The United Sades of America
Hussein Ibish
[from The Baffler No. 22]
Not long after I took
refuge from the academy to work in the policy centers of Washington, I
visited one of D.C.’s landmark bookstores, Politics and Prose—a literary
venue known, as its name suggests, for furnishing customers with the
conceit that they’re browsing and shopping in a vaguely subversive
fashion. But as I walked up to join the store’s cultivated and edgy communitas,
I committed a terrible error: I asked a clerk where I might find the
works of the Marquis de Sade. My request made its way up through an
increasingly consternated group of shop assistants; I had to repeat it
several times before they fully registered what I was asking for. At
that point, I was told to leave the store immediately. The scene
concluded on a perfect grace note when I was sternly conducted to the
store’s exit by a female employee who was obviously French. It was as if
I had asked for a how-to manual for murder, kidnapping, or child
abuse—or, at a minimum, the most objectionable form of pornography.
That
scene spoke volumes about the curious legacy of Donatien Alphonse
François, Marquis de Sade, the great and demented aristocratic theorist
of unrestrained desire, in our own republic of consumer longing. Here,
in the self-regarding intellectual center of a city justly famed for the
free play of unleashed personal ambition and the basest kinds of
instrumental manipulation of others, Sade was a four-letter word. Nor
can I say that I was entirely taken aback by this reception; as I
completed work on my doctorate, my professors took me aside to warn me
that I should never attempt to teach any of Sade’s work until I was
securely tenured—and even then, they stressed, I should proceed with
enormous caution.
On one level, of course, it’s
clear enough why Sade and his work make people squeamish: that was often
his goal. To a degree not even rivaled by Sigmund Freud and other later
explorers of the id (and its indispensible partner, the sadistic
superego), Sade seemed to insist that the darkest, most destructive
urges of humanity are core elements of our nature—that the drive to
inflict pain, to dominate, even to murder, needs to be affirmed as part
of the same complex of erotic and creative desires that keep human
society viable and individuals “free.”
This is
perhaps why, despite the careful strictures against uttering his
name—let alone marketing his work—in polite consumer society, the shade
of Sade is a markedly unquiet one in our America. Like other repressed
ideas, Sade is everywhere and nowhere—indeed, there appears to be a
strong inverse proportion between the popular reach of his name and
image and actual familiarity with his writings and thought. (In an irony
that Sade himself would likely have appreciated, the only European
thinker with a similar universal-yet-unread profile in American
intellectual life is probably the great Puritan theologian John Calvin.)
It’s difficult to imagine anyone, then or now, reading Sade and experiencing profound sexual excitement.
Sade is, indeed, enough of a household
name among us that he functions as a sort of shorthand consumer brand
for transgressive naughtiness, and the outright flouting of
civilization’s taboos. He is commonly associated with sexual
sadomasochism as a commodity, and pornography in general—including the
mommy porn marketing phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey. He’s
popularly synonymous with cruelty and evil, much like the “murderous
Machiavel” of the Renaissance English-speaking world. And he is also
frequently, and reasonably, cast as the most extreme of misogynists. At
the same time, Sade is also often represented as a proto-Romantic
rebel—among the first, and certainly the most radical, protesters
against the rational certainties of Enlightenment humanism (this was
indeed the basis of the largely sympathetic portrait of Sade in Peter
Weiss’s 1963 play Marat/Sade). A bowdlerized version of Sade
has cropped up occasionally as a generic embodiment of artistic and
intellectual freedom struggling against authority and restriction—a
Larry Flynt of the eighteenth century, as it were. This was the Sade
featured, for instance, in Philip Kaufman’s 2000 film Quills.
And
this is all to say nothing, of course, about the sprawling popcult
traffic in the graphically violent genre we might dub thanato-porn: the
voyeuristic cult of invasively depicted death experiences as famously
anticipated in the 1973 J. G. Ballard novel Crash. David
Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation of Ballard’s book reveled in the
erotic allure of death while affecting to critique its exploitation, but
by now we’ve dispensed entirely with the conceit of critique;
thanato-porn now runs the gamut from the Saw movie series to Grand Theft Auto videogaming and the latest network TV spinoff of the CSI
franchise. If the point of much of Sade’s work was to marry the most
intense modes of sexual frustration and release to the practice of
interpersonal violence, he could confidently gaze out on the landscape
of our popular culture, and declare much of this project a fait
accompli.
But there was always much more to Sade
than the simple lionization of the urges to objectify and dominate—and
Sade’s legacy assuredly doesn’t end here, in the overstimulated agoras
of our media world. If we broaden the aperture a bit to take in the
official scenes of governance—a procedure that Sade himself strongly
encourages—we can also see that he haunts our political culture in all
sorts of unacknowledged ways. While many on the intellectual left have
sought to grapple with Sade more directly, Sade also exerts a suitably
perverse influence on the present-day American right. To take just one
example, elements of Sade’s thought—via an embarrassingly reductive
caricature of Nietzsche—thrive in the robust American cult of Ayn Rand.
Mitt
Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan frequently cited Rand as his most
important inspiration, and Rand’s unabashed championing of economic
elites was also echoed by Romney’s own notorious dismissal of the 47
percent of Americans who don’t earn enough money to pay income tax and
therefore needn’t be bothered with. At least one of Sade’s fictional
monsters, Roland, anticipated this Randian attack on all forms of
socially conscious responsibility to others as pathologically
self-indulgent. In Justine, Roland rebuffs Justine’s plea that
she be spared since she saved his life. “What were you doing when you
came to my rescue?” he demands. “Did you not choose [this] as an impulse
dictated by your heart? You therefore gave yourself up to a pleasure?
How in the devil’s name can you maintain I am obliged to recompense you
for the joys in which you indulge yourself?”
Similarly,
there are echoes of Sade’s celebrations of personal violence (as
opposed to the state-sponsored variety) in National Rifle Association
chief Wayne LaPierre’s infamous response to the 2012 Sandy Hook school
massacre. LaPierre suggested that the appropriate response to the
epidemic of gun violence is increased gun ownership in a country already
awash with firearms of every variety. One could easily imagine Sade
also making the argument that the only rational or natural response to
violence is additional and opposing violence—with the sole exception of
the death penalty, which he opposed with all-encompassing passion.
Indeed,
Sade’s deeply idiosyncratic views on the morality of personal violence
are probably Exhibit A for why he cannot pass muster as any kind of
guide for left-liberal cultural resistance. If we take his work at face
value, he was not opposed to individual murders. He frequently had his
characters argue that murder should not be punished by the state at all.
Yet there probably has never been a more passionate opponent of capital
punishment—the only form of premeditated homicide that normative
“rational” thought typically considers potentially justifiable. This is
Sade’s challenge to his readers in a nutshell: he specializes in
justifying the conventionally unjustifiable while absolutely and
passionately condemning what many would regard as, at least plausibly,
defensible and rational.
There is, however, a
much surer gauge of what might be called a vulgar Sadean legacy: the
mainstreaming of American porn. Pornography is now so ubiquitous in
contemporary American culture—so impossible to get away from—that the
two things one may be assured of being offered in even the cheapest
motel are pay-per-view porn on the television and a Gideon Bible in the
bedside table, should you find yourself in sudden need of one form or
the other of shameless mystification. I’m sure I’m not the only frequent
traveler who has never availed himself of either of these kindly
offerings, but they’re always there. One can’t help but imagine both
Sade and Calvin bitterly grousing, in whatever mutually disappointing
afterlife to which they’ve been jointly consigned, about how their
intellectual legacies have been downgraded into all-but-interchangeable
items of consumer convenience.
Can’t Touch This
There’s
an especially bitter irony in Sade’s image as a cheap pornographer: he
was not in any recognizable sense creating pornography at all—nor can he
be neatly pigeonholed into any other literary tradition. Sade was an
astonishingly prolific writer who produced an enormous oeuvre covering a
huge variety of genres. Much of it is mediocre to the point of being
unreadable, particularly his conventionally sentimental or comedic
dramas and stories. There seems little doubt that without his notorious
“libertine novels,” most notably Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Boudoir and, especially since its rediscovery in the early twentieth century, 120 Days of Sodom,
Sade would have been quickly forgotten. Instead, these works, and a few
others, have assured him of a profound—albeit highly contested and
unstable—artistic and intellectual influence.
Because
of the centrality of his erotic novels to his legacy, later critics
have often caricatured Sade as not only a pornographer, but as the arch-pornographer,
representing either the worst or the best of the genre. But this is
deeply misleading. Insofar as pornography is a commodity of
mass-marketed and stylized representations of sexual practices, Sade is
better seen as an anti-pornographer. His work is unquestionably
obscene, and transgressive in the extreme, but its impact is neither
conventionally pornographic nor erotic. Although much of his fiction
bears a great deal of similarity to the Gothic novel genre (of which he
was a noted and serious critic), his best work, in the “libertine”
series of fiction, is sui generis. It doesn’t correspond or submit to
the stylistic or thematic patterns established by any previous
writer—nor has it been successfully reproduced by any successor. Though
stultifyingly repetitive in themselves, Sade’s most provocative works
are simply not containable or assimilable by others. They subvert
themselves in an infinite loop of contradiction, contortion, and, in
many ways, ultimate incomprehensibility.
A
powerful strand of masochism in our political culture has pushed many
toward the overtly avaricious and predatory, and indeed sadistic,
thought of Ayn Rand.
To see how completely Sade fails to
permit even highbrow visual interpretations of his work, one need look
no further than Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, a loose adaptation of 120 Days.
As any patient reader soon discovers, Sade’s project is an exercise in
stretching, in certain very limited directions, language and imagination
(and repetition) beyond all conceivable boundaries. His images of
unimaginable, and physiologically impossible, cruelty, indulgence, and
excess belong entirely to the medium of the wordsmith. Any graphic
representation transforms Sade’s literary surplus into heavy, grounded
imagery, unmoored from the fantastical lightness of prose. It inevitably
literalizes, contains, and forestalls Sade’s overflow of deranged
fantasies and rhetorical overkill.
In Salò,
we see Sade’s scenes staged with graphically represented bodies—a
process that makes the horrible more horrible, but also much more
mundane, and empties Sade’s grotesque fantasies of all their dark humor.
Salò tries very hard to be funny, but it just can’t. By
contrast, no matter how horrible the images described by Sade’s unnamed
narrator in the first part of 120 Days, he rarely fails to
amuse. In his effete verbosity, one can almost smell the powdered wig,
see the over-rouged cheeks, and feel the faint, exasperated swishing of
the handkerchief before the face of the world-weary, jaded, and
supremely haughty late eighteenth-century aristocratic storyteller (yet
another of Sade’s outlandish fictional characters).
Because
Sade can’t be successfully reproduced, he can’t be mass-marketed.
Beyond simply being pornographic, erotic words and images require the
fetishism of branding to become viable commodities. This means there
must be a recognized set of styles of pornography—or of any commercial
genre, for that matter—that are easily reproducible and that will at
least promise the consumer some foreknowledge of the product in
question. To be successfully mass-marketed, porn is best watered down or
sprinkled into other well-established genres of fetishism, especially
what’s now called romantic fiction. Fifty Shades of Grey, for
example, boils down to an execrably written version of “Cinderella” for
our time—a familiar and reassuring fairy tale, albeit larded with a
supposedly edgy brand of erotica.
Porn
is particularly prone to sub-generic classification, for the simple
reason that it’s intended to reproduce a given set of symbolic
fantasies, some of which are already psychically or socially fetishized
before they become commodified. Hence pornographic novels or videos
within a given subgenre are not merely allowed to repeat, in effect, the
same book or film over and over again; instead they must be quite
monotonously re-created. Endless, precise, and meticulous reproduction is required
by the audience. This is, to some extent, true of any genre of popular
fiction, but porn’s commercial impulse to be innovative is even more
deeply suppressed than it is in other highly repetitive genres such as
action thrillers or romantic comedies. And even the silliest, most
repetitive genre can, under the right circumstances, open up the
possibility for real subversion of its central tropes and motifs.
Porn,
of whatever variety, seems to foreclose that prospect. It is designed
to meet an audience’s expectations and satisfy its fantasies, certainly
not to complicate them or subject them to critical examination. These
fantasies are not meant to have any broader personal, social, or
political significance, and their pornographic representations must
never imply that they do. They are presented and used as if they really
were merely ends in themselves.
In this context,
it’s painfully evident that pornography that subverts or implicitly
critiques the fantasies it reproduces—the sort of sexual writing, in
other words, that Sade specialized in, to the ruthless exclusion of
anything resembling standard-issue titillation—will fail in its overt
mission by provoking reflection rather than arousal. This would have a
self-defeating effect similar to that of an insomniac trying to remedy
his or her condition by assiduously taking notes on the experience while
trying to fall asleep. It’s difficult to imagine anyone, then or now,
reading Sade and experiencing profound sexual excitement. A plethora of
other affects are infinitely more plausible: fascination, boredom,
amazement, amusement, disgust, horror, frustration, anger, admiration,
or indifference are all more readily produced by his baroque narratives
and verbose prose style than erotic arousal.
This
effect turns up on nearly every page of the libertine novels. If we
avoid the more ghastly passages—which, believe me, is not easy—we can
see how deliberately counter-erotic Sade’s thought is by simply pointing
to his persistent predilection for the foul, as exemplified by this
passage from 120 Days: “Beauty, health never strike one save in
a simple way; ugliness, degradation deal a far stouter blow, the
commotion they create is much stronger, the resultant agitation must
hence be more lively. . . . [A]n immense crowd of people prefer to take
their pleasure with an aged, ugly, and even stinking crone and will
refuse a fresh and pretty girl.” The description of the crone Fanchon
that follows makes the point even more vividly. And the murder of
Augustine in Part the Fourth is virtually unreadable, and unsurpassed in
its unmitigated horror.
Sade not only invites
the reader to reflect on the nature and origins of the sexual acts,
deviations, and perversions that he so exhaustively catalogues, he
demands it. And he insists that they have profound philosophical and
political implications. Commercial porn, since at least the late
nineteenth century, has been based on the most straightforward possible
commodity fetishism, and is not only intended, but fully expected, to
mask the power relations it represents. By contrast, Sade’s best work
coldly and unflinchingly lays bare those relations—but only for
sustained consideration, not in any neatly programmatic prescriptive or
political schema.
Far from presenting any
actionable or even coherent model for liberation, Sade’s work resists
the reader’s effort to draw any stable conclusion at all. For good or
ill, Sade cannot be appropriated politically, or even philosophically,
because of the internal inconsistencies, incongruities, and
contradictions that make up the core of his thinking and writing. He
raises an infinite loop of questions, but neither offers nor allows any
answers.
The Cunning of Unreason
If
we cannot view Sade as an apostle of political deliverance or personal
liberation, he nevertheless was far ahead of his time, in subject matter
if nothing else. His writings anticipate a huge cross-section of
twentieth-century Western art, scholarship, and politics. Indeed, we
could reasonably posit that his work laid the cornerstone for the entire
anti-humanist project. Surely Sade’s most important contribution, at
its high point, lay in dragging Enlightenment reason to absurdist
logical conclusions, spelling out the method of its implosion, and
anticipating the backlash against it that culminated in the sixties and
seventies. What he bequeathed us was nothing less than a slow-growing
but highly malignant, if not terminal, cancer buried deep in the corpus
of Enlightenment rationalism.
It’s impossible to
know whether Sade—who was almost certainly mentally ill for much of his
life, if not for all of it—deliberately sabotaged the Enlightenment by
ruthlessly parodying it or really held the philosophical and political
convictions his characters voice ad nauseam. They appear to champion
reason, based on quasi-philosophical sophistry, but their arguments seem
deeply arbitrary and profoundly irrational. Whether Sade intended to
create a systematic satire of the philosophies of Rousseau and Kant or
sought simply to take the logic of the laws of nature and the
categorical imperative to their unsustainable conclusions in a mad
trajectory of narcissism and self-gratification, his writings delved one
yard below the mines of the Enlightenment’s humanist conceits, even
though his own ordnance exploded more than a century later.
All
of Sade’s major works pursue—and, indeed, relentlessly repeat—his
anti-Enlightenment arguments. But he airs them most compellingly in the
demented and appalling, but also absurd and hilarious, introduction to 120 Days,
and, above all, in the claims made by its leading character, the Duc de
Blangis. They are further elaborated in a lengthy polemical pamphlet,
“Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans,” that
Sade shoves incongruously into the middle of Philosophy in the Boudoir
by simply having its leading character, Dolmancé, read it aloud to the
other characters. The pamphlet, she tells them, argues that “murder is a
horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is
essential to tolerate in a republican State.”
Insofar
as they can be coherently summarized, Sade’s monstrous antiheroes’
ideas—constantly restated—are of a piece with such horrific broadsides.
If one laid them side by side, their message would amount to this:
individual liberty and autonomy are absolute; anything that interferes
with the use of an object (including another human being) to satisfy
one’s caprices, whatever they might be, is immoral; human impulses of
all kinds, including theft, rape, and murder are the dictates of
“nature,” and hence no law should forbid them; private property is an
intolerable evil as it deprives others of that property’s use, thwarting
their “natural inclinations”; religions, especially Christianity, are
monstrous evils designed to justify the repression of individuals’
“natural rights”; atheism of the most iconoclastic variety is,
therefore, the only defensible religious attitude; and the accumulation
of power by elites should be constantly and violently resisted by
bloodthirsty and “immoral” citizens eager to defend their individual
prerogatives by smashing any social or political institution that might
restrain them.
This logic explains Sade’s
apparent defense of murder but passionate opposition to the death
penalty. Individual murders are “natural,” because the blood-thirsty
impulses behind them arise spontaneously from organic being. Therefore,
it is tyranny to punish them. The state, however, is an artificial and
inorganic structure that has no vital being in nature—and it therefore
has no right to take a life, even under the most extreme circumstances.
It is natural for individuals to objectify each other for whatever
purpose, but it is intolerable for the state or any inorganic
institution to do so. In short, Sade created a reductio ad absurdum
of Enlightenment rationality that—as the limitations of reason became
increasingly apparent toward the end of the nineteenth century and
throughout the twentieth—became increasingly powerful.
It
is, of course, extremely difficult to know to what extent Sade agreed
with these precepts, though he goes to great lengths to encourage
readers to assume that he does. In Philosophy in the Boudoir,
some characters accuse Dolmancé of being the secret author of “Yet
Another Effort,” a sly suggestion that identifies the author with the
character, and both with the pamphlet’s arguments. In 120 Days,
Sade uses similar feints with Blangis, who is often cast as an ironic
self-portrait of the author. The novel even makes reference to “the
brave Marquis de S*** who, when informed of the magistrates’ decision to
burn him in effigy, pulled his prick from his breeches and exclaimed:
‘God be fucked, it has taken them years to do it, but it’s achieved at
last; covered with opprobrium and infamy, am I? Oh, leave me, for I’ve
got absolutely to discharge’; and he did so in less time than it takes
to tell.”
Such self-distancing irony again raises
the question of authorial intent: How seriously did Sade mean to be
taken? Even if he was mad and dangerous, Sade was certainly no
hypocrite. He paid for his chosen way of life, and dearly. Sade proved
utterly unable to live in accordance with any of the social or political
systems of his times. He was jailed under the ancien régime for eleven
years, ten of them in the Bastille, for various forms of libertinage and
criminal abuse. He was released after the Revolution and became a
member of the extreme Left, but was imprisoned and sentenced to death by
the Jacobins. After the Reign of Terror, he was again released, only to
be ordered arrested in 1801 by Napoleon for his “immoral writings”;
declared insane, he was held at the Charenton asylum for the remainder
of his life. Sade spent at least twenty-six of his seventy-four years in
incarceration of one kind or another. That he sacrificed such an
exceptionally large swathe of his adult life to confinement by the state
strongly suggests that although much of Sade’s work is based on a dark
and twisted humor, he wasn’t simply kidding.
Likewise,
even if we view him in earnest, doesn’t Sade simply end up reinforcing
the kinds of cultural authority that he professes to attack head on?
Don’t his arguments remain trapped in a binary from which he cannot
escape—in which vice, in order to be praised, must remain clearly
identified as vice and opposed to virtue? How can one transgress without
acknowledging the moral authority of the forces that one is
transgressing against? Don’t his extensive arguments in favor of
blasphemy all, in effect, come full circle to make him, de facto, a
defender of the spiritual legitimacy of the Church? Blasphemy requires
some acknowledgment that what is being profaned is, at some level,
actually sacred. Many of his fictional outrages, for instance, involve
the abuse of a consecrated host. To everyone but the faithful, this
“host” would appear to be some sort of damp wafer, the sexual use of
which would be odd but inconsequential and hardly scandalous.
Sade
must have seen this tension himself, since it appears in his novels
time and again. After a lengthy diatribe in which Blangis defends theft
and other crimes, Sade’s narrator in 120 Days dryly observes,
“It was by means of arguments in this kind the Duc used to justify his
transgressions, and as he was a man of greatest possible wit, his
arguments had a decisive ring.” Sade’s antiheroes are often described in
his narratives—sometimes even by themselves—as “criminal,” “sick,”
“depraved,” and other adjectives obviously designed to appall the
reader, but that are incompatible with any sincere philosophical
defense. Are they good because they are evil? Or does that make
them, in the end, simply “evil” after all? Or are they beyond good and
evil—in which case, why the remorseless cat-and-mouse game with readers
over his antiheroes’ moral nature and their endless depravities and
crimes?
This is precisely the kind of systematic
self-subversion that makes Sade so slippery, difficult to systematize,
and impossible to appropriate. Such incoherencies and contradictions in
Sade’s work have led a number of scholars, including Laurence Bongie,
the prominent historian of Counter-Enlightenment thought, to deny almost
any value in his libertine fiction (although Bongie does highly praise
his famed prison letters). But the temptation to dismiss Sade’s work,
whatever its merits as literature, has to be tempered by a realistic
assessment of the profound influence it has exerted on the Western world
over the past century and a half.
Choosing Sades
Critical
elements of Nietzsche’s attack on Enlightenment “reason” appear to be
rooted in Sade, although scholarly opinion is divided over how direct
this influence may have been. The imprint of Sadean precepts can be seen
clearly in Nietzsche’s 1887 On the Genealogy of Morals and,
above all, in his bitter denunciations of Christianity, which seem to
mimic in both substance and language those of Sade’s antiheroes. And
Nietzsche obviously originated almost all of Ayn Rand’s ideas, though
she pompously claimed to have been influenced only by Aristotle. Rand
essentially popularized a distorted version of Nietzsche and therefore
some elements of Sade’s legacy. She notably claimed to have been the
most implacable philosophical enemy of Kant, a title that surely belongs
to Sade and not Nietzsche, let alone Rand.
Ironically,
while Sade, Nietzsche, and Rand all champion the primacy of the
individual will, Sade’s antipathy toward all forms of private property
could not have been more absolute. Sade’s contempt for property and the
rationalist philosophical system derived from its defense indeed places
him well to the left of the Jacobins and most other French
revolutionaries. For Sade, property is the essence of despotism.
Conversely, Rand and her present-day followers on the American right
(along with many others) cast private property as the essence of
liberty.
Like so much else having to do with
Sade, his historical descent into present-day influence doesn’t follow
anything resembling a straight line. Sade is so subversive that all
efforts to directly appropriate him politically have been entirely
restricted to the Left, usually as a vehicle for attacking the Right.
Sade
has managed to get his tentacles so deeply into our narcissistic, self-
and other-devouring culture that traces of his influence are almost
ubiquitous.
Scholars began to systematically
rediscover Sade’s work, after decades of censorship and obscurity, in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This recovery took
place in two related contexts. The first was the growth of interest in
the full range of human sexual behavior, most notably through the work
of Richard von Krafft-Ebing. His 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis
popularized the term sadism (derived from Sade’s own name, of course).
Soon thereafter, Freud famously began excavating the psychic origins of
sexuality, often drawing on the same primal fantasies that inform the
Sadean landscape. Here, modern interpreters have cast Sade’s writings,
particularly 120 Days of Sodom, with its obsessive lists of and
commentaries on paraphilia, as precursors to both Krafft-Ebing’s
documentation of human sexual behavior and Freud’s investigations into
its deeper psychological origins. Sade’s novels are also rightly
regarded as neurotic symptoms, par excellence, in and of themselves.
Freud’s
work exerted a strong ideological influence on the early twentieth
century Left, which viewed his brand of psychoanalysis as fundamentally
subversive of the dominant bourgeois social order (though Freud made it
amply clear that his system offered little hope for a more democratic
alternative). But Freud’s ideas also informed the strategies of
corporate mass culture and advertising—particularly through their
practical application in propaganda pioneered by his American nephew,
Edward Bernays, the founder of the new twentieth-century discipline of
public relations—as well as those of the fascist Right. With “mass
society” increasingly subject to manipulation at the unconscious level,
often through highly sexualized imagery, Sade—with his “eroticized”
fantasies of harsh punishment and arbitrary, rigorous discipline—was to
some degree rehabilitated as a writer who channeled a crucial
subconscious dynamic. Sade eventually became identified in a good deal
of psychoanalytic thought as the voice of the shadowy “obscene superego”
that regulates the libidinal economy by prompting and structuring
enjoyment while simultaneously enforcing the “law” that prohibits it.
Likewise,
various artistic and intellectual movements, especially the
Surrealists, rediscovered Sade’s shortcuts to the unconscious—and
embraced them. Existentialist, structuralist, and poststructuralist
critiques that expand on the anti-humanism pioneered by Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals
all have roots in elements of Sade’s writings. Sartre and Camus, and
even Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Dostoevsky, all expanded on themes
originating in Sade—wittingly or unwittingly. In her 1955 essay “Must We
Burn Sade?” Simone de Beauvoir wrestled with the fact that, in spite of
existentialism’s obvious debt to Sade, as a feminist she found his
writings deeply troubling. Somewhat grudgingly, Beauvoir concludes that
Sade was indeed engaged in an existentialist project avant la lettre,
and takes him seriously as a moralist, but ultimately she condemns his
ethics and artistic values. The anti-humanist agenda, arguably initiated
by Sade, culminated in French poststructuralism, and above all in the
work of Michel Foucault (who reveled in homosexual sadomasochism in his
personal life).
The Left has been drawn to Sade’s
attack on Enlightenment reason from two perspectives. The first values
Sade’s anticipation of the logic of various contemporary evils,
including fascism and Nazism, Stalinism, or corporate-driven mass
consumer culture. In their influential 1944 study of the limitations of
the rationalist tradition in capitalist economies, The Dialectic of Enlightenment,
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were probably the first to draw a
direct link between Kant and Sade. Sade and Nietzsche, they wrote, “both
took science at its word,” and pursued “the implications of reason
still more resolutely than the positivists.” Moreover, they added,
“because they did not hush up the impossibility of deriving from reason a
fundamental argument against murder, but proclaimed it from the
rooftops,” they are “still vilified, above all by progressive thinkers.”
If the point of Sade’s work was to
marry sexual frustration and release to the practice of interpersonal
violence, he could confidently gaze out on the landscape of our popular
culture and declare it a fait accompli.
Horkheimer and Adorno argue that
Kantian rationalism, taken to its logical conclusion, lends itself
perfectly to totalitarian systems. They further note that Sade’s
arbitrary but rigorous and ruthlessly imposed sadomasochistic orders
prefigured the elaborate mechanisms of repression that flourished under
totalitarianism, which (much like their Sadean predecessors) vacillate
between utopian and dystopian impulses. They hold that Sade’s
anti-heroine Juliette already explains and enacts the ruthless but
logical consequences of a purely rational categorical imperative when
such ideas are placed in the wrong hands. Horkheimer and Adorno see
Sade’s protagonists as callous automatons of alienated, but rational,
Kantian orders, as well-developed proto-fascists—or, indeed, as modern
bureaucratic functionaries of any ideological persuasion.
A
similar argument by the structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan holds
that Sade, in effect, “completes” Kant by monstrously closing the
circle left gaping by the open-ended categorical imperative. Moreover,
Lacan identified the categorical imperative as simply another term for
the superego itself. Ever the surrealist of theory, Lacan argues that
Sade can be presented as if he were Kant. If Sade’s arbitrary
but rigorously enforced imaginary social systems are a parody of law,
Sade himself can therefore be cast as a parody of Kant.
A
different, though happily much less influential, strand of left-wing
thought has identified in “Sadean” violence, if not a liberatory
potential as such, at least a necessary revolutionary impulse. In 1930,
Georges Bataille cited Sade as the exemplar of the “ecstasy and frenzy”
that characterize “the urges that today require worldwide society’s
fiery and bloody Revolution.” Michel Foucault, greatly influenced by
Bataille, seemed to see in the 1978-79 Iranian revolution an eruption of
the kind of spontaneous revolutionary violence envisioned by Sade in
“Yet Another Effort,” and defended in the name of virtuous “immorality.”
Sade appears to be arguing through Dolmancé that “insurrection . . .
indispensable to a political system of perfect happiness . . . has got
to be a republic’s permanent condition,” and that “the state of an
immoral man is one of perpetual unrest that pushes into, and identifies
him with, the necessary insurrection in which the republican must always
keep the government.” Foucault’s woeful misreading of revolutionary
violence in Iran as exemplifying these “virtues” has done lasting and
significant harm to his reputation.
Assume the Position
While
Sade cannot be successfully appropriated, let alone commercialized, he
has slowly but surely managed to get his tentacles so deeply into our
narcissistic, self- and other-devouring culture that traces of his
influence are almost ubiquitous. These Sadean echoes are hardly
restricted to—and probably not even mainly to be found in—commercial
pornography. By linking Enlightenment and mythology at the hip in their
pioneering and still relevant critique, Horkheimer and Adorno identified
traces of Sade’s obscene, highly regimented social orders not just in
the horrors of fascism and Stalinism, but also in the more mundane
tyranny of industrialized mass culture. They repositioned for us the
ongoing conundrum, apparently inherent to modernity, that people demand
their own subjugation at least as much as they yearn for their own
empowerment. And they found, at the core of this problem, Sade and
Nietzsche’s critiques of reason.
The heavy
tension between egalitarianism and egoism is common to both Sade’s
thinking and contemporary American political culture. As Julie Hayes
notes, after the French Revolution, Sade “was prey to conflicting
notions of society, government, and class structure. He hated the abuse
of power, particularly as it applied to him, but his sense of class
consciousness was stronger than ever.” In a letter to his attorney at
the end of 1791, he confronted the “mobility” of his perspectives,
asking him, “What am I at present? Aristocrat or democrat? You tell me,
if you please, lawyer, for I haven’t the slightest idea.” This
irresolvable tension between radical egalitarianism and radical
individualism in Sade is precisely what makes him and his work
politically and philosophically “impossible.”
What
could be a more resonant puzzle for the way we live now? Is anything,
in this sense, more Sadean than self-negating Tea Party slogans such as
“keep your dirty government hands off my Medicare?” Much of American
culture is committed to egalitarianism, and demands and expects certain
social and economic protections from government. But simultaneously, and
often in the same breath, it venerates extreme wealth, individual
privilege, and the prerogatives of the rich.
This
dichotomy is driven, at least in part, by the classic American illusion
of widespread social mobility and the idea that anyone can join our
morally unrestrained power elite by hewing to the character-defining
virtues of hard work, while also incongruously courting the favor of
fortune. Meanwhile, a powerful strand of masochism in our political
culture has pushed many toward the overtly avaricious and predatory, and
indeed sadistic (though hardly Sadean), thought of Ayn Rand. Economic
Darwinism is thus bizarrely repackaged as a corrective for corporate
amorality—as well as the cure-all for absurd social injustices such as
bailouts for financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.”
So
to rephrase Sade’s quandary slightly, what are we, Americans, at
present? Oligarchs or egalitarians? The normative response to the
tension between individual rights, which protect the prerogatives of the
powerful, and collective rights, which protect those of the general
public, is that we seek to find a balance between the two. This is the
consensus view of both the notional “center-right” and “center-left” in
our punitive-minded political culture—and this may really be the only
politically plausible or reasonable answer in this otherwise untenable
standoff. But Sade, that shadowy doppelganger of the Enlightenment,
still lurks in the dark corners and liminal spaces of our culture,
whispering that reason often carries a very hefty price tag—and with
ever more elaborate punishments to come.
Perhaps
the greatest achievement of his last years were his portraits of the
insane. There were ten of them originally. Only five have survived: A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Command; A Kleptomaniac; A Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy; A Woman Addicted to Gambling and A Child Snatcher. 
Early Modern Psychiatry
Géricault
had many reasons to be interested in psychiatry, starting with his own
family: his grandfather and one of his uncles had died insane. His
experiences while painting The Raft must also have left their
mark. The Medusa’s surgeon, J.B. Henry Savigny, at the time Géricault
interviewed him, was writing an account of the psychological impact the
experience had had on his fellow passengers and, of course, there was
Géricault’s own mental breakdown in 1819. It seems only natural then
that he would be drawn to this new and exciting area of scientific
study. 
The Portraits
The
paintings were executed with great speed, entirely from life and
probably in one sitting. Critics often remark on the painterly quality
of the work, the extraordinary fluency of brushwork, in contrast with
Géricault’s early more sculptural style, suggesting that the erratic
brushwork is used to mirror the disordered thoughts of the patients. In
places it is applied in almost translucent layers, while in others it is
thicker creating highly expressive contrasts in textures.
In
bringing the sensitivity of a great artist to assist scientific enquiry
Géricault was not alone among Romantic painters. John Constable’s cloud
studies, for example, were exactly contemporary with the portraits and
provide an interesting parallel. Both artists capture brilliantly the
fleeting moment, the shifting movements in Constable’s cumulus, stratus,
cirrus and nimbus, in Géricault the complex play of emotions on the
faces of the insane. Not since the Renaissance has art illustrated so
beautifully the concerns of the scientific domain; in Géricault’s case
teaching those early psychiatrists, we might be tempted to think, to
look on their patients with a more human gaze.
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Posted: 05/15/2013 8:07 am EDT
