Sade’s Justine: A Response to the Enlightenment’s Poetics of Confusion

In Fanaticism, superstition, prejudice, and intolerance French Enlightenment philosophes found various forms of dogmatic thinking that they attempted to counter in a new, paradoxical way. Instead of drawing clear, rigid distinctions between the various realms of nature, the classes of Old Regime society, or classically dualistic concepts such as the body and soul, they intentionally blurred the boundaries between categories. In so doing, they hoped to put an end to the excesses of dogmatic certainty which, as Voltaire suggests in his Traité sur la tolerance, can have very real consequences. In the eighteenth century, an ordinary person such as Jean Calas could be wrongly executed solely on the basis of his religious beliefs, in his case Protestantism. Diderot was imprisoned at Vincennes for the materialist overtones of his Lettres sur les aveugles, and Rousseau had to flee France after the publication of his Émile for its supposedly audacious proposal of natural religion. Faced with the formidable obstacle of censure in their writings, these thinkers, among others, adopted what I call a poetics of confusion to achieve the kind of progressive society they sought by introducing, little by little, their new perspective.¹

The Marquis de Sade profoundly understood Enlightenment thinking: its logic, its philosophical tendencies, and its paradoxes. In his own writing, he exploits its seeming confusion, accepting or pushing to an extreme some Enlightenment concepts while rejecting others. He discerns the entire century’s dynamism—its spirit of endless possibilities open to humankind that should, he felt, be explored to their ultimate consequences—and puts that dynamism to a new, albeit sometimes bizarre, use. His novel Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu offers numerous insights beyond the moral and the psychological and into the physical, social, cultural, and aesthetic realms of the world he envisions. However much one may recoil before the image he holds up, it clearly corresponds in many respects to what we now recognize in today’s modernity.

Beyond the amorality and irrationality generally associated with Sade, a certain rationality also operates in the Sadean universe, particularly in the connection between the psychological and the physical. One might even say that Sade derives most of his logic from physical explanations, and he relies on nature to do so. If the passions driving human behaviour remain inexplicable on the individual level, they have an origin in nature in the greater scheme of things. Saint-Florent initially cuts short any explanation of his actions by telling Justine: “Let us drop what happened ... it is the history of the passions, and my principles lead me to believe that nothing should slow down their momentum; when they speak, one must serve them, it is my law.”² Bressac had already tried to teach Justine earlier that the passions “are merely the means that it [nature] uses to achieve its designs” (189).

Nature constituted a master trope for the Enlightenment and permeated its thinking in every conceivable aspect: law, religion, and education, for example, just to mention some of the most obvious cases. Nature when combined with culture, it was thought, could produce a new synthesis in many important areas.³ Sade merely carries nature over into the new, theretofore unspeakable domain of human perversity. But he resurrects the brutal side of nature that Enlightenment thinkers had carefully veiled. Whereas the Enlightenment’s confusion of nature and culture produced generally positive results, Sade would show just how dangerous such combinations could be.

In fact, Sade seeks not to refine culture, as had many eighteenth-century thinkers, but to restore nature to what he sees as its rightful place of dominance. Nature justifies the moral and psychological world Sade describes. Natural laws of physical movement replace theological explanations of the universe. One of Justine’s first instructors in Sadean logic, Cœur-de-fer, tells her that nature provides its own motive force and concludes: “there is no God, nature suffices unto itself; it has absolutely no need for an author” (167). According to this way of thinking, the apathy of libertines merely reflects that of nature, which...