Our Dark Side (5 page)
Authors: Elisabeth Roudinesco
Established by the imperative of
jouissance
, this new order will, of course, be based upon the abolition of the Law of God. Faced with the emergence of sciences that were trying to classify all human behaviours, Sade adopted their rules and forms, parodied them and attempted to exclude from their field the dark power that made
jouissance
possible.
Notes
1
â
Hubris
' means excess, overweening pride and insolence.
2
Loki is one of the Scandinavian world's gods. He is profoundly amoral, lacking in dignity, offensive, a trouble-maker and a transvestite, and is guilty of having been sodomized. He represents none of the three functions (sovereignty, war, fertility). Although he has been excluded from the community of the other gods, he is still indispensable: they need his services, even though they distrust him and make him âspin'. See Dumézil (1986).
3
The
Lausiac History of Palladius of Galatia
(late fourth century AD) records hagiographic legends of monks and ascetics.
4
âPornography': the term originally referred to any discourse pertaining to prostitution or venal love. It now refers to various representations of the sex act that are meant to shock, provoke, hurt or horrify. Cf. Folco (2005). See also Julia Kristeva's classic
Powers of Horror
(Kristeva 1982).
5
We owe the word âsubliminal' to Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776â1841), who used it to describe those atoms of the soul that were repressed at the conscious level. In 1905, Freud conceptualized the term âsublimation' to describe a type of creative activity that derives its strength from the sexual drive insofar as it cathects socially valued objects. Cf. Roudinesco and Plon, (2006).
6
The adjective âmystical' originally referred to that which is hidden, and which therefore âpertains to the mysteries'. The noun-form appeared in the first half of the seventeenth century. âMystical' now came to refer to an initiatory linguistic experience that allowed a subject to have a direct knowledge of God, and therefore to a revelation or illumination that transcended and threatened the discourse of established religions. âMystical' also referred, however, to the study of all forms of mysticism, idealization or exaltation in defence of an ideal.
7
This famous collection of the lives of the saints was composed in the mid-thirteenth century by Jacobus de Voragine (1230â98).
8
The technique of embalming was not known at this time.
9
Jacques Le Goff points out that Pope Boniface VII had (in vain) forbidden such practices on the grounds that they were barbaric and pagan as early as 1299.
10
The same problem now arises with the human remains that are left after cremation (Sueur 2006).
11
It will be recalled that, according to the historians, the Middle Ages lasted from the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 until the capture of Constantinople in 1453, which also the year of the last battle in the Hundred Years War.
12
Certeau, not with audacity, compares mysticism with psychoanalysis. Both criticize, he says in substance, the principle of the unity of the individual, the privilege accorded to consciousness, and the myth of progress.
13
See
Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse
22, Automne 1980, (
Résurgences et dérives de la mystique
) and especially the contributions from Didier Anzieu, Guy Rosolato and Paul-Laurent Asoun.
14
Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1647â90), French Visitdandine famed for her great mystical ecstasies. She experienced many of them at the convent in Paray-le-Monial.
15
Catherine of Siena (1347â80): having rebelled against her family, she became a nun and joined the Dominican order of the Sisters of Penitence. She experienced both ecstasy and mortification, and was canonized in 1461.
16
âYou must know', said Paracelsus, âthat all illness is a form of expiation, and that if God does not consider it over, no doctor can interrupt it.'
17
Lydwne of Scheidam (1380â1433), Dutch mystic. A bed-ridden invalid, she was canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1890. Huysmans was the biographer of the mystics and of Gilles de Rais, and the creator of the perverse hero Des Esseintes (Huysmans 1959). A decadent libertine, he converted to Catholicism because of his hatred of science, modernity and science, he was a mystical aesthete who was fascinated by abjection. âArt', he said, is, together with prayer, the only ejaculation of the soul that is clean. There is a secret complicity between Huysmans, Proust and Wilde. Dorian Gray turns to vice after reading
Against Nature
, whose hero is in part inspired by the life of Robert de Montesquiou, who was the model for the Baron de Charlus, heir to Balzac's Vautrin and the principal incarnation of the accursed race. See Proust (1996).
18
The Great Schism of the West: a conflict that divided the Church between 1378 and 1417 and during which several Popes reigned at the same time, some in Rome and others in Avignon and elsewhere. The origins of the conflict lay in the hostility of the non-Italian cardinals to the election of Urban VI. They elected Clement VII, who was French and who took his throne in Avignon. The Council of Constance (1414â18) put an end to the Schism. Cf. Vallaud (1995).
19
He compares her to several other female mystics of the same period. Cf. Vuarnet (1989).
20
Once his portrait is destroyed, Dorian Gray, in contrast, becomes what he was at the moment of his death because he is the incarnation of evil: â⦠he was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage' (Wilde 1949: 248).
21
Pierre Damien (1007â70), Prior of the Fonte Avelana monastery. Damien reformed monastic life and was violently hostile to homosexuality (which he called sodomy), which he regarded as the worst of all vices. He bemoaned the fact that the Church had, in his view, become a new Gomorrah. The best account is that given by Patrick Vandermeersch (2002).
22
âWhen a woman flagellates herself', writes Albert (1996: 100), âwe find that wounds are opened up on her body and that blood flows. When flagellation involves men, who are just as keen on it, the texts tend to emphasize that the skin hardens and turns into a monstrous leather.' It was mainly men who were âkeen' on public flagellation.
23
The seven deadly sins are listed in the introduction.
24
In his perverse film
The Passion of the Christ
, Mel Gibson, a Christian fundamentalist and a puritan who has always been fascinated by hell and tortured flesh, returns to this tradition by showing a Jesus who is whipped until he bleeds, and whose face has been beaten to a pulp. He is a body without a soul who speaks an inaudible jargon and displays, although he looks like a petrified victim, a boundless hatred and pride. This, in other words, is a Christ who is diabolic rather than divine.
25
Jean de Gerson (1363â1429), French theologian, philosopher and preacher. Appointed High Chancellor of the University of Paris in 1398, he played a major role at the Council of Constance.
26
âFlagellation' in
Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales
, Paris: Asselin-Masson, cited Vandermeersch (2002: 123). Henri III (1551â89) the third son of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis and the last king of the Valois dynasty, was confronted with the violence of the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants. Having had the duc de Guise, the leader of the ultra-Catholic Ligue, assassinated, he was assassinated in his turn by Jacques Clément, the first regicide in French history and the precursor of Ravaillac and Damiens. Fatally wounded, Henri III turned his weapon on his murderer and killed him. That spared Clément the torture of being quartered.
27
Cf. Deleuze (1991) which includes the full text of
Venus in Furs
. The question of sadism and masochism will be discussed in later chapters. All non-consensual practices of flagellation are now regarded, in states that recognize the rule of law, as misdemeanours or even crimes, and are forbidden by law.
28
See Huysmans (2001[1891]). An anti-modern hero who is in search of an
elsewhere
and the systematic derangement of the senses, Curtal resolves to write a biography of Gilles de Rais.
29
In his short novella
Gilles and Jeanne
, Michel Tournier (1987) imagines a relationship between the âmonster' and the âsaint' in which he exists only because she reflects his image, and vice versa.
30
Michelet (1981: 788) cites a contemporary chronicler as reporting that the English wanted her dress to be burned first and demanded that this âobscene and shameless woman' should be left naked so that the crowd would know that she was indeed a woman.
31
Before she could be rehabilitated, it had to be demonstrated that she had not committed a perverse crime (transvestism) and had dressed as a man solely to preserve her virginity from the English, who wanted to rape her (cf. Steinberg 2001).
32
Gilles de Rais killed some three hundred children. His crimes gave birth to the legend of Bluebeard.
33
Charles VII saw through the trick.
34
On Pentecost Sunday, he and his men at arms burst into the Church of Saint-Ãtienne de Mer Morte. This constituted sacrilege.
35
As the terminology of the day had it. I will return to this description, which means âcontrary to the divinely ordained order to procreate'.
2
Sade Pro and Contra Sade
Unlike the mystics, who used their bodies to save their souls, the insubordinate and rebellious libertines wanted to live like gods and, therefore, to free themselves from the religious law by blaspheming and thanks to voluptuous sexual practices. They contrasted the divine order with the sovereign power of a natural order of things. According to this baroque individualism, experience was more important than dogma, and passion was more important than reason: âWhen someone says: “Monsieur is in love with Madame,” claimed Marivaux, it is the same as saying: “Monsieur saw Madame, the sight of her excited desires in his heart and he is dying to get his prick inside her cunt” ' (Delon 1998: 32).
As the idea of transcendence seemed to fade and no longer allowed man to define the forces of good with reference to God, the pact with the Devil became, as in the Faust legend, a way of accepting that the quest for pleasure, or at the opposite extreme, delight in evil, was nothing more than an expression of a sort of inner drive; man's inhumanity could therefore be regarded as consubstantial with his humanity, and not as the effect of a fall ordained by fate or the divine order.
When Philippe d'Orléans became Regent after the death of Louis XV, he enjoyed unlimited powers and made his own contribution to the gradual dissolution of royal absolutism. Thanks to him and his companions in debauchery, who described themselves as â
roués
',
1
libertinage
2
found its ultimate political form, left its mark on the whole century and became one of the causes of the French Revolution. Orgies, acts of blasphemy, economic speculation, a love of prostitution, luxury, extravagance and caprices, a taste for the whip and transgression: all these practices helped to challenge the values of tradition, which were contrasted with a desire for fleeing pleasures. Fascinated by the most excessive pleasures, the aristocracy was also undermined from within by the imminence of its own demise. And, having no weapons with which to fight its enemies, it rushed headlong to its own destruction. âLet us enter the aristocratic world of 1789 for a few moments. Let us try to understand it from within, in its own terms. We find within it a secret connivance with the judgements that condemned it' (Starobinski 1979; cf. Starobinski 1964).
The libertine ideal was a central part of the Marquis de Sade's upbringing. In some respects, his education was similar to that of Gilles de Rais. Born three hundred years after Gilles de Rais in 1749, he too was born into a France that was being torn apart by new political upheavals and was surrounded from birth by debauched predators descended from an arrogant nobility that brooked no restrictions on its pleasures and that lived in the secrecy of its chateaux: âBrought up to believe that he belonged to a superior race, he learned to be haughty at a very early age. He very quickly began to believe that he was better than anyone else and was authorized to use others as he saw fit, and to act and speak as a master who had no need to be censured by either his conscience or humanity' (Lever 1991: 60).
The comparison with Gilles de Rais ends there. Sade never led a life of crime, as it was what he wrote rather than what he did that allowed him to realize a utopia in which the Law was inverted. For twenty-eight years, and under three different regimes, the Prince of the perverse lived in confinement, in the fortress at Vincennes, in the Bastille and then in the asylum at Charenton. In his works, he brought about the triumph of the principle of a perverse society founded not upon the cult of the libertine spirit, but on a parody that destroyed it.
Sade's fictional world is certainly populated by great libertine beasts â Blangis, Dolmancé, Saint-Fond, Bressac, Bandole, Curval, Durcet â but at no point do they claim to be the disciples of some philosophy of pleasure, eroticism, nature or individual freedom. On the contrary, what they implement is a desire to destroy the other and to destroy themselves through sensual excesses. In such a system, it can be claimed that nature can provide the basis for a natural law, provided that nature is seen as the source of all despotisms. Nature, as Sade understands it, is murderous, passionate and excessive; the best way to serve it is to follow its example. Sade therefore perverts the Enlightenment into âa philosophy of crime, and libertinage into a dance of death' (Delon, Introduction to Sade 1990: lv). Whereas the Encyclopaedists tried to explain the world in terms of reason and by expounding its knowledge and technologies, Sade constructed an Encyclopaedia of Evil based upon the need for a strict apprenticeship in boundless
jouissance
.
That is why, when he describes the libertine sexual act â which is always based upon the primacy of sodomy â he compares it with the splendour of a perfectly constructed discourse. It might therefore be said that the perverse sexual act is, in its most highly civilized and most soberly rebellious form â as described by a Sade who has yet to be defined as sadistic by psychiatric discourse â primarily a narrative, a funeral oration, or a macabre form of education. It is, in short, an art of enunciation that is as well ordered as a grammar and as devoid of affect as a lesson in rhetoric.
The Sadean sexual act exists only as a combinatory whose significance excites the human imaginary. It is a real in its pure state, and cannot be symbolized.
3
Sperm â or rather âfuck' or âcome' â speaks in the subject's place (Sade 2006 : 20; cf. Barthes 1997: 32):
In the position I've placed myself in [as Eugénie is being âtaken' by Madame de Saint-Ange], my cock is very close to your hands, Madame. Would you be so kind as to jerk it, while I slurp this divine asshole. Slip your tongue further in, Madame. Don't just lick her clitoris. Let that delicious tongue penetrate all the way to her womb: that's the best way to hasten the ejaculation of the come.
As the sexual act always consists in treating the other as an object, it follows that one object is as good as the next, and that the entire living world must be treated not only like a collection of things, but in accordance with the principle of the inverted norm. The libertine must therefore seek the ultimate degree of pleasure with the most unlikely beings, both human and non-human: âA eunuch, a hermaphrodite, a dwarf, and eighty-year-old woman, a turkey, a small ape, a very big mastiff, a she-goat, and a little boy of four, the great-grandchild of the old woman, were the lust-objects presented us by the Princess's duenna' (Sade 1991: 744). Once the collection of anomalies has been assembled, the libertine must enjoy them [
en jouir
] by inventing a never-ending sequence of positions that defy representation. The libertine Bracciani must embugger the turkey and cut its throat as he ejaculates, then caress both the hermaphrodite's sexes at once, âthe crone's bum being poised above my face so that she splatters shit over my features', while he bum-stuffs the hermaphrodite and takes an ass-fucking from the eunuch. He then has to move from the arse of the goat to that of the old woman, then to the arse of the little boy as another woman slits the child's throat: âI was fucked by the ape; once again by the mastiff, but asswardly: by the androgyne, by the eunuch, by the two Italians, by Olympia's dildo. All the others frigged me, licked me, treated me in every part, and it was only after ten hours of piquant enjoyment I came out of those peculiar orgies', recounts Juliette (Sade 1991: 747).
Sade does not just give page-long descriptions of these extravagant sexual scenes. He gives them a social and theoretical basis, taking his inspiration as much from Diderot as from La Mettrie or D'Holbach. In
Philosophy in the Boudoir
, which was published in 1795, he stages, in dialogue form, the encounter in Madame de Saint-Ange's âlovely boudoir' between three libertines â Dolmancé, Augustin and the Chevalier de Mirvel
4
â and Eugénie de Mistival, a fifteen-year-old virgin whose mother is a sanctimonious woman and whose father is a
debauchee
. Having described Eugénie's initiation, Sade has Dolmancé read the famous pamphlet he wrote in 1789:
Frenchmen, Some More Effort If You Wish To Become Republicans
.
In this admirably constructed text, which contains no descriptions of sexual acts, Sade recommends that the Republic be based upon a radical inversion of the Law that governs human societies: sodomy, incest and crime must be obligatory. According to this system, no man can be in possession of all women but cannot possess any particular woman. It follows that women must not only prostitute themselves to both men and women; prostitution must be their life-long ambition, as it is the precondition for their freedom. Like men, they must be sodomites,
5
and must be sodomized to the extent that they have received from nature a more violent penchant than men for the pleasures of lust. They are thus subject to the generalized principle of a sexual act that mimics the state of nature â
coitus a tergo
â but which also erases the boundaries of the difference between the sexes.
In Ancient Greece, homosexuality was described as pederasty,
6
and was an integral part of the life of the
polis
because it was a culture that allowed the norm to function. It therefore did not preclude relations with women, which were based on the reproductive order, and was based upon the division between an active principle and a passive principle: a free man and a slave, a boy and a mature man, and so on. Its function was, in other words, initiatory. Only men had the right to practise pederasty, and the hierarchy precluded any equality between the partners. But a homosexual who refused to have anything to do with women was regarded as abnormal because he infringed the rules of the
polis
and the family institution.
In the Christian era â as in all the monotheistic religions â the homosexual became the paradigmatic emblem of perversity. His defining characteristic was the choice of one sexual act at the expense of another. Being a sodomite meant refusing to recognize the ânatural' difference between the sexes, which presupposed that coitus had a procreative goal. As a result, any act â onanism, fellatio, cunnilingus â that departed from the rule was regarded as perverse. Sodomy was demonized, and regarded as the darkest side of perverse activity. It was seen as both a heresy and a form of bestiality,
7
or sex with animals, or in other words the Devil. The invert of the Christian era was regarded as a satanic creature and as the most perverse of the perverse his fate was to be burned at the stake for undermining the genealogical bond (Lever 1985). Homosexuals were still tolerated, at least in princely families, provided that they were willing to marry and father children.
By making sodomy compulsory â and Dolmancé is sodomy's purest representative because âI've never fucked a cunt in all my life' (Sade 2006 :100) â Sade reduces the âantiphysical', or homosexuality to nothing, to the extent that sodomy presupposes the freedom to choose a partner of one's own sex, and its corollary: an awareness of sexual difference, and a desire to transgress or transcend it. He therefore drives the invert, who loves only another of the same sex,
8
out of the
polis
. He drives out, in other words the one person who, for centuries, had supposedly been the embodiment of the most untameable human perversion.
The Sadean philosophy's insistence that the primary duty of both men and women is to be sodomites means that the invert not only loses his privilege as an accursed figure, but disappears to make way for the bisexual. In Sade's world, women ejaculate, have erections and bugger, just like men. Sodomy is recommended as a double transgression based upon the imperative to dominate, enslave and accept voluntary servitude: the difference between the sexes is transgressed, and so too is the order of reproduction. That is why Dolmancé can rejoice at the possibility of the total extinction of the human race thanks not only to the practice of homosexuality, but also infanticide, abortion and the use of condoms.
And while children have the right to be conceived, their conception must, according to Sade, be devoid of all sexual pleasure and must be the result of multiple acts of copulation that make it impossible to identify their fathers. Children are therefore the property of the Republic, and not of their parents; they must be separated from their mothers at birth and turned into objects of pleasure. The principle behind Sade's boudoir is therefore the abolition of the paternal institution and the exclusion of the maternal function. As Dolmancé tells Eugénie's mother (Sade 2006: 162â63): âYou must learn, Madame, that nothing is more illusory than the paternal or maternal sentiments for children, and the children's sentiments for their progenitors ⦠You owe those creatures nothing.'
Being a good pupil, and having read her teacher's tract, Eugénie therefore sodomizes her mother. At this point, Dolmancé asks a valet to infect the mother with syphilis. With the help of two women, he then takes a needle âto âsew up her mother's cunt and her asshole' (Sade 2006: 171) to punish her. Turning to the Chevalier, he adds (Sade 2006:173): âGoodbye, Chevalier! And don't fuck Madame en route! Remember that her holes are sewn up and that she's got syphilis!'
As we can see, the only thing that Sade finds acceptable is a community of brother-predators. The women alternate between being their tormentors, because they can outdo them in vice, and their victims when they refuse to obey the orders of a nature that is completely given over to crime.
9
Sade is, in a sense, outlining a social model based upon the generalization of perversion. There is no taboo on incest, no difference between the normal and the monstrous and the illicit, no dividing line between madness and reason, and no anatomical division between men and women: âTo unite incest, adultery, sodomy and sacrilege, he buggers his married daughter with a host' (cited, Barthes 19997: 157).
In the name of the same generalization of perversion, Dolmancé proposes to âwipe out forever the atrocity of capital punishment' (Sade 2006: 119). Because man is naturally murderous, he must obey his impulses. He therefore has the right, or even a duty to kill others under the influence of his passions. On the other hand, no human law can coldly replace nature, or legalize murder. It is, in other words, because nature is essentially criminal that the death penalty must be unconditionally abolished.