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75 Simone de Beauvoir and the Marquis de Sade Contesting the Logic of Sovereignty and the Politics of Terror and Rape Debra Bergoffen Sade the person was a torturer and a rapist. Sade the author created characters and spectacles that justified torture and rape. yet Simone de Beauvoir refused to dismiss him as a mere pornographer or a common criminal. in accordance with the principles of The Ethics of Ambiguity, she credited him with having formulated an authentic ethics. She recognized him as articulating and epitomizing the existential ethical drama—the conflict between the demands of individuality and the necessities of intersubjectivity. in “Must We Burn Sade?” Beauvoir phrased this ethical dilemma in terms of a question: “[is it] only by the sacrifice of our individual differences that we can integrate ourselves into the community?” (Beauvoir 1966, 4). in The Ethics of Ambiguity she framed it in terms of a refusal “to deny a priori that separate existents can at the same time be bound to each other, that their individual freedom can forge laws valid for all” (Beauvoir 1948, 18). in writing “Must We Burn Sade?,” Beauvoir pitted her existential answer to the question of the relationship between the desire to express one’s singularity and the demands of communal life against Sade’s sexual terrorist solution. She interrogated Sade’s life and literature to demonstrate the difference between the perverse subject who thinks of her- or himself as an absolute sovereign with unfettered freedom and the right to terrorize and victimize others, and the ethical subject who recognizes the difference between individuality and sovereignty, acknowledges their ambiguity, affirms her or his bond with others and accepts the limitations of freedom imposed by these bonds. Sade’s ethic was authentic according to Beauvoir, because he assumed responsibility for his choices and actions. it was perverse because in assuming this responsibility he used his freedom to deprive others of theirs. the case of Sade is an important reminder that authenticity is a necessary but not sufficient condition of an existential ethic. had Beauvoir not already have written The Second Sex, her critique of Sade might have stayed focused on the ways that Sade forced us to confront the human consequences of resolving the ethical dilemma by rejecting the idea that a dilemma exists—that is, by insisting that since there are no ontological human bonds nothing 76 Be au voir anD WeStern t h ouGh t can legitimately limit individual freedom. as the author of The Second Sex, however, Beauvoir complicates the ethical landscape. now she frames the ethical question within the political context of oppression—specifically the oppression of women. further, the ethical relationship is no longer confined to the ethics of mutual recognition necessary for the politics of the project; it is also envisioned in terms of the erotic body and its ethic of generosity (Bergoffen 1997). as complicated by The Second Sex, the ethical problem posed by Sade’s affirmation of libertine freedom is unavoidably embodied. now it concerns whether the truth of the erotic in revealing our mutual vulnerability to the passions of the flesh and each other will be experienced as a paradigmatic ethical moment or as an invitation to tyranny. in bringing a gendered lens to Sade’s life and work, Beauvoir reminds us that the ethical dilemma posed by Sade is not lived by asexual disembodied human beings. it is lived by particular men and women living gendered lives in sexist societies where men claim the privileges of freedom, and women are situated as the other. as Beauvoir surveys the scenes of this sexist arrangement, she cites the harem as an extreme example of women’s oppression. in citing this example she was thinking of Middle eastern harems, not Sade’s libertine ones. though it is doubtful that the realities of harem life are mirrored in Sade’s libertine harems, it is also doubtful that Sade was mistaken in his account of the secret of the harem world. for Sade, as for Beauvoir, the extremes of the harem are magnifications, but not distortions, of the forces at work in the sexist social order of the world at large. for both Beauvoir and Sade the harem provides an image of a world where the dream of unfettered sovereignty reigns—where the sovereign has the power and the freedom to subject others to his sexual desires and appetites. the harem is the place where the erotic ethic of response to and affirmation of the dignity...

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