Our Dark Side (6 page)

To support his commitment to abolitionism, Sade introduces a pragmatic argument: the death penalty serves no purpose. Not only does it not repress crime; it commits a new crime by bringing about the death of two men rather than one.
¹⁰

In
The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom
(Sade 1990), a lengthy book written in prison between 1785 and 1789 and modelled on the
One Thousand and One Nights
, Sade describes the system of marriages dreamed up by four very wealthy libertines, who are incestuous, debauched sodomites, towards the end of the reign of Louis XV. Blangis, three times widowed and the father of two daughters, becomes the husband of Durcet's daughter Constance, while Durcet marries Curval's daughter Adélaïde, and while Curval marries Blangis's eldest daughter Julie. The Bishop, who is Blagnis's brother, requests admission to the circle of alliance by introducing his niece Aline, who is Blangis's second daughter, on condition that he has a right of access to the other three women. Each father retains the right to fornicate with his daughter, and there is no reason to think that Aline is the daughter of her father and not her uncle, because he has been the lover of her mother and, therefore her sister-in-law, which is why Blangis has been entrusted with her education. Once established, this strange family of villains resolves to meet in the gloomy chateau of Silling, and to surround themselves with ‘fuckers' and two harems: one of girls, and one of boys.

It is the institutionalization of this system of alliance, exchange and filiation, which both defies and parodies all the rules of kinship, that allows the four libertines – Blangis, Durcet, Curval and the Bishop – to commit every crime imaginable in accordance with a perfectly organized ritual. Silling is like a monastery of vice. Every one moment is subject to a strict codification. Every subject is metamorphosed into an inert object or a sort of vegetable whose every behaviour is measured and evaluated down to the last detail. Everything – gestures, thoughts, table manners, defaecation, personal hygiene, sleep and clothes – is under surveillance and becomes an element in a ritual. In this place of death, human beings are reduced to objects ruled by despots who are themselves things because they obey the rules of a voluntary confinement that is the realization of a fetishization of human life. Trapped in the heart of this lewd, filthy world, which is abject and governed by the law of crime, no one – killer or victim – can escape their fate.

And so, day after day for four months, perverse genealogies are constructed thanks to a narrative modelled on a perverse hagiography: the adolescents are ‘married' to each other – Michette and Giton, Narcisse and Hébé, Colombe and Zélamir, Cupidon and Hyacinthe – so that they can be deflowered, masturbated, sodomized and then tortured by the libertines with the complicity of their ‘wives', who are also their daughters, and in the presence of four ‘story-tellers'. The story-tellers are former prostitutes, now in their fifties, and their role is not only to supply the actors in this theatre of vice with the raw material they need, but also to tell the story of the horrors they have endured. Madame Duclos has ‘one of the most splendid and plumpest of asses that could favour your gaze', Madame Marline is a ‘portly matron' and Champville, ‘a faithful devotee of Sappho'. Then there is Desgranges, ‘her ass, withered, worn, marked, torn … missing one nipple and three fingers … without six teeth and an eye' (Sade 1990: 220–223).

In the midst of this unending banquet, in which orgy follows orgy and discourse follows discourse, a catalogue of perverse sexuality is drawn up. One hundred years later, the artisans of sexology will use it as a work of reference. Here are a few examples chosen from the ‘one hundred and fifty complex passions belonging to the second class': ‘He licks the cunt of one girl while fucking a second in the mouth and while his asshole is being licked by a third; then exchange of positions' (Sade 1990: 576) … ‘He calls for four women; he fucks two of them orally and two cuntwardly, taking great care not to insert his prick in a mouth without having had it first in a cunt. While all this is going on, he is closely followed by a fifth woman, who throughout frigs his asshole with a dildo' (Sade 1990: 577). These are examples of the ‘one hundred and fifty murderous passions': ‘This libertine would previously allow a candle to burn out in a woman's anus; today, he attached her to a lightning rod during a thunderstorm and awaits a fortuitous stroke' (Sade 1990: 634) …' A bugger takes his stand at the foot of a tower; the earth about him is studded with sharpened steel rods pointing upward; his associates pitch several children of both sexes from the top of the tower. He has previously embuggered them, and now enjoys seeing them impaled a second time. ‘ 'Tis, he considers, very thrilling to be splashed by their blood' (Sade 1990: 661).

In attempting to base society on an inversion of the Law, Sade aspires to being the great tamer of all the perversions. And that is why, when we read certain of his great texts and especially the famous
One Hundred and Twenty Days
we find ourselves plunged into the midst of a terrifying narrative which, by relating the most monstrous situations with such rage, eventually turns into its opposite and comes to resemble a recreational game that brings together all the fantasies characteristic of the polymorphous perversity of the world of childhood. This is a world of spiders whose legs have been pulled off, of deformed human beings, of chimeras and feathered creatures that have been torn apart. This is, in a word, a whole breviary of bodily deconstruction, and we know that it allows children to project outwards the terror inspired in them by their entry into the world of language.

Hence the paradox: by inventing a world that centres on the absolute transparency of bodies and the psyche, or in other words a fantasmatic infantilization of the genealogical bond in order to normalize it all the more, and that prevents him from defying the Law. He therefore attempts, unsuccessfully, to abolish the dark side of human existence because he wants to make it the law that rules human existence. In that respect, we can happily endorse the judgement of Michel Foucault, who claims that Sade has invented ‘a disciplinary eroticism': ‘So, too bad for the literary deification of Sade, too bad for Sade: he bores us, he's a disciplinarian, a sergeant of sex, an accountant of the ass and its equivalents' (Foucault 2000 [1975–6]: 227).

It is, then, with Sade, at the end of the eighteenth century and with the advent of bourgeois individualism, that perversion becomes the experience of a denaturalization of sexuality that mimics the natural order of the world. But while Sade asserts that human nature is the source of all vices and that man must be nature's servant, he does not succeed in domesticating perversion. Of course it is
the Law
that replaces the law of God, but it escapes the control of men because it is set in the stone of a nature that is in a state of perpetual motion.

Thanks to Sade's inversion, perversion, so to speak, loses its mystical aura at the very moment when God, like monarchical power, is being stripped of his sovereignty. And thanks to Sade's great gesture, it is propelled beyond the axis of good and evil because it defies only itself. ‘The master cannot be threatened', writes Christian Jambet (1976: 185), ‘because no one can be more barbarous than him.'
¹¹

If, however, the Marquis had been nothing more than a libertine, a pornographer and a pamphleteer living the life of a
roué
in the context of an era dominated by tranquillity, he could never have occupied his unique position in Western literary and political history as the prince of the perverse. Sade profanes the law, invents a disciplinary erotica and is a master who defies only himself. His obscene miasma was denounced by three regimes and eventually allowed him to create a language of textual ecstasy that is proof against all prohibitions (Barthes 1997). Sade also makes evil and the enjoyment of evil desirable (Bataille 2006a). He makes perversion as such desirable, and never describes vice in order to make it hateful.
¹²

In order to understand the permanent reversals that make Sade's work the paradigm for a new way of looking at perversion, and that make Sade the man an object of shame and then a clinical case, we must analyse the dialectic that links his life and the elaboration of his work. ‘Sade … only had one occupation in his long life which really absorbed him – that of enumerating to the point of exhaustion the possibilities of destroying human beings, or destroying them and of enjoying the thought of their death and suffering' (Bataille 2006a: 115–116).

Sade spent his childhood living either with a debauched libertine father, a sodomite who liked both boys and girls, or a mother who entrusted him at a very young age to the care of the wife of the prince de Condé,
¹³
who was her husband's mistress. When the prince died, the child was taken in by his brother, the comte de Charolais, whose cruelty and depravity were notorious. When he was out hunting, he shot at his companions for pleasure – and shot much more often at the workers on his estate.

At the age of five, Donatien displayed no affects and no guilt, and enjoyed inflicting all kinds of violence on other children. At this point, his father decided to send him to the nunnery at Saumane in Provence, where he was taken in by nuns who treated him as though he were baby Jesus. All the attentions he received merely made him more arrogant and more frenzied. He was eventually placed under the guardianship of his uncle Paul Aldonse de Sade, a libertine, Voltairean and erudite
abbé
with a passion for flagellation and pornographer who lived with two women (a mother and her daughter) and slept with both of them. He introduced his nephew to a very broad literary and historical culture, hired a tutor to educate him, and indulged in orgies with linen maids and prostitutes.

When he was ten, Donatien left the Château de Saumane and returned to Paris, where he attended the famous Collège Louis-Le-Grand, which was run by the Jesuits. The education he received included many references to the theatrical arts. Then there was the daily experience of being whipped and of exposure to corporal punishment. Having been introduced to sodomy by his masters and fellow pupils, the adolescent Sade began to spend his summers in the countryside with Madame de Raimond, who was one his father's former mistresses. Surrounded by a swarm of women who were to a greater or lesser degree libertines, he was treated as a sexual plaything, masturbated and bathed in almond oil, much to the delight of
le comte
, who literally fell in love with his son. He therefore introduced him to the world of the aristocracy, where the young man was initiated into the practice of libertinage.

At this point, he enlisted in the royal army as a lieutenant, and spent a few years on the battlefield, where he developed a definite taste for murder. The profligate and debauched Donatien chose to live in Paris while his father, who had been ruined by his vices and prodigality, tried to find him a good match. Although he wanted to marry a much older woman with whom he was in love, he agreed to wed Renée-Pélagie, a wealthy young
bourgoise
. She was rather ugly, looked like a grenadier and dressed in old clothes. Her mother, Marie-Pélagie de Montreuil, known as
La Présidente
, was only interested in linking her family's destiny to that of one of the French nobility's great names.

Having moved into his mother-in-law's house in 1763, Sade inflicted all sorts of ill treatment, blows and insults on his wife, who was so anxious to comply with her mother's demands that she never complained. She also felt that her mad husband was above the law. As for
La Présidente
, her relationship with her son-in-law was based upon a life-long mixture of hatred and fascination that trapped them both into a perpetual struggle to the death. She more she tried to get him to submit to the sovereignty of good, the more he defied her with transgressive acts that both reminded her of her inability to tame him and presented her with an inverted image of the virtue whose Law she sought to embody. ‘Whereas her enemy was confused and chaotic, Madame de Montreuil was inflexibly strict and methodical. Careful, calculating, and always punctual, she had all the patience of a cat that lies in wait for its victims and then suddenly pounces. Her hatred was all the more ferocious in that she felt she had been seduced and then betrayed' (Lever 1991: 121).

Marriage did not, then, prevent the young Marquis from indulging in his vices. With Jeanne Testard, a pregnant young working girl who sometimes took part in orgies, he once more began to rail against religion. On one occasion, he ejaculated into a chalice as he inserted communion wafers into her anus, and had himself flagellated with a whip tipped with a red-hot barb. He forced her to blaspheme and to take an enema before relieving herself on a crucifix.

Having been denounced and then incarcerated in the keep at Vincennes, he resolved to write books. Two years later, he moved into the castle at Lacoste in Provence. He lived the high life, ruined himself and embarked upon a theatrical career. After the death of his father, who had turned to religion, he became the most debauched man in the kingdom of France, and was both notorious and feared for his extravagances and his many affairs with actresses. Even before he had written anything, he had turned his life into the subject matter of his future books.

In 1768, surrounded by his valets, he once more engaged in acts of blasphemy, flagellation and sodomy with Rose Keller, a cotton-spinner who had been reduced to begging. After a long trial, he was placed under house arrest, but continued to create scandals in Marseille. In the course of an evening of debauchery, he administered Spanish fly to a number of prostitutes so that he could smell their faecal matter. The high society of his day soon came to regard Sade as a clinical case: he was a new Gilles de Rais, an ogre and the strange inventor of salves. His seduction of his wife's sister Anne-Prospère de Launay, who was a canoness, gave him a reputation for incest.