“Punishments are always proportionate to the crime, and crimes are always proportionate to the amount of information possessed by the guilty party: the Flood presupposes extraordinary crimes, and those crimes presuppose that we possess information infinitely greater than what we really have.” These are Joseph de Maistre’s comments on original sin. What I should like to emphasize here for later use is the idea of a crime-information relationship, a notion strikingly represented in Sade’s thought and even more strikingly in that of certain of his heroes. If knowledge ends by becoming a crime, what we call crime must contain the key to knowledge. As a result, it is only by extending the sphere of crime further and further that mind, reaching those extraordinary crimes, will recover its lost knowledge—that knowledge which is infinitely greater than what we have.
Possessed by such dispositions, Sade will push materialistic atheism to a point where it will be invested with the form of a truly transcendental fatalism. We see an example of this in the System of Nature set forth by the Pope in his long discussion with Juliette. Here Sade’s thought determinedly gets away from its human condition in order to attempt integration with a mythical cosmogony—the only chance it has, apparently, of getting away from the trial where it stands as much accused as it was at the beginning of its efforts. In vain Sade seeks a judge who will acquit him, and does this even though he has withdrawn the judge’s competence in the realm of human morality.
Sade first of all admits of the existence of an original and eternal Nature who exists outside the realm of the three kingdoms of species and of creatures [the animal, vegetable, and mineral]. “Were Nature to find herself subject to other laws, the creatures who are the result of her present laws would no longer exist.” Nature would still exist, though under different laws. “Creatures, neither beautiful nor good nor valuable,” are the result only of blind laws. Nature creates man in spite of herself; she creates laws specially applicable to man and, from that point on, she has no further control over him. At the beginning of the Pope’s speech, this Nature is seen as being entirely distinct from man’s nature; but though man is no longer dependent on this original Nature, he still cannot escape from the laws which are properly his: the laws of self-preservation and procreation. These laws, moreover, are in no way necessary to Nature, and this is the first indication of his irrelevance within the core of the universe. He can quadruple his species or annihilate it completely without the universe’s feeling the slightest change. Here Sade sees Nature becoming aware of the competitor her own movement has raised up:
If man multiplies his species, he is right according to his own lights; if he destroys his species, he is, by the same lights, wrong; but in Nature’s eyes all this is changed. If he multiplies, he is wrong because he takes away from Nature the honor of a new phenomenon, since the result of the laws which govern him is necessarily new creatures. If those who have been issued forth do not propagate, Nature will issue forth new ones and will enjoy a faculty she no longer has. . . .
In multiplying, man, since he follows a law inherent only to him, does decided harm to the natural phenomena which are within Nature’s capacity. Foreseeing the conflict, Sade modifies his terminology to render it more accurate for a description of the process he wishes to dramatize: “If creatures destroy themselves, they are right as far as Nature is concerned, for they then cease to make use of a received faculty, but not of an imposed law, and commit Nature to the necessity of developing one of her most beautiful faculties. . . .”
Multiplication of the species is no longer considered to be a law which the creature cannot get away from; it is only a faculty which competes with Nature’s original faculty. More and more, as the speech gets more deeply into its description of the conflict, Nature, first admitted as a force obeying blind laws, reveals herself as having purpose: she is creative evolution. Sade says openly that man, in propagating or by not destroying himself, binds Nature to the secondary laws of the species and deprives her of her greatest potential. Nature, if she thereby finds herself the first slave to her own laws, seems only more aware of it and manifests with even greater impetuousness the desire to break the chains of her laws:
Doesn’t she show us to what extent our multiplication disturbs her . . . how much she would like once more to escape by destroying our procreative ability . . . doesn’t she prove this to us by the afflictions with which she ceaselessly overwhelms us, by the divisions and dissensions she sows in our midst. . . by this tendency toward murder with which she inspires us at every instant. . . . Consequently, those murders which our laws punish so rigorously, those murders which we assume to be the greatest outrage which one can do to Nature, not only, as you can see, do her no wrong but cannot do her wrong; rather they become useful to her outlook, since we see her imitating them so often and since it is certain that she does so only because she hopes for the total annihilation of the creatures she has issued forth in order the better to enjoy her faculty of creating new ones. The greatest scoundrel on earth, the abominable and ferocious and barbarous murderer is thus only the organ of her laws . . . only the motive power of her wishes, and the surest agent of her caprices.
In these pages we see the dimensions of the path which Sadean man has traversed from his theology of a Being supreme in its wickedness to this conception of Nature. We saw him at first accepting the existence of God in order to declare God guilty and to take advantage of God’s everlasting guilt; later we saw him confusing this God with a no less ferocious Nature, but still keeping himself on the side of moral categories. But the satanization of Nature was only a preparation for the liquidation of moral categories. The conception of a Nature which aspires to recapture her highest potential signifies in effect the dehumanization of Sade’s thought—a dehumanization which now takes on the form of a singular metaphysics. If Sade, in contradistinction to what he habitually affirms, now goes so far as to consider man entirely distinct from Nature, it is primarily in order to emphasize better a profound lack of harmony between the notion of the human being and the notion of the universe. Eager to reclaim his own rights, he is also eager to explain that the extent of Nature’s efforts must be measured in direct proportion to that lack of harmony. In Sade’s attempt we might also see his will to separate himself from man by imposing on himself the categorical imperative of a cosmic situation which demands the annihilation of all that is human. Without doubt, what Sade is trying to do is declare his separation from a Nature which is the slave of her own laws—and to do so without Nature’s knowing about it. But though Nature, as it is said elsewhere in the System of Pope Pius VI, uses this means to recover her powers, her work in making populations perish from time to time from illness, cataclysms, wars, and discord, or from crimes of scoundrels, actually works only to the profit of that secondary nature of the three kingdoms which are ruled by the laws of a perpetual metempsychosis. Even were she to send out great criminals or great plagues capable of annihilating the three kingdoms, she would only commit another impotent act. To bring about their disappearance, Nature would have to destroy herself totally, and she does not have that kind of mastery.
Thus the scoundrel’s murders not only help Nature attain goals she would otherwise never fulfill but also aid the laws which the kingdoms received along with their initial impetus. I say at their first impetus in order to facilitate understanding of my system; since there was really no creation, and since Nature is eternal, the impetus is given perpetually and lasts as long as there are beings. The impetus would end when there were no more creatures, and at that point would favor other impetuses which would be those desired by Nature; but Nature will only arrive at that point when there is a total destruction of the goal toward which crimes tend. The result of this situation is that a criminal who might be able to overwhelm the three kingdoms all at once by annihilating them and their productive faculties would be the individual who had best served Nature. . . .
A too perfect harmony would have even more drawbacks than disorder; if war, discord
, and crimes were to be banished from the earth, the mind of the three kingdoms, turned to the greatest violence, would then destroy all the other laws of Nature.
The heavenly bodies would all stop, the influences would be suspended because of the unbalancing dominion of one of them; there would no longer be either the force of gravity or of motion. Thus it is that the crimes of men, disturbing the power of the three kingdoms, prevent that power from arriving at a point of dominance and maintain that perfect equilibrium in the universe which Horace called rerum concordia discors. Crime is therefore necessary to the world; and the most useful crimes are those which create the greatest disturbance: a refusal to propagate and destruction . . . these are examples of crimes essential to Nature. . . . [Yet] enough crimes will never be committed on this earth to satiate Nature’s burning thirst for them.
Sade soars directly into myth. The philosophy of his century no longer suffices once it becomes a question of resolving the problem raised by cruelty. As we have just seen, he would like to integrate cruelty into a universal system where it would be brought to its pure state by recovering its cosmic function. Henceforth, passions—from the simple passions to the complex ones—have a transcendental significance: if man believes he is satisfying himself in being obedient to them, he is in reality only satisfying an aspiration which goes beyond his person.
That murderer believes he is destroying; he thinks that he is absorbing. This is sometimes the starting point of his remorse. Let us bring him complete tranquillity on that score; and if the system which I have just developed is not yet within his grasp, let us prove to him by facts visible to his eye that he has not even the honor of destroying, that the annihilation of which he boasts when he is healthy and which causes him to tremble when he is ill, is thoroughly null, and that it is impossible to achieve any success in his enterprise.
Let us for a moment compare the principle of life and death, which will determine Sade’s new position on the problem of destruction, with Freud’s death instinct. Freud, opposing this instinct to that of Eros—the life instinct—uses the two notions as the basis for his ontological theory. While Freud only envisages life at the organic level, Sade—much more the metaphysician despite appearances to the contrary—admits of no difference between life at the organic and inorganic level; he detaches himself from all considerations which relate to the species and to the social milieu in order to offer a single principle:
The principle of life in all beings is no other than the death principle; we receive them both and nourish them both at the same time. At that moment we call death, everything appears to dissolve; we believe this because of the excessive difference which is then visible in this portion of matter which no longer seems alive. But this death is only imaginary; it exists only figuratively and has no reality. Matter, deprived of the more subtle portion of matter which endowed it with motion, is not thereby destroyed; all it does is change form, become corrupt, and that is already a proof of the motion it conserves. It nourishes the earth, fertilizes it, and helps in the regeneration of the other kingdoms as well as in its own. There is, in the end, no difference between the first life we receive and this second life we call death; for the first is made from the matter formed in the woman’s womb while the second follows the same process: matter is renovated and reorganized in the earth’s entrails. . . . The original creation is an example of this: these laws produce their first progeny through a process of exhaustion; they produce other progeny only through destruction. In the first instance, matter is corrupted; in the second, it is putrefied. In both processes we see the only causes of this immensity of successive creations; they are nothing but the initial principles of exhaustion and annihilation.
Corruption, putrefaction, dissolution, exhaustion, and annihilation: these are aspects of life’s phenomena which will have a meaning for Sade that is as moral as it is physical. Only motion is real; creatures are nothing but motion’s changing phases. There is a temptation to make a very cautious comparison between this conception of perpetual motion and the Hindu doctrine of samsara. Nature’s aspiration to escape from herself in order to recover an unconditioned state would seem to be a dream much like that proposed by the notion of Nirvana—at least to the extent that a Western man has a capacity for such dreams. Sade, rather than setting off on the path which Schopenhauer searched for, thrashes out the one Nietzsche was to follow: the acceptance of samsara, the eternal return of the same thing.
Sadean man—having accepted the notion of a Nature which is no more shrewd in wickedness than the Supreme Being, no more voracious than the Minotaur, but rather enslaved from the start by her own laws and the first among the universe’s victims—will arrive at a point where he considers himself a microcosm of Nature, suffering, like Nature, from his own activity. That activity, rather than allowing Nature to achieve her highest potential, allows her only to create, to destroy, to create anew, along with her creatures, in a cycle which proves her impotence. The Pope’s System shows us two competing forces: Nature’s aspiration to recover her highest potential, and the principle of the life and death of the three kingdoms which is the principle of perpetual motion bringing about successive creations. In reality, the phenomena are the same. Perpetual motion is blind, but the aspiration to escape from the laws of this motion by destruction and crime does no more than show our awareness of motion’s role. Sadean man will discover his own conflict in this dualism and perhaps catch glimpses of a final solution. The problem of the cyclic creation and destruction posed by Nature is not much different from the problem of the reality of others as it appears to his conscience. Just as Nature creates obstacles for herself by her will to create, Sadean man creates his neighbor out of a will to create himself. He seems to do this out of a need to destroy the other. Yet he had once aspired to a break with this necessity; through his aspiration toward innocence he had admitted the existence of others and given them reality. Still he remained saddled with the necessity of destroying; and since he wished to prolong the existence of others, he became guilty at that very moment because he had decided to prolong the others’ existence only in order to destroy them. Like Nature, which always and simultaneously aspires to and renounces its highest potential, Sadean man faces the question of whether he can renounce others and be prepared to destroy.
If comparison with the unfortunate—a comparison which remains indispensable if the libertine is to know happiness—presupposes the existence of his neighbor, the first step to be taken in the direction of a renaturalization of cruelty will be to deny the reality of his neighbor and to rid the notion of neighbor of its meaning. In implying the neighbor’s existence, the pleasure of comparison implies evil. Love of neighbor, the chimera which haunted Sade, is converted by the libertine conscience into a love-hatred of the neighbor. Here the libertine makes a mistake, for love-hatred of his neighbor, while it helps liquidate the reality of the other, liquidates his own reality.
How can Sadean man ever give up his object, which is the other, and accept destruction in all its purity, as he must do if he is faithful to his idea of a Nature freed from the need of creating? To do so, he must renounce, not just the other, but also his individual condition as a self.
In apparently solipsistic terms, a quantity of statements made by Sade’s characters implies a doctrine whose conclusions are thoroughly opposed. Under the guise of a Nature aspiring to its highest potential, the doctrine takes absolute and sovereign desire as its principle. But in the name of this principle, it establishes between the self and the other a negative reciprocity:
The false ideas which we have of the creatures who surround us are still the source of an infinite number of judgments whose moral basis is erroneous. We forge chimerical duties for ourselves where our relations with these creatures are concerned, simply because they think they have similar duties toward us. If we have the strength to renounce all that we expect from others, our duties toward them will be immediately annihilated. What, after all, are all the earth’s crea
tures when measured against a single one of our desires? And by what right should I deprive myself of the least of my desires in order to please a creature who is nothing to me and who holds no interest whatsoever for me? . . .
Once the other is nothing, not only am I no longer anything for him, but I am nothing where my own conscience is concerned, and it makes little difference whether the conscience is still mine. For if I break with the other on the moral level, I shall also have broken, on the level of existence, with what I properly am. At any moment I can fall to the mercy of the other who will offer me the same sort of statement as my own: Let us have the strength to renounce all that we expect from others. The wager is pragmatic. Yet, even before this kind of statement is made, the reflective process which leads to it has gone much further in its investigations.
The moral nihilism which tends to suppress awareness of oneself and the other on the level of acts, but which implies no fewer contradictions on Sade’s part, appears here as the last consequence of his atheism. In effect Sade could not limit himself to denying the existence of a personal God, the principle of a self who is responsible and who is the guarantor of Sade’s own selfhood and privacy; he must also attack him. Just as we saw him attacking the principle of the conservation and propagation of the species, we see him now making an issue of the normative principle of individuation in order to give free scope to the erosive forces he has described: the perversions and abnormalities which indicate the emergence within the individual of a sensitive polymorphism by which conscious individuation has been accomplished within individuals. But far from being satisfied with describing those abnormalities, he lends them the eloquence of his spokesmen who refute the existence of a God, guarantor of the norms, in order to plead, in the language of those very norms, the cause of the abnormalities they bear. Now the supposed abnormalities are abnormalities only to the degree that they are expressed in this language—the language of a conscience which is unable to take account of their positive content, that is, of the positive polymorphism which, in a negative manner and in accordance with Sade’s rationalistic terminology, remains tributary. Here we are touching on the singular relationship between Sade and reason, on the constant interaction between the abnormal and thought, and on the contradiction between reason’s effort to enunciate universals even as it pleads—and in pleading offers an extreme example of reason reduced exclusively to its own terms—the very special cause of abnormality. But we are at the same time touching on the adventure of a conscience and are seeing its misunderstandings and its snares once it begins to mediate on the meaning of those forces which are hostile to individuation. What it does is invert those forces so that they may be transformed into what the agent most needs in order to give credibility to his speech. Sade elucidates this misunderstanding without really resolving it; and, through his spokesmen, he disguises the snares it contains and thus provides the Sadean conscience with some elasticity.
The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings Page 10