The Self and Its Pleasures Dean, Carolyn J.

Published by Cornell University Press Dean, C. J.. The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/46091

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PART T W O

S ADE ' S S E L F LE S S NE S S

Sade was the last of the gallant marquis and the first of the neurasthenics. -R. de Bury, Mercure de France, 190 5 If we go straight to the heart of things, we see that the marquis de Sade seems more like a victim than an executioner. -Mark Amiaux, La Vie effrénée du marquis de Sa de, 1936 For example, if a professor were to force students to read some of the work of the Marquis de Sade as part of a course on French society, "it would be actionable," she said. - " [ Catharine ] MacKinnon Leaves Yale Grads With Tough Talk on Sex Abuse," National Law !oumal, 1989

The marquis de Sade ( 1 740- 1 8 1 4) was not known for his discretion or his philanthopy, and it may seem odd that in a section devoted to selflessness he should be the central focus. But in the interwar years Sade's sadistic and not so sadistic crimes, like the crimes of the "deviants" 1 have thus far discussed, also became a metaphor of the self and, more specifically, facilitated the transfor­ mation of the self into an other, into a self that is discreetly power­ fuI, apparently selfless. But even before the Great War, Sade played an essential role in

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Sade's Selflessness

French medical and literary culture as a metaphor for human evil and for perversion, though his work circulated only covertly until the 1 9 30S. Sade was a prolific writer, but he was perhaps best known as the author of Tustine¡ ou, Les MaJheurs de ja vertu ( 1 7 9 1 ) and Tuliette¡ ou, Les Prospérités du vice ( 1 7 97 ), two very long and very obscene novels about two sisters who suffer different fates : Justine clings to her virtue in spite of the repeated sexual assaults to which she is subjected, and Juliette grows up to be an immense­ ly wealthy libertine whose erotic imagination knows no bounds. All of Sade's obscene work is peopled by characters for whom human suffering (including, in a limited fashion, their own) is an indispensable sexual stimulant: The giant Minski's castle is fur­ nished with women's bodies contorted into chairs and tables on which sumptuous feasts are served¡ Juliette sets fire to a full hotel and enjoys the spectacle with her maid from a nearby window¡ the libertine Clairwil, one of Juliette's closest friends, incessantly de­ mands young men and women to mutilate and murder as her fan­ tasies dictate, and she belongs, as do most of Sade's libertines, to a club that supplies its members with the necessary bodies. In Sade's work other people are merely theatrical props that are discarded and exchanged for others as new erotic fantasies require new de­ corso His characters are rich and powerful political insiders such as the pope, judges, govemment ministers-men whose social posi­ tions permit them to execute their fantasies with impunity. The meaning and significance of Sade's works was (and still is) always interpreted in relation to his imprisonment by successive govemments, including the ancien régime (under which, although normally immune as a noble, he was charged with poisoning oth­ ers and with sodomy and condemned to death), the Revolution (whose leaders first released him and later condemned him for moderation), and the Empire. Altogether Sade spent twenty-seven years of his life in prison, both for his crimes and for-as his works were then conceived-writing about them. As Maxime du Camp declared in 1 87 3 , "Any man with the courage to leaf through the works of this man . . . would concur that, as arbitrary as it was . . . his imprisonment was justified./ 1 What concems us in this part is the expression, if not the tri1 Maxime du Camp, Paris: Ses organes, ses fonctions, et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siecle, vol. 4 (Paris: Hachette, 1 8 7 3 ), p. 4 1 8 .

Sade's Selflessness

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umph, of a markedly les s severe attitude toward Sade's deviance in medical and literary circles which emerged during the interwar years. Simply put, doctors and writers began to view Sade as a victim of narrow-mindedness and ignorance.2 The chapters that follow demonstrate how they transformed Sade from a moral mon­ ster into a victim and how that transformation symbolized and shaped a new concept of the self as an irretrievable other. Like the changes documented in Part One, this transformation was framed by a culturally specific dialectic. While the reconstruction of Sade mirrored anxieties about the dissolution of boundaries between the normal and the pathological, it also represented an effort to rein­ force those boundaries in new terms. Chapter 4 describes how that dissolution was cast in terms of an equation of the self with sexual ( sadomasochistic) pleasure. It looks at the medical, biographical, and literary reconstruction of Sade as the victim of a moral and legal system that denied non­ procreative sexual pleasure. Chapter 5 analyzes how that denial became, for the writers Pierre Klossowski, Jean Paulhan, Georges Bataille, and in a different way, for Jacques Lacan, itself the source of Sade's own (primarily masochistic) "pleasure." Sade was first conceived as a victim and then reconceived as wanting to be one. This part addresses the nature of that transition from martyrdom to masochism and ventures to give it a historical meaning. We can link the increasing recognition of sexual diversity in France-the blurry boundary between the normal and the per­ verted-to psychiatric ideologies and psychoanalysis, but only as they were conceived and defined in relation to Sade 's works. Thus, 2 This argument was used in I 9 5 6 in the obscenity trial of Jean Paulhan and Jean­ Jacques Pauvert, who were accused, respectively, of distributing and publishing Sade's works. The defense lawyer in the case, Maurice Garc;on, summed it up in his closing remarks. He did not directly refute Sade's deviance but declared that his reputation had been "50 immeasurably deformed and vulgarized that today still, if we had not discovered the original dossier [documenting Sade's crimesJ in the Na­ tional Archives, we would remain petrified with horror." He pleaded with the judges to recognize to what extent ignorant, superstitious, and philosophically narrow moral leaders of the past had interpreted Sade's "hardly serious" crimes as the acts of a madman. Since, he argued, moral conventions change over time, the greatness of Sade's works could be recognized today by truly modem individuals unencum­ bered by the weight of religious conviction or archaic moral judgrnents. Not only was Sade "hardly dangerous," he was a great writer whose works had been unjustly accorded the status of pomography by a more restrictive era.·Jean Paulhan, L'Affaire Sade ( Paris: Pauvert, I 9 6 3 1, pp. 98-IOO.

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Sade's Selflessness

whereas elsewhere the "scientific" discourses about sexuality res­ cued the self from both too much pleasure and too much repres­ sion, in France, where Sade became the emblem of liberated plea­ sure, they led to the self's dissolution. 1 want to define the dual ideological and cultural process by which Sade's crimes came to be equated with the self's pIe asure, by which Sade's self was defined and redefined as other through the construction of nonprocreative sexuality as a morally acceptable, even necessary, pleasure.