Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)
from: Selections, with an essay by Simone de Beauvoir
Grove Press, NY (1954)
Simone de Beauvoir, "On Violence in de Sade"
. . . . Accomplices are particularly required in order to give sexuality a demoniacal dimension. Thanks to them, the act, whether committed or suffered, takes on definite form instead of being diluted into contingent moments. By becoming real, any crime proves to be possible and ordinary. One gets to be so intimately familiar with it that one has difficulty in regarding it as blameworthy. In order to amaze or frighten oneself, one must observe oneself from a distance, through foreign eyes.
However precious this recourse to others may be, it is not yet enough to remove the contradictions implied in the sadistic effort. If one fails, in the course of an actual experience, to grasp the ambiguous unity of existence, one will never succeed in reconstructing it intellectually. A spectacle, by definition, can never coincide with either the inwardness of consciousness or the opacity of the flesh. Still less can it reconcile them. Once they have been dissociated, these two moments of the human reality are in opposition to each other; and as soon as we pursue one of them, the other disappears. If the subject inflicts excessively violent pain upon himself, his mind becomes unhinged: he abdicates; he loses his sovereignty. Excessive vileness entails disgust, which interferes with pleasure. In practice, it is difficult to indulge in cruelty, except within very modest limits; and in theory, it implies a contradiction which is expressed in the following two passages: "The most divine charms are as nothing when submission and obedience do not come forth to offer them," and "One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater." But where is one to find free slaves? One has to be satisfied with compromises. With paid and abjectly consenting prostitutes, Sade went somewhat beyond the limits that had been agreed upon. He allowed himself some violence against a wife who maintained a certain human dignity in her docility.
But the ideal erotic act was never to be realized. This is the deeper meaning of the words Sade puts into the mouth of Jerome: "What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do." It was not merely that really heinous crimes were forbidden in practice, but that even those which one could summon up in the midst of the wildest ravings would disappoint their author: "To attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze--these would be crimes indeed But if this dream seemed satisfying, it was because the criminal projected into it his own destruction along with that of the universe. Had he survived, he would have been frustrated once again. Sadistic crime can never be adequate to its animating purpose. The victim is never more than a symbol; the subject possesses himself only as an imago, and their relationship is merely the parody of the drama which would really set them at grips in their incommunicable intimacy. That is why the bishop in Les 120 Journees de Sodome "never committed a crime without immediately conceiving a second."
The moment of plotting the act is an exceptional moment for the libertine because he can then be unaware of the inevitable fact, namely, that reality will give him the lie. And if narration plays a primary role in Sadistic orgies and easily awakens senses upon which flesh-and-blood objects cease to act, the reason is that these objects can be wholly attained only in their absence. Actually, there is only one way of finding satisfaction in the phantoms created by debauchery, and that is to accede to their very unreality. In choosing eroticism, Sade chose the make-believe. It was only in the imaginary that Sade could live with any certitude and without risk of disappointment. He repeated the idea throughout his work. "The pleasure of the senses is always regulated [by] the imagination." . . .
The Marquis de Sade
From the Introduction to LES 120 JOURNEES DE SODOME (1785)
Such, dear reader, were the eight principal characters with whom we shall cause you to live. Now it is time to reveal to you the object of the strange pleasures that were projected.
True libertines agree that sensations received through hearing are those that gratify most and give the liveliest impressions; and so our four scoundrels, wishing pleasure to instill their hearts in as deep and predatory a way as possible, had conceived a tolerably strange plan to achieve it.
After surrounding themselves with everything that could best satisfy their other senses by lubricity, it was a question of having themselves, in this situation, told, categorically and in the greatest detail, all the different varieties of this debauch, all its adjuncts, in a word, all that debauchery names as the passions. The degree to which man diversifies them when his fancy is kindled surpasses imagination; if men differ excessively in all their other idiosyncrasies, all their other tastes, by so much the more do they in this case; and if one could capture and catalogue these wayward varieties, he would perhaps produce one of the finest works to be seen on manners, and possibly one of the most interesting. It was, then, a matter of first finding persons able to report on all these excesses, to analyze them, enlarge on them, go into detail, grade them, and through all this, insert the interest of a tale. This, in consequence, was resolved upon. After innumerable searches and enquiries, they found four women already past the prime of life, as indeed was necessary, experience being in this case the most essential thing, four women, as I was saying, who had spent their lives in the most excessive debauchery and who were now in fine frame to report exactly on all these pursuits. As they had been selected carefully for the gift of a certain eloquence and a turn of mind suitable to what was demanded of them, they were able to place, each one of them, in the experiences of their lives all the most extraordinary deviations of debauchery, and these in such an order that the first, for example, filled her tale of the events of her life with the hundred and fifty most elementary passions, the least farfetched deviations, or the most ordinary; the second filled in a similar outline with an equal number of strange passions, and with one man, or several men, and several women; equally, the third in her story had to introduce a hundred and fifty manias most criminal and outrageous to the law, nature, and religion. and since all these excesses lead to murder and since sexual murders are infinite in their variety, and the lecher's fired imagination assumes different punishments on as many occasions, the fourth was obliged to add to the happenings of her life a detailed account of a hundred and fifty of these various tortures. During all this our libertines, surrounded, as I have said, first with their women and then by other objects of every kind, listened, grew hotheaded, and finally extinguished either with these women or with these different objects, the fires these taletellers had kindled. There is, without any shadow of doubt, nothing more pleasurable than the inordinate way they went about it . . . .
from: La Philosophie dans le Boudoir (1745)
. . . . Neither has love, which might be called madness of the soul, any right to justify their fidelity: it satisfies only two individuals, the beloved and the lover, and cannot therefore increase the happiness of others; but women were given to us for the general happiness, not for an egotistical and privileged enjoyment. All men, then, have an equal right to the enjoyment of all women; and there is no man, according to Nature's laws, who can institute a unique and personal claim to any woman. The law which will oblige them to prostitute themselves in the brothels I have spoken of, which will force them if they evade it, is therefore the most equitable of laws and one against which no legitimate excuse can be urged.
A man who wishes to enjoy any woman or girl may thus, if you pass just laws, summon her to appear in one of the houses I have described; and there, safeguarded by the matrons of this temple of Venus, she will be offered in complete meekness and submission to satisfy all the caprices he wishes to indulge with her, however strange and irregular they may be, for there is none that is not inspired by Nature, none that she can refuse. It would only remain then to fix the age; but I claim that that cannot be done without hampering the freedom of whoever desires a girl of such and such an age. . . .
If we admit, as we have just done, that all women should submit to our desires, surely we should also allow them fully to satisfy their own; our laws should in this respect look favorably upon their ardent natures; and it is absurd that we have assigned both their honor and their virtue to the unnatural strength they must use to resist the inclinations with which they have been far more profusely endowed than we. This social injustice is even more glaring since we agree both to weaken them by our seduction and then to punish them when they yield to all our efforts to make them fall. The whole absurdity of our morals, it seems to me, is contained in that atrocious injustice, and the revelation of that alone should be enough to make us realize the absolute necessity of changing it for a purer morality.
I claim that women, who have far more violent desires than we for the pleasures of lust, should be able to express them as much as they wish, free from the bonds of marriage, from all the false prejudices of modesty, completely returned to the state of Nature. I want the law to permit them to enjoy as many men as they like; I want the enjoyment of both sexes and all parts of their bodies to be allowed to them as to men; and under the ruling that they must also be allowed the freedom to enjoy [any one] they think is capable of satisfying them. . . . .
Our foregoing analysis obviously makes it unnecessary to discuss adultery; let us glance at it, nevertheless, however meaningless it becomes after the laws I have established. How ridiculous it was to consider it a crime under our former institutions! If there was one thing in the world particularly absurd it was the eternal duration of the marriage bond; one had surely only to observe or experience the weight of these chains to cease to consider any alleviating action a crime; and Nature, as we have remarked, having endowed women with a more passionate temperament and greater sensibility than the other sex, the marriage bond was undoubtedly more stifling for them.
Ardent women, on fire with the flames of love, recompense yourselves now without fear; realize that there cannot be any harm in following Nature's impulses, that she did not create you for one man but for the delight of all. Let nothing restrain you. Imitate the Greek republicans; their legislators never dreamed of making adultery a crime, and they nearly all authorized women's excesses. Thomas More in his Utopia proves that it is advantageous to a woman to give herself up to debauchery, and this great man's ideas were not always mere fantasy. * . . .
[* He also suggested that betrothed couples should see each other naked before marrying. How many marriages would not take place if this law were enforced!]
. . . . Volumes could be written to prove that sexual indulgence was never considered criminal among any of the wiser nations. Every philosopher realizes that we have only the Christian impostors to thank for making it a crime. The priests had a good reason for forbidding us indulgence; this command, by keeping the knowledge and absolution of these secret sins for them alone, gave them unbelievable power over women and opened the way to a life of unlimited lust. We know how they profited by it and how they would still if they had not irretrievably lost their credit.
Is Incest more dangerous? Undoubtedly not; it extends the family ties and consequently makes the citizen's love of his country more active; it is commanded us by Nature's first laws; we feel the necessity of it; and it makes the enjoyment of objects that belong to us seem yet more delicious. The earliest institutions favored incest; it is found in primitive societies; it has been consecrated by all religions, and favored by all laws. If we survey the whole world we see that incest has been established everywhere. The Negroes of the Pepper Coast and the Gaboon pimp for their wives to their own children; the eldest son of Judah had to marry his father's wife; the peoples of Chile sleep with sisters or daughters indifferently and marry mother and daughter at the same time. To put it briefly, I dare affirm that incest should be the rule under any government based on fraternity. How could reasonable men go to the absurd lengths of thinking that the enjoyment of mother, sister, or daughter could ever be a crime? I ask you, is it not abominably prejudiced to make a man a criminal if he enhances his appreciation of the object closest to him by ties of Nature! It is like saying that we are forbidden to love too much just those individuals whom Nature teaches us to love the most, and that the more she inclines us towards an object, the more she also bids us keep our distance. These contradictions are absurd; only races debased by superstition could believe in them or adopt them. Since the communal state of women that I propose would necessarily involve incest, there is little more to say about this supposed crime that is so obviously a fallacy; and we will pass to rape, which seems at first sight to be the most clearly injurious of all forms of libertinism because of its apparent outrage. It is nevertheless certain that rape, so rare and hard to prove, does less harm than robbery, for the latter appropriates the property, while the former only spoils it. And how could you answer a violator if he objected that in fact he had done but slight harm, since he had only made a certain alteration in an object which would soon have been made in any case through marriage or desire?
But sodomy, then, this so-called crime which brought the wrath of heaven upon the cities given over to it, is this not a monstrous perversion that cannot be too severely punished? It is undoubtedly painful for us to have to reproach our ancestors with the legal murders which they permitted for this cause. Is it possible to be so uncivilized as to condemn an unfortunate individual to death because he has different tastes from ours? It makes one shudder to realize that our legislators were still at that point less than forty years ago. Have no fear, Citizens; such absurdities will not happen again; the wisdom of your legislators will see to that. Now that we are enlightened on this subject of the weakness of certain men, we realize today that such a weakness cannot be criminal, and that Nature could not attach enough importance to the fluid in our loins to be angry over which channel we choose to direct it into.
What is the only crime that can exist here? It is assuredly not in placing oneself in one particular place or another, unless one tries to maintain that the different parts of the body are not really all exactly the same and that some are pure and some filthy; but since it is impossible to put forward such absurdities, the only so-called crime in this case must be the actual loss of semen. Now I ask you, is it likely that that semen is so precious in Nature's eyes that in releasing it one commits a crime? Would she permit this release every day if that were so? Does she not authorize it by permitting the semen to escape during dreams or during the enjoyment of a pregnant woman? Is it conceivable that Nature would enable us to commit a crime that outraged her? Could she consent to men destroying her pleasures and so becoming stronger than she? We fall into an endless gulf of absurdities if we thus abandon the light of reason in our arguments. Let us rest assured, therefore, that it is as natural to have a woman in one way as in another, that it is absolutely indifferent whether we enjoy a boy or a girl, and that once it is agreed that no other desires can exist in us but those received from Nature, Nature herself is too wise and too logical to implant in us anything that could offend her.
The taste for sodomy is the result of our constitution, which we do not foster in vain. Children show this preference from a tender age and never swerve from it. Sometimes it is the fruit of satiety; but even then, is it not still a part of Nature? From every point of view, it is Nature's handiwork, and all that she inspires must be viewed with respect. If it could be proved, by taking an exact census, that this taste is infinitely more widespread than the other, that its pleasures as far keener, and that for this reason its supporters are far more numerous than its enemies, might it not be possible to conclude that this vice, far from outraging Nature, accords with her purposes, and that she is far less concerned with reproduction than we foolishly believe. If we take the whole world into consideration, how many peoples do we see who despise women! Some of them will have nothing to do with women except to get a child to succeed them. In a republic the custom of men living side by side always makes this vice more frequent, but it is not dangerous. Would the legislators of Greece have introduced it into their republic if they had thought so? Far from it, they thought it necessary in a fighting nation. Plutarch tells us with enthusiasm of the battalion of the lovers and the beloved: they alone continued to defend the liberty of Greece. This vice reigned in a society of brothers in arms; it strengthened it. The greatest men have been interested in it. The whole of America, when discovered, was peopled with men of those inclinations. . . .