Communal Sexuality: Mutual Pleasure in Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir

Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) envisions mutual pleasure as the most elusive and transcendent experience available to libertines, achievable only by submitting oneself wholly to the expansive, unpredictable group dynamics of orgy. In this model of intense communal pleasure, I contend, Sade evinces a keen interest in the literature and modes of sensibility—particularly in how the orgy emulates its representations of shared and mutual communities of feeling. By further incorporating the fraught politics of looking and feeling epitomized by this literary tradition, Sade constructs through the orgy a (limited) liberatory sexual politics and a narrative of progressive sexual community, both of which are defined and shaped by the female body in particular, as it is this body that registers the group sentimental response. The male libertine's obsessive focus on the sentimental female body thus draws him into the collective pleasures of the orgy and reveals, in unexpected ways, a communal—as opposed to complementary or oppositional—politics of pleasure in Sade's work.