Our Sadean Modernity

There are probably as many ways to read the Marquis de Sade as there are readers who are willing to do so; but read him we must, it seems to me. As Camille Paglia observed in her once controversial book Sexual Personae:

The Marquis de Sade is a great writer and philosopher whose absence from university curricula illustrates the timidity and hypocrisy of the liberal humanities. No education in the western tradition is complete without Sade. He must be confronted, in all his ugliness.

Timidity and hypocrisy indeed. We in Europe and North America cannot face the Marquis because we are unwilling to hear the music that confronts us when we do. If we were able to muster the moral courage to face the Marquis's peculiar "music," then, perhaps, we could come to an honest appraisal of our present role in the world, and instead of averting our eyes and remaining silent about that role--the twisted way we are managing to "Abu Ghraibize" it (not just the Middle East, among other atrocities, the U.S. government maintains secret torture chambers throughout the world and financially underwrites foreign governments that do the same)--we might actually find our way out of that role into a new one. But I'm not holding my breath.

In the course of what will be but brief remarks, I do not wish to create the impression that I see Sade as a villain. I do not. I see him, in part, as a victim. He found himself living in revolutionary times--a revolution that threatened everything he had been raised to take for granted as prerogatives of his privileged birth. And he seems to have embraced this revolution, despite his own interests. Then the revolutionaries turned on him. His life story is truly an amazing one and his personal strength of character, his imagination, his critical acumen and, above all, his unflinching candor, are what made him more than a victim. In my view, he was a hero.

And yet, one cannot help but be intensely ambivalent about his literary heroics. For he is like Milton's Satan or Milton's precursors among those Sufi sages who saw Iblis (the Satan character in the Qur'an) as the true monotheist, the one figure among the angels to understand the implications of Allah's order to bow down to Adam (consequently, Iblis refused).

Intensely ambivalent because the freedom of which Sade may be thought an "apostle" carries with it untold burdens of responsibility. For all the lip-service we give to freedom in this country, we lack the guts to lay hold of it. Sade is a painful reminder of our cowardice.

In one of his revolutionary pamphlets, written before he fell out of favor with the new French Republic, Sade proclaimed sovereignty to be "...one, indivisible, inalienable." When you share it or confer it on others, he says, you destroy it. So he proposed radical methods of democratic self-governance that the revolution was incapable of institutionalizing. Or we must assume it was incapable of institutionalizing Sade's reforms, for I am not aware that any effort was made to put them into effect.

Of course, there are those who would say, "On the contrary! You yourself have admitted that we are Abu Ghraibizing the world. Does that not make us Sadeans to the core?"

I answer: yes and no.

Here we must distinguish between Sade the literary artist and Sade's own characters. We have become Sadean fictions to the core: indiscriminately cruel and in love with our own barbaric natures. But the Marquis himself, the aristocrat who embraced radical democracy and personal liberty and maintained this stance throughout a lifetime of successive imprisonments at the hands of "democrats" and "liberals," that Sade eludes us. We don't know him. We don't recognize him. We do not aspire to be him.

Instead, we emulate his literary revenge upon our own craven politics and religion. And we do so without a touch of ironic self-recognition. We see ourselves in Sade's mirror and we do not blush. Worse, we gush. We applaud the sickening visage he shows us of ourselves as if it were a thing of beauty.

Our Sadean modernity is nothing if not labyrinthine. A deep reading of Sade holds the potential of revealing its ins and outs, swerves and curves, its dark recesses and trompe l'oeils. But in the deepening shade of the Eveninglands we now inhabit, who has sufficient light to begin to read his texts anew?