The world must tremble upon learning of the crimes we shall have committed. Men must be made to blush and feel ashamed at belonging to the same species as we do. I demand that a monument be raised to commemorate this crime and signal it to the whole world, and that our names be graven upon it by our own hands.
To be unique, unique among one’s own species, is indeed the sign of true sovereignty, and we shall see to what absolute limits Sade has taken this category, and what absolute meaning he has given it.
The whole scheme is beginning to be even clearer. And yet at the stage to which we have progressed we also feel that it is also becoming very dark indeed. This deft movement by which the Unique Being eludes the influence and control of others is far from crystal clear. In certain respects, it is a sort of stoic insensibility, which seems to assume man’s perfect autonomy with respect to the world. But at the same time it is the exact opposite, for the Unique Being, being independent of all the others who are incapable of harming him, immediately declares complete dominion over them. And it is not because others are powerless against him that torture, the stab of the dagger, and debasing maneuvers they devise against him leave him intact, but because he can do whatever he wishes to others that even the pain others cause him affords him the pleasure of power and helps him exercise his sovereignty. Now, this situation becomes very embarrassing. For the moment that “to be master of myself” means “to be master of others,” the moment my independence does not derive from my autonomy but from the dependence of others upon me, it becomes obvious that I remain bound to the others and have need of them, if only to reduce them to nothing. Sade’s commentators have often pointed out this difficulty. It is far from certain whether Sade himself was aware of it, and one of the original aspects of this “exceptional” philosophy perhaps comes from this fact: when one is not Sade there is a crucial problem created, through which the relations of mutual solidarity between master and slave are reintroduced; but if one is Sade, there is no problem and, furthermore, it is impossible even to imagine one in this connection.
It is impossible for us to examine, as we should, the large number of texts (with Sade, everything is always infinitely numerous) which relate to this situation. Actually, there is a plethora of contradictions. Sometimes the most ferocious libertinage seems as though haunted by the contradiction of its pleasures. The libertine derives his most exquisite pleasure and joy from the destruction of his victims, but this joy ruins itself, is self-destructive, since it annihilates what causes it. “The pleasure one gets from killing a woman,” says one of them,
is soon past; once dead, she feels nothing further; the pleasure of making her suffer disappears with her life. . . . Brand her (with a red-hot iron); sully and soil her; from this debasement she will suffer to the very last moments of her life and our lust, infinitely prolonged, will as a result be even more delicious.
Similarly, Saint-Fond, not content with tortures that are too simple, dreams of a kind of infinitely protracted death for everyone; it is for this reason that he conceives of an undeniably ingenious system whereby he would avail himself of Hell and arrange to use, in this upper world, Hell’s inexhaustible resources for torturing victims of his choice. Here we can surely discern what inextricable bonds oppression creates between the oppressor and the oppressed. Sade’s heroes draw their sustenance from the deaths they cause, and there are times when, dreaming of everlasting life, he dreams of a death he can inflict eternally. The result is that the executioner and the victim, set eternally face to face, find themselves endowed equally with the same power, with the same divine attribute of eternity. It would be impossible to claim that such a contradiction does not exist in Sade’s work. But even more often he attempts to by-pass it by the use of arguments that give us a much clearer and more profound picture of the world that is his. Clairwil chides Saint-Fond for what she terms his unpardonable excesses, and to restore him to the right path she advises him thus:
Get rid of that voluptuous idea which works you up to such a white-hot pitch—the idea of indefinitely prolonging the agonies of the creature you have selected to kill—get rid of it and replace it by a greater abundance of murders. Do not concentrate on killing the same person over a long period, which is an impossibility, but murder a whole host of others, which is entirely feasible.
Increased numbers is indeed the more correct solution. To consider human beings from the viewpoint of quantity kills them more completely than does the physical act of violence which annihilates them. It may well be that the criminal is inextricably bound to and involved with the person he murders. But the libertine who, as he immolates his victim, feels only the need to sacrifice a thousand others, seems strangely free of all involvement with him. In his eyes, the victim does not of itself exist, he is not a distinct individual but a mere sign, which is indefinitely replaceable in a vast erotic equation. When we read statements such as this: “Nothing is so amusing, nothing so stimulates and excites the brain as do large numbers,” we comprehend more fully why Sade utilizes the concept of equality so often to buttress his arguments. To declare that all men are equal is equivalent to saying that no one is worth more than any other, all are interchangeable, each is only a unit, a cipher in an infinite progression. For the Unique Person, all men are equal in their nothingness, and the Unique One, by reducing them to nothing, simply clarifies and demonstrates this nothingness.
That is what makes Sade’s world so strange. Scenes of savagery are followed by more scenes of savagery. The repetition is as extraordinary as it is endless. It is not unusual for a libertine to slaughter four or five hundred victims in a single session; then he starts in again the following day; then again that same evening with a new ceremony. The arrangements and positions may vary slightly, but once again things work up to a fever pitch and hecatomb succeeds hecatomb. But is it not eminently clear that those who perish in these gigantic butcheries no longer possess the slightest reality, and if they disappear with such ludicrous ease it is because they have previously been annihilated by a total, absolute act of destruction, because they are present and die only to bear witness to this kind of original cataclysm, this destruction applicable not only to themselves but to everyone else as well? What is especially striking is the fact that the world in which the Unique One lives and moves and has his being is a desert; the creatures he encounters there are less than things, less than shades. And when he torments and destroys them he is not wresting away their lives but verifying their nothingness, establishing his authority over their non-existence, and from this he derives his greatest satisfaction. What in fact does the Duc de Blangis say to the women who, at the dawn of the first of the hundred and twenty days, have been gathered together as the pleasure pawns for the four libertines?
Consider your circumstances, remember who you are and who we are, and let these reflections cause you to tremble and shudder with horror. You are outside the borders of France, in the heart of an uninhabited forest, far beyond the steep mountains whose paths and passages have been obliterated behind you the minute you crossed over them; you are sealed in an impregnable citadel, no one in the world has the slightest idea where are you, you are beyond the reach of both your friends and your family: so far as the world is concerned, you are already dead.
This last should be taken quite literally. These women are already dead, suppressed, enclosed in the absolute void of a bastille into which existence no longer dares to enter, a bastille where their lives serve only to make manifest this quality of “already dead” with which they are commingled.
We shall leave aside the tales of necrophilia which, while there is no dearth of them in Sade’s writings, seem at some remove from the “normal” inclinations of his heroes. We should, moreover, point out that whenever Sade’s heroes exclaim: “Ah, the lovely corpse!” and wax ecstatic at the insensibility of death, they have generally begun their careers as murderers, and it is the effects of this capacity for aggression that they are striving to prolong beyond the grave. I
t is undeniable that what characterizes Sade’s world is not the desire to become one with the cadaver’s immobilized and petrified existence, nor is it the attempt to slip into the passivity of a form representing the absence of forms, of a wholly real reality, shielded and protected from life’s uncertainties and yet incarnating the very essence of irreality. Quite the contrary: the center of Sade’s world is the urgent need for sovereignty to assert itself by an enormous negation. This negation, which cannot be satisfied or adequately demonstrated on the plane of the particular, requires large quantities, for it is basically intended to transcend the plane of human existence. It is in vain that Sadean man imposes himself on others by his power to destroy them: if he gives the impression of never being dependent on them, even in the situation where he finds himself obliged to annihilate them—if he invariably seems capable of doing without them, it is because he has placed himself on a plane where he and they no longer have anything in common, and he has done this by setting himself such goals and lending his projects a scope which infinitely transcends man and his puny existence. In other words, insofar as Sadean man seems surprisingly free with respect to his victims—upon whom, however, his pleasures depend—it is because violence, as it applies to and is used upon them, is not aimed at them but at something else, something far beyond them, and all Sade’s violence does is to authenticate—frenziedly, and endlessly in each particular case—the general act of destruction by which he has reduced God and the world to nothing.
Clearly, with Sade the criminal instinct stems from a nostalgic, transcendental vision which the miserable practical possibilities are forever debasing and dishonoring. The most glorious crime which this poor world is capable of providing is a wretched nothing which makes the libertine blush with shame. Like the monk Jérôme, there is not one among them who is not overwhelmed with shame at the thought of how mediocre his crimes are, and all seek a crime superior to any of which man is capable in this world. “And unhappily,” says Jérôme, “I cannot find it. All we do is but the pale image of what we dream of doing.” And Clairwil says:
What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life, even when I were asleep, when I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a disturbance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt.
To which Juliette offers this reply, calculated to please the author of the La Nouvelle Justine: “Try your hand at a moral crime, the kind one commits in writing.” Although Sade, in his doctrine, reduced to a strict minimum the part played by intellectual pleasures, although he eliminated almost entirely intellectual eroticism (because his own erotic dream consists in projecting, onto characters who do not dream but really act, the unreal movement of his pleasures: Sade’s eroticism is a dream eroticism, since it expresses itself almost exclusively in fiction; but the more this eroticism is imagined, the more it requires a fiction from which dream is excluded, a fiction wherein debauchery can be enacted and lived), and although Sade does however, and in an exceptional sense, exalt the imaginary, it is because he is wonderfully well aware of the fact that the basis for many an imperfect crime is some impossible crime that only the imagination can comprehend. And that is why he allows Belmore to say:
Ah, Juliette, how delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In these delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.
In his volume of essays Sade mon prochain, wherein the boldest ideas are advanced on Sade and also on the problems Sade’s existence can help to clarify, Pierre Klossowski explains the extremely complex character of the relations the Sadean consciousness entertains with God and with its fellow men. He shows that these are negative, but that, inasmuch as this negation is real, it reintroduces the concept it rejects: the concept of God and of one’s fellow man are, Klossowski says, indispensable to the libertine consciousness. This is a point we could discuss endlessly, for Sade’s work is a welter of clear ideas wherein everything is stated but wherein everything is also concealed. Nevertheless, Sade’s originality seems to us to reside in his extremely firm claim to found man’s sovereignty upon a transcendent power of negation, a power which in no wise depends upon the objects it destroys and which, in order to destroy them, does not even presuppose their previous existence because, at the instant it destroys them, it has already previously, and without exception, considered them as nothing. A dialectic such as this finds both its best example and, perhaps, its justification, in the stance Sade’s Omnipotent One assumes with respect to divine omnipotence.
Maurice Heine has emphasized Sade’s extraordinary steadfastness of purpose when it comes to atheism.2 But how right Klossowski is to remind us that Sade’s is not a cold-blooded atheism. The moment the name of God is interjected into even the mildest discussion or plot, the language is instantly ignited, the tone becomes haranguing and the words are infused with and overwhelmed by hate. It is surely not in the scenes of luxury and lust that Sade’s passion is revealed; but whenever the Unique One finds the slightest vestige of God in his path, then are the violence and scorn and heat of pride and the vertigo of power and desire immediately awakened. In a way, the notion of God is man’s inexpiable fault, his original sin, the proof of his nothingness, the thing which justifies and authorizes crime, for when one is dealing with a person who has accepted to prostrate himself before God and declare himself as worthless in God’s eyes, one cannot resort to too extreme or too energetic measures against him. “The notion of God is the one fault I cannot forgive in man,” writes Sade. A decisive thought, and one of the keys of his system. The belief in an omnipotent God who only grants to man the reality of a wisp of straw, an atom of nothingness, makes it incumbent upon the integral man to retrieve this superhuman power and exercise himself, on behalf of man and at the expense of men, the sovereign right which they have granted to God. When the criminal kills, he is God-on-earth, because he effects between his victim and himself a relationship of subordination wherein the latter sees the concrete definition of divine sovereignty. The moment a true libertine detects, be it in the mind of the most corrupt debauchee, the slightest trace of religious faith, he immediately decrees him dead: for the miscreant debauchee has destroyed himself, by having abdicated into the hands of God. To do so means that he considers himself as nothing, so that he who kills him is simply rectifying a situation which is only thinly veiled by appearances.
Sadean man denies man, and this negation is achieved through the intermediary of the notion of God. He temporarily makes himself God, so that there before him men are reduced to nothing and discover the nothingness of a being before God. “It is true, is it not, prince, that you do not love men?” Juliette asks. “I loathe them. Not a moment goes by that my mind is not busy plotting violently to do them harm. Indeed, there is no race more horrible, more frightful. . . . How low and scurvy, how vile and disgusting a race it is!” “But,” Juliette breaks in, “you do not really believe that you are to be included among men?. . . Oh, no, no, when one dominates them with such energy, it is impossible to belong to the same race.” To which Saint-Fond: “Yes, she is right, we are gods.”
Still, the dialectic evolves to further levels: Sade’s man, who has taken unto himself the power to set himself above men—the power which men madly yield to God—never for a moment forgets that this power is completely negative. To be God can have only one meaning: to crush man, to reduce creation to nothing. “I should like to be Pandora’s box,” Saint-Fond says at another point, “so that all the evils which escaped from my breast might destroy all mankind individually.” And Verneuil: “And if it were true a God existed, would we not be his rivals, since we destroy thus what he has made?” This is the way an
ambiguous conception of the Omnipotent is gradually fashioned, and yet there can scarcely be any doubt about the ultimate meaning. Klossowski refers often to the theories of this same Saint-Fond, some of whose views we have cited and who, among all Sade’s heroes, is the only one to believe in a Supreme Being. But the God in whom he believes is not terribly benign, but “extremely vindictive, very barbaric, very wicked, most unjust, and very cruel.” He is the Supreme Being of wickedness, the God of malfeasance. From this idea Sade deduced all kinds of brilliant theories. He imagines a Last Judgment which he describes with all the resources of savage humor which he possesses. We hear God upbraiding the good in these terms:
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings Page 8