He is a libertine. We are going to take an interest in his nature rather than the conceptual history of the libertine.
It is therefore as a philosopher that he will be taken seriously, or more precisely, as a thinker: one can learn something by having to overcome Sade. All other things being equal, the will to order expressed in the attempt at overcoming involves a sacrifice, involves a civilizing of Sade’s unruliness. Tidying Sade up to a certain extent seems to me inevitable, for what is terrible in Sade can hardly be expressed. Sade is not tidy: his world of thought is dreadful. Sade is not immoral like Nietzsche but unmoral or amoral, as his point is that the will to the good involves evil.
Sade presents the hardships of virtue, its unhappiness, symbolized by the fair Justine, and he presents the prosperity of vice, symbolized by the dark Juliette. As sisters they belong to the same family, but a broken family. Why use Sade as a prism to call the social into question and to ask whether a different ethics is possible? Because he can give rise to a calling into question of the precedence of virtue in ethical thought. Precisely because on the whole he is the complaint against thinking in grooves about ethics; because he calls the precedence of the other into question rather than simply questioning the arguments for this precedence. The social and ethics are therefore what is at issue – and not taken for granted. To Sade the social is not a matter of course such as it has become for many good reasons in the twentieth century at a time when metaphysics has become a social metaphysics; but when it has also become matter-of-course, all too matter-of-course, and as such almost un-thinkable. As we shall see, tradition believes that it can provide the answer even though it merely is the answer. Association with Sade recalls the question mark that should not be denied or suppressed but that as a consequence of active forgetting can simply be withdrawn.
First Fiddle
What is going to concern us is, in short, the social: how we relate to relations, including ethics, which in our culture is about what one can do out of regard for and with regard to “the other.” Ethics is no longer about “the good life,” as the case was in Greek ethics. Nowadays this is translated into “quality time,” into the problem of taking one’s time. Nevertheless, the question is whether or not in reality the social matter of course is due to the fact that regarding the other has become all too much a matter of course. The question is actually whether there is in this underlying humanism, which along with Christianity and the Enlightenment project form our grand traditions, an unnecessary hostility towards life; that is, whether awarding the other absolute – and thereby in-dependent – value is not properly speaking a form of “passive nihilism” to borrow one of Nietzsche’s expressions.
The three grand Western traditions all have to do with the Other. As a form of culture, Christianity is first of all a vertical commitment to Jesus as the son of man, as the generalized other, as the neighbor; humanism is, on the other hand, a horizontal commitment to the concrete other in the shape of fellow man. The Enlightenment project is a commitment to the abstract other and thereby the other as or in oneself as well: that is to say, humaneness and humanity. From relating to the other mediated through the Lord we now relate to l’homme en général(Rousseau) or Menschheit (Kant).
Perhaps the time has come to reevaluate the priority that is given to the other, i.e., to conceive the involvement of the other differently. It is among other things this supposition that has resulted in a series of speculations that I refer to as Social Analytics. The aim is to venture a displacement whereby one neither approves of nor reconciles oneself with the Christian tradition but nor does one hysterically combat it. It must be a question of reconciling oneself to this tradition as our culture’s basic form of problematization without gleefully giving oneself up to it.
This displacement entails the construction of a problematic in which the other does not play first fiddle, without the consequence being hedonism in the classical sense or liberalism in the modern sense. It will move from one set of categories to another: from pain to pleasure, from regard to respect, from forbidden fruits and commands to offers and abstention, and so forth. The shift in perspective caused by this displacement is in this way a shift in problematic as well, and should the displacement happen to succeed it could lead to the accomplishment of a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy, for at this point desire and morality would no longer pose a problem for each other.
That moral philosophy always lets the other play first fiddle can be illustrated with reference to the modern versions of moral law. As in so many other cases, it is Rousseau who epitomizes regard for the other. In La Nouvelle Heloïse Rousseau-Wolmar says that there is only one moral commandment (précepte) that can replace all of the others: “Do nothing, say nothing that you do not wish everyone to see or hear.” In Rousseau we find a brilliant and radical thesis on a presence/absence equivalence: on the generalized other’s presence insofar as this entity is concretely absent and on its absence in case it is concretely present. The ideal for this neutralization between absence and presence in an absolute being there is borrowed from a certain Roman who wished his house to be constructed in a way that allowed one to see everything that happened inside it. One is in a condition of being seen by a third party. In Rousseau, relations and relations to oneself are always mediated through ‘the other’ (which is thus really in the nature of ‘a third party’). It is immediacy lost or lost self-presence. It is the generalized other, the third party’s being there that decides the moral worth.
It is the same idea that makes Rousseau describe the individuality of modern existence as the mundane attitude of seeing oneself through the others’ eyes. One’s relation to oneself is always mediated through the relation to the generalized other. In Rousseau what we have is a thoroughly worldly notion of transparency; but this moral claim to public transparency is linked to Christianity in Kant, who often systematizes Rousseau, and not always for the best.
In Kant, Rousseau’s idea is translated into a categorical imperative that says: “Act in such a way that the maxim for your action can be made into universal law.” By virtue of the Enlightenment notion of humaneness and human value, this imperative turns into the notion that one should always treat the humanity in oneself and in the other, and never just as a means but also as an aim. Thus not, and that will be crucial in our discussion, as a pure object.
This is about versions of the golden rule: do unto others or do not unto others as you would have others do or not do unto yourself. We find an example of the two variations of the golden rule in Jesus and Confucius. What is important is that the relation to oneself is mediated through the relation to the other. Does this mean that the other is always going to play first fiddle?
In Sade’s texts we find a practical answer to a question he hardly would have considered posing. To our question of “playing the lead” we find a practical answer: no, replies Sade, the other is not going to play first fiddle. Take your pleasure at the expense of anybody, commands the libertine’s nature. Of course one cannot do that, replies every decent person. But let us look into this matter further.
In all decency, it is possible if at the same time it is possible to replace the Christian problematic, the other’s pain, with personal pleasure.
Thus, what is at issue is not the greatest possible happiness for as many as possible, as is preached by utilitarianism and consequentialist moral theories and often emphasized as a unconventional supplement