Sadian Reflections (review)

Yoav Rinon's thoughtful monograph is one of a growing number of critical texts that offer new approaches to Sade's work. Sadian Reflections is original in structure and expression, and contentious throughout, features that some may find rebarbative, others bold and challenging of critical orthodoxies. Overall, this is a lucid and stimulating contribution to Sade studies, but a number of flaws bespeak the book's origins as a doctoral thesis.

The author eschews conventional critical language to embrace the vulgarity of expression found in his primary texts, a choice he defends on grounds of a desire to "understand Sade 'from within'" (19). This rationale scarcely extends beyond the superficial level of "the power of his words to shock and horrify" (20), although occasionally Rinon's enthusiasm for the sadean vernacular produces turns of phrase that are unfortunate in the context, even if motivated by conscious irony. The varying size of libertine organs, we are told, is "especially prominent in Sodome," for example, while chapter 5 opens discussion "with the prick due to the relative facility of its handling" (71).

Rinon divides his book into two unequal sections, the eight chapters of part 1 devoted to parts of the body and related themes, and the three chapters of part 2 to modern "reflections" on Sade. Thus, for example, chapter 1 is about eyes and "looking" or voyeurism, chapter 4 the legs and "wandering" or journeys, chapter 6 focuses on representations of the "cunt" and female sexuality, chapter 7 takes as its subject the "arse" and male homosexuality, and chapter 8 the "heart" and love, this last the most surprising in a sadean context, but a theme that gives rise to a discussion of some originality. Rinon finds the glimmerings of feeling, albeit self-focused ones, in the hardest of libertine hearts (for instance, Jérôme in La Nouvelle Justine).

The commentaries on selected passages that form the core of these chapters are, on the whole, sensitive and persuasive. There are, for example, excellent analyses of focalization and the associated issue of reader identification. Through close readings of use of language, Rinon convincingly demonstrates how Sade excels in representing a child's point of view with regard to sexual activities (38, 85; see also 101–2). The author is to be commended for addressing difficult issues here that many Sade critics shy away from: the eroticization of children, sadism, and murder in particular, but also and less controversially, the oft-mentioned but rarely explored feature of repetition in the text.

His most contentious arguments in part 1, however, relate to the status of women in Sade's world and to the libertine's quest for perfect happiness. In the case of the latter, Rinon is undoubtedly right that frustration and an attendant wrath drive the sadean personality. His claim that the sadean woman is superior to her male counterpart is less convincing. The "happy lesbianism" of Juliette, Delbène, and others is well demonstrated (127), but the ability of women to dispense with men, their potential for multiple orgasms and therefore unending pleasure, in contrast with the physical limitations of male sexuality, are not so much evidence of a privileging of the feminine as the source of a resentment that finds its expression in the brutalization and murder of the overwhelming majority of females in Sade's libertine novels.

Other weaknesses in this section include spelling and syntactical errors, and the occasional factual inaccuracy, such as the notion that Sade resided in "one kind of asylum or another" (50), whereas Charenton was the only asylum among the many prisons that held him throughout his adult life. More seriously, there is a tendency at times to conflate author and narrator, for instance, "the Marquis" as the narrator of the 120 Journées de Sodome (32).

The first two chapters of part 2 place Sade in the context of twentieth-century French poststructuralism, with discussions of the usefulness of Lacan and Derrida for an understanding of Sade's ethical position. Chapter...