CHAPTER II

DE SADE'S SOVEREIGN MAN

Those who are not bound by reason: thieves and kings

There is nothing on our world to parallel the capricious excitement of a crowd obeying impulses of violence with acute sensitivity and unamenable to reason.

Nowadays everyone has to take responsibility for his actions and obey the law of reason in everything. Leftovers from the past do persist but only the anti-social underworld preserves a quantity of energy that does not go into work; this happens on quite a large scale since there is no check on its underhand violence. This is so in the New World any way, more stringently under the control of cold reason than the Old. (Of course Central and South America are different from the United States, and in another way the Soviet sphere of influence is different from the capitalist countries of Europe—but the facts given in the Kinsey Report are not yet available, and will not be for some long time, for the rest of the world as a whole. There are people who turn up their noses at these statistics, but for all their imperfections can they not see how valuable a Soviet Kinsey Report would be?)

In the world as it used to be, men used not to renounce their exuberant eroticism for reason's sake as they do now. At any rate they wanted mankind personified by one of their fellows to escape the bonds to which the masses were subject. Everybody agreed that the sovereign should enjoy the privilege of riches and leisure, and the youngest and loveliest girls were reserved for him. Moreover, wars opened up greater possibilities than work for the conquerors. The conquerors of old enjoyed the privileges that are now the prerogative of the American underworld (and this very underworld is nothing but a shoddy leftover). Slavery prolonged the effects of wars and persisted certainly up to the Russian and Chinese revolutions, but the rest of the world still enjoys these effects, or suffers from them, according to one's point of view. In the non-communist world North America is indubitably the place where the remoter consequences of slavery are least important as far as social inequality is concerned.

Some sovereign rulers are still with us but for the most part they are domesticated and docile; the autocrats have gone and we are berefit of the vision of the "whole man" desired by a humanity unable to imagine equal personal success for everybody. Tales that have come down to us about the splendid extravagances of kings show us how meagre in comparison are the excesses of the American gangster or wealthy European. What is more, the spectacular apparatus of royalty has disappeared. This is the worst of it. In olden days the spectacle of royal privilege made up for the poverty of common life, just as tragedy on the stage counter balanced the placidity of common existence. Now the frightening thing is the denouement, the last act of the comedy the old world lived out.

It was rather like a shower of firework stars, but so be wildering and so dazzlingly bright that it blinded the watchers. The show of pomp had by then long ceased to satisfy the masses. Were they weary of it? Did each man hope to achieve his own satisfactions?

Egypt by the third millennium had ceased to tolerate a state of affairs justified only by the Pharaoh; the rebellious masses demanded a share in those exorbitant privileges and the immortality that had been until then the sovereign's alone. In 1789 the French mob had demanded to live on their own account. The spectacle of the pomp of the aristocracy, far from satisfying them, drew forth louder angry murmurs. One isolated individual, the Marquis de Sade, took advantage of this to develop the system to its logical consequence under a pretence of criticising it.

The Marquis de Sade's system perfects as much as it criticises a certain way of bringing the individual in to the full excercise of all his potentialities above the heads of the goggling crowd. In the first place de Sade tried to use the privileges conferred on him by a feudal regime to further his passions. But the regime was by that time tempered suffi ciently with reason (indeed, it almost always had been) to oppose the potential abuse of these privileges by a great lord. De Sade's abuse was apparently no worse than that of other lords of the same times, but he was careless and clumsy and blessed with a rather powerful mother-in-law. His privileges vanished when, a victim of chance, he became a prisoner in Vincennes and then in the Bastille. He was an enemy of the ancien regime and fought against it. The excesses of the Terror he condemned but he was a Jacobin and the secretary of a section. He worked out his criticism of the past along two lines: in the one he sided with the Revolution and criticised the monarchy, but in the other he exploited the infinite possibilities of literature and propounded to his readers the concept of a sovereign type of humanity whose privileges would not have to be agreed upon by the masses. The privileges de Sade visualised were outrageous com pared with those of kings and lords. They were such as wicked kings and nobles might be expected to possess with impunity in their omnipotence according to the romantic idea. The gratuitous character of this notion and its value as a spectacle gave much more scope than institutions which responded feebly at best to the need for an existence freed from all limits.

Solitude in prison and the terrifying truth of an imaginary moment of success

It had formerly been the general wish that the erotic whims of some outstandingly exuberant personality should be unstintingly satisfied. Yet there were limits, and de Sade outstripped them to a staggering degree. De Sade's sovereign individual is no longer a man encouraged to his extravagance by the crowd. The kind of sexual satisfaction that suits everyone is not for de Sade's fantastic characters. The kind of sexuality he has in mind runs counter to the desires of other people (of almost all others, that is); they are to be victims, not partners. De Sade makes his heroes uniquely self-centred; the partners are denied any rights at all: this is the key to his system. If eroticism leads to harmony between the partners its essential principle of violence and death is invalidated. Sexual union is fundamentally a com promise, a half-way house between life and death. Communion between the participants is a limiting factor and it must be ruptured before the true violent nature of eroticism can be seen, whose translation into practice corresponds with the notion of the sovereign man. The man subject to no restraints of any kind falls on his victims with the devouring fury of a vicious hound.

The events of de Sade's real life lead one to suspect an element of braggadocio in his insistence on sovereignty seen as a denial of the rights and feelings of others. But the boasting was essential if he was to work out a system completely free from human weakness. In his life de Sade took other people into account, but his conception of fullfilment worked over and over in his lonely cell led him to deny out right the claims of other people. The Bastille was a desert; his writing was the only outlet for his passions and in it he pushed back the limits of what was possible beyond the craziest dreams ever framed by man. These books distilled in prison have given us a true picture of a man for whom other people did not count at all.

De Sade's morality, says Maurice Blanchot 1 "is founded on absolute solitude as a first given fact. De Sade said over and over again in different ways that we are born alone, there are no links between one man and another. The only rule of conduct then is that I prefer those things which affect me pleasurably and set at nought the undesirable effects of my preferences on other people. The greatest suffering of others always counts for less than my own pleasure. What matter if I must purchase my most trivial satisfaction through a fantastic accumulation of wrongdoing? For my satisfaction gives me pleasure, it exists in myself, but the consequences of crime do not touch me, they are outside me"

Maurice Blanchot's analysis faithfully matches de Sade's basic thinking. This thinking is doubtless artificial. It fails to take into account the actual make-up of every real man, inconceivable if shorn of the links made by others with him and by him with others. The independence of one man has never ceased to be any more than a boundary to the inter dependence of mankind, without which there would be no human life. This is of cardinal importance. But de Sade's doctrine isnot so wide of the mark as all that. It may deny the reality on which life is based, yet we do experience moments of excess that stir us to the roots of our being and give us strength enough to allow free rein to our elemental nature. But if we were to deny those moments we should fail to understand our own nature.

De Sade's doctrine is nothing more nor less than the logical consequence of these moments that deny reason.

By definition, excess stands outside reason. Reason is bound up with work and the purposeful activity that incarnates its laws. But pleasure mocks at toil, and toil we have seen to be unfavourable to the pursuit of intense pleasure. If one calculates the ratio between energy consumed and the usefulness of the results, the pursuit of pleasure even if reckoned as useful is essentially extravagant; the more so in that usually pleasure has no end product, is thought of as an end in itself and is desired for its very extravagance. This is where de Sade comes in. He does not formulate the above principles, but he implies them by asserting that pleasure is more acute if it is criminal and the more abhorrent the crime the greater the pleasure. One can see how the excesses of pleasure lead to the denial of the rights of other people which is, as far as man is concerned, an excessive denial of the principle upon which his life is based.

In this de Sade was convinced that he had made a decisive discovery in the field of knowledge. If crime leads a man to the greatest sensual satisfactions, the fullfilment of the most powerful desires, what could be more important than to deny that solidarity which opposes crime and prevents the enjoyment of its fruits? I can picture this violent truth striking him in the loneliness of his prison. From that instant he ceased to have any truck with anything, even in himself, that might have invalidated his system. Had he not been in love himself, just like anyone else? When he had run off with his sister-in-law, had not that helped to get him locked up by arousing his mother-in-law's wrath so that she procured the fatal lettre de cachet? Latterly was he not to adopt political views based on concern for the welfare of the masses ? Was he not horror-struck to see from his window, in the prison to which his opposition to the methods of the Terror had brought him, the guillotine at work? And finally did he not shed "tears of blood" over the loss of a manuscript in which he had striven to reveal—to other men, observe-the truth of the insignificance of other people ? 2 He may have told himself that none the less the truth of sexual attraction is not fully ap parent if consideration for other people paralyses its action. He refused to contemplate anything he could not ex perience in the interminable silence of his cell where only visions of an imaginary world bound him to life.

The very extravagance of his affirmations stands in the way of getting them accepted at all easily. But by taking his affirmations as a starting point, it is possible to understand that tenderness has no effect on the interaction of eroticism and death. Erotic conduct is the opposite of normal conduct as spending is the opposite of getting. If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to increase the sum of our possessions or of our know ledge, we use all means to get richer and to possess more. Our status in the social order is based on this sort of behaviour. But when the fever of sex seizes us we behave in the opposite way. We recklessly draw on our strength and sometimes in the violence of passion we squander consider able resources to no real purpose. Pleasure is so close to ruinous waste that we refer to the moment of climax as a "little death". Consequently anything that suggests erotic excess always implies disorder. Nakedness wrecks the decency conferred by our clothes. But once we have ventured along the path of sensuous disorder it takes a good deal to satisfy us. Destruction and betrayal will sometimes go hand in hand with the rising tide of genetic excess. Besides nudity there is the strangeness of half-clothed bodies; what garments there ate serve to emphasise the disorder of the body and show it to be all the more naked, all the more disordered. Brutality and murder are further steps in the same direction. Similarly prostitution, coarse language and everything to do with eroticism and infamy play their part in turning the world of sensual pleasure into one of ruin and degradation. Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can. As remote as we can :—that is hardly strong enough; we want a world turned upside down and inside out. The truth of eroticism is treason.

De Sade's system is the ruinous form of eroticism. Moral isolation means that all the brakes are off; it shows what spending can really mean. The man who admits the value of other people necessarily imposes limits upon himself. Respect for others hinders him and prevents him from measuring the fullest extent of the only aspiration he has that does not bow to his desire to increase his moral and material resources. Blindness due to respect for others happens every day; in the ordinary way we make do with rapid incursions into the world of sexual truths and then openly give them the lie the rest of the time. Solidarity with everybody else prevents a man from having the sovereign attitude. The respect of man for man leads to a cycle of servitude that allows only for minor moments of disorder and finally ends the respect that their attitude is based on since we are denying the sovereign moment to man in general.

From the opposite point of view, "the centre of de Sade's world" is, according to Maurice Blanchot, "the demands of sovereignty asserted through an enormous denial". Un fettered freedom opens out into a void where the possibilities match the intensest aspirations at the expense of secondary ones; a sort of heroic cynicism cuts the ties of consideration and tenderness for others without which we cannot bear ourselves in the normal way. Perspectives of this order place us as far from what we usually are as the majesty of the storm is from the sunshine or from the drearily overcast sky. In fact we do not possess the excessive store of strength necessary to attain the fulfilment of our soveriegnty. Actual soveriengty, however boundless it might seem in the silent fantasy of the masses, still even in its worst moments falls far below the unleashed frenzy that de Sade's novels portray. De Sade himself was doubtless neither strong enough nor bold enough to attain to the supreme moment he describes. Maurice Blanchot has pinpointed this moment which dominates all the rest and which de Sade calls apathy. "Apathy", says Maurice Blanchot, "is the spirit of denial applied to the man who has elected to be sovereign. It is in some ways the cause and principle of energy. De Sade seems to reason somewhat after this manner: the individual of today possesses a certain amount of strength; most of the time he wastes his strength by using it for the benefit of such simulacra as other people, God or ideals. He does wrong to disperse his energy in this way for he exhausts his potentialities by wasting them, but he does worse in basing his behaviour on weakness, for if he puts himself out for the sake of other people the fact is that he feels he needs to lean on them. This weakness is fatal. He grows feeble by spending his strength in vain and he spends his strength because he thinks he is feeble. But the true man knows himself to be alone and accepts the fact; he denies every element in his own nature, inherited from seventeen centuries of cowardice, that is concerned with others than himself; pity, gratitude and love, for example, are emotions that he will destroy; through their destruction he regains all the strength he would have had to bestow on these debilitating impulses, and more important he acquires from this labour of destruction the beginnings of true energy. It must be clearly under stood indeed that apathy does not consist in ruining 'parasitic' affections but also in opposing the spontaneity of any passion no matter what. The vicious man who indulges his vice immediately is nothing but a poor doomed creature. Even debauchees of genius, perfectly equipped to become monsters, are fated for catastrophe if they are content to follow their inclinations. De Sade insists that for passion to become energy it has to be compressed, it must function at one remove by passing through a necessary phase of insensibility; then its full potentiality will be realised. Early in her career Juliette is always being scolded by Clairwill: she commits crime only in the flush of enthusiasm, she lights the torch of crime only at the torch of passion, she sets lewdness and heady pleasure above all else. This is easy and dangerous. Crime is more important than lewdness; crimes committed in cold blood are greater than crimes carried out in the heat of the moment; but the crime 'committed when the sensitive part has been hardened, that dark and secret crime is the most important of all because it is the act of a soul which having destroyed everything within itself has accumulated immense strength, and this can be completely identified with the acts of total destruction soon to come.' All the great libertines who live only for pleasure are great only because they have destroyed in themselves all their capacity for pleasure. That is why they go in for frightful anomalies, for otherwise the mediocrity of ordinary sensuality would be enough for them. But they have made themselves insensitive; they intend to exploit their insensitivity, that sensitiveness they have denied and destroyed, and they become ferocious. Cruelty is nothing but a denial of oneself carried so far that it becomes a destructive explosion; insensibility sets the whole being aquiver, says de Sade: 'The soul passes on to a kind of apathy that is metamorphosed into pleasures a thousand times more wonderful than those that their weaknesses have procured them.' "3

The triumph of death and pain

I have quoted that passage in full for it throws great light on the central point where being is more than just presence. Presence is sometimes almost sloth, the neutral moment when, passively being means indifference to being, already on the way to meaninglessness. Being is also the excess of being, the upward surge towards the impossible. Excess leads to the moment when transcendent pleasure is no longer confined to the senses, when what is felt through the senses is negligible and thought, the mental mechanism that rules pleasure, takes over the whole being. Without this excess of denial pleasure is a furtive, contemptible thing, powerless to keep its real place, the highest place, in an awareness that is ten times as sensitive. Clairwill, the heroine Juliette's companion in debauch, says "I'd like to find a crime that should have never ending repercussions even when I have ceased to act, so that there would not be a single instant of my life when even if I were asleep I was not the cause of some disorder or another, and this disorder I should like to expand until it brought general corruption in its train or such a categorical disturbance that even beyond my life the effects would continue".⁴ To reach such impossible peaks is indeed no less formidable an undertaking than the ascent of Everest; no one can do it without a colossal concentration of energy. But in the concentration that leads to the summit of Mount Everest there is but a limited response to the desire to excel. If we start from the principle of denying others posited by de Sade it is strange to observe that at the very peak of unlimited denial of others is a denial of oneself. Theoretically, denial of others should be affirmation of one self, but it is soon obvious that if it is unlimited and pushed as far as it can possibly go, beyond personal enjoyment, it becomes a quest for inflexible sovereignty. Concern for power renders real, historical sovereignty flexible. Real sovereignty is not what it claims to be; it is never more than an effort aimed at freeing human existence from the bonds of necessity. Among others, the sovereign of history evaded the injunctions of necessity. He evaded it to a high degree with the help of the power given him by his faithful subjects. The reciprocal loyalty between the sovereign and his subjects rested on the subordination of the latter and on their vicarious participation in his sovereignty. But de Sade's sovereign man has no actual sovereignty; he is a fictitious person age whose power is limited by no obligations. There is no loyalty expected from this sovereign man towards those who confer his power upon him. Free in the eyes of other people he is no less the victim of his own sovereignty. He is not free to accept a servitude in the form of a quest for wretched pleasures, he is not free to stoop to that! The remarkable

thing is that de Sade starts from an attitude of utter irresponsibility and ends with one of stringent self-control. It is the highest satisfaction alone that he is after, but such satisfaction has a value. It means refusing to stoop to a lower degree of pleasure, refusing to opt out. De Sade describes for the benefit of other people, his readers, the peak that sovereignty can attain. There is a movement forward of transgression that does not stop before a summit is reached. De Sade has not shirked this movement; he has accepted it in all its consequences and these go further than the original principle of denying others and asserting oneself. Denying others becomes in the end denying oneself. In the violence of this progression personal enjoyment ceases to count, the crime is the only thing that counts and whether one is the victim or not no matter; all that matters is that the crime should reach the pinnacle of crime. These exigencies lie outside the individual, or at least they set a higher value on the process begun by him but now detached from him and transcending him, than on the individual himself. De Sade cannot help bringing into play beyond the personal variety an almost impersonal egotism. We are not bound to consider in terms of real life his entirely imaginary situations. But we can see how he was forced in spite of his principles to accept the transcendence of the personal being as a concomitant of crime and transgression. What can be more disturbing than the prospect of selfishness becoming the will to perish in the furnace lit by selfishness? De Sade incarnated this progression in one of his most perfect characters.

Amelie lives in Sweden. One day she goes to see Bor champs . . . This man, hoping for a monster execution, has just turned over to the king all the members of a conspiracy which he himself has plotted, and this betrayal delights the young woman. "I love your ferocity," she tells him, "swear to me that one day I also shall be your victim. Since I was 15 my imagination has been fired only at the thought of dying a victim of the cruel passions of a libertine. Not that I wish to die tomorrow—my extravagant fancies do not go as far as that; but that is the only way I want to die; to have my death the result of a crime is an idea that sets my head spinning." A strange head, that one, and well deserving of the answer: "I love your head madly, and I think we shall achieve great things between us... rotten and corrupt it is I grant you!" Thus "for the whole man, man in his entirety, no evil is possible. If he inflicts hurt on others, the pleasure of it! If others hurt him, what satisfaction! Virtue pleases him because it is weak and he can crush it, and so does vice, for the disorder it brings even at his own expense gives him satisfaction. If he lives there is no event in his life that will not seem to him fortunate. If he dies his death is a greater happiness yet, and conscious of his own destruction he sees in it the crown of a life only justified by the urge to destroy. Thus the man who denies is the ultimate denial of all else in the universe, a denial which will not even spare him. Doubtless the strength to deny confers a privilege while it lasts, but the negative action it exerts is the only protection against the intensity of a huge denial. 5
An impersonal denial, an impersonal crime!

Tending towards the continuity of beings beyond death!

De Sade's sovereign man does not offer our wretchedness a transcendent reality. At least his aberration points the way to the continuity of crime! This continuity transcends nothing. It cannot overtake what is lost. But in Amelie de Sade links infinite continuity with infinite destruction.

1 Lautreamont et Sade. Editions de Minuit, 1949, pages 220-221. Maurice Blanchot's study is not only the first coherent account of De Sade's thought; in the author's words, it helps man to understand himself by helping to modify the conditions of all understanding.
2 The Cent Vingi Journees de Sodome is the first work in which he describes the sovereign life, the life of crime of licentious scoundrels dedicated to unlawful pleasure. A day or so before July 14th, 5789, he was moved to another prison for having tried to stir up the passers-by to rebellion by shouting out of his window "People of Paris, they are cutting the prisoners' throats !" He was not allowed to take anything with him and the manuscript of the Cent Vingt Journees was stolen in the looting that followed the fall of the Bastille. Scroungers picked over the piles of assorted objects littering the courtyard for anything they thought might be of us or value. In 1900 the manuscript was recovered from a German bookseller. De Sade himself said he had wept tears of blood for a loss which did indeed affect other people; it affected humanity in general.
3 Maurice Blanchot, op. cit. page 256-258.
4 Op. cit. page 244.
5 Op. cit. page 236-237.