The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

by Marquis de Sade

  Indeed, Sade’s plea is so forceful that he ends by denying any criminal character to crime. He realizes this himself. The last part of Juliette is a convulsive attempt to rekindle the flame of Evil, but despite volcanoes, fires, poison, and plague, if there is no God, man is merely smoke. If Nature permits everything, then the worst catastrophes are a matter of indifference. “To my mind, man’s greatest torment is the impossibility of offending Nature!” And if Sade had staked everything only on the demoniacal horror of crime, his ethic would have ended in radical failure; but if he himself accepted this defeat, it was only because he was fighting for something else, namely, his profound conviction that crime is good.

  In the first place, crime is not only inoffensive to Nature, it is useful to her. Sade explains in Juliette that if “the spirit of the three kingdoms” were confronted with no obstacles, it would become so violent that it would paralyze the working of the universe. “There would be neither gravitation nor movement.” As a result of its inner contradiction, human crimes save it from the stagnation which would also endanger an overly virtuous society. Sade had certainly read Mandeville’s The Grumbling Hive, which had had a great success at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Mandeville had shown that the passions and defects of individuals served the public welfare, and even that the greatest scoundrels were the ones who worked most actively for the common good. When an inopportune conversion made for the triumph of virtue, the hive was ruined. Sade also declared repeatedly that a collectivity that fell into virtue would thereby be pushed into inertia. We have here a kind of presage of the Hegelian theory according to which “the spirit’s restlessness” could not be abolished without involving the end of history. But, for Sade, immobility appears not as a static plenitude but as a pure absence. Mankind makes every effort by means of the conventions with which it is armed to cut all its ties with Nature; and it would become a pale phantom were it not for a few resolute souls who maintain within it, in spite of itself, the rights of truth—and truth means discord, war, and agitation.

  In the strange text where he compares us all to blind men, Sade says that it is already enough that our limited senses prevent us from attaining the core of reality. Let us, therefore, not spoil our pleasure even more. Let us try to transcend our limits: “The most perfect being we could conceive would be the one who alienated himself most from our conventions and found them most contemptible.” In its proper context, this statement recalls both Rimbaud’s demand for a “systematic derangement” of all the senses and the attempts of the surrealists to penetrate beyond human artifice to the mysterious heart of the real. But it is as moralist rather than as poet that Sade tries to shatter the prison of appearances. The mystified and mystifying society against which he rebels suggests Heidegger’s “the one,” in which the authenticity of existence is swallowed up. For Sade, too, it is a question of regaining authenticity by an individual decision. These comparisons are quite deliberate. Sade must be given a place in the great family of those who want to cut through the “banality of everyday life” to a truth which is immanent in this world. Within this framework, crime becomes a duty: “In a criminal society one must be a criminal.” This formula sums up his ethic. By means of crime, the libertine refuses any complicity with the evils of the given situation, of which the masses are merely the passive, and hence abject, reflection. It prevents society from reposing in injustice and creates an apocalyptic condition which constrains all individuals to insure their separateness, and thus their truth, in a state of constant tension.

  Nevertheless, it is in the name of the individual that it seems possible to raise the most convincing objections to Sade’s notions; for the individual is quite real, and crime does him real injury. It is here that Sade’s thinking proves to be extreme: the only thing that has truth for me is that which is enveloped in my own experience; the inner presence of other people is foreign to me. Hence, it does not concern me and cannot dictate any duty to me. “We don’t care a bit about the torment of others; what have we in common with this torment?” And again: “There is no comparison between what others experience and what we feel. The strongest pain in other people is certainly nothing to us, but we are affected by the slightest tickle of pleasure that touches us.” The fact is that the only sure bonds among men are those they create in transcending themselves into another world by means of common projects. The only project that the hedonistic sensualism of the eighteenth century has to offer the individual is to “procure pleasant sensations and feelings.” It fixes him in his lonely immanence. Sade shows us in Justine a surgeon who plans to dissect his daughter in order to further science and thereby mankind. Seen in terms of its transcendent future, mankind has value in his eyes; but what is a man when reduced to his mere vain presence? Just a pure fact, stripped of all value, who affects me no more than a lifeless stone. “My neighbor is nothing to me; there is not the slightest relationship between him and myself.”

  These statements seem contradictory to Sade’s attitude in real life. It is obvious that if there were nothing in common between the tortures of the victims and the torturer, the latter would derive no pleasure from them. But what Sade is actually disputing is the a priori existence of a given relationship between myself and the other by which my behavior should be guided in the abstract. He does not deny the possibility of establishing such a relationship; and if he rejects ethical recognition of other people founded on false notions of reciprocity and universality, it is in order to give himself the authority to destroy the concrete barriers of flesh which isolate human minds. Each mind bears witness only for itself as to the value it attributes to itself and has no right to impose this value upon others. But it can, in a singular and vivid manner, demand recognition of such value in its acts. This is the course chosen by the criminal, who, by the violence of his self-assertion, becomes real for the other person and thereby also reveals the other as really existing. But it should be noted that, quite unlike the conflict described by Hegel, this process involves no risk for the subject. His primacy is not at stake; regardless of what happens to him, he will accept no master. If he is defeated, he returns to a solitude which ends in death, but he remains sovereign.

  Thus, for the despot, other people do not represent a danger that could strike at the heart of his being. Nevertheless, this outside world from which he is excluded irritates him. He wants to penetrate it. Paradoxically enough, he is free to make things happen in this forbidden domain, and the temptation is all the more dizzying in that these events will be incommensurable with his experience. Sade repeatedly stresses the point that it is not the unhappiness of the other person which excites the libertine, but rather the knowledge that he is responsible for it. This is something very different from an abstract demoniacal pleasure. When he weaves his dark plots, he sees his freedom being transformed for others into a destiny. And as death is more certain than life, and suffering more certain than happiness, it is in persecutions and murder that he takes unto himself this mystery. But it is not enough to impose oneself upon the bewildered victim in the guise of destiny. Duped and mystified as he is, one possesses him, but only from without. In revealing oneself to the victim, the torturer incites him to manifest his freedom by his screams or prayers. If it is not revealed, the victim is unworthy of torture. One kills him or forgets about him. He may also escape his torturer by the violence of his revolt, be it flight, suicide, or victory. What the torturer demands is that, alternating between refusal and submission, whether rebelling or consenting, the victim recognize, in any case, that his destiny is the freedom of the tyrant. He is then united to his tyrant by the closest of bonds. They form a genuine couple.

  There are occasional cases in which the victim’s freedom, without escaping the destiny which the tyrant creates for it, succeeds in getting around it. It turns suffering into pleasure, shame into pride; it becomes an accomplice. It is then that the debauchee is gratified to the full: “There is no keener pleasure for a libertine mind than to win prosely
tes.” To debauch an innocent creature is obviously a satanic act, but in view of the ambivalence of evil, we effect a genuine conversion by winning for it a new adept. The capturing of a virginity, among other things, appears in this light as a ceremony of initiation. Just as we must outrage Nature in order to imitate her, though the outrage is canceled out since she herself demands it, so, in doing violence to an individual, we force him to assume his separateness, and thereby he finds a truth which reconciles him with his antagonist. Torturer and victim recognize their fellowship in astonishment, esteem, and even admiration.

  It has rightly been pointed out that there is never any permanent bond among Sade’s libertines, that their relationship involves a constant tension. But the fact that Sade systematically makes selfishness triumph over friendship does not prevent him from endowing friendship with reality. Noirceuil is very careful to let Juliette know that he is interested in her only because of the pleasure he finds in her company; but this pleasure implies a concrete relationship between them. Each feels confirmed within himself by the presence of an alter ego; it is both an absolution and an exaltation. Group debauchery produces genuine communion among Sade’s libertines. Each one perceives the meaning of his acts and of his own figure through the minds of the others. I experience my own flesh in the flesh of another; then my fellow creature really exists for me. The shocking fact of coexistence eludes our thinking, but we can dispose of its mystery the way Alexander cut through the Gordian knot: we must set ourselves down in it by acts. “What an enigma is man!—Yes, my friend, and that’s what made a very witty man say that it’s better to f . . . him than to understand him.” Eroticism appears in Sade as a mode of communication, the only valid one. We might say, parodying Claudel, that in Sade “the penis is the shortest path between two hearts.”

  5

  To sympathize with Sade too readily is to betray him. For it is our misery, subjection, and death that he desires; and every time we side with a child whose throat has been slit by a sex maniac, we take a stand against him. Nor does he forbid us to defend ourselves. He allows that a father may revenge or prevent, even by murder, the rape of his child. What he demands is that, in the struggle between irreconcilable existences, each one engage himself concretely in the name of his own existence. He approves of the vendetta, but not of the courts. We may kill, but we may not judge. The pretensions of the judge are more arrogant than those of the tyrant; for the tyrant confines himself to being himself, whereas the judge tries to erect his opinions into universal laws. His effort is based upon a lie. For every person is imprisoned in his own skin and cannot become the mediator between separate persons from whom he himself is separated. And the fact that a great number of these individuals band together and alienate themselves in institutions, of which they are no longer masters, gives them no additional right. Their number has nothing to do with the matter. There is no way of measuring the incommensurable. In order to escape the conflicts of existence, we take refuge in a universe of appearances, and existence itself escapes us. In thinking that we are defending ourselves, we are destroying ourselves. Sade’s immense merit lies in his taking a stand against these abstractions and alienations which are merely flights from the truth about man. No one was more passionately attached to the concrete than he. He never respected the “everyone says” with which mediocre minds lazily content themselves. He adhered only to the truths which were derived from the evidence of his own actual experience. Thus he went beyond the sensualism of his age and transformed it into an ethic of authenticity.

  This does not mean that we can be satisfied with the solution he offers. For if Sade’s desire to grasp the very essence of the human condition in terms of his particular situation is the source of his greatness, it is also responsible for his limits. He thought that the solution he chose for himself was valid for everyone else, to the exclusion of any other. Wherein he was doubly mistaken. For all his pessimism, he was, socially, on the side of the privileged, and he did not understand that social injustice affects the individual even in his ethical potentialities. Even rebellion is a luxury requiring culture, leisure, and a certain detachment from the needs of existence. Though Sade’s heroes may pay with their lives for such rebellion, at least they do so after it has given their lives a valid meaning; whereas for the great majority of men it would be tantamount to a stupid suicide. Contrary to his wishes, it is chance, and not merit, which would operate in the selection of a criminal elite. If it is objected that he never strove for universality, that he wanted only to insure his own salvation—that does not do him justice. He offers himself as an example, since he wrote—and so passionately!—of his own experience. And he probably did not expect his appeal to be heard by everyone. But he did not think that he was addressing only the members of the privileged classes, whose arrogance he detested. The kind of predestination in which he believed was democratically conceived, and he would not have wanted to discover that it depended upon the economic circumstances from which, as he saw it, it should allow one to escape.

  Moreover, he did not suppose that there could be any possible way other than individual rebellion. He knew only two alternatives: abstract morality and crime. He was unaware of action. Though he might have suspected the possibility of a concrete communication among subjects through an undertaking which might unite all men in the common realization of their manhood, he did not stop there. Denying the individual all transcendence, he consigns him to an insignificance which sanctions the use of violence. But this violence in the void becomes absurd, and the tyrant who tries to assert himself by such violence discovers merely his own nothingness.

  To this contradiction, however, Sade might oppose another. For the eighteenth century’s fond dream of reconciling individuals within their immanence is, in any case, unfeasible. Sade embodied in his own way his disappointment with the Terror. The individual who is unwilling to deny his particularity is repudiated by society. But if we choose to recognize in each subject only the transcendence which unites him concretely with his fellows, we are leading him only to new idols, and their particular insignificance will appear all the more obvious. We shall be sacrificing today to tomorrow, the minority to the majority, the freedom of each to the achievements of the community. Prison and the guillotine will be the logical consequences of this denial. The illusory brotherhood ends in crimes, wherein virtue recognizes her abstract features. “Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime,” said Saint-Just. Is it not better to assume the burden of evil than to subscribe to this abstract good which drags in its wake abstract slaughters? It is probably impossible to escape this dilemma. If the entire human population of the earth were present to each individual in its full reality, no collective action would be possible, and the air would become unbreathable for everyone. Thousands of individuals are suffering and dying vainly and unjustly at every moment, and this does not affect us. If it did, our existence would be impossible. Sade’s merit lies not only in his having proclaimed aloud what everyone admits with shame to himself, but in the fact that he did not simply resign himself. He chose cruelty rather than indifference. This is probably why he finds so many echoes today, when the individual knows that he is more the victim of men’s good consciences than of their wickedness. To confront this terrifying optimism is to come to his aid. In the solitude of his prison cells, Sade lived through an ethical darkness similar to the intellectual night in which Descartes shrouded himself. He emerged with no revelation but at least he disputed all the easy answers. If ever we hope to transcend the separateness of individuals, we may do so only on condition that we be aware of its existence. Otherwise, promises of happiness and justice conceal the worst dangers. Sade drained to the dregs the moment of selfishness, injustice, and misery, and he insisted upon its truth. The supreme value of his testimony lies in its ability to disturb us. It forces us to re-examine thoroughly the basic problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation between man and man.

  —TRANSLATED BY ANNETTE MI
CHELSON

  Nature as Destructive Principle

  by Pierre Klossowski

  When it wants martyrs, atheism has only to speak; my blood is ready to flow.

  —La Nouvelle Justine

  In Sade’s work the uneasy conscience of the debauched libertine represents a transitional state of mind between the conscience of social man and the atheistic conscience of the philosopher of Nature. It offers at one and the same time those negative elements which Sadean thought, in its dialectical movement, makes great efforts to eliminate, and the positive elements which will make it possible to move beyond this intermediary state of mind in order to get to the atheistic and asocial philosophy of Nature and a moral system based on the idea of Nature as perpetual motion.

  The libertine’s conscience maintains a negative relationship with God on one hand and with his neighbor on the other. Both the notion of God and the notion of his neighbor are indispensable to him. The relationship with God is negative because the libertine’s conscience, as we find it in Sade, is not atheistic in a cold-blooded way; rather its atheism is the result of effervescence and therefore of resentment; his atheism is only a form of sacrilege. Only the profanation of religious symbols is able to convince him of his apparent atheism, which is thus clearly distinguishable from the conscience of the atheistic philosopher for whom sacrilege has no significance beyond its revelation of the weakness of the individual who indulges in it.