It is this frontier outpost that we are now going to seek out in Sade’s libertine nature, in the actual will to excess.
Chapter 1: Natural Excess
Redundancy
In the field of the history of ideas there are certain authors (Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, etc.) whose work is taken for granted and considered to be self-evident objects of study by intellectual historians. This is not the case with Sade. He is the genitor of a body of work that is not taken for granted. Not because his name is unknown, on the contrary, it is all too well-known. Sade is actually notorious, and for good reasons.
Everyone has heard of the lewdness of his writings, but it is seldom that his thinking is taken seriously. Yet, compared to his thinking, his passion practice, and thus his literary practice, is almost popular. And when the thinking is brought to light it is either to recreate it in a new form merely reminiscent of Sade or else, and this is often the case, it is to borrow a bit of the lewd energy with which the shocking material almost automatically provides the reading, and by means of which the commentaries, protected by more or less scholarly allusions, enjoy their own provocation of the average public’s narrow-mindedness. If a new philosophy of transgression (cf. Georges Bataille) is not created, this provocation is often the sole remnant of Sade’s philosophy of transgression: commentators cautiously hint that they are indeed at odds with the world and have interesting interests. Of course, many exceptions to this rule are to be found, and as an example Theodor Adorno’s reading of Sade ought to be mentioned.
My attempt to take Sade’s thinking seriously in what follows is neither due to elective philosophical affinity nor to lewd interests. Sade is hardly “the great thinker” in the manner of romantic Rousseau, who can be seen as his most important fencing partner, nor in the manner of categorical Kant, his contemporary counterpart. But he is, as mentioned above, a philosophe: he carries the torch of philosophy against untimely education and ordinary prejudices, insisting that a “new age” that does not eliminate the sources of the former age will be obsolete before it is born. This is why Sade is above all radical in the sense that he is consistent. He conceives of his entire effort to be that of a philosopher: the light of philosophy must be lit so as to do away with the many prejudices. His project has to be characterized as an excess in the hunt for prejudices: contrary to his colleagues’ idealization of a certain moderation, he does not stop before it gets dangerous, for he fully accepts the consequences of the light of philosophy, capable of illuminating all the work of man as forms of prejudice. In this we do not find the self-reflection of reason but, on the contrary, we find stimulation: he seeks in vain the limit where it is said to be reasonable for reason to stop being reasonable. The “limit” to stimulation is merely the crisis and natural exhaustion. In Sade, judgement is thus absent, which again is consistent with respect to the war he wages against the social element and his demonstration that an authoritative settlement is always to be found in potency, in the broadest sense of the word. Through his consistency a number of the most important themes in French Enlightenment philosophy are magnified and rendered visible, and for this reason his monstrous text-body is worth reading. In the perspectives of the history of ideas and Social Analytics, we are going to inquire into the excessive consistency with which he problematisizes the apparent virtues – and the values of Christian culture on the whole. They should not be taken for granted and they are not self-evident, demonstrates libertinism.
Philosophically speaking, what is interesting about le divin Marquis is not his taxonomy of perversions or his discourse as such, nor is it his novelistic art or his dramatic poetry. One must not forget that it is psychopathology and sexology that have upheld the theoretical dimension in Sade, but in the perspective of Social Analytics it is not this part of his positive knowledge that seems interesting. In the scientific perspective of sexology, the object of discussion would of course be his divisions and reasons, or one could contribute to a psychoanalytically inspired reading of Sade’s perversions by analyzing his presentation of them. Yet we are not going to take an interest in his novelistic art, nor in his capacity as a writer and litterateur. A historical literary analysis would among other things read the development in the body of work from the philosophical stories in the Enlightenment tradition to the romantic novel, and a textual analysis would among other things take an interest in the narrative structures and subject positions in a distinctive way that is different from what is intended in the following.
Offhand it may seem a bit paradoxical that we are not particularly going to concern ourselves with what he says or with the way in which he says things in our interpretive construction and constructive interpretation of Sade’s thinking, which includes pointing out what he cannot think. Our problematic is the libertine’s nature, the common libertine, such as it manifests itself in the philosophy expressed in Sade’s knowledge and literature, in his non-fiction and fiction. In other words, the postulate is that thinking takes place in Sade’s theory of libertinism, a philosophy articulated by the multitude of libertines of all shades and social classes populating his texts. In connection with the orgies, an unmistakable redundancy is in evidence in the stylistic libertine digressions, each of which is distinctive in terms of the thoroughness of the argumentation. This redundancy, which localizes the libertine commonness encompassing both the subject of the enunciation and the enunciate, is what I will permit myself to discuss as Sade’s philosophy; but precisely because the libertine commonness can only be localized when articulated, I will properly indicate the libertine in question when illustrative statements are cited. Naturally, documenting redundancy is a technical problem, but let us pass over this. Correspondingly, another problem is that the presentation only sporadically has occasion to discuss why Sade’s thinking had to take this form: let us leave this problem alone as well this time around. An analysis must be aware of its limitations, as only then can it gain a perspective.
For the same reason, Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome from 1785 plays a leading part in this interpretation, for this fundamental work, which Sade himself believed was lost, launches his project, and the rest of the work can be considered Sade’s A la recherche du manuscrit perdu. The endless repetition proves to be the philosophical object, which again is the precondition for the acting out of natural passion or taste. Even in his repetitions he is excessive. Using the hypothesis of les malheurs de la virtu and les prospérités du vice, in his examinations of this object Sade discusses the condition constituted by the involvement of another, of others, of the other, i.e. the involvement we have termed the social.
Sade’s form of problematization is excess, both in terms of writing and plot. His excess is and remains the challenge for any moral reflection, for any attempt to found morals in nature, religion, or the law, and above all it is a problematization of ‘naturalistic morals’, inasmuch as with this term we are referring to all sorts of attempts to legitimize reciprocal human communication and human communication with things in the natural demands and commands of nature. It is as this radical querist that Sade becomes an interesting object for social analytics. Due to a number of different reasons, neither before nor since Sade has a problematization of naturalistic morals been carried out more radically.
The Climatic Circumstances
Sade wishes to demonstrate that we can only refer to the demands of nature, since human adaptations are completely arbitrary. But then this is something we actually can do. This reference is the torch of philosophy, and in Sade its light is such that it is comparable to ‘the speed of light’ in Einstein: relativity is absolute. The weight of philosophy is that of the universe.
Sade accepts all of the consequences of the rise of anthropological knowledge and the predominant form of problematization in the French Enlightenment; that is, a ‘climatism’. A characteristic of the Sadian libertines is that they are well-travelled. As hommes du monde they have knowledge, and therefore they are aware of the wide variety of customs