In Sade’s fictional world, “to say everything”30 means that the libertine welcomes cruelty and delight simultaneously. Emotional responses in such narrative imply the roué’s unreserved sensitivity,31 reversing the conventional knowledge of aesthetics at least in two ways. On the one hand, the fusion of erotic art and carnal knowledge in the boudoir links the libertine’s erotic contest to the narrative of transgression as the inevitable consequence of an aesthetic manifestation. On the other hand, the cruel delight in the narrative of transgression manifests a value of vice as well as of aesthetics:32
“It is not a question of knowing whether our proceedings please or displease the object that serves us, it is purely a question of exposing our nervous system to the most violent possible shock; there is no doubt that we are much more keenly affected by pain than by pleasure.” (PB 252)
The aesthetic value in this narrative hinges on cruelty beyond the limit. With excessive pain, the roué plays his language game, which works through the principle of delight in immorality to satirize weakness in society. “It is in the civilized state cruelty is dangerous, because the assaulted person nearly lacks the force or the means to repel injury; but in the state of uncivilization, if cruelty’s target is strong, he will repulse cruelty” (PB 254). This repulsion of any civilized oppressions echoes the libertine’s absolute sensibility which manifests their theory of cruelty.
As for the roué’s theory of cruelty, Dolmance claims that only through an extreme
30 “To say everything,” Henaff observes, “is the sign of a great audaciousness, which Sadeian discourse deems indispensable and definitive” (qtd. in Allison etc. 142).
31“Sadeian discourse professes to take the 18th century materialist thinking to its definite conclusion,
rationalizing the association of sex and torture and adducing the cruel sensitivity of the libertines”
(Frappier-Mazur 1998: 184).
32 Sade writes that “the best novels are those that make us weep over the defeat of virtue and push passions and vices to the limit. They should stir the whole gamut of emotions in the reader” (Sade, “Reflections on the Novel,” in The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, 106-7). Moreover, in Philosophy in the Boudoir, this proclamation serves as “a summation of Sade’s aesthetic tenets” (Plessix Gray xvi).
sensibility can cruelty manifests its jubilant impression on the debauchee. This quest for delight in extremity invigorates the libertine’s everlasting challenge of the order and even provides a new optical art when it comes to an aesthetic manifestation in such narrative.
“All excesses procure it (pleasure), provided one is libertine; and a woman is best advised to multiply those excesses even to beyond the possible” (PB 263). The narrative of
“beyond the possible” situates cruelty in the obscene narrative, turning common sense upside-down. The libertine who admits to be vicious abides by such narrative of vice. The debauchee delights in telling and repeating that suffering is cruel; this cruel delight arouses the roué’s emotional responses in the erotic narrative, giving free rein to their sexual nature. “If eroticism leads to a harmony between the partners its essential principle of violence and death is invalidated. We do experience moments of excess that stir us to the roots of our being and give us strength enough to allow free rein to our elemental nature” (Bataille 1992: 167-68). From Bataille’s observation, excessive delight as the root of aesthetic discourse is to some extent inherent in the libertine’s narrative of cruelty.
Bataille keeps explicating how the dark side of sexuality in Sade’s work is intrinsic to the debauchee’s pursuit of delight in cruelty. From Bataille’s viewpoint, Sade does this by disclosing that the jubilant ethos of the transgressive narrative is connected to the violent predilection. “In human life, sexual violence causes a wound that rarely heals of its own accord; it has to be closed, and will not even remain closed without constant attention based on anguish” (Bataille 1992: 104). This anguish emerging from violent taste serves as the energy to heal the wound resulting from such cruelty in sexuality. In Dolmance’s words, “Yes, I mask nothing, and my pleasures would be more ardent were the wounds more cruel” (PB 281). The transgressive power in the roué’s erotic discourse generates a relentless movement of the narrative towards excess. During sexual indoctrination, a ferocious treatment will to some great extent deepen the senses. It focuses largely on violence as a human phenomenon concerning something to do, to
enjoy and even to desire. The knowledge, or sexual incitement passed on by the narrative of cruelty is one which is full of sensual pleasure. The truth it contains is about pleasure itself—how pleasure can be experienced, intensified or maximized. It is a kind of artistic manifestation that is activated from the acknowledged master to the devoted pupil who put it into practice through piquant narrative. “Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it”
(Bataille 1992: 144, my italics). What Bataille emphasizes is extreme delight resulting from any deviant narrative, enabling the libertine to enjoy brutality.
The aesthetic manifestation in the piquant narrative is important and crucial for the debauchee to experience sense of beauty and to regard such extreme language as the force to liberate themselves from any constraints. The heartless sense in cruelty functions as the sovereignty with which sex is subject to an unrestricted exercise of power that knows no other laws but its own. “No middle way, no compromise: you have got to repay it or ready yourself for abuse. Upon proud spirits a good deed sits very heavily: it weighs upon them with such violence that the one feeling they exhale is hatred for their benefactors”
(PB 287). During cruel initiation, the emotional responses in sexual intercourse can be accelerated by the roué’s unbending sovereignty. Through the libertine instruction, Eugenie gets more and more familiar with the extreme pleasure that stands for a harbinger of revolutionary excess, abandoning pretentious codes. Bataille observes that it is the enormous set of excesses, unconstrained by limit, bond, and modesty, that offer the libertine the spectacle of cruel delight as the force of sublimation in aberrant narrative.
As for the relationship between aesthetic manifestation and cruel delight in the narrative of transgression, Bataille keeps explaining that “excess leads to the moment when ‘transcendent pleasure’ is no longer confined to the senses, when what is felt through the senses is negligible and [the] thought (from without), the mental mechanism that rules pleasure, takes over the whole being” (Bataille 1992: 173, my emphasis). The
delight in such mental mechanism has the force to arouse the libertine’s emotional responses. It establishes a bridge between cruelty and delight, which exists in the voice of passion. In the dedication “To Libertines,” Sade refers to a voice of passions in transgression as a state of happiness in cruelty: “No voice save that of the passions can conduct you to happiness. It is only by sacrificing everything to the sense’s pleasure that this individual may be able to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life” (PB 185). “To sacrifice everything” is aesthetically considered the mark of excessive pleasure.
This cruel delight can be achieved by an infinite unfolding of narrative, signifying an immeasurable aesthetic value in Sade’s writing. Such narrative reveals its “internal violence” (Bataille 1992: 91), which deepens its vicious heat.33 Under the burning heat of passion, hastening towards a point where the libertine goes beyond the limit, the narrative of cruelty in delight thus opens a bit more, extending a bit more aesthetic nature in itself.
The narrative of cruelty as the force to accelerate emotional responses shows a metamorphosis of pleasure in aberrant sexuality. Dolmance reminds Eugenie that “you will observe such discourses to increase without fail your sensibility;” afterwards, Eugenie will imperceptibly feel “the pain metamorphoses into pleasure” (PB 242).
Moreover, Madame de Saint-Ange reminds Eugenie that “all the while he (Dolmance) discourses [sic], observe how he acts, how voluptuously he frigs the young man’s handsome prick” (PB 260).34 This transformation from pain to pleasure is the result of sublimating the conventional use of language in cruelty: “If we run up against this law, we can linger over the surprise which it provides us. With a bit of chance, we perceive from such a state what increases the intensity” (Bataille 1988: 14-15). Such ecstasy in intensity triggers what the libertine enjoys in cruel delight. “Ecstasy has no meaning for it,
33 “The external violence of the sacrifice reveals the internal violence of the creature, seen as loss of blood and ejaculations” (Bataille 1992: 91).
34 Blanchot observes that the infinite gaze brings about fascination that the libertine sublimates the narrative of transgression. “It is the gaze of the incessant and interminable. The impossibility of vision always and always preserves its eternal gaze” (Blanchot 1989: 32). This impossible, eternal gaze constitutes the erotic discourse in obscene sexuality wherein Sade manifests his aberrant aesthetics.
if not that it captivates, being new…the desire belongs to distinct beings, [and] it has [sic]
no consistency and is dissipated…ecstasy [is] ignorant of the concern of which it is [sic]
the object” (Bataille 1988: 60, italics original).35 This “being new” in cruelty derives from the libertine’s erotic narrative which distances one from the other, opening up an aesthetic scope. On the one hand, this aesthetic scope refutes logical senses; on the other hand, it heeds the libertine to go beyond their limit. Consequently, what makes such aesthetic scope manifest itself is the libertine’s pleasure-seeking in the narrative of sodomy.
The analysis of sodomistic pleasure proposed by Dolmance has an important role in ferocious narrative and it sublimates the force of cruelty to a moment of delight for Eugenie:
In this mode of pleasure-seeking…after having mused for an instant upon the splendid prospect of a ready and beckoning ass…the fucker must be lively and drive his engine ahead…To complete the metamorphosis into pleasures…his object still experiences…to the very depths of the ass of his delight…an attitude we will account for in good time. (PB 231-32)
In order to engage in this extreme delight, the libertine works their cruelty in sexuality beyond the moral codes. Instead of simply breaking a rule, the libertine immerses themselves into transgressive narrative, enjoying this disorder. “What bursts in the bewilderment of the extreme obscenity comes to light…as soon as ‘life begins to go astray’…the autonomy of human beings…introduces from the outset ‘a disordered state in all of life’” (Bataille 1988: 88, emphasis original). This disordered state aroused by the narrative of cruelty in sodomy exposes its abundant force to trigger the libertine’s emotional responses. In Bataille’s viewpoint, “The greater the anguish—within the
35 “In the solitude of his prison Sade was the first man to give a rational expression to those uncontrollable desires. Sensuality, liberated from ordinary constraints, is aroused not only by the presence, but by a modification of the possible object” (Bataille 1985: 120, my italics).
measure of the partner’s strength—the stronger the realization of exceeding the bounds and the greater the accompanying rush of joy” (Bataille 1992: 145), implying that the roué obtains great delight through exceeding the norms in sexuality.
This abundant force in cruel delight has a great to do with the aesthetic value in sublimation, which is manifested in the obscene language that Sade is clever at. Words come to Sade in his head, which are loaded with the multitude of aesthetic narrative. “A slanderous and free conversation expresses the certainty of the vanity of my fellow beings;
what is apparently a mean-spirited chat reveals a blind straining of life towards an indefinable [sic] summit” (Bataille 1988: 84, my italics). Reaching the summit of vicious
narrative, the debauchee in the boudoir is bestowed upon an inexplicable glory, signifying the fancy and the imagination in cruel delight. As Madame de Saint-Ange has mentioned,
“My imagination has only been pricked the more by the pleasures I thought to deprive myself of” (PB 186). The delight in cruelty is not that gross as those of sense. It sublimates the narrative of inhumanity, viciousness, and brutality into an aesthetic manifestation.
To regard the narrative of cruelty as an aesthetic manifestation provides the libertine with a space of imagination. All narrative of cruelty is aesthetically transformed by imagination. When Madame de Saint-Ange convinces Eugenie that sexual intercourse atop familial bond will bestow her with a far-reaching delirium, Eugenie cannot but inflame her ecstatic mind:
Madame de Saint-Ange—Fuck, in one word, fuck…no limits to your pleasure save those of your strength and will…Why, then, ’tis by fucking, my dear, you will remain in human memory.
Eugenie—How these seductive words inflame my mind…I am in a state hardly to be painted. (PB 220-21)
Eugenie’s fanatic state can be explained as a moment of excess through the force of
licentious language, which is accompanied with cruel delight during sexual intercourse.
From Bataille’s perspective, the roué keeps searching for their continuity by way of egoistic sexuality in cruel delight. This egoistic sexuality enables the debauchee to enjoy cruel delight and to elevate their emotional responses. “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity…But this nostalgia is responsible for the form of eroticism in man” (Bataille 1992: 15). The narrative of cruel delight as an aesthetic manifestation is not restricted to the representation of horror, but its movement puts itself at the height of sublimity, onto all possibility. As Eugenie is fascinated by the “needle work” in the boudoir, she loses herself in a state of paranoia. “’Tis because this bitch’s sufferings are inflaming my imagination to the point I no longer know exactly what I am doing” (PB 365).36 However, such cruel delight does not necessarily invite the libertine to die in ravishment, but its artistic manifestation has the value of reaching a moment of jouissance in communication. And such jubilant moment also triggers the debauchee’s emotional responses, manifesting its aesthetic value.