is that Juliette’s response to this desire consists in reading a plan that Belmor had sketched out, which is a model of epidemiological increase: A libertine deciding on this kind of action, Juliette read, can easily, in the course of a year, corrupt three hundred children; at the end of thirty years he will have corrupted nine thousand; and if each child he has corrupted only imitates him in a quarter of his corruptions, which is more than believable; and if each generation has acted in the same way, at the end of those thirty years the libertine will have seen spring up under him two generations of this corruption, will have corrupted nearly nine million beings, either by himself or by the principles he has given them. HJ: 651/525–26

Number itself becomes the source of the imaginative sublime, number that is not just abstract but the real possibility of exponential material contagion. Number allows the mind to seize this possibility of measuring the immeasurable, and therein lies its enjoyment. But, as Kant remarks, ‘if by its magnitude [an object] annihilates the end that its concept constitutes’, that is, by its extrapolation it moves beyond the ability to be comprehended, then it becomes monstrous [CPJ: §26, 136]. So insofar as this idea is realized in an unlimited, open-­ended corruption it is beyond the capacities of thought and the monstrous form of this materialization soon makes itself known, as the discussion between Clairwil and Juliette has been about poison.

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If further confirmation of the materiality of the imagination needs to be given, then it is only necessary to see how the apparent penetration by god that Juliette and Clairwil experience in the following pages is quite explicitly a satire on the mystical encounters found in contemporary literature. For the figure of god, or the sylph, as it is also called, is no more than a pale, thin, and rather agitated man of about fifty. However, the important part of this exchange is the meeting with the sorcerer Durand, who provides the libertines with poisons. As soon as they arrive, Clairwil makes their intentions clear: to begin with they would like to know the future; and secondly, ‘you should give us the means of mastering this future by giving us a complete collection of all the poisons you prepare’. Poison is able to offer this mastery because it continues to operate long after it has been introduced into a system, like literature it is able to produce effects across space and time, creating a contamination that persists even without further intervention. Time is that against which the imagination measures itself, in terms of what could have been done, and what could be done, it exists as a frustrating excess for the libertine that exposes the limitations of their abilities, an antagonism that will be at the core of the reading in this essay. Thus the sense of mastery that Clairwil seeks is for a way of extending her desires not only beyond their limits but also their possibilities, as the exposure of the imagination to an endless excess excites her libertinism ever further with its perpetual transgression. As she drily assures Durand in asking to see her laboratory of poisons, ‘we won’t remain at just this level’ [HJ: 652/527]. It can be seen that these two aspects, the endlessness of bodily transformation and that of imaginary corruption, provoke and reflect each other, which introduces the last preliminary issue: that of the language Sade uses to try to bridge this correspondence. As is apparent, his language is rhetorically excessive; although the scenarios are described quite blandly and his use of metaphor is very weak, the hyperbole attached to actions is extreme. (In doing so, he inverts the rhetorical form of the sublime as it is his arguments that are extravagant while his language is relatively plain, indicating that it is not persuasion that concerns him but disruption.) This raises the question of how we are to respond to such excess as readers of his works. It is clearly insufficient to take such language either as mere bravado or at face value, instead it is

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necessary to understand the position from which it is used, which is that of extreme isolation. Often such language seems no more than part of the fantasies of grandeur that he entertains, fantasies that if they are not simply dismissed are repeated by commentaries that seek to recapitulate that grandeur in their own writings.6 Such enthused or exalted language is, in Kant’s terms, to be avoided as it refuses critique and opts instead for an esoteric revelation, that is, it claims to have knowledge that is obscured through an intentionally secretive language.7 Sade’s language is not of this kind as it pursues neither esotericism nor prophetic knowledge, instead, it is an Enlightenment language; committed to exposing truth and unravelling mysteries. If he takes up the language of hyperbole in doing so, then it is partly because of the strength of his passion to unveil the obscure and partly because of the contagious qualities of enthused language, which is why it is dangerous. But the peculiarity of Sade’s language is that it is aesthetic in the double sense of being something that is felt by the reader, as well as being that which discourses upon that feeling. (A duplicity emphasized in the introduction to Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome in its aims to be both literary and scientific: ‘It would thus be a question above all of finding subjects capable of giving an account of all these excesses, of analysing them, extending them, itemizing them, graduating them, and of running the sense [intérêt] of a narrative through them’ [CVJ: 39/28].) This quality is what makes his language so difficult to respond to, and so potentially damaging, for if we respond to the emphatic edge of his writing, then we lose sight of its analytic depth, but if we refuse the former in favour of the latter, then we lose its affective thrust. His language is directly and indirectly effective and so requires a response that can do justice to both sides, which was the full sense of the rhetorical sublime in Longinus: to affect the audience bodily while also provoking critical reflection. Such was the possibility being developed by Enlightenment thinkers before Kant separated the critical and the aesthetic. But Sade’s thought is not simply that of a lumière, he is not Diderot or even La Mettrie as he lacks the Enlightenment faith in reason and progress, or a belief in the essential unity and order of humanity. Between 1777 and 1790 Sade was imprisoned and during this time he became a writer, composing the first version of Justine, along with Aline et Valcour and ‘Eugénie de Franval’ and other plays and poems.

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Much of what he wrote in these years was lost when he was hastily removed from the Bastille, but the most significant loss was probably that of Les Cent Vingt Journées. Conceived between 1782 and 1785, this work has to be seen in context to understand the singularity of Sade’s vision, as this was an attempt to compose the most appalling and detailed study of human sexuality ever written and to do so in such a way that it would be both a roman noir and a philosophical encyclopaedia, and his intent in all this was to educate as well as to provoke and to stimulate. Furthermore, this work is at the beginning of Sade’s theoretical and fictional career, which is to say that he started at the very end of human experience, the limit of what it is possible to imagine, as is made clear by the fact that the story is set in a remote castle cut off from all humanity at the very edge of the world. As is well known, the manuscript was left unfinished and was not fully published until 1931–35, so it is to his other works that we should turn to see how his ideas are brought to fruition. But what is inescapable about Les Cent Vingt Journées is the fact that Sade begins from a point of such extremity, from which he does not turn back but only goes on, and such an approach to literature or philosophy is unique and challenging in itself. Hence, the singularity of his language is not just a rhetorical construction to challenge or impress his readers but instead arises from the extremes on which he is drawn to write. Thus each side exacerbates the other since there is no other way to put into language an experience that has no analogue, as there is no familiar order into which it can be placed, hence it becomes a language that is inordinate insofar as it speaks of that which is without order, it is a language of monstrosity. Just before the midpoint of Juliette the protagonist and her companions encounter the Russian giant Minski, and his castle is described in terms that reflect the concealment and remoteness of Silling in Les Cent Vingt Journées.8 It is buried in the deepest forests, behind the thickest walls, on an island in a lake in a valley made inaccessible by the highest mountains, and reflecting this Minski introduces himself: Much philosophy is needed to understand me . . . I know this: I am a monster, vomited up by nature to cooperate with her in the destruction she demands . . . I am a being unique in my kind . . . a . . . oh yes! I know all the invectives they honour me with; but powerful enough to have need of no one . . . wise

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enough to enjoy my solitude, to detest all mankind, to brave its censure, and to mock its feelings for me, educated enough to demolish every belief, to scorn every religion, and to fuck all the gods, proud enough to abhor every government, to go beyond every bond, every check, every ethical principle, I am happy in my little domain; in it I exercise all the rights of sovereigns, I enjoy all the pleasures of despotism, I fear no one, and I live content; I have few visitors, indeed none, unless in my walks I encounter beings who, like you, seem to me philosophical enough to amuse themselves for some time here; these are only ones I invite, and I meet few HJ: 705/582–83

It is important to realize that this passage not only reflects something of the extremity of Sade’s own isolation but also that of his writing. It is the work itself that has become such a monstrosity; detested and rejected and presenting a face that is forbidding to all but the most philosophical of readers. Of course, the pathos is not incidental to this position but to some degree it says no more than what is inevitable for anything that has found itself unique in nature, as such creations cannot be other than fearsome; their solitude itself is evidence of this extremity, insofar as it is a situation without comparison, monstrous and absolute. What is of interest is how the experience of isolation becomes sustainable, given its remoteness and lack of familiarity, for it can only exist insofar as it makes of its distance from the ordinary the very motor of its existence: alienation is its raison d’être and so must be pursued if it is to persist. The philosophy that is needed is thus no simple analysis but one that can broach this experience, which means apprehending it subjectively as well as objectively and such immersion only adds to its forbidding quality as it means that to read Sade is to involve oneself in his thoughts in their extremity. Such involvement does not reduce the sense of singularity but rather indicates how it can be recapitulated in a different form; how monstrosity regenerates itself in its extremity. This occurs in the mode of propagation by contamination, by provoking other forms of singularity in a kind of education without tradition, as there is no continuity between the different forms, only greater variation. Whether biologically or artistically this distribution knows only monsters, there are no norms against which to measure its changes, only extravagance. Formation without regularity or order implies a constant

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state of treachery, which Juliette develops in the second half of the novel to such a degree that it is the central mode of her existence. While she is extraordinarily violent, betrayal is the key to her monstrosity as it is this that makes her violent acts singular, since betrayal is primarily a rupture of relation. This last point is significant as Sade is not a revolutionary; despite his didacticism he has no philanthropic aims for social or political transformation. He may share the dedication and ruthlessness of the Jacobins but this is directed towards the removal of prohibition rather than the creation of a new order, and it is issued as a challenge to those strong enough to take it up in the knowledge that very few are willing to go as far as he desires, or to do what is necessary to actualize these desires fully. The way that the Jacobins sought to impose a new order as a triumph of reason may seem to resemble the cold abstractions of Sade’s thought except that his abstractions are always in the service of material desires. Again, what this suggests is that the abstract and the passionate cannot be separated in his thought or language but actively cooperate to extrapolate their possibilities ever further. Such would be the aesthetic nature of his thought, as I have termed it, and if it bears a fanaticism, then it is nihilist and libertine rather than political or religious as it lacks a social measure in either its means or its aims, and this is because the mode of his aesthetic is sublime: excessive to the point of absolute alienation. In Kantian terms thought marks itself as rational by way of its observation of the limits of critique and when these are ignored it is at risk of irrationality. Thus, it is not just in terms of the transcendental prohibitions to thought but also in its relation to the material – the bodily and the sensuous – that reason risks losing its rationality. And it is precisely here that Sade begins, and in such a way that the ‘rationality’ of his thought is continually being put into question, for what is the nature of a thought that persistently pushes itself beyond any reasonable limit? Part of the revulsion that his writings arouse is derived from this sense of a perversion of reason itself, which is why it is common to find the philosophical nature of his ideas reduced, but it is essential to realize that this perversion is the inevitable result of the material expression and extension of thought, which recognizes no natural limits.

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III The oft-­noted monotony of Sade’s writing is offset by the fact that his works are so varied in resonance, to the extent that his writing is perhaps more effective because of its banality and seems to offer itself as an exemplar of the times through which we can read its republicanism, its materialism, and its atheism, as well as its violence and erotica. But this banality is deceptive, as part of the problem with Sade is precisely that his works give onto several differing perspectives that overlap but do not converge, as each of these perspectives carries its own concerns and there is not any single principle that unifies them. For example, transgression appears as crime and excess and violence and obscenity and so on, but it is just as much a political principle as it is metaphysical, as much personal and literary as it is impersonal and scientific. Although this combination of interests is distinctive of the lumières (as is especially found in Diderot, for instance), and itself embodies a thought of transgression, its lack of coherence does not render it easier to grasp. Instead, the discussion of transgression leads to discussions of the law, nature, and the state, which in being reconfigured by this thought of transgression become ungrounded and so cannot provide the basis from which to begin a discussion. As a result, the wild, all-­consuming syncretism of libertine thought renders it unavailable to the systematic thinking of Kant or Hegel, even though Sade’s interests stretch across many of the same areas and he desired the same encyclopaedic status for them. But the violence of systematizing is entirely in tune with his thinking, to the degree that it also violates its own system and in doing so shows the disruptive material underside of Idealism. It is significant in this regard that the resurgence of interest in Sade in the twentieth century should occur through the writings of the Surrealists, as it is the same set of (social–artistic–psychological) concerns that guides their thinking, although they do not pursue them as far. Nevertheless, this renewed interest provided the impetus for other writers to pursue these concerns with greater seriousness, and not just Bataille and Klossowski but also Blanchot and Adorno. However, the manner in which the Surrealists introduced Sade into twentieth-­century thinking provided a way of understanding his works in the modern world that marked their subsequent reception. And what enabled this

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translation was their realization that Sade brought the condition of the writer as a revolutionary to a peak of visibility, a realization that was grounded in the limitless powers of the imagination so that writing itself could be understood as revolutionary. Moreover, this was a writing that began when Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille and led to some of the most violent and repellent pages ever written. It was this figure that the Surrealists saw as the culminating representative of their attempts to draw together the insights of Marx and Freud in order to overcome reality. As I have begun to show, the imagination’s role in Sade’s thought is both material and fantastic, abstract and concrete, indicating both the libidinal grounding of thought in the natural world and the excession of nature through its own desires, which grants it both a politics and an aesthetics, and it is thus that a link can be found between Adorno and Blanchot in their ambivalent responses to Surrealism (it is as such that this essay is also an extension of the work begun in my earlier book Aesthetics of Negativity). An ambivalence that may explain why they fall short in their responses to Sade, for in terms of their philosophical and literary approaches Sade’s writings exceed the readings proposed by Blanchot and Adorno. This is perhaps because of the total insurrection of the imagination that was put forward by Sade, which was not reached by Blanchot or Adorno (despite their commitments to the idea) due to their doubts about literary praxis. As Walter Benjamin pointed out in 1929, the significance of Surrealism is that it gave expression, for the first time since Bakunin, to a notion of radical freedom that took on a pivotal role in their thought.9 A freedom stripped of the morality and pragmatism of liberal humanism and willing to envision itself as total liberation. Through this possibility the Surrealists sought to develop a libidinous déreglement of the senses and an oneiric ecstasy in the service of the revolution and thus the lines of inheritance from Sade’s thought, however tenuously or minimally recapitulated, made themselves felt. Except that in Sade the opposite is the case, since the revolution is in the service of libertinism, which from the position of his individualism he sees as the basis and the goal of any broader social revolution. Nevertheless, the idea of an unbridled desire would find itself reformulated in Surrealism and it is because of the naivety with which it is pursued that it is more utopian than the ideas of Blanchot or Adorno, for what

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is apparent is that they both acclaim the ambitions of Surrealism even as they criticize its failure to develop these ambitions with the necessary care, but such is the inevitable failure of practical utopian thinking to which both Blanchot and Adorno demur. Their responses to Surrealism thus provide a counterpoint to their responses to Sade insofar as the significance of the former as a project of liberated desire suggests how the latter might have been considered if it were possible to extend the revolutionary potential of Sade’s writings beyond his absolute singularity. Doing so would require the utopian thinking that Sade lacks, as his thought bears no sense of futurity whereas Surrealism is intrinsically oriented towards the future in which it will actualize itself. Conversely, when, in Qu’est-­ce que la littérature?, Sartre criticizes Surrealism from the position of committed literature, Blanchot’s response in ‘La littérature and le droit à la mort’ indirectly comes to Breton’s defence by restating the radical mutation of idealism that Sade’s works imply for any understanding of the relation between writing and the world.10 For in Sade, Blanchot finds the revolutionary potential of the writer actualized to a point of absolute refusal (rejection, insubordination, contestation), which exposes both its unique challenge to any political thinking and also the demands that this entails for any writing that would pursue this challenge, demands that affect not just the writer’s language but his very existence, as this is a writing that would actualize itself in place of reality as ‘the impossible continuity of the “real” and the “imaginary” ’ [EI: 10/9]. These negative passions of refusal could, Benjamin writes, provide a more profound poetics of Surrealist thought than the more commonly-­discussed elements of surprise and chance and, indeed, an implacable negativity is at the heart of Sade’s atheism and republicanism, and it is for this reason that they have such an elusive status.11 For insofar as they remain passions they are idealist, and yet inasmuch as they are passions they are materialist, and thus they problematize the conventional separation of idealism and materialism, and concreteness and abstraction, as well as the possibility of drawing this negativity into a dialectical resolution. Blanchot sees this actualization of writing as ‘the passage from nothing to everything’, in which there is ‘the affirmation of the absolute as event and of every event as absolute’ [PF: 309/319]. In the form of this chiasmus there is the

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discovery that in literature there is a seizure of totality, of the idea of the world as a whole, the instantaneous realization of the whole in an act of literature that sweeps aside what is and imposes itself in its place. It is thus that Blanchot sees this act as analogous to revolutionary action, for the writer who takes up this possibility ‘has not left history but history is now the void, it is the void that realizes itself, it is absolute freedom become event [. . .] freedom aspires to be realized in the immediate form of everything is possible’ [PF: 309/318]. But this freedom and totality only arises on the basis of the negation of everything, which is what grants the whole that is literature its ghostly reality, and for Blanchot it is this absolute remove (écart) that constitutes literature and its relation to the world. Despite similarities, Sade cannot be entirely assimilated to this idea as his works are not just literature but erotica; they seek a direct and material relation with the reader. Blanchot’s reading of Sade was the first to recognize that his works are a challenge not merely to morality but to thought as such, and although elsewhere he makes much of the material destabilization of literature, in relation to Sade he seems to underestimate the violation of the imaginary that comprises the specific tension of his writings (it could be argued that the encounter between the immanence of the law and the plague of abject eroticism that takes place in Le Très-Haut, the novel that he completed six months before his Sade essay, goes some way towards addressing this problem). It is true that Sade’s works follow this idea of the absolute event but they also exist as manuals for bringing about actual changes in the world, and it is this tension that will be the focus of the following pages. The importance of this tension comes from the fact that Sade’s writings draw attention to the uncertain status of the literary work, and the relation it exposes between thought and the world, which is to say that his works are not just literature even if they are nothing else but literature. The mere fact that such a relation can be discussed by way of Sade immediately casts it in problematic terms, after all what can we learn about the nature of literary works and their place in the world from a body of writings of the most extreme violence and perversity? Except that it is precisely through such extremes that we can come to grasp the movements of thought and desire most vividly. This point might make it seem that a psychoanalytic approach would be appropriate to understanding Sade’s works, but there are important disparities to take into

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account. While there is a sense in which fantasies are acted out (in the Freudian sense) in his writings, crucially these are neither unconscious nor repressed, nor does he recognize any essential differences in gender or sexuality, or even any substantial sense of self or other. Also, and despite appearances, desire is not oriented towards sensual enjoyment or domination but is a perverse compulsion towards transgression as such, without form and without end, which comprises his own sense of jouissance. Such a revision of basic psychoanalytic tenets would be very interesting to explore, and would lead to a thought of desire that went far beyond the already heterodox ideas of Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich.12 But this approach could only be developed on the basis of a reading that had already come to terms with the reconfiguration of subjectivity entailed by Sade’s view of nature as constant destruction and regeneration. It is for this reason that critical theory provides a more viable basis for beginning to understand Sade, since it is in its materialist rethinking of the relation of nature and history that the unique significance of his thought becomes apparent, both in its proximity to the dialectics of natural-­history, and its radical reformulation of the same. The fact that Horkheimer’s reading of Juliette takes a central place in Dialektik der Aufklärung speaks to this awareness of Sade’s importance for understanding Enlightenment thought, but the limitations of his reading make it necessary to find alternatives within the same perspective.13 Adorno’s thoughts on Sade have not been previously explored and although they only comprise a few remarks they provide evidence of exactly the materialist understanding of desire, and the reformulation of natural-­history this entails, that have been omitted by Horkheimer. Furthermore, Adorno is very sensitive to the strangeness of Sade’s writings as works of erotica, so by starting with his comments it will be possible to outline the most important peculiarities of Sade’s works before turning to read them directly. I will focus primarily on Juliette, as already noted, because it presents Sade’s thinking at its most complex as well as in its greatest literary excess, and this is important in order to grasp how his writing demonstrates and extrapolates his ideas. Sade is not a reflexive writer like Diderot or Rousseau but in his writing his ideas develop and propagate through the modes of stimulation, corruption,

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and contagion, which necessarily affects their reading. As a result, the rest of this essay will pursue the textual transformations of reason that his materialist critique exposes, but this does not lead to a positioning of Sade as a textual thinker in the way that Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers desired, but rather the opposite: to a realization that the text of his works presents the materialist critique in praxis, which can be partially intimated by the close relation that erotic literature takes to reality. Diderot’s place in this trajectory becomes very helpful as his understanding of the relation of thought to the body, and the materialist realization of desire, make it possible to see the more exoteric tendencies of the Enlightenment, which Sade explored in a more subterranean but also more incendiary manner. His was the toxic undercurrent of Enlightenment materialism that necessarily could only realize itself through the clandestine networks of erotic literature. Erotica exists as a challenge not only to thought’s relation to the body but also to the separation of the text from the world, and Sade has explored the implications of these points further than any other writer. But understanding this issue has proved difficult since erotica is rarely considered to be a serious examination of the possibilities of literature. The first critical study to appear was Pierre Klossowski’s Sade mon prochain in 1947 but this was strongly criticized by Blanchot and Bataille who questioned its attempt to read Sade in terms of a mystical account of experience. Blanchot’s essay in particular became a key text in establishing the philosophical significance of Sade as it showed that the account of experience in his works was not oriented towards transgression as a form of transcendence but was rather grounded in a persistent negativity that constituted a challenge to the very conditions of understanding. Consequently, reading Blanchot’s essay entails considering Sade’s relation to the thinking of Enlightenment reason that appears in the works of Kant and Hegel, and also to the French Revolution, but in doing so it is necessary to examine how far Blanchot has managed to articulate the challenge of Sade’s works and how far their material excess eludes his thinking. Later chapters will then be able to explore the implications for readers in encountering such an excess of violence and abjection. Sade’s own thoughts on this issue are ambivalent for while the libertines are recommended to act in a mode of indifference to their crimes, the reader is given no such scope for

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remaining unaffected by what is exposed. This problem becomes more tangible when it is understood that he sees crime as the model of praxis, which provides a horizontal, ahistorical, and material alternative to the Enlightenment ideals of law and reason. This in turn explains how his thinking relates to the political and historical responses to his work made by Pasolini in Salò and Peter Weiss in Marat/Sade. As will be seen, criminality, like erotica, is concerned with short-­circuiting the dialectical relation between theory and practice, which has profound effects on any understanding of history or politics. By turning to Weiss’s later novel on revolutionary activism, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, a parallel can then be drawn that enables a greater understanding of how this short-­circuiting leads to a turmoil that is a form of resistance to history, a resistance that is necessarily without end, that is, without aim or conclusion.

1

Turmoil: Adorno’s Literal Reading Consequently, Sade appears in the order of what I will call experimental literature. The work of art is here an experiment [expérience] that, through its action, tears the subject loose from their psychosocial moorings – so as not to remain vague, I would say from all psychosocial appreciation of the sublimation in question. Jacques Lacan, 30 March 1960 The aim of Dialektik der Aufklärung was to analyse the history of European thought in order to understand the cultural and political forms of modern life, in a proximal sense this meant an examination of how fascism and con­ sumerism had developed as social and intellectual possibilities. The thesis that was put forward was that the symbolic order of mythology gave rise to rational thinking in the drive towards greater knowledge and security, but that this transformation is inherently incomplete and so always at risk of reverting to its earlier form. As a result, Enlightenment reason is riven by a dialectical tension between nature and history, and between an atavistic fear of the unknown and a rationalistic desire to control. This is not to say that rationality as such is completely or inevitably fascist in its implications but that its inclinations towards order and abstraction, which lie at the root of modern political and scientific thought, also lead to social (and mythical) modes of domination. While some of the more controversial aspects of this approach were developed through a study of contemporary culture, the book as a whole was historically grounded in readings of the Odyssey and Sade’s Juliette, the former being written by Adorno and the latter by Horkheimer. Although the significance of Odysseus’ role as a pioneering figure of secular cunning seems understandable, the place of Sade in the history of reason is perhaps less

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obvious. But for Horkheimer, citing Kant’s definition of enlightenment, the choice was obvious: The totalitarian order has granted calculating thought all its rights and holds to science as such. Its canon is its own bloody efficiency. From Kant’s Kritik to Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral the hand of philosophy has traced this on the wall; one individual has carried it out in all its details. The work of the Marquis de Sade exhibits ‘understanding without direction from another’, that is, the bourgeois subject freed from tutelage [Bevormundung]. DA: 105–6/67–68; PP: 17

Horkheimer thus reads Sade solely as a critique of modern thought, an exemplar of Enlightenment rationality whose extremity exposes the basis and implications of instrumental reason taken to its limits, rather than examining his works in themselves. Adorno made little contribution to this chapter in Dialektik der Aufklärung and Sade does not appear in the rest of his writings to any significant extent, but his understanding of the dialectics of reason is notably more complex and less pessimistic than Horkheimer’s, so it is possible that there could be room in his thought for reconsidering Sade from a less negative point of view, especially when it is considered that he grants a central importance to bodily and sensual experience. Such modes of experience reveal a form of knowledge that is non-­ conceptual and thus not confined to an identity thinking that assimilates it to the self and to what is known. Sensual experience, like the experience of artworks, becomes integral to any understanding of what may escape the confines of instrumental reason, and thereby hold the possibility of a hope that there might be a form of life without domination and reification, but clearly any attempt to discern such a mode within Sade’s works would be highly problematic. But these two perspectives, of Sade as a forerunner of instrumental reason and of sensual experience as that which escapes it, cannot be simply separated, and, although they are brief and scattered, there is a strong sense in Adorno’s comments on Sade that he saw how their entanglement could be dialectically understood, and perhaps reconstrued to realize their suppressed possibilities. Hence, his thoughts on Sade contain a very different reading from that developed by Horkheimer, but one that also challenges his own

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understanding of the nature of the work of art, in particular its relation to thought and language, by exposing the material contingency inherent to the liberation of desire. The first remark comes from the first part of Minima Moralia, dated 1944: On parle français. – How intimately [innig] sex and language are intertwined can be seen by reading pornography in a foreign language. When Sade is read in the original no dictionary is needed. The most abstruse [entlegensten] expressions for the indecent [Unanständige], knowledge of which no school, no parental home, no literary experience transmits, are understood unconsciously [nachtwandelnd], just as in childhood the most tangential utterances and observations concerning the sexual [Geschlechtlichen] are riddled [zusammenschießen] with correct notions [rechten Vorstellung]. It is as if the imprisoned passions, called by their name in these words, had burst through the walls of their own repression as through those of blind language, and forced their way [schlügen gewalttätig] irresistibly into the innermost cells of meaning, which resembles them. MM: 53/481

This appears to be the first time that Adorno discusses Sade but, as remarks in letters to Benjamin from 1938–39 indicate, he had been familiar with his writings for some time.2 It is clear that Adorno’s concern is with how Sade’s works bring out the peculiar status of language’s relation to sex, which fits with the broader concerns of Minima Moralia in discussing the forms of contemporary mores in the face of instrumental reason. But a number of other concerns are also obvious in that morality is being discussed by way of pornography, and, furthermore, by way of the child’s relation to language with sexual content. This raises issues about the place of sexuality in childhood and its effect on language, which will not be addressed here, since Adorno’s point is that the language of pornography is truthful: demonstrative of a direct relation between words, thoughts, and objects as if language were able to bear out their mimetic relation in this mode. In a sense, this says no more than what is ordinarily known about pornographic language, which is disturbing precisely because it directly affects the reader and seeks an immediate relation to its object. But as Adorno emphasized, this experience is made possible through a mimesis of language

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and the passions in which they become like each other. The words of pornography thereby expose the inter-­relation of the sensible and the conceptual so that this is not simply a language of physicality but a meaningful conveyance of that which surpasses conceptual meaning. Pornography is thus interesting for Adorno as it enables a concrete experience of the non-­identical; that which cannot be subsumed into conceptual thought. That such a philosophically significant concern should be demonstrated through pornographic language is provocative enough, but Adorno chooses to make this claim through the language of Sade, who is not merely an exemplar of pornography but something far more challenging. To begin with the first sentences: ‘How intimately sex and language are intertwined can be seen by reading pornography in a foreign language. When Sade is read in the original no dictionary is needed. The most abstruse expressions for the indecent, knowledge of which no school, no parental home, no literary experience transmits, are understood unconsciously’. To suggest that it is possible to read Sade without knowing French, without translation, is to suggest that pornographic language needs no mediation as the reader directly experiences what is happening. As Adorno states, this experience is like that of the sleepwalker (nachtwandler) who is able to follow paths and avoid obstacles without being aware of them, the implication being that the presence of sexuality in language acts as a mimetic guideline, supplying an unconscious erotic pressure that enables the reader to follow what is going on even without the ability to translate it. Hence, the text must act on the reader in such a way as to make this mimetic communication possible, to draw out its material affinity, but Adorno goes further by claiming that in this experience there is an encounter with truth: ‘in childhood the most tangential utterances and observations concerning the sexual are riddled with correct notions. It is as if the imprisoned passions, called by their name in these words, had burst through the walls of their own repression as through those of blind language, and forced their way irresistibly into the innermost cells of meaning, which resembles them’. Thus, this power of naming derives not from knowledge but from the mimetic capacity of words themselves, which in resembling these suppressed passions call them forth. There is a suggestion of speculative Cratylism here in which language directly opens onto its material grounds. But

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Adorno undercuts the possibility of seeing this as an essential relation by the violent terms he uses to describe this awareness, for the language of sex is shot through (zusammenschießen) with the right idea (rechten Vorstellung) as the passions violently break into (schlügen gewalttätig) it. The passions do not converge with language naturally, as it were, but through a mutual rupture. For there are two sides to this experience: on one side, pornographic language exposes us to the way things actually are in true images of the world; and on the other side, the passions find their way into our awareness by exposing their own suppressed relation to language. This is an intensely intimate (innig) relation of sex and language, their unconscious insistence within each other, and thus this key Idealist term is granted an explicitly material basis that exposes the dialectical movement in which sensuality comes to language just as thought experiences its object. But this is not immediate: there is no speculative coincidence of thought and materiality in an onomatopoeiac intuition, and not just because language and sexuality are socio-­historically constituted but because this experience comes about through the contingency of reading, and, furthermore, one that takes place materially, without a dictionary. But why Sade, what is it about his language that suggests such a critical experience? His writings are well-­known not just for their violence and explicitness but also for their literary poverty and although this is often used as a way of dismissing his works, Sade’s language is nevertheless unavoidably bland and conventional. Evidently, what attracts Adorno is not just the fact that Sade’s works are a paradigm of pornographic writing, which has to be understood as both exemplary and exceptional, but also this peculiar flatness of his writing, its lack of style, which seeks to produce a direct experience of sexuality. This flatness will be the key to what follows as it indicates how Sade’s language appears to undo itself, relinquishing its role as the basis for a literary work in favour of actually conveying or bringing about a state of affairs. But such a realization is not obvious, looking at the first description of Justine in the novel of that name, there is nothing to recommend Sade: ‘a look of the Virgin, big blue eyes, filled with soul and animation, a dazzling complexion, a smooth and supple figure, a moving voice, teeth of ivory and the most beautiful blonde hair, such is the outline of this charming younger sister, whose naïve

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graces and delicate traits are beyond our brushstrokes’ [JMV: 133/7]. Indeed, Sade goes on to describe most of the young women in his writings in similar ways, the only distinctions being hair and eye colour and the presence of lasciviousness or innocence. And on the narrative level, Justine and Juliette operate in the standard episodic mode of erotic or adventure novels, where the protagonist passes from one dangerous or sexual situation to another. There are no apologies for this lack of style, no attempt to dress it up, and in this Adorno sees a resemblance to Kafka’s writings: Like the innocents in Sade – and in American grotesque films and the ‘funnies’ – Kafka’s subject, especially the emigrant Karl Rossmann, goes from one desperate and hopeless [ausweglosen] situation to the next: the stations of the epic adventure become those of the passion [Leidensgeschichte]. The closed complex of immanence concretizes itself as a flight from prisons. Through lack of contrast the monstrous becomes, as in Sade, the whole world, the norm, unlike the unreflective adventure novel, which focuses on extraordinary events and thus confirms the ordinary. In Sade and Kafka, however, reason is at work, as a principium stilisationis madness lets its objectivity emerge. Both belong, at different stages, to the enlightenment. In Kafka its disenchanting touch is the ‘that’s the way it is’ [‘So ist es’]. He reports how it actually happens, though without illusion concerning the subject, which, in supreme consciousness of itself – its nothingness – throws itself on the scrapheap, no different from how the death-­machine proceeds with those handed over to it [Überantworteten]. P: 279–80/265–66

Although published in 1953, Adorno’s reflections on Kafka date to the time of Dialektik der Aufklärung and indicate that this sociological reading reflects the other side of the complication of language with the way that things are, how it is, as Beckett would later say.3 For on the one hand, the series of confinements and flights that marks Sade’s works indicate how the complex of immanence (Immanenzzusammenhang) of the disenchanted world is concretized in a series of prison breaks, that is, a flight from one prison to another, which is why Justine is not a Bildungsroman but a secular passion without salvation. There is no alternative to this world of immanence: Sade’s writings provide no possibility of hope as escape is only from one terrible situation to another, never from this

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world as a whole, and it is this aspect that Adorno suggests is akin to Kafka’s sober recognition of how it is (while also supporting Foucault’s reading of Sade as a pivotal figure in the transition from the age of confinement to the age of Enlightenment).4 On the other hand, Adorno’s point is that by making the monstrous into the norm, Sade finds a mode of writing in which madness becomes the principle of its style, its organizing and expressive mode, thereby rendering its irrationality tangible but also legible, albeit unconsciously, as in the mimetic navigation of the sleepwalker. But how does this sense of madness providing the form of writing relate to the blandness of language, and its relation to sex? Seemingly, the poverty of language permits a direct appearance of the passions, and yet it is also a work of reason, a deliberate stylistic principle that objectively conveys the remorseless iniquity of the world. The relation of language and sexuality that Adorno remarked on in Minima Moralia showed the dialectic between the subjective and objective poles of the reading experience, between the actualization of suppressed passions and the awareness of truth, and this divergence in language marks it as utopian and dystopian. On one side or slope there is the experience of sexual language, recalling that which Proust tried to recapture in the evocative sense of childhood place-­names (in relation to which ‘one has the feeling: if one were there, in that place, that would be it. This “it” – what the “it” is, is extraordinarily difficult to say’ and, of course, should these places be visited ‘it’ would not be found, but the sense of the experience would still remain), and on the other slope there is the closed immanence of unreason without end [MBP: 218/140; cf. ND: 366/373].5 On one side there is a sense that, as what is cannot be conveyed in concepts, language has given way to fleeting gestures of truth, and, on the other side, that what language conveys is what is actually there, the concrete appearance of unreason [MBP: 57/35]. The significance of Sade, and the parallel Adorno recognizes with Kafka, is that both these aspects can be understood when we consider what is underway when we take something literally, when we say that something is literally there, which implies both an actualization of language into reality, and also the reverse, the appearance of what is as it is, literally, as we say, in a kind of material and eidetic doubling. As Adorno remarks in relation to Kafka, but in lines that could apply equally well to Sade, ‘each sentence is literal and each signifies [. . .] each says interpret me

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and none will permit it’, this duplicity has a double effect for it means that the sentence is divided in itself, as we have seen, between its objective and subjective poles of realization, and conversely it collapses the distance between text and reader to such a degree that the reader is shaken thoroughly, as if their life were at stake. The decision incumbent on the narrative involves the reader’s existence because it remains concrete yet elusive: Through the power with which Kafka commands interpretation, he removes [einzieht] aesthetic distance. He demands [zumutet] a desperate effort of the allegedly disinterested observer of earlier times, pounces on [anspringt] him, and suggests that far more than his spiritual equilibrium depends on whether he truly understands; it is life or death. Among Kafka’s presuppositions, not the least is that the contemplative relation between text and reader is disturbed at its base [von Grund auf gestört ist]. His texts are designed [angelegt] not to sustain a constant distance between themselves and their victim [Opfer] but to agitate his feelings so much that he fears that the narrative will shoot towards him [käme auf ihn los] like a train in early three-­ dimensional film technology. Such aggressive physical proximity prevents [unterbindet] the reader’s habit of identifying himself with the figures of the novel. By way of this principle Surrealism can rightfully claim him for itself. He is Turandot become writing. Whoever sees this and chooses not to run away must stick out his head, or rather try to bash down the wall with it, at the risk of faring no better than those who have gone before [den Vorgängern]. As in fairy-­tales, their lot, instead of deterring, increases the incentive. As long as the word is not found the reader remains accountable [schuldig]. P: 255–56/246

As some of the highlighted terms in this passage indicate, Adorno’s text allows itself to respond to Kafka in kind; allowing the peculiarly strong and jarring actions that are so familiar from Kafka’s writings to break through into his own language, which is the mimetic approach he had spoken of in relation to Sade. Reading in such a way allows one to respond to a text by way of its own language, enabling both an immanent critique and an experience of its innervation; how the words track the individual movements or passions by which it proceeds, which necessarily involves the reader in these movements despite (or because of) their obscurity. Hence, the passion or gesture that draws the reader into the text is inherently contingent: it actualizes a specific

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historico-­material moment that can always be otherwise, pain can always be rendered as pleasure, for example. Thus the literal is both actual and contingent; what is there but can be taken otherwise, what makes a claim on the reader and yet cannot be fully grasped, and even as this lays it open to fallibility, it nevertheless lays it open and thereby offers the possibility, not of escape from the closed complex of immanence, but of deviation within it or of it. The facticity of what Sade presents constitutes its prison-­like nature, which is how instrumental reason concretizes itself, but because it is opaque and elusive the mimetic response that it prompts is one in which the exposed passions are also open to diversion; the decision over their status and form is always in question.

I But surely this is very far from what is apparent in reading Sade? The difficulty of his works is exactly that they are so lacking in hope, that they are so incapable of being read otherwise. And this is the point of their negative critique, for what is found in Sade is the aporia of the literal that cannot be escaped. When we read of the cruelty and torture that Justine is subjected to, or the violence that accompanies sexuality, then what is most difficult is to remove oneself from this sphere. There is no metaphorical or allegorical recourse that would safely contain these acts of violence, Sade’s writings are in no way symbolic of anything, they convey themselves literally, almost without translation, and this is the source of their horror, which is to say, their fascination and revulsion. But equally this is a body of writings that however severe and ruthless is still literature and, moreover, pornography, and so is there to serve a purpose: to make money for its author and provoke arousal in the reader, they are eminently instrumental works (although the fact that they are so rebarbative shows them to be a more strident critique of the restricted economy of exchange-­value and the vested interests that support it, and while these are narratives of excessive conjugations there is no conception or reproduction, instead, sex is presented as an affront to both nature and culture). On closer examination, pornography is a very strange form of writing as it seeks to displace itself in favour of actuality, it seeks to actualize itself, almost according to Marx’s eleventh

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thesis on Feuerbach, as a form of writing that is not content with discussing change but wishes to bring it about, which is only exacerbated in Sade’s case as his works are not merely pornographic, in fact, technically, they are not pornography at all. This term only came into use in the 1830s and was primarily devised as a category to contain and marginalize explicit literature. During the time when Sade was writing and publishing, his works were called licentious or immoral and were understood to be an extreme manifestation of libertine thought, and what is distinctive about such works is that they are not solely concerned with erotica but pursue a concerted effort to free thinking of all social, religious, or moral constraints.6 Hence the manner in which violence and sex are intimately intertwined with political and philosophical discussions, as both aspects are essential to the libertine, indeed, each derives from and reflects the other, as Juliette remarks when the King of Naples, after listening to her discourse at length on politics, asks her if all French women are like her: ‘No’, I replied, ‘the majority of them are better analysts of pompons than of kingdoms: they weep when oppressed, they are insolent once unchained. As for me, frivolity is not my vice; I’ll not say the same for libertinage . . . I am excessively taken by it; but the pleasure of fucking does not blind me to the point of being unable to discuss the interests of the different peoples of the world; in strong souls the torch of the passions ignites a Minerva at the same time as a Venus; by the light of the latter, I fuck like your sister-­in-law [Marie Antoinette]; by the rays of the former, I think and discourse like Hobbes and Montesquieu’. HJ: 1025/934

It is precisely the absence of thought that marks the development of pornography, and in a way Sade’s works helped bring this change about, since the most offensive aspect of his writings to contemporary authorities was his atheism and materialism and as this became condemned ordinary pornography arose in its place. But the way that the sexual episodes are interwoven with debates about morality is essential to Sade’s thought as it is necessary, as he remarks on a number of occasions, for theory to be accompanied by practice and vice versa, which not only doubles the repetition in his works but also demonstrates that they are explicitly constructed as manuals to educate the reader into the ways of libertinism. This explains why the pornographic aspects

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of his writings are as didactic as the philosophical aspects are licentious, as both are engaged with attempting to provoke the reader, to draw them into a direct and critical encounter with the world, and so, to understand the peculiarities of his language, and the effects this has on the reader, it is necessary to understand how his flat and literal style converges with his interests. Sade was very familiar with the materialist thinking of the eighteenth century and sought to examine how far its implications could be extended for if, following La Mettrie, d’Holbach, and Helvétius there was nothing more to human behaviour than carrying out the basic impulses of nature, then it was not possible to talk in any meaningful way about sin or crime. In a universe without any grounding theological order, an act was neither good nor bad, and so all that was previously thought to be criminal or immoral was no longer so. This is the basis for the long discourses on murder, incest, theft, sodomy, and so on, since such things are not merely no longer prohibited but are actually justified by their accord with an amoral natural order. But, as has been widely discussed, Sade’s arguments on these points are profoundly conflicted, and the key to this problem lies with the fact that as a libertine, he needs to engage in what is forbidden, while as an atheist, he denies the very basis for such prohibitions. Alternatively, and this is a further aspect of the instability of his writings, it is atheism that is engaged in going ever further as it needs to prove that there is no ground for natural morality and thus violates it again and again, while it is libertinism that is content with enjoying pleasures regardless of their prohibitions. The instability of this tension provides the motor for the endless discussions, so, if they appear to be contradictory, then this is because they reflect the contradictory nature of materiality, the fact that it is sensual and resistant, contingent but excessive, which merely renders explicit, or literal, the lawlessness of desire. In the absence of foundational law there is only excess, which converges on a thought of nature as ceaseless transmutation; materiality as endless destruction and recreation. At this point it would be possible to discuss the relation of Sade’s thought of formal lawlessness to Kant’s categorical imperative, as has been taken up by Lacan and Žižek, and the way that the latter is reconstrued through the deformation of diabolical evil.7 I will return to this point in Chapter Four but for now I want to stay with the problem of reading Sade as it has been taken up

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by Adorno in terms of the ambivalence between passionate mimesis and concrete madness, since this enables a better understanding of what is at work in Sade’s text as a work. This ambivalence between the subjective and objective poles of the work constitutes its appearance, which thereby affects how it is approached as well as indicating why it becomes such an unsettling presence, as it brings out the reversibility in the dialectic of natural-­history. The contrast between a reading that experiences the text as objective concrete madness or as subjective passionate mimesis is played out within the text in terms of the actions of the characters, not just through the different behaviours of Justine and Juliette but also between the situations and actions of the other figures. Blanchot has highlighted this instability in the parallel movements of the libertines and the criminals, both of whom by necessity operate outside the law. For the libertines, what was given to them by history (as natural) has to be actualized through their excessive behaviour (nature as personal history) in order to show that they are legitimately beyond the law. Conversely, for the criminals, what was placed upon them by force of nature (as history) has to be removed through their own history (as nature) such that they can survive. Either ‘one is too far above the law to be able to submit to it without demeaning oneself ’ or ‘one is too far below the laws to be able to conform to them without perishing’ [LS: 21–22/12]. Thus the law is not given but repeatedly made or found, so those that make or find these laws necessarily place themselves outside them, and although the destabilization of the law is performed through the dialectic of nature and history, these categories are themselves no longer given as their dialectical subversion shows. Hence, in reading Sade as concrete and objective or passionate and subjective there is an experience of transgression that is as sensible as it is conceptual, that both transfixes and repels. But if, in being confronted with the ferocity and extent of Sade’s works, there is an experience that is sublime, then, as was noted above, this does not give rise to a thought of the supersensible destination of humanity but to its endless material transgression, and because, in the notion of a fundamental lawlessness or lack of grounds, crime is inherently contingent, it is also the ever-­present material occasion for perversion. This is why Sade cannot stop writing, why the libertine’s case always requires reposing, and why there are persistent arguments to see things otherwise, to realize the movements

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of desire in their non-­transcendental dependence, in this object, this person, here, now. If there is a sense of objectivity in this excess, then it is as a rootless material ecstasy of thought, a madness that is literal, the passion that has irrupted in language as it mimetically responds to what is, and that the text conveys to the reader in its extravagance, its formal transgression in which it renders itself obscene by breaking out of the framework of literature into what is actually there. As Adorno stated, the excession of language into what is occurs through a mimetic relation triggered by the passions. Language gives onto the world only insofar as the passions irrupt into language, the rupture occurs in both directions and in this thought can be found a more pointed relation with Kant’s aesthetics. For part of the repulsion that is felt in the encounter with Sade’s texts is precisely their breaking down of barriers, which means that it is not possible to turn away from the text as we might from another work. The horror or disgust is a reflection of the awareness that Sade has undermined the border between the reader and the text, along with the borders between pleasure and pain, inside and outside, life and death, and so on, transgression is after all the rule, and for Kant this marks a significant slippage of thought, since in such sensations of disgust (Ekel) there is an unconscious awareness of affinity in which ‘the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished in our sensation itself from the nature of the object itself ’, the image has become the thing itself, which we attempt in vain to abject, as it has become literally present [CPJ: §48, 190]. This unconscious affinity is what Adorno had referred to as the skill of the sleepwalker who can navigate by taking advantage of the unrecognized communication between inner and outer, and that enables us to read Sade without a dictionary, which is perhaps the only safe way. For the materiality of the sublime in this experience is that of an excessive intimacy in which the world that is exposed is not harmonious and reconciled but toxic, pathogenic, its communications bear a contagious quality that Sade is fully aware of, indeed, it is precisely this sense of autonomous material contamination to which he aspires. In writing, Sade finds a way of not only sketching out the receding horizon of desire but also of making it into the motor for desire’s expansion, since the nature of crime is such that, by word or deed, its excesses give rise to greater

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excess; transgression is the law. This perpetual effect proceeds by a kind of autoeroticism, the self-­excitation and extension of criminal transgression, but in doing so it also develops a form of knowledge. This explains the significance of the erotic in language, as sexuality is pre-­eminently that experience in which categorical distinctions are most difficult to apply, and which forcefully applies itself to their transgression, thereby drawing out the relations covered over in the differentiation of nature from society, mind from body, self from other. Thus Sade’s usage of erotica is not just a means of conveying arousal but also of experiencing a previously unknown material affect, which also means exposing oneself to an experience of pleasure or pain that expresses something of the world as it is, its material affinities and excess, the passion in the form of the novel, which necessarily cannot find salvation, and must, as Sade insisted, say everything. The language of erotica, as Adorno had pointed out, derives from these material affinities as much as it discourses upon them, and in doing so it captures something of the transgression of nature from within as material repetition explodes into language, or, as Sade would say, discharges. This is not a casual association, although the intimate relation between sex and language could hardly be better presented, especially as Sade’s characters explicitly emphasize this material excession by their fondness for blaspheming at the point of orgasm. No, the point is made more strongly if we consider the different kinds of interest aroused by works of art and those of natural beauty, since for Kant an interest in the beautiful in art ‘provides no proof of a way of thinking that is devoted to the morally good or even merely inclined to it’. By contrast, ‘an immediate interest in the beauty of nature (not merely to have taste in order to judge it) is always a mark of a good soul’ [CPJ: §42, 178]. Sade, typically, inverts this model, since for him artworks are both a reflection and an expression of the natural order and this natural order is one of lawlessness and transgression, and so there is no difference between the beautiful and the sublime. Thus there is no possibility of the good soul finding itself in the contemplation of nature where ‘everywhere is inflamed: the convulsions, the volcanoes of this perpetually criminal nature plunge the soul into a disorder that renders it capable of great deeds and tumultuous passions’ [HJ: 1042/951]. Volcanoes become the most distinctive figure of nature for Sade, and each time Juliette

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comes across one her interest is as direct and explosive, since she is unable to avoid responding to them mimetically through her own acts of sex and violence.8 Hence, while Sade’s universe admits of no exteriority, no ground of law, it nevertheless escapes the prison of sheer immanence through an inner deviation and extravagance. This sense of immanent transcendence is captured in Adorno’s material inversion of the sublime, which is an experience of ‘the self-­consciousness of humanity in its naturalness [Naturhaftigkeit]’ as ‘we are properly no longer a piece of nature in the moment that we notice, that we recognize, that we are a piece of nature’ [AT: 295/198].9 This stuttered recognition is the margin of non-­coincidence or non-­identity between desire and its object, or language and nature, which the libertine’s imagination bridges by bringing together the material and the fantastic, and the abstract and the concrete, through a discipline that Sade as much as Adorno would call exact fantasy, and that his libertine works attempt to teach through a libidinal grounding of thought in the natural world and an excession of nature through its own desires.10 Hence, Sade’s thought debases Hegel’s as much as Kant’s, for while its violence seeks the negation and overcoming of the individual into the universal, and a systematic science of all perversions, these cannot be systematized when they are liberated from any norm, just as the attempt to achieve a universal science by an evacuation (kenosis) of particulars from language is persistently breached by the literal evacuations (kenosis) that emphatically mark the text in its materiality and contingency.11

II As has been noted, it is no accident that Sade’s place in twentieth-­century thought should be mediated by the Surrealists, considering that they too were concerned with the liberation of desire from social and personal constraints, and in Adorno’s response to Surrealism he makes a number of remarks that are equally applicable to Sade. Not only does he state that the substance (Gehalt) of Surrealism is to be found in Hegel’s remark that ‘the sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death’ but also that its language bears ‘witness to abstract freedom’s

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reversion to the supremacy of objects and thus to mere nature’, and although for Adorno this means still life as nature morte, a situation of total reification or concrete madness in which ‘a subject that has become absolute, that has full control of itself and is free of all consideration of the empirical world, reveals itself to be inanimate, something virtually dead’, it is important to emphasize both sides of this situation for these ‘are images of a dialectic of subjective freedom in a situation of objective unfreedom’. In saying as much it is possible to understand how the Surrealists sought to carry on Sade’s project of combined political, sexual, and artistic revolution, for in this language of abstract death and material desire there are ‘images in which the subject’s innermost core becomes aware that it is something external, an imitation of something social and historical’, a passionate mimesis or material ecstasy whose ‘distortions attest to the violence that prohibition has done to the objects of desire’.12 This is the final point that Adorno will make in relation to Sade’s language: that in its flatness it achieves a level of abstraction that inevitably associates it with death. The language of desire is not just associated with the act of negation in which the self asserts itself by negating the other, for there is no sense of the self seeking to assert or affirm itself in Sade and certainly not by way of a transcendence of spirit over nature. Rather, there is simply a negation without end and without sublation, a language in which, in Adorno’s words, ‘nothing else remains to [Sade] than to name the most beautiful gitons des Tableaus “beaux comme des anges” ’. Thus this is not merely a weakness in Sade’s language but a symptom of the facticity he is pursuing in which the literal converges on the abstract. And this is, as Adorno makes clear, the limit of negativity in the artwork, for at this point ‘where its truth transcends semblance, it is most mortally exposed’. The skeletal nature of this abstraction, which makes it so remote from anything human, also displaces it from a critical problem in Adorno’s understanding of the artwork, which ordinarily cannot sustain its formal demands as that which it attempts to express is undone by its mode of expression, its Scheincharakter: ‘In that it is nothing human its expressions cannot be a lie, and so it must lie. It has no power over the possibility that in the end everything may indeed only be nothing and its fictiveness, which is asserted in its existence, is that it has overstepped the limit’ [AT: 200/132]. It is perhaps Sade’s singular virtue that his works appear to have dispelled this

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problem by undermining the possibility of their being seen as fictive, and thus of giving the lie to their semblance, and in this the inhumanity of its truth expresses itself in its fully mortal exposure, in the endless demonstration of the end in its nihilation. Perhaps even more so than was the case in his readings of Kafka and Beckett, there is a suggestion in Adorno’s remarks on Sade that here is a language in which a mimesis of death is encountered, a flattening out that is both material and abstract. In doing so, and in common with modernism generally and Surrealism in particular, his writing breaks the promesse du bonheur, since it sacrifices the appearance of happiness to a thinking of its truth, what Adorno calls the non confundar of the artwork, its extreme claim not to be diluted by illusion, which is in turn the only way of remaining true to its promise [MM: 253/223–24; AT: 461/311]. Stendhal’s remark that beauty is nothing but the promesse du bonheur is critical to Adorno’s thinking of the artwork as it indicates something that goes beyond the work and does so in the emphatically physical form of happiness (Glück) or pleasure (Lust).13 If beauty, or the artwork, is nothing but this promise, then it is nothing in itself, it is merely the sign and placeholder for possible happiness. This is the sense of facticity that was noted in regard to Proust’s memory of childhood place-­names, a sense that there is something there but that it is beyond reach or that it presents itself other than it is, and thus bears an inherent sense of chance. In Sade, as has been shown, natural beauty may promise happiness but only as sheer jouissance, which does not involve the recognition of any natural harmony but only the nonhuman sphere of incessant destruction and transmutation. Thus any bonheur that the artwork may provide in Sade is not grounded in peace but in a violent disruption that renders the work ugly and antagonistic. And, as Adorno writes, the ambiguity of ugliness stems from the fact that the subject subsumes under its abstract and formal category everything condemned by art: sexual polymorphism as well as the violently mutilated and lethal. The perpetually recurring [Wiederkehrenden] becomes that antithetical other without which art, according to its own concept, would not be; adopted through negation, this other – the antithesis to beauty, whose antithesis beauty was – gnaws away correctively on the affirmativeness of spiritualizing art. AT: 77/47

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But, as he goes on to say, the experience of artworks is adequate only as living experience, which is to say that its ugliness cannot remain formal and abstract but must be experienced as much as its happiness, and artworks convey this experience insofar as they become animate: ‘Through contemplative immersion the immanent processuality [Prozeßcharakter] of the work is unbound. Insofar as it speaks, it becomes that which moves in itself. Whatever in the artefact may be called the unity of its meaning is not static but processual, the delivery [Austrag] of antagonisms that each work necessarily has in itself.’ This is not to suggest a form of aesthetic mysticism, for in this immersion (in reading the work literally) aesthetic experience resembles sexual experience: ‘The way that the beloved image is transformed in it, the way that rigidity is unified with the most vivacious, is equivalent to the bodily prototype of aesthetic experience’ [AT: 262–63/176]. So, if the promise that Sade’s works bear, if they bear any at all, is to be understood, then it is to the perpetually recurring transmutations of nature that they point, transmutations that are in no way concerned with the human. But perhaps just as his works fail to be literature, insofar as they extend beyond themselves as erotica, then perhaps they also fail to be artworks, insofar as their abstractness seems to strip them of any sense of semblance and thus any notion that they might suggest anything beyond themselves; instead they are emphatically literal: this is what is, and this is all that there is. But even in a world without scope for transcendence or escape, contingency still leaves room for critique, as is apparent in the differing reactions and behaviours of Justine and Juliette, since the same situations are endured by both but Justine sees only the violation of her pre-­existing beliefs and so passes from one disaster to another, whereas Juliette sees each occasion as the opportunity for discovering new pleasures and going ever further in her desires, pursuing her own promesse du bonheur, as she does not have a predetermined idea of what counts as lawful [LS: 28–29/20]. Juliette’s behaviour does not dissolve but liquefies the reified differences between nature and history, making their dialectic fluid and apparent, while Justine remains bound by ideological repetition. In a world without hope or reconciliation such deviation is perhaps the only form of happiness, which in reading Sade is conveyed as a literal experience, with all that this has come to signify in terms of facticity and

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contingency, of the truth of what is, but above all in its material resistance, or flatness, and it is thus that it becomes a living experience, not a work of literature or art but an actual state of affairs. If an artwork is that which seeks to surpass its status as a work and become an actual state of affairs, thereby appearing as an irreducible enigma but in doing so providing a negative critique of society by way of its fractured existence, which indicates the inextinguishable presence of suffering, then in Adorno’s terms Sade’s works would be exemplary, but the world of this work is one of unremitting evil. Thus it may be possible to go further and to suggest that the most difficult aspect of his works, the jouissance of cruelty, may be a form of mimetic cognition of suffering insofar as it enables suffering to speak, by providing a means for its somatic resonance, something also recognized in the works of Beckett. This is not to valorize Sade’s cruelty or to make an equation between sadism and masochism (as they are popularly understood), but to recognize that the text presents a language in which the anomalous materiality of pain is made sensible. Just as an erotic text provokes genuine sensations of arousal, so can a text in which pain is discussed at such length make its presence felt concretely and specifically in the anguish and revulsion that is also aroused, which enables Sade to find a way of writing that does for pain what erotica does for pleasure.14 In a manner that is as Kantian as it is sexual, it makes us see what should not be seen, what should remain hidden, the diabolical evil of transgression for its own sake, the utter groundlessness of the law, which cannot make itself fully concrete and is impossible in itself but nevertheless persists as a negative idea within reason, which is why it can only take place in literature. While Sade’s works expose the dialectic of natural-­history to instability, this is coupled to a discordance or perversion (Verstimmung) in the heart of reason, a deviation that respects no differences, and for Horkheimer this indicates an amor intellectualis diaboli, an intellectual love of regression, a death-­drive of thought [DA: 114/74].15 But this perversion does not obliterate thinking, for its endless material contingency remains and, as Adorno remarked, such a sensuality of thinking is not to be dismissed, for even if it lacks meaning or reason or goal it is still the only basis for thought: ‘Only he who could determine [bestimmen] utopia in blind somatic pleasure, without intention and stilling the end [die letzte stillt], could have a stable and

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valid idea of truth’ [MM: 66/61]. Such a thought gives a different and materialist cast to the notion of an amor intellectualis diaboli as a sensual thinking of deviation, one that Sade’s works have demonstrated in their literal excess as a limit-­experience of aesthetics, a short-­circuiting of the relation between language and desire, reality and fantasy, abstract and concrete. For Adorno, the possibility of the dialectic of natural-­history being ‘liquefied’ (verflüssigen) was found to its highest degree in Benjamin’s study of the baroque Trauerspiel, where the ‘moment in which nature and history become commensurable with each other is that of passing [Vergängnis] [. . .]. This is the transmutation of metaphysics into history. It secularizes metaphysics in the secular category pure and simple, that of decay [Verfalls]’ [ND: 352–53/359– 60]. What is then of great significance is that the works of Sade do not follow this path exactly, as they concretize the reversibility of nature and history to the same degree as that of the baroque Trauerspiel but they do so through the category of turmoil, a deviation from Benjamin’s thought that reinforces its materialism by resisting the theological reading of history. Hence, what is of further significance is that where Benjamin understood the dialectical relation of nature and history to manifest itself in allegorical terms, in Sade’s writings we come across the possibility that it appears in literal terms: as both concrete and elusive, factical and contingent. It is perhaps for this reason that it fails to be incorporated into the dialectic of enlightenment and myth, for although nature and history pass into each other in Sade’s writings the illusion that this is part of the course of reason is torn away as it appears without semblance, nakedly, which is what makes it so hard to read, since it makes a mockery of the idea that there may be any form of hope. This is the result of Sade’s extreme materialism that refuses to accord any special status to human sensibility. What has to be addressed is the possibility that such a position is inherent in the primacy of libidinal experience, that Adorno’s suggestion of a utopia of blind somatic pleasure would entail the loss of any human sense of history, of either progress or decay. What is remarkable about reading Sade is how far removed from any ordinary experience of literature this reading becomes. Indeed, echoing Benjamin’s lines on the Trauerspiel, it is possible to say of Sade’s writings that ‘hardly ever has there been a literature whose virtuoso illusionism has more

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radically expelled from its works that semblance that transfigured it and through which the essence of artistic formation was once rightly sought to be defined. In this lack of semblance [Scheinlosigkeit] the baroque lyric can be described in one of its most rigorous characteristics’ [UDT: 356/180]. It has often been noted that Juliette ends on a point of provocation that philosophy must say everything but the context of this point is even more emphatic, for it involves the necessity and desire of literature to actualize itself in the name of a truth that has been so remorselessly demonstrated. Upon finding that their crimes have led to them being rewarded with all kinds of happiness (tous les genres de bonheur), Noirceuil slyly remarks, ‘perhaps we wouldn’t dare say this if it was a novel we were writing’. ‘But why fear publishing’, Juliette counters, ‘when truth itself lays bare the secrets of nature, even to the point of making men tremble, philosophy must say everything’ [HJ: 1261/1193]. The work thus presents its own overcoming; it enacts the move from appearance to actuality: The seal of authentic artworks is that what they seem to be appears as if [was sie scheinen, so erscheint] it could not be lying, yet without discursive judgement reaching its truth. If however it is the truth, then it abolishes [aufhebt] the artwork along with its semblance. The definition [Bestimmung] of art by aesthetic semblance is incomplete: art has truth as the semblance of the lack of semblance [Schein des Scheinlosen]. The experience of artworks has as its vanishing point that its truth-­content [Wahrheitsgehalt] is not nothing; every artwork and especially those of unreserved [rückhaltlosen] negativity wordlessly say: non confundar [. . .] The non confundar of artworks is the boundary of their negativity, comparable to that marked out in the novels of the Marquis de Sade, where nothing else remains to him than to name the most beautiful gitons des Tableaus ‘beaux comme des anges’. AT: 199–200/132

Nothing else remains because the demand of the work not to be confused or diluted means that it must refuse all sense of being illusory, so in attempting to describe these beautiful gitons (young male companions) Sade can do no more than to use the most empty and self-­extinguishing phrases that give the appearance of lacking illusion. These phrases are both the most abstract and the most material, a limpid presentation of the literal that flattens out the transcendent movement of language and leaves what is merely there; not a

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work but its truth. Rendering Pygmalion’s dream of realizing physical desire through art into the literal banality of how it is. In Adorno’s reading of Sade, the literal takes on three different meanings: that of the mimesis of the passions, the concreteness of irrationality, and the lack of metaphorical escape, and in all three cases the literal appears like an immediation of the material and the ideal. But this is not an actual loss of relation or mediation, it is only the semblance, the illusion, of immediacy, which literature conveys in liquefying the dialectic of natural-­history so that history is naturalized, insofar as it becomes material and secular, without progress or decay, beginning or end, and nature is historicized, insofar as it is revealed in its endless destruction and recreation. It is thus that Juliette does not give us a historical account of her life, no biography or Bildungsroman, but the story of the movements of her nature, and it is Sade’s talent to have presented this story literally, in its inhuman extravagance. So, just as the work becomes flattened out in leaving behind any semblance, the materiality of the literal explodes into turmoil, which is not just the experience of Sade but also the dialectic that Adorno described in Minima Moralia in which the passions irrupt into language just as it converges on the thing itself in a rechten Vorstellung. Hence, the experience of the dialectic in turmoil occurs by way of a material image, or exact fantasy, which leads it very far from the human, into an experience of unreserved negativity, of nature stripped bare. Fantasy translates desire in such a way that it appears to be directly, materially present but is irreducible to this materiality, it conveys something contingent or excessive, which is precisely that portion that evades relation to the human. It is thus that Adorno finds a practice in the mimesis of language and desire in Sade’s texts that converges on his notion of exact fantasy, which on the one hand brings about an illumination of what is by composing it in the form of a concrete image that liquefies its problems and renders thought actual, but on the other hand, by actualizing itself in this way thought reconfigures its own relation to the concrete and thereby remains outside it, unresolved and out of step. The manner in which this duplicity occurs in both the situation of critique, as that which seeks to actualize itself but remains belated, and the relation of nature and history, as that which recreates itself as it passes away, indicates how it is an issue for thought as much as for existence:

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The exertion of knowledge is predominantly the destruction of its usual exertion, the violence against the object. This knowledge is brought closer by the act in which the subject tears the veil that it weaves about the object. It can do this only when, in fearless [angstloser] passivity, it entrusts itself to its own experience. In the places where subjective reason scents [wittert] subjective contingency, the primacy [Vorrang] of the object shimmers through; that which is not a subjective addition to it. Subject is the agent of object, not the constituent; this also has consequences for the relation of theory and practice.16

This is precisely the model of desire developed by Sade’s libertines in which they seek to discover ever new configurations of jouissance by immersing themselves ever more deeply in the vicissitudes of their possible eventuation, thereby extending this model to an almost impossible extreme, indicating its utopian and dystopian limits. It is only by such dedication to objectivity that unforeseen affects can arise; the mediation of bodies and desires is not for the sake of gratification or domination but for the materially contingent. What is thereby speculatively but concretely revealed is not an ideal of truth but its finite experience, that by which it is, and yet by which it remains partial and incomplete, open-­ended. It is the desire of Sade’s libertine texts to seize this experience and render it absolute, for in doing so they achieve the possibility of being not only the law but also its ground, its condition and its actuality, and is this not also the secret desire of both critique and theory to be autonomous; self-­legitimizing and self-­executing?

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Intoxication: The Nature of Influence

Oh! You who are commonly called unhappy, and who are indeed, in relation to society, beside yourself, you need not worry! You have only to suffocate remorse through reflection (if it has the strength) or through contrary, much more powerful, habits. If you have been raised in other principles, or without the ideas that are their basis, you will have no enemies to combat. That is not all; it is necessary to scorn life, as much as to respect it, as well as public hatred. Thus, in effect, I suggest that parricide, incest, theft, villainy, infamy, and any object of execration of honest men, will however make you happy! For what misfortune or grief can cause these actions, however black or horrible we assume them to be, to leave (following this hypothesis) any trace of crime in the soul of a criminal? But, if you want to live, take care; politics is not so accommodating to my philosophy. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, 1751 Juliette is the culmination of Sade’s writings, written in the late 1790s and published in 1801 it was promptly confiscated, which led to Sade’s arrest and the final period of his confinement. When the story of Justine had emerged in his writings in the Bastille a decade earlier, the figure of Juliette, her sister, was peripheral. But as the story of Justine expanded so did the role of Juliette until she had entirely supplanted Justine, for where Justine was a figure of virtue endlessly abused, Juliette could show the other side of libertine existence: the freedom that comes from embracing a life of crime and debauchery. As such, the story of Juliette allows Sade to deliver his most extensive discussions of libertine thought, and his most detailed analyses of religion and morality and their relation to nature. The range of his readings is well-­known and he cites many works (often verbatim and without acknowledgement), in this way

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Juliette is like an extreme version of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert in its cataloguing of knowledge as well as in its creative reconstruction, but where Diderot and his colleagues had to be careful about how they discussed issues of religion and morality, considering their materialist and atheist perspectives, Sade presents these thoughts in their most explicit and challenging ways. It is for these reasons, as much as for its extreme sexuality, that it was confiscated by the police, and it is for the same reasons that it remains a challenge to thought and reading today. It is not possible to discuss the whole novel but, by following the narrative of the first part and indicating its formal and thematic lines of construction, it is possible to come to a clearer idea of Sade’s intentions and his manner of pursuing them. As part of this exposition it will become apparent that there is a commonality with the thought of Diderot, which indicates how close Sade was to the philosophes but also how far their ideas could be extended once their lack of natural limits was recognized. Diderot was probably only known to Sade through his articles in the Encyclopédie but what makes their relation feasible (despite Diderot being from the generation before Sade) is that Diderot’s thought represents the most developed aspects of Enlightenment thinking on religion, science, and art, all of which concerned Sade in his writings. If Sade’s thought is to be grasped in its extremity, then it must be examined in the context of the most advanced thought of his era, for only then will the singularity of his writings become apparent. In later chapters I will look at Sade’s relation to the thought of Kant and Hegel, as well as to the ideas of the Revolution and the law, but for the moment Diderot’s works will enable a better grasp of the artistry of Sade’s thought: how it is constructed and how it relates to itself.

I Justine and Juliette are sisters, when their story starts Justine is twelve and Juliette is fifteen years old. As it is told in Justine, their story begins with a disaster when their father becomes bankrupt and dies of grief and their mother dies soon afterwards. In a very short time the sisters are taken from a world of security and privilege and plunged into danger as they are forced to make their

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own way in the world. In Juliette, this event is not related until ninety pages into the story and prior to it we are told of Juliette’s experiences in the two years before the disaster. The first ninety pages are thus a prologue that is a self-­ contained narrative, marked quite explicitly by the fact that it is set in a convent, apart from society, where Juliette can begin her education before she is thrown into the world. Juliette’s tutor in these pages is the Abbess Delbène who carefully introduces her to the life of a libertine, both in its theory and its practice, but when the disaster happens and Juliette is forced to leave the convent, Delbène promptly abandons her and is never seen again. This section of the novel presents itself as a guide to what will follow over the remaining thousand pages of the story, and so examining how it is constructed will show how Sade inducts the reader into his world. Within this first ninety pages the narrative is fairly evenly divided between libertine debauches and discourses, the latter occupying some fifty pages and clearly showing how philosophy, in Sade’s sense of the word, will be as important as any other part of the story and of the education it portrays. He loses no time in developing this approach and in the Abbess we find the first of the series of tutors whose hands Juliette will pass through. It would be relatively easy to extract these discourses from the narrative and thereby separate the erotic from the philosophical, but this would not just go against Sade’s insistence that the two are inextricably interwoven as the theory and practice of libertinism but would also fail to grasp how these discourses differ in their contexts and perspectives. The tutors are not interchangeable ciphers, despite appearances, but express different thoughts at different times, which it is part of Juliette’s education to navigate. However, a point that is consistent amongst these tutors is their desire to influence, which as with Socrates is partly based in a desire to eradicate ignorance and dogmatism and partly in a libidinous desire to attract companions. One of the first comments that is made about the Abbess is that she has poisoned (gangrené) the minds of nearly every one of the convent’s residents, a point she confirms by stating that her libertinage is an epidemic that corrupts everyone who comes into her vicinity [HJ: 187–88/11–12]. In other statements, more detail is provided about what this corruption implies, even before the first major discourse is begun. Midway through the first sexual session Delbène stops and says, ‘one moment my good friends, let

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us put a little order into our pleasures, one only enjoys them by organizing them’ [HJ: 183/6]. And further on, ‘I have imagined everything in the matters of libertinage, who knows, perhaps I have even gone far beyond what can be seized by the imagination’ [HJ: 186/9]. And before we can stop to consider this pronouncement Delbène launches into a discussion of what she calls her philosophy, in which, as she says, it is philosophy alone that gives form to the conscience, which in turn regulates all the actions in life. It is unsurprising to find a work of erotica starting with a lesbian orgy in a convent, but it is far less common to find one in which the Abbess is able to hold forth on the importance of Spinoza and d’Holbach, and to do so alongside the debaucheries.1 Philosophy is not merely part of the narrative but, as Delbène indicated, its rationale, its very mode and aim, but with the very significant inversion that the orgies are treated with methodical sobriety while the discourses excel in wild abandon. Sade’s purpose is not just to describe a new philosophy but to bring it about as an actual way of life both in and through the text. As one of the girls in the convent states, she has not only gained an understanding of herself through Delbène’s teachings but it is through her alone that she ‘exists in the world’ [HJ: 185/8]. Thus, if philosophy enables the conscience to be released from bad habits, then this is to allow it to submit to the scope of the imagination, which is the speculative praxis that libertinage will entail. For just as the body is given up to the possibilities of the imagination, so the imagination is committed to exploring the possibilities of the body, each pushing the other to greater extremes, and it is only because Delbène has confined herself to the world of the convent that her acts are also confined, thereby hinting at what readers, and Juliette, may find elsewhere. But the tension and inversion between theory and practice will continue to mark the relation between philosophy and debauchery, since it is necessary for theory to be passionate in order to actualize the most extreme possibilities of the body, just as it is necessary for the practice to be careful in order that these possibilities are explored thoroughly. The novel puts this model into action by leading the reader through one scenario and discourse after another, which gradually become more extreme in both extent and degree, thereby enacting the slow removal of prejudice and the actualization of a dispassionate comprehension.

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In doing so there is a further tension between the increase in physical sensitivity and the decrease in moral sensitivity as the libertines seek an ever-­ greater range of sensuous stimulation while rejecting any conventions that may impose limits on what can or should be available to experience (more precisely, while there is no empathy for suffering there remains a concern with eliminating prejudice, and although the range of physical sensitivity increases, its satisfaction does not). Thus the relative value or meaning of sensation is voided in favour of its absolute affect, which would imply that this materialist philosophy is committed to undoing itself if it sets out to achieve the sensuous without any meaning. Such is the implication of a remark that occurs much later after Belmor delivers a long speech on the absurdity and iniquity of love, for when the speech is over, which he delivers to much applause as part of his inauguration as president of the Society of the Friends of Crime, a member of the audience comes forward, begging to be allowed to bugger him. Hearing this, Noirceuil suggests that it is the force of Belmor’s eloquence that has won him this pleasure, to which Belmor quips: ‘Being a partisan of the physical, as you’ve seen, I’d prefer to owe it to my arse than to my mind’ [HJ: 643/517]. The fact that this is imparted as a joke suggests that Sade recognizes not the limits of materialism as a philosophy, but rather the limits of a certain philosophical form of materialism, one that reduces it to the sheerly physical. For it is clear that material affect includes discourse and philosophy since these are as much a source of sensory stimulation as they are of education, for example, listening to Delbène give a long dissection of the evils of religion Juliette is ‘electrified’ by what she has heard: ‘what is existence without philosophy?’ she asks, and Delbène’s response to this declaration is even more revealing: There is no more piercing pleasure for a libertine mind than that of making proselytes. A thrill marks the inculcation of each principle, a thousand different feelings are flattered in seeing others becoming poisoned [se gangrener] by the corruption that consumes us. Ah, how one cherishes this influence obtained over their soul, the unique work of our counsels and of our seductions. HJ: 225–26/52

And, as Sade goes on to write, by the light of philosophy they soon ignite the fires of their passions, for, in Delbène’s words, the greater one’s spirit, the better one’s taste is for the sweetness of the voluptuous (later, the reverse statement is

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made, that it is through the fire of the passions that philosophy is illuminated, indicating Sade’s indifference to original causes [HJ: 258/88]). This idea of corruption recalls Clairwil’s dream of an endless crime and Juliette’s solution, which was based on the model of epidemiological transmission developed by Belmor, thereby demonstrating that the greater understanding of material affect he is pursuing is one of combined physical and moral corruption. As will be seen later, when Blanchot comes to cite these lines by Clairwil he abbreviates them and although this is unlikely to be a deliberate suppression it coincides with his disinterest in the materialist thinking that formed the atmosphere of Sade’s writings.2 Perhaps because of the way that materiality was understood in terms of Marxist theory in contemporary thought, Blanchot wants to distance Sade’s thinking from that of materialism but in doing so he misses the depth and strangeness of Sade’s ideas. Nevertheless, his omission of this point indirectly demonstrates what is necessary to understand Sade’s thought of contagion and his approach to influence more generally. The way that Sade develops his thought of material affect contributes to this confusion as it appears inconsistent and crude. In the first major speech Delbène provides a discourse on the nature of conscience, for which she uses the popular materialist notion that the body is an instrument that resounds with the impulses of nature [HJ: 190/15].3 Culture has overlaid and suppressed these natural impulses and so concealed what we really are, but the effects can still be felt when we are in heightened or relaxed states. While many thinkers of the ancien régime shared this understanding of the status of natural impulses, the debate became one of whether it was possible or advisable to convert these impulses through education into something more attuned to the social. Sade inverts this model by claiming that it is the social that needs to be converted by removing its moralistic categories and allowing the free expression of the natural, and the most formidable force of society at this time is religion, which is why its repressive ideology will remain the never-­ending target of his attacks. Although the inversion of values Sade is proposing is fairly straightforward, his manner of proceeding is not, since reversing the suppression of the natural requires a twofold approach: on the one hand, a direct attack on the forces of repression to expose their baselessness and malice; and, on the other hand, a persistent rehabituation of the natural through its repeated engagement, as it is

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only in this way that the feelings of guilt or fear that accompany natural impulses can be desensitized. This double strategy provides the motor for Sade’s own writing. But as the following passage from Delbène’s speech will show, the language in which this reversal takes place is far from simple: when you have spent a few years playing with what imbeciles call [nature’s] laws, when, in order to familiarize yourself with their infraction, it will have pleased you to pulverize them all, you will behold the minx [mutine], ravished at having been violated, softened under your nervous desires, coming to offer herself to your chains . . . presenting her hands in order to be your captive; now your slave instead of your sovereign she will subtly instruct your heart in ways to outrage her still more, as if she took delight in degradation, and as if it was only by showing you how to insult her to excess that she had the ability to reduce you to her laws. Do not ever resist when you are there; insatiable in her designs on you, from which you have found the means of seizing her, she will lead you step by step from perversion [écarts] to perversion; the last committed will never be but a step on the way towards that which she prepares to submit to you again; like the whore of Sybaris, who gives herself under many forms, and takes on every shape so as to excite the desires of the voluptuary who buys her, she will likewise teach you a hundred ways to vanquish her, and all to ensnare you more surely in her turn. But a single act of resistance, let me repeat, one alone will make you lose all the fruits of your latest crop; you will know nothing if you have not known everything; and if you are too timid to stay with her, she will escape you forever. HJ: 194/19

Yielding to nature is not passive but active, it requires effort and perseverance, it is a struggle to release oneself as submission to nature involves its domination, just as its domination becomes submission. The chiasmic interweaving of cause and effect within this material model releases it from simple mechanism and turns it into a more complex and less hierarchical dialectic. And without the anthropomorphism of humanistic values nature is neutral in regards to what has been called morality, thus there is no sense in which submission to the natural is pacific as nature is beyond or outside human laws. Thus, to submit to that which is beyond the human is also to submit to its forces of dehumanization, not to embrace merely human terror and domination, which

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would remain bound to moral laws of accumulation, but to recognize nature as nothing but excess and transgression as it perpetually goes beyond itself through the violation of its own laws. Of course, this is not to ignore the anthropomorphism in the description above, which is far from uncommon during this period, but if nature is being caricatured as a woman, then this should not obscure the way that women appear in Sade’s writings where gender, like sexuality, is subjected to an extreme denormalization, thus wildness of behaviour cannot be understood as that of women or of nature when each is used to exemplify and exaggerate the other. This is part of the way that Sade debases values by undermining the possibility of establishing hierarchies between them, instead, there is a horizontal extrapolation in which each element does not define but provokes the other to greater excess. Such an understanding is at work in the context of this discussion, since it occurs between a libertine lesbian and her female student, in which Juliette is far from a passive receptacle of knowledge but actively provokes Delbène to go further in her excesses, just as Delbène provides her guidance with a view to leading Juliette into the same. The terms of the relation only exist by way of the mutual provocation that sustains them, which itself only exists to enable this escalating excess, such is the absolute nature of material affect at work in Sade’s thought. At the end of this speech Delbène warns Juliette about the difficulty of removing religious prejudices from one’s thinking, as these are the most pernicious, and so in her next speech she undertakes a lengthy analysis of the ideas of god and the soul to show their lack of substance and value. The perspective she takes is strictly materialist, as would be expected, and culminates in a rejection of the moral axiom ‘do not do to others what you would not like done to yourself ’ on the grounds that it lacks any natural necessity as nature does not operate with such moral restrictions. Instead, she claims that the only precept that nature observes is that one should ‘enjoy oneself, regardless of the expense to others’ [HJ: 225/52]. In saying as much Delbène has inverted the universality of the axiom from one that was prohibitive to one that is affirmative, for in the latter version we find a position in which actions should proceed regardless of their consequences, whether these are to be endured by others or by oneself. Sade is thus isolating actions from their origins or consequences, for, as Delbène states (repeating Aristotle’s

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definitions), ‘cause’ is merely the name given to every being that produces some change in another being distinct from itself, and ‘effect’ is the word for any change produced in a being by whatever cause, but in conventional thought, she explains, these terms have become reified and given rise to the notion of a first cause that is uncaused, which initiates a chain of binding consequences. By contrast, in libertine practice this logical relation is materially complicated to the point of revealing that ‘all beings, continually acting and reacting upon one another, produce and simultaneously undergo changes’ [HJ: 210/35]. This intimate interweaving of cause and effect is chiasmic because the interaction of bodies is such that distinguishing subject from object, or agent from victim, not only imposes an arbitrary separation but also abstracts from the nature of the sensible affect the libertines are pursuing, where what is done by them is coextensive with what is done to them. Sade takes sensibility (sensibilité) as such as his starting point, without regard for who touches or is touched, a situation found above all in sexuality.4 Moreover, grounding sensibility in the full range of its materiality, in pain as well as pleasure, undoes the possibility of an immaterial soul being sensible, for in removing itself from pain it also obviates the possibility of pleasure, and ‘what is the being who will consent to sacrifice all his pleasures for the certitude of never having difficulties [peines]; what would he be, if he were able to conclude this deal? An inert, motionless being: what would he be after death? Exactly the same thing’ [HJ: 222/49]. A materialist ontology traversed by a desubjectified sexuality gives rise to a robust and vivid worldview of particular differences: The universe is an assemblage of different beings that act and react mutually and successively with each other; I discern no limits, I see only a continual passage from one state to another through relations of particular beings that successively take many new forms, but I acknowledge no universal cause distinct from this that gives it existence and produces the modifications of particular beings that compose it; I affirm indeed that, in my view, the absolute contrary holds HJ: 216–17/43

Such a vision will recur with subtle changes from each of Juliette’s tutors to the next, each providing their own dissimilar perspectives. It is precisely this differentiation that leads to confusion and frustration as it appears that Sade’s

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thought is inconsistent, and it is easier to declare this than it is to work through the sequences to discern their specific changes. It also cannot be assumed that everything being discussed is Sade’s own view, as there is a distinction between the critical aspects of the work that seek to dissolve the illusions of contemporary ideology, and the speculative aspects that extend the possibilities of what has been found in unearthing the effervescence of the material. Equally, it is important to follow Juliette’s pathway through these changing positions as it involves both her physical experiences and her theoretical education, since it is in the former that the contradictions of the latter are worked out in practice, which thereby lead her into further investigations (as in the understandings of causation, relation, and passion). But despite his ambitions, Sade is not Hegel, and his work never achieves the encyclopaedic aims he may have held as his is a phenomenology of materiality rather than spirit, and so will not permit of a summative generalization. Instead of the progressive ascent of spirit there is an endless horizontal extravagance. Having finished her speech Delbène suggests that they put their principles into action, and strapping on a dildo she deflowers Juliette. Thus far the sexual activities have been fairly tame, but now that Juliette’s virginity, both physical and moral, has been lost the narrative moves into the first of its gothic scenarios. This scene introduces the first male characters and also the first victim, Laurette, whom Juliette herself had nominated after hearing Delbène’s eulogy for crime, ‘from that moment the desire to condemn [flétrir] one of my companions inflamed my mind no less than that of being condemned myself ’ [HJ: 202/27]. (Notably, her first choice had been her sister Justine, which would have fatally undermined the narrative, but Delbène dissuades her from this.) It is a conventional point that crime marks the criminal as much as the victim, but Sade makes this communication into its rationale as it brings about the non-­subjective sensibility he is pursuing. The orgy begins quite calmly to enable Juliette to learn the different pleasures of anal and vaginal sex and although it is broken by another long speech from Delbène the most important point comes towards the end. What is intriguing about this scene is the manner in which it is suddenly broken off, which is repeated by two further interruptions to the narrative. It would seem that Sade is deliberately inserting these breaks to delay the proceedings, to make sure that everything is not said all at once,

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which also enables him to elaborate the relation between events and discourses in which each come to reflect and propel the other. For example, just after Delbène relates how she poisoned one of her admirers, the subterranean orgy is abruptly plunged into darkness, after which Juliette wakes up not knowing what has happened [HJ: 267–68/97]. Delbène then explains the need for calmness in the midst of the vicissitudes of life and the worthlessness of fraternal or familial bonds when the next interruption occurs, as a messenger arrives to tell Juliette about the dire situation that has befallen her father. Then, as Juliette is explaining how this change brought her into contact with the procuress Madame Duvergier who led her into further debaucheries, the narrative is interrupted again, but this time by the voices of the Marquis and the Chevalier who have been listening to Juliette telling her story [HJ: 273/103]. This reappearance of the frame narrative marks the end of the prelude by returning us to the point where the story originally began and recalling that Juliette’s story is related as the sequel to Justine’s story in La Nouvelle Justine, but it also emphasizes the erotic nature of these repeated deferrals that only amplify the anticipation and drama of reconstruction. As Delbène had noted, sometimes discourse can be as stimulating as physical enjoyment, especially when the latter is exhausted or absent, but the inter-­relation between philosophy and debauchery that has permeated Juliette’s story so far suggests that this is more than just a refreshing interval to heighten the senses [HJ: 234/60]. For in each of these instances of interruption there is an element of the contingent, of a sudden change in direction as characters come together and separate, which indicates how both within the narrative and in its reconstruction there cannot be any security from accidents. Indeed, Juliette’s narrative is constructed by these chance events, her story may be didactic but it is neither smooth nor comfortable, and in doing so it is more equipped to provoke not only stimulation but also reflection. Although effects must always have causes, as Delbène confirms through her discovery that it was an owl that disrupted their orgy rather than any supernatural occurrence, this does not mean that causes are tied to their effects; the radical contingency that underlies Sade’s materialism disrupts any linear flow of history, any continuity to the story [HJ: 268/97]. Moments in time, like individuals and events, are unrelated to each other and bear no bonds or obligations.

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Thus ends the first section of the first part of the narrative, the second half of this part is taken up by Juliette’s experiences working for Duvergier and is slightly looser in construction. Two key events take place here that will affect the development of Juliette’s situation; firstly, through her work she encounters Dorval who delivers a speech on the virtues of theft, which anticipates both Proudhon and Marx in its analysis of property relations [HJ: 285/118]. Inspired by this she will take her first steps in crime by stealing from two clients. Secondly, she is introduced to Noirceuil who will remain with her to the end, indeed, he is one of the characters in the frame narrative. Noirceuil is the first of the great libertines that she meets and he often reappears to provide extended discourses on the nature of libertine life. He will also introduce Juliette to Saint-Fond and Clairwil, thereby putting in place the elements that will enable the rest of the story to unfold, just as he had initiated Juliette’s problems by bankrupting and killing her parents. These developments then come together, as it is because of Juliette’s thefts that she is arrested and it is only through Saint-Fond’s influence that she is released. Saint-Fond is impressed by her libertine attitudes and rewards her for her crimes, buying her a house and securing an income for her, while also appointing her master of ceremonies for his own excesses. Her time with Saint-Fond then forms the second part of the novel. The most significant aspect of these events is their haphazard nature, as it is only by happening upon Dorval and Noirceuil in this way that Juliette’s fortunes change so dramatically. But her story is also an experiment engineered by Noirceuil, who establishes its initial conditions and fosters it as it proceeds, much like the fabled Rousseauian experiments with enfants sauvages, so to some degree she is no more than the vector for this experimental analysis. Hence, it is Juliette’s responses to these events that become important as it is only insofar as she is able to realize their criminal potential that she finds herself rewarded, and it is thus that her character is formed. A character that is not a permanent moral substrate but simply self-­ interest, an egoism or aptitude that pursues the interests of the self in terms of its independence and daring, rather than its inviolability, and the more this is allowed to flourish, the more it is rewarded. But as libertinism is not grounded in anything other than its own practice it needs to be persistently enacted, it cannot exist passively, which is how it reflects and carries out the broader

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understanding of nature as an active force, natura naturans, and thus can be both materially descriptive and ideally normative, neither fatalist nor determinist but endlessly self-­determining. Juliette is not a behaviourist exercise in psychopathology in the form of a libertine rendering of the Pygmalion story but an experiment in sensibility as such and in extremis.5

II Alongside the sense of corruption highlighted in Delbène’s teachings, there is also a sense of contagion that enhances the ability of the imagination to operate autoerotically. That is, the thought of crime brings about arousal, which leads to greater and more excessive desires for transgression, which then leads to a more heightened sense of arousal. As is apparent, excitement occurs through discussion as much as through physical stimulation and ideas themselves bring about stimulation, perhaps even more so than visual or tactile pleasures (‘to whatever degree he may have affected me physically . . . I cannot conceal that, morally, I was much more deeply moved by the gratuitous horror that the charms of Fatima and Dorval were making me undertake so deliciously’ [HJ: 280–81/113]), but these ideas are themselves secreted like other bodily emissions, which leads to the sense in which this stimulation is autoerotic, as Noirceuil describes: by just caressing the idea of the aberration [égarement] I am planning a divine fire rushes through my veins, a kind of fever seizes me; the delirium into which this idea plunges me spreads a delicious illusion across all the aspects of my plan; I plot, and it delights me; in examining all its ramifications I am intoxicated; it is no longer the same life or the same soul that animates me; my spirit is mixed with pleasure, I breathe no more, other than for lust. HJ: 305/141–42

The body becomes a force of lust, just as lust itself takes on a body. For just as desire takes hold of the body in an exponential excitation that is as much material as it is imaginary, sexuality takes up and extends the images of contamination and transmutation, which finds its combined analogue in the eccentric cycles of ejaculation and ingestion of ideas and bodily fluids (as in the alchemical language used in the discussion of coprophagy [HJ: 324/163]).

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For instance, it is precisely during an experience of felching (which insofar as it is undertaken by Dorval also appears to be an example of his predilection for filching, for the circulation or redistribution of materials) that Juliette expresses the idea noted above of being more profoundly stirred by horror than physical stimulation, as the implications of the act are even more stimulating than its actuality. This is why she becomes so enamoured of her tutors, since it is what they offer in terms of the possibilities of crime that is so seductive, rather than any physical attraction, which is what she will later refer to as the acts, writings, and counsels that render moral crimes unending. And it is by experiencing this first-­hand in her own education that she becomes convinced of the pleasures of its further propagation. After listening to Noirceuil expand on these ideas by demonstrating the self-­serving mendacity of virtue and the open-­ended excitements of vice, Juliette declares her love for him and the evil that he pursues in the most direct manner. But not before he has told her that it was he who was responsible for the disaster that befell her parents, which precipitated her into her current condition: ‘execrable man, I cried, however much I am victim of your vices, I love them’, and then, after Noirceuil goes on to describe how he poisoned her parents to avoid discovery, there is a slight pause as Juliette absorbs this news before she accedes to her desires: ‘monster, I cried out again, . . . you fill me with horror and I love you’. But in the brief moment when Juliette is taking in the information a crucial transition occurs: ‘a sudden quaking took hold of my entire being; but straightaway I fixed Noirceuil with the apathetic phlegm of the villainy [flegme apatique de la scélératesse] that despite myself nature had imprinted in the base of my heart’ [HJ: 310–11/148–49]. Physical excitement aside, in Juliette’s core there is only a calm indifference, and it is this disparity that distinguishes the libertine from others, from the machines and automata (Sade uses both words) who blindly follow convention and lack the courage and imagination to see things otherwise. The libertines are constituted by this paradox of being both involved and detached, which enables a helpful parallel to be drawn with the analysis of acting that Diderot developed, for, much like actors, libertines engage in excesses but remain unmoved in themselves, and it is by maintaining the tension of this disparity that they are able to continue in their lifestyles.6 Although it is unlikely that Sade would have known this piece

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by Diderot, its discussion would have been far from foreign to his thought, as it arose out of the contemporary debate over the differing virtues of realism and fiction, and feeling and reason, in drama, something Sade was very familiar with given his intense interest in the theatre. For Diderot, actors are able to take on many different roles because they are able to alienate themselves from themselves. That is, they separate themselves into an internal observer and an external actor, so while the actor engages in the wildest extravagances, the observer remains unmoved. This distinction allows Diderot to see how actors differ from enthusiasts, for while the latter are as impassioned as actors they lack the essential core of detachment that enables them to remain uninvolved. And it is solely due to this distance that actors can go further, as it not only provides a critical perspective on their passions but also produces a dialectical tension in which sensitivity and insensitivity propel each other to ever greater extremes. But this situation becomes paradoxical if we ask where the actor’s actual position lies, as they are neither insensitive nor sensitive, neither immersed nor abstracted, nor any simple combination of these, instead they appear to be actively engaged in a process of subjectification and desubjectification that has no final or proper position of its own, such that they are nothing in themselves. Much like the libertine, for whom the tension between sensitivity and insensitivity is just as critical, the actor’s subjectivity exists as a process of experimentation that could be termed diabolic insofar as it is thrown backwards and forwards through its own dialectical tension, perverting the situations into which it comes and the manner in which it passes through them. What Diderot’s model brings to the understanding of the libertine is the way that insensitivity is a necessary dialectical component of excess, which takes it beyond mere passion into a critical experiment with subjectification. As Juliette reads in the ‘Instructions for Women joining the Society of the Friends of Crime’, article six: ‘A woman must never have a character of her own, she must artfully borrow that of the people she has the most interest in pleasing’ [HJ: 564–65/433]. The libertine in effect plays a role as much as the actor, but their drama is that of their own subjectivity as it is submitted to the most extreme demands of the senses, which is to make it an experiment in the relation between materiality and sense. It is for this reason that pain becomes the organon of such experimentation, as it is pain that is

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most capable of bringing about changes in sensibility. Moreover, pain bears a sense of depth that differs from that of pleasure, as Burke pointed out, because the effects of pain persist over time whereas the effects of pleasure die away as its stimulus is removed.7 For the libertine pain presents a more poignant sensory experience as its persistence allows it to resonate across time and other sensibilities, which is precisely the model of endless contagion that Clairwil aspires to: an autonomous cross-­modal infection that triggers its own perpetuation, as it is not only pain but also the idea of pain that provokes through its intimation of the extremities of sense and existence. And such a thought leads very far since it means, as Noirceuil spells out, that there are passions that extinguish humanity [HJ: 329/169]. The libertines embody a dialectical relation to nature in that their acts reflect and extend it, following it but also carrying it through into areas that nature would not be able to achieve on its own. This is also the double-­sided relation between the actor and nature, who both imitates and exceeds that which is his model, thereby bringing out the more elemental form of imitation as that of the force of nature (natura naturans) rather than of its current status (natura naturata), which allows the libertine to follow the laws of nature and also to break them insofar as wildness is its law. This idea of excession is apparent in the way that Juliette responds to her tutors, for although Delbène encourages Juliette to imitate her, she takes up this task with the intention of outdoing her [HJ: 202/27]. It is only when she meets Noirceuil that she comes to say in her own words that she wishes to imitate him, and it is precisely because of the ‘irregularity’ of his mind that she is able to make this statement. Noirceuil, characteristically, defies her to do so, claiming that the horrors in his heart would repel anyone who sought to approach him as he has taken the crimes of libertinage to their fullest extent and the only regret he has is that he has not done more [HJ: 342/184–85]. This point becomes the motto that Clairwil uses to describe the libertine’s relation to time, which distinguishes it from the regretful glance of the non-­libertine, just as the ethical imperative of reciprocal consequences is inverted, as the libertine should always consider that ‘I could have done more, I did not do so’ [HJ: 550/416].8 The first part of the novel has now run its course, and it is notable that although the sexual activities have gradually become more excessive they have

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not included murder. And, although Juliette’s thefts have caused their own problems these have not been difficult to resolve, others have been punished in her place, and she has been substantially rewarded on top of the material gains that her thefts have procured. Noirceuil has continued to provide discourses on the meaninglessness of virtue, and as the second part of the novel is beginning, she is about to be introduced to Saint-Fond. A final point is necessary here, which concerns the issue of loyalty, for libertines have no greater regard for this than for any other virtue. Although most of them operate under a loose arrangement of mutual aid, this is only insofar as support provides greater levels of pleasure than destruction, but should the latter become preferable then there is nothing to prevent it, which will become the guiding theme for the rest of the novel [HJ: 359/202]. Before leaving Juliette’s story for the moment, there are points in part two that should be addressed as it is in this part that she becomes an authentic Sadean libertine in her own right, and instrumental to this are the accounts of sensibility that are given by Noirceuil, Saint-Fond, and Clairwil, which indicate how the experience of cruelty and suffering is to be endured and delivered. In the words of Noirceuil: pain is a consequence of the slight relation of foreign objects with the organic molecules composing us; in such a way that instead of the atoms emanating from these foreign objects sticking to those of our neural fluid, as they do in the commotion of pleasure, they here confront them at an angle, sting them, repulse them, and never join with them HJ: 412/267

Although there is only this off-­centre relation, however acute or oblique, jarring or glancing, it is still more stimulating than that of a pleasurable relation, and it is less likely to become familiar because its agitation is not simple. Thus, instead of becoming jaded by its repeated blows, the libertine is inclined to replicate pain in order ‘to move the objects that bring him his enjoyment, in the same way that he himself is moved’. In a distinctive turn of phrase, Noirceuil says that this repetition is an effect of the libertine’s delicacy (délicatesse), which suggests that it is their heightened sensitivity that leads them to induce similar sensations in others [HJ: 413/267; 397/248]. This does

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not imply a form of generosity or reciprocity; the libertines do not share their feelings in the way that lovers do but instead seek to double their experience by feeling it both actively and passively, subjectively and objectively. It is for this reason that the libertines will engage in delaying or denying pleasure to themselves, since this activates a sensation of anticipatory replication (which is to be found in the circumlocutions of the narrative as well), and also to engage in acts of symbolic violation as this involves physical and intellectual stimulation. In all these cases, the nature of sensitivity is mental and physical, material and abstract, and the force of the libertine’s experimentation comes from the degree to which both aspects are extended and intensified. In order that this experimentation can proceed most effectively it is necessary for the libertine to develop a sense of indifference, as Clairwil explains, as this is the only way that stimulation can be experienced without being subsumed by enthusiasm. It is thus that the libertine is a philosophe, not just a sensualist but an active investigator of the possibilities of sensation. But, insofar as greater sensitivity leads to a greater capacity (and need) for stimulation, the more violent this stimulation the more one is inclined to crime, thus the evil of libertinism arises from an intensification of the degree of sensitivity and a concomitant desire for greater stimulation, which distinguishes it from the good.9 And for the same reason that evil involves a more powerful stimulation so must it also involve a greater apathy, such that it separates the feelings involved in the act of crime from those that relate to its consequences, not just to avoid compassion for any victims but also to take advantage of the distance involved in apathy to induce a similar level of doubled stimulation to that brought about by deferral. Moreover, insensitivity means that the libertine can avoid being carried away by the excess of the crime and becoming careless, as this would undermine the long-­term possibilities of experimentation; like the actor or scientist, the libertine is concerned with being able to repeat their actions over and over again. In separating the act from agent and victim, causes and consequences, it becomes a free, gratuitous act as it is without external value or significance and can be repeated endlessly as a pure autonomous gesture. And through this force and repetition the act is able to endure as a perpetual incitement in precisely the manner that Sade desires, an incitement that is the very expérience of life.

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In what might be considered to be some kind of dialectical manoeuvre, the thought of sensitivity passes through its negation in insensitivity and reappears in one of the most peculiar forms in the whole book, which leaves even Juliette and Clairwil amazed. Throughout the second part of the narrative Saint-Fond’s extreme behaviour has been followed, but along the way a strange habit of his has become apparent. Before killing his victims he takes them into a side room from which they appear in a state of great distress. As the other debaucheries are so explicit this secretive behaviour attracts attention, and eventually Saint-Fond is forced to divulge what he does. Like many of the libertines he feels frustrated that he cannot find a way of acting that will approach the endless excesses he can imagine, as he wishes to find a crime that will live on beyond life itself, and following the advice of a libertine trained in alchemy he finds a solution [HJ: 416–17/271; 509/369]. The victims whom he takes aside are forced to sign a pact with the devil in their own blood, which Saint-Fond then forces inside them by sodomizing them. This contract means the victims will continue to endure endless suffering even after they die. Understandably Juliette and Clairwil are outraged by this residual theology and proceed to show how his belief in the eternal torments of hell is absurd and misguided. What is intriguing about this discovery is that Saint-Fond is not punished for holding these beliefs, although he is later killed by Noirceuil this is more a result of the latter’s political ambitions than any sense of libertine ruthlessness. Instead, he is given room to defend his position, and in doing so Sade provides a materialist reduction of theology that renders both terms eccentric. This passage has been seen by Klossowski (and many subsequent readers) as confirming that Sade holds to a form of negative Gnostic theology in that his atheism requires a debased theism to persist, but the prevalence of materialist thinking throughout suggests that he has instead found a way of perverting theism beyond a simple rejection [SMP: 103/75ff]. Although Saint-Fond’s beliefs are not the final word in Sade’s thought, they move it beyond any simple form of materialism or atheism, and the key to understanding this move is the nature of sensibility. What Saint-Fond sees around him is a universe of evil: at its largest and smallest scale the universe is constituted by evil; it is the essence of all life and the reason why life is pervaded by injustice, suffering, and viciousness. There is nothing else in the universe but evil, and this is how it persists, for evil

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is increased when it falls back into itself, and because the part that accepts must necessarily be obliterated by the part that is accepted; which follows the logic in which weakness always submits to strength. That which survives the naturally malicious being, and that which must survive it, since it is the essence of its constitution existing before it, and which will necessarily exist afterwards, by falling back into the heart of evil [sein du mal] and no longer having the strength to defend itself, because it has become weaker, will thus be eternally tormented by the entire essence of evil to which it will be reunited; and these are the maleficent molecules that in the operation of encompassing what we call death reunites to it, composing what poets and those of ardent imagination have named demons. No man, no matter what his conduct in this world, can escape this terrible fate, because it is necessary that everything that emanates from the heart of nature, that is to say, from that of evil, returns to it, such is the law of the universe. Thus are the detestable elements of the malicious [mauvais] man absorbed into the heart of wickedness [méchanceté], which is God, in order to return and to animate other beings again, which will be born that much more corrupted, in that they will be the fruit of corruption. HJ: 535/397–98

Insofar as this materialist vision presents a satanic theodicy, it remains theistic. But the thought of maleficent molecules (molécules malfaisantes) is distinct from theology, since its purpose is to explain the persistence of evil through the continual destruction and regeneration of beings, as well as their essential viciousness. Precisely what evil would be at this molecular level is unclear (‘molecules’ in Sade’s time simply referred to small particles, they did not yet have the specific chemical meaning that is now used), other than suggesting that there is a ruthless, repulsive relation existing between molecules in which sensitivity and insensitivity coexist, which thereby enables evil to be produced and propagated.10 This is not a form of evil that derives from any morality of good and evil, but undercuts such anthropomorphism to indicate a material individualism and recidivism, sauve qui peut. Because there is no sense of social relation in Sade (which does not obscure the utter lack of relations between beings), evil is just the basis and the expression of this anomalous order, the way of things when there are only monsters, when each being is inordinately singular.

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For Saint-Fond it is necessary to be evil so that one will suffer less when it comes to the time when one is dissolved in this primal evil (he had earlier admitted that fear had turned him into a shirker, ‘le plus jean-­foutre de tous les êtres’ [HJ: 397/248]), which is to say that one should render oneself as much like these maleficent molecules as possible, just as Juliette has been encouraged to imitate others in order to survive. But in doing so Saint-Fond has forgotten the crucial point about such imitation, as Diderot had observed, which is that the actor should remain detached from their role and not allow themselves to become absorbed by their passions. It is in doing so that the actor stands apart from others (who will always remain subject to their feelings and the feelings of others), and it is this indifference that Clairwil will oppose to Saint-Fond’s vision, but similarly she will also insist that it is necessary to be indifferent in order to survive in an indifferent universe. In this way, her vision removes itself from the inverted theodicy of Saint-Fond’s thought, since for her there is no reason in any form, either good or evil, and it is perhaps as such that it comes closer to the essential perversion of reason that Kant saw in diabolical evil. The apparently dialectical manner in which this part of the novel stages these differing accounts of sensibility, from sensitivity to insensitivity and then to malice, is shown to be spurious as the attempt to move on from the negation of sensitivity involves a theological subreption motivated by fear. However, the materialist perspective that remains shows more clearly how the movement of indifference makes itself felt in the endless and pointless transmutations of nature, since the significance of indifference comes from the fact that in remaining detached one is able to do more, just as actors are able to play many roles because they are not bound to any one of them. As Clairwil concludes, the only reason she commits crimes is that they please her, ‘and as nothing of me will survive, it matters very little how I conduct myself in this world’ [HJ: 539/402].

III Three themes are worth emphasizing here in order to make the organization of Sade’s thought clearer: firstly, the way that Juliette’s apprenticeship involves the

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passage from one tutor to another; secondly, the discourses that occur during this apprenticeship are concerned with developing Juliette’s understanding of sensibility; and thirdly, the thematic of poisoning that appears to underlie these transmissions. Within the movement of apprenticeship Juliette explicitly aligns herself with her tutors, to the extent of declaring that she wishes to become identical to them, but within the logic of libertinage emulation implies exaggeration: one can only become like another in becoming more so, which inevitably leads to supersession as she passes over each tutor in favour of the next. On a practical level Juliette realizes that aligning herself with the wealthy and powerful will not only enable her to become like them but also to gain the security that will allow her to act as she chooses. This sense of freedom follows from the pragmatism of assimilation in which one can only survive and prosper in a world of corruption and iniquity by blending in (on this point Noirceuil cites Machiavelli, The Prince §15 [HJ: 309–10/147]). As is clear, to be moral in such a world is to invite trouble, whereas to pursue a life of crime effectively renders one invisible and thereby free. Thus, to become like her tutors but only more so is not just to emulate but to become exemplary, to condense the pathway of approximation to its most representative, most potent, and fluidly impersonal possibilities. Within the discourses on sensibility there is an imperative to develop indifference in order to accentuate enjoyment. This is made possible through indirection, as the libertine exposes others to acts that in being observed without compassion or empathy can be experienced objectively. That is, the libertine is able to increase the acuteness of pain by experiencing it concretely: not just absorbing it subjectively but realizing its disruptive effects objectively as well. Thus indifference does not lead to mere scientific detachment but intensifies the enjoyment by allowing suffering to be experienced as such, in the purity of its own appearance. The sense of pain as accidental and shocking is thereby isolated from agent or victim and experienced in its sheer contingency, which increases the range and depth of stimulation. The discourses not only describe this process through analyses of the physics of stimulation and the dynamics of torture but also enact it through the discursive isolation of suffering from causes and effects, hence the importance of recalling

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and retelling these acts, which translates theory into practice and relays this to the reader. Again, this does not reduce the impact of the suffering but condenses and transmits it. The presence of poison throughout this process of education is literal as well as metaphorical, it becomes the favoured means of killing because it is discreet and cruel, and it exemplifies the clandestine nature of infection and inoculation implied in the discussions of sensibility and apprenticeship. Poisoning is both a science and an art as it is aesthetic and effective, and thus provides a model for understanding the actions of a nature that is as destructive as it is creative, and of the kind of literature that would pursue such a nature, for in its inconspicuousness it mimics the literal banality of pain and beauty.11 These points enable a clearer understanding of what is perhaps the central issue in reading Sade, the nature of his influence, for while he disavows any simple sense of causality or tradition he remains committed to a didactic approach in his writings. Consequently, despite the absence of persuasion, his works are deliberate attempts to challenge and provoke. But how is Sade meant to put his arguments across, what could make them convincing, given the lack of standards against which to measure them and the lack of means to convey them? Something of a solution to these problems may be found in the tacit construction of the texts, in which characters and discussions collide with each other as possibilities in an open-­ended field of interaction. But while this demonstrates the materialist conception of bodies in space in the immanent plane of the text, the contingency of their collisions can only address the problem of influence if it is also seen as a mode of contagion. In this way Sade develops a non-­causal model of influence that is material and ahistorical and enables non-­teleological change, that is, contagion brings about change without direction or determinism. Hence, it can be materialist without reverting to mechanism and bears a force of change that is horizontal and infectious rather than proceeding from or towards a transcendent state. This model cuts through the contemporary debates between mechanism and vitalism and displaces the Enlightenment thought of reason into a nonhuman context. Without standards or goals for material and bodily change there is no possibility of establishing norms from which there could be deviations, however monstrous or perverse.

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Such a thought of the endless vicissitudes of material existence is also to be found in Diderot’s Le Rêve de d’Alembert, which is the only work of the period that comes close to the radical philosophical and scientific arguments of Juliette, although Diderot’s humanism means that these ideas are not pursued as far as they were in Sade’s works. This discovery indicates how the last aspect of Sade’s influence should be approached; that of the works themselves as they have been suppressed and yet have persisted. His didacticism seems to operate subcutaneously, bearing a latent toxicity that outlasts the shock-­effect made well-­known in modernity by infiltrating thought with a corrosiveness that appears immune to argument. This may help explain the peculiarly naked rhetoric of Sade’s writings in which arguments are not dressed up with sophisticated persuasive strategies but are simply stated, which leaves them outrageous but also opaque and unanswerable in their bluntness. And yet no one who reads Sade can forget what they have read. This influence does not operate on the level of convincing readers but is more about insistently dissolving opposition.12 Sensibility in Sade’s thought is marked by the fact that expérience refers both to an experience and to an experiment, which means that it is both passive and active. Thus sensation is not simply receptive but requires experimentation if it is to lead to understanding, and the more extreme the experiment, the greater the awareness and its sensory experience. What Sade introduces to this model is not that the imagination can provide its own experiential stimulation, since many philosophes felt that the senses could be excited by the imagination as much as they could by physical stimuli, but his willingness to pursue the implications of this thought through literature. His writings are thus experimental in that they explore what can be discovered or invented through the senses and in doing so they also indicate how they are to be used as handbooks: the experiences that Juliette undergoes are a model for the escalation of stimulation that the reader also finds in reading about them. As readers we are led through one scenario after another that gradually increases the level of extremity and stimulation, establishing a trajectory of familiarization in which we discover the possibilities of such experimentation for ourselves. As training manuals Sade’s works disestablish habits relating to religion and conventional morality and replace them, not with new habits, but with an

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instability in which the libertine (reader) is perpetually drawn to test and extend their own sensitivities. What becomes apparent in looking at Le Rêve de d’Alembert is that Sade’s materialism is not only present in this earlier text but also that Diderot’s methods, however much more sophisticated, nevertheless resemble those of Sade.13 Le Rêve takes place as a dialogue, which starts with an argument between the characters of Diderot and d’Alembert over the relation between materiality and sensibility in a godless universe. Diderot then leaves and d’Alembert goes home to sleep and begins to dream. The following morning his companion, Julie de l’Espinasse, alarmed by his feverishness (apparently brought on by the argument), calls a doctor, Bordeu, and the two of them discuss the contents of d’Alembert’s dream, which she has been transcribing from his unconscious ramblings. This leads to a further discussion of sensibility and its relation to thought and memory, and reproduction and monstrosity, and eventually d’Alembert wakes up and joins the conversation. Bordeu then has to leave for an appointment and the dialogue adjourns, but when he returns there is a brief coda where he and l’Espinasse extend their discussion even further into the realms of sexual fantasy. The characters are based on real figures and as a result the text was suppressed for many years, but its ideas were Diderot’s own (as is shown by the way that his character seeds the discussion) and they provide the most advanced demonstration of his thinking on the implications of materialism. But what is most compelling about this text is that it puts its thoughts into practice in its form and development. Several points thus emerge that parallel the themes noted above and illustrate how the provocative nature of the text develops into a form of experimentalism: Firstly, an inconspicuous mode of communication occurs between the characters in which d’Alembert resists Diderot’s arguments while speaking to him and yet unconsciously carries them over into his dreams, which then come to affect l’Espinasse as she writes down what he mutters in his sleep. This line is carried on to Bordeu who understands d’Alembert’s nocturnal speech to such a degree that he can fill in its gaps and extend it at will. Secondly, this non-­explicit mode of transmission or secretion involves a conversion from theory into practice as the thoughts of one character affect those of the next, as if the mechanism of transmission from body to body is

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necessary to make the conversion between theory and practice, and that contamination carries with it a change in the mode of expression (echoing Sade’s ambivalent or indifferent thought of relation). This transformation is not only effected by the way that d’Alembert’s dream extends Diderot’s arguments much further than could have occurred through dialogue but also in the way that this gives rise to physical stimulation as he finds himself aroused by his own imagination, an excitation that is carried over as l’Espinasse also becomes aroused as she discusses with Bordeu what she has heard from d’Alembert. The third point is the corollary of this transmission, for such communication is necessary as the mind cannot feel anything even as it organizes the senses and the information that passes through it, showing the necessity of the conversion between theory and practice and the neutral position from which this can be assessed (exemplified in l’Espinasse’s image of the spider web, but also anticipating the distinction central to the actor’s craft). The emphasis on sensibility is thereby coupled with its inverse to provide a means for both its accomplishment and its adjudication, which is manifested in the duplicity of expérience. This point finds itself expressed in the two-­way movement between materiality and sensitivity, which indicates that matter bears its own sensitivity, however slight, and that sensitivity does not occur without its own materialization, again, however slight, which is what gives rise to the imaginative conversion of theory into practice, and thought into expression. Since the body is enmeshed in a network of physical impulses through its senses it is necessary for any kind of liberation from this network to encompass a liberation from sensitivity as such, hence the emphasis on indifference amongst the libertines. But Diderot’s model indicates that liberation can also occur in a less severe manner as matter is traversed by two different axes of sensibility: a vector of increased sensitivity, which involves greater continuity of feeling, and, conversely, a vector of increased materialization, which involves greater contiguity of feeling. There is thus a tension between integration and disintegration in the senses that Diderot discusses in terms of the fluidity of their exchange versus the disaggregation of their organs. Hence, the only basis upon which to distinguish between normality and abnormality comes from the variable calibration of this tension in the development of the individual,

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which can lead to monstrosity of a physical or moral kind. And insofar as there is no natural norm against which to measure such divergence, the remarkable conclusion reached by l’Espinasse (rendering Aristotle’s thought of gender chiasmic) is that man is perhaps no more than a monstrous (or deviant) form of woman, or woman a monstrous form of man (‘L’homme n’est peut-être que le monstre de la femme, ou la femme le monstre de l’homme’) [RA: 57/192]. A thought developed in Sade’s belief that sensibility can be recalibrated through experience by replacing one set of habits with another, which involves discovering or inventing new kinds of experiences. Finally, the dream itself operates as an analogue of the text insofar as it is a mode by which an alternative form of expression occurs alongside reality that both represents and extends it, giving scope to its digressive potential, by rendering it more sensitive and mobile, while also interrogating this possibility. Diderot goes on to suggest that dreams present the autonomous material fantasies of the organs in the absence of centralized control, although this idea is subsumed to his concern with education and reflective distance. But what it also demonstrates is the form and basis of the analogy as the material grounding (and interruption) of the fantasy and the fantastic expression (or distortion) of the material in the text/dream. This relation is extended further in the libidinal dreams that Sade will pursue, where sexual desire is the vehicle for a greater material contagion. The importance of Diderot’s work in relation to Sade comes from the way that the thought of materiality takes place in the literary text, how ideas and their expression are reciprocally extended in the same way that theory and practice are inter-­related in Sade’s works. This is not to make of materiality a merely literary form but rather to see the material extension of ideas in literature in terms of the immanence of transformation that Sade understands as communication, which emphasizes its persistence and toxicity. Unfortunately, Sade is not interested in epistemology: he offers no explanation for how knowledge arises from the senses, nor is there any explanation of how judgements are made. Because of his disregard for causality and relation there is no clear understanding of how mind and world, or subject and object, interact. In all ordinary forms of cognition his libertines operate conventionally; acting, planning, and engaging in complex arguments

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requiring extensive discrimination and decision-­making. Hence, the model he sketches out is of the libidinal possibilities that appear alongside this consciousness, but which in doing so perverts and undermines its basic functions. As such, the materiality of desire takes place in the same way that literature occurs: by reflecting and redirecting thought into a different sphere. Sexuality exposes the libertine to contagious and horizontal forms of communication and interaction, which leads to a corruption without end insofar as it serves no purpose and recognizes no satisfaction but only stimulates itself to greater and greater excesses. Such a vision is inherent in the materiality of desire and even if it is raised in Sade’s writings as a series of provocative hypotheses (as occurs in many of the works of the philosophes) it forces a reconsideration of how thought appears in the world. Even at its most abstract thought cannot extricate itself from the body and its desires, and the influence of these aspects is neither negligible nor innocuous. Desire, when taken literally, bears its own form of truth and realism, which deforms experience according to its exact material fantasies and involves reason in the turmoil of a nature without humanity. It is in Blanchot’s reading of Sade that this challenge to thinking is addressed directly.

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Hors-­la-loi: Blanchot and the Revolution

A patriot is one who supports the Republic as a whole; the one who combats it in detail is a traitor. Louis de Saint-Just, 23 Ventôse II (13 March 1794) Blanchot’s reading of Sade is one of the earliest substantial discussions and was first published in Les Temps modernes in 1947 as ‘A la rencontre de Sade’, ostensibly as a review of Klossowski’s Sade mon prochain, and was then reprinted two years later as ‘La raison de Sade’ in the volume Lautréamont et Sade. This volume was reissued in 1963 with a new preface, and the Sade essay was republished in many places, notably in the Cercle du Livre Précieux edition of Sade’s works as a preface to volume six. It was also the first piece of Blanchot’s writings to be translated into English, appearing in 1948 and again the following year, giving evidence not just of the interest in Sade but also of the significance of Blanchot’s interpretation, which was confirmed when it appeared as a preface to the first volume of the Grove Press edition of Sade’s works. The importance of this essay for readers of Sade was that Blanchot, for the first time, took Sade’s thought seriously and attempted to understand it without reducing it to psychology, and doing so meant that he started to read the works on their own terms.1 As such, this essay set the terms for many of the later discussions by indicating what is minimally necessary for any reading, but crucially it is also a key essay in the development of Blanchot’s own thinking. Appearing in the month prior to the first part of his major essay ‘La littérature and le droit à la mort’, the Sade essay anticipates the analyses of the writer as a very particular kind of consciousness in the world, and of writing as a form of material thought, which the later essay will explicate in greater

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detail. But it also takes on the role of an exemplary demonstration of the problematic Blanchot will discuss in more general terms in ‘La littérature and le droit à la mort’, which thus places the greatest pressure on it as a stage in his thought. Bataille recognized the central importance of this essay when he wrote that it ‘reveals Sade’s thought, it makes it emerge from a night so profound that it was doubtlessly an obscurity for Sade himself: if Sade had a philosophy, it would be vain to look for it elsewhere than in Maurice Blanchot’s study, and reciprocally, it is possible that Blanchot’s thought is fulfilled [s’accomplisse] in measuring itself against Sade’s’.2 Considering the possibility of this inter-­ relation will be central to the reading that follows, and while I share Bataille’s understanding of the importance of this essay for the development of Blanchot’s thought, it is not so easy to be as confident about its reading of Sade. Almost inevitably Sade’s writings seem to evade analysis but in ways that are themselves revealing, for if there are limits to Blanchot’s reading, then this is simply due to the excess of Sade’s thought, an excess that is found in the abstraction of its ambitions and the materiality of its actualization. And it is the ambivalence of this relation that Sade inhabits with absolute indifference. For example, it is not just that the chateau of Silling resembles hell in its endless cruelty and degradation, but that the figures that inhabit it are already dead, as the Duc de Blangis informs the attendees at the beginning of Les Cent Vingt Journées: ‘You are enclosed in an impregnable citadel; no one knows you are here, you are beyond the reach of your friends, of your parents, you are already dead to the world, and it is only for our pleasures that you breathe’ [CVJ: 66/56]. In its remoteness and inaccessibility, it appears to be the underworld of the damned, and although the characters there are already dead, their death is never-­ending. In the movement of abstraction that takes place as the system of all perversions is pursued there is no room for individuals, but this sublation of the particular into the general is unsuccessful as Sade goes further and dismembers and evacuates language as well: there are no relations or meanings, no figures or images, just parts in their iterations without end. A language without history or fantasy but strangely literal in its absence of depth or reference, and it is as such that it becomes inhuman, a sovereign space of lawlessness and contingency. While this may reveal the materiality obscured through conceptualization it does so only insofar as it reveals the alien and

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inassimilable qualities of these parts. If this is what is literally there when there is writing, then this is nothing human, nothing that can be thought, but it is precisely this that desire cannot cease to pursue. Empirical comprehension cannot cease in its desire for the material and contingent, it yearns voraciously for every instance, and through it voluptuousness excites itself as it becomes ‘irritated by the augmentation of a desire incessantly inflamed and never satisfied’ [CVJ: 59/49]. Conversely, Sade takes up the discourse of natural right that dominated eighteenth-­century thought in France, especially in the Revolution, and reveals its inevitable implications. It is here that his thought coincides with that of the Terror: where the attempt to ground the law in nothing but the state of nature leads to violence and treachery. It is not that Sade is simply presenting a parody of this discourse but rather insists on following it through to its limit, as is his way and which writing exacerbates, and in doing so the positing of nature as the ground of the law unravels into meaninglessness.3 In the same way, this excess characterizes his position as an atheist, insofar as it is a position without compromise, a refusal of satisfaction, which also characterizes the figures in his works as they take on the role of being outside the law, hors-­la-loi. But there is also the imperative to write, since it is a question of examining this groundlessness through the narrative, exploring it in such a way that it can pursue its own unravelling without end. It is necessary to show how the law undermines itself in order to follow it through according to its own logic, and in doing so the narrative does not just plunge into the abyss but shows how there remains a narrative of this disaster, even in extremis, which is why it does not dissolve into nothing. In some ways, these are the two slopes of Sade’s writings, that of language and that of the law, which are in themselves double, pulling the writing in different directions while also leading into each other and thereby providing its tension. For just as the system of language leads to the materiality of nature so does the law of nature lead to the language of excess, each tendency dividing in itself rather than converging on the other. This image of uncoordinated slopes is central to Blanchot’s discussion of the literary work in his most well-­ known and possibly most significant essay, ‘La littérature and le droit à la mort’. As this essay forms the background to his thinking in the essay on Sade, a brief

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consideration of its concerns will help explicate the issues that focus his reading of Sade. The essay was published in two parts: the first was entitled ‘Le règne animal de l’esprit’ (after Hegel) and came out in November 1947; the second came out two months later and bore the title of the final essay, which joined the two parts together. Although it has been much studied the essay remains structurally enigmatic as it turns from a discussion of Hegel and the possibility of thinking of literature as work to a discussion of literary language and its undecidable oscillation between ideality and materiality.4 The first part appears to constitute a kind of existential analytic, or at least its problematization, as it deals with literary work as an action in the world, while the second part moves into a form of ontology as it concerns the nature of literary language, or at least the ambiguity that passes as its nature. So although there is a sense of analytical progression in the move from the ontic to the ontological, so to speak, there is a change in tone and perspective between the two parts that is hard to place. However, the centre of the essay, that which forms the end of the first part and develops the segue that will lead into the second part, involves a discussion of Sade. It would seem that it is in the figure of Sade that Blanchot finds the hinge that will allow the joining of the two parts of his essay, since it is in Sade that he finds the combination and complication of the worldly and linguistic aspects of the literary work: not just the nominal and verbal meanings of work, but an examination of the empirical and transcendental dimensions of literature. The first part of ‘La littérature and le droit à la mort’ is an implicit critique of Sartre’s promotion of committed literature, which Blanchot responds to by reading Hegel’s thoughts on the nature of work in the Phänomenologie, or rather Kojève’s version thereof, which focuses on the category of intellectual work. As Hegel shows, the actualization of the work is beset by deceptions and contradictions, which for Blanchot becomes exacerbated to an intense degree in the work of the writer, as the writer cannot start to write without having already started, cannot claim a work as their own without seeing it slip from their grasp, and cannot find solace in either the success or failure of the work without finding these conclusions misinterpreted, thereby exposing him to accusations of deception and undermining the possibility of political engagement that Sartre had proposed. When the writer realizes that it is not

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possible to find security with the universal that is putatively actualized in the work, as its language is vulnerable to the same deceptions and contradictions as the work and permits of no synthesis or reconciliation, he falls into the cycle of negating either the work or himself that is found in the shapes of stoicism, scepticism, and the unhappy consciousness, but in doing so Blanchot discerns a further shape, that of the revolutionary. The significance of the revolutionary as a figure for the writer is that it captures the immediate transition from everything to nothing, the impossible demand for freedom or death, which demonstrates the absolute nature of the writer’s work as one that annihilates the world at a stroke and replaces it with another. The negativity of writing is not mediated through action in the world but rather imposes itself at once, which carries the greatest risks, for on the one hand language is a concrete intervention in the world, while on the other hand literature puts the world as a whole at the disposal of the writer, but this is an imaginary world that is constituted by its negativity. As Hegel wrote in relation to the consciousness of the revolutionary, which realizes itself as absolute freedom, the ‘sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death that has no inner scale or fulfilment, for what is negated is the unfulfilled point of the absolutely free self ’ [PG: 320/360]. Hence, the temptation is that the writer sees themselves in the revolution, and it is in Sade that Blanchot sees the contradictions of this position being carried to its greatest extreme as his work (œuvre) is nothing but the work (travail) of negation as the freedom of absolute sovereignty [PF: 311/321]. To consider this proposition the essay on Sade develops along similar lines to ‘La littérature and le droit à la mort’, as Blanchot starts with the facticity of Sade’s writing, its solitary existence, and then moves on to the way that this manifests itself firstly through its monstrosity and then by discovering the force of negativity that sustains this monstrosity, which realizes itself in the work as its own form of lawlessness. But when this lawlessness occurs in writing it does so as an absolute event, a singular rupture of transgression that constantly estranges itself, which affects its reading as much as its writing. Although this excess can be understood in terms of its materiality, Blanchot’s response comes from the way that it exposes an experience of that which exceeds experience, an exteriority, which is discussed through the notion of

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sovereignty. While this notion will occupy Bataille through much of his career, for which Blanchot’s reading of Sade will prove central, in Blanchot’s own work the notion of sovereignty is thought as a persistent negativity: the relentless negation of one position after another that exceeds any relation of position to negation and exposes that which is outside both. This discovery emerges as the critical point as it indicates how Sade’s works expose thinking to the lawlessness at the heart of its own reason, the lack of limits inherent to negativity, which fundamentally reconfigures it. As such, it is the logical rather than the material conditions of thinking that are addressed in Blanchot’s reading, and this is the significance of his version of Sade; that much like Kant, but with a radical perversion of reason, the very conditions of the possibility of thinking are laid bare in his writing. This discovery comes to complement that of the material understanding of sensibility that Sade himself adopts but it is apparent that Blanchot does not examine the relation between these two spheres, and so does not draw out the ways in which this logical perversion is intimately related to its transformation in material experience. Indeed, it is precisely Sade’s ambivalent relation to these spheres that forms his critical novelty: the fact that he does not distinguish the material from the logical within any causal or dialectical hierarchy but sees them as interwoven in the sexual and philosophical threads of his writings.

I In a manner that has become conventional Blanchot begins his essay on Sade with a series of warnings: Not only has he produced a work (La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, suivie de l’Histoire de Juliette, sa soeur) that is monumental in size (ten volumes between 1799 and 1801), but its scandalous nature is such that it has never been surpassed, its extremity marking it as ‘a veritable absolute’ that renders it singular and unapproachable [LS: 17/7]. Is it this, Blanchot asks, that has made it such a neglected work, its seclusion echoing the imprisonment of its author? Its uniqueness at once demanding attention but also leaving it unread and possibly unreadable, ‘as unreadable for its length, its composition, its ruminations [ressassements], as for the vigour of its

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descriptions and the indecency of its savagery, which cannot but cast it into hell’ (as well as its more obvious meaning, enfer refers to that section of libraries that house banned books) [LS: 18/8]. Thus, inherent in its scandalous reputation is the respect that comes from its singularity, a respect seemingly unique in literature. But Blanchot then goes on to describe the other side of Sade’s difficulty, for not only his work ‘but also his thought remains impenetrable – and this even though theoretical developments are there in a very great number, and that he repeats them with disconcerting patience, and he reasons in the clearest way and with satisfactory logic’ [LS: 18/9]. And so, despite this repetition, and the simplicity of his ideas, and the many varied examples and demonstrations, everything remains unclear, not just in its structure and its basis but also in its order and its goals: Such is Sade’s primary singularity. That his theoretical ideas at every moment release the irrational powers [puissances] with which they are bound: these powers at once animate and disturb them with such a thrust that his ideas both resist and yield to them, seeking to master them, indeed mastering them, but only achieving this by releasing other obscure forces, which will lead, change [dévient], and pervert them anew. The result is that everything that is said is clear, but seems at the mercy of something that has not been said, that a little later what has not been said is shown and is recovered by the logic, but in its turn obeys the movement of a still hidden force and in the end everything is brought to light, everything comes to be said, but this everything is also plunged back into the obscurity of unreflected thoughts and unformulable moments again. LS: 19/9

It is now apparent why Blanchot would change the title of this essay from ‘A la rencontre de Sade’ to ‘La raison de Sade’ when it was republished in 1949. The singularity of Sade’s writings is that their reason is duplicitous: both theoretical and irrational, clear and obscure, aesthetic and cognitive, and this is precisely what makes them disturbing. Trying to understand how such a reason, as the organizing principle of his works, can be so ambivalent will be the problem that Blanchot will pursue, for it says much about the nature of literature’s relation to thought that it can mobilize a force that is both concrete and elusive. As has been shown the problem lies in the status of Sade’s thought, which in its

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ambivalence over its materiality and ideality refuses all grounds other than the persistence with which it pursues its singular aim. For Blanchot, this aim arises from the fact of solitude, which is as much Sade’s situation as it is that of the writer; we are each born alone, without ties to anyone or anything, and thus nothing can or should stand in the way of complete self-­interest, and this is the principle by which we should each live. This is the primary perversion, as it were, in that the fact of equality in solitude does not lead to solidarity or philanthropy but rather to the discovery that my desires are not subordinate to anyone else’s, and so no one has the right to refuse themselves to another. And if there comes a time when another demands the same of myself, then it is up to me either to defeat their actions or to realize in them the excess I can achieve for myself (thus does the resistance and evasion of the work give rise to the situations of bad faith that Sartre had sought to combat). This is not to find a masochism hidden inside cruelty but to see that excess as such is at stake, regardless of its origins. This fundamental principle means that Sade’s characters submit to the absolute risk in which the freedom to oppress or to rebel carries with it the chance that it may be turned against oneself. This Hobbesian nightmare indicates the nihilism at the heart of the capitalism, as Horkheimer discussed in Dialektik der Aufklärung, and also its anarchic Stirnerian inversion, but it must not be forgotten that it also articulates the form of literature as well, the relation of thought to the artwork [DA: 106/68]. This lawlessness and irrationality surface in Sade’s ambitions for his works, which attempt a thorough investigation of transgressions: to think both the whole and the excess in their mutually destabilizing tension: to think excess as the whole, and the whole as excess. Sade gives expression to this paradox in the form of the secret society, a society brought together by secrecy and so to some extent secret even from its members (in the sense that it disavows itself, as Bataille, Klossowski, and others sought to recapture in the Acéphale society), which thus operates as both a whole and an excess and finds its realization in the instability of violent sexual relations, where violence is both the form of the relation and its rupturing, just as betrayal becomes the basis of sociality for the libertines.5 For the disruption of sexual relations by violence is the inevitable result of a crime that sets itself against both nature and culture, against family and the state, against the very form

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of stable social structures. It is thus that Sade follows the actions of individuals who have dedicated themselves to this excess for its own sake, without reason or purpose. But such a project can only persist for as long as it is extended, since without any grounds it is inherently unstable. As a result, desire becomes grounded solely through the actualization of its ever-­expanding possibilities, which leads Sade to a position where all acts can become pleasurable, for in placing themselves beyond the law the libertines are also beyond the limitations of any judgements of morality or taste: ‘the sovereign man is inaccessible to evil because no one can do evil to him; he is the man of all passions, and his passions take pleasure in everything’ [LS: 28/20]. And so, in a passage Bataille was fond of citing: for the complete man, who is all men, no evil is possible. If he inflicts harm on others, what exquisite pleasure! If others inflict harm on him, how delightful! Virtue delights him, for it is weak and he crushes it, and vice, because he derives satisfaction from the disorder it produces, even though it is at his expense. If he lives, there is not a single event of his existence that he cannot experience as happy. If he dies, he finds an even greater happiness in his death and, in the consciousness of his destruction, the coronation of a life that alone justifies the need for destruction. He is thus inaccessible to others. No one can undermine him, nothing can take away [aliène] his power of being himself and of enjoying himself. Such is the primary meaning of his solitude. Even if he, in turn, seemingly becomes a victim and a slave, the violence of the passions that he knows how to assuage in any circumstance assures him of his sovereignty, makes him feel that in all circumstances, in life and in death, he remains all-­powerful. LS: 30/21–22

Such is the nature of Sadean solitude: for insofar as this excess can turn any situation back to the libertine’s interests, there is nothing that can perturb or dismay them, everything becomes an occasion for pleasure, thus the libertine becomes complete, sovereign, autonomous, and, in a formulation that should recall its Stirnerian heritage, unique. Even the domination that exists between torturer and victim does not undermine this solitude as it is not a relation of dependency, instead, Sade’s characters have slipped free of the master–slave relation through the sheer quantity of their acts, since excess leads to a

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qualitatively different existence that is indifferent to the implications of its acts other than as sources of pleasure. The equation that underpins this relation is simple and indicates the endless nature and basis of its ambition: for the libertine ‘must experience everything in order to be at the mercy of nothing’ [LS: 29/20; cf. HJ: 194/19]. An ambition as hellish in its anticipation of the endlessness of victims, as it is literary and scientific in its subordination of individuals; this is the substance of the Enlightenment impulse to abstraction. But it is precisely in its excess that it exists as a limit-­experience for both the libertine and the writer; that which experience is drawn to but cannot grasp as the extremes of what can(not) be experienced, ‘everything’ is the vector, the reason, that opens the space of excess and keeps it open but also leaves it as a receding exteriority and the concrete emptiness of its remains: ‘Before the Unique, all beings are equal in nullity, and the Unique, in reducing them to nothing [rien], only makes this nothingness [néant] manifest’ [LS: 33/25]. Although Horkheimer’s reading is earlier, and Lacan’s is more well-­known, Blanchot was the first to recognize the implications of the fact that Sade’s thought resembles Kant’s in its thoroughness and abstraction, for both were concerned with the place and status of reason in the world. While Kant wanted to find the limits of thought by determining the necessary and universal conditions for its possibility (so that we can ascertain what we can know, what we should do, and what we may hope), for Sade the relation of the self to the world is investigated in terms of its lack of limits, in which reason finds that it has no transcendental ground. As such, Sade is investigating the limits of experience in terms of what their lack means for understanding what we can know, do, and hope, and thus what we are.6 Thus the Kantian question of anthropology towards which critique is oriented becomes a question of the monstrousness of the human, in the precise sense of the human finding itself in the violation of natural and social laws, the juridico-­biological monster, as Foucault called it.7 Sade’s writings thereby converge on the most important political problem of the time, for in late 1792 the National Convention was debating the issue of how to execute Louis XVI legally, and the resolution came by understanding the king’s position outside the law in terms of the tyranny of sovereignty. Rather than seeing the king’s sovereign status as indicating that he was above or beyond the law, this position was reinterpreted

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to the effect that he was outside the law (hors-­la-loi), which then made him a criminal by definition: simply by virtue of being king he was guilty and thus should be executed. This status was given greater natural-­historical complexity in the contemporary discourse on the monster, the one whose existence outside the law is a violation of nature as much as society, like the wolf, and so carries the obligation that it should be destroyed. This notion explicates the relation of libertine thinking to its practice, insofar as the monster is an appearance of nature that is yet beyond and against nature. But if nature is that which gives rise to its own transgression, then its law is that of breaching, what is natural is excess, which means that Sade can see the monster as that which is most natural, that towards which the question of the human must necessarily tend. The singularity of this violation of the natural order is also found in the work itself, for by introducing an unavoidable arousal, horror, and boredom into the text the conventional contract of reading is broken, rendering the text illegible, indicating how the materiality of lawlessness in libertinism converges on the formlessness of the work of literature, insofar as they share an indifference to the materialization of sense. When literature changes into something illegible it is no longer literature, but it is not quite anything else, as with the criminal and the libertine it has found a place outside its own law, which leaves it anomalous, monstrous, a factical expression of its own unique ‘meaning’. In this rupture Blanchot finds evidence of the strange limitlessness, the exteriority, that literature leads into when it is exposed to its own lawlessness, which is reflected in Clairwil’s dream of a crime whose endlessness leads to a general or formal disorder: ‘I would like,’ said Clairwil, ‘to find a crime whose action would have a perpetual effect, even when I am no longer doing it, in such a way that there will not be a single instant of my life when, even while sleeping, I am not the cause of a particular disorder, and that this disorder should extend to the point where it brings about a general corruption, or a disturbance so formal, that even beyond my life the effect would continue to extend itself . . .’ ‘I know of little else, my dear,’ I answered, ‘for the fulfilment of your ideas than what could be called moral murder, which is arrived at by means of counsel, writing, or action’. HJ: 650/525

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As previously mentioned, Blanchot silently abbreviates this passage to omit the final reference to counsel and action, thereby emphasizing the ‘very appropriate [propre]’ relation between writing and crime as acts without end (whereas for Sade the relation between writing, action, and counsel is integral to his understanding of corruption as a manifold sensible disruption) [LS: 35/27].8 This emphasis is the corollary of his understanding of how the negativity of writing as experience and practice removes the writer from the world, negating their position in time and space. A displacement he likens to that of the Revolution itself in its interstitial situation, for ‘if Sade could recognize himself in the Revolution, it was only to the degree that, in passing from one set of laws to another, it represented for some time the possibility of a regime without law’, an interval or l’entre-­dire, when lawful speaking is suspended as it is pushed to its limits by speaking without end [LS: 24/15; EI: 329/221]. In this way, the libertines in Sade’s narratives reflect the situation of the writer by way of their relentless self-­examination as much as by their indifference to the abstract parade of victims, which brings them to an awareness of their freedom as a power of endless negation: the centre of the Sadean world is the demand of sovereignty to affirm itself through an enormous negation. This negation, which is carried out on a massive scale, which no individual instance can satisfy, is essentially destined to surpass the plane of human existence. Although the Sadean man imposes himself on others through his power of destroying them, if he gives the impression of never being their tributary, even through the necessity in which he annihilates them, if he seems forever capable of doing without them, it is because he has placed himself on a level where he no longer has anything in common with them, and because he has placed himself once and for all on this plane to make the scope of his destructive project into something that eternally surpasses men and their puny existence. In other words, insofar as the Sadean man appears surprisingly free in relation to his victims, upon whom however his pleasures depend, it is because the violence towards them is directed at something other than them, it goes truly beyond them and only acts to verify frenetically, infinitely, with each individual case, the general act of destruction through which he reduces god and the world to nothing. LS: 34/26

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The figure of god is privileged in Sade’s writings not because of a repressed religiosity but because it is a figure of absolute negativity, since any encounter with god involves a self-­negation that is absolute. In the idea of god humanity has created a notion in relation to whose infinity it can only negate itself, and in the age in which this idea is dethroned its negativity is not lost, since it remains the property of thought, of its idea, but is displaced into a secular infinite, into space and materiality as endless expanse and profusion. This in turn becomes transformed as Sade seeks to uncover the spirit of negation as such, as a force of destruction that knows no limits and becomes identified with nature. So, for all his thoroughness and deliberation, there is no possibility of assimilating his ideas to a greater system of thought, his thought is similar to Kant’s in its spirit but not in its structure; there is no architectonic in Sade as he is only concerned with pursuing the thought of negation, which necessarily affects the possibility of its progress or accumulation. But, as Blanchot shows, the struggle against nature is of a different kind to that against god for in the struggle against nature it is the question of the whole that is at stake, since if destruction and negation are part of nature, then the destruction of nature does not surpass it unless it is able to conceive of itself as a destruction of the whole, which is a different order of destruction. Sade is thus one of the first to realize the significance of a negation that is not partial but is a negation of the whole, an absolute negation, a thought of a different kind in that it announces itself all at once, without qualification [LS: 41/33]. It is the experience (without experience) of the disaster, as Blanchot will later write, or what Bataille calls sovereignty. It is precisely this negativity that makes the experience of reading Sade so compelling and frustrating, as one position after another is negated in a furious rejection that leaves the aims of the narrative contradictory and elusive. Blanchot spells out this sequence as Sade moves through a series of reversals whereby humanity is annihilated through the power of behaving like gods, god is annihilated through the power of nature, and nature itself is annihilated through the sovereign power of an energy that is as destructive as it is affirmative, an energy that can turn against itself at any moment unless a mode of restraint can be found through apathy or indifference [LS: 44–45/37]. Thus, in much the same way that matter is converted into sheer quantity, number

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thus appearing as a kind of abstract materiality, the pathology of Sade’s narratives, which seek to develop a study of the passions, of suffering in its broadest sense, leads to apathy as an experience of non-­experience. It is this paradoxical non-­experience that is conveyed in Bataille’s notion of sovereignty, which is an experience of excess as such, of which we can have no knowledge as its experience inevitably reduces it to the terms of its experience. But in literature, through its attempted abstraction of materiality, this non-­experience is conveyed as that which evades or resists comprehension, as exteriority. This model of successive annihilations is borrowed from Klossowski’s reading, which explicitly describes itself as an ‘Esquisse du système de Sade’, and follows his desire to render Sade’s thought as a religious exercise in which apathy arises as the final stage of a meditative practice through which the self can experience its own dissolution, as well as that of the other, through a mutual annihilation akin to that of reaching nirvana [SMP: 125/90; 136/97– 98]. Thus, for Klossowski, this move from god to nature to apathy involves a dialectical overcoming of the limits of thought, but Blanchot rejects this conclusion by finding in the negativity of Sade’s thought an avoidance of any resolution of its antagonisms, insofar as it cannot negate itself. As a result, although he keeps to the sequential model of negations, Blanchot sees the place of nature being ever further destabilized until the force of negativity gives rise to a thought of ambivalence as such, in the form of energy. For energy is an empirico-­transcendental power that is its own law and actualization, its condition and excess, and so both the possibility and impossibility of itself: Sade, having discovered that in man negation was power [puissance], claimed to found the future of man on negation pushed to its limit. To reach this he came up with a principle, borrowed from the vocabulary of his time, which, by its ambiguity, represents a very ingenious choice. The principle is energy. Energy is, in fact, a very equivocal notion. It is at once reserve and expenditure [dépense] of forces, affirmation that only completes itself [s’accomplit] through negation, power that is destruction. Moreover, it is fact and law, data and value. LS: 42/34–35

In pushing themselves to ever greater excesses, the libertines (and literature) arrive at the point of realizing this ambivalence in the desire for total

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destruction and creation, there being no material distinction between them when the only aim is to be excessive. Expenditure does away with the need for any support and loses itself in a world of entire transformation, complete ongoing upheaval, which can only be pursued by a thought that, given its materialism, is not just a negation but a replacement of the world, its fantasy and obliteration as literature: ‘this thought is the work of madness and it had as a mould a depravity before which the world shrank [s’est derobé]. Additionally, it presents itself as the theory of this penchant, it is its tracing [décalque], it claims to transpose the most repugnant anomaly into a complete worldview. For the first time, philosophy conceived itself in broad daylight as the product of illness’ [LS: 47/40]. (This idea of the material energy of pathology will be recapitulated in Klossowski’s later readings of Nietzsche.9) However, it should be noted that this sequence of annihilations imposes a teleological model on Sade’s texts that, in themselves, do not follow any simple escalation. Instead, nature is constantly moving through differing positions of negation and affirmation that do not lead or settle into any final situation. As such, the displacement of nature by energy, which in turn yields to apathy, should not be viewed as the ideal course of the libertine’s existence. Rather, it remains its immanent condition, which is alluded to structurally in the way that the text sustains itself by way of reflected and deferred excesses that foster the imagination. Consequently, the sovereignty of experience is found through the material alienation of thought in literature, which is the discovery that will lead Klossowski away from his earlier religious interpretation.10 For within literature there is a repetition that does not signify but simply persists, an abstract material reiteration that follows the thought of nature as endless transmutation, and disrupts the sublation of antagonism into a self-­realization of spirit. Forms (whether literary or natural) appear and are destroyed and then recreated, but in doing so apathy takes on the jouissance of perversity as the sheer enjoyment of what is, regardless of its morality, which is an experience that subsists entirely in its endless recreation, not in any transcendental ground but in its contingency. And the order of this contingency is ambivalent: nature generates forms, which in existing become obstacles to further creation, and so must be destroyed, but there is no complete destruction, only recreation;

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equally, individuals arise as affronts to nature, and so must condemn it to further their own existence, but in doing so they find that this destructive attitude follows nature, since in destruction nature affirms itself. Perversity becomes the closest replication of this propulsive self-­antagonism; it is, in Klossowski’s words, the contingent and momentary self-­awareness (prise de conscience) of this movement, which finds its most distinctive form in sodomy in its biological uselessness and sexual indifference as an eternal return of the same, the endless repetition of acts of incomplete destruction [SMP: 127/91; 32/24].11 In thus persistently negotiating the limits of experience Klossowski discovers how the exteriority of writing makes itself felt despite the limitations of literature, for while this exteriority evades or resists commentary, what is found in the excess of Sade’s writings is that ‘this outside comes to interpret itself as it produces itself [se commenter comme se produisant] inside thought’ [SMP: 53/42]. Such a point provides a way of understanding what is perhaps the most perplexing sentence in Blanchot’s reading of Sade, which is also its final sentence, where he states that the Sadian man has gone further than the normal man in understanding the truth and logic of his situation and has found a deeper intelligence ‘to the point of being able to help the normal man understand himself, by helping him modify the conditions of all understanding’ [LS: 49/41]. Insofar as Blanchot refers to the conditions of all understanding he must mean its transcendental conditions (the a priori concepts of space and time, and the categories of the understanding), and so their modification would appear to imply the rearrangement consequent upon submitting these a priori conditions to the endless force of negativity. Hence, Sade’s works would involve the unfounding of thought as it is removed from the conceptual purity and stability of the transcendental and thrust into a world of ambivalence and negation. But through this negation self and world are stripped of their terms and relation and exposed to exteriority as a limitless whole. As Sade has shown, this is not simply an imaginary whole but a sensual, material expanse that is ever-­changing and, insofar as it is a whole, it is as abstract as it is material, and forms its own inhuman thought in the work of literature as the ongoing pathological tracing of the world. What was a priori is no longer unconditional but intimately involved in the transformations of the material, which is now to

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be understood through its natural-­historical turmoil. Thus the modification of the conditions of understanding occurs through a combined abstraction of materiality and a materialization of thought to the unlimited. Whether this discovery helps normal man to understand himself is another question, but it follows from Sade’s didactic interests and his desire to bring about actual changes to thought and behaviour through his writings. Such is Sade’s ‘reason’, as Blanchot calls it, a reason that derives from a text that is not simply a form of literature. The strength of this point casts light on an equally strong remark that Blanchot makes at the end of his next essay, which appeared the month after his reading of Sade, where Sade is described as ‘the writer par excellence’. This formulation would seem to derive exactly from what has been discussed in the Sade essay, as it comes from the fact that Sade ‘combines all the writer’s contradictions’ in terms of the relation of his works to society and to history, the role they take in actualizing their own place in the world, and also their status given their ambivalent relation between materiality and ideality [PF: 311/321]. The unique significance of Sade’s thought consists in the fact that his works initiate a movement from literature to material consciousness, and it is this that enables him to be a writer par excellence alongside the modification of the conditions of understanding that his writings entail. The essay on Sade thus uncovers a materialist critique of reason that leads to an extreme reconfiguration of the relation of self and world, which in turn leads to the more extended and general considerations in Blanchot’s next article, ‘La littérature and le droit à la mort’. A consideration of the context will enhance this reading, since ‘A la rencontre de Sade’ appeared in Les Temps modernes shortly after Sartre’s essays on literature and Merleau-Ponty’s essays on Stalinism that would be published in Humanisme et terreur. These points are important as they remind us of the contemporary debate between communism and existentialism that was then at its most virulent, for while Sartre’s essays on literature sought to develop a model of the writer as a committed intellectual, they arose from his critique of Marxism and the promotion of existentialism as humanism that followed the negative responses to L’Être et le néant by French communists. In doing so Sartre wanted to make his own thought into the philosophy he felt communism

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lacked by emphasizing the subjectivity that bound historical action to humanism. Equally, Merleau-Ponty’s critiques of Stalinism sought to re-­ evaluate the nature and possibility of revolutionary violence from the position of the proletariat, and thereby rescue a sense of revolutionary activity that would not necessarily lead to totalitarianism. By publishing his article on Sade in the forum of these debates Blanchot might be seen to be supporting a notion of the writer as an engaged intellectual realizing themselves in a moment of revolutionary violence, except that in doing so he suspends the possibility of both ends of this proposal by indicating that the nature of activity associated with the work of the writer does not cohere with any humanism and that the encounter with revolutionary violence cannot be secured from its most devastating conclusions. That this analysis occurs after the lawlessness, strikes, and purges that followed the Liberation, which enacted their own form of intellectual terror, only emphasizes this point, and conversely shows how the impact of Sade’s works lies in the extent to which he goes beyond the merely empirical disturbance of thought (of understanding or judgement) to a profound destabilization of its foundations (as rational). Moreover, it indicates how the partisan logic of the post-­war years, in which one was defined according to what one opposed (anti-American, anti-Catholic, anti-­communist, etc.) and that motivated the purges and disputes that Les Temps modernes pursued, becomes disrupted in Sade’s vision of diabolical evil that recognizes no positions and upholds opposition as such, a persistent but ambiguous indifference that came to affect what Blanchot would understand as the neutral intransigence of literature.

II A year before ‘A la rencontre de Sade’, a shorter essay entitled ‘Quelques remarques sur Sade’ had appeared in Critique, and although it is not as developed as the later piece it contains some differing points of emphasis that help explicate the reason that would become Blanchot’s concern. Principally, his interest here is in demonstrating the contradictory nature of Sade’s thought, a contradiction that is active and deliberate:

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The world of Sade is constituted by the entanglement of two systems: in one, beings are equal, everyone counts equally. But in the other, which is in action in all the novels, not only are individuals not equal, but inequality is such that no relations, or reciprocity, is possible between them. There is not even inequality, there is, on one side, the existence, power, and fullness of being and of the means of being, and on the other, nothing, a simple possibility of being reduced to nothing, a destitution to which the worst torture and the basest degradations are still honourable. QRS: 244

Complete perversion renders victimhood indiscriminate as gender, age, and beauty no longer have any significance. Indeed, for the libertines nothing counts, nothing exists, they are always alone as the others are never other, they are simply nothing. Hence, their world has been emptied of every presence, the thousands of victims do not have any reality, they are less than things or shadows, and are ‘more like the infinitely substitutable signs of an immense erotic equation, more like beings of pure reason than living creatures upon whom an unjust violence is exercised’ [QRS: 245–46]. This is a paradox of practical concern, for how can the libertines experience pleasure when nothing exists? It is not enough, as Blanchot points out, to try to defuse this paradox by claiming that the libertines have ‘sadistic’ pleasures, as it is said, in that they achieve satisfaction through destruction, since before this can take place relation itself has been negated. This act of universal annihilation emerges in the imperative of desire in Sade’s works, its impatience, which cannot wait or endure but bursts and decomposes in endless fury, such that in their desires the libertines find that desire itself is already dead and yet also never satisfied, hence the demand to repeat and to extend, to draw out that which by necessity explodes. Desire occurs (or voids itself) through the hollow passages and episodes that constitute the text, the concealed and empty spaces in which time no longer exists, oases, in Blanchot’s words, where there are no obstacles or delays but only the careful preparation of the most exact and immediate consummation. This obsessive methodology is the counterpoint to impatience since as desire is unpredictable and uncontrollable everything must be foreseen and prefigured. Sade is thus committed to developing an absolute reason and an

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integral analysis, an Encyclopaedia of Sodom in which ‘the general forms of knowledge are only there to submit to the singularity of the most aberrant passions’ [QRS: 247]. As is clear he has come up against the same problem that occupied Hegel, and in noting this Blanchot shows how Sade has moved from beings of pure reason to the system of absolute reason. It is thus that Sade’s thought arrives at a situation in which the Unique has no possessions and cannot be possessed, for in a world without relations or reciprocity there is a contradictory liberty that implies both complete equality and inequality. The law is only a prohibition against anyone refusing themselves to anyone else, while liberty involves nothing but the principle that one cannot be owned by anything but one’s own desires. This is a profound perversion of Enlightenment thought as it disavows the relation between knowledge and possession, and liberty and responsibility. As Blanchot concludes, the strangest part of this reasoning is that it presents itself in a universal form without any qualms about its contradictions, for in a world without relations or beings everything has already been consumed in a universal destruction that derives from the infinite solitude of the individual. A solitude that recalls the long imprisonment that marked Sade’s life, and from which he may have been drawn to imagine the solitude of the universe, but that is more importantly the solitude of the work, since ‘this prison does not trouble him, it is his work, it is the measure of the world’ [QRS: 249]. It is from this perspective that Sade will come to view the world as it is convulsed by the Revolution, in which death is ever-­present and that, despite its Enlightenment potential, leads not to liberty and rationality but to madness and treachery. When Blanchot comes back to Sade in ‘La littérature and le droit à la mort’ it is to place his thoughts in the context of Hegel’s thinking of the Revolution as it relates to contemporary problems of intellectual action. In this respect, it would be easy to see Sade’s libertines in the position of the master in Hegel’s dialectic of mastery and slavery, since they luxuriate in the fact of an other’s labour and destruction, but the libertine is also the one who daily experiences the reality of death and the subversion of all values as they attempt to pursue their desire for the absolute. Such a conflation occurs in the figure of the revolutionary, as described by Blanchot as a further shape of consciousness, which arises out of the inability to absorb death into any cycle of work or

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assimilated labour. Death pervades the Revolution as a negativity beyond use that can only be understood in terms of its excessive persistence, which is what the actions of the revolutionary or the writer seek to grasp as the void that is the very work (travail) of freedom [PF: 310/319].12 At the beginning of Les Cent Vingt Journées the attendees are told that they should consider themselves as already dead, and as such they find the possibility to go through with what follows. And for the writer it is the same, the existence of language is constituted by its inescapable negativity, which is manifested through its constant upheavals of sense, its pervasive empirico-­transcendental ambivalence over its nature and status, and it is to this that the writer is beholden. Consequently, writers, like revolutionaries, seem to act, ‘not like people living among living people, but like beings deprived of being, universal thoughts, pure abstractions judging and deciding, beyond history, in the name of all of history’. And it is because death and negativity are meaningless that they are pursued so obsessively, such that they become ‘the greatest passion and the ultimate platitude’ [PF: 310–11/320–21]. As Kant and Hegel understood, there was something very unsettling about the French Revolution, a naked extremity in which thought contemplated its truth, a moment of negativity that constitutes its possibility and its impossibility. Hegel’s critique of enlightenment, by which he means that of the French lumières rather than the German Aufklärer, bears directly on the situation of Sade, and also carries a tacit critique of Kant in its analysis of the inevitable movement from reason to Terror. With the progressive discrediting of religion in the eighteenth century, enlightenment, for Hegel, assumes a dualistic response that tends towards the idealism of pure deism or a crude materialism. However, as he goes on to explicate, both contain an undisclosed theological element that prevents them from developing into truly enlightened thought and instead leaves them bound to an endless oscillation from one end of this dualism to the other, with ever-­increasing blindness and severity. In both forms the suppressed religious yearning for transcendence reasserts itself as a thought of the first cause, or of primal matter, but both are simply the thought of a pure concept without predication, which ends up converging on the form of the other side. For while the pure thought of absolute essence becomes the negative of self-­consciousness and thus becomes an external being, on the other side pure matter becomes, in its abstraction from the determinate

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qualities of particular things, the pure essence of thought as a sheer unconditioned absolute. Neither form is able to recognize the relation between these two tendencies, which would allow them to be harmonized, because neither is aware of itself and so fails to grasp the absence that arises in the place of any theological grounding, and that would enable thought to realize itself as thought thinking itself. Yet each side bears an awareness of this absence as that which eludes comprehension, which can thereby move from being an emptiness external to thought to one that is internal to it and which, as Hegel concludes, if it were recognized as such, would enable the misfortune of this absence to become its fortune, as is found in the transition from the endless torments of Justine’s evacuated theodicy to the sheer negativity of Juliette’s freedom [PG: 312–13/351–52]. But, as he wrote on the assumption of revolutionary freedom in the Terror, ‘no positive work or deed can thus be produced by universal freedom; there remains for it only the negative act; it is only the fury of disappearance [Verschwindens]’ [PG: 319/359]. As a result, the dialectical resolution of thought and matter in enlightened thought that Hegel describes is displaced in Sade’s writings by the endlessness of desire, which leads to the turmoil of a thought without subjectivity and a matter without objectivity. Such turmoil emerges as contagion or treachery, which activate lateral vectors across the state, as well as the system of thought, since they do not recognize the hierarchy or accumulation of sense, only its eccentricity or extravagance, and so if there is a whole that emerges from this turmoil it does so only to the degree that it submits to ‘the singularity of the most aberrant passions’, as Blanchot made clear. While the persistent presence of religion in Sade’s works may suggest an undisclosed relation to theology, it is only because it is the constant spur for his critique, part of the same ideology as the law, the family, or the state, against which his thought motivates itself in order to escape its dependency. (It is worth noting that while Les Cent Vingt Journées is based around the activities of four libertines who are quintessential figures of the establishment – a judge, a banker, a duke, and a bishop – by the time of Juliette, that is, after the Revolution, figures of such authority become a persistent target of criticism for their residual beliefs in conventional power, from Saint-Fond, to Braschi, to Ferdinand.) There is thus no disavowed yearning for transcendence still present in Sade, only its critique. Equally, his ideas of materiality cannot be

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reduced to the dull weaving (dumpfe Weben) of matter within itself that Hegel (and Marx) sees in French materialism, because he pursues an understanding of materiality torn by open-­ended convulsions, which is not only expressed through its endless destruction and transmutation but also through the toxic, contagious quality of the works themselves as prohibited literature. The stimulation and revulsion that Sade’s works inspire is direct evidence of their affective materiality, which is why they are not works of literature like any other. Literature may be an indeterminate form of materiality but it does not lack force or substance, as the prohibitions on Sade’s writings demonstrate. Nevertheless, the manner in which the libertines see themselves as actualizing the universal will of nature before which individuals and objects become mere things to be used and enjoyed, and ultimately destroyed, accords with Hegel’s description of how the rational insight of enlightenment is transformed into an absolute freedom that can only realize itself in negation and death. What becomes intriguing is why this does not manifest itself in Sade’s thought in terms of revolution, for although his libertines espouse their beliefs as aspects of the will of nature there is no attempt to coordinate or organize this activity into a totality. His libertines persist in operating as criminals rather than revolutionaries; they desire to remain clandestine elements within the body politic instead of seeking to take control themselves. Unlike the founding myths elaborated by Frazer and Freud, violence is not seen as establishing the basis of society, instead, and this is the perversity of Sade’s version of the dialectic, his desire is to perpetuate the corruption of the system as its own most natural order. After all, corruption is just a situation in which the lack of systematic control leads to a breakdown in integrity, which in turn generates new forms, the interesting point being Sade’s insistence that this situation is generalized, since ‘corruption is only dangerous because it is not universal’.13 Such a profound disruption to the rule of law leaves society without any means, either internal or external, by which to administer itself, and without such transcendental grounding it will be simply unruly, riven by perpetual local disturbances that never stabilize or accumulate. And the form in which this generalized corruption can be pursued (that is, modelled, understood, and generated) is, as noted above in terms of its material force, literature, and, as Sade makes clear, his aim is to pursue this idea practically ‘like those perverse

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writers whose corruption is so dangerous, so active, that their only aim is, by having their appalling doctrines printed, to extend the sum of their crimes beyond their life; they can commit no more, but their accursed writings will have them committed’ [JMV: 272/145].14 In this sense, corruption signifies nothing more than the autonomy and materiality of desire, in which an evasive contingency is the only form of unity, and equality only exists as the equal distribution of violence. In this form the republic, as Sade concludes, exists in a permanent state of insurrection that is also a ‘perpetual immoral agitation’.15 In ‘La littérature and le droit à la mort’ Blanchot reads the section on absolute freedom and terror in the Phänomenologie through the lens of Sade’s writings, but without drawing out the materialist basis of his disruption or corruption of the dialectic of reason and history. ‘A la rencontre de Sade’, however, goes a long way towards explicating the brief comments on Sade in this essay and how and why he comes to bridge its two panels, the empirical and the transcendental. But although Blanchot shows that the contradictions of freedom and terror are united in the figure of the writer, and to an exemplary degree in Sade, and that language bears an undecidable ambiguity of sense, which is the voice of writing, this is not to say that Sade’s works are to be understood simply as writing for these tensions are underpinned by their erotic and material ambivalence. Even though elements of this materialist reading arise in the Sade essay, they are subordinated to the need to address Sade’s reason, which means that the impact of realizing that Sade’s works are not just literature, and the effects that this discovery has on the conditions of understanding, are not pursued to show that this ambiguity not only constitutes literature and its relation to the world that it negates and replaces but that it is also the literal objectivity of the world, its commercial and libidinal excess as material forms of endless contingency (for which Le Très-Haut instead provides some level of examination). For in Sade’s writings the excess of language traverses materiality just as much as the reverse, as Juliette had emphatically stated, ‘in strong souls the torch of the passions ignites a Minerva at the same time as a Venus’, and it is by way of this excess that nature continually transforms itself [HJ: 1025/934]. And, in the same way, this implies that Sade’s writings are not there just to be read; rather they provoke the reader not only into understanding but also into conveying this corruption.

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Once you have read the Marquis de Sade and have recovered from the dazzling effect [éblouissement], you begin to wonder if it could not all be true, if everything that he teaches is not the truth – and this because you cannot resist the hypothesis that he makes you dream of a boundless power and of magnificent jouissances. Gustave Flaubert, 1840 Kant discusses the need for orientation in thinking by referring to the phenomenology of the act of orientation, which involves a coordination between the body and the position of the sun or the stars that makes it possible to find one’s place and direction in the world [RBR: 4–5]. Abstract conceptualization takes place on the basis of this concrete grounding of thinking, which marks the difference between it and the speculative thinking of the Schwärmer (which detaches itself from the concrete). Religious ideas then occur by analogy with this celestial-­bodily coordination, so that the notion of god becomes the necessary belief that is generated to provide the cause and ground for what exists, insofar as reason needs such a unity and order to be able to think. The idea of god is thus abstract but not speculative because it remains tied to its concrete coordinates (the forms of experience) for its conceptualization and in doing so it provides the fundamental ground of all orientation. Such a thought raises the question of the form and possibility of orientation in the secular world, a world that is, as far as Sade or Blanchot is concerned, disastrous in its lack of celestial order and unity. For how can such thinking avoid fanciful speculation, or sheer disorientation? The stars can of course be interpreted differently, they can be understood scientifically rather than theologically, but doing so relies on the same rational faith

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(Vernunftglaubens), as Kant termed it, as it is grounded in the idea of an inherent order and unity to the universe, an idea that fundamentally remains a belief. It is also possible to view the constellations as without any order but this would seem to be psychotic, whereas Blanchot in particular is concerned with a dis-astrous night, one without the possibility of guidance as its stars are only signs of errancy or misfortune, accidents, what Hölderlin called fatelessness or dysmoron, a lack of measure.1 In its emptiness, this other kind of night offers no hope of interpretive order, but seems to signify the specific situation of literature in modernity rather than a general episteme, and as such indicates the inherent anarchy of literature as that which is without order. Literature remains linked to the situation of the writer (or reader) but otherwise lacks the corresponding horizon that would co-ordinate its thinking. As a result, the thinking of literature is exposed to a space that is inordinate, without restraining cause or unity, reason or order. It is thus that literary conventions are developed to curtail this excess, which would otherwise unsettle thought by exposing it to a relation that is endlessly eccentric as it is unable to secure its limits. Blanchot’s insight was to realize how little effect these conventions have, as the anarchy of literary space remains inherent in all writing and is only suppressed by virtue of a voluntary and widespread denial. Such denial becomes more difficult whenever writing comes to consider itself, when thinking attempts to bring writing to a degree of reflexivity, which reveals its mise en abyme as the emptiness of infinite space that so terrified Pascal, and that Kant described as the sublime of solitude by way of Carazan’s dream. It is worth noting the specifics of Kant’s description, as he says that deep solitude is sublime in a terrifying way: ‘For this reason extensive wastes, such as the immense deserts of Schamo in Tartary, have always given us occasion to people them with fearsome shades, goblins, and ghosts.’2 It is the lack of human company that causes these wastes to be terrifying and sublime, as he points out in the third Kritik, for this implies the lack of any sense of social orientation and thus an expanse whose featurelessness inspires both dread and wonder. As the later text makes clear, solitude is sublime only if it arises out of the lack of any need for society, rather than a flight from it, as the former indicates a superiority over sensible interests [CPJ: §29, 157].3 But it is the

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sense in which this infinite expanse resembles the space of literature that indicates how Sade has both endured and succumbed to its terrifying disorientation, for on the one hand it is a space that he has peopled with ghosts, ogres, and ghouls, and on the other hand these shades have themselves merged into the endless wastes of a blank infinity. The manner in which reason is first released from celestial guidance and then pushed to the extremes of an empty space provides the schema for Sade’s thought: ‘I am alone here, I am at the end of the world, removed from everyone’s eyes, and without any means for any creature to come near me; no more restraints, no more barriers’ [CVJ: 193/191]. Eighteen years before his essay on orientation in thinking, Kant had attempted to draw out the basis for the differentiation of regions in space, and had placed the body at the heart of this transcendental-­empirical process insofar as the body naturally carries a differentiation between front and back, up and down, and left and right, which is then made use of in the determination of other directions and objects.4 The body is that from which space is determined into regions, and this model is articulated into more abstract considerations in the later article on the thinking of speculative ideas. As Sade’s works proceed by way of an emphatic lack of bodily differentiation, space at its most local and empirical becomes as disoriented as it is at its extremes. Such would seem to be the corollary of the desubjectification of desire in which there is no point from which or to which it orients itself, it simply courses through materiality as a force of spatial deformity. This would be a source of madness for any individual involved in its deformation, but as this occurs through literature it draws out the particular fragmentation of sense that occurs alongside its general delimitation. Indeed, it would appear that the former converges on the latter, as the unsettling emptiness and ambiguity that inserts itself into the attempt to determine meaning at a local level merges with the greater and expanding doubt that starts to affect the broader parameters of sense. The polymorphous perversity of Sadean sexuality is thus at the basis of his materialist critique of reason, and any understanding of the body (of touch, sensibility, affect, carnality, etc.) that may arise within contemporary thought will be foreshortened if it does not take account of the extremes of deformation explored by the Sadean body.

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I In discussing Sade, I have avoided using the term pornography as the current connotations of the word are too strong and do not reflect the atmosphere or approach of his works. While the term appears to have been introduced by Rétif de la Bretonne in his 1769 work Le Pornographe, which proposed that prostitution should be regulated in order to make best use of its sanitary and philanthropic potential, such a model, with which Sade would have been very familiar, is worlds apart from his own thought and writing. Far from this civic-­ minded utilitarianism, sex in Sade’s works is not limited to a socially acceptable caste of workers but is rather the mode by which characters of all types can achieve freedom and happiness. And even though it becomes associated with violence and abuse, sexuality is essential to Sade’s understanding of the text as that which directly affects the reader by bringing about a sensual response. Consequently, his works can better be described as erotic in the broadest sense of discussing and provoking a sense of physical arousal, which leads to their most powerful and disturbing quality, their inability to remain mere texts, which, moreover, engage the reader not just physically but also cognitively through the discourses that interpolate the sexual episodes. Such an approach would resemble the Platonic dialogues were it not for the material and criminal excesses to which Sade pushes his thought and which in turn becomes the most difficult aspect of his writings; the fact that in reading them we are engaged in a world of seemingly endless cruelty. This is not an experience that can be calmly assimilated to a form of vicarious edification as we do not learn about the value of virtue by being exposed to the brutality of Sade’s writings; indeed, there is nothing we can draw from them as their lesson. Instead, reading Sade simply plunges the reader into an experience of evil without end, a diabolical (teuflisch) evil in Kant’s terms in that it is evil for its own sake, without any purpose or content, and yet one that is pursued with all the rigour and seriousness of a moral duty. Although such evil is radical, as it is rooted in rationality, it does not have the formlessness of mere radical evil or wickedness, as diabolical evil also has the formal quality of being a principle and hence is not just ineradicable but actively pursues its own demands. As Kant explains, ‘the wickedness [Bösartigkeit] of human nature is therefore not to be called

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malice [Bosheit] – if one takes this word in the strict meaning, namely as an attitude (a subjective principle of maxims) of admitting evil as evil as an incentive into one’s maxims (for this is diabolical)’ [RBR: 60]. Thus the experience of reading Sade is as transcendental as it is empirical insofar as the text gives on to its own conditions as the endlessness of a reason perverted without reason. This is the space of literature as excess and transgression, where the only reason or order is that of lawlessness. And it is from this experience that the reader recoils, as much as from the individual acts of torture, since it is the sense of the text as unbridled and relentless that provokes the greatest horror: it knows no bounds and will not stop; it will just go on with one act of violence after another. Such a phenomenon, the literary exposure of the limitlessness of thought, does not help us to understand the Terror or Auschwitz or any of the other periods of extreme violence that have occurred up to the present day, except to say that there is no hope that these will ever be eliminated. What Sade’s writings show is that such evil is inherent to reason and can be experienced through writing, insofar as writing exposes this extreme possibility of lawlessness, something no other writer has taken as far. This is not simply to state that in literature we are able to experience that which exceeds the bounds of reason as literature exists in a world apart, for on the one hand the erotic quality of his writing means that it cannot be safely consigned to a literary experience, but on the other hand reading uncovers the fact that this excess harbours its own materiality and reason, albeit one far removed from any human sphere. This is the result of Sade’s materialism, which is not just secular and atheist, but a carefully thought through exposition of nature as endless generation and destruction. Sade’s writings bear the form and sense of this materiality in their literal excess. Language does not become sheer meaninglessness when it arises outside the conceptualization of thought but rather appears as a proliferation of contingency, which is strictly neutral in regards to thought and exposes it to extremity as such, as the best or the worst. What Sade seems to have uncovered is a way to experience this effect within the space of literature, and not just on a narrative level but also through its materiality as a force of exteriorization without aim or value. The problem with diabolical evil for Kant lies not just in its lack of purpose but also in its perversion of the form of reason, for as it lacks any content it

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can assert itself as an entirely formal demand, as evil for its own sake, which is why he dismisses the very possibility of formal evil, since ‘a reason exonerated from the moral law, an evil reason [boshafte Vernunft] as it were (an absolutely evil will [böser Wille]), contains too much because opposition to the law would itself thereby be elevated to an incentive (for without any incentive the power of choice [Willkür] cannot be determined), and so the subject would be made a diabolical being’ [RBR: 58]. The form of diabolical evil is empty, like that of the categorical imperative, as it does not indicate the content of its opposition, it simply opposes and through this demand exposes its radical perversion of the imperative as that which can always harbour such evil.5 It is thus that the life of the libertine, as that which must always go further and knows no law other than its own, takes on the force and rigour of a duty. And this rationale also takes place in the writing itself, not just through the violent actions of the narrative but through the demands of the sequences to go on by going back, to persistently restart and restate their own position and negation, to proceed through their own destruction, following the criminal maxim of persistent breaching, which is how Sade makes its insidious force apparent to the reader. Kant believes such diabolical evil to be impossible not only because it is so profoundly excessive, but also because any criminal would bear some sense of guilt as they could not breach the law without knowing that they were doing so, which would imply an awareness of the fault that they then must assume as a result. But the libertines have no sense of guilt or remorse (the conscience, Juliette explains, ‘has the distinction over the other affects of the soul of withering away the more that one adds to it [de s’anéantir en raison de ce qu’on l’accroît]’ [HJ: 754/641]) for, although their excessive justifications might bear witness against this, their dialectical negation of both the law and the basis of the law means that they can embrace lawlessness and yet also claim that their actions are in no way illegal. Instead of finding the lawful guilt within every criminal act, as Kant would insist, the libertines discover the radical criminality of the law, its essential groundlessness. As the following passage makes clear, the Sadean libertine develops a form of transgression that can be both natural and free, and thus forms a principle that is derived from the criminality of nature while also being formally evil:

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Any transgression of the law can and must be explained only as arising from a maxim of the criminal (to make such a crime his rule); for if we were to derive it from a sensible impulse, he would not be committing it as a free being and it could not be imputed to him. But how it is possible for the subject to form such a maxim contrary to the clear prohibition of lawgiving reason absolutely cannot be explained, since only what happens in accordance with the mechanism of nature is capable of being explained. Now the criminal can commit his misdeed either on a maxim he has taken as an objective rule (as holding universally) or only as an exception to the rule (exempting himself from it occasionally). In the latter case he only deviates from the law (though intentionally); he can at the same time detest his transgression and, without formally renouncing obedience to the law, only want to evade it. In the first case, however, he rejects the authority of the law itself, whose validity he still cannot deny before his own reason, and makes it his rule to act contrary to the law. His maxim is therefore opposed to the law not by way of default only (negative) but by rejecting it (contrarie) or, as we put it, his maxim is diametrically opposed to the law, as contradictory to it (hostile to it, so to speak). As far as we can see, it is impossible for a human being to commit a crime of this kind, a formally evil (wholly pointless) crime; and yet it is not to be ignored in a system of morals (although it is only the idea of the most extreme evil). PP: 464

This is the argument that Kant uses to explain regicide, which is not just an ordinary act of killing but ‘the formal execution of a monarch that strikes horror in a soul filled with the idea of human rights’. The nature of this horror is what concerns him, for it ‘is not aesthetic feeling (sympathy, an effect of imagination by which we put ourselves in the place of the sufferer) but moral feeling resulting from the complete overturning of all concepts of right’, so that the execution of a monarch by his people ‘must be regarded as a complete overturning of the principles of the relation between a sovereign and his people’ [PP: 464]. The extremity of the violence involved in regicide is such that the revulsion it generates is excessive not just in degree but also in kind: it is a crime in principle as well as in fact. But although regicide is a crime in legal and political terms for Kant, its extremity can only be gauged adequately by the horror that it incurs, since, for as much as he seeks to distinguish the moral from the aesthetic, its

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outrage takes place with the force and the form of an actual violation, which indicates more fundamentally how it is contrary to all nature. Hence, this overturning is complete because it is rational and sensible, conceptual and practical, insofar as it violates the basis of the relation between the people and the sovereign, the law itself: A law that is so holy (inviolable) that it is already a crime even to call it in doubt in a practical way, and so to suspend its effect for a moment, is thought as if it must have arisen not from human beings but from some highest, flawless lawgiver; and that is what the saying ‘All authority is from God’ means. This saying is not an assertion about the historical basis of the civil constitution; it instead sets forth an idea as a practical principle of reason: the principle that the presently existing legislative authority ought to be obeyed, whatever its origin. PP: 462

Like the pole star the sovereign is a point of absolute orientation, thus their rights are beyond question and should not be examined practically as doing so would suggest that there might be a higher seat of governance from which it would be possible to judge them, and that would violate the principle of the sovereign as supreme ruler. The revolutionary places themselves outside the law, in the same exteriority as the criminal or libertine, since questioning the sovereign implies contesting the basis of their law as supreme, and so the possibility of the law itself as governing. The dethronement of the monarch is thus equivalent to the dethronement of reason, as the overturning of the principle upon which judgements can be made. In this way, the revolutionary is not only outside the law but, according to Kant, irrational to the point of being suicidal insofar as their violence opens a legal chasm that swallows everything without return [PP: 464]. But if we recall what Kant said a decade earlier (prior to the Revolution) about the necessity of escaping self-­incurred immaturity (selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit) by having the courage to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another, then it can be seen how the issue of revolutionary violence lies at the heart of the project of enlightenment [PP: 17]. A project he may have sought to circumscribe by limiting the possibility of putting reason itself in question, but such a limit is nominal and only grounded in its own faith.

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The antinomy of nature and freedom that motivates Kant’s critiques arises out of the secularization of thought in the eighteenth century, wherein science reveals not just the structure of the natural world and the redundancy of any divine explanation thereof but also the freedom and independence of the human. On the one hand enlightenment leaves the human without any guiding order or purpose and so free to pursue their own ends, and on the other hand science reveals the possibility for control and manipulation of the world by revealing its fixed causal relations. Hence, the antinomy of nature and freedom arises for Kant because nature is a field of finitude and determinism while thought is infinitely creative. Although Sade does not provide anything like a critical analysis of this problem he does find his own solution through a form of dialectic insofar as human freedom is defined in terms of nature, which is itself understood in terms of unbridled lawlessness. In this way, the antinomy is dissolved from both sides as the human is made indistinct from nature, and nature despite its mechanism is shown to be unbound by causal determinism. Such a solution pushes eighteenth-­century thought to an extreme, since it rethinks nature to the point of displacing the human, for where the Enlightenment was grounded in the pre-­eminence of the human, Sade removes this central point and considers the human as traversed by a force of desire that is not simply human but is material to a volcanic or plutonic degree. Thus, the Kantian vision of man as drawn upright as he is stretched between the earth and the stars is contorted and subverted by the infernal pressures of Sade’s thought. What becomes interesting is that Sade develops his understanding of enlightenment on the basis of a freedom that arises from the laws of nature. It is through an understanding of nature that the individual can extricate themselves from the bonds of tradition, and it is by applying reason to this study that one can uncover the basis and actuality of freedom. However, this reason is grounded in the physicality of desire; its endlessly unsatisfied appetite and its all-­consuming energy. Desire, rather than critique, forms the motor and the measure of Sade’s reason, and so although he may share the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and reason he does not determine these from the position of humanism, with its concerns with progress and harmony, but rather from the autonomy of desire in its self-­legislation and self-­execution. It is precisely the

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autonomy of desire, its orientation towards itself, that removes Sade’s thought from any concern with temporality understood as tradition or causation, for in terms of his understanding of nature as endless transformation time has no value or weight. This would be a thought of freedom without any law other than its own extension, which gives it the sense of violence that Kant recognizes. It is a freedom that can be rendered equally as an endless affirmation or negation, as irrational or rational, which is why it is so troubling as it indicates that the reason of such freedom is indistinguishable from unreason. The yearning for self-­understanding and self-­legislation that occurred in the Enlightenment is pushed to such extremes in Sade’s works that it is unclear if he has simply extrapolated its form or perverted it entirely. Enlightenment thought established a mutual constraint between freedom and reason in which understanding occurred with a view to control, and liberty was possible within the bounds of social order. Sade effectively explodes this model by demonstrating not a mutual constraint but a mutual extravagance between freedom and reason, as each pushes the other to greater extremes as it proceeds on its own course, as if he had found the escape velocity of reason that would leave it permanently eccentric. In doing so the notion of autonomy is reconfigured as it is the autonomy of desire rather than the subject that is preserved, which leaves the subject evacuated and merely the function and expression of desire in its transformations. Causation is not lost in this relation but is, as Juliette suggests, useless (inutile), which is to say that it still occurs (as the widespread use of mechanical and chemical models indicates) but it is gratuitous, it carries no obligations, which follows from the contingency that governs Sade’s world; although derived from nature, the human is epiphenomenal [HJ: 846/743]. As Juliette goes on to explicate, recalling the words of the Pope: ‘man is in no way dependent on nature; he is not even its child; he is its froth, its outcome [résultat]’ [HJ: 1015/923; 871/766]. This affects the experience of reading Sade as the breakdown in causation undermines the possibility of the work operating didactically. In opposition to the Enlightenment tactic of a text rhetorically designating its subject and audience, and thereby creating a socius that involves the reader, Sade’s works speak to and from a subject that may concern itself with humanity but only to the extent that this is no longer understood as a subject but as an exit point, an

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Ausgang, as Kant wrote in his essay on enlightenment, where his concern was with an exit from immaturity. In this sense, Sade’s works cannot pretend to persuade the reader directly but must create the conditions through which this departure from ignorance can arise through provocation and contamination. Although initially shocking, with repetition his ideas become less so, and as familiarity grows so does the awareness that the ideas cannot be easily dismissed, however outrageous they may seem, and with this step they become tacitly accepted, thereby infiltrating the thoughts of the reader as notions that are always possible. It is thus that readers become changed, not in terms of being convinced by these ideas but, more substantially, by being opened to change as such through the discovery that everything can be said and nothing is prohibited.

II One of the most distinctive aspects of Sade’s writings, in common with much erotica, is its episodic nature; the suddenness with which scenes are brought to a close and the perfunctory nature of the transition to the next scene. Although this is clearly part of the mechanics of erotic literature, which Sade makes no attempt to disguise, it has an odd effect on the reading experience for while the reader is conducted through a text that is potentially endless, it is only able to achieve this endlessness by repeatedly stopping and restarting, and in doing so temporal progress is converted into spatial stuttering, an expanding thickening. The scene stops in order to restart, to recover the movement that enables it to escalate. Hence it is not just the erotic imperative that drives the episodic structure of Sade’s writings, or if it is it exceeds itself by indicating how excess as such occurs by way of writing, which may explain his unconventional use of erotica. This is not a writing that seeks just to arouse, rather it is intent on pursuing excess for its own sake, excess in any and all forms, which necessarily involves sex and violence but is not limited to them. To undertake this pursuit Sade is drawn to the stimulus of rebeginning that inhabits writing, for in starting again one goes further than through continuation by building on and repeating to excess what has gone before. It is this experience of escalation that

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is exposed in reading Sade, which occurs from scene to scene by way of interruption and is thus not only the deferral and exacerbation of erotic tension but also the breaching of a novel space, a layering of the text that introduces density and complexity as a creative process. Such is the nature of the physical involvement that occurs in reading his writings, as these are not works that can be read calmly and abstractly, there is no disinterest here in a Kantian sense but rather desire and passion, an inescapable imaginative innervation as we are exposed, as readers, to the extension of our thought. Sade provides a paradigm of such exposure in a widely-­discussed example from Juliette, where the protagonist describes how to achieve an ecstasy of thought through the deliberate exercise of restraint and a repetition of desire mediated by writing: Go a whole fortnight without lusty occupations, divert yourself, amuse yourself with other things; but up to the last day do not let yourself even admit any libertine ideas. When this period is over retire alone to your bed in calmness, silence, and the deepest darkness; lying there, recall everything that you have banished during this interval and deliver yourself indolently and with nonchalance to that gentle pollution by which no one knows how to arouse yourself or others as you do. Next, give your imagination the freedom to present aberrations of different sorts by degrees; cover all of them in detail, pass through them in review one by one; convince yourself that all the world is yours . . . that you have the right to change, mutilate, destroy, shatter all beings as you see fit; you have nothing to fear; choose whatever pleases you but without exception, suppress nothing; without regard to anyone; without captive bonds or restraining checks; let your imagination take on all the cost of the ordeal and above all don’t rush your gestures; your hand should take orders from your head and not your temperament. Without noticing it, from the various scenes that have passed before you, one will claim you more energetically than the others and with such a force that you cannot divert it or replace it by another; the idea acquired by the means I indicate will dominate you, captivate you, delirium will take over your senses; and believing yourself already at work you will discharge like a Messalina. Once this is done, relight your candles, and write out the type of perversion that came to inflame you, forgetting none of the circumstances that could aggravate its details; go to sleep on them, reread your notes the following morning and in restarting your operation add

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everything your imagination, a bit tired of an idea that has already cost you some come, can suggest that is capable of increasing its arousal. Now form a body to this idea and, in putting the final touches to it, once again add all the episodes that prompt your mind; then execute it and you will find that this is the perversion that suits you best and that you will carry out with the greatest delight. My secret, I know, is a bit villainous but it is certain; and I would not recommend it to you if I had not tested it successfully. HJ: 752–53/640–41

As commentators have noted this example resembles the spiritual exercises practiced by the Jesuits, who would contemplate the crucifixion to such a degree of intensity that they would come to identify with it.6 In doing so, the monk would not just experience the rending of the flesh but also the spiritual transcendence attendant upon this rending. Sade inverts this model by showing that the identification that occurs through the visualization and projection of one act of sexual violence after another leads to an experience of rending that does not transcend it but is provoked by it to further transgressions. The erotic imagination leads to material ecstasy as an experience of endless transmutability, but this passage also makes clear that the act of imagination and dramatization is intrinsically literary, involving the abstractions and materiality of repeated acts of writing and reading. On the one hand, this means that the experience of ecstasy is framed (not just by Juliette in her description of the exercises but also by Sade in his writing) to emphasize its ruptures and repetitions, its presence and absence. On the other hand, the framing indicates that the experience is both linguistic and imaginary, a material-­conceptual process of desire and annihilation, a jouissance of transgression as such, which occurs in the way that Sade’s characters find an eroticism in the very word ‘crime’. These exercises in imaginative dramatization were also used by Bataille in his attempts to reach the emptiness of non-­experience, but his heterodox Hegelian thought of nothingness differs from Sade’s material imagination by virtue of the sheer excess of materiality that the latter pursues, which is remote from any kind of mysticism, however apophatic. Thus, the overwhelming fascination and revulsion that is encountered in reading Sade leads to an inverted sense of the sublime as the material ecstasy of thought, for without the guidance of the moral law the destination (Bestimmung) of humanity can only be an endless

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perversion (Verstimmung). Although it appears by way of the unbounded space of literature this perversion is not just of literature but of the actual movement of thought in the world, such that what the text gives to thought is not any form of knowledge or understanding but a material extravagance, or madness. It is because the text offers no interpretive guides that would frame it as safely allegorical or symbolic or parodic that it offers itself to madness, in fact, it goes even further by deliberately unframing (actualizing) itself in becoming ob-scene. The manner of extension of the narrative can be understood almost physiologically as a movement of dilation, which occurs in the distinct modes of extravagance, deferral, prolepsis, and secretion. For in the actualization of the crimes that the libertines pursue the acts exceed and extend themselves, for instance the pursuit of a particular act of violence or sexuality can extend beyond its initial or anticipated form through the extravagance with which it is pursued, the deferral of its conclusion, the projection of further extension, or the clandestine adumbration of alternatives. A particularly clear discussion of this point occurs in the debate at the end of the eighth day in Les Cent Vingt Journées, where Durcet argues that it is not in simple jouissance (understood as pleasure) that happiness exists, but in breaking the restraints that prevent one from reaching one’s desires [CVJ: 156–59/151–54]. Thus, as is made clear elsewhere in comments that reflect Sade’s construction of this work, ‘by dint of committing horrors, one desires new ones, and the more that one commits the more one desires’, and so ‘the plan was to have described to them in the greatest detail and by order all the different deviations [écarts] of debauchery, all its branches, all its extensions [attenances], all of what is called in one word, in the language of libertinage, the passions. One cannot imagine the degree to which man varies them when his imagination is inflamed’ [CVJ: 291/296; 39/28]. By describing its own desires, the imagination does not encompass them but is rather provoked to ever greater desires, it exceeds itself through its self-­ examination. That is, the act exposes and involves its own penumbra of possibility, its own fictional potentiality to go further through these modes of physical, temporal, or eccentric dilation, extending the act beyond itself in ways that cannot be anticipated. Such dilation provides an understanding of how a system that is self-­sufficient and admits of no external causes or grounds

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can extend itself seemingly without end. To take one example of Sade’s method in this regard, from the plan for the second part of Les Cent Vingt Journées, consider this note for 28 December: 137. He whips a girl nine days in a row, a hundred strokes the first day, doubling every day up to and including the ninth. CVJ: 325/333

At the end of this nine-­day period, the girl will have been whipped 51,100 times, and realistically would have died on the first or second day.7 But this does not concern Sade, excess is not to be understood in purely realistic terms, what excites is the numerical quality of the cruelty and its possibility of operating in an almost autonomous manner (in Delbène’s words, ‘nothing inflames the mind like large numbers’ [HJ: 253/82]). It is notable that he does not spell out the number of lashes the girl will have received, it is more important to indicate the manner of proceeding, which is based in the action of doubling. This mathematical approach to torture suggests a mechanical version of organic growth, which at each stage escalates and thus sketches out an open-­ended extravagance. Violence can then be finite and determinate but open-­ended, hinting at a potential for endless extension but remaining grounded in the specific. Hence, while this experience might appear to be a purely abstract or intellectual pleasure, it is grounded in the repetition and escalation of the acts in and through their writing, and the interaction between the two is precisely what constitutes the broader sense of jouissance; the momentary deferral and inhibition produced by material recapitulation that is then breached by the next phase of abstract propulsion: These species of pleasures can only be delicious when one breaches [franchit] everything in tasting them; the proof is that they only begin to become such through the breaking of a certain restraint; in rupturing one more the irritation becomes more violent, and necessarily so with each step, you do not really reach the true goal of these species of pleasures until the aberration of the senses has been carried to the final limit of the faculties of your being, in such a way that your nerves endure an irritation of such a prodigious degree of violence that they are as if overthrown, shrivelled up along all their length; he who would know all the force, all the magic of the pleasures of lubricity must be thoroughly convinced that only by receiving or

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producing the greatest possible upheaval in the nervous system may he succeed in procuring for himself the drunkenness he must have if he is to enjoy himself well. HJ: 482/340

This is the essential conundrum of Sade’s works, which finds expression in the fact that a world now stripped of transcendence in the form of any theological or moral law can still express itself without end through interminable innovations. The law, as has been shown, is transgressed from within in being derived from a nature that is criminal, and thus experiences itself as exteriority through the pursuit of an indifferent extravagance, innervations without end or purpose producing differences without difference, an excess that is baroque in its sheer aimless profusion, nature in other words in its immanent wildness and exteriority (although its wildness is far from anything Schelling or Merleau-Ponty imagined). This tension can also be found in the nature of Sade’s materialism, which is drawn on the one hand to the pleasures of the most everyday crudities and on the other hand to the demands of a materialist rejection of transcendence and heteronomy that can never be satisfied. But the discovery of a nature without external cause or ground, without heteronomy, and thus sufficient in itself, does not preclude transcendence but rather diverts (perverts, inverts) it, so that nature without exterior becomes nature as its own exteriorization. This is paralleled and reflected in the space of literature in the relation of its materiality to an excess that is immanent, insofar as it bears out its own programme of actualizing theory into practice alongside a description and analysis of this practice, which is why it takes place as a narrative of transgression and criminality. It is through this reflection of materiality on and in itself that its immanent innervation is found. Bataille’s open letter on Sade, which was written around 1930 but not published until 1967, focused on the instability of this sense of materiality and is drawn to the following formula: Verneuil makes someone shit, he eats the turd and demands that someone eat his. The one whom he made eat his shit vomits, he devours what she throws up.

This line is central to Bataille’s attempt to reconfigure the understanding of Sade, as he was read by the Surrealists, towards a greater awareness of the base

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materialism in his works, an element that cannot be symbolically recuperated and serves as the substrate of his thought, underpinning its very possibility.8 This passage comes from the notes Sade made for La Nouvelle Justine and what is of significance is that, like the note from Les Cent Vingt Journées and Juliette’s recipe for ecstasy, it holds an undecidable combination of the abstract and the material. Just as the materiality of whipping was rendered abstract through its excessive repetition, which then achieved its own force as mathematical, here the act of coprophagy is made inescapably material while also remaining part of a formula of intransigent circulation. Bataille’s point in emphasizing a passage like this is that it bears out his understanding of heterology (or scatology) as a thought that cannot remain within the confines of thought. Its heterodox aspects are such that they draw any sense of logic or discourse into the base materiality that is being discussed; the abstract possibility of thought, thinking as such, is made possible and impossible by its base materiality. The cycle of excretion and consumption that is made concrete in this line mimics that of discourse but empties it of any sense or purpose, it will simply go round and round, again and again. This is the importance of the emphasis on shit, which comes to take on its own (useless, meaningless) significance as a unit of orgiastic syntax, a debased logic of sheer matter. As the excluded substance par excellence shit is that by which the very nature of limits are measured out, not just within society and education, but also in thought and language, hence the manner in which its form arises in the crudest of expressions and as a refusal of conceptual terms. Sade’s fondness for it comes from the extreme inversions and transgressions that he pursues, for which it becomes exemplary as the form of the abject, and as a formula for abjection. Barthes has remarked that, in spite of the ubiquity of defecation in Sade’s writings, the word shit does not smell, and as such he feels entitled to conclude that the language of Sade is entirely rhetorical: ‘Being a writer and not a realistic author, Sade always chooses the discourse over the referent; he always sides with semiosis rather than mimesis: what he “represents” is constantly being deformed by the meaning, and it is on the level of the meaning, not of the referent, that we should read him.’9 Attempting to sublate Sade’s works into some putative meaning is the course of containment: safely confining his language to its rhetorical meaning we can then pass by its violence and

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materiality and remain undisturbed. But whatever meaning we may adduce to Sade’s works, and it is highly doubtful that such an operation can proceed successfully, it can only be made apparent by way of the materiality of the text, which is by no means merely semiotic. Shit may not smell in Sade’s works, but this is only to take the most obvious aspect of its sense or meaning when it is apparent that the very resistance of the text, its rebarbative quality, is precisely what makes the presence of shit real in a manner that is not semiotic but mimetic, as Adorno pointed out, insofar as it makes apparent in the text a form of material excess and resistance that is the equivalent of actual faeces: as is evident from the revulsion that arises, this materiality is experienced in reading and is experienced as a reality without meaning. The importance of these points is that they illustrate how Sade’s writings operate across the slopes of abstraction and materialization, and that it is the combination of the two, unsystematically, inconclusively, which grants them their existence as a form of thought that is material and aesthetic but also cognitive and abstract. The key aspect of this reading is the emphasis it places on transformation, since it indicates how Sade’s writing is itself engaged in the constant aimless turmoil that is being described in the long discussions of nature. The degree to which the materialization of thought and language are rendered inhuman in Sade’s texts is indicated further by the inter-­relation between erotic description and narrative or analysis, where the singular presence of bodies and individuals is displaced not just through their multiplicity and violent degradation but also as part of the narrative and analytic discourse. For what takes place through this discourse is an abstraction from the sensible dimensions of each encounter to their general and nominal existence as part of a sequence of thought. There is a Hegelian sense to this abstraction in which names are substituted for things, which become things again but of a different kind (words) as they are internalized in the discourse. Here lies the murderous aspects of language’s emergence, as Blanchot has emphasized in his response to Hegel, in which the word only arises by negating the thing, and the sensibility that subtends this abstraction carries a trace of the death and mortality that made its abstraction possible [PF: 312/322ff]. The same process of incomplete linguistic sublation is also found phylogenetically, in the emergence of language in the human species, where the effects of

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abstraction lift the human out of the here and now of animal existence but doing so also indicates the death of the human, for through language the human gives rise to its own transience and superfluity as now no individual human is necessary for the continued existence of language.10 The same mechanism of abstract redundancy may seem to be apparent in Sade’s writings, since it is notable that although a considerable amount of time is spent in describing the victims (their selection, appearance, seduction, abuse, rape, torture, and murder), there is no remainder to this process. As soon as the victims have been killed, the narrative moves on, little or no time is given to explaining how the bodies are removed; murder in Sade’s writings leaves no trace. Except in the narrative itself, of course, which gives lasting evidence of the extent and detail of the crimes, and appears to take on a kind of life of its own as a material taxonomy, not just an abstract parade of victims but their actual deaths, page after page, again and again, visceral, intransigent, repugnant, and seemingly without end. Such is his realism. This nominal-­material extravagance shows that the apparent similarity between the mode of Sade’s thinking and writing and that of paranoia does not hold up. For where the paranoiac is engaged in an attempt to control their world by decisively naming all aspects of their environment according to their worldview and thereby eliminating any aspects of chance, with Sade this is not the case. Clearly there is just as powerful a desire to name and to organize in his writings but the result is not the same, as it is more like an inversion of the paranoid model in which the excessive nominalization of the world only exposes the impossibility of such an exercise. The act of naming does not bring the world into any greater unity or order but instead reveals the elusiveness of desire and the concomitant impoverishment of language under pressure of the imagination. Where Sade may share the monomania of paranoia it does not tend towards the totalitarian vision that is often its governing characteristic, for while it is a vision of everything, this is the whole in its exploded form as an endless excess without any totalizing order, Hegel’s schlechte infinite.11 And it is as such that despite its virulent depravity it avoids the fascistic culmination of violence and degradation, for although it is just as terrifying it is not a Procrustean attempt to impose an order on the world but rather an actualization of the immanent drive of materiality, which is indifferent to all individual forms of life.

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Desire, as Sade was aware, bears its own peculiar reflexivity such that it never appears in a pure state but is always accompanied by its own discourse. For instance, it is apparent that Justine’s narration literally gives rise to her misfortunes (since each time she tells the story of her ordeals, it only arouses her audience to greater violence) as well as to a virulence that will live on despite her, a virulence that cannot be assimilated to either the abstract or the sensible as it is neither theory nor practice, not merely erotica or its analysis but something undecidably unsettling, for at each point that the conceptual seeks to assert itself within the narrative, the material irrupts within it, and vice versa. So although the systematic qualities of the text drive it towards an inhuman violence, its materiality gives evidence of its own form of life, albeit one that is just as remote from humanity. It is thus that the libertines might seem to be engaged in a search for a moment of absolute experience, a paradoxical sense of sheer absence that Bataille understood as sovereignty, as opposed to Hegelian mastery, as it is independent of any relation to that from which it arises. As such this moment of absolute experience arises within thought as that which exceeds it, the breach that occurs as it realizes its own difference, its lack of unity and stability that is a result of its materio-­semiotic disparity, a violence that exposes it to both the best and the worst and, moreover, to a moment, a time and a space, that is not present.

III As Blanchot had indicated at the end of his article on Sade, the reconfiguration of space and time under a certain incidence of law and prohibition leads to a discussion of sovereignty as a unique and absolute rupture, but recent discussion of this notion has been complicated by the way that sovereignty has been addressed by two differing traditions of modern thought. In addition to the attempt by Bataille to discern a sovereign moment in experience that is not reducible to thought or language but exposes an absence or neutrality of sense, there is the examination of political sovereignty by Schmitt and Benjamin, and latterly, Agamben, with its focus on secularity and the legal nature of political violence, a problem that, as has been shown, was central to Kant’s attempt to

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come to terms with the execution of Louis XVI. But Benjamin’s understanding also derived from his reading of the baroque Trauerspiel, which dramatized quite precisely the vacuum of power that arises in a regime that is no longer grounded in a transcendental order: There is no baroque eschatology; and thus no mechanism by which all earthly creatures are gathered and exalted before being consigned to the end. The beyond is emptied of everything in which even the slightest breath of the world is woven, and from it the baroque reclaims a profusion of things that are carefully extracted from every formulation and brought, at its high point, into the drastic form of the day, in order to clear an ultimate heaven and place them in a vacuum-­like state so as one day to destroy the earth with catastrophic violence. UDT: 246/66

In place of any essence that the removal of the law dissolves there is now only a mass of contingency, meaningless accidents and chance encounters of material difference that the libertine might be said to be pursuing. For in the vast machinery of abuse and intercourse that structures Sade’s works there is a fascination with novelty, a desire for the unforeseen, the ever new conjugation, as the libertines immerse themselves in a search for the previously unknown differences that each new act may throw up. Indeed, it would seem to be the case that the position of neutral sovereignty that Blanchot discerns in the lives of the libertines is one in which the sheer quantity of their sexual excess becomes transformed into an endless plane of difference whose forms cannot be predetermined as either good or bad, meaningful or meaningless, words or acts. Sade’s language thus avoids any goal or conclusion, there is no reason that justifies it, rather it serves only to pursue these minimal and ever-­changing differences as they appear and disappear without end. In Sade’s world of evil without purpose and desire without end all individuals appear subject to the law of mediacy. While, most obviously, the victims are simply the means for the satisfaction of the libertines’ desires and are used and then killed when they are no longer of use, these desires are never-­ending and are the end towards which the libertine acts; to maintain this endlessness not just through an unending supply of victims but through a careful and insistent abrogation of any purpose or meaning. For as soon as the libertine begins to

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assert a transcendental goal to their acts (Saint-Fond), or places them in a conventional framework of values and relations (Olympe), they fall short of preserving the endlessness of desire. Thus their actions are not grounded in any fundamental law but in their own ongoing demonstration, which serves to unsettle the nature of fundamental ethical grounding as such. They act on the basis of criminality alone, which persists only for as long as it acts (like writing) as it is grounded in nothing other than its own transgressions. Nature is found to be a contingent ground and not a transcendental one, ‘a profusion of things’, as Benjamin wrote, which in its meaninglessness brings about its own form of ‘catastrophic violence’. Thus the orgies can change at any moment if the libertine fails to preserve the endlessness of their transgressions by considering them as subordinate to their ends, or if the victim is able to replace their moral submission to cruelty by seeing it as unbound by any law and open to enjoyment as a pure means without end, a perpetual breaching. Despite appearances Sade’s universe is not the same as that of a fascist dystopia in which a select band of rulers torture and exploit the masses for it lacks the mythical order that such dystopias require to legitimize their violence and oppression. There is no external law that would underpin the structure of Sade’s universe as it can invert itself at any point and exists precisely to demonstrate and extend such instability; the endlessness of criminal desire is the end to which the libertines are committed rather than the preservation of a state structure. So, contrary to Georges Sorel’s ideas for example, the pure violence of Sade’s writings is not configured according to the myth of a future utopia, for violence irrupts in Sade’s writings as a force of sheer abject materiality that is not for anything, it does not proclaim any truth or justice but is mere ugliness, the thing itself in its obtrusiveness as a meaningless turd or corpse, wherein lies its irrecuperable fascination. The apparent parallel between the violence of Sade’s works and that of the Third Reich – and perhaps much of the state-­sanctioned violence that has become widespread since then – is untenable because the latter was pursued not just as part of a programme of racist ideology, which Sade would have found abhorrent by putting abuse and violence at the service of the law and as a means to an end, but also through a state-­wide bureaucracy that absolved the individual of responsibility as much as it did the state, which again Sade would

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have rejected. This parallel was first made by Raymond Queneau in 1945 but the most significant attempt to pursue the relation between fascist and Sadean violence occurs in Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975).12 Although this is a powerful and disturbing film in its own right, it is misguided in its response to Sade as it assumes that the violence of the Salò republic reflects that of Les Cent Vingt Journées insofar as the former exemplified a brutal and systematic sadism. This error derives from the more basic flaw of assuming that ‘sadism’ is an adequate means of understanding Sade but, as is evident, his works are not simply concerned with the enjoyment of cruelty, and they share none of the authoritarianism of fascism. Pasolini attempts to explicate his approach by including citations from Klossowski and Barthes in the film, but his libertines lack any sense of what they are discussing, instead these texts become mere signifiers of their decadence, of a socially and psychologically derived sadism that is very far from what takes place in Sade’s works. While this might provide insights into the nature of the Salò republic, and also the oppression and distortion of sexuality in contemporary Italy, which seems to have been Pasolini’s underlying concern, it only confuses any understanding of what is at stake in Sade’s own works. What becomes even more problematic is the way that the experience of watching Salò is desensitized through the flat visual aesthetic and a deliberately bland and repetitive construction, for although this resembles Sade’s approach it also develops a distancing effect (compounded by the camp theatrics, which are entirely foreign to Sade) that is at odds with the emphasis on contagion that Sade is keen to pursue. Pasolini’s film may be provocative but it does not engage thought in the same way that Sade interweaves discourse and debauchery in his writing. By starting from a proposition in which sadism is equated with fascism the discussion of these phenomena is foreclosed, instead, we simply see its representation; violence is already part of a discourse that has framed its significance and thus the text and its scenarios are presented as given, rather than as problems. The same can also be said in relation to the analogy between Sade’s libertines and the rapacious oligarchs of neoliberalism, for although the libertines are wealthy and think nothing of abusing, exploiting, enslaving, and destroying others for their own pleasure there are two key differences that distinguish them from contemporary plutocrats, and that follow the differences from fascist

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violence. Firstly, their wealth and power is used solely for consuming pleasure to excess, they have no interest in consolidating power or accumulating wealth, and if this occurs it is only to the degree that it can be used towards a greater conflagration of indulgence. The key to this distinction is that the libertines have no interest in establishing a hegemonic class that can maintain power over generations, there is instead an active rejection of inheritance and continuity. (The family is a persistent target of libertine criminality as it forms the basis of the law, and parents, children, and siblings are frequently killed, but Juliette ends on a particularly horrible scene in which Noirceuil and Juliette marry their own children and then rape and torture them to death, including Juliette’s seven-­year old daughter – tellingly called Marianne – who is burned alive [HJ: 1255–56/1186–87].) As such, they behave like criminals and outlaws rather than members of the ruling classes, in that their sole relation to the law is through its violation and so they exist outside society, refusing any attempts to perpetuate themselves. They may form secret societies or groups but these are volatile and apt to destroy themselves, unlike the corporate powerbases of today they are not interested in changing the law in order to persist and grow but rather secrete themselves through the interstices of a corrupt world for their own enjoyment. It helps if the world about them is corrupt as this facilitates their activities but just as they have no concern with the future so they have no concern with society at large, the repeated exhortations to realize the advantages of libertinism serve only to enable their own existence, rather than to establish a utopia. From the perspective of neoliberalism these groups have failed to capitalize on their wealth and power and so have missed the chance to legitimize their activities by moving into traditional business and politics, but of course this is because they have no interest in capital, legitimacy, or tradition. But there is another reason, which is the second important difference, for although contemporary oligarchs operate through the same mechanism of separating themselves off from the world into areas that are controlled and secure this is done for the purposes of removing themselves from the consequences of their actions, something the libertines would violently reject. They may not be concerned with the long-­term effects of their actions, but the potlatch of desires that they undergo is precisely for its experience: they wish to grasp in all its details the pain and suffering and misery that they bring about [CVJ: 157/152]. To disavow these consequences as occurs

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in capitalist practice is to go against the fundamental materialism of libertine excess, and would amount to the theological rejection of the flesh that informs conventional morality and that Sade finds so repugnant. As has been pointed out, Sade’s characters are no closer to revolutionaries than they are to oligarchs; in terms of conventional Marxist thought they are no more than dissolute reactionaries and libertarians that neither aid nor promote social change but are merely self-­serving parasites on the iniquities of society. Such is the caricature that would arise on first encountering their excesses, but the relations of materiality and desire are not so simple. Integral to the behaviour of the libertines is their understanding of the materiality of sexual experience, which despite its abuses nevertheless constitutes an intimate and profound sensuality. The project of Enlightenment reason that traverses Sade’s works is at all points underpinned by the density and variability of bodily experience. Thus, these works do not simply anticipate the commodification of the body under capitalism but also its underside: its perpetual and elusive intransigence. Much like the artwork in modernity, the body in Sade’s works is both exploited and resistant, which is precisely Horkheimer’s conclusion in his reading of Juliette. Although he discusses the relation between Sade’s thought and that of the instrumental reason ascendant in modern society, this does not lead to the simple equation of sadism and totalitarianism that has been noted above. Instead, it reveals the enigmatic variability of the sensual: whereas the unconscious colossus of actuality, subjectless capitalism, carries out its destruction blindly, the rebellious subject thanks to his delusion sees it as his fulfilment and radiates, together with a biting cold towards humans misused as things, a perverted love that, in the world of things, takes its place of immediacy. Sickness becomes the symptom of recuperation. In the transfiguration of victims, delusion recognizes their degradation. It makes itself like the monster of domination that it cannot physically overcome. As horror, imagination seeks to withstand horror. The Roman saying, according to which strictness [die strenge Sache] is true pleasure, is not mere slave-­ driving. It also expresses the indissoluble contradiction of order that happiness is turned into its parody when it is sanctioned, and it is created only when it is outlawed. Sade and Nietzsche perpetuated this contradiction, but they have helped with its conceptualization [zum Begriff]. DA: 134/89

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What becomes significant in Sade’s writings is that this ambivalent pursuit of sensuality is conducted in the mode of crime, which is to say that the very form in which theory seeks to actualize itself in the practice of the sensual is criminal, since crime is precisely that which is concerned with the breaking of barriers and primarily those that separate thought from action.

5

Praxis: Crime and History

There is a Nietzschean conspiracy that is not of a class but of an isolated individual (like Sade) with the means of this class, not only against his own class, but also against the existing forms of the human species as a whole. Pierre Klossowski, 1969 Article forty-­three of the statutes of the Society of the Friends of Crime explicitly prohibits any interference in the affairs of governments by members of the Society, and also prohibits political speeches of any kind: ‘The Society respects the government under which it lives.’ But, as is then explained in ways that begin to undermine what is meant by respect here, the fact that members of the Society do not respect the law does not conflict with this apolitical stance since it derives from the belief that ‘man does not have the power to make laws that hamper or frustrate those of nature’ [HJ: 558/425]. Thus governments are only respected insofar as they are considered unimportant, but this disdain only arises because the libertines are wealthy and powerful enough to be able to exist independently of any political systems. Nevertheless, the emphasis on avoiding political action gives evidence not so much of the conservatism of libertine thought as of an awareness that politics is not the arena of actual power. It is readily apparent that politics of a certain kind is never far from Sade’s thought and so the disavowal voiced by the Society is simply a mark of discretion, which itself indicates that politics will proceed but with other means and aims. So, when Juliette harangues the Pope or the King of Naples, demanding that they give up their thrones and dissolve their authority, this is because it will lead to anarchy, which will enable the libertines to exercise their desire for excess with greater freedom. Necessarily, this desire in its infinitude constantly runs up against infringement, whether it is of the law or of social norms, but

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also against the limits of human action. The combination of these two threads, which yields a ruthlessly single-­minded opportunism alongside the burden of satisfying it, can be found in the story that Borchamps tells about his involvement in a conspiracy to oust the King of Sweden. Borchamps is not a member of the Society, so he is not in breach of article forty-­three, but his position is just as deceptive. On meeting the senator leading the conspiracy Borchamps states outright: ‘I abhor kings and their tyranny’, and, after urging the senator to encourage the Swedish people to rise up against their king, he pledges that he will struggle ‘until the last of the tyrants of the earth’ is destroyed [HJ: 954–55/859]. But rather than this being a pledge to revolutionary emancipation Borchamps is ready to join this conspiracy as he sees that it is merely an attempt by one camp to unseat another, which is driven not by the desire to liberate but by a wish to wield power themselves and enjoy its riches and impunity. Thus he recognizes a kinship with the conspirators that he makes no attempt to conceal, for when it comes to his induction into the conspiracy he declares that his motives are ‘jealousy, ambition, pride, despair of being dominated, desire to tyrannize others myself ’ [HJ: 957/862]. And on hearing this, they welcome him warmly. Being a foreigner, they cannot allow him to participate in the conspiracy directly, but instead he will be charged with spreading fear and disorder by going through the country killing, raping, and burning at random. In this way they hope to take power by inciting the people to rise up against the government. Although he proceeds with this orgy of destruction Borchamps realizes that the forces of the conspirators are feeble in comparison with those of the king and so, despite his earlier pledges, he quickly changes sides and informs the king of the plot. Amply rewarded for this information he looks forward to the bloodbath of vengeance that should follow only to be disappointed by the fact that the conspirators are merely arrested. Desiring more than this, Borchamps returns to the conspirators and tells them it was Emma, his travelling companion, who betrayed them, and she is then summoned and flayed and burned alive. Aroused by this scene, Amélie, the wife of one of the conspirators, declares her love for Borchamps and her desire to be immolated in a similar fashion: ‘since the age of fifteen my mind has been inflamed by the idea of perishing as the victim of the cruel passions of libertinage [. . .] to become, in expiring, the occasion of a crime is an idea

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that makes my head reel’ [HJ: 968/873]. Such a direct evocation of extinction is rare and has caught the attention of Blanchot and Bataille but the basis of this idea is not that of masochism, as it is commonly understood, but rather the delirious passion for crime as such, regardless of who suffers. In this way Amélie is echoing the desires of Clairwil and Saint-Fond for a crime that would continue to live on past death, even if it is one’s own, in a kind of perpetual motion that would overcome the limits of human abilities. Summarizing these different aspects of excess Borchamps explains that crime is not just ‘the surest means a statesman can use to gather up everything that can consolidate happiness’, but also, more generally, it is ‘the responsibility [ressorts] of all governments’ [HJ: 958/863]. Crime is as essential to the functioning of the state as it is to the libertine’s desires, since it is the force, but also the form, by which excess can itself be harnessed. This is the reason why the word itself is of such importance, since it is excessive to itself by virtue of its variable and contradictory meanings. Firstly, crime is a meaningless word, as nature prohibits nothing, hence there are no crimes. Secondly, crime is not meaningless, insofar as it is used to describe actions that go against nature’s laws. Thirdly, crime remains meaningful as the term for transgression as such (and its jouissance), understood now as the law of nature [HJ: 551–52/418]. There is no reconciliation or sublation of these different meanings, only their instability, which gives evidence of the way that crime, as an act as well as an idea, however ambivalently, remains excessive to meaning; it simply marks a breach, not just of laws or conventions but of sense itself, and thus cannot be reduced to a single thought or action. Crime as a term in Sade’s vocabulary takes on a similar role to that of aufheben in Hegel’s vocabulary (as that which refers to the contradictory combination of elevation, preservation, and cancellation), as it is precisely because of its complexity that it remains a key focus of his thought, since the force and intangibility of the act and idea are compressed into a word that has multiple and divergent meanings, which thereby provides a mechanism to broach excess as such. At any one time, it is both present and absent in terms of being meaningful, and yet also exceeds both as that which eludes its own definition. Notably, the image used to convey this excess is that of a volcano, as Ghigi, the Roman police chief explains, ‘without laws the universe is nothing but a volcano throwing out execrable

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crimes every minute. Yet there are fewer drawbacks in this state of perpetual lesions, far fewer, without doubt, than under the empire of laws’ [HJ: 838/732]. But Amélie’s passion reveals an intriguing nuance within libertine behaviour that casts light on the apathy or indifference that libertines are meant to employ. Clairwil had explained the difference between vice and virtue by stating that the impact of foreign objects upon the nervous fluids could either be slight or forceful, in the former case a person tends towards virtue, in the latter towards vice. But as this excessive sensibility drives a person to criminality, it is necessary to counter it with a blunting effect (émousser) to ensure that one is not carried away with the effects of crime, either towards their indulgence, which creates the risk of carelessness, or towards pity, which would reduce the possibility of enjoyment. Libertines should develop a sang-­froid that enables them to pursue any activity, no matter how extreme, because they have understood that materialism undermines the impact of consequences and that suffering is only to be experienced fully when it is recognized objectively [HJ: 422/277ff]. Such distancing was discussed earlier in relation to Diderot’s model of acting, but here the significant point comes from the fact that Juliette only partially learns this lesson as she remains passionately involved in crime. The efficiency Clairwil emphasizes does not entail a complete detachment from emotion, as it is an intrinsic part of libertine behaviour that its extremes should be experienced as much as possible. This point is crystallized in Amélie’s behaviour, where it is a question of experiencing the most extreme suffering possible, given or received, and it is this overwhelming excess that makes her request so striking. In contrast to Clairwil’s stated position (which she barely keeps to herself), it is not the case that excess must always be distanced, as there are situations where the consequences are insignificant relative to the enjoyment, hence it is possible to succumb to the depths of passion without compromising one’s own position. Juliette’s own behaviour and that of others like Durand indicates this, as she is able to abandon herself to the most horrendous acts and yet does not desist from a theoretical understanding or careful execution of her crimes. There may be an indifference to consequences, but this does not imply that the libertines are also insensible. The appeal of crime is precisely that it animates the heart as much as the head, it is a source of jouissance that is as much mental as it is physical, and it is this combination to which Amélie has given expression.

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This dissociation is recapitulated in Adorno’s understanding of the relation of bourgeois coldness to the behaviour that arose at Auschwitz, since the possibility of survival at Auschwitz called for a coldness ‘without which Auschwitz would not have been possible’ [ND: 355–56/363]. The survivor is forced to take on the same abandonment of compassion that allowed the camps to arise in the first place. Such a disposition is not, however, unique to the death camps, but rather constitutes the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, in Adorno’s words; the distancing and insensitivity characteristic of modern urban living, which was already explicated in Horkheimer’s reading of Juliette as an intrinsic part of the dialectic of enlightenment reason [DA: 115/75ff].1 This analysis is compelling for the understanding of Sade, as Adorno also explicates the other side of this dialectic by relating coldness to the position of the critic as spectator (Zuschauer, echoing Diderot), for if the critic is to embrace the objective truth of individual existence as insignificance, then this must be done without fear, without immediacy. Perversely, it is this inhuman position of the critic – who, in detaching themselves from their existence, is not there, or not themselves – that becomes the most human part and that resists ideology. The spectator is able to look on life and express doubts that this could be everything, as the concrete truth of the situation is that which evades it: in releasing itself from the here and now of sheer physicality the discovery of insignificance becomes the only significance of human existence, an empty universality that nevertheless renders it not completely meaningless insofar as it is still a discovery (what he had also referred to as ‘the self-­consciousness of humanity in its naturalness’ [AT: 295/198]). The trouble with thoughts of self-­preservation, Adorno goes on to write, is that in tying us to a mortal body they force us to confront its imminent dissolution, its non-­existence, and this discovery may lead to violence in trying to defend ourselves from such a horror. Philosophy emerges with this discovery but risks replacing the concreteness of the finite with a speculative essence that is remote from things as they are. It is thus that speculation needs to be countered by the concrete, by the awareness that the elsewhere or otherwise that is sought is not beyond what is but is rather its endless rearrangement [ND: 357/364]. Sade’s libertines exemplify this materialist inversion of transcendence by seeking to embrace the fullness of experience as that which

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always exceeds itself, thereby combining the concrete with its universality in an ever-­expanding field. But Adorno’s reading underlines the distance of Sade’s thought from that which pervaded Auschwitz, since it is precisely the sensuality of non-­experience that the libertines pursue for in its receding horizon experience is always exceeding itself, which makes clear how the apparent solipsism of libertine sovereignty is rather the critical experience of non-­ experience, its own unravelling as sensible materiality. For,‘if negative dialectics calls for the self-­reflection of thinking, then the tangible implication is that thinking, if it is to be true, today in any case, must also be a thinking against itself ’, and so, in this (Nietzschean) materialization of thought, it must be ‘measured by the extremity that eludes the concept’ [ND: 358/365]. Coldness for Adorno, as for the libertines, becomes an antidote to the fake intimacy and solidarity of society, which in its ideological framing merely supports a more basic bourgeois inhumanity. Consequently, there is an inversion in the nature of compassion: sympathetic pleasures only work to sustain the status quo and prevent the possibility of change into anything else, since tolerance and love for what people are arises from a hatred for what they might be. Thus, it is suffering that should be shared, for in this there is a recognition of the iniquity of what is and an imperative for its alteration [MM: 26–27/25–26]. Bataille returns this point to the context of libertinism, for while the extremity of Sade’s characters arises from the imperative that links crime and transgression to the transcendence of personal being, this leads to ‘the passage from egoism to a will to be consumed in the furnace that illuminates egoism’, a thought that he links directly to the words of Amélie.2 While the libertines may not share any bonds of love there are numerous expressions of mutual ecstasy, a passion that is bodily but inhuman, and that is a destructive affirmation of possibility as such. In this they are clearly not humane, but instead reveal the inhumanity that is intrinsic to humanity.

I About halfway through the second part of Juliette, the protagonist decides to commit a crime: ‘inflamed by everything I had seen . . . by everything I had

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heard, it became impossible for me to keep myself from the extreme need I had of committing a crime on my own account’ [HJ: 443/299]. Although she has already participated in many serious crimes spurred on by the activities of Noirceuil and Saint-Fond, including the poisoning of Noirceuil’s wife and Saint-Fond’s father, she desires to commit a crime for herself, a solitary, gratuitous act, which will put into practice all that she has heard and seen from the other libertines. Tellingly, this moment comes just after Clairwil has told Juliette about the existence of the Society of the Friends of Crime, and so it is partly in order to prove to herself that she is qualified and ready to join such a semi-­professional body that the occasion imposes itself on her: Thus I decided on a horror worthy of the lessons I had received every day. Wanting to test both my courage and my savagery I dressed as a man and went alone, two pistols in my pockets, to wait in a backstreet [une rue détournée] for the first passerby who would fall into my hands, with the sole aim of robbing and killing them for my pleasure. Pressed against the wall, I was in that kind of turmoil caused by great passions, and whose shock on our animal spirits is necessarily the principle of the first delight of crime . . . I listened . . . Every noise nourished my hopes. I imagined that the least movement would finally reveal my victim, then some lamentations could be heard . . . I sped towards the sound; I could distinguish groans; I approached: a poor woman, lying in a doorway, was uttering the moans that had come to my ears.

The woman asks Juliette to take pity on her as she has lost her home, her family, and her money. Hearing this, Juliette becomes excited and starts to abuse her, threatens to rape her, and then shoots her in the head with the words, ‘go to Hell and tell them Juliette has arrived’ (va dire aux Enfers que voilà le coup d’essai de Juliette). In doing so she feels a conflagration in the brain and comes excessively: ‘So, these are the results of crime?’ Juliette asks herself. ‘They were right to portray them deliciously! God! What an influence it has on a mind like mine, and how much pleasure it holds!’ [HJ: 444/300] This scene is interesting not just because of its key position as the conscious point of Juliette’s entry into a life of crime but also because of the way it establishes the movement from theory into practice. It would be unwise to make too much of the fact that she dresses as a man in this scene, transvestism

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is not a common theme in Sade’s works and here it simply appears circumspect for a young woman (she is seventeen at this stage) about to commit her first crime on the streets of Paris firstly to go in disguise, and secondly, going alone into such an enterprise it would be safer to dress as a man. Moreover, the scene is complicated quite quickly and undecidably, for as Juliette abuses the woman she tells her initially that she is a man, in threatening to rape her, and then immediately thereafter tells her that she is a woman, as she wants to be masturbated by her. The most intriguing aspect of this scene is in fact the location, as most of Sade’s writings take place indoors, there are very few exteriors that are not simply figured as woodland, apart from the travelogue descriptions of the Italian landscape in the second half of the book and these tend to focus on its wildness. There are no street-­scenes, no descriptions of the cities, except here, and this is a generic, almost clichéd setting. As such, this would be a point of departure for any comparison between the Sadean libertine and the Surrealist flâneur, especially considering Breton’s notorious statement about the simplest Surrealist act being that of running amok.3 But for present purposes it is clearly the separation that this space implies from Juliette’s ordinary existence that provides its justification, furthermore, because the kind of crime that she desires is to be quick and anonymous the street is more favourable, as opposed to the elaborately staged murders that take place elsewhere. Indeed, she proudly claims the site in relating the story to SaintFond afterwards, as this was not just any crime ‘but a street crime’ [HJ: 445/301]. While she has set out with the intention of robbing and killing (the verb she uses is égorger, but she brings guns rather than a knife), and of waiting for the first person to come by, it is she who makes the first move by rushing off to find the source of the cries that she hears. Her state of excitement clearly derives from her expectations, and the heightening of her senses contributes to the sexualized atmosphere of the scene. The victim is, however, rather pathetic, and it is only when Juliette lifts up the woman’s dress that she feels ready to consummate the act, for seeing the woman’s behind arouses her and leads to her request to be masturbated, and when the woman refuses, she is shot. The scene is analogous to the violations enacted by the other libertines, in that a victim is chosen who is then abused and then punished for rejecting these abuses. Juliette has thus successfully put into practice what she has learned,

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and as such can lay claim to this act, as she does so emphatically. The great passion that assails her, pummelling her animal spirit and inflaming her brain, is not just that of committing a gratuitous murder but of the expectation, enactment, and after-­effects of the realization of an idea. Even though she is quickly arrested, the act of being placed in irons only makes her come once more and confirms her calling: ‘delicious are the fetters of the crime that one loves’ [HJ: 444/301]. The freedom found in the idea of crime is carried over into its actualization as the exhilaration of acting without restraint. Crime as an idea carries an almost unreal sense of freedom, of going beyond not just what is acceptable but also what is possible, and this freedom commits it to a sense of actualization that is excessive. For the idea to occur is to experience the possibility of finding its excessive possibilities made real, so simply in its actualization there is a sense of transgression, of extraordinary excitement. Crime cannot accede to its idea perfectly but it nevertheless takes place and in this way it expresses its freedom, as both an act and its idea. Crime thereby brings out the demands of praxis as such: that an idea demands actualization but that doing so seems almost impossible, and that this translation involves its own betrayal and transformation. The notion of praxis as that in which an idea is brought into the world implies its own sense of violence and treachery, as the idea is being actualized in order to bring about change, in whatever form, but it does so only by betraying its initial formulation. But praxis is also the ongoing critical application and exploration of a body of ideas, which are being tested against the world, and vice versa. In saying as much the distinction between what is practical and what is theoretical becomes unstable depending on the degree to which the ideas are concrete or abstract. But with libertinism this distinction barely comes into play at all, for insofar as it is concerned with transgression it is always engaged with the crossing or breaking of barriers. Crime is already both an idea and its act. The very idea commits itself to an act, which even in its thinking begins to bring about its own actualization, and once the thought has occurred it cannot be undone, and this is perhaps where Sade’s writings become so dangerous, for what is read there cannot be expunged, it has already taken place. And its effect is as physical as it is conceptual, for in emerging it announces itself, bringing about a linguistic rupture alongside the concrete.

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In the tradition of Marxist thought the issue of praxis has always been associated with the problem of overcoming alienation, which entails bringing about changes in society that can lead to a more harmonious relation between subject and object. While Sade is also concerned with developing a greater understanding between humanity and nature this is based on a model of desire and so is focused on achieving moments of immediacy in which desire is realized. For him there are no social or historical relations that subtend subject and object, which thought should seek to uncover, and so mediacy holds a limited attraction. But this is not to find in his thinking a merely instrumental approach, since for as much as individuals become nameless victims there is also the continual emphasis on the contingent materiality that substantiates abstraction. Desire realizes itself in the immediate conjugation of the material and the abstract, which is nevertheless inherently, endlessly, unsatisfying. Between the libidinal materialism of Sade and the historical materialism of Marx there is little common ground as the notion of materialism is on the one side considered without relation, and on the other as being incomprehensible without relation. It is precisely this division that Surrealism vainly sought to bridge, since the force of desire as Sade conceives it is intrinsically antisocial. But although Sade has no interest in redressing alienation, however anachronistically this might be formulated, conversely, the materiality of desire and the imagination is an important aspect of the work of Adorno and Herbert Marcuse in their understandings of the aesthetics of praxis, and thus of the relation of thought to the world. Adorno, for example, makes much of the possibility of considering artworks in terms of their refusal to endure, for which he finds an exemplar in fireworks. Just as art refuses to recognize such forms as artworks, it also refuses to bridge the division that separates art from the empirical. Art defines itself against the world, and phenomena like fireworks are mere entertainments that in refusing the idealization of art remain pre- or anti-­artistic. By contrast, art aspires to the permanent and rejects the bodily and comedic, which would puncture this aspiration with their materiality. What fireworks are for art, Sade’s works are for literature, not so much ephemeral but lacking in idealistic purity and conversely, but concomitantly, refusing to leave the world untouched by actualizing themselves in sensual incandescence [AT: 126/81]. As Adorno

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describes, there is something in these occurrences that is not just shocking but literally incredible, as in the joke that he relates about the ignorant soldier who returns from a visit to the zoo in great agitation and tells his commanding officer, ‘Lieutenant, there are no such animals [solche Tiere gibt es nicht]’ [AT: 127/82]. A similar incredulity awaits the reader of Sade’s works, even if it is more terrifying than comic, because it is an encounter with the monstrous sensuality of violence. For the soldier of course, the zoo is not a joke, he has had to experience having his sense of the world utterly changed in seeing these creatures he could not even imagine, ideas that were previously inconceivable have become real and left him shaken and nothing will be the same again, and it is only from our safe position outside the experience that we can see it as a joke. The point of Adorno’s understanding of critique as a form of negative dialectics is that there is no place outside experience from which a positive alternative to the present world of iniquity can be articulated. Thought always operates from within the current world and so can only offer a negative critique; equally it cannot offer a leap into that which is otherwise, thought can only point to transformations within the world where its contingent material alternatives are exposed. The fantasies of sexual and artistic liberation found in Breton and Marcuse fail to grasp the prevalence of domination, which cannot be overturned or avoided as it is inherent to thought and desire. What Sade shows is not the world as it could be, whether this is utopian or dystopian, but the world as it is, and that is all. His is not a vision that is edifying or cautionary but a statement of fact with all its endless material complications. In a conversation with Horkheimer in 1956, Adorno remarks on the difficulty of developing a form that would enable critique to become tangible: praxis no longer presents itself in the framework of class struggle, as reification has become thoroughly coextensive with thought, so how does critique develop? In response to the perennial problem of appearing simply to be impotent intellectuals, Horkheimer observes quite bluntly: ‘We must seek to solve the problem of theory and practice through our style.’ Only in this way will it be possible for thought to be genuinely critical, as thinking must transform itself to show that transformation as such is possible, that theory is not a priori separate from praxis. In response to this comment Adorno makes a surprising

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remark: ‘I see no way out here, other than by making these considerations explicit. There is a certain way of writing that offends certain taboos. One must find the point where it hurts. Offending against sexual taboos’.4 The example is unusual, and it is quickly dismissed by Horkheimer who feels that Adorno is moving too close to the area of Marcuse’s thought, but the point is that sexual taboos acutely focus the site where theory and praxis converge, to which critique can then be applied. Horkheimer has missed the depth of Adorno’s point, which only emphasizes the distance between his own pessimistic reading of Sade and Adorno’s, because it is not simply a case of suggesting that a sexual utopia offers liberation from social conventions but that sexuality conveys the relation between theory and praxis in precisely the form that he wanted: as a challenge that leads to a new way of thinking. The point is not lost, as Adorno raises it again seven years later when he wrote that whereas traditional taboos attacked genitality and the partial drives, ‘Sade’s work revolted against this’ by emphasizing the limitless manifold of sexuality.5 Of course, what Sade’s works also show is that sexuality and desire are not peaceful or harmonious, but nor is nature, and it is only by combating the ideology of a bucolic nature that critique can understand the basis of domination. However, the possibility of humanity recovering a supposedly natural sexuality that has been suppressed by social conventions is equally ideological; the desires that the libertines pursue are historically constituted, except insofar as they fully accede to the formlessness of a desire or crime without end. It is as such that they find a way of distorting the dialectic of natural-­history into a form that is no longer simply dialectical, and in doing so Sade’s works are also removed from simply being literature. Just as critique must reinvent itself from within in order to transform itself, so Sade’s writings become something other than literature, by way of literature; they become a mode of engaging with the world and bringing about change, be it for the best or the worst, insofar as change is never either one or the other but just change. It is inherent in the artwork that there is a drive to anti-­art, to become reality rather than simply remaining art, and for Adorno it is this dialectic between art and anti-­art in the work that makes it an artwork: ‘art must go beyond its own concept in order to remain faithful to it’ [AT: 50/29]. The manner in which this counter-­tendency makes itself felt can be seen in the form of

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ugliness, where ugliness is that which resists the harmonious formulation of the work. Such elements may reflect the reality of suffering and abuse but they are not represented in ways that assimilate them to an overall reconciliation; they are not merely parts of a meaningful whole, which would reduce their singularity to a relatively safe position. If suffering is presented without meaning, then it cannot be seen as part of an instructive lesson about human nature, and in this abstraction from meaning it becomes a formlessness that comprises both materiality and abstraction. The work undoes itself in such unformulated elements, becoming sheer facticity without purpose or value, and consequently there is nothing that can be learned from reading it. It has become an experience of reading that is more like an encounter with an expanse of existence, in which ‘the violence that cuts across the material is the imitation of that which issues from it, and that endures in its resistance to form’ [AT: 80/50].

II In Sade’s terms, even from his position writing in the ancien régime, it is inevitable that the state will be convulsed by revolution, which will in turn devour itself, since this follows from his materialist thinking of nature as a world of continual destruction and regeneration. Writing soon after the first phase of the Revolution, Kant takes the conservative view that revolution goes against both the law and the principle of the law, its very authority and legitimacy, while for Sade its convulsions are the working out of the essential violence and illegitimacy of the law. But in writing this lawlessness into his novels it becomes an unending disaster (or malheur) that we cannot, as readers, separate ourselves from as its erotic and didactic tension involves the reading in its endless process of criminal transgression. This is not the calm vicarious experience that Kant envisioned by which German readers could separate the abuses of the Revolution from its virtues, but rather an exposure to its inner logic as a space of excesses that cannot be ameliorated as any engagement with his novels is both sensible and conceptual. Reading Sade, just like the life of the libertine, requires dedication and seriousness, as the reader finds that they

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must commit at once and completely to a worldview that permits of no relaxation or dereliction, but rather continual application and extension. This is less a leap of faith as it is the result of the compulsion arising from the deflated dialectic of natural-­history that Sade’s materialism implies, in which the convention of history as natural and nature as historical is displaced by the self-­generating and self-­consuming dialectic of nature as its own evacuated history. This is why there is no possibility of development in the narrative, as there is no mediation between the dialectic of natural-­history in its conventional form and the endlessness of nature as turmoil, there can only be its sudden and irreversible transition to which the reader is exposed. It is precisely the role of Justine’s virtue to provide an ideological shield to such pressure as it mediates all encounters so that their suddenness is negated. Consequently, Justine fails as a Bildungsroman not simply because Justine fails to learn anything, as her attitudes and behaviour do not change, but also because its extreme violence and didacticism makes it hard for the reader to feel engaged with Justine’s plight, or feel anything but the most generic sympathy for her, but the work (and its sequels) compels because of its attempts to pursue its ideas as far as possible, and it is this excess that is fascinating. It is thus that the libertines provide the most engaging figures as they are intent on going ever further, beyond any rational boundaries, breaking all laws and conventions, and thereby actualizing the rationale of the work itself. Thus the arguments for murder or incest are not simply developed to show that there is no essential morality that would prohibit them but also to show that thought is a force of infinite freedom as well as a source of inhuman possibilities. And by developing these arguments the text demonstrates its own ideas of transgression, which the reader then comes to experience in reading them. Hence, it is only by exposing the abuses to which such abyssal thinking leads that it can be grasped that thinking bears the possibility of its own radical undoing, which literature in turn makes real. In literature thought comes to experience its own transgression, or in Horkheimer’s words: ‘In taking fright before itself in its own mirror thinking opens a view onto that which lies beyond it’ [DA: 138/92]. It is for this reason that these books cannot be read in any straightforward sense just as they do not operate as simple pornography. Instead, there is a

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transformation of reading that occurs when sexual acts become a calculus of dispassionate permutations just as, and only insofar as, the philosophical and political discussions that occur alongside them become cumbersome, obscure, and noxious. Erotica, like political rhetoric, appears to work directly on the reader, fascinating them through the force of its images, but Sade is not content only to seduce, he wants to problematize the relation of reader to text by rendering this seduction both conceptual and appalling so that it does not occur without an equivalent repulsion and examination. Reading cannot proceed easily but nor can it not proceed; instead it becomes implicated in ideas that take on the force of physical acts and sexuality that has become a complex of abstract propositions. Like Justine, the reader is led into the darkness only to find that there is no hope of salvation, no providence, no natural order, but this is what his works unfold: a world without any resolution that the behaviour of Justine blinds her to by trying to impose a rationale on it. Sade’s novels do not follow the mode of the Bildungsroman as they invert its morality, for while his protagonists may start as inexperienced what they confront is the complete unfounding of moral orders and the supremacy of the natural in the form of pleasure. In place of a Bildungstrieb, the inner drive through which the form of an organism is progressively unfolded, Sade pursues a Verbildungstrieb, a drive towards the corruption of forms, irrespective of any hierarchy or order.6 Thus Sade’s works become toxic because the figures of whom we gain the greatest understanding are the criminals and libertines as they navigate the indeterminate borders of life and death, and pleasure and pain. Literature does not legitimize such excess (it cannot legitimize anything), instead it is the only way of interrogating it without falling prey to its madness. At this extreme literature is not pleasurable as it bears the abstract pain of extremity as such, as ‘the very ordeal of thought seeking to escape the power of unity’ [EI: 513/350]. This is the philosophical underpinning of Sade’s writing; to find a way of realizing the infinity of thought, but such realization means that it cannot remain thought, and it is by way of sexual violence that both the physicality of such a realization becomes apparent and also its singular distance from any human norms or perspectives, since it is no longer simply our thought. What Sade has discovered, and what makes his works so modern, is the pathos of

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infinity, something that Kant and Hegel both discerned but ultimately shrank back from in placing it within a framework of speculative reason. But for Sade infinity is precisely a pathos, an experience of exhilaration and torment, which is more properly what is at work in the notion of ‘sadism’. And it is because he realized that infinity was only to be understood in this form that it takes place as erotica, for in doing so infinity is not understood as an ideal transcendence but as a force of actual excess. This essay has been guided throughout by the antagonism central to Sade’s thought, between the infinity of desire and its infringement by the finitude of human actions, and it is this infringement that literature undoes (contrary to Lacan’s psychological hypostasization of this limit). So when Juliette states at the end of her narrative that philosophy should say everything, this is what has been happening in the text itself, with the critical corollary that in putting everything into words it becomes concrete, tangible, and this means that it becomes impossible to unsay it. Furthermore, to say everything is to make it actual, to bring about every possibility, whether good or bad, and to do so in the enjoyment of its irreversibility rather than its establishment: to continually cross limits from which there is no turning back, to commit to a headlong flight without reserve. This is no more than the inherent logic of Enlightenment thought taken to extremes, the daring of thought as such, which knows no limits. There is no relation in Sade’s thought, only the movement of desire, which is absolute and insatiable. Consequently, there is not a movement of desire from something to something else, no psychology. The logic that supports this movement recognizes no differences or contradictions, it is a logic of this and that, which is just the appetitive logic of a desire that wants everything. This is not simply a sexual or bodily desire but rather sheer longing, which converges on the manifest formlessness of literary space as that which comes from nowhere and goes nowhere and knows no other logic than one of going on and going further. The autonomy of literary space is, like that of desire, impelled by the constant self-­stimulation of the movements of language, thought, and the world. Sade is not a textual thinker in the sense developed by Barthes and others following him but a thinker of the immanence of literature and desire, of materiality not as exteriority in contradistinction to meaning but simply as

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a field without external limits.7 Such a thought of materiality is an experiment rather than an ontology, an active engagement with the force and energy of its transformations, its endless turmoil, to which the reader is exposed in reading Sade. While this means that thought is exposed to unreason it also means that the experience of monstrosity is thought; in reading we not only experience but understand, these acts are not simply thought but said and done. It is the nature of this tension, which is also its experience, that Sade’s texts ceaselessly explore, soliciting both thought and itself, that is, not just arousing it but also challenging it, even to the point of making it tremble. The field of literature may expose these material contortions of thinking, but thought thereby gives rise to its own praxis. The complications of this estrangement are captured in the formula that Sade tacitly proposed: what would it mean to be a friend of crime? When crime is seen in the ways that have been laid out, as a process of endless betrayal and transformation, then it comes close to the burden of the eternal return as it is discussed by Nietzsche, in that it asks the question of how such a recurrence of the same as perpetual (in)difference can be borne. These notions have been adumbrated in the episodic structure of the narrative, and also in its emphasis on criminality and especially sodomy, as Klossowski pointed out, as an endless series of acts of useless, aimless passion. But the point comes out more fully in later works by Klossowski, where he discusses this problem in relation to the thought of the conspiracy (complot), as the only form in which individuals in their solitude can come together, which is to affirm their situation in its clandestiny and thus to demonstrate their ‘friendship’ to that which knows no friends. In the face of a society that enforces moral norms of identity and behaviour the libertine individual comes to be a perverse or pathological form that secedes from identity as such, along with the meanings and goals that subtend such identities. In place of these norms the conspiracy of libertines is formed by those who act according to the eternal return of endless, pointless actions, and affirm this circulus vitiosus as their raison d’être. The political consequences of such a conspiracy are profoundly destabilizing even in their elusiveness.8 But the material abstraction of thought in Sade’s works separates his ideas from those of Nietzsche, particularly in respect to the ‘pessimism of strength’ that the latter pursues as a way to affirm a reality of endless becoming without

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the illusions of progress.9 Where Nietzsche’s thought is turned towards the futurity of the eternal recurrence as the constitutive burden of individual experience, Sade finds only the horror of an infinite expanse beset by constant turmoil. History is removed from such a model as there is no possibility that the past was or the future will be any different, instead it is replaced by a liberated materiality of perpetual recidivism. Sade’s concern is not with trying to convince the reader to embrace the freedom of libertinism directly but to provoke them to consider its necessity. This necessity is conveyed as much by the form of his writings as it is by their content; by experiencing the reality of a world of endless transformation and destruction without meaning or purpose. In doing so he reflects the scientific attitude common to his age by seeking to understand and experience this reality without shrinking from its discoveries, although he does so through an elaboration of orgies that are set up only to destroy themselves and discourses that exceed themselves as sensibility. Very much in the spirit of Diderot, although without his interest in harmony, Sade pursues an analysis of materiality through experiments in the possibilities of sexuality, and vice versa. Consequently, Sade’s writing, like Diderot’s, becomes a mode of thought in which philosophy and literature are not a priori distinct from scientific investigation. Where Kant sought to establish philosophy on the basis of excluding science by making the transcendental the only basis for critique, Sade and Diderot both begin with the empirical and then extend it by way of their literary experiments. This approach to writing arises from their materialist convictions but also shows that such materialism involves theoretical and aesthetic explications. Thought is not isolated from the empirical but engaged with it in a mutual extension and expression, the stakes of which are made apparent in the excesses that Sade uncovers, for anything less would fall short of the nonhuman implications science makes possible.10 This scientific attitude explains the position Sade appears to put forward in which the iniquity of the world is such that it is best to succumb to it in order to survive. This position is not as craven as it might seem (nor is it an elaborate version of the Stockholm Syndrome) as it arises out of a worldview akin to that of classical tragedy in which the world is seen in terms of endless and unrelieved

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suffering: there will always be corruption, violence, exploitation, and abuse, and humans will not learn from this, let alone resolve it. While Sade holds to this position in viewing suffering without equivocation or judgement he diverges from it by not seeing it as a trial to be endured but as an opportunity to uncover new experiences. If humanity lacks humanity, and if this is accepted without regret or fear, then this reality is what must be faced and this can only be done by one who relinquishes their own humanity, for once this situation is viewed without taking up a position of prioritizing human values, then it is merely what is, neither good nor bad. Sade’s characters are not sadists in the popular sense of the word since their acquiescence to a life of crime is not only due to the jouissance that this brings but also because this is the truth of the world. Hence, it is not simply a case of assimilating oneself to a corrupt world in order to remain safe but of realizing that, if this is reality, then one only evades it by attempting to place values on it. Reality viewed without illusion leads to this position, and although this conclusion may be difficult to accept its logic is sound, and it is a challenge to any other worldview that would claim that humanity exists. In terms of Sade’s extreme materialism, humanity views the world through the lens of its own parochial illusions and once this is removed the world that is exposed is not one that can be embraced joyfully or heroically, as these remain human values, instead, as has been seen, there is only the surfacing of an inhuman indifference. For better or for worse humanity views the world from its own position, Sade’s unique challenge to this was to have shown the other side, which is exposed when humanity no longer grounds our thought, and it is literature that makes such a view available to thought in the infinite material plane of a text without value or goal, endlessly extending and reconfiguring itself.

III In many ways, the most elusive problem in reading Sade is the lack of any substantial notion of time or history, everything takes place at once, immediately, without progression or development. Even though his stories take place across time, their temporality is immaterial, scenes are marked with

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changing time frames but these have no value other than to move the scene on from one state to the next.11 Although the Enlightenment was marked by its interest in social progress, this was subsumed to questions of education and cultivation, to which Sade’s responses have been made clear, whereas a thinking of history as such would only emerge with Herder and Condorcet and James Hutton, and Sade is not likely to have been aware of these ideas. Equally, while the scientific focus on materiality in its relation to questions of life and feeling would give rise to theories of evolution, these would only later become sophisticated studies of growth and adaptation. Consequently, change in Sade’s novels occurs in the form of infection and augmentation, turmoil and secretion, rather than through any kind of progressive lineation. This horizontal form of temporal extension is closer to the modes of baroque extravagance and innervation, which is why its presence appears so alien to us as readers thoroughly immersed in the historicism of material and intellectual change. But despite this lack of historical relation Sade’s libertine novels are still historical, and in a manner that emphasizes the strangeness and force with which his model of change operates. Les Cent Vingt Journées appears to be set quite precisely in the winter of 1715–16, while the narratives of Justine and Juliette take place in the period between 1765 and 1785, given internal evidence about the genuine historical characters that appear in them (although it should be recalled that for Sade historical verisimilitude was not important for novel writing). Only La Philosophie dans le Boudoir has a contemporary setting as it refers to actual events that occurred just before its publication in 1795. Thus, Sade is writing quite explicitly about a past that has passed away, a fact he often refers to in his footnotes by remarking on how things have changed since those times, and although it is not the case that these are nostalgic or melancholy narratives, there is a sense in which the characters and situations belong to a world that no longer exists, and in many ways could not return, given the moralism of the Revolution. While it is apparent that Sade is writing about the period of his youth, before he was imprisoned and time effectively stopped, more broadly, his writings concern characters whose behaviour is symptomatic of the lawlessness and corruption of the ancien régime. (A fact that may explain the profound anachronism of his thinking, which is rooted in the ancien régime but set adrift in the Revolution.) This exploration becomes stronger as Sade

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grows older, for as he becomes more removed from this time his narratives about it expand, just as they become more violent and amoral as the times become more conservative. This change suggests that he is seeking to develop a double critique, of the past by the present and vice versa, through the distance of the historical narrative, but it is also an investigation of a time that is as remote from the time of composition and publication as are the places in which these narratives are set. Consequently, Silling is not only situated at the end of the earth but also in a time that is its own form of end-­time, far removed from the present (whether of its writing, publication, or reading) in the disorder after the death of the Sun King. This extreme point is another world, which has only the most tenuous relations with what currently exists. The Revolution cast everything that occurred before it into a past that was now unreachable, an irrevocable change had taken place, and so writing about that past was not just a challenge, however implicit, to the status quo but an excursion into a period that had now become very remote, whatever the actual continuities of money, property, and power may demonstrate otherwise. This is not to claim that Sade is doing anything formally or politically challenging in writing about the past, but it does indicate the dislocation to which he is giving voice, and the effect this must necessarily have. For in looking back on a time that no longer exists, he is sketching out possibilities that his present has rejected, and in bringing these possibilities to light in literature he is seeking to make them actual, when it is no longer their time. Sade’s sense of erotic praxis means that his writings are chasing the impossibility of fully actualizing these extremes, however remote or detached they may be. This other world is that which literature announces and seeks to introduce, not despairing of its distance from the actual but issuing itself as a demand and expression of it. To understand the implications of these issues it is appropriate to turn to a particularly significant examination of political praxis that Sade’s writings have inspired, an example that is all the more powerful in the distance it takes from his work, which indicates the degree and the mode of any kind of literary work that would now attempt to respond to his thought. Aside from Pasolini’s Salò, the other major cultural response to Sade in the late twentieth century was Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter

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Anleitung des Herrn de Sade (Marat/Sade) by Peter Weiss. Unlike Pasolini, Weiss does not attempt to respond directly to Sade’s works but tries to dramatize something of his thought through a reconstruction of the figure of Sade himself. But the attempt to respond artistically to what is uncovered in Sade’s ideas is complicated by the fact that he cannot simply be read, or read simply: On the one hand it would be futile and misguided to try to dramatize his works directly, and on the other hand, any attempt to respond to his thoughts first has to negotiate their proliferation and apparent confusion. Not only that, but the writings have become overlaid by the influence of the figure of Sade himself, and the notion of sadism, both of which mean that his writings can only be responded to indirectly as it is almost impossible to read him now without such preconceptions. Nevertheless, the afterlife of any work is indicative of its impact, and although the scholarly work has shown how his writings have been received, their influence as literature remains to be thought. Understanding this impact will also indicate how the praxis of his thought is differentially actualized, and thus what this means for the challenges of reading Sade. The significance of Sade for Weiss and Pasolini would appear to arise from the way that he focuses the convergence between the violence of state power and that of artistic censorship. The fact that Sade’s works became more well-­ known in the period just after the Second World War coincided with the necessity of trying to make sense of the violence of living under fascism, which was then reflected in the way that Sade’s works themselves became the target of condemnation. It was thus possible to imagine that the violence that arose in Sade was not only a mirror of what had happened in Europe in the previous years but that the suppression and censorship that his works endured were actions brought about by the same state functions. Hence the use of Sade to concentrate arguments about the state had little to do with Sade’s works but was a way to protest against state violence while also studying it. For Weiss, the Sadean text made these possibilities critical as it provided a way of discussing violence that directed it back to its source, since the violence that erupts in his play comes from oppression and indicates its essential corruption. Consequently, the violence that is used to protest against the state is merely the reflection of the state’s own violence, which thereby confronts it with its own

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degradation in order to combat it, but this is very far from Sade’s own understanding of an open-­ended and non-­partisan corruption. Marat/Sade was first staged in 1964 and was immediately successful, being widely recognized as a major work of European theatre. Part of this acclaim was due to the staging by Peter Brook when it transferred to London and this has to be distinguished from Weiss’s own thought, which is more ambivalent and problematic. Weiss’s focus involved a doubling in the spatial and temporal dimensions of the performance that creates a greater sense of engagement with the audience rather than estranging it. In order to overcome the historical distance of his themes Weiss makes their translation the focus of his staging, as is emphasized in the title, and uses the figure of Sade as its conducting point. The play is set in the asylum at Charenton, where Sade is an inmate and where he puts on a play about the death of Marat for the entertainment of the director of the institute and his family. It is thus a play within a play, although this encapsulation is uncertain as the performance Sade is directing is frequently interrupted by protests from the audience complaining about the script or the performance. The challenging aspects of the play are also twofold, for Sade has cast the inmates in the roles of Marat and Corday and so on, but he has also written a script that is necessarily very critical given that it discusses the events of 1793 from the perspective of 1808 when the social and political situation in France had completely changed. It is through this deliberate staging that it becomes incendiary, for the inmates become very animated and seem to identify with their characters, which makes the play less a performance than a re-­enactment and it is this effect that makes the audience outraged, leading to the riot that engulfs it. Amidst all of this stands the figure of Sade who is orchestrating the events and their convulsions, since the escalating disruptions are mediated by discussions between Marat and Sade over the nature of revolutionary violence. The play within the play culminates in Marat’s death, which leads to chaos, and Weiss’s play ends in a recognition that it cannot find a conclusion as the positions of Marat and Sade are irreconcilable: even as they share many of the same views, Marat is much more radical, albeit idealistic, while Sade is more cautious, albeit nihilistic. The force of the play comes from the fact that its discussions are made concrete in the actions of the somnambulistic cast who, by enacting them,

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convey them to the audience, unleashing the tension between the bodily and the conceptual that is reflected within and between the figures of Marat and Corday, as the force of one confronts the force of the other. Marat the polemicist is ravaged by sores and confined to a bath, his intellect becoming more inflamed as his body is corrupted, while Corday the provincial virgin is overwhelmed by the revolutionary city and becomes a sensual embodiment of a passion she barely understands. Equally, Sade is both Marat’s interlocutor within the play and its director, and so it is his words that are spoken by each of the characters. The combination of these different perspectives leads to an increasing tension as the positions of the revolution are seen from within and without, and in which the idealism of Marat is apparently just as much Sade’s voice as is the scepticism that he expresses himself. This tension between the material and the ideal becomes Weiss’s focal point as the revolution cannot be separated from its material embodiments, even as these betray it in violence and self-­interest, just as the bodily passion of the revolutionaries is that which is aroused by its idealist rhetoric. It would appear that the revolution will always be betrayed by contingent material desires, which nevertheless find in the revolution a passion that will animate them in ways nothing else will equal. For Weiss in 1964, just as for Sade in 1808, the revolution is betrayed as its praxis always involves violence, but conversely, and this is the manner in which Sade’s twisted ambivalence expresses itself, there is a sense in which betrayal is itself revolutionary just as violence is its own praxis, as they each become forces of unpredictable, clandestine disruption. Thus the performance at Charenton indicates that the revolution will only ever be actualized in terms of sexuality, as it is sexualization that carries this ambivalence to its most intense degree. The revolution, like desire, is always unsatisfied as it seeks what lies beyond the here and now, within the here and now, a tension developed more fully in Weiss’s novel, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, which will be discussed in the next chapter because of what it demonstrates about the difficulties of understanding this Sadean thought of history and revolution. The distance between the events of 1793 and those of 1808 allows for a satirical element to emerge in the play (since what happened then could never happen now, a device Sade also made use of in the many asides in his novels), which makes it possible for it to remain relevant in 1964, and thereafter. But

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in the course of the play this satirical distance is dissolved by the eruption of violence, which makes it impossible to keep events at a safe distance, furthermore, it also dissolves the respective positions of Sade and Marat, their cynicism and idealism, by forcing them to confront the fact that actions take place regardless of intentions. Just as significantly, violence also makes it apparent that individual sensation is still possible amidst the homo­­ genization of sense and feeling, which ultimately leads to the all-­consuming industrialization of labour and death, to which the revolution seems to tend. In the face of this ubiquity, violence individualizes with the same force as that of sexuality, which is why these aspects are combined in the consummation of Corday’s assassination, as the character of Sade conveys in his last words before the fatal act: Marat Marat diese Gefängnisse des Innern these cells of the inner self sind schlimmer als die tiefsten are worse than the deepest stone   steinernen Verliese   dungeon und solange sie nicht geöffnet werden and as long as they are not opened bleibt all euer Aufruhr all your turmoil remains nur eine Gefängnisrevolte only a prison riot die niedergeschlagen wird to be put down von bestochenen Mitgefangenen by corrupted fellow-­prisoners12

While Weiss has made the play didactic and schematic, and has dealt with political issues much more directly than Sade, he has managed to convey something of the energy of Sade’s writings in their way of staging the interaction of thoughts and actions through explosive and unpredictable scenarios. Thus Weiss has less to say about Sade’s writings, but rather conveys their force through the form of the play and its outcome. But what remains impressive is the manner in which violence is rendered contagious and the way that thought is complicit in this effect, which suggests that the events of the play are no more than the results of the tension between thoughts and their actualization that is exacerbated by the historical and dramatic perspective. This would mean that there is no staging that does not make events uncontrollably intimate, and no way of discussing the anachronism of revolutionary violence without conveying it.

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Resistance: Forms Without End

If you are alone for a long time, have accustomed yourself to loneliness, become trained in loneliness, you discover more and more everywhere, where for the normal person there is nothing. In a wall you discover cracks, small gaps, rough patches, bugs. There is an enormous movement on the walls. Actually wall and book page are completely alike. Thomas Bernhard, 6 June 1970 The work of Weiss allows for an important transformation in the reading of Sade by removing it from its context and granting a perspective on its historical-­ ahistorical persistence. The significance of Sade’s writings lies in the endlessness of the turmoil that is described, which persistently confronts history with non-­ historical elements, thereby displacing the natural-­historical dialectic of Marxian thought into something more intransigently material. In literary terms, this model of impassive concreteness would recur in the labours of Flaubert, who was fascinated by Sade’s writings, but in his case the introduction of a socio-­historical resonance offsets its material obtrusion. It is only with more formally radical writers like Raymond Roussel and Alain Robbe-Grillet that the sense of blankness that lies in this materiality is given expression. But what is needed is to understand how this formal materiality arises from the thematics of the work, that is, how the discussions of a natural world in constant revolt can find expression in an endless parade of material suffering and abstract speculation, as is found textually in the manuscript of Les Cent Vingt Journées, for example, which appears to have been constituted as single unbroken paragraph. It is this model of nature as a ruthless tumult without end that is described in the long speech by Pope Pius VI (known by his secular name of Braschi) in Juliette, which gathers up the most extreme materialist thinking of the time into an apology for murder.

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This speech repeats much that has already been discussed but the central point comes from Braschi’s insistence that the ‘relations of humanity to nature, or of nature to humanity, are null’ [HJ: 871/767]. Creatures may derive entirely from natural generation, but this implies no privileged bond or obligation: once generated they are free to proceed as they can, nothing is prohibited or enforced, there is only the sense that if nature is to generate new forms, then what is most natural is to create space so that this can occur. The principle of life, he says, is death, but death is no more than a transition in the perpetual transformations of matter, of which crime is thus an integral part [HJ: 874/769].1 This sense of radical material independence and communication casts light on the central issue of this essay: the reason why Sade chose to write erotica of such an extreme kind, which is given form in the nature of criminal influence that preoccupies him. The manner in which this notion of crime imparts its own understanding of history can be shown through two passages that indicate its diverging aspects. At the very end of the book, after Juliette’s narration has ended, we are told that her exploits carried on for a further ten years until she died, without leaving any record of what happened in that time. Thus, just as Sade himself would insist in his request to be buried without ceremony in an unmarked grave so that all traces of him might disappear, Juliette disappeared from the world ‘as all that is brilliant vanishes from the earth’ [HJ: 1261/1193].2 However, at an earlier point, when she has been captured by the bandit Brisa-Testa and is seemingly about to be killed, Juliette issues the defiant desire that, if she should die, her criminality might continue to arise (en fissent exhumer) from her ashes and her shade might wander among mortals, poisoning them with crimes or the inspiration for crimes [HJ: 908/808]. Although these lines appear to be contradictory, they focus the sense of nature that Braschi discusses in which bodies cease to exist in particular forms but their influence carries on, materially, literally, in counsels, actions, and writings. Sade’s understanding of erotica, but also history, is grounded in this sense of criminality as a self-­propagating contagion, which allows for persistence without continuity or tradition, histoire but not history. Even if the novel itself could not encompass what occurred in Juliette’s last ten years, their existence has been announced and secreted, rendering their excess to the narrative clandestine.

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The nature of this contagion comes from the way that crime impacts on the individual. In Noirceuil’s speech about the effect of pain on the nervous system, the encounter with pain leads to a jarring resonance that conveys the sense of the event by allowing for a communication between the objective contingency of the act and its subjective echo, and it is this echo that bears the contagion of the action insofar as its resonance leads to an awareness and a need for recapitulation, as Noirceuil made clear. This sense of material resonance underlies the notion of erotic mimesis that Adorno used, but its basis is only explained in Sade in a later speech by Durand, when she speaks of the animating force of all substances as part ‘of that infinitely subtle matter whose source is in the sun [. . .] but in introducing itself into the hollows of our nerves, which is its habitual residence, it impresses such a movement on the animal machine that it makes it capable of all feelings and all their combinations’ [HJ: 666/542]. She speaks of this force as a fiery or etheric fluid like electricity but its importance lies in the way that it enables a communication between subject and object grounded in both a necessity, insofar as it is the natural force of all substances, and a contingency, insofar as it operates by way of its accidental impacts, reflecting the broader point made by Braschi that humans are derived from natural laws and yet are entirely independent in themselves. There is an objectivity to these acts of contingency that is their historical-­ahistorical actuality, which is exemplified in the fact that they are criminal acts as these allow for both freedom and its materiality, as Juliette discovered in the mental and physical jouissance of committing her first crime. Thus Sade’s critique of reason is grounded in the fact that it is crime that forms the link between freedom and necessity, and it is thus through contingency and contagion that criminal reason finds its purposeless material expression. These formulations recall Breton’s attempt to translate the materialist thought of external (natural-­historical) necessity into his own idea of objective chance, which was the focus of later Surrealist practice, as the arbitrary encounter of subjective-­objective communication, in which ‘chance is the form of manifestation of the exterior necessity that opens [se fraie] a path in the human unconscious (boldly trying to interpret and to reconcile Engels and Freud on this point)’.3 But Breton’s idealization of chance fails to grasp the concreteness intrinsic to the combination of necessity and contingency, which

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is what is found in Sadean criminality. And in doing so this sense of crime raises the question of the materiality of historical change, as was introduced in the last chapter, which is the central problem faced by Weiss in writing Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. This novel is certainly not an obvious point of reference for readers of Sade today, but as has become clear in relation to Marat/Sade, Weiss is very keenly aware of the tension between physicality and thought that marks Sade’s works, and is also concerned with the difficulty and necessity of making sense of this mute physicality in relation to contemporary suffering, which is now irrevocably related to social and historical complexes. Thus, the necessity for writing is to respond to this materiality in such a way that its form takes place through its own inherent abstraction, which only becomes more problematic in relation to genuine violence. The problem lies in the ease with which suffering is dissolved into its socio-­historical relations, and so the imperative, which Sade strangely reveals, is to find a way of conveying the singularity of suffering, its own material voice, outside of these relations. It is all the more helpful in this regard to recall the manner in which the dialectic of natural-­history is disrupted before it develops in Sade’s writings, and thereby allows for a way of approaching the dialectics of Marxian thought without rendering them absolute. Sade’s works are unique in their aesthetic toxicity, and the naked facticity of their violence, but these two aspects come together in the literal turmoil with which his writings challenge any thinking of nature and history.

I To approach a novel like Die Ästhetik des Widerstands as a work of abstraction seems counter-­intuitive as it is thoroughly constituted by historical detail of the most precise kind. Indeed, part of the project that Weiss was entering into in writing this work was one of finding a way to reconstruct the historical novel such that previously overlooked facts and experiences could be felt in their actuality.4 The pathos of such an endeavour is directly felt not just in the accumulation of details but also in the layout of the work. For the most characteristic affect of its reading is the almost overwhelming sense of being

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confronted by a never-­ending surge of detail. The first stage of reading is an encounter with the sheer density of the work as page after page of solid prose-­ blocs, like an immense unfolding wall of words. There is a sense of vertigo to this encounter, an awareness of undergoing an affect that cannot be avoided or circumscribed, that cannot be encountered piecemeal but rather must be embraced in its massiveness. From an aesthetic point of view there is a concrete doubling to the reading experience, a shifting between the extensive and intricate network of details and the developing work in its massiveness, and at the level of the latter there is an experience of abstraction. While there is a sense in which the accumulation of detail leads to the enormous mass of prose, there is also a sense in which it is the inordinate nature of the mass that first orients the reading towards its material constituents, as it is the overwhelming surfeit of prose that prevents it from being broken down into isolable parts. But this is not an experience that is abstracted into an idea as it is not lacking in material affect, rather it is an experience of an unfolding concrete expanse. The opening scene in the Berlin museum characterizes this tension, for the narrator and his companions encounter the Pergamon frieze as an array of classical figures whose roles and relations must be interpreted, but also as an all-­consuming mass of stone blocks out of and into which the sculpted figures merge and emerge. And in this encounter, they find themselves passing between being spectators to the frieze and being absorbed into its ongoing struggle: no longer outside but part of it; no longer immersed but expelled from its vicissitudes. The sense of this expanse as abstract indicates its never-­ ending nature in which its details never reach a point of fully realizing themselves as particular forms, but its concreteness indicates that this is no equivocal indeterminacy. Weiss’s attempt to reconstruct the historical novel in this work is grounded in the way that it enables a rethinking of history to be experienced as well as conceived, in order to understand that the dialectic of a history that is caught in the endless struggle between immensity and particularity is not one that presents itself innocuously. Although the narrator is drawn into the actions that surround him, there is no final point of enlightened self-­actualization, and this endlessness is there to be endured. Hence, in terms of the relation between the historical novel and the Bildungsroman, Weiss renders the movements of the narrative concrete and

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immanent rather than transcendent. While this may be a novel that is involved with nothing other than Bildung, it does so with no conceivable end in view, as the historical morass of details in which the characters are immersed affords no position from which it could be conceived from the outside, and thus at which an accomplished self-­determination could be attained. As the Pergamon frieze materially demonstrates, the struggle between the giants and the gods is the primal struggle between materiality and the transcendence of form, a struggle that is unresolved and that the concrete mass of prose-­blocs makes real in its unending contestation of representational formation: All around us the bodies rose out of the stone, crowded into groups, intertwined, or shattered into fragments, hinting at their shapes with a torso, a propped-­up arm, a burst hip, a scabbed shard, always in warlike gestures, dodging, rebounding, attacking, shielding themselves, stretched high or crooked, some of them snuffed out, but with a freestanding, forward-­pressing foot, a twisted back, the contour of a calf harnessed into a single common motion. A gigantic wrestling, emerging from the grey wall, recalling a perfection, sinking back into formlessness. A hand, stretching from the rough ground, ready to clutch, attached to the shoulder across empty surface, a barked face, with yawning cracks, a wide-­open mouth, blankly gaping eyes, the face surrounded by the flowing locks of the beard, the tempestuous folds of a garment, everything close to its weathered end and close to its origin. AW: 7/3

We are in the midst of things, a tragic, endless, embattled place. But this is the continuous present, whose continuity is constituted by human action, verbs at the limit of their extension carefully coupled to moments of reflection in a dialectic of common and individual action. Everything is at stake in these individual movements, despite the endlessness of the struggle, including its language as it strains under the tension of untrammelled movements and the passivity of its inarticulacy. No detail is insignificant inasmuch as each registers the pain of its emergence and its imminent dissolution, and inclines to the excess that is still submerged. The massiveness of the congealed energy in this passage opens out into the specificity of a linguistic moment, the gigantomachia, pauses briefly to register its historical site, its pastness, before plunging

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onwards, paradoxically revealing the continuity of that past, its unending drama, which replaces any historical precedence with a concern for its undying consequences that marks each subsequent word. The claim such language makes on the reader is very strong, for we are being challenged to hold onto the details just as we are swept along by its rhythm, hence the placing of reflective moments indicates its didactic concerns, the careful punctuation that enables us to pause and absorb before we plunge onward again, nothing should be lost and yet so much ground needs to be covered. Such an energetic opening is common to the historical narrative trope of starting from a particular event that is seen to be a microcosm of the whole and then extending outwards to take in a wider panorama, but here we are not being allowed to fall too deeply into the details of the particular nor to move on too quickly from these to the whole. The past is fixed in stone, but one to which the reader is drawn to attempt their own partial and unclear interpretations, so there is no certainty about the transition that might be made from such particular details outwards, neither in their direction nor in their possibility, for as we are thrust into its midst it becomes an event that continues despite its particularity, allowing no scope for an external perspective and yet announcing through its obscurity that it must be reinterpreted again and again. There is no safe historical position from which it can be viewed, secure in the knowledge that what is transpiring is already finished, instead, there is an opening-­out of the past that calls for the reader’s active involvement, not just to listen and to observe but to engage since this is a struggle whose outcome is not yet decided. However, the socio-­political dimensions of this struggle are nuanced by its historical situation and, moreover, by its immense material presence, which suggests that any call to arms that is emerging can only do so out of a patient exploration of the past, thereby enacting a dialectic of the historical and the political that grounds itself in the careful rhythm of the sentences from detail to reflection and back and on. Thus the novel is material insofar as it is literature, that is, not a historical record, not a documentary text, despite the fact that its constituents are the same. For in its refusal to operate as a textbook, to be reducible to its representational referents, the novel foregrounds its own materiality and composition so as to draw the reading into the uncoordinated forces of

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structuring and destructuring within history. What makes this technique engaging is that Weiss achieves this effect through an accumulation of thousands of precise details: the names of real people and places, specific dates and events, and the intricacies of the tactical and strategic debates among the various camps of the European anti-­fascist movement in the 1930s and 1940s. But as is emphasized by the title and the exemplary scenes of aesthetic discussion, these historical facts are not to be considered simply on their own terms but also as a means of conveying the actual aesthetics of resistance, whether political or historical, and, more broadly, as a resistance to representation as such. Thus, resistance, as that which is pre-­eminently resistance to representation (expropriated, imposed, or otherwise fixed), must be considered an aesthetic issue in order for it to be considered politically or historically. And this is why historical fidelity must be married to aesthetic concretion, since faithfulness to the fragmentary nature of historical truth can only be conveyed by way of a technique that insistently challenges its modes of representation. It is this mode of contestation that disrupts the possibility of becoming entirely immersed in the novel, of identifying and losing oneself in its narrative flow, for the construction of the work is too large and too complex to allow for such ready identification. Instead, the surfeit of details creates an opacity before which reading is pulled up, unable to clearly decide on a point of emphasis when there is no hierarchy of images as each point is as significant as the next. Furthermore, the narrative passes through sudden shifts in focus and style, making the position of reading uncertain and disallowing any stable perspective. There is something impassive and wayward about these great blocs of prose as their objectivity is animated by a logic that remains persistently alien, which only exacerbates the pathos of their history. The effects of reading a block of prose would seem to be unproblematically characterized by comparing it with the experience of reading conventional prose and noting what it lacks, paragraph breaks, and then showing that this lack arises from a deliberate attempt to develop a greater level of intensity in the text by granting it an uninterrupted flow. Thus, this style of writing would seem to comprise a particularly strong mode of authorial control as it appears to assert an uncompromising level of continuity and accumulation over the reading. As such, the lack of breaks can seem very forbidding since it demands

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a degree of concentration and dedication that is not commonly required for reading. The text demands this level of focus as it appears to provide no cues for its reading: it is not possible to dip into it and then pause; one has to start at the beginning and follow the author’s direction without let up, wherever and however it leads. There is a sense of arrogance or tyranny here; of the author requiring the reader to submit to the demands of the text and stripping away all aids or guides. But this is not always the case, as the lack of paragraph breaks does not prevent the modulation of the text in other ways. Consequently, the prose-­bloc is not simply an unedited tract, that is, it is not to be defined simply in contradistinction to ordinary prose forms, as it asserts an identity of its own that is characterized by its rhythm and tone. Thus it might be possible to gain a better understanding of such pieces by comparison with other forms of artwork, like music, sculpture, film, or painting. Music would seem to be the obvious parallel here, given the emphasis on continuity and accumulation, but the sheerness of the manifestation of the prose-­bloc, combined with the density of its detail, also indicates a proximity to visual art, whose form exists for close and repeated examination. In a different context, Sade himself makes such an observation in relation to the difficulty of conveying the dense and mobile materiality of sensuality, which his works nevertheless express: Ah, what an engraver would have been necessary here to transmit this divinely voluptuous scene to posterity; but lust encircled our actors too quickly and the artist perhaps would not have been given time to seize it. It is not easy for an art that lacks movement to realize an action in which movement fills its soul, and this is what makes engraving at once the most difficult and the most thankless art. HJ: 374/221–22

The significance of the prose-­bloc in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands comes from its relation to what is being addressed, which requires a level of uninterrupted dedication that is its mode of recall. These are texts that seek a way to commemorate, to bring about a form of memory in writing that is ordinarily absent and as such these are texts as modes of action: historico-­political interventions that attempt to bring about an encounter with a certain past so that it is recalled to the present, so that it is not forgotten, and to do so in such

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a way that this recall is experienced aesthetically in the form of the work itself, its sheer material expanse. Such is the basis of the allegorical opening scene, the encounter with the Pergamon frieze, which mobilizes a direct confrontation of history, politics, and art, of the very possibility of representing history politically, or politics historically. By adopting an unbroken gaze, the writer gives every element equal weight and position and places everything in an even succession, as Adorno noted in regards to the form of philosophical writing [MM: 78/71]. No extraneous structures are introduced to guide or focus the narrative; instead the account achieves a monumental quality by virtue of the immanent organization of its detail, in which all is preserved regardless of its source or merit. In the face of this totality it can be difficult to know how to read or what to focus on, and it is for this reason that Weiss makes use of motifs and rhythms to provide a way through the detail, which in turn indicates how such a path emerges from the work as a response to the demand to recall that the work is attempting to pursue. Thus the work becomes a manual for its own reading, both describing and enacting what it is seeking, and at this point Weiss’s novel approaches Sade’s writing again after diverging from it over the dialectical materiality of historical detail. But for Weiss the imperative of the novel lies in its detail, which derives from the necessity of responding to what was lost as what must be recalled, not to find it again and thereby relocate it in the present but to recall the past in its loss, to recognize its ruination as its truth. The counter tensions of doing justice to the past and writing critically for the present are thus not to be resolved but restaged, for in this way the impasse of the past is continually revisited in the work of writing such that its impassability becomes the passage of the work. In doing so the risk of melancholic fascination, of becoming lost in contemplation of the ruins of the past, is inverted by a perspective that takes these ruins as a mark of the ever-­present unfulfillment of the work to come, thus not resolving the trauma of loss but, by remarking its absence, allowing it to resonate as the site of an unfinished material expression, that which in its trauma hints towards a dimension refractory to the procession of history.5 So to understand how this alternative dimension of historical materiality is made present it is first necessary to understand how Weiss carefully sets up the actual details of the narrative, which exposes that which has not been included in this account, the

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impassive persistence of what remains outside history, which for Sade was to be found in the materiality of desire, whereas for Weiss, similarly, but necessarily divergently, it is to be found in the materiality of pain. Weiss responds to this problem as he did in Marat/Sade by a very particular configuration of different time periods. The first volume was published in 1975 and two further parts appeared in 1978 and 1981, completing the trilogy just before he died, and as a whole the novel is set in the period between 1937 and 1945. But in reading the work now the difficulties of historical writing become layered with a further level of contemporary complications. This is partly Weiss’s aim, anticipating the lasting challenge that he was giving to his readers, for in writing about the activities of anti-­fascist groups in Germany and Spain the reader is both drawn to and surprised by the similarities and disjunctions with the present time, and also that of the period and place in which it was published. Specifically, he is writing about a group of young German communists who were members of an underground resistance network coordinated by Harro Schulze-Boysen, called Die Rote Kapelle by the Gestapo, who were captured and executed in December 1942. So, while the novel looks back to their actions with a sense of respect, in that they were able to mobilize an anti-­fascist campaign from within Berlin in the early years of the war, it does so from a perspective thirty years later of knowing not only that they were doomed but also that the campaign of anti-­fascist activism would be undermined after the war by the inability of West Germany to confront its own complicities and the inability of East Germany to uphold the aspirations for workers’ liberation. The fact that a further forty years later the very idea of workers’ liberation seems intangibly remote only emphasizes the significance of Weiss’s project, for it is by way of this distance that the double vision of the past, of the fascist Germany of the 1940s and the divided Germany of the 1970s, is granted a concrete but universal significance as a marker of the passage of thought in the twentieth century. More than ever the activities of the Schulze-Boysen network seem anachronistic, for not only their past but also their future is another country, but as a result the narrative is given a greater depth, for their apparent distance from the present only makes their doomed attempts at resistance more compelling. This is exactly the point of the work, for it is by following such a marginal group that the tyranny of

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historical narrative is inverted, as the very inability of the underclass to find a pathway to its own historical representation is here dramatized in the most vivid terms, as is found conversely in the outlaw status of Sade’s libertines in their own historical moment, which bears its own critique of the present. But for Weiss the importance of these radicals is that they are crushed, that their dreams of liberation fail, since it is by turning back to the resistance that they nevertheless pursue and embody that a vision of history can be found that is not governed by greater narrative arcs but by specific instants of passion and destruction. In this way Weiss is able to turn his historical narrative back to the present so as to critically reflect and revitalize it. Thus the project of Weiss’s work is to try to address the aesthetics of this resistance: the way that resistance to representation is itself represented, and thus the way that these pathways of resistance overcome the traditional barriers to representation, both political and cultural. In describing how the former becomes the means for the latter, the novel becomes a manual for the development of such an activism, as well as an account of its inevitable limitations. This emphasis on limitation is necessary not only for the novel to be a historical account but also to take the measure of the resistance, as it is inherent to the activism of these dissidents that the forces they confront are overwhelming. Thus the novel, in attempting to respond to the demands of history and the ordeals of the activists, finds itself faced by the very same difficulties of representation, and in finding a way through these difficulties it does not lessen or resolve them but commits them to the page as the inevitable pressures from which historical resistance (resistance to history from within history) can never be disentangled. Here lies the necessity behind the endless disputes over issues of Marxist doctrine and the studious recording of real names, places, and dates. But the novel is not just a marker to these forgotten traces, as the once central disputes between the socialists and the communists in Germany after the First World War have probably never been staged in such a profoundly ahistorical manner. These are matters of life and death for their participants, not arbitrary historical curiosities, and as such they cannot be brought to conclusion or consigned to the past. Equally, the accounts of artistic and literary criticism become part of the basic need for representation demanded by the underclass, part of the drive to escape their exclusion from the cultural world. Just as was the case

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with the discourses on materialism, atheism, vice, and criminality in Sade, these vital arguments perpetually re-­enact their confrontation and resistance, the confrontation that will never end and by which resistance is maintained. These arguments take the place of the plot or characters traditionally used to construct historical narratives and it is their vitality that is ultimately being commemorated insofar as they have energized the movements of these young radicals. Even if their movements are doomed this in no way diminishes the arguments for which they were fighting, arguments that for all their intrinsic specificity are grounded in the right of contestation: the right to question, to doubt, to challenge.

II And so the novel opens with the primal scene for such chthonic resistance, the revolt of the Giants against the Olympians and their subsequent defeat, as captured in the frieze of the Pergamon Altar as a pre-­eminent work of art, that is, one that captures the polemos of labour and culture in the very production and depiction of its scene of violent suppression, which was re-­enacted by the German archaeologists who seized these antiquities for the Berlin museum. For if there is no other truth to history than endless suffering, then there is nothing other than resistance that can respond to it. All around us the bodies rose out of the stone, crowded into groups, intertwined, or shattered into fragments, hinting at their shapes with a torso, a propped-­up arm, a burst hip, a scabbed shard, always in warlike gestures, dodging, rebounding, attacking, shielding themselves, stretched high or crooked, some of them snuffed out, but with a freestanding, forward-­pressing foot, a twisted back, the contour of a calf harnessed into a single common motion.

Thus it begins, this is the first sentence and on it goes across a thousand pages, but this is not simply a cavalcade of excessive pathos, for we are thrown right into the middle of a specific narrative scene. The narrator is a constant but nameless presence throughout the novel, but here as elsewhere the emphasis is on the group; there are no individual protagonists. Although the novel features

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hundreds of characters drawn from real historical figures, except for those of the narrator and his parents, there are no specific figures that drive the plot. Moreover, these are groups united in their labour and their suffering, in their resistance, which is focused here by the impact of bodies writhing in stone, bodies that seem broken but are no less straining with passion. No time is taken with introducing this scene; we are not told that the narrator and his two friends are visiting the Pergamon Museum in Berlin; we are not told that they are standing in front of the enormous 371-foot-­long frieze that passes around the base of the altar (which is only a third of its full length). Instead, we are thrown into the scene so that we too are surrounded by these agonized forms, the call to solidarity with the reader is immediate and made in the strongest terms as the call to witness the struggle of bodies arising from stone. Bodies that speak not as characters but as groups or fragments, as more or less than individuals, striving against pain but leaping forward in attack, the two intertwined and shattered, united despite or through individual separation, bound together in the single movement of a ‘freestanding, forward-­pressing foot, a twisted back’, harnessed into their fractures. Then again in microcosm: ‘A gigantic wrestling, emerging from the grey wall, recalling a perfection, sinking back into formlessness’. This gigantomachia – the original battle of the Giants and the Olympians – draws everything into its combat; men and animals, gods and monsters, the clash of weapons against teeth and claws. This is a struggle of existence, the struggle in which for the first time there was a new time as the Olympians were the first new generation, the success of which would lead to the opening of history and the fate of the human. Thus the very gradations of being and nothing can be seen, for ‘everything [is] close to its weathered end and close to its origin’ [AW: 7/3]. Within this struggle a decision is at stake: the Olympians are here to place their mark on the Giants, to put them in bonds, and the Giants are striving to preserve their life; that which has only just emerged from the blankness of the grey wall is about to be slaughtered and imprisoned. Their pathos, their suffering and their passion, is of such a kind that it only exists in their endurance, whereas the Olympians are about to bring about the transition into change, the weight of history is about to be felt in the violent overthrow of the present by that which will call itself authority: tradition.

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But in the moment of the frieze we are held at the point of the decision: the battle is suspended, caught within its frame, in the cornice that grounds it, which is ‘perforated at only one place’ where Gaia, mother of the Giants, ‘the demoness of the earth’, rises up, one of her hands seemingly searching for the inscription on the cornice, which Coppi and Heilmann, the narrator’s two companions, try to decipher [AW: 8/4]. Drawn now into the frame of the text by the names of two characters, whose action is to try to read the script on the edge of the frame exposed by the chthonic rupture of its form, the reader is faced directly with the critical task of the writing. The allegorical nature of this opening scene is not simply obvious but necessary as it enables the writing to read itself and thus present itself; to make its historical reading present and critical. The whole basis of this possibility lies in the need to cross the border of its historical frame and to find that which marks the frame as such. But if every detail preserves the form of its expression, if each are ‘brittle fragments from which the whole could be gleaned’, then the grey wall of the text is not just a sign of its excess of detail but of the ever-­present possibility of its turmoil being muted, for in the act of writing Weiss is drawn up against the impossibility of preventing his own work from fading back into the stone [AW: 7/3]. In becoming a monument it becomes an enduring trace, but also silent, opaque; withdrawn into the massiveness of its own commemoration it has something of the tomb about it. It is out of this tomb that the text draws the burden of its writing, to speak not just of the dead, for that is inherent in all literature, but also of the doomed, of a struggle that cannot succeed insofar as it is the struggle of mortality itself. But in this struggle there is a part that does not die and that is its suffering, and it is from this suffering that there can arise a response to the ever-­present, inescapable doom. Thus, if it is a tomb, then it is one of an undying, endless death, a death played out over and over again; a struggle that endures but never wins and a dying that persists but never succeeds. Just as Sade developed a study of the infinity of desire in its struggle with the finitude of its fulfilment, Weiss attempts to develop the agony of this struggle into a dialectic of labour and suffering that leads to a certain enlightenment; hence it is with students that it begins, with their books and their desire to learn undiminished by their exclusion from formal education; hence the arguments that never end. But this

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is the point at which the dialectic seems to fail, for the work simply preserves the struggle and endlessly re-­enacts it, a struggle that is without resolution. As Fredric Jameson notes in his introduction to the novel, within the Marxist critique of historical narrative ‘the regulative idea’, as Benjamin puts it, is one in which the struggle of the workers is seen as continuous and the oppressions of the ruling classes are discontinuous.6 Only in this way is there a possibility of inverting the dominant narratives of historical progress and thereby doing justice to those whose stories and lives are suppressed. But this inversion does not take account of the endless finitude of the lives of the workers, which is what constitutes but also undermines the continuity of their history, hence, it is a question of seeking to respond to the particular instants of this struggle as points that describe a movement away from the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity. Thus Weiss takes the workers’ struggle in its depth and breadth so as to expose the points that escape from its persistence, thereby revealing precise passions that neither fully participate nor fully turn aside from the course of events, but instead seem to echo it. Among these points are the descriptions of works of art and the dreamlike excursions that the narrator pursues, and it is these too that constitute the aesthetics of the title, which because of their seeming superfluity inscribe a dimension that is irreducible to the course of history. Although these works of art are introduced as didactic stimuli for discussing the symbolic manner of bourgeois dominance, which is inverted to expose the labour and craft that subvert the dominant narrative, there is nevertheless, as the discussion of the Pergamon Altar illustrates, an opening that occurs within these discussions that turns away from the narrative. Here the pathos of the artwork is literally con-temporaneous, as the suffering and passion of history is echoed in a point that is extracted from history as a shadow of the present, a contemporaneity that persists alongside the present as a chthonic rupture, or concrete abstraction. The task of historical writing is to respond to the undying murmur of this endless suffering, which both frames and ruptures the course of history. This task becomes an encounter with a particular kind of memory, a memory not of life, but of that which is other than life, and which inscribes itself endlessly in history: pain. The practice of this memory is enacted through the reading of the Pergamon Altar by the narrator’s companions, who have a guidebook that provides

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background details about the frieze. While it depicts the victory of the Olympians over the Giants, it was commissioned by the Attalid general Eumenes II to mark his victory over the armies of Antioch III at the Battle of Magnesia in 190 BCE. Thus the book that Weiss has composed is an echo of the guidebook that Heilmann reads from, and the historical task that Heilmann encounters is one that Weiss repeats in the novel itself, which in providing this information provokes us to continue this research elsewhere. Heilmann is fourteen and he is the most learned of the group, at this point in 1937 they have not yet become involved with the Schulze-Boysen network but are taking their first steps in revolutionary training by reading and discussing omnivorously, trying to seize the education and history they have been officially denied. Thus they have come to Museum Island in Berlin where the Pergamon Altar is housed, which in an act of literal cultural upheaval was taken from its site in western Turkey by German archaeologists in the late nineteenth century and transplanted to Berlin [AW: 35–53/29–44]. Pergamon became a major cultural and economic power in the Mediterranean after the victory over Antioch III, and the defeat of the northern Celtic tribes, and it was this victory of culture over barbarism that was commemorated in the construction of the Pergamon Altar with its explicitly mythological frieze. So the contours of anguished bodies that writhe along the frieze depict not only the thousands that died to honour the reign of Eumenes II in the battles that consecrated his position, and the nameless sculptors and engineers and builders who actually made the work, but also the replication of this act of cultural domineering that took place as the altar was taken from its original site and used to consecrate a new regime in another country in a different age, again at the cost of its anonymous workers. All this is given form in the suppression of the Giants, and the self-­reflecting honour that the Olympian, Attalid, and German rulers saw in it. It is thus a conscious act of inversion for these young working-­class students to come to Museum Island to uncover the movements of the anonymous dead in the ruptures of the cultural frames of the altar. For in each individual mark in the stone of the frieze, each chip and dent and scratch, is to be found the trace of a nameless sculptor or builder, an ever-­present reminder that this is not an unequivocal act of domination and suppression but the striving and suffering of the thousands of

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unknown dead who both made this act of domination possible and also inscribed their own counter-­struggle in each mark of pain. This act of inversion is difficult to achieve for the emphasis on the violence of oppression and the assertion of authority is felt from the very beginning. In designing the frieze, the Attalid rulers turned to Hellenic myths in order to place themselves in the lineage of Athens and thereby assert a mythological authority. And the contemporary situation is little different, for as the students walk around the exhibit Nazi officers mingle with the crowd, and even today the contested history of the frieze continues. The Turkish government has attempted to have the exhibit returned to its original site outside Bergama, but the Pergamon Museum has said that the pieces should remain in Berlin as this is where they can be best preserved, that is, for the sake of the works (and the cultural history they represent) they should stay in Germany. As a result, the tourist board in Bergama have built a replica of the altar at the original site that has a sign attached to it saying that the actual work is in Berlin, mirroring the sign on the Pergamon Altar itself that indicates that it was taken from Bergama. As Coppi asks, ‘has this mass of stone now become a value in its own right, belonging to anyone who steps in front of it’ [AW: 12/8]. But within this cycle of suppression the narrative provides an alternative perspective in which the continuous/discontinuous history of the bourgeois and Marxist accounts is set aside in favour of an immersion in the battle itself. While discussing the changes in the construction and ownership of the altar and the suffering that has made this possible, the narrator and his companions have been circling the frieze that passes around its horseshoe façade, so that they have themselves experienced an inversion in which they are no longer outside the frieze but inside it, as if in a panopticon. As Heilmann points out, visitors to the museum find themselves drawn into the battle of the Giants and the Olympians in such a way that the exterior surface of the frieze becomes an enclosing wall: ‘Something the viewer was to grasp by slowly circling it was now surrounding him instead’ [AW: 15/10]. The key aspect of the frieze then becomes apparent, as it presents a single moment in the battle: there is no narrative or development in its depiction, no figure is shown more than once, all is frozen at the very moment when victory or defeat is in the balance. The execution avoids the perspective of a triumphant or disastrous

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conclusion for such an event is not present; there is no consolation here for either workers or rulers, there is only the pitched moment that is extracted from any process: the crushing blow will never reach its mark, the fallen will never finally collapse, the wounds will not cease to bleed. It is because of this image that Weiss uses it at the very beginning of his novel, for it marks the point from which he approaches the task facing the historical writer. That is, he insists on a persistently contemporary account that responds to history and its demand as that which remains outside, preserving it as the hollow of time: the endless desire or anxiety of unfulfilled action. In such finite consciousness of the infinite, the human ‘exists this nothingness’ (existe ce néant) as ‘an always future hollow’ (un creux toujours futur), in Jean Hyppolite’s words, a negativity in which the human becomes the yearning abstraction that was interior to nature as its material excess.7 This is not the past as what has been, nor is it present, it is another moment. This would indicate why the writing can only occur as an extended prose-­bloc made up of great ashlars (the stone slabs from which the frieze was constructed) of text, for although there is a narrative that emerges through the novel, it is not constructed by way of plot but by repeated slabs of unresolved conflict. In this way, the reader becomes surrounded by it, unable to bring it to conclusion or to dispel it but instead confronted by its endless demand, which remains unanswerable by virtue of the fact that it is empty, since it does not demand anything but just demands. In doing so the heroic struggle of the gigantomachia, which is governed by the arc of successful appropriation and climactic resolution, is turned towards something more concrete and mundane: not a moment of actualization but a long chthonian gaze in which there is no discovery but only an intensely focused yet empty attention. Only thus does it materially remain with its desires.

III Braschi’s discourse on murder does not stop at the point of declaring that it is good, as it enables nature to produce new forms, but typically (according to Sade’s excessive destabilization of logic) he goes on to show that it is also

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meaningless, as death is merely a stage in the endless transformation of forms. Real death would involve something different; a second death that would annihilate the possibility of regeneration and thereby bring a halt to the whole movement of nature, but this is not a power that is available to humans, however much it might be desired: to serve [nature] would require destructions more thorough . . . more complete than those we can bring about; it is atrocity, extension that she wants in crimes; the more our destructions are of this kind, the more they are agreeable to her. To serve her still better, it would be necessary to oppose the regeneration resulting in the corpses that we bury. Murder can only take away the first life of the individual that we strike; it would be necessary to strip them of the second to be still more useful to nature; it is annihilation that she wants, and it is beyond us to give to our murders all the extension she desires. HJ: 876/772

Nature as a creative force is in a double-­bind: it is only through destruction that it can create but it cannot reach complete destruction insofar as it is that which creates. The flaw in this logic is the excess to which it drives itself, which is nevertheless inherent to it and derives from the utterly meaningless force of creativity in materialist thought; no beings are valued more than any other, either singularly or as a species, and so there is no reason to favour or preserve any over any other. Hence, because total destruction is beyond reach, nature and the libertines can only proceed through endless destruction, which necessarily requires endless victims. Libertinism is Sade’s answer to the central question of materialism: how is it possible to exist in a world without essential hierarchies and whose only aim is transformation? This situation parallels that of monstrosity in eighteenth-­century thought, which is both remarkable and unremarkable, since the monster’s status as a deviation can only arise on the basis of norms that materialism denies as all beings are equally produced by chance, and yet there are prodigies, so what is the status of the extraordinary in a system that admits of no order? This problem directly informs the position of the libertines who justify their activities as natural deviations, that is, by understanding nature as deviation such that their deviations are both from nature and of nature, écarts de la

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nature, and are distinctive only insofar as their self-­awareness (the prise de conscience that Klossowski pointed out) makes them representative. Sade thus negotiates the problem of order in a materialist universe, which can no longer rely on any transcendental ground, by admitting monsters and crimes and transgressions only insofar as they do not exist as such, as now there are only disorders. The existence of victims then becomes evidence of inertia, the conventions and norms that arise through stagnation, thereby providing the imperative for the libertines’ actions. The victim as victim is necessarily faceless and anonymous, beau comme un ange in Sade’s language, while the libertines are formidably unusual and their actions indicate this excess; they demonstrate their own existence as monstrosities, as expressions and signs (monstrums) of material excess. This understanding illuminates the nature of the reader’s relation to the text, for although his novels are self-­consciously theatrical in their desire to expose this is not done entirely with a view to educate or entertain since if that were the case they would have evidently failed. Instead, the reader is conveyed through scenes of extreme sexuality and violence as experiments in annihilation, much like Zummo’s morbid Wunderkammern, not just to experience the work’s destructiveness and perversity but also its attempts to exhaust itself, to think it through to the end, in which its failure to do so brings it closer to nature. Thus this experience involves both the abstract deployment of annihilation and the inescapable resistance of its material, such that reading Sade’s works becomes an experience of the actuality of negativity as a material exhaustion without end. By comparing Sade’s writings to Weiss’s novel this material exhaustion is illuminated historically as well as stylistically. For alongside the vast and irreducible materiality of suffering, there is an awareness of the historical distance that such suffering exists in, but crucially the difference in their works arises from the status of this distance, since Weiss is writing from a post-­ revolutionary perspective, while Sade is just as emphatically situated in a pre-­ revolutionary moment. The struggle that had to be faced by writers and thinkers after 1789, and especially after 1793, was that history as such had manifested itself; it had become real and concrete in a way that had not been experienced before (as was shown by the introduction of the republican calendar, which bore a new secular metric of time). Sade comes to terms with

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this transition from a pre-­revolutionary corruption to an incipient turmoil in his call for a permanent insurrection in ‘Français encore un effort . . .’, and by the increasing emphasis on the violence of nature in La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette where the volcanism and poisonings give evidence of the incessant transformations of matter. These themes guide the view that Sade seems to take on the irruption of the revolutionary moment from out of its prefiguring situation, in that history itself emerges as a boiling senseless effervescence. Juliette summarizes this new position at the conclusion of her narrative: ‘the past encourages me, the present electrifies me, and I have little to fear for the future’ [HJ: 1257/1188]. There is no history as passage in this thought but rather its charging and explosion, in all its aimlessness and unpredictability. From a (our) post-­revolutionary perspective this historical disparity is perhaps the most difficult point to grasp as it is not just the French Revolution that irreversibly marks modern European thought but the series of revolutions that followed it, so that Sade’s pre-­revolutionary perspective and the turmoil that emerged from it will always be a lost experience. History has already inserted itself into every subsequent European thought in a way that cannot be ignored, it can never appear again as it did in 1789, as a novel phenomenon. It is this thought that infuses Die Ästhetik des Widerstands even as it struggles to turn it into praxis, and it is because of this parallel that Weiss’s novel can offer a way of bringing out the most difficult and important aspect of Sade’s materialism, its contemporary turmoil. It would perhaps have been more obvious to turn to texts that appear similar, like Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices, or Éden, Éden, Éden by Pierre Guyotat, but none of these engage the deliberate confrontation of violence and philosophy that is central to Sade’s libertine writings. Furthermore, as has been pointed out, Weiss found a form that reflected the ideas and themes he was discussing, and in doing so his work comes closest to Sade in seeking to grasp the movement of revolutionary action and its effects on people, but with the crucial distinction that his novel is configured from the moment afterwards; the fading revolutionary retention instead of its emerging protention, in Husserl’s terms. This reflection enables a greater understanding of how to bridge the gap that separates Sade’s writings from today by indicating the component that, from the perspective of current readers, is lacking. Conversely,

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Sade’s works enable a greater insight into the materialist turmoil that subtends and undermines the Marxist account of socio-­historical emergence. It is by way of history that Sade’s relation to politics becomes apparent: what was not significant to him in writing for a world without socius or destiny but only a disastrous isolation; and what has become significant as violence and cruelty are recruited to social teleologies that puts them to use in ways he would not have tolerated. In Die Ästhetik des Widerstands Weiss maps the ways in which the endless debates and struggles of its protagonists bring about an active revolutionary consciousness with a view to exposing his readers to the same, in Juliette Sade maps the ways in which his protagonist explores the possibilities of libertinism and in doing so seeks to bring the reader into this state as well. Both operate by seeking to reduce the gap between theory and practice, although in Weiss’s perspective this transition to immediacy is cut short by the historical dialectics of class struggle, except in its aesthetics, whereas for Sade, in his ahistorical perversion of Bildung, instantiation occurs through material intoxication. We should recall the impact that viewing Zummo’s sculptures had on Sade, in which it was the process of degradation and transformation that marked his perception of time. This is perhaps what is most intriguing about Sade’s works; the fact that they show a mode of change that is not historical, an immemorial alternative to a historically-­centred time, but an alternative that cannot be embraced any more than it can be recommended as it is a tumult that is not human.

Notes Introduction: Realism, Imagination and Desire Epigraph: Thomas Moore, The Journal of Thomas Moore: Volume 1, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), 94. ‘P.’ is the editor of The Morning Chronicle, James Perry. This appears to be the earliest reference in English to a notion of ‘sadism’, and it is notable that it refers to a practical application of Sade’s ideas, rather than to the later and narrower psychosexual caricature. 1 The idea that Sade’s works bear a corrupting and toxic effect is a constant in his reception from the first commentary by Jules Janin in 1834, whose sensational account did much to promote the Sade myth. As he remarks after discussing Gilles de Rais, whose crimes ceased when he died, with Sade there is no such hope: ‘these are books, and consequently crimes that will not perish’, see Le Marquis de Sade (Paris: Les marchands de nouveautés, 1834), 33. The nature of this conflation and its implications are precisely the problem to be explored here, one that is rarely addressed directly. 2 Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes XI (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 452; The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, tr. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1994), 201. Bataille also includes Blanchot in this claim. 3 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 39, 51. Whether or not Sade knew Burke’s volume, its ideas became popular across the continent as they matched the contemporary interest in sensibility in French and German thinking. And, like many of the early scholars of the sublime, Sade had also experienced the wildness of nature in his journeys through Italy. 4 John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry: 1704 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1971), 79. As Marjorie Hope Nicolson shows in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), 276–88, Dennis’s thought derives from his experience of seeing the Alps and trying to write about it. 5 Sade, Voyage d’Italie, in Œuvres complètes 16, ed. Gilbert Lely (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1967), 152: ‘In one of these cabinets one sees a sepulchre filled with an infinity of cadavers, in each of which one can observe the different gradations of

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dissolution, from the fresh cadaver up to the one that the worms have totally devoured. This bizarre idea is the work of a Sicilian named Zummo. Everything is executed in wax and naturally coloured. The impression is so strong that the senses seem to mutually inform themselves. Without realizing it one naturally covers one’s nose in considering these horrible details, which it is difficult to examine without being reminded of sinister ideas of destruction and consequently, more consolingly, of the Creator.’ Given the way this passage is reworked in Juliette the mention of the Creator merely indicates the surface Sade wished to reveal in his writings, which is removed in his anonymous, libertine works. See Georges Festa, ‘Le Voyage d’Italie de Sade: genèse d’un matérialisme visionnaire’, in Manuscrits de la révolution I, la fin de l’ancien régime, eds Béatrice Didier and Jacques Neefs (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1991), 55–72; and, Armelle St-Martin and Valerio Cantafio Casamaggi, Sade et l’Italie (Paris: Desjonquères, 2010). 6 This is the approach taken by Annie Le Brun in Sade: A Sudden Abyss, tr. Camille Naish (San Francisco: City Lights, 1990) in order to oppose the kind of reading found in Blanchot, which in focusing on the philosophical aspect of Sade’s writings apparently ignores the physical force of reading such violent and obscene works. It can be seen that this reading, although valid to a degree, given what might be called the asceticism of Blanchot’s thought (although her criticisms more accurately describe the limits of the linguistic analyses pioneered by Barthes and taken up by Philippe Roger, Béatrice Didier, and Chantal Thomas), fails to grasp that Sade’s descriptions of sexuality and violence are never simply physical but are also a challenge to thought; it is precisely this separation of the conceptual and the sensual that his writings render impossible. See also her more recent study On n’enchaîne pas les volcans (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). The partisan nature of much of the scholarship on Sade in part arises from the fact that his works cannot be approached with equanimity, but also because this response seems to give rise to an equally intense desire to make definitive statements about them. Helpful studies of these different strategies can be found in Françoise Laugaa-Traut, Lectures de Sade (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973); and, Éric Marty, Pourquoi le XXe siècle a-­t-il pris Sade au sérieux? (Paris: Seuil, 2011). 7 Kant’s essay on exalted (erhobenen) language and Derrida’s important commentary can be found in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. and tr. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), see especially, 128–38. 8 As is remarked in relation to the location of Silling, where the vocabulary of the sublime is explicitly diverted from its religious basis: ‘they had chosen a remote and isolated retreat, as if silence, distance, and stillness were the potent vehicles

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[véhicules puissants] of libertinage, and as if everything that impresses a religious terror on the senses through these qualities must evidently give an extra attraction to lust’ [CVJ: 54/43]. And then, fifteen years later, in relation to the castle of Minski, where this perversion of sense reveals its inevitable outcome: ‘it was impossible to have seen anything more wild [agreste] or more sombre, one felt at the end of the universe’ [HJ: 700/578]. 9 Benjamin, ‘Der Surrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz’, in Gesammelte Schriften II, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 306; tr. Edmund Jephcott as ‘Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927–1934, eds Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 215. 10 Jean-Paul Sartre’s comments on Surrealism in Qu’est-­ce que la littérature? (What is Literature?, tr. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1950), 133–46), expand on those he had made in his earlier reading of Bataille’s L’Expérience intérieure, where he took the opportunity to criticize Breton for the promiscuité charnelle his writings sought to establish between author and reader, see Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 145; tr. Chris Turner as Critical Essays (London: Seagull Books, 2010), 222. It is the suggestion of immediacy that Sartre finds objectionable, a suggestion writing cannot confirm, which doubly condemns it for the committed writer. 11 Evidence of this association can also be found in the notion of the great refusal taken up by Herbert Marcuse, see Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 149–50, 160, 170–71, 236, and, One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, 1991), 255–57. Although Marcuse links this thought to Blanchot and Whitehead it would appear to derive more closely from André Breton, in particular the Second Manifesto and the 1934 lecture ‘What is Surrealism?’, see Manifestoes of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 129, 186, and, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 113. 12 The most significant work in this area has been done by Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade, tr. Gillian C. Gill (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), which examines the nature of the Sadean orgy as an encounter between the taboos relating to the social body and the parodic inscription of the textual body, although her interest in the axis of anality and orality obscures what is more significant about Sade’s understanding of a jouissance without end. 13 As the editor’s afterword to Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 221–24, makes clear the chapter on Juliette was written by Horkheimer in late

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1942. Useful readings of this chapter can be found in Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism, tr. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 84–94; William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 72–85; and, most significantly, Marcel Hénaff, Violence dans la raison? Conflit et cruauté (Paris: L’Herne, 2014).

Chapter One:  Turmoil: Adorno’s Literal Reading Epigraph: Jacques Lacan, L’Éthique de la psychanalyse 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 237; tr. Dennis Porter as The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960 (London: Routledge, 1992), 201. 1 It should be noted that in the fragment preceding this one, ‘English spoken’, Adorno makes an opposing point, for in coming across books written in English when he was a child, he had the impression that they ‘were not books at all, but advertisements’ [MM: 52/47]. It says much about Adorno’s situation that encountering French gives rise to thoughts about sexuality, while English, just as incomprehensibly, gives rise to thoughts of commerce. That the lack of understanding can still be interpreted differently indicates something of the mimetic understanding of language within the specific context of Adorno’s childhood, which goes beyond mere clichés about French and English characters. 2 Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, tr. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 286–87 and 301–2. Rebecca Comay’s article, ‘Adorno avec Sade’, Differences 17.1 (2006): 6–19, is the only previous inquiry into this issue and, although it is only an outline, it has laid the ground for my own thought. 3 I have examined Adorno’s thoughts on Kafka’s and Beckett’s notions of ‘how it is’ in Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). This work also includes an extensive analysis of Adorno’s understanding of mimesis and its relation to language and artworks. 4 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, tr. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), 360–62, 532–35. Sade’s place in Foucault’s work is more extensive than might be thought, since from the studies of madness and medicine to those on policing and sexuality, by way of the relation between literature and critical philosophy, Sade remains a tacit limit-­case for the examination of the legacy of the Enlightenment. Foucault recognizes that the critique of Kantianism must take place by extending it to its furthest extremes, and

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so the work of Sade becomes the point at which this critique both realizes and problematizes itself. As Colin Koopman has stated, ‘whereas for Kant transcendental critique would describe limits that we must not tread beyond, for Foucault genealogical and archaeological critique would describe our practices of division in such a way as to call forth experimentation on what we take to be the limits of our selves’, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 16. Such a reconfiguration would not have been possible without the work of Sade. Particularly important in this regard is the idea of books as experiences that Foucault uses in an interview in 1978, in which the book is something that engages both writer and reader in a process of reflexive critique that leads to a form of desubjectification, an exposure or impasse of thinking that leaves it transformed, see ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’, tr. Robert Hurley in Power, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000), 239–46. Although he explicitly links this idea with that of Bataille’s ‘limit-­ experience’ and Blanchot’s ‘outside’, it is a historico-­political experience for Foucault, as it is linked to a moment of collective practice that refashions social ontology. Such an idea indicates the Enlightenment tendencies underlying his thinking: of rethinking libertinism as social rather than isolated. 5 Christian Skirke develops this reading of the literal in ‘Metaphysical Experience and Constitutive Error in Adorno’s “Meditations on Metaphysics” ’, Inquiry 55.3 (2012): 307–28. 6 See, Jean Marie Goulemot, Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and its Readers in Eighteenth-Century France, tr. James Simpson (Oxford: Polity, 1994); Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); and also, Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993). 7 Lacan, ‘Kant with Sade’, tr. Bruce Fink in Écrits (New York: Norton, 2006), 645–68; Slavoj Žižek, ‘Kant with (or against) Sade’, New Formations 35 (1998): 93–107, and, ‘Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple’, Lacanian Ink 13 (1998). More generally on this point see especially, Monique David-Ménard, Les Constructions de l’universel, psychanalyse, philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). Although widely referred to, Lacan’s essay is slight in both its readings of Kant and Sade, and is much less substantial than his earlier discussion in L’Éthique de la psychanalyse. Basing his reading largely on the discourses of Saint-Fond and Braschi, Lacan suggests that Sade is trapped in a fantasy of his own unachievable desires, which hypostasizes him into a figure of the law, albeit one that exceeds Kant. This reading is taken up by David Martyn in Sublime Failures: The Ethics of Kant and Sade (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), to claim that Sade, in this perverse

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Kantianism, provides the basis of a form of ethics understood as the sublime recuperation of impossible desire. As I will show, this account is not supported by any extensive reading of Sade, which instead demonstrates a much more complex and fluid dialectical relation to the law. 8 See, Joachim von der Thüsen, ‘Juliette at the Volcano: Reflections on the Sadean Journey’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 22 (1992): 87–103; and, Catherine Cusset, ‘Sade: de l’imagination libertine à l’imaginaire volcanique’, French Forum 18.2 (1993): 151–63. See also the Almani episode in La Nouvelle Justine, in Sade, Œuvres II, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 777–81. 9 Adorno, Probleme der Moralphilosophie, ed. Thomas Schröder (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 154; tr. Rodney Livingstone as Problems of Moral Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 103. 10 Adorno, ‘Die Aktualität der Philosophie’, in Philosophische Frühschriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 342; tr. Benjamin Snow as ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 37. 11 Kenosis is the Greek word for externalization (Entäußerung), which is taken up from Christian theology into Hegel’s thought in a number of ways. In particular, the manner in which God manifests itself in the body of Christ, who is then condemned to die before returning to itself, becomes transformed into the speculative movement of Spirit: ‘it is that side that does not have being-­for-itself but simple being as its essence that empties [entäußert] itself of itself, goes to its death, and as a result reconciles the absolute essence with itself. In this movement it presents itself as spirit; the abstract essence is self-­alienated, it has natural existence and self-­like actuality; this, its otherness, or its sensuous presence, is taken back through the second coming-­to-be-­other and posited as sublated, as universal; as a result, the essence has in that come to be itself; the immediate existence of actuality has ceased to be alien or external to it, since it is sublated, universal; thus, this death is its resurrection as spirit’ [PG: 415/471]. In Sade’s debased logic kenosis returns to its more literal meaning as a bodily evacuation, the passage of the body outside itself, which does not return except through its own, non-­conceptual, non-­ universal, unsublated, and unending coprophagy. Such a reconfiguration allays Blanchot’s concern that transgression is simply ‘a less compromising way of naming “transcendence” ’, see Le Pas au-­delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 41; tr. Lycette Nelson as The Step Not Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 27. 12 Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 104–5; tr. Shierry Weber Nicholsen as Notes to Literature: Volume 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 88–90. The only extensive study of the

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Surrealist response to Sade remains Svein Eirik Fauskevåg’s Sade dans le surréalisme (Paris: Éditions Privat, 1986). 13 The problems and complexity of this notion have been examined by Gordon Finlayson in ‘The Artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in Adorno’, European Journal of Philosophy 23.3 (2015): 392–419. 14 J. M. Bernstein has developed this approach in relation to the visual arts, see his studies of Picasso and Cindy Sherman in Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 281–318, and, ‘ “The Demand for Ugliness”: Picasso’s Bodies’, in Art and Aesthetics after Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 210–48. 15 As Eva Geulen writes in a reading of Adorno’s comments on Snow White in Minima Moralia, her death should not be regarded as murder but as a release from the illusions and sickness of life, and, particularly, of the sickness of living one life and sacrificing all the other possibilities. In a notably Sadean conclusion she sees this as evidence of the affinity of pleasure and death in Adorno’s thought and the dissolution of the exclusion between the facticity of life and its unlived possibilities, see ‘ “No Happiness without Fetishism”: Minima Moralia as Ars Amandi’, in Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno, ed. Renée Heberle (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 107–8. 16 Adorno, ‘Zu Subjekt und Objekt’, in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 752; tr. Henry W. Pickford as ‘On Subject and Object’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 254.

Chapter Two:  Intoxication: The Nature of Influence Epigraph: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Discours sur le bonheur, ed. John Falvey (Banbury: Voltaire Foundation, 1975), 195. 1 The reference to Spinoza only occurs in passing and is not repeated and so does not carry much weight [HJ: 195/20]. It would seem that Sade did not know Spinoza in any depth and his name was merely used as a marker of atheist thought. As well as Michel Delon’s extensive notes in the Pléiade edition, knowledge about Sade’s readings has been compiled by Hans-Ulrich Seifert, Sade. Leser und Autor (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1983); and, Alain Mothu, ‘La bibliothèque du Marquis de Sade à La Coste’, in Papiers de famille II, le Marquis de Sade et les siens (1761–1815), ed. Maurice Lever (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 592–711. There is a

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considerable philological literature on Sade’s sources and Caroline Warman, in Sade: From Materialism to Pornography (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002), provides an excellent overview of how these sources have affected the style and manner of his thinking. My only reservation about this work is that it remains at the level of a rhetorical analysis and appears sceptical about the actual philosophical substance of Sade’s thought. See also her later essay, ‘Sade et les sciences, parcours d’un engagement matérialiste’, in Sade, sciences, savoirs, et invention Romanesque, eds Adrien Paschoud and Alexandre Wenger (Paris: Éditions Hermann, 2012), 9–25. 2 As is shown in Blanchot’s review of a book on d’Holbach by Pierre Naville, see A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, tr. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 253–60. While d’Holbach’s work is marked by the antinomy of freedom and determinism common to his age, for Blanchot his thought is still a form of vulgar materialism due to his lack of awareness of this antinomy. D’Holbach is certainly a less subtle thinker than Diderot, but nevertheless it seems as if Blanchot’s response is coloured by the reading provided by Naville, whose own thought followed a trajectory from Surrealism to Trotskyism that would influence his relation to eighteenth-­century materialism. Thus, Naville adopts the view found from Lange’s History of Materialism to Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, that La Mettrie, d’Holbach, and Diderot are precursors to Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels. Consequently, although Sade is not mentioned in this article on d’Holbach, it is apparent from Blanchot’s later comments in ‘A la rencontre de Sade’ that this scepticism about materialism is behind his attempts to distinguish Sade’s thought from the ‘atheist philosophies’ and ‘the naturalist ideology’ of his time [LS: 39/31–32]. 3 See, for example, La Mettrie, Machine Man, in Machine Man and Other Writings, ed. and tr. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 14; and, Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature, tr. H. D. Robinson (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999), 88. The idea was common to many French materialists, due to the influence of Locke’s empiricism, and can also be found in Diderot [RA: 13/156]. Significantly, where these authors liken the soul to a harpsichord whose many strings are subtly plucked by environmental influences, Delbène uses a more simple and dramatic image: moral effects derive from physical causes like ‘the sound that results from a stick hitting the skin of a drum’ [HJ: 190/15]. For more background on these issues, see Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and, Sean Quinlan, ‘Shocked Sensibility: The Nerves, the Will, and Altered States in Sade’s L’Histoire de Juliette’, EighteenthCentury Fiction 25.3 (2012): 533–56.

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4 As Juliette discovers when she joins the Society of the Friends of Crime, there is a similar phenomenon in the mass orgy: ‘There was a moment when all the members of the society formed a single group; there was not one that was not active or passive and you could hear nothing but gasps and the cries of discharges’ [HJ: 574/443]. The significance of this paradigm of touched touching is confirmed by the fact that it is found, long before Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Irigaray, in a more simple form in Diderot’s Le Rêve de d’Alembert [RA: 40/178–79]. See also the analysis of flagellation in Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 315–16. However, it should also be noted that Sade feels obliged to provide specific details on the orgies that Juliette engages in, for example, at a later point he inserts a footnote to indicate exactly how many times she has been penetrated [HJ: 616–18/488–89]. Delbène’s speech draws its substance from d’Holbach’s 1768 Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe (contemporaneously attributed to Nicolas Fréret), but as Naville has shown in ‘Sade et la philosophie’, in Sade, Œuvres complètes 11, ed. Gilbert Lely (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1964), 11–23, Sade’s reading persistently takes d’Holbach’s thoughts (just as he did with those of La Mettrie) and extends them far beyond their original intentions, which remain concerned with order and morality. 5 In Le Rêve the character of Diderot proposes to demonstrate the transformation of materiality from insensibility to sensibility by making marble edible, and he does so by suggesting that if a statue was to be smashed up and its particles mixed with soil and left for some time it would become a viable source for plant growth, which could then be eaten, thus indicating the passage from the inert to the active as it becomes part of a living organism [RA: 6–7/151–52]. What is most intriguing about this image, and has not often been remarked, is that the statue that Diderot refers to is likely to be Falconet’s Pygmalion et Galatée (1763), thereby explicitly removing the Pygmalion legend from the sphere of magic and replacing its transformation of a woman from stone into flesh with a profoundly materialist and destructive alternative. 6 Diderot, ‘The Paradox of the Actor’, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, tr. Geoffrey Bremner (London: Penguin, 1994), 103–4. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe interprets this tension in terms of the hyperbolic logic that he had also uncovered in Hölderlin’s dramaturgical writings, and that he connects to the mimetic relation between art and nature, a logic I have described here as eccentric or extravagant as it extends itself horizontally to ever greater extremes through the mutually sustaining and extrapolating disparity between sensitivity and insensitivity. See, ‘Diderot: Paradox and Mimesis’, tr. Jane Popp in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 252–53.

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Aligning this disparity with that between the characters in Le Neveu de Rameau, Jean Deprun remarks that Sade is both the nephew and the philosophe, see ‘Sade philosophe’, in Sade, Œuvres I, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), lxii. (Blanchot makes a similar association between Sade and Diderot in his review of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie [EI: 299/201].) 7 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 34–35. Such thoughts about the empirical significance of pain for experience were also to be found in the writings of d’Holbach and Helvétius, see especially the latter’s De l’Homme from 1773. 8 See also the early work by Sade, ‘Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribund’, in Œuvres I, 3–4; tr. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver as ‘Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man’, in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and other writings (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 165–66. 9 This point enables a broader understanding of Sade’s method in relation to his sources: La Mettrie is cited twice in Juliette in the highest terms, and both times Sade twists the meaning of La Mettrie’s point away from mere instances in which people may find pleasure in extreme activities into an imperative that sees extremity as the guarantee of greater stimulation and truth [HJ: 648/522; 817/709–10]. Deprun has analysed these citations in ‘La Mettrie et l’immoralisme sadien’, in De Descartes au romantisme (Paris: Vrin, 1987), 127–32. 10 See Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, ed. Jean Mayer (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1964), 266: ‘Man reduced to one sense would be mad: he would remain only sensibility, the blind quality of the living molecule; nothing would be as mad as that. The wise man is simply composed of mad molecules.’ Armelle St-Martin has pointed out that the notion of maleficent molecules may owe something to Sade’s familiarity with the notion of miasmas, see ‘Sade’s System of Perversity and Italian Medicine’, in Marquis de Sade and the Scientia and Techne of Eroticism, eds Frederick Burwick and Kathryn Tucker (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 26–53. For more on the scientific background of the period of Sade’s thinking see Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, ed. Keith R. Benson, tr. Robert Ellrich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Jean Ehrard, L’Idée de nature en France à l’aube des Lumières (Paris: Flammarion, 1970); and, Delon, L’Idée d’énergie au tournant des Lumières (1770–1820) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988). 11 Mladen Kozul, ‘Le poison sadien: metaphores, sources, savoir medical’, Littérales 20 (1997): 161–76; and more generally, St-Martin, De la medicine chez Sade, disséquer la vie, narrer la mort (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010). See also Blanchot’s comments on poisoning in L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 272; tr. Ann

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Smock as The Space of Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 260. I have discussed this passage in ‘Unmade in its Image: The Spacing of the Sentence and the Exposure of Thought in Blanchot’, Textual Practice (2016). 12 As Manuel Mühlbacher explains in ‘Le libertinage du lecteur chez Sade’, Romance Studies 32.3 (2014): 194–203, the relation of the reader to Juliette parallels that of the protagonist to her tutors, where the movement towards identification with the tutor is coupled to the emergence of a radical isolation, such that the reader passes between the position of victim and libertine in relation to the text. This problematic has been discussed more broadly by Jean-Christophe Abramovici in Encre de sang, Sade écrivain (Paris: Garnier, 2013). The unavoidable implication of the reader was dubbed ‘the Sade effect’ by Michel Tort, particularly in relation to the libidinal excess of Les Cent Vingt Journées, where ‘ethical refusal becomes at the same time the sign of an incomplete reading’, see ‘L’effet Sade’, Tel Quel 28 (1967): 76. A more thoroughly materialist understanding of this effect would take into account both the rational and the moral aspects of its corruption, as I will show. 13 Written in 1769, this work was not published until 1830, although private copies circulated from 1782. Sade appears not to have been familiar with it, given the records of his readings and the inventory of his library, but it bears substantial similarities in content with d’Holbach’s Système de la nature, with which he was indirectly familiar. Much has been written about this dialogue, and some of the most useful commentaries can be found in Wilda Anderson, Diderot’s Dream (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Aram Vartanian, Science and Humanism in the French Enlightenment (Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 1999); Andrew Curran, Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001); and, Kate E. Tunstall, ‘Eyes Wide Shut: Le Rêve de d’Alembert’, in New Essays on Diderot, ed. James Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 141–57. See also, Josiane Boulad-Ayoub, ‘Diderot et d’Holbach: un système matérialiste de la nature’, Dialogue 24.1 (1985): 59–89; Natania Meeker, Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); and, Kurt Ballstadt, Diderot: Natural Philosopher (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008).

Chapter Three:  Hors-­la-loi: Blanchot and the Revolution Epigraph: Louis de Saint-Just, Rapport sur les factions de l’Etranger, et sur la conjuration ourdie par elle dans la République française, pour détruire le

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gouvernement républicain, par la corruption, et affamer Paris, 23 Ventôse II. This declaration targeted the Hébertists, who were attempting to stage an insurrection as they believed the government had failed the revolution by not being radical enough. This saying was cited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in 1947 in discussing the Moscow Trials but also inevitably referred to the purges then ongoing in Liberated Paris, see Humanism and Terror, tr. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 34. As he explains, this statement implies that ‘there is no clear-­cut boundary [frontière précise] between political divergences and objective treason’. This essay also brought Blanchot to the attention of Samuel Beckett, who was so impressed by it that he started translating it, see his letters to Georges Duthuit, Letters: Volume II, 1941–1956, ed. Dan Gunn, tr. George Craig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 210–25. It was around this time that Beckett gave up on the idea of translating Les Cent Vingt Journées, despite his admiration for Sade’s method, see John Pilling, ‘Beckett/Sade: Texts for Nothing’, in Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 117–30. Bataille, Œuvres complètes XI, 452; The Absence of Myth, 200–1. Bataille seems to have regarded Blanchot’s essay on Sade as a key work, as he returned to it again and again: in May 1949 he reviewed the version that appeared in Lautréamont et Sade, this review then provided the basis for his thinking of the sovereignty of limitless eroticism in the second volume of La Part maudite, and was used again in L’Érotisme, see, Œuvres complètes VIII (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 149–57; The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 174–84; and, Œuvres complètes X (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 166–75; Eroticism, tr. Mary Dalwood (London: Penguin, 1962), 166–76. Consider, for example, the way that the first five articles of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, which Sade would have known intimately, are perverted. On these issues see especially, Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); and, Ann Thomson, ‘French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law’, History of European Ideas 42.2 (2016): 243–55. See my reading in Aesthetics of Negativity, 199–209; the essays by Christopher Fynsk and Rodolphe Gasché in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), 34–90; and also, James Swenson, ‘Revolutionary Sentences’, Yale French Studies 93 (1998): 11–29. In fact, it is precisely in relation to the combined thoughts of Sade and Max Stirner that Blanchot orients his defence of Bataille’s understanding of community, see La

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Communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 11–12; tr. Pierre Joris as The Unavowable Community (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988), 2–3. A study of Sade and Stirner has been undertaken by Maurice Schuhmann in Die Lust und die Freiheit (Berlin: Kramer, 2007). The most important readings on Sade’s thinking of the law can be found in Hénaff, Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, tr. Xavier Callahan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Sade: Laying Down the Law’, Oxford Literary Review 6.2 (1984): 38–56; and, Philippe Mengue, L’Ordre sadien, loi et narration dans la philosophie de Sade (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1996). 6 Pierre Macherey takes this starting point for his reading of Les Cent Vingt Journées as a narrative of confinement, see The Object of Literature, tr. David Macey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 147–77. 7 Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, ed. Arnold Davidson, tr. Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003), 89–104. These points also appear more broadly in Derrida’s extensive meditations on the beast and the sovereign, which unfortunately do not treat Louis XVI or Sade. 8 Indeed, Sade makes this point very clear by explaining on the next page that ‘when one takes on such a project it is necessary, for the greatest chance of success, to employ at once the three methods I have indicated: counsels, actions, writings’ [HJ: 651/526]. The nature of this project suggests that, in terms of Sade’s own writings, erotica is to be understood more as a mode of clandestine activism than as a form of literature. 9 Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Paris: Mercure, 1978), 47–59; tr. Daniel W. Smith as Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 23–33. It is clear that Klossowski’s earlier reading of Sade guides his response to Nietzsche, and thus that Nietzsche can be seen to be developing the thought of Sade. In particular, the pathological energy of the body prefigures the mode of thinking against thought found in Nietzsche’s model of the drives, where thinking itself becomes a mere non-­sensuous thought, producing an endless series of images and fictions abstracted from the body, reflecting the tension also found in Diderot’s image of the nervous system as a spider’s web, between its indifferent centre and the extended thinking of the organs [RA: 59–60/194]. 10 Bataille’s review of Klossowski’s book appeared before Blanchot’s essay, but finds similar weaknesses in its mystical quasi-Hegelian interpretation, see Bataille, Œuvres complètes IX (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 247–50; Literature and Evil, tr. Alastair Hamilton (London: Marion Boyars, 1985), 113–16. Although Sade mon prochain had appeared in 1947 it contained articles written over the previous fifteen years and so, following the critical responses by Bataille, Blanchot, and his

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own changing thought, Klossowski brought out a revised edition in 1967 with a new introduction that abandoned his earlier mystical inclinations for an understanding of the literary basis of perversion. Ian James examines this transition in his Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of a Name (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), chapter one. Gary Banham, in ‘The Antimonies of Pure Practical Libertine Reason’, Angelaki 15.1 (2010): 13–27, gives an overview of how Klossowski’s reading of Sade responds to Kant’s antinomies of practical reason, and thereby provides the basis of Lacan’s response. 11 The place of Sade’s works in queer theory is unparalleled as he presents the first robust and unequivocal defence of homosexuality in European literature. His general understanding of gender and sexuality makes his position even more modern as he recognizes no natural differences, only preferences, which are never essential. Much more work needs to be done in this area but William F. Edmiston presents a very clear introduction in Sade: Queer Theorist (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013). 12 In his lectures of 2000, Derrida claims that Blanchot’s positioning of Sade as the writer par excellence is part of an essentializing gesture in which the right to death conforms to a logic of sacrifice, see The Death Penalty, ed. Geoffrey Bennington et al., tr. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 112–17. While valid for Derrida’s larger argument that the law is indissociably linked to the death penalty, and relevant in terms of the occasional weakness of Blanchot’s thought in this regard, raising this point in relation to ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’ (despite the qualifications he goes on to include) is closer to Kojève’s thought than it is to Blanchot’s, for whom the negativity of writing cannot be recouped in any form, and it is this that destabilizes the logic of the law from within, rather than the reverse, and which finds its exemplary (but not essential, insofar as it is contradictory) moment in the work of Sade. 13 Sade, La Nouvelle Justine, in Œuvres II, 770. See also, in Juliette, ‘the greatest misfortune that can occur in a completely corrupted world is to want to secure oneself from the general contagion’ [HJ: 673/550–51]. 14 See also, La Nouvelle Justine, in Œuvres II, 684. 15 Sade, La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, ou Les Instituteurs Immoraux, in Œuvres III, 129; tr. Joachim Neugroschel as Philosophy in the Boudoir or, The Immoral Mentors (London: Penguin, 2006), 124. For Jean-François Lyotard, in Libidinal Economy, tr. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Athlone, 1993), 83–90, this perpetual disruption marks the ‘exorbitant’ nature of Sadean economy, its irreducibility to simple exchange.

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Chapter Four:  Disorientation: The Conditions of Abstraction Epigraph: Gustave Flaubert, Œuvres de jeunesse, eds Claudine Gothot-Mersch and Guy Sagnes (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 743. Flaubert’s interest in Sade was a constant in his life, as was recognized by the Goncourts, who noted after a visit on 9 April 1861 that ‘there is truly an obsession for de Sade in Flaubert’, see Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Volume IV 1860–1861, ed. Robert Ricatte (Monaco: Éditions de L’Imprimerie Nationale, 1956), 178. Geoffrey Wall discusses this obsession in ‘Thinking with Demons: Flaubert and de Sade’, Cambridge Quarterly 36.2 (2007): 101–28. 1 Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Anmerkungen zur Antigonä’, in Sämtliche Werke 5, ed. Friedrich Beißner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1952), 270; Essays and Letters, ed. and tr. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), 330. 2 Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, tr. Paul Guyer in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 16–17. Kant cites the story of Carazan’s dream from Bremisches Magazin 4 (1761), which translated stories from English journals, in this case, ‘An Oriental Story’ by John Hawkesworth in The Adventurer: A Gentleman’s Magazine 132 (1754). ‘Schamo’ is the Chinese word for desert and in this instance probably refers to the Gobi Desert. 3 See also the description of eternity that appears at the beginning of ‘The end of all things’ [RBR: 195]. Useful readings can be found in Peter Fenves, A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 69–75; and, Jonathan Luftig, ‘Fiction, Criticism, and Transcendence: On Carazan’s Dream in Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime’, MLN 126.3 (2011): 614–29. 4 Kant, ‘Concerning the ultimate ground of the differentiation of directions in space’, in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. and tr. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 366–67. 5 Suzanne Guerlac finds a similar reflexive annihilation of the imperative as a maxim in Isidore Ducasse’s Poésies, see The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 153–81. The association with Sade arises from the fact that Lautréamont also pursues a rational evil, or evil reason, as Blanchot recognized in combining the two in Lautréamont et Sade. For more on Kant’s thought of radical evil see Jacob Rogozinski, ‘It makes us wrong: Kant and radical evil’, in Radical Evil, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1996), 29–45.

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6 Hénaff, Sade, 89–97; Josué Harari, ‘Sade’s Discourse on Method: Rudiments for a Theory of Fantasy’, MLN 99.5 (1984): 1057–71; and, Foucault, Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature, ed. Philippe Artières et al., tr. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 103–14. See also Bataille’s description of his meditative practices in Œuvres complètes V (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 137–42; Inner Experience, tr. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 119–23. Sade uses this model of repeated writing and reading in ‘Idée sur les romans’ [IR: 17–18/111–12]. 7 See especially, Peter Cryle, ‘Taking Sade Serially: Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome’, SubStance 64.1 (1991): 91–113. 8 Bataille, Œuvres complètes II (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 59, 74; ‘The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and tr. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 95; Sade, Œuvres II, 1378, this passage appears in detail in La Nouvelle Justine, in Œuvres II, 916–17. 9 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, tr. Richard Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 36–37. Later on (137) he writes that ‘Language has this property of denying, ignoring, dissociating reality: when written, shit does not have an odour [écrite, la merde ne sent pas]; Sade can inundate his partners in it, we receive not the slightest whiff, only the abstract sign of something unpleasant. So libertinage appears: a fact of language.’ As noted above, this antiseptic approach led to Le Brun’s polemic against the linguistic domestication of Sade, although the force of his writings can no more be accepted than it can be dismissed. 10 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, tr. Michael Inwood (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), §§462–63, and, Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6), ed. and tr. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 86ff.; Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 569–70; ‘The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, tr. Joseph Carpino Interpretation 3 (1973): 151. 11 Monomania was the term used for what would later be called paranoia, and was developed by Esquirol while he worked at the Salpêtrière and through visits to other asylums, including Charenton, where he would become director in 1825. Although he had met Sade at Charenton, he was not much impressed. Indeed, the diagnosis that Sade received when he arrived at Charenton in 1803 was that he was ‘in a perpetual state of libertine dementia’, a term invented for him, see the biography by Maurice Lever, Marquis de Sade, ed. and tr. Arthur Goldhammer (London: Flamingo, 1993), 508. On the numerology and cryptophilia of Sade’s thought see Philippe Sollers, ‘Sade in the Text’, tr. Philip Barnard in Writing and the Experience of Limits, ed. David Hayman (New York: Columbia University Press,

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1983), 45–62; and, Julie C. Hayes, ‘Sophistry and Displacement: The Poetics of Sade’s Ciphers’, SVEC 242 (1986): 335–43. 12 Raymond Queneau, Bâtons, chiffres, et lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 152. Similar but less direct comments are made by Albert Camus in The Rebel, tr. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1956), 46–47. Giorgio Agamben also makes this conflation in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 134–35. More generally, the relation of Sade’s thought to the bureaucratized violence of the twentieth century has been rejected by Bataille in L’Érotisme and Lacan in L’Éthique de la psychanalyse, indeed, Bataille had already spoken against this relation in a lecture from May 1947, see Œuvres complètes VII (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 376. The problems involved in Pasolini’s adoption of this relation are made clear by Foucault in his response to Salò, see Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 1998), 225–26. Barthes’s response, although more nuanced, is just as critical, see ‘Pasolini’s Salò: Sade to the Letter’, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, ed. Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1977), 64–67. Pasolini discusses the film in relation to the writings of Blanchot, Barthes, and Klossowski in Gideon Bachmann, ‘Pasolini on de Sade: An Interview during the Filming of The 120 Days of Sodom’, Film Quarterly 29.2 (1975): 39–45. While this interview provides much invaluable information about the shooting, it also shows how far removed Pasolini’s thinking is from that of Sade or Blanchot, insofar as he is pursuing his own pessimistic concerns with the relations between Marx, Freud, Catholicism, and homosexuality. The most helpful readings can be found in Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, ‘Merde Alors’, October 13 (1980): 22–35; Naomi Greene, ‘Salò: The Refusal to Consume’, in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, eds Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 232–42; and, Armando Maggi, The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), chapter four. See also David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 169–96.

Chapter Five:  Praxis: Crime and History Epigraph: Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux, 12; Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, xv. 1 The point is made explicit by Kant insofar as disinterest is not just an aesthetic attitude but also political, in fact, the disinterested participation (uneigennützige

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Teilnehmung) shown by foreign spectators to the French Revolution is seen as essential to their ability to appreciate the significance of the events without becoming enthused by them, which Kant believes is evidence of the progress of Enlightened reason, see ‘A renewed attempt to answer the question: “Is the human race continually improving?” ’, tr. H. B. Nisbet in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 182. See also Adorno, ‘Erziehung nach Auschwitz’, in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II, 686–89; tr. Henry W. Pickford as ‘Education after Auschwitz’, in Critical Models, 200–2. The topic of coldness in Adorno’s rethinking of ethics has not received as much attention as it requires; Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 396–414; and, Simon Mussell, ‘ “Pervaded by a chill”: The Dialectic of Coldness in Adorno’s Social Theory’, Thesis Eleven 117.1 (2013): 55–67, provide useful introductions but insofar as neither relate the topic to that of sensuality, the full range of its dialectical complexity is not illuminated. 2 Bataille, Œuvres complètes X, 174; Eroticism, 175. This passage mixes lines from Sade and Blanchot into Bataille’s own thoughts: while it is largely drawn from Blanchot’s essay it also includes lines from La Nouvelle Justine (Œuvres II, 950–51) as well as Juliette [LS: 29–30/21; HJ: 968/873]. A point Allan Stoekl has unfortunately missed in his Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 27–28. 3 Breton, Second manifeste du surréalisme, in Œuvres complètes I, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 782–83; Manifestoes of Surrealism, 125–26: ‘Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a dogma of absolute revolt, total insubordination, all-­out sabotage, and that it expects nothing anymore except from violence. The simplest Surrealist act consists of going down into the street, pistol in hand, and shooting at random into the crowd as much as you can. Anyone who has not, at least once, wanted in this way to put an end to the petty system of degradation and cretinization in force has his place marked out in that crowd, stomach at barrel level. The justification of such an act is, to my mind, in no way incompatible with the belief in that glow that Surrealism seeks to detect deep within us. I only wanted to reintroduce human despair here, on this side of which nothing would be able to justify this belief. It is impossible to give one’s assent to one and not to the other. Anyone pretending to adopt this belief without truly sharing this despair would in the eyes of those who know soon be taken as an enemy.’ For more on the place of crime in Sade’s thought see Brice Lévy Koumba, Sade, la littérature, le crime (Paris: Connaissances et savoirs, 2013). 4 Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis’, in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften 19. Nachträge, Verzeichnisse und Register, ed. Gunzelin

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7

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Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1996), 53; tr. Rodney Livingstone as ‘Towards a New Manifesto?’, New Left Review 65 (2010): 46. Adorno, ‘Sexualtabus und Recht heute’, in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II, 538; tr. Henry W. Pickford as ‘Sexual Taboos and Law Today’, in Critical Models, 75. For Kant, the Bildungstrieb is that which enables an organism to be both the cause and effect of itself [CPJ: §65, 244]. Corruption thereby operates in libertinism as the exploded form of this self-­excitation, as the theory and practice of desire reveals an eccentric influence of ever greater deviation. In the French context, the understanding of what would later emerge as the Bildungstrieb was provided by Buffon’s notion of the ‘inner mould’ of an organism, which was animated by its encounter with a productive force. Such a model reflects Sade’s thinking of corruption, as is found in Juliette’s responses to her tutors and the chance events of her life, which demonstrates how creativity operates horizontally for Sade, rather than vertically, it is a question of infection rather than reproduction, contingency rather than development. In his article on corruption in the Encyclopédie (volume 4 (1754): 278), d’Alembert concludes, after discussing Buffon’s understanding of accidental formation (assemblage fortuit) – by way of Aristotle’s axiom that the corruption of one thing leads to the generation of another (On Generation and Corruption, 318a25) – with the question: ‘is it demonstrated in every case that corruption can never engender a living being?’ Derrida, Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 88–89; tr. Alan Bass as Positions (London: Athlone, 1981), 65–66. It is in the same conversation, which would lead to Derrida’s break with Tel Quel, that he also expresses an interest in eighteenth-­ century ‘mechanical’ materialism (69/50). Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux, 242–49; Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 165–71, and, ‘Circulus Vitiosus’, tr. Joseph D. Kuzma The Agonist 2.1 (2009): 33–47. Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of this point can be found in Beyond Good and Evil/On the Genealogy of Morality, tr. Adrian Del Caro (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 55, where he describes the one who lives the eternal return as ‘the most exuberant, lively and world-­affirming human being who has learned to reconcile and come to terms with not only what was and is, but also wants to have it again as it was and is, for all eternity, insatiably shouting da capo not only to himself but to the whole play and performance, and not only to a performance, but at bottom to the one who needs this performance – and makes it necessary: because he needs himself again and again – and makes himself necessary’. Thus, in terms of Sade’s thinking, the libertine is the one who both needs and is needed by nature, and thereby affirms their own existence as necessary even in its contingency.

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9 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, tr. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 180. 10 Support for this understanding can be found in some remarks Blanchot makes about the weaknesses of science fiction in the face of its own peculiar demands: ‘it is odd that the literature of anticipation, outside some happy attempts, shows almost no mark of its own literary invention and nothing of the abstract force of the scientific imagination. Does this mean that it is only a puerile contamination of a simulacrum of science by a simulacrum of literature? Not at all; rather that it represents or could represent, if it accepted to become more rigorous, another path, a new form: the accomplishment of a certain labour of the spirit, an effort of thought to welcome all the possible and to submit to it by exposing itself to it’. He then goes on to make the connection to Sade more concretely by stating that science fiction is born when it starts to describe not the adventures of a future or possible humanity but those of a possible reason, see ‘Le bon usage de la science-­fiction’, La Nouvelle revue française 73 (1959): 94, 96. 11 Jean-Claude Bonnet provides an especially good reading of this issue in ‘Sade historien’, in Sade, écrire la crise, eds Michel Camus and Philippe Roger (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1983), 133–48. 12 Weiss, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade. Drama in zwei Akten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), 123–24; tr. Geoffrey Skelton and Robert Cohen as The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of Monsieur de Sade: A Drama in Two Acts, in Marat/Sade, The Investigation, and The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman, ed. Robert Cohen (London: Continuum, 1998), 106. Anne Beggs offers a very helpful overview of the issues relating to this play, see ‘Revisiting Marat/Sade: Philosophy in the Asylum, Asylum in the Theatre’, Modern Drama 56.1 (2013): 60–79.

Chapter Six:  Resistance: Forms Without End Epigraph: Thomas Bernhard, Drei Tage, in Der Italiener (München: Wilhelm Heyne, 1971), 100; tr. Laura Lindgren as 3 Days (New York: Blast Books, 2016), 100. The context for Bernhard’s discussion is that of the resistance necessary to thought and writing, and the attitude or disposition this engenders.

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1 The aleatory materialism developed in the Pope’s speech in which creatures are thrown (lancé) into existence and then abandoned to themselves is examined by Deprun as a combination of Classical atomism with contemporary vitalism, which generates its own form of diachronic transformation grounded in crime, see ‘Sade et la philosophie biologique de son temps’, in De Descartes au romantisme, 133–47. On the debate between mechanism and vitalism see Bentley Glass et al., eds, Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959); Thomas S. Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter: Studies in the History of General Physiology, Volume 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); and, Peter Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 2 Sade, ‘Testament’, Œuvres complètes 11, eds Annie Le Brun and Jean-Jacques Pauvert (Paris: Pauvert, 1991), 158–59; tr. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver as ‘Last Will and Testament’, in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and other writings, 157: ‘The pit [fosse] once covered over, acorns shall be sown above it, so that afterwards the surface of the aforesaid pit shall be replenished, and the copse become as thick as it was before, the traces of my grave disappearing from the surface of the earth, as I flatter myself that my memory shall be effaced from the minds of men.’ 3 Breton, L’Amour fou (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), 25; tr. Mary Ann Caws as Mad Love (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 23. As the use of the verb frayer makes clear, Breton is directly linking this thought to Freud’s notion of Bahnung in Jenseits des Lustprinzips, where events imprint themselves on the memory through the breaching of different neural pathways in a violence akin to that which Noirceuil had described. There is considerable uncertainty about which passage from Engels Breton was referring to, since the former makes no mention of objective chance, however, in the following passage, there is an understanding of the materialist inversion and communication at work in the relation between the mind and the world, and the basis of this relation lies in the presence of external necessity in the accidental, see Friedrich Engels, Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe. Mai 1883 bis September 1886, ed. Renate Merkel-Melis (MEGA I.30) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 149; Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941), 44: ‘dialectics reduced itself to the science of the universal laws of motion – both of the external world and of human thought – two orders of laws that are identical in substance but are different in their expression, insofar as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature, and also up to now for the most part in human history, they assert themselves in unconscious ways in the form of external necessity in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents. Thereby the

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dialectic of the concept itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world, and thus the Hegelian dialectic was placed on its head, or rather off its head, on which it was standing, and placed on its feet again’. Only the first part of Weiss’s three-­volume novel has been translated, and English-­ language commentary has been correspondingly minimal, but Klaus R. Scherpe, ‘Reading the Aesthetics of Resistance: Ten Working Theses’, tr. James Gussen New German Critique 30 (1983): 97–105; and, Robert Buch, ‘The Resistance to Pathos and the Pathos of Resistance: Peter Weiss’, Germanic Review 83.3 (2008): 241–66, offer good introductions. This novel was also a focus for a debate between Habermas and Bürger over the relation of Adorno’s aesthetics to the notion of modernity, see Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’, tr. Nicholas Walker in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on ‘The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity’, eds Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: MIT, 1997), 38–55; and, Bürger, The Decline of Modernism, 137–46. This point is missed by W. G. Sebald in ‘Die Zerknirschung des Herzens–über Erinnerung und Grausamkeit in Werk von Peter Weiss’, Orbis Litterarum 41.3 (1986): 265–78; tr. Anthea Bell as ‘The Remorse of the Heart: On Memory and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss’, in On the Natural History of Destruction (London: Random House, 2003), 171–91. Despite citing Weiss’s carefully balanced remark that writing is an attempt ‘to preserve our equilibrium among the living with all our dead within us, as we lament the dead and with our own death before our eyes’, he proceeds to valorize Weiss as a martyr to the melancholy of historical suffering, whose work sees itself ‘not only as the expression of an ephemeral wish for redemption, but as an expression of the will to be on the side of the victims at the end of time’. Not even Benjamin’s melancholy extends this far. For Weiss’s remark see the entry for 5 September 1970 in Notizbücher 1960–1971 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), volume II, 813. I have explored the relation of trauma to history in ‘Melancholy and Parapraxis: Rewriting History in Benjamin and Kafka’, MLN 123.5 (2008): 1068–87. Fredric Jameson, ‘Foreword: A Monument to Radical Instants’, in Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, xliv. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften V, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 459–60; The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 364. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, tr. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 184.

Further Reading The literature on Sade is extensive, the following is a sample of some of the most significant readings. Allison, David B., Mark S. Roberts, and Allen S. Weiss, eds, Sade and the Narrative of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Beauvoir, Simone de, ‘Must we burn Sade?’, tr. Kim Allen Gleed et al. in Political Writings, eds Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 44–101. Benrekassa, Georges, ‘Libertinage and Figurations of Desire: The Legend of a Century’, tr. Sophie Aslanides Yale French Studies 94 (1998): 29–51. Butler, Judith, ‘Beauvoir on Sade: Making Sexuality into an Ethic’, in The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 168–88. Camus, Michel, and Philippe Roger, eds, Sade, écrire la crise (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1983). Cronk, Nicholas, and Manuel Mühlbacher, eds, Sade, l’inconnu? Nouvelles approches critiques, deux cents ans après sa mort, Special Issue of Romance Studies 32.3 (2014). De Jean, Joan, Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Delers, Olivier, ‘ “Mais où est le cul?” Life and Form in Sade’s Les Infortunes de la vertu and La Nouvelle Justine’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22.4 (2010): 657–72. Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, tr. Jean McNeil in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 9–138. Delon, Michel, Le Savoir-­vivre libertin (Paris: Hachette, 2000). Didier, Béatrice, Sade, une écriture du désir (Paris: Denoël, 1976). Dubost, Jean-Pierre, ‘The Sublime Adverse and its Sadian Reverse: Kant, Sade, Schiller’, tr. Mary Lynch Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.1 (1994): 83–9. Edelman, Bernard, Sade, le désir et le droit (Paris: L’Herne, 2014). Fauskevåg, Svein Eirik, Sade ou la tentation totalitaire (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001). Faye, Jean-Pierre, ‘Changer la mort (Sade et le politique)’, Obliques 12–13 (1977): 47–57.

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Ferguson, Frances, ‘Sade and the Pornographic Legacy’, Representations 36 (1991): 1–21. Fowler, James, The Libertine’s Nemesis: The Prude in Clarissa and the ‘roman libertin’ (Oxford: Legenda, 2011). Gladfelder, Hal, ‘Machines in Love: Bodies, Souls, and Sexes in the Age of La Mettrie’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.1 (2014): 55–81. Goulemot, Jean M., ‘Sadean Novels and Pornographic Novels: Narration, its Objectives, and its Effects’, Paragraph 23 (2000): 63–74. Hayes, Julie Candler, Identity and Ideology: Diderot, Sade, and the Serious Genre (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991). Heimonet, Jean-Michel, ‘Recoil in Order to Leap Forward: Two Values of Sade in Bataille’s Text’, tr. Joaniko Kohchi Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 227–36. Hénaff, Marcel, ‘Naked Terror: Political Violence, Libertine Violence’, SubStance 86 (1998): 5–32. Keenan, Thomas, ‘Freedom, the Law of Another Fable’, Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 231–51. Kehrès, Jean-Marc, ‘Libertine Anatomies: Figures of Monstrosity in Sade’s Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu’, Eighteenth-Century Life 21.2 (1997), 100–13. Kozul, Mladen, Le Corps dans le monde, récits et espaces sadiens (Louvain: Peeters, 2005). Lauwaert, Lode, ‘Not just Free but Flesh: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Approach to Sade’s Life and Work’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 45.2 (2014): 62–74. LePage, Raymond, ‘The Interrogative Sentence as a Sadian Narrative Device in the Service of ars erotica’, Romanic Review 77.3 (1986): 243–53. Lloyd, Henry Martyn, ‘ “Je n’ai jamais vu une sensibilité comme la tienne, jamais une tête si délicieuse!” Rousseau, Sade, and Embodied Epistemology’, Intellectual History Review 25.3 (2015): 327–42. McMorran, Will, ‘Intertextuality and Urtextuality: Sade’s Justine Palimpsest’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19.4 (2007): 367–90. Michael, Colette V., ed., Sade: His Ethics and Rhetoric (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989). O’Neal, John C., ‘Sade’s Justine: A Response to the Enlightenment’s Poetics of Confusion’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 21.3 (2009): 345–56. Ost, François, Sade et la loi (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005). Parker, Kate, and Norbert Sclippa, eds, Sade’s Sensibilities (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015).

Further Reading

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Paschoud, Adrien, and Alexandre Wenger, eds, Sade, sciences, savoirs, et invention romanesque (Paris: Éditions Hermann, 2012). Paulhan, Jean, ‘The Marquis de Sade and his Accomplice’, tr. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 3–36. Perkins, Merle L., ‘Sade: The Liberty of Despotism’, SVEC 260 (1989): 112–28. Pierre, Étienne, Le Boudoir de la mort, ou l’imposture de Sade (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015). Pleynet, Marcelin, ‘The Readability of Sade’, tr. Patrick ffrench in The Tel Quel Reader, eds Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack (London: Routledge, 1998), 109–22. Roger, Philippe, Sade, la philosophie dans le pressoir (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1976). Sauvage, Emmanuelle, L’Oeil de Sade (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007). Sawhney, Deepak Narang, ed., Must We Burn Sade? (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1999). Schmidt, Lars-Henrik, The Libertine’s Nature, tr. Stacey M. Cozart and Lotte Broe (Copenhagen: Danish University of Education Press, 2005). Sclippa, Norbert, ed., Lire Sade (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). Shapiro, Michael J., ‘Eighteenth-Century Intimations of Modernity: Adam Smith and the Marquis de Sade’, Political Theory 21.2 (1993): 273–93. Shea, Louisa, ‘Sade and the Cynic Tradition’, Modern Language Quarterly 67.3 (2006): 313–31. Stewart, Susan, ‘The Marquis de Meese’, Critical Inquiry 15 (1988): 162–92. Thomas, Chantal, Sade, la dissertation et l’orgie (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 2002). Thomson, Ann, ‘L’art de jouir de La Mettrie à Sade’, in Aimer en France, 1760–1860, eds Paul Viallaneix and Jean Ehrard (Clermond-Ferrand: Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1980), 315–22. Vilmer, Jean-Baptiste Jeangène, Sade moraliste (Genève: Droz, 2005). Wynn, Thomas, ‘Violence, Vulnerability, and Subjectivity in Sade’, in Representing Violence in France 1760–1820, ed. Thomas Wynn (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013), 139–160.

Index acting, 64–5, 66, 68, 71, 76, 187 Adorno, T. W., 4, 5, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27–49, 120, 133–4, 138–41, 157, 164, 182, 185, 196–7, 200 Agamben, G., 122, 195 d’Alembert, J., 52, 197 Aristotle, 58–9, 77, 197 atheism, 22, 36, 37, 69, 81, 185, 186 Auschwitz, 107, 133–4 autoeroticism, 13, 40, 63 Bakunin, M., 21 Barthes, R., 25, 119, 125, 144, 180, 194, 195 Bataille, G., 6, 9, 20, 25, 80, 84, 86, 87, 91, 92, 115, 118–19, 122, 131, 134, 179, 181, 183, 190, 191, 194, 195, 196 Beckett, S., 32, 43, 45, 182, 190 Benjamin, W., 21, 22, 29, 46, 122–3, 124, 170, 200 Bernstein, J. M., 185, 196 betrayal/treachery, 18–19, 81, 86, 98, 100, 137, 145, 152 Bildungsroman, 32, 48, 142, 143, 159–60, 177 Blanchot, M., 4, 5, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 38, 56, 78, 79–102, 103, 104, 120, 122, 123, 131, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 188–9, 190, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198 Breton, A., 6, 22, 136, 139, 157, 181, 196, 199 Brook, P., 151 Buffon, 197 Bürger, P., 182, 200 Burke, E., 9, 66, 179, 188 causality, 60, 73, 77, 84, 111, 112 clandestiny, 25, 73, 101, 116, 145, 152, 156, 191 Comay, R., 182, 190 conspiracy, 145 contagion, 2, 14, 16, 25, 39, 56, 63, 66, 73, 77, 78, 100, 101, 125, 153, 156, 157

contingency, 2, 29, 31, 34–5, 37, 38, 41, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 61, 72, 73, 80, 81, 93, 94, 102, 107, 112, 123, 124, 138, 139, 152, 157, 197 corruption, 2, 3, 14, 15, 24, 53, 55, 56, 70, 72, 78, 90, 101–2, 126, 143, 147, 150–1, 179, 189, 197 Delon, M., 4, 185, 188 Dennis, J., 10, 179 Deprun, J., 4, 188, 199 Derrida, J., 180, 191, 192, 197 Diderot, D., 1–2, 5, 6–7, 16, 20, 24, 25, 52, 64–5, 71, 74, 75–7, 132, 133, 146, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191 Edmiston, W., 192 Engels, F., 157, 186, 199 erotica, 1, 2, 4, 23, 25, 26, 36, 40, 44, 45, 113, 122, 143, 144, 156, 191 Esquirol, J.-E., 194 evil, 37, 45, 68, 69–71, 87, 96, 106–9, 123, 193 fascism, 27, 121, 124, 125, 150 Flaubert, G., 103, 155, 193 Foucault, M., 33, 88, 182–3, 194, 195 Frappier-Mazur, L., 181 Frazer, J. G., 101 Freud, S., 21, 24, 101, 157, 195, 199 gender, 24, 58, 77, 97, 192 Geulen, E., 185 Guerlac, S., 193 Habermas, J., 200 Hegel, G. W. F., 4, 6, 20, 25, 41, 60, 82, 83, 98, 99, 100, 101, 120, 121, 122, 131, 144, 184 Helvétius, C. A., 37, 188 Hénaff, M., 182, 191, 194

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history, 8, 23, 24, 26, 38, 44, 45, 46, 48, 61, 99, 142, 146, 147–8, 155, 156, 158, 159, 162, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177 Hobbes, T., 36, 86 d’Holbach, 37, 54, 186, 187, 188, 189 Hölderlin, F., 104, 187, 193 Horkheimer, M., 5, 24, 27–8, 45, 86, 88, 127, 133, 139–40, 142, 181–2 Husserl, E., 176, 187 hyppolite, J., 173 indifference, 12, 25, 56, 64, 68, 71, 72, 76, 80, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 96, 118, 121, 132, 147, 191 infinity, 13, 14, 91, 97, 104–5, 121, 142, 143–4, 146, 147, 169, 173 Jameson, F., 170 Janin, J., 179 jouissance, 14, 24, 43, 45, 49, 93, 103, 115, 116, 117, 131, 132, 147, 157, 181 Kafka, F., 32–4, 43, 182 Kant, I., 1, 4, 6, 9, 14, 16, 19, 20, 25, 28, 37, 39, 40, 41, 45, 71, 84, 88, 91, 99, 103–13, 114, 122, 141, 144, 146, 180, 182–4, 192, 193, 195–6, 197 kenosis, 41, 184 Klossowski, P., 20, 25, 69, 79, 86, 92, 93, 94, 125, 129, 145, 175, 191–2, 195 Kojève, A., 82, 192, 194 Koopman, C., 183 Lacan, J., 27, 37, 88, 144, 183, 192, 195 Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 187 La Mettrie, J. O., 16, 37, 51, 186, 187, 188 Lautréamont, 176, 193 Le Brun, A., 180, 194 literality, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47–8, 73, 78, 80, 81, 102, 107, 156, 183 Longinus, 9, 10, 16 Louis XIV, 149 Louis XVI, 88–9, 123, 191 Lyotard, J.-F., 192 Macherey, P., 191 Machiavelli, N., 72

madness, 32, 33, 38, 39, 42, 93, 98, 105, 116, 121, 143, 194 Marat, J.-P., 151–3 Marcuse, H., 138, 139, 140, 181 Martyn, D., 183–4 Marx, K., 4, 21, 35–6, 62, 101, 138, 186, 195 Marxism, 5, 56, 95, 127, 138, 155, 158, 166, 170, 172, 177 Merleau-Ponty, M., 95–6, 118, 187, 190 mimesis, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 48, 119, 120, 157, 182, 187 monstrosity, 5, 14, 17–18, 70, 75, 77, 83, 88–9, 145, 174–5 Mühlbacher, M., 189 Naville, P., 186, 187 Nietzsche, F. W., 28, 93, 127, 129, 134, 145–6, 191, 197 number, 14, 91–2, 117 pain, 9, 35, 40, 45, 59, 65–6, 67, 72, 143, 157, 160, 165, 170, 172 Pasolini, P. P., 26, 125, 149–50, 195 poison, 14, 15, 53, 55, 61, 64, 72, 73, 135, 156, 176, 188 pornography, 29–31, 35–6, 106, 142 Proudhon, P.-J., 62 Proust, M., 33, 43 psychoanalysis, 23–4 Pygmalion, 48, 63, 187 Queneau, R., 125, 195 regicide, 109 Rétif de la Bretonne, N.-E., 106 revolutionary (figure), 19, 21, 83, 98, 99, 110 rhetoric, 9, 15, 16, 17, 74, 112, 119, 143, 152 Rousseau, J.-J., 24, 62 sadism, 45, 125, 127, 144, 150, 179 Saint-Just, L. A., 79, 189–90 St-Martin, A., 180, 188 Sartre, J.-P., 22, 82, 86, 95–6, 181 scatology, 118–20, 194 Schmitt, C., 122 Schulze-Boysen, H., 165 Sebald, W. G., 200

Index Socrates, 53 sodomy, 69, 94, 145 solitude, 18, 86, 87, 98, 104, 145 Sollers, P., 25, 194 Sorel, G., 124 sovereignty, 80, 83–4, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 109–10, 122, 123, 134, 190, 191 Spinoza, B., 54, 185 Stirner, M., 86, 87, 190–1 sublime, 8–10, 14, 15, 16, 19, 38, 39, 40, 41, 104, 115, 179, 180, 184 surrealism, 20–2, 34, 41–2, 43, 118, 136, 138, 157, 184–5, 186, 196

turmoil, 26, 46, 48, 94–5, 100, 120, 142, 145, 146, 148, 176, 177

Terror, the, 3, 81, 99, 100, 107 Tort, M., 189

Žižek, S., 37, 183 Zummo, G., 12, 175, 177, 180

207

ugliness, 43–4, 124, 140–1 utopia, 21–2, 33, 45, 46, 49, 124, 126, 139, 140 verisimilitude, 6, 8, 9, 148 volcanoes, 8, 40–1, 111, 131–2, 176, 184 Warman, C., 4, 186 Weiss, P., 26, 149–53, 155, 158–73, 175, 176, 177, 200