《繡房裡的哲學》薩德浪蕩美學之研究

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(1)Dai 1. 國立臺灣師範大學英語研究所國立臺灣師範大學英語研究所碩士論文 Master Thesis Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University. 《繡房裡的哲學繡房裡的哲學》裡的哲學》薩德浪蕩美學之研究薩德浪蕩美學之研究 Sadeian Aesthetics of Libertinage in Philosophy in the Boudoir. 指導教授：指導教授：賴守正 Thesis Advisor: Prof. Lai Shou-cheng. 研究生：研究生：戴志岡 Presented by: Dai Zhi-gang 中華民國九十八中華民國九十八年二月 February, 2009.

(2) Dai 2. Sadeian Aesthetics of Libertinage in Philosophy in the Boudoir. A thesis submitted to The Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. by Dai Zhi-gang Feb 2009.

(3) Dai 3. Table of Contents English Abstract. 4. Chinese Abstract. 5. Acknowledgements. 6. Introduction 1. Libertinage in Sade’s Work: A Historical Survey. 8. 2. Philosophy in the Boudoir and Its Aesthetic Value. 35. Chapter One. Emotional Responses in the Narrative of Transgression. 1. Sensuality in Blasphemy. 43. 2. Destruction in Egotism. 46. 3. Delight in Cruelty. 51. 4. Jouissance in Communication. 57. Chapter Two. Extreme Pleasure in the Libertine Body. 1. Perfection through Libertine Technologies of the Self. 66. 2. Appreciation of Erotic Objet d’art. 74. 3. The Libertine’s Aesthetics of Existence: Ecstasy in Transgression. 83. Chapter Three Sadesthetics—The Sense of Beauty in Sadistic Sensuality 1. Pleasing Expression in Sadistic Sensuality. 92. 2. Self-liberation in Avant-garde Posture. 99. 3. Sublimation of Sadism in the Sense of Beauty. 108. Conclusion. 117. Works Cited. 120. Appendix. The Marquis de Sade. 127.

(4) Dai 4. Abstract This thesis aims to figure out how Philosophy in the Boudoir manifests Sadeian aesthetics of libertinage through emotional responses in the narrative of transgression and extreme pleasure in the libertine body. First, I use Bataille’s erotic discourse to explicate how the narrative of transgression in the boudoir arouses the libertine’s emotional responses, signifying its aesthetic value. Then, I elaborate that the debauchee uses libertine technologies of the self to perfect their posture as erotic objet d’art, manifesting the roué’s aesthetics of existence—ecstasy in transgression. Last, I coin the word “Sadesthetics”—the sense of beauty in the narrative of transgression and erotic objet d’art, which sublimates sadistic immorality into sadesthetic amorality in the boudoir. My argument is that through Sadesthetics the sense of beauty of language and performance in transgression sublimates Sadism, which provides the reader with aesthetic interpretation. Keywords Sadeian aesthetics of libertinage, Philosophy in the Boudoir, the narrative of transgression, the libertine body, objet d’art, aesthetics of existence, the sense of beauty.

(5) Dai 5. 摘要本論文藉由分析《繡房裡的哲學》中踰越論述及身體呈現的樣態，帶領讀者理解此作品所蘊含的薩德浪蕩美學—情慾中的美感 (the sense of beauty) 呈現方式。首先，筆者嘗試以巴代耶 (Georges Bataille) 的「情色論述」(erotic discourse) 強調言談的踰越性作為美學表現的一種形式。其次，文中更進一步闡述薩德作品中的參與者透過傅柯 (Michel Foucault) 哲學概念中的「自我技術」(technologies of the self)，將任何浪蕩身體的樣態視為情色藝術品 (erotic objet d’art)，藉此展現其生存美學— 踰越中的愉悅。最後，筆者以「薩德式美學」(Sadesthetics) —「踰越論述」及「情色藝術品」中的美感經驗，嘗試轉化作品裡的施虐性 (Sadism)。本論文著眼於「薩德式美學」中「踰越論述」及「浪蕩的身體樣態」的美感經驗分析，供讀者從美學角度解讀薩德作品。關鍵詞關鍵詞薩德浪蕩美學，《繡房裡的哲學》，踰越論述浪蕩身體，藝術品，生存美學，美感.

(6) Dai 6. Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis advisor, Professor Lai Shou-cheng, for his painstaking, long-term attention and instruction. Without his kindness and help, I would never finish my thesis. I heartily appreciate Professor Chen Chao-ming and Professor Chen Chun-yen, as the other two committee members, for taking the time to be my readers and for their extremely kind and valuable suggestions about my thesis. So many friends also deserve attention for their caring. Special thanks are due to my good friends Chen Ruei-bin and Yang I-ping for their encouragement and advice. I feel tremendously fortunate to have them as my life-long friends. Of course, my greatest debt is owed to my family. I would have never finished this work without their generous support and abiding love. And finally, I want to record a deep thank-you to Bi-fei for sharing my joy and sorrow without complaints..

(7) Dai 7. Introduction This thesis tries to figure out how Philosophy in the Boudoir1 manifests Sadeian aesthetics of libertinage—the sense of beauty in sadistic sensuality, which consists of emotional responses in the narrative of transgression 2 and extreme pleasure in the libertine body.3 My argument is that through emotional responses and extreme pleasure in transgression the libertine in the boudoir will attain a state of sublimity. And the aesthetic value in Philosophy in the Boudoir resides in such sublime state, which I render as Sadesthetics—sublimation of Sadism. In Chapter One, I use Bataille’s erotic discourse to explicate how the narrative of transgression arouses the roué’s emotional responses. In Chapter Two, I use Foucault’s notion “transgression in sexuality” to explain that the debauchee operates their body, no matter male or female, through libertine technologies of the self—phallic-anal sexuality. This phallic-anal sexuality enables the libertine to appreciate their body as erotic objet d’art with which the debauchee manifests their 1. The title of the work in the following citation is abbreviated as PB. The text is from Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (Grove Press edition); however, I would rather keep the French word “Boudoir” instead of “Bedroom.” “Unlike its predecessors, the title promises to take the reader into a specific space, which is associated with physical relaxation. The word ‘boudoir’ is mistranslated in English editions as ‘bedroom,’ meaning an elegant salon into which ladies can retire (Petit Robert). The ‘boudoir,’ a paradise-like space of sexual freedom for women as well as for men, becomes a kind of compartment embedded in philosophical thought” (Phillips 2001: 63, 70, emphasis original). 2 “Transgression presupposes the existing order, the apparent maintenance of norms, under which energy accumulates, thereby making the transgression necessary.” “What the act of transgression recuperates from the possible in what does not exist is its own possibility of transgressing what exists” (Klossowski 39, 41). In Allison’s words, “the very operation of transgression seems to encounter its limit” (qtd. in Sawhney ed. 204). However, “the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it. Concern over a rule is sometimes at its most acute when that rule is being broken, for it is harder to limit a disturbance already begun. Transgression is complementary to the profane world, exceeding its limits but not destroying it” (Bataille 1992: 63, 65, 67). In Sade’s writing, transgression is in fact the “clarification of perversity,” which is entirely integrated within his system of naturally arising “pleasure and response.” Moreover, “the key metaphor of transgressive narrative in the boudoir is ‘heat’—disorderly cruel delight” (Hallie 39, emphasis original). Based on “pleasure and response” in terms of Sade’s language, I will elaborate my argument “aesthetic value in emotional responses to the narrative of transgression” in Chapter One. 3 “The libertine body speaks of a breach, contemporaneous with the eighteenth-century materialism, in the reading of signs. It speaks of an investigation into the pleasures of knowledge, of a new organization in the perception of space and time. But it also speaks of a radical break with the modes of production and their techniques of domination.” For the libertine, this body is also the one “which is stripped of all its symptoms, freed from the impassive matter of all expression, given a detailed description of its parts, and connected to other bodies” (Henaff 10, 18). In Sade’s fictional world, the roué, men as well as women, obtains extreme pleasure from their operation of libertine body, especially in sodomy. I will explain its aesthetic value which elicits extreme pleasure for the debauchee in Chapter Two..

(8) Dai 8. aesthetics of existence—ecstasy in transgression. In Chapter Three, I coin “Sadesthetics” to compare with “Sadism.” It sublimates sense of obscenity into sense of beauty through pleasure. in. diversity.. In. Conclusion,. I. hope. that. Sadeian. aesthetics. of. libertinage—Sadesthetics—provides the reader with another interpretation in Philosophy in the Boudoir, the aesthetic value in Sade’s work. In “Introduction,” I begin with a historical survey of libertinage in Sade’s work, for libertinage represents Sade’s unbending spirit as well as his writing in the era of Enlightenment. Then I focus on Philosophy in the Boudoir, one of “Sade’s most innovative piece of writing” (Phillips 2001: 62), and its aesthetic value.. 1. Libertinage in Sade’s Work: A Historical Survey In this section some literature reviews will focus on libertinage in Sade’s work. Sade’s writing has been seen as the exploration of sexual and religious freedom in its encyclopedic catalogue of every possible form of sexual diversity. His work is that of an unfettered imagination and is addressed to voluptuaries of all ages, of every sex in the hope that the debauchee will find nourishment in their libertine principles. Whether through heedlessness or out of malicious pleasure taken in contradictory situations, the characters in Sade’s work are “philosophers who are villains to the core” (Klossowski 16). The villainous aspect of Sadeian libertine is against God, even against everything. “Sade’s characters do not speak to man in general, as literature does even in the apparent discretion of the private journal” (Bataille 1992: 188). Sadeian libertine talks to each other, indulging in long speeches to show their righteousness. Moreover, Sadeian libertine is regarded as “instrumental in shaping aspects of the modern sensibility: their paranoia, despair, sexual terrors, omnivorous egocentricity, tolerance of massacre, holocaust, and annihilation” (Carter 32). The libertine establishes their own rigorous structure, no matter strong and weak, dominant and subordinate. “Like.

(9) Dai 9. Juliette’s ‘Sodality of the Friends of Crime’ and the vast ‘School for Libertinage’ in The 120 Days of Sodom, Sadeian libertine organizes themselves into autonomous social units” (Paglia 237, emphasis original). In Sade’s fictional world, the penetration from behind that is socially forbidden is both proof of the natural character of will and action and additionally testimony to the victory of personal liberty over the shackles of society.4 Fiction allows Sade to repeat his transgression endlessly, which accounts for the repetitiveness. As for libertinage in Sade’s work, first I will explain the relationship between libertinage and the free spirit in the era of Enlightenment, which offers a brief contour about Sadeian libertinage at that time. Then, several aspects of Sadeian libertinage, which have drawn lots of the critics’ attention since the 20th century, can be categorized as two main facets: “the narrative of transgression” and “the libertine body.” As for the narrative of transgression, I summarize it in the followings: “Blasphemy in Sensuality,” “Apathy in Extremity,” “Pleasure in Excess,” and “Communication in Jouissance.” As for the libertine body, “Dionysian Reveler,” “Androgynous Sodomite,” “Sovereign Being” and “Erotic Connoisseur” are what distinguish Sade from other materialists at his time. Through the above literature reviews, I focus on Philosophy in the Boudoir and propose that Sadeian aesthetics of libertinage resides in the narrative of transgression and the libertine body. 1.1 Libertinage Libertinage,5 a way of amorous living, delineates one’s life devoid of any restraints. 4. For this forbidden sexuality (anal intercourse), Rinon has mentioned that “we might add the personal taste of the author: Sade preferred it, both active and passive with his valet” (Rinon 91). 5 Though Andre Semiek wrote in 1980 “There is no libertinage as such” (qtd. in Dubost 1998: 52), what he really means is “before Sade, libertine self-justification is sporadic and fragmentary, or mostly cited as an individual ‘petit systeme’ of justification. Only the libertine figures in Sade’s works aim at an authentic philosophical purpose and try to establish a consistent theoretical basis for their attitude, and even then only within the specific logic of their fictional strategy” (Dubost 1998: 56, emphasis original). “In the context of what is now called ‘libertinage,’ nothing is less free than the pervert’s gesture. For if one means by libertinage the pure and simple propensity for orgy, free of scruples, the pervert’s desire would be sated only in the scrupulous taste” (Klossowski 22, emphasis original). “The word ‘libertine’ derives from the Latin adjective ‘libertinus’ meaning ‘of a freed man’ and from ‘libertus’ meaning ‘freed man’” (Lai 109, emphasis original)..

(10) Dai 10. It ignores or even disdains religious norms, accepted morals, and the forms of behavior sanctioned by society. In Latin, it means one who is emancipated, freed from the insignia of slavery: “Those who are freed by legal practice from legal servitude are called libertines” (Martin 102). The interconnection between libertinage and emancipation defines the spirit of erotic literature as the main tendency in the era of Enlightenment. Since the era of the Enlightenment, the notion “man of reason” has been proposed to claim the existence of human beings. Nevertheless, the practice of libertinage, contrary to the ethics by which every being is indoctrinated, has gained newly-found adherents since the late seventeenth century, particularly in the eighteenth-century France. The vertiginous spin of libertinage partakes of another circular motion, one linking the turn of phrase to a turn of events: revolution. During the seventeenth and eighteenth century in France, the word “libertinage” especially is brought to a climax by Sade. Influenced by French materialists,6 the sexual intercourse, for Sade, is detached from reproduction; it is dissociated from impregnation and from the social codes that bear on the female body in the form of a child to come. What libertinage ultimately brings to light is that the emancipation of diversity in the name of freedom. This freedom is one of the ultimate goals that the libertine keeps transgressing all their lives. As Peter Nagy has mentioned in Libertinage et Revolution: One cannot ever emphasize enough that libertinage, as a social attitude or as a literary course, is only a sign, and often an ambiguous one. . . . Even if libertinage was often and for many a required stage for breaking away from the bindings of religions and superstitions of a sexual or of any other nature. . . it had to be overcome in order to get at an unreserved acceptance of the Revolution. (qtd. in Dubost 1998: 55) 6. “Sade was influenced by two materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment: La Mettrie and Baron d’Holbach. Materialists rejected belief in a soul or afterlife, reducing everything in the universe to the physical organization of matter” (Phillips 2005: 9)..

(11) Dai 11. Negy puts libertinage under the milieu of revolution. For Sade, he even highlights the libertine spirit by bestowing sovereignty upon libertinage, which Sadeian libertine is notorious for. In novels, libertinage takes the form of multiple amorous adventures featuring scenes of seduction, an appetite for pleasure and a total disregard for the social rules governing love affairs. “In libertine prose fiction, which basically dates back to the writings of Crebillon fils” (Goulemot 1998: 136), it is as if the libertine, with their liberated sexual desire and without the slightest regard for the rules, nor the slightest care for the moral values of society or religion, is putting into practice the teachings of erudite erotica as expressed in the attacks on fundamental religious doctrine. In their broadest lines, in terms of their evolution, and their adulterated content, the pornographic novels in philosophical contemplation correspond to the libertine treatise, with the notable reservation that libertine fictions, as we shall see, are never devoid of philosophical probe and that arguments from the most distant libertine tradition find their way quite naturally into erotic novels—Sade. In Sade’s work, with the exception of Justine, any character that refuses an accepted moral code is considered as a libertine, in matters of lovemaking, property rights, filial devotion, honesty in business, or respect for institutions. The desire for sensual pleasure does not come from the libertine’s identification with a hero (heroine) in ecstasy, but from the “distance”—implicit in the act of observing, and from the incitement to experience such ecstasy that comes from the bodies and the pleasures they perceive. This distance enables the libertine to enjoy ecstatic delight, challenging the notion of decorum. Going against the grain of the form in classical decorum, the champion of libertinage abandons euphemism and preciosity in favor of a brutally direct presentation of acts that qualifies as an unspeakable demonstration. Absolutely, Sade’s writing seems to be a zealous realization of the ideal of linguistic transparency. For the libertine, the educative.

(12) Dai 12. project has another dimension: the roué arrives at the absoluteness of libertinage. In Philosophy in the Boudoir, Dolmance is invited by Madame de Saint-Ange to indoctrinate Eugenie; in Juliette, Clairwil is assigned to Juliette as her professor; Juliette is given by Saint-Fond the task of acting as preceptress to his daughter Alexandrine. Lingis observes that “the libertine’s voluptuous discharge comes in reducing the speech of the receivers to gasps, pants, sobs, screams of pain, in showing the other to be full of obscenity and covering them with extreme licentiousness” (qtd. in Sawhney ed. 44). In expressing himself in accordance with the concepts of libertine extremity, Sade accounts for the positive content of perversion, or even polymorphous sensibilities, other than with negative concepts that derive from reason. Based on the above discussion, in Sade’s work, the enlightened spirit of libertinage can be manifested in the two main levels: the narrative of transgression and the libertine body. 1.2 The Narrative of Transgression Sade is the first to synthesize the components of the libertine narrative, whose analysis of the erotic discourse demonstrates the perversity. Such perverse narrative manifests itself in the following: “Blasphemy in Sensuality,” “Apathy in Extremity,” “Pleasure in Excess,” and “Communication in Jouissance.” Blasphemy in Sensuality Sade against God is Sade against absolute monarchy…it is Sade against anything that constitutes any degree or kind of restraint on the shining light of man’s subjectivity. —Gilbert Lely, The Marquis de Sade In Sade’s philosophy, “God is evil and the sexual violence suffered by the virtuous Justine is a result of denying this [Divinity]” (Mahon 130). World, flesh and the devil fuse; when an atheist casts a cool eye on the world, s/he must always find Satan a more.

(13) Dai 13. likely hypothesis as the ruling principle than a Savior: “’Twas nought but the fires of emotion cindered that odious scare, the Divinity, in whose name so many throats were cut for so many centuries; passion alone dared obliterate those foul altars” (Juliette 88). In Bataille’s elusive etymology, the words “divine” and “sacred” have carried undertones of “an inner secret animation, a deep-seated frenzy, a violent laying hold of an object, consuming it like fire, leading it headlong to ruin” (Bataille 1992: 180). In contrast with the contemporary theists, Sade cannot stop himself from seeing the sovereignty of his spirit with respect to the obscene divinity in the libertine narrative. Maurice Heine has celebrated the exceptional resolution of Sade’s atheism. This atheism is by no means dispassionate. Moreover, “it is in the name of Nature that the libertines lead the struggle against God and against all that God represents, morality in particular” (Blanchot 2004: 32). By continually talking about blasphemy, finding oneself constantly confronted with this insurmountable and sovereign presence, the libertine gradually becomes aggravated and tries to pulverize the Divinity. The perversity of reason is the annihilation of reason which certifies sensuous Nature. It is because Sade conceives of the libertine as stemming from the perverse way of sensing that he declares himself an atheist. Having refused the idea of God which limits man, the debauchee naturally comes to resist any idea of limitation at all. From this point of view, “there can be no attempt to comprehend and include Sade within a system. Sade’s vehement blasphemies may well be linked to that state of mental insurrection” (Le Brun 41). The libertine discards the notion of God and the notion of the neighbor by transgressing Christian codes. 7 Yes, like a wild beast, Sade’s savage logic is what emboldens this consciousness through the void where atheist thinking supposedly travails. “Such deviant thinking carefully skirts round the void, eager from the outset to plant 7. “The relationship with God is negative because the libertine’s conscience, as we find it in Sade, is not atheistic in a cold-blooded way; rather its atheism is the result of effervescence and therefore of resentment; his atheism is only a form of sacrilege” (Klossowski 74)..

(14) Dai 14. railings for the concept of Nature” (Le Brun 32). Moreover, it is Sade’s genius to make the image of the machine coincide with the philosophical weapon against the concept of Divinity. Each time Sade’s unique materialist atheism occurs, it marks the point of rupture with his contemporaries. Such is the case with his use of lightening in the killing of Justine: no atheist of his time would or could have wanted to justify it. The Sadeian libertine goes further in this application of the sacrilegious deviation. “One has to channel the atheist machine’s function of unmasking the deity, continuing to materialize the abstract divinity. The libertines could transform it into an instrument of sovereign domination” (Le Brun 158). The debauchee adopts this atheistic instrument to facilitate their sexuality, reaching an obsessive excitement. At the height of their sexual excitement, the libertine often taunts God with obscenities, challenging the non-existent deity to confound them by hurling a thunderbolt from heaven to punish them for their sins. For the libertine, the desires in Sade’s fictional world may no longer be satisfied by flesh; flesh becomes an elaborate metaphor for sexual abuse. “The function of confession, a religious rite Sade greatly enjoys putting into the libertine’s orgies, is not only ignominiously to parody the sacrament of penitence but also to illustrate the sadistic situation of the body submitting to the executioner” (Barthes 1989: 145); the profane narrative introduces a duplicity not only of meaning, but of erotic existence. In fact, “the libertine’s own manner of existence, so resolutely atheist, might not be utterly foreign to devotion of this sort” (Le Brun 9). Through being impregnable in its aberrant divinity, the castle Silling in The 120 Days of Sodom quite possibly reveals the secret of sacrilegious intimidation exercised by Sadeian libertine. It is certainly through the scenes of lust and lechery that Sadeian libertine reveals the passion of atheism. Each time the libertine perceives some vestige of God in the lascivious path, it is then that violence, contempt, the fervor of pride, and the anxiety of power and desire immediately ensue. In Philosophy in the Boudoir, Dolmance begins by.

(15) Dai 15. lambasting the fiction of Christianity, arguing that a less theocentric religion would better serve the people. “…as of the moment God does not exist, what’s the use of insulting his name? but it is essential to pronounce hard and foul words during pleasure’s intoxication, and the language of blasphemy very well serves the imagination” (PB 251). The libertine wishes to free thought and action from all pre-established normative religious codes. “Unless atheism is reconceived on the basis of phenomena which reason rejects, it will continue to consolidate the existing institutions based on anthropomorphic norms” (Klossowski 16). In order to anti-consolidate the hypocritical religion, the libertine enjoys an extreme cruelty against the divine law, signifying their apathetic narrative. Apathy in Extremity Vice is the deep truth at the heart of man. —Georges Bataille, “De Sade and the Normal Man” According to some critics, the manifestation of Sadeian libertine narrative is partly rooted in its knowledge of apathy which carries the debauchee into transgression. “The apathetic reiteration coveys Sade’s own struggle to regain possession of what is irreducible in his experience” (Klossowski 32). Sade is the first to prove, and to do so with pride, that from a certain personal and even monstrous way of behaving the roué rightfully gains a significant view of the world, reaffirming its ethic of cruelty. “The ethic of cruelty is not an ethic to be emulated; but it is an ethic that the world knows and uses, and it indisputably exists in nature” (Michelson 132). Thus, reason is dismissed, and the mechanics of apathy can be placed at the very origin of desire, signifying the extreme eroticism as Sade’s fictional system. Sade’s system is the extreme form of eroticism. “Respect for others hinders the libertine and prevents them from measuring the fullest extent of the only aspiration they have that does not bow to their desire to increase the moral and material resources” (Bataille 1992: 171). The great libertine themselves, who is immersed in apathy that.

(16) Dai 16. generates crimes which are no longer dependent upon pleasure, revels in an endless repetition of their mania, indistinguishable from one another. The libertine in apathy is the figure in a voracious void. In The 120 Days of Sodom, the Duc’s presence of mind once restored, his frenzy is immediately replaced by the most complete indifference to the infamies wherewith he has just indulged himself, and of this indifference, of this kind of apathy, where further sparks of lechery further is born almost at once. What Eugenie in Philosophy in the Boudoir attempts to interiorize is precisely the connection of obsession with apathetic repetition “from numerical excess to eccentric one, and to derive full and conscious enjoyment from this transmuted apathy” (Le Brun 188). This apathetic knowledge leads the roué to master the skill to annihilate every virtuous code. In Sade’s work, the libertine is the master of annihilation with apathetic expertise. Sade proclaims that reason is (or must become) the slave of the apathetic knowledge. Apathy is “the spirit of negation applied to the man who has chosen to be sovereign. It is, in a certain way, the cause and the principle of energy” (Blanchot 2004: 37). With this energy of negation, the roué must discard others’ existence to ascertain their existence. “Through destruction he regains all the strength he would have had to bestow on these debilitating impulses, and more important [is] he acquires from this labor of destruction the beginnings of true energy” (Bataille 1992: 172). In Justine we can see apathy at work. “As the debate between Rombeau and Rodin indicates, detachment is necessary and admirable, yet the operators are highly sensitive and engaged from another. The pleasures of vivisection are clearly couched in terms of materialist conceptions of indifference” (Steintrager 114, my italics). The libertine delights in the extreme of narrative, which Sade is notorious for in his work. Sade’s originality seems to be in the extreme assertion of the transcending power of “negation,” a power to “destroy anything” (Blanchot 2004: 28). This apathetic destruction reminds us of Sadeian “Sovereign Being” who displays their anomaly through.

(17) Dai 17. annihilation. In a more fundamental sense, this knowledge about the very basis of apathy turns intrinsically into a gain of power. Sade’s tact of abnormal cruelty is not an attribute of civilization, according to Barthes, but “a power of analysis and a means of ejaculation, which produces an exultation that is unknown in our society” (Barthes 1989: 170). That is, the knowledge of apathy signifies Sadeian libertine’s narrative as a unique transgression. Apathy is the transformer that converts instinctual matter into scenes within the imagination so that the sex organs become wired up to the brain, and desire takes possession of language. “As a technique for bringing about a lapse of consciousness, apathy isolates primary process from instinct and disconnects its socially normative object” (Henaff 86), which opens a great deal of imagination for the libertine to put their apathetic narrative into practice through pleasure in sacrifice. In their transgressive narrative, the libertine knows no greater pleasure than sacrificing the victims. “Sade’s libertines become a terrorist of ferocious imagination, turning the unacknowledged truths of the encounters of sexuality into a cruel festival where every participator is both torturer and victim” (Carter 22). In the roué’s eyes, the victim does not exist for him or herself, the victim is not a distinct being, but “a simple component, indefinitely exchangeable, within an enormous erotic equation” (Blanchot 2004: 24). In Juliette, Clairwil has mentioned an apathetic way of knowing. He highlights the difference between loving and taking pleasure. What he emphasizes is the importance of taking pleasure without love. For this, “all the great libertines who live only for pleasure are great only because they have destroyed in themselves all their capacity for pleasure” (Bataille 1992: 173). The libertine intends to exploit the insensitivity which they have denied and destroyed, and then they become ferocious. It is true that the debauchee draws their principal pleasure from the excess of suffering in which they plunge the member into the object for the extreme enjoyment. Under such circumstance, the libertine manifests their existence as the excessive apathy whose greatest delight.

(18) Dai 18. comes from the cruel appetite. The libertine’s appetite marks the magnificent inhumanity with which the debauchee enjoys the pleasure in excess. Pleasure in Excess Sade formulates the idea that the libertine’s greatest excess calls for the secrecy and obscurity of the abyss, that is, an inviolable solitude in a cell.8 In his words, the libertine soul transforms itself from knowledge of apathy into excessive pleasure a thousand times more divine than that panders to weaknesses. “Sade’s rule of absolute egoism in presenting the libertine body is ‘I do what pleases me, I know only my pleasure, and I torture and kill by guaranteeing that I get it’” (Blanchot 2004: 14, original emphasis). The libertine enjoys speech’s entire gamut, from the silence in which the telluric eroticism of solitary is practiced, to the convulsions of speech that accompany ecstasy. The debauchee immersed in the excessive practice will do well to take another look at the scene in which Saint-Fond initiates Juliette, handing the theoretical keys to her for her future and happiness: Give in, Juliette, give in fearlessly to your impetuous tastes, to your irregular and learned whims, to the burning impulse of desire; warm me with its excess, thrill me with your pleasure…let your voluptuous imagination vary our disorders, for it is only by multiplying them that we shall find happiness. (qtd. in Le Brun 91) In the libertine’s world, pleasure can be understood as “transcendence, as the crossing of limits so that one enters the void where all is permissible, nothing matters, and nothing can be achieved” (Airaksinen 64), signifying the libertine’s sovereignty. Sadeian libertine achieves sovereignty through excessive pleasure. However, to break out of normal universe, it is not enough to assert the significance of bodily orgasm. 8. Sade is the one “who always aspired to the solitude of the earth’s entrails, to the mystery of a subterranean and reclusive existence.” He “formulated the idea that man’s wildest excesses call for secrecy, for the obscurity of the farthest depths, the inviolable solitude of a cell” (Blanchot 1965: 38)..

(19) Dai 19. “Excess leads to the moment when transcendent pleasure is “no longer confined to the senses” (Bataille 1992: 173). In that case, the mental mechanism that rules pleasure will take over the whole being. Thus, pleasure is therefore directed to the domain which transgresses the limits posed by society, criticizing the moral codes and appreciating the taboos. Pleasure takes the libertine into their inner self, and its intensity corresponds proportionally to the degree that nothing interferes with selfishness. The nature of pleasure is the one in which the libertine often concerns themselves; for them, sexual pleasure is a given fact, a necessary concomitant of the juxtaposition of bodies. “Sadeian pleasure comes from resistance, from the friction between injunction and desire” (Carpenter 59). Sade refers to wickedness as irritation and to pleasure as destruction: a person who faces an incomprehensible pleasure feels a strong unnameable emotion. This unnameable emotion arouses the libertine’s ecstatic pleasure which keeps amazing them in every deviant way. “Sade’s Justine relates a seemingly endless list of perverse tortures and sexual acts that never cease to amaze the heroine” (O’Neal 152). Every libertine Justine encounters has some novel and surprising way of heightening his/her own pleasure at the expense of the victim’s suffering. Moreover, in Juliette, Clairwil, the heroine Juliette’s companion in debauch, says: I’d like to find a crime that should have never ending repercussions even when I have ceased to act, so that there would not be a single instant of my life when even if I were asleep I was not the cause of some disorder or another, and this disorder I should like to expand…even beyond my life the effects would continue. (Juliette 236-37, italics mine) The disorderly repercussions convey the libertine’s everlasting pleasure in excess. In Philosophy in the Boudoir, according to the orchestrations from the maestro libertine, Dolmance, any libertine body in dizzying geometric and orgiastic operation will satisfy the libertine’s jubilant appetite..

(20) Dai 20. As is mentioned in the previous section “Apathy in Extremity,” the ultimate exultation, for the debauchee, resides in a certain sacrificial state. In the preface “To the Libertines” in Philosophy in the Boudoir, sacrifice is a necessary evil if the sovereign being encounters the ultimate exultation. The sensual pleasure is by nature a channel of releasing violence, which is rooted in the desire to lose oneself without reservation. In Sade’s fictional world, sacrifice, as a rule of excessive pleasure, enables the libertine to reach in extremity where they transgress the limit of reason. For instance, in The 120 Days of Sodom, the debauchee freely wallows in filth and finds no humiliation in being flogged or sodomized. For the roué, the pleasure comes not only from transgression of reason, but also from a mode of existence in excess. Pfohl observes that “it asserts itself as a mode of being. [Its] excessive form could be a gruesome ethnography of desires, which possesses what to penetrate” (qtd. in Sawhney ed. 73), signifying its relation to an absolute value. The pleasure in excess can be what the libertine endows their narrative with “an absolute value which denies others’ existence” (Bataille 1992: 180). The obscene narrative in excessive pleasure, for the debauchee, represents itself through the embodiment of absolute self which eradicates any social norms or constraints. In the narrative of excessive pleasure which results in aphrodisiac experience, act, desire and pleasure form an ensemble whose elements are distinguishable certainly, but closely bound to one another. “There is always a supplement of demand, of desire which the libertine tries illusively to exhaust with an ecstatic feeling of continuity or perfusion” (Barthes 1989: 129). Here the excessive ecstasy implies that the roué communicates with each other in an excellent, jubilant way, which amplifies Sadeian libertine’s narrative of transgression as “Communication in Jouissance.” It exceeds every traditional norm and manifests a new body discourse in erotic literature..

(21) Dai 21. Communication in Jouissance The libertine enjoys their narrative of transgression at the moment of instantaneity. “The Sadeian narration is the exciting present, which is meant to generate the pleasures of the future on the basis of the verbal representation of the past” (Rinon 32). It is the power in the transgressive narrative that enables the debauchee to achieve a constant stage of jouissance9 by filling gaps between past and future. “Language succeeds in eliminating the flaws in the Sadeian being by exchanging physical for emotional or mental excitement” (Rinon 33). A chain of passion is built upon the harmonious relationship of words and actions: the deeds that the roué experiences are translated into words. The libertine derives satisfaction from philosophical discussions about evil, from lecturing to an audience on their life stories, or from the mere feelings of hatred and vengeance. Sade transgresses the limits of narrative and breaks through them to the world of the reader. For Sadeian libertine, the transition of writing-reading-acting is a means to eliminate not only the limits between the mind and the body, but also gaps between fiction and reader. The effects of aberrant narration and demonstration serve to liberate the reader’s own irrational forces. Knowing that classical language is itself the very limit of law and prohibition, Sade perversely induces the reader to become intensely aware of the possibility of communication in jouissance. The reader can enjoy this jubilant ecstasy when perusing the lines in Sade’s work. Even more profoundly, such communication is the channel of unconscious violence at the very core of the psyche, where primal impulses engage in perpetual conflict. This conflict, emerging from the encounter when the libertine exchanges their narrative of transgression, is an intensified, eroticized state where the debauchee enjoys 9. “Jouissance is unspeakable, inter-dicted. I refer to Lacan (‘What one must bear in mind is that jouissance is forbidden to the speaker, as such, or else that it cannot be spoken except between the lines…’) and to Leclaire (‘…Whoever speaks, by speaking denies jouissance, or correlatively, whoever experiences jouissance causes the letter—and all possible speech—to collapse in the absolute degree of the annihilation he is celebrating’)” (Barthes 1975: 21)..

(22) Dai 22. ecstatic pleasure. That is, the roué exposes themselves in a state of jouissance. In Sade’s fictional world, to say everything implies communication in every orgy. The technique of expression empties symbolism of all efficacies, enabling all narrative to become actualized in Sade’s utopian fairyland. In the Sadeian universe, there are sufficient conditions for saying everything. “The actual ‘philosophy’ of Philosophy in the Boudoir is a philosophy of the imperative. What was once taboo now becomes a part of the scene” (Weiss 204, emphasis original). The scene is the mechanics of manipulation, of domination, within which there is a duplication of speech, a mastery of the scene through speech. The libertine masters such speech to enjoy themselves in a jubilant communication. For Sadeian libertine, every form of communication in sexuality is possible. There are no more boundaries. Sade scarcely develops his narrative plots from scenes of heterosexuality. The transgressive sexuality occupies all communication in the narrative, which represents the ruin of binary (homo/heterosexual) in Sade’s fiction. This “narrative without limit” is framed by the roué’s controlling narration which contains an ongoing process where the debauchee welcomes any interruptions from without, focusing on sadistic cruelty in erotic discourse. In Allison’s words, “Sade claims to engage the doctrines of the new sciences so as to bring about their concrete expression. In short, he is concerned with understanding and with explaining how it is we act” (qtd. in Sawhney ed. 209). Nothing can properly be said to determine how or why the libertine can act, other than their own will, their passions and inclinations. For the debauchee, communication in jouissance allows them to enjoy absolute freedom, absolved from all constraints. This communication is full of nothing but “energy:” a sheer, unrestrained, unlimited energy. Such energy in jubilant communication expresses itself as action, as desire, as passion, in an infinite number of ways. What the libertine wants is the totally free fulfillment of all desires, drives and impulses. For.

(23) Dai 23. Sadeian libertine, they attack each justification of reason in turn, even to the point of upsetting or volatilizing the very notion of nature. Communicating in jouissance, the roué eliminates the underlying reason or justification for any taboo, restriction or inhibition. 1.3 The Libertine Body 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”.

(24) Dai 24. (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..

(25) Dai 25. 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.

(26) Dai 26. 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)..

(27) Dai 27. 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)..

(28) Dai 28. 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.

(29) Dai 29. 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,.

(30) Dai 30. 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,.

(31) Dai 31. 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.

(32) Dai 32. 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 but aspires to inscribe on the body—to ‘capture’—the possibilities of discourse” (Henaff 116, author’s emphasis). As for the erotic discourse, Sade rarely speaks of an “act” of sexuality; he prefers the word “tableau.” For example, in the dedication of Justine, Sade refers to the novel as “ces tableaux du crime” (Kropf 22). In Sade’s writing, the monastery, the chateau, and the boudoir are where the libertine isolates themselves from society in order to fill them with their own licentious imagination. As imagination 14. In “The Imaginable and the Space of the Tableau,” Henaff focuses on how the libertine body as tableau vivant functions itself as a mirror-like space, providing a possible appreciation in Sade’s work. (Henaff 104-20)..

(33) Dai 33. proceeds, a tableau of fanaticism takes shape, echoing the libertine body penetrated by every possible mean. For the roué, imagination is practiced by means of sensual incitement, characterizing the libertine body as the performance of passion. Sensual incitement, for Sade, is not just infusion. It is the manifestation of the strongest passion, the “performance” of personal liberty as well. Bataille preserves the possibility of transcendence in Sadeian libertine body;15 however, the true libertine loves the reproaches s/he receives for the unspeakable deeds s/he has done, manifesting “a deviant tableau vivant,” which signifies a transformational operation where the libertine body is appreciated from an artistic viewpoint. Moreover, Sadeian libertine body turns the theatrical machine into a fantastic performance of knowledge “capable of objectifying for the first time the body of the imaginary through the imaginary of the body” (Le Brun 109, my italics). This imagination of libertine demonstration can provide the reader with an artistic appreciation in Sade’s work. In this respect, the scene in The 120 Days of Sodom is impressive and even artistic in cruelty: “A man who is a great connoisseur of ass lures a pretty girl into a canoe into the bottom of which has been drilled a hole. Then he abandons the canoe, which sinks. The girl drowns.” As an erotic connoisseur, the debauchee will consider such cruel operation in the libertine body as an artwork. In Sade’s work, the multiple operations, extending and succeeding each other, form the largest possible unit of the erotic scene where the libertine body is presented as work of art. “The operation calls for several actors; when it is conceived as a tableau, a simultaneous ensemble of postures is called a figure” (Barthes 1989: 29, italics added). This figure is the smallest unit of the libertine body. When accumulating in any deviant way, it forms an ensemble of figurality, and that’s what Sade rediscovers in erotic literature. “Figurality rediscovers its origins in Sade, reappearing as the graphic image” 15. “Sade’s sovereign man does not offer our wretchedness a transcendent reality. At least his aberration points the way to the continuity of crime! This continuity transcends nothing. It cannot overtake what is lost” (Bataille 1992: 176)..

(34) Dai 34. (Carpenter 44). Joining diversity so dear to Sade with the picturality that characterizes the origins of rhetoric are those truly graphic figures, which designates the libertine body as explicit engravings. Sade’s writing is not only poetic, but in addition he has taken every precaution to see this poetic manifestation in body discourse. “Sade is boring, only if we fix our gaze on the crimes being reported and not on the performances of the discourse” (Barthes 1989: 36, my italics). No doubt, performances will be multiplied before the eyes of the libertine, as an erotic connoisseur, in Sade’s licentious depiction.. To sum up this section, we have a brief contour that in terms of the transgressive narrative the roué luxuriates in extreme apathy when desecrating the Divinity. They also enjoy the pleasure in excess when narrating such deviation. Moreover, the debauchee is eager to immerse themselves in jouissance when communicating with each other and manifesting their libertine principle. The libertine cannot be only judged through their passion but through nonchalant penetration till the end of destruction. Based on diverse demeanor, the libertine elevates themselves to an absolute being—Sovereign Being, who receives, projects, and even “appreciates” every possible deviation upon self and other as an erotic connoisseur. In choosing one over the other in the demonstration of body discourse, Sadeian libertine body produces and assumes a meaning of transgression in several facets: “Dionysian Reveler,” “Androgynous Sodomite,” “Sovereign Being” and “Erotic Connoisseur.” Moreover, the diversity of Sadeian libertine body has been addressed by seminal thinkers in literary critics, such as Klossowski, Bataille, Blanchot, Beauvoir, and Barthes, etc. However, many of Sade’s critics don’t fully articulate aesthetic value in his work. In this thesis I focus on Philosophy in the Boudoir and try to explain that the sense of beauty in Sadeian aesthetics of libertinage can be manifested in two main levels: emotional responses in the narrative of transgression and extreme pleasure in the libertine.

(35) Dai 35. body. With the narrative and demonstration in the boudoir as artistic manifestation, the libertine can fulfill their transgressive way of life in a state of sublimity. These are what I want to develop in the following chapters.. 2. Philosophy in the Boudoir and Its Aesthetic Value 2.1 About the Work Like most of Sade’s work, Philosophy in the Boudoir16 features a great deal of sex as well as libertine philosophies. However, it contains no actual murder although there is still some torture. It is more or less influenced by previous works. “There is no doubt that Mirabeau’s Education of Laura serves as the model for Philosophy in the Boudoir” (Bloch 29);. nevertheless, Philosophy in the Boudoir exceeds Mirabeau’s work in. depicting the obscenity during the pupil’s “enlightenment” by the libertine. Moreover, this work challenges Rousseau’s educational philosophy in Emile17 by overturning moral lesson and highlighting sexual transgression as well. And it echoes La Mettrie’s materialist thinking in L’Homme Machine, 18 playing a key role in the invention of libertine body in Sade’s work. Philosophy in the Boudoir exemplifies the physical potential of human taken to its libertine logic. Sade brilliantly exploits this potential to 16. “In 1795, there appeared in Paris a slim little volume, anonymously published, entitled La Philosophie dans le Boudoir (Philosophy in the Boudoir). Its frontispiece portrays three nude persons disporting themselves. This work is as obsessively concerned with numerology as any of Sade’s texts” (Plessix Gray vii). “La Philosophie also operates on a number of complex levels—dramatic dialogue, philosophical and political polemic, literary parody, Chaucerian farce—which make it Sade’s most innovative piece of writing” (Phillips 2001: 62). 17 “Sade had certainly read Rousseau’s Emile ou l’Education which had appeared in 1762. The emphasis, for Rousseau, is on the practical experience of Nature. In Sade’s privileging of sexual practice and his constant references to the destructive side of Nature, it is hard not to see an implicit parody of Rousseau’s educational philosophy” (Phillips 2001: 177). Moreover, “the most perverse aspect of Philosophy in the Boudoir may well be Sade’s vicious subversion of Rousseau. His reversal of the philosopher’s view of Nature’s goodness is here given a political spin” ( Plessix Gray xiv). 18 Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) is a French physician and philosopher, the earliest of the French materialist school from the Enlightenment. His work, L’Homme Machine (Man a Machine), emphasizes the experiment and examination of human body: “Man a machine: wherein the several systems of philosophers, in respect to the soul of man, are examined, the different states of the soul are shown to be co-relative to those of the body, the diversity between men and other animals, is proved to arise from the different quantity and quality of brains, the law of nature is explained, as relative to the whole animal creation, the immateriality of an inward principle is by experiments and observations exploded, and a full detail is given of the several springs which move the human machine” (CogWeb, Revised on 3 September 2006, http://cogweb.ucla.edu/index.html)..

(36) Dai 36. demonstrate the interdependence of the narrative and the body in transgression. The main characters in Philosophy in the Boudoir are Dolmance, a libertine maestro who is an elegant sodomite; Madame de Saint-Ange, a depraved aristocratic who boasts of having enjoyed twelve thousand lovers in her twelve years of marriage; Le Chevalier de Mirvel, Madame de Saint-Ange’s younger brother, a cynic pederast with his spirited sophistry; Eugenie de Mistival, an innocent girl, who is indoctrinated with all the principles of the most unbridled libertinage. Moreover, there are Augustin and Lapierre. The former is an uneducated servant, who has the most gallant penis in the libertines. The latter is Dolmance’s valet, who is infected with syphilis. And Madame de Mistival, Eugenie’s mother, is re-educated to experience “the libertine value” and gets pox with her vagina sewn at the end of the work. Philosophy in the Boudoir is split into seven dialogues19 with a polemical tract “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans” inserted in the fifth dialogue.. Throughout the work the principle libertines—Dolmance and Madame de. Saint-Ange—praise the vices and activities long considered the most heinous by civilized mankind: egotism, adultery, incest, sodomy, atheism, blasphemy, theft, even murder. They instruct Eugenie in the anatomy and physiology of the male and female privates with practical demonstrations, a crash course on the arts of masturbation, fellatio, cunnilingus, sensual spanking, etc. In the pamphlet “Yet Another Effort,” the imperative of a truly republican state is the institution of public bordellos in which both sexes can satisfy their erotic drive. Having done away with the monarchy in the French Revolution, it is argued that the people of France should take a final step towards liberty by abolishing religion 19. “Philosophy in the Boudoir is a pastiche of the didactic conversational form which has long used in erotic literature, on which Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), an Italian author in the era of Renaissance, wields an immense influence. As far as erotic literature is concerned, Aretino’s Dialogues had a great impact on later erotic writers. Even when Sade wrote Philosophy in the Boudoir at the end of the eighteenth century, he still maintained the Aretine legacy” (Lai 49, 52). Moreover, the number “seven” seems to be a highly appropriate structuring device in Sadeian text, for example, there are seven characters in the seven dialogues in Philosophy in the Boudoir. According to Cirlot, it is the symbol of “pain.” For more details, see Cirlot 233..