Sade uses statements of dimensions to make it perfectly clear that the libertine body is nothing but a “system” made up of itemized parts from which a detailed sexual pleasure can be extracted. I will explain that this body in Sade’s system can be categorized as “Dionysian Reveler,” “Androgynous Sodomite,” “Sovereign Being,” and
“Erotic Connoisseur.”
Dionysian Reveler
Sade demonstrates Dionysus’s promiscuous all-inclusiveness. If sexual activity mirrors the chaos of true nature, Sadeian libertine proceeds to render the act distinctly
“un-natural.” In Sade’s writing, each Dionysian transgression generates more than Apollonian verbalization. From Bataille’s observation, this erotic body (corporal, anomalous, and shameful parts) can just as well explain a brutal rupture absorbed through the desire to put the libertine body entirely in a more or less violent state of expulsion.
“Sadeian libertine body, in a manner that the more it gets paroxysmic the more it tries to stifle discourse, shows through and through that the victim is powerless to muzzle the eruption of sensualism, of an often bloodthirsty sexuality” (Maffesoli etc. 22). The 120 Days of Sodom shows this libertine sexuality very well, in particular in the night time
orgies that punctuate Dionysian existence in the Sillling castle. “The particular figures change, the combinations are done and undone, the passive and active each take turns at the role of protagonist, and at the core of a hierarchy that remains rigid, complementarity is the order of the day” (Maffesoli etc. 60). Everywhere in Sade’s libertine world, the insurmountable Dionysian revelry is always present.
As a Dionysian mode, Sadeian libertine body is “multiplicity and metamorphosis”
(Paglia 242). In Juliette, an abbess tells Juliette that variety and multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust. Everything that happens to Juliette reveals her power, and she takes pleasure in its far-reaching fascination as an expansion of herself. “Our desire to consume, to annihilate, to make a bonfire of our resources, and the joy we find in the burning, the fire and the ruin are what seem to us divine, sacred” (Bataille 1992: 185).
This exultation of burning joy echoes a mode of Dionysian revelry. In the entanglement of the passion the libertine body finds again, according to the occurrence, blows or caresses, and it is useless to deny either of them. “Sade reminds us often that it is rendering homage to Nature to make it undergo outrages, to violate it; by this the libertines recognize the structural ambivalence, the mixture of creation (Apollo) and destruction (Dionysus)” (Maffesoli etc. 88). The libertine body goes beyond the limit through such licentious operation.
The libertine body pushes beyond the truth of natural freedom to the total liberty of pure Dionysian subjectivity that even transgresses Nature itself by its violence. Sade traverses the terrible path from “man’s violent nature” to the “infinity of non-nature,”
which gets close to Dionysian essence of subversion, thus to a point where Nature itself breaks up and reveals its own weakness, its dissension and abolition. Humanity has no special status in the universe. In Philosophy in the Boudoir, Le Chevalier reads in “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans:”10 “What is man? And what difference is there between him and other plants, between him and all other animals of the world? None, obviously” (PB 329-30). This is a “classically Dionysian view of man’s immersion in organic Nature” (Paglia 236). Sade asserts Dionysian deviation by abandoning the disciplines. The extreme delirium occurs in orgasm where words generally sail through ejaculation.
Sade consigns the libertine body to the realm of Dionysian dismemberments when
10 It is called “Yet Another Effort” for short in the following discussion.
manifesting its ejaculation in extremity. The libertine eagerly obliterates the body’s formal contours, tearing, piercing, scraping, gouging, maiming, slicing, shredding, burning, and melting. “Sade is subjecting the libertine body to Dionysian process, reducing the human to raw matter and feeding it back to rapacious nature” (Paglia 239).
Sade’s creative fashioning manages to break the social givens of distinction and identity, moderation and order, leading to confusion, excess, transgression and renewal. Ultimately, Sadeian libertine body suppresses sexual difference and unsettles language itself. This is the case with the libertine body as well as with a Dionysian initiate whose vision surpasses the limit of time and undergoes a transgressive experience. That is, the libertine body not only overthrows the conventional morality but also establishes a new era of Dionysus in obscenity. What allows the reader today to examine Sadeian libertine body is the recognized autonomy of the literary object which by itself transforms another object into a mode of aesthetics of existence, and allows us to posit in a Dionysian way the act of actualization which constitutes the licentious existence.
The Western worship of Dionysus is equally characterized by the acknowledgement and glorification of destruction, violation, and incitement: “it admits expression of a liberating frenzy, very often strictly linked to orgiastic experience in a ritual, sacrificial, and transfiguring framework, like connotation of sacrilege in Sadeian libertine body”
(Evola 109). When analyzing Sade’s fictional body, “we encounter, on the one hand, the body of hatred, the parceled-out body sieve: ‘heads without a neck, arms without shoulders, [and] eyes without a face;’ but on the other hand, we encounter the glorious body without organs: ‘formed in one piece’” (Deleuze 147, emphasis original). I term the former one as “dismembered body” and the latter as “impenetrable body.” Thus, we are not only bestowed “a Dionysus dismembered, but also Dionysus the impenetrable.” Such libertine body, not matter dismembered or impenetrable, is placed in the service of sodomy which marks this glorious body. This sodomistic body is put into disjunction and
it averts from the moral contamination. Sade keeps refuting the confined sexuality in his work: reorientation of the thought in sexuality and a new geography of piquant diversity with which the libertine establishes their vicious self as an androgynous sodomite.
Androgynous Sodomite
Sodomy evinces an attitude “not only of refusal but of aggression, which is also a simulacrum of the destruction that the libertines dream of ravaging upon each other by a sort of transgression of their limits” (Klossowski 24). The supreme licentious image Sade depicts in the libertine body is that of sodomy. Almost every libertine image is the one who enjoys sodomy, no matter buggering or being buggered. “Sodomy is Sade’s irrational [sic] protest against relentlessly overabundant procreative nature” (Paglia 246).
In The 120 Days of Sodom, the President de Curval explores such technique: “In order to combine incest, adultery, sodomy, and sacrilege, he embuggers his married daughter with a Host.” In Philosophy in the Boudoir, fornicating with her brother, Madame de Saint-Ange is sodomized by Dolmance, who in turn is being sodomized by the gardener.
In Sade’s work, most libertines are not only sodomites but they also enjoy being sodomized. In Lingis’s words, during this process, voluptuousness does not see in offspring the end and seal of a union between man and woman, but “a source of jealous conflicts and a temptation to incestuous transgressions” (qtd. in Sawhney ed. 32), which characterizes the libertine as double-sexed.
Sadeian libertine is often double-sexed.11 The male sex organ is no longer committed to the ragged system of signs; if it is committed to anything, “it is to the pleasure of its user and not to conventional norms that, by definition, shackle sexuality and therefore liberty” (Rinon 72). Sade’s heroines are among the most potent women in literature. “Madame de Clairwil of Juliette and Madame de Saint-Ange of Philosophy in
11 Moreover, this double-sexed taste characterizes the libertine as a third sex. “Dolmance belongs to a third sex: with his ‘feminine manias,’ the sodomite was created by nature to diminish or minimize propagation”
(Paglia 237, emphasis original).
the Boudoir have extraordinary self-command” (Paglia 237). Juliette calls herself
“manlike in her tastes as in her thinking.” In Sade’s work, the female libertines are high priestesses of savage nature, doing their work day and night. This ferocious female libertine is different from what Klossowski terms as “less potent creature.” Thus, we can say that both male and female libertines are capable of immersing themselves in androgynous excitement.12
Sadeian libertine body, male or female, serves as mechanics of sodomy with which the debauchee practices their orgiastic way of life and exceeds normality. In Philosophy in the Boudoir, Dolmance continues that women are free to choose to act like men.
Women can transform themselves into men by choosing to engage in sodomy.13 Lingis observes that the sodomite, who doesn’t use some knife or ice pick at hand but his erect penis to gore the partner, indifferently female or male, “makes of the lure of shared pleasure the means to isolate his or her sovereignty” (qtd. in Sawhney ed. 35). The prick/dildo as a defined and measured organ is the basis upon which the libertine builds the fantasies and passion that transgress the limit. In Sade’s work, the libertine not only realizes their vicious nature, but also sows the seeds of the movement “against Nature,”
resulting in a denaturalized art world. It is thus the libertine’s most profound, inexplicable, Dionysian experience—androgynous sex—which goes beyond the borderline of rationality, where language and action are deployed to manifest its extreme sexuality.
For Sadeian libertine body, the limited experience in sexuality, that is, heterosexuality or cunt-sexuality, defined by the sexual organs (penis, clitoris), is marginalized under the sodomistic rule. What emerges is a vast plain of liberty directed solely by pleasure in every possible form. “Sadeian female libertines prefer anal to
12 Klossowski pinpoints that “no matter how monstrous, perverse, or delirious a woman may be, she is never considered ‘abnormal:’” “By nature she [Sadeian woman] lacks reflection, possesses no equilibrium or measure, and never represents anything but uncontrolled sensuous nature, more or less attenuated by a reflection prescribed by men” (Klossowski 35, 54, emphasis original).
13 In Acker’s words, “a woman can know freedom by choosing to counterfeit a man who selects the bottom power position” (qtd. in Sawhney ed. 232).
vaginal penetration, for this guarantees resistance of the body to entrance through the unexpected door” (Rinon 76). When prick is nothing more than a tool valued for its power to break the limit, male libertines must enter the domain of obscene body where female ones are the ultimate judges, and excitement is based on the criteria that male focalization invests such effort to subvert. For Sadeian libertine, vagina is merely an inferior and a less exciting channel than anus. Sodomy is an unproductive act, and natural sexual differentiation is denied in such act of deviation. “This in-mixing of sperm and shit in sodomy denotes an amoral categorical imperative through which the differentiation between Nature and culture may be effected on the eroticized body” (Weiss 47). The sodomite collapses the representational order by means of the very contestation of the normative system, induced by the deeds of those sovereign libertines, whose integral monstrosities are depicted in Sade’s fictional world.
In his work, Sade elaborates the synthetic simulacrum of the androgynous being. In Juliette, on the one hand, Juliette represents the perfect example of the sexual
differentiation. On the other hand, she is the one who takes someone from the same sex and connects her sexual organ with the partner, finding the corresponding orifices. In a word, Juliette and her partner are two halves that are united together. Indeed, nearly all possible relations between the sexual partners (even the multiple players) are manifested in Sade’s fictional world (dildo, cunnilingus, analingus, and sodomy). All permutations and combinations are achieved, and none are privileged. “There is a semiotic closure of the system in which the genital function is never privileged, and any possible perversion is never denigrated” (Weiss 66). The libertine body might realize that the culture of sodomy is “not an island in itself but a neighborhood where this culture is shared or somehow coexisted with other similar sexual cultures” (Althaus-Reid 90). In this sexual differentiation—sodomy, the libertine body sets itself free by sodomizing and being sodomized at the same time. Through the cruel delight from behind, Sadeian libertine
body becomes a “Sovereign Being,” whose knowledge of sodomy is deeply rooted in the chilling way of life.
Sovereign Being
Sade exploits the infinite possibilities of literature and propounds to his readers the concept of a sovereign type of humanity whose privileges would not have to
be agreed upon by the masses.
—Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality
The notion “Sadeian libertine body as Sovereign Being” distinguishes itself from the conventional body discourse. For Sade, “the sovereign man is inaccessible to evil because no one can hurt him. He is the man consumed by every passion, and his passions take pleasure in everything” (Blanchot 2004: 20). The libertine asserts themselves through sovereign existence. This great existence offers the roué the most supreme dissolution.
Such supreme dissolution manifests Sade’s uniquely twisted order: “[He] constantly usurps the order of outside society in favor of his own hierarchy” (Armstrong 31), signifying the roué’s absoluteness. The libertine’s sovereignty even cannibalizes others’
existence, manifesting its unique cruelty. One of the ways that the sovereign being operates cruelty is through the erotic representation of egotism. Any breaching of the egoistic rules will lead the victims to expulsion into the bitterness, into an everlasting destruction.
An everlasting despoilment resulting from the sovereign egotism characterizes the libertine body as a medium of erotic representation. “Egoism is the root of Sadeian sovereign being and of his erotic representation of human nature as well” (Michelson 131). For Sade, the libertine is the one consumed by every passion, and they take pleasure in everything through the erotic body. And this is why Sade, in The 120 Days of Sodom, sets about accomplishing the enormous task of completely enumerating every anomaly,
every distraction, and every human possibility. The violence of the passion that the libertine knows how to assuage in any circumstances assures them of sovereignty, and makes them feel that in life or death, the libertine body shall remain all powerful. The sovereign being happily produces the pain of all private experiences and practices the experience in a licentious way.
The practice of Sadeian libertine body as “Sovereign Being” is highly related to the libertine themselves that savors a lascivious way of life, and their aberrant souls beyond social constraints transgress norms. The libertine body is full of revolting energy and challenges the notion of “man of reason.” What matters concerning the libertine body in refutation of man of reason is its abysmal potentiality of self-assertiveness. In the preface
“To the Libertines” in Philosophy in the Boudoir, Sade proclaims: “Voluptuousness as a necessary evil: it is only by sacrificing everything to the senses’ pleasure [does] this poor creature [that] goes under the name of Man be able to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life” (PB 185). We can deduce from this assertion that Sadeian libertine body tries to go beyond the name of Man, transforming its obscene essence into an absolute self (in Blanchot’s words). Communication between the libertines is a limiting factor and it must be ruptured before the nature of absolute existence can be seen, whose translation into practice corresponds to the notion of “Sovereign Being.”
To carry its sovereignty on, Sadeian libertine designates their erotic body as an absolute egotistic existence. The libertine’s absolute egotism will “never fall prey to misfortune” (Blanchot 2004: 14-15). In other words, this body celebrates the inhuman treatment and transgresses its limit. In Juliette, Saint-Fond declares to Juliette that his pride is such that he would like those who serve him to kneel, and never to speak to them except through a spokesperson. This pride resides in every transgressive manifestation with which Sadeian libertine longs for. Sade takes the diverse possibilities of the libertine body to the furthest extreme. The extreme limit favors body in an everlasting penetration,
regardless of its worth. “There is nothing but worthlessness in every being for the
‘Unique Being,’ and the libertine makes this nothingness manifest” (Blanchot 2004: 25, emphasis original). As a transgressive subject, “cast in opposition to the social codes, the Sadeian figure (the libertine body) stands as a veritable indictment of the civil order” (Lai 89), rather than just mere nothingness. Accordingly, to vivify its transgression, the repulsive manifestation of absolute sovereignty in Sadeian libertine body is rooted in a system of erotic extremity.
Sade’s system paves a way for the roué to exercise their sovereign taste through the libertine body, to multiply sexual orifices. “Sade’s system of libertine body perfects as much as it criticizes a certain way of bringing the individual in to the full exercise of all the potentialities above the heads of the goggling crowd” (Bataille 1992: 166). As a sovereign being, the debauchee uses their bodily operation to trample the rational being, designating the libertine body as an insurmountable barrier. “And the Supreme Being no longer reaffirms Himself except as the gigantic pressure of a bronze-like transcendence which crushes each being in proportion to his weakness raised to its highest degree”
(Blanchot 2004: 30). In Justine, Sade demonstrates Justine’s being an orphan, being deprived of a certain obfuscatory protection afforded by family life, immediately increases the likelihood that other people will see her less for her intentions than for her body. As Dubourg, who is the rich man from whom Justine initially seeks aids, says:
The thing which least flatters men, that which makes the least favorable impression upon them, for which they have the most supreme contempt, is good behavior in your sex;…what does the virtue of women profit us! It is their wantonness which serves and amuses us; but their chastity could not interest us less. (qtd. in Ferguson 62)
Thus, Sadeian libertine body hopes to excavate the innermost absoluteness which is manifested before an erotic connoisseur who enjoys and highlights every sensual
indictment. As I argue, the libertine body as “Erotic Connoisseur”14 can transform sadistic repetition into an aesthetic appreciation when the reader peruses Sade’s writing.
And this erotic body also signifies a new exploration for my following discussion on Sadeian aesthetics of libertinage in Philosophy in the Boudoir.
Erotic Connoisseur
Sade, in his own words, is not only an absolute egotist but also a connoisseur who explores the infinite possibilities in his work and presents to the reader the concept of a sovereign type of humanity whose physicality isn’t agreed upon by the public at his time.
The libertine body in Sade’s fictional world serves as vast variety of artistic performance upon which the debauchee gazes. “It is indisputable, that Sade, within his novelistic writings, systematically deploys theatrical technique for erotic sensation” (Le Brun 109).
Through such theatrical technique, Sade invents a libertine body that is the equivalent of a new image in mind. From this new image, the libertine takes on different dimensions, beginning with that which restores to each body its space for imagination. This imagination in bodily manifestation regards the libertine body as a “tableau vivant.”
In Sade’s work, the libertine body as “tableau vivant” reflects what can be called an
“imaginary pictoriality,” offering the debauchee a possibility of actualizing their obscene schema. “What this means is that the Sadeian text rejects all the effects of identification
“imaginary pictoriality,” offering the debauchee a possibility of actualizing their obscene schema. “What this means is that the Sadeian text rejects all the effects of identification