Sade and Sollers: Hoax or Ventriloquism?

What if Sade were to send us a letter?

A strange idea, perhaps. For what would Sade have to tell us that he hasn't already told us, an infinite number of times; what would this man, who, as Maurice Blanchot has famously told us, has already said everything, ¹ have left to say? Why would he need to speak to us, again, after all this time?

A strange idea. But let's stay with it, let's press it a little further. What if there were something left to be said? Or rather, what if Sade deduced, not that he hadn't already told us everything, but that there was something we had not yet understood about his work, some part of his work that we had read but to which we had not yet paid sufficient attention, a kind of message that we had to this point missed despite its urgency—for us? What if Sade—thinking, speaking, writing from beyond the grave—decided that he had to transmit this message to us? What if Sade decided that there remained a secret he had not yet shared with us?

And how could we be sure that the letter had indeed been written by him? A letter from a dead man, a letter in which death literally speaks—is this not implausible? How could we be certain of the letter's authenticity?

The question of authenticity would indeed be a vexing one, were we to receive such a letter. But the idea that Sade would have a secret to transmit to us is not, in fact, so far-fetched. Secrecy, after all, is one of the main themes of his work. This is one of the lessons Maurice Blanchot taught us, in his constant—uninterrupted, it must be said—engagement with Sade. The violence to which we are constantly witness in Sade, writes Blanchot, this violence that literally brings its victims (but also its perpetrators) to the verge of death—that situates them, to be precise, in a zone between life and death—is in no way haphazard: on the contrary, it belongs to the strictest and most rigorous system. And the first condition of this system is secrecy. Throughout Sade's monumental work, violence only occurs in the most secret and hidden spaces, away from the world, and concealed from the eyes of the law. In his essay "La Raison de Sade," Blanchot calls attention to the following sentence from the 120 Journées de Sodome, spoken by the Duc de Blangis "aux femmes réunies pour le plaisir des quatre libertins":

Examinez votre situation, ce que vous êtes, ce que nous sommes, et que ces réflexions vous fassent frémir, vous voilà hors de France au fond d'une forêt inhabitable, au-delà de montagnes escarpées dont les passages ont été rompus aussitôt après que vous les avez eu franchis, vous êtes enfermées dans une citadelle impénétrable, qui que ce soit ne vous y sait, vous êtes soustraites à vos amis, à vos parents, vous êtes déjà mortes au monde.

(Qtd. in Blanchot, "Raison," 242, Blanchot's emphasis)

This intersection of secrecy and death, of secrecy and the "déjà mort," is the very foundation, for Blanchot, of Sade's system. And any secret that Sade were to tell us, if he saw fit to send us such a message, such a letter, would likely bear upon this state of living death.

In fact, such a letter exists.

I am referring to a letter that is a relatively recent addition to the Sadean corpus, published for the first time just over twenty years ago, in 1989. The letter, published as a pamphlet by Quai Voltaire, and given the name Contre l'être suprême by its editor, Philippe Sollers, deals with a well-known but often overlooked aspect of the French Revolution: the Cult of the Supreme Being, the celebration of which was decreed by Robespierre in his famous speech of 18 floréal an II (7 May 1794), at the very height of the Reign of Terror...