Sade's Material/ Material Sade

Neil Schaeffer. The Marquis de Sade: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Pp. viii + 567. $18.95. paper.

Norbert Sclippa. Le Jeu de la Sphinge: Sade et la philosophie des Lumières (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). Pp. 108. $43.95.

Caroline Warman. Sade: From Materialism to Pornography (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002). Pp. x + 178. Paper. $67.00.

Nearly half a century has passed since "L'Affaire Sade" of 1956, the censorship trial brought against publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert for his landmark edition of the complete works of the Marquis de Sade. Pauvert "lost" in terms of the actual judgment, which was sustained on appeal, but he "won" inasmuch as the appellate court dropped the order to seize his books and imposed only a symbolic fine. Sade had long since won over artists and intellectuals, of course; Jean Paulhan, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, and Georges Bataille testified for the defense; Simone de Beauvoir republished her essay "Faut-il brûler Sade?" in 1955. Even before its conflicted final judgment, however, the Sade trial was rife with mixed messages: the state prosecutor worried openly about finding a place in literary history alongside the denouncers of Flaubert and Baudelaire, Bataille admitted that Sade's books shouldn't fall into the hands of just anybody, and both prosecution and defense agreed that Sade was "boring."

Sade's paradoxical status continues to this day. While in many respects his work has entered the eighteenth-century canon, there are still indications—Laurence Bongie's 1998 Sade: A Biographical Essay, criticizing Sade's "rehabilitation," being a particularly visible one—that uncontested literary canonicity remains elusive. Sade's status is quite unlike others—while other iconic figures of the Enlightenment certainly continued to polarize opinion long after the Revolution ("C'est la faute à Voltaire, c'est la faute à Rousseau")—contemporary critics are unlikely to classify themselves as Voltaire's "admirers" or "detractors," or the "cultural left" and "cultural right" as either for or against Rousseau. On the other hand, a columnist for the National Review recently had no qualms about citing Sade as "accessory before the fact" to a series of murders committed in the 1960s. Taking the recent release of the movie Quills as a starting point, she makes much of the fact that the one of the perpetrators of the "Moors Murders" of 1963-65 possessed a paperback copy of Justine (in addition to a dysfunctional childhood amidst urban blight and multiple early signs of sociopathic behavior, none of which apparently mattered as much). The immediate targets are, of course, "Hollywood liberals." (Florence King, "Misanthrope's Corner: Misrepresentation of the Marquis de Sade as Hero in the Movie Quills," National Review, June 11, 2001). Given his lifelong attachment to the theater, Sade would have doubtless appreciated the connection.

Of the books under consideration here, two scholarly monographs and a biography, none are "critical" of Sade, but they go about the business of studying the Marquis and situating him in literary and intellectual history in very different ways. Norbert Sclippa's Le Jeu de la Sphinge is unabashedly "pro-Sade." Although he ultimately argues for Sade as an "Enlightenment philosopher," he sets his study in the broadest possible context: the mythic confrontation between Oedipus and the Sphinx. ("Sphinge," in Sclippa's terminology, is meant to reflect the creature's triple aspect of "femme, lion, et aigle" [8]). Sclippa reads the scene as a play of mirrors in which "man deceives himself to the extent to which he takes himself to be other than a monster: blind, incestuous, murderous" (14; my translation). Whereas mainstream philosophes, we are told, optimistically (naively) believe in human perfectibility—the elimination of monstrosity—Sade's heroes "recognize themselves" in the mirror and "accept the consequences" (22).

In itself, this is not terribly original: Sade's "lucidity" has been a theme of commentators from Apollinaire to Foucault. Sclippa's merit lies rather in his ability to interrogate the category of "monstrosity" in a...