Sade

Apathy, not pleasure.

Nature unscreened.

The castle is the condition of the argument.

Sade (1740–1814), root

Message

Nature is destruction, and the law is a convention laid over it. Virtue in a wicked world is a miscalculation; the virtuous suffer because they have obeyed a rule nature does not obey. The libertine’s aim is not comfort and not even pleasure as a trembling. It is apathy: a will that can contemplate crime without the remainder of conscience that would still be moral. God is the idea for which there is no forgiveness, because it is the idea that makes nature guilty. The republic, if it is serious, must finish the work the Revolution only began and abolish the crimes invented by priests. What is called a crime against nature is nature’s own operation, seen without the screen.

Content

The 120 Days of Sodom (written 1785, in the Bastille; unpublished in his lifetime) is the catalogue: a closed castle, four libertines, a schedule of passions arranged as a science. Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) inserts, into a pornographic dialogue, the pamphlet “Yet another effort, Frenchmen, if you would become republicans.” Justine and Juliette are the paired demonstration: virtue punished, vice rewarded, each ending as an argument. The letters and the prison notebooks are the life pressing on the system.

Presentation

Demonstration by excess. The dialogue is a lesson. The narrative is a proof, repeated until the reader’s objection has nowhere to stand. Isolation—the castle, the boudoir, the cell—is the condition of the argument. Nothing from outside is allowed to rescue the victim or refute the libertine.

Method

Materialist moral philosophy run backwards. He grants the Enlightenment its nature and its reason, then removes the clandestine premise that nature is benign and reason is sociable. Classification does the work later centuries will call clinical. Apathy is the spiritual exercise: repeat the act until the nerves no longer vote.

Summary

The limit should be abolished, and nature put in its place. He does not yet have the later rule that transgression needs the taboo. That difference is why he is the root and not the founder.

What shaped him

People: a Provençal noble house; servants and prostitutes as the first theatre; later, in prison, the imaginary partners of the manuscripts. Place: Paris, Lacoste, the Bastille, Charenton. Formative experience: imprisonment under letter cachet, then under the Revolution, then under the Empire—the libertine locked up by every regime, including the one his pamphlet addressed. Cultural events: the philosophes’ nature; the Revolution’s virtue, which he lived long enough to see become the Terror; the asylum as the century’s last word on him.

Quotes

“Yet another effort, Frenchmen, if you would become republicans.”

Nature “has not got two voices… the one forbidding what the other commands.”

Crime is “the soul of lust.” What the law calls unnatural is nature unscreened.

Apathy, not pleasure, is the libertine’s perfection: the calm in which nothing one does can move one.

“The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.”