THAT the French libertine novelist Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814) was a man of obscene taste and literary disrepute during his own lifetime is well known. His writings were regarded as vulgar and distasteful by the standards of the time and for which he spent a considerable portion of his life in various prisons and asylums, including the infamous Bastille state prison before it was blown up during the French Revolution in 1789. However, neither his literary unpopularity nor imprisonment proved to be an impediment to his writing career as he produced some of his major works from those prisons, including the stomach turning novel 120 Days of Sodom, written in 1785 during his imprisonment in Bastille.

After his death in 1814, his writings were banned, both in France and elsewhere, and some of them were burnt by his own son. Given the vulgarity and the violence in his writings, it seems rather apt that his name should come to denote a basic perversion of human nature – ‘sadism’ which as an eponym made its first appearance in the Dictionnaire universel de la langue française in 1803.¹

However, as an eponym ‘sadism’ was popularized by the German psychiatrist Richard von-Krafft Ebing who introduced the term as a clinical concept in his principal work Psychopathia Sexualis published in 1886.² Subtitled in English as ‘A Clinical-Forensic Study’, it is from this context of clinical psychiatry in the latter half of the 19th century that de Sade’s works began to spread into other domains of intellectual endeavour – surrealism, for example.³ When an ‘illness’ comes to be named not after the doctor who cures it but the patient, it shows the power of literature; soon important romantic and decadent authors like Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert also began discussing his novels.⁴

 

Among these multifaceted interests in the works of de Sade from the late 19th century onwards and into the 20th, it is the capital importance of his works in the history of ideas with a focus on ‘violence’ that I shall consider for this paper.⁵ For this I shall operate within a Foucauldian framework and engage especially with Foucault’s writings in the two decades of the 1960s and ’70s to approach de Sade’s novels, particularly The 120 Days of Sodom.⁶ The paper attempts to look at the representation of violence in de Sade’s novels and in the process link it to the epistemic shifts occurring between the Renaissance and the neoclassical 17th and 18th centuries, the Enlightenment and the anthropological preoccupation with ‘man’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the development of disciplinary and biopolitical modes of power from the 19th century onwards, all of which Foucault extensively wrote about in the last two decades of his truncated life. Simply put, the question can be posed as how (sexual) violence, particularly the way de Sade represents it in his novels, can be used to conceptualize the epistemic shifts between various ages in the manner Foucault does in his various texts.

 

Studies in the history of the (western) novel, as the form developed in the early 18th century England but more firmly in the 19th, have shown that this ‘new’ literary form of prose writing marked an epistemic shift from the earlier epic and Romance forms of literary outputs. The subject matter as well as the language of this new literary form radically differed from those in the past, occasioned by economic transformations and the rise of the bourgeoisie. That this new form of literary writing as well as its subject of analysis is the cultural correlate of a new mode of economic production called capitalism is hopefully settled among the historians of the novel by now. What is still disputed, however, is the question about that first novel ever written, and there are numerous candidates claiming this spot, including the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-1615). But an unsettled question implies more than a definitive answer.

 

Early attempts at novel writing belonged to what Michel Foucault in his The Order of Things (1966) called a ‘threshold’ zone occurring between a prevailing episteme and a new coming one, and as such the status of these literary texts becomes that of ‘threshold texts’ existing at the interstices between multiple epistemes.⁷ From this perspective, debates like those on the history of the novel, as well as literature as such, can legitimately participate in the ‘history of ideas’ as they anticipate a changing pattern of thought in their literary capacity. Sade’s novels, like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, are a case in point as ‘threshold texts’ – texts that push the limits of the current episteme and forestall the coming of a new one. That is, ‘literary texts’, according to Foucault, participate in a discursive practice and are literary expressions marking the edge of a mode of thinking that is in the process of becoming relegated in favour of a new episteme.

Sade’s libertine novels closed the episteme which Cervantes’ Don Quixote had opened. In this what de Sade’s novels inaugurated in their literary capacity was the modern age where the death of God became coexistent with the discovery of sexuality. But at the time de Sade was writing those texts, they exceeded the realm of the fundamental codes of culture of the time, codes that could not have conditioned the possibility of that kind of literary production. Therefore, the writings were unacceptable and unpublishable as that period did not yet have the grammar by which to make sense of them.

 

To further establish the context for de Sade’s works for the purposes of this paper, we need to go back a little more into Foucault’s The Order of Things where he conceptualizes epistemic changes between classical and modern forms of knowledge from the 16th century to the 19th and onwards. What made classical knowledge possible was that it was based on resemblance. Similitude, that is establishing similarities between things, was the order of the time. Resemblance was the way in which ‘the space where one speaks’ and ‘the space where one looks… fold one over the other as though they were equivalents.’⁸ That is, in the world of resemblance, there was a kinship between signs and the things they stood for, as if they were one and the same. This is why Cervantes’ Don Quixote mistook a windmill for a giant, a herd of sheep for an army, and a washerwoman for a damsel in distress. For a man from the world of resemblance had found himself in the world of representation which, from the point of view of the former, was complete madness. Don Quixote thus becomes an interstitial, ‘threshold text’ that insinuates itself between a retiring and an incoming episteme.

If resemblance based on similitude was the order for the possibility of classical knowledge, representation based on differentiation was the order for the modern form of knowledge (roughly beginning in the 18th century but developing more firmly in the 19th). In an epistemic system of representation, ‘to know is to discriminate’⁹ and that knowledge was no longer based on similitude but on comparison. As a result, the equivalence between signs and the things they described got dissociated and could be understood only by their difference, thus modifying the fundamental arrangements of the classical western episteme.

In other words, ‘the written word ceases to be included among the signs and forms of truth… it is the task of words to translate that truth if they can; but they no longer have the right to be considered a mark of it’.¹⁰ From this point, Foucault once again enters literature, rather ‘literary texts’ as he calls it, through the Marquis de Sade who for him marked the decline of representation’s triumph over resemblance, for it is now ‘the obscure and repeated violence of desire beating at the limits of representation’.¹¹

 

It is well known that the Marquis de Sade took only thirty-seven days in the Bastille prison to write 120 Days of Sodom (1785). And after his death the work could be preserved only in fragmentary form, mainly as a list of various perversions, lacking the deep sociological and political insight with which he had composed his later works like Justine (1791), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), and Juliette (1797-1801). Written in the unfavourable conditions of a prison, de Sade’s only draft of the novel was hidden in one of the cells of Bastille until it was blown up during the French Revolution in 1789, leaving the author convinced that it was lost forever. It was only several decades later that the work would be posthumously brought to light, with its first publication in 1904.

 

The story revolves around four wealthy and debauched gentlemen who exercise every form of physical torture and excess on 24 teenaged victims in a span of 120 days out of a 17th century Swiss villa where de Sade’s imagination had set it in. However, the bulk of the Sodom’s storytelling comes from the ‘sub-characters’, collectively named as ‘The Storytellers’. They consist of four weathered, experienced and extremely well spoken prostitutes whose main purpose in the story is to act as a narrative vehicle as well as inspire the four gentlemen into sexual acts/crimes. The novel itself follows a certain structure in its escalation of violence – from ‘simple or first class passions’ to the ‘murderous or fourth class passions’ that gradually familiarize the inmates as well the readers with an atmosphere of violence.

Following a prolonged introduction which also serves as a ‘contract’ to the sexual conduct of the participants in the villa, we have the first part of the novel, ‘The 150 Simple Passions, or Those Belonging to the First Class’ beginning with a story from the first storyteller, Duclos, recounting the events of her own violation during her teenage by a local monk. Her duty of narrating the story of her sexual assault was entrusted in the following manner:

‘Duclos,’ the Président interrupted at this point, ‘we have, I believe, advised you that your narrations must be decorated with the most numerous and searching details; the precise way and extent to which we may judge how the passion you describe relates to human manners and man’s character is determined by your willingness to disguise no circumstance; and, what is more, the least circumstance is apt to have an immense influence upon the procuring of that kind of sensory irritation we expect from your stories.’¹²

 

That is, in principle the stories of the ‘women chroniclers’ must arouse the men with their words to the effect that their bodies would be compelled to repeat the movements that those words suggest. The manner in which their stories formalize and verbalize the activities of the men and their partners, it would appear that for de Sade language reaches its full significance only when it acts directly on the senses and prompts the body to action.¹³ What is more is that despite the many imperatives followed by obscene actions in the text, de Sade’s novel does follow a certain structure in the form of that storytelling without which the events in the text cannot be set into motion and which ‘disciplines’ those obscene and violent sexual activities in a wholly different capacity meriting the work as more than just ‘pornography’.

In the light of such an interpretation, it is worth asking at this point what could possibly be the philosophy of a Sadeian universe, especially regarding violence, if those works are not mere pornography. It should be noted that many of de Sade’s novels do contain philosophical interludes between the sexual events that exalt those works to the status of philosophical treatises. For example, the libertines may analyse a pamphlet, discuss theories, even draft a constitution in between their activities, or hold a discussion with one of his victims. Such interludes are frequent in novels like Justine where a torturer treats his victims as his listener and confidante, giving them a different role to fill in.¹⁴

 

Though the world of de Sade is one of stark and unapologetic brutality, a deep philosophical structure still holds it all together from whose point of view such a world is not one of madness – the philosophy of unbridled (sexual) freedom attained through exercises in apathy.¹⁵ So brutal is that world that often the sexual activities escalated to violent deaths. In fact, the fourth part of 120 Days of Sodom is subtitled as ‘150 Murderous Passions, or Those Belonging to the Fourth Class’ where again the ‘storytellers’ were assigned the duty of narrating stories that must be so meticulously detailed in their murderous character that they should promptly inspire the libertines to commit the murder of their own victims.

Desgranges, the narrator in charge, begins as follows:

‘He used to enjoy amusing himself with a beggar woman who had not had a bit to eat in three days, and his second passion is to leave a woman to die of hunger in a dungeon; he keeps a close watch upon her and frigs himself while examining her, but does not discharge until the day she perishes.

‘First, he would have her kiss, then he would slowly destroy her by preventing her from drinking although feeding her all she wanted to eat.

‘That same evening, Michette, after having eaten a big supper, is hung head downward until she has vomited everything…’¹⁶

Thus the ‘formal’ structure that the stories offer to the actions in the novel makes death a natural escalation, however violent it is that does not require any further justification. Perhaps, this is why de Sade was a vehement opponent of capital punishment, as expressed in his Philosophy in the Bedroom, for it needs to be rationalized by law as opposed to murders that are committed passionately and hence naturally. In the world of de Sade violence was normalized thus making his novels more than just pornography; it was after all the ‘school’ of libertinage offering training in sexual violence.

 

Through the commitment of the Sadeian libertines towards a principle of unimpeded freedom and sexual liberty, what we notice is a disobedience of any moral order or law in favour of a rule of nature. His conception of nature is one that is characterized by extreme violence whose ultimate goal is to create, but through the path of destruction. Such a conception makes violence a means to a creative end for which one must cultivate an attitude of apathy towards the suffering of others, even death, which will not hinder the process of creation. In this, the sexual activities of the libertines become more like a (counterfactual?) thought experiment where conventions are pushed to their extremes, annulled, and transgressed even methodologically for the pursuit of something beyond them.¹⁷

Generally speaking, if law’s function is to define a realm of transgression in the absence of any pre-established content of its own, de Sade’s universe operates from the other side – it defines the realm of law from within a universe where that transgression had already taken place. That is to say, it is only through such acts of transgression that one comes to learn what law can possibly be, and that law and transgression operate as an intimate and conjoined totality.

 

In the essay ‘Preface to Transgression’, Foucault advances much of what he had been discussing about de Sade in his Order of Things in relation to the ‘non-representational nature of the language of sexuality’ that marks another epistemic shift in the modern regime.¹⁸ Meaning to say, what characterizes this epistemic shift for Foucault is that the old dichotomy of the sacred and the profane has now been replaced by a new couple – transgression and limit. The discovery of sexuality is thus contemporaneous with the death of God, or any transcendental moral order. What is more is that transgression is primary and hence more natural; limit is retrospective which we realize only through an experience of the former. Limit or what we may call law is hence without any positive content and can be apprehended only through a knowledge/experience of crossing over. Transgression, sexual in the context of de Sade, becomes only an ‘acting out’ of the limit.

However, the discovery of sexuality is far from complete and what makes it yet markedly modern is that it has been ‘denatured’ – ‘cast into an empty zone where it achieves whatever meagre form is bestowed upon it by the establishment of limits.’¹⁹ The moment sexuality is understood through an experience of transgression, it anticipates its own limits through that same experience as transgression cannot have a life if its own without that which it crosses over. Therefore, even if from de Sade to Freud the language of sexuality has linked itself to the death of God, any transgression of a sexual nature will always address to this absence because the limit and its transgression constitute each other, operating simultaneously.

 

This co-constitution of the transgression and its limit serves as the fundamental arrangement for understanding Foucault’s other works written in the same decade about the rise of the two explicitly modern forms of power – disciplinary and biopower – and thus this essay aptly ‘prefaces’ Discipline and Punish (1975) – a text that discusses the unity of docility and delinquency – and the Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79) – a text that discusses another unity of life enhancing biopower and life annihilating racism.

In such an understanding, (sexual) violence is not some form of ‘pure’ transgression; rather it is something that can be folded into the ambit of the discipline just at the moment of its transgression.²⁰ That is, the unit of transgression and limit reproduces itself onto a similar unit of violence and discipline that operate in a constitutive reciprocity and can be deployed jointly in modernity in the formation of a docile, modern subject. In this, de Sade’s novels and their contribution in understanding the link between sexuality, transgression and limit, continues to be a literary resource as they form ‘threshold texts’ that can apprehend the epistemic shifts among regimes. Perhaps this is why, despite all the gory details, we still cannot burn The 120 Days of Sodom.

 

Footnotes:

1. Pierre-Claude-Victor Boiste, Dictionnaire universel de la langue française, avec le latin et les étymologies, extraitcomparatif, concordance, critique et supplément de tous les dictionnairesfrançaises: manuelencyclopé dique de grammaire, d’orthographie, de vieuxlangage, de néologie (2nd edition). Desrav, Paris, 1803.

2. Richard von-Krafft Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: eineKlinisch-Forensische Studie. Verlag, Stuttgart, 1886.

3. The French poet and novelist, Guillaume Apollinaire, considered to be one of the forefathers of surrealism, published the first comprehensive work on the life and work of de Sade, L’œuvre Du Marquis de Sade. Bibliothèque des Curieux, Paris, 1909.

4. Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty (trans. Jean McNeil). Zone Books, New York, 1991, p. 15. The work was originally published in French in 1967.

5. Few notable 20th century French intellectuals to take interest in de Sade were Pierre Klossowski, Sade Mon Prochain. Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1947; Georges Bataille, ‘Le Secret de Sade’, Critique 15-16 (1947), 147-160; Georges Bataille, ‘Le Secret de Sade (II)’, Critique 17 (1947), 304-312; Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Faut-ilbrûler Sade?’, Les Temps Modernes 74 (1951), 1002-1033; Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Faut-ilbrûler Sade? (fin)’, Les Temps Modernes 75 (1952), 1197-1230; Maurice Blanchot, ‘A la Rencontre de Sade’, Les Temps Modernes 25 (1947), 577-612; Maurice Blanchot, ‘La Raison de Sade’, in Lautréamont et Sade. Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1949, 17-49; Jacques Lacan, ‘Kant Avec Sade’, Critique 191 (1963), 291-313; and Roland Barthes, ‘L’arbre du Crime’, Tel Quel 28 (1967), 22-37.

6. Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage,1904.

7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Tavistock Publications, London, 1970, p. 4. An episteme is that ‘which defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.’ p. 168.

8. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 9-10.

9. Foucault, ibid., p. 55.

10. Foucault, ibid., p. 56.

11. Foucault, ibid., p. 210.

12. Marquis de Sade, op. cit. fn. 6, p. 62.

13. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, op. cit., fn. 4, p. 18.

14. Deleuze, ibid.

15. Beverely Clack, ‘Violence and the Maternal in the Marquis de Sade’, Feminist Theology 17(3), 27 March 2009, 273-291, pp. 274-276.

16. Marquis de Sade, op. cit. fn. 6, p. 351-2.

17. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, op. cit., fn. 4, pp. 87-90.

18. Michel Foucault, ‘Preface to Transgression’, in Donald F. Bouchard, (ed. and trans.), Language, Counter Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1977, 29-52, p. 50.

19. Foucault, ‘Preface to Transgression’, pp. 29-30.

20. In this essay Foucault writes, ‘The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable.’ p. 34.