Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body (review)

606 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:4 portrait of Johnson that shows that half-blind man squinting at a small book with a ferocity that was probably induced by such a feeling of ocular insufficiency as these books produced in me. John Allen Stevenson University of Colorado, Boulder Marcel Hénaff. Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body. Trans. Xavier Callahan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 324pp. ISBN 0-8166-2536-0. In the growing literature on the topic of the body, Marcel Hénaff's Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body fills an important gap in the history of Western notions of the concept. His approach is appropriately philosophical, theoretical, and textual. If the focus is primarily upon Sade, Hénaff brings in not only the major philosophers of the modern age, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and Deleuze (to whom the book is dedicated), but also the major anthropologists, Mauss, LéviStrauss , and Bataille. Through the libertine body Hénaff addresses some of the vexing questions that concern our modernity: sexuality, obscenity, power, violence, and the ways in which these issues are exacerbated in Sade's work. The book is divided into two parts. The first offers a poetics of the Sadean body, in which the author deals with the narration of the body and identifies the signs that are able to support its fictionality. The second part, called an "economics," analyses the various forms of exchange in which the body participates, the diverse transactions in which the body circulates. Hénaff starts by defining the Sadean body, which he presents as non-lyric, nonexpressive , and symptomless. These qualities are the precondition of the body for Sade. The Sadean body is reduced to a collection of organs, a machinery involved in a complex play of permutations and combinations. Sade treats the body as a materialist thinker of the Enlightenment, but he pushes the premises of the mechanistic doctrine to their limit: the Sadean body is a body without a soul; it is without interiority; it is depersonalized. As such, it finds itself strictly involved in a series of operations in the programming of quantifiable, classifiable, and measurable acts. Hénaff shows the way in which nudity becomes the protocol par excellence of the Sadean body, refusing any expression (the pathos of the classical diegesis); the nude body offers itself up to the operations of inventory and verification without recourse to emotions. The author then examines Sadean discourse as a dictionary of excesses, a repertory of passions integrated into a narration that realizes them in order to "say everything." Here again, we find, as in the description of the body, the objective of saturation, of cataloguing. To "say everything," Hénaff demonstrates, is the principal condition of libertine jouissance. The desire for language invests the body. What most fully satisfies the libertine Sadean body is utterance; it is speaking that exposes the body in language. This leads to a further development when Hénaff REVIEWS 607 complements "saying everything" by "seeing everything." Discursive mastery has to be accompanied by visual mastery. The author provides a skilful analysis ofthe function of the tableau in Sade. The tableau, in the sense of engraving, scene, and schema (or catalogue, as the author indicates), allows for the perfect repertory of erotic action, for the actualizing offantasies, for the realization ofdebauched acts. In the second part of the book, on the economics of Sade's fiction, libertine theory explodes. The libertine body is studied in the epiphany oîjouissance as a consuming machine. In this part, Hénaffrelies mostly on Marx, Veblen (Theory of the Leisure Class), and Foucault (Discipline and Punish) to support his analysis of the Sadean body. He distinguishes between the non-productive body ofthe libertine (absorbed in leisure) and the disciplined body ofthe victim (condemned to provide pleasure to the master libertine). In an intricate analysis he demonstrates that the Sadean model of productivity functions to produce pleasure for the libertinemaster of capital (the libertine's principal preoccupation is the stockpiling of bodies for sexual exploitation). Here Hénaff studies in depth the industrialization of the body. The mechanization described earlier is analysed here in the very functions that define it...