British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
A Different Sade: Food for Thought
Thursday, 7 June 2007
A British Academy discussion evening convened and chaired by
Marian Hobson, FBA, Queen Mary, University of London
ABOUT THIS EVENT | MEETING REPORT | PAPERS AND RESPONSES
Responses from Svein-Eirik Fauskevåg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
I would like to start by responding to the five papers I received prior to this event, and then to express some general views on the significance of Sade's works of fiction.
Katherine Astbury
You focus on Sade's modernity as a literary assessor, as a critic of the 18th century novel, and you emphasize the effectiveness of 'trauma theory' as an appropriate means to better understand the literature of the 1790s.
What struck me in particular while reading Sade's Idée sur les romans and its first version, the Avertissement, which Sade never published, is the stress he lays on the transition from what he calls the 'fadeurs', the insipidity that characterizes the representation of love in the 17th century novel, to the energetic representation of love that he finds in the literary representations that focus on the physical aspect of love.
This trend started, he says, when Ninon de Lenclos, Chaulieu, Saint-Evremond …. and others, when 'toute cette charmante société', as he puts it, began to think – as Fontenelle was later to put it – 'qu'il n'y a de bon dans l'amour que le physique'.
What is stressed here is the epicurean, libertine and naturalistic current in French literature. Sade recognizes the prolongation of this trend in Crébillon and in Marivaux, and he finds that it reaches its culminating point in Prévost.
If indeed 'modern literary critics' are 'catching up with his assessment', as you claim, is it on the basis of a similar epicurean motivation? The age in which we are now living is, as it happens, one characterised by what I would term 'pansexualism'. Sexuality has infiltrated all areas and activities of our public and private lives. The barrier of secrecy that in earlier times surrounded sex no longer constitutes even a thin veil compared to the shame and loathing that previously hid what were called the secrets d'alcôve, meaning any sexual activity that took place in the privacy of the bedroom. This was especially so with regard to those activities classified as sexual aberrations, such as sadism, masochism, fetishism and other examples of what the sexologists used to gather together under the umbrella of sexual psychopathology.
As for the importance of the idea of energy in Sade's assessment of the 18th century novel, I do not think that one should limit oneself to Sade's avowed infatuation with the Gothic novel, as you do. One should not, for example, forget the grotesque realism that links his novels to the baroque histories tragiques, especially those collections of short stories written by Jean-Pierre Camus and François de Rosset in the first half of the 17th century.
These two authors wanted their readers to acquire a deeper understanding of the existential situation of the human being in a hostile world. In my opinion, then, their short stories may be envisaged as mental images having a cognitive and didactic function. My question is thus: do the scenic representations in Sade's novel have the same function?
As for trauma theory, if it is indeed to be applied in a literary interpretation, I think this should be done in dialectical interaction with an engagement with the fictional level of Sade's novels.
Bob Gillan
Sade's works of fiction deserve a prominent place in the cultural history of Europe. In them, for the first time, we get a coherent model, a shameless image of what constitutes a discontinuity, a scandalous interruption, in our cultural continuity. Sade's novels openly display the kind of human behaviour and experiences of which we have been ashamed for centuries.
Sade's main characters have a great fascination for what is forbidden and illicit, symbolized in excrement. Amongst the various sexual perversions listed in his novels, coprophilia occupies a central place. Georges Bataille has shown that excrement entails at once repulsion and fascination. Why? It symbolizes a loss and thus prefigures the possibility of nothingness, the void and destruction. Bataille implies that to overcome a loathing for excrement is similar to overcoming a metaphysical anguish in the face of nothingness and death, thus inferring that to prevail over a repulsion for excrement is similar to an approach to the sacred. The body is conceived as the sphere wherein the sacred is revealed. I think that all this is part of a mythological approach to Sade. It has its roots in the modernism bequeathed to us by Baudelaire and the Surrealists.
What is abject motivates a deification of Sade. He becomes 'the divine marquis'. I think that your emphasis on the religious side of Sade's literary world borders on a hagiographic approach to Sade, to a supra-historical image that perverts the traditional image of the sacred understood as das ganz andere, as le tout autre. Sade is deified because of his pornographic novels and his debauched way of life, both of which are supposed to manifest a resurrection of the mythical life, and even a theophany, a manifestation of God through abjection His uniqueness is associated with the lower parts of the human body which have traditionally been banished from the hierarchy of the cultural values associated vertically with heaven and head, with what is up, as these values are codified in the linguistic system of Christianity and humanism.
In my opinion, however, Sade's literary universe does not constitute a civilization but on the contrary a technological barbarism, a spiritual desert where there exists no friendship between human beings on the one hand and nature in its material reality on the other. Human existence is conceived within a purely technical and atomic dimension and the existential question revolves less around the topic of ontological meaning and finalism than around the mode in which the anatomical mechanism of the body functions.
The existential and religious question is, accordingly, moved from the level where existence is a matter of life and death, which is where and how it is usually envisaged in our western civilization, and transferred to another level where everything is about physical energy and mechanical force. Human beings are ranked in accordance with a technological structure that identifies the human with the mechanical.
Moreover, the Sadean writings extol an egocentricity that is vehemently opposed to the idea of communion, an idea which is absolutely central to Christian anthropology and to all religious experience. In Christianity, the notion of communion stands in sharp contrast to the concept of nature advocated by Sade. In Christianity, the human being is defined in accordance with a condition at once divine and human, that is to say that the human being cannot be judged according to mathematical laws, because the significance of his individual existence extends beyond the limits of personal selfhood. All Christians are reunified in the body of Christ and thus bound together in a living community.
Libertines, on the other hand, are characterized by their anti-divine nature. They find themselves to be inexorably solitary, isolated in their ontological status, separated in an inevitable manner from one another. It is a non-communal life. In Christianity, human existence has a qualitative value: the human being is more than animals and material things. Sade is a sincere atheist, because as a result of his naturalistic ideology he regards human existence as purely quantitative.
Sadean anthropology is by no means anthropocentric as is Christian anthropology. It is lacking in the spiritual and fraternal dimension, the qualitative dimension according to which the human being owes his high dignity to his position as the spiritual axis of creation, at the top of the hierarchy of all created things and beings.
Paul Ricœur has explained the meaning of the Judeo-Christian idea of the human as a created being by referring to the predicate 'good', which in Genesis is applied to the whole of the created order: 'God saw everything that he had made, and, indeed, it was very good' (I, 31). In the Judeo-Christian tradition, he maintains, the person as a created being is placed 'in the middle of a nature regarded not as a career to be exploited, but as an object of solicitude, respect and admiration'. Extended to the whole creature, 'good' implies what Ricœur calls a 'supra-ethical dimension'. This 'supra-ethical dimension' is epitomized by the fact that the commandment to love one's neighbour also carries the implication that one must love one's enemy.
In contrast to such a requirement, Sadean materialism manifests a complete lack of interest in justifying natural objects in any ethical or 'supra-ethical' way.
Thomas Wynn
Sade uses the language of classical humanism, the language which traditionally codifies authorized truth, rational order, and Christian and humanistic values. Thus, he uses the language that traditionally expresses human dignity, what is useful and reasonable, and he does so in a repetitive way that you find creative.
On the other hand, Roland Barthes maintained in 1971 that Sade, Fourier and Loyola are the founders of a new language. They are what he calls 'des logothètes'. This is not a language of communication, but a semiotic language that sets up a kind of theatrical ritual. The linguistic process corresponds to the process that Barthes terms 'théatraliser'.
He asks himself the question: 'Qu'est-ce que théâtraliser?' And he answers himself: it is not to embellish literary representation, but to create a kind of unlimited or unbound language: 'c'est illimiter le langage'. This makes the emergence of a liberated language possible, something that happens when the ideological, intellectual or philosophical content, le signifié, is no longer perceived for its own sake, but only in terms of its status as a signifiant, le signifiant, as a semiotic form that dramatises and organizes the dissemination of a semantic void. In French this process is summarized in a single word: 'foutre', meaning 'sperm'. Foutre is a kind of dissemination, and this dissemination, Barthes implies, occurs repetitively throughout Sade's works of fiction.
Do you think that Sade's theatricality resides in a constant and purely formalist rehearsal of this semiotic dissemination?
Is it in this respect that Sade is a 'scénographe', as Barthes asserts? Is it in its function as scenography that the text becomes an object of pleasure? According to Barthes, the pleasure resides in the fragmentation and dissemination of humanistic and classical language in order to make it unrecognizable. Is this what Sade is aiming to do by means of monotonous repetitions? Does the monotony of repetition constitute a kind of ritual comparable to religious rites?
It is because of this repetitive theatricality that the reader can live with Sade, Barthes asserts: a co-existence is created between Sade, the author of the text, and its readers.
In my opinion, Sade, in his pornographic novels, drives classical language to its utmost border, using its rational structure to express a content that is at the edge of rationality, excessive and transgressive. In this way, Sade is able to give expression to what human beings have always feared: violence as a dissolving and disintegrating force within the context of life, death as a break, as a rupture in the unity of the existence. For what is rationally excessive is in itself a way of breaking up or bursting the borders of rationality, in order to overstep them.
Caroline Warman and Will McMorran
Caroline Warman is concerned with persuasion and rhetoric in relation to the themes of role-playing and acting in Sade.
What are the rhetorical strategies used by Sade to create theatricality in his novels? I am thinking especially of his predilection for the rhetoric of hypotyposis, a predilection that he has in common with so many other French novelists of the Enlightenment. The Greek word that corresponds to hypotyposis is the rhetorical concept of enargeia. According to the Latin handbooks in the tradition of Quintilian and Cicero, 'enargetic speech' is said to make a vivid appeal to the senses, in particular to sight. A recurrent phrase is: 'to bring (something) before one's eyes', in Latin: sub oculos subiecto.
The rhetoric of hypotyposis, of bringing something before the reader's eyes, is thus linked to a descriptive representation or to a scenic visualisation that brings the subject matter before the reader's eyes in a vivid way.
In this sense, theatricality in Sade should be linked to the visual, to visual clarity, and to literary description. In Greek, the technical term for description is ekphrasis. Scenic visualisation aims to lead the actual reader, just as it leads the implied reader (Will McMorran), to the feeling of being present at what is told or reported: the reader is placed as an eye-witness before the represented event.
What the literary representation thus seeks to convey, then, is not an objective or factual description, but the implied reader's perception, as an observer, of the described event.
I think that in order to actualize the lascivious education displayed in his fictions, Sade tries to make a scene or a performance visible to us as implied readers.
If all this is true, the appeal to the gaze, to seeing, is at the centre of the textual realisation of the educational project, creating a mental link to the ideology that the implied reader is required to adopt. This ideology is experimentally assumed by the author himself in order to provide us with a deeper understanding both of the ideology and of its consequences.
When Sade uses the rhetoric of hypotyposis, it is in furtherance of a single main perspective, one that pervades all his works of fiction. Being monoperspectival, they extol only one possible world, as I see it, a world that the reader is invited to assess.
Very often, a work of fiction contains several possible worlds and perhaps also several implied readers. That is to say that the actual reader may walk in and out of the different worlds and thus acquire knowledge of different fields and of different types of experience.
But Sade's fictions do not provide us with this opportunity to move between different worlds. Why? They extol a philosophical monism which is monological and monolithic. His literary statements are always dominated by a point of view that belongs to the strong, to the cruel masters. Having all the same point of view, the Sadean protagonists are but different incarnations of the same monster. Thus Sade's novels are deprived of any multiplicity or juxtaposition of perspectives; all the perspectives which they present are equivalent to one another.
My own view of the Marquis De Sade and the French Enlightenment
During the 20th century the case for accepting Sade's fictional works took the form of a threefold justification:
- their literary rehabilitation answered a demand for poetical freedom and for freedom of expression;
- their scientific rehabilitation answered a demand for psychological and historical relevance and significance;
- their philosophical rehabilitation answered a demand for the right to preach atheism
The two sexual tendencies named after Sade and Sacher-Masoch structure the main topic of the Marquis de Sade's works of fiction, justifying the pornographic outlook of his novels on the basis of a coherently developed philosophical materialism and an uncompromising atheism.
In my view, in his novels Sade explores the consequences of materialistic ideology when carried to its logical conclusion. What would human beings be like if all social and ethical conventions were swept away, if we were stripped of our religious faith and civilized appearance, being disclosed in our purely natural status as nothing but a material entity equipped with physical energy or movement? This question is the point of departure for Sade's literary experimentation with philosophical problems belonging to the fields of anthropology and ontology.
The Sadean novels present a very cynical image of natural processes devoid of any value, being nothing but a kind of vortex where the produced material forms are destroyed in order to make the creation of new forms possible. As a self-sufficient material entity, the human being is imprisoned in this cycle of oscillation between creation, destruction and new creation. The only substance that exists is matter, which is endowed with an inherent force that ensures the natural movement. The more a person is endowed with force, the stronger is his sexual drive because sexuality is the energetic expression of physical strength.
As a result of his naturalistic depersonalization and dehumanization of the human being, long before Marx, Sade divided humanity into masters and slaves, into the strong and the weak. The masters are those who are powered by natural energy, while the slaves are characterized by their inertia. They show a lack of energy, and this becomes obvious in their willingness to accept religious dogma and to trust to social and cultural conventions, which are a mere disguise invented by the strong in order to keep the weak down so that they can be used as pleasure-machines. The weak are always represented as victims. They are victims as a result of their refusal to acknowledge the terrible truth that natural life is nothing but a war waged by everybody against everybody. This is the truth that the weak hide from themselves, which they dare not face.
The consequence of this is that they fall prey to the masters' cruel quest for strong sensory stimuli and to the masters' constant desire to enhance sensuous experience. In Sade's novels the weak are tortured, hurt, dissected alive, in order to provide the strong with ever more intensified physical pleasure. The degree of pleasure can be measured in accordance with the physical harm or violence inflicted on the innocent victim and it can be calculated mathematically according to the extent of the physical damage and the number of the bodies sacrificed during each orgy. Sade's fictional universe is a purely quantitative one. Human beings are reduced to engines set in motion by sexual irritation according to their energetic capacity.
Sade's writings leave us with a radical anthropological question: what does it mean to be a human being if the spiritual and moral dimension of life is a mere illusion, nothing but a pure deceit, if sensual desire is the only real impulse, the immediate cause which prompts us to act in a legitimate manner according to the laws of nature, if the individual is nothing but an insignificant component of the causal nature of matter and of its energetic organization and evolution? In order to answer this question Sade's pornographic writings coherently draw the most radical consequences of 18th century materialism, thus showing us what humans are like when deprived of their free will, of their most respectable feelings, and of their exalted thoughts of love.
That being the case, only when we have banished a faith in God and the notion of human dignity from our lives can we truly fulfil our destiny as authentic persons. The only legitimate goal in life resides in egotistical hedonism or, in other words, in a practice based on individual pleasure as the ultimate value. What is intrinsically good resides in the maximizing of individual sensory pleasure in its most complex expression. Sexual liberalism turns into a kind of biological solipsism: the biological existence of the individual self is the only valuable reality.
In his pornographic writings the Marquis de Sade turns the general ideology which characterises the Age of Enlightenment upside-down. The better part of the French philosophers of this age linked materialism and rationalism with the idea of progress. Unlike his contemporary writers, Sade combines materialism and rationalism with the idea of violence and destruction. While his fellow novelists extolled an optimistic view of nature as a source of prosperity, welfare and well-being for all, Sade focuses on how the laws of nature can be exploited in order to stimulate the nodal-points of pleasure in the individual human body.