Sex in the Cities. Volume 1. Amsterdam. Hans-Jürgen Döpp

de Sade: Imagination Triumphs over Reason

      The epicentre of the earthquake that is sexual desire bubbling away within mankind is located in the head.

      “‘The thoughts you inspire in me, Juliette,’ said Belmor to me one day, ‘are what I find tantalising about you. No one could have a more lascivious… richer… more liberal [imagination] than yours. And you must have noticed that my most pleasurable alliances with you are those that develop when our imagination runs away with us and leads us on to innovatively sensual ideas that, alas, are impossible to realise or fulfil.’”

      It is rare that purely imaginary scenes unfold in erotic literature, which is not always a creative genre. It is even rarer for imagination itself to be the object of reflection. The imagination is nonetheless the source of desire and of enjoyment for the Marquis de Sade, whose works are intended mainly to enlighten. To Sade, intellectual thought neutralises sensuality. The limitations of reality may be cast off by means of the sheer scope of the imagination, which grants potential existence to notions that far surpass reality. A passionate frenzy for release from the constraints of reality takes hold of the conscious mind. (During the French Revolution it actually burst through into reality as well.)

      The works of Sade – whose concept of reality was physically limited for many years by the walls of a prison – should be read as the extreme expressions of a completely liberated imagination, as a dream of freedom for a prisoner, and not as the notional diary of a sadist. Isn’t it perhaps exactly this conscious distancing of self from reality that makes it possible for erotic imagination to develop fantasies of megalomaniac proportions?

      “Oh Juliette, how exquisite are the joys of the mind!” says Lamettrie. “Should we not embark on all the roads to sensual pleasure lit up by its fireworks?… During such exquisite moments the entire world is ours – there is nothing that can deny us. Everything holds out joy to the heightened senses our fervid imaginations have prepared to receive it. We can lay waste to the earth… we can repopulate it with new creatures – which we can then kill again if we feel like it.”

      What a combination of notions of dominance, self-importance, and destructiveness!

      “Happy, a hundred times happy,” goes on Lamettrie, “are those whose lively, sensual imagination always keeps available to the senses a foretaste of the joys to come. In truth, Juliette, I wouldn’t like to say whether reality is equal to the imaginary – whether indulging in pleasures one does not actually possess is not a hundred times more enervating than indulging in those one really can possess.”