When you saw that everything was vicious and criminal on earth, why did you stray into the paths of virtue? Did not the perpetual misery with which I covered the universe suffice to convince you that I love only disorder and chaos, and that to please me you must irritate me? Did I not daily provide you with the example of destruction? Seeing which, Fool, why did you not destroy, why did you not do as I did?
But having recalled this, it is obvious that the conception of an infernal God is but a way station of the dialectic according to which Sade’s superman, after having denied man in the guise of God, next advances to meet God and will in turn deny him in the name of Nature, in order finally to deny Nature by identifying it with the spirit of negation. In the evil God, the negation which has just exterminated the notion of man rests as it were for a few moments before launching a new attack, this time against itself. In becoming God, Saint-Fond by the same stroke compels God to become Saint-Fond, and the Supreme Being, into whose hands the weak have committed themselves in order to force the strong to commit themselves as well, no longer asserts Himself except as the gigantic constraint of a rocklike transcendence which crushes each in proportion to his frailty. This is hatred of mankind hypostasized, raised to its highest degree. But no sooner has the spirit of negation attained the pinnacle of absolute existence than it is compelled to become aware of its own infinitude and can only turn against the affirmation of this absolute existence, which now is the sole object worthy of a negation grown infinite. It is the hatred of men that was embodied in God. Now it is the hatred of God which liberates from God hatred itself—a hatred so violent that it seems to be constantly, moment by moment, projecting the reality of what it is denying, the better to assert and justify itself. “If that existence—if God’s existence,” says Dubois,
should prove to be true, the mere pleasure of baiting and annoying the person so designated would become the most precious compensation for the necessity I would then find myself in to acknowledge some belief in him.
But does a hate so intense and searing as this not indicate, as Klossowski would seem to believe, a faith which had forgotten its name and resorted to blasphemy as a means of forcing God to break his silence? That seems quite unlikely to us. On the contrary, everything suggests that the only reason this powerful hatred has shown such a predilection for the deity is because it has found in him both a pretense and a privileged sustenance. For Sade, God is clearly nothing more than a prop for his hate. That hatred is too great to be concerned about any particular object; being infinite, and as it is constantly transcending any limits, it tends to delight in itself and to wax ecstatic over that infinitude to which it lends the name of God (“The sole source of your system,” Clairwil says to Saint-Fond, “is your profound hatred for God.”). But it is hate and hate alone which is real, and in the end it will turn itself with the same intensity and fearlessness against Nature as against the non-existent God it loathes.
Actually, if Sade’s most tempestuous passions are unleashed by things religious, by the name of God and by his priests, whom Sade terms “God-makers,” it is because the terms God and religion embody virtually every form of his hatred. In God, he hates the nothingness of man, who has fashioned such a master for himself, and the thought of this nothingness irritates and inflames him to such an extent that all he can do is join forces with God to sanction this nothingness. And he also hates God’s omnipotence, in which he recognizes what should properly belong to him, and God becomes the figure and embodiment of his infinite hate. And finally, what he hates in God is God’s poverty, the nullity of an existence which, however much it may posit itself as existence and creation, is nothing, for what is great, what is everything, is the spirit of destruction.
This spirit of destruction, in Sade’s system, is identified with Nature. This point proved to be a thorny one for Sade, and he found himself forced to grope his way along, and in fact had to repudiate the then fashionable atheistic philosophies for which he could not help but feel a certain sympathy and from which his reason, always eager for supporting opinions, could draw an inexhaustible supply. But to the extent that he was able to pass beyond naturalistic ideology and that he was not taken in by external analogies, he proves to us that in him logic has proceeded to its ultimate limits without ever abandoning the field to the obscure forces which supported it. “Nature” is one of those words Sade, like so many eighteenth-century authors, delighted in writing. It is in the name of Nature that he wages his battle against God and against everything that God stands for, especially morality. There is no need to emphasize this point: Sade emphasizes it over and over again; his material on the subject is truly staggering. According to him, this Nature is first of all universal life, and for hundreds and hundreds of pages his whole philosophy consists in reiterating that immoral instincts are good, since they are the facts of Nature, and the first and last appeal must be to Nature. In other words, no morality: the fact reigns. But subsequently, bothered by the equal value he sees himself obliged to accord both to good and evil instincts and impulses, he attempts to establish a new scale of values with crime at the summit. His principal argument consists in maintaining that crime conforms more closely to the spirit of Nature, because it is movement, that is life; Nature, he says, which wishes to create, needs crime, which destroys: all this is set forth in the greatest detail and at incredible length, and sometimes with rather striking proof. Nevertheless, by dint of talking about Nature, by being constantly faced with this frame of reference, ubiquitous and commanding, the Sadean protagonist becomes gradually annoyed, his anger mounts, and before long his hatred for Nature is such that Nature, unbearable in his eyes, is the target for his anathemas and negations. “Yes, my friend, yes indeed, I loathe Nature.” There are two deep-seated reasons for this revolt. On the one hand, he finds it quite intolerable that the incredible power of destruction which he represents has no other purpose than to authorize Nature to create. And on the other hand, insofar as he himself belongs to Nature he feels that Nature eludes his negation, and that the more he insults and defiles it the better he serves it, the more he annihilates it the more he is submitting to its law. Whence those cries of hatred, that truly insane revolt:
Oh thou, blind and insensate force, when I shall have exterminated all the creatures on the face of the earth I shall still be far indeed from my goal, for I shall have served thee, cruel master, whereas all I aspire to is to revenge myself for the stupidity and evil which thou makest men to experience by refusing them the means to indulge themselves freely in the frightful predilections which thou dost inspire in them.
Therein lies the expression of a primordial and elementary feeling: to insult and outrage Nature is man’s most deep-rooted exigency, one which is a thousand times stronger than his need to offend God.
In everything we do there are nothing but idols offended and creatures insulted, but Nature is not among them, and it is she I should like to outrage. I should like to upset her plans, thwart her progress, arrest the wheeling courses of the stars, throw the spheres floating in space into mighty confusion, destroy what serves Nature and protect what is harmful to her; in a word, to insult her in her works—and this I am unable to do.
And once again, in the above passage, Sade allows himself to confuse Nature with its great laws, and this enables him to dream of a cataclysm such that it could destroy them; but his logic rejects this compromise and when, elsewhere, he envisions an engineer inventing a machine to pulverize the universe, he is forced into the following admission: no one will have been more deserving of Nature than he. Sade was perfectly well aware of the fact that to annihilate everything is not to annihilate the world, for the world is not only universal affirmation but universal destruction as well, and can be represented alike by the totality of being and the totality of non-being. It is for this reason that the struggle with Nature represents, in man’s history, a far more advanced dialectical stage than his struggle with God. We can safely state, without fear of unduly modernizing S
ade’s thought, that he was one of the first thinkers of his century to have recognized and incorporated into his world view the notion of transcendence: since the notion of nothingness, of non-being, belongs to the world, one cannot conceive of the world’s non-being except from within a totality, which is still the world.
If crime is the spirit of Nature, there is no crime against Nature and, consequently, there is no crime possible. Sade states this, at times with the most profound satisfaction, and then again with the deepest resentment and rage. For to deny the possibility of crime allows him to deny morality and God and all human values; but to deny crime is also to renounce the spirit of negation, to admit that this spirit can suppress itself. This is a conclusion against which he protests most vigorously, and one which leads him little by little to withdraw all reality from Nature. In the last volumes of La Nouvelle Justine, (especially in Volumes VIII and IX), Juliette repudiates all her previous conceptions and makes amends in the following terms:
Fool that I was, before we parted I was still involved with the notion of Nature, but the new systems which I have since adopted have removed me from her. . . .
Nature, she says, has no more reality, no more truth or meaning than God:
Ah, bitch, perhaps thou dost deceive me too, as in times past I was deceived by the vile deific chimera to which thou art, we were told, submissive; we are no more dependent upon thee than upon him; perhaps the causes are not essential to the effects. . . .
Thus Nature disappears, although the philosopher had placed all his trust in her and although he would greatly have loved to make a formidable death machine of universal life. But mere nothingness is not his goal. What he has striven for is sovereignty, through the spirit of negation, carried to its extreme. Putting this negation to the test, he has alternately employed it on men, God, and Nature. Men, God, and Nature: the moment each of these notions comes in contact with negation it seems to be endowed with a certain value, but if one considers the experiment as a whole, these moments no longer have the slightest reality, for the characteristic of the experiment consists precisely in ruining and nullifying them one after the other. What are men, if before God they are nothing? What is God when compared to Nature? And what in fact is Nature, which is compelled to vanish, driven to disappear by man’s need to outrage it? Thus the circle is closed. With man we started, we now end up with man. Except that he now bears a new name: he is called the Unique One, the man who is unique of his kind.
Sade, having discovered that in man negation was power, claimed to base man’s future on negation carried to the extreme. To reach this ultimate limit, he dreamed up—borrowing from the vocabulary of his time—a principle which, by its very ambiguity, represents a most ingenious choice. This principle is: Energy. Energy is, actually, a completely equivocal notion. It is both a reserve of forces and an expenditure of forces, both potential and kinetic, an affirmation which can only be wrought by means of negation, and it is the power which is destruction. Furthermore, it is both fact and law, axiom and value.
One thing quite striking is that Sade, in a universe full of effervescence and passion, suppresses desire and deems it suspect rather than emphasizing it and raising it to the highest level of importance. The reason he does so is that desire denies solitude and leads to a dangerous acknowledgment of the world of others. But when Saint-Fond declares:
My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way,
we can see very clearly why “destruction” and “power” may appear synonymous, without the destroyed object deriving the slightest value from this operation. This principle has another advantage: it assigns man a future without saddling him with any feeling of indebtedness to any transcendental concept. For this all honor is due Sade. He has claimed to overthrow the morality of Good, but despite a few provocative affirmations he has been very careful not to replace it with a Gospel of Evil. When he writes: “All is good when it is excessive,” he can be reproached for the uncertainty of his principle, but he cannot be charged with wanting to establish the supremacy of man over the supremacy of ideas to which man would be subordinated. In this doctrine, no conduct is granted any special privileges: one can choose to do whatever one likes; the important thing is that, in doing them, one should be able to render coincident the maximum of destruction and the maximum of affirmation. Practically speaking, that is exactly what happens in Sade’s novels. It is not the degree of Vice or Virtue that makes people happy or unhappy, but the energy they put to use, for, in Sade’s words:
Happiness is proportionate to the energy of principles; no one who drifts endlessly would ever be capable of experiencing it.
Juliette, to whom Saint-Fond proposes a plan by which two-thirds of France would be decimated by starvation, has a moment’s hesitation and is overawed at the prospect: immediately she is threatened. Why? Because she has shown signs of weakness, her vital temper is slackened, and the greater energy of Saint-Fond prepares to make her its prey. This is even clearer in the case of Durand. Durand is a poisoner completely incapable of the slightest virtue; her corruption is total. But one day the government of Venice asks her to disseminate the plague. The project frightens her, not because of its immoral character but because of the dangers she would expose herself to. Straightway she is condemned. Her energy failed her and she found her master; and that master is death. In leading a dangerous life, says Sade, what really matters is never “to lack the strength necessary to forge beyond the furthermost limits.” One might say that this strange world is not made up of individuals, but of systems of vectors, of greater or lesser tensions. Wherever or whenever the tension falls, catastrophe inevitably ensues. Furthermore, there is no reason to distinguish between Nature’s energy and the energy of man: luxury and lust are a kind of lightning flash, as lightning is the lubricity of Nature; the weak will be the victim of both and the mighty will emerge triumphant. Justine is struck by lightning; Juliette is not. There is nothing providential about this denouement. Justine’s weakness attracts the same lightning which Juliette’s energy deflects away from her. Similarly, everything that happens to Justine makes her unhappy, because everything that affects her diminishes her; we are told of Justine that her inclinations are “virtuous but base,” and this must be taken in the strict sense of the phrase. On the contrary, everything that befalls Juliette reveals her own power to her, and she enjoys it as she would some increment of herself. This is why, were she to die, her death would carry her to the very apogee of power and exaltation, for it would enable her to experience total destruction as the total release of her enormous energy.
Sade was clearly aware of the fact that the supremacy of energetic man, insofar as he achieves this supremacy by identifying himself with the spirit of negation, is a paradoxical situation. The integral man, who asserts himself completely, is also completely destroyed. He is the man of all passions, and he is without feeling. First he destroyed himself as man, then as God, and then as Nature; thus did he become the Unique Being. Now he is all-powerful, for the negation in him has vanquished everything. To describe his formation, Sade resorts to an extremely curious concept to which he gives the classical name: apathy.
Apathy is the spirit of negation applied to the man who has chosen to make himself supreme. In a way, it is both the cause and the principle of energy. Sade, it would seem, reasons about as follows: the individual of today represents a certain quantum of force; generally he squanders and disperses his forces, by estranging them, to the benefit of those simulacra which parade under the names of “other people,” “God,” or “ideals.” Through this dispersal, he makes the mistake of exhausting his possibilities, by wasting them, but what is worse, of basing his conduct on weakness, for if he expends himself on behalf of others it is because he believes he needs them as a crutch to lean upon. This is a fatal lapse: he weakens himself by spending his strength in vain, and he expends his ene
rgies because he deems himself weak. But the true man knows that he is alone, and he accepts it; everything in him which relates to others—to his whole seventeen centuries’ heritage of cowardice—he repudiates and rejects: for example, pity, gratitude, and love are all sentiments he crushes and destroys; by destroying them, he recuperates all the strength that he would have had to dedicate to these debilitating impulses and, what is even more important, from this labor of destruction he draws the beginning of a true energy.
It must be well understood that apathy does not only consist in ruining “parasitical” affections, but also in opposing the spontaneity of any passion at all. The vicious person who immediately abandons himself to his vice betrays a flaw that will be his undoing. Even debauchees of genius, perfectly endowed to become monsters if they simply content themselves with following their bent, will end in disaster. Sade is adamant: in order to convert passion into energy, it must be compressed and mediatized by passing through a necessary moment of insensibility, after which it will attain its apogee. During the early stages of her career, Juliette is constantly reprimanded by Clairwil, who reproaches her for committing crimes only out of enthusiasm, of lighting the torch of crime only from the torch of passion, and who also accuses her of valuing lust and the effervescence of pleasure above everything else. These are dangerous and facile tendencies. Crime matters more than lust, and the coldblooded, the premeditated crime is greater than the crime committed in the heat of passion. But most important is the somber, secret crime “committed by a conscious hardening of sensitivity,” because it is the act of a soul which, having destroyed everything within itself, has accumulated an immense strength which will completely identify itself with the act of total destruction which it prepares. All these mighty libertines who live solely for pleasure are mighty only because they have eliminated in themselves all capacity for pleasure. This is why they resort to terrifying and hideous anomalies, for otherwise the mediocrity of normal pleasures would suffice for them. But they have made themselves insensitive: they claim to enjoy their insensibility, their rejected and annihilated sensibility, and they become ferocious. Cruelty is nothing more than the negation of self, carried so far that it is transformed into a destructive explosion; insensibility makes a tremor of the whole being, says Sade, and adds:
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